Now, this may not be for every department or division, but almost every NGC employee I know is basically well familiar with furlough. Whether good or bad, NGC is left with the ability to place entire departments on furlough to reduce overhead costs in the event a contract dries up. Now perhaps it's their size, perhaps they simply don't care about their workers, but this sort of thing seems to happen often. I'd guess that no NGC employee with a tenure more than 2 years hasn't been out of work for up to a month or so. But this is how things are run there.
See, government contracting works like this. You create a company, hire some folk to work on a contract. Whatever their salary is, you charge the government +50% or more, so essentially the government is not only flat out paying your salary but also the company for your services. If the contract ends, so does your job as the company may not want to charge overhead. In contrast to other business sectors, employment typically isn't grounded so harshly on the existence of a contract, which is where cost of business and business management can keep workers afloat even during down times (think department store).
FWIW, this makes it sound like NGC is a couple of steps better than the contract IT shops that I'm familiar with that service the private sector. 100% markup is fairly common, and keeping idle employees "on furlough" is a concept that doesn't really exist. When the contract ends, the job ends. A pure pimp agency will usually try to place a profitable contractor in another spot ASAP once a customer provides notice, but they won't guarantee anyones rates and I have never heard of a pimp agency doing anything to hold on to a contractor who is between contracts if they don't have anything suitable immediately available. For "managed project" type contractors it is as bad or worse. Agencies typically make sure they have the power to take their people with them if they lose a project, but often they only exercise that power only as a tool and/or weapon applied to customers and competitors to the detriment of their employees, rather than to actually move them to other work.
They had pretty much the most expensive support contracts possible. The problem is that apparently all this waste of taxpayers' money has bought nothing useful.
"Most expensive" != "Best"
"Most expensive" != "Adequate"
I have not seen all the details and they probably are not public but given that NG has a history of being primarily a military contractor, I'd bet on whatever they offered being vastly overpriced, deceptively sold, specified well short of best-in-class, and provided objectively short of that spec.
Why the rage? Just spell out very clearly (and in writing) exactly what will happen if component X fails, and the cost to implement redundancy now. When component X fails and the company loses Y dollars of revenue and the CEO comes to you, just pull out the email and say "I tried to design redundancy but he wouldn't spend the money".
BTDTGTPS
Or very nearly so. I admit I have never been immediately and explicitly fired for "I told you so" moments, but both as an employee and as a consultant I've had predominantly negative experiences of citing unheeded advice in my own defense. Sometimes a blamethrower is rational and accepts the fact of having made a mistake, but that is not the most common outcome. If a problem gets to the point of someone trying to narrow the focus of accountability, it is unlikely to end fairly or well for the people with the lowest management stature.
I had a new battery cabinet installed within 2 weeks, *and* a redundant UPS for most servers.
I've had that sort of thing happen as well, but it isn't necessarily a victory. My first instructive experience of this sort (about 20 years ago, so obviously I'm a cynical old fart) seemed a success in the short term direct sense, but 3 months later it was the centerpiece of a brutally unfair annual performance review, zeroing out my bonus because I was not a "team player" and had not "stood behind" my boss (a hard trick when she was actively trying to make me a human shield while stabbing me in the back.) And of course the ongoing cost of belatedly following my advice was used to rationalize a pay freeze for our whole team. My primary lesson from that was that I needed to work elsewhere, but a more generally useful rule of thumb is that there is no such thing as winning in a workplace CYA game. Being right and even being acknowledged as such don't guarantee anything and being subject to the decisions of someone who doesn't take responsibility for their errors is a crappy way to live.
The Washington Monument was started while Washington was still alive, thus, it is a monument, NOT a memorial.
THAT IS AN ABSURDLY MULTIFACETED FALSEHOOD
The semantic difference between 'monument' and 'memorial' is wrong and work on the Washington Monument (which is a National Memorial) did not start until long after Washington's death in 1799.
While a nearby location (now the location of the Jefferson Pier) was specified for a monument featuring Washington in L'Enfant's 1791 city plan, that monument (an equestrian statue) was never built. A different plan for a monument (in the Capital itself) was authorized in 1799, but that one was also never actually started. The monument that actually exists today was the result of a quasi-private project that started in 1832 and spent 26 years in corrupt clusterfuckery. That fiasco got the obelisk part of their design 1/3-built between 1848 and 1858 before running out of money and credible public figures to sully by association. It sat untouched as an eyesore for 18 years, and the work done 1854-58 was such crap that it had to be dismantled before completion of the monument (with a slightly different color of stone and a simpler overall design) could continue.
How does a fault in a single SAN controller cause an outage of the entire data storage network? Expensive SAN solutions are expensive & highly redundant for reason. This smells like a "Let's buy the cheaper solution" and/or an infrastructure design fail.
RTFA!
The problem was a dual (or worse) failure. What the article reveals is that while they may have had all of the right hardware in place and a mechanism for it to handle the most likely failures, they were missing the 'soft' components of a good HA system: routine testing of failover and a rapid repair plan. In the auto industry where failed systems can halt factories and rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost per hour of downtime, it is the norm for HA systems to have frequent failover tests, to have on-site spares for critical components that can be replaced by on-site staff, and to have support arrangements that put a skilled human on-site with replacement hardware in a small amount of time. This is why traditional "enterprise class" systems are so expensive. They are designed for rapid diagnosis and repair, and a well-run enterprise that needs truly HA systems pays for expensive HUMAN support by their own staff and/or from IBM, Sun^WOracle, EMC, HP, etc. and monitoring systems on top of that. If you fail over your HA systems every Sunday at 02:00 (or whatever time is safe...) and have the right staff, processes, and support contracts in place, you will find nearly all of the latent failures and have them fixed before a true production failure exposes them.
The most appalling thing about this to me isn't the failure. Some systems don't have safe times for testing failovers, and I know from personal experience that a component in an HA system that was working perfectly Saturday and has been idle since Sunday can go tits-up when needed on Wednesday. The real problem is the long outage. If the clowns in the VA state government were doing their jobs, they would not have a system like this without vendor support contracts to fix well-defined hardware problems (e.g. "bad memory card" ) within a few hours at most. This was something I always loved about working in a shop with the top-grade EMC contract. The Symmetrix and its associated gadgetry would call EMC about failures and we'd have a tech show up at the DC with parts before we even noticed anything unusual: costly, but nowhere near as expensive as killing all of the SAN-reliant systems for a random day every 3 years. The 4th 9 is not cheap or simple, because it always requires humans.
On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second
If they get attacked that often, it shouldn't take long for them to find and confirm security holes in Windows. Yet they have been noticeably slow in patching some of those holes; why don't they respond quicker?
Smart attackers do not aim new types of attack at MS or other targets where there is likely to be clueful attentiveness. As anyone who is engaged in clueful attentiveness to external attacks against heavily-attacked systems knows, the actual risk is not evenly spread across all attacks and the overwhelming majority of attacks are completely harmless for minimally protected systems. For example: I have managed systems that have seen SSH password guessing attacks bursting into the hundreds/second order of magnitude, but purely passive and simple protective measures (including default configurations of some components) made those "attacks" completely harmless. They didn't even amount to a DoS attack, because they were entirely the result of being a high profile target of a lot of idiots rather than being a really high value target of anyone with half a clue. High profile targets attract every script kiddy on the net, high value targets are usually well enough protected that they aren't useful detection systems. This is why the concept of the "honeypot" exists: a system with a relatively low profile that is made to look like a weakly-protected high-value target in order to attract serious attacks.
Their motto has been thrown down the drain with the recent press releases, media coverage, and acquisitions. It's almost as if they're no longer the original company with their great philosophies.
[...]
I'm dumbfounded. Simply dumbfounded.
I've sincerely been a Google supporter since a little kid, and loved their products, services, and philosophies... and for most of this time, I ignored most critics, since Google actually kept doing good for the most part. Now, all of that has changed. I'm very disappointed in Google.:/
Welcome to adulthood. It appears that your parents and teachers have failed to provide you with a very important lesson. Just to make sure a few others are covered: the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus all do not exist.
Here's the more important lesson; Google is a publicly traded US corporation, a complex fact which ought to inform how any rational adult should view them. To start, understand that "corporation" is not a synonym for "business" or "company." The corporation is a special sort of legally constructed entity which was invented primarily to allow people who own and run businesses to escape accountability for what they do as the corporation. A corporation is the legal embodiment of an ethical compromise: assets, liabilities, acts, speech, and contracts associated with many people bundled into a "corporate person" for whom no set of humans can ever be held fully accountable. In the US, we take that further for corporations whose ownership shares are traded in public markets. The law makes shareholders' interests supreme above every other principle (other than legality) in the operation of a corporation. A corporation can be sued by its shareholders for putting vague ideas like "Don't be evil" above shareholder value. Google may (or may not) have some protection against such suits because management has always been open about their unconventional views on shareholder value and their corporate mission but that cannot change the fact that ultimately for Google Inc. or any other such corporation, "good" is profit and "evil" is loss. Statements by a corporation about their "motto," "mission," "culture," and similar legally meaningless things should never be trusted at face value. Those are marketing tools for shaping people's ideas about the corporation with the ultimate end of adding to corporate profit. They are not binding contracts with anyone or claims about business practices that can be enforced in any way. A corporation cannot be held accountable as a "corporate person" for a misleading motto, and neither can the actual people who act and speak as the corporation or who ultimately own the corporation. The strongest useful belief that a rational adult should get from the Google Inc. motto is that its managers believe that it is valuable for Google Inc. to be seen by everyone as a business that follows normal human ethics, not the alternative corporate ethics of profit limited only by law. That image ultimately cannot be the truth for any corporation, although the fact that the people running Google see value in the image may have some influence over how much obvious unequivocal evil they do. As someone young enough to have been a 'little kid' during the brief existence of Google, it is helpful for you to get a practical understanding of the limited trustworthiness and fundamental amorality of corporations as a Google spectator. Many people don't really start to consider those issues until they are directly damaged by a corporate employer, vendor, or customer that fails to meet expectations grounded in human ethics. Corporate ethics are a different thing, and humans dealing with a corporation should always assume that it will never be nicer than is dictated by the law, legally enforceable contracts, and the risk to future business of not-nice behavior.
Beyond that, Google has a business model from an ancient family that was pioneered before recorded history by egg, wool, and dairy farmers. When you or I watch
I have one also, and it is the most disappointing tech purchase I've ever made...
it's running 2.1 and will no longer be upgraded by Sprint according to their news release.
Another annoyance with carriers having to provide the upgrade is they toss in extra junk programs. I have an amazon MP3 store, sprint live Nascar, and other apps that can not be removed. Samsung also tossed in a few non-standard apps, like Moxier Mail, which costs $25 on the app store. So there are some minor benefits to using the network provided Android.
I like these kernel hacks, if they cause enough problems it may force Sprint to give me 2.2!
Dream on. Nothing can force Sprint to put out a 2.2 load for the Moment, because it is not their device. It is Samsung's hardware, and Samsung has made every dime they ever can from every Moment sold so far, and they have no interest in having any more sold. The phone has serious widely reported defects[0] and Samsung has already moved on to their next round of consumer fraud^W^Wmodels. Sprint has to collaborate on deploying upgrades to the Moment, but Samsung ultimately controls whether they get created.
What I am hoping for and have not yet determined is that this hack will make it easier for me to root and reflash my Moment. All of the existing mechanisms for escaping the standard Samsung/Sprint distribution require a real Windows machine to run black-box binaries that provide the initial 'root' foothold by talking some not-really-USB magic at the device's firmware in "recovery mode." Aside from the skin-crawling effect of that concept, I do not have a Windows machine. To load the Samsung/Sprint 2.1 release, I had to set up Boot Camp on one of my Macs, use a Windows disk & license my wife bought for running a VM on her Mac, scrub myself afterwards until all the hot water was gone, and chug a pint of Everclear to erase the pain.
[0]See the Sprint forum for the gory details. My least favorite is the not-really-airplane-mode: using WiFi drives the CDMA radio into a delayed catatonia that demands a hard reboot to resolve. The ridiculously inadequate battery and its seemingly random charge/usage characteristics, misplacement of the card slot, Bluetooth that isn't really there, USB that isn't USB, and shoddy auto-misfocus camera are tied for a close 2nd place among the fundamental hardware flaws.
Procmail has been filtering email since 1990. Proving prior art on scanning a message for spam filtering should not be difficult.
But that's not what is claimed. Claimed is sender context information from an external reference.
Right. Eudora was doing that circa 1992 for RFC822 mail. Notes and Exchange/Outlook were doing it by 1996, and one could argue that PROFS was doing it as far back as the 70's. Anyone who was paying attention to the MIME specs in 1996 could have given a standards-based logical equivalent to the 'preferred embodiment' described in the patent. The reason mail clients haven't taken this sort of thing beyond talking to local directories is that email has evolved badly. Even in 1996, it was usually safe to believe what mail headers said. Following an URL in a header to retrieve remote context info because the mail client didn't recognize the sender seemed reasonable to a lot of people. But it was already worrying some people and by the end of the decade *distrust* of unknown senders' mail was where mail software was heading. By the time this patent was actually awarded, no one doing anti-spam work would have seen it as anything but quaintly naive.
It is hard not to hope that this case crushes Mr. Uomini's hopes of being a great software developer. The programs he has released since winning the lottery in 1995 seem to share a theme: naively harmful concepts implemented carelessly. This lawsuit smells like a last desperate grab for recognition. It's sad.
Perhaps, but the patent in question doesn't even go into that depth of detail. It simply says it stores the emails context in a db, which it'd use later for some form of classification.The two problems I see with this is: 1) I thought patents were supposed to disclose some sort of detail regarding implementation and 2) are algorithms, even ones as loosely described as this, patentable?
I think you must not have read the actual patent carefully. It has a "DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENT" section and a bunch of figures showing how things fit together in that system. It does not refer to spam filtering or any other type of mail classification. The described mechanism uses custom mail headers to provide the recipient "context" attributes (real name, physical address, etc.) about the sender, ideally with a pointer URL to a "context server" but optionally through multiple headers with the actual context data. It also states that messages without the special headers could have context attributes deduced from using the contents of the From and Organization headers to query other services on the Internet such as the "domain name registry server " i.e. whois.
Having read the whole thing and having squandered far too much time with the arcana of email and spamfighting over the past 2 decades, I don't see how anyone can think that this patent is as broad as the/. blurb, the TechDirt article, or the lawsuit PR make it out to be, and as a practical matter it is barely relevant to spam filtering, particularly for the modern Internet. It offers a bandwidth-sparing alternative to using a text signature or attaching a vCard to every message, so it is accurately titled as a "SYSTEM FOR ADDING TO ELECTRONIC MAIL MESSAGES INFORMATION OBTAINED FROM SOURCES EXTERNAL TO THE ELECTRONIC MAIL TRANSPORT PROCESS." As such it is both obvious and unoriginal, it would have been so when filed, and by the time it was approved in 2000 the "inventor" would have deserved a giggle and head pat instead of a patent. The fallback mechanism includes a reliance on whois that would have been forgivably naive but mostly functional in 1996 but which by 2000 would have been considered ridiculous by anyone with half a clue. The fact that it the patent was granted is evidence of gross technical incompetence at USPTO, no matter what one believes about the fundamental merits of software-related patents.
I hope the defendants show some spine and go after the patent itself rather than just arguing that they aren't infringing it or tossing a few dollars at Uomini to get him to go away. Qualcomm, IBM, and Microsoft aren't on the surreal (JCPenney? really?) defendant list, which is a hint that either Uomini or his lawyer knows about their prior art that would at least box in the scope of his patent and probably invalidate it altogether. It is also notable that the patent somehow failed to cite RFC2017, published 2 months before the patent filing, updating the MIME spec for 'message/external-body' to use URL's. The bottom line is that there was an obvious way using open standards to do what the patent claims as its essential original idea, there were already similar non-standard methods implemented in both commercial and free software before the patent was filed, and the novel assertion in the lawsuit that this general process is critical to spam filtering is ridiculous.
I can say that with certainty because there is no functioning permanent waste disposal system for fission plants anywhere in the world. There are plans, fantasies, hand-waving, and excuses, but nothing that actually demonstrates anyone's hypotheses about long-term costs. As recently as 2008, the lobbyists for enhancing fission subsidization in the US were still basing their "cost accounting" on antique and dishonest budgeting for Yucca Mountain that has not been updated because no one sane actually believes that Yucca Mountain will ever go live.
This is not an argument against fission specifically. Externalized and socialized costs are a problem for essentially all forms of power generation, as is delusional forecasting. What does it cost to produce fission fuel when the average cost of oil production is $50/bbl? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it won't be what anyone promoting fission today cites. Any energy generation system that depends on an ongoing input of a fuel that requires energy to extract, prep, and ship has similar uncertainties because the world is migrating to increasingly expensive methods for extracting fossil fuels. Until we actually have other sources providing the bulk of energy inputs for mining, processing, and transporting Uranium, Thorium, Lithium, or Heavy Water, the cost of an energy economy migrating towards nuclear technologies and batteries is going to be heavily influenced by the costs of extracting oil from sand, shale, and below miles of water and the costs of mountaintop removal and hydraulic fracturing for coal and gas.
A feature of all forms power generation that exploit an existing natural energy transfer in place rather than using an extracted resource is that cost is heavily front-loaded and hence largely knowable before production starts. The only external economic changes that can harm the operating profitability of plants that exploit natural energy transfers are a significantly increased labor:energy price ratio (not likely) and hard dependence on maintenance materials that may become scarce and hence prohibitively expensive. A power plant whose only special material need is a large quantity of mixed alkali nitrates/nitrites is pretty safe on the materials cost side.
Actually what I'm ignoring is the cost of decommissioning the plant and that's because I have no way of estimating how much this mirror farm will cost to decommission.
No one has budgeted for the decommission costs of Hoover Dam either...
Nuclear fission and coal plants have significant decommission costs because they tend to toxify their sites. Those need to be planned for because they are virtually assured by their narrow operating margins to reach a point where they need to be decommissioned before their planners are beyond blame. For plants that exploit a natural energy transfer of a particular site, the operating margins tend to be high and stable, and when decommissioning does become necessary it is a simpler and more predictable process. For example, it is quite certain that today's big wind and solar projects will not leave behind huge ponds full of toxic wind ash and whole sites filled with "low-level" contaminated materials giving off dangerous secondary solar radiation.
So here's a quick question, who on earth thought it would be a good idea to even *allow* javascript to run in an email?
Netscape and Microsoft, in the mid-90's, when they were both known for hiring fresh grads based on GPA and driving away experienced developers who understood their own fallibility.
Google is not particularly innovative in their design errors or how they got them.
I'd say that people that stupid deserve whatever they get, except that they are likely to do damage to other systems than their own.
As always, this sentiment annoys me.
Ignorance may be annoying, but it doesn't mean someone "deserves" any misfortune. No one is born knowing "I should not enable javascript in my e-mail." If this slipped through google, who I expect to be better than the average user, who the hell are you to say the average user should have known better and deserves it?
One need not have any technical expertise to know what a free service from a profit-making enterprise ultimately will be worth. Anyone who expects a free service from a corporation which exists to make money to be anything other than shoddy is assured disappointment. That is something that any competent adult in a money-driven society should understand. No matter how many of the self-defined best and brightest are gathered together and no matter how slick they are at selling the idea that they are dedicated to not being evil, Google cannot (and doesn't want to) eliminate the most basic principle of healthy economics: at best, you get what you pay for.
It's a bit more subtle to understand that when a company like Google gives away services, the users of those services are not customers. They are human livestock. The Google business model is not new, rather it is one of the oldest. The quality of a service like GMail for users is analogous to the quality of feed and shelter offered by the first egg and dairy farmers to their hens and cows. That may be quite good relative to the context of the livestock, but it is feed and shelter. Non-human livestock doesn't know that there are such things as food and housing, and might not value the difference. Making a domestication bargain is not necessarily based on ignorance and demonstrates some level of intelligence. Saying that GMail users do not deserve whatever breakage they get from it is insulting to their basic competence. No one is born into Gmail, no one is required to use GMail. People use GMail by choice and no one competent to manage their own affairs in a market economy would expect it to be a high-quality service, even if understanding the specific metrics of quality for such a service requires rather arcane knowledge. Either the bulk of GMail users *DESERVE* whatever crapulence they get from GMail (because they chose to take an obvious risk whose details are likely beyond their understanding) or we have a huge unmet need for custodial social workers, sheltered workshops, and adult day care. Or maybe just for research into better utilization of human livestock.
Apple offers the Keychain APIs for secure storage of identity items as well.
Using this a browser can store what it needs in a secure way. Access to each and every item is controlled by ACLs that you can tweak to your heart's content.
And we all know that with the excellent security synergy between users and application developers, the result of having freely tweakable security settings that default to moderate strength inevitably tends towards most users finding their own optimal balance of security and convenience that never leaves anyone at significant risk.
What, you haven't noticed that? I'm SHOCKED!
Snark aside: YES, Apple provides a strong toolkit and default behaviors (in Safari and elsewhere) that set a reasonably secure norm for MacOS apps. However, it is important to keep in mind that legitimate users are ultimately the weak point in any security model that involves them. Apple has done well with the MacOS Keychain and securityd, but in a reality-based context, "doing well" means that they have chosen a default compromise between convenience and security that is neither trivially weak (the MS problem) or strong enough that most users effectively switch it off (the Mozilla problem.) Any generally tolerable password/identity/authentication management system that addresses the multiple-password problem is a security compromise per se. The real trick is not making it tweakable, but making it discourage/resist user and developer tweaking that turns "compromise" into "gaping open hole." One can make the Keychain and securityd a gaping open hole or an infuriating nuisance, but it isn't particularly easy to do either.
What is really interesting about this is the age of the rock art, which would seem to be as old as any human art anywhere and make the case for the Jawoyn Aborigines having one of the oldest cultures in the world. .
from the original article
The Jawoyn people say they are excited the painting could be Australia's oldest dated rock art. The Jawoyn are a group of Indigenous peoples who are the traditional owners of the land in Australia's Northern Territory...
What leads you to believe that as successive waves of humans entered Australia that the current occupants are in any way related to the painting's creators? Were the original inhabitants pushed further south,overrun,wiped out,walked to Tasmania?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070509161829.htm
"At the time of the migration, 50,000 years ago, Australia and New Guinea were joined by a land bridge and the region was also only separated from the main Eurasian land mass by narrow straits such as Wallace's Line in Indonesia. The land bridge was submerged about 8,000 years ago...
Given 30,000 years plus at the front door entrance to Australia I think the Jarwoyn are the least likely descendants of the original artists.
You seem to have stopped reading that article a paragraph ahead of the answer to your question. One of the key findings from that genetic tracing work is that unlike many other places, Australia had only one genetically significant wave of immigration. Geographically, I believe it is also not quite right that Arnhem Land was the 'front door' into Australia, since Cape York was the most persistent part of the connection to New Guinea.
In addition, there is some continuity between essentially modern Jawoyn rock art and the older drawings. When Europeans arrived, they were making red ochre rock drawings in the same places that have similar red ochre rock drawings going back thousands of years. Between that and the genetic evidence that all Australian Aborigines and Melanesians are descendants of a single group of immigrants from ~50kya, it would take significant hypothesizing away from the evidence to not credit their ancestors with the oldest of the drawings.
Who is to say that the descriptions of the bird were not passed down in legends? It seems entirely possible to me that the bird was painted after they had become extinct.
The answer to precisely that question is in the article, lifted directly from one of its source articles.
More generally, the surprise about the age of this rock art isn't a matter of a century or two, or even really a millennium or five. The paleontologists and archaeologists are saying 40kya, the rock art expert is saying 5-10kya. There are very few cultures in the world which are known to have postulated anything older than 10kya as the beginning of humankind, and those which have done so tell stories of old times that are far from accuracy or precision. Getting the beak, leg, and claw shapes of an extinct bird passed down correctly through 30ky+ would be an unrivaled feat of trivial fact preservation.
So, we think the bird went extinct 40k years ago, so we're using that to date the painting as being that old? Does that seem backwards to anyone else?
Probably, but that doesn't mean that it *IS* backwards.
How about we date the painting, then maybe we can get a better estimate of exactly when these birds went extinct?
RTFA, and the sources it cites.
What is really interesting about this is the age of the rock art, which would seem to be as old as any human art anywhere and make the case for the Jawoyn Aborigines having one of the oldest cultures in the world. Dating rock art tends to be imprecise to the point of near impossibility in many cases, dating bird remains in the 40kya range is much less so. TFA states that there is a plan to attempt to 'radiocarbon' date the drawing but since the medium is red ochre and the cited sources don't mention any other dating methods being tried despite extensive skepticism of the age, that's not very credible.
Contrary to rumour, spammers don't spider for email addresses much. Mine is in the clear in many places and I'm getting less and less spam over time, not more. If you were to subscribe him to a few porn sites, however....
I have no idea if porn sites pass along email addresses these days[0], but web scrapers remain somewhat active. I have pages with addresses in the clear that change over time and the rate of delivery attempts to those has not changed significantly over the past 3 years. What has changed over time in a big way is how easy is is to shun those deliveries using free tools and open public data sources without collateral damage. The spammers who are still doing simple web scraping are the dumbest of the dumb, but they remain numerous.
[0] Once upon a time it was part of my paying job to know how various classes of business handled email addresses. I can say for sure that in 2000, a sizable fraction of "porn site" operators were not so much in the business of porn as they were in the business of assembling email address lists that they could sell to people who were really running porn sites.
I'm sorry, but I don't see a big problem with the "nuclear option".
Look more closely...
Underground nuclear explosions have been used quite a bit and they are not a significant radiation hazard. The geology of the area is presumably also fairly well understood.
Understanding the geology (which is put in question by the accident) is necessary but not sufficient. Sites for underground nuclear tests are not simply understood, they are selected and prepared. They are not selected under a mile of water, and test chambers are not prepared by connecting them to large high-pressure oil and gas deposits.
I wonder, though, if they even need a nuclear bomb. The drill hole is tiny compared to the 3 miles of rock it goes through. I would think even a conventional explosive placed some distance to the drill hole about a mile or so down into the rock might be enough to shift the rock and seal it off with little risk of making things worse.
The risk of making things worse is quite real. The root cause of the accident according to some reports was the destabilization of an unrecognized clathrate layer, and setting off a large explosion in that sort of formation would be a crapshoot. Even if the clathrate is a small localized issue, the concept of trying to plug the hole by shattering the cap layer around it carries the risk of trading one pipe of known characteristics in a known location for a giant sieve leaking more gas and oil from a myriad of unknown random seep points.
There isn't much relevant history to look at for troubleshooting accidents like this one but in general, throwing high-energy chaos at a piece of complex engineering gone wrong is a tactical class that has a vanishingly small success rate..
Of course we do. The Gulf is said to leak 2000 barrels a day naturally.
Technically a truism, but is there someone other than you by whom that is said?
Some natural leaks in the gulf of California are even bigger.
Which ones?
In 1995, the Smithsonian was saying that natural seeps globally totaled 62 million gallons/year which is about 4k barrels/day. In 2000, NASA put a number around 1.5k bbl/day on Gulf of Mexico seepage, with a methodology that couldn't fully exclude human-caused leakage but only included the northern GoM. The 2003 NRC "Oil in the Sea" report put global seepage at 600k tonnes/year which is about 12k bbl/day, and extrapolated the NASA GoM seepage data to 140k t/y for the whole GoM, or 2.8k bbl/day.
My point is not that 2k bbl/day is a wrong number, but that (as that NRC report made clear) natural seepage numbers are only a little more than order of magnitude estimates, and at best have only one significant digit. That is largely because the nature of marine seepage is such that it generally does not cause noticeable effects. The spread of those few thousand barrels per day across the whole of the GoM has led to the development of ecological systems that can degrade that widespread and essentially continuous input of oil that is seeping slowly in any single location and doing so through porous areas in sedimentary deposits that have effects on what reaches the open water. A well blowout is fundamentally different because the oil is spewing out of an open channel to a sub-surface reservoir which in most cases worth drilling has a non-porous cap layer above it. So even a partial well blowout like the current one brings both a gross carrying capacity overrun with more "oil" coming out in one place than the whole GoM system normally handles and a qualitative difference in what that "oil" consists of.
Just where did I mention any company besides AT&T? That was the one company mentioned in the post I replied to, and they got their monopoly on phone service lines several decades ago.
Yes, and it is important to understand that their monopoly was not simply on physical wires, it was on the whole business of telephony. AT&T ceded local service in some low-margin bits of geography to smaller companies, but they effectively owned the equipment market, the interconnect facilities, the long lines, the technical standards process, the patents, the rights-of-way in profitable markets, the customers, and the political pull at all levels of government. Some of those areas were whittled at before the AT&T breakup and some were addressed by the breakup. The huge failure of the breakup was that it left in place the most exploitable and self-perpetuating features of the Bell System monopoly, sliced them regionally between the ILEC's, and effectively gave them each more leeway to exploit their monopoly positions in their regions than 'Ma Bell' ever had. The big bundles of last-mile POTS pairs running out of thousands of local CO's were not themselves such a valuable asset, but they are the physical manifestation of the crown jewels of the Bell System which were handed over to the ILEC's: captive customers, CO's, rights of way, and finely divided (and hence easily conquered) regulators.
I realize the games that have been played since then, but that isn't the point. If you're going to mention one specific company as an example then make it something relevant, something current. AT&Ts original lines, as well as their original equipment, are now basically irrelevant. Land(twisted pair copper) lines are dying, although there will be large parts of rural America that will be stuck using them for quite a few years. My in-laws didn't even get a party line until about 10 years ago.
The local ILEC remains the only provider of basic phone service and a physical layer for Internet access in many places, they are one of two choices for most people, and wherever any number of communications providers can connect a customer, a corporate heir of the 1980 regulated monopoly phone company (overwhelmingly, of one of the old Bell System entities) is one of the dominant mass-market providers of voice and data service. For the bulk of people who have 2 competing wire-providers, the other one is essentially always the heir to whatever cable company bid highest for their municipal officials^W monopoly cable franchise back in the 70's or 80's. The duopoly exists because circa 1980, the phone company was at the lowpoint of its political influence and mostly lacked the vision to understand that geographically balkanized monopoly franchises to run coax for analog video on "telephone poles" were a fundamental threat to their most important monopoly leverage. Cable companies and phone companies have had slightly different monopolies because of how their networks of wires were originally structured. Both have used their iron grip on one type of service to exclude true direct competitors and maintain margins that have allowed them to evolve their physical plants towards the ability to make a run at each others' core services. The problem with that isn't the evolving competitive duopoly, it is the fact that both classes of monopoly wire-provider have used their nominally regulated monopolies on the wires to become dominant players in the unregulated areas of business that depend on their wires. The ILEC's (today being mostly the re-assembled AT&T and Verizon, which is most of the rest of the old Ma Bell plus MCI and GTE) have pushed CLEC's and independent ISP's into low-volume/low-margin niches, while the cable companies have consolidated themselves to the point where they are big enough to buy NBC/U and blackmail companies like News Corp. and Disney, while essentially doing away with the quaint old concept of municipal grifts^W franchises.
Yes, it is possible some viable mutants will result. However, would the chances be any higher of producing a strain of E. coli that are deadlier to humans? I doubt it.
Increasing the mutation rate has to increase the chances of mutants that are both viable and more harmful. Mutations from radiation are essentially random, so more mutation events means more mutation varieties, and so a greater chance of something very bad happening. Analogy: a handful of 5 6-sided dice. If you roll those dice once an hour, your chances of rolling all sixes in any day is very low: 1 in 324. If you roll them every 5 seconds you don't have a better shot at all sixes in any particular roll (1:7776) but your odds of hitting all sixes at least once in a day are 720 times higher, and most days you'd hit it twice. And have serious hand cramps.:)
It should also be noted that most E. coli strains are harmless to humans, and our guts are full of them. It is evolutionarily problematic for a parasitic microorganism to kill its hosts, so most things that take advantage of living inside us do so without doing damage. We actually are dependent on our gut flora (including E. coli) for healthy digestion and absorption. The deadly strain of E. coli is believed to be the result of fairly recent (decades) incorporation of Shigella virus toxin genes by E. coli in cattle feedlot environments where shortening host life is essentially meaningless but triggering large volumes of waste helps the bacteria spread from its already-doomed (i.e. future hamburger) hosts to nearby others with a few more days of life.
Back on topic, is the uranium-phosphate that is produced still radioactive, or does this just make it easier to extract and remove from the environment?
There is no (bio)chemical way to eliminate radioactivity. This is just a way to isolate Uranium out of whatever soup of other stuff it happens to be in. Isolating the Uranium out of waste is useful because the Uranium is both hazardous and potentially reusable, but it only deals with part of the problem. Nuclear waste comes in many different forms, and the forms that would be targeted by this sort of tactic also are full of Uranium's decay products, many of which are themselves also radioactive and/or toxic. Absent a truly radical revolution in our understanding of nuclear physics, there is no total solution to the problem of waste from fission reactors other than time. There's nothing we can do to prevent radioactive decay and only a few narrow cases (i.e. fission reactors and bombs) where we have figured out ways to speed it up, so the "solutions" are all aimed at trying to concentrate and fractionate the various forms of bad stuff in the waste and find ways to safely store or reuse each fraction.
Not to mention that with RDP, you can start a session locally and reconnect remotely. Anyone local will see a lock screen. If you start a remote session and unlock locally, your remote session is right there. You can't do this with X or VNC.
The last sentence is simply not true. it is true that many people do not configure systems to work that way, but that's a human choice, not a technology problem. In the pure X world, where the user sits in front of the display server and the clients (like the window manager and apps) run elsewhere, your claim doesn't even make sense because user login sessions associated with a GUI are unrelated to a local host console, which may or may have any GUI capabilities and may be a serial line into terminal server. Of course, in that model it is impossible to have GUI sessions dropped in one place and picked up elsewhere, which is why VNC exists. For VNC the X display server is resident on the host (i.e. a 'Xvnc' process associated to a display number for each VNC session) and it is common to set up multiple VNC displays for machines which need to serve multiple concurrent users. With a decent GUI stack properly configured, (ancient CDE works, I assume KDE and Gnome do also...) you can lock and disconnect from a session in one place and come back from anywhere else and unlock it. Even on MacOS you can do this sort of thing with the free Vine VNC server and fast user switching. Each account can be set to run an instance of the Vine server when logged in, and another instance (or Apple's Remote Desktop agent) can run to handle the login window GUI context.
Of course, that sort of functionality is not really a big deal in the context of the original question. Sure, it is nice that I can hook up to my weeks-old session on my personal desktop when I'm traveling with my laptop without unlocking the real screen, but it's really not the sort of functionality you need for managing a large pile of machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, this may not be for every department or division, but almost every NGC employee I know is basically well familiar with furlough. Whether good or bad, NGC is left with the ability to place entire departments on furlough to reduce overhead costs in the event a contract dries up. Now perhaps it's their size, perhaps they simply don't care about their workers, but this sort of thing seems to happen often. I'd guess that no NGC employee with a tenure more than 2 years hasn't been out of work for up to a month or so. But this is how things are run there.
See, government contracting works like this. You create a company, hire some folk to work on a contract. Whatever their salary is, you charge the government +50% or more, so essentially the government is not only flat out paying your salary but also the company for your services. If the contract ends, so does your job as the company may not want to charge overhead. In contrast to other business sectors, employment typically isn't grounded so harshly on the existence of a contract, which is where cost of business and business management can keep workers afloat even during down times (think department store).
FWIW, this makes it sound like NGC is a couple of steps better than the contract IT shops that I'm familiar with that service the private sector. 100% markup is fairly common, and keeping idle employees "on furlough" is a concept that doesn't really exist. When the contract ends, the job ends. A pure pimp agency will usually try to place a profitable contractor in another spot ASAP once a customer provides notice, but they won't guarantee anyones rates and I have never heard of a pimp agency doing anything to hold on to a contractor who is between contracts if they don't have anything suitable immediately available. For "managed project" type contractors it is as bad or worse. Agencies typically make sure they have the power to take their people with them if they lose a project, but often they only exercise that power only as a tool and/or weapon applied to customers and competitors to the detriment of their employees, rather than to actually move them to other work.
They had pretty much the most expensive support contracts possible. The problem is that apparently all this waste of taxpayers' money has bought nothing useful.
"Most expensive" != "Best"
"Most expensive" != "Adequate"
I have not seen all the details and they probably are not public but given that NG has a history of being primarily a military contractor, I'd bet on whatever they offered being vastly overpriced, deceptively sold, specified well short of best-in-class, and provided objectively short of that spec.
Why the rage? Just spell out very clearly (and in writing) exactly what will happen if component X fails, and the cost to implement redundancy now. When component X fails and the company loses Y dollars of revenue and the CEO comes to you, just pull out the email and say "I tried to design redundancy but he wouldn't spend the money".
BTDTGTPS
Or very nearly so. I admit I have never been immediately and explicitly fired for "I told you so" moments, but both as an employee and as a consultant I've had predominantly negative experiences of citing unheeded advice in my own defense. Sometimes a blamethrower is rational and accepts the fact of having made a mistake, but that is not the most common outcome. If a problem gets to the point of someone trying to narrow the focus of accountability, it is unlikely to end fairly or well for the people with the lowest management stature.
I had a new battery cabinet installed within 2 weeks, *and* a redundant UPS for most servers.
I've had that sort of thing happen as well, but it isn't necessarily a victory. My first instructive experience of this sort (about 20 years ago, so obviously I'm a cynical old fart) seemed a success in the short term direct sense, but 3 months later it was the centerpiece of a brutally unfair annual performance review, zeroing out my bonus because I was not a "team player" and had not "stood behind" my boss (a hard trick when she was actively trying to make me a human shield while stabbing me in the back.) And of course the ongoing cost of belatedly following my advice was used to rationalize a pay freeze for our whole team. My primary lesson from that was that I needed to work elsewhere, but a more generally useful rule of thumb is that there is no such thing as winning in a workplace CYA game. Being right and even being acknowledged as such don't guarantee anything and being subject to the decisions of someone who doesn't take responsibility for their errors is a crappy way to live.
I thought Liberty Island is/was closed for tours after 9/11*. Has it opened again?
Yes. Old news. Is it really so hard to enter 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty' into a browser?
The Washington Monument was started while Washington was still alive, thus, it is a monument, NOT a memorial.
THAT IS AN ABSURDLY MULTIFACETED FALSEHOOD
The semantic difference between 'monument' and 'memorial' is wrong and work on the Washington Monument (which is a National Memorial) did not start until long after Washington's death in 1799.
While a nearby location (now the location of the Jefferson Pier) was specified for a monument featuring Washington in L'Enfant's 1791 city plan, that monument (an equestrian statue) was never built. A different plan for a monument (in the Capital itself) was authorized in 1799, but that one was also never actually started. The monument that actually exists today was the result of a quasi-private project that started in 1832 and spent 26 years in corrupt clusterfuckery. That fiasco got the obelisk part of their design 1/3-built between 1848 and 1858 before running out of money and credible public figures to sully by association. It sat untouched as an eyesore for 18 years, and the work done 1854-58 was such crap that it had to be dismantled before completion of the monument (with a slightly different color of stone and a simpler overall design) could continue.
How does a fault in a single SAN controller cause an outage of the entire data storage network? Expensive SAN solutions are expensive & highly redundant for reason. This smells like a "Let's buy the cheaper solution" and/or an infrastructure design fail.
RTFA!
The problem was a dual (or worse) failure. What the article reveals is that while they may have had all of the right hardware in place and a mechanism for it to handle the most likely failures, they were missing the 'soft' components of a good HA system: routine testing of failover and a rapid repair plan. In the auto industry where failed systems can halt factories and rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost per hour of downtime, it is the norm for HA systems to have frequent failover tests, to have on-site spares for critical components that can be replaced by on-site staff, and to have support arrangements that put a skilled human on-site with replacement hardware in a small amount of time. This is why traditional "enterprise class" systems are so expensive. They are designed for rapid diagnosis and repair, and a well-run enterprise that needs truly HA systems pays for expensive HUMAN support by their own staff and/or from IBM, Sun^WOracle, EMC, HP, etc. and monitoring systems on top of that. If you fail over your HA systems every Sunday at 02:00 (or whatever time is safe...) and have the right staff, processes, and support contracts in place, you will find nearly all of the latent failures and have them fixed before a true production failure exposes them.
The most appalling thing about this to me isn't the failure. Some systems don't have safe times for testing failovers, and I know from personal experience that a component in an HA system that was working perfectly Saturday and has been idle since Sunday can go tits-up when needed on Wednesday. The real problem is the long outage. If the clowns in the VA state government were doing their jobs, they would not have a system like this without vendor support contracts to fix well-defined hardware problems (e.g. "bad memory card" ) within a few hours at most. This was something I always loved about working in a shop with the top-grade EMC contract. The Symmetrix and its associated gadgetry would call EMC about failures and we'd have a tech show up at the DC with parts before we even noticed anything unusual: costly, but nowhere near as expensive as killing all of the SAN-reliant systems for a random day every 3 years. The 4th 9 is not cheap or simple, because it always requires humans.
From the summary
On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second
If they get attacked that often, it shouldn't take long for them to find and confirm security holes in Windows. Yet they have been noticeably slow in patching some of those holes; why don't they respond quicker?
Smart attackers do not aim new types of attack at MS or other targets where there is likely to be clueful attentiveness. As anyone who is engaged in clueful attentiveness to external attacks against heavily-attacked systems knows, the actual risk is not evenly spread across all attacks and the overwhelming majority of attacks are completely harmless for minimally protected systems. For example: I have managed systems that have seen SSH password guessing attacks bursting into the hundreds/second order of magnitude, but purely passive and simple protective measures (including default configurations of some components) made those "attacks" completely harmless. They didn't even amount to a DoS attack, because they were entirely the result of being a high profile target of a lot of idiots rather than being a really high value target of anyone with half a clue. High profile targets attract every script kiddy on the net, high value targets are usually well enough protected that they aren't useful detection systems. This is why the concept of the "honeypot" exists: a system with a relatively low profile that is made to look like a weakly-protected high-value target in order to attract serious attacks.
Their motto has been thrown down the drain with the recent press releases, media coverage, and acquisitions. It's almost as if they're no longer the original company with their great philosophies. [...] I'm dumbfounded. Simply dumbfounded. I've sincerely been a Google supporter since a little kid, and loved their products, services, and philosophies... and for most of this time, I ignored most critics, since Google actually kept doing good for the most part. Now, all of that has changed. I'm very disappointed in Google. :/
Welcome to adulthood. It appears that your parents and teachers have failed to provide you with a very important lesson. Just to make sure a few others are covered: the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus all do not exist.
Here's the more important lesson; Google is a publicly traded US corporation, a complex fact which ought to inform how any rational adult should view them. To start, understand that "corporation" is not a synonym for "business" or "company." The corporation is a special sort of legally constructed entity which was invented primarily to allow people who own and run businesses to escape accountability for what they do as the corporation. A corporation is the legal embodiment of an ethical compromise: assets, liabilities, acts, speech, and contracts associated with many people bundled into a "corporate person" for whom no set of humans can ever be held fully accountable. In the US, we take that further for corporations whose ownership shares are traded in public markets. The law makes shareholders' interests supreme above every other principle (other than legality) in the operation of a corporation. A corporation can be sued by its shareholders for putting vague ideas like "Don't be evil" above shareholder value. Google may (or may not) have some protection against such suits because management has always been open about their unconventional views on shareholder value and their corporate mission but that cannot change the fact that ultimately for Google Inc. or any other such corporation, "good" is profit and "evil" is loss. Statements by a corporation about their "motto," "mission," "culture," and similar legally meaningless things should never be trusted at face value. Those are marketing tools for shaping people's ideas about the corporation with the ultimate end of adding to corporate profit. They are not binding contracts with anyone or claims about business practices that can be enforced in any way. A corporation cannot be held accountable as a "corporate person" for a misleading motto, and neither can the actual people who act and speak as the corporation or who ultimately own the corporation. The strongest useful belief that a rational adult should get from the Google Inc. motto is that its managers believe that it is valuable for Google Inc. to be seen by everyone as a business that follows normal human ethics, not the alternative corporate ethics of profit limited only by law. That image ultimately cannot be the truth for any corporation, although the fact that the people running Google see value in the image may have some influence over how much obvious unequivocal evil they do. As someone young enough to have been a 'little kid' during the brief existence of Google, it is helpful for you to get a practical understanding of the limited trustworthiness and fundamental amorality of corporations as a Google spectator. Many people don't really start to consider those issues until they are directly damaged by a corporate employer, vendor, or customer that fails to meet expectations grounded in human ethics. Corporate ethics are a different thing, and humans dealing with a corporation should always assume that it will never be nicer than is dictated by the law, legally enforceable contracts, and the risk to future business of not-nice behavior.
Beyond that, Google has a business model from an ancient family that was pioneered before recorded history by egg, wool, and dairy farmers. When you or I watch
I have a Samsung Mobile from Sprint,
99.999% sure you mean "Moment" not "Mobile".
I have one also, and it is the most disappointing tech purchase I've ever made...
it's running 2.1 and will no longer be upgraded by Sprint according to their news release.
Another annoyance with carriers having to provide the upgrade is they toss in extra junk programs. I have an amazon MP3 store, sprint live Nascar, and other apps that can not be removed. Samsung also tossed in a few non-standard apps, like Moxier Mail, which costs $25 on the app store. So there are some minor benefits to using the network provided Android.
I like these kernel hacks, if they cause enough problems it may force Sprint to give me 2.2!
Dream on. Nothing can force Sprint to put out a 2.2 load for the Moment, because it is not their device. It is Samsung's hardware, and Samsung has made every dime they ever can from every Moment sold so far, and they have no interest in having any more sold. The phone has serious widely reported defects[0] and Samsung has already moved on to their next round of consumer fraud^W^Wmodels. Sprint has to collaborate on deploying upgrades to the Moment, but Samsung ultimately controls whether they get created.
What I am hoping for and have not yet determined is that this hack will make it easier for me to root and reflash my Moment. All of the existing mechanisms for escaping the standard Samsung/Sprint distribution require a real Windows machine to run black-box binaries that provide the initial 'root' foothold by talking some not-really-USB magic at the device's firmware in "recovery mode." Aside from the skin-crawling effect of that concept, I do not have a Windows machine. To load the Samsung/Sprint 2.1 release, I had to set up Boot Camp on one of my Macs, use a Windows disk & license my wife bought for running a VM on her Mac, scrub myself afterwards until all the hot water was gone, and chug a pint of Everclear to erase the pain.
[0]See the Sprint forum for the gory details. My least favorite is the not-really-airplane-mode: using WiFi drives the CDMA radio into a delayed catatonia that demands a hard reboot to resolve. The ridiculously inadequate battery and its seemingly random charge/usage characteristics, misplacement of the card slot, Bluetooth that isn't really there, USB that isn't USB, and shoddy auto-misfocus camera are tied for a close 2nd place among the fundamental hardware flaws.
Procmail has been filtering email since 1990. Proving prior art on scanning a message for spam filtering should not be difficult.
But that's not what is claimed. Claimed is sender context information from an external reference.
Right. Eudora was doing that circa 1992 for RFC822 mail. Notes and Exchange/Outlook were doing it by 1996, and one could argue that PROFS was doing it as far back as the 70's. Anyone who was paying attention to the MIME specs in 1996 could have given a standards-based logical equivalent to the 'preferred embodiment' described in the patent. The reason mail clients haven't taken this sort of thing beyond talking to local directories is that email has evolved badly. Even in 1996, it was usually safe to believe what mail headers said. Following an URL in a header to retrieve remote context info because the mail client didn't recognize the sender seemed reasonable to a lot of people. But it was already worrying some people and by the end of the decade *distrust* of unknown senders' mail was where mail software was heading. By the time this patent was actually awarded, no one doing anti-spam work would have seen it as anything but quaintly naive.
It is hard not to hope that this case crushes Mr. Uomini's hopes of being a great software developer. The programs he has released since winning the lottery in 1995 seem to share a theme: naively harmful concepts implemented carelessly. This lawsuit smells like a last desperate grab for recognition. It's sad.
Perhaps, but the patent in question doesn't even go into that depth of detail. It simply says it stores the emails context in a db, which it'd use later for some form of classification.The two problems I see with this is: 1) I thought patents were supposed to disclose some sort of detail regarding implementation and 2) are algorithms, even ones as loosely described as this, patentable?
I think you must not have read the actual patent carefully. It has a "DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENT" section and a bunch of figures showing how things fit together in that system. It does not refer to spam filtering or any other type of mail classification. The described mechanism uses custom mail headers to provide the recipient "context" attributes (real name, physical address, etc.) about the sender, ideally with a pointer URL to a "context server" but optionally through multiple headers with the actual context data. It also states that messages without the special headers could have context attributes deduced from using the contents of the From and Organization headers to query other services on the Internet such as the "domain name registry server " i.e. whois.
Having read the whole thing and having squandered far too much time with the arcana of email and spamfighting over the past 2 decades, I don't see how anyone can think that this patent is as broad as the /. blurb, the TechDirt article, or the lawsuit PR make it out to be, and as a practical matter it is barely relevant to spam filtering, particularly for the modern Internet. It offers a bandwidth-sparing alternative to using a text signature or attaching a vCard to every message, so it is accurately titled as a "SYSTEM FOR ADDING TO ELECTRONIC MAIL MESSAGES INFORMATION OBTAINED FROM SOURCES EXTERNAL TO THE ELECTRONIC MAIL TRANSPORT PROCESS." As such it is both obvious and unoriginal, it would have been so when filed, and by the time it was approved in 2000 the "inventor" would have deserved a giggle and head pat instead of a patent. The fallback mechanism includes a reliance on whois that would have been forgivably naive but mostly functional in 1996 but which by 2000 would have been considered ridiculous by anyone with half a clue. The fact that it the patent was granted is evidence of gross technical incompetence at USPTO, no matter what one believes about the fundamental merits of software-related patents.
I hope the defendants show some spine and go after the patent itself rather than just arguing that they aren't infringing it or tossing a few dollars at Uomini to get him to go away. Qualcomm, IBM, and Microsoft aren't on the surreal (JCPenney? really?) defendant list, which is a hint that either Uomini or his lawyer knows about their prior art that would at least box in the scope of his patent and probably invalidate it altogether. It is also notable that the patent somehow failed to cite RFC2017, published 2 months before the patent filing, updating the MIME spec for 'message/external-body' to use URL's. The bottom line is that there was an obvious way using open standards to do what the patent claims as its essential original idea, there were already similar non-standard methods implemented in both commercial and free software before the patent was filed, and the novel assertion in the lawsuit that this general process is critical to spam filtering is ridiculous.
The $4-6 includes waste disposal.
False.
I can say that with certainty because there is no functioning permanent waste disposal system for fission plants anywhere in the world. There are plans, fantasies, hand-waving, and excuses, but nothing that actually demonstrates anyone's hypotheses about long-term costs. As recently as 2008, the lobbyists for enhancing fission subsidization in the US were still basing their "cost accounting" on antique and dishonest budgeting for Yucca Mountain that has not been updated because no one sane actually believes that Yucca Mountain will ever go live.
This is not an argument against fission specifically. Externalized and socialized costs are a problem for essentially all forms of power generation, as is delusional forecasting. What does it cost to produce fission fuel when the average cost of oil production is $50/bbl? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it won't be what anyone promoting fission today cites. Any energy generation system that depends on an ongoing input of a fuel that requires energy to extract, prep, and ship has similar uncertainties because the world is migrating to increasingly expensive methods for extracting fossil fuels. Until we actually have other sources providing the bulk of energy inputs for mining, processing, and transporting Uranium, Thorium, Lithium, or Heavy Water, the cost of an energy economy migrating towards nuclear technologies and batteries is going to be heavily influenced by the costs of extracting oil from sand, shale, and below miles of water and the costs of mountaintop removal and hydraulic fracturing for coal and gas.
A feature of all forms power generation that exploit an existing natural energy transfer in place rather than using an extracted resource is that cost is heavily front-loaded and hence largely knowable before production starts. The only external economic changes that can harm the operating profitability of plants that exploit natural energy transfers are a significantly increased labor:energy price ratio (not likely) and hard dependence on maintenance materials that may become scarce and hence prohibitively expensive. A power plant whose only special material need is a large quantity of mixed alkali nitrates/nitrites is pretty safe on the materials cost side.
Actually what I'm ignoring is the cost of decommissioning the plant and that's because I have no way of estimating how much this mirror farm will cost to decommission.
No one has budgeted for the decommission costs of Hoover Dam either...
Nuclear fission and coal plants have significant decommission costs because they tend to toxify their sites. Those need to be planned for because they are virtually assured by their narrow operating margins to reach a point where they need to be decommissioned before their planners are beyond blame. For plants that exploit a natural energy transfer of a particular site, the operating margins tend to be high and stable, and when decommissioning does become necessary it is a simpler and more predictable process. For example, it is quite certain that today's big wind and solar projects will not leave behind huge ponds full of toxic wind ash and whole sites filled with "low-level" contaminated materials giving off dangerous secondary solar radiation.
So here's a quick question, who on earth thought it would be a good idea to even *allow* javascript to run in an email?
Netscape and Microsoft, in the mid-90's, when they were both known for hiring fresh grads based on GPA and driving away experienced developers who understood their own fallibility.
Google is not particularly innovative in their design errors or how they got them.
I'd say that people that stupid deserve whatever they get, except that they are likely to do damage to other systems than their own.
As always, this sentiment annoys me.
Ignorance may be annoying, but it doesn't mean someone "deserves" any misfortune. No one is born knowing "I should not enable javascript in my e-mail." If this slipped through google, who I expect to be better than the average user, who the hell are you to say the average user should have known better and deserves it?
One need not have any technical expertise to know what a free service from a profit-making enterprise ultimately will be worth. Anyone who expects a free service from a corporation which exists to make money to be anything other than shoddy is assured disappointment. That is something that any competent adult in a money-driven society should understand. No matter how many of the self-defined best and brightest are gathered together and no matter how slick they are at selling the idea that they are dedicated to not being evil, Google cannot (and doesn't want to) eliminate the most basic principle of healthy economics: at best, you get what you pay for.
It's a bit more subtle to understand that when a company like Google gives away services, the users of those services are not customers. They are human livestock. The Google business model is not new, rather it is one of the oldest. The quality of a service like GMail for users is analogous to the quality of feed and shelter offered by the first egg and dairy farmers to their hens and cows. That may be quite good relative to the context of the livestock, but it is feed and shelter. Non-human livestock doesn't know that there are such things as food and housing, and might not value the difference. Making a domestication bargain is not necessarily based on ignorance and demonstrates some level of intelligence. Saying that GMail users do not deserve whatever breakage they get from it is insulting to their basic competence. No one is born into Gmail, no one is required to use GMail. People use GMail by choice and no one competent to manage their own affairs in a market economy would expect it to be a high-quality service, even if understanding the specific metrics of quality for such a service requires rather arcane knowledge. Either the bulk of GMail users *DESERVE* whatever crapulence they get from GMail (because they chose to take an obvious risk whose details are likely beyond their understanding) or we have a huge unmet need for custodial social workers, sheltered workshops, and adult day care. Or maybe just for research into better utilization of human livestock.
Apple offers the Keychain APIs for secure storage of identity items as well. Using this a browser can store what it needs in a secure way. Access to each and every item is controlled by ACLs that you can tweak to your heart's content.
And we all know that with the excellent security synergy between users and application developers, the result of having freely tweakable security settings that default to moderate strength inevitably tends towards most users finding their own optimal balance of security and convenience that never leaves anyone at significant risk.
What, you haven't noticed that? I'm SHOCKED!
Snark aside: YES, Apple provides a strong toolkit and default behaviors (in Safari and elsewhere) that set a reasonably secure norm for MacOS apps. However, it is important to keep in mind that legitimate users are ultimately the weak point in any security model that involves them. Apple has done well with the MacOS Keychain and securityd, but in a reality-based context, "doing well" means that they have chosen a default compromise between convenience and security that is neither trivially weak (the MS problem) or strong enough that most users effectively switch it off (the Mozilla problem.) Any generally tolerable password/identity/authentication management system that addresses the multiple-password problem is a security compromise per se. The real trick is not making it tweakable, but making it discourage/resist user and developer tweaking that turns "compromise" into "gaping open hole." One can make the Keychain and securityd a gaping open hole or an infuriating nuisance, but it isn't particularly easy to do either.
I told the firehose this link-bait was stupid, not sure why it did not listen.
Professional courtesy. One robotic mindless incompetent website editor giving another a free pass.
TFA article does not make any sense. There is no meat to it. It does not offer any information. The entire thing is pointless.
It got a bunch of /.ers to visit MP3 Newswire, which appears to the the point of everything "Hodejo1" submits to /.
What is really interesting about this is the age of the rock art, which would seem to be as old as any human art anywhere and make the case for the Jawoyn Aborigines having one of the oldest cultures in the world. .
from the original article
The Jawoyn people say they are excited the painting could be Australia's oldest dated rock art. The Jawoyn are a group of Indigenous peoples who are the traditional owners of the land in Australia's Northern Territory...
What leads you to believe that as successive waves of humans entered Australia that the current occupants are in any way related to the painting's creators? Were the original inhabitants pushed further south,overrun,wiped out,walked to Tasmania? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070509161829.htm
"At the time of the migration, 50,000 years ago, Australia and New Guinea were joined by a land bridge and the region was also only separated from the main Eurasian land mass by narrow straits such as Wallace's Line in Indonesia. The land bridge was submerged about 8,000 years ago...
Given 30,000 years plus at the front door entrance to Australia I think the Jarwoyn are the least likely descendants of the original artists.
You seem to have stopped reading that article a paragraph ahead of the answer to your question. One of the key findings from that genetic tracing work is that unlike many other places, Australia had only one genetically significant wave of immigration. Geographically, I believe it is also not quite right that Arnhem Land was the 'front door' into Australia, since Cape York was the most persistent part of the connection to New Guinea.
In addition, there is some continuity between essentially modern Jawoyn rock art and the older drawings. When Europeans arrived, they were making red ochre rock drawings in the same places that have similar red ochre rock drawings going back thousands of years. Between that and the genetic evidence that all Australian Aborigines and Melanesians are descendants of a single group of immigrants from ~50kya, it would take significant hypothesizing away from the evidence to not credit their ancestors with the oldest of the drawings.
Who is to say that the descriptions of the bird were not passed down in legends? It seems entirely possible to me that the bird was painted after they had become extinct.
The answer to precisely that question is in the article, lifted directly from one of its source articles.
More generally, the surprise about the age of this rock art isn't a matter of a century or two, or even really a millennium or five. The paleontologists and archaeologists are saying 40kya, the rock art expert is saying 5-10kya. There are very few cultures in the world which are known to have postulated anything older than 10kya as the beginning of humankind, and those which have done so tell stories of old times that are far from accuracy or precision. Getting the beak, leg, and claw shapes of an extinct bird passed down correctly through 30ky+ would be an unrivaled feat of trivial fact preservation.
So, we think the bird went extinct 40k years ago, so we're using that to date the painting as being that old? Does that seem backwards to anyone else?
Probably, but that doesn't mean that it *IS* backwards.
How about we date the painting, then maybe we can get a better estimate of exactly when these birds went extinct?
RTFA, and the sources it cites.
What is really interesting about this is the age of the rock art, which would seem to be as old as any human art anywhere and make the case for the Jawoyn Aborigines having one of the oldest cultures in the world. Dating rock art tends to be imprecise to the point of near impossibility in many cases, dating bird remains in the 40kya range is much less so. TFA states that there is a plan to attempt to 'radiocarbon' date the drawing but since the medium is red ochre and the cited sources don't mention any other dating methods being tried despite extensive skepticism of the age, that's not very credible.
Contrary to rumour, spammers don't spider for email addresses much. Mine is in the clear in many places and I'm getting less and less spam over time, not more. If you were to subscribe him to a few porn sites, however....
I have no idea if porn sites pass along email addresses these days[0], but web scrapers remain somewhat active. I have pages with addresses in the clear that change over time and the rate of delivery attempts to those has not changed significantly over the past 3 years. What has changed over time in a big way is how easy is is to shun those deliveries using free tools and open public data sources without collateral damage. The spammers who are still doing simple web scraping are the dumbest of the dumb, but they remain numerous.
[0] Once upon a time it was part of my paying job to know how various classes of business handled email addresses. I can say for sure that in 2000, a sizable fraction of "porn site" operators were not so much in the business of porn as they were in the business of assembling email address lists that they could sell to people who were really running porn sites.
I'm sorry, but I don't see a big problem with the "nuclear option".
Look more closely...
Underground nuclear explosions have been used quite a bit and they are not a significant radiation hazard. The geology of the area is presumably also fairly well understood.
Understanding the geology (which is put in question by the accident) is necessary but not sufficient. Sites for underground nuclear tests are not simply understood, they are selected and prepared. They are not selected under a mile of water, and test chambers are not prepared by connecting them to large high-pressure oil and gas deposits.
I wonder, though, if they even need a nuclear bomb. The drill hole is tiny compared to the 3 miles of rock it goes through. I would think even a conventional explosive placed some distance to the drill hole about a mile or so down into the rock might be enough to shift the rock and seal it off with little risk of making things worse.
The risk of making things worse is quite real. The root cause of the accident according to some reports was the destabilization of an unrecognized clathrate layer, and setting off a large explosion in that sort of formation would be a crapshoot. Even if the clathrate is a small localized issue, the concept of trying to plug the hole by shattering the cap layer around it carries the risk of trading one pipe of known characteristics in a known location for a giant sieve leaking more gas and oil from a myriad of unknown random seep points.
There isn't much relevant history to look at for troubleshooting accidents like this one but in general, throwing high-energy chaos at a piece of complex engineering gone wrong is a tactical class that has a vanishingly small success rate. .
Of course we do. The Gulf is said to leak 2000 barrels a day naturally.
Technically a truism, but is there someone other than you by whom that is said?
Some natural leaks in the gulf of California are even bigger.
Which ones?
In 1995, the Smithsonian was saying that natural seeps globally totaled 62 million gallons/year which is about 4k barrels/day. In 2000, NASA put a number around 1.5k bbl/day on Gulf of Mexico seepage, with a methodology that couldn't fully exclude human-caused leakage but only included the northern GoM. The 2003 NRC "Oil in the Sea" report put global seepage at 600k tonnes/year which is about 12k bbl/day, and extrapolated the NASA GoM seepage data to 140k t/y for the whole GoM, or 2.8k bbl/day.
My point is not that 2k bbl/day is a wrong number, but that (as that NRC report made clear) natural seepage numbers are only a little more than order of magnitude estimates, and at best have only one significant digit. That is largely because the nature of marine seepage is such that it generally does not cause noticeable effects. The spread of those few thousand barrels per day across the whole of the GoM has led to the development of ecological systems that can degrade that widespread and essentially continuous input of oil that is seeping slowly in any single location and doing so through porous areas in sedimentary deposits that have effects on what reaches the open water. A well blowout is fundamentally different because the oil is spewing out of an open channel to a sub-surface reservoir which in most cases worth drilling has a non-porous cap layer above it. So even a partial well blowout like the current one brings both a gross carrying capacity overrun with more "oil" coming out in one place than the whole GoM system normally handles and a qualitative difference in what that "oil" consists of.
Just where did I mention any company besides AT&T? That was the one company mentioned in the post I replied to, and they got their monopoly on phone service lines several decades ago.
Yes, and it is important to understand that their monopoly was not simply on physical wires, it was on the whole business of telephony. AT&T ceded local service in some low-margin bits of geography to smaller companies, but they effectively owned the equipment market, the interconnect facilities, the long lines, the technical standards process, the patents, the rights-of-way in profitable markets, the customers, and the political pull at all levels of government. Some of those areas were whittled at before the AT&T breakup and some were addressed by the breakup. The huge failure of the breakup was that it left in place the most exploitable and self-perpetuating features of the Bell System monopoly, sliced them regionally between the ILEC's, and effectively gave them each more leeway to exploit their monopoly positions in their regions than 'Ma Bell' ever had. The big bundles of last-mile POTS pairs running out of thousands of local CO's were not themselves such a valuable asset, but they are the physical manifestation of the crown jewels of the Bell System which were handed over to the ILEC's: captive customers, CO's, rights of way, and finely divided (and hence easily conquered) regulators.
I realize the games that have been played since then, but that isn't the point. If you're going to mention one specific company as an example then make it something relevant, something current. AT&Ts original lines, as well as their original equipment, are now basically irrelevant. Land(twisted pair copper) lines are dying, although there will be large parts of rural America that will be stuck using them for quite a few years. My in-laws didn't even get a party line until about 10 years ago.
The local ILEC remains the only provider of basic phone service and a physical layer for Internet access in many places, they are one of two choices for most people, and wherever any number of communications providers can connect a customer, a corporate heir of the 1980 regulated monopoly phone company (overwhelmingly, of one of the old Bell System entities) is one of the dominant mass-market providers of voice and data service. For the bulk of people who have 2 competing wire-providers, the other one is essentially always the heir to whatever cable company bid highest for their municipal officials^W monopoly cable franchise back in the 70's or 80's. The duopoly exists because circa 1980, the phone company was at the lowpoint of its political influence and mostly lacked the vision to understand that geographically balkanized monopoly franchises to run coax for analog video on "telephone poles" were a fundamental threat to their most important monopoly leverage. Cable companies and phone companies have had slightly different monopolies because of how their networks of wires were originally structured. Both have used their iron grip on one type of service to exclude true direct competitors and maintain margins that have allowed them to evolve their physical plants towards the ability to make a run at each others' core services. The problem with that isn't the evolving competitive duopoly, it is the fact that both classes of monopoly wire-provider have used their nominally regulated monopolies on the wires to become dominant players in the unregulated areas of business that depend on their wires. The ILEC's (today being mostly the re-assembled AT&T and Verizon, which is most of the rest of the old Ma Bell plus MCI and GTE) have pushed CLEC's and independent ISP's into low-volume/low-margin niches, while the cable companies have consolidated themselves to the point where they are big enough to buy NBC/U and blackmail companies like News Corp. and Disney, while essentially doing away with the quaint old concept of municipal grifts^W franchises.
This is wh
Yes, it is possible some viable mutants will result. However, would the chances be any higher of producing a strain of E. coli that are deadlier to humans? I doubt it.
Increasing the mutation rate has to increase the chances of mutants that are both viable and more harmful. Mutations from radiation are essentially random, so more mutation events means more mutation varieties, and so a greater chance of something very bad happening. Analogy: a handful of 5 6-sided dice. If you roll those dice once an hour, your chances of rolling all sixes in any day is very low: 1 in 324. If you roll them every 5 seconds you don't have a better shot at all sixes in any particular roll (1:7776) but your odds of hitting all sixes at least once in a day are 720 times higher, and most days you'd hit it twice. And have serious hand cramps. :)
It should also be noted that most E. coli strains are harmless to humans, and our guts are full of them. It is evolutionarily problematic for a parasitic microorganism to kill its hosts, so most things that take advantage of living inside us do so without doing damage. We actually are dependent on our gut flora (including E. coli) for healthy digestion and absorption. The deadly strain of E. coli is believed to be the result of fairly recent (decades) incorporation of Shigella virus toxin genes by E. coli in cattle feedlot environments where shortening host life is essentially meaningless but triggering large volumes of waste helps the bacteria spread from its already-doomed (i.e. future hamburger) hosts to nearby others with a few more days of life.
Back on topic, is the uranium-phosphate that is produced still radioactive, or does this just make it easier to extract and remove from the environment?
There is no (bio)chemical way to eliminate radioactivity. This is just a way to isolate Uranium out of whatever soup of other stuff it happens to be in. Isolating the Uranium out of waste is useful because the Uranium is both hazardous and potentially reusable, but it only deals with part of the problem. Nuclear waste comes in many different forms, and the forms that would be targeted by this sort of tactic also are full of Uranium's decay products, many of which are themselves also radioactive and/or toxic. Absent a truly radical revolution in our understanding of nuclear physics, there is no total solution to the problem of waste from fission reactors other than time. There's nothing we can do to prevent radioactive decay and only a few narrow cases (i.e. fission reactors and bombs) where we have figured out ways to speed it up, so the "solutions" are all aimed at trying to concentrate and fractionate the various forms of bad stuff in the waste and find ways to safely store or reuse each fraction.
Not to mention that with RDP, you can start a session locally and reconnect remotely. Anyone local will see a lock screen. If you start a remote session and unlock locally, your remote session is right there. You can't do this with X or VNC.
The last sentence is simply not true. it is true that many people do not configure systems to work that way, but that's a human choice, not a technology problem. In the pure X world, where the user sits in front of the display server and the clients (like the window manager and apps) run elsewhere, your claim doesn't even make sense because user login sessions associated with a GUI are unrelated to a local host console, which may or may have any GUI capabilities and may be a serial line into terminal server. Of course, in that model it is impossible to have GUI sessions dropped in one place and picked up elsewhere, which is why VNC exists. For VNC the X display server is resident on the host (i.e. a 'Xvnc' process associated to a display number for each VNC session) and it is common to set up multiple VNC displays for machines which need to serve multiple concurrent users. With a decent GUI stack properly configured, (ancient CDE works, I assume KDE and Gnome do also...) you can lock and disconnect from a session in one place and come back from anywhere else and unlock it. Even on MacOS you can do this sort of thing with the free Vine VNC server and fast user switching. Each account can be set to run an instance of the Vine server when logged in, and another instance (or Apple's Remote Desktop agent) can run to handle the login window GUI context.
Of course, that sort of functionality is not really a big deal in the context of the original question. Sure, it is nice that I can hook up to my weeks-old session on my personal desktop when I'm traveling with my laptop without unlocking the real screen, but it's really not the sort of functionality you need for managing a large pile of machines.