Setting aside your exceedingly poor taste in word choices, just what exactly do you think insurance is for? It's to pay for expenses associated with accidents.
And how do they pay these expenses? With premiums from everyone. As insured people, we pool our money with the expectation that if we are involved in an accident the pool will cover our expenses. We expect that the persons managing this pool will take good care of it, and dole it out when necessary, and only when necessary. We also expect the people managing this pool to make a fair profit. Not outlandish, but fair.
How do you figure on fairly charging people for access to this pool of money? If you think young unmarried males pay too much, what would you suggest instead? Would you suggest all payers in the pool simply pay equal amounts? Why should I put an equal share of money in the pool if I have a spotless record? Why should I put an equal share in the pool if I drive a beaten-up 1976 Oldsmobile? If not equal shares, then how would you have them predict the future "accident-proneness" of drivers?
As the manager of this pool of money, I need incentives to force the drivers in an equal-share pool to not cost the pool extra money? If all shares are equal, and if your record doesn't matter, you'll drive around bouncing off everyone, costing the pool a fortune. It would be irresponsible to everyone else in the pool to charge you the same amount as everyone else if you're going to cost the pool lots.
If the pools simply raised your rates after you show a propensity towards using them, as a smart consumer you'd simply switch pools to avoid the premium increases. As this is still a mostly free country, you can't be locked into a lifetime agreement to pay whatever rates the insurance companies demand of you.
So, it finally seems that the insurance companies need to charge people based on their likelyhood of getting into an accident. Since the insurance companies do not have the gift of foresight, they have turned to statistical analysis, which provides a reasonable estimate of this likelyhood.
Actuaries are the people at the insurance companies who compile these statistics. They have determined many things that tend to be true over a large group. People with accidents on their records tend to have more accidents. People with speeding tickets tend to have more expensive accidents. People convicted of DUI tend to have more injury accidents. Students with good grades tend to have fewer accidents. Young unmarried males tend to have more accidents, and so on. Premium rates are determined on the basis of these statistics. It's not based on "who can we make the most money from", (as they would then simply charge you based on income,) it's based on "who is likely to cost us more."
You are certainly welcome to set up your own self-insurance scheme. First, escrow a big chunk of money. What? You don't have half a million dollars to guarantee expenses in an accident? Then I guess the insurance industry is your choice.
Do you really think insurance is superfluous? Have you ever been involved in an accident? A simple parking lot fender-bender with a Mercedes could set you back many thousands of dollars, really quickly. If you drove that Mercedes, wouldn't you expect the guy who hit you to pony up for the damages? Would you still think the laws requiring insurance coverage are onerous? Or would you rather take your chances in a lawsuit with a yellow-toothed drunk in a rusted-out 1968 Bronco who's already 18 years behind in his child-support payments, and is about to be fired for being late to his minimum wage job?
Finally, if you don't like the thought of the insurance companies making a fortune off of people like you, then go invest in one! Reap some of this profit you seem to claim they're making. Here's a list of insurance companies for you. Pick one, buy some shares, make lots of money off the rest of us, it's how capitalism works.
I would much rather more information about attacks and their severity.
A study of honeypot projects that showed most wi-fi abuse was "bandwidth stealing" doesn't exactly fill me with a sense of dread. More useful would have been a list of attempts hackers sitting outside of unsecured businesses trying to get at the corporate data.
Or are they trying to lull potential customers into a false sense of security?
What will be most interesting is if the crypto "wars" play out through all the theorized stages of attack, counterattack, and man-in-the-middle attacks that the cryptographers have worked out over the past 20 years. We already expect the RIAA won't take kindly to encrypted networks sharing their music, so we should expect to see some countermeasures.
So what will be their strategy? Will they first attempt to "join" these networks, posing as users looking for Britney's latest, and entrapping systems that serve up the bits? Will they put out bogus trojaned clients on the services? "Dude, download LockTella 1.9, it's l33t!!" only to find that it hoovers up passwords and music lists, and forwards them on to DUDE@RIAA.COM?
Will cypherpunks come to the rescue, providing signed versions of the clients? Will the users finally understand the need to verify the signatures before running them? It's a big stick -- "run an untrustworthy client, get a lawsuit."
And finally, will this come full circle, leading to a true "Web of Trust" as originally envisioned by Zimmerman et al with PGP? I can see the further parallels to Prohibition, with entry to speakeasies controlled by passwords like "John said to tell you I'm OK" whispered through a hole in the door.
First, encryption is already "built in" to Windows via the Crypto API. However, I don't know who is using it (apart from Microsoft) for anything, simply because trusting Microsoft with security has not proven to be the winning horse at too many races.
I understand your point that encryption won't be widespread until it's "built-in", and that's been the bane of widespread adoption of crypto. But the whole point of this article is that if the most popular filesharing services adopt encryption, users will indeed begin using it as a part of their download and install of the newest filesharing client. Filesharing and the RIAA pressures will drive the spread of underground crypto.
The issue here is trying to improve usability while saving battery life over the current default setting of "always backlight on button press." The earlier poster claimed that a button press did not activate the light, indicating the iPod's owner didn't care for that feature and disabled the default. Presumably the owner disabled the default because he wanted to save battery life by not engergizing the backlight during his normal daytime usage. I don't know this for a fact -- perhaps his friend is simply a Goth who doesn't care for illumination that doesn't come from candles.
My suggestion wouldn't waste "extra" electricity over and above the current default setting. No matter what, the light only comes on when you press a button, not when it's sitting in your pocket. It is doubtful you would intentionally press any buttons unless you are actively looking at the device. And a holster isn't a challenge -- the photocell sensor could be placed at the edge of the display itself.
Remote control button presses are distinct from case button presses as they come in on a different set of wires, and therefore would not need to activate the main backlight. They could, of course, activate the remote's own backlight according to the light falling on the remote's photosensor.
The photo sensor itself would not draw energy until the iPod received a triggering event (a configured button press or whatever.) At that time it would sample the ambient light, and if the CPU determined that it was dark enough, it would energize the backlight. And, just like now, this would only be the default setting. You would still be free to customize the behavior to suit your holstering, remote-controlling, candle-illuminating needs. And you could still leave your friends in the dark if you so choose. It's just an attempt to make the product more adapted to the typical user's needs straight out of the box.
Motorola solved this problem years ago with their higher-line pagers: they simply have a photocell that determines whether or not the backlight needs to come on when you press any of the buttons.
Apple certainly could do that. They may have to license a patent from Motorola, but it's a simple thing. The license, a photocell, and a translucent spot on the cover shouldn't amount to more than a few dollars. And it seems like The Right Thing To Do from a usability standpoint.
I think backlights on all of the controls are always a good thing except for cost and battery life. And I would think battery life would be improved, since most of the usage happens in sufficient illumination to not require the backlight.
I suppose if they were going that far, the final step would be to blink a backlight on the "hold" switch whenever a button is pressed in the dark AND the thing is locked.
My reaction to that is the wires don't come long enough to get far enough away from my Athlon. I have the vent closed in the room with the computer, and it keeps it a comfortable temperature through the winter. For reference, the bank thermometer outside my window currently reads "0F".
I'm just afraid the "outside air" would be too locally warmed.
I can't take all the credit; this is just the old Monty Python "Dead Parrot Sketch" with the word 'parrot' crossed out and the word 'protocol' written in in crayon.
I (incorrectly) figured anyone who got it would also be a Monty Python fan.
Kermit is dead. Zmodem is dead. The argument died ten years ago! Get over it!
It's not pinin', it's passed on! This protocol is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of value, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the Space Station it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its CPU usage is now zero! It's off the box! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-PROTOCOL!!
Sheesh, if you want an argument to die around here, you've got to complain 'til you're blue in the face.
You are correct in understanding that steganography is different than cryptography. It is possibly the purest example of "security through obscurity" that exists. To address your concerns, read to the bottom of the article where you can see where he experiments with a program called steghide which performs both encryption (using your choice of modern, high strength algorithms) PLUS steganographic hiding.
Yes, "receipt printers" cost more than "no receipt printers". However, if Diebold can sell a printerless machine for $3000 and a printing machine for $4000, considering that the print engines have already been designed and cost about $100 each, don't you think they would try to sell the $4000 version?
Or perhaps I'm not being conspiratorial enough. Perhaps Diebold wants to sell $3000 voting machines, wait for the public outcry at a lack of printed audits, then sell add-on printers for $2000 each. Or, even better, perhaps they'll offer a $1000 rebate on the $3000 machines in trade for the $4000 printing machines.
Perhaps with your individual experiences, no, they haven't "saved you time."
But believe me, they do save time. "Payroll" time.
Two examples: Earlier this year, my wife took a job as a bookkeeper for a firm whose previous bookkeeper was out of work for two months due to an injury. The previous bookkeeper had about "two people's worth of work to do," and had hired assistants several times in the past, but they never worked out. This previous bookkeeper was also not comfortable with technology, and spent much of her time hand writing some accounts on ledger paper with pencils, keeping paper folders, making xeroxed copies of everything, and basically fearing technology. Along comes my wife, and she brings with her the ability to fully use accounting programs, and a ton of experience. She knows Excel. She knows Word. In six months, she had moved accounts from green ledger pads to spreadsheets and payroll taxes from the typewriter to data transfers. The time it used to take to gather frequently requested data for reports was reduced from days to moments. In six months the workload had been reduced to a "one person job," and so they layed off the previous bookkeeper, keeping my wife (they feared a return to the green ledger pads.)
This shows that automation reduced a task from a two person job to a one person job. It's not a "computer industry" job -- this is an "end user" job. That's where the real "time savings" come from.
My other example is that we have tens of thousands of internal clients using our software. I was told that by reducing a certain transaction function from its current runtime of 16 seconds to 8 seconds, our company would realize payroll savings of millions of dollars per year. (We've worked hard to shave time from it and reduced it to 12 seconds, but the users keep wanting us to add time-consuming functionality to these transactions. Darn users.)
My point is the time saved isn't necessarily that of the IT people. The time saved is the time of the end users of software. The expense of a developer wasting a bit of time struggling with technology is small compared to the potential overall savings the developer and that technology can generate.
Except my point is that they don't get 0.1% valid responses. Most get vanishingly close to zero actual responses. They already do not make money at it.
0.1% response rate is a myth perpetuated by spammers to advertise just how valuable their services are. Anyone believing that would say "Hey, one million emails means I will sell one thousand ink cartriges." The reality of spam is that one million emails means they MIGHT sell five or ten ink cartriges, or even one or zero. Their sales rates on a good run might be between 0.001% (1:100,000) and 0.0001% (1:1,000,000)
Compare that to my wife's firm's experiences with third-class bulk mailing. They were extremely pleased with a 2% return, and weren't surprised by 1%. The mailings cost somewhere around $0.20 per piece, so advertising cost them $10.00 - $20.00 per sale. According to a sponsored google link querying for 'bulk email rates', "spam-free email advertising" (?!?) costs $69.60 for 300,000 pieces. At the spammers' mythical 0.1% return rate looks like you'd get 300 sales, at a cost of $0.23 per sale. The reality of spam is that a return rate of 0.0001% costs $232.00 per sale. As my blonde friend might say, "We'll just have to get a bigger computer!"
Hopefully a merchant burned thusly will no longer look to spam for advertising, as the spammer pocketed the only profits made in this transaction. But the spammer will simply move on to fleece another gullible merchant.
So, it's already not profitable. Beating them into the ground with a really cool java program isn't going to teach them anything more than they've already learned by pissing their money away to the spammers.
The heyday of truly profitable spam is long past. 0.001% sales rates or lower are now the norm. "Hit rates" remain high due to auto-preview features in Outlook and Outlook Express, but even my mother doesn't read the spam anymore. As long as spammers continue to parrot the myth that spam is profitable for the merchants, and as long as the ethically-challenged amoral suckers are willing to buy into that lie, we'll continue to have spam.
The objective isn't a DOS, it's to salt their data. If 99 out of 100 'orders' are fakes with invalid cc numbers, their transaction costs will go up and their profitability will plummit.
I think you've missed the profit model of spam. You need to recognize the difference between the spammer and the merchant. Two different businesses, with two different objectives.
The spammer makes money by selling bulk-email services to merchants. $100 dollars for 1 million emails, that sort of thing.
The merchant spends his money for this advertising, hoping to get the promised 1% (or.1% or whatever) of responses to pay for it.
It's very important to see that the spammer gets his money regardless of whether or not the merchant makes money. The spammer stays in business. As for the merchant? The spammer certainly does not care.
There are hundreds of small businesses started each day by out-of-work ex-employees, drones tired of their McJobs, etc. They each have an idea of how to Get Rich Quick, if only they could get their message out. "I know, I'll hire a spammer!" After using up their advertising budget on spam and getting 0 returns, they fold up and go back to McWork. But another hundred try the same thing tomorrow.
All this project will do is inconvenience and annoy these suckers who were so stupid as to give a spammer their money. While you might consider it their karmic punishment for hiring spammers, you are only giving them more crap to do while they're busy going out of business. But they're going out of business regardless, because they spent their ad budgets on spam instead of a legitimate medium. They aren't going to be repeat spam customers anyway. The spammers' profits don't come from repeat customers. They come from duping this never-ending supply of rubes.
Poisoning the merchants' databases will not adversely affect the spammers, nor do I believe it will slow the tide of spam. If it makes you happy to drive the point home with these stupid merchants, fine, just don't fall into the illusion that it will have much of an effect.
I'm pretty sure you meant this as a joke, but that's one of the [dis]advantages of this system: you simply add more sensors to replace those which have died. The new sensors "understand" the task at hand and start performing their function without further configuration, etc. The network just integrates the new data arriving from the new sensors, and it doesn't matter if the old sensors stop sending.
I included an optional "dis" in there because that means abandoning dead sensors in place is also the cheap route to take. That means more pollution. If it was just silicon I'd be OK with it as it will decompose back into sand over time, but the batteries and other circuit interconnections typically will have heavy metals or toxic or corrosive components.
That's the beauty of an off-beat R&D lab. They're given free rein to develop just about anything without regard to need OR profit.
AT&T and IBM both funded labs like these for years. They were responsible for developing such novel and diverse things as transistors and scanning tunnelling microscopes. The goal is, of course, that they will develop a product that fills a real need, which in turn will create a demand for their product appeasing their shareholders.
I think it's absolutely terrific that some industries are able to risk investing in the totally unknown. It was truly a shame when Bell Labs dropped their unfettered research. It was also disappointing to see IBM drop research for all but computer-related work. But even so, their Zurich labs have recently come up with some novel storage mechanisms leveraging their decade-old scanning tunnelling work.
Regardless of whether these labs prove to be duds or if one of them creates the transistor of the 21st century, the money is being well spent. Exploring the unknown is always of value.
I doubt it. These things are going to be tiny, which means tiny sized batteries, which means they can only sip very tiny amounts of power, which finally means they can only transmit very very tiny amounts of radiation.
Here's an analogy: think about the visible-spectrum radiation emitted by an LED. Are you concerned about sunburns or skin-cancer from LED radiation? (If so, I'd like to see your computer room...) These motes will be capable of transmitting similar amounts of power. I doubt very much that they'll adversely affect anything with their radiation.
Their bigger impact will probably be the damage done by the adhesives or fasteners used to stick them to their monitoring posts, or by the hazardous wastes left behind when they're done using them.
According to the article at sfgate: Doreen Woo Ho, head of Wells' consumer credit group, said the bank would "prosecute to the fullest extent of the law" now that a suspect is in custody.
I think I fragged someone yelling "Woo Ho" yesterday in America's Army... don't think they were named Doreen, tho...
The only way I can think of to keep vote you made readable would be to take into the booth a bogus second layer and then hand it to the poll worker to shred--leaving your vote intact and readable.
He's taken that into account. Both the top and bottom layers have the same serial number on them. The poll worker can verify that the destroyed layer's serial number matches the one on the voter's layer. I don't see where in the text he describes this, but perhaps it was an oversight that he failed to mention it.
The bigger problems I see with the system are the complexity and cost. Explaining to non-cryptographers how this helps verify their vote was counted is going to be difficult, at best. And inventing a new double sided printer and stocking it with laminated transparent film is not going to be cheap.
First, to have it printing on clear stock will require thermal transfer film ribbons. Direct thermal printing is not possible on transparent film. That means two thermal elements per printer: one each for the top and bottom. That also means two rolls of thermal film need to be present. Two film drive mechanisms, plus the ballot drive, plus a cutter means a lot of moving parts to warranty.
Designing this printer to keep the colors perfectly aligned both top and bottom, plus the cutter, plus allowing for it to be loaded with ballot stock and ribbons by volunteers, plus durability, and possibly adding an imaging verifier to ensure that none of the print elements are failing and that the thermal elements are properly aligned, is going to make it very expensive to design. The per unit cost will be ridiculously high (I'm guessing thousands of dollars per printer.) They will be large and heavy, to hold all those mechanisms, ribbons, and ballot stock. That means they will also be more expensive to store than a smaller printer. The maintenance fees are going to be hundreds of dollars per unit per year. And they'll need at least two per polling place (in case one fails.)
The per ballot cost is going to be similarly outrageous. Two layers of transparent film, held together by adhesives along the edges (or possibly perforated film) is going to cost. Both the top layer and bottom layer of the film itself are going to require special topcoats to accept the thermally transferred image. The cheapest polyester label stock I could find on the web in the 2" x 1" range (about the smallest label I could find that might hold a vote and still be legible) cost $0.0061 each in quantity. That would have to be at least doubled (since the backer would be replaced by another layer of the higher quality polyester film. And that would be per candidate / issue / vote. Most elections I've attended have a national race, a senate race, a congressional race, five local races, six judgeships, and a local schoolboard issue. I would consider about 20 votes per ballot to be an average. We're looking at close to $0.25 per ballot for ballot costs alone, not counting the cost of the thermal film.
This is not out-of-line with my experience with custom-printed direct thermal receipt tape, which cost about $0.015 per receipt in quantities large enough to qualify for the lowest rates.
It's not worth it for a machine that's basically little more than an instant-gratification device for the news media. It simply doesn't buy me that much more confidence in the outcome of the election, as I see the bigger issue being fraudulently registered voters, and not counterfeit paper ballots being miscounted by corrupt election officials. But it is a very cleverly designed protocol.
I used cable ties (aka zip-ties) on the coils. They stay manageable that way. And they're cheap enough.
Keep the radii large when coiling the stuff, by the way. Cat 5 cable data sheets usually state the minimum radius of a bend should be no tighter than about 10 times the jacket diameter (a 5mm diameter cable should be bent no tighter than a 5cm radius. So don't "fold" the cable, and be careful when you're untangling that you don't pull a kink too tight. If the jacket discolors at the point of flex, it's almost certainly too tight a curve. You can permanently damage the "cat-5-ness" of the cable by bending it too tight.
You can also damage it by pulling it too hard. Boy, it was painful to watch a friend who had coiled up excess inside the wall (and stapled it there) give it a good yank to dislodge his staple. He damaged one of the conductors with the yank, and we had to fish a new wire to replace it, since the old wire went horizontally through many studs and around a corner.
I should probably have disposed of the short cat-5 pieces anyway. I keep a 1000 foot box of cat-5 in the basement for "just in case" wiring, and tend not to go back to the bins for the short pieces.
"Web weaver" simply ruins my job title: "web slave".
No, when they correctified the names around here, we all became "coding monkeys" and so the bosses became "organ grinders." Since that's all they were doing before the name change anyway...
But seriously, folks, they said wanted us to change all our server combinations from "Master and Slave" to "Dominatrix and worm"... or was that "Pimps" and "Hos"?
Slashdot Mirror
Setting aside your exceedingly poor taste in word choices, just what exactly do you think insurance is for? It's to pay for expenses associated with accidents.
And how do they pay these expenses? With premiums from everyone. As insured people, we pool our money with the expectation that if we are involved in an accident the pool will cover our expenses. We expect that the persons managing this pool will take good care of it, and dole it out when necessary, and only when necessary. We also expect the people managing this pool to make a fair profit. Not outlandish, but fair.
How do you figure on fairly charging people for access to this pool of money? If you think young unmarried males pay too much, what would you suggest instead? Would you suggest all payers in the pool simply pay equal amounts? Why should I put an equal share of money in the pool if I have a spotless record? Why should I put an equal share in the pool if I drive a beaten-up 1976 Oldsmobile? If not equal shares, then how would you have them predict the future "accident-proneness" of drivers?
As the manager of this pool of money, I need incentives to force the drivers in an equal-share pool to not cost the pool extra money? If all shares are equal, and if your record doesn't matter, you'll drive around bouncing off everyone, costing the pool a fortune. It would be irresponsible to everyone else in the pool to charge you the same amount as everyone else if you're going to cost the pool lots.
If the pools simply raised your rates after you show a propensity towards using them, as a smart consumer you'd simply switch pools to avoid the premium increases. As this is still a mostly free country, you can't be locked into a lifetime agreement to pay whatever rates the insurance companies demand of you.
So, it finally seems that the insurance companies need to charge people based on their likelyhood of getting into an accident. Since the insurance companies do not have the gift of foresight, they have turned to statistical analysis, which provides a reasonable estimate of this likelyhood.
Actuaries are the people at the insurance companies who compile these statistics. They have determined many things that tend to be true over a large group. People with accidents on their records tend to have more accidents. People with speeding tickets tend to have more expensive accidents. People convicted of DUI tend to have more injury accidents. Students with good grades tend to have fewer accidents. Young unmarried males tend to have more accidents, and so on. Premium rates are determined on the basis of these statistics. It's not based on "who can we make the most money from", (as they would then simply charge you based on income,) it's based on "who is likely to cost us more."
You are certainly welcome to set up your own self-insurance scheme. First, escrow a big chunk of money. What? You don't have half a million dollars to guarantee expenses in an accident? Then I guess the insurance industry is your choice.
Do you really think insurance is superfluous? Have you ever been involved in an accident? A simple parking lot fender-bender with a Mercedes could set you back many thousands of dollars, really quickly. If you drove that Mercedes, wouldn't you expect the guy who hit you to pony up for the damages? Would you still think the laws requiring insurance coverage are onerous? Or would you rather take your chances in a lawsuit with a yellow-toothed drunk in a rusted-out 1968 Bronco who's already 18 years behind in his child-support payments, and is about to be fired for being late to his minimum wage job?
Finally, if you don't like the thought of the insurance companies making a fortune off of people like you, then go invest in one! Reap some of this profit you seem to claim they're making. Here's a list of insurance companies for you. Pick one, buy some shares, make lots of money off the rest of us, it's how capitalism works.
A study of honeypot projects that showed most wi-fi abuse was "bandwidth stealing" doesn't exactly fill me with a sense of dread. More useful would have been a list of attempts hackers sitting outside of unsecured businesses trying to get at the corporate data.
Or are they trying to lull potential customers into a false sense of security?
"Now you see that Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb."
So what will be their strategy? Will they first attempt to "join" these networks, posing as users looking for Britney's latest, and entrapping systems that serve up the bits? Will they put out bogus trojaned clients on the services? "Dude, download LockTella 1.9, it's l33t!!" only to find that it hoovers up passwords and music lists, and forwards them on to DUDE@RIAA.COM?
Will cypherpunks come to the rescue, providing signed versions of the clients? Will the users finally understand the need to verify the signatures before running them? It's a big stick -- "run an untrustworthy client, get a lawsuit."
And finally, will this come full circle, leading to a true "Web of Trust" as originally envisioned by Zimmerman et al with PGP? I can see the further parallels to Prohibition, with entry to speakeasies controlled by passwords like "John said to tell you I'm OK" whispered through a hole in the door.
This could be a very interesting time to live in.
I understand your point that encryption won't be widespread until it's "built-in", and that's been the bane of widespread adoption of crypto. But the whole point of this article is that if the most popular filesharing services adopt encryption, users will indeed begin using it as a part of their download and install of the newest filesharing client. Filesharing and the RIAA pressures will drive the spread of underground crypto.
My suggestion wouldn't waste "extra" electricity over and above the current default setting. No matter what, the light only comes on when you press a button, not when it's sitting in your pocket. It is doubtful you would intentionally press any buttons unless you are actively looking at the device. And a holster isn't a challenge -- the photocell sensor could be placed at the edge of the display itself.
Remote control button presses are distinct from case button presses as they come in on a different set of wires, and therefore would not need to activate the main backlight. They could, of course, activate the remote's own backlight according to the light falling on the remote's photosensor.
The photo sensor itself would not draw energy until the iPod received a triggering event (a configured button press or whatever.) At that time it would sample the ambient light, and if the CPU determined that it was dark enough, it would energize the backlight. And, just like now, this would only be the default setting. You would still be free to customize the behavior to suit your holstering, remote-controlling, candle-illuminating needs. And you could still leave your friends in the dark if you so choose. It's just an attempt to make the product more adapted to the typical user's needs straight out of the box.
Apple certainly could do that. They may have to license a patent from Motorola, but it's a simple thing. The license, a photocell, and a translucent spot on the cover shouldn't amount to more than a few dollars. And it seems like The Right Thing To Do from a usability standpoint.
I think backlights on all of the controls are always a good thing except for cost and battery life. And I would think battery life would be improved, since most of the usage happens in sufficient illumination to not require the backlight.
I suppose if they were going that far, the final step would be to blink a backlight on the "hold" switch whenever a button is pressed in the dark AND the thing is locked.
Clap your hands.
I'm just afraid the "outside air" would be too locally warmed.
I (incorrectly) figured anyone who got it would also be a Monty Python fan.
Kermit is dead. Zmodem is dead. The argument died ten years ago! Get over it!
It's not pinin', it's passed on! This protocol is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of value, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the Space Station it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its CPU usage is now zero! It's off the box! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-PROTOCOL!!
Sheesh, if you want an argument to die around here, you've got to complain 'til you're blue in the face.
You are correct in understanding that steganography is different than cryptography. It is possibly the purest example of "security through obscurity" that exists. To address your concerns, read to the bottom of the article where you can see where he experiments with a program called steghide which performs both encryption (using your choice of modern, high strength algorithms) PLUS steganographic hiding.
Or perhaps I'm not being conspiratorial enough. Perhaps Diebold wants to sell $3000 voting machines, wait for the public outcry at a lack of printed audits, then sell add-on printers for $2000 each. Or, even better, perhaps they'll offer a $1000 rebate on the $3000 machines in trade for the $4000 printing machines.
I guess you're right: it is about the money.
It could have been worse. SCO could have been represented by Darl's other brother Darl.
But believe me, they do save time. "Payroll" time.
Two examples: Earlier this year, my wife took a job as a bookkeeper for a firm whose previous bookkeeper was out of work for two months due to an injury. The previous bookkeeper had about "two people's worth of work to do," and had hired assistants several times in the past, but they never worked out. This previous bookkeeper was also not comfortable with technology, and spent much of her time hand writing some accounts on ledger paper with pencils, keeping paper folders, making xeroxed copies of everything, and basically fearing technology. Along comes my wife, and she brings with her the ability to fully use accounting programs, and a ton of experience. She knows Excel. She knows Word. In six months, she had moved accounts from green ledger pads to spreadsheets and payroll taxes from the typewriter to data transfers. The time it used to take to gather frequently requested data for reports was reduced from days to moments. In six months the workload had been reduced to a "one person job," and so they layed off the previous bookkeeper, keeping my wife (they feared a return to the green ledger pads.)
This shows that automation reduced a task from a two person job to a one person job. It's not a "computer industry" job -- this is an "end user" job. That's where the real "time savings" come from.
My other example is that we have tens of thousands of internal clients using our software. I was told that by reducing a certain transaction function from its current runtime of 16 seconds to 8 seconds, our company would realize payroll savings of millions of dollars per year. (We've worked hard to shave time from it and reduced it to 12 seconds, but the users keep wanting us to add time-consuming functionality to these transactions. Darn users.)
My point is the time saved isn't necessarily that of the IT people. The time saved is the time of the end users of software. The expense of a developer wasting a bit of time struggling with technology is small compared to the potential overall savings the developer and that technology can generate.
0.1% response rate is a myth perpetuated by spammers to advertise just how valuable their services are. Anyone believing that would say "Hey, one million emails means I will sell one thousand ink cartriges." The reality of spam is that one million emails means they MIGHT sell five or ten ink cartriges, or even one or zero. Their sales rates on a good run might be between 0.001% (1:100,000) and 0.0001% (1:1,000,000)
Compare that to my wife's firm's experiences with third-class bulk mailing. They were extremely pleased with a 2% return, and weren't surprised by 1%. The mailings cost somewhere around $0.20 per piece, so advertising cost them $10.00 - $20.00 per sale. According to a sponsored google link querying for 'bulk email rates', "spam-free email advertising" (?!?) costs $69.60 for 300,000 pieces. At the spammers' mythical 0.1% return rate looks like you'd get 300 sales, at a cost of $0.23 per sale. The reality of spam is that a return rate of 0.0001% costs $232.00 per sale. As my blonde friend might say, "We'll just have to get a bigger computer!"
Hopefully a merchant burned thusly will no longer look to spam for advertising, as the spammer pocketed the only profits made in this transaction. But the spammer will simply move on to fleece another gullible merchant.
So, it's already not profitable. Beating them into the ground with a really cool java program isn't going to teach them anything more than they've already learned by pissing their money away to the spammers.
The heyday of truly profitable spam is long past. 0.001% sales rates or lower are now the norm. "Hit rates" remain high due to auto-preview features in Outlook and Outlook Express, but even my mother doesn't read the spam anymore. As long as spammers continue to parrot the myth that spam is profitable for the merchants, and as long as the ethically-challenged amoral suckers are willing to buy into that lie, we'll continue to have spam.
I think you've missed the profit model of spam. You need to recognize the difference between the spammer and the merchant. Two different businesses, with two different objectives.
The spammer makes money by selling bulk-email services to merchants. $100 dollars for 1 million emails, that sort of thing.
The merchant spends his money for this advertising, hoping to get the promised 1% (or .1% or whatever) of responses to pay for it.
It's very important to see that the spammer gets his money regardless of whether or not the merchant makes money. The spammer stays in business. As for the merchant? The spammer certainly does not care.
There are hundreds of small businesses started each day by out-of-work ex-employees, drones tired of their McJobs, etc. They each have an idea of how to Get Rich Quick, if only they could get their message out. "I know, I'll hire a spammer!" After using up their advertising budget on spam and getting 0 returns, they fold up and go back to McWork. But another hundred try the same thing tomorrow.
All this project will do is inconvenience and annoy these suckers who were so stupid as to give a spammer their money. While you might consider it their karmic punishment for hiring spammers, you are only giving them more crap to do while they're busy going out of business. But they're going out of business regardless, because they spent their ad budgets on spam instead of a legitimate medium. They aren't going to be repeat spam customers anyway. The spammers' profits don't come from repeat customers. They come from duping this never-ending supply of rubes.
Poisoning the merchants' databases will not adversely affect the spammers, nor do I believe it will slow the tide of spam. If it makes you happy to drive the point home with these stupid merchants, fine, just don't fall into the illusion that it will have much of an effect.
I included an optional "dis" in there because that means abandoning dead sensors in place is also the cheap route to take. That means more pollution. If it was just silicon I'd be OK with it as it will decompose back into sand over time, but the batteries and other circuit interconnections typically will have heavy metals or toxic or corrosive components.
That's the beauty of an off-beat R&D lab. They're given free rein to develop just about anything without regard to need OR profit.
AT&T and IBM both funded labs like these for years. They were responsible for developing such novel and diverse things as transistors and scanning tunnelling microscopes. The goal is, of course, that they will develop a product that fills a real need, which in turn will create a demand for their product appeasing their shareholders.
I think it's absolutely terrific that some industries are able to risk investing in the totally unknown. It was truly a shame when Bell Labs dropped their unfettered research. It was also disappointing to see IBM drop research for all but computer-related work. But even so, their Zurich labs have recently come up with some novel storage mechanisms leveraging their decade-old scanning tunnelling work.
Regardless of whether these labs prove to be duds or if one of them creates the transistor of the 21st century, the money is being well spent. Exploring the unknown is always of value.
Here's an analogy: think about the visible-spectrum radiation emitted by an LED. Are you concerned about sunburns or skin-cancer from LED radiation? (If so, I'd like to see your computer room...) These motes will be capable of transmitting similar amounts of power. I doubt very much that they'll adversely affect anything with their radiation.
Their bigger impact will probably be the damage done by the adhesives or fasteners used to stick them to their monitoring posts, or by the hazardous wastes left behind when they're done using them.
I think I fragged someone yelling "Woo Ho" yesterday in America's Army... don't think they were named Doreen, tho...
I, for one, welcome our new piscene overlords ...
He's taken that into account. Both the top and bottom layers have the same serial number on them. The poll worker can verify that the destroyed layer's serial number matches the one on the voter's layer. I don't see where in the text he describes this, but perhaps it was an oversight that he failed to mention it.
The bigger problems I see with the system are the complexity and cost. Explaining to non-cryptographers how this helps verify their vote was counted is going to be difficult, at best. And inventing a new double sided printer and stocking it with laminated transparent film is not going to be cheap.
First, to have it printing on clear stock will require thermal transfer film ribbons. Direct thermal printing is not possible on transparent film. That means two thermal elements per printer: one each for the top and bottom. That also means two rolls of thermal film need to be present. Two film drive mechanisms, plus the ballot drive, plus a cutter means a lot of moving parts to warranty.
Designing this printer to keep the colors perfectly aligned both top and bottom, plus the cutter, plus allowing for it to be loaded with ballot stock and ribbons by volunteers, plus durability, and possibly adding an imaging verifier to ensure that none of the print elements are failing and that the thermal elements are properly aligned, is going to make it very expensive to design. The per unit cost will be ridiculously high (I'm guessing thousands of dollars per printer.) They will be large and heavy, to hold all those mechanisms, ribbons, and ballot stock. That means they will also be more expensive to store than a smaller printer. The maintenance fees are going to be hundreds of dollars per unit per year. And they'll need at least two per polling place (in case one fails.)
The per ballot cost is going to be similarly outrageous. Two layers of transparent film, held together by adhesives along the edges (or possibly perforated film) is going to cost. Both the top layer and bottom layer of the film itself are going to require special topcoats to accept the thermally transferred image. The cheapest polyester label stock I could find on the web in the 2" x 1" range (about the smallest label I could find that might hold a vote and still be legible) cost $0.0061 each in quantity. That would have to be at least doubled (since the backer would be replaced by another layer of the higher quality polyester film. And that would be per candidate / issue / vote. Most elections I've attended have a national race, a senate race, a congressional race, five local races, six judgeships, and a local schoolboard issue. I would consider about 20 votes per ballot to be an average. We're looking at close to $0.25 per ballot for ballot costs alone, not counting the cost of the thermal film.
This is not out-of-line with my experience with custom-printed direct thermal receipt tape, which cost about $0.015 per receipt in quantities large enough to qualify for the lowest rates.
It's not worth it for a machine that's basically little more than an instant-gratification device for the news media. It simply doesn't buy me that much more confidence in the outcome of the election, as I see the bigger issue being fraudulently registered voters, and not counterfeit paper ballots being miscounted by corrupt election officials. But it is a very cleverly designed protocol.
Keep the radii large when coiling the stuff, by the way. Cat 5 cable data sheets usually state the minimum radius of a bend should be no tighter than about 10 times the jacket diameter (a 5mm diameter cable should be bent no tighter than a 5cm radius. So don't "fold" the cable, and be careful when you're untangling that you don't pull a kink too tight. If the jacket discolors at the point of flex, it's almost certainly too tight a curve. You can permanently damage the "cat-5-ness" of the cable by bending it too tight.
You can also damage it by pulling it too hard. Boy, it was painful to watch a friend who had coiled up excess inside the wall (and stapled it there) give it a good yank to dislodge his staple. He damaged one of the conductors with the yank, and we had to fish a new wire to replace it, since the old wire went horizontally through many studs and around a corner.
I should probably have disposed of the short cat-5 pieces anyway. I keep a 1000 foot box of cat-5 in the basement for "just in case" wiring, and tend not to go back to the bins for the short pieces.
No, when they correctified the names around here, we all became "coding monkeys" and so the bosses became "organ grinders." Since that's all they were doing before the name change anyway ...
But seriously, folks, they said wanted us to change all our server combinations from "Master and Slave" to "Dominatrix and worm" ... or was that "Pimps" and "Hos"?
I got a million of 'em! Tip your servers, folks.