Part of the problem is, the examples are really too small to call either way.
Interestingly enough, I recently took a peek at one of Linus' latest patches (regarding the OS' ability to patch without rebooting), and examined the use of goto in that code. This is "real world" code, and saw three uses of goto, and each one seemed perfectly reasonable and easy-to-follow.
You'll see malware definitions (Windows Defender) pretty often, but these are tiny and never require a reboot. They should be practically invisible to you, and I don't think MS really considers them "patches" per se. I also see Flash updates more frequently - that also shouldn't require a reboot, but I don't use Flash so I'm not sure. Obviously, MS doesn't control the timing of those patches - that's Adobe, but MS apparently just pushes them along. There are occasionally out-of-band patches as well that don't fall under the regular schedule, but these seem to be fairly rare. On rare occasions, errors in patches are rolled back fairly soon after - I think that happened a couple of times in the last year - it almost always makes news.
The "Patch Tuesday" was largely created to make things easier for enterprise customers by MS, so they'd have more predictable patching schedules. Generally, large enterprises will control the patching themselves, first testing the patches out on test machines, and then deploying them across the company workstations in a controlled fashion.
For consumer customers, it just generally means we pull down the bulk of the patches directly from MS within a day or two of that time. Maybe your experience is different from mine, but I really do typically only have to reboot my Window machine once a month because of patches.
Ah, I see, so it's a real-time library function pointer fixup then... no need to shutdown and restart processes at all (which would make it much less useful, I guess). I guess by nature there wouldn't typically be any changes that should have extraneous side effects from C-style library functions, so this should work pretty well in practice.
Well, naturally, a goto makes no sense if you only need to return a constant. To clarify, a goto (or similar jump construct) typically only makes sense in error conditions where you have a lot of common cleanup code AND when you have a number of sequential error checks, often return values from functions, that must be called in sequence.
You don't want to have to repeat that cleanup code after each error check. So, assuming you don't want a horrendous nest of if/else conditions, you can either use goto error, or you can perhaps use an empty for statement and break-on-error to achieve the same sort of effect.
In either case, unnecessarily duplicating the cleanup code is, in my opinion, a far worse offense than a goto or slightly non-standard for/break use.
Really? Honestly, that's sounds a tiny bit "urban legend-ish" to me. If you can find links about that with data about specific makes and models, then I'll be convinced, but until then, call me skeptical.
As of just a couple of years ago (when I bought my TV), most owners of smart TVs did not connect them to the internet. I'm betting that hasn't changed all that significantly in only two years. If so, any manufacturer who pulled a stunt like would undoubtedly get a wave of complaints and product returns. It's hard for me to imagine they'd subject themselves to something like that. Remember the Xbox One and the hoopla about requiring an internet connection?
Actually, once a month - second Tuesday of the month is patch day.
I read the commit notes, but am still a bit fuzzy at how the system can patch code that's currently in use by running processes... Does anyone understand the mechanism used to do this? The mention of stop_machine() suggests that processes affected by the patch are being shut down and restarted. If that's the case, then although the machine isn't necessarily rebooted, processes may go down and come back up during this procedure, right? Or am I misinterpreting this?
The most common one I see, people can't quite bring themselves to "return" from an error handler in the middle of a function, so they instead GOTO the end of it.
I'd bet this is because of another slavishly followed idiom, which is that it's considered a bad practice to return early from functions. I'd guess that argument gets made because it's easy to miss the fact that the function is returning early, and thus accidentally leak a resource that was allocated earlier. While this is a good principle in general, it's always important to understand there are good exceptions for most any rules or idioms.
Generally speaking, I tend to use early returns exclusively for error conditions (when writing or interfacing with C code, for instance) - for anything else, I try not to break the flow of the function. If it's complex enough to need early returns, then it's probably time to break things up into another function.
As for GOTOs, I very, very rarely use them (if ever). There are almost always reasonable alternatives in which you can avoid them. That being said, I really have no problem with the very common idiom of a GOTO for errors ending at a label at the end of a C function for common resource cleanup. It's a pattern that any moderately experienced programmer would look at and understand completely at a glance.
Of course, if someone was using that idiom in C++ code (when not interfacing with C code at least), then I'd have a chat with the programmer responsible to find out why they did that.
Same here. I picked up a 60" LCD TV that had a smattering of "smart" features, and I never use them. Simply don't allow your TV to be hooked up to your internal network. Besides which, the built-in stuff is typically horrid (badly designed, terrible performance), and some companies actually have the gall to show ads when you're using the smart features - not to mention the latest gaff of sending your private conversations out over the internet. Screw that.
BTW, you'll often find that TVs are sold in several variations among the same brand and family. You can often save hundreds of dollars by choosing the lowest-end variant among the family of model variants. The difference is often some subtle display technology and a bunch more "smart" features. It's likely you might not even notice the difference in picture quality, and you've indicated you don't want those smart features anyhow. Nowadays, even "low end" LCD TVs like the one I purchased a few years ago have fantastic visual quality - at least to my eyes.
If you've got a console, use that as a media player. They're much better at it anyhow. Or, you can buy purpose-built media devices pretty cheap nowadays as well.
the "users" scores (and reviews) tend to be more reliable in terms of not being overly critical of games that are generally pretty good
In my experience, users are very extreme in their assigned scores. If they enjoy the game, they assign it a 100 (ZOMG, Best Game EVAR!!!). If they didn't enjoy the game for some reason, it rates a 0 (WTF?! Worst !@#$!@ game of ALL TIME!!!). There are often relatively few scores in the middle. Also, user ratings will often pick up on issues that the press doesn't touch, though, which is a good thing. For instance, when a company introduces intrusive DRM, or if an online-only game has a very bad launch, users will flood the systems with very low scores, where professional scores would not have touched (or perhaps seen) these issues.
Generally speaking, if a game gets universal praise, there's probably something worthwhile about it, at least to many people. If it generally gets horrid scores, you know that there's something seriously wrong. No, review scores aren't pointless at all. If you want to get the details, then read the actual review, and you can find out if you agree with those specific points or not.
Eurogamer isn't really dropping the score, incidentally. They're just moving to a "four star" system ("Avoid", "No Recommendation", "Recommended", and "Essential"). In truth, I think that's probably a more honest way of scoring, because it's sort of silly to try to rank a different games based on a one or two percentage points of difference, which is probably completely arbitrary. For instance, what's the difference between a game that ranks 90% on metacritic and one that ranks 89% ? Answer: one more high profile review gave it a five out of five stars instead of four out of five stars. This also avoids the problem of having to try to rank very different genres against each other, or try to convey what a particular score "means" (there's almost always a chart along with the score). In a sense, giving it one of four rankings is sort of cutting out the score as a middleman.
Also, honestly, I sort of wonder if dropping numeric ratings is a way for gaming sites to give themselves an "out" with publishers, who may apply pressure if their review scores are too low. I've heard of bonus and such being tied to metacritic review scores, which is a pretty nasty thing to do to your employees, IMO. Also, I'm guessing websites don't care to have their review simply aggregated by metacritic into a single, unified score.
Agreed. As the saying goes: "The devil is in the details".
It's often very easy and quick to write the "core" functionality, but dealing with exceptions (both in workflow and code), one-offs and special rules, shifting requirements, scope creep, etc, etc... It may not be core, but it's a huge amount of work to write it all. I remember a saying that went something like "80 percent done... now you've only got 80 percent to go", meaning that the perception of being "nearly finished" is much different than the reality.
It's especially bad when you're racing to meet a milestone with payment tied to specific functionality (I've seen this in the videogame industry), and just barely write enough code to more or less hit that "easy" initial 80 percent, but never get that "last 80 percent" until the end of the project. It ends up as a hellish crunch-mode disaster at the end of the projects, with managers not understanding why the project seems to implode near the end.
It reminds me of the (now bankrupt) Radio Shack stores that insisted I give them my phone number whenever I purchased anything from them, even if I paid cash. I figured it was none of their damned business what my home phone number was, so I simple refused to give it to them. The poor clerk stammered and told me that their computer required it to ring up the purchase, so I told them to enter 123-456-7890 or something stupid like that. Modern grocery stores are also annoying with their stupid "club cards" or whatever they want to call them that track all your purchases.
I sort of wonder if we're the last generation that's going to really care whether we're tracked and monitored by everyone and everything? Maybe the kids that grow up in this world will wonder why we kicked up such a fuss about it...
Every time I order pizza from pizza hut, I put in a bullshit name and address.
I'm rather curious how the driver finds your front door with a made-up address...?
That aside, I think something that labor intensive and impractical is really never going to catch on, since it requires a good deal of extra work by normal people to really work. I think total, end-to-end encryption for anything you don't want snooped on is the only real, practical solution. I'm not nearly as worried about Pizza Hut collecting my ordering habits. But I only surf behind a VPN now. My ISP sees nothing but pseudo-random noise. I suppose the NSA might be able to theoretically piece together outbound and inbound traffic from the commercial VPN's exit to the open net that I use, but at least I'm making it a hell of a lot harder for them. Also, there's actually good, viable end-to-end personal chat-type communication available now as well in products like Threema and WhatsApp, if people care enough to make use of it. I think the trick is that we need to make it dead-simple for everyone to use, and tell them "if you don't want to be snooped on - use this".
I remain unconvinced that the NSA eavesdropping program will ever be shut down. Maybe the only way would be to de-fund it, I suppose. It's incredibly hard to dismantle government bureaucracies once they've been established, as history has shown us.
Excellently argued. Apparently people don't realize how incredibly difficult it was to get all the states to sign onto the new Constitution, and the compromises involved and why they occurred. The states were very close to actual independent nations in practice (i.e. actual "states" - you have no idea how much it confused me growing up learning how outside of the US, a "state" was a sovereign nation), and there's simply no way they would have signed on had any attempt been made to interfere with slavery, which was seen as the foundation of the entire southern state's economies, as you indicated. This is all very well documented.
No kidding. Quite a few years ago, I was part of a robotics club that competed in walking robotics contests, so I have a bit of appreciation for how amazing these machines actually are. They're making incredible progress with these devices. It's amazingly fun to see how "organically" the robots respond to a loss of balance or footing.
It's a little sad that it's the military that has to fund these things, but I'm sure that civilians will eventually reap the benefits of this R&D. After all, the internet and GPS were both military-funded project as well.
Note to self: erase footage of early robots getting kicked by humans before they achieve overlord status.
There's a standard for speech recognition already, as long as you're talking about "intelligent agents", which the Xbox One is certainly not: Natural English (or insert your language here) conversation. The gold standard, no pun intended, should be to phrase queries or commands in such a manner that any reasonably intelligent native speaker could easily understand your intent, and the computer should perform those tasks or retrieve that information for you.
At this point, the only reason there's jarring inconsistencies is because these systems are still very primitive. In essence, for Android, I more or less can expect my statements to be translated into the equivalent of a Google search. As long as the keywords are there, it can more or less pull up any information I need within some reasonable limits. I know Siri has some specific queries that the system recognizes, but I haven't played with it or Cortana yet to know how complex those can get.
The Xbox One and Siri have two different "interfaces" because they have completely different goals. This is natural. The Xbox one has no need for natural language processing - it just needs to recognize a specific and limited set of commands. It would be more accurate to compare Siri to Cortana. And with all new technologies, it will take a while of experimenting to find something that works well, and does so naturally and seamlessly. Then everyone will copy it, corporations will try to patent it, and sue the ever-living crap out of the copiers, etc, etc. Live and business goes on...
I see plenty of male waiters and grocery store clerks where I live. They may be slightly skewed female, but probably not *nearly* as skewed as kindergarten teachers and nurses. Both of those professions are not hugely paying, but not bottom of the barrel wage-wise either (they both require significant education as well).
I'd say secretaries, office managers, executive assistants are probably even more skewed as well. Probably most are fairly low paying but decent jobs, especially for entry-level workers.
Have you noticed a trend here? Jobs requiring nurturing or excellent interpersonal skills but no physical demands often are highly female dominated. Add rigorous physical demands or highly analytical skills, and then the jobs become male dominated. And I'll bet there are plenty of feminists who would call me sexist for daring to say that - that I'm perpetrating "gender roles".
This is all about a certain number of people refusing to accept that many thousands of years of evolution has programmed females to be nurturing and socially adept, and males to be physically aggressive and analytical problem solvers. No one is saying that females can't be excellent programmers, or that males can't be wonderful kindergarten teachers, but by default, our gender programming tends to work against it, so those people tend to be exceptions rather than the norm.
This isn't about me wanting to keep women out of CS either. I'd love to have more females in the sausage-fests where I currently work. But if they're not interested in that work, I'm not sure the right approach is to who try to point fingers at what portion of our society is turning them away from tech. No one wants to breach the "inconvenient truth" that the answer probably lies in our genes.
Oh, and I totally forgot to include the benefits you get with SAAS (Software As A Service), if that's indeed what this is, namely, that:
a) Your TV won't function properly if you disconnect it from your internet or network, or if there's some sort of network interruption of any sort, and b) If Samsung either goes out of business or decides it doesn't want to bother paying for the voice translation servers anymore (and THAT never happens, right?), your voice activation functionality will suddenly stop working a number of years from now.
The initial panic I'm seeing around this looks ill-informed
Not really, I've seen a number of explanations (like yours) that state exactly why and how this is happening. What I'm also seeing is that, post Snowden, we can no longer trust that any of our personal data will not be collected and misused, period. I'd be surprised if Samsung even took the rudimentary step of encrypting this data, or if they did, probably used a fixed key burned into the firmware. Internet Of Things companies have been historically bad at security. If so, it would mean that data would be immediately available to anyone who wants to grab it. It would be trivial for the government to match up the data to known IP addresses pointed at by other metadata for a given date and time.
Five years ago, I'm not sure how much I would have worried about this. This used to be tinfoil-hat sort of stuff. Nowadays, it's almost guaranteed that this data will be collected by the NSA and stored indefinitely. I'll bet they're training their own systems to listen in on key "phrases of interest" from these sorts of smart TVs. If I was in the NSA trying to figure out ways to snoop, I sure as hell would be looking into how to exploit an always-on microphone in every house. Seriously, with all we've learned about what's happening, is the worst case scenario all that implausible?
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Samsung says. An always-on microphone that transmits your voice from the living room across the internet is a bad idea in today's world, I'm sorry to say. There's a reason the phone company is heavily regulated. As they say, "this is why we can't have nice things."
Well, for #1 and #2, I think the police are going to have to learn how to sniff these situations out through additional training or procedures. At this point, I think we're probably putting people MORE at risk by not trying to contact the people at these residences before busting in with a SWAT team. We probably have to ask ourselves - what are the odds of a false alarm versus an actual situation like you described, which are probably more likely to occur in a Hollywood script than in real life?
If it's a matter of time-based urgency, it seems like a second officer could initiate a call while the caller is on the line in a very short amount of time, long before a SWAT team can be assembled and move to the scene - which I'm guessing probably takes 20 to 30 minutes minimum.
#3 sounds like a technical failing that needs to be addressed to make spoofing more difficult.
Anyhow, thanks for the info. Those do sound like pretty plausible explanations for the current situation.
This is known as internet background noise. Like you said, *everyone* is being continuously scanned and probed for weaknesses, non-stop. For instance, set up a honeypot with an unpatched Windows XP machine open to the net, and I'll bet it's compromised surprisingly quickly.
Restrained, yes, executed, no. Five years in prison was mentioned in the article. I think that sounds just about right. Oh, and no more online access for him for some period of time after release as part of his probation. Internet access can obviously be every bit as much a weapon as a firearm, and he's probably going to go right back and make trouble if he's allowed, unfortunately.
I agree that in the article, they should talk about "perpetrators" or "culprits", not "pranksters". None of my pranks ever had the remotest possibility of someone accidentally getting killed by police weapons. One of these days, something is going to go very badly during a "prank" SWAT raid, and someone is going to die.
Here's a question: Why are police not calling back the houses in question to ascertain if there's actually an incident occurring? I'd think this would be standard procedure by now, with all the swatting that's happened.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem is, the examples are really too small to call either way.
Interestingly enough, I recently took a peek at one of Linus' latest patches (regarding the OS' ability to patch without rebooting), and examined the use of goto in that code. This is "real world" code, and saw three uses of goto, and each one seemed perfectly reasonable and easy-to-follow.
You'll see malware definitions (Windows Defender) pretty often, but these are tiny and never require a reboot. They should be practically invisible to you, and I don't think MS really considers them "patches" per se. I also see Flash updates more frequently - that also shouldn't require a reboot, but I don't use Flash so I'm not sure. Obviously, MS doesn't control the timing of those patches - that's Adobe, but MS apparently just pushes them along. There are occasionally out-of-band patches as well that don't fall under the regular schedule, but these seem to be fairly rare. On rare occasions, errors in patches are rolled back fairly soon after - I think that happened a couple of times in the last year - it almost always makes news.
The "Patch Tuesday" was largely created to make things easier for enterprise customers by MS, so they'd have more predictable patching schedules. Generally, large enterprises will control the patching themselves, first testing the patches out on test machines, and then deploying them across the company workstations in a controlled fashion.
For consumer customers, it just generally means we pull down the bulk of the patches directly from MS within a day or two of that time. Maybe your experience is different from mine, but I really do typically only have to reboot my Window machine once a month because of patches.
I'm not very familiar with Linix programming yet, which is why I tried to ask nicely for an explanation. Sorry for not already being omniscient.
Ah, I see, so it's a real-time library function pointer fixup then... no need to shutdown and restart processes at all (which would make it much less useful, I guess). I guess by nature there wouldn't typically be any changes that should have extraneous side effects from C-style library functions, so this should work pretty well in practice.
Thanks for the high-level explanation!
Well, naturally, a goto makes no sense if you only need to return a constant. To clarify, a goto (or similar jump construct) typically only makes sense in error conditions where you have a lot of common cleanup code AND when you have a number of sequential error checks, often return values from functions, that must be called in sequence.
You don't want to have to repeat that cleanup code after each error check. So, assuming you don't want a horrendous nest of if/else conditions, you can either use goto error, or you can perhaps use an empty for statement and break-on-error to achieve the same sort of effect.
In either case, unnecessarily duplicating the cleanup code is, in my opinion, a far worse offense than a goto or slightly non-standard for/break use.
Really? Honestly, that's sounds a tiny bit "urban legend-ish" to me. If you can find links about that with data about specific makes and models, then I'll be convinced, but until then, call me skeptical.
As of just a couple of years ago (when I bought my TV), most owners of smart TVs did not connect them to the internet. I'm betting that hasn't changed all that significantly in only two years. If so, any manufacturer who pulled a stunt like would undoubtedly get a wave of complaints and product returns. It's hard for me to imagine they'd subject themselves to something like that. Remember the Xbox One and the hoopla about requiring an internet connection?
Actually, once a month - second Tuesday of the month is patch day.
I read the commit notes, but am still a bit fuzzy at how the system can patch code that's currently in use by running processes... Does anyone understand the mechanism used to do this? The mention of stop_machine() suggests that processes affected by the patch are being shut down and restarted. If that's the case, then although the machine isn't necessarily rebooted, processes may go down and come back up during this procedure, right? Or am I misinterpreting this?
The most common one I see, people can't quite bring themselves to "return" from an error handler in the middle of a function, so they instead GOTO the end of it.
I'd bet this is because of another slavishly followed idiom, which is that it's considered a bad practice to return early from functions. I'd guess that argument gets made because it's easy to miss the fact that the function is returning early, and thus accidentally leak a resource that was allocated earlier. While this is a good principle in general, it's always important to understand there are good exceptions for most any rules or idioms.
Generally speaking, I tend to use early returns exclusively for error conditions (when writing or interfacing with C code, for instance) - for anything else, I try not to break the flow of the function. If it's complex enough to need early returns, then it's probably time to break things up into another function.
As for GOTOs, I very, very rarely use them (if ever). There are almost always reasonable alternatives in which you can avoid them. That being said, I really have no problem with the very common idiom of a GOTO for errors ending at a label at the end of a C function for common resource cleanup. It's a pattern that any moderately experienced programmer would look at and understand completely at a glance.
Of course, if someone was using that idiom in C++ code (when not interfacing with C code at least), then I'd have a chat with the programmer responsible to find out why they did that.
Same here. I picked up a 60" LCD TV that had a smattering of "smart" features, and I never use them. Simply don't allow your TV to be hooked up to your internal network. Besides which, the built-in stuff is typically horrid (badly designed, terrible performance), and some companies actually have the gall to show ads when you're using the smart features - not to mention the latest gaff of sending your private conversations out over the internet. Screw that.
BTW, you'll often find that TVs are sold in several variations among the same brand and family. You can often save hundreds of dollars by choosing the lowest-end variant among the family of model variants. The difference is often some subtle display technology and a bunch more "smart" features. It's likely you might not even notice the difference in picture quality, and you've indicated you don't want those smart features anyhow. Nowadays, even "low end" LCD TVs like the one I purchased a few years ago have fantastic visual quality - at least to my eyes.
If you've got a console, use that as a media player. They're much better at it anyhow. Or, you can buy purpose-built media devices pretty cheap nowadays as well.
the "users" scores (and reviews) tend to be more reliable in terms of not being overly critical of games that are generally pretty good
In my experience, users are very extreme in their assigned scores. If they enjoy the game, they assign it a 100 (ZOMG, Best Game EVAR!!!). If they didn't enjoy the game for some reason, it rates a 0 (WTF?! Worst !@#$!@ game of ALL TIME!!!). There are often relatively few scores in the middle. Also, user ratings will often pick up on issues that the press doesn't touch, though, which is a good thing. For instance, when a company introduces intrusive DRM, or if an online-only game has a very bad launch, users will flood the systems with very low scores, where professional scores would not have touched (or perhaps seen) these issues.
Generally speaking, if a game gets universal praise, there's probably something worthwhile about it, at least to many people. If it generally gets horrid scores, you know that there's something seriously wrong. No, review scores aren't pointless at all. If you want to get the details, then read the actual review, and you can find out if you agree with those specific points or not.
Eurogamer isn't really dropping the score, incidentally. They're just moving to a "four star" system ("Avoid", "No Recommendation", "Recommended", and "Essential"). In truth, I think that's probably a more honest way of scoring, because it's sort of silly to try to rank a different games based on a one or two percentage points of difference, which is probably completely arbitrary. For instance, what's the difference between a game that ranks 90% on metacritic and one that ranks 89% ? Answer: one more high profile review gave it a five out of five stars instead of four out of five stars. This also avoids the problem of having to try to rank very different genres against each other, or try to convey what a particular score "means" (there's almost always a chart along with the score). In a sense, giving it one of four rankings is sort of cutting out the score as a middleman.
Also, honestly, I sort of wonder if dropping numeric ratings is a way for gaming sites to give themselves an "out" with publishers, who may apply pressure if their review scores are too low. I've heard of bonus and such being tied to metacritic review scores, which is a pretty nasty thing to do to your employees, IMO. Also, I'm guessing websites don't care to have their review simply aggregated by metacritic into a single, unified score.
Agreed. As the saying goes: "The devil is in the details".
It's often very easy and quick to write the "core" functionality, but dealing with exceptions (both in workflow and code), one-offs and special rules, shifting requirements, scope creep, etc, etc... It may not be core, but it's a huge amount of work to write it all. I remember a saying that went something like "80 percent done... now you've only got 80 percent to go", meaning that the perception of being "nearly finished" is much different than the reality.
It's especially bad when you're racing to meet a milestone with payment tied to specific functionality (I've seen this in the videogame industry), and just barely write enough code to more or less hit that "easy" initial 80 percent, but never get that "last 80 percent" until the end of the project. It ends up as a hellish crunch-mode disaster at the end of the projects, with managers not understanding why the project seems to implode near the end.
Ugh, I see why that would annoy you.
It reminds me of the (now bankrupt) Radio Shack stores that insisted I give them my phone number whenever I purchased anything from them, even if I paid cash. I figured it was none of their damned business what my home phone number was, so I simple refused to give it to them. The poor clerk stammered and told me that their computer required it to ring up the purchase, so I told them to enter 123-456-7890 or something stupid like that. Modern grocery stores are also annoying with their stupid "club cards" or whatever they want to call them that track all your purchases.
I sort of wonder if we're the last generation that's going to really care whether we're tracked and monitored by everyone and everything? Maybe the kids that grow up in this world will wonder why we kicked up such a fuss about it...
Ah, yeah... after I posted that, I read the summary a bit more carefully and saw they were purchased by Google.
Every time I order pizza from pizza hut, I put in a bullshit name and address.
I'm rather curious how the driver finds your front door with a made-up address...?
That aside, I think something that labor intensive and impractical is really never going to catch on, since it requires a good deal of extra work by normal people to really work. I think total, end-to-end encryption for anything you don't want snooped on is the only real, practical solution. I'm not nearly as worried about Pizza Hut collecting my ordering habits. But I only surf behind a VPN now. My ISP sees nothing but pseudo-random noise. I suppose the NSA might be able to theoretically piece together outbound and inbound traffic from the commercial VPN's exit to the open net that I use, but at least I'm making it a hell of a lot harder for them. Also, there's actually good, viable end-to-end personal chat-type communication available now as well in products like Threema and WhatsApp, if people care enough to make use of it. I think the trick is that we need to make it dead-simple for everyone to use, and tell them "if you don't want to be snooped on - use this".
I remain unconvinced that the NSA eavesdropping program will ever be shut down. Maybe the only way would be to de-fund it, I suppose. It's incredibly hard to dismantle government bureaucracies once they've been established, as history has shown us.
Excellently argued. Apparently people don't realize how incredibly difficult it was to get all the states to sign onto the new Constitution, and the compromises involved and why they occurred. The states were very close to actual independent nations in practice (i.e. actual "states" - you have no idea how much it confused me growing up learning how outside of the US, a "state" was a sovereign nation), and there's simply no way they would have signed on had any attempt been made to interfere with slavery, which was seen as the foundation of the entire southern state's economies, as you indicated. This is all very well documented.
Had I mod points, I'd give you some +Informative.
No kidding. Quite a few years ago, I was part of a robotics club that competed in walking robotics contests, so I have a bit of appreciation for how amazing these machines actually are. They're making incredible progress with these devices. It's amazingly fun to see how "organically" the robots respond to a loss of balance or footing.
It's a little sad that it's the military that has to fund these things, but I'm sure that civilians will eventually reap the benefits of this R&D. After all, the internet and GPS were both military-funded project as well.
Note to self: erase footage of early robots getting kicked by humans before they achieve overlord status.
There's a standard for speech recognition already, as long as you're talking about "intelligent agents", which the Xbox One is certainly not: Natural English (or insert your language here) conversation. The gold standard, no pun intended, should be to phrase queries or commands in such a manner that any reasonably intelligent native speaker could easily understand your intent, and the computer should perform those tasks or retrieve that information for you.
At this point, the only reason there's jarring inconsistencies is because these systems are still very primitive. In essence, for Android, I more or less can expect my statements to be translated into the equivalent of a Google search. As long as the keywords are there, it can more or less pull up any information I need within some reasonable limits. I know Siri has some specific queries that the system recognizes, but I haven't played with it or Cortana yet to know how complex those can get.
The Xbox One and Siri have two different "interfaces" because they have completely different goals. This is natural. The Xbox one has no need for natural language processing - it just needs to recognize a specific and limited set of commands. It would be more accurate to compare Siri to Cortana. And with all new technologies, it will take a while of experimenting to find something that works well, and does so naturally and seamlessly. Then everyone will copy it, corporations will try to patent it, and sue the ever-living crap out of the copiers, etc, etc. Live and business goes on...
I see plenty of male waiters and grocery store clerks where I live. They may be slightly skewed female, but probably not *nearly* as skewed as kindergarten teachers and nurses. Both of those professions are not hugely paying, but not bottom of the barrel wage-wise either (they both require significant education as well).
I'd say secretaries, office managers, executive assistants are probably even more skewed as well. Probably most are fairly low paying but decent jobs, especially for entry-level workers.
Have you noticed a trend here? Jobs requiring nurturing or excellent interpersonal skills but no physical demands often are highly female dominated. Add rigorous physical demands or highly analytical skills, and then the jobs become male dominated. And I'll bet there are plenty of feminists who would call me sexist for daring to say that - that I'm perpetrating "gender roles".
This is all about a certain number of people refusing to accept that many thousands of years of evolution has programmed females to be nurturing and socially adept, and males to be physically aggressive and analytical problem solvers. No one is saying that females can't be excellent programmers, or that males can't be wonderful kindergarten teachers, but by default, our gender programming tends to work against it, so those people tend to be exceptions rather than the norm.
This isn't about me wanting to keep women out of CS either. I'd love to have more females in the sausage-fests where I currently work. But if they're not interested in that work, I'm not sure the right approach is to who try to point fingers at what portion of our society is turning them away from tech. No one wants to breach the "inconvenient truth" that the answer probably lies in our genes.
Oh, and I totally forgot to include the benefits you get with SAAS (Software As A Service), if that's indeed what this is, namely, that:
a) Your TV won't function properly if you disconnect it from your internet or network, or if there's some sort of network interruption of any sort, and
b) If Samsung either goes out of business or decides it doesn't want to bother paying for the voice translation servers anymore (and THAT never happens, right?), your voice activation functionality will suddenly stop working a number of years from now.
The initial panic I'm seeing around this looks ill-informed
Not really, I've seen a number of explanations (like yours) that state exactly why and how this is happening. What I'm also seeing is that, post Snowden, we can no longer trust that any of our personal data will not be collected and misused, period. I'd be surprised if Samsung even took the rudimentary step of encrypting this data, or if they did, probably used a fixed key burned into the firmware. Internet Of Things companies have been historically bad at security. If so, it would mean that data would be immediately available to anyone who wants to grab it. It would be trivial for the government to match up the data to known IP addresses pointed at by other metadata for a given date and time.
Five years ago, I'm not sure how much I would have worried about this. This used to be tinfoil-hat sort of stuff. Nowadays, it's almost guaranteed that this data will be collected by the NSA and stored indefinitely. I'll bet they're training their own systems to listen in on key "phrases of interest" from these sorts of smart TVs. If I was in the NSA trying to figure out ways to snoop, I sure as hell would be looking into how to exploit an always-on microphone in every house. Seriously, with all we've learned about what's happening, is the worst case scenario all that implausible?
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Samsung says. An always-on microphone that transmits your voice from the living room across the internet is a bad idea in today's world, I'm sorry to say. There's a reason the phone company is heavily regulated. As they say, "this is why we can't have nice things."
I'll take this smart car, thank you.
Correct. We must have gender equality and balance in all fields of employment. Unless, of course, it's a dirty or dangerous job. Men can have those.
Well, for #1 and #2, I think the police are going to have to learn how to sniff these situations out through additional training or procedures. At this point, I think we're probably putting people MORE at risk by not trying to contact the people at these residences before busting in with a SWAT team. We probably have to ask ourselves - what are the odds of a false alarm versus an actual situation like you described, which are probably more likely to occur in a Hollywood script than in real life?
If it's a matter of time-based urgency, it seems like a second officer could initiate a call while the caller is on the line in a very short amount of time, long before a SWAT team can be assembled and move to the scene - which I'm guessing probably takes 20 to 30 minutes minimum.
#3 sounds like a technical failing that needs to be addressed to make spoofing more difficult.
Anyhow, thanks for the info. Those do sound like pretty plausible explanations for the current situation.
This is known as internet background noise. Like you said, *everyone* is being continuously scanned and probed for weaknesses, non-stop. For instance, set up a honeypot with an unpatched Windows XP machine open to the net, and I'll bet it's compromised surprisingly quickly.
Restrained, yes, executed, no. Five years in prison was mentioned in the article. I think that sounds just about right. Oh, and no more online access for him for some period of time after release as part of his probation. Internet access can obviously be every bit as much a weapon as a firearm, and he's probably going to go right back and make trouble if he's allowed, unfortunately.
I agree that in the article, they should talk about "perpetrators" or "culprits", not "pranksters". None of my pranks ever had the remotest possibility of someone accidentally getting killed by police weapons. One of these days, something is going to go very badly during a "prank" SWAT raid, and someone is going to die.
Here's a question: Why are police not calling back the houses in question to ascertain if there's actually an incident occurring? I'd think this would be standard procedure by now, with all the swatting that's happened.