That was my thought. Everyone talks about how OSS is so secure. If you had a bone to pick with that notion, why not go over one of the highest profile examples of OSS? I'm sure that they're running Apache, right? Probably MySQL too? Surely they aren't hosting their sight on IIS and powering it with Asp.Net, are they?
It would be great if situations like this brought the entire computer using community closer together. The reality is that no matter how epicly great your software might be, there are people out there looking to bring it down. It doesn't matter if you run Microsoft, Apple or OSS. There are bugs in your applications and there are incentives for finding and exploiting those bugs.
So, all of a sudden, we have drones that are flying around and are programmed to look for suspicious behavior...
Suspicious behavior... the drone notices that a group of three people are hanging out in the parking lot up the street from your house at 1:00am on a Wednesday night. Is gathering in public illegal? Nope. Is it suspicious enough to warrant having a patrol car do a drive by? I'd say that it is.
As a person who lives in a neighborhood that is slowly sliding the wrong way down the socio-economic ladder, I'm all for giving the police more tools to do their job with. Right now I have to call and report suspicious and unwelcome activity to the police. If they want to fly a drone with some AI analyzing the video feed, great. People are creatures of habit. Law enforcement exists to disuade bad habits, like hanging out on the porch with the homies and hassling the neighbors, or wandering down the street at 2am looking for a residence to burgularize. Is it possible that old man Johnson might get "hassled" by the cops and have to explain that he likes the quiet of night to take his 2am walks through the neighborhood? Sure, that could happen. I think that is perfectly reasonable. If I'm out walking at 2am, and a police car drives by, I expect them to potentially ask me what I'm doing. I don't see what is so wrong about a drone that has been "programmed to look for suspicious behavior" initiating the same kind of contact.
My example above is totally hypothetical. If you want an idea of what the drones are really looking for, and what the software is being calibrated to pick up on, check out this information about the "terrorist attack cycle".
Think of things like people loitering in secure areas, large groups where there aren't usually large groups, etc. The tools are being used for counter-intelligence and counter-surveillance. If you think they're being used for anything else (at this point in the game), you have an active imagination. I used to work for an organization with facilities on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, right in the heart of the financial center. I know what the LAPD and the DHS guys are looking for, and what the image analysis software is calibrated to respond to. Despite what some people seem to think judging by the responses in this thread, it isn't two people sunbathing in the nude on their apartment roof or balcony.
I can only speak to the approach into LAX, because that is the only major international airport that I have seen on a regular basis (unless you count PDX, but that is more regional). There are plenty of 4-5 story parking garages along the 405 as the planes are nearly down on final approach. A person could probably get another 5 feet of elevation for standing on top of a vehicle, maybe 6-7 feet if you find a big lifted monster truck or cargo van. All in total that is about 55 feet of elevation.
The flight paths on those planes is completely predictable. It would be fairly easy to get into the cockpit of some of those planes. A person would probably need a aim a few miles out. Once they were near the garage, the angle would be too extreme given the height of the cockpit.
How much energy would be needed to create a distracting level of laser light into the cockpit of a jumbo jet that is 5-10 miles away?
My primary use of Google is to research system and application error messages that I come across while at work. A few years ago searching for an error message would yield some valuable results. These days it seems like the same kind of searches often turn up other people looking for the same information. Those search results usually take the form of forum postings and Usenet postings. Almost every single time, there will be one or two other results in the same result set that are exact same question, just copied into another forum. It's like spammers are simply taking Usenet postings, mirroring them, and then putting AdWords links on the mirrored pages.
Now that the law is on the books it is up to plaintiffs to get the job done. The lawyers and representatives can only take us half way. It is in our hands to go the rest of the way. Do you really care about spam? Are you ready to do something about it? You have the law, and legal precedent on your side. What else do you need?
Hostile much? It was business class satellite. Definitely not Dish. I will figure out who it was and get back to you. I'm going to laugh if it's your company.
The feature that you're asking for is unheard of and fanciful. I've only been doing IT for 15 years, so maybe there was time before I got into the game when what you asked for was a reality. But from everything I've seen, any sort of migration is a long and involved process, whether or not you are "locked in" to a product.
To say, "until I can migrate... with one click" shows a complete lack of understanding about what you are asking for. You're going to need more than $20K to convince an ASP to give you one-click "move to the competition" functionality. In fact, even if you're billing your time at lawyer rates, I doubt that ten years of your time would be enough to convince anyone to develop what you want.
I take that back. You could convince someone to develop it. You couldn't convince them to put it into production. Just look at how Google and Facebook treat each other when it comes to sharing contact data. Contact data is just a few columns and maybe a few hundred rows. You want a complete environment migration... one click?
Our elected representatives actually got it right for once. They crafted legislation that holds the advertisers and beneficiares of spam accountable for the spam itself. It only took them a decade plus, but this is the government we're talking about here. The fact that they got it done is to be lauded.
The only time I ever worked with a satellite connection was at a power plant in the middle of California's Central Valley. The latency was constantly above 2000ms and establishing a VPN connection back to the main office in Los Angeles was a real challenge.
You should go ahead and write the functionality that you want. I'm sure it will only take you a weekend. Just think, it's probably in such demand that you'll be rich by Monday.
In my experience I have found that instrumental music is the best for elevating my mood. I've been listening to Bach's violin concertos lately on the way to and from work. No matter how bad traffic might be, I cannot listen to that music and not be happy. The notes and the melody just hit the right parts of the brain to trigger those good feelings. I find that a lot of electronica music helps too. On the other hand, the typical music on the radio with lyrics and the same repetitive refrains and choruses just seem to irk me.
The more things change, they more they stay the same. Once upon a time, we used to visit webpages and were told that we needed to download Real Player to view the content on the page. Then we needed QuickTime. Then we needed Flash. Now we are going to need WebM.
In the end, it doesn't matter what the browser vendors want to include with the browser. It will come down to the content providers and whether or not their content is compelling. If they are offering what consumers want, consumers will download whatever plugin they need. Downloading plugins is an established behavior.
The only group who will be affected by this at all are the developers. They have to make the choice as to what video encoding scheme they want to use for their applications. So developers out there, how many of you care? On one hand you know that if you go with H.264, all IE and Safari users (read 90%+ of computer users) will be able to view your content without downloading a plugin. You will miss out Chrome users (assuming nobody comes out with an H.264 plugin for Chrome). On the other hand, you can choose WebM and presumably avoid the spectre of maybe, possibly, one day (but not very likely) having to pay royalities on H.264. You end up with some portion of the 90% of the market who are willing to download a plugin. Which do you choose? Or more realistically, which one does your employer hoist on you?
And the saddest part is that he is one of us in so much as he reads Slashdot. As much as he rails against the Slashdot audience, it's obvious that he still cares what we think about him enough to conceal his identity.
I remember that game. That was back in the days when you had to pick up EVERYTHING because you never knew when you might need it. Then another aspect of the game play was attempting to use everything in your inventory on everything else in the game.
I swear that I've been Pavlovianly conditioned by growing up with those games. I can't play Fallout without obsessively searching every container and mousing over every item in every room I come across.
The original Alone in the Dark suffered from it in a bad way. Hey, I'm in a scary house. I have to go around opening doors... Woops, opening that door immediately drops me to a cutscene of my dying horribly, with no possible clues by which I could have inferred that it was different than any other door. I guess it is time to save-and-check my way around the entire damn place...
+1 old school credit for mentioning Alone in the Dark.
Do you remember that game, or more importantly, the hardware that was out at the time? I played it on a 386. Those stupid pitfalls were the game. They only had a few megabytes to work with. It was all about exploring a haunted house, and dealing with Cthulhu-esque monsters.
So, in the end, killing people was risky business.
And yet Bethesda considered that angle, and once you've killed enough people, you get a perk for it that makes it so you do more damage. I think it is the "Death Bringer" or "Lord of Death" or something along those lines.
I ran into a similar, less dramatic issue. At one point I came across some random guy in a motel. I to him and told him I was there to kill him. He ran away. It turns out that later in the game, I could have made good money from that guy.
There are some people who want their games to be a linear progression and who dislike the stress of making a "wrong" decision. On the other hand, some games are improved by having a branching tree quest logic. Fallout: New Vegas is a great game with a non-linear progression system. One of the first decisions in the game involves deciding whether or not to help the town that has saved you from the wasteland defend someone who has taken refuge there. The other side of that coin is to help the "bad guys" who are there to kill him. I probably spent a good two hours putting off that decision by doing every other quest besides that one. In the end, I made the (morally) right decision and saved the weakling from the bullies.
The next time I play the game, you can bet that the weakling and the town foolish enough to protect him will all die together. For me, that is the fun of open ended games. They have replay value, and they change as you replay them. I tend to play them through the first time doing what I think the designers want me to do to further their idea of what the story line should be. The second time through, I make every "wrong" decision imaginable, just to see how far off track the story will go.
In a typical game, the choices are simple. Either you make the right decision and live, or you make the wrong decision and die. In a well written game, any decision you make furthers the story. The difference is that the ending will not always be the same. Decisions should lead to outcomes and not be a simple pass or fail logic.
This is where the system is broken. If a person or company is going to patent something, they should be patenting it because they intend to use it. If they intend to use it, they should know what it is worth.
This system we currently have were patents are granted to people who are not using them, and are instead simply viewing a patent as a mechanism for making money is disgusting.
One of the parts of my job that irks me is that I work for a company that does "damages discovery" for cases like this. Our firm gets hired to determine what the damages are. It is a complete load of crap the way they determine these awards. The fact that a company like Walker Digital can go to court without even knowing what they are using for in the first place just shows how broken the system really is. It fails any sanity check what so ever. It baffles my mind that a judge would not throw this out of court right away.
Judge, "You're telling me that YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR 'BUSINESS MODEL' IS WORTH?!"
Walker, "No your honor, we have no idea what our patent is worth."
Judge, "GTFO!"
Unfortunately the reality of the situation is that they will bring in some insanely high paid "experts" who will talk out of their ass and come up with a valuation in the millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. What will their valuation be based on? Absolutely nothing tangible. They make it up as they go. It isn't like they have any prior information to base it on. It all comes down to whatever the plaintiffs and the judge agree on. The defendant is SOL. It is not like Blizzard can say, "Your honor, WoW is worthless."
Everyone I've been talking to my field is telling me that corporations are spending like crazy on IT in the last two quarters, and are going to continue spending large amounts for at least the next year. There has been some slow down after the economy tanked, but from everything I've seen, the cash flow spigots are opening up.
In my own experience I just got a new job six months ago and it has been non-stop, balls to the walls busy since I walked through the door. We're hiring new people and spending millions on hardware. Of course, we are an IT business. Our SaaS environment is what allows our part of the organization to make money. The spending priorities might be different in other sectors.
BTW, the signal has already been stopped. Have you tried to run a mail server or a web server from your home lately?
Thanks for making this point. The idea of a neutral internet was dead years ago, right after providers started putting it into their ToS that you are unable to run servers on standard ports.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my thought. Everyone talks about how OSS is so secure. If you had a bone to pick with that notion, why not go over one of the highest profile examples of OSS? I'm sure that they're running Apache, right? Probably MySQL too? Surely they aren't hosting their sight on IIS and powering it with Asp.Net, are they?
It would be great if situations like this brought the entire computer using community closer together. The reality is that no matter how epicly great your software might be, there are people out there looking to bring it down. It doesn't matter if you run Microsoft, Apple or OSS. There are bugs in your applications and there are incentives for finding and exploiting those bugs.
So, all of a sudden, we have drones that are flying around and are programmed to look for suspicious behavior...
Suspicious behavior... the drone notices that a group of three people are hanging out in the parking lot up the street from your house at 1:00am on a Wednesday night. Is gathering in public illegal? Nope. Is it suspicious enough to warrant having a patrol car do a drive by? I'd say that it is.
As a person who lives in a neighborhood that is slowly sliding the wrong way down the socio-economic ladder, I'm all for giving the police more tools to do their job with. Right now I have to call and report suspicious and unwelcome activity to the police. If they want to fly a drone with some AI analyzing the video feed, great. People are creatures of habit. Law enforcement exists to disuade bad habits, like hanging out on the porch with the homies and hassling the neighbors, or wandering down the street at 2am looking for a residence to burgularize. Is it possible that old man Johnson might get "hassled" by the cops and have to explain that he likes the quiet of night to take his 2am walks through the neighborhood? Sure, that could happen. I think that is perfectly reasonable. If I'm out walking at 2am, and a police car drives by, I expect them to potentially ask me what I'm doing. I don't see what is so wrong about a drone that has been "programmed to look for suspicious behavior" initiating the same kind of contact.
My example above is totally hypothetical. If you want an idea of what the drones are really looking for, and what the software is being calibrated to pick up on, check out this information about the "terrorist attack cycle".
http://thesurvivalpodcast.com/forum/index.php?topic=1354.0
Think of things like people loitering in secure areas, large groups where there aren't usually large groups, etc. The tools are being used for counter-intelligence and counter-surveillance. If you think they're being used for anything else (at this point in the game), you have an active imagination. I used to work for an organization with facilities on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, right in the heart of the financial center. I know what the LAPD and the DHS guys are looking for, and what the image analysis software is calibrated to respond to. Despite what some people seem to think judging by the responses in this thread, it isn't two people sunbathing in the nude on their apartment roof or balcony.
If your optics are shit, or there is fog/dust/substantial thermal shimmer
Would the exhaust trail from the jets themselves fall under thermal shimmer? Or does that only matter when dealing with the atmosphere?
I can only speak to the approach into LAX, because that is the only major international airport that I have seen on a regular basis (unless you count PDX, but that is more regional). There are plenty of 4-5 story parking garages along the 405 as the planes are nearly down on final approach. A person could probably get another 5 feet of elevation for standing on top of a vehicle, maybe 6-7 feet if you find a big lifted monster truck or cargo van. All in total that is about 55 feet of elevation.
The flight paths on those planes is completely predictable. It would be fairly easy to get into the cockpit of some of those planes. A person would probably need a aim a few miles out. Once they were near the garage, the angle would be too extreme given the height of the cockpit.
How much energy would be needed to create a distracting level of laser light into the cockpit of a jumbo jet that is 5-10 miles away?
My primary use of Google is to research system and application error messages that I come across while at work. A few years ago searching for an error message would yield some valuable results. These days it seems like the same kind of searches often turn up other people looking for the same information. Those search results usually take the form of forum postings and Usenet postings. Almost every single time, there will be one or two other results in the same result set that are exact same question, just copied into another forum. It's like spammers are simply taking Usenet postings, mirroring them, and then putting AdWords links on the mirrored pages.
Now that the law is on the books it is up to plaintiffs to get the job done. The lawyers and representatives can only take us half way. It is in our hands to go the rest of the way. Do you really care about spam? Are you ready to do something about it? You have the law, and legal precedent on your side. What else do you need?
Hostile much? It was business class satellite. Definitely not Dish. I will figure out who it was and get back to you. I'm going to laugh if it's your company.
The feature that you're asking for is unheard of and fanciful. I've only been doing IT for 15 years, so maybe there was time before I got into the game when what you asked for was a reality. But from everything I've seen, any sort of migration is a long and involved process, whether or not you are "locked in" to a product.
To say, "until I can migrate ... with one click" shows a complete lack of understanding about what you are asking for. You're going to need more than $20K to convince an ASP to give you one-click "move to the competition" functionality. In fact, even if you're billing your time at lawyer rates, I doubt that ten years of your time would be enough to convince anyone to develop what you want.
I take that back. You could convince someone to develop it. You couldn't convince them to put it into production. Just look at how Google and Facebook treat each other when it comes to sharing contact data. Contact data is just a few columns and maybe a few hundred rows. You want a complete environment migration... one click?
Thanks for the laugh.
Our elected representatives actually got it right for once. They crafted legislation that holds the advertisers and beneficiares of spam accountable for the spam itself. It only took them a decade plus, but this is the government we're talking about here. The fact that they got it done is to be lauded.
I think is nick is a bit hyperbole. He's posting on /. with the rest of us after all.
The only time I ever worked with a satellite connection was at a power plant in the middle of California's Central Valley. The latency was constantly above 2000ms and establishing a VPN connection back to the main office in Los Angeles was a real challenge.
You should go ahead and write the functionality that you want. I'm sure it will only take you a weekend. Just think, it's probably in such demand that you'll be rich by Monday.
Get back to me when you're done.
In my experience I have found that instrumental music is the best for elevating my mood. I've been listening to Bach's violin concertos lately on the way to and from work. No matter how bad traffic might be, I cannot listen to that music and not be happy. The notes and the melody just hit the right parts of the brain to trigger those good feelings. I find that a lot of electronica music helps too. On the other hand, the typical music on the radio with lyrics and the same repetitive refrains and choruses just seem to irk me.
The more things change, they more they stay the same. Once upon a time, we used to visit webpages and were told that we needed to download Real Player to view the content on the page. Then we needed QuickTime. Then we needed Flash. Now we are going to need WebM.
In the end, it doesn't matter what the browser vendors want to include with the browser. It will come down to the content providers and whether or not their content is compelling. If they are offering what consumers want, consumers will download whatever plugin they need. Downloading plugins is an established behavior.
The only group who will be affected by this at all are the developers. They have to make the choice as to what video encoding scheme they want to use for their applications. So developers out there, how many of you care? On one hand you know that if you go with H.264, all IE and Safari users (read 90%+ of computer users) will be able to view your content without downloading a plugin. You will miss out Chrome users (assuming nobody comes out with an H.264 plugin for Chrome). On the other hand, you can choose WebM and presumably avoid the spectre of maybe, possibly, one day (but not very likely) having to pay royalities on H.264. You end up with some portion of the 90% of the market who are willing to download a plugin. Which do you choose? Or more realistically, which one does your employer hoist on you?
And the saddest part is that he is one of us in so much as he reads Slashdot. As much as he rails against the Slashdot audience, it's obvious that he still cares what we think about him enough to conceal his identity.
I remember that game. That was back in the days when you had to pick up EVERYTHING because you never knew when you might need it. Then another aspect of the game play was attempting to use everything in your inventory on everything else in the game.
I swear that I've been Pavlovianly conditioned by growing up with those games. I can't play Fallout without obsessively searching every container and mousing over every item in every room I come across.
The original Alone in the Dark suffered from it in a bad way. Hey, I'm in a scary house. I have to go around opening doors... Woops, opening that door immediately drops me to a cutscene of my dying horribly, with no possible clues by which I could have inferred that it was different than any other door. I guess it is time to save-and-check my way around the entire damn place...
+1 old school credit for mentioning Alone in the Dark.
Do you remember that game, or more importantly, the hardware that was out at the time? I played it on a 386. Those stupid pitfalls were the game. They only had a few megabytes to work with. It was all about exploring a haunted house, and dealing with Cthulhu-esque monsters.
So, in the end, killing people was risky business.
And yet Bethesda considered that angle, and once you've killed enough people, you get a perk for it that makes it so you do more damage. I think it is the "Death Bringer" or "Lord of Death" or something along those lines.
I ran into a similar, less dramatic issue. At one point I came across some random guy in a motel. I to him and told him I was there to kill him. He ran away. It turns out that later in the game, I could have made good money from that guy.
There are some people who want their games to be a linear progression and who dislike the stress of making a "wrong" decision. On the other hand, some games are improved by having a branching tree quest logic. Fallout: New Vegas is a great game with a non-linear progression system. One of the first decisions in the game involves deciding whether or not to help the town that has saved you from the wasteland defend someone who has taken refuge there. The other side of that coin is to help the "bad guys" who are there to kill him. I probably spent a good two hours putting off that decision by doing every other quest besides that one. In the end, I made the (morally) right decision and saved the weakling from the bullies.
The next time I play the game, you can bet that the weakling and the town foolish enough to protect him will all die together. For me, that is the fun of open ended games. They have replay value, and they change as you replay them. I tend to play them through the first time doing what I think the designers want me to do to further their idea of what the story line should be. The second time through, I make every "wrong" decision imaginable, just to see how far off track the story will go.
In a typical game, the choices are simple. Either you make the right decision and live, or you make the wrong decision and die. In a well written game, any decision you make furthers the story. The difference is that the ending will not always be the same. Decisions should lead to outcomes and not be a simple pass or fail logic.
He means that given the choice, the market decided that they preferred something other than Apple more than they preferred Apple.
This is where the system is broken. If a person or company is going to patent something, they should be patenting it because they intend to use it. If they intend to use it, they should know what it is worth.
This system we currently have were patents are granted to people who are not using them, and are instead simply viewing a patent as a mechanism for making money is disgusting.
One of the parts of my job that irks me is that I work for a company that does "damages discovery" for cases like this. Our firm gets hired to determine what the damages are. It is a complete load of crap the way they determine these awards. The fact that a company like Walker Digital can go to court without even knowing what they are using for in the first place just shows how broken the system really is. It fails any sanity check what so ever. It baffles my mind that a judge would not throw this out of court right away.
Judge, "You're telling me that YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR 'BUSINESS MODEL' IS WORTH?!"
Walker, "No your honor, we have no idea what our patent is worth."
Judge, "GTFO!"
Unfortunately the reality of the situation is that they will bring in some insanely high paid "experts" who will talk out of their ass and come up with a valuation in the millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. What will their valuation be based on? Absolutely nothing tangible. They make it up as they go. It isn't like they have any prior information to base it on. It all comes down to whatever the plaintiffs and the judge agree on. The defendant is SOL. It is not like Blizzard can say, "Your honor, WoW is worthless."
Everyone I've been talking to my field is telling me that corporations are spending like crazy on IT in the last two quarters, and are going to continue spending large amounts for at least the next year. There has been some slow down after the economy tanked, but from everything I've seen, the cash flow spigots are opening up.
In my own experience I just got a new job six months ago and it has been non-stop, balls to the walls busy since I walked through the door. We're hiring new people and spending millions on hardware. Of course, we are an IT business. Our SaaS environment is what allows our part of the organization to make money. The spending priorities might be different in other sectors.
If the Lich King couldn't distract us from rampaging across South Shore, why should Deathwing deter us from dropping the pain hammer on the Alliance?
BTW, the signal has already been stopped. Have you tried to run a mail server or a web server from your home lately?
Thanks for making this point. The idea of a neutral internet was dead years ago, right after providers started putting it into their ToS that you are unable to run servers on standard ports.