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The Year In Ideas
No_Weak_Heart writes "The New York Times Magazine (registration required) presents its annual compendium of ideas. The list ranges from acoustic keyboard eavesdropping to land-mine-detecting plants to water that isn't wet. What catches your fancy? And what do you think is missing?"
What's obviously missing is not having to register at nytimes! Come on guys, how hard of a concept is that?
I didn't RTFA, but I noticed my ski bike isn't on there. Neither is my shopping cart grocery trailer! Whats is this, a popularity contest?
http://craig.backfire.ca/imgbrowse/ski-bike/
A list of new and innovative ideas hidden behind a required login.
Agile Artisans
Here's a login and password.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Flying cars.
...and if one learns Dvorak and Qwerty keyboard methods, and switches back and forth between them, wouldn't that cause audio monitoring of the typist and/or keyboard to be inconclusive? Or more interesting yet, have multiple keyboards, so to never leave an audio bug knowing which keyboard one is using at any given point so that they can't develop a profile of a given piece of equipm$#@^&
NO CARRIER
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You don't need to know the make and model of the keyboard to be able to decipher the keystrokes. As long as each key makes a slightly different sound, you can give each sound a number and it becomes a letter-substitution code. More complex because there are more keys, but really not all that hard. Now what's the relative frequency of e and ,?
The whole point of Liberal Arts education is to produce human beings incapable of doing something worthwhile, thus successfully eliminating them from the work pool (yay, more jobs for others). For decades, nay, centuries, this scheme has functioned flawlessly, keeping the World well oiled and working like a chronometer. And now, someone's trying to spoil it by teaching Liberal Arts majors Real World Stuff. I swear, if this is allowed to continue, you'll face the consequences pretty real soon.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
"Worse, cows might be attracted to the weeds growing over mines, with disastrous consequences."
I think it's pretty obvious we have a winner.
http://www.aaplblog.com/ - News about Apple Inc.
Apparently, it's a "carbon-based molecule" with "fire-safety applications". Last time I checked, water only contained hydrogen and oxygen, not carbon.
I'd give that Ebay vigilante a cookie if I met him. And give me that Exoskeleton and I'll show you a superhero with freckles! Kimota!!
They're the only things that will survive a nuclear war, right? So why not build bomb shelters out of them?
Secondly, given that anything buttered always lands butter side down, has anyone considered buttering a kitten's back? Caught between the duel imperatives of landing on it's feet and landing on the butter, it would rotate endlessly in the air. Stick on some magnets and voila, instant free energy
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
FACT: websites with free content that force readers to surrender their details end up collecting garbage information, and also annoy said readers who end up reading some other website with similar content.
IDEA: uuh, like, stop the registration thing perhaps?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
And if people changed passwords regularly, breaking into people's systems would be much more difficult. But neither is very likely.
If you don't use the keyboard enough to give them a large enough sampling to determine which sound corresponds to which key (which they'd have to figure out with a best guess method) then they might not be able to build a profile on a given piece of equipment.
If you had many, many keyboards of the same manufacturer and model it'd be even more difficult, since the sounds would be so similar that they might not have an easy time telling keyboards apart, especially if you switched keyboards many times in the middle of a given session on the computer, and even worse if you switch keyboard layouts frequently too.
You can't accurately number-letter substitute if you don't know which numbers correspond to given letters. Admittedly they could take the time, over a long enough period of time, to determine which is which if you never change out to newer keyboards, but it would make the problem significantly more complex than simple sound interpretation.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I remember hearing about this this year. It looks like a great idea, but I have real doubts over how well it'll be implemented.
Our troops don't even have the kevlar vests and armor plating they need. What makes us think they'll ever have a state-of-the-art exoskeleton?
open sesame
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Which threat is it that changing passwords frequently mitigates?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Let me be the first to welcome our new, low-price overlords.
In america, these, days? Probably, about the, same.
ResidntGeek
Why should I be forced to install *both* when I only want *one*? A lot of people (myself included) have a secondary *slow* computer that also runs Linux. 1gb of hard disk space makes every meg precious.
Le français vous intéresse?
It is a hydraulic engine with which you can build motors of any size. Want to rotate the Pentagon? It is possible with the Hercules motor:
http://www.indrives.com/frameset.html
All I want to see if solar-powered flashlight...Greatest invention of all time...
How can we have a list of anything without a Cowboy Neil optioin?
Monstar L
1gb of hard disk space makes every meg precious.
Then you won't want to use a desktop enviroment at all. In fact, you might want to consider using one of the BSD's instead; NetBSD would probably work great on such an old system.
Yes, many many people have considered and attempted to build the butter-cat core reactors. Currently more energy must be put into the system than can be drawn from it.
As the core spins, the butter is flung outwards, causing the system to shut down quickly. Researchers have overcome this problem by cooling the system and containing the core inside a super-conductive bread 'bottle'. As any final year physics student will tell you, cold butter can not be spread onto bread, infact, it is repelled by it. By surrounding the core with high-intensity bread fields, the butter is pushed towards the centre of the reactor, sticking to the cat. Of course, this system requires large amounts of energy.
Much research has gone into this technology, and scientists believe that they have a design that will produce more energy than is put into the system.
Construction of the prototype is due to commence shortly, however it is an international effort. Currently progress has been halted because France and Japan are arguing over who should have the reactor on their soil. Supporters of the french claim that their skills in making french toast will allow for a higher quality core. On the other hand, Japan's extensive collection of 'hello kitty' products puts them at the forefront of feline technology.
Where ever the prototype is constructed, this is an exciting time to be alive. Cheap, clean power is just around the corner.
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
I think that land-mine plant could have an extra benifit - if countries who refuse to sign land-mine bans continue to use them (COUGH USA COUGH) someone needs to fill a plane with these seeds and drop them everywhere they think land mines are being used - but not after the war, during the war! render them totally useless as a weapon by revealing their locations days after they have been set! Although the plant still seems a little creepy...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
>You can even use the time between strokes as a crude measure of distance between (unknown) keys, or as a hint as to what kind of stuff is being typed (c code will sound different from a memo, even if the keys are all the same) to improve your frequency analysis
g .pdf
My advisor (Dawn Song) has a paper (with other people, of course) about timing analysis of interactive ssh sessions. Basically, the upshot is that you can watch how long it is between packets that come out, and you get one packet per keystroke (iirc), so you can use this to learn about what they're typing. It's reasonably difficult, of course, but the microphone attack does gain extra information which the ssh attack does not.
If you're interested, a pdf is at http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~dawnsong/papers/ssh-timin
Lea
"The Best Way to Skip a Stone" isn't silly. In fact, skipping stones was the basis of the concept of Dambuster bombs back in WW2.
One rather bizarre note appears here . "If the bomb breaches the dam, code word is Nigger but if it does not breach, code word is Gonner."
In any case, skipping objects off water is hardly a new area of research and does not belong on a list of things "new and innovative" as it is neither. But it is not at all silly.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Letting techno-geeks rule the country is BAD. (Unfortunately, I include lawyers among that group; and they're the ones running things right now.) You want your country populated by people capable of seeing the big picture not just their little part of it. We need fewer people with employable skills and more people capable of actually thinking. It's a matter of training vs. education. I vote for more education and less trainable skills.
..."
... unless it is the third or so time, in which case I reply with "You're fired."
The problem is, you then have people that do too much thinking, and not enough 'doing.'
You've probably never been in charge of someone, given them a task to do, come back when it was supposed to be done and instead of seeing the result you get something that starts with this: "So I've been thinking about this
To which I reply with a simple "Do first, think later"
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
FACT: websites with free content that force readers to surrender their details end up collecting garbage information, and also annoy said readers who end up reading some other website with similar content.
IDEA: uuh, like, stop the registration thing perhaps?
You seem to think that the content is free. You are mistaken.
Just because the currency isn't green or made of metal doesn't mean it isn't a payment. The NYT wants a payment for viewing their content. That payment is your personal information.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Get rid of patents. Seriously. Think about it, you want to talk about bringing zillions of unused ideas into the mainstream. There's the way. For every monopoly an inventor looses, all of a sudden he'll have access to millions of other ideas he could never have access to without a royality or liability. Companies could save billions of dollars on lawsuits and lawyer expenses. Ford could make parts that are compatable with GM - it would force industries to consolidate parts standards and save a ton on excessive waste that often ends up as junk that is environmantal waste.
And it would force real commoditized competition which would likely increase quality and decrease prices.
I know of many workers who are required to use these tags as part of their employer's worksite access policy, and although the employer is not supposed to use RFIDs for work performance purposes, the attendance of the workers is being tracked down to the second.
These devices are being implemented so gradually that I don't think the implications have been fully thought through by the public.
BTW, I was going to link a bunch of previous /. stories on the subject, but I don't know how the code works here; doesn't seem to work when I preview the submission and shows the text of the entire link. Anyway, just search this site for "RFID" for the most recent headlines.
Linux is fractured between two dominant desktop enviorments; which is hindering it's market penetration.
No, the fact that one company already held 90% of the market share when Linux became viable as a desktop OS is hindering its market share. If your average Linux distro was 100% compatible with MS-Windows XP, Microsoft would disappear.
So, therefore, why don't we merge gnome into kde so that we have one major desktop enviroment with two 'sub-desktops' (the original kde and gnome) that users can choose between?
There already is a common denominator, and that is pure X11 programs. Besides, I don't like one of those two desktop environments, and I'd rather use nothing than a combined monstrosity of a desktop. If I wanted that, I'd use Windows.
Don't be so quick to scoff, after emacs absorbed vi its' user base increased, and I think that with a little thought and planning the same could happen for linux, too.
Since when did emacs absorb the vi userbase? I use vi every day, and haven't used emacs for... 8 years maybe. Is this some sort of joke? Emacs is a bloated overbuilt editor that takes too damn long to start up. (If it takes longer than about a second, it's too long.)
My guess is that you are trying to reignite a KDE-vs-GNOME or VI-vs-EMACS flame war.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Saw a Danish documentary on those landmine detecting plants. Funny enough they used the dehydrated water to "water" their plants. It was due to the seeds being so small that they could be carried away by the wind. On a different note, it seems as if the guys that developed the plants are having a hard time in getting the right clearances, some english chap that was in the documentary, working for the team as an observer, and link to the African country's government, ended up trying to wreck the whole projekt because he was afraid of genetically engineered plants.........(Note to guy, if your country is chock full of landmines, a few extra plants is not going to ruin your day)
Other than that, not much, because if someone is logging keystrokes they could conceivably use your data only seconds after you enter it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GNOME and KDE will probably never merge. If they do, the result will be craptacular as it will end up with all the worst features of both and it won't matter if it has any of the best features of either. It would be better to add any "missing" functionality from one to the other and abandon the other, implementing a compatibility layer to support the other until those programs are superseded or transitioned to the other toolkit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Those planting the mines could easily till salts and/or herbicides into the soil at the same time. When nothing grows there, these plants won't work.
On the positive side, this would prevent people from trying to farm or graze on the mined land.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
If people changed their own passwords as often as people change the BugMeNot shared passwords just to piss others off, everything would be much more secure.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Tax intellectual property the way we tax real property. If you don't value it enough to pay the tax, sell it or put it in the public domain.
This would bring unused ideas into the mainstream.
Oooh +5 Troll - nice one..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
PeTA probably has plans about the cats to be used, as well as the poor cows that get milked for the butter.
And it has to be butter. Oleo (margarine) has about half the effect that Butter has.
They are not getting it though, and they still require a logon. They know the information is bad, but are still doing this for other reasons...
My guess is that this has more to do with company politics then anything else. Once they've decided to try to restrict the information, people have a lose-lose situation. Argue that you should open it and your for giving away the product, argue that you should keep the logon and your for collecting useless information. Most people working in an office would simply ignore the issue and pretend everything is fine.
Thanks for putting on the feedbag. Thanks for going all out. Thanks for showing me your Swiss Army knife.
Thanks, that's a nice paper; I'll have to read the Viterbi algorithms in more detail later though it's nice to see pure info. theory put to nefarious ends. =)
The upshot of an empirical 50x reduction in workload for password-cracking from timing information alone is surprising and disturbing. However, even the rudimentary position info from a multi-microphone analysis should at least double that (in the case of a high-latency digraph it can give order information, e.g. tell OZ from ZO; otherwise, it will tell you where the flurry of keystrokes is occurring and possibly let you break up the HMM into one for each hand if you have a model for how humans type).
It's pretty much impossible to avoid brute force if the adversary has access to the encrypted password. I'm not worrying about that attack anymore; if people gain access to my shadow files I have larger problems.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Someone might be able to exploit a hole in a remotely accessible service that would allow them to get specific files from your system given full paths, but not otherwise get into your computer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This article: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12LAWFA RE.html I did not understand. While it seems like neo-con "we must let ourselves be bound by international laws and obligations" I couldn't really make heads or tails out of enough of it to know for sure.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
For those curious, it's not water that isn't wet. It's a water-like fire-supression substitute called Novec 1230. You may have seen it on some of the morning talk shows. It's a carbon-based liquid molecule that looks and feels a lot like water, but you can soak most electronic devices in it and they will still work. It puts out fires just as effectively, but it vaporizes quickly, drying 25 times faster than water. It's non-carcinogenic, it breaks down completely within 5 days and doesn't do any damage to the ozone layer. It's rapidly becoming adopted as the fire supression system of choice for many businesses. Bruce
I don't know if any of these are really new ideas but they seem to have come up a lot in 2004.
- Affordable space tourism for the masses
- Podcasting. ipod+time shifting+rss
- The Seriousness of Fake news. It seems like even the mainstream news channels like CNN have started to incorporate comedians and irony in their shows. Jon Stewart interviews John Kerry, and the daily show book is a best seller. Many articles are written about why people are so turned off the real news channels.
- Global Economic Crash imminent. The declining US dollar is at risk of being dumped by Asia and losing its status as world currency to the Euro - potentially trigger global economic crisis. Another scenario involves the 'peak oil' theory and the increasing price of oil.
- Fighting Terrorism using Drug War tactics. An interview with John Kerry in the NY Times magazine reveiled that his view of terrorism as a problem you fight locally in a similar fashion to drug cartels and not as a global war fought at the level of nations.
- Sex Slavery in America. A controversial piece of investigative journalism in the NY Times posited that sex slavery is widespread in the US.
In the "A Fire Upon The Deep" universe, the Powers of the higher computational zones are hypothesized to be able to perform powerful computations on minimal data.
The keyboard thing is a great example of that; with scanty data you can reverse engineer what keys are being tapped.
I'd bet with a bit more work you wouldn't even need to calibrate the device, just collect a lot of keypresses, classify them blind, and apply known probability distributions to the data. With that you could get a high probability analysis of the keypresses. (After all, if the two most probable passwords are "thebeatles" or "theb]atles", which do you think it is?)
A single picture or a short sound doesn't have a lot of data in it, but a long sound sample or video file has a lot of data in it. Expect this to be just the beginning.
The NYT has my real e-mail address and in return I find real NYT news content in my in-box each morning, something I want and need. I suspect that is true of most of those who register.
The tinfoil hat market being what it is this days, I doubt the Times worries much about the Slashdot demographic.
i bet the year in patents is a much longer list than the year in ideas.
Hrmmm, clearly you haven't thought (nyuck nyuck nyuck) this through. Let the set of techno-geeks minus the lawyers rule the country. Problem solved. As a bonus you get both education and skills. And the fifty foot tall robot warriors bring a whole new meaning to the phrase "iron fist".
As a liberal arts graduate with a math degree, I can proudly say that I do both, generally in your preferred order unless I can incorporate the thinking into the doing without ditching too much efficiency.
It's nice to be in a field where the thinking results either in publications (if it is deep), some C/java code (if it is thorough) or a perl script to replace some future "doing" (if it's neither).
That's true, and I am also in a liberal arts school seeking a CIS degree (with minors in Math and Geology), but the needs and workings of the world economy don't support the idea that everyone should receive a liberal arts degree.
The chief problem I see with the liberal arts curriculum is that, for instance, my school doesn't touch anything with the word "engineering" in it. Thinking is one thing, being able to apply thought in a practical manner is another. I've also had to waste a lot of effort in art classes that I will never make use of. Good GPA boosters, however.
Personally, I know people come out of liberal arts schools with the ability to both do and think, but I see a lot of my fellow students learning how to think (or what to think, depending on degree) but not learning how to do anything practical with that knowledge. I avoided a lot of this by spending my lower-division time in another school that emphasized skills as well.
This is all reminding me one of my computer science teachers who knew theory to an amazing depth, yet needed help from a student when enabling video mirroring in MacOS X every few days in class. She taught MIPS assembler, too, but couldn't write a working program to save her life. Still, she was damn smart when it came to theory.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I can just imagine the plans that People for the Eating of Tasty Animals would have for cats and cows.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
I'm so sorry for having no sense of humour.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Another invention that gets piled with the :>
screen doors for submarines, and the
spaceship that only works underwater
Eh.. If PETA has a complaint about cat-butter reactors, we just need to remind them that the cat not need be living to have the desired effect as far as I know. Kill a couple dozen cats, they'll beg the scientists to return to the humane live cat reactors.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Clean? Obviously you have never replaced a litterbox. Buttered cats also have a tendency to toxic spills of hairballs, a tendency likely to be increased by buttering. And then there is the still unsolved problem of herding.
In my opinion, the butter-cat core reactor will never be more than a footnote of science. Of course, while it will never achieve large scale production, it will certainly continue to be a very popular lab demonstration.
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
ps: If you want to validate the test, corporations, see if you can get HP CEO Carly Fiorina to take it...
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
Secondly, given that anything buttered always lands butter side down, has anyone considered buttering a kitten's back?
My sister used to have kitten that hadn't learned to wash (from its mother or wherever kittens are supposed to learn that). In order to induce this poor stinky kitten to wash its fur, they resorted to buttering it.
I don't think they tried flinging it in the air while buttered though (one can imagine the poor thing trying desperately to complete its washing, while spinning rapidly, before it hits the ground; talk about kitty stress!).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Two more words: Counted Honestly --MarkusQ
But if you are
1. Willing to crack open the keyboard to install a mic.
2. Install not one, but two high end mic.
Won't it be much more easier just stick a bucket-brigade style monitor in the keyboard that actually read the data from keyboard to computer.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Thinking is a drug, an addiction. Reasonable people can avoid getting addicted to it, while still "doing" it when necessary. Some are so frightened of the possibility of getting addicted that they simply refuse to think, and indulge in other addictions (like drugs or TV or Slashdot) instead.
And then there are the people that are so addicted to thinking that they have no time for nothing else. They don't even have time to realize their thoughts. Some don't even have the time to properly think about their own thoughts.
I belong in the last category. I do too much thinking. Only when i'm tired will i be able to "do" something (like, say, post this shit on Slashdot).
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
An encrypted link between keyboard and box. Such as this.
...is old as the hills. I read an article about this in, like, 1996. You can even do it from a few hundred meters away by bouncing a laser off a window.
Here's the Firefox Plugin
The New York Times Magazine (registration required)
Another great use of bug me not!
Am I the only one who is reminded of Space Quest 1? The packet of dehydrated water that could be used to kill a monster? bah.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
Clean?
Clearly, you don't have cats. Particularly ones that don't know what the litterbox is for!
Wouldn't a good counterattack be to have the computer reproduce random keystroke noises as you're working? (And come to think of it, even when you're not...)
Treat it as a white noise solution, something like broadcasting static at a window to prevent outside mics listening in to the vibrations induced in the glass by a conversation insude.
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
Compared to the failed dog-deadfish reactor, yes, very clean.
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
Get several keyboards of the same model and find some way to randomly depress keys on these keyboards.
Or just turn the stereo on and way up...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.