The causes of heart disease aren't really so mysterious these days. If anyone's reading along, and doesn't know, smoking, poor diet, hypertension, and low exercise are the four worst contributors, but it's basically lifestyle. The solution is to change your lifestyle. Ounce of prevention, etc.
(I do not recommend anyone give up smoking, though. Doing so increases your chances of dying of old age. Sounds terrible!)
Given the choice, I'd take research into more effective treatments for heart disease over full body scanners in airports any day. But given further choice, I'd take research into non-preventable fatal diseases first, or artificial (mechanical or biological) organs as a general treatment for a host of conditions.
I've seen a number of photos of tourists standing on the sidelines watching the riots, unharmed and uninvolved. And one photo of a drunken westerner being marched out of the riot; both sides were happier to see the dickhead out of there, no matter what he was shouting in support of.
The Australian travel advice for Thailand right now looks pretty much the same as for most south-east Asian countries: exercise a high degree of caution, stay the fuck out of the areas with armed militias, and avoid large gatherings of locals. If I were there at present, I wouldn't be standing near a riot watching it, but I don't think there's a whole lot of personal danger for locals OR foreigners right now.
Seven or so deaths over the weekend is a bad sign of possible deterioration of the situation, though.
Right. The title and summary are perhaps misleading: it's not good business sense for Boeing or Lockheed Martin to try and compete in this space, but there is a market here. Naturally those companies are going to invest in a bit of propaganda to try and retain their non-competitive business deals with NASA; they stand to lose a tidy sum of money otherwise.
They might not fight it too hard though, given the continuing trend of wilful ignorance and anti-science sentiment in the U.S. and the impact of that on the NASA budget. Fighting for 5% of the U.S. Federal budget is one thing, fighting for 0.5% of it is another. Still a $15bn amount, but nowhere near all of that goes to buying launches.
Yes, that's generally a better solution. The right decision involves trying to stop at a yellow, and then you just need to have noticed it far enough away to stop in the distance involved, not the time involved. If you're going 45mph, you only need about 150ft of stopping distance, and only a second or so to see the change, process it, and start braking. If you decide you're too close, you only need 3sec to travel 150ft plus a 50ft large intersection.
The common decision is to stop at a red or a "close to red" yellow, where "close to red" is a guess. It still only takes 150ft and one second to decide and stop, but it also still takes 3 seconds to travel the stopping distance and intersection width, and if the light is one second off red you'll be running it.
So keeping yellow light times at 3-5 seconds, but adding 2-3 seconds to red times on the other side should have the effect of reducing red light collisions.
I wonder how many collisions occur because people don't notice the lights at all, though. There's really nothing you can do about that short of robot cars. Robot cars, woo!
See: iPad. More clearly a portable computer than the iPhone, same locked down model.
It's a curious thing, this rage at Apple's model. After all, the PSP is just as much of a portable computer as the iPhone, but I really don't see much disgust at how protective Sony are of their content distribution programme. Same with a number of other common devices - PVRs, PMPs, wrist watches, TVs, digital photo frames...
I wonder if part of it is the freely available SDK. More people are able to produce software for iPhone OS, so more people want to get their software onto the device, but don't want to play by Apple's rules.
Though that doesn't explain why there was so much rage at the original SDK-less model!
Interesting.
Re:For tablets yes, but not the Ipad
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
The iPad's special sauce is that it's not a desktop OS crammed into a netbook with the keyboard cut off.
The iPad will make tablets more popular, because future devices will emulate it, and almost certainly surpass it in both innovation and affordability.
Look to the iPhone, and the waves of emulation that followed as manufacturers tried to figure out why people liked it. Android eventually won, because it's the software, not the touch screen, the camera (lolz), the lack of buttons, or the form factor. (Well, ok, it's also the carrier independence, and Google has learned that lesson the hard way -- but looks to be recovering from it well).
I wouldn't say that this has anything to do with the teachings of the government hate.
Major news outlets don't bother running a story every time a pair of drug-addled paranoid anarchists sitting in a county jail cell make up some fantasy to explain why their child was taken away from them. It's not censorship. It's just not very interesting or uncommon news.
In one case, no, the machine was on its last legs (and has since died) and I really didn't care about updating something used once a month. In the other case, yes, but the hardware itself doesn't support WPA.
I really want to wire the house for GE, but time and money are scarce resources.
I have a Billion ADSL WiFi router that my ISP supplied me.
I have, right beside it, a WRT54G running the dd-wrt firmware, because the Billion router and the Mac Mini disagree somewhere, somehow, and stop sharing broadcast packets, which breaks ARP and mDNS.
The Billion is also running a wifi network, because the Windows XP devices in the house can't handle WPA2PSK.
Interesting. I'd no idea we had come so far in brain research as to actually understand how it operates.
Various forms of brain structure preservation are extreme forms of life support, though, and people make the decision to terminate life support quite regularly. I don't think you need to use the notion of organ harvesting to explain why we don't spend large amounts of resources preserving brains against the currently unforeseeable day in which we can plug them into a robot body and watch them go on an insane murderous spree across a quiet country town.
Re:iChat? Really? What about multi-tasking?
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
Quite right.
Unfortunately, Apple's push service is too limited to support chat well. Push notifications are authenticated using a key pair associated with the app developer. There's no room in that model for chat service providers or third party server authors to adapt to push. Chat app developers need to implement a proxy service, which of course carries an operational cost that must be factored into the pricing model of the app -- as seen on the App Store!
The main reason why you want IPv6 is so that you could communicate client to client (VoIP, P2P, gaming, etc.).
The main reason why I want IPv6 is because I don't want to return to a world of vertical integration run by telcos. Essential to that is the lack of distinction between "client" and "server." The internet is an end to end protocol, not a client to server protocol.
In principle, DNSSEC prevents this form of attack because you cannot form a chain of trust through a hijacked answer.
In practice, no-one checks the result for a signature failure, because it's Hard to know what the right thing is to do, and it's Pointless until the roots are signed.
Or have a trusted CA operator sign over your private key.
Not that there's a Chinese CA operator in the trusted key set or an... er.
Don't mind me, I'm just rabble rousing. I do not believe that CNNIC is any less trustworthy than VeriSign. Or maybe more accurately, I do not expect that VeriSign is any more trustworthy than CNNIC:-) Oops, rabble rousing again.
Use 2FA for online banking, neither HTTPS nor DNS is safe.
Yeah, thanks for that. You're so right. Go ahead, drink the tap water in Malaysia. Or Thailand. Or mainland China.
Me, I'll stick with my bottled drinking water, because I'm really not keen to spend a week cramping and shitting liquid because I'm not accustomed to the local water-borne parasites.
On the other hand, I'm in the US on business this week, and I have no problem drinking the tap water here.
Yeah, I read the first sentence, and I was going to suggest you get a wheel balance:-) My car's shaking at 90k and over right now, needs two new tyres and balance (and alignment, but that manifests through the car veering to the side a little if you let go of the wheel).
I'd try to understand why people pirate my games. Off the cuff:
They might not want to pay the asking price. To lower my asking price, I need to either reduce costs or increase sales volumes enough to cover the price change. Without having any studies to investigate this, I would personally suspect that there are too few people who would be willing to pay at any given price below current shelf prices to justify the drop (eg, if you charge 1/2 the price, you won't have 2x the sales, replace "2" with "n" and the statement holds true). I wouldn't bother doing anything about this category of pirate, because they would never pay the price, so I'm just throwing away money trying to stop them playing.
They might not want to wait for the game to be released in their region. I either need to lrn2globalmarket or use an online distribution model. Both are feasible. Both have been done successfully. A game publisher not investigating how they can do near-simultaneous global releases, and ways they can ship electronically, is a game publisher on a trajectory into a dirt nap right now.
They might be fed up with games that don't work as well as the pirated version. This should be a no-brainer. A game should perform better if it's legit than if it's pirated. Simple idea with no real analysis behind it: you can tie in social services. UbiSoft could have a social platform for high scores, game achievement rankings, online guilds and forums, all tied to a CD-key based account, and common across all their games to amortise the cost of development and maintenance.
A company that clearly has done this research is Blizzard Entertainment. They get all three of these things right: older games are cheap enough that the second-hand market is pretty much dead, they can be downloaded (multiple times, tied to your battle.net account), and battle.net offers online play and ladders using game keys, a very simple and cheap to operate protection system. People still pirate Blizzard games, but I doubt it has a very significant impact on their bottom line. And having done their research, they've probably got other mechanisms in place that I haven't even thought of.
UbiSoft, on the other hand, have fucked themselves sideways with a broomstick. They've spent millions on a flaky DRM system, they're offering an expensive product with more restrictions than the pirate copy, and they haven't even released it in the US yet. It's like they've got a CEO with a significant golden parachute clause in his contract that's just waiting to be fired by the board.
I'm not the GP, but there's several techniques to mitigate DDoS attacks in your infrastructure, it's just that UbiSoft didn't think they were worth the money. The interesting question isn't what could they have done, it's whether what they didn't do would have cost more than the current damage to their reputation.
(Irate gamers often talk big about boycotting, but forget pretty quickly... and a large proportion of AC2 players probably aren't even aware of the root cause of the issue, and just think there's a temporary issue that UbiSoft are working hard to resolve.)
Slashdot Mirror
The causes of heart disease aren't really so mysterious these days. If anyone's reading along, and doesn't know, smoking, poor diet, hypertension, and low exercise are the four worst contributors, but it's basically lifestyle. The solution is to change your lifestyle. Ounce of prevention, etc.
(I do not recommend anyone give up smoking, though. Doing so increases your chances of dying of old age. Sounds terrible!)
Given the choice, I'd take research into more effective treatments for heart disease over full body scanners in airports any day. But given further choice, I'd take research into non-preventable fatal diseases first, or artificial (mechanical or biological) organs as a general treatment for a host of conditions.
I've seen a number of photos of tourists standing on the sidelines watching the riots, unharmed and uninvolved. And one photo of a drunken westerner being marched out of the riot; both sides were happier to see the dickhead out of there, no matter what he was shouting in support of.
The Australian travel advice for Thailand right now looks pretty much the same as for most south-east Asian countries: exercise a high degree of caution, stay the fuck out of the areas with armed militias, and avoid large gatherings of locals. If I were there at present, I wouldn't be standing near a riot watching it, but I don't think there's a whole lot of personal danger for locals OR foreigners right now.
Seven or so deaths over the weekend is a bad sign of possible deterioration of the situation, though.
Right. The title and summary are perhaps misleading: it's not good business sense for Boeing or Lockheed Martin to try and compete in this space, but there is a market here. Naturally those companies are going to invest in a bit of propaganda to try and retain their non-competitive business deals with NASA; they stand to lose a tidy sum of money otherwise.
They might not fight it too hard though, given the continuing trend of wilful ignorance and anti-science sentiment in the U.S. and the impact of that on the NASA budget. Fighting for 5% of the U.S. Federal budget is one thing, fighting for 0.5% of it is another. Still a $15bn amount, but nowhere near all of that goes to buying launches.
Yes, that's generally a better solution. The right decision involves trying to stop at a yellow, and then you just need to have noticed it far enough away to stop in the distance involved, not the time involved. If you're going 45mph, you only need about 150ft of stopping distance, and only a second or so to see the change, process it, and start braking. If you decide you're too close, you only need 3sec to travel 150ft plus a 50ft large intersection.
The common decision is to stop at a red or a "close to red" yellow, where "close to red" is a guess. It still only takes 150ft and one second to decide and stop, but it also still takes 3 seconds to travel the stopping distance and intersection width, and if the light is one second off red you'll be running it.
So keeping yellow light times at 3-5 seconds, but adding 2-3 seconds to red times on the other side should have the effect of reducing red light collisions.
I wonder how many collisions occur because people don't notice the lights at all, though. There's really nothing you can do about that short of robot cars . Robot cars, woo!
See: iPad. More clearly a portable computer than the iPhone, same locked down model.
It's a curious thing, this rage at Apple's model. After all, the PSP is just as much of a portable computer as the iPhone, but I really don't see much disgust at how protective Sony are of their content distribution programme. Same with a number of other common devices - PVRs, PMPs, wrist watches, TVs, digital photo frames...
I wonder if part of it is the freely available SDK. More people are able to produce software for iPhone OS, so more people want to get their software onto the device, but don't want to play by Apple's rules.
Though that doesn't explain why there was so much rage at the original SDK-less model!
Interesting.
The iPad's special sauce is that it's not a desktop OS crammed into a netbook with the keyboard cut off.
The iPad will make tablets more popular, because future devices will emulate it, and almost certainly surpass it in both innovation and affordability.
Look to the iPhone, and the waves of emulation that followed as manufacturers tried to figure out why people liked it. Android eventually won, because it's the software, not the touch screen, the camera (lolz), the lack of buttons, or the form factor. (Well, ok, it's also the carrier independence, and Google has learned that lesson the hard way -- but looks to be recovering from it well).
http://trueslant.com/stephenwebster/2010/03/25/barry-candi-cooper-lose-their-son-over-misdemeanor-pot-charge/
I wouldn't say that this has anything to do with the teachings of the government hate.
Major news outlets don't bother running a story every time a pair of drug-addled paranoid anarchists sitting in a county jail cell make up some fantasy to explain why their child was taken away from them. It's not censorship. It's just not very interesting or uncommon news.
In one case, no, the machine was on its last legs (and has since died) and I really didn't care about updating something used once a month. In the other case, yes, but the hardware itself doesn't support WPA.
I really want to wire the house for GE, but time and money are scarce resources.
I have a Billion ADSL WiFi router that my ISP supplied me.
I have, right beside it, a WRT54G running the dd-wrt firmware, because the Billion router and the Mac Mini disagree somewhere, somehow, and stop sharing broadcast packets, which breaks ARP and mDNS.
The Billion is also running a wifi network, because the Windows XP devices in the house can't handle WPA2PSK.
Technology. Is awesome.
Interesting. I'd no idea we had come so far in brain research as to actually understand how it operates.
Various forms of brain structure preservation are extreme forms of life support, though, and people make the decision to terminate life support quite regularly. I don't think you need to use the notion of organ harvesting to explain why we don't spend large amounts of resources preserving brains against the currently unforeseeable day in which we can plug them into a robot body and watch them go on an insane murderous spree across a quiet country town.
Quite right.
Unfortunately, Apple's push service is too limited to support chat well. Push notifications are authenticated using a key pair associated with the app developer. There's no room in that model for chat service providers or third party server authors to adapt to push. Chat app developers need to implement a proxy service, which of course carries an operational cost that must be factored into the pricing model of the app -- as seen on the App Store!
Teehee, you think MAC addresses are unique!
:-)
The main reason why I want IPv6 is because I don't want to return to a world of vertical integration run by telcos. Essential to that is the lack of distinction between "client" and "server." The internet is an end to end protocol, not a client to server protocol.
In principle, DNSSEC prevents this form of attack because you cannot form a chain of trust through a hijacked answer.
In practice, no-one checks the result for a signature failure, because it's Hard to know what the right thing is to do, and it's Pointless until the roots are signed.
Or have a trusted CA operator sign over your private key.
Not that there's a Chinese CA operator in the trusted key set or an... er.
Don't mind me, I'm just rabble rousing. I do not believe that CNNIC is any less trustworthy than VeriSign. Or maybe more accurately, I do not expect that VeriSign is any more trustworthy than CNNIC :-) Oops, rabble rousing again.
Use 2FA for online banking, neither HTTPS nor DNS is safe.
Yeah, thanks for that. You're so right. Go ahead, drink the tap water in Malaysia. Or Thailand. Or mainland China.
Me, I'll stick with my bottled drinking water, because I'm really not keen to spend a week cramping and shitting liquid because I'm not accustomed to the local water-borne parasites.
On the other hand, I'm in the US on business this week, and I have no problem drinking the tap water here.
I look forward to a future where it is a crime to ignore or outright avoid advertisements.
Like drinking water, sometimes it's better to be sure your porn is free of viruses.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<reply xmlns="http://slashdot.org/xmlns/reply">
<content xml:lang="enUS">True.</content>
<content xml:lang="frFR">Vrai.</content>
<content xml:lang="it">Vero.</content>
<content xml:lang="hr">Istinto.</content>
</reply>
I did try it. Locked up my phone good -- it needed to be restored through iTunes. So now it's 3.1.3 and not jailbroken. I'm not too keen to try again.
If only I'd learned that rule before I first heard of MS Office...
Who do you think pays for "free" OTA broadcasts? :-)
Yeah, I read the first sentence, and I was going to suggest you get a wheel balance :-) My car's shaking at 90k and over right now, needs two new tyres and balance (and alignment, but that manifests through the car veering to the side a little if you let go of the wheel).
Hmm, should book that now.
I'd try to understand why people pirate my games. Off the cuff:
They might not want to pay the asking price. To lower my asking price, I need to either reduce costs or increase sales volumes enough to cover the price change. Without having any studies to investigate this, I would personally suspect that there are too few people who would be willing to pay at any given price below current shelf prices to justify the drop (eg, if you charge 1/2 the price, you won't have 2x the sales, replace "2" with "n" and the statement holds true). I wouldn't bother doing anything about this category of pirate, because they would never pay the price, so I'm just throwing away money trying to stop them playing.
They might not want to wait for the game to be released in their region. I either need to lrn2globalmarket or use an online distribution model. Both are feasible. Both have been done successfully. A game publisher not investigating how they can do near-simultaneous global releases, and ways they can ship electronically, is a game publisher on a trajectory into a dirt nap right now.
They might be fed up with games that don't work as well as the pirated version. This should be a no-brainer. A game should perform better if it's legit than if it's pirated. Simple idea with no real analysis behind it: you can tie in social services. UbiSoft could have a social platform for high scores, game achievement rankings, online guilds and forums, all tied to a CD-key based account, and common across all their games to amortise the cost of development and maintenance.
A company that clearly has done this research is Blizzard Entertainment. They get all three of these things right: older games are cheap enough that the second-hand market is pretty much dead, they can be downloaded (multiple times, tied to your battle.net account), and battle.net offers online play and ladders using game keys, a very simple and cheap to operate protection system. People still pirate Blizzard games, but I doubt it has a very significant impact on their bottom line. And having done their research, they've probably got other mechanisms in place that I haven't even thought of.
UbiSoft, on the other hand, have fucked themselves sideways with a broomstick. They've spent millions on a flaky DRM system, they're offering an expensive product with more restrictions than the pirate copy, and they haven't even released it in the US yet. It's like they've got a CEO with a significant golden parachute clause in his contract that's just waiting to be fired by the board.
I'm not the GP, but there's several techniques to mitigate DDoS attacks in your infrastructure, it's just that UbiSoft didn't think they were worth the money. The interesting question isn't what could they have done, it's whether what they didn't do would have cost more than the current damage to their reputation.
(Irate gamers often talk big about boycotting, but forget pretty quickly... and a large proportion of AC2 players probably aren't even aware of the root cause of the issue, and just think there's a temporary issue that UbiSoft are working hard to resolve.)