"As a whole, it's not like the police have a great deal of respect for citizens who exercise their rights. So I have to wonder: do they retaliate? Do they suddenly take a really hard look at his driving and see how many things they can charge him with that they'd normally let slide? Do they insist on searching him for guns/drugs/dead hookers/etc. every time he gets pulled over for i.e. speeding?"
Probably.
A friend of mine went to court to get out of a speeding ticket. I'm guessing it was a fairly high-priced ticket, because when he was successful, the police waited a year or more, then filed a completely made-up charge of "driving without a license" (he was in his late 30s, and had been a licensed driver for several decades). The charge/requirement to show up in court was mailed to him... at his old address, because he'd moved during the time in-between those two events.
When he didn't show up in court (because he never received the thing that was mailed to his old address), he automatically lost, and an *additional* count of "flight to evade prosecution" was added. But he still didn't know about any of this. He found out when he was pulled over something like *another* year or two later for an illegal lane change in an intersection. At that point he was immediately taken into custody and sent to jail (because clearly he was a convicted felon with no respect for the law). He talked to a lawyer and was told that because judgment had already taken place (back when the original bogus charge made its uncontested court appearance), it would cost something like $30K to contest it. It was cheaper for him to spend three months in county jail.
So yeah, the police don't exactly have any reservations about abusing the system if they feel that it's being done to punish someone they believe deserves it.
"Asking what port 8443 is for wasn't a stupid question - if it's not in/etc/services, it's not a standard port number."
8443 is the standard "alternate HTTPS" port, just like 8080 is the standard "alternate HTTP" port, whether or not they're in/etc/services. They're used by default by server software like Apache Tomcat because back when HTTP was invented, someone thought it would be awesome to have the HTTP and HTTPS ports be below 1024, and therefore require root access to bind to them on Unix systems.
"I've never understood why DNS lookups aren't locally cached by default."
As far as I know, they are. Are you using a web proxy? Because if so, unless you are also using a proxy autoconfig ("PAC") javascript file, you are implicitly delegating DNS lookups to that proxy. That may be why you're seeing some DNS lookup latency.
"(and, really, how often does any web site change their IP address?)."
Among other things, websites hosted by CDNs (Akamai, etc.) give different IP addresses to different clients (or even the same client) constantly for load-balancing and geographic optimization.
It's not *that* revolutionary. A few months ago, I used the same general principle to make a more interesting rotating "please wait" symbol: I made multiple ring animations with transparent backgrounds, with each ring completing one revolution in a different number of frames. I used odd numbers, but not primes specifically. Anyway, the result was conceptually the same - it takes quite awhile before the rings ever line up in exactly the way they started, but only a handful of animation frames are used, because it's separate files overlaid on each other, and each one alone is a short animation. I was thinking of the "counter-rotating concentric rings" look that has been used everywhere from Tron to Dead Space. The designers on those may have even done exactly the same thing I did.
I'm also curious to see just how useful this specific technique is for things other than website backgrounds. For example, you couldn't use it (at least without modification) for most 3D object textures, because it only introduces variation along one axis.
The Bit was also voiced by the same actor who did the voiceover work for Kosh, and of course there's the Bruce Boxleitner and David Warner connections too.
"Oddly, the rich in California (if by that you mean people with high incomes) likely pay the highest income tax rates in America, and yet it's here that the government is collapsing due to financial problems."
Even assuming that's true, how much of those taxes *do they actually pay*? Hollywood in particular is known for its essentially fraudulent accounting that turns every business venture into a loss on paper. It doesn't contribute to the state coffers if they manage to deduct their way down to a full (or nearly full) tax refund, even though - again, on paper it looks like they're paying high taxes.
"If the encryptor was using a one time pad any solution would be correct for one possible key."
Yes, but based on the repeating content in the notes ("NCBE", etc.), it seems unlikely that it was a one-time pad, unless it's for a funny encoding where multiple characters in a row in the ciphertext actually represent a single character in the plaintext (but not always the same single character, of course). I'm sure the FBI would have picked up any sort of common substitution cipher, so the suggestion that it's a bunch of abbreviations/shorthand makes sense.
"Dot.net has a lot of out-of-the-box tools. However, it's difficult to go outside of their box. You have to become a 'configurator' more than a programmer to use it effectively. Rather than re-program it to do X, you have to figure out how to change the configuration or combination of existing widgets to get close enough to X (unless you want to start from scratch, which is expensive.)"
I think you're using it the wrong way. Can you cite any specific examples? I've written C# code that did everything from automate user/system maintenance, to synthesize audio, to process multispectral image data. I've never run into the kind of problems you describe. It's always been faster and easier to do everything I've cared to work on in C# than in any other language that I've used, and the resulting applications have been nicer to work with as an end user.
"The worst part of it is that Plato made up Atlantis just to set up a hypothetical argument. His contemporaries understood this, but eventually it got out of hand and people took it literally."
I've seen this statement before, and I've always wondered - is there a Cliff's Notes version of the alleged supporting evidence for it? I mean, actual statements from people of Plato's era along the lines of "that Plato sure does like inventing ancient cities that never existed as back-story for his work! I bet in a few thousand years, people will think Atlantis actually existed, even though all of us here in Ancient Greece know that that is completely false!".
I ask because art critics and members of the "soft sciences" have a terrible habit of making statements like this, and then those statements become accepted as fact, when really it was just someone's opinion. One of the great things about art is that different people take away different things from each work, but the downside is that many of those people also assume that whatever *they* took away was what the creator of that work actually intended.
Given that the Intel P6 chips (let alone the Pentium II, III, etc.) hadn't been released when Hackers was written, filmed, or in theatres, don't you think it's not entirely out of the question that they could have been making assumptions about the direction Intel would go in, rather than making a mistake? Intel *did* try to switch to RISC, after all.
Every time I see an x86 disassembly, it makes me wish I were living in the alternate universe where they succeeded.
"I don't see any wiki articles about PSXnation.com or scifi.com either."
Old Man Murray was an extremely popular (adjusted for internet-usage inflation) gaming-related website in the late 90s/early 2000s. It was based on the sort of independent, snarky writing that people like Maddox are doing now, except specifically focused on videogames. My guess would be that even if either of those websites were around when OMM was popular, they probably wouldn't have linked to it for fear of alienating their advertising base.
While I agree with you that that's what a professional would do, I suspect the people this camera is targeted at will be happy enough with the camera automatically applying a simple algorithm like "perform a smart blur on the entire image, then look for any area on the face that looks like a pimple or other blemish and smooth it out".
One thing that would probably result in a lot more "good" pictures would be if when the camera detected faces in a shot (which virtually any digital camera these days can do) *and* that the user was operating below 50mm focal length, it suggested that they increase the focal length and step back. Telephoto focal lengths are much more flattering to peoples' faces than wide-angle.
If it detected that the shot was of a single face (e.g. a portrait), it could suggest framing, and also automatically switch to the wide-aperture "portrait mode" that most digital cameras have too. Maybe throw in a "social network glamour shot" feature, where it would suggest standing on a stool and pointing down at the subject instead of directly at them, etc.
I don't think the camera should *prevent* taking a non-ideal picture, but there is a lot of room for things like you describe - suggesting that the user step around to a different angle to optimize the lighting, that the guy with the shaved head swipe a paper towel across it to reduce the glare, etc.
I'm pretty sure Kinect is something that came out of MS Research. But now that I think about it, you're probably right - the only reason Kinect made it out the door is because for some reason, the only sane management at MS these days are in charge of the Xbox division.
Did you watch the video? There were plenty of examples of how the interfaces would be used in real-world applications:
Walk around an object, letting your camera take pictures at intervals, and the software builds a 3D model of the object for you that can be examined from any angle on a touchscreen by swiping around.
Take a picture with your camera, place the camera on a Surface device, and it automatically transfers the photos to the larger system for display.
Interact with a 3D UI using simple geometric physical objects placed on a Surface-type device, while wearing 3D shutter glasses that overlay an augmented reality-style view on top of those simple objects.
Use a Kinect as a facial puppet-controller, so your online avatar has facial expressions similar to yours and lip-syncs as you speak.
Etc. The Kinect stuff is probably already in use with that product.
I don't know that I'd want any of these UI concepts on a desktop workstation, but I like a lot of them for phones and Surface-style tabletop devices that are supposed to be more like appliances and less like traditional workstations. I just hope MS have realized that it's OK to have *different* UIs for different classes of device, instead of trying to force one UI on all of them, like they did when they made Windows CE/Mobile/Phone/Tablet.
"It is an icon, and all icons except this one represent applications. It breaks the metaphor."
I think you meant to say "all icons except this one - and My Computer, Network Neighbourhood/My Network Places, all directories and shortcuts to directories, all files and shortcuts to files, and all URL shortcuts, to name a few - represent applications." But I guess that's pretty much the same thing.
This is still all beta software he is dealing with.
You could say that about all of RIM's software. I can virtually guarantee that the experience will not improve significantly between now and the "release". Or ever, most likely.
"What? RIM is being obtuse with developers? NO WAY MAN!"
I came here to say this. RIM's "support" of third-party developers (and system administrators, etc.) has always been the worst, which is why there are virtually no decent third-party (or even first-party) applications for their platform.
I had a good laugh when they announced "AppWorld", because I knew there was no way they were going to offer something as mobile-developer-friendly as Apple, Google, or even Microsoft. It's the same level of spin on a crappy product as Qualcomm trying to portray "BREW" as being anything like Java.
I'm also glad to know they still haven't fixed that ridiculous issue with your website where you are prompted for personal information every time you download a file, and there is no way to get the form to remember what you entered 30 seconds ago when you downloaded a different file. Hey, guys, it was doing that six years ago. Maybe you should take a look into it?
I think you're forgetting things like browser hostname headers and so forth. Knowing the IP of the server a website is hosted on it *not* even close to a guarantee that you'll be able to get to that website. This is especially true with CDNs like Akamai.
Because cross-compilation works so well for making it 100% seamless to compile regular C code across multiple architectures?
Even setting aside the potential security issues, and the potential "why isn't there support for my platform" issues, I'm pretty sure introducing the possibility of things like endianness problems into *web applications* makes this a terrible idea.
Seriously, this has got to have been invented by someone who wasn't around when the alleged benefit of migrating everything to web apps was platform-independence. If you want native code, write a traditional native client. Apple figured this out with iOS, and it seems to be working out pretty well for them.
Even with the most sensitive detector possible, you still need a lens to focus the image. Otherwise you've just got a very fancy flatbed scanner, and everything further away than a couple of inches will be a useless blur.
The lens can be virtual, like in synthetic aperture systems, but building something like that for optical wavelengths with literally *no* physical lenses involved (whether those lenses are glass, mirrors, or whatever) on a football-field-sized scale would be challenging at best. Each photosite on each of your supercooled sensors would need to capture phase information as well as amplitude. The system would also have to store timestamps for each pixel with atomic clock-level accuracy in order to use the phase information. I think some day, the human race will build something like that, but it's probably going to be awhile.
HTTPS doesn't do much good if the country in question implements transparent proxies at the borders of their national network infrastructure that decrypt SSL traffic, inspect the contents, then re-encrypt it with an SSL certificate issued by one of the authorities registered for that country (which is certainly within the realm of possibility for most governments). Have you ever looked at (let alone modified) the list of SSL authorities that your web browser trusts by default?
So IOW it sells to people who don't understand how to manage users and groups?
Group Policy is a very powerful tool for applying policy rules across an entire organization. It has very little to do with managing users and groups, other than that the criteria for who or what the policies apply to is often based on membership in a group.
I've worked with Unix and Linux on and off over the years, and I am not aware of an equivalent in the Linux world, at least not a standard package that works on multiple major distributions. Obviously it's possible to build a crappy quasi-equivalent for one's own organization out of shell scripts, but it would be a lot of work to build and maintain, and it wouldn't be as flexible or as reliable.
One of my old coworkers and I had a joke that you could make nearly any of the old "easy" passwords meet new security requirements by appending "4TheWin!" to the end, and it would usually still make sense too: "cocacola4TheWin!", "vacation4TheWin!", and so on.
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"As a whole, it's not like the police have a great deal of respect for citizens who exercise their rights. So I have to wonder: do they retaliate? Do they suddenly take a really hard look at his driving and see how many things they can charge him with that they'd normally let slide? Do they insist on searching him for guns/drugs/dead hookers/etc. every time he gets pulled over for i.e. speeding?"
Probably.
A friend of mine went to court to get out of a speeding ticket. I'm guessing it was a fairly high-priced ticket, because when he was successful, the police waited a year or more, then filed a completely made-up charge of "driving without a license" (he was in his late 30s, and had been a licensed driver for several decades). The charge/requirement to show up in court was mailed to him... at his old address, because he'd moved during the time in-between those two events.
When he didn't show up in court (because he never received the thing that was mailed to his old address), he automatically lost, and an *additional* count of "flight to evade prosecution" was added. But he still didn't know about any of this. He found out when he was pulled over something like *another* year or two later for an illegal lane change in an intersection. At that point he was immediately taken into custody and sent to jail (because clearly he was a convicted felon with no respect for the law). He talked to a lawyer and was told that because judgment had already taken place (back when the original bogus charge made its uncontested court appearance), it would cost something like $30K to contest it. It was cheaper for him to spend three months in county jail.
So yeah, the police don't exactly have any reservations about abusing the system if they feel that it's being done to punish someone they believe deserves it.
"Asking what port 8443 is for wasn't a stupid question - if it's not in /etc/services, it's not a standard port number."
8443 is the standard "alternate HTTPS" port, just like 8080 is the standard "alternate HTTP" port, whether or not they're in /etc/services. They're used by default by server software like Apache Tomcat because back when HTTP was invented, someone thought it would be awesome to have the HTTP and HTTPS ports be below 1024, and therefore require root access to bind to them on Unix systems.
"I've never understood why DNS lookups aren't locally cached by default."
As far as I know, they are. Are you using a web proxy? Because if so, unless you are also using a proxy autoconfig ("PAC") javascript file, you are implicitly delegating DNS lookups to that proxy. That may be why you're seeing some DNS lookup latency.
"(and, really, how often does any web site change their IP address?)."
Among other things, websites hosted by CDNs (Akamai, etc.) give different IP addresses to different clients (or even the same client) constantly for load-balancing and geographic optimization.
It's not *that* revolutionary. A few months ago, I used the same general principle to make a more interesting rotating "please wait" symbol: I made multiple ring animations with transparent backgrounds, with each ring completing one revolution in a different number of frames. I used odd numbers, but not primes specifically. Anyway, the result was conceptually the same - it takes quite awhile before the rings ever line up in exactly the way they started, but only a handful of animation frames are used, because it's separate files overlaid on each other, and each one alone is a short animation. I was thinking of the "counter-rotating concentric rings" look that has been used everywhere from Tron to Dead Space. The designers on those may have even done exactly the same thing I did.
I'm also curious to see just how useful this specific technique is for things other than website backgrounds. For example, you couldn't use it (at least without modification) for most 3D object textures, because it only introduces variation along one axis.
The Bit was also voiced by the same actor who did the voiceover work for Kosh, and of course there's the Bruce Boxleitner and David Warner connections too.
"Oddly, the rich in California (if by that you mean people with high incomes) likely pay the highest income tax rates in America, and yet it's here that the government is collapsing due to financial problems."
Even assuming that's true, how much of those taxes *do they actually pay*? Hollywood in particular is known for its essentially fraudulent accounting that turns every business venture into a loss on paper. It doesn't contribute to the state coffers if they manage to deduct their way down to a full (or nearly full) tax refund, even though - again, on paper it looks like they're paying high taxes.
"If the encryptor was using a one time pad any solution would be correct for one possible key."
Yes, but based on the repeating content in the notes ("NCBE", etc.), it seems unlikely that it was a one-time pad, unless it's for a funny encoding where multiple characters in a row in the ciphertext actually represent a single character in the plaintext (but not always the same single character, of course). I'm sure the FBI would have picked up any sort of common substitution cipher, so the suggestion that it's a bunch of abbreviations/shorthand makes sense.
"It's become even harder with the diagnosis or Aspergers and ADD/ADHD, as many of us end up on medication which robs us of the gift."
On the other hand, many of us end up on medication that lets us make the most effective use of our gift(s).
"Dot.net has a lot of out-of-the-box tools. However, it's difficult to go outside of their box. You have to become a 'configurator' more than a programmer to use it effectively. Rather than re-program it to do X, you have to figure out how to change the configuration or combination of existing widgets to get close enough to X (unless you want to start from scratch, which is expensive.)"
I think you're using it the wrong way. Can you cite any specific examples? I've written C# code that did everything from automate user/system maintenance, to synthesize audio, to process multispectral image data. I've never run into the kind of problems you describe. It's always been faster and easier to do everything I've cared to work on in C# than in any other language that I've used, and the resulting applications have been nicer to work with as an end user.
"The worst part of it is that Plato made up Atlantis just to set up a hypothetical argument. His contemporaries understood this, but eventually it got out of hand and people took it literally."
I've seen this statement before, and I've always wondered - is there a Cliff's Notes version of the alleged supporting evidence for it? I mean, actual statements from people of Plato's era along the lines of "that Plato sure does like inventing ancient cities that never existed as back-story for his work! I bet in a few thousand years, people will think Atlantis actually existed, even though all of us here in Ancient Greece know that that is completely false!".
I ask because art critics and members of the "soft sciences" have a terrible habit of making statements like this, and then those statements become accepted as fact, when really it was just someone's opinion. One of the great things about art is that different people take away different things from each work, but the downside is that many of those people also assume that whatever *they* took away was what the creator of that work actually intended.
Given that the Intel P6 chips (let alone the Pentium II, III, etc.) hadn't been released when Hackers was written, filmed, or in theatres, don't you think it's not entirely out of the question that they could have been making assumptions about the direction Intel would go in, rather than making a mistake? Intel *did* try to switch to RISC, after all.
Every time I see an x86 disassembly, it makes me wish I were living in the alternate universe where they succeeded.
"I don't see any wiki articles about PSXnation.com or scifi.com either."
Old Man Murray was an extremely popular (adjusted for internet-usage inflation) gaming-related website in the late 90s/early 2000s. It was based on the sort of independent, snarky writing that people like Maddox are doing now, except specifically focused on videogames. My guess would be that even if either of those websites were around when OMM was popular, they probably wouldn't have linked to it for fear of alienating their advertising base.
While I agree with you that that's what a professional would do, I suspect the people this camera is targeted at will be happy enough with the camera automatically applying a simple algorithm like "perform a smart blur on the entire image, then look for any area on the face that looks like a pimple or other blemish and smooth it out".
I agree somewhat.
One thing that would probably result in a lot more "good" pictures would be if when the camera detected faces in a shot (which virtually any digital camera these days can do) *and* that the user was operating below 50mm focal length, it suggested that they increase the focal length and step back. Telephoto focal lengths are much more flattering to peoples' faces than wide-angle.
If it detected that the shot was of a single face (e.g. a portrait), it could suggest framing, and also automatically switch to the wide-aperture "portrait mode" that most digital cameras have too. Maybe throw in a "social network glamour shot" feature, where it would suggest standing on a stool and pointing down at the subject instead of directly at them, etc.
I don't think the camera should *prevent* taking a non-ideal picture, but there is a lot of room for things like you describe - suggesting that the user step around to a different angle to optimize the lighting, that the guy with the shaved head swipe a paper towel across it to reduce the glare, etc.
I'm pretty sure Kinect is something that came out of MS Research. But now that I think about it, you're probably right - the only reason Kinect made it out the door is because for some reason, the only sane management at MS these days are in charge of the Xbox division.
Did you watch the video? There were plenty of examples of how the interfaces would be used in real-world applications:
Walk around an object, letting your camera take pictures at intervals, and the software builds a 3D model of the object for you that can be examined from any angle on a touchscreen by swiping around.
Take a picture with your camera, place the camera on a Surface device, and it automatically transfers the photos to the larger system for display.
Interact with a 3D UI using simple geometric physical objects placed on a Surface-type device, while wearing 3D shutter glasses that overlay an augmented reality-style view on top of those simple objects.
Use a Kinect as a facial puppet-controller, so your online avatar has facial expressions similar to yours and lip-syncs as you speak.
Etc. The Kinect stuff is probably already in use with that product.
I don't know that I'd want any of these UI concepts on a desktop workstation, but I like a lot of them for phones and Surface-style tabletop devices that are supposed to be more like appliances and less like traditional workstations. I just hope MS have realized that it's OK to have *different* UIs for different classes of device, instead of trying to force one UI on all of them, like they did when they made Windows CE/Mobile/Phone/Tablet.
"It is an icon, and all icons except this one represent applications. It breaks the metaphor."
I think you meant to say "all icons except this one - and My Computer, Network Neighbourhood/My Network Places, all directories and shortcuts to directories, all files and shortcuts to files, and all URL shortcuts, to name a few - represent applications." But I guess that's pretty much the same thing.
This is still all beta software he is dealing with.
You could say that about all of RIM's software. I can virtually guarantee that the experience will not improve significantly between now and the "release". Or ever, most likely.
"What? RIM is being obtuse with developers? NO WAY MAN!"
I came here to say this. RIM's "support" of third-party developers (and system administrators, etc.) has always been the worst, which is why there are virtually no decent third-party (or even first-party) applications for their platform.
I had a good laugh when they announced "AppWorld", because I knew there was no way they were going to offer something as mobile-developer-friendly as Apple, Google, or even Microsoft. It's the same level of spin on a crappy product as Qualcomm trying to portray "BREW" as being anything like Java.
I'm also glad to know they still haven't fixed that ridiculous issue with your website where you are prompted for personal information every time you download a file, and there is no way to get the form to remember what you entered 30 seconds ago when you downloaded a different file. Hey, guys, it was doing that six years ago. Maybe you should take a look into it?
I think you're forgetting things like browser hostname headers and so forth. Knowing the IP of the server a website is hosted on it *not* even close to a guarantee that you'll be able to get to that website. This is especially true with CDNs like Akamai.
Because cross-compilation works so well for making it 100% seamless to compile regular C code across multiple architectures?
Even setting aside the potential security issues, and the potential "why isn't there support for my platform" issues, I'm pretty sure introducing the possibility of things like endianness problems into *web applications* makes this a terrible idea.
Seriously, this has got to have been invented by someone who wasn't around when the alleged benefit of migrating everything to web apps was platform-independence. If you want native code, write a traditional native client. Apple figured this out with iOS, and it seems to be working out pretty well for them.
Even with the most sensitive detector possible, you still need a lens to focus the image. Otherwise you've just got a very fancy flatbed scanner, and everything further away than a couple of inches will be a useless blur.
The lens can be virtual, like in synthetic aperture systems, but building something like that for optical wavelengths with literally *no* physical lenses involved (whether those lenses are glass, mirrors, or whatever) on a football-field-sized scale would be challenging at best. Each photosite on each of your supercooled sensors would need to capture phase information as well as amplitude. The system would also have to store timestamps for each pixel with atomic clock-level accuracy in order to use the phase information. I think some day, the human race will build something like that, but it's probably going to be awhile.
HTTPS doesn't do much good if the country in question implements transparent proxies at the borders of their national network infrastructure that decrypt SSL traffic, inspect the contents, then re-encrypt it with an SSL certificate issued by one of the authorities registered for that country (which is certainly within the realm of possibility for most governments). Have you ever looked at (let alone modified) the list of SSL authorities that your web browser trusts by default?
So IOW it sells to people who don't understand how to manage users and groups?
Group Policy is a very powerful tool for applying policy rules across an entire organization. It has very little to do with managing users and groups, other than that the criteria for who or what the policies apply to is often based on membership in a group.
I've worked with Unix and Linux on and off over the years, and I am not aware of an equivalent in the Linux world, at least not a standard package that works on multiple major distributions. Obviously it's possible to build a crappy quasi-equivalent for one's own organization out of shell scripts, but it would be a lot of work to build and maintain, and it wouldn't be as flexible or as reliable.
One of my old coworkers and I had a joke that you could make nearly any of the old "easy" passwords meet new security requirements by appending "4TheWin!" to the end, and it would usually still make sense too: "cocacola4TheWin!", "vacation4TheWin!", and so on.