The problem with eye witnesses is that the human brain builds it's model of reality from incomplete data - but humans rarely realize that this is happening. So people assert that they saw or heard what they expected to see and hear, rather than what actually occurred, and things that you heard about second hand become (in memory) things you witnessed personally.
There have been a number of studies by People With Important Letters After Their Names that showed how easy it was to create false memories in people. The studies were originally done as part of the research into "recovered memories" of long ago events, but it applies to events just witnessed, as well.
The article is correct, eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable.
It's so much better in other countries in the world where the disaffected set off car bombs and kill dozens of people at a time, instead of picking them off.
If countries that ban guns are so much safer, why does England have razor wire around it's government buildings and road blocks around the financial district?
I think that what you're thinking of is TI's patent on the IC. The patent was awarded in the USA ages ago - but when TI tried to patent it in Japan, the Japanese semiconductor industry fought them. The battle raged so long in Japanese courts that the patent expired everywhere else in the world - only to finally take effect in Japan in the early 90's.
So, basically, the Japanese semiconductor industry deserved what it got.
You should check out the Game Boy color. I bought one recently to play (gurk) Pokemon with my son. While games that use the color well seem to be rare, but overall it's very slick - the LCD is just amazing compare to the original system.
Besides, I think the Game Boy is a testament to the fact that you don't need to throw mega-hardware at the user to get good games. Instead of upping the specs each year, Nintendo has been reducing the power consumption, system size and manufacturing cost.
I don't think the C64 ever used the 6502. Maybe the Vic-20 did?
The 6510 was a 6502 with some built-in memory mapped I/O capabilities. You controlled the I/O by setting bits in memory locations 0x0000 and 0x0001. Sweet. I liked the Z-80's instruction set much better, but you could play all sorts of games with the 6510 chip and the C64 architecture that you couldn't dream of with a TRS-80.
I've been in the biz for nearly 20 years now, I've used every language from assembler to FORTH, to C++, and I love Java. I've used it to deploy commercial financial services applications faster and more reliably than I could have in C++.
While the JVM will always be a performance issue, (I would never use Java for number crunching or high transaction rates), it's good enough for many business applications and the Java language is a huge improvement over C++.
People forget that C was around a long time before it began to make inroads against FORTRAN and COBOL. Sooner or later, Java will do the same to C.
First, it isn't FUD, it was done - although (as another person pointed out) it was never released outside AT&T, which contradicts what I had originally read, but I guess Thompson would know better than I what he did with the Trojan.
Second - That doesn't eliminate my main point: There's no reason why someone with access to one of the main GNU distributions sites couldn't pull the same trick off today, by slipping the trojan into gcc.
More realisticly - show me one person who has never done anything (smoking weed, or had an affair, for example) that could be used to blackmail them. That's the real issue here: being blackmailed by your own government. And for people who think that it cannot happen: What the hell do you think living in the USSR was like? Or china, where children are taught to report their parents' "suspicious" behaviour?
A couple of years ago, Ritchie revealed that he had put a back door into the original UNIX login program that no one ever caught: He added code to the C compiler so that if the compiler was compiling login.c, it would inject the back door function. He then added code to the compiler so that if it was compiling *itself* it would inject the code to create the login back door.
He then deleted the code from the C compiler source. You could examine the source all you wanted - but when you recompiled the compiler, it inserted the backdoor creation code into the new compiler - and when you compiled login.c, it would add the back door to the login executable.
He claimed the trap door existed for years on many ports of UNIX. Any port of UNIX that was built using a cross-compiled version of the original C compiler had it.
It would be straight forward to replicate this process in GCC. It would spread much more slowly (unless you managed to get your binaries picked up by a major mirror) but it would be nearly undetectable.
I waited for someone to point this out, but no one has, so:
People - there is nothing magical about the definitions of kilobyte and megabyte. the values of kilobytes (1024 bytes), megabytes (1024 * 1024) and so forth were not chosen because they were optimal for computer design! If they were, we'd be using units based on 2**8, 2**16, and 2**32! (DooD! My new harddrive has 2 longs of space! k3wl!!)
1024 and 1024*1024 were chosen as a compromise - as close approximations of 10**3 and 10**6!
The only time the precise difference matters is when you're actually laying out the hardware. At any other time, everyone should just relax!
I've used the Pilot 1000, the Pro, and the III. The Palm is the best platform because of it's simplicity and speed. Why screw it up with gew-gaws like color? My 2 meg III works great, and with almost all of that 2 megs available for data storage, I used to keep two full length novels installed in it at all times. Now I download news pages instead. Meanwhile WinCE boxes need 8 megs to do *anything*.
Why are people so determined to turn their elegant Pilots into bloated WinCE boxes?
Minor side note, NASA is going to send a plutonium loaded probe that might reenter the atmosphere in August. If it does about 72lb of that stuff is going to come down on us... farewell then.
First, get your facts straight. NASA isn't launching anything in August. Cassini, which NASA launched last year, will be making a close pass to Earth in order to get a gravity boost on it's way to Saturn.
In any case, your description of the plutonium risk is a massive exaggeration. Plutonium is primarily dangerous if you breath it in as dust after managing to survive the atomic explosion that spread it around in the first place. If you do that, it is about the most toxic substance known to man - it will settle into your bones and just start spawning cancers.
NASA probes, OTOH, are using ceramic pellets to encase the plutonium. No dust. You could probably even handle the pellets (for a short while) without ill effects.
The biggest threat you face from Cassini is if it re-entered and happened to hit you on the head as it crashed.
Sheesh. You'd think someone who posts on Slashdot would know a little science.
Wasn't there a short story by Larry Niven where an astronaut on Mars commits murder by "accidentally" dropping a microscopic black hole through another man? At the end of the story,the narrator estimates that in a couple of years Mars would be gone, replaced by a slightly larger black hole in the same orbit.
I got mine today. It includes two modules, since the Transciever is effectively also an Appliance module.
So, for 6 bucks, I got an appliance module, a lamp module, a wireless remote control and the computer interface. Not bad.
Downside is that the computer interface does not work at all on my one computer, and on the second computer it only works if I turn off my HotSync software - which makes it a non-starter.
Anyway, I now have a wireless remote for my lavalamp and the lights in my weight room.
On the other hand, communications sent to a specific individual over the Internet (e.g. e-mail) do carry such an expectation (in the absence of specific agreements to the contrary, such as are often found in employee Internet-use policies).
Bzzt. Wrong. Only people who do not understand the technology could have such expectations. Believing that e-mail is private is like believing telegraph operators don't read telegrams and that postal carriers can't read post cards.
E-mail can be trivially read on any machine the mail item passes through.
I'm sorry, but that's a very foolish attitude. Even if our current government is, er, "trustable", we cannot guarantee that future governments will be. Nor can we guarantee that individuals within the government will never abuse their power.
Keep in mind that many of the worst tyrants of the 20th century began as elected officials. Milosivec, Mussolini(?), Hitler. Do you really believe that such a thing can never happen in America? The same America that was founded on the principal of a weak government, but who's government has been steadily accruing power ever since?
The only way to prevent tyranny is to limit the power of the government. And the best way to limit the government's power is to prevent it from finding out what we're doing in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with eye witnesses is that the human brain builds it's model of reality from incomplete data - but humans rarely realize that this is happening. So people assert that they saw or heard what they expected to see and hear, rather than what actually occurred, and things that you heard about second hand become (in memory) things you witnessed personally.
There have been a number of studies by People With Important Letters After Their Names that showed how easy it was to create false memories in people. The studies were originally done as part of the research into "recovered memories" of long ago events, but it applies to events just witnessed, as well.
The article is correct, eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable.
--
Yes.
It's so much better in other countries in the world where the disaffected set off car bombs and kill dozens of people at a time, instead of picking them off.
If countries that ban guns are so much safer, why does England have razor wire around it's government buildings and road blocks around the financial district?
--
I think that what you're thinking of is TI's patent on the IC. The patent was awarded in the USA ages ago - but when TI tried to patent it in Japan, the Japanese semiconductor industry fought them. The battle raged so long in Japanese courts that the patent expired everywhere else in the world - only to finally take effect in Japan in the early 90's.
So, basically, the Japanese semiconductor industry deserved what it got.
--
Ummmm.... But wouldn't a bright blue-green backlight kind of ruin the color display?
I can see it now... games done completely in shades of green, blue-green, purple....
--
You should check out the Game Boy color. I bought one recently to play (gurk) Pokemon with my son. While games that use the color well seem to be rare, but overall it's very slick - the LCD is just amazing compare to the original system.
Besides, I think the Game Boy is a testament to the fact that you don't need to throw mega-hardware at the user to get good games. Instead of upping the specs each year, Nintendo has been reducing the power consumption, system size and manufacturing cost.
--
I don't think the C64 ever used the 6502. Maybe the Vic-20 did?
The 6510 was a 6502 with some built-in memory mapped I/O capabilities. You controlled the I/O by setting bits in memory locations 0x0000 and 0x0001. Sweet. I liked the Z-80's instruction set much better, but you could play all sorts of games with the 6510 chip and the C64 architecture that you couldn't dream of with a TRS-80.
--
Changing the palette during retrace??? Yow! Holy Hold-And-Modify Mode, Batman!
Sounds like the new GameBoy is using the old Commodore Amiga graphics chipset.
Time to start spreading the rumors....
*grin*
--
I've been in the biz for nearly 20 years now, I've used every language from assembler to FORTH, to C++, and I love Java. I've used it to deploy commercial financial services applications faster and more reliably than I could have in C++.
While the JVM will always be a performance issue, (I would never use Java for number crunching or high transaction rates), it's good enough for many business applications and the Java language is a huge improvement over C++.
People forget that C was around a long time before it began to make inroads against FORTRAN and COBOL. Sooner or later, Java will do the same to C.
--
I have to wonder how this works at all...
I noticed one of my posts was flagged as flame bait (I didn't mean it that way, but I guess I can see the point). But it was also scored as '+2'?
What does that mean? Is it a bug? Did someone forget their minus sign? Or was it just really insightful flame bait?
--
First, it isn't FUD, it was done - although (as another person pointed out) it was never released outside AT&T, which contradicts what I had originally read, but I guess Thompson would know better than I what he did with the Trojan.
Second - That doesn't eliminate my main point: There's no reason why someone with access to one of the main GNU distributions sites couldn't pull the same trick off today, by slipping the trojan into gcc.
--
Thanks for the correction - I had forgotten who had actually written the trojan.
--
More realisticly - show me one person who has never done anything (smoking weed, or had an affair, for example) that could be used to blackmail them. That's the real issue here: being blackmailed by your own government. And for people who think that it cannot happen: What the hell do you think living in the USSR was like? Or china, where children are taught to report their parents' "suspicious" behaviour?
--
The exploit is called TEMPEST.
TEMPEST is the DoD security program for preventing the remote surveillance of computers.
--
A couple of years ago, Ritchie revealed that he had put a back door into the original UNIX login program that no one ever caught: He added code to the C compiler so that if the compiler was compiling login.c, it would inject the back door function. He then added code to the compiler so that if it was compiling *itself* it would inject the code to create the login back door.
He then deleted the code from the C compiler source. You could examine the source all you wanted - but when you recompiled the compiler, it inserted the backdoor creation code into the new compiler - and when you compiled login.c, it would add the back door to the login executable.
He claimed the trap door existed for years on many ports of UNIX. Any port of UNIX that was built using a cross-compiled version of the original C compiler had it.
It would be straight forward to replicate this process in GCC. It would spread much more slowly (unless you managed to get your binaries picked up by a major mirror) but it would be nearly undetectable.
--
I waited for someone to point this out, but no one has, so:
People - there is nothing magical about the definitions of kilobyte and megabyte. the values of kilobytes (1024 bytes), megabytes (1024 * 1024) and so forth were not chosen because they were optimal for computer design! If they were, we'd be using units based on 2**8, 2**16, and 2**32! (DooD! My new harddrive has 2 longs of space! k3wl!!)
1024 and 1024*1024 were chosen as a compromise - as close approximations of 10**3 and 10**6!
The only time the precise difference matters is when you're actually laying out the hardware. At any other time, everyone should just relax!
--
But this corel-amiga alliance is older than it looks. The very first 3rd party Word Processor for the Amiga was WordPerfect.
--
I've used the Pilot 1000, the Pro, and the III. The Palm is the best platform because of it's simplicity and speed. Why screw it up with gew-gaws like color? My 2 meg III works great, and with almost all of that 2 megs available for data storage, I used to keep two full length novels installed in it at all times. Now I download news pages instead. Meanwhile WinCE boxes need 8 megs to do *anything*.
Why are people so determined to turn their elegant Pilots into bloated WinCE boxes?
--
First, get your facts straight. NASA isn't launching anything in August. Cassini, which NASA launched last year, will be making a close pass to Earth in order to get a gravity boost on it's way to Saturn.
In any case, your description of the plutonium risk is a massive exaggeration. Plutonium is primarily dangerous if you breath it in as dust after managing to survive the atomic explosion that spread it around in the first place. If you do that, it is about the most toxic substance known to man - it will settle into your bones and just start spawning cancers.
NASA probes, OTOH, are using ceramic pellets to encase the plutonium. No dust. You could probably even handle the pellets (for a short while) without ill effects.
The biggest threat you face from Cassini is if it re-entered and happened to hit you on the head as it crashed.
Sheesh. You'd think someone who posts on Slashdot would know a little science.
--
Wasn't there a short story by Larry Niven where an astronaut on Mars commits murder by "accidentally" dropping a microscopic black hole through another man? At the end of the story,the narrator estimates that in a couple of years Mars would be gone, replaced by a slightly larger black hole in the same orbit.
--
It's not that bad.
I got mine today. It includes two modules, since the Transciever is effectively also an Appliance module.
So, for 6 bucks, I got an appliance module, a lamp module, a wireless remote control and the computer interface. Not bad.
Downside is that the computer interface does not work at all on my one computer, and on the second computer it only works if I turn off my HotSync software - which makes it a non-starter.
Anyway, I now have a wireless remote for my lavalamp and the lights in my weight room.
--
Much better than they would be if I didn't have a gun.
Ask the albanians how they felt about not having guns.
--
Why would it be developed in Europe? I thought many European countries have much more restrictive policies than the USA.
--
Bzzt. Wrong. Only people who do not understand the technology could have such expectations. Believing that e-mail is private is like believing telegraph operators don't read telegrams and that postal carriers can't read post cards.
E-mail can be trivially read on any machine the mail item passes through.
--
I dispute that! The IQ of any group is the lowest individual IQ divided by the number of feet.
--
I'm sorry, but that's a very foolish attitude. Even if our current government is, er, "trustable", we cannot guarantee that future governments will be. Nor can we guarantee that individuals within the government will never abuse their power.
Keep in mind that many of the worst tyrants of the 20th century began as elected officials. Milosivec, Mussolini(?), Hitler. Do you really believe that such a thing can never happen in America? The same America that was founded on the principal of a weak government, but who's government has been steadily accruing power ever since?
The only way to prevent tyranny is to limit the power of the government. And the best way to limit the government's power is to prevent it from finding out what we're doing in the first place.
--