They probably gave him older equipment that was due to be sold as surplus. It's easy to find that sort of thing on eBay or at university auctions for surprisingly low prices.
As long as someone doesn't mind using a device that's a lot bigger and clunkier than the brand-new equivalent (and is off-warranty, and probably past due for calibration), it's a great way to get ahold of things that would normally be out of reach for non-professionals.
The University of Washington has so much unwanted equipment like this that not only do they have regular auctions, but they actually have a large store that's open to the public on certain days of the month. The store is incredibly overpriced, especially since most of the equipment is incomplete and/or untested, but a lot of highly specialized (older) equipment is sold at very reasonable prices at the auctions.
Anyway, given the low interest in fields like physics among the general population, I'm not at all surprised that staff there thought it was worthwhile to encourage someone who obviously has a talent for it.
"There's nothing illegal about owning and being proud of guns (at least in the US)...so I don't get this comment on the article."
You are joking, right? And it just went over my head?
There are plenty of people in the US who hate guns to the point that if they saw a photo of a job applicant online with one or more firearms, they would discount them immediately, just like there are plenty of people in the US who would discount an applicant immediately if they saw a photo online revealing that underneath the long-sleeved shirt they were wearing to the interview, they had tattoos.
It doesn't have to be illegal to be something that you might not want to broadcast to the world. But that's true of whether there is a company dredging things up using automated tools or not.
Land's End could probably do that because their clothes are their own label (or at least they were the last time I checked, which was quite awhile ago). Retailers who sell clothes made by other companies are often required to display them in a way that meets various requirements of the manufacturer. Some of them require that only photos they provide to the retailers be used. Some allow the retailer to shoot their own photos, but require approval of the models used and/or the photos that are taken. The really picky ones don't allow their merchandise to be sold online *at all* - the buyer has to physically go to a store just to see it.
I don't think this somewhat-fancy mannequin would meet any of those requirements either, but that's why it will probably be awhile before you see anything like you're describing at more than a handful of online stores.
"Either the Shuttle is larger than I thought, or the ISS is smaller than I thought."
The Shuttle is surprisingly large. When I was younger, I always had an image in my mind of it being closer to a large business jet or a school bus with wings in terms of size. I saw the full-scale mockups in Florida and Texas last summer, and was shocked. It's actually closer to the size of a single-aisle airliner.
I think the reason for my earlier perception is that I'd seen photos of the Shuttle on its 747 carrier before, but was picturing the relative scale as if the carrier were a 727 or MD-80.
I understand why it's being retired, and that it wasn't super-efficient, but seeing one in person made me appreciate even more just what sort of engineering it took to get something that big into orbit, as opposed to a capsule.
"Seriously, if someone has your password hash, it's game over anyway and it doesn't matter if it takes 2 weeks or 2 months to guess the passwords. And if they don't, then you shouldn't be letting them try several BILLION attempts at guessing a password anyway."
Actually, it does matter how long it takes. If the passwords can't be cracked in less time than it takes them to expire, then it doesn't really matter who has the hashes.
I've been using passphrases for the last 3-4 years. They're at least 15 characters long - usually in the mid-20s - and I don't need to write them down to remember them. Whether they use special characters or not, I don't think anyone is going to be building a rainbow table that big any time soon.
While I'd like to believe that most police officers are decent people - the ones I've met certainly seem to be - it seems like virtually every police department in the country is willing to help protect their members from punishment for this sort of behaviour. You didn't see police officers in Seattle saying "hey, most of us don't stomp on handcuffed Mexicans while using racial slurs" or "most of us aren't actually one-man homeless-person slaughtering machines - we want that ex-officer to go to jail just like the rest of you", and I am convinced you won't see any in Miami decrying the actions of these thugs either.
Whenever there is public scrutiny of police behaviour, they will throw up the "blue wall of silence", regardless of how obviously in the wrong the officer(s) in question were.
By staying silent - or worse, actively supporting police union protection of obviously out-of-control cops, or participating in get-out-of-jail-free situations for family and friends of other cops - they are making themselves part of the problem instead of setting an example and inspiring confidence in what they're supposed to represent.
This happens so frequently now that I can't really blame anyone who picks up the "I hate cops" sentiment.
What are you basing these claims on? Lucas has stated that he never wrote any story for Episodes 7-9, just that *decades ago* the plan was to eventually have nine films.
I've seen some of the very early versions of the story, from back when it was about Anakin Starkiller. While I could see a lot of the bits and pieces that became the six films he eventually made, there didn't seem to be anything beyond that, so I tend to believe his claim.
"The permutations for users to tokens to guessing PINs is still astronomical unless an insider was involved that had access to the securid database."
Maybe. But if you think about it, there are approaches that would only require a lot of attempts, not an "astronomical" number. If you know the username of an employee and whatever Lockheed-Martin's helpdesk uses for verification (last four SSN digits or whatever), you can have their password and SecurID PIN reset. Then just try that PIN with every cloned token in your possession. Trying different PINs with the same token will cause a lockout, but will trying each token once with the same PIN? I'm pretty sure that would go unnoticed, especially if the attempts were made from different proxy servers to mask the source IP all being the same.
It could also be that RSA had network captures or SecurID database backups or something along those lines *from* Lockheed-Martin that were sent in for troubleshooting purposes, and *those* were stolen as well.
"The VISOR detected electromagnetic signals across the entire EM spectrum between 1 Hz and 100,000 THz"
As much as I thought the VISOR was a cool concept (which got me interested in multispectral imaging back when I was a kid), unless I'm doing the math wrong, I think someone just made those numbers up (and I don't mean the Star Trek scriptwriters). 100,000 THz (100 PHz, right?) doesn't even get you all of the way through X-rays, let alone into gamma territory.
Also, is it even possible for something that small to detect radio waves of 1 Hz? That's a wavelength of 300 million meters, according to this calculator.
It's hard to tell for sure because of the depth-of-field effect applied to the rendering (which I imagine was the reason they used that effect), but it seems like the quality of the model drops off dramatically the further you get from looking straight down. In the few unblurred street-level frames I caught of the high-resolution video, it's almost as though I'm looking at a clay model of the city which has had really high-quality texturemaps applied to it.
It's still pretty cool, but I don't think anyone is going to be using it to generate FPS maps to play in. It looks like it *might* be good enough to use as the distant background behind hand-built models of the same location, but again, that DOF blur makes it hard to tell.
They seem to have the texture part down pretty well. Maybe they could add a LIDAR system to the drone to improve the model itself?
When I hear people saying "the next big thing" is people bringing in their own devices, my first reaction is that those people are assuming that using their personal devices will be "better", because they won't be locked-down the way managed IT hardware is. But I don't see how that's significantly different or better than just giving employees admin/root access to their own machines. At least with the latter, the devices aren't going back and forth between the (hopefully) firewalled/proxied corporate environment and the wild west of their home network.
What I think is more likely is that aside from limited access (email, maybe web browsing), the criteria for bringing their own devices in will be so onerous that they would rather have separate devices after all, rather than accept the new limitations on using their personal devices. After all, if it were cost-effective to support unmanaged systems, business IT would already be run that way.
"Due to how badly Gibson's big screen adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic butchered the original story, I am worried this too will tarnish my memories of William Gibson's works."
When I was younger, I was somewhat mystified as to why Gibson's stories seemed so amazing on paper, but disappointing to me on the screen.
It wasn't until almost a decade later that I remembered something he'd said when I interviewed him back in the late 90s. I don't remember his exact wording, but it was something like "when someone is reading a novel, they're getting a completely custom, one-off 'film' in their mind".
Suddenly, I had a shocking realization: it wasn't that the people adapting his work for film or television were doing a terrible job of it. It was that I was imagining a very different fictional world than the one he actually wrote about.
In my mind (and a lot of peoples', I think), the world of Neuromancer is grim and bleak. That is, it not only looks like Bladerunner, but it makes its fictional inhabitants feel the way watching Bladerunner makes us feel.
What I've started to believe is that this is not really the case for Gibson himself. There is certainly a lot of the look of Bladerunner in Neuromancer (they draw on the same inspirations, like Heavy Metal comics), but there is also a huge helping of quirky humour, like the Rastafarian space station (or if you go back to Johnny Mnemonic (the short story) itself, elements like the "Aryan Reggae Band").
When I read Neuromancer, those elements are sort of in the background - little one-offs that briefly lighten the mood, like Sebastian's "I make friends!" line in Bladerunner, or the way Doctor Who will have a funny scene right before stabbing the viewer in the gut with something sad. But I think Gibson intended them as being close to (if not fully) on equal footing with the more serious aspects.
If you watch Johnny Mnemonic (the film), or either of the X-Files episodes that Gibson wrote with this in mind, I think you'll see what I mean. All of them are set in a world that looks grim and gritty, but the story itself is actually not. Sort of like The Fifth Element, another Heavy Metal-inspired film.
Anyway, I don't know if I'm right, but the more I think about it, the more I believe I am. Just follow the trail that each of his successive novels points in. Each one is more fantastical and less-serious overall than the previous one.
Track down the shooting script for Johnny Mnemonic - the one that Gibson himself claims is much closer to his original vision for the film. It's really not substantially different than what ended up on screen, at least in the ways that I'm thinking of.
"You can crash cars on the highway today with a well-aimed laser pointer or a few bricks, if that rocks your boat."
Laser pointers and bricks are easy to follow back to their point of origin, because someone has to be actively using them. It's a lot harder for regular people to figure out where a radio transmission is coming from, and it's a lot easier to set up a time-delayed, battery-powered radio transmitter that will interfere with a system like this than the laser or brick equivalent.
"Broken bones: something that bounces off bone and can detect the time to travel which will determine fractures and breaks. If you're using a flat scanning device, everything needs to bounce off something inside the body, rather than pass through and imprint itself on x-ray paper, etc."
I'm thinking it would be a challenge - at best - to find something other than X-rays that will pass through skin but not bone. Why not just add a "medical tricorder"-style hand gadget that emits X-rays, put that on one side of the area to be imaged, and the "tricorder" (which would act as the digital X-ray "film" plate) on the other?
Make the whole back panel of the "tricorder" flip up to reveal the X-ray imaging plate, like the panel on the back of Soviet Geiger counters that flips up for when you want to detect beta radiation.
"Neither is email, so I guess if you could read everyone's email that wouldn't be a weakness either. Get off your high horse, the URL is supposed to be the equivalent of an email account password, if you have it you can access the files otherwise not. You have to make sure only the right people have the URL, but anything that lets others grab the file anyway is obviously a goatse-class backdoor just as if gmail or hotmail was wide open."
I've heard this argument before, and here's the reason I'm skeptical of it:
The password for an email account or website can be transmitted encrypted, so that even if someone intercepts the communication, they don't know the password. This may not *always* be the case, but its the intent of the systems design in most cases.
Treating the URL as "secret" is different because anything that captures it in-between the client and destination host can record it and use it for any purpose it likes, and it may not even be with malicious intent (because URLs aren't supposed to contain "secret" information).
For example, let's say your company runs both a search engine *and* a free-as-in-not-really-but-close-enough-for-most-people email service. Given all the other parsing of email that your service does to generate "relevant" ads, don't you think it would make sense to look for URLs in emails and add those to the indexer for your search engine? There is still plenty of content online that won't be found by simply spidering websites, because in order to get to it, the user has to submit a form or have javascript executing in an actual DOM or whatever, so doing that would be very likely to increase the amount of useful content indexed by your search engine. But all of a sudden, poof, that "secret" Flickr URL is no longer secret, and anyone uses that search engine can find it.
In terms of more malicious intent, consider that there's nothing stopping Google or Microsoft (or other search engine companies) from hosting a bunch of Tor exit nodes, and adding any URLs that pass through *those* to their search indexers, or paying major corporations to funnel URLs from corporate proxy logs to them for the same purpose. I'm not saying they do either of those things, just that there's no reason they couldn't, and I would have a hard time seeing it as truly "wrong", given that URLs aren't supposed to be treated as secret.
"I never saw any good reason why HTTP Referrers and user-agent headers were ever included in the HTTP spec in the first place. The first is extraneous information and the second is contrary to a Web based on open standards (and tends to help malicious sites know which exploits to use)."
The referrer is useful for a number of reasons. Beyond the obvious one (statistical information), this is helpful for setting up mechanisms to help prevent people hot-linking to images (or other content) on your site. For people who have transfer caps or surcharges, it's really frustrating to have a significant part of that taken up by people who hot-link to your images for use as forum icons or other heavily-used things which don't benefit your site in any way.
re: the user-agent header - just because the web is supposedly based on open standards doesn't mean users should all get the same content. Ideally they should all be able to *choose* to access the same content, but most people are going to be happier if a website detects that they're using a smartphone and sends them a version of the content optimized for display on a smaller screen.
I've known a couple of people with schizophrenia and other psychoses, and when they were in the middle of an episode, they would often recall trivial details from the past and incorporate them into what they were talking about. It was actually a little unnerving, sometimes, and I'm someone who tends to remember trivial details better than most people. I didn't really make the "eidetic memory" connection until reading this article. I always assumed that it was just a random sampling of trivia that they had remembered like that. I can easily imagine a brain getting overwhelmed if they're actually dealing with a flood of information at that level of detail.
VBScript is included with any version of Windows you're likely to be working with, is mature, and stable. That having been said, it has the boneheaded pre-.NET Visual Basic syntax, so you may hate yourself for choosing it.
PowerShell is either included with or available as an add-on for most versions of Windows you're likely to be working with. It has a much nicer syntax that is inspired by several Unix/Linux scripting languages, and can make use of.NET assemblies, which is *very* powerful. However, my experience with it was that it wasn't 100% ready for primetime. I've written hundreds of VBScripts, but before I'd hit ten PowerShell scripts, I ran across a nasty bug related to one of the wildcard syntaces (is that even a word?) that the language supports - if I tried to use a for loop to iterate through a list of directories, and any of the directory names included square brackets, I was basically out of luck. There had been a workaround in older versions of PS, but not in the one I was using. Maybe MS eventually fixed this, but if so it literally took years.
In an ideal world, I'd recommend PowerShell, because it can do a lot more, and typically with less script code. But I play it safe by sticking with VBScript, at least until the issues with PS are worked out.
".NET compatibility in mono these days is steller."
I have to agree. The only area I've run into trouble in general is with the XML parser. Apparently the Mono team wrote their own, completely redesigned XML libraries, and so there are areas where it behaves differently than.NET in really weird ways.
For example, up until about a month ago, if you tried to read UTF-16-encoded XML from a MemoryStream, it would fail, indicating that the first character (the XML byte order marker, I believe) was invalid. I opened a ticket about that and it was partially fixed, but the issue still crops up in some cases. When it breaks, it does so so badly that it somehow screws up the rendering of WinForms, so that text and other elements are missing, even when the XML part of the code had nothing to do with the GUI. The same code works fine under the actual.NET framework.
I've also had issues on Kubuntu (and I assume Ubuntu) with the default font being of a very different size than the one on Windows (or OpenSUSE), so text gets cut off, but I figure there's an easy fix for that.
"Where do you change settings.... edit>preferences, or tools>options?"
On Windows and other sanely-laid-out operating systems it's supposed to always be under Tools -> Options, because changing settings has nothing to do with editing the file. That was something that bugged me about MacOS even back in the olden days before there was a Windows or Linux.
"Find is under edit, not view?"
Find is under Edit, because Find is a subset of Find/Replace, which is an editing operation. It doesn't make any more sense to put them both under View, because Replace is an editing command.
"And print preview is under file, instead of view? Why is print a file command at all?"
Because printing the file is a file I/O operation, not interacting with it or viewing it. It makes sense to group the printing commands together, and Print Preview is the only one that could sort of be argued to be a View-type operation.
"And why is import, when paste is under edit?"
Import is another file I/O operation, whereas Paste is not. Clipboard operations (like Paste) are all under the Edit menu, because they're related to editing the current document. That would be true whether there were an OS-level clipboard or one that's just confined to the application.
"Come on, towards the end they were just cramming in new commands wherever they'd fit."
Overall, I think the ribbon is a bit of a wash - it's probably better in some ways, and worse in others.
But there is one thing that *really* annoys me, and that's the microscopic unlabeled button in the lower-right corner of some of the panes in the Office ribbons. I didn't even know it was a button until I read a tutorial about how to do something that required functionality in a window that one of them opens.
On my monitor at work, I couldn't even tell what it was supposed to represent. I thought it was just a little square. On my larger monitor at home, I can see that it's a frame with an arrow pointing outward, indicating that it is going to open a larger window of some kind. But without knowing that in advance, it's incredibly unintuitive and therefore a poor design.
"You should NEVER, EVER, EVER allow an officer of the law, under any circumstances what-so-ever, to search your person, your belongings, or your car. Clearly this includes your mobile phone as well."
While this is a laudable ideal, how likely is it* to just result in being detained for a few hours while the cop gets a search warrant because obviously you have something to hide if you don't consent to a search?
*Especially in certain Midwest states like Minnesota with rabid state troopers who pull over anyone with an out-of-state plate.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably gave him older equipment that was due to be sold as surplus. It's easy to find that sort of thing on eBay or at university auctions for surprisingly low prices.
As long as someone doesn't mind using a device that's a lot bigger and clunkier than the brand-new equivalent (and is off-warranty, and probably past due for calibration), it's a great way to get ahold of things that would normally be out of reach for non-professionals.
The University of Washington has so much unwanted equipment like this that not only do they have regular auctions, but they actually have a large store that's open to the public on certain days of the month. The store is incredibly overpriced, especially since most of the equipment is incomplete and/or untested, but a lot of highly specialized (older) equipment is sold at very reasonable prices at the auctions.
Anyway, given the low interest in fields like physics among the general population, I'm not at all surprised that staff there thought it was worthwhile to encourage someone who obviously has a talent for it.
"There's nothing illegal about owning and being proud of guns (at least in the US)...so I don't get this comment on the article."
You are joking, right? And it just went over my head?
There are plenty of people in the US who hate guns to the point that if they saw a photo of a job applicant online with one or more firearms, they would discount them immediately, just like there are plenty of people in the US who would discount an applicant immediately if they saw a photo online revealing that underneath the long-sleeved shirt they were wearing to the interview, they had tattoos.
It doesn't have to be illegal to be something that you might not want to broadcast to the world. But that's true of whether there is a company dredging things up using automated tools or not.
Land's End could probably do that because their clothes are their own label (or at least they were the last time I checked, which was quite awhile ago). Retailers who sell clothes made by other companies are often required to display them in a way that meets various requirements of the manufacturer. Some of them require that only photos they provide to the retailers be used. Some allow the retailer to shoot their own photos, but require approval of the models used and/or the photos that are taken. The really picky ones don't allow their merchandise to be sold online *at all* - the buyer has to physically go to a store just to see it.
I don't think this somewhat-fancy mannequin would meet any of those requirements either, but that's why it will probably be awhile before you see anything like you're describing at more than a handful of online stores.
"Either the Shuttle is larger than I thought, or the ISS is smaller than I thought."
The Shuttle is surprisingly large. When I was younger, I always had an image in my mind of it being closer to a large business jet or a school bus with wings in terms of size. I saw the full-scale mockups in Florida and Texas last summer, and was shocked. It's actually closer to the size of a single-aisle airliner.
I think the reason for my earlier perception is that I'd seen photos of the Shuttle on its 747 carrier before, but was picturing the relative scale as if the carrier were a 727 or MD-80.
I understand why it's being retired, and that it wasn't super-efficient, but seeing one in person made me appreciate even more just what sort of engineering it took to get something that big into orbit, as opposed to a capsule.
"Seriously, if someone has your password hash, it's game over anyway and it doesn't matter if it takes 2 weeks or 2 months to guess the passwords. And if they don't, then you shouldn't be letting them try several BILLION attempts at guessing a password anyway."
Actually, it does matter how long it takes. If the passwords can't be cracked in less time than it takes them to expire, then it doesn't really matter who has the hashes.
I've been using passphrases for the last 3-4 years. They're at least 15 characters long - usually in the mid-20s - and I don't need to write them down to remember them. Whether they use special characters or not, I don't think anyone is going to be building a rainbow table that big any time soon.
While I'd like to believe that most police officers are decent people - the ones I've met certainly seem to be - it seems like virtually every police department in the country is willing to help protect their members from punishment for this sort of behaviour. You didn't see police officers in Seattle saying "hey, most of us don't stomp on handcuffed Mexicans while using racial slurs" or "most of us aren't actually one-man homeless-person slaughtering machines - we want that ex-officer to go to jail just like the rest of you", and I am convinced you won't see any in Miami decrying the actions of these thugs either.
Whenever there is public scrutiny of police behaviour, they will throw up the "blue wall of silence", regardless of how obviously in the wrong the officer(s) in question were.
By staying silent - or worse, actively supporting police union protection of obviously out-of-control cops, or participating in get-out-of-jail-free situations for family and friends of other cops - they are making themselves part of the problem instead of setting an example and inspiring confidence in what they're supposed to represent.
This happens so frequently now that I can't really blame anyone who picks up the "I hate cops" sentiment.
What are you basing these claims on? Lucas has stated that he never wrote any story for Episodes 7-9, just that *decades ago* the plan was to eventually have nine films.
I've seen some of the very early versions of the story, from back when it was about Anakin Starkiller. While I could see a lot of the bits and pieces that became the six films he eventually made, there didn't seem to be anything beyond that, so I tend to believe his claim.
"Why lead? My phones don't emit beta and gamma radiation... Where the hell are you getting your cellphones? The corner dealer in Chernobyl?"
I think you're on to something with the "gamma radiation cellphone" concept. No more signal loss just because you're in the middle of downtown!
"The permutations for users to tokens to guessing PINs is still astronomical unless an insider was involved that had access to the securid database."
Maybe. But if you think about it, there are approaches that would only require a lot of attempts, not an "astronomical" number. If you know the username of an employee and whatever Lockheed-Martin's helpdesk uses for verification (last four SSN digits or whatever), you can have their password and SecurID PIN reset. Then just try that PIN with every cloned token in your possession. Trying different PINs with the same token will cause a lockout, but will trying each token once with the same PIN? I'm pretty sure that would go unnoticed, especially if the attempts were made from different proxy servers to mask the source IP all being the same.
It could also be that RSA had network captures or SecurID database backups or something along those lines *from* Lockheed-Martin that were sent in for troubleshooting purposes, and *those* were stolen as well.
"The VISOR detected electromagnetic signals across the entire EM spectrum between 1 Hz and 100,000 THz"
As much as I thought the VISOR was a cool concept (which got me interested in multispectral imaging back when I was a kid), unless I'm doing the math wrong, I think someone just made those numbers up (and I don't mean the Star Trek scriptwriters). 100,000 THz (100 PHz, right?) doesn't even get you all of the way through X-rays, let alone into gamma territory.
Also, is it even possible for something that small to detect radio waves of 1 Hz? That's a wavelength of 300 million meters, according to this calculator.
It's hard to tell for sure because of the depth-of-field effect applied to the rendering (which I imagine was the reason they used that effect), but it seems like the quality of the model drops off dramatically the further you get from looking straight down. In the few unblurred street-level frames I caught of the high-resolution video, it's almost as though I'm looking at a clay model of the city which has had really high-quality texturemaps applied to it.
It's still pretty cool, but I don't think anyone is going to be using it to generate FPS maps to play in. It looks like it *might* be good enough to use as the distant background behind hand-built models of the same location, but again, that DOF blur makes it hard to tell.
They seem to have the texture part down pretty well. Maybe they could add a LIDAR system to the drone to improve the model itself?
When I hear people saying "the next big thing" is people bringing in their own devices, my first reaction is that those people are assuming that using their personal devices will be "better", because they won't be locked-down the way managed IT hardware is. But I don't see how that's significantly different or better than just giving employees admin/root access to their own machines. At least with the latter, the devices aren't going back and forth between the (hopefully) firewalled/proxied corporate environment and the wild west of their home network.
What I think is more likely is that aside from limited access (email, maybe web browsing), the criteria for bringing their own devices in will be so onerous that they would rather have separate devices after all, rather than accept the new limitations on using their personal devices. After all, if it were cost-effective to support unmanaged systems, business IT would already be run that way.
"Due to how badly Gibson's big screen adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic butchered the original story, I am worried this too will tarnish my memories of William Gibson's works."
When I was younger, I was somewhat mystified as to why Gibson's stories seemed so amazing on paper, but disappointing to me on the screen.
It wasn't until almost a decade later that I remembered something he'd said when I interviewed him back in the late 90s. I don't remember his exact wording, but it was something like "when someone is reading a novel, they're getting a completely custom, one-off 'film' in their mind".
Suddenly, I had a shocking realization: it wasn't that the people adapting his work for film or television were doing a terrible job of it. It was that I was imagining a very different fictional world than the one he actually wrote about.
In my mind (and a lot of peoples', I think), the world of Neuromancer is grim and bleak. That is, it not only looks like Bladerunner, but it makes its fictional inhabitants feel the way watching Bladerunner makes us feel.
What I've started to believe is that this is not really the case for Gibson himself. There is certainly a lot of the look of Bladerunner in Neuromancer (they draw on the same inspirations, like Heavy Metal comics), but there is also a huge helping of quirky humour, like the Rastafarian space station (or if you go back to Johnny Mnemonic (the short story) itself, elements like the "Aryan Reggae Band").
When I read Neuromancer, those elements are sort of in the background - little one-offs that briefly lighten the mood, like Sebastian's "I make friends!" line in Bladerunner, or the way Doctor Who will have a funny scene right before stabbing the viewer in the gut with something sad. But I think Gibson intended them as being close to (if not fully) on equal footing with the more serious aspects.
If you watch Johnny Mnemonic (the film), or either of the X-Files episodes that Gibson wrote with this in mind, I think you'll see what I mean. All of them are set in a world that looks grim and gritty, but the story itself is actually not. Sort of like The Fifth Element, another Heavy Metal-inspired film.
Anyway, I don't know if I'm right, but the more I think about it, the more I believe I am. Just follow the trail that each of his successive novels points in. Each one is more fantastical and less-serious overall than the previous one.
Track down the shooting script for Johnny Mnemonic - the one that Gibson himself claims is much closer to his original vision for the film. It's really not substantially different than what ended up on screen, at least in the ways that I'm thinking of.
"You can crash cars on the highway today with a well-aimed laser pointer or a few bricks, if that rocks your boat."
Laser pointers and bricks are easy to follow back to their point of origin, because someone has to be actively using them. It's a lot harder for regular people to figure out where a radio transmission is coming from, and it's a lot easier to set up a time-delayed, battery-powered radio transmitter that will interfere with a system like this than the laser or brick equivalent.
"Broken bones: something that bounces off bone and can detect the time to travel which will determine fractures and breaks. If you're using a flat scanning device, everything needs to bounce off something inside the body, rather than pass through and imprint itself on x-ray paper, etc."
I'm thinking it would be a challenge - at best - to find something other than X-rays that will pass through skin but not bone. Why not just add a "medical tricorder"-style hand gadget that emits X-rays, put that on one side of the area to be imaged, and the "tricorder" (which would act as the digital X-ray "film" plate) on the other?
Make the whole back panel of the "tricorder" flip up to reveal the X-ray imaging plate, like the panel on the back of Soviet Geiger counters that flips up for when you want to detect beta radiation.
"Neither is email, so I guess if you could read everyone's email that wouldn't be a weakness either. Get off your high horse, the URL is supposed to be the equivalent of an email account password, if you have it you can access the files otherwise not. You have to make sure only the right people have the URL, but anything that lets others grab the file anyway is obviously a goatse-class backdoor just as if gmail or hotmail was wide open."
I've heard this argument before, and here's the reason I'm skeptical of it:
The password for an email account or website can be transmitted encrypted, so that even if someone intercepts the communication, they don't know the password. This may not *always* be the case, but its the intent of the systems design in most cases.
Treating the URL as "secret" is different because anything that captures it in-between the client and destination host can record it and use it for any purpose it likes, and it may not even be with malicious intent (because URLs aren't supposed to contain "secret" information).
For example, let's say your company runs both a search engine *and* a free-as-in-not-really-but-close-enough-for-most-people email service. Given all the other parsing of email that your service does to generate "relevant" ads, don't you think it would make sense to look for URLs in emails and add those to the indexer for your search engine? There is still plenty of content online that won't be found by simply spidering websites, because in order to get to it, the user has to submit a form or have javascript executing in an actual DOM or whatever, so doing that would be very likely to increase the amount of useful content indexed by your search engine. But all of a sudden, poof, that "secret" Flickr URL is no longer secret, and anyone uses that search engine can find it.
In terms of more malicious intent, consider that there's nothing stopping Google or Microsoft (or other search engine companies) from hosting a bunch of Tor exit nodes, and adding any URLs that pass through *those* to their search indexers, or paying major corporations to funnel URLs from corporate proxy logs to them for the same purpose. I'm not saying they do either of those things, just that there's no reason they couldn't, and I would have a hard time seeing it as truly "wrong", given that URLs aren't supposed to be treated as secret.
"I never saw any good reason why HTTP Referrers and user-agent headers were ever included in the HTTP spec in the first place. The first is extraneous information and the second is contrary to a Web based on open standards (and tends to help malicious sites know which exploits to use)."
The referrer is useful for a number of reasons. Beyond the obvious one (statistical information), this is helpful for setting up mechanisms to help prevent people hot-linking to images (or other content) on your site. For people who have transfer caps or surcharges, it's really frustrating to have a significant part of that taken up by people who hot-link to your images for use as forum icons or other heavily-used things which don't benefit your site in any way.
re: the user-agent header - just because the web is supposedly based on open standards doesn't mean users should all get the same content. Ideally they should all be able to *choose* to access the same content, but most people are going to be happier if a website detects that they're using a smartphone and sends them a version of the content optimized for display on a smaller screen.
I've known a couple of people with schizophrenia and other psychoses, and when they were in the middle of an episode, they would often recall trivial details from the past and incorporate them into what they were talking about. It was actually a little unnerving, sometimes, and I'm someone who tends to remember trivial details better than most people. I didn't really make the "eidetic memory" connection until reading this article. I always assumed that it was just a random sampling of trivia that they had remembered like that. I can easily imagine a brain getting overwhelmed if they're actually dealing with a flood of information at that level of detail.
VBScript is included with any version of Windows you're likely to be working with, is mature, and stable. That having been said, it has the boneheaded pre-.NET Visual Basic syntax, so you may hate yourself for choosing it.
PowerShell is either included with or available as an add-on for most versions of Windows you're likely to be working with. It has a much nicer syntax that is inspired by several Unix/Linux scripting languages, and can make use of .NET assemblies, which is *very* powerful. However, my experience with it was that it wasn't 100% ready for primetime. I've written hundreds of VBScripts, but before I'd hit ten PowerShell scripts, I ran across a nasty bug related to one of the wildcard syntaces (is that even a word?) that the language supports - if I tried to use a for loop to iterate through a list of directories, and any of the directory names included square brackets, I was basically out of luck. There had been a workaround in older versions of PS, but not in the one I was using. Maybe MS eventually fixed this, but if so it literally took years.
In an ideal world, I'd recommend PowerShell, because it can do a lot more, and typically with less script code. But I play it safe by sticking with VBScript, at least until the issues with PS are worked out.
"Trucks should pay even more."
Trucks *already* pay even more. That's what those weigh-stations along the sides of the road are for.
".NET compatibility in mono these days is steller."
I have to agree. The only area I've run into trouble in general is with the XML parser. Apparently the Mono team wrote their own, completely redesigned XML libraries, and so there are areas where it behaves differently than .NET in really weird ways.
For example, up until about a month ago, if you tried to read UTF-16-encoded XML from a MemoryStream, it would fail, indicating that the first character (the XML byte order marker, I believe) was invalid. I opened a ticket about that and it was partially fixed, but the issue still crops up in some cases. When it breaks, it does so so badly that it somehow screws up the rendering of WinForms, so that text and other elements are missing, even when the XML part of the code had nothing to do with the GUI. The same code works fine under the actual .NET framework.
I've also had issues on Kubuntu (and I assume Ubuntu) with the default font being of a very different size than the one on Windows (or OpenSUSE), so text gets cut off, but I figure there's an easy fix for that.
"Where do you change settings.... edit>preferences, or tools>options?"
On Windows and other sanely-laid-out operating systems it's supposed to always be under Tools -> Options, because changing settings has nothing to do with editing the file. That was something that bugged me about MacOS even back in the olden days before there was a Windows or Linux.
"Find is under edit, not view?"
Find is under Edit, because Find is a subset of Find/Replace, which is an editing operation. It doesn't make any more sense to put them both under View, because Replace is an editing command.
"And print preview is under file, instead of view? Why is print a file command at all?"
Because printing the file is a file I/O operation, not interacting with it or viewing it. It makes sense to group the printing commands together, and Print Preview is the only one that could sort of be argued to be a View-type operation.
"And why is import, when paste is under edit?"
Import is another file I/O operation, whereas Paste is not. Clipboard operations (like Paste) are all under the Edit menu, because they're related to editing the current document. That would be true whether there were an OS-level clipboard or one that's just confined to the application.
"Come on, towards the end they were just cramming in new commands wherever they'd fit."
No, they really weren't.
Overall, I think the ribbon is a bit of a wash - it's probably better in some ways, and worse in others.
But there is one thing that *really* annoys me, and that's the microscopic unlabeled button in the lower-right corner of some of the panes in the Office ribbons. I didn't even know it was a button until I read a tutorial about how to do something that required functionality in a window that one of them opens.
On my monitor at work, I couldn't even tell what it was supposed to represent. I thought it was just a little square. On my larger monitor at home, I can see that it's a frame with an arrow pointing outward, indicating that it is going to open a larger window of some kind. But without knowing that in advance, it's incredibly unintuitive and therefore a poor design.
Slipstreaming in SP3 and making a bootable CD out of the combination is a short, easy, one-time process for anyone who does their own OS installs.
Every time I've used a CD like that, it took one round of patching via Microsoft Update after the base installation to get everything up and running.
XP is definitely past its prime, but if you're spending 3 hours (interactively) to install it, you're making it harder on yourself than you need to.
"You should NEVER, EVER, EVER allow an officer of the law, under any circumstances what-so-ever, to search your person, your belongings, or your car. Clearly this includes your mobile phone as well."
While this is a laudable ideal, how likely is it* to just result in being detained for a few hours while the cop gets a search warrant because obviously you have something to hide if you don't consent to a search?
*Especially in certain Midwest states like Minnesota with rabid state troopers who pull over anyone with an out-of-state plate.