There's a scientific scale to measure the strength of Chili peppers - the Scoville scale
The average chili pepper from the supermarket isn't going to do much. You have to specially order the extra spicy ones like the Naga Viper pepper, Infinity Chili or Bhut Jolokai chili pepper, Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper.
The timezone database is stored in/usr/share/zoneinfo or/usr/lib/zoneinfo, with there being an entry for every capital pr incipal city in each country. Each entry consists of around 3K of binary data.
zone.tab has the copyright and longitude/latitude information.
iso3166.tab has the two letter codes for each country.
It wouldn't be too difficult to reconstruct these databases from a volunteer effort.
You don't understand the history of Silicon Valley. The whole company was founded in his parent's garage. One half for marketing, the other half for engineering. Most startups fold within 18 months. They were the ones that not just made it but issued stock and survived through three decades (1980's - home computers, 1990's - GUI based workstations, 2000's - consumer 3D/ downloadable music, 2010's - mobile devices).
Maybe it's like MIDI file format for music - there are actually instructions that specify specific time delays. Other instructions activate and deactivate notes for particular instruments. Though it doesn't actually specify what an instrument should sound like. That's the job of the other data files, known as SoundFonts.
Ken Dodd In 1989 Dodd was charged with tax evasion. The subsequent trial, with the prosecution case lead by Brian Leveson QC, led to several revelations. The Diddy Men, who had appeared in his stage act, were often played by local children from stage schools, and were revealed never to have been paid. Dodd was also revealed to have very little money in his bank account, having £336,000 in cash stashed in suitcases in his attic. When asked by the judge, "What does a hundred thousand pounds in a suitcase feel like?", Dodd made his now famous reply, "The notes are very light, M'Lord."[10] Dodd was represented by George Carman, who in court famously quipped, "Some accountants are comedians, but comedians are never accountants".[11] The trial lasted three weeks: Dodd was acquitted.[11]
Very true - it used to be the case that every corporation or company offered multiple career paths. You could either move into management, technical design, or research.
Then the smart-ass shareholders thought, we don't need one 50-year old guy designing stuff, when we can get a handful of 25 year-olds doing the same work for half the salary, so out went the technical design path. These older guys were lucky enough to have pensions and the option to take early retirement when cutbacks were introduced. Others became consultants. So out went the technical career path.
That wasn't enough, the same smart-ass shareholders then thought they could just buy in research from abroad or from the universities. So out went the research career path.
Another money grab was the skimming off of "pension fund surpluses". After reassuring the government that there were loads of money in the pension funds, and that nobody would notice the difference if they had a dip, the government decided to take a grab for themselves. What they didn't realize was that the pension fund surpluses were actually reinvested in the very same companies. As a consequence, company pension funds collapsed.
Even then the smart-ass shareholders weren't happy then. They thought companies should be working on bleeding-edge high-return products rather than safe low-return products that they had been able to maintain a dominant market-share for 30 years. So entire engineering teams were redeployed elsewhere. When those new markets didn't materialize, the staff were laid off, and the stock price went down to junk status.
The unemployment situation is so bad, that when the normal career path was to work as software engineer for a decade, a senior engineer for another five years, it has now been compressed into periods of six months each.
Combine that with flea-bites and you would have a real problem. Fleas don't just puncture the skin, they also inject anti-coagulants as well as whatever else they have picked up from whatever else they have bitten. So wounds don't heal and continue to itch.
They are still a problem in some European countries. Some hospitals still insist on giving patients a shower with iodine soap and shampoo before surgery. The side effect is that it temporarily dyes the patient yellow.
Some of us used to use Borland C at 640x480 resolutions on a text-based EGA/VGA screen without a mouse. If an Iphone had a keyboard, then it might be possible -Maybe a clam-shell style i-phone with dual screens, like the Nintendo 3DS.
There's a story where a new teacher is assigned the "problem students" class in a bottom year who are kept a grade or two below the other classes in their year. With persistence and individual attention, she gets everyone to the same level as average students two years ahead of them. Now there's a problem - parental expectations all round have been raised, and the students are now out of sync with what the teaching board expects of them, creating problems for the teachers for the next two years. She is promptly fired by the school for not following the prescribed syllabus.
It's bizarre that the teachers should have this attitude. How do they handle the fact that there are online forums for maths help, science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, arts news sites and blogs, university books and research papers available for free download, as well as available cheap second hand books. What about parents who have university degrees, neighbors kids or older siblings who are at college? Not forgetting the dozens of art and programming guide magazines available in magazine racks at supermarkets? Are they aware that the exam boards usually sell the exam syllabus booklets for a few dollars each to anyone who wishes to buy them?
For me, getting through high school during the teachers strike, was achieved by purchasing "Lett's study guides" to each subject. These were A-level/SYS textbooks available for about $3 each in every subject from languages to sciences and technical drawing.
Apple's products are used a lot by the media types. They all have their iPhones for booking interview slots and sending updates to each other as well as iPad's and Mac's for doing all their video editing, compositing and DVD burning.
That's not what they would be looking for - if a message propagates saying "watch out for something happening in the next few days", that's going to be of interest. Trace the spread of the message back to its source and watch those individuals and their contacts.
No different from a crime committed in international waters.
Suppose a demolitions expert removed something like a ships wheel, commemorative sign, bell or compass from a shipwreck that was going to be sunk for being a hazard to shipping. Technically, it might belong to the owners. They wouldn't know for forty years until someone sends down an underwater ARV to make a documentary. Then somebody else notices the missing items on some old work-place photographs.
If it was a TV show judge, he/she would want to see receipts, permission to take and transport the item from the astronaut, as well as what means the government was going to take to prevent the item from being destroyed.
Sounds like the government suddenly sees there's a valuable chunk of history on sale, and wants a slice of the action. I can imagine it would become an exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center - the camera in a glass box, a full-size model of the lander, along with some video screens showing the actual movies made with that camera.
Reliable will become nearly 100% if everything moves to solid state. How many electric motors are there in a laptop these days? Cooling fans, hard disk drives, CD-drives (auto-eject, play motor) - must be around five or six.
Telephone exchanges in rural areas are like that. The only time a technician had to enter the premises was to clear out old equipment. There was enough spare capacity in the exchanges that the only work required was to open the local cabinets on the street and pair up a new telephone line.
It's more scary - every field of technology evolves that way.
Early valve computers used to require technicians to replace burnt out valves on a daily basis. Each morning of the day, the technicians would go round and replace any that had burnt out or were about to burn out. Now your PC has about 2 billion transistors or more (CPU +GPU), and not one will burn out.
100 years ago, it would take 25 minutes to make a long-distance call between San Francisco and New York due to all the operators involved. Now, it's all automated.
200 year ago, it took four people to operate a single loom to make a shirt. Now, one technician can supervise fifteen industrial carpet making looms that reload automatically.
We've actually got a global clothing surplus due to all the designer and brand name labels to the extent that local makers in developing countries are put out of business.
Just about every possible problem has been discussed on slashdot before.
Trying simple things to lock down military PC's such as sealing up CD-ROM/DVD drives and USB ports is defeated by the motivation of troops wanting to listen to his MP3 collection or view family videos.
Then the security of actual networks isn't done because the admin's are also engaged in regular military duties. They only have enough time to get any system setup before moving to the next assigned work task.
Research groups also have students going in and out as well as working remotely from other sites.
DTi has a report that the level of hacking was so bad that even the group conferences by telephone networks were being accessed remotely.
Each pixel element consists of at least three eight or sixteen bit values, so that's at least sixteen million values per pixel. Assuming monchrome, thats 256 or 65536 values per pixel.
I did some experiments with those digital photograph postcard printing booths and a scanner. You could easily create an image, print it out, and scan it back in again to recover a few hundred kilobytes.
The trick is to create a couple of horizontal and vertical bands of coordinates encoded in binary. Then you can see what the recoverable resolution is.
There's a better understanding once people know that the cost of national (inter-state) and international calls were at least $1.50/minute. So if a college student desperately wanted to call her parents from campus for a 30 minute call, that was $45. Take into account inflation over the past 40 years, and that would be like paying $250 now.
Or you could get a little blue box, put it over the handset, and enter some admin codes to get a free call.
Now you just use Skype with a PC or a mobile phone. There was a fuss over that in the beginning because while the phone companies had already moved their voice traffic to travel over their data traffic networks to save costs, they didn't expect their customers to do the same. (National calls were used to subsidize local phone networks).
Maybe the closest thing now to Phreaking is wi-fi wardialing and making antennae out of Pringles cans.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a scientific scale to measure the strength of Chili peppers - the Scoville scale
The average chili pepper from the supermarket isn't going to do much. You have to specially order the extra spicy ones like the Naga Viper pepper, Infinity Chili or Bhut Jolokai chili pepper, Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper.
The timezone database is stored in /usr/share/zoneinfo or /usr/lib/zoneinfo, with there being an entry for every capital pr incipal city in each country. Each entry consists of around 3K of binary data.
zone.tab has the copyright and longitude/latitude information.
iso3166.tab has the two letter codes for each country.
It wouldn't be too difficult to reconstruct these databases from a volunteer effort.
More information from tzfile, zdump and zic.
You don't understand the history of Silicon Valley. The whole company was founded in his parent's garage. One half for marketing, the other half for engineering. Most startups fold within 18 months. They were the ones that not just made it but issued stock and survived through three decades (1980's - home computers, 1990's - GUI based workstations, 2000's - consumer 3D/ downloadable music, 2010's - mobile devices).
Maybe it's like MIDI file format for music - there are actually instructions that specify specific time delays. Other instructions activate and deactivate notes for particular instruments. Though it doesn't actually specify what an instrument should sound like. That's the job of the other data files, known as SoundFonts.
Ken Dodd
In 1989 Dodd was charged with tax evasion. The subsequent trial, with the prosecution case lead by Brian Leveson QC, led to several revelations. The Diddy Men, who had appeared in his stage act, were often played by local children from stage schools, and were revealed never to have been paid. Dodd was also revealed to have very little money in his bank account, having £336,000 in cash stashed in suitcases in his attic. When asked by the judge, "What does a hundred thousand pounds in a suitcase feel like?", Dodd made his now famous reply, "The notes are very light, M'Lord."[10]
Dodd was represented by George Carman, who in court famously quipped, "Some accountants are comedians, but comedians are never accountants".[11] The trial lasted three weeks: Dodd was acquitted.[11]
Very true - it used to be the case that every corporation or company offered multiple career paths. You could either move into management, technical design, or research.
Then the smart-ass shareholders thought, we don't need one 50-year old guy designing stuff, when we can get a handful of 25 year-olds doing the same work for half the salary, so out went the technical design path. These older guys were lucky enough to have pensions and the option to take early retirement when cutbacks were introduced. Others became consultants. So out went the technical career path.
That wasn't enough, the same smart-ass shareholders then thought they could just buy in research from abroad or from the universities. So out went the research career path.
Another money grab was the skimming off of "pension fund surpluses". After reassuring the government that there were loads of money in the pension funds, and that nobody would notice the difference if they had a dip, the government decided to take a grab for themselves. What they didn't realize was that the pension fund surpluses were actually reinvested in the very same companies. As a consequence, company pension funds collapsed.
Even then the smart-ass shareholders weren't happy then. They thought companies should be working on bleeding-edge high-return products rather than safe low-return products that they had been able to maintain a dominant market-share for 30 years. So entire engineering teams were redeployed elsewhere. When those new markets didn't materialize, the staff were laid off, and the stock price went down to junk status.
The unemployment situation is so bad, that when the normal career path was to work as software engineer for a decade, a senior engineer for another five years, it has now been compressed into periods of six months each.
Combine that with flea-bites and you would have a real problem. Fleas don't just puncture the skin, they also inject anti-coagulants as well as whatever else they have picked up from whatever else they have bitten. So wounds don't heal and continue to itch.
They are still a problem in some European countries. Some hospitals still insist on giving patients a shower with iodine soap and shampoo before surgery. The side effect is that it temporarily dyes the patient yellow.
Gorgon Stare?
I-Ball?
Firefly?
Some of us used to use Borland C at 640x480 resolutions on a text-based EGA/VGA screen without a mouse. If an Iphone had a keyboard, then it might be possible -Maybe a clam-shell style i-phone with dual screens, like the Nintendo 3DS.
"The Peter Principle" has a great explanation.
There's a story where a new teacher is assigned the "problem students" class in a bottom year who are kept a grade or two below the other classes in their year. With persistence and individual attention, she gets everyone to the same level as average students two years ahead of them. Now there's a problem - parental expectations all round have been raised, and the students are now out of sync with what the teaching board expects of them, creating problems for the teachers for the next two years. She is promptly fired by the school for not following the prescribed syllabus.
It's bizarre that the teachers should have this attitude. How do they handle the fact that there are online forums for maths help, science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, arts news sites and blogs, university books and research papers available for free download, as well as available cheap second hand books. What about parents who have university degrees, neighbors kids or older siblings who are at college? Not forgetting the dozens of art and programming guide magazines available in magazine racks at supermarkets? Are they aware that the exam boards usually sell the exam syllabus booklets for a few dollars each to anyone who wishes to buy them?
For me, getting through high school during the teachers strike, was achieved by purchasing "Lett's study guides" to each subject. These were A-level/SYS textbooks available for about $3 each in every subject from languages to sciences and technical drawing.
You are right there - heard more than one story of university departments dragging out thesis projects for over three or four years.
It would get spooky if the system could really develop predictive algorithms and start anticipating events before they happened.
Apple's products are used a lot by the media types. They all have their iPhones for booking interview slots and sending updates to each other as well as iPad's and Mac's for doing all their video editing, compositing and DVD burning.
I thought this was an article about sending the first Database administrator into space...
It might well be - if they choke on it ... "hey dude, let's make a fake popsicle and see how many try to take a bite"
That's not what they would be looking for - if a message propagates saying "watch out for something happening in the next few days", that's going to be of interest. Trace the spread of the message back to its source and watch those individuals and their contacts.
No different from a crime committed in international waters.
Suppose a demolitions expert removed something like a ships wheel, commemorative sign, bell or compass from a shipwreck that was going to be sunk for being a hazard to shipping. Technically, it might belong to the owners. They wouldn't know for forty years until someone sends down an underwater ARV to make a documentary. Then somebody else notices the missing items on some old work-place photographs.
If it was a TV show judge, he/she would want to see receipts, permission to take and transport the item from the astronaut, as well as what means the government was going to take to prevent the item from being destroyed.
Sounds like the government suddenly sees there's a valuable chunk of history on sale, and wants a slice of the action. I can imagine it would become an exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center - the camera in a glass box, a full-size model of the lander, along with some video screens showing the actual movies made with that camera.
Reliable will become nearly 100% if everything moves to solid state. How many electric motors are there in a laptop these days? Cooling fans, hard disk drives, CD-drives (auto-eject, play motor) - must be around five or six.
Telephone exchanges in rural areas are like that. The only time a technician had to enter the premises was to clear out old equipment. There was enough spare capacity in the exchanges that the only work required was to open the local cabinets on the street and pair up a new telephone line.
It's more scary - every field of technology evolves that way.
Early valve computers used to require technicians to replace burnt out valves on a daily basis. Each morning of the day, the technicians would go round and replace any that had burnt out or were about to burn out. Now your PC has about 2 billion transistors or more (CPU +GPU), and not one will burn out.
100 years ago, it would take 25 minutes to make a long-distance call between San Francisco and New York due to all the operators involved. Now, it's all automated.
200 year ago, it took four people to operate a single loom to make a shirt. Now, one technician can supervise fifteen industrial carpet making looms that reload automatically.
We've actually got a global clothing surplus due to all the designer and brand name labels to the extent that local makers in developing countries are put out of business.
Just about every possible problem has been discussed on slashdot before.
Trying simple things to lock down military PC's such as sealing up CD-ROM/DVD drives and USB ports is defeated by the motivation of troops wanting to listen to his MP3 collection or view family videos.
Then the security of actual networks isn't done because the admin's are also engaged in regular military duties. They only have enough time to get any system setup before moving to the next assigned work task.
Research groups also have students going in and out as well as working remotely from other sites.
DTi has a report that the level of hacking was so bad that even the group conferences by telephone networks were being accessed remotely.
Have you played Vultures Claw or Vultures Eye? They are third-person perspective views of the Nethack levels.
Each pixel element consists of at least three eight or sixteen bit values, so that's at least sixteen million values per pixel. Assuming monchrome, thats 256 or 65536 values per pixel.
I did some experiments with those digital photograph postcard printing booths and a scanner. You could easily create an image, print it out, and scan it back in again to recover a few hundred kilobytes.
The trick is to create a couple of horizontal and vertical bands of coordinates encoded in binary. Then you can see what the recoverable resolution is.
Ask your women-folk - they'll want to chat about everything from relationships, celebrities, friends, relatives, marriages, divorces, babies, uncles, aunts, fashions, dresses, blouses, events, weddings, parties, celebrations, festivals, and more...
There's a better understanding once people know that the cost of national (inter-state) and international calls were at least $1.50/minute. So if a college student desperately wanted to call her parents from campus for a 30 minute call, that was $45. Take into account inflation over the past 40 years, and that would be like paying $250 now.
Or you could get a little blue box, put it over the handset, and enter some admin codes to get a free call.
Now you just use Skype with a PC or a mobile phone. There was a fuss over that in the beginning because while the phone companies had already moved their voice traffic to travel over their data traffic networks to save costs, they didn't expect their customers to do the same.
(National calls were used to subsidize local phone networks).
Maybe the closest thing now to Phreaking is wi-fi wardialing and making antennae out of Pringles cans.