Posts by SusanY 11 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Apr 2012
On the plus side, a small LCD screen + a couple of buttons is just what you need for many raspberry Pi projects, and it looks cool.
On the other hand, everyone wants something slightly different to suit the particular project they have in mind (whether to include a speaker or not, etc. etc.), making your own case isn't that hard, and if you make your own case you can include exactly the features you want.
As someone who used to work in law enforcement, Scott Charney should know that compliance with court orders is not optional.
If you're a small company, and the cops turn up with a valid court order that lets them sieze your computers as evidence of some crime or other, saying "but that would bankrupt my company" will not necessarily stop them taking your computers away.
In principle, at least, a court order or National Security Letter can compel Microsoft employees to do something that has the side-effect of bankrupting the company (and also enables them to lie to Microsoft's shareholders about what they're done, because of the secrecy provisions in the court order). A company the size of Microsoft can afford a decent legal department, so you'ld kind of expect them to have gone to court to challenge such an order, if it existed. This court case would in all likelihood have occured in secret, and it would be illegal for Microsoft to tell us that they lost.
If there was a backdoor in Windows, it would presumably be a secret only known to a few people (with a certain amount of obfuscation needed to prevent the large number of Microsoft's developers who have access to most of the source code from seeing the bit where the back door was inserted). There is no reason why Scott Charney would know about it's existence; I would not expect him to have been told about it, if it existed.
Come to think about it, it would possibly be illegal for the people in the know to tell Charney about it, if they were subject to one of those court orders that forbids you from telling anyone except your lawyer about its existence.
Doing this right would involve something like (a) making the Microsoft C compiler deterministic --- so the same source always produces the same binary, no matter who compiles it; (b) building the Microsoft C compiler with a known good bootstrap compiler --- e.g. gcc; (c) comparing the windows build you get at the end of this with what Redmond distributes.
In the Windows security push a while back, they did make sure they actually had the source code to everything that goes on to the Windows install DVD, so at least you no longer have the problem of "hey, we lost the source to that binary, so you'll just have to trust it".
The above sketch is clearly not the whole picture --- you'ld also have to look pretty closely at their equivalent of Makefiles (a program called build, if I recall correctly) to make sure there was no funny business with object files being copied from somewhere rather than recompiled when you build the O/S.
And this still wouldn't help about deliberate bugs such as buffer overflows being left in the code.
I think Japanese doesn't use sexual words like "fuck" in the metaphorical way that English does --- only in their literal sense -- so fuck.everybody wouldn't work quite as well when translated into Japanese as it does in English.
(English doesn't have the gramatical politeness forms that Japanese does, so English speakers have to resort to using various forms of "fuck" to indicate that the sentence is not polite, e.g. "shut the fucking door" etc.)
。ます could be an amusing TLD...
There's a fair number of people of think Assange is a narcissitic jerk and the last thing we need is a film about him. And that's among the Wikileaks <i>supporters</i> - who are in favour of more government transparency etc. Then, of course there are also the people who weren't even in favour of the leaks, apart from their views on Assange's personality. I can see why the film didn't do so well...
They thought of that -- the procedure was to send your call sign at normal CW speed during the first "dit" of the slow-speed "HI" message. So Juno would have heard the first "dit" as being quieter than the rest of the "HI" message, because it consisted of lots of people sending their call sign (hence transmitting about 50% of the time) rather than lots of people sending a continuous carrier.
(If you wanted to get fancy, you could have sent your call sign using frequency shift keying during the first "dit" period --- so this would be heard as a full-volume slow "dit" by Juno's wide-band reciever, and as a normal speed CW call-sign by someone else (e.g. Ofcom) listening with a narrow filter).
Agreed, the fact that there's a robot on Mars trundling around and sending pictures back to us is more astonishing and SF-like than anything the mystery object might turn out to be.
As iron metorite that melted on impact, was buried beneath the surface, and has been exposed by erosion, seems plausible.
Still, if you were making a SF film and wanted a prop for a martian like-form or a piece of alien technological junk, you couldn't have done much better that object that even if you had H. R. Giger design it...
I think there are some interesting things that could be done with virtual reality in psychology research, but this particular paper strikes me as really problematic.
Different online games (or communities, if you want to be pedantic and say SL isn't a game) can have different cultural norms about what's acceptable behaviour. Second Life, in particular, tends to be more tolerant of nudity, open displays of sexuality, and unconventional sexuality (e.g. BDSM, furries...) than other online environments. Indeed, it's notorious for this. There's an obvious self-selection bias: the people who continue to hang around in Second Life are mostly the kind of people who enjoy the kind of things that go on in Second Life.
I really don't think you can generalise from Second Life to other online games, much less the real world. The result in the paper is just about a particular subculture.
(It might have been interesting to compare some of the "nudist beach" sims in SL --- I'd conjecture you'ld find a large number of gay men who enjoy looking at naked men --- which would skew your starts more towards male nudity, The point of the comparison being that the "gay bar" subculture has way more male nudity that the "star wars RPG subculture", with neither of them necessarily being typical of any wider group).
Director: Alex Cox
Shinji Ikari (Cate Blanchett in drag) is a whiny loser who is bullied at school. Luckily for Shinji, all his bullying problems come to an end when robots from outer space invade Earth and his former classmates are incinerated in an atomic blast. Even better for Shinji, the Christian lady who rescues him the ruins (Linda Fiorentino) is really foxy, and has an interest in boys his age. It turns out that Shinji's father Gendo (Michael Myers) has a really cool underground hideout with robots and guns and stuff. While there he meets Asuku Langley Soraya (Miranda Richardson), who is really into blowing stuff up, even though she's a girl. But even though he kind of likes Asuka, he really wants Rei Ayanami (Tina Fey) because she's a clone of his mom, and having it off with her would be like doing it with his mom. Sadly, Shinji's luck comes to a end when the Japanese Interior Ministry (not know for their efficiency or competence) finally figure out that Gendo is an Evil Genius, and send in Harry Dean Stanton. More stuff gets blown up, and people get killed.
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