Plug it into your car's power supply and it uses Bluetooth to help guide your phone back to your car -- no data plan required.
I must be missing something. Bluetooth is an extremely short-range technology; if it can "see" your phone, you can almost certainly already see your car. So what useful thing does this device do?
Besides, with more and more cars these days coming with a keyfob that lets you remotely honk the horn, difficulty finding your car is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. All you really need to remember is which parking lot you parked in.
I'm a bit surprised no one seems to be particularly horrified by the "fake volcano" idea.
When something heavier than air is up in the air, it tends to fall back down. When acid falls from the sky, they call that acid rain, and it can do serious damage to both people and property. And sulfuric acid is very scary stuff: it can do this to basic organic matter. (You know, the stuff our bodies are made of.) Anyone who advocates making that fall from the sky needs to have their head examined. Global warming is a serious problem that needs serious solutions, but I'd hardly say this qualifies as one!
I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. I wish I had more years left. -- Thomas Edison
Re: If It Weren’t For Climate Change, The Human Race Woudln’t Exist
Come on, guys, quit feeding the trolls. It's not like there was much room for reasonable doubt before, but with the recent revelations about Exxon, there's no longer any room whatsoever. Anyone still denying the reality of anthropogenic climate change is either flat-out lying or has been deceived by people who were flat-out lying. Either way, at this point trying to set them straight is kinda pointless.
Re: Re: Re: If It Weren’t For Climate Change, The Human Race Woudln’t Exist
Thank you! That's the thing too many people never seem to get about Y2K: the only reason it didn't happen the way the alarmists warned is because we did a huge amount of work to make it not happen! Why do so many people not get this?
A key part of the reasoning of the original Hargreaves report was that allowing a private copyright right would actually bring copyright norms into alignment with what people expected copyright law to allow -- thus giving people more of a reason to respect copyright law, for not being totally ridiculous and unreasonable
Jessica Litman, in her excellent book Digital Copyright, points out that one of the biggest problems is that so many people don't believe copyright law. Not that they "don't believe in" it, but they simply do not believe, when told about what the law requires and what it restricts, that the law could actually be that ridiculous; surely the person explaining it to them is misinformed... right?
When things get to that point, it's a good sign that the law needs to be changed.
Once inside, the hacker obtained the ... passwords, ... of 4,833,678 parents
That right there should be considered a priori evidence of criminal negligence on the part of VTech. It's basically Websites 101 that if you store passwords in such a way that it's possible for a hacker to read them, you're Doing It Wrong.
Some people without experience in such matters may look at this and say, "but wait, if you don't store the password, how do you validate it when you log in?" The answer is, you store a hash of the password, which is a technical transformation that's kind of like encryption, except it can only be performed one-way. (You can decrypt something that's been encrypted if you have the key, but you can't de-hash hashed data.) When the person tries to log in, you hash the password that they sent and if the hash matches, you're confident that the password is correct, since a properly designed cryptographic hash makes it exceptionally unlikely that two different passwords will hash to the same value.
Getting the details of password hashing right can be complicated, but if the hacker got everyone's passwords, that means VTech was almost certainly storing them in plain text (not hashed at all) or using a hash that's known to be broken (the math for some of them has flaws that do make it possible to reverse the hashing process a lot of the time). Doing either one would be considered grossly negligent by any competent programmer.
Frankly this is history. As anyone who knows anything about the region can tell you, there are several distinct ethnicities who live there. Pray tell, which one(s) am I allegedly being racist against?
I'm not trying to "spare the ideology"; I'm talking about what really happened, and had been happening for thousands of years before Islam came along, formally codified the worst of it, and packaged it up for export by the sword.
And please bear in mind that the existence of a few cherry-picked exceptions does not invalidate any general rule.
My personal theory is that it when you get down to it, it has nothing to do with race, religion, or anything similar, but that deserts are simply a really toxic place to live. It's the most fundamental theory of civilization that it starts with producing an abundance of food through agriculture, which allows the majority of the populace to get beyond subsistence and begin to specialize in things that raise society to a higher level. But when a climate poor in water makes the widespread practice of agriculture difficult or impossible, you can't lay that foundation, and so instead of collaborating to build up civilization, you end up with a culture that never moves beyond highly xenophobic tribes competing with their neighbors (which often means warring/raiding) for scarce resources. The problem is that cultural ideas often become traditions that long outlive the conditions that originally made them necessary. (Particularly when formalized by religion, the most effective mechanism that humanity has ever come up with for preserving information over the extreme long term!)
This explains why, looking back through history, you see a lot of the same cultural problems in many distinct races living in the Middle East, and why things don't tend to get better even when abundance is introduced and scarce resources become less scarce.
He's right, though depending on how he made the comparison, possibly not in the way he thinks.
Terrorism (well, terrorism of the Islamist variety, the one that everyone's been so concerned about for the last decade-and-a-half or so,) is funded in large part by oil money. If we were to get serious about stopping either global warming or terrorism, the single most significant part of the solution--do away with petroleum-based fuels--would go a long way toward solving both problems.
...and why were the Crusaders there in the first place? Because the Byzantine Emperor begged for aid from the West to retake territory that had been conquered by Muslim invaders, without which there would have been no Crusades at all.
And then, in the culmination of centuries of the sort of scheming and infighting that have since made the word "Byzantine" synonymous with "deadly, treacherous politics", they proved unable to deal with the consequences of what they had unleashed. It may not be strictly true that "no country has ever been conquered from without unless it had already rotted from within," but it was certainly true in this case! As I said above, it's not really a religious problem, but a cultural one endemic to the Middle East. Islam is just a symptom; the real problem is that the people who live there have been at each other's throats literally for thousands of years, regardless of which religious or political entity held sway at any given time.
Throw around ugly words all you want. My "views" are simply the recognition of millennia of historical fact, and those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
I didn't say they're unworthy of belonging to humanity; I said they're too uncivilized to safely mix with people who have learned better ways of resolving problems than "violence and/or the threat thereof as the first resort." I used the word "quarantine" in my earlier post for a reason.
Most places in the world, as wealth and improved technology flow in, it improves the standard of living generally and tends to reduce crime and violence. "A rising tide lifts all ships," as they say. But in the deserts of the Middle East, where water is in scarce supply, this nautical metaphor for sociological conditions just doesn't seem to hold true, largely due to overriding cultural problems.
And for all your high-minded attempts to throw around large numbers, that figure actually is exactly what you would expect. Given a bell-curve distribution of a population of approximately 7 billion, you're statistically likely to have a little over 1 billion located 1 SD or more to the left.
Immediately before the advent of Mohammed, Mecca was multi-faith and relatively tolerant. Certainly it was not significantly worse than any other place at that time.
I'm not talking about "immediately before Mohammed;" I'm talking about thousands of years of history in the region. The cultural problems in the area have been pretty consistent since the days of Ishmael and Esau, if not longer.
Travel is a right and not a privilege. The act of operating heavy machinery at speeds at which even minor contact with anything can result in severe injury, death, and/or massive amounts of property damage, on the other hand, is very much a privilege that needs to be tightly regulated for legitimate public safety reasons.
Again, that didn't happen in Seattle. (I know; I was living in the area at the time.) As Socrates said, the discrepancies between what happened and what got reported are massive.
On the post: Congress Still Fighting SEC's Investigation Of Alleged Insider Trading By Its Members
Re: "I am not a crook... and you don't have the power or authority to say otherwise."
On the post: Daily Deal: Zus Car Charger And Locator
Re: Re:
On the post: Daily Deal: Zus Car Charger And Locator
I must be missing something. Bluetooth is an extremely short-range technology; if it can "see" your phone, you can almost certainly already see your car. So what useful thing does this device do?
Besides, with more and more cars these days coming with a keyfob that lets you remotely honk the horn, difficulty finding your car is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. All you really need to remember is which parking lot you parked in.
On the post: DailyDirt: Geoengineering Could Have Its Own Unintended Consequences
When something heavier than air is up in the air, it tends to fall back down. When acid falls from the sky, they call that acid rain, and it can do serious damage to both people and property. And sulfuric acid is very scary stuff: it can do this to basic organic matter. (You know, the stuff our bodies are made of.) Anyone who advocates making that fall from the sky needs to have their head examined. Global warming is a serious problem that needs serious solutions, but I'd hardly say this qualifies as one!
On the post: DailyDirt: Geoengineering Could Have Its Own Unintended Consequences
Re:
On the post: The Details Of Why Judge O'Grady Rejected Cox's DMCA Defense: Bad Decisions By Cox May Lead To Bad Law
You keep using that word...
Seems to me the person who wrote this email needs to look up the definition of "unwritten".
On the post: Mom, My Barbie Needs A Better Firewall
So play nice!
On the post: DailyDirt: Geoengineering Could Have Its Own Unintended Consequences
Re: If It Weren’t For Climate Change, The Human Race Woudln’t Exist
On the post: DailyDirt: Geoengineering Could Have Its Own Unintended Consequences
Re: Re: Re: If It Weren’t For Climate Change, The Human Race Woudln’t Exist
On the post: What Did The UK Accomplish In Revoking The Right To Rip CDs After Just One Year... Other Than Greater Disrespect For Copyright?
Jessica Litman, in her excellent book Digital Copyright, points out that one of the biggest problems is that so many people don't believe copyright law. Not that they "don't believe in" it, but they simply do not believe, when told about what the law requires and what it restricts, that the law could actually be that ridiculous; surely the person explaining it to them is misinformed... right?
When things get to that point, it's a good sign that the law needs to be changed.
On the post: Toy Maker Vtech Hacked, Revealing Kids' Selfies, Chat Logs, & Even Voice Recordings
That right there should be considered a priori evidence of criminal negligence on the part of VTech. It's basically Websites 101 that if you store passwords in such a way that it's possible for a hacker to read them, you're Doing It Wrong.
Some people without experience in such matters may look at this and say, "but wait, if you don't store the password, how do you validate it when you log in?" The answer is, you store a hash of the password, which is a technical transformation that's kind of like encryption, except it can only be performed one-way. (You can decrypt something that's been encrypted if you have the key, but you can't de-hash hashed data.) When the person tries to log in, you hash the password that they sent and if the hash matches, you're confident that the password is correct, since a properly designed cryptographic hash makes it exceptionally unlikely that two different passwords will hash to the same value.
Getting the details of password hashing right can be complicated, but if the hacker got everyone's passwords, that means VTech was almost certainly storing them in plain text (not hashed at all) or using a hash that's known to be broken (the math for some of them has flaws that do make it possible to reverse the hashing process a lot of the time). Doing either one would be considered grossly negligent by any competent programmer.
On the post: Saudi Arabia Says It Will Sue Twitter Users Who Compare It To ISIS; Apparently Skips The NY Times
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm not trying to "spare the ideology"; I'm talking about what really happened, and had been happening for thousands of years before Islam came along, formally codified the worst of it, and packaged it up for export by the sword.
And please bear in mind that the existence of a few cherry-picked exceptions does not invalidate any general rule.
My personal theory is that it when you get down to it, it has nothing to do with race, religion, or anything similar, but that deserts are simply a really toxic place to live. It's the most fundamental theory of civilization that it starts with producing an abundance of food through agriculture, which allows the majority of the populace to get beyond subsistence and begin to specialize in things that raise society to a higher level. But when a climate poor in water makes the widespread practice of agriculture difficult or impossible, you can't lay that foundation, and so instead of collaborating to build up civilization, you end up with a culture that never moves beyond highly xenophobic tribes competing with their neighbors (which often means warring/raiding) for scarce resources. The problem is that cultural ideas often become traditions that long outlive the conditions that originally made them necessary. (Particularly when formalized by religion, the most effective mechanism that humanity has ever come up with for preserving information over the extreme long term!)
This explains why, looking back through history, you see a lot of the same cultural problems in many distinct races living in the Middle East, and why things don't tend to get better even when abundance is introduced and scarce resources become less scarce.
On the post: Our Response To The Latest Ridiculous Legal Threat Against Us: Milorad Trkulja Can Go Pound Sand
On the post: Saudi Arabia Says It Will Sue Twitter Users Who Compare It To ISIS; Apparently Skips The NY Times
Re:
Terrorism (well, terrorism of the Islamist variety, the one that everyone's been so concerned about for the last decade-and-a-half or so,) is funded in large part by oil money. If we were to get serious about stopping either global warming or terrorism, the single most significant part of the solution--do away with petroleum-based fuels--would go a long way toward solving both problems.
On the post: Saudi Arabia Says It Will Sue Twitter Users Who Compare It To ISIS; Apparently Skips The NY Times
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
And then, in the culmination of centuries of the sort of scheming and infighting that have since made the word "Byzantine" synonymous with "deadly, treacherous politics", they proved unable to deal with the consequences of what they had unleashed. It may not be strictly true that "no country has ever been conquered from without unless it had already rotted from within," but it was certainly true in this case! As I said above, it's not really a religious problem, but a cultural one endemic to the Middle East. Islam is just a symptom; the real problem is that the people who live there have been at each other's throats literally for thousands of years, regardless of which religious or political entity held sway at any given time.
On the post: Saudi Arabia Says It Will Sue Twitter Users Who Compare It To ISIS; Apparently Skips The NY Times
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Saudi Arabia Says It Will Sue Twitter Users Who Compare It To ISIS; Apparently Skips The NY Times
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Most places in the world, as wealth and improved technology flow in, it improves the standard of living generally and tends to reduce crime and violence. "A rising tide lifts all ships," as they say. But in the deserts of the Middle East, where water is in scarce supply, this nautical metaphor for sociological conditions just doesn't seem to hold true, largely due to overriding cultural problems.
And for all your high-minded attempts to throw around large numbers, that figure actually is exactly what you would expect. Given a bell-curve distribution of a population of approximately 7 billion, you're statistically likely to have a little over 1 billion located 1 SD or more to the left.
On the post: Saudi Arabia Says It Will Sue Twitter Users Who Compare It To ISIS; Apparently Skips The NY Times
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm not talking about "immediately before Mohammed;" I'm talking about thousands of years of history in the region. The cultural problems in the area have been pretty consistent since the days of Ishmael and Esau, if not longer.
On the post: L.A. Politician Proposes Bold Plan To Wreck Homes, Destroy Lives And Abuse License Plate Reader Technology
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: French Government Using State Of Emergency As An Excuse To Round Up Climate Change Activists
Re: Re: Whom?
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