Worm naming...
on
Name That Worm
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Are they going to use alphabetical-ordered human names like with hurricanes?
Can't you just see the newspaper headlines already? "Worm Andrew Batters Microsoft Servers! The worm overtopped firewalls and flooded into data-centers throught the country. Emergency officials said that it will take a week to repair the firewalls and begin letting users back into the data..."
If you want to get more hours in front of the keyboard, I'd suggest a Mountain Dew drink fountain and a catheter. In fact, if you're into case mods, you could work the catheter into the liquid CPU cooling somehow.
I managed to find a picture of Six Flags (a series of large theme parks for you non-USians, second only to Disney's stuff) after it was hit. It looks pretty disturbing to see rides halfway submerged.
However, the log-ride is still operational, with over 4,000 new circuits you can ride through.
A) Don't live by a freaking ocean. Oceans have hurricanes.
B) Don't live in a city that is 8 feet below sea level. Flooding WILL occur.
I mostly concur. Now, out here on the west coast, we don't get storms that do serious damage to our coastline... but New Orleans.... come ON! Go on Google Earth and look at it. It's like that whole place is built on sedement deposited from the Mississippi river. As soon as a sedement deposit breaks the surface of the water, they go build something on it. Note to self: Don't Do That!
It seems as if the ultimate (admittedly, far off) goal of such developments is to establish a virtually automated mass transit system using today's road networks. When cars automatically take the correct routes, make correct lane changes, and communicate with each other to ensure safe distances and traffic queues the joy of driving, for those who value it, will be essentially lost. I can't help but wonder if the joy of driving will be entirely lost in 20-50 years.
I have two things to say about this.
First, I think that the trade-off will be more than worth it. Consider these things: Cars won't need adults to drive them; you can let your kids take the car to their soccer practice while you stay home and do something more productive. Furthermore, the cars won't need *anyone* to drive them. Send your car to your kid's school to pick them up or drop them off. Send your car to the appliance-mart a half-hour away to have it loaded with the washing machine you just bought online. Go to the mall and hop out at the front door and have your car go park itself. It doesn't matter how far away it parks because it's going to come pick you up at the door anyway.
The second point is this: The type of driving that they're looking to automate and the type of driving that most people enjoy aren't the same thing. I don't enjoy driving 7 hours to my mom's mountain cabin. I *do* enjoy taking my truck out onto the beach and cruising along the surf... or driving along a curvy road in the hills. It's a lot like flying. As I pilot, when I need to cover some *distance*, I want a plane that goes fast, has autopilot, good navigation instruments, etc. However, when I want to just tool around over the dunes, I want a piddly little two-seater that goes slower than the cars on the road under me. So, in other words, the *joy* in driving doesn't come (for me, anyway) from the kind of driving that they're looking to automate.
Go down to the shoreline and step on an inclined algae-covered rock.
I asure you that they'll bear your load a lot further than a few centimeters. (Although getting your ass to the emergency room afterward is your problem)
The Trifinite group showed how hackers could eavesdrop
I've wondered, for some time, if police would ever employ those "listen to a conversation inside a room by bouncing a laser off of the window" spy gadgets to listen to what the occupants of a car are saying during a traffic stop (or maybe even *before* the cop decides to pull them over) to hear time-saving tidbits like "Vinnie... quick! Hide the dope under the back seat!".
This bluetooth thing makes it a lot easier. I'm pretty sure that the supreme court has said that talking on a cell phone does not give you expectation of privacy (meaning: whatever you say into your phone during a cell call is admissible as evidence in court), but what about just having an unsecured bluetooth phone (ie, not making a call with it)? I wouldn't be surprised to see a supreme court ruling about this within 5 years and, given the future composition of the court, I don't think the ruling will be good.
My girlfriend lives and works in West Africa and on my next visit...
You travel to Africa to get to your girlfriend?!? Dude, either you are TOTALLY pussy-whipped, or she's totally hot and you're a genius for getting her away from any potential competition by sticking her out in the boondocks. ("A 'bird' out in the bush is worth two in a developed country', I guess they could say).
(does GPS equipment from the US work over there?)
Fortunately, the Motion Picture Assoc. of America didn't forsee GPS's ever being used for any kind of movie viewing... so they didn't press to get region-coding into GPS's, like they do with DVD players.:)
Isn't this just a swamp cooler? Aren't they rendered useless in humid environments?
Although there is evaporation happening from his garbage can full of cold water, that's not the main focus of the rig. Since he's siphoning the water through the coils and then dumping it outside, the water is not really being added to the room air, so it's not really an evaporative ("swamp") cooler.
As for whether they're useless in humid environments... they're not "useless", it's just that they get more effective the farther away from 100% humidity you get. So, they'd work great in the desert... less so in Florida. Go look at this psychrometric chart and read example 3 near the bottom.
What's amusing about this project is how worthless a *little* bit of knowledge is. There's not really much thermodynamics going on here. The dude's taking some cold water/ice from the fridge and running it through some coils and then tossing it outside. The amusing part is that the coils don't look terribly efficient, so the discarded water probably wasn't able to absorb as much heat from the room as it could have. In other words, the water he's dumping out is probabably still relatively cool.
What *that* means is that he probably could have done better by just chucking the siphon system altogether and just put a big trash can of cold water in his room and wait for the water temp and the room temp to meet. To speed the process, he could have just pointed the fan into the garbage can and sped up the heat exchange AND gotten some evaporative cooling to boot.
Another solution which would probably work better is to just blow air over a block of ice. $2-$3 for a cubic foot of ice and it should require somewhere around 9,000 kiloJoules to melt. Meanwhile, a cubic room measuring 3m on a side should hold abour 34kg of air, which will require 34kiloJoules to cool it each Celcius degree. So, the block of ice should be enough to cool the room by 264 degrees. So, the block should be able to take a 264C room down to freezing. That seems like an awful lot, so I'm not sure my math is right... but I *do* think that the dude could have done much better just blowing air over a block of ice with some holes drilled in it for more surface area.
What you are talking about economists call price discrimination
Right, and, before I give some examples, I'll tell you a little story.
When I was taking Econ in college, the professor drew the little downward-sloping "demand" curve on the Price-Quantity graph and showed how you usually want to set the price to some point on the demand curve such that it forms a square underneath with maximal area (since the area equals your total revenue). It quickly dawned on me that it sure would be nice if you could capitalize on *all* of the trianglular area under the "demand" line. In other words, charge $100 to the one guy willing to pay that much, while still charging $10 to the 30 people only willing to pay that... and then charge $4 to the hundreds of folks willing to pay that.
My professor just kinda waved his arms and said... "yeah... that would be nice...". Only later, did I learn that this is called "Price Discrimination", and it's very cleverly used in the following ways.
Haggling. This doesn't seem like the insidious form of PD, but it *is* PD, nonetheless. Think about it. The seller is deliberatly adjusting the price according to how much he/she thinks they can get out of you. However, the fact that the buyer understands that this is the arrangement makes them feel like there's no deception happening. But it *is* PD.
Outlet Stores. Admittedly, part of the reason for lower prices at outlet stores is because they're in out-of-the-way low-rent locales, and also because they're often selling blemished items. However, another reason they're cheaper is *because* they're usually out in the boondocks. If you're an affluent customer, it's not worth it to you to drive 15 minutes each way to save $15 on a pair of pants (or to save $15 by buying a blem). You're just going to pay the premium to buy from a nearby store. However, if you're on welfare, living in the trailer park, then it's well worth it to you to drive for a while to save a little money. This way, the companies are able to sell their pants to poor folk, without having to give the rich people the "poor folk" price.
Premium gas: High-octane gasoline only costs the gas station an extra penny or two per gallon, yet they charge an extra 10 cents or so. This is because the people who self-select premium fuel do so either because they're affluent and like to feed their car "the good stuff", or they own an expensive car which requires it. Either way, they've identified themselves to the gas station owner as being well-off, and the station owner gouges them a little more.
Airplane tickets. This is the biggie. Ever noticed how you have to pay a lot more for round-trip tickets if you don't stay over a weekend? The reason for that is because, if you're not willing to stay over the weekend, you're probably not a vacationer; you're a *business* traveller... probably going to some meeting or conference. This means that you're spending the company's money on the ticket... which means that you're less sensitive to price. Who wouldn't be willing to burn an extra couple of hundred dollars in order to be home with the wife and kids for the weekend? However, if you *are* willing to spend the weekend, you're probably vacationing... which means that you're spending *your* money, where price is a bigger factor.
PD is all around you. It's legal. You could argue that it's "unfair", but I wouldn't agree. The seller and the buyer are adversaries. The seller's trying to get as much money as they can... and the buyer is trying to part with as little as they can. If either thinks that the deal isn't good for them, then the deal doesn't happen. If both think that the deal *is* worth it to them, then it *does* happen. That's the fundamental tenet of the free-market economy: all mutually-beneficial exchanges are allowed to take place.
Those who say that PD is unfair are probably the same people who, if they owned a retail store, would claim that it's unfair if a customer walked in with a few mail-order catalogs for price comparison.
If they occupy as much solid-angle as the moon, then they could eclipse the sun (or moon). Can you imagine disc-shaped billboards? I can see it now... "This eclipse brought to you by Coca-Cola!"
Better yet, "All your photons are belong to us".
- Joe
scientists think they may have finally located the lander's wreckage and confirmed what went wrong with the mission...
and concluded that "what went wrong" is most likely that they chose to set down in a "bad part" of Mars. Their evidence for this seems to be that photos show that the lander was up on blocks and the wheels and hubcaps were missing.
Unfortunately, they open themselves up to impostors. How will they know which, of those in attendance, are really time-travelers?
The real way to tell is to reserve the meeting space... and then, only advertize it after the event has passed. That way, anybody who actually showed up (other than the organizers), are highly suspect as real time-travelers.
However, the fact that they didn't do this, I think, shows the lack of conviction that these organizers have that any real time-travelers will show.
You need more power. Otherwise you will fail in your job
Just about all of the posts thus far have been along the lines of "Pull the plug on the people who don't care until they *do* care.... IF the administration will let you."
Here's an alternative to the "IF the administration will let you" part. Make use of the fact that nobody else really understands what it is the wizard (you) does behind the curtain:
Implement whatever service termination solution you feel necessary (whether by writing/downloading some automated system, or by doing it manually yourself). When the offender calls to complain, *don't* say that they were shut off administratively. Tell them that the massive traffic from their machine "overloaded" the port they were on (tell them it's kinda like a circuit breaker on house wiring).
They'll say that this never happened before. Tell them that they've got a newer, more-aggressive virus.
They'll ask that their port be "reset". Tell them that, due to all of the machines that they helped infect, and to the convoluted process for "resetting" a port, there's a backlog of a couple days before you can get their port reset.
Maybe they'll ask if you can just plug them into a different port. Tell them that they're all maxxed out.
At some point, Administration might ask why this is happening. Tell them the same thing you told the users... new, nastier viruses. They might ask what new equipment they could get to fix the problem. Tell them that the BFS-9000 can do it... but it's very... very expensive. It would be much cheaper for everyone to just use virus protection.
As far as I understand them, switching power supplies operate by "topping off" a capacitor that your DC-operated-device drains power from. If your device sucks a lot of power, the power supply has to "switch" and top off the capacitor more often. If it doesn't suck much power, it switches less-often.
The beauty of this is that it doesn't require a transformer for stepping down the AC and they don't require a linear voltage regulator. Have you noticed that Radio Shacks newer Adaptaplug adaptors (thanks to switching electronics being cheap enough) are now really small and light (like... smaller than the transformer that's no longer inside them?) and can supply surprising amounts of current. They've got a 9V adaptor that can supply 1500mA and it's the size of two Zippo lighters... whereas they used to sell two transformer-based ones. One could supply about 300mA and looked like a normal adaptors and the "heavy-duty" one could give you 800mA and was the size and weight of a baseball!
This also should give you power savings and less heat because of the way linear voltage regulators work. If you step a 110V AC signal down (and rectify it) to 12V DC and then run it through a 9V regulator, the regulator does this, essentially, by acting as a variable resistance between the transformer and the load. So, if your 9V device is drawing 1 amp, then 1 amp must be going into the voltage regulator... which means that the voltage regulator has to burn up 3V x 1A = 3Watts. That's why voltage regulator ICs almost always have heat sinks on them.:)
When you think about this, you realize that they only way to prevent this heat generation is if you can decrease the current going into the regulator by the same amount that you're decreasing the voltage coming out. Linear voltage regulators can't do this, but switching power supplies achieve it by quickly turning on and off to top off a capacitor. So, it's more like a pulse-width-modulation method of providing a certain voltage level.
Anyway, to respond to the parent of the parent, I had the same idea of household-wide-DC a few years ago. My EE friend set me straight, though. Typical house wiring is good for 20, sometimes 30, amps per circuit. Go tally up the current requirements for all of your devices (starting with your Mac mini and LCD). Chances are you'll quickly exceed 30 amps. So then you've got a choice: Do you wire the walls of your house with jumper-cable-sized cable, or do you have multiple DC circuits to complement your multiple AC circuits? Not a very attractive set of options.
They will be pressed with charges even though they had good intentions compared to hardly anyone getting caught with malicious intentions.
If they wanted to protect themselves from possible legal hassle later, they could have just recorded how many click-throughs they got from the actual email. Then, they could have just had the actual web page at the address have something like "No, No, NO! Don't click on links asking you for your password!".
I don't know why eBay doesn't do this already. They could send out emails to their users from bogus addresses, with links pointing to IP-only websites, etc. When the user actually clicked-through, it could be a page explaining all of the hints that they could have used to figure out that it was a phish. Even if they had people submit their login info, eBay couldn't be accused of tricking them out of information that ebay already had, right?
On a slightly off-topic note, does anyone else here wonder if eBay is secretly "salting" real phishing sites with "marked" usernames? Like banks give robbers marked money, ebay could submit specially-marked username/password pairs to phish pages. These usernames wouldn't map to real users. Instead, they'd cause an alert to happen at eBay when someone used the account. eBay could pre-load the user with fake feedback... the whole shot. And "eBay honeypot", if you will.
It's not really all that new, but this is on a scale that I haven't witnessed firsthand before.
The scale of it isn't what I think is as outrageous as is the fact that they're so open about it.
Where previous administrations might cook up some half-legitimate sounding criteria for membership on the panel which was only met by the people they wanted, the Bush administration just comes right out and says "If you supported our opposition, we're freezing you out". It's a purge of all but the "True Believers". He already did this to the CIA.
The reason for doing it this openly seems clear. If they were doing it to help ensure policies favorable to the administration, they could just do this silently. By doing it publicly, they're sending a message to all those watching. This isn't as much about the makeup of the committee as much as it's about making people and oraganizations afraid to openly give support to opposition to the Republican party.
This reminds me of something that happened when I was in elementary school. During recess, some kids were playing "keep away" from me. They had something of mine that they were throwing around to keep me from getting it. So, I approached the kid who had it... and he threw it to someone else. So I slugged him. Then I approached the kid who he threw it to... and that kid quickily handed it over.
Sometimes, one graphic example is all it takes for the rest to fall in line.
The sad part is that this almost forces the Democrats to do the same. If they don't, then think about the message it sends. "If you support the Democrats and the Republicans win, you get punished. If you support the Republicans and the Democrats win, then you *don't* get punished." So, supporting the Dems would carry much more risk than supporting the Reps. The best move for timid Democrats would be to merely not-support either.
Take heart, though. At least they're not lynching us yet.... or having McCarthy-esque hearings to find out "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Democratic Party?".
I guess it's back to the automotive repair buisiness for *those* guys.
Honestly, when I read this, I had flashbacks to all of those TV news investigative reports of mechanics, exterminators, plumbers, etc. who climb under/behind your car/sink/house and come back with "evidence" of a problem that you need to pay them $$$ to fix.
So... back to the auto shops with the bums! That's what I say!:)
Frankly, I don't really see any problem with the tracking of the kids, per se. It doesn't tell you what they're doing in the bathroom... it just lets you know that they are in the bathroom... which I don't regard as an invasion of privacy, really. All in all, it's good to keep close track of those meddling kids.
However....
The thing about this that really freaks me out is that it might give us a group of future voters who view this level of tracking as "the way things are". I'm someone who considers the Patriot act to be a dangerous step in the direction of Nazi Germany. However, I think that a group of kids just graduating from a school where they wore, essentially, tracking beacons for four year will think that the Patriot Act is downright lax.
Is it just me... or do the old suits look freakin' cool and the new ones look totally gay?
The old ones look functional, with color-coded hose hook-ups and all... like a deep-sea diver... a deep-space diver, if you will.
These new ones... jeez... you can tell if the guy's circumcised or not! Seeing as how an astronaut is probably more likely to encounter an alien being than the rest of us land-lubbers, I'd be very concerned if the first human the martians meet is dressed like a metrosexual.
I'm doubtful that the UK branch of AA can be verifying the info you give them before you set foot on the plane.
"Let's see... in the morning, I'll be staying with my pal I.P.Frehley in Hoboken,NY. Then, I'm going to have lunch with Seymour Butts in Seattle. And then I'll be bedding down at Mike Hunt's place in Miami. Now, can I get on the plane, please?".
Well, even today, I can build you a one-robot team that will, at least, would never lose.
I needs no batteries or wheels. However, it is 24 feet wide and 8 feet high. If the ball is stiffly inflated, we can actually reduce the size of this robot down to about 23 feet wide by 7.5 feet tall.:)
One thing that I didn't see mentioned in the article is that, when they use the chute, the plane doesn't come wafting gently down. On the contrary, it comes down so hard that it causes significant damage to the aircraft; demolishing the landing gear and, sometimes, resulting in scrapping of the entire aircraft.
Granted, this is better than dying in a crash, but some pilots think that you can just pull the chute any time you get in a little trouble... which can cause a lot of unnecessary scrapped aircraft.
Well, you can always pee on the ransom note before you send it.... or just spray it with some other yellowing agent.
This brings up another idea I had. CSI's use luminol to find invisible blood traces. The chemical in the luminol spray reacts with the iron in the remaining blood and glows. Anyway, I'm waiting for the day when some smart-ass murder suspect sprays his entire house with some iron-containing substance so that, when the CSI's show up with their luminol, everything glows.
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Are they going to use alphabetical-ordered human names like with hurricanes?
Can't you just see the newspaper headlines already? "Worm Andrew Batters Microsoft Servers! The worm overtopped firewalls and flooded into data-centers throught the country. Emergency officials said that it will take a week to repair the firewalls and begin letting users back into the data..."
If you want to get more hours in front of the keyboard, I'd suggest a Mountain Dew drink fountain and a catheter. In fact, if you're into case mods, you could work the catheter into the liquid CPU cooling somehow.
First, I think that the trade-off will be more than worth it. Consider these things: Cars won't need adults to drive them; you can let your kids take the car to their soccer practice while you stay home and do something more productive. Furthermore, the cars won't need *anyone* to drive them. Send your car to your kid's school to pick them up or drop them off. Send your car to the appliance-mart a half-hour away to have it loaded with the washing machine you just bought online. Go to the mall and hop out at the front door and have your car go park itself. It doesn't matter how far away it parks because it's going to come pick you up at the door anyway.
The second point is this: The type of driving that they're looking to automate and the type of driving that most people enjoy aren't the same thing. I don't enjoy driving 7 hours to my mom's mountain cabin. I *do* enjoy taking my truck out onto the beach and cruising along the surf... or driving along a curvy road in the hills. It's a lot like flying. As I pilot, when I need to cover some *distance*, I want a plane that goes fast, has autopilot, good navigation instruments, etc. However, when I want to just tool around over the dunes, I want a piddly little two-seater that goes slower than the cars on the road under me. So, in other words, the *joy* in driving doesn't come (for me, anyway) from the kind of driving that they're looking to automate.
Go down to the shoreline and step on an inclined algae-covered rock.
I asure you that they'll bear your load a lot further than a few centimeters. (Although getting your ass to the emergency room afterward is your problem)
This bluetooth thing makes it a lot easier. I'm pretty sure that the supreme court has said that talking on a cell phone does not give you expectation of privacy (meaning: whatever you say into your phone during a cell call is admissible as evidence in court), but what about just having an unsecured bluetooth phone (ie, not making a call with it)? I wouldn't be surprised to see a supreme court ruling about this within 5 years and, given the future composition of the court, I don't think the ruling will be good.
As for whether they're useless in humid environments... they're not "useless", it's just that they get more effective the farther away from 100% humidity you get. So, they'd work great in the desert... less so in Florida. Go look at this psychrometric chart and read example 3 near the bottom.
What's amusing about this project is how worthless a *little* bit of knowledge is. There's not really much thermodynamics going on here. The dude's taking some cold water/ice from the fridge and running it through some coils and then tossing it outside. The amusing part is that the coils don't look terribly efficient, so the discarded water probably wasn't able to absorb as much heat from the room as it could have. In other words, the water he's dumping out is probabably still relatively cool.
What *that* means is that he probably could have done better by just chucking the siphon system altogether and just put a big trash can of cold water in his room and wait for the water temp and the room temp to meet. To speed the process, he could have just pointed the fan into the garbage can and sped up the heat exchange AND gotten some evaporative cooling to boot.
Another solution which would probably work better is to just blow air over a block of ice. $2-$3 for a cubic foot of ice and it should require somewhere around 9,000 kiloJoules to melt. Meanwhile, a cubic room measuring 3m on a side should hold abour 34kg of air, which will require 34kiloJoules to cool it each Celcius degree. So, the block of ice should be enough to cool the room by 264 degrees. So, the block should be able to take a 264C room down to freezing. That seems like an awful lot, so I'm not sure my math is right... but I *do* think that the dude could have done much better just blowing air over a block of ice with some holes drilled in it for more surface area.
When I was taking Econ in college, the professor drew the little downward-sloping "demand" curve on the Price-Quantity graph and showed how you usually want to set the price to some point on the demand curve such that it forms a square underneath with maximal area (since the area equals your total revenue). It quickly dawned on me that it sure would be nice if you could capitalize on *all* of the trianglular area under the "demand" line. In other words, charge $100 to the one guy willing to pay that much, while still charging $10 to the 30 people only willing to pay that... and then charge $4 to the hundreds of folks willing to pay that.
My professor just kinda waved his arms and said... "yeah... that would be nice...". Only later, did I learn that this is called "Price Discrimination", and it's very cleverly used in the following ways.
Haggling. This doesn't seem like the insidious form of PD, but it *is* PD, nonetheless. Think about it. The seller is deliberatly adjusting the price according to how much he/she thinks they can get out of you. However, the fact that the buyer understands that this is the arrangement makes them feel like there's no deception happening. But it *is* PD.
Outlet Stores. Admittedly, part of the reason for lower prices at outlet stores is because they're in out-of-the-way low-rent locales, and also because they're often selling blemished items. However, another reason they're cheaper is *because* they're usually out in the boondocks. If you're an affluent customer, it's not worth it to you to drive 15 minutes each way to save $15 on a pair of pants (or to save $15 by buying a blem). You're just going to pay the premium to buy from a nearby store. However, if you're on welfare, living in the trailer park, then it's well worth it to you to drive for a while to save a little money. This way, the companies are able to sell their pants to poor folk, without having to give the rich people the "poor folk" price.
Premium gas: High-octane gasoline only costs the gas station an extra penny or two per gallon, yet they charge an extra 10 cents or so. This is because the people who self-select premium fuel do so either because they're affluent and like to feed their car "the good stuff", or they own an expensive car which requires it. Either way, they've identified themselves to the gas station owner as being well-off, and the station owner gouges them a little more.
Airplane tickets. This is the biggie. Ever noticed how you have to pay a lot more for round-trip tickets if you don't stay over a weekend? The reason for that is because, if you're not willing to stay over the weekend, you're probably not a vacationer; you're a *business* traveller... probably going to some meeting or conference. This means that you're spending the company's money on the ticket... which means that you're less sensitive to price. Who wouldn't be willing to burn an extra couple of hundred dollars in order to be home with the wife and kids for the weekend? However, if you *are* willing to spend the weekend, you're probably vacationing... which means that you're spending *your* money, where price is a bigger factor.
PD is all around you. It's legal. You could argue that it's "unfair", but I wouldn't agree. The seller and the buyer are adversaries. The seller's trying to get as much money as they can... and the buyer is trying to part with as little as they can. If either thinks that the deal isn't good for them, then the deal doesn't happen. If both think that the deal *is* worth it to them, then it *does* happen. That's the fundamental tenet of the free-market economy: all mutually-beneficial exchanges are allowed to take place.
Those who say that PD is unfair are probably the same people who, if they owned a retail store, would claim that it's unfair if a customer walked in with a few mail-order catalogs for price comparison.
If they occupy as much solid-angle as the moon, then they could eclipse the sun (or moon). Can you imagine disc-shaped billboards? I can see it now... "This eclipse brought to you by Coca-Cola!" Better yet, "All your photons are belong to us". - Joe
Unfortunately, they open themselves up to impostors. How will they know which, of those in attendance, are really time-travelers?
The real way to tell is to reserve the meeting space... and then, only advertize it after the event has passed. That way, anybody who actually showed up (other than the organizers), are highly suspect as real time-travelers.
However, the fact that they didn't do this, I think, shows the lack of conviction that these organizers have that any real time-travelers will show.
Here's an alternative to the "IF the administration will let you" part. Make use of the fact that nobody else really understands what it is the wizard (you) does behind the curtain:
Implement whatever service termination solution you feel necessary (whether by writing/downloading some automated system, or by doing it manually yourself). When the offender calls to complain, *don't* say that they were shut off administratively. Tell them that the massive traffic from their machine "overloaded" the port they were on (tell them it's kinda like a circuit breaker on house wiring).
They'll say that this never happened before. Tell them that they've got a newer, more-aggressive virus.
They'll ask that their port be "reset". Tell them that, due to all of the machines that they helped infect, and to the convoluted process for "resetting" a port, there's a backlog of a couple days before you can get their port reset.
Maybe they'll ask if you can just plug them into a different port. Tell them that they're all maxxed out.
At some point, Administration might ask why this is happening. Tell them the same thing you told the users... new, nastier viruses. They might ask what new equipment they could get to fix the problem. Tell them that the BFS-9000 can do it... but it's very... very expensive. It would be much cheaper for everyone to just use virus protection.
As far as I understand them, switching power supplies operate by "topping off" a capacitor that your DC-operated-device drains power from. If your device sucks a lot of power, the power supply has to "switch" and top off the capacitor more often. If it doesn't suck much power, it switches less-often.
The beauty of this is that it doesn't require a transformer for stepping down the AC and they don't require a linear voltage regulator. Have you noticed that Radio Shacks newer Adaptaplug adaptors (thanks to switching electronics being cheap enough) are now really small and light (like... smaller than the transformer that's no longer inside them?) and can supply surprising amounts of current. They've got a 9V adaptor that can supply 1500mA and it's the size of two Zippo lighters... whereas they used to sell two transformer-based ones. One could supply about 300mA and looked like a normal adaptors and the "heavy-duty" one could give you 800mA and was the size and weight of a baseball!
This also should give you power savings and less heat because of the way linear voltage regulators work. If you step a 110V AC signal down (and rectify it) to 12V DC and then run it through a 9V regulator, the regulator does this, essentially, by acting as a variable resistance between the transformer and the load. So, if your 9V device is drawing 1 amp, then 1 amp must be going into the voltage regulator... which means that the voltage regulator has to burn up 3V x 1A = 3Watts. That's why voltage regulator ICs almost always have heat sinks on them.
When you think about this, you realize that they only way to prevent this heat generation is if you can decrease the current going into the regulator by the same amount that you're decreasing the voltage coming out. Linear voltage regulators can't do this, but switching power supplies achieve it by quickly turning on and off to top off a capacitor. So, it's more like a pulse-width-modulation method of providing a certain voltage level.
Anyway, to respond to the parent of the parent, I had the same idea of household-wide-DC a few years ago. My EE friend set me straight, though. Typical house wiring is good for 20, sometimes 30, amps per circuit. Go tally up the current requirements for all of your devices (starting with your Mac mini and LCD). Chances are you'll quickly exceed 30 amps. So then you've got a choice: Do you wire the walls of your house with jumper-cable-sized cable, or do you have multiple DC circuits to complement your multiple AC circuits? Not a very attractive set of options.
I don't know why eBay doesn't do this already. They could send out emails to their users from bogus addresses, with links pointing to IP-only websites, etc. When the user actually clicked-through, it could be a page explaining all of the hints that they could have used to figure out that it was a phish. Even if they had people submit their login info, eBay couldn't be accused of tricking them out of information that ebay already had, right?
On a slightly off-topic note, does anyone else here wonder if eBay is secretly "salting" real phishing sites with "marked" usernames? Like banks give robbers marked money, ebay could submit specially-marked username/password pairs to phish pages. These usernames wouldn't map to real users. Instead, they'd cause an alert to happen at eBay when someone used the account. eBay could pre-load the user with fake feedback... the whole shot. And "eBay honeypot", if you will.
Where previous administrations might cook up some half-legitimate sounding criteria for membership on the panel which was only met by the people they wanted, the Bush administration just comes right out and says "If you supported our opposition, we're freezing you out". It's a purge of all but the "True Believers". He already did this to the CIA.
The reason for doing it this openly seems clear. If they were doing it to help ensure policies favorable to the administration, they could just do this silently. By doing it publicly, they're sending a message to all those watching. This isn't as much about the makeup of the committee as much as it's about making people and oraganizations afraid to openly give support to opposition to the Republican party.
This reminds me of something that happened when I was in elementary school. During recess, some kids were playing "keep away" from me. They had something of mine that they were throwing around to keep me from getting it. So, I approached the kid who had it... and he threw it to someone else. So I slugged him. Then I approached the kid who he threw it to... and that kid quickily handed it over.
Sometimes, one graphic example is all it takes for the rest to fall in line.
The sad part is that this almost forces the Democrats to do the same. If they don't, then think about the message it sends. "If you support the Democrats and the Republicans win, you get punished. If you support the Republicans and the Democrats win, then you *don't* get punished." So, supporting the Dems would carry much more risk than supporting the Reps. The best move for timid Democrats would be to merely not-support either.
Take heart, though. At least they're not lynching us yet.... or having McCarthy-esque hearings to find out "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Democratic Party?".
Honestly, when I read this, I had flashbacks to all of those TV news investigative reports of mechanics, exterminators, plumbers, etc. who climb under/behind your car/sink/house and come back with "evidence" of a problem that you need to pay them $$$ to fix.
So... back to the auto shops with the bums! That's what I say! :)
So... what technology were they accounting for in the part where authorities no longer needed probable-cause in order to tap my phone?
Frankly, I don't really see any problem with the tracking of the kids, per se. It doesn't tell you what they're doing in the bathroom... it just lets you know that they are in the bathroom... which I don't regard as an invasion of privacy, really. All in all, it's good to keep close track of those meddling kids.
However....
The thing about this that really freaks me out is that it might give us a group of future voters who view this level of tracking as "the way things are". I'm someone who considers the Patriot act to be a dangerous step in the direction of Nazi Germany. However, I think that a group of kids just graduating from a school where they wore, essentially, tracking beacons for four year will think that the Patriot Act is downright lax.
Is it just me... or do the old suits look freakin' cool and the new ones look totally gay?
The old ones look functional, with color-coded hose hook-ups and all... like a deep-sea diver... a deep-space diver, if you will.
These new ones... jeez... you can tell if the guy's circumcised or not! Seeing as how an astronaut is probably more likely to encounter an alien being than the rest of us land-lubbers, I'd be very concerned if the first human the martians meet is dressed like a metrosexual.
I'm doubtful that the UK branch of AA can be verifying the info you give them before you set foot on the plane.
"Let's see... in the morning, I'll be staying with my pal I.P.Frehley in Hoboken,NY. Then, I'm going to have lunch with Seymour Butts in Seattle. And then I'll be bedding down at Mike Hunt's place in Miami. Now, can I get on the plane, please?".
Well, even today, I can build you a one-robot team that will, at least, would never lose.
:)
I needs no batteries or wheels. However, it is 24 feet wide and 8 feet high. If the ball is stiffly inflated, we can actually reduce the size of this robot down to about 23 feet wide by 7.5 feet tall.
One thing that I didn't see mentioned in the article is that, when they use the chute, the plane doesn't come wafting gently down. On the contrary, it comes down so hard that it causes significant damage to the aircraft; demolishing the landing gear and, sometimes, resulting in scrapping of the entire aircraft.
Granted, this is better than dying in a crash, but some pilots think that you can just pull the chute any time you get in a little trouble... which can cause a lot of unnecessary scrapped aircraft.
Well, you can always pee on the ransom note before you send it.... or just spray it with some other yellowing agent.
This brings up another idea I had. CSI's use luminol to find invisible blood traces. The chemical in the luminol spray reacts with the iron in the remaining blood and glows. Anyway, I'm waiting for the day when some smart-ass murder suspect sprays his entire house with some iron-containing substance so that, when the CSI's show up with their luminol, everything glows.