The top ten most often quoted people in .plan file (myself excluded) as of 8 February 2010:
Lyssa (199 times)
Anonymous (114)
Hasufin (110 times)
Jason (49 times)
Pegritz (46 times)
Kyrin (41 times)
Unknown (34 times)
the.Silicon.Dragon (33 times)
The Ferrett (29 times)
Terrence McKenna (22 times)
All quotes of multiple people have been collapsed into a single name based upon the number of times all of the names appeared. People with more than one name had all of their quotes totaled up.
Edited and uploaded at last (the power failure this morning notwithstanding), here are the first round of Snowpocalypse II pictures. While many of the people in our complex spent a good bit of last night and today digging out, we're still plowed in. Our complex is considered a side street, and the state of Virginia isn't going to clear the roads back here until sometime later this week (when more snow is predicted). Plus, a few brainiacs have decided to park right in the middle of some of the roads which have at most a single lane free, so no one can really get anywhere. We saw a few people on skis making pretty good time, and Hasufin's been working on a pair of snowshoes in his spare time.
The federal government's called a code red, so only emergency personnel are supposed to come in... which isn't most of us.
While it's probably common knowledge to everyone inside the beltway but me, I stumbled across a news article in the Politico that talks about CIA analysts hiring themselves out to the private sector as contractors who specialize in determining the veracity of what is said by people involved in corporate negotiations.
While I'm only slightly joking with the Dune reference, the way it's described they're doing much the same thing, only without the aid of external devices or mind-altering compounds. Apparently, the Agency maintains a cadre' of operatives who are trained in reading overt and covert physiological cues to determine if someone is lying about something and how important that something is to them as well as linguistic cues which are employed to qualify falsehoods or gloss over missing facts. They seem to refer to this technique as Tactical Behavior Assessment. It seems that they changed their internal policies to allow this because they got tired of their highly trained agents quitting to take jobs in the private sector where the pay and benefits are much better. They are, it should be noted, still bound by whatever security clearance and non-disclosure agreements they were granted when they signed on with the agency, though it would also not surprise at all if any interesting bits of information they picked up got passed up the food chain when they got back. An in depth description of work must be submitted to the Agency for review before a go/no go is returned to the agent in question. Any conflict of interest or hints of impropriety are grounds for an immediate refusal, backed up by the fearsome US legal system.
There is even an outfit based in Boston called Business Intelligence Advisors, which appears to be staffed by former Agency employees, though they seem to contract a fair number of active CIA employees for specific tasks. Not only can assets be contracted to carry out these tasks but sometimes they can be contracted to instruct non-assets in TBA methodologies.
It seems that the walls between worlds grow thinner and thinner as time goes by.
In the United States, genetic testing of newborns for inherited diseases began quietly sometime in the 1960's; the technology of the time, understandably, was in its infancy so it didn't detect a whole lot. Jump forward a half-decade, and you will find that the practice is still going on, plus it's mandatory in every state, and you might not be aware it's been done. Anna Brown gave birth to a bouncing baby girl a while ago (the article doesn't say when), and was understandably shocked when her pediatrician sat her down to tell her that her daughter Isabel carried a gene which put her at risk for cystic fibrosis. The real shocker came when she discovered that the tests were carried out without her knowledge or consent. The pediatrician wasn't the one who ordered the tests, he was only informed of the results by the state of Minnesota. The testing procedures are carried out by the GEnetic and NEwborn Screening Resource Center of the United States or GeNeS-R-US (a cute but tortured backronym, which seem to be all the rage these days). Even more interesting, genetic samples from babies are cryopreserved and archived indefinitely in some states, again without making a public deal out of it. It's possible for parents to ask the state to destroy the archived samples but it's not paticularly easy. There is also the fear that employers could refuse to hire someone and insurance companies could decline coverage to people who have certain genetic proclivities, even though it's been illegal to do so for a half-decade now.
It should be noted, however, that the insurance companies pay for this testing and get a free copy of the results to add to their records. Even if nothing is wrong. Even if you don't necessarily find out the results, for good or for ill.
What really gets some people's goats is that genetic samples can be passed along to researchers in the private sector without the parents being informed. Privacy laws state that the name of the infant must be kept separate from the sample, but that doesn't always happen. Plus, the security of the data systems which hold this information is always a matter of question. Still, the process through which researchers get hold of DNA samples isn't an easy one, and you have to prove how much you really want those samples to get them.
The ethics and legalities involved are under hot debate: in the past couple of years wrongful life lawsuits have begun to appear in the court system because sperm banks have distributed gametes to clients that weren't screened, and the children conceived were born with inherited genetic conditions. The most famous case involves a sperm donor who carries the gene for a disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which will leave you feeling hale and hearty until an odd combination of factors, which may not necessarily ever come to pass, causes you to fall over dead without warning. The defendant's sperm resulted in the conception of twenty-two children (plus two of his own); one died at age two of HCM, nine positively carry the genetic defect, and two evidence serious left ventricular hypertrophy.
This raises a whole host of thorny ethical questions. Is it ethical for everyone but the parents to know ahead of time what genetic glitches a child is carrying? Is it ethical to terminate a pregnancy because the fetus has better than a 50/50 chance of being born with an inherited disease that could cause them to die without warning? (Countries like Iran have this written into their legal code.) Is it ethical for the state of birth to put a DNA sample of an infant in deep freeze indefinitely for future unspecified purposes without the permission of the parents or donor? What sort of legal precedent does it set that a child born of donated genetic material can track down and sue the donor if they discover that they have a genetic defect? At what point does this cross over into selecting for specific genetic traits, and if it does when will we notice?
The Foresight Institute, a think tank concentrating on the possibilities and potential hazards of emerging and potentially disruptive technologies has announced the Kartik M. Gada Personal Manufacturing Prize totaling $100kus. Part of an effort to spur the development of rapid fabrication and manufacturing technologies at the grassroots level, the prize aims to help bootstrap the quality of life of people living in the twenty most poor economies on the planet. The idea is to lower the cost of entry to the field of manufacturing commodity personal goods by making use of recyclable materials and cheap to construct additive fabbers. The prize consists of two distinct awards, one of $20kus and one of $80kus.
The interim award of $20kus will be awarded by 31 December 2012 to the first project which meets a certain set of requirements. Namely, the fabber must be able to extrude three different construction materials, one of which must be electrically conductive, which dovetails nicely into the second requirement of being able to fabricate circuit boards. The fabber's feedstock must be reusable no less than twenty times before it must be replaced. The fabber must be cheap to construct, costing no more than $200us and at least 90% of the components must themselves be printable (in the same fashion as a RepRap's components). The fabber must be able to print a device larger than 12x12x4 (inches), which basically means that it must construct things you use every day (like moderately complex hand tools). It must be able to generate a single set of all of its printable parts within ten days' time with only one malfunction of the extruder. It must not rely upon a computer, though it may interface with one if such is available. It must also require less than 60 watts of power, which would lend it to being powered by wind, solar, or someone riding a jerry-rigged bicycle.
The grand prize of $80kus will be awarded three years after the interim prize to the project which meets a few more requirements than the first. Largely, it is focused upon speeding up the replication process (seven days instead of ten) but there are a few other aspects that the projects will be judged by. The grand prize winner must make use of relatively cheap feedstock, on the order of $4us/kg (which can be a lot of material if you think about it); additionally, recycling other materials into feedstock factors in prominently.
Participating teams are expected to publish their results regularly for peer review and collaboration. It is expected that the teams will bounce ideas and developments off of each other, and that the rosters of the teams could change over time. If, during the course of the competition teams co-operate with one another and thus improve all 3D printers they worked on, the grand prize may be divided up among the teams at the discretion of the judges. Also, all of their technologies must be made available to everyone under the GPL or BSD licenses for maximum availability.
The weather predictions are growing like the tales of Paul Bunyon in the DC metroplex as the second winter storm of the year comes rolling in. They're calling it Snowpocalypse II around here, and people have been getting ready for it for three days now. On Wednesday evening the stores were packed full of people buying groceries and snow shovels in preparation for today, and the moment a few flakes began sifting down from the ominous grey clouds most every agency in the area called a code red: if you're not security don't come in, stay warm, and stay safe. We got the message today shortly before lunchtime that Goddard was shutting down at 1300, so we wrapped things up early and headed for home shortly after 1200 local time in the hope of beating the worst of the traffic as the city emptied. While the beltway was more densely packed than usual for that time of day, it wasn't a maze of wrecked cars and panicked drivers. Looking out of the window, I'd guess we've got about three inches already and it's still coming down. About once an hour we can hear snow plows outside scraping the roads to stay ahead of the accumulation. Depending on where you are and what newswire you hit, they're predicting anywhere from twenty to thirty inches by midnight tomorrow.
HacDC has canceled tonight's Shmoocon lounge, and last evening a few hardy hackers got together for a sled-making workshop at the 'space.
If you're down this way, don't go out unless you have to. Don't risk it.
Late last year, the bank account of an outfit in Texas called Hillary Machinery, Inc. was siphoned to the tune of $800kus after their online banking credentials were compromised. The bank they did business with, PlainsCapital, required customers to supply a username and passphrase and then enter a single-use passphrase e-mailed to a certain address a few minutes later to complete the authentication process. Investigation showed that IP addresses roughly corresponding to networks in Italy and Romania were used to initiate the transfer of funds to bank accounts in the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe. From this evidence, it seems reasonable to state that their primary login credentials were compromised, and the e-mail address the one-time authenticator was sent to was also being monitored by the attackers, hence, the successful login. The hell of it is PlainsCapital has filed a lawsuit against Hillary Machinery because they had the audacity to accuse them of having lousy security.
Not that this is much of a stretch today, but that's beside the point.
PlainsCapital was able to recover $600kus of the $800kus stolen. The lawsuit filed asks the US District Court in charge of eastern Texas to certify that PlainsCapital's information security is, in fact, reasonable, and thus the electronic funds transfers were carried out in good faith. Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that because the authentication procedure was carried out with valid credentials, their security posture is compliant (nevermind the fact that having valid credentials and having decent security are two entirely different things). Hillary Machinery claims that they never received the authentication e-mails, so it could not have been anyone on their end who transferred the money. This isn't implausible; all you have to do is delete an e-mail before the contents of the mail server get backed up and unless someone audits the mail server's logs (if it's a busy server, this is a nontrivial task) the mail may as well have never been there. When you get right down to it, even being certified compliant to some set of official regulations or other aren't a guarantee that your security's any good, because compliance and actual security are two very different things.
The lawsuit is still ongoing, so neither side is saying much until they get in front of a judge.
It's not that great, though - we passed one of these around at a party a few weeks ago and agreed that it tastes like Kool-Aid made with Ringer's solution.
Yes, Virginia, there apparently is a Pac-Man energy drink. I'm willing to bet that it tastes like transmission fluid and Swee-tarts; I haven't actually opened it because the untouched product itself amuses me. It's sitting on my bookshelf.
This is the weblog of the Doctor, who is (in no particular order), a computer geek, a writer, a musician, a mystech, occasionally a coder, a traveler, an adventurer, and is interested in just about everything to some extent.
The Doctor's life is quite busy so he posts whenever the opportunity arises. It isn't as often as he would like.
