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Of course by now I'm sure every floor has a Comp Sci major who has figured out how to break through the protections on the media service

As a well-heeled undergrad in CS at NIU, I would say that this is unlikely.

Most of our CS students are incompetent at any real hacking like the reverse-engineering problem you describe (including me). This is in part due to our outdated-since-1985 curriculum which strongly emphasizes coding ASM and COBOL on our IBM S/390 mainframe. Of course, almost none of our undergrad curriculum has anything to do with security, networking, copy-protection, or reverse-engineering. People in our Java course (CSCI480) don't know what an IP address is or why DNS is important, for god's sake! And don't even ask a junior or senior what even a "buffer overflow" is, despite having had 2 courses in C.

There's probably a couple dozen of our CS students who are actually thinking about getting around the protection on this service, and of those, 1 or 2 are actually trying to do something about it. The rest of them are probably doing homework or drinking and playing games, because most NIU CS'ers, in my experience, go into CS thinking that "playing games" == "writing games" (which obviously is not true). And most of them, in truth, want to play games, not write them - and that isn't the hacker spirit by any means.

Give the Ruckus Network to the genius kids who form the pride of Illinois -- then I'd agree with you. :)

Of course by now I'm sure every floor has a Comp Sci major who has figured out how to break through the protections on the media service

As a well-heeled undergrad in CS at NIU, I would say that this is unlikely.

Most of our CS students are incompetent at any real hacking like the reverse-engineering problem you describe (including me). This is in part due to our outdated-since-1985 curriculum which strongly emphasizes coding ASM and COBOL on our IBM S/390 mainframe. Of course, almost none of our undergrad curriculum has anything to do with security, networking, copy-protection, or reverse-engineering. People in our Java course (CSCI480) don't know what an IP address is or why DNS is important, for god's sake! And don't even ask a junior or senior what even a "buffer overflow" is, despite having had 2 courses in C.

There's probably a couple dozen of our CS students who are actually thinking about getting around the protection on this service, and of those, 1 or 2 are actually trying to do something about it. The rest of them are probably doing homework or drinking and playing games, because most NIU CS'ers, in my experience, go into CS thinking that "playing games" == "writing games" (which obviously is not true). And most of them, in truth, want to play games, not write them - and that isn't the hacker spirit by any means.

Give the Ruckus Network to the genius kids who form the pride of Illinois -- then I'd agree with you. :)

I am an NIU student.

We had approximately 23k students last year, and given our growth, that figure is probably closer to 23.5k-24k students now.

Personally, I believe this Ruckus Network thing is a fucking waste of my money. But that is all NIU does -- steal our money via student fees and spend it on shit I couldn't care less about.

Our school is run like a socialist government on crack, except that our uni is in the red like our state budget and for a while was considering laying off some NIU profs, meanwhile giving John Peters (our school President) a substantial series of yearly raises until 2010.

NIU is as corrupt as the famously-corrupt IL state government that funds it. And yes, sadly, I really am a student here at this shithole. I have a regular UID here on /., but I'm too ashamed of my school to post using the UID here...

Needless to say, the alumni group won't be getting money out of me.

I'd agree with you that it would be a problem if that isolated part of the lake were being used as a heat sink, but that's just not the case. What IS happening there is that there is a net loss of colder water in that region, at that particular strata of the lake. But the fluid dynamics of water (and the persistence of temperature strata) will tend to disperse the effect over a fairly wide area. The comparison to 7 additional seconds of sunlight over a year is probably about as accurate as you can get without a lot more math.

I'm sure the reversal of the Chicago River more than a century ago has affected Lake Michigan more than this will Lake Ontario.

i'd guess probably hundred meteres per second (just below mach 1 or something)

Actually around 30 mph

since as it manages to speed up it will start to forcibly stay "sideways" not like O but |

Um... why? Turbulence would skew it out out the verticle position constantly. Since a penny has little mass, as soon as it corrected itself, (and probably before) it would get blown off verticle again. I'd guess on average that the penny would fall at a 30 degree angle to it's verticle, but as it's just a guess (though a little google confirms pennys wobble in experience) this assertion is just as baseless as yours.

> Oh yeah? What's the terminal velocity of a coin?

Which coin?

I guess you could read this and then tell me! I can imagine that being hit on the head by a British One Pound coin dropped from a plane would really hurt, and could kill a young child, if not an adult.

www.fishkeeping.co.uk

ADM & Mark Whitacre

Also, that stuff will rot your teeth. Everybody with a mother knows that.

Assembler is used as a weed-out course. This course humbles a lot of hackers....

Child's play. Try to get out of Gr(11,4). Now that's a challenge.

Psychotronic warfare and mind control are real. Read this at your own risk and remember that you ARE being watched.

Group think. That's what we're dealing with here (on both sides, the gung-ho warmongers AND the terrorists). It's simply easier for people to conform to the group, than it is to deny the group and think for themselves. If pushed, some of these people will actually claim that it is just and moral to MURDER an innocent human being if it supposedly saves another. This is the power of group think.

what good is a sensor that can take 20,000 samples per second...?
preventing aliasing artifacts

The only single datum I use is the geographic references for, say, sea level. By definition, if everyone agrees on one sea level, or baseline, or whatever, it's a datum.

See This article for more.

That's the only way I could describe the novel. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, in about five hours time, finishing at about 2AM. I couldn't put it down.

I have a habit of reading books several times over, but I could not get through this book the second time. Once I was over the suspense and action I found that almost half the book was stupid, implausible, fictional, inaccurate, unbelieveable, and contrary to all logic. Example: A Google search for "Rotating Cleartext" (which was one of the major parts of the supposedly unbreakable encryption) turned up exactly two results; both of them were about the book itself.

The major failure, though, was the idea that a supercomputer--even a really really fast one--could crack an unknown algorithm by brute force. The idea of applying key guessing to a unknown encryption type is rediculous and impossible.

If you tried it for a long enough time you could probably decode it into an entirely different message, for the same reason monkeys could produce the full works of Shakespeare. And then if you know the algorithm, key guessing by definition will always work, although it may take centuries (not hours, as the book claims). There are more technical inaccuracies that I noticed and that others noticed (especially the final firewall scene). That said, the book was a fun read for a couple of hours, and I might have some fun later illustrating exactly where the book got it wrong (Answer: A lot of places).

Digital Pearl Harbor? The former Presidential Fearmonger should've trademarked that term back in 2000. He could've spared us from this abuse. Or maybe all of the fearmongers could've read this for some good material. Or something.

The author insults my intelligence by cheapening the memory of Pearl Harbor.

Does anyone have any info on the development progress of electromagnetic pulse weapons (nuclear or otherwise)? Goldeneye-type stuff? It would seem something like this could turn a battalion of robot soldiers or field of robotic support dogs into a pile of titanium scrap.

Hrmm. A little googling revealed this rather thorough article in the Crypt Newsletter that seems to indicate that any claims these weapons are viable is hogwash.

So bring on the robots! Woo-hoo!

Does anyone have any info on the development progress of electromagnetic pulse weapons (nuclear or otherwise)? Goldeneye-type stuff? It would seem something like this could turn a battalion of robot soldiers or field of robotic support dogs into a pile of titanium scrap.

Hrmm. A little googling revealed this rather thorough article in the Crypt Newsletter that seems to indicate that any claims these weapons are viable is hogwash.

So bring on the robots! Woo-hoo!

Ok, I know I'm asking for an Offtopic or Redundant here but as a pure math major I have to reply to this :)

Diffeq is not pure math. At least, not the way it is usually presented (there are some more 'pure' aspects to it, but usually the focus is on applications). If you want pure math, try taking an abstract algebra course, or some upper division analysis or geometry.

The question of what 'pure math' means can be rather controversial, and there are those who insist that there is no such thing as pure math, that all mathematics has practical applications as its ultimate goal (I dissagree with this). If you are interested in what pure math is, you might take a look at What Is Pure Mathematics or A Gentle Introduction to the Mathematics Subject Classification Scheme. I'm sure there are many more pages discussing this topic, but I don't recall where they are off the top of my head.

As for calculators, in pure mathematics a calculator generally won't do you much good. Pure mathematics is usually more concerned with proving theorems than with performing computations. Calculators are great at performing computations, but they can't prove theorems for you. That said, a calculator can be a useful tool, and which calculator is best to use depends on personal preference and on the application. Personally I prefer HP over TI (it's a shame HP isn't making calculators anymore), but I understand that TIs can be easier to learn to use. However, it should be noted that HPs can do symbolic manipulations, matrix algebra, regressions and such, and yes, the HP can evaluate expressions in the traditional 'algebraic' format, and you can revise them, etc.

Although I'm not sure that vote buying or selling should necessarily be wrong, ie people are still responsible for their vote, they just choose and accept to give it in exchange for money. They'd have to choose and accept the actions of the person whom they elect that way.

From here about half way down

38 / March 2000 Illinois Issues

One major vote fraud technique was "chain voting," where a wily precinct captain would obtain a blank punch card, often by securing an absentee ballot, and punch in the "right" votes. He would then give the prepunched card to a voter -- sometimes solicited off the street with a few bucks or a bottle of cheap wine -- have him go in to vote, drop the prepunched card in the box on the way out and hand the precinct captain another unpunched card. The "chain" could go on all day, as long as cooperating voters could be found and friendly election judges didn't examine things too closely.

----------
Note that this method probably works with any paper voting system.

It would be interesting to have a system whereby a computer can be used to facilitate the vote (eg with photos of candidates etc) print the filled out ballot, and it also records the result. Then the paper vote count could be compared with the computer vote count. If they were different you'd know that some stuffing around had occured although you still couldn't rule out "chain voting". Hmm, maybe if the paper had a security tag that beeped if it left the room...and you could see people putting their ballots in, and they had no opportunity to hand blank ballots over to bodgy election officials without being seen by everyone else that is voting.

I think if we're game to use the internet or computers for banking we should be game to use it for voting. Also if we do stick with paper, a computer system that prints out the ballot would still help people who can't read or see paper or whom have dodgy handwriting. Ie it would still be better than paper alone.

Like maybe looking into securing their own software first?

Here, let's look through a quick timeline:

1994: People laugh at the GoodTimes virus, because everyone knows viruses can't spread through email!
1995: Word macro viruses first created, and now viruses are easier to write than ever before. Meanwhile, Microsoft has plenty of time to figure out how to prevent them, especially since their users hardly ever use macros in the first place, and especially not to, say, destroy the Windows registry or something.
1996: Macro viruses spread to the extent that Microsoft distributes them as well--unwittingly, we hope.
1997: Word '97 released; the dawn of VBA viruses.
1998: With over 1,000 word macro viruses out there, it's worth making virus scanners for them!
1999: Melissa word macro virus spreads over email and infects Word thanks to Microsoft; as they mention, if you don't use Outlook, you're safe. If you do use Outlook, you might get infected without ever looking at the attachment yourself; previewing it may be enough.
2000: The love bug virus spreads over email thanks to Microsoft Outlook, and causes an estimated $8.7 billion in damage.
2001: Code Red spreads, attacking Windows NT and 2K. Sircam emails itself absolutely everywhere, again thanks to Microsoft.
2002: Klez and Nimda spread.
2003: You guessed it, even still yet more viruses spreading faster than ever, thanks to Windows, Outlook, Word, blah, blah, blah.

So what has Microsoft done? Well maybe by securing their MSN network that'll stop e-mail viruses from... ahh, nevermind, they don't give a fuck about their customers. Otherwise, they could have stopped most of this back in 1996 at the latest. And remember, security is top priority over there now. Ha.

I'm just glad that I don't pay to get infected, like so many of their other customers. Instead, I just have to deal with the spam and network traffic that they're responsible for. But at least the files on my Linux desktop are safe!

Obligatory link:

Great Northeast Blackout of '65

Basically, the reason for this blackout is that nobody learned from the experience 38 years ago.

Since the same thing (basicall) happened in '65 I'd have to agree that its probably just a design flaw in the system.

Actually, its not..the plants shutdown automatically to prevent damage to equipment from overloads. Short of building new power stations, I don't think this kind of thing can be prevented.

Being near Philly, i'm glad that the grid isolates the problem as well as it does..

This isn't the first time folks: The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965

Small nitpick. You're referring to trisomy, not triploidy. Trisomy (in humans) refers to an inadvertant tripling of one chromosome; triploidy is the result of an extra (third) copy of all chromosomes. Triploidy is usually the result of two sperm fertilizing a single egg. (Oops.) Trisomy (or monosomy, where the fetus is one chromosome short) is usually the result of an uneven division of genetic material when sperm or egg was formed.

Triploid fetuses usually spontaneously abort, though some will survive to term--in which case their life expectancy is less than a month.

As you noted, some trisomies are survivable; most are not. More details here.

Interesting aside: Some species (particularly plants) tolerate polyploidy quite well, having tetraploid or hexaploid genomes (four or six sets of chromosomes). Odd numbers of sets are infertile, but again are often tolerated in plants--this infertility is sometimes a desired trait, as in seedless watermelons and grapes.

[OT] You have been befriended for your signature :-)

There should be a degree sign after 3200.

Actually there should be a K behind the 3200 as measurements on the Kelvin scale is designated by K as opposed to a degree symbol. This is due to the fact that 3200K is referred to "3200 Kelvins" not "3200 degrees Kelvin". The following quote explains:

The scale of scientific choice is the Kelvin scale, introduced by the Scottish physicist William Thompson (Lord Kelvin, 1924-1907). Each degree on the scale is called a kelvin (K). (Just a note: Celsius and Fahrenheit scales always carry the word degree, but the kelvin scale does not. For example a temperature of 300K will be read "300 hundred kelvin", not "three hundred degrees kelvin".)

Ok I have to go wash my hands off with soap as I am now tainted. Damn you grammer nazi's, damn you all to hell! :-P

Merlin.
p.s. if the reader is interested in more info about lighting characteristics of lamps try here for a decent intro.

An interesting paper debunking EMP guns along with a bunch of background info on EMP and stories of hackers tricking the news media into running bogus EMP gun stories.

Haven't read Harry Potter (why the heck am I reading this thread, let alone participating in it? *sigh*!), but that rang a few bells. One quick Google(TM) later...

See here (see 'Plagiarism Victory' paragraph), here ('Befuddled Muggle') and here.

The first two lines are the 'Job card'.
U890898 - this is the 'Job name'.
REGION=2048K - the amount of memory required.

I think I can top that. At my school by the time I have my master's degree in Theoretical Computer Science, I'll have taken a class in FORTRAN 77 (which I also was a teacher's assistant for), and three classes in IBM's System/370 assembler language plus a whole class of JCL. A few people I have talked to online have affectionately called my school "Timewarp U." Not to mention the fact that the other Computer Science students have to take a class in COBOL that is only taught by a professor who's degree is in geophysics.

other areas far from the west coast in the U.S. have been rated for being in danger of a severe quake....even parts of my home state of Illinois , about every 500 years or so

If "EMP guns" existed, certainly.(See here for discussion.)

Alternatively, the easy solution would probably to just get a microwave oven and leave the door open during operation.

If you rewired it to defeat the safety interlock that prevents it working with the door open. And didn't mind all the meat nearby (i.e., you) getting cooked too.

---

"The 1991 Infoworld April Fool's story written by reporter John Gantz about a National Security Agency-developed computer virus smuggled into Iraq from France hidden in a chip in a printer continues on with a life of its own a full eight years after its genesis. The joke piece about the virus that attacked the Iraqi air defense computer network during the Gulf War was given a shot in the arm late last year by James Adams' book on information warfare, "The Next World War." Adams had been hooked by the original April Fool, US News & World Report, which had passed on the hoax as fact in its book on the Gulf War, "Triumph Without Victory," in 1992.

In the March 1999 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, at the end of an article on "information warfare," science reporter Jim Wilson takes the sucker-bait: "In the days following the Gulf War, stories circulated that [information warfare] weapons had been unleashed on the Iraqi air defense system. According to these accounts, French printers exported to the Iraqi military were intercepted and equipped with special chips developed by the [National Security Agency]. On these chips were programs designed to infect and disrupt the communications systems that linked anti-aircraft missiles to radar installations."

Popular Mechanics, a magazine seemingly aimed at a readership that gets an erection over stories about the amount and variety of bombs that can be dropped on foreigners by a B-52, can be found on almost any neighborhood newsstand.

More good company: A few months ago ex-CIA chief William Webster and journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave were also gaffed by the Gulf War virus hoax in a Center for Strategic and International Studies report entitled "Cybercrime, Cyberterrorism, Cyberwarfare."

Perhaps it is time for the publisher of Infoworld to consider charging for reuse of the magazine's April Fool's joke."

---

Helevius

Speaking as a mainframe user at a large, average midwestern university where we work on an IBM s/390 mainframe running MVS...

I can say that using mainframes sucks.

Do you like waiting anywhere from 1-20 minutes for your assembler code to get submitted via FTP?

Do you like your FTP session dying for no apparent reason?

Do you like hearing "MVS is down, we don't know when it'll be back up" from the lab monitor and having no control over the situation, meanwhile your boss/professor screams in your ear that your work/assignment is late?

Neither do I.

That's why PC's took the world by storm nearly 20 years ago -- it freed us all from the tyranny of slow, overloaded, not-as-reliable-as-we-need-them-to-be mainframes...

Speaking as a mainframe user at a large, average midwestern university where we work on an IBM s/390 mainframe running MVS...

I can say that using mainframes sucks.

Do you like waiting anywhere from 1-20 minutes for your assembler code to get submitted via FTP?

Do you like your FTP session dying for no apparent reason?

Do you like hearing "MVS is down, we don't know when it'll be back up" from the lab monitor and having no control over the situation, meanwhile your boss/professor screams in your ear that your work/assignment is late?

Neither do I.

That's why PC's took the world by storm nearly 20 years ago -- it freed us all from the tyranny of slow, overloaded, not-as-reliable-as-we-need-them-to-be mainframes...

You're right about NMR --> MRI; I used to be a technologist. :)

Probably the most interesting outcome of the Chernobyl "experiment" is the almost indetectable effect the radiation had on the environment. All sorts of sensitive monitoring has been done, and there has been no evidence (other than one retracted paper) of damage to animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. In fact, the area has become something of a nature park, since people have been kept out.


As for Chernobyl, what you say puzzles me. The various stories and reports I have seen on Chernobyl detail continuing human impact such as thyroid cancer as far away as Scandinavia, significant radioactive contamination, and a bleak future. The exclusion zone in particular sounds like no nature park, despite its superficial appearance. Total human deaths alone are estimated in the tens of thousands, and animals show high concentrations of radioactivity in their flesh. It may be that insufficient studies have been done on animals.

Animals must be susceptible to many of the same hazards as humans. On the web I see a lot of people talking about Chernobyl such as here -- it's hard to find a consensus. I would be interested in cites to contrarian info.

In my opinion this is a better explanation of the conjecture, in part because it was written by an actual mathematician.

lemon power
or
cedu.niu.edu
or more google

http://mvs.cso.niu.edu

CSCI 360 kids will love you.

Elliptic Curves:

curves of the form y^2 = Ax^3 + Bx^2 + Cx + D

pick values for A B C and D, the locus in 2 space (the cartesian plane, or R2) is the type of curve Escher was using.

In analysis, which is where all of the headline making math using Elliptic Curves, A B C and D (as well as x and y) can be complex numbers.

At this point things get complicated. I'm not going to fill up 1000 words explaining Riemann surfaces, algebraic functions, etc.

There are a lot of good pages out there.

And if that isn't enough, how 'bout another word:

Spammer.

The ACLU has a a long track record of defending spam as somehow Frea Speach that's worthy of First Amendment protection.

1997: "commercial speech restrictions on telemarketing calls and unsolicited fax advertisements have passed First Amendment challenges but direct mail and door-to-door solicitations enjoy much greater protection. Given the Supreme Court decision in ACLU v. Reno, on-line messages should receive the same First Amendment protection given traditional print media, which includes commercial mailings."

2000: "...and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union that oppose any restrictions on commercial e-mail"

2001:The argument raised by the ACLU and other memters of the First Amendment lobby is that spam, like junk mail in our offline mailboxes, is a nuisance that still must be protected."

In fact, ACLU has always supported spammers, going back to 1995.

Source: CuD (Computer underground Digest) 7.50

This issue of CuD quotes from Canter and Siegel's (the original "Green Card Lawyers" spammers) as follows:

"In May of 1994, believing that the EFF really did support freedom of speech in the same broad and democratic manner as did the ACLU, we initiated a discussion with Mike Godwin, an EFF lawyer. We wanted his views on the censorship issues raised by the behavior of electronic vandals and access providers who had pulled our account for performing the perfectly legal act of Internet advertising. We were amazed when Godwin stated to us that he was so busy sympathizing with those who opposed us, that he had no sympathy left for the other side. So much for freedom of speech (p. 194)."

-- Canter and Siegel, "How to make a FORTUNE on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and other On-line Services", 1995

To which I can only add:

"Fuck the ACLU and the pigload of potted meat product it rode in under."

-- Me, 2002.

The military gets about 15% ($300 billion) of the federal budget. Most of these moneys go to paying soldiers salaries and benefits or to weapons systems unsuited to quelling domestic disturbance.

I don't see the US military getting involved in quelling dissenters to any considerable degree. This is not South America.

There have been instances where US National Guard troops have responded to domestic rioters or dissenters. These instances (Kent State, LA OJ Simpson Riots, "Bonus Army" riots in 1932 (scroll down)) have been of limited scope and usually warranted.

I'm not worried about US troops being used for wholesale domestic pacification. We're not anywhere close to having to worry about such a scenario.

Mathematical Atlas

Statistics Every Writer Should Know

Not only has MS done this before, they've done it several times before.

I'm just amazed that it doesn't happen more often.

[1] Viruses are an urban myth. It's like the story of alligators in the sewers of New York, everyone knows about them, but no one's ever seen them.

this whole thread should sing along!

If you could only find the parts to build an EMP gun it would be easy to win. I'm afraid it wouldn't make for good TV, though.

Maybe you're thinking of this urban legend?

well... i couldn't find a downloadable copy, but i found a few school districts with a copy of it, and a web page with a synopsis

http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/CUDS4/cud463.t xt

and also a web page with a teaching plan http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/2607/lesson s/lesson12.html