Up until a year or two ago, GVSU used a student's SSN for their Student ID number. They no longer do this for new students, and are working on switching current students.
Many other colleges used to do this as well, but most (if not all) have switched to a different method for generating a student ID number.
I go to GVSU. Whoever took it also stole some other office-type stuff, so it was definitely a theft. However, since they took other stuff, it was concluded that they probably weren't after the data on the drive, just the drive itself. I haven't heard any reports of students' identities being stolen, so it's possible that whoever stole the drive formatted it for their own use and erased the file containing the SSNs.
Would you be willing to share this class that you've created?
I'm an officer in the CS club at the university I attend, and part of what we do is education about safe computing practices. It's a pretty small part right now, but I'd like to expand our efforts in this area, and I'd love to use/adapt something that's known to work well.
Good point. Unless I'm mistaken, if Novell chooses to continue to distribute SUSE under GPLv2, then any new patent-related provisions of GPLv3 simply don't apply. Even if the individual authors of the numerous programs included in SUSE switch to GPLv3, Novell could just maintain their own versions based on the last release made under GPLv2.
Any flaws in this scenario? I'm by no means an expert.
Wired peripherals will still be necessary for computers in public spaces. I supervise several computer labs on a college campus, and if we used wireless keyboards and mice, they'd all be gone within a week, regardless of the fact that they'd be useless to anyone without the proper receiver.
It's not exactly a business, but at the university I attend, we are limited to about 25MB of email storage space. We use Novell NetMail, and there are 20,000 to 25,000 students.
The 32 GB limit for FAT32 volumes is an arbitrary limit imposed by Windows, probably to encourage people to move to NTFS. The actual limit of the FAT32 filesystem is on the order of hundreds of GB, possibly more (I can't remember off the top of my head).
Anyway, you should be able to use a Mac or Linux to format the entire drive as a single FAT32 volume.
CD Walkmans are much less likely to scratch CDs because the CD is held in place parallel to the disc tray. When you push the CD onto the spindle, the little nubs at the top of the spindle hold it in place. Laptop optical drives work the same way.
AFAIK, tray-loading optical drives (like those in PCs and game consoles) only have a taller conical spindle and something to apply a little pressure to hold the disc in place. I'm not familiar with the internal workings of tray-loading optical drives, so I can't say for sure. However it works, it's obviously not very effective.;)
I'm not sure about Sun and Java, but Macromedia gives out licenses to redistribute their player plugins. There's an application process, so they probably don't hand them out to anyone that asks, but it can't be too difficult to get one if you can do it on the Web.
From what I can tell based on about a year of experience as a computer lab assistant at a university, that's a very good breakdown. Unfortunately, many people in my department (Information Technology) seem to fit into the "jerk" categories. Sometimes they're clueful, but all to often they aren't.
Professors and students, on the other hand, are usually nice.
If we're to follow Thompson's reasoning, won't the actual Ken and Barbie dolls (and others like them) have to be banned? If a human figure without genitals can't be shown on a computer screen, then why are we allowing our children playing with actual physical representations?
And what about dolls of Barbie's little sister? Also a dirty tool for the pedophile that probably lives next door!
I have worked for the IT department at a major University for almost a year. Believe me, having an advanced degree has very little, if any, correlation with computer literacy or technological aptitude in general.
That's a good translation of the English title, but the Japanese title for the series was actually quite different: "Shin Seiki Evangelion". "Shin Seiki" translates fairly directly to "New Century", and "Evangelion" is a modification of the English word "evangel", which is synonymous with "gospel". So, "Shin Seiki Evangelion" can be (somewhat loosely) translated as "Gospel of the New Century".
Personally, I think that's much cooler (if a bit pretentious), and fits the series better, IMHO.
(I didn't figure this out on my own, I read it somewhere. Exactly where, I can't remember.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the detection scheme described in the article (two infrared sensors, one with a 705-nm filter, and the other without a filter to eliminate false positives) be easy to fool by masking the explosive with another substance that also photoluminesces at 705-nm?
For example, suppose non-explosive substance foo photoluminesces at and around 705-nm, and is normally allowed past the detector because it lacks the special signature. If you were to put a bunch of foo in the same container as your explosive, thereby combining the infrared signatures (if that's actually what would happen), couldn't you fool the detector?
Of course, the article is light on real details, and I'm no chemistry expert, so maybe it's not that easy to fool.
...but it was rather half-baked. It was a passive system that involved a fixed array of spheres on some kind of (possibly low-friction) surface that a person would walk on. Fill up a shallow pan with a layer of marbles and you'll have an idea of what it would look like.
I hadn't solved the problem of how to create the proper amount of resistance, so if it were implemented as designed, it probably would have been something like walking on ice. Also, I hadn't entirely worked out how to get data from the grid for feedback to the imaging components of the system.
Just one of those things you come up with when you're not paying attention in class.:)
Ham operators have huge bands all to themselves, for what amounts to a glorified boys' clubhouse.
You, sir, are both incorrect and offensive.
First off, many of the frequencies that ham radio operators have access to are shared. Also, for the radio spectrum below 1.3GHz, ham radio operators have access to less than 130MHz of spectrum. That's less than 10 percent. I think "huge" is an overstatement.
Second, ham radio is much more than "a glorified boys' clubhouse." That you should suggest such a thing is an insult to all of the ham volunteers who have assisted in natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, fires) unnatural disasters (terrorist attacks), and public events (parades, etc.). Ham volunteers play a vital role in large-scale emergency situations, and organizations of ham operators exist for this explicit purpose. Public service is, in fact, one of the most (if not single most) critical tenets of ham radio.
Furthermore, some the core ideals and culture of ham radio are experimentation and exploration, to push the limits and find new ways of doing things. Ideals that are very similar, I think, to the hacker (in the original sense) culture.
So, before you make such statements, check your facts and and consider what you would lose if you had your way.
I'm amazed that you can OCR handwritten pages at all -- that's incredible. I had no idea the technology was that good.
Well, you can OCR anything, including your neighbor's dog, but that doesn't mean an OCR engine will produce anything intelligible.;)
Seriously, I think in this case OCR would be a waste of time. Even the really good OCR engines (like ABBYY Fine Reader, which I use at work, supposedly very good) have significant problems with handwritten text and will produce lots of errors, making the ability to search the document worthless. Also, to my knowledge, there are no OCR engines that correctly handle formulas and symbols.
An alternative file format may be a possibility, but if these files are going to be distributed to students, you may want to stick with PDF.
Also, **good results are possible** with PDF, you just have to know what settings to use and tweak. I scan textbooks for the Academic Support office at a university. The settings I use are 300dpi 1-bit black and white with adaptive compression at highest quality, and I can fit about 30 pages in a few MB.
Slashdot Mirror
You can download it from their Vimeo page. You'll need a Vimeo account, and you might have to wait, since videos are limited to 100 downloads a day.
Why not have an official party in Holland, MI, the birthplace of Slashdot?
Up until a year or two ago, GVSU used a student's SSN for their Student ID number. They no longer do this for new students, and are working on switching current students.
Many other colleges used to do this as well, but most (if not all) have switched to a different method for generating a student ID number.
I go to GVSU. Whoever took it also stole some other office-type stuff, so it was definitely a theft. However, since they took other stuff, it was concluded that they probably weren't after the data on the drive, just the drive itself. I haven't heard any reports of students' identities being stolen, so it's possible that whoever stole the drive formatted it for their own use and erased the file containing the SSNs.
Would you be willing to share this class that you've created?
I'm an officer in the CS club at the university I attend, and part of what we do is education about safe computing practices. It's a pretty small part right now, but I'd like to expand our efforts in this area, and I'd love to use/adapt something that's known to work well.
A mis-spelled expiry.
Good point. Unless I'm mistaken, if Novell chooses to continue to distribute SUSE under GPLv2, then any new patent-related provisions of GPLv3 simply don't apply. Even if the individual authors of the numerous programs included in SUSE switch to GPLv3, Novell could just maintain their own versions based on the last release made under GPLv2.
Any flaws in this scenario? I'm by no means an expert.
Wired peripherals will still be necessary for computers in public spaces. I supervise several computer labs on a college campus, and if we used wireless keyboards and mice, they'd all be gone within a week, regardless of the fact that they'd be useless to anyone without the proper receiver.
It's not exactly a business, but at the university I attend, we are limited to about 25MB of email storage space. We use Novell NetMail, and there are 20,000 to 25,000 students.
The 32 GB limit for FAT32 volumes is an arbitrary limit imposed by Windows, probably to encourage people to move to NTFS. The actual limit of the FAT32 filesystem is on the order of hundreds of GB, possibly more (I can't remember off the top of my head).
Anyway, you should be able to use a Mac or Linux to format the entire drive as a single FAT32 volume.
CD Walkmans are much less likely to scratch CDs because the CD is held in place parallel to the disc tray. When you push the CD onto the spindle, the little nubs at the top of the spindle hold it in place. Laptop optical drives work the same way.
;)
AFAIK, tray-loading optical drives (like those in PCs and game consoles) only have a taller conical spindle and something to apply a little pressure to hold the disc in place. I'm not familiar with the internal workings of tray-loading optical drives, so I can't say for sure. However it works, it's obviously not very effective.
The office microwave has an Apple sticker on the door. I suppose that would make in an iNuke.
I'm not sure about Sun and Java, but Macromedia gives out licenses to redistribute their player plugins. There's an application process, so they probably don't hand them out to anyone that asks, but it can't be too difficult to get one if you can do it on the Web.
From what I can tell based on about a year of experience as a computer lab assistant at a university, that's a very good breakdown. Unfortunately, many people in my department (Information Technology) seem to fit into the "jerk" categories. Sometimes they're clueful, but all to often they aren't.
Professors and students, on the other hand, are usually nice.
If we're to follow Thompson's reasoning, won't the actual Ken and Barbie dolls (and others like them) have to be banned? If a human figure without genitals can't be shown on a computer screen, then why are we allowing our children playing with actual physical representations?
And what about dolls of Barbie's little sister? Also a dirty tool for the pedophile that probably lives next door!
Thompson is a Grade A Moron.
I have worked for the IT department at a major University for almost a year. Believe me, having an advanced degree has very little, if any, correlation with computer literacy or technological aptitude in general.
Sixty minutes? Pfft. I can secure any network in sixty seconds. You can, too, with these instructions.
That's a good translation of the English title, but the Japanese title for the series was actually quite different: "Shin Seiki Evangelion". "Shin Seiki" translates fairly directly to "New Century", and "Evangelion" is a modification of the English word "evangel", which is synonymous with "gospel". So, "Shin Seiki Evangelion" can be (somewhat loosely) translated as "Gospel of the New Century".
Personally, I think that's much cooler (if a bit pretentious), and fits the series better, IMHO.
(I didn't figure this out on my own, I read it somewhere. Exactly where, I can't remember.)
Is there an equivalent or similar event for undergrad students in the US?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the detection scheme described in the article (two infrared sensors, one with a 705-nm filter, and the other without a filter to eliminate false positives) be easy to fool by masking the explosive with another substance that also photoluminesces at 705-nm?
For example, suppose non-explosive substance foo photoluminesces at and around 705-nm, and is normally allowed past the detector because it lacks the special signature. If you were to put a bunch of foo in the same container as your explosive, thereby combining the infrared signatures (if that's actually what would happen), couldn't you fool the detector?
Of course, the article is light on real details, and I'm no chemistry expert, so maybe it's not that easy to fool.
...but it was rather half-baked. It was a passive system that involved a fixed array of spheres on some kind of (possibly low-friction) surface that a person would walk on. Fill up a shallow pan with a layer of marbles and you'll have an idea of what it would look like.
:)
I hadn't solved the problem of how to create the proper amount of resistance, so if it were implemented as designed, it probably would have been something like walking on ice. Also, I hadn't entirely worked out how to get data from the grid for feedback to the imaging components of the system.
Just one of those things you come up with when you're not paying attention in class.
I believe that these tiles have one major advantage over your treadmill: 360-degree range of motion.
;)
I'd love to see you try and sidestep on your treadmill.
Ham operators have huge bands all to themselves, for what amounts to a glorified boys' clubhouse.
You, sir, are both incorrect and offensive.
First off, many of the frequencies that ham radio operators have access to are shared. Also, for the radio spectrum below 1.3GHz, ham radio operators have access to less than 130MHz of spectrum. That's less than 10 percent. I think "huge" is an overstatement.
Second, ham radio is much more than "a glorified boys' clubhouse." That you should suggest such a thing is an insult to all of the ham volunteers who have assisted in natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, fires) unnatural disasters (terrorist attacks), and public events (parades, etc.). Ham volunteers play a vital role in large-scale emergency situations, and organizations of ham operators exist for this explicit purpose. Public service is, in fact, one of the most (if not single most) critical tenets of ham radio.
Furthermore, some the core ideals and culture of ham radio are experimentation and exploration, to push the limits and find new ways of doing things. Ideals that are very similar, I think, to the hacker (in the original sense) culture.
So, before you make such statements, check your facts and and consider what you would lose if you had your way.
~~LightForce, KC8EPG
I'm amazed that you can OCR handwritten pages at all -- that's incredible. I had no idea the technology was that good.
;)
Well, you can OCR anything, including your neighbor's dog, but that doesn't mean an OCR engine will produce anything intelligible.
Seriously, I think in this case OCR would be a waste of time. Even the really good OCR engines (like ABBYY Fine Reader, which I use at work, supposedly very good) have significant problems with handwritten text and will produce lots of errors, making the ability to search the document worthless. Also, to my knowledge, there are no OCR engines that correctly handle formulas and symbols.
An alternative file format may be a possibility, but if these files are going to be distributed to students, you may want to stick with PDF.
Also, **good results are possible** with PDF, you just have to know what settings to use and tweak. I scan textbooks for the Academic Support office at a university. The settings I use are 300dpi 1-bit black and white with adaptive compression at highest quality, and I can fit about 30 pages in a few MB.
~~LF