It might have worked if a) they had named it anything but Google+, b) had made it actually a cool place to hang out, and c) they hadn't tried to ram it down people's throats!!!! The internet resists efforts to control it. Even Google isn't too big for that.
Here's a 100% effective ransomeware solution. When you fork out hundreds or thousands of dollars for your computer, fork out a $100 more and get an identical hard drive to what it has inside and a one-button disk cloner off of Ali Express or eBay for a few dollars. Weekly disk cloning kills ranssomeware dead. In the worst case scenario, you clone the drive with the malware on it but before it activates. In that scenario, you can still restore from backup and even if the OS is hopelessly compromised with malware beyond anyone's skill to remove, you still can access all your files.
Of course, the best solution is still not to run stupid software.
Thing is, you've carefully crafted your post so that it's almost impossible for anyone to try and tell you you're wrong. You make sweeping claims and hardly anything specific. So yes, you're going to get emotional "fanboy" type responses, because there's really nothing for a reasoned person to refute. I will take a stab at a couple things:
1) "The UI is terrible" - every time I get on an iPhone I feel hamstrung by the lack of a "back" button. Going back is almost as important as going forward, and every little iPhone app handles that differently because there is no consistent interface for it. Also, a back button makes linking between apps much easier, since one app can invoke another to provide a certain service and then the back button returns you to the first. The Android UI promotes cooperation and best practices between apps. Apple's UI can be described as pretty, but, well, absent.
2) App badging - I understand this to be the little number an app presents on its icon to show you how many messages, for example, are waiting. This is identical for every app that uses it, since all it is is a little number.
3) Updates: If anything, apps are updated far too frequently for my liking. I don't enable auto updates, which while it gives me much greater control does require me to vet every update and it is a considerable number.
The subject of this story is identical to the story itself. Both exist for the sole purpose of creating a discussion about what is otherwise nothing. To wit, the robot is no more responsible for the "harm" it inflicts than the tip of a knife is, or a bullet is. The discussion is useless, originating and ending in itself.
This just highlights why it's important to a) turn off auto update, and b) screen all updates as you apply them. It's more work up front, but will save you pain in the long run. Microsoft goes out of its way to make getting info on individual updates difficult. You can't (of course) get the info directly from Windows Update, you have to click on a link from there, and then sometimes follow more links before you can find out. And, in some cases, the real purpose is quite obfuscated in generic language and you then have to more general searches. Update days can take an hour or more of research. But it's worth it. My computer is clean from nagware.
To everyone who has auto update turned on, I offer the old scorpion and the frog adage. We all know who Microsoft is. Take the scorpion on your back and you will get stung. It's Microsoft's nature. And in this day and age where this kind of negative publicity multiplies exponentially, where desktop computing is being increasingly relegated to the back burner, and where there are other viable desktop alternatives, Microsoft really is killing itself too by stinging the frog carrying it. But, as they have aptly... and repeatedly... demonstrated, they really can't help themselves.
I would entirely justified completely ignoring the 124000 morons that voted for Boaty McBoatface. Why have the vote? They thought people would take it seriously and wanted genuine engagement. They, unfortunately, didn't count on the moronic factor.
Goes to show people will vote for anything. It's why the US is facing a Trump presidency.
Actually, maybe that would be a good thing. In four years those that remain in the smoking crater of the US will be an example to the rest of the world of what happens when you abuse your vote.
If you want to make the whole system irrelevant you don't need to dig or circumvent it. You trigger it. Over and over and over again, at the most remote places you can find. Get a tennis ball thrower and a hopper that can hold a gazillion balls, park it on Pakistan's side they aim it right at a beam. Have it set to shoot a ball every random interval between 1 and 40 hours. With a dozen of those bad boys, the whole system would be useless.
This is a design failure, not an implementation failure. Buy a book, get a book. Nothing wrong with that paradigm. More and more vendors want to grind content down to finer and finer granules, as it ends up increasing their profit.
Because emissions requirements are generally based on percentage of (bad thing being tested for) per litre of exhaust. "Fixing" the problem reduces the fuel economy, so even though the amount of bad emissions per litre of exhaust is lower, the total amount of fuel being burned is so much higher that the amount of bad emissions per amount-of-fuel-burned per kilometer is much higher since there is so much more exhaust total.
Correct. The telephone records were part of the case records - it is those case records which have been preserved. What changed was information that the crime could have been committed earlier, which if true, would have rendered the telephone call irrelevant as an alibi. When the information that the crime was committed earlier was discredited, the phone records in the case file became relevant to him again.
This is completely not a case of phone records being retained indefinitely.
AI-written "scientific" papers have been published too, but that doesn't mean that they are any good. Every year there is some story about how some new AI has autonomously done some amazing feat of natural-language something, and the stories laud that is has, or is just about to pass the Turing test, and yet under closer scrutiny it is inevitably something little advanced from ELIZA (linked for the younger crowd). Just look at Microsoft's latest bungle.
This will turn out to be either A) more an indictment of the award process than a validation of the "novel", or B) an "AI" that turns out to be rather specifically crafted to contain all the story elements with a little bit of a random mixing function.
An "AI" that writes one novel doesn't impress me. I could make an "AI" that writes one novel. I'll be impressed when one AI churns out three completely different ones with nothing more than a natural language sentence giving the broad story themes for each. I will call that AI.
The version number almost says it all. How can you get excited about a new Firefox release with any feature, when it's just another rapid release. It could have true hard AI and no one would notice any more. It would get lost in the staggeringly mediocre array of non-features nobody wants, forced UI changes, broken addons, and developers that decide they know more about what people want than the users do.
Firefox adopted Google's rapid release cycle on a project that it was neither technically nor culturally suited for. One has to actually admire their dogged persistence to holding course in the face of what is an almost a completely unified chorus of "WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE?!?!?".
I recommend Palemoon. A fork of the previous Firefox LTR, it has refused to add features unless they make sense, is compatible with most addons, and has its own growing body of its own addon developers that are quite loyal to the project for the simple reason that the project remains loyal to them. That's not to say that it's a static browser. Just one that took the best of what Firefox was and decided to continue in the direction of sensible goals and not alienating its user base.
Inertial Navigation Systems are good pieces of hardware, and without giving anything away I can tell you that you can assume most major warships in any of the better NATO navies will be equipped with it. However, no unit (surface or submarine) relies on it as a principal means of navigation, certainly not for months at a time. It is a system that starts out accurate and gets progressively less and less so as you go, especially in rough seas. Remember, it has to add up every bit of inertia in every direction - including wave motion. By the time you reach your destination your area of probability can be so large that celestial navigation (using modern instruments) can actually be more accurate. INS has to be periodically corrected, and when GPS isn't available or is degraded (or we are training without it), this is done by old fashioned traditional navigation methods. Fixes based on visible features (land, nav markers), celestial fixes, bottom contour fixes, etc. It's bottom contour fixes using depth sounders that submerged vessels use as their primary means of navigation.
INS does have its uses. And while I can't discuss when and what situations would call for its use as a primary means of position fixing, it probably shouldn't be too hard to work out likely scenarios. Traditional navigation is still king. INS is only used as a primary means of navigation by the authors of war novels.
I'm an officer for the Royal Canadian Navy. I've spent time on the bridge of some of our American friends' warships and it's sometimes a white-knuckle experience. Sailing into northern waters away from large constellations of GPS satellites can easily bring your dilution of precision to the point where you could be almost anywhere, and yet many of my American friends didn't even know what the reading meant on their display. HDOP would be flashing red on the bridge and they would be all fat and happy sailing at full speed. ECPINS put a dot on the electronic chart as to where they were, so that meant that's where they are.
It was with puzzlement that I first learned that Americans didn't teach celestial navigation to its officers. It's not that celestial navigation by itself is really all that necessary, because yes, even without it, there are other methods. But the training of it produces officers that have a better understanding of when their machines are lying to them. It, and all the related skills you need to learn to make it work, gives more useful things in your toolbox to draw from. Because I will tell you from experience, it is not a matter of if a GPS will give you a wrong answer. It's a matter of when.
It's also, if you ask me, not a matter of if but when a shooting war finally breaks out. And if and when it does, you can guarantee that one of the first priorities for the enemy will be to deny NATO (one way or the other) the use of GPS.
Perhaps with a renewed focus on training techniques that don't rely on toys, the USN will stop having the most collision-dented ships in NATO.
I love how there is no mention of the Concorde, which did it faster and carried more passengers on 1970's technology.
It's like building a new space shuttle that is smaller than the shuttle was, and then comparing it to the Gemini capsules in the marketing. What, do they think the world has become globally amnesiac in the last ten years?
I miss the days when Slashdot tags were sort of a group vote, the more people that entered a tag, the more likely it would show up. Crowdsource publicly visible tagging, But then Slashdot realized that it was used more for people to point out the flamebating, slashvertisement, and just generally fuckwitted posts than it was to actually tag the article's content. A feature that got dropped like a hot potato, and which I am very much missing right about now.
DuckDuckGo doesn't have a crawler. Well, they say they do, and I'm sure they have some basic crawling, but they only say that so they don't look silly for being a search engine that doesn't actually do search. They buy their results from Bing, and then do some value added stuff like munging in Wikipedia results. I doubt Apple wants to buy something that sends money to Microsoft, and they certainly won't back Google. And Apple doesn't have the expertise to build an effective search engine on their own.
The fact that this is just happening now illustrates the fact that the app store model just doesn't work to bring you reasonable content. A walled garden is always still a walled garden.
I find it very interesting the wording. They think that they should have "ceased supporting the dual EC_DRBG algorithm immediately after security researchers discovered the potential for a trapdoor" and that their failure to do so was regrettable. What about their helping to develop the algo with a back door to begin with?
They are essentially coming out and admitting they are sorry that they didn't drop support, because if they had dropped support at least they would have been able to cover up the fact they intentionally create algorithms with flaws to begin with.
What I wrote was completely accurate. It's the reason why there is a campaign right now to train people on the ways to detect a stroke, because there is no feeling when you bleed in your brain. There is no pain, no warmth, no tingling, because there are no sensory receptors in the brain. None. Sensory receptors are nature's burglar alarms. You put sensors on your outer doors, and windows, and maybe in a few main hallways. The master bedroom door likely doesn't have a sensor, because once someone is there it's too late. There's little advantage to putting sensory receptors in the brain, so nature didn't.
Epileptic seizures are neural cascades that are still not well understood. What they are not is electrical, though they are sometimes dumbed down and explained that way because that is the way neural transmission is sometimes explained. There are electrochemical reactions that are involved in a seizure, because they are involved in all neural activity, but what a person who is experiencing the advance symptoms of a seizure is feeling is not electricity in the brain, but the beginnings of that neural cascade and its effects on different areas of the brain. There are as many different pre-symptoms of a seizure as there are people that experience them, though they are sometimes grouped into broad categories. Just like people who experience migraines have many different types of pre-auras (auditory, visual, sometimes olfactory). People who feel headaches feel pain not in the brain (did I mention there are no receptors there?), but in the scalp, neck, eyes, or muscles of the head.
If the person wearing this device we are commenting on here had electricity actually passing through his brain, what he would have felt are the stimulating effects on the part of the brain that the electricity was passing through. He would have seen lights, or heard something, or been hungry. What he wouldn't feel is tingling, because there is nothing in the brain that can feel tingling. There are no sensory receptors in the brain.
I felt "tingles" pulling and hitting my brain on the left side and in the middle.
Wrong. The author may have thought that, because the author was a moron. The author felt exactly nothing hitting his brain because the brain has no sensory nerves servicing it. Anything that anyone feels with this device is sensations in the skin or muscles of the skull.
The idea that putting patches on the skin of your head and applying a voltage ends up passing any actual current through your brain is rather ludicrous to anyone who understands anything about electricity and biology. Think of it this way... take a hard boiled egg and peel the shell off it. This is your brain. Now take the egg and put it in a glass of salt water. Then take that glass and wrap it in slightly damp leather. Now put electrodes on either side of that package. How much electricity do you think is actually passing through the egg?
I call this hogwash. When you ask Windows what version it is in software, it doesn't return its marketing name (Windows 95, Windows 2000), it returns it's platform ID (1 for DOS based, 2 for NT based), and its version numbers in major, minor format. Windows 95 returned 4.0 (platform 1), Windows 98 returned 4.1 (platform 1). Windows 2000 returned 5.0 (platform 2).
Slashdot Mirror
There aren't any bad programming ideas that work.
It might have worked if a) they had named it anything but Google+, b) had made it actually a cool place to hang out, and c) they hadn't tried to ram it down people's throats!!!! The internet resists efforts to control it. Even Google isn't too big for that.
Here's a 100% effective ransomeware solution. When you fork out hundreds or thousands of dollars for your computer, fork out a $100 more and get an identical hard drive to what it has inside and a one-button disk cloner off of Ali Express or eBay for a few dollars. Weekly disk cloning kills ranssomeware dead. In the worst case scenario, you clone the drive with the malware on it but before it activates. In that scenario, you can still restore from backup and even if the OS is hopelessly compromised with malware beyond anyone's skill to remove, you still can access all your files.
Of course, the best solution is still not to run stupid software.
Thing is, you've carefully crafted your post so that it's almost impossible for anyone to try and tell you you're wrong. You make sweeping claims and hardly anything specific. So yes, you're going to get emotional "fanboy" type responses, because there's really nothing for a reasoned person to refute. I will take a stab at a couple things:
1) "The UI is terrible" - every time I get on an iPhone I feel hamstrung by the lack of a "back" button. Going back is almost as important as going forward, and every little iPhone app handles that differently because there is no consistent interface for it. Also, a back button makes linking between apps much easier, since one app can invoke another to provide a certain service and then the back button returns you to the first. The Android UI promotes cooperation and best practices between apps. Apple's UI can be described as pretty, but, well, absent.
2) App badging - I understand this to be the little number an app presents on its icon to show you how many messages, for example, are waiting. This is identical for every app that uses it, since all it is is a little number.
3) Updates: If anything, apps are updated far too frequently for my liking. I don't enable auto updates, which while it gives me much greater control does require me to vet every update and it is a considerable number.
The subject of this story is identical to the story itself. Both exist for the sole purpose of creating a discussion about what is otherwise nothing. To wit, the robot is no more responsible for the "harm" it inflicts than the tip of a knife is, or a bullet is. The discussion is useless, originating and ending in itself.
This just highlights why it's important to a) turn off auto update, and b) screen all updates as you apply them. It's more work up front, but will save you pain in the long run. Microsoft goes out of its way to make getting info on individual updates difficult. You can't (of course) get the info directly from Windows Update, you have to click on a link from there, and then sometimes follow more links before you can find out. And, in some cases, the real purpose is quite obfuscated in generic language and you then have to more general searches. Update days can take an hour or more of research. But it's worth it. My computer is clean from nagware.
To everyone who has auto update turned on, I offer the old scorpion and the frog adage. We all know who Microsoft is. Take the scorpion on your back and you will get stung. It's Microsoft's nature. And in this day and age where this kind of negative publicity multiplies exponentially, where desktop computing is being increasingly relegated to the back burner, and where there are other viable desktop alternatives, Microsoft really is killing itself too by stinging the frog carrying it. But, as they have aptly... and repeatedly... demonstrated, they really can't help themselves.
I would entirely justified completely ignoring the 124000 morons that voted for Boaty McBoatface. Why have the vote? They thought people would take it seriously and wanted genuine engagement. They, unfortunately, didn't count on the moronic factor.
Goes to show people will vote for anything. It's why the US is facing a Trump presidency.
Actually, maybe that would be a good thing. In four years those that remain in the smoking crater of the US will be an example to the rest of the world of what happens when you abuse your vote.
If you want to make the whole system irrelevant you don't need to dig or circumvent it. You trigger it. Over and over and over again, at the most remote places you can find. Get a tennis ball thrower and a hopper that can hold a gazillion balls, park it on Pakistan's side they aim it right at a beam. Have it set to shoot a ball every random interval between 1 and 40 hours. With a dozen of those bad boys, the whole system would be useless.
This is a design failure, not an implementation failure. Buy a book, get a book. Nothing wrong with that paradigm. More and more vendors want to grind content down to finer and finer granules, as it ends up increasing their profit.
Because emissions requirements are generally based on percentage of (bad thing being tested for) per litre of exhaust. "Fixing" the problem reduces the fuel economy, so even though the amount of bad emissions per litre of exhaust is lower, the total amount of fuel being burned is so much higher that the amount of bad emissions per amount-of-fuel-burned per kilometer is much higher since there is so much more exhaust total.
Correct. The telephone records were part of the case records - it is those case records which have been preserved. What changed was information that the crime could have been committed earlier, which if true, would have rendered the telephone call irrelevant as an alibi. When the information that the crime was committed earlier was discredited, the phone records in the case file became relevant to him again.
This is completely not a case of phone records being retained indefinitely.
AI-written "scientific" papers have been published too, but that doesn't mean that they are any good. Every year there is some story about how some new AI has autonomously done some amazing feat of natural-language something, and the stories laud that is has, or is just about to pass the Turing test, and yet under closer scrutiny it is inevitably something little advanced from ELIZA (linked for the younger crowd). Just look at Microsoft's latest bungle.
This will turn out to be either A) more an indictment of the award process than a validation of the "novel", or B) an "AI" that turns out to be rather specifically crafted to contain all the story elements with a little bit of a random mixing function.
An "AI" that writes one novel doesn't impress me. I could make an "AI" that writes one novel. I'll be impressed when one AI churns out three completely different ones with nothing more than a natural language sentence giving the broad story themes for each. I will call that AI.
...not to be downloading cam versions any more.
The version number almost says it all. How can you get excited about a new Firefox release with any feature, when it's just another rapid release. It could have true hard AI and no one would notice any more. It would get lost in the staggeringly mediocre array of non-features nobody wants, forced UI changes, broken addons, and developers that decide they know more about what people want than the users do.
Firefox adopted Google's rapid release cycle on a project that it was neither technically nor culturally suited for. One has to actually admire their dogged persistence to holding course in the face of what is an almost a completely unified chorus of "WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE?!?!?".
I recommend Palemoon. A fork of the previous Firefox LTR, it has refused to add features unless they make sense, is compatible with most addons, and has its own growing body of its own addon developers that are quite loyal to the project for the simple reason that the project remains loyal to them. That's not to say that it's a static browser. Just one that took the best of what Firefox was and decided to continue in the direction of sensible goals and not alienating its user base.
Palemoon
Inertial Navigation Systems are good pieces of hardware, and without giving anything away I can tell you that you can assume most major warships in any of the better NATO navies will be equipped with it. However, no unit (surface or submarine) relies on it as a principal means of navigation, certainly not for months at a time. It is a system that starts out accurate and gets progressively less and less so as you go, especially in rough seas. Remember, it has to add up every bit of inertia in every direction - including wave motion. By the time you reach your destination your area of probability can be so large that celestial navigation (using modern instruments) can actually be more accurate. INS has to be periodically corrected, and when GPS isn't available or is degraded (or we are training without it), this is done by old fashioned traditional navigation methods. Fixes based on visible features (land, nav markers), celestial fixes, bottom contour fixes, etc. It's bottom contour fixes using depth sounders that submerged vessels use as their primary means of navigation.
INS does have its uses. And while I can't discuss when and what situations would call for its use as a primary means of position fixing, it probably shouldn't be too hard to work out likely scenarios. Traditional navigation is still king. INS is only used as a primary means of navigation by the authors of war novels.
I'm an officer for the Royal Canadian Navy. I've spent time on the bridge of some of our American friends' warships and it's sometimes a white-knuckle experience. Sailing into northern waters away from large constellations of GPS satellites can easily bring your dilution of precision to the point where you could be almost anywhere, and yet many of my American friends didn't even know what the reading meant on their display. HDOP would be flashing red on the bridge and they would be all fat and happy sailing at full speed. ECPINS put a dot on the electronic chart as to where they were, so that meant that's where they are.
It was with puzzlement that I first learned that Americans didn't teach celestial navigation to its officers. It's not that celestial navigation by itself is really all that necessary, because yes, even without it, there are other methods. But the training of it produces officers that have a better understanding of when their machines are lying to them. It, and all the related skills you need to learn to make it work, gives more useful things in your toolbox to draw from. Because I will tell you from experience, it is not a matter of if a GPS will give you a wrong answer. It's a matter of when.
It's also, if you ask me, not a matter of if but when a shooting war finally breaks out. And if and when it does, you can guarantee that one of the first priorities for the enemy will be to deny NATO (one way or the other) the use of GPS.
Perhaps with a renewed focus on training techniques that don't rely on toys, the USN will stop having the most collision-dented ships in NATO.
I love how there is no mention of the Concorde, which did it faster and carried more passengers on 1970's technology.
It's like building a new space shuttle that is smaller than the shuttle was, and then comparing it to the Gemini capsules in the marketing. What, do they think the world has become globally amnesiac in the last ten years?
I miss the days when Slashdot tags were sort of a group vote, the more people that entered a tag, the more likely it would show up. Crowdsource publicly visible tagging, But then Slashdot realized that it was used more for people to point out the flamebating, slashvertisement, and just generally fuckwitted posts than it was to actually tag the article's content. A feature that got dropped like a hot potato, and which I am very much missing right about now.
DuckDuckGo doesn't have a crawler. Well, they say they do, and I'm sure they have some basic crawling, but they only say that so they don't look silly for being a search engine that doesn't actually do search. They buy their results from Bing, and then do some value added stuff like munging in Wikipedia results. I doubt Apple wants to buy something that sends money to Microsoft, and they certainly won't back Google. And Apple doesn't have the expertise to build an effective search engine on their own.
The fact that this is just happening now illustrates the fact that the app store model just doesn't work to bring you reasonable content. A walled garden is always still a walled garden.
I find it very interesting the wording. They think that they should have "ceased supporting the dual EC_DRBG algorithm immediately after security researchers discovered the potential for a trapdoor" and that their failure to do so was regrettable. What about their helping to develop the algo with a back door to begin with?
They are essentially coming out and admitting they are sorry that they didn't drop support, because if they had dropped support at least they would have been able to cover up the fact they intentionally create algorithms with flaws to begin with.
What I wrote was completely accurate. It's the reason why there is a campaign right now to train people on the ways to detect a stroke, because there is no feeling when you bleed in your brain. There is no pain, no warmth, no tingling, because there are no sensory receptors in the brain. None. Sensory receptors are nature's burglar alarms. You put sensors on your outer doors, and windows, and maybe in a few main hallways. The master bedroom door likely doesn't have a sensor, because once someone is there it's too late. There's little advantage to putting sensory receptors in the brain, so nature didn't.
Epileptic seizures are neural cascades that are still not well understood. What they are not is electrical, though they are sometimes dumbed down and explained that way because that is the way neural transmission is sometimes explained. There are electrochemical reactions that are involved in a seizure, because they are involved in all neural activity, but what a person who is experiencing the advance symptoms of a seizure is feeling is not electricity in the brain, but the beginnings of that neural cascade and its effects on different areas of the brain. There are as many different pre-symptoms of a seizure as there are people that experience them, though they are sometimes grouped into broad categories. Just like people who experience migraines have many different types of pre-auras (auditory, visual, sometimes olfactory). People who feel headaches feel pain not in the brain (did I mention there are no receptors there?), but in the scalp, neck, eyes, or muscles of the head.
If the person wearing this device we are commenting on here had electricity actually passing through his brain, what he would have felt are the stimulating effects on the part of the brain that the electricity was passing through. He would have seen lights, or heard something, or been hungry. What he wouldn't feel is tingling, because there is nothing in the brain that can feel tingling. There are no sensory receptors in the brain.
From the article:
I felt "tingles" pulling and hitting my brain on the left side and in the middle.
Wrong. The author may have thought that, because the author was a moron. The author felt exactly nothing hitting his brain because the brain has no sensory nerves servicing it. Anything that anyone feels with this device is sensations in the skin or muscles of the skull.
The idea that putting patches on the skin of your head and applying a voltage ends up passing any actual current through your brain is rather ludicrous to anyone who understands anything about electricity and biology. Think of it this way... take a hard boiled egg and peel the shell off it. This is your brain. Now take the egg and put it in a glass of salt water. Then take that glass and wrap it in slightly damp leather. Now put electrodes on either side of that package. How much electricity do you think is actually passing through the egg?
I call this hogwash. When you ask Windows what version it is in software, it doesn't return its marketing name (Windows 95, Windows 2000), it returns it's platform ID (1 for DOS based, 2 for NT based), and its version numbers in major, minor format. Windows 95 returned 4.0 (platform 1), Windows 98 returned 4.1 (platform 1). Windows 2000 returned 5.0 (platform 2).