then you are willing to put up with a constant low level of dissatisfaction in exchange for a reward of "play time" or "toys".
And 100,000 years ago people were willing to put up with a constant risk of being trampled by a mastodon in exchange for a reward of "dinner". So what.
Put down your bong. You must have been looking at too many blacklight posters back in the 60's. When a IR filter is exposed to infrared wavelengths, it doesn't suddenly create more light, infrared or otherwise.
A piece of black paper makes an excellent filter to stop visible light, but it doesn't shine brilliantly when exposed to light.
Either that, or the scientists were horribly misquoted by the reporter. From TFA:
Specifically, if wind generation were expanded to the point where it produced one-10th of today's energy, the models say cooling in the Arctic and a warming across the southern parts of North America should happen.
The exact mechanism for this is unclear, but the scientists believe it may have to do with the disruption of the flow of heat from the equator to the poles.
So they created a computer model, which when run indicated drastic temperature shifts across the globe. And yet they don't know by which mechanism this occurred???? Obfuscated Code contests aside, if a computer programmer can't figure out out how his program came up with the answer that it produced, then he either lied about his C.S. degree or he's trying to sell you snake oil.
They interviewed 500 people out of 185 million Americans with Internet-enabled computers.
Wouldn't that be called a "statistically insignificant" sample set?
Not at all, if the sample is well chosen. Take a course in statistics to find out why.
Interviewing more people will reduce the margain of error of your results from, say, 10% to 1%, but the overall results will be the same.
If there truly is a nursing shortage, then shouldn't the nurses be putting themselves up for bid? If there are more positions available than there are qualified persons to fill those positions, then the nurses should be posting a *minimum* rate for which they'd work, and the competing hospitals could bid up from there.
Either the nursing shortage doesn't exist, which goes against what I've been reading in the news for at least several years, or this is some scam to bring in more less-qualified nurses and push out the more experienced (and therefore more expensive) ones. Boards of Directors being what they are, I'm guessing the latter. These are two hospitals I would not want to wind up at after an accident.
While you're at it, pick up a copy of Richard Feynman's "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Feynman spent much of WWII at Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb. He devotes part of this book to his work there, including his (usually succesful) attempts to crack the many safes & locked file cabinets found at the base. He was very much a computer hacker in the days before computers.
I'd much rather we provide grants to comericial companies like Scaled Composites where you can gauge results better.
Because as we all know, private companies are much more trustworthy when given a big steaming pile of government money. And how exactly can you gauge the results of a Scaled Composites mission any better than a NASA mission?
If you get a chance, take a ride on the Amtrak Coast Starlight (for non-USA'ns, Amtrak manages what is left of the American passenger train service.) Do it while you can, there's been talk lately of eliminating this money-losing route. The track runs along the beach for much of its route, including the section through Vandenberg Air Force Base. There aren't any public roads through this section of the California coast, so this is the only way to see it without getting a visitor pass to the base. As you go whizzing by, you'll see not just some launch pads, but also the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building, similar to the one NASA has in Florida. Built in the early days of the shuttle program, but then mothballed in favor of the Florida facility.
For example, what *would* be useful, but unlikely, would be to change the string '$1995' to '$2995', but as likely as not, to get it to hash right, you'd end up with like '$#g95' or some other rubbish, even if you managed to get the changed bits to line up with the critical bit of data (in this case a dollar amount). It's more likely that you'd end up changing some word like 'benefactor' to '2knefactor'.
Or, you could get it to hash right by making other, less noticable changes. Extra spaces between words or at the end of the document, extra non-displaying bytes, etc., that won't give away the fact that the original has been tampered with.
Notice that the two plaintext messages that were found by Joux were very similar, large sections of each message were identical. If you can create a plaintext message that looks superficially similar to the original (except that $1995 is now $2995) in significantly less time than would be required using brute force, then that certainly is a big problem.
Re:turnitin.com: wholesale copyright infringement
on
Cheating Made Easy
·
· Score: 1
Even though I don't like the idea of students cheating, I dislike the idea of turnitin.com even more. I manage a web server. It contains (to the best of my knowledge) no plagerized material. Nevertheless, I refuse to allow turnitin spybots to have access to my server. The following lines in/etc/sysconfig/iptables do nicely:
-A INPUT -s 64.140.49.66 -j spybots -A INPUT -s 64.140.49.67 -j spybots -A INPUT -s 64.140.49.68 -j spybots -A INPUT -s 64.140.49.69 -j spybots -A spybots -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
Or to prevent terrorists sneaking bombs into aeroplane service hatches?
Yeah, right.....
You could also just install a keyed lock to prevent access to the service hatch, but that wouldn't create the same profits that you can generate by playing the terrorism card whenever you pitch some useless idea dreamed up by the trained chimps in marketing.
"A loss of 1 percent of the market may not mean much to Microsoft, but it translates into a large growth, proportionately, in the number of users running Mozilla and Netscape-based browsers. Mozilla and Netscape's combined market share has increased by 26 percent, rising from 3.21 percent of the market in June to 4.05 percent in July"
That 1% (0.84% actually) is not the change in the number of users that are using Mozilla, but rather the additional portion of the entire market that is now using Mozilla.
If I sold widgets to 10% of the planet last month, but sold them to 11% of the planet this month, I've still increased the number of customers by 60,000,000.
That's the part that worries me. I typed my first Usenet post over ten years ago, shortly after getting my first internet account (yeah, I know, I was on AOL, but we were all young and stupid once.) What struck me about Usenet was the properties that I soon learned applied to the Internet as a whole: Nobody owns Usenet or its content, nobody can easily regulate or censor Usenet, and Usenet tends to find its way around any distruptions in service (since it's not all stored on one giant server.) One day DajaNews started collecting and saving Usenet posts, making them available through their web site. I found that idea disturbing, sort of like when I saw my first Canter & Segal spam. I quickly realized, however, that given enough disk space and bandwidth I too could archive all the chatter and discourse that is Usenet, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop me. Usenet discussions could theoretically be made immune to virtual book burning.
DejaNews was eventually bought by Google, which continues to archive most of the non-binary groups, as well as provide a web-based portal to Usenet. It does not, however, have the only copy of Usenet. Other companies like Yahoo, Delphi, ( and even Slashdot) have created their own user group systems, accessable only from their servers, and viewable only with a web browser (after all, what good is the Internet if you can't put banner ads on it?) If you don't like the way that your newsreader sorts & displays, you can get a different one, or even write your own. If you don't like the spam posts that Delphi weaves among regular ones, or the spam page that they present to you before allowing you to see a group, tough sh*t. You'll read Delphi postings the way they want you to , or you won't read them at all. If Delphi goes belly up, all their archived posts could go to the highest bidder, or maybe just disappear completely.
Google has always worn the white hats, so far. If they become as popular with these groups that "aren't actual Usenet groups." as they've gotten with their search engine, what happens if Usenet slowly dissappears when everyone jumps on the Googler bandwagon? What happens if this central database, owned by a single company, is no longer freely accessable?
BTW, I highly recommend GigaNews Usenet service. I've used them for about 5 years now; good consistant service, & they never tried to pull anything sneaky.
There's a fairly simple way to make any keylogger useless - one time passwords. I've for some time now had the idea of an extension to VNC that works like this:
- You connect to your PC and press the 'Request password' button.
- A one-time password is sent to your preconfigured cell phone number.
- You log on with this password, and after you're done working you log out, and the password becomes invalid.
This way, it doesn't matter how insecure the computer you're on is. Worst case, the keylogger only gets a useless password.
Except that once you're logged on, the keylogger will still capture everything you do; account numbers, notes to your mistress, etc., which is what you were trying to protect in the first place. And what happens if your cell phone is stolen? The thief has himself a perfectly good one-time password to use at any of these public terminals.
The LA Times has an interesting story today about the Mexican music industry. It is in the process of being destroyed by piracy.
Please note that it's the Mexican music *Industry* that's being hurt. The music continues to be played & recorded, and people are still listening to it. The ones that are being hurt are the middle-men that try to price CDs at the equivelant of $15-$20 U.S., in a country where there average daily wage is about $4. And they wonder why their business model isn't working??
This is "new" tech, in the sense that Las Vegas Monorail will be the first mass-transit application of "driverless" rail systems anywhere in the United States (BART comes close, but somebody still pushes the "close door" button).
Not exactly a rail system, but the PRT that services WVU in Morgantown, WV., has been running for about 30 years now. Driverless, electrically driven cars with rubber tires on a concrete track, powered from a 3rd rail. The tracks are steam-heated in winter. It was a pork-barrel Rockefeller project from day one, and most likely sucks up great piles of federal funds to this day. Being prone to breakdowns, the University still had to keep buses & drivers on constant standby to shuttle students between the two spread-out campuses.
I remember news stories when I was attending college there in the late 70's about how stray dogs would occasionaly manage to get onto the track. The PRT cars, being computer controlled, would soon overtake and squish the pooches without even slowing down, while the passengers watched the whole thing, unable to do anything about it.
Wow, could it cost a little bit more? $3 a ride! $40 for 3 days? No week pass?
It's clearly marketed to the weekend tourists, rather than the local commuters. Tourists, many of whom fly in for the weekend, like to travel around town (no point in giving all your money to one casino when there are so many needy casino's in town). Now you've got a choice of a quick $3 monorail ride, a $8 cab fare through grid-locked streets, or hoofing it in the 100+ degree sun. It's a no-brainer. Once they do get it to the airport (around 2007 or so), it'll be the best thing to hit Vegas since the machine-gun shooting range.
Scientific American has become a shallow, dumbed-down, replacement of what it was for many, many years; a collection of serious and in-depth articles covering scientific discoveries of the time.
My Dad kept every issue back in the 60's, frequently referring back to them during his many forays in the world of physics, math, & chemistry. They were twice as thick as the current issues, with almost zero advertisements. The magazine today is only a small step above Popular Science, probably closer to Omni magazine.
A quick Google turns up eurionize
, a perl script that adds the anti-copying constellation of circles to any Postscript file. (Haven't tried it out yet). I'm sure someone could quickly print out some of those iron-on sheets for T-shirts.
This is something that would be built near a feedlot, where there are thousands of cows in a small area. The bulldozers would just take the manure to the lagoon instead of piling it into huge mountains like they do now.
I'm assuming you're not talking about RFID tags worn by hikers, but rather a motion sensor at each trail junction that records anything that passes.
Even if you figure out how to keep them all running, what with temperature extremes, solar panels, wireless connections to home, vandalism, etc., all you'll wind up with is useless data. The mere fact that something passed a trail junction does you no good, especially if you don't even know if was a human or a deer.
Since resources are limited, you would initially place them in areas that have a history of search & rescue incidents. Those also tend to be the areas with the most traffic. (Nobody's going to install & maintain something like this in an area that gets one search & rescue case every 4 years.) Once the number of hikers gets to be in the same ballpark as the number of sensors, you'll be buried in noise with no way to tell which blip belongs to your search target.
Of course if you are talking about attaching RFID tags to every hiker (maybe a big numbered tag stapled to our ear, just like the park bears), it also won't work, because sure as sh*t I'll be out there the very next day with my pipe cutter mowing them down just like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.
Other than fans & hard drives, I don't think I've ever heard noise from any machine I've ever worked on, though back in the old days we would hold an AM radio next to the computer, which would give very distinct noise patterns as the CPU went about its business.
If you really want to do some acoustic evesdropping, listen to the keyboard. It's got a much larger signal to begin with (from across the room, instead of having to paste your ear to the computer case.) Since there are always slight mechanical differences between keys on any given keyboard, I would think that the sound spectrum would also be slightly different. Being able to always listen in on the same user would also help, since most people are somewhat consistent regarding which finger they use on which key. (Evesdropping on people who were smart enough to take a touch-typing class in high school is also a big plus.)
Assuming you could discern between the acoustic fingerprint of 100 different keys, then it's just a matter of figuring out which sound goes with which key. It's a simple substitution cypher, which are almost trivial to break.
Sneak your cell phone into your boss's office, set it to silent mode and plug in a headset so that you can set it to auto-answer when a call comes in. Then, while your boss is busy typing dirty notes to his mistress, you call your cell phone, start recording it, and presto, you've got a keylogger without ever having touch his computer or the software on it. Then, at your next performance review, you convince him to give you a hefty raise.
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And 100,000 years ago people were willing to put up with a constant risk of being trampled by a mastodon in exchange for a reward of "dinner". So what.
Put down your bong. You must have been looking at too many blacklight posters back in the 60's. When a IR filter is exposed to infrared wavelengths, it doesn't suddenly create more light, infrared or otherwise.
A piece of black paper makes an excellent filter to stop visible light, but it doesn't shine brilliantly when exposed to light.
Specifically, if wind generation were expanded to the point where it produced one-10th of today's energy, the models say cooling in the Arctic and a warming across the southern parts of North America should happen. The exact mechanism for this is unclear, but the scientists believe it may have to do with the disruption of the flow of heat from the equator to the poles.
So they created a computer model, which when run indicated drastic temperature shifts across the globe. And yet they don't know by which mechanism this occurred????
Obfuscated Code contests aside, if a computer programmer can't figure out out how his program came up with the answer that it produced, then he either lied about his C.S. degree or he's trying to sell you snake oil.
They interviewed 500 people out of 185 million Americans with Internet-enabled computers. Wouldn't that be called a "statistically insignificant" sample set? Not at all, if the sample is well chosen. Take a course in statistics to find out why.
Interviewing more people will reduce the margain of error of your results from, say, 10% to 1%, but the overall results will be the same.
If there truly is a nursing shortage, then shouldn't the nurses be putting themselves up for bid? If there are more positions available than there are qualified persons to fill those positions, then the nurses should be posting a *minimum* rate for which they'd work, and the competing hospitals could bid up from there.
Either the nursing shortage doesn't exist, which goes against what I've been reading in the news for at least several years, or this is some scam to bring in more less-qualified nurses and push out the more experienced (and therefore more expensive) ones.
Boards of Directors being what they are, I'm guessing the latter. These are two hospitals I would not want to wind up at after an accident.
While you're at it, pick up a copy of Richard Feynman's "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman."
In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Feynman spent much of WWII at Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb. He devotes part of this book to his work there, including his (usually succesful) attempts to crack the many safes & locked file cabinets found at the base. He was very much a computer hacker in the days before computers.
Because as we all know, private companies are much more trustworthy when given a big steaming pile of government money. And how exactly can you gauge the results of a Scaled Composites mission any better than a NASA mission?
For the clueless: rpm means Revolutions Per Minute. 15rpm is one revolution every 4 seconds, barely faster than a merry-go-round.
If you get a chance, take a ride on the Amtrak Coast Starlight (for non-USA'ns, Amtrak manages what is left of the American passenger train service.) Do it while you can, there's been talk lately of eliminating this money-losing route. The track runs along the beach for much of its route, including the section through Vandenberg Air Force Base. There aren't any public roads through this section of the California coast, so this is the only way to see it without getting a visitor pass to the base. As you go whizzing by, you'll see not just some launch pads, but also the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building, similar to the one NASA has in Florida. Built in the early days of the shuttle program, but then mothballed in favor of the Florida facility.
Or, you could get it to hash right by making other, less noticable changes. Extra spaces between words or at the end of the document, extra non-displaying bytes, etc., that won't give away the fact that the original has been tampered with.
Notice that the two plaintext messages that were found by Joux were very similar, large sections of each message were identical. If you can create a plaintext message that looks superficially similar to the original (except that $1995 is now $2995) in significantly less time than would be required using brute force, then that certainly is a big problem.
Or to prevent terrorists sneaking bombs into aeroplane service hatches? Yeah, right.....
You could also just install a keyed lock to prevent access to the service hatch, but that wouldn't create the same profits that you can generate by playing the terrorism card whenever you pitch some useless idea dreamed up by the trained chimps in marketing.
"A loss of 1 percent of the market may not mean much to Microsoft, but it translates into a large growth, proportionately, in the number of users running Mozilla and Netscape-based browsers. Mozilla and Netscape's combined market share has increased by 26 percent, rising from 3.21 percent of the market in June to 4.05 percent in July"
That 1% (0.84% actually) is not the change in the number of users that are using Mozilla, but rather the additional portion of the entire market that is now using Mozilla.
If I sold widgets to 10% of the planet last month, but sold them to 11% of the planet this month, I've still increased the number of customers by 60,000,000.
That's the part that worries me. I typed my first Usenet post over ten years ago, shortly after getting my first internet account (yeah, I know, I was on AOL, but we were all young and stupid once.) What struck me about Usenet was the properties that I soon learned applied to the Internet as a whole: Nobody owns Usenet or its content, nobody can easily regulate or censor Usenet, and Usenet tends to find its way around any distruptions in service (since it's not all stored on one giant server.) One day DajaNews started collecting and saving Usenet posts, making them available through their web site. I found that idea disturbing, sort of like when I saw my first Canter & Segal spam. I quickly realized, however, that given enough disk space and bandwidth I too could archive all the chatter and discourse that is Usenet, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop me. Usenet discussions could theoretically be made immune to virtual book burning.
DejaNews was eventually bought by Google, which continues to archive most of the non-binary groups, as well as provide a web-based portal to Usenet. It does not, however, have the only copy of Usenet. Other companies like Yahoo, Delphi, ( and even Slashdot) have created their own user group systems, accessable only from their servers, and viewable only with a web browser (after all, what good is the Internet if you can't put banner ads on it?) If you don't like the way that your newsreader sorts & displays, you can get a different one, or even write your own. If you don't like the spam posts that Delphi weaves among regular ones, or the spam page that they present to you before allowing you to see a group, tough sh*t. You'll read Delphi postings the way they want you to , or you won't read them at all. If Delphi goes belly up, all their archived posts could go to the highest bidder, or maybe just disappear completely.
Google has always worn the white hats, so far. If they become as popular with these groups that "aren't actual Usenet groups." as they've gotten with their search engine, what happens if Usenet slowly dissappears when everyone jumps on the Googler bandwagon? What happens if this central database, owned by a single company, is no longer freely accessable?
BTW, I highly recommend GigaNews Usenet service. I've used them for about 5 years now; good consistant service, & they never tried to pull anything sneaky.
- You connect to your PC and press the 'Request password' button.
- A one-time password is sent to your preconfigured cell phone number.
- You log on with this password, and after you're done working you log out, and the password becomes invalid.
This way, it doesn't matter how insecure the computer you're on is. Worst case, the keylogger only gets a useless password.
Except that once you're logged on, the keylogger will still capture everything you do; account numbers, notes to your mistress, etc., which is what you were trying to protect in the first place. And what happens if your cell phone is stolen? The thief has himself a perfectly good one-time password to use at any of these public terminals.
Please note that it's the Mexican music *Industry* that's being hurt. The music continues to be played & recorded, and people are still listening to it. The ones that are being hurt are the middle-men that try to price CDs at the equivelant of $15-$20 U.S., in a country where there average daily wage is about $4. And they wonder why their business model isn't working??
Not exactly a rail system, but the PRT that services WVU in Morgantown, WV., has been running for about 30 years now. Driverless, electrically driven cars with rubber tires on a concrete track, powered from a 3rd rail. The tracks are steam-heated in winter. It was a pork-barrel Rockefeller project from day one, and most likely sucks up great piles of federal funds to this day. Being prone to breakdowns, the University still had to keep buses & drivers on constant standby to shuttle students between the two spread-out campuses.
I remember news stories when I was attending college there in the late 70's about how stray dogs would occasionaly manage to get onto the track. The PRT cars, being computer controlled, would soon overtake and squish the pooches without even slowing down, while the passengers watched the whole thing, unable to do anything about it.
It's clearly marketed to the weekend tourists, rather than the local commuters. Tourists, many of whom fly in for the weekend, like to travel around town (no point in giving all your money to one casino when there are so many needy casino's in town). Now you've got a choice of a quick $3 monorail ride, a $8 cab fare through grid-locked streets, or hoofing it in the 100+ degree sun. It's a no-brainer.
Once they do get it to the airport (around 2007 or so), it'll be the best thing to hit Vegas since the machine-gun shooting range.
Scientific American has become a shallow, dumbed-down, replacement of what it was for many, many years; a collection of serious and in-depth articles covering scientific discoveries of the time.
My Dad kept every issue back in the 60's, frequently referring back to them during his many forays in the world of physics, math, & chemistry. They were twice as thick as the current issues, with almost zero advertisements. The magazine today is only a small step above Popular Science, probably closer to Omni magazine.
Absolutely true. There is still some debate, however, as to exactly which half.
A quick Google turns up eurionize , a perl script that adds the anti-copying constellation of circles to any Postscript file. (Haven't tried it out yet). I'm sure someone could quickly print out some of those iron-on sheets for T-shirts.
This is something that would be built near a feedlot, where there are thousands of cows in a small area. The bulldozers would just take the manure to the lagoon instead of piling it into huge mountains like they do now.
Going back as far as last week
Even if you figure out how to keep them all running, what with temperature extremes, solar panels, wireless connections to home, vandalism, etc., all you'll wind up with is useless data. The mere fact that something passed a trail junction does you no good, especially if you don't even know if was a human or a deer.
Since resources are limited, you would initially place them in areas that have a history of search & rescue incidents. Those also tend to be the areas with the most traffic. (Nobody's going to install & maintain something like this in an area that gets one search & rescue case every 4 years.) Once the number of hikers gets to be in the same ballpark as the number of sensors, you'll be buried in noise with no way to tell which blip belongs to your search target.
Of course if you are talking about attaching RFID tags to every hiker (maybe a big numbered tag stapled to our ear, just like the park bears), it also won't work, because sure as sh*t I'll be out there the very next day with my pipe cutter mowing them down just like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.
If you really want to do some acoustic evesdropping, listen to the keyboard. It's got a much larger signal to begin with (from across the room, instead of having to paste your ear to the computer case.) Since there are always slight mechanical differences between keys on any given keyboard, I would think that the sound spectrum would also be slightly different. Being able to always listen in on the same user would also help, since most people are somewhat consistent regarding which finger they use on which key. (Evesdropping on people who were smart enough to take a touch-typing class in high school is also a big plus.)
Assuming you could discern between the acoustic fingerprint of 100 different keys, then it's just a matter of figuring out which sound goes with which key. It's a simple substitution cypher, which are almost trivial to break.
Sneak your cell phone into your boss's office, set it to silent mode and plug in a headset so that you can set it to auto-answer when a call comes in. Then, while your boss is busy typing dirty notes to his mistress, you call your cell phone, start recording it, and presto, you've got a keylogger without ever having touch his computer or the software on it. Then, at your next performance review, you convince him to give you a hefty raise.