Besides, "hacking" when referring to people's limbs and skin produces a much more vivid visualization, and therefore is more likely to be adopted...
Must be my perverted imagination, but I get an awful vivid visualization with "cracking", as in "skull". Limbs are redundant and removal of one will merely halve my typing speed, but my skull is a single point of failure.
Re:And yet Europe seems to be doing fine
on
Pornified
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· Score: 1
Seen any European "sex comedies" lately?
Please do not equate 'British' with 'European'.
Also, movies might not be the right way to observe a society. Why is that all Americans I see in movies are spectacular muscular and those I see on the street are spectacular fat?
I can't find the stats from a casual Google, but the US consistantly ranks at the top of the rate of sexual activity. In other words, we do it the most, but don't need to see it everywhere.
Maybe the stats are not there? Also, stats like this are very vulnerable for 'giving the appropriate answer' - interviewees giving the answers that they think are socially acceptable. Which means you basically test which nationality brags the most.
Also - a pity for you - you cannot deduct individual behaviour group statistics.
One statistic that I did find, and that Americans are famous for, at least down here in Europe:
Teen Pregnancy Rates
* Despite impressive declines over the past decade, the United States still has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and births in the industrialized world. Teen pregnancy costs the United States at least $7 billion annually.
* There are nearly 900,000 teen pregnancies annually. Eight in ten of these pregnancies are unintended and 79% are to unmarried teens.
Not only is the idea of having RFIDs embedded into people's skin scary to me, but it also promises to add a new, terrifying meaning to the term "hacking"...
Well, the "hackers" are supposed to be the curious test-the-system type of guys. It is it the "crackers" with their "cracking tools" that you should really be worried about...
These cards are much less a liability than credit cards of the American type.
Did you ever use your card in France? Your seemingly well protected PIN card does not need a PIN there - cashiers will just swipe it, and that's it. A very nice option for card thieves: Paris is just 6 hours by train. Yes, the thieves are with the program, they have been for a long time 8)
And by the way, PIN cards for payment in shops have been around since the early nineties - in 1970 people were still fuzzing about with 'spaarbankboekjes', a paper booklet with your account information that the bank's cashier could modify.
It seems like Verizon, Sprint or someone could make a boatload of money from opportunities like this. They could have a few mobile cell towers that run from generators. When a tornado, hurricane, wind storms, or whatever hit, they truck those towers in as temporary replacements.
You mean like COLTs (Cell on Light Trucks)? This seems like prior art to me:
Rapid Disaster Response - COLTs
Verizon Wireless "Cell on Light Trucks" (COLTs) can process thousands of calls every hour in the event cell sites or other key communications equipment are damaged or disabled by a community disaster. The 25,000 pound vehicle features two retractable masts, a microwave antenna to link network components, an emergency power generator and a small office. The COLT is also fully equipped with resources needed during emergencies including equipment, fuel, electrical generators, food, water and cots.
Now that would be interesting to see - instead of mayo that's chemically processed, perhaps one could have a better oil used in the first place...
Roll your own, this is a no brainer for anyone with a food processor. With a mixer or blender it is slightly tricker but can still be done - and even if it fails, it still tastes great.
Gawd, more fake food. Don't we get that already from McDonalds, Kraft, Budweiser et al? This junk is not good for you and long-term health effects are only partially known.
What really makes me sad is that discussions like this always wave the health argument around, because health is not what this is about.
This stuff is bad for you even if it is good: Slow Food is not about Health Food (be sure that Kraft has its departments to cover those consumer demands as well), it is about the culture of food. Apparently even McDonalds opponants cannot see anymore that there is a huge cultural sphere around the food we produce and eat. A cultural sphere that we will discard and that we will not be able to revive if we keep buying big products from big suppliers in big supermarkets, no matter how healthy that food may be.
He, a lot of the food Slow Food promotes is even risky. Raw milk soft cheeses for instance can be infected with Listeria. But, as they said in France when I tried to buy a pasteurized cheese for my pregnant wife: "C'est n'est pas la même chose" - it is not the same thing. You can't eliminate the health risk without killing the product, so as long as the risk is minimal (which it really is), please do keep making and eating it.
Through its understanding of gastronomy with relation to politics, agriculture and the environment Slow Food has become an active player in agriculture and ecology. Slow Food links pleasure and food with awareness and responsibility. The association's activities seek to defend biodiversity in our food supply, spread the education of taste, and link producers of excellent foods to consumers through events and initiatives.
Defense of Biodiversity
Slow Food believes the enjoyment of excellent foods and wines should be combined with efforts to save the countless traditional cheeses, grains, vegetables, fruits, and animal breeds that are disappearing due to the prevalence of convenience food and agribusiness. Through the Ark of Taste and Presidia projects (supported by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity), the Slow Food Award for Biodiversity and Terra Madre, Slow Food seeks to protect our invaluable food heritage.
Taste Education
In a world where the pleasures of taste are not always learned through leisurely meals around a lively table, we must make a conscious effort to explore, question and experiment. This is the aim of Slow Food's taste education initiatives. Convivia activities introduce new foods to members while Taste Workshops offer guided tastings with food experts. Our youngest eaters benefit from Slow Food in Schools and true gastronomes are trained at the University of Gastronomic Sciences.
Linking Producers and Consumers
Slow Food organizes fairs, events and farmers' markets to showcase products of excellent gastronomic quality. The huge success of the international food festival Salone del Gusto, with its cornucopia of foods to be tasted and bought, supports producers while offering up a world of delights to the public. Other events include Urban Harvest, Cheese, Slow Fish, Deutscher Käsemarkt and Aux Origines du Goût.
It becomes practically impossible to find out which one of the thousands (or millions if it's a nudie group:-) of receivers are the enemy agent, even if the sender and/or the message themselves get compromised.
How could I not mention this story in my first post. It was your posting that reminded me of it: A couple of years ago a Dutch blackmailer hid the ransom payment by steganography on an extremely busy public website. Of course police checked all the weblogs, and traced the one entry that had gone through an anonymizer service (which in the end coughed up the user real name and address). Had the poor sod just used a public terminal, no one would have been able to trace him down.
Indeed Iit would have been smartest to use an usenet group, for there is no central logging of downloaded messages then.
Back to the future: 9 months ago on slashdot...
on
10 Computer Mishaps
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· Score: 1
ZDNet UK posted Ontrack Data Recovery's 2004 list of the 10 strangest and funniest computer mishaps...
Ahum... 2004 ? Is there something about the word 'News' in the phrase 'News for Nerds' that I do not understand? This list was covered on bbc world nine months ago, and discussed here as well.
If you own both the sending and receiving servers, or use one of the infected army of the drones, there is a miniscule chance of your message even being observed in the ocean of the information that is the internet.
Notice the word 'if'. If you *do not* own both the sending and receiving servers the story is different. For instance if you do not know where your agents are, who they are or when they are on line. The GIA once used an open for all mailing list (or was it usenet?) on football to send orders from Algeria to Paris. There is so much nonsense on this lists (and on Flickr too) that some odd remarks do not catch any attention - except by the one waiting for the message,
No, Disney won't object. But the family of Percival_Lowell may:
Lowell's greatest contribution to planetary studies came during the last 8 years of his life, which he devoted to the search for Planet X, which was the designation for a planet beyond Neptune. The search continued for a number of years after his death at Flagstaff in 1916; the new planet, named Pluto, was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. The symbol for the planet is a stylized "PL", chosen in part to honor Lowell.
It's a great idea, but I think it should be a function of the BIOS.
Underpants as a BIOS function? I know us Mac guys are a different breed, but when I hear stuff like this I severely doubt Steve's decision to switch to Intel.
On the flip side, I would think that most people who steal laptops are going to wipe them or snoop around in them for awhile before connecting to the net and surf for porn. So this should hardly be viewed as a perfect solution for catching thieves (although WiFi certainly helps).
Above article is a story about a guy who retreives his sister's computer by using Timbuktu Pro (a VNC like client/server solution for Mac). Same article also mentions this BS:
Absolute's CompuTrace software programs computers to call the company's tracking center in Vancouver, B.C., at prescheduled times. If a machine is reported stolen, the monitoring center waits for it to dial in, then reprograms it to call every 15 minutes until its location can be traced. The software is very difficult to remove, and works even if the hard drive is reformatted or repartitioned. The company has been operating since 1997 and claims a 95-percent success rate.
Sorry, but that doesn't resonate with Absolut's own FAQ. A bit too much absolute absolute maybe?
and sometimes ham up national stereotypes in the most hysterical of manners
Pardon me for not being so exact as the average Simpsons quote, but I do remember the joke that Not the nine o'clock news (?) made on their yearly calender (?) when Germany had won the contest with Ein bisschen Friede (a little bit of Peace) way back in 1982:
Germany, the first country to start two world wars within one century and win the eurovision song contest with a song about peace afterwards.
Among us for some time indeed. A friend of mine had a similar problem two or three years ago with a Peugeot. I do not rememember the model, but it was one of the first batches out of the factory.
She had problems with the engine shutting down sporadically while driving (at any speed). This happened one or twice. She went with her car to the garage, and the mechanic told her, blank face, "Known problem. Needs a software upgrade. Come back in two weeks time, we have place in our schedule by then".
Of course she told the guy to give her a replacement car for two weeks - you must be mental to take a car like that into the Dutch rush hour traffic.
The Bible, while not a scientific document (and it does not intend to be one) does hold some VERY accurate, simple scientific truths. While his contemporaries believed the world to be flat (along with science at the time), the prophet Isaiah spoke of "the circle of the earth".
A circle is a 2-dimensional shape, and thus still as flat as a pancake (also a circle by the way). If Isaiah had had spoken about the globe of the earth, or the ball, or even the appel or pomegrade, you might have been right.
The round (as in circle) earth has been a very popular shape in Christian iconography. Feel free to google around for "TO maps" (where the O stands for the shape of the earth, and the T for the rivers dividing it into the tree continents - Asia, Europe and Africa) or visit this non-english page with loads of pretty pictures.
There are web pages out there full of fake email addresses, for just that purpose.
Spammers can get around the problem by putting a URL in the message and using a fake sender address (or your address, for that matter). They don't care if half of their messages are bounced after the open relay they're sent through, because the messages almost never get back to the spammer anyway.
On the fake page that I put up for harvesters, I use these exact URLs to annoy the spammers. The page contains:
(a) e-mail adresses that get generated from a bogus user name + the URL of a spamvertized website (example: Nadeem.Stuffen@spamvertized.com)
(b) links to all these spamvertized websites (http://www.spamvertized.com/ etc.)
This way they will at least, apart from using the resources on zombied PC's, use up some of the resources of their own MXes. And the harvesting spambots will have a swell time harvesting spamvertized sites, instead of the rest of the world.
Re:I wish I could make that much moola....
on
Yahoo buys Flickr
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· Score: 2, Informative
Perhaps this is a "big buyout", but I honestly don't think so.
The Ludicorp people themselves speak of their money troubles (on their Typepad, no less, weblog) "It means that we'll no longer have to draw straws to see who gets paid."
So, my take is that while they do have a vibrant, growing, etc. community of photosharing/social networking, they do not have a sustainable business model.
They may not have a sustainable business model because they never needed one. This isn't Stewart's first buyout: he always called himself 'one of the winners of the Internet lottery'. During the dotcom bubble he created one of those 'follow your ex-schoolmates' sites, that by accident got very popular in India, so was sold off the some party that liked that demography (how's that for outsourcing?). [beware: I do not posses magic checkbook-x-ray-goggles so I might completely miss the mark here]
It always seemed to me like he used that money to develop the things he wanted to develop more than the things he thought would bring revenue. There was certainly no money, but a lot of fun in gameneverending.
And I don't think the developers will rest quietly after this buyout, no matter how small or big it is. You'd better prepare for more fun in the future.
Less neurotically, both CNet and PCWorld have discussions of the Shuffle's interior spaces.
For a hands-on discussion of the Shuffle's interior space, including lines like "If you remove the wheel like I did in the picture you will never get it back in", see An iPod shuffle on the inside.... Sure beats C|net's stock photo's.
The design magazine Dot Dot Dot once had an issue with a couple of synesthesia-related articles. They had a nice back cover on it, a synesthesia test. Went a bit like (this one is over simplified):
Slashdot Mirror
Must be my perverted imagination, but I get an awful vivid visualization with "cracking", as in "skull". Limbs are redundant and removal of one will merely halve my typing speed, but my skull is a single point of failure.
Please do not equate 'British' with 'European'.
Also, movies might not be the right way to observe a society. Why is that all Americans I see in movies are spectacular muscular and those I see on the street are spectacular fat?
Maybe the stats are not there? Also, stats like this are very vulnerable for 'giving the appropriate answer' - interviewees giving the answers that they think are socially acceptable. Which means you basically test which nationality brags the most.
Also - a pity for you - you cannot deduct individual behaviour group statistics.
One statistic that I did find, and that Americans are famous for, at least down here in Europe:
Might be you are right after all
Well, the "hackers" are supposed to be the curious test-the-system type of guys. It is it the "crackers" with their "cracking tools" that you should really be worried about...
Did you ever use your card in France? Your seemingly well protected PIN card does not need a PIN there - cashiers will just swipe it, and that's it. A very nice option for card thieves: Paris is just 6 hours by train. Yes, the thieves are with the program, they have been for a long time 8)
And by the way, PIN cards for payment in shops have been around since the early nineties - in 1970 people were still fuzzing about with 'spaarbankboekjes', a paper booklet with your account information that the bank's cashier could modify.
For a proper salute we need three more dupes.
You mean like COLTs (Cell on Light Trucks)? This seems like prior art to me:
Rapid Disaster Response - COLTs
Verizon Wireless "Cell on Light Trucks" (COLTs) can process thousands of calls every hour in the event cell sites or other key communications equipment are damaged or disabled by a community disaster. The 25,000 pound vehicle features two retractable masts, a microwave antenna to link network components, an emergency power generator and a small office. The COLT is also fully equipped with resources needed during emergencies including equipment, fuel, electrical generators, food, water and cots.
Roll your own, this is a no brainer for anyone with a food processor. With a mixer or blender it is slightly tricker but can still be done - and even if it fails, it still tastes great.
What really makes me sad is that discussions like this always wave the health argument around, because health is not what this is about. This stuff is bad for you even if it is good: Slow Food is not about Health Food (be sure that Kraft has its departments to cover those consumer demands as well), it is about the culture of food. Apparently even McDonalds opponants cannot see anymore that there is a huge cultural sphere around the food we produce and eat. A cultural sphere that we will discard and that we will not be able to revive if we keep buying big products from big suppliers in big supermarkets, no matter how healthy that food may be.
He, a lot of the food Slow Food promotes is even risky. Raw milk soft cheeses for instance can be infected with Listeria. But, as they said in France when I tried to buy a pasteurized cheese for my pregnant wife: "C'est n'est pas la même chose" - it is not the same thing. You can't eliminate the health risk without killing the product, so as long as the risk is minimal (which it really is), please do keep making and eating it.
Slowfood mission statementMission
Through its understanding of gastronomy with relation to politics, agriculture and the environment Slow Food has become an active player in agriculture and ecology. Slow Food links pleasure and food with awareness and responsibility. The association's activities seek to defend biodiversity in our food supply, spread the education of taste, and link producers of excellent foods to consumers through events and initiatives.
Defense of Biodiversity
Slow Food believes the enjoyment of excellent foods and wines should be combined with efforts to save the countless traditional cheeses, grains, vegetables, fruits, and animal breeds that are disappearing due to the prevalence of convenience food and agribusiness. Through the Ark of Taste and Presidia projects (supported by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity), the Slow Food Award for Biodiversity and Terra Madre, Slow Food seeks to protect our invaluable food heritage.
Taste Education
In a world where the pleasures of taste are not always learned through leisurely meals around a lively table, we must make a conscious effort to explore, question and experiment. This is the aim of Slow Food's taste education initiatives. Convivia activities introduce new foods to members while Taste Workshops offer guided tastings with food experts. Our youngest eaters benefit from Slow Food in Schools and true gastronomes are trained at the University of Gastronomic Sciences.
Linking Producers and Consumers
Slow Food organizes fairs, events and farmers' markets to showcase products of excellent gastronomic quality. The huge success of the international food festival Salone del Gusto, with its cornucopia of foods to be tasted and bought, supports producers while offering up a world of delights to the public. Other events include Urban Harvest, Cheese, Slow Fish, Deutscher Käsemarkt and Aux Origines du Goût.
How could I not mention this story in my first post. It was your posting that reminded me of it:
A couple of years ago a Dutch blackmailer hid the ransom payment by steganography on an extremely busy public website. Of course police checked all the weblogs, and traced the one entry that had gone through an anonymizer service (which in the end coughed up the user real name and address). Had the poor sod just used a public terminal, no one would have been able to trace him down.
Indeed Iit would have been smartest to use an usenet group, for there is no central logging of downloaded messages then.
Ahum... 2004 ? Is there something about the word 'News' in the phrase 'News for Nerds' that I do not understand? This list was covered on bbc world nine months ago, and discussed here as well.
Though I must admit, they do stay funny,
If you own both the sending and receiving servers, or use one of the infected army of the drones, there is a miniscule chance of your message even being observed in the ocean of the information that is the internet.
Notice the word 'if'. If you *do not* own both the sending and receiving servers the story is different. For instance if you do not know where your agents are, who they are or when they are on line. The GIA once used an open for all mailing list (or was it usenet?) on football to send orders from Algeria to Paris. There is so much nonsense on this lists (and on Flickr too) that some odd remarks do not catch any attention - except by the one waiting for the message,
No, Disney won't object. But the family of Percival_Lowell may:
It is amazing what you can do remotely with a stolen laptop before the thief notices anything.
Above article is a story about a guy who retreives his sister's computer by using Timbuktu Pro (a VNC like client/server solution for Mac). Same article also mentions this BS:
Sorry, but that doesn't resonate with Absolut's own FAQ. A bit too much absolute absolute maybe?The GIS data is probably from 1830.
Am I missing some?
Postfix
and sometimes ham up national stereotypes in the most hysterical of manners
Pardon me for not being so exact as the average Simpsons quote, but I do remember the joke that Not the nine o'clock news (?) made on their yearly calender (?) when Germany had won the contest with Ein bisschen Friede (a little bit of Peace) way back in 1982:
Germany, the first country to start two world wars within one century and win the eurovision song contest with a song about peace afterwards.
Among us for some time indeed. A friend of mine had a similar problem two or three years ago with a Peugeot. I do not rememember the model, but it was one of the first batches out of the factory.
She had problems with the engine shutting down sporadically while driving (at any speed). This happened one or twice. She went with her car to the garage, and the mechanic told her, blank face, "Known problem. Needs a software upgrade. Come back in two weeks time, we have place in our schedule by then".
Of course she told the guy to give her a replacement car for two weeks - you must be mental to take a car like that into the Dutch rush hour traffic.
The Bible, while not a scientific document (and it does not intend to be one) does hold some VERY accurate, simple scientific truths. While his contemporaries believed the world to be flat (along with science at the time), the prophet Isaiah spoke of "the circle of the earth".
A circle is a 2-dimensional shape, and thus still as flat as a pancake (also a circle by the way). If Isaiah had had spoken about the globe of the earth, or the ball, or even the appel or pomegrade, you might have been right.
The round (as in circle) earth has been a very popular shape in Christian iconography. Feel free to google around for "TO maps" (where the O stands for the shape of the earth, and the T for the rivers dividing it into the tree continents - Asia, Europe and Africa) or visit this non-english page with loads of pretty pictures.
There are web pages out there full of fake email addresses, for just that purpose.
Spammers can get around the problem by putting a URL in the message and using a fake sender address (or your address, for that matter). They don't care if half of their messages are bounced after the open relay they're sent through, because the messages almost never get back to the spammer anyway.
On the fake page that I put up for harvesters, I use these exact URLs to annoy the spammers. The page contains:
(a) e-mail adresses that get generated from a bogus user name + the URL of a spamvertized website (example: Nadeem.Stuffen@spamvertized.com)
(b) links to all these spamvertized websites (http://www.spamvertized.com/ etc.)
This way they will at least, apart from using the resources on zombied PC's, use up some of the resources of their own MXes. And the harvesting spambots will have a swell time harvesting spamvertized sites, instead of the rest of the world.
If this is not a joke, then we'll finally get good support for exporting Illustrator files to Flash!!
Don't get your hopes to high. Have you ever tried to export from Freehand to Flash? Apparently not.
The peak was a year go.
Perhaps this is a "big buyout", but I honestly don't think so.
The Ludicorp people themselves speak of their money troubles (on their Typepad, no less, weblog) "It means that we'll no longer have to draw straws to see who gets paid."
So, my take is that while they do have a vibrant, growing, etc. community of photosharing/social networking, they do not have a sustainable business model.
They may not have a sustainable business model because they never needed one. This isn't Stewart's first buyout: he always called himself 'one of the winners of the Internet lottery'. During the dotcom bubble he created one of those 'follow your ex-schoolmates' sites, that by accident got very popular in India, so was sold off the some party that liked that demography (how's that for outsourcing?).
[beware: I do not posses magic checkbook-x-ray-goggles so I might completely miss the mark here]
It always seemed to me like he used that money to develop the things he wanted to develop more than the things he thought would bring revenue. There was certainly no money, but a lot of fun in gameneverending.
And I don't think the developers will rest quietly after this buyout, no matter how small or big it is. You'd better prepare for more fun in the future.
Less neurotically, both CNet and PCWorld have discussions of the Shuffle's interior spaces.
For a hands-on discussion of the Shuffle's interior space, including lines like "If you remove the wheel like I did in the picture you will never get it back in", see An iPod shuffle on the inside.... Sure beats C|net's stock photo's.
The design magazine Dot Dot Dot once had an issue with a couple of synesthesia-related articles. They had a nice back cover on it, a synesthesia test. Went a bit like (this one is over simplified):
2222222
2225222
2252522
2522252
2252522
2225222
2222222
People with some kinds of synesthesia will clearly see a shape here, not just two's and five's.