In any scenario there are explicit facts and implied facts. The explicit fact in this scenario is that the asker was hacked twice. The implied fact, from the question, is that one or both were related to his router. Turning that around on the asker questions his competence to ask the question, and is an arrogant assertion that your mere assumption that he likely doesn't know what he's talking about is more probable than the poser's clear implication in the question that the router is pertinent to the discussion.
There are some Ask Slashdot questions where the implied facts are inherently inconsistent with the question being asked. In cases like that, go to town pointing it out. This here, however, is pretty open and shut and the asker deserves deference in his scenario. In general all implied facts should be assumed to be in favour of the poser of the question knowing what he's talking about.
In short, and I'm going to bold this so you can refer back to it, unless there is an overwhelming reason not to, either answer the question asked or exercise your constitutional right to remain silent.
How about you stop being pedantic on what the background information means, and either helpfully answer the (fairly easy to understand) question or decide you have nothing useful to add to the conversation and not try to. The people who think they are clever by second guessing Ask Slashdot questions get rather annoying in short order.
I actually came to this question with some amount of actual curiosity. I used to build Linux firewalls for small businesses. This was back before routers were appliances. When NAT was still "IP Masquerading" on Linux, and it was actually a dirty word because it let you "share" internet connections when the early cable modem providers wanted to sell you an IP address for every computer using the connection. I moved on to process control and automation work, project management, and then switched tracks into the Navy. What relevance is that? The point is, there are lots of people like me who had at one point been heavily invested in the current state of the art who, for some years, haven't had the time or resources to follow current best practices. Ask Slashdot questions like these are actually helpful to those of us who would like the benefit of the experience of those who are still up on the state of the art.
When you, and those like you, roll in with your clever meta-answers, it helps no one. You and (especially) the five moderators who upvoted your post as "informative" should hang your heads in collective shame.
This will work fine for vanilla applications - anything that requires a single outgoing port should work fine, but anything that requires UPnP to open a listening port will run into issues. Games will be hit and miss.
Sure, it's cumbersome enough to an attacker that it prevents easy hacking, but that's also not very good if it's so cumbersome as to be a burden to the user as well.
At first I thought my unfamiliarity with it was just that I am firmly on the Debian side in the type of distros I prefer. This isn't even in the Distrowatch top 300 - if there are (at least) 300 distributions above you, including Slackware, the distribution that is, famously, essentially a one-man-show, then this is beyond even being a niche case. I kind of feel for the guy, though. Whomever he is. He's dedicated ten years of his life to making a distribution that could only register on the Internet's visual perceptors by a perfect storm combination of going supernova and a bored Slashdot editor being shown the explosion through a telescope.
Nice cartoon. Too bad #3 is factually correct, not stupid. Which just goes to show, even someone making a point about mount stupid can be standing on it.
I'm relatively certain #3 was meant not to try and indicate it was factually inaccurate, but simply ignorant. As in, the kind of people who tell you that a tomato is, botanically, a fruit are the kind of people who want to appear clever and who ignore that in general a) everyone else also knows and b) no one cares or treats it as one. IE: A piece of knowledge that someone gains before they have the wisdom to use it correctly, which is pretty much the epitome of being on mount stupid.
Negative. It's the techno-idiots and the donut-eating mother's-basement-living sci-fi dweebs that have escaped.
The combination of machine learning and robotics have exciting prospects for eliminating mundane jobs. Including new horizons in human-machine-interface technology. Real-time limited natural voice interaction may become a reality in the near future. However we are no closer to hard AI today than we were forty years ago. Worse, actually. At least forty years ago we were coming down off the pinnacle of the first mount stupid. After the Heinlein-esque overly optimistic sci-fi of the 50's and 60's where AI (along with nuclear rockets, flying cars, and colonies throughout the solar system) was just assumed to be right around the corner, computer scientists actually drank the cool aid and believed it. In the 70's and 80's we sheepishly came down off that mount and realized we didn't even really have a clue how to do it and we learned a bit of wisdom.
However, what the mount stupid graph I liked above doesn't show is that it's quite possible to have more than one of them in a single subject. Now with new machine learning techniques we are climbing right back onto another mount stupid. People think that because a medical database can spout off fringe diagnoses better than some actual experienced doctors that this means AI is right around the corner. I am no more impressed with that or with computers winning at Go and Chess than I am impressed that a hydraulic press can exert several (thousand) times my strength. The software that is winning at Chess and Go are, in fact, little smarter than that same hydraulic press. The software knows from analyzing millions of games that humans have played what winning strategies are, and combines that with brute force strength to know where to optimize its searches. For like reason I am also not terribly impressed with the Google's latest natural voice accomplishments either. At least, not as an indicator that actual AI is around the corner. They are just the same machine learning tied into voice recognition data Google has been able to compile by stealing billions of voice samples by claiming that voice recognition requires them to transmit your actual voice to their servers.
We are not close to hard AI. We are not close to soft AI. For AI to be AI it has to be BOTH A and I, and one out of two doesn't count. I personally don't think we are within half a century of hard AI.
First of all your question assumes facts not in evidence. You are stating as a fact within your question that that Pluto has few similarities to the other eight planets. While it's difficult to nail down Pluto's geology precisely, best evidence suggests that Pluto has a rocky/metalic core, a probably liquid mantle, and a solid crust. How much other differentiation there are between layers (an outer/inner mantle, outer/inner core) is pure guesswork right now, but as it stands it has quite similar enough geology to the other eight planets for me to recognize it as belonging.
Secondly the way your question is worded also suggests that, to you, somehow the number of planets in the solar system is a problem. Who cares if it's just Eris or a dozen more? If they are large enough for gravity to pull them into a sphere, if they are geologically and structurally similar to the other planets, how is the number of them even relevant? That's not evidence-based science at all. That's letting your comfort-level with the result determine what you accept as results.
The whole reason for "demoting" Pluto had nothing to do with Pluto itself. It had to do with Eris. When Eris was discovered, it appeared to be (because of its albedo) larger than Pluto. It is, in fact, more massive tham Pluto is though slightly smaller. Because of its size, the discoverer was making a strong case for having it accepted as the solar system's 10th planet. While this gave NASA a huge ole woody, because they were counting the dollar signs of how a newly discovered actual planet would spur public opinion for exploration, it caused significant consternation at the IAU. That's actually understating things. A few members of the IAU were quite literally horrified at the prospect. They were looking at the fact Michael Brown's team had discovered scads of Trans-Neptunian-Objects, that there very well could be half a dozen or more additional ones the size of Pluto/Eris, and they were quite happy with the set of planets we already had, thank-you-very-much. There was a certain historical congruency to it and no upstart finding a TNO that happened to be as large as Pluto was going to get his name listed in the same breath as such nobility as William Herschel. So they decided that in the end, that since they really couldn't call Eris a planet if Pluto was a planet, they did what they thought was the lesser evil. They preserved the sanctity of the rest of the solar system by demoting Pluto.
Of course the definition has holes and is not even self-consistent. The whole purpose of it was to demote Pluto and all other similar objects and to ensure that it was worded such that no other TNO could ever be labelled a planet, by nature of being out in the area where nothing is "cleared".
What people need to ask themselves is this: does the fact that the IAU had its collective head up its ass tell me what I consider to be a planet? The answer for me personally is a big whopping no. And when it comes up in conversation, usually after I name all 9 traditional planets (sometimes adding Eris) and get "corrected" that, hey, don't I know Pluto isn't a planet any more, that's when I let the poor smarty-pants have it with both barrels. Not really their fault, but anyone toeing the IAU party line and not willing to think for themselves deserves to get it.
The IAU isn't an official body with any authority other than what they have taken on themselves. And if they are going to let historical politics cloud scientific thinking, they certainly aren't going to speak for me. I'd like to see some textbook publishers take a stand too.
If you want your privacy back then demand your data back. Ask where your data is going with each transaction. Now, for the type of data I have, I trust encryption to protect my data going over the internet, but we've learned that any time we turn our data over to someone else that it's not a matter of "if" but "when" that data will find itself somewhere we would rather it not be.
In today's environment of easy access to home internet with speeds that rival a LAN of not too long ago, it's not hard to control all your data end points. Perhaps that's the new lame catch phrase we need. End point computing. Where everyone controls all their data end points. PC for processing, home central storage appliance for storage and archiving, media center for A/V, smartphone for portable and remote control. I also consider a rented virtual server (from a reputable company) to be close enough to personal property to count, and you can add that to your portfolio of processing if you want dedicated web applications like a good personally owned webmail. I don't actually expose my home storage appliance to the internet, though it's capable of it. I don't trust the security on it enough for that, so I use syncthing on my server for data synchronization and save bulk transfers to/from archive for when I'm home.
Demand you own all your data end points and simply refuse to use any "service" which offers to take care of your data for you. I won't use gmail, dropbox, picasa, or anything which will make it easy if I just give them my property.
If you want privacy, take back ownership of your data.
What's the difference between a car marketing phrase writer and a computer marketing phrase writer? The car marketing phrase write knows when he's lying.
Correct. They are only self-destruct when using Google's platform. Which means only when sent from AND to Google gmail accounts. They may be self destruct for the end users, but you know who they are not self destruct for? Google. They encourage people to send email that's even more sensitive than people already use email for by implying a time-limited duration, then they are the arbiters of what data is private and what isn't. Great scam.
Any soldier, sailor, or airman who takes ANY powered phone on an op should be charged. EMCON considerations are serious, and they will locate you faster from the fact you are making any transmission than they will locate you from hacks in the phone's OS. This is drilled into everyone.
No, this is far too measured an escalation, this tells me there are untold behind-the-scenes activities being played out here. This is a shot across the bow. A first real action to hit them in the sales department. I suspect US agencies are trying to negotiate behind-the-scenes deals with Huwei to get their own greasy mitts into the guts of phones they sell in North America and are using the prospect of banning their sales outright for "national security" reasons to put the gears on them. If Huwei doesn't give in, they will find the US will escalate claims of Chinese spying and Huwei will lose access to the market.
Of course the US knows that China could order their domestic corporations to put back doors in their products. They know from long experience justhoweasyit is to slip a back door into products and standards.
Thing is, if I were a US citizen, I'd far rather have a Huwei product. Actually, as a Canadian I think I still would rather own a Huwei. At least I can probably trust the NSA doesn't have its greasy mitts inside one of those (or, at least, there's a better chance of it). There are daily stories of strange and unusual things happening to people at the border because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some database has their phone as having been in close proximity to some person of interest to US intelligence and suddenly they are locked in a room with no phones, often no clothes, and definitely no recourse, until they cough up answers that US officials like.
Your internet prices seemed to be subsidized by your TV pricing. If you no longer pay for TV pricing then your internet pricing will rise to compensate. After all, someone has to pay for the cable to get to your house, and that was likely massively financed, so there are continued payments due on the loans. You might have to learn to accept it.
Cable TV prices skyrocketed long before cord cutting started hurting their bottom line. Netflix et al are not viable replacements for TV, people are simply making do with them in greater numbers as a result of cable company greed. Cable TV prices skyrocketed simply because they could - cable companies have, for the most part, a monopoly in any given area handed to them by city and state governments which sign agreements to allow only one company to lay cable during the construction of new neighborhoods. So this isn't a problem solely of supply and demand, and people having to "pay the piper" in some way. Cord cutting is self defense, not people wanting to somehow skirt the system. Cable companies are well compensated for the cable they lay, even at internet-only rates as they currently exist.
This problem, of cable companies jacking internet prices to offset loss of their overcharged TV subscriptions, is somewhat mitigated in Canada. Because of the sole-source agreements for laying cable, the CRTC ruled that cable companies here are required to allow independent resellers access to their network at bulk rates, and the cable companies have to justify the rate they charge to these resellers. Unbundled internet-only accounts are, therefore, available here at pretty reasonable rates. I pay $55CAD/month for a 100Mbit. And, where I live at least, it's a very solid 100Mbit - actually a touch faster sustained.
Given the essential nature of internet in modern society, this could be a model that might work in the US as well.
The funny (and when I say funny what I really mean is very very sad) part is the video on the logo design process. What's funny isn't so much the content of that video (which is mostly just a series of rejected stupider ideas for the logo), it's the fact they made a "making of" video at all. Here's a hint... that logo is not exactly a creative masterpiece guys. The word itself implies movement, so the word GO with a few movement implying lines behind it, like every kid has used in every stick drawing since the second grade, is not exactly artistic or branding genius.
In the end it's a programming language. The use, dissemination, and discussion of which should be based solely on technical considerations and merits. You didn't see Kernighan and Ritchie stopping work to release branding guides for their offering, and it's still going strong the better part of 50 years later.
From a public safety and for the interests of the state, this is a good outcome. But for any particular individual contemplating sending their DNA in to one of those sites, there is no good side. In this case it's a serial rapist and murderer. Queue the ticker tape parade. But your personal interests can only be harmed. This is becoming more like Gattaca every day. If any piece of random sloughed off skin is public domain, then at some point everywhere I've been, everything I do becomes public domain. Which bodes ill if there is a rare book I happen to touch immediately before or after a serial killer. If, for example, it's known that a suspect touched this book, my DNA on it suddenly puts me in the running for man of the hour. This is just one example, and an unlikely one to be sure, but I honestly can't think of any use of my randomly shed DNA in correlation with these genetic genealogy sites that serves my self interest.
Not seeing the new UI since I have stopped using gmail long ago due to the draconian and pervasive privacy invasions. I'm honestly surprised that a UI change at gmail is even news.
They were a good search engine before they tried to be an everything portal. People went there for search results, and so they tried to become the place you could go to for everything and not have to search for anything. Slow to load, intrusive, and tacky. Google did it better by keeping their search clean, other things unobtrusive and selectable in a menu, and allowing people who wanted to find something to get in, search, and get out quickly. If Lycos had followed that model, they could easily have retained their crown.
There was another Slashdot story a few months ago that C was making a comeback. Now Slashdot ponders if Ruby, one of the languages that contributed to the "death" of C can make it another 25 years.
The answer is no. At least, not in the way it is now. I suspect that, like Perl and Python and other interpreted languages, Ruby will always have a little niche of users. There will always be projects that are well suited to the ease of letting your programming language do all the thinking for you, and which don't care about the performance hit. JIT, if it makes it into Ruby, will further extend this, especially for the (often rather vocal) crowd that thinks JIT is magick that makes an interpreted language just as performant as compiled. Unfortunately, there is no fairy here, and Ruby (like the ones before it) will never be a real boy.
A comment made by one of the developers of PiTiVi (an open source video editor done in Python) on the how-to-contribute page for that project actually sums up Python in general, and also extends quite well to my thoughs on Ruby and most others in the same vein:
GStreamer Editing Services, the C library on which Pitivi depends to do all the serious work. If you want to work on the backend, this is the way to go.
Which is a great summation for Python, and is so applicable to Ruby as well it could have been written about it. Great for quick and dirty little tools, good for a project framework perhaps, but if you want to do serious work, go to a C library. This will always be the case. Ruby and Python and Perl and even mighty Java, they will have their niches supported by adherents who expound some aspect of their garbage collection, or ease of use, or type safety, but for the real work, people will always turn to native code. In a few years there will be some new debutant... there will always be some new debutant, bright and beautiful in that sparkling ball gown, that will draw all the ooohs and aahhhs of the boys in the crowd and which will rally the people to cry "this... THIS is the one that will kill native code dead once and for all", and yet it will never happen.
While we're discussing teachable moments, let's touch on "making crucial, consequential changes in staff and scope" based on "a verbal commitment".
It's the other way around. They were trying to do more and more based on the strength of the verbal commitments they had, and when they realized that their development staff were going hog wild with that extra stuff, that's when they made the "crucial" and "consequential changes in staff and scope" in order to rein it in and bring it back on track.
...As the budget grew, we began a long series of conversations with potential publishing partners. The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great.... As the CEO and founder of Nightdive Studios... I let things get out of control. I can tell you that I did it for all the right reasons, that I was totally committed to making a great game, but it has become clear to me that we took the wrong path, that we turned our backs on the very people who made this possible, our Kickstarter backers.
I have put the team on a hiatus while we reassess our path so that we can return to our vision. We are taking a break, but NOT ending the project. Please accept my personal assurance that we will be back and stronger than ever. System Shock is going to be completed and all of our promises fulfilled.
Interestingly, I already use Linux in Windows for some of the things I no longer trust Windows for. Just not Microsoft's version of Linux, of course, because I will never trust that. I use VirtualBox.
Of course, any VM running in Windows is just as vulnerable as any other piece of software, but it's an extra layer of difficulty. My VirtualBox VM's filesystem is encrypted, so a random piece of Windows malware can't just read its files indiscriminately, and any malware (and by that I mean software antagonistic to my best interests, including the OS) reading the VM's memory has an extra layer of data structures to have to parse to get at any juicy data in RAM. It adds a layer between the OS and important software like KeePass. A layer that automated malware tools are unlikely to have been designed to search through, which is another reason not to use Microsoft's solutions.
Microsoft's Linux offerings are a solution looking for a problem. Nothing that you distrust Windows for can be trusted to them. There are other solutions that have been around longer and are better understood. I think I'll stick to what I know, thank-you.
What's really rather ironic, is that they aren't just on fire but they are on fire because they poured the gasoline all over themselves and then proceeded to actually light the match.
A company that has taken the admitted stance of connection at all cost, which has exploited its phone apps to mine for contacts, and which almost singlehandedly invented and then exploited the culture of over sharing so much that privacy isn't even a consideration for a whole generation is now hoist by their own revelations. And they have the nerve to complain that the problem isn't in the memo, but that the memo was leaked. That is truly rich. They are so far gone they don't even see the problem any more. They talk about "suicide bomber" employees who are just getting a job to destroy the company, spies, and state actors they don't see that the problem isn't with the act of revelation. I actually hope that some state actors are involved, because if they are I want to thank that country.
Here is a tidbit for Facebook, and every other social networking executive and employee in the world. Learn it, because it's important. The problem is never in the revelation. If you are afraid of how other people will react if an action is revealed, then you need to ask yourself if that fear of revelation isn't a part of your own psyche (call it a conscience if you like) making a last ditch effort at telling you that maybe what you're doing is wrong. If you are that far gone that all you have left to keep you in check is the fear of how normal people will react to what you're doing or saying, then you desperately need to listen to that fear until you can get back whatever humanity you can. Because it's not a matter of if, but when it will come to light.
I especially love the part where Bosworth tries to claim he didn't even agree with what he was saying as he was saying it. A note to him, that particular reaction isn't what I'm talking about above. Trying to claim you were just trying to spark discussion and were playing devil's advocate doesn't work when you are the vice president and your statements influence the actions and motivations of hundreds of employees.
I'm actually impressed. While I will never own a Tesla, unfortunately, because I won't own a car where the manufacturer can issue over-the-air updates that I cannot control and which materially affect the performance of the vehicle, this is actually perhaps the most responsible way I've seen a recall handled. In most cases, recalls are forced by the NHTSA. For the most part, auto manufacturers don't wait until the NHTSA actually orders a recall, but generally the writing is on the wall that they need to voluntarily recall or the NHTSA will step in. In this case, it wasn't even on the NHTSA's radar.
Considering this "story" has, as of this post, 299 comments and most other stories are under 50, the editors would seem to know what they are doing. Ask Slashdot, like very other story here, is intended to generate discussion. The more buzz, the more successful it is.
Slashdot Mirror
In any scenario there are explicit facts and implied facts. The explicit fact in this scenario is that the asker was hacked twice. The implied fact, from the question, is that one or both were related to his router. Turning that around on the asker questions his competence to ask the question, and is an arrogant assertion that your mere assumption that he likely doesn't know what he's talking about is more probable than the poser's clear implication in the question that the router is pertinent to the discussion.
There are some Ask Slashdot questions where the implied facts are inherently inconsistent with the question being asked. In cases like that, go to town pointing it out. This here, however, is pretty open and shut and the asker deserves deference in his scenario. In general all implied facts should be assumed to be in favour of the poser of the question knowing what he's talking about.
In short, and I'm going to bold this so you can refer back to it, unless there is an overwhelming reason not to, either answer the question asked or exercise your constitutional right to remain silent.
How about you stop being pedantic on what the background information means, and either helpfully answer the (fairly easy to understand) question or decide you have nothing useful to add to the conversation and not try to. The people who think they are clever by second guessing Ask Slashdot questions get rather annoying in short order.
I actually came to this question with some amount of actual curiosity. I used to build Linux firewalls for small businesses. This was back before routers were appliances. When NAT was still "IP Masquerading" on Linux, and it was actually a dirty word because it let you "share" internet connections when the early cable modem providers wanted to sell you an IP address for every computer using the connection. I moved on to process control and automation work, project management, and then switched tracks into the Navy. What relevance is that? The point is, there are lots of people like me who had at one point been heavily invested in the current state of the art who, for some years, haven't had the time or resources to follow current best practices. Ask Slashdot questions like these are actually helpful to those of us who would like the benefit of the experience of those who are still up on the state of the art.
When you, and those like you, roll in with your clever meta-answers, it helps no one. You and (especially) the five moderators who upvoted your post as "informative" should hang your heads in collective shame.
This will work fine for vanilla applications - anything that requires a single outgoing port should work fine, but anything that requires UPnP to open a listening port will run into issues. Games will be hit and miss.
Sure, it's cumbersome enough to an attacker that it prevents easy hacking, but that's also not very good if it's so cumbersome as to be a burden to the user as well.
At first I thought my unfamiliarity with it was just that I am firmly on the Debian side in the type of distros I prefer. This isn't even in the Distrowatch top 300 - if there are (at least) 300 distributions above you, including Slackware, the distribution that is, famously, essentially a one-man-show, then this is beyond even being a niche case. I kind of feel for the guy, though. Whomever he is. He's dedicated ten years of his life to making a distribution that could only register on the Internet's visual perceptors by a perfect storm combination of going supernova and a bored Slashdot editor being shown the explosion through a telescope.
I'm relatively certain #3 was meant not to try and indicate it was factually inaccurate, but simply ignorant. As in, the kind of people who tell you that a tomato is, botanically, a fruit are the kind of people who want to appear clever and who ignore that in general a) everyone else also knows and b) no one cares or treats it as one. IE: A piece of knowledge that someone gains before they have the wisdom to use it correctly, which is pretty much the epitome of being on mount stupid.
But, yes, your overall point was not lost.
Negative. It's the techno-idiots and the donut-eating mother's-basement-living sci-fi dweebs that have escaped.
The combination of machine learning and robotics have exciting prospects for eliminating mundane jobs. Including new horizons in human-machine-interface technology. Real-time limited natural voice interaction may become a reality in the near future. However we are no closer to hard AI today than we were forty years ago. Worse, actually. At least forty years ago we were coming down off the pinnacle of the first mount stupid. After the Heinlein-esque overly optimistic sci-fi of the 50's and 60's where AI (along with nuclear rockets, flying cars, and colonies throughout the solar system) was just assumed to be right around the corner, computer scientists actually drank the cool aid and believed it. In the 70's and 80's we sheepishly came down off that mount and realized we didn't even really have a clue how to do it and we learned a bit of wisdom.
However, what the mount stupid graph I liked above doesn't show is that it's quite possible to have more than one of them in a single subject. Now with new machine learning techniques we are climbing right back onto another mount stupid. People think that because a medical database can spout off fringe diagnoses better than some actual experienced doctors that this means AI is right around the corner. I am no more impressed with that or with computers winning at Go and Chess than I am impressed that a hydraulic press can exert several (thousand) times my strength. The software that is winning at Chess and Go are, in fact, little smarter than that same hydraulic press. The software knows from analyzing millions of games that humans have played what winning strategies are, and combines that with brute force strength to know where to optimize its searches. For like reason I am also not terribly impressed with the Google's latest natural voice accomplishments either. At least, not as an indicator that actual AI is around the corner. They are just the same machine learning tied into voice recognition data Google has been able to compile by stealing billions of voice samples by claiming that voice recognition requires them to transmit your actual voice to their servers.
We are not close to hard AI. We are not close to soft AI. For AI to be AI it has to be BOTH A and I, and one out of two doesn't count. I personally don't think we are within half a century of hard AI.
I was arguing on behalf of Pluto. Was that actually unclear?
First of all your question assumes facts not in evidence. You are stating as a fact within your question that that Pluto has few similarities to the other eight planets. While it's difficult to nail down Pluto's geology precisely, best evidence suggests that Pluto has a rocky/metalic core, a probably liquid mantle, and a solid crust. How much other differentiation there are between layers (an outer/inner mantle, outer/inner core) is pure guesswork right now, but as it stands it has quite similar enough geology to the other eight planets for me to recognize it as belonging.
Secondly the way your question is worded also suggests that, to you, somehow the number of planets in the solar system is a problem. Who cares if it's just Eris or a dozen more? If they are large enough for gravity to pull them into a sphere, if they are geologically and structurally similar to the other planets, how is the number of them even relevant? That's not evidence-based science at all. That's letting your comfort-level with the result determine what you accept as results.
The whole reason for "demoting" Pluto had nothing to do with Pluto itself. It had to do with Eris. When Eris was discovered, it appeared to be (because of its albedo) larger than Pluto. It is, in fact, more massive tham Pluto is though slightly smaller. Because of its size, the discoverer was making a strong case for having it accepted as the solar system's 10th planet. While this gave NASA a huge ole woody, because they were counting the dollar signs of how a newly discovered actual planet would spur public opinion for exploration, it caused significant consternation at the IAU. That's actually understating things. A few members of the IAU were quite literally horrified at the prospect. They were looking at the fact Michael Brown's team had discovered scads of Trans-Neptunian-Objects, that there very well could be half a dozen or more additional ones the size of Pluto/Eris, and they were quite happy with the set of planets we already had, thank-you-very-much. There was a certain historical congruency to it and no upstart finding a TNO that happened to be as large as Pluto was going to get his name listed in the same breath as such nobility as William Herschel. So they decided that in the end, that since they really couldn't call Eris a planet if Pluto was a planet, they did what they thought was the lesser evil. They preserved the sanctity of the rest of the solar system by demoting Pluto.
Of course the definition has holes and is not even self-consistent. The whole purpose of it was to demote Pluto and all other similar objects and to ensure that it was worded such that no other TNO could ever be labelled a planet, by nature of being out in the area where nothing is "cleared".
What people need to ask themselves is this: does the fact that the IAU had its collective head up its ass tell me what I consider to be a planet? The answer for me personally is a big whopping no. And when it comes up in conversation, usually after I name all 9 traditional planets (sometimes adding Eris) and get "corrected" that, hey, don't I know Pluto isn't a planet any more, that's when I let the poor smarty-pants have it with both barrels. Not really their fault, but anyone toeing the IAU party line and not willing to think for themselves deserves to get it.
The IAU isn't an official body with any authority other than what they have taken on themselves. And if they are going to let historical politics cloud scientific thinking, they certainly aren't going to speak for me. I'd like to see some textbook publishers take a stand too.
If you want your privacy back then demand your data back. Ask where your data is going with each transaction. Now, for the type of data I have, I trust encryption to protect my data going over the internet, but we've learned that any time we turn our data over to someone else that it's not a matter of "if" but "when" that data will find itself somewhere we would rather it not be.
In today's environment of easy access to home internet with speeds that rival a LAN of not too long ago, it's not hard to control all your data end points. Perhaps that's the new lame catch phrase we need. End point computing. Where everyone controls all their data end points. PC for processing, home central storage appliance for storage and archiving, media center for A/V, smartphone for portable and remote control. I also consider a rented virtual server (from a reputable company) to be close enough to personal property to count, and you can add that to your portfolio of processing if you want dedicated web applications like a good personally owned webmail. I don't actually expose my home storage appliance to the internet, though it's capable of it. I don't trust the security on it enough for that, so I use syncthing on my server for data synchronization and save bulk transfers to/from archive for when I'm home.
Demand you own all your data end points and simply refuse to use any "service" which offers to take care of your data for you. I won't use gmail, dropbox, picasa, or anything which will make it easy if I just give them my property.
If you want privacy, take back ownership of your data.
What's the difference between a car marketing phrase writer and a computer marketing phrase writer? The car marketing phrase write knows when he's lying.
Correct. They are only self-destruct when using Google's platform. Which means only when sent from AND to Google gmail accounts. They may be self destruct for the end users, but you know who they are not self destruct for? Google. They encourage people to send email that's even more sensitive than people already use email for by implying a time-limited duration, then they are the arbiters of what data is private and what isn't. Great scam.
Any soldier, sailor, or airman who takes ANY powered phone on an op should be charged. EMCON considerations are serious, and they will locate you faster from the fact you are making any transmission than they will locate you from hacks in the phone's OS. This is drilled into everyone.
No, this is far too measured an escalation, this tells me there are untold behind-the-scenes activities being played out here. This is a shot across the bow. A first real action to hit them in the sales department. I suspect US agencies are trying to negotiate behind-the-scenes deals with Huwei to get their own greasy mitts into the guts of phones they sell in North America and are using the prospect of banning their sales outright for "national security" reasons to put the gears on them. If Huwei doesn't give in, they will find the US will escalate claims of Chinese spying and Huwei will lose access to the market.
Of course the US knows that China could order their domestic corporations to put back doors in their products. They know from long experience just how easy it is to slip a back door into products and standards.
Thing is, if I were a US citizen, I'd far rather have a Huwei product. Actually, as a Canadian I think I still would rather own a Huwei. At least I can probably trust the NSA doesn't have its greasy mitts inside one of those (or, at least, there's a better chance of it). There are daily stories of strange and unusual things happening to people at the border because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some database has their phone as having been in close proximity to some person of interest to US intelligence and suddenly they are locked in a room with no phones, often no clothes, and definitely no recourse, until they cough up answers that US officials like.
Cable TV prices skyrocketed long before cord cutting started hurting their bottom line. Netflix et al are not viable replacements for TV, people are simply making do with them in greater numbers as a result of cable company greed. Cable TV prices skyrocketed simply because they could - cable companies have, for the most part, a monopoly in any given area handed to them by city and state governments which sign agreements to allow only one company to lay cable during the construction of new neighborhoods. So this isn't a problem solely of supply and demand, and people having to "pay the piper" in some way. Cord cutting is self defense, not people wanting to somehow skirt the system. Cable companies are well compensated for the cable they lay, even at internet-only rates as they currently exist.
This problem, of cable companies jacking internet prices to offset loss of their overcharged TV subscriptions, is somewhat mitigated in Canada. Because of the sole-source agreements for laying cable, the CRTC ruled that cable companies here are required to allow independent resellers access to their network at bulk rates, and the cable companies have to justify the rate they charge to these resellers. Unbundled internet-only accounts are, therefore, available here at pretty reasonable rates. I pay $55CAD/month for a 100Mbit. And, where I live at least, it's a very solid 100Mbit - actually a touch faster sustained.
Given the essential nature of internet in modern society, this could be a model that might work in the US as well.
The funny (and when I say funny what I really mean is very very sad) part is the video on the logo design process. What's funny isn't so much the content of that video (which is mostly just a series of rejected stupider ideas for the logo), it's the fact they made a "making of" video at all. Here's a hint... that logo is not exactly a creative masterpiece guys. The word itself implies movement, so the word GO with a few movement implying lines behind it, like every kid has used in every stick drawing since the second grade, is not exactly artistic or branding genius.
In the end it's a programming language. The use, dissemination, and discussion of which should be based solely on technical considerations and merits. You didn't see Kernighan and Ritchie stopping work to release branding guides for their offering, and it's still going strong the better part of 50 years later.
From a public safety and for the interests of the state, this is a good outcome. But for any particular individual contemplating sending their DNA in to one of those sites, there is no good side. In this case it's a serial rapist and murderer. Queue the ticker tape parade. But your personal interests can only be harmed. This is becoming more like Gattaca every day. If any piece of random sloughed off skin is public domain, then at some point everywhere I've been, everything I do becomes public domain. Which bodes ill if there is a rare book I happen to touch immediately before or after a serial killer. If, for example, it's known that a suspect touched this book, my DNA on it suddenly puts me in the running for man of the hour. This is just one example, and an unlikely one to be sure, but I honestly can't think of any use of my randomly shed DNA in correlation with these genetic genealogy sites that serves my self interest.
Not seeing the new UI since I have stopped using gmail long ago due to the draconian and pervasive privacy invasions. I'm honestly surprised that a UI change at gmail is even news.
They were a good search engine before they tried to be an everything portal. People went there for search results, and so they tried to become the place you could go to for everything and not have to search for anything. Slow to load, intrusive, and tacky. Google did it better by keeping their search clean, other things unobtrusive and selectable in a menu, and allowing people who wanted to find something to get in, search, and get out quickly. If Lycos had followed that model, they could easily have retained their crown.
There was another Slashdot story a few months ago that C was making a comeback. Now Slashdot ponders if Ruby, one of the languages that contributed to the "death" of C can make it another 25 years.
The answer is no. At least, not in the way it is now. I suspect that, like Perl and Python and other interpreted languages, Ruby will always have a little niche of users. There will always be projects that are well suited to the ease of letting your programming language do all the thinking for you, and which don't care about the performance hit. JIT, if it makes it into Ruby, will further extend this, especially for the (often rather vocal) crowd that thinks JIT is magick that makes an interpreted language just as performant as compiled. Unfortunately, there is no fairy here, and Ruby (like the ones before it) will never be a real boy.
A comment made by one of the developers of PiTiVi (an open source video editor done in Python) on the how-to-contribute page for that project actually sums up Python in general, and also extends quite well to my thoughs on Ruby and most others in the same vein:
Which is a great summation for Python, and is so applicable to Ruby as well it could have been written about it. Great for quick and dirty little tools, good for a project framework perhaps, but if you want to do serious work, go to a C library. This will always be the case. Ruby and Python and Perl and even mighty Java, they will have their niches supported by adherents who expound some aspect of their garbage collection, or ease of use, or type safety, but for the real work, people will always turn to native code. In a few years there will be some new debutant... there will always be some new debutant, bright and beautiful in that sparkling ball gown, that will draw all the ooohs and aahhhs of the boys in the crowd and which will rally the people to cry "this... THIS is the one that will kill native code dead once and for all", and yet it will never happen.
It's the other way around. They were trying to do more and more based on the strength of the verbal commitments they had, and when they realized that their development staff were going hog wild with that extra stuff, that's when they made the "crucial" and "consequential changes in staff and scope" in order to rein it in and bring it back on track.
From a February blog entry:
Interestingly, I already use Linux in Windows for some of the things I no longer trust Windows for. Just not Microsoft's version of Linux, of course, because I will never trust that. I use VirtualBox.
Of course, any VM running in Windows is just as vulnerable as any other piece of software, but it's an extra layer of difficulty. My VirtualBox VM's filesystem is encrypted, so a random piece of Windows malware can't just read its files indiscriminately, and any malware (and by that I mean software antagonistic to my best interests, including the OS) reading the VM's memory has an extra layer of data structures to have to parse to get at any juicy data in RAM. It adds a layer between the OS and important software like KeePass. A layer that automated malware tools are unlikely to have been designed to search through, which is another reason not to use Microsoft's solutions.
Microsoft's Linux offerings are a solution looking for a problem. Nothing that you distrust Windows for can be trusted to them. There are other solutions that have been around longer and are better understood. I think I'll stick to what I know, thank-you.
What's really rather ironic, is that they aren't just on fire but they are on fire because they poured the gasoline all over themselves and then proceeded to actually light the match.
A company that has taken the admitted stance of connection at all cost, which has exploited its phone apps to mine for contacts, and which almost singlehandedly invented and then exploited the culture of over sharing so much that privacy isn't even a consideration for a whole generation is now hoist by their own revelations. And they have the nerve to complain that the problem isn't in the memo, but that the memo was leaked. That is truly rich. They are so far gone they don't even see the problem any more. They talk about "suicide bomber" employees who are just getting a job to destroy the company, spies, and state actors they don't see that the problem isn't with the act of revelation. I actually hope that some state actors are involved, because if they are I want to thank that country.
Here is a tidbit for Facebook, and every other social networking executive and employee in the world. Learn it, because it's important. The problem is never in the revelation. If you are afraid of how other people will react if an action is revealed, then you need to ask yourself if that fear of revelation isn't a part of your own psyche (call it a conscience if you like) making a last ditch effort at telling you that maybe what you're doing is wrong. If you are that far gone that all you have left to keep you in check is the fear of how normal people will react to what you're doing or saying, then you desperately need to listen to that fear until you can get back whatever humanity you can. Because it's not a matter of if, but when it will come to light.
I especially love the part where Bosworth tries to claim he didn't even agree with what he was saying as he was saying it. A note to him, that particular reaction isn't what I'm talking about above. Trying to claim you were just trying to spark discussion and were playing devil's advocate doesn't work when you are the vice president and your statements influence the actions and motivations of hundreds of employees.
I'm actually impressed. While I will never own a Tesla, unfortunately, because I won't own a car where the manufacturer can issue over-the-air updates that I cannot control and which materially affect the performance of the vehicle, this is actually perhaps the most responsible way I've seen a recall handled. In most cases, recalls are forced by the NHTSA. For the most part, auto manufacturers don't wait until the NHTSA actually orders a recall, but generally the writing is on the wall that they need to voluntarily recall or the NHTSA will step in. In this case, it wasn't even on the NHTSA's radar.
This might make me rethink my stance on Tesla.
Considering this "story" has, as of this post, 299 comments and most other stories are under 50, the editors would seem to know what they are doing. Ask Slashdot, like very other story here, is intended to generate discussion. The more buzz, the more successful it is.