I don't know what's wrong with your present solution, since it seems like you've got a working setup. However, you could get yourself a keyboard, mouse and lcd monitor, and hook them up to a PC/104 single-board computer to accomplish what you're after.
I like cats and all, but I found the mental picture I formed while reading this quite funny: Men dressed in white lab coats conducting an official study by throwing cats out windows to see if they'd survive, with another man with a clipboard and white lab coat standing on the ground tallying the results.
This reminds me of a WWII story. Seems someone got the bright idea that, since cats hate water, they'd make good pilots for anti-ship bombs. The thinking (if that's what you could call it) was that you'd stick a cat in a bomb with some controls that it was trained to use, and it would guide the bomb away from water and toward the ship. They had to drop a cat in harness a few times to prove that this was one of the dumbest ideas anyone ever had.
You know, there's a simple solution to this: don't take the damned money. The feds are notorious for threatening to take away their (aka 'your') money if you don't toe their line. Not being constitutionally able to directly legislate legal limits for drunk driving, they're extorting states by witholding some of the Federal hiway trust funds if a state refuses to set its limit to.08 like Uncle Sam wants. So, if you don't want to put up with this crap, tell them to take their dough, jam it up sideways, and rotate it.
Does this mean that sections of your constitution don't apply to private schools? How so, I thought the constitution was all-powerful (or am I misunderstanding this?)
Under the U.S. constitution, you're perfectly free to exercise your opinions in whatever forum you want (exceptions apply, but this is the general rule). However, a private school is also free to throw you out for pretty much any reason, including none at all. I suppose that it would be possible to contest a retaliatory expulsion in a lengthy and expensive court battle, but it would be a pyrric victory at best.
P.S. Not like I need to say it but this also means that the current injunction against Napster is also pretty worthless. If I can post everything by Limp Bizkit with filenames like "1.mp3", "2.mp3", etc., then that gets around their current "blocking" of songs / artists. Now you know.
Which wuld be fine with the RIAA, since it would be extremely difficult for someone to find a specific song. No one is going to download every '1.mp3' and listen to each in order to find those that happen to be Limp Bizkit. The RIAA won't much care if the content is there if it's unfindable.
I'd love to use a 'one-time-only' credit card number system. I can't count the times that I've purchased what I thought was a limited-period service and discovered that the merchant automatically charges me at renewal time. It's a bloody nuisance to have to call them to remove the charge and take me off the auto-renewal list. Some of them have been so hard to reach that I've just cancelled the card to end the problem (my early AOL experience was one of those times).
Removing the CDDB would cause a large number of people to input their own names with all the associated inconsistancies, making filtering all the more difficult.
Better yet, pollute the CDDB with alternative names. CDDB identifies CDs based on the number of tracks and their playtimes. Most of the time this is unique to a CD, but every once in a while you'll be asked to select which CD is the one in question. This is because two CDs happen to have identical numbers of tracks with identical playtimes. So, how about we start making up alternative names ('Meta11ica' is an earlier example cited on SlashDot) and submitting them to CDDB. Then when someone is ripping a CD, they can easily select one of the alternative spellings for the filenaming. This also has the salutatory effect of hosing the CDDB, which appears to be richly deserved.
Encoding with ROT13 would require that you run your text thru an encoder program and then carefully type it into napster with no mistakes. With the pig encoder you can do it in your head and transcribing mistakes are much less likely.
My Utah experience: I went to Provo to visit my girlfriend's daughter and son-in-law, who are Mormons. One night after visiting with them, we decided to get a bottle of wine to take back to our hotel room. It took us 45 minutes to locate the state-run package store situated in a dingy part of town. It looked like a run-down methadone clinic, with bars on the windows, burned-out neon sighs, and a trash-strewn parking lot. We got the bottle of wine from their lousy selection and wanted to get a corkscrew. No gots. At a liquor store. So we go to a large supermarket and ask one of the 18-year-old stockboys where to find a corkscrew. He didn't know what a corkscrew was. Finally had to track down the manager to ask, and he ultimately led us to where they were. Moral: if you're going to drink in Utah, have it shipped in from elsewhere so that you don't have to deal with the locals.
Well, I can tell you how the Navy at a top-secret comm installation was supposed to do it if the place was in danger of being overrun: pile all sensitive stuff (hard drives, crypto machinery, etc.) in the parking lot, put thermite bricks on top of it, then melt everything into slag. I think it was more for speed than effectiveness. They might not necessarily have the time to do it in a less spectacular fashion.
NVidia are developing a worrying monopoloy, and are clearly miles ahead of the competition.
[snip]
Instead I shall buy from competitors, and urge others to help keep them afloat, until such time as the market is more equal.
In other words, shield the competitors from the feedback of the marketplace, letting them produce inferior products without suffering the consequences for so doing. Even if enough people were willing to do this, it wouldn't produce a 'more equal' market. It would simply keep second-rate products coming. Only by allowing the market to signal an organization that it's putting out stuff that people won't buy will the situation improve.
If today's students are anything like I was, I wouldn't give them admin access to a network. My brother and I made a hobby of figuring out how to hack and tap pay phones, jackpot vending machines, and various and sundry illegalities that I hesitate to mention because I suspect someone is still looking for those responsible. If I'd had access to a computer network in those days, I'd have probably installed sniffers, email diverters, and anything else that looked like fun. I've since matured into a responsible adult, but the thought of handing over a network to my then-peers is like letting a teenage boy accompany my daughter on an overnight 'camping' trip.
Napster may have to block all 2.5 million of the RIAA's songs, as soon as the RIAA can figure out all their names.
Blocking songs by name isn't going to work. Alternate naming systems will arise in about a millisecond. The Rolling Stone's 'Lady Jane' could easily be '1@dy J@ne' for instance. Or ROT13, or... You get the idea.
You could try joining anti-immigrant groups such as the Reform Party or the IEEE. They are lobbying to block those foreigners stealing US jobs. I doubt it'll work though, coz neither has enough power.
How you got an anti-immigrant bias from my post is beyond me. The industry goes bitching to Congress every year about how they can't get enough U.S. citizens, and I was suggesting to the original poster that he simply present himself to one of the bitchers. I don't think we need to import foreign help if our own citizens are ready and able to do the same work. What we surely don't need is more thin-skinned grievance-nursing soreheads like yourself.
A couple of years ago, the New York Times' Cybertimes section had a similar encoder/decoder. In their case, it encoded to a description of a phoney baseball game. If one's going to really encode and send a message, the phoney spam approach seems much more likely to survive scrutiny than several pages of nonsensical baseball coverage. Very cool.
I recall back in the olden days (early '70s), when I was in engineering school, everyone was thinking I was nuts because the aerospace sector was tanking and there were massive layoffs of engineers. Well, by the time I graduated a few years later, demand was intense and I got a premium whn I was hired. This stuff is highly cyclical and downturns are temporary. Plus, while I haven't personally tried this, it might be worth trying to find the companies trying to obtain H-1B visas to bring in foreign workers in your speciality. They're supposed to certify that they've done a diligent search for a U.S. worker and failed to find one. It would be pretty tough to make that argument if you're standing there saying "here I am". I don't know if there's a way to queer an H-1B by protesting it to the government agency granting it, but it's an interesting thought.
How long before a copy of Carnivore leaks and gets mirrored for public consumption?
I'd say it's unlikely. I'm sure the code is classified, and breaches of security are treated very seriously. Plus the folks involved have gone through extensive security checks and tend to believe in the 'mission.' It's not impossible (witness the Pentagon Papers), but the probability of finding a rogue programmer willing to risk prison to leak the code is low, IMO.
Steve writes: "CNET News.com reports that the FBI has changed the name of Carnivore to DCS1000. [snip] According to the article, 'A spokesman for the FBI denied that the name change stemmed from worries that the name Carnivore made the system sound like a predatory device made to invade people's privacy.
Man, what a pain for the FBI, especially after they just got done changing it to Carnivore from the earlier name, "Net Raper 2000".
There are plenty of ways around attempts to pierce online anonymity. Three that quickly come to mind:
1. Anonymous remailers such as Mixmaster
2. Open wireless
3. Zeroknowledge Freedom
It really bugs some people when they can't locate which door to kick in, doesn't it?
For purposes of sensing/surveillance, I see a more interesting (and ominous) technology: Smart Dust. The eventual goal is to miniaturize things so much that the 'robot' (if one can call something that has no ability to move itself a robot) is the size of dust motes. You'd release a cloud of this stuff into the air, with the expectation that some of it will end up somewhere interesting to you. They'd network with each other optically, so large amounts of power wouldn't be needed for comms. Shades of a Neal Stephenson novel.
I know that you're asking about 2 GHz phones, but I have to say that I love my Vtech 1511 900 Mhz. The phone is completely contained in a headset (no wires drooping down to belt-level) and has a little infrared keypad that's separate so you can easily dial while wearing the phone. I can throw it on and rotate the boom mic up out of the way. When a call comes in, rotate the mic down and presto, the call is answered. The earphones don't come in contact with your ears, they sort of float just 'above' them, which means you can hear ambient sounds easily. It's somewhat larger and heavier than a regular headset, but the design is such that I don't notice. I haven't yet seen an equivalent product in 2GHz, but I haven't had any range or interference problems yet, so I'm in no hurry to switch anyway.
I've had similar problems in the past, though in my case it was that I didn't have security clearances high enough to get into the facility where the machine I developed resided. What we ended up doing was to set up an encrypted phone line on which I could dialup the remote system and connect to the console port. In my case, if the system had to be reset, I had a user at the other end do it. However, there are devices which allow you to do power cycling or equipment reset via the telephone (there's one called Power Mate over at Blackbox Catalog). If your remote site can dedicate a phone line to the equipment, an encrypted modem call and a remote reset capability might be the way to go.
Another choice might be to insert a terminal server over at the remote end, connected to the lan on one side and the server's console port on the other ("10/100 Serial Server" over at Blackbox). It wouldn't give you a remote reset capability, but you'd be able to control the server no matter what state it was in, short of total unresponsiveness.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what's wrong with your present solution, since it seems like you've got a working setup. However, you could get yourself a keyboard, mouse and lcd monitor, and hook them up to a PC/104 single-board computer to accomplish what you're after.
Thank God people are still on that hobby horse. Having an opposition that continues to deny reality makes it so much easier to get his agenda through.
This reminds me of a WWII story. Seems someone got the bright idea that, since cats hate water, they'd make good pilots for anti-ship bombs. The thinking (if that's what you could call it) was that you'd stick a cat in a bomb with some controls that it was trained to use, and it would guide the bomb away from water and toward the ship. They had to drop a cat in harness a few times to prove that this was one of the dumbest ideas anyone ever had.
You know, there's a simple solution to this: don't take the damned money. The feds are notorious for threatening to take away their (aka 'your') money if you don't toe their line. Not being constitutionally able to directly legislate legal limits for drunk driving, they're extorting states by witholding some of the Federal hiway trust funds if a state refuses to set its limit to .08 like Uncle Sam wants. So, if you don't want to put up with this crap, tell them to take their dough, jam it up sideways, and rotate it.
Under the U.S. constitution, you're perfectly free to exercise your opinions in whatever forum you want (exceptions apply, but this is the general rule). However, a private school is also free to throw you out for pretty much any reason, including none at all. I suppose that it would be possible to contest a retaliatory expulsion in a lengthy and expensive court battle, but it would be a pyrric victory at best.
Which wuld be fine with the RIAA, since it would be extremely difficult for someone to find a specific song. No one is going to download every '1.mp3' and listen to each in order to find those that happen to be Limp Bizkit. The RIAA won't much care if the content is there if it's unfindable.
I'd love to use a 'one-time-only' credit card number system. I can't count the times that I've purchased what I thought was a limited-period service and discovered that the merchant automatically charges me at renewal time. It's a bloody nuisance to have to call them to remove the charge and take me off the auto-renewal list. Some of them have been so hard to reach that I've just cancelled the card to end the problem (my early AOL experience was one of those times).
Better yet, pollute the CDDB with alternative names. CDDB identifies CDs based on the number of tracks and their playtimes. Most of the time this is unique to a CD, but every once in a while you'll be asked to select which CD is the one in question. This is because two CDs happen to have identical numbers of tracks with identical playtimes. So, how about we start making up alternative names ('Meta11ica' is an earlier example cited on SlashDot) and submitting them to CDDB. Then when someone is ripping a CD, they can easily select one of the alternative spellings for the filenaming. This also has the salutatory effect of hosing the CDDB, which appears to be richly deserved.
Encoding with ROT13 would require that you run your text thru an encoder program and then carefully type it into napster with no mistakes. With the pig encoder you can do it in your head and transcribing mistakes are much less likely.
My Utah experience: I went to Provo to visit my girlfriend's daughter and son-in-law, who are Mormons. One night after visiting with them, we decided to get a bottle of wine to take back to our hotel room. It took us 45 minutes to locate the state-run package store situated in a dingy part of town. It looked like a run-down methadone clinic, with bars on the windows, burned-out neon sighs, and a trash-strewn parking lot. We got the bottle of wine from their lousy selection and wanted to get a corkscrew. No gots. At a liquor store. So we go to a large supermarket and ask one of the 18-year-old stockboys where to find a corkscrew. He didn't know what a corkscrew was. Finally had to track down the manager to ask, and he ultimately led us to where they were. Moral: if you're going to drink in Utah, have it shipped in from elsewhere so that you don't have to deal with the locals.
Well, I can tell you how the Navy at a top-secret comm installation was supposed to do it if the place was in danger of being overrun: pile all sensitive stuff (hard drives, crypto machinery, etc.) in the parking lot, put thermite bricks on top of it, then melt everything into slag. I think it was more for speed than effectiveness. They might not necessarily have the time to do it in a less spectacular fashion.
In other words, shield the competitors from the feedback of the marketplace, letting them produce inferior products without suffering the consequences for so doing. Even if enough people were willing to do this, it wouldn't produce a 'more equal' market. It would simply keep second-rate products coming. Only by allowing the market to signal an organization that it's putting out stuff that people won't buy will the situation improve.
If today's students are anything like I was, I wouldn't give them admin access to a network. My brother and I made a hobby of figuring out how to hack and tap pay phones, jackpot vending machines, and various and sundry illegalities that I hesitate to mention because I suspect someone is still looking for those responsible. If I'd had access to a computer network in those days, I'd have probably installed sniffers, email diverters, and anything else that looked like fun. I've since matured into a responsible adult, but the thought of handing over a network to my then-peers is like letting a teenage boy accompany my daughter on an overnight 'camping' trip.
I look forward to the expose on the Flat Earth Society. It's time the veil was ripped from their faces as well.
Blocking songs by name isn't going to work. Alternate naming systems will arise in about a millisecond. The Rolling Stone's 'Lady Jane' could easily be '1@dy J@ne' for instance. Or ROT13, or ... You get the idea.
How you got an anti-immigrant bias from my post is beyond me. The industry goes bitching to Congress every year about how they can't get enough U.S. citizens, and I was suggesting to the original poster that he simply present himself to one of the bitchers. I don't think we need to import foreign help if our own citizens are ready and able to do the same work. What we surely don't need is more thin-skinned grievance-nursing soreheads like yourself.
A couple of years ago, the New York Times' Cybertimes section had a similar encoder/decoder. In their case, it encoded to a description of a phoney baseball game. If one's going to really encode and send a message, the phoney spam approach seems much more likely to survive scrutiny than several pages of nonsensical baseball coverage. Very cool.
I recall back in the olden days (early '70s), when I was in engineering school, everyone was thinking I was nuts because the aerospace sector was tanking and there were massive layoffs of engineers. Well, by the time I graduated a few years later, demand was intense and I got a premium whn I was hired. This stuff is highly cyclical and downturns are temporary. Plus, while I haven't personally tried this, it might be worth trying to find the companies trying to obtain H-1B visas to bring in foreign workers in your speciality. They're supposed to certify that they've done a diligent search for a U.S. worker and failed to find one. It would be pretty tough to make that argument if you're standing there saying "here I am". I don't know if there's a way to queer an H-1B by protesting it to the government agency granting it, but it's an interesting thought.
I'd say it's unlikely. I'm sure the code is classified, and breaches of security are treated very seriously. Plus the folks involved have gone through extensive security checks and tend to believe in the 'mission.' It's not impossible (witness the Pentagon Papers), but the probability of finding a rogue programmer willing to risk prison to leak the code is low, IMO.
Man, what a pain for the FBI, especially after they just got done changing it to Carnivore from the earlier name, "Net Raper 2000".
1. Anonymous remailers such as Mixmaster
2. Open wireless
3. Zeroknowledge Freedom
It really bugs some people when they can't locate which door to kick in, doesn't it?
Perhaps you ought to move off the planet, just in case. Oh, and take Alec Baldwin with you.
For purposes of sensing/surveillance, I see a more interesting (and ominous) technology: Smart Dust. The eventual goal is to miniaturize things so much that the 'robot' (if one can call something that has no ability to move itself a robot) is the size of dust motes. You'd release a cloud of this stuff into the air, with the expectation that some of it will end up somewhere interesting to you. They'd network with each other optically, so large amounts of power wouldn't be needed for comms. Shades of a Neal Stephenson novel.
I know that you're asking about 2 GHz phones, but I have to say that I love my Vtech 1511 900 Mhz. The phone is completely contained in a headset (no wires drooping down to belt-level) and has a little infrared keypad that's separate so you can easily dial while wearing the phone. I can throw it on and rotate the boom mic up out of the way. When a call comes in, rotate the mic down and presto, the call is answered. The earphones don't come in contact with your ears, they sort of float just 'above' them, which means you can hear ambient sounds easily. It's somewhat larger and heavier than a regular headset, but the design is such that I don't notice. I haven't yet seen an equivalent product in 2GHz, but I haven't had any range or interference problems yet, so I'm in no hurry to switch anyway.
Another choice might be to insert a terminal server over at the remote end, connected to the lan on one side and the server's console port on the other ("10/100 Serial Server" over at Blackbox). It wouldn't give you a remote reset capability, but you'd be able to control the server no matter what state it was in, short of total unresponsiveness.