Extremely doubtful that the signal (in usable form) can make it past the pole transformer in either direction. That's quite a security dongle.
Actually, it will probably make it to every other customer on that transformer.
All you have to worry about is your neighbor (or the EffBeeEye) running an extension ccord to a socket on the side of your house...};^)
Or picking it up off the neighbor's plugs.
In an apartment building that means after the rents a room on the same transformer (or borrows a plug from a helpful neighbor) they don't have to drill holes through the wall to tap your LAN. Or they can wire a powerline-to-disk-or-802.11 bridge into your attic fan or garage lights rather than breaking into your comp room and hotwiring your keyboard.
Any bets whether a tempest-style directional antenna and high-gain preamp can pick this up WITHOUT physically connecting to the lines?
You would still need a proper NIC for each machine on this network, so what does it really buy you?
It buys you not having to string cat5 through the walls to every appliance you want to automate and every room where you, the wife, or the kid has a computer or appliance you want on the LAN.
I've strung a house with RS-232, another with Cheapernet, and am building one with Cat5 preinstalled. But after wiring the kitchen in my current house I've decided that stringing Cat5 where I want it is too much work and too hazardous for my creeky old body. And I'm a strongly motivated network nerd. So what's it like for Joe Accountant?
Aw, c'mon. Insightful? It's easy to build a highly regulated DC power supply from arbitrarily noisy AC power mains.
He's not talking about coupling through the power supply. He's talking about capacitive coupling.
Yes, he has a valid concern. The power lines carry 60 HZ and a lot of harmonics of it - all low frequency stuff - plus switching noise - higher frequency stuff but more intermittent, except for commutator noise which (as you probably know from listening to AM while running an electric drill) is all over the map. Not to mention fluorescent and other arc lamps and switching power supplies - all over the ultrasonic-to-radio ranges.
The higher the frequency the easier it couples - in direct proportion. Beyond the audio range it can still cause some trouble, but not as much.
This technology is running in the tens of megabits over a noisy channel, so it will be running a goodly fraction of that in bandwidth. The question is mostly whether the LOW end is well above the audio and FM multiplex subcarrier range.
Don't bet on that. The audio range is just as useful as an equivalent bandwidth above it, so unless the designers were trying to avoid hi-fi and telephone interference they probably used it.
I have a few other concerns:
How does it behave in the presence of interference from commutator-based motors (drills, vacuum cleaners, blenders, mixers, hedge trimmers, etc.), switching power supplies (computers, peripherals, compact fluorescents), and arc lamps (standard fluorescents, high-pressure vapor)?
How does it behave in the presence of other similar devices in other houses attached to the same power transformer? (Like X10 it probably won't go THROUGH the transformer enough to notice.)?
Will you need a coupling capacitor between the two sides (or in industrial situations, the three phases) of your feed to get the other half (two-thirds) of your outlets to work?
Will the default configuration share your internet and intranet with your neighbors?
On the other hand, can you feed a neighbor deliberately, to cut a deal to share a DSL or Cable drop?
If the TC can take complaints of the form "MS, via the BSA, is threatening to sue me for doing something I should be allowed to", and prevent MS et al from filing suit, the TC would have a major stick to use against MS.
Interesting idea.
I think there may be problems with it. For instance, if the TC blocked it then MS would be able to appeal that decision. So it still ends up in the courts - with the potential target now out lawyer's fees for time writing an appeal to the TC and briefs for the appelate court even BEFORE the basic suit (if any) starts. Part of the threat of a suit is the potential costs of litigating it, and this raises them.
Also the TC has a very limited lifetime - after which MS can sue for things that happened during its life and it won't be around to gate them.
All that aside, perhaps there's a variant that might work.
When did Slashdot evolve into a high-calibre news source ranking up with CNN, ABC, and the Wall Street Journal? Did I miss the transitional period where Slashdot hired real journalists and reported news? Without commentary? Lacking simplistic articles about how someone threw a motherboard into a tree? Reporting recent news? Grammar checking? Fact checking?
ROTFL!
Characterizing ABC and CNN as "high-calibre news sources" and calling for "real journalists" on the payroll (and in positions of power) as a prerequisite to being a credible news "source" (I presume you mean "conduit") has totally made my day.
When was the last time you saw an article in one of your "high-calibre news sources" run by "real journalists" - where you had any PERSONAL knowlege of the events reported - where they got ANYTHING SIGNIFICANT right?
"Fact checking"? Under deadline? Give me a break! They check them all right - just enough to create plausible deniability for anything they get wrong. Then they cut out the ones that conflict with their agenda, filter the rest down to a level "their readership (read 'reporters') will understand", and write a political opinion piece disguised as fact. Their money - in their opinion as well as mine - comes from creating an entertainment product. Their power comes from creating an illusion of popular opinion in the minds of the busy, isolated, legislators and executives.
(Perhaps Wall Street Journal comes close to your ideal. They sell information to businessmen, who aren't in the mood to patronize suppliers of a product with excessive defects. Info World somewhere between - "News for Nerds" again - but more an outlet for news releases than investigative reporting.)
But go with your assumptions for a moment. What do "real journalist"s do when they're REALLY doing an investigative report?
1: They find people with information - or such people find them.
2: They interview them to get the information as they see it.
3: They get confirmation of the facts from other people - who have no more individual credibility than the original "source".
4: They MAY seek an opinion on the credibility of particular pieces of the story from an "expert" in the field (i.e. a member of an advocacy group, a staff pundit, or the guy at the next desk who once did a similar story).
5: They "write the story" - distilling it though one non-expert's mind into a coherent piece of prose that fits the outlet's style guide, genreal space requirements, and political agenda.
6: They hand it off to another "real journalist" - the editor (or editorial board), who decides whether to run it, whether it's SAFE to run, where to position it, and how much to cut out to fit today's edition's space requirements.
And all by deadline time - so on a busy day meat gets cut, while on a slow day the fat and entrails get included.
Now in case you didn't notice: The first four steps collect the informaion (along with a bunch of junk) and rate it, while the last two delete, distort, and bias it.
And also in case you didn't notice: Slashdot creates a mechanism to get the first four done, with broader access than even a large team of "real" reporters. Then presents you with the raw data and ratings but WITHOUT the filtering (unless set your browsing level too high and rejected some meat along with the heavily-panned stuff.)
WE get to be the reporter. And the good source. And the bad source. And the expert. And the pundit. And the spin-meister.
But we DON'T get to be the editor, cutting the story everyone sees down to "all the news that fits" - the space, bias, style, or the agenda. And if we as "reporters" filter the news through our lack of understanding or personal biases we affect only ourselves, individually.
Yes, it means you need to keep your bullshit detector on, because some of the crap that would be filtered out by a "real journalist" is still there. But so is the meat that the journalist would cut out. Meanwhile the "real journalist"'s personal misunderstanding of the facts is not a choke-point between the data and the reader. The "editorial board"'s political agendas and spin only make it as far as the initial subject selection and the editorializing comment in the "article" posting. From then on all spins and agendas have equal opportunity.
This is BETTER than any gang of "real journalists" can produce. And it will continue to be better until trolls, astroturf, or a too-fast or too-large influx of newbies causes the system to break down. Or possibly until the "real journalists" manage to get their act together.
Back in the Vietnam war-like-thingie days I was eligible for the draft, and (after a LONG sequence of events I won't go into here - involving a congressional inquiry B-) ) I ended up in a private doctor's office getting an allergy test to confirm my documented infirmities.
The allergist appeared to be delicately fishing for a bribe. I stood there with my arm swolen up from the test injection and had a nice rambling conversation with him, pretending throughout to be totally ignorant of what he was doing - right through the pregnant pause before he told the officer on the other end of the phone that I was unfit for service.
(Due to allergies, or too stupid to recognize a fish for a bribe? Can't have THAT in the army! B-) )
Of course it helps that I had objective evidence that I had the allergies - including a currently-swolen patch test. So if he failed to do his job correctly I could have gotten him into trouble too. And you never know if that congressional inquiry might be into doctors consulting for the military and taking bribes. B-)
We've had it for a while and talked about it quite a bit. And decided it was silly.
A large stealth vessel was part of the original stealth project, and is well documented. (It was a very fast powered twin-hull, which gave them an opportunity to absorb or redirect the microwaves that got into the space UNDER the main body of the craft.)
The problem was that it DID work.
But the rough surface of the sea also reflects radar. The stealth craft blocked this. The net result was a dark streak on the radar background, with the stealth ship exactly at the end of the streak closest to the radar antenna.
Effectively it was a big, black arrowhead on a dim green background, pointing exactly at the stealth vessel. The only thing missing was a label saying "Stealth ship HERE".
To solve this you'd need to deliberately transmit a fake of a surface reflection behind you - which means that you need active ECM for EVERY radar that shines on you. Then you risk showing up as a spotlight on PASSIVE radar.
So we're talking a virtual graffiti service, which lets people "tag" sites and deface structures without actually defacing them. People don't have to see it unless they deliberately try.
But why should it be limited to ONE set of graffiti? Unless somebody patents it, of course.
If there IS only one service the owners of the REAL site may have a property-rights claim against any posters to coordinates that fall on their property, and perhaps even the service itself (especially if it doesn't let them "paint out" anything on their location and/or if someone posts something derogatory).
This is naive. Guns have been around for over 100 years, but it's only recently that kids have taken to gunning down multiple classmates in schools.
Actually, shootings in schools, though always extremely rare, have been present for quite a while. They actually were going down slightly during the period of the high-profile incidents.
What's new is two things:
- the media's focus on them.
- who's doing them.
The latter has always been the school's psychopaths - rule-breakers, petty crooks, conscience-missing reveng-takers. But the ones in the news were also the children of vocal and politically-active anti-gunners, whose parents "protected" them from mainstream education on guns and gun handling.
(Interestingly, in one of the cases the anti-gunner dad, after the kid stole guns from others, went out and bought him one in an attempt to stop the stealing problem.)
It turns out that taking a kid to a range and teaching him proper gun handling doesn't change his delinquency rate. But it does change the TYPE of delinquency he participates. Oversimplifying slightly: Kids who were taught gun handling tend to break rules like being out after curfew, and in those few incidents where they are involved in crime they don't use a gun. Kids who weren't taught are the ones that become gangstas and shoot up others.
The spammer's ideal email list would include every email address on the planet with the exception of those who are inclined to take action against spam. The spammer doesn't mind the vast majority of people who "just hit delete". If automatic filtering means that those inclined to complain about the spam don't see the spam, then filtering actually helps the spammer.
So set your filter to forward each spam to your congressman. B-) Say, with a nice form-letter about how this showed up in your inbox today and you'd really like the law against unsolicited faxes to be expanded to include spam, with only "opt-in" allowed.
And re-tune it periodically as the congresscritters change their email addresses.
Some things you might not know about deer hunting:
"Sport hunting" is a legal term, which includes all legal hunting other than "market hunting" (i.e. hunting to sell the carcas or its parts). While it does include those hunters who hunt "for the fun of it" or for the trophy, most hunters are hunting to put a seasonal meat on the table. Most "trophy hunters" use the meat also - or donate it to some feed-the-hungry program. (Hunters consider anyone who "wastes the meat" of a non-vermin animal to be scum.)
(Unfortunately, many "food banks" won't accept hunted meat - out of political correctness rather than any practical reason. The sickos would rather let the meat rot and the poor starve than do anything that might be mistaken for "encouraging hunting".)
Being shot by a firearm is about the easiest death available for a deer. A good life, a sudden pain, typically dead of blood loss before the shock wears off. Indians switched from bows to firearms because they considered them less cruel - dying from an arrow generally takes longer. But both are much more humane than the "natural" way of death for a deer: Being eaten alive over hours by peredators, painful starvation over several months, disease over weeks, infection from wounds incurred in deer-deer battles or escape from peredators.
including a grain that was nearly made extinct by the Spaniards
You mean Amaranth?
Yep. (And thanks for the link.)
Note that Amaranth is high in the nutrients (especially lysine) which are missing from corn, and lysine deficiency is a problem even today in South American diets - to the point that construction of a genetically-engineered high-lysine corn was a major event. Eating both grains together produces a much better diet than eating corn alone.
This implies that the suppression of Amaranth by the Spanish may have been a factor in the diseases that ravaged the South American Indians.
Note that one set of protiens where lysine is necessary is antibodies, where a disulfide bond between lysines in the major and minor chains forms the final assembly. This means a lysine is in every antibody molecule. So a lysine shortage would stall the synthesys at that point in the chain, resulting in a drastic drop in antibody production - even production of unassembled fragments.
The only way I can imagine this failing is if the BIOS runs the entire game in protected mode with no way to subvert it.
Well, actually I can see one way it could fail: If the BIOS uses asymmetric cryptography to see if the game is signed by Microsoft's private key and refuses to run it otherwise.
But that would also break the "game that flashes the ROM" unless you can get Microsoft to sign it.
All we need is one person to create an X-box game that just flashes in a Linux BIOS and can boot a linux image from CD.
Why bother flashing the ROM?
Just reverse-engineer its contents sufficiently to see how it loads from the CD. Then make a new LILO version-or-replacement that will boot linux (and other stuff) on the X box - perhaps with a soft BIOS under it and/or suitable modifications to certain linux modules that use BIOS services.
The only way I can imagine this failing is if the BIOS runs the entire game in protected mode with no way to subvert it.
Of course flashing the BIOS ROM is cleaner when you're done (except that you can't run the games anymore.)
So your, um, postulating that the Greeks made this 10,000 mile jaunt in what year again?
Who said the Greeks did it? If there was an empire on the other side of the gates, why couldn't they have been the ones to do it?
As to doability - Thor Heyerdahl has done a couple of proofs-of-concept that it could be done, easily, with the technology available in the old world at the time. (And a few generations of wooden sailing ships, different in detail but not much more seaworthy than what was plying the Mediteranian in Plato's time, made an industry out of it a couple centuries ago.)
People do it now in dinghies, kayaks, and rafts, just for the sport. It's not all THAT hard if the weather's right.
There's lots of evidence in the Americas of intermittent contact with the old world through prehistory. There are a couple loops of current, along with prevailing winds, in the Atlantic that will tend to take ships that get blown away from one hemisphere's continents to the other if it happens in the right season and from the right areas. Thor showed that small boats blown off-course could make it, with the people living off the sea for quite a long while.
So there's nothing impossible or inconsistent with current paradigms about an occasionall inter-hemisphere contact bringing news of an advanced American city-state, and its destruction, to southern Europe.
Bzzt. The 68000 could not completly re-execute an instruction that was aborted due to a bus error.
That's why I said the "68000 family" rather than the 68000.
Like Zilog, Motorola's first "x000" chip couldn't restart instructions that failed due to memory faults. Unlike Zilog, Motorola did a followon which COULD.
Perhaps it was more cluefulness on Motorola's part than Zilog's. Perhaps it was pressure from Sun, or their two-CPU box which PROVED that people REALLY wanted to do virtual memory with microprocessors - badly enough to put in a second expensive (in those days) CPU chip just to make it possible.
So the 68010 was the first microprocessor chip that could do true virtual memory. Combined with Unix its family became the foundation of one era of the microprocessor explosion.
This lasted until it was displaced by the horribly asymmetrical, but extremely cheap (at the time), Intel 86 family, on the (almost inadvertently) open and expandable IBM PC/clone defacto-standard platform.
The problem is, Plato made the entire legend up, without any precedent. The widespread Atlantis legends all spring from that single invention. (The "great flood" legends are distinct and separate from Atlantis legends.)
Really? And after all these years how do you show that Plato did it himself, rather than simply repeating something he had heard and being the first person to be recorded to do so. The same was said about Homer and the Oddesy, but they found Troy.
The Americas had about as long, true, but there was a huge lack of cultivatable plants and domesticable large animals.
The Egyptians built quite well with just human labor rather than using domestic animals. (Also: The Americas had quite a range of stuff - including wolly mamoths - until the inhabitants ATE them.)
As for plants - where do you think corn comes from, just for starters? And tomatoes? There were a number of other crop plants in the Americas that weren't available in the "old world" - including a grain that was nearly made extinct by the Spaniards (in their reaction to a rather bloody ritual that was associated with its cultivation).
Despite the convenient old world conceit that they "civilized" the new world (rather than wiping out the current civilizations there by introducing disease and then conquering or subverting the cultures most of the survivors, destroying their records and traditions) there have been several rather extensive civilizations in the Americas. These include one that was destroyed by a climate change well before the European invasion, and an empire that formed the ACTUAL foundation of the resurgence of Repulics. One more would be no surprise.
... of my first time to the NCC, in the early '70s - when Zilog had first announced the Z8000.
One of the things I did was drop by the Zilog booth - twice (the second time when the head of the project was there), to comment on the instruction set. Went something like this:
Me: ~"This is a really great instruction set. But there's one thing missing. When an instruction is aborted by an external memory controller and the interrupt taken, the state isn't preserved well enough to restart the instruction after the memory fault is fixed. You could do true virtual memory if you fixed that.~"
Him: ~"We're not planning to do that. We already looked at it, and it would expand the microcode by about 50%~"
Me: ~"Oh, good. Then (given Moore's law improvements in silocon fabrication) it could be done in 6 to 9 months.~"
Him: ~"Nobody would ever want to do virtual memory on a microprocessor.~"
So they didn't do it. And a few years later the Motorola 68000 family (which DID have restartable instructions on memory faults) became the canonical processor for the "cheap unix box" explosion.
Of course, I'm sure this will set off a whole new round of newage (rhymes with "sewage") types talking about Atlantis.
Not to mention actual, reputable, archaeologists.
Legends/oral traditions have preserved quite a bit of actual history over millenia, despite entropy, destruction or loss of records, and religious/ideological suppression. Poems are particularly resistant to change: The rythm, rhyme schemes, alliteration, and other artistic conventions serve as error-correcting codes. These have proven quite useful in directing archaeologists on where to dig.
For a long time they were discounted. But that was before the rich guy with the bee in his bonet funded the dig that discovered the ruins of Troy - the first of several successes using the technique of analyzing legends and seeing what sites in the real world might match.
The Atlantis legend is quite widespread and a number of sites have been considered as possible matches. But none have been really convincing so far.
A 6,000-ish year old city 2,000 feet down just off the coast of Cuba ("Island Beyond the Gates of Hercules") sounds like a very good candidate - especially given that the Americas had about as many years for civilizations to rise and fall as the EurAsian/African landmass did, along with sufficient population and resources to make it happen.
It should be noted that war driving will come up with a lot more "open" access points than are actually open.
Savvy companies now put their 802.11b links on the OUTSIDE of the firewall, and require their users to use an encrypted tunnel (ssh, VPN, etc.) to get to the LAN.
(Actually, it's usually a separate "outside" from the general internet, so they can also control forwarding of packets between the wireless users and the rest of the net. If they don't feel like providing a free access port for passers-by they can cut it off. The company users can work through a proxy at the other end of their tunnel.)
but thats tricky because you are not intercepting, those airwaves are hitting your laptop, therefore your property.
The US law, at least, has long distinguished between a "directed transmission" and a "broadcast transmission", the distinction being whether it was intended for a particular listener (or set of listeners) versus anyone who tuned in.
Basic rule was that you could listen to a directed transmission but couldn't disclose it further. That was later modified with the advent of subscription TV in microwave bands, cellular phones, and so on.
Its like that satelite case. satelite tv companies were bitching that people were just buying the dish and not buying the service. so they were enforced to encrypt the signal cause the govt said hey, its in the open air thats your prob
Yep.
But there's a maze of laws and regulations now so your mileage may vary from the days of the Big Ugly Dish.
I understand your position matches that of the Canadian government with respect to Canadians intercepting and decrypting scrambled satellite subscription services - especially ones where subscriptions are not available to Canadians. B-)
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Extremely doubtful that the signal (in usable form) can make it past the pole transformer in either direction. That's quite a security dongle.
Actually, it will probably make it to every other customer on that transformer.
All you have to worry about is your neighbor (or the EffBeeEye) running an extension ccord to a socket on the side of your house...};^)
Or picking it up off the neighbor's plugs.
In an apartment building that means after the rents a room on the same transformer (or borrows a plug from a helpful neighbor) they don't have to drill holes through the wall to tap your LAN. Or they can wire a powerline-to-disk-or-802.11 bridge into your attic fan or garage lights rather than breaking into your comp room and hotwiring your keyboard.
Any bets whether a tempest-style directional antenna and high-gain preamp can pick this up WITHOUT physically connecting to the lines?
You would still need a proper NIC for each machine on this network, so what does it really buy you?
It buys you not having to string cat5 through the walls to every appliance you want to automate and every room where you, the wife, or the kid has a computer or appliance you want on the LAN.
I've strung a house with RS-232, another with Cheapernet, and am building one with Cat5 preinstalled. But after wiring the kitchen in my current house I've decided that stringing Cat5 where I want it is too much work and too hazardous for my creeky old body. And I'm a strongly motivated network nerd. So what's it like for Joe Accountant?
He's not talking about coupling through the power supply. He's talking about capacitive coupling.
Yes, he has a valid concern. The power lines carry 60 HZ and a lot of harmonics of it - all low frequency stuff - plus switching noise - higher frequency stuff but more intermittent, except for commutator noise which (as you probably know from listening to AM while running an electric drill) is all over the map. Not to mention fluorescent and other arc lamps and switching power supplies - all over the ultrasonic-to-radio ranges.
The higher the frequency the easier it couples - in direct proportion. Beyond the audio range it can still cause some trouble, but not as much.
This technology is running in the tens of megabits over a noisy channel, so it will be running a goodly fraction of that in bandwidth. The question is mostly whether the LOW end is well above the audio and FM multiplex subcarrier range.
Don't bet on that. The audio range is just as useful as an equivalent bandwidth above it, so unless the designers were trying to avoid hi-fi and telephone interference they probably used it.
I have a few other concerns:
How does it behave in the presence of interference from commutator-based motors (drills, vacuum cleaners, blenders, mixers, hedge trimmers, etc.), switching power supplies (computers, peripherals, compact fluorescents), and arc lamps (standard fluorescents, high-pressure vapor)?
How does it behave in the presence of other similar devices in other houses attached to the same power transformer? (Like X10 it probably won't go THROUGH the transformer enough to notice.)?
Will you need a coupling capacitor between the two sides (or in industrial situations, the three phases) of your feed to get the other half (two-thirds) of your outlets to work?
Will the default configuration share your internet and intranet with your neighbors?
On the other hand, can you feed a neighbor deliberately, to cut a deal to share a DSL or Cable drop?
If the TC can take complaints of the form "MS, via the BSA, is threatening to sue me for doing something I should be allowed to", and prevent MS et al from filing suit, the TC would have a major stick to use against MS.
Interesting idea.
I think there may be problems with it. For instance, if the TC blocked it then MS would be able to appeal that decision. So it still ends up in the courts - with the potential target now out lawyer's fees for time writing an appeal to the TC and briefs for the appelate court even BEFORE the basic suit (if any) starts. Part of the threat of a suit is the potential costs of litigating it, and this raises them.
Also the TC has a very limited lifetime - after which MS can sue for things that happened during its life and it won't be around to gate them.
All that aside, perhaps there's a variant that might work.
ROTFL!
Characterizing ABC and CNN as "high-calibre news sources" and calling for "real journalists" on the payroll (and in positions of power) as a prerequisite to being a credible news "source" (I presume you mean "conduit") has totally made my day.
When was the last time you saw an article in one of your "high-calibre news sources" run by "real journalists" - where you had any PERSONAL knowlege of the events reported - where they got ANYTHING SIGNIFICANT right?
"Fact checking"? Under deadline? Give me a break! They check them all right - just enough to create plausible deniability for anything they get wrong. Then they cut out the ones that conflict with their agenda, filter the rest down to a level "their readership (read 'reporters') will understand", and write a political opinion piece disguised as fact. Their money - in their opinion as well as mine - comes from creating an entertainment product. Their power comes from creating an illusion of popular opinion in the minds of the busy, isolated, legislators and executives.
(Perhaps Wall Street Journal comes close to your ideal. They sell information to businessmen, who aren't in the mood to patronize suppliers of a product with excessive defects. Info World somewhere between - "News for Nerds" again - but more an outlet for news releases than investigative reporting.)
But go with your assumptions for a moment. What do "real journalist"s do when they're REALLY doing an investigative report?
1: They find people with information - or such people find them.
2: They interview them to get the information as they see it.
3: They get confirmation of the facts from other people - who have no more individual credibility than the original "source".
4: They MAY seek an opinion on the credibility of particular pieces of the story from an "expert" in the field (i.e. a member of an advocacy group, a staff pundit, or the guy at the next desk who once did a similar story).
5: They "write the story" - distilling it though one non-expert's mind into a coherent piece of prose that fits the outlet's style guide, genreal space requirements, and political agenda.
6: They hand it off to another "real journalist" - the editor (or editorial board), who decides whether to run it, whether it's SAFE to run, where to position it, and how much to cut out to fit today's edition's space requirements.
And all by deadline time - so on a busy day meat gets cut, while on a slow day the fat and entrails get included.
Now in case you didn't notice: The first four steps collect the informaion (along with a bunch of junk) and rate it, while the last two delete, distort, and bias it.
And also in case you didn't notice: Slashdot creates a mechanism to get the first four done, with broader access than even a large team of "real" reporters. Then presents you with the raw data and ratings but WITHOUT the filtering (unless set your browsing level too high and rejected some meat along with the heavily-panned stuff.)
WE get to be the reporter. And the good source. And the bad source. And the expert. And the pundit. And the spin-meister.
But we DON'T get to be the editor, cutting the story everyone sees down to "all the news that fits" - the space, bias, style, or the agenda. And if we as "reporters" filter the news through our lack of understanding or personal biases we affect only ourselves, individually.
Yes, it means you need to keep your bullshit detector on, because some of the crap that would be filtered out by a "real journalist" is still there. But so is the meat that the journalist would cut out. Meanwhile the "real journalist"'s personal misunderstanding of the facts is not a choke-point between the data and the reader. The "editorial board"'s political agendas and spin only make it as far as the initial subject selection and the editorializing comment in the "article" posting. From then on all spins and agendas have equal opportunity.
This is BETTER than any gang of "real journalists" can produce. And it will continue to be better until trolls, astroturf, or a too-fast or too-large influx of newbies causes the system to break down. Or possibly until the "real journalists" manage to get their act together.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for the latter.
Back in the Vietnam war-like-thingie days I was eligible for the draft, and (after a LONG sequence of events I won't go into here - involving a congressional inquiry B-) ) I ended up in a private doctor's office getting an allergy test to confirm my documented infirmities.
The allergist appeared to be delicately fishing for a bribe. I stood there with my arm swolen up from the test injection and had a nice rambling conversation with him, pretending throughout to be totally ignorant of what he was doing - right through the pregnant pause before he told the officer on the other end of the phone that I was unfit for service.
(Due to allergies, or too stupid to recognize a fish for a bribe? Can't have THAT in the army! B-) )
Of course it helps that I had objective evidence that I had the allergies - including a currently-swolen patch test. So if he failed to do his job correctly I could have gotten him into trouble too. And you never know if that congressional inquiry might be into doctors consulting for the military and taking bribes. B-)
We've had it for a while
Of course, our Navy won't talk about it.
We've had it for a while and talked about it quite a bit. And decided it was silly.
A large stealth vessel was part of the original stealth project, and is well documented. (It was a very fast powered twin-hull, which gave them an opportunity to absorb or redirect the microwaves that got into the space UNDER the main body of the craft.)
The problem was that it DID work.
But the rough surface of the sea also reflects radar. The stealth craft blocked this. The net result was a dark streak on the radar background, with the stealth ship exactly at the end of the streak closest to the radar antenna.
Effectively it was a big, black arrowhead on a dim green background, pointing exactly at the stealth vessel. The only thing missing was a label saying "Stealth ship HERE".
To solve this you'd need to deliberately transmit a fake of a surface reflection behind you - which means that you need active ECM for EVERY radar that shines on you. Then you risk showing up as a spotlight on PASSIVE radar.
So we're talking a virtual graffiti service, which lets people "tag" sites and deface structures without actually defacing them. People don't have to see it unless they deliberately try.
But why should it be limited to ONE set of graffiti? Unless somebody patents it, of course.
If there IS only one service the owners of the REAL site may have a property-rights claim against any posters to coordinates that fall on their property, and perhaps even the service itself (especially if it doesn't let them "paint out" anything on their location and/or if someone posts something derogatory).
This is naive. Guns have been around for over 100 years, but it's only recently that kids have taken to gunning down multiple classmates in schools.
Actually, shootings in schools, though always extremely rare, have been present for quite a while. They actually were going down slightly during the period of the high-profile incidents.
What's new is two things:
- the media's focus on them.
- who's doing them.
The latter has always been the school's psychopaths - rule-breakers, petty crooks, conscience-missing reveng-takers. But the ones in the news were also the children of vocal and politically-active anti-gunners, whose parents "protected" them from mainstream education on guns and gun handling.
(Interestingly, in one of the cases the anti-gunner dad, after the kid stole guns from others, went out and bought him one in an attempt to stop the stealing problem.)
It turns out that taking a kid to a range and teaching him proper gun handling doesn't change his delinquency rate. But it does change the TYPE of delinquency he participates. Oversimplifying slightly: Kids who were taught gun handling tend to break rules like being out after curfew, and in those few incidents where they are involved in crime they don't use a gun. Kids who weren't taught are the ones that become gangstas and shoot up others.
The spammer's ideal email list would include every email address on the planet with the exception of those who are inclined to take action against spam. The spammer doesn't mind the vast majority of people who "just hit delete". If automatic filtering means that those inclined to complain about the spam don't see the spam, then filtering actually helps the spammer.
So set your filter to forward each spam to your congressman. B-) Say, with a nice form-letter about how this showed up in your inbox today and you'd really like the law against unsolicited faxes to be expanded to include spam, with only "opt-in" allowed.
And re-tune it periodically as the congresscritters change their email addresses.
Some things you might not know about deer hunting:
"Sport hunting" is a legal term, which includes all legal hunting other than "market hunting" (i.e. hunting to sell the carcas or its parts). While it does include those hunters who hunt "for the fun of it" or for the trophy, most hunters are hunting to put a seasonal meat on the table. Most "trophy hunters" use the meat also - or donate it to some feed-the-hungry program. (Hunters consider anyone who "wastes the meat" of a non-vermin animal to be scum.)
(Unfortunately, many "food banks" won't accept hunted meat - out of political correctness rather than any practical reason. The sickos would rather let the meat rot and the poor starve than do anything that might be mistaken for "encouraging hunting".)
Being shot by a firearm is about the easiest death available for a deer. A good life, a sudden pain, typically dead of blood loss before the shock wears off. Indians switched from bows to firearms because they considered them less cruel - dying from an arrow generally takes longer. But both are much more humane than the "natural" way of death for a deer: Being eaten alive over hours by peredators, painful starvation over several months, disease over weeks, infection from wounds incurred in deer-deer battles or escape from peredators.
apt-get install xmms
hard wasnt it
%apt-get install xmms
apt-get: Command not found.
Care to try again? (Hint: Red Hat 6.2)
Nobody who can't extract his own would have a use for them until someone writes an Xbox emulator.
Actually, one use for a ROM dump would be to assist in designing a linux loader that runs with the existing BIOS.
That phone message was pretty funny...
Does anybody with an MP3 decoder feel inspired to write a transcript of it for those of us who don't have one set up yet?
including a grain that was nearly made extinct by the Spaniards
You mean Amaranth?
Yep. (And thanks for the link.)
Note that Amaranth is high in the nutrients (especially lysine) which are missing from corn, and lysine deficiency is a problem even today in South American diets - to the point that construction of a genetically-engineered high-lysine corn was a major event. Eating both grains together produces a much better diet than eating corn alone.
This implies that the suppression of Amaranth by the Spanish may have been a factor in the diseases that ravaged the South American Indians.
Note that one set of protiens where lysine is necessary is antibodies, where a disulfide bond between lysines in the major and minor chains forms the final assembly. This means a lysine is in every antibody molecule. So a lysine shortage would stall the synthesys at that point in the chain, resulting in a drastic drop in antibody production - even production of unassembled fragments.
The only way I can imagine this failing is if the BIOS runs the entire game in protected mode with no way to subvert it.
Well, actually I can see one way it could fail: If the BIOS uses asymmetric cryptography to see if the game is signed by Microsoft's private key and refuses to run it otherwise.
But that would also break the "game that flashes the ROM" unless you can get Microsoft to sign it.
Or break the asymmetric cryptography. B-)
All we need is one person to create an X-box game that just flashes in a Linux BIOS and can boot a linux image from CD.
Why bother flashing the ROM?
Just reverse-engineer its contents sufficiently to see how it loads from the CD. Then make a new LILO version-or-replacement that will boot linux (and other stuff) on the X box - perhaps with a soft BIOS under it and/or suitable modifications to certain linux modules that use BIOS services.
The only way I can imagine this failing is if the BIOS runs the entire game in protected mode with no way to subvert it.
Of course flashing the BIOS ROM is cleaner when you're done (except that you can't run the games anymore.)
how about: ..."
"Shoshkeles, named for the middle daughter of their creator,
Maybe we can get them busted for child abuse?
So your, um, postulating that the Greeks made this 10,000 mile jaunt in what year again?
Who said the Greeks did it? If there was an empire on the other side of the gates, why couldn't they have been the ones to do it?
As to doability - Thor Heyerdahl has done a couple of proofs-of-concept that it could be done, easily, with the technology available in the old world at the time. (And a few generations of wooden sailing ships, different in detail but not much more seaworthy than what was plying the Mediteranian in Plato's time, made an industry out of it a couple centuries ago.)
People do it now in dinghies, kayaks, and rafts, just for the sport. It's not all THAT hard if the weather's right.
There's lots of evidence in the Americas of intermittent contact with the old world through prehistory. There are a couple loops of current, along with prevailing winds, in the Atlantic that will tend to take ships that get blown away from one hemisphere's continents to the other if it happens in the right season and from the right areas. Thor showed that small boats blown off-course could make it, with the people living off the sea for quite a long while.
So there's nothing impossible or inconsistent with current paradigms about an occasionall inter-hemisphere contact bringing news of an advanced American city-state, and its destruction, to southern Europe.
Bzzt. The 68000 could not completly re-execute an instruction that was aborted due to a bus error.
That's why I said the "68000 family" rather than the 68000.
Like Zilog, Motorola's first "x000" chip couldn't restart instructions that failed due to memory faults. Unlike Zilog, Motorola did a followon which COULD.
Perhaps it was more cluefulness on Motorola's part than Zilog's. Perhaps it was pressure from Sun, or their two-CPU box which PROVED that people REALLY wanted to do virtual memory with microprocessors - badly enough to put in a second expensive (in those days) CPU chip just to make it possible.
So the 68010 was the first microprocessor chip that could do true virtual memory. Combined with Unix its family became the foundation of one era of the microprocessor explosion.
This lasted until it was displaced by the horribly asymmetrical, but extremely cheap (at the time), Intel 86 family, on the (almost inadvertently) open and expandable IBM PC/clone defacto-standard platform.
The problem is, Plato made the entire legend up, without any precedent. The widespread Atlantis legends all spring from that single invention. (The "great flood" legends are distinct and separate from Atlantis legends.)
Really? And after all these years how do you show that Plato did it himself, rather than simply repeating something he had heard and being the first person to be recorded to do so. The same was said about Homer and the Oddesy, but they found Troy.
The Americas had about as long, true, but there was a huge lack of cultivatable plants and domesticable large animals.
The Egyptians built quite well with just human labor rather than using domestic animals. (Also: The Americas had quite a range of stuff - including wolly mamoths - until the inhabitants ATE them.)
As for plants - where do you think corn comes from, just for starters? And tomatoes? There were a number of other crop plants in the Americas that weren't available in the "old world" - including a grain that was nearly made extinct by the Spaniards (in their reaction to a rather bloody ritual that was associated with its cultivation).
Despite the convenient old world conceit that they "civilized" the new world (rather than wiping out the current civilizations there by introducing disease and then conquering or subverting the cultures most of the survivors, destroying their records and traditions) there have been several rather extensive civilizations in the Americas. These include one that was destroyed by a climate change well before the European invasion, and an empire that formed the ACTUAL foundation of the resurgence of Repulics. One more would be no surprise.
... of my first time to the NCC, in the early '70s - when Zilog had first announced the Z8000.
One of the things I did was drop by the Zilog booth - twice (the second time when the head of the project was there), to comment on the instruction set. Went something like this:
Me: ~"This is a really great instruction set. But there's one thing missing. When an instruction is aborted by an external memory controller and the interrupt taken, the state isn't preserved well enough to restart the instruction after the memory fault is fixed. You could do true virtual memory if you fixed that.~"
Him: ~"We're not planning to do that. We already looked at it, and it would expand the microcode by about 50%~"
Me: ~"Oh, good. Then (given Moore's law improvements in silocon fabrication) it could be done in 6 to 9 months.~"
Him: ~"Nobody would ever want to do virtual memory on a microprocessor.~"
So they didn't do it. And a few years later the Motorola 68000 family (which DID have restartable instructions on memory faults) became the canonical processor for the "cheap unix box" explosion.
Of course, I'm sure this will set off a whole new round of newage (rhymes with "sewage") types talking about Atlantis.
Not to mention actual, reputable, archaeologists.
Legends/oral traditions have preserved quite a bit of actual history over millenia, despite entropy, destruction or loss of records, and religious/ideological suppression. Poems are particularly resistant to change: The rythm, rhyme schemes, alliteration, and other artistic conventions serve as error-correcting codes. These have proven quite useful in directing archaeologists on where to dig.
For a long time they were discounted. But that was before the rich guy with the bee in his bonet funded the dig that discovered the ruins of Troy - the first of several successes using the technique of analyzing legends and seeing what sites in the real world might match.
The Atlantis legend is quite widespread and a number of sites have been considered as possible matches. But none have been really convincing so far.
A 6,000-ish year old city 2,000 feet down just off the coast of Cuba ("Island Beyond the Gates of Hercules") sounds like a very good candidate - especially given that the Americas had about as many years for civilizations to rise and fall as the EurAsian/African landmass did, along with sufficient population and resources to make it happen.
Let's see how this develops.
It should be noted that war driving will come up with a lot more "open" access points than are actually open.
Savvy companies now put their 802.11b links on the OUTSIDE of the firewall, and require their users to use an encrypted tunnel (ssh, VPN, etc.) to get to the LAN.
(Actually, it's usually a separate "outside" from the general internet, so they can also control forwarding of packets between the wireless users and the rest of the net. If they don't feel like providing a free access port for passers-by they can cut it off. The company users can work through a proxy at the other end of their tunnel.)
but thats tricky because you are not intercepting, those airwaves are hitting your laptop, therefore your property.
The US law, at least, has long distinguished between a "directed transmission" and a "broadcast transmission", the distinction being whether it was intended for a particular listener (or set of listeners) versus anyone who tuned in.
Basic rule was that you could listen to a directed transmission but couldn't disclose it further. That was later modified with the advent of subscription TV in microwave bands, cellular phones, and so on.
Its like that satelite case. satelite tv companies were bitching that people were just buying the dish and not buying the service. so they were enforced to encrypt the signal cause the govt said hey, its in the open air thats your prob
Yep.
But there's a maze of laws and regulations now so your mileage may vary from the days of the Big Ugly Dish.
I understand your position matches that of the Canadian government with respect to Canadians intercepting and decrypting scrambled satellite subscription services - especially ones where subscriptions are not available to Canadians. B-)