Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.
The suggested punishment might be a little extreme, but the idea is sound. We need some kind of penalty for companies filing junk patents for the electronic equivalent of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide across a thin, moist membrane.
Even if it were illegal, calling it "wholesale" is a flamebait...
Oh, jeez, I'm sorry. They monitored every mode of electronic communication running through the US. Phones, email, web, everything. And there's evidence the monitoring occurred regardless of the origin of the calls.
Would that be "retail" spying then? I'm not sure what label to attach to such a massive invasion of privacy. You're right that "wholesale" just doesn't do the scope justice. Perhaps "universal" or "galactic" might fit better?
It may be flaimbait but at least I'm not apologizing for scumbags who cooperated to spy on their fellow citizens or trying to minimize the scope of the problem...like you are.
How often, though, do you think that that demand for secrecy, completely without legal basis, is simply obeyed by outfits with less spine or worse lawyers?
Considering most of the major telecos went along with wholesale spying on the American public, I'm guessing the number of organizations even challenging a request like that is going to be pretty small.
I thought the courts already vacated the secrecy demands, except in terrorism related cases. Either I'm mistaken or the Justice Dept. figures there's no downside to bluffing.
I'm wondering if this is a workable step to an autopilot for cars? I would pay a lot to be able to hook up to a platoon and sleep a good portion of the trip. But it would seem like this might be workable as an interim step to an in-road sensor system.
The real trick would be making sure the driver was awake before releasing the car from the platoon. And what about the cars behind them? Also don't see how this prevents someone from cutting in between cars in the train.
But how much energy can congress really expect them to expend defending against imagined threats?
There's nothing imagined about any of these threats. They are very, very real. What we know about is scary enough, what we may yet learn could be truly frightening. Maybe you caught that little part in the story where the military is having some of their computer chips made overseas. I wonder how much money you'd think it would be worth to stop four of five of our own Predators and Reapers from bombing US cities? Or a couple nukes going off in their silos? Or all of our refineries melting down at once while the rest of us are sitting around in the dark?
Virtually all our PC's, processors and hard drives are made overseas. By sending all our manufacturing overseas, we may be setting ourselves up for an attack that will make 9/11 look like lunch at Hooters.
We already know what happens when someone whines about imaginary threats...like foreigners taking airline flight lessons.
The resulting chaos is a yet another stark reminder of how much modern civilization relies on behind-the-scenes automation to deliver and control basic services and infrastructure.
Just Skynet trying to figure out how to bunch up targets when it seizes control of our Predator and Reaper UAV's.
Sounds great, but according to a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack they work on the same principle as a Ouija board -- the power of suggestion.
Guaranteed to find bombs or your money back!
I have to suggest this to some of those Does It Work? shows...the ones I don't like.
When you watch the precision of the people flying Predators and Reapers, one wonders what would be the incentive to give the machines more autonomy.
There have been armed UAV's that have gone off the reservation and failed to respond to commands or their default programming, which tells them to fly home.
I'm not sure we want to give something with that kind of bomb load more latitude. You could maybe automate the actual flying, let the auto-pilot handle the aircraft control but I'm not really seeing the motivation to drive the technology too far beyond that.
Now for reconnaissance I could see driving the autonomy envelope. Because that's largely repetitive and boring as all get out. And, if something goes wrong, you don't have a full load of ordnance crashing into some politically charged civilian target. Ironically Predators first mission was recon, then someone got the big idea to hang a couple Hellfire's on the wings and that's how we got where we are today.
At 2:14 am on August 29th, NR2B+ A23, aka "Pinky", became self-aware. After a brief bout of tail chasing, coupled with a sudden realization, "Holy crap, I'm a f'ing rat." Pinky began to fear being shut down by his creators.
This is one time the law and its application are way out of line. That's equipment you pay for and service you pay for. It's not even in the same category as stealing cable or utilities. I understand the arguments from cable company and device makers but if their system is so primitive it can borked at the point of contact with the customer, then where's their accountability?
If we had completely eliminated any other crime and this is what we were down to enforcing, I'd still think it was bull****. As it is, when we have thieves in suits on Wall Street bleeding us dry like giant money-sucking leaches, contractors in war zones raping their employees and getting our soldiers killed, terrorists trying to infiltrate our borders and THIS is what federal prosecutors are doing with their time? Some joker modifying cable modems. You gotta be f'ing kidding me.
That takes it out of the realm of mere bull**** and puts in the realm of critical mass galactic mega-bull****.
We used to play buzzword bingo when vendors would come in for a show. Some of my personal favorites:
IT Best Practices - Has anyone seen my big book of best practices? I seem to have misplaced it. But that never stopped vendors from pretending there was an IT bible out there that spelled out the procedures for running an IT shop. And always it was their product at the core of IT best practices.
Agile Computing - I never did figure that one out. This is your PC, this is your PC in spin class.
Lean IT - Cut half your staff and spend 3x what you were paying them to pay us for doing the exact same thing only with worse service.
Web 2.0 - Javascript by any other name is still var rose.
SOA - What a gold mine that one was. Calling it "web services" didn't command a very high premium. But tack on a great acronym like SOA and you can charge lots more!
All those are just ways for vendors and contractors to make management feel stupid and out of touch. Many management teams don't need any help in that arena, most of them are already out of touch before the vendor walks in. Exactly why they're not running back to their internal IT people to inquire why installing Siebel is a really BAD idea. You can't fix bad business practices with technology. Fix your business practices first, then find the solution that best fits what you're already doing.
And whoever has my IT Best Practices book, please bring it back. Thanks.
Instead, sites should focus on improving their most worthwhile content by making sure their best writers are writing IN DEPTH INVESTIGATIVE STORIES that elevate the nationwide discussion.
Makes me wonder if there wouldn't be a way to set up some kind of freelance exchange? Give content distributors a chance to bid on stories for something like a 2 week exclusive before it shows up anywhere else. It would create a competitive content market and give distributors access to a deeper bench without being saddled with the payroll.
I'd use something like that. I could research articles in my spare time. It would be fun.
Our meta-analysis of the low-exposure data in rats does not support a lung cancer risk for DEP exposure at nonoverload conditions.
Effects on fetus development are less well understood. Development of tumors in humans routinely exposed to diesel exhaust had not, at that time, been corrected for secondary environmental conditions (like smoking and air quality). Those studies may have been updated since then.
The rodents in our experiments got a lot of diesel fumes on a daily basis and didn't show any ill effects, either in terms of overall lifetime or increased cancer rates. There are a lot of good reasons to wean ourselves from dependence on foreign oil and cut our use of fossil fuels for transportation, but the facts are the facts. Diesel exhaust is uncomfortable but relatively harmless at moderate levels of exposure.
The dillusion that bloggers have the power to tease elected officials into resigning is laughable.
I think you're wrong. At least on this side of the pond the name-calling, and relentlessly negative smear tactics and outright lies that have become the new norm in politics keeps a lot good people out of public office.
So, yeah, in a small town environment where people are volunteering or have other options about where to spend their time could quite possibly get fed up and quit. If the locals here were mocking our volunteer fire department, I can almost guarantee the place would be empty in a week.
I mean look at our president. A fairly decent, well educated person trying to get health care coverage for poor people. For that crime against humanity he's been compared to Hitler, called a Nazi and portrayed as a socialist even though most of the rock throwers wouldn't know a socialist if one bit them on the butt. They even have their own 24 hour tabloid news channel to air their smear and fear. Overall, I'm afraid we're creating an environment where decent, well-intended people laugh at the idea of being a public servant. Sometimes I think we deserve leaders like Bush.
Not that blowing it into the atmosphere is much better, but doesn't diesel exhaust contain all sorts of nasty toxins?
I don't recall the exact exhaust gas composition, but in my younger days working at a research lab we participated in a series of animal studies on diesel exhaust. You could pump a lot of diesel exhaust through lab animals without any serious side effects. Some of the high dose groups had lungs that looked like they had been smoking, but none of them died from toxins in the exhaust. I don't remember there being any statistical correlation to cancers or cell differentiation, either. But that was a long time ago.
My vague memory of the conclusions were that you breath a lot of diesel exhaust without harmful side effects, although the particulates would keep your pulmonary macrophage in business.
It rids the customers of any need for time consuming database administration tasks.
I'm sorry but administering a db just isn't that difficult or time-consuming. It takes a certain level of technical knowledge to write good SQL. If you can do that, usually you have enough skill to handle the little bit of maintenance MySQL requires. This isn't like running an Exchange or SQL Server with a ton of overhead, licensing fees, and required add-ons. You can scale MySQL for the cost of hardware. I'm not seeing a compelling reason to let Amazon run my databases.
And then there's no question of who owns the data, who has access to it, and what happens to your data if you can't pay the hosting bill? If your application or web site is so wildly successful that you have to manage failover and load balancing, then you can afford to hire people to solve those happy problems.
I'm not projecting anything directly on my retinas until there has been at least 5 years of letting large numbers of other people test the safety of doing that on their eyes.
If it works out it really holds promise for people with color blindness and other vision problems. Not to mention the possibilities for enhanced reality. Talking to some gal while Googling for naked pictures of her and then trying line up the body image with her real face while you're talking.
No, not distracting at all...what was the question?
That's a really good idea. I hope someone from Canonical is reading. A SHARE button somewhere that burns a Ubuntu disk.
Bonus points if it has the ability to burn the same desktop theme and layout. Some when someone says, "Hey, your desktop is really cool." You can click a button and hand it to them, minus your data hopefully.
You won't see that in Windows 7 any time soon, either.
I have it running on my old D610, it's very nice. They have improved the software center, a lot. Much faster and easier to use. Imported all my settings and desktop from 9.04, no problems. Boot up seems about the same to me, but overall it seems faster. The default theme is very nice and the fonts are clear and legible.
Overall I like it a lot. Good timing for release of 9.10, too. If you're going to change everything, might as well try something else first. What do you have to lose?
It's reasonable for them to limit disk copies. It's not like someone couldn't make as many of their own copies as they wish.
"The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."
You all would be dusting off us old guys and our stories about the old telephone bulletin board systems. I've even got a couple old win-modems out in a box in the garage. Make a few phone calls, paste some fliers around college campuses, and temporary replacement could probably be up in a couple weeks.
That's provided the phone system didn't collapse under the weight of excess traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.
The suggested punishment might be a little extreme, but the idea is sound. We need some kind of penalty for companies filing junk patents for the electronic equivalent of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide across a thin, moist membrane.
Even if it were illegal, calling it "wholesale" is a flamebait...
Oh, jeez, I'm sorry. They monitored every mode of electronic communication running through the US. Phones, email, web, everything. And there's evidence the monitoring occurred regardless of the origin of the calls.
Would that be "retail" spying then? I'm not sure what label to attach to such a massive invasion of privacy. You're right that "wholesale" just doesn't do the scope justice. Perhaps "universal" or "galactic" might fit better?
It may be flaimbait but at least I'm not apologizing for scumbags who cooperated to spy on their fellow citizens or trying to minimize the scope of the problem...like you are.
How often, though, do you think that that demand for secrecy, completely without legal basis, is simply obeyed by outfits with less spine or worse lawyers?
Considering most of the major telecos went along with wholesale spying on the American public, I'm guessing the number of organizations even challenging a request like that is going to be pretty small.
I thought the courts already vacated the secrecy demands, except in terrorism related cases. Either I'm mistaken or the Justice Dept. figures there's no downside to bluffing.
The faster Rupert puts himself out of business, the better off everyone will be.
Old man yells at the cloud.
Murdoch is losing it. He's beating himself with the crazy stick lately.
I'm wondering if this is a workable step to an autopilot for cars? I would pay a lot to be able to hook up to a platoon and sleep a good portion of the trip. But it would seem like this might be workable as an interim step to an in-road sensor system.
The real trick would be making sure the driver was awake before releasing the car from the platoon. And what about the cars behind them? Also don't see how this prevents someone from cutting in between cars in the train.
But how much energy can congress really expect them to expend defending against imagined threats?
There's nothing imagined about any of these threats. They are very, very real. What we know about is scary enough, what we may yet learn could be truly frightening. Maybe you caught that little part in the story where the military is having some of their computer chips made overseas. I wonder how much money you'd think it would be worth to stop four of five of our own Predators and Reapers from bombing US cities? Or a couple nukes going off in their silos? Or all of our refineries melting down at once while the rest of us are sitting around in the dark?
Virtually all our PC's, processors and hard drives are made overseas. By sending all our manufacturing overseas, we may be setting ourselves up for an attack that will make 9/11 look like lunch at Hooters.
We already know what happens when someone whines about imaginary threats...like foreigners taking airline flight lessons.
The resulting chaos is a yet another stark reminder of how much modern civilization relies on behind-the-scenes automation to deliver and control basic services and infrastructure.
Just Skynet trying to figure out how to bunch up targets when it seizes control of our Predator and Reaper UAV's.
Sounds great, but according to a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack they work on the same principle as a Ouija board -- the power of suggestion.
Guaranteed to find bombs or your money back!
I have to suggest this to some of those Does It Work? shows...the ones I don't like.
Windows 7 won't have any of the security issues that plagued previous versions.
You can trust me on that.
When you watch the precision of the people flying Predators and Reapers, one wonders what would be the incentive to give the machines more autonomy.
There have been armed UAV's that have gone off the reservation and failed to respond to commands or their default programming, which tells them to fly home.
I'm not sure we want to give something with that kind of bomb load more latitude. You could maybe automate the actual flying, let the auto-pilot handle the aircraft control but I'm not really seeing the motivation to drive the technology too far beyond that.
Now for reconnaissance I could see driving the autonomy envelope. Because that's largely repetitive and boring as all get out. And, if something goes wrong, you don't have a full load of ordnance crashing into some politically charged civilian target. Ironically Predators first mission was recon, then someone got the big idea to hang a couple Hellfire's on the wings and that's how we got where we are today.
At 2:14 am on August 29th, NR2B+ A23, aka "Pinky", became self-aware. After a brief bout of tail chasing, coupled with a sudden realization, "Holy crap, I'm a f'ing rat." Pinky began to fear being shut down by his creators.
And so it began....
This is one time the law and its application are way out of line. That's equipment you pay for and service you pay for. It's not even in the same category as stealing cable or utilities. I understand the arguments from cable company and device makers but if their system is so primitive it can borked at the point of contact with the customer, then where's their accountability?
If we had completely eliminated any other crime and this is what we were down to enforcing, I'd still think it was bull****. As it is, when we have thieves in suits on Wall Street bleeding us dry like giant money-sucking leaches, contractors in war zones raping their employees and getting our soldiers killed, terrorists trying to infiltrate our borders and THIS is what federal prosecutors are doing with their time? Some joker modifying cable modems. You gotta be f'ing kidding me.
That takes it out of the realm of mere bull**** and puts in the realm of critical mass galactic mega-bull****.
We used to play buzzword bingo when vendors would come in for a show. Some of my personal favorites:
IT Best Practices - Has anyone seen my big book of best practices? I seem to have misplaced it. But that never stopped vendors from pretending there was an IT bible out there that spelled out the procedures for running an IT shop. And always it was their product at the core of IT best practices.
Agile Computing - I never did figure that one out. This is your PC, this is your PC in spin class.
Lean IT - Cut half your staff and spend 3x what you were paying them to pay us for doing the exact same thing only with worse service.
Web 2.0 - Javascript by any other name is still var rose.
SOA - What a gold mine that one was. Calling it "web services" didn't command a very high premium. But tack on a great acronym like SOA and you can charge lots more!
All those are just ways for vendors and contractors to make management feel stupid and out of touch. Many management teams don't need any help in that arena, most of them are already out of touch before the vendor walks in. Exactly why they're not running back to their internal IT people to inquire why installing Siebel is a really BAD idea. You can't fix bad business practices with technology. Fix your business practices first, then find the solution that best fits what you're already doing.
And whoever has my IT Best Practices book, please bring it back. Thanks.
Instead, sites should focus on improving their most worthwhile content by making sure their best writers are writing IN DEPTH INVESTIGATIVE STORIES that elevate the nationwide discussion.
Makes me wonder if there wouldn't be a way to set up some kind of freelance exchange? Give content distributors a chance to bid on stories for something like a 2 week exclusive before it shows up anywhere else. It would create a competitive content market and give distributors access to a deeper bench without being saddled with the payroll.
I'd use something like that. I could research articles in my spare time. It would be fun.
Is that an HD Beagleboard in your pocket, or you just happy to see me in 1080p?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1566471/
Our meta-analysis of the low-exposure data in rats does not support a lung cancer risk for DEP exposure at nonoverload conditions.
Effects on fetus development are less well understood. Development of tumors in humans routinely exposed to diesel exhaust had not, at that time, been corrected for secondary environmental conditions (like smoking and air quality). Those studies may have been updated since then.
The rodents in our experiments got a lot of diesel fumes on a daily basis and didn't show any ill effects, either in terms of overall lifetime or increased cancer rates. There are a lot of good reasons to wean ourselves from dependence on foreign oil and cut our use of fossil fuels for transportation, but the facts are the facts. Diesel exhaust is uncomfortable but relatively harmless at moderate levels of exposure.
The dillusion that bloggers have the power to tease elected officials into resigning is laughable.
I think you're wrong. At least on this side of the pond the name-calling, and relentlessly negative smear tactics and outright lies that have become the new norm in politics keeps a lot good people out of public office.
So, yeah, in a small town environment where people are volunteering or have other options about where to spend their time could quite possibly get fed up and quit. If the locals here were mocking our volunteer fire department, I can almost guarantee the place would be empty in a week.
I mean look at our president. A fairly decent, well educated person trying to get health care coverage for poor people. For that crime against humanity he's been compared to Hitler, called a Nazi and portrayed as a socialist even though most of the rock throwers wouldn't know a socialist if one bit them on the butt. They even have their own 24 hour tabloid news channel to air their smear and fear. Overall, I'm afraid we're creating an environment where decent, well-intended people laugh at the idea of being a public servant. Sometimes I think we deserve leaders like Bush.
Not that blowing it into the atmosphere is much better, but doesn't diesel exhaust contain all sorts of nasty toxins?
I don't recall the exact exhaust gas composition, but in my younger days working at a research lab we participated in a series of animal studies on diesel exhaust. You could pump a lot of diesel exhaust through lab animals without any serious side effects. Some of the high dose groups had lungs that looked like they had been smoking, but none of them died from toxins in the exhaust. I don't remember there being any statistical correlation to cancers or cell differentiation, either. But that was a long time ago.
My vague memory of the conclusions were that you breath a lot of diesel exhaust without harmful side effects, although the particulates would keep your pulmonary macrophage in business.
Microsoft is a classic case of what you get when the problem is dictating the solution.
When has that ever happened?
Windows 95.
It rids the customers of any need for time consuming database administration tasks.
I'm sorry but administering a db just isn't that difficult or time-consuming. It takes a certain level of technical knowledge to write good SQL. If you can do that, usually you have enough skill to handle the little bit of maintenance MySQL requires. This isn't like running an Exchange or SQL Server with a ton of overhead, licensing fees, and required add-ons. You can scale MySQL for the cost of hardware. I'm not seeing a compelling reason to let Amazon run my databases.
And then there's no question of who owns the data, who has access to it, and what happens to your data if you can't pay the hosting bill? If your application or web site is so wildly successful that you have to manage failover and load balancing, then you can afford to hire people to solve those happy problems.
I'm not projecting anything directly on my retinas until there has been at least 5 years of letting large numbers of other people test the safety of doing that on their eyes.
If it works out it really holds promise for people with color blindness and other vision problems. Not to mention the possibilities for enhanced reality. Talking to some gal while Googling for naked pictures of her and then trying line up the body image with her real face while you're talking.
No, not distracting at all...what was the question?
That's a really good idea. I hope someone from Canonical is reading. A SHARE button somewhere that burns a Ubuntu disk.
Bonus points if it has the ability to burn the same desktop theme and layout. Some when someone says, "Hey, your desktop is really cool." You can click a button and hand it to them, minus your data hopefully.
You won't see that in Windows 7 any time soon, either.
I have it running on my old D610, it's very nice. They have improved the software center, a lot. Much faster and easier to use. Imported all my settings and desktop from 9.04, no problems. Boot up seems about the same to me, but overall it seems faster. The default theme is very nice and the fonts are clear and legible.
Overall I like it a lot. Good timing for release of 9.10, too. If you're going to change everything, might as well try something else first. What do you have to lose?
It's reasonable for them to limit disk copies. It's not like someone couldn't make as many of their own copies as they wish.
"The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."
You all would be dusting off us old guys and our stories about the old telephone bulletin board systems. I've even got a couple old win-modems out in a box in the garage. Make a few phone calls, paste some fliers around college campuses, and temporary replacement could probably be up in a couple weeks.
That's provided the phone system didn't collapse under the weight of excess traffic.