Wish this technology would be used by TV stations to provide 'sort of' subtitling for programs that don't have any. This could be helpful for deaf/hearing impaired viewers.
Where I live (Netherlands), there's a few public TV channels. Most programs on there are subtitled using a dedicated teletext page (888). For the bulk of commercial channels, there's also subtitles for things like prime time movies, and specific (popular) TV shows. But a lot of it is not, like average day time shows / late night documentaries / commercials etc. etc. This is due to manpower/cost issues: you have a limited audience, a limited percentage of viewers that is deaf/hearing impaired, and (proper) subtitling needs humans. Read money = eating into commercial TV stations' bottom line. It's entirely up to these stations to decide what to subtitle, and what not.
This technology (combined with automated translation) would be a nice complement for those programmes where human-provided subtitling is deemed to expensive. Automated translation is still bad at times, but for deaf/hearing impaired people, subtitles with a bad translation can still be better than no subtitles at all. An automated system shouldn't be very expensive when applied to mass media like national TV, and would be easy to provide for all programmes. And perhaps speech recognition / automated translation would improve over time, to the point where humans aren't needed anymore to get good results.
The entry fee 1998 for beating up the competition and securing a top spot was microscopic compared to today, when applied to "web search engine".
The entry fee 2010 for beating up the competition and securing a top spot is microscopic compared to 10~15 years from now, for some yet-to-become-popular application. There, fixed that for you.
With smartphones, PayPal sees a future in which its system can be used to pay at the grocery store, the cleaners, the gas station, and for things like rent and parking meters, he said.
Really? As long as you can't pay your hookers & blackjack with PayPal, it'll be useless.
And PayPal tries to present itself to users as some sort of bank, but well... it isn't. And from the looks of it, doesn't even want to become one (government oversight and all that crap).
I've only used PayPal on a few occassions to buy stuff abroad, and it worked well for me. But in order for PayPal to become more commonplace, it needs to:
Clean up its act, start to behave like a real bank. Preferably: register as one.
Remove limitations on where & what for you can use PayPal.
Lower their fees to reasonable levels (like: competitive with direct bank -> bank transfers).
This IS RAM we're talking about here, right? y'know nanosecond stuff, 10^-9 not 10^-3 seconds.
Yes, and nanoseconds (10^-9) multiplied by the number of memory locations to clear (10^6 when you're talking multi-MB chunks of memory) gets us right back in the millisecond (10^-3) range. Which is just a blink of the eye for us humans, btw.
(..) enough mass around them to provide protections in an accident, enough space and power to haul 4 - 8 people plus cargo/luggage, and decent speed and accelleration - I think most of us have had driving experiences where we really needed to accellerate *right now* in order to avoid getting run over by a truck or bus or whatever.
Mass doesn't protect you in an accident. Material (perferably light-weight) that can be deformed (around a strong inner cage), and converts energy in heat when deformed, does. As do seatbelts, airbags, and windshields that shatter into tiny pieces. More mass OTOH means more energy that must be absorbed, more stress on the brake system, more force that the tires need to transfer to the road, and more damage to the other car (which might just happen to be the one you're in). Less mass improves you power/acceleration ratio, and is easier to bring to a halt. Or, given the same constraints as a heavier vehicle, smaller/lighter breaks, engine, transmission system and tires to archieve the same effect.
People want vehicles very much like what they already have. ..
Not really... if you look at market developments it appears people want smaller, lighter, more energy-efficient & eco-friendly cars. What would really sell (a cheap, all-electric vehicle that goes to your holiday destination & back on a single charge) is totally unlike what most people have today.
Subscribe to one free daily naked chick mailing list. Imagine how much of that spam is about porn! There are probably more porn emails sent out every week than there are people on the planet.
If you subscribe to such a mailing list, then what you're getting from them isn't spam (because you asked for it). Only other, uninvited e-mail is spam.
Also, I don't know what network you're on. Spam I get is mostly for the famous blue pills & co, fake watches, and the occassional silly 419 / phishing attempt or "get your degree now!" bullshit. Porn spam? What on earth are you talking about?
a virus tends to replicate and trojan horses do not, on their own.
How weird... I recently dealt with an infected system where a trojan (2 different ones, in fact) copied itself onto an USB stick, without user intervention.
IIRC a virus usually tries to replicate itself without user action, or the user noticing. A trojan OTOH 'rides along' with another program that is intentionally run by a user. So the virus may come in on its own, the trojan arrives in 'useful' program+trojan packages. After infection, the trojaned program may place executables on the system that behave like a virus (further blurring the distinction). Isn't a program like this called a dropper or something?
You have this infected machine, perhaps it's a bot sending out bulk spam. Or you install a game on it, and a trojaned executable steals your CD-key and sends it off.. to China? To Russia? Who knows... Or you do some home banking with it (imbecile!), and possibly some program monitors your keystrokes, and sends of username+passwords to "parties unknown".
But the recurring problem: how to explain this to a noob? They're sitting on this trojaned machine, actively using it, processing private data with it, and just don't seem to care (as long as the apparatus still does the job). Anyone know of a good way to explain it to a person like this, what the dangers are? Why they should desinfect / wipe the machine ASAP? What does it take to make them understand what it means "there's a trojan / backdoor on your machine"?
Or is this futile? Should you just wait until they get hit hard(er)? Bank account emptied, e-mail account hacked, game CD-key blocked etc.? Any ideas?
I believe you mean, "hold a copyright on the media."
Ah, it shows again why discussions on copyright are so often confusing, as people don't even understand the underlying concepts.
You can "hold a copyright" on the content. That is: the data (or recorded signal in case of analog media), the intangible asset. What you "hold" is basically a legal agreement between a group of people (read: in the form of copyright laws & international treaties). No less, no more. This is the valueable part, and is what's usually meant when referring to "content owner". In the case of end-user, he/she owns nothing here.
The media OTOH, is just the physical representation, the real-world hardware that carries the data. This is the tangible, and not-so-valueable part, since it's easy to reproduce physical media at will, or make countless digital copies. But as end-user, this you do own, and for the full 100% (since you are free to physically manipulate, destroy, cut in half, or shoot into space your precious DVD's/harddisks/USB-sticks/audio tapes etc.).
So: you don't "hold a copyright on the media". You hold a copyright on the data (the content), or you own the physical media that carries it. And these 2 options can apply at the same time.
Spam is ultimately an economic problem. As long as spam remains highly profitiable spamming will continue.
I won't assume this to mean a 'silent approval' for spamming, but it does sound you take this as a given. IMHO that is not true. There are other reasons why spam remains a problem:
Because e-mail (and "from:" field in particular) is easily faked. If public key authentication and strong encryption were the norm, it would be impossible to spam on the current scale with fake "from:" info and bullshit messages. Spam with valid security envelope would directly point back to the responsible perps, or a very recently compromised machine/account. Upon compromise, most owners would publish a new public key. It would be easy to ignore/blacklist users that don't do so. Messages encoded with a compromised key would have an invalid security envelope.
Often it is difficult to connect an e-mail address to an actual person or organization. When compromised, e-mail addresses are easily discarded, and new ones created. This is very related to the 1st point. If untrue, past actions would stick to a person or organization much longer, and be much more damaging when abused (read: promoting careful use over abuse).
It's so easy to compromise an average computer. Basically: use any system that isn't updated to the latest & greatest (for whatever reason), browse the wrong website, open the wrong document, or download & run an executable from the wrong place (any of these actions will do), and you're hosed. And a market dominated by the least secure option doesn't help.
Once the spammer is known, it's often difficult to get the person convicted because he/she is abroad, and the governments involved aren't co-operating well. The lack of strong authentication makes it harder to prove things. When a conviction happens, it's the spammer not the company pushing pills that pays.
Costs for sending, receiving & filtering spam are paid by parties other than the ones spamming.
Basically, a combination of technical, political and legal reasons, beside the economic ones. Spam continues because the parties profiting from it aren't held accountable.
True, and somehow mankind will adapt (as a species) to deal with this. Some people will be better in coping with this, and be more successful in life than people who are not. Better in filtering/ignoring crap, seeking out the good stuff, deciding what's most important etc. And over time, natural selection will make sure that humans are better equipped to deal with their new surroundings. Electronic gadgets & information everywhere, always-connected, buildings filled with smart sensor networks, electronic records kept of everything etc.
I'm not sure I would entirely like such a 'brave new world' though... some aspects yes, some aspects not so much.
Yeah remote desktops are the wet dream for outsourcing where I work.
Yeah sure... replace a low-bandwidth, local application with a remote one that heavily relies on a fast network (and we all know it won't stop evil employees from taking business data where it shouldn't go). Sounds like a losing proposition to me. Am I missing something here, or are your bosses stupid?
Today you can get box solutions for under $1000 dollars to provide basic Identity Management, monitoring, logging and firewall/proxy control to give you more control but many of those solutions are still not enough to prevent file sharing, or provide extended logging with 12 months or more records in case you have to prove a legal issue
Get real. For a small business owner, a 'under $1000 dollars box solution with monitoring, logging etc.' is massive overkill. For a restaurant or small hotel, it's nice to provide your guests with free wireless internet access. But that's simply a service, a bonus, and nothing more. As provider of that extra service:
You probably don't have the money to spend much on it, since it isn't a necessity in any way (not for you, probably not for your guests).
You don't have the time or (wo)manpower (or expertise) to fiddle with it much, monitor activity, check logfiles or such. Your personnel is busy pouring coffee, you're busy running your business.
Basically you'd want a small, cheap 'thingie' that hooks up to your internet connection, throw that in a corner, and forget about it until a guest asks why the wireless internet isn't working.
Holding you responsible, or expecting you to monitor what happens on that service, is a) unrealistic, and b) unreasonable. It would be much too ask even for an ISP, whose breat and butter it is. For a small business owner, it's just a sideshow. Legislators (and courts) should keep this in mind.
No, it's more like [hardware manufacturer of your choice] AND [software manufacturer of your choice] are incapable of making products that are both complex, and bug-free.
And for some reason, 'high performance' often equals 'complex'.
They only way you're going to get someone who is happy with Windows or OSX to go Linux is to get apps that are Linux only that they just can't live without.
... Or to have it pre-installed on their new computer.
(..) but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.
And any true FOSS supporter should welcome that: whatever the motive of folks employing open source, as long as they do, they further general adoption of it.
Commercial exploitation of FOSS means incorporation into products, means equipment that adheres to standards (vs. closed protocols). It also means software reuse, less re-inventing of the wheel, and (ultimately) cheaper products because the manufacturer didn't waste money re-inventing those wheels. And products that are more valuable to end-users because of their open, commodity, standards-compliant properties. And if we're lucky, perhaps some promotion of the "share me" vs. the "it's mine!" philosophy, if end-users see that FOSS is being used.
That is all fine with me, even if the original motivation was cold, hard greed.
That is: if anyone figures out a way to combine end-to-end encryption with web based e-mail (popular as it is).
And no, 2 users connecting securely to the same e-mail service doesn't cut it: in that scenario the e-mail service itself can read the messages (a man-in-the-middle attack so to speak)
"They had to use the less-than-inconspicuous giant beetles because other species are too weak to take off with the weight of the necessary antenna and brain and muscle electrodes."
So, as technology advances: smaller electronics, radio parts, electromechanical components, power source -> smaller state-of-the-art RC toy. How long until you can have your own, remote-controlled army of fruit flies? 5 years? 10? 20?
Slashdot Mirror
Wish this technology would be used by TV stations to provide 'sort of' subtitling for programs that don't have any. This could be helpful for deaf/hearing impaired viewers.
Where I live (Netherlands), there's a few public TV channels. Most programs on there are subtitled using a dedicated teletext page (888). For the bulk of commercial channels, there's also subtitles for things like prime time movies, and specific (popular) TV shows. But a lot of it is not, like average day time shows / late night documentaries / commercials etc. etc. This is due to manpower/cost issues: you have a limited audience, a limited percentage of viewers that is deaf/hearing impaired, and (proper) subtitling needs humans. Read money = eating into commercial TV stations' bottom line. It's entirely up to these stations to decide what to subtitle, and what not.
This technology (combined with automated translation) would be a nice complement for those programmes where human-provided subtitling is deemed to expensive. Automated translation is still bad at times, but for deaf/hearing impaired people, subtitles with a bad translation can still be better than no subtitles at all. An automated system shouldn't be very expensive when applied to mass media like national TV, and would be easy to provide for all programmes. And perhaps speech recognition / automated translation would improve over time, to the point where humans aren't needed anymore to get good results.
The entry fee 1998 for beating up the competition and securing a top spot was microscopic compared to today, when applied to "web search engine".
The entry fee 2010 for beating up the competition and securing a top spot is microscopic compared to 10~15 years from now, for some yet-to-become-popular application. There, fixed that for you.
With smartphones, PayPal sees a future in which its system can be used to pay at the grocery store, the cleaners, the gas station, and for things like rent and parking meters, he said.
Really? As long as you can't pay your hookers & blackjack with PayPal, it'll be useless.
Then there's a long list of people that have been screwed over by PayPal, and that warn you never to do business with them (especially on the money recipient side). Complaints like this http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/07/1830222/Paypal-Reverses-Payments-Made-To-Indians keep coming in: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/10/0048246/India-Suspended-From-PayPal-For-At-Least-a-Few-Months
And PayPal tries to present itself to users as some sort of bank, but well... it isn't. And from the looks of it, doesn't even want to become one (government oversight and all that crap).
I've only used PayPal on a few occassions to buy stuff abroad, and it worked well for me. But in order for PayPal to become more commonplace, it needs to:
And this makes a difference, how? Btw. your kids are reading Slashdot?
This IS RAM we're talking about here, right? y'know nanosecond stuff, 10^-9 not 10^-3 seconds.
Yes, and nanoseconds (10^-9) multiplied by the number of memory locations to clear (10^6 when you're talking multi-MB chunks of memory) gets us right back in the millisecond (10^-3) range. Which is just a blink of the eye for us humans, btw.
"Fill 'r up, please!"
"1/10 of a gallon, as usual, ma'am?"
"Yes, thank you."
(..) enough mass around them to provide protections in an accident, enough space and power to haul 4 - 8 people plus cargo/luggage, and decent speed and accelleration - I think most of us have had driving experiences where we really needed to accellerate *right now* in order to avoid getting run over by a truck or bus or whatever.
Mass doesn't protect you in an accident. Material (perferably light-weight) that can be deformed (around a strong inner cage), and converts energy in heat when deformed, does. As do seatbelts, airbags, and windshields that shatter into tiny pieces. More mass OTOH means more energy that must be absorbed, more stress on the brake system, more force that the tires need to transfer to the road, and more damage to the other car (which might just happen to be the one you're in). Less mass improves you power/acceleration ratio, and is easier to bring to a halt. Or, given the same constraints as a heavier vehicle, smaller/lighter breaks, engine, transmission system and tires to archieve the same effect.
People want vehicles very much like what they already have. . .
Not really... if you look at market developments it appears people want smaller, lighter, more energy-efficient & eco-friendly cars. What would really sell (a cheap, all-electric vehicle that goes to your holiday destination & back on a single charge) is totally unlike what most people have today.
FTA: "The spamming botnets are constantly in flux, waxing and waning, morphing, becoming obsolete, being replaced, taken down, and upgraded."
Read: replace dual-core bots with quad-core ones.
Subscribe to one free daily naked chick mailing list. Imagine how much of that spam is about porn! There are probably more porn emails sent out every week than there are people on the planet.
If you subscribe to such a mailing list, then what you're getting from them isn't spam (because you asked for it). Only other, uninvited e-mail is spam.
Also, I don't know what network you're on. Spam I get is mostly for the famous blue pills & co, fake watches, and the occassional silly 419 / phishing attempt or "get your degree now!" bullshit. Porn spam? What on earth are you talking about?
a virus tends to replicate and trojan horses do not, on their own.
How weird... I recently dealt with an infected system where a trojan (2 different ones, in fact) copied itself onto an USB stick, without user intervention.
IIRC a virus usually tries to replicate itself without user action, or the user noticing. A trojan OTOH 'rides along' with another program that is intentionally run by a user. So the virus may come in on its own, the trojan arrives in 'useful' program+trojan packages. After infection, the trojaned program may place executables on the system that behave like a virus (further blurring the distinction). Isn't a program like this called a dropper or something?
You have this infected machine, perhaps it's a bot sending out bulk spam. Or you install a game on it, and a trojaned executable steals your CD-key and sends it off.. to China? To Russia? Who knows... Or you do some home banking with it (imbecile!), and possibly some program monitors your keystrokes, and sends of username+passwords to "parties unknown".
But the recurring problem: how to explain this to a noob? They're sitting on this trojaned machine, actively using it, processing private data with it, and just don't seem to care (as long as the apparatus still does the job). Anyone know of a good way to explain it to a person like this, what the dangers are? Why they should desinfect / wipe the machine ASAP? What does it take to make them understand what it means "there's a trojan / backdoor on your machine"?
Or is this futile? Should you just wait until they get hit hard(er)? Bank account emptied, e-mail account hacked, game CD-key blocked etc.? Any ideas?
Do I read this correctly, you're threathening the Anonymous Coward?
I believe you mean, "hold a copyright on the media."
Ah, it shows again why discussions on copyright are so often confusing, as people don't even understand the underlying concepts.
You can "hold a copyright" on the content. That is: the data (or recorded signal in case of analog media), the intangible asset. What you "hold" is basically a legal agreement between a group of people (read: in the form of copyright laws & international treaties). No less, no more. This is the valueable part, and is what's usually meant when referring to "content owner". In the case of end-user, he/she owns nothing here.
The media OTOH, is just the physical representation, the real-world hardware that carries the data. This is the tangible, and not-so-valueable part, since it's easy to reproduce physical media at will, or make countless digital copies. But as end-user, this you do own, and for the full 100% (since you are free to physically manipulate, destroy, cut in half, or shoot into space your precious DVD's/harddisks/USB-sticks/audio tapes etc.).
So: you don't "hold a copyright on the media". You hold a copyright on the data (the content), or you own the physical media that carries it. And these 2 options can apply at the same time.
Spam is ultimately an economic problem. As long as spam remains highly profitiable spamming will continue.
I won't assume this to mean a 'silent approval' for spamming, but it does sound you take this as a given. IMHO that is not true. There are other reasons why spam remains a problem:
Basically, a combination of technical, political and legal reasons, beside the economic ones. Spam continues because the parties profiting from it aren't held accountable.
True, and somehow mankind will adapt (as a species) to deal with this. Some people will be better in coping with this, and be more successful in life than people who are not. Better in filtering/ignoring crap, seeking out the good stuff, deciding what's most important etc. And over time, natural selection will make sure that humans are better equipped to deal with their new surroundings. Electronic gadgets & information everywhere, always-connected, buildings filled with smart sensor networks, electronic records kept of everything etc.
I'm not sure I would entirely like such a 'brave new world' though... some aspects yes, some aspects not so much.
Yeah remote desktops are the wet dream for outsourcing where I work.
Yeah sure... replace a low-bandwidth, local application with a remote one that heavily relies on a fast network (and we all know it won't stop evil employees from taking business data where it shouldn't go). Sounds like a losing proposition to me. Am I missing something here, or are your bosses stupid?
2. Last year, Citi lost tens of millions of dollars from skimmers attached to ATMs.
2. Last year, Citi customers lost tens of millions of dollars from skimmers attached to ATMs.
(emphasis mine)
Not individually, but as a group customers always pay the bill for incompetent management / inadequate security.
Today you can get box solutions for under $1000 dollars to provide basic Identity Management, monitoring, logging and firewall/proxy control to give you more control but many of those solutions are still not enough to prevent file sharing, or provide extended logging with 12 months or more records in case you have to prove a legal issue
Get real. For a small business owner, a 'under $1000 dollars box solution with monitoring, logging etc.' is massive overkill. For a restaurant or small hotel, it's nice to provide your guests with free wireless internet access. But that's simply a service, a bonus, and nothing more. As provider of that extra service:
Basically you'd want a small, cheap 'thingie' that hooks up to your internet connection, throw that in a corner, and forget about it until a guest asks why the wireless internet isn't working. Holding you responsible, or expecting you to monitor what happens on that service, is a) unrealistic, and b) unreasonable. It would be much too ask even for an ISP, whose breat and butter it is. For a small business owner, it's just a sideshow. Legislators (and courts) should keep this in mind.
No, it's more like [hardware manufacturer of your choice] AND [software manufacturer of your choice] are incapable of making products that are both complex, and bug-free.
And for some reason, 'high performance' often equals 'complex'.
It sounds like microsoft should retract the advice and issue a warning that no OS should be run on a processor with such spurious interrupts?
Ehm, aren't these spurious interrupts a hardware feature, designed to test the code handling them?
(ducks to avoid in-flight chair)
They only way you're going to get someone who is happy with Windows or OSX to go Linux is to get apps that are Linux only that they just can't live without.
... Or to have it pre-installed on their new computer.
(..) but unfortunately the Open Source community of programmers has been replaced by a conglomeration of companies who are exploiting Open Source as a tool to further sales.
And any true FOSS supporter should welcome that: whatever the motive of folks employing open source, as long as they do, they further general adoption of it.
Commercial exploitation of FOSS means incorporation into products, means equipment that adheres to standards (vs. closed protocols). It also means software reuse, less re-inventing of the wheel, and (ultimately) cheaper products because the manufacturer didn't waste money re-inventing those wheels. And products that are more valuable to end-users because of their open, commodity, standards-compliant properties. And if we're lucky, perhaps some promotion of the "share me" vs. the "it's mine!" philosophy, if end-users see that FOSS is being used.
That is all fine with me, even if the original motivation was cold, hard greed.
That is: if anyone figures out a way to combine end-to-end encryption with web based e-mail (popular as it is).
And no, 2 users connecting securely to the same e-mail service doesn't cut it: in that scenario the e-mail service itself can read the messages (a man-in-the-middle attack so to speak)
(..) so that's $50k per person, from a single week (..)
Are they hiring?
"They had to use the less-than-inconspicuous giant beetles because other species are too weak to take off with the weight of the necessary antenna and brain and muscle electrodes."
So, as technology advances: smaller electronics, radio parts, electromechanical components, power source -> smaller state-of-the-art RC toy. How long until you can have your own, remote-controlled army of fruit flies? 5 years? 10? 20?