The data as presented indicates a recent warming trend, but does not say anything about whether this is man-made or not; a 0.5deg rise in 50 years is extremely small in the scheme of things, and drawing the usual alarmist conclusions from this is quite unfounded.
The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index
(AGGI) shows radiative forcing relative to 1750, of all
the long-lived greenhouse gases indexed to 1 for the
year 1990. Since 1990, radiative forcing from greenhouse
gases has increased 27.5%.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)
are important atmospheric trace gases with significant
man-made sources. Nitrous oxide has the third
strongest anthropogenic climate forcing after CO2
and CH4 and is considered a major greenhouse gas
(Butler 2009).
The atmospheric N2O budget is
out of balance by one-third as a result of man-made
emissions, primarily through emissions from nitrogen
fertilizers (Crutzen et al. 2007).
Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continued
to rise, with CO2 increasing at a rate above the 1978
to 2008 average. The global ocean CO2 uptake flux for
2008, the most recent year for which analyzed data are
available, is estimated to have been 1.23 Pg C yr-1, which
is 0.25 Pg C yr-1 smaller than the long-term average and
the lowest estimated ocean uptake in the last 27 years.
At the same time, the total global ocean inventory of
anthropogenic carbon stored in the ocean interior as of
2008 suggests an uptake and storage of anthropogenic
CO2 at rates of 2.0 and 2.3 ±0.6 Pg C yr-1 for the decades
of the 1990s and 2000s, respectively.
In the tropics this increase has been
formally attributed to anthropogenic change over the
1988–2006 period (Santer et al. 2007).
all the time series show an underlying rise in
OHC consistent with our understanding of anthropogenic climate change.
I mean, the evidence is all over the report. The only thing stopping them from saying that it is conclusively man made is that 1) it's probably impossible to prove it and 2) there might always be some evidence of non anthropogenic warming contributing to the cause but not accounting for all of it.
There's a really neat prototype dashboard that presents data surrounding climate change in an intuitive way. And the report is here (from the second link in the summary). And I submitted a story that got rejected a few weeks ago about NOAA's announcement:
Aside from that, I'm not really interested in making comments on this anymore because I'm so sick and tired of the armchair idiocy that follows (and somehow gets moderated up). Prediction: Not even 300 scientists from 48 countries and NOAA are going to convince everyone that global warming is real. At this point, I think it's just going to get worse.
Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.
I never said to use the Facebook API.
For a mental exercise let's imagine (and really maybe Perl is the better choice here) that I made a Ruby gem called SocialWalker or something of the sort and basically I used mechanize to log into Facebook after getting the user's credentials. Then the application connects to my webservice that sends the latest selector strings (harvested from the latest Facebook interface by hand with SelectorGadget) and also Nokogiri to quickly scrape off all the information and date/time stamps. I think the pictures would be a different kind of effort but completely feasible.
At that point, the user could save it in some documented open social file format that any application can read... it would probably be a tree directory with a bunch of XML files and images. Maybe they want to put that into Diaspora and I would have a way that the system would autopopulate their diaspora with this archived data? Maybe they want to do their own thing with it? Maybe I could spend time doing this for Facebook and MySpace and Friendster and whatever you send me a link to?
Yeah, I might not be able to spider your posts on your friends walls and maybe I won't be able to get some information and maybe the new system won't let you back timestamp things so that data has to be put in the comments on your new photo albums.
Maybe Google could be petitioned to create this system instead of some developer who prefers to get drunk on the weekends instead of liberating social network users? Google is the god of scraping and caching after all.
But it would look like nothing more than one user looking at all their history one last time;) No API ToS violations needed.
They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.
Well let's travel backward in time to when Facebook was starting. Now let's rephrase your statement:
They're too late to join the game. The problem is that MySpace already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about really bad user design and spam won't make normal people switch over and all the bands will stay on MySpace since Facebook doesn't host music.
Now if we go a little further back to when MySpace was starting:
They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Friendster already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about... about... what was wrong with Friendster again?
Obviously the barrier you speak of has been broken down and it can be broken down again. You just have to understand your users better than Facebook does. And given the user feedback wouldn't you say that's possible to do?
I would counter that the real big dealbreaker would be ability to import all pictures and posts from Facebook into the new system. So you would have the user run an app from their local machine that needs their username and password and then scrapes everything off of Facebook while a loading bar processes it and then loads it into the new system. Option at the end to delete the Facebook account and maybe send an e-mail to Facebook telling them that if they don't permanently remove your user data from all their servers, you will get litigious. Of course, that's just a fantasy of mine...
I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.
Well, if you firmly believe that video games and the digital interactions they provide to the player are art and part of our culture (and I personally do) then yes it does make sense for society to have a prerogative to save these video games. Why give up on video games when we've spent so much time, money and resources saving the Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, the Statue of Liberty or old phonograph recordings of dead musicians? Your view is quite callous to the hours spent developing and imagining these video games as well as the hours spent enjoying them.
Whatever plan that can be instituted to save games should be done now before too many consoles are lost to the ages.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
It became some sort of rallying cry for some folks about some ideals. But if you really think about it, personifying information is quite idiotic. Information doesn't want to be free. It can't want anything. If there were no humans around information wouldn't do a whole lot. Certain kinds of information like DNA seem to have some unknown motive and mechanization to persist and mutate but the way we view information (as a product of other humans) is something that we want to be free and that we don't want to have to pay for. And really, the producers of the information want it to be expensive. They want their reward back for their work. And the consumers are still wanting it to be free. So the speech did an interesting job of boiling it down into one thing -- one thing that has both these very strong forces pulling on it. But then you have the legal system of most nations pulling it to be more expensive and litigious while at the same time technology pulls it paradoxically the other way. It's a capital tug of war game with the rope of information and when you say "information wants to be free" you're only talking about one side of the rope.
Who cares if you leave disks 10% full? To get rid of the minimum of 2 disks per server you need to boot from SAN, and disk space in the SAN is often 10x the cost of standard SAS disks. Especially if the server could make do with the two built-in disks and save the cost of an FC card + FC switch port.
I/O's per second on the other hand cost real money, so it is a waste to leave 15k and SSD disks idle. A quarter full does not matter if they are I/O saturated; the rest of the capacity is just wasted, but again you often cannot buy a disk a quarter of the size with the same I/O's per second.
I don't know too much about what you just said but I do know that the Linux images I get at work are virtual machines of a free distribution of Linux. I can request any size I want. But my databases often grow. And then the next thing is that a resizing of a partition is very expensive from our provisioner. So what do we do? We estimate how much space our web apps take up a month and then we request space for 10 years out. Because a resize of the partition is so damned expensive. And those sizes are usually pretty small anyway if you're building databases. Then we occasionally notify our managers when space is getting low by using the provisioner's dashboard tool and we re-assess the application. Is it getting unexpectedly popular or was it bad estimation from the beginning?
I don't know if I should be bothering with the hardware level of things. I sure do like it this way even though it is a really expensive price for the project but the payment remains inside our company anyway. It's internal to the company so we're all using some nebulous group of actual machines and RAIDs to produce a massive cloud of smaller servers as images. There are some downsides and a bit of overhead to pay for virtualization but I thought everyone had moved to this model...
I'll bet there are about 100 million people who would like to test the security of Ron Bowes' nuts against a swift kick. I mean, he should be aware of the Extreme Pain vulnerability by now, and he should have taken the most basic security precautions by now, like wearing a cup. If not, well, he deserves what he gets, right?
+5 Insightful? Why is it that we regard Tavis Ormandy as someone trying to expose the insecurity of Microsoft when he releases a how-to exploit Windows hack but when a security researcher attempts to reveal how insecure Facebook's "Directory" service can be we attack him as the creator of that service and not Facebook?
I believe your anger would be better directed at Facebook. After all, this is posted in his blog for the world to see while a malware author could have just taken this list and run ncrack on it without anyone knowing.
I would also like to point out that, as mentioned many times in this thread, this is just a list. Not even real names but just usernames of people on Facebook. That means that if you find your username on this list, you can restrict your settings so that no one can see your public profile. Then if someone uses this URL list to look you up they get nothing.
So a security researcher tries to wake up Facebook users and he's the guy you want to kick in the nuts? Very curious.
This guy wrote a script to crawl Facebook and download everything he could.
It's not even about that, it's about a guy who wrote a script to collect usernames of everyone on facebook which double as the URL for their profiles. From there you can go and scrape everything you want. You don't even get their public information that they can chose to display on the front page like religion or real name. That's not even on there. No images, just URLs which double as logins.
This story is about a glorified crawler. No actual hacking transpired. No personal information that wasn't already revealed has been revealed. This is not news. In fact, I had to go back to TFS and double-check that kdawson wasn't the editor - that's how terrible this story really is.
It's worse than that. It's about a glorified crawler that was augmented with common names to create a list of possible usernames and URLs for Facebook. If you gave me a glorified crawler that collected interesting data inside a csv, I'd actually be a little interested in using it. Hell, anyone can do this in perl by coding for five minutes but it would take days for the thing to complete with a risk of banning from Facebook.
They say this in the article and from the original source. The summary is more than misleading and there's even less to say "big deal" about than you presupposed.
* The URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile * The name of every searchable Facebook user, both unique and by count (perfect for post-processing, datamining, etc) * Processed lists, including first names with count, last names with count, potential usernames with count, etc * The programs I used to generate everything
You're going to get a URL to pages. If the user has since made them inaccessible, you'll only get what you can from their public profile. Like, you cannot get to my friends list from my public profile. You'll get "potential" usernames to log into Facebook. Big deal. Remember when everyone could make a username for Facebook and that was also their profile URL? Well, now you can guess the most common names and add them to this list like david. Then you could use ncrack or whatever.
Not a whole lot in this file. Not like he scraped the pages of data and put that in a csv file for research or anything really interesting.
I don't think he even understands how the ads work.
All you have to understand is that
Google Trends tells people when a key word gets hot (like 'Chocomize').
Websites of ill repute watch this and then gank content from CNN about some fluff piece on Chocomize.
The websites that gank the content vie for the top seats in the "organic" part of search results (not the advertisement part of Google's search results).
When the user is selects any of these websites (and in the case of chocomize there are many), they are hosting Google ads so Google actually profits from this misbehavior.
The author of the article is complaining that Google encourages poor behavior and then turns a dime on it through whatever ads end up being hosted at the websites that don't produce any actual content. You can claim they don't know this is happening or they don't care or they are laughing all the way to the bank. Either way the author appears to be correct in his analysis although you cannot be certain that Trends is where the crap websites find which terms are hot. Other sites could possibly measure this but would require a lot of indexing and resources to do so. So it's most likely Google Trends.
... it seems naive to think that people aren't going to create/alter content in order to get a higher ranking.
Well, it certainly is naive to think that considering that Google encourages it and they offer a PDF Starter Guide that instructs you how to alter your title, description and meta tags in your website to better your chances of coming up in the "organic" (not adwords) section of search results.
Does it matter?
Well, that's the article's argument. That it does matter because Google complains of the internet being a cesspool and yet here they are encouraging it with Trends. To you and I this is no problem. We don't care. To someone like Google that 0.1% of the end user experience might be worth millions of dollars to take care of because those end users are the eyeballs that sells their ad service to marketers of other companies. If Google perceives this to threaten the people that search their site then, yes, it does matter.
There might be some day when you sit down to use Google and you search for some popular music or terms and all you get is complete unadulterated feces on the first page of search results. And you might consider checking the other search engine pages for the same results. If this phenomena could cause that to happen then, yes, Google will care very much.
If you look at the right side of the page, the second most popular article is titled
"US 'heat ray' gun fails final test"
This morning, when I read this article and submitted it to Slashdot, that was the title. The words "fails final test" were all over the article. Unfortunately Google doesn't seem to offer a cache for it but those words are all over.
The summary isn't wrong, it's just that the BBC changed their story. In the original version the final test was actually putting it to use in Afghanistan. And the US Military Leaders decided ADS doesn't work in that war scenario.
The ADS is the wrong tool for the job.
So if you use the wrong tool for the job and it doesn't work wouldn't you call that failing?
They need to find whoever made that stupid decision and hit them with it.
Who knows? I mean, there was a very interesting thread on the last story about how to circumvent it. Perhaps the first thing they did with it was turn it on their own soldiers only to find out that a resourceful individual could easily bypass it with shielding or simple armor? If that's the case, what's the point of deploying more expensive bulky power consuming equipment when you're most likely going to end up using lethal force anyway? They could have identified this as one ineffective step in a cat-and-mouse game... the details were thin as I submitted this I looked for more sources than the BBC but came up short.
But for some reason the firehose put it down to purple and it was rejected. I understand he's a media whore with shady beginnings but what was everyone afraid of? That the interview would go poorly and he'd start releasing sensitive Slashdot information?:-)
Chatroulette, the strangely addictive online game...
So you're strangely addicted to staring at male genetalia? I think we all just learned a little something about littlekorea.
That is by far the most positive review of that web site I have ever encountered. Personally I've used the service precisely once. Discovering what happened during that usage is left as an exercise to the reader.
The founder of Chatroulette has announced the company has hired developers to collect IP addresses and take screenshots of those users breaking the rules.
And then what? Actually it sounds like they have already done this:
"We've captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behaviour.
"We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have."
Are they going to press charges? Do you think that site created by a lone developer has the legal resources to do that against that many offenders? Do you really think any law enforcement agency has the resources to investigate thousands of complaints with little more than a screenshot of someone's junk and their IP address? It's the internet. Your effort is futile. What ever happened to the recognition software? Has that already fallen through? Too many false positives? Light problems?
Is this site about news for nerds, or gratuitously bashing companies and/or their customers for no discernible logical reason?
This site is about generating readership and discourse because that leads to more ad views which is their primary source of income. You may accuse them of baiting the users to incite a veritable shitstorm of comments with a particular summary instead of having actual valuable content or you can claim that this is what interests nerds and therefore should be reported on. Both are true. Plus it's CmdrTaco editing which can be more volatile than the other editors.
I would posit that particularly resentful stories that are sure to create serious nerd carnage are accepted when they come from high profile sources. What I mean is that this is coming from Wired which has one of the higher approval ratings of nerd news out there and not some unknown site. You're free to go to the original source for more data (which, ironically, is an unknown site but does a good job of visualizing the survey data).
I still can't get over that he said "We let them teach evolution to our children..." as though this is some sort of compromise with liberals or something...
I think they're having problems with the textbooks when they say "them." And it's not really a compromise as they pushed it into an either/or scenario. The logic of the comments in the article seemed to follow this sort of path: 1. We believe (note, not their constituents, them) in creationism so there should be a way for teachers to also teach that in the classroom 2. When children learn one thing from one adult an opposing thing from another adult, the child interprets this as confusion and sometimes exploit it to undermine authority and we already have a problem with that so 4. Only creationism or evolution should be taught to our students but 5. We probably shouldn't be deciding that at this meeting so (thank the flying spaghetti monster) we should form a committee to investigate it.
So it sounds like the resolution was to form a committee to decide if evolution or creationism should be taught in the classroom. Should be entertaining and maybe even tragic.
Learning Without a Negative Response?
on
The End of Forgetting
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
By erasing external memories, he says in the book, 'our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.'
But what if there is no negative response to your behavior? I mean, in the situation quoted in the summary there was no illegal activity. A high school teacher went to a party and got drunk. Nothing illegal there. Sounds like she had some fun (the horror!). So let's assume no picture was taken and no picture was posted on MySpace and she wasn't terminated from her teaching position or dropped from her enrollment in teaching. What negative response would she receive that would stop her from ever doing that again?
None.
Because there shouldn't be a negative response to that. This is some scarlet letter bullshit where no laws are broken but you've offended someone's morals even though it was on your own time and therefore you should be fired. This isn't about forgetting on the web, it's about managing your public image. Some people are slow to catch on that if it's on the internet, the world can see it. So don't put your dirty laundry on the internet. There are plenty of bumps on the social side of things. Plenty of embarrassing social gaffs on sites like MySpace and Facebook but for things like forums and Slashdot it's great that everything is permanently remembered for reference in the future.
Really this is just the old Facebook privacy issue and their total abuse of their clients. Balancing features with privacy is nothing new -- it's just on a much much larger level now.
Working Non-Authorize Requesting Link
on
The End of Forgetting
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I got hit with a login when I tried to use the link in the summary but was able to surf to this link. You'll get a splash advertisement for the Economist or something but I'd wager most people would tolerate that more than logging in.
I got a wireless mouse and keyboard working on my XBox 360 and then played through Modern Warfare 2 in single player mode. On my back projection TV from 1999, I was doing on average a lot better on XBox live than I was with the control pad. We set it up on my friends massive LCD with a very high response time and I felt unstoppable. It seems when you increase the input devices and give me finer tuned control I can concentrate on that and get further up the curve more easily. Might not be the same for some people but if you want to walk all over people, see if your device supports keyboard and mouse through USB and then relearn the game. It took a while but it got to the point of not being fun anymore.
I'd imagine on average the PC user would trounce the XBox 360 user. For me the killer aspect was reducing having to use my thumbs on two joysticks to look around down to the two dimensional plan of my mouse pad. Had to tweak the sensitivity a bit but really two different worlds.
The owned of acdc-bootlegs.com site mentioned in the summary isn't exactly innocent either.
To begin with, the site is devoted to offer downloads of bootlegs, which according to current copyright laws is illegal. Even if you don't think it's a big deal, you have to go by laws.
So when those copyright holders come knocking, he should be prosecuted for that. Why are you trying to smear together two separate cases of alleged copyright infringement? Is it easier to wave your hands and say "it'll never happen to Slashdot?" If you're trying to put me at ease that this won't happen to me because I don't also commit other crimes, it's not working. I submit many articles to Slashdot and I quote many articles in my comments here as I dissect news. Will they sue me for my karma?
The way the/. story title and summary is worded makes it sound bad, but this guy is also blatantly breaking several laws and frauding advertisers to generate money. He just got what he asked for. He should be happy AC/DC or Google hasn't sued him.
Then let him be charged for click fraud (is that even illegal?) and bootlegging movies. If he's being charged for reposting news articles, we should probably talk about that and the sort of growing mentality that may come with it if it turns out to be profitable to sue under. I don't care about his speeding tickets or other things he may be guilty of. Your ad hominem attack may help in a court of law as character assassination but given the number of these suits, it's not putting me at ease.
In response to the second step in the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure ("Step 2: Hurry Up and Wait"), I've printed several copies of the CVD on quadruple ply tissue paper and stocked all the restrooms with it. I've also prepared a special four course meal for Mr. Ormandy consisting of Taco Bell, a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a spoonful of castor oil.
Mr. Ormandy, I think you know what to do. I really found it amusing that they called the blog posting "Bringing Balance to the Force" when it looks to be completely defined by Microsoft with little or no input from the community.
Is that phone makers can do anything they want with it.
The horrible thing about Android is that phone makers can do anything they want with it.
“It’s different from phone to phone and operator to operator,” says Keith Nowak, spokesman for HTC. “But in general, the apps are put there to meet the operator’s business and revenue needs.”
Nowak must be new to PR. He was supposed to spin it as "free apps, everybody wins!" But instead he handed out a healthy dosage of the truth. Enjoy it, it rarely happens.
Slashdot Mirror
The data as presented indicates a recent warming trend, but does not say anything about whether this is man-made or not; a 0.5deg rise in 50 years is extremely small in the scheme of things, and drawing the usual alarmist conclusions from this is quite unfounded.
So read the report itself:
The NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) shows radiative forcing relative to 1750, of all the long-lived greenhouse gases indexed to 1 for the year 1990. Since 1990, radiative forcing from greenhouse gases has increased 27.5%.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) are important atmospheric trace gases with significant man-made sources. Nitrous oxide has the third strongest anthropogenic climate forcing after CO2 and CH4 and is considered a major greenhouse gas (Butler 2009).
The atmospheric N2O budget is out of balance by one-third as a result of man-made emissions, primarily through emissions from nitrogen fertilizers (Crutzen et al. 2007).
Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continued to rise, with CO2 increasing at a rate above the 1978 to 2008 average. The global ocean CO2 uptake flux for 2008, the most recent year for which analyzed data are available, is estimated to have been 1.23 Pg C yr-1, which is 0.25 Pg C yr-1 smaller than the long-term average and the lowest estimated ocean uptake in the last 27 years. At the same time, the total global ocean inventory of anthropogenic carbon stored in the ocean interior as of 2008 suggests an uptake and storage of anthropogenic CO2 at rates of 2.0 and 2.3 ±0.6 Pg C yr-1 for the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, respectively.
In the tropics this increase has been formally attributed to anthropogenic change over the 1988–2006 period (Santer et al. 2007).
all the time series show an underlying rise in OHC consistent with our understanding of anthropogenic climate change.
I mean, the evidence is all over the report. The only thing stopping them from saying that it is conclusively man made is that 1) it's probably impossible to prove it and 2) there might always be some evidence of non anthropogenic warming contributing to the cause but not accounting for all of it.
So far, it's been a scorcher for folks all around the world. So it might come as no surprise that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released a report revealing 2010 having the record for warmest June, warmest April to June and warmest year to date. The announcement said 'Each of the 10 warmest average global temperatures recorded since 1880 have occurred in the last fifteen years. The warmest year-to-date on record, through June, was 1998, and 2010 is warmer so far.' So far we are even surpassing 1998's records which held the warmest year (despite directly contradicting reports). It certainly seems the scads of winter precipitation we enjoyed were no indication of how we would swelter through our summer this year. Will 2010 turn it around or are we set to break more records?
Aside from that, I'm not really interested in making comments on this anymore because I'm so sick and tired of the armchair idiocy that follows (and somehow gets moderated up). Prediction: Not even 300 scientists from 48 countries and NOAA are going to convince everyone that global warming is real. At this point, I think it's just going to get worse.
Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.
I never said to use the Facebook API.
... it would probably be a tree directory with a bunch of XML files and images. Maybe they want to put that into Diaspora and I would have a way that the system would autopopulate their diaspora with this archived data? Maybe they want to do their own thing with it? Maybe I could spend time doing this for Facebook and MySpace and Friendster and whatever you send me a link to?
;) No API ToS violations needed.
For a mental exercise let's imagine (and really maybe Perl is the better choice here) that I made a Ruby gem called SocialWalker or something of the sort and basically I used mechanize to log into Facebook after getting the user's credentials. Then the application connects to my webservice that sends the latest selector strings (harvested from the latest Facebook interface by hand with SelectorGadget) and also Nokogiri to quickly scrape off all the information and date/time stamps. I think the pictures would be a different kind of effort but completely feasible.
At that point, the user could save it in some documented open social file format that any application can read
Yeah, I might not be able to spider your posts on your friends walls and maybe I won't be able to get some information and maybe the new system won't let you back timestamp things so that data has to be put in the comments on your new photo albums.
Maybe Google could be petitioned to create this system instead of some developer who prefers to get drunk on the weekends instead of liberating social network users? Google is the god of scraping and caching after all.
But it would look like nothing more than one user looking at all their history one last time
They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.
Well let's travel backward in time to when Facebook was starting. Now let's rephrase your statement:
They're too late to join the game. The problem is that MySpace already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about really bad user design and spam won't make normal people switch over and all the bands will stay on MySpace since Facebook doesn't host music.
Now if we go a little further back to when MySpace was starting:
They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Friendster already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about ... about ... what was wrong with Friendster again?
Obviously the barrier you speak of has been broken down and it can be broken down again. You just have to understand your users better than Facebook does. And given the user feedback wouldn't you say that's possible to do?
...
I would counter that the real big dealbreaker would be ability to import all pictures and posts from Facebook into the new system. So you would have the user run an app from their local machine that needs their username and password and then scrapes everything off of Facebook while a loading bar processes it and then loads it into the new system. Option at the end to delete the Facebook account and maybe send an e-mail to Facebook telling them that if they don't permanently remove your user data from all their servers, you will get litigious. Of course, that's just a fantasy of mine
I don't feel there's any sense pining over this eventuality.
Well, if you firmly believe that video games and the digital interactions they provide to the player are art and part of our culture (and I personally do) then yes it does make sense for society to have a prerogative to save these video games. Why give up on video games when we've spent so much time, money and resources saving the Mona Lisa, Sistine Chapel, the Statue of Liberty or old phonograph recordings of dead musicians? Your view is quite callous to the hours spent developing and imagining these video games as well as the hours spent enjoying them.
Whatever plan that can be instituted to save games should be done now before too many consoles are lost to the ages.
Information doesn't want to be free. Some people want other people's information to be free, but that's about as far as it goes.
I found the original quote in its entirety to be a lot better at describing our trade off:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
It became some sort of rallying cry for some folks about some ideals. But if you really think about it, personifying information is quite idiotic. Information doesn't want to be free. It can't want anything. If there were no humans around information wouldn't do a whole lot. Certain kinds of information like DNA seem to have some unknown motive and mechanization to persist and mutate but the way we view information (as a product of other humans) is something that we want to be free and that we don't want to have to pay for. And really, the producers of the information want it to be expensive. They want their reward back for their work. And the consumers are still wanting it to be free. So the speech did an interesting job of boiling it down into one thing -- one thing that has both these very strong forces pulling on it. But then you have the legal system of most nations pulling it to be more expensive and litigious while at the same time technology pulls it paradoxically the other way. It's a capital tug of war game with the rope of information and when you say "information wants to be free" you're only talking about one side of the rope.
Who cares if you leave disks 10% full? To get rid of the minimum of 2 disks per server you need to boot from SAN, and disk space in the SAN is often 10x the cost of standard SAS disks. Especially if the server could make do with the two built-in disks and save the cost of an FC card + FC switch port.
I/O's per second on the other hand cost real money, so it is a waste to leave 15k and SSD disks idle. A quarter full does not matter if they are I/O saturated; the rest of the capacity is just wasted, but again you often cannot buy a disk a quarter of the size with the same I/O's per second.
I don't know too much about what you just said but I do know that the Linux images I get at work are virtual machines of a free distribution of Linux. I can request any size I want. But my databases often grow. And then the next thing is that a resizing of a partition is very expensive from our provisioner. So what do we do? We estimate how much space our web apps take up a month and then we request space for 10 years out. Because a resize of the partition is so damned expensive. And those sizes are usually pretty small anyway if you're building databases. Then we occasionally notify our managers when space is getting low by using the provisioner's dashboard tool and we re-assess the application. Is it getting unexpectedly popular or was it bad estimation from the beginning?
...
I don't know if I should be bothering with the hardware level of things. I sure do like it this way even though it is a really expensive price for the project but the payment remains inside our company anyway. It's internal to the company so we're all using some nebulous group of actual machines and RAIDs to produce a massive cloud of smaller servers as images. There are some downsides and a bit of overhead to pay for virtualization but I thought everyone had moved to this model
I'll bet there are about 100 million people who would like to test the security of Ron Bowes' nuts against a swift kick. I mean, he should be aware of the Extreme Pain vulnerability by now, and he should have taken the most basic security precautions by now, like wearing a cup. If not, well, he deserves what he gets, right?
+5 Insightful? Why is it that we regard Tavis Ormandy as someone trying to expose the insecurity of Microsoft when he releases a how-to exploit Windows hack but when a security researcher attempts to reveal how insecure Facebook's "Directory" service can be we attack him as the creator of that service and not Facebook?
I believe your anger would be better directed at Facebook. After all, this is posted in his blog for the world to see while a malware author could have just taken this list and run ncrack on it without anyone knowing.
I would also like to point out that, as mentioned many times in this thread, this is just a list. Not even real names but just usernames of people on Facebook. That means that if you find your username on this list, you can restrict your settings so that no one can see your public profile. Then if someone uses this URL list to look you up they get nothing.
So a security researcher tries to wake up Facebook users and he's the guy you want to kick in the nuts? Very curious.
This guy wrote a script to crawl Facebook and download everything he could.
It's not even about that, it's about a guy who wrote a script to collect usernames of everyone on facebook which double as the URL for their profiles. From there you can go and scrape everything you want. You don't even get their public information that they can chose to display on the front page like religion or real name. That's not even on there. No images, just URLs which double as logins.
This story is about a glorified crawler. No actual hacking transpired. No personal information that wasn't already revealed has been revealed. This is not news. In fact, I had to go back to TFS and double-check that kdawson wasn't the editor - that's how terrible this story really is.
It's worse than that. It's about a glorified crawler that was augmented with common names to create a list of possible usernames and URLs for Facebook. If you gave me a glorified crawler that collected interesting data inside a csv, I'd actually be a little interested in using it. Hell, anyone can do this in perl by coding for five minutes but it would take days for the thing to complete with a risk of banning from Facebook.
They say this in the article and from the original source. The summary is more than misleading and there's even less to say "big deal" about than you presupposed.
You're going to get a URL to pages. If the user has since made them inaccessible, you'll only get what you can from their public profile. Like, you cannot get to my friends list from my public profile. You'll get "potential" usernames to log into Facebook. Big deal. Remember when everyone could make a username for Facebook and that was also their profile URL? Well, now you can guess the most common names and add them to this list like david. Then you could use ncrack or whatever.
Not a whole lot in this file. Not like he scraped the pages of data and put that in a csv file for research or anything really interesting.
I don't think he even understands how the ads work.
All you have to understand is that
The author of the article is complaining that Google encourages poor behavior and then turns a dime on it through whatever ads end up being hosted at the websites that don't produce any actual content. You can claim they don't know this is happening or they don't care or they are laughing all the way to the bank. Either way the author appears to be correct in his analysis although you cannot be certain that Trends is where the crap websites find which terms are hot. Other sites could possibly measure this but would require a lot of indexing and resources to do so. So it's most likely Google Trends.
Well, it certainly is naive to think that considering that Google encourages it and they offer a PDF Starter Guide that instructs you how to alter your title, description and meta tags in your website to better your chances of coming up in the "organic" (not adwords) section of search results.
Does it matter?
Well, that's the article's argument. That it does matter because Google complains of the internet being a cesspool and yet here they are encouraging it with Trends. To you and I this is no problem. We don't care. To someone like Google that 0.1% of the end user experience might be worth millions of dollars to take care of because those end users are the eyeballs that sells their ad service to marketers of other companies. If Google perceives this to threaten the people that search their site then, yes, it does matter.
There might be some day when you sit down to use Google and you search for some popular music or terms and all you get is complete unadulterated feces on the first page of search results. And you might consider checking the other search engine pages for the same results. If this phenomena could cause that to happen then, yes, Google will care very much.
"US 'heat ray' gun fails final test"
This morning, when I read this article and submitted it to Slashdot, that was the title. The words "fails final test" were all over the article. Unfortunately Google doesn't seem to offer a cache for it but those words are all over.
The summary isn't wrong, it's just that the BBC changed their story. In the original version the final test was actually putting it to use in Afghanistan. And the US Military Leaders decided ADS doesn't work in that war scenario.
The ADS is the wrong tool for the job.
So if you use the wrong tool for the job and it doesn't work wouldn't you call that failing?
They need to find whoever made that stupid decision and hit them with it.
Who knows? I mean, there was a very interesting thread on the last story about how to circumvent it. Perhaps the first thing they did with it was turn it on their own soldiers only to find out that a resourceful individual could easily bypass it with shielding or simple armor? If that's the case, what's the point of deploying more expensive bulky power consuming equipment when you're most likely going to end up using lethal force anyway? They could have identified this as one ineffective step in a cat-and-mouse game ... the details were thin as I submitted this I looked for more sources than the BBC but came up short.
But for some reason the firehose put it down to purple and it was rejected. I understand he's a media whore with shady beginnings but what was everyone afraid of? That the interview would go poorly and he'd start releasing sensitive Slashdot information? :-)
Chatroulette, the strangely addictive online game ...
So you're strangely addicted to staring at male genetalia? I think we all just learned a little something about littlekorea.
That is by far the most positive review of that web site I have ever encountered. Personally I've used the service precisely once. Discovering what happened during that usage is left as an exercise to the reader.
The founder of Chatroulette has announced the company has hired developers to collect IP addresses and take screenshots of those users breaking the rules.
And then what? Actually it sounds like they have already done this:
"We've captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behaviour.
"We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have."
Are they going to press charges? Do you think that site created by a lone developer has the legal resources to do that against that many offenders? Do you really think any law enforcement agency has the resources to investigate thousands of complaints with little more than a screenshot of someone's junk and their IP address? It's the internet. Your effort is futile. What ever happened to the recognition software? Has that already fallen through? Too many false positives? Light problems?
Is this site about news for nerds, or gratuitously bashing companies and/or their customers for no discernible logical reason?
This site is about generating readership and discourse because that leads to more ad views which is their primary source of income. You may accuse them of baiting the users to incite a veritable shitstorm of comments with a particular summary instead of having actual valuable content or you can claim that this is what interests nerds and therefore should be reported on. Both are true. Plus it's CmdrTaco editing which can be more volatile than the other editors.
I would posit that particularly resentful stories that are sure to create serious nerd carnage are accepted when they come from high profile sources. What I mean is that this is coming from Wired which has one of the higher approval ratings of nerd news out there and not some unknown site. You're free to go to the original source for more data (which, ironically, is an unknown site but does a good job of visualizing the survey data).
Reminds me of a little known story by Alan Moore with art by Mark Beyer called The Bowing Machine except it's not a comic ...
I still can't get over that he said "We let them teach evolution to our children..." as though this is some sort of compromise with liberals or something...
I think they're having problems with the textbooks when they say "them." And it's not really a compromise as they pushed it into an either/or scenario. The logic of the comments in the article seemed to follow this sort of path: 1. We believe (note, not their constituents, them) in creationism so there should be a way for teachers to also teach that in the classroom 2. When children learn one thing from one adult an opposing thing from another adult, the child interprets this as confusion and sometimes exploit it to undermine authority and we already have a problem with that so 4. Only creationism or evolution should be taught to our students but 5. We probably shouldn't be deciding that at this meeting so (thank the flying spaghetti monster) we should form a committee to investigate it.
So it sounds like the resolution was to form a committee to decide if evolution or creationism should be taught in the classroom. Should be entertaining and maybe even tragic.
By erasing external memories, he says in the book, 'our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.'
But what if there is no negative response to your behavior? I mean, in the situation quoted in the summary there was no illegal activity. A high school teacher went to a party and got drunk. Nothing illegal there. Sounds like she had some fun (the horror!). So let's assume no picture was taken and no picture was posted on MySpace and she wasn't terminated from her teaching position or dropped from her enrollment in teaching. What negative response would she receive that would stop her from ever doing that again?
None.
Because there shouldn't be a negative response to that. This is some scarlet letter bullshit where no laws are broken but you've offended someone's morals even though it was on your own time and therefore you should be fired. This isn't about forgetting on the web, it's about managing your public image. Some people are slow to catch on that if it's on the internet, the world can see it. So don't put your dirty laundry on the internet. There are plenty of bumps on the social side of things. Plenty of embarrassing social gaffs on sites like MySpace and Facebook but for things like forums and Slashdot it's great that everything is permanently remembered for reference in the future.
Really this is just the old Facebook privacy issue and their total abuse of their clients. Balancing features with privacy is nothing new -- it's just on a much much larger level now.
I got hit with a login when I tried to use the link in the summary but was able to surf to this link. You'll get a splash advertisement for the Economist or something but I'd wager most people would tolerate that more than logging in.
I got a wireless mouse and keyboard working on my XBox 360 and then played through Modern Warfare 2 in single player mode. On my back projection TV from 1999, I was doing on average a lot better on XBox live than I was with the control pad. We set it up on my friends massive LCD with a very high response time and I felt unstoppable. It seems when you increase the input devices and give me finer tuned control I can concentrate on that and get further up the curve more easily. Might not be the same for some people but if you want to walk all over people, see if your device supports keyboard and mouse through USB and then relearn the game. It took a while but it got to the point of not being fun anymore.
I'd imagine on average the PC user would trounce the XBox 360 user. For me the killer aspect was reducing having to use my thumbs on two joysticks to look around down to the two dimensional plan of my mouse pad. Had to tweak the sensitivity a bit but really two different worlds.
The owned of acdc-bootlegs.com site mentioned in the summary isn't exactly innocent either.
To begin with, the site is devoted to offer downloads of bootlegs, which according to current copyright laws is illegal. Even if you don't think it's a big deal, you have to go by laws.
So when those copyright holders come knocking, he should be prosecuted for that. Why are you trying to smear together two separate cases of alleged copyright infringement? Is it easier to wave your hands and say "it'll never happen to Slashdot?" If you're trying to put me at ease that this won't happen to me because I don't also commit other crimes, it's not working. I submit many articles to Slashdot and I quote many articles in my comments here as I dissect news. Will they sue me for my karma?
The way the /. story title and summary is worded makes it sound bad, but this guy is also blatantly breaking several laws and frauding advertisers to generate money. He just got what he asked for. He should be happy AC/DC or Google hasn't sued him.
Then let him be charged for click fraud (is that even illegal?) and bootlegging movies. If he's being charged for reposting news articles, we should probably talk about that and the sort of growing mentality that may come with it if it turns out to be profitable to sue under. I don't care about his speeding tickets or other things he may be guilty of. Your ad hominem attack may help in a court of law as character assassination but given the number of these suits, it's not putting me at ease.
In response to the second step in the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure ("Step 2: Hurry Up and Wait"), I've printed several copies of the CVD on quadruple ply tissue paper and stocked all the restrooms with it. I've also prepared a special four course meal for Mr. Ormandy consisting of Taco Bell, a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a spoonful of castor oil.
Mr. Ormandy, I think you know what to do. I really found it amusing that they called the blog posting "Bringing Balance to the Force" when it looks to be completely defined by Microsoft with little or no input from the community.
The horrible thing about Android is that phone makers can do anything they want with it.
“It’s different from phone to phone and operator to operator,” says Keith Nowak, spokesman for HTC. “But in general, the apps are put there to meet the operator’s business and revenue needs.”
Nowak must be new to PR. He was supposed to spin it as "free apps, everybody wins!" But instead he handed out a healthy dosage of the truth. Enjoy it, it rarely happens.