The right of everyone to keep the money they've earned? I missed that one. Must be an unenumerated right. Or are you one of those nickel-wits that believes that the IRS is unconstitutional? Or Occam's Razor: you're about as economically astute as my shoelaces. So far, I have yet to meet a no-taxes zealot that I respect.
Given that my tax burden is the same as yours, roughly, I also respectfully insist you 'shut your fscking cake-hole', yourself. You most assuredly do NOT speak for me. Unlike tight-fisted whiney greedy narrow-minded short-sighted wankers like you, I am fed up with watching governmental spending getting squeezed. The mere existence of Paris Hilton (a rich girl that has never worked a day in her life) is proof-positive that your ideal system is broken. Nobody deserves a free ride like that, no matter what their grandpa did.
I am fed up with seeing school funding cut, even if I don't have kids in schools. It offends me to think that several area schools have shifted to 4-day weeks (making many borderline-poor 2-income households suffer as the parents struggle to cover the 5th day themselves). My dad is alive due to technology that came from DoD and NASA research. I prefer a society that takes care of disabled and elderly citizens. I like welfare if the alternative is youth poverty, youth hunger, and more crime. I'm even comfortable with the tiny percentage of estimated welfare fraud, considering how hard fighting fraud is.
Rather than whining about a few hundred bucks, I put my effort into increasing my income and my worth. My thoughts about Social Security are about the same: I don't distrust my ability to save/invest, but I don't *want* to have acquaintances or relatives that are financially inept (or just unlucky) eating cat-food someday.
Oh, you're delusional if you think fighting taxes is an uphill battle. Everyone's knee-jerk response is to doubt/wonder if the money is well-spent... but only idiots believe that all taxes (or even your claimed 90%) are bad.
Step 1 in fighting your disease (not that you'll listen, but someone else might) is empathy: look at who your cuts affect and try harder to see indirect effects (like crime or poverty, increased costs of business, or the inefficiencies of slow travel).
And get involved in budgetary/administrative roles on things you support (even a club or church), so you can see first-hand how expensive everything really is. A million-dollar budget changes your perspective on real costs, if all you've ever seen is your own checkbook balance. Watching deadlines slip hanges your perspective on what volunteers or underpaid unskilled help can do.
Precident is there to ensure fairness (IANAL, but i've done a fair share of law courses) - essentially, if you do something naughty today, and get sued for $100, then joe slashdot is going to be really pissed if he does the same thing tomorrow and ends up losing $100,000 - people need consistency in the law.
Oh, you mean like fileswapping, cracking, and the likes? Because rampant penalty inflation's pretty much the trend over the last 30 yrs.
I feel sorry for any country's astronomers where one of these things get put up.
Nah, I'll just shift from astronomy to Extreme Model Rocketry for a few years, if you get my drift... There also might be some more terrestrial monkey-wrenching to whatever sponsor's assets. I dunno what... Pepsi trucks do run on Pepsi, don't they?
Thanks for the chuckle. It sorta fits with a funny blog 'about-me' page I read yesterday: ( I threw in a couple extra from his list because they're excellent, too.)
7. I had one really great high school teacher who told me that education is "the process of disillusionment". I didn't know what he meant at the time; I do now.
8. My real first name is Richard. In the 7th grade, after years of living with the horror of having that as a first name, we moved from one town to another and it occured to me that no one in the new town knew my name. So I decided to go by my middle name. Alas, my clever plan backfired. In the 10th grade, some punk saw the teacher's name list and found out my real first name and I became "Dick Ed". They never did find his body.
9. I think that Celine Dion is Canada's revenge on the US for decades of acid rain.
10. I think we owe Canada a lot more acid rain now.
Since I didn't have the link, let me again say I *love* google... any time you can google up something based on key words you remember in the article... 'acid rain celine dion'.. presto!
think you meant 'off the beaten path'. Double negatives and all that.
Re:and everyone is still using floppies : )
on
Blu-Ray DVDs Hit 100 GB
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe this is a dumb question, but if the surface gets scratched, wouldn't it prevent all layers from being read correctly?... an offset on the layers... some kind of raid structure... if each layer is offset by 180 degrees, the scratch wouldn't harm both copies, but... sacrificing performance... to scan the disc, decide if the data was readable, if not find the other copy, and the use that... Also, writing your data would take twice as long.
Heh, nice job. You're halfway to reinventing FEC, or Forward Error Correction, a technique for on-the-fly checksumming and knowing what data is valid and what data is damaged. It's *ideally* suited for broadcast or other high-dataflow streams, like dvd data. And heck, no, it isn't a dumb question. It's just been asked and answered. Now if someone could just tell me why this (or an earlier generation of error-correction code) isn't built into cd's and dvd's to start with... I *hate* unprotected media and losing data to scratches.
I think even $5 is a high estimate. Look at the price point for Divx and how poorly it did. I mean, the DVD's I buy get swapped and loaned around to relatives and friends (not often, but sometimes). And while *my* stereo is networked, nobody I know has bothered to bring a net connection to their stereo, making this a nuisance for legal/casual sharing and for technological requirements.
Customers aren't idiots. They just don't care as much as we do, unless it bites 'em on the ass. Via word of mouth, 'watch out for those piece-of-shit biometric DVDs' solves this faster than anything else. Net value will be below cost.
That said, if security folks wanna see a sudden *massive* increase in biometric hacks (for example: jujubie- or glue-based faked fingerprints), make biometric platforms ubiquitous enough to let teenagers practice their hacks at home. The neighborhood bank or supermarket won't let a couple 14-year-olds stand at a biometric tool trying things until something works...
Hardly. Check my comments higher up in this thread (
here,
here,
here,
here. I'm not going to rehash those (you can see me fizzling out by the 4th msg, above), but the ability to *bury* your communication so that it is indetectable is less about using curl or some other obscure/rare protocol (I feel you're absolutely right by implying that going that route makes you stand out until it increases your risks of getting in trouble and more about picking a plausible and hard-to-eavesdrop high-traffic protocol to bury your traffic in.
I am a big fan of Westheimer's Conclusion (frank, not ruth's) that scientists will spend a year in the lab to avoid a day in the research library. This shows up every day: wasting hours using computer-editing tools when five minutes with scissors, white-out and a copier (or a few markers) will work as well, or in the case of crypto, devising some elaborate technical means when brush-passes, blind drops, mail drops, and so many other means of communication work effectively, provide deniability, and 'hide in plain sight'.
Changing the subject: Several people have written that anonymous dissident activity is worthless. Since writing these other posts earlier today, I happened to read a few pages of 'Freakonomics'. They happened to be startlingly relevant pages. I suggest that anyone thinking that anonymous information is worthless (repeatedly screeched out here) google 'Stetson Kennedy KKK' to read how he was able to hurt the KKK by leaking their secrets to writers for the 'Adventures of Superman' radio program.
Information, even anonymous information, can be powerful.
Do all ssh tunneling over port 443 (As I recall that's the ssl port), then you can make it look like you were just doing some online banking.
Nope. That'd only work if you can get a bank to set up the 443 ssh receiver. And good luck getting a bank to open 443 for ssh redirecting. Banks are the epitome of conservative behavior.
Otherwise, target IP gives you away or at least confirms you're 'up to no good' in the eyes of whoever is watching you.
But you're on the right track... hide by doing something arguably-innocent that's in plain sight. Now, if you can find someone like yahoo/aol that offers online banking and many other services, you might find a way to sneak that info thru. But really, do you trust *them* to not set up a tap when so ordered?
I work for an oppressive government's ISP monitoring administration. Do you have any suggestions for proxy websites we should block? Any particular ports we should be examining, or traffic patterns?
Dear Oppressive Government:
My phone is digital spread-spectrum. The way it hops around the allocated spectrum, eavesdropping it is a royal bitch. In a neighborhood of these phones, singling out just my phone traffic makes your job worse. Luckily, you'll just need a wiretap.
I use GAIM and GAIM-ENCRYPTION, because sometimes coworkers and I use it for business reasons (password changes, discussing contract prices or bid status, for work-related meetings or planning). We also talk about other stuff we don't want the boss to eavesdrop on. And we use gaim a *lot* for mundane chit-chat, without bothering to turn off encryption. That's a lot of irrelevant traffic that you'll need to sort thru, once you can decrypt my communication.
I use a digital cellphone sometimes. Mine's GSM... I think. Other times, I borrow one from someone for a few minutes. Minutes have gotten cheap enough, even strangers don't mind loaning you a phone for a minute or two. If minutes are expensive in your country, I bet folks do like we used to, where you just give someone a buck or two after borrowing their phone. If it helps, I can try to get you a list of my friends' numbers. I doubt it will. And I have no idea how you'll track down my calls from strangers' phones. They're like roaming phone booths.
Friends and I like to exchange movies via bittorrent. Sometimes, I wait days for a gig-size download, only to find that I don't have the right codec, or the picture quality sucks. Last time I checked Azureus, I was at 65 gigs of data transferred. Have at the analysis of that stuff, with my blessings, considering the near-random packet storm resultant from using bittorrent. If you get usable data out of 'em, can you drop me a note and tell me where I download the more obscure codecs?
A friend uses Skype to talk to his family in Venezuela. Lots. I'm sure that, given the price of international calls to tinpot dictatorships like yours, everyone in your country has heard of Skype or knows someone with relatives abroad that uses it. This friend of mine also had a girlfriend that he'd talk an hour a night with (using Skype), and they even sometimes set up videochats via some other mechanism. I wonder how much difficulty you'll have dsigning efficient ways of tracking stuff like pictures or pages held up for a few moments within a videochat. Even harder would be detecting hand signals or other codes. I hear India is taking in a lot of outsourcing... maybe they can get you roomsful of trained experts to eavesdrop all this crap.
You'll also want to watch for those nifty new camera cellphones and TXT'ing and blackberrys, iPods and handheld games and beaming and wifi and bluetooth. Then there's DVD-R's and cheap SD cards that can be passed along via old-fashioned means. Never underestimate the postal service, covert drops, or good-ol' brush-pass techniques.
I'm sure there's more. Please let me know when you have surveilance techniques worked out for this stuff, and I'll think of a few more.
Throughout this, knowing that I'm a dissident will be your only (thin) hope. Heaven help you if underground cells or other means are used to spread a counter-message anonymously.
(tongue-in-cheek aside, Elwood, the situation is (luckily) getting unsurveilable faster than governments can control it. In 15 years, we've gotten so far beyond the heavy use of faxes during China's Tiananmen Incident as an unmonitorable mechanism for spreading news or messages to organize dissent: search AAR's report for 'Faxes Save Lives' for a pithy paragraph on the state of surveilance there.)
While I'm not sure of their 'hardness', I'd also recommend non-steg hiding: hiding in plain sight by using mechanisms that are harder to eavesdrop.
The one I had in mind (again, not sure on hardness) is GAIM plus GAIM-ENCRYPTION. If chat has easy, ubiquitous encryption, you just sort of turn it on by default and the 'noise' of a thousand encrypted channels makes it that much harder to even know who is just chattering, who is using the security for business-security reasons, and who is a dissident.
(note, this all goes out the window in regimes where possession of encryption is an offense by itself)
Similarly, voip (SKYPE) or other scrambled/compressed/encrypted stuff can be an asset: they generate tons of capturable data, but no way to know which stuff matters enough to decrypt. Voice compression is less-likely to involve a risk of possession-of-encryption, because the encoding is so deep into the app that users aren't aware they're making life hard on the despots... they just wanna call internationally for free.
Between metaphysics, physics, paradoxes, dualities, Goedel's theorem,and fantasies of turning into Natalie Portman's favorite swan, reality never stood a chance.
fantasies of turning into Natalie Portman's favorite swan
This fantasy, if true, has to qualify as one of the oddest i have yet to meet on the net. Congratulations.
Aw, shucks, thanks!
(Truth be known, GP blurred two concepts together (something about bored gods turning into swans and having sex with hotties) and I was trying to show how easily the mind transcends the possible. That is one helluva image, aint' it. If real, I think it'd transcend even the bizarre^2-ness of 'furrys' )
Wherever possible, the communication should be not just encrypted, but undetected and 'normal' when profiled. Otherwise, 'they' still know you're up to no good and will detain/surveil/interrogate/torture/extort anyone that'll get the information revealed.
If you're quietly leaking resistance reports and it looks like you're surfing for something benign (apolitical news, entertainment or work-related information), nobody's the wiser. If you spend a couple hrs a day using encrypted channels, they'll notice.
As used to be the mantra for so many supporters of PGP, this is a strong argument for ubiquitous encryption. If everything's in envelopes, those few life-protecting envelopes don't look out of place.
Slashdot is only as up-to-date as you make it. AFAIK the editorial team don't go looking for articles, they wait for YOU the reader to submit them.
If you want current news, you should participate in providing it.
Yeah, like readers are even remotely in control here...
In bizarro slashdot-land, there's no doubt a peer-reviewed, wiki-ish news system and their critics are arguing that all the trouble with old news, inanity and dupes could be solved if they allowed advertising and used the profit to hire editors to professionally manage the news flow.
...it's more likely that the fact that we can imagine it, implies (or is it infers in this context)that there is some possibility of it just based on the fact that we can conceptualize it.
I imagine someday using any future means to squish your naive optimism in time to not have to read that dreck...
(f5)
Nope... didn't work. Damn.
Seriously, you ain't never met my imagination if you think it maps to reality. Between metaphysics, physics, paradoxes, dualities, Goedel's theorem,and fantasies of turning into Natalie Portman's favorite swan, reality never stood a chance.
Went looking to see what Elsevier had done post-resignation, to see if they were still publishing, who'd taken the editorial positions, etc.
It appears they haven't updated their webpages in the year since the resignation. Elsevier still shows Knuth et al as editors. Clicking the 'editorial board' gets a 2nd page that looks unchanged. I'm not a subscriber and tens of miles from anywhere that might have a subscription, so that's as far as my researching goes...
Am sure you know that 'dropping' stuff from space is an oxymoron. I dislike the term because it sounds so cheap when in fact decellerating stuff into a decaying orbit requires almost as much energy as launching stuff (the difference between 'em is air drag counts against you going up vs. air drag being useful to decellerate coming down.)
And then there's the problem of finding an ideal uninhabited spot. Aim for the ocean? Oops, it sank. And there'll be a steam cloud and waves and other side effects. Aiming for dry land? Dust, impact craters, angry locals (natives, tourists, whatever).
And then there's all the *other* unintended side effects: does burning stuff off on reentry create pollution, or reduce greenhouse gasses by binding up atmospheric carbon or other unwanteds? Does whatever is burned off cause unpleasant side effects like acid rain, or do areas under flight-paths get a thin coating of ash worth $5 a pound for the metals content (pixie dust!). Is modifying stuff to enable a graceful orbital decay going to cost more than the material being spun down from orbit?
That said, they're engineerable risks. Spray-coating a re-entry covering of optimum material is possible. A mechanism to 'eat' the recoil energy needed to bring some object to a screeching/controlled halt in orbit (thus, letting it fall to earth) isn't implausible: think solar-wound clockworks, slingshots or the likes, for starters.
I do think that my handwavy suggestions and yours constitute jack-zip compared to the gazillion bucks of research effort expended so far by others... they've likely already been-there, tried-that. And for each easy answer, they've probably researched the hard followup questions and high price tags. There's a world of difference between CAN and CAN AFFORD TO.
First off, I like diversity just because it makes life interesting. The new guy listens to hip-hop? Cool, at least it isn't Country, which is what everyone else around here listens to (sigh). Women? My undergraduate degree came from a tiny department with 1 married/nontrad female. Grad school: suddenly there were women in the classes, on study groups, etc... studying was suddenly a bit less unpleasant. Foreign cultures? People introduce you to new foods and different music and culture, etc., and you have a chance to ask questions like "What the hell is Keema Naan?"
Next: It'd be tougher to prove these, but a 98%-white company might suffer in other ways:
Your prospective client/partner from a diverse area (let's say Detroit) might be uncomfortable with you based on the *appearance* of your company being entirely white. If they don't take a moment to consider where you're from, that suspicion could weaken the business link.
Cultural nuances might get overlooked that could help a company: if you do marketing and some junior partner notices an untapped niche because of his ties to albanian/kenyan/cuban/whatever culture, for example.
Oh, and if you're 98% white, how nervous about being insensitive (and thus how distracted) will your team be the day you have a critical contract meeting and they're all black or hispanic or whatever. The issue is somewhat recursive: you don't know, so you try to reexamine stuff on-the-fly to make sure you're not inadvertently being rude, and that makes you pause, and then the pause makes you wonder if... (etc)
It's also impolite to say stereotype-heavy things like 'Without a few 'queer eyes', a company full of straight guys will design stuff that has all the design elegance of post-fraternal off-campus apartments'. But the area I live in has about as much culture as the seal on an autoclave. And the people I work with reflect that: few of them monitor fashion and style, few instinctively recognize elegant design, etc. Instead, tools and farming and engineering and self-reliance skills are the norm. You want a prototype make? Sure! It'll work well, and look like s**t. Push it to final product stage? Sure! It'll work even better, and look slightly less like s**t.
Uh... what the hell is the Nicean Creed? Cuz if I knew, I could tell you...
(googling...)
eeeew... Something contrived in 325AD is your best definition? Can't we just say 'believer in the teachings of Jesus'!?
You do realize that the 300 years *backward* to Jesus through some deeply anti-christian empires is literally (and I mean with-respect-to-writing) as improbably-dense a barrier as the 1200 years forward to just get to a printing press? Then again, if Benedict did it, copies probably survive intact, so the big 'hmmm' is the rearward 300 years and the political and philosophical adjustments made in 325ad.
mumble mumble... father, son, holy ghost -- check! mumble mumble... the paradox of the trinity -- mormons don't agree mumble mumble... crucified, risen, atonement -- mostly agreeable mumble mumble... one holy catholic church-- uh, not even, but we're not alone mumble mumble... baptism, resurrection, life-after -- yup.
So, after 1680 years, I'd give Mormon's a 60%. That 'other' book or books are best thought of as 'jesus -- the lost episodes' (Ediron ducks the lightning). And, as so many have said here, there's much in mormonism that'd make any christian proud.
I liked the whole Ender series. And I'd say the concept of a Speaker for the Dead ( and finding the meaning in a life (even if it isn't pretty) is noteworthy/interesting, since your praise stops at book 1. And there is room for letting religion infuse one's writing. But it's tough to do inoffensively. And Card seems utterly unable to let go of the negativity. Quite frankly, it largely was narrowminded backward dweebs with opinions like his that led to my jack-mormon status.
Today's best irony is this whole subthread was provoked by some troll that has the same ugly negativism while dissing Mormons. The only thing funnier (and karmic) was if he was OSC's next-door-neighbor.
Troll admits he's evangelical. Many just utterly seem to hate mormons.
Mormons believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ. Anyone not eager to wrap themselves in a knot semantically will agree:
Darwinists believe in Darwin's theory. (hee-hee, evangelicals don't) Buddhists respect the teachings of Buddha. Christians believe in the teachings of Jesus.
Anyone that gets into 'you busted the trinity' or similar tangles is trying too hard.
Rather than doing what you *love*, aim for something you like or find interesting that pays well.
Not to sound like some postmodern Henny Youngman, but it isn't that I'm obsessed with money... it's that everyone else is. I want the financial means to walk away from a job that stresses me out or compromises my ethics. I want the financial means to scale back and enjoy myself (sooner not later). I want the means to put my kids through college anywhere they want. I want the means to afford medical services that might save a loved one who'd otherwise die because "that procedure isn't covered under your policy, sir".
If I pick what I love, I might choose philosophy PhD or trout bum or starving artist/writer. Yeah, I might make a living at it, but chances are stronger that I'll be divorced and less happy than I would be if I pick the lucrative stuff I like doing: computers (ok, I *love* working on computers), computer security (love... again), computer programming (like), taking care of the project management tasks for a computer team, rethinking/re-engineering stuff for improvements. A few other lucrative likes that I've let fall by the wayside: architecture (but I'm designing a remodel of a house in my free time!), civil engineering and construction mgmt, almost any trade/craft skill (but I don't like 'em enough to *do* the job forever... just enough to get good at 'em), photography, etc.
Since this wandered clear into the weeds, let me just add: both of TFP's career paths will be interesting enough and lucrative enough if you pay attention to the financial side of your life. Hardware's got some perks (it seems more a black art to more people, which you like, and there are cool gadgets that'll let you throw custom/embedded hardware at a problem that'd take longer to solve in software or COTS gear).
But parent's right. If you start in, and realize you don't like hardware (or embedded / PIC type coding, more specifically), that'll be your answer: the money's equivalent, so go with the one you like more.
Besides, I see a steady stream of people doing things that are tangential to their degree, anyway. If you really like your current school or someone there (like parent, I'd say life matters more than work) and don't want to transfer to get into a hardware-oriented program, you're not blocked from working on embedded systems: buy a Basic Stamp kit, go read up on homebrew PIC coding, and use them in projects/assignments whenever you can. Your full-bore software degree will carry you fine and from there you just nudge your career track toward hardware-based jobs. You won't be a hardware wizard, but you'll compliment the hardware guys nicely on a team, because they won't be expert in the software side.
Oh, and as for deep-hardware (computer or ASIC design, for example), that's probably not a hobby-beomes-job option.
And I tried to walk to Cancun but got tired. George should fund my vacations.
My whole point is that one needs to have a desire to learn and get the experience. If $100 is out of reach, when I had to save $50 for a mitt as a kid, $1600 for an Amiga while in college, etc. then the desire isn't there. Gifts from George won't make a difference.
And how can you say the flash platform is unusable? I've seen 8-year-olds figure out animation basics on it.
My brother and I, a few days after the superbowl, compared notes to the reaction where each of us were to the GoDaddy ads. In both cases, a roomful of people were mystified, scandalized, amused, and completely unaware what godaddy was. The guesses were like you describe (porn, some new reality show, competition for Desperate Housewives, etc). In both cases, we sat quietly and waited until someone (one person out of 20, at each party) remembered who/what GoDaddy was and explained to the room.
Yup, ugly and awful. But did I mention that the party I was at was Ad execs and business owners hosted by a small TV station's marketing director? And that those 20 people *now* have a name when they go to register their next domain name? The ad wonks in the room remarked that 'who the hell is _____?' was a priceless bonus to the effectiveness of those ads.
So... ugly, but damn effective for creating name recognition in an area nobody gives a crap about.
Oh, and over the last 2 years I've consolidated as domains lapsed: GoDaddy has all my domains. Cheap and decent is all I need.
Slashdot Mirror
The right of everyone to keep the money they've earned? I missed that one. Must be an unenumerated right. Or are you one of those nickel-wits that believes that the IRS is unconstitutional? Or Occam's Razor: you're about as economically astute as my shoelaces. So far, I have yet to meet a no-taxes zealot that I respect.
Given that my tax burden is the same as yours, roughly, I also respectfully insist you 'shut your fscking cake-hole', yourself. You most assuredly do NOT speak for me. Unlike tight-fisted whiney greedy narrow-minded short-sighted wankers like you, I am fed up with watching governmental spending getting squeezed. The mere existence of Paris Hilton (a rich girl that has never worked a day in her life) is proof-positive that your ideal system is broken. Nobody deserves a free ride like that, no matter what their grandpa did.
I am fed up with seeing school funding cut, even if I don't have kids in schools. It offends me to think that several area schools have shifted to 4-day weeks (making many borderline-poor 2-income households suffer as the parents struggle to cover the 5th day themselves). My dad is alive due to technology that came from DoD and NASA research. I prefer a society that takes care of disabled and elderly citizens. I like welfare if the alternative is youth poverty, youth hunger, and more crime. I'm even comfortable with the tiny percentage of estimated welfare fraud, considering how hard fighting fraud is.
Rather than whining about a few hundred bucks, I put my effort into increasing my income and my worth. My thoughts about Social Security are about the same: I don't distrust my ability to save/invest, but I don't *want* to have acquaintances or relatives that are financially inept (or just unlucky) eating cat-food someday.
Oh, you're delusional if you think fighting taxes is an uphill battle. Everyone's knee-jerk response is to doubt/wonder if the money is well-spent... but only idiots believe that all taxes (or even your claimed 90%) are bad.
Step 1 in fighting your disease (not that you'll listen, but someone else might) is empathy: look at who your cuts affect and try harder to see indirect effects (like crime or poverty, increased costs of business, or the inefficiencies of slow travel).
And get involved in budgetary/administrative roles on things you support (even a club or church), so you can see first-hand how expensive everything really is. A million-dollar budget changes your perspective on real costs, if all you've ever seen is your own checkbook balance. Watching deadlines slip hanges your perspective on what volunteers or underpaid unskilled help can do.
Nah, I'll just shift from astronomy to Extreme Model Rocketry for a few years, if you get my drift... There also might be some more terrestrial monkey-wrenching to whatever sponsor's assets. I dunno what... Pepsi trucks do run on Pepsi, don't they?
Since I didn't have the link, let me again say I *love* google... any time you can google up something based on key words you remember in the article... 'acid rain celine dion'.. presto!
think you meant 'off the beaten path'. Double negatives and all that.
Heh, nice job. You're halfway to reinventing FEC, or Forward Error Correction, a technique for on-the-fly checksumming and knowing what data is valid and what data is damaged. It's *ideally* suited for broadcast or other high-dataflow streams, like dvd data. And heck, no, it isn't a dumb question. It's just been asked and answered. Now if someone could just tell me why this (or an earlier generation of error-correction code) isn't built into cd's and dvd's to start with... I *hate* unprotected media and losing data to scratches.
I think even $5 is a high estimate. Look at the price point for Divx and how poorly it did. I mean, the DVD's I buy get swapped and loaned around to relatives and friends (not often, but sometimes). And while *my* stereo is networked, nobody I know has bothered to bring a net connection to their stereo, making this a nuisance for legal/casual sharing and for technological requirements.
Customers aren't idiots. They just don't care as much as we do, unless it bites 'em on the ass. Via word of mouth, 'watch out for those piece-of-shit biometric DVDs' solves this faster than anything else. Net value will be below cost.
That said, if security folks wanna see a sudden *massive* increase in biometric hacks (for example: jujubie- or glue-based faked fingerprints), make biometric platforms ubiquitous enough to let teenagers practice their hacks at home. The neighborhood bank or supermarket won't let a couple 14-year-olds stand at a biometric tool trying things until something works...
I am a big fan of Westheimer's Conclusion (frank, not ruth's) that scientists will spend a year in the lab to avoid a day in the research library. This shows up every day: wasting hours using computer-editing tools when five minutes with scissors, white-out and a copier (or a few markers) will work as well, or in the case of crypto, devising some elaborate technical means when brush-passes, blind drops, mail drops, and so many other means of communication work effectively, provide deniability, and 'hide in plain sight'.
Changing the subject: Several people have written that anonymous dissident activity is worthless. Since writing these other posts earlier today, I happened to read a few pages of 'Freakonomics'. They happened to be startlingly relevant pages. I suggest that anyone thinking that anonymous information is worthless (repeatedly screeched out here) google 'Stetson Kennedy KKK' to read how he was able to hurt the KKK by leaking their secrets to writers for the 'Adventures of Superman' radio program.
Information, even anonymous information, can be powerful.
Otherwise, target IP gives you away or at least confirms you're 'up to no good' in the eyes of whoever is watching you.
But you're on the right track... hide by doing something arguably-innocent that's in plain sight. Now, if you can find someone like yahoo/aol that offers online banking and many other services, you might find a way to sneak that info thru. But really, do you trust *them* to not set up a tap when so ordered?
My phone is digital spread-spectrum. The way it hops around the allocated spectrum, eavesdropping it is a royal bitch. In a neighborhood of these phones, singling out just my phone traffic makes your job worse. Luckily, you'll just need a wiretap.
I use GAIM and GAIM-ENCRYPTION, because sometimes coworkers and I use it for business reasons (password changes, discussing contract prices or bid status, for work-related meetings or planning). We also talk about other stuff we don't want the boss to eavesdrop on. And we use gaim a *lot* for mundane chit-chat, without bothering to turn off encryption. That's a lot of irrelevant traffic that you'll need to sort thru, once you can decrypt my communication.
I use a digital cellphone sometimes. Mine's GSM... I think. Other times, I borrow one from someone for a few minutes. Minutes have gotten cheap enough, even strangers don't mind loaning you a phone for a minute or two. If minutes are expensive in your country, I bet folks do like we used to, where you just give someone a buck or two after borrowing their phone. If it helps, I can try to get you a list of my friends' numbers. I doubt it will. And I have no idea how you'll track down my calls from strangers' phones. They're like roaming phone booths.
Friends and I like to exchange movies via bittorrent. Sometimes, I wait days for a gig-size download, only to find that I don't have the right codec, or the picture quality sucks. Last time I checked Azureus, I was at 65 gigs of data transferred. Have at the analysis of that stuff, with my blessings, considering the near-random packet storm resultant from using bittorrent. If you get usable data out of 'em, can you drop me a note and tell me where I download the more obscure codecs?
A friend uses Skype to talk to his family in Venezuela. Lots. I'm sure that, given the price of international calls to tinpot dictatorships like yours, everyone in your country has heard of Skype or knows someone with relatives abroad that uses it. This friend of mine also had a girlfriend that he'd talk an hour a night with (using Skype), and they even sometimes set up videochats via some other mechanism. I wonder how much difficulty you'll have dsigning efficient ways of tracking stuff like pictures or pages held up for a few moments within a videochat. Even harder would be detecting hand signals or other codes. I hear India is taking in a lot of outsourcing... maybe they can get you roomsful of trained experts to eavesdrop all this crap.
You'll also want to watch for those nifty new camera cellphones and TXT'ing and blackberrys, iPods and handheld games and beaming and wifi and bluetooth. Then there's DVD-R's and cheap SD cards that can be passed along via old-fashioned means. Never underestimate the postal service, covert drops, or good-ol' brush-pass techniques.
I'm sure there's more. Please let me know when you have surveilance techniques worked out for this stuff, and I'll think of a few more.
Throughout this, knowing that I'm a dissident will be your only (thin) hope. Heaven help you if underground cells or other means are used to spread a counter-message anonymously.
(tongue-in-cheek aside, Elwood, the situation is (luckily) getting unsurveilable faster than governments can control it. In 15 years, we've gotten so far beyond the heavy use of faxes during China's Tiananmen Incident as an unmonitorable mechanism for spreading news or messages to organize dissent: search AAR's report for 'Faxes Save Lives' for a pithy paragraph on the state of surveilance there.)
Excellent list.
While I'm not sure of their 'hardness', I'd also recommend non-steg hiding: hiding in plain sight by using mechanisms that are harder to eavesdrop.
The one I had in mind (again, not sure on hardness) is GAIM plus GAIM-ENCRYPTION. If chat has easy, ubiquitous encryption, you just sort of turn it on by default and the 'noise' of a thousand encrypted channels makes it that much harder to even know who is just chattering, who is using the security for business-security reasons, and who is a dissident.
(note, this all goes out the window in regimes where possession of encryption is an offense by itself)
Similarly, voip (SKYPE) or other scrambled/compressed/encrypted stuff can be an asset: they generate tons of capturable data, but no way to know which stuff matters enough to decrypt. Voice compression is less-likely to involve a risk of possession-of-encryption, because the encoding is so deep into the app that users aren't aware they're making life hard on the despots... they just wanna call internationally for free.
(Truth be known, GP blurred two concepts together (something about bored gods turning into swans and having sex with hotties) and I was trying to show how easily the mind transcends the possible. That is one helluva image, aint' it. If real, I think it'd transcend even the bizarre^2-ness of 'furrys' )
Wherever possible, the communication should be not just encrypted, but undetected and 'normal' when profiled. Otherwise, 'they' still know you're up to no good and will detain/surveil/interrogate/torture/extort anyone that'll get the information revealed.
If you're quietly leaking resistance reports and it looks like you're surfing for something benign (apolitical news, entertainment or work-related information), nobody's the wiser. If you spend a couple hrs a day using encrypted channels, they'll notice.
As used to be the mantra for so many supporters of PGP, this is a strong argument for ubiquitous encryption. If everything's in envelopes, those few life-protecting envelopes don't look out of place.
In bizarro slashdot-land, there's no doubt a peer-reviewed, wiki-ish news system and their critics are arguing that all the trouble with old news, inanity and dupes could be solved if they allowed advertising and used the profit to hire editors to professionally manage the news flow.
(f5)
Nope... didn't work. Damn.
Seriously, you ain't never met my imagination if you think it maps to reality. Between metaphysics, physics, paradoxes, dualities, Goedel's theorem,and fantasies of turning into Natalie Portman's favorite swan, reality never stood a chance.
Went looking to see what Elsevier had done post-resignation, to see if they were still publishing, who'd taken the editorial positions, etc.
It appears they haven't updated their webpages in the year since the resignation. Elsevier still shows Knuth et al as editors. Clicking the 'editorial board' gets a 2nd page that looks unchanged. I'm not a subscriber and tens of miles from anywhere that might have a subscription, so that's as far as my researching goes...
(3D0G solves -151)
ETS;
Am sure you know that 'dropping' stuff from space is an oxymoron. I dislike the term because it sounds so cheap when in fact decellerating stuff into a decaying orbit requires almost as much energy as launching stuff (the difference between 'em is air drag counts against you going up vs. air drag being useful to decellerate coming down.)
And then there's the problem of finding an ideal uninhabited spot. Aim for the ocean? Oops, it sank. And there'll be a steam cloud and waves and other side effects. Aiming for dry land? Dust, impact craters, angry locals (natives, tourists, whatever).
And then there's all the *other* unintended side effects: does burning stuff off on reentry create pollution, or reduce greenhouse gasses by binding up atmospheric carbon or other unwanteds? Does whatever is burned off cause unpleasant side effects like acid rain, or do areas under flight-paths get a thin coating of ash worth $5 a pound for the metals content (pixie dust!). Is modifying stuff to enable a graceful orbital decay going to cost more than the material being spun down from orbit?
That said, they're engineerable risks. Spray-coating a re-entry covering of optimum material is possible. A mechanism to 'eat' the recoil energy needed to bring some object to a screeching/controlled halt in orbit (thus, letting it fall to earth) isn't implausible: think solar-wound clockworks, slingshots or the likes, for starters.
I do think that my handwavy suggestions and yours constitute jack-zip compared to the gazillion bucks of research effort expended so far by others... they've likely already been-there, tried-that. And for each easy answer, they've probably researched the hard followup questions and high price tags. There's a world of difference between CAN and CAN AFFORD TO.
First off, I like diversity just because it makes life interesting. The new guy listens to hip-hop? Cool, at least it isn't Country, which is what everyone else around here listens to (sigh). Women? My undergraduate degree came from a tiny department with 1 married/nontrad female. Grad school: suddenly there were women in the classes, on study groups, etc... studying was suddenly a bit less unpleasant. Foreign cultures? People introduce you to new foods and different music and culture, etc., and you have a chance to ask questions like "What the hell is Keema Naan?"
Next: It'd be tougher to prove these, but a 98%-white company might suffer in other ways:
Your prospective client/partner from a diverse area (let's say Detroit) might be uncomfortable with you based on the *appearance* of your company being entirely white. If they don't take a moment to consider where you're from, that suspicion could weaken the business link.
Cultural nuances might get overlooked that could help a company: if you do marketing and some junior partner notices an untapped niche because of his ties to albanian/kenyan/cuban/whatever culture, for example.
Oh, and if you're 98% white, how nervous about being insensitive (and thus how distracted) will your team be the day you have a critical contract meeting and they're all black or hispanic or whatever. The issue is somewhat recursive: you don't know, so you try to reexamine stuff on-the-fly to make sure you're not inadvertently being rude, and that makes you pause, and then the pause makes you wonder if... (etc)
It's also impolite to say stereotype-heavy things like 'Without a few 'queer eyes', a company full of straight guys will design stuff that has all the design elegance of post-fraternal off-campus apartments'. But the area I live in has about as much culture as the seal on an autoclave. And the people I work with reflect that: few of them monitor fashion and style, few instinctively recognize elegant design, etc. Instead, tools and farming and engineering and self-reliance skills are the norm. You want a prototype make? Sure! It'll work well, and look like s**t. Push it to final product stage? Sure! It'll work even better, and look slightly less like s**t.
Uh... what the hell is the Nicean Creed? Cuz if I knew, I could tell you...
(googling...)
eeeew... Something contrived in 325AD is your best definition? Can't we just say 'believer in the teachings of Jesus'!?
You do realize that the 300 years *backward* to Jesus through some deeply anti-christian empires is literally (and I mean with-respect-to-writing) as improbably-dense a barrier as the 1200 years forward to just get to a printing press? Then again, if Benedict did it, copies probably survive intact, so the big 'hmmm' is the rearward 300 years and the political and philosophical adjustments made in 325ad.
mumble mumble... father, son, holy ghost -- check!
mumble mumble... the paradox of the trinity -- mormons don't agree
mumble mumble... crucified, risen, atonement -- mostly agreeable
mumble mumble... one holy catholic church-- uh, not even, but we're not alone
mumble mumble... baptism, resurrection, life-after -- yup.
So, after 1680 years, I'd give Mormon's a 60%. That 'other' book or books
are best thought of as 'jesus -- the lost episodes' (Ediron ducks the lightning). And, as so many have said here, there's much in mormonism that'd make any christian proud.
I liked the whole Ender series. And I'd say the concept of a Speaker for the Dead ( and finding the meaning in a life (even if it isn't pretty) is noteworthy/interesting, since your praise stops at book 1. And there is room for letting religion infuse one's writing. But it's tough to do inoffensively. And Card seems utterly unable to let go of the negativity. Quite frankly, it largely was narrowminded backward dweebs with opinions like his that led to my jack-mormon status.
Today's best irony is this whole subthread was provoked by some troll that has the same ugly negativism while dissing Mormons. The only thing funnier (and karmic) was if he was OSC's next-door-neighbor.
Don't feed the troll.
Troll admits he's evangelical. Many just utterly seem to hate mormons.
Mormons believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ. Anyone not eager to wrap themselves in a knot semantically will agree:
Darwinists believe in Darwin's theory. (hee-hee, evangelicals don't)
Buddhists respect the teachings of Buddha.
Christians believe in the teachings of Jesus.
Anyone that gets into 'you busted the trinity' or similar tangles is trying too hard.
Nuff said.
Heh, that hasn't happened here...
to:
Draw your own conclusions.
I'd temper/soften it just a bit, though.
Rather than doing what you *love*, aim for something you like or find interesting that pays well.
Not to sound like some postmodern Henny Youngman, but it isn't that I'm obsessed with money... it's that everyone else is. I want the financial means to walk away from a job that stresses me out or compromises my ethics. I want the financial means to scale back and enjoy myself (sooner not later). I want the means to put my kids through college anywhere they want. I want the means to afford medical services that might save a loved one who'd otherwise die because "that procedure isn't covered under your policy, sir".
If I pick what I love, I might choose philosophy PhD or trout bum or starving artist/writer. Yeah, I might make a living at it, but chances are stronger that I'll be divorced and less happy than I would be if I pick the lucrative stuff I like doing: computers (ok, I *love* working on computers), computer security (love... again), computer programming (like), taking care of the project management tasks for a computer team, rethinking/re-engineering stuff for improvements. A few other lucrative likes that I've let fall by the wayside: architecture (but I'm designing a remodel of a house in my free time!), civil engineering and construction mgmt, almost any trade/craft skill (but I don't like 'em enough to *do* the job forever... just enough to get good at 'em), photography, etc.
Since this wandered clear into the weeds, let me just add: both of TFP's career paths will be interesting enough and lucrative enough if you pay attention to the financial side of your life. Hardware's got some perks (it seems more a black art to more people, which you like, and there are cool gadgets that'll let you throw custom/embedded hardware at a problem that'd take longer to solve in software or COTS gear).
But parent's right. If you start in, and realize you don't like hardware (or embedded / PIC type coding, more specifically), that'll be your answer: the money's equivalent, so go with the one you like more.
Besides, I see a steady stream of people doing things that are tangential to their degree, anyway. If you really like your current school or someone there (like parent, I'd say life matters more than work) and don't want to transfer to get into a hardware-oriented program, you're not blocked from working on embedded systems: buy a Basic Stamp kit, go read up on homebrew PIC coding, and use them in projects/assignments whenever you can. Your full-bore software degree will carry you fine and from there you just nudge your career track toward hardware-based jobs. You won't be a hardware wizard, but you'll compliment the hardware guys nicely on a team, because they won't be expert in the software side.
Oh, and as for deep-hardware (computer or ASIC design, for example), that's probably not a hobby-beomes-job option.
And I tried to walk to Cancun but got tired. George should fund my vacations.
My whole point is that one needs to have a desire to learn and get the experience. If $100 is out of reach, when I had to save $50 for a mitt as a kid, $1600 for an Amiga while in college, etc. then the desire isn't there. Gifts from George won't make a difference.
And how can you say the flash platform is unusable? I've seen 8-year-olds figure out animation basics on it.
My brother and I, a few days after the superbowl, compared notes to the reaction where each of us were to the GoDaddy ads. In both cases, a roomful of people were mystified, scandalized, amused, and completely unaware what godaddy was. The guesses were like you describe (porn, some new reality show, competition for Desperate Housewives, etc). In both cases, we sat quietly and waited until someone (one person out of 20, at each party) remembered who/what GoDaddy was and explained to the room.
Yup, ugly and awful. But did I mention that the party I was at was Ad execs and business owners hosted by a small TV station's marketing director? And that those 20 people *now* have a name when they go to register their next domain name? The ad wonks in the room remarked that 'who the hell is _____?' was a priceless bonus to the effectiveness of those ads.
So... ugly, but damn effective for creating name recognition in an area nobody gives a crap about.
Oh, and over the last 2 years I've consolidated as domains lapsed: GoDaddy has all my domains. Cheap and decent is all I need.