the only thing I've ever heard that raises violence amongst individuals is pornography, or sexually explicit material.
The evidence does not support this link. See
here
and
here
. The second article does a good job of covering both pro and con studies, with the studies indicating a link given first. And if you pay attention you will note that some of the studies that found a link did not find a link when repeated by others. And other studies showed porn was associated with significant reductions in violence.
I forgot to mention an interesting factoid from the bonus interviews on the DVD version of the movie Supersize Me. One school was suffering from a high violence rate until they switched from junk food school lunches to whole foods school lunches and the violence went away. Just anecdotal but deserves more study. One web page claims that
B12 deficiency causes violence
I don't have the DVD any more so I cannot be more specific, perhaps someone who does can transcribe the relevent portion.
A new study was released yesterday by Tulane Medical which tracked video game users over a 8 year period testing how much the video games they play affect their tendency toward violence. The study found that among those who played games 8% went on to have some form of violence conviction while only 6% of the non-gamers did.
Correllation does not prove causality. Consider, for example the following hypothetical statistics:
20% of the population is prone to commit violent crimes
People who are prone to violence are twice as likely to enjoy violent games. Suppose 30% of the non-violence prone population plays the
violent games and 60% of the violence prone population plays the games.
50% of the violence prone successfully sublimate their violent tendancies through violent video games while none find that it makes them more prone to violence.
0% of non-violence prone become more likely to commit violence as a result of playing the games
To simplify the explanation, we are going to assume 1 crime per offender.
Now we conduct an omnipitant study of 1 million people. Results show:
Non Violent, plays violent games: 0 commit acts of violence, 240,000 people
Non Violent, don't play violent games: 0 commit acts of violence, 560,000
Violent, plays violent games: 50% commit acts of violence, 120,000 population, 60,000 commit crimes
Violent, doesn't play violent games: 100% commit acts of violence, 80,000 population, 80,000 commit crimes
Now a study committed by mere mortals that looks only at the numbers and doesn't look deeper would show:
Of the 140,000 who committed crimes, 60,000 played games. Thus 42% of those who committed acts of violence played games as opposed to 30% of those who did not. Thus, violent offenders were 40% more likely to have played violent games.
Of the 360,000 who played violent games, 60,000 (17% committed violent crimes). Of the 640,000 who did not play violent games, 80,000 (12.5%) commited acts of violence. Thus, those who play violent games are 36% more likely to commit acts of violence.
Both of these studys show a strong correlation between playing violent games and committing crimes. But in reality, the violent games have
actually eliminated 60,000 violent crimes and the availibility of violent games have reduced the amount of violence by 30%.
There are many other reasons for violent crime.
There is a statistical indication that the drug war may have doubled violent crime (not even counting the crimes perpetrated by the government)
just as prohibition did. There is considerable violence against racial and sexual minorities. The poor are increasingly desparate in our rich get richer, poor get poorer economy.
Someone was pointing out to me, that in an area of the city where I live, that there has been a substantial outbreak of armed robbery. This followed a recent crackdown on dope dealing. Possible cause: the remaining dope dealers have decided that it is safer to commit armed robbery and split than to wait around long enough for both drug buyters and police to find them.
The original shuttle design also included a detachable crew cabin that would have saved the Challenger crew. Plus it probably would have been less prone to blowing up in the first place.
Classic case of mismanagement. When engineers tell someone it costs X to build something and you tell them to build it for 1/2X, what usually ends up happening is that you ultimately spend 2X for half the product.
Wait a minute. Person with a uniform and a role of auhtority says to a citizen, "Show me your ID." Citizen asks, "Why?" Person with authority says, "Because it's the law." Citizen asks, "What law?", and the person with authority doesn't have an answer.
Reminds me of a real incident that happened to me
where I made just such a demand. This wasn't a privacy case; rather it was one where following
the officer's instructions would have created a threat to public safety.
Most of the police here in Charlottesville, VA, USA are reasonable and easy to deal with. But you get the occassional jerk.
A cop came to my door because of the way my car was parked. At the time, I normally parked on
one of the steepest hills in a hilly city. I had even had a parking brake fail before under the stress. So, I always parked my minivan at an angle with one wheel in the ditch so that in the event of a mishap, the vehicle would not relocate itself into the house at the bottom of the hill (T intersection).
Enter Barney Fife. He looked at the car and concluded something must be wrong. Probably guessed I had driven home drunk or it offended his sense of aesthetics.
I explain why the vehicle is actually parked that way. He tells me that I can't park at an angle like that. I point out that the vehicle is not extending any further out into the road than if it had been parked per his instructions (indeed it extended out even less). I point out that following his instructions would be a threat to public safety. I explain that my vehicle has been parked that way every single day for the last year and that neighbors can verify this fact. I
explain that the hill was steep enough that I could not rely on the brakes even though I set the brake hard enough to sheer off the parking brake pedal and the brakes had been serviced and I had
service records that support those facts.
I ask him to give me a logical reason why I can't park like that. He has none.
I ask him to cite chapter and verse. He can't.
Mind you if he can't tell me what the laws are than nobody has any guarantee that he is enforcing the law and only the law. He can't even give a vague reference or call the dispatcher for someone to lookup the actual law. Nope. I asked him to demonstrate a compelling state interest that supercedes the public safety interest. He can't. He instructs me to repark the vehicle dozens of times. Each time I demand a valid reason. Now bear in mind the entire time I am firm but reasonably polite, and not all all beligerant.
Fortunately, some witnesses came by and stopped to watch. Because this was all about an incompetant cops ego and there was danger of him fabricating some infraction. After the witnesses had observed many more rounds of the incredibly repititions debate, I basically dismissed the officer. I told him something to the effect that he had one last chance to produce a compelling reason for me to move the vehicle or the matter was closed. No? Have a nice day. He left with his tail between his legs. And I continued parking the same way every day.
If he had pursued it beyond that, I would have
called 911 on my cell phone (and in the process created an audio tape record) and asked them to dispatch a superior and if the superior was no more reasonable,
demanded an order in writing from the City asking me to park parallel to the road that specifically stated that the City understood the dangers involved, that I was indemnified and held harmless, and that the city would compensate any party who sustained property damage, injury, or death. And signed original copies of the same letter for each of the neighbors at the bottom of the hill. And then I would have installed a concrete bump and let the snowplows be damned.
If he had asked me in a professional manner to move my car off the street on a single occassion because of some legitimate need that he couldn't divulge, I would have complied and waited for the presidential motorcade to drive by or whatever. But in this case, there was a clear and present danger to public safety and not the slightest hint of the rule of law or any legitimate state interest.
Are there such things as video projectors that accept an encrypted stream of data?
The article mentions custom projectors so I suspect that is exactly what they are going to do. A fairly standard projector may be packaged with the decryption and possibly decompression apparatus in a tamper resistant enclosure that not only is secured by high security locks but also has the private key stored in battery backed RAM with tamper switches that remove power to the RAM when the case is opened. The projector bulb would have to be located in a non secure compartment of the enclosure or even externally.
They could encrypt the data before or after compression. Encrypt first then compress would allow the decompression to be handled by a very powerful computer or other apparatus outside the projector but is not likely to be practical since the encryption would interfere with the compression.
It would also require the compression process to be rerun for each copy which would be expensive.
Effective watermarks, which could be detected after a pirated movie had been DiVX compressed would also require each copy to be compressed separately.
Since a theater can have more than one projector and the movie might not always be shown on the same screen, they would need to encrypt the movie for each private key at a theater.
With film, the theater has to send the film back after it has finished showing which puts limits on how much the theater can lie about how many screenings it had.
If they were paranoid, they could use keys that only worked at a particular time on a particular day so the theater would have to license each showing individually some time in advance. Or, they could use single use keys that the projector would reject after one showing. The projector could also take audit logs that it could save onto an SD card and distributors could require weekly copies of the logs.
Since public key systems normally are just used to safely transport a symetric key, licensing the film
could be done after the hard drive had been sent
or at least after it had been encoded. Thus, they could make thousands of copies of the film, each with a separate symetric key, on as many hard drives long before they knew what theaters they would be shipping those hard drives to.
While hard drives are cheaper than film, there is another cost saving to be had. The hard drives can be recycled after the film has finished playing in theaters or even immediately after the film has been copied to local servers.
All of this protection (other than the watermark) is likely to be somewhat moot as a projectionist can simply insert a 1% reflector into the beam of the projector and direct the beam into a camera to make a sufficiently high quality copy for internet distribution or, with good enough equipment, for pirate DVDs.
So while it's true that downloaders would almost never pay for everything they watch, it's also true that downloaders would almost always pay for at least one thing they watch, or a substitute.
And it is also true that if someone downloads 25 movies for free, there is a good chance that they will buy a legitimate copy of at least one of them
that they would not have purchased sight unseen.
So, the copy of a bad movie they would have bought
if they didn't have a chance to see it for free is replaced by a copy of a good movie they would not have bought sight unseen. So, the movie industry is likely to make about the same amount of money either way but with downloading consumers money will go to reward quality rather than marketing.
Maybe that is what gives the movie industry the screeming heebeejeebees.
Yes, there are freeloaders out there who have the money to buy but won't buy if they can steal. And these people should be treated differently from those who are engaged in try-before-you-buy.
As for sueing for $150,000 per movie downloaded, the MPAA does that and then has the chutzpah to call "pirates" thieves? Yes, they should charge more than the retail price. Part of the equation is the probability of getting caught. If the movie sells for $15 (and I am going to ignore the difference in duplication costs and the fact that you don't get as good a copy by downloading) and there is a 10% chance of getting caught than you need to sue for at least $150 to be an effective deterent (ignoring legal fees and based entirely on probably weighted average of the possible costs). Now, $150,000 might be reasonable if the chances of getting caught for a given movie are 1 in 10,000 (though draconian enforcement against a small minority results in punishments grossly disproportionate to the crime to the point of being cruel and
unusual). Now the MPAA is currently suing large numbers of people and plans to go after a lot more
which means that the chance of being caught are likely to be much greater than 1 in 10000.
Total Home video sales (DVD, VHS, and rental) rose $4.7billion in 2003 to $22.5 billion. MPAAs inflated claims for the cost of internet piracy is $3.5billion. Yeah, internet piracy has really hurt them. They are selling fewer copies at higher profit margins and that may be the real reason for internet piracy. Because the movies are being sold at inflated costs that exceed their value for many consumers and because consumers are spending more money to get fewer movies, they need to pirate to see the same number of movies they used to see and to allow them to more carefully choose which movies to actually buy.
Become illegal distributor of content (whether it really should have been illegal and wether the operator of the central site should have been held responsible may be open to debate)
Receive a credible threat to sue from MPAA (other posts substantiate that this must have occurred)
Raise money for "legal defense"
Settle out of court for an amount you can't possibly pay to avoid being actually hauled into court
Take he money raised to cover the cost of exercising the cut and run "legal defense" - relocate to another country where you won't have to pay the damages you agreed to pay
Some of the contributors may have been willing to donate money for a cut and run but if he had honestly explained what the money was for he would have been prevented for doing so.
Another variation on this doesn't involve a cut and run. Perhaps $30,000 was the settlement amount. In this case, his "legal expense" was the cost of settling which was almost certainly less than the cost of paying lawyers (not even counting the cost of paying damages after losing the case). It is also quite possible that he intended to fight in court but later realized that he did not have the resources to do so.
Now what is likely to upset donors is that they thought they were donating not merely to get the site operator out of hot water but to actually fight the industry in court. Fighting in court has the possibility of setting precedent against the industry if you win thereby benifiting the community or at least, if you lose, making it more trouble for the industry to pursue their agenda than if you just bend over.
Tell me why if this model produces 3 - 4 watts of energy why they can't cover the blades of larger windmills with these things or better yet design the blades so they have edge holes with these things inside.
There is no such thing as a free lunch (1st law of thermodynamics). The drag produced by the turbines extracting energy slows the speed of the windmill blades reducing the power delivered to the main generator so you gain nothing by adding those (more likely you will lose since the main generator is less efficient at slower speeds).
Coincidently, this is the same problem with charging the cell phone by clipping this device to
the outside of the window while riding in a bus, train, or car. The vehicles engine needs to consume more energy to offset the drag produced by
the turbine. Granted it is small compared to the amount of energy used to move the vehicle in the first place but it would be more energy efficient to connect the phone to the vehicles alternator
than to convert the engines rotory motion to motion induced "wind flow" and then the wind flow back to rotary motion.
Now could you make a windmill with no main generator and use a large number of small turbines
instead? Yes but it probably would not work well at all. In fact, it would probably work less well than just pointing the turbines into the wind which in turn would not work very well at all.
The problem is a serious impedance mismatch. Turbines want high pressure/high airflow.
A windmill blade tip will be travelling at a lower linear velocity than the air that turns it.
Incidently, power from wind is proporional to the cube of the wind velocity. Generators are inefficient at low speeds.
Modern windmills adjust to different wind velocities by feathering the blades to try to run the generator at a relatively constant speed. In really high winds they turn the blades parallel to the airflow to avoid destroying the generator and gear train.
Note that since it was described as a turbine and not a "wind turbine" (which is normally a very different beast) and described it as fitting in a pocket, I am imagining a device with multiple disks with the edge shaped into blades inside a tube like you might find in a jet engine or gas fired power plant (every other disk is stationary or counter rotates to restore longitudinal airflow). A friend built an toilet paper roll cardboard tube sized device out of sheet metal in this topology that was demonstrated with the air from a shop vac that would be about the right size for a cell phone charger.
If that is not the topology used., then some of what I have said will not apply but much of it still will.
Whatever turbine topology you use on your windmill blades, you are converting from wind to rotary motion twice and therefore are reducing the efficiency by around 60% compared to doing so once even if it is well designed and operating at optimal wind speed. And poor performance at low speeds will be made even worse by being being run twice through the innefficent portion of a non-linear transfer function.
Back to the original article, the usefulness of this is likely to be very limited since people in India who don't have electricity aren't likely to spend a lot of time running around in vehicles every day to charge their phones. A small roof mounted windmill would probably be a lot more practical. It may have some use as a travel charger for people who will be traveling to distant points but not be staying for very long (such as tourists).
The little generators that run headlights on a bicycle might be another alternative for charging a cell phone. With a stand, pedal power can even be used while stationary. Someone
built a generator stand for a bicycle
that was capable of generating as much as 260W (100W seems more likely for an extended period of time).
A small solar panel with built in battery (so you don't need to leave your cell phone on char
My mom works in a public library in a DC suburb. According to her, they have extremely high damage rates (mostly scratches) on CDs and DVDs that are much higher than for cassettes and videotapes and the discs are quickly destroyed. Apparently, people are more careless with discs from the library than they are with video rentals or their own collection or the people who use the library as opposed to paying for video rentals or purchases are more inept in their handling of disks.
Most libraries have very small collections of movies. The main branch of the Charlottesville, VA public library has 240 video titles (all formats) and the entire system has only 396.
Video rental stores have much larger selections (about 5000 titles) and online services like Netflix (aprox 30000 titles), GreenCine (25000), BB online (approx 30,000), etc. have much larger collections, still. The local university has a much larger collection than the public library but it is still far less complete than netflix.
On a busy day Netflix ships about 5,000,000 gigabytes of data on DVDs, this is approximately 70% of the entire daily capacity of the Internet in the U.S. and Canada (7,000,000 gigabytes per day).
That suggests that internet delivery of movies will start to become practical (at least for early adopters) when the current internet capacity doubles.
Since postage costs are a significant portion of netflix's cost, internet delivery could be a a very good thing. Currently, though, bandwidth costs are substantial. Bandwidth costs are dropping, however, as postage costs increase.
As the service becomes more popular, however, I can see companies like netflix locating server farms at all major exchange points. This would eliminate the need to pay backbone providers for long haul costs.
It would be a bad thing if the oil industry acquired exclusive rights to this technology. It would be even worse if a single oil company did so.
In the latter case, only a single oil company would switch to waste/biomass and the other companies would have to continue to pump oil to stay in business.
As long as the technology remains availible to all, though involvement of the oil companies would be a good thing, at least in the short term. Who else has the capital and the experience to deploy this on a large scale? Also, the second stage of the process looks suspiciously like an oil refinery so it may be possible to "bolt" the first stage onto existing refineries converting them to the ability to run off of waste and biomass.
In the long term, however, it would be desireable to have many smaller plants scattered throughout the country. This would greatly reduce the cost and energy consumption associated with transporting the waste, biomass, and finished products not to mention the hazards of spills.
Smaller installations could be placed at each landfill, sewage treatment plant, medical waste facility (medical waste and mad cows might need a separate plant because the grinder would become contaminated), farm coop, large poultry/pig/beef plants, oil storage facilities, and other strategic locations.
So, it could be important to have legislation restricting exclusive ownership of the technology or at least a commitment to use existing anti-trust laws. This is one case where eminent domain would be justified.
I find it curious that both Livejournal and Wikipedia were using fancy battery backed RAID controllers and this still happened. I have no personal experience with such controllers but I assume they must work like this: the most recent N writes are stored in battery backed RAM. After power is restored, the controller rewrites ALL of the data in battery backed RAM in case some of it didn't make it out to disk.
Now there are three scenarios where this could fail, that I can think of. In one, the total cache on all connected disk drives exceeds the total size of the battery backed RAM. Unless there is a message you can send to the drive forbidding it to use a portion of its cache for writes (ok to use all for reads), you are SOL in this case. The second scenario is that the controller clears some of the data in the battery backed RAM after it has been told by the drive that it has been written (via serial number) or after some amount of time (or number of write operations) has passed and this assumption is wrong. The third scenario is a variation of the second in which the controller assumes the drive does not cache writes at all and immediately invalidates the RAM copy as soon as a write xfer operation completes but that is rather pointless. I am ignoring problems due to equipment failures or week long power outages here.
Write back caching on the drive is loaded with problems and in lieu of such a controller, It would seem that about the only way it can safely be enabled (without supplemental storage on a device without write back cache) is if there is the ability for the operating system to send a query to the drive to ask if a specific serial number of write operation has completed or at least to return the highest serial number such that all serial numbers lower than that have completed. Then the operating system can allow, for example, 15 processes to simultaneously schedule write operations (or one process multiple writes) which the drive can complete in optimal order but none of those processes can continue once they have called flush() until the data has actually been written.
I assume wikipedia has something like 100 reads for every write. I wonder if the performance from allowing write caching is really necessary during normal operations (as opposed to database or index rebuilds or replication operations) and if it could be turned off most of the time. This is not a fix for the underlying problems (unless it stays off all the time) but would be a way to improve the odds considerably.
It seems to me that data center proceedures should be designed (and fire codes need to accomodate this) to allow operations to occur in a reasonable sequence. First the alarm goes off. Then a signal is transmitted to all servers to begin shutdown (can be delivered by ethernet). Lights must remain powered until people have a chance to evacuage. Then there is a reasonable delay to allow evacuation of personell and to allow someone to reach the hold off switches. There would be separate hold off switches for halon and power down. Then halon wold be released. Power would not be shut off until servers had time to power down or fire crews needed to enter the area for purposes other than verifying that the fire was out. Even if the fire is being maintained by emergency power, the halon should kill it so a facility with adequate halon should never need to actually do an emergency power off unless perhaps the fire affected an area outside the area protected by halon.
At a minimum, I would expect the data center to have two complete UPS systems. These would supply power to racks in a cartesian arrangement where each rack was supplied power from two different UPSes, one from a row bus and one from a column bus. With the exception of the emergency power off required by fire codes, it would be very difficult for a rack to lose power on both busses unless there was a short from one b
Re:Quick Measures?
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have barely any cryptography knowledge, but would the SHA series be any safer if the size of the data was part of the signature? From glancing over Bruce's post (and remembering how MD5 and others were broken), data has to be padded. You can't just change arbitrary bits and produce the same signature. So, couldn't you just add the size of the file to the signature? Does that decrease security, because the size is now known?
It would greatly add to the security in theory except that it wouldn't really work well in practice. I am not an expert on cryto algorithms but the limitations of this approach can be seen even without knowing anything about the actual
has algorithm.
The trick with forging messages is that you need to add some amount of garbage to the forged message to make it match the hash of the original (there are other ways in theory that are likely to be less practical). This is why the length inforormation would appear to help.
Then you have to disguise the purpose of the garbage so it doesn't draw attention to itself. Perhaps as another fake signature or
an uncompressed image. Steganography would give you the requisite number of bits while still letting you include an image (of a hand written signature, a document page, or a company logo)that wasn't obviously junk but the bits would not be consequtive which makes it harder). Instead of hiding them in low order bit steganography, you could replace a number of consequtive pixels; the result would be visable but would be mistaken for a smudge.
By including the length in the signature, you make it much harder to make a message that says what you want it to say and still matches the hash.
However, the problem with your suggestion is protecting the new size information. If you include the size in the message before hashing, then you simply search for a hash that matches the forged message with modified size which could be about the same amount of work as forging in the first place for a brute force attack though it may well add additional constraints that might prevent taking particular shortcuts
vs. a brute force attack in which case it would help. It would really depend on whether the hash crack is bothered by this constraint. If the crack algorithm knows in advance how many extra bits will be generated then running the length through the hash doesn't help at all.
If you just add some message size bits to the end of the hash, then the information is unprotected and can be changed to match the message. So, you probably would want to sign the length separately.
But if you are going to do that, you could use a hash with twice as many bits in the first place or
hash the same message twice with two different initial values for the hash (cracking the first hash may or may not provide a shortcut to cracking the second). Both of these approaches would probably be much more secure than adding the length. Even more secure would be to hash the message with two different hash algorithms.
There are also ways of returning to the original message length even when adding garbage. Suppose I want to change a contract to say you will pay me $100,000 instead of $10,000. To make room for the extra hash fooling bits, I can delete an entire paragraph from the contract that is of no
importance to me (or even makes it more favorable to me by its absence). Longer hashes or double hashes would effectively prevent this but length information would not.
Cooking carrots is likely to reduce their cancer fighting ability. Likewise, while carrot extracts
such as described in the article may be profitable for drug manufacturers (and the researchers who get grants from them), I have a hunch fresh carrot juice extracted with a centrifical juice extractor
could be more effective and cheaper. Carrot juice
provides a way of consuming large quantities of carrot nutrients including anti-oxidants in their natural proportions without consuming too much insoluable fiber. It also is a good base for juices of less palatable vegetables that also have cancer fighting properties.
You didn't specify what kind of learning disability
your brother had. The most common kind of disability that affects reading is Dyslexia. It could also cause problems with math since if you don't perceive the digits and symbols in the same order they appear on the page, you are going to have trouble with math. Dyslexia is itself a rather
vague diagnosis.
I can't really recommend specific software but I can share some observations from personal experience. Attitudes towards disability can make a huge difference. Expectations of failure can be self fulfilling prophacies.
A friend of mine was diagnosed as Dyslexic when he was young. His parents were told by doctors that he would never learn to read. Fortunately, his parents did not listen. They spent time tutoring him and enrolled him in a special school. My friend not only reads better than the vast majority of the population, he is extremely well read and has a Ph. D. in astrophysics.
I myself was diagnosed in high school as having dyslexia though that came as quite a surprise since I was reading at a 12th grade level in the
6th grade. When I was a kid, my mother read to me a lot.
Another friend has dyslexia. His parents took the attitute of steering him away from activities that
he would be likely to fail at. As a result, he is functionally illiterate but slowly making progress on his own. It may have helped that I was able to counter some of the defeatist non-sense.
Your brother might benefit from using the English subtitles availible on most DVD players. As long as he tries to read them rather than just relying on the audio, the effect could be similar to being read to. He could choose content that was interesting to him. An interesting technological twist would be to modify an open source software DVD player such as Ogle to deliberately desynchronize the audio so the words would be spoken only after he had a chance to try and read them himself. Neurologically, being forced to make the attempt and then being corrected or reinforced immediately thereafter is important
to the learning process. Of course, he may not be far enough along that he can follow the subtitles. He might be able to try to get the first word out of each subtitle, then work up to the first two words. It is important to be aware that sometimes the subtitles and the dialog do not match (subtitles having been copied from the script not transcribed from the actual performance) but they match often enough that if you take this into consideration it could be useful. Another variation would be to make the DVD player software automatically pause after each new subtitle is displayed.
Similarly, text to speech can be integrated with applications such as instant messaging and slight
modification would create a delay between presenting the written words and speaking them.
Of course, he would need to be litterate enough to be able to write something back in the case of instant messaging unless he is just lurking in some chat rooms. In the latter case, logs could be used so he doesn't have to keep up with the frantic pace in many chat rooms.
Dyslexic.com has some information on technological aids for dyslexia. Hierarchical Program Tree is a package listed at freshmeat that is intended for dyslexics.
There is probably some more stuff out there.
I think there is a lot of potential for educational software that is designed to take particular learning disabilities into consideration that may not have been realized yet.
As an example, a dyslexic may be able to make out
the individual letters in a word but have difficulty perceiving them in the order they appear. So, "tea" and "ate" might be hard to distinguish. A program could sort through the dictionary finding words that are different morphologies of the same letters and speak a word and present similar words as a multiple choice test. Educational softw
The universities are moaning about their loss of revenue from the land-line cash cow but it is their own fault. If they had installed sufficient 802.11g wireless routers throughout campus (as well as around the bars off campus) and provided wireless VoIP service, they could have undercut the cell phone providers. People who live off campus don't buy land line service from the university, anyway, and the ones who live on campus rarely stray off campus so they could be
tempted by a service that allows unlimited calls (some cellular companies offer unlimited calls by they have limited coverage but systems with reasonable coverage charge exhorbitant rates for daytime minutes). And the system could be setup to deliver calls to your PC when you are in your dorm room. A typical university already has much of the infrastructure. It already has a high speed network. It already owns the buildings where the access points would be installed. It already has right of ways in the form of steam tunnels located under the sidewalks allowing access points to be added between buildings easily.
It already has a PBX with trunk lines to connect to landlines.
No, the school wouldn't have a monopoly but it would be competing against cell phone services that cost more than the university charged for land lines.
Bandwidth would be an issue so they would need to go with lots of access points with small antennas located inside buildings or along sidewalks rather than a few access points with big antennas on the roof.
The Bean itself is voilating copyrights of the buildings that it reflects...the reflections themselves are "reproductions" of the buildings that are designed by artists and builders.
One could confuse the issue considerably by taking a picture of the bean as reflected in a handheld mirror. After all, if the city wants to hold the position that when you photgraph the mirror known as the bean you are taking a picture of the bean and not the objects it reflects then that same argument can be used against them: you were taking a photograph of your personal property. The case would be an even stronger parallel if your mirror was not a planar mirror but distorted the image in some way. Now, they might be able to rip your case to shreds but in so doing they would rip their own case to shreds.
The owner of a building reflected in the bean could sue the city for infringement of their own copyrights when the city charged money for the use of their reflection.
And there is attractive nuisance legislation. By placing the structure in a public place where it will naturally be a backdrop to activities that may be photographed without enclosing it in a protective structure, they are inducinging minors to violate copyright law. When you build a swimming pool, you are required to build a fence around it to protect yourself from being sued by the parents who fail to teach their kids not to trespass or swim without supervision.
And if selling a device which allows people to copy copyrighted material after they make the explict effort to purchase the product, another explict effort to hook up the product, and yet another explict effort to activate the product is
I.N.D.U.C.E-ing someone to commit copyright infringment, than placing a copyrighted object in a public place where people can't help but photograph it in the course of normal human activities, such as photographing their friends,
is certainly inducement to commit copyright infringement. Since the object was placed in
the park by the same legal entitity that wishes to collect the fees and prosecute violators, it is also entrapment.
Since the park was undoubtably marketted to the public as a place of public recreation and not
as a for-profit-subsidiary of the city, they are
also guilty of unlawful conversion of property and violating the public trust when they infringe on the publics right to use the park in the manner that all other parks are used.
True, the taxpayers would be the supposed beneficiaries of any money raised through license fees but that "benefit" would be far outweighed by the greater losses incurred by depriving them of the normal use of the park.
By violating the rights of handicapped people with poor visual memory to make a photographic record to compensate for their non-photographic memory, the city is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
If the city prevents taking and publishing photographs of demonstrators in front of the sculpture prostesting the cities policy regarding the structure, they are in volation of the first amendment.
Photographing a famous work of art with nothing else in the frame and selling that may be an infringing reproduction but photographing your girlfriend as she admires the work (with the work in the background) for your own personal use is certainly not.
While using a flashlight on a disk may be worth doing, the results may not mean what you think they will. First, light from the flashlight is either reflected, absorbed, or transmitted. If you shine light through the disk, you can see pinholes that could be a sign of poor manufacturing or subsequent damage. It is not the absolute reflectivity of the disk that matters it is the contrast.
Imagine disk A reflects 90% of light for a one and 80% of the light for a zero. Disk B
reflects 70% of the light for a 1 and 30% of the light for a zero. Disk A looks more shiny initially and even more so when data is recorded on itbut Disk B is clearly the better disk (not considering
differences in aging processes) to store data on.
Now consider two new hypothetical disks. Disk C starts out with a reflectivity of 90% but ages linearly to 30% over 5 years. Disk D starts out at 70% and ages linearly to 65% over 5 years.
The manufacturers engineered Disk C for good looks and Disk D for data preservation.
PHB: "can't you make the disk more shiny" Engineer: "Yes, but it won't last as long" PHB: "Yeah but longevity is intangible. You can't see it in the store or when you open the package when you get home"
Engineer: but eventually people will notice problems
PHB: Yeah, but we will blame it on improper storage and handling. Besides, in three years I will have milked this company for as much as I can
by favoring short term quarter gains over long term growth and will have cashed out my stock option bonuses for showing quartly gains and moved on to another company.
A shiny disk might be better or it might be worse; you just can't tell.
Several people have suggested the idea of storing
media in the fridge or freezer. This is not something to be done lightly. Yes, the colder temperatures would, all other things being equal, reduce the rate of
chemical reactions. But in the real world, the
fridge or freezer is a magnet for condensation and
frost. If you put the disks in a freezer with auto defrost, then they can also be subjected to thermal cycling which is very bad. I am also dubious about a fridge/freezers suggested ability to survive fire given that they are often insulated with petrochemical foams that could be highly combustable or outgas harmful materials in a fire.
The humidity/moisture environment in a fridge/freezer is a complicated thing.
On the one hand, water will condense on the
evaporator coils which leads to a desicating effect. On the other hand, new moisture enters the compartment every time you open the door and through leaky gaskets. Sometimes the system desicates the contents of the compartment and sometimes it desicates the room only to condense or drip on the contents. And if the fridge is also used for food there can be vinegar drips from fermented food, mold, and other nasties. Each time the door opens, the contents are subjected to some degree of thermal cycling. When you remove
a disk, it is also exposed to condensation.
The odds could be improved by putting the disks in a sealed container with some desicant, using a dedicated fridge, and maintaining the gaskets and drain.
The problem with existing PDAs is that they are uninspired, underpowered, overpriced, lack adequate expandability/scalability, and are too fragile. Hundreds of dollars for a device that is lucky to last a year and only does 20% of what you want it to do is not a good investment.
If I was designing a PDA (which I could do if
I had the capitol, so this isn't all pie in the sky), these are some of the unusual features it would have:
At least one compact flash slot, preferably two. Cellular modems
don't appear to be availible in SDIO.
A dozen or mor MMC/SD/SDIO slots. At least
half of
these would be designed to protect protruding
antennas/connectors without shielding them. These slots
would be used for bluetooth, wifi, GPS,
landline modem, ethernet, TV/FM tuner, RFID modem, etc. The other slots would be
used for storage. At 1GB per flash card, you
could store 6 gigs that way without moving parts. And these slots could support optional sensor modules: temperature, humidity, accelerometer, inclinometer, noxious gas sensor
(flamable gas, carbon monoxide, etc), sound pressure level, magnetism, light intensity.
A very large battery to power all of that.
1/4" of silicone rubber for protection
(think fluke DMM).
USB master and slave ports. Almost all PDAs
forget the master port. The master port
could connect to a full size keypord and mouse,
USB serial adapters for use as a terminal
emulator, USB flashdrives, ham radio equipment, modems, game controllers, ethernet adapters, USB headsets, printers, TV/FM tuners, DMM, Oscilliscope, and logic analyzer and portable hard drives. With an externally
powered hub, you could even connect power hungry devices such as a USB
scanner or bus powered DVD or hard drive.
The slave port is used for hot sync, battery
charging, acting as a portable hard drive, etc.
Both ports could be used simultaneously, allowing the PDA to double as a smart controller
or daisychain USB hub.
An optional hard drive of the sort found in
ipods and other portable media devices.
A belt clip that won't break and won't fall of
your belt. This means a full size metal clip.
I broke belt clips about once a month until I
switched to a modified ham radio clip.
An optional camera with a decent lens (bulky) that could actually collect some photons and also double as a barcode scanner. The base unit would
have a port intended for use with a camera with
the means for very secure attachment.
An optional keyboard that doubles as a screen cover (the screen being the only part not well protected by rubber).
An optional wrist harness for wearable use.
optional DVD+/-RW dock.
IRDA port with bright IR remote control transceiver.
An LED flash light (capable of being modulated)
and also serving as illuminator for the camera/bar code scanner and a signaling device.
Optional replacement front panel "case" for
embedded controller applications.
Color display with mpeg/HD decoder.
When a PDA can offer simultaneous wireless connectivity on a variety of networks simultaneously and has enough storage space to
store a reasonable linux distribution, at least a full days worth of OGG/MP3 files, wikipedia (1GB), urban dictionary, sourcewatch (so you can lookup the bias of sources cited in news articles), a couple novels, a couple newspapers, dilbert, userfriendly, roadmaps, weathermaps, a photo library, and a movie, then it becomes worth carrying. And because the I/O would be removable, you could start small and
add features and even unplug those peripherals
and install them in the model you upgrade to in
a year or two with a faster processor, more ram, and a better screen. And it would be scalable from junior geek to senior geek. So, you spend $500 on
the basic unit,
$500 for more peripherals and storage next two years,
and the year after that you spend $500 to upgrade
the basic unit but keep you
...(and safer) way with FeCl3 (ferric clhoride), the very same stuff used to etch circuit boards by hobbyists arround the world.
I have forgotten a lot of chemistry over the years.
I thought Ferric Chloride works as an etchant for copper because the chlorine prefers copper to iron
so it is happy to trade an iron atom for copper.
But why would it trade an iron atom for another iron atom? Now in a solution, there will be free chlorine and iron ions floating about so the chlorine may etch the steel but I would not expect it to do as well as a compound that combined chlorine with something less desirable than iron.
Maybe FeCL3 would rather combine with another Fe to produce two molecules of FeCL2. That would make sense.
Some people do use ferric chloride on steel and stainless steel but reportedly it quickly builds up an
oxide layer on steel
that must be sanded off before it will continue etching. In stainless steel, the ferric chloride attacks the chromium (chromium chloride is very soluable in water) so it neutralizes the "stainless" in "stainless steel" making it more vulnerable.
I also wonder why you suggest FeCL3 is safer. Is this because there is no need for an electric current (and the free oxygen and hydrogen it produces?) which produce an explosive gas mixture and may also combine with components of steel to make other compounds.
"Flatbed trucks are a bigger threat," he said, "and a lot lower tech."
And picking pockets is cheaper than flatbed trucks or ipod sized widgets - and less likely to get you
arrested for froteurism than rubbing up against someones crotch or leg to read the RFID code.:-)
I do wonder about these longer range RFID keys that allow you to open the door or start the car without removing the keys from your pocket. Seems like it might make it easy for rapists, muggers, and carjackers to gain access to you
while you are inside your vehicle with the doors theoretically locked. Hopefully, it is disabled
while the key is in he ignition though that still leaves a window of opportunity while you are getting in your car (which is why some keyless entry systems now require you to press the unlock button more than once to unlock doors other than the drivers door).
And, critically, if you want to see what the entire US foreign policy is based on, see:
Statement of Principles
Interestingly, liberals are mortified when they read that. I have no earthly idea why, as it represents a critical and fundamental understanding that we have an obligation not only to ourselves but to the world at large to spread concepts of freedom and democratic principles for positive gain. The "American interests" they which to further are really the interests of a small minority of rich and powerful Americans,
not the interests of the majority of Americans, and certainly not the interests of the world population as a whole or the interests of the
majority of the population in the affected countries.
Maybe they are mortified because what it says, even without reading between the lines, can be
summed up as "Think locally, act globally".
If you do read between the lines, you may also note that "Freedom" is the freedom for the rich to oppress and exploit both people and the environment for their own selfish "positive gain".
Prior art includes:
1)solar cells with a plug.
2)A coil of wire with a plug.
3)Stealing electric power from utility lines.
4)any detachable radio antenna when used with
an RF powered device (such as a field strength meter).
Also, these are intended to be permanently attached to your cell phone or similar device.
So, perhaps a better title should be "device for breaking the power connector on portable electronic equipment" because that is exactly what will happen in short order. Having the plug protruding from your portable device while you carry it around will expose the connector to
stresses it will not withstand. To do this safely requires a hard case with a shroud around the plug, not just some cheesy stick on pad as they suggest in the patent.
I think it is highly likely many of their other patents infringe on prior art such as cordless toothbrushes, digititizer pads (summagraphics/wacom) - particularly those with cordless pucks powered by the sensor field, and the deactivator pads for anti-theft tags.
Slashdot Mirror
the only thing I've ever heard that raises violence amongst individuals is pornography, or sexually explicit material.
The evidence does not support this link. See here and here . The second article does a good job of covering both pro and con studies, with the studies indicating a link given first. And if you pay attention you will note that some of the studies that found a link did not find a link when repeated by others. And other studies showed porn was associated with significant reductions in violence.
I forgot to mention an interesting factoid from the bonus interviews on the DVD version of the movie Supersize Me. One school was suffering from a high violence rate until they switched from junk food school lunches to whole foods school lunches and the violence went away. Just anecdotal but deserves more study. One web page claims that B12 deficiency causes violence I don't have the DVD any more so I cannot be more specific, perhaps someone who does can transcribe the relevent portion.
A new study was released yesterday by Tulane Medical which tracked video game users over a 8 year period testing how much the video games they play affect their tendency toward violence. The study found that among those who played games 8% went on to have some form of violence conviction while only 6% of the non-gamers did.
Correllation does not prove causality. Consider, for example the following hypothetical statistics:
Now we conduct an omnipitant study of 1 million people. Results show:
Now a study committed by mere mortals that looks only at the numbers and doesn't look deeper would show:
Both of these studys show a strong correlation between playing violent games and committing crimes. But in reality, the violent games have actually eliminated 60,000 violent crimes and the availibility of violent games have reduced the amount of violence by 30%.
There are many other reasons for violent crime. There is a statistical indication that the drug war may have doubled violent crime (not even counting the crimes perpetrated by the government) just as prohibition did. There is considerable violence against racial and sexual minorities. The poor are increasingly desparate in our rich get richer, poor get poorer economy.
Someone was pointing out to me, that in an area of the city where I live, that there has been a substantial outbreak of armed robbery. This followed a recent crackdown on dope dealing. Possible cause: the remaining dope dealers have decided that it is safer to commit armed robbery and split than to wait around long enough for both drug buyters and police to find them.
The original shuttle design also included a detachable crew cabin that would have saved the Challenger crew. Plus it probably would have been less prone to blowing up in the first place.
Classic case of mismanagement. When engineers tell someone it costs X to build something and you tell them to build it for 1/2X, what usually ends up happening is that you ultimately spend 2X for half the product.
Wait a minute. Person with a uniform and a role of auhtority says to a citizen, "Show me your ID." Citizen asks, "Why?" Person with authority says, "Because it's the law." Citizen asks, "What law?", and the person with authority doesn't have an answer.
Reminds me of a real incident that happened to me where I made just such a demand. This wasn't a privacy case; rather it was one where following the officer's instructions would have created a threat to public safety. Most of the police here in Charlottesville, VA, USA are reasonable and easy to deal with. But you get the occassional jerk.
A cop came to my door because of the way my car was parked. At the time, I normally parked on one of the steepest hills in a hilly city. I had even had a parking brake fail before under the stress. So, I always parked my minivan at an angle with one wheel in the ditch so that in the event of a mishap, the vehicle would not relocate itself into the house at the bottom of the hill (T intersection).
Enter Barney Fife. He looked at the car and concluded something must be wrong. Probably guessed I had driven home drunk or it offended his sense of aesthetics. I explain why the vehicle is actually parked that way. He tells me that I can't park at an angle like that. I point out that the vehicle is not extending any further out into the road than if it had been parked per his instructions (indeed it extended out even less). I point out that following his instructions would be a threat to public safety. I explain that my vehicle has been parked that way every single day for the last year and that neighbors can verify this fact. I explain that the hill was steep enough that I could not rely on the brakes even though I set the brake hard enough to sheer off the parking brake pedal and the brakes had been serviced and I had service records that support those facts. I ask him to give me a logical reason why I can't park like that. He has none. I ask him to cite chapter and verse. He can't. Mind you if he can't tell me what the laws are than nobody has any guarantee that he is enforcing the law and only the law. He can't even give a vague reference or call the dispatcher for someone to lookup the actual law. Nope. I asked him to demonstrate a compelling state interest that supercedes the public safety interest. He can't. He instructs me to repark the vehicle dozens of times. Each time I demand a valid reason. Now bear in mind the entire time I am firm but reasonably polite, and not all all beligerant. Fortunately, some witnesses came by and stopped to watch. Because this was all about an incompetant cops ego and there was danger of him fabricating some infraction. After the witnesses had observed many more rounds of the incredibly repititions debate, I basically dismissed the officer. I told him something to the effect that he had one last chance to produce a compelling reason for me to move the vehicle or the matter was closed. No? Have a nice day. He left with his tail between his legs. And I continued parking the same way every day.
If he had pursued it beyond that, I would have called 911 on my cell phone (and in the process created an audio tape record) and asked them to dispatch a superior and if the superior was no more reasonable, demanded an order in writing from the City asking me to park parallel to the road that specifically stated that the City understood the dangers involved, that I was indemnified and held harmless, and that the city would compensate any party who sustained property damage, injury, or death. And signed original copies of the same letter for each of the neighbors at the bottom of the hill. And then I would have installed a concrete bump and let the snowplows be damned.
If he had asked me in a professional manner to move my car off the street on a single occassion because of some legitimate need that he couldn't divulge, I would have complied and waited for the presidential motorcade to drive by or whatever. But in this case, there was a clear and present danger to public safety and not the slightest hint of the rule of law or any legitimate state interest.
Are there such things as video projectors that accept an encrypted stream of data?
The article mentions custom projectors so I suspect that is exactly what they are going to do. A fairly standard projector may be packaged with the decryption and possibly decompression apparatus in a tamper resistant enclosure that not only is secured by high security locks but also has the private key stored in battery backed RAM with tamper switches that remove power to the RAM when the case is opened. The projector bulb would have to be located in a non secure compartment of the enclosure or even externally.
They could encrypt the data before or after compression. Encrypt first then compress would allow the decompression to be handled by a very powerful computer or other apparatus outside the projector but is not likely to be practical since the encryption would interfere with the compression. It would also require the compression process to be rerun for each copy which would be expensive. Effective watermarks, which could be detected after a pirated movie had been DiVX compressed would also require each copy to be compressed separately.
Since a theater can have more than one projector and the movie might not always be shown on the same screen, they would need to encrypt the movie for each private key at a theater.
With film, the theater has to send the film back after it has finished showing which puts limits on how much the theater can lie about how many screenings it had. If they were paranoid, they could use keys that only worked at a particular time on a particular day so the theater would have to license each showing individually some time in advance. Or, they could use single use keys that the projector would reject after one showing. The projector could also take audit logs that it could save onto an SD card and distributors could require weekly copies of the logs.
Since public key systems normally are just used to safely transport a symetric key, licensing the film could be done after the hard drive had been sent or at least after it had been encoded. Thus, they could make thousands of copies of the film, each with a separate symetric key, on as many hard drives long before they knew what theaters they would be shipping those hard drives to.
While hard drives are cheaper than film, there is another cost saving to be had. The hard drives can be recycled after the film has finished playing in theaters or even immediately after the film has been copied to local servers.
All of this protection (other than the watermark) is likely to be somewhat moot as a projectionist can simply insert a 1% reflector into the beam of the projector and direct the beam into a camera to make a sufficiently high quality copy for internet distribution or, with good enough equipment, for pirate DVDs.
So while it's true that downloaders would almost never pay for everything they watch, it's also true that downloaders would almost always pay for at least one thing they watch, or a substitute.
And it is also true that if someone downloads 25 movies for free, there is a good chance that they will buy a legitimate copy of at least one of them that they would not have purchased sight unseen. So, the copy of a bad movie they would have bought if they didn't have a chance to see it for free is replaced by a copy of a good movie they would not have bought sight unseen. So, the movie industry is likely to make about the same amount of money either way but with downloading consumers money will go to reward quality rather than marketing. Maybe that is what gives the movie industry the screeming heebeejeebees.
Yes, there are freeloaders out there who have the money to buy but won't buy if they can steal. And these people should be treated differently from those who are engaged in try-before-you-buy.
As for sueing for $150,000 per movie downloaded, the MPAA does that and then has the chutzpah to call "pirates" thieves? Yes, they should charge more than the retail price. Part of the equation is the probability of getting caught. If the movie sells for $15 (and I am going to ignore the difference in duplication costs and the fact that you don't get as good a copy by downloading) and there is a 10% chance of getting caught than you need to sue for at least $150 to be an effective deterent (ignoring legal fees and based entirely on probably weighted average of the possible costs). Now, $150,000 might be reasonable if the chances of getting caught for a given movie are 1 in 10,000 (though draconian enforcement against a small minority results in punishments grossly disproportionate to the crime to the point of being cruel and unusual). Now the MPAA is currently suing large numbers of people and plans to go after a lot more which means that the chance of being caught are likely to be much greater than 1 in 10000.
Total Home video sales (DVD, VHS, and rental) rose $4.7billion in 2003 to $22.5 billion. MPAAs inflated claims for the cost of internet piracy is $3.5billion. Yeah, internet piracy has really hurt them. They are selling fewer copies at higher profit margins and that may be the real reason for internet piracy. Because the movies are being sold at inflated costs that exceed their value for many consumers and because consumers are spending more money to get fewer movies, they need to pirate to see the same number of movies they used to see and to allow them to more carefully choose which movies to actually buy.
Another possibility
(other posts substantiate that this must have occurred)
Some of the contributors may have been willing to donate money for a cut and run but if he had honestly explained what the money was for he would have been prevented for doing so.
Another variation on this doesn't involve a cut and run. Perhaps $30,000 was the settlement amount. In this case, his "legal expense" was the cost of settling which was almost certainly less than the cost of paying lawyers (not even counting the cost of paying damages after losing the case).
It is also quite possible that he intended to fight in court but later realized that he did not have the resources to do so.
Now what is likely to upset donors is that they thought they were donating not merely to get the site operator out of hot water but to actually fight the industry in court. Fighting in court has the possibility of setting precedent against the industry if you win thereby benifiting the community or at least, if you lose, making it more trouble for the industry to pursue their agenda than if you just bend over.
Tell me why if this model produces 3 - 4 watts of energy why they can't cover the blades of larger windmills with these things or better yet design the blades so they have edge holes with these things inside.
There is no such thing as a free lunch (1st law of thermodynamics). The drag produced by the turbines extracting energy slows the speed of the windmill blades reducing the power delivered to the main generator so you gain nothing by adding those (more likely you will lose since the main generator is less efficient at slower speeds).
Coincidently, this is the same problem with charging the cell phone by clipping this device to the outside of the window while riding in a bus, train, or car. The vehicles engine needs to consume more energy to offset the drag produced by the turbine. Granted it is small compared to the amount of energy used to move the vehicle in the first place but it would be more energy efficient to connect the phone to the vehicles alternator than to convert the engines rotory motion to motion induced "wind flow" and then the wind flow back to rotary motion.
Now could you make a windmill with no main generator and use a large number of small turbines instead? Yes but it probably would not work well at all. In fact, it would probably work less well than just pointing the turbines into the wind which in turn would not work very well at all. The problem is a serious impedance mismatch. Turbines want high pressure/high airflow. A windmill blade tip will be travelling at a lower linear velocity than the air that turns it.
Incidently, power from wind is proporional to the cube of the wind velocity. Generators are inefficient at low speeds. Modern windmills adjust to different wind velocities by feathering the blades to try to run the generator at a relatively constant speed. In really high winds they turn the blades parallel to the airflow to avoid destroying the generator and gear train.
Note that since it was described as a turbine and not a "wind turbine" (which is normally a very different beast) and described it as fitting in a pocket, I am imagining a device with multiple disks with the edge shaped into blades inside a tube like you might find in a jet engine or gas fired power plant (every other disk is stationary or counter rotates to restore longitudinal airflow). A friend built an toilet paper roll cardboard tube sized device out of sheet metal in this topology that was demonstrated with the air from a shop vac that would be about the right size for a cell phone charger. If that is not the topology used., then some of what I have said will not apply but much of it still will.
Whatever turbine topology you use on your windmill blades, you are converting from wind to rotary motion twice and therefore are reducing the efficiency by around 60% compared to doing so once even if it is well designed and operating at optimal wind speed. And poor performance at low speeds will be made even worse by being being run twice through the innefficent portion of a non-linear transfer function.
Back to the original article, the usefulness of this is likely to be very limited since people in India who don't have electricity aren't likely to spend a lot of time running around in vehicles every day to charge their phones. A small roof mounted windmill would probably be a lot more practical. It may have some use as a travel charger for people who will be traveling to distant points but not be staying for very long (such as tourists).
The little generators that run headlights on a bicycle might be another alternative for charging a cell phone. With a stand, pedal power can even be used while stationary. Someone built a generator stand for a bicycle that was capable of generating as much as 260W (100W seems more likely for an extended period of time).
A small solar panel with built in battery (so you don't need to leave your cell phone on char
My mom works in a public library in a DC suburb. According to her, they have extremely high damage rates (mostly scratches) on CDs and DVDs that are much higher than for cassettes and videotapes and the discs are quickly destroyed. Apparently, people are more careless with discs from the library than they are with video rentals or their own collection or the people who use the library as opposed to paying for video rentals or purchases are more inept in their handling of disks.
Most libraries have very small collections of movies. The main branch of the Charlottesville, VA public library has 240 video titles (all formats) and the entire system has only 396. Video rental stores have much larger selections (about 5000 titles) and online services like Netflix (aprox 30000 titles), GreenCine (25000), BB online (approx 30,000), etc. have much larger collections, still. The local university has a much larger collection than the public library but it is still far less complete than netflix.
Here is a little factoid from their website.
That suggests that internet delivery of movies will start to become practical (at least for early adopters) when the current internet capacity doubles.
Since postage costs are a significant portion of netflix's cost, internet delivery could be a a very good thing. Currently, though, bandwidth costs are substantial. Bandwidth costs are dropping, however, as postage costs increase. As the service becomes more popular, however, I can see companies like netflix locating server farms at all major exchange points. This would eliminate the need to pay backbone providers for long haul costs.
It would be a bad thing if the oil industry acquired exclusive rights to this technology. It would be even worse if a single oil company did so. In the latter case, only a single oil company would switch to waste/biomass and the other companies would have to continue to pump oil to stay in business.
As long as the technology remains availible to all, though involvement of the oil companies would be a good thing, at least in the short term. Who else has the capital and the experience to deploy this on a large scale? Also, the second stage of the process looks suspiciously like an oil refinery so it may be possible to "bolt" the first stage onto existing refineries converting them to the ability to run off of waste and biomass.
In the long term, however, it would be desireable to have many smaller plants scattered throughout the country. This would greatly reduce the cost and energy consumption associated with transporting the waste, biomass, and finished products not to mention the hazards of spills. Smaller installations could be placed at each landfill, sewage treatment plant, medical waste facility (medical waste and mad cows might need a separate plant because the grinder would become contaminated), farm coop, large poultry/pig/beef plants, oil storage facilities, and other strategic locations.
So, it could be important to have legislation restricting exclusive ownership of the technology or at least a commitment to use existing anti-trust laws. This is one case where eminent domain would be justified.
I find it curious that both Livejournal and Wikipedia were using fancy battery backed RAID controllers and this still happened. I have no personal experience with such controllers but
I assume they must work like this: the most recent N writes are stored in battery backed RAM. After power is restored, the controller rewrites ALL of the data in battery backed RAM in case some of it didn't make it out to disk.
Now there are three scenarios where this could fail, that I can think of. In one, the total cache on all connected disk drives exceeds the total size of the battery backed RAM. Unless there is a message you can send to the drive forbidding it to use a portion of its cache for writes (ok to use all for reads), you are SOL in this case. The second scenario is that the controller clears some of the data in the battery backed RAM after it has been told by the drive that it has been written (via serial number) or after some amount of time (or number of write operations) has passed and this assumption is wrong. The third scenario is
a variation of the second in which the controller assumes the drive does not cache writes at all and immediately invalidates the RAM copy as soon as a write xfer operation completes but that is rather pointless. I am ignoring problems due to equipment failures or week long power outages here.
Write back caching on the drive is loaded with problems and in lieu of such a controller, It would seem that about the only way it can safely be enabled (without supplemental storage on a device without write back cache) is if there is the ability for the operating system to send a query to the drive to ask if a specific serial number of write operation has completed or at least to return the highest serial number such that all serial numbers lower than that have completed. Then the operating system can allow, for example, 15 processes to simultaneously schedule write operations (or one process multiple writes) which the drive can complete in optimal order but none
of those processes can continue once they have called flush() until the data has actually been written.
I assume wikipedia has something like 100 reads for every write. I wonder if the performance from allowing write caching is really necessary
during normal operations (as opposed to database or index rebuilds or replication operations) and if it could be turned off most of the time. This is not a fix for the underlying problems (unless it stays off all the time) but would be a way to improve the odds considerably.
It seems to me that data center proceedures should be designed (and fire codes need to accomodate this) to allow operations to occur in a reasonable sequence. First the alarm goes off. Then a signal is transmitted to all servers to begin shutdown (can be delivered by ethernet). Lights must remain powered until people have a chance to evacuage. Then there is a reasonable delay to allow evacuation of personell and to allow someone to reach the hold off switches. There would be separate hold off switches for halon and power down. Then halon wold be released. Power would not be shut off until servers had time to power down or fire crews needed to enter the area for purposes other than verifying that the fire was out. Even if the fire is being maintained by emergency power, the halon should kill it so a facility with adequate halon should never need to actually do an emergency power off unless perhaps the fire affected an area outside the area protected by halon.
At a minimum, I would expect the data center to have two complete UPS systems. These would supply power to racks in a cartesian arrangement where each rack was supplied power from two different UPSes, one from a row bus and one from a column bus. With the exception of the emergency power off required by fire codes, it would be very difficult for a rack to lose power on both busses unless there was a short from one b
I have barely any cryptography knowledge, but would the SHA series be any safer if the size of the data was part of the signature? From glancing over Bruce's post (and remembering how MD5 and others were broken), data has to be padded. You can't just change arbitrary bits and produce the same signature. So, couldn't you just add the size of the file to the signature? Does that decrease security, because the size is now known?
It would greatly add to the security in theory except that it wouldn't really work well in practice. I am not an expert on cryto algorithms but the limitations of this approach can be seen even without knowing anything about the actual has algorithm.
The trick with forging messages is that you need to add some amount of garbage to the forged message to make it match the hash of the original (there are other ways in theory that are likely to be less practical). This is why the length inforormation would appear to help. Then you have to disguise the purpose of the garbage so it doesn't draw attention to itself. Perhaps as another fake signature or an uncompressed image. Steganography would give you the requisite number of bits while still letting you include an image (of a hand written signature, a document page, or a company logo)that wasn't obviously junk but the bits would not be consequtive which makes it harder). Instead of hiding them in low order bit steganography, you could replace a number of consequtive pixels; the result would be visable but would be mistaken for a smudge. By including the length in the signature, you make it much harder to make a message that says what you want it to say and still matches the hash.However, the problem with your suggestion is protecting the new size information. If you include the size in the message before hashing, then you simply search for a hash that matches the forged message with modified size which could be about the same amount of work as forging in the first place for a brute force attack though it may well add additional constraints that might prevent taking particular shortcuts vs. a brute force attack in which case it would help. It would really depend on whether the hash crack is bothered by this constraint. If the crack algorithm knows in advance how many extra bits will be generated then running the length through the hash doesn't help at all. If you just add some message size bits to the end of the hash, then the information is unprotected and can be changed to match the message. So, you probably would want to sign the length separately. But if you are going to do that, you could use a hash with twice as many bits in the first place or hash the same message twice with two different initial values for the hash (cracking the first hash may or may not provide a shortcut to cracking the second). Both of these approaches would probably be much more secure than adding the length. Even more secure would be to hash the message with two different hash algorithms.
There are also ways of returning to the original message length even when adding garbage. Suppose I want to change a contract to say you will pay me $100,000 instead of $10,000. To make room for the extra hash fooling bits, I can delete an entire paragraph from the contract that is of no importance to me (or even makes it more favorable to me by its absence). Longer hashes or double hashes would effectively prevent this but length information would not.
Cooking carrots is likely to reduce their cancer fighting ability. Likewise, while carrot extracts such as described in the article may be profitable for drug manufacturers (and the researchers who get grants from them), I have a hunch fresh carrot juice extracted with a centrifical juice extractor could be more effective and cheaper. Carrot juice provides a way of consuming large quantities of carrot nutrients including anti-oxidants in their natural proportions without consuming too much insoluable fiber. It also is a good base for juices of less palatable vegetables that also have cancer fighting properties.
You didn't specify what kind of learning disability your brother had. The most common kind of disability that affects reading is Dyslexia. It could also cause problems with math since if you don't perceive the digits and symbols in the same order they appear on the page, you are going to have trouble with math. Dyslexia is itself a rather vague diagnosis.
I can't really recommend specific software but I can share some observations from personal experience. Attitudes towards disability can make a huge difference. Expectations of failure can be self fulfilling prophacies.
A friend of mine was diagnosed as Dyslexic when he was young. His parents were told by doctors that he would never learn to read. Fortunately, his parents did not listen. They spent time tutoring him and enrolled him in a special school. My friend not only reads better than the vast majority of the population, he is extremely well read and has a Ph. D. in astrophysics.
I myself was diagnosed in high school as having dyslexia though that came as quite a surprise since I was reading at a 12th grade level in the 6th grade. When I was a kid, my mother read to me a lot.
Another friend has dyslexia. His parents took the attitute of steering him away from activities that he would be likely to fail at. As a result, he is functionally illiterate but slowly making progress on his own. It may have helped that I was able to counter some of the defeatist non-sense.
Your brother might benefit from using the English subtitles availible on most DVD players. As long as he tries to read them rather than just relying on the audio, the effect could be similar to being read to. He could choose content that was interesting to him. An interesting technological twist would be to modify an open source software DVD player such as Ogle to deliberately desynchronize the audio so the words would be spoken only after he had a chance to try and read them himself. Neurologically, being forced to make the attempt and then being corrected or reinforced immediately thereafter is important to the learning process. Of course, he may not be far enough along that he can follow the subtitles. He might be able to try to get the first word out of each subtitle, then work up to the first two words. It is important to be aware that sometimes the subtitles and the dialog do not match (subtitles having been copied from the script not transcribed from the actual performance) but they match often enough that if you take this into consideration it could be useful. Another variation would be to make the DVD player software automatically pause after each new subtitle is displayed.
Similarly, text to speech can be integrated with applications such as instant messaging and slight modification would create a delay between presenting the written words and speaking them. Of course, he would need to be litterate enough to be able to write something back in the case of instant messaging unless he is just lurking in some chat rooms. In the latter case, logs could be used so he doesn't have to keep up with the frantic pace in many chat rooms.
Dyslexic.com has some information on technological aids for dyslexia. Hierarchical Program Tree is a package listed at freshmeat that is intended for dyslexics. There is probably some more stuff out there.
I think there is a lot of potential for educational software that is designed to take particular learning disabilities into consideration that may not have been realized yet. As an example, a dyslexic may be able to make out the individual letters in a word but have difficulty perceiving them in the order they appear. So, "tea" and "ate" might be hard to distinguish. A program could sort through the dictionary finding words that are different morphologies of the same letters and speak a word and present similar words as a multiple choice test. Educational softw
Another case of a monopoly doing themselves in.
The universities are moaning about their loss of revenue from the land-line cash cow but it is their own fault. If they had installed sufficient 802.11g wireless routers throughout campus (as well as around the bars off campus) and provided wireless VoIP service, they could have undercut the cell phone providers. People who live off campus don't buy land line service from the university, anyway, and the ones who live on campus rarely stray off campus so they could be tempted by a service that allows unlimited calls (some cellular companies offer unlimited calls by they have limited coverage but systems with reasonable coverage charge exhorbitant rates for daytime minutes). And the system could be setup to deliver calls to your PC when you are in your dorm room. A typical university already has much of the infrastructure. It already has a high speed network. It already owns the buildings where the access points would be installed. It already has right of ways in the form of steam tunnels located under the sidewalks allowing access points to be added between buildings easily. It already has a PBX with trunk lines to connect to landlines.
No, the school wouldn't have a monopoly but it would be competing against cell phone services that cost more than the university charged for land lines.
Bandwidth would be an issue so they would need to go with lots of access points with small antennas located inside buildings or along sidewalks rather than a few access points with big antennas on the roof.
The Bean itself is voilating copyrights of the buildings that it reflects...the reflections themselves are "reproductions" of the buildings that are designed by artists and builders.
One could confuse the issue considerably by taking a picture of the bean as reflected in a handheld mirror. After all, if the city wants to hold the position that when you photgraph the mirror known as the bean you are taking a picture of the bean and not the objects it reflects then that same argument can be used against them: you were taking a photograph of your personal property. The case would be an even stronger parallel if your mirror was not a planar mirror but distorted the image in some way. Now, they might be able to rip your case to shreds but in so doing they would rip their own case to shreds.
The owner of a building reflected in the bean could sue the city for infringement of their own copyrights when the city charged money for the use of their reflection.
And there is attractive nuisance legislation. By placing the structure in a public place where it will naturally be a backdrop to activities that may be photographed without enclosing it in a protective structure, they are inducinging minors to violate copyright law. When you build a swimming pool, you are required to build a fence around it to protect yourself from being sued by the parents who fail to teach their kids not to trespass or swim without supervision.
And if selling a device which allows people to copy copyrighted material after they make the explict effort to purchase the product, another explict effort to hook up the product, and yet another explict effort to activate the product is I.N.D.U.C.E-ing someone to commit copyright infringment, than placing a copyrighted object in a public place where people can't help but photograph it in the course of normal human activities, such as photographing their friends, is certainly inducement to commit copyright infringement. Since the object was placed in the park by the same legal entitity that wishes to collect the fees and prosecute violators, it is also entrapment.
Since the park was undoubtably marketted to the public as a place of public recreation and not as a for-profit-subsidiary of the city, they are also guilty of unlawful conversion of property and violating the public trust when they infringe on the publics right to use the park in the manner that all other parks are used. True, the taxpayers would be the supposed beneficiaries of any money raised through license fees but that "benefit" would be far outweighed by the greater losses incurred by depriving them of the normal use of the park.
By violating the rights of handicapped people with poor visual memory to make a photographic record to compensate for their non-photographic memory, the city is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
If the city prevents taking and publishing photographs of demonstrators in front of the sculpture prostesting the cities policy regarding the structure, they are in volation of the first amendment.
Photographing a famous work of art with nothing else in the frame and selling that may be an infringing reproduction but photographing your girlfriend as she admires the work (with the work in the background) for your own personal use is certainly not.
While using a flashlight on a disk may be worth doing, the results may not mean what you think they will. First, light from the flashlight is either reflected, absorbed, or transmitted. If you shine light through the disk, you can see pinholes that could be a sign of poor manufacturing or subsequent damage. It is not the absolute reflectivity of the disk that matters it is the contrast.
Imagine disk A reflects 90% of light for a one and 80% of the light for a zero. Disk B reflects 70% of the light for a 1 and 30% of the light for a zero. Disk A looks more shiny initially and even more so when data is recorded on itbut Disk B is clearly the better disk (not considering differences in aging processes) to store data on.
Now consider two new hypothetical disks. Disk C starts out with a reflectivity of 90% but ages linearly to 30% over 5 years. Disk D starts out at 70% and ages linearly to 65% over 5 years. The manufacturers engineered Disk C for good looks and Disk D for data preservation.
PHB: "can't you make the disk more shiny"
Engineer: "Yes, but it won't last as long"
PHB: "Yeah but longevity is intangible. You can't see it in the store or when you open the package when you get home"
Engineer: but eventually people will notice problems
PHB: Yeah, but we will blame it on improper storage and handling. Besides, in three years I will have milked this company for as much as I can by favoring short term quarter gains over long term growth and will have cashed out my stock option bonuses for showing quartly gains and moved on to another company.
A shiny disk might be better or it might be worse; you just can't tell.
Several people have suggested the idea of storing media in the fridge or freezer. This is not something to be done lightly. Yes, the colder temperatures would, all other things being equal, reduce the rate of chemical reactions. But in the real world, the fridge or freezer is a magnet for condensation and frost. If you put the disks in a freezer with auto defrost, then they can also be subjected to thermal cycling which is very bad. I am also dubious about a fridge/freezers suggested ability to survive fire given that they are often insulated with petrochemical foams that could be highly combustable or outgas harmful materials in a fire.
The humidity/moisture environment in a fridge/freezer is a complicated thing. On the one hand, water will condense on the evaporator coils which leads to a desicating effect. On the other hand, new moisture enters the compartment every time you open the door and through leaky gaskets. Sometimes the system desicates the contents of the compartment and sometimes it desicates the room only to condense or drip on the contents. And if the fridge is also used for food there can be vinegar drips from fermented food, mold, and other nasties. Each time the door opens, the contents are subjected to some degree of thermal cycling. When you remove a disk, it is also exposed to condensation.
The odds could be improved by putting the disks in a sealed container with some desicant, using a dedicated fridge, and maintaining the gaskets and drain.
The problem with existing PDAs is that they are uninspired, underpowered, overpriced, lack adequate expandability/scalability, and are too fragile. Hundreds of dollars for a device that is lucky to last a year and only does 20% of what you want it to do is not a good investment.
If I was designing a PDA (which I could do if I had the capitol, so this isn't all pie in the sky), these are some of the unusual features it would have:
At least one compact flash slot, preferably two. Cellular modems don't appear to be availible in SDIO.
A dozen or mor MMC/SD/SDIO slots. At least half of these would be designed to protect protruding antennas/connectors without shielding them. These slots would be used for bluetooth, wifi, GPS, landline modem, ethernet, TV/FM tuner, RFID modem, etc. The other slots would be used for storage. At 1GB per flash card, you could store 6 gigs that way without moving parts. And these slots could support optional sensor modules: temperature, humidity, accelerometer, inclinometer, noxious gas sensor (flamable gas, carbon monoxide, etc), sound pressure level, magnetism, light intensity.
A very large battery to power all of that.
1/4" of silicone rubber for protection (think fluke DMM).
USB master and slave ports. Almost all PDAs forget the master port. The master port could connect to a full size keypord and mouse, USB serial adapters for use as a terminal emulator, USB flashdrives, ham radio equipment, modems, game controllers, ethernet adapters, USB headsets, printers, TV/FM tuners, DMM, Oscilliscope, and logic analyzer and portable hard drives. With an externally powered hub, you could even connect power hungry devices such as a USB scanner or bus powered DVD or hard drive. The slave port is used for hot sync, battery charging, acting as a portable hard drive, etc. Both ports could be used simultaneously, allowing the PDA to double as a smart controller or daisychain USB hub.
An optional hard drive of the sort found in ipods and other portable media devices.
A belt clip that won't break and won't fall of your belt. This means a full size metal clip. I broke belt clips about once a month until I switched to a modified ham radio clip.
An optional camera with a decent lens (bulky) that could actually collect some photons and also double as a barcode scanner. The base unit would have a port intended for use with a camera with the means for very secure attachment.
An optional keyboard that doubles as a screen cover (the screen being the only part not well protected by rubber).
An optional wrist harness for wearable use.
optional DVD+/-RW dock.
IRDA port with bright IR remote control transceiver.
An LED flash light (capable of being modulated) and also serving as illuminator for the camera/bar code scanner and a signaling device.
Optional replacement front panel "case" for embedded controller applications.
Color display with mpeg/HD decoder.
When a PDA can offer simultaneous wireless connectivity on a variety of networks simultaneously and has enough storage space to store a reasonable linux distribution, at least a full days worth of OGG/MP3 files, wikipedia (1GB), urban dictionary, sourcewatch (so you can lookup the bias of sources cited in news articles), a couple novels, a couple newspapers, dilbert, userfriendly, roadmaps, weathermaps, a photo library, and a movie, then it becomes worth carrying. And because the I/O would be removable, you could start small and add features and even unplug those peripherals and install them in the model you upgrade to in a year or two with a faster processor, more ram, and a better screen. And it would be scalable from junior geek to senior geek. So, you spend $500 on the basic unit, $500 for more peripherals and storage next two years, and the year after that you spend $500 to upgrade the basic unit but keep you
I have forgotten a lot of chemistry over the years. I thought Ferric Chloride works as an etchant for copper because the chlorine prefers copper to iron so it is happy to trade an iron atom for copper. But why would it trade an iron atom for another iron atom? Now in a solution, there will be free chlorine and iron ions floating about so the chlorine may etch the steel but I would not expect it to do as well as a compound that combined chlorine with something less desirable than iron. Maybe FeCL3 would rather combine with another Fe to produce two molecules of FeCL2. That would make sense. Some people do use ferric chloride on steel and stainless steel but reportedly it quickly builds up an oxide layer on steel that must be sanded off before it will continue etching. In stainless steel, the ferric chloride attacks the chromium (chromium chloride is very soluable in water) so it neutralizes the "stainless" in "stainless steel" making it more vulnerable.
I also wonder why you suggest FeCL3 is safer. Is this because there is no need for an electric current (and the free oxygen and hydrogen it produces?) which produce an explosive gas mixture and may also combine with components of steel to make other compounds.
"Flatbed trucks are a bigger threat," he said, "and a lot lower tech."
And picking pockets is cheaper than flatbed trucks or ipod sized widgets - and less likely to get you arrested for froteurism than rubbing up against someones crotch or leg to read the RFID code. :-)
I do wonder about these longer range RFID keys that allow you to open the door or start the car without removing the keys from your pocket. Seems like it might make it easy for rapists, muggers, and carjackers to gain access to you while you are inside your vehicle with the doors theoretically locked. Hopefully, it is disabled while the key is in he ignition though that still leaves a window of opportunity while you are getting in your car (which is why some keyless entry systems now require you to press the unlock button more than once to unlock doors other than the drivers door).
And, critically, if you want to see what the entire US foreign policy is based on, see:
Statement of Principles
Interestingly, liberals are mortified when they read that. I have no earthly idea why, as it represents a critical and fundamental understanding that we have an obligation not only to ourselves but to the world at large to spread concepts of freedom and democratic principles for positive gain. The "American interests" they which to further are really the interests of a small minority of rich and powerful Americans, not the interests of the majority of Americans, and certainly not the interests of the world population as a whole or the interests of the majority of the population in the affected countries.
Maybe they are mortified because what it says, even without reading between the lines, can be summed up as "Think locally, act globally". If you do read between the lines, you may also note that "Freedom" is the freedom for the rich to oppress and exploit both people and the environment for their own selfish "positive gain".
One of their patents, "ADAPTING PORTABLE ELECTRICAL DEVICES TO RECEIVE POWER WIRELESSLY", is for a power receiving device plugged into the existing power adapter on an electronic device.
Prior art includes: 1)solar cells with a plug. 2)A coil of wire with a plug. 3)Stealing electric power from utility lines. 4)any detachable radio antenna when used with an RF powered device (such as a field strength meter).
Also, these are intended to be permanently attached to your cell phone or similar device. So, perhaps a better title should be "device for breaking the power connector on portable electronic equipment" because that is exactly what will happen in short order. Having the plug protruding from your portable device while you carry it around will expose the connector to stresses it will not withstand. To do this safely requires a hard case with a shroud around the plug, not just some cheesy stick on pad as they suggest in the patent.
I think it is highly likely many of their other patents infringe on prior art such as cordless toothbrushes, digititizer pads (summagraphics/wacom) - particularly those with cordless pucks powered by the sensor field, and the deactivator pads for anti-theft tags.