Recent Posts
(see attachment in previous post)
Hardcore Gamer Mom In China Gives Birth In an Internet Cafe, Goes Back to Gaming-Arizona Hot (May 21, 2015, 12:12 PM)
^ I know I'm not chancing it. Not sure if it should be left linked if there is a warning...-wraith808 (May 20, 2015, 04:39 PM)
I read a SciFi novel maybe 6 months ago. I don't recall the author or title, but it was all about diverting comets to Mars to get the water from the ice.-MilesAhead (March 20, 2015, 05:40 PM)
The physicists at the Thunderbolt Project have illustrated that comets have no ice. Just a fun fact. It's interesting how they explain things.-Renegade (May 20, 2015, 12:25 AM)
Here is the SciFi Novel in question: Mining the Oort by Frederik Pohl
Speaking of Mars I heard an old radio interview with some dude about the "face with the helmut" on Mars. I forget the dude's name. I think he has one book published. Anyway according to this dude NASA has known all along intelligent extraterrestrials exist. If this should be true I have to wonder if the "rock with the cellular life fossils" was NASA checking the public's reaction to the possibility of other life in the Solar System.
With the luck mankind has if there is life on Mars they are probably big cockroaches.-MilesAhead (May 20, 2015, 05:41 AM)
I read a SciFi novel maybe 6 months ago. I don't recall the author or title, but it was all about diverting comets to Mars to get the water from the ice.-MilesAhead (March 20, 2015, 05:40 PM)
A security test by the Canada Revenue Agency found thousands of its employees could not resist the lure of a phony e-mail phishing scam, a discovery that suggests vulnerabilities remain at the agency more than a year after it was rocked by a major online security breach.
The Globe and Mail has learned that over the first three months of this year, the agency’s security and internal-affairs division sent 16,000 employees an e-mail designed to replicate the potentially dangerous messages that are common to anyone with an e-mail account.
A phishing scam usually involves an e-mail that encourages a user to click on a link, which could then expose the user’s computer to malicious software.
The result of the CRA’s test was that 78 per cent of employees did not click on the link contained in phishing attempts. However, that means roughly 3,500 employees did fall for the scam, even though they were informed ahead of time that the test would take place.
Philippe Brideau, a spokesperson for the CRA, said, "...The CRA’s systems are safe and secure.”
2. Ads "related" to something describe what you are. If you code, then you are a car. Proof:Yes, but where do fractions and Elvis impersonators fit in??-TaoPhoenix (May 14, 2015, 08:58 AM)-x16wda (May 14, 2015, 08:12 PM)
Peter Schiff spoke briefly with Ben Bernanke at the SkyBridge Alternatives (SALT) Conference yesterday. Approaching the former Federal Reserve Chairman, Peter warned, “In full disclosure, I’m your biggest critic.” Bernanke didn’t miss a beat: “You have a lot of competition.”
(I don't need any - this is just to bump the thread.) Professor: If You Read To Your Kids, You’re ‘Unfairly Disadvantaging’ Others
Check your privilege, ladies.
May 6, 2015 3:24 PM
Bedtime-story privilege?
According to a professor at the University of Warwick in England, parents who read to their kids should be thinking about how they’re “unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children” by doing so.
In an interview with ABC Radio last week, philosopher and professor Adam Swift said that since “bedtime stories activities . . . do indeed foster and produce . . . [desired] familial relationship goods,” he wouldn’t want to ban them, but that parents who “engage in bedtime-stories activities” should definitely at least feel kinda bad about it sometimes:
“I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,” he said.
But Swift also added that some other things parents do to give their kids the best education possible — like sending them to “an elite private school” — “cannot be justified” in this way.
“Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,” he said.
”It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realize these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school,” he continued, adding that “we could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to elite family relationships.”
At one point, Swift even flirted with the idea of “simply abolishing the family” as a way of “solving the social justice problem” because “there would be a more level playing field” if we did, but ultimately concluded that “it is in the child’s interest to be parented” and that “parenting a child makes for what we call a distinctive and special contribution to the flourishing and well-being of adults.”
In general, I tend to believe that focusing on improving things for the less fortunate is a better way to advance our society than purposely making things worse for those who have more, but what do I know? After all, it’s not like I’m a philosopher or anything.
— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.
Citizens Looking To Safely Record Interactions With Law Enforcement Have A Couple Of New Options To Consider
The ACLU has a "new" app available that allows users to record interactions with the police and automatically upload them to the ACLU's servers to preserve the footage in case the phone is seized… or smashed on the ground.
The app itself is not new, although it is new to California. Previous ACLU apps that serve the same purpose have already debuted in New York (as "Stop and Frisk Watch"), New Jersey (the now-defunct "Police Tape" app that generated 'flash mob' fears all the way across the country in Burbank, CA), Mississippi, Oregon, Nebraska and Missouri.
Each version has been tweaked to comply with local recording laws and presumably more versions are on the way. The Mobile Justice app also provides a handy list of rights citizens have when interacting with law enforcement (subject to law enforcement recognition of those rights, of course) as well as incident forms that can be filled out post-interaction to give the ACLU more detail on the recording itself.
Inarguably, it has been footage obtained by citizens that has blown the lid off police misconduct in this country -- ranging from seemingly routine harassment of camera-wielding citizens to incidents like the death of Walter Scott at the hands of South Carolina police officer Michael Slager, who shot him in the back as he was running away.
If your local ACLU chapter hasn't put together an app to automatically archive recordings of law enforcement interactions, there's another app on the way that will give anyone the ability to capture footage and ensure that, not only will it survive attempts to destroy evidence, but that it will possibly be seen by others as the event unfolds.
- ver the course of the weekend, developer Marinos Bernitsas demoed an app that immediately begins recording live audio and video as soon as you tap the app’s icon, but doesn’t actually display the video stream being recorded on the smartphone’s screen.
Meanwhile, instead of having the stream sent out to the public via social networks like Twitter, only designated contacts you’ve previously configured in the app’s settings are alerted to the incident via phone calls and text messages.
Unlike the ACLU's app, Bernitsas' program isn't specifically aimed at police accountability. It's also meant to act as a form of protection against any potentially dangerous interaction. Because it hasn't been crafted with an eye on local recording laws, there's a chance that footage captured could result in charges being brought against the person recording and streaming the incident.
It does have two advantages over the ACLU's app: First off, the app doesn't need to be opened to initiate a recording. Secondly, anyone who grabs the phone will have little clue they're being recorded. The only indicator that anything out of the normal is happening is a red banner across the top of the screen, which may look like nothing more than phone UI customization. The app also makes it possible to capture and stream recordings in areas where coverage is less-than-optimal.
What’s also clever about the app is that even if the user loses their Internet connection, Witness will record video in 10-second chunks and store them locally on the end user’s iPhone. When their connection returns, that video is uploaded to the server.
With the footage going to any contacts the user chooses rather than a neutral party only interested in certain incidents and interactions (like the ACLU), this app holds potential for abuse. One could easily "repurpose" this public safety app to stream sexual encounters, private conversations, etc.
The upside of this downside is that doing so will violate many states' wiretapping laws, which would provide for prosecution of those who use this app for purposes other than what was intended. That the perpetrator creates his or her own damning evidence is helpful and one would imagine captured footage (if still stored at the pass through point) could easily be obtained from Witness' servers with a subpoena. The ACLU notes that footage sent to it is also potentially accessible to law enforcement via subpoenas or other court orders, but does point out that it will fight these requests, rather than simply hand over whatever's requested.
...And people wonder why I think that the education system as it is should be entirely scrapped. Viscously. Without mercy. Without remorse. With fury and fire. ...
________________________-Renegade (May 05, 2015, 10:59 AM)
Either @Renegade has been chatting with our friend Mrs Malaprop again, or there may be reason to suspect that he is not a real person per se, but an AI connected to the Internet. Hard to explain that away as "just a typo" methinks.-IainB (May 06, 2015, 02:01 AM)
There is an announcement dated 2015-05-05 on the Google Cloud Platform blog:
Announcing Google Cloud Bigtable: The same database that powers Google Search, Gmail and Analytics is now available on Google Cloud Platform
Amongst the verbiage, it gives a list of "key benefits", which list also makes the classic confusion of features with benefits. One of these "benefits is described thus:Security: Cloud Bigtable is built with a replicated storage strategy, and all data is encrypted both in-flight and at rest.
Pretty impressive, eh?
Yes, but it set my BS alarm off. What exactly does "in-flight and at rest" mean? Well, it's using ambiguous clichés, so it could mean anything you wanted, or more probably it means nothing, but the desired implication would seem to be that everything is safely encrypted and cannot be decrypted or viewed by other parties. So why didn't they just say so? Probably because if they did say that, it would not be true/provable, and they don't want to lie about it because it could not be confirmed in contract, and they know that very well and so just obfuscate instead. Heck, this "announcement" is only a marketing puff, after all.-IainB (May 06, 2015, 08:24 AM)
In other - possibly related - news, it might not have escaped your attention that Dropbox have announced that they are setting up data storage farms in Ireland to house all the data belonging to their business users and other paying customers outside of North America.
Now why would they do that?-IainB (May 06, 2015, 08:24 AM)
And do all the Dells of the last few years have a built-in wireless?-Steven Avery (May 03, 2015, 11:07 PM)
I gotta see what that's about. this version has come to the US - first look via imaging-resource.com-tomos (May 05, 2015, 08:47 AM)
Possibly of more long term interest (?) - a multi-lens camera is in development for smartphones:
(see attachment in previous post)
Startup Light “reimagines photography” - Will phones finally compete with cameras for image quality?
(imaging-resource.com again)
and an interview which gets fairly technical at times (I didnt read it all)-tomos (May 05, 2015, 08:47 AM)