My personal anecdote about the unreliability of fingerprint scanning comes from the Science Museum in London.
When I was there several years ago, they had an interactive creative exhibit where you could save your creations by identifying yourself using your fingerprint. I had to go through four fingers before I found one which wasn't incorrectly identified as belonging to someone else.
While this is only an anecdote and the fingerprint scanning system was designed for a relatively unimportant scenario and probably matched against a large number of fingerprints it has always made me wonder about the uniqueness of fingerprints.
An ordinary scam (like the Habbo one listed above) is different from a phishing attack (which requires that the attacker impersonates another entity).
You have absolutely no hard evidence (other than your own experience and cynicism) that the site collecting Habbo logins isn't doing so for purely honest reasons and will only use them to deposit 500 credits in each account submitted.
This comes down to a matter of trust. If you trust random people on the Internet, you're going to get screwed over.
I think in this case it is unreasonable because they solicit review submissions on the same page. When you submit a review the impression is given that it will appear with the other reviews for the product.
This is markedly different to promoting positive trade reviews (e.g. putting the PCFormat Editor's Choice logo on the page for a piece of software that received that accolade).
I guess that holds true, but only if you use wave like twitter (which is to miss its main attractions).
Where wave really shines is for collaboration, communicating ideas between people working together towards a solution rather than disseminating information to a large audience.
At some level, where users can read and write data, locking is always required.
In the most basic case, a user must never retrieve a half written record, therefore the database must ensure that a read either occurs before or after a write, never mid-way through.
(Note that the database may make some optimizations here as serialization of operations only has to be maintained from the clients point of view. Internally, the database may be updating the record and indexes at the same time that data is being read but taking steps to ensure that a read either returns the old data or the new data.)
This doesn't mean that the client has to lock things explicitly. The update in Step 4 could be done like this:
UPDATE records SET key1 = value1, key2 = value2 WHERE id = ? AND timestamp = ?
If the timestamp has changed (because another client committed a change) then the update won't modify any rows. The client must check to see how many rows were modified to see whether the update was successful.
If your users don't do edits on the same data (e.g. a forum) or your webapp isn't heavily used (e.g. internal app for a small company), you can have plenty of concurrency bugs all through your code which never get triggered.
No dipshit, I mean the image of my Supreme Commander DVD which despite only being used once, would not read on either of my housemate's PCs. Since it would still read correctly on mine, I ripped it.
I found programming completely useless for touch-typing simply because there were too many symbols and I needed to do too much jumping around in the code.
Writing essays at GCSE, on the other hand, did wonders for my typing ability.
Perhaps because people other than the story writer will read this thread?
I'm currently looking to build a home server and would have considered a soekris except that they're quite expensive and I'd like something with a little more grunt and disk space.
Looking through browser history is equivalent to asking you to provide your personal diary in order to get into the country. Similarly, looking at your saved email is equivalent to requiring you to bring copies of all your personal correspondence for the previous 12 months in order to get into the country.
No it isn't. It's more like if you voluntarily brought your diary and correspondence with you and they demanded to see it before allowing you into the country.
It's not much better but it's a very different scenario. If you don't want something searched you can leave it at home.
Total cost of eight gaming laptops: £8000 (roughly)
Total cost of two 360s and two HDTVs: £1500 (again, roughly)
Control issues in FPS games on consoles are a non-issue, it's the same for everyone and part of the game. On CoD4 for PC you can spin around instantly and aim very precisely, on 360 turning round takes longer. You can argue that one is inherently better than the other but in terms of game balance and fairness, it's a non-issue.
2) "Following" people on Twitter is necessarily superficial compared to other media, which offer the same benefits without the message size limit.
And that's exactly the point, following someone on Twitter isn't even close to declaring them a "friend", it merely means that you find their thoughts interesting and would like to subscribe to their newsletter.
Slashdot Mirror
PhishTank is a crowd sourcing site which merely samples the opinions of their users which makes it accountable to... no-one?
Netcraft does not consider it a phish (although you have to use their toolbar to check that.)
Incidentally, the spreadsheet is suddenly gone so I suspect someone at Google is reading Slashdot.
My personal anecdote about the unreliability of fingerprint scanning comes from the Science Museum in London.
When I was there several years ago, they had an interactive creative exhibit where you could save your creations by identifying yourself using your fingerprint. I had to go through four fingers before I found one which wasn't incorrectly identified as belonging to someone else.
While this is only an anecdote and the fingerprint scanning system was designed for a relatively unimportant scenario and probably matched against a large number of fingerprints it has always made me wonder about the uniqueness of fingerprints.
An ordinary scam (like the Habbo one listed above) is different from a phishing attack (which requires that the attacker impersonates another entity).
You have absolutely no hard evidence (other than your own experience and cynicism) that the site collecting Habbo logins isn't doing so for purely honest reasons and will only use them to deposit 500 credits in each account submitted.
This comes down to a matter of trust. If you trust random people on the Internet, you're going to get screwed over.
I think in this case it is unreasonable because they solicit review submissions on the same page. When you submit a review the impression is given that it will appear with the other reviews for the product.
This is markedly different to promoting positive trade reviews (e.g. putting the PCFormat Editor's Choice logo on the page for a piece of software that received that accolade).
Have a look at this article from torrent freak (complete with update saying TPB is back on the results page):
http://torrentfreak.com/google-removes-pirate-bay-frontpage-from-search-results-091002/
Sure, unless getting everyone together is difficult or expensive.
I guess that holds true, but only if you use wave like twitter (which is to miss its main attractions).
Where wave really shines is for collaboration, communicating ideas between people working together towards a solution rather than disseminating information to a large audience.
All well and good until Firefox (or the whole OS) crashes.
(Yes, I get the joke, I just take a sick pleasure in pulling it apart)
At some level, where users can read and write data, locking is always required.
In the most basic case, a user must never retrieve a half written record, therefore the database must ensure that a read either occurs before or after a write, never mid-way through.
(Note that the database may make some optimizations here as serialization of operations only has to be maintained from the clients point of view. Internally, the database may be updating the record and indexes at the same time that data is being read but taking steps to ensure that a read either returns the old data or the new data.)
This doesn't mean that the client has to lock things explicitly. The update in Step 4 could be done like this:
UPDATE records SET key1 = value1, key2 = value2 WHERE id = ? AND timestamp = ?
If the timestamp has changed (because another client committed a change) then the update won't modify any rows. The client must check to see how many rows were modified to see whether the update was successful.
If your users don't do edits on the same data (e.g. a forum) or your webapp isn't heavily used (e.g. internal app for a small company), you can have plenty of concurrency bugs all through your code which never get triggered.
More relevantly, the UK and the US already ban tools which can be used to bypass an effective copy protection mechanism.
I know, I did. We happily watched DVDs on my housemate's PC for the rest of the year.
I'm still entitled to make my one backup copy, which I did since I assumed the disk was failing.
It's actually 40GB 2.5" hard disk which is great for copying patches and games at LANs.
Even on a 100mbit LAN, you shouldn't underestimate the datarate of a guy walking across the room with a portable HDD.
No dipshit, I mean the image of my Supreme Commander DVD which despite only being used once, would not read on either of my housemate's PCs. Since it would still read correctly on mine, I ripped it.
FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit.
Although this isn't often a problem, I have run into it when copying DVD images (for backups).
For convenience, I now use NTFS on that drive since Linux support for NTFS (through ntfs-3g) is now good enough.
I found programming completely useless for touch-typing simply because there were too many symbols and I needed to do too much jumping around in the code.
Writing essays at GCSE, on the other hand, did wonders for my typing ability.
Perhaps because people other than the story writer will read this thread?
I'm currently looking to build a home server and would have considered a soekris except that they're quite expensive and I'd like something with a little more grunt and disk space.
No it isn't. It's more like if you voluntarily brought your diary and correspondence with you and they demanded to see it before allowing you into the country.
It's not much better but it's a very different scenario. If you don't want something searched you can leave it at home.
Portsmouth, where we've also seen more CCTV cameras.
Interesting.
This contradicts an anacdote from a UK magistrate I know who said that "most" of the cases that came before her were supported by CCTV footage.
Come on guys, it's possible to understand a joke and then make a serious comment about some aspect of it.
It's not hard, just hire a bunch of recent CS graduates.
Total cost of eight gaming laptops: £8000 (roughly)
Total cost of two 360s and two HDTVs: £1500 (again, roughly)
Control issues in FPS games on consoles are a non-issue, it's the same for everyone and part of the game. On CoD4 for PC you can spin around instantly and aim very precisely, on 360 turning round takes longer. You can argue that one is inherently better than the other but in terms of game balance and fairness, it's a non-issue.
And that's exactly the point, following someone on Twitter isn't even close to declaring them a "friend", it merely means that you find their thoughts interesting and would like to subscribe to their newsletter.