I saw about 25 of them in about 10 minutes of looking, and that was in NYC where the lights never dim. I used a piece of paper in each hand to block out some of the worst local light sources (street lamps).
I even got to see two that left visible trails for 3-5 seconds!!! Not bad! Definitely worth dragging myself out of bed for...
Anyone interested should read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Over half the book covers this *exact* issue of how to take advantage of a broken code without revealing to the enemy that you've broken it.
The book is 900 pages though -- but as anyone who's read it knows, you can just read every odd-numbered chapter to get the WWII stuff. (kidding... a little).
This is so off-topic it's not even funny, but to me it's quite seriously worth spending a few karma points on...
Quick background: A few years ago, some otherwise competent low-end programmers I knew were coming out of school, training classes, etc. calling Microsoft's IDE with the initials VB, "Visual Basics" -- plural. I thought at first it was just a single mistake, or a particular guy, but then I started hearing it enough that it was scaring me that it might be becoming people's actual idea of the proper name. There are other examples of things like this, and I'm sorry to mention F$!krosoft on this site, but...
Getting my present point. When did otherwise *perfect* grammarians/spellers like the fine gentlemen/lady who wrote this commment which included "we'll loose another shuttle" start to get the idea that "loose" could be used as a verb in regards to objects other than arrows?
"Loose" is an adjective, an antonym of "tight". "Lose" is a verb that is an antonym of "find".
I really would not bring this up except that it's about the sixth time I've seen non-haX0r types (i.e. those who appear to be trying to follow common English grammar and spelling conventions) on this site use "loose" improperly in place of "lose".
First, I get the humor/irony -- and heartily approve.
But allow me to expound on the hypothetical situation you propose. A special allowance for smoking pot is (arguably) more "right" because smoking pot is a consensual "crime" -- an individual smoking pot can only harm others in the room sucking down their second-hand, and of course, "the children" from "What about the <outrage>children</outrage>??!!?!" fame.
So as not to start a debate on the righteousness of intellectual property law in any particular country/jurisdiction -- I'll just close this out by saying that *if* you accept intellectual property law (whatever that set of laws may be), your religion should not get special rights to break those laws -- because they are not "victimless" crimes you'd be committing.
Committing those crimes in the name of religion would be (NOT on the same scale, trust me I saw it from 10 blocks away, but) in the same ballpark as using religion to justify WTC attacks.
The point about *discovering* breast cancer genes is an interesting one. Can anyone suggest any good ideas about how the patent system might be amended to address this point? Assume that we can't do away with the patent system with regards to _discoveries_.
Assuming that, I've always thought it would be better if there were some way to get industry groups to "pre-claim" certain ideas as natural/near-obvious extensions of current knowledge.
The difficulty is:
precisely because they're more obvious, such ideas are difficult to conceive of pre-claiming, e.g. "I discovered that people have noses!"
creating an _objectively_ (near-)fair evaluation method which allows these pre-claimed ideas to have a "fuzzy" value between 0 and 1 which "phases out" the time they will get the patent.
The first point has obvious difficulties, but is somewhat mitigated by the fact that even the current patent system implicitly warns potential patent holders that their idea can always be rejected, particularly with heavy evidence something is obvious, or nearly so.
The second point is the most insidious, since it involves changing the system -- in such a way that something like inventing "1-click" ordering, given the Web, gets "modded down" to something like a quasi-invention (on a continuous scale). We want people to go ahead and *discover* that breast cancer gene -- but the point is that every doctor knows the process to go about doing it.
Perhaps one good idea would be to have an announcement before a patent is issued (which I'm guessing they do) which says, "Hey all you people who have *almost* discovered the breast cancer gene. Give us your current data and we'll give you partial credit based on how close you are."
That's really the point I'm trying to home in on -- partial credit for both the patenter, and his unknown co-conspirators. With the actual patent-holder getting a large amount of the benefit. Kinda like having at least 51% of the outstanding shares of a company.
10. Visual Basic For Dummies
9. Learn HTML in 21 Days
8. Learn Perl in 4 Days
7. 7 Minute Abs
6. Practical Programming for the PDP-11
5. Advanced Programming with the Windows Task Scheduler
4. xClock for xPerts
3. t0p 100 l33t 5c41pts
2. Customized Quake Maps in 5 Minutes!
and destined to be a timeless classic...
1. Microsoft Terminology for Microsoft Certified Certifiers of Microsoft Certification Seeking Professionals
This is becoming the end-all, be-all textbook on cryptography (both composing and cracking message) in the wild.
One of its more valuable contributions is the fact that it sets down a common language for various cryptographic terms and practices we all sorta know about, but can't really bring clearly into a conversation. Having the common vocabulary that Bruce brings to security is as powerful as the common language that the Gang of Four book brought to object-oriented design.
Combine this with the payola that puts certain for-a-fee pr0n sites at the top of the list, and little Timmy doing a search for his latest book report on "naked singularity" is going to have 20 very confusing new windows pop up on his screen that make him have strange feelings faster than you can say "Tentpole".
On Friday night, I saw this silly poster in the subway... It's bright yellow, and it says, "The BSA is targeting NYC".
In slightly smaller type near the bottom it says, "License your software now, before the BSA licenses it for you" or something very much along those lines.
People mistakenly seem to think that "reasonable price" somehow has meaning. The problem with this is that if I *don't* have the power to refuse to sell my property (physical or intellectual), then there's no point in my debating price in the first place -- because the purchaser knows they need not go above whatever the arbitrator's will decide on as "reasonable".
As Prof. Elzinga (my Econ Prof. at UVA) said (I paraphrase): "If I have title to a bottle of salad dressing, that means I can put it on my salad, use it as skin cream, water plants with it, sell it to someone else, and most importantly -- the right to simply poor it down the drain." Anything less is just a license to use the dressing according to a predetermined set of proper use regulations -- not nearly as useful as owning the thing outright.
Aren't there algorithms that will report messages that are pretty close, i.e., within N arbitrary bits of each other, as the same checksum? Or at least something approximating a checksum..., i.e. two different checksums that nonetheless return true when passed to an equals(cs1, cs2) method?
Does someone have a link?
--
I had a female crustacean once, but I lobster...
One of the biggest reasons I'll only consider Intel CPUs and Intel chipsets is because of slightly-too-frequent occurrence of audio cards having published incompatibilities with AMD CPUs and non-Intel chipsets (like VIA).
If I'm going to spend $500-700 on an audio card (you thought video cards were expensive?) then I'm certainly not going to gripe about $100-odd dollars to get a CPU and chipset that those companies must support.
Don't forget that except for the fan, most of the noise is coming from completely *inside* the case. So it would make sense that if you could just block it from getting out, you'd be good.
Acoustic noise (once generated) tends to be dampened only by high mass. So getting a computer case with thicker walls can really be a help. The down side is that the things that tend to dampen noise also tend to squelch air flow -- the energy has to go somewhere. But as anyone who's ever been in an anechoic chamber (like the ones used to test microphone frequency response patterns) can tell you -- truly dispersing the noise in completely random directions can often be almost equivalent to having no noise.
Sound on Sound magazine in the UK has several good articles on keeping down acoustic noise. And they're freaks about getting it right -- since it's a home recording and music technology magazine.
Slashdot Mirror
I even got to see two that left visible trails for 3-5 seconds!!! Not bad! Definitely worth dragging myself out of bed for...
Anyone interested should read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Over half the book covers this *exact* issue of how to take advantage of a broken code without revealing to the enemy that you've broken it.
The book is 900 pages though -- but as anyone who's read it knows, you can just read every odd-numbered chapter to get the WWII stuff. (kidding... a little).
The story clearly statest that there are only two on public display.
Quick background: A few years ago, some otherwise competent low-end programmers I knew were coming out of school, training classes, etc. calling Microsoft's IDE with the initials VB, "Visual Basics" -- plural. I thought at first it was just a single mistake, or a particular guy, but then I started hearing it enough that it was scaring me that it might be becoming people's actual idea of the proper name. There are other examples of things like this, and I'm sorry to mention F$!krosoft on this site, but...
Getting my present point. When did otherwise *perfect* grammarians/spellers like the fine gentlemen/lady who wrote this commment which included "we'll loose another shuttle" start to get the idea that "loose" could be used as a verb in regards to objects other than arrows?
"Loose" is an adjective, an antonym of "tight". "Lose" is a verb that is an antonym of "find".
I really would not bring this up except that it's about the sixth time I've seen non-haX0r types (i.e. those who appear to be trying to follow common English grammar and spelling conventions) on this site use "loose" improperly in place of "lose".
THIS MUST STOP!
Seriously -- it's a matter of /. pride!
The reductions in latency -- would that include the type of latency that plagues real-time audio applications like sound-on-sound recording?
But allow me to expound on the hypothetical situation you propose. A special allowance for smoking pot is (arguably) more "right" because smoking pot is a consensual "crime" -- an individual smoking pot can only harm others in the room sucking down their second-hand, and of course, "the children" from "What about the <outrage>children</outrage>??!!?!" fame.
So as not to start a debate on the righteousness of intellectual property law in any particular country/jurisdiction -- I'll just close this out by saying that *if* you accept intellectual property law (whatever that set of laws may be), your religion should not get special rights to break those laws -- because they are not "victimless" crimes you'd be committing.
Committing those crimes in the name of religion would be (NOT on the same scale, trust me I saw it from 10 blocks away, but) in the same ballpark as using religion to justify WTC attacks.
She's in Maxim this month. Why won't this link work?
first
Umm, okay *maybe* not the telegraph, but I'm pretty sure the telephone tagged this particular base first.
I beg of writers to stop and think twice before using phrases like "first time in human history".
My favorite is the vacuum-tube unit they use to store ONE decimal digit of data...
Assuming that, I've always thought it would be better if there were some way to get industry groups to "pre-claim" certain ideas as natural/near-obvious extensions of current knowledge.
The difficulty is:
- precisely because they're more obvious, such ideas are difficult to conceive of pre-claiming, e.g. "I discovered that people have noses!"
- creating an _objectively_ (near-)fair evaluation method which allows these pre-claimed ideas to have a "fuzzy" value between 0 and 1 which "phases out" the time they will get the patent.
The first point has obvious difficulties, but is somewhat mitigated by the fact that even the current patent system implicitly warns potential patent holders that their idea can always be rejected, particularly with heavy evidence something is obvious, or nearly so.The second point is the most insidious, since it involves changing the system -- in such a way that something like inventing "1-click" ordering, given the Web, gets "modded down" to something like a quasi-invention (on a continuous scale). We want people to go ahead and *discover* that breast cancer gene -- but the point is that every doctor knows the process to go about doing it.
Perhaps one good idea would be to have an announcement before a patent is issued (which I'm guessing they do) which says, "Hey all you people who have *almost* discovered the breast cancer gene. Give us your current data and we'll give you partial credit based on how close you are."
That's really the point I'm trying to home in on -- partial credit for both the patenter, and his unknown co-conspirators. With the actual patent-holder getting a large amount of the benefit. Kinda like having at least 51% of the outstanding shares of a company.
10. Visual Basic For Dummies
9. Learn HTML in 21 Days
8. Learn Perl in 4 Days
7. 7 Minute Abs
6. Practical Programming for the PDP-11
5. Advanced Programming with the Windows Task Scheduler
4. xClock for xPerts
3. t0p 100 l33t 5c41pts
2. Customized Quake Maps in 5 Minutes!
and destined to be a timeless classic...
1. Microsoft Terminology for Microsoft Certified Certifiers of Microsoft Certification Seeking Professionals
This is becoming the end-all, be-all textbook on cryptography (both composing and cracking message) in the wild.
One of its more valuable contributions is the fact that it sets down a common language for various cryptographic terms and practices we all sorta know about, but can't really bring clearly into a conversation. Having the common vocabulary that Bruce brings to security is as powerful as the common language that the Gang of Four book brought to object-oriented design.
Today's guest star has been brought to you by the letter X...
Combine this with the payola that puts certain for-a-fee pr0n sites at the top of the list, and little Timmy doing a search for his latest book report on "naked singularity" is going to have 20 very confusing new windows pop up on his screen that make him have strange feelings faster than you can say "Tentpole".
In slightly smaller type near the bottom it says, "License your software now, before the BSA licenses it for you" or something very much along those lines.
Sheesh!
--
Ask me if I'm a carrot.
Are you a carrot?
No.
As Prof. Elzinga (my Econ Prof. at UVA) said (I paraphrase): "If I have title to a bottle of salad dressing, that means I can put it on my salad, use it as skin cream, water plants with it, sell it to someone else, and most importantly -- the right to simply poor it down the drain." Anything less is just a license to use the dressing according to a predetermined set of proper use regulations -- not nearly as useful as owning the thing outright.
Haven't you been to business school? The question we (males, i.e. ummm.... consumers) all want answered is, "Does it stop PMS?"
Does someone have a link?
-- I had a female crustacean once, but I lobster...
No, the answer is not Cowboy Neal!
You have more than 4 cars up on cinder blocks in your front yard...
I'd rather trade $2048 for a 98-digit salary any day of the week...
If I'm going to spend $500-700 on an audio card (you thought video cards were expensive?) then I'm certainly not going to gripe about $100-odd dollars to get a CPU and chipset that those companies must support.
Acoustic noise (once generated) tends to be dampened only by high mass. So getting a computer case with thicker walls can really be a help. The down side is that the things that tend to dampen noise also tend to squelch air flow -- the energy has to go somewhere. But as anyone who's ever been in an anechoic chamber (like the ones used to test microphone frequency response patterns) can tell you -- truly dispersing the noise in completely random directions can often be almost equivalent to having no noise.
Sound on Sound magazine in the UK has several good articles on keeping down acoustic noise. And they're freaks about getting it right -- since it's a home recording and music technology magazine.
Not anymore...