The Nevada Gaming Control Board has technical standards for slot machines. They've had enough fraud over the years that they know what has to be done. Some highlights:
... must resist forced illegal entry and must retain evidence of
any entry until properly cleared or until a new play is initiated. A gaming device must have a
protective cover over the circuit boards that contain programs and circuitry used in the random selection process and control of the gaming device, including any electrically alterable program
storage media. The cover must be designed to permit installation of a security locking mechanism
by the manufacturer or end user of the gaming device.
... must exhibit total immunity to human body
electrostatic discharges on all player-exposed areas.... A gaming device may exhibit temporary disruption when subjected to electrostatic
discharges of 20,000 to 27,000 volts DC... but must exhibit a capacity to recover and complete an interrupted play without loss or corruption of any stored or displayed
information and without component failure.... Gaming device power supply filtering must be sufficient to prevent disruption of the device by repeated switching on and off of the AC power.... must be impervious to
influences from outside the device, including, but not limited to, electro-magnetic interference, electro-static interference, and radio frequency interference.
All gaming devices which have control programs residing in one or more Conventional ROM Devices must employ a mechanism approved by the chairman to verify control programs and
data. The mechanism used must detect at least 99.99 percent of all possible media failures. If these programs and data are to operate out of volatile RAM, the program that loads the RAM must reside on and operate from a Conventional ROM Device.
All gaming devices having control programs or data stored on memory devices other than
Conventional ROM Devices must: (a) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which verifies that all control program
components, including data and graphic information, are authentic copies of the approved
components. The chairman may require tests to verify that components used by Nevada licensees are approved components. The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less
than 1 in 10 to the 38th power and must prevent the execution of any control program component if any component is determined to be invalid. Any program component of the verification or
initialization mechanism must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated using a method approved by the chairman.
(b) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which tests unused or unallocated areas of
any alterable media for unintended programs or data and tests the structure of the storage media for integrity. The mechanism must prevent further play of the gaming device if unexpected data or
structural inconsistencies are found.
(c) Provide a mechanism for keeping a record, in a form approved by the chairman, anytime a control program component is added, removed, or altered on any alterable media. The record
must contain a minimum of the last 10 modifications to the media and each record must contain
the date and time of the action, identification of the component affected, the reason for the modification and any pertinent validation information.
(d) Provide, as a minimum, a two-stage mechanism for validating all program components on
demand via a communication port and protocol approved by the chairman. The first stage of this mechanism must verify all control components. The second stage must be capable of completely
authenticating all program components, including graphics and data components in a maximum
of 20 minutes. The mechanism for extracting the authentication information must be stored on a Con
Even the numbers from the National Corn Growers's Association only indicate that ethanol from corn produces only 30% more energy than goes in. That's a poor energy return. Numbers from opponents of ethanol are much worse.
The more promising idea, if it can be made to work, is "cellulosic ethanol". The idea is to develop bioengineered enzymes that can digest agricultural waste (straw, corncobs, sugar cane, wood chips, etc.) into something more useful. But so far, no process to do that is beyond the pilot plant stage.
Call up a venture capitalist friend and ask for some rejected business plans for really stupid business ideas. Put them on your honeypot.
Get some publicly available geophysical data for real oil wells, and change all the locations to somewhere else with comparable geology but no oil.
Get some rejected porno images from people in the industry. Buy the reproduction rights. Put Digimarc watermarks on them. Wait for them to reappear elsewhere. Sue. Profit.
Hollywood seems to be going through an idea shortage period. Too many remakes this summer.
"Pirates of the Caribbean" (a sequel to a movie version of a ride at Disneyland). "Clerks II" (a sequel to a very low budget movie, now with a bigger budget.) "Superman Returns" ("Up in the sky! That guy with a cape again!") "Miami Vice" (Probably not going to bring back pastels.) "Underworld Evolution" (Kate Beckinsale does a great job making a stupid concept work.) "Tokyo Drift" (Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom... yawn).
This tends to happen when studios are losing money and opt for the sure thing.
The original ideas aren't that good, either. "Nacho Libre?" "Snakes on a Plane?" "The Lake House?" Even Pixar blew it this year, with "Cars".
There's some good stuff. "The Devil Wears Prada" is very funny.
The average quality for this year isn't that awful. But there's no great movie this year. Nothing this year will make the top 50 movies of all time. That's what creates the feeling it's a bad movie year.
Note that the problem is writing and story, and to a lesser extent, acting. Effects, backgrounds, locations, and action are being done perfectly. Hollywood really does have the mechanics of the business nailed. CG integration is now seamless. Practical effects are better than ever. Because of this, audiences now expect so much of that stuff that story and dialogue are overwhelmed. This makes the story look weak. And you leave the theater feeling you just watched a video game.
The poster is right. Each time we find out more about one of these operations, it turns out to be dumb. As more info comes out about Guantanamo prisoners, it comes out that the US is holding bin Laden's driver, a guy who didn't make the cut for 9/11, and a bunch of random people who were turned in by bounty hunters in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration is fighting real trials for those prisoners because they'll lose most of them, and look even stupider.
The bill only affects access to commercial social networking sites. This is regulation under the commerce clause, so Congress is limited to regulating businesses.
This will be a boost for non-commercial sites like free-association.net, which was founded by Tribe members unhappy with the Murdoch buyout and subsequent censorship. It doesn't take a company. After all, the users are providing all the content.
Oh, I thought it was a mouse that moved itself
on
Output Mouse
·
· Score: 1
Canada has a small claims court system. That's always useful.
So is saying "This conversation is being recorded and anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Please identify yourself.... What is the exact name of the company with which you claim I have a contract...... Do you have a signed copy of the contract... "
It's not really "image based". It's just another file archiving system, with one big file full of many compressed files. Like "zip" files. This is mostly a hype phrase, because "Microsoft announces new, incompatible compressed file format" would sound so stupid.
There are true "image based" systems. QNX has one. A QNX image, containing the microkernel, the servers, and any desired application programs, can be built, burned into ROM, and executed from ROM. This is how embedded systems start up, from copiers to routers to car navigation systems. Vista isn't doing that.
I wrote a program to do that in 1968, for a UNIVAC 1108 with a pen plotter. Even did hidden surface elimination. We even ran it on a display a few times during really slow periods. But I don't have the ALGOL code any more.
The algorithm was in JACM around 1967, but you wouldn't do it that way today.
When I look at technology today, I'm disappointed. We're not getting technology we really need, like a new source of low-cost energy, cures for cancer, heart disease, and aging, or some defensive measure to counteract nuclear and bioweapon proliferation. What we're getting are new systems for advertising delivery and content control. This is seriously disappointing.
The technology future looked more promising in the 1950s and 1960s than it does now. "You will have robot slaves by 1956". Energy "too cheap to meter". Flying cars. Space travel.
"Giant brain" computers. Didn't happen.
On the AI front, things are starting to look up a little from the days of the "AI Winter", but still, nobody has anything working that looks like "common sense". Most of what we have in AI today are the same old ideas with more CPU power behind them and at lower cost. This allows applying the technology to lower-end problems, but not harder ones. Yes, there's a little progress; early vision is starting to work, and some of the "learning" algorithms work on carefully selected problems. But "strong AI" which will work across a wide range of problems seems no closer than it was twenty years ago.
Very few people are really working on this stuff. Xerox PARC is dead. DEC SRL and WRL are long gone. HP Labs is moribund. IBM Almaden is dying. Bell Labs is half dead. Microsoft and Google have R&D operations in computer science, but those are very product-focused. Sony bailed out of AI along with dropping the Aibo. DoD has cut back on general computer science funding. There's maybe a dozen good university groups, all small. Where's this "singularity" going to come from? Bangalore? Shenzhen? Myspace?
Here's the real link to the research. As usual, Roland the Plogger is posting a story from a blog, maximizing ad revenue, and the actual reference has been lost. One would think that Slashdot's "editors" would be wise to this by now, but they still don't get it.
It;s only a prototype; the water stream that comes out is more like a garden hose than a fire hose.
The whole concept of recognizing known viruses was fundamentally flawed. It had a good run, but that was because virus writers were mostly trying to get attention, not steal. Now that viruses are an ongoing criminal enterprise, the old dumb tactics won't work.
We're going to have to give up on recognition and put more effort into partitioning. We need setups where each web page renders in its own jail, and it doesn't matter if the browser is insecure - when the page closes, a program exits and any corrupted info goes away.
Of course, this will break Active-X, toolbars, downloads, etc. Then again, on business systems, you want those things broken.
Once the browser is locked down like that, you need a "guard" program. When you want to move a file out of a browser's jail, it has to go through a program that "sanitizes" it. Often, a translation to a well-documented format that doesn't contain execution capability will do the job. Converting incoming.doc files to Open Document XML format, for example.
It's quite possible to completely solve this problem.
This is about try #4 for this concept. In the 1980s, there was "Silent Radio", which drove LED signs with text messages. These used to show up in bars and restaurants, so you could watch the news and sports scores scroll by. Then there was sending song info on FM subcarriers of broadcast stations, which many car radios understand. XM satellite radio has a fancier system for doing the same thing, as does the on-band-in-channel digital broadcast system.
The main feature of this new system seems to be ads. Yawn.
I just saw two movie trailers which gave the web site for the movie as "myspace.com/moviename". You used to see "AOL keyword: moviename", then
"www.moviename.com". Now it's Myspace. Interesting trend.
SGI doesn't have any valuable rights in OpenGL. The specification is a public document. The reference implementation is open source. You can't copyright an API (SCO and Microsoft have both tried and failed). There's a charge to use the OpenGL trademark in a closed-source implementation, and that's it.
SGI's higher level APIs, like Inventor and Performer, have little if any resale value.
Yes, the stock dropped. Around July 1, somebody dumped almost a million shares of SCOX all at once, and the price dropped from around $4 to into the $2-$3 range and has been there since. $2.51 right now. For the last two years, the stock has been hovering around $4, so this is a big change.
At the height of the lawsuit hype, it hit $20, but that was back in 3Q 2003. Back in the glory days of the dot-com boom, it reached $100.
The Olympics was an Australian case. Target was not "successfully sued"; that's still pending. Southwest Airlines won a case over that issue, Access Now vs. Southwest.; their "virtual ticket counter" does not have to be handicapped-accessable. Access Now appealed, and the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected the appeal.
That's the only final US court decision on the subject to date.
As the court put it, it's up to Congress to change the ADA if Congress wants it to apply to the Internet.
With Google's "Accessable search", sites will be able to tell from their weblogs how many visitors are coming in via the "accessable search" route. So it will be possible to figure out the financial benefit of web accessability. If it turns out to be low, even for pages that Google thinks are "accessable", there's a business case for not bothering with "accessability".
OK, let's see it go to Tahoe. Start at Sacramento, and make that long climb up I-80 at Donner Pass. That's 100 miles, but it's mostly uphill. It's easy to get range on the flat.
Absolute positioning was the really bad idea.
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 1
The big mistakes in CSS were 1) absolute positioning, and 2) the ability to put stuff on top of other stuff. You've all seen pages where the text ran off the left side of the page, or with text on top of other content. We didn't have those problems with HTML tables.
I laugh when I see CSS nuts struggling to make three equal columns. That's what tables are for. The concept that every page should have a Javascript formatting engine is silly.
Remember, CSS fans, that your page might not be viewed the way you planned. It might be viewed through a language translator, like Google's. Or reformatted for a cell phone. With tables, it will probably still look right after translation; with CSS absolute positioning, it will probably look like crap.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nevada Gaming Control Board has technical standards for slot machines. They've had enough fraud over the years that they know what has to be done. Some highlights:
(a) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which verifies that all control program components, including data and graphic information, are authentic copies of the approved components. The chairman may require tests to verify that components used by Nevada licensees are approved components. The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less than 1 in 10 to the 38th power and must prevent the execution of any control program component if any component is determined to be invalid. Any program component of the verification or initialization mechanism must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated using a method approved by the chairman.
(b) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which tests unused or unallocated areas of any alterable media for unintended programs or data and tests the structure of the storage media for integrity. The mechanism must prevent further play of the gaming device if unexpected data or structural inconsistencies are found.
(c) Provide a mechanism for keeping a record, in a form approved by the chairman, anytime a control program component is added, removed, or altered on any alterable media. The record must contain a minimum of the last 10 modifications to the media and each record must contain the date and time of the action, identification of the component affected, the reason for the modification and any pertinent validation information.
(d) Provide, as a minimum, a two-stage mechanism for validating all program components on demand via a communication port and protocol approved by the chairman. The first stage of this mechanism must verify all control components. The second stage must be capable of completely authenticating all program components, including graphics and data components in a maximum of 20 minutes. The mechanism for extracting the authentication information must be stored on a Con
Even the numbers from the National Corn Growers's Association only indicate that ethanol from corn produces only 30% more energy than goes in. That's a poor energy return. Numbers from opponents of ethanol are much worse.
The more promising idea, if it can be made to work, is "cellulosic ethanol". The idea is to develop bioengineered enzymes that can digest agricultural waste (straw, corncobs, sugar cane, wood chips, etc.) into something more useful. But so far, no process to do that is beyond the pilot plant stage.
Hollywood seems to be going through an idea shortage period. Too many remakes this summer. "Pirates of the Caribbean" (a sequel to a movie version of a ride at Disneyland). "Clerks II" (a sequel to a very low budget movie, now with a bigger budget.) "Superman Returns" ("Up in the sky! That guy with a cape again!") "Miami Vice" (Probably not going to bring back pastels.) "Underworld Evolution" (Kate Beckinsale does a great job making a stupid concept work.) "Tokyo Drift" (Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom ... yawn).
This tends to happen when studios are losing money and opt for the sure thing.
The original ideas aren't that good, either. "Nacho Libre?" "Snakes on a Plane?" "The Lake House?" Even Pixar blew it this year, with "Cars".
There's some good stuff. "The Devil Wears Prada" is very funny.
The average quality for this year isn't that awful. But there's no great movie this year. Nothing this year will make the top 50 movies of all time. That's what creates the feeling it's a bad movie year.
Note that the problem is writing and story, and to a lesser extent, acting. Effects, backgrounds, locations, and action are being done perfectly. Hollywood really does have the mechanics of the business nailed. CG integration is now seamless. Practical effects are better than ever. Because of this, audiences now expect so much of that stuff that story and dialogue are overwhelmed. This makes the story look weak. And you leave the theater feeling you just watched a video game.
Google News does a rather good job of associating all the stories on the same topic. I'd thought this was a solved problem.
Well, it went to 5, so we're done there.
The poster is right. Each time we find out more about one of these operations, it turns out to be dumb. As more info comes out about Guantanamo prisoners, it comes out that the US is holding bin Laden's driver, a guy who didn't make the cut for 9/11, and a bunch of random people who were turned in by bounty hunters in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration is fighting real trials for those prisoners because they'll lose most of them, and look even stupider.
Meanwhile, bin Laden is still free and active.
The bill only affects access to commercial social networking sites. This is regulation under the commerce clause, so Congress is limited to regulating businesses.
This will be a boost for non-commercial sites like free-association.net, which was founded by Tribe members unhappy with the Murdoch buyout and subsequent censorship. It doesn't take a company. After all, the users are providing all the content.
From the title, it sounded much more interesting.
Canada has a small claims court system. That's always useful.
So is saying "This conversation is being recorded and anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Please identify yourself. ... What is the exact name of the company with which you claim I have a contract ... ... Do you have a signed copy of the contract ... "
Canadian corporation lookup is here.
It's not really "image based". It's just another file archiving system, with one big file full of many compressed files. Like "zip" files. This is mostly a hype phrase, because "Microsoft announces new, incompatible compressed file format" would sound so stupid.
There are true "image based" systems. QNX has one. A QNX image, containing the microkernel, the servers, and any desired application programs, can be built, burned into ROM, and executed from ROM. This is how embedded systems start up, from copiers to routers to car navigation systems. Vista isn't doing that.
I wrote a program to do that in 1968, for a UNIVAC 1108 with a pen plotter. Even did hidden surface elimination. We even ran it on a display a few times during really slow periods. But I don't have the ALGOL code any more.
The algorithm was in JACM around 1967, but you wouldn't do it that way today.
When I look at technology today, I'm disappointed. We're not getting technology we really need, like a new source of low-cost energy, cures for cancer, heart disease, and aging, or some defensive measure to counteract nuclear and bioweapon proliferation. What we're getting are new systems for advertising delivery and content control. This is seriously disappointing.
The technology future looked more promising in the 1950s and 1960s than it does now. "You will have robot slaves by 1956". Energy "too cheap to meter". Flying cars. Space travel. "Giant brain" computers. Didn't happen.
On the AI front, things are starting to look up a little from the days of the "AI Winter", but still, nobody has anything working that looks like "common sense". Most of what we have in AI today are the same old ideas with more CPU power behind them and at lower cost. This allows applying the technology to lower-end problems, but not harder ones. Yes, there's a little progress; early vision is starting to work, and some of the "learning" algorithms work on carefully selected problems. But "strong AI" which will work across a wide range of problems seems no closer than it was twenty years ago.
Very few people are really working on this stuff. Xerox PARC is dead. DEC SRL and WRL are long gone. HP Labs is moribund. IBM Almaden is dying. Bell Labs is half dead. Microsoft and Google have R&D operations in computer science, but those are very product-focused. Sony bailed out of AI along with dropping the Aibo. DoD has cut back on general computer science funding. There's maybe a dozen good university groups, all small. Where's this "singularity" going to come from? Bangalore? Shenzhen? Myspace?
Here's the real link to the research. As usual, Roland the Plogger is posting a story from a blog, maximizing ad revenue, and the actual reference has been lost. One would think that Slashdot's "editors" would be wise to this by now, but they still don't get it.
It;s only a prototype; the water stream that comes out is more like a garden hose than a fire hose.
The whole concept of recognizing known viruses was fundamentally flawed. It had a good run, but that was because virus writers were mostly trying to get attention, not steal. Now that viruses are an ongoing criminal enterprise, the old dumb tactics won't work.
We're going to have to give up on recognition and put more effort into partitioning. We need setups where each web page renders in its own jail, and it doesn't matter if the browser is insecure - when the page closes, a program exits and any corrupted info goes away.
Of course, this will break Active-X, toolbars, downloads, etc. Then again, on business systems, you want those things broken.
Once the browser is locked down like that, you need a "guard" program. When you want to move a file out of a browser's jail, it has to go through a program that "sanitizes" it. Often, a translation to a well-documented format that doesn't contain execution capability will do the job. Converting incoming .doc files to Open Document XML format, for example.
It's quite possible to completely solve this problem.
This is about try #4 for this concept. In the 1980s, there was "Silent Radio", which drove LED signs with text messages. These used to show up in bars and restaurants, so you could watch the news and sports scores scroll by. Then there was sending song info on FM subcarriers of broadcast stations, which many car radios understand. XM satellite radio has a fancier system for doing the same thing, as does the on-band-in-channel digital broadcast system.
The main feature of this new system seems to be ads. Yawn.
I just saw two movie trailers which gave the web site for the movie as "myspace.com/moviename". You used to see "AOL keyword: moviename", then "www.moviename.com". Now it's Myspace. Interesting trend.
SGI doesn't have any valuable rights in OpenGL. The specification is a public document. The reference implementation is open source. You can't copyright an API (SCO and Microsoft have both tried and failed). There's a charge to use the OpenGL trademark in a closed-source implementation, and that's it.
SGI's higher level APIs, like Inventor and Performer, have little if any resale value.
Yes, Myspace has an ecosystem. They have adware. They have spyware. They have spam. They have Zango. They have affiliates. It's like AOL gone bad.
Yes, the stock dropped. Around July 1, somebody dumped almost a million shares of SCOX all at once, and the price dropped from around $4 to into the $2-$3 range and has been there since. $2.51 right now. For the last two years, the stock has been hovering around $4, so this is a big change.
At the height of the lawsuit hype, it hit $20, but that was back in 3Q 2003. Back in the glory days of the dot-com boom, it reached $100.
The Olympics was an Australian case. Target was not "successfully sued"; that's still pending. Southwest Airlines won a case over that issue, Access Now vs. Southwest.; their "virtual ticket counter" does not have to be handicapped-accessable. Access Now appealed, and the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected the appeal. That's the only final US court decision on the subject to date.
As the court put it, it's up to Congress to change the ADA if Congress wants it to apply to the Internet.
Please link to the actual site, not the blog. We don't need to read all the blogodreck and ads.
With Google's "Accessable search", sites will be able to tell from their weblogs how many visitors are coming in via the "accessable search" route. So it will be possible to figure out the financial benefit of web accessability. If it turns out to be low, even for pages that Google thinks are "accessable", there's a business case for not bothering with "accessability".
OK, let's see it go to Tahoe. Start at Sacramento, and make that long climb up I-80 at Donner Pass. That's 100 miles, but it's mostly uphill. It's easy to get range on the flat.
The big mistakes in CSS were 1) absolute positioning, and 2) the ability to put stuff on top of other stuff. You've all seen pages where the text ran off the left side of the page, or with text on top of other content. We didn't have those problems with HTML tables.
I laugh when I see CSS nuts struggling to make three equal columns. That's what tables are for. The concept that every page should have a Javascript formatting engine is silly.
Remember, CSS fans, that your page might not be viewed the way you planned. It might be viewed through a language translator, like Google's. Or reformatted for a cell phone. With tables, it will probably still look right after translation; with CSS absolute positioning, it will probably look like crap.
Sony needs to get the PS3 down to $299 for the base system before the Xmas shopping season, or it's not going to happen.
For what the PS3 currently is proposed to cost, you can get the kid a PS2, a cell phone, a TV, a DVD player, a Game Boy, and some games and DVDs.