We elected the politicians who listened to the lobbyists. Whoops. All the lobbyists and campaign donations are only as effective as voters allow them to be. Lobbyists do not automatically get what they want, by virtue of being lobbyists. A lobbyists job is to get the politician (usually by spending money at fundraisers and the like) to hear out their argument. Almost any issue has a hundred different lobbyists pulling at the politician in 100 different ways, often in completely different directions. Rather then delusions of a new slavery (prisons are a huge expense to the state, and produce only tiny amounts of revenue through voluntary work programs) it is more likely Wackenhut hired the lobbyists to buy their way into a little face-to-face time with some politicians to say "Hey, we think prison is a good way to deal with criminals, but criminals who get out too early due to prison overcrowding are x% more likely to become repeat offenders, we think you should make them stay in longer and give the fine people at Wackenhut the contract cause their so darn swell." The politician may take their advice, or he may decide its bunk, or the million other groups lobbying him to reduce prison spending have more political power, etc. It only makes sense for a large corporation that works closely with the government to spend moeny to represent their interests to the government (and they proably wouldnt be in the prison business if they didnt think long prison sentences for criminals was a good idea). And the whole reason campaign contributions exist is because campaigns have steadily become more costly circuses (all those tv ads full of fluff gotta be paid for by someone) and less discussion of the issues of the candidates. The blame for this can be laid solely at the feet of the American voter (although it is the same in about every democratic country throughout history).
These black boxes will most often be used in civil court, over injuries insurance settlements, etc. Then add in judges and cops who have little to no understanding of these newfangled black boxes beyond "they record information about the crash". The sitation I envision (and which is already happening) is the car is towed off, cop writes an accident report, couple months later a civil trial starts, lawyer subpeonas the black box from the junkyard or wherever the totalled car is being held, Billy Bob goes out and get it, and the lawyer presents it as evidence. The lawyers hire someone to present themselves as an expert witness, and interpret the data in whatever way fits the case. We have here a sitaution where 1. The cops don't know how to handle the black box properly 2. the car and black box are held in an unsecured location until someone wants it as evidence, 2. The judge has no experience with the devices and has to rely on what the "expert" tells him. By tampering with the sensors I dont mean some nefarious perfectly tamepring to simulate an accident, but mroe along the line of a ricer with a street drag habit modifies the sensors to keep them from reporting his actual speed. I dont claim we shouldnt use these devices, but only that we shouldnt use them as evidence in a court case until the tech matures and proper anti-tampering measures are taken.
There is a motivation, it's called market competition. Anyone with a reasonable amount to back their policies can become an insurance company. If a company can use this to lower their costs (by making poor/dangerous drivers pay more) they can offer lower priced policys to get the highly attractive safe driver market. Insurance is spreading the cost of the occasional accident across a large number of people. Insurers play the odds to charge the right amount to cover all the claims and expenses and make a profit on the side. If insurers can get rid of poor drivers, they can play the odds a little tighter, and offer more attractive policies. This is better for the safe driver, who is paying more in insurance then justified for his actual level of risk. I have a hard time believing none of the thousands of insurance companies are willing to lower prices to steal more customers from their competitors. I see insurance commercials all the time, often afvertising their lower price, so there must be some competition.
My main concern with black box data being used to determine fault, etc. is that currently they have little to no security other then a proprietary connector. There is nothing to prevent tampering with the "evidence". Even if the box data is encrypted, etc. you can still tamper with the vehicles sensors. I have no problem with technology being applied to enforce the law, but we can't take human judgement out of the equation. I can think of lots of situations that could unintentionally cause the computer to report bad data, not to mention malicous tampering. Also the kind of information reported (speed, direction of wheels, braking, engine status, etc.) can be interpreted to fit a preconceived notion. Sadly cars are turning more and more into a consumable good like electronics, to be used then thrown away, or turned over to a manufacturer's repair facility. Part of this is due to an inherent increase in the complexity of cars, but a lot of its because people can't be bothered to do things themselves (and thus demand servicable cars). Ever try to work on a car in the driveway of your home, in the suburbs? Won't be long before the neighbors are bitching and calling code enforcement etc. to breath down your neck (all but the poorest areas of where I live are becoming like this).
When did Bush become hard-core republican? Bush is about as left-leaning as a republican can get. Other then the gay-marriage hangup, he seems to be pretty liveral (for a republican candidate) to me. That said I believe the two-party system actually has a lot of benefits. First off it forces a candidate to have broad-base support, unlike run-off systems, where all the parties end up supporting some party's candidae who got a few more % then they did, and aren't as bad as the other party that got a few more then they did. The truth of the matter is part of democracy is compromise, and both Democrats and Republicans are finding a platform that large groups of people can agree is "good enough". When a party starts to lean too far away, they generally either lose enough votes to give it to the other guy or split into factions and lose horribly. If you post on slashdot, chances are you are part of a very tiny minority who thinks like you do. Software patents might be a deal breaker for you, but to everyone else they are "computer geek stuff" and they could care less. You can't expect a candidate that tailors his platform just to you to be popular, or to have a chance in hell at winning(hell, even getting on the ballot). so you have to compromise and pick a more appealing candidate, and no matter how many parties there are, thats not gonna change. As for all the people who dont vote at all, the vast majority of them dont vote because they do not give a damn, they have matters clsoer to home to deal with and thats it. The truth of the matter is if there was a third party that was really as appealling as you make it sound (and the vast majority of them only seem to field wackjobs in the first place) people would vote for them. Instead people want to vote for a candidate that they know enough other people like to make them viable. Democracy requires compromise, if neither of the major candidates are willing to take the steps to appeal to you, the reality is you dont have enough influence, be it in voters or money or alien mind control to make it worth it to them.
Schools are generally cutting back on their computer budgets in general, which makes cheap pc boxes more attractive. THe mian thing is, Microsoft has made huge strides in the last couple of years in making Windows more manageable. Windows 2000/XP added good user based permissions, good easy to use mass deployment tools, good central administration, etc. Macs used to be much easier to support in school enviroments, just becasue they were harder to break softwarewise. Apple also used to offer massive educational discounts, now its pc makers (especially Dell). I actually arranged a lab upgrade for my old high school (at the technicians request). Dell gave them 30 dual Xeon machines with lcd monitors, and 3 top of the line servers, already configured and supported by Dell, including the rack mount, for the price Apple wanted for 20 iMacs. The choice was obvious, and unlike the mac labs, whenever there was a problem the machine could just be imaged remotely in a few minutes, with no student work lost. Add to this the mess the transistion to Mac OS X caused (which shook up the status quo in school systems in general), and the choice is obvious. In the 4 years I was there the school went from all Mac and one PC lab to all PC and 2 Mac graphic design labs. They were much better off in the end. Hate MS all you want, but Windows has taken huge steps in the past few years, and Apple hasnt done anything to stop them.
It is not nearly as easy as you make it sound. CNC machines capable of creating complicated 3D parts are very expensive to run (A wire cutter machine I once worked on cost something around $400 per hour to run, and making the part took 12 hours). There is the initial cost of the machine, maintenance, consumables (lubricant, bits, etc.), plus an operator to set up each job. A job will only be as precise as the operator sets the offsets and secures the peice. Compared to the costs of running the machines, aluminum is dirt cheap. As far as patent issues goes, that is the designers problem.
What the article doesn't mention is that the projectionist just finished using the googles to check on his camcorder in the booth. Those darn kids need to leave pirating to the professionals.
Cops in America(well at least in my part of it) are also taught to shoot to kill. If it's not a situation you are willing to kill, you shouldn't shoot. The reasoning being "shooting to wound" is not reliable, and if you do it enough you're gonna kill someone by accident anyway. It's my opinion that you should not carry or draw a gun unless you are ready and willing to kill.
The problems encountered by the author A. Almost certainly did not require a reinstall and B. His difficulty with the reinstall could easily have been avoided. First off, "cruft" in the registry only happens if you have a strong penchant for constantly installing/uninstalling poorly written software. You can get plenty of free registry cleaning utilities, or you can just use the built in registry editor, or just ignore it completely (the "cruft" generally doesn't hurt anything). Why Window's security mdoel is responsible for VMWare or Linux screwing up your sound card I don't quite understand. The right click problem is a bug I've never heard of it, I'm willing to bet something you installed tried to add something to the context menu and screwed it up. To avoid being infected after a reinstall, just activate the built-in firewall during the install or before connecting it to the net. You also apparently condemn Microsoft's issuing patches over Windows Update? How else should they do it? Are you gonna run around to everyone's house with a box of CD-R's? The registry has always been a generally dumb idea, but it's been relegated to glorified config file status anyway, and most registry problems are easily fixed. The registry has nothing to do with the various worms anyway, they all exploit holes in various other parts of the opertaing system (or internet explorer). The idea of updated windows cd's is a good idea, which is why Microsoft supplies the tools to do it. Also, Microsoft announced it was reversing it's policy on allowing pirates to install SP2. Basically the entire article is a rant about a guy who screwed up his computer, and got infected reinstalling like a million other people. I realize MS bashing is a sport here on Slashdot, but there is no substance here besides just '1 guy pissed off at microsoft, not gonna take it anymore."
The number of possible permutations isn't important, as you are doing a dictionary attack. Take for example, and 8 letter word. A fixed width font would narrow it down to just 8 letter words. Presumably from the sentence structure you could get the type of word (verb, noun, etc.). let's assume we think it's a noun, and now we have narrowed it down to 8-letter nouns. Theres a whole lot of 8 letter nouns out there, and even in context you cold not be certain exactly which one they were talking about (if you could just guess, it wasn't redacted very well). This information, while easier from a resources point of view, still leaves you with a bunch of people trying to guess which one is right from a long list of possibilities. With a variable width font, you know exactly how wide that word is. You can preprocess your dictionary to generate the exact width of all the words in it, then compare the width of your mystery word against it (comparing integers is much less processor intensive then comparing strings anyway). You've spent more processing power overall (almost all of which is in generating the dictionary) but you have a much smaller list (words that are X-pixels wide are much less abundant then X letters wide. You then apply the same contextual filters you did to the fixed-width approach, and you have an even smaller list. This list should be much easier to choose the correct word. TO give an example, Imagine a report about foreign policy with a hostile nation, with only one word, the four letter name of the nation, blacked out. A fixed width approach gives you a list of four letter names of countries. Is it Iraq or Iran (or any other 4-letter country). Which one it is will make a huge difference. The variable width approach gives a much smaller subset of countries whose names just happen to be X pixels. Multiple answers may still be possible, but your better off then you were. For this reason a fixed-width font is more secure. The ideal solution would be to replace all redacted words with a universal graphic or block or whatever that removes the length-information entirely, improving upon even random width font, as a pattern from a pc's crappy pseudorandom number generator could still be used against it.
So the same encryption you gladly use walking around town is not good enough? (I'd imagine it would also support WEP, so you'd probably have two layers of encryption.) If you could listen in on conversations with this you could do it just as easily on normal cell phone conversations. At least with Wifi, it's limited range works in your favor, as it's much easier to look around and see if any suspicous black van types are around. Of course wandering around town talking about things so important it'd be worth the effort to snoop is probably a bad idea anyway. I suspect anyone trying to cast a wide enough net to get some dirty info by sheer luck would shoot themselves after the 20th teenage girl.
How are we forced into capital punishment? We choose it (not individually, but as a society through voting). We want the option to punish the most grievous offenders with death. It's not like we go around executing political prisoners (aka China), you have to commit murder, go through an extensive trial (where you are innocent unless proven guilty) and years and years of appeals. And if at the end of all that, if the governor has sufficient reason to believe there is a possibility you are innocent or have somehow redeemed yourself, he can call the whole thing off. Personally I support it, I don't intend to murder anyone, so I'm not to worried about it. If you're really against it, I guess you could move to one of the states that don't have capital punishment (although the federal government also has capital punishment, you'd have to kill someone in a manner that would involve the feds by crossing state borders to do it etc.) By comparing China's summary executions without a fair trial for no real crime (other then opposing the state) to the US's executions of violent and dangerous criminals, after a fair trial, and years of appeals, through laws made by democratically elected leaders and applied by democratically elected (or at least appointed by the democratically elected in some cases) judges show you have no interest in exaiming why we choose to have Capital Punishment (and if after you understand, deciding to oppose it) but just want something to bash the U.S. for.
Since when did we have to train guards not to rape, molest, and humiliate their prisoners? You should be able to take any group of people off the street, throw them in a prison, and have them figure that out. Why do we need to make excuses for these soldiers? They are sick fucks and should be thrown in prison for the rest of their lives. Their commanding officers should be investigated, and if they know about it, charged as well. If they didnt, they should just be busted down to Private and be thankful for it (knowing what his/her soldiers are doing is an officers duty after all). Every US Soldier represents our entire country. This is the responsibility they signed up for (all volunteer military, remember) and what we pay them for. We shouldn't have to train soldiers to have the same standards of decent behavior as is expected of civilians. And to all those who say "They just signed up to pay for college" so what? This is the condition they agreed to! The money isn't free, they weren't tricked into it. I'm racking up student loans right now, because I talked to recruiters etc. and decided it wasn't for me. Apparently I got screwed, cause I could've just signed up and when the time came to pay the piper piss and moan how I didn't expect to actually go to war.
Apstring was horrible. Several of the member functions were broken beyond repair, and the whole thing is a waste of time anyway (most modern compilers include the libraries for far superior implementations of the same thing). The Questions on the test required you used certain ap strings as your input, I quickly converted all of them to pointers using the supplied member function that I knew for a fact didn't work. It kind of makes me chuckle to think I got a 5 writing code I know for a fact will never work. A friend covered the last two written problems with smiley faces and got a 3. Here in the Florida a 5 gets you a credit for the "Introduction to Programming" course. The course is not actually required (You can go straight to Intermediate Programming if you desire, whether or not you did the intro course). I have a ton of credits from my AP scores, the only ones worthwhile are the English and Calculus tests.
This is what always happens when marketing starts to determine the specs rather then sound engineering. Those who don't do research buy based on the megapixel count and price. This causes a situation where the camera with the highest megapixel sensor crammed into the cheapest possible camera is the most succesful. The same thing happens with everything from printers to processors to cell-phones. The only positive aspect is the informed buyer can sometimes get good deals as a result, as the best camera for the price may not be the most popular one, and stores have to sell it for less of a markup.
What the hell is a "robot psychiatrist", and why should I care? As someone who has actually built robots, what qualifies you to talk about human-robot relationships over me? Your phd? I apologize for being so cynical, but academia is full of naval-gazing idiots who make broad predictions based of no evidence, and get media and peer acolades for their effort. Those of us actually involved in robotics can see first-hand just how of out touch these people are, but the media loves them. So where's the research? All I found on your website is useless fluff. What exactly do you do besides media appearances? What "psychiatry" have you done with the actual robots of today, and not just speculation of your vision of the robots of tommorow (which seems heavily influenced by science fiction and not reality).
When your testing how well a robot can destroy another robot, a battle to the death is the answer. When you want robots to do soemthing usefull, how well they can fight is pointless. It's like saying we should pick the best ice-skater based on which one of them does the best at boxing.
Your full of shit. I was in FIRST for 4 years. Our Sponsor was Motorola (Team 108 - the SigmaC@Ts if you must know). We built our robot side by side with the engineers. Solely engineer built robots are the extreme exception, as are solely student built robots. The whole idea is you work with and learn from professionals. Teams whose students had nothing to do with their bot are not encouraged, they are reviled, and it is easy to tell when you talk to the team members (as a driver for two years, I've had plenty of opportunities to talk to other teams). You picked NASA as an example, which shows your ignorance. NASA has a grant program where they pay the entry fees for you and thats it. You can only qualify for two years, then your on your own. Most of the teams you saw with Nasa on them were probably rookies. It sounds to me like you tried it once, and when you got beaten by the veteran teams, got bitter and didnt come back. US FIRST is a great education oppourtunity, by the time I graduated I was teaching the engineers things about how to build a robot. Also, although it didnt in 1997, the national competition now has qualifications to attend it. You now must win a regional or regional award, earn a "bye" based on last year's performance to qualify for nationals, or be a rookie team to get in to nationals. It's also worth noting that if the companies just wanted the PR opportunity, theres lots of places they could spend it and get a lot more (PR-wise) for their very large sums of money. Also the engineers and other staff at these companies use their own, unpaid time to work with the teams. Also, student run student built teams can be competitive, bit don't expect to do it in 1 year, against teams that have been around since the program started. finally, some other FIRST related links the story should have mentioned.
Soap 108 A website run by my team that records and digitizes every match for every competition we attend. Go here for video from matches of a real competition.
Chief Delphi forums The most popular FIRST related message board, and a good place to learn about the attitudes of the students involved.
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Engineers with common sense? As an engineering student, trust me when I say you have no idea how wrong you are.
To steal a line from Lewis Black, Can you wear a tinfoil hat so we know who you are?
We elected the politicians who listened to the lobbyists. Whoops. All the lobbyists and campaign donations are only as effective as voters allow them to be. Lobbyists do not automatically get what they want, by virtue of being lobbyists. A lobbyists job is to get the politician (usually by spending money at fundraisers and the like) to hear out their argument. Almost any issue has a hundred different lobbyists pulling at the politician in 100 different ways, often in completely different directions. Rather then delusions of a new slavery (prisons are a huge expense to the state, and produce only tiny amounts of revenue through voluntary work programs) it is more likely Wackenhut hired the lobbyists to buy their way into a little face-to-face time with some politicians to say "Hey, we think prison is a good way to deal with criminals, but criminals who get out too early due to prison overcrowding are x% more likely to become repeat offenders, we think you should make them stay in longer and give the fine people at Wackenhut the contract cause their so darn swell." The politician may take their advice, or he may decide its bunk, or the million other groups lobbying him to reduce prison spending have more political power, etc. It only makes sense for a large corporation that works closely with the government to spend moeny to represent their interests to the government (and they proably wouldnt be in the prison business if they didnt think long prison sentences for criminals was a good idea). And the whole reason campaign contributions exist is because campaigns have steadily become more costly circuses (all those tv ads full of fluff gotta be paid for by someone) and less discussion of the issues of the candidates. The blame for this can be laid solely at the feet of the American voter (although it is the same in about every democratic country throughout history).
These black boxes will most often be used in civil court, over injuries insurance settlements, etc. Then add in judges and cops who have little to no understanding of these newfangled black boxes beyond "they record information about the crash". The sitation I envision (and which is already happening) is the car is towed off, cop writes an accident report, couple months later a civil trial starts, lawyer subpeonas the black box from the junkyard or wherever the totalled car is being held, Billy Bob goes out and get it, and the lawyer presents it as evidence. The lawyers hire someone to present themselves as an expert witness, and interpret the data in whatever way fits the case. We have here a sitaution where 1. The cops don't know how to handle the black box properly 2. the car and black box are held in an unsecured location until someone wants it as evidence, 2. The judge has no experience with the devices and has to rely on what the "expert" tells him. By tampering with the sensors I dont mean some nefarious perfectly tamepring to simulate an accident, but mroe along the line of a ricer with a street drag habit modifies the sensors to keep them from reporting his actual speed. I dont claim we shouldnt use these devices, but only that we shouldnt use them as evidence in a court case until the tech matures and proper anti-tampering measures are taken.
There is a motivation, it's called market competition. Anyone with a reasonable amount to back their policies can become an insurance company. If a company can use this to lower their costs (by making poor/dangerous drivers pay more) they can offer lower priced policys to get the highly attractive safe driver market. Insurance is spreading the cost of the occasional accident across a large number of people. Insurers play the odds to charge the right amount to cover all the claims and expenses and make a profit on the side. If insurers can get rid of poor drivers, they can play the odds a little tighter, and offer more attractive policies. This is better for the safe driver, who is paying more in insurance then justified for his actual level of risk. I have a hard time believing none of the thousands of insurance companies are willing to lower prices to steal more customers from their competitors. I see insurance commercials all the time, often afvertising their lower price, so there must be some competition.
My main concern with black box data being used to determine fault, etc. is that currently they have little to no security other then a proprietary connector. There is nothing to prevent tampering with the "evidence". Even if the box data is encrypted, etc. you can still tamper with the vehicles sensors. I have no problem with technology being applied to enforce the law, but we can't take human judgement out of the equation. I can think of lots of situations that could unintentionally cause the computer to report bad data, not to mention malicous tampering. Also the kind of information reported (speed, direction of wheels, braking, engine status, etc.) can be interpreted to fit a preconceived notion. Sadly cars are turning more and more into a consumable good like electronics, to be used then thrown away, or turned over to a manufacturer's repair facility. Part of this is due to an inherent increase in the complexity of cars, but a lot of its because people can't be bothered to do things themselves (and thus demand servicable cars). Ever try to work on a car in the driveway of your home, in the suburbs? Won't be long before the neighbors are bitching and calling code enforcement etc. to breath down your neck (all but the poorest areas of where I live are becoming like this).
When did Bush become hard-core republican? Bush is about as left-leaning as a republican can get. Other then the gay-marriage hangup, he seems to be pretty liveral (for a republican candidate) to me. That said I believe the two-party system actually has a lot of benefits. First off it forces a candidate to have broad-base support, unlike run-off systems, where all the parties end up supporting some party's candidae who got a few more % then they did, and aren't as bad as the other party that got a few more then they did. The truth of the matter is part of democracy is compromise, and both Democrats and Republicans are finding a platform that large groups of people can agree is "good enough". When a party starts to lean too far away, they generally either lose enough votes to give it to the other guy or split into factions and lose horribly. If you post on slashdot, chances are you are part of a very tiny minority who thinks like you do. Software patents might be a deal breaker for you, but to everyone else they are "computer geek stuff" and they could care less. You can't expect a candidate that tailors his platform just to you to be popular, or to have a chance in hell at winning(hell, even getting on the ballot). so you have to compromise and pick a more appealing candidate, and no matter how many parties there are, thats not gonna change. As for all the people who dont vote at all, the vast majority of them dont vote because they do not give a damn, they have matters clsoer to home to deal with and thats it. The truth of the matter is if there was a third party that was really as appealling as you make it sound (and the vast majority of them only seem to field wackjobs in the first place) people would vote for them. Instead people want to vote for a candidate that they know enough other people like to make them viable. Democracy requires compromise, if neither of the major candidates are willing to take the steps to appeal to you, the reality is you dont have enough influence, be it in voters or money or alien mind control to make it worth it to them.
Schools are generally cutting back on their computer budgets in general, which makes cheap pc boxes more attractive. THe mian thing is, Microsoft has made huge strides in the last couple of years in making Windows more manageable. Windows 2000/XP added good user based permissions, good easy to use mass deployment tools, good central administration, etc. Macs used to be much easier to support in school enviroments, just becasue they were harder to break softwarewise. Apple also used to offer massive educational discounts, now its pc makers (especially Dell). I actually arranged a lab upgrade for my old high school (at the technicians request). Dell gave them 30 dual Xeon machines with lcd monitors, and 3 top of the line servers, already configured and supported by Dell, including the rack mount, for the price Apple wanted for 20 iMacs. The choice was obvious, and unlike the mac labs, whenever there was a problem the machine could just be imaged remotely in a few minutes, with no student work lost. Add to this the mess the transistion to Mac OS X caused (which shook up the status quo in school systems in general), and the choice is obvious. In the 4 years I was there the school went from all Mac and one PC lab to all PC and 2 Mac graphic design labs. They were much better off in the end. Hate MS all you want, but Windows has taken huge steps in the past few years, and Apple hasnt done anything to stop them.
It is not nearly as easy as you make it sound. CNC machines capable of creating complicated 3D parts are very expensive to run (A wire cutter machine I once worked on cost something around $400 per hour to run, and making the part took 12 hours). There is the initial cost of the machine, maintenance, consumables (lubricant, bits, etc.), plus an operator to set up each job. A job will only be as precise as the operator sets the offsets and secures the peice. Compared to the costs of running the machines, aluminum is dirt cheap. As far as patent issues goes, that is the designers problem.
I think you need to wear a tinfoil hat so the rest of us can know who you are.
What the article doesn't mention is that the projectionist just finished using the googles to check on his camcorder in the booth. Those darn kids need to leave pirating to the professionals.
Cops in America(well at least in my part of it) are also taught to shoot to kill. If it's not a situation you are willing to kill, you shouldn't shoot. The reasoning being "shooting to wound" is not reliable, and if you do it enough you're gonna kill someone by accident anyway. It's my opinion that you should not carry or draw a gun unless you are ready and willing to kill.
I'd like to see you try to walk in stripper clothes (wait, no I wouldn't) before you comment on their dress code.
Training users to enter the aministrator password whenever a box pops up and asks for it might not be the best idea ever.
I think you mean Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnn!
The problems encountered by the author A. Almost certainly did not require a reinstall and B. His difficulty with the reinstall could easily have been avoided. First off, "cruft" in the registry only happens if you have a strong penchant for constantly installing/uninstalling poorly written software. You can get plenty of free registry cleaning utilities, or you can just use the built in registry editor, or just ignore it completely (the "cruft" generally doesn't hurt anything). Why Window's security mdoel is responsible for VMWare or Linux screwing up your sound card I don't quite understand. The right click problem is a bug I've never heard of it, I'm willing to bet something you installed tried to add something to the context menu and screwed it up. To avoid being infected after a reinstall, just activate the built-in firewall during the install or before connecting it to the net. You also apparently condemn Microsoft's issuing patches over Windows Update? How else should they do it? Are you gonna run around to everyone's house with a box of CD-R's? The registry has always been a generally dumb idea, but it's been relegated to glorified config file status anyway, and most registry problems are easily fixed. The registry has nothing to do with the various worms anyway, they all exploit holes in various other parts of the opertaing system (or internet explorer). The idea of updated windows cd's is a good idea, which is why Microsoft supplies the tools to do it. Also, Microsoft announced it was reversing it's policy on allowing pirates to install SP2. Basically the entire article is a rant about a guy who screwed up his computer, and got infected reinstalling like a million other people. I realize MS bashing is a sport here on Slashdot, but there is no substance here besides just '1 guy pissed off at microsoft, not gonna take it anymore."
The number of possible permutations isn't important, as you are doing a dictionary attack. Take for example, and 8 letter word. A fixed width font would narrow it down to just 8 letter words. Presumably from the sentence structure you could get the type of word (verb, noun, etc.). let's assume we think it's a noun, and now we have narrowed it down to 8-letter nouns. Theres a whole lot of 8 letter nouns out there, and even in context you cold not be certain exactly which one they were talking about (if you could just guess, it wasn't redacted very well). This information, while easier from a resources point of view, still leaves you with a bunch of people trying to guess which one is right from a long list of possibilities. With a variable width font, you know exactly how wide that word is. You can preprocess your dictionary to generate the exact width of all the words in it, then compare the width of your mystery word against it (comparing integers is much less processor intensive then comparing strings anyway). You've spent more processing power overall (almost all of which is in generating the dictionary) but you have a much smaller list (words that are X-pixels wide are much less abundant then X letters wide. You then apply the same contextual filters you did to the fixed-width approach, and you have an even smaller list. This list should be much easier to choose the correct word. TO give an example, Imagine a report about foreign policy with a hostile nation, with only one word, the four letter name of the nation, blacked out. A fixed width approach gives you a list of four letter names of countries. Is it Iraq or Iran (or any other 4-letter country). Which one it is will make a huge difference. The variable width approach gives a much smaller subset of countries whose names just happen to be X pixels. Multiple answers may still be possible, but your better off then you were. For this reason a fixed-width font is more secure. The ideal solution would be to replace all redacted words with a universal graphic or block or whatever that removes the length-information entirely, improving upon even random width font, as a pattern from a pc's crappy pseudorandom number generator could still be used against it.
So the same encryption you gladly use walking around town is not good enough? (I'd imagine it would also support WEP, so you'd probably have two layers of encryption.) If you could listen in on conversations with this you could do it just as easily on normal cell phone conversations. At least with Wifi, it's limited range works in your favor, as it's much easier to look around and see if any suspicous black van types are around. Of course wandering around town talking about things so important it'd be worth the effort to snoop is probably a bad idea anyway. I suspect anyone trying to cast a wide enough net to get some dirty info by sheer luck would shoot themselves after the 20th teenage girl.
How are we forced into capital punishment? We choose it (not individually, but as a society through voting). We want the option to punish the most grievous offenders with death. It's not like we go around executing political prisoners (aka China), you have to commit murder, go through an extensive trial (where you are innocent unless proven guilty) and years and years of appeals. And if at the end of all that, if the governor has sufficient reason to believe there is a possibility you are innocent or have somehow redeemed yourself, he can call the whole thing off. Personally I support it, I don't intend to murder anyone, so I'm not to worried about it. If you're really against it, I guess you could move to one of the states that don't have capital punishment (although the federal government also has capital punishment, you'd have to kill someone in a manner that would involve the feds by crossing state borders to do it etc.) By comparing China's summary executions without a fair trial for no real crime (other then opposing the state) to the US's executions of violent and dangerous criminals, after a fair trial, and years of appeals, through laws made by democratically elected leaders and applied by democratically elected (or at least appointed by the democratically elected in some cases) judges show you have no interest in exaiming why we choose to have Capital Punishment (and if after you understand, deciding to oppose it) but just want something to bash the U.S. for.
Since when did we have to train guards not to rape, molest, and humiliate their prisoners? You should be able to take any group of people off the street, throw them in a prison, and have them figure that out. Why do we need to make excuses for these soldiers? They are sick fucks and should be thrown in prison for the rest of their lives. Their commanding officers should be investigated, and if they know about it, charged as well. If they didnt, they should just be busted down to Private and be thankful for it (knowing what his/her soldiers are doing is an officers duty after all). Every US Soldier represents our entire country. This is the responsibility they signed up for (all volunteer military, remember) and what we pay them for. We shouldn't have to train soldiers to have the same standards of decent behavior as is expected of civilians. And to all those who say "They just signed up to pay for college" so what? This is the condition they agreed to! The money isn't free, they weren't tricked into it. I'm racking up student loans right now, because I talked to recruiters etc. and decided it wasn't for me. Apparently I got screwed, cause I could've just signed up and when the time came to pay the piper piss and moan how I didn't expect to actually go to war.
Apstring was horrible. Several of the member functions were broken beyond repair, and the whole thing is a waste of time anyway (most modern compilers include the libraries for far superior implementations of the same thing). The Questions on the test required you used certain ap strings as your input, I quickly converted all of them to pointers using the supplied member function that I knew for a fact didn't work. It kind of makes me chuckle to think I got a 5 writing code I know for a fact will never work. A friend covered the last two written problems with smiley faces and got a 3. Here in the Florida a 5 gets you a credit for the "Introduction to Programming" course. The course is not actually required (You can go straight to Intermediate Programming if you desire, whether or not you did the intro course). I have a ton of credits from my AP scores, the only ones worthwhile are the English and Calculus tests.
This is what always happens when marketing starts to determine the specs rather then sound engineering. Those who don't do research buy based on the megapixel count and price. This causes a situation where the camera with the highest megapixel sensor crammed into the cheapest possible camera is the most succesful. The same thing happens with everything from printers to processors to cell-phones. The only positive aspect is the informed buyer can sometimes get good deals as a result, as the best camera for the price may not be the most popular one, and stores have to sell it for less of a markup.
What the hell is a "robot psychiatrist", and why should I care? As someone who has actually built robots, what qualifies you to talk about human-robot relationships over me? Your phd? I apologize for being so cynical, but academia is full of naval-gazing idiots who make broad predictions based of no evidence, and get media and peer acolades for their effort. Those of us actually involved in robotics can see first-hand just how of out touch these people are, but the media loves them. So where's the research? All I found on your website is useless fluff. What exactly do you do besides media appearances? What "psychiatry" have you done with the actual robots of today, and not just speculation of your vision of the robots of tommorow (which seems heavily influenced by science fiction and not reality).
When your testing how well a robot can destroy another robot, a battle to the death is the answer. When you want robots to do soemthing usefull, how well they can fight is pointless. It's like saying we should pick the best ice-skater based on which one of them does the best at boxing.
Your full of shit. I was in FIRST for 4 years. Our Sponsor was Motorola (Team 108 - the SigmaC@Ts if you must know). We built our robot side by side with the engineers. Solely engineer built robots are the extreme exception, as are solely student built robots. The whole idea is you work with and learn from professionals. Teams whose students had nothing to do with their bot are not encouraged, they are reviled, and it is easy to tell when you talk to the team members (as a driver for two years, I've had plenty of opportunities to talk to other teams). You picked NASA as an example, which shows your ignorance. NASA has a grant program where they pay the entry fees for you and thats it. You can only qualify for two years, then your on your own. Most of the teams you saw with Nasa on them were probably rookies. It sounds to me like you tried it once, and when you got beaten by the veteran teams, got bitter and didnt come back. US FIRST is a great education oppourtunity, by the time I graduated I was teaching the engineers things about how to build a robot. Also, although it didnt in 1997, the national competition now has qualifications to attend it. You now must win a regional or regional award, earn a "bye" based on last year's performance to qualify for nationals, or be a rookie team to get in to nationals. It's also worth noting that if the companies just wanted the PR opportunity, theres lots of places they could spend it and get a lot more (PR-wise) for their very large sums of money. Also the engineers and other staff at these companies use their own, unpaid time to work with the teams. Also, student run student built teams can be competitive, bit don't expect to do it in 1 year, against teams that have been around since the program started. finally, some other FIRST related links the story should have mentioned.
Soap 108
A website run by my team that records and digitizes every match for every competition we attend. Go here for video from matches of a real competition.
Chief Delphi forums
The most popular FIRST related message board, and a good place to learn about the attitudes of the students involved.