People are simple organisms. They react to immediate threats to their lives, after that they prioritise their next meal, their next dose of "fun" and whatever bodilly functions cause them discomfort.
Now, try to persuade those people to stop doing things they like doing and address some abstract concepts that may, but almost certainly won't, become important to them at some distant point in their futures. That's what education tries to do. it only succeeds because the teacher (for want of a better term) is able to induce or threaten their pupils to PAY ATTENTION - or at least not blatantly ignore them. Then, if the teacher is lucky, a small percentage of the wisdom they impart will be retained - for a few days, at least.
Once you remove the teacher from the scene, and replace him/her/it with a device that gives the pupil access to an almost infinite source of "fun" the chances of them stumbling upon the information they are supposed to be learning is indistinguishably close to zero. [ Although it's still perfectly possible that they will learn stuff that WILL be useful to them in later life, that's not what they will be tested and their teachers' success assessed on - so it doesn't count. ]
If you accept the licence agreement, it then downloads malware to your PC.
So all the "malware infested" media does is get the unsuspecting (or credulous, it's a fine line) user to download their own malware. It's not the video that contains the bad software and you'd expect any AV software to pick up on this old, old (the article is dated 2006) attack vector.
For a small proportion of the population (but, possibly, a large proportion of slashdot-ers) a PC is not a platform for doing useful work or serving entertainment, it's a source of "fun" in its own right. In past decades the people who like to play with their computers would be out in the yard, covered in oil, fiddling with a junky old car, or tuning a valve radio. Now they get their satisfaction from squeezing the last few MHz out of their PCs - whether there is any need or use for those few extra cycles, is immaterial.
And for those with a more software bent, than a hardware leaning, there's always OSS - which serves a similar purpose.
once one person from high school finds you on Facebook, the rest will soon follow
So don't publish details of where you went to school. It's not compulsory and if you don't want people from your old school finding you, then seriously: don't say where you were at school.
It's not as if you're the only person with your particular name in the whole world and even if you have posted photos of yourself it's easy to either ignore the requests or reply "no you must be mistaken". If you post your personal information, people are going to find it. You can't complain that the "wrong people" find it - you wouldn't have posted it if you didn't want people to find it.
There is a cliche film/tv reunion where where everyone is vital, pretty, socially able and remembers lots of amusing stories about the "best time of their life" at school or university.
In practice the interesting people are too busy being interesting to attend, the "hot" people you remember from when they were 17 or 18 have now gained 30kg (4+ stone) and only want to talk about their children, or their problems, or their scumbag ex-partner. Even worse, the events themselves are frequently thinly-veiled fundraisers for the school/university to support causes that didn't exist when you were there, and don't care about since you moved away - a long, long way away.
So if FB has managed to start killing off reonions, then at least it's performing one social good.
The point about delivery within 7 days is that implies the product is in stock, sitting on a shelf somewhere, ready to be picked, packed and shipped. I've done the early adopter thing (you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs:)) and generally it doesn't work - you end up as a beta tester and spend too much time working around shortcomings and "version 1" bugs.
Likewise, I've bought promising sounding products, only to have them disappear (TINI, anyone?) when they should have taken the world by storm. Right now I'm happy to wait until I can see some reviews from actual users (not magazines that just parrot the spec list and award it the default 9 / 10 or 5 stars) and get some confidence that I will spend at least three quarters of my time developing a usable end result - not groping around trying to get the IDE to work, waiting for V1.1 firmware, or cutting tracks and patching hardware.
Sorry for the skepticism, but my days as an uncritical fanboy of anything are long gone.
But "spoofing" GPS signals is a great deal more challenging.
Surely not. I am certain it formed the basis for a James Bond movie back in the 90's. If the concept has been mainstream for all that time, the only real surprise is that nobody has succeeded in doing it before.
Leaving aside the question about percentages of users, almost everyone in almost every country (in europe, at least) can receive a 3G signal. So long as you can receive that signal and can afford the equipment, you have internet access. Whether or not you then choose to spend your agricultural-grade income on something as unnecessary as Facebook or Twitter access, and content in a language you probably don't speak is up to you. I have to say that if I only earned 50 euros a day and was asked to pay out some hundreds for a computer, and 3G broadband - but that most of the content I could access was in some unknown language, I think I could easily life a full and happy life without it.
Having internet access at home does not mean you need to have ADSL or cable provision. It only means that it is theoretically possible, with enough money spent, to ping a site. It does not mean the access has to be affordable, ubquitous or even useful. On that basis, this survey fails.
Not only are the prospective shareholders thinking of ways to spend their dosh, probably 10 times as many scammers are cooking up schemes to relieve them of it. Given that the scammers have way more experience of separating victims from their money than these doe-eyed (soon to be) millionaires have of holding on to it - I'd bet on the baddies.
It will interesting to see what happens to the street price of recreational chemicals (where-ever Facebookers live) after the storm of money hits.
they intercepted a victim's two factor online banking codes
Surely the victim here was the bank. They are the ones who gave away money to people who weren't entitled to it. They were the ones who allowed a weak form of authentication to be accepted. They are the ones who will bear the eventual loss.
The person who's account was used did nothing wrong. He didn't disclose any confidential information and (from what I've read) complied with the terms of his account.
We need to get away from defining the victims of these crimes as being the person who's name is on the account that was used - the account that the bank wrongly withdrew money from and gave away to the scammers. Unless we start identifying the true victims as being the financial institutions who we entrust with our money, yet have weak and inappropriate security measures the time will come when they shift the expectation and liability, so that the customer will bear the loss for something that is neither their fault not within their control.
Not simply with age, but all the commitments these "firstees" take on cost money - extra money. So the salaries they would have accepted as new entrants into the job market are no longer sufficient to support their lifestyles. While they may have gained some skills during those fifteen years (or not, there's not many ways to distinguish 15 years of experience and 1 year of experience repeated 14 times), employers don't necessarily value those skills - especially as the relevance of a skill has a half-live of somewhere round 2 - 5 years, depending on how "sharp-end"/leading edge your employer is.
So what's happened is these 35 y/o's have believed their own CVs (resumes) and think they're actually worth the salaries they're asking for - simply because the company they wish to leave, or have been kicked out of, was prepared to pay at that level.
What they should be doing is asking themselves: what can I do that a 25 year-old couldn't do? What skills do I have that actually make more money for my employer? The answers to those questions are tough and generally not what people want to hear. However there is some good news: at least they're not 50 and in the same situation.
Although everyone makes mistakes, some people make hundreds of times more errors than others. Whether that's due to inherent lack of ability, poor training, lacking oversight, laziness, time pressures or just a slapdash attitude varies with each person. One place I was involved with (as an external consultant) made over 12,000 changes to their production systems every year. It turned out that well over half of those were backing out earlier changes, correcting mistakes/bugs from earlier "fixes" or other activities (a lot that resulted in downtime, and far too much of it unscheduled or emergency downtime) that should not have happened and could have been prevented.
So after China has mastered the art of the counter claim, next comes the defensive art of getting your attack in first:
US: "dum di dum di da - what a nice day it is"
China; "The US is doing a bad thing"
US: "We absolutely deny doing anything bad, ever, for all eternity <FX: thumps table with clenched fist>"
Populace: "Sounds like a bit of an over-reaction, maybe there IS something going on?"
However, ISTM they're not being a lot more subtle: "You want us to lend you $ X trillion? Sure, but we don't want to see any TV or newspaper exposee's about our human rights, or pollution, or foreign policy, or..."
Seriously though, it may be because those "hard core" ultrareligious sorts live in fear (which IMO is suboptimal). It's not funny if you feel unsafe.
Sounds plausible. I've heard theories that humour is associated with the release of tensions - people *do* laugh at inopportune times, frequently when something stressful has happened, not just when there's a "funny" in the air. So if religious types never feel relaxed (or, conversely, never feel under tension) then the release will never happen and the laughter won't be caused.
Re:Hay Pete! All the guys down at the pub...
on
The Science of Humor
·
· Score: 1
... say your girl is a lousy lay, but I want you to know that that's not my experience at all.
They're probably right. I know your wife thinks that too!
... then you'll be limited to airport style security checks and limitations on type and quantity of what you can take in to the stadia, so they have every option fully closed off. Anyone know who's sponsoring the toilets?
Errors are universal, humour is cultural
on
The Science of Humor
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Humor is when you catch yourself in an error
But The Funniest joke in the (english speaking?) World reckons that people from different cultures find different styles of humour to be more/less funny.
So there appears to be a conflict here. You'd expect everyone's brain to be wired to catch the same sorts of errors or false inferences, yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
happiness and quality of life, not number of dollars
I think you'd be genuinely surprised just how much happiness and QoL a reasonable amount of dollars can buy you - provided you apply them properly (and don't waste them on divorce lawyers - or any other kind of lawyers). Maybe the course that's missing is how to use your money effectively.
... the real Fikri (who?) is getting on with his/her/its nefarious activities on the other side of the country, while the decoy is just wondering when they'll twig. Aren't Mission Impossible style latex masks wonderful when the whole security system is designed around farcial recognition.
Or what?
They'll prosecute you for not giving them your password?
Exactly right - though I've never heard of any such prosecutions being made, or what the punishment is.
More interesting is how law enforcement would react to a large block of random data that appeared on a drive. It would not be much of a stretch to imagine that they would assume any data they didn't recognise was "encrypted data" and therefore require you to tell/show them how to gain access to it. If the data was, genuinely random (dd if=/dev/random of=/my/file) there is no possibility of decrypting it - but also no possibility of them being able to prove that it *is* encrypted.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be the same "international audience" that we periodically have to save from some other part of the "international audience"
Only if they have oil
Yes, it's called "California."
Not to mention most of the rest of the world.
People are simple organisms. They react to immediate threats to their lives, after that they prioritise their next meal, their next dose of "fun" and whatever bodilly functions cause them discomfort.
Now, try to persuade those people to stop doing things they like doing and address some abstract concepts that may, but almost certainly won't, become important to them at some distant point in their futures. That's what education tries to do. it only succeeds because the teacher (for want of a better term) is able to induce or threaten their pupils to PAY ATTENTION - or at least not blatantly ignore them. Then, if the teacher is lucky, a small percentage of the wisdom they impart will be retained - for a few days, at least.
Once you remove the teacher from the scene, and replace him/her/it with a device that gives the pupil access to an almost infinite source of "fun" the chances of them stumbling upon the information they are supposed to be learning is indistinguishably close to zero. [ Although it's still perfectly possible that they will learn stuff that WILL be useful to them in later life, that's not what they will be tested and their teachers' success assessed on - so it doesn't count. ]
If you accept the licence agreement, it then downloads malware to your PC.
So all the "malware infested" media does is get the unsuspecting (or credulous, it's a fine line) user to download their own malware. It's not the video that contains the bad software and you'd expect any AV software to pick up on this old, old (the article is dated 2006) attack vector.
For a small proportion of the population (but, possibly, a large proportion of slashdot-ers) a PC is not a platform for doing useful work or serving entertainment, it's a source of "fun" in its own right. In past decades the people who like to play with their computers would be out in the yard, covered in oil, fiddling with a junky old car, or tuning a valve radio. Now they get their satisfaction from squeezing the last few MHz out of their PCs - whether there is any need or use for those few extra cycles, is immaterial.
And for those with a more software bent, than a hardware leaning, there's always OSS - which serves a similar purpose.
once one person from high school finds you on Facebook, the rest will soon follow
So don't publish details of where you went to school. It's not compulsory and if you don't want people from your old school finding you, then seriously: don't say where you were at school.
It's not as if you're the only person with your particular name in the whole world and even if you have posted photos of yourself it's easy to either ignore the requests or reply "no you must be mistaken". If you post your personal information, people are going to find it. You can't complain that the "wrong people" find it - you wouldn't have posted it if you didn't want people to find it.
There is a cliche film/tv reunion where where everyone is vital, pretty, socially able and remembers lots of amusing stories about the "best time of their life" at school or university.
In practice the interesting people are too busy being interesting to attend, the "hot" people you remember from when they were 17 or 18 have now gained 30kg (4+ stone) and only want to talk about their children, or their problems, or their scumbag ex-partner. Even worse, the events themselves are frequently thinly-veiled fundraisers for the school/university to support causes that didn't exist when you were there, and don't care about since you moved away - a long, long way away.
So if FB has managed to start killing off reonions, then at least it's performing one social good.
The point about delivery within 7 days is that implies the product is in stock, sitting on a shelf somewhere, ready to be picked, packed and shipped. I've done the early adopter thing (you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs :)) and generally it doesn't work - you end up as a beta tester and spend too much time working around shortcomings and "version 1" bugs.
Likewise, I've bought promising sounding products, only to have them disappear (TINI, anyone?) when they should have taken the world by storm. Right now I'm happy to wait until I can see some reviews from actual users (not magazines that just parrot the spec list and award it the default 9 / 10 or 5 stars) and get some confidence that I will spend at least three quarters of my time developing a usable end result - not groping around trying to get the IDE to work, waiting for V1.1 firmware, or cutting tracks and patching hardware.
Sorry for the skepticism, but my days as an uncritical fanboy of anything are long gone.
Until that time it's just vapourware - same goes for the Raspberry Pi, unless you want a keyboard sticker, they've got nothing on the market.
But "spoofing" GPS signals is a great deal more challenging.
Surely not. I am certain it formed the basis for a James Bond movie back in the 90's. If the concept has been mainstream for all that time, the only real surprise is that nobody has succeeded in doing it before.
Leaving aside the question about percentages of users, almost everyone in almost every country (in europe, at least) can receive a 3G signal. So long as you can receive that signal and can afford the equipment, you have internet access. Whether or not you then choose to spend your agricultural-grade income on something as unnecessary as Facebook or Twitter access, and content in a language you probably don't speak is up to you. I have to say that if I only earned 50 euros a day and was asked to pay out some hundreds for a computer, and 3G broadband - but that most of the content I could access was in some unknown language, I think I could easily life a full and happy life without it.
Having internet access at home does not mean you need to have ADSL or cable provision. It only means that it is theoretically possible, with enough money spent, to ping a site. It does not mean the access has to be affordable, ubquitous or even useful. On that basis, this survey fails.
how many quantum computer groups are there likely to be in Bristol?
You can either know where they are, or how many there are - but not both.
Not only are the prospective shareholders thinking of ways to spend their dosh, probably 10 times as many scammers are cooking up schemes to relieve them of it. Given that the scammers have way more experience of separating victims from their money than these doe-eyed (soon to be) millionaires have of holding on to it - I'd bet on the baddies.
It will interesting to see what happens to the street price of recreational chemicals (where-ever Facebookers live) after the storm of money hits.
they intercepted a victim's two factor online banking codes
Surely the victim here was the bank. They are the ones who gave away money to people who weren't entitled to it. They were the ones who allowed a weak form of authentication to be accepted. They are the ones who will bear the eventual loss.
The person who's account was used did nothing wrong. He didn't disclose any confidential information and (from what I've read) complied with the terms of his account.
We need to get away from defining the victims of these crimes as being the person who's name is on the account that was used - the account that the bank wrongly withdrew money from and gave away to the scammers. Unless we start identifying the true victims as being the financial institutions who we entrust with our money, yet have weak and inappropriate security measures the time will come when they shift the expectation and liability, so that the customer will bear the loss for something that is neither their fault not within their control.
Not simply with age, but all the commitments these "firstees" take on cost money - extra money. So the salaries they would have accepted as new entrants into the job market are no longer sufficient to support their lifestyles. While they may have gained some skills during those fifteen years (or not, there's not many ways to distinguish 15 years of experience and 1 year of experience repeated 14 times), employers don't necessarily value those skills - especially as the relevance of a skill has a half-live of somewhere round 2 - 5 years, depending on how "sharp-end"/leading edge your employer is.
So what's happened is these 35 y/o's have believed their own CVs (resumes) and think they're actually worth the salaries they're asking for - simply because the company they wish to leave, or have been kicked out of, was prepared to pay at that level.
What they should be doing is asking themselves: what can I do that a 25 year-old couldn't do? What skills do I have that actually make more money for my employer? The answers to those questions are tough and generally not what people want to hear. However there is some good news: at least they're not 50 and in the same situation.
Although everyone makes mistakes, some people make hundreds of times more errors than others. Whether that's due to inherent lack of ability, poor training, lacking oversight, laziness, time pressures or just a slapdash attitude varies with each person. One place I was involved with (as an external consultant) made over 12,000 changes to their production systems every year. It turned out that well over half of those were backing out earlier changes, correcting mistakes/bugs from earlier "fixes" or other activities (a lot that resulted in downtime, and far too much of it unscheduled or emergency downtime) that should not have happened and could have been prevented.
So after China has mastered the art of the counter claim, next comes the defensive art of getting your attack in first:
US: "dum di dum di da - what a nice day it is"
China; "The US is doing a bad thing"
US: "We absolutely deny doing anything bad, ever, for all eternity <FX: thumps table with clenched fist>"
Populace: "Sounds like a bit of an over-reaction, maybe there IS something going on?"
However, ISTM they're not being a lot more subtle: "You want us to lend you $ X trillion? Sure, but we don't want to see any TV or newspaper exposee's about our human rights, or pollution, or foreign policy, or ..."
Seriously though, it may be because those "hard core" ultrareligious sorts live in fear (which IMO is suboptimal). It's not funny if you feel unsafe.
Sounds plausible. I've heard theories that humour is associated with the release of tensions - people *do* laugh at inopportune times, frequently when something stressful has happened, not just when there's a "funny" in the air. So if religious types never feel relaxed (or, conversely, never feel under tension) then the release will never happen and the laughter won't be caused.
... say your girl is a lousy lay, but I want you to know that that's not my experience at all.
They're probably right. I know your wife thinks that too!
You will be eating at McDonalds,
Humor is when you catch yourself in an error
But The Funniest joke in the (english speaking?) World reckons that people from different cultures find different styles of humour to be more/less funny.
So there appears to be a conflict here. You'd expect everyone's brain to be wired to catch the same sorts of errors or false inferences, yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
Why are IT staff treated with near universal contempt?
One reason might be because that's how IT staff treat everyone else.
happiness and quality of life, not number of dollars
I think you'd be genuinely surprised just how much happiness and QoL a reasonable amount of dollars can buy you - provided you apply them properly (and don't waste them on divorce lawyers - or any other kind of lawyers). Maybe the course that's missing is how to use your money effectively.
... the real Fikri (who?) is getting on with his/her/its nefarious activities on the other side of the country, while the decoy is just wondering when they'll twig. Aren't Mission Impossible style latex masks wonderful when the whole security system is designed around farcial recognition.
Or what?
They'll prosecute you for not giving them your password?
Exactly right - though I've never heard of any such prosecutions being made, or what the punishment is.
More interesting is how law enforcement would react to a large block of random data that appeared on a drive. It would not be much of a stretch to imagine that they would assume any data they didn't recognise was "encrypted data" and therefore require you to tell/show them how to gain access to it. If the data was, genuinely random (dd if=/dev/random of=/my/file) there is no possibility of decrypting it - but also no possibility of them being able to prove that it *is* encrypted.