I spend several hours a month supporting my mother-in-law and her skanky disease-ridden Windows laptop. I'd love to get her onto a nice Linux system, supported by somebody who's not me.
I'll install it, and train her, and then she can call the nice Help Desk boys when she can't execute the free screen-saver software that she got in her e-mail.
But there is a SKID in the front. Which makes this machine GROSSLY safer, and more practical, and stop-able, than the last thirty designs for mono-wheel vehicles that we've seen on Slashdot.
Good idea. I trust mail from my brother, and the executable that's attached to it, because it's strongly encrypted, and there was a PASSWORD that my brother used, when he encrypted it.
Yup!
Uh... he DID use a password with his private key, didn't he? There couldn't be some kinda worm on his machine that sends out mal-mail, encrypted with HIS private key, could there?
If you have something to say that you don't want other people to read, encrypt it. There are plenty of simple tools to help you do this.
And the more we do this, as a matter of routine, the more the non-dweeb population will start to do so.
I dream of a day when you can immediately distinguish spam from personal communications because notes from your brother-in-law will routinely be encrypted.
I have this furnace in my house. It has a pump that consumes electric power, spraying oil into the burner, plus a fan. But it gives off a lot more energy (in heat) than it consumes in electricity.
True, I have to keep buying oil. But I think that these researchers intend to keep buying the little frozen-pellet thingies.
My Dad opens every friggin' attachment he gets, and no amount of education seems to be effective. He's in his 80's, and loves swapping moderately dirty jokes with his buddies via e-mail.
I demonstrated Linux to him with a Knoppix CD, and he thought it made about as much sense as Windows. On the Knoppix live CD there's a button that you can push that installs Knoppix for real.
He's using the default Knoppix apps for everything, and doesn't seem to miss Windows for an instant.
He used to call up and ask if it was safe to open the executable attachment that 7ew43z5@yahoo.com had sent him.
Now he knows that he can open any God-damned thing he wants, and his smarty-pants son won't yell at him or treat him like a child.
It's done wonders for our relationship. I recommend it highly: use the Knoppix live CD to sucker 'em in. Then install Knoppix, or Debian, or whatever.
The calls that I get from him nowadays are about much more interesting (and less irritating) things than tech support.
Well, we'll never find out from their lame-ass web page, which is a collection of Flash that beeps a little, but otherwise provides no useful information.
But we can speculate, can't we?
To be honest, I'm not sure how fun this would be. Real slot-cars are enjoyably hard to drive fast: too much juice, and they fly off the track. That's where the fun is: racing without wiping out.
But if they're in a tube... then there's no reason not to go 100 percent all the time. Or even interact with it at all.
Boy, the process just accelerates every day, doesn't it?
Given that large multinational companies are now figuring out how to outsource pretty much everything that Americans make a middle-class living at... How does a geek plan for the future?
Not to be Mr. Negative-Pants, but the future appears to be one where a thin layer of prosperity on the level of a Pakistani bricklayer is smeared around the globe.
So... how do we plan for this? Any creative ideas out there?
Um... I think that what they're all so exercised about is a that the local government wants to require the cybercafe owners to install security cameras.
Speaking as a person who's recently fled Southern California, due in some small part to a fear of gang violence, I'm not sure that the city fathers are so wrong. It's a serious issue.
This is indeed a good prediction. Bootable CDs, like Knoppix and Mandrake's new MandrakeMove,are just too irresistable, when used with a memory stick. I've tried the Knoppix one, and DAMN, it Just Works, even on a clapped-out old laptop with hardware issues.
Lots of different kinds of knowledge workers can put their whole (current) work-lives on a little stick, and then just use whatever machine they can borrow time on.
"Bulky" CDs? surely you have room in your briefcase / bag for one thin CD.
Smell-data? That's a really, really good idea. Gathering data about noise is a good idea, I suppose, but it's really hard to actually DO sommething about it.
"Hey! It's really noisy here next to the freeway!"
Well, no duh, genius. And so what? Are you going to move the freeway?
But stench... I bet there are a lot of complicating factors, like wind direction and speed, air temperature, and the number of hogs per minute passing through the abbatoir down the block, that contribute to how bad it smells at a particlar place and time.
Now, THAT would be worth mapping, over time, because there might be simple things that could be done to alleviate bad smells for lots of people, which might not be apparent without a lot of data points.
Oops... Hold on, I don't think any of this will work. From the article:
Philips' I.Code chips, embedded in the labels, are incorporated into garments during manufacturing. They are
imperceptible to the wearer and remain in the clothing items throughout their lifetime.
This is indeed wonderful news, and can be taken as a victory for people who worry about the potential for the abuse of this kind of aggregated personal information.
But there are still many, many other ways in which personal information is aggregated and analyzed, without the benefit of an oversight committee, or even significant regulation. So I'm still worried.
And I have another creeping worry: what if convicted felon Poindexter might have actually done some good with his (admittedly grotesque, and probably wildly impractical) database?
I mean, I'm always the first to howl about how those who give up freedom to gain a little security deserve neither, but does anybody else wonder about this? I mean, things are getting a little tense in the world these days.
Dude, CNet is a general-audience wide-circulation publication. Yes, the geeks that hang out in here all know this stuff already, but my clients, with whom my company must exchange data securely, may not know anything about why open source is good.
Anything that helps convince my crypto-less clients to use GnuPG is very, very helpful.
What planet can they possibly be thinking of operating this on?
In the cab of the truck are housed...a communications system that Fuller described as "hacker in a box." It includes a computer program linked with surveillance equipment to monitor what people in the area around the vehicle are saying in e-mail. SmarTruckII could just sit and listen, send bogus e-mails to confuse an enemy, or, if it is not amused, kill the enemy communications system altogether.
Perhaps e-mail messages give off small amounts of radiation that we don't know about, so that you can home in on them with special missiles.
Re:What about crashes?
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I wonder if drones crash more because the penalty for operator error is not FLAMING DEATH.
Think about it: the ground-based drone operator decides that, due to the staggeringly boring nature of his job, he needs to take a few minutes now and then to smoke a bowl or surf for pr0n.
Real pilots have a lot more invested in the ship's safe return.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, people make fun of us tin-foil-heat-wearing paranoid psychos...
But then people invent stuff like this. Which just makes us even crazier.
I spend several hours a month supporting my mother-in-law and her skanky disease-ridden Windows laptop. I'd love to get her onto a nice Linux system, supported by somebody who's not me.
I'll install it, and train her, and then she can call the nice Help Desk boys when she can't execute the free screen-saver software that she got in her e-mail.
Hell, I'd go ten bucks.
But there is a SKID in the front. Which makes this machine GROSSLY safer, and more practical, and stop-able, than the last thirty designs for mono-wheel vehicles that we've seen on Slashdot.
Hey, who wants to talk on my femto-phone?
Douchebags.
I'm not sure how well Windows XP runs on positronic brains.
Good idea. I trust mail from my brother, and the executable that's attached to it, because it's strongly encrypted, and there was a PASSWORD that my brother used, when he encrypted it.
Yup!
Uh... he DID use a password with his private key, didn't he? There couldn't be some kinda worm on his machine that sends out mal-mail, encrypted with HIS private key, could there?
Oops.
It boils down to this:
If you have something to say that you don't want other people to read, encrypt it. There are plenty of simple tools to help you do this.
And the more we do this, as a matter of routine, the more the non-dweeb population will start to do so.
I dream of a day when you can immediately distinguish spam from personal communications because notes from your brother-in-law will routinely be encrypted.
Well... Maybe this isn't so unlikely.
I have this furnace in my house. It has a pump that consumes electric power, spraying oil into the burner, plus a fan. But it gives off a lot more energy (in heat) than it consumes in electricity.
True, I have to keep buying oil. But I think that these researchers intend to keep buying the little frozen-pellet thingies.
Let's see...
Assuming that '500 trillion' means 500 x 10^12 watts... They said it would be for a 'few billionths' of a second: maybe 2 x 10^-9 seconds?
Am I counting wrong, or does that come out to about a million watt-seconds, or 0.277 kilowatt-hours?
I consume more energy than that makin' coffee.
My Dad opens every friggin' attachment he gets, and no amount of education seems to be effective. He's in his 80's, and loves swapping moderately dirty jokes with his buddies via e-mail.
I demonstrated Linux to him with a Knoppix CD, and he thought it made about as much sense as Windows. On the Knoppix live CD there's a button that you can push that installs Knoppix for real.
He's using the default Knoppix apps for everything, and doesn't seem to miss Windows for an instant.
He used to call up and ask if it was safe to open the executable attachment that 7ew43z5@yahoo.com had sent him.
Now he knows that he can open any God-damned thing he wants, and his smarty-pants son won't yell at him or treat him like a child.
It's done wonders for our relationship. I recommend it highly: use the Knoppix live CD to sucker 'em in. Then install Knoppix, or Debian, or whatever.
The calls that I get from him nowadays are about much more interesting (and less irritating) things than tech support.
But we can speculate, can't we?
To be honest, I'm not sure how fun this would be. Real slot-cars are enjoyably hard to drive fast: too much juice, and they fly off the track. That's where the fun is: racing without wiping out.
But if they're in a tube... then there's no reason not to go 100 percent all the time. Or even interact with it at all.
F that.
Boy, the process just accelerates every day, doesn't it?
Given that large multinational companies are now figuring out how to outsource pretty much everything that Americans make a middle-class living at... How does a geek plan for the future?
Not to be Mr. Negative-Pants, but the future appears to be one where a thin layer of prosperity on the level of a Pakistani bricklayer is smeared around the globe.
So... how do we plan for this? Any creative ideas out there?
This is a very important point.
Last week I convinced the neighbor's child that the reason that the wind blows it because the trees thrash around.
Without a causal mechanism, a correlation between two conditions is no more logical.
Um... I think that what they're all so exercised about is a that the local government wants to require the cybercafe owners to install security cameras.
Speaking as a person who's recently fled Southern California, due in some small part to a fear of gang violence, I'm not sure that the city fathers are so wrong. It's a serious issue.
Perhaps it's an area that smells bad?
Oh, no, wait, it has to do with dust.
This is indeed a good prediction. Bootable CDs, like Knoppix and Mandrake's new MandrakeMove,are just too irresistable, when used with a memory stick. I've tried the Knoppix one, and DAMN, it Just Works, even on a clapped-out old laptop with hardware issues. Lots of different kinds of knowledge workers can put their whole (current) work-lives on a little stick, and then just use whatever machine they can borrow time on. "Bulky" CDs? surely you have room in your briefcase / bag for one thin CD.
Smell-data? That's a really, really good idea. Gathering data about noise is a good idea, I suppose, but it's really hard to actually DO sommething about it.
"Hey! It's really noisy here next to the freeway!"
Well, no duh, genius. And so what? Are you going to move the freeway?
But stench... I bet there are a lot of complicating factors, like wind direction and speed, air temperature, and the number of hogs per minute passing through the abbatoir down the block, that contribute to how bad it smells at a particlar place and time.
Now, THAT would be worth mapping, over time, because there might be simple things that could be done to alleviate bad smells for lots of people, which might not be apparent without a lot of data points.
Good idea!
How 'bout a ball-peen hammer?
Oops... Hold on, I don't think any of this will work. From the article: So do we just need to cut out the labels?But there are still many, many other ways in which personal information is aggregated and analyzed, without the benefit of an oversight committee, or even significant regulation. So I'm still worried.
And I have another creeping worry: what if convicted felon Poindexter might have actually done some good with his (admittedly grotesque, and probably wildly impractical) database?
I mean, I'm always the first to howl about how those who give up freedom to gain a little security deserve neither, but does anybody else wonder about this? I mean, things are getting a little tense in the world these days.
Anything that helps convince my crypto-less clients to use GnuPG is very, very helpful.
Every time you think SlashDot is getting dull, somebody posts something wild like this.
Christ, what a diverse audience!
I wonder if drones crash more because the penalty for operator error is not FLAMING DEATH.
Think about it: the ground-based drone operator decides that, due to the staggeringly boring nature of his job, he needs to take a few minutes now and then to smoke a bowl or surf for pr0n.
Real pilots have a lot more invested in the ship's safe return.
It's too small to see with the unaided eye?