The magnetic strip in my credit cards are usually destroyed/useless before the card even expires.
My cards usually crack from curvature long before the stripe is demagnetized or worn away. I guess that's what comes from sitting on your wallet all the time.
FWIW, Esso Canada (gas station chain) has been using keychain-dongles for rapid payment for about a year now. You just hold your keys in front of the coloured box on the pump for a few seconds and it prepares to make the sale exactly the way it would if you stuck your card in the stripe reader. They also put the same dongle-reader at each cash register so you can buy your morning coffee a few seconds faster....
How about something USEFUL?
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Rich Dad, Poor Dad" would be a good starting point for someone who's fresh out of school and wondering what sort of future their diploma will bring. It might also open your eyes to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of dot-bomb paupers out there who thought a 60-hours-per-week job with a signing bonus was the epitome of success....
If you have the ability to add a back-door you will also (in most cases) have the ability to recover from a lost password without *needing* a back door.
There were some rumors a while back that HP printer drivers inserted the printer serial number or some other identifier (like a Windows GUID) into color prints in a way that could be read back later by scanning with the right software, but wasn't visible just from looking at the print.
You can do that sort of thing yourself, too. The simplest form of steganography is to diddle the LSB of one of the colours. Since the human eye doesn't focus well in the blue wavelengths, you would filter the host image to create a 23-bit RGB (887) image and OR it with your one-bit RGB (001) data image. Extracting the data is a matter of scanning the original (if not already in electronic form) and filtering out everything but the blue LSB. The real challenge is determining the best patterns to use to encode your data so that it can be recovered if the image is damaged enroute (as would quickly happen with currency). Like a barcode image, you would want the embedded data to have a large surface area, delimiters, CRCs and have redundant copies distributed throughout the host image.
$a.='('.$_POST["it$f['n1'][$i]"]."='${q2}');";
Is there any good CGI language that doesn't have this kind of problems?
If you are comfortable with Perl then one way around the "stuff HTML into a variable and print it" problem is to use the MASON system. This allows you to embed Perl inside an HTML page rather than trying to print HTML from within Perl. One positive side effect of this role-reversal is that all static HTML remains literal text in the source code so that you can do page layout using wysiwyg editors and can structure your code so that opening and closing tags are easily identifiable and balanced.
Re:Cheaper in Vancouver, BC
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 1
The Vancouver Segway rental site is on Granville Island. The city is trying to decide how to classify it:
1) As an electric vehicle it would require a license and insurance, even though ICBC (the socialized insurance scam) refuses to license or insure electric vehicles.
2) As a non-vehicle, it would be banned by existing bylaws against the use of skateboards, etc. on public property.
(And if it floats then it must be... a witch!)
Maybe the Segway folks should put a tiny wind-up key on it somewhere so that it can be classified as a "gas/electric-assisted human-powered vehicle", in which case it can fall into the same category as the classic moped....
The alternative would be to add a 3rd wheel and a basket and try to convince people it was just another one of those electric shopping carts that the grey-haired speed freaks like to zoom around in.
What could a Segway do to solve someone's transportation problems that a bicycle could not?
Spoken like a true flat-lander. Have you never biked up a long hill? I can go for miles on flat land without breaking a sweat, but somehow always end up drenched after a two or three mile stretch of 8% grade. At least on a Segway the rider doesn't need to leave time in the morning commute for a shower upon arrival at the destination.
think about all the features the cable network can provide. now think about all the wires going all over the home. wireless is the natural solution.
I think the wires will be around for a while yet. If I was building a house today I would still insist two (of each) coax, Cat5 and telephone lines be bundled to a distribution box in each room (via PVC conduits, no less, so that the runs can be upgraded without poking any more holes). I have two WiFi-equipped computers in my house (connected to a cable-modem equipped Linux server hidden in the basement), but still find myself moving the WAP around to try and eliminate the dead spots. If my house had decent wiring I'd be able to put the WAP in the attic....
Yes -- but that's because eBay designed their system that way, and they continue to maintain it in that fashion. They can't really claim solace in a policy that is entirely under their own discretion.
Why not? None of the participants on the site are compelled to be there against their will. You are clearly told when you sign up (and many times thereafter) that the vendor and winning bidder will be subject to feedback.
Personally, I think Grace sounds like a slimebag. But his argument does have merit: eBay is not simply a conduit for information, like an ISP. eBay actively publishes content onto the web, and Grace is arguing that eBay should be held responsible when that content violates the law.
EBay is less like a publisher and more like the operator of a printing press -- they don't write or edit the information, but simply provide the conduit for delivery. And like a printing press operator, they reserve the right to refuse to deliver certain content without taking full responsibility for content that isn't rejected.
Hoax #101 : USA is democratic country; a land of freedom where the government respects it's citizen's privacy.
What makes you think "democracy" has anything to do with "freedom" or "respect"? Democracy simply means that the government is elected by the people and is, at least in theory, responsible to the people.
Democratic nations can have styles ranging from socialist (Canada) to libertarian (Netherlands) to puritanical (U.S.A.) and choose to respect (Pierre Trudeau) or trod upon (George Bush Jr.) the privacy of the citizenry. There is an *expectation* that a democracy will respect privacy in order to get itself re-elected, but that presumes A) that the government is interested in getting re-elected, and B) it needs to respect privacy in exchange for the winning votes.
Lastly, those countries who have tariffs levied against them, may retaliate with equivalent tariffs or legislation against the import of other goods and services from the tariff imposing country which will hurt the countries export marketing and thier domestic industry as a whole.
Another method of retaliating is to impose *export* tarrifs on critical goods sold to the USA, thereby causing inflation in the USA. I live in British Columbia, where the huge softwood lumber industry is being crippled by unfair (as ruled by the WTO on several occasions) US import tarrifs on finished lumber even while the American saw mills are asking for lower prices on raw Canadian logs. There is a huge resentment up here because of the way the tarrif has caused 90% unemployment in some towns, and the silly trade war has caused housing costs in the USA to jump significantly.
Many people are calling on the Canadian government to impose a punitive export duty on oil, water and electricity, particularly since California is still in default on its electrical payments to B.C.Hydro from last year's shortages. You (Americans) don't mind raping other countries when you are in need, but quickly turn on your friends when you see an opportunity to fatten your wallets and protect industries that aren't competitive.
How will a cashier "give" you an hour of access? Will there be a code printed on your receipt? Is there an easy way for a user to configure his/her PC to gain access to an otherwise closed wireless LAN for a limited time?
The typical solution is to have the firewall server connected to the cash register so that it can provide an access code (if the register is able to request one) or at least watch the receipt data and store unique items (register number, date/time and total purchase price) for later use. Each customer's purchase data is inserted into temporary storage and time-stamped for automatic removal.
The default firewall rule would redirect all outbound connections to the gateway machine. Your web browser would end up downloading the login page regardless of what URL you requested. The server-side script would validate your receipt information and give your IP address to the gateway manager script, which would match up the MAC and open the firewall for you. An hour later, the cleanup routine would expire your receipt and remove your MAC from the firewall.
Even running a "shadow operation" on a second set of computers can be an expensive proposition when you're talking about ATC. It is far more common to do "in place" upgrades by taking the redundant systems off-line and upgrading them while the controllers continue to carry live traffic on the other half of the system. At some quiet period the two systems change roles (usually with data loss) and then the controllers run with the new software for a few hours to see if it breaks. If all is well, then the other side is upgraded and brought back into redundancy.
The problem with this situation is that there is a significant period of time in which the smallest hiccup can bring the whole aviation system back to the stone age because of the lack of redundancy. There have also been (unfortunately numerous) occasions where latent software defects were not detected until after the second side had been upgraded.
The need for quality control at the design and coding stages cannot be overstated, as it's almost impossible to do live load testing on these systems before they are shipped to the facilities. Sure, the developers can pipe in recorded radar traffic, etc., but nothing can simulate the pseudo-random reality-based pounding of a hundred controllers on the keyboards.
From my experience, the biggest bugs to reach the operational systems are generally race conditions that weren't expose in testing due to the different operating conditions and/or the presence of debugging code that were actually masking the condition they were trying to detect.
Redundancy started to suffer when the bean counters took over. Air Traffic Control is no longer an exercise in absolute safety but one of "risk management". This means that when the system designer says "I want a fully redundant hot standby system in a separate building powered from a different grid feed and on its own battery backup" the bean-counters say "you can have a warm standby (because we wouldn't want to have to pay for two software licenses) in a separate rack in the same computer room (have you looked at the cost of raised flooring lately?)". Instead of asking "what can we do to avoid a failure?" they tend to ask "how long will each failure last and how much will that cost us in lost revenue?"
Totally trying to capitalize on the x-men franchise.
I went to see "Dare Devil" last night and they played the advertisements for "LXG" and "X-Men 2" sequentially. Most people were laughing and mocking the "LXG" trailer but the comments were favorable and enthusiastic for "X-Men 2".
And to think I've been incorrectly referring to it as an octothorpe all my life (except for that brief period when it was simply a "tic-tac-toe board"). I would never think to call C# "C sharp" unless I was talking about musical notes....
Build software that "learns" what is spam and what isn't
Better idea: ditch SMTP/POP protocols in favour of new systems which makes spam advertising less cost-effective. For example, instead of forwarding all email to recipient, how about a protocol that stores the message on the sender's box and forwards only a "you've got mail" header? Spammers would then have to store billions of messages on their own systems or use up CPU resources to create on-the-fly content. Best of all, the sender's address could never be forged or else the recipient wouldn't be able to receive the content.
Well, if gravity travels at the speed of light, wouldn't the gravitational pull of black holes be confined by the event horizon as is the case with light?
When I saw "earliest memory" on the front page I was expecting a completely different kind of article.
My first computer was a CoCo ("-D" board) that came with 16K RAM in the form of 8x4116. I was one of the first kids in my block to do memory upgrades, first to 32k (piggyback method) and then to 64K using 4164 chips.
Where do the current security standards fall short? Afterall, you can listen in on any Internet traffic (in theory).
One problem with wireless is that people tend to look at security from only one perspective -- "are my secrets safe?" -- and conclude that people without secrets don't need any security.
The reason I use IPSec is not to keep the black hats from reading my credit card data (https keeps that safe enough), but to keep them from using my connection to send packets elsewhere. I just don't want my ISP or the police to break down the doors because some drive-by sent a million spam messages (or worse) with my return address!
for (int i = 0; i < a.length; i++) a[i] = i++;
Each access a[i] is needlessly bounds-checked.
Except, of course, that you're thinking in terms of a single-threaded application. The a[] array could conceivably change size in one thread while being iterated by another....
Not to sound like some George W Bush speech; anonymity is where the enemies of freedom hide as well.
Not to sound like some Noam Chomsky article... The "enemies of freedom" line is political scape-goatism supported by a massive failure of the 4th Estate. CNN is not doing us any favours by pounding home the message that *we* are the only victims.
The politicians and media have been telling us about our moral superiority for so long that we've effectively lost the ability to see ourselves as the rest of the world sees us. The United States of America and its western allies have propped up as many puppet dictators as they have shut down, and certainly started more wars than they have ended. We look at people like Noriega, Marcos, the Iran-Contra affair, bin Laden, etc. as isolated disasters instead of seeing them as eggs in the same US-made crate.
I'm not suggesting that driving airplanes into buildings is excusable by any stretch of the imagination. What really scares me, though, is not the next terrorist act but the fact that people don't see (or refuse to acknowledge) the cause-effect relationship at play here. As long as the 1st World governments are abusing 3rd World nations there will always be those who have the means and desire to fight back.
The best way to keep the "enemies of freedom" from hiding behind legal or technological walls is to stop manufacturing these enemies of freedom. Perhaps the Canadian diplomat's "moron" comment wasn't so far off base.
A friend of a friend invented a remote-control vibrator. I kid you not! It's wired to the PC and has a web interface so that people in long-distance relationships can intimately stimulate each other during telephone/IM sex.... His company will be selling the product on-line shortly.
Um, if you need to pull the handle, it strongly suggests that not pulling the handle would have also destroyed the plane.
These parachutes will almost certainly be used prematurely on occasion, "saving" the occupants from what would have otherwise been a survivable off-airport landing.
The most likely use for the parachute is to recover from spins. Most countries (other than the U.S.A.) teach their pilots how to recover from spins using brain-power and control surfaces instead of relying on silk.
Speaking of which, does the pilot of the airplane in question get a membership in the Caterpiller Club?
Also, protests can be a lot of work... they should be fun to get people to show up and help you out. Handing out fliers while holding some home-made 'DMCA Sucks' sign isn't fun. Puppet shows are fun. Fake non-disclosure agreements (that are clearly parodies) are fun.
Imaging the power of the "Geeky Villiage People":
[singing]
"We're complainin' 'bout the D-M-C-A
Yes we're talkin' 'bout the D-M-C-A man!
When you buy in this store
You're supporting a whore..."
Slashdot Mirror
My cards usually crack from curvature long before the stripe is demagnetized or worn away. I guess that's what comes from sitting on your wallet all the time.
FWIW, Esso Canada (gas station chain) has been using keychain-dongles for rapid payment for about a year now. You just hold your keys in front of the coloured box on the pump for a few seconds and it prepares to make the sale exactly the way it would if you stuck your card in the stripe reader. They also put the same dongle-reader at each cash register so you can buy your morning coffee a few seconds faster....
"Rich Dad, Poor Dad" would be a good starting point for someone who's fresh out of school and wondering what sort of future their diploma will bring. It might also open your eyes to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of dot-bomb paupers out there who thought a 60-hours-per-week job with a signing bonus was the epitome of success....
If you have the ability to add a back-door you will also (in most cases) have the ability to recover from a lost password without *needing* a back door.
You can do that sort of thing yourself, too. The simplest form of steganography is to diddle the LSB of one of the colours. Since the human eye doesn't focus well in the blue wavelengths, you would filter the host image to create a 23-bit RGB (887) image and OR it with your one-bit RGB (001) data image. Extracting the data is a matter of scanning the original (if not already in electronic form) and filtering out everything but the blue LSB. The real challenge is determining the best patterns to use to encode your data so that it can be recovered if the image is damaged enroute (as would quickly happen with currency). Like a barcode image, you would want the embedded data to have a large surface area, delimiters, CRCs and have redundant copies distributed throughout the host image.
Is there any good CGI language that doesn't have this kind of problems?
If you are comfortable with Perl then one way around the "stuff HTML into a variable and print it" problem is to use the MASON system. This allows you to embed Perl inside an HTML page rather than trying to print HTML from within Perl. One positive side effect of this role-reversal is that all static HTML remains literal text in the source code so that you can do page layout using wysiwyg editors and can structure your code so that opening and closing tags are easily identifiable and balanced.
1) As an electric vehicle it would require a license and insurance, even though ICBC (the socialized insurance scam) refuses to license or insure electric vehicles.
2) As a non-vehicle, it would be banned by existing bylaws against the use of skateboards, etc. on public property.
(And if it floats then it must be
Maybe the Segway folks should put a tiny wind-up key on it somewhere so that it can be classified as a "gas/electric-assisted human-powered vehicle", in which case it can fall into the same category as the classic moped....
The alternative would be to add a 3rd wheel and a basket and try to convince people it was just another one of those electric shopping carts that the grey-haired speed freaks like to zoom around in.
Spoken like a true flat-lander. Have you never biked up a long hill? I can go for miles on flat land without breaking a sweat, but somehow always end up drenched after a two or three mile stretch of 8% grade. At least on a Segway the rider doesn't need to leave time in the morning commute for a shower upon arrival at the destination.
I think the wires will be around for a while yet. If I was building a house today I would still insist two (of each) coax, Cat5 and telephone lines be bundled to a distribution box in each room (via PVC conduits, no less, so that the runs can be upgraded without poking any more holes). I have two WiFi-equipped computers in my house (connected to a cable-modem equipped Linux server hidden in the basement), but still find myself moving the WAP around to try and eliminate the dead spots. If my house had decent wiring I'd be able to put the WAP in the attic....
Why not? None of the participants on the site are compelled to be there against their will. You are clearly told when you sign up (and many times thereafter) that the vendor and winning bidder will be subject to feedback.
Personally, I think Grace sounds like a slimebag. But his argument does have merit: eBay is not simply a conduit for information, like an ISP. eBay actively publishes content onto the web, and Grace is arguing that eBay should be held responsible when that content violates the law.
EBay is less like a publisher and more like the operator of a printing press -- they don't write or edit the information, but simply provide the conduit for delivery. And like a printing press operator, they reserve the right to refuse to deliver certain content without taking full responsibility for content that isn't rejected.
What makes you think "democracy" has anything to do with "freedom" or "respect"? Democracy simply means that the government is elected by the people and is, at least in theory, responsible to the people.
Democratic nations can have styles ranging from socialist (Canada) to libertarian (Netherlands) to puritanical (U.S.A.) and choose to respect (Pierre Trudeau) or trod upon (George Bush Jr.) the privacy of the citizenry. There is an *expectation* that a democracy will respect privacy in order to get itself re-elected, but that presumes A) that the government is interested in getting re-elected, and B) it needs to respect privacy in exchange for the winning votes.
Another method of retaliating is to impose *export* tarrifs on critical goods sold to the USA, thereby causing inflation in the USA. I live in British Columbia, where the huge softwood lumber industry is being crippled by unfair (as ruled by the WTO on several occasions) US import tarrifs on finished lumber even while the American saw mills are asking for lower prices on raw Canadian logs. There is a huge resentment up here because of the way the tarrif has caused 90% unemployment in some towns, and the silly trade war has caused housing costs in the USA to jump significantly.
Many people are calling on the Canadian government to impose a punitive export duty on oil, water and electricity, particularly since California is still in default on its electrical payments to B.C.Hydro from last year's shortages. You (Americans) don't mind raping other countries when you are in need, but quickly turn on your friends when you see an opportunity to fatten your wallets and protect industries that aren't competitive.
The typical solution is to have the firewall server connected to the cash register so that it can provide an access code (if the register is able to request one) or at least watch the receipt data and store unique items (register number, date/time and total purchase price) for later use. Each customer's purchase data is inserted into temporary storage and time-stamped for automatic removal.
The default firewall rule would redirect all outbound connections to the gateway machine. Your web browser would end up downloading the login page regardless of what URL you requested. The server-side script would validate your receipt information and give your IP address to the gateway manager script, which would match up the MAC and open the firewall for you. An hour later, the cleanup routine would expire your receipt and remove your MAC from the firewall.
Even running a "shadow operation" on a second set of computers can be an expensive proposition when you're talking about ATC. It is far more common to do "in place" upgrades by taking the redundant systems off-line and upgrading them while the controllers continue to carry live traffic on the other half of the system. At some quiet period the two systems change roles (usually with data loss) and then the controllers run with the new software for a few hours to see if it breaks. If all is well, then the other side is upgraded and brought back into redundancy.
The problem with this situation is that there is a significant period of time in which the smallest hiccup can bring the whole aviation system back to the stone age because of the lack of redundancy. There have also been (unfortunately numerous) occasions where latent software defects were not detected until after the second side had been upgraded.
The need for quality control at the design and coding stages cannot be overstated, as it's almost impossible to do live load testing on these systems before they are shipped to the facilities. Sure, the developers can pipe in recorded radar traffic, etc., but nothing can simulate the pseudo-random reality-based pounding of a hundred controllers on the keyboards.
From my experience, the biggest bugs to reach the operational systems are generally race conditions that weren't expose in testing due to the different operating conditions and/or the presence of debugging code that were actually masking the condition they were trying to detect.
Redundancy started to suffer when the bean counters took over. Air Traffic Control is no longer an exercise in absolute safety but one of "risk management". This means that when the system designer says "I want a fully redundant hot standby system in a separate building powered from a different grid feed and on its own battery backup" the bean-counters say "you can have a warm standby (because we wouldn't want to have to pay for two software licenses) in a separate rack in the same computer room (have you looked at the cost of raised flooring lately?)". Instead of asking "what can we do to avoid a failure?" they tend to ask "how long will each failure last and how much will that cost us in lost revenue?"
I went to see "Dare Devil" last night and they played the advertisements for "LXG" and "X-Men 2" sequentially. Most people were laughing and mocking the "LXG" trailer but the comments were favorable and enthusiastic for "X-Men 2".
# is not. It's a hash.
And to think I've been incorrectly referring to it as an octothorpe all my life (except for that brief period when it was simply a "tic-tac-toe board"). I would never think to call C# "C sharp" unless I was talking about musical notes....
Better idea: ditch SMTP/POP protocols in favour of new systems which makes spam advertising less cost-effective. For example, instead of forwarding all email to recipient, how about a protocol that stores the message on the sender's box and forwards only a "you've got mail" header? Spammers would then have to store billions of messages on their own systems or use up CPU resources to create on-the-fly content. Best of all, the sender's address could never be forged or else the recipient wouldn't be able to receive the content.
Well, if gravity travels at the speed of light, wouldn't the gravitational pull of black holes be confined by the event horizon as is the case with light?
When I saw "earliest memory" on the front page I was expecting a completely different kind of article.
My first computer was a CoCo ("-D" board) that came with 16K RAM in the form of 8x4116. I was one of the first kids in my block to do memory upgrades, first to 32k (piggyback method) and then to 64K using 4164 chips.
One problem with wireless is that people tend to look at security from only one perspective -- "are my secrets safe?" -- and conclude that people without secrets don't need any security.
The reason I use IPSec is not to keep the black hats from reading my credit card data (https keeps that safe enough), but to keep them from using my connection to send packets elsewhere. I just don't want my ISP or the police to break down the doors because some drive-by sent a million spam messages (or worse) with my return address!
Each access a[i] is needlessly bounds-checked.
Except, of course, that you're thinking in terms of a single-threaded application. The a[] array could conceivably change size in one thread while being iterated by another....
Not to sound like some Noam Chomsky article... The "enemies of freedom" line is political scape-goatism supported by a massive failure of the 4th Estate. CNN is not doing us any favours by pounding home the message that *we* are the only victims.
The politicians and media have been telling us about our moral superiority for so long that we've effectively lost the ability to see ourselves as the rest of the world sees us. The United States of America and its western allies have propped up as many puppet dictators as they have shut down, and certainly started more wars than they have ended. We look at people like Noriega, Marcos, the Iran-Contra affair, bin Laden, etc. as isolated disasters instead of seeing them as eggs in the same US-made crate.
I'm not suggesting that driving airplanes into buildings is excusable by any stretch of the imagination. What really scares me, though, is not the next terrorist act but the fact that people don't see (or refuse to acknowledge) the cause-effect relationship at play here. As long as the 1st World governments are abusing 3rd World nations there will always be those who have the means and desire to fight back.
The best way to keep the "enemies of freedom" from hiding behind legal or technological walls is to stop manufacturing these enemies of freedom. Perhaps the Canadian diplomat's "moron" comment wasn't so far off base.
ll: bye, Karma. It's been nice knowing you.
A friend of a friend invented a remote-control vibrator. I kid you not! It's wired to the PC and has a web interface so that people in long-distance relationships can intimately stimulate each other during telephone/IM sex.... His company will be selling the product on-line shortly.
These parachutes will almost certainly be used prematurely on occasion, "saving" the occupants from what would have otherwise been a survivable off-airport landing.
The most likely use for the parachute is to recover from spins. Most countries (other than the U.S.A.) teach their pilots how to recover from spins using brain-power and control surfaces instead of relying on silk.
Speaking of which, does the pilot of the airplane in question get a membership in the Caterpiller Club?
Imaging the power of the "Geeky Villiage People":
[singing]
"We're complainin' 'bout the D-M-C-A
Yes we're talkin' 'bout the D-M-C-A man!
When you buy in this store
You're supporting a whore..."