Posts by John Deeb 304 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2007
True enough but my guess would be certain sequences and modes would have to be performed fully autonomous. Especially the locking on targets and firing, dodging and so on. It will take a lot of AI to win still with all other things remaining equal but new frame designs and high-G manoeuvres might as some point indeed level the playing field if not obliterate it.
Plait is a bit of an idiot the moment he asks " why wasn’t it embedded in some bit of rock?". Eh-mm perhaps it wouldn't stay up that long with the added weight? So perhaps we have a self-selecting mechanism here: the most clean and free of soil being the most available.
As far as his other brilliant deduction goes : "And just because they can’t think of a way to get it up there doesn’t mean there isn’t one". And one way to find out would be to take a sample and perhaps get an idea where it was coming from?
Phil is spot on about a couple of other things though. Just overreaching a bit.
All criticism aside, they might have very well found alien life even when using terribly shaky science. Simply because if the hypothesis is right, the chance on finding aliens raining down would be quite high. It might not differ that much at first glance from life on Earth, following that same hypothesis. How to do this experiment better with limited budget and interest, I wonder?
The Telegraph has Prof Wainwright adding: "If the ratio of certain isotopes gives one number then our organisms are from Earth, if it gives another, then they are from space."
And the tongue in cheek:
"The tension will obviously be almost impossible to live with."
C'mon people, they go out on a limb and try to be the first to capture alien life. It's as scientific as the Nostromo landing on a planetoid and poking through some mysterious eggs, then bringing back the infected inside their ship. But it might still be the harbinger of greater things to come :)
Torvald's internal rage once transmigrated into the birth of Linux. So he just might need a new project for himself or a little group: l'enfer c'est les autres. The alternative is him being sued to the brink of the poorhouse for the up and coming murder threats he will utter sooner or later. Self-destruction being of course the privilege of many great minds in aging bodies.
"the road map they give to our adversaries"
But for NSA everyone is nowadays an "adversary" or might be at some point. In their systematic thinking there's no real distinction possible any more . Everyone being potentially a target so any avoidance of detection is potentially an adversary tactic...
Great article. Forgot about the Philips EL 3300, my first music playing device in my childhood bedroom. Start of a growing collection of tapes and development of "taste". Many models and brands came after it and ended also with a Philips, the DCC 730 but it played ordinary tapes surprisingly well. Only still recently saved a few rare recordings by connecting the digital out on that deck to the digital input on my soundcard. I guess the cassette age finally ended here!
As long as the second factor (what you have) is something complex enough so that you cannot know or memorize it (including notes), nearly anything goes. Any 3 digit code like written on a credit card or some PIN is still knowing. But Dropbox uses TOTP and also support SMS based sending: stuff you need to have. Definately two factors!
You forgot to actually read the main targets of the project being "open source" and "affordable" as to get to mass application and acceptance. By the way, did you check the prices of the PD 100? Not sure what you mean with "lower profile", the proxydynamics stuff is all over the place for a while already. But it remains exclusive, profit driven and a black box. That is: not helping innovation that much.
Sounds to me like a rather dumbed down form of following procedures. Just like the article I'm too lazy to find the relevant manual but a bit of searching already gives in comparable manuals: "Volatile memory should not be considered erased until 24 hours without power has passed".
So no mystery there really. My guess for the random arrangement is that the Guardian knew it was coming and just selected some old computers to be the "ones" holding the "data". Since it was all symbolic, they're not going to point to their server park as the location or their cloud solution. Procedures demanded destruction of "something" and something was provided to destroy.
Silly, indeed.
Many seem to be missing the obvious: not the patients or civilians would be initially helped by a more reliable and cheaper Internet, but the clinics, travelling doctors and other professionals helping out, the schools to educate the local people, the community leaders to keep themselves informed of the regional situation faster and more accurately, and so on, and so on.
Of course Bill Gates is still the consumer oriented guy when it comes to his thinking about technology. That's why sysadmins are now stuck with MS Windows in the server room.
Such temporary permit is very common though. Most somewhat civilised countries have such a system in place and does not reflect any definite position being taken on anything. It just means Snowden has qualified as human being and has rudimentary proven that any other option would be a direct danger to his universal rights, which is proven beyond reasonable doubt by various international organisations which investigated the treatment of fellow leaker Manning. Since "leaking" or "spying on your own government" is not an international acknowledged crime, Russian authorities are engaged in a fairly standard procedure so far without much if any political involvement.
The graph seems to be more like a combination of general standard of living combined with importance of chocolate culturally in terms of local confectionery and pastry preferences, plus some added random elements. To me that's Occam's Razor in action: we already have a very simple reason of why we see this distribution. No need to find arcane reasons!
It's true that one needs to explain Belgium but their Burgundian attitude might conflict with Nobel aspirations, at times :-)
Xperrsonie, if you're going to say "crackpot theory" it's important to not look extremely silly by not being able to parse simple sentences and read Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth
Of course we can discuss now if the sentence:
Earth has water, and an atmosphere, nobody knows where it came from.
...is correctly constructed since the meaning of "it" remains ambiguous. But even the article which X supplied at least links the second stage of atmosphere evolution to "the late heavy bombardment of Earth by huge asteroids".
About this fear of a comment section being raided. Perhaps because that's what you get when you start posting strong ideological pieces which aren't in any way a.) journalistic or b.) IT-related?
One example from Page's underlying ideology:
"...to be pretty sure of tearing the guts out of pretty much any nation on Earth in one salvo"
This is an ideological view: the philosophy of mutually assured destruction being in some way being connected to security and stability. The historical facts of the cold war do not support this at all. All depending on how historical facts would be interpreted. Depending how you make the calculations with the many assumptions connected to your ideology.
From historical perspective the article is mostly immature posturing and then putting a firewall up against other ideologists coming in for the kill? Not to mention people pointing out the obvious: writing flaming articles is one thing, defending them a whole other.
James O'Shea:
" the current prez of Venezuela...accused the CIA of 'infecting' the previous prez"
"the previous prez accused the USN of generating earthquakes in Haiti."
Yeah, it's on the scale of presidents saying and believing Saddam was somehow behind 9/11....
"past whistleblowers, such as Daniel Ellsberg and even Bradley Manning ...stayed to face the music"
Stay with the facts! Bradley didn't "stay" as it was unknown he was the leak until someone else ratted him out. And Ellsberg himself explained recently that things have changed since his time and that the wisest thing to do in this day and age of empire, is to get the hell out in any similar situation.
"SpaceX Falcons ... still look likely to beat any government outfit you care to name on cost".
Newsflash: ESA does not design and build the rockets. Arianespace was the first commercial space transportation company, already since the 1980's. With Astrium and EADS the space business has been commercialized since decades .The Americans are a few decades behind with that concept! Perhaps the mains reason space ships have been cheaper to build and operate generally for ESA the last two decades! Now some of those concepts are starting to be employed only now in a cash strapped NASA ecosystem?
While one could argue government cash flows and partial shareholding still might justify a term like "government outfit", the implied uniqueness of some non-governmental SpaceX sounds rather unrealistic and dated. The main difference is US cash flow and the local industrial ecosystem that puts SpaceX in a brilliant position to compete with the rest. And that's good.
Check out the customer list of "government outfit" that delivers the Ariane technology.
http://www.arianespace.com/about-us-corporate-information/customers.asp
Matt Bryant "it will be interesting to see how the Wikileaks "lawyers" are treated seeing as I'm not sure they get immunity from prosecution".
Perhaps because any American charges of "helping someone charged with espionage" wouldn't mean much elsewhere in the world? Or in the States for that matter unless the criminal nature of someone's actions would be found beyond dispute which obviously it is not. Next thing would be charging the group of high profile journalists helping him to get his story out? But it's still a thorny subject, reason why publicly Assange hasn't been charged yet with anything in the US either even while in court evidence was presented of some assistance given to Manning.
Pet Peeve: "Do the three letter agencies do that [man in the middle]?"
The context here was the stored traffic and not the live flow. Therefore man in the middle would not be feasible unless the tap can also redirect (not split) specific traffic through their own infrastructure on request. But technically this would modify active routing tables: highly unlikely. The tap at the main exchange has to be passive. That said, there are other possibly access points up or downstream for block and insert which could help to achieve this if such target was to be selected.
Anonymous Coward posted Sunday 23rd June 2013 12:03 GMT
"he fact that the US want to have him jailed so quickly only proves two things:"
Overall your post makes sense but not the part I quoted here. There are a few things wrong with it. It's not that they want him jailed but more like back within their own jurisdiction and then trialled, which is not the same. Too late to prevent the leaks now as all documents are probably spread out.
And it's not only two things as what you mention are just two possibilities. The most likely options need to be listed as well, Snowden appears to have broken several laws and technically, legally, he's treated exactly as would be required by law. If there are circumstances which might change the final verdict is for a judge to decide, not for the general public. However Showden is wise not to put the legal system he is challenging with his very actions to the test.
"in international diplomacy, he isn't worth much."
His current worth seems to lie in letting him leak in peace. For a country whose wall is under fire [pun intended] as well as because of some of the more intrusive pollicies this is all pure gold for future talks on the subject. It takes the heat off!
When he's done leaking, another game will start. Another reason to leak in a slow pace and keep the escape route standby.
Same here but it turned out that the images under cylindrical view open an iframe for "photosynth.net/embed.aspx" but the two images under panoramic viewer load flash from gigapan which worked for me.
Sometimes I wish NASA would sort out their standard when communicating with audience and spacecraft alike,
The article just describes the natural tendency of "pure bred" capitalist system to gravitate towards a situation of wealthy landowners and their mansions, commuting by first class transport and accommodation, offset by a more feudal looking serfs roving around in mobile homes and tents, chasing income, almost never building up capital through property or any other statically positioned wealth.
As an earlier commenter noted: "What's to stop you renting out your owned house and renting another in a different area?".
The answer is simply: maintenance. Which many home owners still do themselves at least in part. For that one has to be often on location. Land and estate property has been a common way to secure or safely accumulate wealth but normally not by sleeping but by maintaining or developing it on location. Something a tenant obviously doesn't have to do as it's in the rental price, so not very cost-effective or bound to natural responsibility in most cases.
More importantly there's a cultural value imposed on static living and spreading roots in local communities. With the breakdown of the social and the notion of family life itself this obviously puts into question this very evaluation. But it's very uncertain if it can be phrased as pure economical issues without even addressing transport, teleworking and the possibility of constructing worker hotels. At least it's a more complex social-economical issue but more likely just a vector of some social theory "du jour" that happens to be in place.
Assange makes perfect sense, no matter if one agrees with his outlook or not and has all the written and spoken evidence in place which strangely enough many people trying to intelligently commenting on the story still keep ignoring. This is not about speculation, it's established as far as one can with official secret acts that the indictment will be forthcoming the moment Assange is in a position to be secured. Not sooner, obviously, I hope.
After the Manning trail is over and Assange's role in the leak has been made more clear legally beyond any wiggle room for future revisions, obviously that's the time for Assange to start rethinking his position at the embassy. This might still take a while though.
St. Assange orated: "But as Google dealt with the big bad world, it leaned very heavily on the State Department and entered into its systems".
Quite right. But one level of abstraction higher and the "problem" lies more in the BIG aspect and the larger scale systematic functioning of both. Assange explores these "man vs machine" dichotomies but it would be wise not to focus too much on just these two exponents "du jour". The problem, ultimately is way more systematic/
There's no end to the confusion a fool causes in the world when he opens his mouth trying to blow the whistle of meaning. Shortest summary of the story: Snowden thought he knew heavy shit which was actually quite boring and legally complicated but creating Big Meaning for himself by starting playing in the Big Leak when he starting running with it. The Media however, always waiting for any juicy news confirming mass suspicion ran away with it distorting most of the actual facts thereby preventing any sensible discussion about traffic mining to occur in the foreseeable future.
Everyone point to "evil government" but as far as rational analysis goes everything points to companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft setting up some internal servers for NSA to tap into any requestion information (easier than sending it with express mail I suppose).
So NSA, the White House AND all major ISP's and solution providers are all together out to invade your privacy with this scheme! Perhaps you can't vote in another government but you can change all the services and proxies you're using pretty easily. And that's where our response should lie, not for the government to fix it or undo anything but for the people to become smarter!
Am I the only one thoroughly unimpressed by this Powerpoint "bombshell"? Apart from the hyping of the media, "Prism" seems to be really nothing else than a fancy name to request through various legal departments some traces of traffic but now without the usual complex individualized processes of authorisation and falling under a more general broader authorization. This makes it all faster and more efficient for sure! It brings together various complex processes and procedures, hanging them under some large umbrella and offering it as operational tool to certain operatives. Legal? Unsure. Super high-tech spy tool? Certainly not.
The conclusion by the Guardian that "NSA is able to reach directly into the servers" is hyperbole only for consumption. The access is obviously not "direct" (as that would risk an immense back-door and corruption of security of millions) but the request for information is *only* more direct from the NSA perspective. That's what the slides are talking about!
The NSA will be the last one to explain themselves though. Even if they didn't leak it themselves, nothing better than giving criminals the impression they cannot hide! Stirs up the hornets a bit.
Hmm, but what about OpenWindows in 1990? Not sure what Windows 95 improved five years later fundamentally apart from using the latest graphic adapters better (which also caused it to be unstable to the point of being unusable for any business relying on PC's not crashing). Also Windows 95 put a somewhat fixed START button on the screen which many opted to hide again. Barely a standard desktop breakthrough.
OpenWindows workspace menu in 1990: better then taskbar?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haUnfHLw4sQ#t=301s
That said, apart from Microsoft being involved in the Unix desktop developments quite early, I think they did well to really find out what inexperienced people wanted to see on their desktop, how they would "feel at home" the quickest. It's not surprising therefore other desktop environment developers discovered the same round wheel. But should we really talk about licensing common sense designs again?
But which mental health standard was being used? The whole field does not know any, there are only categories for when something seems troubling the social-economical functioning. And whatever neurosis the tested people might actually suffer from, the act of sublimating that into some play might be in itself the main factor here. Perhaps next time compare with other random groups like train spotters or theatre lovers. If my hobby is to suck the blood of wandering sheep, the very thing which keeps me sane and pleasant to be around: what does that mean?
The biggest problem around the continent there being education and communication, not food or roads, perhaps it's not a bad idea. Then again, it's not just information which sets us free. A lot of other things need to be in place for information to function. Perhaps will function like alcohol to native Americans, to drag in another stereotype.
Jake, as soon as any device moves between networks, some hacker might become interested. Stuxnet was launched using USB-sticks as go-in-between for example. It's quite easy to target networks which have outgoing connections only, like most LAN's but of course excluding the obvious high-secure locations.
Many businesses would really have a hard time working on a fully partitioned LAN with no internet gateway, disabled USB slots and NO EMAIL. And once you're in, there are many ways to get information out again, just as easy as it is for employees to do that.
No way a delete button will ever be created without the control and alter keys attached. Effectively rebooting the Internet into something what's not the Internet. Shockingly Schmidt doesn't understand the nature of the copy and the pseudo-anarchy which enables and fuels the very web he eats from.
Maybe ate a bit too much from....
Completely agreed. X.400 was destroyed by the very fact most admins couldn't get it configured in a time everyone was worshipping simplicity (while running out of time to do their job) and users couldn't cope with it at all they had some clunky gateway adding sorrow to injury. Then again, AFAIK the military and other serious organisations where mail needs to be more than a shot in the dark do still use X.400 based systems extended with the latest encryption tech so I'm not sure where the Seals would have to complain about. Perhaps for undercover mailing?
"plead their case for me to lay on my healing hands."
Happened to me as well many times during the good old days of computer support, no matter if it was with business, friends or family. Literary those same words on many occasions. My own theory is that some IT people emanate a reality rectifying field (RFF) which modifies ("cools down") slightly the behaviour and outlook of the one experiencing problems and no matter how they try they cannot show what went wrong or how. They swear it didn't work for them, really it didn't! After leaving the room their eyes flick back to cross-mode and their fingers and hands return to the usual erratic jitter.
"Germany was almost entirely flattened by 1945. Yet the place was back up to pre-war production and GDP levels by the early 1950s."
There are a few issues with this. First of all the complexity of modern infrastructure has had decades to grow to its size and capacity, which will be not so quickly be back in comparison with the '30's (crisis times anyway in Germany, since WW1 GDP was low).
The other thing is that more than five years in this global and extremely short-cycled economy is actually quite long. Important players and industries might not wait for it and not come back so quickly. Not to mention the money and US investments being pumped into post-war Germany and Europe which I don't see happening post 2009 any time soon in Korea in these times.
It's possible North Korea does realize the cherished economical value of a South without war. Even a suicidal war would still potentially break the South's prosperity (which is not that stable anyway if you study the current details).
It's weird to assume both genders will gravitate to the same interests even if all other things being equal. There's no single thread of evidence yet to be found that they do. And computer science is highly interest driven. So it's not a problem waiting to be solved. It's a problem waiting to stop being called a problem. But one solution could be to introduce relevant computing science classes and programs at the biology department itself: the mountain going to Mohammed, so to speak.
The real problem is the ambiguity of the US State en Justice department on what, if any, charges they might raise against Assange based on what (sealed) evidence. Since this is an unknown, as it cannot be certain the extradition agreement might still apply. For example for hacking military computers or actively aiding such activity. Assange has taken the most rational cause of action so far and waits for the US to play their cards first. The trial of Manning is probably a key factor in this regard and this explains perfectly the status quo in place.
A lot of downtime of devices, appliances, networks and clouds alike will not go away simply because human beings will not go away. The tablet only seems reliable because it's mass produced, with very predictable behaviour to test during development and production. We can say landlines or TV are reasonably reliable because of similar reasons. But IT is in the real world a more complex beast especially when customized to the needs of a business or customer. If you install another OS on the tablet or heavily tweak the thing, I can assure you it won't behave that predictable any more. See also various form of hardware and software certification like they need to define reliability in high-end industries or just any standardized configuration management.
Indeed some customers will expect from a real dynamic or complex system the same as from their iPad's but that's not a new problem. When everybody had a Windows PC, people thought all automation, installing and management on every scale in every business was just as easy as clicking on a wizard. But the architects survived that and they will survive the personal device bias.
Everyone with a decent amount of cleverness and curiosity can figure out most computer issues by themselves or at least figure out that some professional advice will be better for everyone involved, limiting the Question towhat is a good shop to go to for advice.
As such we need to conclude cleverness and curiosity have become a scarce commodity. Certainly a lot of people possessing it capitalized and had sometimes additionally fun with it doing computer work for a living. But the rest of the world still has "smarts" (common sense really) and curiosity in great demand.
There's where you come in. A walking supply of common sense and experience earned by just being curious and asking the right questions to the right people and remembering some of it. Now you are "expert" and needs to be drained. But nobody can take your common sense and general curiosity. It cannot be tapped! But you have something else perhaps: kindness and generosity. And those are also in demand and ruthlessly exploited until depleted.
End result is that you will try to appear less informed and curious at any social scene. Like the One Ring, you need to remain invisible for the Eyes looking for Power (or just for someone to plug in something the right way). You need to become Hobbit all the way. No bloody adventures, slamming that round door close and wipe the wizard's mark off!
Since my first time as victim of a hack was because of out-to-date BIND somewhere later in the nineties when I was really just a junior apprentice admin, I'd never "forget" what was running at the edge somewhere. It was Christmas morning though and I had to try to investigate from home using shaky ISDN dialup, no physical transport being available and trying to remember various IP addresses since all DNS was down. But the lesson I learned there was that the first machines I'd upgrade or keep at least to a recent level would be the ones opened up to the Interwebs like that. That's the only flaw I could find in the article's analysis, to have the priorities really ass backwards as it was stated that almost everything was gone over to CentOS 6 apart from one of the main attack vectors in the network! Not knowing or investigating BIND's defaults seems nearly irrelevant (although might have helped). Better have a proper upgrade policy and inventory in place. That's where proper management and security starts but definitely will not end. But the scrubber might have seen like a hassle to upgrade?
From the article:
"That's, pedantically, ...."
Indeed. The article had no need to be written any further as it ends up being wholly based on a pedantic technical correction of an entertainer. A questionable correction as well, to be entirely pedantic, as outlined by other commentators.
It's Friday, but c'mon, have your pint a tat cooler.
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