What grey bar? Just install the YesScript plugin and disable JavaScript for slashdot (and do so as well whenever you get to one of the subdomains for a story). About the only thing that doesn't work when you disable JavaScript on/. is the ability to enter your own tags for a story. Block javascript for/. and all the places where ads would have gone don't even show up. It also stops the damn auto-refresh where you lose your place on the page. You get nice clean formatting. I agree that browing/. with JavaScript enabled is a poor experience, though....
"... it would not be in its lowest energy state, and it would require a regular kick to pulse."
and
"The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder."
So, no perpetual motion machine. However, maybe if they used a nice hot cup of tea to generate brownian motion as the source of random disorder, perhaps this could be a step towards inventing an infinite improbability drive?
I thought it was related more to the 1998 Lancet paper that really kicked off the anti-vaccination movement. That paper has since been thoroughly debunked, and retracted due to fraud and ethics violations. A good synopsis of the affair can be found here:
I use NetGuard, but if you want hosts file blocking, you can't use the one from the PlayStore, since that disables that feature. I tried using the open source playstore equivalent for app updates, but it was buggy on my phone and updates often failed. So, I gave up with that and just have the app itself check for updates and install them direct from the opensource project site. You will need to disable updates for NetGuard, specifically, in the PlayStore to prevent the PlayStore from automatically overwriting the full version with the less functional PlayStore version.
It has ads, but they are small banners at the bottom of the app settings page, so it's really not much of an annoyance, since I rarely need to customize my settings after I've set it up the first time. No ads anywhere else at any time. I really like the app, overall.
For a Ginsu and Spiral Slicer, you bet! My family went to a flea market in the mid 80's, and there was a salesman giving a wonderful demonstration of a Gensu knife. It slices, it dices! Saws through a hammer, and still cuts cleanly through this tomato! Well, after a great demonstration like that, we bought a knife and spiral slicer.
Best damn kitchen and utility knife we ever had. That thing was awesome. Cut through all sorts of building materials for school projects, still worked great on watermelons, bread, etc.. The spiral slicer also made wonderful potato chips that we would fry in a Fry Daddy. These were indeed wonderful products!
TL;DR: They are smart and if your Android phone isn't getting the latest patches then you are vulnerable to total pwn4g3 from anything in the Google Play Store until Google figures out how to scan for apps that will perform this attack.
I thought I'd add a potentially interesting anecdote to this. The app is not available on the US Google Play Store, as the github readme said may be the case. I downloaded the app directly to my Motorola Droid 2 Turbo (last OS update July 1st, 2016) and installed it. I was surprised to see a warning message pop up "Installation blocked. This app contains code that attempts to bypass Android's security protections." Something in my phone is detecting the potentially malicious code, and I don't think it is the Play Store, since I didn't use the Play Store, and installed the app directly from my download directory.
Once installed, it looked like it tried to download 100 files (progress meter showed 0 out of 100). This hung, since I have the NetGuard firewall installed, set to block all wifi / mobile data access by default.
I canceled out of the download and tried to run the hammertime attack, but got an extremely long error message that took up the whole screen.
So, for at least this proof of concept attack app, it failed on several levels:
1) Something on my phone detected it as potentially malicious and asked me if I really wanted to install it (I have not installed any virus/malware scanners that I am aware of, so I don't know what this was).
2) It failed to download some files, potentially necessary for the attack, due to my firewall
3) It failed to work, maybe due to missing the files it couldn't download.
I'm sure that a more robust attack app could be developed, but, at least as far as the proof of concept app is concerned, I'm not overly worried -- for the moment.
Something is wrong with Slashdot! Not a single post at moderation 3 or above questioning if the Tolkien estate can or should do anything about the use of the name Palantir.
The Smithsonian Channel heavily advertised a 2 hour special sort of about the 50th anniversary of Star Trek for several weeks before it aired, and it has been airing frequently this past week. It is about a sci-fi / pop culture museum in Seattle working to get a 50th anniversary exhibit completed, as well as the team at the Smithsonian restoring the original filming model of the Enterprise for display at the Air and Space Museum. And a bunch of not-so-great "we sort of have Star Trek technology now, but not really" science bits. Overall, worth a watch for the interviews with various people involved in the production (and/or disposal of the original props).
BBC America has also been showing Seasons 1 and 2 in their restored HD glory since yesterday, and will continue on today. The image and color quality look great, and the re-generated special effects are also pretty well done. Definitely worth a watch!
You won't see robots outlawed until robots start replacing lawyers. Lawyers tend to control the law in their favor, so, once you have technology replacing lawyers, that's when the revolution really comes.
I'd been getting the "an error has occured, please try again later" error ever since the move to HTML5. I assumed it was yet another bug in HTML5 video support. So, I installed the plugin that lets you force Flash on youtube, and the problem went away. I never connected it with AdBlock. I had no idea an ad was even trying to play. I just forced Flash, which solved the problem, and never looked back. If Goggle wants to get rid of Flash, then they need to fix their HTML5 support to not get broken by adblockers (and also give a more informative error message, as I had no clue that adblocking was the problem).
It is, annoying, however, that the Flash version continues to default to pretty much the smallest low-resolution version available, and I have to switch to 720p or 1080p on *every single video*, despite my having set my preferences to use the highest video resolution. So, you either get broken HTML5 or broken Flash, neither one of which they appear to have any intention of fixing....
I have been reading Slashdot since the late 90's (I didn't create an account until the filter controls switched to those slider bars and layout changed a lot and became pretty horrid -- an account gave me some preferences to turn off a lot of that crap). Never, in my entire time reading slashdot, has the search function been even remotely useful. I've always had to use google (if it was even around when I started) to do any actually useful searches for content on slashdot.
"RMS: I certainly do not! A cell phone is Stalin's dream: its movements are tracked, and it can be converted (through the universal back door) into a listening device."
Static linking might be semi-adequate for stuff that you compile at home, but for any code that's distributed using static is a sabotage.
I think you've got that backwards. Dynamic linking is fine for stuff you compile at home, but for any code that's distributed, using dynamic linking will often cause your binary to *just not work* on another system.
Missing a shared library? Which package does it come in? Oh crap, that package requires dependencies I don't have, or are the wrong version, etc.. Or you have the shared library, but it is a different version, and the size of a structure or something changed, or a variable doesn't exist anymore, and your binary crashes, won't run with it, or produces corrupt output. Or you go through all of your dependency Hell and update all the libraries you need to install the package with the missing shared library, only to find that the libraries you updated caused other programs to break for similar reasons to why yours wasn't working with your current library version. Newer versions of libraries do not always maintain binary compatibility with older versions.
Some programs should just be statically linked, so that they will always work on any version of any distribution. Otherwise, there may be no avoiding a recompile and its associated dependency Hell. Static linking is a compatibility God-send.
People could try voting for different politicians I suppose, but they seem unwilling out of the irrational fear of losing what they have.
I keep seeing this solution trotted out from time to time on Slashdot, but the reality is closer to the South Park episode, where we a given the choice between voting for a Giant Douch or Shit Sandwich. It's not that we are unwilling to vote for different politicians, it's that there are no different politicians presented to us to vote for.
If companies actually cared about data privacy, then they would know how to protect it. If they don't know how to protect it, then they only care about *appearing* to care about data privacy.
Schoolchildren are bing taught there are eight planets
Actually, Bing-taught kids are learning that there are 13;P A search for "number of planets" returns the following quote from universetoday.com:
"For those of us who believe dwarf planets should be counted as a subclass of planets, the latest status is that our solar system now has 13 planets: four terrestrial planets, four jovian planets, and five dwarf planets."
Snowpiercer was a lot better than Highlander 2, though. The first of the movie was lame in both movies. The end of Snowpiercer was lame, too, but the middle part of the movie was full of good action and some intrigue, and at least the plot was reasonably internally consistent. I enjoyed the middle of Snowpiercer. Highlander 2, on the other hand, was lame throughout. Highlander 2 was indeed a "really terrible movie", but I don't think I'd use quite that term for Snowpiercer. Only the beginning and end of Snowpiercer were "really terrible":) Overall, if you like action movies, then I think Snowpiercer averages out to a "mediocre".
Remembering back to some long ago slashdot stories, John Carmack had some interesting comments regarding driver quality in his 2002-02-11.plan entry:
"My judgment was colored by the experience of bringing up Doom on the original Radeon card a year earlier, which involved chasing a lot of driver bugs. Note that ATI was very responsive, working closely with me on it, and we were able to get everything resolved, but I still had no expectation that things would work correctly the first time.
When I have a problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else's drivers, I assume it is their fault. This has turned out correct almost all the time."
Sounds like things haven't changed all that much in this respect...
Even Woz wrote a rant (now pulled it seems) about ditching OS X in favor of Linux over the frustration of the mounting shit-pile of bugs and anoyances with OS X You can read comments about Woz' post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
Maybe Woz did at some point write a rant somewhere against OSX, I don't know, but this isn't it. The link you provided is to a rant by a Geoff Wozniak, not Woz (Steve Wozniak).
Google Maps isn't a good example in this case, due to Google's ever-increasingly bad UI design (sort of like slashdot beta...). With the latest round of changes to make google more smart phone friendly, google maps became more difficult to get to (scan for non-text icon, click, search for another icon in the drop-down, click), rather than just clicking the word Maps that used to be on the top bar. I now find it faster to simply type "maps", hit return, and click the first link, than to try to navigate their more difficult to use UI. For other things, such as Google Scholar, I gave up on trying to find it in the pulldown menus entirely, and have to use google to find its own service in order to use it. So, yes, if I'm using google, and I search for one of their services, then I definitely want the google service as the first link. But this is more due to my working around poor UI design than my desire to determine which Maps site is the most popular.
Along similar lines, I have to use google to search for old slashdot stories, since slashdot search does, and always has, sucked. Same for many other forums. Also many other websites in general, where it can be difficult to figure out how to navigate/find the content that you want. I use google as a workaround to the failings of many other websites poor UI/search design. Google Maps is another example of this, so, at least from my perspective, it's not the best example to use to make your point:)
Sorry, I just felt like ranting against increasingly poor website design, and this post brought that to the surface. Not like anyone besides maybe the original author is going to read this when I'm only getting around to reading the article 2 weeks after if was posted anyways....
Slashdot Mirror
If the genome hasn't been sequenced yet, then how can we know if its genome is or will be interesting or not?
What grey bar? Just install the YesScript plugin and disable JavaScript for slashdot (and do so as well whenever you get to one of the subdomains for a story). About the only thing that doesn't work when you disable JavaScript on /. is the ability to enter your own tags for a story. Block javascript for /. and all the places where ads would have gone don't even show up. It also stops the damn auto-refresh where you lose your place on the page. You get nice clean formatting. I agree that browing /. with JavaScript enabled is a poor experience, though....
From TFA:
"... it would not be in its lowest energy state, and it would require a regular kick to pulse."
and
"The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder."
So, no perpetual motion machine. However, maybe if they used a nice hot cup of tea to generate brownian motion as the source of random disorder, perhaps this could be a step towards inventing an infinite improbability drive?
I thought it was related more to the 1998 Lancet paper that really kicked off the anti-vaccination movement. That paper has since been thoroughly debunked, and retracted due to fraud and ethics violations. A good synopsis of the affair can be found here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
I use NetGuard, but if you want hosts file blocking, you can't use the one from the PlayStore, since that disables that feature. I tried using the open source playstore equivalent for app updates, but it was buggy on my phone and updates often failed. So, I gave up with that and just have the app itself check for updates and install them direct from the opensource project site. You will need to disable updates for NetGuard, specifically, in the PlayStore to prevent the PlayStore from automatically overwriting the full version with the less functional PlayStore version.
It has ads, but they are small banners at the bottom of the app settings page, so it's really not much of an annoyance, since I rarely need to customize my settings after I've set it up the first time. No ads anywhere else at any time. I really like the app, overall.
For a Ginsu and Spiral Slicer, you bet! My family went to a flea market in the mid 80's, and there was a salesman giving a wonderful demonstration of a Gensu knife. It slices, it dices! Saws through a hammer, and still cuts cleanly through this tomato! Well, after a great demonstration like that, we bought a knife and spiral slicer.
Best damn kitchen and utility knife we ever had. That thing was awesome. Cut through all sorts of building materials for school projects, still worked great on watermelons, bread, etc.. The spiral slicer also made wonderful potato chips that we would fry in a Fry Daddy. These were indeed wonderful products!
TL;DR: They are smart and if your Android phone isn't getting the latest patches then you are vulnerable to total pwn4g3 from anything in the Google Play Store until Google figures out how to scan for apps that will perform this attack.
I thought I'd add a potentially interesting anecdote to this. The app is not available on the US Google Play Store, as the github readme said may be the case. I downloaded the app directly to my Motorola Droid 2 Turbo (last OS update July 1st, 2016) and installed it. I was surprised to see a warning message pop up "Installation blocked. This app contains code that attempts to bypass Android's security protections." Something in my phone is detecting the potentially malicious code, and I don't think it is the Play Store, since I didn't use the Play Store, and installed the app directly from my download directory.
Once installed, it looked like it tried to download 100 files (progress meter showed 0 out of 100). This hung, since I have the NetGuard firewall installed, set to block all wifi / mobile data access by default.
I canceled out of the download and tried to run the hammertime attack, but got an extremely long error message that took up the whole screen.
So, for at least this proof of concept attack app, it failed on several levels:
1) Something on my phone detected it as potentially malicious and asked me if I really wanted to install it (I have not installed any virus/malware scanners that I am aware of, so I don't know what this was).
2) It failed to download some files, potentially necessary for the attack, due to my firewall
3) It failed to work, maybe due to missing the files it couldn't download.
I'm sure that a more robust attack app could be developed, but, at least as far as the proof of concept app is concerned, I'm not overly worried -- for the moment.
Something is wrong with Slashdot! Not a single post at moderation 3 or above questioning if the Tolkien estate can or should do anything about the use of the name Palantir.
The Smithsonian Channel heavily advertised a 2 hour special sort of about the 50th anniversary of Star Trek for several weeks before it aired, and it has been airing frequently this past week. It is about a sci-fi / pop culture museum in Seattle working to get a 50th anniversary exhibit completed, as well as the team at the Smithsonian restoring the original filming model of the Enterprise for display at the Air and Space Museum. And a bunch of not-so-great "we sort of have Star Trek technology now, but not really" science bits. Overall, worth a watch for the interviews with various people involved in the production (and/or disposal of the original props).
BBC America has also been showing Seasons 1 and 2 in their restored HD glory since yesterday, and will continue on today. The image and color quality look great, and the re-generated special effects are also pretty well done. Definitely worth a watch!
You won't see robots outlawed until robots start replacing lawyers. Lawyers tend to control the law in their favor, so, once you have technology replacing lawyers, that's when the revolution really comes.
BakerHostetler Hires Artificial Intelligent Attorney 'Ross' Progress is being made on that front :-)
I'd been getting the "an error has occured, please try again later" error ever since the move to HTML5. I assumed it was yet another bug in HTML5 video support. So, I installed the plugin that lets you force Flash on youtube, and the problem went away. I never connected it with AdBlock. I had no idea an ad was even trying to play. I just forced Flash, which solved the problem, and never looked back. If Goggle wants to get rid of Flash, then they need to fix their HTML5 support to not get broken by adblockers (and also give a more informative error message, as I had no clue that adblocking was the problem).
It is, annoying, however, that the Flash version continues to default to pretty much the smallest low-resolution version available, and I have to switch to 720p or 1080p on *every single video*, despite my having set my preferences to use the highest video resolution. So, you either get broken HTML5 or broken Flash, neither one of which they appear to have any intention of fixing....
I have been reading Slashdot since the late 90's (I didn't create an account until the filter controls switched to those slider bars and layout changed a lot and became pretty horrid -- an account gave me some preferences to turn off a lot of that crap). Never, in my entire time reading slashdot, has the search function been even remotely useful. I've always had to use google (if it was even around when I started) to do any actually useful searches for content on slashdot.
Hmm... this is interesting given his previous 2012 Slashdot response when asked if he owned a mobile phone:
"RMS: I certainly do not! A cell phone is Stalin's dream: its movements are tracked, and it can be converted (through the universal back door) into a listening device."
Static linking might be semi-adequate for stuff that you compile at home, but for any code that's distributed using static is a sabotage.
I think you've got that backwards. Dynamic linking is fine for stuff you compile at home, but for any code that's distributed, using dynamic linking will often cause your binary to *just not work* on another system.
Missing a shared library? Which package does it come in? Oh crap, that package requires dependencies I don't have, or are the wrong version, etc.. Or you have the shared library, but it is a different version, and the size of a structure or something changed, or a variable doesn't exist anymore, and your binary crashes, won't run with it, or produces corrupt output. Or you go through all of your dependency Hell and update all the libraries you need to install the package with the missing shared library, only to find that the libraries you updated caused other programs to break for similar reasons to why yours wasn't working with your current library version. Newer versions of libraries do not always maintain binary compatibility with older versions.
Some programs should just be statically linked, so that they will always work on any version of any distribution. Otherwise, there may be no avoiding a recompile and its associated dependency Hell. Static linking is a compatibility God-send.
People could try voting for different politicians I suppose, but they seem unwilling out of the irrational fear of losing what they have.
I keep seeing this solution trotted out from time to time on Slashdot, but the reality is closer to the South Park episode, where we a given the choice between voting for a Giant Douch or Shit Sandwich. It's not that we are unwilling to vote for different politicians, it's that there are no different politicians presented to us to vote for.
Too bad it still doesn't work in Seamonkey :-(
If companies actually cared about data privacy, then they would know how to protect it. If they don't know how to protect it, then they only care about *appearing* to care about data privacy.
Schoolchildren are bing taught there are eight planets
Actually, Bing-taught kids are learning that there are 13 ;P A search for "number of planets" returns the following quote from universetoday.com:
"For those of us who believe dwarf planets should be counted as a subclass of planets, the latest status is that our solar system now has 13 planets: four terrestrial planets, four jovian planets, and five dwarf planets."
Well, of course you can't make it any darker, there are lights and lens flares everywhere! ;P
Clearly, we just need to do what Eric Cartman did this past season of South Park -- turn the food pyramid upside down :)
Snowpiercer was a lot better than Highlander 2, though. The first of the movie was lame in both movies. The end of Snowpiercer was lame, too, but the middle part of the movie was full of good action and some intrigue, and at least the plot was reasonably internally consistent. I enjoyed the middle of Snowpiercer. Highlander 2, on the other hand, was lame throughout. Highlander 2 was indeed a "really terrible movie", but I don't think I'd use quite that term for Snowpiercer. Only the beginning and end of Snowpiercer were "really terrible" :) Overall, if you like action movies, then I think Snowpiercer averages out to a "mediocre".
Remembering back to some long ago slashdot stories, John Carmack had some interesting comments regarding driver quality in his 2002-02-11 .plan entry:
"My judgment was colored by the experience of bringing up Doom on the original Radeon card a year earlier, which involved chasing a lot of driver bugs. Note that ATI was very responsive, working closely with me on it, and we were able to get everything resolved, but I still had no expectation that things would work correctly the first time.
When I have a problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else's drivers, I assume it is their fault. This has turned out correct almost all the time."
Sounds like things haven't changed all that much in this respect...
Even Woz wrote a rant (now pulled it seems) about ditching OS X in favor of Linux over the frustration of the mounting shit-pile of bugs and anoyances with OS X You can read comments about Woz' post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
Maybe Woz did at some point write a rant somewhere against OSX, I don't know, but this isn't it. The link you provided is to a rant by a Geoff Wozniak, not Woz (Steve Wozniak).
"There are some who call me... Tim"
Google Maps isn't a good example in this case, due to Google's ever-increasingly bad UI design (sort of like slashdot beta...). With the latest round of changes to make google more smart phone friendly, google maps became more difficult to get to (scan for non-text icon, click, search for another icon in the drop-down, click), rather than just clicking the word Maps that used to be on the top bar. I now find it faster to simply type "maps", hit return, and click the first link, than to try to navigate their more difficult to use UI. For other things, such as Google Scholar, I gave up on trying to find it in the pulldown menus entirely, and have to use google to find its own service in order to use it. So, yes, if I'm using google, and I search for one of their services, then I definitely want the google service as the first link. But this is more due to my working around poor UI design than my desire to determine which Maps site is the most popular.
:)
Along similar lines, I have to use google to search for old slashdot stories, since slashdot search does, and always has, sucked. Same for many other forums. Also many other websites in general, where it can be difficult to figure out how to navigate/find the content that you want. I use google as a workaround to the failings of many other websites poor UI/search design. Google Maps is another example of this, so, at least from my perspective, it's not the best example to use to make your point
Sorry, I just felt like ranting against increasingly poor website design, and this post brought that to the surface. Not like anyone besides maybe the original author is going to read this when I'm only getting around to reading the article 2 weeks after if was posted anyways....