You suggest that MITM attacks on SSL are as bad as someone sniffing on unencrypted traffic. It is not! MITM attacks are active attacks and are much more invasive to carry out.
Is "false security" better or worse than "no security"? I don't think there's a simple one-size-fits-all answer to that - it depends on the type of threat and who the target is. If the bad guys want to snoop on an individual over a period of time, then traffic sniffing probably is easier. If its an organised gang going after money then MITMing a major ecommerce or banking site might be far more effective - and only needs to be in place for an hour or two to collect enough paydirt.
Anyway, the headline was "Is Firefox now the most secure mobile browser" not "Is Firefox the most betterer-than-nothing mobile browser". Browsers display nice reassuring padlocks and tell users that "the connection to this website is secure" not "meh, well, its probably safe from casual snooping, but if anybody organised is after you or whoever you're connecting to then you're basically screwed."
I love that ARM didn't initially go head to head with Intel and thus ended up not getting crushed by them (think transmeta/AMD).
Actually, they did start out (as Acorn) by going head-to-head with Intel. Others have mentioned Acorn but not really pointed out that the original 1987 ARM was a credible competitor to the 80286 and 68000. (By "credible competitor" I mean "left the 68k and 286 choking on its dust"). It was only ever really used in that way in the Acorn Archemedes and RiscPC which never made it big outside of the UK - although it outlived most of the other non-Wintel personal computers.
OK - when ARM was spun off they did, as you say, rather sensibly, end up going after the embedded market, but ARM might never have happened if Acorn had gone with the 80286 for their BBC Micro successor.
Another problem identified just five years ago is that the eyeballs of at least some astronauts became somewhat squashed.... 'We uncovered something that has been right under our noses forever.'
I'm not a doctor, but if your eyeballs have always been under your nose then I suspect you have a pre-existing condition. Don't blame space.
To be fair, in zero gravity, it's easy to get confused about 'under' and 'over'.
This sounds a lot like the "Pizza is a vegetable" nonsense I remember reading about a few years ago.
Hold the cheese and pepperoni and, maybe... leaving only the Godwin-esque issue of whether a tomato is a vegetable...
But seriously folks, I don't think anybody is claiming that "computer languages == foreign languages" in any practical sense, just that they're equally valid as an indicator of intelligence and employability.
Water is H2O - the air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other stuff. I don't see 'N' in the H2O equation. Humans cannot survive with pure oxygen. This is bogus.
The "James Bond Mouthpiece" idea is definitely bogus.
However, assuming (for the sake of argument) you could extract oxygen from water in useful quantities, I suppose you could take a rebreather apparatus (which scrubs out the excess CO2 and recycles the nitrogen and unused oxygen) and use your artificial gills to help keep the oxygen levels topped up.
I'm pretty sure the UK is still in the EU (even if it doesn't like to admit it), and none of those things have happened here.
Agreed. Before the "ban" CFLs were ~£10 or more - and that was 12+ years ago when £10 was worth £10. Then some stores started cost-cutting to ~£5 (I got a load from Ikea). Then my power company sent me half-a-dozen bulbs for free. Now basic CFL bulbs cost the same as a packet of washing powder. I don't know whether the advertised figures are correct - but I've only had to replace one or two "early deaths" in the last 10 years, so they definitely last several times longer than incandescent, so by the time you factor in the power savings, its an absolute no-brainer - the "ban" is almost irrelevant.
The only thing that does annoy me about the EU regs is the over-statement of the "equivalent wattage" and that it seems the only available table/desk lamps now have the "small screw" fitting and you can't seem to get bigger than a 8W "40W equivalent" bulb to fit. These lamps would have been limited to 40W incandescents in the past, but the laws of phyiscs kinda suggest that they would be perfectly safe with a 20W CFL (theoretically equivalent to 100W but probably more like 60W in the real world).
Since both are sooo similar, why should electronics hardware be patentable and software not?
Because the only purported purpose of patents is to promote science and innovation, and there is a metric shedload of empirical evidence that software patents are actually being used to suppress innovation. Also, software is well-covered by copyright - which also restricts the usefulness of the 'disclosure' that is part of the quid-pro-quo of receiving patent protection.
Don't get stuck on the "software is mathematics" tar baby. Yes, software is mathematics - for given definitions of "software", "mathematics" and "is", none of which would have occurred to the people who drafted the patent system years before Russell, Goedel, Turing and all that, and none of which would be understood by judges or juries. Lawyers can easily do an end run around by hair-splitting between mathematics and the application of mathematics (or see the EU "computer-implemented invention" dodge). Plus, as you point out, the argument would logically extend to much of electronics and other fields where the patented "artefact" could be replaced by a general-purpose device running equivalent software: no way is that going to get through the system.
Not that patent trolling is restricted to software patents - but software seems to be the "miner's canary" that dies first. As noted above, it is already well protected by copyright law. Patent offices appear to be uniquely incapable of spotting overbroad or obvious software patents. The software industry is already prone to monopolistic practices because of data lock-in - patents strengthen such monopolies. Software lends itself well to unique 'zero marginal cost' business models such as Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech, Open Source or just plain cheap, which have been major drivers of innovation (See: the internet, the world-wide-web, the various free operating systems): having to pay even modest royalties on a laundry-list of patents is poison to such schemes. (C.f. an electronic device, where patents might add a few percent to the per-unit cost, where they weren't already included in the cost of components).
Patents have no particular moral or abstract philosophical basis - they were introduced (ostensibly) for pragmatic reasons, so the argument against them should also be pragmatic - not an angels-on-a-pinhead argument like "software is mathematics".
(NB: the "software is mathematics" argument, based on the specific exclusion of mathematics from patentability, isn't quite the same as the "you can't patent a list of instructions" argument which has had some success against "business method" patents).
Re:Warning! - Socialism ahead.
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"The only universal medicine (Marxists) have for social evils - State ownership of the means of production - is not only perfectly compatible with all the disasters of the capitalist world: with exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery, economic waste, national hatred and national oppression, but it adds to them a series of disasters of its own: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and above all the unrestricted rule of the omnipresent bureaucracy, a concentration of power never before known in human history".
-- Leszek Kolakowski
The current alternative to socialism: global hyper-capitalism - is not only perfectly compatible with all the disasters of the socialist world: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and above all the unrestricted control of supposedly democratic governments by unaccountable multinational corporations , a concentration of power never before known in human history, but it lacks any of the redeeming qualities of either socialism or capitalism as they were in the time of Marx. Even the "omnipresent bureaucracy" helps protect large business from any true competition by building a regulatory thicket to discourage enterprising newcomers.
Worse, we have a world where even capitalist governments such as the US recognise the need for some sort of social welfare and infrastructure program, but with the multinational corporations paying the absolute minimum in tax this has to be funded primarily by punitive taxation of middle-income earners. Moreover, most of this money is actually spend protecting the interests of those same corporations, either overtly (like the state underwriting the casino bankers when their pyramid schemes collapse) or indirectly (in welfare payments that allow businesses to employ workers without paying them enough to live).
Meanwhile, the managerial elite enjoy more "feather-bedding" than the inhabitants of the most unrealistic workers' paradise, with annual salary and bonus packages any one of which would secure a typical person for life, seeming total immunity from the consequences of their actions, any failure rewarded by windfall severance and pension packages, and all sins forgiven after a "decent interval". Yet, with a few exceptions, these are largely managers and administrators, not entrepreneurs who have created wealth by building new businesses.
As for TFA - its hard to say how much of any reduction in jobs in Western countries is connected to automation rather than the offshoring of work to developing countries still experiencing their first industrial revolution fuelled by former agriculture workers/subsistence farmers.
If you look at science fiction - particularly Iain Banks and the like - what you see is a post-scarcity form of anarcho-socialism where the means of production not only automated and virtually cost-free but distributed and democratised. That the sort of thing we need - but whether it is attainable without the fantasy plot devices available in a SF story (e.g. humanity effectively ruled by hyper-intelligent and benevolent AIs who might as well be called gods - who usually go bad in order to drive the story).
I find this ironic since the political AWG alarmism lobby deserves a lot of the blame for this
and the AWG denial lobby deserves a lot of the blame for the AWG alarmism body.
Unfortunately, when you have a well-funded denial campaign telling people what they want to hear (no problem here, ignore the commie academics, relax and enjoy your SUV) a lobby that doesn't resort to alarmism is a lobby that doesn't get listened to.
A bone fide climatologist would have made a more accurate documentary than Al Gore - which would then have been seen by an audience of, oh dozens of people who watch PBS at midnight.
Or, just wait 50-100 years until there's enough data to decide for sure whether Katrina or the polar vortex were just statistical blips or part of the AGW-predicted increase in extreme weather - if the latter then good luck building a time-machine to go back and fix the problem (hint: don't use the traditional DeLorian because if we go on using oil as if there is an infinite supply then, AGW or not, you won't be able to afford enough gas to get it up to 88 mph, and Mr Fusion is about as technically plausible as the flux capacitor) .
All this news about steam machines is great, but in the end they will compete with consoles, not with standard PCs.
Higher end of the console market + lower end of the specialist gaming PC market (which is Alienware's arena) sounds like a viable target market to me.
There's probably not enough details of these third party steam machines yet, but in principle they should be more customisable and expandable, with more up-to-date hardware than consoles. Also, (unless Dell et. al. break out the footgun and lock their boxes down), they can double as Linux PCs or dual-boot Windows if you really must.
Plus, there's the potential of a "single market" for content that covers Steam on Mac, Windows and regular Linux distros, commercial Steam Machines and home-brew SteamOs boxes.
Unfortunately Apple appears to have stopped providing security updates for older versions.
A statement that is cast into severe doubt by the continuing appearance of security updates for older versions, like Safari 6.1.1 on December 16th, Apple Remote Desktop 3.5.4 on 22 October and the lack of any claim that Apple has stopped releasing security updates in the article they link to to support their claim that Apple has stopped releasing security updates. It does talk about some of the security updates in 10.9 - a couple of which are covered by those Safari and Remote Desktop updates. As for the rest, TFA doesn't take the trouble to actually establish whether they are fixes c.f. 10.8 or fixes for issues in the 10.9 beta that was widely released to developers - so neither will I.
Now, is Apple maybe prioritising which security fixes it backports to 10.8 or earlier, and only bothering with the "OMG remote pwnage imminent" ones? Maybe. I will try and contain my fear.
Should you kill the healthy person, harvest the organs, and save the five terminal patients?
That's not the utilitarian option. Providing an unlimited supply of transplant organs would produce an unsustainable demand for expensive transplant operations and expensive aftercare (transplants do have long-term consequences you know) not to mention the social injustice caused when rich people start harvesting poor people to replace their alcohol-addled livers. On the positive side, ruling yourself out as an involuntary organ donor is a nice rationalisation for enjoying the unhealthy things in life...
I'm pretty sure that the cold equations would tell you to euthanise the five terminal patients and stop wasting time and resources that could be used saving or improving the lives of more easily treatable patients. Not that I'm advocating this, but if you're going to offer a choice between an emotional response and a cold amoral one, at least get the cold amoral option right.
Meanwhile, a less extreme option might be to make organ donation after death opt-out rather than opt-in to create a better, but manageable supply of donor organs. I hear some indecisive bastard just ran a train-load of healthy adults off a cliff to save a baby, so you should have plenty of organs!
There's a difference between "the method must be kept secret" and "the input/outputs must be kept secret."
Until you look beyond the pretty math to the messy human factors - such as how a typical person can be expected to remember a secure password such as apH03$zQ9*%fT and their reluctance to accept "tough" as an answer when they forget. Then the best open-source encryption algorithm in the world is reduced to "don't tell anybody about the envelope at the back of the filing cabinet".
If your password is all that stands between the forces of chaos and evil and some military-grade secrets or billions of untraceable dollars then I'm sure there are well-documented, probably contractual or even statutory, procedures for ensuring continuity of access should the password-holder be stabbed by a Bulgarian umbrella.
Otherwise, just write the bloody thing down and keep it wherever you put other important documents - if the bad guys get physical access to your computer and paper records, especially without you knowing you're probably humped anyway.
Or if you want perfect security, learn to live with the consequential risk that you might lock yourself out rather than introducing deliberate backdoors or involving third parties. You can't create a way of accessing your account without knowing the password without, er, creating a way of accessing your account without knowing the password.
NOOOO!!!! it was conspiracy theorists , you have to have a fresh conspiracy at new year!
but everybody knows that conspiracy theorists are all agents of the Black Helicopter Brigade paid to create plausible deniability for the real conspiracies.
Proof? No, you have a hypothesis and a single point of data.
If only he had a hypothesis (men in black kill hacker to shut him up*) and two points of data: (A) Hacker about to give a speech, (B) hacker dies from overdose - then it would be much more compelling.
(*despite knowing that "Hacker gives talk on hacking pacemakers" = page 5 just under the skateboarding duck whereas "Hacker dies mysteriously on eve of controversial speech" is at least worth a side column on page 1.)
Remember - this was Asimov's idea for storing large amounts of data. The office ENIAC would address data by reading microscopic vibrations set going within a large tank of mercury..
Sounds like the next step up from a bit of real ~1950 technology - the mercury delay line. Probably more plausible at the time than making valves - or even those new-fangled transistors - small and reliable enough to make fully electronic memory.
It no more "looks like" an anti-gravity system than does the Bernoulli effect when an airplane flies.
I think the point is that the absence of any visible means of support, wings, rockets, big balloons full of gas, whacking great magnets or other contrivances popularly associated with making things hang in the air - along with the failure to look like a bird - might make some people think it was an anti-gravity device. I'm sure that the first people to see a an aeroplane fly would have shouted 'anti gravity!' if birds and balloons hadn't pre-dated H.G. Wells.
Presumably, though, an actual anti-gravity system would actually look like an object flying off into space because there was no longer any centripetal force
In fact, the laws in some states demand that brick and mortar stores to honor the prices that they advertive. This includes prices that are in error! Why should online stores be treated any different?
because (even with such a law) there are practical limitations on how may $99 products can walk out the door of a bricks & mortar store for $0.99 before the error can be caught and corrected.
For an an online store, the error can go viral on social networking and by the time a human being spots the situation, there can be so many orders that they'd need to build a couple of new factories to fulfil them.
Now, if the retailer takes your $0.99 and delivers the product that's one thing (analogous to the shop taking your money and letting you walk out the door) - but when these stories crop up it is usually people whining because the retailer just refuses to honour the order (in this case, TFA is somewhat vague on whether money has been taken or products delivered).
Try and compel stores to honour those orders and I guarantee that the only winners will be the lawyers.
It was obvious from the day the Mac Pro was announced that a system containing Xeon, ECC RAM and dual FirePros would cost $6 - $10k if you priced up the components, and that if Apple brought it in at a comparable price to the old Pro it could be made to sound like a bargain, and putting it all into a tiny tube was the icing on the cake.
The real issue is whether those features bring any real advantages to you - particularly those two GPUs. What seems pretty well established is that 'workstation class GPUs' like FirePro and Quadro are nothing special unless they're paired with pro applications that have been optimised for them, and that part of the 'premium' is for the pro (windows) drivers, and stability features like ECC RAM. We're really still waiting for the in-depth teardown to determine what those Mac Pro GPU cards really are, how they compare to PC FirePro cards in terms of clock speed, ECC RAM etc., whether the OS X drivers are any good and whether they can do Crossfire (which might make them more impressive for games). Otherwise, 'FirePro' is just a sticker (which Apple will leave off rather than sully the shiny case).
I suspect the vast majority of Slashdot readers, if they built a PC, would just go for an i7, a couple of 'consumer' GPUs and non-ECC RAM unless they really, really needed that secret 'workstation-class' sauce - which would be a fraction of the cost, and isn't something Apple really has an offering for (unless you want an iMac with built in display, or a Mac Mini reliant on the integrated GPU). The reason that Apple don't offer such a thing is that there's no bloody money in competing directly with such generic commodity low-margin hardware - it would look expensive c.f. Dell et, al. and/or cannibalise sales of higher-margin laptops, SFF and workstation systems. It will be interesting to see what happens with the next iteration of the Mac Mini, though.
The interesting thing about the new Mac Pro is whether it will encourage more general support for OpenCL in Mac software - one thing the reviews so far seem to agree on is that OpenCL optimised software such as Apple's Final Cut goes like shit off a shovel.
and themes even on the majority of produced shows comes from completely digital composers who produce the product through digitized instrument samples
OTOH, I suspect it is now much more common for a TV show to have a full original score for each episode, rather than a library of recyclable cues - and the highest production value shows will hire real orchestras for the bragging rights (and the spin-off concerts - heck, that's one show that could do with going back to cheaply-produced electronic music).
Then there are all the amateur soloists who can practice, perform or even write their own concertos without having to hire an orchestra.
In other news, the invention of Cinema 100-ish years ago was the end of the line for stage actors. Now they're turning movies into stage shows...
Knowing that a stolen car is driving right there twice a day is of no use to them at all.
Actually, knowing that the stolen motorbike has driven past a particular camera 60 times in the last 6 months probably isn't that much help unless you have the manpower to stake out that camera site or do a house-to-house search in the area. TFA is pretty vague on whether the camera is on a busy street, or exactly how predictable those drive-bys really were.
Before reaching for conspiracy theories I'd consider the strong possibilities that these systems are the result of police chiefs and other politicians buying into high tech snake oil products in the belief that they are a miracle substitute for expensive and properly trained boots on the street. All such a system will do is deluge over-worked officers with alert emails - and they're probably under strict instructions to prioritise the cases that lead to recovery of unpaid fines rather than expensive criminal prosecutions. To re-phrase Hanlon's Razor - never attribute to grand corruption that which may be adequately explained by petty corruption.
If the powers that be wanted a database of everything there are plenty of large IT corporations they could buy it from.
Slashdot Mirror
You suggest that MITM attacks on SSL are as bad as someone sniffing on unencrypted traffic. It is not! MITM attacks are active attacks and are much more invasive to carry out.
Is "false security" better or worse than "no security"? I don't think there's a simple one-size-fits-all answer to that - it depends on the type of threat and who the target is. If the bad guys want to snoop on an individual over a period of time, then traffic sniffing probably is easier. If its an organised gang going after money then MITMing a major ecommerce or banking site might be far more effective - and only needs to be in place for an hour or two to collect enough paydirt.
Anyway, the headline was "Is Firefox now the most secure mobile browser" not "Is Firefox the most betterer-than-nothing mobile browser". Browsers display nice reassuring padlocks and tell users that "the connection to this website is secure" not "meh, well, its probably safe from casual snooping, but if anybody organised is after you or whoever you're connecting to then you're basically screwed."
I love that ARM didn't initially go head to head with Intel and thus ended up not getting crushed by them (think transmeta/AMD).
Actually, they did start out (as Acorn) by going head-to-head with Intel. Others have mentioned Acorn but not really pointed out that the original 1987 ARM was a credible competitor to the 80286 and 68000. (By "credible competitor" I mean "left the 68k and 286 choking on its dust"). It was only ever really used in that way in the Acorn Archemedes and RiscPC which never made it big outside of the UK - although it outlived most of the other non-Wintel personal computers.
OK - when ARM was spun off they did, as you say, rather sensibly, end up going after the embedded market, but ARM might never have happened if Acorn had gone with the 80286 for their BBC Micro successor.
Another problem identified just five years ago is that the eyeballs of at least some astronauts became somewhat squashed. ... 'We uncovered something that has been right under our noses forever.'
I'm not a doctor, but if your eyeballs have always been under your nose then I suspect you have a pre-existing condition. Don't blame space.
To be fair, in zero gravity, it's easy to get confused about 'under' and 'over'.
This sounds a lot like the "Pizza is a vegetable" nonsense I remember reading about a few years ago.
Hold the cheese and pepperoni and, maybe... leaving only the Godwin-esque issue of whether a tomato is a vegetable...
But seriously folks, I don't think anybody is claiming that "computer languages == foreign languages" in any practical sense, just that they're equally valid as an indicator of intelligence and employability.
err: missing escape ... "Dude, I don\'t even know what you are saying"
WTF? Even good old-fangled C doesn't need an escape there.
Water is H2O - the air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other stuff. I don't see 'N' in the H2O equation. Humans cannot survive with pure oxygen. This is bogus.
The "James Bond Mouthpiece" idea is definitely bogus.
However, assuming (for the sake of argument) you could extract oxygen from water in useful quantities, I suppose you could take a rebreather apparatus (which scrubs out the excess CO2 and recycles the nitrogen and unused oxygen) and use your artificial gills to help keep the oxygen levels topped up.
I'm pretty sure the UK is still in the EU (even if it doesn't like to admit it), and none of those things have happened here.
Agreed. Before the "ban" CFLs were ~£10 or more - and that was 12+ years ago when £10 was worth £10. Then some stores started cost-cutting to ~£5 (I got a load from Ikea). Then my power company sent me half-a-dozen bulbs for free. Now basic CFL bulbs cost the same as a packet of washing powder. I don't know whether the advertised figures are correct - but I've only had to replace one or two "early deaths" in the last 10 years, so they definitely last several times longer than incandescent, so by the time you factor in the power savings, its an absolute no-brainer - the "ban" is almost irrelevant.
The only thing that does annoy me about the EU regs is the over-statement of the "equivalent wattage" and that it seems the only available table/desk lamps now have the "small screw" fitting and you can't seem to get bigger than a 8W "40W equivalent" bulb to fit. These lamps would have been limited to 40W incandescents in the past, but the laws of phyiscs kinda suggest that they would be perfectly safe with a 20W CFL (theoretically equivalent to 100W but probably more like 60W in the real world).
Since both are sooo similar, why should electronics hardware be patentable and software not?
Because the only purported purpose of patents is to promote science and innovation, and there is a metric shedload of empirical evidence that software patents are actually being used to suppress innovation. Also, software is well-covered by copyright - which also restricts the usefulness of the 'disclosure' that is part of the quid-pro-quo of receiving patent protection.
Don't get stuck on the "software is mathematics" tar baby. Yes, software is mathematics - for given definitions of "software", "mathematics" and "is", none of which would have occurred to the people who drafted the patent system years before Russell, Goedel, Turing and all that, and none of which would be understood by judges or juries. Lawyers can easily do an end run around by hair-splitting between mathematics and the application of mathematics (or see the EU "computer-implemented invention" dodge). Plus, as you point out, the argument would logically extend to much of electronics and other fields where the patented "artefact" could be replaced by a general-purpose device running equivalent software: no way is that going to get through the system.
Not that patent trolling is restricted to software patents - but software seems to be the "miner's canary" that dies first. As noted above, it is already well protected by copyright law. Patent offices appear to be uniquely incapable of spotting overbroad or obvious software patents. The software industry is already prone to monopolistic practices because of data lock-in - patents strengthen such monopolies. Software lends itself well to unique 'zero marginal cost' business models such as Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech, Open Source or just plain cheap, which have been major drivers of innovation (See: the internet, the world-wide-web, the various free operating systems): having to pay even modest royalties on a laundry-list of patents is poison to such schemes. (C.f. an electronic device, where patents might add a few percent to the per-unit cost, where they weren't already included in the cost of components).
Patents have no particular moral or abstract philosophical basis - they were introduced (ostensibly) for pragmatic reasons, so the argument against them should also be pragmatic - not an angels-on-a-pinhead argument like "software is mathematics".
(NB: the "software is mathematics" argument, based on the specific exclusion of mathematics from patentability, isn't quite the same as the "you can't patent a list of instructions" argument which has had some success against "business method" patents).
"The only universal medicine (Marxists) have for social evils - State ownership of the means of production - is not only perfectly compatible with all the disasters of the capitalist world: with exploitation, imperialism, pollution, misery, economic waste, national hatred and national oppression, but it adds to them a series of disasters of its own: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and above all the unrestricted rule of the omnipresent bureaucracy, a concentration of power never before known in human history". -- Leszek Kolakowski
The current alternative to socialism: global hyper-capitalism - is not only perfectly compatible with all the disasters of the socialist world: inefficiency, lack of economic incentives and above all the unrestricted control of supposedly democratic governments by unaccountable multinational corporations , a concentration of power never before known in human history, but it lacks any of the redeeming qualities of either socialism or capitalism as they were in the time of Marx. Even the "omnipresent bureaucracy" helps protect large business from any true competition by building a regulatory thicket to discourage enterprising newcomers.
Worse, we have a world where even capitalist governments such as the US recognise the need for some sort of social welfare and infrastructure program, but with the multinational corporations paying the absolute minimum in tax this has to be funded primarily by punitive taxation of middle-income earners. Moreover, most of this money is actually spend protecting the interests of those same corporations, either overtly (like the state underwriting the casino bankers when their pyramid schemes collapse) or indirectly (in welfare payments that allow businesses to employ workers without paying them enough to live).
Meanwhile, the managerial elite enjoy more "feather-bedding" than the inhabitants of the most unrealistic workers' paradise, with annual salary and bonus packages any one of which would secure a typical person for life, seeming total immunity from the consequences of their actions, any failure rewarded by windfall severance and pension packages, and all sins forgiven after a "decent interval". Yet, with a few exceptions, these are largely managers and administrators, not entrepreneurs who have created wealth by building new businesses.
As for TFA - its hard to say how much of any reduction in jobs in Western countries is connected to automation rather than the offshoring of work to developing countries still experiencing their first industrial revolution fuelled by former agriculture workers/subsistence farmers.
If you look at science fiction - particularly Iain Banks and the like - what you see is a post-scarcity form of anarcho-socialism where the means of production not only automated and virtually cost-free but distributed and democratised. That the sort of thing we need - but whether it is attainable without the fantasy plot devices available in a SF story (e.g. humanity effectively ruled by hyper-intelligent and benevolent AIs who might as well be called gods - who usually go bad in order to drive the story).
I find this ironic since the political AWG alarmism lobby deserves a lot of the blame for this
and the AWG denial lobby deserves a lot of the blame for the AWG alarmism body.
Unfortunately, when you have a well-funded denial campaign telling people what they want to hear (no problem here, ignore the commie academics, relax and enjoy your SUV) a lobby that doesn't resort to alarmism is a lobby that doesn't get listened to.
A bone fide climatologist would have made a more accurate documentary than Al Gore - which would then have been seen by an audience of, oh dozens of people who watch PBS at midnight.
Or, just wait 50-100 years until there's enough data to decide for sure whether Katrina or the polar vortex were just statistical blips or part of the AGW-predicted increase in extreme weather - if the latter then good luck building a time-machine to go back and fix the problem (hint: don't use the traditional DeLorian because if we go on using oil as if there is an infinite supply then, AGW or not, you won't be able to afford enough gas to get it up to 88 mph, and Mr Fusion is about as technically plausible as the flux capacitor) .
All this news about steam machines is great, but in the end they will compete with consoles, not with standard PCs.
Higher end of the console market + lower end of the specialist gaming PC market (which is Alienware's arena) sounds like a viable target market to me.
There's probably not enough details of these third party steam machines yet, but in principle they should be more customisable and expandable, with more up-to-date hardware than consoles. Also, (unless Dell et. al. break out the footgun and lock their boxes down), they can double as Linux PCs or dual-boot Windows if you really must.
Plus, there's the potential of a "single market" for content that covers Steam on Mac, Windows and regular Linux distros, commercial Steam Machines and home-brew SteamOs boxes.
Unfortunately Apple appears to have stopped providing security updates for older versions.
A statement that is cast into severe doubt by the continuing appearance of security updates for older versions, like Safari 6.1.1 on December 16th, Apple Remote Desktop 3.5.4 on 22 October and the lack of any claim that Apple has stopped releasing security updates in the article they link to to support their claim that Apple has stopped releasing security updates. It does talk about some of the security updates in 10.9 - a couple of which are covered by those Safari and Remote Desktop updates. As for the rest, TFA doesn't take the trouble to actually establish whether they are fixes c.f. 10.8 or fixes for issues in the 10.9 beta that was widely released to developers - so neither will I.
Now, is Apple maybe prioritising which security fixes it backports to 10.8 or earlier, and only bothering with the "OMG remote pwnage imminent" ones? Maybe. I will try and contain my fear.
Should you kill the healthy person, harvest the organs, and save the five terminal patients?
That's not the utilitarian option. Providing an unlimited supply of transplant organs would produce an unsustainable demand for expensive transplant operations and expensive aftercare (transplants do have long-term consequences you know) not to mention the social injustice caused when rich people start harvesting poor people to replace their alcohol-addled livers. On the positive side, ruling yourself out as an involuntary organ donor is a nice rationalisation for enjoying the unhealthy things in life...
I'm pretty sure that the cold equations would tell you to euthanise the five terminal patients and stop wasting time and resources that could be used saving or improving the lives of more easily treatable patients. Not that I'm advocating this, but if you're going to offer a choice between an emotional response and a cold amoral one, at least get the cold amoral option right.
Meanwhile, a less extreme option might be to make organ donation after death opt-out rather than opt-in to create a better, but manageable supply of donor organs. I hear some indecisive bastard just ran a train-load of healthy adults off a cliff to save a baby, so you should have plenty of organs!
There's a difference between "the method must be kept secret" and "the input/outputs must be kept secret."
Until you look beyond the pretty math to the messy human factors - such as how a typical person can be expected to remember a secure password such as apH03$zQ9*%fT and their reluctance to accept "tough" as an answer when they forget. Then the best open-source encryption algorithm in the world is reduced to "don't tell anybody about the envelope at the back of the filing cabinet".
Actually, that "security through obscurity" approach is exactly how security does NOT work :-)
Funny. Relying on a password that nobody else knows sounds like "security through obscurity" to me.
If your password is all that stands between the forces of chaos and evil and some military-grade secrets or billions of untraceable dollars then I'm sure there are well-documented, probably contractual or even statutory, procedures for ensuring continuity of access should the password-holder be stabbed by a Bulgarian umbrella.
Otherwise, just write the bloody thing down and keep it wherever you put other important documents - if the bad guys get physical access to your computer and paper records, especially without you knowing you're probably humped anyway.
Or if you want perfect security, learn to live with the consequential risk that you might lock yourself out rather than introducing deliberate backdoors or involving third parties. You can't create a way of accessing your account without knowing the password without, er, creating a way of accessing your account without knowing the password.
just under the skateboarding duck
link please
Ok: "And finally, over to Sally for a story that may seem a bit 'quackers'!"
NOOOO!!!! it was conspiracy theorists , you have to have a fresh conspiracy at new year!
but everybody knows that conspiracy theorists are all agents of the Black Helicopter Brigade paid to create plausible deniability for the real conspiracies.
Proof? No, you have a hypothesis and a single point of data.
If only he had a hypothesis (men in black kill hacker to shut him up*) and two points of data: (A) Hacker about to give a speech, (B) hacker dies from overdose - then it would be much more compelling.
(*despite knowing that "Hacker gives talk on hacking pacemakers" = page 5 just under the skateboarding duck whereas "Hacker dies mysteriously on eve of controversial speech" is at least worth a side column on page 1.)
Remember - this was Asimov's idea for storing large amounts of data. The office ENIAC would address data by reading microscopic vibrations set going within a large tank of mercury..
Sounds like the next step up from a bit of real ~1950 technology - the mercury delay line. Probably more plausible at the time than making valves - or even those new-fangled transistors - small and reliable enough to make fully electronic memory.
It no more "looks like" an anti-gravity system than does the Bernoulli effect when an airplane flies.
I think the point is that the absence of any visible means of support, wings, rockets, big balloons full of gas, whacking great magnets or other contrivances popularly associated with making things hang in the air - along with the failure to look like a bird - might make some people think it was an anti-gravity device. I'm sure that the first people to see a an aeroplane fly would have shouted 'anti gravity!' if birds and balloons hadn't pre-dated H.G. Wells.
Presumably, though, an actual anti-gravity system would actually look like an object flying off into space because there was no longer any centripetal force
In fact, the laws in some states demand that brick and mortar stores to honor the prices that they advertive. This includes prices that are in error! Why should online stores be treated any different?
because (even with such a law) there are practical limitations on how may $99 products can walk out the door of a bricks & mortar store for $0.99 before the error can be caught and corrected.
For an an online store, the error can go viral on social networking and by the time a human being spots the situation, there can be so many orders that they'd need to build a couple of new factories to fulfil them.
Now, if the retailer takes your $0.99 and delivers the product that's one thing (analogous to the shop taking your money and letting you walk out the door) - but when these stories crop up it is usually people whining because the retailer just refuses to honour the order (in this case, TFA is somewhat vague on whether money has been taken or products delivered).
Try and compel stores to honour those orders and I guarantee that the only winners will be the lawyers.
It was obvious from the day the Mac Pro was announced that a system containing Xeon, ECC RAM and dual FirePros would cost $6 - $10k if you priced up the components, and that if Apple brought it in at a comparable price to the old Pro it could be made to sound like a bargain, and putting it all into a tiny tube was the icing on the cake.
The real issue is whether those features bring any real advantages to you - particularly those two GPUs. What seems pretty well established is that 'workstation class GPUs' like FirePro and Quadro are nothing special unless they're paired with pro applications that have been optimised for them, and that part of the 'premium' is for the pro (windows) drivers, and stability features like ECC RAM. We're really still waiting for the in-depth teardown to determine what those Mac Pro GPU cards really are, how they compare to PC FirePro cards in terms of clock speed, ECC RAM etc., whether the OS X drivers are any good and whether they can do Crossfire (which might make them more impressive for games). Otherwise, 'FirePro' is just a sticker (which Apple will leave off rather than sully the shiny case).
I suspect the vast majority of Slashdot readers, if they built a PC, would just go for an i7, a couple of 'consumer' GPUs and non-ECC RAM unless they really, really needed that secret 'workstation-class' sauce - which would be a fraction of the cost, and isn't something Apple really has an offering for (unless you want an iMac with built in display, or a Mac Mini reliant on the integrated GPU). The reason that Apple don't offer such a thing is that there's no bloody money in competing directly with such generic commodity low-margin hardware - it would look expensive c.f. Dell et, al. and/or cannibalise sales of higher-margin laptops, SFF and workstation systems. It will be interesting to see what happens with the next iteration of the Mac Mini, though.
The interesting thing about the new Mac Pro is whether it will encourage more general support for OpenCL in Mac software - one thing the reviews so far seem to agree on is that OpenCL optimised software such as Apple's Final Cut goes like shit off a shovel.
and themes even on the majority of produced shows comes from completely digital composers who produce the product through digitized instrument samples
OTOH, I suspect it is now much more common for a TV show to have a full original score for each episode, rather than a library of recyclable cues - and the highest production value shows will hire real orchestras for the bragging rights (and the spin-off concerts - heck, that's one show that could do with going back to cheaply-produced electronic music).
Then there are all the amateur soloists who can practice, perform or even write their own concertos without having to hire an orchestra.
In other news, the invention of Cinema 100-ish years ago was the end of the line for stage actors. Now they're turning movies into stage shows...
Knowing that a stolen car is driving right there twice a day is of no use to them at all.
Actually, knowing that the stolen motorbike has driven past a particular camera 60 times in the last 6 months probably isn't that much help unless you have the manpower to stake out that camera site or do a house-to-house search in the area. TFA is pretty vague on whether the camera is on a busy street, or exactly how predictable those drive-bys really were.
Before reaching for conspiracy theories I'd consider the strong possibilities that these systems are the result of police chiefs and other politicians buying into high tech snake oil products in the belief that they are a miracle substitute for expensive and properly trained boots on the street. All such a system will do is deluge over-worked officers with alert emails - and they're probably under strict instructions to prioritise the cases that lead to recovery of unpaid fines rather than expensive criminal prosecutions. To re-phrase Hanlon's Razor - never attribute to grand corruption that which may be adequately explained by petty corruption.
If the powers that be wanted a database of everything there are plenty of large IT corporations they could buy it from.