I think MMORPGs build "stronger" communities through volume. Sony has, what, 2 million users of EverCrack? Most MUDs have memberships in the hundreds or low thousands (if that.) The sheer numbers would indicate that you'd be more likely to meet up with other like-minded people, regardless of the situation.
But yeah, it's more like going to a movie
It looks like they're patenting database "filters"
on
NCR Patents the Internet
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So apparently if you can filter a database you violate their patents?
If Borland could find an old copy of PowerBase they could probably get this patent thrown out for prior art, and have their own patent rejected for coming 20 years too late.
I dunno. Whining about incompetently issued patents is like whining about Microsoft or the DMCA. Good for a few quotable flames, but no real news. Move along, nothing to see here.
Hey, I think the study was an EXCELLENT and much needed experiment. Traffic metering (the pre-study way) did NOT work well at all.
I certainly was one of the meter detractors: I always knew that the meters did nothing but increase my personal travel time. I commuted from the south metro (up Hwy 77) to Minneapolis and was affected by the meters both coming and going. And sure enough, shutting off the meters improved my morning commute by 10-15 minutes or more! But it increased my evening commute by about the same amount. What it did show was that the metering system was out of touch with reality, and that improvements were both possible and needed.
Most of us long-time commuters always saw those meter lights as wasteful delay devices. They actively discouraged us from trying alternate routes (if you ever took side-streets south and then tried to use the Old Shakopee Rd ramp to southbound 77 on a snowy day, you would have experienced over an hour of frustratation.) They also encouraged some people to waste gas by "cheating" meters -- driving a few miles out of the way to a never-busy meter. Meters were just a piece of incompetent 1970's legislation that had just been forced on the citizenry, a managerial "quick-fix" reaction to traffic problems. The study forced MnDOT to take a good look at how they were operating their meters, and to actually tune them to improve the way traffic really flows.
More than that, it gave us all a needed dose of acceptance that something actually had been done. Someone looked at problems, and someone tried to fix them. Even if the metering had been restored to exactly what it had been like before (even though it was immediately obvious when they fixed it) the fact that they actually studied the problems and tried to address them made us all feel a lot better about those red-eyed cyclopses.
It was one of those rare cases of a frustrated citizenry actually getting a legislator to listen and to try something new and it produced a tangible good. Not only are my commute times improved, but I don't get angered by the metering lights any more.
I think the second novel was a decent followup to Dune, but it's also where Herbert started to get more wrapped up in the political / religious issues.
After the second book, even the bogus political / religious issues took on a tiresome sameness, rather like the plotions manufactured for each episode of Star Trek. I found them frustrating. He hinted at all these worlds, each of which could easily have been as interesting as Arrakis (I wanted to see a book set on Salusa Secundis) but they all focused around the lame Bene Gesserits.
I hope the SciFi channel has enough sense to stop filming sequels after this book.
Just a followup to evilpenguin's fine description.
Each of the metering lights in the Twin Cities are uniquely preset with three metering rates: light, medium and heavy. This means that one on-ramp might release cars every two seconds in light, fast-moving traffic conditions; but the next ramp down the same stretch of freeway might be releasing cars only once every four seconds in the same conditions.
Also, the DOT is easily able to identify misfiring sensors. On their old web page, you could see that they had "greyed out" the failed sensors.
What this means is that a single metering light won't just decide to sit there for 10 minutes if a glitch happens. It might switch to its "heavy" setting, but it won't take ten minutes to change.
Finally, as an aside, around here running a ramp meter light carries the exact same penalty as running a red light at any intersection. Moving violation, $80 fine, 3 points, the whole nine yards. I won't do it. Ten minutes seems really excessive, though. If you have to wait 10 minutes for a light to change, call your highway department and report a broken signal. They should fix it.
Can I ask where you live? I'm in the Minneapolis / St.Paul area and I'm weighing the DSL vs cable issue right now.
I have Qwest phone service and AT&T cable. I have been thinking I'd rather go DSL (private line service, so to speak, and not tithing the Death Star also has an appeal) but I didn't think the price for DSL would be as high as you're paying.
Star Trek is dying because its fanbase hasn't changed. At all. Wide-eyed boys watching it in the 1960s at the peak of the space race have become wide-backsided 40-somethings (yes, I mean me.) Sorry to be the harbinger of doom, but the world has changed, and the fanbase hasn't.
In the 60's, the Red Menace with their Atom Bombs and the looming reality of being drafted into the Vietnam war pressed our society to turn to something fantastic for relief. The urgency of the race to the moon gave a certain romance to anything set in space. So now provide a superbly written series set in space where the good guys always defeat the bad guys, the hero always kisses the girl, and you'll have made such an impression on your fan base that they will follow you until both you and they die.
So here we are. 40-somethings trying to hang on to that amazing bit of our youth. Sure, the occassional larva of today will watch the show with his dad or mom, but he's got a hundred other action movies to go see now, and a hundred other shows on TV to watch. Our kids just don't have the pressures to emotionally invest themselves in a show that doesn't have the real-world relevance that Star Trek once held for us. Scenes like jumping the land rover into the shuttle are a nod to the successes of other action movies such as Spiderman or Men in Black. They make the trekkies laugh or howl. Keep in mind that either reaction is fine, since any reaction is better than none at all. Hopefully, they hold the Trekkies' kids interest for a few more minutes.
Trekkies are a dying breed. Literally. Their best hope for future movies may be to include more plots ranging around geriatric issues, offering that amazing "Star Trek Gee-Whiz Space Hope (TM)" to elderly Trekkies; maybe pitching "Romulan Metamucil" or "Klingon Moment".
As long as the FBI's tentacles may be, they don't extend all the way into Hungary. They'd have to convince Hungarian law enforcement that this is a virus, yadda yadda.
However, Xupiter is busy paying Hungarian taxes, while the FBI is not. If you were the Hungarian police, who would you take direction from?
No, master keys don't necessarily need to have the deepest OR shallowest cuts. It's been a convenient convention for locksmiths to use in the past, but by no means is it required. Software derived key master systems are now available to locksmiths of any level of expertise, and the old school of "Start here to make a master, then do this to make change keys" is not as relevant as it once was.
Matt's attack might be best described with a password analogy of a lock.
Because that's exactly how a pin tumbler lock works.
You've been given the password "FOO" for use with some ancient security system. The master password is unknown, but you know that it has three letters. The trick is knowing that there is no relationships between password letters. It will let you in regardless of if the letter was for your password or for the master password.
You start out by trying "AOO". No go. You try "BOO", and it works. Therefore, the first master letter is "B".
Next, you try "FAO". It works. Therefore, the second letter of the password is "A".
Next, you try "FOA". Nope, try "FOB". Nope, try "FOC". Nope, try "FOD". Bingo! The third letter is "D", and the master password is "BAD".
Yes, it's that easy. Instead of changing letters, you file a bit of metal off a key blank, but otherwise it's the exact same attack.
The article is spare on details, because the NYT does not really want to risk publishing this already publically available information. (They're trying to avoid the "Look, lock picking info right here in the Times!" claims.)
First, you really should read Matt's paper, then you might understand the details of the attack as well as gain an appreciation for its simplicity.
I'm not going to argue the difference between terrorists and criminals, or between terror targets and criminal targets. Let's just say that the value of a Top Master Key to either group would be higher than not having one.
Matt makes mention in the paper that he found no reference to this type of attack in the available locksmithing literature, either in trade publications, reference materials, manufacturers information or in the underground literature. He speculates that the idea is simple enough that he probably wasn't the first to take the approach; but if it was already a known weakness, locksmiths around the world sure hadn't been getting together anywhere to say "Hey, let's fix this problem." When he brought it to the attention of law enforcement and lock manufacturers last September, they started to get word out. And as word of the defense spread, news of the attack spread faster, so Matt felt justified in publishing it openly. Now, the industry had better move fast, as faith in their product is being eroded.
Matt includes the math indicating how many attempts need to be made by the attacker. Most commercial systems would take about 40 attempts or so. This is much faster than traditional lockpicking.
The basic idea here is that the attacker is already someone trusted enough to use the lock for which he has already been legitimately given a key. The attacker can walk up to the lock, and if nobody is paying much attention he can try a test key. If nobody continues to notice him, he can try a second, or a third, etc. If someone does come by, he pulls out his legitimate key, apologizes "Oops, I tried my house key without thinking, sorry I didn't mean to slow you down" opens the lock, and goes about his ordinary business. He's a legitimate employee, with a legitimate key and has every right in the world to put his key in the lock. But he uses that right as cover for his illegitimate attack. It would certainly be possible to perform the attack right in front of a receptionist over the course of a month, just by trying only one test key each trip through a door. If the receptionist even noticed anything, it would probably be along the lines of "you take longer to open that door than anyone else in this office." The social-engineer's reply would then be "the key they gave me is sticky, it usually takes a couple times to get it to work right." Instead of suspicion, the attacker gets sympathy.
It's a real flaw, and a very easily exploited one. I just got out my lowly supply closet key (giving highly-trusted-me access to a veritable wealth of paper clips and pencil lead refills), and with this small effort I could turn it into a key allowing me access to payroll's offices and records, the vice president's office, the closet where they keep airline tickets and petty cash, the boiler room, whatever.
Rest assured, the pictures on his web show no place you could hide enough weight to overcome the mass of that RCX brick. It sure looks real enough at first glance.
Hey, if you doubt him, he's got building instructions on his web site, and source code to the program. Go build your own. It'd be far more scientific that accusing him of cheating.
We had ancient IBM 3650s that we ditched in 1987. Had a 10MB drive in the cabinet, platters driven by a belt from a motor that looked like a sewing machine motor.
That drive had the ordinary head mounted on the arm, but it also had an extra stationary head mounted at the edge. It was for high performance live data capturing. The write data from the live capture was always written almost immediately with the stationary head, and was later read by the ordinary movable head.
Of course, this was certainly back in the day when a 13" platter only held 10MB (probably about 260KB/in^2). Alignment might have been less critical.
By the same logic, this would apply to spam and to spam relays. Given the typical law enforcement agency's less-than-complete grasp of all the technology out there, I would be justified in taking down your box because it forwarded spam to me.
Does it extend further? Can I take down tripod.com because I got a bunch of pop-unders from one of their pages? If I do, can I convince a judge that I was justified because of the loss of bandwidth and memory I suffered?
It just gets gray really fast. One persons "attack" is another persons advertising (think "free speech".) What if someone downloads a Metallica MP3 from a Trojan RIAA machine? That may be considered entrapment, or it may be seen as an active defense. I think that anything that has such a nebulous line, such a wide gray area, probably shouldn't be allowed simply because of the "slippery slope" patterns of abuse we see so often here in America.
The poster had valid points, he just didn't back them up with enough facts.
When you start dealing with the barcode specs (I use MIL-STD-1189A for Code 3 of 9, the UPC Shipping Container Code and Symbol Specification Manual for Interleaved 2 of 5, among many others) you will find that not all codes are created equal.
All barcodes specifications state the allowable tolerances for bar width, spacing, color, reflectance, etc. These tolerances tighten up as the barcode gets smaller, (and loosen as the barcodes get larger.) If you want to print a 50-digit Code 128 in a two-inch-wide space, for example, you've got to be absolutely precise (within.0025 inches not only with the leading edge of the bar, but the interbar spacing has to be within.0015 inches. Plus, each character has to be within.0015 of the right distance to the next character. This is very difficult to achieve on digital equipment with fixed element printing positions for a variety of reasons. Most scanners have a very hard time reading accurately at this small end of the scale.
If you're spraying interleaved 2 of 5 barcodes on the sides of fibre box shipping containers, the tolerances change dramatically. The width tolerances climb to.014 inches per symbol. Of course, the factory-line bar code scanners are dramatically different than the hand held scanners you see at department stores, and are designed
(By the way, UPC has four distinct bar widths and spaces, not two. Code 3 of 9 and Interleaved 2 of five have only two distinct widths. And PostNet has only one width. The PostNet post office barcode is different from other bar codes in that it's not self clocking: the space between the bars means nothing, the short bars exist only as place holders for timing the long bars. It's a rudimentary 2D system.)
Those are the standards. What that means is if bar code producers meet them, and your barcode still doesn't work, then you get to blame the scanner manufacturer for failings.
All that said, reality actually ends up being "whatever works." Scanners are usually more tolerant than specifications demand, simply because people complain when the scanners don't work. Barcodes that are printed on merchandise are usually tighter to spec than required, because the merchants frequently have contractual obligations to provide "100% first scan success rates." (Think how much it would cost a big retail chain like Target if those bottles of Mountain Dew took five seconds to scan each instead of.5 seconds. Every clerk in the chain would be wasting time each day fighting the bottles and scanners.)
To address your examples, the older barcodes may be fading to your eyes, which may or may not be affecting their reflectivity (just because it's fading in the visible spectrum doesn't necessarily meaning it's fading in the spectrum the scanner uses.) The dot-matrix Blockbuster barcode was most likely produced on a Blockbuster corporate tested dot-matrix printer and tested with the Blockbuster corporate store scanner. Your older barcodes probably aren't stretching non-linearly, either.
Printing barcodes on random people's computers is risky. You don't know what kind of equipment they're going to have. They may have a cruddy old dot-matrix printer, or the latest Canon BubbleJet. And no matter what kind of gear they have, they're likely to be proud of it, so if you can't read their barcodes, they'll take it personallly.
Anyway, you're right. Barcoding is not an overly demanding science, but it does have limitations. JPEG isn't great because while it can print sharp lines, its compression scheme can change WHERE each of those lines are printed, which is just as important as sharpness.
Hey, this is a Windows project. Ever use Visual Studio's "wizards"?
The bastards'll generate 100 lines of code per left click, 150 lines per right click, and an extra 50 lines for each check box you manage to hover over.
Unless it's MFC based. Then double each of those.
(Before anyone starts refuting this, it is a joke! I don't care how many lines of code the app lizards crank out...)
Hey, I'm locked into MS by my day job as well. But that doesn't mean I'm going to be seduced by the plusses offered. I see only the looming stick of Palladium at the other end of that path, and I fully intend to be running Linux or FreeBSD at home full time before that.
I just need to have a distro I can convince my wife, son, brother-in-law, mother and sister to run. It's very hard to tell them "Hey, you can't buy software at Target or Best Buy any more because we run Linux now." That's not a big selling point.
You also don't address the *use*.NET was put to. It was used as a marketing gimmick, and to justify getting people locked in to the system to pay for new versions and upgrade their systems.
I did mention at the very bottom that I think.NET is being used as the "Gateway to Palladium." I don't believe it was created to that end, but its architecture certainly lends itself to absolute OS control of the machine. And that's the ultimate lock-in.
What is the problem that.NET as you describe is supposed to fix?
I think the problems Microsoft is addressing are twofold: One, make development "easier" by improving type safety and allowing free choice of languages. Easier development leads to more development per developer, therefore developers are more "productive." Also, it should improve platform stability. (Carrots.) Two, it will help Microsoft make more money by moving end users to a subscription-based model of software sales. (Stick.) All of these help Microsoft, but only the stability portion helps the end user.
My interpretation is basically that they've gotten a new language, and they are changing all their other languages to be like it.
It's not really a new language, it's a mostly-familiar set of front-end languages (VB.NET ~= VB, C# ~= C++) to a new bytecode language, and a new API beneath it.
New bindings in code to.NET beneath wouldn't solve the current DLL hell problems. And the old languages don't improve reliablity just because they're generating bytecode. The automatic memory allocation and deallocation means that there will be almost no chances for buffer overflows or memory leaks, the biggest contributers to crashing under Windows today. Sure, programs can still be written "wrong", (such as add $1.00 and $2.00 and come up with $2.99) but they won't be as likely to crash the platform beneath themselves or corrupt other unrelated applications.
I'm sorry, but that quote from the Microsoft FAQ never cleared anything up for me. It's like saying "We have developed a motive device used to convey substances from a point to another point." They could be describing a car, a bucket, or a fish's stomach.
Perhaps I divided it up in arbitrarily labeled fragments based on my understanding. But none of the Microsoft marketing drivel ever made anything clear. This is how I explained it to myself.
and you just missed a golden opportunity to enlighten us all...
Fine, then I'll do it.
.NET the "language" is an intermediate language bytecode called IL (Intermediate Language). You can produce it from any.NET compiler. The bytecode that is "JITted" (Just In Time compiled) at runtime as needed. The runtime environment is a process called the CLR (Common Language Runtime.)
.NET the framework also contains the system class, which exposes all of the available platform functionality. Those of you who use the Win32 API, Platform SDK, DDK, etc., know just how big this class is. It's fairly well organized.
The biggest advantage to the platform for develpers is absolute type declarations with full knowledge at the object interface: if you write an object method in VB.NET that takes two Integers, a String, and an array of Dates and returns an Integer value, then you can directly refer to that method in your C# routine. There is no conversion needed between types, not even between languages, which has historically been a problem with Microsoft code ever since OLE.
.NET also fully supports exporting and importing these objects via SOAP.
Visual Studio.NET is a development IDE for all the Microsoft.NET languages: VB.NET, C#, and others. It's similar to Microsoft's Visual Studio 6.0, but all the separate components are better integrated. All languages compile together to produce a single "package", which you then ship to your customers. There are no "installations" as the package is self contained. And it still includes a native C++ compiler which can still emit code for any Windows platform (except for.NET...)
Microsoft says the combination of the above puts all languages on an equal footing: developers can code in whatever language suits them. (Since it's interpreted bytecodes, I think it makes all languages equally second class, but that's just me.) So with.NET language is not a barrier to function calls. You want to call method "Foo" on an object called "Bar"? You just do it in your working language, however that language invokes methods on objects. You don't know when you're writing it what language it will be called from. You don't worry when you're calling it what language it was written in.
That's the developers' carrot in a nutshell. And so here's the developers' stick: Everything is shipped as bytecodes in that package, and the supplied decompiler already spits out source code that's only missing some of the documentation. I asked the guy during the.NET product introduction "How is intellectual property protected if anyone can just decompile the code?" The answer started out evasive, but boiled down to: We [Microsoft] will be serving up our meat-and-potatoes functionality via the web, so our code is hidden behind our firewall. Come, join us. You do not know the power of the dark side. (OK, so maybe the guy didn't say that last line, or at least not out loud.)
On the whole, I was semi-impressed at the product introduction. Having strong type safety is really a good thing to me, because I do spend time fighting code that has been carelessly cast, and I also spend time converting from VARIANT arrays of UI1 to STD::strings. Automated garbage collection and automagic reference counting is also really nice. But interpreted languages haven't been exciting to me since GW-BASIC. (Sorry, you Java weenies, but I'm too old to think wasting cycles interpreting bytecodes in front of a user at run time is ever a good thing.) And C# is not C++, nor is it Java. I don't like that IL will only do its own random-time garbage collection and can not support destructors, not even virtual destructors. There are times when I want to garbage collect at a specific point in time (examples such as cleaning up scarce resources like database connections or sockets come easily to mind.)
But I really, really don't like that.NET is ultimately just a facade to hide the movement of software to the subscription model under Palladium. Want to print that Word document? Did you tithe Microsoft this month? Nope? Too bad. Are you still offline? Too bad, you can't run PowerPoint.NET until you're back online and we can check the status of your subscription (or at least check the status of your Visa card authorization.).NET will make Palladium viable, since the CLR is a trusted software container (read: sandbox.)
So, on the whole,.NET has too many really huge negatives to get me going. It even caused me to ditch my MSDN subscription because it had become "Nothing but.NET" Literally.
Lead is toxic, but not in the tiny quantities that are likely to be left on your hands after you melt it into your car.
[ I'm sorry, but I just want to scream when I hear people talk like this. "It won't hurt my kids; we did that all the time when I was a kid; I never got sick from it." You sound like my father-in-law, who would be very lucky to make it to age 70 after all his occupational exposures to various chemicals. He has certainly been crippled by them. ]
Lead is toxic in any quantity. It doesn't change toxicity just because you have less of it. The real issue is "at what quantity does this toxicity pose an unacceptable risk to me or my child?" Do you know how much lead you or your child can safely tolerate? Did you look it up? I'll save you the trouble. According to the CDC the current action level for lead is 10 micrograms/dL. That's been reduced about 10 micrograms/dL per decade since the 1960s, when they first decided 40 micrograms/dL was too much.
An average adult has about 5.6 liters of blood. Figure a child under 12 as having about half of that. That means you should be concerned if your child's blood contains more than 280 micrograms of lead..00028 grams. A 1-ounce fishing sinker contains one million times this amount. If you can see the gray smears on your hands and fingers after handling the lead, you probably have more than that right there on your hands. Wash it off.
Children also have a much higher absorption rate of ingested lead -- adults absorb about 11% of the lead that reaches the digestive tract, while children absorb about 35%. For this fact, others, and a listing of the damage lead can do to a human, read this FDA report.
Keep in mind that lead does not exit the body. Lead builds up over time. If your child acquires.0001 grams of lead this year,.0001 grams next year and.0001 grams the year after, he will exceeded the actionable amount of lead.
The CDC and other federal agencies have been lowering the acceptable limit of lead dramatically every decade since the sixties, and not just for children. They lower it because they know the dangers of lead poisoning are real, and the studies keep showing neurological damage occurs at lower and lower levels. They don't know at what level (other than zero) it's safe.
And regarding telling the kids about "aerodynamic glue", I didn't know if you were the sort of person who would feel the need to have a cover story to hide behind. As you may have guessed, I certainly told my son the truth about the lead sinkers we were using, and we washed our hands carefully afterwards. Hell, I made our whole family wash our hands after working with the Christmas tree light strings this year, because I discovered they use lead-based pigment in the green electrical insulation!
Lead exposure is a serious health problem, and one that you can help avoid every time you avoid exposure. And this is an easy one to avoid -- use an alternate substance. If your car is.1 gram overweight at the official scale, use a drill and remove wood instead of lead.
But don't go telling people stuff like "it's OK, that's not enough lead to hurt you or your kid." That's irresponsible in the extreme.
I know this is a "duh" posting, but it needs to be repeated, and especially when there are kids involved.
Scout stores and hobby stores sell prescored "pinewood derby weight kits" that come with predrilled plates, some doublestick tape, and a couple of screws. They're nontoxic, and you can easily break off excess amounts of weight during the weigh-in. (Personally, I think they're a bit overkill, but hey, they're non-toxic.) If you don't want to go that route, I had my son use thick steel bolts or threaded rod glued into predrilled holes. You only need 5 oz max. Just about any metal will work. It doesn't have to be lead.
If you must use lead (because fishing sinkers always seem to be at hand) make sure the kids (and you!) wash your hands thoroughly after handling the lead, and most definitely before eating anything or even touching your faces. (And if you're a smoker, wash before touching a cigarette.) Apply a thick layer of white glue over the lead as soon as possible to reduce the amount of time your kids will be exposed to it. You can tell your kids that it's filler to make it more aerodynamic. And when you're all done racing, you still need to be concerned that your kids will contact the lead when playing with the car.
Finally, don't forget that the addition of lead will make the car a hazardous waste. Please don't throw the dead cars containing lead in the garbage. If they're trash, at least remove the lead before disposal.
Again, this may seem silly but lead is an insidious toxin. It never leaves the environment. And it seems to affect developing children even more than adults.
Rather than buying plastic fenders and parts, most hobby stores sell "modeling putty." Mold it around the sides to produce a stylized Indy-race-car or NASCAR looking effect. (If the $8 cost is an issue, it's little more than expensively repackaged "featherweight drywall patching compound" that you can get at Home Depot for about $2. And the half-pint tub will last you for a dozen cars or more.) Your son can mold the stuff to make fenders around the tires, low side wings, etc. Smooth the design with fingers. When it's dry sand it along with the wood.
I'd also recommend you give him sanding sealer to use before the paint. Makes for a much glossier finish. Apply sanding sealer, sand, repeat, sand with 000 steel wool, and then spray a high gloss paint.
Remember, the kids want the cars to do two things: win the race AND look cool. Your goal should be to raise the excitement, get the kids to want to get involved. Not every kid can win the race, but all of them can make their cars look cool. Our pack always had a separate trophy for coolest looking car, judging was by the parents and grandparents in the audience.
Slashdot Mirror
But yeah, it's more like going to a movie
If Borland could find an old copy of PowerBase they could probably get this patent thrown out for prior art, and have their own patent rejected for coming 20 years too late.
I dunno. Whining about incompetently issued patents is like whining about Microsoft or the DMCA. Good for a few quotable flames, but no real news. Move along, nothing to see here.
I certainly was one of the meter detractors: I always knew that the meters did nothing but increase my personal travel time. I commuted from the south metro (up Hwy 77) to Minneapolis and was affected by the meters both coming and going. And sure enough, shutting off the meters improved my morning commute by 10-15 minutes or more! But it increased my evening commute by about the same amount. What it did show was that the metering system was out of touch with reality, and that improvements were both possible and needed.
Most of us long-time commuters always saw those meter lights as wasteful delay devices. They actively discouraged us from trying alternate routes (if you ever took side-streets south and then tried to use the Old Shakopee Rd ramp to southbound 77 on a snowy day, you would have experienced over an hour of frustratation.) They also encouraged some people to waste gas by "cheating" meters -- driving a few miles out of the way to a never-busy meter. Meters were just a piece of incompetent 1970's legislation that had just been forced on the citizenry, a managerial "quick-fix" reaction to traffic problems. The study forced MnDOT to take a good look at how they were operating their meters, and to actually tune them to improve the way traffic really flows.
More than that, it gave us all a needed dose of acceptance that something actually had been done. Someone looked at problems, and someone tried to fix them. Even if the metering had been restored to exactly what it had been like before (even though it was immediately obvious when they fixed it) the fact that they actually studied the problems and tried to address them made us all feel a lot better about those red-eyed cyclopses.
It was one of those rare cases of a frustrated citizenry actually getting a legislator to listen and to try something new and it produced a tangible good. Not only are my commute times improved, but I don't get angered by the metering lights any more.
After the second book, even the bogus political / religious issues took on a tiresome sameness, rather like the plotions manufactured for each episode of Star Trek. I found them frustrating. He hinted at all these worlds, each of which could easily have been as interesting as Arrakis (I wanted to see a book set on Salusa Secundis) but they all focused around the lame Bene Gesserits.
I hope the SciFi channel has enough sense to stop filming sequels after this book.
Each of the metering lights in the Twin Cities are uniquely preset with three metering rates: light, medium and heavy. This means that one on-ramp might release cars every two seconds in light, fast-moving traffic conditions; but the next ramp down the same stretch of freeway might be releasing cars only once every four seconds in the same conditions.
Also, the DOT is easily able to identify misfiring sensors. On their old web page, you could see that they had "greyed out" the failed sensors.
What this means is that a single metering light won't just decide to sit there for 10 minutes if a glitch happens. It might switch to its "heavy" setting, but it won't take ten minutes to change.
Finally, as an aside, around here running a ramp meter light carries the exact same penalty as running a red light at any intersection. Moving violation, $80 fine, 3 points, the whole nine yards. I won't do it. Ten minutes seems really excessive, though. If you have to wait 10 minutes for a light to change, call your highway department and report a broken signal. They should fix it.
I have Qwest phone service and AT&T cable. I have been thinking I'd rather go DSL (private line service, so to speak, and not tithing the Death Star also has an appeal) but I didn't think the price for DSL would be as high as you're paying.
In the 60's, the Red Menace with their Atom Bombs and the looming reality of being drafted into the Vietnam war pressed our society to turn to something fantastic for relief. The urgency of the race to the moon gave a certain romance to anything set in space. So now provide a superbly written series set in space where the good guys always defeat the bad guys, the hero always kisses the girl, and you'll have made such an impression on your fan base that they will follow you until both you and they die.
So here we are. 40-somethings trying to hang on to that amazing bit of our youth. Sure, the occassional larva of today will watch the show with his dad or mom, but he's got a hundred other action movies to go see now, and a hundred other shows on TV to watch. Our kids just don't have the pressures to emotionally invest themselves in a show that doesn't have the real-world relevance that Star Trek once held for us. Scenes like jumping the land rover into the shuttle are a nod to the successes of other action movies such as Spiderman or Men in Black. They make the trekkies laugh or howl. Keep in mind that either reaction is fine, since any reaction is better than none at all. Hopefully, they hold the Trekkies' kids interest for a few more minutes.
Trekkies are a dying breed. Literally. Their best hope for future movies may be to include more plots ranging around geriatric issues, offering that amazing "Star Trek Gee-Whiz Space Hope (TM)" to elderly Trekkies; maybe pitching "Romulan Metamucil" or "Klingon Moment".
As long as the FBI's tentacles may be, they don't extend all the way into Hungary. They'd have to convince Hungarian law enforcement that this is a virus, yadda yadda.
However, Xupiter is busy paying Hungarian taxes, while the FBI is not. If you were the Hungarian police, who would you take direction from?
Makes for some really nice memories (and some funny ones) because you'll get shots of more guests than just your photographer would take.
One per table is about $7.00 plus another $7 or so to get it developed) is less than $4/guest.
Plus, cameras interest and entertain both geeks and non-geeks alike!
Matt's attack might be best described with a password analogy of a lock.
Think of a naive programmer who wrote this code:
Because that's exactly how a pin tumbler lock works.You've been given the password "FOO" for use with some ancient security system. The master password is unknown, but you know that it has three letters. The trick is knowing that there is no relationships between password letters. It will let you in regardless of if the letter was for your password or for the master password.
You start out by trying "AOO". No go. You try "BOO", and it works. Therefore, the first master letter is "B".
Next, you try "FAO". It works. Therefore, the second letter of the password is "A".
Next, you try "FOA". Nope, try "FOB". Nope, try "FOC". Nope, try "FOD". Bingo! The third letter is "D", and the master password is "BAD".
Yes, it's that easy. Instead of changing letters, you file a bit of metal off a key blank, but otherwise it's the exact same attack.
First, you really should read Matt's paper, then you might understand the details of the attack as well as gain an appreciation for its simplicity.
I'm not going to argue the difference between terrorists and criminals, or between terror targets and criminal targets. Let's just say that the value of a Top Master Key to either group would be higher than not having one.
Matt makes mention in the paper that he found no reference to this type of attack in the available locksmithing literature, either in trade publications, reference materials, manufacturers information or in the underground literature. He speculates that the idea is simple enough that he probably wasn't the first to take the approach; but if it was already a known weakness, locksmiths around the world sure hadn't been getting together anywhere to say "Hey, let's fix this problem." When he brought it to the attention of law enforcement and lock manufacturers last September, they started to get word out. And as word of the defense spread, news of the attack spread faster, so Matt felt justified in publishing it openly. Now, the industry had better move fast, as faith in their product is being eroded.
Matt includes the math indicating how many attempts need to be made by the attacker. Most commercial systems would take about 40 attempts or so. This is much faster than traditional lockpicking.
The basic idea here is that the attacker is already someone trusted enough to use the lock for which he has already been legitimately given a key. The attacker can walk up to the lock, and if nobody is paying much attention he can try a test key. If nobody continues to notice him, he can try a second, or a third, etc. If someone does come by, he pulls out his legitimate key, apologizes "Oops, I tried my house key without thinking, sorry I didn't mean to slow you down" opens the lock, and goes about his ordinary business. He's a legitimate employee, with a legitimate key and has every right in the world to put his key in the lock. But he uses that right as cover for his illegitimate attack. It would certainly be possible to perform the attack right in front of a receptionist over the course of a month, just by trying only one test key each trip through a door. If the receptionist even noticed anything, it would probably be along the lines of "you take longer to open that door than anyone else in this office." The social-engineer's reply would then be "the key they gave me is sticky, it usually takes a couple times to get it to work right." Instead of suspicion, the attacker gets sympathy.
It's a real flaw, and a very easily exploited one. I just got out my lowly supply closet key (giving highly-trusted-me access to a veritable wealth of paper clips and pencil lead refills), and with this small effort I could turn it into a key allowing me access to payroll's offices and records, the vice president's office, the closet where they keep airline tickets and petty cash, the boiler room, whatever.
If you're interested, check out Loronix who have had multi-feed stacked systems out for years.
Rest assured, the pictures on his web show no place you could hide enough weight to overcome the mass of that RCX brick. It sure looks real enough at first glance.
Hey, if you doubt him, he's got building instructions on his web site, and source code to the program. Go build your own. It'd be far more scientific that accusing him of cheating.
We had ancient IBM 3650s that we ditched in 1987. Had a 10MB drive in the cabinet, platters driven by a belt from a motor that looked like a sewing machine motor.
That drive had the ordinary head mounted on the arm, but it also had an extra stationary head mounted at the edge. It was for high performance live data capturing. The write data from the live capture was always written almost immediately with the stationary head, and was later read by the ordinary movable head.
Of course, this was certainly back in the day when a 13" platter only held 10MB (probably about 260KB/in^2). Alignment might have been less critical.
Does it extend further? Can I take down tripod.com because I got a bunch of pop-unders from one of their pages? If I do, can I convince a judge that I was justified because of the loss of bandwidth and memory I suffered?
It just gets gray really fast. One persons "attack" is another persons advertising (think "free speech".) What if someone downloads a Metallica MP3 from a Trojan RIAA machine? That may be considered entrapment, or it may be seen as an active defense. I think that anything that has such a nebulous line, such a wide gray area, probably shouldn't be allowed simply because of the "slippery slope" patterns of abuse we see so often here in America.
When you start dealing with the barcode specs (I use MIL-STD-1189A for Code 3 of 9, the UPC Shipping Container Code and Symbol Specification Manual for Interleaved 2 of 5, among many others) you will find that not all codes are created equal.
All barcodes specifications state the allowable tolerances for bar width, spacing, color, reflectance, etc. These tolerances tighten up as the barcode gets smaller, (and loosen as the barcodes get larger.) If you want to print a 50-digit Code 128 in a two-inch-wide space, for example, you've got to be absolutely precise (within .0025 inches not only with the leading edge of the bar, but the interbar spacing has to be within .0015 inches. Plus, each character has to be within .0015 of the right distance to the next character. This is very difficult to achieve on digital equipment with fixed element printing positions for a variety of reasons. Most scanners have a very hard time reading accurately at this small end of the scale.
If you're spraying interleaved 2 of 5 barcodes on the sides of fibre box shipping containers, the tolerances change dramatically. The width tolerances climb to .014 inches per symbol. Of course, the factory-line bar code scanners are dramatically different than the hand held scanners you see at department stores, and are designed
(By the way, UPC has four distinct bar widths and spaces, not two. Code 3 of 9 and Interleaved 2 of five have only two distinct widths. And PostNet has only one width. The PostNet post office barcode is different from other bar codes in that it's not self clocking: the space between the bars means nothing, the short bars exist only as place holders for timing the long bars. It's a rudimentary 2D system.)
Those are the standards. What that means is if bar code producers meet them, and your barcode still doesn't work, then you get to blame the scanner manufacturer for failings.
All that said, reality actually ends up being "whatever works." Scanners are usually more tolerant than specifications demand, simply because people complain when the scanners don't work. Barcodes that are printed on merchandise are usually tighter to spec than required, because the merchants frequently have contractual obligations to provide "100% first scan success rates." (Think how much it would cost a big retail chain like Target if those bottles of Mountain Dew took five seconds to scan each instead of .5 seconds. Every clerk in the chain would be wasting time each day fighting the bottles and scanners.)
To address your examples, the older barcodes may be fading to your eyes, which may or may not be affecting their reflectivity (just because it's fading in the visible spectrum doesn't necessarily meaning it's fading in the spectrum the scanner uses.) The dot-matrix Blockbuster barcode was most likely produced on a Blockbuster corporate tested dot-matrix printer and tested with the Blockbuster corporate store scanner. Your older barcodes probably aren't stretching non-linearly, either.
Printing barcodes on random people's computers is risky. You don't know what kind of equipment they're going to have. They may have a cruddy old dot-matrix printer, or the latest Canon BubbleJet. And no matter what kind of gear they have, they're likely to be proud of it, so if you can't read their barcodes, they'll take it personallly.
Anyway, you're right. Barcoding is not an overly demanding science, but it does have limitations. JPEG isn't great because while it can print sharp lines, its compression scheme can change WHERE each of those lines are printed, which is just as important as sharpness.
The bastards'll generate 100 lines of code per left click, 150 lines per right click, and an extra 50 lines for each check box you manage to hover over.
Unless it's MFC based. Then double each of those.
(Before anyone starts refuting this, it is a joke! I don't care how many lines of code the app lizards crank out...)
I just need to have a distro I can convince my wife, son, brother-in-law, mother and sister to run. It's very hard to tell them "Hey, you can't buy software at Target or Best Buy any more because we run Linux now." That's not a big selling point.
I did mention at the very bottom that I think .NET is being used as the "Gateway to Palladium." I don't believe it was created to that end, but its architecture certainly lends itself to absolute OS control of the machine. And that's the ultimate lock-in.
What is the problem that .NET as you describe is supposed to fix?
I think the problems Microsoft is addressing are twofold: One, make development "easier" by improving type safety and allowing free choice of languages. Easier development leads to more development per developer, therefore developers are more "productive." Also, it should improve platform stability. (Carrots.) Two, it will help Microsoft make more money by moving end users to a subscription-based model of software sales. (Stick.) All of these help Microsoft, but only the stability portion helps the end user.
My interpretation is basically that they've gotten a new language, and they are changing all their other languages to be like it.
It's not really a new language, it's a mostly-familiar set of front-end languages (VB.NET ~= VB, C# ~= C++) to a new bytecode language, and a new API beneath it.
New bindings in code to .NET beneath wouldn't solve the current DLL hell problems. And the old languages don't improve reliablity just because they're generating bytecode. The automatic memory allocation and deallocation means that there will be almost no chances for buffer overflows or memory leaks, the biggest contributers to crashing under Windows today. Sure, programs can still be written "wrong", (such as add $1.00 and $2.00 and come up with $2.99) but they won't be as likely to crash the platform beneath themselves or corrupt other unrelated applications.
Perhaps I divided it up in arbitrarily labeled fragments based on my understanding. But none of the Microsoft marketing drivel ever made anything clear. This is how I explained it to myself.
Fine, then I'll do it.
The biggest advantage to the platform for develpers is absolute type declarations with full knowledge at the object interface: if you write an object method in VB.NET that takes two Integers, a String, and an array of Dates and returns an Integer value, then you can directly refer to that method in your C# routine. There is no conversion needed between types, not even between languages, which has historically been a problem with Microsoft code ever since OLE.
Visual Studio .NET is a development IDE for all the Microsoft .NET languages: VB.NET, C#, and others. It's similar to Microsoft's Visual Studio 6.0, but all the separate components are better integrated. All languages compile together to produce a single "package", which you then ship to your customers. There are no "installations" as the package is self contained. And it still includes a native C++ compiler which can still emit code for any Windows platform (except for .NET...)
Microsoft says the combination of the above puts all languages on an equal footing: developers can code in whatever language suits them. (Since it's interpreted bytecodes, I think it makes all languages equally second class, but that's just me.) So with .NET language is not a barrier to function calls. You want to call method "Foo" on an object called "Bar"? You just do it in your working language, however that language invokes methods on objects. You don't know when you're writing it what language it will be called from. You don't worry when you're calling it what language it was written in.
That's the developers' carrot in a nutshell. And so here's the developers' stick: Everything is shipped as bytecodes in that package, and the supplied decompiler already spits out source code that's only missing some of the documentation. I asked the guy during the .NET product introduction "How is intellectual property protected if anyone can just decompile the code?" The answer started out evasive, but boiled down to: We [Microsoft] will be serving up our meat-and-potatoes functionality via the web, so our code is hidden behind our firewall. Come, join us. You do not know the power of the dark side. (OK, so maybe the guy didn't say that last line, or at least not out loud.)
On the whole, I was semi-impressed at the product introduction. Having strong type safety is really a good thing to me, because I do spend time fighting code that has been carelessly cast, and I also spend time converting from VARIANT arrays of UI1 to STD::strings. Automated garbage collection and automagic reference counting is also really nice. But interpreted languages haven't been exciting to me since GW-BASIC. (Sorry, you Java weenies, but I'm too old to think wasting cycles interpreting bytecodes in front of a user at run time is ever a good thing.) And C# is not C++, nor is it Java. I don't like that IL will only do its own random-time garbage collection and can not support destructors, not even virtual destructors. There are times when I want to garbage collect at a specific point in time (examples such as cleaning up scarce resources like database connections or sockets come easily to mind.)
But I really, really don't like that .NET is ultimately just a facade to hide the movement of software to the subscription model under Palladium. Want to print that Word document? Did you tithe Microsoft this month? Nope? Too bad. Are you still offline? Too bad, you can't run PowerPoint.NET until you're back online and we can check the status of your subscription (or at least check the status of your Visa card authorization.) .NET will make Palladium viable, since the CLR is a trusted software container (read: sandbox.)
So, on the whole, .NET has too many really huge negatives to get me going. It even caused me to ditch my MSDN subscription because it had become "Nothing but .NET" Literally.
"Barmonkey."
tweedle-fwoop
"Ale, Romulan. Neat."
bleep!
[ I'm sorry, but I just want to scream when I hear people talk like this. "It won't hurt my kids; we did that all the time when I was a kid; I never got sick from it." You sound like my father-in-law, who would be very lucky to make it to age 70 after all his occupational exposures to various chemicals. He has certainly been crippled by them. ]
Lead is toxic in any quantity. It doesn't change toxicity just because you have less of it. The real issue is "at what quantity does this toxicity pose an unacceptable risk to me or my child?" Do you know how much lead you or your child can safely tolerate? Did you look it up? I'll save you the trouble. According to the CDC the current action level for lead is 10 micrograms/dL. That's been reduced about 10 micrograms/dL per decade since the 1960s, when they first decided 40 micrograms/dL was too much.
An average adult has about 5.6 liters of blood. Figure a child under 12 as having about half of that. That means you should be concerned if your child's blood contains more than 280 micrograms of lead. .00028 grams. A 1-ounce fishing sinker contains one million times this amount. If you can see the gray smears on your hands and fingers after handling the lead, you probably have more than that right there on your hands. Wash it off.
Children also have a much higher absorption rate of ingested lead -- adults absorb about 11% of the lead that reaches the digestive tract, while children absorb about 35%. For this fact, others, and a listing of the damage lead can do to a human, read this FDA report.
Keep in mind that lead does not exit the body. Lead builds up over time. If your child acquires .0001 grams of lead this year, .0001 grams next year and .0001 grams the year after, he will exceeded the actionable amount of lead.
The CDC and other federal agencies have been lowering the acceptable limit of lead dramatically every decade since the sixties, and not just for children. They lower it because they know the dangers of lead poisoning are real, and the studies keep showing neurological damage occurs at lower and lower levels. They don't know at what level (other than zero) it's safe.
And regarding telling the kids about "aerodynamic glue", I didn't know if you were the sort of person who would feel the need to have a cover story to hide behind. As you may have guessed, I certainly told my son the truth about the lead sinkers we were using, and we washed our hands carefully afterwards. Hell, I made our whole family wash our hands after working with the Christmas tree light strings this year, because I discovered they use lead-based pigment in the green electrical insulation!
Lead exposure is a serious health problem, and one that you can help avoid every time you avoid exposure. And this is an easy one to avoid -- use an alternate substance. If your car is .1 gram overweight at the official scale, use a drill and remove wood instead of lead.
But don't go telling people stuff like "it's OK, that's not enough lead to hurt you or your kid." That's irresponsible in the extreme.
I know this is a "duh" posting, but it needs to be repeated, and especially when there are kids involved.
Scout stores and hobby stores sell prescored "pinewood derby weight kits" that come with predrilled plates, some doublestick tape, and a couple of screws. They're nontoxic, and you can easily break off excess amounts of weight during the weigh-in. (Personally, I think they're a bit overkill, but hey, they're non-toxic.) If you don't want to go that route, I had my son use thick steel bolts or threaded rod glued into predrilled holes. You only need 5 oz max. Just about any metal will work. It doesn't have to be lead.
If you must use lead (because fishing sinkers always seem to be at hand) make sure the kids (and you!) wash your hands thoroughly after handling the lead, and most definitely before eating anything or even touching your faces. (And if you're a smoker, wash before touching a cigarette.) Apply a thick layer of white glue over the lead as soon as possible to reduce the amount of time your kids will be exposed to it. You can tell your kids that it's filler to make it more aerodynamic. And when you're all done racing, you still need to be concerned that your kids will contact the lead when playing with the car.
Finally, don't forget that the addition of lead will make the car a hazardous waste. Please don't throw the dead cars containing lead in the garbage. If they're trash, at least remove the lead before disposal.
Again, this may seem silly but lead is an insidious toxin. It never leaves the environment. And it seems to affect developing children even more than adults.
I'd also recommend you give him sanding sealer to use before the paint. Makes for a much glossier finish. Apply sanding sealer, sand, repeat, sand with 000 steel wool, and then spray a high gloss paint.
Remember, the kids want the cars to do two things: win the race AND look cool. Your goal should be to raise the excitement, get the kids to want to get involved. Not every kid can win the race, but all of them can make their cars look cool. Our pack always had a separate trophy for coolest looking car, judging was by the parents and grandparents in the audience.
Have fun!