So... people weren't interested in cracking the PS3 when news hit on just about every gaming website that someone had got a 'hello world' working on the console? Lots of people got really excited about that, even though it was only a minor achievement and even then, it was probably faked.
It's the good old "any justification I can grasp at for piracy".
I was doing it on the basis of 1 in 100 people in the general population having autism. Seems it's closer to 1 in 170-200 (which are likely the figures they use)
I personally believe that these savants are little more than statistics in action. For every autistic person who can do incredibly complex maths with ease, I'd be willing to bet there are hundreds in academia or research with similar levels of ability. If 1 in 500 regular people are mathematical whizzes, then 1 in 500 people (whose version of autism doesn't affect their thinking in that way) should also be whizzes.
Other times, it's a case of mental disabilities forcing people into certain career paths. Take Dyspraxia and it's more famous cousin Dyslexia. Both of these conditions affect hand to eye co-ordination (Dyspraxia especially). Kids with these conditions get lumped with the fat kids when it comes to being picked last in the playground because. These kids aren't especially likely to take up sports because of this (that's not to say some don't). This is why a larger portion of geeks tend to have this condition compared to the general population.
Trouble is, you don't want 'first filter' tests. False positives of any kind in medicine are incredibly stressful and you want to minimise them. Telling patients that a result is 'probably nothing to worry about' doesn't ease their worries.
Tests and treatments need to do more good than harm. Even if a comprehensive testing regime catches someone who would otherwise be missed, it's not worth it if the 100 false positives make life horrible for the people affected.
Say you scan 50,000 a year, you'll get 5000 false positives. That means each year you'll have 5000 children who'll have to go through humiliating therapy and have their education severely hampered for no good reason! Of those 50,000, you'd expect only 500 to actually have autism.
Even if you used this as a basis for further testing, You're still putting 10 families through the stress of comprehensive testing for autism for no reason for every 1 family whose child actually has the condition.
Yeah, he's just totally riding off of the fact he managed to become celebrated as one of the smartest people in the world and helped millions become interested in astro-physics, all whilst dealing with a crippling disability.
He clearly needs to get over himself! You can totally hear the smugness in that voice synthesiser of his!
Just because figures given may be correct or events mentioned in an article known to have taken place, it doesn't mean they're a fair or accurate representation. You can spin facts and figures to mean anything if you try hard enough.
When rendering a complex scene, parts of the system sit idle for periods of time. The CPU finishes its job fast, waits for the CPU. The GPU waits for stuff to arrive from the VRAM. The shaders only operate for a bit of the time.
When you're operating at an obscene frame rate, every part of the system will be operating at full pelt because no one spends any time waiting.
For evidence of this, compare system and GPU load on a fur benchmark to running crysis on max settings.
How many people leave a benchmark on solidly for an hour or more?
Not only that, assuming you loop 3D mark. Every 3-4 minutes, you get a nice 30 second break as the next scene is loaded.
Situations where a GPU is churning at a solid 100% for a long period are incredibly rare (even on an intensive game, it fluctuates). Games that don't have a frame rate cap tend to get away with it because there'll never be a situation that causes the GPU to go into overdrive for a long period.
I don't see how you can possibly defend shoddy coding like this. A frame rate cap is pure common sense. Even if your cooling is perfectly able to cope, you're still using 50-150W (depending on the system setup) more than you should be.
Conversely a behaviour I hate in Firefox is when you 'miss' an url in the auto complete dropdown. Rather than either doing nothing or closing the dropdown (both reasonable behaviours), it has a habbit of trying to take you to the half typed url (eg. 'www.slashdot.c' )which is utterly useless and irritating.
Is it not ironic to criticize security through obscurity only then to recommend that the device be secured in a method that is relying 100% on obscurity to function?
Security through obscurity being no security at all is a myth that simply doesn't hold true.
If that was so, why bother with classifying top secret documents? Why keep details on how Nuclear codes get entered hush hush? Why not publicise exactly what the secret service will do before every public appearance by the president?
Obscurity shouldn't be the only security measure (if you know the Secret Service's routes, you still have to deal with their guns and training), but it is a valid method. Just as binaries can be decompiled or run through attack tools to look for weaknesses, so can encryption be brute forced or passwords social engineered.
There seems to a double standard that code is somehow special from physical actions/objects.
Why is knowing the code for a fly by wire system any more important than knowing the schematics for the physical control systems? Am I more at risk not knowing how a CPU controls the amount of fuel going to a jet engine than I am not knowing the make up of the pumps and delivery system?
I wouldn't expect Rolls Royce to make their engine blueprints public, why should we expect it of code?
A 2kg battery pack is 24V for 4.2Ah. That's ~100wh
To match the Chevy Volt's 16Kwh You'd need around 160 of these. That's for a tiny 40mile range. These aren't going to be the main power source of a car any time soon
Funny how you don't include figures of how many charges get dropped or downgraded before they get to trial.
Those statistics could represent a harsh oppressive society where the innocent are thrown into jail at the drop of a hat.
However it could also indicate that there's an incredibly high burden of proof required to get a trial, if this high burden isn't met, the trial doesn't happen.
30 incidents over a 5 year period? Presented by a site that gives an entirely one sided view on each incident? Well I'm convinced!
As for the youtube vids. The critical mass cyclist one was valid and the officer punished (probably why you felt you needed to post it twice). Other than that, it's funny how these videos always seem to miss out the incident behind the arrests and just cut straight into the arrest.
But anyway, there are thousands, if not 10,000s of protests in the US each year and the vast vast majority of them are allowed to be carried out without any notable incidents involving police.
You get a handful of incidents that get reported where it was debatable if the force by the police was reasonable or not.
This in a country of 300million. A country with such open attitudes to protest that the Westboro church are freely allowed to protest (there are very few civilised countries that would allow that).
There's no reason why a trojan like this couldn't be installed on Linux or OSX. You don't even need admin rights to install something that could log their key presses.
Because once you get down to 1-2 seeds, chances are the only person seeding is a dedicated seeder rather than a downloader. When you have 1000 seeds, you probably only have an incredibly tiny portion of them being pure seeders.
Car tires, even if replaced regularly are at risk of blowing out.
If you suffer a blowout 6 months into a new set, spin out of control despite your best efforts and collide with another car, killing the occupants.
Should you face a murder charge? Despite you replacing the tires you should know theres always a blowout risk. Blowouts happen all the time and frequently lead to accidents. If you had spent a bit more and got some run on flat tires, the people in the other car would still be alive.
You can always spend a bit more and make something a little safer. At some point you need to draw the line. How much should they spend before you'd deem they've spent enough? 1billion? 10billion? 20billion? Would you be happy paying $1 more for every litre for this to happen?
These things go 'all the way to the top' every time because it's the nature of a large business for decisions to get passed down a chain.
Usually at some point there's a subtle break where an employee decided to interpret a decision or made a choice indepentdently other how to go about a task. Is it really likely the Head of a huge company directly made a decicion on 1 of 1000 safety measures on 1 of 1000 (numbers made up) of their oil operations?
Then there's the sheer size of corporations. You could have a brilliant set of safty standards which makes the chance of an accident insanely low. However your company employs 100,000 people, eventually you'll get a perfect storm where perhaps one safety measure fails, another isn't obeyed and someone dies.
There may not have been anything especially wrong with the level of safty overall at an organisation but an enquiry finds that this unlikely accident could've been prevented if they'd forseen the possibility of it occuring.
Should the boss of that company, face criminal charges? Would you want to be the boss of a company knowing that, no matter how much attention you paid to safty, something could still go wrong and you'd wind up in jail if one of your 100K employees had a serious accident?
An appeal would've meant he spent much more time in jail and would have to go through a long trial (bad enough when you're not suffering from cancer). When your time is limited, that's a big deal.
3 months was a reasonable estimate at the time based on the medical evidence the doctor had. Doctors deal with probability, the cancer seemed more aggressive than it turned out to be. The 10 years estimate is likely a bunch of rubbish though, almost certainly a best case scenario that's incredibly unlikely.
But anyway, this guy was convicted by a single piece of evidence 'found' (a cloth belonging to him wrapped around a circuit board) many weeks after the crash by security agencies and the people who testified linking it to him were paid 7 figure sums. As I said, it was a joke of a conviction and everyone expected the appeal to be successful.
Slashdot Mirror
So... people weren't interested in cracking the PS3 when news hit on just about every gaming website that someone had got a 'hello world' working on the console? Lots of people got really excited about that, even though it was only a minor achievement and even then, it was probably faked.
It's the good old "any justification I can grasp at for piracy".
I was doing it on the basis of 1 in 100 people in the general population having autism. Seems it's closer to 1 in 170-200 (which are likely the figures they use)
I personally believe that these savants are little more than statistics in action. For every autistic person who can do incredibly complex maths with ease, I'd be willing to bet there are hundreds in academia or research with similar levels of ability. If 1 in 500 regular people are mathematical whizzes, then 1 in 500 people (whose version of autism doesn't affect their thinking in that way) should also be whizzes.
Other times, it's a case of mental disabilities forcing people into certain career paths. Take Dyspraxia and it's more famous cousin Dyslexia. Both of these conditions affect hand to eye co-ordination (Dyspraxia especially). Kids with these conditions get lumped with the fat kids when it comes to being picked last in the playground because. These kids aren't especially likely to take up sports because of this (that's not to say some don't). This is why a larger portion of geeks tend to have this condition compared to the general population.
Trouble is, you don't want 'first filter' tests. False positives of any kind in medicine are incredibly stressful and you want to minimise them. Telling patients that a result is 'probably nothing to worry about' doesn't ease their worries.
Tests and treatments need to do more good than harm. Even if a comprehensive testing regime catches someone who would otherwise be missed, it's not worth it if the 100 false positives make life horrible for the people affected.
aaaaand it says that in the article.
Bleh, I'm not used to actual good reporting on "a new totally amazing test!!!" stories in the media.
Say you scan 50,000 a year, you'll get 5000 false positives. That means each year you'll have 5000 children who'll have to go through humiliating therapy and have their education severely hampered for no good reason! Of those 50,000, you'd expect only 500 to actually have autism.
Even if you used this as a basis for further testing, You're still putting 10 families through the stress of comprehensive testing for autism for no reason for every 1 family whose child actually has the condition.
Yeah, he's just totally riding off of the fact he managed to become celebrated as one of the smartest people in the world and helped millions become interested in astro-physics, all whilst dealing with a crippling disability.
He clearly needs to get over himself! You can totally hear the smugness in that voice synthesiser of his!
Just because figures given may be correct or events mentioned in an article known to have taken place, it doesn't mean they're a fair or accurate representation. You can spin facts and figures to mean anything if you try hard enough.
When rendering a complex scene, parts of the system sit idle for periods of time. The CPU finishes its job fast, waits for the CPU. The GPU waits for stuff to arrive from the VRAM. The shaders only operate for a bit of the time.
When you're operating at an obscene frame rate, every part of the system will be operating at full pelt because no one spends any time waiting.
For evidence of this, compare system and GPU load on a fur benchmark to running crysis on max settings.
Most games will never get into a situation where they're rendering 1000's of frames a second for an hour or so.
How many people leave a benchmark on solidly for an hour or more?
Not only that, assuming you loop 3D mark. Every 3-4 minutes, you get a nice 30 second break as the next scene is loaded.
Situations where a GPU is churning at a solid 100% for a long period are incredibly rare (even on an intensive game, it fluctuates). Games that don't have a frame rate cap tend to get away with it because there'll never be a situation that causes the GPU to go into overdrive for a long period.
I don't see how you can possibly defend shoddy coding like this. A frame rate cap is pure common sense. Even if your cooling is perfectly able to cope, you're still using 50-150W (depending on the system setup) more than you should be.
Conversely a behaviour I hate in Firefox is when you 'miss' an url in the auto complete dropdown. Rather than either doing nothing or closing the dropdown (both reasonable behaviours), it has a habbit of trying to take you to the half typed url (eg. 'www.slashdot.c' )which is utterly useless and irritating.
Is it not ironic to criticize security through obscurity only then to recommend that the device be secured in a method that is relying 100% on obscurity to function?
Security through obscurity being no security at all is a myth that simply doesn't hold true.
If that was so, why bother with classifying top secret documents? Why keep details on how Nuclear codes get entered hush hush? Why not publicise exactly what the secret service will do before every public appearance by the president?
Obscurity shouldn't be the only security measure (if you know the Secret Service's routes, you still have to deal with their guns and training), but it is a valid method. Just as binaries can be decompiled or run through attack tools to look for weaknesses, so can encryption be brute forced or passwords social engineered.
There seems to a double standard that code is somehow special from physical actions/objects.
Why is knowing the code for a fly by wire system any more important than knowing the schematics for the physical control systems? Am I more at risk not knowing how a CPU controls the amount of fuel going to a jet engine than I am not knowing the make up of the pumps and delivery system?
I wouldn't expect Rolls Royce to make their engine blueprints public, why should we expect it of code?
A 2kg battery pack is 24V for 4.2Ah. That's ~100wh
To match the Chevy Volt's 16Kwh You'd need around 160 of these. That's for a tiny 40mile range. These aren't going to be the main power source of a car any time soon
Ah statistics.
Funny how you don't include figures of how many charges get dropped or downgraded before they get to trial.
Those statistics could represent a harsh oppressive society where the innocent are thrown into jail at the drop of a hat.
However it could also indicate that there's an incredibly high burden of proof required to get a trial, if this high burden isn't met, the trial doesn't happen.
30 incidents over a 5 year period? Presented by a site that gives an entirely one sided view on each incident? Well I'm convinced!
As for the youtube vids. The critical mass cyclist one was valid and the officer punished (probably why you felt you needed to post it twice). Other than that, it's funny how these videos always seem to miss out the incident behind the arrests and just cut straight into the arrest.
But anyway, there are thousands, if not 10,000s of protests in the US each year and the vast vast majority of them are allowed to be carried out without any notable incidents involving police.
Police states do not have thousands of protests.
No they are not
You get a handful of incidents that get reported where it was debatable if the force by the police was reasonable or not.
This in a country of 300million. A country with such open attitudes to protest that the Westboro church are freely allowed to protest (there are very few civilised countries that would allow that).
There's no reason why a trojan like this couldn't be installed on Linux or OSX. You don't even need admin rights to install something that could log their key presses.
Because once you get down to 1-2 seeds, chances are the only person seeding is a dedicated seeder rather than a downloader. When you have 1000 seeds, you probably only have an incredibly tiny portion of them being pure seeders.
Most seeded torrents is the only fair way of doing it.
If you randomly picked out of any and all torrents, they'd likely find that 95% of then have 0-5 seeds.
Car tires, even if replaced regularly are at risk of blowing out.
If you suffer a blowout 6 months into a new set, spin out of control despite your best efforts and collide with another car, killing the occupants.
Should you face a murder charge? Despite you replacing the tires you should know theres always a blowout risk. Blowouts happen all the time and frequently lead to accidents. If you had spent a bit more and got some run on flat tires, the people in the other car would still be alive.
You can always spend a bit more and make something a little safer. At some point you need to draw the line. How much should they spend before you'd deem they've spent enough? 1billion? 10billion? 20billion? Would you be happy paying $1 more for every litre for this to happen?
These things go 'all the way to the top' every time because it's the nature of a large business for decisions to get passed down a chain.
Usually at some point there's a subtle break where an employee decided to interpret a decision or made a choice indepentdently other how to go about a task. Is it really likely the Head of a huge company directly made a decicion on 1 of 1000 safety measures on 1 of 1000 (numbers made up) of their oil operations?
Then there's the sheer size of corporations. You could have a brilliant set of safty standards which makes the chance of an accident insanely low. However your company employs 100,000 people, eventually you'll get a perfect storm where perhaps one safety measure fails, another isn't obeyed and someone dies.
There may not have been anything especially wrong with the level of safty overall at an organisation but an enquiry finds that this unlikely accident could've been prevented if they'd forseen the possibility of it occuring.
Should the boss of that company, face criminal charges? Would you want to be the boss of a company knowing that, no matter how much attention you paid to safty, something could still go wrong and you'd wind up in jail if one of your 100K employees had a serious accident?
An appeal would've meant he spent much more time in jail and would have to go through a long trial (bad enough when you're not suffering from cancer). When your time is limited, that's a big deal.
3 months was a reasonable estimate at the time based on the medical evidence the doctor had. Doctors deal with probability, the cancer seemed more aggressive than it turned out to be. The 10 years estimate is likely a bunch of rubbish though, almost certainly a best case scenario that's incredibly unlikely.
But anyway, this guy was convicted by a single piece of evidence 'found' (a cloth belonging to him wrapped around a circuit board) many weeks after the crash by security agencies and the people who testified linking it to him were paid 7 figure sums. As I said, it was a joke of a conviction and everyone expected the appeal to be successful.
Perhaps try RTFS? The article says/speculates that this is in response to what we're discussing.