Posts by sisk 2455 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Mar 2010
I could see it fooling some people if they believed they were talking to a human with less than stellar command of the English language (such as could be expected from a 13 year old Ukrainian), but 30% of humans? I think that's pushing it.
Then again, people are stupid and will believe whatever they want to be true or what they fear is true.
>So no, I can't just 'make it faster'
Yes you can.
1. Uninstall everything from Symantec or McAfee. FInd replacements if necessary.
2. See what's starting up with the computer. Delete all the crap.
3. A low-level pass with Malwarebytes or Spybot. Both if you're feeling keen.
4. ???
5. Faster! (On probably 99% of machines)
Alternatively, wipe Windows and install some minimalist Linux distro designed to run on computers built in the 90s, which will no doubt run faster than Windows on a modern machine. When they complain point out that you did exactly as they asked and made their computer run faster.
Or get a bit of G scale model train track, build a track from the computer desk to the nearest window, and add some wheels and a largeish model rocket engine to the computer. That'll make it 'run' faster to.
There might be a reason people don't bother me with computer problems when I'm in a bad mood.
Unfortunately, it's not wholly successful, so I'm considering getting one with the words "£30 per hour" written on it instead.
That doesn't work either in my experience. Most of the ones I deal with will happily cough up my $50/hour with 1 hour minimum payment to avoid having to take their computer to the local computer repair shops. But to be fair those morons make the Geek Squad look good.
And hey, sometimes it works out. I got a crack in my windshield fixed for free because the guy at the glass shop remembered I was a tech and they happened to be having computer problems that day. (I use the term 'computer problems' lightly. They'd accidently closed their file in QuickBooks and couldn't figure out which one they needed to open back up. Open a file, get a rock pit fill for free. Good trade for me.)
That's a load of bull Matt. That line moves because it is the measure of where you can be income wise and have a decent life. It doesn't move to reflect a rising level of living. It moves to reflect the rising COST of living. There's a big difference. The level of living is always the same at the poverty line, no matter where it's at. If you don't believe me I suggest you go talk to someone who's had the line move from below their feet to over their head in the last decade. There are plenty of them to be found.
As the poverty line moves up the percentile there are more people living in poverty. That's a product of the cost of living increasing faster than people's incomes. 'On the poverty line' today is on the freaking poverty line. Until you go hungry for a few days so that you can feed your kids (a pretty common situation for families living on the poverty line) don't go telling me how great it is to be there.
Sure, someone making $10,000 a year would have been pretty well off 100 years ago. But that was when you could easily feed a family of 4 with $20 a month. Sure, $5000 a year puts you in the top 5% of income earners in the world, but in most of the world you can STILL feed a family of 4 for $20 a month. When you quote those sorts of numbers you leave out the fact that it costs, bare minimum, $6000 a year just to keep a roof over your head and another $4000 a year to feed your family if you eat the cheapest foods you can get. Add in gas, electric, and water bills and it's dang near impossible to live in the first world at the poverty line. And those things aren't optional. 100 years ago you could cook on your fireplace and have an outhouse. Today fireplaces cost extra, and even if you have one you have to pay for the wood for it because they won't let you just go chop down trees in most of the country (even if you live somewhere where there ARE trees) and environmental regulations mean you're liable to run afoul of the EPA if you're using an outhouse. And yes, there are parts of the world that have it worse, where whole populations live in, you guessed it, poverty. That doesn't make you 'lucky' to be living in poverty here.
The bottom line is that poverty is poverty.
Why? We have a welfare state, whose aim and purpose is to make us all richer. And, despite the sort of calumnies that people like me occasionally heap upon it, it does just this.
Um....no it doesn't. If the welfare state was making us all richer then the percentile at which the poverty line sits would be reducing. Instead the poverty line rests at a higher percentile every year as more and more people live in poverty.
Not that I'm saying that he's right about taxing the snot out of the top 1%, but you've got this point wrong.
Heartbleed only affects the server side of a SSL connection. Android handsets are almost always clients. Only once in a great while will you come across some geek who for some obscure reason has set up a server using SSL on their phone, and even then it's not part of the core OS.
That's not as bad as you might think. My phone is still running Cyanogen 9. I simply have no reason to update. The "glaring" security holes everyone's always talking about on Android require that the user either use the Android web browser or install unfamiliar apps. I use a different browser and I haven't installed an app, familiar or otherwise, on the thing for over a year, so my chances of picking up one of the malwares out there for Android are next to nil. Additionally newer versions don't offer any features that I want badly enough to have to mess with setting my phone up all over again.
So no, my phone will not be upgraded. IS that a bad thing? I don't think so. My computer is running Windows 7 and it won't be upgraded either. I have a file server in my house that's been cut off from the internet and happily plugging away on a version of Debian that's two versions past when it was oldstable since it was current. I won't update that either. (And, to be fair, I'm not entirely certain I could remember the root password even if I wanted to. I haven't actually logged onto the thing for several years. No need to. It just sits there doing it's job.)
Simply put, upgrading any system carries an element of hassle and a little risk (the update could always go wrong, even if the chances are vanishingly small). So, unless you actually have a reason to upgrade, it's usually best not to. The fact that Apple shoves updates down your throat whether you actually have a reason to update or not annoys me greatly.
If it's CryptoLocker it'll be able to infect any Windows system running Win2k+. I believe there's a less prevalent OSX version floating around too, but don't quote me on that.
CryptoLocker is nasty. Someone here has a virus on their home computer that has been sending out malicious emails containing it to their entire contact list (so about 50 or 60 of our users) a couple times a week for the last couple months. Everyone's wise to it now thanks to liberal use of a metaphorical cluebat*, but we must have had 15 CryptoLocker infections the first couple weeks as people fell for it and opened the "account summery" (sic) or "scanned document" that came in with them. Seriously, I had to pull the same files from backups 7 times in two weeks because of Cryptolocker infections, and that was just me (I'm not the only backup administrator) and for just one network share.
*They won't let me use my literal cluebat.
You have such faith in security after all that has happened
It's not 'faith in security'. It's more like 'faith that there's nothing there to be hacked.' I'd trust it for the same reason I don't bother pointing security cameras at blank walls: there's no door for people to come in through.
In all likelihood the navigation system will be controlled by a system that feeds data to the robotics controller, which would have no reason to talk to the outside world. Nor is there any reason for the nav system to accept input other than maps and GPS data. Even if you did somehow feed it different data, what's it going to do with it? It'd be like trying to hack a computer not hooked up to the internet by hacking into a Garmin that happens to be plugged into it.
Of course I could be wrong. Google could have done something stupid like put an SSH server in the thing with access to wifi, or they could have set up the nav system and the robotics on the same ARM chip without properly sandboxing the system, but I don't think they're that idiotic.
I'd guess at least 95% of crashes are due to the human element
I'd guess it's more like 99%. Maybe even 99.5% or 99.9%. Mechanical failures that result in collisions are fairly rare. Collisions caused by humans not watching where they're going or running stop signs or driving drunk or being just plain stupid, however, are extremely common. As long as all the systems in these cars remain in good working order I wouldn't expect them to ever be in a wreck unless it involved a second, human operated vehical. The problem is that if one of the systems isn't in good working order you'll probably not find out until it hits something.
When some a$$hole hack the vehicles control system (and it will happen) what chance do I stand?
I would imagine that the only part of the car that it would even talk to the outside world without a hard connection would be the navigation system, and the only realistic thing you could do with that would be to mess up the maps. Even that would be difficult because it likely talks directly to Google Maps. All in all it would be a lot like trying to remotely hack a Garmin. Why would anyone with the resources to do it bother when it's so much easier to sabotage the thing while you're in the office?
Of greater concern, to me anyway, is that if the navigation system works like they navigation app for Android and you stop for a restroom break in an area without cellular service you're in trouble. That happened to me once on a long road trip. I suddenly couldn't pull the maps for my navigation app and, as evidence of how dependent I am on my technology, it never occurred to me to stop and buy a map. It was the one time I've ever been lost on a road trip. (Full disclosure: my wife would say it's just the only time I've ever admitted to being lost.)
I'm sorry. I couldn't read the article. I tried but I just couldn't stop looking at the headline in disbelief. Why in the name of all that's holy would you want Outlook on Android? All it would do is duplicate the functionality that comes with most Android phones via Google's apps. And if it's anywhere near as resource intensive out Outlook for Windows* it'll be an absolute nightmare to.
*Relative to the total resources of the phone, of course. Any phone app that requires a gig of RAM is going to be completely unusable. Microsoft may have some bad products, but none THAT bad...well except Vista....and ME.....and Bob...and Win8...You know what, forget I said anything.
Personally I frequently run into 'password too long' errors when making new passwords for places that have my financial information. Some places really don't like 50 character passwords.
Passwords that are truly random mixes of numbers, upper and lower case letters and symbols are hard for humans to remember but relatively easy for computers to guess. That being the case I tend more towards mnemonically friendly nonsensical phrases written in 13375p34k. I end up with passwords that even my wife couldn't guess and that would take millennia to brute force but which I can easily remember.
Perhaps you read that in Randall Munroe's What-If?
I couldn't remember where I'd read it, but if it's been in What-If then that's most likely it. I make pretty regular visits there. Math, physics and logic applied answer to silly questions with Randall's brand of humor....what more could a nerd want?
Ah yes, the so called doomsday argument. I've read that almost everyone who comes across it sees a flaw in it. Apparently if you actually get down to actually putting serious study into it you end up changing your mind about what the flaws are. In essence there's a consensus that it's wrong but no one can agree on WHY it's wrong.
Which, frankly, is a bad sign for the future of the human race. Better have a beer now.
"And even if Netflix someday works in Firefox, it will NEVER work in any browser running on Linux. I know for a fact that in Linux, audio streamed in a browser running from a website can easily be intercepted, allowing the user a choice about what to do with that audio stream next. You don't even need any special plugin. I'm reasonably sure this is also true for video content. And I'm sure the Netflix folks are well aware of that..."
1) As was mentioned above, this is true of all OSes, not just Linux. The only difference is that the typical Linux user understands the process well enough to intercept the stream. It's not because we're any smarter than users of other OSes but because Linux doesn't hide the processes from anyone who cares to look and tends to attract the type of people who want to know whats going on under the hood.
2) Netflix actually runs quite well on Linux through a dedicated app. It's been a while since I've used it, but if I remember correctly it runs the decryption through a process running in Wine but is otherwise just a streaming video player. Even still though it's trivial to capture the output (it's trivial on Windows to by the way, in case you were wondering).
Well I didn't say DRM was a good idea. It is a horrible, worthless, expensive, counter-productive idea in fact. My argument is that until the movie studios figure that out like the music labels did years ago we ('we' being those of us who prefer to get our media legally - those who ignore copyrights can do a little dance to get rid of DRM and will continue to do so) are sort of stuck with it. Refusing to allow it in Firefox would just mean that people who respect copyrights would have to use a different browser, which would accomplish exactly nothing except a slip in Firefox's market share. Idealism is great and all, but at the end of the day we all have to live in the real world.
I support this move. Hold the downvotes a moment and let me explain.
DRM is the devil. It really is. However Big Content won't let us watch/listen to their stuff without it. Since the web these days is all about content what do you think will become of any browser that refuses to give users the means to decrypt Big Content's stuff legally? You might as well be using Dillo if you're going to refuse to let the devil DRM touch your browser. The way Firefox is doing it, allowing users to download a separate module should they decide they want to be able to use DRM restricted resources, is the best solution to a bad situation. It sucks, but there it is.
Wonder when they plan on taking on Microsoft....
It could be that they're testing their patents against a softer target first. You'd need to be very sure of your patent portfolio before you started a patent brawl with Microsoft between their rather intimidating portfolio and the buckets of cash they have to throw around.
Macintoshes are brutal and clunky. Seriously! I let the design department talk me into installing two teaching labs of the maliciously-crippled things (on the - obviously outdated - assumption that an OS was an OS and it really wouldn't matter much), and am now stuck with them for another 2 years (well technically, the students are stuck with them - it took me 2 weeks to get sick of the one in my office and have it replaced with a Win7 machine - and those who know me know I am a Linux fanGrrl).
I'm inclined to agree. The learning curve on a Mac is pretty brutal by comparison to the one on Linux or even Windows. Add to that the fact that Apple assumes all their users are idiots and you've got a recipe for a terrible OS, at least for those of us who are used to being able to dig into our machines as deeply as we choose.
Those of us who remember 16 bit / 8 bit word processing know what he is talking about.
Indeed. When I'm writing creatively I use Sublime (with syntax highlighting turned off, naturally) for the same reasons he uses WordStar. Granted no one's ever going to buy the stories I write even if the few people I share them with enjoy them, but the point still stands.
I also mentioned time-coded vinyl earlier. You should give it a try: The user interface that you're used to, plus all you ever need is two records and maybe a couple of spares just in case something bad happens at a gig.
I'll take your word for it. My turntables are actually virtual and my music lives on a couple external HDDs (mirrored for backup purposes - they both go with me but I only use one at a time). My time DJing isn't lucrative enough to justify the expense for DJ-quality turntables. It's a hobby that pays a little for me, not a potential career path.
Vinyls may sound warmer, or subjectively "better", but it isn't superior, the sound that comes out is not as close to the original as that from a CD.
That may have been true when CDs first came out, but not for many years now. With current tech we can perfectly capture the sound on vinyl, something that will never be possible with any digital format.
Mind you most of us wouldn't be able to tell the difference between $4000 worth of analog equipment playing a modern vinyl and cheap headphones plugged into a smartphone with MP3s anyway. Even as a part time DJ I think audiophiles are a bit off their rockers.
I saw that and my first thought was "Why?". Seriously what's the point of charging a dead man with a crime? Are they going to put his corpse in a jail cell for a few years before they cremate his remains? It just sounds like a waste of taxpayer money to me.
Besides if they really wanted to charge him posthumously with a crime surely homicide is a far more serious crime than unlicensed discharge of a firearm even under the strictest of gun controls.
I'm not an expert on the subject by any stretch of the imagination, but I would imagine that we're a good century away from what most laymen (and in this regard Hawking is a layman) think of as AI - that is self aware machines. Barring some magical breakthrough that we don't an won't any time soon understand* it's just not going to happen within our lifetimes. We don't even understand self-awareness, let alone have the ability to program it.
In technical terms I would argue that an AI need not necessarily follow the model for human intelligence. Our form of intelligence is a little insane really if you think about it. Machines would, of necessity, have a much more organized form of intelligence if it were to be based on any current technology. If you'll grant me that point I would argue that it follows that we don't necessarily have to fully understand our own intelligence to created a different sort of intelligence. Even so we're a long ways off from that unless you accept the theory that the internet itself has already achieved a rather alien form of self awareness (I forget where I read that little gem, but I'm not sure about it. The internet's 'self awareness' would require that its 'intelligence', which again would be very alien to us and live in the backbone routers, understand the data that we're feeding it every day, such as this post, and I just don't buy that.)
*Such breakthroughs do happen but they're rare. The last one I'm aware of was the invention of the hot air balloon, which took a long time to understand after they were invented.
No. Quantum computers are good for the following:
1) Factoring large numbers
2) Rapid searching in databases
3) Simulation of quantum processes
Otherwise they are mostly useless for any calculation of importance in the macro world.
Funny. They said something very similar to electronic computers 70 years ago. Supposedly the things were only useful for very large calculations and there's no reason anyone would ever want one outside of a lab.
Slight problem with that thought: the only government system that puts people who don't want to be in power into power are monarchies, and even then it only occasionally happens. Under our system the only people who can get the job are those who want it very badly.
I would rather that Shrub had failed to achieve POTUS too
Every time I start to think that I think about what Al Gore's reaction to 9/11 would have been and decide that Bush was probably the better man of the two to have in office on that day. That said we definitely could have done better than either of them.
Honestly I hated Bush when he was in office, but right now I'd take him back in a heartbeat if it meant we could be rid of Obama today. Bush at least had clue 1 how to do the job. Obama's been stumbling around making a mess of everything he touches for 6 years and seems to have been reelected only because people don't actually pay attention to what he's doing.
That or they thought Romney would be even worse, which, to be fair, he may have been. That election was even a worse case of two bad choices than most: we had one guy who's proven he can't do the job very well and one who didn't even want the job. I joke about writing in Mickey Mouse every election cycle, but in 2012 I was actually tempted to.
Right. I've often wondered, the first day after a new pres gets settled into the White House, does (s)he get a "helpful induction powerpoint presentation" from the True Mafia®?
Nope. They don't get onto the ballot, let alone into the White House, without having already seen that PowerPoint and heartily agreeing to do what they're told. What, you think they'd risk losing their power by letting someone they don't already own get votes?
Not quite, IMHO, because he doesn't need the support of Congress to declare war
Yes he does. He can dictate military actions, but an actual declaration of war (which hasn't happened since WW2 by the way) can only come from Congress under US law.
Technically if we were sticking to the Constitution (yes, yes, I know) he wouldn't even be able to direct troop movements without that declaration, or command the Air Force or the Marines at all, even WITH a declaration of war (though only by the letter and only because they didn't exist to be written into the Constitution along with the Army and Navy when it was written....By the spirit of the document the President would have full control of the military in a declared war).
They also believe that for obvious reasons the US public are war weary
The US public, for the most part, is. I honestly think the 2008 election would have been a lot closer were it otherwise. I know some normally hardcore Republicans who voted for Obama because they feared McCain would be just as much a war monger as Bush was.
and that Obama is now a lame duck president.
He pretty much is. Barring some massive changes come this November and in 2016 to Congress the next President will be to. Right no everyone in DC is a lame duck.
To a large extent, Obama's heart and brain are in the right place: Overseas military intervention has been a costly twelve year disaster in terms of US & allied lives, local lives, money, and respect.
As long as we keep that statement in the context of overseas military actions I'll agree with you. We really don't have any business being in most of the places we've been since 2001.
This isn't to say that the US needs to walk away from all forms of intervention (and having happily appointed themselves as world policeman, it's a little late to object to others expecting this of them). Walking softly and carrying a big stick has always been a good strategy, but over the past decade the US has been to busy using the stick, not enough time walking softly.
I would argue that it's long past time to pass the badge on to someone else. Actually given some of the stuff going on now (most of which is easy to miss if you're not paying attention, which few people are unfortunately -- seems Huxley was right) I'd say the current US government has become the corrupt bad cop of the world.
Personally I ascribe to the view of a certain famous general* who actually saved the country from the predecessors of the people running it now (and I mean the owners of Congress, not the politicians). Our armed forces should be for the defense of this nation and nothing else. Overseas intervention might be justified if it directly affected the security of this nation, but otherwise let's not throw away money and lives on it.
*Major General Smedley Butler, AKA the Fighting Quaker. Look him up. It's an interesting bit of history from the years leading up to WW2 when the world didn't yet know just how bad the Nazis and facism really were.
Maybe antivirus would still be a good money maker if Norton worked as well as the various free AV offerings you can get. Honestly how the likes of Norton and McAfee have stayed afloat while offering less dependable and more buggy offerings than the freebie antivirus that's floating around is something I've never understood. I'm not opposed to paying for AV (in fact, I do pay for AV for my wife's computer*), but it has to be better than what I can get for free and Norton just isn't.
*In case you're curious, the other computers in the house all run Linux. Mine has ClamAV because I've not seen a better AV for Linux. My kids' computer has a rather paranoid whitelist internet filter (the plan is to make it less paranoid as they get older and eventually loose the filter altogether and just monitor what they're doing, but right now at 3 and 6 I have them locked down to just a few trusted educational and games sites) so they don't have much chance to pick up the exceedingly rare Linux virus anyway.
Lucky our ancestors didn't feel the same way, eh?
Some of them did. Galileo could tell you all about it if he were still around.
But a bit of perspective here. Eventually life on Earth will be wiped out. That's an unavoidable fact. It most likely won't be in our lifetimes, but it will happen. When it does the only hope humanity (and our favored pets, plus - more importantly - the mice) have to survive is to have colonized other planets. In order to do that we need to first learn as much as possible about the rest of the universe. The 8 planets plus several dozen dwarf planets we can study in our solar system aren't going to cut it for filling in our knowledge.
Granted we could just ask the mice, but they're still pretending to be dumb animals rather than a race of super genius computer boffins so they may not answer.
a number of physicists, Sir Roger Penrose notably among them, have posited theories of a cyclical universe. Some of those theories have been discredited or possibly even disproven (stupid work internet filter prevents verification), but there is a certain beauty to the idea of such symmetry.
If I recall what I've read on the subject correctly the cyclical universe model has been mostly dismissed by cosmologists. I believe the current theories suggest the universe will eventually end in a big freeze as entropy sets in rather than a big crunch as gravity pulls everything back together.
I've also heard a big tear theory where the fabric of space-time rips under the strain of the accelerating expansion of the universe, but that may have been in a sci-fi novel rather than a scientific journal. I know that one sci-fi series I'm fond of ends with a rather shocking confirmation of that model (nope, not saying which, no spoilers here) but I can't recall if it was also a serious model or not.
Back to the original post, I find the idea that the universe exists in the event horizon of a black hole very interesting. Unfortunately my knowledge of cosmology and black hole mechanics stops far short of being able to know how likely it is.
Not so sure about kids though. I can quite easily imagine these things being relegated to serious artists, or at least crafty adults. Rather like how most kids are given those cheap $2 water color trays that come with a 50 cent brush whereas serious artists will spend $5 minimum on each color and no less than $10 on each brush (and will have several brushes as opposed to the one that kids are expected to make do with).
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