This Website has a bunch of information on the code, including a picture and a detailed description of it from the CIA.
Suggestion: button to find original parent
on
Slashdot Tweaks
·
· Score: 1
If a comment has been reparented, it would be really nice to have a button that would jump you to the original parent (even if it is beneath your threshold). It would make it much easier to figure out what's going on in high-volume threads at a 2+ threshold.
I seem to remember a slashdot story a while ago about ATI releasing Linux drivers for the ATI All-in-wonder 128, which has Mpeg encrypt as well as decrypt capabilities. Does anyone know what came of it?
Jeff Papows made the announcement at Lotusphere in January... I started following slashdot closely after this, and had assumed it was widely known.
I happen to work in an organization that is extraordinarily involved with Domino, and I've been using it since '94. I'm also a UNIX junkie and linux enthusiast. Which gives me a rare perspective. Used properly, Notes / Domino an amazing and wonderful thing. The replication technology is deep magic... it just works. Used improperly (ie, only for e-mail) it's a big, sucking monolithic beast that is much more trouble than it's worth.
Many may not realize this, but there are many close parallels between the way Notes adoption grew and the way Linux is invading the enterprise today. It started out in most companies as a "grass roots" effort... a small department would start using it and hack together some quick applications, which soon other people would want access to, which increased the number of users, which increased the number of applications being created, and so on. Sooner or later, people realized that their business depended on the damn thing, and it became a "standard".
Notes is best viewed as an environment for developing and operating small applications for managing and sharing unstructured information, and the most successful users (companies) are those who figure out how to effectively manage the chaos associated with the fact that every user has a full Notes development environment on their desktop. (The latter part is finally changing substantively with the release of R5, which is sad). You end up with an "application ecosystem" of constantly-evolving applications in which only the most useful are successful and end up sticking around. This is a nightmare scenario for your typical top-down control-freak IT department, but it can lead to tremendous innovation.
Unfortunately, Lotus (IMO) has constantly screwed up the marketing of what really is some great (if closed) technology. I don't expect that to change with this release. I was there when Papows announced the Linux port, and there was *no* vision to accompany it. In fact, about all he said was that his CFO thought they were crazy to do it. I got the impression that this was a reactionary "me too" announcement with little real management understanding of it's implications.
Reminds me a lot of NextStep... killer tech, bad business. Sigh.
The key here is that the upstream providers are paying for *guaranteed* bandwidth. The Internet today (and its economic model) functions perfectly well today for (relatively) low speed, no guarantee connections from any point to any other point. A site like slashdot wouldn't bother paying for guaranteed bandwidth to the readers, since there's no bandwidth-dependent content. There's no need for slashdot to be able to fill my home DSL pipe at 800Kb/s like a streaming media provider would.
So you basically have (at least) two classes of service: the completely unguaranteed, relatively low throughput "public" net that functions as the Internet does today, and the provider-funded guaranteed bandwidth broadband network that gets us the quality assurance to begin to take advantage of the nice big pipes we're just starting to get to the consumer premises. I'm guessing that, given the economics of the latter, it may be used to fund the consumer connection to the former, given that "any to any" connectivity is a big hook to get people connected in the first place.
This is not a move towards metering your individual user account and making you pay as you go. In fact, it's a move in the opposite direction. Even in today's relatively uncommoditized bandwidth market, the cost of paying for the right to use 56kb/s any time you want to is affordable for most people... the infamous $19.95/month. What's happening here is that your ISP (or the carriers upstream from it) will be able to buy their bandwidth more efficiently, which should eventually trickle down to the end users.
And yes, search engines do suck. I doubt this will fix that.
Bandwidth bartering is a little silly today, given the high cost and low speed of residential local loops. But imagine how things will change if local loop / MAN connectivity (Metropolitan Area Network) starts resembling a LAN more than a WAN (fast, ubiquitous and cheap).
First off, it's likely that your average person will have a much higher local connectivity speed than they could expect to use for free over the WAN. This is not the case today- the Internet WAN is SO much faster than most people's MAN connection (their analog POTS modem) that there's a reasonable expectation that you can get a MAN speed connection between any two points on the Internet WAN without paying extra. This will not be the case as the multimegabit MAN becomes a reality. I can't expect to get a 2Mb/s connection from my home in Houston to my Dad in Chicago for "free".
However, both producers and consumers of content and network-based applications will want to be able to take advantage of that new MAN speed, and are likely to be willing to pay for it. This creates a market for guaranteed quality bandwidth from point to point. In the consumer market, this need is likely to be on-demand. If I decide I want to "rent" a streamed episode of the Simpsons from the Fox website, I'll be happy to pay a few extra cents for a guaranteed quality connection for the time I need it to watch the show. This won't negate the need an unguaranteed Internet like we have today, but will create the financial motivation to introduce guaranteed QOS either through separate parallel networks or some sort of traffic prioritization. I believe Enron is building a parallel network.
This dramatically changes the economics of the WAN bandwidth. Right now, both information distributors and consumers share the cost of WAN connectivity by paying to connect to an "upstream" Internet provider. The producer pays it directly, and the consumer pays it as part of their ISP bill. However, in a world where high quality bandwidth is requested and paid for on demand, this cost burden must shift to the producer entirely since it's the producer who is providing the on-demand service and will be able to pass the costs of that on-demand bandwidth to the end user directly (or subsidize it with advertising).
As the guaranteed QOS WAN bandwidth companies begin to compete for the business of the producers, it becomes critical that they be able to promise nearly universal reach; to be able to connect to as many consumers as possible. So they will be motivated to connect to as many of the local loop providers (local ISPs) as possible. This won't happen if the local loop provider has to pay for the WAN connections, so companies like Enron will offer connectivity to ISPs for free or even pay them for the right to reach their subscribers.
So in the new world, it works like this. A content or application distributor will connect to some sort of MAE-like bandwidth trading facility and buy WAN connectivity from the various WAN vendors located there. At first, the bandwidth units will be traded in large chunks, but it will become more and more granular as routing protocols evolve and dynamic financial-cost routing and accounting becomes more practical. The content producer will either charge the customer for the content and delivery bandwidth, or will pay for the services via advertising. The consumer's ISP will be paid by these WAN bandwidth companies for the privilege of reaching the consumer, who may end up paying nothing for their MAN connection (similar to the TV broadcast model).
Enron is betting the farm that this will happen. They're investing big bucks in building this huge fiber network in anticipation of providing this service, and they are already hooking up to local ISPs to make it possible.
At least, this is how I read it. What do y'all think?
Possible moderation DOS attack?
on
Slashdot Notes
·
· Score: 5
So, given that everyone knows now how moderator points are limited, it seems to me that a malicious baddie could post lots and lots of useless flamebait-type postings. This would soak up a lot of the moderation points by being moderated down, and potentially sabotage the promotion of worthwhile postings.
It doesn't seem very likely if the moderators do a good job, but seeing the number of downgraded postings in this thread made me think. Of course, this moderation system is an order of magnitude better than anything else out there- it's really nice to be able to cruise at +2 or +3 when I'm really busy and don't have time to read everything.
So, if I remember correctly, IBM used a system called "Womplex" to host the 1996 Olympic website. After receiving an HTTP request, the system would send out a message on a private WAN to several servers placed around the world and have them each ping the recipient, and then determine what the "best" webserver for the user to be on the resulting ping times. It would then feed the user a dynamically-built web page with all of the links pointing to the server that had the lowest latency to them.
There was a C|Net article about this dated June, '96 (two months after the Infospinner filing), but the system obviously was built and running at that point. Sounds like prior art to me. Did anyone dig through InfoSpinner's filing enough to know?
You're right in one respect- I don't know why some people have been saying that the Palm doesn't do IP, because it does, today.
However, that doesn't mean that they're using IP over mobitex. My company built a mobitex wireless messaging solution for laptop users- I've used a mobitex network as an end user, and I've seen "under the covers". It just doesn't make any sense to put IP in mobitex- it's not necessary, and the overhead is too high, given the sucky bandwidth and high cost.
As I understand it, the network behind Palm.Net is Bell South Wireless Data, which was originally a company called "RAM". The technology is called "Mobitex" and is a low-speed FM radio packet network. I know a bit about the network, having worked on a laptop-based wireless messaging service that used it.
The IP issue The network itself is not IP-based, and I doubt that Palm would implement full TCP/IP on top of it- specifically, I don't think TCP would be feasible, and it wouldn't make sense to add the overhead of an additional packet protocol on top of the base network. Palm has probably implemented proxy servers that communicate with specially-designed websites and compress and transmit the web data back to your palm using a protocol that is most likely largely proprietary. The transmission protocol between a wireless application server and the actual network was X.25 back when I was working with it, but I bet they've moved to Frame Relay or some sort of stream wrapped in IP by now. So it's unlikely that any of the existing Palm TCP/IP apps will work with this service (based on what I know of the network).
Coverage Although Bell South is regional, the network is nationwide in the US, and has pretty amazing coverage. RAM used to compete with a similar network run by Motorola- RAM generally had the higher data trasmission rates, Motorola better in-building coverage. Folks outside the US are out of luck- I don't think Mobitex is an international standard.
Performance The network is designed to transmit fairly large packets, and has high latency. In-building coverage can be a real problem- when I was using RAM to get my e-mail on the road, I generally had to be near a window for it to work well. It was also somewhat spotty when moving (like in a car). It's been a couple of years since I really used the network, so they may have improved things, but there are very good reasons why Palm has implemented this as a "web clippings" service and not as a full-on browser.
There's a case of a famous Russion mneumonist who had seemingly perfect recall of arbitrary data for unlimited periods of time. The psychologist who "discovered" him as a young man and followed him throughout his life documented incredible feats of memory, including remembering long strings of random numbers from tests that he'd given the subject 20 years earlier. Interestingly, having such an incredible memory impaired this man's ability to process things in the abstract- his mind was so overwhelmed by the detail of unforgotten memories that he couldn't effectively summarize or process information in the way that most of us can. If you want to read more about his case (it's fascinating), there's an english translation of the book written by the psychologist published by MIT Press called "The Mind of a Mneumonist".
Some psychologists believe that the process of selectively forgetting is a very important part of being able to see past the minute details of an experience and capture the larger meaning. The process of forgetting is not as simple as losing bits in RAM- how much you remember is based on how the memory was encoded in the first place, what cues caused you to retreive it, what about a particular event was important to you, and what related things have happened since. But even "unimportant" details that aren't stored very well in the first place deteriorate into vague impressions that still allow you to have some sense for what was there.
I can recommend a another book I'm reading right now called "Searching for Memory" by Daniel Schacter which gives a very readable description of the latest theories on memory function.
" The Progressive" ran an expose about taser weapons like this (the direct-contact kind) back in November of 1997... it's not available online, but you can find a summary as #5 on this page.
I've been experiencing the repercussions of this event from both sides of the fence. I'm fortunate enough to be a sponsor / leader for the high school youth group at my church, which is urban and Presbyterian. Although we're a little light on "jocks", otherwise we've got a real cross section of the high-school power structure among the group members. (As an example, we recently participated in an interfaith-exchange program, and after seeing our group, the Jewish delegation asked if our church required boys to have long hair.:-)
I deeply know the pain and agony that can be life at highschool, both from the young people in the group and from my own school experience (I won our district's high school *team* programming contest working alone. There wasn't anyone from my school there. 'Nuff said).
However, I've also heard the fear of being bombed or shot from almost every young person in our group. One of our youth talked about the fact that when he walks around now, he always keeps an "escape route" in mind. Another told of a "lock down" because someone brought a gun to class. Yet another was sent outside for a few hours after a bomb threat emptied the building. Yet another was on a "hit list" confiscated from a student who had allegedly been planning a mass-murder. Many were afraid to go to school last friday, which supposedly was the anniversary of Hitler's death. The terror goes on, and on, and on.
The problem is that now, every attention-seeking, disaffected, neglected youth knows how to get immediate attention and action: threaten to shoot something or blow something up. It's very sad that our educational institutions (and parenting!) have fallen to the level that this is necessary. But it is also unacceptable that our young people (most of whom go about their daily business without picking on people) live in fear.
If you've been experiencing the Hellmouth, I sympathize deeply with you. Please find *someone* to talk about it with, whether it's your parents, your church leaders, your friends, or an Internet community.
Please *don't* take out your frustrations by "pushing the limits" and scaring other people, no matter how tempting that may be at times. It just doesn't help, and it will only prolong this backlash.
This is a really frightening development. What is under your clothes is your own business. Do you want people to know about your piercings, or hip replacement, or colostomy bag, or pacemaker, or flask? Our society is harsh enough already on those who don't conform to the *external* appearance of normalcy.
If we make the assumption that the widespread use of this technology is inevitable, what standards must we set to ensure that privacy is not sacrificed? Here's few off the top of my head:
1. Clearly mark anyplace such a system is being used, so people can at least know if they are being scanned (this becomes more important as the technology advances and becomes less obvious).
2. Allow people to opt-out and be searched by traditional means. At least a hand search doesn't leave a recorded image.
3. Secure the output display area to prevent unauthorized viewing, and establish a system of ethics for the operators.
I promise not to get all mushy about this, but shucks, hasn't the quality of this thread been great? It's unfortunate that it's taken such a tragedy to pull this community together, but we may have found the one topic with truly universal resonance among slashdot readers: the trauma that is high school.
And it's startlingly unanimous. Last time I checked this thread, there were 612 postings at level 0, and 611 at -1. That's right- 1 article has been moderated down. And it was the only one criticizing the posting of the story (that I saw). When have we ever seen a Katz article that has generated so much traffic that wasn't the familiar "Katz sux vs Learn to filter" flamefests?
This demands some self examination from us, as a group. What happened to that macho-geek verneer that so many of us cling to when we're talking about other subjects? Why do we inflict on each other the same kind of abuse that so many of us are so bitter about receiving in high school? Make no mistake about it: there normally is a conformity-enforcement engine running here that is as viscious in words as the sticks and stones and fists hurled at the misfits in high school. Just look what happens when someone advocates a pro-Microsoft position.
There's irony in the fact that the very topic which prompted such an outpouring of heartfelt honesty is probably responsible for much of the vitriol normally found here. The angst, anger, shame, and depression many geeks experience in highschool leaves scars that are too often evident in the bitterness and callousness of many postings.
Is this thread a new beginning? A kinder, gentler/.? I doubt it. But next time you start loading up that flamethrower to toast some wrongfully-opionioned fellow/.'er, remember your highschool years, and what it's like to be on the receiving end. Don't become the musclebound ape in highschool that faithfully tried on you each new wedgie that Dinosaur Bob comes up with.
Unless it's about a "first post". Those bastards deserve it.:-)
The Wired article about this drew an implied connection that David Smith was Vicodin ES, with the obvious implication to us slashdot regulars that he was found via GUID. But I haven't seen any real evidence to back this up.
As an excellent article on Ars Technica has pointed out, all the GUID shows is who the original document creator was. If someone had taken a previous Vicodin ES virus and modified it to create Melissa, his GUID / MAC address would remain in the "new" virus.
So is David Smith Vicodin ES? And do they have anything stronger on him than the GUID?
Slashdot Mirror
This Website has a bunch of information on the code, including a picture and a detailed description of it from the CIA.
If a comment has been reparented, it would be really nice to have a button that would jump you to the original parent (even if it is beneath your threshold). It would make it much easier to figure out what's going on in high-volume threads at a 2+ threshold.
I seem to remember a slashdot story a while ago about ATI releasing Linux drivers for the ATI
All-in-wonder 128, which has Mpeg encrypt as well
as decrypt capabilities. Does anyone know what
came of it?
Jeff Papows made the announcement at Lotusphere in January... I started following slashdot closely after this, and had assumed it was widely known.
I happen to work in an organization that is extraordinarily involved with Domino, and I've been using it since '94. I'm also a UNIX junkie and linux enthusiast. Which gives me a rare perspective. Used properly, Notes / Domino an amazing and wonderful thing. The replication technology is deep magic... it just works. Used improperly (ie, only for e-mail) it's a big, sucking monolithic beast that is much more trouble than it's worth.
Many may not realize this, but there are many close parallels between the way Notes adoption grew and the way Linux is invading the enterprise today. It started out in most companies as a "grass roots" effort... a small department would start using it and hack together some quick applications, which soon other people would want access to, which increased the number of users, which increased the number of applications being created, and so on. Sooner or later, people realized that their business depended on the damn thing, and it became a "standard".
Notes is best viewed as an environment for developing and operating small applications for managing and sharing unstructured information, and the most successful users (companies) are those who figure out how to effectively manage the chaos associated with the fact that every user has a full Notes development environment on their desktop. (The latter part is finally changing substantively with the release of R5, which is sad). You end up with an "application ecosystem" of constantly-evolving applications in which only the most useful are successful and end up sticking around. This is a nightmare scenario for your typical top-down control-freak IT department, but it can lead to tremendous innovation.
Unfortunately, Lotus (IMO) has constantly screwed up the marketing of what really is some great (if closed) technology. I don't expect that to change with this release. I was there when Papows announced the Linux port, and there was *no* vision to accompany it. In fact, about all he said was that his CFO thought they were crazy to do it. I got the impression that this was a reactionary "me too" announcement with little real management understanding of it's implications.
Reminds me a lot of NextStep... killer tech, bad business. Sigh.
The key here is that the upstream providers are paying for *guaranteed* bandwidth. The Internet today (and its economic model) functions perfectly well today for (relatively) low speed, no guarantee connections from any point to any other point. A site like slashdot wouldn't bother paying for guaranteed bandwidth to the readers, since there's no bandwidth-dependent content. There's no need for slashdot to be able to fill my home DSL pipe at 800Kb/s like a streaming media provider would.
So you basically have (at least) two classes of service: the completely unguaranteed, relatively low throughput "public" net that functions as the Internet does today, and the provider-funded guaranteed bandwidth broadband network that gets us the quality assurance to begin to take advantage of the nice big pipes we're just starting to get to the consumer premises. I'm guessing that, given the economics of the latter, it may be used to fund the consumer connection to the former, given that "any to any" connectivity is a big hook to get people connected in the first place.
This is not a move towards metering your individual user account and making you pay as you go. In fact, it's a move in the opposite direction. Even in today's relatively uncommoditized bandwidth market, the cost of paying for the right to use 56kb/s any time you want to is affordable for most people... the infamous $19.95/month. What's happening here is that your ISP (or the carriers upstream from it) will be able to buy their bandwidth more efficiently, which should eventually trickle down to the end users.
And yes, search engines do suck. I doubt this will fix that.
Bandwidth bartering is a little silly today, given the high cost and low speed of residential local loops. But imagine how things will change if local loop / MAN connectivity (Metropolitan Area Network) starts resembling a LAN more than a WAN (fast, ubiquitous and cheap).
First off, it's likely that your average person will have a much higher local connectivity speed than they could expect to use for free over the WAN. This is not the case today- the Internet WAN is SO much faster than most people's MAN connection (their analog POTS modem) that there's a reasonable expectation that you can get a MAN speed connection between any two points on the Internet WAN without paying extra. This will not be the case as the multimegabit MAN becomes a reality. I can't expect to get a 2Mb/s connection from my home in Houston to my Dad in Chicago for "free".
However, both producers and consumers of content and network-based applications will want to be able to take advantage of that new MAN speed, and are likely to be willing to pay for it. This creates a market for guaranteed quality bandwidth from point to point. In the consumer market, this need is likely to be on-demand. If I decide I want to "rent" a streamed episode of the Simpsons from the Fox website, I'll be happy to pay a few extra cents for a guaranteed quality connection for the time I need it to watch the show. This won't negate the need an unguaranteed Internet like we have today, but will create the financial motivation to introduce guaranteed QOS either through separate parallel networks or some sort of traffic prioritization. I believe Enron is building a parallel network.
This dramatically changes the economics of the WAN bandwidth. Right now, both information distributors and consumers share the cost of WAN connectivity by paying to connect to an "upstream" Internet provider. The producer pays it directly, and the consumer pays it as part of their ISP bill. However, in a world where high quality bandwidth is requested and paid for on demand, this cost burden must shift to the producer entirely since it's the producer who is providing the on-demand service and will be able to pass the costs of that on-demand bandwidth to the end user directly (or subsidize it with advertising).
As the guaranteed QOS WAN bandwidth companies begin to compete for the business of the producers, it becomes critical that they be able to promise nearly universal reach; to be able to connect to as many consumers as possible. So they will be motivated to connect to as many of the local loop providers (local ISPs) as possible. This won't happen if the local loop provider has to pay for the WAN connections, so companies like Enron will offer connectivity to ISPs for free or even pay them for the right to reach their subscribers.
So in the new world, it works like this. A content or application distributor will connect to some sort of MAE-like bandwidth trading facility and buy WAN connectivity from the various WAN vendors located there. At first, the bandwidth units will be traded in large chunks, but it will become more and more granular as routing protocols evolve and dynamic financial-cost routing and accounting becomes more practical. The content producer will either charge the customer for the content and delivery bandwidth, or will pay for the services via advertising. The consumer's ISP will be paid by these WAN bandwidth companies for the privilege of reaching the consumer, who may end up paying nothing for their MAN connection (similar to the TV broadcast model).
Enron is betting the farm that this will happen. They're investing big bucks in building this huge fiber network in anticipation of providing this service, and they are already hooking up to local ISPs to make it possible.
At least, this is how I read it. What do y'all think?
So, given that everyone knows now how moderator points are limited, it seems to me that a malicious baddie could post lots and lots of useless flamebait-type postings. This would soak up a lot of the moderation points by being moderated down, and potentially sabotage the promotion of worthwhile postings.
It doesn't seem very likely if the moderators do a good job, but seeing the number of downgraded postings in this thread made me think. Of course, this moderation system is an order of magnitude better than anything else out there- it's really nice to be able to cruise at +2 or +3 when I'm really busy and don't have time to read everything.
So, if I remember correctly, IBM used a system called "Womplex" to host the 1996 Olympic website. After receiving an HTTP request, the system would send out a message on a private WAN to several servers placed around the world and have them each ping the recipient, and then determine what the "best" webserver for the user to be on the resulting ping times. It would then feed the user a dynamically-built web page with all of the links pointing to the server that had the lowest latency to them.
There was a C|Net article about this dated June, '96 (two months after the Infospinner filing), but the system obviously was built and running at that point. Sounds like prior art to me. Did anyone dig through InfoSpinner's filing enough to know?
You're right in one respect- I don't know why some people have been saying that the Palm doesn't do IP, because it does, today.
However, that doesn't mean that they're using IP over mobitex. My company built a mobitex wireless messaging solution for laptop users- I've used a mobitex network as an end user, and I've seen "under the covers". It just doesn't make any sense to put IP in mobitex- it's not necessary, and the overhead is too high, given the sucky bandwidth and high cost.
As I understand it, the network behind Palm.Net is Bell South Wireless Data, which was originally a company called "RAM". The technology is called "Mobitex" and is a low-speed FM radio packet network. I know a bit about the network, having worked on a laptop-based wireless messaging service that used it.
The IP issue
The network itself is not IP-based, and I doubt that Palm would implement full TCP/IP on top of it- specifically, I don't think TCP would be feasible, and it wouldn't make sense to add the overhead of an additional packet protocol on top of the base network. Palm has probably implemented proxy servers that communicate with specially-designed websites and compress and transmit the web data back to your palm using a protocol that is most likely largely proprietary. The transmission protocol between a wireless application server and the actual network was X.25 back when I was working with it, but I bet they've moved to Frame Relay or some sort of stream wrapped in IP by now. So it's unlikely that any of the existing Palm TCP/IP apps will work with this service (based on what I know of the network).
Coverage
Although Bell South is regional, the network is nationwide in the US, and has pretty amazing coverage. RAM used to compete with a similar network run by Motorola- RAM generally had the higher data trasmission rates, Motorola better in-building coverage. Folks outside the US are out of luck- I don't think Mobitex is an international standard.
Performance
The network is designed to transmit fairly large packets, and has high latency. In-building coverage can be a real problem- when I was using RAM to get my e-mail on the road, I generally had to be near a window for it to work well. It was also somewhat spotty when moving (like in a car). It's been a couple of years since I really used the network, so they may have improved things, but there are very good reasons why Palm has implemented this as a "web clippings" service and not as a full-on browser.
Knew I should have run the spellchecker on that one... :-)
There's a case of a famous Russion mneumonist who had seemingly perfect recall of arbitrary data for unlimited periods of time. The psychologist who "discovered" him as a young man and followed him throughout his life documented incredible feats of memory, including remembering long strings of random numbers from tests that he'd given the subject 20 years earlier. Interestingly, having such an incredible memory impaired this man's ability to process things in the abstract- his mind was so overwhelmed by the detail of unforgotten memories that he couldn't effectively summarize or process information in the way that most of us can. If you want to read more about his case (it's fascinating), there's an english translation of the book written by the psychologist published by MIT Press called "The Mind of a Mneumonist".
Some psychologists believe that the process of selectively forgetting is a very important part of being able to see past the minute details of an experience and capture the larger meaning. The process of forgetting is not as simple as losing bits in RAM- how much you remember is based on how the memory was encoded in the first place, what cues caused you to retreive it, what about a particular event was important to you, and what related things have happened since. But even "unimportant" details that aren't stored very well in the first place deteriorate into vague impressions that still allow you to have some sense for what was there.
I can recommend a another book I'm reading right now called "Searching for Memory" by Daniel Schacter which gives a very readable description of the latest theories on memory function.
Generally meaning that it will work effectively when chilled with liquid nitrogen. That's much better than liquid helium, but "better" is relative...
" The Progressive" ran an expose about taser weapons like this (the direct-contact kind) back in November of 1997... it's not available online, but you can find a summary as #5 on this page.
I've been experiencing the repercussions of this event from both sides of the fence. I'm fortunate enough to be a sponsor / leader for the high school youth group at my church, which is urban and Presbyterian. Although we're a little light on "jocks", otherwise we've got a real cross section of the high-school power structure among the group members. (As an example, we recently participated in an interfaith-exchange program, and after seeing our group, the Jewish delegation asked if our church required boys to have long hair. :-)
I deeply know the pain and agony that can be life at highschool, both from the young people in the group and from my own school experience (I won our district's high school *team* programming contest working alone. There wasn't anyone from my school there. 'Nuff said).
However, I've also heard the fear of being bombed or shot from almost every young person in our group. One of our youth talked about the fact that when he walks around now, he always keeps an "escape route" in mind. Another told of a "lock down" because someone brought a gun to class. Yet another was sent outside for a few hours after a bomb threat emptied the building. Yet another was on a "hit list" confiscated from a student who had allegedly been planning a mass-murder. Many were afraid to go to school last friday, which supposedly was the anniversary of Hitler's death. The terror goes on, and on, and on.
The problem is that now, every attention-seeking, disaffected, neglected youth knows how to get immediate attention and action: threaten to shoot something or blow something up. It's very sad that our educational institutions (and parenting!) have fallen to the level that this is necessary. But it is also unacceptable that our young people (most of whom go about their daily business without picking on people) live in fear.
If you've been experiencing the Hellmouth, I sympathize deeply with you. Please find *someone* to talk about it with, whether it's your parents, your church leaders, your friends, or an Internet community.
Please *don't* take out your frustrations by "pushing the limits" and scaring other people, no matter how tempting that may be at times. It just doesn't help, and it will only prolong this backlash.
This is a really frightening development. What is under your clothes is your own business. Do you want people to know about your piercings, or hip replacement, or colostomy bag, or pacemaker, or flask? Our society is harsh enough already on those who don't conform to the *external* appearance of normalcy.
If we make the assumption that the widespread use of this technology is inevitable, what standards must we set to ensure that privacy is not sacrificed? Here's few off the top of my head:
1. Clearly mark anyplace such a system is being used, so people can at least know if they are being scanned (this becomes more important as the technology advances and becomes less obvious).
2. Allow people to opt-out and be searched by traditional means. At least a hand search doesn't leave a recorded image.
3. Secure the output display area to prevent unauthorized viewing, and establish a system of ethics for the operators.
Any others?
611 posts at level 0, 612 at level -1. Sigh. Rob, when are you writing that automatic proofreader? :-)
I promise not to get all mushy about this, but shucks, hasn't the quality of this thread been great? It's unfortunate that it's taken such a tragedy to pull this community together, but we may have found the one topic with truly universal resonance among slashdot readers: the trauma that is high school.
/.? I doubt it. But next time you start loading up that flamethrower to toast some wrongfully-opionioned fellow /.'er, remember your highschool years, and what it's like to be on the receiving end. Don't become the musclebound ape in highschool that faithfully tried on you each new wedgie that Dinosaur Bob comes up with.
:-)
And it's startlingly unanimous. Last time I checked this thread, there were 612 postings at level 0, and 611 at -1. That's right- 1 article has been moderated down. And it was the only one criticizing the posting of the story (that I saw). When have we ever seen a Katz article that has generated so much traffic that wasn't the familiar "Katz sux vs Learn to filter" flamefests?
This demands some self examination from us, as a group. What happened to that macho-geek verneer that so many of us cling to when we're talking about other subjects? Why do we inflict on each other the same kind of abuse that so many of us are so bitter about receiving in high school? Make no mistake about it: there normally is a conformity-enforcement engine running here that is as viscious in words as the sticks and stones and fists hurled at the misfits in high school. Just look what happens when someone advocates a pro-Microsoft position.
There's irony in the fact that the very topic which prompted such an outpouring of heartfelt honesty is probably responsible for much of the vitriol normally found here. The angst, anger, shame, and depression many geeks experience in highschool leaves scars that are too often evident in the bitterness and callousness of many postings.
Is this thread a new beginning? A kinder, gentler
Unless it's about a "first post". Those bastards deserve it.
The Wired article about this drew an implied connection that David Smith was Vicodin ES, with the obvious implication to us slashdot regulars that he was found via GUID. But I haven't seen any real evidence to back this up.
As an excellent article on Ars Technica has pointed out, all the GUID shows is who the original document creator was. If someone had taken a previous Vicodin ES virus and modified it to create Melissa, his GUID / MAC address would remain in the "new" virus.
So is David Smith Vicodin ES? And do they have anything stronger on him than the GUID?