Yet, any time law enforcement shows up, it is my understanding that you don't have to give them any information besides the identify statutes require, like name and maybe ID if your state says so. So I'd sit in the parking lot, and not invite them into my home and tell them I don't want them to search my car without some kind of pretense. Also, I'd turn my smart phone recorder on since we were having the discussions in public.
At which point they forcibly seize your smart phone and threaten you with detention for interfering with a police investigation. (Which, for all you know, could be something they can do.) It's easy to be brave from your office, hundreds of miles away, but it would be a different story if you had to tell your manager that you wouldn't be in for the next couple of days because the FBI was holding you for questioning. Maybe as a law student you could get away with that. I can tell you right now that a salesman could not. Cooperating with the FBI at that point was the correct decision. Holding onto their equipment wouldn't have gained you anything.
The general feeling around here is that many software patents that are legitimately handed out by the USPTO should not have been handed out in the first place. Patents are handed out for things that are "obvious" to experts in the field, and patents are handed out where prior art exists. And if there is prior art to this patent, then Google and Microsoft **SHOULD** sue to invalidate it.
But in this case, the vigilantes are addressing behavior that the government is turning a blind eye to, not behavior that the government had addressed and approved of. It would be quite a different story if there had been a criminal investigation of HBGary and they were found innocent; however, certain parties within the government would seem to have known that they were acting illegally, and chose to do nothing.
And again, it still doesn't mean that the vigilantes are in the right. It just means that they're addressing (for better or for worse) a problem that the government should be addressing, but has failed to.
The summary leaves out the most important part of the story: Nautilus-X is an acronym for "Non-Atmospheric Universal Transport Intended for Lengthy United States eXploration".
The reason that every PS3 game is rife with cheats is because those games were designed poorly. If the security were implemented server-side instead of client-side, no amount of console modding would make cheating possible.
I think the real problem is that people are seeing inconsistencies in their growing systems, and looking to grow to a system that doesn't have inconsistencies. Which is basically impossible. It's not that the big players don't ever have inconsistent data - Amazon's Dynamo relies on reaching a quorum, rather than a totally consistent state. Rather, the big players have a much better idea of exactly how inconsistent their data can be, while still giving their system good performance.
Rock Band is doing fine, it's Guitar Hero that's doing so poorly. And it's doing so poorly because they followed the Activision strategy of pushing out a new game every six months, which is actually the exact same game that was previously released. Between 2006 and 2010, twenty-two (22) Guitar Hero-branded games were released - about one every three months. Granted, this was across multiple platforms. If we look at console only, there were only eleven unique Guitar-Hero branded games during this time frame. Still way too many. The simple fact is that they flooded the market, and killed off their own brand.
I imagine that I wouldn't attempt to get close enough to someone with an assault rifle to tase them, much like I wouldn't attempt to get close enough to shoot them with a concealed pistol. I'd call the cops. What situation are you envisioning where a firearm is necessary and provides a clear benefit over a taser? A mugging at 30 yards? A criminal with an equally high-powered firearm who doesn't happen to have it out and pointed at you?
I'm sorry if I'm coming off as incredulous, and perhaps I just live too sheltered a life, but I do not understand the circumstances where a civilian is significantly better off having a concealed pistol than a concealed taser. Is it just the concern that the first shot might miss?
That's the goal - to be neighborhood watch weirdos. There are no superheros. These guys know that if they get shot, they die. Their goal is to be a conspicuous presence, to let people know that they're being watched, recorded, and the police have been called. I mean, RTFA. One of them carries around grey spraypaint to cover up gang tags. Do you think he plans on stopping bank robberies? I think he walks around the neighborhood in his goofy costume, and calls the cops when he sees someone tagging a building. Pretty soon, that neighborhood is known as a bad place to tag, because the cops always show up. Mission accomplished.
A taser will still knock someone out, even if they're carrying an assault rifle. The ridiculous arms war on our streets only really applies if you expect the other guy to be wearing some sort of modern ballistics armor. I've never seen a petty thug wearing several thousand dollars worth of body armor when they're out tagging a building; maybe things are just different around here.
Similarly, the laser isn't to "blind" someone; it's merely to let them know that you're there, that you're watching, and have already called the police. That can be enough to scare someone away. These guys know that they're not Batman. They're trying to stop the levels of crime that can be prevented by the conspicuous present of concerned citizens, not bank-robbery/hostage situations.
These guys are a little weird, but by making their presence known in the areas they "patrol", they're doing worlds more than the "keep my head down, shoot anyone who gives me trouble" crowd.
Oh, I have no doubt that Lua runs much faster than Python or Perl. That wasn't the comparison I was drawing. Lua runs much slower than C, C++, Java... compiled system languages are going to be much faster than scripting languages in almost every case.
Here's a nice blog entry visually benchmarking various programming languages that was posted on Slashdot maybe a year ago. It might be a bit dated; doubtless we've seen more improvements in the past year to relatively new programming languages, compared to those which have been around for decades. Still, it is pretty immediately apparent that with scripting languages, you're often trading performance for much less verbose code.
Man, revisiting that article makes me want to pick up Haskell. Everything I've seen makes it out to be a wonder-language.
Re:Uh, watever, just migrate to Python, Perl6, Lua
on
Oracle To Monetize Java VM
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· Score: 3, Interesting
That's a nice list of scripting languages you've got there. And don't get me wrong, scripting languages are nice. However, if speed is an issue, Lua's never going to cut it in the same way that Java does.
Not a total non-story. It's good to be reminded that the capability exists, even if we come to the consensus that it's not a big deal, or even that it's a good thing. Not ever story on Slashdot has to result in moral outrage. Sometimes we can look at something and say "Yeah, that's probably and okay feature to have."
What do you mean "genetic-genetic"? The only thing that I can see that might be missing is a reference to "sexual reproduction" or "mating" in TFA, but I don't think that's strictly necessary for a GA. I especially liked the potential for "junk DNA" to build up. In my own simulations, chromosomes did either something or nothing consistently; perhaps it's just the domain that he's working in, but it certainly lends itself to "situational" expression of a chromosome.
It's certainly no EvolvableHardware, but it's still a pretty neat idea.
If you read TFA, the fitness function defined as distance (in time and resources) from having a desired set of units. The example provided is having 7 roaches. The GA isn't scoped to fight battles or develop a strategy; the programmer defines the desired end-state, and the GA finds an optimum path to get there. It's a tool for developing build-orders, not an AI to play the game for you.
Look at it this way: If they'd meant to do it, they would have done a better job. They wouldn't have grabbed data from a moving vehicle, because they're not going to be in range of any single AP long enough to get anything coherent. They would have targeted somebody or something. They would have logged specific data; probably something they could sell to their advertisers. This all would have come up in the third-party review of the data. It didn't.
Google intended to build a WiFi map. They were intentionally logging every AP, signal strength, encryption status, etc that they came across. The code that they reused from a previous project was responsible for logging the traffic data. They were not "borrowing" bandwidth as you do. Furthermore, you have almost definitely "accidentally" logged data. You're on a Mac, right? Go check out/var/log, and then tell me that you were already aware of what specific data your computer was logging while you were using it. I can easily imagine a Logger.log_debug(packet); floating around in code, and it going unnoticed for quite some time, simply because no one was interested in digging through their log files.
After reading through the third party audit, it looks like this is the case. Raw data frames were logged (but not interpreted) because a boolean in a config file was set to it's default value of false instead of true. Maybe you're right. Maybe Google is violating your privacy for the hell of it. I just can't imagine why they'd log the data that they did, without any apparent way to profit of it.
I wouldn't build an anyone-can-use-it-autoupdater into my operating system, either. What if a developer "goes rogue," and intentionally puts a Trojan in their update? Certainly the developer is to blame, but does Apple hold any liability for downloading and installing this malicious update? And I'm not talking about where blame should be placed in an ideal world, I'm talking about legal liability. Proving you're not to blame is a nightmare in the legal system, and even if you're 100% in the right, someone is going to sue you and waste your time and money anyway.
I'm no fan of Apple's walled garden, but this is clearly a CYA move, rather than a misguided attempt at preserving "experience".
Google didn't abuse their position as Google to collect this data. Were they skimming emails, search terms, etc for passwords, that would be an abuse. However, they were driving around in a car with a wireless router, something I could do with about as much efficiency. The people whose data they collected didn't entrust it to Google to keep private; they were simply broadcasting data.
Certainly, Google has a responsibility to not collect, store, and use this data, but they didn't do that. They accidentally copied/pasted the wrong code segment, and ended up logging more than they intended to. Furthermore, once they discovered their mistake, they disclosed this information, and begin working with local governments to correct their mistake. I believe that they acted admirably in this situation; many other companies simply wouldn't have disclosed this information in order to protect their image.
Exactly. Jobs and Rubin are making different points here. Open-sourced and consistent are completely different issues. For the obligatory car analogy, Rubin is saying "Android has power windows and locks!", and Jobs is shouting, "No, what consumers really want is a red car! Your cars are all blue!" Each side's fanboys can walk away smug, knowing that what their glorious leader said was correct; what they're overlooking is that the other guy was correct too.
This isn't a meaningful discussion, this is two people setting up and knocking down strawmen. Neither has any real interest in a real conversation.
The results follow the research money. Embryonic stem cell research hasn't provided as much fruit as it is capable of because the NIH isn't willing to fund it, or any part of it. If your lab uses microscopes bought with an NIH grant, you cannot use those microscopes in embryonic stem cell research. And very few labs are fully stocked with equipment that hasn't been partially paid for with NIH funds.
United States courts have repeatedly found that anything done using company resources is property of the company. This means any personal emails sent or received on your company-owned laptop are up for grabs if your boss feels like pushing the issue. This means that any texts/photos sent on the company paid-for blackberry are also property of the company, even if they're done on your own time. Anything done for business purposes or while you're on the clock on a personal machine is also company property, although the machine is still your own. Most people won't push the issue - some will.
Really, if you want to keep your work out of your personal life, you have to make damned sure that you're keeping your personal life out of your work.
The short answer is: if playing a video game upsets you, you shouldn't play that video game. I mean, it's a given that you can't make a game that appeals to everyone. Someone might even be deeply offended by your "murder simulator." But the people who aren't going to play your game anywaren't and shouldn't be the main concern of the game designers.
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Yet, any time law enforcement shows up, it is my understanding that you don't have to give them any information besides the identify statutes require, like name and maybe ID if your state says so. So I'd sit in the parking lot, and not invite them into my home and tell them I don't want them to search my car without some kind of pretense. Also, I'd turn my smart phone recorder on since we were having the discussions in public.
At which point they forcibly seize your smart phone and threaten you with detention for interfering with a police investigation. (Which, for all you know, could be something they can do.) It's easy to be brave from your office, hundreds of miles away, but it would be a different story if you had to tell your manager that you wouldn't be in for the next couple of days because the FBI was holding you for questioning. Maybe as a law student you could get away with that. I can tell you right now that a salesman could not. Cooperating with the FBI at that point was the correct decision. Holding onto their equipment wouldn't have gained you anything.
The point is to move up through every Windows version. He started with DOS 5 because Windows 1.0 would only install on top of DOS.
The general feeling around here is that many software patents that are legitimately handed out by the USPTO should not have been handed out in the first place. Patents are handed out for things that are "obvious" to experts in the field, and patents are handed out where prior art exists. And if there is prior art to this patent, then Google and Microsoft **SHOULD** sue to invalidate it.
But in this case, the vigilantes are addressing behavior that the government is turning a blind eye to, not behavior that the government had addressed and approved of. It would be quite a different story if there had been a criminal investigation of HBGary and they were found innocent; however, certain parties within the government would seem to have known that they were acting illegally, and chose to do nothing.
And again, it still doesn't mean that the vigilantes are in the right. It just means that they're addressing (for better or for worse) a problem that the government should be addressing, but has failed to.
The summary leaves out the most important part of the story: Nautilus-X is an acronym for "Non-Atmospheric Universal Transport Intended for Lengthy United States eXploration".
The reason that every PS3 game is rife with cheats is because those games were designed poorly. If the security were implemented server-side instead of client-side, no amount of console modding would make cheating possible.
Yes.
I think the real problem is that people are seeing inconsistencies in their growing systems, and looking to grow to a system that doesn't have inconsistencies. Which is basically impossible. It's not that the big players don't ever have inconsistent data - Amazon's Dynamo relies on reaching a quorum, rather than a totally consistent state. Rather, the big players have a much better idea of exactly how inconsistent their data can be, while still giving their system good performance.
Rock Band is doing fine, it's Guitar Hero that's doing so poorly. And it's doing so poorly because they followed the Activision strategy of pushing out a new game every six months, which is actually the exact same game that was previously released. Between 2006 and 2010, twenty-two (22) Guitar Hero-branded games were released - about one every three months. Granted, this was across multiple platforms. If we look at console only, there were only eleven unique Guitar-Hero branded games during this time frame. Still way too many. The simple fact is that they flooded the market, and killed off their own brand.
I imagine that I wouldn't attempt to get close enough to someone with an assault rifle to tase them, much like I wouldn't attempt to get close enough to shoot them with a concealed pistol. I'd call the cops. What situation are you envisioning where a firearm is necessary and provides a clear benefit over a taser? A mugging at 30 yards? A criminal with an equally high-powered firearm who doesn't happen to have it out and pointed at you?
I'm sorry if I'm coming off as incredulous, and perhaps I just live too sheltered a life, but I do not understand the circumstances where a civilian is significantly better off having a concealed pistol than a concealed taser. Is it just the concern that the first shot might miss?
That's the goal - to be neighborhood watch weirdos. There are no superheros. These guys know that if they get shot, they die. Their goal is to be a conspicuous presence, to let people know that they're being watched, recorded, and the police have been called. I mean, RTFA. One of them carries around grey spraypaint to cover up gang tags. Do you think he plans on stopping bank robberies? I think he walks around the neighborhood in his goofy costume, and calls the cops when he sees someone tagging a building. Pretty soon, that neighborhood is known as a bad place to tag, because the cops always show up. Mission accomplished.
A taser will still knock someone out, even if they're carrying an assault rifle. The ridiculous arms war on our streets only really applies if you expect the other guy to be wearing some sort of modern ballistics armor. I've never seen a petty thug wearing several thousand dollars worth of body armor when they're out tagging a building; maybe things are just different around here.
Similarly, the laser isn't to "blind" someone; it's merely to let them know that you're there, that you're watching, and have already called the police. That can be enough to scare someone away. These guys know that they're not Batman. They're trying to stop the levels of crime that can be prevented by the conspicuous present of concerned citizens, not bank-robbery/hostage situations.
These guys are a little weird, but by making their presence known in the areas they "patrol", they're doing worlds more than the "keep my head down, shoot anyone who gives me trouble" crowd.
Oh, I have no doubt that Lua runs much faster than Python or Perl. That wasn't the comparison I was drawing. Lua runs much slower than C, C++, Java... compiled system languages are going to be much faster than scripting languages in almost every case.
Here's a nice blog entry visually benchmarking various programming languages that was posted on Slashdot maybe a year ago. It might be a bit dated; doubtless we've seen more improvements in the past year to relatively new programming languages, compared to those which have been around for decades. Still, it is pretty immediately apparent that with scripting languages, you're often trading performance for much less verbose code.
Man, revisiting that article makes me want to pick up Haskell. Everything I've seen makes it out to be a wonder-language.
That's a nice list of scripting languages you've got there. And don't get me wrong, scripting languages are nice. However, if speed is an issue, Lua's never going to cut it in the same way that Java does.
Not a total non-story. It's good to be reminded that the capability exists, even if we come to the consensus that it's not a big deal, or even that it's a good thing. Not ever story on Slashdot has to result in moral outrage. Sometimes we can look at something and say "Yeah, that's probably and okay feature to have."
What do you mean "genetic-genetic"? The only thing that I can see that might be missing is a reference to "sexual reproduction" or "mating" in TFA, but I don't think that's strictly necessary for a GA. I especially liked the potential for "junk DNA" to build up. In my own simulations, chromosomes did either something or nothing consistently; perhaps it's just the domain that he's working in, but it certainly lends itself to "situational" expression of a chromosome.
It's certainly no Evolvable Hardware, but it's still a pretty neat idea.
If you read TFA, the fitness function defined as distance (in time and resources) from having a desired set of units. The example provided is having 7 roaches. The GA isn't scoped to fight battles or develop a strategy; the programmer defines the desired end-state, and the GA finds an optimum path to get there. It's a tool for developing build-orders, not an AI to play the game for you.
Look at it this way: If they'd meant to do it, they would have done a better job. They wouldn't have grabbed data from a moving vehicle, because they're not going to be in range of any single AP long enough to get anything coherent. They would have targeted somebody or something. They would have logged specific data; probably something they could sell to their advertisers. This all would have come up in the third-party review of the data. It didn't.
Google intended to build a WiFi map. They were intentionally logging every AP, signal strength, encryption status, etc that they came across. The code that they reused from a previous project was responsible for logging the traffic data. They were not "borrowing" bandwidth as you do. Furthermore, you have almost definitely "accidentally" logged data. You're on a Mac, right? Go check out /var/log, and then tell me that you were already aware of what specific data your computer was logging while you were using it. I can easily imagine a Logger.log_debug(packet); floating around in code, and it going unnoticed for quite some time, simply because no one was interested in digging through their log files.
After reading through the third party audit, it looks like this is the case. Raw data frames were logged (but not interpreted) because a boolean in a config file was set to it's default value of false instead of true. Maybe you're right. Maybe Google is violating your privacy for the hell of it. I just can't imagine why they'd log the data that they did, without any apparent way to profit of it.
I wouldn't build an anyone-can-use-it-autoupdater into my operating system, either. What if a developer "goes rogue," and intentionally puts a Trojan in their update? Certainly the developer is to blame, but does Apple hold any liability for downloading and installing this malicious update? And I'm not talking about where blame should be placed in an ideal world, I'm talking about legal liability. Proving you're not to blame is a nightmare in the legal system, and even if you're 100% in the right, someone is going to sue you and waste your time and money anyway.
I'm no fan of Apple's walled garden, but this is clearly a CYA move, rather than a misguided attempt at preserving "experience".
Google didn't abuse their position as Google to collect this data. Were they skimming emails, search terms, etc for passwords, that would be an abuse. However, they were driving around in a car with a wireless router, something I could do with about as much efficiency. The people whose data they collected didn't entrust it to Google to keep private; they were simply broadcasting data.
Certainly, Google has a responsibility to not collect, store, and use this data, but they didn't do that. They accidentally copied/pasted the wrong code segment, and ended up logging more than they intended to. Furthermore, once they discovered their mistake, they disclosed this information, and begin working with local governments to correct their mistake. I believe that they acted admirably in this situation; many other companies simply wouldn't have disclosed this information in order to protect their image.
Exactly. Jobs and Rubin are making different points here. Open-sourced and consistent are completely different issues. For the obligatory car analogy, Rubin is saying "Android has power windows and locks!", and Jobs is shouting, "No, what consumers really want is a red car! Your cars are all blue!" Each side's fanboys can walk away smug, knowing that what their glorious leader said was correct; what they're overlooking is that the other guy was correct too.
This isn't a meaningful discussion, this is two people setting up and knocking down strawmen. Neither has any real interest in a real conversation.
Florescent lights also produce light without generating heat, as do LEDs. What makes them unsuitable for military applications?
The results follow the research money. Embryonic stem cell research hasn't provided as much fruit as it is capable of because the NIH isn't willing to fund it, or any part of it. If your lab uses microscopes bought with an NIH grant, you cannot use those microscopes in embryonic stem cell research. And very few labs are fully stocked with equipment that hasn't been partially paid for with NIH funds.
United States courts have repeatedly found that anything done using company resources is property of the company. This means any personal emails sent or received on your company-owned laptop are up for grabs if your boss feels like pushing the issue. This means that any texts/photos sent on the company paid-for blackberry are also property of the company, even if they're done on your own time. Anything done for business purposes or while you're on the clock on a personal machine is also company property, although the machine is still your own. Most people won't push the issue - some will.
Really, if you want to keep your work out of your personal life, you have to make damned sure that you're keeping your personal life out of your work.
The short answer is: if playing a video game upsets you, you shouldn't play that video game. I mean, it's a given that you can't make a game that appeals to everyone. Someone might even be deeply offended by your "murder simulator." But the people who aren't going to play your game anywaren't and shouldn't be the main concern of the game designers.