In addition to the copyright issues (which I think the parent is correct about), what about the 2257 Regulations issues? The laws in the US are pretty strict about full records being kept of the models in pornographic videos by the producers. It would seem these revenge sites are sitting ducks for child porn smackdowns.
Really, proteins can recognize small biological molecules? Here I thought that proteins, like other molecules would react with other molecules in a bio-chemical reaction, but to find out that they can actually recognize other molecules is really amazing!
What a pointless, unfunny comment. I don't know what a "bio-chemical reaction" is. If you mean a chemical reaction, then no, proteins do not react that way. The composition of the protein does not change, in the way that two reacting chemicals would change their bonding or electron counts. In general, the protein is simply shaped in a way that fits the molecule better than other molecules (i.e., it recognizes the molecule), holding it in place so that other reactions can happen more favorably. Metalloenzymes come closer to your notion of a chemical reaction with a protein, but the protein part of the enzyme is still there just to position the reactant close to the catalytic center.
Traveling from New York to Hungary, I have had baggage delayed twice. American Airlines had a special car drive the bags 2 hours to my location the next day, and gave a $100 reimbursement for emergency replacement of items for that missing day.
British Airways is another story. The bags hadn't arrived in Vienna when we arrived. The whereabouts were unknown, but the next day they showed up at the airport. We couldn't communicate with the airport baggage handlers directly to give them our address; we needed to fill out a form with BA and they would telex -- TELEX -- the information to the airport. Then, we would need to wait for a phone call between working hours to give them directions how to reach our address. Every day, when the phone call never arrived, we would call BA back, and discover that the information was garbled--that an address in Hungary isn't a local phone number, that it needs an international country code, that we are not at our origin since we left it via airplane so there is no point in calling it. After 3 days, the information was allegedly straightened out. From that point, there was no longer a reason for them not to call us. Since there was still no way to contact the airport, we had no choice but to call BA every few hours and plead with them to get the airport to call us. All they did was tell us they sent these pleas via telex, and it was a one-way communication so there was no way to receive a direct response. They could not or would not give us a phone number directly to the people they were sending the telexes to. We sent messages to BA customer service headquarters, since the BA staff in Vienna were not helping. Their customer service never responded, not even with an automated message.
After a week of no clothing, our own deodorant, or toothbrushes, we looked up the address of the airport on the web and tracked down a working phone number for the baggage handlers. They delivered the bag the next day, though with reluctance over the distance and the country border. We never did hear from BA customer service, and we never got a cent for the inconvenience, because we needed receipts for our items in order to get any money.
Just fuck them. I understand that the company was at the mercy of Austria's sadistic concept of customer service, but the organization should still be held responsible for those it hires or contracts. For contrast, I once complained to AA when the TV in my seat wasn't working on an international flight, and I got a $100 voucher (which I never used). No airline is perfect, but there is an expectation on customer service in fixing problems that is lacking with BA.
The article is rather light on the cons of working at home. I have been self-employed for 7 years consulting for my ex-employer. Over the years I've come across various pitfalls of being paid hourly, such as:
- Sitting in a regular chair instead of an office chair, resulting in a year of back problems before I figured it out
- Your coworkers think you're rich because you make a good hourly amount, without considering they get paid vacation, health care, 401k and many other benefits
- For any errands or chores that have to be done during work hours, you're expected to do it since your family can't leave work to do it
- You can't work after hours because you're expected to be with the family
- You can't work after hours because there is way too much noise and interruption, and no door is thick enough to block it out
- It's difficult to leave the house, knowing how much it's effectively costing you
- With no place to walk to, you could go a whole day and not walk more than 200 steps
- Less than ideal lighting and air movement
- Time goes much slower with nobody around, and 6 hours feels like a full day
- Vacation is unpaid, so you're less likely to take one
- Being at home 24 fucking hours a day for weeks on end
My goal was 6 hours a day of work, and it was difficult most days to fill this amount. I got crazy after 6 years, and am now renting an inexpensive office space. It's a much better environment for many reasons, and the additional hours I can put in per month makes it pay for itself within a day. I have an office mate, and even though he works in a different field, it makes a difference having someone else around. It has been great being able to work in a real office environment, and I'm a more cheerful person as a result. Lessons learned the hard way.
I think he was doing great until the last P.P.S., when he casually suggested that he could buy westorange.gov, and then sell or license it to the city for over $28,000. If the city ever decided to go through ICANN arbitration, the impression of domain squatting specifically for commercial profit with no evidence of personal use isn't looked on favorably. Considering that the rest of the letter was satire, surely this paragraph is too. But it would be easier not to have to convince an arbitration judge of that fact.
Someone had an interesting comment in the New Yorker article:
I see that you refer to "Philomena" in your comment rather than the "Philomela" of the text. St. Philomena was a virgin martyr whose times and story are roughly contemporaneous to the composition of the book. Possibly there is some connection to the "revirginization" quotes within the lost text. In addition, the tears may refer to the liquid reputed to have sprung from Philomena's statue in Italy in the 19th century...
Also, there is more than one reference on the net. There is a Flickr image from a Sotheby's auction in 1854, which was just uploaded yesterday.
The only reason why Java is being exploited and making headlines so much recently is because Java is so widely adopted now that it makes a big target.
But there's nothing wrong with examining whether Java in the browser should be widely adopted. After the last merry-go-round of critical updates I deleted the Java plugin and haven't noticed a difference. The only site I encountered since then that used any embedded Java was the Taiwan Ministry of Education using it for some unimportant news ticker (which sums up browser applets in general: a distant reminder of Geocities and Livejournal). Even before then, Firefox intermittently would disable Java plugins as being insecure, so Java applets haven't been a seamless experience for a while.
I still have the JRE around on my work machine for some development tools that need it. But the usage is all local, so there is no urgent need to update. Plus, the update process has been broken in Windows 7. The update check and nag warning comes up for all users, but the installation can only be done by an admin account. Even as an admin, the update fails because it's expecting to download to a temp directory that doesn't exist. I deleted Java completely from my family computers, because I got tired of reassuring everyone that the constant update warnings weren't serious. Nobody has missed it.
I've thought it might be amusing to bypass the HR process entirely, task some of the developers with attending the various techie get-togethers around town and collect qualified candidates that way, then give the hiring manager their resumes directly in addition to sending them to HR.
I thought this was normal practice in a job search. The best chance of getting past HR is to send it to an employee at the company, no matter how vaguely you know them. There is sometimes a finder's fee to the employee if you get in, which gives them more of an incentive to follow through.
HR is crap. I think the chances have been low for a while that a human actually sees it before a keyword matching process rejects it, no matter how closely the resume matches the job description.
Link was trollbait. CBS News asserts that since the average income is $50,000, then anyone who makes more than $50,000 is not middle class. Ridiculous.
Ah, the weakly supported claims that China is at an all-out "cyberwar" now become clearer. The Chinese army must have created the site min.liveanalytics.org. Then they deviously drew in visitors from a popular site, including some from major US corporations. For any machine that was vulnerable, China has thusly "hacked" the corporations owning those machines. Hackers get cred, the news media gets to scream that the sky is falling, and the US government gets to increase funding for the "war on cyberterror". It's win-win-win!
As to your next question, no I do not know the owner of min.liveanalytics.org to prove it is owned by the PLA. However I follow the same standards as the news media, security companies, and most slashdot posters; i.e., that it "seems reasonable" and "who can doubt that they are behind it." Who, indeed!
"I left naked pictures of myself on the passenger seat when I gave my keys to the valet and he took them" is closer.
Close. Try "I left naked pictures of myself in my car, in individual envelopes in a folder called DCIM. When I got back to my car the envelopes were all opened and some of the pictures were covered with fingerprints".
Yay, a car analogy.
Read it here. Sometimes parody is the purest truth. I'm also partial to the Bokononism of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, especially:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land,
Man got to tell himself he understand.
It's not only insightful, it's also got a good beat that you can dance to.
Without reading the research, coffee is hard to carry while walking because the regular pace of your walking creates a resonant frequency that increases the sloshing until it spills over. If you take irregular steps or move your cup around in a random motion you can overcome this. However, you won't look cool doing either of these.
Tatu Ylönen has garnered fame in technology circles as... the dick who tried to trademark the term SSH in a move to try to shut down OpenSSH as a free alternative to their commercial product.
How is the concept of computing something substantially different from an algorithm that computes something? Patents are supposed to be on physical inventions, not abstract ideas. The formal, "When run on a computer," clause does not mean a math^H^H^H^Hsoftware patent is somehow not a patent on an abstract idea.
The concept is different from an algorithm when your patent is on the end result and not the process. That's the problem; there is no way to work at a different solution because the patent covers EVERY solution. What patent abusers really want to patent is the idea -- an auction, meeting scheduling, one-click ordering, etc. (on the INTERNET!, to boot) - but those aren't allowed. So they describe what are obvious (to anyone learned in the art of software design) steps to perform their idea. This is where I see the problem. It's an evil fusion between unpatentable ideas and obvious implentations that falsely appears to be a novel process.
As an example, Shazam paid a settlement to Tune Hunter over the idea of music identification. If you read Tune Hunter's actual patent, they only described in detail a method where you hear an interesting song on the radio, press a key fob usb, which can be used to look up the song based on the time and the station's playlist (this sounds like something NPR had given as a promotional item a few years ago, but I'm not sure). Obviously, what Shazam does is nothing like that. Their patent does also include a claim for identification based on sound samples, but they offer no actual process to accomplish this, other than "uses a central processing unit and search stored information as known in the art to analyze the music segment" (emphasis mine). Thus, they flat out admit in the patent that what Shazam is doing is not something they invented. But still Shazam felt threatened by a patent on the idea of "music identification".
Nobody has mentioned anything other than a few math questions, so I assume few people RTFA. I think his comment on the reading portion is spot on:
On the FCAT, they are reading material they didn’t choose. They are given four possible answers and three out of the four are pretty good. One is the best answer but kids don’t get points for only a pretty good answer. They get zero points, the same for the absolute wrong answer. And then they are given an arbitrary time limit. Those are a number of reasons that I think the test has to be suspect.
This is true of standardized reading tests, and as an analytical-minded person with good math skills, this always troubled me about these tests. Many times there is more than 1 correct answer, and you have to somehow make a judgment as to which is most correct. Whether this comes from intuition, ability to weigh qualitative factors on the fly, or taking a lot of practice tests, it's not a skill that comes easily for many people. It's not just with reading comprehension but also in grammar questions, where there are no clear grammatical errors, but one choice of phrasing is supposed to be "better" than another option that can also be perfectly acceptable.
The texture of that unrefined pulpy cardboard that McDonald's drink trays are made of. Feeling that stuff against my fingertips just makes my skin crawl. Styrofoam and chalkboards don't bug me at all.
Sort of related, I can't stand the feeling of wooden popsicle sticks against my teeth. Certain paper products have the same effect. It's hard to finish a popsicle--it has to be very tasty for me to take that last lick. Funny, even just the thought of the feeling is only slightly less pleasant....Gotta go, I'm going to be sick.
In all the Superman III hate, what everyone is forgetting is this: When Richard Prior was causing mayhem with the city grid, at one point he MADE A DON'T WALK SIGNAL GO OVER AND STRANGLE THE WALK SIGNAL!! Yes, you read this right. He hacked a traffic signal so that the stick figure pedestrians moved and then fought with each other. If you haven't seen the movie, I think this sums up just how utterly terrible it is. Stupid password hacks are in many movies, but in no other movie did a Don't Walk signal go over and strangle a Walk signal.
The musical Into the Woods is in a similar vein. Cinderella is shallow and bored as a princess, the widow of the giant grieves for her husband who was killed during Jack's theft, and Red Riding Hood has morbidly acquired a wolfskin scarf.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to the copyright issues (which I think the parent is correct about), what about the 2257 Regulations issues? The laws in the US are pretty strict about full records being kept of the models in pornographic videos by the producers. It would seem these revenge sites are sitting ducks for child porn smackdowns.
Really, proteins can recognize small biological molecules? Here I thought that proteins, like other molecules would react with other molecules in a bio-chemical reaction, but to find out that they can actually recognize other molecules is really amazing!
What a pointless, unfunny comment. I don't know what a "bio-chemical reaction" is. If you mean a chemical reaction, then no, proteins do not react that way. The composition of the protein does not change, in the way that two reacting chemicals would change their bonding or electron counts. In general, the protein is simply shaped in a way that fits the molecule better than other molecules (i.e., it recognizes the molecule), holding it in place so that other reactions can happen more favorably. Metalloenzymes come closer to your notion of a chemical reaction with a protein, but the protein part of the enzyme is still there just to position the reactant close to the catalytic center.
Traveling from New York to Hungary, I have had baggage delayed twice. American Airlines had a special car drive the bags 2 hours to my location the next day, and gave a $100 reimbursement for emergency replacement of items for that missing day.
British Airways is another story. The bags hadn't arrived in Vienna when we arrived. The whereabouts were unknown, but the next day they showed up at the airport. We couldn't communicate with the airport baggage handlers directly to give them our address; we needed to fill out a form with BA and they would telex -- TELEX -- the information to the airport. Then, we would need to wait for a phone call between working hours to give them directions how to reach our address. Every day, when the phone call never arrived, we would call BA back, and discover that the information was garbled--that an address in Hungary isn't a local phone number, that it needs an international country code, that we are not at our origin since we left it via airplane so there is no point in calling it. After 3 days, the information was allegedly straightened out. From that point, there was no longer a reason for them not to call us. Since there was still no way to contact the airport, we had no choice but to call BA every few hours and plead with them to get the airport to call us. All they did was tell us they sent these pleas via telex, and it was a one-way communication so there was no way to receive a direct response. They could not or would not give us a phone number directly to the people they were sending the telexes to. We sent messages to BA customer service headquarters, since the BA staff in Vienna were not helping. Their customer service never responded, not even with an automated message.
After a week of no clothing, our own deodorant, or toothbrushes, we looked up the address of the airport on the web and tracked down a working phone number for the baggage handlers. They delivered the bag the next day, though with reluctance over the distance and the country border. We never did hear from BA customer service, and we never got a cent for the inconvenience, because we needed receipts for our items in order to get any money.
Just fuck them. I understand that the company was at the mercy of Austria's sadistic concept of customer service, but the organization should still be held responsible for those it hires or contracts. For contrast, I once complained to AA when the TV in my seat wasn't working on an international flight, and I got a $100 voucher (which I never used). No airline is perfect, but there is an expectation on customer service in fixing problems that is lacking with BA.
The article is rather light on the cons of working at home. I have been self-employed for 7 years consulting for my ex-employer. Over the years I've come across various pitfalls of being paid hourly, such as:
My goal was 6 hours a day of work, and it was difficult most days to fill this amount. I got crazy after 6 years, and am now renting an inexpensive office space. It's a much better environment for many reasons, and the additional hours I can put in per month makes it pay for itself within a day. I have an office mate, and even though he works in a different field, it makes a difference having someone else around. It has been great being able to work in a real office environment, and I'm a more cheerful person as a result. Lessons learned the hard way.
I think he was doing great until the last P.P.S., when he casually suggested that he could buy westorange.gov, and then sell or license it to the city for over $28,000. If the city ever decided to go through ICANN arbitration, the impression of domain squatting specifically for commercial profit with no evidence of personal use isn't looked on favorably. Considering that the rest of the letter was satire, surely this paragraph is too. But it would be easier not to have to convince an arbitration judge of that fact.
Someone had an interesting comment in the New Yorker article:
Also, there is more than one reference on the net. There is a Flickr image from a Sotheby's auction in 1854, which was just uploaded yesterday.
The only reason why Java is being exploited and making headlines so much recently is because Java is so widely adopted now that it makes a big target.
But there's nothing wrong with examining whether Java in the browser should be widely adopted. After the last merry-go-round of critical updates I deleted the Java plugin and haven't noticed a difference. The only site I encountered since then that used any embedded Java was the Taiwan Ministry of Education using it for some unimportant news ticker (which sums up browser applets in general: a distant reminder of Geocities and Livejournal). Even before then, Firefox intermittently would disable Java plugins as being insecure, so Java applets haven't been a seamless experience for a while.
I still have the JRE around on my work machine for some development tools that need it. But the usage is all local, so there is no urgent need to update. Plus, the update process has been broken in Windows 7. The update check and nag warning comes up for all users, but the installation can only be done by an admin account. Even as an admin, the update fails because it's expecting to download to a temp directory that doesn't exist. I deleted Java completely from my family computers, because I got tired of reassuring everyone that the constant update warnings weren't serious. Nobody has missed it.
I've thought it might be amusing to bypass the HR process entirely, task some of the developers with attending the various techie get-togethers around town and collect qualified candidates that way, then give the hiring manager their resumes directly in addition to sending them to HR.
I thought this was normal practice in a job search. The best chance of getting past HR is to send it to an employee at the company, no matter how vaguely you know them. There is sometimes a finder's fee to the employee if you get in, which gives them more of an incentive to follow through.
HR is crap. I think the chances have been low for a while that a human actually sees it before a keyword matching process rejects it, no matter how closely the resume matches the job description.
Link was trollbait. CBS News asserts that since the average income is $50,000, then anyone who makes more than $50,000 is not middle class. Ridiculous.
Ah, the weakly supported claims that China is at an all-out "cyberwar" now become clearer. The Chinese army must have created the site min.liveanalytics.org. Then they deviously drew in visitors from a popular site, including some from major US corporations. For any machine that was vulnerable, China has thusly "hacked" the corporations owning those machines. Hackers get cred, the news media gets to scream that the sky is falling, and the US government gets to increase funding for the "war on cyberterror". It's win-win-win!
As to your next question, no I do not know the owner of min.liveanalytics.org to prove it is owned by the PLA. However I follow the same standards as the news media, security companies, and most slashdot posters; i.e., that it "seems reasonable" and "who can doubt that they are behind it." Who, indeed!
Not exactly the same.
"I left naked pictures of myself on the passenger seat when I gave my keys to the valet and he took them" is closer.
Close. Try "I left naked pictures of myself in my car, in individual envelopes in a folder called DCIM. When I got back to my car the envelopes were all opened and some of the pictures were covered with fingerprints". Yay, a car analogy.
It's not only insightful, it's also got a good beat that you can dance to.
Without reading the research, coffee is hard to carry while walking because the regular pace of your walking creates a resonant frequency that increases the sloshing until it spills over. If you take irregular steps or move your cup around in a random motion you can overcome this. However, you won't look cool doing either of these.
Like Social Security numbers? Like the names of embedded spies?
Tatu Ylönen has garnered fame in technology circles as ... the dick who tried to trademark the term SSH in a move to try to shut down OpenSSH as a free alternative to their commercial product.
How is the concept of computing something substantially different from an algorithm that computes something? Patents are supposed to be on physical inventions, not abstract ideas. The formal, "When run on a computer," clause does not mean a math^H^H^H^Hsoftware patent is somehow not a patent on an abstract idea.
The concept is different from an algorithm when your patent is on the end result and not the process. That's the problem; there is no way to work at a different solution because the patent covers EVERY solution. What patent abusers really want to patent is the idea -- an auction, meeting scheduling, one-click ordering, etc. (on the INTERNET!, to boot) - but those aren't allowed. So they describe what are obvious (to anyone learned in the art of software design) steps to perform their idea. This is where I see the problem. It's an evil fusion between unpatentable ideas and obvious implentations that falsely appears to be a novel process.
As an example, Shazam paid a settlement to Tune Hunter over the idea of music identification. If you read Tune Hunter's actual patent, they only described in detail a method where you hear an interesting song on the radio, press a key fob usb, which can be used to look up the song based on the time and the station's playlist (this sounds like something NPR had given as a promotional item a few years ago, but I'm not sure). Obviously, what Shazam does is nothing like that. Their patent does also include a claim for identification based on sound samples, but they offer no actual process to accomplish this, other than "uses a central processing unit and search stored information as known in the art to analyze the music segment" (emphasis mine). Thus, they flat out admit in the patent that what Shazam is doing is not something they invented. But still Shazam felt threatened by a patent on the idea of "music identification".
Funner fact: With 900 million active users at a 13.4% growth rate, there will be 230 trillion users in 100 years.
Then, six days later they returned to the store, put the burrito back into the microwave, reheated it, and left.
This is true of standardized reading tests, and as an analytical-minded person with good math skills, this always troubled me about these tests. Many times there is more than 1 correct answer, and you have to somehow make a judgment as to which is most correct. Whether this comes from intuition, ability to weigh qualitative factors on the fly, or taking a lot of practice tests, it's not a skill that comes easily for many people. It's not just with reading comprehension but also in grammar questions, where there are no clear grammatical errors, but one choice of phrasing is supposed to be "better" than another option that can also be perfectly acceptable.
The CCP?? Do you really think the Communist Party is paying for these ads? Or was "China" too long to type?
Know what I hate?
The texture of that unrefined pulpy cardboard that McDonald's drink trays are made of. Feeling that stuff against my fingertips just makes my skin crawl. Styrofoam and chalkboards don't bug me at all.
Sort of related, I can't stand the feeling of wooden popsicle sticks against my teeth. Certain paper products have the same effect. It's hard to finish a popsicle--it has to be very tasty for me to take that last lick. Funny, even just the thought of the feeling is only slightly less pleasant....Gotta go, I'm going to be sick.
Someone should write an Onion article about states banning/hampering municipal water systems because Coke and Pepsi demand it.
You're close. The product was Brawndo ("It's got what plants crave!"), and it was in a documentary called Idiocracy.
In all the Superman III hate, what everyone is forgetting is this: When Richard Prior was causing mayhem with the city grid, at one point he MADE A DON'T WALK SIGNAL GO OVER AND STRANGLE THE WALK SIGNAL!! Yes, you read this right. He hacked a traffic signal so that the stick figure pedestrians moved and then fought with each other. If you haven't seen the movie, I think this sums up just how utterly terrible it is. Stupid password hacks are in many movies, but in no other movie did a Don't Walk signal go over and strangle a Walk signal.
The musical Into the Woods is in a similar vein. Cinderella is shallow and bored as a princess, the widow of the giant grieves for her husband who was killed during Jack's theft, and Red Riding Hood has morbidly acquired a wolfskin scarf.