Be glad, at least someone blew the whistle. How many votes from other nations do you think could be somehow influenced and nothing done about it? Yeah yeah I'll grab my tinfoil hat:-p
April fools is also the perfect time to practice those social engineering techniques, this year, I am going to try to make a lot of authoritative posts on slashdot that start off like "I am a biology PhD candidate at UCLA and you are wrong because. .." that are quite believable at first, but slowly become more and more absurd, finally ending with a sig that is a disclaimer in case anyone REALLY missed it. Bookmark my profile if you like:-p
I've done a lot but I think my favorite one was when I was in 6th grade or so. My father usually got up at around 7:00 to take me to school at 8. I went into his room (very sneakily) and set his clock an hour forward wearing my backpack, spring jacket, etc. I then turned on the lights, woke him up and said, "Dad, you have to take me to school, I have a presentation!" and then quickly went downstairs as if I too was in a hurry. He looked at the clock (displaying 7:55) and promptly jumped out of bed frantically trying to get ready. I could have easily let it continue till we were actually at school by switching his car clock too and everything (it was a cloudy day so the sun wouldn't have been able to clue him), but I decided to let him know after he got dressed and was about to jump in the car:)
Moral of the story: 1) Get it in as early as possible: chances are by the end of the day they probably are more suspicious. 2) Know your victim: my father knew how much I hate getting up early in the morning, he would find it really hard to believe I would wake up before I had to. 3) Make it plausable: We all have at some point screwed up in setting our alarms, the scenario I created could have very well actually happened. Be mindful of details. 4) Don't be cruel: Let them in on it after it is apparent they fell for it before they start really acting on what you fooled them with. Don't make them afraid for their life or anything crazy like that.
My father is a smart man that isn't easily deceived, I have spent many years refining my technique.
An elitist bastard that enjoys pointing out errors that no one else caught because they got the correct meaning anyways. Grammar Nazis also the only known exemption to Godwin's law.
I think a better way to think of it is that given any position, you can solve it in 25 moves or less. There are many algorithms that you can use to solve rubik's cubes, applying a general rule to solve any position, but they can take ~60 moves in some situations. So while it may be possible (completely intuitive guessing here, I'm no rubik master) to solve for a certain position in 25 moves it may be non-intuitive and require a specific strategy to that position. You're better off learning one of the more general algorithms IMO, if you get good at it you can solve cubes rather quickly. A computer on the other hand could easily ha
Ironically enough, I think the most inappropriate smiley ever was on another Slashdot post that also was concerning atomic bombs. It's hard not to laugh but I don't think even Stephen Colbert would go there.
I think Whitespace is worth learning, if only to be a smartass on exams where the prof specifies you may use "any" programming language. Just leave it blank, then after the exam spend a few hours figuring out how the hell you would solve the problem in whitespace, and bring a proof of concept on a USB flashdrive to fight the inevitable incorrect grade you receive for the problem.
I have yet to find the courage to actually attempt this. . .
HAHA. I ofcourse wanted to make sure some wise-ass AC couldn't just reply "TFS said xxx wrote it, dumbass" and decided to reply to my own post as a karma whoring and face saving measure. Ofcourse I was elated to see it was written by Roland Piquepaille. If that name doesn't ring a bell you might want to research slashdot memes, or at the very least, consult tinfoil hat wearing slashdotters who are concerned with the story approval process.
The most interesting part of the story is that the existing gas stations would not need to be modified to distribute hydrogen. With these nanoparticle coatings, car owners could make their own hydrogen, either in their garage or even when driving.
Ok, so gas stations don't need to be modified because they will be deprecated? Thats the worst (or best. . . largest in magnitude) spin I've seen in a while. Might as well just omit anything about gas stations or just say "technology would be independent of current gasoline infrastructure".
Also, I don't see anything that mentions storage. To my knowledge, storage of hydrogen is a tricky business. What good is making fuel at home if it'll only last you 10 miles? I'm sure there are plenty of advances in the storage of hydrogen, but lets try to keep the summary relevant to the article. What is described (yes I read TFA) is a way to make metal with loads of surface area, that has applications in electrolyzing water. Also, TFA mentions the other applications of this new technology such as better chemical batteries. Non rechargables that perform 5x better than standard alkaline batteries and NiMH that perform better than current lithium batteries. One could argue that the battery technology application is more important due to the immediate applications, yet it was absent in the summary.
Why did they buy ATI?
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I was wondering if anyone could explain to me why they purchased ATI. They spent oodles of money to R&D the new quad core architecture to really be a seamless 4 core proc that shared caches etc. Intel just slapped two dual cores together and shipped that. Turns out that in benchmarks for consumer programs, intel's stuff works quite well. AMD's cache sharing and topology of memory access that seems better for true multithreaded applications is irrelevant and occasionally a hinderance when you're running multiple single threaded programs. So they spend oodles on R&D and may not see that much of a return until apps can utilize it better. ..Then they go off and buy ATI? Wouldn't it make sense to hang onto money a bit more than just purchase another company? Could that move end up dragging ATI down too?
I think the idea here is to stop Comcast from injecting their own RST packets into the stream, effectively killing the connection from both sides. Every time an ISP implements a harsh countermeasure, they force the evolution of the protocol. I see this simple as the next logical step in the constant pull and tug of P2P and ISP's. Still, kudos for these guys doing this stuff. I'm sure Blizzard will like hearing that their updates are hindered on Comcast's networks while P2P data has an easier time.
Yeah, After reading the article, I just can't comprehend how this is a good idea. What ever happened to think of the children? Imagine a mother leaving her child next to once of these devices because she couldn't hear it. I don't think starting a war with the younger generation is a great way to solve young people assembling. ..no really, from TFA:
"What police find is that rather than one group of 20 or [3]0 kids in one location they will split into smaller groups and the smaller groups cause less problems. Of course it doesn't solve the long-term problem, but it does what it says on the box. It disperses the large groups."
I find that statement extremely unnerving. So a group of people of a certain age getting together is always a bad thing? Is it possible that other age groups also would not have the ability to assembly (wrong side of the pond, I know)? What ever happened to just posting signs and asking people to leave and finally contacting the police if there was still a problem. Could teenagers respond by playing their heavy metal "music" at the same level wherever they are.
I'm sure there are other noises that can be created that are within noise pollution laws that annoy older folk too. That way everyone is annoyed and nothing is solved. How convenient technology can be, why interact with other people at all when you can just drive them off using a device that exploits a statistical correlation with the group you don't like. Best Idea Ever.
"What type of society uses a low-level sonic weapon on its children? Imagine the outcry if a device was introduced that caused blanket discomfort to people of one race or gender, rather than to our kids,"
</angry-sarcasm>Ok then, glad to see someone sensible is leading the charge
It's more like having a professional sniper taking out the competitors.
My favorite analogy: It's more like AT&T interrupting a phone call to your buddy, faking his voice to you and saying "Oh sorry, gotta go" and hanging up. As if that weren't bad enough it fakes your voice to your buddy doing the same thing. This is fraud, they inject RST packets and make it look like it's legitimate traffic from the other computer. It's an awful way to do QoS if it can even be construed as such. Why don't they just add in nice shaping rules like everyone else?
This is actually a very good point, a network is only as strong as its weakest link (or firewall). While each machine on a network may be secure, hijacking a printer can do the same amount of damage as hacking any other machine on the network (save actual servers w/ data on them). Imagine hijacking a printer on a network and then having it send out spam (hey, its on superreliabledomain.com, no reason to hastily toss it in the spam bucket), or arp poisoning to listen in on other traffic on the network it should have no business with. Any device connected to a network should meet a certain standard of security, it only takes one weak link to really mess things up.
Heh, yeah. . ..I used to hook up my computer using Rybka to yahoo chess. I played against other bots, other players(always a glorious win), and tolerated the unending spam from other bots that would just want you to go to some porn website. Eventually, they instituted a CAPTCHA. ..Oh noes, my bot was broken. Turns out I could just manually enter the CAPTCHA and grab the session ID info before the applet loaded and forward that manually to the bot. Once I'm "logged in" with the bot, it's no big deal. Point is: If a spammer has to type in one CAPTCHA and can then spam for days in God knows how many chat rooms. . is it really that effective? Should we interrupt logged in users with more CAPTCHA's? Quite the interesting problem indeed, perhaps some sort of feedback where people would mark someone as a bot, if enough people did it, it would present the bot with a CAPTCHA. *shrug*
Because emotions and instinct are (arguably less precise) ways of processing information that don't require much "thinking". Instead of emotions, imagine a state-manager. If the robot is malfunctioning a certain way, it sets a "paranoia" or "defensive" boolean value that is used to shortcut further decisions, ultimately affecting the behavior on a global scale in a relatively quick way. Given a certain risky challenge it might take on under normal circumstances it might choose not to because it is "afraid". All in all this would most likely be a desired behavior.
However, I'm not sure you'll find that answer good enough, it seems you're more concerned about robots becoming to autonomous and not obeying the will of their creators. You could easily just manually change emotions (erm. . state values) and the algorithms that define them, etc. Think of it as putting your robot on anti-depressants.
If we want robots to do our bidding then just use computers of today. If you want to give a robot a task and have it think for itself instead of waiting for more detailed instructions from you. ..that will require autonomy which inherently has the risk of the robot not doing things exactly the way you envisioned. What if the robot has more information than you and is in a better position to make a decision? I think you've watched too many movies with robots that kill without moral compunction.
I don't give a shit. And I mean that in the most literal, non-idiomatic way. If I had a pile of turds in my back yard, and you were to walk up to me and say, "Excuse me, sir, if you would let me relieve you of one of these useless pieces of feces I could guarantee a resolution to the Y2K38 computer issue," I would simply reply, "I'm sorry, but those are my shits, and I'm not giving one."
You are clearly a person who has their shit together.
Yes, and prior to his mass defecation in his own back yard he must have been quite full of shit.
You know, in order to send 56K over the phone line you must have a digital hookup on the other end. So dial up customers can receive data at 56K because AOL or whoever has a digital hookup to the telco, but you can only transmit at ~33K. Aliasing frequencies and all that. I highly doubt you can transmit at 56k with an analog channel. Nonetheless, I'd like to see a benchmark of your. . erm. . mouth?
I see banner ads now whenever I click a comment to expand it, don't recall that being there before, maybe it's that. Also, in protest of the new banner ads, I click every single one, I encourage you to do the same.
Why for example do they confiscate tubes of toothpaste or shampoo bottles potentially containing explosive materials, only to throw them out in the trash unchecked?
OK, I here this meme all the time and it's finally annoyed me to post something. It's a preventative measure. A terrorist going to an airport wouldn't be able to easily take in liquid explosives (or otherwise nasty liquid chemicals) by stuffing them into toothpaste tube or shampoo bottle. Checking ALL the confiscated items would be prohibitively expensive and would almost definitely be entirely fruitless. As a terrorist, why would you take a shampoo bottle filled with napalm if you know it will just be confiscated? So long as we are looking for explosives in shampoo bottles we won't find any there. A terrorist will have to figure out another (probably less effective yet clever) way to smuggle such material in. IMO, it's to make it more challenging to take hazardous chemicals onboard a plane. Personally I agree with your first statement that a simple mindset and procedural change (along with a weapon or two for the pilots perhaps) would have been enough to prevent another 9-11 like disaster. I just hate the way you fail to acknowledge that the TSA isn't entirely stupid. Reminds me of all those anti-drug campaigns talking about how marijuana forces you to commit crimes.
I was talking to a gentleman from (big name hard drive company) about their plans for hybrid and/or solid state drives. Essentially he told me that solid state was still limited by price and sequential reading. So it may be advantageous to put some things on flash like OS files that require a lot of random seeks, but for sequential reading of things like media files, traditional hard drive tech won't die just yet . ..I apologize for being too lazy to back this stuff up with numbers, what can I say, I'm a true slahsdotter.
Slashdot Mirror
Be glad, at least someone blew the whistle. How many votes from other nations do you think could be somehow influenced and nothing done about it? Yeah yeah I'll grab my tinfoil hat :-p
April fools is also the perfect time to practice those social engineering techniques, this year, I am going to try to make a lot of authoritative posts on slashdot that start off like "I am a biology PhD candidate at UCLA and you are wrong because. . ." that are quite believable at first, but slowly become more and more absurd, finally ending with a sig that is a disclaimer in case anyone REALLY missed it. Bookmark my profile if you like :-p
Moral of the story:
1) Get it in as early as possible: chances are by the end of the day they probably are more suspicious.
2) Know your victim: my father knew how much I hate getting up early in the morning, he would find it really hard to believe I would wake up before I had to.
3) Make it plausable: We all have at some point screwed up in setting our alarms, the scenario I created could have very well actually happened. Be mindful of details.
4) Don't be cruel: Let them in on it after it is apparent they fell for it before they start really acting on what you fooled them with. Don't make them afraid for their life or anything crazy like that.
My father is a smart man that isn't easily deceived, I have spent many years refining my technique.
ck therefore I will end the travesty that I started. I quickly posted the rest of my post anyways...geez.
A grammar Nazi is -
An elitist bastard that enjoys pointing out errors that no one else caught because they got the correct meaning anyways. Grammar Nazis also the only known exemption to Godwin's law.
sh the starting positions and use a simple lookup table after enumerating all the possible starting positions and moves to solve.
I think a better way to think of it is that given any position, you can solve it in 25 moves or less. There are many algorithms that you can use to solve rubik's cubes, applying a general rule to solve any position, but they can take ~60 moves in some situations. So while it may be possible (completely intuitive guessing here, I'm no rubik master) to solve for a certain position in 25 moves it may be non-intuitive and require a specific strategy to that position. You're better off learning one of the more general algorithms IMO, if you get good at it you can solve cubes rather quickly. A computer on the other hand could easily ha
Ironically enough, I think the most inappropriate smiley ever was on another Slashdot post that also was concerning atomic bombs. It's hard not to laugh but I don't think even Stephen Colbert would go there.
:)
I think Whitespace is worth learning, if only to be a smartass on exams where the prof specifies you may use "any" programming language. Just leave it blank, then after the exam spend a few hours figuring out how the hell you would solve the problem in whitespace, and bring a proof of concept on a USB flashdrive to fight the inevitable incorrect grade you receive for the problem.
I have yet to find the courage to actually attempt this. . .
Why not? Sun's Sparc processors already are.
HAHA. I ofcourse wanted to make sure some wise-ass AC couldn't just reply "TFS said xxx wrote it, dumbass" and decided to reply to my own post as a karma whoring and face saving measure. Ofcourse I was elated to see it was written by Roland Piquepaille. If that name doesn't ring a bell you might want to research slashdot memes, or at the very least, consult tinfoil hat wearing slashdotters who are concerned with the story approval process.
Ok, so gas stations don't need to be modified because they will be deprecated? Thats the worst (or best. . . largest in magnitude) spin I've seen in a while. Might as well just omit anything about gas stations or just say "technology would be independent of current gasoline infrastructure".
Also, I don't see anything that mentions storage. To my knowledge, storage of hydrogen is a tricky business. What good is making fuel at home if it'll only last you 10 miles? I'm sure there are plenty of advances in the storage of hydrogen, but lets try to keep the summary relevant to the article. What is described (yes I read TFA) is a way to make metal with loads of surface area, that has applications in electrolyzing water. Also, TFA mentions the other applications of this new technology such as better chemical batteries. Non rechargables that perform 5x better than standard alkaline batteries and NiMH that perform better than current lithium batteries. One could argue that the battery technology application is more important due to the immediate applications, yet it was absent in the summary.
I was wondering if anyone could explain to me why they purchased ATI. They spent oodles of money to R&D the new quad core architecture to really be a seamless 4 core proc that shared caches etc. Intel just slapped two dual cores together and shipped that. Turns out that in benchmarks for consumer programs, intel's stuff works quite well. AMD's cache sharing and topology of memory access that seems better for true multithreaded applications is irrelevant and occasionally a hinderance when you're running multiple single threaded programs. So they spend oodles on R&D and may not see that much of a return until apps can utilize it better. . .Then they go off and buy ATI? Wouldn't it make sense to hang onto money a bit more than just purchase another company? Could that move end up dragging ATI down too?
I think the idea here is to stop Comcast from injecting their own RST packets into the stream, effectively killing the connection from both sides. Every time an ISP implements a harsh countermeasure, they force the evolution of the protocol. I see this simple as the next logical step in the constant pull and tug of P2P and ISP's. Still, kudos for these guys doing this stuff. I'm sure Blizzard will like hearing that their updates are hindered on Comcast's networks while P2P data has an easier time.
I find that statement extremely unnerving. So a group of people of a certain age getting together is always a bad thing? Is it possible that other age groups also would not have the ability to assembly (wrong side of the pond, I know)? What ever happened to just posting signs and asking people to leave and finally contacting the police if there was still a problem. Could teenagers respond by playing their heavy metal "music" at the same level wherever they are. I'm sure there are other noises that can be created that are within noise pollution laws that annoy older folk too. That way everyone is annoyed and nothing is solved. How convenient technology can be, why interact with other people at all when you can just drive them off using a device that exploits a statistical correlation with the group you don't like. Best Idea Ever.
</angry-sarcasm>Ok then, glad to see someone sensible is leading the charge
Wow. . .uhm. . .yeah, definitely going to have to RTFA on this one, sounds way too easy to agree with. Gotta get in a first post first though.
My favorite analogy: It's more like AT&T interrupting a phone call to your buddy, faking his voice to you and saying "Oh sorry, gotta go" and hanging up. As if that weren't bad enough it fakes your voice to your buddy doing the same thing. This is fraud, they inject RST packets and make it look like it's legitimate traffic from the other computer. It's an awful way to do QoS if it can even be construed as such. Why don't they just add in nice shaping rules like everyone else?
This is actually a very good point, a network is only as strong as its weakest link (or firewall). While each machine on a network may be secure, hijacking a printer can do the same amount of damage as hacking any other machine on the network (save actual servers w/ data on them). Imagine hijacking a printer on a network and then having it send out spam (hey, its on superreliabledomain.com, no reason to hastily toss it in the spam bucket), or arp poisoning to listen in on other traffic on the network it should have no business with. Any device connected to a network should meet a certain standard of security, it only takes one weak link to really mess things up.
Heh, yeah. . . .I used to hook up my computer using Rybka to yahoo chess. I played against other bots, other players(always a glorious win), and tolerated the unending spam from other bots that would just want you to go to some porn website. Eventually, they instituted a CAPTCHA. . .Oh noes, my bot was broken. Turns out I could just manually enter the CAPTCHA and grab the session ID info before the applet loaded and forward that manually to the bot. Once I'm "logged in" with the bot, it's no big deal. Point is: If a spammer has to type in one CAPTCHA and can then spam for days in God knows how many chat rooms. . is it really that effective? Should we interrupt logged in users with more CAPTCHA's? Quite the interesting problem indeed, perhaps some sort of feedback where people would mark someone as a bot, if enough people did it, it would present the bot with a CAPTCHA. *shrug*
Because emotions and instinct are (arguably less precise) ways of processing information that don't require much "thinking". Instead of emotions, imagine a state-manager. If the robot is malfunctioning a certain way, it sets a "paranoia" or "defensive" boolean value that is used to shortcut further decisions, ultimately affecting the behavior on a global scale in a relatively quick way. Given a certain risky challenge it might take on under normal circumstances it might choose not to because it is "afraid". All in all this would most likely be a desired behavior.
.that will require autonomy which inherently has the risk of the robot not doing things exactly the way you envisioned. What if the robot has more information than you and is in a better position to make a decision? I think you've watched too many movies with robots that kill without moral compunction.
However, I'm not sure you'll find that answer good enough, it seems you're more concerned about robots becoming to autonomous and not obeying the will of their creators. You could easily just manually change emotions (erm. . state values) and the algorithms that define them, etc. Think of it as putting your robot on anti-depressants.
If we want robots to do our bidding then just use computers of today. If you want to give a robot a task and have it think for itself instead of waiting for more detailed instructions from you. .
Yes, and prior to his mass defecation in his own back yard he must have been quite full of shit.
You know, in order to send 56K over the phone line you must have a digital hookup on the other end. So dial up customers can receive data at 56K because AOL or whoever has a digital hookup to the telco, but you can only transmit at ~33K. Aliasing frequencies and all that. I highly doubt you can transmit at 56k with an analog channel. Nonetheless, I'd like to see a benchmark of your. . erm. . mouth?
I see banner ads now whenever I click a comment to expand it, don't recall that being there before, maybe it's that. Also, in protest of the new banner ads, I click every single one, I encourage you to do the same.
I was talking to a gentleman from (big name hard drive company) about their plans for hybrid and/or solid state drives. Essentially he told me that solid state was still limited by price and sequential reading. So it may be advantageous to put some things on flash like OS files that require a lot of random seeks, but for sequential reading of things like media files, traditional hard drive tech won't die just yet . . .I apologize for being too lazy to back this stuff up with numbers, what can I say, I'm a true slahsdotter.