No, no.
Hard drives are actually vented. There's no pressurized compartment. They run at the same atmosphere as the rest of the machine. The lift of the hard drive heads is the "Bernoulli effect" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli's_equation) see also (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5413198.stm).
So when these drives are exposed to hard vacuum (as suggested by the OP) the Bernoulli effect
fails and the heads start gouging into the platters.
Whats needed is some really good logging though I'm not sure how to produce evidence grade logging information (ie tamper proof)
That's realtively easy. I should say "almost tamper proof" though. Have a computer that is just a network log server as its only function. Everything sends logs to that computer.
There is one hacker that could easily tamper with that evidence... you!
The prosecution could assert that you had tampered with the logs to make it
look like you had been hacked (not sure how farfetched that scenario is I suspect
it depends on who is prosecuting you, the RIAA is sure to grasp at that straw)
Thats why I was thinking about using a 3rd party. If logs were emailed to say a gmail
account which is never read, it would be possible to show that the log had been emailed
at a specific datetime and could not have been modified (I guess there is still oppotunity for
shenanigan I wonder if there is a room for a write only email logging service it you could cc/bcc to
it and at least prove an email had been sent)
"If I enabled wireless security on my network and someone hacked it, I would have a far harder time proving my innocence",
I think this is a fair point, its hard enough to prove that an unsecured network was 'hacked'
and the 'WiFi lobby' would be banging on the door to act as expert witness against you...
Whats needed is some really good logging though I'm not sure how to produce evidence grade logging
information (ie tamper proof)
I suppose sending the logs to a trusted 3rd party would do the trick. Does such a service exist?
I suppose automated emails to Gmail or somesuch would provide useful 3rd party timestamping.
though you really need the logs exported in real time to catch a hypothetical superhacker.
But it is not prophecy. Instead, it's mere extrapolation of totalitarianism in the technologically advancing western world.
and not a very prophetic one at that, we can do it much much better and cheaper
nowadays. Orwell totally failed to predict the potential of datamining, tracking via mobile phone, RFID,
credit records etc. Nowadays Winston would alter news records with a simple regexp and would
never got away with shagging in the woods where the trees are 'too small to hide a microphone'.
But please remember that most europeans have access to decent public transportation... Poor gringos have to drive everywhere...
more to the point the average European car does 43mpg and the average American one does 29
(stats from first source I found)
granted some of this may be due to differences in testing but up to now fuel economy has not been a major
selling point in the US market.
Yeah and on top of that, the coolest toy you could give a kid for Christmas is a simple computer and teach them to do a Linux build. Imagine the shock on the faces of friends and teachers when your kid tells them what he/she did over Christmas break.
How does it feel to have an xkcd strip all about you?
The main reason for the destruction (of Colossus) was that we no longer needed the same number of machines. We did keep two though I believe which were moved to GCHQ (General Communications Head Quarters - Our eavesdropping department). We certainly did not destroy them all but much of what they did after the war will still be classified.
I've heard scurrilous rumors that the Enigma (Do I really need to wiki link it:-) machines were sold on
to other nations...
Having a social networking account is an inherent risk, you may have a squeeky clean
page used to stay in touch with your granny. Then your mate 'Mad Dave' decides to
post thoes photos which made you look really pissed (you were yawning at the time),
then the interviewer happens by...
Even if you say nothing about your self Facebook reveals your friends,
acquaintances and people you happen to be in shot with. Guilt by association
could cost a job.
Can it make a spider-shaped object? Specifically, one in which all of the feet touch the ground, but the torso and head of the spider are above the feet (suspended by the legs), and the knees of the legs are above the torso and head of the spider?
You can't make that layer-by-layer in a single pass. You have to make the feet first, go all the way up to the knees, and then back down to the body.
A safe would be a good investment, most are fire proof which is important too.
A safe that is "fire proof" for paper (< 451 F) is not "fire proof" for your backups - you need a data/media safe, which are significantly more expensive. Fireproof safes do not stop the contents getting hot.... just stops them burning by keeping the air out.
I head of a case where they found the fireproof safe and eagerly opened it while it was still
hot... the moment the air got in the paper burst into flame.
When you look at the history of Soviet space exploration, you often get the impression that "it builds and fits together, launch it" was more often than not the deciding factor. Isn't this one of the main tenets of Hacker Philosophy - to play around with technology and see where that gets you? Hmm it seems more like a Management anti-pattern, throw lots of money at the problem and
hope some sticks... and if it does not stick, execute the project leader and most of the
middle management.
b) you have young children and leave them in childcare, there is nothing inherently wrong with that technically, but it isn't very nice for the parents nor the children. On top of that the cost of childcare can easily wipe out half a salary.
I put weather from my backyard on my website. I use it for fun, when I'm at work, or away, I can tell the up-to-the minute weather, and I'd love to put a picture of the backyard up every few minutes. I want to get a wireless camera, but I don't want to pay a fortune, and I'd like it to support wireless.
Can anybody suggest a good camera for this purpose? Powering the device would be a problem but how about plugging a cheap webcam into a
wireless USB adapter.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Capchas were overcomes simply by showing the graphics to some underpaid person who just types in the actual responses.
A sophisticaed enough system could easily "pipe" these graphics to someone who just sits and types all day. At one capcha every 10 seconds, that's about 8000 in a day working 24/7.
Not everything these spammers do has to be automated. I've heard storys about this being done... it would make sense, possibly more
profitable than goldfarming, on WoW subs as overheads could get by with less bandwidth
.
You dont even need to do the experement, there is a name for it since the 1980s From the Jargon files gorilla arm: n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s.
The Wii seems to be rather popular.
THe Wii does not expect you to make very precise , it has more in common with a tennis racket than a biro
You dont even need to do the experement, there is a name for it since the 1980s
From the Jargon files
gorilla arm: n.The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to fly in real use?".
if we spend our time to discredit the ID theory, even if we are successful, another superstitious theory will come along to capture the minds of the scientifically illiterate. The solution is not to attack individual crackpot theories, but to attempt to teach the public to recognise all of them with critical thinking and with as much scientific knowledge we can pass to them. Only by educating the public we can get rid of crackpots.
Oddly enough this is exactly what the ID lobby want to do, except they want to proselytize (as outlined by their
'Wedge strategy'.
ID is not just a crackpot theory, ID is part of a political agenda invented after the 'creationist lobby'
lost Edwards v. Aguillard
to Quote wikipedia Wikipedia
The overall goal of the intelligent design movement is to "overthrow materialism" and atheism. They believe that society has suffered "devastating cultural consequences" from adopting materialism and that science is the cause of this decay into materialism since science seeks only natural explanations. Science is therefore atheistic, they claim. They believe that the theory of evolution implies that humans have no spiritual nature, no moral purpose, and no intrinsic meaning. The movement's proponents seek to "defeat [the] materialist world view" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions".
Anyway publicially debating the crackpots is quite a good way of spreading critical thinking
and scientific knowledge to a public who to be honest don't really care.
Newsflash: Reason still survives in the modern world - Government officials have not fallen into the dark ages (yet) - Hopes for sustainance of science in the coming decades!
Future archaeologists and historians will undoubtedly regard the presence of such news stories before the next dark ages as a clear indication of the pathetic condition of science in our civilisation. When confronted with a stupid theory the best course of action is to blatantly ignore it without remorse. Even by taking your time to attack the stupid theory, you are giving it some value (your time).
In which case future historians may well conclude that the Dark Ages came because everyone who was able to
counter the stupid theory. just ignored it....
You don't matter (to thost pushing the ID adjenda), you can see the gaping flaws.
ID is aimed at the Scientifically Illiterate 'open minded' types who are not inclined to
think too closly about the issue. If ID is just ignored the ID crowd will do the speaking
for you...
a lie can travel twice round the world before the truth has even got its boots on
I remember hearing way back when that the Human Genome people were doing their job more quickly by only mapping the active DNA and skipping the "junk"... if that "junk" is in fact active, does that mean they have a lot more mapping to do? Or is my info just hopelessly out of date?
The central dogma of biology is DNA makes RNA makes Protein (but since this is biology there are exceptions:-)
Think of DNA as the source code (Exons) with lots and lots of commented out text (Introns)
RNA is the executable with all the commented out text has been removed
the RNA provides the patten to make protein by, so if you know what RNA molecules are in a cell
you know to a first approximation what proteins are in that cell.
Its possible to decompile the RNA executable back into DNA (using Reverse transcriptase (this is important
because RNA is unstable and easily breaks down).
I think thats enough background... What you do is take some living tissue flash freeze in
in liquid nitrogen extract the RNA convert it back to DNA, clone
all the resultant DNA molecules (yielding ~50 thousand clones)then pick one at random and do a quick and dirty sequencing on it. Wash rince repeat dump the results in a database
Back when sequenceing was expensive it was a useful way of snagging genes without having to struggle though mega bases of DNA. Now you can sequence whole genomes (small ones:) in a week
and are talking about doing the individual human genomes in a matter of months/. EST data
provides support for computational gene predections (just because something looks like a gene, quacks like a gene
doesn't mean that it is ever expressed (used) like a gene:-)
Exhaustion is not an appropriate mechanic for a pulp/space opera setting as it violates
the genre's style conventions on heroic action. Exhaustion mechanics belong in "grittier"
settings such as noir or low fantasy.
The one scene I can think of is when Luke is hanging upside down in the ice cave in Hoth. His exhaustion makes it extremely difficult to even summon his light saber from a few feet away.
If you want that in WEG game terms I'd suggest that Luke was wounded -1D and at the
time he only had an alter of about 4D, On top of that the lightsaber was stuck in the
ice so it required an Easy skill roll (ie a roll of 10 or more) to free it. so he had about
a 50:50 chance of success. He clearly made two skill rolls in the film:-)
George Lucas's inability to deal with human limitations except in the rarest plot points
doesn't have to limit my imagining of how the Star Wars universe works.
I don't think you can blame George for this... He is doing space opera which means fast-paced
lots of shooting and only a few superficial wounds to the heros.
This is probably
also why I like the Knigts of the Old Republic, it is much 'grittier' than the movies.
In fiction, it is generally when the character's are at their limit that things are the
most interesting, and setting that limit too high results in games that are dull soap operas.
I think your putting your finger on a more generic problem here, the higher the powerlevel of
any game the harder it is to set an appropriate challange level and there is often little middle ground
between characters that are 'eggshells armed with sledgehammers' and ones that are 'anvils armed with feathers'
it can be really hard to challange one without killing the other
The old d20 system charged vitality (stun damage) for using force powers. IME the net result
was that noone dared using forcepowers as they never knew when they would take a blaster bolt
and need their vitality to soak the damage.
Exhaustion does come up in my games but only as a result of fumbling a roll
getting 1 on the force dice (I make up the fumbles on the spot so
'ooooh that took a lot out of you your at -1D till you can rest' comes up from time to time).
Set exhaustion mechanics would just slow things down and inhibit players from
getting into the swing of things (IMHO).
> You take all your photos within 10 feet of your computer? I'd suggest your working practices are somewhat atypical...
Studio work?
Several thousand pictures a day in a single room. Hmmm... If it were thousands of shots a day I'd have thought that WiFi
made even more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Geez. The LAST thing society needs is a bunch of synthesized clones running around with hacked up spaghetti code for genes.
Too late we are already running on the most worst spaghetti code that depends on undocumented action at a distance method calls.
Hard drives are actually vented. There's no pressurized compartment. They run at the same atmosphere as the rest of the machine. The lift of the hard drive heads is the "Bernoulli effect" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli's_equation) see also (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5413198.stm).
So when these drives are exposed to hard vacuum (as suggested by the OP) the Bernoulli effect fails and the heads start gouging into the platters.
That's realtively easy. I should say "almost tamper proof" though. Have a computer that is just a network log server as its only function. Everything sends logs to that computer.
There is one hacker that could easily tamper with that evidence ... you!
The prosecution could assert that you had tampered with the logs to make it
look like you had been hacked (not sure how farfetched that scenario is I suspect
it depends on who is prosecuting you, the RIAA is sure to grasp at that straw)
Thats why I was thinking about using a 3rd party. If logs were emailed to say a gmail account which is never read, it would be possible to show that the log had been emailed at a specific datetime and could not have been modified (I guess there is still oppotunity for shenanigan I wonder if there is a room for a write only email logging service it you could cc/bcc to it and at least prove an email had been sent)
I think this is a fair point, its hard enough to prove that an unsecured network was 'hacked' and the 'WiFi lobby' would be banging on the door to act as expert witness against you...
Whats needed is some really good logging though I'm not sure how to produce evidence grade logging information (ie tamper proof)
I suppose sending the logs to a trusted 3rd party would do the trick. Does such a service exist? I suppose automated emails to Gmail or somesuch would provide useful 3rd party timestamping. though you really need the logs exported in real time to catch a hypothetical superhacker.
Irony: (adj) like tinney and coppery only made out of iron.
and not a very prophetic one at that, we can do it much much better and cheaper nowadays. Orwell totally failed to predict the potential of datamining, tracking via mobile phone, RFID, credit records etc. Nowadays Winston would alter news records with a simple regexp and would never got away with shagging in the woods where the trees are 'too small to hide a microphone'.
more to the point the average European car does 43mpg and the average American one does 29 (stats from first source I found) granted some of this may be due to differences in testing but up to now fuel economy has not been a major selling point in the US market.
I doubt that enough of the energy of the kind of laser used for this can be transformed into heat to be a safety concern.
Light is a form or radiation, all forms of radiation are Evil and hence a safety concern.
Yeah and on top of that, the coolest toy you could give a kid for Christmas is a simple computer and teach them to do a Linux build. Imagine the shock on the faces of friends and teachers when your kid tells them what he/she did over Christmas break.
How does it feel to have an xkcd strip all about you?
The main reason for the destruction (of Colossus) was that we no longer needed the same number of machines. We did keep two though I believe which were moved to GCHQ (General Communications Head Quarters - Our eavesdropping department). We certainly did not destroy them all but much of what they did after the war will still be classified. I've heard scurrilous rumors that the Enigma (Do I really need to wiki link it:-) machines were sold on to other nations...
Having a social networking account is an inherent risk, you may have a squeeky clean page used to stay in touch with your granny. Then your mate 'Mad Dave' decides to post thoes photos which made you look really pissed (you were yawning at the time), then the interviewer happens by...
Even if you say nothing about your self Facebook reveals your friends, acquaintances and people you happen to be in shot with. Guilt by association could cost a job.
You can't make that layer-by-layer in a single pass. You have to make the feet first, go all the way up to the knees, and then back down to the body.
Can it do that?
Make it upside down.
A safe that is "fire proof" for paper (< 451 F) is not "fire proof" for your backups - you need a data/media safe, which are significantly more expensive. Fireproof safes do not stop the contents getting hot.... just stops them burning by keeping the air out. I head of a case where they found the fireproof safe and eagerly opened it while it was still hot... the moment the air got in the paper burst into flame.
On top of that the cost of childcare can easily wipe out half a salary.
I put weather from my backyard on my website. I use it for fun, when I'm at work, or away, I can tell the up-to-the minute weather, and I'd love to put a picture of the backyard up every few minutes. I want to get a wireless camera, but I don't want to pay a fortune, and I'd like it to support wireless.
Can anybody suggest a good camera for this purpose? Powering the device would be a problem but how about plugging a cheap webcam into a wireless USB adapter.
A sophisticaed enough system could easily "pipe" these graphics to someone who just sits and types all day. At one capcha every 10 seconds, that's about 8000 in a day working 24/7.
Not everything these spammers do has to be automated. I've heard storys about this being done... it would make sense, possibly more profitable than goldfarming, on WoW subs as overheads could get by with less bandwidth .
The Wii seems to be rather popular.
THe Wii does not expect you to make very precise , it has more in common with a tennis racket than a biroYou dont even need to do the experement, there is a name for it since the 1980s From the Jargon files gorilla arm: n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to fly in real use?".
Oddly enough this is exactly what the ID lobby want to do, except they want to proselytize (as outlined by their 'Wedge strategy' .
ID is not just a crackpot theory, ID is part of a political agenda invented after the 'creationist lobby' lost Edwards v. Aguillard to Quote wikipedia Wikipedia
The overall goal of the intelligent design movement is to "overthrow materialism" and atheism. They believe that society has suffered "devastating cultural consequences" from adopting materialism and that science is the cause of this decay into materialism since science seeks only natural explanations. Science is therefore atheistic, they claim. They believe that the theory of evolution implies that humans have no spiritual nature, no moral purpose, and no intrinsic meaning. The movement's proponents seek to "defeat [the] materialist world view" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions".
Anyway publicially debating the crackpots is quite a good way of spreading critical thinking and scientific knowledge to a public who to be honest don't really care.
Newsflash: Reason still survives in the modern world - Government officials have not fallen into the dark ages (yet) - Hopes for sustainance of science in the coming decades!
Future archaeologists and historians will undoubtedly regard the presence of such news stories before the next dark ages as a clear indication of the pathetic condition of science in our civilisation. When confronted with a stupid theory the best course of action is to blatantly ignore it without remorse. Even by taking your time to attack the stupid theory, you are giving it some value (your time).
In which case future historians may well conclude that the Dark Ages came because everyone who was able to counter the stupid theory. just ignored it....
You don't matter (to thost pushing the ID adjenda), you can see the gaping flaws. ID is aimed at the Scientifically Illiterate 'open minded' types who are not inclined to think too closly about the issue. If ID is just ignored the ID crowd will do the speaking for you...
a lie can travel twice round the world before the truth has even got its boots on
Hopelessly out of date :-) I think your talking about Expressed sequence tags (EST)
The central dogma of biology is DNA makes RNA makes Protein (but since this is biology there are exceptions :-)
Its possible to decompile the RNA executable back into DNA (using Reverse transcriptase (this is important because RNA is unstable and easily breaks down).
I think thats enough background ... What you do is take some living tissue flash freeze in
in liquid nitrogen extract the RNA convert it back to DNA, clone
all the resultant DNA molecules (yielding ~50 thousand clones)then pick one at random and do a quick and dirty sequencing on it. Wash rince repeat dump the results in a database
Back when sequenceing was expensive it was a useful way of snagging genes without having to struggle though mega bases of DNA. Now you can sequence whole genomes (small ones:) in a week and are talking about doing the individual human genomes in a matter of months/. EST data provides support for computational gene predections (just because something looks like a gene, quacks like a gene doesn't mean that it is ever expressed (used) like a gene:-)
The one scene I can think of is when Luke is hanging upside down in the ice cave in Hoth. His exhaustion makes it extremely difficult to even summon his light saber from a few feet away.
If you want that in WEG game terms I'd suggest that Luke was wounded -1D and at the time he only had an alter of about 4D, On top of that the lightsaber was stuck in the ice so it required an Easy skill roll (ie a roll of 10 or more) to free it. so he had about a 50:50 chance of success. He clearly made two skill rolls in the film:-)
George Lucas's inability to deal with human limitations except in the rarest plot points doesn't have to limit my imagining of how the Star Wars universe works.
I don't think you can blame George for this... He is doing space opera which means fast-paced lots of shooting and only a few superficial wounds to the heros.
This is probably also why I like the Knigts of the Old Republic, it is much 'grittier' than the movies. In fiction, it is generally when the character's are at their limit that things are the most interesting, and setting that limit too high results in games that are dull soap operas.I think your putting your finger on a more generic problem here, the higher the powerlevel of any game the harder it is to set an appropriate challange level and there is often little middle ground between characters that are 'eggshells armed with sledgehammers' and ones that are 'anvils armed with feathers' it can be really hard to challange one without killing the other
The old d20 system charged vitality (stun damage) for using force powers. IME the net result was that noone dared using forcepowers as they never knew when they would take a blaster bolt and need their vitality to soak the damage.
Exhaustion does come up in my games but only as a result of fumbling a roll getting 1 on the force dice (I make up the fumbles on the spot so 'ooooh that took a lot out of you your at -1D till you can rest' comes up from time to time). Set exhaustion mechanics would just slow things down and inhibit players from getting into the swing of things (IMHO).
Studio work?
Several thousand pictures a day in a single room. Hmmm... If it were thousands of shots a day I'd have thought that WiFi made even more sense.