Recent Comments

I find this new poll to be very innovative. Multiple choice tick boxes!

Wasn't able to respond earlier. No, no response. But the word on the street is that B&N is in a deathspiral anyway, so who cares? They've closed their European store abruptly, leaving a lot of European book buyers essentially in the lurch. The ebook/nook division of B&N seems to be losing money fast. They've just reworked their website and it's been getting a lot of complaints of serious interface problems (they offer you a link to rebuy a book rather instead of something else, etc.).

Hate to see Amazon lose what little competition it has, but B&N seems to be having trouble getting it together. Too bad for us, the consumers.

I did the very same thing you did: I went up to my boss and said "Hey, sound desk operators usually get around $50k a year."

He said "So?"

I told him that clearly I was underpaid and deserved more.

He told me I could quit if I didn't like it.

Yeah it's kind of baffling to me, though of course quite welcome. The economics of finding advertisers, renting broadcast slots, overhead, etc. versus the small number of people still watching via antennas ... I don't quite get their incentive.

on second thought, i do know personally a few people who really, honestly do believe in these types of topics; to each their own. As to not deprive them of interesting content, might i suggest a new category of 'Fringe', or something of the like? A place for stories like aliens, conspiracy theories and other reaching-news

if pipedot eventually implements user category-filtering, one could just hide theses stories, no big deal.

generally, yes - almost anything but fox. although in this case in certainly appears each of those sources are airing the same non-story - "get a load of this guy!", so i'd probably still vote down. Aside, he isn't exactly the first notable person to make alien claims, and his claim isn't new.

edit: after re-reading my first post i wanted to clarify that the -1 wasn't only because of Fox as the source; i'd put 75% of that vote on the story itself.

fox is a terrible source to redistribute

Would you prefer RT, TheBlaze, Telegraph, Newsmax, Press Examiner, Daily Mail, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Techworm, Gizmodo, or Yahoo News?

https://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=dTPTvX_VR45a17Mx4pUk47-AZAc9M&ned=us

they are really scraping the barrel on this one...its really just an article pointing out that this guy is crazy- they didn't even attempt to talk to anybody except one person, who could smack it down.

-1 as fox is a terrible source to redistribute. i don't feel pipedot should be associated with a 'news' corp that has asserted they have no obligation to report facts.

Cosmetic. The. Damn. Red. Commies.

This sounds like a remote Waldo, not a robot. Robots are autonomous. Of course that doesn't make it useless by any means.

I was unable to get any traction at all on meaningful parameters.

* How noisy is this thing compared to a human?

* What is the unrefueled/unrecharged endurance doing typical tasks? Again, compare to a human.

* How is the thing refueled or recharged, how much does it cost to do so, and how long does it take? Does it need to be returned to a base station to do it? Compare to a sandwich and a pint of beer for a human. I imagine, however, that it does not have to eliminate waste products at intervals like a human.

there will always be a rouge element

Are you talking about jeweller's rouge, or cosmetic rouge?

We come in peace! Shoot to kill..

Falcons, eagles and hawks of different species have adapted to urban and suburban areas. Maybe it would all sort itself out.

Yup. It won't be much different than today, but I Imagine it may be more difficult to track down unregistered drone owners. Unless they decide to disable them when detected or something. I can see the Washington DC area outfitted with anti drone technology that "shoots" first and asks questions later. Not sure if they can all be taken down with lasers or Radio signal jamming or hard rubber projectiles would be needed.

Only in built up areas, because nature has its own way of dealing with pests

Then they will build a device to detect drones and scan for chips. Fail x times and the drone is reported. Or tracked back Home probably. Just like today with licence plate scanning.

More than that, congestion pricing. So as the airspace gets more crowded during peak times, a toll is charged automatically to anyone flying.

Of course, there will always be a rouge element that refuses to install and use a required chip to enable all of this registration and toll charges. Just like there are millions of unregistered cars with unlicensed drivers in them today. But, unless you are driving an old drone, or built or modified an existing on to disable the system, you should be good.

I hadn't thought of that, but what you say makes sense. It's easier to negotiate salaries up than down, in general. There's a perception aspect to salaries anyway, especially when the economy is doing well. You don't want to lose people to competing firms, so you try to pay a little higher. Everyone else does it too, and suddenly everyone is overpaying for relatively shittier quality personnel.

I can see this getting to the point where drones will require registration like cars. Maybe even to the point where a licence is required to fly a drone in built up areas. A transponder system perhaps.. no respose equals dead flying machine.

*woosh*

Not sure what your concern is? It's a widely advertised and public conference held in a big, Las Vegas hotel. These are PDFs.

You're afraid that if you open one the NSA will beat your door down? These PDFs don't show you how to hack the White House, they discuss the state of security systems. Likely the NSA attended the conference.

Happy reading.

If worried use pdf2ps or pdf2jpg or some other variety to convert it.

Almost every raise I've ever received (some updwards of 50%) have been because I've presented data others have collected (typically the computerworld.com annual survey). This type of information is readily available to various fields, and everyone that can should use it. The idea that CEO salaries have risen across the board because of laws requiring reporting sounds plausible, but without hard numbers (good luck with that) I'm not 100% sold. The people in these jobs are very much the people whose skills in negotiating financials are very much at the forefront of why they are getting hired.

Um, and I the only one who doesn't want to open any of these?

When the law changed to require executive compensation to be reported along with the other financials for publicly traded companies, we handed future CEO's an incredible amount of power. If you or I apply for a job we are often shooting in the dark when it comes to salary. We can (maybe) get information from friends, colleagues. professional associations, etc., but that information is hard to use in a negotiation (it canbe effective at bumping up yourpay if presented correctly, but that doesn't help anyone else applying for that job or similar jobs since they may not have equal access to that information). That's not the case with these guys. They go in and have hard numbers. They can point to another CEO at a comparably sized company and say, "That guy is making $1.2 mil. I need at least $1.3 + some stock options, since I am far more qualified (have more expertise, will do amazing things, etc.)!"

Soon enough, the salaries of those positions bloom beyond what is reasonable. Other benefits (golden parachutes) get tacked on that aren't available to the lower tiered worker. A company doesn't want to be known as a miserly bunch that pays its executives LESS than their competitors!

Unintended consequences.

Yes, it looks like you can still get pagers, but they appear to be just as expensive as full cell-phone service:

* http://www.pagersonline.com/

* http://www.npr.org/2012/07/18/156956159/are-pagers-obsolete

Damn it, I just got a cheap flip phone a couple of months ago! Now in 18 months I'll just look like I read some stupid trend piece and simply had to get on that bandwagon.

_{Can you still get pagers?}

thank you for pushing this to the FP. there are more PDF files @ blackhat/2015 site but some were skipped over and others likely added at a later date.

I almost dropped this article from the queue - huge list of PDFs was a pain in the *ss to format. But then i started reading them. Neat stuff.

Check out the internet facing PLC systems one at least - stuff like Stuxnet, SCADA. Also interesting to me to see the German guys must have done their slides using LaTeX and the beamer package - awesome. Other presentations are so glossy they almost take away from the content (like the social engineering one). Last one I liked was about the smart cards - with application not only for printer cartridge manufacturers but that technology's push into the impending Internet of Things.

That's not how probabilities are calculated.

ever have banned talks? i've heard of some talks being banned on a particular topic, maybe it was DEFCON
and/or some other similar gathering.

The switch to digital has also multiplied the number of channels available by approximately a factor of 3X. Most major stations now have multiple sub-channel showing films (ThisTV/Movies/GetTV/Grit/Escape) older TV shows (LAFF/AntennaTV/MeTV/Cozi/Retrotv/PBJ/Buzzr/Heroes&Icons/Decades), kids shows (Qubo/PBS Kids) various others (Create/LivWell/IonLife/MHz WorldView/NHK), and more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_over-the-air_television_networks#Table_of_broadcast_networks

OTA TV is now a lot like cable TV was in the early days... Best picture available, big selection of better-ish content, lots of groups trying to break-in and innovate, etc.

I have and use FreeNAS, and unless I'm gravely mistaken, has no firewall capabilities whatsoever. It's a file server, not a firewall.

Right. We actually have decent roads here. It is possible for a car to live and die with the original windshield.

Jeez, that's some interesting stuff, but who's got the time and energy to format this mess?

That's my opinion too. If it does no more than provide free juice for charging your gadgets while you drive, hey, it's a win, probably. Same goes for skyscrapers: as long as their sides are just sitting there providing no benefit, hey! Go for it. Run a little cost-benefit analysis to see how it works out, and go.

Really depends where you live. Where I am now, replacing wind-shields every couple of years is pretty normal. Either that, or drive around with huge cracks and a bunch of chips in them.

5% per year is plenty frequent. That's a 50/50 chance over 10 years. If you've got two cars, make that a 100% chance you'll need to replace one of them in 10 years. And none of this is including all the years people drive around with a cracked/chipped windshield before replacing it. That's not long enough of a horizon for solar panels, which should last 30+ years, easily.

There are ~250 million passenger vehicles in the US. Assuming that each replacement was on a different car (which they are not) that's only about 5% being replaced. That's not even "somewhat" frequently.

If you are referring to the content that's on, you have an argument. If you are talking about the picture quality, you may or may not be correct. If you can get a signal, TV is much better than it was in the 70's even before the digital switch over. However, with the switch over, there are some locations like mine in a vast sea of a suburban sprawl in a major tv market that *had* good signal before the switch over and decent picture quality, but lost all channels except one after the switch over.

But the analog static, audio pop, v sync and general waviness is gone. Its as good as anything you can get from any internet source ( netflix, hulu, etc).

Buildings vary a great deal. One World Trade Center has one hell of a lot more window area than roof area. So does the Empire State Building.

Yes, and if you're going to be building a glass skyscraper then this is something you'll want to think about once they have move beyond 9 square inches of surface area.

But for most of us, panels on the roof are a good solution at the present.

Not being a biologist, I can't respond authoritatively, but I am guessing that this evolved in the same was as many other "mutualisms" (an official term worth looking up if you are genuinely curious). Another famous example of co-evolution is the orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale) which has a 16 inch long nectary. When it was first discovered, Darwin postulated that there must be a species of insect with an insanely long tongue that feeds on (and pollinates) that flower. Without a moth with a 15 inch long tongue, the flower wouldn't survive, and vice versa. That moth was observed in 1992 (way, way after Darwin had died).

So back to mutualism, any creature that visits a particular plant for a number of reasons (food, resting place, etc.) and picks up pollen allows that particular plant a greater opportunity for genetic diversity. If those visits lead to better reproductive success (for both creature and plant), you begin to have a generation-long feedback loop of changes (however small) that led to a mutually dependent relationship.

In this particular instance (and this is hypothetical), let's say that a plant secretes something that the bats find tasty. That isn't unusual. These particular plant exists in a nutrient-scarce environment, so being able to attract the bats (and their feces) leads to greater reproductive success for that particular plant. Minor mutations that occur in every generation may lead to some plants being more tasty, and some plants being less tasty, to the bats. Those that are more tasty get the bats to come by more often. Bats coming by more often leads to healthier plants that reproduce better. None of this is purposeful on the side of the plants. It just works out that some minor genetic changes due to mutation are beneficial, and some are not. As time goes by, both species (plant and animal) that are benefited by the relationship are also shaped by it. Bats that visit these plants to eat or use them as shelter have more babies (meaning more bats that would visit vs. bats that would not visit), and the plants that attract the bats and the bat's feces are more likely to reproduce as well (so more plants that attract bats, and fewer plants that do not attract bats. Pretty soon, especially if this is one of the stronger environmental pressure on their genes over generations, you have two species that are very different than the first plant that attracted that first bat. The taste of the plant is just one of the many minor things that would change, of course. Shape changes over time, and some changes are beneficial (more bats visit, leaving feces, meaning proliferation of that particular shape) and some are not beneficial (fewer bats visit, plants don't reproduce as well, those variations die out or become scarce).

This is a very simple hypothetical of a relationship that developed over many, many generations. This kind of relationship isn't all that rare, or all that surprising (although we are surprised by the funny things nature does, this being one of those particulars).

Thanks for the info. I keep several linux and bsd live cds around for this purpose. Moving slowly to live-usbs.

Now I am wondering how long your front teeth last for...

A truly powerful anecdote. But according the Internets "13-14 million windshields are replaced each year". Lower figure is 7.5 million. I imagine that doesn't necessarily even include the millions of windshield repairs (not replacements). I've had it done 2 or 3 times.

Your mileage may vary. But your anecdote (and mine) aren't worth anything.

Did I fully explain that your anecdote is meaningless?

Also, the poster wrote "somewhat frequently".

Frequently? I have never had to replace a windshield. My cars have lasted for 5 and 11 years.

In that occasion I used a recent kubuntu, probably w/systemd. It sucked (does not apply setxkbmap, no error)but did the job.

Sounds like a great idea for car windshields... They're clear so should be street-legal, they block the infrared light responsible for much of the heat, they block the ultraviolet light that hurts your eyes and makes you squint, and they also float-charge your battery while you're parked in the sun, or maybe even turn an exhaust fan. A little less load on your alternator would improve gas mileage by a hair.

Only big problem with the idea is windshields get damaged and need to be replaced somewhat frequently, so the solar tech needs to be cheap enough that it doesn't quadruple the cost.

Buildings vary a great deal. One World Trade Center has one hell of a lot more window area than roof area. So does the Empire State Building.

looks to me like that one is locked to Sprint. Sprint is completely worthless here.

The nice thing about Sprint/Ting/Republic (but not Boost/Virgin/most-MVNOs) is ability to roam (for free) onto Verizon wherever Sprint coverage is non-existent. Where Sprint sucks, however, is the areas where their coverage is just poor (1 or 0 bars), but the phone is reluctant to roam and you get stuck with a signal that keeps breaking-up. And they severely limit data while roaming.

The phone occasionally gets subjected to being crushed because it just gets in the way. If it's much more breakable than a pocketknife, it WILL get broken.

Look into heavy-duty smartphone cases before you dismiss them. http://www.otterbox.com/en-us/defender-series is a good place to start.