How about a shirt with a USB port & flash memory so you could put all kinds of crazy pics on your shirt. Or possibly some sort of scripting language for ever-changing fractals.
Considering the typical first uses of a new technology, I actually forsee people walking around with short porn videos looping on their shirts.
I don't know if using the Enron e-mails as his test material is such a good idea. Corporate malfeasance is probably not conducted the same way that every other criminal (or terrorist) network runs. At least their communication might be different due not to a "lack of guilt" but due to the fact that it's probably so easy to make a naughty memo sound like an innocent one without being obvious. After all these memos would be mixed in with a lot of legitimate company business the conspirators are also conducting.
How does automated analysis separate a memo saying "I think we should go ahead and promote Price out of the mailroom" - which means "Have Price-Waterhouse cook those spreadsheets I sent you", from one which just leads to some dude getting promoted out of the mailroom? Of course if they are not bothering to use code words then the system might work very well.
A related trick, he says, is to examine patterns in who e-mails whom. As an example, in criminal networks it is common to find several people communicating regularly with the same person, but never with each other. This is meant to ensure that if one lawbreaker is caught, he or she is unlikely to lead authorities to too many others. But it can also be a clue to suspicious activity.
Traffic analysis is probably more promising, since you can reconstruct relationships between players with it. The traffic pattern could look like a terrorist cell, or it could look like a bunch of guys who know each other - as he says, there's a difference. But this is old news, though automating it would make snoops' lives easier.
At any rate I find this line of inquiry disturbing for civil rights reasons, but I don't believe we should attack the researcher for working on it. Academic freedom is a very useful concept and ultimately does us more good than harm, IMO.
This was an undergraduate ornithology project that was supposed to take six weeks, according to my advisor. Every professor I've told about it since then has said, that's graduate level at least...
No, if it was a graduate-level project it would be planned to take two years, and end up taking three and a half, with many of the originally planned techniques being utterly unaffordable and instead substituted for some experiment where the student has to stay up all night taking data every ten minutes, only to have their advisor explain that the results "don't really fit his model" and should be disregarded.
I was eating breakfast. Mea culpa, my reading comprehension wasn't at its daily peak:O
That said, I have little confidence that even six years ago the secret police would have sent her on her way with "Have a nice day Ms. Foreign Journalist, Allah willing". Horrible people did horrible things to her - they didn't just hire those guys fresh out of Sicko College three years ago.
Um right. Your non-fundamentalist state raped and tortured a Canadian journalist to death * not too long ago, just for taking pictures. I don't support the US neo-cons one bit, but the Iranian system is far from "free".
* I'm not sure who disgusted me more, the Iranian gov't barbarians or my own pussy government for not expelling their ambassador and converting their embassy into a roller rink.
Like most advances in biotechnology, "any idiot" has no hope of using the technique (whatever the hell it actually is). Heck, half the molecular biologists out there will be incapable of using it properly if it's anything like other research tools.
And one more thing... this is all expensive. Very, very expensive. Even a basic (and I mean BASIC, as in you could maybe do three experiments) molecular bio lab starts at many tens of thousands of dollars. That's with teaching grade supplies and equipment, not real research quality stuff. Nobody's making the next plague in their basement even with this technique (whatever the hell it actually is).
I guess I just meant that right now, most people don't even know their IP #s at all:) And once your toaster has one too... IP # is just a device address on the network, not a personal identifier. If you want a unique personal identifier for use on the internet, IP # is a poor choice.
Anyway, once the government forces ISP's to keep all their records forever and secretly surrender them to law enforcement without a warrant, they'll be able to match any subscriber with a specific dynamic IP at a certain date & time, for whatever nefarious purposes they see fit.
Your IP address is not your "digits", in fact most of us get a new one every time we connect ot the network. Also, many of us have several. You're thinking about e-mail addresses, and if you think ECHELON or one of its successors aren't "reading" every e-mail you send right now, you aren't paranoid enough. Of course it's for "national security reasons" and thus has no civilian oversight.
Hey, my PC runs on tubes, heck it even has 256 MB RAM in magnetic memory cores. I keep it in an abandoned shopping centre near my house. The RAM fills up the old Sears store, the processor is... pretty much everywhere else. Alas, bus latency becomes a real problem with that much wiring, so I can only run Counter Strike 1, not Source.
Buffy - "I really thought that you were a nice, normal guy." Riley - "I am a nice, normal guy." Buffy - "Maybe by this town's standards, but I'm not grading on a curve." - Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Like Buffy's love life, movie reviews should be on an absolute scale, not comparing a film to previous films of the same series. Because, quite frankly, I'm sure ROTS is f**king brilliant compared to the previous two. That doesn't make it a good movie, it makes it "less sucky".
And finally, there is the "you get what you pay for" comment. Most open soruce apps are done for free. As such, Joe EndUser has no right to be "included" in the process.
Fair enough, but coding with "Joe" (disclaimer: I am Joe) in mind is what could make the difference between your project languishing on sourceforge with only three users (two of whom could have written it themselves), or being the next big thing in OSS. So you're really only restricting yourself if you take this attitude. Of course, I recognize that as a FOSS coder your time is not being compensated, so "Joe" does NOT have the right to expect that you'll drop everything to code/update that nice UI.
Haha, if there are, I say... "suckers!". Anyone tugging it to grainy voyeur-cam pics of my out-of-shape ass is even more pathetic than I am, and really needs to get out more.
What kind of red tape am I gonna have to go thru now to get the proper media of my woman to use when she goes on that long business trip?!?!?
Try this: Use a Polaroid camera, NOT digital. Physical photo prints are easier to keep under control. And she gets to take photos of YOU and keep those (she might enjoy that anyway). That might warm her to the idea. If you go all psycho later and start to mess with her, she can post your photos on gay sex websites, under the pseudonym "HairyBearseeker23". And of course with all photos of this type, you'd both have to be careful not to lose or misplace them.
This sort of thing can be a lot of fun for couples but you have to exercise some common sense and data security, and trust each other not to abuse the images.
I'd also need a red leather Michael Jackson jacket and pants, and a dorky matching hat. Plus, I only wear halloween costumes from GOOD motion pictures;D
30 indeed... I was stunned recently to learn that people younger than us have never HEARD of the "V" miniseries!
Hell, I finally read "V for Vendetta" recently, and was thinking of dressing as V this year because I thought people might actually get it! Plus it's a cool ass costume, love that mask.
Life is supposed to look normal, well trimmed, green and conforming.
While this vision of life makes me want to vomit pea soup on priests, nonconformity is not a virtue in and of itself. I would not live in a community that said I couldn't paint my house black, or red, or some other traditional house colour (bland-as-f*ck pastels seem to be popular now), or that I couldn't have a basketball net in my driveway. However, doing something like this is clearly making the house look like shit (random sheet metal is attractive in almost NOBODY'S aesthetic), and consequently makes the neighbourhood look a little like ass. You can argue that a red house with a hoop in the driveway is "enjoyment of your own property". You can't say that piling sheet metal randomly against the fence and your roof is the same at all.
Not to mention it's absolutely insane. Nobody's beaming microwaves into this family's house to try and kill them. If they had any proof of it whatsoever, they could call the cops. But they don't, because it's some off-the-deep-end schizo-hippie fantasy brought on by god knows what combination of mental illness, gullibility and moronic government bioterror warnings.
I wonder if large machinery is really the answer to renewable and enviromentally friendly power. Personally, I don't think its likely.
What are we supposed to use, magic? Virtually everything modern humans do is based on machinery, often large machinery. You want solar power? Big arrays, manufactured in large factories. Some resource consumption and pollution is inevitable in implementing ANY "green" power scheme. It's just a matter of determining if you're reducing the overall environmental effects or not. Alternately, we all go back to living in teepees.
The "blimps" in BR weren't supposed to be in orbit, they were just flying through the city. That's why you could hear the "Let's go to the colonies!" spiel coming from them. They looked pretty heavy, maybe they were supposed to be anti-grav instead of just lighter-than-air craft.
I am familiar with this famous article, so I was surprised when I recently noticed Vlasic pickles for sale at my local grocery store here in Ontario. Before there were only Strub's and Bick's (I think). So the company clearly still exists, but in what form?
I'm no RIAA fan but part of the reason we have laws at all is to protect us FROM "reality". Reality is that a strong man can force his will upon a weaker one, a clever man can embezzle just about anything, and a smooth talking man can walk away with your life savings. Laws prevent or at least punish these activities.
I guess my point is that proper, productive copyright law would protect us FROM "reality" by ensuring that artistic expression was not instantly pillaged and that artists could make a living from their works, for a temporary period, after which the work became freely available to all. I.E., the bare minimum required to allow the artists who enrich our lives to pay the rent through their art instead of giving up to work in a factory.
Fruit-of-the-Loom wants you to buy new underwear, so, they turn off the authentication for your year old undies. Now, your washing machine will not run with these undies present.
A true hacker would take a brute force approach and wash his or her undies by hand.
I only have two data points - a friend and I have ordered various items from them - but I didn't detect anything unsavory, fraudulent, or even vaguely shitty about TigerDirect. Delivery seemed fairly prompt, and the items worked and were as advertised. So what do the rest of you know that I don't?
Note: I ordered from the Canadian side of the business.
Slashdot Mirror
What about people like me, your parent poster, who have Hypoglycemia? I'm lucky if my bloodsugar stays above 60mg/dl the whole day!
"Yeah, maybe I will order dessert. I can barely read my watch today."
How about a shirt with a USB port & flash memory so you could put all kinds of crazy pics on your shirt. Or possibly some sort of scripting language for ever-changing fractals.
Considering the typical first uses of a new technology, I actually forsee people walking around with short porn videos looping on their shirts.
Ah, my alma mater Queen's makes it onto Slashdot!
I don't know if using the Enron e-mails as his test material is such a good idea. Corporate malfeasance is probably not conducted the same way that every other criminal (or terrorist) network runs. At least their communication might be different due not to a "lack of guilt" but due to the fact that it's probably so easy to make a naughty memo sound like an innocent one without being obvious. After all these memos would be mixed in with a lot of legitimate company business the conspirators are also conducting.
How does automated analysis separate a memo saying "I think we should go ahead and promote Price out of the mailroom" - which means "Have Price-Waterhouse cook those spreadsheets I sent you", from one which just leads to some dude getting promoted out of the mailroom? Of course if they are not bothering to use code words then the system might work very well.
A related trick, he says, is to examine patterns in who e-mails whom. As an example, in criminal networks it is common to find several people communicating regularly with the same person, but never with each other. This is meant to ensure that if one lawbreaker is caught, he or she is unlikely to lead authorities to too many others. But it can also be a clue to suspicious activity.
Traffic analysis is probably more promising, since you can reconstruct relationships between players with it. The traffic pattern could look like a terrorist cell, or it could look like a bunch of guys who know each other - as he says, there's a difference. But this is old news, though automating it would make snoops' lives easier.
At any rate I find this line of inquiry disturbing for civil rights reasons, but I don't believe we should attack the researcher for working on it. Academic freedom is a very useful concept and ultimately does us more good than harm, IMO.
This was an undergraduate ornithology project that was supposed to take six weeks, according to my advisor. Every professor I've told about it since then has said, that's graduate level at least...
No, if it was a graduate-level project it would be planned to take two years, and end up taking three and a half, with many of the originally planned techniques being utterly unaffordable and instead substituted for some experiment where the student has to stay up all night taking data every ten minutes, only to have their advisor explain that the results "don't really fit his model" and should be disregarded.
I was eating breakfast. Mea culpa, my reading comprehension wasn't at its daily peak :O
That said, I have little confidence that even six years ago the secret police would have sent her on her way with "Have a nice day Ms. Foreign Journalist, Allah willing". Horrible people did horrible things to her - they didn't just hire those guys fresh out of Sicko College three years ago.
Um right. Your non-fundamentalist state raped and tortured a Canadian journalist to death * not too long ago, just for taking pictures. I don't support the US neo-cons one bit, but the Iranian system is far from "free".
* I'm not sure who disgusted me more, the Iranian gov't barbarians or my own pussy government for not expelling their ambassador and converting their embassy into a roller rink.
Like most advances in biotechnology, "any idiot" has no hope of using the technique (whatever the hell it actually is). Heck, half the molecular biologists out there will be incapable of using it properly if it's anything like other research tools.
And one more thing... this is all expensive. Very, very expensive. Even a basic (and I mean BASIC, as in you could maybe do three experiments) molecular bio lab starts at many tens of thousands of dollars. That's with teaching grade supplies and equipment, not real research quality stuff. Nobody's making the next plague in their basement even with this technique (whatever the hell it actually is).
I guess I just meant that right now, most people don't even know their IP #s at all :) And once your toaster has one too... IP # is just a device address on the network, not a personal identifier. If you want a unique personal identifier for use on the internet, IP # is a poor choice.
Anyway, once the government forces ISP's to keep all their records forever and secretly surrender them to law enforcement without a warrant, they'll be able to match any subscriber with a specific dynamic IP at a certain date & time, for whatever nefarious purposes they see fit.
Your IP address is not your "digits", in fact most of us get a new one every time we connect ot the network. Also, many of us have several. You're thinking about e-mail addresses, and if you think ECHELON or one of its successors aren't "reading" every e-mail you send right now, you aren't paranoid enough. Of course it's for "national security reasons" and thus has no civilian oversight.
Hey, my PC runs on tubes, heck it even has 256 MB RAM in magnetic memory cores. I keep it in an abandoned shopping centre near my house. The RAM fills up the old Sears store, the processor is... pretty much everywhere else. Alas, bus latency becomes a real problem with that much wiring, so I can only run Counter Strike 1, not Source.
Natalie Portman was involved in a "no-pants continuity error"? I'm surprised this wasn't on the front page as its own article.
Buffy - "I really thought that you were a nice, normal guy."
Riley - "I am a nice, normal guy."
Buffy - "Maybe by this town's standards, but I'm not grading on a curve."
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Like Buffy's love life, movie reviews should be on an absolute scale, not comparing a film to previous films of the same series. Because, quite frankly, I'm sure ROTS is f**king brilliant compared to the previous two. That doesn't make it a good movie, it makes it "less sucky".
And finally, there is the "you get what you pay for" comment. Most open soruce apps are done for free. As such, Joe EndUser has no right to be "included" in the process.
Fair enough, but coding with "Joe" (disclaimer: I am Joe) in mind is what could make the difference between your project languishing on sourceforge with only three users (two of whom could have written it themselves), or being the next big thing in OSS. So you're really only restricting yourself if you take this attitude. Of course, I recognize that as a FOSS coder your time is not being compensated, so "Joe" does NOT have the right to expect that you'll drop everything to code/update that nice UI.
Haha, if there are, I say... "suckers!". Anyone tugging it to grainy voyeur-cam pics of my out-of-shape ass is even more pathetic than I am, and really needs to get out more.
What kind of red tape am I gonna have to go thru now to get the proper media of my woman to use when she goes on that long business trip?!?!?
Try this: Use a Polaroid camera, NOT digital. Physical photo prints are easier to keep under control. And she gets to take photos of YOU and keep those (she might enjoy that anyway). That might warm her to the idea. If you go all psycho later and start to mess with her, she can post your photos on gay sex websites, under the pseudonym "HairyBearseeker23". And of course with all photos of this type, you'd both have to be careful not to lose or misplace them.
This sort of thing can be a lot of fun for couples but you have to exercise some common sense and data security, and trust each other not to abuse the images.
I'd also need a red leather Michael Jackson jacket and pants, and a dorky matching hat. Plus, I only wear halloween costumes from GOOD motion pictures ;D
30 indeed... I was stunned recently to learn that people younger than us have never HEARD of the "V" miniseries!
Hell, I finally read "V for Vendetta" recently, and was thinking of dressing as V this year because I thought people might actually get it! Plus it's a cool ass costume, love that mask.
Plus, sometimes I think we need V, NOW.
Life is supposed to look normal, well trimmed, green and conforming.
While this vision of life makes me want to vomit pea soup on priests, nonconformity is not a virtue in and of itself. I would not live in a community that said I couldn't paint my house black, or red, or some other traditional house colour (bland-as-f*ck pastels seem to be popular now), or that I couldn't have a basketball net in my driveway. However, doing something like this is clearly making the house look like shit (random sheet metal is attractive in almost NOBODY'S aesthetic), and consequently makes the neighbourhood look a little like ass. You can argue that a red house with a hoop in the driveway is "enjoyment of your own property". You can't say that piling sheet metal randomly against the fence and your roof is the same at all.
Not to mention it's absolutely insane. Nobody's beaming microwaves into this family's house to try and kill them. If they had any proof of it whatsoever, they could call the cops. But they don't, because it's some off-the-deep-end schizo-hippie fantasy brought on by god knows what combination of mental illness, gullibility and moronic government bioterror warnings.
I wonder if large machinery is really the answer to renewable and enviromentally friendly power. Personally, I don't think its likely.
What are we supposed to use, magic? Virtually everything modern humans do is based on machinery, often large machinery. You want solar power? Big arrays, manufactured in large factories. Some resource consumption and pollution is inevitable in implementing ANY "green" power scheme. It's just a matter of determining if you're reducing the overall environmental effects or not. Alternately, we all go back to living in teepees.
The "blimps" in BR weren't supposed to be in orbit, they were just flying through the city. That's why you could hear the "Let's go to the colonies!" spiel coming from them. They looked pretty heavy, maybe they were supposed to be anti-grav instead of just lighter-than-air craft.
I am familiar with this famous article, so I was surprised when I recently noticed Vlasic pickles for sale at my local grocery store here in Ontario. Before there were only Strub's and Bick's (I think). So the company clearly still exists, but in what form?
Google for "pistol cat".
I'm no RIAA fan but part of the reason we have laws at all is to protect us FROM "reality". Reality is that a strong man can force his will upon a weaker one, a clever man can embezzle just about anything, and a smooth talking man can walk away with your life savings. Laws prevent or at least punish these activities.
I guess my point is that proper, productive copyright law would protect us FROM "reality" by ensuring that artistic expression was not instantly pillaged and that artists could make a living from their works, for a temporary period, after which the work became freely available to all. I.E., the bare minimum required to allow the artists who enrich our lives to pay the rent through their art instead of giving up to work in a factory.
Fruit-of-the-Loom wants you to buy new underwear, so, they turn off the authentication for your year old undies. Now, your washing machine will not run with these undies present.
A true hacker would take a brute force approach and wash his or her undies by hand.
I only have two data points - a friend and I have ordered various items from them - but I didn't detect anything unsavory, fraudulent, or even vaguely shitty about TigerDirect. Delivery seemed fairly prompt, and the items worked and were as advertised. So what do the rest of you know that I don't?
Note: I ordered from the Canadian side of the business.