...Congresswoman Pelosi does not read Slashdot or she would have learned about the slowdown in Internet growth in the US. Broadband is not nearly as important to everyone as she thinks, and most people who want it porbably have it already. If she's hoping to sway the Internet voter, she's a little behind the curve. That doesn't say much for her other promises.
Does anyone have any speculation on the probability, given the enormous arena of thoughts possible to the human mind, that two individuals have identical thoughts simultaneously?
I think that this dissertation on the The Law of Large Numbers is perhaps the best answer to your question. I know that when I posted that reply, it was late in the evening, I'd just finished paying bills, and wanted one more look at Slashdot before I went to bed. I can't say there was any clairvoyance involved -- I noted the title and the image of a planet of Rocky Balboa's was just too funny.
It's little wonder that millions of people don't like or trust the Internet. Take Sylvia Goodwin, a 57-year-old assistant attorney general in Tucson. She has a PC at home but no Net service. That puts her among the 31% of households that say they will not subscribe to an Internet service because access at work is sufficient. To Goodwin, the Web is a 21st century manifestation of the world depicted in George Orwell's 1984. As a prosecutor, Goodwin knows how easy it is for Big Brother to gain access to personal information. To her, giving out addresses, telephone numbers, and credit-card information online seems like a surefire way to lose control of your privacy. "If you do everything on the Internet, someone can go in and pick it up," she says.
1984? That's a bit of a stretch. There, the government controlled all communications; I don't think any one government can control the Internet. It's spread across the globe and even repressive governments allow limited access.
Her problem is that she's bought into the media hype over the problems on the Internet. It's not like there are none, but if she's worried about her personal information, does she throw out sensitive documents (pay stubs, credit card bills, etc.) without shredding them? Perhaps she's handed her card over to a cashier, not realizing it's being double swiped. Does she carry on cell phone conversations out in public, blithely giving away personal details anyone in earshot can hear?
The problem is not the Internet, but the people on the Internet, specifically the con artists, scammers, and criminals who now have a new way of fleecing honest citizens. As long as the media contnues to blow every story out of proportion, Internet growth will die out.
SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems) robots are equipped with either the M249, machine gun which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at 750 rounds per minute or the M240, which fires 7.62-millimeter rounds at up to 1,000 per minute.
From rfidvirus.org: Here is where the trouble comes in. Up until now, everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software, and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong. In our research, we have discovered that if certain vulnerabilities exist in the RFID software, an RFID tag can be (intentionall) infected with a virus and this virus can infect the backend database used by the RFID software. From there it can be easily spread to other RFID tags. No one thought this possible until now. Later in this website we provide all the details on how to do this and how to defend against it in order to warn the designers of RFID systems not to deploy vulnerable systems.
So to sum up, if some programmer doesn't do his/her job, the RFID tag they plan on implanting in our passports could be used as delivery devices to compromise computer systems around the globe.
I'm going to rate this a pretty big if, though, as we know from all the patching going on, the probability is very high. RFID software is going to have to be thoroughly tested and watched like a hawk. Undoubtedly there's going to come a point where if one or two of these viruses get out and something newsworthy happens (airport computers crash, Citigroup gets credit card data stolen, etc.), the whole idea of RFID tags everywhere is going to get a serious black eye.
"This is horrifying, an editor's worst nightmare," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington. "For the government to actually physically have those hard drives from a newsroom is amazing. I'm just flabbergasted to hear of this."
We have the potential for confidential sources and other non-related data to be exposed to the light of day. On the other hand:
The grand jury is investigating whether the Lancaster County coroner gave reporters for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal his password to a restricted law enforcement Web site. The site contained nonpublic details of local crimes. The newspaper allegedly used some of those details in articles.
If the reporters used the Web site without authorization, officials say, they may have committed a crime.
We have reporters, eager to scoop the competition to drive up circulation by exposing little know details of crimes, committing a crime themselves in cahoots with the coroner, who must have been getting something out of the deal.
Either way you cut it, it's a legal quagmire and a constitutional nightmare.
Gidari said that Alexa Internet, which is owned by Amazon.com, is a site that offers Web analytics services that can produce similar information "without entangling us in litigation going forward."
That point was raised repeatedly by Ware, who seemed concerned that if he granted the request, "a slew of trial attorneys and curious social scientists could follow suit."
"Now Google could face hundreds of university professors (saying), 'I've got a study I'd like you to conduct,'" Ware said.
Further on...
The dispute has elevated the prominence of search privacy, touching on how divorce lawyers or employers in a severance dispute could gain access to search terms that people have typed in. It's also raised eyebrows because Google chose to cooperate with a demand by the Chinese government to censor searches on the company's Google.cn site.
If the Justice Department does win this case, Google would likely face a second round of subpoenas from the American Civil Liberties Union for follow-up information. The ACLU is challenging the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, which makes it a crime for a commercial Web site to post material that some jurors might find "harmful" to any minor who stumbles across it.
The point becomes: if Google complies with this request, either voluntarily or by court order, then that open's a Pandora's box for any group that wants a crack at their data, to prove their pet theory or compile information to use in other court cases. Ultimately, the government doesn't care about the actual data. They'll find enough porn searches in MSN, Yahoo, and AOL to keep them salivating for a good while. But if they can't bring Google to heel, they will a) look powerless in the face of one of the world's largest Internet companies and b) lose any grip they have on the others, who will say "if Google doesn't have to do it, we don't either."
"We made a cut, put the material in, and then we looked at the brain over different time points," explained Dr Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, a neuroscientist at MIT and lead author on the paper.
"The first thing we saw was that the brain had started to heal itself in the first 24 hours. We had never seen that before - so that was very surprising."
Hopefully this means this it could be used in the peripheral nervous system as well, to heal severed sensory neurons, or perhaps even spinal cord injuries. Too bad Christopher Reeve won't be around to see that.
We all know Windows won't run on a Mac! Totally incompatible architecture... I mean Apple would have to be stupid enough to use Intel chipsets... oh wait...
It is now pitching the technologies as a SCAMP stack, placing it squarely up against the Linux-based LAMP stack. SCO claims that Linux contains Unix code donated to the open source operating system in violation of agreements between it and IBM Corp.
Big whoop. SCAMP, LAMP... so SCO is trying to compete with Linux. This is hardly news. As a matter of fact, you have to wonder what took them so long. Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?
Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts.
RIAA Lawyer: We are petitioning the court to shut down this illegal operation, called The Pirate Bay, on the grounds they are trafficking in illegally obtained and downloaded material.
The list continues to grow. Somewhere, someone is writing code in the warm little cocoon of ignorance and once they have released it into the wild, they will be set upon by flocks of hungry vultures^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers and will eventually be sued into backruptcy and destitution. Ah, it's a great time to be a programmer!
British Rail patented a design for a flying saucer powered by thermonuclear fusion back in 1973. The public transport body submitted Charles Osmond Frederick's maverick contraption, the Guardian reports.
The fact that sustainable fusion hasto this day eluded scientists was no deterrent to such a ferociously inventive mind. Frederick explains how to dodge the scientific watershed: "The thermonuclear fusion will take place in a series of pulses, each pulse being triggered by laser energy, and/or energetic particles reflected from a previous pulse. The system will be arranged so that the fusion process will decay after each pulse so that the stability of the system is maintained."
...a competition for people with eidetid memory? It seems if you have a so-called photographic memory, then most of these feats would be child's play, I would think. There are some autisitc individuals who would find some of this trivial. It seems like fun and all that, but how about harnessing all that brain power to solving the world's problems instead of memorizing playing cards.
It can become quite a task however to properly configure and you still need user awareness to keep them from clicking "YES" everytime like they do with every other popup they face (the other option is that you manage everything but then you will get flooded with support calls).
This would seem to be a good place for the addition of some low-level AI, to learn usage and traffic patterns and be able to anticipate such things. It might even be made smart enough to detect suspicious or erroneous processes/traffic and alert the sys admin so action could be taken. It would then "learn" from the response and be able to become more autonomous as time passed.
The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections.
137 to 0 -- ouch!!
Diebold has gotten itself into a quagmire and they don't seem to be able to pull themselves out. How hard was it to add a paper trail to the machines to start with?
And yes, there's plenty of fraud with paper ballots and mechanical voting machines. But the idea is that electronic voting machines are supposed to be superior to those systems, and without a paper trail to verify that votes have been recorded properly, they're reduced to being no better and actualy, given their hackability, worse.
Its a pity they couldn't organise a relay. There are two spacecraft in mars orbit right now which can relay comms from the ground. You would think that with a few software changes and a bit of planning one of them would be able to at least record telemetry from the spacecraft as it did the burn.
Take it one step further and ring Mars with communication satellites. If Mankind is ever going there, commsats will become a necessity to ensure uninterrupted communication. Bundle communications in with GPS (MPS?) so that probes and eventual human explorers can find their way around.
Called the General Parallel File System (GPFS), the technology allows for high-speed access to files across multiple nodes of a Linux or AIX cluster. The file system could be used in a variety of fields, including engineering design, digital media and entertainment, data mining, financial analysis, seismic data processing and scientific research.
It could also allow users to access their porn collections with much greater speed and efficiency.
If Samsung wants to beat Apple at their own game, they're going to have to do better than hang on their coattails. Unfortunately, every new revision of the iPod and iTunes from Apple raises the barrier to entry that much higher.
That's not the name of the game. You can't simply hope to defeat a competitor's lead in a technology by working full bore on something to surpass it, because by the time you are done, your competitor will simply have incorporated your enhancements in their own device as well as upgrades, and still be ahead. Samsung is not trying to "kill" the iPod, merely find an even footing, giving people a viable alternative. My wife has an iRiver I bought her for her birthday and she's pleased with it, but it's very limited; I think this Samsung machine might prove to be more like what she wants.
I said it before when Amazon announced it was going toe-to-toe with Apple in the music market -- if Amazon could link up with Samsung, especially if Samsung develops a decent alternative to the iPod, there will be much better competition, which might even keep Apple from raising prices.
Re:TFA is weak, Here is Anand's updated benchmarks
on
The Near Future of Intel
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
From AnandTech: The performance picture with regards to Conroe hasn't really changed all that much - on average we're still seeing a bit over a 20% increase in performance over an overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60. While it's worth noting that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, we really were not able to determine any cause for suspicion based on Intel's setups. The machines were as clean as they could get, with the BIOS oversight having no tangible impact on most performance.
So Intel is finally catching up to and beating AMD in some regards. Mind you this is only one set of tests, but it may be indicative of a tightening of the processor battle.
Witlog: why i did it? i've read an article on yahoo or smth like this
Witlog: so when i've read that article, i thought "why not to make my own"?
SecurityFix: so did you just download the source from some site and set it loose?
Witlog: yes
Witlog: changed settings, and started it
Witlog: thats all
Witlog: anyone could do that
Witlog: you don't have to know many things to do a botnet like this
This kid is not a "hacker" or "cracker" anymore than I'm a professional wrestler. He finds a script or two somewhere, configures it, and lets it go. He has no moral compass, he doesn't care about other people's property, and he seems to think this is a hoot. He sounds too much like those college boys who are accused of setting those Alabama church fires.
But as he says, anyone can do this. While it's nice that goups like Shadowserver.org are tracking down and shutting down these botnets, why isn't someone doing something about the supply source for these scripts? It's like leaving a loaded gun lying around -- some idiot may decide to use it, even though they don't know how. I say find the morons behind the botnet scripts and take them out. Stop wasting time on the small fry.
Slashdot Mirror
...a Mac that can boot OS X, XP, and Linux? Now that would be impressive.
...Congresswoman Pelosi does not read Slashdot or she would have learned about the slowdown in Internet growth in the US. Broadband is not nearly as important to everyone as she thinks, and most people who want it porbably have it already. If she's hoping to sway the Internet voter, she's a little behind the curve. That doesn't say much for her other promises.
I think that this dissertation on the The Law of Large Numbers is perhaps the best answer to your question. I know that when I posted that reply, it was late in the evening, I'd just finished paying bills, and wanted one more look at Slashdot before I went to bed. I can't say there was any clairvoyance involved -- I noted the title and the image of a planet of Rocky Balboa's was just too funny.
Yoooooooooooo... Adriannnnneeeee
1984? That's a bit of a stretch. There, the government controlled all communications; I don't think any one government can control the Internet. It's spread across the globe and even repressive governments allow limited access.
Her problem is that she's bought into the media hype over the problems on the Internet. It's not like there are none, but if she's worried about her personal information, does she throw out sensitive documents (pay stubs, credit card bills, etc.) without shredding them? Perhaps she's handed her card over to a cashier, not realizing it's being double swiped. Does she carry on cell phone conversations out in public, blithely giving away personal details anyone in earshot can hear?
The problem is not the Internet, but the people on the Internet, specifically the con artists, scammers, and criminals who now have a new way of fleecing honest citizens. As long as the media contnues to blow every story out of proportion, Internet growth will die out.
... a first generation BOLO.
From rfidvirus.org: Here is where the trouble comes in. Up until now, everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software, and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong. In our research, we have discovered that if certain vulnerabilities exist in the RFID software, an RFID tag can be (intentionall) infected with a virus and this virus can infect the backend database used by the RFID software. From there it can be easily spread to other RFID tags. No one thought this possible until now. Later in this website we provide all the details on how to do this and how to defend against it in order to warn the designers of RFID systems not to deploy vulnerable systems.
So to sum up, if some programmer doesn't do his/her job, the RFID tag they plan on implanting in our passports could be used as delivery devices to compromise computer systems around the globe.
I'm going to rate this a pretty big if, though, as we know from all the patching going on, the probability is very high. RFID software is going to have to be thoroughly tested and watched like a hawk. Undoubtedly there's going to come a point where if one or two of these viruses get out and something newsworthy happens (airport computers crash, Citigroup gets credit card data stolen, etc.), the whole idea of RFID tags everywhere is going to get a serious black eye.
On the one hand:
"This is horrifying, an editor's worst nightmare," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington. "For the government to actually physically have those hard drives from a newsroom is amazing. I'm just flabbergasted to hear of this."We have the potential for confidential sources and other non-related data to be exposed to the light of day. On the other hand:
The grand jury is investigating whether the Lancaster County coroner gave reporters for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal his password to a restricted law enforcement Web site. The site contained nonpublic details of local crimes. The newspaper allegedly used some of those details in articles.If the reporters used the Web site without authorization, officials say, they may have committed a crime.
We have reporters, eager to scoop the competition to drive up circulation by exposing little know details of crimes, committing a crime themselves in cahoots with the coroner, who must have been getting something out of the deal.
Either way you cut it, it's a legal quagmire and a constitutional nightmare.
Gidari said that Alexa Internet, which is owned by Amazon.com, is a site that offers Web analytics services that can produce similar information "without entangling us in litigation going forward."
That point was raised repeatedly by Ware, who seemed concerned that if he granted the request, "a slew of trial attorneys and curious social scientists could follow suit."
"Now Google could face hundreds of university professors (saying), 'I've got a study I'd like you to conduct,'" Ware said.
Further on...
The dispute has elevated the prominence of search privacy, touching on how divorce lawyers or employers in a severance dispute could gain access to search terms that people have typed in. It's also raised eyebrows because Google chose to cooperate with a demand by the Chinese government to censor searches on the company's Google.cn site.
If the Justice Department does win this case, Google would likely face a second round of subpoenas from the American Civil Liberties Union for follow-up information. The ACLU is challenging the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, which makes it a crime for a commercial Web site to post material that some jurors might find "harmful" to any minor who stumbles across it.
The point becomes: if Google complies with this request, either voluntarily or by court order, then that open's a Pandora's box for any group that wants a crack at their data, to prove their pet theory or compile information to use in other court cases. Ultimately, the government doesn't care about the actual data. They'll find enough porn searches in MSN, Yahoo, and AOL to keep them salivating for a good while. But if they can't bring Google to heel, they will a) look powerless in the face of one of the world's largest Internet companies and b) lose any grip they have on the others, who will say "if Google doesn't have to do it, we don't either."
"The first thing we saw was that the brain had started to heal itself in the first 24 hours. We had never seen that before - so that was very surprising."
Hopefully this means this it could be used in the peripheral nervous system as well, to heal severed sensory neurons, or perhaps even spinal cord injuries. Too bad Christopher Reeve won't be around to see that.
We all know Windows won't run on a Mac! Totally incompatible architecture... I mean Apple would have to be stupid enough to use Intel chipsets... oh wait...
Big whoop. SCAMP, LAMP... so SCO is trying to compete with Linux. This is hardly news. As a matter of fact, you have to wonder what took them so long. Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?
RIAA Lawyer: We are petitioning the court to shut down this illegal operation, called The Pirate Bay, on the grounds they are trafficking in illegally obtained and downloaded material.
Swedish Judge: Worrrr dooooo ishky dishky mooooovvvviesss kannnnshhhhhh veeeeeeeee downshky looooooodshky?
RIAA Lawyer: What?
Swedish Judge: Worrrr dooooo ishky dishky mooooovvvviesss kannnnshhhhhh veeeeeeeee downshky looooooodshky?
RIAA Lawyer: I don't understand!
Swedish Judge: Caaaaaaaaasssssshhhh dushmiskked, bork, bork, bork!
Hate to tell you, but this is alreay at critical mass. Look at the number of big-time patent fights that are going on now:
The list continues to grow. Somewhere, someone is writing code in the warm little cocoon of ignorance and once they have released it into the wild, they will be set upon by flocks of hungry vultures^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers and will eventually be sued into backruptcy and destitution. Ah, it's a great time to be a programmer!
The fact that sustainable fusion hasto this day eluded scientists was no deterrent to such a ferociously inventive mind. Frederick explains how to dodge the scientific watershed: "The thermonuclear fusion will take place in a series of pulses, each pulse being triggered by laser energy, and/or energetic particles reflected from a previous pulse. The system will be arranged so that the fusion process will decay after each pulse so that the stability of the system is maintained."
And according to a related report, the fusion required to run the thing may not be ready anytime soon
...a competition for people with eidetid memory? It seems if you have a so-called photographic memory, then most of these feats would be child's play, I would think. There are some autisitc individuals who would find some of this trivial. It seems like fun and all that, but how about harnessing all that brain power to solving the world's problems instead of memorizing playing cards.
"Nanobots, transform!
This would seem to be a good place for the addition of some low-level AI, to learn usage and traffic patterns and be able to anticipate such things. It might even be made smart enough to detect suspicious or erroneous processes/traffic and alert the sys admin so action could be taken. It would then "learn" from the response and be able to become more autonomous as time passed.
137 to 0 -- ouch!!
Diebold has gotten itself into a quagmire and they don't seem to be able to pull themselves out. How hard was it to add a paper trail to the machines to start with?
And yes, there's plenty of fraud with paper ballots and mechanical voting machines. But the idea is that electronic voting machines are supposed to be superior to those systems, and without a paper trail to verify that votes have been recorded properly, they're reduced to being no better and actualy, given their hackability, worse.
Take it one step further and ring Mars with communication satellites. If Mankind is ever going there, commsats will become a necessity to ensure uninterrupted communication. Bundle communications in with GPS (MPS?) so that probes and eventual human explorers can find their way around.
Moonbase Alpha
It could also allow users to access their porn collections with much greater speed and efficiency.
That's not the name of the game. You can't simply hope to defeat a competitor's lead in a technology by working full bore on something to surpass it, because by the time you are done, your competitor will simply have incorporated your enhancements in their own device as well as upgrades, and still be ahead. Samsung is not trying to "kill" the iPod, merely find an even footing, giving people a viable alternative. My wife has an iRiver I bought her for her birthday and she's pleased with it, but it's very limited; I think this Samsung machine might prove to be more like what she wants.
I said it before when Amazon announced it was going toe-to-toe with Apple in the music market -- if Amazon could link up with Samsung, especially if Samsung develops a decent alternative to the iPod, there will be much better competition, which might even keep Apple from raising prices.
So Intel is finally catching up to and beating AMD in some regards. Mind you this is only one set of tests, but it may be indicative of a tightening of the processor battle.
Witlog: so when i've read that article, i thought "why not to make my own"?
SecurityFix: so did you just download the source from some site and set it loose?
Witlog: yes
Witlog: changed settings, and started it
Witlog: thats all
Witlog: anyone could do that
Witlog: you don't have to know many things to do a botnet like this
This kid is not a "hacker" or "cracker" anymore than I'm a professional wrestler. He finds a script or two somewhere, configures it, and lets it go. He has no moral compass, he doesn't care about other people's property, and he seems to think this is a hoot. He sounds too much like those college boys who are accused of setting those Alabama church fires.
But as he says, anyone can do this. While it's nice that goups like Shadowserver.org are tracking down and shutting down these botnets, why isn't someone doing something about the supply source for these scripts? It's like leaving a loaded gun lying around -- some idiot may decide to use it, even though they don't know how. I say find the morons behind the botnet scripts and take them out. Stop wasting time on the small fry.