cheeseprocedure

I wonder if video input could be reduced to textures and geometry/transforms for low-bandwidth videoconferencing scenarios.

While Xen should make live migrations technically possible, it would probably reduce EC2's provisioning flexibility and introduce undesirable complexity.

Migrations would be restricted to hosts running specific releases of the hypervisor [1], and AWS's SDN systems would need to handle these changes in very-near-realtime.

[1] wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Version_Compatibility

I giggled at this, but a serious question for those in the know: is computer simulation a significant factor in the development of fusion experiments, and can it be distributed (a la SETI@Home, Folding@Home, et al)?

> death can be a traumatic experience, but it's also simply part of being a biological organism.

This tends to be glossed over in discussions of his work, but Aubrey de Grey is specifically interested in reducing the (currently inevitable) human suffering associated with aging. Clinical immortality would be an eventual side-effect of succeeding in that mission.

Every manner of treatable and correctable disease and condition is "part of being a biological organism," but it seems absurd to hold such a standpoint if you're not also in favour of discarding modern medicine in order to die slowly and painfully from cancer.

Non-US citizen here. I bounce off a Linode in the US (which I require for other purposes anyway; there are surely cheaper options).

SSH has a baked-in SOCKS proxy. Example: I SSH into my VPS with the "-D 55555" commandline option, configure my browser to use a SOCKS proxy at localhost:55555, and visit www.netflix.com. That HTTP traffic is tunneled over the SSH connection, and as far as Netflix is concerned, it originates at the US datacenter hosting my VPS.

http://wiki.vpslink.com/Instant_SOCKS_Proxy_over_SSH

These tools let you focus on the bigger picture instead of the nitty-gritty.

Docker and Vagrant are convenient for building (and distributing) consistent environments on top of (potentially wildly) different software or hardware platforms. Docker has a ton of other tricks up its sleeve (one example is "layers:" http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/terms/layer/).

Chef/Puppet/Salt/et al. are configuration management tools which enable programmatic definition of infrastructure. The key point is: you define how the system should look, not the specific steps on how to get there. Abstraction layers (management of files/users/packages/services/etc.) provided by the CM tool shield you from a nightmare of permutations, corner cases, and platform-specific options; it'll just enforce a given configuration regardless of local changes.

Having a central source of truth for systems configuration is a gamechanger in itself; your configuration directives or applications can query (or update) your configuration management database, which enables some very cool automation with very little effort. Then there's the community: for any given stack, there's probably a well-documented, well-tested Chef cookbook or Puppet manifest to build it, instantly plugging you into a rich experience base.

Yes, one could script all of this from scratch, but I'm not sure why one would.

Have you tried Jenkins as a CI server? While the core Gitlab product is quite nice, the feedback I've heard on the CI component is that it becomes problematic once builds become non-trivial (though to be fair, I've heard this mostly from Jenkins folks).

Can someone with experience mitigating an attack like this describe how it's done? A known set of hosts/address spaces is fine, but it's the "distributed" part I don't understand how to deal with.

I've spoken to Palantir folks about the libertarian angle, and their story went like this: by maximizing the utilization of available intelligence data, they could minimize the erosion of civil liberties that occurs in the pursuit of more data.

I'm not sure that story survives outside a vacuum, but there you have it.

You're right, I misunderstood the behaviour of UK lines; however, it would still be workable in the US or Canada.

> "[...] call it and type in the following number: X X X X X. That will route the call directly back to me."

I wish every bank did this as standard practice! Hang up, dial the customer care number on the back of the card, then dial the digits supplied by the support rep.

Better yet, print instructions right on the back of the card: "don't engage any support representative you did not call directly." Training customers to do this (perhaps even through proactive callouts?) would work to significantly reduce this kind of fraud.

> * Not being blown up by terrorists

Disregarding the fact that most of those items have nothing to do with government surveillance, this particular item has more to do with the fact that attempted (and competent) acts of terrorism are an extremely rare event.

The CIA and FBI failed to stop 9/11 when they failed to exchange relevant information [1]. Lack of actionable data was not the problem then, and I have a hard time believing it's a problem now.

[1] http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/wall.pdf

The article specifically mentions incarcerations skyrocketing as a result of the drug war. Throwing petty dealers in prison is not an effective use of taxpayer dollars.

I wonder how long it'll be before reports surface of authoritarian countries deploying anti-Loon lasers.

In all seriousness, I'm curious how difficult it would be to jam this network.

The international reactions to Fukushima seem about as absurd as pulling every commuter car off the road because the Pinto was a terrible design.

Sadly, it is a business, and it's become an entrenched part of the political landscape. It's hard to read "Top Secret America" [1] and not come to that conclusion.

A lack of transparency for intelligence operations means their outcomes are difficult to measure, which in turn means the bang-for-the-buck efficacy of those operations is probably not a significant deciding factor in the funding they receive.

[1] http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

An exec in the renewables sector once told me that battery subsystems in electrics and hybrids were so proprietary and critical to design that the idea of standardizing them across major manufacturers would never happen in the near term. It's a shame; Better Place's model was fascinating (but the idea of being locked into one manufacturer is not appealing).

> However, there is hope but we cannot rely on the government to sort it out.

Indeed:

"A change in public policy saw the mass discharge of Riverview Hospital's patients as an effort to integrate them into the community while the province considered the land for development. However, this caused a large influx of mentally ill into the DTES as poor follow-up support failed to reach a majority of these individuals."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Eastside#Mental_Illnes...

Is there historical evidence to back the notion that, through market forces, employment standards would rise to meet workers' demands?

I had this reaction too, but if an offender is given opportunities to become a more conscientious and educated human being through hard work, it seems reasonable that we would want them released (and contributing to society in a positive way) sooner rather than later.

A preference for vinyl does not equate to ignorance of audio technology.

Your article [2] mentions mastering issues. In many cases, the master for the vinyl edition of an album differs significantly from that of the CD or digital release; for example, the vinyl edition may feature less compression, preserving dynamic range.

http://www.soundmattersblog.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness-...

It would be really handy to have a table of common raw ingredients, the temperatures at which they become safe to eat (if applicable), and the temperature at which their various nutrients denature.

I would LOVE to export the game history to a screensaver.

This is a very nice breakdown:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/understanding-bash-fork-bomb/

I cut my Linux teeth on Gentoo stage 1 and 2 installs, which I found enormously frustrating and equally educational.

Today, I'd recommend working through Linux From Scratch. You'll develop a rich understanding of how a UNIX-like OS fits together, including a fair bit of shell functionality: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/

My favourite dead-tree UNIX book would be UNIX Power Tools, 3rd Edition (http://www.amazon.com/Power-Tools-Third-Shelley-Powers/dp/05...). It may be a while before it's a truly valuable resource, but keep it in mind.

I only have a few small-ish mail servers under my care, and I couldn't agree more.

Reviewing the history of the mailop list [1] shows how frustrating it can be when a behemoth (AOL, MS, etc.) stops accepting your mail. It's bad enough when you're a sizeable mail operation; as a tiny standalone mailserver, you are not at all a priority, and it's possible you'll lose the ability to communicate with a significant fraction of the Internet's email users (regardless of how complete/correct your configuration) and with little recourse.

[1] http://chilli.nosignal.org/mailman/listinfo/mailop

I do not. My limited understanding of wheat-free diets is that 1. the vast majority of people are not affected in any measurable way by gluten, and 2. there is too much anecdotal noise obscuring point #1.

"Wheat Belly" is probably not a shining example to use here. It (rightfully) attracted a lot of criticism over the author's cherry-picking of citations (even those of studies whose own abstracts contradict his claims) and failure to provide concrete evidence for many of his most damning conclusions.

Some examples:

http://noglutennoproblem.blogspot.ca/2012/03/wheat-belly-bus...

http://huntgatherlove.com/content/wheat-belly

I'm surprised to see ssh-keygen being called more often than ps. Perhaps this is skewed by history files being sourced from development boxes?

Disk encryption wouldn't defeat an attacker that had access to your keys (either by compromising a running system or through a cold-boot attack[1]). If the keys are available, the contents of the disk are accessible. Overwriting deleted files would still have value in these cases.

[1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/coldboot-sec08.pdf