You can make a cube unsolvable just by rotating a single piece (eg not by completely disassembling it, just twisting one of the corners around). No amount of moving the cube around by the correct means can rotate only a single corner piece or flip a single edge piece - they have to be done in pairs or multiples of two.
I can do it in under a 90 seconds sometimes (and under 60 seconds consistently when I was a kid), and i'm nowhere near the fastest person I know at solving them. 30 seconds isn't unreasonable for someone who is actually good at it.
"perpetual" will only work if it can stay in the air in the dark using additional power it gathered during the day. Otherwise it has to be able to keep up with the sun... I read that it has batteries, but if it has enough batteries to store enough charge to stay in the air through ~12 hours of darkness then we could ditch the solar cells and run planes on batteries and just charge them when they land.
Bail is applied to people as monetary value means something to people. Monetary value forced to be paid for by parents (when I was 13 I got a whole $10 weekly allowance) has no intrinsic value to the accused.
Bail is set on value, the kid gave up something that was valued. While I don't agree with this I don't see this as being any better or worse than any other bail system.
Agree. In a perfect world you'd peer into your crystal ball or strap the kid into the truth extraction machine and not have to bother with a trial at all. But you can't know if he's guilty or innocent in advance, and while the whole "innocent until proven guilty" idea sounds like a beautiful thing it just isn't that black and white in reality. For the justice system to work, some innocent people are going to have to go to trial which can be of itself a pretty steep punishment for an innocent person.
Nothing is perfect, and a lot of things aren't even close.
Microsoft knows their OS better than anyone. For anyone getting MS updates, it seems it would be a simple matter for Microsoft to identify these machines, disable the rootkit, and alert the user.
It would be a little bit of work for MS, but isn't this kind of service that you'd expect to get from a vendor that stands behind its products?
The problem is that by definition, the malware authors always get to go first. As soon as Microsoft (or other antivirus vendor) figure out how to prevent the current malware from working, the malware guys will have reverse-engineered the update, developed a workaround, and deployed it before the windows/antivirus update has reached widespread deployment. They also have other advantages over Microsoft as they don't care as much if they crash a few computers along the way. Microsoft need to do heaps of regression testing before releasing an update, the malware authors just have to make sure it works on (say) 99.9% of computers - incidental damage isn't an issue.
The article states that Windows PCs are vulnerable to this botnet. I think it is a safe guess that BSD and Linux machines are, as per the usual, safe.
With a couple of exceptions on a dual boot system...
1. If your Linux bootloader is on the MBR then having your MBR overwritten might break something 2. The code that runs in the MBR that starts the bot running before Windows starts might be incompatible with Linux and/or whatever bootloader you are using.
You're right in that Linux won't be infected but it could still get broken.
Telstra - be quiet. You don't have the backbone to provide the freedom of Internet communication to the masses.
I actually wondered if they used this as an excuse to back out of putting the filter in because they don't really want to. Of course if they really did have a backbone they'd tell the government "no. this won't work, and even if it did work it would be wrong", but at least this way they won't turn on the filter but aren't directly disobeying the government.
Hmm, you mean hosting centers should, by default, include a (unused) server in each rack and label it 'naughty server'? that would fix the downtime for customers for a while and give an early warning to make extra backups when this server gets confiscated
A box with a few flashing lights on it and a few fans humming away would probably do. In fact if you put more flashing lights on it than any other server in there the FBI would just take it by default, whatever label you put on it. Add a skull and crossbones and a swastika or two just to be sure.
As for the "magic splicing" it is not hard to do, anyone with a basic understanding of electric circuits can splice two live cables together.
But it's a lot more entertaining when someone without a basic understanding of electric circuits does it:)
In any case, if I was writing malware i'd be detecting when network connectivity changed (eg my server was being loaded into a truck and no longer connected to the data centre) and initiating an erase of all the disks and RAM... keeping the server hot to run forensics would only make this easier.
The hosting centre is at fault here. "Naughty Servers" should be clearly labelled as such so they can't be mistaken for "Benign Servers". If those fatcats in Washington had just listened when the 'Evil Bit' was first proposed we wouldn't be in this mess now!
It wasn't strictly a bug in the code, they just accidentally put the FBI version up on their main web servers instead of just on the secret back door servers that all cloud based services have for government access.
I seriously doubt it was an error in "knowledge of authentication", it was a mistake in the implementation. Programmers should not do anything beyond simple unit testing on their own code, and certainly shouldn't be wasting their time doing regression testing, which should be an automated function and any manual testing done by a separate team. If anything, it is the testers that should be fired, but why fire the one bunch of testers who are probably never going to make this mistake again?
According to the CDC, seatbelts reduce the risk of death by about 50%. So, without any further knowledge, I guess there's 50/50 chance the seatbelt would have saved him.
I'm a firm believer in wearing seatbelts, but I think you are misunderstanding the 50% bit. It might make sense in terms of "of 100 car accidents where people were killed, if they were all wearing seabelts then 50 of them would have lived", but that is not taking into account the specifics of each accident. At around 40kph an impact starts having a serious risk of killing you if you aren't wearing a seatbelt. If Bob failed to make a turn at highway speeds and hit a tree head on in a 40yo VW Beetle with no ABS or airbags etc I doubt the presence of a seatbelt would have made much of a difference.
And remember that a car accident doesn't have to kill you to be disasterous... having a seatbelt can make a significant different to what your brain smashes into which can make a significant difference to the quality of the rest of your life (and the quality of life for those left to wipe up your dribble).
This kind of reminded me of the episode of Red Dwarf where Holly had gone computer senile and the toaster reconfigured her to increase her intelligence at the expense of her operational lifetime. Intelligence != memory, obviously, but I wonder if there is any of the same effect here... not that it really matters - I bet there wouldn't be a person in the world diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease who still had some presence of mind who wouldn't trade quantity for quality
The stimulation to cause orgasm may come from other parts of the body (clitoris, g-spot, etc), but so far I haven't heard the uterus as one of the erogenous zones.
Google or wikipedia for Uterine Orgasm if you dare. I'm not sure if it ranks alongside G-Spots and female ejaculations as a subject of dispute, but it's definitely not unheard of. Even without that, anecdotal evidence supports a change in orgasm after a hysterectomy.
I don't know anything about the donor so i'm not saying it's a big deal or not, but to dismiss it outright by saying that "mom's past menopause she has no use for it anyway" is a bit preemptive. There was a doctor who was taken to court for removing some poor lady's clitoris as part of a skin cancer removal procedure. He claimed it was necessary but is also reported to have told a nurse that "Her husband's dead so it doesn't matter anyway".
The use of explosives by anyone on this forum would be considered "hostile" and would land them in jail. They can label it whatever they want, but you drop a bomb somewhere, you better expect a "hostile" reply.
What? Even when you have your fingers crossed when you push the button?
Well my post was kind of tongue in cheek, but people do tend to mean different things when they say fan and fanboy. I'm a fan of Linux and of Apple products (although I have mixed feelings about the Apple company), but if you tell me you don't like either or both I won't take it personally. A fanboy would, and would respond with a post not unlike yours.
I don't see why Apple and Linux are held to be opposites either... "you made a comment about Apple fanboys being morons... you must be a Linux fanboy"... it's fanboyism that I was poking fun at. Reminds me of all the youtube posts that compare every song to Lady Gaga or Justin Beiber. I don't believe for a second that Linux fanboys are any less moronic than Apple fanboys.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of my favorite social site, you are rewarded points based on what you say..
Or have them taken away
(Score: -1, Troll)
I think you could do this by having an array of cubes somehow interlinked... or http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm
You can make a cube unsolvable just by rotating a single piece (eg not by completely disassembling it, just twisting one of the corners around). No amount of moving the cube around by the correct means can rotate only a single corner piece or flip a single edge piece - they have to be done in pairs or multiples of two.
I can do it in under a 90 seconds sometimes (and under 60 seconds consistently when I was a kid), and i'm nowhere near the fastest person I know at solving them. 30 seconds isn't unreasonable for someone who is actually good at it.
"perpetual" will only work if it can stay in the air in the dark using additional power it gathered during the day. Otherwise it has to be able to keep up with the sun... I read that it has batteries, but if it has enough batteries to store enough charge to stay in the air through ~12 hours of darkness then we could ditch the solar cells and run planes on batteries and just charge them when they land.
With a Seagate Barracuda I think the challenge is getting the thing to actually run for over a minute.
I just ran smartcl here and the two Seagate Barracudas in this machine have each been running for 29,908 hours.
I see what you're saying... even the SMART data is corrupt.
Bail is applied to people as monetary value means something to people. Monetary value forced to be paid for by parents (when I was 13 I got a whole $10 weekly allowance) has no intrinsic value to the accused.
Bail is set on value, the kid gave up something that was valued. While I don't agree with this I don't see this as being any better or worse than any other bail system.
Agree. In a perfect world you'd peer into your crystal ball or strap the kid into the truth extraction machine and not have to bother with a trial at all. But you can't know if he's guilty or innocent in advance, and while the whole "innocent until proven guilty" idea sounds like a beautiful thing it just isn't that black and white in reality. For the justice system to work, some innocent people are going to have to go to trial which can be of itself a pretty steep punishment for an innocent person.
Nothing is perfect, and a lot of things aren't even close.
Judge: "What's something of value to you?"
Defendant: "I plead the fifth!"
Or alternatively, just take his constitutional rights away from him :)
Microsoft knows their OS better than anyone. For anyone getting MS updates, it seems it would be a simple matter for Microsoft to identify these machines, disable the rootkit, and alert the user.
It would be a little bit of work for MS, but isn't this kind of service that you'd expect to get from a vendor that stands behind its products?
The problem is that by definition, the malware authors always get to go first. As soon as Microsoft (or other antivirus vendor) figure out how to prevent the current malware from working, the malware guys will have reverse-engineered the update, developed a workaround, and deployed it before the windows/antivirus update has reached widespread deployment. They also have other advantages over Microsoft as they don't care as much if they crash a few computers along the way. Microsoft need to do heaps of regression testing before releasing an update, the malware authors just have to make sure it works on (say) 99.9% of computers - incidental damage isn't an issue.
The article states that Windows PCs are vulnerable to this botnet. I think it is a safe guess that BSD and Linux machines are, as per the usual, safe.
With a couple of exceptions on a dual boot system...
1. If your Linux bootloader is on the MBR then having your MBR overwritten might break something
2. The code that runs in the MBR that starts the bot running before Windows starts might be incompatible with Linux and/or whatever bootloader you are using.
You're right in that Linux won't be infected but it could still get broken.
I sure wouldn't want an object like that falling on my car, or my home, or into my pool, or onto my dog, or even onto myself.
and especially not your testicles.
Telstra - be quiet. You don't have the backbone to provide the freedom of Internet communication to the masses.
I actually wondered if they used this as an excuse to back out of putting the filter in because they don't really want to. Of course if they really did have a backbone they'd tell the government "no. this won't work, and even if it did work it would be wrong", but at least this way they won't turn on the filter but aren't directly disobeying the government.
Hmm, you mean hosting centers should, by default, include a (unused) server in each rack and label it 'naughty server'? that would fix the downtime for customers for a while and give an early warning to make extra backups when this server gets confiscated
A box with a few flashing lights on it and a few fans humming away would probably do. In fact if you put more flashing lights on it than any other server in there the FBI would just take it by default, whatever label you put on it. Add a skull and crossbones and a swastika or two just to be sure.
As for the "magic splicing" it is not hard to do, anyone with a basic understanding of electric circuits can splice two live cables together.
But it's a lot more entertaining when someone without a basic understanding of electric circuits does it :)
In any case, if I was writing malware i'd be detecting when network connectivity changed (eg my server was being loaded into a truck and no longer connected to the data centre) and initiating an erase of all the disks and RAM... keeping the server hot to run forensics would only make this easier.
The hosting centre is at fault here. "Naughty Servers" should be clearly labelled as such so they can't be mistaken for "Benign Servers". If those fatcats in Washington had just listened when the 'Evil Bit' was first proposed we wouldn't be in this mess now!
It wasn't strictly a bug in the code, they just accidentally put the FBI version up on their main web servers instead of just on the secret back door servers that all cloud based services have for government access.
I seriously doubt it was an error in "knowledge of authentication", it was a mistake in the implementation. Programmers should not do anything beyond simple unit testing on their own code, and certainly shouldn't be wasting their time doing regression testing, which should be an automated function and any manual testing done by a separate team. If anything, it is the testers that should be fired, but why fire the one bunch of testers who are probably never going to make this mistake again?
snap!
According to the CDC, seatbelts reduce the risk of death by about 50%. So, without any further knowledge, I guess there's 50/50 chance the seatbelt would have saved him.
I'm a firm believer in wearing seatbelts, but I think you are misunderstanding the 50% bit. It might make sense in terms of "of 100 car accidents where people were killed, if they were all wearing seabelts then 50 of them would have lived", but that is not taking into account the specifics of each accident. At around 40kph an impact starts having a serious risk of killing you if you aren't wearing a seatbelt. If Bob failed to make a turn at highway speeds and hit a tree head on in a 40yo VW Beetle with no ABS or airbags etc I doubt the presence of a seatbelt would have made much of a difference.
And remember that a car accident doesn't have to kill you to be disasterous... having a seatbelt can make a significant different to what your brain smashes into which can make a significant difference to the quality of the rest of your life (and the quality of life for those left to wipe up your dribble).
Lets blow up all the hygrometers so bad weather can never happen again!
This kind of reminded me of the episode of Red Dwarf where Holly had gone computer senile and the toaster reconfigured her to increase her intelligence at the expense of her operational lifetime. Intelligence != memory, obviously, but I wonder if there is any of the same effect here... not that it really matters - I bet there wouldn't be a person in the world diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease who still had some presence of mind who wouldn't trade quantity for quality
The stimulation to cause orgasm may come from other parts of the body (clitoris, g-spot, etc), but so far I haven't heard the uterus as one of the erogenous zones.
Google or wikipedia for Uterine Orgasm if you dare. I'm not sure if it ranks alongside G-Spots and female ejaculations as a subject of dispute, but it's definitely not unheard of. Even without that, anecdotal evidence supports a change in orgasm after a hysterectomy.
I don't know anything about the donor so i'm not saying it's a big deal or not, but to dismiss it outright by saying that "mom's past menopause she has no use for it anyway" is a bit preemptive. There was a doctor who was taken to court for removing some poor lady's clitoris as part of a skin cancer removal procedure. He claimed it was necessary but is also reported to have told a nurse that "Her husband's dead so it doesn't matter anyway".
If mom's past menopause she has no use for it anyway
Uterine contractions supposedly form part of the female orgasm...
The use of explosives by anyone on this forum would be considered "hostile" and would land them in jail. They can label it whatever they want, but you drop a bomb somewhere, you better expect a "hostile" reply.
What? Even when you have your fingers crossed when you push the button?
Well my post was kind of tongue in cheek, but people do tend to mean different things when they say fan and fanboy. I'm a fan of Linux and of Apple products (although I have mixed feelings about the Apple company), but if you tell me you don't like either or both I won't take it personally. A fanboy would, and would respond with a post not unlike yours.
I don't see why Apple and Linux are held to be opposites either... "you made a comment about Apple fanboys being morons... you must be a Linux fanboy"... it's fanboyism that I was poking fun at. Reminds me of all the youtube posts that compare every song to Lady Gaga or Justin Beiber. I don't believe for a second that Linux fanboys are any less moronic than Apple fanboys.