... psychoactive drugs... trying to release demons from one's brain with a hand drill and a piece of metal coat hanger...
(citation needed) I have heard a similar story before, but haven't been able to find any useful reference, and have presumed it to be an urban legend. (snopes doesn't have this particular one, as far as i can tell)
As a parent, and occasional teacher of other children, though, more evidence on a subject such as this would be useful, if you have any. thanks-
Or, if you want to stick with Sprint's coverage (including voice roaming on Verizon) you can try Ting, which also has inexpensive "plan" pricing, provided you are willing to buy your phone.
Data is not particularly cheap with Ting, but my family (4 phones so far) doesn't use a lot of that anyway, so it winds up being fairly inexpensive for us. T-mobile would be $100 per month (or more) plus tax for us, and our high bill has been $67, so we've made up the up the up-front cost of the phones.
Ting doesn't have 2 year contracts or any of that noise, either, so we can leave anytime. Even though I don't want to leave, it's nice to have the freedom, and not worry about ETF's.
Ting is another MVNO on Sprint's network, but they do VOICE roaming to Verizon. (not data)
Depending on usage, they can be even cheaper than Virgin. The one complicated part about them is that you have to buy your phone upfront, which makes comparing oranges (no apples allowed yet) to other fruit more difficult.
Our family has 4 smartphones, many bought from craigslist, that have cost a net of $560. Our usage bills us for $67 per month, plus taxes (under $15) If you have a sprint phone that is paid for, you don't even have that startup cost to overcome. Still, saving more than $40 per month verses our previous bit with AT&T, we got there fast. Buying top end, unlocked, brand new phones would make it harder, though.
some people get concerned about the "pay for what you use" model, but for us, it has been really beneficial. I don't even stress about going "over" into the next bucket, because it's really only an incremental charge, not a "blow you out of the water" thing.
that's one of the reasons I've liked "finger vein" authentication, it uses infrared to look through your skin, and touchless scanners are available. well, for lots of $$$ anyway. I keep expecting to see them in hospitals, where germ propagation and HIPAA are big isssues.
also, I forgot to mention, finger-vein can't be subverted with gummi bears. Somebody will come up with something, someday, but I wouldn't imagine it will be easy, inconspicuous, and cheap. (at least for quite a while)
Hitachi has something called "finger-vein authentication", which seems pretty good. Supposedly, it has really good accuracy, it's scanning something internal, so you don't leave copies of it everywhere you touch, or in long-zoom high megapixel pictures. Scanners can (have) been made that are touchless, making them useful in hospitals where germ-spread is an issue.
Actually, I saw a full-color hologram in high school (mumble-decades) ago. It was worse about angles, there was pretty much exactly one precise angle you had to look from, or the colors were all bad, but still, it worked. As for the "narrow range of angles from which they can be viewed", I thought one of the great parts about holograms was that it WASN'T "just ONE spot". Narrow, maybe, but honestly some of the new parallax barrier screens are MUCH worse.
The game is over when you die. While you are alive, whether you are investing in the stock market, keeping your money in a bank, precious metals, or other assets, you are being played by the game. When you are done playing or being played, you are free to ignore it and Praise God. (actually, you could do that all along, but then it becomes more obvious)
Airset is a "social" tool that has a model like this; but it never took off like Facebook did.
It has much better find-grained controls for each group of friends, and lots of tools, including one of the best contacts data models I've seen. Unfortunately a good data model doesn't make you popular.
Yes, it has a database, but it sync's to the metadata in the file. The part I like best is the "tags, with hierarchy". Maybe that's just a sign I have too many tags. You can't really get that feature without paying money, (photoshop elements, lightroom, IMatch) and this tool seems the best of them to me. (not as slow as elements, better features than the other two, not too expensive)
A few people above have mentioned the "thou shalt not touch the originals" principle, which I personally don't quite believe in, but it is possible with IdImager: You can set up the downloader to mirror to another location for backup or whatever.
IdImager has a bunch of other advanced features I haven't fully taken advantage of yet, like Stacks, Versioning, and scripting. It has a face detector, but it isn't as good as picasa's. Still, it's something, and picasa's tag system is horrible.
Overall, the best image organizer available right now. Technically I guess it is a general-purpose DAM, since it can import other file types, but it definitely focuses on images.
... XP mostly shed it's poor reputation, and replaced it with one of stability and speed on modern to previous-generation machines. But XP accomplished some of that by virtue of the available machines getting faster, not by slimming down to run on the previous generation machines. This is important because of your following point
What's the difference?... Thus, buyers were essentially given a choice: Unstable ME, or Unproven XP.... New system buyers have a different choice than a few years ago: Proven XP, or Unproven Vista. Today, consumers can still get XP or Vista. Break the market into three segments. Vista doesn't work on the low end. -->XP wins the hearts of the cheapos.
In the medium area, either one will run, but Proven XP does it faster, and Unproven Vista gives not much to make up for it. -->Advantage: XP.
On the top end, the same situation as the middle, except the speed difference MAY not be felt because there are clock cycles to waste. (depends on the user, some buy these systems becase they desperately want those extra cycles... and strangely, the "applications" they frequently want to run don't work in Vista...)
Actually, I REALLY like the Photo organizer. I only got to play with it for an hour or two, but I found it nearly as good as photoshop's. Still, not worthy of a whole operating system (and the attendant hardware upgrades), particularly since it still had a deal buster. (non hierarchical tags)
Why are custom chipsets required? Usually, "custom" cryptography is Broken cryptography. I'm not sure when you consider hardware to have a custom chipset, but an encrypted drive I admire is the Dekart Smart Container, which uses standard (separate) smart card chips for key storage, and the way I understand it, even if you use an advanced method to extract the data from the smart card, you still have to guess the password to decrypt the key, that you would then use to decrypt the data on the drive.
Of course, if you know the weakness to 3des, I suppose you could just grab the raw data from the flash and decrypt it directly rather than playing with trying to extract the key, but as near as anyone knows, that's several years away even for government agencies.
It would be nice if they used AES256, but I've got two or three other features that are on my wishlist for "the perfect device" that nobody seems to have implemented. Things like "ability to store data on SDHC card, rather than internal memory" and "uses finger-vein authentication to unlock certificates, without allowing biometric data to ever leave the device, or be stored in the clear on the device"
You mentioned Google Calendar, so I figure web-based stuff is fair game. Check out Airset.com; it is Extremely powerful, and its item schema seems to be as complete or better than Outlook's. A sync tool is available for Outlook if you wish to use that for an offline client, but it's a little weak, partly due to Microsoft's data model.
Speaking of which, rather than Outlook's "folder" view, Airset has "groups", which fairly match up with the concept of "tags". You can filter out, filter in, do most things short of an SQL query among your groups to see a particular subset of calendar entries.
It also contains one of the best online contact managers I've been able to find, which also syncs to outlook. (once again, I'd like to bring up the completeness of the item schema/elements)
I don't use the other parts, (I think it has ten or so other services these days) but the calendar and contacts Rock.
You'll probably get plenty of takers, but as for myself, I find the following terms and conditions an Extreme turn-off:
" (c)... you hereby assign, transfer and convey, and agree to further assign, transfer and convey, to Sponsor any and all your intellectual property rights in the Design."... " (g) Entries become the property of the Sponsor and will not be returned...."
Isn't slashdot a big supporter of Creative Commons? Non-exclusive copyright arrangements anyone? maybe there wouldn't be much cause to reuse code that would be developed for this contest, but that would make it less valuable and interesting to write, in my opinion.
So here's a question for you; if taking away your VIRTUAL name, in ONE virtual world made you uncomfortable, does it give you greater insight into the problem of REAL identity theft in the REAL world? (another slashdot hot topic anyway)
It's something that truly concerns me. There's no escape; no other world to go to, the problem will continually dog you from that time forward, and it's something that's hard to protect yourself against. Your "identity" is in the hands of others. Millions of others. Usually Enron employees. Or tidymart or whatever.
There's still a "man in the middle" that this is vulnerable to, though the "middle" is creatively defined; in between you and the computer, rather than somewhere on the path between your computer and the bank.
If your PC is infected with a trojan, it could watch for login attempts to mybank.com, and present its own fake screen. It could then pass on any clicks or characters on to the "true" window, with a different transaction than you intended. (send $1000 to otherbank.ru)
I think the point is that your assumption is incorrect.
why is a mag stripe/PIN considered secure enough
It is Not. Anymore. A card with a magstripe used to go farther; it USED to be difficult to duplicate them. The 3-digit code written on it was unique to it, not usually kept anywhere else, etc. Now that these pieces of information are easily/regularly duplicated, it's not any better than a username/password.
Now, we need to go to the next level, using complicated mathematical algorithms with a secret seed, producing un-duplicable results to attempt to secure our transactions.
While I agree with your clarification that ID should be classified as theology, I think evolution also falls in the "not provable" category. History is not repeatable, and none of us were there. Even IF we were to develop super-light transport AND super-magnification to watch the light that escaped earth eons ago, there would be assumptions involved that would make "provable"==>"debatable".
Not "evolution: species improve through natural selection", I mean "evolution: all creatures came to be from a continual improvement process, starting from a one-celled organism"
As to whether theology should be taught in the classroom, I'm not sure. Too much culture/history is based on what people believed to completely exclude teaching SOMETHING about SOME religion, so I think that a more appropriate thing would be striking a balance. That's tricky though, because trying to teach 1000 religions equally is silly when in a hypothetical region where 70% of the taxpayers are christian, and 29% are muslim. in such an area, it would probably make sense to spend less time on b'hai than on, even mormanism, (and both of those less than islam) because b'hai would be less likely to come up in historical studies.
When you go to the gas station, the clerk may notice you going up and down the aisles over and over again, and ask if there is something he can help you find.
Companies and websites ARE impersonal, but as tech improves and we approach the expert system/AI holy grail, websites may be able to read your "body language"/click stream and help you get what you want, presented in the way most appealing to you.
I think that robots will not be allowed to remember anything they may see or hear, since that would be a violation of the DMCA.
of course, over here in meatspace, I don't remember much either unless I write it down or record it somehow in a way that is probably similarly illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
... psychoactive drugs ... trying to release demons from one's brain with a hand drill and a piece of metal coat hanger...
(citation needed)
I have heard a similar story before, but haven't been able to find any useful reference, and have presumed it to be an urban legend. (snopes doesn't have this particular one, as far as i can tell)
As a parent, and occasional teacher of other children, though, more evidence on a subject such as this would be useful, if you have any.
thanks-
Oh, I didn't notice before, T-mobile's $100 per month requires you to bring/pay for a phone separately, too.
Or, if you want to stick with Sprint's coverage (including voice roaming on Verizon) you can try Ting, which also has inexpensive "plan" pricing, provided you are willing to buy your phone.
Data is not particularly cheap with Ting, but my family (4 phones so far) doesn't use a lot of that anyway, so it winds up being fairly inexpensive for us. T-mobile would be $100 per month (or more) plus tax for us, and our high bill has been $67, so we've made up the up the up-front cost of the phones.
Ting doesn't have 2 year contracts or any of that noise, either, so we can leave anytime. Even though I don't want to leave, it's nice to have the freedom, and not worry about ETF's.
if you are interested in Ting, use this referral code, and save a little money:
https://zs8p4n4rq.ting.com/
Ting is another MVNO on Sprint's network, but they do VOICE roaming to Verizon. (not data)
Depending on usage, they can be even cheaper than Virgin. The one complicated part about them is that you have to buy your phone upfront, which makes comparing oranges (no apples allowed yet) to other fruit more difficult.
Our family has 4 smartphones, many bought from craigslist, that have cost a net of $560. Our usage bills us for $67 per month, plus taxes (under $15) If you have a sprint phone that is paid for, you don't even have that startup cost to overcome. Still, saving more than $40 per month verses our previous bit with AT&T, we got there fast. Buying top end, unlocked, brand new phones would make it harder, though.
some people get concerned about the "pay for what you use" model, but for us, it has been really beneficial. I don't even stress about going "over" into the next bucket, because it's really only an incremental charge, not a "blow you out of the water" thing.
If you use this referral code, you can get a signup discount too:
https://zs8p4n4rq.ting.com/
that's one of the reasons I've liked "finger vein" authentication, it uses infrared to look through your skin, and touchless scanners are available. well, for lots of $$$ anyway. I keep expecting to see them in hospitals, where germ propagation and HIPAA are big isssues.
also, I forgot to mention, finger-vein can't be subverted with gummi bears. Somebody will come up with something, someday, but I wouldn't imagine it will be easy, inconspicuous, and cheap. (at least for quite a while)
Hitachi has something called "finger-vein authentication", which seems pretty good.
Supposedly, it has really good accuracy, it's scanning something internal, so you don't leave copies of it everywhere you touch, or in long-zoom high megapixel pictures. Scanners can (have) been made that are touchless, making them useful in hospitals where germ-spread is an issue.
Unfortunately, it's pretty expensive.
Yeah, I just stuck it in my .sig.
with room for future changes, even.
Actually, I saw a full-color hologram in high school (mumble-decades) ago. It was worse about angles, there was pretty much exactly one precise angle you had to look from, or the colors were all bad, but still, it worked. As for the "narrow range of angles from which they can be viewed", I thought one of the great parts about holograms was that it WASN'T "just ONE spot". Narrow, maybe, but honestly some of the new parallax barrier screens are MUCH worse.
The game is over when you die.
While you are alive, whether you are investing in the stock market, keeping your money in a bank, precious metals, or other assets, you are being played by the game.
When you are done playing or being played, you are free to ignore it and Praise God. (actually, you could do that all along, but then it becomes more obvious)
Airset is a "social" tool that has a model like this; but it never took off like Facebook did.
It has much better find-grained controls for each group of friends, and lots of tools, including one of the best contacts data models I've seen. Unfortunately a good data model doesn't make you popular.
Yes, it has a database, but it sync's to the metadata in the file.
The part I like best is the "tags, with hierarchy". Maybe that's just a sign I have too many tags. You can't really get that feature without paying money, (photoshop elements, lightroom, IMatch) and this tool seems the best of them to me. (not as slow as elements, better features than the other two, not too expensive)
A few people above have mentioned the "thou shalt not touch the originals" principle, which I personally don't quite believe in, but it is possible with IdImager: You can set up the downloader to mirror to another location for backup or whatever.
IdImager has a bunch of other advanced features I haven't fully taken advantage of yet, like Stacks, Versioning, and scripting. It has a face detector, but it isn't as good as picasa's. Still, it's something, and picasa's tag system is horrible.
Overall, the best image organizer available right now. Technically I guess it is a general-purpose DAM, since it can import other file types, but it definitely focuses on images.
Already a book. I suppose you could use it as a script.
http://www.amazon.com/Illegal-Aliens-Nick-Pollotta/dp/1933274131/ref=sr_1_1/104-0896581-2510320?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217019633&sr=1-1
Silly. Hilarious.
... XP mostly shed it's poor reputation, and replaced it with one of stability and speed on modern to previous-generation machines. But XP accomplished some of that by virtue of the available machines getting faster, not by slimming down to run on the previous generation machines. This is important because of your following point What's the difference?Vista doesn't work on the low end.
-->XP wins the hearts of the cheapos.
In the medium area, either one will run, but Proven XP does it faster, and Unproven Vista gives not much to make up for it.
-->Advantage: XP.
On the top end, the same situation as the middle, except the speed difference MAY not be felt because there are clock cycles to waste. (depends on the user, some buy these systems becase they desperately want those extra cycles... and strangely, the "applications" they frequently want to run don't work in Vista...)
Actually, I REALLY like the Photo organizer. I only got to play with it for an hour or two, but I found it nearly as good as photoshop's. Still, not worthy of a whole operating system (and the attendant hardware upgrades), particularly since it still had a deal buster. (non hierarchical tags)
Why are custom chipsets required? Usually, "custom" cryptography is Broken cryptography.
I'm not sure when you consider hardware to have a custom chipset, but an encrypted drive I admire is the Dekart Smart Container, which uses standard (separate) smart card chips for key storage, and the way I understand it, even if you use an advanced method to extract the data from the smart card, you still have to guess the password to decrypt the key, that you would then use to decrypt the data on the drive.
Of course, if you know the weakness to 3des, I suppose you could just grab the raw data from the flash and decrypt it directly rather than playing with trying to extract the key, but as near as anyone knows, that's several years away even for government agencies.
It would be nice if they used AES256, but I've got two or three other features that are on my wishlist for "the perfect device" that nobody seems to have implemented. Things like "ability to store data on SDHC card, rather than internal memory" and "uses finger-vein authentication to unlock certificates, without allowing biometric data to ever leave the device, or be stored in the clear on the device"
You mentioned Google Calendar, so I figure web-based stuff is fair game.
Check out Airset.com; it is Extremely powerful, and its item schema seems to be as complete or better than Outlook's. A sync tool is available for Outlook if you wish to use that for an offline client, but it's a little weak, partly due to Microsoft's data model.
Speaking of which, rather than Outlook's "folder" view, Airset has "groups", which fairly match up with the concept of "tags". You can filter out, filter in, do most things short of an SQL query among your groups to see a particular subset of calendar entries.
It also contains one of the best online contact managers I've been able to find, which also syncs to outlook. (once again, I'd like to bring up the completeness of the item schema/elements)
I don't use the other parts, (I think it has ten or so other services these days) but the calendar and contacts Rock.
You'll probably get plenty of takers, but as for myself, I find the following terms and conditions an Extreme turn-off:
... you hereby assign, transfer and convey, and agree to further assign, transfer and convey, to Sponsor any and all your intellectual property rights in the Design." ... ..."
" (c)
" (g) Entries become the property of the Sponsor and will not be returned.
Isn't slashdot a big supporter of Creative Commons? Non-exclusive copyright arrangements anyone?
maybe there wouldn't be much cause to reuse code that would be developed for this contest, but that would make it less valuable and interesting to write, in my opinion.
Prayer does not help Heart Patients not die.
other things, well, that wasn't studied here.
So here's a question for you; if taking away your VIRTUAL name, in ONE virtual world made you uncomfortable, does it give you greater insight into the problem of REAL identity theft in the REAL world? (another slashdot hot topic anyway)
It's something that truly concerns me. There's no escape; no other world to go to, the problem will continually dog you from that time forward, and it's something that's hard to protect yourself against. Your "identity" is in the hands of others. Millions of others. Usually Enron employees. Or tidymart or whatever.
There's still a "man in the middle" that this is vulnerable to, though the "middle" is creatively defined; in between you and the computer, rather than somewhere on the path between your computer and the bank.
If your PC is infected with a trojan, it could watch for login attempts to mybank.com, and present its own fake screen. It could then pass on any clicks or characters on to the "true" window, with a different transaction than you intended. (send $1000 to otherbank.ru)I think the point is that your assumption is incorrect. why is a mag stripe/PIN considered secure enough It is Not. Anymore. A card with a magstripe used to go farther; it USED to be difficult to duplicate them. The 3-digit code written on it was unique to it, not usually kept anywhere else, etc. Now that these pieces of information are easily/regularly duplicated, it's not any better than a username/password.
Now, we need to go to the next level, using complicated mathematical algorithms with a secret seed, producing un-duplicable results to attempt to secure our transactions.While I agree with your clarification that ID should be classified as theology, I think evolution also falls in the "not provable" category. History is not repeatable, and none of us were there. Even IF we were to develop super-light transport AND super-magnification to watch the light that escaped earth eons ago, there would be assumptions involved that would make "provable"==>"debatable".
Not "evolution: species improve through natural selection",
I mean "evolution: all creatures came to be from a continual improvement process, starting from a one-celled organism"
As to whether theology should be taught in the classroom, I'm not sure. Too much culture/history is based on what people believed to completely exclude teaching SOMETHING about SOME religion, so I think that a more appropriate thing would be striking a balance. That's tricky though, because trying to teach 1000 religions equally is silly when in a hypothetical region where 70% of the taxpayers are christian, and 29% are muslim. in such an area, it would probably make sense to spend less time on b'hai than on, even mormanism, (and both of those less than islam) because b'hai would be less likely to come up in historical studies.
When you go to the gas station, the clerk may notice you going up and down the aisles over and over again, and ask if there is something he can help you find.
Companies and websites ARE impersonal, but as tech improves and we approach the expert system/AI holy grail, websites may be able to read your "body language"/click stream and help you get what you want, presented in the way most appealing to you.
I think that robots will not be allowed to remember anything they may see or hear, since that would be a violation of the DMCA.
of course, over here in meatspace, I don't remember much either unless I write it down or record it somehow in a way that is probably similarly illegal.