Posted by samzenpus (48% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control have now developed a scheme for protecting implantable medical devices against wireless attacks. The approach relies on using ultrasound waves to determine the exact distance between a medical device and the wireless reader attempting to communicate with it.” I had no idea that things have gotten so bad that hearts are being hacked.

From someone with an implant.. - by skgrey (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
I have a spinal implant, which is basically an implanted tens-unit, that I use to block the pain from the degenerative disease I have. Although the device has a top level setting, it still hurts if I crank it up that far. If someone was able to remotely turn on my device and turn the intensity up and shorten the waveform they could bring me to my knees. If I couldn’t turn it off I’d be in some serious trouble, since I couldn’t flee.  
 
As much as it’s not life-threatening in my case, it’s still pretty damn scary. I can’t imagine having a pacemaker that could be disrupted remotely. Although talk about a great tool for the CIA for remote-kills.

Hearts Being Hacked - by BJ_Covert_Action (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Well the article talks about how the threats have been demonstrated in the lab by a fella named Kevin Fu, but it doesn’t mention it being a major problem right now:

So this defense seems primarily like foresight rather than a hindsight, “Shit fixitfixitfixtfixit!” moment…So in response to your pondering, I don’t think too many hearts are being hacked right now, nor that things have gotten that bad. Rather, it just seems like two security researchers are doing their job to keep the defensive actions one step ahead of offensive actions…

Re:No Locked Hardware! - by iamacat (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

If your life, health and well being depends on being able to tune the device, having DRMed firmware would suck pretty badly. If some doctor tunes the pacemaker to enable short burst higher rates so that, for example, I can climb a flight of stairs comfortably, I should have a right to install the update.

Re:No Locked Hardware! - by jpmorgan (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
These are implantable medical devices we’re talking about. Forget DRM, to achieve the kind of world you’re dreaming of would require a massive overhaul of the medical regulatory system. Personally, I question the wisdom of a world where patients can replace firmware on their medical devices with stuff they find on the internet. The medical profession frowns upon self medication for a reason.

Hacking hearts - by devnullkac (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

If I could hack her heart, she’d really love me…

Posted by timothy (68% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “If you buy a smartphone through Verizon, be prepared for an increase in the early termination fee. Verizon is doubling the phone-subsidy to $350. What’s more, is that Verizon also actively charges customers for accidental data transmissions of as little as 0.02kb. ‘They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch ‘Get it now’ or ‘Mobile Web’—usually a single key like an arrow key. […] The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn’t matter; they’ve told me that ANY data—even one kilobyte—is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.’”

Verizon: “there’s a scam for that”. - by argent (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Don’t want to use the data service? There’s a scam for that. Want to upgrade your phone? There’s a scam for that. No matter what you want to do, we’ll get your money. Because there’s a scam for that.

Termination Fees - by MozeeToby (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I understand, on principle why they charge early termination fees. $350 for a smartphone seems extreme, but taking the new Droid for example, the phone costs $550 without a plan and the customer gets it for $200 which is right in line. What doesn’t make sense is the fact that if I cancel my contract 1 year and 11 months in, I’m expected to pay the whole termination fee, despite the fact that Verizon has already made back $335 of it. That’s just abussive. Termination fees should be proportional to the amount of the contract you are terminating and capped at the amount of subsidization on the phone.

Re:Termination Fees - by ircmaxell (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
This one is proportional… $10 per month IIRC… So if you canceled 23 months in, you’d only owe $105.

Re:It’s not just a “phone subsidy.” - by Jthon (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The problem for me isn’t that they have ETF fees, in fact given most phones have a subsidy I under stand that. My problem is that you cannot sign a contract without an ETF even if you provide your own phone. On top of that if you buy a phone without a subsidy it’s not like you can negotiate a service discount with Verizon. You pay the same amount in either case and that’s not really fair.

If Verizon actually cared about the customer they would offer a choice of the following two plan options.

1. Subsidized phone, contract, and ETF. You pay for you phone over the life of your contract, basically you’re leasing the phone.

2. Unsubsidized phone, no contract, no ETF, discounted plan rate. You buy the phone outright since you paid full price for it you should save the difference between the price you paid and the subsidized price over the same length of time as the contract from option 1.

In fact at one point I was going to sign up for a plan with Verizon and bring my own phone, but even if I didn’t get a new phone from them to setup new service I had to agree to a 1 year contract which included an ETF. There was NO way to avoid the contract.

This entire subsidy and ETF thing on your phone reminds me of old MA Bell. Before the original AT&T got broken up due to being a monopoly it wasn’t actually possible for you to buy a telephone. You HAD to lease the phone from the phone company, and the phone company owned your phone. You basically got whatever phone Ma Bell wanted you to have. Cellphone companies are in that position now. While they say you “buy” your phone, you’re really leasing it with no option to truly own it. If these companies were forced to offer a choice of phones, and didn’t have these crazy contracts to hide behind I’m sure the cost of cellphone handsets would drop along through real competition.

Re:It’s not just a “phone subsidy.” - by tcc3 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You would be right if the contract actually worked both ways. If you have problem with your service, or a billing dispute, or any of a number of other problems, their answer is likely to be “Too bad.”

The customer is left with two choices - a very costly and unlikely to succeed lawsuit, or to walk. Taking your business elsewhere is sometimes the only effective protest against a corporate bully.

Posted by timothy (50% noise) View Skip
nam37 writes with this BoingBoing snippet “The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town’s municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA’s spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts).”

Geneva Conventions - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Hate to be pedantic.. but the fourth Geneva Convention (which OP was referring to) sets forth protection for civilians in times of war. Last I checked, there is not a war going on in Coshocton, OH and the MPAA is not a sovereign authority (as much as it might like to be). I always cringe when people reference the Geneva Conventions like this in such an overly dramatic and misrepresentation way.

Re:Geneva Conventions - by vekrander (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

So the MPAA is clearly then allowed to treat civilians worse than people being occupied in wartime by any country that has signed the Geneva Convention?

Re:Geneva Conventions - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Incidentally, this is why cops get to use chemical weapons and soldiers don’t…

Wasn’t the MPAA who shut down the network - by Saxerman (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Wow, talk about misrepresenting the facts. I hate the way the MPAA is using copyright law as much as the next digital rights activist. But, for the record, the MPAA didn’t take down the network. They just sent their usual infringement notice to the ISP, who then forwarded it on to Coshocton County. The county then made the decision to shut down the wifi service, they weren’t ordered to by any judge or MPAA executive/lawyer/asshat.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=117273

Re:Wasn’t the MPAA who shut down the network - by pavon (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

No, it’s an example of elected officials doing their job poorly. 
Deciding to which public services the county does and does not want to offer is a legitimate function of government. Choosing to end one is not a “punishment”.

Posted by timothy (69% noise) View Skip
grmoc writes “As part of the ‘Let’s make the web faster’ initiative, we (a few engineers — including me! — at Google, and hopefully people all across the community soon!) are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of Web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced ‘SPeeDY’), an application-layer protocol (essentially a shim between HTTP and the bits on the wire) for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a rough specification for the protocol, we have hacked SPDY into the Google Chrome browser (because it’s what we’re familiar with) and a simple server testbed. Using these hacked up bits, we compared the performance of many of the top 25 and top 300 websites over both HTTP and SPDY, and have observed those pages load, on average, about twice as fast using SPDY. Thats not bad! We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code (we’ve open sourced the protocol, etc!), and test results.”

While we’re at it … - by RAMMS%2BEIN (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

While we’re at it, let’s also make processing web pages faster.

We have a semantic language (HTML) and a language that describes how to present that (CSS), right? This is good, let’s keep it that way.

But things aren’t as good as they could be. On the semantic side, we have many elements in the language that don’t really convey any semantic information, and a lot of semantics there isn’t an element for. On the presentation side, well, suffice it to say that there are a _lot_ of things that cannot be done, and others that can be done, but only with ugly kludges. Meanwhile, processing and rendering HTML and CSS takes a lot of resources.

Here is my proposal:

  - For the semantics, let’s introduce an extensible language. Imagine it as a sort of programming language, where the standard library has elements for common things like paragraphs, hyperlinks, headings, etc. and there are additional libraries which add more specialized elements, e.g. there could be a library for web fora (or blogs, if you prefer), a library for screenshot galleries, etc.

  - For the presentation, let’s introduce something that actually supports the features of the presentation medium. For example, for presentation on desktop operating systems, you would have support for things like buttons and checkboxes, fonts, drawing primitives, and events like keypresses and mouse clicks. Again, this should be a modular system, where you can, for example, have a library to implement the look of your website, which you can then re-use in all your pages.

  - Introduce a standard for the distribution of the various modules, to facilitate re-use (no having to download a huge library on every page load).

  - It could be beneficial to define both a textual, human readable form and a binary form that can be efficiently parsed by computers. Combined with a mapping between the two, you can have the best of both worlds: efficient processing by machine, and readable by humans.

  - There needn’t actually be separate languages for semantics, presentation and scripting; it can all be done in a single language, thus simplifying things

I’d be working on this if my job didn’t take so much time and energy, but, as it is, I’m just throwing these ideas out here.

Not a terribly new concept. - by ranson (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
AOL actually does something similar to this with their TopSpeed technology, and it does work very, very well. It has introduced features like multiplexed persistent connections to the intermediary layer, sending down just object deltas since last visit (for if-modified-since requests), and applying gzip compression to uncompressed objects on the wire. It’s one of the best technologies they’ve introduced. And, in full disclosure, I was proud to be a part of the team that made it all possible. It’s too bad all of this is specific to the AOL software, so I’m glad a name like Google is trying to open up these kind of features to the general internet.

Cool… but it’s not http - by Colin Smith (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

So which ports are you planning to use for it?

Solving the wrong problem - by Animats (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The problem isn’t pushing the bits across the wire. Major sites that load slowly today (like Slashdot) typically do so because they have advertising code that blocks page display until the ad loads. The ad servers are the bottleneck. Look at the lower left of the Mozilla window and watch the “Waiting for …” messages.

Even if you’re blocking ad images, there’s still the delay while successive “document.write” operations take place.

Then there are the sites that load massive amounts of canned CSS and Javascript. (Remember how CSS was supposed to make web pages shorter and faster to load? NOT.)

Then there are the sites that load a skeletal page which then makes multiple requests for XML for the actual content.

Loading the base page just isn’t the problem.

Re:Solving the wrong problem - by Monkeedude1212 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I think you mean SNKY

Posted by timothy (38% noise) View Skip
alphadogg writes “Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they’ve discovered a way to circumvent the networking technology used by law enforcement to tap phone lines in the US. The flaws they’ve found ‘represent a serious threat to the accuracy and completeness of wiretap records used for both criminal investigation and as evidence in trial,’ the researchers say in their paper, set to be presented Thursday at a computer security conference in Chicago. Following up on earlier work on evading analog wiretap devices called loop extenders, the Penn researchers took a deep look at the newer technical standards used to enable wiretapping on telecommunication switches. They found that while these newer devices probably don’t suffer from many of the bugs they’d found in the loop extender world, they do introduce new flaws. In fact, wiretaps could probably be rendered useless if the connection between the switches and law enforcement are overwhelmed with useless data, something known as a denial of service (DOS) attack.”

A couple things… - by mea37 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

…for those who didn’t RTFA:

First, this apparently applies to VoIP systems and cell phones, not analog land lines.

Second, it is not a DDoS attack, as the headline claims. It is a DoS attack, though. That extra D means “distributed” and refers to situations where you bring many computers (say, a botnet for example) to the party so that your cumulative traffic-generation ability exceeds your target’s capacity. Those techniques are not in play here. I guess Internet-based distributed attacks have become so common that people don’t bother knowing what the acronyms really mean anymore.

The channel you’re trying to flood is a 64kbps data link between the phone company’s switch and the law enforcement equipment. That is to say, the spec calls for 64kbps - so you don’t really know if they have more than that in implementation. The idea is that if you program your system to rapidly make useless connections (such as text messages to random numbers) then you can flood this link and the equipment will lose track of the metadata describing an important message you send along during the flood. “Rapid” is on the order of 40 text messages per second; maybe you can program your equipment to do that.

They have not been able to test this attack in practice, and they’re making assumptions - some of which I doubt - about what the result would be. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to for the chance that maybe there’ll be a random probability that the call you care about doesn’t get logged - and even then you won’t know after the fact whether it worked. Anyone who takes communications security seriously enough to apply that much effort, will apply it to doing something more certain to work.

Some background about Matt Blaze - by jonaskoelker (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Here’s a bit of background the /. editors didn’t give you.

If you take a 2-second look at the paper (the pdf link in the summary), you see Matt Blaze’s name.

He’s been doing other work on making law enforcement wiretapping not work. For instance, go to http://www.usenix.org/events/sec06/tech/ and search the page for “Blaze”; you should find his talk (http://www.usenix.org/events/sec06/tech/mp3/blaze.mp3) and the Q&A session.

He also gave essentially the same talk as the first (under a different title) at http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa05/tech/ (again, search the page for “Blaze” or go straight to http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa05/tech/mp3/blaze.mp3).

He also spoke at hotsec06, http://www.usenix.org/events/hotsec06/tech/, with no recorded mp3, and at an e-voting panel, http://www.usenix.org/events/sec07/tech/.

As you might infer, this isn’t the first time Mr. (Dr.?) Blaze has been studying wiretapping (or other security issues). He’s also quite a good, entertaining speaker. I recommend giving him a listen.

The short story (from the usenix talks): press the “C” key on your old 4x4-keypad phone. That’s the in-band signal (doh!) used by law enforcement to mean “don’t record now”. Or, look up the tone frequency, then play it back at a much lower volume with a tone generator (your laptop might do) so it’s more comfortable to talk over.

Already happens - by Slightly Askew (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

”…if the connection between the switches and law enforcement are overwhelmed with useless data, something known as a denial of service (DOS) attack…

This just in, arrest warrants issued for 92% of American females between the ages of 12 and 17.

New best … - by dijjnn (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

New best way to get your funding cut: publish a paper that outlines a way to use DDOS to hinder a federal investigation. Old best: come out of the closet & join the communist party.

Buffering… - by chill (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

As someone who worked on a CALEA system for 18 months, implementing, testing and helping design, I can tell you one thing.

The specs of all the systems are such that they DO NOT BUFFER the actual voice, only the data. I mean the numbers punched, busy signals, etc. Buffered voice would rapidly overwhelm the system, so it is just dropped if the link from the CO (central office) to the LE (law enforcement) goes down.

Call data can be buffered for days, so that isn’t dropped.

This isn’t a flaw, it was a design decision. Good luck DDoSing a major telco switching office.

StarCraft AI Competition Announced" /> Posted by Soulskill (62% noise) View Skip
bgweber writes “The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment. The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top-performing bots.”

naughty ai would win - by hort_wort (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

My AI would design its base to be a rough representation of a naughty picture on the minimap. Human players would always lose as they just let the AI build away to see the picture get a higher resolution.

Re:Breakdown - by aliquis (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Human Advantages: 
Imagined Prediction Advantage 
Flexible Stategies 
Arguably Faster Learning

AI Advantages: 
Able to command all units at once 
Usually More efficient w/ resources 
Instant Macro management

Korean Advantages: 
Superior Strategies 
Advanced Prediction 
Flexible Tactics 
Arguably Faster Learning 
Able to command all units at once 
Usually More efficient w/ resources 
Instant Macro management

Fixed that for you :D

Re:Breakdown - by Frogbert (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Worst. Poem. Ever.

Re:Is StarCraft the right game to use for this? - by Sprotch (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
A good player can defend against a rush in Starcraft. It’s all about micro-managing peons until your first combat unit arrives. Then you go head straight for their economically challenged base.

Re:Brood War - by PopeRatzo (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Instead of an AI that can win at Starcraft, maybe they ought to try to build an AI that can finish Starcraft 2.

Apparently, that’s a much greater challenge.

Posted by Soulskill (53% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader tips news that openSUSE 11.2 has reached its official release. You can get it from their download page, or just grab the torrents (32-bit, 64-bit). “openSUSE 11.2 will come with the latest version 2.6.31 of the Linux kernel, the beating heart of every openSUSE system. The default file system of openSUSE will be switched to the new Ext4 as well. Of course, openSUSE will continue to support Ext3 and other filesystems — but on install, new partitions will automatically be designated Ext4. … Desktops and servers can use the same kernel, but it’s better to tune the kernel for the job at hand. That’s why openSUSE now includes a desktop kernel specially tuned for desktop users. … In addition to the work of the openSUSE Project in the desktop, openSUSE 11.2 includes the latest versions of the two desktop environments, KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28. KDE users will enjoy the new Firefox KDE integration, OpenOffice.org KDE4 integration, consistent KDE artwork and all standard applications being ported to KDE4 including KNetworkManager, Amarok, Digikam, k3b, Konversation and more.”

“or just grab the torrents ” - by rickb928 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

There you go again, egging us on to use such tools with no legitimate use for actual *legal* purposes.

Somewhere, the CEOs of Comcast, Time-Warner, the RIAA, and AT&T have collectively felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if most of their objections to actual legitimate Internet use were suddenly silenced…

Re:Ext4 makes me nervous as Hell. - by Enderandrew (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Actually those “Ext4” data corruption issues that set the Internet all ablaze (including Slashdot) were mainly due to KDE 4 not handling metadata correctly. In the end, it wasn’t an Ext4 issue. However, feel free to spread FUD.

And you’re right. I shouldn’t have suggested he run Fat32 if he is paranoid that newer filesystems are inherently unsafe. He should run Fat16 to be sure.

Certainly, an older file system that doesn’t have the nicer, fine-grained journaling (and journaling controls) which be much safer.

Ext4 is a wild, data-eating beast that just can’t be trusted.

Re:Why switch to openSuse? - by kimvette (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

If you want to get actual work done, OpenSUSE is pretty much ready to go out of the box. Its achilles’ heel has historically been poor wifi support (requiring a lot of tinkering, whereas Ubuntu has worked consistently well with wifi in my experience) but hopefully 11.2 fares a lot better in that regard.

Re:Why switch to openSuse? - by Krondor (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Sure a few reasons;

OpenSUSE has one of the best KDE4 setups. They’ve done a lot of work into making KDE4 really shine. The Firefox KDE integration is AWESOME, and not something I am sure the other distros are shipping with. There is also additional work above and beyond stock on OpenOffice and such. A great attention to detail on the theming (not that you can’t change that on Ubuntu and Fedora).

Zypper is hands down the best RPM tool and I would say on par or superior to Apt. Definitely a step over yum.

Nomad provide an RDP server for Linux that supports Compiz, not sure if that’s been ported to other distros.

iFolder (if you care about that) is so far only packaged for SUSE, I believe.

Also Yast is great to administer your system if you’re not command line friendly. It used to be atrocious, but now is very much decent. I still don’t use it that much, but it has an appeal to people (especially our Windows friends). Overall it’s a solid distro and I would say on par with Ubuntu and others.

Re:The beating heart… - by Bralkein (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Here on Slashdot today, not only did two people make a joke about an obscure techincal configuration option of the Linux kernel, we both made the same joke, and we made it one minute apart. This place is terrifying.

Posted by Soulskill (94% noise) View Skip
DarkDevil writes “Ever since I was introduced to computers at a very young age, I’ve been the resident tech support for a household of 7 users. I’ve been in a cycle for the last ~8 years where something happens to my parents’ computer, I spend a week or two trying to non-destructively fix the problem (and try to explain to the users what caused it and how to avoid it), and then if it’s not easily fixed I’ll reformat and start from scratch. Most often, the level of infection warrants a reformat, which usually ends up taking even more time to get the computer back to how my parents know how to use it. 4-8 months later, it happens again. Recently, I found ~380 instances of malware and 6 viruses. I only realized something was wrong with their computer after it slowed down the entire network whenever anyone used it. My question for Slashdot is: are there any resources out there that explain computer viruses, malware, adware, and general safe computer practices to non-technical people in an easy-to-digest format? The security flaws in my house are 9, 26, and ~50 years old, with no technical background aside from surfing the internet. Something in video format would be ideal as they are perfectly happy with our current arrangement and so it’ll be hard to get them reading pages and pages of technical papers.”

The f’in magic method - by gestalt_n_pepper (Score: 2) Thread

My sister claims that I can fix a computer just by walking near it or looking over her shoulder when she’s about to do something er… creative. Seems my nephew has the same ability.

It does save so much time.

Look to the Corporate world - by Gyorg_Lavode (Score: 2) Thread
First, I concur with pretyt much everyone else who indicated to try is to fail.

However, if you’re still willing to subject yourself to it, look to corporate IT. they are the gold standard for maintaining stupid people’s computers. Personally, I’d build a slip-steamed USB drive that you can plug in and have automatically rebuild a computer. Also, I’d consider looking to see if there are any tools you can use to dump a rediculiously restrictive policy on the computers. Finally, depending on the types of computers, you may want to consider looking at some of the desktop-type virtualization technologies. That way when they screw up their computer, you can just dump the VM back on.

I personally used an MSDN license to pull a copy of windows SBS and a few copies of windows pro. I joined everything to the domain and then centrally manage. Turn VPN on on their home router and you can simply VPN in, remote desktop to the server, and push the fix to the computers. (Personally, I don’t know why MS doesn’t offer a stripped down version of SBS for home use designed to allow a parent or such to manage all the computers in the house without going to each one individually…)

free support for linux, pay for windows - by zotz (Score: 2) Thread

Tell them that if they will let you install and lock down linux and work remotely, you will do family tech support gratis but that windows tech support is gonna cost. Offer a discount on windows tech support if they agree to sit by your side and not leave while you fix the problems. (And they have to listen to your rants and beefs.)

Give that a go and see if it helps any.

all the best,

drew

Set it up then leave them to it - by DaveGod (Score: 2) Thread

Set it up with the essential programs including Firefox and plugins. Install Adblock. Apply your hosts file. Set up the firewall. Install antivirus set to automatically update and quick scan daily, automatically fixing any problems it encounters. Set Windows, Java, Adobe (Reader and Flash), Quicktime and so on to automatically download and install updates. Arrange an appropriately frequent automatic backup of the My Documents folder (exclude Videos and Music if using a thumbdrive). Uninstall Outlook and tell them to use web based email.

Image the drive.

Now leave them to it. Do not feel obliged to solve their problems a the drop of the hat. I don’t mean to be unreasonable, but rather to apply reason! As always, using a car analogy can make the situation clear. What action would you take if the problem was with their car? People tend to completely exaggerate computer problems in scope, importance and immediacy - like you have to come over RIGHT NOW because they can’t play a flash video. Talk through how important the problem is and when they really need it to be fixed by and then schedule it at your convenience, as if you were going to fix their car.

People have this weird void when it comes to computers. Smart, sensible people cannot figure out silly things like checking the cable is plugged in when the keyboard doesn’t work. The same person will call me and complain like it’s my fault when their computer I advised them against (and subsequently never touched) has a problem, yet they will offer an evening of beer, pizza and movies if I help decorate, or offer to pay me to help them with their tax return.

I once spent 3 hours fixing a flatmates computer (including donating a RAM stick) and just as I was finishing he went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, came back and complained it was my turn to do the dishes.

Stop “helping”! - by BLKMGK (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

For 8 years they have relied upon you to solve their issues and apparently not learned anything! they are “non-technical” but have been using computers this entire time? I’m sorry but after that many years of using the damned thing if they haven’t learned anything it’s because you’re always there to help them - stop helping. The excuse that they’re non-technical doesn’t fly after that length of time IMO. If they are so disinterested in the device but rely on it so heavily then there’s a serious disconnect.

They aren’t learning anything because they don’t have to. If you always had someone to wipe your ass you probably would never have learned but somewhere along the way your parents decided it was time you did it yourself and TaDah YOU learned. Think of it as AA for computers - they have to hit rock bottom before they will get off their butts and bother to learn anything. A once in awhile help session is one thing but not to the extent that has been laid out here. Do they even bother to sit and watch while you fix their stuff? Or do they get to go off and do other things all the while whining that they want their computer fixed? Make them feel pain, make them sit and watch silently if you work on the computer for them and answer questions if you want. You’re being taken advantage of and it;s not helping anyone except maybe you a little as you find out ever more innovative ways to solve their issues.

Here’s another thought - stop trying to fix their computer. Simply reformat the thing, patch it, and walk away. Let them have to go through the pain of fixing it up the way they like it - maybe with some ramifications they will begin to get a clue and understand the cause\effect that’s going on here…

Posted by Soulskill (86% noise) View Skip
suraj.sun passes along this excerpt from the Consumerist: “The Motion Picture Association of American wants to rent movies to TV viewers earlier in the release window, but they don’t want anyone potentially streaming that video out to other appliances. That’s why last week they went back to the FCC to once again ask for the power to disable analog ports on consumer television sets. This capability is called selectable output control or SOC, and the FCC banned it back in 2003. SOC would allow ‘service operators, such as cable companies, to turn off analog outputs on consumer electronics devices, only allowing digital plugs’ such as HDMI. The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly turn those plugs on and off, they could offer more goods to consumers.”

TV “Hood” Analog Hole - by Danathar (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

I kid you not, if they turn off analog component video I GAURANTEE you that somebody will engineer something that fits over the front of 1080p display and acurately captures every last bit. You may not be able to buy it for your home, but stuff will continue to get onto the internet.

Ok, give me a list - by SnarfQuest (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly turn those plugs on and off, they could offer more goods to consumers.

Ok, I want a list of goods that it is impossible for you to offer now, but would be possible by turning off the analog ports.

Spoiled little children - by nsayer (Score: 3) Thread

In other words, if they don’t get their way, they’re going to take their ball and go home. Wah.

I want DRM! - by janimal (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

I, for one, welcome such an advancement. (Yea, I’m trolling with the subject, but I do want to make a point)

I have a satellite decoder/PVR on my TV that lets me record HD movies (true, I can’t get them off the box), and lets me rent movies for 24 hour periods (VOD). I do not pirate, as I’m happy to pay for my content. But, guess what, I haven’t rented a VOD movie yet. Why? Because the deal sucks. I’m sure the idiots who invented it will figure out what’s wrong sooner or later (price).

I say: Let the MPAA have their DRM and let’s see how much more they sell. If they get the kind of control they want, then we’ll have the freedom not to buy their produce. I’ll be more than happy to stop paying if they give me a worse product.

It’s not like i need to see 2012 on my TV before it comes out on BD; hell, I don’t have to go see it on my TV at all (I already paid to see it at the theatre).

Why give these idiots arguments to sponsor projects, like “pirate taxes”? I’d much rather have DRM in my TV and PVR than have to pay a pirate tax or some other stupid blanket scheme.

Just to ask . . . - by mmell (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Given that Blu-Ray/DVD/MP4 streams can all be ripped digitally without resorting to analog (with all the quality degradation that brings) - and given that somebody with sufficient skill and equipment to use the analog hole probably also has the skills and equipment to rip digital video without resorting to analog techniques - who cares?

Besides, if Hollyweird’s streamed content breaks my TV, I’ll just (A) Sue, (B) Vote with my wallet, and (C) Sue. Even if (A) and (C) are eliminated from the list, I’m pretty sure a lot of the cash-spending public will employ option (B).

Which reminds me - do they really have anything to offer which makes this kind of tradeoff worth it? I’ll admit that occasionally something really worthwhile comes out of Tinseltown, but not that often IMHO; and even then I think I’ll be okay waiting a few extra weeks and buying physical media rather than letting some nameless, faceless entity screw with the firmware in my home electronics.

Posted by Soulskill (46% noise) View Skip
coondoggie writes “NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are aiming to cooperate on all manner of robotic orbiters, landers and exploration devices for a future trip to Mars. Specifically, NASA and ESA recently agreed to consider the establishment of a new joint initiative to define and implement their scientific, programmatic, and technological goals for the exploration of Mars. The program would focus on several launch opportunities with landers and orbiters conducting astrobiological, geological, geophysical, climatological, and other high-priority investigations and aiming at returning samples from Mars in the mid-2020s.”

China/Japan/russia - by RiotingPacifist (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

China seam to have more money to throw about, I hear Japan are pretty good at technology and russia seam to be the goto guys if you want something launched. If getting to Mars is a serious scientific venture and not a cock swinging contest, why not work with them as well?

Cooperation - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

As long as they agree on one set of units it should be fine.

Re:Cooperation - by Rogerborg (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

(Mars lander smacks into planet at ballistic speeds)

“I don’t understand. By my calculations 1000 foot-pounds was enough thrust to bring the lander to soft landing.” - NASA engineer

“Je ne vous comprends pas, culturelement appauvri impérialiste chien de porc.” - ESA engineer

Fixed that for you.

Re:First things first. - by nuclearpenguins (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Perhaps investing in developing the new technologies we would need to get our asses to Mars would create all sorts of new jobs.

Re:First things first. - by FlyingSquidStudios (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
NASA’s budget is such a small fraction of the overall budget ($17.318 billion out of $2.9 trillion in 2008) that it really has very little effect on the economy. If you want to worry about the U.S. economy, fighting two different expensive wars is a much bigger problem. Less than half a penny out of every tax dollar goes to NASA. 5 cents goes to the ‘global war on Terror.’ [see: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ef/Fy2008spendingbycategory.png%5D

Posted by Soulskill (32% noise) View Skip
Kohenkatz writes “Intel has agreed to pay $1.25 billion to AMD. In return, AMD will drop its lawsuits about patent and antitrust complaints. The two companies released this joint statement: ‘While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.’ The press release also says, ‘Under terms of the agreement, AMD and Intel obtain patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement,’ and that ‘Intel and AMD will give up any claims of breach from the previous license agreement.’”

Re:DOJ? - by Attila Dimedici (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The answers to your questions are in order: Yes and Yes.  
If the DOJ thinks that Intel has done something worthy of an antitrust suit they can go after them (and the DOJ has been investigating Intel, so they still may). However, a non government entity can also bring an antitrust suit (although they have to demonstrate that they are in some way directly impacted by this behavior).

What AMD needs to do - and quickly - by haruchai (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

is to get its shit together Fab-wise. They’ve been leading Intel for nearly 10 years in developing or deploying new tech and architecture 
but Chipzilla has always been able to keep abreast because of their fabrication prowess.

Now that Intel’s Nehalem architecture has all of the elements that AMD has been delivering with the Athlon and its descendants, 
they’re back to being the budget brand.

Only $1.25 Billion? - by mantis2009 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Seriously, this number seems low to me. The pending suits against Intel alleged that for a decade Intel conspired to freeze AMD out of the market. Intel poisoned nearly all of AMD’s potential customers. Surely that cost AMD a lot more than just a billion or so dollars in lost revenue.

Re:Only $1.25 Billion? - by Moridin42 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Except that this is 1.25 billion dollars that AMD need make no sale to acquire. No materials costs, no QC costs. No manufacturing losses. Why should AMD (or anyone else) be concerned with revenues lost? They’re only a way to secure profits. This is much closer to a billion dollars of profits, which is far more valuable than a billion dollars of revenue.

Re:Only $1.25 Billion? - by brxndxn (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

As an AMD shareholder and an enthusiast who has followed this ‘case’ since 1999, I also think this settlement is low. I do not believe $1.25billion could bump AMD to a cash position of where it would have been if Intel had not competed unfairly. Yes, it is a $1.25billion injection of direct profits to AMD - but the cashflow through the company over the years from the marketplace to R and D would have put AMD in a much more competitive position.

Posted by Soulskill (84% noise) View Skip
theodp writes “Some people love how CNN employs Twitter to engage its audience. Not Steve Dahl. ‘I am not interested in the take of @stinky on the Fort Hood shootings or any other current events,’ complains Dahl of the access the media gives to Internet know-it-alls. ‘I am watching CNN because I expect them to gather the news, not act as a clearinghouse for any bonehead with a computer, a cable modem and a half-baked opinion.’”

Re:Know-it-alls & Bone-heads - by plasmacutter (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

Those know-it-alls and bone-heads have research teams backing them up.. oh wait a minute they fired those guys and either regugitate press releases or just make crap up.. carry on!

Was it ever any better? - by lymond01 (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

I often wonder if the news was ever any better. I read recently in, I think, Time magazine an article about newspapers from the 1920s. They would also back candidates and bad mouth the opponents, take political sides when reporting stories (and which stories to report), etc. Nothing has changed there. I don’t imagine papers weren’t “making news” back in the day either — it’s hardly a novel idea. They need to sell papers and, just like Slashdot, there are slow news days. So you go and interview a politician or police captain or waitress and you hope that something more interesting comes out of it. If not, you have a nice “people” piece. But there wasn’t any news until you started asking.

With the Internet news, it’s likely not any different, it’s just faster. 24 hour news can’t possibly generate enough facts to keep people going, so even the “famous” journalists like Anderson Cooper are left with filling in the gap with their faces and open mouths. “Gosh, I remember when I was sick with the flu. I coughed and coughed. Really hurt. Really hurt my ribs when I coughed like that. With the flu. So…uh…so you don’t want it. The flu. Or to cough.”

I read Time magazine (paper edition) because they usually have one or two long, decently-researched articles (thrown in between what are essentially headlines for the rest of the “news” and some opinion pieces). Anything online is essentially under-researched nonsense — I’d rather see constant updates, then, after a week, see a full write-up on the situation with sources, quotes, facts, etc. Let me know what’s going on, as you hear it, but give me the NEWS at some point instead of just a bunch of repeated text.

Opinion - by endianx (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I find CNN (and other “news” stations) too often use the internet as a way to inject opinions that they don’t want to state themselves because it would make them look bias. For example, you read three message from intelligent people who are in favor of government health care, and one from some moron who is opposed. The message is that the majority of people are in favor and the few who aren’t are morons. However, the anchors themselves didn’t say anything. They were just giving viewer comments. It is a way to inject opinion in to the segments that are officially reserved for news.

Twitter is not the problem - by tmk (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
The real problem: CNN has no real interest in facts anymore. interview the extremists on every side and leave it there. 
 
Jon Steward has something to say about the problem

People like yelling at the news. - by jellomizer (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

I remember my Dad Yelling at the TV for whenever those Darn Democrats did A n y t h i n g . And if the news covered too much positive that those darn Democrats did he would change the channel. Hence why like only watches Fox news now… However with CNN just posting the comments from other people it allows think their views have meaning and they may get 2 seconds of fame if they actually read them on the air. They will probably still stick to the station and watch it.

Just like in the old Roman Days right before the collapse lets hide all the problems of the world and give them a good show. As long as they are kept entertained they wont revolt.

Posted by Soulskill (88% noise) View Skip
Norsefire writes “Since releasing the ‘Go’ programming language on Tuesday, Google has been under fire for using the same name as another programming language that was first publicly documented in 2003. ’Go!’ was created by Francis McCabe and Keith Clark. McCabe published a book about the language in 2007, and he is not happy. He told InformationWeek in an email: ‘I do not have a trademark on my language. It was intended as a somewhat non-commercial language in the tradition of logic programming languages. It is in the tradition of languages like Prolog. In particular, my motivation was bringing some of the discipline of software engineering to logic programming.’”

Tingo? - by houghi (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

This Is Not GO. 
It apparently also means “To take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them.” in Pasquense, Easter Island.

Beyond that, ‘Go’ is not google unique - by An dochasac (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

What is wrong with people who name new computer languages? Like it or not, google has become a defacto reference for coders. You can’t remember the exact syntax of python string concatenation, Google it and see:

Results 1 - 10 of about 21,200 for python “string concatenation”. (0.20 seconds)

And the relevant examples are bunched near the top of the first page. Now try the same for Go: 
Results 1 - 10 of about 50,000 for Go “string concatenation”. (0.20 seconds) 
Of course none of them are relevant but you can see that Go coders are going to have a much worse Signal/Noise ratio.

The only thing I don’t like about the processing language is its name: 
  Results 1 - 10 of about 45,900 for processing “string concatenation”. (0.24 seconds)

Of course it come from a long history of google silly names like ‘C’ 
Results 1 - 10 of about 84,300 for C “string concatenation”. (0.09 seconds)

Microsoft wasn’t very smart here: 
Results 1 - 10 of about 157,000 for .net “string concatenation”. (0.30 seconds)

Sun was better 
Results 1 - 10 of about 70,600 for Java “string concatenation”. (0.19 seconds)

Now we’re talking: 
  Results 1 - 10 of about 7,050 for fortran “string concatenation”. 
  Results 1 - 10 of about 3,230 for cobol “string concatenation”.

Of course those last two are much less popular languages but the S/N ratio of the pages you get when you search google for that is very high.

Google should have a naming contest for their new language. Come up with something unique like zarking00g

UUIDs - by ewg (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
This is why I name all my programming languages by UUID. In fact, look for my new book, Ed68c886-6390-4255-813f-48e61f6b0b06: The Definitive Guide to be published in the second quarter of next year!

Re:UUIDs - by clickety6 (Score: 3, Funny) Thread

Bastard! A little research through a few obscure, un-archived computing journals published in the now defunct USSR would have shown you that I wrote the programming language Ed68c886-6390-4255-813f-48e61f6b0b05 over 25 years ago! The cheek of some people!

Wikipedia proposes deletion of Go! page - by rkww (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

It is proposed that this article be deleted because of the following concern: Non notable language. All the sources seem to be papers and a book by the author of the language. Per WP:N, sources should be secondary sources independent of the subject.

This template was added 2009-11-12 14:22

Posted by samzenpus (76% noise) View Skip
Z80xxc! writes “After a comment by a Microsoft employee claiming in an interview that ‘what we [Microsoft] have tried to do with Windows 7… is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics,’ the Windows 7 team has issued an official rebuttal, saying that the comment came from an employee who was ‘not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7,’ and that it was ‘inaccurate and uninformed.’”

This is not like OS X! - by zebslash (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Microsoft has issued an official rebuttal: “We never used OS X as a source of inspiration in the design of Windows 7. This is completely uninformed. We used KDE 4 instead”.

Hi - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I’m a Mac and Windows 7 was MY idea

So? - by war4peace (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
So a Microsoft employee says something out the top of his head. In a normal discussion between me and you, this would be just an opinion, something along the lines of “I think that…”. But change the speaker and all of a sudden it’s along the lines of “BIG SECRET REVEALED!!!1111” kind of thing. Even worse, for most people it becomes one with the company’s official PoV and this simple statement grows so much that the company must spit out a rebuttal via an official channel/spokesman. 
We are living in a twisted, perverted world, where one can’t express an opinion without being beheaded by both the press and the company he’s working for. God help us all! :)

What Apple does right - by BadAnalogyGuy (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Apple and Microsoft attack the problem of user interface from two completely different points of view. Microsoft wants things to be orthogonal, logical, menu driven, hierarchical, and otherwise fully featured. Apple takes the approach that the user doesn’t want to fuss with all sorts of menus and submenus (no two button mouse for years!) and just wants to do what they need as simply as possible. So you end up with two completely different interfaces.

Apple’s interface is elegant but inflexible. Everything fits into the existing scheme and runs perfectly within that scheme.

Windows’ interface is flexible but clumsy. While this has gotten much better in later versions, we’re still looking at deeply nested menus, and applications which do not necessarily have any UI themes in common with each other.

However the key point is that Microsoft is gradually becoming more user-centric. As far as that goes in their own perspective. They are making changes to the OS that were implemented in Mac years ago, and now that they are here, they make Windows a better product.

Aesthetics is a major theme with Apple, and it is one that Microsoft hadn’t fully embraced until Vista. Listen to the users. Let the users tell you what is good and bad. Build the interface to match the user.

In a sense, the MS employee was right. Microsoft is doing a lot to emulate Apple. And frankly, it’s about time.

Re:What Apple does right - by TheRaven64 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
I don’t understand your complaint. On windows, you do alt, F, S and get to the save menu item in the file menu. On OS X you do contol-F2, F, S, and get to the save menu. It is just one more keystroke. I’m not sure why this is better than using shortcuts to jump straight to the menu though, nor why you think pressing keys to explore the menu is better than using the mouse.

Posted by samzenpus (56% noise) View Skip
paulraps writes “Forget Spotify and Skype: the latest strangely-named-but-hey-it’s-free service from Sweden offers users streamed on-demand movies free of charge, has deals with two major Hollywood studios, and is called Voddler. Since its launch two weeks ago, the service has signed up a quarter of a million users and has almost the same number queuing for an invitation. After signing deals with Disney and Paramount, the company provides access to thousands of films, which are shown uninterrupted after a barrage of ads. The target is the file-sharing generation: ‘Our customers can be sure that Voddler is totally legal, secure, and that there are no risks of computer viruses infecting their machines from downloaded files,’ says executive vice president Zoran Slavic.”

Depends on definition of virus, - by antiaktiv (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
I was very excited about Voddler (I’m a Spotify premium subscriber, and a big movie buff, so it was just what I’d been waiting for), until I read about how the mac client works. 
When installed it takes root access (in beta? how can that be safe?), and the server part never shuts down. That’s right, when you’re not watching a movie, you’re still uploading. When you’re out and about with your laptop and on a 3G tether, just checking your email and paying for data transfer, you’re still uploading. When you have some real uploading to do (for work or whatever), the only way to turn off the Voddler sharing is to uninstall the server part, and then the client and player stops working. 
 
No thanks.

Re:Depends on definition of virus, - by dr_d_19 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

That’s already fixed. Doesn’t run as root and you now have the option of turning the P2P stuff off and on as you wish.

Voddler on Mac

barrage of ads; been to the theater lately? - by dltaylor (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

One of the reasons I stopped going to theaters to watch movies was that after I paid to get in, I was sitting through commercials (not just trailers, but commercials). I decided that I might as well stay home and wait for the movies on non-premium cable.

Anyone skim the summary and read - by sakdoctor (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Why, oh why do they insist on this selling point of “no risks of computer viruses”. 
I’m always concerned that “legitimate” sources will contain a dodgy driver or a rootkit. No such concerns with the latest aXXo rip.

I’m a beta tester of voddler - by Xerfas (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
I have been using voddler as a beta tester for a few weeks now and it works quite ok after the last client upgrade. The first mac client was crap, nothing happened when I tried to login and it went fullscreen mode when started plus the program froze so I had to shut down the computer with forced shut down. After the latest client version I was logged in when I started the program, Voddler client is built on XBMC Media Center and you can only use the keyboard to navigate which can be quite annoying when navigating. 
Browsing the few movies they have at the moment is fairly easy (only about 500 movies or so). First I get a commercial and then the movie plays nicely on just 10-12Mbit adsl line. I have heard that there was commercial breaks in the movies, but I haven’t seen any commercial in a movie so far, just the commercial just before the movie starts which can be 10 minutes long or so. 
For a beta I think it’s a nice product which works quite well for me. Especially since the last update on the client which allows you to go into windowed mode which I forgot to mention further up in my text. 
I believe that Voddler can be great once the new movies pop in and the beta goes into full product. The client has only crashed on me once and when I started it up again and found my movie I was looking at I could start where it ended.

Mafia Wars CEO Brags About Scamming Users" /> Posted by Soulskill (72% noise) View Skip
jamie writes with a follow-up to our recent discussion of social gaming scams: “Mark Pincus, CEO of the company that brought us Mafia Wars, says: ‘I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which was like, I don’t know… I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it.’” TechCrunch also ran a interesting tell-all from the CEO of a company specializing in Facebook advertisements, who provided some details on similarly shady operations at the popular social networking site.

Blaming “greed” accomplishes what? - by QuoteMstr (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Whenever corporate mismanagement causes some calamity, people invariably decry the people responsible as “greedy bastards”, “short-sighted morons”, and so on. Although these statements are true, stating them is useless: greed, as a part of human nature, is here to stay. And organizations invariably elevate their most greedy and ambitious members because these are people are the ones who will exploit the rules to their advantage. Thus, given that greedy people will inevitably be in positions of power, we need to construct rules which ensure that this greed doesn’t harm society. These rules need to make it the greedy party’s interest to be a good participant in society.

We seem to ignore this principle. Over and over again, we fume and demand that companies and individuals be more responsible and respectful. Yet hardly anyone talks about implementing rules that would actually limit the damage.

A huge number of people believe that if society were just free of constraints, it’d organize itself into an efficient, elegant system and solve all our problems. That’s wishful thinking. Greedy people will take advantage of inside connections, of special knowledge, and of outright dishonesty to screw over everyone else. And as much as we’d like to believe that the screwed will respond by researching their own information and leveling the playing field, doesn’t actually happen, and won’t.

First of all, even if everyone were equally capable, the screwing party has more time to research a particular type of transaction than the screwed party, so the asymmetry is really built-in. Second, not everyone is equally capable. As Larry Summers famously wrote, “There are idiots. Look around.” Sometimes people can’t help being idiots. Does that mean they deserve to be exploited? How far does that extend? Do people deserve to be exploited because they haven’t studied browser security, or because they’re not privy to office gossip, or because they don’t have the social skills to network their way out of sticky situations?

We’re going to keep seeing “X screwed over by powerful greedy person Y” stories until we use political channels to create new regulations that makes it in the best interests of the greedy to play nice with society. We can talk about the form these regulations should take. (IMHO, I think it’s pretty clear we need far stronger privacy laws in the US.) What won’t work is complaining that corporations are greedy. What won’t work is trying to make laws while under the delusion that everyone is a rational actor with full access to relevant information. What might work is a determined effort to restore a sense of fair play and balance to our laws and institutions.

—

tl;dr: greed is a fact of life, and crying about it won’t do any good. We need effective and strong regulation to prevent the greed that invariably appears from hurting the rest of us.

Re:Blaming “greed” accomplishes what? - by QuoteMstr (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

stupid fuckheads

First, maturity is realizing that not everyone who disagrees with you is a “fuckhead”.

Is there a specific name for a typical way of walking? Typical way of breathing? Typical attitude toward others?

As a matter of fact, we have an extensive vocabulary to describe all these things. Try “strolling”, “breathing” and “being amicable”. In fact, that a concept has a simple name in all languages shows by sort of a reverse Sapir-Whorf route the universality of that concept.

Greed, being a deviant behavior

Greed isn’t deviant. In fact, it’s rather common, and to some degree, universal. What we call “greed” is just the manifestation of game theory. Every organism acts in its own interest, or more precisely, in the interest of its genes. Organisms do this because they inherited the trait from their ancestors, who were the organisms who spread their genes best. Humans are not above mathematics. It’s only natural that we act in our best interests too. But for the most part, we do so by cooperating, because they makes us all better off.

When all is well, we all get along in a state of enlightened self-interest where our self-interest and collective interest balance. But aggressive players can disrupt the game and at least temporarily benefit. Sometimes the gain really is short-term, and the society (system) settles back into a stable state. Other times, a new equilibrium is achieved. In human terms, that new equilibrium usually isn’t desirable, and even the aggressors end up worse off. (To pick an example: who did the Trojan War benefit, exactly?)

If we want a stable society in which we can all accrue the maximum personal benefit, we need to push back against those who would destabilize it using short-sighted aggressive behavior. To do that, we need to institute rules that make this behavior less attractive, and we need to institute rules that make society more tolerant to the damage caused by this aggressive behavior.

“Good” and “bad” are inflammatory and irrelevant on this level. Instead, we should be talking about how to prevent society from being damaged by its most aggressive members.

Re:Blaming “greed” accomplishes what? - by QuoteMstr (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

There’s an old adage that advises, “never try to apply a technical solution to a social problem.” It’s true here: there were no attacks that an encrypted connection to Facebook would have mitigated; toolbar installation was the user’s choice, not some drive-by download; finally, product offers and hidden $10-per-month charges didn’t even have anything to do with computing, except incidentally.

While improving technical security is worthwhile, it’s not something that would have helped here. You can’t solve the dancing bunny problem without preventing users from choosing what to do with their own machines. You’d have to implement draconian and pervasive DRM, and effective give people appliances when before they had general-purpose computers. That’s a cure worse than the disease.

This problem is social, and needs a social solution. Legislation is how we collectively solve social problems. There’s nothing inherently scary or sinister about law. It makes us civilized. Reading about the exploits of this CEO and the thousands like him, I can’t help but think we need a lot more civilization right now.

The first words in “The Godfather” novel were… - by yoey (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“Behind every great fortune is a crime.” — Honoré de Balzac

Re:The joys of capitalism - by Ash Vince (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Actually he is right according “The Google Story” by David A Vise. Their original plan was to licence the underlying search technology to other search companies. It was only after they were stonewalled by every other search company who wanted to be able to skew results in favour of their best customers that they released their own search engine to the masses and started moving to an advertising based model.

Even now they are very ambivalent with regard to advertising. The have the most high value piece of internet real estate in existence (http://www.google.co.uk/) and it does not contain a single advert.

I know many people here may have bought into the current MS and AT&T sponsored “Google is Evil” campaign, but lets not forget they were shunned by every other search engine of the time as they were to interested in giving their users the most relevant results, not the results that made them the most money. Until this changes it will always be my home page as I wonder whether Bing and Yahoo would go to revenue based results at the drop if a hat if Google were out of the picture.

Posted by samzenpus (37% noise) View Skip
Ponca City, We love you writes “Juliet Eilperin writes in the Washington Post that while for years, humans have thought of great white sharks as wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore, it turns out we were wrong. Scientists lured 179 great white sharks to their boat with a carpet decoy designed to look like a seal, and used a lance to attach satellite tags with the aid of 2.3-inch titanium darts to track the sharks and discovered that Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February, foraging among elephant seals, sea lions, and other prey. The sharks were spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge. ‘It shows you how wild it is off our West Coast of North America. This is Yellowstone,’ says Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara A. Block. The fact that ‘a major concentration’ of great whites can ignore humans ‘shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering,’ says Salvador J. Jorgensen.”

Ignore humans? - by SvnLyrBrto (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Relatively few humans are crazy enough to swim near the Golden Gates in the first place. There’s a reason Alcatraz was such a secure prison, despite being a fairly short swim away from San Francisco; and it has nothing to do with sharks. Hypothermia, fast tides and currents, a rocky coastline, and a major shipping channel are not very conducive to happyfunbeachday.

you can see them from the golden gate bridge - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

here’s a typical shot of a great white in san francisco bay:

http://www.empireonline.com/features/golden-gate-bridge-in-movies/

In TFA, love the first paragraph - by failedlogic (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Love the first paragraph in TFA that points out the obvious: “For years, humans have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore.”

Holy shit. I always thought “For years, elephants have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore.”

I just learned something today. Guess I thought I knew more about elephants than people. I am sadly mistaken.

They won’t ignore humans for long. - by Scholasticus (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
[Scene: A New York apartment. Someone knocks on the door.] Woman: [not opening the door] Yes? Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Arlsburgerhhh? Woman: What? Voice: (mumbling) Mrs. Johannesburrrr? Woman: Who is it? Voice: [pause] Flowers. Woman: Flowers for whom? Voice: [long pause] Plumber, ma’am. Woman: I don’t need a plumber. You’re that clever shark, aren’t you? Voice: [pause] Candygram. Woman: Candygram, my foot. You get out of here before I call the police. You’re the shark, and you know it. Voice: Wait. I-I’m only a dolphin, ma’am. Woman: A dolphin? Well…okay. [opens door].

I read the article… - by cjfs (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
… and there was no mention of laser beams (frickin’ or otherwise), so move along now.

Posted by samzenpus (48% noise) View Skip
angry tapir writes “Microsoft is rolling out some enhancements to its Bing search engine, including some that rely on computational information delivered by Wolfram Alpha. That means that people will be able to search for some complicated information, and the search engine will be able to compute the answers. In a blog post, Tracey Yao, program manager, and Pedro Silva, product manager at Microsoft, give some examples.”

Sounds great but… - by T Murphy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Wolfram Alpha is well known to badly guess what you are trying to do, and has plenty of graphs and charts. Now add a liberal amount of Microsoft flavoring to it, and you have a cross between Clippy and a really bad PowerPoint presentation… let’s hope Microsoft never tries to help “improve” WA.

what about how Wulfram Alpha is not useful? - by Trepidity (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

For very narrow queries, where you already know ahead of time Wulfram Alpha supports it, you can get useful structured information out of it. For example, if you look up a first name or surname, you can get information on popularity and geographic distribution and such. But the only time I’ve ever gotten useful information like that is when I already knew that it supported a particular kind of query. That’s less like a search engine, and more like just querying a database. There have always been special-purpose databases on the internet where you can look up specific information, once you know that such a database exists for a particular kind of fact. What Alpha utterly fails to do is answer any useful proportion of queries without already knowing in advance exactly what you need to query and what syntax to use when doing so.

And yes, I’ve seen Wulfram’s talks on it, and they’re crap. He presented via videoconference at IJCAI IJCAI 2009, which he only got into because of the hype (sure, it’s blind review, but it’s hard to have blind review of a Wulfram Alpha paper that identifies itself as such in the paper), and there was no technical information at all, nor AI advances that weren’t already done by like the 1960s (the AI advance in question is “querying a database”).

Maybe Bing has something up their sleeve, but I’d bet on it being more hype.

It answers the most important questions though. - by RudeIota (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Why are you so hard on W|A? Wolfram Alpha answers LOTS of extremely important questions! 
 
Query: What is the speed of an unladen swallow? 
Answer: “there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)”  
 
Query: What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything? 
Answer: 42  
 
Query: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? 
Answer: Not sure, but wherever she is, it isn’t here.  
 
Query: When is judgement day? 
Answer: “2:14 am EDT | Friday, August 29, 1997”  
 
Query: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?? 
Answer: “No. Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.”  
 
Query: Can entropy be reversed? 
Answer: “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”  
 
Query: who would win in a fight: pirates or ninjas? 
Answer: “The answer remains an ongoing debate which Wolfram|Alpha is not in a position to arbitrate.”

Next up… - by BountyX (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Bing to use google results!

wolfram alpha and hubristic user interfaces - by dackroyd (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

It will be interesting how Bing presents Wolfram Alpha and whether it removes the inherent design flaws in it. There is an insightful but long article about the problems here - wolfram alpha and hubristic user interfaces. Two good quotes from which are:

and

Posted by samzenpus (38% noise) View
eldavojohn writes “From special organic molecules to organic surfaces with special properties to organic concrete, MIT’s Technology Review takes a look at inspirations in nature that materials scientists are currently mimicking for human purposes. You may be able to name other fields that have turned to evolution for inspiration as well.”

Ask Nature - by axlrosen (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Check out the bio-mimicry database: http://asknature.org/

Here’s the really interesting TED talk where the founder introduces it, and describes some examples of nature’s engineering at work: http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html

Biomimetics - by MeatBag PussRocket (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Regardless of ones theological views i’ve always found the field of biomimetics fascinating. Looking at systems in the world around us to find better ways of doing human things creates novel solutions for oftentimes complex problems. Personally i believe in an intelligent Creator, and to me i cannot help but marvel at the inherent wisdom in these complex systems and the incredible harmony they share. Again for the sake of the hypersensitive evolutionists out there, i’m not trying to change beliefs here, but from my perspective this is an especially interesting subject.

Re:Biomimetics - by MeatBag PussRocket (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

you sir, made my day. ;)

Re:Biomimetics - by JoshuaZ (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
It doesn’t take a “hypersensitive evolutionist” to see that this argument is incredibly weak. If an intelligent designer was constructing clever solutions and using them for life then it seems incredibly strange that solutions don’t get used multiple times. A material can be incredibly strong and yet it will show up only in a handful of generally related lineages. Moreover, if one looks at a scale beyond the details of exceptional materials the designer made some really strange decisions. The recurrent laryngeal nerve for example which goes from the brain to the voice box feels a need to loop already down around the heart and back up. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective given the essentially segmented form that vertebrates arose from (and hence that mammals were forced to work with). Yes any reasonable engineer would just have this use the direct path. This is even more glaring in other animals: The giraffe for instance has the exact same thing. That means that there are about 15 feet of extra nerve tissue. It seems pretty clear that if there is a creator, the creator was either very stupid or simply hasn’t involved itself in the design of life. Which of those do you prefer?

Re:Biomimetics - by ShakaUVM (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

>>Like for example, causing the temperature of the planet to drop for a period of time to nerf cold-blooded animals?

Yeah, God took out Velociraptors in the 1.2 patch. They were too OP.

Reptile players kind of bitched about it on the forums, but the introduction of flying units in 1.3 gave them a strong advantage that only late game mammal players can counter.