China has declared the Internet to be 'the crystallization of human wisdom'
So the Chinese Government finally admits that they are officially acting on behalf of and protecting their general population from wisdom. Heaven knows that the Chinese Government is the defacto expert on that very subject, and are no doubt the most practised in the art of 'head in the sand policy' of any society.
A previous car of mine stopped running the day after its warranty expired. Coincidence? While taking that loooong walk home I stopped by the post office, and would you believe I had an advertisement to buy a brand new car from the same dealership and a "really great deal on ANY trade in, just drive or push it in" for $$$ off the new car price. I replaced the 'computer module' with an after market unit and drove it for 7 more years. You can guess how much future business they got from me.
Tiny malfunctions w Gigawatts of power do go boom
on
Is Cyberwarfare Fiction?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You might lead the casual reader to think that merely throwing a switch has no real world consequences, which is anything but the truth. When you are dealing with systems of such magnitude of energies even the smallest delay in rectifying an issue has a very lasting effect. e.g http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2009/08/17/hydro-electic-power-plant-explosion/ There are any number of ways to force mechanical failures simply by using 'control' software. Any mechanical system can be forced to fail if you know how it is built, and what problems plague the internal design of that system. The US is vulnerable to many such attacks against the control systems (e.g. SCADA ) and these threats should be taken VERY seriously until such time that we know the internal control networks are unreachable from any outside influence. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11465
Gee, what had Comcast done for me lately... Well for one they changed the name of their service to XFINITY, that doesn't seem to help me at all. Then because of the new "upgrades to [my] service" they REMOVED two of our favourite stations that we used to watch, and now they want US to "upgrade" to get those two stations back. That's a lot of "doing more" to me, not for me. Yes, I can see why they have such a low satisfaction rating.
Just wait until some pissed off down-loader hacks an application which takes a Government representatives email address and requests that their own IP's be taken down. I predict a simple point-n-click (input email address, ping/traceroute the @*.gov.ie for IP address(s), then forge email to report them) is bound to happen within three months time of this programs implementation/enforcement. It won't be me, but it will be fun to watch how this misdirected law gets repealed once the Government officers learn how the Internet actually works.
All the agencies/Governments that want that kind of information invest far more time, money, and energy doing the same thing, and they have all their own experts. In fact, the 'sellers' of this kind of information may be 'giving it away for free' and not even know they have been 'visited'. Why pay for what you can get for free?
Well there you go, x86 legacy instruction sets, yet another reason to virtualize your Arduino! If you layer enough software (e.g. http://www.multiplo.org/duinos/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) on top of your project and eventually we will make it secure. Heck, just add a TPM shield, a few million in research grants, and even more libraries and eventually it will be so much safer to use. </sarcasm>
If someone thinks that adding software is going to do much for security in the long run, then go no further than contemplating what happens when your BIOS, chipset, NIC, GPU, or microcode get re-flashed by an adversary running ring0. If the hypervisor is deemed to be ring(-1) then bios should be considered ring(-2). Game over, but then the machine hasn't even started yet. If you are not even in control of your own hardware (e.g DMA, boot strap load vector) then what does your hypervisor really do for security? Yes its better than not having it of course, because it will prevent something like HyperDBG from inserting itself during run time. He who loads first wins, and usually the firmware devices will boot up faster than the main OS will. Timing counts, and they can just sit in memory waiting their own turn. So should we really be using the 'guarantee' word? Likely not, as long as we have human ingenuity we won't have absolute 'garenteed' security.
With the amount of fighting I have had to do with SprintPCS directly I would say going to Best Buy would be well worth it! To get a rebate you need a sales slip, which is never in the package delivered to your door (at least not mine). They don't accept other documentation other than what they list on the MIR forms. The MIR processing itself is handled by an outsourced company that can't or won't look up your Sprint records and absolutely refuses to honour anything as far as I can tell. Ok, once. I have been through this with five phones over the years and so far I have collected on a single phone MIR so far. Next time I'm documenting everything and sending a cc copy of everything to my lawyer. I bet there is a class action suit brewing here somewhere, as I can't be the only one screwed by this again and again. They will have to pull my current phone/contract from my dead or dying hand, or at least they will never get a contract renewal from me until I have the MIR payment in hand *first*. I'm happy with their service over all, but this MIR rejection stuff has got to stop. Don't promise what you won't deliver, please. Sprint, you listening? Hello?
The purpose of the "seeding" in general is to put particulate matter into the clouds that act as nuclei so that the normal water vapour particles condense back out as rain. When each droplet dries there will be nanoscopic particles of salt and diatoms thrust up into the air along with the water vapour. If the salt didn't make it to the clouds then all he is doing is wasting energy, and a lot of it. How much energy does it take to mechanically vaporize "ten tons of water per second"?
The greenhouse effect of the energy expended will probably out-weigh the benefits of reflected IR light from the clouds, because a portion of the CO2 will get distributed above the lower cloud layers being created thus causing a layer of trapped heat above the clouds. When it rains we may feel a little cooler, but don't be fooled, that heat stays up there.
...that comes after ward? Once the salt water rains down and kills half the vegetation how much Elymus mollis (salt tolerant wild rye) are you willing to eat? Hint: to get enough salt into the clouds to do any good in dry areas that need it you are going to move a large quantity of the stuff, and where does it go? Into the poor soils that are had to cultivate. Is there a plan on how to grow plants in wet salty sand? Thought not....
Agreed, I have yet to find a book on Web Programming in ADA, and I doubt if one ever did surface nobody would read it. Those features that make a language secure tend also to make it unpopular.
Well I'm all for tapping into Natures resources providing that it doesn't make too great of an impact on other life on this planet, so lets see if we can tweak this design a little shall we? This could be fun...
Step one, lets confine these contraptions to a smaller segment so we don't collide with as many other living things, such as blue whales. That's also got to hurt the kite so it make s economic sense too providing you can steer wildlife around them. We will just have them fly closer together, but the tethers might tangle, so they must fly in organized formation. A figure 8 is out because they would just twist up their cables, so a circle it is.
Step two; To keep them from diving into the mud on the bottom during storms, and ruining their expensive little turbines, we can join them together on a central hub. Since they are on a central hub we can save weight by using one central generator, no individual cables to tangle, kill, or mame fish, and there will be fewer parts, therefore fewer turbine failures.
Ok, the final design looks like, well..., a big light weight propeller. And if so, how does "improving" on a brand new design bring me back to square one? What is so novel here, and what have they really solved? We have had tidal water turbines on the market for years and I have not seen a single one installed in my area yet. Economically they have just not been able to prove their worth without upsetting too many people about the damage they could do to the local environment. How does a kite solve those same problems and become "more economical" than an "improved design" of the same general technology?
Can't say that I used my ATM card to withdraw the funds, or my debit card to buy all that junk.
I would agree, as the ARM cards, or other pieces of plastic, are only entry/authentication mechanisms to get into the banking network. In this case the perpetrator is working from within the network, and all that is needed to ruin your day is some carefully crafted electrons. No plastic necessary, and no denyability since plastic was not required to empty the account in the first place.
All you need is to have someone mistype/process an electronic check once in your life and you will understand the power of banks to make your life miserable through money transfers. I had a payment mistyped by an operator at another bank and debited from my personal account electronically, where an extra digit was added to the amount paid, putting that transaction at six figures. Yes, I could eventually prove I didn't approve any payments for that amount, but in the mean time that account was drained and my savings account was then held hostage by my own bank as well because the checking account ran under. All that happened electronically with no plastic, and no physical paper involved. All that is needed is for someone to make a change to a database record with the destination being another bank not under your control. Yes you might eventually prove your case and have the money returned (insured fdic?), but who actually pays for the missing funds? Hint; its not likely to be the guy in Russia that actually took it.
May I ask how using a live teller keeps someone else from empting out your bank account electronically? After all, you can't prove a negative. You simply can't prove you did not use a machine unless you are lucky enough to be out of town at the time your account was emptied out. But even that does not work if the transaction was electronic and from somewhere other than a physical ATM. We are talking about rootkits on ATM's that by definition have a direct connection into your banking system, and no doubt have a way to export whatever information they want from it.
Granted, the fact that the ATM will not be given the opportunity to capture your personal pin code is a step in the right direction, but having a corrupt hacker on the inside of your banking network cant be good for your bottom line either. There are security vulnerabilities in ALL computer systems and if a hacker has a foothold inside the network proper the rest of the system can fall like dominoes if the bank is naive enough to think they are safe from such an exploit.
Matlab utilizes a copy-on-write algorithm, so the overhead is not as bad as one might first think if you understand the principals. Just because you have to explicitly pass the matrix into and out of a function does not mean that the whole thing was copied. It is only copied if you changed its data within the function. In Matlab, writing lots of little functions that allow changes to a matrix would be 'the bad way' to do things, so one must carefully think about what functions should and should not have operations that permute the data passed into it if you want both speed of execution and lower memory requirements.
SCO: Your honour, we need those Copyrights so we can protect the owners rights against all the evil-doers out there.
Judge: But Novell is the owner, the Jury just decided that.
SCO: But without the Copyrights we can't run our business! That's why you need to give the Copyrights to US, so we can protect all that valuable IP. If Novell isn't going to do it, somebody needs to!
Yes but can they do it without copying Migranes?
on
How To Grow a Head
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They could make a fortune on that technology, but the problem is how to transition to the new one gracefully?
With Microsoft Bing servers running on Apple processors? (Note: Microsoft job ads recently run asked for ARM processor aware Admins). This will be interesting.
Blame it on Tobias Learhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Lear_VTobiasLearVTobias Lear. He was Washingtons' personal secretary at the time. Are not the secretaries held accountable for managing the affairs of presidents?
No, I didn't mean THAT kind of affair!! A President would never do that kind of thing would they?
Seems pretty clear to me. No stars,..no supernova's,..no condensed matter,..no planets,..no life as we know it. Short of some kind of bizarre plasma based lifeforms you could not expect to find ET. I think I will stay out of that part of the Universe just the same.
I have to wonder what exactly they expect to measure with such a device. The premise of the Penning trap device is to use a static magnetic field (magnets) and an electric field (electric circuits) to cap the ends of the device to contain the super cooled, in this case beryllium ions. In order to "measure" external electric fields one has to let in external electromagnetic radiation, which will not come without having some overall effects on the containment vessel and circuitry as well. With external electromagnetic radiation power propagating at r^2 the vessel will get more of a dose than the beryllium ions and the electric field will have some level of modulation which will in turn make the ions vibrate in the axial direction based on the reactance of the containment circuitry, not the primary waveform desired to be measured. Yes, you will measure vibrations at the quantum level, but are you really measuring what you think you are? The device is likely so sensitive that due to the uncertainty principal it may defy us the ability to prove what is actually being measured.
They would likely be flying above the clouds, if possible, so rain would not matter much, except for avoiding the major storms. The flight characteristics are likely similar to the http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-034-DFRC.html Pathfinder but with battery technology and materials improvements they will do better than the 14-15 hours aloft of pathfinder. Their nighttime flight was limited to 2-5 hours, likely due to the battery technology of the day. The trade off with this plane is that it also has to carry a passenger which likely more that makes up for the lighter batteries available today.
One reason Bob didn't sell is that it never made it to version 3.0. Most every product Microsoft has ever marketed was a flop until version 3.x where either the people woke up and realized its value, or Mr G found a way to entice the users to try it (i.e. twist their arms a little by preventing them from buying a machine without it).
Actually this product was focused on a market segment (children) who don't generally buy computers in the first place. While many of them may be quick to pull out their plastic to make a purchase on a whim, what plastic they did have was kind of soggy and didn't carry much buying power. The high tech Mom and Dad who did think that their child should learn using expensive computer technology in those days didn't exactly fancy the idea of buying a 'cartoon like machine' for their children either.
With my luck the new 'Windows Control Room API 1.1' will be written in C# in such a way that it will be completely incompatible with my third party FusionReactor.so.6 that I have been happy with for so long. I bet the EU won't be happy about this either, that is unless M$ adds yet another selection to the Win9,10,11 'power control thermal isolation unit' installation menu. At least that way we can all have a 'level playing field' without going completely nuclear over this anti-standards compliance business tactic. We simply can not afford to have another ISO 'Embrace, Extend, and *Extinguish*' episode like the last one. </sarcasm>
Slashdot Mirror
So the Chinese Government finally admits that they are officially acting on behalf of and protecting their general population from wisdom. Heaven knows that the Chinese Government is the defacto expert on that very subject, and are no doubt the most practised in the art of 'head in the sand policy' of any society.
A previous car of mine stopped running the day after its warranty expired. Coincidence? While taking that loooong walk home I stopped by the post office, and would you believe I had an advertisement to buy a brand new car from the same dealership and a "really great deal on ANY trade in, just drive or push it in" for $$$ off the new car price. I replaced the 'computer module' with an after market unit and drove it for 7 more years. You can guess how much future business they got from me.
You might lead the casual reader to think that merely throwing a switch has no real world consequences, which is anything but the truth. When you are dealing with systems of such magnitude of energies even the smallest delay in rectifying an issue has a very lasting effect. e.g http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2009/08/17/hydro-electic-power-plant-explosion/ There are any number of ways to force mechanical failures simply by using 'control' software. Any mechanical system can be forced to fail if you know how it is built, and what problems plague the internal design of that system. The US is vulnerable to many such attacks against the control systems (e.g. SCADA ) and these threats should be taken VERY seriously until such time that we know the internal control networks are unreachable from any outside influence. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11465
Gee, what had Comcast done for me lately... Well for one they changed the name of their service to XFINITY, that doesn't seem to help me at all. Then because of the new "upgrades to [my] service" they REMOVED two of our favourite stations that we used to watch, and now they want US to "upgrade" to get those two stations back. That's a lot of "doing more" to me, not for me. Yes, I can see why they have such a low satisfaction rating.
Just wait until some pissed off down-loader hacks an application which takes a Government representatives email address and requests that their own IP's be taken down. I predict a simple point-n-click (input email address, ping/traceroute the @*.gov.ie for IP address(s), then forge email to report them) is bound to happen within three months time of this programs implementation/enforcement. It won't be me, but it will be fun to watch how this misdirected law gets repealed once the Government officers learn how the Internet actually works.
All the agencies/Governments that want that kind of information invest far more time, money, and energy doing the same thing, and they have all their own experts. In fact, the 'sellers' of this kind of information may be 'giving it away for free' and not even know they have been 'visited'. Why pay for what you can get for free?
If someone thinks that adding software is going to do much for security in the long run, then go no further than contemplating what happens when your BIOS, chipset, NIC, GPU, or microcode get re-flashed by an adversary running ring0. If the hypervisor is deemed to be ring(-1) then bios should be considered ring(-2). Game over, but then the machine hasn't even started yet. If you are not even in control of your own hardware (e.g DMA, boot strap load vector) then what does your hypervisor really do for security? Yes its better than not having it of course, because it will prevent something like HyperDBG from inserting itself during run time. He who loads first wins, and usually the firmware devices will boot up faster than the main OS will. Timing counts, and they can just sit in memory waiting their own turn. So should we really be using the 'guarantee' word? Likely not, as long as we have human ingenuity we won't have absolute 'garenteed' security.
Take a look here. http://qubes-os.org/Home.html
With the amount of fighting I have had to do with SprintPCS directly I would say going to Best Buy would be well worth it! To get a rebate you need a sales slip, which is never in the package delivered to your door (at least not mine). They don't accept other documentation other than what they list on the MIR forms. The MIR processing itself is handled by an outsourced company that can't or won't look up your Sprint records and absolutely refuses to honour anything as far as I can tell. Ok, once. I have been through this with five phones over the years and so far I have collected on a single phone MIR so far. Next time I'm documenting everything and sending a cc copy of everything to my lawyer. I bet there is a class action suit brewing here somewhere, as I can't be the only one screwed by this again and again. They will have to pull my current phone/contract from my dead or dying hand, or at least they will never get a contract renewal from me until I have the MIR payment in hand *first*. I'm happy with their service over all, but this MIR rejection stuff has got to stop. Don't promise what you won't deliver, please. Sprint, you listening? Hello?
The greenhouse effect of the energy expended will probably out-weigh the benefits of reflected IR light from the clouds, because a portion of the CO2 will get distributed above the lower cloud layers being created thus causing a layer of trapped heat above the clouds. When it rains we may feel a little cooler, but don't be fooled, that heat stays up there.
Cloud Seeding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
Even if the intent is to have the water vapour stay up there you still have to factor in the "normal" effects of cloud seeding.
...that comes after ward? Once the salt water rains down and kills half the vegetation how much Elymus mollis (salt tolerant wild rye) are you willing to eat? Hint: to get enough salt into the clouds to do any good in dry areas that need it you are going to move a large quantity of the stuff, and where does it go? Into the poor soils that are had to cultivate. Is there a plan on how to grow plants in wet salty sand? Thought not....
Agreed, I have yet to find a book on Web Programming in ADA, and I doubt if one ever did surface nobody would read it. Those features that make a language secure tend also to make it unpopular.
Step one, lets confine these contraptions to a smaller segment so we don't collide with as many other living things, such as blue whales. That's also got to hurt the kite so it make s economic sense too providing you can steer wildlife around them. We will just have them fly closer together, but the tethers might tangle, so they must fly in organized formation. A figure 8 is out because they would just twist up their cables, so a circle it is.
Step two; To keep them from diving into the mud on the bottom during storms, and ruining their expensive little turbines, we can join them together on a central hub. Since they are on a central hub we can save weight by using one central generator, no individual cables to tangle, kill, or mame fish, and there will be fewer parts, therefore fewer turbine failures.
Ok, the final design looks like, well..., a big light weight propeller. And if so, how does "improving" on a brand new design bring me back to square one? What is so novel here, and what have they really solved? We have had tidal water turbines on the market for years and I have not seen a single one installed in my area yet. Economically they have just not been able to prove their worth without upsetting too many people about the damage they could do to the local environment. How does a kite solve those same problems and become "more economical" than an "improved design" of the same general technology?
I would agree, as the ARM cards, or other pieces of plastic, are only entry/authentication mechanisms to get into the banking network. In this case the perpetrator is working from within the network, and all that is needed to ruin your day is some carefully crafted electrons. No plastic necessary, and no denyability since plastic was not required to empty the account in the first place.
All you need is to have someone mistype/process an electronic check once in your life and you will understand the power of banks to make your life miserable through money transfers. I had a payment mistyped by an operator at another bank and debited from my personal account electronically, where an extra digit was added to the amount paid, putting that transaction at six figures. Yes, I could eventually prove I didn't approve any payments for that amount, but in the mean time that account was drained and my savings account was then held hostage by my own bank as well because the checking account ran under. All that happened electronically with no plastic, and no physical paper involved. All that is needed is for someone to make a change to a database record with the destination being another bank not under your control. Yes you might eventually prove your case and have the money returned (insured fdic?), but who actually pays for the missing funds? Hint; its not likely to be the guy in Russia that actually took it.
Granted, the fact that the ATM will not be given the opportunity to capture your personal pin code is a step in the right direction, but having a corrupt hacker on the inside of your banking network cant be good for your bottom line either. There are security vulnerabilities in ALL computer systems and if a hacker has a foothold inside the network proper the rest of the system can fall like dominoes if the bank is naive enough to think they are safe from such an exploit.
Matlab utilizes a copy-on-write algorithm, so the overhead is not as bad as one might first think if you understand the principals. Just because you have to explicitly pass the matrix into and out of a function does not mean that the whole thing was copied. It is only copied if you changed its data within the function. In Matlab, writing lots of little functions that allow changes to a matrix would be 'the bad way' to do things, so one must carefully think about what functions should and should not have operations that permute the data passed into it if you want both speed of execution and lower memory requirements.
SCO: Your honour, we need those Copyrights so we can protect the owners rights against all the evil-doers out there.
Judge: But Novell is the owner, the Jury just decided that.
SCO: But without the Copyrights we can't run our business! That's why you need to give the Copyrights to US, so we can protect all that valuable IP. If Novell isn't going to do it, somebody needs to!
They could make a fortune on that technology, but the problem is how to transition to the new one gracefully?
With Microsoft Bing servers running on Apple processors? (Note: Microsoft job ads recently run asked for ARM processor aware Admins). This will be interesting.
No, I didn't mean THAT kind of affair!! A President would never do that kind of thing would they?
Seems pretty clear to me. No stars, ..no supernova's, ..no condensed matter, ..no planets, ..no life as we know it. Short of some kind of bizarre plasma based lifeforms you could not expect to find ET. I think I will stay out of that part of the Universe just the same.
I have to wonder what exactly they expect to measure with such a device. The premise of the Penning trap device is to use a static magnetic field (magnets) and an electric field (electric circuits) to cap the ends of the device to contain the super cooled, in this case beryllium ions. In order to "measure" external electric fields one has to let in external electromagnetic radiation, which will not come without having some overall effects on the containment vessel and circuitry as well. With external electromagnetic radiation power propagating at r^2 the vessel will get more of a dose than the beryllium ions and the electric field will have some level of modulation which will in turn make the ions vibrate in the axial direction based on the reactance of the containment circuitry, not the primary waveform desired to be measured. Yes, you will measure vibrations at the quantum level, but are you really measuring what you think you are? The device is likely so sensitive that due to the uncertainty principal it may defy us the ability to prove what is actually being measured.
They would likely be flying above the clouds, if possible, so rain would not matter much, except for avoiding the major storms. The flight characteristics are likely similar to the http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-034-DFRC.html Pathfinder but with battery technology and materials improvements they will do better than the 14-15 hours aloft of pathfinder. Their nighttime flight was limited to 2-5 hours, likely due to the battery technology of the day. The trade off with this plane is that it also has to carry a passenger which likely more that makes up for the lighter batteries available today.
Actually this product was focused on a market segment (children) who don't generally buy computers in the first place. While many of them may be quick to pull out their plastic to make a purchase on a whim, what plastic they did have was kind of soggy and didn't carry much buying power. The high tech Mom and Dad who did think that their child should learn using expensive computer technology in those days didn't exactly fancy the idea of buying a 'cartoon like machine' for their children either.
With my luck the new 'Windows Control Room API 1.1' will be written in C# in such a way that it will be completely incompatible with my third party FusionReactor.so.6 that I have been happy with for so long. I bet the EU won't be happy about this either, that is unless M$ adds yet another selection to the Win9,10,11 'power control thermal isolation unit' installation menu. At least that way we can all have a 'level playing field' without going completely nuclear over this anti-standards compliance business tactic. We simply can not afford to have another ISO 'Embrace, Extend, and *Extinguish*' episode like the last one. </sarcasm>