It is getting totally insane. Seven babies will make a family. Not even a clan. Learn the hierarchy. Individual, couple, family, extended family/clan, tribe, nation, State, Empire.
It is the same guys who have predicted 200$ barrel of oil by 2010, or the onset of depression when Bill Clinton enacted the biggest tax increase in the history of the USA in 1993. They seem to completely ignore the demographic time bomb in China. Several generations of strict enforcement of one child policy has aged its population very very quickly. Children grew up without brothers/sister, their children did not have aunts or uncles, now the grand children have no grand uncles or grand aunts. One working couple supports all their surviving ancestors. Their government pensions have dwindled in value to nothing. China could be the first country to go from agrarian/developing country to a geriatric country short circuiting the usual industrial/developed country phase.
China is running a trade deficit with most other countries supplying it with raw materials. It runs a surplus only with a few western countries. And Japan-China hatred goes back several centuries. These complex interactions do not lend themselves to extrapolation on a graph sheet easily.
Anyway, even if it does come to pass, it is just reversion to pre 18th century world power balance. Till about 1750s, 25% of world GDP came from India and another 25% from China.
In most third world countries you can buy a 1 TB hard disk filled with cracked versions of all kinds of software . Price is cheaper for the Bring Your Own Harddisk deals. Everything from Maya, Adobe Illustrator, video editors all the way to strange things like Serenade 7.0 circuit simulator from Compact Software or Star-CCM++ mesher, whatever the hell that is. CAD/CAM tools blah blah blah... everything. So not surprised by the fact some one cracked it. What surprised me was that it is as simple as reading the file in, and changing an XML attribute of an entity with off-the-shelf tools, not something complicated like the black-orifice cracker/debugger. Reminds me of the early days in Web commerce where a site was submitting the price and quantity in a open form. People could just modify the html page and submit orders with spurious (and low) price.
The whole idea of birds laying eggs is to raise the next generation to take over when they die. But if the birds are immortal, and no matter how many times they smash themselves at structures and commit suicide, if they are going to come back alive, why would they lay eggs? Why would they work themselves into a frenzy? And why I am working myself into a frenzy trying to find a logical and coherent underpinnings for the stupid free game?
Former Prime Minister of India Morarji Desai and his side kick and Minister of Health Raj Narayan were pioneers ahead of their times, it looks like. They were practitioners of auto urine therapy.
Fact1 : Any change will create winners and losers. Be it changes in law, changes in technology, changes in business practices, population, demographics, generally accepted social norms... all changes will create winners and losers.
Fact 2: Most winners will not know they are going to be winners. Most losers can see they are going to be getting the short end of the stick
Fact 3: The losing side will fight tooth and nail to avert it.
When the side that is going to lose is rich and powerful, they employ very powerful techniques to avoid it or postpone it. They will buy out the competitors, engage in collusion, pay the legislators (legally or illegally), spread misinformation, doubt and feat, anything. It is very instructive to read the book by the University of Chicago professor, Dr Raghuram Rajan, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists
Copyright is one place where we can see the dynamics playing out very clearly and use it as an opportunity to educate the public.
When the news about the hack got out, the company came out with "two levels of fixes".
The first level is basically making the DC charging port more difficult access. Replace plastic
with metal etc. It was willing to ship that thing for free.
Then, it had the second second level fix, flashing new firmware. It wanted some 40$ per lock for the locks that were capable of accepting the patch! This is basically daylight robbery. There is simply no justification for charging that much for a security upgrade in software! If the locks were not capable of being upgraded, then the entire board has to be changed, costing even more money.
I think Onnity does not seem to get one striking fact. 90% of the motels and economy hotels are owned by Indian immigrants. It is very much possible they have a cousin back home who might hack out a patch.
From what I could understand from the article, it starts with a compromised PC. The virus, sits there, biding its time, not taking any other malicious actions. May be a key stroke logger but does not phone home yet.
When the user visits a banking website, it probably has the username, password, bank url from the key logging. It adds javascript to the web page dished out by the bank asking for the mobile device number. But this javascript phones home dumping the info to the attacker.
Then the attacker sends in a trojan to the mobile device. User installs a trojan in the mobile device. Technically mobile device is not hacked. User is tricked into installing a software. At this point there is no security left. The attacker can do anything.
Now, the attacker can just the trojan to the mobile device directly, but it would be difficult to persuade the user to install it. All the compromised PC is doing is, giving account numbers, and details about last few transactions etc to make it look authentic. But if such info is available from other sources, or if not all that much is needed to persuade the user to install that trojan, it is game over. The key to the whole thing is sneaking the trojan past without arousing suspicion of the user into the mobile device.
That is the only and correct reason to be a const correctness nazi. Auto threading and auto vectorization would produce a few papers and mint some PhDs. But for the guy hacking code to make a living, they are not going to make much diff.
All these days of careful coding diligently avoiding static_casts and const_casts... All those recompilations triggered because I had to touch one header file used by everyone and his brother to satisfy my strict insistence of const correctness... I paid and paid and paid all these days. I avoided mutable data members because Soustroup pontificated in some vague posting in comp.lang.c++ (OMG I even forgot the usenet group name!) that "a well constructed object oriented code should not require mutables".
This is my pay day baby! My code is going to run super fast in multicore machines without any (more) extra work from me! Wooo Hooo!
Please take pity on my and let me enjoy my day dream for a few hours, without rudely inserting reality into my reverie! Thanks slashdotters, I know I can count on you!
Dang it! That Dyson guy! How did he steal my idea 32 years before I published it in slashdot! Well, he must have built a time machine. There is *no* other explanations;-)
Someday you could xerox a xerox machine! Would that violate the max call stack depth limits of recursion?
Imagine if we could print parts of a copy machine to make a better copy machine. Then each xerox machine could print out parts and become bigger and stronger. So technically we can pack a very small rudimentary xerox machine in a rocket, blast it to some distant planet and it would make increasingly more sophisticated copy machines and eventually build a rocket and make miniature xerox machines and blast them other planets!
But what about energy? What about material? Come on, it is all in the software. The little rudimentary machine would print out small powerplants and raw material factories too.
But what material could you use in a planet you have never been to? Well, let us just use the most abundant material like carbon and water and these machines would make small variations in the copies they make. Whichever variation uses the available materials better, would make more copies of itself. So we can build redundancy into the process. Let these machines fight among themselves and the ones most suitable to each plant will evolve bigger and better.
All we need to do is provide some kind of insatiable appetite to make more copies of itself deeply into the kernel of these machines. That should be enough.
Oh, wait. It is us. Folks, we are the end result of those damned 3D printing machines envisaged by some distant civilization! OMG, you did it, didn't you, God?
My Prius model year 2006 came in with the maps stored in a DVD that was updated in Feb 2005. Car is still going strong, giving me 45 mpg in summer and about 40 mpg in winter. No problems, no issues. Except for that stupid map-DVD. Toyota thinks the updated DVD is worth 200$. And furthermore, only an authorized dealer technician can do this impossibly difficult task of ejecting old dvd and inserting the new one, labor at 80$ an hour. And the local dealer charges 20$ a day "storage fee" if you don't pick the car up when they call you to say it is done. It is a rip off. No one in right mind is paying for this stuff.
... dont buy ready made tools from the store. These shrink wrapped tools are virus prone security risks. They use the mini numerical milling machine and write csh scripts to drive it to mill/cut/machine custom fitting tools from solid blocks of iron-carbide steel as and when they need them.
Pentalobular is not found in most run-of-the-mill tool sets. It is a path breaking new innovation among screw drivers. This is Apple's answer to people ridiculing it for patenting rounded rectangles. This innovative work shows they are familiar with more complicated shapes too. You need to buy a special iScrew set to get it. Of course you can get cheap imitation ones. But a true fan buys only the best. And you get a slimmer, shinier handle, stand-out-from-the-crowd white color, brushed aluminum shank and pride of knowing that you own the best and you deserve the best. It is not easy to be the best, you need to upgrade it to dodecodolobular screw driver in the next release. That sesquicentolobular thing from Samsung just would not cut it.
It is just a matter of time before someone is going to sue the traffic camera company. Especially when reports like this come out. So what kind of liability waivers these companies are getting from the cities? We already know the city officials are a bunch of chimps who get just peanuts while bulk of the collection goes to the traffic camera company. They are not known for their skill in negotiating with these companies. It is very much possible these companies have full immunity and all the liability will fall on the city and its tax payers.
Onity has announced two step solution. The first one is making it difficult to access the port.
There is a cover at the bottom it looks like and they are strengthening it. May be metal instead of plastic.
And adding a *security* torx screw too. Yeah, may be they will also make it need pentalobulous head like
Apple iPads. But all it will do is to slow down but can't stop the intruder. This part is free.
They are also providing a software solution. Even when the locks are programmable and upgradable,
flashing the new firmware is available for a "nominal" fee. And if your lock does not have upgradable
firmware? Well, you need to call in and ask for the price. I think the current pricing is one arm and
one leg per upgrade.
Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.
I tried to update my hate machine. In fact I have turned on auto update. Still I get the following error:
Genuine Hate Machine Advantage Update failed. Please validate your installation of Hate Machine or upgrade to Ultimate Professional Platinum edition Hate Machine
That is the catch. It has not worked so far in people, or animals for that matter. But $scientist speculates it might. Till more data comes through we should soak the RNA in snake oil before freeze drying it.
People, ICE stands for Internal Combustion Engine. Just because it has cylinders, pistons and valves it does not make it an ICE. It is a closed cycle engine. All the fluids used can be recycled and only heat will be added to them, and the mechanical energy extracted from them. Much like nuclear power plants. But piston/value thingies are much less efficient than gas/steam turbines. The only "innovation" here is to use oil to store the heat of solar energy. Again there are many other "fluids" including molten salt proposed as a heat energy storage medium.
I wonder how much energy can be stored in heated oil compared to batteries. Quick back of the envelop calc shows, 20 gallons of oil, that is about 60 Kg. Specific heat of water is 1 cal/gm/degree, is 60,000 cal/deg, 470 deg over ambient, gives, 60,000x470=2.8e07 cal, or 1.2e08 Joules, or 2.85 Kg of gasoline at 42 MJ/Kg. That is about 0.95 gal of gasoline. 60 Kg battery pack can probably store more energy than 1 gal of gas. And that energy converts to mechanical power at a much greater efficiency than any heat engine. It does not look like an application for cars. May be cheaper fixed installations competing with solar panels may be. May be if the build a tiny steam turbine, it would be more efficient.
Small gas turbines are quite familiar to engineers, all the turbo-charged ICEs use a gas turbine in the exhaust manifold to pack more air into the inlet manifold. So small gas turbines are well understood, but still they are not usually found in the power ranges needed to drive cars and trucks. Heck, even railway locomotives go for 16 cylinder diesels than gas turbines. I wonder why.
Slashdot Mirror
It is getting totally insane. Seven babies will make a family. Not even a clan. Learn the hierarchy. Individual, couple, family, extended family/clan, tribe, nation, State, Empire.
China is running a trade deficit with most other countries supplying it with raw materials. It runs a surplus only with a few western countries. And Japan-China hatred goes back several centuries. These complex interactions do not lend themselves to extrapolation on a graph sheet easily.
Anyway, even if it does come to pass, it is just reversion to pre 18th century world power balance. Till about 1750s, 25% of world GDP came from India and another 25% from China.
In most third world countries you can buy a 1 TB hard disk filled with cracked versions of all kinds of software . Price is cheaper for the Bring Your Own Harddisk deals. Everything from Maya, Adobe Illustrator, video editors all the way to strange things like Serenade 7.0 circuit simulator from Compact Software or Star-CCM++ mesher, whatever the hell that is. CAD/CAM tools blah blah blah... everything. So not surprised by the fact some one cracked it. What surprised me was that it is as simple as reading the file in, and changing an XML attribute of an entity with off-the-shelf tools, not something complicated like the black-orifice cracker/debugger. Reminds me of the early days in Web commerce where a site was submitting the price and quantity in a open form. People could just modify the html page and submit orders with spurious (and low) price.
That is why they called this thing sham. It ain't real tank. It is a sham.
The whole idea of birds laying eggs is to raise the next generation to take over when they die. But if the birds are immortal, and no matter how many times they smash themselves at structures and commit suicide, if they are going to come back alive, why would they lay eggs? Why would they work themselves into a frenzy? And why I am working myself into a frenzy trying to find a logical and coherent underpinnings for the stupid free game?
Former Prime Minister of India Morarji Desai and his side kick and Minister of Health Raj Narayan were pioneers ahead of their times, it looks like. They were practitioners of auto urine therapy.
Fact 2: Most winners will not know they are going to be winners. Most losers can see they are going to be getting the short end of the stick
Fact 3: The losing side will fight tooth and nail to avert it.
When the side that is going to lose is rich and powerful, they employ very powerful techniques to avoid it or postpone it. They will buy out the competitors, engage in collusion, pay the legislators (legally or illegally), spread misinformation, doubt and feat, anything. It is very instructive to read the book by the University of Chicago professor, Dr Raghuram Rajan, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists
Copyright is one place where we can see the dynamics playing out very clearly and use it as an opportunity to educate the public.
The first level is basically making the DC charging port more difficult access. Replace plastic with metal etc. It was willing to ship that thing for free.
Then, it had the second second level fix, flashing new firmware. It wanted some 40$ per lock for the locks that were capable of accepting the patch! This is basically daylight robbery. There is simply no justification for charging that much for a security upgrade in software! If the locks were not capable of being upgraded, then the entire board has to be changed, costing even more money.
I think Onnity does not seem to get one striking fact. 90% of the motels and economy hotels are owned by Indian immigrants. It is very much possible they have a cousin back home who might hack out a patch.
When the user visits a banking website, it probably has the username, password, bank url from the key logging. It adds javascript to the web page dished out by the bank asking for the mobile device number. But this javascript phones home dumping the info to the attacker.
Then the attacker sends in a trojan to the mobile device. User installs a trojan in the mobile device. Technically mobile device is not hacked. User is tricked into installing a software. At this point there is no security left. The attacker can do anything.
Now, the attacker can just the trojan to the mobile device directly, but it would be difficult to persuade the user to install it. All the compromised PC is doing is, giving account numbers, and details about last few transactions etc to make it look authentic. But if such info is available from other sources, or if not all that much is needed to persuade the user to install that trojan, it is game over. The key to the whole thing is sneaking the trojan past without arousing suspicion of the user into the mobile device.
That is the only and correct reason to be a const correctness nazi. Auto threading and auto vectorization would produce a few papers and mint some PhDs. But for the guy hacking code to make a living, they are not going to make much diff.
This is my pay day baby! My code is going to run super fast in multicore machines without any (more) extra work from me! Wooo Hooo!
Please take pity on my and let me enjoy my day dream for a few hours, without rudely inserting reality into my reverie! Thanks slashdotters, I know I can count on you!
Confucius said "please stop giving Lincoln credit for my sayings."
Conucisus say "I said not many things I said"
Dang it! That Dyson guy! How did he steal my idea 32 years before I published it in slashdot! Well, he must have built a time machine. There is *no* other explanations ;-)
Imagine if we could print parts of a copy machine to make a better copy machine. Then each xerox machine could print out parts and become bigger and stronger. So technically we can pack a very small rudimentary xerox machine in a rocket, blast it to some distant planet and it would make increasingly more sophisticated copy machines and eventually build a rocket and make miniature xerox machines and blast them other planets!
But what about energy? What about material? Come on, it is all in the software. The little rudimentary machine would print out small powerplants and raw material factories too.
But what material could you use in a planet you have never been to? Well, let us just use the most abundant material like carbon and water and these machines would make small variations in the copies they make. Whichever variation uses the available materials better, would make more copies of itself. So we can build redundancy into the process. Let these machines fight among themselves and the ones most suitable to each plant will evolve bigger and better.
All we need to do is provide some kind of insatiable appetite to make more copies of itself deeply into the kernel of these machines. That should be enough.
Oh, wait. It is us. Folks, we are the end result of those damned 3D printing machines envisaged by some distant civilization! OMG, you did it, didn't you, God?
I am very sure, my dealer knows I am a total sucker.
My Prius model year 2006 came in with the maps stored in a DVD that was updated in Feb 2005. Car is still going strong, giving me 45 mpg in summer and about 40 mpg in winter. No problems, no issues. Except for that stupid map-DVD. Toyota thinks the updated DVD is worth 200$. And furthermore, only an authorized dealer technician can do this impossibly difficult task of ejecting old dvd and inserting the new one, labor at 80$ an hour. And the local dealer charges 20$ a day "storage fee" if you don't pick the car up when they call you to say it is done. It is a rip off. No one in right mind is paying for this stuff.
... dont buy ready made tools from the store. These shrink wrapped tools are virus prone security risks. They use the mini numerical milling machine and write csh scripts to drive it to mill/cut/machine custom fitting tools from solid blocks of iron-carbide steel as and when they need them.
Pentalobular is not found in most run-of-the-mill tool sets. It is a path breaking new innovation among screw drivers. This is Apple's answer to people ridiculing it for patenting rounded rectangles. This innovative work shows they are familiar with more complicated shapes too. You need to buy a special iScrew set to get it. Of course you can get cheap imitation ones. But a true fan buys only the best. And you get a slimmer, shinier handle, stand-out-from-the-crowd white color, brushed aluminum shank and pride of knowing that you own the best and you deserve the best. It is not easy to be the best, you need to upgrade it to dodecodolobular screw driver in the next release. That sesquicentolobular thing from Samsung just would not cut it.
They guy who designed the security for this printer quit and became the chief of security for Onity hotel swipe card key systems, it looks like.
It is just a matter of time before someone is going to sue the traffic camera company. Especially when reports like this come out. So what kind of liability waivers these companies are getting from the cities? We already know the city officials are a bunch of chimps who get just peanuts while bulk of the collection goes to the traffic camera company. They are not known for their skill in negotiating with these companies. It is very much possible these companies have full immunity and all the liability will fall on the city and its tax payers.
They are also providing a software solution. Even when the locks are programmable and upgradable, flashing the new firmware is available for a "nominal" fee. And if your lock does not have upgradable firmware? Well, you need to call in and ask for the price. I think the current pricing is one arm and one leg per upgrade.
http://www.securityinfowatch.com/news/10766203/onity-provides-lock-upgrades-following-hack
Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.
I tried to update my hate machine. In fact I have turned on auto update. Still I get the following error:
Genuine Hate Machine Advantage Update failed. Please validate your installation of Hate Machine or upgrade to Ultimate Professional Platinum edition Hate Machine
The $followup by $user is right.
If the vaccine works in people,
That is the catch. It has not worked so far in people, or animals for that matter. But $scientist speculates it might. Till more data comes through we should soak the RNA in snake oil before freeze drying it.
I wonder how much energy can be stored in heated oil compared to batteries. Quick back of the envelop calc shows, 20 gallons of oil, that is about 60 Kg. Specific heat of water is 1 cal/gm/degree, is 60,000 cal/deg, 470 deg over ambient, gives, 60,000x470=2.8e07 cal, or 1.2e08 Joules, or 2.85 Kg of gasoline at 42 MJ/Kg. That is about 0.95 gal of gasoline. 60 Kg battery pack can probably store more energy than 1 gal of gas. And that energy converts to mechanical power at a much greater efficiency than any heat engine. It does not look like an application for cars. May be cheaper fixed installations competing with solar panels may be. May be if the build a tiny steam turbine, it would be more efficient.
Small gas turbines are quite familiar to engineers, all the turbo-charged ICEs use a gas turbine in the exhaust manifold to pack more air into the inlet manifold. So small gas turbines are well understood, but still they are not usually found in the power ranges needed to drive cars and trucks. Heck, even railway locomotives go for 16 cylinder diesels than gas turbines. I wonder why.