Moreover, IMHO, more diversity is not inherently good nor is less of it inherently bad.
I agree. However, don't try to say that in a modern university or college setting, you racist, sexist, Eurocentric, homophobic, phallocentric pig.
You probably weren't even aware that you were racist, sexist, Eurocentric, homophobic, or phallocentered, but that's what you'd be labeled. The idea that diversity, by itself and without anything attached, is inherently a Good Thing is a key tenet of modern liberal (in the 'liberal arts' but also politically) thought. It's such a core belief, that any questioning of it will almost always be met with vitriolic denial.
Which really raises a question in itself, namely if diversity is so good, why are so many academians buried in this group-think circle-jerk about why diversity is unquestionably the most wonderful thing on earth, at the expense of all other points of view on the matter?
PS - What is going on with./? Are we in the middle of changing skins or something? The interface is out of control.
I'm not entirely convinced about the calculator business, but I definitely agree about the wired vs. wireless point.
Wireless here seems excessive. It's going to introduce a whole host of other issues: I think the OP would be much better served by reconsidering his requirements and going with a wired solution.
There's a reason all those TV studios with the audience-response clickers still use wired systems (as does Congress). Wireless ones are expensive, probably prone to failure, and require a lot of maintenance in terms of battery replacement. Plus, they'll get stolen like crazy if they're not locked down -- and if they're tied down to the desks why not just wire them in, instead? Sure the up-front investment in terms of labor will be higher, but I'll bet the TCO isn't in the long run.
I'm not an expert when it comes to hardware design, so I'm sure someone else can come up with a better implementation than I can. In fact there are probably lots of COTS products for doing voting with wired-in handheld transmitters. I would try to go for something that would use some kind of very inexpensive twisted pair wiring and phone connectors. Really the only thing that each transmitter needs to send is some sort of unique ID code and a one-bit response for each possible options (so three bits if you have 3 buttons on each unit for answers A,B,C).
I'm thinking of a way you could do it for just a few transmitters using standard TTL logic and UARTS, but that wouldn't scale very well -- you'd need way too many parts on the receiving end. Anyway, I'm sure it's a problem that's already been solved somewhere.
The other way I can think of to do it would be in a situation where all the students have laptops and use them in class. There it would be just a matter of writing some software -- maybe on top of an IM client program (Jabber, perhaps) -- that would take input from a GUI and send a message to a server, which would total up and display the data. However I've only been to a few classes where all the students used laptops during the lectures, and I can imagine a lot of professors who wouldn't want to start, just so they could get an instant 'yay' or 'boo' on their teaching.
By the way -- what the hell just happened to Slashdot? It was down for quite a while there.
I know you mean this as a joke, but I thought I'd point out that a professor of mine once built a setup like this (okay, it had nothing to do with clickers) in a circular room on our campus. Basically he made a giant set of Helmholtz coils, big enough to enclose the whole room.
What he did was take the circumference of the room, and multiply it by 2, and then go out and got two lengths of 50-pair phone cables that long. One he mounted on a raceway on the wall, the other at about floor level. Where the cable ends met, he spliced the conductors of the phone wires together so that instead of 50 pairs, he made one long continuous circuit, running around the circumference of the room 200 times (50 pairs = 100 conductors * 2 wraps = 200 times around).
One loop was at floor level, the other was somewhere in the walls near the ceiling. The internal resistance of the coils was pretty high, but with an AC current it produced a measurable current in another coil any place in the room.
The purpose of the whole thing was actually a sort of assisted listening system for people with hearing aids. Many hearing aids have a small coil in them attached to the amplifier which can act as a sort of receiving antenna if the person is standing in a fluctuating EM field at audio frequencies. So basically you could hook these coils up to an audio source (with proper amplification) and a person with a hearing aid would be able to hear it through their own hearing aid, standing or sitting anywhere in the room.
Whether or not the system was ever used for anything other than lab demonstrations I don't know.... but I just thought I'd relate the story. Assuming you can get some surplus 25 or 50-conductor POTS cable, making a room-sized Helmholtz coil arrangement isn't at all impossible.
I don't think that they actually use it anymore, but in England under Common Law there used to be a thing called the Riot Act (incidentally it's where the expression being 'read the riot act' comes from). If an mob became violent, the Riot Act would be read, which was basically an order to go home and disburse, that the assembly was now illegal. After the Riot Act was read, it became legal (perhaps after a certain amount of time) for troops to open fire on the rioters and force them to disburse.
Now here in the U.S. we've traditionally taken a dim view of such heavy handed government tactics (although we tend to employ them at times when push comes to shove) which is why I believe you don't see anything like that in the U.S. Code or Constitution. Although I think you're going to see as part of the reactions to the Katrina lawlessness, that other cities are going to start factoring 'hoodlum control' into their disaster management and mitigation plans.
I think most people (maybe not you) agree that it should be illegal to enter into a contract where you get paid less than minimum wage.
That made me laugh so hard, if I'd been drinking anything it would be all over my keyboard right now by way of my nose.
You have obviously never held a low-level salaried position. It is very common for new employees, especially 'store manager' types of big corporations, to make what would be sub-minimum wage if they were paid hourly. And in some cases they even report hours, but are just paid a flat rate, because that's how they're contracted.
Technically I suppose it's not being "paid less than minimum wage" because the minimum wage laws have an exemption for salaried workers, but in reality that's just a catch-22 for a lot of people that allows them to get into contracts where they earn far less than they would if they were being paid hourly at minimum (and got overtime).
The way it usually works is that the corporation will simply refuse to give hourly workers any overtime, and cap their pay and hours at 40 a week. In order to get slightly better pay, employees jump on the salary bandwagon, but quickly find out that their 40-hour workweek might as well have been an afternoon paper route.
I'd be willing to bet that minimum wage is one of the most commonly signed-away rights in the U.S. today. And other than religion, voting and things which are direct or indirect perpetuities, you can pretty much sign away any right you want in a contract (in particular, free speech).
I can't decide if you're trolling, or just totally misinformed. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and treat it as the latter.
According to the Fermilab High Energy Physics Information Center, the SSC was cancelled by the House of Representatives in 1993. That would be the overwhelmingly Democrat controlled House of Representatives. 258-D to 176-R, during the latter part of 1993, and 267-D to 167-R earlier in the year. So who killed the SSC again?
Far from making sense, your theory isn't even possible.
Furthermore, then-Governor G.W. Bush, while visiting Japan in 1992, reportedly offered the Japanese a $1.25 BN "full partnership" stake in the venture in an effort to keep it alive. While I'm sure this had more to do with the windfall for his state than any particular love of high-energy particle physics, it certainly doesn't look good for your book-burning, anti-science red-staters theory.
I don't know if you were just tossing your little 'factoid' out there in the hopes of getting some karma from the other knee-jerk libs, but you must have a really short memory if you thought 1993 was a big year for conservatives, anti-science book-burners or not.
There are a lot of legitimate things to go after the ultra-right wingers with, especially recently, but the SSC isn't one of them. Do some research next time.
At the moment people seem to be enjoying changing it between two possible explanations, one of which has to do with God's Body, and the other of which is this:
"Originally (1743) a negro euphemistic corruption of "by golly!""
Frankly this one doesn't make any sense, since it's a circular definition. How can "golly" be explained away as being a contraction of "by golly"? That doesn't answer the original question here, namely where the hell "golly" came from.
I'm not convinced that the NYT is right necessarily, but I haven't seen any better explanations.
Actually what I found most interesting in this was the line about the engineer's "20% project time." If that means what I think it does -- namely that Google's engineers get 20% of their time free to work on side projects -- that's a very cool thing. It wouldn't surprise me if some of these side projects are where their latest ideas have come from.
I'm glad you brought up this point. Using a regular magnet is unlikely to take the data off of your credit card. It might happen if you moved it around enough, but just swiping it by probably won't do it.
To erase data from a magnetic medium (video or audio tape also) you really want a fluctuating magnetic field, like what you'd get by running AC through a coil. Then you put the media near the coil, and (this is actually most important) move the media slowly away from the coil, before shutting down the power.
This ensures that all the data in the media is destroyed. The key step is actually moving the media away from the fluctuating magnetic field, if you want to make sure the erasure is complete. I was once given a very thorough explanation of the physics of why this works, but it's not something I can easily summarize. I'll dig around and see if I can find a link.
But if you find an old tape head demagnetizer for an open-reel deck, it will generally say in the instructions to place tip of demagnetizer near head, turn on coil, move tip slowly away from head. Turn off coil. Same thing if you have an old good-quality bulk tape eraser.
I just thought that I'd point out that most of the major cruise lines do this on-ship also. When you book the ticket or check in, you choose a credit card to 'associate' with your room account.
Then during the course of the whole vacation, you don't use cash or your credit card at all (except to leave tips for the crew, and the last time I went on one they had even come up with a way to charge those). Food, wine, bar tabs, even gambling in the casino all go onto your room charge. Then when you check out you sign one big-ass honking receipt for the whole bill, and it gets dumped onto your credit card.
The cards that they use on cruise ships though are not the reusable variety in hotels: they have a magnetic stripe but are also printed on the front side with your name, ship name and arrival and departure dates, and often your photo. So they're not reused afterwards.
It's sort of odd, that at first there was this urban myth saying you needed to worry, and then Snopes "debunked" it, and now we have good evidence from a person who actually took a card reader and checked some cards (as opposed to Snopes, who just called Doubletree, apparently), saying that the original hoax actually was on to something, after all.
None of this changes the Slashdot article at all, assuming that we trust the author to not be fabricating his results with the card reader completely (and I have no reason to believe that).
I think instead we just have a case where reality imitated art a little too closely -- the art in this case being that hoax, and reality being the stuff the hotels are putting on your card.
Using a regular card reader I'm pretty confident you could only get one "generation." To get the next one you'd have to use some pretty specialized equipment. And I'm not sure it would be a sure thing either, provided that the information was recorded into the stripe using the same equipment and the same power level.
However if the hotel personnel sometimes used card reader/writer A, which has low power, but occasionally reader B, which has an ever so slightly higher power level, then assuming the last one used was A, you ought to be able to get at least 2 records off of the card, because the last record from B will be buried a little deeper in the strip than the overwrite by A.
Or if you had 3 card reader/writers, each at slightly different power levels, and used them in the right order, you might be able to reconstruct 3 sets of data from the card.
The analogy I'm thinking of is like how (analog) HiFi audio is written to a VHS tape: it's recorded onto the tape underneath the video signal, using a recording head where the flux pattern goes deeper into the recording medium. (It's also separated by virtue of an FM carrier and the azimuth angle of the recording heads, which you wouldn't have on a magnetic stripe card.)
I've read some articles on recovering overwritten information from linear magnetic tape (Nixon tapes, etc.) and it's no easy task. The usual way to do it is to just look for areas of the tape near the edges that weren't saturated by the erase head the second time around. I'm fairly confident in saying that recovery of two sets of data, made by the same reader/writer, would be non-trivial.
I think there's probably an even easier way to do it than that: don't use a dedicated MP3 decoder chip, and don't have any firmware loaded in the device when it ships. Make it a general purpose embedded system with flashable firmware and an an open API.
Essentially, the retailer is just sending the user a box with a hard drive, boot ROM or BIOS, and an embedded processor. (I think this is what the iPod is -- it uses a 25MHz StrongARM I believe, although whether it also has an MP3 decoder I'm not sure.) Onto this the user could load whatever firmware and applications they wanted. MP3 player, Ogg player, digital photo storage / management, etc.
It would be an extremely versatile device to begin with for the consumer, and it would also specifically not be a "music player," any more than a Palm handheld or a cellphone onto which you can download software is.
I'm sure that any hole in the law that you could exploit in that way would probably get patched eventually, especially if there's a lot of money at stake for the **AA's of the world to make, but you might be able to sneak some interesting products through in the meantime.
Humm... okay, so France is just as bad or worse than Italy. Doesn't surprise me, for some reason.
Are there any countries in the E.U. that don't impose some sort of levy like this? Perhaps you couldn't buy it from the Apple Store in that country, but you could get it from another retailer (assuming there are other retailers -- here in the U.S. it seems that everybody is selling iPods these days, including RadioShack at one point) that might be a little less strict about its shipping policies.
I'm thinking maybe Germany would be a good bet? I don't know about whether they have a levy, but it seems like you'd have a pretty good chance of finding some German reseller who doesn't have a physical presence in Italy that would be happy to sell you one via mail.
Maybe I'm being optimistic about the ability of residents of one E.U. nation to buy stuff from another E.U. nation... I was under the impression that was a benefit of Europeanization.
It was, I believe, for not reporting his "income." The money was all laundered and couldn't be proven conclusively to come from illegal activities other than gambling (although it was rather clearly coming from the alcohol trade), but what they got him on was not paying taxes on his 'gambling' income.
In something that's tangentially related, did you know that your gambling losses are tax deductible? Kind of ironic that the fiscal incentive to donate money to the Red Cross is the same that it is to blow it down at the track on the ponies.
Couldn't people in Italy just buy it from another country in Europe (hopefully where they don't have such a levy) and have it shipped to them? Italy is part of the E.U. if I'm not mistaken, doesn't that mean that there's no tariff if you're getting it just for personal use (and not for resale)?
I knew some people in Canada who were ordering iPods from the U.S. back when they still had their own ridiculous surcharge, seems it ought to be even easier to do in the E.U.
Imagine if the laws the media industry 'buy' were appplied to other products. Knife manufacturers would face life imprisonment (or the death penalty) incase someone buying one of their knives killed someone with it, Ford and Honda executives would be locked up on the off chance that one of their cars was used as a getaway car, and makers of mobile phones would face a free holiday in Gitmo because a nutter could use one of their phones to remotely detonate a bomb.
Imagine? No, I don't need to imagine. It's called "strict liability," friend, and we're already there.
Yes! And I hear they're all fully vested members of the InternAtional New Arts League (IANAL), an association for experts on the legal ramifications of emerging new technologies.
Isn't it wonderful to have access to a resource like this?
No, you've got it turned around. You pay taxes so that there will be a police department there if your house gets broken into, a fire department if it catches on fire, an ambulance service if you fall down the stairs, etc. That is to say, you pay taxes because these are all things which you might one day have a need for, and when you need them, you really NEED them. Also they're arguably (and yes I am aware that this point could go either way) not things the free market would adequately provide.
You are paying for the service before you use it -- just like you'd pay for a tech support contract, or insurance, basically.
These copyright "taxes" are completely different in that they place the consumer in the role of the criminal, paying damages for a crime they haven't committed yet, under the assumption that they are either complicit or somehow involved in it. There's not any good natural or common law analogy that I can come up with for it, which makes me suspect that it's probably unreasonable.
I find the ban on cellphones with cameras somewhat dubious. I'm not saying there aren't places where it's true, but how would you enforce it in a small magazine shop? It doesn't make sense.
The market saturation of cellphone cameras is getting pretty close to 100% in some markets, they're also getting smaller and easier to conceal as well. Unless you're very thoroughly patting-down every person who comes into your store, that's just not going to be enforceable.
I guess my question is, if you're doing Olympic barbell lifting, was carrying a 200lb air conditioner up the stairs a big deal? Seems like that ought to be a good warmup or something.:)
Just messing with you. I've actually never had a real problem with either, although UPS did drive over a package of mine once. However they were totally upfront with me and called immediately after it happened, and got my insurance check on the way quickly. (Actually as a result of the shipper overvaluing the merchandise, I made a profit at the end of the day.)
I was about to consider the GGP's point as valid, but anybody who makes references to Harry Potter and expects everyone else to understand them as if they're a part of conversational English, is probably a little detached from reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Moreover, IMHO, more diversity is not inherently good nor is less of it inherently bad.
./? Are we in the middle of changing skins or something? The interface is out of control.
I agree. However, don't try to say that in a modern university or college setting, you racist, sexist, Eurocentric, homophobic, phallocentric pig.
You probably weren't even aware that you were racist, sexist, Eurocentric, homophobic, or phallocentered, but that's what you'd be labeled. The idea that diversity, by itself and without anything attached, is inherently a Good Thing is a key tenet of modern liberal (in the 'liberal arts' but also politically) thought. It's such a core belief, that any questioning of it will almost always be met with vitriolic denial.
Which really raises a question in itself, namely if diversity is so good, why are so many academians buried in this group-think circle-jerk about why diversity is unquestionably the most wonderful thing on earth, at the expense of all other points of view on the matter?
PS - What is going on with
I'm not entirely convinced about the calculator business, but I definitely agree about the wired vs. wireless point.
Wireless here seems excessive. It's going to introduce a whole host of other issues: I think the OP would be much better served by reconsidering his requirements and going with a wired solution.
There's a reason all those TV studios with the audience-response clickers still use wired systems (as does Congress). Wireless ones are expensive, probably prone to failure, and require a lot of maintenance in terms of battery replacement. Plus, they'll get stolen like crazy if they're not locked down -- and if they're tied down to the desks why not just wire them in, instead? Sure the up-front investment in terms of labor will be higher, but I'll bet the TCO isn't in the long run.
I'm not an expert when it comes to hardware design, so I'm sure someone else can come up with a better implementation than I can. In fact there are probably lots of COTS products for doing voting with wired-in handheld transmitters. I would try to go for something that would use some kind of very inexpensive twisted pair wiring and phone connectors. Really the only thing that each transmitter needs to send is some sort of unique ID code and a one-bit response for each possible options (so three bits if you have 3 buttons on each unit for answers A,B,C).
I'm thinking of a way you could do it for just a few transmitters using standard TTL logic and UARTS, but that wouldn't scale very well -- you'd need way too many parts on the receiving end. Anyway, I'm sure it's a problem that's already been solved somewhere.
The other way I can think of to do it would be in a situation where all the students have laptops and use them in class. There it would be just a matter of writing some software -- maybe on top of an IM client program (Jabber, perhaps) -- that would take input from a GUI and send a message to a server, which would total up and display the data. However I've only been to a few classes where all the students used laptops during the lectures, and I can imagine a lot of professors who wouldn't want to start, just so they could get an instant 'yay' or 'boo' on their teaching.
By the way -- what the hell just happened to Slashdot? It was down for quite a while there.
I know you mean this as a joke, but I thought I'd point out that a professor of mine once built a setup like this (okay, it had nothing to do with clickers) in a circular room on our campus. Basically he made a giant set of Helmholtz coils, big enough to enclose the whole room.
.... but I just thought I'd relate the story. Assuming you can get some surplus 25 or 50-conductor POTS cable, making a room-sized Helmholtz coil arrangement isn't at all impossible.
What he did was take the circumference of the room, and multiply it by 2, and then go out and got two lengths of 50-pair phone cables that long. One he mounted on a raceway on the wall, the other at about floor level. Where the cable ends met, he spliced the conductors of the phone wires together so that instead of 50 pairs, he made one long continuous circuit, running around the circumference of the room 200 times (50 pairs = 100 conductors * 2 wraps = 200 times around).
One loop was at floor level, the other was somewhere in the walls near the ceiling. The internal resistance of the coils was pretty high, but with an AC current it produced a measurable current in another coil any place in the room.
The purpose of the whole thing was actually a sort of assisted listening system for people with hearing aids. Many hearing aids have a small coil in them attached to the amplifier which can act as a sort of receiving antenna if the person is standing in a fluctuating EM field at audio frequencies. So basically you could hook these coils up to an audio source (with proper amplification) and a person with a hearing aid would be able to hear it through their own hearing aid, standing or sitting anywhere in the room.
Whether or not the system was ever used for anything other than lab demonstrations I don't know
I don't think that they actually use it anymore, but in England under Common Law there used to be a thing called the Riot Act (incidentally it's where the expression being 'read the riot act' comes from). If an mob became violent, the Riot Act would be read, which was basically an order to go home and disburse, that the assembly was now illegal. After the Riot Act was read, it became legal (perhaps after a certain amount of time) for troops to open fire on the rioters and force them to disburse.
Now here in the U.S. we've traditionally taken a dim view of such heavy handed government tactics (although we tend to employ them at times when push comes to shove) which is why I believe you don't see anything like that in the U.S. Code or Constitution. Although I think you're going to see as part of the reactions to the Katrina lawlessness, that other cities are going to start factoring 'hoodlum control' into their disaster management and mitigation plans.
I think most people (maybe not you) agree that it should be illegal to enter into a contract where you get paid less than minimum wage.
That made me laugh so hard, if I'd been drinking anything it would be all over my keyboard right now by way of my nose.
You have obviously never held a low-level salaried position. It is very common for new employees, especially 'store manager' types of big corporations, to make what would be sub-minimum wage if they were paid hourly. And in some cases they even report hours, but are just paid a flat rate, because that's how they're contracted.
Technically I suppose it's not being "paid less than minimum wage" because the minimum wage laws have an exemption for salaried workers, but in reality that's just a catch-22 for a lot of people that allows them to get into contracts where they earn far less than they would if they were being paid hourly at minimum (and got overtime).
The way it usually works is that the corporation will simply refuse to give hourly workers any overtime, and cap their pay and hours at 40 a week. In order to get slightly better pay, employees jump on the salary bandwagon, but quickly find out that their 40-hour workweek might as well have been an afternoon paper route.
I'd be willing to bet that minimum wage is one of the most commonly signed-away rights in the U.S. today. And other than religion, voting and things which are direct or indirect perpetuities, you can pretty much sign away any right you want in a contract (in particular, free speech).
I can't decide if you're trolling, or just totally misinformed. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and treat it as the latter.
According to the Fermilab High Energy Physics Information Center, the SSC was cancelled by the House of Representatives in 1993. That would be the overwhelmingly Democrat controlled House of Representatives. 258-D to 176-R, during the latter part of 1993, and 267-D to 167-R earlier in the year. So who killed the SSC again?
Far from making sense, your theory isn't even possible.
Furthermore, then-Governor G.W. Bush, while visiting Japan in 1992, reportedly offered the Japanese a $1.25 BN "full partnership" stake in the venture in an effort to keep it alive. While I'm sure this had more to do with the windfall for his state than any particular love of high-energy particle physics, it certainly doesn't look good for your book-burning, anti-science red-staters theory.
I don't know if you were just tossing your little 'factoid' out there in the hopes of getting some karma from the other knee-jerk libs, but you must have a really short memory if you thought 1993 was a big year for conservatives, anti-science book-burners or not.
There are a lot of legitimate things to go after the ultra-right wingers with, especially recently, but the SSC isn't one of them. Do some research next time.
I propose a test: we'll gather up all the people who talk like that, and slam their fingers in car doors simultaneously.
Perhaps they'll invent even more powerful curse words, given something a normal person would actually swear about?
At the moment people seem to be enjoying changing it between two possible explanations, one of which has to do with God's Body, and the other of which is this:
"Originally (1743) a negro euphemistic corruption of "by golly!""
Frankly this one doesn't make any sense, since it's a circular definition. How can "golly" be explained away as being a contraction of "by golly"? That doesn't answer the original question here, namely where the hell "golly" came from.
I'm not convinced that the NYT is right necessarily, but I haven't seen any better explanations.
Actually what I found most interesting in this was the line about the engineer's "20% project time." If that means what I think it does -- namely that Google's engineers get 20% of their time free to work on side projects -- that's a very cool thing. It wouldn't surprise me if some of these side projects are where their latest ideas have come from.
I'm glad you brought up this point. Using a regular magnet is unlikely to take the data off of your credit card. It might happen if you moved it around enough, but just swiping it by probably won't do it.
To erase data from a magnetic medium (video or audio tape also) you really want a fluctuating magnetic field, like what you'd get by running AC through a coil. Then you put the media near the coil, and (this is actually most important) move the media slowly away from the coil, before shutting down the power.
This ensures that all the data in the media is destroyed. The key step is actually moving the media away from the fluctuating magnetic field, if you want to make sure the erasure is complete. I was once given a very thorough explanation of the physics of why this works, but it's not something I can easily summarize. I'll dig around and see if I can find a link.
But if you find an old tape head demagnetizer for an open-reel deck, it will generally say in the instructions to place tip of demagnetizer near head, turn on coil, move tip slowly away from head. Turn off coil. Same thing if you have an old good-quality bulk tape eraser.
I just thought that I'd point out that most of the major cruise lines do this on-ship also. When you book the ticket or check in, you choose a credit card to 'associate' with your room account.
Then during the course of the whole vacation, you don't use cash or your credit card at all (except to leave tips for the crew, and the last time I went on one they had even come up with a way to charge those). Food, wine, bar tabs, even gambling in the casino all go onto your room charge. Then when you check out you sign one big-ass honking receipt for the whole bill, and it gets dumped onto your credit card.
The cards that they use on cruise ships though are not the reusable variety in hotels: they have a magnetic stripe but are also printed on the front side with your name, ship name and arrival and departure dates, and often your photo. So they're not reused afterwards.
It's sort of odd, that at first there was this urban myth saying you needed to worry, and then Snopes "debunked" it, and now we have good evidence from a person who actually took a card reader and checked some cards (as opposed to Snopes, who just called Doubletree, apparently), saying that the original hoax actually was on to something, after all.
None of this changes the Slashdot article at all, assuming that we trust the author to not be fabricating his results with the card reader completely (and I have no reason to believe that).
I think instead we just have a case where reality imitated art a little too closely -- the art in this case being that hoax, and reality being the stuff the hotels are putting on your card.
Using a regular card reader I'm pretty confident you could only get one "generation." To get the next one you'd have to use some pretty specialized equipment. And I'm not sure it would be a sure thing either, provided that the information was recorded into the stripe using the same equipment and the same power level.
However if the hotel personnel sometimes used card reader/writer A, which has low power, but occasionally reader B, which has an ever so slightly higher power level, then assuming the last one used was A, you ought to be able to get at least 2 records off of the card, because the last record from B will be buried a little deeper in the strip than the overwrite by A.
Or if you had 3 card reader/writers, each at slightly different power levels, and used them in the right order, you might be able to reconstruct 3 sets of data from the card.
The analogy I'm thinking of is like how (analog) HiFi audio is written to a VHS tape: it's recorded onto the tape underneath the video signal, using a recording head where the flux pattern goes deeper into the recording medium. (It's also separated by virtue of an FM carrier and the azimuth angle of the recording heads, which you wouldn't have on a magnetic stripe card.)
I've read some articles on recovering overwritten information from linear magnetic tape (Nixon tapes, etc.) and it's no easy task. The usual way to do it is to just look for areas of the tape near the edges that weren't saturated by the erase head the second time around. I'm fairly confident in saying that recovery of two sets of data, made by the same reader/writer, would be non-trivial.
I think there's probably an even easier way to do it than that: don't use a dedicated MP3 decoder chip, and don't have any firmware loaded in the device when it ships. Make it a general purpose embedded system with flashable firmware and an an open API.
Essentially, the retailer is just sending the user a box with a hard drive, boot ROM or BIOS, and an embedded processor. (I think this is what the iPod is -- it uses a 25MHz StrongARM I believe, although whether it also has an MP3 decoder I'm not sure.) Onto this the user could load whatever firmware and applications they wanted. MP3 player, Ogg player, digital photo storage / management, etc.
It would be an extremely versatile device to begin with for the consumer, and it would also specifically not be a "music player," any more than a Palm handheld or a cellphone onto which you can download software is.
I'm sure that any hole in the law that you could exploit in that way would probably get patched eventually, especially if there's a lot of money at stake for the **AA's of the world to make, but you might be able to sneak some interesting products through in the meantime.
Humm ... okay, so France is just as bad or worse than Italy. Doesn't surprise me, for some reason.
Are there any countries in the E.U. that don't impose some sort of levy like this? Perhaps you couldn't buy it from the Apple Store in that country, but you could get it from another retailer (assuming there are other retailers -- here in the U.S. it seems that everybody is selling iPods these days, including RadioShack at one point) that might be a little less strict about its shipping policies.
I'm thinking maybe Germany would be a good bet? I don't know about whether they have a levy, but it seems like you'd have a pretty good chance of finding some German reseller who doesn't have a physical presence in Italy that would be happy to sell you one via mail.
Maybe I'm being optimistic about the ability of residents of one E.U. nation to buy stuff from another E.U. nation... I was under the impression that was a benefit of Europeanization.
Yep, it's 11:20am and the server is completely unresponsive. Stick a fork in it, guys ... it's done.
0 5/
The coral cache is still working, however.
http://marc.merlins.org.nyud.net:8090/perso/bm/20
It was, I believe, for not reporting his "income." The money was all laundered and couldn't be proven conclusively to come from illegal activities other than gambling (although it was rather clearly coming from the alcohol trade), but what they got him on was not paying taxes on his 'gambling' income.
e /capone.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone
http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/capon
In something that's tangentially related, did you know that your gambling losses are tax deductible? Kind of ironic that the fiscal incentive to donate money to the Red Cross is the same that it is to blow it down at the track on the ponies.
Couldn't people in Italy just buy it from another country in Europe (hopefully where they don't have such a levy) and have it shipped to them? Italy is part of the E.U. if I'm not mistaken, doesn't that mean that there's no tariff if you're getting it just for personal use (and not for resale)?
I knew some people in Canada who were ordering iPods from the U.S. back when they still had their own ridiculous surcharge, seems it ought to be even easier to do in the E.U.
Imagine? No, I don't need to imagine. It's called "strict liability," friend, and we're already there.
Yes! And I hear they're all fully vested members of the InternAtional New Arts League (IANAL), an association for experts on the legal ramifications of emerging new technologies.
Isn't it wonderful to have access to a resource like this?
No, you've got it turned around. You pay taxes so that there will be a police department there if your house gets broken into, a fire department if it catches on fire, an ambulance service if you fall down the stairs, etc. That is to say, you pay taxes because these are all things which you might one day have a need for, and when you need them, you really NEED them. Also they're arguably (and yes I am aware that this point could go either way) not things the free market would adequately provide.
You are paying for the service before you use it -- just like you'd pay for a tech support contract, or insurance, basically.
These copyright "taxes" are completely different in that they place the consumer in the role of the criminal, paying damages for a crime they haven't committed yet, under the assumption that they are either complicit or somehow involved in it. There's not any good natural or common law analogy that I can come up with for it, which makes me suspect that it's probably unreasonable.
I find the ban on cellphones with cameras somewhat dubious. I'm not saying there aren't places where it's true, but how would you enforce it in a small magazine shop? It doesn't make sense.
The market saturation of cellphone cameras is getting pretty close to 100% in some markets, they're also getting smaller and easier to conceal as well. Unless you're very thoroughly patting-down every person who comes into your store, that's just not going to be enforceable.
I guess my question is, if you're doing Olympic barbell lifting, was carrying a 200lb air conditioner up the stairs a big deal? Seems like that ought to be a good warmup or something. :)
Just messing with you. I've actually never had a real problem with either, although UPS did drive over a package of mine once. However they were totally upfront with me and called immediately after it happened, and got my insurance check on the way quickly. (Actually as a result of the shipper overvaluing the merchandise, I made a profit at the end of the day.)
Uh, you mean kinda like Kuro5hin does?
Because that system works soooo well.
I was about to consider the GGP's point as valid, but anybody who makes references to Harry Potter and expects everyone else to understand them as if they're a part of conversational English, is probably a little detached from reality.