There is an important, yet meaningless, distinction between what you're saying and what they're doing.
They aren't hiding the law. They're hiding their interpretation of the law. Anybody can look up the law and read it. The government just decided they think the law means something different than anybody else thinks it means, and they won't tell you what.
You and I know that, empirically, hiding how the law will be enforced is the same thing as hiding the text of the law itself. Either way, the public can not determine what actions are illegal. The difference is that while hiding the law itself is clearly wrong in a very objective, supreme-court overturnable sort of way, classifying the government's interpretation of the law is doubleplusgood.
In fact, if this does make it to the Supreme Court, the DoJ can just say that they have an alternate, classified interpretation of The Constitution, that the Supreme Court can not know about this interpretation due to it being classified, and that this interpretation makes it legal for the government to radically reinterpret laws and classifying those reinterpretations.
Catch 22, SCOTUS, what do you do now? Before you answer, remember that you're not the branch with a Commander In Chief.
Do you think the Wikipedia page on North Korea confoms to the laws of North Korea? The wikipedia article itself, in the span of two sentences, shows that it's not a legal article there:
In its 2010 report, Reporters Without Borders ranked the freedom of the press in North Korea as 177th out of 178, above only that of Eritrea.[136] Only news that favors the regime is permitted...
I don't hear anyone threatening to pull it down.
The law itself is abysmal, but there's no reason for it to affect Wikipedia. It strikes me that in making this claim, Wikipedia is taking up a political fight. Wikipedia is not in any danger from the law, they're theatrically threatening to pull out, despite being unaffected, in order to draw attention to this. I'm against this abhorrent and ridiculous law, but I'm not in favor of Wikipedia making exaggerated claims and throwing its weight around on political issues.
It's true, the transaction speed advantage, unlike the market as a whole, is a 0-sum game, and companies are investing in huge resources trying to win it. That is, they're dumping huge resources into a totally unproductive sector of the economy. This is not a sign of efficient markets, something stock markets supposedly help facilitate.
They should go to turn-based trading. Everyone line up your bids and resolve them on 1-second intervals or some such scheme.
Presenting original analysis of the course material requires a much deeper understanding of it than merely typing up my class notes as a paper, which as I noted, did not even require me to read the course material in order to get an A. Most of the professors there, had they been given my first papers for that class, would have been given my original paper a B+, A-, or A. The rewrite (and my subsequent papers that also got "A's") would have probably gotten C-'s for simply regurgitating exactly what was presented in class.
Similar experience here. I got very good grades on my college papers. Later on I had a sociology class and got a bad grade on my first paper. I knew it was a much better paper than that. I talked to the TA and she tactfully went over some things I could improve that sounded mostly like BS she was trying to make up because she didn't know what she could tell me. After a pause I said "it is my concern that I can not get a good grade in this class without agreeing with the professor's opinions," and she replied:
"That would be my concern also."
On the first paper we were allowed to re-write it and resubmit it, and rather than picking a new topic, I simply re-wrote the same paper from the opposite stance, parroting back the professor's (in my view entirely wrong) opinions. I even included some egregious BS about how I'd learned so much and realized how right he was. I worried it might be over-the-top with the sarcasm, but I couldn't help myself. Anyone without an ego problem would have seen through it, that a college student isn't likely to have a total change of heart and (in this instance) change from being basically a libertarian to being a socialist overnight because their professor was so brilliant that they showed them the error of their ways. I was a little scared he was going to notice and call me into his office for submitting a sarcastic paper.
I got an A. The rest of the class was a disgusting piece of cake. There was no reason to bother with hard work, insightful points, and original analysis. It wasn't even necessary to read the material (although I generally did for my own benefit.) I just typed whatever opinions the professor espoused in class, with fidelity that was borderline plagiarism, and it was an easy A every time.
They will merge. It will not be a problem for interface, because the OS will determine what hardware it is on and automatically present an appropriate interface. Likewise for resource usage, it will load different modules and run appropriately for the hardware.
They didn't do this to begin with, because the original iPhone didn't have near the memory nor horsepower to do anything useful with a full copy of OSX anyway, it would be a waste. All it needed was the small, optimized iOS.
Soon it will need both. Because Apple's new Thunderbolt display isn't just aimed at their new laptops. It's aimed at the yet-to-come Thunderbolt iPhones. The ones with no dock connector.
Because the average user won't have a PC. The average user that ChromeOS is aimed at. The person with the $500 appliance-like budget box who only uses the web, who doesn't know the difference between webmail and a client email application using IMAP. All they'll need is an iPhone. And a really nice monitor. A monitor with a nice line of ports, for their printer and maybe ethernet and whatever. And one Thunderbolt cable, a cable that can, all at once, run a 4-megapixel display, a USB hub, firewire, ethernet, a display webcam, and charge the iPhone. Maybe a thunderbolt dock. Maybe a thunderbolt iPhone dock built into the display in future iterations.
It's the future. As every year more and more users find that all their storage and processing needs can be met with hardware that can fit in an iPhone, it's inevitable. Will it cannibalize Mac sales? Yes, but so did the iPad. Apple can see the future and intends to own it. Even if Moore's Law promises a smaller pie for PC's as cheaper and cheaper machines meet the average user's needs, Apple intends to own a bigger and bigger slice of that pie.
--
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
"XP has not been sold on systems for years, and a four years of security support is not bad at all."
I bought a Dell Mini 10v new from Dell on 5/28/2010 that came with Windows XP.
So at most, one year.
And I don't think the gist of the story here is "wow, they're abandoning their users so soon," the point is more "wholly *$@!, Microsoft went so long between successful OS releases that they need to support users for three more years on a system that came out when Apple was still on Mac OS 9 and Ubuntu was still on... oh wait, Ubuntu didn't even come out for three more years. I should say Red Hat Eneterprise Linux was on... holy cow, that wasn't out yet either. Red Hat Linux was on 7.2
When did Apple stop supporting OS 9? I'm guessing the vast majority of Mac users would respond "OS-what?"
Not literally on the "new thing," but stop making competing ports. Start and then end the next generation port format war as quickly as possible, and everybody get on board with either USB3, Firewire 3200, or Thunderbolt as quickly as possible. Computers should have one row of identical ports that work with everything. We need to get over the idea that certain 1's and 0's need a different shaped plug than others.
Everything they do is for entertainment value. Because they're not terrorists; they're trolls.
You're missing the point of "who anonymous is" just like all the media organization who call them an elite group of "hackers on steroids" or a domestic terrorist organization or any kind of organization. Anonymous is anyone who shows up on 4chan, or their IRC channels, or who DOESN'T show up there but participates in things that started there like trolling all their favorite tagets, posting flicker animations to epilepsy boards, Project Chanology, DDOSing the flame of the day, or whatever. Or anyone who doesn't show up there, doesn't participate, and calls themselves part of "Anonymous."
Anonymous is full of "moralfags" who hate the trolling. And it's easy to prove that a lot of the people who have recently been the most attention-grabbing members of Anonymous regarding HB Gary Federal are some of the most anti-troll people you can find. How? The female CEO of HB Gary [NOT Federal] actually popped by the AnonOps IRC channel to ask (or really an odd combination between beg and demand) them to remove her company's emails from the torrent.
So a bunch of people you're classifying as trolls have the female CEO of a large security company popping into AnonOps IRC to beg them for mercy... so they troll the fuck out of her, right? Wrong. In fact, the one total troll who pops up quickly has a bunch of the rest of the channel asking for +m to shut the trolls up. Nearly everyone is polite and courteous to her. Read it yourself, she comes in at 522, but it's interesting that before that there's a lot of discussion about setting +m to shut up the trolls. Everyone seems to admonish everyone over and over to slow down and be nice to her.
So again... don't classify Anonymous. Is it riddled with fierce trolls? Absolutely, a lot of people who hang out on 4chan are "the internet's hate machine" and love trolling the fuck out of anybody. But that doesn't mean you can classify Anonymous as trolls, because Anonymous is whoever shows up, or whoever doesn't show up but participates, or whoever doesn't show up or participate and calls themselves Anonymous. So Anonymous is scared deranged 12-year olds who hide in their parents basements and taunt strangers with horrible obscenities for lulz because they get beat up at school, but it's also people who will lay their personal well-being on the line to try damage a dangerous cult, and it's people who will risk potential life imprisonment to defend their views on freedom of speech, and people who want to help the people of Egypt communicate when their dictator shut down the internet, and it's apparently some people with actual cracking skills, and it's a surprisingly large number of people who want to maintain a civil dialog with a CEO who comes into an Anonymous forum to talk to them.
Only classify anonymous by the actions readily attributable to whoever's calling themselves Anonymous these days. If they were overwhelmingly a pack of trolls at one point, they could include the My Little Pony fan club next week. They include trolls. Maybe they do include terrorists. Maybe they include heroes. Certainly some of the members want to be V for Vendetta style terrorist-heros, and V was chivalrous in his heroism, an anti-troll.
There are a lot of posts here pointing out that this is no-big-deal and it happens all the time, but I wonder if there's any movement to suggest it shouldn't happen? I mean, it sounds like a pain to make all these changes- maybe they should just make one change to label all runways according to true north, and to use electronic compasses on planes that compensate from magnetic north to true north, and never have to change a runway/chart again?
whoever in his right mind would want to listen to binary files loudly?
All the music I listen to is binary files. How else would I keep them on digital storage?
Of course, I don't listen to them by having a voice read the ones and zeroes, but interpreted to analog via the proper codec.
Still, I don't know that listening to a computer voice reading source code is much more useful or pleasant than a computer voice repeating ones and zeroes.
I second that. I've got an internet connection that usually runs about 15 megabits with a 30 millisecond ping - plenty of speed to stream a youtube video. I can play two 1080p Quicktime videos simultaneously on my two monitors without any apparent frame dropping.
But a tiny 320 x 240 flash video, fully buffered, still drops frames whenever there's a lot of motion. It floors one processor core to 100% and then gets choppy. This is absurd - in 1991 my Macintosh IIsi with a 20mhz 68030 could play 320 x 240 quicktime videos off my 1x external CD-ROM drive without dropping frames. The idea that my 2 core 2GHZ machine is brought to its knees and still can't handle a tiny flash video makes Microsoft look good at optimizing Word. Did Intel pay off Adobe to create a new reason for people to need faster processors, or what?
If the internet is secularizing the Finnish, it isn't through this website, except for by some bureaucratic technical definition. This website is allowing those who had already been secular to easily make an official declaration of such, but it's not like devoted god-fearing true believers are finding this site and saying "you know, this internet form makes a good point. I guess since it's easy to unsubscribe from the church now, I don't believe in God anymore."
Previous stories along these lines have shown things like that most bank employees surveyed would trade their passwords to secure financial systems for a twinky or a chance to win an iPhone, serious idiocy. But almost nothing this showed is actually a big deal. I end up in the "stupid" category on almost every question according to him, and I don't for a minute believe it's a security problem.
Shared passwords?
Absolutely, I share passwords to things with my girlfriend all the time. If she needs to order from a company I usually order from and doesn't want to set up a new account, if she needs to log into the home router, use a forum I'm a member of... whatever. Am I concerned at all about this? No. She lives in my home, she has continuous access to all my stuff, my wallett, my checkbook. Of course we both know the logons to all of each other's computers. If I didn't trust her, having my password to crutchfield.com is the least of my worries.
Same password for multiple sites?
You've got to be kidding me. I use a password management program, and it says I have 199 password files right now. You think I'm going to use unique, strong passwords for every forum I want to post in? If someone gets my password and goes around trying to guess every site I have an account at and what my common username/password combos are, what are they going to do, post a bunch of stuff that makes me sound like a jerk or something? Whole ton of work, practically no payoff.
Special characters?
Again, you do not need special characters for a strong password. A password does not need to get very complex before the chances of anyone guessing it or running an attack against it become almost nil. Unless you're a billionaire or it's a nuclear launch code or something, if you have a 10-digit password that's not susceptible to dictionary attack or really common guessing (kids birthdays or such), no one's going to "guess" it anyway. I do things like pick two dictionary words I can remember and intersperse the characters, and then intersperse a number I can remember with extra characters to match the longer word. For example, say you go to the random word generator and get "coloring" and "rash." Then throw in a number you remember, like the age you were when you first rode a ten-speed, in my case, 11. password: croalsohr1i1ng
Incidentally, that's not actually what I do, my point is, a simply system like that will allow you to generate a bunch of somewhat memorable (if you can remember the root words and system) passwords that are arbitrarily strong for the average user. And if you never tell anyone what system you actually do use, the chances of anyone ever "guessing" a single password are so close to nil...
Using a significant date or pet's name?
Well, using one alone is not so great, but again, if it's a discussion forum where someone would have to know you use it to begin with, then guess both a username and password combination, and then the result is they get... nothing of value, then I still don't see it as a big deal. And even if you use the most obvious and important signifiers to plug into a "create a password" system like the above, but that you generate yourself, unless you're the president of a country, it's probably more secure than anyone would ever break.
sharing a password in a text message?
Again, he's not distinguishing between the importance of passwords. Doing that with a bank account password? Insane. Doing that with your password to break.com? Who cares?
password over public WiFi?
Same as above. Plus, what is the specific danger here? I usually assume anything online could be intercepted, and that that's what the encryption on secure sitesis for. I guess public wifi is especially vulnerable to man in the middle attacks? I wouldn't use public wifi for banking, but again, lots of things use passwords. I've
In answer to this and numerous similar comments; no, I did not forget. For the heck of it, I decided to hazard a rough estimate at comparing the ENERGY efficiency of shipping water from Alaska to the middle east with desalination in the middle east.
Comparing the economic efficiency would actually be much easier, except that it would involve bothering other people. Contact shipping companies for price quotes. Call a contractor who builds and runs desalination plants for a quote. Choose a discount rate for money so you can compare the different distribution of cost across time for the two methods, and compare the total cost per liter for the amount of water you anticipate needing.
If you're a leader in the middle east trying to get water for a good price, that's a way to compare those two options. Along with political considerations, like can you fund the upfront money for the desalination plant, will you benefit from the construction project and jobs, etc. The energy costs of either aren't really relevant to the buyer, they'd just get factored into the prices quoted by the suppliers.
That all makes sense, thanks. I used the Emma Maersk because, as a famous ship, information on it was readily available, and I didn't know enough about cargo shipping to understand its disadvantages for this kind of freight.
Although a 5x increase in shipping efficiency still leaves us with desalination being 2x more energy efficient. Anyone else got anything else I missed?
Of course, the Emma Maersk doesn't sail Alaska to Saudi Arabia, but we can extrapolate from another long-distance trip.
The sailing distance from Alaska to the middle east is 10,428 nautical miles.
When the Emma Maersk sails from Yantian to Suez, that's 6,370 miles and it takes 353 hours. So it might be around ((10428/6370) x 353) = 575 hours sailing time, x 1,660 gallons of fuel per hour = 954,500 gallons of fuel. Divided by 154 million liters of water is.0062 gallons of fuel consumed per liter transported. Heavy fuel oil like the Emma Maersk burns contains about 41,805,000 joules per gallon of energy. So that's (.0062 x 41,805,000) = 259,191 Joules of energy consumed per liter of water transported. Of course, I'm not accounting for loading and unloading, but then there's some transportation involoved in getting water to and back from a desalination plant that I'm also not going to account for.
Desalination plants consume about 5 watt hours of electricity per liter. But note that for the Emma Maersk, I used the energy of fuel consumed, not power output of the diesel engine, which only runs at 50% efficiency. So the proper comparison here would also take into account the loss at the power plant. The 2,000 MegaWatt power plant that runs the Jebel Ali desalination plant in Dubai is a gas turbine plant. Modern gas turbine generators can run at about 60% efficiency, so that 5 watt hours of electric energy took about 8.3 watt hours of fuel energy to produce. 8.3 watt hours is about 30,000 joules.
So unless I've got a big mistake in my napkin math, desalination is actually about 10x more energy efficient that shipping water from Alaska to the Middle East.
It will be no time before the fear mongers on the evening news are bandying about the new statistic, 600% of the population of the US are sex offenders.
While you can certainly still buy monitors in all sorts of aspect ratios, including lots of 5:4 monitors, the trend has certainly been to higher and higher aspect ratios.
What I haven't seen anyone else pointing out is this:
The cost of manufacturing a monitor (other things being equal) is roughly proportional to the area of the screen. But monitors are marketed by the diagonal of the screen.
This means that to the average non-technical consumer, the greater the aspect ratio, the greater the ratio of perceived value to manufacturing cost.
That is:
a 24" 16:9 monitor has sides of 20.9 x 11.8, an area of 246 square inches
a 24" 5:4 monitor has sides of 18.7 x 15.0, an area of 281 square inches
So that's 14% more monitor for a 5:4 that's sold at the same "size" as a 16:9.
Soon they'll probably sell 24" monitors in a 24:1 aspect ratio, saving them gobs. Just get them by mail order. No returns.
Slashdot Mirror
There is an important, yet meaningless, distinction between what you're saying and what they're doing.
They aren't hiding the law. They're hiding their interpretation of the law. Anybody can look up the law and read it. The government just decided they think the law means something different than anybody else thinks it means, and they won't tell you what.
You and I know that, empirically, hiding how the law will be enforced is the same thing as hiding the text of the law itself. Either way, the public can not determine what actions are illegal. The difference is that while hiding the law itself is clearly wrong in a very objective, supreme-court overturnable sort of way, classifying the government's interpretation of the law is doubleplusgood.
In fact, if this does make it to the Supreme Court, the DoJ can just say that they have an alternate, classified interpretation of The Constitution, that the Supreme Court can not know about this interpretation due to it being classified, and that this interpretation makes it legal for the government to radically reinterpret laws and classifying those reinterpretations.
Catch 22, SCOTUS, what do you do now? Before you answer, remember that you're not the branch with a Commander In Chief.
Seriously - don't host in Italy, and who cares?
Do you think the Wikipedia page on North Korea confoms to the laws of North Korea? The wikipedia article itself, in the span of two sentences, shows that it's not a legal article there:
In its 2010 report, Reporters Without Borders ranked the freedom of the press in North Korea as 177th out of 178, above only that of Eritrea.[136] Only news that favors the regime is permitted...
I don't hear anyone threatening to pull it down.
The law itself is abysmal, but there's no reason for it to affect Wikipedia. It strikes me that in making this claim, Wikipedia is taking up a political fight. Wikipedia is not in any danger from the law, they're theatrically threatening to pull out, despite being unaffected, in order to draw attention to this. I'm against this abhorrent and ridiculous law, but I'm not in favor of Wikipedia making exaggerated claims and throwing its weight around on political issues.
It's true, the transaction speed advantage, unlike the market as a whole, is a 0-sum game, and companies are investing in huge resources trying to win it. That is, they're dumping huge resources into a totally unproductive sector of the economy. This is not a sign of efficient markets, something stock markets supposedly help facilitate.
They should go to turn-based trading. Everyone line up your bids and resolve them on 1-second intervals or some such scheme.
Presenting original analysis of the course material requires a much deeper understanding of it than merely typing up my class notes as a paper, which as I noted, did not even require me to read the course material in order to get an A. Most of the professors there, had they been given my first papers for that class, would have been given my original paper a B+, A-, or A. The rewrite (and my subsequent papers that also got "A's") would have probably gotten C-'s for simply regurgitating exactly what was presented in class.
Similar experience here. I got very good grades on my college papers. Later on I had a sociology class and got a bad grade on my first paper. I knew it was a much better paper than that. I talked to the TA and she tactfully went over some things I could improve that sounded mostly like BS she was trying to make up because she didn't know what she could tell me. After a pause I said "it is my concern that I can not get a good grade in this class without agreeing with the professor's opinions," and she replied:
"That would be my concern also."
On the first paper we were allowed to re-write it and resubmit it, and rather than picking a new topic, I simply re-wrote the same paper from the opposite stance, parroting back the professor's (in my view entirely wrong) opinions. I even included some egregious BS about how I'd learned so much and realized how right he was. I worried it might be over-the-top with the sarcasm, but I couldn't help myself. Anyone without an ego problem would have seen through it, that a college student isn't likely to have a total change of heart and (in this instance) change from being basically a libertarian to being a socialist overnight because their professor was so brilliant that they showed them the error of their ways. I was a little scared he was going to notice and call me into his office for submitting a sarcastic paper.
I got an A. The rest of the class was a disgusting piece of cake. There was no reason to bother with hard work, insightful points, and original analysis. It wasn't even necessary to read the material (although I generally did for my own benefit.) I just typed whatever opinions the professor espoused in class, with fidelity that was borderline plagiarism, and it was an easy A every time.
You're missing the potential of merging the two.
They will merge. It will not be a problem for interface, because the OS will determine what hardware it is on and automatically present an appropriate interface. Likewise for resource usage, it will load different modules and run appropriately for the hardware.
They didn't do this to begin with, because the original iPhone didn't have near the memory nor horsepower to do anything useful with a full copy of OSX anyway, it would be a waste. All it needed was the small, optimized iOS.
Soon it will need both. Because Apple's new Thunderbolt display isn't just aimed at their new laptops. It's aimed at the yet-to-come Thunderbolt iPhones. The ones with no dock connector.
Because the average user won't have a PC. The average user that ChromeOS is aimed at. The person with the $500 appliance-like budget box who only uses the web, who doesn't know the difference between webmail and a client email application using IMAP. All they'll need is an iPhone. And a really nice monitor. A monitor with a nice line of ports, for their printer and maybe ethernet and whatever. And one Thunderbolt cable, a cable that can, all at once, run a 4-megapixel display, a USB hub, firewire, ethernet, a display webcam, and charge the iPhone. Maybe a thunderbolt dock. Maybe a thunderbolt iPhone dock built into the display in future iterations.
It's the future. As every year more and more users find that all their storage and processing needs can be met with hardware that can fit in an iPhone, it's inevitable. Will it cannibalize Mac sales? Yes, but so did the iPad. Apple can see the future and intends to own it. Even if Moore's Law promises a smaller pie for PC's as cheaper and cheaper machines meet the average user's needs, Apple intends to own a bigger and bigger slice of that pie. -- Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
"XP has not been sold on systems for years, and a four years of security support is not bad at all."
I bought a Dell Mini 10v new from Dell on 5/28/2010 that came with Windows XP.
So at most, one year.
And I don't think the gist of the story here is "wow, they're abandoning their users so soon," the point is more "wholly *$@!, Microsoft went so long between successful OS releases that they need to support users for three more years on a system that came out when Apple was still on Mac OS 9 and Ubuntu was still on... oh wait, Ubuntu didn't even come out for three more years. I should say Red Hat Eneterprise Linux was on... holy cow, that wasn't out yet either. Red Hat Linux was on 7.2
When did Apple stop supporting OS 9? I'm guessing the vast majority of Mac users would respond "OS-what?"
The Tetris Movie
The Angry Birds movie.
Not literally on the "new thing," but stop making competing ports. Start and then end the next generation port format war as quickly as possible, and everybody get on board with either USB3, Firewire 3200, or Thunderbolt as quickly as possible. Computers should have one row of identical ports that work with everything. We need to get over the idea that certain 1's and 0's need a different shaped plug than others.
Everything they do is for entertainment value. Because they're not terrorists; they're trolls.
You're missing the point of "who anonymous is" just like all the media organization who call them an elite group of "hackers on steroids" or a domestic terrorist organization or any kind of organization. Anonymous is anyone who shows up on 4chan, or their IRC channels, or who DOESN'T show up there but participates in things that started there like trolling all their favorite tagets, posting flicker animations to epilepsy boards, Project Chanology, DDOSing the flame of the day, or whatever. Or anyone who doesn't show up there, doesn't participate, and calls themselves part of "Anonymous."
Anonymous is full of "moralfags" who hate the trolling. And it's easy to prove that a lot of the people who have recently been the most attention-grabbing members of Anonymous regarding HB Gary Federal are some of the most anti-troll people you can find. How? The female CEO of HB Gary [NOT Federal] actually popped by the AnonOps IRC channel to ask (or really an odd combination between beg and demand) them to remove her company's emails from the torrent.
So a bunch of people you're classifying as trolls have the female CEO of a large security company popping into AnonOps IRC to beg them for mercy... so they troll the fuck out of her, right? Wrong. In fact, the one total troll who pops up quickly has a bunch of the rest of the channel asking for +m to shut the trolls up. Nearly everyone is polite and courteous to her. Read it yourself, she comes in at 522, but it's interesting that before that there's a lot of discussion about setting +m to shut up the trolls. Everyone seems to admonish everyone over and over to slow down and be nice to her.
So again... don't classify Anonymous. Is it riddled with fierce trolls? Absolutely, a lot of people who hang out on 4chan are "the internet's hate machine" and love trolling the fuck out of anybody. But that doesn't mean you can classify Anonymous as trolls, because Anonymous is whoever shows up, or whoever doesn't show up but participates, or whoever doesn't show up or participate and calls themselves Anonymous. So Anonymous is scared deranged 12-year olds who hide in their parents basements and taunt strangers with horrible obscenities for lulz because they get beat up at school, but it's also people who will lay their personal well-being on the line to try damage a dangerous cult, and it's people who will risk potential life imprisonment to defend their views on freedom of speech, and people who want to help the people of Egypt communicate when their dictator shut down the internet, and it's apparently some people with actual cracking skills, and it's a surprisingly large number of people who want to maintain a civil dialog with a CEO who comes into an Anonymous forum to talk to them.
Only classify anonymous by the actions readily attributable to whoever's calling themselves Anonymous these days. If they were overwhelmingly a pack of trolls at one point, they could include the My Little Pony fan club next week. They include trolls. Maybe they do include terrorists. Maybe they include heroes. Certainly some of the members want to be V for Vendetta style terrorist-heros, and V was chivalrous in his heroism, an anti-troll.
Jesus christ. I swear, Steve Jobs is gone for one day and this happens.
Maybe Google doesn't need adult supervision anymore, but it looks like Apple still does.
Or next time they don't want one again.
This sounds familiar.
There are a lot of posts here pointing out that this is no-big-deal and it happens all the time, but I wonder if there's any movement to suggest it shouldn't happen? I mean, it sounds like a pain to make all these changes- maybe they should just make one change to label all runways according to true north, and to use electronic compasses on planes that compensate from magnetic north to true north, and never have to change a runway/chart again?
I was about to post:
It can solve two great outstanding problems in physics simultaneously? I nominate that we start calling it "the uncanny x-particle."
whoever in his right mind would want to listen to binary files loudly?
All the music I listen to is binary files. How else would I keep them on digital storage?
Of course, I don't listen to them by having a voice read the ones and zeroes, but interpreted to analog via the proper codec.
Still, I don't know that listening to a computer voice reading source code is much more useful or pleasant than a computer voice repeating ones and zeroes.
Anonymous’ spokesperson...
I'm sorry, who?
I second that. I've got an internet connection that usually runs about 15 megabits with a 30 millisecond ping - plenty of speed to stream a youtube video. I can play two 1080p Quicktime videos simultaneously on my two monitors without any apparent frame dropping.
But a tiny 320 x 240 flash video, fully buffered, still drops frames whenever there's a lot of motion. It floors one processor core to 100% and then gets choppy. This is absurd - in 1991 my Macintosh IIsi with a 20mhz 68030 could play 320 x 240 quicktime videos off my 1x external CD-ROM drive without dropping frames. The idea that my 2 core 2GHZ machine is brought to its knees and still can't handle a tiny flash video makes Microsoft look good at optimizing Word. Did Intel pay off Adobe to create a new reason for people to need faster processors, or what?
The Internet is secularizing the Finnish
If the internet is secularizing the Finnish, it isn't through this website, except for by some bureaucratic technical definition. This website is allowing those who had already been secular to easily make an official declaration of such, but it's not like devoted god-fearing true believers are finding this site and saying "you know, this internet form makes a good point. I guess since it's easy to unsubscribe from the church now, I don't believe in God anymore."
Previous stories along these lines have shown things like that most bank employees surveyed would trade their passwords to secure financial systems for a twinky or a chance to win an iPhone, serious idiocy. But almost nothing this showed is actually a big deal. I end up in the "stupid" category on almost every question according to him, and I don't for a minute believe it's a security problem.
Shared passwords?
Absolutely, I share passwords to things with my girlfriend all the time. If she needs to order from a company I usually order from and doesn't want to set up a new account, if she needs to log into the home router, use a forum I'm a member of... whatever. Am I concerned at all about this? No. She lives in my home, she has continuous access to all my stuff, my wallett, my checkbook. Of course we both know the logons to all of each other's computers. If I didn't trust her, having my password to crutchfield.com is the least of my worries.
Same password for multiple sites?
You've got to be kidding me. I use a password management program, and it says I have 199 password files right now. You think I'm going to use unique, strong passwords for every forum I want to post in? If someone gets my password and goes around trying to guess every site I have an account at and what my common username/password combos are, what are they going to do, post a bunch of stuff that makes me sound like a jerk or something? Whole ton of work, practically no payoff.
Special characters?
Again, you do not need special characters for a strong password. A password does not need to get very complex before the chances of anyone guessing it or running an attack against it become almost nil. Unless you're a billionaire or it's a nuclear launch code or something, if you have a 10-digit password that's not susceptible to dictionary attack or really common guessing (kids birthdays or such), no one's going to "guess" it anyway. I do things like pick two dictionary words I can remember and intersperse the characters, and then intersperse a number I can remember with extra characters to match the longer word. For example, say you go to the random word generator and get "coloring" and "rash." Then throw in a number you remember, like the age you were when you first rode a ten-speed, in my case, 11. password:
croalsohr1i1ng
Incidentally, that's not actually what I do, my point is, a simply system like that will allow you to generate a bunch of somewhat memorable (if you can remember the root words and system) passwords that are arbitrarily strong for the average user. And if you never tell anyone what system you actually do use, the chances of anyone ever "guessing" a single password are so close to nil...
Using a significant date or pet's name?
Well, using one alone is not so great, but again, if it's a discussion forum where someone would have to know you use it to begin with, then guess both a username and password combination, and then the result is they get... nothing of value, then I still don't see it as a big deal. And even if you use the most obvious and important signifiers to plug into a "create a password" system like the above, but that you generate yourself, unless you're the president of a country, it's probably more secure than anyone would ever break.
sharing a password in a text message?
Again, he's not distinguishing between the importance of passwords. Doing that with a bank account password? Insane. Doing that with your password to break.com? Who cares?
password over public WiFi?
Same as above. Plus, what is the specific danger here? I usually assume anything online could be intercepted, and that that's what the encryption on secure sitesis for. I guess public wifi is especially vulnerable to man in the middle attacks? I wouldn't use public wifi for banking, but again, lots of things use passwords. I've
In answer to this and numerous similar comments; no, I did not forget. For the heck of it, I decided to hazard a rough estimate at comparing the ENERGY efficiency of shipping water from Alaska to the middle east with desalination in the middle east.
Comparing the economic efficiency would actually be much easier, except that it would involve bothering other people. Contact shipping companies for price quotes. Call a contractor who builds and runs desalination plants for a quote. Choose a discount rate for money so you can compare the different distribution of cost across time for the two methods, and compare the total cost per liter for the amount of water you anticipate needing.
If you're a leader in the middle east trying to get water for a good price, that's a way to compare those two options. Along with political considerations, like can you fund the upfront money for the desalination plant, will you benefit from the construction project and jobs, etc. The energy costs of either aren't really relevant to the buyer, they'd just get factored into the prices quoted by the suppliers.
That all makes sense, thanks. I used the Emma Maersk because, as a famous ship, information on it was readily available, and I didn't know enough about cargo shipping to understand its disadvantages for this kind of freight.
Although a 5x increase in shipping efficiency still leaves us with desalination being 2x more energy efficient. Anyone else got anything else I missed?
To plug in a little napkin math on your hypothesis (which I expect will be confirmed):
.0062 gallons of fuel consumed per liter transported. Heavy fuel oil like the Emma Maersk burns contains about 41,805,000 joules per gallon of energy. So that's (.0062 x 41,805,000) = 259,191 Joules of energy consumed per liter of water transported. Of course, I'm not accounting for loading and unloading, but then there's some transportation involoved in getting water to and back from a desalination plant that I'm also not going to account for.
The Emma Maersk can haul 11,000 14-ton containers, or 154,000 metric tons, or 154,000,000 KG of water, which is the same as liters.
It consumes 1,660 gallons of fuel oil per hour.
Of course, the Emma Maersk doesn't sail Alaska to Saudi Arabia, but we can extrapolate from another long-distance trip.
The sailing distance from Alaska to the middle east is 10,428 nautical miles.
When the Emma Maersk sails from Yantian to Suez, that's 6,370 miles and it takes 353 hours. So it might be around ((10428/6370) x 353) = 575 hours sailing time, x 1,660 gallons of fuel per hour = 954,500 gallons of fuel. Divided by 154 million liters of water is
Desalination plants consume about 5 watt hours of electricity per liter. But note that for the Emma Maersk, I used the energy of fuel consumed, not power output of the diesel engine, which only runs at 50% efficiency. So the proper comparison here would also take into account the loss at the power plant. The 2,000 MegaWatt power plant that runs the Jebel Ali desalination plant in Dubai is a gas turbine plant. Modern gas turbine generators can run at about 60% efficiency, so that 5 watt hours of electric energy took about 8.3 watt hours of fuel energy to produce. 8.3 watt hours is about 30,000 joules.
So unless I've got a big mistake in my napkin math, desalination is actually about 10x more energy efficient that shipping water from Alaska to the Middle East.
But this just tracks US sex offenders.
It will be no time before the fear mongers on the evening news are bandying about the new statistic,
600% of the population of the US are sex offenders.
While you can certainly still buy monitors in all sorts of aspect ratios, including lots of 5:4 monitors, the trend has certainly been to higher and higher aspect ratios.
What I haven't seen anyone else pointing out is this:
The cost of manufacturing a monitor (other things being equal) is roughly proportional to the area of the screen. But monitors are marketed by the diagonal of the screen.
This means that to the average non-technical consumer, the greater the aspect ratio, the greater the ratio of perceived value to manufacturing cost.
That is:
a 24" 16:9 monitor has sides of 20.9 x 11.8, an area of 246 square inches
a 24" 5:4 monitor has sides of 18.7 x 15.0, an area of 281 square inches
So that's 14% more monitor for a 5:4 that's sold at the same "size" as a 16:9.
Soon they'll probably sell 24" monitors in a 24:1 aspect ratio, saving them gobs. Just get them by mail order. No returns.