why is a purely electronic hack able to mobilise a SWAT team?
It isn't. The "hack" was faking the caller ID on his telephone. The part of the "hack" that led to SWAT being sent was entirely social engineering - he acted on the 911 call and pretended this armed-and-dangerous situation was occurring. The only "electronic hack" was faking the caller ID so that when the police dispatcher (correctly) mobilised SWAT given the situation at hand, they (incorrectly) sent the team to the wrong address, based on the caller ID of the telephone they believed the call was coming from.
I would expect Microsoft's engineers to look at the comments and fix whatever management will allow them to do.
Which at that point would be absolutely nothing, because Microsoft would have their kludge of a format declared a "standard" and at that point the managers have no incentive to allow further improvements.
1) Those voice menu things, especially if they have no paths to speak to a human
Most of them do have an option to speak to a human, even if it isn't listed. Try pressing 0 or * repeatedly, that usually does the trick when the system decides it can't understand you. Of course, there are some where you really can't get a human, but more often than not, it's possible.
The common cold is a virus, and every one is different. It's exceedingly rare to develop immunity to a virus by any method other than infection with that exact virus, or immunization. It's possible that your immune system used to do a better job of fighting the virus off before you developed noticeable symptoms, but you certainly weren't immune.
The IPCC "Summary for Policy makers" (linked and quoted above) intentionally includes far less numbers than the full report. It is, after all, a summary for policy makers. If you want numbers and references en mass to back up the statements in the summary, the full IPCC reports are all available online. The working group 2 report on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability is especially interesting (and sobering) reading. WG2 Chapter 9 discusses impacts on human health and touches on some of the co-benefits of dealing with climate change. IMHO, the SPM, along with other documents such as the UDHR should be required reading for any politician taking office.
Please...stop this nonsense about fixing global warming and stopping the impending doom and spend the billions on fixing actual problems we have NOW, like world hunger and the poor state of medical care.
IHAMIAS*
You might want to read the IPCC assessment of the affects climate change will have on food production and the spread of tropical diseases.
Overall, climate change is projected to increase threats to human health, particularly
in lower income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries.
Climate change can affect human health directly (e.g., reduced cold stress in temperate countries
but increased heat stress, loss of life in floods and storms) and indirectly through changes in the
ranges of disease vectors (e.g., mosquitoes),3 water-borne pathogens, water quality, air quality,
and food availability and quality (medium to high confidence).
Where there is also a large decrease in rainfall in subtropical and tropical dryland/
rainfed systems, crop yields would be even more adversely affected. These estimates include some
adaptive responses by farmers and the beneficial effects of CO2 fertilization, but not the impact of
projected increases in pest infestations and changes in climate extremes. The ability of livestock
producers to adapt their herds to the physiological stresses associated with climate change is
poorly known. Warming of a few C or more is projected to increase food prices globally, and may increase the risk of hunger in vulnerable populations.
The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries
and the poor persons within all countries, and thereby exacerbate inequities in
health status and access to adequate food, clean water, and other resources.
Starting to put the connections together yet? Climate change is a meta-issue. Dealing with climate change is directly working on world hunger and health.
Incorrect. First post also got first typo. But I guess that's what you get when you post quickly. Not that it makes any difference to me - I doubt I'll be able to type fast enough in my lifetime to get a first post anyway.
Meanwhile, engineering research projects, including one at the University of Missouri-Columbia, were already under way long before this week's bridge collapse to advance the science of bridge monitoring. At the school, work is being done on a large-scale sensor system that would be fastened to several concrete bridge piers below a span to alert officials about even the slightest tilting or swaying of critical piers supporting a bridge.
He said "the legal range of spectrum", i.e. it has the capability (in hardware) to broadcast frequencies that are not permitted, and only the software prevents it from doing so. This has nothing to do with signal range, which is affected by power output and - as you know - antenna design. An open implementation that had frequency or power restrictions implemented in software would be a trivial matter to override. That said, I would be surprised if the fact that it's possible to change the code and recompile would make the open source implementation illegal. It's still the person who changes the code, recompiles it, and actually transmits outside the permitted region who is breaking the law, just like someone who physically modifies the hardware to transmit on non-permitted frequencies.
The 21st century is all about corporations and commercialism, while convincing individuals that it's really "their" society, political systems, freedom, etc.
It wouldn't surprise me if this is a direct result of the work on open-source optical character recognition being done specifically to prevent the increased prevalence of captcha-style image spam. It would be rather ironic if the open source model meant the spammers are now turning our own anti-spam tools around and using them against us.
It would not surprise me, though, if the test machine was dual boot and WGA properly validated the available Windows system.
It would surprise me.
For most intents and purposes Wine sandboxes applications from the rest of the machine reasonably effectively. For the WGA software to be able to detect a copy of Windows elsewhere on the machine it would have to be checking it was running under wine then taking deliberate measures to break out of the sandbox. It's possible, since wine is not a VM, but quite unlikely - after all, the entire idea of WGA is that Microsoft wants people downloading updates to be using them on a genuine copy of Windows. If you have Windows on the machine already, why would you be dual booting into Linux and running wine to access Windows Update? That would make no sense, and Microsoft making that possible by design would make even less sense.
Slashdot Mirror
What? Barney the Dinosaur got a job as a research assistant?
Well, I guess we know where all that traffic got diverted to, then.
It isn't. The "hack" was faking the caller ID on his telephone. The part of the "hack" that led to SWAT being sent was entirely social engineering - he acted on the 911 call and pretended this armed-and-dangerous situation was occurring. The only "electronic hack" was faking the caller ID so that when the police dispatcher (correctly) mobilised SWAT given the situation at hand, they (incorrectly) sent the team to the wrong address, based on the caller ID of the telephone they believed the call was coming from.
What makes you so sure, hmmmm?
Which at that point would be absolutely nothing, because Microsoft would have their kludge of a format declared a "standard" and at that point the managers have no incentive to allow further improvements.
(599 - 399) / 599 * 100 = 33.4 ~ 30%
I think the grandparent did a rough estimate in his/her head, rather than picked that number off a tree.
Most of them do have an option to speak to a human, even if it isn't listed. Try pressing 0 or * repeatedly, that usually does the trick when the system decides it can't understand you. Of course, there are some where you really can't get a human, but more often than not, it's possible.
No, you didn't.
The common cold is a virus, and every one is different. It's exceedingly rare to develop immunity to a virus by any method other than infection with that exact virus, or immunization. It's possible that your immune system used to do a better job of fighting the virus off before you developed noticeable symptoms, but you certainly weren't immune.
The IPCC "Summary for Policy makers" (linked and quoted above) intentionally includes far less numbers than the full report. It is, after all, a summary for policy makers. If you want numbers and references en mass to back up the statements in the summary, the full IPCC reports are all available online. The working group 2 report on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability is especially interesting (and sobering) reading. WG2 Chapter 9 discusses impacts on human health and touches on some of the co-benefits of dealing with climate change. IMHO, the SPM, along with other documents such as the UDHR should be required reading for any politician taking office.
IHAMIAS*
You might want to read the IPCC assessment of the affects climate change will have on food production and the spread of tropical diseases.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/un/syreng/spm.pdf
Here are a few relevant parts (emphasis added):
Starting to put the connections together yet? Climate change is a meta-issue. Dealing with climate change is directly working on world hunger and health.
(* I have a masters in atmospheric science.)
There, fixed that for you.
Incorrect. First post also got first typo. But I guess that's what you get when you post quickly. Not that it makes any difference to me - I doubt I'll be able to type fast enough in my lifetime to get a first post anyway.
What I find interesting is that I seem to be able to re-license it under various other licenses at my discretion.
How very open of Sun. I approve. ;)
It is GPLv2:
http://opensparc-t2.sunsource.net/
Well, I suppose the GP could be a hermaphrodite.
He said "the legal range of spectrum", i.e. it has the capability (in hardware) to broadcast frequencies that are not permitted, and only the software prevents it from doing so. This has nothing to do with signal range, which is affected by power output and - as you know - antenna design. An open implementation that had frequency or power restrictions implemented in software would be a trivial matter to override. That said, I would be surprised if the fact that it's possible to change the code and recompile would make the open source implementation illegal. It's still the person who changes the code, recompiles it, and actually transmits outside the permitted region who is breaking the law, just like someone who physically modifies the hardware to transmit on non-permitted frequencies.
The 21st century is all about corporations and commercialism, while convincing individuals that it's really "their" society, political systems, freedom, etc.
There, fixed that for you.
It wouldn't surprise me if this is a direct result of the work on open-source optical character recognition being done specifically to prevent the increased prevalence of captcha-style image spam. It would be rather ironic if the open source model meant the spammers are now turning our own anti-spam tools around and using them against us.
If Microsoft made cars, they wouldn't need jump-starting.
Oh wait...
It would surprise me.
For most intents and purposes Wine sandboxes applications from the rest of the machine reasonably effectively. For the WGA software to be able to detect a copy of Windows elsewhere on the machine it would have to be checking it was running under wine then taking deliberate measures to break out of the sandbox. It's possible, since wine is not a VM, but quite unlikely - after all, the entire idea of WGA is that Microsoft wants people downloading updates to be using them on a genuine copy of Windows. If you have Windows on the machine already, why would you be dual booting into Linux and running wine to access Windows Update? That would make no sense, and Microsoft making that possible by design would make even less sense.
...to link direct to Shuttleworth's post on his blog?
> Anyone have better solutions?
Yes.
eZComponents Graph, from the developers of the eZpublish CMS. It's FLOSS, easy to use, and works very well for some automatically generated graphs I made that needed to update every week.