The first step in producing an intelligent system is creating something that can constantly take in inputs and react to them in some intelligent way.
People overlook how important Turing's original successes in producing the earlier computers were towards this goal, the fact that he was able to create a machine that was continuously able to react to inputs and respond to them in a much more dynamic way than mechanical systems is a good first step, the fact we even have computers is a major hurdle out the way in producing intelligent systems.
AI suffers in that the more we understand about intelligence the less we actually attribute to intelligence. Intelligence is too often treated as some mystical thing that is unexplainable and just is, but the fact is at the end of the day it does just come down to sets of processes and knowledge - albeit extremely complex ones! The problem is in how do we produce something capable of performing processes on par with a human brain when the human brain is a massively powerful system that we just don't have the technology to create artificially on that scale yet.
Of course there's also the question of defining intelligence in the first place, different people explain intelligence in different ways. Many people even redefine their understanding of intelligence many times in a single day, you may have person x deciding one person is stupid and unintelligent one minute because they failed a simple English exam yet they may decide their dog is intelligent the next because it lifted it's paw for that person when given a command to do so. It is the moving goalposts of what intelligence is that are often why intelligence often gets treated with such contempt as using the above example we may create a robot that could equally lift a robotic paw on being given the same voice command as a real dog, yet when the robot does it it's no longer classed as intelligent. It's hard if not impossible right now to create a system that would be capable of passing the English exam, but you can guarantee as soon as we could it would no longer be seen as an intelligent task due to the very fact that it had been handed on to a machine to perform.
AI isn't impossible by any measure, we just have to have realistic expectations for it and realise when we've create a machine that has actually peformed an intelligent task. There is never going to be a mystical machine that's seen as being an amazing AI robot because it can walk like us, talk like us and act like us simply because by the time we are able to produce such a machine we will understand it well enough that the mysticism has gone and it's just another machine performing some task that we now understand that we can produce machines to perform.
"5. Artificial intelligence. Goedel Escher Bach had our hopes up. But nothing ever happened. It' too hard. People claim breakthoughs all the time, but wheres the beef ?"
You sound like you're a hook line and sinker victim of the AI effect. I'm no expert in the other areas you mention, but in terms of AI you truly don't seem to understand the subject at all. There are plenty of examples out there of fields where AI has been extremely successful and are used on a daily basis - data mining, medical diagnosis, spam filtering to name a few examples. I can only guess that you're living under some false expectation of strong AI anytime soon, whilst the possibilities of AI were overhyped for a long time, it's now also nearly been equally long accepted that we simply don't have the understanding or the computing power to produce strong AI quite just yet.
It's not that straightforward, the 360 (like laptops and many other electronic devices) has an external power supply. The 360 itself does infact shut off if it overheats but as with just about every power supply ever created, the power supply itself doesn't.
There is no reason this couldn't have happened with a Laptop, the power adapter for a speaker system, a router or anything similar. You're right in that devices with integrated power supplies are often more capable in terms of shutting down if heat becomes an issue but you're wrong in suggesting the guy whose comment you quote is an idiot, he's quite right in what he says. You suggested your laptop would shutdown if it overheated and that's correct, but you can be pretty damn sure the power supply wont - put your laptop power supply in a confined space whilst using your laptop in a clearer space long enough and you'll encounter exactly the same issue.
Personally whenever I build a new PC I'm concerned about leaving it on overnight as I'm not sure how safe it is - I use it lots for long periods whilst I'm around before trusting it on an overnight run unattended, dealing with heat generating electricity requires some common sense and caution, if you don't treat potentially dangerous devices with the respect they deserve then you should expect something like this to go wrong.
I suppose there's an argument that perhaps it's time external power supplies had some ounce of intelligence added to them to ensure they shut off because people are too stupid as demonstrated here to treat such devices with care however this is an industry wide problem and again it's rather unfair to target the 360 for this when as mentioned already, everything from speaker systems, to routers, to laptops, to some printers suffer exactly the same issue.
I'm not sure personally that I want to see the price of electronics go up to ensure further safe guards against idiocy. This brings a question of what extreme do you take it to - should all electronics be water-proof to protect against people stupid enough to rest cups of liquid on top their TVs before knocking them over said electronic device for example? I'd rather not suffer in having to pay more because some people are stupid quite honestly.
A concept long lost on the internet is the idea that hosting providers aren't responsible for their content and it's the end users that are responsible.
In much the same way that Sweden is still sensible enough to accept legally that linking to content isn't copyright infringement I'd like to believe it's also sensible enough to realise that hosting providers shouldn't have to police content.
I don't know if this is the case but if it is then they should be in the clear for people to say what they want, if the Swedish authorities have a problem they would in theory have to go after the end user. Many many years ago things used to be this way before governments started fighting for control and corporations started corrupting it's very existence in every way possible.
The funny thing is, China is one of the few countries in the world that truly has a great big firewall sat at the border of it's internet, so is one of the few countries that actually could do something about massive unexpected loads of outgoing traffic from it's internet.
I'm not defending the great firewall of China, but I think it's worth pointing out that when the goverment has that kind of control over what does and doesn't go in and out if they wanted to they could easily do something to stop these kind of accusations surrounding large scale DoS attacks unless they're happy for them to continue in which case may the stories continue.
Of course there's always captured zombie machines outside the great firewall to do the trick, but certainly here in the UK many ISPs take note of which computers are sending out suspicious traffic, I've known a couple of people have their net access disabled by their ISP for throwing out known virus traffic at least. Most responsible ISPs worldwide could no doubt do exactly the same things.
The real question is could ISPs do this without introducing "feature" creep? My guess is, no, they'd quickly use the tools for blocking bad traffic for blocking things like BitTorrent, well, those few that don't already of course;)
It's a shame really that the tools are out there to prevent this kind of bad traffic, and yet the bad traffic is all to often allowed through and the tools are used to filter good traffic which is certainly the case with China. There's a question of what's good and bad traffic of course, but that's a debate for another day I think.
You can copy the contents of an XP CD to a USB memory stick, an SD card, anything like that and install it from there although you may have to make it bootable, but that's no big deal.
A quick search on Google will give you any details you need!
I think what it comes down to is this, that IF the asteroid were to hit a satellite then on it's next run it'll have a 1 in 450 chance of hitting Earth. NASA no doubt agree with this but also it doesn't necessarily make their original math wrong in that the overall chance of it hitting or not hitting a satellite and then hitting earth is vastly lower.
That's my take on it, I could be wrong but the kids only right IF the asteroid hits a satellite in the first place. The overall chance of the asteroid hitting earth including the possibility that it does or doesn't first hit a satellite is likely still the original figure. I think his figure is based on the premise that the asteroid definitely hits a satellite.
The reason the UK is so bandwidth starved is because BT is dragging on 21cn, the new internet backbone for the UK. The reason they're dragging is because they want it subsidised by the tax payers, but now BT is a private company the goverment aren't willing to hand tax payers money over to them.
If we stopped wasting money on crap like the war in Iraq we'd likely have the money to pay for something like this without worry. As the Labour/Conservative parties are technically incompetent and unable to make decisions and pass laws that are forward thinking and designed for the internet age this only makes the problem worse.
Unless there's a major change to Labour or the Conservatives, or unless the Lib Dems get in we're not going to see change to UK laws and parliamentary decisions that will create a nation that's prepared for the internet age then we're going to continue to see stuff like this, and this is only the start of it.
With our current Labour/Conservative majority making the decisions in parliament it will get worse, I'm fairly convinced net neutrality will go out the window, the 3 strikes law for illegal P2P will be implemented and our data will be sold to the highest bidder. There's just no one in power right now with the understanding to make the right decisions at the moment and doesn't look like there will be for at least another 5 years unless we can somehow educate them or remove them some way.
Demon internet have a cap that for years wasn't publicised (not sure if it is now or not), if you went over that unknown cap you were dropped to 128kbps for an entire month no questions asked.
Dropped to narrowband speeds for a month for breaching an unpublicised cap? It'll surely take some doing to beat that!
I'm not sure we have common carrier in the UK to be perfectly honest but OFCOM the communications watchdog that oversees these things has in the past stated with no uncertain words that ISPs are allowed to throttle certain traffic i.e. P2P, as long as they're not throttling/unthrottling for money as Virgin has quite blatantly just admitted to doing so here.
Virgin has now openly accepted that they've gone against the telecomms watchdog's views on net neutrality here, whether they'll have the balls to do anything is unlikely.
It's obvious, the NSA let them have them because they realised people guessed it was them that cut the cables so to pretend it wasn't they did a double bluff and gave out the images to say "look we're the good guys here!"
It's all part of the coverup!
Next week on Internet Conspiracies.com we bring you details of the sharks with laser beams that cut the other cables.
Seriously though, where did they get satellite imagery capable of seeing ships? well erm, seeing as you can just about pick out people on Google earth I wouldn't imagine it was too much of a challenge being able to see big god damn ships. I'm sure plenty of companies and nations with an interest in finding out which muppet cut their net access can provide such imagery?
I've noticed they've parked some of my empty domains and subdomains with sedo completely and utterly without my permission.
Whilst I have parked a specific domain with sedo in the past for a very short time I most certainly have never accepted to have anything else parked with them and I'm the type of person that does actually read contractual agreements for these sort of things nowadays due to the constant abuse of customers and their rights via hidden clauses in everything ranging from ISP contracts to MMO contracts nowadays.
PDAs/Mobiles are too small to browse the web decently and don't have a decent input device - a keyboard. Normal laptops are too big to carry round with you everywhere.
These new gen small notebooks are the perfect size, plenty small enough to carry round but big enough to be able to display web pages properly and maintain a proper keyboard.
I'm not sure why anyone would say they're underpowered or lacklustre though, unless you're expecting to play Crysis on it then the spec is just find, people have been happily creating spreadsheets, presentations, word documents, doing e-mail, browsing the web ever since the 486 era. You're not going to be playing the latest and greatest games on them it's silly to think so, we don't have the tech. to put that much power in such a small size at a reasonable price point but if you want to use it to do every day stuff you do on a computer I'd argue it's better than a laptop and better than a PDA because it has the advantages of both without the disadvantages (well except proper laptops have better specs, but gaming laptops are so big and bulk they may as well be in the desktop category anyway!).
The new sub-notebooks fill a niche that was filled then emptied again over the past decade or so. I found an old 486 laptop at work not so long ago that funnily enough whilst fatter than the new gen notebooks wasn't really much deeper or wider. Similarly Apple did away with their nice small notebooks and upped the size an inch or so when they went Intel - I'm not sure what the Air was all about either, it's just as wide and deep but extremely thin, to me thinness really doesn't solve anything and just makes me worry I'll snap it or something!
Their site was IE6 only after IE7 had been forced out by automatic updates, I found that somewhat amusing. If you'd installed IE7 or used Firefox then tough you couldn't access you money via the net. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact Firefox had been out years and was far more secure than IE6, the fact they not only weren't prepared for IE7's release but still didn't support it months and months after release when it's much more secure than IE6 and had been forced out via Microsoft update tells me it's certainly not my IT policy I need to be worrying about. I'm not suggesting it's any better upgrading to the latest and greatest version of a browser automatically and assuming it be more secure, but certainly supporting IE6 only over IE7 and very mature, secure versions of Firefox is laughable.
I'm not sure it's fixed even now to be honest the only difference is you can tell it to log in anyway if you're using something other than IE6 whereas before it refused if it didn't like your user agent string.
Don't say that otherwise they'll tell us the failed attacks on London and Glasgow at the back end of last year were only failures because they were medical professionals behind it and not Engineer;)
Or wait, perhaps medical professionals are more likely to be terrorists!
Alternatively, we could just go back to reality and accept the fact that there is no stereotype profile for terrorists. You can slot islamic extremists into likely being of Middle Eastern or Asian descent, similarly you could slot IRA terrorists into likely being Irish and Eta into being likely French/Spanish. In other words it doesn't matter what someone's genetic descent or intellectual origins are, if they have enough anger and feel strongly about something they'll be willing to perform terrorist attacks.
Engineers don't make good terrorists, terrorists make engineers, chemists, preachers, medical professionals and any other type of career they might possibly need to carry out their plot. It's like saying airline pilots make good terrorists because of 9/11 but we all know that the terrorists made themselves airline pilots and not the other way around.
I have to say ever since EMI's take over they do seem to have woken up a bit, they were first to sign up with DRM free online music stores, they've spoken openly about not bothering to pay their subscription or whatever to the RIAA anymore and now this.
It really does seem like at least one of the old music companies is waking up to reality and has been for a few months now.
It's just a shame the remaining 3 of the big 4 still have their heads too far up their own arses.
I'm not going to say I like EMI or anything yet, for their participation in the RIAA's antics it's going to take a long time for those wounds to heal, but they have to be given credit at least because they do seem to be on the right path.
What's comical though is that it took EMI to be bought out by an investment firm before it got a clue, it's such a shame the music industry couldn't figure things out for itself but still let's hope EMI continues on this positive path, particularly as they seem to be the only big music company that's actually acting in a way that might ensure it has a future right now!
I notice from TFA the lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii, as CERN is in Europe surely even a succesful lawsuit could simply be ignored?
I was under the impression that whilst the US has helped develop the LHC it doesn't actually own it and as such has no control over deciding whether it's allowed to start and stop. Is there something vital the US still brings to the project that could be used to prevent the project starting should the lawsuit be a success?
I was going to make a comment about how it seems typically American to try and create a lawsuit to shut down something they have no right to try and shutdown (see things like the recent Wikileaks domain fiasco) but in all honesty I'm not sure abuse of the court system is really much less in many European countries now, the only difference being the European countries at least tend to make the sensible judgement on the case even if the case itself is idiotic. With again for example the Wikileaks case the judgement was just simply stupid and the fact the judge had to backtrack so quickly only emphasised the level of idiocy that can occur in some courts. At least cases like this were thrown out in British courts for example:
Excuse my sheer ignorance of the subject, but may I ask what humans, plants and pachyderms have in common to lump us into the same group that other creatures aren't lumped in to?
Is there any reason we're being lumped along with things like elephants and trees or was that list just a very small sample of the creatures included such that the term covers pretty much all living creatures? Presumably creatures like primates are also in this group?
The key in making a profitable MMO is to ensure your players are addicted enough to stay playing and hence keep their subscriptions but also that they're online as little as possible without jeopardizing the addiction.
The less you're online, the less computing resources and bandwidth you consume and the less content you consume, the more profitable you as a customer are. What Blizzard (and other MMO companies) don't like is that people are increasing the amount of time their characters are in game with bots, hence eating their bandwidth and resources whilst the player is elsewhere actually having fun in real life instead of boring themselves in a game (the irony huh?).
Essentially what they do with content is draw out the content they have created as much as possible, for example they may introduce a new sword which will take them maybe an hour or two to design and implement but they ensure that it takes you the player tens of hours to aquire that item. People want the item because it makes them feel special for some obscure reason that phsycologists can likely fathom so they'll spend maybe 30 hours a week to get this item across two weeks. Unfortunately for companies bots change that, players can suddenly get the example item in just a couple of days by letting their bot get it for them.
Rather than invest time and money in better content they just create small amounts of crap content and just make sure it takes you weeks to consume that content. If you only use a couple of gb bandwidth and only consume content that took 10hrs to produce in 2 months then Blizzard love you. If however you consume a couple of gb and the same content in 2 days and do so all the time then you're more expensive to look after as a paying customer in terms of bandwidth costs and it's harder to keep content available for you so you don't get bored and quit. You're spot on in your analysis, only I felt the need to point out the reasoning for such crap design - it's not incompetence, as I've pointed out here it's purely financial.
As for my opinion on the practice? Well, I think people who do bot away at the content are forgetting why they play games - for fun, if they consume all the content they're given to the point they run out and end up bored to death then, well that's up to them. On the other hand however, MMO companies are both lazy and greedy. Blizzard especially so, with the profits they make there is simply no excuse to not have better quality content that people actually want to play rather than bot their way through. Until they invest in decent content people actually want to play then they've got no reason to cry and I wish the bot creators all the best in defending against this. Ignoring the moral point of view regarding cheating and taking the comp sci./law point of view I think Blizzard don't or at least shouldn't have a leg to stand on, their argument and tactics are as weak and apalling as the RIAA/MPAAs here. They produce shite content, they create a system that spies on process to make sure you're not cheating which is akin to DRM for the music industry and when that fails they just resort to law suits citing copyright infringement for making a copy of a program in memory even though that's exactly what Windows does when it loads an application in the first fucking place- are they going to sue Microsoft next for allowing you to run their application too? So quite rightly as you say, they're taking these measures rather than actually you know, spending that time and money on actually making a game people want to play rather than bot.
On a final note, here's a hint to MMO developers- chances are if the content is complex enough to be fun, it's too complex to be easily and efficiently botted also. If you produce content that's simply a bunch of repetitive tasks don't blame people for using computers to solve them, that is after all what they excel at - solving dull, repetitive tasks.
I'll remember this article next time that me, born in 1982 has to go round removing all the shareware games like Kyodai that all the middle age helpdesk women have decided to install on their computers because the 40 yr old manager we have thinks they should be free of security restrictions even if it causes such problems and creates security risks for the network.
Or when I'm dealing with silly amounts of calls because one 40+ yr old colleague is stood outside on their mobile phone arranging with their wife who is doing the cooking and the other is browsing holiday sites deciding where to go on holiday next.
Articles like this are stupid, they're a generalisation and where I work it couldn't be further from the truth. 3 out of 4 of our 1980s+ born workers and 1 out of 12 of our pre 1980s born workers make up our best 4 workers, that's completely out of line with the articles findings and whilst I realise you always get anomalies from statistical samples you should also not try and dress up this kind of bullshit as general fact.
In fact look at TFA, as hard as that is when it insists on jumping to the next stat before you've had chance to check the page properly I don't notice any information how solid a test base they used.
For all I know this could be put together by some disgruntled middle aged worker who actually sucks bad at his job but like many would rather blame someone else and so decided to blame the younger generation for taking his work.
Anyone know how reasonable a test base was used for this study? As it stands I could equally put together a made up study claiming older people are more likely to steal from the work place and pass it off as being fact.
I don't think that's true, even zealots have a breaking point whereby they realise no matter how many of their children they throw at a problem with no solution have a breaking point.
The question is how long, and can the general public ever been convinced to accept that if we're to win it's going to require a whole lot more US sons and daughters to die also?
The best options were passed up - that of either not going into Iraq at all or that of keeping Saddam or at least his military in power to maintain stability rather than disbanding them.
It's sad really, imagine if all the resources that have gone into Iraq had gone into Afghanistan instead and we'd never have touched Iraq? Afghanistan would be long done and dusted - realistically, another 10,000 troops would be plenty to really push the Taliban back to the brink of near complete defeat in Afghanistan right now and there's 130,000 troops in Iraq. Furthermore Saddam would've kept Iran in check and it's likely far less lives in Afghanistan would've been lost overall also. The additional resources not wasted in Iraq would've gone a long long way towards helping rebuild their nation to the strength and relative civility it was pre-soviet invasion also.
Re:They should consider low tech options.
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America's Robot Army
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree with your sentiment but I think the benefits of high tech. weaponry are often overshadowed by the typical scenario you mention whereby something like a multi-million dollar vehicle is taken out by a cheaply made IED.
When we hear news reports of raids on insurgent strongholds by our forces you often hear about how 10s, 100s were killed compared to maybe 2 or 3 allied soldiers. It's the very fact we have high tech. weaponry that allows this, be it simple things such as night vision to full on portable video link ups with drones above the battlefield - the fact is high tech. weaponry is saving the lives of our soldiers.
Similarly, I understand that an expensive roboting land vehicle like this could be blown apart but if it can traverse more difficult terrain than your average hummer can then surely that allows us to transport things off standard roadways and across tougher terrain hence avoiding the sides of the road where IEDs are often hidden? Surely the best defense against a trap is to be able to not walk into it in the first place?
There's a lot to be said for the point you make - that we mustn't start using technology in warzones for the sake of it. Used well however it can and already is making our forces a lot better off than they ever have been previously. Whilst 4,000 odd US soldiers may have died in Iraq to insurgents, that figure is dwarfed by the number of insurgents that have died to high tech. weaponry in US hands.
One final point is that Iraq and Afghanistan are fairly different in terms of weaponry and tactics used, the typical IED made by a taliban tribesman living in the mountains isn't going to do an awful lot to an MBT, but as soon as you go to Iraq where you have insurgents potentially armed by the Iranians using charges shaped specifically to penetrate tank armour it's a different story. The insurgents the US is dealing with in Iraq aren't the same insurgents you describe in your post (i.e. next to no training and only using cheap weaponry) that are more commonly found in Afghanistan. Many insurgents in Iraq have been given vast amounts of training and are aquiring some pretty expensive weaponry themselves. The problem is now that some of the tactics in Iraq are spilling over into Afghanistan.
Technology does matter in the warzone when it comes to saving soldiers lives, sure a multi-million dollar MULE may get blown to pieces, but I'd rather see that than a patrol of actual humans suffer the same fate.
Whilst I'd love to believe this is great news, I have to wonder how many of those projects are things like "just another PHP content management system". Is Open source really beginning to take off in areas it was previously very weak or are these new projects just rehashes of the same old tired ideas?
If it's the former then this is indeed fantastic news and I hope the trend continues.
Slashdot Mirror
The first step in producing an intelligent system is creating something that can constantly take in inputs and react to them in some intelligent way.
People overlook how important Turing's original successes in producing the earlier computers were towards this goal, the fact that he was able to create a machine that was continuously able to react to inputs and respond to them in a much more dynamic way than mechanical systems is a good first step, the fact we even have computers is a major hurdle out the way in producing intelligent systems.
AI suffers in that the more we understand about intelligence the less we actually attribute to intelligence. Intelligence is too often treated as some mystical thing that is unexplainable and just is, but the fact is at the end of the day it does just come down to sets of processes and knowledge - albeit extremely complex ones! The problem is in how do we produce something capable of performing processes on par with a human brain when the human brain is a massively powerful system that we just don't have the technology to create artificially on that scale yet.
Of course there's also the question of defining intelligence in the first place, different people explain intelligence in different ways. Many people even redefine their understanding of intelligence many times in a single day, you may have person x deciding one person is stupid and unintelligent one minute because they failed a simple English exam yet they may decide their dog is intelligent the next because it lifted it's paw for that person when given a command to do so. It is the moving goalposts of what intelligence is that are often why intelligence often gets treated with such contempt as using the above example we may create a robot that could equally lift a robotic paw on being given the same voice command as a real dog, yet when the robot does it it's no longer classed as intelligent. It's hard if not impossible right now to create a system that would be capable of passing the English exam, but you can guarantee as soon as we could it would no longer be seen as an intelligent task due to the very fact that it had been handed on to a machine to perform.
AI isn't impossible by any measure, we just have to have realistic expectations for it and realise when we've create a machine that has actually peformed an intelligent task. There is never going to be a mystical machine that's seen as being an amazing AI robot because it can walk like us, talk like us and act like us simply because by the time we are able to produce such a machine we will understand it well enough that the mysticism has gone and it's just another machine performing some task that we now understand that we can produce machines to perform.
"5. Artificial intelligence. Goedel Escher Bach had our hopes up. But nothing ever happened. It' too hard. People claim breakthoughs all the time, but wheres the beef ?"
You sound like you're a hook line and sinker victim of the AI effect. I'm no expert in the other areas you mention, but in terms of AI you truly don't seem to understand the subject at all. There are plenty of examples out there of fields where AI has been extremely successful and are used on a daily basis - data mining, medical diagnosis, spam filtering to name a few examples. I can only guess that you're living under some false expectation of strong AI anytime soon, whilst the possibilities of AI were overhyped for a long time, it's now also nearly been equally long accepted that we simply don't have the understanding or the computing power to produce strong AI quite just yet.
It's not that straightforward, the 360 (like laptops and many other electronic devices) has an external power supply. The 360 itself does infact shut off if it overheats but as with just about every power supply ever created, the power supply itself doesn't.
There is no reason this couldn't have happened with a Laptop, the power adapter for a speaker system, a router or anything similar. You're right in that devices with integrated power supplies are often more capable in terms of shutting down if heat becomes an issue but you're wrong in suggesting the guy whose comment you quote is an idiot, he's quite right in what he says. You suggested your laptop would shutdown if it overheated and that's correct, but you can be pretty damn sure the power supply wont - put your laptop power supply in a confined space whilst using your laptop in a clearer space long enough and you'll encounter exactly the same issue.
Personally whenever I build a new PC I'm concerned about leaving it on overnight as I'm not sure how safe it is - I use it lots for long periods whilst I'm around before trusting it on an overnight run unattended, dealing with heat generating electricity requires some common sense and caution, if you don't treat potentially dangerous devices with the respect they deserve then you should expect something like this to go wrong.
I suppose there's an argument that perhaps it's time external power supplies had some ounce of intelligence added to them to ensure they shut off because people are too stupid as demonstrated here to treat such devices with care however this is an industry wide problem and again it's rather unfair to target the 360 for this when as mentioned already, everything from speaker systems, to routers, to laptops, to some printers suffer exactly the same issue.
I'm not sure personally that I want to see the price of electronics go up to ensure further safe guards against idiocy. This brings a question of what extreme do you take it to - should all electronics be water-proof to protect against people stupid enough to rest cups of liquid on top their TVs before knocking them over said electronic device for example? I'd rather not suffer in having to pay more because some people are stupid quite honestly.
A concept long lost on the internet is the idea that hosting providers aren't responsible for their content and it's the end users that are responsible.
In much the same way that Sweden is still sensible enough to accept legally that linking to content isn't copyright infringement I'd like to believe it's also sensible enough to realise that hosting providers shouldn't have to police content.
I don't know if this is the case but if it is then they should be in the clear for people to say what they want, if the Swedish authorities have a problem they would in theory have to go after the end user. Many many years ago things used to be this way before governments started fighting for control and corporations started corrupting it's very existence in every way possible.
The funny thing is, China is one of the few countries in the world that truly has a great big firewall sat at the border of it's internet, so is one of the few countries that actually could do something about massive unexpected loads of outgoing traffic from it's internet.
;)
I'm not defending the great firewall of China, but I think it's worth pointing out that when the goverment has that kind of control over what does and doesn't go in and out if they wanted to they could easily do something to stop these kind of accusations surrounding large scale DoS attacks unless they're happy for them to continue in which case may the stories continue.
Of course there's always captured zombie machines outside the great firewall to do the trick, but certainly here in the UK many ISPs take note of which computers are sending out suspicious traffic, I've known a couple of people have their net access disabled by their ISP for throwing out known virus traffic at least. Most responsible ISPs worldwide could no doubt do exactly the same things.
The real question is could ISPs do this without introducing "feature" creep? My guess is, no, they'd quickly use the tools for blocking bad traffic for blocking things like BitTorrent, well, those few that don't already of course
It's a shame really that the tools are out there to prevent this kind of bad traffic, and yet the bad traffic is all to often allowed through and the tools are used to filter good traffic which is certainly the case with China. There's a question of what's good and bad traffic of course, but that's a debate for another day I think.
You can copy the contents of an XP CD to a USB memory stick, an SD card, anything like that and install it from there although you may have to make it bootable, but that's no big deal.
A quick search on Google will give you any details you need!
I think what it comes down to is this, that IF the asteroid were to hit a satellite then on it's next run it'll have a 1 in 450 chance of hitting Earth. NASA no doubt agree with this but also it doesn't necessarily make their original math wrong in that the overall chance of it hitting or not hitting a satellite and then hitting earth is vastly lower.
That's my take on it, I could be wrong but the kids only right IF the asteroid hits a satellite in the first place. The overall chance of the asteroid hitting earth including the possibility that it does or doesn't first hit a satellite is likely still the original figure. I think his figure is based on the premise that the asteroid definitely hits a satellite.
The reason the UK is so bandwidth starved is because BT is dragging on 21cn, the new internet backbone for the UK. The reason they're dragging is because they want it subsidised by the tax payers, but now BT is a private company the goverment aren't willing to hand tax payers money over to them.
If we stopped wasting money on crap like the war in Iraq we'd likely have the money to pay for something like this without worry. As the Labour/Conservative parties are technically incompetent and unable to make decisions and pass laws that are forward thinking and designed for the internet age this only makes the problem worse.
Unless there's a major change to Labour or the Conservatives, or unless the Lib Dems get in we're not going to see change to UK laws and parliamentary decisions that will create a nation that's prepared for the internet age then we're going to continue to see stuff like this, and this is only the start of it.
With our current Labour/Conservative majority making the decisions in parliament it will get worse, I'm fairly convinced net neutrality will go out the window, the 3 strikes law for illegal P2P will be implemented and our data will be sold to the highest bidder. There's just no one in power right now with the understanding to make the right decisions at the moment and doesn't look like there will be for at least another 5 years unless we can somehow educate them or remove them some way.
Demon internet have a cap that for years wasn't publicised (not sure if it is now or not), if you went over that unknown cap you were dropped to 128kbps for an entire month no questions asked.
Dropped to narrowband speeds for a month for breaching an unpublicised cap? It'll surely take some doing to beat that!
I'm not sure we have common carrier in the UK to be perfectly honest but OFCOM the communications watchdog that oversees these things has in the past stated with no uncertain words that ISPs are allowed to throttle certain traffic i.e. P2P, as long as they're not throttling/unthrottling for money as Virgin has quite blatantly just admitted to doing so here.
Virgin has now openly accepted that they've gone against the telecomms watchdog's views on net neutrality here, whether they'll have the balls to do anything is unlikely.
I ask because this is the second time in as many days I've heard someone say this so I'm intrigued to know why and where people are hearing this from?
DSL ZoneIf you look at sites like this:
ISP Reviewor this:
They're fairly consistently rated as almost worst ISP there is.
I'm wondering if Virgin have run some kind of successful whisper campaign to hide the truth about their service?
It's obvious, the NSA let them have them because they realised people guessed it was them that cut the cables so to pretend it wasn't they did a double bluff and gave out the images to say "look we're the good guys here!"
It's all part of the coverup!
Next week on Internet Conspiracies.com we bring you details of the sharks with laser beams that cut the other cables.
Seriously though, where did they get satellite imagery capable of seeing ships? well erm, seeing as you can just about pick out people on Google earth I wouldn't imagine it was too much of a challenge being able to see big god damn ships. I'm sure plenty of companies and nations with an interest in finding out which muppet cut their net access can provide such imagery?
I've noticed they've parked some of my empty domains and subdomains with sedo completely and utterly without my permission.
Whilst I have parked a specific domain with sedo in the past for a very short time I most certainly have never accepted to have anything else parked with them and I'm the type of person that does actually read contractual agreements for these sort of things nowadays due to the constant abuse of customers and their rights via hidden clauses in everything ranging from ISP contracts to MMO contracts nowadays.
PDAs/Mobiles are too small to browse the web decently and don't have a decent input device - a keyboard. Normal laptops are too big to carry round with you everywhere.
These new gen small notebooks are the perfect size, plenty small enough to carry round but big enough to be able to display web pages properly and maintain a proper keyboard.
I'm not sure why anyone would say they're underpowered or lacklustre though, unless you're expecting to play Crysis on it then the spec is just find, people have been happily creating spreadsheets, presentations, word documents, doing e-mail, browsing the web ever since the 486 era. You're not going to be playing the latest and greatest games on them it's silly to think so, we don't have the tech. to put that much power in such a small size at a reasonable price point but if you want to use it to do every day stuff you do on a computer I'd argue it's better than a laptop and better than a PDA because it has the advantages of both without the disadvantages (well except proper laptops have better specs, but gaming laptops are so big and bulk they may as well be in the desktop category anyway!).
The new sub-notebooks fill a niche that was filled then emptied again over the past decade or so. I found an old 486 laptop at work not so long ago that funnily enough whilst fatter than the new gen notebooks wasn't really much deeper or wider. Similarly Apple did away with their nice small notebooks and upped the size an inch or so when they went Intel - I'm not sure what the Air was all about either, it's just as wide and deep but extremely thin, to me thinness really doesn't solve anything and just makes me worry I'll snap it or something!
Their site was IE6 only after IE7 had been forced out by automatic updates, I found that somewhat amusing. If you'd installed IE7 or used Firefox then tough you couldn't access you money via the net. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact Firefox had been out years and was far more secure than IE6, the fact they not only weren't prepared for IE7's release but still didn't support it months and months after release when it's much more secure than IE6 and had been forced out via Microsoft update tells me it's certainly not my IT policy I need to be worrying about. I'm not suggesting it's any better upgrading to the latest and greatest version of a browser automatically and assuming it be more secure, but certainly supporting IE6 only over IE7 and very mature, secure versions of Firefox is laughable.
I'm not sure it's fixed even now to be honest the only difference is you can tell it to log in anyway if you're using something other than IE6 whereas before it refused if it didn't like your user agent string.
Don't say that otherwise they'll tell us the failed attacks on London and Glasgow at the back end of last year were only failures because they were medical professionals behind it and not Engineer ;)
Or wait, perhaps medical professionals are more likely to be terrorists!
Alternatively, we could just go back to reality and accept the fact that there is no stereotype profile for terrorists. You can slot islamic extremists into likely being of Middle Eastern or Asian descent, similarly you could slot IRA terrorists into likely being Irish and Eta into being likely French/Spanish. In other words it doesn't matter what someone's genetic descent or intellectual origins are, if they have enough anger and feel strongly about something they'll be willing to perform terrorist attacks.
Engineers don't make good terrorists, terrorists make engineers, chemists, preachers, medical professionals and any other type of career they might possibly need to carry out their plot. It's like saying airline pilots make good terrorists because of 9/11 but we all know that the terrorists made themselves airline pilots and not the other way around.
I have to say ever since EMI's take over they do seem to have woken up a bit, they were first to sign up with DRM free online music stores, they've spoken openly about not bothering to pay their subscription or whatever to the RIAA anymore and now this.
It really does seem like at least one of the old music companies is waking up to reality and has been for a few months now.
It's just a shame the remaining 3 of the big 4 still have their heads too far up their own arses.
I'm not going to say I like EMI or anything yet, for their participation in the RIAA's antics it's going to take a long time for those wounds to heal, but they have to be given credit at least because they do seem to be on the right path.
What's comical though is that it took EMI to be bought out by an investment firm before it got a clue, it's such a shame the music industry couldn't figure things out for itself but still let's hope EMI continues on this positive path, particularly as they seem to be the only big music company that's actually acting in a way that might ensure it has a future right now!
I notice from TFA the lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii, as CERN is in Europe surely even a succesful lawsuit could simply be ignored?
I was under the impression that whilst the US has helped develop the LHC it doesn't actually own it and as such has no control over deciding whether it's allowed to start and stop. Is there something vital the US still brings to the project that could be used to prevent the project starting should the lawsuit be a success?
I was going to make a comment about how it seems typically American to try and create a lawsuit to shut down something they have no right to try and shutdown (see things like the recent Wikileaks domain fiasco) but in all honesty I'm not sure abuse of the court system is really much less in many European countries now, the only difference being the European countries at least tend to make the sensible judgement on the case even if the case itself is idiotic. With again for example the Wikileaks case the judgement was just simply stupid and the fact the judge had to backtrack so quickly only emphasised the level of idiocy that can occur in some courts. At least cases like this were thrown out in British courts for example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7243656.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7292657.stm
Hopefully (un)common sense will similarly prevail and save the day.
Excuse my sheer ignorance of the subject, but may I ask what humans, plants and pachyderms have in common to lump us into the same group that other creatures aren't lumped in to?
Is there any reason we're being lumped along with things like elephants and trees or was that list just a very small sample of the creatures included such that the term covers pretty much all living creatures? Presumably creatures like primates are also in this group?
The key in making a profitable MMO is to ensure your players are addicted enough to stay playing and hence keep their subscriptions but also that they're online as little as possible without jeopardizing the addiction.
The less you're online, the less computing resources and bandwidth you consume and the less content you consume, the more profitable you as a customer are. What Blizzard (and other MMO companies) don't like is that people are increasing the amount of time their characters are in game with bots, hence eating their bandwidth and resources whilst the player is elsewhere actually having fun in real life instead of boring themselves in a game (the irony huh?).
Essentially what they do with content is draw out the content they have created as much as possible, for example they may introduce a new sword which will take them maybe an hour or two to design and implement but they ensure that it takes you the player tens of hours to aquire that item. People want the item because it makes them feel special for some obscure reason that phsycologists can likely fathom so they'll spend maybe 30 hours a week to get this item across two weeks. Unfortunately for companies bots change that, players can suddenly get the example item in just a couple of days by letting their bot get it for them.
Rather than invest time and money in better content they just create small amounts of crap content and just make sure it takes you weeks to consume that content. If you only use a couple of gb bandwidth and only consume content that took 10hrs to produce in 2 months then Blizzard love you. If however you consume a couple of gb and the same content in 2 days and do so all the time then you're more expensive to look after as a paying customer in terms of bandwidth costs and it's harder to keep content available for you so you don't get bored and quit. You're spot on in your analysis, only I felt the need to point out the reasoning for such crap design - it's not incompetence, as I've pointed out here it's purely financial.
As for my opinion on the practice? Well, I think people who do bot away at the content are forgetting why they play games - for fun, if they consume all the content they're given to the point they run out and end up bored to death then, well that's up to them. On the other hand however, MMO companies are both lazy and greedy. Blizzard especially so, with the profits they make there is simply no excuse to not have better quality content that people actually want to play rather than bot their way through. Until they invest in decent content people actually want to play then they've got no reason to cry and I wish the bot creators all the best in defending against this. Ignoring the moral point of view regarding cheating and taking the comp sci./law point of view I think Blizzard don't or at least shouldn't have a leg to stand on, their argument and tactics are as weak and apalling as the RIAA/MPAAs here. They produce shite content, they create a system that spies on process to make sure you're not cheating which is akin to DRM for the music industry and when that fails they just resort to law suits citing copyright infringement for making a copy of a program in memory even though that's exactly what Windows does when it loads an application in the first fucking place- are they going to sue Microsoft next for allowing you to run their application too? So quite rightly as you say, they're taking these measures rather than actually you know, spending that time and money on actually making a game people want to play rather than bot.
On a final note, here's a hint to MMO developers- chances are if the content is complex enough to be fun, it's too complex to be easily and efficiently botted also. If you produce content that's simply a bunch of repetitive tasks don't blame people for using computers to solve them, that is after all what they excel at - solving dull, repetitive tasks.
Britain has a space agency???
Oh sorry, that bit wasn't the news?
I'll remember this article next time that me, born in 1982 has to go round removing all the shareware games like Kyodai that all the middle age helpdesk women have decided to install on their computers because the 40 yr old manager we have thinks they should be free of security restrictions even if it causes such problems and creates security risks for the network.
Or when I'm dealing with silly amounts of calls because one 40+ yr old colleague is stood outside on their mobile phone arranging with their wife who is doing the cooking and the other is browsing holiday sites deciding where to go on holiday next.
Articles like this are stupid, they're a generalisation and where I work it couldn't be further from the truth. 3 out of 4 of our 1980s+ born workers and 1 out of 12 of our pre 1980s born workers make up our best 4 workers, that's completely out of line with the articles findings and whilst I realise you always get anomalies from statistical samples you should also not try and dress up this kind of bullshit as general fact.
In fact look at TFA, as hard as that is when it insists on jumping to the next stat before you've had chance to check the page properly I don't notice any information how solid a test base they used.
For all I know this could be put together by some disgruntled middle aged worker who actually sucks bad at his job but like many would rather blame someone else and so decided to blame the younger generation for taking his work.
Anyone know how reasonable a test base was used for this study? As it stands I could equally put together a made up study claiming older people are more likely to steal from the work place and pass it off as being fact.
I don't think that's true, even zealots have a breaking point whereby they realise no matter how many of their children they throw at a problem with no solution have a breaking point.
The question is how long, and can the general public ever been convinced to accept that if we're to win it's going to require a whole lot more US sons and daughters to die also?
The best options were passed up - that of either not going into Iraq at all or that of keeping Saddam or at least his military in power to maintain stability rather than disbanding them.
It's sad really, imagine if all the resources that have gone into Iraq had gone into Afghanistan instead and we'd never have touched Iraq? Afghanistan would be long done and dusted - realistically, another 10,000 troops would be plenty to really push the Taliban back to the brink of near complete defeat in Afghanistan right now and there's 130,000 troops in Iraq. Furthermore Saddam would've kept Iran in check and it's likely far less lives in Afghanistan would've been lost overall also. The additional resources not wasted in Iraq would've gone a long long way towards helping rebuild their nation to the strength and relative civility it was pre-soviet invasion also.
I agree with your sentiment but I think the benefits of high tech. weaponry are often overshadowed by the typical scenario you mention whereby something like a multi-million dollar vehicle is taken out by a cheaply made IED.
When we hear news reports of raids on insurgent strongholds by our forces you often hear about how 10s, 100s were killed compared to maybe 2 or 3 allied soldiers. It's the very fact we have high tech. weaponry that allows this, be it simple things such as night vision to full on portable video link ups with drones above the battlefield - the fact is high tech. weaponry is saving the lives of our soldiers.
Similarly, I understand that an expensive roboting land vehicle like this could be blown apart but if it can traverse more difficult terrain than your average hummer can then surely that allows us to transport things off standard roadways and across tougher terrain hence avoiding the sides of the road where IEDs are often hidden? Surely the best defense against a trap is to be able to not walk into it in the first place?
There's a lot to be said for the point you make - that we mustn't start using technology in warzones for the sake of it. Used well however it can and already is making our forces a lot better off than they ever have been previously. Whilst 4,000 odd US soldiers may have died in Iraq to insurgents, that figure is dwarfed by the number of insurgents that have died to high tech. weaponry in US hands.
One final point is that Iraq and Afghanistan are fairly different in terms of weaponry and tactics used, the typical IED made by a taliban tribesman living in the mountains isn't going to do an awful lot to an MBT, but as soon as you go to Iraq where you have insurgents potentially armed by the Iranians using charges shaped specifically to penetrate tank armour it's a different story. The insurgents the US is dealing with in Iraq aren't the same insurgents you describe in your post (i.e. next to no training and only using cheap weaponry) that are more commonly found in Afghanistan. Many insurgents in Iraq have been given vast amounts of training and are aquiring some pretty expensive weaponry themselves. The problem is now that some of the tactics in Iraq are spilling over into Afghanistan.
Technology does matter in the warzone when it comes to saving soldiers lives, sure a multi-million dollar MULE may get blown to pieces, but I'd rather see that than a patrol of actual humans suffer the same fate.
Whilst I'd love to believe this is great news, I have to wonder how many of those projects are things like "just another PHP content management system". Is Open source really beginning to take off in areas it was previously very weak or are these new projects just rehashes of the same old tired ideas?
If it's the former then this is indeed fantastic news and I hope the trend continues.