A lot of good comments have already been made here, but I'm surprised nobody has commented yet on something that seems obvious: if you're going to hack into a system, you have to know a little bit about the system first. You can't simply design some buffer overflow exploit and trust it will "hack" the back-end system. That seems awful "Independence Day"-ish - you know, writing a virus here on Earth that somehow magically attacks and shuts down an alien computer system. Makes for exciting movies (if you're not minimally smart about computers) but it never works in the real world.
In this case, it seems to me that if you know enough about both ends of the process, sure, you can develop some method to penetrate the system. Most malware authors have the benefit of working on a very well-known platform - the Windows PC - with known software (one of the limited numbers of email or browser programs). But attacking a back-end system like this is a much more dicey proposition - each large corporation probably will have its own back end, and may be running any of a dozen OS-and-database combinations.
So to benefit from this attack, it seems to me that the author has to be an insider to stand a ghost of a chance of success. If he's an insider, there are MUCH easier ways to penetrate the system.
As a result, while I have great concerns about RFID, this strikes me as FUD. 1) Develop complicated, application-specific RFID attack that would never be real-world useful 2) Write research paper spreading more fear about RFID 3) PROFIT! (or at least get a lot of attention)
I'm also a MD voter. I was very unhappy with a totally-electronic system - not because I didn't trust the machines, but because it was impossible to prove they had (or hadn't) been tampered with. I personally would insist that any system have a paper copy of my vote that I could inspect, and while I don't expect that level of compliance, at least a paper count from each machine at the end of the day (or however often it is taken) will be a vast improvement. I never had any problem with the fill-in-the-dot system we used for years; I knew that it was easy to verify each vote if a recount was required. But I guess the idiots in Florida ruined that for us.
There is STILL the big problem that whoever counts the votes controls the results. It's possible to hack the system no matter WHAT device or technology you use, although some systems may be harder to hack. At least we have a system where both parties participate directly in the polling, counting, verification and reporting process, so most fraud can be caught by the observers.
In the end, as with so many things we hold dear in America, it's all a matter of trust. The legal, judicial, and political systems work because we trust them. If we lose trust, the result will be a practically instantaneous collapse. So we must work to provide a system that is inherently trustworthy. The purely electronic systems were NOT trustworthy, and a 137-to-0 vote proves that fact.
Okay, not to be crass or anything, but we are ALL going to die sometime. I'm only 38 and I'm already well aware that I'm no spring chicken anymore - college grads see me as the greybeard already. I know I won't live much past 100 even if things go perfectly. I'm over 1/3 done.
In my opinion, we should ALWAYS live our lives as if we will die anyday. Knowing (or thinking) that you have a fixed endpoint doesn't seem that much different.
So it seems to me that we should always handle our job skills (not to mention our MUCH more important family life) as if it ought to stand on its own merits all the time. If you want it passed on, keep it sorted and organized and marked so that anyone else can pick up what you were doing and carry on with it. If it doesn't matter after you die, why are you bothering with it right now?
All that said, this is basically a reality check for ALL of us. What are you doing to cover those you care about? I think this is an excellent article with good thoughts for how to handle the practical aspects of being long-term ill on the job, much more than an article about what happens AFTER you die.
>It seems infinitely sad to me that the primary motivation >for most technological advance in the world is to come up >with a better means of killing others.
I'm sure I'll burn some karma on this, but I would beg to differ.
There is an interesting premise to Larry Niven's sci fi writing about the Kzin war - the Kzin telepaths reported to their masters that the humans had no military weaponry, and were sure to be an easy conquest. Yet when they first attacked, humanity threw them back in short order, because the civilian technology we DID have was so powerful it cut thru their military systems like butter. http://www.larryniven.org/kzin/empire.htm Hmmm.
I see things a little differently, however. I work for the US military as a civilian, directly involved in the procurement of weapons of war. Anyone in our organization will immediately tell you that the goal is not to wage war, but to avoid it. Ronald Reagan knew this when he emphasized his "peace thru superior firepower" mantra. If we allow ourselves to become weaker than our foes, we will find war waged upon us, simply because it's possible. Granted, the only way to stay ahead is to work hard at it, and stay atop the technological king-of-the-hill game. To many (and apparently to this person) it looks as if we want the weapons so we can use them - but I assure you that the vast majority of soldiers, airmen and marines in this country want nothing to do with going to war. I have great respect for the armed services in America, because they are willing to put themselves in death's way to free others. But nobody that I've ever talked with had any interest in conquering another county for the sake of expanding our territory, or taking something that was not already ours.
In the end, I find it fortunate that our military research ends up providing such dramatic benefits for the civilian world.
If this device uses a laser to project its image, it makes me concerned about the dazzle or sparkle you see when looking at a truly monochromatic, coherent point of light. Shine a laser pointer at the wall, and it looks like the dot sparkles. I believe this is a function of the coherency of the light plus the way our eyes perceive the light.
I have a hard time imagining watching an entire wall full of sparkle effect across the entire picture. Do they somehow make the light non-coherent, so your eye doesn't have this problem?
I've been a very satisfied owner of a DirecTV UltimateTV reciever since they first came out. About a year ago we got a Tivo for my live-in mother-in-law (since you cannot buy new UTVs anymore). We were very unhappy to discover that Tivo killed the commercial skip feature (at least, without resorting to a hack that is lost every time the power blinks). And the Tivo's maximum fast forward speed seems quite slower than the 300x UTV forward speed.
The commercial skip feature, in my opinion, makes the UTV far nicer than the Tivo. It just works, and it means I don't have to see ANY of a commercial, instead of watching some Tivo-imposed advertisement superimposed on my fastforward thru another advertisement that I also didn't want to see in the first place.
> If you are that worried, get a one time use number, most credit cards > can generate them online. You use it once, and poof, in a few hours > it is no longer valid.
Yah, that's neat and all, and it's a great idea for online shopping, but I'm not sure it really helps here. It's still a valid CC number that can cost you money. If they don't actually USE it right away, it remains valid for however long you specified. If they decide to charge it anytime within its valid time frame, they still can - at least that one time. If it's a scam and they sell the number, a crook can still use it once. Sure, it limits your losses, and the CC company will help you fight a crooked charge, but it's still not fuss-free.
As other posters have noted, if you're gonna give them a fake login, might as well fake a CC as well.
Re:Critique (That's what "Revisited" is about)
on
Ask The Mythbusters
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· Score: 2, Informative
Every so often they do a "Myths Revisited" episode, where they take into account user feedback about this very issue. In this case, they did determine that they had over-generalized, and in fact the data proved that at a certain speed it becomes more efficient to use AC. So this question is sort of answered already.
The uninstall form is MIA... did we slashdot it?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
The uninstall request form is gone. There's now a message saying:
"UNINSTALL REQUESTS
November 15th, 2005 - We currently are working on a new tool to uninstall First4Internet XCP software. In the meantime, we have temporarily suspended distribution of the existing uninstall tool for this software. We encourage you to return to this site over the next few days. Thank you for your patience and understanding."
Hmmmm.... I wonder if they yanked it after it got slashdotted (and slashblogged?)...
Aside from being a "keep the devices separate" argument, there ARE people who cannot carry a camera phone. People who work in a secured area, like many military facilities or sensitive manufacturing areas, may not be ALLOWED to carry a phone with a camera. I work near an active flight line, and there are large signs stating "CAMERA PASS REQUIRED FOR ALL CAMERAS (INCLUDING CELL PHONES)". If you don't have a camera pass (and most people don't) you cannot carry a cam-phone. Other buildings nearby have "no recording devices" restrictions - a PDA may be okay but not if it has a microphone or camera. So for that reason, I MUST purchase a phone with no camera. Talk about a limitation - it's very hard to find a decent phone without a camera anymore. So sometimes it really is good to have a simple device, Luddite or not.
I was and still am a big Descent III fan. "Realism" is of limited importance in an obviously artificial or alien game world. But the sense of immersion was quite impressive, especially with the very pervasive audio environment, from steam pipes hissing to occasional clanking mechanical sounds in the distance, then the faint but growing sound of an enemy bot creeping up from behind or off to one side. I distinctly remember jumping out of my seat once when my wife opened the office door suddenly.
I'm personally of the opinion that the audio is actually much more important than the graphics. And newer games are growing quickly in this manner, aided by the growing population of surround or positional audio systems.
One other big factor is timing and synchronization. If the audio and video are out of sync, or the frame rate is too low, or the response-to-controller-inputs is out of whack, all the photo-realistic video or positional audio won't matter.
Either way, our brain adjusts to the input it's getting, sort of a suspension-of-disbelief thing. More "realistic" video or audio won't really change our immersion.
Also, I think that making the object physics, collision detection, wounds/damage models, and so forth accurate is much more important than fancier graphics or better audio. Take for example the ability of a game character to jump off a 2-story building and fall slowly to the ground without damage. Nope. Or the fact you can kill any bad guy with little effort, while your character can absorb 100 damage points and be refreshed to like-new within just minutes. Again, nope.
Our subconcious brain really expects objects to REACT a certain way, and we conciously know the health ratios are off-kilter. Those are the areas that must improve to really change the sense of immersion.
I already replied on this thread, or I'd mod the parent comment up a notch. A lot of folks have been griping about the reader not being able to handle multiple cards in your wallet simultaneously, when really RFID is designed to do that just fine. In fact, the problem, as "iamdrscience" has identified, is precisely the OPPOSITE problem - RFID is a little TOO good at multiple simultaneous identifications. He's right - how do you prevent the system from reading the wrong card - or multiple cards - and double charging or charging the wrong account?
Inter-chip conflict is not a problem, really. The RFID spec is designed for this overlap. Just like Ethernet communications, the chip is programmed to select a random delay before responding, then "test the waters" and see if it's clear before sending. In short, there's anti-collision features built in to the chips and the readers. Even a simple Google search will give you complete details.
Honestly, do you think this hasn't been considered? RFID was DESIGNED for warehouse operations, where literally THOUSANDS of identical chips (except for the serial number) were in reading range ALL THE TIME. Three cards in your wallet won't even make the system break a sweat....
Ditto. We bought a TiVo for my wife's mother, but I'd never trade give up my UTV for a TiVo. The skip and guide are MUCH more responsive and well-designed. Imagine, a M$ product I actually like.
One gripe (a common problem) with the UTV boxes is the high failure rate of the dual tuners. I have had two units lose one of the two tuners now. I finally bought a few spare units on eBay, so I've got a hardware backup.
The real problem will be the service. At some point M$ can simply decide to stop supporting the guide service, or stop sending out the "allow you to keep using the PVR features" flag, and the UTV will stop being useful overnight. That's right, if you don't have a valid access card you can't play back recorded shows. And older units don't have the latest software updates (that have some really valuable changes). So even the UTV is a slowly-dying breed. I really dread the day I can no longer keep it running.
The parent comment conveys a typical myth about New Orleans. It is a very valuable shipping and commerce city, true, but the part which flooded is NOT the shipping and commerce district - that's a ways upstream, and is NOT built below sea level. The parts which were hugely damaged were almost exclusively the residential districts. There's no legitimate commerce or business need to rebuild the flooded structures on the exact same spot.
In my opinion, Louisiana should move all the people to higher ground, and pass laws forbidding the new construction of a building or business in a levee-protected area that lies at or below sea level.
Note that I don't care about stuff behind a levee - it's perfectly reasonable to build a protective levee - just don't use it to justify building below sea level.
But then, Louisiana never asked me, and they really don't care what I think, so in all probability my taxes will again someday go to hurricane or flood relief for the idiots who choose to put themselves right back in harm's way.
Oh, and in case you think I'm being cold and heartless, I'm not - as soon as the situation has stabilized a bit, I intend to do a missions trip to put my construction skills to good use, by helping to build houses with Habitat for Humanity in the Mississippi or Alabama areas - but I intend to refuse any request to help rebuild New Orleans, out of pure principle.
"...often filled with too much sensation reporting..." - I wholeheartedly agree with this. New Scientist is the Popular Science for geeks. I've found far too many sensationalist articles in this mag to bother with it anymore. And I've even found myself answering questions from other family members about the accuracy of claims they make. Sure, it's easily understandable for the layman, but it seems to exaggerate the here-and-now technologies and to pump the "maybe we could do this soon" stuff unrealistically. It really does remind me of the breathless "We'll all be flying in Moller Aerocars on highways in the sky" stuff that's run in PopSci for the past 30 years. Sorry, haven't seen it yet, and I don't expect to either.
I got supremely tired of the PC noise a couple years ago, and after an initial bad experience with simply relocating the thing (under the desk, thus providing a not-so-pleasant sauna effect), plus some underpowered power supply instability issues, I sprung for an Antec TruePower 450 with its speed controlled fan plus a secondary speed controlled fan plug. I've been extremely happy with the arrangement. While I don't need all 450 watts, the fact that the unit is way overcapable means that it runs very cool all the time, and the fans stay at very low speed, so the noise factor is very low. As an added benefit, the underutilized power supply means that the power supply is very stable, and the overall machine has been accordingly much more reliable (compared to a previous daily crash or two even with WinXP, simply due to undervoltage problems). (I'm now convinced that a couple drive failures I had over a couple years were primarily due to poor power quality.)
Also, I upgraded to a couple 7200 RPM SATA drives that are extremely quiet - not zero noise, but far less objectionable than the previous drives. Frankly, I don't care for the whine, but I like hearing the heads move, because it gives an excellent indication of what the machine is doing; an overly quiet drive always leaves me wondering what's going on under the hood.
It's no silent machine, but it's far quieter than the other two PCs in my house.
The "small aluminum plates" are not just small... they're TINY. Others have already noted that "rail gun" is a big misstatement; the discs they're talking about here are merely 850 MICRONS thick. Let's get this thing in perspective, shall we? I know that "rail gun" makes many geeks twitch uncontrollably, but come on now, that's just karma whoring.
Oh, and to link to a two-year-old image... with a caption of "have created" that implies it's brand new... PLEASE.
Once again, the question must be asked: where's the moderation system for STORIES?
Hate to break up the party here, but the parent post is rather misinformed.
I AM an aerospace engineer and have worked on NUMEROUS carrier-based naval jet aircraft. I have been aboard aircraft carriers watching landings and evaluting the data from those landings. I have significant experience with flight stability - in fact I have fifteen years of test and evaluation experience in the field.
With that said...
Stability is two-pronged. Yes, as the parent poster said, letting go of the stick and having things return to stable conditions is stability, but it's only one level of stability. Rather, the newest fighters (especially the F-117 stealth fighter and B-2 stealth bomber) are highly UNSTABLE airplanes. Without the computers, they simply would not fly straight - or at all. The amount of divergence depends on the design - if all the computers in the F-117 shut down, the plane would break apart in moments. It simply cannot fly without the computers constantly making tiny adjustments to correct the flight path. There may be narrow ranges of stability - but stray too far from straight-and-level flight, and things go bad very very quickly.
This is a LOT different from "let go of the stick and it starts to roll". In this case, the pilot could not maintain stability at all - it's simply too unstable to handle without computers.
In fact, instability contributes to maneuverability - if a plane is too stable, it's hard to quickly turn or pitch. But start with an unstable airplane, and you can imagine that if the computer relaxes its control slightly, it can generate very fast maneuvers.
As a matter of fact, the computers in these new planes mean that the pilot is not actually flying the plane. He is telling the plane what he'd like it to do - but the plane's computers are telling the control surfaces how to move (often several at once) to do what the pilot asked.
So "stability" is a very complex issue - and depending on WHICH planes we're talking about, it's VERY true that some planes are not flyable without computers.
However, with Wiki, while people can indeed write anything, everything is subjected to heavy scrutiny by the God-knows-how-many visitors to the site.
Yep, that's true, BUT: this is only an accurate statement when integrated over time. At any given moment, it's quite possible the article has just been "spammed" or somehow defaced, either maliciously or inadvertently. You see, since the most-recently-edited version is available the moment the edit has been made, it takes some time before a damaged page gets corrected.
Unless you know this fact, and take a look at the article history, and run some careful comparisons on recent versions, you don't stand a chance of knowing how accurate THIS revision actually is.
There's this nastly little problem: it's hard to quantify the accuracy of a page, other than perhaps using some metric like "it's been three weeks since this version was edited, and 32,000 people have viewed it, and nobody decided it needed to be changed".
So to use Wikipedia as a research tool, therefore, requires quite a bit of in-depth work "behind the curtain", to assure yourself that what you're reading is on average an accepted point of view.
Still, on the whole, taken as a time-averaged issue, I agree that the overall accuracy is unmatched. And unlike a static set of bound encyclopediae, at least with Wikipedia we have the chance to correct errors, and we don't have to assume that the publisher is unbiased. In this case, it's all out on the table, both good and bad, for the user to see (but only if he chooses).
I know it sounds a bit like 1337-speak, but it's very easy to make a common word virtually un-guessable by doing easy-to-remember substitutions like 0 for o, 1 for i, & for 8 and so forth. Take it a step further: for those passwords that require a non-letter/non-digit somewhere in the password, consider substitutions like @ for a, $ for s, ! for 1, & for 8, ( for C, etc.
And to make it a bit harder, try starting with foreign language words.
It doesn't take many weird characters to hugely amplify the cracking workload of a dictionary attack. Suddenly, every word has numerous possible misspellings.
VVhen y0u th1nk ab0ut 1t, 1t'$ n0t t00 h@rd. Those spammers are already good at this, for busting filters.
NOTE: This will erase all data...
on
Build Your Own PBX
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· Score: 4, Funny
From the article:
With Asterisk@Home, you simply need to download the disk image, burn it to a CD, and boot off of it.
* Burn Asterisk@Home iso to a blank CD
* Boot your Asterisk PC with the CD and press enter
NOTE: This will erase all data on the hard drive of the PC!!!
Just a "minor technical detail", that last note. The way people don't RT*A around here, I'll bet in a day or two we'll see some late posts whining about their loss of data. (is that Darwin I hear?)
Aw, com'on, don't tell me you've never just hit enter without REALLY reading the dialog box, right?
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of good comments have already been made here, but I'm surprised nobody has commented yet on something that seems obvious: if you're going to hack into a system, you have to know a little bit about the system first. You can't simply design some buffer overflow exploit and trust it will "hack" the back-end system. That seems awful "Independence Day"-ish - you know, writing a virus here on Earth that somehow magically attacks and shuts down an alien computer system. Makes for exciting movies (if you're not minimally smart about computers) but it never works in the real world.
In this case, it seems to me that if you know enough about both ends of the process, sure, you can develop some method to penetrate the system. Most malware authors have the benefit of working on a very well-known platform - the Windows PC - with known software (one of the limited numbers of email or browser programs). But attacking a back-end system like this is a much more dicey proposition - each large corporation probably will have its own back end, and may be running any of a dozen OS-and-database combinations.
So to benefit from this attack, it seems to me that the author has to be an insider to stand a ghost of a chance of success. If he's an insider, there are MUCH easier ways to penetrate the system.
As a result, while I have great concerns about RFID, this strikes me as FUD.
1) Develop complicated, application-specific RFID attack that would never be real-world useful
2) Write research paper spreading more fear about RFID
3) PROFIT! (or at least get a lot of attention)
I'm also a MD voter. I was very unhappy with a totally-electronic system - not because I didn't trust the machines, but because it was impossible to prove they had (or hadn't) been tampered with. I personally would insist that any system have a paper copy of my vote that I could inspect, and while I don't expect that level of compliance, at least a paper count from each machine at the end of the day (or however often it is taken) will be a vast improvement. I never had any problem with the fill-in-the-dot system we used for years; I knew that it was easy to verify each vote if a recount was required. But I guess the idiots in Florida ruined that for us.
There is STILL the big problem that whoever counts the votes controls the results. It's possible to hack the system no matter WHAT device or technology you use, although some systems may be harder to hack. At least we have a system where both parties participate directly in the polling, counting, verification and reporting process, so most fraud can be caught by the observers.
In the end, as with so many things we hold dear in America, it's all a matter of trust. The legal, judicial, and political systems work because we trust them. If we lose trust, the result will be a practically instantaneous collapse. So we must work to provide a system that is inherently trustworthy. The purely electronic systems were NOT trustworthy, and a 137-to-0 vote proves that fact.
Okay, not to be crass or anything, but we are ALL going to die sometime. I'm only 38 and I'm already well aware that I'm no spring chicken anymore - college grads see me as the greybeard already. I know I won't live much past 100 even if things go perfectly. I'm over 1/3 done.
In my opinion, we should ALWAYS live our lives as if we will die anyday. Knowing (or thinking) that you have a fixed endpoint doesn't seem that much different.
So it seems to me that we should always handle our job skills (not to mention our MUCH more important family life) as if it ought to stand on its own merits all the time. If you want it passed on, keep it sorted and organized and marked so that anyone else can pick up what you were doing and carry on with it. If it doesn't matter after you die, why are you bothering with it right now?
All that said, this is basically a reality check for ALL of us. What are you doing to cover those you care about? I think this is an excellent article with good thoughts for how to handle the practical aspects of being long-term ill on the job, much more than an article about what happens AFTER you die.
I propose "Brandon's Law"...
As an online discussion of anything privacy-related grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving RIAA or the MPAA approaches 1.
See also Godwin's Law...
>It seems infinitely sad to me that the primary motivation
>for most technological advance in the world is to come up
>with a better means of killing others.
I'm sure I'll burn some karma on this, but I would beg to differ.
There is an interesting premise to Larry Niven's sci fi writing about the Kzin war - the Kzin telepaths reported to their masters that the humans had no military weaponry, and were sure to be an easy conquest. Yet when they first attacked, humanity threw them back in short order, because the civilian technology we DID have was so powerful it cut thru their military systems like butter.
http://www.larryniven.org/kzin/empire.htm
Hmmm.
I see things a little differently, however. I work for the US military as a civilian, directly involved in the procurement of weapons of war. Anyone in our organization will immediately tell you that the goal is not to wage war, but to avoid it. Ronald Reagan knew this when he emphasized his "peace thru superior firepower" mantra. If we allow ourselves to become weaker than our foes, we will find war waged upon us, simply because it's possible. Granted, the only way to stay ahead is to work hard at it, and stay atop the technological king-of-the-hill game. To many (and apparently to this person) it looks as if we want the weapons so we can use them - but I assure you that the vast majority of soldiers, airmen and marines in this country want nothing to do with going to war. I have great respect for the armed services in America, because they are willing to put themselves in death's way to free others. But nobody that I've ever talked with had any interest in conquering another county for the sake of expanding our territory, or taking something that was not already ours.
In the end, I find it fortunate that our military research ends up providing such dramatic benefits for the civilian world.
If this device uses a laser to project its image, it makes me concerned about the dazzle or sparkle you see when looking at a truly monochromatic, coherent point of light. Shine a laser pointer at the wall, and it looks like the dot sparkles. I believe this is a function of the coherency of the light plus the way our eyes perceive the light.
I have a hard time imagining watching an entire wall full of sparkle effect across the entire picture. Do they somehow make the light non-coherent, so your eye doesn't have this problem?
But does it have commercial skip?
I've been a very satisfied owner of a DirecTV UltimateTV reciever since they first came out. About a year ago we got a Tivo for my live-in mother-in-law (since you cannot buy new UTVs anymore). We were very unhappy to discover that Tivo killed the commercial skip feature (at least, without resorting to a hack that is lost every time the power blinks). And the Tivo's maximum fast forward speed seems quite slower than the 300x UTV forward speed.
The commercial skip feature, in my opinion, makes the UTV far nicer than the Tivo. It just works, and it means I don't have to see ANY of a commercial, instead of watching some Tivo-imposed advertisement superimposed on my fastforward thru another advertisement that I also didn't want to see in the first place.
> If you are that worried, get a one time use number, most credit cards
> can generate them online. You use it once, and poof, in a few hours
> it is no longer valid.
Yah, that's neat and all, and it's a great idea for online shopping, but I'm not sure it really helps here. It's still a valid CC number that can cost you money. If they don't actually USE it right away, it remains valid for however long you specified. If they decide to charge it anytime within its valid time frame, they still can - at least that one time. If it's a scam and they sell the number, a crook can still use it once. Sure, it limits your losses, and the CC company will help you fight a crooked charge, but it's still not fuss-free.
As other posters have noted, if you're gonna give them a fake login, might as well fake a CC as well.
Every so often they do a "Myths Revisited" episode, where they take into account user feedback about this very issue. In this case, they did determine that they had over-generalized, and in fact the data proved that at a certain speed it becomes more efficient to use AC. So this question is sort of answered already.
The uninstall request form is gone. There's now a message saying:
"UNINSTALL REQUESTS
November 15th, 2005 - We currently are working on a new tool to uninstall First4Internet XCP software. In the meantime, we have temporarily suspended distribution of the existing uninstall tool for this software. We encourage you to return to this site over the next few days. Thank you for your patience and understanding."
Hmmmm.... I wonder if they yanked it after it got slashdotted (and slashblogged?)...
Aside from being a "keep the devices separate" argument, there ARE people who cannot carry a camera phone. People who work in a secured area, like many military facilities or sensitive manufacturing areas, may not be ALLOWED to carry a phone with a camera. I work near an active flight line, and there are large signs stating "CAMERA PASS REQUIRED FOR ALL CAMERAS (INCLUDING CELL PHONES)". If you don't have a camera pass (and most people don't) you cannot carry a cam-phone. Other buildings nearby have "no recording devices" restrictions - a PDA may be okay but not if it has a microphone or camera. So for that reason, I MUST purchase a phone with no camera. Talk about a limitation - it's very hard to find a decent phone without a camera anymore. So sometimes it really is good to have a simple device, Luddite or not.
I was and still am a big Descent III fan. "Realism" is of limited importance in an obviously artificial or alien game world. But the sense of immersion was quite impressive, especially with the very pervasive audio environment, from steam pipes hissing to occasional clanking mechanical sounds in the distance, then the faint but growing sound of an enemy bot creeping up from behind or off to one side. I distinctly remember jumping out of my seat once when my wife opened the office door suddenly.
I'm personally of the opinion that the audio is actually much more important than the graphics. And newer games are growing quickly in this manner, aided by the growing population of surround or positional audio systems.
One other big factor is timing and synchronization. If the audio and video are out of sync, or the frame rate is too low, or the response-to-controller-inputs is out of whack, all the photo-realistic video or positional audio won't matter.
Either way, our brain adjusts to the input it's getting, sort of a suspension-of-disbelief thing. More "realistic" video or audio won't really change our immersion.
Also, I think that making the object physics, collision detection, wounds/damage models, and so forth accurate is much more important than fancier graphics or better audio. Take for example the ability of a game character to jump off a 2-story building and fall slowly to the ground without damage. Nope. Or the fact you can kill any bad guy with little effort, while your character can absorb 100 damage points and be refreshed to like-new within just minutes. Again, nope.
Our subconcious brain really expects objects to REACT a certain way, and we conciously know the health ratios are off-kilter. Those are the areas that must improve to really change the sense of immersion.
I already replied on this thread, or I'd mod the parent comment up a notch. A lot of folks have been griping about the reader not being able to handle multiple cards in your wallet simultaneously, when really RFID is designed to do that just fine. In fact, the problem, as "iamdrscience" has identified, is precisely the OPPOSITE problem - RFID is a little TOO good at multiple simultaneous identifications. He's right - how do you prevent the system from reading the wrong card - or multiple cards - and double charging or charging the wrong account?
Very insightful.
Inter-chip conflict is not a problem, really. The RFID spec is designed for this overlap. Just like Ethernet communications, the chip is programmed to select a random delay before responding, then "test the waters" and see if it's clear before sending. In short, there's anti-collision features built in to the chips and the readers. Even a simple Google search will give you complete details.
Honestly, do you think this hasn't been considered? RFID was DESIGNED for warehouse operations, where literally THOUSANDS of identical chips (except for the serial number) were in reading range ALL THE TIME. Three cards in your wallet won't even make the system break a sweat....
Ditto. We bought a TiVo for my wife's mother, but I'd never trade give up my UTV for a TiVo. The skip and guide are MUCH more responsive and well-designed. Imagine, a M$ product I actually like.
One gripe (a common problem) with the UTV boxes is the high failure rate of the dual tuners. I have had two units lose one of the two tuners now. I finally bought a few spare units on eBay, so I've got a hardware backup.
The real problem will be the service. At some point M$ can simply decide to stop supporting the guide service, or stop sending out the "allow you to keep using the PVR features" flag, and the UTV will stop being useful overnight. That's right, if you don't have a valid access card you can't play back recorded shows. And older units don't have the latest software updates (that have some really valuable changes). So even the UTV is a slowly-dying breed. I really dread the day I can no longer keep it running.
The parent comment conveys a typical myth about New Orleans. It is a very valuable shipping and commerce city, true, but the part which flooded is NOT the shipping and commerce district - that's a ways upstream, and is NOT built below sea level. The parts which were hugely damaged were almost exclusively the residential districts. There's no legitimate commerce or business need to rebuild the flooded structures on the exact same spot.
In my opinion, Louisiana should move all the people to higher ground, and pass laws forbidding the new construction of a building or business in a levee-protected area that lies at or below sea level.
Note that I don't care about stuff behind a levee - it's perfectly reasonable to build a protective levee - just don't use it to justify building below sea level.
But then, Louisiana never asked me, and they really don't care what I think, so in all probability my taxes will again someday go to hurricane or flood relief for the idiots who choose to put themselves right back in harm's way.
Oh, and in case you think I'm being cold and heartless, I'm not - as soon as the situation has stabilized a bit, I intend to do a missions trip to put my construction skills to good use, by helping to build houses with Habitat for Humanity in the Mississippi or Alabama areas - but I intend to refuse any request to help rebuild New Orleans, out of pure principle.
"...often filled with too much sensation reporting..." - I wholeheartedly agree with this. New Scientist is the Popular Science for geeks. I've found far too many sensationalist articles in this mag to bother with it anymore. And I've even found myself answering questions from other family members about the accuracy of claims they make. Sure, it's easily understandable for the layman, but it seems to exaggerate the here-and-now technologies and to pump the "maybe we could do this soon" stuff unrealistically. It really does remind me of the breathless "We'll all be flying in Moller Aerocars on highways in the sky" stuff that's run in PopSci for the past 30 years. Sorry, haven't seen it yet, and I don't expect to either.
Good thing this was in the UK... seems like decrypting the info to retrieve the IMEI information would violate the DMCA here in the states.
I got supremely tired of the PC noise a couple years ago, and after an initial bad experience with simply relocating the thing (under the desk, thus providing a not-so-pleasant sauna effect), plus some underpowered power supply instability issues, I sprung for an Antec TruePower 450 with its speed controlled fan plus a secondary speed controlled fan plug. I've been extremely happy with the arrangement. While I don't need all 450 watts, the fact that the unit is way overcapable means that it runs very cool all the time, and the fans stay at very low speed, so the noise factor is very low. As an added benefit, the underutilized power supply means that the power supply is very stable, and the overall machine has been accordingly much more reliable (compared to a previous daily crash or two even with WinXP, simply due to undervoltage problems). (I'm now convinced that a couple drive failures I had over a couple years were primarily due to poor power quality.)
Also, I upgraded to a couple 7200 RPM SATA drives that are extremely quiet - not zero noise, but far less objectionable than the previous drives. Frankly, I don't care for the whine, but I like hearing the heads move, because it gives an excellent indication of what the machine is doing; an overly quiet drive always leaves me wondering what's going on under the hood.
It's no silent machine, but it's far quieter than the other two PCs in my house.
Maybe if they just used "democlacy" or "fleedom" - after all, that's how it's pronounced over there, right?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
The "small aluminum plates" are not just small... they're TINY. Others have already noted that "rail gun" is a big misstatement; the discs they're talking about here are merely 850 MICRONS thick. Let's get this thing in perspective, shall we? I know that "rail gun" makes many geeks twitch uncontrollably, but come on now, that's just karma whoring.
Oh, and to link to a two-year-old image... with a caption of "have created" that implies it's brand new... PLEASE.
Once again, the question must be asked: where's the moderation system for STORIES?
Hate to break up the party here, but the parent post is rather misinformed.
I AM an aerospace engineer and have worked on NUMEROUS carrier-based naval jet aircraft. I have been aboard aircraft carriers watching landings and evaluting the data from those landings. I have significant experience with flight stability - in fact I have fifteen years of test and evaluation experience in the field.
With that said...
Stability is two-pronged. Yes, as the parent poster said, letting go of the stick and having things return to stable conditions is stability, but it's only one level of stability. Rather, the newest fighters (especially the F-117 stealth fighter and B-2 stealth bomber) are highly UNSTABLE airplanes. Without the computers, they simply would not fly straight - or at all. The amount of divergence depends on the design - if all the computers in the F-117 shut down, the plane would break apart in moments. It simply cannot fly without the computers constantly making tiny adjustments to correct the flight path. There may be narrow ranges of stability - but stray too far from straight-and-level flight, and things go bad very very quickly.
This is a LOT different from "let go of the stick and it starts to roll". In this case, the pilot could not maintain stability at all - it's simply too unstable to handle without computers.
In fact, instability contributes to maneuverability - if a plane is too stable, it's hard to quickly turn or pitch. But start with an unstable airplane, and you can imagine that if the computer relaxes its control slightly, it can generate very fast maneuvers.
As a matter of fact, the computers in these new planes mean that the pilot is not actually flying the plane. He is telling the plane what he'd like it to do - but the plane's computers are telling the control surfaces how to move (often several at once) to do what the pilot asked.
So "stability" is a very complex issue - and depending on WHICH planes we're talking about, it's VERY true that some planes are not flyable without computers.
Yep, that's true, BUT: this is only an accurate statement when integrated over time. At any given moment, it's quite possible the article has just been "spammed" or somehow defaced, either maliciously or inadvertently. You see, since the most-recently-edited version is available the moment the edit has been made, it takes some time before a damaged page gets corrected.
Unless you know this fact, and take a look at the article history, and run some careful comparisons on recent versions, you don't stand a chance of knowing how accurate THIS revision actually is.
There's this nastly little problem: it's hard to quantify the accuracy of a page, other than perhaps using some metric like "it's been three weeks since this version was edited, and 32,000 people have viewed it, and nobody decided it needed to be changed".
So to use Wikipedia as a research tool, therefore, requires quite a bit of in-depth work "behind the curtain", to assure yourself that what you're reading is on average an accepted point of view.
Still, on the whole, taken as a time-averaged issue, I agree that the overall accuracy is unmatched. And unlike a static set of bound encyclopediae, at least with Wikipedia we have the chance to correct errors, and we don't have to assume that the publisher is unbiased. In this case, it's all out on the table, both good and bad, for the user to see (but only if he chooses).
I know it sounds a bit like 1337-speak, but it's very easy to make a common word virtually un-guessable by doing easy-to-remember substitutions like 0 for o, 1 for i, & for 8 and so forth. Take it a step further: for those passwords that require a non-letter/non-digit somewhere in the password, consider substitutions like @ for a, $ for s, ! for 1, & for 8, ( for C, etc.
And to make it a bit harder, try starting with foreign language words.
It doesn't take many weird characters to hugely amplify the cracking workload of a dictionary attack. Suddenly, every word has numerous possible misspellings.
VVhen y0u th1nk ab0ut 1t, 1t'$ n0t t00 h@rd. Those spammers are already good at this, for busting filters.
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With Asterisk@Home, you simply need to download the disk image, burn it to a CD, and boot off of it.
- * Burn Asterisk@Home iso to a blank CD
Just a "minor technical detail", that last note. The way people don't RT*A around here, I'll bet in a day or two we'll see some late posts whining about their loss of data. (is that Darwin I hear?)* Boot your Asterisk PC with the CD and press enter
NOTE: This will erase all data on the hard drive of the PC!!!
Aw, com'on, don't tell me you've never just hit enter without REALLY reading the dialog box, right?