AAA members can get 2 gallons of fuel free when the call the tow-truck. At 75$ a year membership fee, just get 1000 memberships and you can ask for 4000 gallons for $75000. And if you put it on the Discover card, you get 1% cash back too.
I bitched about a mangled printing of a number, and suggested scientific notation, 5.0e-06 m for 5 micrometers. A biologist replied saying, "I know micro is smaller than milli and that is enough. 5.0e-06 looks scary to me". He is not dumb, after all, he is a biologist. It would have taken him less than two minutes to understand the exponent notation and thus get a much richer understanding of numbers. But still SI notation somehow is seen very unfriendly.
Storing your credit card numbers when you use them via a magnetic swipe is actually illegal,...
One, not that many people who sign up for these cards know it is illegal, they assume the store could do this, and still they sign up.
Second, just because it is illegal now, does not mean it will be forever. We are living in post CUD USA now. (CUD = Citizens United Decision). With so little value attached to privacy by general public it would not be very difficult for corporations to get loopholes created in this law. They will name it something like, "Citizens Privacy Protection Act" and prohibit explicitly a few things. And by default everything not explicitly prohibited will be legal. Corporations are citizens, now remember. They can spawn new corporations and Grocery Store does not store it. Credit Card company does not store it. But a Third Corporation will buy data from Grocery Store and from Credit Card company and collate it. All the three corporations are owned by a single larger corporation.
As a citizen of the United States you have one vote and only one vote. But corporations can keep creating new corporations, they have all the rights you have, accept huge long term liabilities and short term profits, transfer the profits to another corporation and die without having to pay off the long term liabilities. You, citizen, will be left holding the bag. This is what life in post CUD means.
You know these grocery store frequent buyer card? The one that knocks a grand 25 cents off for a loaf of bread? People happily use them. And the grocery store knows every thing you buy to eat, most of them also serve as pharmacies, so they can even send you a 2$ off coupon for lipitor once the total amount of high calorie beef you have eaten passes a threshold. They know your address, your credit card numbers, when you stopped refilling pills prescription, when you bought pre natal vitamins, when to send 1$ off coupon for a case of diapers for newborns.
I think Scott is over estimating the discount needed to get a large group of volunteers to move to Fishbowlville.
Shockwave flash file inside an excel spreadsheet?
on
New Adobe Flash 0-Day
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· Score: 4, Informative
The attack vector is a excel spreadsheet delivered via an attachment that contains a swf file that has this vulnerability. Looks like it is not a drive by download. Not sure if the streamed flash videos have the vulnerability. It does not affect Win7. Affects XP. If it is leveraging some specific bug in excel and then a bug in flash, it is very specific to that combination. XP+Excel+Adobe. The rest of us can rest easy and enjoy a little bit of schadenfreude.
Well, none of them are really mistakes. That is the standard operation procedure in Microsoft. They tried to contact your CIO and convince him that based on this Gartner survey about Total Cost of Ownership and that survery and this opinion piece by the shill, Zune was the best product in the market. They tried to supply him with powerpoint slides that will allow him to easily defend the decision. And they tried to tell him confidentially, "look, between you and me, you might not be convinced. But no one got fired for buying Microsoft, on the other hand you go with some with shiny white thing, and if it blows up on your face, you need to explain that".
The thing that tripped them up was that people are not made up multiple parts, one part acting as CIO and other parts as worker bees and some other parts as CEO. So their sales force, so very well trained to sell their stuff by sabotaging the competition got nowhere with Zune.
Inflation is based on the price increase of a basket of goods and services used by typical families. Gold is not part of that basket. Gold's value was falling steadily for a long time. A fixed amount of gold could buy smaller and smaller part of the basket all through 1980 till 2007, despite the spikes at y2k, 9/11 etc. Finally a bar of gold buried in the backyard back in the 1980s has the same purchasing power, almost but not quite. It has not beaten bond returns nor stock returns over that long a period.
If you put in piece of paper that says100$ and get back another piece of paper that says 100$ a few years later, you would claim you did not lose any money. But the 100$ you put in had greater buying power than the 100$ you get back, you have lost money.
I am not saying Gold will not lose buying power, prices of gold has had significant down turns in the past, and only after the recent run up, gold is catching up to inflation, it has not beaten the stocks or bonds in the long run (20 years). But still it is very naive to claim that no one lost money in FDIC banks.
Modern society has become very complex with very heavy reliance on external infrastructure in every walk of life. You can not simply disengage from the society and try to live a self sufficient life style of agriculture, hunting and fishing. And the system has become so complex even the top money managers don't really know the risks, and nor do they know how to de-escalate the race to the bottom.
Apple lost me when it wanted me to fork over another 20$ to get a mpg to mov converter for the iMac. I paid premium price for it, and I do not want to be nickel and dimed. Yeah, I know enough to download and install ffmpg, and handbrake etc. But still it feels like buying a Lexus and then the sales man wants 20$ more for some floor mats.
Reader Stoobalou points out other cancer-related news that Norwegian researchers have found a group of genes that increase a person's risk to develop lung cancer.
Natural selection can only work on weeding out genes that affect reproduction. So genes that kill you so slowly that the genes have passed on to the next generation will live long. Genes that trade higher reproduction success for problems in post-reproduction life will be at an advantage. When that advantage runs amok, the organism will die almost immediately after reproducing. Like salmon. So in some sense almost the entire genome is making this trade off, and one could argue that at some life span, the entire genome is carcinogenic!!!
But he notes that proprietary systems have advantages — such as video and audio systems that rarely break. 'I spent so many years battling with Linux and something new is broken every time,' he says. 'We as an open source community, we don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop.'"
Is it because the open source community fails to get its "act" together? Or the audio and video codecs are encumbered with so many dubious patents and intellectual property claims. And the closed source vendors are using that to create walled gardens?
Curiously, the top executives are furious that their secret sauce algorithm to rack up USpoints has been leaked to this hacker. The CEO of Morgan Stanley was seen throwing a tantrum, curses and a few chairs, "This is our trick. This is what we have been doing to create money in the Federal Reserve accounts. And now some stupid hacker is using it to rack up real money? I wanna know who is responsible and heads are goin' to roll"
So why was chrome not effected if the bug was in Webkit?
There was only one contestant registered to hack Chrome. Google released a batch of updates the day before the release. According to the rules, the machine was frozen a week ago with the latest updates available then. If that machine gets hacked you get to own that machine. If the bug is still present on the latest update as of the day of the contest, then you get prize money too. The prize money is more for Chrome, but the machine is not a big deal. So no one showed up to hack Chrome.
It is possible the lone contestant was the one who took the 1337$ bug bounty giving up the 20K prize money too. Getting on the good books of Google might be worth a lot more to that contestant, if my conjecture is true, than embarrassing them in this high profile contest.
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have managed to constrain its temperature to just shy of 100 degrees Celsius.
If these guys have the power to constrain the temperature in some distant galaxy, I wish they will use the power constructively to combat global warming here in this planet. Or at least give a few more days of sunshine to the rust belt USA.
Re:Something more immediate....
on
Kidney Printer
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the clarification changa_Mc, you said it better, I have canceled my partially formed reply.
Other points would be that bio-engineered fois gras would put some cash on the table and fund the R&D towards kidney research, it will iron out the kinks in the process and pay to amortize the installation costs of the production facility too.
Binghamton University computer scientist Lijun Yin thinks that using a computer should be a comfortable and intuitive experience, like talking to a friend.
Yup, it turned out to be so great last time two pals, Hal and Dave got talking.
Something more immediate....
on
Kidney Printer
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· Score: 1
Wish this guy would test the technology using goose liver. It will save the poor birds a lot of grief, assure French restaurants a steady supply of fois gras, satisfy PETA and will get to the market sooner.
Do these GPS transmitters be really up in space? Would it be possible to set up terrestrial transmitters, on mountain tops, tall buildings etc and increase the signal strength?
That is 1 billion less available to Microsoft to distort the open documents marketplace to keep its fraying monopoly intact. 1 billion less for shills like Gartner to produce TCO studies. 1 billion less available to cats paw companies like SCO to create distracting law suits.
But still we are not seeing competition with level playing fields. Corporate desk tops and office applications are still dominated by Microsoft. Media entertainment market is still dominated by Apple, another closed proprietary system. For smartphones and tablets there is some small battle going on between Android and iOS. Search engine is still dominated by Google.
Instead of open battle between the companies fighting in the open duking it out in close range combat, each giant has built a fortress and are fighting each other with long range artillery. For the consumers to benefit we need level playing fields and major players in each arena.
Last century was not a battle between Capitalism and Communism. It was between Competitionism (to coin a term) and Controlled economies. By misattributing the fall of Berlin wall to Capitalism instead of Competitionism, we are working to preserve existing winners in each sector of economy. Consolidating the power in the hands of Microsofts, Goldman-Sachs, BofA, Wallmarts, HomeDepots etc instead of creating multiple players who can actually fight each other for the privilege of serving us. There is no special interest lobbying group for the winners of tomorrow, for those who could create millions jobs in the coming decade. Our political system rewards people who benefit by the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
AAA members can get 2 gallons of fuel free when the call the tow-truck. At 75$ a year membership fee, just get 1000 memberships and you can ask for 4000 gallons for $75000. And if you put it on the Discover card, you get 1% cash back too.
Here is the posting: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2019470&cid=35359752 We need to ask him. I was riffed by the posters for having a too Fortran-centric view of the universe by others on that thread ;-)
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-12/world/japan.earthquake.tsunami.earth_1_tsunami-usgs-geophysicist-quake?_s=PM:WORLD
I bitched about a mangled printing of a number, and suggested scientific notation, 5.0e-06 m for 5 micrometers. A biologist replied saying, "I know micro is smaller than milli and that is enough. 5.0e-06 looks scary to me". He is not dumb, after all, he is a biologist. It would have taken him less than two minutes to understand the exponent notation and thus get a much richer understanding of numbers. But still SI notation somehow is seen very unfriendly.
You are being a little silly here.
Storing your credit card numbers when you use them via a magnetic swipe is actually illegal, ...
One, not that many people who sign up for these cards know it is illegal, they assume the store could do this, and still they sign up.
Second, just because it is illegal now, does not mean it will be forever. We are living in post CUD USA now. (CUD = Citizens United Decision). With so little value attached to privacy by general public it would not be very difficult for corporations to get loopholes created in this law. They will name it something like, "Citizens Privacy Protection Act" and prohibit explicitly a few things. And by default everything not explicitly prohibited will be legal. Corporations are citizens, now remember. They can spawn new corporations and Grocery Store does not store it. Credit Card company does not store it. But a Third Corporation will buy data from Grocery Store and from Credit Card company and collate it. All the three corporations are owned by a single larger corporation.
As a citizen of the United States you have one vote and only one vote. But corporations can keep creating new corporations, they have all the rights you have, accept huge long term liabilities and short term profits, transfer the profits to another corporation and die without having to pay off the long term liabilities. You, citizen, will be left holding the bag. This is what life in post CUD means.
I think Scott is over estimating the discount needed to get a large group of volunteers to move to Fishbowlville.
The attack vector is a excel spreadsheet delivered via an attachment that contains a swf file that has this vulnerability. Looks like it is not a drive by download. Not sure if the streamed flash videos have the vulnerability. It does not affect Win7. Affects XP. If it is leveraging some specific bug in excel and then a bug in flash, it is very specific to that combination. XP+Excel+Adobe. The rest of us can rest easy and enjoy a little bit of schadenfreude.
Pity Microsoft, finally when they release IE 9, Chromed is ready to go to 11
The thing that tripped them up was that people are not made up multiple parts, one part acting as CIO and other parts as worker bees and some other parts as CEO. So their sales force, so very well trained to sell their stuff by sabotaging the competition got nowhere with Zune.
Inflation is based on the price increase of a basket of goods and services used by typical families. Gold is not part of that basket. Gold's value was falling steadily for a long time. A fixed amount of gold could buy smaller and smaller part of the basket all through 1980 till 2007, despite the spikes at y2k, 9/11 etc. Finally a bar of gold buried in the backyard back in the 1980s has the same purchasing power, almost but not quite. It has not beaten bond returns nor stock returns over that long a period.
(((Institutionalized embezzlement)))
It has gone far beyond institutionalized embezzlement. It is lapping up the shores of Cleptocracy.
I am not saying Gold will not lose buying power, prices of gold has had significant down turns in the past, and only after the recent run up, gold is catching up to inflation, it has not beaten the stocks or bonds in the long run (20 years). But still it is very naive to claim that no one lost money in FDIC banks.
Modern society has become very complex with very heavy reliance on external infrastructure in every walk of life. You can not simply disengage from the society and try to live a self sufficient life style of agriculture, hunting and fishing. And the system has become so complex even the top money managers don't really know the risks, and nor do they know how to de-escalate the race to the bottom.
In this climatic battle between the scientist and the millions of clones created by the robot, the final victory is achieved by "Select all robots" and "delete"! http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2376096,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ziffdavis%2Fextremetech+(Extremetech)
Apple lost me when it wanted me to fork over another 20$ to get a mpg to mov converter for the iMac. I paid premium price for it, and I do not want to be nickel and dimed. Yeah, I know enough to download and install ffmpg, and handbrake etc. But still it feels like buying a Lexus and then the sales man wants 20$ more for some floor mats.
Reader Stoobalou points out other cancer-related news that Norwegian researchers have found a group of genes that increase a person's risk to develop lung cancer.
Natural selection can only work on weeding out genes that affect reproduction. So genes that kill you so slowly that the genes have passed on to the next generation will live long. Genes that trade higher reproduction success for problems in post-reproduction life will be at an advantage. When that advantage runs amok, the organism will die almost immediately after reproducing. Like salmon. So in some sense almost the entire genome is making this trade off, and one could argue that at some life span, the entire genome is carcinogenic!!!
But he notes that proprietary systems have advantages — such as video and audio systems that rarely break. 'I spent so many years battling with Linux and something new is broken every time,' he says. 'We as an open source community, we don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop.'"
Is it because the open source community fails to get its "act" together? Or the audio and video codecs are encumbered with so many dubious patents and intellectual property claims. And the closed source vendors are using that to create walled gardens?
Some day Linux will dominate the desktop market. That is when the desktops constitute less than 4% of all computing platforms.
Curiously, the top executives are furious that their secret sauce algorithm to rack up USpoints has been leaked to this hacker. The CEO of Morgan Stanley was seen throwing a tantrum, curses and a few chairs, "This is our trick. This is what we have been doing to create money in the Federal Reserve accounts. And now some stupid hacker is using it to rack up real money? I wanna know who is responsible and heads are goin' to roll"
So why was chrome not effected if the bug was in Webkit?
There was only one contestant registered to hack Chrome. Google released a batch of updates the day before the release. According to the rules, the machine was frozen a week ago with the latest updates available then. If that machine gets hacked you get to own that machine. If the bug is still present on the latest update as of the day of the contest, then you get prize money too. The prize money is more for Chrome, but the machine is not a big deal. So no one showed up to hack Chrome.
It is possible the lone contestant was the one who took the 1337$ bug bounty giving up the 20K prize money too. Getting on the good books of Google might be worth a lot more to that contestant, if my conjecture is true, than embarrassing them in this high profile contest.
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have managed to constrain its temperature to just shy of 100 degrees Celsius.
If these guys have the power to constrain the temperature in some distant galaxy, I wish they will use the power constructively to combat global warming here in this planet. Or at least give a few more days of sunshine to the rust belt USA.
Other points would be that bio-engineered fois gras would put some cash on the table and fund the R&D towards kidney research, it will iron out the kinks in the process and pay to amortize the installation costs of the production facility too.
Binghamton University computer scientist Lijun Yin thinks that using a computer should be a comfortable and intuitive experience, like talking to a friend.
Yup, it turned out to be so great last time two pals, Hal and Dave got talking.
Wish this guy would test the technology using goose liver. It will save the poor birds a lot of grief, assure French restaurants a steady supply of fois gras, satisfy PETA and will get to the market sooner.
Do these GPS transmitters be really up in space? Would it be possible to set up terrestrial transmitters, on mountain tops, tall buildings etc and increase the signal strength?
But still we are not seeing competition with level playing fields. Corporate desk tops and office applications are still dominated by Microsoft. Media entertainment market is still dominated by Apple, another closed proprietary system. For smartphones and tablets there is some small battle going on between Android and iOS. Search engine is still dominated by Google.
Instead of open battle between the companies fighting in the open duking it out in close range combat, each giant has built a fortress and are fighting each other with long range artillery. For the consumers to benefit we need level playing fields and major players in each arena.
Last century was not a battle between Capitalism and Communism. It was between Competitionism (to coin a term) and Controlled economies. By misattributing the fall of Berlin wall to Capitalism instead of Competitionism, we are working to preserve existing winners in each sector of economy. Consolidating the power in the hands of Microsofts, Goldman-Sachs, BofA, Wallmarts, HomeDepots etc instead of creating multiple players who can actually fight each other for the privilege of serving us. There is no special interest lobbying group for the winners of tomorrow, for those who could create millions jobs in the coming decade. Our political system rewards people who benefit by the status quo.
OK, here is the obligatory, Get off my lawn.