Exactly... the first 5 digits are kinda recoverable from your birth date and location. So if you give them the last 4 numbers, which are the only ones that are really kinda random, then they can pretty much deduce your entire SSN from available public records.
But I don't really understand why I'm supposed to keep my SSN any more protected and secret than, say my employee ID number or my Slashdot UID for that matter. Any bank or government that uses a simple 9 digit number as a S3(R1+ C0D3 to authenticate people are obviously morons when it comes to security and deserves to cover any losses they accrue due to "identity theft". Give me a two-factor authentication smartcard now, dammit, and to hell with any idiot credit card company that is foolish enough to allow someone to open an account in my name without it.
Since the 80s came back and "bad" is the (re)new cool.
The Ubuntu love is still strong over at http://www.nixiepixel.com/ (who runs plenty of fairly technical Ubuntu vlogs and actually knows what she's talking about)
Too early, too late, nothing's ever just on time anymore:P
I'm pretty happy with my G-Tablet running a custom TnT-Lite ROM (well, "custom" in the sense that it uncustomized all the crap that Viewsonic put in the OS). The surprising thing for me was that Dolphin HD was the main app I find myself using on it... in preference to all of the crappy app-ified versions of several services. Flash videos and stuff work great, much better than my eeePC (probably due to the nVidia stuff).
I'm looking forward to getting Honeycomb on it purely from a 3D UI bling perspective. But I wouldn't hold off on buying a tablet waiting for it (provided you don't get one with "planned obsolence" via ROM update blocking)
Huh, cool... I thought it was just the opposite, though... that the "bad guys" who had Jack Shaftoe working for them at the time (and was in possession of the Solomonic gold and also the fastest pirate ship that never needed barnacles scraped off of it) were the ones that placed some of the Solomonic gold coins into the Pyx... thereby making all of the other coinage ever minted in comparison look some (small) percentage less valuable and wrecking the English currency's credibility. But I wasn't sure how they managed to clear it up... Stephenson tends to enjoy explaining things, but after both the tampering and the resolution to the Trial of the Pyx, we were left with just a bit of "wink wink nudge nudge".
But yeah, your explanation makes more sense. For some reason it never occurred to me that they planted a few lighter coins in the Pyx rather than a few heavier ones.
I've played with stuff like that (Fujitsu Lifebook, probably in the $2k range at the time). No one seemed to like using them, though, probably because the software (which could do what you requested) wasn't intuitive enough yet.
Doesn't seem possible to use precision stylus gear with the current crop of capacitive touchscreens that's on everything now... (even the old resistive palm pilots worked well with the little stylus). Hopefully that will change someday:-/
DId anyone "get" that plot point in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy where they were trying to use Solomon's gold (a heavier isotope that was probably worth much more than normal gold) to create some counterfeits and (completely? slightly?) devalue the British currency coined in London? Didn't seem all that plausible to me, but I guess it's as good a reason as any for an adventure novel.
People have been running ARM Debian / Ubuntu on their Android devices for some time: http://www.android-devs.com/?p=152 (albeit you'd only be booting one or the other OS at a time)
A simpler way is by using the chroot method such as the one described at: http://www.misfit.co.zw/?p=144 , that way you can still run the Android OS with all the drivers and everything, but be able to SSH or VNC into a full Debian ARM install running on a chroot on a partition in your SD card.
I haven't had too much luck with it yet (TnT-Lite on my GTablet didn't let me use the loopback device to mount an img file... will try again using a straight ext2 partition on my SD card). Looking forward to being able to apt-get stuff onto my phone/tablet, though:-P
I think you'll be happy with an Android device, though... they are really hacker friendly for the following reasons:
* Manufacturers don't release updates for older phones forcing some planned obsolescence : This is actually a big *win* for hackers, because then they can then buy these phones for *cheap* from the lusers upgrading their handsets to get the latest OS, and then install the current CyanogenMOD to get the whole shebang. I've picked up all three of my Android devices (HTC MyTouch 3G, Slide, and Viewsonic G-Tablet) from craigslist for relatively cheap because of this.
* Some devices (like the G-Tablet) don't even bother to try to lock their ROM. Sure you'll void the warranty (until you reflash the stock ROM, at least), but all you have to do to install a custom ROM is put it in/sdcard/update.zip (plus tweak a text file to point to it). No "hacking" required!
* People have already gotten full ARM Debian installed and working on their Android devices (I haven't but still plan to eventually). This is both either alongside the Android kernel (so you still boot Android with all the working drivers, and then simply chroot into your ARM Debian install) or sometimes as a full distribution (but then you're on your own to get the touchscreen / wifi drivers working well.
I waited maybe 2 years for the N900 to come down in price... at that point I could get an Android that pretty much did what I wanted it to do (physical keyboard with ConnectBot & AndroidVNC to my home Debian box over a fast HSDPA radio).
I still carry my Palm TX around, though... still haven't found suitable replacements for Progect, HandyShopper, or even DiddleBug yet:-P
Um, I thought the "memory" was provided by antibodies, which help tag known intruders and serve as a "rally point" for lymphocytes (white blood cells).
I suppose white blood cells can eventually figure out for themselves if another cell is a friend or foe, but the presence of antibody tags makes them go into ingest mode much more quickly.
Without antibodies, I'm guessing the rival white blood cells would spend some time sniffing each other out, and the "more aggressive" one will recognize the other as foreign first and start attempting to ingest it.
I hope this art exhibit comes to visit us in the US sometime, it sounds awesome! Would really like to see video of this happening >:-D
Ha, I have something of the opposite problem with my HTC Android phone. At work (in the secret underground bunker), it doesn't get a signal anywhere at all. Unless it's sitting in my pocket under my desk, then it somehow manages to barely hold onto an EDGE link.
Anyway, a half decent solution to either issue is a bluetooth headset, which I'm sure the iPhone crowd could afford;-P
Word, I'm rockin TnTLite on my Viewsonic G Tablet, and it works great! Flash videos on websites under the DolphinHD browser works like a dream in fullscreen... no stuttering like with my eeePC 901 (I'm sure this has more to do with the intel GPU... the nVidia ION atom platform can run smoothly).
Also have my old bluetooth GPS tethered to it so I can use navigation apps, and of course I have it tethered to my phone. The only thing it still lacks from a fully-featured Android device (other than 3G) is a magnometer/compass... which so far I can get by fine without.
Kinda wondering why they bothered hacking Honeycomb onto the Nook first (and kinda doing a half-assed job at it) when it would have been much more straightforward to get it working on a G Tablet. You don't even have to resort to any jailbreak hacks to load ROMs onto it, just have the ROM in an update.zip file and have a config file point to it.
Looking forward to getting Honeycomb running on it, though seriously other than testing the high-end games and apps that won't run on my midrange HTC slide phone, I primarily just use it for the Dolphin HD web browser:-P
Heh, I had my Redhat 4 box broken into using some remote samba exploit back in '97. (Been running Debian without incident ever since)
At least this "worst hacker" uses "history -c" at the end of his session. Mine just did a "rm ~/.bash_history" before he logged out... at which point the shell just writes it over again with everything they did during their session, IP addresses and all:-P
Heh, I thought some of the CSS failed to load or something, I was hitting Ctrl-R a few times before I thought to look for a "Slashdot is getting a facelift!" post.
Haven't tried loading this on my mobile phone yet, but it seems like the changes might make the mobile browsing experience better..:/
Who are the other two? And particularly the person who actually NEEDS AOL?
We've tried, and she actually understands. But she's hooked on the "experience". Maybe she just likes some disembodied voice telling her that her internet is up or down.
Well, maybe it will go away once she starts using a smartphone and starts uploading all her stuff into the cloud. That doesn't seem like a very compelling argument we have to make to her, though.
First thing I do is use jhead to import all my photos from the camera and immediately rename them from the useless IMGXXXX.jpg to GMT date_time... something like 20110120_173601.jpg . This way I can have photos / videos / audio clips (need a separate rename by date script for those) from multiple cameras show up in the correct order. Then I dump them in an archive by year / month so I can easily find them again.
I can create a few "highlights" albums simply by symlinking a bunch of them into a new directory. Or I'll copy them if I need to photoshop them or something... I try not to save over the originals in a non-lossless fashion.
Then I run album on them to create smaller thumbnails for viewing on the web. It's a bit tricky to get things like Picasa to ignore all the thumbnail directories, though.
The good ones might get posted to Flickr / Picasaweb / Facebook, but the datestamp means I can go back and find the original in my archive if I want to.
For backups, the whole thing gets rsync'd every once in a while to one of my friends or relatives whom I bought a hard disk for.
So in that representation you're pretty much saying that:
lim x->infinity (0.1)^x = 0
What's interesting is that instead of 0.1 you can substitute 0.9 or 0.999 or anything between (-1.. 1) exclusive and still end up with zero. Dunno how that translates into infinitely repeating decimal digits, tho:-P
/ Stupid slashcode filtering out HTML and unicode infinity symbols:-P
I want to buy a powerful ARM laptop, with the fastest CPU, most cores and the biggest screen (15" is preferable).
Is there anything like this on the market?
No, not really. Dual-core 2Ghz ARM chips are supposed to come out this year.
I just bought a Tegra 2 tablet to play around with (got the Viewsonic G-Tablet for cheaper than it would have cost to upgrade my midrange Android phone). It's all right. But the performance system you're looking for is still a ways off.
Yep, the Lockheed design is actually a type of biplane, where the bottom wing is swept back and the rear wing is swept forward (and each top wing holds an engine)
Well, vaginas got to vote in the US with the 19th Amendment in 1920, but yeah, point taken;)
But they can still join the military at 18 (17 with parental consent... hmm, maybe that's the ticket for "underage" porn as well...)
Anyway, car insurance companies don't trust anyone's decision making abilities until they hit 25, so I wouldn't be surprised if the age of consent keeps rising:P
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly... the first 5 digits are kinda recoverable from your birth date and location. So if you give them the last 4 numbers, which are the only ones that are really kinda random, then they can pretty much deduce your entire SSN from available public records.
But I don't really understand why I'm supposed to keep my SSN any more protected and secret than, say my employee ID number or my Slashdot UID for that matter. Any bank or government that uses a simple 9 digit number as a S3(R1+ C0D3 to authenticate people are obviously morons when it comes to security and deserves to cover any losses they accrue due to "identity theft". Give me a two-factor authentication smartcard now, dammit, and to hell with any idiot credit card company that is foolish enough to allow someone to open an account in my name without it.
Since when is Ubuntu the 'bad linux'?
Since the 80s came back and "bad" is the (re)new cool.
The Ubuntu love is still strong over at http://www.nixiepixel.com/ (who runs plenty of fairly technical Ubuntu vlogs and actually knows what she's talking about)
Too early, too late, nothing's ever just on time anymore :P
I'm pretty happy with my G-Tablet running a custom TnT-Lite ROM (well, "custom" in the sense that it uncustomized all the crap that Viewsonic put in the OS). The surprising thing for me was that Dolphin HD was the main app I find myself using on it... in preference to all of the crappy app-ified versions of several services. Flash videos and stuff work great, much better than my eeePC (probably due to the nVidia stuff).
I'm looking forward to getting Honeycomb on it purely from a 3D UI bling perspective. But I wouldn't hold off on buying a tablet waiting for it (provided you don't get one with "planned obsolence" via ROM update blocking)
Huh, cool... I thought it was just the opposite, though... that the "bad guys" who had Jack Shaftoe working for them at the time (and was in possession of the Solomonic gold and also the fastest pirate ship that never needed barnacles scraped off of it) were the ones that placed some of the Solomonic gold coins into the Pyx... thereby making all of the other coinage ever minted in comparison look some (small) percentage less valuable and wrecking the English currency's credibility. But I wasn't sure how they managed to clear it up... Stephenson tends to enjoy explaining things, but after both the tampering and the resolution to the Trial of the Pyx, we were left with just a bit of "wink wink nudge nudge".
But yeah, your explanation makes more sense. For some reason it never occurred to me that they planted a few lighter coins in the Pyx rather than a few heavier ones.
I've played with stuff like that (Fujitsu Lifebook, probably in the $2k range at the time). No one seemed to like using them, though, probably because the software (which could do what you requested) wasn't intuitive enough yet.
Doesn't seem possible to use precision stylus gear with the current crop of capacitive touchscreens that's on everything now... (even the old resistive palm pilots worked well with the little stylus). Hopefully that will change someday :-/
DId anyone "get" that plot point in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy where they were trying to use Solomon's gold (a heavier isotope that was probably worth much more than normal gold) to create some counterfeits and (completely? slightly?) devalue the British currency coined in London? Didn't seem all that plausible to me, but I guess it's as good a reason as any for an adventure novel.
People have been running ARM Debian / Ubuntu on their Android devices for some time:
http://www.android-devs.com/?p=152 (albeit you'd only be booting one or the other OS at a time)
A simpler way is by using the chroot method such as the one described at: http://www.misfit.co.zw/?p=144 , that way you can still run the Android OS with all the drivers and everything, but be able to SSH or VNC into a full Debian ARM install running on a chroot on a partition in your SD card.
I haven't had too much luck with it yet (TnT-Lite on my GTablet didn't let me use the loopback device to mount an img file... will try again using a straight ext2 partition on my SD card). Looking forward to being able to apt-get stuff onto my phone/tablet, though :-P
Pretty sad for the business end of things.
I think you'll be happy with an Android device, though... they are really hacker friendly for the following reasons:
* Manufacturers don't release updates for older phones forcing some planned obsolescence : This is actually a big *win* for hackers, because then they can then buy these phones for *cheap* from the lusers upgrading their handsets to get the latest OS, and then install the current CyanogenMOD to get the whole shebang. I've picked up all three of my Android devices (HTC MyTouch 3G, Slide, and Viewsonic G-Tablet) from craigslist for relatively cheap because of this.
* Some devices (like the G-Tablet) don't even bother to try to lock their ROM. Sure you'll void the warranty (until you reflash the stock ROM, at least), but all you have to do to install a custom ROM is put it in /sdcard/update.zip (plus tweak a text file to point to it). No "hacking" required!
* People have already gotten full ARM Debian installed and working on their Android devices (I haven't but still plan to eventually). This is both either alongside the Android kernel (so you still boot Android with all the working drivers, and then simply chroot into your ARM Debian install) or sometimes as a full distribution (but then you're on your own to get the touchscreen / wifi drivers working well.
I waited maybe 2 years for the N900 to come down in price... at that point I could get an Android that pretty much did what I wanted it to do (physical keyboard with ConnectBot & AndroidVNC to my home Debian box over a fast HSDPA radio).
I still carry my Palm TX around, though... still haven't found suitable replacements for Progect, HandyShopper, or even DiddleBug yet :-P
Um, I thought the "memory" was provided by antibodies, which help tag known intruders and serve as a "rally point" for lymphocytes (white blood cells).
I suppose white blood cells can eventually figure out for themselves if another cell is a friend or foe, but the presence of antibody tags makes them go into ingest mode much more quickly.
Without antibodies, I'm guessing the rival white blood cells would spend some time sniffing each other out, and the "more aggressive" one will recognize the other as foreign first and start attempting to ingest it.
I hope this art exhibit comes to visit us in the US sometime, it sounds awesome! Would really like to see video of this happening >:-D
I just started using Tomato a couple years ago on my WRT54Gv4. Did some benchmarks on speedtest.net before and after.
HyperWRT (based on the original Linksys FW) maxed out around 20mbps.
Tomato managed to max out my 25mbps FiOS line.
So Tomato saved me from a hardware upgrade. Plus the web interface is much prettier and has traffic graphs.
Ha, I have something of the opposite problem with my HTC Android phone. At work (in the secret underground bunker), it doesn't get a signal anywhere at all. Unless it's sitting in my pocket under my desk, then it somehow manages to barely hold onto an EDGE link.
Anyway, a half decent solution to either issue is a bluetooth headset, which I'm sure the iPhone crowd could afford ;-P
Word, I'm rockin TnTLite on my Viewsonic G Tablet, and it works great! Flash videos on websites under the DolphinHD browser works like a dream in fullscreen... no stuttering like with my eeePC 901 (I'm sure this has more to do with the intel GPU... the nVidia ION atom platform can run smoothly).
Also have my old bluetooth GPS tethered to it so I can use navigation apps, and of course I have it tethered to my phone. The only thing it still lacks from a fully-featured Android device (other than 3G) is a magnometer/compass... which so far I can get by fine without.
Kinda wondering why they bothered hacking Honeycomb onto the Nook first (and kinda doing a half-assed job at it) when it would have been much more straightforward to get it working on a G Tablet. You don't even have to resort to any jailbreak hacks to load ROMs onto it, just have the ROM in an update.zip file and have a config file point to it.
Looking forward to getting Honeycomb running on it, though seriously other than testing the high-end games and apps that won't run on my midrange HTC slide phone, I primarily just use it for the Dolphin HD web browser :-P
Heh, I had my Redhat 4 box broken into using some remote samba exploit back in '97. (Been running Debian without incident ever since)
At least this "worst hacker" uses "history -c" at the end of his session. Mine just did a "rm ~/.bash_history" before he logged out ... at which point the shell just writes it over again with everything they did during their session, IP addresses and all :-P
... Not to mention Valve's subliminal in-game product placement...
Louis:
Bill: Watch out for that leaking hot steam!
Zoey: Mmm, I loooooove Steam!
Francis (who hates everything): Yeah, Steam's all right.
(L4D Crash Course)
Heh, I thought some of the CSS failed to load or something, I was hitting Ctrl-R a few times before I thought to look for a "Slashdot is getting a facelift!" post.
Haven't tried loading this on my mobile phone yet, but it seems like the changes might make the mobile browsing experience better.. :/
Egypt is not a monarchy, it's a normal 20th century dictatorship ruled by a president.
For 30 years running!
You shall now be flogged mercilessly by the low UID brigade for your ambiguously factually correct post >:-D
Who are the other two? And particularly the person who actually NEEDS AOL?
We've tried, and she actually understands. But she's hooked on the "experience". Maybe she just likes some disembodied voice telling her that her internet is up or down.
Well, maybe it will go away once she starts using a smartphone and starts uploading all her stuff into the cloud. That doesn't seem like a very compelling argument we have to make to her, though.
My NAS is also my little webserver.
First thing I do is use jhead to import all my photos from the camera and immediately rename them from the useless IMGXXXX.jpg to GMT date_time ... something like 20110120_173601.jpg . This way I can have photos / videos / audio clips (need a separate rename by date script for those) from multiple cameras show up in the correct order. Then I dump them in an archive by year / month so I can easily find them again.
I can create a few "highlights" albums simply by symlinking a bunch of them into a new directory. Or I'll copy them if I need to photoshop them or something... I try not to save over the originals in a non-lossless fashion.
Then I run album on them to create smaller thumbnails for viewing on the web. It's a bit tricky to get things like Picasa to ignore all the thumbnail directories, though.
The good ones might get posted to Flickr / Picasaweb / Facebook, but the datestamp means I can go back and find the original in my archive if I want to.
For backups, the whole thing gets rsync'd every once in a while to one of my friends or relatives whom I bought a hard disk for.
So in that representation you're pretty much saying that:
lim x->infinity (0.1)^x = 0
What's interesting is that instead of 0.1 you can substitute 0.9 or 0.999 or anything between (-1 .. 1) exclusive and still end up with zero. Dunno how that translates into infinitely repeating decimal digits, tho :-P
/ Stupid slashcode filtering out HTML and unicode infinity symbols :-P
I want to buy a powerful ARM laptop, with the fastest CPU, most cores and the biggest screen (15" is preferable).
Is there anything like this on the market?
No, not really. Dual-core 2Ghz ARM chips are supposed to come out this year.
I just bought a Tegra 2 tablet to play around with (got the Viewsonic G-Tablet for cheaper than it would have cost to upgrade my midrange Android phone). It's all right. But the performance system you're looking for is still a ways off.
Yep, the Lockheed design is actually a type of biplane, where the bottom wing is swept back and the rear wing is swept forward (and each top wing holds an engine)
This "internal wing" design is similar, except it has a third bottom wing as well:
http://www.precisiondesigninc.com/iwa012.jpg
The blended-wing body design was probably originally developed as a bomber (like the B2).
So that solves your swift evacuation plans quite nicely!
Well, vaginas got to vote in the US with the 19th Amendment in 1920, but yeah, point taken ;)
But they can still join the military at 18 (17 with parental consent... hmm, maybe that's the ticket for "underage" porn as well...)
Anyway, car insurance companies don't trust anyone's decision making abilities until they hit 25, so I wouldn't be surprised if the age of consent keeps rising :P
So do the women involved lose their "internet license"?
Or does Facebook become the de-facto standard for issuing internet licenses? :P
Um, you have to register with the selective service so they can decide to throw your ass in a war? Something like that.
You're innocent until you're old enough to vote and (legally) kill people.