A friend and I nearly got bounced out of an electronica concert at the door due to homebrew wearable blinkenlights (err yes, this was in Boston). As some other posters has suggested, Instructables might do well to devote a section to "making your homemade circuits look purchased" so as not to attract nuisance Homeland Security attention and/or jail time. (Although, the Mooninite boards that ground Boston to a halt in January were professionally manufactured, and appeared to be machine-populated boards. They even masked the boards in black solder mask (unlike the boring green mask on most circuit boards), which costs extra for small runs.)
Heh, exactly. When going back to an older, more stable, less bloated version of something, I prefer to call it "retrograding" (sounds a lot nicer besides more accurate;)
"boo hoo, y'all shoulda had a nightly(/hourly/minutely) backup server running off of an OC-3 in your basement" - all of slashdot so far
So wait...has nobody yet noticed the part in TFS where the guys took the money and ran? Yes, people should have local backups of all their files, databases and UGC, but that doesn't make it acceptable business practice to keep billing customers with no intention of paying your upstream, knowing that the company will not last the month but choosing to keep it a secret until after the servers can be unplugged. (Along with "shoulda backed up" UGC goes any email that arrived since each customer's last login, etc.) FWIW, "but other companies have done it" doesn't make it ethical or acceptable either.
Usually when their attempts at defamation / trademark infringement rulings fail, they go right for the deep end of tort law - "interference with contract" (user agreed contractually to install this trash) or "tortious interference with prospective economic advantage"...that one's a hoot.
The new (or not even so new) wave in portable gadget batteries and charging circuitry is the battery-authentication IC. Companies like Microchip, TI and Dallas/Maxim offer these for around $1 in quantity, with levels of nastiness all the way up to SHA-1 encryption between the battery pack and the charger. Of course, the companies behind them claim they're necessary to protect the consumer from counterfeit or underspec'ed aftermarket battery packs.
Yes folks, slapping in a replacement battery pack for some discontinued gadget can now be a DMCA violation. I wouldn't be surprised to see other manufacturers following Apple's "lead" by using the existing chips to tie a specific battery and charger together, rather than just a specific model of battery as they currently do. At any rate, it just means more inconvenience, frustration and expense for end-users, and more ability for manufacturers to get away with anticompetitive practices while claiming all the while they are in the consumer's best interest.
So to make things less annoying for the 4dv4nc3d us3rz, you performed the version check via a simple string comparison with the string in plaintext inside the executable, right?;-)
Fond memories back to the days of non- or pseudo-p2p programs, a la AudioGalaxy. Some of these would have a very...ambitious...upgrade cycle, with the latest version being required (via version-check) to connect to the network. Of course in many cases the codebase was already stable - maybe a couple minor bugs were fixed in the process, but mainly the forced upgrades occurred as the developer's array of "partners" (spyware/adware bundles) changed. Since the protocols/etc. hadn't changed, simply opening the executable in Wordpad (who needs a hex editor? The version string is known plaintext) and performing the "upgrade" yourself would buy a few more months' usage until the next batch of foistware was introduced.
Mathematically sound solution, no algebra required. Although the bigger problem I find with "seat down" isn't one of power efficiency (number of seat state changes) but that leaving the seat down on any public facility leads to it getting pissed on by slobs, which isn't much good to anybody.
you can argue about whether Mr. Smarty Toilet should be programmed to lift the lid, or both lid and seat. That is, until they come up with the next generation of toilets than can differentiate between individual people...
Alternatively, use existing face recognition technology to determine if a face is present (i.e. which way the user is facing). There are situations (for example, 2 hrs after eating at White Castle) where men want the seat down too.
There's the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words (bandwidth-wise, it may be accurate!). Non-spam marketdroids have been using evocative pictures to get their points across for countless years. Yet in every image spam I've ever received, the image contains only text--distored text, psychedelic colored text, garbaged text, text over confetti, text over random noise... I have yet to see a big colorful graphic of a Little Blue Pill cross my inbox.
In college I created a Half-Life map of one of the buildings on campus. My hallmates and I had lots of fun blowing each other to smithereens in it, just like every other multiplayer map to date. (This was when HL was *the* FPS to multiplayer in, obviously post-Columbine.)
Why did I map a campus building...because I'm a sick sadist who's a homicide risk? No. Simply because it was a familiar building I spent hours in almost every day. Without getting out of your chair, sketch the floorplan of your favorite building on graph paper from memory. You'll be amazed at how quickly your rendition diverges from reality. If all the space is accurately accounted for in your drawing at all, walls all line up, etc., give yourself a gold star. Now project it into 3-D (including any vaulted ceilings, swooping staircases, curvatures and various other non-orthogonal geometry) and add wall coloration, lighting, etc. to the mix, and prepare to be amazed how poorly you really know any building.
Microsoft is going to reverse-engineer and patch my old copy of Paintshop Pro 5? Proxomitron? Winamp 2.7? Thousands of other "good, old" programs that are no longer maintained or supported, yet you'll have to pry from peoples' cold, dead hands?
So basically... if I make MS Word try to open the Windows equivalent of/dev/random as a.doc file, it'll crash. How...inconvenient. Sure, there's this small-but-nonzero chance that such crashes are an exploitable vulnerability. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't (I don't have my disassembler handy)...but if they aren't, I don't give a damn about them, and I'd be surprised if the Word development team felt differently. One in a million users might rename their favorite Black Sabbath mp3 to a.doc file to look for hidden satanic messages, or whatever, but I wouldn't exactly consider this a showstopper--especially one that the devs should waste time fixing in preference of Word's more serious issues. How about not randomly changing fonts and sizes when you delete neighboring paragraphs or copy/move text around? It seems since Word 95 onward (at least up to Office 2003), they decided to reimplement the Delete key as a "randomize font sizes" key.
The light-changer beam already uses infrared, right? They could just put bright IR beams alongside the license plate so that the cheap CCD/CMOS cameras can't read it:-)
I think that's meant to mean "non-lawyerly", not "unlawful". I've only seen one reputationdefender letter (referring to lawful-speech materials posted online), and it was essentially a long, polite persuasive letter asking the poster to cut the client some slack and un-publish the information. (The letter was ignored and there was nothing further heard on the matter.)
Slashdot Mirror
Icy to dull the pain, hot to relax it away?
And to avoid your friends thinking you're loony toony.
Without sharing:
"Oww, this fish is too piping hot to eat!" - You
"Umm, are you going crazy? This dish is served cold." -Everyone Else
With sharing:
"Ack, this shit's too hot!" - You
"Right on brother." - Everyone
Mayor Menino! Is that you?
A friend and I nearly got bounced out of an electronica concert at the door due to homebrew wearable blinkenlights (err yes, this was in Boston). As some other posters has suggested, Instructables might do well to devote a section to "making your homemade circuits look purchased" so as not to attract nuisance Homeland Security attention and/or jail time. (Although, the Mooninite boards that ground Boston to a halt in January were professionally manufactured, and appeared to be machine-populated boards. They even masked the boards in black solder mask (unlike the boring green mask on most circuit boards), which costs extra for small runs.)
Heh, exactly. When going back to an older, more stable, less bloated version of something, I prefer to call it "retrograding" (sounds a lot nicer besides more accurate ;)
"boo hoo, y'all shoulda had a nightly(/hourly/minutely) backup server running off of an OC-3 in your basement" - all of slashdot so far
So wait...has nobody yet noticed the part in TFS where the guys took the money and ran? Yes, people should have local backups of all their files, databases and UGC, but that doesn't make it acceptable business practice to keep billing customers with no intention of paying your upstream, knowing that the company will not last the month but choosing to keep it a secret until after the servers can be unplugged. (Along with "shoulda backed up" UGC goes any email that arrived since each customer's last login, etc.) FWIW, "but other companies have done it" doesn't make it ethical or acceptable either.
Heh, I don't recommend clicking this link if you use IE.
Usually when their attempts at defamation / trademark infringement rulings fail, they go right for the deep end of tort law - "interference with contract" (user agreed contractually to install this trash) or "tortious interference with prospective economic advantage"...that one's a hoot.
The new (or not even so new) wave in portable gadget batteries and charging circuitry is the battery-authentication IC. Companies like Microchip, TI and Dallas/Maxim offer these for around $1 in quantity, with levels of nastiness all the way up to SHA-1 encryption between the battery pack and the charger. Of course, the companies behind them claim they're necessary to protect the consumer from counterfeit or underspec'ed aftermarket battery packs.
http://www.edn.com/article/CA6301616.html
Yes folks, slapping in a replacement battery pack for some discontinued gadget can now be a DMCA violation. I wouldn't be surprised to see other manufacturers following Apple's "lead" by using the existing chips to tie a specific battery and charger together, rather than just a specific model of battery as they currently do. At any rate, it just means more inconvenience, frustration and expense for end-users, and more ability for manufacturers to get away with anticompetitive practices while claiming all the while they are in the consumer's best interest.
So to make things less annoying for the 4dv4nc3d us3rz, you performed the version check via a simple string comparison with the string in plaintext inside the executable, right? ;-)
Fond memories back to the days of non- or pseudo-p2p programs, a la AudioGalaxy. Some of these would have a very...ambitious...upgrade cycle, with the latest version being required (via version-check) to connect to the network. Of course in many cases the codebase was already stable - maybe a couple minor bugs were fixed in the process, but mainly the forced upgrades occurred as the developer's array of "partners" (spyware/adware bundles) changed. Since the protocols/etc. hadn't changed, simply opening the executable in Wordpad (who needs a hex editor? The version string is known plaintext) and performing the "upgrade" yourself would buy a few more months' usage until the next batch of foistware was introduced.
Don't do it! I've always been telling my officemate, "you code like my ass". Now it will be true...
Score: -1, Pedantic
the word "wave" is usually reserved for theoretical treatments in published papers.
..."?
You mean in the context of "Big Hand
Mathematically sound solution, no algebra required. Although the bigger problem I find with "seat down" isn't one of power efficiency (number of seat state changes) but that leaving the seat down on any public facility leads to it getting pissed on by slobs, which isn't much good to anybody.
So you're saying the real problem isn't that they don't know how to operate the seat, but that they don't know how to operate the light switch?
you can argue about whether Mr. Smarty Toilet should be programmed to lift the lid, or both lid and seat. That is, until they come up with the next generation of toilets than can differentiate between individual people...
Alternatively, use existing face recognition technology to determine if a face is present (i.e. which way the user is facing). There are situations (for example, 2 hrs after eating at White Castle) where men want the seat down too.
Yikes, this makes two consecutive stories where this post would be entirely on-topic and +5 Funny.
There's the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words (bandwidth-wise, it may be accurate!). Non-spam marketdroids have been using evocative pictures to get their points across for countless years. Yet in every image spam I've ever received, the image contains only text--distored text, psychedelic colored text, garbaged text, text over confetti, text over random noise... I have yet to see a big colorful graphic of a Little Blue Pill cross my inbox.
In college I created a Half-Life map of one of the buildings on campus. My hallmates and I had lots of fun blowing each other to smithereens in it, just like every other multiplayer map to date. (This was when HL was *the* FPS to multiplayer in, obviously post-Columbine.)
Why did I map a campus building...because I'm a sick sadist who's a homicide risk? No. Simply because it was a familiar building I spent hours in almost every day. Without getting out of your chair, sketch the floorplan of your favorite building on graph paper from memory. You'll be amazed at how quickly your rendition diverges from reality. If all the space is accurately accounted for in your drawing at all, walls all line up, etc., give yourself a gold star. Now project it into 3-D (including any vaulted ceilings, swooping staircases, curvatures and various other non-orthogonal geometry) and add wall coloration, lighting, etc. to the mix, and prepare to be amazed how poorly you really know any building.
Heh, and here I've been using cosmic roundoff error to explain free will.
Microsoft is going to reverse-engineer and patch my old copy of Paintshop Pro 5? Proxomitron? Winamp 2.7? Thousands of other "good, old" programs that are no longer maintained or supported, yet you'll have to pry from peoples' cold, dead hands?
So basically... if I make MS Word try to open the Windows equivalent of /dev/random as a .doc file, it'll crash. How...inconvenient. Sure, there's this small-but-nonzero chance that such crashes are an exploitable vulnerability. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't (I don't have my disassembler handy)...but if they aren't, I don't give a damn about them, and I'd be surprised if the Word development team felt differently. One in a million users might rename their favorite Black Sabbath mp3 to a .doc file to look for hidden satanic messages, or whatever, but I wouldn't exactly consider this a showstopper--especially one that the devs should waste time fixing in preference of Word's more serious issues. How about not randomly changing fonts and sizes when you delete neighboring paragraphs or copy/move text around? It seems since Word 95 onward (at least up to Office 2003), they decided to reimplement the Delete key as a "randomize font sizes" key.
The light-changer beam already uses infrared, right? They could just put bright IR beams alongside the license plate so that the cheap CCD/CMOS cameras can't read it :-)
I think that's meant to mean "non-lawyerly", not "unlawful". I've only seen one reputationdefender letter (referring to lawful-speech materials posted online), and it was essentially a long, polite persuasive letter asking the poster to cut the client some slack and un-publish the information. (The letter was ignored and there was nothing further heard on the matter.)
*woosh*