What bugs me about advertising is that other people seem to pay attention to ads that just convince me not to buy from various companies. I mean, companies wouldn't spend huge amounts of money on advertising if they didn't think it worked, right?
So it's not the advertisers that bug me, they're just doing what sells. What bugs me is the majority of the general populace who fall for the current generation of marketing/advertising bulldada and run out and buy a new SUV...
If people would hold out for products advertized with witty, fun, intelligent advertising, it would be a joy to watch the ads. But as long as people
really do "ask their doctor if the new chartruse pill is right for them", we're going to have annoying stupid ads..
The League of Women Voters runs Democracy Net
which will give you information on all of your races from president on down. They have statements they collect from the candidates where they summarize their stated position on the issues.
Now of course, you have to consider whether you believe what the candidates have to say about the issues, but that's another topic:-)
But that description is remarkably similar to the definition of the nondeterministic turing machine which is basis of the NP set of problems -- it isn't that it tries every permutation in parallel, it's that it *could* do every permutation, and the right permutation takes polynomial time.
So the concern is that a quantum computer is equivalent to the nondeterministic turing machine, as a current boolean-state computer is equivalent to a deterministic turing machine, at which point
the NP problems take polynomial time on such a computer.
is if you can compute a short block (approx the size of the MD5 hash) which you can append to a file and make the resulting file have a given MD5 hash. Then you can take any arbitrary tarfile, add a chunk on the end, and the resulting tarfile will have the "right" MD5 sum, but still unpack the large wooden horse complete with hidden gate-opener code.
So I take items A and B off of their respective shelves, ground my shopping basket (faraday cage),
swap the ids, put the B item on A's shelf, and buy
A for B's price, etc.
I'm agreed it gets harder, but the auto-shelf-inventory will make the store more complacent over time, and they will take much longer to notice this kind of swap. And as I mentioned in
another thread, people may be doing this so that it won't be recorded that they bought embarrasing items (i.e. condoms, pregnancy tests, etc), rather than just for the percieved cost difference of the items.
It means that someone standing at the door to the store can get an inventory of what you bought,
without your knowledge, as you walk by.
If you need help with why that's an invasion of your
privacy which has been enabled by the store's RFID policy, we can discuss ramifications at length.
But just consider:
your kid sister has just bought
a pregnancy test with cash, someone scans the RFID as she leaves the drugstore and uses the info to blackmail her...
Partisan electoral official scans people's bags who are leaving local bookstores, and "accidently" deletes people who bought a certain book from the voter registration roles.
The thing is, UPC barcodes are hackable too. You can print a couple of barcodes on sticky labels on any old printer, and stick new barcodes on the item, and I expect most stores wouldn't really notice. In fact, Slippery Jim DiGriz was doing that in the Stainless Steel Rat books quite a few years ago (Okay, so he was messing with the barcodes with a good old pen, by hand, but you get the idea).
What is cool about the RFID stuff is that I bet with the right antenna, you could do the reprogramming from the parking lot, and do a whole shelf full (store full?) at once. Suddenly, everything in the store is a 50 cent pack of Wrigley's...
If you remap every item in the store, everything
everyone buys on that day will be wrong. Narrowing it down to the Black Hat who did it is hard.
If you swap ID's between components, the inventory (which they also take with RFID's, of course) comes out right, and the problem shows up when
a pack of gum has the RFID of a $50 item...
Brings to mind my favorite old college trick of
tacking a compressed, encrypted copy of Nethack onto the end of a 1 block "a.out" file which promptly dumped core if you ran it...
That successfully let me hide the game copy for quite some time:-).
... for the big problem we have now. Because everyone is used to looking only for pre-existing patents, not pre-exisiting implementations
Given that, if you go for N years asserting that software is not patentable, so no-one patents software, and
then you allow software patents -- since nothing
in the field is yet patented, everything looks novel (at least compared to existing patents, which seems to be the only thing the patent office actually looks at).
What you needed to have done to make that transition smooth is to
have a comprehensive review of the research literature and past computer related businesses, and
pre-issue patents (possibly already expired) to the people who have already invented novel bits of computing
My big complication is that I'm lysdexic -- er -- dyslexic, and the odds of me getting N numbers
entered correctly in a tax form the first time are vanishingly small.
So since I usually end up basically doing everything 3 or 4 times over, the tax software saves me a lot of hassle.
Every year I end up having to boot MSWindows in order to run Tax software. It's pretty much the only time I boot MSWindows anymore, and I end up doing a lot of work to keep that environment around and running just for that one, annual, task.
And it's not just me, we have had
several
articles here at Slashdot
discussing this topic at great length.
Are you guys working on a deal with any of the tax software publishers to ensure their software runs under Wine each year?
Actually, I thought it was a really cool concept -- that there could be a verbal, low-level, "machine language" for people; and that someone in history figured out how to write a security module in it so people couldn't just arbitrarily be ordered around anymore.
I mean, come on, it's fiction! It's at least as believable as Elven magic...
Police ruled out a possible prankster or pyromaniac after they saw wires burst into flames.
You know, I bet that if you soaked plastic-insulated wires in liquid oxygen for a few minutes, then left the room, the next person to turn on the item in question would get an effect very much like that...
If you read This reference
under "Combustibility", it says:
In the presence of an appreciable oxygen concentration, a spark on certain materials may cause them to burst into flame, whereas in air, fire would not result. (For this reason, liquid oxygen should never be stored or used in small closed compartments, rooms or excavations without added ventilation. Well ventilated storage and working space should be provided.) Materials that should be of special concern in this respect are wood, plastic, powdered metals, combustible rags and clothing.
Now when you consider that dunking a wire and plastic in liquid oxygen is also likely to cause lots of heat-stress fractures in both the now-brittle plastic and the metal...
Geez, I thought everyone knew that
since the Government is using Alien technology, you need to use the same multi-layer Velostat hat that
you use to stop alien abductions
Based on what? Why would it cost $45 for those six channels?
Let's face it, most of the cable channels are now making most of their money on advertising, just like broadcast media do. And that income is already based (roughly) on viewership.
And the big "premium" channels, which aren't largely advertising-income-based, are already purchased separately, 'cause they charge by the viewer, 'cause that's how they pay for their content (i.e. movies).
So moving all of their income to a viewership-based model will actually be a minor
change for them.
No, what it means is the cable companies will have to stop using the addition of channels you don't want as an excuse to charge you more money. Plain and simple.
It's too darn bad that McCain didn't get the Republican nomination a few years back; he's one of the few Republicans I would actually vote for.
Seriously. When I was in college I took a Sociology class; they talked about roles and expectations of roles, etc. Lots of things that had always mystified me about people suddenly made a whole lot more sense -- it gave me an abstraction with which to understand behavior that worked.
Once you get those basics down, you can start discussing with someone what role the other person puts you in, what expectations they have of someone in a given role.
For example, teachers generally expect students to be one of 3 or 4 roles -- "good student", "troublemaker", "sleeper", "low esteem", etc.
So what do they associate with those roles, and are you giving them the right association by what you wear, how you behave, etc.
Similarly, potential dates have expectations of what a boyfriend/girlfriend should be like.
If you behave according to their roles, you get along, if not, you don't.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's not the advertisers that bug me, they're just doing what sells. What bugs me is the majority of the general populace who fall for the current generation of marketing/advertising bulldada and run out and buy a new SUV...
If people would hold out for products advertized with witty, fun, intelligent advertising, it would be a joy to watch the ads. But as long as people really do "ask their doctor if the new chartruse pill is right for them", we're going to have annoying stupid ads..
Now of course, you have to consider whether you believe what the candidates have to say about the issues, but that's another topic :-)
Actually, with recent BIOS-es, you can boot off of a USB key...
So the concern is that a quantum computer is equivalent to the nondeterministic turing machine, as a current boolean-state computer is equivalent to a deterministic turing machine, at which point the NP problems take polynomial time on such a computer.
I was going to say "Does it run Linux Yet?", but of course, NetHack is the real priority :-).
bad
is if you can compute a short block (approx the size of the MD5 hash) which you can append to a file and make the resulting file have a given MD5 hash. Then you can take any arbitrary tarfile, add a chunk on the end, and the resulting tarfile will have the "right" MD5 sum, but still unpack the large wooden horse complete with hidden gate-opener code.I'm agreed it gets harder, but the auto-shelf-inventory will make the store more complacent over time, and they will take much longer to notice this kind of swap. And as I mentioned in another thread, people may be doing this so that it won't be recorded that they bought embarrasing items (i.e. condoms, pregnancy tests, etc), rather than just for the percieved cost difference of the items.
If you need help with why that's an invasion of your privacy which has been enabled by the store's RFID policy, we can discuss ramifications at length.
But just consider:
You have a guy who checks the receipts against the bag?!? I've only ever seen that at Sam's Club.
Hmm.. Do you actually have to hear the reply? Wouldn't you know what the responses are going to be already?
What is cool about the RFID stuff is that I bet with the right antenna, you could do the reprogramming from the parking lot, and do a whole shelf full (store full?) at once. Suddenly, everything in the store is a 50 cent pack of Wrigley's...
If you remap every item in the store, everything everyone buys on that day will be wrong. Narrowing it down to the Black Hat who did it is hard.
If you swap ID's between components, the inventory (which they also take with RFID's, of course) comes out right, and the problem shows up when a pack of gum has the RFID of a $50 item...
Brings to mind my favorite old college trick of tacking a compressed, encrypted copy of Nethack onto the end of a 1 block "a.out" file which promptly dumped core if you ran it...
That successfully let me hide the game copy for quite some time :-).
I'm not looking to sign up neccesarily, just curious... :-)
Given that, if you go for N years asserting that software is not patentable, so no-one patents software, and then you allow software patents -- since nothing in the field is yet patented, everything looks novel (at least compared to existing patents, which seems to be the only thing the patent office actually looks at).
What you needed to have done to make that transition smooth is to
Then you add the fingerprint-noise for a random Senator on the appropriate commitee, and post.
Repeat.
Six months later, the RIAA sues all the Senators on the House Appropriations Committee.
One week later, the law is changed.
- Really Big
- Way Back in Time
Of course, that last one is the hard partSo since I usually end up basically doing everything 3 or 4 times over, the tax software saves me a lot of hassle.
lysdexics of the world untie and lure!
Are you guys working on a deal with any of the tax software publishers to ensure their software runs under Wine each year?
If not, would you consider it?
I mean, come on, it's fiction! It's at least as believable as Elven magic...
If you read This reference under "Combustibility", it says:
Now when you consider that dunking a wire and plastic in liquid oxygen is also likely to cause lots of heat-stress fractures in both the now-brittle plastic and the metal...Whoosh!
There's a place in Yellow Springs, Ohio, called Ha Ha's Whole Wheat Pizza which used to answer the phone "Hello Ha Ha"...
Let's face it, most of the cable channels are now making most of their money on advertising, just like broadcast media do. And that income is already based (roughly) on viewership.
And the big "premium" channels, which aren't largely advertising-income-based, are already purchased separately, 'cause they charge by the viewer, 'cause that's how they pay for their content (i.e. movies).
So moving all of their income to a viewership-based model will actually be a minor change for them.
No, what it means is the cable companies will have to stop using the addition of channels you don't want as an excuse to charge you more money. Plain and simple.
It's too darn bad that McCain didn't get the Republican nomination a few years back; he's one of the few Republicans I would actually vote for.
Once you get those basics down, you can start discussing with someone what role the other person puts you in, what expectations they have of someone in a given role.
For example, teachers generally expect students to be one of 3 or 4 roles -- "good student", "troublemaker", "sleeper", "low esteem", etc. So what do they associate with those roles, and are you giving them the right association by what you wear, how you behave, etc.
Similarly, potential dates have expectations of what a boyfriend/girlfriend should be like. If you behave according to their roles, you get along, if not, you don't.