Re:Some more info & a description of the video
on
Smart Flying Robots
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· Score: 1
I was at Georgia Tech back around 1990 and knew someone who worked on their helicopter. At the time they were still trying to solve the flight stability problems. I believe they were working on a gyro system that could hold the machine in a level hover. That was the big challenge then. Of course, that was when I had EE profs tell me that they doubted CPUs could run much over 40 MHz because of all the cross-talk and RF interference.
I saw this contest about 2 or 3 years ago on some tv show. Some high school kids almost made it. If I remember correctly, they had a blimp and they managed to pick up a disk but couldn't get the mechanism to drop it. (Actually, I think the high school kids didn't have to be autonomous).
We used to do the booby-traps too. A couple business cards, rubber bands, and tape and you can rig up something to launch confetti from a drawer or overhead bin.
Steve Jackson Games sells rules for the old Assassin or Killer game. They have some good ideas and links to Nerf weaponry.
Well there's SkyGuard 200, a GPS-based solution from BI. Maybe Mitnick could have a new career if he can find a way to apply that sort of technology to this problem.
...this ballot wasn't arranged like the ballots he's used in the previous sixteen elections.
But, if you've been watching the reports carefully, this ballot is arranged like the ballot he used 4 years ago (and probably 8, 12, and 16 years ago). Palm Beach reportedly used the same ballot format for years.
Heck, why doesn't Buchanan sue because he was listed on the second page?
My favorite part of this was watching Brokaw eat it twice and have to "uncall" Florida.
I didn't see it in the comments, so here's the direct link to the F lorida election results from their Department of State.
It's currently slash-nationed, I think, but it worked earlier this morning and it's what the trigger-happy media outlets were quoting as their official source at times.
I notice it's an ASP page. I hope they had installed the IIS patch for the "Web Server Folder Traversal" vulnerability.
I was practically forced into the freelance work-from-home world (joining my work-at-home wife). Now I spend about 1/3 of my 9-5 workday with my wife or daughter and still get more done than I ever did in the office. Plus I rack up the rest of 50-60 hours a week after hours and on the weekends when I'm not on the phone every 15 minutes. I actually get to spend time with my daughter. I'm not pissed off and anti-social at the end of the day.
One day I swapped the bitmaps for the 3 and 4. About a week later, he was playing it while he was on the phone. When he hung up, he freaked out. He was convinced there was a bug in Minesweeper. He even said "there's no way you guys did this one." We managed to last about 5 minutes before we were laughing our asses off.
One option I didn't think of until I saw it the other day is to use SmartMedia cards (or a Sony memory stick) with a floppy adapter. That's what Sony recommends for those floppy-based Mavica cameras. It's a bit pricey (about $60 for the floppy adapter, plus $40+ for the flash card), but you don't need anything special on the machine to deal with it. Shove the cost off on the students...
I've used compact flash cards to move things between laptops a lot and think they're perfect for this. I'm suprised they aren't more popular. The prices are coming down thanks to all the digital cameras. There's something a little Star Trek-ish about them too. You're probably about a year or two ahead of the curve in trying to adopt them now.
Good luck with students. I was in this position about 10 years ago and saw several students who lost their only copy of their thesis when their beat-up floppy finally died.
Didn't Steve Jobs solve this with the NeXT? I still have two magneto optical disks here. No drive to read them in though.
How can I tell my kids not to smoke pot or snort coke? They're gonna tell me, "how harmful can it be, just look where it got the President." Clinton, Gore or Bush are leading the war on drugs? Maybe we should just put Robert Downey Jr. or Willie Nelson in charge of it instead.
Re:Initial breakin was via email trojan
on
Microsoft Cracked
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· Score: 1
Here's my question: If a user got bit by an attachment and it opened a port on his machine, how did the cracker connect to that machine? Shouldn't they be behind a firewall? Or did someone start a new email attachment trojan that does an outbound connection instead?
How many seniors (that's your grandma and grandpa) would be on the street, dying because they don't have ANY money now to try and buy drugs.
One of Browne's big things with social security is to continue to pay for it for people older than a certain cutoff age. He says he'd fund it by selling off federally-owned property, including BLM lands, military bases, etc.
For people under the cutoff age, you get to save your own money. Social security costs you 15% of your income. Put that in a simple interest checking account and you'd probably do better than the social security system.
But eliminating the income tax doesn't mean eliminating all taxes. There are still plenty of hidden taxes that could pay for necessary programs.
And all those unnecessary programs? To quote Browne, "Gone." A lot of federal programs run well over a 50% overhead rate. The American Red Cross and Salvation Army run more like a 5-10% overhead rate. And that's our money, folks.
I've often said that the best tax reform anyone could ever pass is to get rid of automatic witholding. Make everyone have to write their tax check at the end of the year and we wouldn't stand for those taxes very long. Why do we get excited about a $1,000 refund when we're paying $20,000 in taxes?
Here's what used to be Browne's rallying cry: "Would you give up your favorite federal program if it meant never having to pay income tax again?" I would. Mine is probably the national park system. I'd give it up because then I could donate $5,000 to a trail club and still have enough money left over to take a long vacation and go hiking.
I have to agree. VMWare is one of the coolest pieces of software I run. No more quad-booting for me. And yes, I'm almost ashamed to admit, I run it under Win2000, not Linux.
My favorite features:
You can roll back changes to the virtual disk
You can suspend to disk and restore very quickly
I keep a couple VM's around with Win98 and different browser versions so I can test web sites. I have a couple disk images of clean Win98 and NT4 installs so I can test installers. And of course I have a Linux image just so I can run nessus, which I can't seem to get working under OpenBSD.
I've been on RoadRunner for almost 2 years. I don't think I've had more than 5 IP addresses in that time. About 2 months ago my RedHat 6.2 firewall was getting crashed about every other day. I could see a ton of ftp attempts getting blocked, so I assumed someone published the wrong IP for their warez/mp3z server. I thought I would try to change my IP. The only way I could do it was to swap out the ethernet card and get a new MAC address. I suppose I could have left it shut down for a day or two, but didn't have the time.
Then I moved to OpenBSD and haven't had a crash since. Well, that's not exactly true. I did have one, but once I taped over the power button on that machine, my 1-year old can't pull that trick again.
There is no way I would run my Win2000 or NT4 Server boxes without a firewall. I've got a two-page list of what I need to do to attempt to secure an NT4 or Win2000 web server.
I've never worked anywhere where someone was paid extra to carry a support pager. It was part of their (and my) job description, even if it got added to it against our will.
That said, I've seen plenty of ways people do a good job of getting out of "pager duty."
The best is if you can get a rotating pager. Chances are good that people will forget to turn over the pager on time. Then you can "forget" the pager and leave it at work for at least a day. You can also swap in a dead battery and blame the previous person.
But my all-time favorite is when they finally got ahold of my tech lead one weekend with some pseudo-urgent problem. He said "well, I'm too drunk to come in, so deal with it yourself."
Exactly. I recently had a phone conversation with an HR drone. She was trying to talk me into one of their positions. I told her how much money I wanted. It was about $20k more than they were listing the position. She told me that she thought I was being unrealistic. I told her "that's why that position is still open" and hung up.
Another job I know of was listed for at least 6 months, 3 of those after the "application deadline". I know of two well-qualified people that applied for it. So why didn't it get filled? The company wouldn't make a decision and eventually decided not to fill the position due to a money crunch.
In my opinion, that's the labor shortage in a nutshell. Every open position I see has a story behind why it's still open. It isn't because there aren't people out there looking for work. It's because the job is underpaid, they aren't really hiring, nobody can make a decision about hiring, etc. I've seen plenty of jobs listed where it's obvious that the someone priced the position using 1997's salary chart.
It's funny to think back to middle and high school. I had a knife held to my throat by another kid once in 7th grade (he was "just joking around"). As far as I know, he didn't play any role-playing or computer games.
I saw a number of brutal fights in high school, including one between a guy and a girl where he knocked her knife across the cafeteria and started ripping her hair out. From what I knew of those two, neither played any role-playing or computer games.
The year after I graduated from high school, two kids who were suspended from school paid a visit with a pair of handguns. They shot three staff members, one fatally. No mention of computer or role-playing games.
But I have seen the other side of the coin. I knew a guy in middle school who was very much into role playing games who broke into the school and trashed part of it. He was later shipped off to military school where I understand he found a perfect outlet for his f-ed up emotions.
A few years after high school, I happened to meet a friend-of-a-friend who played some role-playing games and hung out on BBSs. At dinner, he ordered a very rare steak ("put it on the grill, count to five, flip it, count to five, then bring it out"). A couple weeks later he was arrested (and I believe later convicted) for brutally murdering his former girlfriend. The funny part is, I started playing with this guy's old gaming group after that and had a great time with a group of mostly well-adjusted geeks.
There are plenty of people in this world who's brains just aren't wired right. Not all of them can be ex-marines or postal workers when they dump core. Some will use a computer. Some will play role-playing games. Some will be in wealthy families. Some will be vice presidents at large companies.
In my experience, things go much smoother with universities if there is a student organization involved. Surely you have a couple student members that could form a student organization. Heck, they could probably even get funding for it.
Another approach is to see if other local groups have a meeting space. Here locally, you could probably work out something with a ham radio club that has a nice facility of their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Just one URL: www.beaver.edu
I was at Georgia Tech back around 1990 and knew someone who worked on their helicopter. At the time they were still trying to solve the flight stability problems. I believe they were working on a gyro system that could hold the machine in a level hover. That was the big challenge then. Of course, that was when I had EE profs tell me that they doubted CPUs could run much over 40 MHz because of all the cross-talk and RF interference.
I saw this contest about 2 or 3 years ago on some tv show. Some high school kids almost made it. If I remember correctly, they had a blimp and they managed to pick up a disk but couldn't get the mechanism to drop it. (Actually, I think the high school kids didn't have to be autonomous).
Sigh. If only there were money in robotics.
We used to do the booby-traps too. A couple business cards, rubber bands, and tape and you can rig up something to launch confetti from a drawer or overhead bin.
Steve Jackson Games sells rules for the old Assassin or Killer game. They have some good ideas and links to Nerf weaponry.
Now I can fit a 1024 node Beowulf cluster in the linuxen closet.
You would think they could have stickered over the "Powered by Windows CE" logo for the screenshot.
Well there's SkyGuard 200, a GPS-based solution from BI. Maybe Mitnick could have a new career if he can find a way to apply that sort of technology to this problem.
But, if you've been watching the reports carefully, this ballot is arranged like the ballot he used 4 years ago (and probably 8, 12, and 16 years ago). Palm Beach reportedly used the same ballot format for years.
Heck, why doesn't Buchanan sue because he was listed on the second page?
My favorite part of this was watching Brokaw eat it twice and have to "uncall" Florida.
I didn't see it in the comments, so here's the direct link to the F lorida election results from their Department of State.
It's currently slash-nationed, I think, but it worked earlier this morning and it's what the trigger-happy media outlets were quoting as their official source at times.
I notice it's an ASP page. I hope they had installed the IIS patch for the "Web Server Folder Traversal" vulnerability.
I was practically forced into the freelance work-from-home world (joining my work-at-home wife). Now I spend about 1/3 of my 9-5 workday with my wife or daughter and still get more done than I ever did in the office. Plus I rack up the rest of 50-60 hours a week after hours and on the weekends when I'm not on the phone every 15 minutes. I actually get to spend time with my daughter. I'm not pissed off and anti-social at the end of the day.
Get out of the office! Get off of salary!
Oh man, this makes me want to hack up a beer keg and build one of these.
One day I swapped the bitmaps for the 3 and 4. About a week later, he was playing it while he was on the phone. When he hung up, he freaked out. He was convinced there was a bug in Minesweeper. He even said "there's no way you guys did this one." We managed to last about 5 minutes before we were laughing our asses off.
One option I didn't think of until I saw it the other day is to use SmartMedia cards (or a Sony memory stick) with a floppy adapter. That's what Sony recommends for those floppy-based Mavica cameras. It's a bit pricey (about $60 for the floppy adapter, plus $40+ for the flash card), but you don't need anything special on the machine to deal with it. Shove the cost off on the students...
I've used compact flash cards to move things between laptops a lot and think they're perfect for this. I'm suprised they aren't more popular. The prices are coming down thanks to all the digital cameras. There's something a little Star Trek-ish about them too. You're probably about a year or two ahead of the curve in trying to adopt them now.
Good luck with students. I was in this position about 10 years ago and saw several students who lost their only copy of their thesis when their beat-up floppy finally died.
Didn't Steve Jobs solve this with the NeXT? I still have two magneto optical disks here. No drive to read them in though.
How can I tell my kids not to smoke pot or snort coke? They're gonna tell me, "how harmful can it be, just look where it got the President." Clinton, Gore or Bush are leading the war on drugs? Maybe we should just put Robert Downey Jr. or Willie Nelson in charge of it instead.
Here's my question: If a user got bit by an attachment and it opened a port on his machine, how did the cracker connect to that machine? Shouldn't they be behind a firewall? Or did someone start a new email attachment trojan that does an outbound connection instead?
How many seniors (that's your grandma and grandpa) would be on the street, dying because they don't have ANY money now to try and buy drugs.
One of Browne's big things with social security is to continue to pay for it for people older than a certain cutoff age. He says he'd fund it by selling off federally-owned property, including BLM lands, military bases, etc.
For people under the cutoff age, you get to save your own money. Social security costs you 15% of your income. Put that in a simple interest checking account and you'd probably do better than the social security system.
But eliminating the income tax doesn't mean eliminating all taxes. There are still plenty of hidden taxes that could pay for necessary programs.
And all those unnecessary programs? To quote Browne, "Gone." A lot of federal programs run well over a 50% overhead rate. The American Red Cross and Salvation Army run more like a 5-10% overhead rate. And that's our money, folks.
I've often said that the best tax reform anyone could ever pass is to get rid of automatic witholding. Make everyone have to write their tax check at the end of the year and we wouldn't stand for those taxes very long. Why do we get excited about a $1,000 refund when we're paying $20,000 in taxes?
Here's what used to be Browne's rallying cry: "Would you give up your favorite federal program if it meant never having to pay income tax again?" I would. Mine is probably the national park system. I'd give it up because then I could donate $5,000 to a trail club and still have enough money left over to take a long vacation and go hiking.
I have to agree. VMWare is one of the coolest pieces of software I run. No more quad-booting for me. And yes, I'm almost ashamed to admit, I run it under Win2000, not Linux.
My favorite features:
I keep a couple VM's around with Win98 and different browser versions so I can test web sites. I have a couple disk images of clean Win98 and NT4 installs so I can test installers. And of course I have a Linux image just so I can run nessus, which I can't seem to get working under OpenBSD.
Now if I could just get it to boot QNX.
Trade your dad's Playboy collection to the kid down the street for some time on his uncensored cable modem box
Sell the pot you've been growing in the woods behind your house and buy an eMachine
I've been on RoadRunner for almost 2 years. I don't think I've had more than 5 IP addresses in that time. About 2 months ago my RedHat 6.2 firewall was getting crashed about every other day. I could see a ton of ftp attempts getting blocked, so I assumed someone published the wrong IP for their warez/mp3z server. I thought I would try to change my IP. The only way I could do it was to swap out the ethernet card and get a new MAC address. I suppose I could have left it shut down for a day or two, but didn't have the time.
Then I moved to OpenBSD and haven't had a crash since. Well, that's not exactly true. I did have one, but once I taped over the power button on that machine, my 1-year old can't pull that trick again.
There is no way I would run my Win2000 or NT4 Server boxes without a firewall. I've got a two-page list of what I need to do to attempt to secure an NT4 or Win2000 web server.
I've never worked anywhere where someone was paid extra to carry a support pager. It was part of their (and my) job description, even if it got added to it against our will.
That said, I've seen plenty of ways people do a good job of getting out of "pager duty."
The best is if you can get a rotating pager. Chances are good that people will forget to turn over the pager on time. Then you can "forget" the pager and leave it at work for at least a day. You can also swap in a dead battery and blame the previous person.
But my all-time favorite is when they finally got ahold of my tech lead one weekend with some pseudo-urgent problem. He said "well, I'm too drunk to come in, so deal with it yourself."
Exactly. I recently had a phone conversation with an HR drone. She was trying to talk me into one of their positions. I told her how much money I wanted. It was about $20k more than they were listing the position. She told me that she thought I was being unrealistic. I told her "that's why that position is still open" and hung up.
Another job I know of was listed for at least 6 months, 3 of those after the "application deadline". I know of two well-qualified people that applied for it. So why didn't it get filled? The company wouldn't make a decision and eventually decided not to fill the position due to a money crunch.
In my opinion, that's the labor shortage in a nutshell. Every open position I see has a story behind why it's still open. It isn't because there aren't people out there looking for work. It's because the job is underpaid, they aren't really hiring, nobody can make a decision about hiring, etc. I've seen plenty of jobs listed where it's obvious that the someone priced the position using 1997's salary chart.
Let me know when some kid takes a chainsaw to his classmates. Then I might believe that Doom made him do it.
It's funny to think back to middle and high school. I had a knife held to my throat by another kid once in 7th grade (he was "just joking around"). As far as I know, he didn't play any role-playing or computer games.
I saw a number of brutal fights in high school, including one between a guy and a girl where he knocked her knife across the cafeteria and started ripping her hair out. From what I knew of those two, neither played any role-playing or computer games.
The year after I graduated from high school, two kids who were suspended from school paid a visit with a pair of handguns. They shot three staff members, one fatally. No mention of computer or role-playing games.
But I have seen the other side of the coin. I knew a guy in middle school who was very much into role playing games who broke into the school and trashed part of it. He was later shipped off to military school where I understand he found a perfect outlet for his f-ed up emotions.
A few years after high school, I happened to meet a friend-of-a-friend who played some role-playing games and hung out on BBSs. At dinner, he ordered a very rare steak ("put it on the grill, count to five, flip it, count to five, then bring it out"). A couple weeks later he was arrested (and I believe later convicted) for brutally murdering his former girlfriend. The funny part is, I started playing with this guy's old gaming group after that and had a great time with a group of mostly well-adjusted geeks.
There are plenty of people in this world who's brains just aren't wired right. Not all of them can be ex-marines or postal workers when they dump core. Some will use a computer. Some will play role-playing games. Some will be in wealthy families. Some will be vice presidents at large companies.
Anywhere I've worked it's more like 1 in 4. And the other 3 in 4 are the reason the 1 in 4 are so pissed off/depressed.
In my experience, things go much smoother with universities if there is a student organization involved. Surely you have a couple student members that could form a student organization. Heck, they could probably even get funding for it.
Another approach is to see if other local groups have a meeting space. Here locally, you could probably work out something with a ham radio club that has a nice facility of their own.
Jim McCoy, Mojo Nation and the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow are obviously just tools of the Illuminati.
Fnord.