I would change the order: 1. Obey the authorized user (esp since he is normally the OWNER) 2. Protect the authorized user. 3. Protect itself.
I would change it slightly differently:
1. Obey the authorized user if, after (non-verbosely but with option of expanded explanation) warning him of issues with laws 2 or 3, he says he really means it.
2. Protect the authorized user.
3. Protect itself.
4. Obey the authorized user.
BTW there's a new plug just release, the DreamPlug. A bit like the SheevaPlug bit with two Ethernet ports & wifi. Looks like a cool little beast, although the CPU like the sheevaplug is a bit underpowered.
Is that the one with the REALLY NOISY FAN, because going to two gig-E ports made it too hot to run without a blower?
After getting over the bridge, my brother found the cruise control vacuum actuator, (with the disconnected electrical harness,) was pulling the throttle open. He disconnected the linkage, and the problem never happened again.
You may have the bingo!
That sounds like a mechanical problem in an electronically controlled vacuum valve in the cruise control actuator.
(I had something similar with the computer/valve/vacuum-diaphragm actuator on the waste valve of an Eagle Talon's turbo.)
Here is an idea: why not use a cable between the pedal and the throttle body?
Given that the Prius "transmission" is a planetary gear set with the drive shaft torque controlled by a computer-mediated balancing act among the throttle, two electric motors, and a battery pack, that pedal would have to control four parameters and accept additional input from things including your current speed and forward/reverse/neutral setting.
I'd LOVE to see the mechanical linkage that correctly performed the computation. B-)
... or the driver is too stupid to do anything while the car runs away?
If the car suddenly accelerates by itself it takes a short time to react and hit the brake. Then it takes time for the brakes to take effect (especially if the drive train didn't stop and is fighting the brakes). One can get into a LOT of trouble in that interval.
The unexpectedness of the car's behavior would also surprise the driver and might result in a delay of the reaction.
Finally, if the car is in traffic and hasn't ALREADY had an accident, trying to control the speed with brakes alone can cause it to slow or stop suddenly and get into trouble at the rear end.
So I wouldn't assume a driver who had an impact due to such an event to have been "too stupid" to control the car that had turned on him.
A far simpler thing to do that will leave the power steering working is to shift into neutral.
Shift? Neutral? I thought we were talking about a Prius.
The Prius has no shift, no clutch, no neutral. It has a planetary gear system with:
- The engine and one electric motor-generator (MG1) on one shaft,
- another motor-generator (MG2, or "MGS" for "speed") on another, and
- the drive shaft to the wheels on the third. Transmission "shifting" is done by electronically controlling the relative speeds and torque directions of MG1 and MG2, transferring power from one to the other and/or between them and the batteries.
If the computer commands it to drive the car forward you have no way to intervene.
Different problem. Read the Woz's description. His complaint is only about the cruise control.
It's not necessarily a different problem. Scenario:
- Driver bumps the cruise control or the wiring/control is worn or otherwise has a momentary contact.
- Car goes into uncontrolled acceleration.
- Hitting brake clears the problem.
- Driver has no clue the cruise control was involved.
Another poster reported uncontrolled acceleration when taking foot off brake. The brake switch is also an input to the cruise control algorithm. One way for software to cause THAT to trigger the issue is if a bug in the contact debounce routines not only generates a hold-down-resume/accel output for a tap on the regular control but also for a bounce-on-release in the brake signal.
Things to look for: Race conditions, bugs in input signal conditioning routines, an interrupt not properly saving&restoring a register, wild store smashing a state, insufficient stack allocation to a task to prevent interrupt state stacking to clobber another task's stack, etc.
One of the problems with trying to set up an alternative DNS to get around things like the seizure of domain names by DNS/ICE is that a DNS registry system provides two services:
- Mapping names to addresses.
- Assuring uniqueness in the identification. An alternative system has the problem that, if it allocates a name, the OFFICIAL system could allocate the same name to somebody else, causing havoc.
But if there is a set TLDs that this supernational agency had decreed would NOT be allocated, an alternate registry could allocate names there with impunity. And once they're allocated they become, in effect, property. If the agency later changed its mind and decided to allocate them after all, all the owners of alternate TLDs AND the operators of the alternate registries would have a suit, at least in the US, both against the government under the 5th amendment's "takings" clause and against the agency as well. B-)
I don't know about anyone else, but it looked more like a hellraiser puzzle box than a rubiks cube.
Looked like that to me, too.
Looking closer it seems the creepy face is an antenna built using gold-plated stripline technology, i.e. a printed circuit antenna with a bit of gold plating to protect it from the elements.
If you can sequence the pathogen, maybe you can avoid storing a living or livable (spore, etc.) copy of it and minimize the risk of escape.
And if you sequence it and the sequence is published, anybody with the right lab equipment can manufacture it with no physical connection to the "library".
(Yes they have successfully constructed a bacterium from data already.)
The RF spectrum at "the edge" does not work like that and I doubt it ever will work like that.
Given that the base station allocates timeslots to outgoing traffic it can divide those timeslots evenly among all users with traffic toward them when dequeueing and transmitting traffic from their per-destination queues. This produces appropriate backpressure on the router's per-destination queues and results in packet drops when the incoming traffic overflows the queues (and other signaling, such as RED) just like a constant bit-rate link to the users would.
The only thing that's special about how RF works (from a bps-allocation standpoint) is that stations more distant from the base station or in a more noisy environment may have been configured for a lower bit/bandwidth modulation variant. The carrier would have to decide whether to divide things evenly on the basis of bit rate (giving the distant/noisy customers a larger slice of the cell's available spectrum) or bandwidth usage (dividing the spectrum usage equally and penalizing customers who are distant or have bad radio environments). IMHO, because station site selection is the carrier's choice (and because it's easier to implement) the choice should be to evenly divide the bit rate.
Most of the problem occurs at "the edge". (And if it's congested in "the core" you need more core.) So why not just divide the instantaneous bandwidth evenly among all users?
With this approach the high-usage users are not throttled when they're not interfering with other users when the edge is not congested, and get no more than an equal share with the intermittent users when it is congested.
Heard about a guy who used primacord to shovel his sidewalks.
1) Run a length down the middle of the sidewalk.
2) Set it off. WHACK!
3) Result: Clean walk and two piles of snow beside it.
4) Profit?
5) Try to explain this to the BATF(E) and DHS.
6) Collect a free Club Gitmo T-shirt.
Haven't tried this myself yet, so can't tell you whether/how well it actually works.
Probably won't,either, since the Supreme Court seems unlikely to extend District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago to explosive technology in what remains of my lifetime.
Come on, folks, you're traveling between Portland OR and Las Vegas NV, and your GPS says the most direct route is over some gravel Forest Service road in the Eastern Oregon mountains... In the winter... You take it? Really?
And then you:
- Remove something like four roadblocks placed there to indicate the road is closed (except to locals with local knowledge).
- Go up a ways in the snow, decide to back out, and go out by a DIFFERENT route.
- When you get stuck, burn your tires to make a smoke signal WITHOUT waiting for the snowstorm to end and cloud cover to clear so it will be visible. (And with all this wet burns-smoky wood around, too...)
- Then leave the car to hike out for help, rather than sticking around for the air search to find you.
But what's really stupid is when the CLEO in charge of the search gets on the media and says that "he did all the right things" to salve the feelings of the Darwin Award winner's loved ones - and drive the Mountain Rescue volunteers ballistic because he's just told several million news watchers to do THE SAME STUPID STUFF.
There's not much you can do about MORONS, one way or another, they may kill themselves.
But you CAN at least MENTION to them that GPS databases show:
- every historic abandoned logging road and ghost town known to the USGS (whose maps and databases they used as their major input),
- every closed-all-winter road and only-occupied-seasonally resort town ditto, and
- a few fake towns and roads that are deliberately inserted - in out-of-the-way places - to detect copyright violators.
With those in the database the poor program is going to include them in the route finding. So somebody in a Prius looking for a way to the Bodie state park may be driected to the 4-wheel-drive-only road to save a few miles (as happened to a friend). Or somebody looking for a way over a mountain might end up on the closed-by-snow-until-summer-meltoff road to the summer-only resort town, rather than the interstate road a few miles over. Or somebody running low on gas in a desert may take a back road to a copyright-protection fake town or a mining town that's been "ghost" for a century.
It's unreasonable to expect everybody who bought a "maps and navigation" product to figure this out in advance. This is especially true for city dwellers whose experience with surviving in hostile environments is limited to cable/satellite TV shows. News stories like this one get the word out that GPS system use produces a "kill you" mode that is not intuitively obvious.
If they kill themselves by trusting a GPS AFTER seeing/hearing about a few of these, THEN it's a much clearer case of "evolution in action".
PS: The italic tag is broken with the new version of slashcode.
Come on, folks, you're traveling between Portland OR and Las Vegas NV, and your GPS says the most direct route is over some gravel Forest Service road in the Eastern Oregon mountains... In the winter... You take it? Really?
And then you:
- Remove something like four roadblocks placed there to indicate the road is closed (except to locals with local knowledge).
- Go up a ways in the snow, decide to back out, and go out by a DIFFERENT route.
- When you get stuck, burn your tires to make a smoke signal WITHOUT waiting for the snowstorm to end and cloud cover to clear so it will be visible. (And with all this wet burns-smoky wood around, too...)
- Then leave the car to hike out for help, rather than sticking around for the air search to find you.
But what's really stupid is when the CLEO in charge of the search gets on the media and says that "he did all the right things" to salve the feelings of the Darwin Award winner's loved ones - and drive the Mountain Rescue volunteers ballistic because he's just told several million news watchers to do THE SAME STUPID STUFF.
There's not much you can do about MORONS, one way or another, they may kill themselves.
But you CAN at least MENTION to them that GPS databases show:
- every historic abandoned logging road and ghost town known to the USGS (whose maps and databases they used as their major input),
- every closed-all-winter road and only-occupied-seasonally resort town ditto, and
- a few fake towns and roads that are deliberately inserted - in out-of-the-way places - to detect copyright violators.
With those in the database the poor program is going to include them in the route finding. So somebody in a Prius looking for a way to the Bodie state park may be driected to the 4-wheel-drive-only road to save a few miles (as happened to a friend). Or somebody looking for a way over a mountain might end up on the closed-by-snow-until-summer-meltoff road to the summer-only resort town, rather than the interstate road a few miles over. Or somebody running low on gas in a desert may take a back road to a copyright-protection fake town or a mining town that's been "ghost" for a century.
It's unreasonable to expect everybody who bought a "maps and navigation" product to figure this out in advance. This is especially true for city dwellers whose experience with surviving in hostile environments is limited to cable/satellite TV shows. News stories like this one get the word out that GPS system use produces a "kill you" mode that is not intuitively obvious.
If they kill themselves by trusting a GPS AFTER seeing/hearing about a few of these, THEN it's a much clearer case of "evolution in action".
How do you tell the difference between an MIT mathematician and a smart MIT mathematician? One talks to the media, the other is a millionaire.
If you'd read the fine article, you'd have seen that he calculated how much he'd earn by using his system and how long it would take - and found that it was far lower than his consulting pay rate. So if he spent time doing it rather than his day job he'd be taking a pay cut.
Sounds to me like a GOOD mathematician - one who applies math to ALL the aspects of the problem and comes to the right conclusion.
From my perspective, any external process that changes anything in or on my body is invasive, including flipping the on/off switch to various regions of the brain.
In medical speak, "noninvasive" means they didn't have to cut you open or poke holes in you when they tweaked your innards.
Sounds like Freenet on ad-hoc WiFi mesh. Maybe with a little tweaking to use the mesh's routing table and avoid any dependency on centralized network services such as DNS.
... "Ads Disabled. Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!" box that you get for spending far to much time here without subscribing.
I get that.
But I also still get "Slow Down, Cowboy!"
Seems odd. I'd expect the "disable ads" option to be intended to encourage people whose postings are considered valuable and well-considered to post more of them. But the one-per-five-minutes limit for such people (who can often compose postings quickly) seems to work at cross-purposes to the option. So I'd have expected the limit to go away with the offering of the option.
Don't need a standard. There are plenty of available blog server packages and ANY of 'em will do the job. Or fall all the way back to netnews, or Fidonet, which not only don't require the capital-I Internet but also don't have a single point of failure for the bad guys to destroy.
All you need is a server with a blog tool on it and a way for people to contact it.
The problem is not that the tools are missing. The problem is that the network to connect people TO them is missing.
Come up with a replacement for that (preferably one that doesn't immediately lead the enemy to the key piece of infrastructure or its operator) and you're live. Once people are connected they can figure it out on-the-fly.
I hope one thing that comes out of this is some work on ad-hoc networking.
Example: a self-orgainzing, ad-hoc, robust re-routing and load balancing network using WiFi enabled machines. To join you'd bring up your machine and sniff for WiFi access points identifying as the net you're after. You'd connect to the strongest one, and if you didn't already have the software you'd bring up a browser and the neighbor would serve you a copy of the routing-and-configuring software. Accept and load it and you're now another node on the net.
Security risks of accepting such software are obvious. (Especially after malware authors and authoritarian government security operations build attacks or sock puppets with spyware.) But it has the advantage that you can play without having anything preloaded in advance of the network disruption. In a situation like Egypt's it could easily be worth the risk.
Others: Software-defined cell phone base stations, to replace shut-down cellphone infrastructure with VoIP over whatever works - or just enable the nearby phones to talk to each other over a square mile or so. Right NOW you'd need some special hardware for the radio part. (Can't use a handset because the built-in diplexer keeps it listening and talking on the wrong halves of the cellphone bands.) But in the future? And you don't need a LOT of "cells" to cover a city. Then there are smartphones that can switch over to WiFi "microcells" when available. Those wouldn't need any special radio to create the pirate cells.
Slashdot Mirror
I would change the order:
1. Obey the authorized user (esp since he is normally the OWNER)
2. Protect the authorized user.
3. Protect itself.
I would change it slightly differently:
1. Obey the authorized user if, after (non-verbosely but with option of expanded explanation) warning him of issues with laws 2 or 3, he says he really means it.
2. Protect the authorized user.
3. Protect itself.
4. Obey the authorized user.
BTW there's a new plug just release, the DreamPlug. A bit like the SheevaPlug bit with two Ethernet ports & wifi. Looks like a cool little beast, although the CPU like the sheevaplug is a bit underpowered.
Is that the one with the REALLY NOISY FAN, because going to two gig-E ports made it too hot to run without a blower?
sorry no you still do its called the brakes and or the off buttion.
I addressed the brakes above.
The off button is just another input to the computer, not an actual cutoff of anything.
After getting over the bridge, my brother found the cruise control vacuum actuator, (with the disconnected electrical harness,) was pulling the throttle open. He disconnected the linkage, and the problem never happened again.
You may have the bingo!
That sounds like a mechanical problem in an electronically controlled vacuum valve in the cruise control actuator.
(I had something similar with the computer/valve/vacuum-diaphragm actuator on the waste valve of an Eagle Talon's turbo.)
Here is an idea: why not use a cable between the pedal and the throttle body?
Given that the Prius "transmission" is a planetary gear set with the drive shaft torque controlled by a computer-mediated balancing act among the throttle, two electric motors, and a battery pack, that pedal would have to control four parameters and accept additional input from things including your current speed and forward/reverse/neutral setting.
I'd LOVE to see the mechanical linkage that correctly performed the computation. B-)
... or the driver is too stupid to do anything while the car runs away?
If the car suddenly accelerates by itself it takes a short time to react and hit the brake. Then it takes time for the brakes to take effect (especially if the drive train didn't stop and is fighting the brakes). One can get into a LOT of trouble in that interval.
The unexpectedness of the car's behavior would also surprise the driver and might result in a delay of the reaction.
Finally, if the car is in traffic and hasn't ALREADY had an accident, trying to control the speed with brakes alone can cause it to slow or stop suddenly and get into trouble at the rear end.
So I wouldn't assume a driver who had an impact due to such an event to have been "too stupid" to control the car that had turned on him.
A far simpler thing to do that will leave the power steering working is to shift into neutral.
Shift? Neutral? I thought we were talking about a Prius.
The Prius has no shift, no clutch, no neutral. It has a planetary gear system with:
- The engine and one electric motor-generator (MG1) on one shaft,
- another motor-generator (MG2, or "MGS" for "speed") on another, and
- the drive shaft to the wheels on the third.
Transmission "shifting" is done by electronically controlling the relative speeds and torque directions of MG1 and MG2, transferring power from one to the other and/or between them and the batteries.
If the computer commands it to drive the car forward you have no way to intervene.
Different problem. Read the Woz's description. His complaint is only about the cruise control.
It's not necessarily a different problem. Scenario:
- Driver bumps the cruise control or the wiring/control is worn or otherwise has a momentary contact.
- Car goes into uncontrolled acceleration.
- Hitting brake clears the problem.
- Driver has no clue the cruise control was involved.
Another poster reported uncontrolled acceleration when taking foot off brake. The brake switch is also an input to the cruise control algorithm. One way for software to cause THAT to trigger the issue is if a bug in the contact debounce routines not only generates a hold-down-resume/accel output for a tap on the regular control but also for a bounce-on-release in the brake signal.
Things to look for: Race conditions, bugs in input signal conditioning routines, an interrupt not properly saving&restoring a register, wild store smashing a state, insufficient stack allocation to a task to prevent interrupt state stacking to clobber another task's stack, etc.
One of the problems with trying to set up an alternative DNS to get around things like the seizure of domain names by DNS/ICE is that a DNS registry system provides two services:
- Mapping names to addresses.
- Assuring uniqueness in the identification.
An alternative system has the problem that, if it allocates a name, the OFFICIAL system could allocate the same name to somebody else, causing havoc.
But if there is a set TLDs that this supernational agency had decreed would NOT be allocated, an alternate registry could allocate names there with impunity. And once they're allocated they become, in effect, property. If the agency later changed its mind and decided to allocate them after all, all the owners of alternate TLDs AND the operators of the alternate registries would have a suit, at least in the US, both against the government under the 5th amendment's "takings" clause and against the agency as well. B-)
I don't know about anyone else, but it looked more like a hellraiser puzzle box than a rubiks cube.
Looked like that to me, too.
Looking closer it seems the creepy face is an antenna built using gold-plated stripline technology, i.e. a printed circuit antenna with a bit of gold plating to protect it from the elements.
Put Linux on it and make your own cell tower/server?
You can already do that with a laptop, a GNU radio, and open source "soft cell tower" software.
(I haven't checked whether a Shiva Plug has enough crunch to replace the laptop. But if it doesn't the 1.2G version from the UK should.)
Now if somebody would just build a GNU radio in a USB thumb drive form factor ...
If you can sequence the pathogen, maybe you can avoid storing a living or livable (spore, etc.) copy of it and minimize the risk of escape.
And if you sequence it and the sequence is published, anybody with the right lab equipment can manufacture it with no physical connection to the "library".
(Yes they have successfully constructed a bacterium from data already.)
The RF spectrum at "the edge" does not work like that and I doubt it ever will work like that.
Given that the base station allocates timeslots to outgoing traffic it can divide those timeslots evenly among all users with traffic toward them when dequeueing and transmitting traffic from their per-destination queues. This produces appropriate backpressure on the router's per-destination queues and results in packet drops when the incoming traffic overflows the queues (and other signaling, such as RED) just like a constant bit-rate link to the users would.
The only thing that's special about how RF works (from a bps-allocation standpoint) is that stations more distant from the base station or in a more noisy environment may have been configured for a lower bit/bandwidth modulation variant. The carrier would have to decide whether to divide things evenly on the basis of bit rate (giving the distant/noisy customers a larger slice of the cell's available spectrum) or bandwidth usage (dividing the spectrum usage equally and penalizing customers who are distant or have bad radio environments). IMHO, because station site selection is the carrier's choice (and because it's easier to implement) the choice should be to evenly divide the bit rate.
The "throttling" approach strikes me a bogus.
Most of the problem occurs at "the edge". (And if it's congested in "the core" you need more core.) So why not just divide the instantaneous bandwidth evenly among all users?
With this approach the high-usage users are not throttled when they're not interfering with other users when the edge is not congested, and get no more than an equal share with the intermittent users when it is congested.
Heard about a guy who used primacord to shovel his sidewalks.
1) Run a length down the middle of the sidewalk.
2) Set it off. WHACK!
3) Result: Clean walk and two piles of snow beside it.
4) Profit?
5) Try to explain this to the BATF(E) and DHS.
6) Collect a free Club Gitmo T-shirt.
Haven't tried this myself yet, so can't tell you whether/how well it actually works.
Probably won't,either, since the Supreme Court seems unlikely to extend District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago to explosive technology in what remains of my lifetime.
Come on, folks, you're traveling between Portland OR and Las Vegas NV, and your GPS says the most direct route is over some gravel Forest Service road in the Eastern Oregon mountains... In the winter... You take it? Really?
And then you:
- Remove something like four roadblocks placed there to indicate the road is closed (except to locals with local knowledge).
- Go up a ways in the snow, decide to back out, and go out by a DIFFERENT route.
- When you get stuck, burn your tires to make a smoke signal WITHOUT waiting for the snowstorm to end and cloud cover to clear so it will be visible. (And with all this wet burns-smoky wood around, too...)
- Then leave the car to hike out for help, rather than sticking around for the air search to find you.
But what's really stupid is when the CLEO in charge of the search gets on the media and says that "he did all the right things" to salve the feelings of the Darwin Award winner's loved ones - and drive the Mountain Rescue volunteers ballistic because he's just told several million news watchers to do THE SAME STUPID STUFF.
There's not much you can do about MORONS, one way or another, they may kill themselves.
But you CAN at least MENTION to them that GPS databases show:
- every historic abandoned logging road and ghost town known to the USGS (whose maps and databases they used as their major input),
- every closed-all-winter road and only-occupied-seasonally resort town ditto, and
- a few fake towns and roads that are deliberately inserted - in out-of-the-way places - to detect copyright violators.
With those in the database the poor program is going to include them in the route finding. So somebody in a Prius looking for a way to the Bodie state park may be driected to the 4-wheel-drive-only road to save a few miles (as happened to a friend). Or somebody looking for a way over a mountain might end up on the closed-by-snow-until-summer-meltoff road to the summer-only resort town, rather than the interstate road a few miles over. Or somebody running low on gas in a desert may take a back road to a copyright-protection fake town or a mining town that's been "ghost" for a century.
It's unreasonable to expect everybody who bought a "maps and navigation" product to figure this out in advance. This is especially true for city dwellers whose experience with surviving in hostile environments is limited to cable/satellite TV shows. News stories like this one get the word out that GPS system use produces a "kill you" mode that is not intuitively obvious.
If they kill themselves by trusting a GPS AFTER seeing/hearing about a few of these, THEN it's a much clearer case of "evolution in action".
PS: The italic tag is broken with the new version of slashcode.
Come on, folks, you're traveling between Portland OR and Las Vegas NV, and your GPS says the most direct route is over some gravel Forest Service road in the Eastern Oregon mountains... In the winter... You take it? Really? And then you: - Remove something like four roadblocks placed there to indicate the road is closed (except to locals with local knowledge). - Go up a ways in the snow, decide to back out, and go out by a DIFFERENT route. - When you get stuck, burn your tires to make a smoke signal WITHOUT waiting for the snowstorm to end and cloud cover to clear so it will be visible. (And with all this wet burns-smoky wood around, too...) - Then leave the car to hike out for help, rather than sticking around for the air search to find you. But what's really stupid is when the CLEO in charge of the search gets on the media and says that "he did all the right things" to salve the feelings of the Darwin Award winner's loved ones - and drive the Mountain Rescue volunteers ballistic because he's just told several million news watchers to do THE SAME STUPID STUFF. There's not much you can do about MORONS, one way or another, they may kill themselves. But you CAN at least MENTION to them that GPS databases show: - every historic abandoned logging road and ghost town known to the USGS (whose maps and databases they used as their major input), - every closed-all-winter road and only-occupied-seasonally resort town ditto, and - a few fake towns and roads that are deliberately inserted - in out-of-the-way places - to detect copyright violators. With those in the database the poor program is going to include them in the route finding. So somebody in a Prius looking for a way to the Bodie state park may be driected to the 4-wheel-drive-only road to save a few miles (as happened to a friend). Or somebody looking for a way over a mountain might end up on the closed-by-snow-until-summer-meltoff road to the summer-only resort town, rather than the interstate road a few miles over. Or somebody running low on gas in a desert may take a back road to a copyright-protection fake town or a mining town that's been "ghost" for a century. It's unreasonable to expect everybody who bought a "maps and navigation" product to figure this out in advance. This is especially true for city dwellers whose experience with surviving in hostile environments is limited to cable/satellite TV shows. News stories like this one get the word out that GPS system use produces a "kill you" mode that is not intuitively obvious. If they kill themselves by trusting a GPS AFTER seeing/hearing about a few of these, THEN it's a much clearer case of "evolution in action".
How do you tell the difference between an MIT mathematician and a smart MIT mathematician? One talks to the media, the other is a millionaire.
If you'd read the fine article, you'd have seen that he calculated how much he'd earn by using his system and how long it would take - and found that it was far lower than his consulting pay rate. So if he spent time doing it rather than his day job he'd be taking a pay cut.
Sounds to me like a GOOD mathematician - one who applies math to ALL the aspects of the problem and comes to the right conclusion.
I knew it! They can deactivate my brain with magnets and stuff! *proudly wears tin foil hat*
Dude! You need to switch to mu-metal.
(But keep the tinfoil as a lining for high frequency stuff.)
From my perspective, any external process that changes anything in or on my body is invasive, including flipping the on/off switch to various regions of the brain.
In medical speak, "noninvasive" means they didn't have to cut you open or poke holes in you when they tweaked your innards.
I think you meant unthinkable ways to stifle innovations.
Watch them patent "newspaper on a networked portable computer with display" - then use it to suppress all news reporting on the Internet.
Sounds like Freenet on ad-hoc WiFi mesh. Maybe with a little tweaking to use the mesh's routing table and avoid any dependency on centralized network services such as DNS.
... "Ads Disabled. Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!" box that you get for spending far to much time here without subscribing.
I get that.
But I also still get "Slow Down, Cowboy!"
Seems odd. I'd expect the "disable ads" option to be intended to encourage people whose postings are considered valuable and well-considered to post more of them. But the one-per-five-minutes limit for such people (who can often compose postings quickly) seems to work at cross-purposes to the option. So I'd have expected the limit to go away with the offering of the option.
Don't need a standard. There are plenty of available blog server packages and ANY of 'em will do the job. Or fall all the way back to netnews, or Fidonet, which not only don't require the capital-I Internet but also don't have a single point of failure for the bad guys to destroy.
All you need is a server with a blog tool on it and a way for people to contact it.
The problem is not that the tools are missing. The problem is that the network to connect people TO them is missing.
Come up with a replacement for that (preferably one that doesn't immediately lead the enemy to the key piece of infrastructure or its operator) and you're live. Once people are connected they can figure it out on-the-fly.
I hope one thing that comes out of this is some work on ad-hoc networking.
Example: a self-orgainzing, ad-hoc, robust re-routing and load balancing network using WiFi enabled machines. To join you'd bring up your machine and sniff for WiFi access points identifying as the net you're after. You'd connect to the strongest one, and if you didn't already have the software you'd bring up a browser and the neighbor would serve you a copy of the routing-and-configuring software. Accept and load it and you're now another node on the net.
Security risks of accepting such software are obvious. (Especially after malware authors and authoritarian government security operations build attacks or sock puppets with spyware.) But it has the advantage that you can play without having anything preloaded in advance of the network disruption. In a situation like Egypt's it could easily be worth the risk.
Others: Software-defined cell phone base stations, to replace shut-down cellphone infrastructure with VoIP over whatever works - or just enable the nearby phones to talk to each other over a square mile or so. Right NOW you'd need some special hardware for the radio part. (Can't use a handset because the built-in diplexer keeps it listening and talking on the wrong halves of the cellphone bands.) But in the future? And you don't need a LOT of "cells" to cover a city. Then there are smartphones that can switch over to WiFi "microcells" when available. Those wouldn't need any special radio to create the pirate cells.
I could go on...