The newer ones are more powerful than dedicated cards from just a few years ago. The latest line can do 1080p at levels that ATI only recently has been capable of (still not officially IIRC). 3D performance is fine for everything but the newest games at higher detail levels. With open source drivers, minimal power consumption and price, what more do you really want from an integrated card?
(Yeah, yeah, we'd all love for an open source Intel card to out benchmark nVidia and ATI's best, while costing less than $10 and using only a couple milliwatts of power under load. I hear that model comes with it's own Pony.)
We're sorry, but turning off your pacemaker would be murder.
I'm deeply saddened to hear that there are still doctors that think such things. Ethically, it's pretty clear cut nowadays to allow a patient to refuse any treatment, including life preserving ones. It's not the doctor killing the patient, it's the patient's disease. Performing/continuing treatment against a rational patient's wishes is a form of assault (ethically and perhaps legally). If this happened recently you should report it to the state medical licensing board, because that is simply medically unacceptable and I'm fairly sure it's illegal.
I'm starting to wonder why they disable perfectly good chips to begin with. Most businesses just give a free upgrade if the customer orders something that isn't in stock and the price difference isn't too great. So why not just give a few customers a 5 or 6 core processor for the price of a 4 core? Customers are happier, the manufacturer doesn't have to waste time/money disabling stuff, and you have fewer RMAs (e.g. core #2 dies on a quad core, but #5 wasn't disabled so the customer still has 4 working cores).
I suppose the only drawback would be that customers would be less willing to pay for the pricier processors if they knew how artificial the distinction was. OTOH, customers are perfectly willing to pay nearly twice as much for an LCD screen with a "zero dead pixel" guarantee, so the more thoroughly tested units should still be able to fetch a high price.
I'm still a student, a couple months away from clinical rotations, so it's very possible there are multiple methods of contact. I have seen very few people carrying multiple devices though, so I don't think there is that much redundancy here. OTOH, "here" is a pretty large hospital in a decent sized city with good cell coverage, so I suspect only the most essential personnel have a dual device requirement.
Actually I do. The iPhone and Android predominate though, since they run the best versions of medical software (colored graphs, pill identifiers, misc. smaller apps, etc.). Blackberries aren't very popular around here since they require a $100 software package plus an extra $20/month to check one's university e-mail. Palms are the rarest, but a few people use them. OTOH, the relative popularity of each platform differs by demographics and institution.
As the summary mentions, every field has cheaters, and there probably aren't tremendous differences in percentages between them. It makes sense evolutionarily, since it's beneficial to be a stealthy cheater. I've observed it personally at all stages of my academic career, and while it's more shocking at higher levels, I don't think the prevalence is decreasing.
I don't understand the mentality, but apparently some people just don't see a problem with academic dishonesty. The only justification that I have heard is that "everybody" [uses stolen tests / steals lunches / copies assignments / lies about credentials / "pirates" audio lectures, textbooks, and software / etc.]. It's sickening, but this trend continues even into professional careers.
I can think of a few, especially with the medical field. If a hospital can't get in touch with the doctors on call because they all have similarly compromised phones then I'd imagine that patient care would suffer. Or if the phones become so glitchy that Epocrate's drug interaction checker doesn't work, leading to that step geting skipped since there's no time to do it manually (3! to 15! possible interactions per patient). Or the doctor's account on the EMR system is compromised so patient information is leaked and used nefariously.
For people that don't deal with life or death situations, it is much harder to contrive a scenario where an electronic device malfunctioning might cause harm (well, economic harm is easy). I suppose someone could cause the phone to play a loud noise to distract a vehicle driver at a crucial moment. Or perhaps someone could make a cheap lithium ion battery explode, although there should be dozens of safeguards preventing that. The most likely though, would be for stalkers to be able to track their victims much more effectively, which would cause emotional harm if nothing else.
This is why I am seriously considering just running my own e-mail server from my house. Then the only way to get the information would be to either subpoena me for it, or issue a warrant to come into my home to search my computer.
I've often wondered if that would actually help. For starters, unless people e-mail you by directly connecting to your SMTP server, or on a server they own, your mail is still in a log file somewhere. Finding out who you contact would be tedious, but I'd assume one could ask the major e-mail providers for "all e-mail sent to badguy@example.com".
The next major fault is that you're more vulnerable to sniffing. Personally, I use SSL for my mail connections to Gmail. If I ran my own server I'd have plaintext SMTP to my home. That makes it ridiculously vulnerable to local attacks such as a wiretap, directional RF antenna, or a noisy ISP.
The best solution would probably be to have a server you own/control in some difficult to access location. Perhaps something solar powered and hidden within range of several open wifi networks that it bounced between. OTOH, at that point it'd just be easier to bounce unencrypted messages until you either had no friends/clients/employer, or they
learned to use GPG.
Alcohol is still involved since even at.05 BAC in a normal individual (Bill probably has lowered levels of ADH 2 or 3 and his BAC would be higher than expected given consumption). Specifically, they have increased relaxation and talkativeness, and decreased inhibition, alertness, and judgment. So they're basically a rowdy passenger that distracts the driver.
Higher BACs mostly impair motor skills whereas the behavioral changes start to occur at lower BACs. Changes in motor skills and behavior can be detected at.01 BAC, and at.03 they're obvious in normal people. Alcoholics can tolerate much higher BACs, in fact, one guy at an ER that appeared sober had a BAC of.65, and several had BACs around.4. That, of course, makes me wonder about your friends if: a.05 BAC isn't very high for them, if they get tested often enough for you to be familiar with how they act at a specific BAC, and for them to not be suffering obvious effects at such a BAC...
That's great for the six month period preceding a potential reelection, but what recourse does one have for a politician currently in office acting against his constituent's wishes? And how can we encourage a politician to be as good as possible rather than just slightly better than the other guy?
"Click here to have your corrupt mayor tarred and feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail."
IMHO, governments would improve greatly if citizens could vote to do that to representatives that fail to serve their constituent's interests. Just give people a choice of "Yay", "Nay", or abstain (i.e. for the non-voters), and ensure there's no way to delay the tarring/feathering or force a re-vote. I don't think we'd see too many more secrete copyright treaties, or politicians being bought by corporate interests.
Modern technology allows us to effectively live in a true democracy. Of course, this isn't desirable since the average person has no clue what the government ought to be doing, so a republic is still the better option. What we need now is a way to ensure that our representatives are actually acting on our behalf rather than their own. We can easily monitor most political actions, but we lack the ability to do anything about them.
Also, please take care with driving. Depth perception is kinda important for that, and tested in modern driving tests. In the US, some states have special restrictions for those who fail that part of the exam, such as having a 45 mph speed limit (Mississippi).
I have to wonder why people are under the delusion that you can prevent criminals from communicating with each other. It's the same flawed concept behind filtering the internet, which is a failure to realize that it's basically impossible to prevent the distribution of information in the information age. You might slow down the non-technically proficient, but it's better just to monitor their communication and use it to your own advantage.
IMHO, a far more useful application of this technology would be to make bullet/fragment resistant gloves. With current military body armor many attacks that would have been fatal in prior wars aren't. That's why so many soldiers are just left with limb injuries. Besides soldiers, anyone who works with their hands near anything sharp or heavy could benefit from such an invention. Losing the use of one or both hands is one of the most crippling injuries a person can sustain, as far as everyday life goes.
So, if the address of their website cannot be published without a fee, the what of their physical address and phone number? Do students and scholars also need to pay to cite them in a paper?
Stuff like this makes me wish the Referrer and User-agent HTTP headers were disabled by default. It seems like they have zero benefit for users, and are merely used as stupidly weak forms of access control.
Solar collectors wouldn't work, but other systems probably wouldn't have much problem on overcast days. Direct sunlight comes in at 32,000 - 130,000 lux, indirect is 10,000 - 25,000 lux, overcast days are usually above 1,000 lux. Normal office lighting is only 350-500 lux and hallways are at about 80 lux. So, you might have trouble during an eclipse or severe thunderstorm, but there's plenty light on normal days.
True for this case, but you say that as though 27 is insufficient for anything. First of all, the actual data set is much larger, i.e. the data points for Toyotas that didn't crash are omitted. You'd need that data so you don't make a useless observation (all vehicles that crashed were driven by humans under the age of 128). Think of a dataset like a 2x2 grid, people without X who didn't crash, people without X who did, people with X who didn't, and people with X who did. We're only seeing half of the relevant categories.
From there, you could have a decently strong conclusion if all 27 accidents had something in common that was unique to them. You could do the statistics to figure out your confidence levels for just about any theory, so that isn't an issue. What is, is that with 27 data points you probably lack the power to have an acceptable level of confidence in anything but a near perfect correlation.
Everybody doesn't care if it looks like OS-X or Win7 or Gnome or something else. They just don't care. Read that last sentence again and again till it sinks in.
If it were just appearance then it wouldn't be such a problem. But it also changes behavior, which prevents users from learning patterns since no two applications behave the same way. It also tends to disrupt stuff like copy and paste, drag and drop, and interaction with other applications. It is very difficult to properly integrate an application into multiple OSes, perhaps impossible if the conventions differ. Heck, few applications make proper use of OS conventions even if they're only available on a single OS.
But you are right, most programmers lack the skill to do this, so users with "keen widget sensitivity" will just have to groan and figure out how to use the broken interface anyway. IMHO, the groaning and complaining is justified though, just like I complain when a maintenance worker can't figure out how to properly mount a sliding door, so it falls on me when I try to use it. A programming analogy might be the use of poor grammar in every language in a multilingual application.
Sure it will. How else will he know how much torque he needs to apply in order to have sufficient rotational inertia to keep the spear level during flight? Or the optimal path to forage from 23 different locations?
That's rather amusing. What I've noticed is that in the life sciences, it's very rare to see someone who didn't struggle with physics and calculus. Conversely, statistics are used all the time. There are two main reasons for this. First, biology is more memorization and less mathematical, and requires a different skill set than math or physics. Second, biology is messy, most numbers are inexact, and everything follows a normal distribution.
That said, not being proficient in math means that you'll also likely struggle with statistics. I've heard estimates that more than half of research articles in the life sciences have at least one statistical error. When I say "everything follows a normal distribution", that's because everything is assumed to do so. I have yet to see a research article actually verify or check to see if that assumption is true. Last year I read a paper concerning some high profile discovery in medicine that actually reported a negative p value (reminder: probabilities range from zero to one).
It's kind of odd, just the other day I posted here about how the US has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world, hence why we pay less income tax and the cost of living is higher. The effective tax rate for businesses is around 40%, deductions included. In fact checking my post, I came across this chart, which indicated that corporations only provide 14% of the total tax revenue, while individuals provide 44%.
Never having studied economics nor tax law, at the time I figured that was more related to businesses passing their tax burden to the share holders, who paid it as income tax. But now it's apparent that a fair chunk of this is just other countries being a little more beholden to their corporate overlords and letting their citizens shoulder more of the tax burden. I suppose that's the free market taking advantage of the complexity in tax law.
I'd suspect that the short term memory (or similar) of these individuals is better than average. Most people can remember 7 things at once, hence why phone numbers are that length. Some people can only remember 5, others 9. Depending on the type of conversation, I could imagine one that only required remembering two things to keep up with it. If you can normally remember 9 things, use 2 "slots" for a phone conversation would leave 7 slots for other tasks. Driving probably only takes ~4-5 so the reduced capacity isn't apparent.
OTOH, I'd imagine that you could determine a difference by increasing the difficulty of the task at hand. So I'd say even "supertaskers" would still have avoidable accidents at a higher rate then they normally would. Of course, their accident rate would still be within normal limits.
TFA says "This is still marked as a rumour, so we'll let you know when (and if!) it’s confirmed." and no other sources are provided. It is currently Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 12:22:38 PM on Christmas Island (6:22 PM EDT).
I just tested it using 64-bit PDF X-Change Viewer V2.0 Build 44 on Windows 7 and it did not execute the payload. Others on the source blog are reporting that they get a warning but even saying "Yes" fails to open the payload. So it seems that PDF X-Change Viewer is not vulnerable to this exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
The newer ones are more powerful than dedicated cards from just a few years ago. The latest line can do 1080p at levels that ATI only recently has been capable of (still not officially IIRC). 3D performance is fine for everything but the newest games at higher detail levels. With open source drivers, minimal power consumption and price, what more do you really want from an integrated card?
(Yeah, yeah, we'd all love for an open source Intel card to out benchmark nVidia and ATI's best, while costing less than $10 and using only a couple milliwatts of power under load. I hear that model comes with it's own Pony.)
And then grow complacent with security until a flash exploit wipes out your home directory.
We're sorry, but turning off your pacemaker would be murder.
I'm deeply saddened to hear that there are still doctors that think such things. Ethically, it's pretty clear cut nowadays to allow a patient to refuse any treatment, including life preserving ones. It's not the doctor killing the patient, it's the patient's disease. Performing/continuing treatment against a rational patient's wishes is a form of assault (ethically and perhaps legally). If this happened recently you should report it to the state medical licensing board, because that is simply medically unacceptable and I'm fairly sure it's illegal.
I'm starting to wonder why they disable perfectly good chips to begin with. Most businesses just give a free upgrade if the customer orders something that isn't in stock and the price difference isn't too great. So why not just give a few customers a 5 or 6 core processor for the price of a 4 core? Customers are happier, the manufacturer doesn't have to waste time/money disabling stuff, and you have fewer RMAs (e.g. core #2 dies on a quad core, but #5 wasn't disabled so the customer still has 4 working cores).
I suppose the only drawback would be that customers would be less willing to pay for the pricier processors if they knew how artificial the distinction was. OTOH, customers are perfectly willing to pay nearly twice as much for an LCD screen with a "zero dead pixel" guarantee, so the more thoroughly tested units should still be able to fetch a high price.
I'm still a student, a couple months away from clinical rotations, so it's very possible there are multiple methods of contact. I have seen very few people carrying multiple devices though, so I don't think there is that much redundancy here. OTOH, "here" is a pretty large hospital in a decent sized city with good cell coverage, so I suspect only the most essential personnel have a dual device requirement.
Actually I do. The iPhone and Android predominate though, since they run the best versions of medical software (colored graphs, pill identifiers, misc. smaller apps, etc.). Blackberries aren't very popular around here since they require a $100 software package plus an extra $20/month to check one's university e-mail. Palms are the rarest, but a few people use them. OTOH, the relative popularity of each platform differs by demographics and institution.
As the summary mentions, every field has cheaters, and there probably aren't tremendous differences in percentages between them. It makes sense evolutionarily, since it's beneficial to be a stealthy cheater. I've observed it personally at all stages of my academic career, and while it's more shocking at higher levels, I don't think the prevalence is decreasing.
I don't understand the mentality, but apparently some people just don't see a problem with academic dishonesty. The only justification that I have heard is that "everybody" [uses stolen tests / steals lunches / copies assignments / lies about credentials / "pirates" audio lectures, textbooks, and software / etc.]. It's sickening, but this trend continues even into professional careers.
I can think of a few, especially with the medical field. If a hospital can't get in touch with the doctors on call because they all have similarly compromised phones then I'd imagine that patient care would suffer. Or if the phones become so glitchy that Epocrate's drug interaction checker doesn't work, leading to that step geting skipped since there's no time to do it manually (3! to 15! possible interactions per patient). Or the doctor's account on the EMR system is compromised so patient information is leaked and used nefariously.
For people that don't deal with life or death situations, it is much harder to contrive a scenario where an electronic device malfunctioning might cause harm (well, economic harm is easy). I suppose someone could cause the phone to play a loud noise to distract a vehicle driver at a crucial moment. Or perhaps someone could make a cheap lithium ion battery explode, although there should be dozens of safeguards preventing that. The most likely though, would be for stalkers to be able to track their victims much more effectively, which would cause emotional harm if nothing else.
This is why I am seriously considering just running my own e-mail server from my house. Then the only way to get the information would be to either subpoena me for it, or issue a warrant to come into my home to search my computer.
I've often wondered if that would actually help. For starters, unless people e-mail you by directly connecting to your SMTP server, or on a server they own, your mail is still in a log file somewhere. Finding out who you contact would be tedious, but I'd assume one could ask the major e-mail providers for "all e-mail sent to badguy@example.com".
The next major fault is that you're more vulnerable to sniffing. Personally, I use SSL for my mail connections to Gmail. If I ran my own server I'd have plaintext SMTP to my home. That makes it ridiculously vulnerable to local attacks such as a wiretap, directional RF antenna, or a noisy ISP.
The best solution would probably be to have a server you own/control in some difficult to access location. Perhaps something solar powered and hidden within range of several open wifi networks that it bounced between. OTOH, at that point it'd just be easier to bounce unencrypted messages until you either had no friends/clients/employer, or they learned to use GPG.
Alcohol is still involved since even at .05 BAC in a normal individual (Bill probably has lowered levels of ADH 2 or 3 and his BAC would be higher than expected given consumption). Specifically, they have increased relaxation and talkativeness, and decreased inhibition, alertness, and judgment. So they're basically a rowdy passenger that distracts the driver.
.01 BAC, and at .03 they're obvious in normal people. Alcoholics can tolerate much higher BACs, in fact, one guy at an ER that appeared sober had a BAC of .65, and several had BACs around .4. That, of course, makes me wonder about your friends if: a .05 BAC isn't very high for them, if they get tested often enough for you to be familiar with how they act at a specific BAC, and for them to not be suffering obvious effects at such a BAC...
Higher BACs mostly impair motor skills whereas the behavioral changes start to occur at lower BACs. Changes in motor skills and behavior can be detected at
That's great for the six month period preceding a potential reelection, but what recourse does one have for a politician currently in office acting against his constituent's wishes? And how can we encourage a politician to be as good as possible rather than just slightly better than the other guy?
"Click here to have your corrupt mayor tarred and feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail."
IMHO, governments would improve greatly if citizens could vote to do that to representatives that fail to serve their constituent's interests. Just give people a choice of "Yay", "Nay", or abstain (i.e. for the non-voters), and ensure there's no way to delay the tarring/feathering or force a re-vote. I don't think we'd see too many more secrete copyright treaties, or politicians being bought by corporate interests.
Modern technology allows us to effectively live in a true democracy. Of course, this isn't desirable since the average person has no clue what the government ought to be doing, so a republic is still the better option. What we need now is a way to ensure that our representatives are actually acting on our behalf rather than their own. We can easily monitor most political actions, but we lack the ability to do anything about them.
Also, please take care with driving. Depth perception is kinda important for that, and tested in modern driving tests. In the US, some states have special restrictions for those who fail that part of the exam, such as having a 45 mph speed limit (Mississippi).
I have to wonder why people are under the delusion that you can prevent criminals from communicating with each other. It's the same flawed concept behind filtering the internet, which is a failure to realize that it's basically impossible to prevent the distribution of information in the information age. You might slow down the non-technically proficient, but it's better just to monitor their communication and use it to your own advantage.
IMHO, a far more useful application of this technology would be to make bullet/fragment resistant gloves. With current military body armor many attacks that would have been fatal in prior wars aren't. That's why so many soldiers are just left with limb injuries. Besides soldiers, anyone who works with their hands near anything sharp or heavy could benefit from such an invention. Losing the use of one or both hands is one of the most crippling injuries a person can sustain, as far as everyday life goes.
So, if the address of their website cannot be published without a fee, the what of their physical address and phone number? Do students and scholars also need to pay to cite them in a paper?
Stuff like this makes me wish the Referrer and User-agent HTTP headers were disabled by default. It seems like they have zero benefit for users, and are merely used as stupidly weak forms of access control.
Solar collectors wouldn't work, but other systems probably wouldn't have much problem on overcast days. Direct sunlight comes in at 32,000 - 130,000 lux, indirect is 10,000 - 25,000 lux, overcast days are usually above 1,000 lux. Normal office lighting is only 350-500 lux and hallways are at about 80 lux. So, you might have trouble during an eclipse or severe thunderstorm, but there's plenty light on normal days.
True for this case, but you say that as though 27 is insufficient for anything. First of all, the actual data set is much larger, i.e. the data points for Toyotas that didn't crash are omitted. You'd need that data so you don't make a useless observation (all vehicles that crashed were driven by humans under the age of 128). Think of a dataset like a 2x2 grid, people without X who didn't crash, people without X who did, people with X who didn't, and people with X who did. We're only seeing half of the relevant categories.
From there, you could have a decently strong conclusion if all 27 accidents had something in common that was unique to them. You could do the statistics to figure out your confidence levels for just about any theory, so that isn't an issue. What is, is that with 27 data points you probably lack the power to have an acceptable level of confidence in anything but a near perfect correlation.
Everybody doesn't care if it looks like OS-X or Win7 or Gnome or something else. They just don't care. Read that last sentence again and again till it sinks in.
If it were just appearance then it wouldn't be such a problem. But it also changes behavior, which prevents users from learning patterns since no two applications behave the same way. It also tends to disrupt stuff like copy and paste, drag and drop, and interaction with other applications. It is very difficult to properly integrate an application into multiple OSes, perhaps impossible if the conventions differ. Heck, few applications make proper use of OS conventions even if they're only available on a single OS.
But you are right, most programmers lack the skill to do this, so users with "keen widget sensitivity" will just have to groan and figure out how to use the broken interface anyway. IMHO, the groaning and complaining is justified though, just like I complain when a maintenance worker can't figure out how to properly mount a sliding door, so it falls on me when I try to use it. A programming analogy might be the use of poor grammar in every language in a multilingual application.
Sure it will. How else will he know how much torque he needs to apply in order to have sufficient rotational inertia to keep the spear level during flight? Or the optimal path to forage from 23 different locations?
That's rather amusing. What I've noticed is that in the life sciences, it's very rare to see someone who didn't struggle with physics and calculus. Conversely, statistics are used all the time. There are two main reasons for this. First, biology is more memorization and less mathematical, and requires a different skill set than math or physics. Second, biology is messy, most numbers are inexact, and everything follows a normal distribution.
That said, not being proficient in math means that you'll also likely struggle with statistics. I've heard estimates that more than half of research articles in the life sciences have at least one statistical error. When I say "everything follows a normal distribution", that's because everything is assumed to do so. I have yet to see a research article actually verify or check to see if that assumption is true. Last year I read a paper concerning some high profile discovery in medicine that actually reported a negative p value (reminder: probabilities range from zero to one).
It's kind of odd, just the other day I posted here about how the US has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world, hence why we pay less income tax and the cost of living is higher. The effective tax rate for businesses is around 40%, deductions included. In fact checking my post, I came across this chart, which indicated that corporations only provide 14% of the total tax revenue, while individuals provide 44%.
Never having studied economics nor tax law, at the time I figured that was more related to businesses passing their tax burden to the share holders, who paid it as income tax. But now it's apparent that a fair chunk of this is just other countries being a little more beholden to their corporate overlords and letting their citizens shoulder more of the tax burden. I suppose that's the free market taking advantage of the complexity in tax law.
I'd suspect that the short term memory (or similar) of these individuals is better than average. Most people can remember 7 things at once, hence why phone numbers are that length. Some people can only remember 5, others 9. Depending on the type of conversation, I could imagine one that only required remembering two things to keep up with it. If you can normally remember 9 things, use 2 "slots" for a phone conversation would leave 7 slots for other tasks. Driving probably only takes ~4-5 so the reduced capacity isn't apparent.
OTOH, I'd imagine that you could determine a difference by increasing the difficulty of the task at hand. So I'd say even "supertaskers" would still have avoidable accidents at a higher rate then they normally would. Of course, their accident rate would still be within normal limits.
TFA says "This is still marked as a rumour, so we'll let you know when (and if!) it’s confirmed." and no other sources are provided. It is currently Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 12:22:38 PM on Christmas Island (6:22 PM EDT).
I just tested it using 64-bit PDF X-Change Viewer V2.0 Build 44 on Windows 7 and it did not execute the payload. Others on the source blog are reporting that they get a warning but even saying "Yes" fails to open the payload. So it seems that PDF X-Change Viewer is not vulnerable to this exploit.