Nearly all vinyl is pressed from the exact same master as the CD, with all its dynamic range compression. In my collection of 30 or so records, ranging from 1960s pressings through to new releases this year, none of them are better produced than their CD version. In fact, one of the vinyl records I have was actually pressed using MP3s as the source material. (The CD version of that album was also MP3-sourced.)
A vinyl record gets you 40 - 60 dB of dynamic range, not 120. It can be less if you are trying to fit lots of material on the record, anything more than 20 minutes per side and you'll need to start lowering the volume of the music in order to reduce the spacing between the grooves (damaging signal-to-noise ratio in the process). 16-bit PCM like you have on a CD delivers 96 dB of dynamic range, regardless of running time.
Nobody said anything about dragged away, that's your own strawman. It sounds like no one has actually entered the complex at this point. Any pictures of the site in its current state will look like a hole filled with rocks most likely. Even if those pictures have been released, the editor for this news article probably thought it would be more illustrative to show a bunker "like" the one being excavated. Not that the Times of Israel's editorial practices are relevant to the archaeological discovery in the first place... bravo on fitting a strawman and a red herring into two or three sentences.
When I'm traveling I don't want to read, I want to experience the culture and the history and the landscape of the place I'm visiting. On the plane/bus, I listen to music; reading makes me carsick. If I have a few minutes to kill while at the destination and I feel I must read, I'll buy a print magazine or something. On my trip to Europe, I read through a couple of UK magazines and got a good grip on their slang.
If for some reason I decided to travel to a totally boring place where I felt I needed to read novels to pass time... adding a couple of paperbacks into a full-sized suitcase isn't an issue. That suitcase is going to be checked baggage anyway.
If you had read the full article you would know that excavation at the site has been temporarily halted by Austrian authorities - I imagine due to concerns with the radiation or it being a historical site.
Also from the article:
"The existence of the facility was mentioned in the diaries of an Austrian physicist who worked for the Nazis, and Sulzer used ground-penetrating radar technology to pinpoint its location...
'Declassified intelligence documents as well as testimony from witnesses helped excavators identify the concealed entrance,' The Times said."
It seems that there were "longstanding claims that Nazi scientists experimented with nuclear weapons in the area" and that this discovery didn't rise out of nowhere. Hell, there were much weirder happenings than secret bunkers going on in WW2. I'm sure the guy wants to promote his film too, but that doesn't cancel out his legitimate discovery. This is like you sitting on a BBS in the 80s saying "Robert Ballard couldn't really have discovered the Titanic... he has cameras! He needs funds! The ship's been gone for 70 years!"
You don't think there's still the old-school hacker way to break into systems, by hacking, not buying backdoors from corporations? I'd wager that a team of no more than 5 or 10 top-notch hackers could pull off a Stuxnet- or Sony-style attack. And it may only take the cost-equivalent of 50 soldiers-with-tanks-and-support-column to do it. Normal soldiers are actually really expensive when you think of all the supplies and equipment they need in addition to just the pay and benefits. To house and feed a literal army of men for years at a time probably costs much more than putting up a roomful of hackers. Have you ever heard of the term "asymmetric warfare"? Many countries are missing entire branches of military like navy and air force and their associated expenditures. Think of the R&D funding for that alone going to hackers - you could have a hacker army. All you need is the right recruiting program, which is probably easier to put together than the US military budget. I predict we will see many more high-profile breaches before people start taking security more seriously.
The goal of this chat program is to have the perceived security, not actual security. Dotcom is a master of PR in the digital world, and he's used that manipulative skill-set to commit outright fraud in the past as well (this was way before Megaupload, look up his bio.) Given his history, it's not too far-out of a theory that he would collect user information passing through his chat service to sell to third parties: corporations, governments (trying to earn favors), possibly other shady groups with the right money or leverage. A browser-based client isn't required to do that, but make no mistake that actual privacy isn't the #1 feature of MegaChat. Helping out Mega, in some way, is.
A single group would need to own over 50% of Tor nodes for that type of attack to be effective. There are other attacks using (for example) traffic analysis that can be effective without controlling any nodes, but that's a different attack vector.
They went from starting in September to early August here in the late 90s. All in all the kids have about an extra 6 weeks of school now compared to when I was in kindergarten. This is Texas, not sure if it's a state or local thing.
Who said anything about a spy? This was a remote attack launched from a hotel room in southeast Asia, in the accounts I've read. Although the average NK citizen is computer illiterate, keep in mind they do have a small class of elites, and defectors have reported they specifically have a hacker training program. It's likely they hired some established black hats to either start the program, or help directly with this attack.
NK does a lot of odd things for a nation state. They'll take whatever money or aid in any form they can, and use it frivolously. See the mass deaths in the 1990s from starvation, and how NK actually cut domestic food production after receiving food aid, to up the budget by 2% for the military and elites, until the workers making that happen literally starved to death.
It's doubtful the attackers could have done anything to actually prevent the movie from being released; Sony's got to have off-site and offline backups for a multimillion dollar piece of data. Surely the attackers realized this too. So it seems they had several other goals:
1. Extorting money, or at least trying to,
2. Economic and personal damage to Sony and its employees (leaking emails and prerelease films),
3. A big, loud PR message that says "Don't fuck with us", and "We have the capability to take your industries down."
While there's no direct evidence that the attack was sponsored by NK, or anyone else... this attack fits right in with NK's modus operandi and works to their benefit. Especially the PR angle. NK has a long history of pulling off saber-rattling stunts to send a message, then officially denying involvement to save face in international relations, keep what small bargaining chips they have, and most importantly avoid escalation to war. War would be the end of North Korea.
What I think happened is Kim took the film very personally. He's the Dear Leader, the savior of all the people, who can do no wrong. Who is known to smoke Marlboros and occasionally watch Hollywood movies. Then you have a second-tier Seth Rogen performance mocking him. Kim wasn't going to take that, and used extensive resources to strike back. Nobody really has anything to gain from these attacks but NK, which is perhaps the top reason I'm calling it as NK, in absence of hard evidence.
I can't think of any benefits the US would gain from invading NK. SK would want it even less, since they'd have a bunch of missiles fly in and destroy their economy. US and SK's strategy is to just put the squeeze on NK until it eventually implodes from the inside. NK isn't a serious contender for victory in open warfare, they have much more bark than bite, but they can definitely fire their missiles off and kill a bunch of people before they are conquered. Think of why the armistice was signed in the first place. It's a stalemate in which neither side can make a gainful win. The situation persists.
FWIW, it has been revealed recently that there were in fact WMDs in Iraq, although they were decades old, hidden (think buried), and deteriorated - mostly not fit for combat deployment. It wasn't trumpeted from the hilltops by the media because they were US-designed and European-built, decades ago when Saddam was the "good guy". Also, some friendly soldiers who were decontaminating the sites were exposed to the nerve agents, that doesn't make good press either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
See sources 108-110
There's no chance they'd be using a normal, unmodified commercial game like whatever the latest Call of Duty is, I've lost track. It would either be something open source and probably 10+ years old - ie, already a codified classic - or a newer game that gets locked to a specific version for people to train on, with any bugfixes (the only update allowed) having to pass through an Olympic committee first. Alternatively, there might be a game specially developed just for the Olympics. However, this won't ever happen, so it's all moot.
I've been a "hardcore gamer" (remember when that was a thing?) since the 90s, and at no point did I ever enjoy watching other people play games, much less be willing to pay big money to watch someone play a game.
Presumably their internal network only has a few closely-watched links to the wider internet that can easily be cut in the event of a DDOS, leaving the internal network running. AFAIK, the DDOS only affected their connectivity to the wide internet, which is essentially just a toy for the elite anyway. I haven't seen any reports to the contrary.
And under what circumstances will data in an.mp3 execute? Windows won't execute it without the old.mp3.exe trick, and probably a UAC prompt as well. Linux and presumably OS X won't execute without setting the x permission. And any sane media player isn't going to execute anything from inside a media file.
Then again, most people use insanely bloated and stupid media players like WMP and iTunes, I could see those executing random code in a media file as some harebrained "feature"...
"...but sometimes there's no beating the portability of an ebook on your phone or tablet."
When did normal books become non-portable? I mean, if you're looking at something like Moby Dick, yes a tablet might have a slight edge. But most books I have are not much thicker than a tablet, and actually smaller in the width and height dimensions.
Also, I do most of my reading in the bath. That brings up the issue of dropping things in the water. I have dropped books in the water before, and if you pull them out quickly you end up with a perfectly readable book where the edges of the pages are wrinkly. Worst-case scenario, if the book is destroyed, I'm out $6 and one book (I buy used). If I drop an eBook or tablet in the water, I might be out anywhere from $80 to $400. I'd also have to wait at least a day, possibly a few weeks depending on money situation, to replace it and resume reading. With a wrinkly book, I can generally resume reading immediately.
Part of it is a changing political landscape. Another part of it may be "keyboard warrior syndrome" where people do things virtually that they would never do in person, due to the detachment. Except in this case, the keyboard warriors are money-hungry and power-happy corporations and government entities.
And, at least from the viewpoint of John Q. Public and Grandma Penelope Facebooker, digital privacy never existed in the first place. So even if they are aware of the violations, it's not as grievous to them as if their mail privacy were taken away.
Have there ever been any instances of Google sending themselves your browsing data without your explicit permission through Chrome? (Not through their web sites which are accessible on any browser.) I've been keeping away from Chrome for my own reasons, mainly the plugin infrastructure and lack of customization options. However, as Firefox continues to bloat and mirror Chrome in UI, I've been thinking I might as well go for the faster browser. If there are actual privacy violations in Chrome I'd like to know about it, preferably with a source cited.
I can second (or third or fourth or whatever it is by now) this point. I read The Hobbit in school at a similar age (13, IIRC) and it had a profound effect on my reading in general. Years later I got into LOTR, I already of course enjoyed reading, but LOTR got me to appreciate highly descriptive and detailed worlds.
I won't credit The Hobbit 100% for my interest in reading, since I'd been into Harry Potter before that. But maybe some kids in that class had never got into HP. HP is also longer, which might wear some kids out, and take time away from other things on the curriculum.
Ugh, they cut THAT out? That kinda wraps up the whole story arc about the hobbits' transformation. I can understand side-quests like Tom Bombadil and that creepy hilly place w/ the ghostly dudes in the first book (it's been a while since I read) being cut out. But, the reclaiming of the Shire should definitely have been in the director's cut at least, if not all releases.
But not when YOU need to get in contact with someone. Besides, I've never had a salesman leave a voice message. Hell, I have bill collectors calling me, even they quit leaving messages after a few weeks of being ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly all vinyl is pressed from the exact same master as the CD, with all its dynamic range compression. In my collection of 30 or so records, ranging from 1960s pressings through to new releases this year, none of them are better produced than their CD version. In fact, one of the vinyl records I have was actually pressed using MP3s as the source material. (The CD version of that album was also MP3-sourced.)
A vinyl record gets you 40 - 60 dB of dynamic range, not 120. It can be less if you are trying to fit lots of material on the record, anything more than 20 minutes per side and you'll need to start lowering the volume of the music in order to reduce the spacing between the grooves (damaging signal-to-noise ratio in the process). 16-bit PCM like you have on a CD delivers 96 dB of dynamic range, regardless of running time.
Nobody said anything about dragged away, that's your own strawman. It sounds like no one has actually entered the complex at this point. Any pictures of the site in its current state will look like a hole filled with rocks most likely. Even if those pictures have been released, the editor for this news article probably thought it would be more illustrative to show a bunker "like" the one being excavated. Not that the Times of Israel's editorial practices are relevant to the archaeological discovery in the first place... bravo on fitting a strawman and a red herring into two or three sentences.
When I'm traveling I don't want to read, I want to experience the culture and the history and the landscape of the place I'm visiting. On the plane/bus, I listen to music; reading makes me carsick. If I have a few minutes to kill while at the destination and I feel I must read, I'll buy a print magazine or something. On my trip to Europe, I read through a couple of UK magazines and got a good grip on their slang.
If for some reason I decided to travel to a totally boring place where I felt I needed to read novels to pass time... adding a couple of paperbacks into a full-sized suitcase isn't an issue. That suitcase is going to be checked baggage anyway.
If you had read the full article you would know that excavation at the site has been temporarily halted by Austrian authorities - I imagine due to concerns with the radiation or it being a historical site.
Also from the article:
"The existence of the facility was mentioned in the diaries of an Austrian physicist who worked for the Nazis, and Sulzer used ground-penetrating radar technology to pinpoint its location...
'Declassified intelligence documents as well as testimony from witnesses helped excavators identify the concealed entrance,' The Times said."
It seems that there were "longstanding claims that Nazi scientists experimented with nuclear weapons in the area" and that this discovery didn't rise out of nowhere. Hell, there were much weirder happenings than secret bunkers going on in WW2. I'm sure the guy wants to promote his film too, but that doesn't cancel out his legitimate discovery. This is like you sitting on a BBS in the 80s saying "Robert Ballard couldn't really have discovered the Titanic... he has cameras! He needs funds! The ship's been gone for 70 years!"
Or the one from the 2000s sitcom... wait, that was the one from Sabbath??
You don't think there's still the old-school hacker way to break into systems, by hacking, not buying backdoors from corporations? I'd wager that a team of no more than 5 or 10 top-notch hackers could pull off a Stuxnet- or Sony-style attack. And it may only take the cost-equivalent of 50 soldiers-with-tanks-and-support-column to do it. Normal soldiers are actually really expensive when you think of all the supplies and equipment they need in addition to just the pay and benefits. To house and feed a literal army of men for years at a time probably costs much more than putting up a roomful of hackers. Have you ever heard of the term "asymmetric warfare"? Many countries are missing entire branches of military like navy and air force and their associated expenditures. Think of the R&D funding for that alone going to hackers - you could have a hacker army. All you need is the right recruiting program, which is probably easier to put together than the US military budget. I predict we will see many more high-profile breaches before people start taking security more seriously.
The goal of this chat program is to have the perceived security, not actual security. Dotcom is a master of PR in the digital world, and he's used that manipulative skill-set to commit outright fraud in the past as well (this was way before Megaupload, look up his bio.)
Given his history, it's not too far-out of a theory that he would collect user information passing through his chat service to sell to third parties: corporations, governments (trying to earn favors), possibly other shady groups with the right money or leverage.
A browser-based client isn't required to do that, but make no mistake that actual privacy isn't the #1 feature of MegaChat. Helping out Mega, in some way, is.
A single group would need to own over 50% of Tor nodes for that type of attack to be effective. There are other attacks using (for example) traffic analysis that can be effective without controlling any nodes, but that's a different attack vector.
They went from starting in September to early August here in the late 90s. All in all the kids have about an extra 6 weeks of school now compared to when I was in kindergarten. This is Texas, not sure if it's a state or local thing.
Who said anything about a spy? This was a remote attack launched from a hotel room in southeast Asia, in the accounts I've read. Although the average NK citizen is computer illiterate, keep in mind they do have a small class of elites, and defectors have reported they specifically have a hacker training program. It's likely they hired some established black hats to either start the program, or help directly with this attack.
NK does a lot of odd things for a nation state. They'll take whatever money or aid in any form they can, and use it frivolously. See the mass deaths in the 1990s from starvation, and how NK actually cut domestic food production after receiving food aid, to up the budget by 2% for the military and elites, until the workers making that happen literally starved to death.
It's doubtful the attackers could have done anything to actually prevent the movie from being released; Sony's got to have off-site and offline backups for a multimillion dollar piece of data. Surely the attackers realized this too. So it seems they had several other goals:
1. Extorting money, or at least trying to,
2. Economic and personal damage to Sony and its employees (leaking emails and prerelease films),
3. A big, loud PR message that says "Don't fuck with us", and "We have the capability to take your industries down."
While there's no direct evidence that the attack was sponsored by NK, or anyone else... this attack fits right in with NK's modus operandi and works to their benefit. Especially the PR angle. NK has a long history of pulling off saber-rattling stunts to send a message, then officially denying involvement to save face in international relations, keep what small bargaining chips they have, and most importantly avoid escalation to war. War would be the end of North Korea.
What I think happened is Kim took the film very personally. He's the Dear Leader, the savior of all the people, who can do no wrong. Who is known to smoke Marlboros and occasionally watch Hollywood movies. Then you have a second-tier Seth Rogen performance mocking him. Kim wasn't going to take that, and used extensive resources to strike back. Nobody really has anything to gain from these attacks but NK, which is perhaps the top reason I'm calling it as NK, in absence of hard evidence.
I can't think of any benefits the US would gain from invading NK. SK would want it even less, since they'd have a bunch of missiles fly in and destroy their economy. US and SK's strategy is to just put the squeeze on NK until it eventually implodes from the inside. NK isn't a serious contender for victory in open warfare, they have much more bark than bite, but they can definitely fire their missiles off and kill a bunch of people before they are conquered. Think of why the armistice was signed in the first place. It's a stalemate in which neither side can make a gainful win. The situation persists.
FWIW, it has been revealed recently that there were in fact WMDs in Iraq, although they were decades old, hidden (think buried), and deteriorated - mostly not fit for combat deployment. It wasn't trumpeted from the hilltops by the media because they were US-designed and European-built, decades ago when Saddam was the "good guy". Also, some friendly soldiers who were decontaminating the sites were exposed to the nerve agents, that doesn't make good press either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
See sources 108-110
There's no chance they'd be using a normal, unmodified commercial game like whatever the latest Call of Duty is, I've lost track. It would either be something open source and probably 10+ years old - ie, already a codified classic - or a newer game that gets locked to a specific version for people to train on, with any bugfixes (the only update allowed) having to pass through an Olympic committee first. Alternatively, there might be a game specially developed just for the Olympics. However, this won't ever happen, so it's all moot.
I've been a "hardcore gamer" (remember when that was a thing?) since the 90s, and at no point did I ever enjoy watching other people play games, much less be willing to pay big money to watch someone play a game.
What if an ice skater has a heart attack or a seizure? What if the lights go out at an indoor or nighttime soccer match? OH NOE!
Presumably their internal network only has a few closely-watched links to the wider internet that can easily be cut in the event of a DDOS, leaving the internal network running. AFAIK, the DDOS only affected their connectivity to the wide internet, which is essentially just a toy for the elite anyway. I haven't seen any reports to the contrary.
I'm sure they're writing it already.
And under what circumstances will data in an .mp3 execute? Windows won't execute it without the old .mp3.exe trick, and probably a UAC prompt as well. Linux and presumably OS X won't execute without setting the x permission. And any sane media player isn't going to execute anything from inside a media file.
Then again, most people use insanely bloated and stupid media players like WMP and iTunes, I could see those executing random code in a media file as some harebrained "feature"...
"...but sometimes there's no beating the portability of an ebook on your phone or tablet."
When did normal books become non-portable? I mean, if you're looking at something like Moby Dick, yes a tablet might have a slight edge. But most books I have are not much thicker than a tablet, and actually smaller in the width and height dimensions.
Also, I do most of my reading in the bath. That brings up the issue of dropping things in the water. I have dropped books in the water before, and if you pull them out quickly you end up with a perfectly readable book where the edges of the pages are wrinkly. Worst-case scenario, if the book is destroyed, I'm out $6 and one book (I buy used). If I drop an eBook or tablet in the water, I might be out anywhere from $80 to $400. I'd also have to wait at least a day, possibly a few weeks depending on money situation, to replace it and resume reading. With a wrinkly book, I can generally resume reading immediately.
Ghostery+Adblock+Scriptblock = No Facebook.
Part of it is a changing political landscape. Another part of it may be "keyboard warrior syndrome" where people do things virtually that they would never do in person, due to the detachment. Except in this case, the keyboard warriors are money-hungry and power-happy corporations and government entities.
And, at least from the viewpoint of John Q. Public and Grandma Penelope Facebooker, digital privacy never existed in the first place. So even if they are aware of the violations, it's not as grievous to them as if their mail privacy were taken away.
Have there ever been any instances of Google sending themselves your browsing data without your explicit permission through Chrome? (Not through their web sites which are accessible on any browser.) I've been keeping away from Chrome for my own reasons, mainly the plugin infrastructure and lack of customization options. However, as Firefox continues to bloat and mirror Chrome in UI, I've been thinking I might as well go for the faster browser. If there are actual privacy violations in Chrome I'd like to know about it, preferably with a source cited.
I can second (or third or fourth or whatever it is by now) this point. I read The Hobbit in school at a similar age (13, IIRC) and it had a profound effect on my reading in general. Years later I got into LOTR, I already of course enjoyed reading, but LOTR got me to appreciate highly descriptive and detailed worlds.
I won't credit The Hobbit 100% for my interest in reading, since I'd been into Harry Potter before that. But maybe some kids in that class had never got into HP. HP is also longer, which might wear some kids out, and take time away from other things on the curriculum.
Ugh, they cut THAT out? That kinda wraps up the whole story arc about the hobbits' transformation. I can understand side-quests like Tom Bombadil and that creepy hilly place w/ the ghostly dudes in the first book (it's been a while since I read) being cut out. But, the reclaiming of the Shire should definitely have been in the director's cut at least, if not all releases.
But not when YOU need to get in contact with someone. Besides, I've never had a salesman leave a voice message. Hell, I have bill collectors calling me, even they quit leaving messages after a few weeks of being ignored.