One company, for example, offers 166 tests in one of its testing packages where approximately 60% of the tests (99) are categorized as âpreliminary researchâ(TM) because the genetic-association data have not yet been replicated (www.23andme.com/health/all/). These tests are given 1, 2, or 3 stars based on the size of the study that supports the genetic association for which they test. Information for each of these tests cites references for the original ïnding of the genetic association, including the journal where it was published and the study size. It also provides the number of attempted replications and the number of contrary studies that have been published. Although transparent, examination of the scientiïc evidence provided for many of the genetic associations in this category raises the question of whether these tests should even be included in a genetic-testing package. Two of the ïve genetic tests with 1-star status (those for âavoidance of errorâ(TM) and âobsessive compulsive disorderâ(TM)) are based on single studies with fewer than 100 participants (https://www.23andme.com/you/health/). In both cases the variants map to the D2 dopamine receptor, a gene that has repeatedly been associated with human behavioral traits and attracted newspaper headlines, only to have the associations refuted in later studies [8]. Eight of the 37 (22%) available 2-star-rated genetic associations (originating from a single study with less than 750 participants) have a âcontrary studyâ(TM) indicated. Two different 3-star tests, one for Lou Gehrigâ(TM)s Disease (ALS) and another for obesity, utilize variants that have been positively associated with disease in one or two studies, respectively. However, both these variants have failed replication in four additional studies (https://www.23andme.com/you/health/). Although, the company boasts of its 'systematic vetting processâ(TM) used to determine which research ïndings to include in its genetic-testing package, a number of highly questionable tests continue to be offered to consumers.
I have a BS and MS in CS from one of the top 10 colleges in the US. For my BS, I had a scholarship from the University and I RA-ed throughout grad school which paid for the MS (incl. living expenses).
As one of the much derided supposedly wage suppressing immigrants, allow me to point out a few things:
1. Not once was I made an offer below market wage or below what American citizens were being offered. If anything, I was made higher offers, as were many of my other international friends. In fact, I was almost always made an offer first and immigration status usually never came into the picture until I had indicated that I would accept. And I make way above what the average American makes - so I'm not the one suppressing your wages.
2. I have never been passed over for promotions or opportunities because of my immigration status, nor have any of my immigrant friends. Most people in the organizations I've worked in are simply unaware that I'm not a citizen.
3. MS is offering to pay for GREEN CARDS for their employees. If the argument here was wage suppression, why the hell would you get your employees Green Cards? Once you get a green card, you can work anywhere, thus undercutting the indentured labor argument that people often make (including normally astute people here on/.). Multiple companies have offered to get green cards for me and my friends from overseas. In fact, in some cases even if my friends didn't want to apply for whatever reason, the companies (MS and Google to be specific) kept pushing them to apply. Again, they would NOT do this if they wanted to underpay us. In fact, pretty much everywhere I've worked, they would have been happy to pay extra to expedite a Green Card for me if that were possible (it isn't because there are strict quotas).
4. If there are even 20 Sergey Brins, Vinod Dhams and Vinod Khoslas in every year's crop of immigrants, the US will come out ahead in terms of jobs created vs. jobs lost to immigrants. I suspect the number has traditionally been higher but might be lower now on account of the increasing prevalence of body-shoppers.
5. People claim that fewer Americans are studying STEM subjects and CS because of immigrants and wage suppression. This is simply utter crap. Go look at salary surveys and you'll find that engineering jobs consistently pay more than most non-STEM jobs, and even if you wanted to work on Wall Street, you are more likely to get hired if you were an engineer because you have domain knowledge which is in high demand on Wall Street and in business these days. CS graduates from my school were routinely offered over $100K after MS degrees (with a BS, it was usually somewhere between $80-100K, typically on the higher end of that range). Some CS majors were making more than McKinsey consultants or Goldman bankers straight out of college (the latter is only true if you look at the hourly wage).
The flaw in my argument that I'll readily admit: my sample is biased because most of the immigrants I know are the cream of the crop, and so my experience is likely not representative of the majority of immigrants, particularly in IT and those from India (I say this as an Indian).
All that said, there is undoubtedly wage suppression that happens but you might want to retrain your guns from the Microsoft to the Indian IT companies and the smaller IT consulting shops.
The bigger problem in IT and CS jobs is *age*. That's the elephant in the room. People don't lose their job because of immigrants, they lose it because IT companies don't like older employees.
The whole network is only as good as its weakest link. I.e., if one of your trusted 'friends' is stupid and adds a RIAA bot, everyone who is friends with your friend just got screwed.
The article is a little light on details, but am I right in thinking that people's session cookies were being sidejacked? AFAIK, despite FB not sending everything over https, the password is sent over https. So I don't see how a keylogger like approach would work to intercept the pw, unless the Tunisian government was smart enough to run something like Moxie Marlinspike's sslstrip where they did a MITM attack and sent unencrypted http traffic to the user and then stole their password. I doubt this was the case because a) they don't seem smart enough and b) no security measure would circumvent this unless people knew not to log in over http.
So now we just wait until the government uses sslstrip...
P.S. - It's unbelievable that in this day and age FB doesn't encrypt the whole session given how trivial session-jacking is.
"At that point, Facebook offered Twitter around $100 million in cash, with the rest of the deal in stock. Facebook said it would come up with the $100 million by selling more of its stock to outside investors. Twitter agreed on one condition: that the Facebook stock it received be valued at the price company shares garnered on the open market. Facebook blinked and the deal talks ended. "They wanted to buy us but there was not much conviction," the person says."
"Analytics Web site Compete shows Twitter has 6 million unique users, up from around 800,000 last year. Yet Twitter doesn't generate any revenue, despite its surge in popularity."
I can't imagine how many times you've been asked, "But how will you make money?" We will make money, and I can't say exactly how, because we can't predict exactly what's going to work.
From TFA: Which gets us to InPhase's target market: archiving. That's why they were showing at NAB.
I don't get it. No matter how valuable your content, why would you pay $18,000 for a burner and $180 for for a 300GB disc? Just for the price of the media, you can mirror your data across three different brand-new hard disks. Surely the odds of 3 hard disks failing at the same time are lower than that of an untested, brand-new technology with no redundancy?
Maybe I'm too thick, but why would anyone buy this at this price? (Other than the coolness/my dick is bigger than yours factor, of course.)
So why is this news? Haven't Rainbow Tables been around for several years now? I remember I was looking into them when I wanted to crack my high school network admin's password (turns out I didn't need to, it was 3 characters long).
I have mod points, but what the heck. The slashdot editors strike again - posting stories without checking their facts. I've been following this since the muslix64 hack, so I do know what I'm talking about. I'm quoting the 'hacker' (arnezami - great guy) mentioned in the Ars Technica article:
In order to decrypt a disc you need the keys the content is encrypted with. These we usually refer to as Volume Unique Keys (although technically VUKs give Title Keys which are used to decrypt the content but this amounts to the same thing). What is important is that VUKs cannot be revoked. In other words: once we have a VUK for a disc then the AACS decryption-protection is broken for that disc. AACS cannot undo this.
So how can we get VUKs?
There are several ways to get VUKs for discs. But none of them are permanent solutions for retrieving all VUKs for all discs (released in the future).
* Get the VUKs out of "old" versions of a Software Player
* Get a Volume ID (unique per movie) and a Processing Key (unique per Media Key Block version) and calculate the VUK.
The first method will expire quickly: we can now use WinDVD to retrieve VUKs out of its memory. But when new discs come out they won't work with this old version of WinDVD so you would have to install a new version. Therefore making this method obsolete for new discs.
The second method requires not one piece of information (like taking a single VUK out of the memory of WinDVD) but two pieces of information. We have several techniques now for a drive to reveal the Volume ID of a disc. So this part of the method is permanent. However the Processing Key will change every time they change to a new MKB version. And since we also need this second piece of information to calculate a VUK for a disc we always need to get the new Processing Key out of some player (whether its a Software Player or a standalone). The Processing Key (or better a Device Key) is very powerful though: if found it makes it possible to decrypt all discs released so far (assuming we can also retrieve the Volume IDs of those discs).
UNQUOTE
Moral of the story: We still need the processing key and that can be changed by the AACS, or by the abuse of language, "revoked". So the new AACS Crack is not "Undefeatable".
The only development since the time this article was written is that the firmware doesn't need to be changed anymore for the drive to reveal the VolumeID. There are some standard commands which get the job done.
Just thought I'd add this shameless plug here for my uni...I'm currently taking an undergraduate course in linear algebra at Stanford (Math 51; it's taken by a lot of freshmen) and we studied almost everything the article talked about earlier in the quarter. So, moral of the story - if you want to learn interesting stuff, come to Stanford!
Sadly this sums up why a lot of the rich Barons give away their wealth when they get old. They know that they have screwed over people to get where they are. They know they can't take it with them. They try to pay penance before they die. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt all did the same thing. Now add Buffet and Gates to the list.Just remind me again how Warren Buffet has screwed over people?
I'm a teenager and I completely agree with you. The kind of music (think Britney & Eminem), books (lol, can't think of anything right now), movies (think American Pie) that teenagers like these days is sick.
Not all teenagers are fucking morons. Some of the sensible ones hang out at/. instead of myspace...:)
Check out Foxit PDF Reader. Works like a charm!
All you have to do is disable the Acrobat plugin in Firefox and download every PDF and then open it.
You don't even need to install it! Just unzip it and run it, it automatically configures Windows to run Foxit whenever you open a PDF!
Just my 2 cents!
"The newspaper highlighted in an editorial that the 15 million dollars initially offered by Washington was less than the figure the ruling Republican Party would spend on President George W. Bush's inauguration in January.The administration has since increased its aid to 35 million dollars."
And before you start trolling that this is from an Indian newspaper, read properly, it is excerpted from guess what - "The NY Times". So you aren't financing our economy or anything.
Here's the entire article from the NYTimes (this article was published on December 30)
"President Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday's tsunamis in Asia. He also hurried to put as much distance as possible between himself and America's initial measly aid offer of $15 million, and he took issue with an earlier statement by the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who had called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations "stingy." "The person who made that statement was very misguided and ill informed," the president said.
We beg to differ. Mr. Egeland was right on target. We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world's poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world's richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That's less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.
The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush's turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.
Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.
Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Mr. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disburse a single dollar.
Mr. Bush said yesterday that the $35 million we've now pledged "is only the beginning" of the United States' recovery effort. Let's hope that is true, and that this time, our actions will match our promises."
Also, I don't agree with what the parent says about our voting system. Touch-screen machines have a much lower cost as compared to counting by hand in the long run.
Anybody who says that we shouldn't spend on the space program or o
I live in India and there is absolutely no way I can find the kind of music I like in music shops. I mostly listen to classic rock and while I can find stuff like Led Zep, The Doors, Deep Purple, etc. I can't find lesser known bands like say Ten Years After, Grand Funk Railroad, Allman Brothers, ZZ Top...not even Chuck Berry, basically there isn't much choice in my kind of music. Online stores don't stock this kind of music either and there are no equivalents for iTunes etc. in India
There aren't any classic rock stations on the radio. There are like two rock programs a week, (BTW, there's only ONE radio station that plays English music anyway and that's mixed with Hindi too) on the radio that too at odd hours like 11 p.m. So radio isn't a good way to hear new stuff either.
I occasionally borrow music from my friends but this is also not 'new', in the sense I've generally heard it before its just that I don't have the album or the song. Plus, there are a very very limited number of people who listen to the same stuff as I do. Most people listen to crap like Britney, Enrique, Hilary Duff - I hadn't even heard of Duff until the other day when a 10 year old girl told me.
So there really isn't a way for me to hear songs which I haven't heard before. In that sense P2P is great, it lets me sample stuff.
Given a choice I would buy the music I download from P2P, albeit only if I like it. I don't think there's a problem with that, the same principle applies when you hear songs on the radio.
Its not like I don't respect the artists' creativity, talent, hard work etc., I really do, but my problem is that I'm 16 and I really can't ask or expect my parents to buy me a new CD every week or so when we already have more than 200 CDs. Of course when I grow up I would buy my music instead of getting it through P2P, but right now I don't think I have an option...
Delta = arctan(diameter/distance) where Delta stands for angular diameter. This formula is the basic definition of angular diameter. (Note : This formula automatically implies that the units of angular diameter are same as the unit of a plane angle, i.e. radian/degree)
Taking tan function on both sides we get tan Delta = diameter/distance
Since resolution of the telescope is (20/3600000)/360*2pi radians we get tan ((20/3600000)/360*2pi) = diameter/distance.
Now, tan ((20/3600000)/360*2pi) = 9.69627362*10^-8,
This means that 9.69627362*10^-8 = minimum diameter/distance which can be restated as distance*9.69627362*10^-8 = minimum diameter
By substituting distance as required, we can obtain the diameter of the smallest observable object at that particular distance.
For example, taking (mean) earth-moon distance as 385,000 km we get minimum diameter for an object on the moon to be observable = (385,000*9.69627362*10^-8) km = 0.0373306534 km = 37.3306534 m (approx.)
All math was done using Google's calculator and all formulae/definitions are from Wikipedia.
Disclaimer : I may have misinterpreted/misued the formulae so the above results are open to mistakes.
Mod this up anyway, I'm sure somebody will find my mistakes, if there are any (I hope not:)), that is.
I worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit) this February at JPL and we had images like the posted one available almost as soon as the rover landed, of course you couldn't see the tracks back then...I don't have a link handy to any of the pictures from then
I remember that we had a wall-sized poster where scientists used to guess where the rover would land. Some days later, once the rover landed, there was another poster with various points of interest (lander, parachute etc.) marked on it. So we have had images (also from the Mars Global Surveyor) like these for a long time only they weren't available to the public.
If anything, these images bear testimony to the quality of the camera on-board MGS.
Ok I'm 15 and I've been using Firefox for like an year now.
I have IE 6 on my computer too but I never use it. I've already converted three of my friends to Firefox, they aren't power users or anything, they don't know jack about computers...
On the other when I tried to convince my Dad (he's a web-developer, 44 yrs)to switch to Firefox, he's like no way (!) - Firefox is still in beta and unreliable, unstable blah blah blah... (BTW, this was before he had used it)
I showed him all the cool features like find as you type, google search built-in to the toolbar, tabbed browsing, popup blocker, adblock...the works.
I really can't see why my dad doesn't use firefox. I showed one of my relatives Firefox too, but he wasn't too interested - even though he had reformatted his HDD twice or thrice cuz of spyware and scum coming in thru IE. So yes converting someone over 30 is damn hard even if they despise spyware.
I'd like to hear from fellow slashdotters if they've faced similar problems in converting people to firefox.
Really, the state of computer literacy, at least in India (my friends in the US say its equally bad there) is really appalling, and I'm talking about well-educated,smart people not the poor people. I mean look at my Dad he's really smart, he graduated from the top colleges in India and still never bothered to install a firewall on our computer even though we have ADSL, doesn't want to use stuff like Firefox...
Basically converting people to firefox or linux is hard for two reasons - people are averse to change and mainly because most people are stupid.
P.S - I know somebody in my family who put a folder named 'sex' on the fucking Desktop, it had loads of porn, about a gig, and he has two kids (10 & 13).
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, the new update breaks my user-chrome CSS settings that changed tabs to bottom. Now they are on top again. :(
One company, for example, offers 166 tests in one of its testing packages where approximately 60% of the tests (99) are categorized as âpreliminary researchâ(TM) because the genetic-association data have not yet been replicated (www.23andme.com/health/all/). These tests are given 1, 2, or 3 stars based on the size of the study that supports the genetic association for which they test. Information for each of these tests cites references for the original ïnding of the genetic association, including the journal where it was published and the study size. It also provides the number of attempted replications and the number of contrary studies that have been published. Although transparent, examination of the scientiïc evidence provided for many of the genetic associations in this category raises the question of whether these tests should even be included in a genetic-testing package. Two of the ïve genetic tests with 1-star status (those for âavoidance of errorâ(TM) and âobsessive compulsive disorderâ(TM)) are based on single studies with fewer than 100 participants (https://www.23andme.com/you/health/). In both cases the variants map to the D2 dopamine receptor, a gene that has repeatedly been associated with human behavioral traits and attracted newspaper headlines, only to have the associations refuted in later studies [8]. Eight of the 37 (22%) available 2-star-rated genetic associations (originating from a single study with less than 750 participants) have a âcontrary studyâ(TM) indicated. Two different 3-star tests, one for Lou Gehrigâ(TM)s Disease (ALS) and another for obesity, utilize variants that have been positively associated with disease in one or two studies, respectively. However, both these variants have failed replication in four additional studies (https://www.23andme.com/you/health/). Although, the company boasts of its 'systematic vetting processâ(TM) used to determine which research ïndings to include in its genetic-testing package, a number of highly questionable tests continue to be offered to consumers.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20828856
I have a BS and MS in CS from one of the top 10 colleges in the US. For my BS, I had a scholarship from the University and I RA-ed throughout grad school which paid for the MS (incl. living expenses).
/.). Multiple companies have offered to get green cards for me and my friends from overseas. In fact, in some cases even if my friends didn't want to apply for whatever reason, the companies (MS and Google to be specific) kept pushing them to apply. Again, they would NOT do this if they wanted to underpay us. In fact, pretty much everywhere I've worked, they would have been happy to pay extra to expedite a Green Card for me if that were possible (it isn't because there are strict quotas).
As one of the much derided supposedly wage suppressing immigrants, allow me to point out a few things:
1. Not once was I made an offer below market wage or below what American citizens were being offered. If anything, I was made higher offers, as were many of my other international friends. In fact, I was almost always made an offer first and immigration status usually never came into the picture until I had indicated that I would accept. And I make way above what the average American makes - so I'm not the one suppressing your wages.
2. I have never been passed over for promotions or opportunities because of my immigration status, nor have any of my immigrant friends. Most people in the organizations I've worked in are simply unaware that I'm not a citizen.
3. MS is offering to pay for GREEN CARDS for their employees. If the argument here was wage suppression, why the hell would you get your employees Green Cards? Once you get a green card, you can work anywhere, thus undercutting the indentured labor argument that people often make (including normally astute people here on
4. If there are even 20 Sergey Brins, Vinod Dhams and Vinod Khoslas in every year's crop of immigrants, the US will come out ahead in terms of jobs created vs. jobs lost to immigrants. I suspect the number has traditionally been higher but might be lower now on account of the increasing prevalence of body-shoppers.
5. People claim that fewer Americans are studying STEM subjects and CS because of immigrants and wage suppression. This is simply utter crap. Go look at salary surveys and you'll find that engineering jobs consistently pay more than most non-STEM jobs, and even if you wanted to work on Wall Street, you are more likely to get hired if you were an engineer because you have domain knowledge which is in high demand on Wall Street and in business these days. CS graduates from my school were routinely offered over $100K after MS degrees (with a BS, it was usually somewhere between $80-100K, typically on the higher end of that range). Some CS majors were making more than McKinsey consultants or Goldman bankers straight out of college (the latter is only true if you look at the hourly wage).
The flaw in my argument that I'll readily admit: my sample is biased because most of the immigrants I know are the cream of the crop, and so my experience is likely not representative of the majority of immigrants, particularly in IT and those from India (I say this as an Indian).
All that said, there is undoubtedly wage suppression that happens but you might want to retrain your guns from the Microsoft to the Indian IT companies and the smaller IT consulting shops.
The bigger problem in IT and CS jobs is *age*. That's the elephant in the room. People don't lose their job because of immigrants, they lose it because IT companies don't like older employees.
The whole network is only as good as its weakest link. I.e., if one of your trusted 'friends' is stupid and adds a RIAA bot, everyone who is friends with your friend just got screwed.
The article is a little light on details, but am I right in thinking that people's session cookies were being sidejacked? AFAIK, despite FB not sending everything over https, the password is sent over https. So I don't see how a keylogger like approach would work to intercept the pw, unless the Tunisian government was smart enough to run something like Moxie Marlinspike's sslstrip where they did a MITM attack and sent unencrypted http traffic to the user and then stole their password. I doubt this was the case because a) they don't seem smart enough and b) no security measure would circumvent this unless people knew not to log in over http.
So now we just wait until the government uses sslstrip...
P.S. - It's unbelievable that in this day and age FB doesn't encrypt the whole session given how trivial session-jacking is.
Emphasis mine.
"At that point, Facebook offered Twitter around $100 million in cash, with the rest of the deal in stock. Facebook said it would come up with the $100 million by selling more of its stock to outside investors. Twitter agreed on one condition: that the Facebook stock it received be valued at the price company shares garnered on the open market. Facebook blinked and the deal talks ended. "They wanted to buy us but there was not much conviction," the person says."
"Analytics Web site Compete shows Twitter has 6 million unique users, up from around 800,000 last year. Yet Twitter doesn't generate any revenue, despite its surge in popularity."
And finally the best quote of all from Portfolio's interview with Twitter's CEO:
I can't imagine how many times you've been asked, "But how will you make money?"
We will make money, and I can't say exactly how, because we can't predict exactly what's going to work.
From TFA:
Which gets us to InPhase's target market: archiving. That's why they were showing at NAB.
I don't get it. No matter how valuable your content, why would you pay $18,000 for a burner and $180 for for a 300GB disc? Just for the price of the media, you can mirror your data across three different brand-new hard disks. Surely the odds of 3 hard disks failing at the same time are lower than that of an untested, brand-new technology with no redundancy?
Maybe I'm too thick, but why would anyone buy this at this price? (Other than the coolness/my dick is bigger than yours factor, of course.)
So why is this news? Haven't Rainbow Tables been around for several years now? I remember I was looking into them when I wanted to crack my high school network admin's password (turns out I didn't need to, it was 3 characters long).
I have mod points, but what the heck. The slashdot editors strike again - posting stories without checking their facts. I've been following this since the muslix64 hack, so I do know what I'm talking about. I'm quoting the 'hacker' (arnezami - great guy) mentioned in the Ars Technica article:
QUOTE - Original post
In order to decrypt a disc you need the keys the content is encrypted with. These we usually refer to as Volume Unique Keys (although technically VUKs give Title Keys which are used to decrypt the content but this amounts to the same thing). What is important is that VUKs cannot be revoked. In other words: once we have a VUK for a disc then the AACS decryption-protection is broken for that disc. AACS cannot undo this.
So how can we get VUKs?
There are several ways to get VUKs for discs. But none of them are permanent solutions for retrieving all VUKs for all discs (released in the future).
* Get the VUKs out of "old" versions of a Software Player * Get a Volume ID (unique per movie) and a Processing Key (unique per Media Key Block version) and calculate the VUK.
The first method will expire quickly: we can now use WinDVD to retrieve VUKs out of its memory. But when new discs come out they won't work with this old version of WinDVD so you would have to install a new version. Therefore making this method obsolete for new discs.
The second method requires not one piece of information (like taking a single VUK out of the memory of WinDVD) but two pieces of information. We have several techniques now for a drive to reveal the Volume ID of a disc. So this part of the method is permanent. However the Processing Key will change every time they change to a new MKB version. And since we also need this second piece of information to calculate a VUK for a disc we always need to get the new Processing Key out of some player (whether its a Software Player or a standalone). The Processing Key (or better a Device Key) is very powerful though: if found it makes it possible to decrypt all discs released so far (assuming we can also retrieve the Volume IDs of those discs).
UNQUOTE
Moral of the story: We still need the processing key and that can be changed by the AACS, or by the abuse of language, "revoked". So the new AACS Crack is not "Undefeatable".
The only development since the time this article was written is that the firmware doesn't need to be changed anymore for the drive to reveal the VolumeID. There are some standard commands which get the job done.
Just thought I'd add this shameless plug here for my uni...I'm currently taking an undergraduate course in linear algebra at Stanford (Math 51; it's taken by a lot of freshmen) and we studied almost everything the article talked about earlier in the quarter. So, moral of the story - if you want to learn interesting stuff, come to Stanford!
I thought some people might be interested...
Sadly this sums up why a lot of the rich Barons give away their wealth when they get old. They know that they have screwed over people to get where they are. They know they can't take it with them. They try to pay penance before they die. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt all did the same thing. Now add Buffet and Gates to the list.Just remind me again how Warren Buffet has screwed over people?
I'm a teenager and I completely agree with you. The kind of music (think Britney & Eminem), books (lol, can't think of anything right now), movies (think American Pie) that teenagers like these days is sick. Not all teenagers are fucking morons. Some of the sensible ones hang out at /. instead of myspace... :)
Check out Foxit PDF Reader. Works like a charm! All you have to do is disable the Acrobat plugin in Firefox and download every PDF and then open it. You don't even need to install it! Just unzip it and run it, it automatically configures Windows to run Foxit whenever you open a PDF! Just my 2 cents!
To add to that, we built our own supercomputer, Param, when we were denied access to Crays by the US govt.
Check out this report from a newspaper on how stingy the US is in giving aid. For those who won't bother to read the article, I will quote a few lines here:
"The newspaper highlighted in an editorial that the 15 million dollars initially offered by Washington was less than the figure the ruling Republican Party would spend on President George W. Bush's inauguration in January.The administration has since increased its aid to 35 million dollars."
And before you start trolling that this is from an Indian newspaper, read properly, it is excerpted from guess what - "The NY Times". So you aren't financing our economy or anything.
The original NYTimes article can be found here. Use Bugmenot to login.
Here's the entire article from the NYTimes (this article was published on December 30)
"President Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday's tsunamis in Asia. He also hurried to put as much distance as possible between himself and America's initial measly aid offer of $15 million, and he took issue with an earlier statement by the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who had called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations "stingy." "The person who made that statement was very misguided and ill informed," the president said.
We beg to differ. Mr. Egeland was right on target. We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world's poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world's richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That's less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.
The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush's turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.
Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.
Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Mr. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disburse a single dollar.
Mr. Bush said yesterday that the $35 million we've now pledged "is only the beginning" of the United States' recovery effort. Let's hope that is true, and that this time, our actions will match our promises."
Also, I don't agree with what the parent says about our voting system. Touch-screen machines have a much lower cost as compared to counting by hand in the long run.
Anybody who says that we shouldn't spend on the space program or o
Yup, this is insightful in the sense that Slashdot's moderators though that this was insighful...instead of funny
Really gives me an insight into Slashdot's moderating system!!!
Now if only I get to meta-moderate this...
I live in India and there is absolutely no way I can find the kind of music I like in music shops. I mostly listen to classic rock and while I can find stuff like Led Zep, The Doors, Deep Purple, etc. I can't find lesser known bands like say Ten Years After, Grand Funk Railroad, Allman Brothers, ZZ Top...not even Chuck Berry, basically there isn't much choice in my kind of music. Online stores don't stock this kind of music either and there are no equivalents for iTunes etc. in India
There aren't any classic rock stations on the radio. There are like two rock programs a week, (BTW, there's only ONE radio station that plays English music anyway and that's mixed with Hindi too) on the radio that too at odd hours like 11 p.m. So radio isn't a good way to hear new stuff either.
I occasionally borrow music from my friends but this is also not 'new', in the sense I've generally heard it before its just that I don't have the album or the song. Plus, there are a very very limited number of people who listen to the same stuff as I do. Most people listen to crap like Britney, Enrique, Hilary Duff - I hadn't even heard of Duff until the other day when a 10 year old girl told me.
So there really isn't a way for me to hear songs which I haven't heard before. In that sense P2P is great, it lets me sample stuff.
Given a choice I would buy the music I download from P2P, albeit only if I like it. I don't think there's a problem with that, the same principle applies when you hear songs on the radio.
Its not like I don't respect the artists' creativity, talent, hard work etc., I really do, but my problem is that I'm 16 and I really can't ask or expect my parents to buy me a new CD every week or so when we already have more than 200 CDs. Of course when I grow up I would buy my music instead of getting it through P2P, but right now I don't think I have an option...
Here's some math to explain what a resolution of 20 milliarcseconds really means.
:)), that is.
1 arcsecond = 1/3600 degrees
Therefore, 20 milliarcseconds = 20/3600000 degrees = (20/3600000)/360*2pi radians
Delta = arctan(diameter/distance)
where Delta stands for angular diameter. This formula is the basic definition of angular diameter. (Note : This formula automatically implies that the units of angular diameter are same as the unit of a plane angle, i.e. radian/degree)
Taking tan function on both sides we get
tan Delta = diameter/distance
Since resolution of the telescope is (20/3600000)/360*2pi radians we get
tan ((20/3600000)/360*2pi) = diameter/distance.
Now,
tan ((20/3600000)/360*2pi) = 9.69627362*10^-8,
This means that
9.69627362*10^-8 = minimum diameter/distance
which can be restated as
distance*9.69627362*10^-8 = minimum diameter
By substituting distance as required, we can obtain the diameter of the smallest observable object at that particular distance.
For example, taking (mean) earth-moon distance as 385,000 km we get
minimum diameter for an object on the moon to be observable = (385,000*9.69627362*10^-8) km = 0.0373306534 km = 37.3306534 m (approx.)
All math was done using Google's calculator and all formulae/definitions are from Wikipedia.
Disclaimer : I may have misinterpreted/misued the formulae so the above results are open to mistakes.
Mod this up anyway, I'm sure somebody will find my mistakes, if there are any (I hope not
Coral Cache
Note - Doesn't seem to be working. Use mirrordot in case of that.
Mirrordot
Karma whoring since 1962!!!
I worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit) this February at JPL and we had images like the posted one available almost as soon as the rover landed, of course you couldn't see the tracks back then...I don't have a link handy to any of the pictures from then I remember that we had a wall-sized poster where scientists used to guess where the rover would land. Some days later, once the rover landed, there was another poster with various points of interest (lander, parachute etc.) marked on it. So we have had images (also from the Mars Global Surveyor) like these for a long time only they weren't available to the public. If anything, these images bear testimony to the quality of the camera on-board MGS.
Ok I'm 15 and I've been using Firefox for like an year now.
I have IE 6 on my computer too but I never use it. I've already converted three of my friends to Firefox, they aren't power users or anything, they don't know jack about computers...
On the other when I tried to convince my Dad (he's a web-developer, 44 yrs)to switch to Firefox, he's like no way (!) - Firefox is still in beta and unreliable, unstable blah blah blah... (BTW, this was before he had used it)
I showed him all the cool features like find as you type, google search built-in to the toolbar, tabbed browsing, popup blocker, adblock...the works.
I really can't see why my dad doesn't use firefox. I showed one of my relatives Firefox too, but he wasn't too interested - even though he had reformatted his HDD twice or thrice cuz of spyware and scum coming in thru IE. So yes converting someone over 30 is damn hard even if they despise spyware.
I'd like to hear from fellow slashdotters if they've faced similar problems in converting people to firefox.
Really, the state of computer literacy, at least in India (my friends in the US say its equally bad there) is really appalling, and I'm talking about well-educated,smart people not the poor people. I mean look at my Dad he's really smart, he graduated from the top colleges in India and still never bothered to install a firewall on our computer even though we have ADSL, doesn't want to use stuff like Firefox...
Basically converting people to firefox or linux is hard for two reasons - people are averse to change and mainly because most people are stupid.
P.S - I know somebody in my family who put a folder named 'sex' on the fucking Desktop, it had loads of porn, about a gig, and he has two kids (10 & 13).
that's kinda similar to using Dos (command-line) over Windows Explorer (GUI) for tasks like renaming a bunch of *.txt files to *.bat files