Come on guys, I need an extension to Chrome and Firefox. It should open a pseudo tab, that
is actually never rendered on screen. It should click on all the click bait links. Should have
some AI to recognize clickbait headlines. The neural network trying to learn my click bait
tastes should go completely haywire.
Wish I have the energy to write one. But after hacking all day at work, I dont have
the stamina to embark on more coding in my leisure. It should be childs play for those
who hack browser extensions for a living.
I told them when GM introduced its new fangled hydramatic transmission, it is going degrade the driver's skill, soon no one would know how to declutch and shift. And I was proven right. I was just bragging about my prediction coming true the other day and my grandpa chimed in. "Son, the slippery slope goes way back. I never liked them self starter anyways... Nothing like cranking up the old tin lizzy with a cranking rod to fully wake up in the morning" he went.
This will separate the wheat from chaff. People who know security and take it seriously will make sure they spend the resources to find a couple of large primes and base their keys on them. The equivalent of script kiddies who just download some binaries with security hashing algorithms who use it without understanding them will get cracked. Not just by NSA. Anyone with a budget and determination will. All the governments.
My suggestion was to custom build some pseudo malware, load it on those flash keys, or a set of flash keys, and leave them around campus. Nothing nefarious would happen to the user who did insert it other than an autorun popup informing them that we could have owned them right there if we wanted.
Don't do it on your own. Don't do it with serious back up and written guarantee for support from higher ups. What you are doing is very similar to finding homes with unlatched/unlocked back porches, walking in sitting in the living room sofa and shouting boo when the home owners walk in. No matter how sensible and helpful your advice is, the homeowners are going to be jumpy, irritated, made to look like fools and they will hate you intensely.
Try to do it differently. Create these USB warning devices as you planned, but give them to students, tell them what it does and ask them to "educate" their friends and relatives. Watermark each device so that they don't prank unsuspecting people.
All these studies are creating fear, uncertainty and doubt among the people. They make the job creators look like villains despite creating several, I repeat, several not just one, minimum wage jobs while making a measly profit of a few million dollars. And all these ivory tower professors, funded by the bureaucrats in Washington, doling out your taxes to create regulations that destroy your jobs.
The only thing to do is to cut all funding for all research in all universities if they collect any data whatsoever about the safety of oil facilities. If you make the oil industry extract refine and sell gasoline using only safe procedures, it could potentially raise the price at the pump by 10 or even 20 cents a gallon, and the burden will fall disproportionately on the poor people, making it very regressive. Why are all you guys hate poor people?
All that said, the bigger failing of the metric system is that the "base" units in most measurements are equally inconvenient to all users.
It is not a failing of metric system, but it is due to pre-existing conventions. The benefits of metric system is not so much it could dislodge existing kings of the hill. It is the same reason why the weird keyboards from microsoft/Dvorak did not displace QWERTY. Same reason why linux struggled against windows. People who grew up with metric have no problem using kilometer or kilogram or meter. But in civil engineering, walls thickness and room widths are still in feet, but rebar rod dia are in mm, even in India. Had to do mental arithmetic when a nephew quoted his Paris apartment area in square meters.
My best understanding is: Time is defined as a multiple of time period of oscillation of cesium atom at some pressure and temperature. Length is defined as a multiple of a particular frequency light, frequency depends only on time already defined. Now the change is kilogram is defined as a formula based on Plank's constant, length and time both previously defined. Now we can define charge, temperature etc from these. Thus we claim that we have stable definition of the standards.
I am not sure *stable* is the right word. It is indestructible information not any physical object. It is readily reproducible, can make back ups etc. But is it stable? As our ability to maintain temperature and pressure improves the time period measured could change. As our measurement techniques improve, that too can change the measured time period of oscillation of that atom. Similarly our ability to measure the wavelength can improve/change and thus change the definition of meter. Further all our measuring devices are calibrated using current basic standards. So there is this issue of recursion and that can introduce drift.
As fat as I understand, kilogram is now based on *digital* information, so it is replicatable without loss of fidelity, archivable. Indestructible as long as there are governments, and the willingness, funding standard setting organizations .
Tried to see what kind of newspaper it was. Its cartoons all tend to be liberal. Anti gun, anti GOP mostly. But it is recycling editorials from USA Today. So all my mouse-click investigative journalism to unearth deep plot by Koch Brothers has come to a naught:-)
Comprising some 50 species, box jellyfish are not like other jellyfish: they have 24 eyes, can move with intention and at surprising speed, and have something resembling a brain
The Boehner and Romney are busy trying to recruit it to be the next speaker of the house. If it actually has a real brain it would refuse...
But if you are planning to run away with police hot on your tail, it is better to be on a fully fueled Jeep. It sucks if you have to plan your escape hopping super charger to super charger station.
Elon Musk is not going to taking it lying down. Next soft update will allow you to easily access "being chased by police, plot best route using super charger" mode. Time is the essence in those situation, you don't want this buried three levels deep in menu. You want a hot one-click icon prominently in the opening screen.
According to the Telsa reports the two trespassers were told police is coming. The newspaper side does not contradict any major points, other than pointing out that a rock had damaged the windshield and the driver side seat belt was partially cut.
Seat belt could be prior damage. Not sure about windshield. A minor crack due to a pebble or something could be prior damage too. If it was some big head size rock thrown at the Jeep, then it is unlikely to be prior damage.
Any way you look at it, it is insane to run the security guards over known police were on their way. Or were they doing something even more serious and taking the fall for vehicular manslaughter, assault etc are lesser charges?
In the USA the natural gas is so cheap it is not worth capturing it from the shitpile. And there is no relief from odor pollution in this method. Simply covering the pile with plastic and sticking in perforated pvc pipes would be enough to capture the methane.
USA has about 100 million cows. I calculated once that six cows can produce enough methane to drive a car for about 15000 miles. We could move 15 million cars off the imported oil if we could sell the idea of cow gas plants to the US farmers. But unlikely to succeed. Organic fertilizer and odor relief are the big gains here. Methane is too cheap.
Shipping pre fabricated homes has a long history in the USA. Sears, Roebuck and Company used to sell homes in its catalog and ship them by rail and carts. Some of the homes built in 1890s are still standing.
The basic problem in developing nations, especially in rural areas, is the lack of capital. Let me give a simple example: India has the largest cattle population in the world. Rural Indian villages, and many parts of its cities too are deluged with cow waste. Imagine how much the life will be better if we could contain the cow waste to remove the odor, separate the combustible gases for fuel, and the remaining bio matter to be used as fertilizer! Fuel and fertilizer alone would justify themselves based on cash flow and the odor elimination is a pure bonus!
How much would it cost? What kind of high tech process you need to do this? You need to dig a pit about 25 feet deep, 10 feet in diameter, fill it with cow waste, cover it with some kind of plastic sheet or a metal lid or even a brick dome. You need a central pivot and some paddles to stir it once or twice a day. A smaller diameter tube to extract stuff from the bottom without disturbing the layers on top. Takes about two weeks for the anaerobic bacteria to start working. You can collect odorless natural gas from the top, pull buckets of organic fertilizer from the bottom. Once it gets going this can handle a herd of about 20 cows. The farmer has excess natural gas to cook, to make added products like par-boiled rice, or distillation or popped grains or make country sugar... all of them need lots of fuel. Fertilizer is valuable. Costs less than 250$ to build this. Still not much of market penetration. I remember making presentations to villagers back in 1980s. They simply don't have 250$ to invest.
Shipped prefabricated homes are developed nation solution. The lack of capital for to do even mind bogglingly simple things is just staggering.
The basic construction is based on finished lumber. Lumber is actually a very expensive material. Wood is plentiful around the world. But most of them grow in stunted, twisted, gnarled forms without much of structural strength. Wood that can be finished into lumber comes from barely a dozen (or at most two dozen) species around the world. It tends to be very expensive.
Most homes in developing countries are built using bricks, clay, or concrete and cement. Wood, glass, steel and aluminum are expensive and rare in most of the world.
So why can't these digital files be adapted to clay, brick or cement construction?
Fundamentally all the materials have enormous strength in compression. We knew we could pile brick on brick, dirt on dirt and build enormous, stable enduring structures 5 to 10 thousand years ago. But all of them are brittle and they have no real strength in tension. They have very little elasticity. For a design to "snap" together, you need a little bit of elasticity and some tensile strength. You can not "bend" a concrete beam a little, snap it into place and it would not "spring" back to assume old shape with old strength. Bent concrete is dead concrete.
R & D on developing cheap housing for the developing nations is a very active area of research. Many universities around the world are working on it. But most solutions are dull, and do not lend themselves to flashy headlines. Back when I was in college, the very first rupee I earned in my life came from the Centre for Rural Development, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. We were working on natural gas from cow waste, cottage industries suitable for rural areas, efficient wood burning stoves, and cheaper construction techniques for mud huts. Internet has a role to play in rural development. But it is not going to be as simple as mailing a few files around the world.
I always imagined British bobbies to be of the mold of Constable Harold Potter or D`Arcy "Stilton" Cheesewright, good only for helmets to be stolen from on the Oxford Boat Race night. As long as "Eustace H Plimsoll, of the Labernums, East Dulwich" rolls off your tongue easily and have 5 pounds in the pocket, you will back at the Drones by 12 noon next day nursing your favorite drink.
The land of the free and the home of the brave. We teach our kids to blindly obey the police officers, no matter how heinous the demand, no matter how much it violates your personal freedom. Come on Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Jay, Tyler, Revere... See what the nation you had wrought has come down to.... And weep.
The real danger to the democracy is the apathy of the people. In 90% of the house districts the low turn out primary is the real election. The districts are so blue/red that even a lamp post running as the Democrat/Republican will win the general election. The turn out in general election is a very underwhelming 50% of eligible voters and it drops to stunning 15 to 20% for the primaries. And you need 50%+1 in the primaries.
So people elected by 15% of the eligible population ends up as the Representative. No wonder they don't listen to you. You did not elect them. 85% of America did not elect them. You find it in the polls. 85% of America has negative opinion of their Reps.
If mere 15% more people arm themselves with facts, start showing up in the polling booth, register as independents to vote for the best candidate from either party, the influence of money on the politics will wane. Don't blame the rich people for being jerks. Blame the non-so-rich people for being lazy and ignorant.
Only dogs have co-evolved with humans for 25000 years, they are the only species that "understand" humans. They will look where you look. They will look at the object you point to, not at your pointing finger. They are the symbiotic species, friends for humans, set us towards the path of sedentism and later domestication of other plants and animals. Nomadic bands of pre-dog humans kept killing each other. Without dogs acting as early warning systems, humans could never have developed sedentism, even when the fertile lands where hunting and gathering was good.
All other animals are either domesticated or feral animals conditioned by food reward. They are merely pets.
Ogdan Nash put it perfectly. Outside of dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of dog, it is too dark to read.
Opened at 40, peaked at 70 struggling in 30s now. The last batch of stock options and restricted shares must be coming due to be sold. So some window dressing, get a price bump for a quarter? Seems like it.
It is never in the interests of the vendors to support full two way interoperability. Up starts will support interoperability with established players when it suits them and sabotage interoperability to prevent people from leaving. From early days of Microsoft making sure unix file systems can be seen by windows but not vice versa to present day CAD vendors investing order of magnitude more effort in "importing" other vendor's CAD format but becoming very apathetic to bugs reported on their export capability. Parametric Technologies started encrypting its files to prevent Microedge or some such vendor from reading the files, and invoking DMCA to stop anyone else from reading the files. The format is PTC's but the data is the customers'. They use every trick in the book to hold the data hostage. Every CAD tool vendor does this, PTC is not particularly worse than any of its competitor. It is exactly the same fight between ODF and XLS. The "open" formats are STEP and IGES
But it is in the interest of the customers to make sure their data never gets locked up in a format they don't control. Why wouldn't the fortune 500 companies invest a tiny part of their IT budgets to support ACM or IEEE to play the role of arbitrator when it comes to file formats, data and export/import protocols, fundamental security etc. These things should be neutral and no vendor should see them as yet another way to invade and occupy their customer's systems and processes.
Of course, there's an exception: "Because Adobe Flash is still a common part of the Web experience for most users, we will continue to support Flash within Firefox as an exception to the general plugin policy. Mozilla and Adobe will continue to collaborate to bring improvements to the Flash experience on Firefox, including on stability and performance, features and security architecture."
The moral is, if you screw up in small scale you pay the price. If you screw up in gigantic scale, others will accommodate you. Small borrowers get foreclosed. Gigantic debtors get bailed out. Minor plug-ins with stability and security issues get pulled.Even major ones like java. But you screw up in gigantic scale like Adobe Flash, the market prices your misdeeds in and expects others to act knowing, "yeah, Adobe Flash is a mess, but we know it is a mess, we need to work around it".
Slashdot Mirror
Wish I have the energy to write one. But after hacking all day at work, I dont have the stamina to embark on more coding in my leisure. It should be childs play for those who hack browser extensions for a living.
Sufficiently advanced humor is indistinguishable from wisdom, as Arthur C Clarke said.
I told them when GM introduced its new fangled hydramatic transmission, it is going degrade the driver's skill, soon no one would know how to declutch and shift. And I was proven right. I was just bragging about my prediction coming true the other day and my grandpa chimed in. "Son, the slippery slope goes way back. I never liked them self starter anyways ... Nothing like cranking up the old tin lizzy with a cranking rod to fully wake up in the morning" he went.
This will separate the wheat from chaff. People who know security and take it seriously will make sure they spend the resources to find a couple of large primes and base their keys on them. The equivalent of script kiddies who just download some binaries with security hashing algorithms who use it without understanding them will get cracked. Not just by NSA. Anyone with a budget and determination will. All the governments.
My suggestion was to custom build some pseudo malware, load it on those flash keys, or a set of flash keys, and leave them around campus. Nothing nefarious would happen to the user who did insert it other than an autorun popup informing them that we could have owned them right there if we wanted.
Don't do it on your own. Don't do it with serious back up and written guarantee for support from higher ups. What you are doing is very similar to finding homes with unlatched/unlocked back porches, walking in sitting in the living room sofa and shouting boo when the home owners walk in. No matter how sensible and helpful your advice is, the homeowners are going to be jumpy, irritated, made to look like fools and they will hate you intensely.
Try to do it differently. Create these USB warning devices as you planned, but give them to students, tell them what it does and ask them to "educate" their friends and relatives. Watermark each device so that they don't prank unsuspecting people.
The only thing to do is to cut all funding for all research in all universities if they collect any data whatsoever about the safety of oil facilities. If you make the oil industry extract refine and sell gasoline using only safe procedures, it could potentially raise the price at the pump by 10 or even 20 cents a gallon, and the burden will fall disproportionately on the poor people, making it very regressive. Why are all you guys hate poor people?
All that said, the bigger failing of the metric system is that the "base" units in most measurements are equally inconvenient to all users.
It is not a failing of metric system, but it is due to pre-existing conventions. The benefits of metric system is not so much it could dislodge existing kings of the hill. It is the same reason why the weird keyboards from microsoft/Dvorak did not displace QWERTY. Same reason why linux struggled against windows. People who grew up with metric have no problem using kilometer or kilogram or meter. But in civil engineering, walls thickness and room widths are still in feet, but rebar rod dia are in mm, even in India. Had to do mental arithmetic when a nephew quoted his Paris apartment area in square meters.
I am not sure *stable* is the right word. It is indestructible information not any physical object. It is readily reproducible, can make back ups etc. But is it stable? As our ability to maintain temperature and pressure improves the time period measured could change. As our measurement techniques improve, that too can change the measured time period of oscillation of that atom. Similarly our ability to measure the wavelength can improve/change and thus change the definition of meter. Further all our measuring devices are calibrated using current basic standards. So there is this issue of recursion and that can introduce drift.
As fat as I understand, kilogram is now based on *digital* information, so it is replicatable without loss of fidelity, archivable. Indestructible as long as there are governments, and the willingness, funding standard setting organizations .
But stable?
The membership to 7 digit user id club is particularly valuable as credntials.
Tried to see what kind of newspaper it was. Its cartoons all tend to be liberal. Anti gun, anti GOP mostly. But it is recycling editorials from USA Today. So all my mouse-click investigative journalism to unearth deep plot by Koch Brothers has come to a naught :-)
Comprising some 50 species, box jellyfish are not like other jellyfish: they have 24 eyes, can move with intention and at surprising speed, and have something resembling a brain
The Boehner and Romney are busy trying to recruit it to be the next speaker of the house. If it actually has a real brain it would refuse...
Elon Musk is not going to taking it lying down. Next soft update will allow you to easily access "being chased by police, plot best route using super charger" mode. Time is the essence in those situation, you don't want this buried three levels deep in menu. You want a hot one-click icon prominently in the opening screen.
Seat belt could be prior damage. Not sure about windshield. A minor crack due to a pebble or something could be prior damage too. If it was some big head size rock thrown at the Jeep, then it is unlikely to be prior damage.
Any way you look at it, it is insane to run the security guards over known police were on their way. Or were they doing something even more serious and taking the fall for vehicular manslaughter, assault etc are lesser charges?
If hackers with low skill levels could access her machine easily, there must be a number of caches of all the data she was trying to hide.
Come on guys, For computer science, it is Kanpur and it has always been Kanpur.
USA has about 100 million cows. I calculated once that six cows can produce enough methane to drive a car for about 15000 miles. We could move 15 million cars off the imported oil if we could sell the idea of cow gas plants to the US farmers. But unlikely to succeed. Organic fertilizer and odor relief are the big gains here. Methane is too cheap.
The basic problem in developing nations, especially in rural areas, is the lack of capital. Let me give a simple example: India has the largest cattle population in the world. Rural Indian villages, and many parts of its cities too are deluged with cow waste. Imagine how much the life will be better if we could contain the cow waste to remove the odor, separate the combustible gases for fuel, and the remaining bio matter to be used as fertilizer! Fuel and fertilizer alone would justify themselves based on cash flow and the odor elimination is a pure bonus!
How much would it cost? What kind of high tech process you need to do this? You need to dig a pit about 25 feet deep, 10 feet in diameter, fill it with cow waste, cover it with some kind of plastic sheet or a metal lid or even a brick dome. You need a central pivot and some paddles to stir it once or twice a day. A smaller diameter tube to extract stuff from the bottom without disturbing the layers on top. Takes about two weeks for the anaerobic bacteria to start working. You can collect odorless natural gas from the top, pull buckets of organic fertilizer from the bottom. Once it gets going this can handle a herd of about 20 cows. The farmer has excess natural gas to cook, to make added products like par-boiled rice, or distillation or popped grains or make country sugar... all of them need lots of fuel. Fertilizer is valuable. Costs less than 250$ to build this. Still not much of market penetration. I remember making presentations to villagers back in 1980s. They simply don't have 250$ to invest.
Shipped prefabricated homes are developed nation solution. The lack of capital for to do even mind bogglingly simple things is just staggering.
Most homes in developing countries are built using bricks, clay, or concrete and cement. Wood, glass, steel and aluminum are expensive and rare in most of the world.
So why can't these digital files be adapted to clay, brick or cement construction?
Fundamentally all the materials have enormous strength in compression. We knew we could pile brick on brick, dirt on dirt and build enormous, stable enduring structures 5 to 10 thousand years ago. But all of them are brittle and they have no real strength in tension. They have very little elasticity. For a design to "snap" together, you need a little bit of elasticity and some tensile strength. You can not "bend" a concrete beam a little, snap it into place and it would not "spring" back to assume old shape with old strength. Bent concrete is dead concrete.
R & D on developing cheap housing for the developing nations is a very active area of research. Many universities around the world are working on it. But most solutions are dull, and do not lend themselves to flashy headlines. Back when I was in college, the very first rupee I earned in my life came from the Centre for Rural Development, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. We were working on natural gas from cow waste, cottage industries suitable for rural areas, efficient wood burning stoves, and cheaper construction techniques for mud huts. Internet has a role to play in rural development. But it is not going to be as simple as mailing a few files around the world.
I always imagined British bobbies to be of the mold of Constable Harold Potter or D`Arcy "Stilton" Cheesewright, good only for helmets to be stolen from on the Oxford Boat Race night. As long as "Eustace H Plimsoll, of the Labernums, East Dulwich" rolls off your tongue easily and have 5 pounds in the pocket, you will back at the Drones by 12 noon next day nursing your favorite drink.
The land of the free and the home of the brave. We teach our kids to blindly obey the police officers, no matter how heinous the demand, no matter how much it violates your personal freedom. Come on Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Jay, Tyler, Revere ... See what the nation you had wrought has come down to.... And weep.
So people elected by 15% of the eligible population ends up as the Representative. No wonder they don't listen to you. You did not elect them. 85% of America did not elect them. You find it in the polls. 85% of America has negative opinion of their Reps.
If mere 15% more people arm themselves with facts, start showing up in the polling booth, register as independents to vote for the best candidate from either party, the influence of money on the politics will wane. Don't blame the rich people for being jerks. Blame the non-so-rich people for being lazy and ignorant.
All other animals are either domesticated or feral animals conditioned by food reward. They are merely pets.
Ogdan Nash put it perfectly. Outside of dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of dog, it is too dark to read.
Opened at 40, peaked at 70 struggling in 30s now. The last batch of stock options and restricted shares must be coming due to be sold. So some window dressing, get a price bump for a quarter? Seems like it.
But it is in the interest of the customers to make sure their data never gets locked up in a format they don't control. Why wouldn't the fortune 500 companies invest a tiny part of their IT budgets to support ACM or IEEE to play the role of arbitrator when it comes to file formats, data and export/import protocols, fundamental security etc. These things should be neutral and no vendor should see them as yet another way to invade and occupy their customer's systems and processes.
Of course, there's an exception: "Because Adobe Flash is still a common part of the Web experience for most users, we will continue to support Flash within Firefox as an exception to the general plugin policy. Mozilla and Adobe will continue to collaborate to bring improvements to the Flash experience on Firefox, including on stability and performance, features and security architecture."
The moral is, if you screw up in small scale you pay the price. If you screw up in gigantic scale, others will accommodate you. Small borrowers get foreclosed. Gigantic debtors get bailed out. Minor plug-ins with stability and security issues get pulled.Even major ones like java. But you screw up in gigantic scale like Adobe Flash, the market prices your misdeeds in and expects others to act knowing, "yeah, Adobe Flash is a mess, but we know it is a mess, we need to work around it".