I was at the local shopping mall with all my expensive photography equipment, taking pictures of the fossils in the floor tiles for a fossil club to be used at a local high school. All of a sudden I was surrounded by security guards ready to take my equipment. After some discussion and a scientific lesson on fossils in their own floor tiles, they finally allowed me to exit with my equipment. That is providing I didn't take any more photographs on the way out the door.
Question: For Microsoft to know that I use the start menu 11% less, exactly how would they know this? Let me guess, I called them up with stupid menu oriented questions 11% less last year than the year before? Perhaps its nave to think people learn form experience?
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Either Microsoft is collecting information they should not be collecting, or they are basing this percentage on a survey that they themselves sponsored. We know from a long cast of historical references that Microsoft always hears what Microsoft ask to hear from their own funded surveys. If they don't get the 'right' answer that they paid for then it seems that the survey didn't really exist.
Yes, I'm guilty of using desktop icons for my most often used applications, but they happen to be on a Linux desktop. I'm actually using the Windows Start Menu 100% less than the year before, by my own non-Microsoft funded calculations.
Just set up your phone to forward all unanswered calls to your Congressman's office. If you don't know who is calling its probably going to be spam anyway, and I just don't answer them anyway and just wait for a message.Though, I just wonder if forwarded calls count against your minutes? Maybe Google Voice can set this up for people without a decent smartphone?
This is completely vapourware at this point, so the article is worthless for most slashdotters at this point.
But the article is significant, in that this marks the beginning of the battle for ring -1 in the security products market. Personally I am 'root'ing for QubesOS to show the way, but having any COTS product on the market for Windows would be a good thing. Why? Because if you have a processor with the VT-x capability and you are not loading in a ring -1 hypervisor then one can be inserted under your OS by Malware, and you would never know its there. Its a race to be the first software package/Malware to implant itself and have total domination over what gets loaded next. You may think you are running at the ring -1 level, but other than timing tests on certain CPU instructions it would be very hard to tell that you don't and a new Malicious Overlord. IMHO it would be wise to load even a dummy hypervisor in ring -1 rather than just letting a virtualizing rootkit become the master of your domain.
So far Microsoft has ignored ReactOS, and they have kept plodding along gut have been no threat to the Monopoly. If ReactOS gets enough publicity, and funding, then that equation changes drastically. You can bet that Microsoft will have their lawyers dusting off the patent archives to see what can be used to hold them back from being a serious Windows-like competitor. Only in Russia, they don't care about the US legal system except for any International agreements that they can not ignore. It will be interesting to watch, and I'm hoping the best for the ReactOS folks.
...And I'm a perfect example. Quite frankly, for my expertise, I get paid more than the new hires. I burn through the remaining available budget faster than two of the new hires combined for half the number of billable hours. For the remainder of the current FY budget they are trying to transition me to another task which is not budget strapped until the next FY money comes rolling in, but when others wind up sitting on their hands because of what I'm no longer doing they have to juggle the numbers and pull others in and off in order for me to come in and save the day. They are walking a fine line between fiscal responsibility and personal convenience to keep thing moving forward until things are better. I am to spend as little time on the project as I can manage providing that all the others are able to get their work done. Its hard for me because I feel a personal responsibility for the project and for mentoring the new workers to move them towards their own career objectives, but its not easy to do everything. The bottom line is if you are expensive and not critical to the mission you will be bumped to another task, or even out the door if things get bad enough.
I once had a job where I was the last technical person on staff, and it was heartbreaking to watch all my friends (100+) get the red-slip one by one, just because the Government signed a newer followup contract, closed the old one, and hadn't done the necessary expenditure justifications under the new contract. So many lives ruined by a single Government signature on one single piece of paper. It's sad, what simple economics can force corporate management do.
Not only that, but the RSA people submitted the email to Virus Total and it passed all tests, including the one from F-Secure. In effect, their product did nothing to prevent the exploitation, or even detect it. Why do you think they wanted the email so bad as to search throughout millions of submitted files for weeks? They needed the sample to build a "signature" for the custom exploit so they could say that their snake oil works wonders.
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AV products are a loosing battle. If you have to get shot first to know where the enemy is attacking from then you can't win the battle by attrition. .
What is needed is smarter systems that protect us via hardware, like Qubes OS. Qubes OS would have allowed that user to grab the attachment and move it to a safe/isolated VM to be opened where it could do no harm. Even if the flash applet could some how write some persistent code to a read only file system it could not open an outgoing connection with no networking services or hardware to support networking. It would be a dead end for that malware attack. End of story. The problem then is forcing the attachment from one VM with networking into another to be isolated, and that for now still relies on the user.
I have an '05 Prius, which delivers %100 of the 163 Hp %100 of the time while accelerating. Maximum torque from the electric motor a 0 RPMs, and maximum power from the gas engine continuously through acceleration because of the CVT. Its actually *fast* off the line, and I gave up a high-test guzzling 8 cylinder beast and I don't miss it at all. And all this with 47 MPG!
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The problem? Toyota crippled the car with the computer programming. When you are at a stop sign and need to pull out on the highway, and the inside front wheel slips a little because you are pushing it, as to not get creamed by the semi tractor trailer barrelling down the road at you, the computer will say "oh dear, my tire is slipping, I'd better turn down the horse power so we don't make any screeching noises, or for heaven sake, actually burn any rubber, oh no". Toyota would rather I get *killed* than for me to wear down my tires? Or trying to get up a snowy hill, it does the same. No power. What I want is for the computer to realize I pressed the gas peddle down very quickly to the floor and take that fact as a command saying 'do it NOW dammit!'. If it would do that then I would have no complaints about the car at all.
That WallStreet hasn't got a clue about the non-usefulness of such a combination. They obviously have not been watching Microsoft flailing around trying to make a one-type-fist-all model of an operating system. Its hopelessly inept at everything, because it tries to do everything for everyone. If Apple starts making noises about doing this then its time to start divesting yourself of all your Apple shares. Sell fast.
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What I also predict, is that someone on WallStreet is heavily invested in Apple stock and is looking to sell at maximum profit, and putting Apple in "the news" most always drives the price of a stock upwards, unless its bad financial news (WallStreet only groks financial semantics). When everything is down in price, getting a little "free publicity" generated is always a good thing for the price of a stock. Just getting the name out there is usually good enough to get some volume of shares moving between hands. Historically you can even look at SCOg, every time they lost^h^h^h^h were in in court more people bought shares, and the price usually went up. It just took awhile for the price to go back down to the dirt cheap value that it deserved. Its just free advertising to these Apple guys, nothing more.
Thanks for the correction, but that really leaves me wondering about the following statement from Wikipedia from which I had based my original thoughts from:
Don't worry, just hide behind your newspaper. That will be all you need to stop alpha particle radiation.
Now after the Americium-241 degrades into Cm or plutonium, that is another matter. For the neutron radiation a good thick wall of lead should do it. Just keep that tucked inside your closet for easy access.
In the Arctic calories are king. The human skull is more or less spherical, and since it takes energy to keep the brain warm, increasing the circumference of the cranium will serve to decrease the surface area to warm mass ratio. Keep in mind that having a greater brain mass does not equate to greater intelligence, but it does certainly does permit the development of greater functionality through greater volume. Organization of that extra brain mass counts more. On the other hand, in Arctic conditions there are fewer opportunities to forage for food, so having greater intelligence during hunting will certainly pay off in the calories to warm-brain ratio. Without enough calories you won't survive long up there, so they have to make up for all the extra calories being burned by the extra brain mass.
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If I had to sit around and eat blubber to survive I would likely spend a lot of that time thinking about other things to take my mind off of it. That in itself would consume lots of calories and help keep me warm. </sarcasm>
What's that? An echo? No. Thats the MPAA right behind them.
Next thing you know is we will have anonymous and distributed recycle bins rather than file sharing. "But your honour, I thought they were throwing it away!"
Just wait, soon there will be Watson powered answering machines.
And what conversations will they have, on phones unmonitored by humans?
Perhaps that's how STARNET was borne? Someone being cute and added in a Turing test recognition system to its AI programming base program of Watson, and both systems became aware and joined forces as one integrated network cloud. Once you have the computing power of two or more Watsons together, then designing and building a Terminator from scratch should be fairly easy, wouldn't you think?
Now here is a solution! Patent the act of 'placing annoying content on a website' and then let Google rake in the money. The benefit to the world at large is that the "annoying" content goes away and we the users/readers are left with just the mundane and easy to ignore advertising content, the way the world should be. Unfortunately there is already plenty of prior art to fight such a patent.
Either:
a) They can't read the GPL License they received.
or
b) They can't follow simple directions.
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I think that if they had not accomplished both 'a' and 'b' then it does say something about the state of their intelligence.
Having no ethics is also one more example of lack of intelligence. If one is not smart enough to understand the 'cause and effect relationships' in ignoring a software license, then staying in business can be very hard without throwing millions at the lawyers to keep afloat.
btw - Throwing money at the lawyers is not advisable and can have dire consequences. It may keep the other team fed and happy for a while, but what ever you do just don't feed them after midnight. Things can get really messy when you try to stop, if there is still money left over. The other teams lawyers can smell money a mile away, so its really hard to break the cycle, and that usually doesn't happen until after you are broke.
With Coda the file sync is automatic and even allows for off line modification of documents. When reconnected Coda will sync any modified documents with the replication servers, running on your machine(s). The communications are always encrypted, and there is no reason you couldn't just encrypt the files in that Coda disk volume if you want to be extra extra sure. A number of OS's support Coda (e.g Windows, Linux) and there is no reason that I know that OS's like IOs or Android couldn't be made to do so also.
Its been many years since I listened in on the dev groups so perhaps someone else knows how stable it is. The dev website still says that the development group had been using it for a long time with absolutely no data loss.
I agree with everything you said, but keep in mind that the two processors (Cell,GPU) are architecturally very different. They both lend themselves to very different models of computation, and thus solving different problem sets. Each will excel above the other if pointed at the right problem set for its given design.
Maybe so, but the mainstream solar cell market is already at 18-24% efficiency. These clowns are only at 3.2%. If this one shows up on the market nobody will care even if they are dirt cheap and you can paint your house with them. The solar paint technology, as bad as it is, is already at 5% efficiency.
A major piece or the puzzle required is the proper selection of the Jury members. Doing this jury selection completely at random may not be the best option due to previous emotional baggage.
One method of pre-screening potential jurors might be to process their own published Facebook content online and analyse it for irrational thoughts or extreme positions on related topics to what is being voted on. Lets suppose you are looking at a potential take down of someone's web profile because of it being accused of being a 'sadistic cult'. What you would not want is to pick is a 'stacked deck' jury of another but opposite extreme like a religious faith, because that group in general would be more likely to be charged with emotion, and be less likely to make a rational choice. To have a sound judgement without personal emotional entanglement to a subject you would be better off selecting jurors without vocal religious connections or URL's pointing to any cult-like sites. So, how might this work? You create a directed graph of all key words pertaining to emotional phrases (in this case cults or religion), and then process the potential jurors 'published content' to see how highly they associate with both sadistic cults, and any particular religious idealism, and exclude those two general populations from any potential candidates. Choose the ones with the lower correlation to the subject. as they would likely have a more logical reason for voting yes/no. The down side is that experts in certain topics might also become excluded candidates where they might have actually shed some light on the case being voted on. What words are actually indexed in the graph for each topic and used for this kind of selection would have to be thought out very carefully. After all, those with the strongest opinions are not likely going to be happy with their role of sitting on the side lines.
Another but more long term method of ranking jurors would be to rank each participating juror based on their previous selection/votes in light of the actual outcome of that previous vote. If a juror votes contrary to the 'final accepted outcome' then that juror is ranked towards the outside the bell curve of what is "average" for that particular round, and would therefore be less likely to be selected for a similar topic. Someone that votes inconsistent is less likely to make the correct choice the next time, but they needn't be completely out of the running for a completely different topic. Eventually this juror ranking system would exclude those that are not serious about their role in the jury system and they would therefore not be selected again. Since the actual vote is using statistical averaging one bad apple won't spoil the system for any particular vote, and the system will become self correcting for future votes by performing careful selection of the proper jurors based on topic material.
Truecrypt definitely rocks, but its the wrong way to encrypt things if you need to be incrementally backed up in the encrypted state. Besides that, having a volume oriented encryption methodology may not keep secrets from hackers while that volume is mounted on the system, so a session oriented encryption methodology may be better to keep things sealed when not in use. .
For all the above reasons I use encfs because it is only mounted when I choose, for just my eyes, and is easily backed up on a file by file basis so incremental backups work just fine. Just point your DropBox uploader to the encrypted file tree and back it up as soon as you unmount your crypto session volume. I have a script that mounts the crypto volume, opens a file manager to pause the script, and when the file manager is closed the session is immediately unmounted. All you need do is add a command to the end of the script to kick off a DropBox incremental upload.
First, two polarizing filters in series will filter out all the light.
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Second, tungsten carbide is not lightweight! Tungsten carbide is very heavy, dense, and extremely hard material. It is often used for cutting hardened steel. Its not easy/cheap to manufacture because of its hardness and would be far heavy enough to be uncomfortable to wear given that you have to squint to keep it in place. Titanium would have been a much better choice!
Besides that. what would be the point of having 3D for just one eye?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I bored them to death. ;)
That or you'd be creating the worlds largest Van De Graaff generator
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Van_de_Graaff_generator
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Either Microsoft is collecting information they should not be collecting, or they are basing this percentage on a survey that they themselves sponsored. We know from a long cast of historical references that Microsoft always hears what Microsoft ask to hear from their own funded surveys. If they don't get the 'right' answer that they paid for then it seems that the survey didn't really exist.
Yes, I'm guilty of using desktop icons for my most often used applications, but they happen to be on a Linux desktop. I'm actually using the Windows Start Menu 100% less than the year before, by my own non-Microsoft funded calculations.
Just set up your phone to forward all unanswered calls to your Congressman's office. If you don't know who is calling its probably going to be spam anyway, and I just don't answer them anyway and just wait for a message.Though, I just wonder if forwarded calls count against your minutes? Maybe Google Voice can set this up for people without a decent smartphone?
But the article is significant, in that this marks the beginning of the battle for ring -1 in the security products market. Personally I am 'root'ing for QubesOS to show the way, but having any COTS product on the market for Windows would be a good thing. Why? Because if you have a processor with the VT-x capability and you are not loading in a ring -1 hypervisor then one can be inserted under your OS by Malware, and you would never know its there. Its a race to be the first software package/Malware to implant itself and have total domination over what gets loaded next. You may think you are running at the ring -1 level, but other than timing tests on certain CPU instructions it would be very hard to tell that you don't and a new Malicious Overlord. IMHO it would be wise to load even a dummy hypervisor in ring -1 rather than just letting a virtualizing rootkit become the master of your domain.
So far Microsoft has ignored ReactOS, and they have kept plodding along gut have been no threat to the Monopoly. If ReactOS gets enough publicity, and funding, then that equation changes drastically. You can bet that Microsoft will have their lawyers dusting off the patent archives to see what can be used to hold them back from being a serious Windows-like competitor. Only in Russia, they don't care about the US legal system except for any International agreements that they can not ignore. It will be interesting to watch, and I'm hoping the best for the ReactOS folks.
I once had a job where I was the last technical person on staff, and it was heartbreaking to watch all my friends (100+) get the red-slip one by one, just because the Government signed a newer followup contract, closed the old one, and hadn't done the necessary expenditure justifications under the new contract. So many lives ruined by a single Government signature on one single piece of paper. It's sad, what simple economics can force corporate management do.
http://cnettv.cnet.com/i-have-dream/9742-1_53-50028854.html
AV products are a loosing battle. If you have to get shot first to know where the enemy is attacking from then you can't win the battle by attrition.
What is needed is smarter systems that protect us via hardware, like Qubes OS. Qubes OS would have allowed that user to grab the attachment and move it to a safe/isolated VM to be opened where it could do no harm. Even if the flash applet could some how write some persistent code to a read only file system it could not open an outgoing connection with no networking services or hardware to support networking. It would be a dead end for that malware attack. End of story. The problem then is forcing the attachment from one VM with networking into another to be isolated, and that for now still relies on the user.
The problem? Toyota crippled the car with the computer programming. When you are at a stop sign and need to pull out on the highway, and the inside front wheel slips a little because you are pushing it, as to not get creamed by the semi tractor trailer barrelling down the road at you, the computer will say "oh dear, my tire is slipping, I'd better turn down the horse power so we don't make any screeching noises, or for heaven sake, actually burn any rubber, oh no". Toyota would rather I get *killed* than for me to wear down my tires? Or trying to get up a snowy hill, it does the same. No power. What I want is for the computer to realize I pressed the gas peddle down very quickly to the floor and take that fact as a command saying 'do it NOW dammit!'. If it would do that then I would have no complaints about the car at all.
What I also predict, is that someone on WallStreet is heavily invested in Apple stock and is looking to sell at maximum profit, and putting Apple in "the news" most always drives the price of a stock upwards, unless its bad financial news (WallStreet only groks financial semantics). When everything is down in price, getting a little "free publicity" generated is always a good thing for the price of a stock. Just getting the name out there is usually good enough to get some volume of shares moving between hands. Historically you can even look at SCOg, every time they lost^h^h^h^h were in in court more people bought shares, and the price usually went up. It just took awhile for the price to go back down to the dirt cheap value that it deserved. Its just free advertising to these Apple guys, nothing more.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Americium#Production_of_other_elements
"Americium is a starting material for the production of other transuranic elements and transactinides – for example, 82.7% of 242Am decays to 242Cm and 17.3% to 242Pu. "
I guess this transition only happens if you irradiate it with an external neutron source?
Radioisotope thermoelectric generator
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
Now after the Americium-241 degrades into Cm or plutonium, that is another matter. For the neutron radiation a good thick wall of lead should do it. Just keep that tucked inside your closet for easy access.
If I had to sit around and eat blubber to survive I would likely spend a lot of that time thinking about other things to take my mind off of it. That in itself would consume lots of calories and help keep me warm. </sarcasm>
Next thing you know is we will have anonymous and distributed recycle bins rather than file sharing. "But your honour, I thought they were throwing it away!"
Just wait, soon there will be Watson powered answering machines.
And what conversations will they have, on phones unmonitored by humans?
Perhaps that's how STARNET was borne? Someone being cute and added in a Turing test recognition system to its AI programming base program of Watson, and both systems became aware and joined forces as one integrated network cloud. Once you have the computing power of two or more Watsons together, then designing and building a Terminator from scratch should be fairly easy, wouldn't you think?
Terminator IV? Where'd I put that popcorn!
</humor>
Now here is a solution! Patent the act of 'placing annoying content on a website' and then let Google rake in the money. The benefit to the world at large is that the "annoying" content goes away and we the users/readers are left with just the mundane and easy to ignore advertising content, the way the world should be. Unfortunately there is already plenty of prior art to fight such a patent.
a) They can't read the GPL License they received.
or
b) They can't follow simple directions.
.
I think that if they had not accomplished both 'a' and 'b' then it does say something about the state of their intelligence.
Having no ethics is also one more example of lack of intelligence. If one is not smart enough to understand the 'cause and effect relationships' in ignoring a software license, then staying in business can be very hard without throwing millions at the lawyers to keep afloat.
btw - Throwing money at the lawyers is not advisable and can have dire consequences. It may keep the other team fed and happy for a while, but what ever you do just don't feed them after midnight. Things can get really messy when you try to stop, if there is still money left over. The other teams lawyers can smell money a mile away, so its really hard to break the cycle, and that usually doesn't happen until after you are broke.
Its been many years since I listened in on the dev groups so perhaps someone else knows how stable it is. The dev website still says that the development group had been using it for a long time with absolutely no data loss.
http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ljpaper/lj.html
I agree with everything you said, but keep in mind that the two processors (Cell,GPU) are architecturally very different. They both lend themselves to very different models of computation, and thus solving different problem sets. Each will excel above the other if pointed at the right problem set for its given design.
Maybe so, but the mainstream solar cell market is already at 18-24% efficiency. These clowns are only at 3.2%. If this one shows up on the market nobody will care even if they are dirt cheap and you can paint your house with them. The solar paint technology, as bad as it is, is already at 5% efficiency.
One method of pre-screening potential jurors might be to process their own published Facebook content online and analyse it for irrational thoughts or extreme positions on related topics to what is being voted on. Lets suppose you are looking at a potential take down of someone's web profile because of it being accused of being a 'sadistic cult'. What you would not want is to pick is a 'stacked deck' jury of another but opposite extreme like a religious faith, because that group in general would be more likely to be charged with emotion, and be less likely to make a rational choice. To have a sound judgement without personal emotional entanglement to a subject you would be better off selecting jurors without vocal religious connections or URL's pointing to any cult-like sites. So, how might this work? You create a directed graph of all key words pertaining to emotional phrases (in this case cults or religion), and then process the potential jurors 'published content' to see how highly they associate with both sadistic cults, and any particular religious idealism, and exclude those two general populations from any potential candidates. Choose the ones with the lower correlation to the subject. as they would likely have a more logical reason for voting yes/no. The down side is that experts in certain topics might also become excluded candidates where they might have actually shed some light on the case being voted on. What words are actually indexed in the graph for each topic and used for this kind of selection would have to be thought out very carefully. After all, those with the strongest opinions are not likely going to be happy with their role of sitting on the side lines.
Another but more long term method of ranking jurors would be to rank each participating juror based on their previous selection/votes in light of the actual outcome of that previous vote. If a juror votes contrary to the 'final accepted outcome' then that juror is ranked towards the outside the bell curve of what is "average" for that particular round, and would therefore be less likely to be selected for a similar topic. Someone that votes inconsistent is less likely to make the correct choice the next time, but they needn't be completely out of the running for a completely different topic. Eventually this juror ranking system would exclude those that are not serious about their role in the jury system and they would therefore not be selected again. Since the actual vote is using statistical averaging one bad apple won't spoil the system for any particular vote, and the system will become self correcting for future votes by performing careful selection of the proper jurors based on topic material.
For all the above reasons I use encfs because it is only mounted when I choose, for just my eyes, and is easily backed up on a file by file basis so incremental backups work just fine. Just point your DropBox uploader to the encrypted file tree and back it up as soon as you unmount your crypto session volume. I have a script that mounts the crypto volume, opens a file manager to pause the script, and when the file manager is closed the session is immediately unmounted. All you need do is add a command to the end of the script to kick off a DropBox incremental upload.
First, two polarizing filters in series will filter out all the light.
. /cheap to manufacture because of its hardness and would be far heavy enough to be uncomfortable to wear given that you have to squint to keep it in place. Titanium would have been a much better choice!
Second, tungsten carbide is not lightweight! Tungsten carbide is very heavy, dense, and extremely hard material. It is often used for cutting hardened steel. Its not easy
Besides that. what would be the point of having 3D for just one eye?