I'm curious about which patents are being asserted. The news items somehow never get around to listing the patent numbers or describing them.
(I worked for a router company when Nortel was sinking and suing everybody who did anythig with SONET for infringement, in a desperate attempt to come up with enough money to avoid going under. Very much like a drowning person dragging others down. Some of my inventions (including patented ones) were in a chip that had something to do with SONET, so I (and other designers on the project) were called in to explain how the way WE did things didn't infringe these particular paptents. My stuff didn't infringe, IMHO, though I don't know about other people's. Nevertheless, the company settled the suit by cutting a cross-license deal (incuding paying them a few million because Nortel had more patents).
[Parent poster talks of ONE of his many anti-gun (i.e. anti-gun-in-private-hands) projects.]
Prohibition of something means the illegal providers of it have less competition and can thus sell for a higher price. So it's very convenient for those sellers. Thus, for instance, drug lords are just fine with keeping the drug laws strong and complex, and opposed to legalization of their product (which would put them in competition with efficient conglomerates who could compete the pants off them).
(Incidentially: I suspect Yee's opposition to video games was a spinoff of his antigun agenda.)
By the way: Pro-gunners are celebrating tonight. (The call from a friend a few hours ago with the news made both my wife my own day. B-) )
... people fully EXPECT the NSA to be upto nasty secret snooping habits. That is actually the minor part of the story that caused the outrage. The more dangerous fact is that the NSA can demand companies or individuals turn over data to them and impose a gag order thus forcing them to keep it secret.
I agree that the latter IS a big problem. But I don't agree that it's the ONLY problem, or the only BIG one.
National Security Letters are still relatively narrow compared to what the NSA did. They also tapped the fibers Google and others used to communicate with each other, and used these taps to snoop everything that went across them, without Google's knowledge.
I encountered a Google engineer with job responsibilities related to that at a conference last year, and he was LIVID. They'd tapped fibers OWNED BY GOOGLE - trespassing and damaging them (aong with Google's credibility) in the process - with no letters, warrants, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, or what-have-you. Google has since been installing encryption thorughout it's network - not just where it leaves the building, but even from rack to rack.
Maybe they're still stuck disclosing SOME stuff. But at least they're trying to know what it is, do their best to minimize it (and protect their model), and avoid inadvertently firehosing EVERYTHING into the maw of the NSA.
She is making a dangerous assumption that if tax revenues increased the extra would be spent on schools
THANK you! That is beautifully expressed. It should be instantly understood by anyone hearing pro-tax propaganda by Lewis or others in a debate or comments-allowed-publication setting.
It's a prototype for similar arguments for raising taxes allegedly for other purposes as well.
They made their bathroom walls out of glass and then complained that he was a peeping tom for setting up a webcam from across the street. Scuzzy? yes, but not illegal.
It varies by state. But...
Pointing a webcam at an uncovered bathroom or bedroom window generally IS explicitly illegal. It will get you busted and into the registered sex offender database.
IANAL but if I undersand this correctly the test is whether the peeped-at has a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
In the all-glass bathroom case you might claim that the bathroom user did not have a reasonable expectation. But what if the switch from opaque walls to glass was made by a contractor and the homeowner was blind? That's the kind of situation we have here, and the accused knew it.
Once upon a time, decades ago, the built-in permission systems of computers were also usually considered (by their users and administrators, before the law got involved) to also assumed to be a presumed-valid expression of intent. My preference would be to have this approach recognized in law - if only to avoid slippery-slopes between users and jail, and to put any blame for security flaws like this on the people designingn and deploying the tools. But then things happened (like WiFi access points being shipped with security features off to reduce service calls by new users), and the law has been going a different way.
The BIOS has bare back access to the hardware. Why cant it log the keyboard and dump it out the Ethernet? Why cant it access the ram directly?
Built-in threats include more than just BIOS. At least one, and probably most, chip makers build in backdoors that do exactly what you describe, and much more. It's built right into the silicon, too.
Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)
Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature.
You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.
If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.
Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):
Hardware-based AMT features include:
amt.feature:Encrypted, remote communication channel for network traffic between the IT console and Intel AMT.
amt.feature: Ability for a wired PC (physically connected to the network) outside the company's firewall on an open LAN to establish a secure communication tunnel (via AMT) back to the IT console. Examples of an open LAN include a wired laptop at home or at an SMB site that does not have a proxy server.
amt.feature: Protected Audio/Video Pathway for playback protection of DRM-protected media.
Additional AMT features in laptop PCs
Laptops with AMT also include wireless technologies:
michael@shuttle:~/nomad-michael/letters$ cat amt.feature Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)
Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature.
You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.
If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.
Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):
Hardware-based AMT features include:
Encrypted, remote communication channel for network traffic between the IT console and Intel AMT.
Ability for a wired PC (physically connected to the network) outside the company's firewall
Nazi propaganda must be beaten, not hidden. The best way to discredit an idiot is to hand him a microphone and let him speak.
Further, hiding it makes it impossible for later generations to recognize the very seductive ideas when they reappear, later, without the "NAZI" label on them.
It's a classic example of the adage about being doomed to repeat history if you fail to learn from it. How can you learn from it if it's censored away?
The people who are the best in technical fields tend to have well developed social intelligence as well as being technically brilliant. These aren't either-or abilities. The lack of social or emotional skills is a cognitive deficit.
As one who moved to Silicon Valley (which looks to me like one big Aspergers ward B-J ) and socializes with many of the founders of the compter industry, I can tell you that there are a lot of unquestionably "technically brilliant" and wildly successful people who would be textbook examples of Aspergers' "sufferers".
My own opinion is somewhat between yours and that of the previous poster: I suspect Aspergers' people primarily do well with computers because it's a field where the "missing social skills" are not an impediment to success.
The various levels of social-skill blindness, and the resulting stronger focus on the functionality that IS present, may also help more with the programming somewhat (if only by reducing distriction from anthropomorphizing the machines), or it may simply be irrelevant. I suspect it helps some - more than lack of communication with the Pointy Haired Bosses hurts - but that any such effect pales before the "something interesting I can do" effect.
Yes, social skills can help in teamwork, organizing and finding financing for companies, and in finding problems that technology can solve and earn a profit doing so. (Example: Social media.) On the other hand, building technological prosthetics to help replace the missing functionality can also help lead to success. (Example again: Social media.)
[reference to graph with post-vaccination bumps in Measles incidences and a recommendation for a second, booster, dose at the start of the third bump.]
Maybe this is just the half-time of the shots, and it's time to refresh? I.e. "2014, third dose recommended"
I suspect the second-dose recommendation was driven by the detection of substantial numbers of Measles cases among those vaccinated a few years previously, indicating that the immunity from one dose wore down after a few years.
I also suspect that we'll get a third-dose recommendation iff a similar number of cases is detected among those who had two dosesk (of non-defectivek vaccine, properly spaced).
The proper signal comes, not from the overall infection rate, but from the infection rate among those already vaccinated.
Earlier this week, fears emerged that thousands of people might have been exposed to measles when a sick UC Berkeley student traveled on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.
In yet another sign of the perils and irresponsibility of the anti-vaccination movement, thousands of riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles -- a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 but has since returned.The latest threat comes from an unnamed and unvaccinated UC Berkeley student who apparently contracted the disease while traveling in the Philippines during an outbreak there. Public health officials in Contra Costa County say people who rode BART during the morning or evening rush hours from Feb. 4 through Feb. 7 may have been exposed by the carrier, who is unidentified.
That could be hundreds of thousands of people.
(The estimate was later expanded to millions. Also, this "patient zero" infected four of his family members in addition to any he infected on the BART or elsewhere.)
There's more than fuel efficiency to consider when comparing mass transit vs. private automobile transportation.
Slashdot moderators have absolutely no intellectual honesty.
Shashdot moderators have no CONSISTENCY. They are randomly selected and only get to moderate a small number of posts each.
Further, they each get to chose which postings they moderate. People with different idea systems and hot buttons will chose different postings.
To expect "intellectual honesty" in the moderators to be visible as some visible, rational, consistency among moderation of diverse items is to expect that the readership of Slashdot to be suffering from such extreme group-think that they all moderate identically (excetpt for their choices of what to moderate).
Why don't we decide on a handful of strong PRNGs, and make every major OS use them exclusively,
Maybe because if somebody then breaks one or more of THOSE they have a zero-day exploit for EVERYTHING.
While we're at it. why don't we standardize on an operating system, and version, and stop all this diversity? After all, if a committee comes up with a pick how can any individual or team invent anything better?
Genetic engineering is getting to the point that we can soon modify our children so they all have the same immune system - the best one we can find in the wild or tweak up. Why don't we do that too? After all, you'd NEVER see a disease mutate so it's fatal to everyone with that flavor of immune system, would you? B-/ (You know, like the corn blight that was fatal to the cytoplasmic male-sterile corn that was virtually all that was grown in the US in the early '70s, and nearly wiped out the crop for a year or two?)
Of course the REAL reason is because it's a FREE MARKET. Companies who's management thinks they have a better design for a random number generator get to deploy their own choice, and the customers get to decide whether they want to trust their data and critical processes to that OS or switch to some alternative (either immediately or after they pick up the pieces from the LAST set of exploits...)
Of course, neither political party is anything like they were when Abe was around. In most issues they have swapped position.
Actually, in most places people have been propagandized to THINK they swapped position. But when you look at how they actually voted on various subjects (civil rights laws and Internet censorship, for two of a host of examples) or how the programs they produced actually worked out (The Great Society for just one in a host of examples), expect to find that the alleged swap is mostly smoke, mirrors, and very effective political propaganda.
What is it with the constant disbelieving of Snowden?
One of the things Snowden exposed was systematic disinformation campaigns by the spooks to achieve various political goals, including the discrediting of their own critics.
Perhaps these comments are examples of such a program in action?
At present we have two parties that are both owned, for the most part, by the same people, and kept in power by gerrymandering and the systemic weakness of first-past-the-post elections.
Further, the people in control of the major parties themselves cheat when someone not of their faction tries to go the primary/caucus root. They change rules in midstream, miscount, break meeting rules, physically attack supporters of opponents, pass out bogus delegate slates, and a host of other dirty tricks.
For a list of the things the Republican have done to just one challenger in the last two cycles, check out the archives of any of the several sites where Ron Paul supporters congregate. (For example, The Daily Paul.)
The Democrats do this as well. (The riots in Chicago in 1968 were largely a public reaction to the party machine repelling a primary effort by Gene McCarthy, popular with the antiwar movement, in favor of Hubert Humphrey. The Paul/Romney nomination battle was eeriely similar.)
Some of this was known back in the '60s and '70s. But the federal government decided to suppress it. In particular: Any drug with side-effects that were pleasant was considered a threat to the status quo of governance - a way for productive people to achieve happiness without driving industrial profit and/or part of a Communist conspiracy to rot the "Free World"'s moral fiber.
There was a period where researchers would only get new grants if the conclusions of their studies stated that the drugs - psychedelics, marijhuana, etc. - were useless for medical purposes and/or dangerous. (The papers in Science, for instance, were often pathetically hilarious. The reduced data said one thing, while the conclusion said the opposite.)
Meanwhile the government (notably with such things as the FBI's COINTELPRO program) smeared those (formerly highly respected scientists) who had been proponents of finding uses for them (especially those who had tried to use them to augment intelligence and experimented on themselves - often with bizarre results). The most prominent of these was Timothy Leary, though there were a number of others.
Somewher in there the drugs were added to various "schedules" and banned from medical use.
After a couple years of this, with any actual benefits buried in the noise, the government declared that it was "settled science" that there were no useful treatments using these drugs and stopped issuing new permits for their use in new research projects. (It's very much like research into global warming: You can't convince people on either side because the research is suspect due to the government becoming involved and pushing its horse in the race.)
Then the government declared acts related to banned-drug trafficing, possession, and use to be "serious" crimes and imposed passed mandatory minimum sentences - recreating the scenario of alcohol prohibition, funding organized crime, filling up the prisons, and lining corrupt police personell's pockets with graft money. Then it passed RICO and created the same financial incentive structure that fueled the Spanish Inquisition - driving ever-increasing anti-drug activity and blocking attempts to repeal drug bans.
And that's where it stood for decades. Negligible work on uses for the chemicals - either by organized research or private self-medication (with drugs of uncertain content and quality).
So while Moore's Law drove the computes from giant cabnets filling floors of office buildings to chips in everything under the sun, work on a nimber of categories of drugs stagnated.
The canabinoids of Marijuana, alone, have a number of apparent (but not adequately researhed) benefits:
- They appear to be a specific treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which, itself, seems to be a result of undermeidcation for pain - also driven by the "drug war").
- Canabinoids (including at least one which does not produce a substantial "high") also appear to be a successful treatment for a debilitating form of childhood epilepsy.
- Parkinson's disease eventually kills, not directly through loss of dopamine, but by the body's attempt to compensate for it by fouling up a system that uses the recently discovered endocanabinoids as neurotransmitters. (These are the chemicals that THC and its relatives mimic, much as opioids mimic endorphins.) This ends up with loss of memory and loss of appetite, and the victim starves herself to death. Canabinoids may help alleviate this and/or prolong life, (if only by reducing the tendency to self-starvation by inducing "the munchies").
- Canabinoids have been claimed to arrest the progress of several cancers, including a brain cancer.d
- Canabinoids have long been used for reducing the nausea of chemotherapy, easing self-starvation in cancer patients. (Similarly with side-effects of anti-AIDS drug coctails.)
I could go on.
But "more research is needed" to determine which (if any) of these effects are real, turn them into practical treatments, and deploy them. And it's not going to happen smoothly and rapidly with the government continuing to interfere.
However, the term "assault weapon" is more fuzzy, at least according to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has it right, in its own "being unbiased in the wording" way.
"Assault Rifle" is a technical term in warfare. It first applied to a particluar select-fire rifle short enough to avoid getting hung up when popping up through the hatch of a tank to fire at surrounding infantry (or otherwise going through tight spaces), and since has been applied to others with simiilar characteristics. This trades away some accuracy for rapid fire and rapid movement.
"Assault Weapon" is a term invented by antigunners and defined in particular laws, to confuse the population about proposed gun control laws by making them appear to be banning military design Assault Rifles when they actually ban a hodge-podge of civilian guns based on some arbitrary (and juristiction-specific) set of characteristics typically unrelated to any objective standard of danger or functionaity.
I'd really like to be able to install something on the lines leaving my breaker panel that acts like a firewall and blocks any kind of network communication over powerline.
1. Get some electrical-noise suppression ferrite toroids and some ceramic capacitors at your local electronics store. (.005 microfarad at a minimum of 600V would be good for the caps. 1000V or higher on cap used for 240V circuits.)
2. In your fusebox connect a cap from each breaker's hot output to the nearest ground bus, keeping the wires as short as possible. (You want them downstream of the breaker so they blow the breaker, rather than start a fire, in the very unlikely chance that one fails shorted.) On 220v loads hook the cap between the two hot wires (red and black in the US).
The cap wires are too small to carry the current in case of a short, so get some tiny 1A pigtail fuses and wire them in series on the hot side (either side in the 240V both-are-hot case). Put plastic insulation rated at least 600V over (at least) the hot side wires and the fuse. (You can get such insulation, of adequate voltage and temperature ratings, by stripping the insulation from a spare piece of electrical wiring.)
3. In your fusebox disconnect the circuits, one by one, both hot and neutral. On each run the hot and neutral lines through a ferrite toroid core in opposite directions and reconnect the . For a 220V circuit run the two hot lines through the ferrite core, again in opposite directions, and ignore the Neutral. If you have multiple loads on a breaker, you can use separate toroids on each load or a single one on from two to all of them: Run the hot wires all one way through the toroid and the neutral (or red-hot on 240V) the other way.
This puts inductance in series with the signal and capacitance shunting it, forming a low pass filter. The low-frequency power will get through just fine and the high frequency networking signals will get stopped.
Putting cores on the main feeds also works, and takes fewer cores. You can also put one on each of the hot wires, separately, rather than using one with the wires crossed through it. You can get big ones that are split, intended to be clamped over a computer signal cable to prevent it from acting like an antenna, which you can clamp onto the wires without unhooking them.
Don't bother putting the two haves of the circuit through the core in the SAME direction, as you would with the signals in a cable or power cord if you clamped a core around the whole thing. This keeps the common-mode (both wires go positive or negative together) from propagating past the core, but the differential mode (one goes positive while the other goes negative), which is what power line networking uses, goes right through.
Note that putting this stuff in your fusebox may be against code, and void your fire insurance. The capacitor wiring may also be problematic for creating hazards if not done properly (insulated with "spaghetti tubing" on at least the hot side, hot side cut short, a little fuse (1A or so) in series, etc.).
"THE" billion dollar hacker club? Seems to me there are several of those.
Two instances just from the public record: First there's the Homebrew Computer Club, founded in '73, which includes a number of leading lights in the Silicon Valley part of the industry, including Jobs and Woz. (Apple alone has WhatsApp beat by a factor of neary 25, as of today's close.) Then there's the (invitation-only) Hackers Conference, Founded by in '84, whose membership may not have as high a percentage of people who made billions in high tech, but does have more than one just among those whose membership is publicly known.
I could go on for a while, and I'm SURE I don't know anywhere near all such organizations.
But this box DOES have lights, as the ilustration clearly shows. Looks like it has signals, too, though that's not clear. (There are rear-facing lights, too.)
As another has already pointed out, it's designed so you have to start up manually before the motor will cut in, to make it escape the definition of a motor vehicle.
Yep, 3D printing, were the per unit price is likely 10x more than other techniques...
That goes well with the one-grand-plus pricetag for a device that should be selling for a couple hundred bux or less in mass production.
If this catches on I expect to see an injection-molded version closer to the price I mentioned. Either this guy will go to that as he ramps up or the Chinese/Koreans/whatever will have a knockoff out in a few months after it catches on.
Whatsamatter, fattie, can't pedal for more than 5 minutes without having a coronary?
I expected more math literacy on Slashdot. Silly me.
12 to 20 miles at a top speed of 16 MPH is an hour (+-25%).
That's up and down the steep hills of San Francisco, of course, in all sorts of weather. Do you want to try it - twice a day, to and from work in rush hour traffic? (Didn't think so.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious about which patents are being asserted. The news items somehow never get around to listing the patent numbers or describing them.
(I worked for a router company when Nortel was sinking and suing everybody who did anythig with SONET for infringement, in a desperate attempt to come up with enough money to avoid going under. Very much like a drowning person dragging others down. Some of my inventions (including patented ones) were in a chip that had something to do with SONET, so I (and other designers on the project) were called in to explain how the way WE did things didn't infringe these particular paptents. My stuff didn't infringe, IMHO, though I don't know about other people's. Nevertheless, the company settled the suit by cutting a cross-license deal (incuding paying them a few million because Nortel had more patents).
[Parent poster talks of ONE of his many anti-gun (i.e. anti-gun-in-private-hands) projects.]
Prohibition of something means the illegal providers of it have less competition and can thus sell for a higher price. So it's very convenient for those sellers. Thus, for instance, drug lords are just fine with keeping the drug laws strong and complex, and opposed to legalization of their product (which would put them in competition with efficient conglomerates who could compete the pants off them).
(Incidentially: I suspect Yee's opposition to video games was a spinoff of his antigun agenda.)
By the way: Pro-gunners are celebrating tonight. (The call from a friend a few hours ago with the news made both my wife my own day. B-) )
... people fully EXPECT the NSA to be upto nasty secret snooping habits. That is actually the minor part of the story that caused the outrage. The more dangerous fact is that the NSA can demand companies or individuals turn over data to them and impose a gag order thus forcing them to keep it secret.
I agree that the latter IS a big problem. But I don't agree that it's the ONLY problem, or the only BIG one.
National Security Letters are still relatively narrow compared to what the NSA did. They also tapped the fibers Google and others used to communicate with each other, and used these taps to snoop everything that went across them, without Google's knowledge.
I encountered a Google engineer with job responsibilities related to that at a conference last year, and he was LIVID. They'd tapped fibers OWNED BY GOOGLE - trespassing and damaging them (aong with Google's credibility) in the process - with no letters, warrants, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, or what-have-you. Google has since been installing encryption thorughout it's network - not just where it leaves the building, but even from rack to rack.
Maybe they're still stuck disclosing SOME stuff. But at least they're trying to know what it is, do their best to minimize it (and protect their model), and avoid inadvertently firehosing EVERYTHING into the maw of the NSA.
She is making a dangerous assumption that if tax revenues increased the extra would be spent on schools
THANK you! That is beautifully expressed. It should be instantly understood by anyone hearing pro-tax propaganda by Lewis or others in a debate or comments-allowed-publication setting.
It's a prototype for similar arguments for raising taxes allegedly for other purposes as well.
They made their bathroom walls out of glass and then complained that he was a peeping tom for setting up a webcam from across the street. Scuzzy? yes, but not illegal.
It varies by state. But...
Pointing a webcam at an uncovered bathroom or bedroom window generally IS explicitly illegal. It will get you busted and into the registered sex offender database.
IANAL but if I undersand this correctly the test is whether the peeped-at has a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
In the all-glass bathroom case you might claim that the bathroom user did not have a reasonable expectation. But what if the switch from opaque walls to glass was made by a contractor and the homeowner was blind? That's the kind of situation we have here, and the accused knew it.
Once upon a time, decades ago, the built-in permission systems of computers were also usually considered (by their users and administrators, before the law got involved) to also assumed to be a presumed-valid expression of intent. My preference would be to have this approach recognized in law - if only to avoid slippery-slopes between users and jail, and to put any blame for security flaws like this on the people designingn and deploying the tools. But then things happened (like WiFi access points being shipped with security features off to reduce service calls by new users), and the law has been going a different way.
The BIOS has bare back access to the hardware. Why cant it log the keyboard and dump it out the Ethernet? Why cant it access the ram directly?
Built-in threats include more than just BIOS. At least one, and probably most, chip makers build in backdoors that do exactly what you describe, and much more. It's built right into the silicon, too.
Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)
One example: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and its standard Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), the latter standardized in 1998 and supported by "over 200 hardware vendors". This is built into the northbridge (or, in early models, the Ethernet) chip).
Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature.
You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.
If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.
Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):
Credited in the titles as "55MPH Briefcase", but I don't think Jittlov ever got it going that fast.
Didn't he call it "killer" or something like it, because it was so difficult to control, especially on that down-the-hill run?
(I thought of it, too, buit posted following up something early in the discussion before seeing the WoSaT posting.)
I want a flying car that folds into a briefcase like George Jetson.
Me, too.
Other "prior art" occurs in the 1988 feature movie version of Jitlov's The Wizard of Speed and Time.
See 1:05:25 throug 1:11:10
Nazi propaganda must be beaten, not hidden. The best way to discredit an idiot is to hand him a microphone and let him speak.
Further, hiding it makes it impossible for later generations to recognize the very seductive ideas when they reappear, later, without the "NAZI" label on them.
It's a classic example of the adage about being doomed to repeat history if you fail to learn from it. How can you learn from it if it's censored away?
The people who are the best in technical fields tend to have well developed social intelligence as well as being technically brilliant. These aren't either-or abilities. The lack of social or emotional skills is a cognitive deficit.
As one who moved to Silicon Valley (which looks to me like one big Aspergers ward B-J ) and socializes with many of the founders of the compter industry, I can tell you that there are a lot of unquestionably "technically brilliant" and wildly successful people who would be textbook examples of Aspergers' "sufferers".
My own opinion is somewhat between yours and that of the previous poster: I suspect Aspergers' people primarily do well with computers because it's a field where the "missing social skills" are not an impediment to success.
The various levels of social-skill blindness, and the resulting stronger focus on the functionality that IS present, may also help more with the programming somewhat (if only by reducing distriction from anthropomorphizing the machines), or it may simply be irrelevant. I suspect it helps some - more than lack of communication with the Pointy Haired Bosses hurts - but that any such effect pales before the "something interesting I can do" effect.
Yes, social skills can help in teamwork, organizing and finding financing for companies, and in finding problems that technology can solve and earn a profit doing so. (Example: Social media.) On the other hand, building technological prosthetics to help replace the missing functionality can also help lead to success. (Example again: Social media.)
[reference to graph with post-vaccination bumps in Measles incidences and a recommendation for a second, booster, dose at the start of the third bump.]
Maybe this is just the half-time of the shots, and it's time to refresh? I.e. "2014, third dose recommended"
I suspect the second-dose recommendation was driven by the detection of substantial numbers of Measles cases among those vaccinated a few years previously, indicating that the immunity from one dose wore down after a few years.
I also suspect that we'll get a third-dose recommendation iff a similar number of cases is detected among those who had two dosesk (of non-defectivek vaccine, properly spaced).
The proper signal comes, not from the overall infection rate, but from the infection rate among those already vaccinated.
From an LA Times story:
And from the story it referenced:
(The estimate was later expanded to millions. Also, this "patient zero" infected four of his family members in addition to any he infected on the BART or elsewhere.)
There's more than fuel efficiency to consider when comparing mass transit vs. private automobile transportation.
Slashdot moderators have absolutely no intellectual honesty.
Shashdot moderators have no CONSISTENCY. They are randomly selected and only get to moderate a small number of posts each.
Further, they each get to chose which postings they moderate. People with different idea systems and hot buttons will chose different postings.
To expect "intellectual honesty" in the moderators to be visible as some visible, rational, consistency among moderation of diverse items is to expect that the readership of Slashdot to be suffering from such extreme group-think that they all moderate identically (excetpt for their choices of what to moderate).
Why don't we decide on a handful of strong PRNGs, and make every major OS use them exclusively,
Maybe because if somebody then breaks one or more of THOSE they have a zero-day exploit for EVERYTHING.
While we're at it. why don't we standardize on an operating system, and version, and stop all this diversity? After all, if a committee comes up with a pick how can any individual or team invent anything better?
Genetic engineering is getting to the point that we can soon modify our children so they all have the same immune system - the best one we can find in the wild or tweak up. Why don't we do that too? After all, you'd NEVER see a disease mutate so it's fatal to everyone with that flavor of immune system, would you? B-/ (You know, like the corn blight that was fatal to the cytoplasmic male-sterile corn that was virtually all that was grown in the US in the early '70s, and nearly wiped out the crop for a year or two?)
Of course the REAL reason is because it's a FREE MARKET. Companies who's management thinks they have a better design for a random number generator get to deploy their own choice, and the customers get to decide whether they want to trust their data and critical processes to that OS or switch to some alternative (either immediately or after they pick up the pieces from the LAST set of exploits...)
Of course, neither political party is anything like they were when Abe was around. In most issues they have swapped position.
Actually, in most places people have been propagandized to THINK they swapped position. But when you look at how they actually voted on various subjects (civil rights laws and Internet censorship, for two of a host of examples) or how the programs they produced actually worked out (The Great Society for just one in a host of examples), expect to find that the alleged swap is mostly smoke, mirrors, and very effective political propaganda.
What is it with the constant disbelieving of Snowden?
One of the things Snowden exposed was systematic disinformation campaigns by the spooks to achieve various political goals, including the discrediting of their own critics.
Perhaps these comments are examples of such a program in action?
At present we have two parties that are both owned, for the most part, by the same people, and kept in power by gerrymandering and the systemic weakness of first-past-the-post elections.
Further, the people in control of the major parties themselves cheat when someone not of their faction tries to go the primary/caucus root. They change rules in midstream, miscount, break meeting rules, physically attack supporters of opponents, pass out bogus delegate slates, and a host of other dirty tricks.
For a list of the things the Republican have done to just one challenger in the last two cycles, check out the archives of any of the several sites where Ron Paul supporters congregate. (For example, The Daily Paul.)
The Democrats do this as well. (The riots in Chicago in 1968 were largely a public reaction to the party machine repelling a primary effort by Gene McCarthy, popular with the antiwar movement, in favor of Hubert Humphrey. The Paul/Romney nomination battle was eeriely similar.)
This has been a long known fact,
Some of this was known back in the '60s and '70s. But the federal government decided to suppress it. In particular: Any drug with side-effects that were pleasant was considered a threat to the status quo of governance - a way for productive people to achieve happiness without driving industrial profit and/or part of a Communist conspiracy to rot the "Free World"'s moral fiber.
There was a period where researchers would only get new grants if the conclusions of their studies stated that the drugs - psychedelics, marijhuana, etc. - were useless for medical purposes and/or dangerous. (The papers in Science, for instance, were often pathetically hilarious. The reduced data said one thing, while the conclusion said the opposite.)
Meanwhile the government (notably with such things as the FBI's COINTELPRO program) smeared those (formerly highly respected scientists) who had been proponents of finding uses for them (especially those who had tried to use them to augment intelligence and experimented on themselves - often with bizarre results). The most prominent of these was Timothy Leary, though there were a number of others.
Somewher in there the drugs were added to various "schedules" and banned from medical use.
After a couple years of this, with any actual benefits buried in the noise, the government declared that it was "settled science" that there were no useful treatments using these drugs and stopped issuing new permits for their use in new research projects. (It's very much like research into global warming: You can't convince people on either side because the research is suspect due to the government becoming involved and pushing its horse in the race.)
Then the government declared acts related to banned-drug trafficing, possession, and use to be "serious" crimes and imposed passed mandatory minimum sentences - recreating the scenario of alcohol prohibition, funding organized crime, filling up the prisons, and lining corrupt police personell's pockets with graft money. Then it passed RICO and created the same financial incentive structure that fueled the Spanish Inquisition - driving ever-increasing anti-drug activity and blocking attempts to repeal drug bans.
And that's where it stood for decades. Negligible work on uses for the chemicals - either by organized research or private self-medication (with drugs of uncertain content and quality).
So while Moore's Law drove the computes from giant cabnets filling floors of office buildings to chips in everything under the sun, work on a nimber of categories of drugs stagnated.
The canabinoids of Marijuana, alone, have a number of apparent (but not adequately researhed) benefits:
- They appear to be a specific treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which, itself, seems to be a result of undermeidcation for pain - also driven by the "drug war").
- Canabinoids (including at least one which does not produce a substantial "high") also appear to be a successful treatment for a debilitating form of childhood epilepsy.
- Parkinson's disease eventually kills, not directly through loss of dopamine, but by the body's attempt to compensate for it by fouling up a system that uses the recently discovered endocanabinoids as neurotransmitters. (These are the chemicals that THC and its relatives mimic, much as opioids mimic endorphins.) This ends up with loss of memory and loss of appetite, and the victim starves herself to death. Canabinoids may help alleviate this and/or prolong life, (if only by reducing the tendency to self-starvation by inducing "the munchies").
- Canabinoids have been claimed to arrest the progress of several cancers, including a brain cancer.d
- Canabinoids have long been used for reducing the nausea of chemotherapy, easing self-starvation in cancer patients. (Similarly with side-effects of anti-AIDS drug coctails.)
I could go on.
But "more research is needed" to determine which (if any) of these effects are real, turn them into practical treatments, and deploy them. And it's not going to happen smoothly and rapidly with the government continuing to interfere.
However, the term "assault weapon" is more fuzzy, at least according to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has it right, in its own "being unbiased in the wording" way.
"Assault Rifle" is a technical term in warfare. It first applied to a particluar select-fire rifle short enough to avoid getting hung up when popping up through the hatch of a tank to fire at surrounding infantry (or otherwise going through tight spaces), and since has been applied to others with simiilar characteristics. This trades away some accuracy for rapid fire and rapid movement.
"Assault Weapon" is a term invented by antigunners and defined in particular laws, to confuse the population about proposed gun control laws by making them appear to be banning military design Assault Rifles when they actually ban a hodge-podge of civilian guns based on some arbitrary (and juristiction-specific) set of characteristics typically unrelated to any objective standard of danger or functionaity.
I'd really like to be able to install something on the lines leaving my breaker panel that acts like a firewall and blocks any kind of network communication over powerline.
1. Get some electrical-noise suppression ferrite toroids and some ceramic capacitors at your local electronics store. (.005 microfarad at a minimum of 600V would be good for the caps. 1000V or higher on cap used for 240V circuits.)
2. In your fusebox connect a cap from each breaker's hot output to the nearest ground bus, keeping the wires as short as possible. (You want them downstream of the breaker so they blow the breaker, rather than start a fire, in the very unlikely chance that one fails shorted.) On 220v loads hook the cap between the two hot wires (red and black in the US).
The cap wires are too small to carry the current in case of a short, so get some tiny 1A pigtail fuses and wire them in series on the hot side (either side in the 240V both-are-hot case). Put plastic insulation rated at least 600V over (at least) the hot side wires and the fuse. (You can get such insulation, of adequate voltage and temperature ratings, by stripping the insulation from a spare piece of electrical wiring.)
3. In your fusebox disconnect the circuits, one by one, both hot and neutral. On each run the hot and neutral lines through a ferrite toroid core in opposite directions and reconnect the . For a 220V circuit run the two hot lines through the ferrite core, again in opposite directions, and ignore the Neutral. If you have multiple loads on a breaker, you can use separate toroids on each load or a single one on from two to all of them: Run the hot wires all one way through the toroid and the neutral (or red-hot on 240V) the other way.
This puts inductance in series with the signal and capacitance shunting it, forming a low pass filter. The low-frequency power will get through just fine and the high frequency networking signals will get stopped.
Putting cores on the main feeds also works, and takes fewer cores. You can also put one on each of the hot wires, separately, rather than using one with the wires crossed through it. You can get big ones that are split, intended to be clamped over a computer signal cable to prevent it from acting like an antenna, which you can clamp onto the wires without unhooking them.
Don't bother putting the two haves of the circuit through the core in the SAME direction, as you would with the signals in a cable or power cord if you clamped a core around the whole thing. This keeps the common-mode (both wires go positive or negative together) from propagating past the core, but the differential mode (one goes positive while the other goes negative), which is what power line networking uses, goes right through.
Note that putting this stuff in your fusebox may be against code, and void your fire insurance. The capacitor wiring may also be problematic for creating hazards if not done properly (insulated with "spaghetti tubing" on at least the hot side, hot side cut short, a little fuse (1A or so) in series, etc.).
"THE" billion dollar hacker club? Seems to me there are several of those.
Two instances just from the public record: First there's the Homebrew Computer Club, founded in '73, which includes a number of leading lights in the Silicon Valley part of the industry, including Jobs and Woz. (Apple alone has WhatsApp beat by a factor of neary 25, as of today's close.) Then there's the (invitation-only) Hackers Conference, Founded by in '84, whose membership may not have as high a percentage of people who made billions in high tech, but does have more than one just among those whose membership is publicly known.
I could go on for a while, and I'm SURE I don't know anywhere near all such organizations.
NYC [treats] electric bikes [as] illegal [... No] (lights, signals, VIN numbers, etc).
But this box DOES have lights, as the ilustration clearly shows. Looks like it has signals, too, though that's not clear. (There are rear-facing lights, too.)
As another has already pointed out, it's designed so you have to start up manually before the motor will cut in, to make it escape the definition of a motor vehicle.
Yep, 3D printing, were the per unit price is likely 10x more than other techniques ...
That goes well with the one-grand-plus pricetag for a device that should be selling for a couple hundred bux or less in mass production.
If this catches on I expect to see an injection-molded version closer to the price I mentioned. Either this guy will go to that as he ramps up or the Chinese/Koreans/whatever will have a knockoff out in a few months after it catches on.
Whatsamatter, fattie, can't pedal for more than 5 minutes without having a coronary?
I expected more math literacy on Slashdot. Silly me.
12 to 20 miles at a top speed of 16 MPH is an hour (+-25%).
That's up and down the steep hills of San Francisco, of course, in all sorts of weather. Do you want to try it - twice a day, to and from work in rush hour traffic? (Didn't think so.)
If you don't like Apple's energy policy, buy majority shares.
And/or recruit other shareholders to your opinion.
Which is what he tried to do. It's a testiment to the Apple shareholders that it didn't work. B-)