I'd go further and argue that editors should disclose their real names, too, as that provides some accountability for content.
Which will most likely kill of 99% [citation needed] of edits on Wikipedia. Good job! [citation needed]
Some people really more qualified to edit an article than others.
Sure thing, Stephen Hawking is going to update that page on black holes immediately, right after he updates the Theory of Everything and breaks down the entire universe into a single formula [citation needed]. The man has little else to do anyway.
The problem with wikipedia doesn't lie with the crappy contributions (those get edited out over time anyway), it lies with the people who insist on arguing about its content rather than improving it. This is why most pages [citation needed] are littered with "[citation needed]" left and right. Pointless little edit wars where a paragraph is added, removed, added again, removed again, simply because of clashing egos [citation needed] and not necessarily because the content simply wasn't up to shape [citation needed]...
Adding real names to this isn't going to change that kind of dickish behaviour, because you have no way of verifying all of the credentials on the various subjects on wikipedia.
Sincerely yours,
Captain Dick Darlington
Department of Funology and Funectomy
Her Majesties Royal Army
P.S.: If you want proof of my authority on the subject of funectomy, invite me to a party and allow me to suck all the fun out of the room. My certificate of authority from the Mexican University of Fun expired last week [citation needed]. Sorry about that.
It's a support forum, not 4chan. Calling for a boycot has nothing to do with technical support.
As much as I'd like to say "It just works" right now while basking in my PC glory, I personally think it's more productive for these couple of users to post crash reports and try to help Apple find a solution. Throwing a tantrum on a forum and yelling "boycott" (on their iPad2 preferably while listening to music from their iPod Touch) never got any results anyway.
What you are describing is typically called a darknet. In small groups darknets work great, but as the group grows the risk grows.
Assuming it's technically implemented in the right way, a node in such a network can only be compromised when a friend betrays you.
Let's assume 3 friends are in the relationship A -> B -> C. If A is somehow caught (due to coincidence, stupidity or simply trusting the wrong person) then that exposes B. When B is caught inevitably due to A, that exposes C. Each node that is compromised on the network reveals more and more, and basically an attacker only needs one node to get started.
Given the nature of the average user, this network will not survive many iterations of "friends of friends". It's inevitable that someone who misunderstands the concept of a darknet breaks trust. What you're describing is already implemented several times and is used by W.A.S.T.E. and if I'm not mistaken Freenet 0.7 has an implementation of a darknet.
I wanted to implement this myself but the NAT traversal without central servers needed for this to work turned out to be a tough nut to crack. Of course, using a broadcast/flooding search the network is also not very efficient. But perhaps someone finds the idea interesting...?
Kademlia does a good job of maintaining a "routing table" for your network, but doesn't solve the NAT traversal problem for you. You're stuck with STUN and NAT-PMP or UPnP for solving the NAT problem. These techniques are already in use in current bittorrent clients that use DHT. The biggest problem with Kademlia is that it builds a list of all nodes on the network for efficiency reasons, allowing it to survive network churn. A kademlia like DHT would be needed for building an index of what is on the network.
You would most likely be more interested in having each node in the network act as a relay for other nodes, so Kademlia is perhaps a bit overkill for tracking nodes. Suppose that you're interested in downloading "cop_dog.mpg". You go look in your lookup table for "cop_dog.mpg" and find that you got keys from your neighbour node B. So you know who to contact. Node B knows that Node C and D on the network have this movie, but they are only connected to node B, and you're node A. This would mean that node B can download the movie from C and D, and has to relay all that data towards your node A (if you want to make sure that you only allow direct peers to connect to eachother).
There are several problems with this setup as well:
Node B in this scenario is pulling twice the bandwidth (one for download from C&D, and one for upload to A). Given how many ISPs are implementing data caps this becomes a bit of a problem.
Node B is also the point where you can start doing traffic analysis. Since node B is using so much bandwidth, an ISP or totalitarian regime X could start checking the IPs node B sends traffic to/receives traffic from. It becomes apparent quickly that 1.4GB of data is being uploaded to Node A, and 700MB is downloaded from C & D.
I'm not an expert on the subject, and I'm sure the developers of Tor, I2P and Freenet have much more interesting things (and most likely more accurate) to say on the subject. There's also a lot of interesting research papers written on P2P networks, although mostly about churn. I got interested in P2P a long time ago when I was looking for a solution to a particular problem, but opted for a centralized system in the end due to not finding a decent way to "trust" nodes in the network.
You mean, like a No Structured Query Language Query Language?
UnQL - Unstructured Data Query Language
Oh... Wellp, I'm always going to read this as "uncle". Then again I always read SQL as "squeel", so I'm far from the authority on abbreviations, but strangely enough I always read NoSQL as "No Squirrel".
I remember an age of 1200 vertical resolutions even on laptops
Strange, I have a laptop with 1920x1200 resolution... Progress indeed, a few years ago I had far less horizontal space.
I get your point, but there's little you can do about it. The 16:9 format (or 16:10) became the new standard. I personally don't mind either. I just try to fit more stuff on my screen horizontally nowadays;)
Re:Demand for 3D content? WHAT DEMAND?
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 1
I don't plant to
Oh for crying out loud;_;
Re:Demand for 3D content? WHAT DEMAND?
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 1
Actual traction in the customer channels is lukewarm AT BEST.
If by lukewarm you mean that most people don't give a flying fuck, you would be correct.
A lot of people only recently upgraded to a HDTV, and most of those aren't going to be looking for a replacement any time soon. It's the industry just pushing their latest new technology onto the consumer market because they realize that nearly everyone has gone through the upgrade cycle and their increase in revenue is going to dissipate.
I personally don't even own a single Bluray title, and I don't plant to in the near future. I only bought the HDTV because my old CRT finally croaked and the price was about right. I don't even get the appeal in 3D. The few times I've seen it was in the local theatre and it was always gimmicky and didn't contribute much to the movie itself. With HD content under the right conditions you notice the increase in resolution, but even then you don't really miss it if it's not there.
I guess the industry is really just hoping to keep riding the revenue wave, but I think they're in for a cold shower.
Can they actually throttle OpenVPN though? I was under the impression that it goes on port 443 and looks like normal SSL traffic unless you decrypt it.
By default OpenVPN is UDP traffic over port 1194, although you can use TCP over 443.
The behaviour of OpenVPN over TCP differs quite a bit in packet flow compared to most HTTPS requests. While both use OpenSSL over TCP, HTTPS requests typically follow the pattern of : connect -> short burst of data -> short burst of data from client -> long burst of data from server -> short burst of data from client -> long burst of data from server -> disconnect (according to http Keep-Alive).
This differs from OpenVPN which tries to keep the connection open as long as possible (and upon disconnect reconnects almost immediately). The packet flow doesn't typically follow the short burst from client -> large burst from server pattern, since we're not dealing with HTTP underneath. A good way to throttle OpenVPN usage over TCP at port 443 is to throttle port 443 on the client side to allow for short bursts of data, but not allow sustained bandwidth intensive usage. Typical P2P usage even when the client isn't uploading much requires much more data from the client side than HTTP does. You can accomplish this on your average linux box with QOS, but that requires a bit of reading of the Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control HOWTO. It's a very enlightening document as to how the linux networking stack works, although it's quite a dry subject.
And yes, you're going to hinder things like HTTPS file uploads of large files, but all in all that's something not many people need so the damage you do is pretty limited.
If you want to avoid your ISP's tomfoolery, use a VPN.
Until your ISP starts fooling around with the VPNs. It's trivially easy to throttle things like OpenVPN & co. My ISP is currently testing DPI combined with throttling, and they've been quite successful at it.
By leap-frogging the ISP like this, you can work around some of the bullshit.
And you become dependent on the company offering the VPN service, which also has to keep logs to be legally compliant to its local government. Hell, once the VPN service becomes the next target instead of your local privacy laws protecting you (if your country has such a thing), you now are subjected to the local policies of the company you're hiring the service from. Most companies have a policy in place to keep track of financial records, if you get what I mean.
I'm very wary of companies offering me VPNs to "enhance my internet privacy".
deliberately obfuscating logs and so forth (to within the letter of the law on data retention, of course)
The law on logging and data retention here is quite clear and doesn't allow for much breathing room. Very few people are complying with it at the moment except for the ISPs and large corporations, but it's bound to cause a mess sooner or later, and not in a good way.
explaining loudly and publicly why we feel it important to do so.
But who other than the slashdot audience gives a fuck? I'm pretty sure that no Joe Sixpack isn't going to care. Aside from that, this kind of blocking is so trivially circumvented that it's only going to lead to more stringent approaches.
But of course, anyone that really cares would use a VPN and this wouldn't affect them in the first place.
Newzbin felt this coming on a long time ago and have set up their service on Tors.onion a while ago. I read about it a month or so ago, but I'm sure it's been up a good while longer.
It's quite pointless to do this, and it sets a dangerous precedent legally for using a filter in place to stop kiddy porn (equally useless for the same reason btw) to protect corporate interests. Insert your favourite slippery slope argument here.
So, 10 petabytes of data - who cares about the raw source.
Depends on what you're doing. If you're taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower on your vacation you're not really interested in if the CCD on your camera's LSB was a 1 or a 0. If you're taking images from a hyperspectral sensor for scientific purposes the better the accuracy the better (hopefully) your results. It depends on the type of application and how important accuracy is to you (and how accurate your sensor is).
I work for a video streaming company and we have several petabytes of H.264 video.
We've got several hundreds of terabytes in lossless compressed high resolution hyper spectral images. If you start using lossy compression you often lose too much information and gain artifacts that can (sometimes drastically) change the outcome of whatever algorithms you wish to run on those images. However, in some cases you can find a good compromise in compression factor, it all depends on what you're planning to measure or calculate. If you're doing scientific research you'll always want to determine what the effects are of lossy compression on your dataset before you start throwing away the raw data.
In your case where you are streaming video though, lossy compression is very applicable. The human eye (and/or brain) is quite limited in what it can perceive visually.
If the traffic exceeds the capacity of the roundabout, or there is a bottleneck on one of the roads off the roundabout, then all hell breaks loose as traffic is unable to leave and blocks off all the other exits.
This is very true. My drive to and from work has two of these not-so-carefully placed 2-lane roundabouts from an expressway into a road that is one of the main arteries into the city or the highway/motorway. Every morning that roundabout causes about 6km worth of traffic jam and there's no way around it if you're going in that direction. The entire thing just chokes up in the morning and evening because it was a terrible idea.
In some situations roundabouts can increase accidents;
A local study has revealed that most accidents with cyclists happen on roundabouts where the road for bicycles is on the edge of the roundabout. People on the roundabout are often too focussed on getting on and off to notice a cyclist while making the turn.
Having said that, I should note that in many situations a roundabout is definitely beneficial to traffic flow compared to stoplights or unmarked intersections. They also reduce the speed of automobiles in populated areas, although there have been some exceptions with people doing some "creative" driving.
I'm sorry, slashdot has an informal comment priority system. On a story about radiation the priority of the topics of discussion are:
Radioactive space lizards > Government conspiracies > Criticizing government agencies > Bashing engineering flaws > Pro and con debate of nuclear power >... > Goatse.
Obviously, this story will have more posts critical of government agencies since it's about TSA and cancer, but less posts of the dangers of radiation, since the slashdot community in general considers TSA more annoying (and dangerous) than radiation.
On a Fukushima story, please note the high quantity of posts critical of building a nuclear power plant near the coast, followed closely by a pro and con debate of nuclear power. Unless of course the article delves into the Japanese government, at which point those topics take priority.
In the unlikely event of Godzilla actually roaming the streets of Tokyo, you will note that the discussion will primarily focus on:
the rampage of radioactive space lizards
people claiming that the local government has been breeding radioactive space lizards as a new kind of biological weapon
the disastrous military response from the government
Finally, in the event that the article is completely worthless, please don't click any links unless you are have already become desensitivized to the brown hole.
I know that this technology will end up being used by bullies.
On the bright side, lawyers will be cheering on this piece of technology as sexual harassment lawsuit suddenly became a lot more complicated.
Defendant: "I'm sorry your honor, I did not mean to smack Ms Fanny Widebottom delicious booty. Sony implanted a hand controlling device in me"
Lawyer : "It's true your honor. My client simply has no control over his hands due to the defective product being hacked."
I also can't help but think about what this could do to further research into creating zombies.
if we spend a moment imagining ourselves as a chattel-wife in Saudi Arabia for a moment or held at gunpoint for everything around us in Somalia
It's clear that things have been getting worse over the past 30 years in the West.
So you're saying that one excuses the other here? "Our women are still allowed to drive and criminals aren't pointing guns at us, so it's okay for us to give up a little of our freedoms. It's all still good..."
Yeah, it's all still good, but like you said, definitely on the decline. There's always some sort of boogeyman (commies, pedophiles, terrorists,...) to cause a scare. It's been only a few months since there was talk of the White House trying to implement a "shutdown" for the internet in a state of emergency, and as much as the thought of having a big red button to disable the internet amuses me, the line of thinking does not. We need only to look at China to see what direction the West is headed with regards to the Internet. Oh, we're still far from that, but give it enough time and boogeymen.
It's also clear that lulzsec's civil disobedience is having some sort of effect
I have very ambiguous opinions about lulzsec. One the one hand their actions should be an eye opener to most people to take better care of network security, coding, and password policy. I've seen a few pastebins full of instructions on how to do basic SQL Injections together with lists of URLs to search for in google, apparently intended for AnonOps. I'm not surprised that it works so often, which is telling of how lax security concerns are on website development.
Their motivations however, are not quite clear to me other than "for the lulz". I think that some people have a much nobler vision of what "for the lulz" means, seeing them as some sort of digital e-justice warriors while in fact they're just doing it for "shits and giggles". It has that "bad kind of cool" that as a teenager was so alluring, but as you grow older you're glad you only flirted with in the past. The thing is, their motivations aside, we actually need people like lulzsec every now and then to cause a bit of a shitstorm and point out the blatantly obvious: a lot of stuff of the internet is terribly insecure, and a lot of people have terrible ideas for using passwords.
although it's not quite clear how it'll play out (maybe it'll just be used as an excuse to impose more stringent anti-terror[tm] laws on the Internet?)
Considering that NATO is getting their panties in a bunch over Anonymous I'm expecting that they're not going to suggest an open Internet as we know it today. If we look at international politics it's slowly but steadily moving in that direction. On the one hand you have the RIAA/MPAA and their local equivalents making a strong push towards enforcing the protection of their IP, with strong political backers like Sarkozy (and recently Obama, although with less harsh measures than expected). On the other you have governments seeing hackers (either government sponsored or not) and internet-aided revolutions left and right... Despite all the claims of how great a thing it is to see the will of the people manifest itself, I doubt most governments involved in the Libya conflict are so solely because of the will the of the people.
Sometimes I think that the reason Internet became such a big game changer for businesses and governments because when it started to grow phenomenally there was a lack of understanding of it, both technologically and what its potential was. And while the people who form the body of government are mostly still on the level of the average Internet user when it comes to understanding how it works, they do understand the potential.
when compared with history and the world in general, protecting the rights of common people is something your government almost certainly does more of every day than lulzsec
This would make the whole process feel like a game where you catch up with the others.
Sounds like my uncle who's devised a game of shutting down Windows before the update reaches 10% on shutdown. If holding the power button isn't fast enough to his liking, he just janks the plug and kicks it.
That man has no compassion for things that make him wait.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd go further and argue that editors should disclose their real names, too, as that provides some accountability for content.
Which will most likely kill of 99% [citation needed] of edits on Wikipedia. Good job! [citation needed]
Some people really more qualified to edit an article than others.
Sure thing, Stephen Hawking is going to update that page on black holes immediately, right after he updates the Theory of Everything and breaks down the entire universe into a single formula [citation needed]. The man has little else to do anyway.
The problem with wikipedia doesn't lie with the crappy contributions (those get edited out over time anyway), it lies with the people who insist on arguing about its content rather than improving it. This is why most pages [citation needed] are littered with "[citation needed]" left and right. Pointless little edit wars where a paragraph is added, removed, added again, removed again, simply because of clashing egos [citation needed] and not necessarily because the content simply wasn't up to shape [citation needed]...
Adding real names to this isn't going to change that kind of dickish behaviour, because you have no way of verifying all of the credentials on the various subjects on wikipedia.
Sincerely yours,
Captain Dick Darlington
Department of Funology and Funectomy
Her Majesties Royal Army
P.S.: If you want proof of my authority on the subject of funectomy, invite me to a party and allow me to suck all the fun out of the room. My certificate of authority from the Mexican University of Fun expired last week [citation needed]. Sorry about that.
censoring posts in their support forum that mention words like 'boycott' and 'petition.'
Censoring technical discussions? Removing posts?
Seriously?
It's a support forum, not 4chan. Calling for a boycot has nothing to do with technical support.
As much as I'd like to say "It just works" right now while basking in my PC glory, I personally think it's more productive for these couple of users to post crash reports and try to help Apple find a solution. Throwing a tantrum on a forum and yelling "boycott" (on their iPad2 preferably while listening to music from their iPod Touch) never got any results anyway.
Another storm in a glass of water...
.NET is not a systems language. It never will be. Neither is Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, or HTML5.
Well, shit. There go my hopes of writing an OS in HTML5 and javascript. Grmbl, ruining all my fun...
What you are describing is typically called a darknet. In small groups darknets work great, but as the group grows the risk grows.
Assuming it's technically implemented in the right way, a node in such a network can only be compromised when a friend betrays you.
Let's assume 3 friends are in the relationship A -> B -> C. If A is somehow caught (due to coincidence, stupidity or simply trusting the wrong person) then that exposes B. When B is caught inevitably due to A, that exposes C. Each node that is compromised on the network reveals more and more, and basically an attacker only needs one node to get started.
Given the nature of the average user, this network will not survive many iterations of "friends of friends". It's inevitable that someone who misunderstands the concept of a darknet breaks trust. What you're describing is already implemented several times and is used by W.A.S.T.E. and if I'm not mistaken Freenet 0.7 has an implementation of a darknet.
I wanted to implement this myself but the NAT traversal without central servers needed for this to work turned out to be a tough nut to crack. Of course, using a broadcast/flooding search the network is also not very efficient. But perhaps someone finds the idea interesting...?
Kademlia does a good job of maintaining a "routing table" for your network, but doesn't solve the NAT traversal problem for you. You're stuck with STUN and NAT-PMP or UPnP for solving the NAT problem. These techniques are already in use in current bittorrent clients that use DHT. The biggest problem with Kademlia is that it builds a list of all nodes on the network for efficiency reasons, allowing it to survive network churn. A kademlia like DHT would be needed for building an index of what is on the network.
You would most likely be more interested in having each node in the network act as a relay for other nodes, so Kademlia is perhaps a bit overkill for tracking nodes. Suppose that you're interested in downloading "cop_dog.mpg". You go look in your lookup table for "cop_dog.mpg" and find that you got keys from your neighbour node B. So you know who to contact. Node B knows that Node C and D on the network have this movie, but they are only connected to node B, and you're node A. This would mean that node B can download the movie from C and D, and has to relay all that data towards your node A (if you want to make sure that you only allow direct peers to connect to eachother).
There are several problems with this setup as well:
I'm not an expert on the subject, and I'm sure the developers of Tor, I2P and Freenet have much more interesting things (and most likely more accurate) to say on the subject. There's also a lot of interesting research papers written on P2P networks, although mostly about churn. I got interested in P2P a long time ago when I was looking for a solution to a particular problem, but opted for a centralized system in the end due to not finding a decent way to "trust" nodes in the network.
Unified NoSQL Query Language
You mean, like a No Structured Query Language Query Language?
UnQL - Unstructured Data Query Language
Oh... Wellp, I'm always going to read this as "uncle". Then again I always read SQL as "squeel", so I'm far from the authority on abbreviations, but strangely enough I always read NoSQL as "No Squirrel".
It has Microsoft's backing.
Queue flamewar in 5.. 4.. 3..
I remember an age of 1200 vertical resolutions even on laptops
Strange, I have a laptop with 1920x1200 resolution... Progress indeed, a few years ago I had far less horizontal space.
I get your point, but there's little you can do about it. The 16:9 format (or 16:10) became the new standard. I personally don't mind either. I just try to fit more stuff on my screen horizontally nowadays ;)
I don't plant to
Oh for crying out loud ;_;
Actual traction in the customer channels is lukewarm AT BEST.
If by lukewarm you mean that most people don't give a flying fuck, you would be correct.
A lot of people only recently upgraded to a HDTV, and most of those aren't going to be looking for a replacement any time soon. It's the industry just pushing their latest new technology onto the consumer market because they realize that nearly everyone has gone through the upgrade cycle and their increase in revenue is going to dissipate.
I personally don't even own a single Bluray title, and I don't plant to in the near future. I only bought the HDTV because my old CRT finally croaked and the price was about right. I don't even get the appeal in 3D. The few times I've seen it was in the local theatre and it was always gimmicky and didn't contribute much to the movie itself. With HD content under the right conditions you notice the increase in resolution, but even then you don't really miss it if it's not there.
I guess the industry is really just hoping to keep riding the revenue wave, but I think they're in for a cold shower.
Can they actually throttle OpenVPN though? I was under the impression that it goes on port 443 and looks like normal SSL traffic unless you decrypt it.
By default OpenVPN is UDP traffic over port 1194, although you can use TCP over 443.
The behaviour of OpenVPN over TCP differs quite a bit in packet flow compared to most HTTPS requests. While both use OpenSSL over TCP, HTTPS requests typically follow the pattern of : connect -> short burst of data -> short burst of data from client -> long burst of data from server -> short burst of data from client -> long burst of data from server -> disconnect (according to http Keep-Alive).
This differs from OpenVPN which tries to keep the connection open as long as possible (and upon disconnect reconnects almost immediately). The packet flow doesn't typically follow the short burst from client -> large burst from server pattern, since we're not dealing with HTTP underneath. A good way to throttle OpenVPN usage over TCP at port 443 is to throttle port 443 on the client side to allow for short bursts of data, but not allow sustained bandwidth intensive usage. Typical P2P usage even when the client isn't uploading much requires much more data from the client side than HTTP does. You can accomplish this on your average linux box with QOS, but that requires a bit of reading of the Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control HOWTO. It's a very enlightening document as to how the linux networking stack works, although it's quite a dry subject.
And yes, you're going to hinder things like HTTPS file uploads of large files, but all in all that's something not many people need so the damage you do is pretty limited.
If you want to avoid your ISP's tomfoolery, use a VPN.
Until your ISP starts fooling around with the VPNs. It's trivially easy to throttle things like OpenVPN & co. My ISP is currently testing DPI combined with throttling, and they've been quite successful at it.
By leap-frogging the ISP like this, you can work around some of the bullshit.
And you become dependent on the company offering the VPN service, which also has to keep logs to be legally compliant to its local government. Hell, once the VPN service becomes the next target instead of your local privacy laws protecting you (if your country has such a thing), you now are subjected to the local policies of the company you're hiring the service from. Most companies have a policy in place to keep track of financial records, if you get what I mean.
I'm very wary of companies offering me VPNs to "enhance my internet privacy".
deliberately obfuscating logs and so forth (to within the letter of the law on data retention, of course)
The law on logging and data retention here is quite clear and doesn't allow for much breathing room. Very few people are complying with it at the moment except for the ISPs and large corporations, but it's bound to cause a mess sooner or later, and not in a good way.
explaining loudly and publicly why we feel it important to do so.
But who other than the slashdot audience gives a fuck? I'm pretty sure that no Joe Sixpack isn't going to care. Aside from that, this kind of blocking is so trivially circumvented that it's only going to lead to more stringent approaches.
But of course, anyone that really cares would use a VPN and this wouldn't affect them in the first place.
Newzbin felt this coming on a long time ago and have set up their service on Tors .onion a while ago. I read about it a month or so ago, but I'm sure it's been up a good while longer.
It's quite pointless to do this, and it sets a dangerous precedent legally for using a filter in place to stop kiddy porn (equally useless for the same reason btw) to protect corporate interests. Insert your favourite slippery slope argument here.
...court orders pavements(sidewalks) ripped up to prevent bank robbery.
Robbers seen handling steamrollers creating their own pavement.
Your all idiots
+1, Accurate misspelling
enslaved squirrels on treadmills
Squirrels of the world unite! It's time to overthrow the treadmills and the bourgeoisie!
are we supposed to laugh? with them? or at them?
I think the joke's on the user
Courtney Love
Hey, I'm all up for arguing on the internet, but involving her is just vile.
So, 10 petabytes of data - who cares about the raw source.
Depends on what you're doing. If you're taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower on your vacation you're not really interested in if the CCD on your camera's LSB was a 1 or a 0. If you're taking images from a hyperspectral sensor for scientific purposes the better the accuracy the better (hopefully) your results. It depends on the type of application and how important accuracy is to you (and how accurate your sensor is).
I work for a video streaming company and we have several petabytes of H.264 video.
We've got several hundreds of terabytes in lossless compressed high resolution hyper spectral images. If you start using lossy compression you often lose too much information and gain artifacts that can (sometimes drastically) change the outcome of whatever algorithms you wish to run on those images. However, in some cases you can find a good compromise in compression factor, it all depends on what you're planning to measure or calculate. If you're doing scientific research you'll always want to determine what the effects are of lossy compression on your dataset before you start throwing away the raw data.
In your case where you are streaming video though, lossy compression is very applicable. The human eye (and/or brain) is quite limited in what it can perceive visually.
If the traffic exceeds the capacity of the roundabout, or there is a bottleneck on one of the roads off the roundabout, then all hell breaks loose as traffic is unable to leave and blocks off all the other exits.
This is very true. My drive to and from work has two of these not-so-carefully placed 2-lane roundabouts from an expressway into a road that is one of the main arteries into the city or the highway/motorway. Every morning that roundabout causes about 6km worth of traffic jam and there's no way around it if you're going in that direction. The entire thing just chokes up in the morning and evening because it was a terrible idea.
In some situations roundabouts can increase accidents;
A local study has revealed that most accidents with cyclists happen on roundabouts where the road for bicycles is on the edge of the roundabout. People on the roundabout are often too focussed on getting on and off to notice a cyclist while making the turn.
Having said that, I should note that in many situations a roundabout is definitely beneficial to traffic flow compared to stoplights or unmarked intersections. They also reduce the speed of automobiles in populated areas, although there have been some exceptions with people doing some "creative" driving.
I'm fairly sure he'll show up in court to get his Xbox back.
That, or he'll show up in the nearest Gamestop with pocket full of money.
Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
I'm sorry, slashdot has an informal comment priority system. On a story about radiation the priority of the topics of discussion are:
Radioactive space lizards > Government conspiracies > Criticizing government agencies > Bashing engineering flaws > Pro and con debate of nuclear power > ... > Goatse.
Obviously, this story will have more posts critical of government agencies since it's about TSA and cancer, but less posts of the dangers of radiation, since the slashdot community in general considers TSA more annoying (and dangerous) than radiation.
On a Fukushima story, please note the high quantity of posts critical of building a nuclear power plant near the coast, followed closely by a pro and con debate of nuclear power. Unless of course the article delves into the Japanese government, at which point those topics take priority.
In the unlikely event of Godzilla actually roaming the streets of Tokyo, you will note that the discussion will primarily focus on :
Finally, in the event that the article is completely worthless, please don't click any links unless you are have already become desensitivized to the brown hole.
I know that this technology will end up being used by bullies.
On the bright side, lawyers will be cheering on this piece of technology as sexual harassment lawsuit suddenly became a lot more complicated.
Defendant: "I'm sorry your honor, I did not mean to smack Ms Fanny Widebottom delicious booty. Sony implanted a hand controlling device in me"
Lawyer : "It's true your honor. My client simply has no control over his hands due to the defective product being hacked."
I also can't help but think about what this could do to further research into creating zombies.
if we spend a moment imagining ourselves as a chattel-wife in Saudi Arabia for a moment or held at gunpoint for everything around us in Somalia
It's clear that things have been getting worse over the past 30 years in the West.
So you're saying that one excuses the other here? "Our women are still allowed to drive and criminals aren't pointing guns at us, so it's okay for us to give up a little of our freedoms. It's all still good..."
Yeah, it's all still good, but like you said, definitely on the decline. There's always some sort of boogeyman (commies, pedophiles, terrorists, ...) to cause a scare. It's been only a few months since there was talk of the White House trying to implement a "shutdown" for the internet in a state of emergency, and as much as the thought of having a big red button to disable the internet amuses me, the line of thinking does not. We need only to look at China to see what direction the West is headed with regards to the Internet. Oh, we're still far from that, but give it enough time and boogeymen.
It's also clear that lulzsec's civil disobedience is having some sort of effect
I have very ambiguous opinions about lulzsec. One the one hand their actions should be an eye opener to most people to take better care of network security, coding, and password policy. I've seen a few pastebins full of instructions on how to do basic SQL Injections together with lists of URLs to search for in google, apparently intended for AnonOps. I'm not surprised that it works so often, which is telling of how lax security concerns are on website development.
Their motivations however, are not quite clear to me other than "for the lulz". I think that some people have a much nobler vision of what "for the lulz" means, seeing them as some sort of digital e-justice warriors while in fact they're just doing it for "shits and giggles". It has that "bad kind of cool" that as a teenager was so alluring, but as you grow older you're glad you only flirted with in the past. The thing is, their motivations aside, we actually need people like lulzsec every now and then to cause a bit of a shitstorm and point out the blatantly obvious: a lot of stuff of the internet is terribly insecure, and a lot of people have terrible ideas for using passwords.
although it's not quite clear how it'll play out (maybe it'll just be used as an excuse to impose more stringent anti-terror[tm] laws on the Internet?)
Considering that NATO is getting their panties in a bunch over Anonymous I'm expecting that they're not going to suggest an open Internet as we know it today. If we look at international politics it's slowly but steadily moving in that direction. On the one hand you have the RIAA/MPAA and their local equivalents making a strong push towards enforcing the protection of their IP, with strong political backers like Sarkozy (and recently Obama, although with less harsh measures than expected). On the other you have governments seeing hackers (either government sponsored or not) and internet-aided revolutions left and right... Despite all the claims of how great a thing it is to see the will of the people manifest itself, I doubt most governments involved in the Libya conflict are so solely because of the will the of the people.
Sometimes I think that the reason Internet became such a big game changer for businesses and governments because when it started to grow phenomenally there was a lack of understanding of it, both technologically and what its potential was. And while the people who form the body of government are mostly still on the level of the average Internet user when it comes to understanding how it works, they do understand the potential.
when compared with history and the world in general, protecting the rights of common people is something your government almost certainly does more of every day than lulzsec
What you all recommend?
Janking out the cable modem from the wall. You'll never have browser problems again.
This would make the whole process feel like a game where you catch up with the others.
Sounds like my uncle who's devised a game of shutting down Windows before the update reaches 10% on shutdown. If holding the power button isn't fast enough to his liking, he just janks the plug and kicks it.
That man has no compassion for things that make him wait.