So, each key on a membrane keyboard makes a unique sound? I HOPE they try to patent this technology... that is just SO obvious... but is it practical in application?
Eighty percent accuracy after "voiceprinting" each key thirty times and using neural nets to arrive at an abstract sound signature for each key? Of course, the simple expedient of changing keyboards will defeat that. Or by the other obvious antidote... background noise! Better be some damned high-value information you're after bucko!
Blinking lights on a modem can be decoded to yield the byte values sent and received? DUH... also obvious... that's why they are labelled "TD" and "RD"! Also easily defeated by simple piece of black tape.
Sleep well tonight, your AFDB Brigade is on duty and alert!
I have a very serious theory... you need to turn in your AFDB. There are two things you need to keep in mind on this issue...
1) While it IS conceivable that you are right, Diebold is NOT that brilliant technologically. My god, for decades their biggest business was making and selling big dumb iron safes; and
2) Occam's razor militates against a conspiracy of this nature for two reasons. First, any disaffected Diebold employee, or disgruntled FORMER employee, involved in the design or manufacture of these things could turn whistleblower in a heartbeat. He/she would find a ready market at the NYT, Washington Post, or hell, even the Houston Comical (errr... Chronicle). Second, when dealing with governments and their vendors it is a long-standing rule that "When faced with a choice between conspiracy and stupidity, choose the latter and you'll be right 90% of the time."
I, personally, think it's a side effect of "offshoring."
I work in the College of Engineering at a large university. I haven't seen the actual statistics but my impression is that the MAJORITY of our students are citizens of other countries. Why is this, you ask? It's because American kids are SMART.
Engineering is a DIFFICULT field of study. So are Computer Science, Math, Chemistry and Physics. We have students who graduate and HAVE to go to graduate school because they can't get a job in the US at the B.S. level. They (the jobs) have all been "offshored" to India, China, Malaysia and other low wage countries. American kids are just too damned smart to work as hard as they have to in order to earn a degree in the hard sciences or Engineering if there's no payoff for their four (in most cases five) years of grind.
I agree. My box has 768 megs of RAM specifically to minimize swapping. If BloatyApp occupies it all and I start up another app to do something else, I'm prepared to tolerate the swap delay, but if BloatyApp is all I'm using and I start a file copy in a shell, I'd rather get back to what I was doing in BloatyApp than have the copy finish an immeasurable fraction sooner.
I've yet to reinstall OS X on my iBook after 2 years...
... and your point is? After all, I have yet to reinstall Solaris 8 on my Ultra10 after approximately 3 and a half years... comparing OSX (or any other *n?x, for that matter) to any release of Windows is like comparing prime rib to a Big Mac... not QUITE apples and oranges.
Why would anybody reinstall an OS at ALL? At work we have an old SparcStation 10 running a license server for a simulaton package our students use... it's still running Solaris 2.5.1...
Due to crappy power at my apartment, I had the root filesystem get completely fried on my Debian box at home (back before I bought a UPS)... mke2fs -S recomputed the superblocks, fsck -y cleaned everything up, tune2fs -j built new journals. All I had to do then was move the hopelessly lost and confounded stuff out of/lost+found back to where it belonged and everything just worked. Tedious, yes... better than reinstalling? DEFINITELY!
Whether Islam is larger than Christianity depends on which Christian you ask. I know any number of evangelical Christian fundamentalists who will tell you that Catholics, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses are not Christians. Some Catholics feel the same way about Protestants (e.g., Mel Gibson et pére).
The Greek root word "theos" means "god" along the model of the gods of the Olympian Pantheon (i.e., personalities having some really awesome poweres). A "theist" believes in a god or gods of that type. An "atheist" does not. There are several other philosophical models of the Divine Mystery that are decidedly non-theistic, and therefor atheistic, while at the same time acknowledging the existence of something greater than ourselves. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist (there is a god, but he/she/it does not involve itself in the day-to-day events of the physical world), there are a number of people who are Pantheists (god is in everything) and Panentheists (god is in everything and everything is part of god). There are also religions that acknowledge no god (most Bhuddists are non-theists).
Faith is a belief that lacks evidence to support it. To this extent, atheism is a faith just as much as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. You say it only requires common sense to support your belief that there is no god... I say to you "Prove it." This is just as fair a demand as your demand that a Theist prove what he or she believes by credible evidence. The absence of proof is not proof of absence. After all, Thomas Jefferson (a Deist) may have been right... there may not be any proof of the existence of a god because he/she/it doesn't do anything that affects the physical world.
By the way, my religious beliefs tend toward "religious humanism" and I am fairly non-theistic myself. I just don't like to see someone get away with faulty logic and argument... not even here on/.:)
Christian music is not what it is today because it has Christian lyrics, it was started as a clean alternative to the music of the day.
I beg to differ. "Christian popular music," more particularly, "Christian Rock," "Christian Metal" and "Christian Rap" were specifically invented to 1) allow Christian youth to think of themselves as "kewl," and 2) as an attempt to proselytize.
If mainstream music stayed "clean", Christian music would never have become so popular it may never have even been a seperate category.
I rather have my doubts about that... I clearly remember hearing that "Rock and Roll is the Devil's music" back in the fifties. However, it's overbearing popularity forced the evangelicals to come up with something in a similar vein in order to retain any semblance of cultural relevance. Those who really like Rock, Metal and Rap consider the "Christian" variants to be laughable at best, pathetic at worst.
Personally, I'll stick with Classical (where all the GOOD Christian music is (Palestrina, Faure, Bach, Brahms, Handel, the Haydns, Pachelbel, etc.)) and Jazz.
I actually clicked the link to see the CGDC official website and was treated to a Flash homepage that rendered about 1.5 inches tall and 3 inches wide on my Sun 21" Trinitron... I hate to think what it would be like on my 17" monitor at home! The text on the page was, needless to say, completely illegible.
I haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ" nor do I intend to... but to see the "Left Behind" series mentioned in a sentence stating that Bible-based products do well in the market "if they are well-made"... GIVE ME A BREAK!
The "Left Behind" series of alleged Christian sci-fi books" is, not to put too fine a point on it, hackneyed crap. The fact that they do well in the market is more a result of tightly targeting them on the large evangelical Christian demographic group than the quality of the writing.
On one machine on which I installed it, it found and removed more than 256 spyware components (bad cookies, spyware registry keys, etc.). That friend installed it on her brother's PC (according to her, he's a <sarcasm>"Really Bright Guy"</sarcasm>) and it cleaned out more than 1,000 Bad Things(TM).
Why can't they just put anything they feel like in their license, and never have it reviewed by the court, effectively ending "fair use" protections?
For the pure, simple reason that there is NO licensing agreement involved in purchasing music on CD or any other media. The courts that have addressed the issue have uniformly treated the purchase of music, regardless of the media upon which it is distributed, as a sale of goods. Were this not the case, there would be no "doctrine of first sale" (the author/publisher is only entitled to a royalty payment from the first sale of a particular copy of the work, subsequent sales of that copy are royalty-free).
Would that I had a "-2 WRONG!" mod to give this post and its siblings.
A ruling from a German court can, and, in light od the recent drive (last five-ten years) to harmonize US with European copyright law, SHOULD be considered by a US court. It will never be considered "binding authority, but if no other US court has addressed the question presented, it would be trated as "persuasive authority" and followed IF the US judge found the German judge's legal analysis convincing.
Since the principles of contract (read, licensing) law are pretty similar on a worldwide basis, I imagine the US judges will give considerable weight to the only ruling on this question, particularly if it came out of a German Appellate court.
Actually it doesn't take MUCH imagination the way our Bushie neo-conservative overlords have been stomping on basic civil liberties for the last few years and I, for one, salute them... with one finger extended.
That's because the only reason scientists aren't the biggest Luddites in the world is because there are still musicians in the world. *sigh*
I disagree! Most of the musicians I know EMBRACE advances in technology! I find scientists and engineering professors MUCH more conservative when it comes to change.
Normal upgrades because a royal PITA because of dependency hell.. Thats one issue that definately needs to be addressed.
Two little commands work together to solve that problem...
#apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade
takes me all of about 20 minutes one time a week to keep my Debian "sarge" (testing) box up to date. Some folks put it in a crontab so it runs overnight, but I'm too paranoid for that.
Beats the heck out of the two hours it took to install the last Windows 2000 Service Pack I loaded on my SunPCIii card at work.
Two years ago a friend of mine was a PowerBase developer for the US gov't. I told her that "When developers grow up they become admins." She blew my remark off as being a "smartass."
She is now an Oracle-certified DBA making about half again what she made as a coder and saying "Developers become admins when they grow up."
Programming in C++ youre less likely to get a reeking pile of bloat, but the language is like a knife with no handle: you have to be quite competent to use it safely.
... or as Stroustrup allegedly said, "In C it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot. In C++ it's not so easy, but when you do, you blow your leg off."
I will admit that I haven't read every post in great detail, so someone MAY have said this already...
<RANT>
Is NOBODY besides me bothered by the fact that this is facially unconstitutional under (most likely) BOTH the federal and the State Constitutions??
Ignition interlocks, at this time, are ordered by a court to be installed as part of a drunk driver's PUNISHMENT! The driver has already been found guilty of a crime and preventive action by the state is justified by the fact that DUI is a high-recidivism-rate offense.
Unfortunately, following that logic, New Mexico drivers will now have to pay more for a car than their neighbors in TX, CO and AZ pay for the same car without the interlock. This is a taking of property by the state without due process (Fifth Amendment). They are being subjected to unreasonable search (technically) without any probable cause (Fourth Amendment). If the law passes, they will have to prove they are NOT guilty of a crime before they can drive (Fifth Amendment). And, more than likely, disabling the interlock, or failing to maintain it in working order, will be made a crime too, more than likely a crime of the "strict liability" sort. Not only that but it smacks of "guilty until proven innocent" to me.
I will admit that drunk driving is a major problem, and that it seems to be a more severe problem in the western states, but this is a MASSIVE abrogation of constitutional rights and civil liberties all WITHOUT the protection of due process.
</RANT>
In short, I think this is a very bad idea proposed by PhDs (pin-headed dopes) in the legislature who should by, to put it mildly, turned out of office Real Soon Now<super>TM</super>.
You really have to wonder whether it was worthwhile for Microsoft
It most definitely WAS worthwhile for MS for reasons I will explain below.
What would have changed if Netscape had continued to sell their browser? Fewer people using Windows? Hardly.
I hasten to disagree and hope to enlighten you my friend. In 1995 when Netscape released 3.0 Gold, it included both javascript and full support for Java. This made the browser into a full-blown (although I must admit it was also crude and slow given the hardware available in that day) OS-agnostic application platform. This was Andreesen's stated intention at the time for taking a move that predated the current marketing uproar over "Web Services" by some eight+ years. Needless to say, this was an idea about which Microsoft was somewhat less than ambivalent.
... the browser never could be the operating system.
True, but the browser could have... or, more accurately, might have... succeeded in making the OS irrelevant... a commodity software layer which served only to support the browser. Again, Microsoft was less than enthusiastic about this idea so they moved to "cut off their (Netscape's) air supply" (internal Microsoft memo entered into evidence in the antitrust trial).
If you truly buy into the logic you espouse about the browser being, "... just one more applet, fundamentally....," I would recommend that you not seek employment in the Web Services field.
Slashdot Mirror
So, each key on a membrane keyboard makes a unique sound? I HOPE they try to patent this technology ... that is just SO obvious ... but is it practical in application?
... background noise! Better be some damned high-value information you're after bucko!
... also obvious ... that's why they are labelled "TD" and "RD"! Also easily defeated by simple piece of black tape.
Eighty percent accuracy after "voiceprinting" each key thirty times and using neural nets to arrive at an abstract sound signature for each key? Of course, the simple expedient of changing keyboards will defeat that. Or by the other obvious antidote
Blinking lights on a modem can be decoded to yield the byte values sent and received? DUH
Sleep well tonight, your AFDB Brigade is on duty and alert!
Running the vampire on my workstation at work (100 Mb/s switched ethernet straight through one gateway to the backbone):
Script started:
Mon 03 May 2004 11:20:10 AM CDT
Time now:
Mon 03 May 2004 03:13:20 PM CDT
Total images: 12 (5 active, 7 dead)
Images loaded: 10953 (46/min)
Total load failures: 410
Just doing my bit to rid the world of fraudfeasing scum.
I have a very serious theory ... you need to turn in your AFDB. There are two things you need to keep in mind on this issue ...
... Chronicle). Second, when dealing with governments and their vendors it is a long-standing rule that "When faced with a choice between conspiracy and stupidity, choose the latter and you'll be right 90% of the time."
1) While it IS conceivable that you are right, Diebold is NOT that brilliant technologically. My god, for decades their biggest business was making and selling big dumb iron safes; and
2) Occam's razor militates against a conspiracy of this nature for two reasons. First, any disaffected Diebold employee, or disgruntled FORMER employee, involved in the design or manufacture of these things could turn whistleblower in a heartbeat. He/she would find a ready market at the NYT, Washington Post, or hell, even the Houston Comical (errr
Just my US$0.02
I, personally, think it's a side effect of "offshoring."
I work in the College of Engineering at a large university. I haven't seen the actual statistics but my impression is that the MAJORITY of our students are citizens of other countries. Why is this, you ask? It's because American kids are SMART.
Engineering is a DIFFICULT field of study. So are Computer Science, Math, Chemistry and Physics. We have students who graduate and HAVE to go to graduate school because they can't get a job in the US at the B.S. level. They (the jobs) have all been "offshored" to India, China, Malaysia and other low wage countries. American kids are just too damned smart to work as hard as they have to in order to earn a degree in the hard sciences or Engineering if there's no payoff for their four (in most cases five) years of grind.
Just my US$0.02
I agree. My box has 768 megs of RAM specifically to minimize swapping. If BloatyApp occupies it all and I start up another app to do something else, I'm prepared to tolerate the swap delay, but if BloatyApp is all I'm using and I start a file copy in a shell, I'd rather get back to what I was doing in BloatyApp than have the copy finish an immeasurable fraction sooner.
"Hold your friends close and your (potential) enemies closer."
XEmacs is NOT an OS ... to qualify as an OS software must include a kernel ... the ONE feature that's missing from XEmacs.
Why would anybody reinstall an OS at ALL? At work we have an old SparcStation 10 running a license server for a simulaton package our students use ... it's still running Solaris 2.5.1 ...
... mke2fs -S recomputed the superblocks, fsck -y cleaned everything up, tune2fs -j built new journals. All I had to do then was move the hopelessly lost and confounded stuff out of /lost+found back to where it belonged and everything just worked. Tedious, yes ... better than reinstalling? DEFINITELY!
Due to crappy power at my apartment, I had the root filesystem get completely fried on my Debian box at home (back before I bought a UPS)
Whether Islam is larger than Christianity depends on which Christian you ask. I know any number of evangelical Christian fundamentalists who will tell you that Catholics, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses are not Christians. Some Catholics feel the same way about Protestants (e.g., Mel Gibson et pére).
The Greek root word "theos" means "god" along the model of the gods of the Olympian Pantheon (i.e., personalities having some really awesome poweres). A "theist" believes in a god or gods of that type. An "atheist" does not. There are several other philosophical models of the Divine Mystery that are decidedly non-theistic, and therefor atheistic, while at the same time acknowledging the existence of something greater than ourselves. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist (there is a god, but he/she/it does not involve itself in the day-to-day events of the physical world), there are a number of people who are Pantheists (god is in everything) and Panentheists (god is in everything and everything is part of god). There are also religions that acknowledge no god (most Bhuddists are non-theists).
... I say to you "Prove it." This is just as fair a demand as your demand that a Theist prove what he or she believes by credible evidence. The absence of proof is not proof of absence. After all, Thomas Jefferson (a Deist) may have been right ... there may not be any proof of the existence of a god because he/she/it doesn't do anything that affects the physical world.
... not even here on /. :)
Faith is a belief that lacks evidence to support it. To this extent, atheism is a faith just as much as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. You say it only requires common sense to support your belief that there is no god
By the way, my religious beliefs tend toward "religious humanism" and I am fairly non-theistic myself. I just don't like to see someone get away with faulty logic and argument
Peace to all,
I beg to differ. "Christian popular music," more particularly, "Christian Rock," "Christian Metal" and "Christian Rap" were specifically invented to 1) allow Christian youth to think of themselves as "kewl," and 2) as an attempt to proselytize.
I rather have my doubts about that
Personally, I'll stick with Classical (where all the GOOD Christian music is (Palestrina, Faure, Bach, Brahms, Handel, the Haydns, Pachelbel, etc.)) and Jazz.
I actually clicked the link to see the CGDC official website and was treated to a Flash homepage that rendered about 1.5 inches tall and 3 inches wide on my Sun 21" Trinitron ... I hate to think what it would be like on my 17" monitor at home! The text on the page was, needless to say, completely illegible.
I haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ" nor do I intend to ... but to see the "Left Behind" series mentioned in a sentence stating that Bible-based products do well in the market "if they are well-made" ... GIVE ME A BREAK!
The "Left Behind" series of alleged Christian sci-fi books" is, not to put too fine a point on it, hackneyed crap. The fact that they do well in the market is more a result of tightly targeting them on the large evangelical Christian demographic group than the quality of the writing.
errrrmmmm
Ad-Aware
...
It just works
On one machine on which I installed it, it found and removed more than 256 spyware components (bad cookies, spyware registry keys, etc.). That friend installed it on her brother's PC (according to her, he's a <sarcasm>"Really Bright Guy"</sarcasm>) and it cleaned out more than 1,000 Bad Things(TM).
For the pure, simple reason that there is NO licensing agreement involved in purchasing music on CD or any other media. The courts that have addressed the issue have uniformly treated the purchase of music, regardless of the media upon which it is distributed, as a sale of goods. Were this not the case, there would be no "doctrine of first sale" (the author/publisher is only entitled to a royalty payment from the first sale of a particular copy of the work, subsequent sales of that copy are royalty-free).
Would that I had a "-2 WRONG!" mod to give this post and its siblings.
A ruling from a German court can, and, in light od the recent drive (last five-ten years) to harmonize US with European copyright law, SHOULD be considered by a US court. It will never be considered "binding authority, but if no other US court has addressed the question presented, it would be trated as "persuasive authority" and followed IF the US judge found the German judge's legal analysis convincing.
Since the principles of contract (read, licensing) law are pretty similar on a worldwide basis, I imagine the US judges will give considerable weight to the only ruling on this question, particularly if it came out of a German Appellate court.
Just my US$0.02
'wands
(and yes, IAAL)
You beat me to it, you insensitive clod!
Actually it doesn't take MUCH imagination the way our Bushie neo-conservative overlords have been stomping on basic civil liberties for the last few years and I, for one, salute them
I disagree! Most of the musicians I know EMBRACE advances in technology! I find scientists and engineering professors MUCH more conservative when it comes to change.
Two little commands work together to solve that problem
#apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade
takes me all of about 20 minutes one time a week to keep my Debian "sarge" (testing) box up to date. Some folks put it in a crontab so it runs overnight, but I'm too paranoid for that.
Beats the heck out of the two hours it took to install the last Windows 2000 Service Pack I loaded on my SunPCIii card at work.
Two years ago a friend of mine was a PowerBase developer for the US gov't. I told her that "When developers grow up they become admins." She blew my remark off as being a "smartass."
...
She is now an Oracle-certified DBA making about half again what she made as a coder and saying "Developers become admins when they grow up."
Interesting
ninewands
I will admit that I haven't read every post in great detail, so someone MAY have said this already ...
<RANT>
Is NOBODY besides me bothered by the fact that this is facially unconstitutional under (most likely) BOTH the federal and the State Constitutions??
Ignition interlocks, at this time, are ordered by a court to be installed as part of a drunk driver's PUNISHMENT! The driver has already been found guilty of a crime and preventive action by the state is justified by the fact that DUI is a high-recidivism-rate offense.
Unfortunately, following that logic, New Mexico drivers will now have to pay more for a car than their neighbors in TX, CO and AZ pay for the same car without the interlock. This is a taking of property by the state without due process (Fifth Amendment). They are being subjected to unreasonable search (technically) without any probable cause (Fourth Amendment). If the law passes, they will have to prove they are NOT guilty of a crime before they can drive (Fifth Amendment). And, more than likely, disabling the interlock, or failing to maintain it in working order, will be made a crime too, more than likely a crime of the "strict liability" sort. Not only that but it smacks of "guilty until proven innocent" to me.
I will admit that drunk driving is a major problem, and that it seems to be a more severe problem in the western states, but this is a MASSIVE abrogation of constitutional rights and civil liberties all WITHOUT the protection of due process.
</RANT>
In short, I think this is a very bad idea proposed by PhDs (pin-headed dopes) in the legislature who should by, to put it mildly, turned out of office Real Soon Now<super>TM</super>.
It most definitely WAS worthwhile for MS for reasons I will explain below.
I hasten to disagree and hope to enlighten you my friend. In 1995 when Netscape released 3.0 Gold, it included both javascript and full support for Java. This made the browser into a full-blown (although I must admit it was also crude and slow given the hardware available in that day) OS-agnostic application platform. This was Andreesen's stated intention at the time for taking a move that predated the current marketing uproar over "Web Services" by some eight+ years. Needless to say, this was an idea about which Microsoft was somewhat less than ambivalent.
True, but the browser could have
If you truly buy into the logic you espouse about the browser being, "
Best wishes,
'wands