Anyone determined enough to plan and execute that sort of stunt comes under the heading
of newsworth psyco and or estranged parent. the only defence is to lock ones child in a
prison cell which by coincidence is what the psyco will probably do.
I assume your suggesting that the kid has ditched the bracelet.
If you found your kid's RFID bracelet behind a trash can, would you assume the kid ditched it? The suggestion is rather that someone else removed it, with ulterior motives. You can't honestly tell me that a mass-produced (read: cheap) bracelet can stand up to a good pocketknife.
OK so my child is standing in a queue surronded by lots of people and a pedo whips out his good pocketknife
cuts off the bracelet and drags him away to a horrible death? I think it more likely that the kid unclips the
bracelet (the park will want to remove reuse them so there not going to use some sort of irrversable lock) and
wanders off to play hooky...
As long as he does't have a chip on him you watch him irl when at LEGO-land. But now that he has the chip you can safely go to the parent longe and watch where he is on the KidLocator(tm) - and there he is, safely in plain site of everyone, where noone can hurt him, perhaps standing in line for a ride. You feel absolutely safe! Then 30min later you start to wonder why he is still in line, he should be on the ride by now. So you start to get a little worried, soon you decide to go check on him. So you go to the line and look for him, but all you find is his rfid-bracelet behind the trashcan...
I assume your suggesting that the kid has ditched the bracelet. From the kids POV this is probably not
a good idea. The choice the child is being given is either a) stay within 15 feet of a parent for
the whole day or b) wander around with their mates doing exactly what they want to do when they want
to do it. A child who pulls this sort of stunt clearly wants to spend more time with their parents
and I suspect for a child who would pull that sort of stunt thats a fate worse than death.
Think of the KidLocator(tm) as the armbands of freedom, they give everyone a bit more confidence to seperate
and give the child a taste of freedom perhaps a year or two before they would normally get it...
Fortunately for all involved all three officers are likely losing their jobs as well as their chief and the intern chancellor for starters.
... There going to lose their jobs??? Is that it? And I bet the UCLA will not give them a very
good reference and a Jolly Good Talking To as well. They won't get charged with Assult? Well Colour me
suprised if I don't see lots of repeat performances.
User 956
Why do we need wireless USB when we already have bluetooth? and vice versa? and beyond that, why do we need wireless HDMI?
Starting out with HDMI, why does a DVD player have to be close to the TV? Why is is stacked on top of a TiVo
a Satellite reciever next to a playstation and an XBox, wouldn't it be nice to have all that clutter
sitting in one corner of the room and have the TV hanging on a wall somewhere else.
How many bluetooth printers and scanners are there?
I'm working on putting a scanner in the kitchen with idea that if I find a nice recipie in a magazine,
I can just lob it in the scanner push the one touch scanning button and it automagically dumps the image on my archive server runs a quick OCR on the image and dumps it in a database. If I want the recipie back (OCR willing) I should be able to find it via a simple text search
Wireless USB would be great I could put the scanner almost anywhere I wanted without having to worry about
running 40 ft of USB cable through the house. Equally having a wireless USB backup drive tucked away in a
draw somewhere makes a great backup if my laptop gets stolen... I'd certainally worry about the security of
data stored on a wireless USB drive but its no worse than having a WiFi dirve.
Figure out a protocol and stick with it. That's why regular plug-in USB works so well.
True up to a point, when did you last use a floppy disk? a protocol that does not move with the times
risks extinction..
If we had more programmers with SE degrees we'd have fewer crappy websites. A CS degree doesn't give you the engineering knowledge neccessary to keep your code clean or your site loading fast.
So users will come across a fastloading websites with an eyeburning colour scheme, baffling text layout
and a byzantine navigation system. they will click on view source and gasp at the sheer beuaty of the code
layout swoon at the elegent almost clinical efficiently of the javascript. and the final realisation that the
navigation really does make sence, but only if you have a SE degree.
The point was to illustrate the shortcomings of digital media, regardless of how durable the medium is.
I'm with julesh here I don't buy the 'in 1000 years time they won't comprehend ASCII' argument,
one could point to Indus script as a proof that formats can become unreadable, OTOH the other three 'first civilisation scripts (Egyptian hieroglyphs Mayan glyphs and Linear B) have been deciphered and that
that gives linguists the experence to construct a superior 'Rosetta Stone' designed specifically to talk to
distant decendents.
I think you have made the opposite case rather neatly... Robert hooks (17th Cent) microscope was able
to resolve cells say ~10um so make use a laser to engrave 10um^2 bits into the ceramic disks thats about 1 million bits/cm2 which means you could get about 14Mbytes on a CDRom sized media. Thats 14Mb of text accessible to a 17th centuary technology, (10um bits are a bit small though larger bits would be much more durable) a simple binary to text lookup table could be included on the back of every disk pretty much solving the fragile media, loss of readers
and obsolete formats problems the only real problem left is language drifting to the point of incomprehensibility...
As the Morse code-like UNICODE implimentation (again, basically Morse but with slightly longer namespace to account for more characters) has no known key, or target to try and translate it to. Such an encoding is incredibly simple, but makes translation all but impossible without knowing what you're trying to get out of it or having a known target. This applies for any computer-readable language: it's an encoding, and often a very complex one.
Hmmm so the creator of the archives went to great effort to build an archive capable of withstanding a
9.0 earthquake fabricate data storage and encoding that would last thousands of years,
but forgot to scribble on the wall...
A.-
B -...
C -.-.
D -..
E .
I really like the idea for these disks... the only thing I'd add is to avoid is
making the disks pretty so there worthless as jewelry. Forget about some handy reader
make the encoding readable by '17th century' microscope
The archivists would be _much_ better off creating, say, nine much cheaper
repositories (1) three per continent, each archive having triplicate copes of every
volume. (One highly accessible (next to the front door), one moderately accessible
(behind a corridor filled with concrete) one very inaccessible (as moderately but
say each disk individually sealed inside a massive concrete block so you would have to chip
away the whole block to extract a complete set of disks.). Each repository
would have the location of two others on different continents, set up in three separate,
so if a hypothetical knowledge destroying cult found a repository would
have a hard time getting to the others and would only know where a thrid of them were
(1) The main cost in creating these disks is the set up, once that is done you may as
well make 30 while your at it or why not 300? forget about hermetically sealing the store
just find lots of remote dry caves in geologically stable areas
An intresting detail:
During each X PRIZE competition test, a TEAM must use its device to sequence within 10 days 100 human dip-
loid genomes of 6 Gbp (6 giga base pairs, i.e., six billion pairs of DNA base molecules) each.
Note that Human Genome Project mapped and sequenced only some 3Gbp. And that was considered to be whole genome. Basically X-Price want winner to sequence all 46 cromosomes. This sounds quite difficult as the method have to be sure that is has sequenced both of the cromosomes (from a pair), not just the other one twice. And this must be valid all the 3Gbp. By bet? The working method just sequences emultiple chromosomes and determines the exact basepairs statically.
Its not just 'difficult' I think thats going to delay a winner untill the inflation reduces
the prize to pocket change. Its not that it doubles the amount of sequenceing that needs tobe done.
To do this meaningfully you would need to sequence the maternal and paternal chromosomes
Given that chromosomes differ by one base in 1000 you can't just mix them up and assign them stastically.
I suspect the best bet would be so sort out single chromosomes the use some sort of Whole Genome Amplification
to get sufficent DNA for sequencing. Sequencing single chromosomes has other advantages, it greatly simplifys the
assemmbly process and brings the problem into the theoretical range of 454 sequencing
This person is going to be a target for the rest of his playing career. The guy below him is gonna be aiming to usurp him to get his sponsorship, not to mention thousands upon thousands of upstarts actively seeking to relegate him to obscurity.
Is this any different to someone in Pro Tennis, Snooker, Darts, Golf or Tiddlywinks?
We absolutely need someone in the United States to hack a Diebold machine into changing its votes and demonstrate how they can do that in a quick and easy way when they have access to the machine.
Already been done OK its a bit dull and
10 minutes long but really scary
Kid's show? I've never met a fan under 15. But "don't overthink it" is still good advice, because the writers already follow it!
I least half the children (under 10) I know would qualify as fans
(but not fanboys or girls). I know several under 7s (besides my own) who
can talk knowledgeably the classic series their faveorate story and Doctor
Where do you live? I'd guess... America where Dr Who is on at 9pm on a niche channel.
in the UK its on at 7pm BBC2 (prime time on a prime channel), its aimed directly at the children
but with the intent of making it family viewing. Aunty has been sending our the new books and audio books
for schools to review. The also preview each episode to a panel of (very lucky children age 5 to 13)
who give it a Fear Factor
rateing allowing parents to know who's bed little Timothy will be sleeping in that night...
Then there is the Merchendice
Make no mistake Dr Who is made for children. Luckly adults are allowed to watch as well
I was on the train having all sorts of trouble installing Mandrake 10 on my laptop
I had to give up because I arrived at my station. Anyway the next day, absently,
I peeled off the 'Designed for Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP' label, tried again and
it booted first time.
Magic
I still have the label, if SysAdmin hack me off, I'll sneak in one night and stick it
on a critical server:->
Do the so-called "archival quality" CD- and DVD-R disks actually last longer than the regular ones? If so, those should certainly be used./
Hmmm... I think the best you can say is 'Archival grade' media less crappy the
the normal stuff. All we have are the CD companys claims which cannot be validated till
much much too late. On top of that whats the use of a CD that will last 100 years
I think there is an excellent chance that there in 100 years will be _nothing_ to
read them with and a non zero chance that by then 'noone uses.jpg anymore'.
I did a little googling and thought this was mildly interesting...
Anyway bottom line is don't trust any single media. Digital data will survive by
being mobile I hope/expect my photos/videos to survive as a forgotten directory
on my great great grandsons Yoctobyte holocrystal array. My responsibility to him
is to make sure the photos are annotated so when my great great great grandchild is doing
a school history project she can put names, places and storys for the faces from another era.
...and if you are one of my decendents and are researching me Hello <WAVES>
you may find it useful to know my USENET sig was always
"NPC rights activist | Nameless Abominations are people too"
I seem to remember reading that the BBC had actually created a vast archive of their broadcast library on state-of-the-art laser discs to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening... unfortunately, there are no longer any players that work with the media. Whoops.
I think your talking about the BBC's The Domesday Project
a 'detailed snapshot or time capsule of British life in the mid-1980s'. Completed in 1986
it used a laserdisk based system (There was no CD-ROM standard at the time). After 15 years
the hardwere used to access the disks was breaking down and the disks near unreadable
fortunatly the data has been resued and preserved as a software emulation has been. reading the article I would not bee too fast to carp the project was way ahead of its with... the disks stored 140Gb of data and this was back in 1986.
Its a interesting object lesson in Digital preservation.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they could end up in a bank vault as part of an elaborate tax avoidance scheme
Anyone determined enough to plan and execute that sort of stunt comes under the heading of newsworth psyco and or estranged parent. the only defence is to lock ones child in a prison cell which by coincidence is what the psyco will probably do.
If you found your kid's RFID bracelet behind a trash can, would you assume the kid ditched it? The suggestion is rather that someone else removed it, with ulterior motives. You can't honestly tell me that a mass-produced (read: cheap) bracelet can stand up to a good pocketknife.
OK so my child is standing in a queue surronded by lots of people and a pedo whips out his good pocketknife cuts off the bracelet and drags him away to a horrible death? I think it more likely that the kid unclips the bracelet (the park will want to remove reuse them so there not going to use some sort of irrversable lock) and wanders off to play hooky...
I assume your suggesting that the kid has ditched the bracelet. From the kids POV this is probably not a good idea. The choice the child is being given is either a) stay within 15 feet of a parent for the whole day or b) wander around with their mates doing exactly what they want to do when they want to do it. A child who pulls this sort of stunt clearly wants to spend more time with their parents and I suspect for a child who would pull that sort of stunt thats a fate worse than death.
Think of the KidLocator(tm) as the armbands of freedom, they give everyone a bit more confidence to seperate and give the child a taste of freedom perhaps a year or two before they would normally get it...
He must have typoed this time and linked to IMDB
And if his own country turns out to be the Good Old US of A? What a great slogan it would make...
Come to the USA! where your lucky to be tasered.
I'm gobsmacked I've just reread your post, there 'likely losing their jobs'??????????????
Fortunately for all involved all three officers are likely losing their jobs as well as their chief and the intern chancellor for starters.
... There going to lose their jobs??? Is that it? And I bet the UCLA will not give them a very good reference and a Jolly Good Talking To as well. They won't get charged with Assult? Well Colour me suprised if I don't see lots of repeat performances.
Its not that hard to build a charcoal fired furnace that is more than capable of melting down a HDD
User 956 Why do we need wireless USB when we already have bluetooth? and vice versa? and beyond that, why do we need wireless HDMI?
Starting out with HDMI, why does a DVD player have to be close to the TV? Why is is stacked on top of a TiVo a Satellite reciever next to a playstation and an XBox, wouldn't it be nice to have all that clutter sitting in one corner of the room and have the TV hanging on a wall somewhere else.
How many bluetooth printers and scanners are there?
I'm working on putting a scanner in the kitchen with idea that if I find a nice recipie in a magazine, I can just lob it in the scanner push the one touch scanning button and it automagically dumps the image on my archive server runs a quick OCR on the image and dumps it in a database. If I want the recipie back (OCR willing) I should be able to find it via a simple text search
Wireless USB would be great I could put the scanner almost anywhere I wanted without having to worry about running 40 ft of USB cable through the house. Equally having a wireless USB backup drive tucked away in a draw somewhere makes a great backup if my laptop gets stolen... I'd certainally worry about the security of data stored on a wireless USB drive but its no worse than having a WiFi dirve.
Figure out a protocol and stick with it. That's why regular plug-in USB works so well.
True up to a point, when did you last use a floppy disk? a protocol that does not move with the times risks extinction..
So users will come across a fastloading websites with an eyeburning colour scheme, baffling text layout and a byzantine navigation system. they will click on view source and gasp at the sheer beuaty of the code layout swoon at the elegent almost clinical efficiently of the javascript. and the final realisation that the navigation really does make sence, but only if you have a SE degree.
The point was to illustrate the shortcomings of digital media, regardless of how durable the medium is.
I'm with julesh here I don't buy the 'in 1000 years time they won't comprehend ASCII' argument, one could point to Indus script as a proof that formats can become unreadable, OTOH the other three 'first civilisation scripts (Egyptian hieroglyphs Mayan glyphs and Linear B) have been deciphered and that that gives linguists the experence to construct a superior 'Rosetta Stone' designed specifically to talk to distant decendents.
I think you have made the opposite case rather neatly... Robert hooks (17th Cent) microscope was able to resolve cells say ~10um so make use a laser to engrave 10um^2 bits into the ceramic disks thats about 1 million bits/cm2 which means you could get about 14Mbytes on a CDRom sized media. Thats 14Mb of text accessible to a 17th centuary technology, (10um bits are a bit small though larger bits would be much more durable) a simple binary to text lookup table could be included on the back of every disk pretty much solving the fragile media, loss of readers and obsolete formats problems the only real problem left is language drifting to the point of incomprehensibility...
As the Morse code-like UNICODE implimentation (again, basically Morse but with slightly longer namespace to account for more characters) has no known key, or target to try and translate it to. Such an encoding is incredibly simple, but makes translation all but impossible without knowing what you're trying to get out of it or having a known target. This applies for any computer-readable language: it's an encoding, and often a very complex one.
Hmmm so the creator of the archives went to great effort to build an archive capable of withstanding a 9.0 earthquake fabricate data storage and encoding that would last thousands of years, but forgot to scribble on the wall...
I really like the idea for these disks... the only thing I'd add is to avoid is making the disks pretty so there worthless as jewelry. Forget about some handy reader make the encoding readable by '17th century' microscope
The archivists would be _much_ better off creating, say, nine much cheaper repositories (1) three per continent, each archive having triplicate copes of every volume. (One highly accessible (next to the front door), one moderately accessible (behind a corridor filled with concrete) one very inaccessible (as moderately but say each disk individually sealed inside a massive concrete block so you would have to chip away the whole block to extract a complete set of disks.). Each repository would have the location of two others on different continents, set up in three separate, so if a hypothetical knowledge destroying cult found a repository would have a hard time getting to the others and would only know where a thrid of them were
(1) The main cost in creating these disks is the set up, once that is done you may as well make 30 while your at it or why not 300? forget about hermetically sealing the store just find lots of remote dry caves in geologically stable areas
there is more about this sort of thinking at the The Long Now Foundation I particuarly like the The 10,000 Year Clock
MySpace in 3D
'Nuff said
I was thinking exactly the same thought ... must be the Orbital Mindcontrol lasers.
An intresting detail: During each X PRIZE competition test, a TEAM must use its device to sequence within 10 days 100 human dip- loid genomes of 6 Gbp (6 giga base pairs, i.e., six billion pairs of DNA base molecules) each.
Note that Human Genome Project mapped and sequenced only some 3Gbp. And that was considered to be whole genome. Basically X-Price want winner to sequence all 46 cromosomes. This sounds quite difficult as the method have to be sure that is has sequenced both of the cromosomes (from a pair), not just the other one twice. And this must be valid all the 3Gbp. By bet? The working method just sequences emultiple chromosomes and determines the exact basepairs statically.
Its not just 'difficult' I think thats going to delay a winner untill the inflation reduces the prize to pocket change. Its not that it doubles the amount of sequenceing that needs tobe done. To do this meaningfully you would need to sequence the maternal and paternal chromosomes Given that chromosomes differ by one base in 1000 you can't just mix them up and assign them stastically.
I suspect the best bet would be so sort out single chromosomes the use some sort of Whole Genome Amplification to get sufficent DNA for sequencing. Sequencing single chromosomes has other advantages, it greatly simplifys the assemmbly process and brings the problem into the theoretical range of 454 sequencing
Is this any different to someone in Pro Tennis, Snooker, Darts, Golf or Tiddlywinks?
Already been done OK its a bit dull and 10 minutes long but really scary
Kid's show? I've never met a fan under 15. But "don't overthink it" is still good advice, because the writers already follow it!
I least half the children (under 10) I know would qualify as fans (but not fanboys or girls). I know several under 7s (besides my own) who can talk knowledgeably the classic series their faveorate story and Doctor
Where do you live? I'd guess ... America where Dr Who is on at 9pm on a niche channel.
in the UK its on at 7pm BBC2 (prime time on a prime channel), its aimed directly at the children
but with the intent of making it family viewing. Aunty has been sending our the new books and audio books
for schools to review. The also preview each episode to a panel of (very lucky children age 5 to 13)
who give it a Fear Factor
rateing allowing parents to know who's bed little Timothy will be sleeping in that night...
Then there is the Merchendice
Make no mistake Dr Who is made for children. Luckly adults are allowed to watch as well
The EtherKiller and friends: http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/
I once had a PC case where the connection to the 'hard disk is running' LED had an evil twin that connected to the power supply....
Actually there's been a lot of buzz going around about Peter Jackson's involvement in a remake of Paul Brickhill's The Dambusters [imdb.com].
After the apocryphal 1954 version, I look forward to seeing the record set straight as to how the USAF blew up those bridges
Of course, run-of-the-mill signature-based antivirus software is equally flawed
Sure they work I haven't seen a signature virus for years...
I was on the train having all sorts of trouble installing Mandrake 10 on my laptop I had to give up because I arrived at my station. Anyway the next day, absently, I peeled off the 'Designed for Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP' label, tried again and it booted first time. Magic I still have the label, if SysAdmin hack me off, I'll sneak in one night and stick it on a critical server :->
Do the so-called "archival quality" CD- and DVD-R disks actually last longer than the regular ones? If so, those should certainly be used./
Hmmm... I think the best you can say is 'Archival grade' media less crappy the the normal stuff. All we have are the CD companys claims which cannot be validated till much much too late. On top of that whats the use of a CD that will last 100 years I think there is an excellent chance that there in 100 years will be _nothing_ to read them with and a non zero chance that by then 'noone uses .jpg anymore'.
I did a little googling and thought this was mildly interesting ...
Anyway bottom line is don't trust any single media. Digital data will survive by
being mobile I hope/expect my photos/videos to survive as a forgotten directory
on my great great grandsons Yoctobyte holocrystal array. My responsibility to him
is to make sure the photos are annotated so when my great great great grandchild is doing
a school history project she can put names, places and storys for the faces from another era.
...and if you are one of my decendents and are researching me Hello <WAVES> you may find it useful to know my USENET sig was always "NPC rights activist | Nameless Abominations are people too"
I seem to remember reading that the BBC had actually created a vast archive of their broadcast library on state-of-the-art laser discs to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening ... unfortunately, there are no longer any players that work with the media. Whoops.
I think your talking about the BBC's The Domesday Project a 'detailed snapshot or time capsule of British life in the mid-1980s'. Completed in 1986 it used a laserdisk based system (There was no CD-ROM standard at the time). After 15 years the hardwere used to access the disks was breaking down and the disks near unreadable fortunatly the data has been resued and preserved as a software emulation has been. reading the article I would not bee too fast to carp the project was way ahead of its with ... the disks stored 140Gb of data and this was back in 1986.
Its a interesting object lesson in Digital preservation.