Before I put solar panels on my roof, I built a system with a camera placed vertically over a reflective sphere (one of those cheap garden decorations), and then took photos from each corner of my roof. I then manually aligned each photo to north based on a compass in the photo and trimmed it to a square centered on the sphere. A script computed the path of the sun transformed onto the surface of the sphere, and drew a line over the photo for each month, with crossing lines for hours in solar time, and a point plotted for the position of the sun at the time the picture was taken. The point lined up "close enough" with the sun in the photo for me to assume that the lines were accurate. Any segment of a month line that was across sky would signify time where the panels would be active. and line crossing trees would be time lost to shade, enough to get a rough estimate of how well the panels would work.
Then I called a solar installer, who came out for a free quote with a handled tool that took a single photo, autodetected the position, orientation, and where the photo was sky vs. trees, and spit out the percentage of total incoming solar energy that would be absorbed at that point. I recommend doing it that way.
The conclusions being drawn from this article in the summary are completely wrong. There are two important findings in this study: 1. Countries that have a higher average student confidence in math tend to have lower average student math scores (unexpected). 2. Within a single country, students with higher confidence in math tend to have higher math scores (as expected).
The only useful conclusion that can be drawn from these is that the countries with education systems that focus on confidence do not end up educating their students as well, or that in countries with higher math scores students feel that they are not at the top of their class. It says nothing about individual students, and it doesn't say that students who are good at math have lower confidence, and it certaintly doesn't say that students who are good at math are bad with people.
Before everybody accuses these "hackers" of unethical behaviour, you should look at what the "hack" was. As far as I can tell, you just had to log in, and then edit the URL. BusinessWeek is agressively removing any posts with the process in it, but there are some references to the basic idea still.
The information was there, the server gave them permission to see it, I don't see what is so unethical. Posting how to do that in a public forum could be considered unethical. But just following the instructions?
'The last time you bought a six-pack of Bud Light at the Piggly Wiggly, Anheuser servers most likely recorded what you paid, when that beer was brewed, whether you purchased it warm or chilled, and whether you could have gotten a better deal down the street.'
So they track all sorts of stuff about their beer, and nothing about you specifically. What's the problem?
The USB specification says that a powered USB port, such as the port on the back of your computer or on a powered USB hub, must be able to provide 500mA of current. Unpowered hubs, which get powered of the port they are plugged in to, can only source 100mA of current.
When a USB device gets plugged in, it reports to the host how much power it would like to draw, and the host can choose not to enable the device if its too high. Under Windows, you'll get a message reporting this problem and giving you hints on how to rearrange your devices. Under Linux, it seems to just enable the device anyways. I tried plugging two devices, each set to report 500mA current usage, into a single keypad with a built in (unpowered) hub. Under Linux, both devices were enabled. Under Windows, no dice.
In summary, the solution to your problem is to buy a slightly more expensive (i.e. $15 instead of $10) USB hub, and you'll be able to use as many high-powered devices as you want. But if all you want is keyboards and mice and not USB hard drives, buy an unpowered hub.
Its not quite the same as the Hubble pictures. The Hubble pictures are images captured with scientific instruments that measure wavelengths of light not visible to the human eye. Since the wavelengths are shifted to the visible spectrum, they have already lost most of their real scientific information, and are then mostly just pretty pictures (I'm sure there's still some relative information, but the absolute scale is gone). The Mars pictures were taken with a visible-spectrum camera, and distorting the colors is purely a loss of information for aesthetic or public relations purposes, and is then slightly more deceitful.
I've posted a Perl version of Taral's full decoder at http://www.mit.edu/~colin/cat.pl (for those of us who don't speak python!)
Most of the decoders people have posted use a lookup table, which only works for numeric valued barcodes. This one decodes all barcodes correctly - for example, UPS tracking codes (which have letters in them), and the type field, which actually says UPA for UPC A codes.
Run his script to load the java applet, and then in the link the script provides, change your IP to localhost.
Definitely time to leave Java turned off until further notice.
In an age where site traffic is almost a type of currency, sites like this begin to fall under a bit of a legal problem. The site is technically profiting off ad revenues (assuming he has banners, if he doesn't, then it has the possibility of profiting), generated by the use of other people's copyrighted work as fodder for his humor engine. His site, however falls under parody and is thus exempt. However, what about sites like Babelfish, which redistribute someone elses copyrighted material, in a new form, in order to gain ad traffic. While I agree that this should be legal, I don't think it currently is.
The notice to bad users states that Metallica has accused them of making available Metallica music, not actually trading it (which brings up all the "I'm putting this here for people who own the CD, it's not my fault they download it"). NetPD has no way of tracking user to user transfers, they can just do a search on Metallica like everyone else, using a 'Bot to save all the resulting users. Maybe they could even do something fancy like search on the titles of all the albums and tracks too.
It doesn't seem likely that they could somehow eavesdrop on user transactions, since the transactions are distributed, only the database of available songs is central.
How much you wanna bet there will be an article published tomorrow quoting a DDOS attack on the FBI's Freedom of Information Act servers, perpetrated by heineous hackers?
I'd have to disagree with the fact that students don't buy CDs. Since I started listening to MP3s, I've bought far more CDs, and been much happier with the ones I buy. Like it or not, there are audible differences between CDs and MP3s, even well-encoded MP3s. I much prefer listening to my CDs than MP3s, but I can decide if I like a CD before I buy it - it's like those listening stations at record stores. In the stores the tradeoff is that I have to be there to listen to it. With MP3s the tradeoff is that I have lower sound quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Before I put solar panels on my roof, I built a system with a camera placed vertically over a reflective sphere (one of those cheap garden decorations), and then took photos from each corner of my roof. I then manually aligned each photo to north based on a compass in the photo and trimmed it to a square centered on the sphere. A script computed the path of the sun transformed onto the surface of the sphere, and drew a line over the photo for each month, with crossing lines for hours in solar time, and a point plotted for the position of the sun at the time the picture was taken. The point lined up "close enough" with the sun in the photo for me to assume that the lines were accurate. Any segment of a month line that was across sky would signify time where the panels would be active. and line crossing trees would be time lost to shade, enough to get a rough estimate of how well the panels would work.
Then I called a solar installer, who came out for a free quote with a handled tool that took a single photo, autodetected the position, orientation, and where the photo was sky vs. trees, and spit out the percentage of total incoming solar energy that would be absorbed at that point. I recommend doing it that way.
The conclusions being drawn from this article in the summary are completely wrong. There are two important findings in this study:
1. Countries that have a higher average student confidence in math tend to have lower average student math scores (unexpected).
2. Within a single country, students with higher confidence in math tend to have higher math scores (as expected).
The only useful conclusion that can be drawn from these is that the countries with education systems that focus on confidence do not end up educating their students as well, or that in countries with higher math scores students feel that they are not at the top of their class. It says nothing about individual students, and it doesn't say that students who are good at math have lower confidence, and it certaintly doesn't say that students who are good at math are bad with people.
Before everybody accuses these "hackers" of unethical behaviour, you should look at what the "hack" was. As far as I can tell, you just had to log in, and then edit the URL. BusinessWeek is agressively removing any posts with the process in it, but there are some references to the basic idea still.
The information was there, the server gave them permission to see it, I don't see what is so unethical. Posting how to do that in a public forum could be considered unethical. But just following the instructions?
'The last time you bought a six-pack of Bud Light at the Piggly Wiggly, Anheuser servers most likely recorded what you paid, when that beer was brewed, whether you purchased it warm or chilled, and whether you could have gotten a better deal down the street.'
So they track all sorts of stuff about their beer, and nothing about you specifically. What's the problem?
The USB specification says that a powered USB port, such as the port on the back of your computer or on a powered USB hub, must be able to provide 500mA of current. Unpowered hubs, which get powered of the port they are plugged in to, can only source 100mA of current.
When a USB device gets plugged in, it reports to the host how much power it would like to draw, and the host can choose not to enable the device if its too high. Under Windows, you'll get a message reporting this problem and giving you hints on how to rearrange your devices. Under Linux, it seems to just enable the device anyways. I tried plugging two devices, each set to report 500mA current usage, into a single keypad with a built in (unpowered) hub. Under Linux, both devices were enabled. Under Windows, no dice.
In summary, the solution to your problem is to buy a slightly more expensive (i.e. $15 instead of $10) USB hub, and you'll be able to use as many high-powered devices as you want. But if all you want is keyboards and mice and not USB hard drives, buy an unpowered hub.
Its not quite the same as the Hubble pictures. The Hubble pictures are images captured with scientific instruments that measure wavelengths of light not visible to the human eye. Since the wavelengths are shifted to the visible spectrum, they have already lost most of their real scientific information, and are then mostly just pretty pictures (I'm sure there's still some relative information, but the absolute scale is gone). The Mars pictures were taken with a visible-spectrum camera, and distorting the colors is purely a loss of information for aesthetic or public relations purposes, and is then slightly more deceitful.
Most of the decoders people have posted use a lookup table, which only works for numeric valued barcodes. This one decodes all barcodes correctly - for example, UPS tracking codes (which have letters in them), and the type field, which actually says UPA for UPC A codes.
Run his script to load the java applet, and then in the link the script provides, change your IP to localhost. Definitely time to leave Java turned off until further notice.
In an age where site traffic is almost a type of currency, sites like this begin to fall under a bit of a legal problem. The site is technically profiting off ad revenues (assuming he has banners, if he doesn't, then it has the possibility of profiting), generated by the use of other people's copyrighted work as fodder for his humor engine. His site, however falls under parody and is thus exempt. However, what about sites like Babelfish, which redistribute someone elses copyrighted material, in a new form, in order to gain ad traffic. While I agree that this should be legal, I don't think it currently is.
The notice to bad users states that Metallica has accused them of making available Metallica music, not actually trading it (which brings up all the "I'm putting this here for people who own the CD, it's not my fault they download it"). NetPD has no way of tracking user to user transfers, they can just do a search on Metallica like everyone else, using a 'Bot to save all the resulting users. Maybe they could even do something fancy like search on the titles of all the albums and tracks too.
It doesn't seem likely that they could somehow eavesdrop on user transactions, since the transactions are distributed, only the database of available songs is central.
How much you wanna bet there will be an article published tomorrow quoting a DDOS attack on the FBI's Freedom of Information Act servers, perpetrated by heineous hackers?
I'd have to disagree with the fact that students don't buy CDs. Since I started listening to MP3s, I've bought far more CDs, and been much happier with the ones I buy. Like it or not, there are audible differences between CDs and MP3s, even well-encoded MP3s. I much prefer listening to my CDs than MP3s, but I can decide if I like a CD before I buy it - it's like those listening stations at record stores. In the stores the tradeoff is that I have to be there to listen to it. With MP3s the tradeoff is that I have lower sound quality.