Of the two hundred or so rockets shot at my city in the past week, we had our first casualty yesterday: an 80 year old woman was injured when a rocket fell outside her house. So far as I know (by hearing the different booms of both successful hits and Iron Dome intercepts) this was only the fourth or fifth rocket to get past the Iron Dome into the city. I'll ask my daughters tomorrow morning: they are the ones keeping score of the booms that they hear.
You're post was interesting but had so many unfounded logical leaps that the conclusion about Iron Dome effectiveness doesn't follow. I'd be fascinated if you could reply, including your daughters' tallies, but with a precise accounting...
(1) Out of two hundred or so rockets shot "at" your city, how many were on a trajectory that they'd actually have landed "in" your city? Not many because they're so wildly inaccurate? Or most because your city is large?
(2) You mentioned 200 hundred rockets shot at your city. Is this the sum of the tallies of "two different kinds of boom" you mentioned, or does the number come from a different source?
(3) Is the low casualty rate better explained by a high intercept rate by Iron Dome? Or by the inaccuracy of the rockets coupled with the fact that statistically a high proportion of possible landing targets wouldn't hurt someone? Or by the fact that so many people in your city sensibly seek shelter? Or by the fact that the rockets are fairly rudimentary and don't pack much explosive and are unlikely to do damage unless they randomly score a hit almost on top of someone? I suspect that the other factors are dominant and the low casualty rate is therefore not a good guide to the effectiveness of Iron Dome.
(4) If by sound you distinguish an IronDome hit from a rocket that hits the ground, do you assume that all "ground" hits land in your city?
(5) In your tallies, you said you heard 4-5 rockets hit the ground. How many did you hear intercepted by Iron Dome?
(6) Do you think the range of your hearing hit-the-ground and hit-by-IronDome are equivalent?
The point is a free service being abused is expected. It is not as if noip encouraged abuse and were paid by abusers.
Expected: That the owners of no-ip should continue to make their own profits from advertising revenue, and a bunch of legitimate users should continue to get free dyndns service, and the benefit to these two groups comes at the expense of a wider pool of internet users who suffer from malware (and at the expense of unpaid volunteers to police no-ip since they're not spending enough resources to do it effectively themselves).
Does that sound like a fair trade to you? Not to me. Count me out.
April 2013: the OpenDNS blog reported that no-ip was the second most popular dynamic-DNS site for malicious software. http://labs.opendns.com/2013/0... -- No-IP responded that they have a very strict abuse "policy", and they want other people to help by reporting violations of the TOS to them. They also scan daily and filter by keyword. http://labs.opendns.com/2013/0...
February 2014, the Cisco blog reported that no-ip had risen to be the worst offender: http://blogs.cisco.com/securit... -- No-ip again responded that they have a strict abuse policy, and they want other people to report violations of the TOS to them, and they scan daily and filter by keyword. http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/...
Were no-ip doing a good enough job at policing themselves? It doesn't sound like it to me, not at all. It sounds like they have a decent "policy" but don't go out of their way to enforce it, their daily manual scans aren't up to what's needed, their keyword filters are easily bypassed. They can sound hurt all they want that OpenDNS and Cisco and Microsoft wrote public blogs or took action rather than reporting the individual offenders to No-IP first. But the fact that No-IP does so badly, and got worse, shows they weren't taking adequate action themselves.
You say they're "very responsive" to reports of abuse. But honestly, if their strategy for combating abuse rests SO HEAVILY upon volunteers to report abuse, and their strategy hasn't been working so far, then they have a bad business model.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but in an entirely unrelated division (I'm on the VB/C# compiler team).
The user interface is brain-dead simple. The dial simply has 17 settings, for 1: Daily for 2 minutes 2: Daily for 5 minutes 3: Daily for 10 minutes... 7: Every other day for 5 minutes 8: Every other day for 10 minutes... 12: Every third day for 10 minutes 13: Every third day for 15 minutes
That's it! There isn't an option for "2 minutes every 3 days" because -- guess what -- gardeners don't actually need that level of control! It just has a laser focus on a simple user interface that will be good for 99% of residential customers.
Would my life be better if I had to change the batteries in the irrigation controller every 5 days to power its wifi? Or if I had to run mains power and Ethernet cabling out into the garden for it? Would my life be better if I had a fiddly iPhone/Android app with more settings pages than I'd care to use, maybe a cloud-based controller like my Nest? Do I ever go on holiday and wish I'd changed the watering schedule before departing?
Are you sure about the "metro"? Name is dead, but I was under impression that all new windows "apps" had to be written in C# against a new SDK that has neither binary nor source compatibility with Win32/posix/C/C++. I'd be glad to be wrong
You're wrong! You can write Windows Store apps in C++ just fine. This C++ can use win32, posix, STL etc just fine. (however, all apps run in a sandbox, so some win32/posix functions aren't as powerful as normal, e.g. the sandbox doesn't let a Windows Store app enumerate files on the hard disk outside of the files it's allowed to touch).
You can also write Windows Phone apps in the same C++. So a mobile app developer could write their core in posix platform-neutral C++, and have it portable across Android+iOS+Windows. I know a few who do.
Of course posix doesn't have anything to do with windowing systems or touch, and win32 APIs (e.g. gdi32.dll, user32.dll) don't apply to windows store or phone apps since they don't have GDI or the traditional windowing system. So your C++ code will invoke new WinRT APIs to access the new functionalities. WinRT is perfectly compatible with posix/win32 APIs. Indeed, for some functionality (e.g. audio), you're REQUIRED to use win32 APIs because they're not exposed in WinRT.
Here's some example code that shows how you'd mix the new WinRT APIs to get hold of sandbox-specific stuff, and then interop with traditional posix APIs. It also shows how the asynchronous nature of WinRT APIs combine with the synchronous traditional posix APIs:
auto f1 = Windows::ApplicationModel::Package::Current->InstalledLocation;
create_task(f1->GetFolderAsync("Assets")).then([this](StorageFolder ^f2)
{
create_task(f2->GetFileAsync("Logo.scale-100.png")).then([this](StorageFile ^f3)
{
auto path = f3->Path;
FILE *f = _wfopen(path->Data, L"r");
byte buf[100];
fread(buf, 1, 100, f);
fclose(f)
});
});
Sounds like you just logically disproved the existence of "self censorship". Or maybe you don't consider it to be a kind of censorship, despite its suggestive name...
I think we saw it 20 years ago with VB and Delphi and similar RAD products. It democratized business computing, allowing every hotel to have a computerized checkin system tailored to its needs, every X business to have a Y system.
The scenario you posed it's interesting but you asked the wrong question. If a person says "searching for John Smith results in the following five search results and I'd like you to remove them" -- it doesn't matter which John Smith people were searching FOR... it only matters which John Smith they were GIVEN.
The question relating to your scenario is "how does google know that the page is about the requestor". Could be solved by making it a perjury to submit a false request, or requests go via notaries, or something like that.
Except the wayback machine ALREADY responds to requests to delete pages (via robots.txt), and when it gets one it deletes the entire history of that page as well.
You shouldn't be able to patent arranging some lights and positioning a camera.
Amazon didn't patent "arranging some lights and positioning a camera" in general.
They patented ONE SPECIFIC arrangement of lights and camera position. Presumably a particular arrangement that they spent a lot of time and effort to achieve, and wasn't obvious to them when they started, and one that they hadn't found documented or explained or taught elsewhere.
When you patent a machine, you're patenting "arranging some gears and positioning some cogs". When you patent a drug, you're patenting "arranging some atoms and positioning them right".
It's a kind of patent-drafter's game, mixing specific claims (like claim 1) and general claims (2, 25) and then making progressively narrower claims from the general ones (3 -- 24). They do this to cover their bases, to make it more likely to have the patent granted, and to help them have something they can fight in court.
Seriously. Did the examiner on this even consider asking anyone who knows anything about photography? I'm not a photographer but I've had my picture taken for "promotional" reasons and already knew about this. I've even created a similar setup here when posting stuff online. Took me 10 seconds to find this page: http://www.raydobbins.com/phot... What, exactly, are they trying to "patent" and why does this examiner still have a job? It's obvious that we need to have crowdsourcing prior art as an official part of the patent process.
"What exactly are they trying to patent?" -- it says so right there in the first claim, and it's stupid that you spent more time looking up prior art of what you *ASSUMED* the patent was about, rather than actually reading the patent.
They patented the combination of a white cyclorama background, with the object on an elevated platform, the combination of four rear light sources in a particular geometry behind the elevated platform, and some technical tricks to make the elevated platform be imperceptible.
I sincerely doubt that your promotional picture was taken on an elevated platform with four lights behind you and some looking down onto the platform. The website you linked was nothing like what the patent is doing either.
I'm not concerned at all. In an emergency I'll put it in neutral, and use brakes and steering wheel. I'll definitely NOT be messing around with ignition, be it key or button. Don't have enough hands.
Cortana is optimized too for American accents in this release.
Not much of a problem. I have a strong English accent, and the same technique works with Cortana as speaking abroad... I just speak LOUDLY AND CONDESCENDINGLY.:)
If devs have to LIVE with the consequences of their bugs or race conditions or misfeatures, by having to manually fix up customer accounts, or reboot the server, or just click through too many screens, then it really focuses their minds on what are the important bugs to fix, helps them triage more effectively, helps direct their coding energy in the right place.
PS. This is only for devops work on the systems running YOUR software. If course it doesn't apply to what most people in this thread are discussing, doing devops work for code you didn't write.
one reason that security-related code is best done in low level languages is that the implementer has absolute control over sensitive data. For example, consider an server which acquires a passphrase from the client for authentication purposes. If your implementation language is C, you can receive that passphrase into a char array on the stack, use it, and zero it out immediately.
That scenario actually explains why security-related code is best done in MANAGED languages using something like SecureString http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u... -- this way, you still have API control to zero it out immediately, but you also benefit from the fact that you can make it ReadOnly, the fact that it's encrypted, the fact that it was authored by someone who's more expert in security than you and has had more eyes to review it than your ad-hoc solution.
Maybe mild autism has been associated with higher wages ever since industrialization? E.g. being a factory worker who was better adjusted to city life, earning more than your peasant agrarian non-autistics? Continuing up to today where lawyers and software developers get higher salaries? That might correlate with slightly higher reproductive success. Just a guess.
(Factory worker, lawyer and programmer are roles where limited empathy wouldn't be a hindrance, and "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests" might be a help).
I'd had it twice. The first time raw in Japan it was okay.
The second time, seared, in Iceland, it was sublime. Like a combination of the best bits of sashimi and the best bits of high quality steak, somehow unexpectedly combined in one delicious whole.
If the carriers currently take in $2bn in theft premiums but only pay out $0.5bn in payouts, then they're pocketing a huge $1.5bn/year difference. Therefore
(1) We can expect them to lobby strongly against anything that will reduce this free money, and attempt to water down any proposed legislation
(2) If the legislation goes through we can expect them to try to gain that money in different ways, maybe with a "remote wipe services fee"...
Slashdot Mirror
Of the two hundred or so rockets shot at my city in the past week, we had our first casualty yesterday: an 80 year old woman was injured when a rocket fell outside her house. So far as I know (by hearing the different booms of both successful hits and Iron Dome intercepts) this was only the fourth or fifth rocket to get past the Iron Dome into the city. I'll ask my daughters tomorrow morning: they are the ones keeping score of the booms that they hear.
You're post was interesting but had so many unfounded logical leaps that the conclusion about Iron Dome effectiveness doesn't follow. I'd be fascinated if you could reply, including your daughters' tallies, but with a precise accounting...
(1) Out of two hundred or so rockets shot "at" your city, how many were on a trajectory that they'd actually have landed "in" your city? Not many because they're so wildly inaccurate? Or most because your city is large?
(2) You mentioned 200 hundred rockets shot at your city. Is this the sum of the tallies of "two different kinds of boom" you mentioned, or does the number come from a different source?
(3) Is the low casualty rate better explained by a high intercept rate by Iron Dome? Or by the inaccuracy of the rockets coupled with the fact that statistically a high proportion of possible landing targets wouldn't hurt someone? Or by the fact that so many people in your city sensibly seek shelter? Or by the fact that the rockets are fairly rudimentary and don't pack much explosive and are unlikely to do damage unless they randomly score a hit almost on top of someone? I suspect that the other factors are dominant and the low casualty rate is therefore not a good guide to the effectiveness of Iron Dome.
(4) If by sound you distinguish an IronDome hit from a rocket that hits the ground, do you assume that all "ground" hits land in your city?
(5) In your tallies, you said you heard 4-5 rockets hit the ground. How many did you hear intercepted by Iron Dome?
(6) Do you think the range of your hearing hit-the-ground and hit-by-IronDome are equivalent?
The point is a free service being abused is expected. It is not as if noip encouraged abuse and were paid by abusers.
Expected: That the owners of no-ip should continue to make their own profits from advertising revenue, and a bunch of legitimate users should continue to get free dyndns service, and the benefit to these two groups comes at the expense of a wider pool of internet users who suffer from malware (and at the expense of unpaid volunteers to police no-ip since they're not spending enough resources to do it effectively themselves).
Does that sound like a fair trade to you? Not to me. Count me out.
I think No-ip sound very shady...
April 2013: the OpenDNS blog reported that no-ip was the second most popular dynamic-DNS site for malicious software. http://labs.opendns.com/2013/0... -- No-IP responded that they have a very strict abuse "policy", and they want other people to help by reporting violations of the TOS to them. They also scan daily and filter by keyword. http://labs.opendns.com/2013/0...
February 2014, the Cisco blog reported that no-ip had risen to be the worst offender: http://blogs.cisco.com/securit... -- No-ip again responded that they have a strict abuse policy, and they want other people to report violations of the TOS to them, and they scan daily and filter by keyword. http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/...
Were no-ip doing a good enough job at policing themselves? It doesn't sound like it to me, not at all. It sounds like they have a decent "policy" but don't go out of their way to enforce it, their daily manual scans aren't up to what's needed, their keyword filters are easily bypassed. They can sound hurt all they want that OpenDNS and Cisco and Microsoft wrote public blogs or took action rather than reporting the individual offenders to No-IP first. But the fact that No-IP does so badly, and got worse, shows they weren't taking adequate action themselves.
You say they're "very responsive" to reports of abuse. But honestly, if their strategy for combating abuse rests SO HEAVILY upon volunteers to report abuse, and their strategy hasn't been working so far, then they have a bad business model.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but in an entirely unrelated division (I'm on the VB/C# compiler team).
And when you're flying at night and can't see anything out the windows -- what then?
And when you're flying in clouds, or taking off in thick fog, and can't see anything through the windows -- what then?
I've been using this wonderful device for controlling drip irrigation:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
The user interface is brain-dead simple. The dial simply has 17 settings, for ... ...
1: Daily for 2 minutes
2: Daily for 5 minutes
3: Daily for 10 minutes
7: Every other day for 5 minutes
8: Every other day for 10 minutes
12: Every third day for 10 minutes
13: Every third day for 15 minutes
That's it! There isn't an option for "2 minutes every 3 days" because -- guess what -- gardeners don't actually need that level of control! It just has a laser focus on a simple user interface that will be good for 99% of residential customers.
Would my life be better if I had to change the batteries in the irrigation controller every 5 days to power its wifi? Or if I had to run mains power and Ethernet cabling out into the garden for it? Would my life be better if I had a fiddly iPhone/Android app with more settings pages than I'd care to use, maybe a cloud-based controller like my Nest? Do I ever go on holiday and wish I'd changed the watering schedule before departing?
NO.
The author coated it at $160mil / mile
It might be really cheap and thin, e.g. Eiffel Tower with venetian blinds to block the wind when needed?
Are you sure about the "metro"? Name is dead, but I was under impression that all new windows "apps" had to be written in C# against a new SDK that has neither binary nor source compatibility with Win32/posix/C/C++. I'd be glad to be wrong
You're wrong! You can write Windows Store apps in C++ just fine. This C++ can use win32, posix, STL etc just fine. (however, all apps run in a sandbox, so some win32/posix functions aren't as powerful as normal, e.g. the sandbox doesn't let a Windows Store app enumerate files on the hard disk outside of the files it's allowed to touch).
You can also write Windows Phone apps in the same C++. So a mobile app developer could write their core in posix platform-neutral C++, and have it portable across Android+iOS+Windows. I know a few who do.
Of course posix doesn't have anything to do with windowing systems or touch, and win32 APIs (e.g. gdi32.dll, user32.dll) don't apply to windows store or phone apps since they don't have GDI or the traditional windowing system. So your C++ code will invoke new WinRT APIs to access the new functionalities. WinRT is perfectly compatible with posix/win32 APIs. Indeed, for some functionality (e.g. audio), you're REQUIRED to use win32 APIs because they're not exposed in WinRT.
Here's some example code that shows how you'd mix the new WinRT APIs to get hold of sandbox-specific stuff, and then interop with traditional posix APIs. It also shows how the asynchronous nature of WinRT APIs combine with the synchronous traditional posix APIs:
auto f1 = Windows::ApplicationModel::Package::Current->InstalledLocation;
create_task(f1->GetFolderAsync("Assets")).then([this](StorageFolder ^f2)
{
create_task(f2->GetFileAsync("Logo.scale-100.png")).then([this](StorageFile ^f3)
{
auto path = f3->Path;
FILE *f = _wfopen(path->Data, L"r");
byte buf[100];
fread(buf, 1, 100, f);
fclose(f)
});
});
Sounds like you just logically disproved the existence of "self censorship". Or maybe you don't consider it to be a kind of censorship, despite its suggestive name...
Why does it say that google hasn't commented?
It has. It told the press about these cherry-picked examples. Straight from the PR textbook.
I think we saw it 20 years ago with VB and Delphi and similar RAD products. It democratized business computing, allowing every hotel to have a computerized checkin system tailored to its needs, every X business to have a Y system.
The scenario you posed it's interesting but you asked the wrong question. If a person says "searching for John Smith results in the following five search results and I'd like you to remove them" -- it doesn't matter which John Smith people were searching FOR... it only matters which John Smith they were GIVEN.
The question relating to your scenario is "how does google know that the page is about the requestor". Could be solved by making it a perjury to submit a false request, or requests go via notaries, or something like that.
Except the wayback machine ALREADY responds to requests to delete pages (via robots.txt), and when it gets one it deletes the entire history of that page as well.
You shouldn't be able to patent arranging some lights and positioning a camera.
Amazon didn't patent "arranging some lights and positioning a camera" in general.
They patented ONE SPECIFIC arrangement of lights and camera position. Presumably a particular arrangement that they spent a lot of time and effort to achieve, and wasn't obvious to them when they started, and one that they hadn't found documented or explained or taught elsewhere.
When you patent a machine, you're patenting "arranging some gears and positioning some cogs". When you patent a drug, you're patenting "arranging some atoms and positioning them right".
Claims 2 and 25 aren't that specific...
It's a kind of patent-drafter's game, mixing specific claims (like claim 1) and general claims (2, 25) and then making progressively narrower claims from the general ones (3 -- 24). They do this to cover their bases, to make it more likely to have the patent granted, and to help them have something they can fight in court.
Seriously. Did the examiner on this even consider asking anyone who knows anything about photography? I'm not a photographer but I've had my picture taken for "promotional" reasons and already knew about this. I've even created a similar setup here when posting stuff online. Took me 10 seconds to find this page: http://www.raydobbins.com/phot... What, exactly, are they trying to "patent" and why does this examiner still have a job? It's obvious that we need to have crowdsourcing prior art as an official part of the patent process.
"What exactly are they trying to patent?" -- it says so right there in the first claim, and it's stupid that you spent more time looking up prior art of what you *ASSUMED* the patent was about, rather than actually reading the patent.
They patented the combination of a white cyclorama background, with the object on an elevated platform, the combination of four rear light sources in a particular geometry behind the elevated platform, and some technical tricks to make the elevated platform be imperceptible.
I sincerely doubt that your promotional picture was taken on an elevated platform with four lights behind you and some looking down onto the platform. The website you linked was nothing like what the patent is doing either.
I'm not concerned at all. In an emergency I'll put it in neutral, and use brakes and steering wheel. I'll definitely NOT be messing around with ignition, be it key or button. Don't have enough hands.
If I understand, your question is basically, "why is the human brain's amygdala hard-wired to produce emotional responses in this way?"
There's no really good answer, other than "it just is" and maybe some handwaving about evolutionary psychology.
They did examine heartbleed.
http://ericlippert.com/2014/04...
Cortana is optimized too for American accents in this release.
Not much of a problem. I have a strong English accent, and the same technique works with Cortana as speaking abroad... I just speak LOUDLY AND CONDESCENDINGLY. :)
I've heard something similar...
If devs have to LIVE with the consequences of their bugs or race conditions or misfeatures, by having to manually fix up customer accounts, or reboot the server, or just click through too many screens, then it really focuses their minds on what are the important bugs to fix, helps them triage more effectively, helps direct their coding energy in the right place.
PS. This is only for devops work on the systems running YOUR software. If course it doesn't apply to what most people in this thread are discussing, doing devops work for code you didn't write.
one reason that security-related code is best done in low level languages is that the implementer has absolute control over sensitive data. For example, consider an server which acquires a passphrase from the client for authentication purposes. If your implementation language is C, you can receive that passphrase into a char array on the stack, use it, and zero it out immediately.
That scenario actually explains why security-related code is best done in MANAGED languages using something like SecureString
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u... -- this way, you still have API control to zero it out immediately, but you also benefit from the fact that you can make it ReadOnly, the fact that it's encrypted, the fact that it was authored by someone who's more expert in security than you and has had more eyes to review it than your ad-hoc solution.
You can also do CtrlAltDel, down, down, enter.
Or you know press the power button on your desktop or laptop or tablet.
Maybe mild autism has been associated with higher wages ever since industrialization? E.g. being a factory worker who was better adjusted to city life, earning more than your peasant agrarian non-autistics? Continuing up to today where lawyers and software developers get higher salaries? That might correlate with slightly higher reproductive success. Just a guess.
(Factory worker, lawyer and programmer are roles where limited empathy wouldn't be a hindrance, and "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests" might be a help).
I'd had it twice. The first time raw in Japan it was okay.
The second time, seared, in Iceland, it was sublime. Like a combination of the best bits of sashimi and the best bits of high quality steak, somehow unexpectedly combined in one delicious whole.
This doesn't add up...
If the carriers currently take in $2bn in theft premiums but only pay out $0.5bn in payouts, then they're pocketing a huge $1.5bn/year difference. Therefore
(1) We can expect them to lobby strongly against anything that will reduce this free money, and attempt to water down any proposed legislation
(2) If the legislation goes through we can expect them to try to gain that money in different ways, maybe with a "remote wipe services fee"...