The worst damage to the US was not so much inflicted by Snowden but by the US government itself. Just look at recent head lines: the farce about Evo Morales' presidential aeroplane caused a lot more long term damage than all of Snowden's disclosures combined. Given that the US go out of their way (laws or international treaties be damned!) to make Snowden's life miserable, I sort of understand why he tries to poke back at them once in a while.
The thing I like about your metaphor best is that you (jokingly, I know), equate "pounding someone's head with a hammer and stealing his wallet" with "hosting copyrighted content for everyone to grab". On several occasions during the last couple of years US foreign policy (and meddling) did indicate that the US strongly thinks these two acts are indeed comparable offenses.
Also remember that nitroglycerin would be detectable quite easily with regular explosive detectors (highly oxidized nitrogen compound), so just because of this incident where would be still no reason to continue confiscating water bottles.
Regardless of whether you love or hate wikileaks, a book store and service provider which censors content based on random telephone calls from US senators is neither trustworthy nor reputable. This lovely award Amazon just won smells very fishy and seems to be either a PR gimmick or a thank you from some political organization. You know, I could pay people to give me all kinds or first prizes and gold medals...
So, let's see. So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.
And thus far no significant release of radioactivity.
How many people do you need to suffer from radiation exposure before YOU call it significant?
And we've got people saying the plants are fragile and unsafe?
Look at the whole story. It started with earthquake and tsunami, but now it's just a series of technical defects and human inability. All kinds of valves and gauges have been reported failing to the point where they have seemingly no idea whether block 2 was flooded or not. Spare generators were brought but couldn't be hooked up. While 5 out of 6 backup coolant pumps were shut down, the sixth ran out of fuel. Sea water reservoirs ran dry.
Folks, this is the nuclear industry working for you in front of everyone and I don't like what I see here one bit.
Because it might have been cheaper to cut some corners with existing equipment than build a new reactor every time some scientist comes along with the next great thing? It might have been more profitable to do things the way they have been done, and when the sh*t hits the fan the nuclear industry can still count on their (highly moderated) forum posters to deny any problem.
This may also be a reason why some folks here don't trust the nuclear industry too much...
They were planning to build two new reactors onsite, # 7 and #8. They'll probably end up with new ABWRs to replace the old clunkers. Note that a single ABWR outputs as much power as three BWR-3s or two BWR-4s so yanking three 40 year old dinosaurs does not necessarily mean they need to build three new ABWRs to take their place... My guess is they'll get one.
I admire your optimism and enthusiasm for nuclear power, but I seriously doubt they'll build anything nuclear near Fukushima. Ever. Again. Having experienced two nuclear bombs with six digit casualties the Japanese know exactly what exposure to excessive radiation means. Despite all the claims of the pro nuclear lobby, the plant operators in Fukushima do not have this under control at all.
I'm hardly on their board of directors but most likely instead of adding 2 new ABWRs they'll probably simultaneously build the currently planned two, decon the old units 1 / 2 / 3 and build a nice new ABWR on top of the old site of 1 / 2 / 3.
Call yourself lucky that you are not on their board as the whole disaster unfolds before everybody's eyes. This is a story which started with an earthquake and a tsunami which then turned into a long drawn story of inability and technical failure. I read "backup generators couldn't be connected" and "pressure gauge malfunction" and "level gauge most likely off but nobody knows for sure" and "pumps which were supposed to cool the core failed". Anyone telling me that this is under control must be completely delusional at this point. Let's just hope this gets resolved before anything really nasty happens at the (by now) three molten reactor cores.
If these automatic block requests are in place, bad guys can and will use these to effectively get your server off the net, either by faking these requests or by forcing your server to create an overwhelming abundance of these. Let's face it: it is out gun him (i.e. put up more resources) or out smart him (use your resources more effectively). No automated tool or mechanism will be able to do that, because automated smarts work for both the attacker and the defender.
The funny thing is that those same carriers sell USB sticks which provide wireless internet capability to laptops, where they obviously have no control over the software that's run on them. These sticks even work under linux, and quite well at that.
That's a quote from the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky, which just so happens to be a great movie, and definitely not a bad horror movie. The mods who downmodded the GP obviously don't know the movie. Pretty sad IMHO...
The power consumption of such a device has little to do with the output power as long as RF output power is in the small mW range. Things like receiver, oscillators and frequency hopping logic require so much power all the time that it almost doesn't matter whether the module transmits at all.
That's the huge advantage of IR: you put all the brains into the receiver (which is powered from a wall outlet) and can keep the transmitter extremely simple and running only when a button is pressed (as AmiMoJo already mentioned).
There are tons of books about this topic, especially about objects which can be viewed through binoculars or small telescopes. Consolmagno's "Turn left at Orion" provides a great introduction and has a really cool map of the moon. My recommendation with a 4" scope would be obviously the Moon surface, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn (you can see the ring in a 4" scope!), Andromeda, Orion Nebula, and possibly some colorful stars.
Despite the great excitement many astronomers have for their craft, most of the "exciting" objects look pretty dull to the layman or are not visible through a 4" scope. People are pretty spoiled by all the colorful nebula photos which are so abundant anywhere.
Good thing about digiKam is that they use ImageMagick as their backend, so they have full 16 bit color and multithreading support and don't have to reinvent the wheel for every image manipulation task. Despite the beta sounding version number it is very stable and can handle huge image data (say 120 MB TIFFs) without any problems.
While GIMP can indeed do RAW conversions, its main limitation for photographic purposes comes from its 8 bit color space, which makes color corrections next to impossible, at least in useful quality.
If you want to steer newcomers towards open source, my recommendation is you show them digiKam for RAW conversion and color correction, and have them use GIMP only for pixel manipulation (healing/cloning, merging,...)
+1 on that!
I've spent countless hours fixing scripts which mistreated decimal numbers created in different locale settings. And I've spent way too much time vainly trying to convince open office to treat 3.1415927 as a number and not as text without having to change the . to a ,
There was a fake article about such an animal years ago on thedailymash (an English satire online publication). The article can be found here. It's shocking how accurately satire can sometimes describe future events:)
You can't call it an unfair moderation just because you were -1 modded flamebait. It doesn't matter what you think about your post, the slashdot moderators are the ones duly elected/appointed to the position of making the decision. What they moderate goes whether you agree with it or not.
The research paper you quote is from 2002, when biometric face recognition was a bad joke. The nytimes article is from the same time frame (assuming that news about scientific results take a while to trickle into the news paper world) Algorithms have improved vastly in the mean time and any halfway decent system can give you a false alarm rate of below 0.01%, assuming you feed it with decent image material. If you combine this with face tracking, you have very few alarms per minute, something a single operator can handle with little effort.
Biometric performance depends a lot on installation details and I am not sure whether this particular installation will do the job. Assuming they use CCTV cameras mounted on lamp posts in an open area I am rather sure they will fail miserably and waste a lot of money. Time will tell...
I'm afraid my post was not entirely clear and/or you misread it. The fact that UA stock plunged after a single wrongly reported article shows that the whole stock market was in a state of panic at that time, due to the immanent burst of the housing bubble and the much larger bubble created by structured financial products, and reckless banks/insurances betting on these products way beyond their financial capability. Poor journalism just accidentally triggered the whole mechanism of panic sales, plunging stock price, general panic and slow recovery. Poor journalism however was not responsible for the general panic ridden market condition which allowed a single head line to cause all this.
That is why the original slashdot article is so alarming: If South Korea panics about a single blogger, their whole economy may be in a morbid state which reeks of collapse. Obviously their actions backfired badly. Who would seriously invest in a country which shows so obvious signs of panic?
So once again: I don't blame the blogger. Even if his blog triggers a market melt down, he is not responsible for the current market condition. And as South Korea has left the slave labor market decades ago, oppressing the free flow of opinions is certainly not going to help the recovery of their economy in any way.
Anyone remember the UA debacle last September? If the markets are sufficiently hysterical, you can make them plunge with a single headline, regardless whether it's correct or not. The wrong reporting about UA was corrected immediately, yet it sent the markets into a nose dive from which they haven't recovered yet. Regardless of whether the blogger is correct with his statements or not, I would call the reaction of the south korean gov't alarming and telling of the economic troubles soon to emerge there.
So what this incident with the south korean blogger tells me:
The south korean economy is on the verge of big trouble
The south korean government is aware of it and desperately tries to keep this concealed
The south korean government has never heard a thing about the Streisand effect
One of my big beefs right now is wireless cards. I really shouldn't have to rely on ndiswrapper to get decent support for wireless with most cards.
Wireless cards can be configured via software, and with software you can configure them so they violate FCC/EN rules. That's the reason why vendors don't open the specs for these cards: they are not allowed to sell devices which can be easily set up in a way that violates FCC/EN rules.
That's why Intel (I think it was them) started this NDIS-scheme: you use the closed source (Windows)-binary-only-driver under linux with just a wrapper around the driver. IMHO this is much more likely to succeed than trying to get wireless card manufacturers to provide binary only linux drivers for every distro on earth.
As sad as it looks, but wireless cards in their current state are unlikely targets for FOSS drivers:(
Slashdot Mirror
Moderation system kicked me again. Posting to remove wrong moderation, please ignore
replying to undo bs moderation - please ignore
The worst damage to the US was not so much inflicted by Snowden but by the US government itself. Just look at recent head lines: the farce about Evo Morales' presidential aeroplane caused a lot more long term damage than all of Snowden's disclosures combined. Given that the US go out of their way (laws or international treaties be damned!) to make Snowden's life miserable, I sort of understand why he tries to poke back at them once in a while.
The report has been updated and now also shows two people killed and several in critical condition.
The thing I like about your metaphor best is that you (jokingly, I know), equate "pounding someone's head with a hammer and stealing his wallet" with "hosting copyrighted content for everyone to grab". On several occasions during the last couple of years US foreign policy (and meddling) did indicate that the US strongly thinks these two acts are indeed comparable offenses.
> Agree on smaller airports. But the TSA farce at larger airports like SEA and SFO just ....
The story with that guy who got denied his flight for wearing an anti-TSA T-shirt happened at one of these smaller airports IIRC.
Also remember that nitroglycerin would be detectable quite easily with regular explosive detectors (highly oxidized nitrogen compound), so just because of this incident where would be still no reason to continue confiscating water bottles.
Regardless of whether you love or hate wikileaks, a book store and service provider which censors content based on random telephone calls from US senators is neither trustworthy nor reputable. This lovely award Amazon just won smells very fishy and seems to be either a PR gimmick or a thank you from some political organization. You know, I could pay people to give me all kinds or first prizes and gold medals ...
So, let's see. So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.
And thus far no significant release of radioactivity.
How many people do you need to suffer from radiation exposure before YOU call it significant?
And we've got people saying the plants are fragile and unsafe?
Look at the whole story. It started with earthquake and tsunami, but now it's just a series of technical defects and human inability. All kinds of valves and gauges have been reported failing to the point where they have seemingly no idea whether block 2 was flooded or not. Spare generators were brought but couldn't be hooked up. While 5 out of 6 backup coolant pumps were shut down, the sixth ran out of fuel. Sea water reservoirs ran dry.
Folks, this is the nuclear industry working for you in front of everyone and I don't like what I see here one bit.
Because it might have been cheaper to cut some corners with existing equipment than build a new reactor every time some scientist comes along with the next great thing? It might have been more profitable to do things the way they have been done, and when the sh*t hits the fan the nuclear industry can still count on their (highly moderated) forum posters to deny any problem.
This may also be a reason why some folks here don't trust the nuclear industry too much ...
They were planning to build two new reactors onsite, # 7 and #8. They'll probably end up with new ABWRs to replace the old clunkers. Note that a single ABWR outputs as much power as three BWR-3s or two BWR-4s so yanking three 40 year old dinosaurs does not necessarily mean they need to build three new ABWRs to take their place... My guess is they'll get one.
I admire your optimism and enthusiasm for nuclear power, but I seriously doubt they'll build anything nuclear near Fukushima. Ever. Again. Having experienced two nuclear bombs with six digit casualties the Japanese know exactly what exposure to excessive radiation means. Despite all the claims of the pro nuclear lobby, the plant operators in Fukushima do not have this under control at all.
I'm hardly on their board of directors but most likely instead of adding 2 new ABWRs they'll probably simultaneously build the currently planned two, decon the old units 1 / 2 / 3 and build a nice new ABWR on top of the old site of 1 / 2 / 3.
Call yourself lucky that you are not on their board as the whole disaster unfolds before everybody's eyes. This is a story which started with an earthquake and a tsunami which then turned into a long drawn story of inability and technical failure. I read "backup generators couldn't be connected" and "pressure gauge malfunction" and "level gauge most likely off but nobody knows for sure" and "pumps which were supposed to cool the core failed". Anyone telling me that this is under control must be completely delusional at this point. Let's just hope this gets resolved before anything really nasty happens at the (by now) three molten reactor cores.
If these automatic block requests are in place, bad guys can and will use these to effectively get your server off the net, either by faking these requests or by forcing your server to create an overwhelming abundance of these. Let's face it: it is out gun him (i.e. put up more resources) or out smart him (use your resources more effectively). No automated tool or mechanism will be able to do that, because automated smarts work for both the attacker and the defender.
The funny thing is that those same carriers sell USB sticks which provide wireless internet capability to laptops, where they obviously have no control over the software that's run on them. These sticks even work under linux, and quite well at that.
That's a quote from the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky, which just so happens to be a great movie, and definitely not a bad horror movie. The mods who downmodded the GP obviously don't know the movie. Pretty sad IMHO ...
The power consumption of such a device has little to do with the output power as long as RF output power is in the small mW range. Things like receiver, oscillators and frequency hopping logic require so much power all the time that it almost doesn't matter whether the module transmits at all.
That's the huge advantage of IR: you put all the brains into the receiver (which is powered from a wall outlet) and can keep the transmitter extremely simple and running only when a button is pressed (as AmiMoJo already mentioned).
There are tons of books about this topic, especially about objects which can be viewed through binoculars or small telescopes. Consolmagno's "Turn left at Orion" provides a great introduction and has a really cool map of the moon. My recommendation with a 4" scope would be obviously the Moon surface, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn (you can see the ring in a 4" scope!), Andromeda, Orion Nebula, and possibly some colorful stars. Despite the great excitement many astronomers have for their craft, most of the "exciting" objects look pretty dull to the layman or are not visible through a 4" scope. People are pretty spoiled by all the colorful nebula photos which are so abundant anywhere.
Good thing about digiKam is that they use ImageMagick as their backend, so they have full 16 bit color and multithreading support and don't have to reinvent the wheel for every image manipulation task. Despite the beta sounding version number it is very stable and can handle huge image data (say 120 MB TIFFs) without any problems.
While GIMP can indeed do RAW conversions, its main limitation for photographic purposes comes from its 8 bit color space, which makes color corrections next to impossible, at least in useful quality. If you want to steer newcomers towards open source, my recommendation is you show them digiKam for RAW conversion and color correction, and have them use GIMP only for pixel manipulation (healing/cloning, merging, ...)
+1 on that! I've spent countless hours fixing scripts which mistreated decimal numbers created in different locale settings. And I've spent way too much time vainly trying to convince open office to treat 3.1415927 as a number and not as text without having to change the . to a ,
There was a fake article about such an animal years ago on thedailymash (an English satire online publication). The article can be found here. It's shocking how accurately satire can sometimes describe future events :)
You can't call it an unfair moderation just because you were -1 modded flamebait. It doesn't matter what you think about your post, the slashdot moderators are the ones duly elected/appointed to the position of making the decision. What they moderate goes whether you agree with it or not.
See my point now?
The research paper you quote is from 2002, when biometric face recognition was a bad joke. The nytimes article is from the same time frame (assuming that news about scientific results take a while to trickle into the news paper world) Algorithms have improved vastly in the mean time and any halfway decent system can give you a false alarm rate of below 0.01%, assuming you feed it with decent image material. If you combine this with face tracking, you have very few alarms per minute, something a single operator can handle with little effort.
Biometric performance depends a lot on installation details and I am not sure whether this particular installation will do the job. Assuming they use CCTV cameras mounted on lamp posts in an open area I am rather sure they will fail miserably and waste a lot of money. Time will tell ...
I'm afraid my post was not entirely clear and/or you misread it. The fact that UA stock plunged after a single wrongly reported article shows that the whole stock market was in a state of panic at that time, due to the immanent burst of the housing bubble and the much larger bubble created by structured financial products, and reckless banks/insurances betting on these products way beyond their financial capability. Poor journalism just accidentally triggered the whole mechanism of panic sales, plunging stock price, general panic and slow recovery. Poor journalism however was not responsible for the general panic ridden market condition which allowed a single head line to cause all this.
That is why the original slashdot article is so alarming: If South Korea panics about a single blogger, their whole economy may be in a morbid state which reeks of collapse. Obviously their actions backfired badly. Who would seriously invest in a country which shows so obvious signs of panic?
So once again: I don't blame the blogger. Even if his blog triggers a market melt down, he is not responsible for the current market condition. And as South Korea has left the slave labor market decades ago, oppressing the free flow of opinions is certainly not going to help the recovery of their economy in any way.
Anyone remember the UA debacle last September? If the markets are sufficiently hysterical, you can make them plunge with a single headline, regardless whether it's correct or not. The wrong reporting about UA was corrected immediately, yet it sent the markets into a nose dive from which they haven't recovered yet. Regardless of whether the blogger is correct with his statements or not, I would call the reaction of the south korean gov't alarming and telling of the economic troubles soon to emerge there.
So what this incident with the south korean blogger tells me:
One of my big beefs right now is wireless cards. I really shouldn't have to rely on ndiswrapper to get decent support for wireless with most cards.
Wireless cards can be configured via software, and with software you can configure them so they violate FCC/EN rules. That's the reason why vendors don't open the specs for these cards: they are not allowed to sell devices which can be easily set up in a way that violates FCC/EN rules.
That's why Intel (I think it was them) started this NDIS-scheme: you use the closed source (Windows)-binary-only-driver under linux with just a wrapper around the driver. IMHO this is much more likely to succeed than trying to get wireless card manufacturers to provide binary only linux drivers for every distro on earth.
As sad as it looks, but wireless cards in their current state are unlikely targets for FOSS drivers :(