All of the stuff that you do with your "normal" online persona, you know, online banking, checking email, discussion groups, etc: You can't do any of that. The second you associate a user profile on a server with your behavior, you're back to square one. The Matrix has you. You would have to create what the intelligence business calls a "legend" for your new anonymous online life. You may only access this persona using these extreme communications security protocols. Obviously, you can't create an agent X persona via your anonymous connection and then log into some site using that profile on your home cable modem connection. To borrow another bit of jargon from the people who do this for real, full time, you must practice "compartmentalization."
Oh man, it's shocking. We have no DSL coverage where we are here in the Far North, and Telecom has no plans to upgrade the infrastructure. We had to go with Farmside satellite. I was paying US$40 for an unmetered 3Mbit pipe. On this Farmside plan, we're paying NZ$100 per month for 1gb of 256kbits/sec down and 128 kbits/sec up. Dialup was unusable out here. Oh well. I hope I never step foot in the U.S. again, broadband or not.
Colin Powell... a former U.S. Army Four Star General, U.S. Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff happens to go into quiet, semi-retirement working for the venture capital firm responsible for funding the company that is building the "Holy Grail" of energy storage devices, based on technology patented by Standard Oil Company in 1966...
My wife and I had to get this on our roof, and you don't want to know what it's costing us and what we're getting in return for all that money. Sorry, I just don't want to talk about it because it's so disturbing. The machine I left behind in the U.S. is on a 7Mbit/sec cable modem circuit!!! AHHHHHHHHHH!!!
The alternative here was dialup at about 13 kbits/sec.:
New Zealand is a beautiful place in so many ways. Internet access, however, is a disaster. The recent bust up of Telecom NZ by the government won't change things in rural areas for the forseeable future. Even in the cities, broadband services are slow and the download caps make the offerings seem like jokes by developed world standards.
I'm starting to really enjoy stories that sum up the situation humanity is facing in very concise ways. Stories that are so jam packed with insanity and evil that one doesn't even know where to begin the analysis. The point, of course, is that analysis is no longer necessary to see where we are headed. The thing is apparent, prima facie.
I wonder how that thing would stand up to a sledge hammer?
How much better off would children be, in general, if the resources that went into making these cheap laptops were instead used to design and build inexpensive, village sized solar water distillation units?
After all, what's the leading cause of death in the world?
The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world. Most of the victims are young children, the vast majority of whom die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources contaminated by raw sewage. VOA's Jessica Berman has more on the story.
A report published recently in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that poor water sanitation and a lack of safe drinking water take a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined.
According to an assessment commissioned by the United Nations, 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of filthy water. The report says four out of every 10 people in the world, particularly those in Africa and Asia, do not have clean water to drink.
Don't like retraining yourself every 6 months?
on
Head Rush Ajax
·
· Score: 1
Find something else to do.
I got out of IT completely because of the constant pressure to learn a new skillset every few months. And for what? Increasingly criminal PHBs and diminishing returns.
My wife and I saved up and bought a small farm in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand. I'm about to quit my last IT job. The other slobs at work are wondering if the axe is going to drop this Friday. I'm laughing my ass off. That's if for me, boys. No more. I played the game one last time, but this time to win. "Win" meaning I don't have to play it anymore.
I hope they try to make the system more robust before adding resource hogging features. Note the message from status.blogger.com just today:
Monday, April 04, 2005
Some users may be experiencing an unexpected Blogger outage right now; we're looking into it and will post updated info soon. Thanks for your patience.
Posted by Eric at 10:26
If the thing is routinely failing with plain text, which it is, how is it going to work with video? - rhetorical question.
Why is OSX on the latest dual processor G5 system sluggish compared to Win 2K on a 1.6Ghz AMD system? Will the G5 processor innovations finally eliminate the clunkiness factor of OSX?
Oh really, what's HIV?
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
There is no objective, quantitative standard for HIV infection. There are no FDA approved diagnostic tests for HIV.
See:
http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/questioning/ult im ate_question.html
"You can be diagnosed HIV-positive if you possess antibodies formed in response to vaccinations, hepatitis, herpes, pregnancy, multiple infections or certain cancers. There are about 60 conditions that can trigger false positives."
HIV vaccination? You've got to be f*cking kidding me.
Gait Recognition Technology May Aid Homeland Defense The characteristics of your walk may not be as distinctive as the swaggering of John Wayne or the sashay of Joan Collins, but your stride may still be unique enough to identify you at a distance -- alone or among a group of people.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and elsewhere are developing technologies to recognize a person's walk, or gait. Results indicate these new identification methods hold promise as tools in the war on terrorism and in medical diagnosis.
Gait recognition technology is a biometric method - that is, a unique biological or behavioral identification characteristic, such as a fingerprint or a face. Though still in its infancy, the technology is growing in significance because of federal studies, such as the Georgia Tech projects, funded by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
At Georgia Tech, one study is addressing issues of gait recognition by computer vision, and the other is exploring a novel approach -- gait recognition with a radar system similar to those used by police officers to catch speeders.
The ultimate goal is detect, classify and identify humans at distances up to 500 feet away under day or night, all-weather conditions. Such capabilities will enhance the protection of U.S. forces and facilities from terrorist attacks, according to DARPA officials.
"We need technology to find the bad guys at a distance around federal buildings," says Jon Geisheimer, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). "That is the original application. And after Sept. 11, we began to see the usefulness of these technologies in airports."
Because gait recognition technology is so new, researchers are assessing the uniqueness of gait and methods by which it can be evaluated.
"We know that we can get some information on gait, but that it is much less diagnostic than faces," says Aaron Bobick, an associate professor of computing and co-director of the computer vision project at Georgia Tech. " Currently, we can't recognize one in 100,000 people. At the moment, gait recognition is not capable of that, but it's getting better so it can act as a filter."
In its early development, gait recognition technology likely will serve as a screening tool in conjunction with other biometric methods.
With two years of experiments and analysis almost complete, researchers on both Georgia Tech projects are hopeful for continued funding to conduct further studies. They must address numerous technical issues and it will be at least five years before the technologies are commercialized, researchers say.
In the project using radar for gait recognition, results from experiments, data analysis and algorithm design are promising, says Geisheimer, who works under the direction of GTRI principal research scientist Gene Greneker, and collaborates with GTRI research engineer Bill Marshall and Georgia State University Professor of Biomechanics Ben Johnson.
Gait recognition by radar focuses on the gait cycle formed by the movements of a person's various body parts move over time.
"The magic goal we're shooting for is accuracy in the high 90 percent range," Geisheimer says. "We're not there yet, but our initial results are encouraging and promising."
Researchers correctly identified 80 to 95 percent of individual subjects, with variances in that range among the three experiment days.
The next step is to build a more powerful radar system and test it in the lab and then the field. In experiments last year, subjects started walking 50 feet away from the radar and then walked within 15 feet of it. But researchers are now building a radar system that can detect people from 500 or more feet.
In the study of gait recognition by computer vision, researchers distinguish their approach from others with a techniqu
The Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, NSA, all branches of.mil, the Department of Justice and the National Security Council are regular readers.
I guess I'm doing something right... or wrong... er, I dunno.
Most people don't want/can't tolerate freedom. They seek out totalitarian systems and leaders in order to escape the responsibilities and pressures freedom creates. This axiom is as true today as it ever was. Oh well and so it goes...
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.
I use a 4+ year old Nokia 6190. This thing is better than any other phone I've ever used. I had nothing but problems with newer phones, so I just dug out my old 6190 and put the SIM chip back in it. The 6190 can make calls where other phones have no service. The voice quality is excellent. It's built like a tank. (The thing has hit the deck several times, and it's still alive.) If I want to play games or be on the Internet, I won't be doing it on a 2 inch screen! I want my phone to be a phone.
Slashdot Mirror
This essay takes the paranoia all the way, but, as it turns out, maybe not far enough...
The Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity
http://cryptogon.com/?p=624
All of the stuff that you do with your "normal" online persona, you know, online banking, checking email, discussion groups, etc: You can't do any of that. The second you associate a user profile on a server with your behavior, you're back to square one. The Matrix has you. You would have to create what the intelligence business calls a "legend" for your new anonymous online life. You may only access this persona using these extreme communications security protocols. Obviously, you can't create an agent X persona via your anonymous connection and then log into some site using that profile on your home cable modem connection. To borrow another bit of jargon from the people who do this for real, full time, you must practice "compartmentalization."
Oh man, it's shocking. We have no DSL coverage where we are here in the Far North, and Telecom has no plans to upgrade the infrastructure. We had to go with Farmside satellite. I was paying US$40 for an unmetered 3Mbit pipe. On this Farmside plan, we're paying NZ$100 per month for 1gb of 256kbits/sec down and 128 kbits/sec up. Dialup was unusable out here. Oh well. I hope I never step foot in the U.S. again, broadband or not.
Colin Powell... a former U.S. Army Four Star General, U.S. Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff happens to go into quiet, semi-retirement working for the venture capital firm responsible for funding the company that is building the "Holy Grail" of energy storage devices, based on technology patented by Standard Oil Company in 1966...
1 15906089199373074
Tell me another one:
http://cryptogon.com/2006_09_17_blogarchive.html#
My wife and I had to get this on our roof, and you don't want to know what it's costing us and what we're getting in return for all that money. Sorry, I just don't want to talk about it because it's so disturbing. The machine I left behind in the U.S. is on a 7Mbit/sec cable modem circuit!!! AHHHHHHHHHH!!!
1 15642162872991388
The alternative here was dialup at about 13 kbits/sec.:
http://cryptogon.com/2006_08_20_blogarchive.html#
New Zealand is a beautiful place in so many ways. Internet access, however, is a disaster. The recent bust up of Telecom NZ by the government won't change things in rural areas for the forseeable future. Even in the cities, broadband services are slow and the download caps make the offerings seem like jokes by developed world standards.
The clinical term is "smacky face."
e ws/2003/03/09/walqa309.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Have a nice day.
I'm starting to really enjoy stories that sum up the situation humanity is facing in very concise ways. Stories that are so jam packed with insanity and evil that one doesn't even know where to begin the analysis. The point, of course, is that analysis is no longer necessary to see where we are headed. The thing is apparent, prima facie.
I wonder how that thing would stand up to a sledge hammer?
How much better off would children be, in general, if the resources that went into making these cheap laptops were instead used to design and build inexpensive, village sized solar water distillation units?
- 03/2005-03-17-voa34.cfm
After all, what's the leading cause of death in the world?
It's not a cheap laptop deficiency:
http://http//www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005
The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world. Most of the victims are young children, the vast majority of whom die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources contaminated by raw sewage. VOA's Jessica Berman has more on the story. A report published recently in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that poor water sanitation and a lack of safe drinking water take a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined. According to an assessment commissioned by the United Nations, 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of filthy water. The report says four out of every 10 people in the world, particularly those in Africa and Asia, do not have clean water to drink.
Find something else to do.
I got out of IT completely because of the constant pressure to learn a new skillset every few months. And for what? Increasingly criminal PHBs and diminishing returns.
I'm a farmer now.
My wife and I saved up and bought a small farm in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand. I'm about to quit my last IT job. The other slobs at work are wondering if the axe is going to drop this Friday. I'm laughing my ass off. That's if for me, boys. No more. I played the game one last time, but this time to win. "Win" meaning I don't have to play it anymore.
Have a nice day.
I work for an evil Wall Street financial services firm. They disable the USB ports with group policy. Oh, it's a great place to work.
Bird Flu Scam: Donald H. Rumsfeld - Former Chairman of Gilead Sciences
Related: Bird Flu "Pandemic" Antidote: Wash Hands
Related: Spain: Bird Flu Sparking Human Epidemic Is 'Science Fiction'
Related: STRATFOR on Bird Flu: Calm Down
I wrote this a few months ago. .gov and .mil have found it interesting:
http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html
-Kevin
I hope they try to make the system more robust before adding resource hogging features. Note the message from status.blogger.com just today:
Monday, April 04, 2005
Some users may be experiencing an unexpected Blogger outage right now; we're looking into it and will post updated info soon. Thanks for your patience.
Posted by Eric at 10:26
If the thing is routinely failing with plain text, which it is, how is it going to work with video? - rhetorical question.
Why is OSX on the latest dual processor G5 system sluggish compared to Win 2K on a 1.6Ghz AMD system? Will the G5 processor innovations finally eliminate the clunkiness factor of OSX?
There is no objective, quantitative standard for HIV infection. There are no FDA approved diagnostic tests for HIV.
t im ate_question.html
See:
http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/questioning/ul
"You can be diagnosed HIV-positive if you possess antibodies formed in response to vaccinations, hepatitis, herpes, pregnancy, multiple infections or certain cancers. There are about 60 conditions that can trigger false positives."
HIV vaccination? You've got to be f*cking kidding me.
http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/index.htm
Originally from the NY times, but copied on my site here:
l #1 10068134140406229
http://cryptogon.com/2004_11_14_blogarchive.htm
"They do see broader possibilities, such as implanting RFID tags under the skin of children to avoid problems with lost or forgotten tags."
Winamp was done years ago. What else could they possibly do to it!? I have no plans to stop using it.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/print.php?url=/release s/2002/10/021015073446.htm
Gait Recognition Technology May Aid Homeland Defense
The characteristics of your walk may not be as distinctive as the swaggering of John Wayne or the sashay of Joan Collins, but your stride may still be unique enough to identify you at a distance -- alone or among a group of people.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and elsewhere are developing technologies to recognize a person's walk, or gait. Results indicate these new identification methods hold promise as tools in the war on terrorism and in medical diagnosis.
Gait recognition technology is a biometric method - that is, a unique biological or behavioral identification characteristic, such as a fingerprint or a face. Though still in its infancy, the technology is growing in significance because of federal studies, such as the Georgia Tech projects, funded by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
At Georgia Tech, one study is addressing issues of gait recognition by computer vision, and the other is exploring a novel approach -- gait recognition with a radar system similar to those used by police officers to catch speeders.
The ultimate goal is detect, classify and identify humans at distances up to 500 feet away under day or night, all-weather conditions. Such capabilities will enhance the protection of U.S. forces and facilities from terrorist attacks, according to DARPA officials.
"We need technology to find the bad guys at a distance around federal buildings," says Jon Geisheimer, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). "That is the original application. And after Sept. 11, we began to see the usefulness of these technologies in airports."
Because gait recognition technology is so new, researchers are assessing the uniqueness of gait and methods by which it can be evaluated.
"We know that we can get some information on gait, but that it is much less diagnostic than faces," says Aaron Bobick, an associate professor of computing and co-director of the computer vision project at Georgia Tech. " Currently, we can't recognize one in 100,000 people. At the moment, gait recognition is not capable of that, but it's getting better so it can act as a filter."
In its early development, gait recognition technology likely will serve as a screening tool in conjunction with other biometric methods.
With two years of experiments and analysis almost complete, researchers on both Georgia Tech projects are hopeful for continued funding to conduct further studies. They must address numerous technical issues and it will be at least five years before the technologies are commercialized, researchers say.
In the project using radar for gait recognition, results from experiments, data analysis and algorithm design are promising, says Geisheimer, who works under the direction of GTRI principal research scientist Gene Greneker, and collaborates with GTRI research engineer Bill Marshall and Georgia State University Professor of Biomechanics Ben Johnson.
Gait recognition by radar focuses on the gait cycle formed by the movements of a person's various body parts move over time.
"The magic goal we're shooting for is accuracy in the high 90 percent range," Geisheimer says. "We're not there yet, but our initial results are encouraging and promising."
Researchers correctly identified 80 to 95 percent of individual subjects, with variances in that range among the three experiment days.
The next step is to build a more powerful radar system and test it in the lab and then the field. In experiments last year, subjects started walking 50 feet away from the radar and then walked within 15 feet of it. But researchers are now building a radar system that can detect people from 500 or more feet.
In the study of gait recognition by computer vision, researchers distinguish their approach from others with a techniqu
Can I nominate my own site? www.cryptogon.com
.mil, the Department of Justice and the National Security Council are regular readers.
The Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, NSA, all branches of
I guess I'm doing something right... or wrong... er, I dunno.
I'd ride her any day. ;) This is her blog, by the way: http://www.megnut.com/
Most people don't want/can't tolerate freedom. They seek out totalitarian systems and leaders in order to escape the responsibilities and pressures freedom creates. This axiom is as true today as it ever was. Oh well and so it goes...
You're not supposed to deface a u.s. flag, either. Well, here's George Bush doing that:
. ht ml#105918027068361202
http://www.cryptogon.com/2003_07_20_blogarchive
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.
Link to story.
I use a 4+ year old Nokia 6190. This thing is better than any other phone I've ever used. I had nothing but problems with newer phones, so I just dug out my old 6190 and put the SIM chip back in it. The 6190 can make calls where other phones have no service. The voice quality is excellent. It's built like a tank. (The thing has hit the deck several times, and it's still alive.) If I want to play games or be on the Internet, I won't be doing it on a 2 inch screen! I want my phone to be a phone.