Especially if it was the circuit board on the outside that was broken, and you had a few hundred drives sitting around and could find an identical model to swap parts with. I imagine that the insides are harder to physically damage than the outside.
followed by hammer strikes until it's in small pieces.
Anybody know about pyrotechnic drive destriction? Thermite, magnesium, Estes D engines? Aside from some toxic fumes, it seems like a more exciting way to eliminate your data once and for all....
I've always wanted to do little projects like this, where a computer controls various relays. The only thing I don't know how to do is get the computer to control them! Are there inexpensive kits that connect to, say, a serial port? I'd love it if anyone who has experience with similar things can tell me how to do this cheaply.
There's a book called Controlling the world through your PC, or something like that. It's old and comes with a floppy disk, but i recall it having schematics for hooking things up to the paralle port. You can wire it directly but you generally want opto-isolators so you can't fry your computer. You can also get a wide array of stuff to interface to the serial port. I like the motoralla 68hc11 microcontroller. It does cool shit (we actually used one in a previous barmonkey prototype), and the evaluation board with chip runs around $100. Try http://www.axman.com/ Also, the amazon page for the above book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail /-/1878 707159/103-7968018-2248661?vi=glance The "customers who bought this also bought this" section may be helpful
Don't worry, there's a drinking fountain in the dorm lounge. And a keggerator. And there's a driking fountain upstairs too, which was apparently plubmed for beer at some point. But yeah, some mudders do drink a lot.
Directv has been available for years to people that spend on motorized antenna mounts that home in on the satellite signal and keep it tracked. And that mount is cheaper.
And it work's great when you're parked in the trailer park. It's hard to keep a servoed driectv dish locked on at 65 mph, unless it's in a huge dome. The point is this dish is kinda flat and fits in an under-5-inch enclosure.
The press release might be a more reliable source than CNN.
Of course, if the Palladium OS is anything like XP, it won't have very many advantages over a non-booting PC, except for turing electricity into heat and noise. (I only say this cause i'm tired of people asking me why they can't {print/surf the web/access files/type/use the mouse} with XP.)
We had guy visit our lab from Japan a few months ago- he's been working on a similar project there to take laser scans of huge Buddah statues and temples. IIRC there were a couple of reasons for doing this- the obvious one being to preserve their cultural heritage. I think one reason was a ban on military research due to WWII, so they have to find ways to apply neat tech which don't involve blowing shit up. (don't quote me on that). I believe they also did a computer reconstruction of a temple which used to be around one of the statues but was destroyed in a tsunami, so you could do a virtual walkthrough of a nonexistent temple, with an accurate virtual statue inside. He also talked about some of the neat texture mapping they're working on to map the images back onto the laser scanned models.
As someone else mentioned, Mudd is a tech school. You can major in math, computer science, engineering, bio, chem, or physics, or certian combinations of the above. A bs isnt always a terminal degree for engineers- all three of the seniors on my senior engineering project team went to grad school. Although CS was taking over as the dominant major during my time at Mudd, the majority of the student body was in engineering when i started (96).
Is there anything left that wont slowly kill or mame you over time?
Life is an STD with a 100% fatality rate. Get used to it.
Re:excellent promotion for alternate browsers
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
·
· Score: 2
Moz can't just block these kind of ads or all those javascript menus and other leditimate onMouseOver scripts that's quite common might stop working.
Yeah, i've been to sites which had relatively benign mouse-over navigation that i couldn't use because i had jscript off. (you shouldn't need it to navigate, but that's beside the point). I think one interesting thing would be like a distributed rating system- have the browser ask before it executes a script, then ask if you are happy with the result (hopefully in some unobtrusive way TBD later). These ratings go to a clearinghouse, and then in the future the browser can check there and say 'oh, the majority of legit users who allowed thie script to run were satisfied with the result, so i'll just run it'. Of course you could set prefs for 'ask before running bu ttell me how many people liked it', 'run if over X% liked the result', 'ask the user before checking online' (privacy) etc. You also need a way to validate the opinions which are submitted, maybe with a karma like system. Could also of couse be used with images, email, etc.- anything where user opinions are likely to be similar.
Come to think of it, this would have some similarities with a mouse-over page rank indicator that tells you the quality of a link before you folow it.
If we were to take 20K slashdot users and have them try and go through the website as much as possible we could eat up thier bandwidth.
Otherwise known as a Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) Attack. But that's a very interesting question -where is the boundary between being a victim and having unwanted content forced upon you (and wasting your bandwidth) and maliciously requesting the content (thus wasting their bandwidth)? If you really download some image 1000 times, you're pretty clearly the attacker, but if you have a background process which loads pop* ads, follows the links, etc, all without ever displaying anything to the screen, you could use a lot of their bandwidth simply getting the content they shoved at you, without feeling the end effects of said content (be they frustration or desire to purchase). That, distributed over a few thousand users, may or may not fry their servers, but it's certainly an inefficient use of ad dollars which will show up in the effectivness stats (see arms race discussion elsewhere on this page).
Image transforms do not add information to an image, they just make it easier to see the information which is there (try using Photoshop Auto-level to make an image of bill clinton shaking hands with an alien). Using dodge and burn over an entire image or a large area of it will not let you change fingerprints, just make existing ones easier to see. However, if you go into photoshop and use a one pixel burn brush you could draw lines with it. This is why it's important that the person doing the image processing isn't also doing the fingerprint analysis. It's like medical imaging- the imaging tech generates a good image, the doctor decides what it means.
As for the 'As if by magic' and 'psuedo-science' bits in the article, those are irresponsible hype. It's like saying you expose film in a camera, develop it, and an image appears as if by magic. If you didn't know how a TV worked, you'd think that was magic too. As for the unrepeatability of results, no two people using fingerprint dust will get exactly the same results. Same with a photoshop brush. If you brushed the same areas in the same ways, you'd get the same results, otherwise not. Duh. This does bring up a point of repeatable, localized image processing. My guess is it wouldn't be too hard to get the GIMP to record all brush strokes. It surely stores their results for the undo option. How hard would it be to output an XML encoded series of operations along with the output image? Then if there's any question as to the usability of the results, someone can start with the original image and apply the same set of operations one at a time. Maybe add image cryptosigning, and sell linux+gimp boxen as forensics tools. Finally, i'm surprised there isn't a standard government issue image transform system. NIH Image might be a good place to start, or just a front end to matlab's image processing toolbox which is luser-friendly and keeps usable, crypto-signable records of each transform it does. As long as there aren't any brushes, no expert witness in image processing is going to say you could doctor prints.
The only way this can be seen as useful is if the person who is "cleaning up" the fingerprint has no idea who the print belongs to and where the print came from.
Or, you could RTFA. "I don't think I could recreate a fingerprint," said Knoerlein, pointing out that he never sees the suspect's fingerprints. The system might be more vulnerable where print examiners have both sets of prints and also are responsible for enhancing the prints, he said.
Digital paper doesn't have to be used for exactly the same things as the paper we have now. I wouldn't expect to see a pad of digital postit notes anytime soon. Where i would expect to see it is in applications for conveying information which has to change on a timescale of a few seconds to a few days. Think of "Upcomming Event" posters that may be placed around your community/campus/workplace. Sure, you can print a new one each week and hire people to go change them, but with E-ink/digital paper, you could put them up all over and have them update every 5 minutes (Seminar starting NOW! You could even have each poster display a map and estimated time to get to each event, so you see Seminar starting in 15 miutes, at this location, which will take you 10 minutes to get there if you follow this route. Do that with normal paper.). Or advertising- as much as i hate ads, i could see changing ad posters from time to time. The ones they have plastered around airports could change in response to the origin of the flight which just arrived. Or consider maps. I'd rather have a single sheet of digital paper with some electronics along one edge that had a map database which allowed multiple levels of zoom, text directories, etc. than one huge piece of paper which only has 2 resolutions available (and which requires a degree in topology to get it back into the glove compartment). As long as i'm at it, how 'bout parking permits. When you enter a parking garage, you could get a ticket (maybe with a non-digital timestamp, for the paranoid) which shows you which section of the garage to park in, and keeps a running total of the parking charge in one corner so you can have correct change ready as you leave. Or across a large system with multiple, time-variant levels of parking permissions, the permit could change based on what time of day it is, how heavy the parking load is, who has resevred spots but is on vacation, etc. Ok, so, yeah, short story is i think there are plenty of uses for digital paper, as long as the information doesn't have to change at 85Hz, and probably fewor involving writing on it than replacing printed material.
Are you suggesting that Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Michaelangelo (as an insightful poster pointed out), and John Carmack are not "skilled artists" because they accept(ed) money for their work?
If you're an artist, and people respect your art enough to offer you money so that you can continue bringing them the art which they enjoy, then you can be a professional artist (Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy has an interesting utopian view of this process). If you create art, and people aren't willing to pay you for it, you just have to get a job like the rest of us and pursue your passion on your own time. And if it wasn't your passion in the first place and you were only in it for the money, then it's not surprising that nobody was willing to pay you.
This is the issue that has almost turned me to the 'downloading music without any intent of paying for it is ok' side- the recording industry's incessant argument that with file sharing will be the end of music. Music, as an art form, has existed since long before the recording industry, and unless they can become something other than a pointless greedy middleman, it will exist much longer than the recording industry. I can see how from their business standpoint, they have a great way to make scads of money, so it maks sense to try buying laws to protect their revenue stream, but in the end, people will pay for art they appreciate.
But at the same time,/. comments are 'approved' by at least one person before they appear at level 3, and you usually know when a poster is trying to sell something.
i'm just gonna change my address to i.unconditionially.agree.to.pay.one.dollar.per.kil obyte.received@cosand.org and just send invoices for email i didn't want. Looking through my inbox, there's a pretty clear size differential anyways: emails containing information from my friends and colleagues seems to run 1.5 to 3k, while spam and junk from the university buearacracy runs from 8k up to a few tens of ks. Depending on how bored i get, i could sue to collect on some of the more expensive ones. I'm not sure it would hold up in court, but one the other hand, it would be fun to stand in court and ask the defendant "which part of 'i unconditionally agree to pay' weren't you clear on?"
And for those of us who were a little slow to pick up on the fact that it was a hoax: "Hodges emitted a scream the like of which I hadn`t heard since his scrotum was burned off during my experiment with fluorine gas last year." Mercury and electric shocks are one thing, but i certainly wouldn't wait around to be canned after this.
I think some places have laws against advertisments directed at young children. Is somebody going to argue that 'this is where babies come from' is more damaging to a child than 'you're not a good person unless you own X'? (The answer being yes, whoever is selling X is going to argue that like hell). If i had kids (big if), i'd be concerned about them being consumerized as well as being scarred by goatse etc. Clearly, supervised use is the way to go, but.kids is arguably a good stopgap measure for parents unwilling or unable to be involved in their child's computer use and preferring to leave the decision of what's appropriate up to The Man (business or the us government(business)). (And it's somewhat similar to my fascistnet proposal).
4 quarts in a gallon discovered to be arbitrary No, but thanks for playing. There are necessarily 4 quarts in a gallon, quart coming from the same root as quarter. If we picked some name which didn't have the same root as the word for one fourth, you could claim that it was arbitrary.
For anyone wanting to go the x10 route instead of this hyped up x10 replacement, check out bottlerocket and BlueLava. Set up a linux server as secure as you want, access it from your handheld, phone, desk, etc. You can probably put it on a port that you broadband provider doesn't block. Or hack it run over email.
Why on earth would you need a remote controlled dishwasher?
Well, since you ask, you could load it up at your convenience and run it at 2am (assuming you don't sleep next to it) when the burden on the power system is mimized. Still, i don't see the average homeowener wiring one of these up to any major appliances.
Much as i think it would be fun to stick it microsoft by DoSing their xbox network, you'll probably be labled a 'cybercriminal' and the FBI will show up at your door in suits and sunglasses. Or they'll find some way to apply the DMCA to hold you without bail. Or if not, they'll buy a new law that says they can. Game Over, Dude. We loose.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially if it was the circuit board on the outside that was broken, and you had a few hundred drives sitting around and could find an identical model to swap parts with. I imagine that the insides are harder to physically damage than the outside.
followed by hammer strikes until it's in small pieces.
Anybody know about pyrotechnic drive destriction? Thermite, magnesium, Estes D engines? Aside from some toxic fumes, it seems like a more exciting way to eliminate your data once and for all....
Port Eliza to it, and it'll listen to your problems as well.
On a hexadecimal keypad?
"Please tell me more about a9 d0 67 3f 7d 83 c2 17"
I've always wanted to do little projects like this, where a computer controls various relays. The only thing I don't know how to do is get the computer to control them! Are there inexpensive kits that connect to, say, a serial port? I'd love it if anyone who has experience with similar things can tell me how to do this cheaply.
l /-/1878 707159/103-7968018-2248661?vi=glance
There's a book called Controlling the world through your PC, or something like that. It's old and comes with a floppy disk, but i recall it having schematics for hooking things up to the paralle port. You can wire it directly but you generally want opto-isolators so you can't fry your computer. You can also get a wide array of stuff to interface to the serial port. I like the motoralla 68hc11 microcontroller. It does cool shit (we actually used one in a previous barmonkey prototype), and the evaluation board with chip runs around $100. Try http://www.axman.com/
Also, the amazon page for the above book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai
The "customers who bought this also bought this" section may be helpful
Don't worry, there's a drinking fountain in the dorm lounge. And a keggerator. And there's a driking fountain upstairs too, which was apparently plubmed for beer at some point.
But yeah, some mudders do drink a lot.
Directv has been available for years to people that spend on motorized antenna mounts that home in on the satellite signal and keep it tracked. And that mount is cheaper.
And it work's great when you're parked in the trailer park. It's hard to keep a servoed driectv dish locked on at 65 mph, unless it's in a huge dome. The point is this dish is kinda flat and fits in an under-5-inch enclosure.
The press release might be a more reliable source than CNN.
Of course, if the Palladium OS is anything like XP, it won't have very many advantages over a non-booting PC, except for turing electricity into heat and noise.
(I only say this cause i'm tired of people asking me why they can't {print/surf the web/access files/type/use the mouse} with XP.)
We had guy visit our lab from Japan a few months ago- he's been working on a similar project there to take laser scans of huge Buddah statues and temples. IIRC there were a couple of reasons for doing this- the obvious one being to preserve their cultural heritage. I think one reason was a ban on military research due to WWII, so they have to find ways to apply neat tech which don't involve blowing shit up. (don't quote me on that). I believe they also did a computer reconstruction of a temple which used to be around one of the statues but was destroyed in a tsunami, so you could do a virtual walkthrough of a nonexistent temple, with an accurate virtual statue inside.
He also talked about some of the neat texture mapping they're working on to map the images back onto the laser scanned models.
As someone else mentioned, Mudd is a tech school. You can major in math, computer science, engineering, bio, chem, or physics, or certian combinations of the above. A bs isnt always a terminal degree for engineers- all three of the seniors on my senior engineering project team went to grad school. Although CS was taking over as the dominant major during my time at Mudd, the majority of the student body was in engineering when i started (96).
Is there anything left that wont slowly kill or mame you over time?
Life is an STD with a 100% fatality rate. Get used to it.
Moz can't just block these kind of ads or all those javascript menus and other leditimate onMouseOver scripts that's quite common might stop working.
.
Yeah, i've been to sites which had relatively benign mouse-over navigation that i couldn't use because i had jscript off. (you shouldn't need it to navigate, but that's beside the point).
I think one interesting thing would be like a distributed rating system- have the browser ask before it executes a script, then ask if you are happy with the result (hopefully in some unobtrusive way TBD later). These ratings go to a clearinghouse, and then in the future the browser can check there and say 'oh, the majority of legit users who allowed thie script to run were satisfied with the result, so i'll just run it'. Of course you could set prefs for 'ask before running bu ttell me how many people liked it', 'run if over X% liked the result', 'ask the user before checking online' (privacy) etc. You also need a way to validate the opinions which are submitted, maybe with a karma like system. Could also of couse be used with images, email, etc.- anything where user opinions are likely to be similar
Come to think of it, this would have some similarities with a mouse-over page rank indicator that tells you the quality of a link before you folow it.
If we were to take 20K slashdot users and have them try and go through the website as much as possible we could eat up thier bandwidth.
Otherwise known as a Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) Attack. But that's a very interesting question -where is the boundary between being a victim and having unwanted content forced upon you (and wasting your bandwidth) and maliciously requesting the content (thus wasting their bandwidth)? If you really download some image 1000 times, you're pretty clearly the attacker, but if you have a background process which loads pop* ads, follows the links, etc, all without ever displaying anything to the screen, you could use a lot of their bandwidth simply getting the content they shoved at you, without feeling the end effects of said content (be they frustration or desire to purchase). That, distributed over a few thousand users, may or may not fry their servers, but it's certainly an inefficient use of ad dollars which will show up in the effectivness stats (see arms race discussion elsewhere on this page).
Image transforms do not add information to an image, they just make it easier to see the information which is there (try using Photoshop Auto-level to make an image of bill clinton shaking hands with an alien). Using dodge and burn over an entire image or a large area of it will not let you change fingerprints, just make existing ones easier to see. However, if you go into photoshop and use a one pixel burn brush you could draw lines with it. This is why it's important that the person doing the image processing isn't also doing the fingerprint analysis. It's like medical imaging- the imaging tech generates a good image, the doctor decides what it means.
As for the 'As if by magic' and 'psuedo-science' bits in the article, those are irresponsible hype. It's like saying you expose film in a camera, develop it, and an image appears as if by magic. If you didn't know how a TV worked, you'd think that was magic too. As for the unrepeatability of results, no two people using fingerprint dust will get exactly the same results. Same with a photoshop brush. If you brushed the same areas in the same ways, you'd get the same results, otherwise not. Duh.
This does bring up a point of repeatable, localized image processing. My guess is it wouldn't be too hard to get the GIMP to record all brush strokes. It surely stores their results for the undo option. How hard would it be to output an XML encoded series of operations along with the output image? Then if there's any question as to the usability of the results, someone can start with the original image and apply the same set of operations one at a time. Maybe add image cryptosigning, and sell linux+gimp boxen as forensics tools.
Finally, i'm surprised there isn't a standard government issue image transform system. NIH Image might be a good place to start, or just a front end to matlab's image processing toolbox which is luser-friendly and keeps usable, crypto-signable records of each transform it does. As long as there aren't any brushes, no expert witness in image processing is going to say you could doctor prints.
The only way this can be seen as useful is if the person who is "cleaning up" the fingerprint has no idea who the print belongs to and where the print came from.
Or, you could RTFA.
"I don't think I could recreate a fingerprint," said Knoerlein, pointing out that he never sees the suspect's fingerprints. The system might be more vulnerable where print examiners have both sets of prints and also are responsible for enhancing the prints, he said.
Digital paper doesn't have to be used for exactly the same things as the paper we have now. I wouldn't expect to see a pad of digital postit notes anytime soon. Where i would expect to see it is in applications for conveying information which has to change on a timescale of a few seconds to a few days. Think of "Upcomming Event" posters that may be placed around your community/campus/workplace. Sure, you can print a new one each week and hire people to go change them, but with E-ink/digital paper, you could put them up all over and have them update every 5 minutes (Seminar starting NOW! You could even have each poster display a map and estimated time to get to each event, so you see Seminar starting in 15 miutes, at this location, which will take you 10 minutes to get there if you follow this route. Do that with normal paper.). Or advertising- as much as i hate ads, i could see changing ad posters from time to time. The ones they have plastered around airports could change in response to the origin of the flight which just arrived. Or consider maps. I'd rather have a single sheet of digital paper with some electronics along one edge that had a map database which allowed multiple levels of zoom, text directories, etc. than one huge piece of paper which only has 2 resolutions available (and which requires a degree in topology to get it back into the glove compartment). As long as i'm at it, how 'bout parking permits. When you enter a parking garage, you could get a ticket (maybe with a non-digital timestamp, for the paranoid) which shows you which section of the garage to park in, and keeps a running total of the parking charge in one corner so you can have correct change ready as you leave. Or across a large system with multiple, time-variant levels of parking permissions, the permit could change based on what time of day it is, how heavy the parking load is, who has resevred spots but is on vacation, etc.
Ok, so, yeah, short story is i think there are plenty of uses for digital paper, as long as the information doesn't have to change at 85Hz, and probably fewor involving writing on it than replacing printed material.
Are you suggesting that Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Michaelangelo (as an insightful poster pointed out), and John Carmack are not "skilled artists" because they accept(ed) money for their work?
If you're an artist, and people respect your art enough to offer you money so that you can continue bringing them the art which they enjoy, then you can be a professional artist (Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy has an interesting utopian view of this process). If you create art, and people aren't willing to pay you for it, you just have to get a job like the rest of us and pursue your passion on your own time. And if it wasn't your passion in the first place and you were only in it for the money, then it's not surprising that nobody was willing to pay you.
This is the issue that has almost turned me to the 'downloading music without any intent of paying for it is ok' side- the recording industry's incessant argument that with file sharing will be the end of music. Music, as an art form, has existed since long before the recording industry, and unless they can become something other than a pointless greedy middleman, it will exist much longer than the recording industry. I can see how from their business standpoint, they have a great way to make scads of money, so it maks sense to try buying laws to protect their revenue stream, but in the end, people will pay for art they appreciate.
But at the same time, /. comments are 'approved' by at least one person before they appear at level 3, and you usually know when a poster is trying to sell something.
i'm just gonna change my address to i.unconditionially.agree.to.pay.one.dollar.per.kil obyte.received@cosand.org and just send invoices for email i didn't want. Looking through my inbox, there's a pretty clear size differential anyways: emails containing information from my friends and colleagues seems to run 1.5 to 3k, while spam and junk from the university buearacracy runs from 8k up to a few tens of ks. Depending on how bored i get, i could sue to collect on some of the more expensive ones. I'm not sure it would hold up in court, but one the other hand, it would be fun to stand in court and ask the defendant "which part of 'i unconditionally agree to pay' weren't you clear on?"
And for those of us who were a little slow to pick up on the fact that it was a hoax: "Hodges emitted a scream the like of which I hadn`t heard since his scrotum was burned off during my experiment with fluorine gas last year."
Mercury and electric shocks are one thing, but i certainly wouldn't wait around to be canned after this.
How many "kids sites" are anything but an advertisement?
;-)
http://www.cia.gov/cia/ciakids/
Well, it is propaganda, but i don't think they're actually selling a product
I think some places have laws against advertisments directed at young children. Is somebody going to argue that 'this is where babies come from' is more damaging to a child than 'you're not a good person unless you own X'? (The answer being yes, whoever is selling X is going to argue that like hell). If i had kids (big if), i'd be concerned about them being consumerized as well as being scarred by goatse etc. Clearly, supervised use is the way to go, but .kids is arguably a good stopgap measure for parents unwilling or unable to be involved in their child's computer use and preferring to leave the decision of what's appropriate up to The Man (business or the us government(business)). (And it's somewhat similar to my fascistnet proposal).
4 quarts in a gallon discovered to be arbitrary
No, but thanks for playing. There are necessarily 4 quarts in a gallon, quart coming from the same root as quarter. If we picked some name which didn't have the same root as the word for one fourth, you could claim that it was arbitrary.
For anyone wanting to go the x10 route instead of this hyped up x10 replacement, check out bottlerocket and BlueLava. Set up a linux server as secure as you want, access it from your handheld, phone, desk, etc. You can probably put it on a port that you broadband provider doesn't block. Or hack it run over email.
Why on earth would you need a remote controlled dishwasher?
Well, since you ask, you could load it up at your convenience and run it at 2am (assuming you don't sleep next to it) when the burden on the power system is mimized.
Still, i don't see the average homeowener wiring one of these up to any major appliances.
Much as i think it would be fun to stick it microsoft by DoSing their xbox network, you'll probably be labled a 'cybercriminal' and the FBI will show up at your door in suits and sunglasses. Or they'll find some way to apply the DMCA to hold you without bail. Or if not, they'll buy a new law that says they can.
Game Over, Dude. We loose.