I'd fully endorse the use of Panotools. I have obtained amazingly good results - hand-held 3M-pixel images stitched together with pixel-perfect accuracy. But it does take some time to optimise the settings.
I am dismayed to hear that iPix are giving Helmut Dersch grief over his software. I wondered why the site had been down for so long. It is outrageous that they should attempt to stop him publishing his own work just because they think it is too similar to something they are doing.
Painting houses is a dangerous game that can land you up with the damned if you are not careful. A cautionary tale:
There was a painter who was having trouble making ends meet. Almost none of his jobs seemed quite to turn a decent profit. One day, he decided he could lower his costs by adding a little water to the paint to make it go further.
The next day, he put this plan into practise, and added a bit of water to the paint. Instead of using three cans, he used only two, and the job didn't look too bad.
Later that night, he was lying in bed when he suddenly heard a deep booming voice calling his name. Trembling with fear, he answered "Who is it?"
"It is I, the Lord", came the reply. "You have done an evil thing, by cheating your customers with watered-down paint."
"What must I do, Lord?" cried the painter.
And the voice replied: "Repaint, and thin no more."
Excellent general point, that we need to consider all of the consequences.
In terms of tidal power though, the earth contains a heck of a lot of water, and what is more, the energy density of moving water is very large (e.g. compared to wind). I doubt that even if the entire world's energy needs were taken from tidal power it would make any appreciable difference to ocean currents etc.
(The bigger problem with tidal power is the loss of habitat for wading birds etc where you dam off the estuary.)
Yes, but I asked about UK law. I know US law is a lot more permissive in this respect. As I said, I don't know much about law, but this would definitely be illegal in the UK.
There was a bit of a news story recently about about the UK Government considering changing the law to make entrapment of paedophiles by police officers posing as children in online chat rooms legal.
Interesting that Article 6 of the EU Convention on Human Rights outlaws evidence gathered by entrapment.
Niels Provos would like you to help create the perfect lure for crackers.
IANAL, but I think that doing this sort of thing in the UK could be considered by the authorities to be entrapment. Just something to think about. (I believe entrapment law is much more strict in the UK than in the US.)
Clearly to make any payment scheme work, a good system of micro-payments would have to be worked out. Then every subscriber to a mailing list would pay a small subscription to cover the cost of their mailings.
As for spammers hijacking some mail server, I've already said that I'm skeptical of whether any technological solution could thwart them, but if one could be implemented, say using payments, then it would have to be implemented right at the net access point. As you imply, an implementation at the,mail server is already too late.
Ok, all this may be pie in the sky. I think it is desirable. I somehow doubt if it is currently practicable.
I appreciate your point that it would be wrong to punish the innocent as well as the guilty.
But I'd like to ask you: why should email/net access be fundamentally any different to the telephone system? For the telephone, I pay a fixed line rental, plus an incremental charge based on usage. That seems to me to be fundamentally more fair than charging everyone the same.
I don't know if you are a light or a heavy telephone user. Imagine that if you were a light user, would you feel happy if you had exactly the same monthly telephone bill as a telemarketing company that interrupted you and tens of thousands of others in the middle of dinner every evening?
The trouble with a payment system though is that it itself is a technological solution that the spammers will eventually find a way around, just as people have at various times found ways to defeat the technological systems used to make us pay for phone calls.
Having said that, I for one would be happy to pay to send emails, in just the same way that I pay to make a phone call, if it did result in a reduction of spam to about the level of telemarketing calls (of which I get significantly less than the 500 spams a day that a previous poster mentioned!)
These work by creating a ipv6 GIF tunnel over ipv4...
That is just so stupid and typical. Why oh why do we have to put up with this recyling of old and broken technologies, and patent issues to boot? You would have thought that if they are making a fresh start with a new so-called modern protocol, they would at least use a new and modern specification such as, let's say, PNG? Duh!!!!
If ctrl+alt+backspace also kills all your other X applications with unsaved work, you might just as well have rebooted.
The key issue when something freezes is to salvage as much of your unsaved work as possible. How long it takes to do that is rarely more than a secondary consideration. I've used Windows NT4.0 intensively at work for over five years and I have never, ever lost work in one application due to the crashing of another.
(And I do run Linux at home because I think it is better in most ways that are important to me.)
Not quite. That's more like a 'hidden variable' version of Quantum Mechanics. The box that the poison treat is in is a hidden variable because it has a definite value (albeit unknown to you). The standard interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is that there are no hidden variables. So the poison treat would have to be simultaneously 'in both' and 'not in both' boxes until you observe one of the cats.
The original Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment used a truly quantum-mechanical device to determine whether the cat should live or die. I don't think you can remove that quantum element and still have a valid analogy. The point (or one of them) of the thought experiment is that the cat 'magnifies' the quantum effect.
Basically what this guy did was realize that the MAC-generation algorithm in spoofing software Wellenreiter... However, this isn't the same as giving a general technique for analyzing MAC addresses on 802.11b, something which was strongly implied in the original post.
You didn't read the whole paper. The part with the bug in the script is only the first few pagers. Later in the paper, he goes into using 802.11 sequence numbers to detect spoofed MACs. I'm not even sure why he mentions the bug, as that's pretty trivial. The sequence number analysis stuff is far more interesting. It's not foolproof, but it could be very useful.
I don't have mod points, so I've reposted it with my +1 bonus (since the Score:5, Informative parent post is wrong).
Try a 'CD Courier'. It is a device shaped like an audio cassette with a wire coming out of it that goes to a 2.5mm stereo audio jack. Where the tape would be is a magnetic head that converts the signal from your iPod into a magnetic field that is picked up by the car cassette read head. Audio quality is no worse than audio cassette - i.e. surprisingly good. You can pick them up for around 10 pounds.
Unfortunately, they don't work in all car stereos. They don't work in the stereo on my Clio for example - maybe the audio read head is in a slightly odd position.
I'm now considering pulling out the radio and trying to find a wire internally that carries the line-level audio signal, and then connecting this to a jack socket on the front panel. But on a one-year old car, I'm a tiny bit hesitant...
As for removing the stereo, may car stereos have 4 small holes in the front panel, two either side. A U-shaped tool inserts into the holes and releases the radio.
How can I get msdev v6 to show some of my variables in hex and some in decimal? Is this such an esoteric request that the developers at MS couldn't be expected to anticipate it?
No, it's not too much to ask at all.
I think this is what you want. E.g. to display a value as a short hex integer in the watch window:
I know this is not the answer you are looking for, but wouldn't it just be so much easier to let the three power users run Excel locally on their own PCs rather than on the server? They are probably already using 800MHz+ PCs as the 'thin clients' - that is more than adequate for most Excel tasks.
Unless they really need to jump from desk to desk, I'm sure they'd get much better performance, and the other users would be happier too.
No, it's 'back/up' in the sense of 'undo' (and 'forward' in the sense of 'redo'). Their 'up' analogy is based on visualising the undo history as a single stack of pages where you add new pages to the bottom of the stack when you visit them.
If you press the back button to go up the stack and then follow a different link, all of the stack below you is deleted, just as when you use an 'undo' button and then make a different change, the 'redo' buffer disappears.
Their suggestion is to make the 'back' button more akin to your browser history, so that you don't lose the record of pages visited and then backed-up from.
Personally, I don't see what's wrong with using the browser history tab for that...
That's not the role of the forward button; you want the link tag. e.g. <link rel="Next" href="day3.html"/>
While not all browsers support these, it is well worth using them for those that do (such as Mozilla, iCab and Lynx). They are standard HTML/XHTML. For more examples, see this excellent article.
Re:Hard to defend a logical morality?
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 2
I think to a certain extent we agree. I deliberately left out "Have no other gods" because if you don't believe God is the creator of the entire universe and of you, and if you don't believe that he is personally interested in you and you are personally accountable to him, then that one can't seem logical or reasonable. But if he is all those things, then to place another god before him would be to deny reality.
"[Wood] is man's fuel for burning... But he also fashions a god and worships it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire... and says 'Ah!, I am warm; I see the fire.' From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says 'Save me; you are my god.'" (Isaiah 44:15-17). Now that's illogical and unreasonable. Pick your own 'god'...
My point is this commandment is silly if God isn't God, but quite sensible and logical if he is. Unless one of us can prove the matter one way or the other, your attempt to label this a priori as 'silly' could be a little premature.
(BTW, I'd go along with both (1) and (2). I don't know why you say (1) demands morality comes from a source external to God. There's no conflict between a morality that is practical and works, and a morality that is entirely derived from the God who made up the rules of the universe.)
Re:Hard to defend a logical morality?
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 2
In summary, it is quite easy to defend group #2's "scientific morality"
Not that easy...
For instance, it's wrong to kill people (most of the time) because a society with rampant murder has less ability to advance than a society with no murder.
But that only begs the question. It is a moral judgement itself that it is good for a society to advance. (Otherwise, why would you want to advance? And what do you mean by 'advance' anyway?)
Those people who belong to group #1 [who get their morality from God] have morals that have no basis in logic or reason
I don't recognise this. I believe all morality comes from God, but I also believe that God's morality works - it does have a basis in logic and reason. The Ten Commandments include things like do not steal, do not murder, do not lie, do not cheat on your wife/husband. Do you think these things have no basis in logic or reason?
Ok, that's enough feeding the troll 8-)
Re:Should there be a GNU-Google?
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 2
But I feel good using Gnu-Linux because RMS, Linus and others have promised, via the GPL, not to take it away. Can/should google or one of its competitors make a similar promise?
Comparing Google with non-free software is like comparing apples with oranges. Unlike users of certain non-free software, no one is locked into using Google. As the article says, it would not be a problem for anyone to switch to a different search engine if Google lost its position of leader of the pack.
Of course qwerty1 was just an example, but I remember reading fairly recently that dictionary attacks have become a lot more sophisticated. Adjacent keys, inserted numbers, random case and compound words are all checked for nowdays. This does make the search space bigger, but computers are getting faster. Sorry - no references to back that up.
And I don't think even a brute-force attack takes a whole month now. So the idea that changing your password every month protects you may be a little outdated.
That's why it is essential to use shadow password files on UNIX boxes, and whatever equivalent measures exist on NT boxes. Really, we should be moving towards two-factor authentication these days ('something you have and something you know').
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't find the site you refer to, although one of the other posters to this thread has given us another mirror.
A bit more searching though, and it appears that the IPIX trouble may not be the cause of the current outage - see this.
I'd fully endorse the use of Panotools. I have obtained amazingly good results - hand-held 3M-pixel images stitched together with pixel-perfect accuracy. But it does take some time to optimise the settings.
I am dismayed to hear that iPix are giving Helmut Dersch grief over his software. I wondered why the site had been down for so long. It is outrageous that they should attempt to stop him publishing his own work just because they think it is too similar to something they are doing.
Painting houses is a dangerous game that can land you up with the damned if you are not careful. A cautionary tale:
There was a painter who was having trouble making ends meet. Almost none of his jobs seemed quite to turn a decent profit. One day, he decided he could lower his costs by adding a little water to the paint to make it go further.
The next day, he put this plan into practise, and added a bit of water to the paint. Instead of using three cans, he used only two, and the job didn't look too bad.
Later that night, he was lying in bed when he suddenly heard a deep booming voice calling his name. Trembling with fear, he answered "Who is it?"
"It is I, the Lord", came the reply. "You have done an evil thing, by cheating your customers with watered-down paint."
"What must I do, Lord?" cried the painter.
And the voice replied: "Repaint, and thin no more."
(Sorry.)
Excellent general point, that we need to consider all of the consequences.
In terms of tidal power though, the earth contains a heck of a lot of water, and what is more, the energy density of moving water is very large (e.g. compared to wind). I doubt that even if the entire world's energy needs were taken from tidal power it would make any appreciable difference to ocean currents etc.
(The bigger problem with tidal power is the loss of habitat for wading birds etc where you dam off the estuary.)
It should be OK for even the police/fbi to do.
Yes, but I asked about UK law. I know US law is a lot more permissive in this respect. As I said, I don't know much about law, but this would definitely be illegal in the UK.
There was a bit of a news story recently about about the UK Government considering changing the law to make entrapment of paedophiles by police officers posing as children in online chat rooms legal.
Interesting that Article 6 of the EU Convention on Human Rights outlaws evidence gathered by entrapment.
I'm glad someone knows more about it than me. Thanks.
Niels Provos would like you to help create the perfect lure for crackers.
IANAL, but I think that doing this sort of thing in the UK could be considered by the authorities to be entrapment. Just something to think about. (I believe entrapment law is much more strict in the UK than in the US.)
Clearly to make any payment scheme work, a good system of micro-payments would have to be worked out. Then every subscriber to a mailing list would pay a small subscription to cover the cost of their mailings.
,mail server is already too late.
As for spammers hijacking some mail server, I've already said that I'm skeptical of whether any technological solution could thwart them, but if one could be implemented, say using payments, then it would have to be implemented right at the net access point. As you imply, an implementation at the
Ok, all this may be pie in the sky. I think it is desirable. I somehow doubt if it is currently practicable.
I appreciate your point that it would be wrong to punish the innocent as well as the guilty.
But I'd like to ask you: why should email/net access be fundamentally any different to the telephone system? For the telephone, I pay a fixed line rental, plus an incremental charge based on usage. That seems to me to be fundamentally more fair than charging everyone the same.
I don't know if you are a light or a heavy telephone user. Imagine that if you were a light user, would you feel happy if you had exactly the same monthly telephone bill as a telemarketing company that interrupted you and tens of thousands of others in the middle of dinner every evening?
The trouble with a payment system though is that it itself is a technological solution that the spammers will eventually find a way around, just as people have at various times found ways to defeat the technological systems used to make us pay for phone calls.
Having said that, I for one would be happy to pay to send emails, in just the same way that I pay to make a phone call, if it did result in a reduction of spam to about the level of telemarketing calls (of which I get significantly less than the 500 spams a day that a previous poster mentioned!)
These work by creating a ipv6 GIF tunnel over ipv4...
That is just so stupid and typical. Why oh why do we have to put up with this recyling of old and broken technologies, and patent issues to boot? You would have thought that if they are making a fresh start with a new so-called modern protocol, they would at least use a new and modern specification such as, let's say, PNG? Duh!!!!
If ctrl+alt+backspace also kills all your other X applications with unsaved work, you might just as well have rebooted.
The key issue when something freezes is to salvage as much of your unsaved work as possible. How long it takes to do that is rarely more than a secondary consideration. I've used Windows NT4.0 intensively at work for over five years and I have never, ever lost work in one application due to the crashing of another.
(And I do run Linux at home because I think it is better in most ways that are important to me.)
get one of those 500meg compact flash things ( a real bargain at about $160 ) that they use in digital cameras for long term user file storage
Um, aren't the 500 meg compact flash devices actually miniature hard disks, e.g. the IBM microdrive? (I may just be showing my ignorance though.)
Not quite. That's more like a 'hidden variable' version of Quantum Mechanics. The box that the poison treat is in is a hidden variable because it has a definite value (albeit unknown to you). The standard interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is that there are no hidden variables. So the poison treat would have to be simultaneously 'in both' and 'not in both' boxes until you observe one of the cats.
The original Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment used a truly quantum-mechanical device to determine whether the cat should live or die. I don't think you can remove that quantum element and still have a valid analogy. The point (or one of them) of the thought experiment is that the cat 'magnifies' the quantum effect.
I don't have mod points, so I've reposted it with my +1 bonus (since the Score:5, Informative parent post is wrong).
Try a 'CD Courier'. It is a device shaped like an audio cassette with a wire coming out of it that goes to a 2.5mm stereo audio jack. Where the tape would be is a magnetic head that converts the signal from your iPod into a magnetic field that is picked up by the car cassette read head. Audio quality is no worse than audio cassette - i.e. surprisingly good. You can pick them up for around 10 pounds.
Unfortunately, they don't work in all car stereos. They don't work in the stereo on my Clio for example - maybe the audio read head is in a slightly odd position.
I'm now considering pulling out the radio and trying to find a wire internally that carries the line-level audio signal, and then connecting this to a jack socket on the front panel. But on a one-year old car, I'm a tiny bit hesitant...
As for removing the stereo, may car stereos have 4 small holes in the front panel, two either side. A U-shaped tool inserts into the holes and releases the radio.
How can I get msdev v6 to show some of my variables in hex and some in decimal? Is this such an esoteric request that the developers at MS couldn't be expected to anticipate it?
No, it's not too much to ask at all.
I think this is what you want. E.g. to display a value as a short hex integer in the watch window:
myVal,hx
I know this is not the answer you are looking for, but wouldn't it just be so much easier to let the three power users run Excel locally on their own PCs rather than on the server? They are probably already using 800MHz+ PCs as the 'thin clients' - that is more than adequate for most Excel tasks.
Unless they really need to jump from desk to desk, I'm sure they'd get much better performance, and the other users would be happier too.
Common misunderstanding - but the article is confusing.
They are comparing 'back' in the sense of 'undo' with 'back' in the sense of browser history. Nothing to do with directory hierarchies.
No, it's 'back/up' in the sense of 'undo' (and 'forward' in the sense of 'redo'). Their 'up' analogy is based on visualising the undo history as a single stack of pages where you add new pages to the bottom of the stack when you visit them.
If you press the back button to go up the stack and then follow a different link, all of the stack below you is deleted, just as when you use an 'undo' button and then make a different change, the 'redo' buffer disappears.
Their suggestion is to make the 'back' button more akin to your browser history, so that you don't lose the record of pages visited and then backed-up from.
Personally, I don't see what's wrong with using the browser history tab for that...
That's not the role of the forward button; you want the link tag. />
e.g.
<link rel="Next" href="day3.html"
While not all browsers support these, it is well worth using them for those that do (such as Mozilla, iCab and Lynx). They are standard HTML/XHTML. For more examples, see this excellent article.
I think to a certain extent we agree. I deliberately left out "Have no other gods" because if you don't believe God is the creator of the entire universe and of you, and if you don't believe that he is personally interested in you and you are personally accountable to him, then that one can't seem logical or reasonable. But if he is all those things, then to place another god before him would be to deny reality.
"[Wood] is man's fuel for burning... But he also fashions a god and worships it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire... and says 'Ah!, I am warm; I see the fire.' From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says 'Save me; you are my god.'" (Isaiah 44:15-17). Now that's illogical and unreasonable. Pick your own 'god'...
My point is this commandment is silly if God isn't God, but quite sensible and logical if he is. Unless one of us can prove the matter one way or the other, your attempt to label this a priori as 'silly' could be a little premature.
(BTW, I'd go along with both (1) and (2). I don't know why you say (1) demands morality comes from a source external to God. There's no conflict between a morality that is practical and works, and a morality that is entirely derived from the God who made up the rules of the universe.)
In summary, it is quite easy to defend group #2's "scientific morality"
Not that easy...
For instance, it's wrong to kill people (most of the time) because a society with rampant murder has less ability to advance than a society with no murder.
But that only begs the question. It is a moral judgement itself that it is good for a society to advance. (Otherwise, why would you want to advance? And what do you mean by 'advance' anyway?)
Those people who belong to group #1 [who get their morality from God] have morals that have no basis in logic or reason
I don't recognise this. I believe all morality comes from God, but I also believe that God's morality works - it does have a basis in logic and reason. The Ten Commandments include things like do not steal, do not murder, do not lie, do not cheat on your wife/husband. Do you think these things have no basis in logic or reason?
Ok, that's enough feeding the troll 8-)
But I feel good using Gnu-Linux because RMS, Linus and others have promised, via the GPL, not to take it away. Can/should google or one of its competitors make a similar promise?
Comparing Google with non-free software is like comparing apples with oranges. Unlike users of certain non-free software, no one is locked into using Google. As the article says, it would not be a problem for anyone to switch to a different search engine if Google lost its position of leader of the pack.
Of course qwerty1 was just an example, but I remember reading fairly recently that dictionary attacks have become a lot more sophisticated. Adjacent keys, inserted numbers, random case and compound words are all checked for nowdays. This does make the search space bigger, but computers are getting faster. Sorry - no references to back that up.
And I don't think even a brute-force attack takes a whole month now. So the idea that changing your password every month protects you may be a little outdated.
That's why it is essential to use shadow password files on UNIX boxes, and whatever equivalent measures exist on NT boxes. Really, we should be moving towards two-factor authentication these days ('something you have and something you know').