I look at my location history sometimes, especially after long trips. Two years ago on reviewing a trip to India it said I had been in Patna, a city I've never been within several hundred miles of. So I knew it was not dependable. I've just looked up the location history for that period in detail. It is still there. It says that I was in Domino's Pizza in Ashok Rajpath Rd, Chowk, Patna, it also says that I then travelled a distance of 1100 miles to a place in southern India where I had actually been, in 13 minutes, by car. It was probably caused by someone identifying a business address wrongly, but it is absolutely not reliable. Lawyers should question its accuracy.
when I moved countries (but took my wireless router with me), google used to think I was still at my old location for the first several months (when I was connected my to wifi). I guess until the next time a google car drove past and got the new location of the AP mac address...
99.8% between humans and chimpanzees refers to the entire genome (~3 billion base pairs).
23 And Me and related companies only look at about 3 million positions - the positions that are often different between different human populations/races (these are known as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms).
this study was funded by Singapore's Ministry of Health partly to see if that was true... unfortunately it turns out not to be (for a 'large' majority of people, at least).
The stupid new item didn't even link to the journal article - the summary and findings are available at http://www.thelancet.com/journ...
this is misreported, as it was back in June when the policy was first announced. They are planning on having a separate network for desktops that can connect to sensitive databases (eg think of citizenship/passport etc functions), and those desktops won't have internet access. I guess those civil servants in such a position will have 2 computers on their desktop.
This is not "all civil servants are now banned from facebook/google at work".
in this case, 1MDB transferred some money to an account owned by a company with a very similar name to another investment company, and claimed it was for investment purposes. (The 'fake' company was controlled by insiders, and was named to looked like it was a Saudi-owned investment fund.) The money from the shell account was transferred through multiple other shell accounts through multiple jurisdictions, to try to hide the paper trail.
Is it really that easy to block? I would like to hear more about successes in circumvention, and prevention of future obstructions.
When I was in China for several months, most popular Western websites were blocked - social networking sites because people can organise/talk freely, and news websites for obvious reasons.
However different ISPs (or different regional divisions of the same large national ISP) would block different sites at different times, so it's not like all of China's traffic goes through 1 single firewalling router:). Presumably they have independent implementations of a vague set of rules. Many sites are blocked via DNS spoofing (using a public DNS server instead of the ISP's server was good enough for most of these but some sites had the DNS requests intercepted even when doing this), some pages get blocked due to the content (if not encrypted). Presumably they have more rules for content written in Chinese than in English.
I often browsed by proxying everything via SSH to my machine in my home country. Sometimes my SSH connections would time out and I couldn't use my proxy. After getting back home I discovered several thousand automated brute force password attempts on SSH, coming from a range of IP addresses assigned to the same city in China where I was staying.
Not being able to type it in Word is just not knowing how to use Word. The Autocorrect options are very adjustable. Add the word to the dictionary and be done with it.
Now as for every other piece of damn software out there such as Windows 10's built in autocorrect which affects all apps, that's not so easy.
I also work with someone whose family name is "Teh". The problem isn't him typing his own name into the computer, it's the entire rest of the world typing his name in. Eg I've seen conference proceedings and meeting minutes with his name spelled as "The".
A W2 tax from shows the amount of taxes withheld from your paycheck. It's used to file your taxes. https://turbotax.intuit.com/ta...
I presume the article refers to this data. Does anyone have any idea what the scammers can do with this?
presumably they can file and claim your tax refund when they have enough information to impersonate you? Especially if they file before you get around to doing it yourself...
I haven't even RTFA yet, but I was wondering if this could have applications with other viruses that become long-term residents of the body. I'm thinking of things in the herpes family like... herpes, or chickenpox / shingles. The trick with most of these is long-term, mostly-dormant viruses hiding in the cells. If you can wake them up, the immune system can clear them, but they are effectively hidden inside the cells while quiescent.
HIV is a "retrovirus", which means the the virus's DNA integrates into the host's DNA. Some other viruses do this, but I think most don't. Some are more interesting, eg EBV is a virus from the herpes family which infects several different tissue types, and we know it can integrate into human DNA inside white blood cells, but I don't think there's proof that it can integrate inside liver or stomach cells.
As a retrovirus, the HIV sequence successfully breaks into a cell, then breaks into the cell's nucleus, then into one of the nucleus' chromosomes. (This is obviously harder to detect than viruses that stay inside the cell's cytoplasm, or that enter the nucleus but stay apart as their own episome [mini-chromosome].) That's what the article is referring to when they say their method recognises a 34-base pair long sequence - it is recognising that piece of the viral sequence in our own chromosome, and then uses something to snip out enough of the viral sequence that it can no longer make new copies of itself.
Obviously you want to be careful with any therapy that involves cutting up bits of human chromosomes...:)
I remember that doing MITM of vanilla http traffic to slashdot was one method that the spooks were using to inject browser exploits, when they were targeting IT professionals at 'interesting' companies. so I think https everywhere would be important:)
Why not Biology? Sure these are chemical processes, but unless someone demonstrates they are active in nature outside biological systems... this seems like an award in the wrong category.
there is no Nobel prize for biology, since it wasn't a big field when the prizes were set up.
The closest categories are the Medicine prize and the Biology prize. A lot of inorganic chemists complain that the chemistry Nobel almost always goes to molecular biology discoveries:) The prize for Blue LEDs are a recent exception to that trend.
Linus has seemed to have weathered many storms and has gathered some wisdom and perspective missing from his earliest pronouncements. This was one of the best/. Q&As ever.
I agree. This is one of the better/most-on-topic things I've seen on/. for quite a while.:)
The headline is shocking when one consider the steep rise of cancer since 1945. If it was luck, then how it could change over time?
we need to be careful that we are comparing apples with apples when comparing cancer rates between different countries or time periods. We have higher rates of people reaching their 70s and 80s now. And in addition to increased longevity, we also (in developed countries at least) have a higher proportion of our populations being older.
This is why we use an "age standardised cancer incidence" rate, to account for differences in the population makeup.
I'm not sure if the age-adjusted rate is much difference between now and the 40s, but if it is then I would expect it to be largely based on the dramatic rates of tobacco use in the couple of decades after WW2.
Really Why? what content on Slashdot justify's the need for encrypted content? I really don't get this huge push for SSL everywhere. give me SSL when I need it, I don't want SSL for accessing a forum or a news site or just generally browsing the web.
since you have a slashdot account, I'm sure you don't mind your ISP, their transit provider, and slashdot's CDN seeing your password going over their network in cleartext when you log in.
Even if you use a throwaway password for sites like this (and I hope you do), don't you think it would be better to make a small change that has no effect on how end users interact with the site but somewhat increases their security?
given that tumour cells (for solid tumours) normally have defects in extra-cellular matrix related genes (eg genes in the collagen family are sometimes mutated in advanced gastric cancer) that help the tumour invade and spread through tissues, I wonder if using such a treatment increases the chances of either tumours forming, or tumours becoming higher grade/more serious more quickly...
I confess to being a bit baffled at how these power cord defects keep happening. Your basic AC power cord is ancient by the standards of electronic gizmos and by far the simplest thing going into a modern laptop.
recently we had a power cord melt and nearly start a fire in our server room while power maintenance was occurring (so power was only going to 1 PSU instead of both PSUs). Turns out the cables don't meet the appropriate standards (IEC 60950) despite being stamped with "10A".
The cross-section of the copper strands in the failed cable was smaller than that of a 'proper' cable. These cables were illegal, but are being imported from cheap manufacturers in China (obviously without testing to Western standards) and being sold at somewhat reputable stores. Beware of cables marked "PVC YOUZHI DIANXIAN 3x0.75mm2":)
there's a version of REM's "What's the frequency Kenneth" recorded live where, near the end of the song, Michael Stipe deliberately replaces "I'll never understand the frequency" with "I'll never understand, don't f*ck with me" rather subtlely....
I don't know if ancient samples are processed differently, but for 'fresh' samples, the DNA gets broken up into small fragments (200-1000 base-pairs long), and then these fragments get sequenced. All bits of the genome have roughly even chance of getting sequenced, and with thousands or millions of copies of each fragment, you normally get reasonably even coverage over the whole genome.
The problem is when you map your sequences back onto a reference genome (ie the currently known chr1, chr2, chrX, etc). The aligning software will have trouble deciding where to place a fragment that is part of a highly repetitive sequence (like centromeres or telomeres) , or is duplicated several/many times (eg large gene families that have large sections of the genes in common, or pseudogenes that look like copies of other genes). In addition, we don't even know the exact sequence for some of these regions, so our reference human genome is contantly being updated (currently up to version 38).
For bioinformatics analysis, sometimes it is easier to sweep some of this under the rug. For example, some people use a reference genome that masks out the centromeres and telomeres (ie our reference sequence just has NNNNNNNNNNNN bases here, instead of As,Cs,Gs and Ts). Otherwise there are databases that list the regions containing repeated sequences or duplicated segments, so you can check any of your findings to make sure they aren't in a suspicious region.
That's generally what each country does to the companies operating inside it.
But here's the problem. Lets say an iPhone costs $400 to make, and sells retail for $1000. One Apple-related company pays $400 to get the phone made in china, and then sells the phone to Apple Ireland. Apple Ireland pays $450 to get the phone, then sells the phone for $995 to Apple Australia or Apple USA or whatever. Australia/USA can tax the profits of the local company, but the local company only made $5 per phone, and then used most of that for local expenses/advertising. Apple Ireland books most of the profit, and at a tax rate far less than other Western countries.
from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch
what if I told you that every single launch has had some worker bees who thought their part of their module wasn't up to scratch, or might not work in the current conditions, and voiced this opinion to their manager? People with an engineering mind-set don't like uncertainty....
I don't have any evidence that this is actually the case, but it seems likely when so many people are involved in a project.
Ever ask yourself why the merchant would spend money on this? I mean there's no risk to the merchant. If stuff is bought with a stolen credit card then the credit card company or the bank bears the risk.
No, it's the merchant who bears all the risk. If someone disputes a charge, the merchant's acquiring bank writes a friendly letter asking for proof of the card-holder's authorization, eg a signed receipt. If you can't offer evidence that it was authorized, then you get a chargeback (ie they deduct the purchase amount from your account) and you are out of the value of whatever you mailed out to the customer.
When we sold stuff online, obviously we don't get physical signatures, but normally we could convince the customer that they had made the purchase (normally they forgot, or didn't recognise our name on their credit card bill) and the customer cancelled the dispute.
Why would the bank voluntarily eat the loss for fraud/disputes?:)
I understood that the high mortality is because most pancreatic cancers are not detected until the cancer has already spread. At which point it usually has already mutated enough to pick up a number of tricks that make it harder to kill, and thus less responsive to chemotherapy.
most solid tumours in organs are like that... they are asymptomatic until they get to an advanced stage.
But in this case, 95% of pancreatic cancers are in the tissue around the pancreatic duct. The other 5% are in a different type of pancreatic tissue and aren't as aggressive, so if they are detected and removed then most patients survive.
That would seem to be the new HP tablet that looks like a BlackBerry PlayBook but with a worse display and camera. What has that got to do with Harvard seeming to have forgotten the difference between a university and a corporation?
Some years ago, HP's board of directors approved spying on some of their own top executives to try to find the source of a leak. "Playbook" was supposed to be a metaphor for "game plan", not a product name:)
Slashdot Mirror
I look at my location history sometimes, especially after long trips. Two years ago on reviewing a trip to India it said I had been in Patna, a city I've never been within several hundred miles of. So I knew it was not dependable. I've just looked up the location history for that period in detail. It is still there. It says that I was in Domino's Pizza in Ashok Rajpath Rd, Chowk, Patna, it also says that I then travelled a distance of 1100 miles to a place in southern India where I had actually been, in 13 minutes, by car. It was probably caused by someone identifying a business address wrongly, but it is absolutely not reliable. Lawyers should question its accuracy.
when I moved countries (but took my wireless router with me), google used to think I was still at my old location for the first several months (when I was connected my to wifi). I guess until the next time a google car drove past and got the new location of the AP mac address...
99.8% between humans and chimpanzees refers to the entire genome (~3 billion base pairs).
23 And Me and related companies only look at about 3 million positions - the positions that are often different between different human populations/races (these are known as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms).
this study was funded by Singapore's Ministry of Health partly to see if that was true... unfortunately it turns out not to be (for a 'large' majority of people, at least).
The stupid new item didn't even link to the journal article - the summary and findings are available at http://www.thelancet.com/journ...
this is misreported, as it was back in June when the policy was first announced. They are planning on having a separate network for desktops that can connect to sensitive databases (eg think of citizenship/passport etc functions), and those desktops won't have internet access. I guess those civil servants in such a position will have 2 computers on their desktop.
This is not "all civil servants are now banned from facebook/google at work".
in this case, 1MDB transferred some money to an account owned by a company with a very similar name to another investment company, and claimed it was for investment purposes. (The 'fake' company was controlled by insiders, and was named to looked like it was a Saudi-owned investment fund.) The money from the shell account was transferred through multiple other shell accounts through multiple jurisdictions, to try to hide the paper trail.
Is it really that easy to block? I would like to hear more about successes in circumvention, and prevention of future obstructions.
When I was in China for several months, most popular Western websites were blocked - social networking sites because people can organise/talk freely, and news websites for obvious reasons.
However different ISPs (or different regional divisions of the same large national ISP) would block different sites at different times, so it's not like all of China's traffic goes through 1 single firewalling router :). Presumably they have independent implementations of a vague set of rules. Many sites are blocked via DNS spoofing (using a public DNS server instead of the ISP's server was good enough for most of these but some sites had the DNS requests intercepted even when doing this), some pages get blocked due to the content (if not encrypted). Presumably they have more rules for content written in Chinese than in English.
I often browsed by proxying everything via SSH to my machine in my home country. Sometimes my SSH connections would time out and I couldn't use my proxy. After getting back home I discovered several thousand automated brute force password attempts on SSH, coming from a range of IP addresses assigned to the same city in China where I was staying.
Not being able to type it in Word is just not knowing how to use Word. The Autocorrect options are very adjustable. Add the word to the dictionary and be done with it.
Now as for every other piece of damn software out there such as Windows 10's built in autocorrect which affects all apps, that's not so easy.
I also work with someone whose family name is "Teh". The problem isn't him typing his own name into the computer, it's the entire rest of the world typing his name in. Eg I've seen conference proceedings and meeting minutes with his name spelled as "The".
A W2 tax from shows the amount of taxes withheld from your paycheck. It's used to file your taxes.
https://turbotax.intuit.com/ta...
I presume the article refers to this data. Does anyone have any idea what the scammers can do with this?
presumably they can file and claim your tax refund when they have enough information to impersonate you? Especially if they file before you get around to doing it yourself...
I haven't even RTFA yet, but I was wondering if this could have applications with other viruses that become long-term residents of the body. I'm thinking of things in the herpes family like... herpes, or chickenpox / shingles. The trick with most of these is long-term, mostly-dormant viruses hiding in the cells. If you can wake them up, the immune system can clear them, but they are effectively hidden inside the cells while quiescent.
HIV is a "retrovirus", which means the the virus's DNA integrates into the host's DNA. Some other viruses do this, but I think most don't. Some are more interesting, eg EBV is a virus from the herpes family which infects several different tissue types, and we know it can integrate into human DNA inside white blood cells, but I don't think there's proof that it can integrate inside liver or stomach cells.
As a retrovirus, the HIV sequence successfully breaks into a cell, then breaks into the cell's nucleus, then into one of the nucleus' chromosomes. (This is obviously harder to detect than viruses that stay inside the cell's cytoplasm, or that enter the nucleus but stay apart as their own episome [mini-chromosome].) That's what the article is referring to when they say their method recognises a 34-base pair long sequence - it is recognising that piece of the viral sequence in our own chromosome, and then uses something to snip out enough of the viral sequence that it can no longer make new copies of itself.
Obviously you want to be careful with any therapy that involves cutting up bits of human chromosomes... :)
I remember that doing MITM of vanilla http traffic to slashdot was one method that the spooks were using to inject browser exploits, when they were targeting IT professionals at 'interesting' companies. so I think https everywhere would be important :)
the summary and/or editor's blurb should have made it clear that in this context AR = Augmented Reality.
Why not Biology? Sure these are chemical processes, but unless someone demonstrates they are active in nature outside biological systems... this seems like an award in the wrong category.
there is no Nobel prize for biology, since it wasn't a big field when the prizes were set up.
The closest categories are the Medicine prize and the Biology prize. A lot of inorganic chemists complain that the chemistry Nobel almost always goes to molecular biology discoveries :) The prize for Blue LEDs are a recent exception to that trend.
Seriously, what is so damn hard about integrating SMS with messaging.
except please don't copy iMessage's "feature" where it tells you the message is delivered but the recipient never gets it.
Linus has seemed to have weathered many storms and has gathered some wisdom and perspective missing from his earliest pronouncements. This was one of the best /. Q&As ever.
I agree. This is one of the better/most-on-topic things I've seen on /. for quite a while. :)
The headline is shocking when one consider the steep rise of cancer since 1945. If it was luck, then how it could change over time?
we need to be careful that we are comparing apples with apples when comparing cancer rates between different countries or time periods. We have higher rates of people reaching their 70s and 80s now. And in addition to increased longevity, we also (in developed countries at least) have a higher proportion of our populations being older.
This is why we use an "age standardised cancer incidence" rate, to account for differences in the population makeup.
I'm not sure if the age-adjusted rate is much difference between now and the 40s, but if it is then I would expect it to be largely based on the dramatic rates of tobacco use in the couple of decades after WW2.
Really Why? what content on Slashdot justify's the need for encrypted content? I really don't get this huge push for SSL everywhere. give me SSL when I need it, I don't want SSL for accessing a forum or a news site or just generally browsing the web.
since you have a slashdot account, I'm sure you don't mind your ISP, their transit provider, and slashdot's CDN seeing your password going over their network in cleartext when you log in.
Even if you use a throwaway password for sites like this (and I hope you do), don't you think it would be better to make a small change that has no effect on how end users interact with the site but somewhat increases their security?
given that tumour cells (for solid tumours) normally have defects in extra-cellular matrix related genes (eg genes in the collagen family are sometimes mutated in advanced gastric cancer) that help the tumour invade and spread through tissues, I wonder if using such a treatment increases the chances of either tumours forming, or tumours becoming higher grade/more serious more quickly...
I confess to being a bit baffled at how these power cord defects keep happening. Your basic AC power cord is ancient by the standards of electronic gizmos and by far the simplest thing going into a modern laptop.
recently we had a power cord melt and nearly start a fire in our server room while power maintenance was occurring (so power was only going to 1 PSU instead of both PSUs). Turns out the cables don't meet the appropriate standards (IEC 60950) despite being stamped with "10A".
The cross-section of the copper strands in the failed cable was smaller than that of a 'proper' cable. These cables were illegal, but are being imported from cheap manufacturers in China (obviously without testing to Western standards) and being sold at somewhat reputable stores. Beware of cables marked "PVC YOUZHI DIANXIAN 3x0.75mm2" :)
there's a version of REM's "What's the frequency Kenneth" recorded live where, near the end of the song, Michael Stipe deliberately replaces "I'll never understand the frequency" with "I'll never understand, don't f*ck with me" rather subtlely....
I don't know if ancient samples are processed differently, but for 'fresh' samples, the DNA gets broken up into small fragments (200-1000 base-pairs long), and then these fragments get sequenced. All bits of the genome have roughly even chance of getting sequenced, and with thousands or millions of copies of each fragment, you normally get reasonably even coverage over the whole genome.
The problem is when you map your sequences back onto a reference genome (ie the currently known chr1, chr2, chrX, etc). The aligning software will have trouble deciding where to place a fragment that is part of a highly repetitive sequence (like centromeres or telomeres) , or is duplicated several/many times (eg large gene families that have large sections of the genes in common, or pseudogenes that look like copies of other genes). In addition, we don't even know the exact sequence for some of these regions, so our reference human genome is contantly being updated (currently up to version 38).
For bioinformatics analysis, sometimes it is easier to sweep some of this under the rug. For example, some people use a reference genome that masks out the centromeres and telomeres (ie our reference sequence just has NNNNNNNNNNNN bases here, instead of As,Cs,Gs and Ts). Otherwise there are databases that list the regions containing repeated sequences or duplicated segments, so you can check any of your findings to make sure they aren't in a suspicious region.
That's generally what each country does to the companies operating inside it.
But here's the problem. Lets say an iPhone costs $400 to make, and sells retail for $1000. One Apple-related company pays $400 to get the phone made in china, and then sells the phone to Apple Ireland. Apple Ireland pays $450 to get the phone, then sells the phone for $995 to Apple Australia or Apple USA or whatever. Australia/USA can tax the profits of the local company, but the local company only made $5 per phone, and then used most of that for local expenses/advertising. Apple Ireland books most of the profit, and at a tax rate far less than other Western countries.
from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch
what if I told you that every single launch has had some worker bees who thought their part of their module wasn't up to scratch, or might not work in the current conditions, and voiced this opinion to their manager? People with an engineering mind-set don't like uncertainty....
I don't have any evidence that this is actually the case, but it seems likely when so many people are involved in a project.
Ever ask yourself why the merchant would spend money on this? I mean there's no risk to the merchant. If stuff is bought with a stolen credit card then the credit card company or the bank bears the risk.
No, it's the merchant who bears all the risk. If someone disputes a charge, the merchant's acquiring bank writes a friendly letter asking for proof of the card-holder's authorization, eg a signed receipt. If you can't offer evidence that it was authorized, then you get a chargeback (ie they deduct the purchase amount from your account) and you are out of the value of whatever you mailed out to the customer.
When we sold stuff online, obviously we don't get physical signatures, but normally we could convince the customer that they had made the purchase (normally they forgot, or didn't recognise our name on their credit card bill) and the customer cancelled the dispute.
Why would the bank voluntarily eat the loss for fraud/disputes? :)
I understood that the high mortality is because most pancreatic cancers are not detected until the cancer has already spread. At which point it usually has already mutated enough to pick up a number of tricks that make it harder to kill, and thus less responsive to chemotherapy.
most solid tumours in organs are like that... they are asymptomatic until they get to an advanced stage.
But in this case, 95% of pancreatic cancers are in the tissue around the pancreatic duct. The other 5% are in a different type of pancreatic tissue and aren't as aggressive, so if they are detected and removed then most patients survive.
That would seem to be the new HP tablet that looks like a BlackBerry PlayBook but with a worse display and camera. What has that got to do with Harvard seeming to have forgotten the difference between a university and a corporation?
Some years ago, HP's board of directors approved spying on some of their own top executives to try to find the source of a leak. "Playbook" was supposed to be a metaphor for "game plan", not a product name :)