Nahh. You just need "my buddy Ernie. He's this guy who knows way more about computers than I do, and he'll be happy to come over and fix it for you."
Then you call "The Geek Squad" and have them send someone out to pretend to be your buddy Ernie. It'll cost you $100, but you don't have to go over there, eat their stupid tunafish casserole and listen to little Karla sing her first-grade song. It's money well spent.
It's a bad idea for inside-the-case components or anywhere near circuit boards. A grinding wheel (or any cutting head) on a moto-tool generates dust so fine you really have no hope of ever getting it all even with a vacuum. Especially the bits that get beneath or behind SMD components.
An ordinary hand drill with a standard bit won't fling such tiny bits around. Yes, they're still metal chips, but not nearly as problematic as conductive dust.
Hey, I have fun with my Dremel, but I don't use it on circuit boards I'm interested in saving. If you must, may I suggest masking EVERYTHING else in the vicinity with masking tape and heavy paper (grocery bags work great) first? You can even put the masking tape right over the screwhead you're slotting (it won't hurt the dremel at all.)
A standard TORX driver plus a needlenose pliers (or other small-tipped, hard object) is all it takes. Use the needlenose or screwdriver to push the security pin off to one side or the other. They're just spot-welded in and break out really easily. Once the pin is gone, the standard TORX driver works just fine.
At least TORX bits are analog and I'm not violating the DMCA by telling you guys this. Of course, there's probably something in the USA PATRIOT act that prevents me from telling you how to open a power supply case... sigh.
These changes are not picked up by typical scanners or easily captured with photography.
It's a way to print a pattern or message out of a series of shiny/non-shiny patches on the paper. But if you look at it from top-down (the same way a scanner views a document) the changes are not visible.
So, you could print "Look for the logo between these lines: ---| @@ |--- " and if the person reading it doesn't see it, they can hopefully suspect a forgery.
This would be good for coupons, low-value stuff. You wouldn't want to print lots of real money relying only on this trick, because it'll get defeated soon enough (probably by some kid with a polarizing plate on his scanner and too much time on his hands.) But it's still a neat idea.
Oh, I agree the wanton waste of life would be a huge economic drain. Slaves have always been expensive to acquire and maintain. And I'm not even convinced it was built by slaves: it was a tomb for their god. If your society is building a tomb for God, you may have been obligated by the priests to work on it yourself: one weekend a month and two weeks per year, that sort of arrangement. Killing your neighbors or your children via falling rocks or other stupid construction accidents is not conducive to maintaining a dedicated volunteer workforce, (even if they are conscripts.)
To your ramp theories, consider the pyramid construction in a spiral fashion. You wouldn't have a single 4800 foot ramp leading up the side, but you'd have 48 ramps each 50 feet long, raising the stones ten feet at a time (yes, this is a 20% grade, keep reading.)
The base would be laid square, with a ramp at a corner. Then the second course would be laid in the middle, leaving a working path around the edge. At the far end of this circumferential path around the top of the first level (at the end of the fourth side) you would erect another ramp leading inward up to the top of the second level. Repeat as needed till you get to the pinnacle.
Completing the pyramid would be a matter of filling in the top path, then destroying the ramp leading to it and filling in the next level. Repeat as needed until you're standing on the ground.
The only hard part is placing the very last block on each layer (the ones that need to go on top of where the ramps are. They require dead lifting. But now, you're only talking one or two stones per level, and you can muster additional help at these times.
This isn't the most efficient ramp system: every stone must travel all the way around the pyramid on every course. But it makes each ramp small and independent and therefore manageable. Ropes wearing thin on the 3rd level ramp? Replace them. The workers never have to haul a stone up more than one level at a time, and therefore they are fresh, and don't risk dropping one all the way down the length of the ramp.
It also scales: if you have more workers than space, you can double production speed by having two ramps on opposite corners. When completion time comes around, one of the ramps is closed and the level filled in with stones brought from the remaining ramp, and only a single corner is left to deadlift. They maybe even quadrupled production by having ramps on each of the four corners, although I haven't given enough thought to the space to figure out if that's even a possible arrangement of the ramps at the corners. I'm pretty sure it would work at the lower levels where there would have been lots of space available, but probably became less cost effective the nearer they got to the pinnacle.
See my earlier post for a description of how to easily raise one encircled block up one ramp at a time using a tethered rope and using the encircled block as a simple pulley. With this very simple method, raising a 2-ton (4000 pound) block up a 20% grade for 50 feet would take 400 pounds of pull on the rope over 100 feet. 400 pounds is not a lot for a small team of workers to pull. (Not that I'd want to do it as my day job, but it's certainly achievable.) And as each level approached completion, the ramps would be shortened and the inclines raised steeper. Now for that 40% grade you have to pull 800 pounds. Just double the number of workers and there you go. You even have extra rope for them to all hang on to because you shortened the ramp!
You're right, they would not have invested any extra work to avoid crushing. They probably wouldn't have gone out of their way to intentionally injure their laborers, but they also probably wouldn't have invested much in risk-avoidance.
But going circular was a huge gain over the rollers of the day. We're talking round logs over hardpacked sand, not ball bearing wheels or even axles fixed to a cart. I don't think cart technology had progressed to the point where they could build durable enough carts to withstand repeated hauling of such heavy weights. And think of the friction! Even if they had wagons or carts that could haul those rocks, you'd be spending as much energy fighting the axle friction as you would actually hauling the rock's weight. Making the rock the center of a circle would have invoked the "least moving parts" principle to reduce friction, and was an excellent solution given the technology of the day.
As I mentioned in the nearby post, I believe the ramps involved were small, one or two block rows at a time from one construction level to the next. The ramps did not extend from the bottom to the top of the pyramids in one giant slope. So there would have been no need to stop for these small distances, or to involve a wedge of any sort.
I also don't think they risked any people by "pushing" the rocks up the ramps. By firmly affixing ropes to the floor at the top of each ramp, they would be invoking a simple pulley to ease the work of raising the blocks. Roll the circular rock up to the base of the ramp, pass the free end of the ropes under the rock, around the circle and over the top back to the pullers standing on the upper surface of the ramp, and you have just cut your work to pull one rock up the ramp in half. As a bonus, you have no one standing behind the rock in case something goes wrong. The most you might need would be tenders on the sides to make sure the rock didn't stray left or right off the ramp.
They may have created many cool things, but I don't think the Pharoahs invented OSHA. What makes you think they'd invest ANY amount of work to keep from crushing a few slaves?
Anyway, keep in mind that the ramps involved are only the height of one block row (maybe five or six feet?) That would be performed in a single effort, and the block would soon be up on the next level, on a flat and level surface. It would be rolled along that flat surface until it got to the next ramp. It would not require wedges at all.
For a diagram, see a back issue of OMNI magazine from 1980.
That's when an "inventor" announced this last time I heard it.
I recall it was an interesting article. He developed the technique to remove blocks from his quarry and thought "this is so easy someone else must have invented it first." So he did some research, then did some more research, and finally found wooden rockers just like the ones he built were discovered in the pyramid (they were labeled "cradles".)
He then duplicated these wooden rockers, quarried some blocks to replicate the size of the blocks used in the pyramids, and had a dozen middle-aged out-of-shape men hauling these several ton blocks up ramps from his quarry to prove his point.
That was 1980. It's quite possible that Mr. Raina dug up an ancient copy of that OMNI magazine, instead of pyramid artifacts. This isn't even archaeological news for nerds any more!
Spam exists only because of idiots. It's sent by idiots to idiots, on behalf of other idiots.
If you were merely average, it'd take you longer to identify spam. If you were truly stupid, it would take you several minutes each to read through them.
As has been pointed out oh-so-many times before, the truly stupid are now online (first 1045 hours free.) It's like a rewrite of the old math trick question: if you discard spam at the speed of light, but they take ten minutes per message, the average is still five minutes per message.
A list where you tick off your preferred political and social leanings (or even a questionaire to help you determine them.)
That way I wouldn't be tempted to buy an Interstate Battery for my vehicle because it was made by religious zealots, or drink Snapple because they donate to pro-life causes; but I would be OK buying the package of napkins because the company that produces them makes official targets for the NRA.
And the PETA folks could choose not to buy Nike shoes because of the leather, the green folks would be sh!t out of luck trying to buy anything because the plastic packaging came from Amoco, etc, etc, etc.
Of course, widespread use of this would lead to widespread fraud, where corporate hackers start attacking the watchdog databases trying to convince users that their brand was made from organic soy but the other guy's brand was made from ground-up third-world children.
It's not just a matter of "upgrading" it, it's a matter of moving it to a higher orbit. And that's something neither it nor the shuttle is designed for. It was designed to be "launched into space, deployed and used" not "deployed, used, packed-up, moved, and redeployed". So it will take some effort to figure out how to stow it for cartage to a higher orbit. But that should not be an insurmountable challenge, and you're right in suggesting we spend some money to achieve it.
The problem is pushing it up into that higher orbit. We don't have a tow truck we can send up to drag it up a couple dozen miles higher. The rapidly dwindling shuttle fleet is not designed to boost it (and as I said, it's not designed to be packed up for further boosting.)
That said, the NASA engineers are a clever bunch, and I trust that if anyone can find a way to extend the life of the HST with one or two missions, they can. So if they say "it has to come down," I'll be inclined to believe them.
I wonder if they could use a tether, tied to the shuttle and the HST, and "slingshot" the HST higher (using the shuttle's boosters as necessary,) transferring energy into boosting the HST into a higher orbit while at the same time decelerating the shuttle (which they have to do anyway to acheive reentry speeds.) Not that I'd really want to be the driver on that mission, mind you, but it could be possible and wouldn't involve putting the HST inside of the shuttle's cargo bay. They'd just have to find a 2km bungie cord, and we're all set!
I suppose they're dividing released copies of XP and dividing by the number of IP addresses reporting errors. That would distort their error rate, lowering it by the number of multiple copies of XP hidden behind each firewall. And for corporate lackeys reporting up to Billy, you can bet that the messenger that says "Sire, the error report is 5%" will not be beheaded nearly as soon as the messenger that says "Sire, the error report is 23%."
They're probably not using the GUID to identify your machine anymore. Spyware and adware coders long ago learned to sniff GUIDs to uniquely identify machines, and it was a well-published hole. In one of the security enhancements that preceeded XP, they "randomized" the UuidCreate() function so it no longer produces GUIDs that have the MAC address as the last 48 bits. (The GUID format used to be based on sequence-time-date-MAC_address, but it now randomly changes all 128 bits every time it's called.) I assume they are now using the same old mechanism but are running the data through MD5 or another similar one-way message digest algorithm, which would continue to guarantee unique numbers while "mostly" removing the ability to reverse-decrypt the MAC addresses.
I say "mostly" because if they are able to sniff out a MAC address via another mechanism (let's say, oh, your XP registration, and possibly your media player's licensing mechanism or another registered product) they would have a MAC / IP address tie-in. That would permit them to more easily brute-force an MD5 style hash based on the few possible IP addresses you may have come from in the past, or from your existing class C or D address. Probably not worth it for locating your average user clicking "Send error report", but perhaps worth tracing if Homeland Security says someone is emailing bad pictures or selling secrets to Soddom.
I suppose it's possible that the error-report-tool generated a GUID at installation and that GUID gets reported back to Microsoft with each error reported, which would serve to correllate errors without specifically identifying your machine. ('Course the environment block may have USERNAME and COMPUTERNAME in the contents of the dump, but hey, it's not like they're looking for it;-)
Anyway, I bet the 5% number is more based on statistics than on actual unique identifiers.
Then it would help you personally to send the error reports again and again, for statistical purposes. The more people click "send" on any given product should* drive their focus on what to fix next.
* for any sane definition of "should".
Of course if you disable the error reporting service completely, then you don't have to worry about whether or not you should send the error reports. For example, I don't like having it on because I don't want to send Microsoft ammunition that Mozilla crashes.:-)
The geologist says "I think I can fit it in my hammer loop here on my belt"... Then the mathmatician butts in and says...
"My engineering buddy here says that you can make 20 minute phone call for only one duck!"
So the bartender turns to the linguist, and says "Cunning."
"TEXT EMAIL ONLY" will not mean anything to anyone.
Less than 5% of the people I know (and I am geek-heavy in friends) understand the different between HTML and "TEXT EMAIL". If you say "TEXT EMAIL ONLY" the rest of these people will think "he doesn't want pictures? But I didn't send him a picture! WTF?" You have to think outside your immediate friends box and include non-tech people like your mom, your uncle in Rhode Island, human resources drones at large corporations who are replying to your resumes, etc.
Most of the world is not clueful enough to be able to tell the difference, and that's why mechanically interpreting the HTML for a spam filter is important.
Besides, the parent poster you replied to is not "rendering" the HTML, he's merely parsing it. No links will be followed, no images retrieved. The parent he replied to suggested rendering the HTML and OCRing it, which would not be the wisest action to take for precisely the reasons you mentioned.
As parents of a fifteen year old son, my wife and I have found the best mechanism for addressing all of this are the same mechanisms our parents used: raise him well enough that we can trust him, and smart enough to avoid problems. Sure, I expect he's going to do something very stupid before he's 18 (or he won't do enough growing up,) but our hope is that the damage won't be permanent. So far, we've been very pleased with the results. He's a great kid, very responsible, very smart, and not a social leper (but definitely a geek-in-training.)
We gave him a cell-phone for his 15th birthday, but haven't placed any "you must answer under penalty of X" restrictions on him. It's mostly so he can call us if he feels like he's in trouble or in over his head. The only real use we've gotten out of it so far is that he can call us to give him a ride after the movie's over.
I personally think the promise of child-tracking devices are highly overrated; sales are driven by FUD news stories of "molesters" and "kidnappers". It's way better to keep an eye on your kids when they're little, and raise children you can trust when they're older.
Sorry I don't, but even if I did I would not be able to talk about it beyond what has been publicly announced. (I'm not even sure where to find out stuff like that, actually.)
Rather than be put off by the "lack of Palmness" and expectations that it will be a substitute PDA, consider it a watch that happens to run Palm OS.
Now, if you don't expect to perform input on a watch, then don't. Instead, you can write a Palm OS program and download it to the watch to have as your watch "face." You want a Matrix-like falling digit clock? Write it. You want a port of the Dali clock, with constantly morphing digits? Port it. You want to write a Tetris clock-game, where the falling blocks are shaped like numbers? Cool. You can even push the buttons on the side to play a little game. Thne, when you want to run OmniRemote to change the channels on the TV in the bar, fine. It runs, it's Palm OS.
Just don't expect it to be your be-all/end-all PDA and it won't disappoint you.
DISCLAIMER: I work for a company who has a retail division that sells Fossil watches. However, I am not trying to shill these watches in order to get you to buy one; I'm just pointing out that they are not as useless as they look as long as you lower your expectations. I personally won't buy one for the same reason I won't buy a PalmOS / cellphone combo: they are two different devices serving two different functions using two different human interfaces that only share a common need for internet connectivity. Viva la Bluetooth!
It's different if it's a dog, or your wallet, or your handgun. But what if it's a person who maybe doesn't want Mommy to know she drove to her boyfriend's house and has been parked at the local park for the last three hours instead of at the library with her study-buddies?
Nothing will happen because you didn't walk out of the door through the security cameras with an unpaid-for packet of razor blades.
The system won't care if you pick them up, put them down, turn them all around, or whatever. The only time anything is triggered is when one passes out the door. The photographs taken at the time of pickup establish a link between the person taking them from the shelf and the person posessing unpaid-for merchandise leaving the store.
The photos provide more evidence that the person posessing them intentionally took them from the shelf. If they are video cameras, they may also provide a visual record that the person taking them stuffed them down their shirt or in their pockets with intent to conceal them.
This is really not that different than what happens today, except the stores are being more discriminating about what they're filming rather than blanket-filming everything and sorting it all out later.
As the previous respondent said, more than just the retailer is interested in where this merchandise has been and where it is going.
Something you may not realize is that retailers do not want to hang tags on their merchandise themselves. It costs way too much in labor and handling to uncrate the merchandise, stick tags on it, put it back in a bin, and hang it on the sales floor. The cost of handling and the cost of the label of store-level tagging far exceeds even the current price of RFID chips. Major retail chains have enough purchasing power to demand all merchandise be tagged for them by the manufacturers. So if the vendor is going to be coerced by the retailer into tagging the merchandise anyway, they too will benefit by inserting the tags earlier in the chain so they can use the automated ID in handling their own products. This also produces the side benefit to the retailer of having the tag embedded deeply in the product, discouraging or even preventing dressing-room tampering. How can you remove the tag if it was cast right into the sole of those $150 Nikes? Being 0.3mm^2 means being hard to find.
Another potential RFID benefit to both customers and merchants is that of returns. When a customer walks into a store and says "I want to return this stuff" the merchant can pull up the sale history of the merchandise, and immediately credit the customer's charge card or return the cash. No checks need to be mailed, no receipts needed; there's no quibble about whether or not the merchandise was purchased at the store in question or how it was paid for.
Merchants today see only good in RFID (except for the unit cost.) It eliminates the extra step required to place security tags on merchandise, it eliminates the expensive and clunky magnetic removers bolted to the checkout stands, it speeds checkout by eliminating the time spent scanning, and it prevents sweethearting at the register (ringing the item at a cheap price for your buddies.)
Merchants are probably not yet looking at tracking merchandise reentering their stores, wandering the aisles; or in interpreting other retailers' merchandise tags. The tags themselves will probably emit simple serial numbers that will not bear any evidence to say "this chip and merchandise was manufactured for sale by Target," but only because Target wouldn't want Wal*Mart to benefit from tracking Target customers around their stores.
Merchants are not overly concerned with customer privacy issues any more than is legally or politically required (HIPAA-Privacy, for example.) They will of course take steps to protect their data because it is prudent for them to do so, but they would not question or argue a court order to turn over RFID tracking data on a product. But they will also bow to popular pressure. Talking heads on the evening news saying "Wal*Mart is tracking your every move, film at 11" does get attention, and not the good kind.
Finally, the Holy Grail hope among merchants is that micro-detailed merchandise tracking will lead to detailed descriptions of willing buyers of more merchandise. I don't know if it's fair to call this behavior "insidous" simply because it's so overtly obvious. Merchandising is what retailers DO. It's just they think with RFID that they can do it better.
The blanket statement of "encryption is limted by law" is not true. Domestic use of encryption is not limited by law, with certain exceptions. Certain applications of encryption are limited. You mentioned the FCC. Most radio transmissions are required to be unencrypted (ham, AM, FM, etc.) but general usage of encryption is not limited. I know that Louis Freeh tried to get a bill together providing for extra penalties for use of encryption in a felony, but I don't remember if that bill ever passed into law or even came before Congress.
The exporting of encryption or encryption devices is still regulated. It used to be covered by the ITAR rules and tightly limited (40 bits max), but now falls under the EAR regulations and simply can't be exported to "bad" nations such as your Axis of Evil types.
Also, don't confuse the 1024-bit encryption in an asymetrical encryption algorithm (used in public/private key algorithms such as RSA, used by PGP to encode the session keys) with 56-, 64- or 128-bit encryption in symmetrical encryption algorithms such as DES or AES. The numbers are not at all comparable.
Finally, it was never proven that Lucifer (IBM's original parent algorithm that later became DES) was weakened at NSA's request. We know now that it was actually strengthened against the then-publically-unknown differential cryptanalysis attacks (via the addition of the staggered shift schedule after each round.)
While conspiracy theories abound, Occam's Razor suggests a more benign explanation. I personally believe the keyspace reduction from 64 to 56 bits actually reflected a needed performance increase traded for a minimal security impact, when you take into account the limited hardware of the time. Remember, DES was not intended for software implementations; as a matter of fact a DES implementation would not meet the FIPS standard unless it was performed in hardware. Anyway, the security reduction was that the high bits (2^7) of the key were dropped from inclusion in the computations. At the time, this would not have been considered a dramatic reduction in security because most keys were expected to be in the ASCII character set, which always has the bit 2^7 set to zero. But it would allow an implementer to make his hardwired chip simpler, cheaper and faster. And in the early 1970's, those were very important goals.
And yes, I know that it's actually only 55 bits of security but that's because it's invertable, not because of the hardware. I imagine 64-bit Lucifer would have only provided 63 bits anyway.
[ Please forgive errors in this since it's all from memory. A banana ate my copy of Applied Cryptography a few years ago. ]
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If it's a Compaq, you can use the pillow to muffle the shotgun blasts. But the neighbors will find out. They always find out.
Then you call "The Geek Squad" and have them send someone out to pretend to be your buddy Ernie. It'll cost you $100, but you don't have to go over there, eat their stupid tunafish casserole and listen to little Karla sing her first-grade song. It's money well spent.
An ordinary hand drill with a standard bit won't fling such tiny bits around. Yes, they're still metal chips, but not nearly as problematic as conductive dust.
Hey, I have fun with my Dremel, but I don't use it on circuit boards I'm interested in saving. If you must, may I suggest masking EVERYTHING else in the vicinity with masking tape and heavy paper (grocery bags work great) first? You can even put the masking tape right over the screwhead you're slotting (it won't hurt the dremel at all.)
A standard TORX driver plus a needlenose pliers (or other small-tipped, hard object) is all it takes. Use the needlenose or screwdriver to push the security pin off to one side or the other. They're just spot-welded in and break out really easily. Once the pin is gone, the standard TORX driver works just fine.
At least TORX bits are analog and I'm not violating the DMCA by telling you guys this. Of course, there's probably something in the USA PATRIOT act that prevents me from telling you how to open a power supply case... sigh.
It's a way to print a pattern or message out of a series of shiny/non-shiny patches on the paper. But if you look at it from top-down (the same way a scanner views a document) the changes are not visible.
So, you could print "Look for the logo between these lines: ---| @@ |--- " and if the person reading it doesn't see it, they can hopefully suspect a forgery.
This would be good for coupons, low-value stuff. You wouldn't want to print lots of real money relying only on this trick, because it'll get defeated soon enough (probably by some kid with a polarizing plate on his scanner and too much time on his hands.) But it's still a neat idea.
To your ramp theories, consider the pyramid construction in a spiral fashion. You wouldn't have a single 4800 foot ramp leading up the side, but you'd have 48 ramps each 50 feet long, raising the stones ten feet at a time (yes, this is a 20% grade, keep reading.)
The base would be laid square, with a ramp at a corner. Then the second course would be laid in the middle, leaving a working path around the edge. At the far end of this circumferential path around the top of the first level (at the end of the fourth side) you would erect another ramp leading inward up to the top of the second level. Repeat as needed till you get to the pinnacle.
Completing the pyramid would be a matter of filling in the top path, then destroying the ramp leading to it and filling in the next level. Repeat as needed until you're standing on the ground.
The only hard part is placing the very last block on each layer (the ones that need to go on top of where the ramps are. They require dead lifting. But now, you're only talking one or two stones per level, and you can muster additional help at these times.
This isn't the most efficient ramp system: every stone must travel all the way around the pyramid on every course. But it makes each ramp small and independent and therefore manageable. Ropes wearing thin on the 3rd level ramp? Replace them. The workers never have to haul a stone up more than one level at a time, and therefore they are fresh, and don't risk dropping one all the way down the length of the ramp.
It also scales: if you have more workers than space, you can double production speed by having two ramps on opposite corners. When completion time comes around, one of the ramps is closed and the level filled in with stones brought from the remaining ramp, and only a single corner is left to deadlift. They maybe even quadrupled production by having ramps on each of the four corners, although I haven't given enough thought to the space to figure out if that's even a possible arrangement of the ramps at the corners. I'm pretty sure it would work at the lower levels where there would have been lots of space available, but probably became less cost effective the nearer they got to the pinnacle.
See my earlier post for a description of how to easily raise one encircled block up one ramp at a time using a tethered rope and using the encircled block as a simple pulley. With this very simple method, raising a 2-ton (4000 pound) block up a 20% grade for 50 feet would take 400 pounds of pull on the rope over 100 feet. 400 pounds is not a lot for a small team of workers to pull. (Not that I'd want to do it as my day job, but it's certainly achievable.) And as each level approached completion, the ramps would be shortened and the inclines raised steeper. Now for that 40% grade you have to pull 800 pounds. Just double the number of workers and there you go. You even have extra rope for them to all hang on to because you shortened the ramp!
But going circular was a huge gain over the rollers of the day. We're talking round logs over hardpacked sand, not ball bearing wheels or even axles fixed to a cart. I don't think cart technology had progressed to the point where they could build durable enough carts to withstand repeated hauling of such heavy weights. And think of the friction! Even if they had wagons or carts that could haul those rocks, you'd be spending as much energy fighting the axle friction as you would actually hauling the rock's weight. Making the rock the center of a circle would have invoked the "least moving parts" principle to reduce friction, and was an excellent solution given the technology of the day.
As I mentioned in the nearby post, I believe the ramps involved were small, one or two block rows at a time from one construction level to the next. The ramps did not extend from the bottom to the top of the pyramids in one giant slope. So there would have been no need to stop for these small distances, or to involve a wedge of any sort.
I also don't think they risked any people by "pushing" the rocks up the ramps. By firmly affixing ropes to the floor at the top of each ramp, they would be invoking a simple pulley to ease the work of raising the blocks. Roll the circular rock up to the base of the ramp, pass the free end of the ropes under the rock, around the circle and over the top back to the pullers standing on the upper surface of the ramp, and you have just cut your work to pull one rock up the ramp in half. As a bonus, you have no one standing behind the rock in case something goes wrong. The most you might need would be tenders on the sides to make sure the rock didn't stray left or right off the ramp.
Anyway, keep in mind that the ramps involved are only the height of one block row (maybe five or six feet?) That would be performed in a single effort, and the block would soon be up on the next level, on a flat and level surface. It would be rolled along that flat surface until it got to the next ramp. It would not require wedges at all.
That's when an "inventor" announced this last time I heard it.
I recall it was an interesting article. He developed the technique to remove blocks from his quarry and thought "this is so easy someone else must have invented it first." So he did some research, then did some more research, and finally found wooden rockers just like the ones he built were discovered in the pyramid (they were labeled "cradles".)
He then duplicated these wooden rockers, quarried some blocks to replicate the size of the blocks used in the pyramids, and had a dozen middle-aged out-of-shape men hauling these several ton blocks up ramps from his quarry to prove his point.
That was 1980. It's quite possible that Mr. Raina dug up an ancient copy of that OMNI magazine, instead of pyramid artifacts. This isn't even archaeological news for nerds any more!
Spam exists only because of idiots. It's sent by idiots to idiots, on behalf of other idiots.
If you were merely average, it'd take you longer to identify spam. If you were truly stupid, it would take you several minutes each to read through them.
As has been pointed out oh-so-many times before, the truly stupid are now online (first 1045 hours free.) It's like a rewrite of the old math trick question: if you discard spam at the speed of light, but they take ten minutes per message, the average is still five minutes per message.
A list where you tick off your preferred political and social leanings (or even a questionaire to help you determine them.)
That way I wouldn't be tempted to buy an Interstate Battery for my vehicle because it was made by religious zealots, or drink Snapple because they donate to pro-life causes; but I would be OK buying the package of napkins because the company that produces them makes official targets for the NRA.
And the PETA folks could choose not to buy Nike shoes because of the leather, the green folks would be sh!t out of luck trying to buy anything because the plastic packaging came from Amoco, etc, etc, etc.
Of course, widespread use of this would lead to widespread fraud, where corporate hackers start attacking the watchdog databases trying to convince users that their brand was made from organic soy but the other guy's brand was made from ground-up third-world children.
The problem is pushing it up into that higher orbit. We don't have a tow truck we can send up to drag it up a couple dozen miles higher. The rapidly dwindling shuttle fleet is not designed to boost it (and as I said, it's not designed to be packed up for further boosting.)
That said, the NASA engineers are a clever bunch, and I trust that if anyone can find a way to extend the life of the HST with one or two missions, they can. So if they say "it has to come down," I'll be inclined to believe them.
I wonder if they could use a tether, tied to the shuttle and the HST, and "slingshot" the HST higher (using the shuttle's boosters as necessary,) transferring energy into boosting the HST into a higher orbit while at the same time decelerating the shuttle (which they have to do anyway to acheive reentry speeds.) Not that I'd really want to be the driver on that mission, mind you, but it could be possible and wouldn't involve putting the HST inside of the shuttle's cargo bay. They'd just have to find a 2km bungie cord, and we're all set!
They're probably not using the GUID to identify your machine anymore. Spyware and adware coders long ago learned to sniff GUIDs to uniquely identify machines, and it was a well-published hole. In one of the security enhancements that preceeded XP, they "randomized" the UuidCreate() function so it no longer produces GUIDs that have the MAC address as the last 48 bits. (The GUID format used to be based on sequence-time-date-MAC_address, but it now randomly changes all 128 bits every time it's called.) I assume they are now using the same old mechanism but are running the data through MD5 or another similar one-way message digest algorithm, which would continue to guarantee unique numbers while "mostly" removing the ability to reverse-decrypt the MAC addresses.
I say "mostly" because if they are able to sniff out a MAC address via another mechanism (let's say, oh, your XP registration, and possibly your media player's licensing mechanism or another registered product) they would have a MAC / IP address tie-in. That would permit them to more easily brute-force an MD5 style hash based on the few possible IP addresses you may have come from in the past, or from your existing class C or D address. Probably not worth it for locating your average user clicking "Send error report", but perhaps worth tracing if Homeland Security says someone is emailing bad pictures or selling secrets to Soddom.
I suppose it's possible that the error-report-tool generated a GUID at installation and that GUID gets reported back to Microsoft with each error reported, which would serve to correllate errors without specifically identifying your machine. ('Course the environment block may have USERNAME and COMPUTERNAME in the contents of the dump, but hey, it's not like they're looking for it ;-)
Anyway, I bet the 5% number is more based on statistics than on actual unique identifiers.
* for any sane definition of "should".
Of course if you disable the error reporting service completely, then you don't have to worry about whether or not you should send the error reports. For example, I don't like having it on because I don't want to send Microsoft ammunition that Mozilla crashes. :-)
So the bartender turns to the linguist, and says "Cunning."
But the cantenna was great. I remember seeing plans in popular electronics, thinking if I lived in an apartment building I'd make one in a minute.
'Course, nowdays it's hard to even FIND a metal slinky anymore :-(
Less than 5% of the people I know (and I am geek-heavy in friends) understand the different between HTML and "TEXT EMAIL". If you say "TEXT EMAIL ONLY" the rest of these people will think "he doesn't want pictures? But I didn't send him a picture! WTF?" You have to think outside your immediate friends box and include non-tech people like your mom, your uncle in Rhode Island, human resources drones at large corporations who are replying to your resumes, etc.
Most of the world is not clueful enough to be able to tell the difference, and that's why mechanically interpreting the HTML for a spam filter is important.
Besides, the parent poster you replied to is not "rendering" the HTML, he's merely parsing it. No links will be followed, no images retrieved. The parent he replied to suggested rendering the HTML and OCRing it, which would not be the wisest action to take for precisely the reasons you mentioned.
We gave him a cell-phone for his 15th birthday, but haven't placed any "you must answer under penalty of X" restrictions on him. It's mostly so he can call us if he feels like he's in trouble or in over his head. The only real use we've gotten out of it so far is that he can call us to give him a ride after the movie's over.
I personally think the promise of child-tracking devices are highly overrated; sales are driven by FUD news stories of "molesters" and "kidnappers". It's way better to keep an eye on your kids when they're little, and raise children you can trust when they're older.
Sorry I don't, but even if I did I would not be able to talk about it beyond what has been publicly announced. (I'm not even sure where to find out stuff like that, actually.)
Rather than be put off by the "lack of Palmness" and expectations that it will be a substitute PDA, consider it a watch that happens to run Palm OS.
Now, if you don't expect to perform input on a watch, then don't. Instead, you can write a Palm OS program and download it to the watch to have as your watch "face." You want a Matrix-like falling digit clock? Write it. You want a port of the Dali clock, with constantly morphing digits? Port it. You want to write a Tetris clock-game, where the falling blocks are shaped like numbers? Cool. You can even push the buttons on the side to play a little game. Thne, when you want to run OmniRemote to change the channels on the TV in the bar, fine. It runs, it's Palm OS.
Just don't expect it to be your be-all/end-all PDA and it won't disappoint you.
DISCLAIMER: I work for a company who has a retail division that sells Fossil watches. However, I am not trying to shill these watches in order to get you to buy one; I'm just pointing out that they are not as useless as they look as long as you lower your expectations. I personally won't buy one for the same reason I won't buy a PalmOS / cellphone combo: they are two different devices serving two different functions using two different human interfaces that only share a common need for internet connectivity. Viva la Bluetooth!
Why do you think that will probably raise the intelligence level here by at least 500%!?
It's different if it's a dog, or your wallet, or your handgun. But what if it's a person who maybe doesn't want Mommy to know she drove to her boyfriend's house and has been parked at the local park for the last three hours instead of at the library with her study-buddies?
The lines get grayer.
Nothing will happen because you didn't walk out of the door through the security cameras with an unpaid-for packet of razor blades.
The system won't care if you pick them up, put them down, turn them all around, or whatever. The only time anything is triggered is when one passes out the door. The photographs taken at the time of pickup establish a link between the person taking them from the shelf and the person posessing unpaid-for merchandise leaving the store.
The photos provide more evidence that the person posessing them intentionally took them from the shelf. If they are video cameras, they may also provide a visual record that the person taking them stuffed them down their shirt or in their pockets with intent to conceal them.
This is really not that different than what happens today, except the stores are being more discriminating about what they're filming rather than blanket-filming everything and sorting it all out later.
Something you may not realize is that retailers do not want to hang tags on their merchandise themselves. It costs way too much in labor and handling to uncrate the merchandise, stick tags on it, put it back in a bin, and hang it on the sales floor. The cost of handling and the cost of the label of store-level tagging far exceeds even the current price of RFID chips. Major retail chains have enough purchasing power to demand all merchandise be tagged for them by the manufacturers. So if the vendor is going to be coerced by the retailer into tagging the merchandise anyway, they too will benefit by inserting the tags earlier in the chain so they can use the automated ID in handling their own products. This also produces the side benefit to the retailer of having the tag embedded deeply in the product, discouraging or even preventing dressing-room tampering. How can you remove the tag if it was cast right into the sole of those $150 Nikes? Being 0.3mm^2 means being hard to find.
Another potential RFID benefit to both customers and merchants is that of returns. When a customer walks into a store and says "I want to return this stuff" the merchant can pull up the sale history of the merchandise, and immediately credit the customer's charge card or return the cash. No checks need to be mailed, no receipts needed; there's no quibble about whether or not the merchandise was purchased at the store in question or how it was paid for.
Merchants today see only good in RFID (except for the unit cost.) It eliminates the extra step required to place security tags on merchandise, it eliminates the expensive and clunky magnetic removers bolted to the checkout stands, it speeds checkout by eliminating the time spent scanning, and it prevents sweethearting at the register (ringing the item at a cheap price for your buddies.)
Merchants are probably not yet looking at tracking merchandise reentering their stores, wandering the aisles; or in interpreting other retailers' merchandise tags. The tags themselves will probably emit simple serial numbers that will not bear any evidence to say "this chip and merchandise was manufactured for sale by Target," but only because Target wouldn't want Wal*Mart to benefit from tracking Target customers around their stores.
Merchants are not overly concerned with customer privacy issues any more than is legally or politically required (HIPAA-Privacy, for example.) They will of course take steps to protect their data because it is prudent for them to do so, but they would not question or argue a court order to turn over RFID tracking data on a product. But they will also bow to popular pressure. Talking heads on the evening news saying "Wal*Mart is tracking your every move, film at 11" does get attention, and not the good kind.
Finally, the Holy Grail hope among merchants is that micro-detailed merchandise tracking will lead to detailed descriptions of willing buyers of more merchandise. I don't know if it's fair to call this behavior "insidous" simply because it's so overtly obvious. Merchandising is what retailers DO. It's just they think with RFID that they can do it better.
The exporting of encryption or encryption devices is still regulated. It used to be covered by the ITAR rules and tightly limited (40 bits max), but now falls under the EAR regulations and simply can't be exported to "bad" nations such as your Axis of Evil types.
Also, don't confuse the 1024-bit encryption in an asymetrical encryption algorithm (used in public/private key algorithms such as RSA, used by PGP to encode the session keys) with 56-, 64- or 128-bit encryption in symmetrical encryption algorithms such as DES or AES. The numbers are not at all comparable.
Finally, it was never proven that Lucifer (IBM's original parent algorithm that later became DES) was weakened at NSA's request. We know now that it was actually strengthened against the then-publically-unknown differential cryptanalysis attacks (via the addition of the staggered shift schedule after each round.)
While conspiracy theories abound, Occam's Razor suggests a more benign explanation. I personally believe the keyspace reduction from 64 to 56 bits actually reflected a needed performance increase traded for a minimal security impact, when you take into account the limited hardware of the time. Remember, DES was not intended for software implementations; as a matter of fact a DES implementation would not meet the FIPS standard unless it was performed in hardware. Anyway, the security reduction was that the high bits (2^7) of the key were dropped from inclusion in the computations. At the time, this would not have been considered a dramatic reduction in security because most keys were expected to be in the ASCII character set, which always has the bit 2^7 set to zero. But it would allow an implementer to make his hardwired chip simpler, cheaper and faster. And in the early 1970's, those were very important goals.
And yes, I know that it's actually only 55 bits of security but that's because it's invertable, not because of the hardware. I imagine 64-bit Lucifer would have only provided 63 bits anyway.
[ Please forgive errors in this since it's all from memory. A banana ate my copy of Applied Cryptography a few years ago. ]