Does this story make tool creating and wielding cockatoos official fact? Cockatoo owners have been talking about these kinds of things for ages and have even provided hard evidence, only to be completely dismissed out of hand by scientists who "know" that cockatoos are mere stupid animals.
This will probably be written off as yet another anomaly, an extreme exception to the notion held dear by science--that animals are too stupid to do smart things, a view curiously inherited by science's veritable nemesis, mainstream religion.
Science must discard it's old notions, prejudices and preconceptions, viewing the world through it's own version of rose-coloured glasses. It must stop filtering out, rejecting whatever does not conform to it's prejudices and start observing objectively, fairly.
There's one CLEC in the western US that provides dialup service to ISP's that also intercepts search requests, forwards the search to Yahoo, etc., and alters the search engine returns by changing links and inserting ads. You'd never know what was happening unless you were watching the traffic on the port and noticed that DNS was returning the same IP address for all the search engines.
Patenting software is a tremendous gamble, given the vast and ever-increasing amount of prior art that exists. There is far too much prior art for anyone to be aware of it all. But patent applicants forge on, sometimes rewording claims to obscure the fact that they are obvious or prior art but never giving up on the dream to see their name on an official US government patent and dreaming of all the millions and millions they'll make from the resulting monopoly, only to find their claims rejected and often whole patents voided on reexamination.
Software should not be patentable. Among other reasons, this is a field fraught with traps and pitfalls that even the most experienced cannot help but fall into. Also, it is so risky that patent insurance, if at all available, costs far more than the patent is worth.
There seems to be a popular notion that there is no difference between sending a video as a file and sending as a stream because bytes is bytes is bytes. Though it seems a reasonable opinion, it is still not a valid assumption. IP wasn't designed for streaming media or any other real-time communication. Streaming is an inefficient use of IP resources that disproportionately degrades network performance. Empirical observations of network data flow and traffic with and without real-time streaming support that conclusion. Gigabit rates will not increase the efficiency of streaming over IP. Instead, it is more likely to make networks slower, in part due to the misconception that fatter pipes means more streaming capacity.
The smartest ways to broadcast media in real time is to use technologies designed for it: Broadcast TV, radio, cable, PSTN. Using IP networks is just plain stupid.
Besides, what good reason is there to stream recorded media in real time? It is not live-as-it-happens. It's like buying a film movie frame by frame and watching it as you receive the frames from the store. Makes absolutely no sense.
And now what will become of the Elephant's Child? Keeping non-robotic entities out of the stacks will serve only to starve it to death.
Exploring the depths of the library stacks is one of the last and more refined civilised expressions of human hunter-gatherer instincts, where one can find even that which she didn't know she was looking for.
Serendipity is at the foundation of discovery and new knowledge. We become less than what we are when it is denied us.
But your bank, credit card companies, et cetera, will be very happy to dump the authentication burdens and liabilities on someone else. Then, when someone steals your money, credit or services, it's not their fault.
Pretty much everything in security & authentication that comes from government has inevitably proven to be crap in the wild. Their stuff only "works" within controlled conditions, behind closed doors and with strictly limited access. Government blessed private and proprietary scams are far more concerned with the money than the security.
A lot of black hats are likely praying for this scam to get underway. And when it does become official, there will likely be a run on rubber sheets.
According to the article there was no measurement made of the magnetic field. Rather, the strength of the magnetic field was calculated by observing and measuring something else and then plugging that data into a model which then calculated the strength of the magnetic field. Regardless of the degree of confidence in the calculation, it is still not a measurement and it's crap science to call it that.
they're talking about stacking the dice, not the devices. You know what dice are? They're the little chips of silicon that are then packaged to make the IC's that you typically see and use. Unless you can precisely align and drill little tiny microscopic holes in the dice and electrically connect the one on top to the one on bottom, then you haven't been doing what they're doing. Not even close.
The closest anyone has ever got to this is stacking small dice on a larger die and wire bonding the pads of one to the other.
Interesting that TSV is found to be useful after all. 29 years ago an AMD employee independently conceived of TSV and AMD refused to talk to the employee about this and other concepts, nearly all of which have subsequently been developed and patented by AMD's competitors.
If not a hoax, then it would seem that DHS/ICS may have overstepped it's authority or is outside it's jurisdiction and is stepping on the Secret Service's and especially the FBI's toes.
The FBI still has primary jurisdiction in copyrights violation cases, IIRC.
What may have happened here is that someone went to the FBI to shutdown the sites, was denied, then went agency shopping and found the DHS/ICS eager to make their internet bones.
This seems somewhat like the FBI and Secret Service inept & incompetent Keystone Kops actions from the 90's when the DMCA was enacted, up to and including going after innocent parties, without evidence, without investigation, based solely on hearsay.
If they are in fact acting outside their jurisdiction, I would hope that EFF and other attorneys give the DHS and ICS a justly deserved roasting in court. But the people who induced the DHS/ICS to do this would get off scot-free, even if they lied to DHS/ICS.
Does anyone remember that little ball of hot stuff at the core of the planet and how it's producing various elements and compounds? Does anyone remember that carbon is one of the elements produced in abundance? Does anyone remember that compounds from the core move out to the surface, combining with other elements (such as oxygen) along the way?
With that nuclear furnace fusioning/fissioning away at the core (and which happens to be the source of carbon, oxygen, etc. for this planet) why would there be a need for atmospheric carbon to somehow go below the ground? Why wait for plant material to get buried underground?
It's not politically correct to mention this and it is Green heresy but a fact is a fact, even when it goes against whatever "correct" thinking is currently fashionable.
Once again, Army genius comes up with a half-assed and dangerous solution.
From the article: "The power lines that run from the street to a house usually consist of one insulated wire that carries electricity to the house, paired with a bare wire that carries electricity away to complete a circuit."
uh, what? I haven't seen any overhead drops that consist of less than two insulated cables and one bare one to carry the split-220 to the typical home, small business, street lamp, etc.
If this device cuts into both insulated wires, there will be fireworks and they will blow any "covert op" they may be indulging in.
There's the wrong way, the right way and the Army way. This is so not the right way.
This is not a civil matter of fraud, breach of contract or any such thing. It is criminal as the civil complaint makes clear. The goal of the school was in fact to conduct a criminal and covert program of spying on their students outside of the school. If there were no criminal intent, why was it kept secret? Schools are not exempt from criminal laws regarding this no matter what their intentions. I doubt very much that there was a "lack of criminal intent". Anyway, it is irrelevant. It is a tenet of law that ignorance is no excuse and these people, being "responsible adults", could reasonably be expected to know or at least presume that it is illegal as well as unethical to spy on others. They admitted that they knew it was wrong. Are they above the law? Are they "special"? Let's not try to explain it away and excuse criminal behaviour with talk of good and noble intentions. Too many crimes are committed under the guise of "good intentions".
What most likely happened is that their unions called in a favor and got the government to drop the case. These privileged elites get a free pass. No non-union individual would ever be given the same consideration as shown here even if it were purely accidental and the images went directly to/dev/null.
Businesses resist the new dollar coins because they are still easily confused with quarters and the costs of accomodating the new coin is high. People who handle money all day do not stop and look at the coins every single time they make change. They go by feel and location. It will cost businesses money to adapt to new coins: They will have to change their cash drawers, coin counting and dispensing devices and eat the costs of mistaking dollar coins for quarters.
The brilliant political decision to make the newdollar the same (or closely similar) size as the quarter is real-world moronic and because it is such a brilliant political move we're stuck with it regardless of the real-world consequences. If the size were different and it were clearly distinguishable from every other coin it may have a better chance of being adopted. Until then don't expect businesses to readily accept them even if the dollar bill goes away.
Law enforcement will look for evidence to win a case. They will NOT look for evidence that may lose their case. It will not be considered. In this context, anything goes, even cached stuff that you might not even have ever seen, which put there by malicious links or by prefetch. You are presumed guilty by law enforcement and it's their job to create evidence to support that presumption.
Evidence extraction can be destructive or, at best, may only alter the original evidence. There have been plenty of cases where collecting evidence has altered the original data or destroyed it. In some cases, the evidence did not exist until it was created by buggy or amateurishly designed analysis or forensics software, or by incompetent or just plain malicious people. Too often, law enforcement believes that "an exact copy or image" of the original data is all that is necessary. There is only their word that it is an "exact copy or image" of the original. That means that the defendant, or victim in such a case, has no way to refute the "evidence" collected.
It is too easy to plant stuff on any PC. Absolutely no password or login of any kind is required and it can be done easily without leaving any trace. People are too naive to imagine that it's possible for anyone to have access to your PC or put crap on it without your knowledge. Fortunately, the vast majority of people are also far too naive to think about planting stuff on someone's PC. That will change as such cases become more frequent, more public, and more people become more savvy about computers.
By the way, with regard to "creating evidence", there are training programs and seminars for law enforcement, forensics people and prosecutors that are all about creating evidence and selling it to a court and jury. "Evidence Creation". Scary, no?
The article begins with "Paul Ockenden calls for Tele Atlas to use Street View to take a look at the mapping errors he's reported - and then fix them"
But I've noticed that even Street View is in error. A certain address may be close to where it really is one day but off by a half mile or more the next. So what good is it to correct errors in Tele Atlas maps with errors in Street View?
Both systems have bizarre numbering methods it seems: Since when does the 3600 block sit between the 2600 block and the 2700 block of some road which ends at 3520?
Where I am, I have the dubious privilege of directing people to the correct destinations when their GPS and Google Maps directions get them lost. Every day a lot of truckers also get lost, given the wrong directions by their GPS and are forced to make u-turns in the middle of the barely-wide-enough highway to get back on the correct route. Luckily they have their CB radios to get sorted out.
If Tele Atlas and Google Maps are depending on each other and if one's data is bad, then it propagates to the other, with obvious results. And I don't get why addresses drift around from day to day. Stuff that! A Thomas Guide remains one of the most accurate street level maps available (here in the US). It's far more reliable and it costs less than a GPS.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't that say it all?
She can have her castle and her laboratory. And the Universe as her demesne.
She could get the Prince and the Doctor.
Who? A Doctor Prince. Or perhaps a Doctor formerly known as a Prince.
Does this story make tool creating and wielding cockatoos official fact? Cockatoo owners have been talking about these kinds of things for ages and have even provided hard evidence, only to be completely dismissed out of hand by scientists who "know" that cockatoos are mere stupid animals.
This will probably be written off as yet another anomaly, an extreme exception to the notion held dear by science--that animals are too stupid to do smart things, a view curiously inherited by science's veritable nemesis, mainstream religion.
Science must discard it's old notions, prejudices and preconceptions, viewing the world through it's own version of rose-coloured glasses. It must stop filtering out, rejecting whatever does not conform to it's prejudices and start observing objectively, fairly.
There's one CLEC in the western US that provides dialup service to ISP's that also intercepts search requests, forwards the search to Yahoo, etc., and alters the search engine returns by changing links and inserting ads. You'd never know what was happening unless you were watching the traffic on the port and noticed that DNS was returning the same IP address for all the search engines.
Patenting software is a tremendous gamble, given the vast and ever-increasing amount of prior art that exists. There is far too much prior art for anyone to be aware of it all. But patent applicants forge on, sometimes rewording claims to obscure the fact that they are obvious or prior art but never giving up on the dream to see their name on an official US government patent and dreaming of all the millions and millions they'll make from the resulting monopoly, only to find their claims rejected and often whole patents voided on reexamination.
Software should not be patentable. Among other reasons, this is a field fraught with traps and pitfalls that even the most experienced cannot help but fall into. Also, it is so risky that patent insurance, if at all available, costs far more than the patent is worth.
There seems to be a popular notion that there is no difference between sending a video as a file and sending as a stream because bytes is bytes is bytes. Though it seems a reasonable opinion, it is still not a valid assumption. IP wasn't designed for streaming media or any other real-time communication. Streaming is an inefficient use of IP resources that disproportionately degrades network performance. Empirical observations of network data flow and traffic with and without real-time streaming support that conclusion. Gigabit rates will not increase the efficiency of streaming over IP. Instead, it is more likely to make networks slower, in part due to the misconception that fatter pipes means more streaming capacity.
The smartest ways to broadcast media in real time is to use technologies designed for it: Broadcast TV, radio, cable, PSTN. Using IP networks is just plain stupid.
Besides, what good reason is there to stream recorded media in real time? It is not live-as-it-happens. It's like buying a film movie frame by frame and watching it as you receive the frames from the store. Makes absolutely no sense.
When asked about this, Bank of America was unresponsive.
As usual.
Bank of America has had a long history of negligence with regard to online security, ever since they opened up web access to account holders.
And now what will become of the Elephant's Child? Keeping non-robotic entities out of the stacks will serve only to starve it to death.
Exploring the depths of the library stacks is one of the last and more refined civilised expressions of human hunter-gatherer instincts, where one can find even that which she didn't know she was looking for.
Serendipity is at the foundation of discovery and new knowledge. We become less than what we are when it is denied us.
It's not a lie!
It's not fraud!
It's a serving suggestion!
What? Where's the beef? Well, it's -- Look! Over there! A unicorn!
Comcast & Verizon have been known to routinely treat business customers as residential customers. ,
But your bank, credit card companies, et cetera, will be very happy to dump the authentication burdens and liabilities on someone else. Then, when someone steals your money, credit or services, it's not their fault.
Pretty much everything in security & authentication that comes from government has inevitably proven to be crap in the wild. Their stuff only "works" within controlled conditions, behind closed doors and with strictly limited access. Government blessed private and proprietary scams are far more concerned with the money than the security.
A lot of black hats are likely praying for this scam to get underway. And when it does become official, there will likely be a run on rubber sheets.
According to the article there was no measurement made of the magnetic field. Rather, the strength of the magnetic field was calculated by observing and measuring something else and then plugging that data into a model which then calculated the strength of the magnetic field. Regardless of the degree of confidence in the calculation, it is still not a measurement and it's crap science to call it that.
they're talking about stacking the dice, not the devices. You know what dice are? They're the little chips of silicon that are then packaged to make the IC's that you typically see and use. Unless you can precisely align and drill little tiny microscopic holes in the dice and electrically connect the one on top to the one on bottom, then you haven't been doing what they're doing. Not even close.
The closest anyone has ever got to this is stacking small dice on a larger die and wire bonding the pads of one to the other.
Interesting that TSV is found to be useful after all. 29 years ago an AMD employee independently conceived of TSV and AMD refused to talk to the employee about this and other concepts, nearly all of which have subsequently been developed and patented by AMD's competitors.
No.
Evade the Constitution by calling it a civil action and then rig the rules to make any defense difficult if not impossible.
If not a hoax, then it would seem that DHS/ICS may have overstepped it's authority or is outside it's jurisdiction and is stepping on the Secret Service's and especially the FBI's toes.
The FBI still has primary jurisdiction in copyrights violation cases, IIRC.
What may have happened here is that someone went to the FBI to shutdown the sites, was denied, then went agency shopping and found the DHS/ICS eager to make their internet bones.
This seems somewhat like the FBI and Secret Service inept & incompetent Keystone Kops actions from the 90's when the DMCA was enacted, up to and including going after innocent parties, without evidence, without investigation, based solely on hearsay.
If they are in fact acting outside their jurisdiction, I would hope that EFF and other attorneys give the DHS and ICS a justly deserved roasting in court. But the people who induced the DHS/ICS to do this would get off scot-free, even if they lied to DHS/ICS.
Does anyone remember that little ball of hot stuff at the core of the planet and how it's producing various elements and compounds? Does anyone remember that carbon is one of the elements produced in abundance? Does anyone remember that compounds from the core move out to the surface, combining with other elements (such as oxygen) along the way?
With that nuclear furnace fusioning/fissioning away at the core (and which happens to be the source of carbon, oxygen, etc. for this planet) why would there be a need for atmospheric carbon to somehow go below the ground? Why wait for plant material to get buried underground?
It's not politically correct to mention this and it is Green heresy but a fact is a fact, even when it goes against whatever "correct" thinking is currently fashionable.
Once again, Army genius comes up with a half-assed and dangerous solution.
From the article:
"The power lines that run from the street to a house usually consist of one insulated wire that carries electricity to the house, paired with a bare wire that carries electricity away to complete a circuit."
uh, what? I haven't seen any overhead drops that consist of less than two insulated cables and one bare one to carry the split-220 to the typical home, small business, street lamp, etc.
If this device cuts into both insulated wires, there will be fireworks and they will blow any "covert op" they may be indulging in.
There's the wrong way, the right way and the Army way. This is so not the right way.
Is this the kind of "free advertising" you would want for your small magazine?
They're going to be too far in debt responding to lawsuits from everyone whose works they've lifted without permission.
Also, the website with the original author's article has already been disabled due to excessive traffic. it was apparently pre-slashdotted.
The article was copied, not just the recipe(s). The article is copyrighted.
And lately:
Cooks Source website name won't resolve in DNS.
It's a twitter trending topic: http://twitter.com/#search?q=Cooks%20Source
it's on the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/nov/04/cooks-source-copyright-complaint
This is not a civil matter of fraud, breach of contract or any such thing. It is criminal as the civil complaint makes clear. The goal of the school was in fact to conduct a criminal and covert program of spying on their students outside of the school. If there were no criminal intent, why was it kept secret? Schools are not exempt from criminal laws regarding this no matter what their intentions. I doubt very much that there was a "lack of criminal intent". Anyway, it is irrelevant. It is a tenet of law that ignorance is no excuse and these people, being "responsible adults", could reasonably be expected to know or at least presume that it is illegal as well as unethical to spy on others. They admitted that they knew it was wrong. Are they above the law? Are they "special"? Let's not try to explain it away and excuse criminal behaviour with talk of good and noble intentions. Too many crimes are committed under the guise of "good intentions".
What most likely happened is that their unions called in a favor and got the government to drop the case. These privileged elites get a free pass. No non-union individual would ever be given the same consideration as shown here even if it were purely accidental and the images went directly to /dev/null.
Businesses resist the new dollar coins because they are still easily confused with quarters and the costs of accomodating the new coin is high. People who handle money all day do not stop and look at the coins every single time they make change. They go by feel and location. It will cost businesses money to adapt to new coins: They will have to change their cash drawers, coin counting and dispensing devices and eat the costs of mistaking dollar coins for quarters.
The brilliant political decision to make the newdollar the same (or closely similar) size as the quarter is real-world moronic and because it is such a brilliant political move we're stuck with it regardless of the real-world consequences. If the size were different and it were clearly distinguishable from every other coin it may have a better chance of being adopted. Until then don't expect businesses to readily accept them even if the dollar bill goes away.
Law enforcement will look for evidence to win a case. They will NOT look for evidence that may lose their case. It will not be considered. In this context, anything goes, even cached stuff that you might not even have ever seen, which put there by malicious links or by prefetch. You are presumed guilty by law enforcement and it's their job to create evidence to support that presumption.
Evidence extraction can be destructive or, at best, may only alter the original evidence. There have been plenty of cases where collecting evidence has altered the original data or destroyed it. In some cases, the evidence did not exist until it was created by buggy or amateurishly designed analysis or forensics software, or by incompetent or just plain malicious people. Too often, law enforcement believes that "an exact copy or image" of the original data is all that is necessary. There is only their word that it is an "exact copy or image" of the original. That means that the defendant, or victim in such a case, has no way to refute the "evidence" collected.
It is too easy to plant stuff on any PC. Absolutely no password or login of any kind is required and it can be done easily without leaving any trace. People are too naive to imagine that it's possible for anyone to have access to your PC or put crap on it without your knowledge. Fortunately, the vast majority of people are also far too naive to think about planting stuff on someone's PC. That will change as such cases become more frequent, more public, and more people become more savvy about computers.
By the way, with regard to "creating evidence", there are training programs and seminars for law enforcement, forensics people and prosecutors that are all about creating evidence and selling it to a court and jury. "Evidence Creation". Scary, no?
Rendered down to it's essence, this story is: "It's OK to spy on other people but not on me."
so is that really news?
Yes?
Amazing.
The article begins with "Paul Ockenden calls for Tele Atlas to use Street View to take a look at the mapping errors he's reported - and then fix them"
But I've noticed that even Street View is in error. A certain address may be close to where it really is one day but off by a half mile or more the next. So what good is it to correct errors in Tele Atlas maps with errors in Street View?
Both systems have bizarre numbering methods it seems: Since when does the 3600 block sit between the 2600 block and the 2700 block of some road which ends at 3520?
Where I am, I have the dubious privilege of directing people to the correct destinations when their GPS and Google Maps directions get them lost. Every day a lot of truckers also get lost, given the wrong directions by their GPS and are forced to make u-turns in the middle of the barely-wide-enough highway to get back on the correct route. Luckily they have their CB radios to get sorted out.
If Tele Atlas and Google Maps are depending on each other and if one's data is bad, then it propagates to the other, with obvious results. And I don't get why addresses drift around from day to day. Stuff that! A Thomas Guide remains one of the most accurate street level maps available (here in the US). It's far more reliable and it costs less than a GPS.