My boss used to do custom business software and database programming back in the big iron days. He said that in order to do customer support they would often build in a way to shell into the machines remotely to do the diagnostics.
No problem there. But the kicker was that he would build back doors into the programs that only he knew about, so if they changed the front door passwords or otherwise screwed it up, he could still get in.
The big problem was that he wouldn't tell his customers about these back doors. This is financial and tax data we're talking about. He saw no ethical problem with this. None at all. Fortunately he's not a malicious guy,
This isn't a suprise to anybody, right? I was just shocked at the total and complete lack of guilt over doing this. And he's otherwise a normal guy. That's scary.
Nobody can pronounce my name on the first try without being born to it. The poor clerks at Safeway have enough to do without trying to learn how! Maybe Prada had better put a phonetic spelling in their records.
This could be really fun at a snob shop like Prada. I now nobody here has signed their loyalty cards as "Frodo Bigbutt," "Billy Bob Gates," or anything like that. let's see the Pradadroid say that out loud! Or would they have the nerve to call BS?
It would be nice to be rich and have absolutely no shame.
At least that's what I'm getting capturing mini-dv and DVCAM stuff at the highest quality setting. DVC Pro 25/50 & some of the other formats are much more fun. We maybe talking about different things.
A retail mini-DV tape will cost at around $5.50 to $7.50, depending on quality and length. I live in a small town so that may be higher than a city dweller will pay. My station buys in bulk and gets a better deal, of course.
It's not like most people need it, but the optics and the mechanical stuff on those cheap DV cameras aren't much good. Forget doing action or sports photography. It will just be annoying to watch.
So Ferrari basically got their computing support needs taken care of and a couple of Acer engineers to abuse by letting someone use their brand name? maybe it's not a bad deal.
I am not sure that manipulation in post is, or ever will be the biggest threat from a dishonest cop. The biggest threat is what the person chooses to put in the video or image, and what is framed out. But everyone knows this, right?
My job is editing video. the only tool I have is Final Cut Pro. Sometimes a person on a program will say something wrong, make a mistake, or I just need to cut for time. I have to make choices all the time about what to cut, and the most difficult thing is often preserving good grammar and the original sense of what the person was saying. Gatekeeping and simple editing are huge, and can't be detected at all if everyone keeps their mouth shut.
More on point, seamless, untraceable sound editing can be done right now and cheaply. I have made someone "say" they were in one town, when they originally said they were in another. I wasn't sure if I had it right until I ran the edit past my boss and he said "what edit?" That's with the primitive sound editing tools built into FCP. That's today!
Obviously it's going to be difficult to put an AK-47 into the hands of a person that really was carrying a beach ball. Manipulation doesn't have to be that obvious. What about changing a single letter on a license plate, or making painting an inconvenient bullet hole out of a wall? I submit that stuff like that can and is being done. Take Hollywood, for instance. OK, they put out 90% crap, but their fakery skills are unmatched, and they are for hire.
It isn't difficult to notice low grade Photoshop chicanery. My brother showed me some of his work in a printed magazine and said to point out the fake. It took me just seconds. He had put a guy in a group photo that was never in that room. That was a rush job in a low resolution printed picture, but it got past his bosses and the audience. Photoshop isn't my area, (yet, hopefully,) but I bet an expert could blow simple manipulations past anyone, everytime.
This ignores your more cryptographic honesty helpers, somebody else is probably going to talk about that at length.
The above, parent post is right, I think. Dot it right and nobody will notice. If you don't notice, what's the chance of doubting it?
Personally, I only trust pictures and audio to the degree that I trust the person that made them and everyone downstream from the creator. Luckily most people are too lazy to make a really good fake.
The day the United States Army takes the rocket packs off of their MLRS and installs a bank of Airzookas, the United States invaded by Lichtenstein.
I do believe there are some infrasonic weaons in development. They are supposed to make the targets go stupid and crap their pants. It's a short ranged, riot control type of deal I think.
The only info I have on this is a half memory from a Discovery episode. Most of the links I found were a bit heavy on the conspiracy theories to be credible. Sorry about that.
Ok, if you've made it this far down in the thread, you probably have a good idea of what he wants most. Take something with bismuth sulfate in it, you'll get better.
Maybe I'm a bit primitive, but V-Day freaks me out a bit. It seems to be very much more important you ladies than the average man-geek. He probably knows this and may be worried about how to keep you happy. At three months, his brain is probably at least 45% occupied thinking of ways not to screw this up.
So do yourself a favor, make certain that he knows exactly what will keep you happy on this day. It'll be good for both of you.
Oh, and in case you still need help in the gift department, get him something from, and you something .
Sorry I could find a better link about this active correction for dishes business. But the CS article made me think. If we have a big array of smaller dishes to do astronomy instead of big dishes like the DSN uses, the system would be more flexible. Surely part of the big array of small dishes could be broken away to control space craft, and when that's done we could turn it back to other projects or science. i'm mostly guessing here!
I have seen a guy build TV satellite downlink dishes using a bicycle powered brake. His machine was set up in a dirt yard in some part of Zambia. At the low end, this isn't exactly precision work. At the high end, maybe it is.
Like many of the above slash friends, I don't see this being super useful for fitting clothes. Especially off the rack clothes.
It might be useful if we ever get into warm capable ships and start wearing those Wesley Crusher suits. I'd have to beat myself up, just on principle.
If that is so, I'd say the high end market is shot also. Anyone that has the money to get custom fitted clothing probably has the money to have some tailor and fitter kiss their butts in person. I can respect tailors for their technical skills, but a good one can also keep you out of fashion trouble. As if I have the money to care about that right now!
If I understand this article, the big deal is the ability to simulate different fabrics draping over the model, not the ability to model a body. We've been able to do that for awhile. Maybe we could use it to make better space suits and their undergarments. After all, we basically make only one size and color, and dangit, our astronauts deserve to feel sexy.
All that being said, I want a copy of this technology. I'd like to do some historical 3d graphics, try out some ergonomic ideas & such.
Anybody that says I want to play virtual Barbie is a damn liar.
From what i'm seeing on the links, manual de-mining is still the gold standard, but an accident will happen for about every 2000 mines destroyed. That sucks, and there can't be that many people that have the skills and balls to do that work. These marking weeds may have to be better than waiting for a charity de-mining!
I'm no EOD tech, but maybe finding the little buggers is 98% of the problem. Once they are found a person could either just mark and leave them in place or blow them up.
Once the weeds mark the mines, a rich villager could call in the army or police and they will lay a few dollars worth of detonating cord next to the mines and clear the field at 20,000 feet per second. Or the army guy could sit back and take shots at the mines from beyond the minimum safe difference.
The poorer and/or depressed villager could tie a rope onto a chunk of tree or a rock, heave the weight on the other side fo the marked area, get behind a tree and then give the rope a good pull.
Obviously these methods have problems. both would leave a lot of fragments flying around, and are not exactly risk free for the person doing the job.
Call me a cruel, heartless bastard, but this isn't oing to be a problem. All you have to do is tell the villagers to stay away from a certain area while the work is being done. Anybody that forgets or doesn't get the news is just gonna be SOL. If a hut gets a bunch of fragments thrown thru it, then they will have to spend a day repairing it. No big deal.
From what I've been able to pick up, a few flying chunks of metal is not going to be real high on the worry list for people that have land mine problems. Waking up is a bigger risk. Getting enough food, not getting some god-awful tropical disease or not pissing off the latest dictator is going to fill their worry bin.
Most countries that have real land mine issues are desperately poor and need something like these plants just to cut down on their chances of having their kids legs blown off. Rich countries can solve their problems with robotics and large amounts of beer for their off duty ordinance techs.
Right or wrong, certainty is for rich countries. Bravo to these scientists.
I was born in Kansas, and just about any job there stinks. Most especially the jobs outside.
I've only had to do that job a tiny little bit, and no doubt about it, it's brutal. My father grew up on a farm in North Dakota, and he had to do that all summer, every summer. The pictures of him when he was a teenager are just scary. He is all chest shoulders and arms.
He said that was a prime motivator for him to get his education. (Master of Divinity, go figure)
A suburban paper route doesn't have the same punch, I think.
Really though, SCO & it's Australian sub-parts might do well to tread lightly. Rightly or not, I bet the Australian authorities would love to make an example of an American corporation, especially one headed by a bunch of pompous lying weasels.
Stripping down and wearing a set of man-panties might help soften the corporate image. But what do I know about business? I work for somebody else.
I tried some of the Lebanese stuff once. It'll definitely put some hair on your ass!
The table service was nice, but in general, I didn't care for the coffee. The spices they put in it wasn't to my taste, but you definitely knew you were drinking coffee. It's worth trying, if only for exploration's sake.
No doubt about it, I'm a moron. Should have been thorough.
The effect on those mirrors was striking. It seems hard to believe that they couldn't build a flatter plate of glass. I'll find out more about this.
Another bit just came to mind. I seem to remember theat some astronomer types are still going back to the old telescopes with lenses that aren't all that large. An article said something about them being able to get information otherwise not available because the same stars had been observed with the same optics for so long. Dang, should have remembered this.
I helped move some furniture from the 1880s that included some thick mirrors. There was noticeable distortion at the bottom of the mirrors that wasn't perceptable, if present, at the top. The bottom of the mirrors looked wavy.
I can say for sure, but it looked like the glass had flowed in only 100 years or so. Maybe glass technology has changed. Maybe I misunderstood what was happening.
I haven't heard of this reactor type before, and it is really exciting me right now.
The author of this piece is almost certainly dumbing it down big time, but he makes sense. I don't see any logical inconsistencies or wishful thinking here.
The thing I do understand is the following statement: " I believe there is a huge pent-up demand for resources in space, and if we could put huge payloads into orbit, uses for those payloads would appear quickly."
Exactly! If weight isn't so all fired important you can build it simpler, faster and cheaper, which lets you build more, which allows economies of scale, which allows research into how to make it better, lighter, stronger, for cheaper... and so on and so forth. Not all feedback loops are bad.
My post doesn't add a whole lot, I know, but this is beyond cool. It may even be possible. Thanks.
1. Pile combustibles. Type, amount and moisture content don't matter too much. Rocks and pinecones will do.
2. Apply lighter fluid. More is better.
3. Stand back and use your "emergency" firestarter (flint stick glued to a bar of magnesium.) Bear down hard with your metal stricker and you can get a good 3 foot spray of sparks. Try to practice for distance before you start the fire if you like having eyebrows.
This technique doesn't work well in really cold weather.
Of course somebody told me about this. I wouldn't know anything about it, personally.
I helped a family member install a washer/dryer set. It took 220v/60hz and he hadn't installed the plug onto the bare wires.
We asked my dear cousin if the breaker was set to "off," asked her to double check, and then went to work. I went to work and accidentally bumped the wires, causing a huge arc about 2 inches in front of my eyes.
I was lucky to live, folks. I'm not sure who the bigger fool was, me or my cousin. The leson is that a wire isn't dead until you have personally checked it, and checked it again. Even then you have to be careful.
I'm pretty new to high voltage electronics and information security, but I have learned a lesson.
It seems to me that even if you use this Word feature, and know what it does, you can't count on your documents being secured. Another ignoramus will come along and screw it up and you won't know it. I really despise half solutions. They are as useful as almost making jump over the Grand Canyon.
Now, we all know what the information security equivalent to lockout/tagout is, right?
Slashdot Mirror
My boss used to do custom business software and database programming back in the big iron days. He said that in order to do customer support they would often build in a way to shell into the machines remotely to do the diagnostics.
No problem there. But the kicker was that he would build back doors into the programs that only he knew about, so if they changed the front door passwords or otherwise screwed it up, he could still get in.
The big problem was that he wouldn't tell his customers about these back doors. This is financial and tax data we're talking about. He saw no ethical problem with this. None at all. Fortunately he's not a malicious guy,
This isn't a suprise to anybody, right? I was just shocked at the total and complete lack of guilt over doing this. And he's otherwise a normal guy. That's scary.
Nobody can pronounce my name on the first try without being born to it. The poor clerks at Safeway have enough to do without trying to learn how! Maybe Prada had better put a phonetic spelling in their records.
This could be really fun at a snob shop like Prada. I now nobody here has signed their loyalty cards as "Frodo Bigbutt," "Billy Bob Gates," or anything like that. let's see the Pradadroid say that out loud! Or would they have the nerve to call BS?
It would be nice to be rich and have absolutely no shame.
At least that's what I'm getting capturing mini-dv and DVCAM stuff at the highest quality setting. DVC Pro 25/50 & some of the other formats are much more fun. We maybe talking about different things. A retail mini-DV tape will cost at around $5.50 to $7.50, depending on quality and length. I live in a small town so that may be higher than a city dweller will pay. My station buys in bulk and gets a better deal, of course. It's not like most people need it, but the optics and the mechanical stuff on those cheap DV cameras aren't much good. Forget doing action or sports photography. It will just be annoying to watch.
So Ferrari basically got their computing support needs taken care of and a couple of Acer engineers to abuse by letting someone use their brand name? maybe it's not a bad deal.
I am not sure that manipulation in post is, or ever will be the biggest threat from a dishonest cop. The biggest threat is what the person chooses to put in the video or image, and what is framed out. But everyone knows this, right?
My job is editing video. the only tool I have is Final Cut Pro. Sometimes a person on a program will say something wrong, make a mistake, or I just need to cut for time. I have to make choices all the time about what to cut, and the most difficult thing is often preserving good grammar and the original sense of what the person was saying. Gatekeeping and simple editing are huge, and can't be detected at all if everyone keeps their mouth shut.
More on point, seamless, untraceable sound editing can be done right now and cheaply. I have made someone "say" they were in one town, when they originally said they were in another. I wasn't sure if I had it right until I ran the edit past my boss and he said "what edit?" That's with the primitive sound editing tools built into FCP. That's today!
Obviously it's going to be difficult to put an AK-47 into the hands of a person that really was carrying a beach ball. Manipulation doesn't have to be that obvious. What about changing a single letter on a license plate, or making painting an inconvenient bullet hole out of a wall? I submit that stuff like that can and is being done. Take Hollywood, for instance. OK, they put out 90% crap, but their fakery skills are unmatched, and they are for hire.
It isn't difficult to notice low grade Photoshop chicanery. My brother showed me some of his work in a printed magazine and said to point out the fake. It took me just seconds. He had put a guy in a group photo that was never in that room. That was a rush job in a low resolution printed picture, but it got past his bosses and the audience. Photoshop isn't my area, (yet, hopefully,) but I bet an expert could blow simple manipulations past anyone, everytime.
This ignores your more cryptographic honesty helpers, somebody else is probably going to talk about that at length.
The above, parent post is right, I think. Dot it right and nobody will notice. If you don't notice, what's the chance of doubting it?
Personally, I only trust pictures and audio to the degree that I trust the person that made them and everyone downstream from the creator. Luckily most people are too lazy to make a really good fake.
The day the United States Army takes the rocket packs off of their MLRS and installs a bank of Airzookas, the United States invaded by Lichtenstein.
I do believe there are some infrasonic weaons in development. They are supposed to make the targets go stupid and crap their pants. It's a short ranged, riot control type of deal I think.
The only info I have on this is a half memory from a Discovery episode. Most of the links I found were a bit heavy on the conspiracy theories to be credible. Sorry about that.
First of all, damn that lucky SOB!
Ok, if you've made it this far down in the thread, you probably have a good idea of what he wants most. Take something with bismuth sulfate in it, you'll get better.
Maybe I'm a bit primitive, but V-Day freaks me out a bit. It seems to be very much more important you ladies than the average man-geek. He probably knows this and may be worried about how to keep you happy. At three months, his brain is probably at least 45% occupied thinking of ways not to screw this up.
So do yourself a favor, make certain that he knows exactly what will keep you happy on this day. It'll be good for both of you.
Oh, and in case you still need help in the gift department, get him something from, and you something .
What about one of these bad boys for the well heeled paranoid?
Would 600Watts at 13.56MHz do the job?
This is not my area of expertise, but we're now doing "active optics" for parabolic radio antennas.
CS Monitor Link
Sorry I could find a better link about this active correction for dishes business. But the CS article made me think. If we have a big array of smaller dishes to do astronomy instead of big dishes like the DSN uses, the system would be more flexible. Surely part of the big array of small dishes could be broken away to control space craft, and when that's done we could turn it back to other projects or science. i'm mostly guessing here!
I have seen a guy build TV satellite downlink dishes using a bicycle powered brake. His machine was set up in a dirt yard in some part of Zambia. At the low end, this isn't exactly precision work. At the high end, maybe it is.
Please, for the love of God, ell me that there is a good reason they didn't put a little mylar peel off layer on the top of their solar cells!
Hook up a wire and a little motor/pulley job, 7 when the dust builds up, peel the top layer off. boom, there you go, another few weeks of life.
This is so simple that I must be missing something. The small loss in efficiency caused by a thin layer of plastic can't be it, or can it?
even with an in-animate object we are not comfortable with our own bodies.
Like many of the above slash friends, I don't see this being super useful for fitting clothes. Especially off the rack clothes.
It might be useful if we ever get into warm capable ships and start wearing those Wesley Crusher suits. I'd have to beat myself up, just on principle.
If that is so, I'd say the high end market is shot also. Anyone that has the money to get custom fitted clothing probably has the money to have some tailor and fitter kiss their butts in person. I can respect tailors for their technical skills, but a good one can also keep you out of fashion trouble. As if I have the money to care about that right now!
If I understand this article, the big deal is the ability to simulate different fabrics draping over the model, not the ability to model a body. We've been able to do that for awhile. Maybe we could use it to make better space suits and their undergarments. After all, we basically make only one size and color, and dangit, our astronauts deserve to feel sexy.
All that being said, I want a copy of this technology. I'd like to do some historical 3d graphics, try out some ergonomic ideas & such.
Anybody that says I want to play virtual Barbie is a damn liar.
I can't spell today. Sorry.
U.N.-centric place to start.
A few black & white pics
Field manual references
From what i'm seeing on the links, manual de-mining is still the gold standard, but an accident will happen for about every 2000 mines destroyed. That sucks, and there can't be that many people that have the skills and balls to do that work. These marking weeds may have to be better than waiting for a charity de-mining!
I'm no EOD tech, but maybe finding the little buggers is 98% of the problem. Once they are found a person could either just mark and leave them in place or blow them up.
Once the weeds mark the mines, a rich villager could call in the army or police and they will lay a few dollars worth of detonating cord next to the mines and clear the field at 20,000 feet per second. Or the army guy could sit back and take shots at the mines from beyond the minimum safe difference.
The poorer and/or depressed villager could tie a rope onto a chunk of tree or a rock, heave the weight on the other side fo the marked area, get behind a tree and then give the rope a good pull.
Obviously these methods have problems. both would leave a lot of fragments flying around, and are not exactly risk free for the person doing the job.
Call me a cruel, heartless bastard, but this isn't oing to be a problem. All you have to do is tell the villagers to stay away from a certain area while the work is being done. Anybody that forgets or doesn't get the news is just gonna be SOL. If a hut gets a bunch of fragments thrown thru it, then they will have to spend a day repairing it. No big deal.
From what I've been able to pick up, a few flying chunks of metal is not going to be real high on the worry list for people that have land mine problems. Waking up is a bigger risk. Getting enough food, not getting some god-awful tropical disease or not pissing off the latest dictator is going to fill their worry bin.
Most countries that have real land mine issues are desperately poor and need something like these plants just to cut down on their chances of having their kids legs blown off. Rich countries can solve their problems with robotics and large amounts of beer for their off duty ordinance techs.
Right or wrong, certainty is for rich countries. Bravo to these scientists.
Until everyone's favorite site in the Christmas Island domain went down, a single URL would suffice.
Well, did he?
I was born in Kansas, and just about any job there stinks. Most especially the jobs outside.
I've only had to do that job a tiny little bit, and no doubt about it, it's brutal. My father grew up on a farm in North Dakota, and he had to do that all summer, every summer. The pictures of him when he was a teenager are just scary. He is all chest shoulders and arms.
He said that was a prime motivator for him to get his education. (Master of Divinity, go figure)
A suburban paper route doesn't have the same punch, I think.
Really though, SCO & it's Australian sub-parts might do well to tread lightly. Rightly or not, I bet the Australian authorities would love to make an example of an American corporation, especially one headed by a bunch of pompous lying weasels.
Stripping down and wearing a set of man-panties might help soften the corporate image. But what do I know about business? I work for somebody else.
I tried some of the Lebanese stuff once. It'll definitely put some hair on your ass!
The table service was nice, but in general, I didn't care for the coffee. The spices they put in it wasn't to my taste, but you definitely knew you were drinking coffee. It's worth trying, if only for exploration's sake.
Miscellaneous links:
A Recipe
How everyone does it
Hey, If we're gonna be wired, we might as well do it right
No doubt about it, I'm a moron. Should have been thorough.
The effect on those mirrors was striking. It seems hard to believe that they couldn't build a flatter plate of glass. I'll find out more about this.
Another bit just came to mind. I seem to remember theat some astronomer types are still going back to the old telescopes with lenses that aren't all that large. An article said something about them being able to get information otherwise not available because the same stars had been observed with the same optics for so long. Dang, should have remembered this.
Sorry for taking up space guys. I'll do better.
I helped move some furniture from the 1880s that included some thick mirrors. There was noticeable distortion at the bottom of the mirrors that wasn't perceptable, if present, at the top. The bottom of the mirrors looked wavy.
I can say for sure, but it looked like the glass had flowed in only 100 years or so. Maybe glass technology has changed. Maybe I misunderstood what was happening.
I haven't heard of this reactor type before, and it is really exciting me right now.
The author of this piece is almost certainly dumbing it down big time, but he makes sense. I don't see any logical inconsistencies or wishful thinking here.
The thing I do understand is the following statement:
" I believe there is a huge pent-up demand for resources in space, and if we could put huge payloads into orbit, uses for those payloads would appear quickly."
Exactly! If weight isn't so all fired important you can build it simpler, faster and cheaper, which lets you build more, which allows economies of scale, which allows research into how to make it better, lighter, stronger, for cheaper... and so on and so forth. Not all feedback loops are bad.
My post doesn't add a whole lot, I know, but this is beyond cool. It may even be possible. Thanks.
1. Pile combustibles. Type, amount and moisture content don't matter too much. Rocks and pinecones will do.
2. Apply lighter fluid. More is better.
3. Stand back and use your "emergency" firestarter (flint stick glued to a bar of magnesium.) Bear down hard with your metal stricker and you can get a good 3 foot spray of sparks. Try to practice for distance before you start the fire if you like having eyebrows.
This technique doesn't work well in really cold weather.
Of course somebody told me about this. I wouldn't know anything about it, personally.
I helped a family member install a washer/dryer set. It took 220v/60hz and he hadn't installed the plug onto the bare wires.
We asked my dear cousin if the breaker was set to "off," asked her to double check, and then went to work. I went to work and accidentally bumped the wires, causing a huge arc about 2 inches in front of my eyes.
I was lucky to live, folks. I'm not sure who the bigger fool was, me or my cousin. The leson is that a wire isn't dead until you have personally checked it, and checked it again. Even then you have to be careful.
I'm pretty new to high voltage electronics and information security, but I have learned a lesson.
It seems to me that even if you use this Word feature, and know what it does, you can't count on your documents being secured. Another ignoramus will come along and screw it up and you won't know it. I really despise half solutions. They are as useful as almost making jump over the Grand Canyon.
Now, we all know what the information security equivalent to lockout/tagout is, right?
Done venting now, thanks.