I'm curious to know if the 'picture password' described by Clifford Pickover (and others, I'm sure) falls under the heading of 'false security.'
Essentially, the user is presented with a detailed image, and is required to 'point' to a preselected set of features, in sequence, to gain access to the system. Alternatively, the user may be required to select, say, 10 faces out of 100, in the correct order.
Not being much of a statistician or cryptologist myself, I'm curious to know what the current (slashdot) view of this method is, ie, 'false' or 'real' security.
Sometimes the developer will put something at the end of the 'man' page describing their preffered method of recompense. Ususally it's pizza or beer or a postcard or money.
Of course, I'm too lazy to search through them all and find an example.
Speech synthesis systems are getting better and better at (or, technically, their creators are getting better at creating systems which) generate speech with very similar intonation to what a human would, based on sentence structure analysis...
A really fine example of this is from the festival project (available for linux and windows, among others) at http://cstr.ed.ac.uk, especially when used with voices from the MBROLA project (http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html).
Also, Speech Synthesis Markup Language (http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis) allows you to customize the intonation for synthesizers which follow this standard.
Java in the browser, which has arguably been a bad idea to begin with
Really, there is a place for java on the browser. One of the most kick-ass apps I developed for a client was a real-time order-management system for a network of catering contractors (like the one they use at Taco Bell to communicate between the register and the "chefs"). Cooks can see orders, change status, etc. Customers and managers have a different view of the same data. No possible way to do this w/o continuous page refreshes and anoying clicks through multiple forms etc.
...java...sucks resources like none other. True, esp. for gui's. (We all know about listener leaks, right?) For other uses, however, such as web-enabled db apps, it can actually make more efficient use of resources -- and Java can remove most of the pain from tasks like session management.
the teaching language be C/C++ - once you know that, you can learn Java, Perl, PHP, etc. with little effort The problem of using C/C++ for teaching is, a student can get distracted from learning how to program well by the idiomatic syntactical complexities that make C/C++ such a powerful language in the first place. I say, learn Java first, so you understand the classic algorhythms, simple OO, and things like threads. Then, find out what else you can do with C/C++, and others.
True, Java's cross-platform... Do not forget, Java is not the only cross-platform language -- emacs-lisp is available for many many platforms, and uses such nicities as "byte-compiling", just like Java.:*)
Although the measure passed in the CT legislature was undoubtedly too restrictive, yet I can understand where the fear on which it was based comes from.
I pop in to the arcade now and again while waiting for a movie, to see the advances in consumer-market VR mostly -- my favorite to date features the player as the pilot of a pedal-powered aircraft, sloloming through a course of teathered baloons.
The increasing realism of shooter games is the most disturbing development. I watched a 12-year old playing a StarWars game. The opening scenes of flying through the Walkers reminded me of EmpireStrikesBack for Atari.
The most disturbing scene came next and involved battling storm troopers. This was difficult to watch. The storm troopers were close to life size, and were so artfully depicted, they were nearly indistinguishable from actors in a live-action movie. Their death-throes were chillingly realistic. Watching that kid totally absorbed in picking them off, steadily moving through the game past the photo-realistic dead people...
In short, maybe I'm getting old, but games like this make me think an age-appropriate rating system may be appropriate for today's arcade games.
We've come a long way from table-top Space Invaders.
13. Houses that cost $36,000 (year 2000 dollars) and last only 25 years
Well, this is at least a partial hit. Most houses today (those cookie cutter ones you see in the 'burbs) are built to last about 30 years, max. (Crappy poured foundation: 15 - 20 years; Crappy vynyl siding: 20-30 years; Lee press-on roofs: 20 years)
The artists should be reimbursed with funds coming from a new CDR-tax, of appr. $0.50 pr. disc.
...I find this somewhat fscked up, as...[a friend who] runs a small side-business (linuxpusher.dk) selling homeburned Linux-distros...is going to be sending ~$100 away in taxes each month...
Not only is this bad for your non-musician friend, but it also means that musicians who self-publish CD's will end up (effectively) paying royalties to the RIAA for their own material!
Now that is truly fscked up.
Q: What do you call a drummer who broke up w/ their girl/boyfriend?
Here is a POV I have until now refrained from posting, but have yet to see addressed. Music, until relatively recently, has always been free as in speech, and very nearly free as in beer.
This is primarily due to the fact that there was no way of reproducing music besides _playing_ it. Musicians would learn a song from other musicians, from their religious centers, their family, or at the pub (so to speak). Gifted and dedicated musicians were able to make a living through their trade -- a living more or less as rewarding as other trades of the times. Very gifted musicians might find a patron who would support them to a degree in exchange for having a live-in musician (remember, no recorded music for most of history). Most of us can think of an example of such an arrangement, a particular favorite of mine would be William the Blind Irish Harper, who gave us "Shebug an Shemore" (sp? my Gaelic is poor).
When written music came along, the primary restrictions on copy were related to finding and paying someone who could copy it.
All of this is, of course, a gross over-simplification of the history of music distrobution, but my primary point is, that the job description of a musician has been, until very recently, to _perform_ music, not to record it. Technology, for a while, allowed the musician to profit from a single, highly refined performance. Technology is now eroding much of that profit. The job -- and primary source of income -- of a professional musician will always be performing music.
As a final case to illustrate my point, I offer Rock Fest, a 4-day concert here in Wisconsin, dedicated to fabulous musicans who sell almost no records: White Snake, Bon Jovi, Ratt, etc. Concerts like Rock Fest are the primary source of income for these artists, who once profited mainly from record sales: even w/o Napster, eventually, performance is all you have.
Q: What do you call a drummer who broke up w/ their girl/boyfriend?
Why do people consider "gesturing" a good user interface?...ignores any strides made in UI regarding access for those with disabilities.
While I am not conviced that this type of interface will make computer apps in general more accessible, gesture recognition has been put to great use in making accessible kiosks and ATMs. When you encounter an accessibly designed ATM, tracing a line diagonally accross the screen will activate speech synthesis mode.
So, while gestures are a powerful paradigm for interfaces, careful thought must go into how and when they are implemented. If done correctly, they can be used to make apps much more accessible.
Would something like the echelon movement do here? What I mean is that people include words that trigger echelon in sigs and what not. In the same spirit, people could just get their hands on lots and lots of genetically modified and patented seeds, and plant them everywhere all over the earth - in public places, parks, governmental areas.
Most emphatically, no. While this may piss off Monsanto's lawyers, etc. it won't actually accomplish much of benefit. Moreover, it is potentially dangerous. Think about it: you are unquestioningly helping to introduce these frankin-genes into the wild -- this when we don't really know the long term effects of "controled" commercial planting!
The best thing to do is write a letter, on paper to your local congresscritter. Call them. Write letters to the editor. Apply the rules of the Linux-Advocacy-HOWTO to your efforts, and be polite, firm, and rational in your arguments.
If IP is your issue, then stick to that. If you believe that these organizms are dangerous, do some research and site some facts.
maybe soon we'll need some slightly longer encryption keys, thanks.
The uber-paranoid may want to revoke their old private keys and issue new ones anyhow... According to this report on cryptome.org, a serious flaw was found in OpenPGP and its derivatives which leaves your private key vulnerable to attack.
Re:outlook is actually pretty horrible....
on
Bad News from Yahoo
·
· Score: 1
That's an interesting assertion. By 'dollars-in', are you counting labor properly?
One-person or one-family farms are labor intensive, probably more so than agri-biz in some ways. However, a single piece of agribiz equipment (one of those giant air-conditioned combine pea-harvesters, for instance) often costs on the order of $100,000. That could buy a lot of labor. Labor goes down somewhat when you start using horse-power, too. Other solutions which have proven successfull include involving your customers (as in a community-supported-agriculture vegitable farm) in work bee's, etc.
1.Technology *will* kill. True.
2.Science *will* create horrible situations. True
3.It will also feed and heal the human race in prosperity never before seen. False!
(1) and (2) have been proven correct countless historical examples. (3) is based on the false assumption that we have never seen true prosperity which could "feed and heal" the human race.
Witness the prosperity enjoyed by the peoples of the NW coast of N America, prior to contact w/ Europeans. Mild climate, unlimited supply of seafood, unlimited supply of small game on shore. The result was an array of flourishing cultures. And they didn't need no stinkin glow-in-the-dark moths!
Re:outlook is actually pretty horrible....
on
Bad News from Yahoo
·
· Score: 1
The poster you respond to makes the point that investor debt ("buying on the margin") was a major factor in creating the depression of the 30's. You make the point that it was "drought," as well.
In fact, while investor debt was a serious contributing factor, farmer debt was equally important. The early industrial farming techniques led to massive depletion of the topsoils. When weather conditions became less than ideal -- drought -- the fields were ripe for destruction, and the legendary "dust storms" were born. When the farmer lost his crops, he could no longer repay his debts, and thousands lost their farms.
Today, rural America is continuing the high-debt / industrial "automated" farming which led to the destruction of the 30's.
Improved agricultural methods have increased the likelyhood that even in a drought that food can be harvested because of hardier crops, less damaging pesticides and the various automated farming implements.
On the contrary, we are finding that while chemicals like DDT are no longer used in the US, they are still used in developing nations. Today's crops are actually less "hardy", as their succesful cultivation often depend upon the application of specific herbicides and pesticides.
Regardless of what you think of engineered crops, pesticides, etc, few can argue that they haven't improved the efficiency of agriculture.
Here, you and a great many bankers, agricultural extension agents, and (unfortunately) farmers are wrong. Small farms, organic or otherwise, have consistantly proven to out produce large farms on a dollar-in dollar-out basis. Organic farms, with less overhead from specialty seeds and expensive chemicals and equipment, fare even better.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious to know if the 'picture password' described by Clifford Pickover (and others, I'm sure) falls under the heading of 'false security.'
Essentially, the user is presented with a detailed image, and is required to 'point' to a preselected set of features, in sequence, to gain access to the system. Alternatively, the user may be required to select, say, 10 faces out of 100, in the correct order.
Not being much of a statistician or cryptologist myself, I'm curious to know what the current (slashdot) view of this method is, ie, 'false' or 'real' security.
I don't want to hear about your disease.
Of course, I'm too lazy to search through them all and find an example.
That and when the PET got "sound" -- a whole room full turning on at once sounded like a canary store.
A really fine example of this is from the festival project (available for linux and windows, among others) at http://cstr.ed.ac.uk, especially when used with voices from the MBROLA project (http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html).
Also, Speech Synthesis Markup Language (http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis) allows you to customize the intonation for synthesizers which follow this standard.
* (MacOS & USB keyboards not currently supported).
One more reason to get a Mac.
Really, there is a place for java on the browser. One of the most kick-ass apps I developed for a client was a real-time order-management system for a network of catering contractors (like the one they use at Taco Bell to communicate between the register and the "chefs"). Cooks can see orders, change status, etc. Customers and managers have a different view of the same data. No possible way to do this w/o continuous page refreshes and anoying clicks through multiple forms etc.
My tv is a book. When dissapearing ink becomes the publishing industry standard, then I'll worry. But not now.
pry my apt-get from my cold dead fingers.
Umm excuse me?
Pick a pass phrase, and use the 1st letter of each word as your password. If you're paranoid, do some 4@x0r char-number substitution on the result.
Ok, so someone here thought of that, but then did something supremely goofy and added a couple of insane rules to it. Really!
True, esp. for gui's. (We all know about listener leaks, right?) For other uses, however, such as web-enabled db apps, it can actually make more efficient use of resources -- and Java can remove most of the pain from tasks like session management.
the teaching language be C/C++ - once you know that, you can learn Java, Perl, PHP, etc. with little effort
The problem of using C/C++ for teaching is, a student can get distracted from learning how to program well by the idiomatic syntactical complexities that make C/C++ such a powerful language in the first place. I say, learn Java first, so you understand the classic algorhythms, simple OO, and things like threads. Then, find out what else you can do with C/C++, and others.
True, Java's cross-platform... :*)
Do not forget, Java is not the only cross-platform language -- emacs-lisp is available for many many platforms, and uses such nicities as "byte-compiling", just like Java.
I pop in to the arcade now and again while waiting for a movie, to see the advances in consumer-market VR mostly -- my favorite to date features the player as the pilot of a pedal-powered aircraft, sloloming through a course of teathered baloons.
The increasing realism of shooter games is the most disturbing development. I watched a 12-year old playing a StarWars game. The opening scenes of flying through the Walkers reminded me of EmpireStrikesBack for Atari.
The most disturbing scene came next and involved battling storm troopers. This was difficult to watch. The storm troopers were close to life size, and were so artfully depicted, they were nearly indistinguishable from actors in a live-action movie. Their death-throes were chillingly realistic. Watching that kid totally absorbed in picking them off, steadily moving through the game past the photo-realistic dead people...
In short, maybe I'm getting old, but games like this make me think an age-appropriate rating system may be appropriate for today's arcade games.
We've come a long way from table-top Space Invaders.
Well, this is at least a partial hit. Most houses today (those cookie cutter ones you see in the 'burbs) are built to last about 30 years, max. (Crappy poured foundation: 15 - 20 years; Crappy vynyl siding: 20-30 years; Lee press-on roofs: 20 years)
...I find this somewhat fscked up, as
Not only is this bad for your non-musician friend, but it also means that musicians who self-publish CD's will end up (effectively) paying royalties to the RIAA for their own material!
Now that is truly fscked up.
Q: What do you call a drummer who broke up w/ their girl/boyfriend?
This is primarily due to the fact that there was no way of reproducing music besides _playing_ it. Musicians would learn a song from other musicians, from their religious centers, their family, or at the pub (so to speak). Gifted and dedicated musicians were able to make a living through their trade -- a living more or less as rewarding as other trades of the times. Very gifted musicians might find a patron who would support them to a degree in exchange for having a live-in musician (remember, no recorded music for most of history). Most of us can think of an example of such an arrangement, a particular favorite of mine would be William the Blind Irish Harper, who gave us "Shebug an Shemore" (sp? my Gaelic is poor).
When written music came along, the primary restrictions on copy were related to finding and paying someone who could copy it.
All of this is, of course, a gross over-simplification of the history of music distrobution, but my primary point is, that the job description of a musician has been, until very recently, to _perform_ music, not to record it. Technology, for a while, allowed the musician to profit from a single, highly refined performance. Technology is now eroding much of that profit. The job -- and primary source of income -- of a professional musician will always be performing music.
As a final case to illustrate my point, I offer Rock Fest, a 4-day concert here in Wisconsin, dedicated to fabulous musicans who sell almost no records: White Snake, Bon Jovi, Ratt, etc. Concerts like Rock Fest are the primary source of income for these artists, who once profited mainly from record sales: even w/o Napster, eventually, performance is all you have.
Q: What do you call a drummer who broke up w/ their girl/boyfriend?
While I am not conviced that this type of interface will make computer apps in general more accessible, gesture recognition has been put to great use in making accessible kiosks and ATMs. When you encounter an accessibly designed ATM, tracing a line diagonally accross the screen will activate speech synthesis mode.
So, while gestures are a powerful paradigm for interfaces, careful thought must go into how and when they are implemented. If done correctly, they can be used to make apps much more accessible.
That's why Monsanto uses the Terminator gene. Obivously, they don't use it enough.
Most emphatically, no. While this may piss off Monsanto's lawyers, etc. it won't actually accomplish much of benefit. Moreover, it is potentially dangerous. Think about it: you are unquestioningly helping to introduce these frankin-genes into the wild -- this when we don't really know the long term effects of "controled" commercial planting!
The best thing to do is write a letter, on paper to your local congresscritter. Call them. Write letters to the editor. Apply the rules of the Linux-Advocacy-HOWTO to your efforts, and be polite, firm, and rational in your arguments.
If IP is your issue, then stick to that. If you believe that these organizms are dangerous, do some research and site some facts.
The uber-paranoid may want to revoke their old private keys and issue new ones anyhow... According to this report on cryptome.org, a serious flaw was found in OpenPGP and its derivatives which leaves your private key vulnerable to attack.
One-person or one-family farms are labor intensive, probably more so than agri-biz in some ways. However, a single piece of agribiz equipment (one of those giant air-conditioned combine pea-harvesters, for instance) often costs on the order of $100,000. That could buy a lot of labor. Labor goes down somewhat when you start using horse-power, too. Other solutions which have proven successfull include involving your customers (as in a community-supported-agriculture vegitable farm) in work bee's, etc.
Oh. Here it is: www.law.upenn.edu/bll/ulc/ucita/ucita200.htm (duh -- it's the same in all states, hence the UNIFORM)
Has anyone found a link to the text of this beast?
True.
2.Science *will* create horrible situations.
True
3.It will also feed and heal the human race in prosperity never before seen.
False!
(1) and (2) have been proven correct countless historical examples. (3) is based on the false assumption that we have never seen true prosperity which could "feed and heal" the human race. Witness the prosperity enjoyed by the peoples of the NW coast of N America, prior to contact w/ Europeans. Mild climate, unlimited supply of seafood, unlimited supply of small game on shore. The result was an array of flourishing cultures. And they didn't need no stinkin glow-in-the-dark moths!
In fact, while investor debt was a serious contributing factor, farmer debt was equally important. The early industrial farming techniques led to massive depletion of the topsoils. When weather conditions became less than ideal -- drought -- the fields were ripe for destruction, and the legendary "dust storms" were born. When the farmer lost his crops, he could no longer repay his debts, and thousands lost their farms.
Today, rural America is continuing the high-debt / industrial "automated" farming which led to the destruction of the 30's.
Improved agricultural methods have increased the likelyhood that even in a drought that food can be harvested because of hardier crops, less damaging pesticides and the various automated farming implements.
On the contrary, we are finding that while chemicals like DDT are no longer used in the US, they are still used in developing nations. Today's crops are actually less "hardy", as their succesful cultivation often depend upon the application of specific herbicides and pesticides.
Regardless of what you think of engineered crops, pesticides, etc, few can argue that they haven't improved the efficiency of agriculture.
Here, you and a great many bankers, agricultural extension agents, and (unfortunately) farmers are wrong. Small farms, organic or otherwise, have consistantly proven to out produce large farms on a dollar-in dollar-out basis. Organic farms, with less overhead from specialty seeds and expensive chemicals and equipment, fare even better.