How about not putting mission critical equipment susceptible to water damage in the one place all water will go.
Well, if you'd prefer to relocate the big, heavy generator, weighing hundreds of tons, and its associated fuel tanks, to the top of a skyscraper, or even two-thirds of the way up, be my guest.
I mean, it's not like the introduction of thousands of gallons of flammable liquid, capable of producing a fire intense enough to overwhelm any practical fire suppression system, in a location where fire trucks can't possibly reach, has ever caused significant structural damage to buildings in NYC before...
Ongoing intelligence reports from the blue world reveals that our programme of infiltration continues unnoticed.
K'Breel, speaker for the Council, spake thus.
"Integrating our semantic maps
into the minds of the blueworlders has been a difficult task, but
already their vocalization sequences have been reprogrammed to
vocalize words unpronounceable in their language, but which are perfectly curlmenot in our fair tongue - words like like 'Nginx', 'Railocms', and 'Glusterfs.'"
When an agile young developer, fresh from a tour of duty infiltrating the blueworlders' breeding factories, suggested that
a traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this
successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting
requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and
flexibility, K'Breel recognized that the threat was bidirectional. (To defend against the threat, the Speaker, being in a particularly mercurial framework of mind, had the developer 's nodes gimped: the silly git's gelsacs were thrown into
a blender, and the extracted fluid was disposed of by means of a waterfall.)
I'll bet it has writing on it that says RETURN FOR REFUND
Today the Council of Elders reports the exposure of a fifth column of
traitors that has apparently existed within the intelligence directorate
of world's security services. The Council neither confirms nor denies
the contents of the following diplomatic transmission leaked to the blue
world by rebellious spies.
12GLENELG0062: If it's actually the trigger for a trap door
beneath the rover, for example, or the last remaining
relic of the Martian race, then NASA obviously needs
to handle it with care.
When a senior military official, apparently intoxicated after
having submersed himself in the poisonous liquid that covers two
thirds of the enemy world's surface, exclaimed "IT'S A TRAP",
K'Breel had the Admiral's gelsacs bronzed and disposed of in
the general vicinity of the invader. The Council reminds all citizens that the planetary metals recycling programme operates on a strict basis of "No deposit, no return."
"Every studio I deal with has a distribution agreement with Google," said Dodd. "We've divided up this discussion in a way that doesn't really get us moving along as a people."
Translation: Dammit, what part of "cartel" have my clients forgotten they once understood?
... and is becoming a quick way to short-circuit certain kinds of arguments.
... Correlation does not imply causation.
The decline in classical education standards is, however, a causal factor behind the shift from references to the "post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy" towards references to the phrase "correlation does not imply causation".
The person who posted this story is a thought criminal. Report to the Ministry of Love immediately.
Nice try, Goldstein! You just want to make sure that by the time the rats in Room 101 are done with your operative, Big Brother's facial recognition scanners will never be able to pick him up!
One of the vectors of infection we're seeing a substantial increase in, called a âoewatering holeâ attack, is a clear shift in the attacking group's method of operations. The concept of the attack is similar to a predator waiting at a watering hole in a desert. The predator knows that victims will eventually have to come to the watering hole, so rather than go hunting, he waits for his victims to come to him. Similarly, attackers find a Web site that caters to a particular audience, which includes the target the attackers are interested in. Having identified this website, the attackers hack into it using a variety of means.
All well and good. The good folk at Symantec, a site that definitely caters to an audience of people who would be interested in this particular exploit, then goes on to link to their research paper:
We have published a research paper that details the links between various exploits used by this attacking group, their method of targeting organizations, and the Elderwood Platform. It puts into perspective the continuing evolution and sheer resilience of entities behind targeted attacks.
That's right. The link to the research paper is, presumably by order of some marketroid who wants to get some metrics about this high-profile story (or are they?) is a goddamn bit.ly link redirector that goes directly to a PDF, and can be expected to spawn precisely one of the sorts of vectors that the attackers have been exploiting for years.
Peter Norton is still alive, but if he weren't, he'd be rolling in his grave. As it stands, he's merely rolling in a big pile of money.
But what about throwing xbmc or MythTV onto an old (or cheap new) box with a couple of huge drives (HDTV's being glorified monitors and all)?
But then the content would be cached in a large cheap local buffer, and not streamed from the cloud over bandwidth-constrained wired or wireless connections. Not only would MAFIAA not approve, but Google/Doubleclick wouldn't get analytics/metrics.
You didn't think that the availability of cheap general-purpose computing hardware was supposed to benefit the consumer, did you?
"Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters,
when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use
a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law
would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They
intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
Seriously, you give an infant a toy, they're not going to listen to how you tell them to play with it.
Think of it from Dad's viewpoint: the Dad who buys his newborn son a new power drill and fishing gear, and a set of Lego Mindstorms for his first birthday. The kid may not be interested in carpentry, angling, or robotics, but Dad sure loves the excuse to go shopping!
Presenting security certifications from Trust, Mcafee and Norton says nothing about how they'll use personal data. It just means that they might be less susceptible to hacking (but I personally doubt it) than companies without similar certifications.
It means you're not reading it like a lawyer.
"The company rushes to counter privacy concerns by pointing out that their service has "received security certifications from TRUSTe, McAfee and Norton."
"The company's concerns are counter-privacy" and/or "they're rushing to counter your privacy" seem pretty consistent with "TRUSTe, McAfee and Norton."
Remember, A TrustE is still a con. (Attr. to Agent 01413 of the Lumber Cartel (TINLC), and to Socks the Cat, ca. 1999 or earlier - the earliest I could find was in a.sig quote from 1999 - and scattered around the web, off and on, for at least ten years.)
My experience was that 5.25" floppies were really reliable. I had hundreds of 5.25" floppies and I don't remember any of them ever failing. I had some failures with 3.5" floppies, but not too often. IMHO, USB flash drives are much more unreliable than floppies were (although capacity of USB flash drives is much larger than floppies).
It would be interesting to check if the floppies that I used over 20 years ago are still readable. I have to try that some day...
Ah, Elephant Memory Systems. At least for the disk I booted, it's true: An Elephant Never Forgets. (The artwork that went into their marketing swag was some of the most surreal in the industry.)
All the manufacturers also had sets of helpful icons/instructions about care and handling on the backs of the envelopes, which were parodied by Beagle Bros.
Once upon a time (ca. 1989-1990), they did. NCD (Network Computing Devices) made a series of X Terminals based on both the 68000 and some of the early MIPS CPUs. One model (the NCD16) featured a 16" square monochrome CRT, at 1024x1024 resolution, and a 1:1 aspect ratio. The Computer History Museum also has an NCD16 in its collection.
Daniel Raimer, RapidShare's Chief Legal Officer, is to meet with technology leaders and law enforcement at the Technology Policy Institute forum. Responding to a public consultation on the future of U.S. IP enforcement, the company emphasized that linking sites are the real problem. It wrote, 'Rather than enacting legislation that could stifle innovation in the cloud, the U.S. government should crack down on this critical part of the online piracy network.'"
"Rather than enacting legislation that could stifle innovation in the cloud, the U.S. government should crack down on this critical part of the online piracy network.'"
I guess that's Newspeak for "Do it to Julia, don't do it to me, do it to her!"
But it was all right, everything was all right, the
struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
A "safety culture" has infused the entire industry, with hazard/safety analysis a key part of the overall process. Until the software has been certified as compliant with the standard, the plane does not fly.
Blair K., Certified Master of the Scrum, responded: "Well, that doesn't sound like a very agile process to me! "Certified" and "compliant with a standard" sound pretty waterfallish. Why not just have a 15-minute standup and decide to launch the plane? At last the aerospace industry could deliver aircraft on time and under budget."
Customer wants their plane painted hot pink? We can totes do that, bros! Shouldn't take more than 24 hours to get to Home Depot and get a few cans of spraypaint. Delivered! And if bits of paint peel off at altitude and get sucked into the engine, gluing themselves to the turbine blades until catastrophic failure of an engine, well, we can just patch the paint recipe in the next sprint! Paint that's "hot pink" is part of this sprint. The user story about engines that don't fail is part of the next sprint.
The real problem with aircraft design is that all our little user stories are in a big clunky database. If we printed out the database's contents (by hand!) on little 3x5 index cards, then we'd be using the best practices of both Scrum and Kanban. Our planes would be so damn agile they'd have turning radii measured in inches.
When a senior engineer piped up that an aircraft with a turning radius measured in inches would kill everyone on board due to G-forces measured in the thousands of Gs, and would likely tear itself apart because the centripetal force far exceeds the tensile modulus of steel, titanium, carbon fiber, or anything else available, he was terminated because "switching from traditional tube-construction to blended-wing-body design made of unobtanium" was part of the next epic.
Late-Breaking News from the Council: VICTORY!
on
Curiosity Lands On Mars
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> It is - the question remains whether intact or not. We're just waiting for the radio signals to arrive.
"Relative to whose frame of reference,
blueworlder?"
The Council of Elders has confirmed the interception and destruction
of the latest mechanized terror from the blue world.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thus:
Citizens, it is with great joy that I announce to you the destruction
of the invader from the blue world!
The blueworlders' latest robotic instrument of terror was powered
by a Pew-238 nucleowarming device which was equipped with a point defense
mechanism consisting of a light source so powerful that it could blast away
the very red soil upon which we thrive.
Yet at the last moment, when all seemed lost, our forces fired upon the
thin umbilical cord connecting the flying invader with its power source
and associated optical weapons system. Its connection to its power
source severed, the invading vessel flew off in a dizzying spiral
and crashed spectacularly into a nearby hillside.
Rejoice, podmates! Our red world is once again safe!
When a junior combat reporter pointed out that the link between
the carrier vessel and the mechanized invader may have been designed
to be broken at the moment of landing, that the actual threat was the
so-called "power source" and not the flying invader, and suggested that if
the Martian Defense Force had just waited just a few seconds longer, the
squibs holding the skyhook to the skycrane might have failed, resulting
in the carrier vessel crashing down upon the invader, thereby
destroying both, K'Breel had the combat reporter's gelsacs placed
directly in front of the dormant invader's photonic weapons.
"If the blue-shirted denizens of the blue world seek evidence of organic
matter so strongly," mused K'Breel, "then let them have their fill of it!"
(Because the Council must to draft at least two of these press releases with every new phase of the battle,
the Speaker would like to thank the infiltrators at the
Martian Cyberdefense Detachment (unit 216.34.181.48) for
remaining as glued to the screen over the past fifteen units
of time as everybeing on the Council was.)
Remember the good old days, when shareware developers built stuff that ran natively and didn't phone home?
When open source developers built stuff that compiled natively and couldn't phone home?
Yeah, Pepperidge farm and I remember.
But then came "downloaders" (Look, Adobe Acrobat XYZ is only 1MB, never you mind the 90MB the 1MB "installer" is downloading in the background.)
And finally came "apps" and "ecosystems", a world in which instead of having a locally-hosted.src.tar.gz/installer/executable that the user can install for him or herself, it all goes away to "the cloud", because it's just a bunch of HTML5 running in a stripped-down web browser that dignifies itself by calling itself a "container".
I'm either getting old and becoming a luddite, or this industry has really taken a turn for the worse. Probably a little of both.
Tempest is by far my favorite video game of all time. No video game since has come close to holding my attention like Tempest. The simplicity of the game, the rhythm of the game, the invisible levels, the chip glitch that enabled you to do weird things to the game depending on the last two digits of your score. I still dream about the game, and I haven't played it in 20 years.
That's a slump you've gotta break. If you can make it to the Bay Area on the weekend of July 28/29, come to California Extreme for a weekend of all the coin-op retrogaming you can handle, no quarters required.
There are usually at least two or three Tempest machines on the show floor, so not only do you not have to worry about quarters, you also won't have to worry about a line-up to play it. It's a rare year that doesn't include virtually the entire line-up of vector games from Atari, Cinematronics, and Sega. Also the only place you'll ever get to play the old laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, and Cliffhanger anymore.
Even if the charges are completely fabricated by someone, anyone (CIA the women in question etc.) it's absurd to think that the UK would refuse extradition to Sweden for something like this.
This.
The guy let his own ego lead him into a situation that enabled him to get caught in a honey trap. He got a little bit of PR out of it, but he and his organization would have been much better off had he realized how susceptible he was to manipulation.
Ironic, given that he worked at Seatec Astronomy:)
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, has been rushed to an undisclosed medical facility following deployment of a cyberweapon from the blue world.
A redacted version of the cyberweapon has been reproduced below for public analysis:
It is already going to take either divine intervention or h3lp from the M@rtians to get that thing down right side up and in one piece.
Upon reading the phrase "h3lp from the M@rtians", K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, immediately collapsed into fits of laughter and promptly laughed his gelsacs off.
When a junior reporter asked for comment on the Speaker's Condition, K'Breel, still wracked with peals of laughter, snickered "I once had a podmate who lost his olfactory organ... How did he smell? AWFUL!"
Citizens are reminded in this time of heightened concern to be aware of security risks associated with transmissions from the blue world, but are reassured that they do grow back.
And just why do you want to know where I work?
So that you can complain to my boss that I made you look stupid and that he should fire me for that?
No, he wants to know where you work so he can complain to the politicians that your company is costing his company money.
Which is exactly the strategy that
Cary Sherman of RIAA suggested when SOPA failed.
If it's about "Hollywood vs. freedom", Hollywood loses.
But if the debate can be reframed to "MPAA vs. Google", or "RIAA vs. Telcos", Hollywood wins, because they can just point the finger and say "Look, we're only saying the things we say because we work for Paramount, Universal, and other MAFIAA organizations. But you're only saying that because you work for Google, a telco, or an ISP, you're a lobbyist just like us!" and with the debate framed in a context that the politicians will understand, Ari and Sherman can easily demand a law that transfers wealth from "Northern California" to "Southern California" (by transferring the cost of preventing piracy from "Southern California rightsholders" to "Northern California companies whose customers happen to infringe on those rights").
No wonder we spend all of our time in the basement. It's the only place we can get any of the really interesting shit done, and almost no one wants to join us.
Old joke:
Three NASA engineers, one from headquarters in Washington, one from the Johnson center in Houston, and one from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena were discussing whether it was better to have a wife or a mistress.
The HQ guy said it was better to have a mistress, because they are more understanding of the long absences required of a NASA employee. The Johnson guy retorted, "Oh, no, one must always follow proper rules and procedures, and marriage is the proper procedure, so it is better to have a wife."
The JPL engineer replied, "No, it is better to have both. That way, you can tell your wife that you're with your mistress, your mistress that you're with your wife, and go to the lab and work."
Last time I checked neither x-ray machines nor CT scanners are considered food or drug so why is the FDA involved? I could see the FCC or OSHA but not FDA.
Here's this year's list of newly-approved devices so far. If you're going to stick it in your coronary artery, your cardiologist probably wants to know that people smarter than him have spent a lot of time asking a lot of hard questions about it.
Not every device gets the full treatment. But even if you're coming up with a minor tweak to something that's comparatively low risk, it must be cleared under section 510(k): last month's cleared devices. The paperwork's simple compared to a new device approval, but even the 510(k) clearance process means that something as simple as "STERILE LUBRICATING JELLY" is sterile, biocompatible, made in a factory that follows good manufacturing processes, etc.
If it sounds like a horrendous amount of paperwork, well, it is. But the alternative - random uncleared devices without even the practicioner knowing what's in them - is far, far worse. There's a reason that both prescription and over-the-counter medications have standard packaging and labeling requirements, undergo multiyear-long clinical studies, and take the better part of a billion dollars and a decade to bring to market, and why quack 'supplements' advertised on TV and in your email's spam filter have a big disclaimer that "this product is not intended for the diagnosis and treatment of any disease".
If it sounds like TSA used the loophole of "these backscatter X-ray machines aren't intended for the diagnosis and treatment of any disease" in order to circumvent FDA scrutiny, well, I'd have to agree with you there, too. But what's more important: the health of the traveling public, or securing cushy careers for HomeSec bureaucrats?
Except we call his relative's cages "cubes."
Now, excuse me, I need to go have my banana for lunch.
In lieu of (+6, Sad-But-True), please accept this cartoon, which hangs on my cage wall: I'm the next contestant on the hot new game show: Who's the dumb ape?
The former Soviets got caught re-using their one time pads after a year.
"Best of all, your secret: nothing extant could extract it.
By 2025 a children's Speak-and-Spell could crack it.
They were thinking, who would store the eTexts for that long, since OTP is unbreakable?
You can't hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh,
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past."
Secrets cost money. How long do you need to keep them?
Today we believe - with good reason - that most cryptographic protocols are secure. Bue even if that's true (and there's no guarantee), why not hoover up the data while it's available and wait for your opponent to slip up, or your mathematicians (or computer engineers) to make a breakthrough, whichever comes first?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you'd prefer to relocate the big, heavy generator, weighing hundreds of tons, and its associated fuel tanks, to the top of a skyscraper, or even two-thirds of the way up, be my guest.
I mean, it's not like the introduction of thousands of gallons of flammable liquid, capable of producing a fire intense enough to overwhelm any practical fire suppression system, in a location where fire trucks can't possibly reach, has ever caused significant structural damage to buildings in NYC before...
K'Breel, speaker for the Council, spake thus.
"Integrating our semantic maps into the minds of the blueworlders has been a difficult task, but already their vocalization sequences have been reprogrammed to vocalize words unpronounceable in their language, but which are perfectly curlmenot in our fair tongue - words like like 'Nginx', 'Railocms', and 'Glusterfs.'"
When an agile young developer, fresh from a tour of duty infiltrating the blueworlders' breeding factories, suggested that a traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility, K'Breel recognized that the threat was bidirectional. (To defend against the threat, the Speaker, being in a particularly mercurial framework of mind, had the developer 's nodes gimped: the silly git's gelsacs were thrown into a blender, and the extracted fluid was disposed of by means of a waterfall.)
Today the Council of Elders reports the exposure of a fifth column of traitors that has apparently existed within the intelligence directorate of world's security services. The Council neither confirms nor denies the contents of the following diplomatic transmission leaked to the blue world by rebellious spies.
12GLENELG0062: If it's actually the trigger for a trap door beneath the rover, for example, or the last remaining relic of the Martian race, then NASA obviously needs to handle it with care.
When a senior military official, apparently intoxicated after having submersed himself in the poisonous liquid that covers two thirds of the enemy world's surface, exclaimed "IT'S A TRAP", K'Breel had the Admiral's gelsacs bronzed and disposed of in the general vicinity of the invader. The Council reminds all citizens that the planetary metals recycling programme operates on a strict basis of "No deposit, no return."
Translation: Dammit, what part of "cartel" have my clients forgotten they once understood?
The decline in classical education standards is, however, a causal factor behind the shift from references to the "post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy" towards references to the phrase "correlation does not imply causation".
Voyeurs and Xzibitionists.
Nice try, Goldstein! You just want to make sure that by the time the rats in Room 101 are done with your operative, Big Brother's facial recognition scanners will never be able to pick him up!
All well and good. The good folk at Symantec, a site that definitely caters to an audience of people who would be interested in this particular exploit, then goes on to link to their research paper:
That's right. The link to the research paper is, presumably by order of some marketroid who wants to get some metrics about this high-profile story (or are they?) is a goddamn bit.ly link redirector that goes directly to a PDF, and can be expected to spawn precisely one of the sorts of vectors that the attackers have been exploiting for years.
Peter Norton is still alive, but if he weren't, he'd be rolling in his grave. As it stands, he's merely rolling in a big pile of money.
But then the content would be cached in a large cheap local buffer, and not streamed from the cloud over bandwidth-constrained wired or wireless connections. Not only would MAFIAA not approve, but Google/Doubleclick wouldn't get analytics/metrics.
You didn't think that the availability of cheap general-purpose computing hardware was supposed to benefit the consumer, did you?
"Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
Meringuoid's Law, Nov 24, 2005.
Think of it from Dad's viewpoint: the Dad who buys his newborn son a new power drill and fishing gear, and a set of Lego Mindstorms for his first birthday. The kid may not be interested in carpentry, angling, or robotics, but Dad sure loves the excuse to go shopping!
It means you're not reading it like a lawyer.
"The company rushes to counter privacy concerns by pointing out that their service has "received security certifications from TRUSTe, McAfee and Norton."
"The company's concerns are counter-privacy" and/or "they're rushing to counter your privacy" seem pretty consistent with "TRUSTe, McAfee and Norton."
Remember, A TrustE is still a con. (Attr. to Agent 01413 of the Lumber Cartel (TINLC), and to Socks the Cat, ca. 1999 or earlier - the earliest I could find was in a .sig quote from 1999 - and scattered around the web, off and on, for at least ten years .)
Ah, Elephant Memory Systems. At least for the disk I booted, it's true: An Elephant Never Forgets. (The artwork that went into their marketing swag was some of the most surreal in the industry.)
All the manufacturers also had sets of helpful icons/instructions about care and handling on the backs of the envelopes, which were parodied by Beagle Bros.
Once upon a time (ca. 1989-1990), they did. NCD (Network Computing Devices) made a series of X Terminals based on both the 68000 and some of the early MIPS CPUs. One model (the NCD16) featured a 16" square monochrome CRT, at 1024x1024 resolution, and a 1:1 aspect ratio. The Computer History Museum also has an NCD16 in its collection.
"Rather than enacting legislation that could stifle innovation in the cloud, the U.S. government should crack down on this critical part of the online piracy network.'"
I guess that's Newspeak for "Do it to Julia, don't do it to me, do it to her!"
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Blair K., Certified Master of the Scrum, responded: "Well, that doesn't sound like a very agile process to me! "Certified" and "compliant with a standard" sound pretty waterfallish. Why not just have a 15-minute standup and decide to launch the plane? At last the aerospace industry could deliver aircraft on time and under budget."
Customer wants their plane painted hot pink? We can totes do that, bros! Shouldn't take more than 24 hours to get to Home Depot and get a few cans of spraypaint. Delivered! And if bits of paint peel off at altitude and get sucked into the engine, gluing themselves to the turbine blades until catastrophic failure of an engine, well, we can just patch the paint recipe in the next sprint! Paint that's "hot pink" is part of this sprint. The user story about engines that don't fail is part of the next sprint.
The real problem with aircraft design is that all our little user stories are in a big clunky database. If we printed out the database's contents (by hand!) on little 3x5 index cards, then we'd be using the best practices of both Scrum and Kanban. Our planes would be so damn agile they'd have turning radii measured in inches.
When a senior engineer piped up that an aircraft with a turning radius measured in inches would kill everyone on board due to G-forces measured in the thousands of Gs, and would likely tear itself apart because the centripetal force far exceeds the tensile modulus of steel, titanium, carbon fiber, or anything else available, he was terminated because "switching from traditional tube-construction to blended-wing-body design made of unobtanium" was part of the next epic.
"Relative to whose frame of reference, blueworlder?"
The Council of Elders has confirmed the interception and destruction of the latest mechanized terror from the blue world.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thus:
When a junior combat reporter pointed out that the link between the carrier vessel and the mechanized invader may have been designed to be broken at the moment of landing, that the actual threat was the so-called "power source" and not the flying invader, and suggested that if the Martian Defense Force had just waited just a few seconds longer, the squibs holding the skyhook to the skycrane might have failed, resulting in the carrier vessel crashing down upon the invader, thereby destroying both, K'Breel had the combat reporter's gelsacs placed directly in front of the dormant invader's photonic weapons.
"If the blue-shirted denizens of the blue world seek evidence of organic matter so strongly," mused K'Breel, "then let them have their fill of it!"
(Because the Council must to draft at least two of these press releases with every new phase of the battle, the Speaker would like to thank the infiltrators at the Martian Cyberdefense Detachment (unit 216.34.181.48) for remaining as glued to the screen over the past fifteen units of time as everybeing on the Council was.)
When open source developers built stuff that compiled natively and couldn't phone home?
Yeah, Pepperidge farm and I remember.
But then came "downloaders" (Look, Adobe Acrobat XYZ is only 1MB, never you mind the 90MB the 1MB "installer" is downloading in the background.)
And finally came "apps" and "ecosystems", a world in which instead of having a locally-hosted .src.tar.gz/installer/executable that the user can install for him or herself, it all goes away to "the cloud", because it's just a bunch of HTML5 running in a stripped-down web browser that dignifies itself by calling itself a "container".
I'm either getting old and becoming a luddite, or this industry has really taken a turn for the worse. Probably a little of both.
That's a slump you've gotta break. If you can make it to the Bay Area on the weekend of July 28/29, come to California Extreme for a weekend of all the coin-op retrogaming you can handle, no quarters required.
There are usually at least two or three Tempest machines on the show floor, so not only do you not have to worry about quarters, you also won't have to worry about a line-up to play it. It's a rare year that doesn't include virtually the entire line-up of vector games from Atari, Cinematronics, and Sega. Also the only place you'll ever get to play the old laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, and Cliffhanger anymore.
This.
The guy let his own ego lead him into a situation that enabled him to get caught in a honey trap. He got a little bit of PR out of it, but he and his organization would have been much better off had he realized how susceptible he was to manipulation.
Ironic, given that he worked at Seatec Astronomy :)
A redacted version of the cyberweapon has been reproduced below for public analysis:
Upon reading the phrase "h3lp from the M@rtians", K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, immediately collapsed into fits of laughter and promptly laughed his gelsacs off.
When a junior reporter asked for comment on the Speaker's Condition, K'Breel, still wracked with peals of laughter, snickered "I once had a podmate who lost his olfactory organ... How did he smell? AWFUL!"
Citizens are reminded in this time of heightened concern to be aware of security risks associated with transmissions from the blue world, but are reassured that they do grow back.
No, he wants to know where you work so he can complain to the politicians that your company is costing his company money.
Which is exactly the strategy that Cary Sherman of RIAA suggested when SOPA failed.
If it's about "Hollywood vs. freedom", Hollywood loses.
But if the debate can be reframed to "MPAA vs. Google", or "RIAA vs. Telcos", Hollywood wins, because they can just point the finger and say "Look, we're only saying the things we say because we work for Paramount, Universal, and other MAFIAA organizations. But you're only saying that because you work for Google, a telco, or an ISP, you're a lobbyist just like us!" and with the debate framed in a context that the politicians will understand, Ari and Sherman can easily demand a law that transfers wealth from "Northern California" to "Southern California" (by transferring the cost of preventing piracy from "Southern California rightsholders" to "Northern California companies whose customers happen to infringe on those rights").
Old joke:
Three NASA engineers, one from headquarters in Washington, one from the Johnson center in Houston, and one from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena were discussing whether it was better to have a wife or a mistress.
The HQ guy said it was better to have a mistress, because they are more understanding of the long absences required of a NASA employee. The Johnson guy retorted, "Oh, no, one must always follow proper rules and procedures, and marriage is the proper procedure, so it is better to have a wife."
The JPL engineer replied, "No, it is better to have both. That way, you can tell your wife that you're with your mistress, your mistress that you're with your wife, and go to the lab and work."
In addition to drugs, the FDA is also responsible for clearing medical products and devices.
Here's this year's list of newly-approved devices so far. If you're going to stick it in your coronary artery, your cardiologist probably wants to know that people smarter than him have spent a lot of time asking a lot of hard questions about it.
Not every device gets the full treatment. But even if you're coming up with a minor tweak to something that's comparatively low risk, it must be cleared under section 510(k): last month's cleared devices. The paperwork's simple compared to a new device approval, but even the 510(k) clearance process means that something as simple as "STERILE LUBRICATING JELLY" is sterile, biocompatible, made in a factory that follows good manufacturing processes, etc.
If it sounds like a horrendous amount of paperwork, well, it is. But the alternative - random uncleared devices without even the practicioner knowing what's in them - is far, far worse. There's a reason that both prescription and over-the-counter medications have standard packaging and labeling requirements, undergo multiyear-long clinical studies, and take the better part of a billion dollars and a decade to bring to market, and why quack 'supplements' advertised on TV and in your email's spam filter have a big disclaimer that "this product is not intended for the diagnosis and treatment of any disease".
If it sounds like TSA used the loophole of "these backscatter X-ray machines aren't intended for the diagnosis and treatment of any disease" in order to circumvent FDA scrutiny, well, I'd have to agree with you there, too. But what's more important: the health of the traveling public, or securing cushy careers for HomeSec bureaucrats?
In lieu of (+6, Sad-But-True), please accept this cartoon, which hangs on my cage wall: I'm the next contestant on the hot new game show: Who's the dumb ape?
"Best of all, your secret: nothing extant could extract it.
By 2025 a children's Speak-and-Spell could crack it.
You can't hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh,
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past."
- MC Frontalot, Secrets from the Future
Secrets cost money. How long do you need to keep them? Today we believe - with good reason - that most cryptographic protocols are secure. Bue even if that's true (and there's no guarantee), why not hoover up the data while it's available and wait for your opponent to slip up, or your mathematicians (or computer engineers) to make a breakthrough, whichever comes first?