1) No, it can't, but it can penetrate through a small portion of flesh, and is useful in determining fatty/non fatty tissue. "X-ray like" was not meant to be scientific in any way.:)
2) Yep.
3) I did, thanks. Again, I was speaking more in the vernacular. Never got a Physics degree.
From reading the article, my layman's-"I'm no physicist"'s take on T-Rays:
1) They can penetrate through clothing/plastic/flesh, and most of the materials mentioned seem to be organic in nature. This gives them "X-ray"-like properties. 2) They were able to make T-Rays before in laboratories, but now they can make them more cheaply, with less power, in human-friendly settings. 3) T-Rays give off less radiation than X-rays, due to the much larger wavelength.
Quick Conclusion: We now have the potential to create an X-ray like device that could be deployed in airports and other travel hubs that could be used to monitor the public without harming the public through this observation. More benignly, they could also be used in hospitals for "persistent monitoring" of patients with tumors or internal bleeding, because they seem to have lower power requirements and risks of side-effects.
This crap that we're doing right now is hurting the problem. Driving a Prius isn't helping, buying a hybrid Chevy Suburban isn't helping. Elect officials that build mass transit systems. Our cities our built with the assumption that people can very cheaply get from one end of it to the other, but they can't anymore.
Priuses and other hybrids are not addressing the root of the problem, which is our assumption of cheap transportation. THAT is what we need to cure. The neo-hippies with their lattes and they horn rimmed glasses are not helping the cause, they're hurting it by buying into a false reality and encouraging others to do so.
First:
Driving a Prius is helping, by reducing the overall amount of gas consumed and gradually edging the energy concious mentality into the mind of the general consumer. You can't make gigantic leaps into the future overnight, as much as we would like to see it happen. Don't deride energy conscious consumer decisions just because they don't meet the future ideal completely.
Second:
There are some pretty legitimate reasons for not fueling an aircraft with Hydrogen fuel, and while they could be worked around, they are still hurdles to overcome. Hydrogen does combust into water, but there is a catch- it is extremely explosive. The Challenger has recently been fitted with Self-Destruct mechanisms because of its age, due to the fact that a space shuttle full of hydrogen fuel colliding with a civilian structure would cause a hell of a lot of damage. A plane full of hydrogen fuel colliding with a structure or the ground would cause a massive explosion, much larger than one created by conventional jet fuel. That is of course an extreme example, but just consider for a second the implications of shipping that much hydrogen fuel for daily use, handling it at the airport, etc. It is a lot more volatile than conventional jet fuel. Also, building a nuclear power plant next to a airport that generated hydrogen fuel may not be the best idea.
Establishing total and completely control across all hardware and operating systems, all patch levels, etc?
I admire your optimism, USAF, but $11 million dollars is simply not going to make that happen -if it can even be done. Software companies have enough trouble just getting their *own* software to work installed on *willing systems*, and some of the bigger ones spend that kind of money just getting it to work on one operating system withing a reasonable set of constraints.
Take into account the fact that you will also be most likely using pre-existing exploits, which will be repaired swiftly by responsible developers that watch security RSS feeds, and this is a red herring task. If you are talking about spending 11 million dollars on doing your own research towards establishing remote control by examining source code or reverse engineering to find new exploits, then honestly, you aren't just crazy- you are batshit crazy. You're going to need a whole hell of a lot of money to do that.
CBS is buying much more than just a few (highly valuable) domains and websites with the acquisition of CNET - they are buying a highly trained technical team that has experience serving huge amounts of data to many users at once across multiple domains targeting many different interests. Which is of course, essentially what CBS wants to do, except they took a long time getting into the internet. To be completely honest they would have been better off making this purchase a few years ago.
This isn't to say that CBS doesn't already have a talented technical team, but I would place my bet on CBS planning to expand further into the internet realm. They probably realize that the future of their medium is tied heavily to the internet, and are making strides to ensure that they will be able to deliver their content over the internet seamlessly in the future. Even accounting for team attrition after acquisition, acquiring an entire company at once is probably much easier than a long term hiring process, especially for a company as large as CBS which has already hesitated too long.
CNET also has a blog that , while not extremely well known, is frequently perused by JavaScript and web developers- Clientside. I haven't visited Download.com in a long time, but I visit Clientside nearly every day for examples , reference, etc. I'm a little worried about its fate(considering that the author could leave always leave CNET after the acquisition), but I hope it survives. It's also a good example of the talent behind CNET- there are some good programmers there, for sure.
The article states that 85% of the people who feel the internet *should* be controlled believe that the Government should be the one to do the controlling.
How many people in China felt that the internet shouldn't be controlled? And, with the political climate the way it is over there, how much can we really trust those numbers - even if the poll was administered by a supposedly neutral organizations?
Noted, and of course, the choice as presented is obvious; its better to be treated like a criminal then to be sent to the TYC.
However: keep this in mind. The people driving this program have commercial interests- at least, thats what I'm getting from the phrase "Asked for 365,000 thousand dollars to expand the program". I'm an adult and am well aware that many people have commercial interests and the proceeding statement may be overly obvious, but, companies tend to have this desire to expand and make more money. I'm wary of this system - as good as an alternative as it may be to an already broken system which jails people who don't go to school and trains them to become prisoners - because it has the potential to spread well beyond its "original advertised intent" because of the money- and hungry investors- involved. This company doesn't seem like its just providing a technology, it also seems like its providing a system, and who is to say that these "overwhelmed" case workers won't simply turn over every borderline case to this system? Who is to say that this program won't be expanded to any child marked as "remotely" problematic, if it makes someone money? Who is to say that these case workers themselves won't be bribed or given incentives, based on how many kids they tag?
As an aside, we currently have too many privately run companies that have nearly direct control of the execution of our law as it is (see private military contractors, privately held state prisons, a privately held federal reserve bank). When we hand over control of our government to private companies and permit them to interpret the laws we create in our legislature, we set ourselves up for many, many problems. Our laws run the risk of being interpreted for the profit of a private individual, beyond even what we are used to already in our legislature (aka "Pork Barrel Projects" or "court favoritism" , etc). At least, with the corruption we are used to, it happens in a public building.
Actually - they would have to use civilian PC's in some manner , one way or the other, to be effective.
Part of the strength - and 100% of the resilience - of a bot net lies in compromising trusted computers and networks. A bot net built on every army base in the nation would be within the governments military domain space, which would be really only trusted by those within the United States government itself.
Overflowing computers in other countries via DDoS attacks could easily be thwarted by simply blocking incoming packets from those military bases - or all incoming requests from any US domain. If you tried to avoid this block by bouncing these packets somewhere along the way to the attacked computer from the US, then you are involving civilian computers somehow, foreign or US. So you risk bombing either a) US civilian computers , or b) foreign innocent civilian computers, since the military's traffic would have to go through some civilian computer at some point even if it was originally funneled through dark fiber (like Internet 2), and its well within the realm of possibility that the civilian computer would not be able to handle the incoming storm of packets before said storm got to it's intended target, so you would completely miss your objective while simultaneously tanking a potentially friendly system.
You could build it without using a civilian computer, but you couldn't use it without effecting a civilian computer, and the odds of hitting an innocent would be huge. It sounds like they are considering "Counter DDoSing" people that attempt too "DDoS", which personally sounds like a really, really dumb idea. It could potentially cause a lot of collateral damage. Conventional military thinking does not apply analogously to the internet; you can return fire in real life, but returning fire on the internet isn't always a smart decision.
I'm guessing that there are only a few groups of people that actually expected Internet2 to replace the internet:
1) The people that work at Internet2.
2) The press covering Internet2.
3) People who read tech news but don't know much about the internet. This group can bleed into 2) and 1) above.
This is really a de-evolution of the internet, and is very similar to how the internet used to operate before a lot of convenient protocols were set up. The only difference here is back in the day, Ye Old Internets were being channeled through very thin pipes, and Ye New Internets2 uses unused portions(dark fiber) of already-existing fiber-optic cable. These portions of cable are intended to be used by service provider companies later, as it becomes more profitable and meets their business model.
What should be interesting to computer scientists/IT people , however, aren't the raw numbers or hardware involved. All of Internet2's infrastructure uses pre-existing hardware and network capacity. What should be interesting are the results of some of their "risky" network algorithm setups - removing, for instance, acknowledgments (ACK packets) from each individual sent packet. I'd be interested to see the results of assuming a solid network connection with gigabytes of data in a closed environment. Will there be data corruption, or can a computer network be controlled sufficiently enough on a global level to remove the need for ACK?
You can walk home in GTA IV- nothing is forcing you to take a car. Unless you are walking through a dangerous neighborhood, this is usually the best bet. I believe you can also call a cab (although I haven't done that yet.)
Understand that if your going to crack into his laptop or recover his account information for his online services, you will be acting as an arbiter of knowledge (granted that you have permission) concerning the final moments before this person's death.
A year ago my aunt committed suicide, and my mother asked me to crack into her laptop so that she could feel closer to her sister and understand more of what she was thinking before she died. I thought about it for a long time and then I went ahead and did it, managing also to recover her password. The password *itself* just so happened to be meaningful to the family, as was the desktop background she left up the day she died (it was a picture of her two children when they were young).
On the other hand, when they asked me to recover deleted data, I decided not to return the deleted data (I actually denied that I could even do it), to the family. The reason was that she had written a lot of hastily thought out "hate notes" to some members of her family, and in the end she probably didn't mean what she said, because the text files were deleted.
There weren't any "skin mags", but make sure that you don't hand over anything that will open old wounds - wounds that won't heal very easily, now that the person related to them is deceased. On the other hand, if you find touching things, hand them over.
Also understand what this will do to you personally- it will put you in a position of knowing things that your family will not, if you have to hide things from them. That is its own particular burden, and its up to you to decide if you want to carry it. I did, but not everyone would make the same decision.
When I made my post, I wasn't really thinking about what you should do for your friends or what would be considered morally/legally correct, I was just relaying information as to what it really costs to have a true "guard dog". The person who responded to my post about how guard dogs annoy/scare him is justified in his reasoning, because honestly these dogs are trained to do exactly what he says they are - hate everyone else except for their owner. If you do have a dog that is dangerous around strangers than you should lock it up if you are expecting strangers. The part where I said that my dogs scare delivery men was mostly intended as a joke - they are usually in a separate room of the house when I answer the door. I would never leave them outside if I wasn't a) there or b) expecting no one to arrive. They also aren't trained to hate strangers, so as guard dogs they are also pretty useless - they are much more bark than bite.
While its true that 99% of the people who approach your house may be friendly or neutral, 99% of the time you should be there when they do that - unless you have your house for sale. I really don't see many reasons why anyone outside of a mail carrier/service person/oil delivery man etc should be on my property without my permission. The dog would be inside, anyway, if I wasn't there. Leaving a dog like that outside while you aren't home is asking for trouble.
A real "guard dog" is also expensive. You can get dogs that will be deterrents to invaders - Rottweilers and Pit Bulls are both pretty effective - but that effectiveness stops if the thief understands that these animals aren't a threat if he behaves correctly.
There is however, a way to train a dog so that it will not be a pushover, and will act as a very real threat to any thief, or as the case may be, anyone who isn't the owner. This training is commonly known as aggression training - its the kind of training that police dogs go through, and its actually available to the public with the proper paperwork. This type of training will make a dog "used" to some humans, but aggressive towards others when that human is absent. There are advantages to having a dog with this kind of training, but it is expensive, and most dog breeders/trainers (certified ones) will only train a dog this way if they have certification - ie, the dog has to come from other dogs that have received this training and have responded well to it. You also have to consider the fact that this training is expensive, a purebred "guard dog" of this nature is particularly expensive , and include any possible insurance cost increases or complete denial of coverage. It might be an animal, but after this training its a living weapon. The cost of one dog trained in this manner could easily reach - with only the cost of purchasing and training the dog - over three to four thousand dollars.
I'd stick with the cameras, from a TCO standpoint.
However, Rottweilers in particular make good pets if you are kind to them, and you don't have to give them aggression training to scare most people away. I have two, and while someone who entered my house with the calm of a surgeon and a piece of bacon might get past them, they do scare the pants off of every delivery person that approaches my house. They are also really great dogs.
But, as a previous poster stated "The thief will probably go after the lowest hanging fruit". A big dog - or any dog for that matter - will still raise that fruit up a notch.
One thing that I think people do that is particularly stupid is put their expensive electronics in *full view* of a window. Electronics are among the most easily resold stolen item, because their worth is directly related to their functionality and often they are pretty easy to transport and get rid of - everyone wants a new TV.
Anyway, as it has already been noted, this problem has nothing specifically to do with the IIS servers.
Yes, but interestingly enough, the targets were seem to be IIS servers. The vulnerability is not IIS specific, as SQL injection can happen anywhere, on any platform, if the developer isn't paying attention.
So this prompts the following question: Why were only IIS servers targeted, if this wasn't simply an IIS vulnerability? Was this a political statement, an intentional "mudball hack" (tarnishing IIS's reputation), or simply a coincidence-that a lot of poorly trained developers maintain and develop IIS systems, even if there are many talented IIS/.ASP net developers out there?
Honestly though, this is a little humiliating. I understand that things get out of control in large projects, but I thought most people nowadays should know that database input sanitizing now fell among those universal truths, including but not limited to: brushing your teeth, wearing a condom, et al.
Its unforgiving, but you really do have to sacrifice speed for security sometimes. That being said, I feel pretty bad for all those sys-admins/developers who are probably going to have a late nights tonight...and maybe for the next week or two.
You seem weak in critical thinking, but its far more likely that they'll charge you a nonveteran an arm and a leg for this stuff so veterans can get it for free. (Well "free" to the veterans. You'll be paying out the...) The other choice is we all pay higher taxes for increased V.A. Benefits that now include regen. That'll pass in two heart beats. No republican or democrat would want to ever be the person that voted against radical health improvements for veterans.
I agree that not every soldier is necessarily "insane" after they leave war- but is it totally beyond the realm of the feasible that some of them *might* need a little therapy afterwards? No. Most people would be supportive of Veterans receiving the care they need- be it physical or mental, or even if it includes groundbreaking technologies such as tissue regeneration.
Unless, of course, you happen to be Senator John McCain, who has voted against Veteran health spending in the past. Which Senate votes? These: 2006 Senate Vote #7, 2/2/06; 2005 Senate Vote #343, 11/17/05; 2003 Senate Vote #74, 3/21/03; 2006 Senate Vote #67, 3/16/2006; 2006 Senate Vote #98, 4/26/06; 2007 Senate Vote #76, 3/15/07;
Particularly interesting is 2006 Senate Vote #98, 4/26/06, where McCain was only one of 13 Republicans that opposed increased spending for Veterans in the form of medical outpatient care. That usually involves physical and mental therapy. Generally helps the recovery process of enduring wounds in war.
Also, he doesn't seem to think they deserve educational reimbursement after being in a war: check out this video
One ruling deals mostly with defamation and the right to control images taken of your person, and the plaintiff was an individual and the case involved a specific incident. The other ruling deals mostly with a complaint by the Fair Housing Council and was a complaint against a web companies business model in general. Neither have anything to do with ISP's and their liability shield as pertaining to "Content Providers". The first one involves using "content" posted by the user as advertising material (which I beleive would constitute as a willful action by the company and no longer grants them liability anyway), and the second one involves the way in which that content is mediated, which is another willful act.
The ISP liability shield would have only diminished in the first case if the woman had posted nude photographs of herself online and then issued a complaint *without* AdultFriendFinder advertising its service using her image. In the second case, the liability shield would have only diminished if a particular person posted an advertisement stating in the description that "They would not room with person of X race" (I'm diffusing the issue of race and sexual orientation here purposefully just to show the logical structure of this argument, they are pretty similar for discrimination purposes), and someone of X race or a organization representing X race sued Roommates.com, and roommates.com made NO requirement to the user that this information be included in a posting.
However, since AdultFriendFinder did use Jane Doe's image for advertisement, and Roommates.com *made* the requirement of choosing a preferred sexual/racial orientation (even if the preferance was none), then the ISP liability shield is still intact.
It's still a pretty interesting article, however, because it does show us that this law is being tested and further defined, and people are being held accountable for their business models on the internet. I think thats the real point here, but the article's author doesn't seem to think so.
I agree that parents should have more time to spend with their children for many reasons, possibly the least of which is that they can forewarn them about future calamities, including predators.
But honestly, is it really fair to blame parents directly when the jobs or careers they have involve them working overtime with no extra pay, sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day? Lets also consider the fact that having a family without a twin income is probably going to be next to impossible in the near future.
I'm not going to rush and blame corporate society either, but if we all worked say, 7 hours a day (like they do in some companies in Germany), then wouldn't we all have a little more time to spend with our children? Last I checked, Germany is kicking our (the US's) ass in right now. So more hours does not equal more productivity. Furthermore, if the corporate climate can't facilitate the needs of parents, then I believe one of two things must happen: 1) the government must intervene to change this climate for the benefit of the children and the parents, or 2) the government must meet this need for the parents through one of its preexisting institutions.
I love the idea of mandatory parenting, but I'm not going to get into the potentially sexist implications of voiding a career for one partner in a marriage for the sake of the children, especially when it may become economically intractable for the majority of the populace. In the future, you will see more and more working couples, and fewer and fewer "house wives" or "house husbands".
It's a huge heap of BS to do this, especially when some people pay for high-bandwidth file services. I understand saying "We can't guarantee that the internet connection will always be this fast" for technical reasons, but purposely slowing down traffic for cross-industrial reasons (concerns over the file sharing of media/mp3s leading to the throttling of all file transfers) *should* be illegal.
Pay-for-use internet subscriber models don't make much sense: eventually, it will cause people to use the internet less , and thus will make the companies less money, because it will have a collective effect as the internet community dissipates because one of the biggest draws of the internet is the interconnected user-base. Less people on the internet = less blogs, fewer reasons to have news sites on the internet, fewer reasons to have forums, fewer reasons for social networking sites and advertising, fewer reasons to participate in multi player gaming, etc. This is why AOL switched over from minutes to unlimited - to ramp up the connected userbase.
Bingo.
Being able to deal with a random crowd of mostly intelligent programmers >> being able to deal with a trained crowd of moderately well trained programmers.
Your communications skills beyond the English wall-barrier will continue to remain the most important thing as you grow forward as a programmer. The more your code shines through towards those of other nations and languages (as is often the case with open source programming), the more your job will be secure and lasting. Trust me. International cooperation is the absolute future.
Sometimes it isn't just the pay. Many scholarships/honors programs require you to keep a certain GPA (fixed , no variation on major), or you lose your scholarship/honors status.
Last I checked, there was *one* BS Presidential Scholar in our class. And he worked his *ass* off.
Also, some of those soft majors pay pretty well. Marketing can get you a lot of money. So can fashion design.
...but it doesn't mean that kids without rich parents won't have a harder time becoming a science major, or won't have a harder time leaving college with a lighter load on their back. Granted, a science job will help you pay off that 40-200k you owe in student loans, but it's much more liberating to walk out of college debt free- you aren't pressured into a job as quickly and have more time to decide what you want to do with your live. Usually a good mix for innovation.
To throw more fuel onto the fire, the system punishes kids who decide to take more science course electives than "fluffy electives". You can't tell me you didn't know kids in college that took a class just because it was an "Easy A". When the kid who took more electives in his discipline applies to grad school, his GPA is probably going to be lower, and most highly competitive schools look at the GPA first as a quick-screen- they won't notice his transcript. The kid who took fluffy courses will probably get into more schools than the student that actually knows more about science. I'm not saying that kids shouldn't take English courses, but this is what happens.
The interesting part about specializing in libraries or frameworks for a language you already know is that it often shows you how to use the language in ways you never thought of, or thought impossible.
Lately I've been doing a lot of stuff with JavaScript, and mooTools has been a framework I've invested a lot of time into. The first time I remember reading the tutorials, I asked myself "The hell? This is javascript?". After a while, I realized that with mooTools and a little creativity, I could create many flash-like effects, without flash. The same thing happened when I started to use CodeIgniter, a PHP framework. I had simply never seen PHP coded in that fashion before. Especially with PHP 5, CI becomes extremely OOP-like, with MCV and everything.When I went to school, the words "Object Oriented" and "Model View Controller" were *never* talked about in my PHP class (even during the advanced segments).
That being said, if you want something that will truly test your resolve as a programmer, I'd try to learn ML. It's not very useful, at all, (although some of its variants are used widely in scientific fields) but it will teach you a lot about type-checking, and how very *nice* a C or Java compiler is to you. Ruby is also a good thing to pick up, especially once you realize how awesome the migrations are in Ruby.
The additional benefit of a bat-like design (as opposed to a pigeon) is that they are nocturnal - so a spy-bat flying around at night would be more difficult to discern from a real bat as opposed to a spy-pigeon from a real pigeon. Bats are also nearly ubiquitous in the earth's ecology, making them ideal for spying anywhere.
Another plus involves the behavior of a bat. A bat sitting still in a tree or a cave wouldn't be considered "abnormal" by a casual observer- and most people are honestly too afraid of them to go up to it and examine it closely. Especially if its hidden amongst a group of "real bats", which would only add to the camouflage aspect.
A perfect night spy. Of course, why not just install a bio-tech camera in a real bat? I'm sure we might see that someday.
Slashdot Mirror
1) No, it can't, but it can penetrate through a small portion of flesh, and is useful in determining fatty/non fatty tissue. "X-ray like" was not meant to be scientific in any way. :)
2) Yep.
3) I did, thanks. Again, I was speaking more in the vernacular. Never got a Physics degree.
From reading the article, my layman's-"I'm no physicist"'s take on T-Rays:
1) They can penetrate through clothing/plastic/flesh, and most of the materials mentioned seem to be organic in nature. This gives them "X-ray"-like properties.
2) They were able to make T-Rays before in laboratories, but now they can make them more cheaply, with less power, in human-friendly settings.
3) T-Rays give off less radiation than X-rays, due to the much larger wavelength.
Quick Conclusion: We now have the potential to create an X-ray like device that could be deployed in airports and other travel hubs that could be used to monitor the public without harming the public through this observation. More benignly, they could also be used in hospitals for "persistent monitoring" of patients with tumors or internal bleeding, because they seem to have lower power requirements and risks of side-effects.
Driving a Prius is helping, by reducing the overall amount of gas consumed and gradually edging the energy concious mentality into the mind of the general consumer. You can't make gigantic leaps into the future overnight, as much as we would like to see it happen. Don't deride energy conscious consumer decisions just because they don't meet the future ideal completely.
Second:
There are some pretty legitimate reasons for not fueling an aircraft with Hydrogen fuel, and while they could be worked around, they are still hurdles to overcome. Hydrogen does combust into water, but there is a catch- it is extremely explosive. The Challenger has recently been fitted with Self-Destruct mechanisms because of its age, due to the fact that a space shuttle full of hydrogen fuel colliding with a civilian structure would cause a hell of a lot of damage. A plane full of hydrogen fuel colliding with a structure or the ground would cause a massive explosion, much larger than one created by conventional jet fuel. That is of course an extreme example, but just consider for a second the implications of shipping that much hydrogen fuel for daily use, handling it at the airport, etc. It is a lot more volatile than conventional jet fuel. Also, building a nuclear power plant next to a airport that generated hydrogen fuel may not be the best idea.
Establishing total and completely control across all hardware and operating systems, all patch levels, etc?
I admire your optimism, USAF, but $11 million dollars is simply not going to make that happen -if it can even be done. Software companies have enough trouble just getting their *own* software to work installed on *willing systems*, and some of the bigger ones spend that kind of money just getting it to work on one operating system withing a reasonable set of constraints.
Take into account the fact that you will also be most likely using pre-existing exploits, which will be repaired swiftly by responsible developers that watch security RSS feeds, and this is a red herring task. If you are talking about spending 11 million dollars on doing your own research towards establishing remote control by examining source code or reverse engineering to find new exploits, then honestly, you aren't just crazy- you are batshit crazy. You're going to need a whole hell of a lot of money to do that.
CBS is buying much more than just a few (highly valuable) domains and websites with the acquisition of CNET - they are buying a highly trained technical team that has experience serving huge amounts of data to many users at once across multiple domains targeting many different interests. Which is of course, essentially what CBS wants to do, except they took a long time getting into the internet. To be completely honest they would have been better off making this purchase a few years ago.
This isn't to say that CBS doesn't already have a talented technical team, but I would place my bet on CBS planning to expand further into the internet realm. They probably realize that the future of their medium is tied heavily to the internet, and are making strides to ensure that they will be able to deliver their content over the internet seamlessly in the future. Even accounting for team attrition after acquisition, acquiring an entire company at once is probably much easier than a long term hiring process, especially for a company as large as CBS which has already hesitated too long.
CNET also has a blog that , while not extremely well known, is frequently perused by JavaScript and web developers- Clientside. I haven't visited Download.com in a long time, but I visit Clientside nearly every day for examples , reference, etc. I'm a little worried about its fate(considering that the author could leave always leave CNET after the acquisition), but I hope it survives. It's also a good example of the talent behind CNET- there are some good programmers there, for sure.
In other news: half of jokes made on Slashdot are incorrectly interpreted as serious commentary.
The article states that 85% of the people who feel the internet *should* be controlled believe that the Government should be the one to do the controlling.
How many people in China felt that the internet shouldn't be controlled? And, with the political climate the way it is over there, how much can we really trust those numbers - even if the poll was administered by a supposedly neutral organizations?
Noted, and of course, the choice as presented is obvious; its better to be treated like a criminal then to be sent to the TYC.
However: keep this in mind. The people driving this program have commercial interests- at least, thats what I'm getting from the phrase "Asked for 365,000 thousand dollars to expand the program". I'm an adult and am well aware that many people have commercial interests and the proceeding statement may be overly obvious, but, companies tend to have this desire to expand and make more money. I'm wary of this system - as good as an alternative as it may be to an already broken system which jails people who don't go to school and trains them to become prisoners - because it has the potential to spread well beyond its "original advertised intent" because of the money- and hungry investors- involved. This company doesn't seem like its just providing a technology, it also seems like its providing a system, and who is to say that these "overwhelmed" case workers won't simply turn over every borderline case to this system? Who is to say that this program won't be expanded to any child marked as "remotely" problematic, if it makes someone money? Who is to say that these case workers themselves won't be bribed or given incentives, based on how many kids they tag?
As an aside, we currently have too many privately run companies that have nearly direct control of the execution of our law as it is (see private military contractors, privately held state prisons, a privately held federal reserve bank). When we hand over control of our government to private companies and permit them to interpret the laws we create in our legislature, we set ourselves up for many, many problems. Our laws run the risk of being interpreted for the profit of a private individual, beyond even what we are used to already in our legislature (aka "Pork Barrel Projects" or "court favoritism" , etc). At least, with the corruption we are used to, it happens in a public building.
Actually - they would have to use civilian PC's in some manner , one way or the other, to be effective.
Part of the strength - and 100% of the resilience - of a bot net lies in compromising trusted computers and networks. A bot net built on every army base in the nation would be within the governments military domain space, which would be really only trusted by those within the United States government itself.
Overflowing computers in other countries via DDoS attacks could easily be thwarted by simply blocking incoming packets from those military bases - or all incoming requests from any US domain. If you tried to avoid this block by bouncing these packets somewhere along the way to the attacked computer from the US, then you are involving civilian computers somehow, foreign or US. So you risk bombing either a) US civilian computers , or b) foreign innocent civilian computers, since the military's traffic would have to go through some civilian computer at some point even if it was originally funneled through dark fiber (like Internet 2), and its well within the realm of possibility that the civilian computer would not be able to handle the incoming storm of packets before said storm got to it's intended target, so you would completely miss your objective while simultaneously tanking a potentially friendly system.
You could build it without using a civilian computer, but you couldn't use it without effecting a civilian computer, and the odds of hitting an innocent would be huge. It sounds like they are considering "Counter DDoSing" people that attempt too "DDoS", which personally sounds like a really, really dumb idea. It could potentially cause a lot of collateral damage. Conventional military thinking does not apply analogously to the internet; you can return fire in real life, but returning fire on the internet isn't always a smart decision.
I'm guessing that there are only a few groups of people that actually expected Internet2 to replace the internet:
1) The people that work at Internet2.
2) The press covering Internet2.
3) People who read tech news but don't know much about the internet. This group can bleed into 2) and 1) above.
This is really a de-evolution of the internet, and is very similar to how the internet used to operate before a lot of convenient protocols were set up. The only difference here is back in the day, Ye Old Internets were being channeled through very thin pipes, and Ye New Internets2 uses unused portions(dark fiber) of already-existing fiber-optic cable. These portions of cable are intended to be used by service provider companies later, as it becomes more profitable and meets their business model.
What should be interesting to computer scientists/IT people , however, aren't the raw numbers or hardware involved. All of Internet2's infrastructure uses pre-existing hardware and network capacity. What should be interesting are the results of some of their "risky" network algorithm setups - removing, for instance, acknowledgments (ACK packets) from each individual sent packet. I'd be interested to see the results of assuming a solid network connection with gigabytes of data in a closed environment. Will there be data corruption, or can a computer network be controlled sufficiently enough on a global level to remove the need for ACK?
You can walk home in GTA IV- nothing is forcing you to take a car. Unless you are walking through a dangerous neighborhood, this is usually the best bet. I believe you can also call a cab (although I haven't done that yet.)
I would agree with the parent post.
Understand that if your going to crack into his laptop or recover his account information for his online services, you will be acting as an arbiter of knowledge (granted that you have permission) concerning the final moments before this person's death.
A year ago my aunt committed suicide, and my mother asked me to crack into her laptop so that she could feel closer to her sister and understand more of what she was thinking before she died. I thought about it for a long time and then I went ahead and did it, managing also to recover her password. The password *itself* just so happened to be meaningful to the family, as was the desktop background she left up the day she died (it was a picture of her two children when they were young).
On the other hand, when they asked me to recover deleted data, I decided not to return the deleted data (I actually denied that I could even do it), to the family. The reason was that she had written a lot of hastily thought out "hate notes" to some members of her family, and in the end she probably didn't mean what she said, because the text files were deleted.
There weren't any "skin mags", but make sure that you don't hand over anything that will open old wounds - wounds that won't heal very easily, now that the person related to them is deceased. On the other hand, if you find touching things, hand them over.
Also understand what this will do to you personally- it will put you in a position of knowing things that your family will not, if you have to hide things from them. That is its own particular burden, and its up to you to decide if you want to carry it. I did, but not everyone would make the same decision.
Agreed.
When I made my post, I wasn't really thinking about what you should do for your friends or what would be considered morally/legally correct, I was just relaying information as to what it really costs to have a true "guard dog". The person who responded to my post about how guard dogs annoy/scare him is justified in his reasoning, because honestly these dogs are trained to do exactly what he says they are - hate everyone else except for their owner. If you do have a dog that is dangerous around strangers than you should lock it up if you are expecting strangers. The part where I said that my dogs scare delivery men was mostly intended as a joke - they are usually in a separate room of the house when I answer the door. I would never leave them outside if I wasn't a) there or b) expecting no one to arrive. They also aren't trained to hate strangers, so as guard dogs they are also pretty useless - they are much more bark than bite.
While its true that 99% of the people who approach your house may be friendly or neutral, 99% of the time you should be there when they do that - unless you have your house for sale. I really don't see many reasons why anyone outside of a mail carrier/service person/oil delivery man etc should be on my property without my permission. The dog would be inside, anyway, if I wasn't there. Leaving a dog like that outside while you aren't home is asking for trouble.
A real "guard dog" is also expensive. You can get dogs that will be deterrents to invaders - Rottweilers and Pit Bulls are both pretty effective - but that effectiveness stops if the thief understands that these animals aren't a threat if he behaves correctly.
There is however, a way to train a dog so that it will not be a pushover, and will act as a very real threat to any thief, or as the case may be, anyone who isn't the owner. This training is commonly known as aggression training - its the kind of training that police dogs go through, and its actually available to the public with the proper paperwork. This type of training will make a dog "used" to some humans, but aggressive towards others when that human is absent. There are advantages to having a dog with this kind of training, but it is expensive, and most dog breeders/trainers (certified ones) will only train a dog this way if they have certification - ie, the dog has to come from other dogs that have received this training and have responded well to it. You also have to consider the fact that this training is expensive, a purebred "guard dog" of this nature is particularly expensive , and include any possible insurance cost increases or complete denial of coverage. It might be an animal, but after this training its a living weapon. The cost of one dog trained in this manner could easily reach - with only the cost of purchasing and training the dog - over three to four thousand dollars.
I'd stick with the cameras, from a TCO standpoint.
However, Rottweilers in particular make good pets if you are kind to them, and you don't have to give them aggression training to scare most people away. I have two, and while someone who entered my house with the calm of a surgeon and a piece of bacon might get past them, they do scare the pants off of every delivery person that approaches my house. They are also really great dogs.
But, as a previous poster stated "The thief will probably go after the lowest hanging fruit". A big dog - or any dog for that matter - will still raise that fruit up a notch.
One thing that I think people do that is particularly stupid is put their expensive electronics in *full view* of a window. Electronics are among the most easily resold stolen item, because their worth is directly related to their functionality and often they are pretty easy to transport and get rid of - everyone wants a new TV.
Yes, but interestingly enough, the targets were seem to be IIS servers. The vulnerability is not IIS specific, as SQL injection can happen anywhere, on any platform, if the developer isn't paying attention.
So this prompts the following question: Why were only IIS servers targeted, if this wasn't simply an IIS vulnerability? Was this a political statement, an intentional "mudball hack" (tarnishing IIS's reputation), or simply a coincidence-that a lot of poorly trained developers maintain and develop IIS systems, even if there are many talented IIS/.ASP net developers out there?
Thoughts?
Solution: Upgrade to Windows Vista!
I kid! I kid!
Honestly though, this is a little humiliating. I understand that things get out of control in large projects, but I thought most people nowadays should know that database input sanitizing now fell among those universal truths, including but not limited to: brushing your teeth, wearing a condom, et al.
Its unforgiving, but you really do have to sacrifice speed for security sometimes. That being said, I feel pretty bad for all those sys-admins/developers who are probably going to have a late nights tonight...and maybe for the next week or two.
I agree that not every soldier is necessarily "insane" after they leave war- but is it totally beyond the realm of the feasible that some of them *might* need a little therapy afterwards? No. Most people would be supportive of Veterans receiving the care they need- be it physical or mental, or even if it includes groundbreaking technologies such as tissue regeneration.
Unless, of course, you happen to be Senator John McCain, who has voted against Veteran health spending in the past. Which Senate votes? These: 2006 Senate Vote #7, 2/2/06; 2005 Senate Vote #343, 11/17/05; 2003 Senate Vote #74, 3/21/03; 2006 Senate Vote #67, 3/16/2006; 2006 Senate Vote #98, 4/26/06; 2007 Senate Vote #76, 3/15/07;
Particularly interesting is 2006 Senate Vote #98, 4/26/06, where McCain was only one of 13 Republicans that opposed increased spending for Veterans in the form of medical outpatient care. That usually involves physical and mental therapy. Generally helps the recovery process of enduring wounds in war.
Also, he doesn't seem to think they deserve educational reimbursement after being in a war: check out this video
One ruling deals mostly with defamation and the right to control images taken of your person, and the plaintiff was an individual and the case involved a specific incident. The other ruling deals mostly with a complaint by the Fair Housing Council and was a complaint against a web companies business model in general. Neither have anything to do with ISP's and their liability shield as pertaining to "Content Providers". The first one involves using "content" posted by the user as advertising material (which I beleive would constitute as a willful action by the company and no longer grants them liability anyway), and the second one involves the way in which that content is mediated, which is another willful act.
The ISP liability shield would have only diminished in the first case if the woman had posted nude photographs of herself online and then issued a complaint *without* AdultFriendFinder advertising its service using her image. In the second case, the liability shield would have only diminished if a particular person posted an advertisement stating in the description that "They would not room with person of X race" (I'm diffusing the issue of race and sexual orientation here purposefully just to show the logical structure of this argument, they are pretty similar for discrimination purposes), and someone of X race or a organization representing X race sued Roommates.com, and roommates.com made NO requirement to the user that this information be included in a posting.
However, since AdultFriendFinder did use Jane Doe's image for advertisement, and Roommates.com *made* the requirement of choosing a preferred sexual/racial orientation (even if the preferance was none), then the ISP liability shield is still intact.
It's still a pretty interesting article, however, because it does show us that this law is being tested and further defined, and people are being held accountable for their business models on the internet. I think thats the real point here, but the article's author doesn't seem to think so.
If the contract signs over all work to Lucas Film, this guy may be in a bit of a bind. If it doesn't, Lucas Film is in a bind.
I bet you two different contracts are presented.
Logical mode off: Its a goddamn Storm Trooper Costume! He was making them for 3k! You make millions of dollars! Go home!
I agree that parents should have more time to spend with their children for many reasons, possibly the least of which is that they can forewarn them about future calamities, including predators.
But honestly, is it really fair to blame parents directly when the jobs or careers they have involve them working overtime with no extra pay, sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day? Lets also consider the fact that having a family without a twin income is probably going to be next to impossible in the near future.
I'm not going to rush and blame corporate society either, but if we all worked say, 7 hours a day (like they do in some companies in Germany), then wouldn't we all have a little more time to spend with our children? Last I checked, Germany is kicking our (the US's) ass in right now. So more hours does not equal more productivity. Furthermore, if the corporate climate can't facilitate the needs of parents, then I believe one of two things must happen: 1) the government must intervene to change this climate for the benefit of the children and the parents, or 2) the government must meet this need for the parents through one of its preexisting institutions.
I love the idea of mandatory parenting, but I'm not going to get into the potentially sexist implications of voiding a career for one partner in a marriage for the sake of the children, especially when it may become economically intractable for the majority of the populace. In the future, you will see more and more working couples, and fewer and fewer "house wives" or "house husbands".
It's a huge heap of BS to do this, especially when some people pay for high-bandwidth file services. I understand saying "We can't guarantee that the internet connection will always be this fast" for technical reasons, but purposely slowing down traffic for cross-industrial reasons (concerns over the file sharing of media/mp3s leading to the throttling of all file transfers) *should* be illegal.
Pay-for-use internet subscriber models don't make much sense: eventually, it will cause people to use the internet less , and thus will make the companies less money, because it will have a collective effect as the internet community dissipates because one of the biggest draws of the internet is the interconnected user-base. Less people on the internet = less blogs, fewer reasons to have news sites on the internet, fewer reasons to have forums, fewer reasons for social networking sites and advertising, fewer reasons to participate in multi player gaming, etc. This is why AOL switched over from minutes to unlimited - to ramp up the connected userbase.
Bingo. Being able to deal with a random crowd of mostly intelligent programmers >> being able to deal with a trained crowd of moderately well trained programmers.
Your communications skills beyond the English wall-barrier will continue to remain the most important thing as you grow forward as a programmer. The more your code shines through towards those of other nations and languages (as is often the case with open source programming), the more your job will be secure and lasting. Trust me. International cooperation is the absolute future.
Sometimes it isn't just the pay. Many scholarships/honors programs require you to keep a certain GPA (fixed , no variation on major), or you lose your scholarship/honors status.
Last I checked, there was *one* BS Presidential Scholar in our class. And he worked his *ass* off.
Also, some of those soft majors pay pretty well. Marketing can get you a lot of money. So can fashion design.
However, this article (and your argument) still hold weight.
http://education-portal.com/articles/Top_10_Paying_College_Majors.html
...but it doesn't mean that kids without rich parents won't have a harder time becoming a science major, or won't have a harder time leaving college with a lighter load on their back. Granted, a science job will help you pay off that 40-200k you owe in student loans, but it's much more liberating to walk out of college debt free- you aren't pressured into a job as quickly and have more time to decide what you want to do with your live. Usually a good mix for innovation.
To throw more fuel onto the fire, the system punishes kids who decide to take more science course electives than "fluffy electives". You can't tell me you didn't know kids in college that took a class just because it was an "Easy A". When the kid who took more electives in his discipline applies to grad school, his GPA is probably going to be lower, and most highly competitive schools look at the GPA first as a quick-screen- they won't notice his transcript. The kid who took fluffy courses will probably get into more schools than the student that actually knows more about science. I'm not saying that kids shouldn't take English courses, but this is what happens.
The interesting part about specializing in libraries or frameworks for a language you already know is that it often shows you how to use the language in ways you never thought of, or thought impossible.
Lately I've been doing a lot of stuff with JavaScript, and mooTools has been a framework I've invested a lot of time into. The first time I remember reading the tutorials, I asked myself "The hell? This is javascript?". After a while, I realized that with mooTools and a little creativity, I could create many flash-like effects, without flash. The same thing happened when I started to use CodeIgniter, a PHP framework. I had simply never seen PHP coded in that fashion before. Especially with PHP 5, CI becomes extremely OOP-like, with MCV and everything.When I went to school, the words "Object Oriented" and "Model View Controller" were *never* talked about in my PHP class (even during the advanced segments).
That being said, if you want something that will truly test your resolve as a programmer, I'd try to learn ML. It's not very useful, at all, (although some of its variants are used widely in scientific fields) but it will teach you a lot about type-checking, and how very *nice* a C or Java compiler is to you. Ruby is also a good thing to pick up, especially once you realize how awesome the migrations are in Ruby.
The additional benefit of a bat-like design (as opposed to a pigeon) is that they are nocturnal - so a spy-bat flying around at night would be more difficult to discern from a real bat as opposed to a spy-pigeon from a real pigeon. Bats are also nearly ubiquitous in the earth's ecology, making them ideal for spying anywhere.
Another plus involves the behavior of a bat. A bat sitting still in a tree or a cave wouldn't be considered "abnormal" by a casual observer- and most people are honestly too afraid of them to go up to it and examine it closely. Especially if its hidden amongst a group of "real bats", which would only add to the camouflage aspect.
A perfect night spy. Of course, why not just install a bio-tech camera in a real bat? I'm sure we might see that someday.