I'd imagine the improvement in driver behavior your friend experienced was more a result of increased visibility.
The reflectors that most bicycles come with are next to useless as they don't reflect well and they're quite small in the scheme of things on the road. Most bicycle head/tail lights are almost as bad. I damn near hit a bicycle cop once because he had no rear reflector and only an LED bicycle seat with nearly-dead batteries, and he parked himself directly between two very bright taillights of a car stopped at a stop light. Just couldn't see the motherfucker until I was right up on him.
What I find works best is those orange vests with reflective fabric strips. No battery powered lighting is going to compete with reflecting a cars own headlights right back at it. Just think about how easy road signs are to see vs. the occasional non-reflective sign you see (or don't see) by the side of the road. I even made backpacks out of the orange vests and their reflective fabric so that I can be seen even when carrying stuff. The fluorescent orange fabric is especially useful at dawn and dusk when cars may not have their headlights turned on, as there's more ultraviolet light than usual at those times and so the orange is especially bright.
I think the orange vests have another advantage in that they remind drivers about safety. Drivers rarely see bicyclists and so they haven't put a lot of thought into how to behave around them. It's better that they think "there's a crazy guy in an orange vest. Maybe he's retarded. I'd better pass him slowly and give him a lot of space." Otherwise they just see a minor obstacle on the side of the road which they almost don't even have to leave their lane to avoid and so they put no more space between you and them than they would if you were merely some roadkill they wanted to avoid splattering all over their car.
That assumes that the salt is as trivially brute-forced as the license and medallion numbers. The reason this data could be brute-forced was because there's only so many possible license plate numbers, and that that 'many' is easy work for a computer. A proper salt would be as many bits as the hash itself, but computing 2^128 hash values requires more CPU time than anyone has.
That said, a hash is an overly-complex solution to this problem. Just take all the plate numbers, randomize them in a list, then just output their position in the list. "Plate #415" isn't going to be decoded into "HQD 1853" no matter what you do.
Low-frequency solutions are no substitute for what an actual oscilloscope can do, but when you're trying to learn electronics, being able to see what the circuit is doing at all is far better than just guessing what it is doing. Multimeters have a use despite their 1 Hz sample rate, and a measly 20 kHz sample rate is going to be much more useful than that.
That said, just as soon as you can replace them with anything else, you'll decide that sound cards suck.
My present favorite solution is to use an FT245RL (a $5 USB chip that implements a simple parallel FIFO buffer, with drivers for Linux and FreeBSD already in your kernel) along with an AT89S52 (a $1 re-programmable microcontroller with 32 I/O pins, though I usually end up dedicating 15 of them to the programming interface and communication with the FT245RL, leaving only 17 for general-purpose use) and just write little programs for the microcontroller to read/write whatever data I want and transfer it to/from the PC. I even built my own programmer for the AT89S52 using the same two chips and a Perl script. (Naturally, the AT89S52 used in the programmer was programmed via other means -- I used a parallel port.) This generally allows me to do anything digital that I want to do. (Obviously my wants aren't that great.)
For analog, I attach a MCP3301 ($3 12-bit ADC w/ SPI interface) to the FT245RL & AT89S52 combo, which allows reading everything from DC up to 100 kS/s. At $3 a chip, adding multiple channels is inexpensive as well, and I've used up to eight simultaneously, driving them all with the same control signals and just reading the resulting eight data bits in parallel. While this is barely better than audio frequencies, the major advantages are that there is no DC filtering, and that you actually know what input voltages correspond to the values you read from the ADC. Sound cards are really only meant to record frequencies and relative amplitudes.
Of course, at this point you're up to about $25 to $50 depending on how much stuff you had to buy and how much stuff you already had, and you've invested a hell of a lot of your time. Time is quite valuable. Spend enough of it and you might as well have picked up a second job and just earned the money to buy that oscilloscope....but if you are a student, putting these chips together is kind of something you should be learning how to do. The big time-waster for me was the software, as I wrote an assembler, a script to drive the programmer, software to run in the microcontrollers, and any software needed on the PC to record and display data.
So a sound card is a rather attractive solution to people who don't already have an oscilloscope and can't justify the expense of one. The needed components are minimal, and the software already exists. Sure, sound cards can't measure DC, but you probably have a multimeter that can, and anything not DC, like a 0.1 Hz square wave, is still going to be visible as little spikes which at least lets you know something is going on, which is better than not knowing. Only very low frequency sine waves aren't going to be visible at all, but they're not that common, and in fact are rather hard to generate.
Not saying it's not possible but all of the cable modem they've put out that is IP6 compatable has it's IP6 disabled
If you're looking at the modem's status page (192.168.100.1) and it says IPv4-Only, that actually has nothing to do with whether you have IPv6.
The quick and easy way to find out is to just run "tcpdump -n ip6" and see if anything shows up. I didn't realize I had IPv6 until I did that, as the configuration changes I made to Linux to support a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel rendered it unable to configure itself automatically with my native IPv6. Even after knowing it was there, it took me a couple of days to figure out how to get it working. Seems the OS support for IPv6 isn't completely sorted out, and so you run into a lot of odd things that work in strange ways that you then have to sort out. In particular, if you want to use a Linux box as a router, you have to set up a DHCPv4 client, a DHCPv6 client, a DHCPv4 server, a DHCPv6 server, radvd, and get the kernel parameters sorted out so that it will actually accept router advertisements and route packets at the same time. I eventually gave up and just run pfSense in VirtualBox, but even figuring out how to get that to work wasn't trivial. Thus, I wouldn't conclude that you don't have IPv6 until you see tcpdump fail to show any IPv6 packets after running for ten minutes.
Not that disappointed, using a HOSTS file and working with IP4 address I've a bit of sense about them, IP6 I couldn't tell you if I've seen it before or not,
Well, the good thing is, even if IPv4 disappears from the internet, it'll still exist on your LAN, and so you can continue to access computers on your LAN via IPv4. I ended up configuring the firewall on my computers to block all incoming connections via IPv6, and just use IPv4 when connecting between them via SSH. As such, I'm using IPv6 basically as an internet-only protocol, which seems to make a lot of sense: I have little IPv4 addresses for my little LAN, and big IPv6 addresses for the big internet.
I prefer my bits non optimized than someone else deciding how they should be "optimized" for me. Thank you!
Indeed. If QoS becomes standard, then god-forbid you attempt to develop a new real-time network application, as the QoS won't recognize its real-time nature and so you'll get 500 ms ping times.
I really don't understand what need QoS is supposed to fill. There's an option for it on my router, and I once tried my best to utilize it. Netflix loves to figure out the size of your internet connection and use all of it, nevermind what anyone else in the house might want to do. So I tried to figure out how to fix this, but QoS isn't about giving everyone the share of the internet that belongs to them. It's about letting some users take bandwidth away from others. When the hell would I want that?
Say I have a dozen people in a house sharing one internet connection. Obviously I'd like to dedicate 1/12 of it to each person, and then, take whatever isn't being used at the moment by some people and divide that equally between everyone else. Then, if someone decides to make a VoIP call, it either fits in their share, or it fits when they get the leftovers, or they just don't get to fucking make their call, because if they want to have control over a larger fraction of the bandwidth, they need to pay more than 1/12 of the bill. So what if the other users are merely doing bittorrent? Presumably they're doing it because they want to, and they're paying for a share of the internet too, and so they can do whatever they want with it.
I really don't want my ISP to be doing any QoS. I don't care if they are oversubscribed. If they're oversubscribed ten to one, then guarantee me that 1/10th of my bandwidth -- I can fit a VoIP call in that just fine -- and let me have the rest only when its available. There's no need at all to take into consideration what type of traffic it is, and doing so will just screw me whenever other customers are doing something more blessed.
Most humans _are_ stupid. AI on their level would not be useful at all.
The point is, we still consider those stupid humans to be intelligent, at least in the sense of what we're talking about when we say "artificially intelligent." They may not be very smart, but we don't insist that they're non-thinking machines of the organic variety. The Turing test isn't designed to detect when we've achieved intelligent artificial intelligence. It's designed to detect when we've achieved any sort of artificial intelligence.
That said, I still doubt this bot has achieved even that. Can't test it since it's obviously slashdotted.
To be a truly fair test, the test must be a comparison, e.g. "one of these two people is actually just a computer program. Can you tell us which one?" Without a comparison, you're left with what everyone mentions: When chat bots were first introduced, nearly everyone was fooled by them, because they didn't know that "it's just a computer" was a plausible explanation for the person's stupidity, leaving the only logical conclusion to be that they were simply talking to an incredibly stupid person, or one which was intentionally trying to be a pain in the ass.
...and that latter point is important as well. I've read about some of these contests where the humans were doing their best to trick the judges into thinking they were a computer, which obviously skews the results. I've heard about other contests where the humans were also given awards for being "the most human human" if they were judged by the most people to actually be a human, so at least some of these contests are more legitimate.
I was looking for a MAME ROM where I had the EXACT spelling and Google kept misspelling it and giving me other stuff with no way to get the actual item at all.
Google is a complete pain in the ass sometimes. I don't recall exactly what I was searching for, but I was once searching for something about decibels, in which I knew that the content I was looking for would never mention the full word, but only the abbreviation "dB" instead. Google assumed that the "db" in my search query was an abbreviation for "database" and I never could figure out how to get it to stop giving me nothing but results about databases.
I got the world's best game controller, in my opinion -- the Logitech Cyberman II -- for playing this game.
And think I still have it... somewhere.
You'd better hope so if you want to play Descent again. It's impossible to find a joystick these days without a dead zone, a spot in the middle of the axis where you can wiggle the stick a little without the value reported to the OS being changed.
Descent, being designed for proper joysticks, is simply incompatible with dead zones. You need to turn slowly left, so you move the stick a little, and nothing happens. Your brain's immediate instinct is to assume it simply moved the stick too little, and so it tries moving it twice as far, but still, nothing happens. So then your brain doubles that, but still, nothing happens, as you've only just now reached the edge of the dead zone. So your brain doubles up again, and suddenly you're turning 8x faster than you wanted.
I tired, but it's apparently impossible for the brain to learn the limits of the dead zone such that it can reliably move the stick just barely past the dead zone to make a slow turn.
I actually thought about making a Descent-like game about a year ago, but attempting to play the old Descent with modern joysticks revealed the above problem, and without a proper joystick, there's just no fucking point.
"I started paying for cable back in the late 70s to early 80s, with the intention that my monthly bill was a replacement for having to watch all those stupid advertisements-- exactly as advertised-- with the perk that I would have more reliable and higher quality of service."
This is getting sad. I see this posted somewhere in the comments of every article about cable television on Slashdot. Aren't people on Slashdot supposed to be smart enough to not accept facts without question simply because they support whatever argument they'd like to make?
It does seem some people on the internet are smart enough to question the story: link and link.
Others seem far too blinded by their desire to believe the story to realize just how likely it is that it is complete bullshit, like this guy who even put "fairy tale" in the title of his story. At first I thought maybe he was presenting it as a fairy tale, but with no argument against the story being presented, I can only conclude that he believes that commercial-free cable television did exist at one time, but has now become a "fairy tale" as it no longer exists.
...and just to make sure I get down-modded, I'll also point out the other popular myth Slashdot is unable to recognize as such: that "hacker" originally meant "intelligent person who is able to make technology do awesome things." Sorry, people, but the only time the word had any meaning besides "criminal" was when it meant (and still means) "to do something in an incorrect way which never the less works," e.g., "I think I can hack that equipment to do what we need." As such, applying the word to computer criminals is entirely appropriate, as they break into computers by exploiting the software on those computers in clever ways to do things that software wasn't intended to do. The legality of the action is irrelevant to the word. Even with the original definition, a hacker isn't something one should aim to be, but rather, being able to hack is merely a useful skill to have. Defining yourself as a hacker makes no more sense than defining yourself as an ass wiper. Yes, you have to wipe your ass, and it's good that you can do it, but if that's how you choose to define yourself then there's something wrong with you.
The problem is: if an electrostatic potential existed in the parts to begin with, separating the plates should diminish it, because if you squish a capacitor the charge is supposed to increase. So, in inverse must be true, right?
A capacitor with plates closer together has a higher capacitance. This means that a voltage applied to that capacitor will cause more charge (a.k.a. electrons) to move between the plates, or in other words, it means that less voltage is required to cause the same amount of charge to move between the plates. So if you have two capacitors with identical charge, the one with plates closer together has a lower voltage, and the one with plates further apart has higher voltage.
So whatever charge is on two surfaces, when you pull those surfaces apart, you increase the voltage between them.
...or just turn their own customers against them. Presumably these people require some sort of proof of having paid the fine before they'll reimburse people. Just offer that proof to anyone who asks for it whether they've paid the fine or not. People who don't pay for the trains probably also have no issues with occasionally getting a free $150 from the people insuring them against their $150 fines.
It can't shoot down the aircraft, but not shooting it down means other people are harmed.
This is why the ends don't justify the means. As soon as someone says "the ends justify the means" it gives everyone an excuse to use any solution to a problem, even if it isn't the best solution. An intelligent robot would figure out some way to stop the plane without killing anyone.
...and how do we even know anyone is going to die? Can the robot predict the future as well? For all it knows, it merely appears that people are going to die, but if it does nothing, the passengers on the plane will regain control and no one will die.
...or maybe the robot simply had bad information and there's actually nothing wrong at all.
Also, while it doesn't apply in this case since the people on the airplane will die whether the robot does anything or not, consider a situation where a robot (with magical all-knowing predictive powers) can save ten people by killing one innocent person. What makes the robot so special (aside from the magical all-knowing predictive powers) that it gets to decide who lives and who dies? Even if we assume that ten lives are better than one, how do we know that one person wouldn't go on to save thousands of lives? Sometimes the only moral choice is to let fate do what fate is going to do. Just because you'll never know what that one innocent person might have done later in his life doesn't mean it's OK that you killed him to save ten others.
The simple fact is that the ends don't justify the means. The morality of one's inactions is an important thing to think about, but nowhere near as important as the morality of one's actions. If the world were full of people who often fail to do good things, but who at least never intentionally do bad things, it'd be a fairly nice place, especially compared with a world where people often do bad things because they think they're good, a.k.a. the world we have now. Even those terrorists on that plane think they're doing the right thing, and so a set of morals that allow you to kill innocent people as long as you have a good reason aren't all that useful.
Time Warner Cable kind of has. They use the "copy once" flag which makes it impossible to use MythTV as there are no cable card compatible tuners that will stream to non-DRM systems. So you're left paying $10/mo for the DVR and $13/mo for "DVR Service" whatever that is.
You can get a TiVo instead of using MythTV, but it kind of defeats the purpose if you just end up taking the money you save and using it to pay for "TiVo Service" which costs $15/mo with a one-year commitment and a $75 early termination fee. Unfortunately the FAQ doesn't mention their excuse for raping their customers like that, as I'd be quite interested to know. With MythTV you can get channel listings for $25/year, a.k.a. $2/mo, or with over-the-air programming you can get listings data from the over-the-air signal, though I still pay for the listings as they're higher quality, e.g. they indicate whether a showing is a new episode or a re-run.
What the fuck? ET is a great movie. You were just a stupid kid.
I have to agree. One of my favorite parts of the movie is in the beginning when the teens are playing D&D and order a pizza, as the dialogue and interactions are much more realistic than anything I'd expect to see in a movie from that time or even in the present. It wasn't even a crucial scene, so they could have easily just wrote some standard obviously-scripted dialog and left it at that, but instead they aimed higher and decided to film something that resembled reality.
It's not just the news, it's television in general. The most disgusting are the shows that detail real-life murders, complete with actual crime scene photographs, as if when someone is murdered, their unfortunate death should become some corporation's profits and everyone else's entertainment.
The idea I should have to earn (and pay for) a license before I have the privilege of transmitting over the airwaves disgusts me.
I feel the same way about it. I can understand wanting to license people who want to build their own transceivers, and maybe even those who want to develop their own modulation schemes and data protocols, but the fact that a HAM can't design and build some nice little ARPS transceivers for his friends and neighbors and allow them to use the devices without having their own license doesn't make any sense to me. Especially if the device were to transmit his call sign when in use so that people know who to talk to if the device or its user misbehaves. The radio spectrum is a natural resource, so I don't understand why less than 1% of it belongs to the public. There's no reason why we should all be paying monthly fees to cell phone companies when ARPS shows us that volunteers are more than capable of running a public text messaging system for free.
When I looked into HAM radio, I just couldn't see anything that appealed to me. I'm not the kind of person who cares to try to see how far away I can communicate with the least amount of power just for shits and giggles. I'd want to build digital devices, using my own data protocols, and maybe experiment with new modulation schemes, but the FCC dictates what you're allowed to transmit and what modulation schemes you're allowed to use. I don't even know how they ended up with ARPS since, from what I saw when I looked into HAM radio, no one would have been allowed to start the project because, by virtue of being new, it wouldn't have been on the list of things that people are permitted to do.
Anyway, I eventually lost interest, but if I still cared I'd probably either use CB or FRS and just ignore the fact that what I was doing with those frequencies was illegal since it's unlikely anyone who heard the transmissions would give a shit anyway. Around here, both bands are rather vacant, so it's unlikely anyone would even notice what I was doing, never mind anyone caring about it.
I'd say my biggest complaint was the lack of a servo control for speed, meaning that a tape recorded on one deck might play faster or slower on another.
Actually, the speed was controlled. You could feed those little motors whatever voltage you wanted and they'd continue to spin at the same speed. The problem was that the path between the motor and the tape movement contained a lot of variables, in particular a smooth rubber belt on pulleys doesn't guarantee a fixed rotational ratio like you get with gears, though I imagine that design was necessary to allow the flywheel to actually do its job and ensure a constant speed.
The big issue was that the things often just weren't calibrated well. As a kid, I liked to play my keyboard along with the music, but every time I got a new cassette player I had to take the thing apart and adjust the potentiometer in the motor until the music was in tune. After that, most store-bought tapes would be in tune, and I imagine those that weren't were more due to artists recording their music without bothering to tune their guitars properly than to the recording speed being incorrect.
I never had any of the sound quality issues people love to complain about. I had one tape that I had listened to for years, even breaking my own rules about where my tapes go by putting it into "untrusted" players, like the one in my car. So one day I thought I had probably degraded the sound quality by now, and so I bought a new copy, but I found it to be indistinguishable from the old copy. When I switched to CDs, it wasn't even because of better sound quality, because they simply weren't better in that regard....and why should they be? Tape can be as good as you want it to be simply by increasing the tape speed.
Wow... Suggest that everyone's happy delusion might actually be false and not only do you get no evidence to the contrary of your suggestion, but you get modded down as a troll as well. So much for discussion and the search for truth. I guess I'll have to find another web site if I want that.
I prefer restoring the original meaning of the "hacker" badge to its original lofty meaning
I know that "hacker" originally meaning "talented programmer" is common knowledge on Slashdot, but is this story actually true?
The idea just seems like a popular meme. Slashdot is full of nerds. Nerds like to call themselves "hackers" because it sounds cool. Then someone introduces them to the idea that they're not calling themselves criminals because that's not what the word "hacker" originally meant, and they absorb that supposed fact without question because they so deeply want it to be true.
Is it actually true? Are there any references that support this history of the word's meaning that are of higher quality than "everyone on the internet says it's true?"
Even the Wikipedia article about the definition controversy lacks any citations relevant to the supposed original meaning, even as it makes statements like "the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized" which just scream for a "citation needed" tag.
Look for the average hours to shrink further as more and more employers seek to avoid Obamacare costs.
If everyone stopped working 40 hours and instead worked only 32, we'd need 25% more employees to make up the difference. That would eliminate unemployment overnight. With unemployment eliminated, employers would have to compete for employees, which would drive up wages and result in more benefits like health insurance.
We already did it once during the great depression, when the standard 40 hour work week was invented. Before that, everyone worked 80 hour weeks, and they had no choice due to a mountain of people desperate for a job. If you didn't like it, you were immediately replaced by someone in the line of people literally sitting outside your employer's front door.
With automation continuing to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, we're slowly returning to that situation. Obviously we need to reduce the standard work week yet again to get things back to where we want them.
Labor prices don't respond to the free market. If you pay people less, all that happens is that their spouses enter the work force as well, and now there are even more people competing for the job you're offering, and so you can reduce wages yet again.
The problem stems from the URL being a machine address necessary to acquire content, but one that is also human-readable which inspires people to treat it as if it were the page's title or something and so they edit it as freely as they edit the page's content.
Just name all of your web pages by UUID. Then, since one random number is just as good as any other, you'll never again have the urge to change your URLs.
Similarly, just use random UUIDs as domain names, and you'll never again be bothered by having your first choice be unavailable. An added advantage of this is that you can name your site whatever you want regardless of what domain names are available since you've decided that your domain name doesn't have to match your web site's name. Suddenly the fact that virtually every domain name is being squatted upon no longer matters.
If it truly bothers me, I can buy a compatible cable or DSL modem
I bought my own cable modem after TWC increased the monthly charge for the modem lease and I realized that if I bought my own it would pay for itself in only a year.
The configuration page for the modem has two buttons. One resets the modem. The other disables a DHCP feature which is only in effect when the modem isn't connected to the cable company's network, as the only reason for the feature is to allow you to view the modem's status pages. (Normally the device behind the modem gets its address via DHCP, and so without a cable connection, you wouldn't get an address and so you'd be unable to access the status pages.) There's literally nothing else the modem does that is under my control. I can't even update the firmware -- any firmware updates have to come over the cable network.
Apparently this is what the DOCSIS standards require. I may own the device, but the cable company determines how it operates, since they own the network.
The only good side of this is that it really doesn't matter as long as your modem isn't also your firewall. Even if your ISP couldn't spy on you by hacking your modem, they could still spy on you from the next hop towards the internet which is also under their control. It only becomes interesting if they can hack a device with access to your LAN, which is the case if your modem is also your router, which is a strong argument for why it shouldn't be.
The really shocking thing about this story is that the backdoor was (and still is) so unprotected. You expect that your ISP can snoop on your internet traffic, but when anyone anywhere on the internet can, that's a serious vulnerability. From the sound of it, the fix apparently closes the backdoor only until it is explicitly opened by the ISP, at which point it is once again available to anyone anywhere on the internet. How can people be this incompetent?
Slashdot isn't what it used to be. This site has become total shit over the years.
I like to pretend it always was shit, and that I and many others have simply become more intelligent over the years and so we're now able to see through it. It makes me feel better as it implies that people are becoming smarter and so there's still some hope for the world.
There was some exploitation of the bug very soon after disclosure, but I can't see a way to win here. You can't tell everyone about the bug without telling the bad guys...
Actually you can. An AC in another story figured it out, and was promptly modded all the way up to +1.
You simply tell everyone that there is a vulnerability, but you do not tell them any details about what the vulnerability is. Instead, you simply announce a release date & time for a patch. People can either shut down their servers until the patch is released, or, if they're feeling lucky, they can keep running the old code until the patch is released since no one actually knows what the vulnerability is and so, in theory, they're in no more danger than they were the day before. Then, at the announced time, you release the patch, and because of the pre-release announcement, everyone with vulnerable servers has already taken them off-line, and so no one gets fucked by the patch essentially telling the hackers about the exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd imagine the improvement in driver behavior your friend experienced was more a result of increased visibility.
The reflectors that most bicycles come with are next to useless as they don't reflect well and they're quite small in the scheme of things on the road. Most bicycle head/tail lights are almost as bad. I damn near hit a bicycle cop once because he had no rear reflector and only an LED bicycle seat with nearly-dead batteries, and he parked himself directly between two very bright taillights of a car stopped at a stop light. Just couldn't see the motherfucker until I was right up on him.
What I find works best is those orange vests with reflective fabric strips. No battery powered lighting is going to compete with reflecting a cars own headlights right back at it. Just think about how easy road signs are to see vs. the occasional non-reflective sign you see (or don't see) by the side of the road. I even made backpacks out of the orange vests and their reflective fabric so that I can be seen even when carrying stuff. The fluorescent orange fabric is especially useful at dawn and dusk when cars may not have their headlights turned on, as there's more ultraviolet light than usual at those times and so the orange is especially bright.
I think the orange vests have another advantage in that they remind drivers about safety. Drivers rarely see bicyclists and so they haven't put a lot of thought into how to behave around them. It's better that they think "there's a crazy guy in an orange vest. Maybe he's retarded. I'd better pass him slowly and give him a lot of space." Otherwise they just see a minor obstacle on the side of the road which they almost don't even have to leave their lane to avoid and so they put no more space between you and them than they would if you were merely some roadkill they wanted to avoid splattering all over their car.
salt + "1234", if you know the "1234" then its a tiny brute force to get the salt
Really? I've chosen a salt consisting only upper & lower-case letters and digits. I then processed it like this:
echo -n "salt1234" | md5sum
The resulting MD5: e6f23ea50a901510fda62e4319e726ba
So, what's my salt?
It's even that puny MD5 hash that everyone keeps saying is broken (not that it isn't) so this should be easy for you.
That assumes that the salt is as trivially brute-forced as the license and medallion numbers. The reason this data could be brute-forced was because there's only so many possible license plate numbers, and that that 'many' is easy work for a computer. A proper salt would be as many bits as the hash itself, but computing 2^128 hash values requires more CPU time than anyone has.
That said, a hash is an overly-complex solution to this problem. Just take all the plate numbers, randomize them in a list, then just output their position in the list. "Plate #415" isn't going to be decoded into "HQD 1853" no matter what you do.
Low-frequency solutions are no substitute for what an actual oscilloscope can do, but when you're trying to learn electronics, being able to see what the circuit is doing at all is far better than just guessing what it is doing. Multimeters have a use despite their 1 Hz sample rate, and a measly 20 kHz sample rate is going to be much more useful than that.
That said, just as soon as you can replace them with anything else, you'll decide that sound cards suck.
My present favorite solution is to use an FT245RL (a $5 USB chip that implements a simple parallel FIFO buffer, with drivers for Linux and FreeBSD already in your kernel) along with an AT89S52 (a $1 re-programmable microcontroller with 32 I/O pins, though I usually end up dedicating 15 of them to the programming interface and communication with the FT245RL, leaving only 17 for general-purpose use) and just write little programs for the microcontroller to read/write whatever data I want and transfer it to/from the PC. I even built my own programmer for the AT89S52 using the same two chips and a Perl script. (Naturally, the AT89S52 used in the programmer was programmed via other means -- I used a parallel port.) This generally allows me to do anything digital that I want to do. (Obviously my wants aren't that great.)
For analog, I attach a MCP3301 ($3 12-bit ADC w/ SPI interface) to the FT245RL & AT89S52 combo, which allows reading everything from DC up to 100 kS/s. At $3 a chip, adding multiple channels is inexpensive as well, and I've used up to eight simultaneously, driving them all with the same control signals and just reading the resulting eight data bits in parallel. While this is barely better than audio frequencies, the major advantages are that there is no DC filtering, and that you actually know what input voltages correspond to the values you read from the ADC. Sound cards are really only meant to record frequencies and relative amplitudes.
Of course, at this point you're up to about $25 to $50 depending on how much stuff you had to buy and how much stuff you already had, and you've invested a hell of a lot of your time. Time is quite valuable. Spend enough of it and you might as well have picked up a second job and just earned the money to buy that oscilloscope. ...but if you are a student, putting these chips together is kind of something you should be learning how to do. The big time-waster for me was the software, as I wrote an assembler, a script to drive the programmer, software to run in the microcontrollers, and any software needed on the PC to record and display data.
So a sound card is a rather attractive solution to people who don't already have an oscilloscope and can't justify the expense of one. The needed components are minimal, and the software already exists. Sure, sound cards can't measure DC, but you probably have a multimeter that can, and anything not DC, like a 0.1 Hz square wave, is still going to be visible as little spikes which at least lets you know something is going on, which is better than not knowing. Only very low frequency sine waves aren't going to be visible at all, but they're not that common, and in fact are rather hard to generate.
Not saying it's not possible but all of the cable modem they've put out that is IP6 compatable has it's IP6 disabled
If you're looking at the modem's status page (192.168.100.1) and it says IPv4-Only, that actually has nothing to do with whether you have IPv6.
The quick and easy way to find out is to just run "tcpdump -n ip6" and see if anything shows up. I didn't realize I had IPv6 until I did that, as the configuration changes I made to Linux to support a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel rendered it unable to configure itself automatically with my native IPv6. Even after knowing it was there, it took me a couple of days to figure out how to get it working. Seems the OS support for IPv6 isn't completely sorted out, and so you run into a lot of odd things that work in strange ways that you then have to sort out. In particular, if you want to use a Linux box as a router, you have to set up a DHCPv4 client, a DHCPv6 client, a DHCPv4 server, a DHCPv6 server, radvd, and get the kernel parameters sorted out so that it will actually accept router advertisements and route packets at the same time. I eventually gave up and just run pfSense in VirtualBox, but even figuring out how to get that to work wasn't trivial. Thus, I wouldn't conclude that you don't have IPv6 until you see tcpdump fail to show any IPv6 packets after running for ten minutes.
Not that disappointed, using a HOSTS file and working with IP4 address I've a bit of sense about them, IP6 I couldn't tell you if I've seen it before or not,
Well, the good thing is, even if IPv4 disappears from the internet, it'll still exist on your LAN, and so you can continue to access computers on your LAN via IPv4. I ended up configuring the firewall on my computers to block all incoming connections via IPv6, and just use IPv4 when connecting between them via SSH. As such, I'm using IPv6 basically as an internet-only protocol, which seems to make a lot of sense: I have little IPv4 addresses for my little LAN, and big IPv6 addresses for the big internet.
I prefer my bits non optimized than someone else deciding how they should be "optimized" for me. Thank you!
Indeed. If QoS becomes standard, then god-forbid you attempt to develop a new real-time network application, as the QoS won't recognize its real-time nature and so you'll get 500 ms ping times.
I really don't understand what need QoS is supposed to fill. There's an option for it on my router, and I once tried my best to utilize it. Netflix loves to figure out the size of your internet connection and use all of it, nevermind what anyone else in the house might want to do. So I tried to figure out how to fix this, but QoS isn't about giving everyone the share of the internet that belongs to them. It's about letting some users take bandwidth away from others. When the hell would I want that?
Say I have a dozen people in a house sharing one internet connection. Obviously I'd like to dedicate 1/12 of it to each person, and then, take whatever isn't being used at the moment by some people and divide that equally between everyone else. Then, if someone decides to make a VoIP call, it either fits in their share, or it fits when they get the leftovers, or they just don't get to fucking make their call, because if they want to have control over a larger fraction of the bandwidth, they need to pay more than 1/12 of the bill. So what if the other users are merely doing bittorrent? Presumably they're doing it because they want to, and they're paying for a share of the internet too, and so they can do whatever they want with it.
I really don't want my ISP to be doing any QoS. I don't care if they are oversubscribed. If they're oversubscribed ten to one, then guarantee me that 1/10th of my bandwidth -- I can fit a VoIP call in that just fine -- and let me have the rest only when its available. There's no need at all to take into consideration what type of traffic it is, and doing so will just screw me whenever other customers are doing something more blessed.
Most humans _are_ stupid. AI on their level would not be useful at all.
The point is, we still consider those stupid humans to be intelligent, at least in the sense of what we're talking about when we say "artificially intelligent." They may not be very smart, but we don't insist that they're non-thinking machines of the organic variety. The Turing test isn't designed to detect when we've achieved intelligent artificial intelligence. It's designed to detect when we've achieved any sort of artificial intelligence.
That said, I still doubt this bot has achieved even that. Can't test it since it's obviously slashdotted.
To be a truly fair test, the test must be a comparison, e.g. "one of these two people is actually just a computer program. Can you tell us which one?" Without a comparison, you're left with what everyone mentions: When chat bots were first introduced, nearly everyone was fooled by them, because they didn't know that "it's just a computer" was a plausible explanation for the person's stupidity, leaving the only logical conclusion to be that they were simply talking to an incredibly stupid person, or one which was intentionally trying to be a pain in the ass.
I was looking for a MAME ROM where I had the EXACT spelling and Google kept misspelling it and giving me other stuff with no way to get the actual item at all.
Google is a complete pain in the ass sometimes. I don't recall exactly what I was searching for, but I was once searching for something about decibels, in which I knew that the content I was looking for would never mention the full word, but only the abbreviation "dB" instead. Google assumed that the "db" in my search query was an abbreviation for "database" and I never could figure out how to get it to stop giving me nothing but results about databases.
I got the world's best game controller, in my opinion -- the Logitech Cyberman II -- for playing this game.
And think I still have it... somewhere.
You'd better hope so if you want to play Descent again. It's impossible to find a joystick these days without a dead zone, a spot in the middle of the axis where you can wiggle the stick a little without the value reported to the OS being changed.
Descent, being designed for proper joysticks, is simply incompatible with dead zones. You need to turn slowly left, so you move the stick a little, and nothing happens. Your brain's immediate instinct is to assume it simply moved the stick too little, and so it tries moving it twice as far, but still, nothing happens. So then your brain doubles that, but still, nothing happens, as you've only just now reached the edge of the dead zone. So your brain doubles up again, and suddenly you're turning 8x faster than you wanted.
I tired, but it's apparently impossible for the brain to learn the limits of the dead zone such that it can reliably move the stick just barely past the dead zone to make a slow turn.
I actually thought about making a Descent-like game about a year ago, but attempting to play the old Descent with modern joysticks revealed the above problem, and without a proper joystick, there's just no fucking point.
"I started paying for cable back in the late 70s to early 80s, with the intention that my monthly bill was a replacement for having to watch all those stupid advertisements-- exactly as advertised-- with the perk that I would have more reliable and higher quality of service."
This is getting sad. I see this posted somewhere in the comments of every article about cable television on Slashdot. Aren't people on Slashdot supposed to be smart enough to not accept facts without question simply because they support whatever argument they'd like to make?
It does seem some people on the internet are smart enough to question the story: link and link.
Others seem far too blinded by their desire to believe the story to realize just how likely it is that it is complete bullshit, like this guy who even put "fairy tale" in the title of his story. At first I thought maybe he was presenting it as a fairy tale, but with no argument against the story being presented, I can only conclude that he believes that commercial-free cable television did exist at one time, but has now become a "fairy tale" as it no longer exists.
The problem is: if an electrostatic potential existed in the parts to begin with, separating the plates should diminish it, because if you squish a capacitor the charge is supposed to increase. So, in inverse must be true, right?
A capacitor with plates closer together has a higher capacitance. This means that a voltage applied to that capacitor will cause more charge (a.k.a. electrons) to move between the plates, or in other words, it means that less voltage is required to cause the same amount of charge to move between the plates. So if you have two capacitors with identical charge, the one with plates closer together has a lower voltage, and the one with plates further apart has higher voltage.
So whatever charge is on two surfaces, when you pull those surfaces apart, you increase the voltage between them.
...or just turn their own customers against them. Presumably these people require some sort of proof of having paid the fine before they'll reimburse people. Just offer that proof to anyone who asks for it whether they've paid the fine or not. People who don't pay for the trains probably also have no issues with occasionally getting a free $150 from the people insuring them against their $150 fines.
It can't shoot down the aircraft, but not shooting it down means other people are harmed.
This is why the ends don't justify the means. As soon as someone says "the ends justify the means" it gives everyone an excuse to use any solution to a problem, even if it isn't the best solution. An intelligent robot would figure out some way to stop the plane without killing anyone.
Also, while it doesn't apply in this case since the people on the airplane will die whether the robot does anything or not, consider a situation where a robot (with magical all-knowing predictive powers) can save ten people by killing one innocent person. What makes the robot so special (aside from the magical all-knowing predictive powers) that it gets to decide who lives and who dies? Even if we assume that ten lives are better than one, how do we know that one person wouldn't go on to save thousands of lives? Sometimes the only moral choice is to let fate do what fate is going to do. Just because you'll never know what that one innocent person might have done later in his life doesn't mean it's OK that you killed him to save ten others.
The simple fact is that the ends don't justify the means. The morality of one's inactions is an important thing to think about, but nowhere near as important as the morality of one's actions. If the world were full of people who often fail to do good things, but who at least never intentionally do bad things, it'd be a fairly nice place, especially compared with a world where people often do bad things because they think they're good, a.k.a. the world we have now. Even those terrorists on that plane think they're doing the right thing, and so a set of morals that allow you to kill innocent people as long as you have a good reason aren't all that useful.
Time Warner Cable kind of has. They use the "copy once" flag which makes it impossible to use MythTV as there are no cable card compatible tuners that will stream to non-DRM systems. So you're left paying $10/mo for the DVR and $13/mo for "DVR Service" whatever that is.
You can get a TiVo instead of using MythTV, but it kind of defeats the purpose if you just end up taking the money you save and using it to pay for "TiVo Service" which costs $15/mo with a one-year commitment and a $75 early termination fee. Unfortunately the FAQ doesn't mention their excuse for raping their customers like that, as I'd be quite interested to know. With MythTV you can get channel listings for $25/year, a.k.a. $2/mo, or with over-the-air programming you can get listings data from the over-the-air signal, though I still pay for the listings as they're higher quality, e.g. they indicate whether a showing is a new episode or a re-run.
What the fuck? ET is a great movie. You were just a stupid kid.
I have to agree. One of my favorite parts of the movie is in the beginning when the teens are playing D&D and order a pizza, as the dialogue and interactions are much more realistic than anything I'd expect to see in a movie from that time or even in the present. It wasn't even a crucial scene, so they could have easily just wrote some standard obviously-scripted dialog and left it at that, but instead they aimed higher and decided to film something that resembled reality.
I wish more films were as bad as E.T.
There's enough death and misery in the news.
It's not just the news, it's television in general. The most disgusting are the shows that detail real-life murders, complete with actual crime scene photographs, as if when someone is murdered, their unfortunate death should become some corporation's profits and everyone else's entertainment.
The idea I should have to earn (and pay for) a license before I have the privilege of transmitting over the airwaves disgusts me.
I feel the same way about it. I can understand wanting to license people who want to build their own transceivers, and maybe even those who want to develop their own modulation schemes and data protocols, but the fact that a HAM can't design and build some nice little ARPS transceivers for his friends and neighbors and allow them to use the devices without having their own license doesn't make any sense to me. Especially if the device were to transmit his call sign when in use so that people know who to talk to if the device or its user misbehaves. The radio spectrum is a natural resource, so I don't understand why less than 1% of it belongs to the public. There's no reason why we should all be paying monthly fees to cell phone companies when ARPS shows us that volunteers are more than capable of running a public text messaging system for free.
When I looked into HAM radio, I just couldn't see anything that appealed to me. I'm not the kind of person who cares to try to see how far away I can communicate with the least amount of power just for shits and giggles. I'd want to build digital devices, using my own data protocols, and maybe experiment with new modulation schemes, but the FCC dictates what you're allowed to transmit and what modulation schemes you're allowed to use. I don't even know how they ended up with ARPS since, from what I saw when I looked into HAM radio, no one would have been allowed to start the project because, by virtue of being new, it wouldn't have been on the list of things that people are permitted to do.
Anyway, I eventually lost interest, but if I still cared I'd probably either use CB or FRS and just ignore the fact that what I was doing with those frequencies was illegal since it's unlikely anyone who heard the transmissions would give a shit anyway. Around here, both bands are rather vacant, so it's unlikely anyone would even notice what I was doing, never mind anyone caring about it.
I'd say my biggest complaint was the lack of a servo control for speed, meaning that a tape recorded on one deck might play faster or slower on another.
Actually, the speed was controlled. You could feed those little motors whatever voltage you wanted and they'd continue to spin at the same speed. The problem was that the path between the motor and the tape movement contained a lot of variables, in particular a smooth rubber belt on pulleys doesn't guarantee a fixed rotational ratio like you get with gears, though I imagine that design was necessary to allow the flywheel to actually do its job and ensure a constant speed.
The big issue was that the things often just weren't calibrated well. As a kid, I liked to play my keyboard along with the music, but every time I got a new cassette player I had to take the thing apart and adjust the potentiometer in the motor until the music was in tune. After that, most store-bought tapes would be in tune, and I imagine those that weren't were more due to artists recording their music without bothering to tune their guitars properly than to the recording speed being incorrect.
I never had any of the sound quality issues people love to complain about. I had one tape that I had listened to for years, even breaking my own rules about where my tapes go by putting it into "untrusted" players, like the one in my car. So one day I thought I had probably degraded the sound quality by now, and so I bought a new copy, but I found it to be indistinguishable from the old copy. When I switched to CDs, it wasn't even because of better sound quality, because they simply weren't better in that regard. ...and why should they be? Tape can be as good as you want it to be simply by increasing the tape speed.
The Original Meaning of "Hacker" (Score:-1)
Wow... Suggest that everyone's happy delusion might actually be false and not only do you get no evidence to the contrary of your suggestion, but you get modded down as a troll as well. So much for discussion and the search for truth. I guess I'll have to find another web site if I want that.
I prefer restoring the original meaning of the "hacker" badge to its original lofty meaning
I know that "hacker" originally meaning "talented programmer" is common knowledge on Slashdot, but is this story actually true?
The idea just seems like a popular meme. Slashdot is full of nerds. Nerds like to call themselves "hackers" because it sounds cool. Then someone introduces them to the idea that they're not calling themselves criminals because that's not what the word "hacker" originally meant, and they absorb that supposed fact without question because they so deeply want it to be true.
Is it actually true? Are there any references that support this history of the word's meaning that are of higher quality than "everyone on the internet says it's true?"
Even the Wikipedia article about the definition controversy lacks any citations relevant to the supposed original meaning, even as it makes statements like "the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized" which just scream for a "citation needed" tag.
Look for the average hours to shrink further as more and more employers seek to avoid Obamacare costs.
If everyone stopped working 40 hours and instead worked only 32, we'd need 25% more employees to make up the difference. That would eliminate unemployment overnight. With unemployment eliminated, employers would have to compete for employees, which would drive up wages and result in more benefits like health insurance.
We already did it once during the great depression, when the standard 40 hour work week was invented. Before that, everyone worked 80 hour weeks, and they had no choice due to a mountain of people desperate for a job. If you didn't like it, you were immediately replaced by someone in the line of people literally sitting outside your employer's front door.
With automation continuing to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, we're slowly returning to that situation. Obviously we need to reduce the standard work week yet again to get things back to where we want them.
Labor prices don't respond to the free market. If you pay people less, all that happens is that their spouses enter the work force as well, and now there are even more people competing for the job you're offering, and so you can reduce wages yet again.
You know, you could always FIX THE BROKEN LINK! :P
...or just not break it in the first place.
The problem stems from the URL being a machine address necessary to acquire content, but one that is also human-readable which inspires people to treat it as if it were the page's title or something and so they edit it as freely as they edit the page's content.
Just name all of your web pages by UUID. Then, since one random number is just as good as any other, you'll never again have the urge to change your URLs.
Similarly, just use random UUIDs as domain names, and you'll never again be bothered by having your first choice be unavailable. An added advantage of this is that you can name your site whatever you want regardless of what domain names are available since you've decided that your domain name doesn't have to match your web site's name. Suddenly the fact that virtually every domain name is being squatted upon no longer matters.
If it truly bothers me, I can buy a compatible cable or DSL modem
I bought my own cable modem after TWC increased the monthly charge for the modem lease and I realized that if I bought my own it would pay for itself in only a year.
The configuration page for the modem has two buttons. One resets the modem. The other disables a DHCP feature which is only in effect when the modem isn't connected to the cable company's network, as the only reason for the feature is to allow you to view the modem's status pages. (Normally the device behind the modem gets its address via DHCP, and so without a cable connection, you wouldn't get an address and so you'd be unable to access the status pages.) There's literally nothing else the modem does that is under my control. I can't even update the firmware -- any firmware updates have to come over the cable network.
Apparently this is what the DOCSIS standards require. I may own the device, but the cable company determines how it operates, since they own the network.
The only good side of this is that it really doesn't matter as long as your modem isn't also your firewall. Even if your ISP couldn't spy on you by hacking your modem, they could still spy on you from the next hop towards the internet which is also under their control. It only becomes interesting if they can hack a device with access to your LAN, which is the case if your modem is also your router, which is a strong argument for why it shouldn't be.
The really shocking thing about this story is that the backdoor was (and still is) so unprotected. You expect that your ISP can snoop on your internet traffic, but when anyone anywhere on the internet can, that's a serious vulnerability. From the sound of it, the fix apparently closes the backdoor only until it is explicitly opened by the ISP, at which point it is once again available to anyone anywhere on the internet. How can people be this incompetent?
Slashdot isn't what it used to be. This site has become total shit over the years.
I like to pretend it always was shit, and that I and many others have simply become more intelligent over the years and so we're now able to see through it. It makes me feel better as it implies that people are becoming smarter and so there's still some hope for the world.
There was some exploitation of the bug very soon after disclosure, but I can't see a way to win here. You can't tell everyone about the bug without telling the bad guys...
Actually you can. An AC in another story figured it out, and was promptly modded all the way up to +1.
You simply tell everyone that there is a vulnerability, but you do not tell them any details about what the vulnerability is. Instead, you simply announce a release date & time for a patch. People can either shut down their servers until the patch is released, or, if they're feeling lucky, they can keep running the old code until the patch is released since no one actually knows what the vulnerability is and so, in theory, they're in no more danger than they were the day before. Then, at the announced time, you release the patch, and because of the pre-release announcement, everyone with vulnerable servers has already taken them off-line, and so no one gets fucked by the patch essentially telling the hackers about the exploit.