What is the point in doing this? For the challenge - OK. But why then post it all over the internet? Oh, so you can jump up and down and say "Look what I did" on the internet. Just remember a bunch of people are going to be upset about it and try to take away your rights/ability to do this - and that affects the rest of us too.
Around 1/2 of the US population has at least one gun in their home. The NRA indirectly represents those people as well as the others that support the right to bear arms but don't happen to have any. Ultimately that means they represent over half the population. So shove the "tyranny", you Anonymous Coward.
Are there even any block buster Android app sales success stories out there?
Does Angry Birds count even though its ad supported?
This whole thing also neglects the reality that most iPhone app developers don't make money. Remember the slashdot blurb a while back where the likened the app store to a lottery for developers?
You can't unsay what you have said. If you scream at someone "I'm gonna kill you", it will be used against you.
No, but you don't have to turn over recording of it. Suppose Twitter didn't archive all the tweets - then what? In fact, why DOES twitter archive all tweets?
I understand that it would be frustrating to see years of labor on a theory go down the tubes, but...
Ever since relativity and quantum theory came along, a lot of physicists have been looking for nifty or non-intuitive explanations for things. They keep looking for unexpected stuff in contrast to the "standard model". You know "new physics" is a common term and probably helps to get funding. The more exotic hypothesis (I won't give them the satisfaction of calling them theories) have been people hoping for something exotic in physics that they can be associated with and they are now getting the message "STFU" from the experiments and it sucks for them.
Snap a photo of someone with a smartphone, analyze an image against a database of social media or Flickr pics and, voila, you have a name. From there, it's easy to get someone's age, hometown, interests, news coverage, you name it.
I was going to post a criminal use-case for your humiliation, but if it's not as obvious as I think, I'm not going to inform would-be criminals. This is only made possible by the ability to identify random people on demand. I'm sure there are many other nefarious uses.
If you look at the dollar value of materials in a cell phone, and then compare it to just the labor cost of thowing it into a machine, I think the plan will fall apart. While tons of precious metals sounds like an opportunity, getting it out of millions of devices may cost more than that. I really can't say, as I'm not familiar with the recovery process. If it's so profitable, stop writing about it and get going!
Why should we get something for free when we can pay for it? Wait a minute....
Because it doesn't meet your needs. Funny, I just read the Joel rant saying "Not Invented Here" is not bad. Now the subsequent Open Sourcing has to be treated as a separate decision (made later) so it's not fair to say they should have modified existing open source. They are also quite capable of putting their slant on existing open source and then releasing it - witness the SE Linux extensions courtesy of the NSA.
They claim a 24x24 pixel image. The video shows a low-resolution grey scale video of a kid on a swing. Looks fantastic if you consider going from blind to THAT. However I paused a frame and the kids head was 12 pixels wide. So the overall image is probably at least 120 to 240 wide - many times higher resolution than the device actually produces. So the video is not actually representative. With further advancements one can hope (expect?) that the resolution will increase over the years. Gives new meaning to "retina display".
The negotiations are secret but it is known that the United States entertainment industry is pushing for stronger copyright provisions among the 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region negotiating the deal.
How does a private company (person as some would claim) get involved in secret international negotiations?
Oh right, it's on their behalf. But in no way does that represent the people of the country.
Lesson 4: Cash is king. That paper shit they pass around on wall street has nebulous value. If someone wants to give you millions of dollars for your company, let them give you millions of actual dollars.
OTOH, from the short summary it sounds like they may have a case.
So some of the first science objectives will be to check for life - live and in person instead of using some autonomous toy with a little scooper and mass spectrometer. If the people there can have 10 free hours a week they can do more research than remote NASA missions could ever hope to.
One good EMP and all your information is lost. You read slashdot, didn't you see the article the other day about an upper atmospheric test that zapped stuff 900 miles away? And that was relatively small compared to what's possible. Just a few of those and all electronics information not specially protected will be erased. Oh, or a giant solar flare can do the same - should you think people can actually behave themselves for 100,000 years. OTOH if we nuke ourselves, what's the difference if we leave some extra nuclear waste lying around for the survivors to find later;-) They still find conventional bombs in europe all the time.
I'm not a nuclear physicist, and I could be wrong, but isn't the rule of thumb something along the lines of the shorter a half-life an isotope has, the more dangerous it is?
Yep, and it's also more useful. That's why (s)he wanted to use it in RTGs. The other thing is that when you "burn" it in a breeder reactor, the quantity of waste is reduced by a factor of 20 or better. So it's more hazardous, more useful, shorter lived, and far less of it.
Re:If ancient people taught us anything...
on
A Million-Year Hard Disk
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I can encode a "don't open" image on one table, the periodic table on another, several number systems (for translation) on a third, and a schematic of the objects buried on a 4th indicating the radioactive elements inside other materials. So yes, 4 tablets that don't require technology to decode. Or one could do a large tablet including all of the above. The first image is all you need. The other 3 are for civilizations that understand atoms to understand what the hazard is.
So put up a picture of the periodic table. Use an "obvious" numbering system - on another page/stone/whatever put several number systems side by side so as to help them figure out the one used on the periodic table. Have a diagram nearby of an atom. Then some diagrams of the buried stuff along with indications which atoms they are composed of. Put a couple materials on the outside that match the diagram, so they can verify the diagrams match the items they've unearthed. Then add some sort of images that depict the nasty elements as hazardous (this seems the most difficult part) so if they don't understand atoms and radiation they can at least get the idea that dangerous stuff be buried there.
Hard drives my ass, we already have trouble reading stuff from 30 years ago. Pictures is the way to go. Sure, we have trouble deciphering stuff from 3000 years ago, but that's a lot of text. Numbers representing different materials shouldn't be too hard, I suspect the periodic table will be recognizable for some time. And there is only one important message - don't open this stuff.
I'm no fan of abortion for controlling overpopulation, so birth control is the lesser of two evils.
Why is birth control evil? I'm not joking, I honestly don't understand what make it "the lesser of two evils".
I'd prefer she spend the money of getting approval for RISUG in the US and proliferating it in other countries instead of the conventional commercial stuff.
Having government incentives for employers to offer "heath insurance" artificially inflates prices. If people had to buy their own it would be a whole different story - a lower cost story. For supporting evidence, we first point to the rising cost of most healthcare services. Then we point to two procedures that have fallen in price dramatically over the last 10-15 years "Lasek" eye correction and Boob jobs - neither is often covered because they are unnecessary "cosmetic" procedures. I once asked a pharmacist what would happen to the price of prescriptions if there was no insurance industry and he said the prices would go down without even pausing to think about it.
Same thing is true of government backed student loans - tuition has been skyrocketing because of that. Housing - same thing. Please eliminate the mortgage deduction. Bankers talk like that means you effectively don't pay interest which is far from the truth (it does mean you effectively pay less interest).
SQL injection AGAIN? There's just no damned excuse for it.
Several people have made similar comments. What worries me is that they are not also slamming them for storing passwords in plaintext AGAIN. User passwords should not be stored anywhere on the system. You store a salt and hash of the password - this is fine for login, but fairly useless for hackers should they get it.
Indeed, I would very much expect an alphabetically ordered layout to be technically slightly superior to QWERTY.
I wouldn't. Alphabetical order is only good for people who need to search for the keys. Anyone who has even moderate typing ability does not need to look at the keys. So placing the keys in a way that takes into account letter frequency and doublet frequency and human dexterity would seem to be the way to go - that's a complicated problem which I would bet does not have alphabetical order as an optimal solution.
As I type this looking at the screen and not the keyboard, I realize that my biggest problem is getting my hands misaligned when returning to the home position - this is due to my tendency to not use my pinkie fingers which mean I need to move side-to-side more. I either need a keyboard that helps me get back home, or I need to learn to use all my fingers when they are supposed to - hey, I used a pinky for an "a" - go me!
Even if we were to change layouts, it would NOT be to this one. They put all the vowels in a column highlighted with a different color. WTF? While they are common letters, so are a lot of others. In fact while txtng ppl tend 2 not use m. Disrupting the otherwise alphabetical order just for this seems like a poor choice. The other major problem I see is there are no numbers on this thing so it's not alpha-numeric, just alpha. I see no compelling features of this layout, but there are some stupid things about it.
They 'clearly show' that the bacteria can’t use arsenic as the researchers claimed, said an accompanying statement from the journal.
Sounds like these folks made the same error as the original author. Let us not speculate on weather the arsenic has been assimilated into critical molecules inside the organism. Let them instead determine the chemical composition of the actual molecules in the organism and say definitively what is going on. I for one took the original research as somewhat speculative since they had not done this, and hence a call to others to do proper analysis. So now the others have apparently done more incomplete research. I may be misinterpreting that "can't use arsenic" is not the same as "does not use arsenic". It's hard to tell without reading the original works.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the point in doing this? For the challenge - OK. But why then post it all over the internet? Oh, so you can jump up and down and say "Look what I did" on the internet. Just remember a bunch of people are going to be upset about it and try to take away your rights/ability to do this - and that affects the rest of us too.
Agreed, that describes the constitution.
Around 1/2 of the US population has at least one gun in their home. The NRA indirectly represents those people as well as the others that support the right to bear arms but don't happen to have any. Ultimately that means they represent over half the population. So shove the "tyranny", you Anonymous Coward.
Does Angry Birds count even though its ad supported?
This whole thing also neglects the reality that most iPhone app developers don't make money. Remember the slashdot blurb a while back where the likened the app store to a lottery for developers?
No, but you don't have to turn over recording of it. Suppose Twitter didn't archive all the tweets - then what? In fact, why DOES twitter archive all tweets?
Ever since relativity and quantum theory came along, a lot of physicists have been looking for nifty or non-intuitive explanations for things. They keep looking for unexpected stuff in contrast to the "standard model". You know "new physics" is a common term and probably helps to get funding. The more exotic hypothesis (I won't give them the satisfaction of calling them theories) have been people hoping for something exotic in physics that they can be associated with and they are now getting the message "STFU" from the experiments and it sucks for them.
I was going to post a criminal use-case for your humiliation, but if it's not as obvious as I think, I'm not going to inform would-be criminals. This is only made possible by the ability to identify random people on demand. I'm sure there are many other nefarious uses.
If you look at the dollar value of materials in a cell phone, and then compare it to just the labor cost of thowing it into a machine, I think the plan will fall apart. While tons of precious metals sounds like an opportunity, getting it out of millions of devices may cost more than that. I really can't say, as I'm not familiar with the recovery process. If it's so profitable, stop writing about it and get going!
Because it doesn't meet your needs. Funny, I just read the Joel rant saying "Not Invented Here" is not bad. Now the subsequent Open Sourcing has to be treated as a separate decision (made later) so it's not fair to say they should have modified existing open source. They are also quite capable of putting their slant on existing open source and then releasing it - witness the SE Linux extensions courtesy of the NSA.
They claim a 24x24 pixel image. The video shows a low-resolution grey scale video of a kid on a swing. Looks fantastic if you consider going from blind to THAT. However I paused a frame and the kids head was 12 pixels wide. So the overall image is probably at least 120 to 240 wide - many times higher resolution than the device actually produces. So the video is not actually representative. With further advancements one can hope (expect?) that the resolution will increase over the years. Gives new meaning to "retina display".
How does a private company (person as some would claim) get involved in secret international negotiations?
Oh right, it's on their behalf. But in no way does that represent the people of the country.
Lesson 4: Cash is king. That paper shit they pass around on wall street has nebulous value. If someone wants to give you millions of dollars for your company, let them give you millions of actual dollars.
OTOH, from the short summary it sounds like they may have a case.
So some of the first science objectives will be to check for life - live and in person instead of using some autonomous toy with a little scooper and mass spectrometer. If the people there can have 10 free hours a week they can do more research than remote NASA missions could ever hope to.
One good EMP and all your information is lost. You read slashdot, didn't you see the article the other day about an upper atmospheric test that zapped stuff 900 miles away? And that was relatively small compared to what's possible. Just a few of those and all electronics information not specially protected will be erased. Oh, or a giant solar flare can do the same - should you think people can actually behave themselves for 100,000 years. OTOH if we nuke ourselves, what's the difference if we leave some extra nuclear waste lying around for the survivors to find later ;-) They still find conventional bombs in europe all the time.
Yep, and it's also more useful. That's why (s)he wanted to use it in RTGs. The other thing is that when you "burn" it in a breeder reactor, the quantity of waste is reduced by a factor of 20 or better. So it's more hazardous, more useful, shorter lived, and far less of it.
I can encode a "don't open" image on one table, the periodic table on another, several number systems (for translation) on a third, and a schematic of the objects buried on a 4th indicating the radioactive elements inside other materials. So yes, 4 tablets that don't require technology to decode. Or one could do a large tablet including all of the above. The first image is all you need. The other 3 are for civilizations that understand atoms to understand what the hazard is.
So put up a picture of the periodic table. Use an "obvious" numbering system - on another page/stone/whatever put several number systems side by side so as to help them figure out the one used on the periodic table. Have a diagram nearby of an atom. Then some diagrams of the buried stuff along with indications which atoms they are composed of. Put a couple materials on the outside that match the diagram, so they can verify the diagrams match the items they've unearthed. Then add some sort of images that depict the nasty elements as hazardous (this seems the most difficult part) so if they don't understand atoms and radiation they can at least get the idea that dangerous stuff be buried there.
Hard drives my ass, we already have trouble reading stuff from 30 years ago. Pictures is the way to go. Sure, we have trouble deciphering stuff from 3000 years ago, but that's a lot of text. Numbers representing different materials shouldn't be too hard, I suspect the periodic table will be recognizable for some time. And there is only one important message - don't open this stuff.
Why is birth control evil? I'm not joking, I honestly don't understand what make it "the lesser of two evils".
I'd prefer she spend the money of getting approval for RISUG in the US and proliferating it in other countries instead of the conventional commercial stuff.
They also support contraception.
Having government incentives for employers to offer "heath insurance" artificially inflates prices. If people had to buy their own it would be a whole different story - a lower cost story. For supporting evidence, we first point to the rising cost of most healthcare services. Then we point to two procedures that have fallen in price dramatically over the last 10-15 years "Lasek" eye correction and Boob jobs - neither is often covered because they are unnecessary "cosmetic" procedures. I once asked a pharmacist what would happen to the price of prescriptions if there was no insurance industry and he said the prices would go down without even pausing to think about it.
Same thing is true of government backed student loans - tuition has been skyrocketing because of that. Housing - same thing. Please eliminate the mortgage deduction. Bankers talk like that means you effectively don't pay interest which is far from the truth (it does mean you effectively pay less interest).
Can someone crowd source the development and/or approval process for medical advances like RISUG that would not be profitable for a company.
Several people have made similar comments. What worries me is that they are not also slamming them for storing passwords in plaintext AGAIN. User passwords should not be stored anywhere on the system. You store a salt and hash of the password - this is fine for login, but fairly useless for hackers should they get it.
I wouldn't. Alphabetical order is only good for people who need to search for the keys. Anyone who has even moderate typing ability does not need to look at the keys. So placing the keys in a way that takes into account letter frequency and doublet frequency and human dexterity would seem to be the way to go - that's a complicated problem which I would bet does not have alphabetical order as an optimal solution.
As I type this looking at the screen and not the keyboard, I realize that my biggest problem is getting my hands misaligned when returning to the home position - this is due to my tendency to not use my pinkie fingers which mean I need to move side-to-side more. I either need a keyboard that helps me get back home, or I need to learn to use all my fingers when they are supposed to - hey, I used a pinky for an "a" - go me!
Even if we were to change layouts, it would NOT be to this one. They put all the vowels in a column highlighted with a different color. WTF? While they are common letters, so are a lot of others. In fact while txtng ppl tend 2 not use m. Disrupting the otherwise alphabetical order just for this seems like a poor choice. The other major problem I see is there are no numbers on this thing so it's not alpha-numeric, just alpha. I see no compelling features of this layout, but there are some stupid things about it.
Sounds like these folks made the same error as the original author. Let us not speculate on weather the arsenic has been assimilated into critical molecules inside the organism. Let them instead determine the chemical composition of the actual molecules in the organism and say definitively what is going on. I for one took the original research as somewhat speculative since they had not done this, and hence a call to others to do proper analysis. So now the others have apparently done more incomplete research. I may be misinterpreting that "can't use arsenic" is not the same as "does not use arsenic". It's hard to tell without reading the original works.