Most "repurposible" radio receivers use one or more local oscillators in their circuits to "down convert" the RF signal into a range more easily demodulated. This involves locally generating a RF signal of a certain frequency and mixing it in with the incoming signal in a non-linear device.
These local oscillator signals "leak out" of the reciever and can be detected remotely. The existence of these leaks is why radio recievers are not allowed on airplanes and are a way in which unlicensed television sets are detected in countries which require them to be licensed.
I presume this process is what is being eluded to by the reference to RF detectors at the end of the/. article.
I am surprised that RF detection methods are not in service already (if they would work). Perhaps Iraq is a very RF noisy place and RF analysis is only as useful as metal detection - there would be so many false alarms from cell phones, TV sets, sparking power line insulators, etc., that it really would not help.
I ran into Jeri at a conference recently and we talked about why certain games are available (or not).
Its often an archeology problem - figuring out who owns the copyrights and getting them to respond.
For example, most of the Bally/Midway games that I was involved with at DNA (Dave Nutting Associates) are in this limbo. My contract with Midway had the game rights reverting to me, and we think that Dave's contract with Midway has the same thing, but he lost all the paperwork, so he does not know for certain. Thus we cannot assure potential distributors that the title is clear. (I actually kept my contract in a file box I was able to dig out, so MAME has Robby Roto).
Its too bad - because we would love to see Gunfight (the first game on a frame-buffer system), Sea Wolf, Gorf, Wizard of Wor, and a host of other titles available on MAME and neo-retro systems like Jeri's.
My dad invented a system for covertly labeling drugs in the 1960s. It involved maxing trace quanitities of amino acids in with the active ingredients. It was like the scheme for micro-tagging explosives, or, if you will, a chemical hash code based on the lot number.
It was very difficult getting the FDA to approve doing this. The FDA viewed these chemicals as adulterants, even though they appear in enormous quanitites in just about everything that humans eat each day.
Where this is really going to be a problem is with people who "borrowed" an Office disk for installation, or who have a slightly different version of the Office disk than their system was originally installed with.
1) Write sloppy JPEG code. 2) Make people prove they are valid owners to get fix. 3) Those that don't get creamed by the next worm. 4) Sell new Windows & Office licenses to the victims. 5) Make billions of dollars.
Most Windows installations die from bit rot in a year or two. The death rate will now double.
I tried updating Visio and Office. Both of the security update procedures insist on you inserting the exact same version of the installation CD that you used originally, otherwise they fail.
In my case, I have the disks from later versions of both products and these were rejected. (I think this NT-2000 installation was from a corporation that dropped dead a year ago and I never bothered reinstalling Office and Visio on top of the already existing installations.)
This means people who "borrowed" CDs for these two products are potential big fat targets.
Bill Gates gets to make another 10 billion dollars.
Long, long time ago I had to add French, German, & Spanish translations to an arcade game Midway produced called 280-Zzzap. (It was a "night-driving" game).
The program would rate the player's driving skills on a 1 to 5 scale. In French, the worst performance phrase was "reprendre la école", which means "go back to school". Since the game font did not have a circumflex in it, I put the phrase in as "reprendre la ecole".
The rough translation of this in French is "you're a cunt!".
We had to rev the ROMs and make sure we shipped the bad ones only to the US, England, Germany, and Spain!
From watching Cops too much, it seems that most undercover operations involve a radio link between the operative(s) and the support team. I always wondered why the dealers and hookers don't have some sort of RF emission detector as a countermeasure.
Of course, the presence of cell phones, particularly those which are pinging the tower, throws this idea off a little - too many false positives.
Perhaps a two color indicator - one for "RF in the neighborhood" and the other "RF classified as from a mobile cell phone". Cell phone pings would blink both.
My i500 would ring with spam messages at random times of the day or night. While they gave me 32 choices of ringtone to assign to an incoming SMS message, none of them were "the sound of silence".
Writing them asking for a "silent" ringtone was futile. Since they want to make money selling you these, it is not easy to create your own.
Eventually I stumbled across a web page that let me set up a filter restricting incoming SMS messages to those on a whitelist.
Here are two inventions I hearby grant to the public domain:
1) How about a button on a mobile phone that disables the ring for a fixed period of time? I go into the meeting and press "shut up for a hour". When the hour is up, the ring comes back on.
2) As a related concept, how about a button that says "stay off until I wander back outside". (The phone would determine that you were back outside by noticing the profound increase in signal strength).
The reason you are not allowed to have a cell phone is because you could leak information to the outside with it. (If RF is blocked by a Faraday cage, you could still use voice recording, etc.).
actually, this concept is being actively challenged, much in the same way the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was a few decades ago.
One side wants it dropped from the DSM-IV because transsexuality is a natural condition while the other wants it to stay so that national health plans pay for hormones and surgery.
I have even heard it bandied about that Alan Turing may have been transgender - back in the 1940s the distinction between gay and TG was not well drawn. I have not heard of any evidence to back that claim up.
"Loser Pays" systems typically include other safeguards that prevent the obvious abuses that come to mind.
The fees that the loser pays the winner are usually determined by a fee schedule that is downright niggardly according to U.S. standards. That means the winner does not get all of his legal expenses back, particularly if he elects to hire a particularly expensive lawyer, delay matters, and so on.
An example of another safegaurd is the practice in New Zealand of holding a trial on successive days, including weekends, until it is concluded. This means the lawyers and judges have a strong incentive to stay on task and not waste anyones time, as doing so will cut into personal time and anger everyone else.
Most other countries have National Health Insurance systems to take care of medical needs, so judgements are smaller.
I went through the entire RSI evaluation, sterioid shots, surgery thing.
The thing that worked best for me is "contrast baths". You set up two tubs of water, one hot, one cold. (Not too hot or too cold).
You then stick your hands in the cold water for a minute, and then switch to the warm water for a minute. You switch back and forth 10 times (for 11 minutes) starting and ending in the cold tub. It helps to have a count-down timer.
Steam locomotive fans will recognize a familiar principal at work - the steam injector used for pumping feedwater into a locomotive boiler has been applied to propelling a boat.
Evolutionary biologists often come up with explanations of why a particular organism evolved a particular feature in a given environment.
Postmodern critics are trying to come up with similar explanations for why a particular meme developed in a given culture. Chip describes one of the methods PoMos use to discern "selective advantage" in a class system.
Unfortunately the last thing the PoMos want to do is read "The Selfish Gene" or its progeny. Its too bad - as the concept of memetics cleans up a lot of the deliberate intellectual mess that has been made.
It is indeed. Among his credits is the original LucasFilm Habitat. He (and Randy) also wrote a paper about how Habitat worked inside that is a classic on how to do a massive multiplayer game.
I worked with Chip Morningstar at a startup he cofounded called Electric Communities in the 1990s. His article on deconstruction was already up on the web back then. I find that Chip's article helps me understand what Chip did at E/C.
Chip has a wicked sense of humor and was fun to work with. He also has a strong formalist streak that he brought to our design problem, which was to create a "next generation protocol suite for global cyberspace".
When I started there, I was very excited. We had some of the smartest people in the world working on a compelling problem. Chip was the leader.
Of course the problem that immediately came up and never went away is the "cat herding problem". Still, Chip had an enormous amount of influence on what we did.
We wound up with an ontology for cyberspace that was made up of "Unums", "Presences", and "Ingredients". Unums were the shared knowledge of an object, Presences where the awareness of an object from a particular agent's point of view, and Ingredients were like Aspects in Aspect Oriented Programming.
We built the whole system in a modified version of Java which had closures and an asynchronous messaging system. That was our big mistake - none of the standard Java development or debugging tools worked, so we wound up using printf as the only debugging technique. We also generated dozens of specialized Java classes for each Unum. The final system had something like 6000 generated Java classes and took many minutes to load. The Java variant was called E. The aspect compositor was called Pluribus.
The system became a combination of a global agreed set of verb meanings and a 1 on 1 intersubjective concept of object identity.
They did not even put a version number in the protocol anywhere. That meant that when they found a bug, they had to change all the clients simulatenously.
So we see, reified in software project, an interesting twist on Morningstar's take on Postmodernism, where he tried to formally blend objectivity and intersubjectivity.
His mistake was to de-emphasize hermenuitics - or the process by which a shared understanding of meaning changes. That version number would have changed everything.
After the entire E, Pluribus, Unum experiment failed, E/C tried to recover by doing chat systems (and failed) There was also a seperate spin-off project, also called E, that Mark Miller is still pursuing. Miller's E is heavily influenced by Scheme, has a scripting language syntax, and is oriented towards secure computation. If we had used E, or a Java extended via pattern rather than language facility, we would have likely succeeded.
Chip is still kicking around - he, like many of us old birds, gets right back up on the horse every time he falls off. I remember him fondly.
Bally/Midway Manufacturing Co had the US rights to PacMan and Ms. PacMan, and spent a considerable sum of money sueing outfits that sold knock-offs during the early 1980s.
One of my friends, Dr. Tom Defanti, was in charge of the SIGGraph conference back then, and raked in a handsome second income as an expert witness. He would compare pirate ROM disassemblies against the proprietary source and testify as to exactly how much of the PacMan code was misappropriated.
Bally/Midway won almost all of these. The court cases set precedents which are cited to this day.
It is very easy to lie on the web forms. The Doctor is in reality a CGI script.
Of course a doctor with a DEA number has to be in the picture so the pharmacy is in compliance with the Controlled Substances Act. They do revoke a doctor's DEA numbers & licenses eventually for being a "script writer", but like all other forms of spam investigation and prosecution, seems to be an endless game of whack-a-mole.
I imagine a doctor can make several million on the Internet writing Valium, Vicadin, etc., scripts before he gets caught. Its a great retirement plan since the gang makes at least $100 per sale.
... and we will all be bisexual trannies next?
on
We Are All Nerds Now
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Imagine you had a form to fill out before you were born that let you pick your sexual orientation and gender identity. Selections include "I want to be a man, I want to be a woman, I want to be both", and "I want to be attracted to men, women, or both".
I don't know about you, but "both" sounds like a great answer to both questions!
As Woodie Allen said, being bisexual doubles your chances on Saturday night. I am also seeing in the generation coming of age now a fluid sense of gender identity that is rather different then that which emerged during the 70's counter-culture. Then, masculinity and feminity blended together, now the boundary is crisper, but is also considered more crossible.
Maybe its just because I am a nerdy bi trannie that I see things this way!
I know I developed several prototype streaming media systems at Apple in 1986-1987 that used Appletalk, and one of my coworkers did a TCP/IP port of one of these experiments. I don't how widely shown this stuff was. Farallon did a screen sharing system that is still available called Timbuktu that did streaming/multicasting too.
I also did some object-oriented streaming media stuff at Kalieda Labs, but that was the early 90s & MPEG was already on the radar.
Despite being a space cadet, I do turn my phone to silent when I go into the theatre. I just forget to set it back to ring when I leave!
A cellphone could, as a feature, have a setting for "go to silent/vibrate for N hours. After the requested delay, it would revert to normal and Spacey Jamie won't miss her phone calls.
The idea is to do occassional enforcement of some law for the purpose of intimidating the populance into general compliance.
Its why the IRS likes to go after high-profile taxpayers, and why the police like to sieze the cars of crack-buyers the week before Halloween. Its memetic warfare.
The effect is to make it riskier to be somebody who shares, as opposed to just mooching. If you share and can be traced, you want to be legally unreachable or judgement-proof.
It causes the tragety of the commons to happen sooner by taking away acreage.
Slashdot Mirror
Most "repurposible" radio receivers use one or more local oscillators in their circuits to "down convert" the RF signal into a range more easily demodulated. This involves locally generating a RF signal of a certain frequency and mixing it in with the incoming signal in a non-linear device.
/. article.
These local oscillator signals "leak out" of the reciever and can be detected remotely. The existence of these leaks is why radio recievers are not allowed on airplanes and are a way in which unlicensed television sets are detected in countries which require them to be licensed.
I presume this process is what is being eluded to by the reference to RF detectors at the end of the
I am surprised that RF detection methods are not in service already (if they would work). Perhaps Iraq is a very RF noisy place and RF analysis is only as useful as metal detection - there would be so many false alarms from cell phones, TV sets, sparking power line insulators, etc., that it really would not help.
I ran into Jeri at a conference recently and we talked about why certain games are available (or not).
Its often an archeology problem - figuring out who owns the copyrights and getting them to respond.
For example, most of the Bally/Midway games that I was involved with at DNA (Dave Nutting Associates) are in this limbo. My contract with Midway had the game rights reverting to me, and we think that Dave's contract with Midway has the same thing, but he lost all the paperwork, so he does not know for certain. Thus we cannot assure potential distributors that the title is clear. (I actually kept my contract in a file box I was able to dig out, so MAME has Robby Roto).
Its too bad - because we would love to see Gunfight (the first game on a frame-buffer system), Sea Wolf, Gorf, Wizard of Wor, and a host of other titles available on MAME and neo-retro systems like Jeri's.
-- Jamie
My dad invented a system for covertly labeling drugs in the 1960s. It involved maxing trace quanitities of amino acids in with the active ingredients. It was like the scheme for micro-tagging explosives, or, if you will, a chemical hash code based on the lot number.
It was very difficult getting the FDA to approve doing this. The FDA viewed these chemicals as adulterants, even though they appear in enormous quanitites in just about everything that humans eat each day.
Where this is really going to be a problem is with people who "borrowed" an Office disk for installation, or who have a slightly different version of the Office disk than their system was originally installed with.
1) Write sloppy JPEG code.
2) Make people prove they are valid owners to get fix.
3) Those that don't get creamed by the next worm.
4) Sell new Windows & Office licenses to the victims.
5) Make billions of dollars.
Most Windows installations die from bit rot in a year or two. The death rate will now double.
... was what my father read to me in the 1950s. A true classic. I still have it, including my scribbles from when I was 3 years old.
0 900074/qid=1095627727/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/002-6629950-4455238?v=glance&s=books&n=507846#p roduct-details
It is available on Amazon, still in print for $19.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/193
The original book is a collectors item that goes for about $100.00
I tried updating Visio and Office. Both of the security update procedures insist on you inserting the exact same version of the installation CD that you used originally, otherwise they fail.
In my case, I have the disks from later versions of both products and these were rejected. (I think this NT-2000 installation was from a corporation that dropped dead a year ago and I never bothered reinstalling Office and Visio on top of the already existing installations.)
This means people who "borrowed" CDs for these two products are potential big fat targets.
Bill Gates gets to make another 10 billion dollars.
This happened about 30 years ago. Details are fuzzy - but you don't forget the first time you have to rev a masked ROM due to a fuck up.
And yes, I did not do too well in French class!
My relations with the French became worse after my video game GORF came out!
-- Jamie
Long, long time ago I had to add French, German, & Spanish translations to an arcade game Midway produced called 280-Zzzap. (It was a "night-driving" game).
The program would rate the player's driving skills on a 1 to 5 scale. In French, the worst performance phrase was "reprendre la école", which means "go back to school". Since the game font did not have a circumflex in it, I put the phrase in as "reprendre la ecole".
The rough translation of this in French is "you're a cunt!".
We had to rev the ROMs and make sure we shipped the bad ones only to the US, England, Germany, and Spain!
Of course, the presence of cell phones, particularly those which are pinging the tower, throws this idea off a little - too many false positives.
Perhaps a two color indicator - one for "RF in the neighborhood" and the other "RF classified as from a mobile cell phone". Cell phone pings would blink both.
My i500 would ring with spam messages at random times of the day or night. While they gave me 32 choices of ringtone to assign to an incoming SMS message, none of them were "the sound of silence".
Writing them asking for a "silent" ringtone was futile. Since they want to make money selling you these, it is not easy to create your own.
Eventually I stumbled across a web page that let me set up a filter restricting incoming SMS messages to those on a whitelist.
Here are two inventions I hearby grant to the public domain:
1) How about a button on a mobile phone that disables the ring for a fixed period of time? I go into the meeting and press "shut up for a hour". When the hour is up, the ring comes back on.
2) As a related concept, how about a button that says "stay off until I wander back outside". (The phone would determine that you were back outside by noticing the profound increase in signal strength).
-- Jamie Faye
The reason you are not allowed to have a cell phone is because you could leak information to the outside with it. (If RF is blocked by a Faraday cage, you could still use voice recording, etc.).
actually, this concept is being actively challenged, much in the same way the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was a few decades ago.
One side wants it dropped from the DSM-IV because transsexuality is a natural condition while the other wants it to stay so that national health plans pay for hormones and surgery.
I have even heard it bandied about that Alan Turing may have been transgender - back in the 1940s the distinction between gay and TG was not well drawn. I have not heard of any evidence to back that claim up.
"Loser Pays" systems typically include other safeguards that prevent the obvious abuses that come to mind.
The fees that the loser pays the winner are usually determined by a fee schedule that is downright niggardly according to U.S. standards. That means the winner does not get all of his legal expenses back, particularly if he elects to hire a particularly expensive lawyer, delay matters, and so on.
An example of another safegaurd is the practice in New Zealand of holding a trial on successive days, including weekends, until it is concluded. This means the lawyers and judges have a strong incentive to stay on task and not waste anyones time, as doing so will cut into personal time and anger everyone else.
Most other countries have National Health Insurance systems to take care of medical needs, so judgements are smaller.
I went through the entire RSI evaluation, sterioid shots, surgery thing.
The thing that worked best for me is "contrast baths". You set up two tubs of water, one hot, one cold. (Not too hot or too cold).
You then stick your hands in the cold water for a minute, and then switch to the warm water for a minute. You switch back and forth 10 times (for 11 minutes) starting and ending in the cold tub. It helps to have a count-down timer.
Works like a charm.
How about have one or two built in scents that turn on under the following conditions:
1) It has been over X days since you backed up your hard drive.
2) It has been over Y days since you checked for patches from your OS system vendor.
Perhaps if poorly maintained computers started to stink, people would not have to learn about backups, virii, and worms the hard way.
(Rather offtopic, but interesting anyway.)
9 99 93321
the CPRR site has an interesting link to an article in New Scientist called "Steam fires underwater jet engine"
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns
Steam locomotive fans will recognize a familiar principal at work - the steam injector used for pumping feedwater into a locomotive boiler has been applied to propelling a boat.
Evolutionary biologists often come up with explanations of why a particular organism evolved a particular feature in a given environment.
Postmodern critics are trying to come up with similar explanations for why a particular meme developed in a given culture. Chip describes one of the methods PoMos use to discern "selective advantage" in a class system.
Unfortunately the last thing the PoMos want to do is read "The Selfish Gene" or its progeny. Its too bad - as the concept of memetics cleans up a lot of the deliberate intellectual mess that has been made.
It is indeed. Among his credits is the original LucasFilm Habitat. He (and Randy) also wrote a paper about how Habitat worked inside that is a classic on how to do a massive multiplayer game.
I worked with Chip Morningstar at a startup he cofounded called Electric Communities in the 1990s. His article on deconstruction was already up on the web back then. I find that Chip's article helps me understand what Chip did at E/C.
Chip has a wicked sense of humor and was fun to work with. He also has a strong formalist streak that he brought to our design problem, which was to create a "next generation protocol suite for global cyberspace".
When I started there, I was very excited. We had some of the smartest people in the world working on a compelling problem. Chip was the leader.
Of course the problem that immediately came up and never went away is the "cat herding problem". Still, Chip had an enormous amount of influence on what we did.
We wound up with an ontology for cyberspace that was made up of "Unums", "Presences", and "Ingredients". Unums were the shared knowledge of an object, Presences where the awareness of an object from a particular agent's point of view, and Ingredients were like Aspects in Aspect Oriented Programming.
We built the whole system in a modified version of Java which had closures and an asynchronous messaging system. That was our big mistake - none of the standard Java development or debugging tools worked, so we wound up using printf as the only debugging technique. We also generated dozens of specialized Java classes for each Unum. The final system had something like 6000 generated Java classes and took many minutes to load. The Java variant was called E. The aspect compositor was called Pluribus.
The system became a combination of a global agreed set of verb meanings and a 1 on 1 intersubjective concept of object identity.
They did not even put a version number in the protocol anywhere. That meant that when they found a bug, they had to change all the clients simulatenously.
So we see, reified in software project, an interesting twist on Morningstar's take on Postmodernism, where he tried to formally blend objectivity and intersubjectivity.
His mistake was to de-emphasize hermenuitics - or the process by which a shared understanding of meaning changes. That version number would have changed everything.
After the entire E, Pluribus, Unum experiment failed, E/C tried to recover by doing chat systems (and failed) There was also a seperate spin-off project, also called E, that Mark Miller is still pursuing. Miller's E is heavily influenced by Scheme, has a scripting language syntax, and is oriented towards secure computation. If we had used E, or a Java extended via pattern rather than language facility, we would have likely succeeded.
Chip is still kicking around - he, like many of us old birds, gets right back up on the horse every time he falls off. I remember him fondly.
-- Jamie
Bally/Midway Manufacturing Co had the US rights to PacMan and Ms. PacMan, and spent a considerable sum of money sueing outfits that sold knock-offs during the early 1980s.
One of my friends, Dr. Tom Defanti, was in charge of the SIGGraph conference back then, and raked in a handsome second income as an expert witness. He would compare pirate ROM disassemblies against the proprietary source and testify as to exactly how much of the PacMan code was misappropriated.
Bally/Midway won almost all of these. The court cases set precedents which are cited to this day.
It is very easy to lie on the web forms. The Doctor is in reality a CGI script.
Of course a doctor with a DEA number has to be in the picture so the pharmacy is in compliance with the Controlled Substances Act. They do revoke a doctor's DEA numbers & licenses eventually for being a "script writer", but like all other forms of spam investigation and prosecution, seems to be an endless game of whack-a-mole.
I imagine a doctor can make several million on the Internet writing Valium, Vicadin, etc., scripts before he gets caught. Its a great retirement plan since the gang makes at least $100 per sale.
Imagine you had a form to fill out before you were born that let you pick your sexual orientation and gender identity. Selections include "I want to be a man, I want to be a woman, I want to be both", and "I want to be attracted to men, women, or both".
I don't know about you, but "both" sounds like a great answer to both questions!
As Woodie Allen said, being bisexual doubles your chances on Saturday night. I am also seeing in the generation coming of age now a fluid sense of gender identity that is rather different then that which emerged during the 70's counter-culture. Then, masculinity and feminity blended together, now the boundary is crisper, but is also considered more crossible.
Maybe its just because I am a nerdy bi trannie that I see things this way!
Does anyone know what Acacia is claiming?
I know I developed several prototype streaming media systems at Apple in 1986-1987 that used Appletalk, and one of my coworkers did a TCP/IP port of one of these experiments. I don't how widely shown this stuff was. Farallon did a screen sharing system that is still available called Timbuktu that did streaming/multicasting too.
I also did some object-oriented streaming media stuff at Kalieda Labs, but that was the early 90s & MPEG was already on the radar.
-- Jamie
Despite being a space cadet, I do turn my phone to silent when I go into the theatre. I just forget to set it back to ring when I leave!
A cellphone could, as a feature, have a setting for "go to silent/vibrate for N hours. After the requested delay, it would revert to normal and Spacey Jamie won't miss her phone calls.
-- Jamie
The idea is to do occassional enforcement of some law for the purpose of intimidating the populance into general compliance.
Its why the IRS likes to go after high-profile taxpayers, and why the police like to sieze the cars of crack-buyers the week before Halloween. Its memetic warfare.
The effect is to make it riskier to be somebody who shares, as opposed to just mooching. If you share and can be traced, you want to be legally unreachable or judgement-proof.
It causes the tragety of the commons to happen sooner by taking away acreage.