My kids' school in FL has a 90 minute continuous reading block (not sure if it's a county or state law or something) at the expense of the other classes. Pretty much the only thing the school teaches now-a-days is items that will be on the FCAT.... so math and reading is pretty much what the whole school day is focused on.
I like that they are getting tough with schools and doing something to try to make them better, but it's just not good policy to focus your entire curriculum around one test and it's even worse to do that at the expense of other necessary curricula. Kids need PE, they need art, they need music and they even need recess. Cutting these things out of their day doesn't make better students, it makes better FCAT takers... that's not what I want for my kids.
Actually, since astronauts are too cool and have too big egos, none of them want to be called co-pilot, so the guy who is actually the co-pilot gets bumped up to the title 'pilot' and the guy (or girl in this case) who is really the pilot gets bumped up to 'Commander'.
I didn't read all of your comment, so i'm not commenting on it as a whole. Your first sentence is WRONG. And i'm very sick of hearing people say that same thing. You most certainly CAN prove a negative. People do it all the time.
There are no.45 handguns on my desk. Negative statement. To prove, examine each square inch of desk area and determine if gun is there, if not then statement is proven.
No person exists who is a tomato. Negative statement. To prove, look at each and every person and determine if they are a tomato or not. (use whatever criteria it takes to convince you of that) and when you are done, you have proven the negative statement.
These are simple examples but let me assure you that much more complex ones happen in formal mathematics, logic and combinitorics all the time. Maybe you don't know about them, but that doesn't mean they are not there and by saying 'You can't prove a negative' you just make yourself sound uneducated.
attribute our whole existance to pure chance, and not just any old pure chance but some REALLY large odds.
It's only really large odds because you are looking at it from the end point. Try looking at it like this: Make a single elimination competition ladder. (You know the ones for almost every sporting event, where the winner advances and the loser goes home). The eventual winner will have been through 5 rounds of increasingly difficult competition and won every time. When he started out, the odds were overwhelming 1 in 64 shot... so the 5 time winner will have overcome "REALLY large odds". But in every competition like this there WILL be a winner and that winner WILL win 5 straight matches and overcome those same amazing odds.... Not big enough of odds for you??? If you had 128 competitors it would have been a 6 time winner the exact same way but with 1 in 128 odds, 256 competitors would have made a 7 time winner overcoming 1 in 256 odds.... You can just keep increasing the number exponentially until you come up with your own personal approximation for the odds of humans evolving out of the primordial muck.... it could be one in 10 trillion odds.... but something would have overcome those odds... in in our case it just happened to be us. There is nothing so special about us that we HAD to be the result of the 10 trillion molecular interactions, it just happened that way...
It is reckless because by law of averages the time will come where it is your turn to pay the piper. If you rely on gambling income for your livelihood then you may put you and your family out on the street.
This is very true. But it applies only to the casino games. The odds are stacked against you and over a long enough timeline you WILL lose... even in blackjack, the game with best odds, you will eventually lose your shirt. Poker, however, is not a game where the odds are stacked against you. Poker is a skill game of player against player and to pro poker players is definately NOT gambling. Those players that are truly gifted can go on for years and years with consistant winnings.
Driving is in no way, shape, or form a "right." It is a privilege that you are afforded.
That's just what you are brainwashed to think. No one would argue that it's not your right to walk places if you chose. Personal mobility is part of personal liberty. But at the next step, is it a right or a priviledge to ride a bike? How about to ride a horse?
At what point does it, fundamentally, make a difference what your vehicle is that your personal mobility is not your right?
The 'driving is a priviledge' BS is just a loophole that legislators take advantage of to be able to deny it to some people. If it were a right they couldn't deny it to anyone. Owning a gun in this country has become a priviledge not a right.... even though it was, supposedly, built into the Bill of 'Rights'. Even free speech is becoming free only for the priviledged.
I think some people reading this thread aren't quite understanding that a fingerprint scanner or retinal scanner are not the holy grail in security.
I suppose it's easy to think that it is. A four digit pin means 9999 possible combinations. There are potentially infinite possible fingerprints and NOBODY has the same one.
A PIN number's data space can be represented in 14 bits. A fingerprint template can be represented in 1 kilobyte. It sounds a lot more secure. There's 2^3 bits to a byte and 2^10 bytes to a kilobyte so there's 2^13 bits to a kilobyte. 8192 bits! That's 585 times the number of bits! It must be more secure.
But it's just bits. That's all it is. Zeros and ones. Your four digit pin is a sequence of 14 zeros or ones. You fingerprint is a sequence of 8192 zeros and ones. Your retinal scan will be a longer sequence of zeros and ones. IF I KNOW THE SEQUENCE, how much harder is it for me to send a 8192 of them than 14? It's not, it's the same thing to a computer.
So you casually stroll up to a fake ATM. Insert your card and type in your pin. The fake machine does everything a standard ATM would do. It encodes the input of the magnetic stripe from your card and encodes your pin number. It does some nifty calculations and dials up the bank network and sends the encoded data... they do a real legitimate transaction and the device dispenses your money. Later, the crook looks at the ATM log he set up to capture your information and can send it again to clean out your account (or if there is a hard daily limit, again and again till someone notices or the account is cleaned). Pretty vulnerable.
With a fingerprint scanner ATM, you casually stroll up to the fake fingerprint scanning ATM. Insert your card and let it scan your print. The fake machine does everything a standard ATM would do.... The transaction is recorded and the crook can come back later and do it again.
There is no added security in using a fingerprint in this context. The only difference? You can't change your fingerprints. It's actually LESS secure.
The only way fingerprint or retinal scanning can be more secure than password based authentication is if you have actual physical security to ensure that the hardware is not compromised. In an ATM context that is just not possible.
I've done the monochrome thing, and our C64 had a tape drive, but i had to look up the Robert Smith/Steven Morrissey reference.
Turns out, Robert Smith is the singer for 'The Cure', and Morrissey (didn't actually use a first name, kinda like Madonna) was the singer from 'The Smiths'.
If such a system eventually gets built and many years down the road the U.S. decides to invade a country which uses the Galileo system for its weaponry, what's to keep the U.S. from jamming and disabling their systems for a clean sweep?
Of course... that's *THE POINT*. The US wants to maintain a strategic advantage that they have bought and paid for (the current GPS system). They don't want it obsoleted by a new-fangled one. Especially an independent European one. You can't fault the US for this. You can't even fault the administration for flexing it's superpower status to cock-block at every turn. That's what nations do, act in their own best interests. Especially in matters of war. It cannot be otherwise. War is not fair and the big guy will use his big guy status to stay the big guy. That's the reality of politics from the international level, right down to the local and even inter-personal level.
Other states should have the capabilities which the United States takes for granted.
Maybe they should. And if they develop these capabilities, then nobody can say they shouldn't. But it's on them to develop them. If they can't stand up to american pressure, then apparently they didn't want them badly enough. You can't fault the US for doing all it can to protect it's interests, you CAN fault the EU for NOT doing all it can to protect it's own interests.
I did mean the C64 (64 whole K of memory, wow)... No, not all systems were incapable of good graphics, but there were many that were. To cater to the lowest common denominator, and in the interests of transmission speed (which was real money, when talking about phone bills) ANSI and ASCII art were the way to go, especially on BBS splash screens.
Back in the stone age, you know, before 1990, when modem speed was measured in baud and 300 of them was pretty good, people used to connect to BBSes as their primitive form of an internet. These were sort of stand-alone websites that you had to dial into directly (yes, over real phone lines). Since 300 baud modems transmit data at dismally slow speeds (and besides computer graphics displays were still primitive) it was necessary to provide any graphics content in a format that was easily and quickly transmitted and supported by the hardware. And by hardware, we're talking about Commodores and Amigas and early IBM PCs.
Today, it's primitive and low-res but Back In The Day(tm), this type of art was the shiz-nit. Art packs (ok, these were mostly ANSI, not ASCII but similar vein) were traded across the country from BBS to BBS.
If you've never tried to draw anything with giant multicolored blocks, you can't understand the talent that goes into this art medium. The ACiD guys were REALLY good.
That was, of course, unless you had the source book that gave rules for forging credsticks. Then everyone with enough nuyen to invest had a virtually undetectable fake credstick with unlimited funds.
But it seems that this weapon would work wonderfully against the US, Europe, and other highly developed countries with armies that rely heavily on electronics.
Well, it would if military hardware weren't hardened against EMP. The US has been preparing since the 50's for a war that involved nuclear weapons. The effects of EMP caused circuit disruptions has been understood at least since then. The application of a Faraday cage will catch and ground the pulse energy sufficiently to protect electronic circuits. This is almost a non-issue.
For military hardware.
Unprotected circuits (read: civilian) are and remain extremely vulnerable to such attacks. This is really where this technology is scary. In a crowded urban area it could really disrupt a LOT of vital systems.
A logo makes your group that much more credible. And real credibility makes your group one step closer to having that one thing that every group really wants: corporate sponsorship.
It might start off small, the team jackets would have only a small "Eat at Lou's" on them. Before long they are bright orange with the Home Depot logo as well as the flyer logo.
Yup, after a bit like that, it's just a matter of what price the group will sell out to Microsoft for. And let's be honest, that's the real goal here.
The problem with sci-fi today is that nothing is fresh. Well, ok, very little is fresh. The space fantasy has been done to death. Star Wars, Star Trek, Asimov, AC Clarke... hell, even Buck Rogers and the like. Also, the dragon-slaying, wizards and warriors D&D fantasy genre has been done to death (but has aged well). Sticking your work in either of these genres pretty much guarantees that you will be overlooked in the MILLIONS of other books in the genre.
The freshest stuff in sci-fi in the last 20 years is the cyberpunk genre. This is, IMHO, the cutting edge of sci-fi. Set in the near-future, incorporating a lot of today's tech, the stories are not out of touch with today's reality and the genre hasn't been over-exploited (yet). They make for fresh sci-fi worlds but can easily touch on themes and stories that we can relate to.
If you haven't looked into cyberpunk, pick up some books by Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, or William Gibson. Esp. Neuromancer, Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Definately worth your time.
The key is to identify the part of the signal which has the desired properties: random, uniform distribution.
Well, that's just the point. The resolution of the device you use has to be up to the standards of randomness you want. Using ambient temperature to one-tenth of a degree isn't very random... to a hundredth is a little more, to a thousandth a little more... etc. etc. But you are only as random as your machine is precise.
The question is if you can make an ambient temperature measurement device that is precise enough to outperform other techniques. It is possible to measure 'how random' a set of numbers is and it's possible to compare these measurements. Most of the time numbers generated from sources that follow a sine wave aren't random enough to outperform numbers from non-sinusodial sources like a lava lamp. Inexpensive electronics just don't have the precision.
Slashdot Mirror
My kids' school in FL has a 90 minute continuous reading block (not sure if it's a county or state law or something) at the expense of the other classes. Pretty much the only thing the school teaches now-a-days is items that will be on the FCAT.... so math and reading is pretty much what the whole school day is focused on.
I like that they are getting tough with schools and doing something to try to make them better, but it's just not good policy to focus your entire curriculum around one test and it's even worse to do that at the expense of other necessary curricula. Kids need PE, they need art, they need music and they even need recess. Cutting these things out of their day doesn't make better students, it makes better FCAT takers... that's not what I want for my kids.
What you actually heard was more of a Boom BOOOM. There are actually two sonic booms caused by the nose first and then the tail.
Actually, since astronauts are too cool and have too big egos, none of them want to be called co-pilot, so the guy who is actually the co-pilot gets bumped up to the title 'pilot' and the guy (or girl in this case) who is really the pilot gets bumped up to 'Commander'.
I didn't read all of your comment, so i'm not commenting on it as a whole. Your first sentence is WRONG. And i'm very sick of hearing people say that same thing. You most certainly CAN prove a negative. People do it all the time.
.45 handguns on my desk. Negative statement. To prove, examine each square inch of desk area and determine if gun is there, if not then statement is proven.
There are no
No person exists who is a tomato. Negative statement. To prove, look at each and every person and determine if they are a tomato or not. (use whatever criteria it takes to convince you of that) and when you are done, you have proven the negative statement.
These are simple examples but let me assure you that much more complex ones happen in formal mathematics, logic and combinitorics all the time. Maybe you don't know about them, but that doesn't mean they are not there and by saying 'You can't prove a negative' you just make yourself sound uneducated.
REEAAL men of GENNIOUSSSS!!!!
When was the last time a manned space mission provided a new answer to a scientific question? Go to the library. Do a web search.
Well, that wasn't very hard. January 2003
attribute our whole existance to pure chance, and not just any old pure chance but some REALLY large odds.
.... it could be one in 10 trillion odds.... but something would have overcome those odds... in in our case it just happened to be us. There is nothing so special about us that we HAD to be the result of the 10 trillion molecular interactions, it just happened that way...
It's only really large odds because you are looking at it from the end point. Try looking at it like this:
Make a single elimination competition ladder. (You know the ones for almost every sporting event, where the winner advances and the loser goes home). The eventual winner will have been through 5 rounds of increasingly difficult competition and won every time. When he started out, the odds were overwhelming 1 in 64 shot... so the 5 time winner will have overcome "REALLY large odds". But in every competition like this there WILL be a winner and that winner WILL win 5 straight matches and overcome those same amazing odds.... Not big enough of odds for you??? If you had 128 competitors it would have been a 6 time winner the exact same way but with 1 in 128 odds, 256 competitors would have made a 7 time winner overcoming 1 in 256 odds.... You can just keep increasing the number exponentially until you come up with your own personal approximation for the odds of humans evolving out of the primordial muck
There is a saying about this that i like:
A camel is a horse that was designed by committee.
It is reckless because by law of averages the time will come where it is your turn to pay the piper. If you rely on gambling income for your livelihood then you may put you and your family out on the street.
This is very true. But it applies only to the casino games. The odds are stacked against you and over a long enough timeline you WILL lose... even in blackjack, the game with best odds, you will eventually lose your shirt. Poker, however, is not a game where the odds are stacked against you. Poker is a skill game of player against player and to pro poker players is definately NOT gambling. Those players that are truly gifted can go on for years and years with consistant winnings.
Actually, Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
Driving is in no way, shape, or form a "right." It is a privilege that you are afforded.
That's just what you are brainwashed to think. No one would argue that it's not your right to walk places if you chose. Personal mobility is part of personal liberty. But at the next step, is it a right or a priviledge to ride a bike? How about to ride a horse?
At what point does it, fundamentally, make a difference what your vehicle is that your personal mobility is not your right?
The 'driving is a priviledge' BS is just a loophole that legislators take advantage of to be able to deny it to some people. If it were a right they couldn't deny it to anyone. Owning a gun in this country has become a priviledge not a right.... even though it was, supposedly, built into the Bill of 'Rights'. Even free speech is becoming free only for the priviledged.
No, the slashdot crowd is going to have to start playing football and wearing letter jackets everywhere. They steal our culture, we'll steal theirs.
I think some people reading this thread aren't quite understanding that a fingerprint scanner or retinal scanner are not the holy grail in security.
... The transaction is recorded and the crook can come back later and do it again.
I suppose it's easy to think that it is. A four digit pin means 9999 possible combinations. There are potentially infinite possible fingerprints and NOBODY has the same one.
A PIN number's data space can be represented in 14 bits. A fingerprint template can be represented in 1 kilobyte. It sounds a lot more secure. There's 2^3 bits to a byte and 2^10 bytes to a kilobyte so there's 2^13 bits to a kilobyte. 8192 bits! That's 585 times the number of bits! It must be more secure.
But it's just bits. That's all it is. Zeros and ones. Your four digit pin is a sequence of 14 zeros or ones. You fingerprint is a sequence of 8192 zeros and ones. Your retinal scan will be a longer sequence of zeros and ones. IF I KNOW THE SEQUENCE, how much harder is it for me to send a 8192 of them than 14? It's not, it's the same thing to a computer.
So you casually stroll up to a fake ATM. Insert your card and type in your pin. The fake machine does everything a standard ATM would do. It encodes the input of the magnetic stripe from your card and encodes your pin number. It does some nifty calculations and dials up the bank network and sends the encoded data... they do a real legitimate transaction and the device dispenses your money. Later, the crook looks at the ATM log he set up to capture your information and can send it again to clean out your account (or if there is a hard daily limit, again and again till someone notices or the account is cleaned). Pretty vulnerable.
With a fingerprint scanner ATM, you casually stroll up to the fake fingerprint scanning ATM. Insert your card and let it scan your print. The fake machine does everything a standard ATM would do.
There is no added security in using a fingerprint in this context. The only difference? You can't change your fingerprints. It's actually LESS secure.
The only way fingerprint or retinal scanning can be more secure than password based authentication is if you have actual physical security to ensure that the hardware is not compromised. In an ATM context that is just not possible.
I've done the monochrome thing, and our C64 had a tape drive, but i had to look up the Robert Smith/Steven Morrissey reference.
Turns out, Robert Smith is the singer for 'The Cure', and Morrissey (didn't actually use a first name, kinda like Madonna) was the singer from 'The Smiths'.
If such a system eventually gets built and many years down the road the U.S. decides to invade a country which uses the Galileo system for its weaponry, what's to keep the U.S. from jamming and disabling their systems for a clean sweep?
Of course... that's *THE POINT*. The US wants to maintain a strategic advantage that they have bought and paid for (the current GPS system). They don't want it obsoleted by a new-fangled one. Especially an independent European one. You can't fault the US for this. You can't even fault the administration for flexing it's superpower status to cock-block at every turn. That's what nations do, act in their own best interests. Especially in matters of war. It cannot be otherwise. War is not fair and the big guy will use his big guy status to stay the big guy. That's the reality of politics from the international level, right down to the local and even inter-personal level.
Other states should have the capabilities which the United States takes for granted.
Maybe they should. And if they develop these capabilities, then nobody can say they shouldn't. But it's on them to develop them. If they can't stand up to american pressure, then apparently they didn't want them badly enough. You can't fault the US for doing all it can to protect it's interests, you CAN fault the EU for NOT doing all it can to protect it's own interests.
I did mean the C64 (64 whole K of memory, wow)... No, not all systems were incapable of good graphics, but there were many that were. To cater to the lowest common denominator, and in the interests of transmission speed (which was real money, when talking about phone bills) ANSI and ASCII art were the way to go, especially on BBS splash screens.
Back in the stone age, you know, before 1990, when modem speed was measured in baud and 300 of them was pretty good, people used to connect to BBSes as their primitive form of an internet. These were sort of stand-alone websites that you had to dial into directly (yes, over real phone lines). Since 300 baud modems transmit data at dismally slow speeds (and besides computer graphics displays were still primitive) it was necessary to provide any graphics content in a format that was easily and quickly transmitted and supported by the hardware. And by hardware, we're talking about Commodores and Amigas and early IBM PCs.
Today, it's primitive and low-res but Back In The Day(tm), this type of art was the shiz-nit. Art packs (ok, these were mostly ANSI, not ASCII but similar vein) were traded across the country from BBS to BBS.
If you've never tried to draw anything with giant multicolored blocks, you can't understand the talent that goes into this art medium. The ACiD guys were REALLY good.
That was, of course, unless you had the source book that gave rules for forging credsticks. Then everyone with enough nuyen to invest had a virtually undetectable fake credstick with unlimited funds.
Good times.
But it seems that this weapon would work wonderfully against the US, Europe, and other highly developed countries with armies that rely heavily on electronics.
Well, it would if military hardware weren't hardened against EMP. The US has been preparing since the 50's for a war that involved nuclear weapons. The effects of EMP caused circuit disruptions has been understood at least since then. The application of a Faraday cage will catch and ground the pulse energy sufficiently to protect electronic circuits. This is almost a non-issue.
For military hardware.
Unprotected circuits (read: civilian) are and remain extremely vulnerable to such attacks. This is really where this technology is scary. In a crowded urban area it could really disrupt a LOT of vital systems.
Hint: it doesn't have a prefix...
I know it's truly nitpicky, but the SI unit for mass is the kilogram... which DOES have a prefix.
A logo makes your group that much more credible. And real credibility makes your group one step closer to having that one thing that every group really wants: corporate sponsorship.
It might start off small, the team jackets would have only a small "Eat at Lou's" on them. Before long they are bright orange with the Home Depot logo as well as the flyer logo.
Yup, after a bit like that, it's just a matter of what price the group will sell out to Microsoft for. And let's be honest, that's the real goal here.
Ok, yeah... that's badass.
8) Trap door so as to easily get rid of people knocking at door.
The problem with sci-fi today is that nothing is fresh. Well, ok, very little is fresh. The space fantasy has been done to death. Star Wars, Star Trek, Asimov, AC Clarke... hell, even Buck Rogers and the like. Also, the dragon-slaying, wizards and warriors D&D fantasy genre has been done to death (but has aged well). Sticking your work in either of these genres pretty much guarantees that you will be overlooked in the MILLIONS of other books in the genre.
The freshest stuff in sci-fi in the last 20 years is the cyberpunk genre. This is, IMHO, the cutting edge of sci-fi. Set in the near-future, incorporating a lot of today's tech, the stories are not out of touch with today's reality and the genre hasn't been over-exploited (yet). They make for fresh sci-fi worlds but can easily touch on themes and stories that we can relate to.
If you haven't looked into cyberpunk, pick up some books by Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, or William Gibson. Esp. Neuromancer, Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Definately worth your time.
The key is to identify the part of the signal which has the desired properties: random, uniform distribution.
Well, that's just the point. The resolution of the device you use has to be up to the standards of randomness you want. Using ambient temperature to one-tenth of a degree isn't very random... to a hundredth is a little more, to a thousandth a little more... etc. etc. But you are only as random as your machine is precise.
The question is if you can make an ambient temperature measurement device that is precise enough to outperform other techniques. It is possible to measure 'how random' a set of numbers is and it's possible to compare these measurements. Most of the time numbers generated from sources that follow a sine wave aren't random enough to outperform numbers from non-sinusodial sources like a lava lamp. Inexpensive electronics just don't have the precision.