As I understand it the problem with the cameras is not that the crimes are not getting
recorded, but it takes so long to trawl through the footage to get at the evidence.
I suspect the solution will be to employ low payed civvies or dodgy face recognition to
trawl the footage for evidence... which will end well:-(
I think it's more that a distributed denial of service attack, is just plain unexciting on the grand scheme of flying aircraft into office buildings.
No one ever died as a result of a computer virus.
I wasn't really thinking of DoS... how about on 8th August every infected computer
overwrites its hard disks with copy's the the Lampton manifesto.
There are bound to be a few infected computer in hospitals airports, power stations etc.
and it does not matter if they were not attached to anything important, the news
story's will be all about how the Lampton worm nearly caused planes to fall, patents to die and 'endangered' the Grimbledown nuclear power plant.
Later on they will move to human interest story's about how the Gumby family lost every precious picture of their dead daughter, along with vastly inflated estimates of the total damage done and productivity lost and the new draconian security policy's that companys now 'have' to enforce.
Sure its no 911 and may not appeal to your typical bomb throwing nut, but perhaps it would
appeal to a radical Anti-capitalist group, religious cult, student jihadist wannabes or loan fruitcake.
I would naively assume that it would be easy enough to buy off the shelf
botnet code release it and when it gets to a sufficient size upload something really
toxic. For bonus points the attack could be limited via IP address or targeted at
idealogically unsound files.
From a practical POV this sort of attack would circumvent the normal surveillance
as there is no need to go to terrorist camps, no need to buy suspicious chemicals...
they would still need to keep their gobs shut.
Is running a botnet a hugely expensive/technical enterprise? (I've no doubt there are enough
disaffected techies out there to run the thing)
Is it that cyperterrorism just seen as too wussy to bother with.... That does not
seem to hold water, terrorism is about publicity one strike or even the rumor
of an attack would generate hyterical coverage in the world press. Followed up with Billions
spent on improved security (not such a bad thing:-).
Perhaps that is the reason why the bot herders don't want to get involved as it would
poison their honey pot...
If your doing Mol bio the first thing you will do is make a 50-100ml of 0.5M EDTA (a constituent of many buffers) this is a long process... if there nice they will tell you you need to slowly add NaOHto get it to dissolve, you will then use this solution for the next 3+ years.
As the difference between lab and computer
Expect very very long debugging sessions. Experiments take between hours and months to run just once (any you may only have money to run it a few times).
Failure will be your constant companion when a nice reliable protocol blow up, you spend the first week in denial rerunning it a few times
then next week you remake all the reagents, next week you get new samples, next week you spend in denial rerunning but this time thinking different thoughts while you put it together. keep this up
for another month or so and then discover that the test tubes plastic has been changed and its
no longer binds the protein coating the protocol depended on (or something equally stupid)
Remember you don't have access to a debugger or the source code
you have a black box.
The bug can be in the input
...and/or the black box
...and/or the output
...and/or the enviroment the environment is done in (up to and including the environment the samples were taken in.
Whats worse is that the only way to validate input/output is to put them through other black boxes. So experimental have to be designed to validate black boxes against each other (ie positive and lots of negative controls).
And maybe, just maybe the bug could be the result....
Knowing that the odds on getting DNA clash are rather lower than an md5 clash will not help:-(
The FBI's CODIS database uses samples that have undergone STR analysis examining 13 loci. The odds of two people having identical 13-loci STR profiles are about one in a billion.
I recently heard that in England, the new powers given to the police (including local ones) by their anti-terrorism laws were mostly used for cases of minor frauds (meaning they could indefinitely detain people who, when presented to a judge, would only risk a fine). That and
checking your in the right school catchment area
"On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
This question is more perceptive that it appears. The aim of the Babbage engine was
to calculate accurate log and trig tables by eliminating human error (mathmatical
tables were hand calculated and ships were lost due to navigation errors derived from
known errors these tables).
So the question "You propose to eliminate human error from the calculation process. The operator is human, how do you stop him making mistakes?" is quite a valid one
Your also assuming someone as ethical as an body snatcher would bother doing these tests and
not take the cheap and cheerful approach of fake documentation
I honestly don't get the big deal with this. Now myself I am religious, but when I'm dead. I'm dead. And unless we figure out how to freeze people then revive them, this doesn't seem like a big deal. You get your grave for people to remember you, and your organs are put to good use. Seems like a fair trade to me.
... you may be dead and not worried about it, but I would not like to get organs of uncertain provenance. For example Alistair Cooke bones were stolen for
transplants, and, given he died of lung cancer which had spread to his bones. I think the recipent may not be too happy.
But what am I looking at??
Why a fun but useless historical overlay and no constellation overlay allowing
one to actually navigate round the interface.
Nice start but very very beta.
Interesting. Most scientists I know learn one language and stick with it exclusively, even to the point of making the language do things that others might do in a fraction of the time.
Does the 'fraction of the time' include the time the scientist takes to identify and learn the new language?
In IT learning a language is boosts the CV. In science its a means to an end spend a 2-4 weeks putting results in the
lab book or picking up another language in the hope it will save you more than in the long run. Additionally
if they don't use the new skill often it starts to fade...
Because some kid could walk up to a robot, and tell it to waltz off a cliff and it would do so. (in such a way as to not kill any people on the way down) I believe the second and third laws would need to be switched.
robots are expensive but expendable, with personality backup even 'death' is not much of an issue to a self aware
robot.
Asimov wrote a short story about this sort of situation Runaronud
Using the Linux example (need to find another one), it has a lot of neat, weird, esoteric features bundled into it, that Windows lacks, but Windows has what people are willing to pay for, not whatever the Windows devs want to put into it.
I sort of see your point here, but I think you have chosen a bad example. Windows ships without neat, weird, esoteric features... it also ships without boring, mundane normal features like a spreadsheet, wordprocessor,
graphics package and database (granted if they did ship with Office they would get slapped with a monopoly
class action toot sweet;-)
Why do they need to place the antenna? Could the build a thousand antenna in 'beachaballs' and just scatter them
over the lunar surface. Then determine their positions by radar and compensate for the scatter in software.
On the up side, if we're talking a wireless setup with the weak signal most home setups have, anyone attempting to crack it is also within physical ass-kicking distance. Minimalist security, a fair IDS, and a lead pipe are all you need unless we're talking something with a larger coverage than most WAPs.
Your forgetting possible charges of assault and the difficulty of tracking the
MAC ID back to a physical location. You could add breaking and entering to the charge list
so you can be sure your beating up the right person...
The number of false positives is going to be astronomical. A bunch of terrorists planning a
attack is going to sound very much like a bunch of spotty teens planing to raid the Dungeon of
Crushing Inevitability.
Yes what could possibly go wrong? I'm really wracking my brains
and I'm having a job
Since these Bases are not synthesized in the wild there is no chance of
the altered DNA getting propagated in somethings genome and since there
(presumably) not recognized by tRNA
they can't affect translation
Re:I thought those things were already broken
on
Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked
·
· Score: 1
I can find as more free porn than have any desire to see without any problem, so it's hard to see why users would bother.
I think this is the key point why work for it if you can get it for free. A more cunning varient would be
to have a Far East site that uses lots of captchas that are spookly similar to say US Hotmail. The site could be
profitable in its own right with a nice side line on captcha solving.
I can't help but feel that people who claim 'Specialist parts have destroyed LEGO' have not watched any children actually playing with them.
I'll step up to that...
My boyfriend's 8-year-old got the Mars Mission set this xmas, and the three of us built it together. I would start rearranging things and goofing off and she would get very upset and tell me I was "playing with it wrong" - her goal was to get everything precisely assembled, and then give the astronauts names and complex social hierarchies (this guy is the grandfather of that guy and they're fighting over some family thing having to do with capturing the aliens, etc.). Basically it's not so much a Lego set to her as it is a small-scale all-male Barbie set in space. *ducks*
OK were on Slashdot... but What is not creative about storytelling and creating complex social hierarchies?
She is not minoring in 3D design:-)
Seriously though, she has also built other sets with her dad (including the Millennium Falcon - drooooool) and enjoys the rules and the right-ness of putting things where they go. I had the old Lego sets at her age and I built all kinds of weird stuff - because the parts were basic and had no specific purpose...she does not (in her mind) have this opportunity with these sets, though I'm sure the ability is there. I have seen this same child turn a plastic drinking straw and 3 empty spools of thread into a family of woodchucks.
Ahem. Yes, woodchucks.
I'll hazard a guess that she can't be bothered dealing with the constrained 'pixilated' options LEGO provides when and is treating it like an 'Airfix' kit, but when given the chance of dealing with an analog set of three spoons and straw sees many more options.
Perhaps I should criticize LEGO for forcing them Kids work within the system... Ducks
Having watched my two boys assemble half a dozen new Lego sets since Christmas (Mars Mission & Aqua Raiders sets, IIRC), my first instinct was to agree with you. But after a few weeks, they're finding ways to build some very interesting custom space ships, towers - you name it. I'm sure that as they get older and no longer care about how much work it took to create the original designs, they'll have even fewer qualms about tearing them apart completely to build more new stuff.
I can't help but feel that people who claim 'Specialist parts have destroyed LEGO' have not watched any children
actually playing with them. When my son is choosing a new set one of the key points he looks
at are specialized parts as they allow him to build with far greater detail and/or on a far smaller scale
then before (He has a very fine collection of minifig scale robots, aliens and monsters)
This seems to be entirely true. I've been looking into the relevant mechanisms (for a bioinformatics course), and it really does feel like an old, kludgey, if it works - ship it, code base. I think it was alternative splicing that did it, but the possibility of genes overlapping (possibly in opposite reading directions) is also bad. If it were code, it would be a maintenance nightmare.
I've often used this analogy to techie people when trying to get across the horrors of evolution
Imagine a world with only one start up tech company... where the programmers have all resigned
after writing a hello-world script.... Instead of getting in new people the PHB decides he can do it
himself and starts randomly diddling (with occasional copy pastes) with the code (and compiler and OS
and hardwear) to see what
happens and testing it by seeing what sells to a market hungery for applications. If it sells he
keeps working on it if it doesn't he stops work.
There is no commenting no version control, each new application is a fork from an existing one... and the horrifying
thing is the parent application is also chosen at random. If he wants to make a mailer he may start out
with a spread sheet or a web server (or even a webserver evolved from a spread sheet).
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it the problem with the cameras is not that the crimes are not getting recorded, but it takes so long to trawl through the footage to get at the evidence.
I suspect the solution will be to employ low payed civvies or dodgy face recognition to trawl the footage for evidence ... which will end well :-(
No one ever died as a result of a computer virus.
I wasn't really thinking of DoS ... how about on 8th August every infected computer
overwrites its hard disks with copy's the the Lampton manifesto.
There are bound to be a few infected computer in hospitals airports, power stations etc. and it does not matter if they were not attached to anything important, the news story's will be all about how the Lampton worm nearly caused planes to fall, patents to die and 'endangered' the Grimbledown nuclear power plant.
Later on they will move to human interest story's about how the Gumby family lost every precious picture of their dead daughter, along with vastly inflated estimates of the total damage done and productivity lost and the new draconian security policy's that companys now 'have' to enforce.
Sure its no 911 and may not appeal to your typical bomb throwing nut, but perhaps it would appeal to a radical Anti-capitalist group, religious cult, student jihadist wannabes or loan fruitcake.
Why have we seen no 'terrorist malware'?
I would naively assume that it would be easy enough to buy off the shelf botnet code release it and when it gets to a sufficient size upload something really toxic. For bonus points the attack could be limited via IP address or targeted at idealogically unsound files.
From a practical POV this sort of attack would circumvent the normal surveillance as there is no need to go to terrorist camps, no need to buy suspicious chemicals ...
they would still need to keep their gobs shut.
Is running a botnet a hugely expensive/technical enterprise? (I've no doubt there are enough disaffected techies out there to run the thing)
Is it that cyperterrorism just seen as too wussy to bother with.... That does not seem to hold water, terrorism is about publicity one strike or even the rumor of an attack would generate hyterical coverage in the world press. Followed up with Billions spent on improved security (not such a bad thing:-).
Perhaps that is the reason why the bot herders don't want to get involved as it would poison their honey pot...
If your doing Mol bio the first thing you will do is make a 50-100ml of 0.5M EDTA (a constituent of many buffers) this is a long process... if there nice they will tell you you need to slowly add NaOHto get it to dissolve, you will then use this solution for the next 3+ years.
As the difference between lab and computer
Expect very very long debugging sessions. Experiments take between hours and months to run just once (any you may only have money to run it a few times).
Failure will be your constant companion when a nice reliable protocol blow up, you spend the first week in denial rerunning it a few times then next week you remake all the reagents, next week you get new samples, next week you spend in denial rerunning but this time thinking different thoughts while you put it together. keep this up for another month or so and then discover that the test tubes plastic has been changed and its no longer binds the protein coating the protocol depended on (or something equally stupid)
Remember you don't have access to a debugger or the source code
you have a black box.
Whats worse is that the only way to validate input/output is to put them through other black boxes. So experimental have to be designed to validate black boxes against each other (ie positive and lots of negative controls).
And maybe, just maybe the bug could be the result....
Knowing that the odds on getting DNA clash are rather lower than an md5 clash will not help :-(
The FBI's CODIS database uses samples that have undergone STR analysis examining 13 loci. The odds of two people having identical 13-loci STR profiles are about one in a billion.
"On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
This question is more perceptive that it appears. The aim of the Babbage engine was to calculate accurate log and trig tables by eliminating human error (mathmatical tables were hand calculated and ships were lost due to navigation errors derived from known errors these tables).
So the question "You propose to eliminate human error from the calculation process. The operator is human, how do you stop him making mistakes?" is quite a valid one
Suspected of trying to send your child to a school outside your catchment area Terrorist
How about lung cancer which had spread to the bones?
Your also assuming someone as ethical as an body snatcher would bother doing these tests and not take the cheap and cheerful approach of fake documentation
... you may be dead and not worried about it, but I would not like to get organs of uncertain provenance. For example Alistair Cooke bones were stolen for transplants, and, given he died of lung cancer which had spread to his bones. I think the recipent may not be too happy.
I'm sure there is an xkcd strip to cover this eventuality....
I'm sure its in here somewhere
Its pretty well know in the UK well know enough for 'The Goodies' to take the mic. Arther C Clark has a lot to answer for:-)
But what am I looking at?? Why a fun but useless historical overlay and no constellation overlay allowing one to actually navigate round the interface. Nice start but very very beta.
Does the 'fraction of the time' include the time the scientist takes to identify and learn the new language? In IT learning a language is boosts the CV. In science its a means to an end spend a 2-4 weeks putting results in the lab book or picking up another language in the hope it will save you more than in the long run. Additionally if they don't use the new skill often it starts to fade...
Because some kid could walk up to a robot, and tell it to waltz off a cliff and it would do so. (in such a way as to not kill any people on the way down) I believe the second and third laws would need to be switched.
robots are expensive but expendable, with personality backup even 'death' is not much of an issue to a self aware robot.
Asimov wrote a short story about this sort of situation Runaronud
I sort of see your point here, but I think you have chosen a bad example. Windows ships without neat, weird, esoteric features... it also ships without boring, mundane normal features like a spreadsheet, wordprocessor, graphics package and database (granted if they did ship with Office they would get slapped with a monopoly class action toot sweet ;-)
amtip: HDD magnets make the best fridgemagnets
Why do they need to place the antenna? Could the build a thousand antenna in 'beachaballs' and just scatter them over the lunar surface. Then determine their positions by radar and compensate for the scatter in software.
Your forgetting possible charges of assault and the difficulty of tracking the MAC ID back to a physical location. You could add breaking and entering to the charge list so you can be sure your beating up the right person...
The number of false positives is going to be astronomical. A bunch of terrorists planning a attack is going to sound very much like a bunch of spotty teens planing to raid the Dungeon of Crushing Inevitability.
Yes what could possibly go wrong? I'm really wracking my brains and I'm having a job
Since these Bases are not synthesized in the wild there is no chance of the altered DNA getting propagated in somethings genome and since there (presumably) not recognized by tRNA they can't affect translation
I think this is the key point why work for it if you can get it for free. A more cunning varient would be to have a Far East site that uses lots of captchas that are spookly similar to say US Hotmail. The site could be profitable in its own right with a nice side line on captcha solving.
I'll step up to that...
My boyfriend's 8-year-old got the Mars Mission set this xmas, and the three of us built it together. I would start rearranging things and goofing off and she would get very upset and tell me I was "playing with it wrong" - her goal was to get everything precisely assembled, and then give the astronauts names and complex social hierarchies (this guy is the grandfather of that guy and they're fighting over some family thing having to do with capturing the aliens, etc.). Basically it's not so much a Lego set to her as it is a small-scale all-male Barbie set in space. *ducks*
OK were on Slashdot... but What is not creative about storytelling and creating complex social hierarchies? She is not minoring in 3D design:-)
Seriously though, she has also built other sets with her dad (including the Millennium Falcon - drooooool) and enjoys the rules and the right-ness of putting things where they go. I had the old Lego sets at her age and I built all kinds of weird stuff - because the parts were basic and had no specific purpose...she does not (in her mind) have this opportunity with these sets, though I'm sure the ability is there. I have seen this same child turn a plastic drinking straw and 3 empty spools of thread into a family of woodchucks.
Ahem. Yes, woodchucks.
I'll hazard a guess that she can't be bothered dealing with the constrained 'pixilated' options LEGO provides when and is treating it like an 'Airfix' kit, but when given the chance of dealing with an analog set of three spoons and straw sees many more options.
Perhaps I should criticize LEGO for forcing them Kids work within the system... Ducks
I can't help but feel that people who claim 'Specialist parts have destroyed LEGO' have not watched any children actually playing with them. When my son is choosing a new set one of the key points he looks at are specialized parts as they allow him to build with far greater detail and/or on a far smaller scale then before (He has a very fine collection of minifig scale robots, aliens and monsters)
I've often used this analogy to techie people when trying to get across the horrors of evolution
Imagine a world with only one start up tech company... where the programmers have all resigned after writing a hello-world script.... Instead of getting in new people the PHB decides he can do it himself and starts randomly diddling (with occasional copy pastes) with the code (and compiler and OS and hardwear) to see what happens and testing it by seeing what sells to a market hungery for applications. If it sells he keeps working on it if it doesn't he stops work.
There is no commenting no version control, each new application is a fork from an existing one... and the horrifying thing is the parent application is also chosen at random. If he wants to make a mailer he may start out with a spread sheet or a web server (or even a webserver evolved from a spread sheet).
You may find this story of evolved hardwear Damn Interesting