You can also spread your application out into layers. From your request I assume you will be collecting and/or publish sensitive data. It may be possible to divide that process into sections, and spread the seconds over three different machines, with custom-written interfaces between them. That way, when (not if, but when) your world-facing server gets pwned, the pwners will probably be unable to immediately pull anything useful out of the second section (on the second machine), since it isn't using any ordinary method (e.g. HTTP on port 80) to publish data. This arrangement, like a bank vault, is not perfect defense, but it does give you more time to notice the breach and react.
Different kinds of food have different chemical composition which results in different combination of neurons firing etc etc etc.
Different kinds of cables - as long as they do transmit the data faithfully, which doesn't take $1000 cable - result in same signal arriving at the acoustic system receiver.
IOW, $90 bottle of wine and three-buck-Chuck objectively give different experience - what subjective is only whether it is a better experience or not, but $20 cable and $1000 cable give objectively same experience.
You're half right. Serious wine people are routinely unable to distinguish $8/bottle wine from $800/bottle wine in double-blind tests.
Yeah yeah, I know that part of the wine/stereo experience is knowing that the thing cost a grand... but luckily for me, my brain is sufficiently well-programmed that I do not enjoy that sort of experience.
Redefining your time horizon after the fact allows you avoid cognitive dissonance when you're proven wrong. The Iraq war was supposed to be a short term affair. Imminent threat from Saddam Hussein, in and out in "I doubt" 6 months. The neo cons never thought it would be an operation on the scale of decades, any attempt to give them the benefit of the "long view" is revisionist history.
The neocons weren't crazy or evil. They were just proud and stupid and flat out wrong.
They may have supposed the war would be short, but the desired effects of the war were (presumably) long-term. I don't know all of the goals, and neither do you, since we don't have access to the classified information that would give a full understanding of the situation. Single facts can greatly change our evaluation of a decision.
I do know that the publicly available facts are misleadingly deficient; my husband was there.
In any case, we can be certain that the warhawks' goals included: Iran, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its planned oil bourse; Iraq, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its pipelines; Afghanistan; Kuwait; OPEC; Israel; al Qaida; Syria; the black market in military hardware; the US, its unemployment rate (re: enlistment), its economy, and its recently sallied reputation as somebody you don't want to mess with; and all the unknown unknowns. There are so many variables, so many political figures, and so much non-public information, you just sound like a child when you assert that the deciders were "stupid and flat out wrong".
It's not over. I only have about 10 domains but I'm going to go elsewhere. The "reversal" was to little, to late, bitches. Man, I use to LOVE Bob Parsons and his whole in your face antics, but to Hell with him and Godaddy now.
Yep, I'm moving too. Looks like HostGator is a good choice for where to move. I'm looking forward to my "Cancel my accounts, I think your organization is evil" phone call to GoDaddy, those are always fun.
The Iraq war was sold to the American people on the basis that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the US. They were wrong on the short term, there was simply no reason to believe (besides the paranoid fantasies of neoconservatives) that Saddam Hussein was preparing any sort of attack. They were wrong on the long term too, 9 years of war cost us more in lives and treasure than the 9/11 attacks.
There is no reasonable difference of opinion when it comes to the Iraq war. The hawks were simply power hungry, vengeful, and completely uninterested in realistic appraisals of the situation. The anti-war crowd were right then, and they have been proven correct about what a long, painful, and pointless struggle the neocons chose for us.
If you conclude that your opponents are "crazy" or "evil", you *probably* don't understand their time horizon.
Wow, yeah. Because paying attention to someone's reputation rather than the arguments they're making is so intelligent. And going along with what everyone else approves of always works out. People shouldn't do things that make other people give them disapproving looks!
In fact it usually does. I'm a subversive libertarian, but I readily admit that most behaviors that garner disapproval -- shoplifting, profanity, physical intimidation, dangerous driving, theft, vandalism, cheating, tresspassing -- do in fact deserve it, in the sense that our society is more efficient at producing safety, comfort, and pleasure without such behaviors occurring.
I think being anonymous is important. It allows people to reveal truths or feelings which might otherwise never be revealed (because of herd mentality). It's also a great thing if you like privacy.
Absolutely. Me too. My.sig used to say something like "Privacy allows you to behave morally, when those around you would judge you by an irrational moral code." But it is nevertheless the case that MOST gauche behaviors really are destructive to all concerned.
Not just in online gaming, but in other things too.
Well sure. We're social creatures, and so we look to our fellow tribesmen for cues on what behavior is acceptable. Having others cheating gives us a sense of permission to do likewise.
Add to this the fact that online interactions do not carry the normal risk of disapproving looks, shame attacks, and damaging the reputation of one's name. Such things are vital in maintaining a society's integrity, and they are almost completely missing online.
I fully agree. I've been advocating basic critical thinking classes in our k-12 school system for years.
We did run a trial, before my time, and apparently (anecdotal) children began questioning their parent's belief systems, this lead to the obvious discontinuation of these classes. It's a little too late to be teaching basic critical thinking skills in college, but it'll take some work to get this curriculum in grade schools.
Alas, such programs are based on three assumptions, all incorrect:
people prefer truth over cognitive consonance
parents want their children's beliefs to be true
parents want their children to be smarter and live better than they are
So naturally the program was cancelled.
When I realized this about our society, I pulled my kids out of school and now we homeschool.
An agitprop guy tells the campus police that "If you let [the prisoners] go, we will let you leave". This false imprisonment bit is the crucial part of the story that got edited out of the YouTube video that went viral and became the face for the OWS movement. Yes, I think that using military grade pepper spray at close range was excessive. But this confrontation was deliberately provoked by the agitprop controlling the OWS crowd at Davis, and he got what he wanted. (And controlling the encounter he was.)
But nobody talks about this, even though there's full video coverage of the entire thing. People don't like having facts contrary to the narrative they've constructed for themselves.
Who was this guy? What are his goals? Who does he work for? To me, those are just as important questions as what to do about Lt. Pike and Chancellor Katehi.
Fascinating. The youtube video is now marked 'private'.
I'm hardly surprised to learn that the OWS leaders are no more honest than those they want us to hate.
And in the end, it's all about money. OWS's fundamental and unstated goal, of which all stated goals are outgrowths, is "We want more financial equality in our society." And their opponents obviously represent the opposite side. In no case it is obvious that our society's current level of financial equality is wrong. It is somewhere between feudalism (zero equality) and socialism (total equality), hopefully in the area where the incentives are right.
Maintaining your beliefs whether or not they are correct is not integrity; it's simply stubbornness. Integrity includes being able to admit you were wrong before, which is seems to be looked down on in our society; consider how many politicians have been accused of "flip-flopping" on a controversial subject.
The problem with this simplification is that it is rarely obvious that one's belief is incorrect.
Certainly, we may encounter a piece of data or an anecdote that appears to contradict our belief... but the new bit of information is rarely the whole story, especially these days when we are only ever told half the story. (The whole story is rarely sensational, whereas half the story makes the subject's decisions seem unwise or "it's just crazy".) When I hear that someone clings to their belief even in the face of a new piece of data, I consider it as likely as not that the believer is simply being appropriately cynical, living as he does in a world of venal liars.
As well, there is a time horizon issue. What we call "beliefs" are often really general principles that predict long-term outcomes. These principles often produce short-term damages, which are then thrown in the believer's face as evidence that his principles are wrong. But that's usually just a disagreement over time horizons. Just look at the arguments for and against the Iraq occupation.
Personally i though Gerald Bull had the right idea for launching unmanned payloads when he came up with the idea of using something similar to HAARP as a "space gun" but he simply didn't have the technology to make it work. Now that we have both rail and coil guns it should be easier to accomplish and ultimately lower the cost of putting objects into space. you could build the barrel on the side of one of those South Pacific islands we've had since WWII, build a small reactor to power the thing, maybe even use a small rocket for the final push after the energy from the firing has been expended so you won't have to build as big a gun.
The atmosphere is the problem with cannon-style launches as Bull proposed. The higher up you can position the muzzle of your launcher, the less muzzle velocity you need, and therefore the less energy you need, and the less accelleration the payload must endure, and the less heat the projectile must resist. So an island at sea level is the very worst place to position your laucher (save perhaps for Death Valley).
Inside a mountain in the Himalayas or Rockies would be a far better choice, with the muzzle emerging at the peak which is already halfway out of the atmosphere (and completely out of the dense, dusty, insect-filled, and humid part of the atmosphere).
The launch accelleration is a more serious constraint than probably any other aspect of the project.
Yes, but the existing planes are constantly updated. Military planes are not like commodity cars, which get build once and only receive new wipers every now end then. The airforce plans to use them for decades. Also, the insight gained will influence the next generation of fighters.
Useless knowledge -- the era of meathauler fighters is already over, at least here in the West.
Are you measured by abandoned tickets? Then tickets will get resolved, even if they don't reasonably deserve to be considered resolved. You will get things unnecessarily classified as "unable to duplicate", "insufficient information", etc.
I experienced a form of this phenomenon just this afternoon, albeit not in an IT environment...
I went to Bank of America to (proudly) close my accounts, having moved to a smaller and thoroughly more moral bank. The customer service rep figured it out right away when he saw that my six ~18-year-old accounts now all had zero balance, and zero activity for the past month. So we start closing. He is doing the keyboarding and mousing while I am watching the screen.
At a certain point in the process of closing each account, the rep is required to give the reason for account closure. In the popup list of reasons are some very relevant choices: 'Service' and 'Competition' sprang out as the correct choices. He chose 'Misc', and for the sub-reason chose 'Bank of America Consolidation', whatever the hell THAT meant.
It was then that I knew there had been a memo from headquarters, probably last month, that said "We know people are closing their accounts. Management wants to make sure that the reason is NOT people leaving in disgust, headed to our competitors." And so now the CEO can stand up and say "We've only lost 1% of our accounts to the competition!"
Just this afternoon that happened, right in front of me. I almost laughed out loud.
Good. glad to see that some VP did the smart thing for once and cut the middle managers instead of the people who actually get the work done.
It is deliciously ironic that you would take a swipe at "middle managers" in this conversation about metrics.
The only way to eliminate middle management, is for upper management to utilize metrics in order to evaluate lower management. There is no time for hands-on management and evaluation with a keen eye in one of these vaunted "flat organizations" with no middle management. And so lower management quickly realizes that their jobs and bonuses depend on the metric, rather than on quality or long-ranged action.
After that, the company is humped... but by then, the "aggressive VP" who wiped out middle management has collected his bonus and moved on.
Losers realize this simple fact, instantly think of several ways to game the metric, then don't do it figuring that "obviously" the decisionmakers realize the metric is horribly broken. Then they get laid off. Winners spend hours, days, or weeks coming up with one way to game the metric, pat themselves on the back for being so clever, and do it. Then they get promoted, eventually to a position where they come up with metrics of their own.
It's not just IT. Our entire society has converted over to metrics. An easy example comes to mind: the stock market versus a company's quarterly performance. Another set of particularly nasty examples is found in our justice system: police officers evaluated by their number of citations, prosecutors by their number of convictions, prisons by their dollars per inmate per day.
I get the financial impetus to switch to metrics. Where it used to be one skilled manager overseeing per 5-7 employees, it can now be one schmuck manager with an Excel spreadsheet overseeing 30 employees.
I even get the psychological impetus. Numbers give us that all-important feeling of certainty, and at low cost too... while the traditional alternative requires legwork, mindwork, judgment, contemplation, and mistakes.
The attack can be stopped using their Protected Mode. Versions that ship with the protected mode will not be addressed to specifically mitigate this attack until later, with Adobe recommending everyone turn on protected mode to protect them in the mean time.
Whether or not that's a reasonable reaction is a whole different question.
Meh. Just switch to a security-conscious web browser like Opera. It lets me browse with plugins (acrobat, flash, java, etc.) disabled, cookies disabled, javascript disabled, and send-referrer disabled. I enable them on a site-by-site basis. Opera handles it natively and beautifully.
You people still using 20th-century web browsers are in serious peril.
No, since when you establish the vibrations you don't know in which one it occurs. So while you could establish vibrations in a distant diamond (or particle), at least theoretically, you never know when you do so which one is actually vibrating. When they set it up, they used 1 photon that could travel and strike either diamond, creating the vibrations. Without measuring the photon's path, they didn't know which one it hit and therefore which on would be vibrating. This caused the entanglement.
Close. The entanglement is created by the fact that the photon COULD HAVE chosen either one. Because the photon was not observed in such a way that it had to collapse into particle-ish behavior, the photon never had to choose which one to hit. Therefore, each crystal was AND was not hit by the photon. They only 'decide' who took the photon when the rest of reality (e.g. an observer, or an interaction with another incident particle) needs to know exactly who took it.
...of a problem that was first noted in the mid 1980s and termed "electronic smog" but the most general term is RFI and dates back as far radio systems in general. Not only do signals interfere with each other, but signals will interfere with ANY electronic device where pins or wires are capable of acting as a dipole.
RFI doesn't even require a pin or wire to be a dipole -- RFI works just as well against a single pin acting as a monopole, since the device's case is almost certainly grounded and so can act as the other pole.
Because the "smart" part of the meter is the part where it gives the utility company (and the powers that be) the ability to monitor in real-time what you've got running and at what times, along with the ability to take control of heating/cooling of a residence away from the consumer.
Why would any company want to do that? Why would anyone want to take control of your heating/cooling? What could anyone possibly gain by doing that? Aside from not being able to charge you more money for using your heating?
Or is it you're just paranoid?
The daily peak power load in the south can be laid at the feet of air conditioning. Likewise for the daily peak load in the north for heating. Peak load is what compels states and utilities to con$$$truct more powerplants. If they can just get peak load down, average load can go way up, and it's all gravy to them.
According to TFA, the smart meters will do more than that. They are intended in the medium term to allow power control within the house. So that the meter can signal to, say, the freezer that power demand is particularly high, and if it could hold off consuming power for a while it would be appreciated.
Yes, that is the selling point used to win over the ballast into allowing those things on their houses.
Information also flows upstream. That information will be used to prove you guilty. It will not be available to you for use in proving yourself not-guilty.
I have seen the phenomenon with my own eyes. Houston has a red-light camera system, but civilians have not been told that it also logs license plates. "Authorized users" can remotely access the system in order to find out which intersection a particular license plate last crossed. It is used to track people down, usually for arrest.
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
Yep yep.
Remember when knol was first introduced? It was supposed to be a "verified wikipedia", written by experts. Those experts (you, me, anyone) were to spend a lot of time, effort, and domain knowledge in writing high-quality articles... and in return we would receive a per-click royalty. This would incentivize the creation of actionable content that would something something revolutionize something synergy something leverage.
I remember thinking through the subjects for which I am credible authority, and considering whether to produce some knols in order to develop a bit of side income. I very seriously considered it... and judging from some of the knols I've seen, lots of other people went all the way.
Now we see how it all ends up. Just like the DRM game ended up. "Oh, sorry users, but this quarter we have decided that the project isn't profitable. Or we just hired a new VP and he's shaking things up. Or whatever. We're closing it down, so f*** you and your investment, you're just an externality."
I will now NEVER, EVER contribute content to a for-profit enterprise. Be it amazon reviews or knols or sidebar markups or whatever, that's it, I'm done.
No doubt that there are some Hams who have gone silent key still on the rolls, but most of their registrations will expire after no more than 10 years. And the dead certainly don't account for many of the new registrations (except perhaps in Chicago).
It doesn't work that way. A license expires after 10 years, but renewal is free and practically effortless, so everyone renews forever. The number of ham licenses will therefore always be "at an all time high" because of the ratchet effect created by free renewals.
My father has been a ham since the 1960s, but hasn't touched a radio in three decades.
Although I prefer Maemo since it seems to be the least soul sucking OS around, Android is also quite nice once you install a few odds and ends to clean up the advertising mess - though you need hardware that can be rooted. Applications like DroidGuard, AdAway, LBE Privacy Guard, or similar will put a halt to anything trying call home or get in your way.
Sorry to yank off your warm fuzzy blanket, but if you carry a cellphone and use it to make calls, your privacy is exactly bupkis because the cellular companies are already inside your kimono...
Your physical location is already tracked real-time, and accessible to people whose career advancement requires wrecking your life (law enforcement). Whereas all Google et. al. want to do is sell you stuff you want, or sell your information to other people who want to sell you stuff you want. They know where you are and they will use that information to prove you guilty -- but not to prove you not-guilty.
Your social connections are also already logged vis-a-vis your call logs, MMS logs, and email records, again accessible to people who are incentivized to get convictions without any primary concern for guilt or innocence. Whereas Google and friends just want to figure out which commercials to show you.
You act like someone on board the Titanic, who is so utterly intimidated by the prospect of sinking in the arctic that you lock yourself in your room and obsess about how to prevent the waitstaff from spilling a drink on you. You are worried about all the wrong things.
They come down with stomach acidosis, and they will only live about six months once the corn diet begins.
Posting this kind of absurd fiction only helps discredit the very real problems caused by overfeeding with grains. A six-month death sentence?
The problem began with New Deal-era crop subsidies. Naturally, every progressive treats government power like violence (if it doesn't work, just use more of it) and instead of removing the subsidies, they want to tax the meat or corn and thus continue to cause hardship.
I agree that crop subsidies are teh stupid, but the corn health problems are real. In addition to acidosis, corn-fed cows have problems with liver failure from (corn) aflotoxin concentration, as well as founder and ulcers. It's not a secret either, just do some googling.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.w3.org/Security/faq/wwwsf4.html Once you understand the things they recommend and WHY they recommend them, you won't need to ask this question anymore.
You can also spread your application out into layers. From your request I assume you will be collecting and/or publish sensitive data. It may be possible to divide that process into sections, and spread the seconds over three different machines, with custom-written interfaces between them. That way, when (not if, but when) your world-facing server gets pwned, the pwners will probably be unable to immediately pull anything useful out of the second section (on the second machine), since it isn't using any ordinary method (e.g. HTTP on port 80) to publish data. This arrangement, like a bank vault, is not perfect defense, but it does give you more time to notice the breach and react.
Also has the advantage that it is basically untraceable... i mean, what to you want, google it?
Yep, a clever choice of alias.
According to TFA, the Cutwail guy's real name is supposedly Dmitry Sergeyvich Nechvolod, phone number +7-916-4444474.
Uhhh, not quite.
Different kinds of food have different chemical composition which results in different combination of neurons firing etc etc etc.
Different kinds of cables - as long as they do transmit the data faithfully, which doesn't take $1000 cable - result in same signal arriving at the acoustic system receiver.
IOW, $90 bottle of wine and three-buck-Chuck objectively give different experience - what subjective is only whether it is a better experience or not, but $20 cable and $1000 cable give objectively same experience.
You're half right. Serious wine people are routinely unable to distinguish $8/bottle wine from $800/bottle wine in double-blind tests.
Yeah yeah, I know that part of the wine/stereo experience is knowing that the thing cost a grand... but luckily for me, my brain is sufficiently well-programmed that I do not enjoy that sort of experience.
Redefining your time horizon after the fact allows you avoid cognitive dissonance when you're proven wrong. The Iraq war was supposed to be a short term affair. Imminent threat from Saddam Hussein, in and out in "I doubt" 6 months. The neo cons never thought it would be an operation on the scale of decades, any attempt to give them the benefit of the "long view" is revisionist history.
The neocons weren't crazy or evil. They were just proud and stupid and flat out wrong.
They may have supposed the war would be short, but the desired effects of the war were (presumably) long-term. I don't know all of the goals, and neither do you, since we don't have access to the classified information that would give a full understanding of the situation. Single facts can greatly change our evaluation of a decision.
I do know that the publicly available facts are misleadingly deficient; my husband was there.
In any case, we can be certain that the warhawks' goals included: Iran, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its planned oil bourse; Iraq, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its pipelines; Afghanistan; Kuwait; OPEC; Israel; al Qaida; Syria; the black market in military hardware; the US, its unemployment rate (re: enlistment), its economy, and its recently sallied reputation as somebody you don't want to mess with; and all the unknown unknowns. There are so many variables, so many political figures, and so much non-public information, you just sound like a child when you assert that the deciders were "stupid and flat out wrong".
It's not over. I only have about 10 domains but I'm going to go elsewhere. The "reversal" was to little, to late, bitches. Man, I use to LOVE Bob Parsons and his whole in your face antics, but to Hell with him and Godaddy now.
Yep, I'm moving too. Looks like HostGator is a good choice for where to move. I'm looking forward to my "Cancel my accounts, I think your organization is evil" phone call to GoDaddy, those are always fun.
The Iraq war was sold to the American people on the basis that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the US. They were wrong on the short term, there was simply no reason to believe (besides the paranoid fantasies of neoconservatives) that Saddam Hussein was preparing any sort of attack. They were wrong on the long term too, 9 years of war cost us more in lives and treasure than the 9/11 attacks.
There is no reasonable difference of opinion when it comes to the Iraq war. The hawks were simply power hungry, vengeful, and completely uninterested in realistic appraisals of the situation. The anti-war crowd were right then, and they have been proven correct about what a long, painful, and pointless struggle the neocons chose for us.
If you conclude that your opponents are "crazy" or "evil", you *probably* don't understand their time horizon.
Wow, yeah. Because paying attention to someone's reputation rather than the arguments they're making is so intelligent. And going along with what everyone else approves of always works out. People shouldn't do things that make other people give them disapproving looks!
In fact it usually does. I'm a subversive libertarian, but I readily admit that most behaviors that garner disapproval -- shoplifting, profanity, physical intimidation, dangerous driving, theft, vandalism, cheating, tresspassing -- do in fact deserve it, in the sense that our society is more efficient at producing safety, comfort, and pleasure without such behaviors occurring.
I think being anonymous is important. It allows people to reveal truths or feelings which might otherwise never be revealed (because of herd mentality). It's also a great thing if you like privacy.
Absolutely. Me too. My .sig used to say something like "Privacy allows you to behave morally, when those around you would judge you by an irrational moral code." But it is nevertheless the case that MOST gauche behaviors really are destructive to all concerned.
Not just in online gaming, but in other things too.
Well sure. We're social creatures, and so we look to our fellow tribesmen for cues on what behavior is acceptable. Having others cheating gives us a sense of permission to do likewise.
Add to this the fact that online interactions do not carry the normal risk of disapproving looks, shame attacks, and damaging the reputation of one's name. Such things are vital in maintaining a society's integrity, and they are almost completely missing online.
I fully agree. I've been advocating basic critical thinking classes in our k-12 school system for years. We did run a trial, before my time, and apparently (anecdotal) children began questioning their parent's belief systems, this lead to the obvious discontinuation of these classes. It's a little too late to be teaching basic critical thinking skills in college, but it'll take some work to get this curriculum in grade schools.
Alas, such programs are based on three assumptions, all incorrect:
So naturally the program was cancelled.
When I realized this about our society, I pulled my kids out of school and now we homeschool.
Here's a link to what actually happened at the infamous UC Davis pepper spraying: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhPdH3wE0_Y#t=8m
An agitprop guy tells the campus police that "If you let [the prisoners] go, we will let you leave". This false imprisonment bit is the crucial part of the story that got edited out of the YouTube video that went viral and became the face for the OWS movement. Yes, I think that using military grade pepper spray at close range was excessive. But this confrontation was deliberately provoked by the agitprop controlling the OWS crowd at Davis, and he got what he wanted. (And controlling the encounter he was.)
But nobody talks about this, even though there's full video coverage of the entire thing. People don't like having facts contrary to the narrative they've constructed for themselves.
Who was this guy? What are his goals? Who does he work for? To me, those are just as important questions as what to do about Lt. Pike and Chancellor Katehi.
Fascinating. The youtube video is now marked 'private'.
I'm hardly surprised to learn that the OWS leaders are no more honest than those they want us to hate.
And in the end, it's all about money. OWS's fundamental and unstated goal, of which all stated goals are outgrowths, is "We want more financial equality in our society." And their opponents obviously represent the opposite side. In no case it is obvious that our society's current level of financial equality is wrong. It is somewhere between feudalism (zero equality) and socialism (total equality), hopefully in the area where the incentives are right.
Maintaining your beliefs whether or not they are correct is not integrity; it's simply stubbornness. Integrity includes being able to admit you were wrong before, which is seems to be looked down on in our society; consider how many politicians have been accused of "flip-flopping" on a controversial subject.
The problem with this simplification is that it is rarely obvious that one's belief is incorrect.
Certainly, we may encounter a piece of data or an anecdote that appears to contradict our belief... but the new bit of information is rarely the whole story, especially these days when we are only ever told half the story. (The whole story is rarely sensational, whereas half the story makes the subject's decisions seem unwise or "it's just crazy".) When I hear that someone clings to their belief even in the face of a new piece of data, I consider it as likely as not that the believer is simply being appropriately cynical, living as he does in a world of venal liars.
As well, there is a time horizon issue. What we call "beliefs" are often really general principles that predict long-term outcomes. These principles often produce short-term damages, which are then thrown in the believer's face as evidence that his principles are wrong. But that's usually just a disagreement over time horizons. Just look at the arguments for and against the Iraq occupation.
Personally i though Gerald Bull had the right idea for launching unmanned payloads when he came up with the idea of using something similar to HAARP as a "space gun" but he simply didn't have the technology to make it work. Now that we have both rail and coil guns it should be easier to accomplish and ultimately lower the cost of putting objects into space. you could build the barrel on the side of one of those South Pacific islands we've had since WWII, build a small reactor to power the thing, maybe even use a small rocket for the final push after the energy from the firing has been expended so you won't have to build as big a gun.
The atmosphere is the problem with cannon-style launches as Bull proposed. The higher up you can position the muzzle of your launcher, the less muzzle velocity you need, and therefore the less energy you need, and the less accelleration the payload must endure, and the less heat the projectile must resist. So an island at sea level is the very worst place to position your laucher (save perhaps for Death Valley).
Inside a mountain in the Himalayas or Rockies would be a far better choice, with the muzzle emerging at the peak which is already halfway out of the atmosphere (and completely out of the dense, dusty, insect-filled, and humid part of the atmosphere).
The launch accelleration is a more serious constraint than probably any other aspect of the project.
Yes, but the existing planes are constantly updated. Military planes are not like commodity cars, which get build once and only receive new wipers every now end then. The airforce plans to use them for decades. Also, the insight gained will influence the next generation of fighters.
Useless knowledge -- the era of meathauler fighters is already over, at least here in the West.
Are you measured by abandoned tickets? Then tickets will get resolved, even if they don't reasonably deserve to be considered resolved. You will get things unnecessarily classified as "unable to duplicate", "insufficient information", etc.
I experienced a form of this phenomenon just this afternoon, albeit not in an IT environment...
I went to Bank of America to (proudly) close my accounts, having moved to a smaller and thoroughly more moral bank. The customer service rep figured it out right away when he saw that my six ~18-year-old accounts now all had zero balance, and zero activity for the past month. So we start closing. He is doing the keyboarding and mousing while I am watching the screen.
At a certain point in the process of closing each account, the rep is required to give the reason for account closure. In the popup list of reasons are some very relevant choices: 'Service' and 'Competition' sprang out as the correct choices. He chose 'Misc', and for the sub-reason chose 'Bank of America Consolidation', whatever the hell THAT meant.
It was then that I knew there had been a memo from headquarters, probably last month, that said "We know people are closing their accounts. Management wants to make sure that the reason is NOT people leaving in disgust, headed to our competitors." And so now the CEO can stand up and say "We've only lost 1% of our accounts to the competition!"
Just this afternoon that happened, right in front of me. I almost laughed out loud.
Good. glad to see that some VP did the smart thing for once and cut the middle managers instead of the people who actually get the work done.
It is deliciously ironic that you would take a swipe at "middle managers" in this conversation about metrics.
The only way to eliminate middle management, is for upper management to utilize metrics in order to evaluate lower management. There is no time for hands-on management and evaluation with a keen eye in one of these vaunted "flat organizations" with no middle management. And so lower management quickly realizes that their jobs and bonuses depend on the metric, rather than on quality or long-ranged action.
After that, the company is humped... but by then, the "aggressive VP" who wiped out middle management has collected his bonus and moved on.
Losers realize this simple fact, instantly think of several ways to game the metric, then don't do it figuring that "obviously" the decisionmakers realize the metric is horribly broken. Then they get laid off. Winners spend hours, days, or weeks coming up with one way to game the metric, pat themselves on the back for being so clever, and do it. Then they get promoted, eventually to a position where they come up with metrics of their own.
It's not just IT. Our entire society has converted over to metrics. An easy example comes to mind: the stock market versus a company's quarterly performance. Another set of particularly nasty examples is found in our justice system: police officers evaluated by their number of citations, prosecutors by their number of convictions, prisons by their dollars per inmate per day.
I get the financial impetus to switch to metrics. Where it used to be one skilled manager overseeing per 5-7 employees, it can now be one schmuck manager with an Excel spreadsheet overseeing 30 employees.
I even get the psychological impetus. Numbers give us that all-important feeling of certainty, and at low cost too... while the traditional alternative requires legwork, mindwork, judgment, contemplation, and mistakes.
But it's wrecking our society.
Yes.
The attack can be stopped using their Protected Mode. Versions that ship with the protected mode will not be addressed to specifically mitigate this attack until later, with Adobe recommending everyone turn on protected mode to protect them in the mean time.
Whether or not that's a reasonable reaction is a whole different question.
Meh. Just switch to a security-conscious web browser like Opera. It lets me browse with plugins (acrobat, flash, java, etc.) disabled, cookies disabled, javascript disabled, and send-referrer disabled. I enable them on a site-by-site basis. Opera handles it natively and beautifully.
You people still using 20th-century web browsers are in serious peril.
No, since when you establish the vibrations you don't know in which one it occurs. So while you could establish vibrations in a distant diamond (or particle), at least theoretically, you never know when you do so which one is actually vibrating. When they set it up, they used 1 photon that could travel and strike either diamond, creating the vibrations. Without measuring the photon's path, they didn't know which one it hit and therefore which on would be vibrating. This caused the entanglement.
Close. The entanglement is created by the fact that the photon COULD HAVE chosen either one. Because the photon was not observed in such a way that it had to collapse into particle-ish behavior, the photon never had to choose which one to hit. Therefore, each crystal was AND was not hit by the photon. They only 'decide' who took the photon when the rest of reality (e.g. an observer, or an interaction with another incident particle) needs to know exactly who took it.
...of a problem that was first noted in the mid 1980s and termed "electronic smog" but the most general term is RFI and dates back as far radio systems in general. Not only do signals interfere with each other, but signals will interfere with ANY electronic device where pins or wires are capable of acting as a dipole.
RFI doesn't even require a pin or wire to be a dipole -- RFI works just as well against a single pin acting as a monopole, since the device's case is almost certainly grounded and so can act as the other pole.
Because the "smart" part of the meter is the part where it gives the utility company (and the powers that be) the ability to monitor in real-time what you've got running and at what times, along with the ability to take control of heating/cooling of a residence away from the consumer.
Why would any company want to do that? Why would anyone want to take control of your heating/cooling? What could anyone possibly gain by doing that? Aside from not being able to charge you more money for using your heating?
Or is it you're just paranoid?
The daily peak power load in the south can be laid at the feet of air conditioning. Likewise for the daily peak load in the north for heating. Peak load is what compels states and utilities to con$$$truct more powerplants. If they can just get peak load down, average load can go way up, and it's all gravy to them.
According to TFA, the smart meters will do more than that. They are intended in the medium term to allow power control within the house. So that the meter can signal to, say, the freezer that power demand is particularly high, and if it could hold off consuming power for a while it would be appreciated.
Yes, that is the selling point used to win over the ballast into allowing those things on their houses.
Information also flows upstream. That information will be used to prove you guilty. It will not be available to you for use in proving yourself not-guilty.
I have seen the phenomenon with my own eyes. Houston has a red-light camera system, but civilians have not been told that it also logs license plates. "Authorized users" can remotely access the system in order to find out which intersection a particular license plate last crossed. It is used to track people down, usually for arrest.
That, in a nutshell, is why I have no particular interest in web applications I do not myself host. Aside from the vast privacy implications, you are totally at the mercy of the provider. A standalone, self-sufficient client with the option of web storage and/or sharing, fine. All of my work on a box run by someone who doesn't even have any contractual or regulatory obligations? No thanks.
Yep yep.
Remember when knol was first introduced? It was supposed to be a "verified wikipedia", written by experts. Those experts (you, me, anyone) were to spend a lot of time, effort, and domain knowledge in writing high-quality articles... and in return we would receive a per-click royalty. This would incentivize the creation of actionable content that would something something revolutionize something synergy something leverage.
I remember thinking through the subjects for which I am credible authority, and considering whether to produce some knols in order to develop a bit of side income. I very seriously considered it... and judging from some of the knols I've seen, lots of other people went all the way.
Now we see how it all ends up. Just like the DRM game ended up. "Oh, sorry users, but this quarter we have decided that the project isn't profitable. Or we just hired a new VP and he's shaking things up. Or whatever. We're closing it down, so f*** you and your investment, you're just an externality."
I will now NEVER, EVER contribute content to a for-profit enterprise. Be it amazon reviews or knols or sidebar markups or whatever, that's it, I'm done.
No doubt that there are some Hams who have gone silent key still on the rolls, but most of their registrations will expire after no more than 10 years. And the dead certainly don't account for many of the new registrations (except perhaps in Chicago).
It doesn't work that way. A license expires after 10 years, but renewal is free and practically effortless, so everyone renews forever. The number of ham licenses will therefore always be "at an all time high" because of the ratchet effect created by free renewals.
My father has been a ham since the 1960s, but hasn't touched a radio in three decades.
Although I prefer Maemo since it seems to be the least soul sucking OS around, Android is also quite nice once you install a few odds and ends to clean up the advertising mess - though you need hardware that can be rooted. Applications like DroidGuard, AdAway, LBE Privacy Guard, or similar will put a halt to anything trying call home or get in your way.
Sorry to yank off your warm fuzzy blanket, but if you carry a cellphone and use it to make calls, your privacy is exactly bupkis because the cellular companies are already inside your kimono...
Your physical location is already tracked real-time, and accessible to people whose career advancement requires wrecking your life (law enforcement). Whereas all Google et. al. want to do is sell you stuff you want, or sell your information to other people who want to sell you stuff you want. They know where you are and they will use that information to prove you guilty -- but not to prove you not-guilty.
Your social connections are also already logged vis-a-vis your call logs, MMS logs, and email records, again accessible to people who are incentivized to get convictions without any primary concern for guilt or innocence. Whereas Google and friends just want to figure out which commercials to show you.
You act like someone on board the Titanic, who is so utterly intimidated by the prospect of sinking in the arctic that you lock yourself in your room and obsess about how to prevent the waitstaff from spilling a drink on you. You are worried about all the wrong things.
Posting this kind of absurd fiction only helps discredit the very real problems caused by overfeeding with grains. A six-month death sentence?
The problem began with New Deal-era crop subsidies. Naturally, every progressive treats government power like violence (if it doesn't work, just use more of it) and instead of removing the subsidies, they want to tax the meat or corn and thus continue to cause hardship.
I agree that crop subsidies are teh stupid, but the corn health problems are real. In addition to acidosis, corn-fed cows have problems with liver failure from (corn) aflotoxin concentration, as well as founder and ulcers. It's not a secret either, just do some googling.