Microsoft's nightmare scenario - the Web as the next platform.
Sounds pretty damn scary to me, too.
Software that depends on a working internet connection
Service outages completely out of your control
Platform issues all over again (Mac vs Linux vs Windows 2k vs Windows XP, Firefox vs Explorer vs Opera, JVM issues, etc.)
No customer-controlled version control (want to stay on Powerpoint 2007 Service Pack 1 because SP2 breaks your slides? Too bad! Not upgrading your app because in the next 24 hours you have a million dollar client proposal? Sorry, your app service provider wants to silently roll out a "bugfix" that causes problems for you)
Having to license software yearly, or go through byzantine activation procedures (Quark XPress 6.0 activation, anyone?)
...to name a few problems individuals and corporations will have.
Why does everyone try to make the web more than what it is- an interactive information platform? Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Then...don't post them? Is Slashdot really that short on story submissions? I submitted a story for the humor section a few days ago about laser-scribed chicken eggs that will "fight terrorism", and it was rejected within an hour of submission.
Gave me the distinct impression the queue was full of really good stories. I mean, what's funnier than barcoding eggs with a laser, so terrorists don't fuss with them? We like lasers, yes?:-)
Last time I mentioned Bhopal and Dow, someone said "hey, that was Union Carbide, not Dow! Dow just bought them!" Well- Dow management and shareholders didn't seem to have much trouble sleeping at night after buying Union Carbide for a song (Union Carbide after the disaster became next to worthless as a brand.) Dow pretty much turned into a industrial-disaster profiteer.
I took the liberty of making it a little more livejournal-ish.
Like, there are still loosers out there who think that the LSB has any value..ohmygod, that is SO last week! This just means they're listening to whatever Jenny the head cheerleader says. Ohmygod, my parent's just don't listen to me, and they totally don't understand ABI issues.
(Seriously, wtf is a technical article doing on a site full of whiny emo-kids?)
As much as many people will ask if disclosure was a good idea in this case, it's important to remember that if one person can find this vulnerability and make it public, an unknown number of people could have found it and be making use of it in the background.
Anyone who has even so much as glanced at the protocol specification can see that the client is trusted to return an accurate count for how much it has uploaded. This wasn't a "disclosure" or a "vulnerability announcement"- it was a statement of the patently obvious.
The problem is not with BitTorrent. The problem is with BitTorrent trackers and sites which trust that value returned by the client. There are dozens of open-source clients, including the original- and all it takes is adding one operation that multiplies the real upload by whatever number you desire.
The functionality of BitTorrent depends on clients seeding copies of the file back into the network after having downloaded, and a vulnerability like this in a significant amount of trackers could easily cause serious damage to the operation of many torrents.
How did this pseudo-intellectual first-post get modded insightful? You clearly don't understand how the BitTorrent network is designed. Clients evaluate only how much data they receive directly from another client, and how fast. Nothing else factors into their decisions of who to upload. There is absolutely NO mechanism for the client to query the server to see how much you've uploaded, nor is there even a way to ask other clients. Why? Because both sources would be unreliable. Each client CAN only rely on direct "experience", unless they're engaging in a reputation system of their own hacking- if they are, best of luck to them, Bram wasn't an idiot for not trying that.
The "vulnerability" only affects trackers which "enforce" an upload ratio, and only to the extent of letting people bypass that ratio. Ratios is a concept that is pretty stupid with BitTorrent. The more you push back, the more you get, unless there is plenty of bandwidth. About the only "benefit" I see to ratios is that it might keep files available with seeds longer.
I hear a lot of crying about leechers on BitTorrent, but the network is self-regulating. Don't upload? You won't get much back. I think the perceived problem is also because reporting of the stats is unreliable- in the case of Azureus, for example, I can download a big file, upload 3x as much, and then if I get a connection error when my client stops, I "loose" all that uploading. I then look like a leecher, when it is exactly the opposite.
...is that we really don't know who to believe, especially since nobody has bothered to the things journalists do. Like go out and interview people, corroborate stories, and so on.
We get:
"However, after speaking to the Methlabs team and various connected members of the community, P2Pnet, SuprNova and Slyck can all confirm that the original story that the domain has been hijacked is genuine"
So "Slyck News" is claiming they've done so- but they haven't given any names, quotes, or details as to how they arrived at this conclusion?
The whole thing is one Big Internet Drama, and pardon me if I just don't care.
The thesis of the article is that rank-and-file employees will tend to engage in dangerous/insecure/irresponsible computing and internet behavior if they know that there's an IT department to clean up the mess.
After almost a decade in IT, I can tell you why there is this expectation. When it comes to fuckups, IT is usually the last guy to get the hot potato, and they're expected to save the day.
Any time a user screws up, the IT department is EXPECTED to save the day by upper management. If they don't, it is (rarely) the fault of the employee, it's the fault of the IT department for not anticipating such a need, or not being available at a second's notice, or simply not being able to save someone else's bacon. Often times we're asked to perform miracles.
It sounds reasonable, until you cross professions. Someone drives off the company driveway, crashes their car into a tree, car bursts into flames. Do the facilities people get in trouble for not ancticipating the employee who leaned over to pick up his cell phone off the floor while driving, and failed to install a nice big inflatable barrier along all the roads? Of course not. Yet IT departments are expected to back up everything known to man, expected to resurrect deleted+overwritten files...
Another example- it's 4:55pm and Fedex comes at 5 to pick up a package that is going to The Big Client. The employee has procrastinated working on it, and goes to print at 4:57. There's something wrong with the printer or their system. Guess whose emergency it becomes? Guess who gets screamed at on the telephone? Guess who gets reamed by the CEO because the package didn't go out? Usually the IT department. "Why was the printer broken? Why couldn't you fix it?"....not, "Bob, why did you wait until 5 minutes before your deadline?"
If not, couldn't they put in a mechanism in the car itself, where at the press of a button, all the diagnostics would be run, and a report generated and shown in a panel or something like that.
Many GM vehicles do in fact do this; a friends' Corvette Z06 (now a few years old) started smoking like crazy out of one set of exhaust pipes. First came a check engine light, then a -blinking- check engine light, which means "pull over, something's REALLY wrong, you might damage the engine driving it further."
Pushing some magical secret combination of buttons, the in-dash display which normally shows trip computer info and whatnot displayed the DTC codes, which he then looked up online. One entire side of the engine's fuel injectors were dead to the ECU (turned out to be a bad wiring harness- the injectors were wide upen, and dumping +203HP worth of fuel into the left bank:-)
Any vehicle sold in the US after 1995-1996 has ODB-2, which means the car can report a lot of standardized information. You still need a "scan tool" (of varying complexity, ranging from a 1-2 line LCD display, to a full-fledged logging/graphing unit or laptop), and some values are manufacturer-unique....but most of the truly important stuff isn't specially coded. So you can usually get throttle angle, O2 sensor information, RPMs, estimated load/mass-airflow-sensor values, coolant and intake air temp, timing advance/retard, etc. All the basic "will it run or not, or why isn't it running well" info.
It contains info on many things that the general public don't, but Google fans do, care about.
I worked for an advertising company for several months, to qualify my statements. The exact job of marketing firms and advertising companies is to make you care about whatever the company has to say. This is best done if you don't realize it's happening. Failing all that, cram it down your throat anyway (this is what the advertising people call "brand recognition"; it's a polite way of saying "every time you need soap, you've seen so many of our commercials, you pick up our bar.")
They are obviously just a release of information intended as a starting point for the press
These days, it's the point for the press.
I stand by my original statement- the "google blog" looks exactly like a press release page on a website. It's a listing of stuff about the company, all of it PR. "Our baby was saved by google!" "Here are some features we're excited about!"
Spend a few months working for an advertising firm. See every day emails floating into your inbox from executives bragging about successful "placement" campaigns with the press. See your company hawk the most incredible crap like it was the best thing since sliced bread. Feel your skin crawl- and realize that PR and marketing people are in the business of LYING. We'll see how skeptical you are of anything a corporation publishes...
When I was young, we used to call a "corporate blog" the "press release page." They're functionally equivalent, it's just that the web log has a more casual tone than your typical press release which usually follows a strict format.
When are y'all going to realize that crap on a stick is still crap on a stick, even if you call it "aromatic material on a thin rod"?
Dr. Lee is going to be the highest-paid HR manager ever
Most expensive, is more accurate. MS's counsel's point (which previous posters seem to have missed) is that the guy is going to be next to worthless to Google by the time Microsoft is done. Still paid his salary, but unable to do anything he was hired to do (or is able to do.)
In a single step, Oracle becomes the number one CRM [customer relationship management] applications company in the world,' said Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison."
..."then Oracle Chief Executive Ellison brandished his katana and with a scream, cut the CEO of Siebel in half"
Well, actually here's a link to a poll that contradicts the "the rest of the world knows is fact" assertion:
Natural selection fighting to survive in the US
No, actually, your linked article is only a survey of residents of the United States.
The rest of the world (ie, not the United States) overwhelmingly supports Darwinism/natural selection, including heavily Catholic countries. For most of the world, it is a "been there, proved that, let's move on" concept.
The United States is one of very few countries to relaunch back into the debate, and we're the laughing stock of the industrialized world for it. "Hee hee, 75% of them think Darwin was wrong, what a bunch of apes!"
More often than not very well-trained and experienced scientists get it completely wrong.
GOOD scientists don't purposefully make statements that are absolute. Good scientists are guarded and pick their words carefully.
That said, somebody with a minimal scientific background (ie. a Journalism major) will very often screw up more complicated scientific articles.
Quite on the contrary. It is the same reason you only get reports about murders and status updates on Bennifer- media, on all levels (at least in the US) is owned increasingly by large holding groups. Holding groups do one thing well: try to squeeze every penny.
Scientific articles require more legwork, and that means fewer stories per person per day. "Entertainment" stories practically pay for themselves (free plane tickets, free hotel stays, free footage, free access to a popular star). Murders are easy to cover- listen to the scanner, show up and stand there for the live-on-scene footage, maybe interview a hysterical family member or friend. Tada, done. Celebs and blood sell; nerdy stories that are hard to research won't.
Science also doesn't jive with the "cover all viewpoints" they teach in journalism 101 (case and point, "intelligent design" vs. Evolution. Evolution is something the church gave up on decades ago, and the rest of the world knows is fact- but the American press feels "Intelligent Design" deserves presentation on equal grounds and parrots the President when he says it deserves "consideration".)
And it looks a lot like you're just using the phone as a headphone/mic combo
Ding! And something I've ALWAYS wondered...why can't you pair a cell phone in MacOS X to audio in+out? I'm guessing it would freak out the telco's, and thus the cell phone makers won't allow it in firmware...but it seems like a very easy hack to make the Mac appear to be a headset to the phone.
I'm not positive, but I believe they're referring to ADF beacons, which are not used very much these days, except to confirm VHF beacons, and ADF technology is not terribly reliable (receivers can be fooled by lightning, for example.) Pilots are told to listen to the received audio carrier (which I believe contains a morse code sequence) to make sure they have a valid signal.
Given that GPS was relatively popular in planes even 15 years ago (before they had ILS-certified GPS systems, so GPS has only become more popular) I can't see this being a problem except for some parts of the general aviation community which haven't chosen to install GPS panel-mount units or at least buy a handheld unit.
I suppose they could also be referring to LORAN/LORAN-C (used mostly by boats, save during WW2), but...jesus christ, I hope nobody's still relying on LORAN...maybe as a backup to GPS, sure...but...yikes.
Interplanetary Protocol, which will be a new standard to communicate from planet to planet, which will be radio/laser communications that are highly tolerant to signal degradation
This guy is amazing
He may be, but not for naming it (why "IP"?), and the author clearly doesn't understand the difference between different network layers.
"radio/laser communications that are highly tolerant to signal degradation" is data link layer and below. Cerf's work most likely is taking place at/above that or the transport layer. I'm not really sure what work he could be doing that NASA hasn't already dealt with themselves- and the massive time delay seems to be a problem better addressed on a per-protocol basis.
It's also likely a problem we won't need to solve for many, many years. Do we really need to give astronauts on the moon or Mars access to websites? No. When we do, it seems like a problem most easily solved by a high bandwidth stream, by monitoring what stuff is popular and simply throwing it at the planet, where it is cached. Obviously interaction will be impossible, which means much of the web becomes useless...
When I got a CD drive for my Macintosh LC, it came with a couple of CDs, including Cosmic Osmo and The Worlds Beyond The Mackerel, a Hypercard interactive adventure that was somewhat of a precusor of Myst (Myst and Riven are both, in terms of gameplay UI and whatnot, rather Hypercard-ish), save the intended age group, complexity, etc. Kind of aimed at kids, but even though I was ~15-16, it was fun. Pretty nice bluesy-jazzy music soundtrack too, included as CD Audio tracks on the same CDROM (only fault of the soundtrack was that it was blatantly a bunch of MIDI machines doing the performing. Myst was much worse; cheesy MIDI instruments galore. They got much better at it with Riven, mostly by limiting themselves exclusively to "electronic" instruments, instead of trying to pretend they had real instruments.)
Most of my (large) family live in New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, and I speak with them as often as possible
If you're able to speak to them, that means they have shelter. Most people left do not.
As an aside, anyone trying to score poliltical points in either direction on the back of this disaster should be taken out back for summary execution. Sorry, I'm pretty close to this, and politics has no place until after this is sorted.
This isn't "politics". It's "life and death" and "people in power not doing anything to prevent mass-scale crime and rioting". That's criminal negligence and/or gross incompetence. A similar disaster occured in the 1920's and they had aid to people within 2-3 days. In this day and age, it took a week before the National Guard even decided to start doing anything (I suspect because staffing levels are so low thanks to the Iraq war; there's a lesson there in sending your civil defense people to fight a foreign war.) A US Navy hospital ship didn't even set sail until 2-3 days ago. Nobody's sending the number of busses needed to get people evacuated to other cities and states. The CDC has managed to set up under a half dozen command centers and medical teams...over a WEEK! There were two hospitals that went utterly IGNORED by the mayor, the governor...to the extent that doctors had to get ahold of AP/Reuters reporters and desperately plea for water, medicine, food, and protection from looters that were breaking into the place.
We KNEW this was going to happen; the levees were rated to category 3, and Katrina was a category 5. Yet ABSOLUTELY NOTHING was done on a Federal or State level to prepare for the mass devastation. The major of New Orleans has flat out accused the President and the Governor of Mississippi of doing nothing but holding press conferences and smiling for cameras with refugees. The evidence is on his side- neither has done more than pat people on the back, say "it's gonna be okay, we'll get ya some aide real soon" and walk away.
Someone on NPR just described it best- it's like a dog trying to grip a basketball with his mouth. Top government officials just can't seem to wrap their heads around how massive a problem this is. A MILLION PEOPLE have no homes anymore. They need to GO somewhere, semi-permanently, until New Orleans is rebuilt. We're talking months before basic services are up...
With the advert of the Internet, they don't need anyone else to publish and distribute their music to the world.
snip
The problem is: I know what kind of music I like, and I know which mainstream bands make this kind of music, but I don't have time to go listening to every indie artist to find out what they make.
Record companies aren't in the business of making records. They're in the business of promoting marketable artists.
A friend said it best- "Indie is just another word for crappy, unmarketable, and unpresentable". It's the god-honest truth. Good music sells itself (and hence isn't "indie"). Most of the people who I've met who like "indie" music are impressed with their trucker hats and "vintage" t-shirts, doing what they do simply to be "different", failing to realize they're just like every other "indie" kid in the room.
We can assist in reestablishing internal communications and provide connectivity to all disaster relief efforts by installing point to point, point to multipoint links, IP Web cams to assist the police and fire departments who can not be everywhere in such a large area,
Webcams? What? There's a 24 hour curfew. They're evacuating everyone. National Guard should be patrolling with orders to detain anyone and get them to evacuation centers, and if they get shot at- give a warning, and then shoot to kill and move on. Policing New Orleans is probably simpler than it ever was- and it will only get easier as they finish the evacuation.
Once order is established, take all that money for wireless access points, webcams...take all those consultants etc...and hand them wader boots. Have them cart water, food, and medicine to people. Go door to door searching for survivors. Go to the relief centers to help there. Because THAT is what we need. A simple radio network will suffice for short term communications (National Guard and HAM operators can probably help there more than anyone else) and should be easy given the lack of interference. Cell service would be a luxury, and suggesting ANYONE needs 802.11b is absolutely stupid. This is a bunch of vendors saying "hey, we'll help, but only if you let us use our most expensive, fancy, unnecessary equipment". You don't deploy a VoIP network, when the cost of one VoIP router will buy you a dozen hand-held radios. You don't give one person a nice big steak with roasted potatoes when you can give 1000 people rice.
PEOPLE NEED FOOD, WATER, AND MEDICINE. THEY NEED TO BE EVACUATED STILL. THEY DO NOT NEED LAPTOPS WITH INTERNET ACCESS. THEY NEED VOLUNTEERS MOVING THAT FOOD, WATER, AND MEDICINE- NOT SETTING UP #$@!ING WEBCAMS. The Mayor of New Orleans has been pretty clear about what he needs. Food, water, medicine, and busses to get people out so they stop rioting and looting. I believe the quote was "the president was talking about getting some school bus drivers down here. Thats' a joke. Get every greyhound bus in the country down here."
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds pretty damn scary to me, too.
...to name a few problems individuals and corporations will have.
Why does everyone try to make the web more than what it is- an interactive information platform? Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Then...don't post them? Is Slashdot really that short on story submissions? I submitted a story for the humor section a few days ago about laser-scribed chicken eggs that will "fight terrorism", and it was rejected within an hour of submission.
Gave me the distinct impression the queue was full of really good stories. I mean, what's funnier than barcoding eggs with a laser, so terrorists don't fuss with them? We like lasers, yes? :-)
Attention citizen, you have been doing evil, posting to a capitalist website! Please report to the "Do No Evil" Friendship Happy Center.
"Don't be evil" ring a bell? Everyone pretty much "believed" the head honcos at google when they declared that was the company's motto.
Dow's motto is "We Bring Good Things to Life", except they purchased Union Carbide after Union Carbide killed tens of thousands of Indian people when a chemical plant in Bhopal released methyl isocyanate.
Last time I mentioned Bhopal and Dow, someone said "hey, that was Union Carbide, not Dow! Dow just bought them!" Well- Dow management and shareholders didn't seem to have much trouble sleeping at night after buying Union Carbide for a song (Union Carbide after the disaster became next to worthless as a brand.) Dow pretty much turned into a industrial-disaster profiteer.
Like, there are still loosers out there who think that the LSB has any value..ohmygod, that is SO last week! This just means they're listening to whatever Jenny the head cheerleader says. Ohmygod, my parent's just don't listen to me, and they totally don't understand ABI issues.
(Seriously, wtf is a technical article doing on a site full of whiny emo-kids?)
Anyone who has even so much as glanced at the protocol specification can see that the client is trusted to return an accurate count for how much it has uploaded. This wasn't a "disclosure" or a "vulnerability announcement"- it was a statement of the patently obvious.
The problem is not with BitTorrent. The problem is with BitTorrent trackers and sites which trust that value returned by the client. There are dozens of open-source clients, including the original- and all it takes is adding one operation that multiplies the real upload by whatever number you desire.
The functionality of BitTorrent depends on clients seeding copies of the file back into the network after having downloaded, and a vulnerability like this in a significant amount of trackers could easily cause serious damage to the operation of many torrents.
How did this pseudo-intellectual first-post get modded insightful? You clearly don't understand how the BitTorrent network is designed. Clients evaluate only how much data they receive directly from another client, and how fast. Nothing else factors into their decisions of who to upload. There is absolutely NO mechanism for the client to query the server to see how much you've uploaded, nor is there even a way to ask other clients. Why? Because both sources would be unreliable. Each client CAN only rely on direct "experience", unless they're engaging in a reputation system of their own hacking- if they are, best of luck to them, Bram wasn't an idiot for not trying that.
The "vulnerability" only affects trackers which "enforce" an upload ratio, and only to the extent of letting people bypass that ratio. Ratios is a concept that is pretty stupid with BitTorrent. The more you push back, the more you get, unless there is plenty of bandwidth. About the only "benefit" I see to ratios is that it might keep files available with seeds longer.
I hear a lot of crying about leechers on BitTorrent, but the network is self-regulating. Don't upload? You won't get much back. I think the perceived problem is also because reporting of the stats is unreliable- in the case of Azureus, for example, I can download a big file, upload 3x as much, and then if I get a connection error when my client stops, I "loose" all that uploading. I then look like a leecher, when it is exactly the opposite.
...is that we really don't know who to believe, especially since nobody has bothered to the things journalists do. Like go out and interview people, corroborate stories, and so on.
We get:
"However, after speaking to the Methlabs team and various connected members of the community, P2Pnet, SuprNova and Slyck can all confirm that the original story that the domain has been hijacked is genuine"
So "Slyck News" is claiming they've done so- but they haven't given any names, quotes, or details as to how they arrived at this conclusion?
The whole thing is one Big Internet Drama, and pardon me if I just don't care.
After almost a decade in IT, I can tell you why there is this expectation. When it comes to fuckups, IT is usually the last guy to get the hot potato, and they're expected to save the day.
Any time a user screws up, the IT department is EXPECTED to save the day by upper management. If they don't, it is (rarely) the fault of the employee, it's the fault of the IT department for not anticipating such a need, or not being available at a second's notice, or simply not being able to save someone else's bacon. Often times we're asked to perform miracles.
It sounds reasonable, until you cross professions. Someone drives off the company driveway, crashes their car into a tree, car bursts into flames. Do the facilities people get in trouble for not ancticipating the employee who leaned over to pick up his cell phone off the floor while driving, and failed to install a nice big inflatable barrier along all the roads? Of course not. Yet IT departments are expected to back up everything known to man, expected to resurrect deleted+overwritten files...
Another example- it's 4:55pm and Fedex comes at 5 to pick up a package that is going to The Big Client. The employee has procrastinated working on it, and goes to print at 4:57. There's something wrong with the printer or their system. Guess whose emergency it becomes? Guess who gets screamed at on the telephone? Guess who gets reamed by the CEO because the package didn't go out? Usually the IT department. "Why was the printer broken? Why couldn't you fix it?"....not, "Bob, why did you wait until 5 minutes before your deadline?"
No asshole- I said "when will you all learn crap on a stick is still crap on a stick even if you call it aromatic material on a thin rod."
IN OTHER FUCKING WORDS, SOMETHING DOESN'T CHANGE JUST BECAUSE YOU PUT NICE SPIN ON IT. A CORPORATE BLOG IS STILL A PRESS RELEASE PAGE.
There is an inferrence there, but it's a weak inferrence- not a statement. Jesus christ, you're a nitpicking little fuck. Gb2/kuro5,kthxbubye.
Many GM vehicles do in fact do this; a friends' Corvette Z06 (now a few years old) started smoking like crazy out of one set of exhaust pipes. First came a check engine light, then a -blinking- check engine light, which means "pull over, something's REALLY wrong, you might damage the engine driving it further."
Pushing some magical secret combination of buttons, the in-dash display which normally shows trip computer info and whatnot displayed the DTC codes, which he then looked up online. One entire side of the engine's fuel injectors were dead to the ECU (turned out to be a bad wiring harness- the injectors were wide upen, and dumping +203HP worth of fuel into the left bank :-)
Any vehicle sold in the US after 1995-1996 has ODB-2, which means the car can report a lot of standardized information. You still need a "scan tool" (of varying complexity, ranging from a 1-2 line LCD display, to a full-fledged logging/graphing unit or laptop), and some values are manufacturer-unique....but most of the truly important stuff isn't specially coded. So you can usually get throttle angle, O2 sensor information, RPMs, estimated load/mass-airflow-sensor values, coolant and intake air temp, timing advance/retard, etc. All the basic "will it run or not, or why isn't it running well" info.
I worked for an advertising company for several months, to qualify my statements. The exact job of marketing firms and advertising companies is to make you care about whatever the company has to say. This is best done if you don't realize it's happening. Failing all that, cram it down your throat anyway (this is what the advertising people call "brand recognition"; it's a polite way of saying "every time you need soap, you've seen so many of our commercials, you pick up our bar.")
They are obviously just a release of information intended as a starting point for the press
These days, it's the point for the press.
I stand by my original statement- the "google blog" looks exactly like a press release page on a website. It's a listing of stuff about the company, all of it PR. "Our baby was saved by google!" "Here are some features we're excited about!"
Spend a few months working for an advertising firm. See every day emails floating into your inbox from executives bragging about successful "placement" campaigns with the press. See your company hawk the most incredible crap like it was the best thing since sliced bread. Feel your skin crawl- and realize that PR and marketing people are in the business of LYING . We'll see how skeptical you are of anything a corporation publishes...
Google Blog link.
When I was young, we used to call a "corporate blog" the "press release page." They're functionally equivalent, it's just that the web log has a more casual tone than your typical press release which usually follows a strict format.
When are y'all going to realize that crap on a stick is still crap on a stick, even if you call it "aromatic material on a thin rod"?
Dr. Lee is going to be the highest-paid HR manager ever
Most expensive, is more accurate. MS's counsel's point (which previous posters seem to have missed) is that the guy is going to be next to worthless to Google by the time Microsoft is done. Still paid his salary, but unable to do anything he was hired to do (or is able to do.)
Of course, the article fails to answer the most important question: can it turn on a dime?
..."then Oracle Chief Executive Ellison brandished his katana and with a scream, cut the CEO of Siebel in half"
Natural selection fighting to survive in the US
No, actually, your linked article is only a survey of residents of the United States.
The rest of the world (ie, not the United States) overwhelmingly supports Darwinism/natural selection, including heavily Catholic countries. For most of the world, it is a "been there, proved that, let's move on" concept.
The United States is one of very few countries to relaunch back into the debate, and we're the laughing stock of the industrialized world for it. "Hee hee, 75% of them think Darwin was wrong, what a bunch of apes!"
GOOD scientists don't purposefully make statements that are absolute. Good scientists are guarded and pick their words carefully.
That said, somebody with a minimal scientific background (ie. a Journalism major) will very often screw up more complicated scientific articles.
Quite on the contrary. It is the same reason you only get reports about murders and status updates on Bennifer- media, on all levels (at least in the US) is owned increasingly by large holding groups. Holding groups do one thing well: try to squeeze every penny.
Scientific articles require more legwork, and that means fewer stories per person per day. "Entertainment" stories practically pay for themselves (free plane tickets, free hotel stays, free footage, free access to a popular star). Murders are easy to cover- listen to the scanner, show up and stand there for the live-on-scene footage, maybe interview a hysterical family member or friend. Tada, done. Celebs and blood sell; nerdy stories that are hard to research won't.
Science also doesn't jive with the "cover all viewpoints" they teach in journalism 101 (case and point, "intelligent design" vs. Evolution. Evolution is something the church gave up on decades ago, and the rest of the world knows is fact- but the American press feels "Intelligent Design" deserves presentation on equal grounds and parrots the President when he says it deserves "consideration".)
Ding! And something I've ALWAYS wondered...why can't you pair a cell phone in MacOS X to audio in+out? I'm guessing it would freak out the telco's, and thus the cell phone makers won't allow it in firmware...but it seems like a very easy hack to make the Mac appear to be a headset to the phone.
I'm not positive, but I believe they're referring to ADF beacons, which are not used very much these days, except to confirm VHF beacons, and ADF technology is not terribly reliable (receivers can be fooled by lightning, for example.) Pilots are told to listen to the received audio carrier (which I believe contains a morse code sequence) to make sure they have a valid signal.
Given that GPS was relatively popular in planes even 15 years ago (before they had ILS-certified GPS systems, so GPS has only become more popular) I can't see this being a problem except for some parts of the general aviation community which haven't chosen to install GPS panel-mount units or at least buy a handheld unit.
I suppose they could also be referring to LORAN/LORAN-C (used mostly by boats, save during WW2), but...jesus christ, I hope nobody's still relying on LORAN...maybe as a backup to GPS, sure...but...yikes.
This guy is amazing
He may be, but not for naming it (why "IP"?), and the author clearly doesn't understand the difference between different network layers.
"radio/laser communications that are highly tolerant to signal degradation" is data link layer and below. Cerf's work most likely is taking place at/above that or the transport layer. I'm not really sure what work he could be doing that NASA hasn't already dealt with themselves- and the massive time delay seems to be a problem better addressed on a per-protocol basis.
It's also likely a problem we won't need to solve for many, many years. Do we really need to give astronauts on the moon or Mars access to websites? No. When we do, it seems like a problem most easily solved by a high bandwidth stream, by monitoring what stuff is popular and simply throwing it at the planet, where it is cached. Obviously interaction will be impossible, which means much of the web becomes useless...
Uh, I take it we're not talking about John Steed and Emma Peel?
There were four good things about that movie. a)the line "How now, Brown Cow?" b)Emma in her catsuit c)her E-type Jaguar, and d)Emma in her catsuit.
When I got a CD drive for my Macintosh LC, it came with a couple of CDs, including Cosmic Osmo and The Worlds Beyond The Mackerel, a Hypercard interactive adventure that was somewhat of a precusor of Myst (Myst and Riven are both, in terms of gameplay UI and whatnot, rather Hypercard-ish), save the intended age group, complexity, etc. Kind of aimed at kids, but even though I was ~15-16, it was fun. Pretty nice bluesy-jazzy music soundtrack too, included as CD Audio tracks on the same CDROM (only fault of the soundtrack was that it was blatantly a bunch of MIDI machines doing the performing. Myst was much worse; cheesy MIDI instruments galore. They got much better at it with Riven, mostly by limiting themselves exclusively to "electronic" instruments, instead of trying to pretend they had real instruments.)
If you're able to speak to them, that means they have shelter. Most people left do not.
As an aside, anyone trying to score poliltical points in either direction on the back of this disaster should be taken out back for summary execution. Sorry, I'm pretty close to this, and politics has no place until after this is sorted.
This isn't "politics". It's "life and death" and "people in power not doing anything to prevent mass-scale crime and rioting". That's criminal negligence and/or gross incompetence. A similar disaster occured in the 1920's and they had aid to people within 2-3 days. In this day and age, it took a week before the National Guard even decided to start doing anything (I suspect because staffing levels are so low thanks to the Iraq war; there's a lesson there in sending your civil defense people to fight a foreign war.) A US Navy hospital ship didn't even set sail until 2-3 days ago. Nobody's sending the number of busses needed to get people evacuated to other cities and states. The CDC has managed to set up under a half dozen command centers and medical teams...over a WEEK! There were two hospitals that went utterly IGNORED by the mayor, the governor...to the extent that doctors had to get ahold of AP/Reuters reporters and desperately plea for water, medicine, food, and protection from looters that were breaking into the place.
We KNEW this was going to happen; the levees were rated to category 3, and Katrina was a category 5. Yet ABSOLUTELY NOTHING was done on a Federal or State level to prepare for the mass devastation. The major of New Orleans has flat out accused the President and the Governor of Mississippi of doing nothing but holding press conferences and smiling for cameras with refugees. The evidence is on his side- neither has done more than pat people on the back, say "it's gonna be okay, we'll get ya some aide real soon" and walk away.
Someone on NPR just described it best- it's like a dog trying to grip a basketball with his mouth. Top government officials just can't seem to wrap their heads around how massive a problem this is. A MILLION PEOPLE have no homes anymore. They need to GO somewhere, semi-permanently, until New Orleans is rebuilt. We're talking months before basic services are up...
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The problem is: I know what kind of music I like, and I know which mainstream bands make this kind of music, but I don't have time to go listening to every indie artist to find out what they make.
Record companies aren't in the business of making records. They're in the business of promoting marketable artists.
A friend said it best- "Indie is just another word for crappy, unmarketable, and unpresentable". It's the god-honest truth. Good music sells itself (and hence isn't "indie"). Most of the people who I've met who like "indie" music are impressed with their trucker hats and "vintage" t-shirts, doing what they do simply to be "different", failing to realize they're just like every other "indie" kid in the room.
Webcams? What? There's a 24 hour curfew. They're evacuating everyone. National Guard should be patrolling with orders to detain anyone and get them to evacuation centers, and if they get shot at- give a warning, and then shoot to kill and move on. Policing New Orleans is probably simpler than it ever was- and it will only get easier as they finish the evacuation.
Once order is established, take all that money for wireless access points, webcams...take all those consultants etc...and hand them wader boots. Have them cart water, food, and medicine to people. Go door to door searching for survivors. Go to the relief centers to help there. Because THAT is what we need. A simple radio network will suffice for short term communications (National Guard and HAM operators can probably help there more than anyone else) and should be easy given the lack of interference. Cell service would be a luxury, and suggesting ANYONE needs 802.11b is absolutely stupid. This is a bunch of vendors saying "hey, we'll help, but only if you let us use our most expensive, fancy, unnecessary equipment". You don't deploy a VoIP network, when the cost of one VoIP router will buy you a dozen hand-held radios. You don't give one person a nice big steak with roasted potatoes when you can give 1000 people rice.
PEOPLE NEED FOOD, WATER, AND MEDICINE. THEY NEED TO BE EVACUATED STILL. THEY DO NOT NEED LAPTOPS WITH INTERNET ACCESS. THEY NEED VOLUNTEERS MOVING THAT FOOD, WATER, AND MEDICINE- NOT SETTING UP #$@!ING WEBCAMS. The Mayor of New Orleans has been pretty clear about what he needs. Food, water, medicine, and busses to get people out so they stop rioting and looting. I believe the quote was "the president was talking about getting some school bus drivers down here. Thats' a joke. Get every greyhound bus in the country down here."