1: How hard would it be to add a straght line tool?
It should be rather obvious that 'straight' is not a tool in itself, but a modifier for the movement of existing tools. More like using a straight-edge accessory with your pen, brush or eraser than having a seperate pen, brush or eraser that only move in straight lines.
2: How are users supposed to know that you use the shift key to draw straight lines?
Since 'straight' is a modifer of movement rather than a tool, its not a huge leap to use a modifier key like shift, control or alt (or apple or whatever your platform uses) to modify the behavour of the current tool. Granted, it might not be completely obvious, but most people who have used graphics programs frequenly know that modifier keys are used to do things like this, and so can be expected to give them a try. Tool pallets should have help hints to clue in newbies and people who don't use the tool often enough to remember the shortcuts.
Then are laws to guide human behavour away from those things that are determental to society and to cause the most desirable emergent or collective behavours?
Or are they to allow special interest groups and politicians to get what they want?
How hard is it to do something dumb like stick three small rockets together to make one big one? They'd have to be at least marginally throttleable to keep stuff balanced, but I presume that they already do that for steering.
Re:Fun with RFID tags
on
NYT on RFID
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· Score: 2, Funny
Na, the automatic doors at the supermarket won't open unless you have RFID tags for at least a shirt and shoes.
Re:Let's enforce a no-resale clause
on
NYT on RFID
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· Score: 1
Nearly all 'Not for Resale' labels are there because they item does not have the federally required nutrition info and whatnot that is reqired for commercial sale. Sometimes you'll see that label as 'Not labeled for individual sale'. It doesn't have anything to do with the manufacturer caring what you do with the product.
Software (including both executable and primarily data items such as ebooks) generally come with a 'license' that tells you what you can and cannot do with it. This 'agreement' is not a contract and does not prevent you from transfering the product to another entity (copyright laws do prevent you from distributing duplicates without permission), even if it says 'you may not transfer this product to another entity'. The vendor may choose not provide any kind of warranty or user support after the product has been transfered, but regardless of what they say, they cannot legally stop you from transfering ownership of the software product.
IANAL.
Re:Mark of the Beast, U.N. Black Helicopters etc.
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
Of course, the criminals they really want to catch will just use faraday cages to keep their money hidden.
Hey, theres a potential new product, a faraday cage wallet.
Proper technology wouldn't require time to use, or training to learn how to use properly, it would just take over the manual tasks we are loath to do.
My house would clean itself, the laundry would do itself and put itself away the car would change its own oil and refuel itself, my body would maintain itself without requiring excersize, and I would be free to spend time raising my children.
Technology should never cause me to do more work (unless its a trade off for something like doing a bit more work in exchange for safer conditions).
The public freenet is currently too small to be very attack-resistant, or even particularly good at protecting your identity from someone with lots of resources.
However, if you want to set up a private freenet, it would not be difficult to make something very secure with the tools they have made available (evidently there are a couple in operation currently).
This is not to say that I don't believe that the public Freenet cannot ever meet these goals. I think that it can, and even has a chance of doing so eventually. I believe in the importance of Freenet strongly enough to have dedicated a 1Ghz/1Gb box to serving a large data store.
Where the data is store does not matter if you just want to break it. Subverting it would be a bit harder, but not much.
Currently much of Freenets vulnerability stems from the fact that it is so small. However, there are some things that will always be vulnerable. There are operations you can initiate that are expensive for other hosts to process. The current client is Java, and has its default resource limits set fairly low, so its not difficult to cause resource exaustion on any given node (one malicious host can exaust resources on several nodes at a time)
First step is to work on building yourself a list of freenet hosts. This isn't any harder than building a map of any other public P2P system. A network of Zombies (or lots of cash) to increase your bandwidth and processing power will be helpful. Besides harvesting, the Freenet developers maintain a host list that can be used.
Connect to the network (which is resonably static) and build a map of what hosts specialize in what keyspaces, monitor the traffic you see and try to find any clients that are unusually well-connected. DDOS them with regular techniques. Disrupting the network causes it to have to reorganize and reoptomize its routing, which slows things down.
Instruct your Zombies to each connect to a large number of freenet clients and begin inserting large amounts of junk data, and post the keys back to a central location. This mass of insertions will be a DOS in itself, each client will reject connections when its load level reaches ~100, and insertions are costly.
Now instruct some zombies to begin constantly requesting the junk data from all over the network, making it the most popular data, and therefore the most replicated. A Freenet clients data cache tends to be around 1-200Mb, and the least accessed data is discarded. The public Freenet currently has less than 10k nodes (probably closer to 1k), giving it a total data capacity of less than 2Tb, much of which is replicated data (I forget the redundancy factor, but its fairly high).
If each node does not validate the data that it transfers, another potential method would be to set up your zombies as freenet nodes that report extremely good access times for the keyspace they specialize in and make them extremely well connected. The Freenet routing algo will tend to route requests for data to these zombies, requests which can then be served with bad data. The requestor will of course detect the bad data, but he won't know who sent it, and has no way of notifying anyone that a particular host is serving bad data.
Very easily, a shaky vertical line that passes mostly through two of the circles.
Some people would just throw out such a ballot as invalid (I'd be inclined to), but there are plenty of others who would argue that we have to determine the voters intent for each and every ballot, because it is not fair to discard ballots that aren't perfect as that might skew the results (a systematic error that discards the votes of stupid people with hand tremors in the above example).
Voting machine prints out paper ballot with text and barcode representation of the votes.
So we have to be able to read barcodes to be sure what our ballot is telling the machine?
The ballot has to have only one representation of the vote, which is easily readable by both human and machine.
Thats the only way to be sure that a hand count and machine count of the ballot will have the same results. There are other ways, but this eliminates a possible error.
Order is important, especially when you have 20 pages of candidates:)
On advantage of an electronic system is that the system can present the list in random order, eliminating any presentation order bias in the results.
Another advantage is that if there are multiple pages of candidates, there is a possibility for the user to search for they one they want.
As an aside, its really, really sad that the order on the ballot makes any difference at all. That means that either people are going in to vote without knowing for whom they want to vote, or they are illiterate, or they are simply total dumbasses.
I do not agree that pen and paper are the best, that opens the door for judgments like the 'hanging chad' stuff. A touch screen (or perhaps a 'Whack-a-candidate' interface with a big padded mallet) with a computer printed ballot pretty much eliminates that (a large sign on the ballot that says 'DO NOT MARK ON THIS BALLOT' might help too).
I like the idea of computer-generated ballots that the human can examin and then hand-deposit into the ballot box. Those physical ballots are the authoritive vote, and the machine can provide quick-tallys so that the paper only needs checked for recounts, or when spot checks of paper ballots don't match teh tallys.
When the average Joe realizes he's getting jerked around and being denied the service he payed for, watch for legitimate and fair businesses to spring forth and pick up the slack.
When that happens, you can be damn sure it will cost more than 35 bucks a month.
Apparently capilliary action pulls bacteria into the wood's pores and away from the surface of the wood, leaving the surface sterile.
Very interesting. Do you have a reference for that study?
I'd be concerned that subsequent use would expose bacteria to the food. For example, you cut up some raw chicken and rinse the board. Next day you slice up some juicy apples, and the knife, which cuts into the surface slightly, pulls up bacteria from yesterday and deposits it on the apple.
I think those disposable cutting mats are a great idea for meats and other substances likely to carry nasties.
Nurses at many hospitals carry cell phones now. They give their number to the patients they work with.
Why? Because nurses tend to be very busy and are damn hard to find. Either the patient or other nurses can quickly reach anyone they need.
That the phones pick up hospital super-bacterial isn't suprising. The problem is that since nurses handle them frequently and don't wash them at the same time the wash their hands (which is supposed to be, and frequenly acutally is, often), their handwashing is less effective, because they pick up the same contaminants again when they handle their phone.
The simple solution is to just provide those steralizing wipes you find all over the hospital at handwashing stations, and train personnel to wipe the phone first, then wash their hands. Cleaning every nook and cranny on and in the phone is not necessary, just as complete steralization of the hands is not.
Incidentally, I read a study a few years ago that showed that the vast majority of clensing of bacterial matter on hands came from the rubbing of the surface, not the soap. Even dry rubbing had a large impact.
"(1) $50,000,000 for fiscal year 2004; and (2) $200,000,000 for fiscal year 2005."
Peanuts. I'm writing my representative and telling him I completely support this, except they need to triple the funds allotment. Considering the billions we are spending to go kill people on the other end of the planet, I don't think thats unreasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
1: How hard would it be to add a straght line tool?
It should be rather obvious that 'straight' is not a tool in itself, but a modifier for the movement of existing tools. More like using a straight-edge accessory with your pen, brush or eraser than having a seperate pen, brush or eraser that only move in straight lines.
2: How are users supposed to know that you use the shift key to draw straight lines?
Since 'straight' is a modifer of movement rather than a tool, its not a huge leap to use a modifier key like shift, control or alt (or apple or whatever your platform uses) to modify the behavour of the current tool. Granted, it might not be completely obvious, but most people who have used graphics programs frequenly know that modifier keys are used to do things like this, and so can be expected to give them a try. Tool pallets should have help hints to clue in newbies and people who don't use the tool often enough to remember the shortcuts.
Then are laws to guide human behavour away from those things that are determental to society and to cause the most desirable emergent or collective behavours?
Or are they to allow special interest groups and politicians to get what they want?
How hard is it to do something dumb like stick three small rockets together to make one big one? They'd have to be at least marginally throttleable to keep stuff balanced, but I presume that they already do that for steering.
Na, the automatic doors at the supermarket won't open unless you have RFID tags for at least a shirt and shoes.
Nearly all 'Not for Resale' labels are there because they item does not have the federally required nutrition info and whatnot that is reqired for commercial sale. Sometimes you'll see that label as 'Not labeled for individual sale'. It doesn't have anything to do with the manufacturer caring what you do with the product.
Software (including both executable and primarily data items such as ebooks) generally come with a 'license' that tells you what you can and cannot do with it. This 'agreement' is not a contract and does not prevent you from transfering the product to another entity (copyright laws do prevent you from distributing duplicates without permission), even if it says 'you may not transfer this product to another entity'. The vendor may choose not provide any kind of warranty or user support after the product has been transfered, but regardless of what they say, they cannot legally stop you from transfering ownership of the software product.
IANAL.
Of course, the criminals they really want to catch will just use faraday cages to keep their money hidden.
Hey, theres a potential new product, a faraday cage wallet.
Thanks, I'd forgotten all about this great game.
For example, raising children.
Proper technology wouldn't require time to use, or training to learn how to use properly, it would just take over the manual tasks we are loath to do.
My house would clean itself, the laundry would do itself and put itself away the car would change its own oil and refuel itself, my body would maintain itself without requiring excersize, and I would be free to spend time raising my children.
Technology should never cause me to do more work (unless its a trade off for something like doing a bit more work in exchange for safer conditions).
Sheet metal, sheers and pop-rivets with a nice powder coat finish. You get exactly what you want in exactly the color you want.
pango.. is that the one where you run around kicking hexagonal blocks around to squish bees and form rows?
Acutally, if you'd read the article, at the end it says:
In this case, we had access to relatively accurate source code
Sounds like the only disassembly they had to deal with was in the few bits that were different in the shipped version.
The public freenet is currently too small to be very attack-resistant, or even particularly good at protecting your identity from someone with lots of resources.
However, if you want to set up a private freenet, it would not be difficult to make something very secure with the tools they have made available (evidently there are a couple in operation currently).
This is not to say that I don't believe that the public Freenet cannot ever meet these goals. I think that it can, and even has a chance of doing so eventually. I believe in the importance of Freenet strongly enough to have dedicated a 1Ghz/1Gb box to serving a large data store.
Where the data is store does not matter if you just want to break it. Subverting it would be a bit harder, but not much.
Currently much of Freenets vulnerability stems from the fact that it is so small. However, there are some things that will always be vulnerable. There are operations you can initiate that are expensive for other hosts to process. The current client is Java, and has its default resource limits set fairly low, so its not difficult to cause resource exaustion on any given node (one malicious host can exaust resources on several nodes at a time)
First step is to work on building yourself a list of freenet hosts. This isn't any harder than building a map of any other public P2P system. A network of Zombies (or lots of cash) to increase your bandwidth and processing power will be helpful. Besides harvesting, the Freenet developers maintain a host list that can be used.
Connect to the network (which is resonably static) and build a map of what hosts specialize in what keyspaces, monitor the traffic you see and try to find any clients that are unusually well-connected. DDOS them with regular techniques. Disrupting the network causes it to have to reorganize and reoptomize its routing, which slows things down.
Instruct your Zombies to each connect to a large number of freenet clients and begin inserting large amounts of junk data, and post the keys back to a central location. This mass of insertions will be a DOS in itself, each client will reject connections when its load level reaches ~100, and insertions are costly.
Now instruct some zombies to begin constantly requesting the junk data from all over the network, making it the most popular data, and therefore the most replicated. A Freenet clients data cache tends to be around 1-200Mb, and the least accessed data is discarded. The public Freenet currently has less than 10k nodes (probably closer to 1k), giving it a total data capacity of less than 2Tb, much of which is replicated data (I forget the redundancy factor, but its fairly high).
If each node does not validate the data that it transfers, another potential method would be to set up your zombies as freenet nodes that report extremely good access times for the keyspace they specialize in and make them extremely well connected. The Freenet routing algo will tend to route requests for data to these zombies, requests which can then be served with bad data. The requestor will of course detect the bad data, but he won't know who sent it, and has no way of notifying anyone that a particular host is serving bad data.
My Kingdom for mod points.
And probably just as he predicted, if everyone knew about and used this science to predict things, it wouldn't work.
The Second Foundation has to remain hidden you know.
Hardly. Freenet, in its currently incarnation, would be nearly trivial to DDOS out of existance.
Performance and robustness was evidently Waaaaaay down on the list of immediate goals for freenet.
I like the idea of freenet, but its got along way to go before it can withstand any kind of intelligent attack.
Very easily, a shaky vertical line that passes mostly through two of the circles.
Some people would just throw out such a ballot as invalid (I'd be inclined to), but there are plenty of others who would argue that we have to determine the voters intent for each and every ballot, because it is not fair to discard ballots that aren't perfect as that might skew the results (a systematic error that discards the votes of stupid people with hand tremors in the above example).
Voting machine prints out paper ballot with text and barcode representation of the votes.
So we have to be able to read barcodes to be sure what our ballot is telling the machine?
The ballot has to have only one representation of the vote, which is easily readable by both human and machine.
Thats the only way to be sure that a hand count and machine count of the ballot will have the same results. There are other ways, but this eliminates a possible error.
Order is important, especially when you have 20 pages of candidates :)
On advantage of an electronic system is that the system can present the list in random order, eliminating any presentation order bias in the results.
Another advantage is that if there are multiple pages of candidates, there is a possibility for the user to search for they one they want.
As an aside, its really, really sad that the order on the ballot makes any difference at all. That means that either people are going in to vote without knowing for whom they want to vote, or they are illiterate, or they are simply total dumbasses.
I do not agree that pen and paper are the best, that opens the door for judgments like the 'hanging chad' stuff. A touch screen (or perhaps a 'Whack-a-candidate' interface with a big padded mallet) with a computer printed ballot pretty much eliminates that (a large sign on the ballot that says 'DO NOT MARK ON THIS BALLOT' might help too).
I like the idea of computer-generated ballots that the human can examin and then hand-deposit into the ballot box. Those physical ballots are the authoritive vote, and the machine can provide quick-tallys so that the paper only needs checked for recounts, or when spot checks of paper ballots don't match teh tallys.
When the average Joe realizes he's getting jerked around and being denied the service he payed for, watch for legitimate and fair businesses to spring forth and pick up the slack.
When that happens, you can be damn sure it will cost more than 35 bucks a month.
If you've got a contract for a set price for a set amount of bandwith, the fuckers should honor it.
Most of those contracts are worded so they can change them whenever they want, without notifying you.
Doesn't seem like that should be legal, but whatever.
So don't check the books out, either read them there, or liberate them and bring them back later.
Apparently capilliary action pulls bacteria into the wood's pores and away from the surface of the wood, leaving the surface sterile.
Very interesting. Do you have a reference for that study?
I'd be concerned that subsequent use would expose bacteria to the food. For example, you cut up some raw chicken and rinse the board. Next day you slice up some juicy apples, and the knife, which cuts into the surface slightly, pulls up bacteria from yesterday and deposits it on the apple.
I think those disposable cutting mats are a great idea for meats and other substances likely to carry nasties.
Nurses at many hospitals carry cell phones now. They give their number to the patients they work with.
Why? Because nurses tend to be very busy and are damn hard to find. Either the patient or other nurses can quickly reach anyone they need.
That the phones pick up hospital super-bacterial isn't suprising. The problem is that since nurses handle them frequently and don't wash them at the same time the wash their hands (which is supposed to be, and frequenly acutally is, often), their handwashing is less effective, because they pick up the same contaminants again when they handle their phone.
The simple solution is to just provide those steralizing wipes you find all over the hospital at handwashing stations, and train personnel to wipe the phone first, then wash their hands. Cleaning every nook and cranny on and in the phone is not necessary, just as complete steralization of the hands is not.
Incidentally, I read a study a few years ago that showed that the vast majority of clensing of bacterial matter on hands came from the rubbing of the surface, not the soap. Even dry rubbing had a large impact.
"(1) $50,000,000 for fiscal year 2004; and
(2) $200,000,000 for fiscal year 2005."
Peanuts. I'm writing my representative and telling him I completely support this, except they need to triple the funds allotment. Considering the billions we are spending to go kill people on the other end of the planet, I don't think thats unreasonable.