The tests of various rain-making programs have been more or less a wash. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't
We've been doing cloud seeding since the 60's or so here in Australia. It works under a fairly specific set of circumstances. You need clouds that are 'bursting at the seams' and are going to drop their rain at some point in the very near future. Given such clouds, you drop silver iodide into them and you'll increase the chance of the rain event happening now rather than a bit later, and probably increase the volume of rain too.
You'll never get rain out of air that just doesn't have enough moisture in it to begin with though.
And you can't stop it raining somewhere, except by coaxing the clouds into making their rain somewhere else first, which is what I think China did (or what I think China think they did:)
I wonder how hard it would be to develop a meatspace version of ROBOTS.TXT... there are several ways this might work that I can think of right now...
1. An opt-in online system where you log in and say "google can show the picture of my house". A bit tricky to maintain though... how do you stop me logging in to google and approving a picture of your house?
2. An opt-out online system.
3. A symbol that you print out, laminate, and affix to your house. Is the resolution that appears on streetview the same as what google actually took or do they downscale it from a much higher resolution? If the latter then there should be no problem identifying the symbol. It could work as an opt-in or an opt-out system.
4. Some combination of the above that changes the resolution that your house appears in (eg from completely blurred to maximum resolution).
Something a bit unrelated that I just thought of... I wonder if google ever considered using garbage collection vehicles to take the pictures. They go basically everywhere in metro areas, and in Australia at least, an increasing number of rural areas. You could just stick a (google provided) bright yellow sticker on your garbage bin if you didn't want/did want (depending on the opt-out/in approach taken) to participate, and an optical sensor on the truck would register your want. The only disadvantage would be that the picture would be always taken on garbage collection day when you have your rubbish bins out, cluttering the view:)
DNS does already work over TCP, and is used where the response will be over a certain size, eg a zone transfer from primary to secondary DNS server.
The problem is one of efficiency. TCP has much higher overheads, you need three packets just to get a connection started and then you have to keep track of the connection and shut it down properly. Three packets doesn't sound like much but over a high latency link (eg 500ms) it makes for a huge increase in the time it takes to resolve a name.
I meant the source address of your request. Eg when your internal dns caching server sends a dns request, your router nat's the source address from a random pool of 64k (or more) addresses. In order for someone to spoof the reply, they would need to know the dns request id, the source port you used to send, and the source IP address chosen by your nat router. It's a client side solution only.
As a solution, it would rely on the following: . a useful number of DNS servers being reachable via IPv6 (not the case yet) . a router able to do IPv6 NAT to a random address (maybe possible if your router runs Linux?)
I think that by the time the above is true, there will be better solutions around.
Not just that, but it's sorta funny when you look at the mitochondrial DNA (inherited strictly from the mother) vs Y chromosome mutations (inherited strictly from the father) for any human invasions or migrations
I know i'm being very pedantic here, and the occurrence of this is probably statistically insignificant, but not every woman is XX and not every man is XY. There is at least one XXY woman on record who has given birth, and others probably exist undetected. It may be that the 'Y' from the mother could not propagate to the child though in which case it's irrelevant.
There is some belief that Mitochondria may be inherited to a very small extent from the father too. Sperm cells to contain Mitochondria and although these are normally killed off by the egg cell, it is possible that some may remain.
What could the second be? A BIOS password? Open it and pull the battery. Big deal.
It could be a big deal. We do warranty and service work for HP hardware and in the past laptops have come in with BIOS passwords and we were not able to remove them. The password is actually part of the ATA protocol and so the disk is unusable without it, even in another machine. I think the only operation you can do is an ERASE. If you remove the battery then the BIOS forgets not only the BIOS password, but the disk password too.
I'm sure there are backdoors for some drives, but the customer in question in this case certainly wasn't willing to pay for us to investigate it so the data was as good as lost.
TPM, if implemented correctly, provides fairly good protection too. As does Microsofts BitLocker.
Physical access reduces security by a whole heap, but if things are done right then it doesn't reduce it to zero.
Of course as others have mentioned, an organisation that loses laptops like that probably isn't 'doing things right'...
But if you think about it, 'nigger' is actually highly offensive and using it is likely going to brand you as a terrible person (unless you are black, in which case you are just ignorant). It's probably one of a few words my potty mouth will never use, it bothers me to type it.
Ditto. I felt uncomfortable typing it, even though it wasn't used in a derogatory context. It's just a word, but the word invokes so many feelings in so many people. And that's just it isn't it... the whole 'swear words' thing is really subjective. In Australia there are some communities of Aboriginal people who readily refer to themselves as blackfella's and to the imports as whitefella's, and think nothing of it. It's just a convenient way of identifying who they are talking about. Other groups get mortally offended if you so much as hint that their skin color might be different to someone elses. The n-word is probably much the same... (ever seen a movie called 'cabin fever'? Hilarious use of the n-word in that:)
Then again, someone who's brought up to think that certain words are really really taboo might get really offended if they were used in front of them. Are their feelings any less valid than those offended by the n-word?
What if his last name was one of 'Hitlerwasmisunderstood', 'Niggersmustdie', 'Kidsarefuntotouchinappropriately', 'Americagotwhatitdeservedon911', 'Linuxistheworkofthedevil'?
In the unlikely event that one of those was actually someone's last name, proudly carried from generation to generation for hundreds of years, would you let someone use it on a system that you were responsible for?
I'm sure the admins of Slashdot would never let that last one in:)
I also find it interesting how the word 'nigger' has actually become more taboo than it was 20 or so years ago (unless you actually happen to have black skin, then you can say it all you like). Watching some old episodes of The Goodies they made reference to black South African persons as 'Nig-nogs'. They'd never get away with that these days, despite the fact that the whole episode was poking fun at the whole idea of apartheid(sp?) anyway.
Also, does anyone remember reading a book called 'The Faraway Tree' by Enid Blyton? One of the characters had the name Fanny. Recent editions of the book have had her name changed to Franny.
I remember it as a skit from a Monty Python or Not The Nine o'Clock News or something from that era. The joke is probably much older. It goes something like:
A man walks into the office of the department of name changes: Man: I'd like to change my name please Clerk: Okay, what is your name? Man: Colin Tittybumface Clerk: I see. And what would you like to change your name to? Man: Roger Tittybumface
When you walk around the street, you are completely anonymous (if you'd like, you can wear hats and sun glasses---those don't really arouse suspicions), and yet, I don't see a disaster happening.
You don't seriously believe that that's the same thing do you?
Disney produced a cartoon decades ago about how people change when they get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, and apart from a bit of exaggeration, it was right on the mark.
Someone crashed into my Aunt's car which was parked on the street in front of her house. By the time she got outside to see what the noise was, the other car was far enough away that she couldn't see the number plate. The guy did actually come back about 10 minutes later, but only because he saw some kids jot down the number plate further up the road.
Some friends had a car they had borrowed from their parents written off in a similar way in the middle of the night. The car that did it was nowhere to be found.
My mum was out with friends and when they came back to get their cars one was about half as wide as it was when she left. The car that did it was long gone.
I could go on... I will.
One of our work cars was scraped up the side while parked in a shopping center. The car that did it was, again, not there, and the driver hadn't made any effort to leave a note or something.
I have personally witnessed on more than one occasion a car crashing into another car in a supermarket and then driving off without the driver stopping to take responsibility for their actions.
I was driving home a few months ago and a car overtook me over a rise. There was a car coming the other way and that car was forced off the road to avoid the collision, as was I to try and make room. The driver of the car that overtook me didn't stop to make sure everyone was okay.
Now I'm sure that someone can cite an equal number of cases where the driver of the car that did the crashing did stick around, but have a think about that ratio as compared to a person accidentally walking into another person, knocking them over, and stopping/not stopping to help them up.
People behave differently once they get behind the wheel of a car.
Giving up your freedom because "My papers are in order" and "I have nothing to hide" is unAmerican.
:)
I wonder how much of the disagreement that goes on on Slashdot about this issue is really differences in belief or is just a communication mismatch...
I wonder how many people fit into each of the following: 1. Those that don't want number plates on cars at all and want to be completely unaccountable on the roads 2. Those that are happy to have number plates on cars but don't want an automatic system that searches a database for matches of known and wanted persons (make the cops do their jobs!) 3. Those that would be happy to have the system mentioned above if there was an absolute assurance that there would be no 'slippery slope', knowing of course that such an assurance is impossible. This is probably just a special case of #2 4. Those that are happy to have the system mentioned above without any disclaimers 5. Those that would be quite happy to have gps implants in their heads that track and log everywhere they go.
#1 would argue with everyone else and chastise them for giving away their freedoms, except that they'd probably never post on Slashdot anyway for fear that someone might find them. #2 mostly peacefully coexist with #3 #3 and #4 argue about the existence of the 'slippery slope' #5 argue with everyone else along the lines of 'if you have nothing to hide then why is there a problem'
I sometimes wonder if there isn't a criminal organization somewhere that every time a new technology comes out that will make it harder for them to get away with stuff they unleash a new wave of 'taking away our freedoms' FUD. I don't really believe it but it gives me a giggle to think about it:)
I also wonder if an argument on Slashdot has ever succeeding in actually changing someone's mind... It's all fun to watch though isn't it!
License plates should never have been designed. Their only purpose was to be a loophole for "unreasonable searches" since they are in public view.
Why is everyone so petrified of being accountable for their actions these days?
I'd love to see a slashdot poll that had two groups to choose from... the groups would contain:
I value my privacy: . more than life itself . highly . moderately . my what? . not at all. I regularly flash my boobs to CowboyNeal on webcams.
and
My age is: . under 12 . 12 to 15 . 16 to 18 .... etc... . Get off my lawn!
I've always imagined that the majority of people nearer the 'Get off my lawn!' end of the latter poll would be nearer the 'more than life itself' end of the former...
Anyway, I think the last thing you want to do with drivers is to make them think that they are anonymous. That would be a recipe for disaster!
Ford tried to do this to me with my car. It would make a shuddering noise somewhere in the front end at low speed (eg parking lots). I mentioned it to them each service and they said they'd look at it, and when I got it back after the service they said they'd flushed the power steering system and upgraded the car computer firmware.
The first service after the warranty expired I took it in and they said that there was a faulty hose causing the problem and it would take $$$ to fix. I got them to fix it under warranty eventually but I wonder how many other people they screwed over...
The parent should: (1) tell the child once that if they don't settle down, they'll pay the bill and leave immediately, food or no food and then (2) do it.
And it's amazing how few times you have to do this for it to work. It's all about your kids calling your bluff. Kids have an amazingly good sense of the likelihood of a parent following through with a threat, and parents are amazingly good at making threats they have no intention of following through on.
If you actually get up and leave the restaurant immediately, instead of just threatening to, you'll probably only have to do it once or twice, and in future all you'll have to do is remind the kids about 'what happened last time' and they'll know you mean business.
If only they had mandatory parenting classes for this sort of thing... some of it seems so obvious in retrospect but it never is when you are 'in the middle' of it.
I was going to write "well... if I had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I'd love for 'long term' to be something I'd need to worry about", but thinking about it more, this is more a "stop you getting worse" drug than a "make you better" drug, so the earlier you start taking it the better. And if Alzheimer's can have it's roots 30-40 years in the past as the article suggests, maybe long term toxicity is something to consider...
Are the really early onset cases of Alzheimer's the same as those more associated with older people? I'm sure there will be no shortage of test subjects who would otherwise have another 50 years of life in front of them...
The best they can hope for anyways would be to be bought by Google.
How do we know they aren't already owned by Google, and just a front for testing out new wacky search algorithms?
Or maybe Google needed a nemesis, and with nothing else on the internet even coming close they've had to construct their own. If everybody is hating Cuil then nobody is hating Google.
Of all the languages to find an alternate word for knowledge, why would they choose Irish? Maybe it's different in the rest of the world but in Australia the Irish are the butt of many jokes, eg if "An Australian, and Englishman, and an Irishman walk into a bar", the Irishman will always be the idiot of the three (unless it's the one where the barman says "What? Is this some kind of joke?").
If I can take The Simpsons as a reliable measure of American culture (and I know I can:) I'd guess it's true in the USA too.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been doing cloud seeding since the 60's or so here in Australia. It works under a fairly specific set of circumstances. You need clouds that are 'bursting at the seams' and are going to drop their rain at some point in the very near future. Given such clouds, you drop silver iodide into them and you'll increase the chance of the rain event happening now rather than a bit later, and probably increase the volume of rain too.
You'll never get rain out of air that just doesn't have enough moisture in it to begin with though.
And you can't stop it raining somewhere, except by coaxing the clouds into making their rain somewhere else first, which is what I think China did (or what I think China think they did :)
I wonder how hard it would be to develop a meatspace version of ROBOTS.TXT... there are several ways this might work that I can think of right now...
1. An opt-in online system where you log in and say "google can show the picture of my house". A bit tricky to maintain though... how do you stop me logging in to google and approving a picture of your house?
2. An opt-out online system.
3. A symbol that you print out, laminate, and affix to your house. Is the resolution that appears on streetview the same as what google actually took or do they downscale it from a much higher resolution? If the latter then there should be no problem identifying the symbol. It could work as an opt-in or an opt-out system.
4. Some combination of the above that changes the resolution that your house appears in (eg from completely blurred to maximum resolution).
Something a bit unrelated that I just thought of... I wonder if google ever considered using garbage collection vehicles to take the pictures. They go basically everywhere in metro areas, and in Australia at least, an increasing number of rural areas. You could just stick a (google provided) bright yellow sticker on your garbage bin if you didn't want/did want (depending on the opt-out/in approach taken) to participate, and an optical sensor on the truck would register your want. The only disadvantage would be that the picture would be always taken on garbage collection day when you have your rubbish bins out, cluttering the view :)
64K was just a rough number I pulled out of the air, as 16 bits of address wouldn't be a huge slice of a end site's address space.
You could easily make it 640k though, then it truly should be enough for anyone!
DNS does already work over TCP, and is used where the response will be over a certain size, eg a zone transfer from primary to secondary DNS server.
The problem is one of efficiency. TCP has much higher overheads, you need three packets just to get a connection started and then you have to keep track of the connection and shut it down properly. Three packets doesn't sound like much but over a high latency link (eg 500ms) it makes for a huge increase in the time it takes to resolve a name.
I meant the source address of your request. Eg when your internal dns caching server sends a dns request, your router nat's the source address from a random pool of 64k (or more) addresses. In order for someone to spoof the reply, they would need to know the dns request id, the source port you used to send, and the source IP address chosen by your nat router. It's a client side solution only.
As a solution, it would rely on the following:
. a useful number of DNS servers being reachable via IPv6 (not the case yet)
. a router able to do IPv6 NAT to a random address (maybe possible if your router runs Linux?)
I think that by the time the above is true, there will be better solutions around.
With IPv6, you would have enough source addresses to add that to the 'random pool' too. Another 64K addresses would make it harder to hack.
Does anyone else think that maybe we are approaching this problem the wrong way?
I know i'm being very pedantic here, and the occurrence of this is probably statistically insignificant, but not every woman is XX and not every man is XY. There is at least one XXY woman on record who has given birth, and others probably exist undetected. It may be that the 'Y' from the mother could not propagate to the child though in which case it's irrelevant.
There is some belief that Mitochondria may be inherited to a very small extent from the father too. Sperm cells to contain Mitochondria and although these are normally killed off by the egg cell, it is possible that some may remain.
Interesting theory. It would explain why they all turned to stone.
To have life, any of the following may qualify:
. ringworm
. head (or other) lice
. intestinal worms
. pimples
. yeast infection
I think most slashdotters are probably doing okay!
It could be a big deal. We do warranty and service work for HP hardware and in the past laptops have come in with BIOS passwords and we were not able to remove them. The password is actually part of the ATA protocol and so the disk is unusable without it, even in another machine. I think the only operation you can do is an ERASE. If you remove the battery then the BIOS forgets not only the BIOS password, but the disk password too.
I'm sure there are backdoors for some drives, but the customer in question in this case certainly wasn't willing to pay for us to investigate it so the data was as good as lost.
TPM, if implemented correctly, provides fairly good protection too. As does Microsofts BitLocker.
Physical access reduces security by a whole heap, but if things are done right then it doesn't reduce it to zero.
Of course as others have mentioned, an organisation that loses laptops like that probably isn't 'doing things right'...
Ditto. I felt uncomfortable typing it, even though it wasn't used in a derogatory context. It's just a word, but the word invokes so many feelings in so many people. And that's just it isn't it... the whole 'swear words' thing is really subjective. In Australia there are some communities of Aboriginal people who readily refer to themselves as blackfella's and to the imports as whitefella's, and think nothing of it. It's just a convenient way of identifying who they are talking about. Other groups get mortally offended if you so much as hint that their skin color might be different to someone elses. The n-word is probably much the same... (ever seen a movie called 'cabin fever'? Hilarious use of the n-word in that :)
Then again, someone who's brought up to think that certain words are really really taboo might get really offended if they were used in front of them. Are their feelings any less valid than those offended by the n-word?
What if his last name was one of 'Hitlerwasmisunderstood', 'Niggersmustdie', 'Kidsarefuntotouchinappropriately', 'Americagotwhatitdeservedon911', 'Linuxistheworkofthedevil'?
In the unlikely event that one of those was actually someone's last name, proudly carried from generation to generation for hundreds of years, would you let someone use it on a system that you were responsible for?
I'm sure the admins of Slashdot would never let that last one in :)
I also find it interesting how the word 'nigger' has actually become more taboo than it was 20 or so years ago (unless you actually happen to have black skin, then you can say it all you like). Watching some old episodes of The Goodies they made reference to black South African persons as 'Nig-nogs'. They'd never get away with that these days, despite the fact that the whole episode was poking fun at the whole idea of apartheid(sp?) anyway.
Also, does anyone remember reading a book called 'The Faraway Tree' by Enid Blyton? One of the characters had the name Fanny. Recent editions of the book have had her name changed to Franny.
Funny old world isn't it?
I remember it as a skit from a Monty Python or Not The Nine o'Clock News or something from that era. The joke is probably much older. It goes something like:
A man walks into the office of the department of name changes:
Man: I'd like to change my name please
Clerk: Okay, what is your name?
Man: Colin Tittybumface
Clerk: I see. And what would you like to change your name to?
Man: Roger Tittybumface
You don't seriously believe that that's the same thing do you?
Disney produced a cartoon decades ago about how people change when they get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, and apart from a bit of exaggeration, it was right on the mark.
Someone crashed into my Aunt's car which was parked on the street in front of her house. By the time she got outside to see what the noise was, the other car was far enough away that she couldn't see the number plate. The guy did actually come back about 10 minutes later, but only because he saw some kids jot down the number plate further up the road.
Some friends had a car they had borrowed from their parents written off in a similar way in the middle of the night. The car that did it was nowhere to be found.
My mum was out with friends and when they came back to get their cars one was about half as wide as it was when she left. The car that did it was long gone.
I could go on... I will.
One of our work cars was scraped up the side while parked in a shopping center. The car that did it was, again, not there, and the driver hadn't made any effort to leave a note or something.
I have personally witnessed on more than one occasion a car crashing into another car in a supermarket and then driving off without the driver stopping to take responsibility for their actions.
I was driving home a few months ago and a car overtook me over a rise. There was a car coming the other way and that car was forced off the road to avoid the collision, as was I to try and make room. The driver of the car that overtook me didn't stop to make sure everyone was okay.
Now I'm sure that someone can cite an equal number of cases where the driver of the car that did the crashing did stick around, but have a think about that ratio as compared to a person accidentally walking into another person, knocking them over, and stopping/not stopping to help them up.
People behave differently once they get behind the wheel of a car.
I wonder how much of the disagreement that goes on on Slashdot about this issue is really differences in belief or is just a communication mismatch...
I wonder how many people fit into each of the following:
1. Those that don't want number plates on cars at all and want to be completely unaccountable on the roads
2. Those that are happy to have number plates on cars but don't want an automatic system that searches a database for matches of known and wanted persons (make the cops do their jobs!)
3. Those that would be happy to have the system mentioned above if there was an absolute assurance that there would be no 'slippery slope', knowing of course that such an assurance is impossible. This is probably just a special case of #2
4. Those that are happy to have the system mentioned above without any disclaimers
5. Those that would be quite happy to have gps implants in their heads that track and log everywhere they go.
#1 would argue with everyone else and chastise them for giving away their freedoms, except that they'd probably never post on Slashdot anyway for fear that someone might find them.
#2 mostly peacefully coexist with #3
#3 and #4 argue about the existence of the 'slippery slope'
#5 argue with everyone else along the lines of 'if you have nothing to hide then why is there a problem'
I sometimes wonder if there isn't a criminal organization somewhere that every time a new technology comes out that will make it harder for them to get away with stuff they unleash a new wave of 'taking away our freedoms' FUD. I don't really believe it but it gives me a giggle to think about it :)
I also wonder if an argument on Slashdot has ever succeeding in actually changing someone's mind... It's all fun to watch though isn't it!
Excuse me, a Mr Godwin would like a word with you.
Why is everyone so petrified of being accountable for their actions these days?
I'd love to see a slashdot poll that had two groups to choose from... the groups would contain:
I value my privacy:
. more than life itself
. highly
. moderately
. my what?
. not at all. I regularly flash my boobs to CowboyNeal on webcams.
and
My age is: ... etc ...
. under 12
. 12 to 15
. 16 to 18
.
. Get off my lawn!
I've always imagined that the majority of people nearer the 'Get off my lawn!' end of the latter poll would be nearer the 'more than life itself' end of the former...
Anyway, I think the last thing you want to do with drivers is to make them think that they are anonymous. That would be a recipe for disaster!
Ford tried to do this to me with my car. It would make a shuddering noise somewhere in the front end at low speed (eg parking lots). I mentioned it to them each service and they said they'd look at it, and when I got it back after the service they said they'd flushed the power steering system and upgraded the car computer firmware.
The first service after the warranty expired I took it in and they said that there was a faulty hose causing the problem and it would take $$$ to fix. I got them to fix it under warranty eventually but I wonder how many other people they screwed over...
And it's amazing how few times you have to do this for it to work. It's all about your kids calling your bluff. Kids have an amazingly good sense of the likelihood of a parent following through with a threat, and parents are amazingly good at making threats they have no intention of following through on.
If you actually get up and leave the restaurant immediately, instead of just threatening to, you'll probably only have to do it once or twice, and in future all you'll have to do is remind the kids about 'what happened last time' and they'll know you mean business.
If only they had mandatory parenting classes for this sort of thing... some of it seems so obvious in retrospect but it never is when you are 'in the middle' of it.
I was going to write "well... if I had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I'd love for 'long term' to be something I'd need to worry about", but thinking about it more, this is more a "stop you getting worse" drug than a "make you better" drug, so the earlier you start taking it the better. And if Alzheimer's can have it's roots 30-40 years in the past as the article suggests, maybe long term toxicity is something to consider...
Are the really early onset cases of Alzheimer's the same as those more associated with older people? I'm sure there will be no shortage of test subjects who would otherwise have another 50 years of life in front of them...
How do we know they aren't already owned by Google, and just a front for testing out new wacky search algorithms?
Or maybe Google needed a nemesis, and with nothing else on the internet even coming close they've had to construct their own. If everybody is hating Cuil then nobody is hating Google.
Of all the languages to find an alternate word for knowledge, why would they choose Irish? Maybe it's different in the rest of the world but in Australia the Irish are the butt of many jokes, eg if "An Australian, and Englishman, and an Irishman walk into a bar", the Irishman will always be the idiot of the three (unless it's the one where the barman says "What? Is this some kind of joke?").
If I can take The Simpsons as a reliable measure of American culture (and I know I can :) I'd guess it's true in the USA too.
I think you missed the part about 'or there's something very wrong with the laws that govern us'.