Canuck truck stuck in muck
You wait your entire career for a story like that and to what end...?
I'd have taken the day off after writing the headline, to heck with the story...
182 publicly visible posts • joined 27 May 2011
...somebody breaking into your phone. And let's face it, thieves are not the people you're worried about getting into your phone. It's your close friends and those you keep even closer...
It's a privacy thing not security. Anybody who keeps really important stuff on a phone that needs to be locked down is not being very smart.
The real problem, in the real world, is the uniqueness of a fingerprint from the user's perspective. They cannot make a copy of their 'key'. They won't be using any of the other options to get into their phone, and will no doubt have lost their PUK codes etc. Then, oops, they catch their finger in a door and they have to wear a great big bandage on it for a few days until the swelling goes down. OMG! They won't be able to update FB to let everybody know how their finger is healing. They will probably not be able to get in touch with any of their contacts, because most people have their friends' numbers in their phone and nowhere else.
I agree with the sentiments expressed elsewhere about the 'normalisation' of using fingerprints to go about our daily lives. It's a Bad Thing(tm). Selling this as a 'security feature' is disingenuous. In fact, the only security people in general care about with regard to their phone is the stealing of the hardware itself I think. I'm pretty sure the majority of thieves will factory reset any phone they get, they're not interested in your personal data. If they were, they wouldn't need to steal your phone to get it...
>...even if it were, the chances of any 7 tests being accurate is less than 70%...
If it's 90 to 95% accurate for one test, surely it becomes more likely for an accurate result the more tests that are done, not less likely?
Skepticism and Probability classes were running simultaneously perhaps?
Twitter, Facebook, the internet...
IT just wants your data...
Your data is a commodity...
IT is being traded between 'other services and companies DataGatheringInc(TM) feels you may or may not be interested in, from time to time and the bits in between...'
IT's in the small print...
And your spambox...
>...Perhaps it demonstrates something clever but I'm not sure what it is.
The best presentations in the field of research usuall end with statements like this.
Of course, the marketing department will be along shortly and make it more 'sellable', but until then we could just continue to classify this as 'interesting...'
>The weight saving comes from the fact that you only have to send up one general purpose tool...
Only if the raw material for the other tools is available at your destination, because if you need to build a tool you need the plastic and its mass doesn't change just because you change its form.
>The element of surprise.....
>Being in technology, I...
>...something that can run C++ code...
Given this remarkable insight into technology, I presume when you say 'being IN technology, I...' implies that you're IN the computer...
Isn't Jobs, or wasn't he, reknowned for being a bit of a bully?
In fact, anecdotal evidence would suggest that he was a right c*nt of one. Shouldn't we think of the children and NOT celebrate bullying, you know... Given the stories in the meeja and all...
Actually, if I remember correctly, 451F is the temperature required before paper will combust. It burns of course at all temperatures above that.
Books are made from materials other than paper, so while the paper might combust at 451F, and subsequently the rest of the material of the book will more than likely do so, if the fire can be maintained long enough to generate the heat required for the other material (leather for one).
It is somewhat ironic that they should use the Fahrenheit 451 reference when the story implied that the screen overruled the paper page for the dissemination of information in that society... The underlying truth of course being that the static nature of the information on a printed page (once that page is not destroyed) is less malleable than digital information.
Oh... and some people have too much time on their hands...
>What are they doing editing it as it is being shown?
I bet they using some new fangled technology to do it...
Back in the day we used to have to jump out of our seats and hit the pause button on the Video Cassette Recorder, jump up see, no remotely controlling, not at first. Ah then came the wired controller, wow, you could play and pause, fast wind forward and back, all from the slightly less inconvenient distance away from the VCR unit than actually having to touch it but still having to lift the rump enough to let daylight shine between it and your seat...
And we still call them the 'good' old days? Feck it, I love this 'almost like the future is here now' time and can't wait until we're able to watch TV shows BEFORE THEY'RE EVEN MADE!
Ooops...
*shuffles off back to his cave (which has a newly acquired C64 awaiting a VDU - yeah that's what we called 'em when we used 8-bit computers, and it is an 8-bit computer so it needs a VDU, okay? hmmm? gots a problem with that?! where's me stick and I'll wave it atchye!)*
...said Mark Twain...
Death is for the individual, taxes are the death for tyrants...
The Roman Empire fell because of its taxation system, Al Capone got stuffed for tax evasion, hopefully America will fall apart due to its bungling global tax collection system it has managed to create.
The 'powers that be' in every empire don't see the law as a barrier; merely an inconvenience, a puzzle, something to make getting rich a little challenging...otherwise, where's the fun?
>It may come as a surprise to you to learn that most people in offices have more important things to do than read photocopier manuals.
Yeah, like get that shredder repaired because somebody tried to shred something with a paper clip on it, which they wouldn't have done hadn't they had to perform a fire drill when they needed time to read the effing manual for the shredder...
We actually had a fire in our office and nobody got up to leave, because we hadn't been told that there was a drill scheduled for that day.
Office people who don't RTFM...bane...of...their...own...lives...
>There's a warning in the manual, if anyone could ever bother to read it, about small fonts and compression.
Yes, you are right. It's there. In small print, of course.
What the warning says is 'Small fonts are impeccable for use in documents requiring accuracy.'
When instead it should say, and does so when printed in a larger font, 'Smalls fonts are impossible for use in documents requiring accuracy.' (The original documentation was in Japanese or some other exotic language from west of Greenwich...)
>Actually the point of the thought experiment is...
Actually, actually, as usual the puny humans have it the wrong way around.
I was reminded of the following recently, cats once were worshipped as gods, they haven't forgotten this.
The cat is the one running this experiment, fooling a scientist to actually try it out. The whole 'is the cat dead and alive at the same time' thing is where the flawed perception gives us one-life players rise for confusion. See, the cat during the closed box period of the experiment is in the dual state of having lost another of its nine lives and not losing one. Once the cat has more than one to spare before the experiment (which it ensures by only ever taking part in this exercise eight times) then the true purpose of the experiment is achieved. I.e. the lifting of the cat from the box and the application of something resembling sawdust and silicon gel with an aroma of fish or chicken.
Cats over many millenia have devised many ingenious methods for being fed by their pets, which is odd considering how lethal they are as killing machines...
>When a method has been executed *once*, subsequent invocations simply run the compiled method.
And then if you modify the source, it is recompiled AT RUNTIME, which is essentially INTERPRETTING. Doesn't matter how many new names MS come up with for the multitude of layers that exist between reading the instructions and executing them on the metal.
.NET is basically a 'compiled' most of the time, 'interpretted'/'recompiled' when modified, execution model.
Kids these days...etc
I remember... having to bend paper clips to flip bits... arg!
>Not so nice to HAVE to put the craft into a dive after it starts disappearing into said clouds. That's between you, me and the rest of the Internet though. Keep it quiet, 'kay?
Oh, oh, oh... me, me, me!
Yes, you at the back with your hand about to fall off if you wave any harder... what?
I know what he should do... he should get one of these helikite thingys and use it as an intermediate base station for his RC aeroplane, then he can find BRITNEY or PARIS or whatever else the lads have left drifting around up there, probably an empty pizza box if the last model is anything to go by...
Okay, so "100 times a week"..."99 times...", that's a 1% hit rate for an undisclosed bounty.
What happens, do they actually find a 'pressure cooker in a backpack'?
Like flies around ...
'errorists ain't as stoopid as we're led to believe...
Soon robo-cop will be all they're prepared to send in 100 times a week...
I bet robo-cop won't be interested in quinoa...
Icon 'cos title
>Yes,yes xkcd, but can't be arsed to get the link...
Hmm, it was quite easy in fact, I feel like downvoting you.
<spoiler>The USA is the bad guy</spoiler>
Has anybody seen this?
I was appalled to see the stress Adrian Lamo underwent while being interviewed. It seems quite obvious to me that this guy is seriously being coerced and is living in a perpetual state of what can only be described as akin to Fr. Dougal in Fr. Ted when being shown the difference between reality and dreams...
To paraphrase one of the paraphrased quotes he ACTUALLY used to justify the shit he did...
"The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of Bradley Manning..." - of course I appreciate the irony of the filmakers to include so many scenes from ST:TWOK, and that's never unpleasant to watch on the big screen...
Lamo uses many other direct quotes from movies in his speech. I really feel sorry for this guy...
...this game got very REAL...
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23. Kn x Q4
24. Draws gun
25. Summons Robo-cop
26. Black to 'move' (black's move because of the numbers, I'm not stereotyping because he's the one in prison, well I am typing with both hands, and all fingers, so I guess...oh...look here's the end of the parenthesis...phews!)
Eh, read this...
And then have a look under the hood of the thingy your o/s is running on...
And to which your webcam and microphone and ethernet or wi-fi and every other darn thing that can be classified as hardware is connected.
Who the heck knows what those circuits are doing with your bits?!
(And don't give me the whole, you need device drivers for all the devices... well, that's true, but the spooks just need the bits, they can figure out what device drivers to use later, when you've gone and blown something up for instance.)
PRISM is just the tip of the iceberg.