Comment Re:Contacting Server... (Score 1) 238
You mean Bill Gates is the enemy?
Welcome to Slashdot!
You mean Bill Gates is the enemy?
Welcome to Slashdot!
Any chance of providing a link. The site http://sc12.supercomputing.org/ doesn't appear to have downloadable papers.
I was probably about 4km east of you then. Cloud passed the sun with about 4 minutes to spare before totality.
Didn't get as many pics as I'd like as I was standing there in amazement trying to see if I could get my brain to believe what it was seeing.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danack/8184416042/in/photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danack/8184416212/in/photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danack/8184416534/in/photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danack/8184417362/in/photostream
Although there is an unjustifiable disparity for the common items they examined, it's even worse for specialist equipment.
E.g. I would like to purchase a large format printer to be able to print and sell my photographs. The price difference between the US and Australia is over 100% !
computeronline.com.au - $3645.00 inc GST
camerapro.net.au - $3,156.00 [Includes GST]
Although Australia is a smaller market than the US, and so there are higher stock costs and lower turnover, having something cost more than twice as much here as it does in the US is just ridiculous.
Totally non-authenticated communication method found to be not authenticated ! More details at 11.
I can't believe that this is news to anyone. Do you really think that people who send marketing, information or run 'adult' services via SMS have a huge bank of mobile handsets with people sitting typing messages into them?
No - they have computers that connect to a bulk SMS supplier (e.g. the company I used to work for http://www.dialogue.net/sms_toolkit/) that allows them to send SMS with any Originating Address that they choose whether that's someone's phone, a shortcode or the name of the company.
Mobile phone operators do sometimes implement limits on what can be set for the O.A. for messages entering their network but there just isn't the infrastructure in place to authenticate what is set for the O.A. within the network.
The assumption is that it allows detection of the installation of the virus via a web-browser.
As the virus seems to be only installed on certain machines with known paths, and those paths can be exposed through Microsoft Office document files, it is possible that whoever targeted this attack had received a MS Office document, that told them who to target. I would not be entirely surprised if the font was used to detect installation on the target PC through either the virus using it in a office document as a file - or possibly even through printed material generated by the target machine.
Here is a simple explanation of why the Judge has ordered this:
1) You are allowed to claim anything you like in a court of law and you can't be sued for slander, defamation, libel etc. as otherwise the legal system would be completely broken.
2) Journalists are allowed to report anything they like and they can't be used for slander, defamation, libel etc. as otherwise freedom of the press would be completely broken.
3) Oracle appears to have paid 'journalists' to repeat the claims made in court as fact. Because those claims are now being made outside of court, they don't have the courts protection against being sued. Because the 'journalist' is acting as a paid agent of Oracle they are no longer protected by freedom of the press.
So this isn't a first amendment issue - this is just a did Oracle pay someone to defame Google issue.
If AU requires ads to not be bought by competitors,
Competitors are still allowed to bid on other companies trademarked names - it's just that the link can't be deceptive.
e.g. Toyota could bid on keywords like 'ford truck' to have one of Toyota's ads come up.
What they can't do is have the ad say 'Hot deals on Ford F-150 trucks' and then have it link through to a site that only sells Toyota trucks, as that is a deceptive advert.
with a head office in the UK, I think this is awesome.
Currently the packets between Oz and the UK either go through central Asia, where there is massive packet loss, or they go the long way round - across the Pacific, across the USA and then across the Atlantic.
The new route will probably shave 40ms off the ping time from Oz to the UK as well as be pretty reliable - and also not subject to US data monitoring.
Basically in the first areas where the NBN has been deployed the biggest complaint from the customers was about the need to have battery packs inside their homes and the fact they will need to be replaced periodically.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/276366,nbn-users-complain-about-battery-backup.aspx
Although some people or businesses may need to have working POTS during a black out I'm not convinced that it is appropriate to have it in all premises, particularly in a country like Australia where everyone has a mobile phone anyway.
However it is currently a requirement for the NBN installation that the phones work during powercuts. Stopping the mass installation of batteries and instead requiring people to keep their copper lines until either a better plan or smarter requirements can be implemented seems quite sensible to me.
TFA may have a point about prices - but no one is forced to choose Telstra. I'll be sticking with iinet and getting twice the data allocation and about six times the speed that I'm currently getting on ADSL.
And yet, according to TFA, the researchers were able to extinguish a foot-high flame (presumably fed via compressed gas of some sort) with only a 600 watts of electricity AND they suspect they could do it with much less.
Watts != voltage differential
If there is no electricity being carried then a small power supply can build up an almost arbitrarily high electric field, until it either either arcs or the electric field becomes strong enough to start electrons streaming from it as an ion wind.
foot-high flame (presumably fed via compressed gas of some sort)
That sounds like it could have been a bunsen burner - i.e. the flame could still have just been a centimeter or two across, which is a much easier fire to deal with that a wide fire. In fact you could probably put that flame out by just licking your thumb and sticking it over the fuel source.
Flames are ionised (i.e. charged) particles. If you have a strong enough electric field (which is really not the same as 'shooting electricity' as per the article) when the charged particles move through the electric field there will be a force on them perpendicular to their motion and to the field i.e. the flame will curve over into spiral.
If you could get this to happen on a large enough scale, the flame would suppress itself as instead of the flame moving away from the fuel it would hang around - stopping oxygen from reaching the fuel.
If this all sounds really unlikely, that's because it is. Here it a video showing an electric field affecting a small candle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fKGeV4NrrA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
It looks like you need an electric field on the order of 10keV per 5cm to get this effect. So if you wanted to do it on a fire that was say 5 meters across you'd need an electric field in the order of 1MV which while obtainable is not exactly an easy thing to setup - particularly when there's a fire going on.
It's the private bank's debts.
For some unknown reason the Irish government decided to guarantee all debts by banks in Ireland including banks that are owned and run by people who are not Irish or based in Ireland. These debts were not sovereign debts until the Irish government decided to unilaterally back them without any good cause. They did this back in 2008 and it's only now that they massive amount that they've basically handed over to private investors is becoming apparent.
It's pretty nuts that private investors had hoped to make money by investing in Irish banks - but now that they're actually facing losses the people of Ireland are going to step up and cover all these debts. So for the private investors it's a case of head I win, tails you lose - where there is no risk of the private investors losing any money - and no chance for the public to get a share of the profits that banks were making in the good times.
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:
Hype also generates funding because it generates exaggerated sales projections. For instance:
"What Wolfram Alpha will do," Wolfram says, "is let people make use of the achievements of science and engineering on an everyday basis, much as the Web and search engines have let billions of people become reference librarians, so to speak."
[...]
It could do things the average person might want (such as generating customized nutrition labels) as well as things only geeks would care about (such as generating truth tables for Boolean algebraic equations).
Generating customized nutrition labels! The average person! I just laughed so hard, I needed a complete change of clothing.
Dr. Wolfram, may I mention a word to you? That word is MySpace. If there is any such person as this average person, she has a MySpace account. Does she generate customized nutrition labels? On a regular basis, or just occasionally? In what other similar activities does she engage - monitoring the population of Burma? Graphing the lifecycle of stars? Charting Korean copper consumption since the 1960s? Perhaps you should feed MySpace into your giant electronic brain, and see what comes out.
and
Google is not a control interface; WA is. When you use WA, you know which of these tools you wish to select. You know that when you type "two cups of flour and two eggs" (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram's giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead.
So the giant electronic brain is doing an enormous amount of work to discern information which the user knows and can enter easily: which tool she wants to use.
When the giant electronic brain succeeds in this task, it has saved the user from having to manually select and indicate her actual data-visualization application of choice. This has perhaps saved her some time. How much? Um, not very much.
When the giant electronic brain fails in this task, you type in Grandma's fried-chicken recipe and get a beautiful 3-D animation of a bird-flu epidemic. (Or, more likely, "Wolfram Alpha wasn't sure what to do with your input." Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!) How do you get from this to your Nutrition Facts? Rearrange some words, try again, bang your head on the desk, give up. What we're looking at here is a classic, old-school, big steaming lump of UI catastrophe.
The task of "guess the application I want to use" is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram's guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user's mind. God can do this, but software can't.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.