> The thing for you to remember is that
higher education, in and of itself, is worth quite a lot more than the piece of paper you get at the end. Do not take a
college CS class and worry yourself with, "how will this class help me in my next job," you will drive yourself nuts. The
benefits are a little more abstract than that, but also more rewarding.
Right on.
And if you're thinking you'll be bored at college, remember that college is where you'll meet other geeks like yourself.
The network of geeks you make at college can, and often will, govern your future success. They'll help you find jobs (and you'll help them find jobs). If you're all bored of college, you may even choose to start a business together, either while you pursue your degrees, or shortly thereafter.
College is like a big witness relocation program for teenage geeks. Take advantage of it.
> I've found that most of the people I know tend to use the same password or pin for everything they have - their e-mail
password is the same as their AOL password is the same as their bank PIN and so on.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
What the hell! Are most/.ers some kind of mutants? (Wait a minute, maybe I don't wanna know.)
Reading that BBS article reminded me that I had over 40 passwords, each one different, for each BBS that I called, and none were guessable in a dictionary attack. It's been over fifteen years, and I can still remember two or three of these.
Today, I'm down to about ten passwords I use frequently, all different, all randomly-generated. And apart from a one-day "learning curve" where I train my finger muscles to type them quickly and discreetly, I still don't have a problem with it.
What the hell? Am I some kind of alien/human hybrid with a unique nervous system never before seen in evolutionary history? Or do I just have two functioning neurons to rub together?
Sure, if you use a cookie to "remember" your settings and only type a password once every few months, you could fail to learn it, but the cure for that is to just use the password more often - enable it on your screen saver, check your stock portfolio daily, etc.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but what the hell is so hard about using passwords? The more you use them, the harder they are to forget.
> Once the first picture is selected, a new grid of pictures is displayed, one of which is the second of your five, again,
randomly placed. The process repeats for all five pictures.
Yeah, that's secure. I mean, it's way harder to shoulder-surf five consecutive movements of a mouse pointer between five pictures from halfway across the room than it is ten fingers on 40-odd keys.
Until we get cameras that track eye movements installed on every computer, the "visual password" is a bad idea.
> It will only catch the stupid drug user, john, etc., but what will the street find as a currency to replace it?
Drugs are often used as a medium of exchange, particularly where street prostitution is involved. (e.g. pussy is sold for crack.)
Now, given that your typical john doesn't have the capacity to make crack, we still have a supply problem, namely, where does John get his crack? He gets it from his dealer. But if the dealer won't take cash (or John doesn't want his trackable cash found on the dealer), what does John do?
John uses legal, but heavily-taxed, drugs - alcohol and tobacco - as currency. Smugglers make a living by moving goods from low-tax to high-tax jurisdictions, providing supply to John through local merchants.
As long as the corner store is stocked with smokes or booze (whether smuggled or not - smuggled smokes/booze simply afford the mob an additional profit opportunity at the start of the supply chain), John can legally purchase all the "tobaccscrip" or "boozescrip" he needs.
If John's lucky, he's got a hooker who's an alcoholic nicotine freak. If John's not so lucky, she's a crackhead or pothead, and he'll have to exchange tobaccscrip and boozescrip for crack or pot at the local drug dealer, before purchasing any pussy.
If the local mobster controls the flow of legal-but-smuggled goods (cigarettes, liquor), illegal goods (illegal drugs), and the prostitution, he can have an entire economy set up and running in no time.
Finally, remember that in the underground economy, some currencies literally do grow on trees.
John could, for instance, cut out the middlemen (and greatly drop his cost of pussy) in his drugs-for-pussy transactions by taking the additional risk associated with growing a plant or two of "hempscrip" in his back yard.
Alternately, John could supply an organized-crime warez group with 0-day warez, pre-release MP3z, or various types of pr0n (whether legal or not).
Currency as we know it evolved from barter. If barter is required to sustain the underground economy, the underground economy may become less efficient -- but that won't end the underground economy. It'll merely provide (like any inefficient market does) those in the market with more opportunities for profit.
Good point. And with them saying that today's 80G hard drives are "already too large for most users to make full use of", what do you want to bet that that 400G hard drive will be utterly useless because SSSCA will have made it illegal to actually store content on it?
> I've got some old Apple ][ magazines from 1981 and they even feature porn ads.
Ah, "Soft Porn Adventure", which most of you young 'uns remember with graphics as "Leisure Suit Larry!"
The good old days, I tell ya. (Anyone remember "Bilestoad"? We were doing two-player fighting games with blood spurting everywhere long before Mortal Kombat!)
> I rarely get lost, can fend for myself and am house trained too. > >
The moment I start barking and piddeling on the floor, well, I'd assume I have "lost it" and perhaps it would be a
good idea then...
Another handy use for it - Alzheimer's patients (a.k.a. "wanderers" when they make it out of the nursing home, who often freeze to death if they wander out during winter). Nuff said.
(OK, that's a case for voluntary implantation, not widespread implantation, but it's still another good use.)
> "As some people wring their hands about the invasion of privacy and civil liberty, a whole other generation is going to go, 'Cool! I've always wanted to embed technology in my body.'
Yeah, I admit I'm not so thrilled about it as an ID technology, but if it did something, I'd line up to get one. (Suppose we go forward a bit and hook it up to something like a cochlear implant - see someone and it whispers in your ear the name of the person. I could sure use that at parties, I'm horrible with names;-)
> the Nazis developed a Total State based on suspicion of citizens, preusumption of guilt, and a vast network of internal spies.
I was thinking more of East Germany's Stasi and the former USSR.
The reason it didn't work is because it took too much effort (and too much resources) to keep track of everyone - when half the population is part of the secret police, and the other half is watching out for them, nobody has time to get anything done.
By reducing the effort required to perform surveillance, we actually have the possibility of getting the security of the surveillance state, but without the collapse in efficiency that usually goes along with it.
> Unless this chip is implanted deep in he body at birth they will be removed, shorted, hacked in a matter of days...
Well, if we used tamperproof hardware that ejected a burst of cyanide when a security breach was attempted, I can bet you there'd be a shortage of volunteers;-)
(And think of how this could be used for crime control - how 'bout a small packet of sedatives, which, upon receipt of an authorizing signal, dropped the suspect to the ground.)
Think about what you could do with public-key cryptography. Build chip-guns that get their authorization by combining the gun's public key, the government's private key, and the law enforcement officer's public key. Only the cop can shoot the gun, and (if the gun transmits the user's private key, downloadable with a warrant) only the target gets hit.
Imagine a gun that shoots to sedate, not kill, and where it's impossible for the cop, no matter how incompetent a shot he is, to hit an innocent bystander.
(Hell, scale it up. Issue the warrant and use transmitters mounted on every cell phone tower in the county to drop the perp. No cops required!)
8-channel Winamp light controller
on
Christmas is Coming
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
> This project is definitely NOT limited to controlling christmas lights. The triacs specified in the parts can handle up to 400V, 4A, and can also drive inductive loads (like florescent lights) and don't generate any noise on the digital side because they are isolated.
D00d, j00 r0ck!
I built an (analog) gadget like this in college, but this kicks vastly more ass.
When I saw the story I originally thought of stringing a room full of ultrabright LEDs or doing some case mods (hmm, all the holes in my case glow and pulsate in time to the beat, changing colors as lights mix), but as soon as I saw "triac", I immediately thought "xenon flash lamp", a.k.a. strobe light.
You've just given the hardware-geek contingent of Slashdot something to build over the holidays, and that's the kind of Christmas present that we've always wanted, and that our relatives never get for us;-)
> > As long as the cthulhu-children don't come on land and demand the production of live-action tentacle rape movies, I'll be happy. The last thing we need is a race of Cthulhu-beings involved with the RIAA or marketing companies. > > You mean they're not already?!?!
Probably not. Cthulhu has better taste than that.
(Which is a pity, as I'd pay good money to see Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti as crunchy Cthulhu-snacks. I'd offer 'em to Yog-Sothoth, but he's not interested... they ain't got no souls to eat.)
> [Content Faction: Tens of billions in revenue] > [Tech Faction: Hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion, in revenue]
I think we'd all agree that government operates by the Golden Rule: Those that have the gold, make the rules. But if we truly live in a "one dollar, one vote" society, why the fsck is anyone in Congress listening to the Content Faction at all? Do Content Faction lobbyists hire better hookers, with cocaine instead of silicone in their tits?
> So even from a strictly financial point, SSSCA does not make any sense. Eisner is a fraud. He is a threat to the IT industry, which produced far more jobs, wealth and well-being than any other industry since WWII.
> > With business executives like that at the head of American corporations, who needs bin Laden?
I thought my "Hollywood hookers and better coke" crack was good, but I think you've got the better soundbite, by far.
Rack up the dollar cost of the WTC disaster. (Conservatively $100B), and compare it to the dollar cost to the Tech Faction if the Content Faction gets its way, and discover that a mere 10-15% "hit" in Tech Faction revenues is the equivalent of a WTC attack when it comes to GDP. The Eisner-Valenti-Rosen triumvirate is a greater threat to the economy than bin Laden ever was.
I think we need to push three talking points:
The memes "Content Faction" and "Technology Faction". Portraying Hollywood as a "faction", rather than an "industry" makes it clear that there are opposing interests here.
The fact that tech is at least an order of magnitude larger - in jobs, revenues, profits, and taxes remitted to the government - than the Content Faction.
When you write your Congresscritter, you can call them "industries" instead of "factions". And instead of asking him which industry is likely to give him the most campaign dollars over the next 30 years, ask him which industry is most likely to provide the most jobs for his constituents.
He'll do the campaign contribution math by himself, and you've pointed out there's a compelling "it's the economy, stupid" excuse his opponent can use against him, should he side against the Tech Faction.
When you talk to your co-workers, write letters to the editor, or post to weblogs, feel free to be honest - call 'em Factions, and ask the campaign contribution question. The readers will do the "Hollywood must have better hookers, if my Congresscritter supports the Hollywood faction, he must be corrupt" math by themselves, and vote accordingly.
> Are the people I converse with in email just cooler/smarter than everyone else
At the risk of stroking the collective/. ego, yeah, they are.
Canonical example - someone who got Sircammed at work, came to me and said they were having trouble opening up this attachment someone had sent them, and they wondered why someone sent it to them in the first place.
I did my best "All your base!" voice and said "I send you this file to have your advice!"
Cow orker said "Yeah, hey, how did you know that? Are you reading my mail?"
Another admin and I spent the next hour disinfecting 0wn3d box3n from other cow orkers who had done the same thing.
> watch the next "service pack" from Micro$oft to fix this quietly installs the Magic Lantern trojan. > >You don't think the Feds dropped the antitrust case for nothing, do you?;)
...and if the Feds support the AGs in strengthening the crippled remedy presently in progress, maybe this was Magic Lantern, and it just got disabled. (If eeye.com executives are disappeared next week, I guess we'll know for sure;-)
I may have misadjusted my tinfoil hat this morning, but it struck me that a PC configured to send out unicast malformed NOTIFY messages to exploit the previously-undisclosed UPnP hole on a specific target machine... well, it'd look to the UPnP service like piece of hardware. Hardware like a lantern, if you will, shining a light on the suspect's machine... *evil grin*
> the rain imprints were represented by small impact craters - averaging about three to five millimetres in diameter. These craters are circular or elliptical in shape, suggesting that the rain drops fell vertically or at a slight angle.
> >Balram Chatterji, a former director of the Geological Survey of India, said the finding could help in establishing the atmospheric conditions on Earth millions of years ago.
"We've concluded that, well, millions of years ago, rain fell in a downward direction, droplets most likely pulled down due to the force of gravity, and uh, there was some sort of other force that may have deflected the drops from a perfectly vertical path, so the rain didn't fall straight down. We've dubbed this 'wind'."
("Hey, what's this rushing sound, all around me, I think I'll call it 'wind'! And this big round flat thing coming straight towards me! Needs a big, round sounding name, like, umm... grrooouuund! I wonder if it'll be friends with me!*SPLAT*")
Slashdot Mirror
Woohoo! Next time some terrorist waltzes through airport security and the passengers kick his ass, we get live streaming video!
Right on.
And if you're thinking you'll be bored at college, remember that college is where you'll meet other geeks like yourself.
The network of geeks you make at college can, and often will, govern your future success. They'll help you find jobs (and you'll help them find jobs). If you're all bored of college, you may even choose to start a business together, either while you pursue your degrees, or shortly thereafter.
College is like a big witness relocation program for teenage geeks. Take advantage of it.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
What the hell! Are most /.ers some kind of mutants? (Wait a minute, maybe I don't wanna know.)
Reading that BBS article reminded me that I had over 40 passwords, each one different, for each BBS that I called, and none were guessable in a dictionary attack. It's been over fifteen years, and I can still remember two or three of these.
Today, I'm down to about ten passwords I use frequently, all different, all randomly-generated. And apart from a one-day "learning curve" where I train my finger muscles to type them quickly and discreetly, I still don't have a problem with it.
What the hell? Am I some kind of alien/human hybrid with a unique nervous system never before seen in evolutionary history? Or do I just have two functioning neurons to rub together?
Sure, if you use a cookie to "remember" your settings and only type a password once every few months, you could fail to learn it, but the cure for that is to just use the password more often - enable it on your screen saver, check your stock portfolio daily, etc.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but what the hell is so hard about using passwords? The more you use them, the harder they are to forget.
Yeah, that's secure. I mean, it's way harder to shoulder-surf five consecutive movements of a mouse pointer between five pictures from halfway across the room than it is ten fingers on 40-odd keys.
Until we get cameras that track eye movements installed on every computer, the "visual password" is a bad idea.
"Hey, baby, turn around, I wanna look at your other side! No, your other side! No, keep turning..."
Drugs are often used as a medium of exchange, particularly where street prostitution is involved. (e.g. pussy is sold for crack.)
Now, given that your typical john doesn't have the capacity to make crack, we still have a supply problem, namely, where does John get his crack? He gets it from his dealer. But if the dealer won't take cash (or John doesn't want his trackable cash found on the dealer), what does John do?
John uses legal, but heavily-taxed, drugs - alcohol and tobacco - as currency. Smugglers make a living by moving goods from low-tax to high-tax jurisdictions, providing supply to John through local merchants.
As long as the corner store is stocked with smokes or booze (whether smuggled or not - smuggled smokes/booze simply afford the mob an additional profit opportunity at the start of the supply chain), John can legally purchase all the "tobaccscrip" or "boozescrip" he needs.
If John's lucky, he's got a hooker who's an alcoholic nicotine freak. If John's not so lucky, she's a crackhead or pothead, and he'll have to exchange tobaccscrip and boozescrip for crack or pot at the local drug dealer, before purchasing any pussy.
If the local mobster controls the flow of legal-but-smuggled goods (cigarettes, liquor), illegal goods (illegal drugs), and the prostitution, he can have an entire economy set up and running in no time.
Finally, remember that in the underground economy, some currencies literally do grow on trees.
John could, for instance, cut out the middlemen (and greatly drop his cost of pussy) in his drugs-for-pussy transactions by taking the additional risk associated with growing a plant or two of "hempscrip" in his back yard. Alternately, John could supply an organized-crime warez group with 0-day warez, pre-release MP3z, or various types of pr0n (whether legal or not).
Currency as we know it evolved from barter. If barter is required to sustain the underground economy, the underground economy may become less efficient -- but that won't end the underground economy. It'll merely provide (like any inefficient market does) those in the market with more opportunities for profit.
Well, the velocity of a European banknote anyways, but what about African banknotes?
Good point. And with them saying that today's 80G hard drives are "already too large for most users to make full use of", what do you want to bet that that 400G hard drive will be utterly useless because SSSCA will have made it illegal to actually store content on it?
2004 prediction: "Bill Gates' Documents". "Bill Gates' Computer".
Ah, "Soft Porn Adventure", which most of you young 'uns remember with graphics as "Leisure Suit Larry!"
The good old days, I tell ya. (Anyone remember "Bilestoad"? We were doing two-player fighting games with blood spurting everywhere long before Mortal Kombat!)
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh CmdrTaco R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. Ia! Ia! CmdrTaco fhtagn. CmdrTaco R'lyeh fhtagn.
(I hate it when Babelfish sprouts tentacles...)
>
> The moment I start barking and piddeling on the floor, well, I'd assume I have "lost it" and perhaps it would be a good idea then...
Another handy use for it - Alzheimer's patients (a.k.a. "wanderers" when they make it out of the nursing home, who often freeze to death if they wander out during winter). Nuff said.
(OK, that's a case for voluntary implantation, not widespread implantation, but it's still another good use.)
>
> Next we will have to have that logo tatooed onto our buttocks.
Last time I spoke to an Intel sales rep, I told him that's what he'd have to do after I told him where he could stick it ;-)
From the article:
> (like the ones they use to tag pets, livestock and wildlife)
So where's the problem? *rimshot*
(Hey, at least I give 'em points for honesty. At least we know what we mean to them :-)
Yeah, I admit I'm not so thrilled about it as an ID technology, but if it did something, I'd line up to get one. (Suppose we go forward a bit and hook it up to something like a cochlear implant - see someone and it whispers in your ear the name of the person. I could sure use that at parties, I'm horrible with names ;-)
I was thinking more of East Germany's Stasi and the former USSR.
The reason it didn't work is because it took too much effort (and too much resources) to keep track of everyone - when half the population is part of the secret police, and the other half is watching out for them, nobody has time to get anything done.
By reducing the effort required to perform surveillance, we actually have the possibility of getting the security of the surveillance state, but without the collapse in efficiency that usually goes along with it.
All in all, that just might work.
Well, if we used tamperproof hardware that ejected a burst of cyanide when a security breach was attempted, I can bet you there'd be a shortage of volunteers ;-)
(And think of how this could be used for crime control - how 'bout a small packet of sedatives, which, upon receipt of an authorizing signal, dropped the suspect to the ground.)
Think about what you could do with public-key cryptography. Build chip-guns that get their authorization by combining the gun's public key, the government's private key, and the law enforcement officer's public key. Only the cop can shoot the gun, and (if the gun transmits the user's private key, downloadable with a warrant) only the target gets hit.
Imagine a gun that shoots to sedate, not kill, and where it's impossible for the cop, no matter how incompetent a shot he is, to hit an innocent bystander.
(Hell, scale it up. Issue the warrant and use transmitters mounted on every cell phone tower in the county to drop the perp. No cops required!)
D00d, j00 r0ck!
I built an (analog) gadget like this in college, but this kicks vastly more ass.
When I saw the story I originally thought of stringing a room full of ultrabright LEDs or doing some case mods (hmm, all the holes in my case glow and pulsate in time to the beat, changing colors as lights mix), but as soon as I saw "triac", I immediately thought "xenon flash lamp", a.k.a. strobe light.
You've just given the hardware-geek contingent of Slashdot something to build over the holidays, and that's the kind of Christmas present that we've always wanted, and that our relatives never get for us ;-)
>
> You mean they're not already?!?!
Probably not. Cthulhu has better taste than that.
(Which is a pity, as I'd pay good money to see Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti as crunchy Cthulhu-snacks. I'd offer 'em to Yog-Sothoth, but he's not interested... they ain't got no souls to eat.)
You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When...
Of course, there are three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count, and those who can't.
> [Tech Faction: Hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion, in revenue]
I think we'd all agree that government operates by the Golden Rule: Those that have the gold, make the rules. But if we truly live in a "one dollar, one vote" society, why the fsck is anyone in Congress listening to the Content Faction at all? Do Content Faction lobbyists hire better hookers, with cocaine instead of silicone in their tits?
> So even from a strictly financial point, SSSCA does not make any sense. Eisner is a fraud. He is a threat to the IT industry, which produced far more jobs, wealth and well-being than any other industry since WWII.
>
> With business executives like that at the head of American corporations, who needs bin Laden?
I thought my "Hollywood hookers and better coke" crack was good, but I think you've got the better soundbite, by far.
Rack up the dollar cost of the WTC disaster. (Conservatively $100B), and compare it to the dollar cost to the Tech Faction if the Content Faction gets its way, and discover that a mere 10-15% "hit" in Tech Faction revenues is the equivalent of a WTC attack when it comes to GDP. The Eisner-Valenti-Rosen triumvirate is a greater threat to the economy than bin Laden ever was.
I think we need to push three talking points:
- The memes "Content Faction" and "Technology Faction". Portraying Hollywood as a "faction", rather than an "industry" makes it clear that there are opposing interests here.
- The fact that tech is at least an order of magnitude larger - in jobs, revenues, profits, and taxes remitted to the government - than the Content Faction.
When you write your Congresscritter, you can call them "industries" instead of "factions". And instead of asking him which industry is likely to give him the most campaign dollars over the next 30 years, ask him which industry is most likely to provide the most jobs for his constituents. He'll do the campaign contribution math by himself, and you've pointed out there's a compelling "it's the economy, stupid" excuse his opponent can use against him, should he side against the Tech Faction.When you talk to your co-workers, write letters to the editor, or post to weblogs, feel free to be honest - call 'em Factions, and ask the campaign contribution question. The readers will do the "Hollywood must have better hookers, if my Congresscritter supports the Hollywood faction, he must be corrupt" math by themselves, and vote accordingly.
At the risk of stroking the collective /. ego, yeah, they are.
Canonical example - someone who got Sircammed at work, came to me and said they were having trouble opening up this attachment someone had sent them, and they wondered why someone sent it to them in the first place.
I did my best "All your base!" voice and said "I send you this file to have your advice!"
Cow orker said "Yeah, hey, how did you know that? Are you reading my mail?"
Another admin and I spent the next hour disinfecting 0wn3d box3n from other cow orkers who had done the same thing.
>
>You don't think the Feds dropped the antitrust case for nothing, do you?
I may have misadjusted my tinfoil hat this morning, but it struck me that a PC configured to send out unicast malformed NOTIFY messages to exploit the previously-undisclosed UPnP hole on a specific target machine... well, it'd look to the UPnP service like piece of hardware. Hardware like a lantern, if you will, shining a light on the suspect's machine... *evil grin*
>
>Balram Chatterji, a former director of the Geological Survey of India, said the finding could help in establishing the atmospheric conditions on Earth millions of years ago.
"We've concluded that, well, millions of years ago, rain fell in a downward direction, droplets most likely pulled down due to the force of gravity, and uh, there was some sort of other force that may have deflected the drops from a perfectly vertical path, so the rain didn't fall straight down. We've dubbed this 'wind'."
("Hey, what's this rushing sound, all around me, I think I'll call it 'wind'! And this big round flat thing coming straight towards me! Needs a big, round sounding name, like, umm... grrooouuund! I wonder if it'll be friends with me!*SPLAT*")