Speaking as someone who has worked in banking infosec for years, I can tell you the signatures on the backs of credit cards are worse than useless.
What banks need to start doing is pre-print the cardholder's signature on the back of the card the same way many state's DMVs do for licenses now. A post-issue-applied signature isn't worth the card it's written on (quite literally).
My 7-year-old cousin just finished an egg-drop competition. As you have suggested, they have a fairly complex scoring algorithm, but it included a number of elements, including:
-the smaller the number of items/materials in the design, the lower the score (lower is better)
-the lighter the container, the lower the score
-the container must come to rest inside a target area, so delivery precision is a key component of the contest.
My to my cousin's chagrin, she was essentially disqualified when her entry bounced out of the target area. Otherwise, being a small container with only three components, it was a frontrunner.
All-in-all, it seems like a very well-run contest. You can take a look at the rules and such at the website: http://www.wsfceggdrop.com/
If you're not already aware of it, the Opera browser allows you to turn off referrer logging globally. I only turn it on very rarely when a site requires it.
It's a handbook of negotiating techniques with specific regard to salary and job prospecting.
The golden rule? WHOEVER GOES FIRST LOSES. Don't EVER be the first to mention a number.
The book is incredible, it really is. There are at least three different techniques for dealing with the "what are you currently making" question.
If you do nothing else before you have your next interview, read the book. If it doesn't help you, I'll buy it from you. I re-read the whole thing before EVERY interview to brush up.
I don't want to seem overenthusiastic, but this is one of the few things I can say works without a doubt. It's one of the most important books I've read in my entire career.
I think that response may have missed the point of the submitter's original question. I read it as "is there a way to prevent all traffic from traversing predictable routes and hubs, thereby disallowing any entity from collecting all of one's transmitted data and using it against one?"
Essentially what the submitter is interested in is a meshed network, which to my knowledge is the only network topology yet created which does not use hubs, centers, or buses to carry conglomerated traffic. Remember that things like bittorrent, bgp (less so), and other similar protocols are really creating "virtual" meshes, not real ones - all of your traffic (and that of every other person in your segment) is still travelling to your ISP, and that to their backbone. So anyone who sits at those hubs or backbones would be able to see all your torrent traffic, and who it is going to/from - it is only the separation of the ISPs and the RIAA/MPAA/FBI that keeps them from knowing your every move on the Internet! (Encryption and proxies help, but it aren't a foolproof solution, btw.)
Also, TCP is designed to be fault-tolerant, but also semi-optimizing, taking the shortest perceived route to its destination. So unless a backbone is down, most (if not all) traffic from you to a host between which the backbone sits will travel on that backbone, very predictably. TCP is not privacy-sensitive.
The short answer is that in a wired world, there is no feasible way to create a mesh. The strength of the mesh is algorithmically tied to the number of other nodes each node is connected to. So unless you're going to dig up the yard between you and, say, three of your neighbors, and they and two more of theirs, and so on, across the entire country, you will end up with a topology which looks more like what you've already got, with a smaller number of larger rings and stars, each funneling through a central location.
In a wireless environment, the possibilities are much better. Some police precincts in the U.S. have been experimenting with mesh-networked radios, where each radio is a repeater as well as a transceiver. Thus a linear configuration of radios could extend the range from perhaps a 30-mile radius to a 60-mile-per-radio diameter for as long as the chain is unbroken. This isn't the optimum configuration, however, since it is presumed that one would want redundancy, so you would be forced to configure the mesh in such a way that you could talk to at least three other nodes at any given time. This requires a very high density of nodes, so it would work much better in a more densely-populated area than one nodes are scarce.
I don't know - according to the chart, a #10 (6mm^2) wire (which, while by A/C standards is huge, isn't really that big at all) will get you 216 feet at 10 amps. Most of the DC devices we use wall-warts for an average of no more than 1 to 1.5 amps, so you could theoretically wire a room for low-amp DC with a single cord.
If you wire your house intelligently - converting your A/C to D/C in a central location and radiating each a line to each room from there - only very large houses will have a throw distance of more than 200 feet. (Remember that the chart accomodates the return trip already.) This makes using D/C internally seems like a very feasable proposition.
I think the biggest pitfall is making sure you don't deliver too much (or little) current to the devices you plug in. It would be very bad to deliver 10 amps to a device which is expecting 300 milliamps, or 300mA to a device expecting 2A.
There's a reason we feed A/C to houses. That's not the same reason we feed A/C within houses.
Speaking of, now I finally have a viable excuse to sleep at my desk!
"No sir, I wasn't slacking - I was making decisions more efficiently!" I love it.:-)
On a more serious note, if you haven't read Gladwell's "Blink" yet, you should. It'an awesome (and fun to read) treatise on the power of the unconscious mind. Similar to Pinker's "The Language Instinct", but more accessible and tries to be less persuasive.
Opera Mini is, unfortunately, slower than molasses on my Blackberry 7290. (It loads so slowly I can't use it.)
I am going to purchase a Nokia 770 tablet here in the near future, and I am doing more browsing using my blackberry than I ever thought I would. (Checking flight itineraries, etc.)
IMHO, I think there really is a future in mobile browsing, but I don't think it should be the coder's responsibility to make a site mobile-compatible. I think Apache et al. should step up to the plate and automatically generate mobile-friendly pages that the devices can render without needing customized versions. But that's just me.
Err, you know, Windows has had a stable API (and ABI) since 1.0.
And it is this stubborn refusal to update the API that allows the same attacks (buffer overflows, etc.) to be successful through four generations of OS.
Microsoft's vulnerabilities aren't just the result of pushy managers and sloppy coding - it's because the APIs weren't written with security in mind, and they have more holes than swiss cheese.
A computer's mastery of a language is almost identical to a human's. The methods for learning languages are hierarchical... you can learn things out of order (for instance if you're only interested in learning the written language), but for the most part, you must learn things in order. Based on my experience (which is not scholarly, but is rather extensive), here is the basic hierarchy for full mastery of a language:
Phonemes -the sounds of the language
Diction/Accent -how the sounds are pronounced in different situations
Vocabulary -the words themselves
Grammar -this and vocabulary tend to be complementary and are often learned together
Context -What does each word mean in a given structure?
Inflection -or other vocal queues not distinctly related to the language itself
Construction -how many ways can you convey a particular idea? e.g., "Who are you?" vs. "Now who might you be?"
Sociology -What social clues or second meanings are there? E.g., double entendres, puns, etc.-
History -What historical or background clues are there? E.g., non-literal meanings: having a "loose tongue" isn't to be taken literally.
Computers have finally gotten up through grammar and are now working on context. This is an important step, but it is truly a long way from mastery of any language. While it shows significant progress, it's still a loooooong way from "superhuman".
While I'm not an apologist for Gibson, I think it should be pointed out that he stated quite clearly in the original interview that his view on the metafile vulnerability was conjecture, and was based on his limited work with the subsystem.
This wasn't a Chicken Little incident. I thought it was very reasonable, controlled, open to correction, and intended mostly to elicit a response from Microsoft, which clearly it did. All in all, I think this was a positive exercise in nearly every respect.
Thanks to "William the Conqueror", English is only Germanic in grammar and structure and some common words. But 70% of English is of Latin origin through French, which ol' Bill brought with him and his court in 1066.
For instance, the English word meaning "the act of throwing someone/something out of a window" is "defenestration", a derivative of the French word for window, "fenêtre".
The closes living relative to English is Frisian (spoken in some parts of the eastern Netherlands, IIRC), which is also very close to Dutch. But that has more to do with sentence structure than vocabulary.
The candies are still around - I bought some a few months ago in North Carolina. I don't know if they still click with Legos, but they can be built on their own for sure. (Might be a different brand, I don't know.)
What I remember about the Tyco blocks is that while they technically did intermingle with real Legos, for some reason they did not hold the connections between blocks well at all. I remember several times getting very frustrated with the Tyco blocks because my creations would fall apart wherever I had used them. I eventually (at 9 or 10 years old) purged my Lego collection of any Tycos whatsoever and never bought them again. To this day that collection is Lego-brand only.
I think you're forgetting that DVD Jon and the others don't have a team of lawyers at their immediate disposal like more companies do, so it takes time for them to seek legal counsel. It may be days or weeks before they announce an intention to sue Sony.
Since when did EULAs become meritorious in any way, shape, or form? They've been stuck down as non-binding as many times as they've been upheld; they often have clauses in them which are not only onerous, but downright illegal; they do not have any form of traditional contractual agreement methods, wherein both parties have the ability (allowed by contract law) to modify the contract to their satisfaction; and they represent the interests of one party to the exclusion of the rights of the other.
Tell me again why this sort of dispute should be allowed past the doors of any courtroom?
I agree with the above to a degree (no pun intended). My girlfriend has a bachelor's in composition and a master's in film composition, and let me tell you - neither prepared her for working in LA. IMHO, I would tell your friend to go get an MBA instead. It will prove FAR more valuable than all the CS classes he could ever take.
Breaking into the game industry is the same as breaking into the film industry: it's not about what you know as much as who you know. And networking (in this sense) falls squarely into what you would learn in business school. (Marketing, PR, advertising, contract management, etc.) A CS degree is really only tangential to his chosen career path and won't help him much.
That being said, the parent is right - keep doing little projects and take every opportunity to meet the right people to land the big ones.
Re:If you can't patent it...
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
cut any silly implications that government secrecy is somehow something new with the Bush administration
You're right, secrecy isn't a new idea in government. However, the sheer amount of secret things - classified data, blocked FOIA requests, and so much more has grown exponentially in the past 20 years or so. The amount of secrecy allowed in the US now is leaps and bounds above what it was when Reagan was president. (And it was a lot then!)
It used to be that data defaulted to "unclassified" unless it was specifically classified. But lately it's taken a quite a turn - more and more data is defaulting to "classified".
I think a large part of this has to do with two realizations at the government level. One, the less information about the government is out there, the less accountable their constituents can hold them. (This is why the FOIA is so critical for the protection of rights for US citizens.) Two, statistical mining, data interpolation and extrapolation, and other sophisticated, computationally-intensive information guessing techniques have advanced so rapidly and with such efficacy that even when only "non-sensitive" portions of data are released, people are becoming extremely good at figuring out the underlying secrets.
Personally, it scares me that the government can keep secrets from me without even telling me why they're keeping it a secret. ("National Security" has become the catch-all reason to classify ANYTHING, it seems.) It scares me more that the government will no longer let me keep secrets from it. That disparity is beginning to undermine the balance of power between the electors and the elect, and could very easily lead this country into a tryannical state. I thank God that there are still some idealists in the government who are trying to make the right decisions; it is they who help to counteract the creep of power and those it affects.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who has worked in banking infosec for years, I can tell you the signatures on the backs of credit cards are worse than useless.
What banks need to start doing is pre-print the cardholder's signature on the back of the card the same way many state's DMVs do for licenses now. A post-issue-applied signature isn't worth the card it's written on (quite literally).
Wait, I think you misspelled "politicians".
My 7-year-old cousin just finished an egg-drop competition. As you have suggested, they have a fairly complex scoring algorithm, but it included a number of elements, including:
-the smaller the number of items/materials in the design, the lower the score (lower is better)
-the lighter the container, the lower the score
-the container must come to rest inside a target area, so delivery precision is a key component of the contest.
My to my cousin's chagrin, she was essentially disqualified when her entry bounced out of the target area. Otherwise, being a small container with only three components, it was a frontrunner.
All-in-all, it seems like a very well-run contest. You can take a look at the rules and such at the website: http://www.wsfceggdrop.com/
If you're not already aware of it, the Opera browser allows you to turn off referrer logging globally. I only turn it on very rarely when a site requires it.
READ THIS BOOK.d _sim_b_1/002-6822999-5302459?_encoding=UTF8&v=glan ce&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1580083102/ref=p
It's a handbook of negotiating techniques with specific regard to salary and job prospecting.
The golden rule?
WHOEVER GOES FIRST LOSES. Don't EVER be the first to mention a number.
The book is incredible, it really is. There are at least three different techniques for dealing with the "what are you currently making" question.
If you do nothing else before you have your next interview, read the book. If it doesn't help you, I'll buy it from you. I re-read the whole thing before EVERY interview to brush up.
I don't want to seem overenthusiastic, but this is one of the few things I can say works without a doubt. It's one of the most important books I've read in my entire career.
I think that response may have missed the point of the submitter's original question. I read it as "is there a way to prevent all traffic from traversing predictable routes and hubs, thereby disallowing any entity from collecting all of one's transmitted data and using it against one?"
Essentially what the submitter is interested in is a meshed network, which to my knowledge is the only network topology yet created which does not use hubs, centers, or buses to carry conglomerated traffic. Remember that things like bittorrent, bgp (less so), and other similar protocols are really creating "virtual" meshes, not real ones - all of your traffic (and that of every other person in your segment) is still travelling to your ISP, and that to their backbone. So anyone who sits at those hubs or backbones would be able to see all your torrent traffic, and who it is going to/from - it is only the separation of the ISPs and the RIAA/MPAA/FBI that keeps them from knowing your every move on the Internet! (Encryption and proxies help, but it aren't a foolproof solution, btw.)
Also, TCP is designed to be fault-tolerant, but also semi-optimizing, taking the shortest perceived route to its destination. So unless a backbone is down, most (if not all) traffic from you to a host between which the backbone sits will travel on that backbone, very predictably. TCP is not privacy-sensitive.
The short answer is that in a wired world, there is no feasible way to create a mesh. The strength of the mesh is algorithmically tied to the number of other nodes each node is connected to. So unless you're going to dig up the yard between you and, say, three of your neighbors, and they and two more of theirs, and so on, across the entire country, you will end up with a topology which looks more like what you've already got, with a smaller number of larger rings and stars, each funneling through a central location.
In a wireless environment, the possibilities are much better. Some police precincts in the U.S. have been experimenting with mesh-networked radios, where each radio is a repeater as well as a transceiver. Thus a linear configuration of radios could extend the range from perhaps a 30-mile radius to a 60-mile-per-radio diameter for as long as the chain is unbroken. This isn't the optimum configuration, however, since it is presumed that one would want redundancy, so you would be forced to configure the mesh in such a way that you could talk to at least three other nodes at any given time. This requires a very high density of nodes, so it would work much better in a more densely-populated area than one nodes are scarce.
I hope that answers the question.
I don't know - according to the chart, a #10 (6mm^2) wire (which, while by A/C standards is huge, isn't really that big at all) will get you 216 feet at 10 amps. Most of the DC devices we use wall-warts for an average of no more than 1 to 1.5 amps, so you could theoretically wire a room for low-amp DC with a single cord.
If you wire your house intelligently - converting your A/C to D/C in a central location and radiating each a line to each room from there - only very large houses will have a throw distance of more than 200 feet. (Remember that the chart accomodates the return trip already.) This makes using D/C internally seems like a very feasable proposition.
I think the biggest pitfall is making sure you don't deliver too much (or little) current to the devices you plug in. It would be very bad to deliver 10 amps to a device which is expecting 300 milliamps, or 300mA to a device expecting 2A.
There's a reason we feed A/C to houses. That's not the same reason we feed A/C within houses.
Speaking of, now I finally have a viable excuse to sleep at my desk!
:-)
"No sir, I wasn't slacking - I was making decisions more efficiently!" I love it.
On a more serious note, if you haven't read Gladwell's "Blink" yet, you should. It'an awesome (and fun to read) treatise on the power of the unconscious mind. Similar to Pinker's "The Language Instinct", but more accessible and tries to be less persuasive.
Opera Mini is, unfortunately, slower than molasses on my Blackberry 7290. (It loads so slowly I can't use it.)
I am going to purchase a Nokia 770 tablet here in the near future, and I am doing more browsing using my blackberry than I ever thought I would. (Checking flight itineraries, etc.)
IMHO, I think there really is a future in mobile browsing, but I don't think it should be the coder's responsibility to make a site mobile-compatible. I think Apache et al. should step up to the plate and automatically generate mobile-friendly pages that the devices can render without needing customized versions. But that's just me.
Err, you know, Windows has had a stable API (and ABI) since 1.0.
And it is this stubborn refusal to update the API that allows the same attacks (buffer overflows, etc.) to be successful through four generations of OS.
Microsoft's vulnerabilities aren't just the result of pushy managers and sloppy coding - it's because the APIs weren't written with security in mind, and they have more holes than swiss cheese.
Aye. "The universe is my eyes and ears. Everything else is hearsay."
A computer's mastery of a language is almost identical to a human's. The methods for learning languages are hierarchical... you can learn things out of order (for instance if you're only interested in learning the written language), but for the most part, you must learn things in order. Based on my experience (which is not scholarly, but is rather extensive), here is the basic hierarchy for full mastery of a language:
Phonemes
-the sounds of the language
Diction/Accent
-how the sounds are pronounced in different situations
Vocabulary
-the words themselves
Grammar
-this and vocabulary tend to be complementary and are often learned together
Context
-What does each word mean in a given structure?
Inflection
-or other vocal queues not distinctly related to the language itself
Construction
-how many ways can you convey a particular idea? e.g., "Who are you?" vs. "Now who might you be?"
Sociology
-What social clues or second meanings are there? E.g., double entendres, puns, etc.-
History
-What historical or background clues are there? E.g., non-literal meanings: having a "loose tongue" isn't to be taken literally.
Computers have finally gotten up through grammar and are now working on context. This is an important step, but it is truly a long way from mastery of any language. While it shows significant progress, it's still a loooooong way from "superhuman".
Hmm, I have a spare I'm not using around here somewhere. Tell you what, I'll give you a deal on it... say, $750.00?
While I'm not an apologist for Gibson, I think it should be pointed out that he stated quite clearly in the original interview that his view on the metafile vulnerability was conjecture, and was based on his limited work with the subsystem.
This wasn't a Chicken Little incident. I thought it was very reasonable, controlled, open to correction, and intended mostly to elicit a response from Microsoft, which clearly it did. All in all, I think this was a positive exercise in nearly every respect.
Thanks to "William the Conqueror", English is only Germanic in grammar and structure and some common words. But 70% of English is of Latin origin through French, which ol' Bill brought with him and his court in 1066.
For instance, the English word meaning "the act of throwing someone/something out of a window" is "defenestration", a derivative of the French word for window, "fenêtre".
The closes living relative to English is Frisian (spoken in some parts of the eastern Netherlands, IIRC), which is also very close to Dutch. But that has more to do with sentence structure than vocabulary.
BTW, I beat /. to the story on my ID theft site: Identity Theft Risk Overhyped. Do I get extra points for that, or what?
/. and then duplicate it a bunch of times.
Nonono, you have to post it after it gets here on
Then you get promoted to Editor.
The candies are still around - I bought some a few months ago in North Carolina. I don't know if they still click with Legos, but they can be built on their own for sure. (Might be a different brand, I don't know.)
What I remember about the Tyco blocks is that while they technically did intermingle with real Legos, for some reason they did not hold the connections between blocks well at all. I remember several times getting very frustrated with the Tyco blocks because my creations would fall apart wherever I had used them. I eventually (at 9 or 10 years old) purged my Lego collection of any Tycos whatsoever and never bought them again. To this day that collection is Lego-brand only.
I think you're forgetting that DVD Jon and the others don't have a team of lawyers at their immediate disposal like more companies do, so it takes time for them to seek legal counsel. It may be days or weeks before they announce an intention to sue Sony.
Certainly not this slashdotter. I haven't bought a new CD in more than four years except for when I went to a band's concert and bought it there.
Hey, everybody knows you can't give blood if you've been in the UK for more than 3 months...
Since when did EULAs become meritorious in any way, shape, or form?
They've been stuck down as non-binding as many times as they've been upheld;
they often have clauses in them which are not only onerous, but downright illegal;
they do not have any form of traditional contractual agreement methods, wherein both parties have the ability (allowed by contract law) to modify the contract to their satisfaction;
and they represent the interests of one party to the exclusion of the rights of the other.
Tell me again why this sort of dispute should be allowed past the doors of any courtroom?
I agree with the above to a degree (no pun intended). My girlfriend has a bachelor's in composition and a master's in film composition, and let me tell you - neither prepared her for working in LA. IMHO, I would tell your friend to go get an MBA instead. It will prove FAR more valuable than all the CS classes he could ever take.
Breaking into the game industry is the same as breaking into the film industry: it's not about what you know as much as who you know. And networking (in this sense) falls squarely into what you would learn in business school. (Marketing, PR, advertising, contract management, etc.) A CS degree is really only tangential to his chosen career path and won't help him much.
That being said, the parent is right - keep doing little projects and take every opportunity to meet the right people to land the big ones.
Hey, why not? Ever notice that the Catholic and Protestant versions of the Bible differ? Or how about the Christian and Rabbinical scriptures?
cut any silly implications that government secrecy is somehow something new with the Bush administration
You're right, secrecy isn't a new idea in government. However, the sheer amount of secret things - classified data, blocked FOIA requests, and so much more has grown exponentially in the past 20 years or so. The amount of secrecy allowed in the US now is leaps and bounds above what it was when Reagan was president. (And it was a lot then!)
It used to be that data defaulted to "unclassified" unless it was specifically classified. But lately it's taken a quite a turn - more and more data is defaulting to "classified".
I think a large part of this has to do with two realizations at the government level. One, the less information about the government is out there, the less accountable their constituents can hold them. (This is why the FOIA is so critical for the protection of rights for US citizens.) Two, statistical mining, data interpolation and extrapolation, and other sophisticated, computationally-intensive information guessing techniques have advanced so rapidly and with such efficacy that even when only "non-sensitive" portions of data are released, people are becoming extremely good at figuring out the underlying secrets.
Personally, it scares me that the government can keep secrets from me without even telling me why they're keeping it a secret. ("National Security" has become the catch-all reason to classify ANYTHING, it seems.) It scares me more that the government will no longer let me keep secrets from it. That disparity is beginning to undermine the balance of power between the electors and the elect, and could very easily lead this country into a tryannical state. I thank God that there are still some idealists in the government who are trying to make the right decisions; it is they who help to counteract the creep of power and those it affects.
No, but the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6 might be...