But are you suggesting that it's somehow unfair that the very small rich minority that control 90% of the wealth pay the lion's share of taxes? After all, they're the ones benefiting most from it. Here's our federal budget:
Top Items: * Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security and other entitlement programs - Sure, these are payments to the poor (save a good chunk of social security, which pays those who made more during their careers a bigger sum), but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying the military/police force that would be needed to keep the poor from simply taking what they want from the rich, which is what would happen if the poor were just left to starve and freeze and watch their families die of curable diseases because they couldn't afford medical care. * Military - If we were invaded, how would life change for the poor? Not too much, probably. But the invaders would probably take everything from the rich folks. Since they have the most to loose, they should pay the bills. And our military keeps the climate for international business favorable to the US. We can ship our goods worldwide with minimal direct security costs. We can get cheap oil for industry. Who benefits most from this? Rich CEOs, stockholders, and the like. * National Debt - We could always just default (or print lots of money, same difference). But that would devalue the dollar. Would the poor care - no they have no dollars and therefore loose nothing. But the rich have lots of dollars and hold lots of debt that will be repaid in dollars. In that light, doesn't paying taxes to fund the national seem cheaper than having the value of your other assets plummet?
So pay up and shut up rich folks, you got no cause for complaints. Remember, capitalism works well when there's plenty to go around. Those who are smart, hardworking and lucky get more, but those who aren't get enough. When there's not enough to go around, we'll have to resort to either communism to evenly distribute limited resources or civil war to thin the population until there's enough to go around. (Given the choices, I think I'd take communism.)
This system is really cool, and the NNSA is already working on it's successor, the Mobile Identification Assessment Response System (MiARS). The MiARS ai-addon will figure out if what it detects is a terrorist, a vandal, an illegal immigrant or an innocent hiker lost in the desert and take appropriate action. Terrorists will be killed but for illegal immigrants they plan to just demonstrate MiARS's bare capabilities in hopes that the alien will be scared back across the border.
So when our own government (whitehouse, CIA, etc.) pushes a bunch of lies that the associated press laps up like the worthless dogs that they are, would this be considered an 'information weapon' being used against one's own people?
If so, does Russia object to that too? (I'm sure it's much worse over there.)
> And deprive millions of corporate IT drones of their false sense of security?!?!? Are you insane, man???
It's not the IT drones that you'd be depriving of a false sense of security, it's users and management. Most of us drones realize AV doesn't do much other than bloat our budgets, slow down our systems and waste our time. But the sense of security we get from it is not that we're protected from viruses but that we're protected from the criticism that we didn't do everything possible to prevent a virus attack should be we be infected. Imagine a virus takes down lots of computers on your network. Your boss's boss or your internal audit department comes around asking what AV software you were running. Do you really want to answer "none"? Even if you know full well that McAfee, Symantec and the like had no protection from that virus, explaining this to the higher-ups wouldn't be pretty.
Are you being critical of the research? TFA talks about a study of the completed solar cycle 23. We're currently IN Solar Cycle 24, which the article you reference predicts will peak in 2012. They may be right. Of course we'll never know, since the Mayan calendar clearly shows the end of the world in 2012, but that's another story. Or is it?!?
Sounds like the permissions you specify for Android apps. That's all fine and dandy for a new platform and we all wish someone had bothered to require least privileges back in the day for our favorite OS, but they didn't. And if they had, it would have been too much work to program for anyway, so something else would have become our favorite OS. So now we have to port all our code to use a new scheme and that's far more work than anyone is willing to do. So we'll remain insecure. Case in point: selinux. Sounds good in principle, but those of us who need to get stuff done don't have time for it.
> that could be misused by spammers to harvest user names and photographs....that has been widely used by spammers, collection agencies, the government, terrorists, aliens (from outer space and otherwise), foreign governments and the like to harvest user names, photographs and e-mails for years.
Parallel programming is a bit different, but so is event-drive (Windows, JS) vs. procedural, and programmers do both of those fine. The problem, unfortunately, isn't that we're all too stupid to pick up multi-threaded programming, but the hardware isn't yet useful enough to make it worth the trouble. Take CUDA for example. To take advantage of the GPU you first have to copy data from main memory into GPU memory, do your parallel processing, then copy data back to main memory. Even for algorithms that are parallelisable, the time it takes to transfer data to/from GPU memory eats up the gains you get from multiple threads. So the reason we haven't all learned GPU programming (after all, just about every recent Nvidia card supports it) is that most of us simply don't have problems that can actually benefit from it.
In short, don't buy the Nvidia/Dell/IBM hype. It's lots of work to port your problem to the GPU (if it's even possible) and there's no guarantee of speedup when you do. Don't buy a Tesla until you've done the appropriate algorithm analysis to determine you can actually use it!
> My solution? Consider either using iTunes gift cards, or if that isn't an option, put the CC info in, make purchases, then remove the information.
TFA agrees with you ("Remove your iTunes card details and consider using gift cards where possible."), but using a gift card is a really bad idea. The article also says to "try prevent any iTunes purchases from clearing." These suggestions show a misunderstanding of the legal protections afforded consumers when we use credit cards.
Under the law, you have 60 days to dispute credit card transactions. You can do this if the transaction has cleared (which is typically less than 24 hours). You can do this even if you've already paid your credit card bill. Your credit card company is required to refund the amount to your account until the dispute is resolved and help you in the dispute resolution process. The law has some antiquated restrictions about transactions occurring more than 50 miles from your home and technically gives you a liability of $50, and doesn't cover debit cards. However, both Visa and Mastercard have policies of zero liability that cover both credit and non-PIN-based debit transactions independent of how far from your home they occur. I've disputed numerous charges for various reason, including having someone make a copy of my card in Mexico (I still had the card but the bank said it was a card-present transaction). Disputes have always been resolved quickly and in my favor. In short, using a credit cards is the safest way to buy stuff. Always use a credit card for any purchase.
Think if you'd used a gift card. Gift cards are like cash. If the purchase was fraudulent, you only lose the value of the gift card, but you have no way to get it back. I guess the safest way would be to reload your gift card each and every time you make a purchase for the exact purchase amount. I think that would be a bit annoying.
> How many of those redirects lead to adult sites?
Probably not many. After all, porn sites actually have a legitimate (or at least legal) internet business model with revenue. Why do they need to infect their customers with malware? The newspapers on the other hand are struggling to figure out how to get people to pay for their content.
What's more, I imagine mostly lonely guys visit porn sites. And who are lonely guys? Geeks! (present company excluded, of course:). And geeks use Firefox, NoScript, etc., so they're hard to infect. If you want to build your fleet of rooted zombies, I'd imagine sites that a bunch of old people who are still using IE 5 on unpatched Windows 2000 is your best bet. And unless they've responded to a Viagra e-mail, I would guess grandma and grandpa aren't visiting porn sites.
This is actually an excellent president. In fact, I think I'm going to stop paying all my bills. Then, next time I try to buy something and either have to pay more or altogether can't buy it because my credit score is only two digits, I'll sue the credit reporting agencies, citing this case as president. If only they kept the $11M judgment, I'd be rich in no time.
This just in: Global Thermonuclear War was narrowly avoided today, after President Obama missed a call on the red phone because he was too busy reading slashdot RSS feeds on his iPhone.
But no one kicked in any doors. All he did was tell people he found the key under the mat, a rather obvious place to look. Do we all really have a responsibility to keep the secrets of perfect strangers that we happen to learn? If he'd used the password, I'd say fine him or jail him, depending on how much trouble he caused or intended to cause. If he tried to sell the password, send him straight to jail. But if he simply embarrassed the whitehouse, thereby encouraging them to better secure their means of communication, then someone send that guy a metal for being a true patriot! And he's not even an American. Now don't we all feel bad about the whole freedom-fries thing.
> Each of us may have our own source tree. If we can convince others to come join us in it, isn't that fun.
But in America, the success of our democracy (or, more accurately, our capitalist system where each dollar, rather than each citizen, gets a vote) has let to illegal immigrants pounding at the multi-billion dollar automated border fences trying to get in. In an open-source democracy, the maintainers are hoping for an influx of contributors who will fix their bugs at below minimum wage (free, in fact) and hope they get enough users that they can figure out a way to turn a profit from their endeavors.
Fortunately you are correct about not having to use Shuttleworth's tree. I've ditched Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and many more for a lot less than the placement of some buttons. That'll show em. I'm now a happy Parsix user, at least until the next time I upgrade a package and figure out what they've done to screw that one up too!
It's sad that $1.5 billion had to be spent to try and protect honest God-fearing Americans from poor Mexicans who wanted to pick our fruit for below minimum wage.
The gas companies have nothing to worry about. Turns out wind energy is a wash. To efficiently produce wind energy, they have to have very accurate wind forecasts which involves running highly parallel computer models on lots of CPUs. Turns out that the energy consumed by all those computers exactly offsets the energy produced by the wind farms they're forecasting for, so wind should have no net effect on the energy markets.
Slashdot Mirror
But are you suggesting that it's somehow unfair that the very small rich minority that control 90% of the wealth pay the lion's share of taxes? After all, they're the ones benefiting most from it. Here's our federal budget:
Top Items:
* Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security and other entitlement programs - Sure, these are payments to the poor (save a good chunk of social security, which pays those who made more during their careers a bigger sum), but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying the military/police force that would be needed to keep the poor from simply taking what they want from the rich, which is what would happen if the poor were just left to starve and freeze and watch their families die of curable diseases because they couldn't afford medical care.
* Military - If we were invaded, how would life change for the poor? Not too much, probably. But the invaders would probably take everything from the rich folks. Since they have the most to loose, they should pay the bills. And our military keeps the climate for international business favorable to the US. We can ship our goods worldwide with minimal direct security costs. We can get cheap oil for industry. Who benefits most from this? Rich CEOs, stockholders, and the like.
* National Debt - We could always just default (or print lots of money, same difference). But that would devalue the dollar. Would the poor care - no they have no dollars and therefore loose nothing. But the rich have lots of dollars and hold lots of debt that will be repaid in dollars. In that light, doesn't paying taxes to fund the national seem cheaper than having the value of your other assets plummet?
So pay up and shut up rich folks, you got no cause for complaints. Remember, capitalism works well when there's plenty to go around. Those who are smart, hardworking and lucky get more, but those who aren't get enough. When there's not enough to go around, we'll have to resort to either communism to evenly distribute limited resources or civil war to thin the population until there's enough to go around. (Given the choices, I think I'd take communism.)
This system is really cool, and the NNSA is already working on it's successor, the Mobile Identification Assessment Response System (MiARS). The MiARS ai-addon will figure out if what it detects is a terrorist, a vandal, an illegal immigrant or an innocent hiker lost in the desert and take appropriate action. Terrorists will be killed but for illegal immigrants they plan to just demonstrate MiARS's bare capabilities in hopes that the alien will be scared back across the border.
> 'Paper books are really dead -- they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the /. home page...
Oxford University's Bodleian Library has purchased a huge £26m warehouse to give a proper home to over 6 million books and 1.2 million maps
If so, does Russia object to that too? (I'm sure it's much worse over there.)
From TFA TODO: adding support for: ...
- Using Java to produce a unique key based off of NIC info
Someone please tell me browsers (at least FF on Linux) don't support reading my MAC address.
> Google's traffic monitors didn't even blink at the extra data being sent across
My browser, on the other hand, blinks like crazy. Thank goodness for NoScript and the in-browser search option.
> And deprive millions of corporate IT drones of their false sense of security?!?!? Are you insane, man???
It's not the IT drones that you'd be depriving of a false sense of security, it's users and management. Most of us drones realize AV doesn't do much other than bloat our budgets, slow down our systems and waste our time. But the sense of security we get from it is not that we're protected from viruses but that we're protected from the criticism that we didn't do everything possible to prevent a virus attack should be we be infected. Imagine a virus takes down lots of computers on your network. Your boss's boss or your internal audit department comes around asking what AV software you were running. Do you really want to answer "none"? Even if you know full well that McAfee, Symantec and the like had no protection from that virus, explaining this to the higher-ups wouldn't be pretty.
Are you being critical of the research? TFA talks about a study of the completed solar cycle 23. We're currently IN Solar Cycle 24, which the article you reference predicts will peak in 2012. They may be right. Of course we'll never know, since the Mayan calendar clearly shows the end of the world in 2012, but that's another story. Or is it?!?
Sounds like the permissions you specify for Android apps. That's all fine and dandy for a new platform and we all wish someone had bothered to require least privileges back in the day for our favorite OS, but they didn't. And if they had, it would have been too much work to program for anyway, so something else would have become our favorite OS. So now we have to port all our code to use a new scheme and that's far more work than anyone is willing to do. So we'll remain insecure. Case in point: selinux. Sounds good in principle, but those of us who need to get stuff done don't have time for it.
> that could be misused by spammers to harvest user names and photographs. ...that has been widely used by spammers, collection agencies, the government, terrorists, aliens (from outer space and otherwise), foreign governments and the like to harvest user names, photographs and e-mails for years.
There. Fixed that for you.
Parallel programming is a bit different, but so is event-drive (Windows, JS) vs. procedural, and programmers do both of those fine. The problem, unfortunately, isn't that we're all too stupid to pick up multi-threaded programming, but the hardware isn't yet useful enough to make it worth the trouble. Take CUDA for example. To take advantage of the GPU you first have to copy data from main memory into GPU memory, do your parallel processing, then copy data back to main memory. Even for algorithms that are parallelisable, the time it takes to transfer data to/from GPU memory eats up the gains you get from multiple threads. So the reason we haven't all learned GPU programming (after all, just about every recent Nvidia card supports it) is that most of us simply don't have problems that can actually benefit from it.
In short, don't buy the Nvidia/Dell/IBM hype. It's lots of work to port your problem to the GPU (if it's even possible) and there's no guarantee of speedup when you do. Don't buy a Tesla until you've done the appropriate algorithm analysis to determine you can actually use it!
> My solution? Consider either using iTunes gift cards, or if that isn't an option, put the CC info in, make purchases, then remove the information.
TFA agrees with you ("Remove your iTunes card details and consider using gift cards where possible."), but using a gift card is a really bad idea. The article also says to "try prevent any iTunes purchases from clearing." These suggestions show a misunderstanding of the legal protections afforded consumers when we use credit cards.
Under the law, you have 60 days to dispute credit card transactions. You can do this if the transaction has cleared (which is typically less than 24 hours). You can do this even if you've already paid your credit card bill. Your credit card company is required to refund the amount to your account until the dispute is resolved and help you in the dispute resolution process. The law has some antiquated restrictions about transactions occurring more than 50 miles from your home and technically gives you a liability of $50, and doesn't cover debit cards. However, both Visa and Mastercard have policies of zero liability that cover both credit and non-PIN-based debit transactions independent of how far from your home they occur. I've disputed numerous charges for various reason, including having someone make a copy of my card in Mexico (I still had the card but the bank said it was a card-present transaction). Disputes have always been resolved quickly and in my favor. In short, using a credit cards is the safest way to buy stuff. Always use a credit card for any purchase.
Think if you'd used a gift card. Gift cards are like cash. If the purchase was fraudulent, you only lose the value of the gift card, but you have no way to get it back. I guess the safest way would be to reload your gift card each and every time you make a purchase for the exact purchase amount. I think that would be a bit annoying.
> How many of those redirects lead to adult sites?
Probably not many. After all, porn sites actually have a legitimate (or at least legal) internet business model with revenue. Why do they need to infect their customers with malware? The newspapers on the other hand are struggling to figure out how to get people to pay for their content.
What's more, I imagine mostly lonely guys visit porn sites. And who are lonely guys? Geeks! (present company excluded, of course :). And geeks use Firefox, NoScript, etc., so they're hard to infect. If you want to build your fleet of rooted zombies, I'd imagine sites that a bunch of old people who are still using IE 5 on unpatched Windows 2000 is your best bet. And unless they've responded to a Viagra e-mail, I would guess grandma and grandpa aren't visiting porn sites.
Great idea Pakistan. I think the only practical and effect way to do that would be to just block the entire Internet. Reminds me of Weird Al's song...
There's no phone, no lights, no motorcar
Not a single luxury
Like Robinson Caruso
It's as primitive as can be
This is actually an excellent president. In fact, I think I'm going to stop paying all my bills. Then, next time I try to buy something and either have to pay more or altogether can't buy it because my credit score is only two digits, I'll sue the credit reporting agencies, citing this case as president. If only they kept the $11M judgment, I'd be rich in no time.
> inanimate objects.
Except for the iPhone, which doesn't run Flash, most smart phones can do animation these days.
And if it could, I think we could write much more popular apps than an AI Physician. ;)
print "Take two asprin and call me in the morning";
Where do I pick up my check?
Their algorithm gets 77% accuracy. I think I can do better:
# Estimated accuracy: 92.1%
isSarcastic(tweet) { return true; }
Or does that only work for slashdot comments?
This just in: Global Thermonuclear War was narrowly avoided today, after President Obama missed a call on the red phone because he was too busy reading slashdot RSS feeds on his iPhone.
But no one kicked in any doors. All he did was tell people he found the key under the mat, a rather obvious place to look. Do we all really have a responsibility to keep the secrets of perfect strangers that we happen to learn? If he'd used the password, I'd say fine him or jail him, depending on how much trouble he caused or intended to cause. If he tried to sell the password, send him straight to jail. But if he simply embarrassed the whitehouse, thereby encouraging them to better secure their means of communication, then someone send that guy a metal for being a true patriot! And he's not even an American. Now don't we all feel bad about the whole freedom-fries thing.
> Each of us may have our own source tree. If we can convince others to come join us in it, isn't that fun.
But in America, the success of our democracy (or, more accurately, our capitalist system where each dollar, rather than each citizen, gets a vote) has let to illegal immigrants pounding at the multi-billion dollar automated border fences trying to get in. In an open-source democracy, the maintainers are hoping for an influx of contributors who will fix their bugs at below minimum wage (free, in fact) and hope they get enough users that they can figure out a way to turn a profit from their endeavors.
Fortunately you are correct about not having to use Shuttleworth's tree. I've ditched Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and many more for a lot less than the placement of some buttons. That'll show em. I'm now a happy Parsix user, at least until the next time I upgrade a package and figure out what they've done to screw that one up too!
It's sad that $1.5 billion had to be spent to try and protect honest God-fearing Americans from poor Mexicans who wanted to pick our fruit for below minimum wage.
There, fixed that for ya.
I was thinking more like Zaphod Beeblebrox.
The gas companies have nothing to worry about. Turns out wind energy is a wash. To efficiently produce wind energy, they have to have very accurate wind forecasts which involves running highly parallel computer models on lots of CPUs. Turns out that the energy consumed by all those computers exactly offsets the energy produced by the wind farms they're forecasting for, so wind should have no net effect on the energy markets.