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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.
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.
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
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
How can we have a list of anything without a Cowboy Neil optioin?
Monstar L
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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
Two more words: Counted Honestly --MarkusQ