Not to argue that the mythbusters are always right, but they've disproved this in one of thier episodes.
Actually, they only disproved their own design and construction methods on this one. A properly-designed and -constructed working model was demonstrated on BBC Two's practical archeology programme, What The Ancients Did For Us
None of the methods you have mentioned have actually fixed the problem of financial fraud. They've all been stop-gap patches-on-patches solutions.
I only wish we did live in Bruce Schneier's world where having law-makers push the problem onto banks to get the problem fixed would have any real effect. Unfortunately for us, in the world in which we live, banks' "fixes" for the problems are insufficient and they "defray the costs" by increasing loan interest rates and adding "administration charges" to their accounts.
Bottom line: banks are businesses. If they feel they can reduce the problem with a cheap-ass "fix" then they will - to keep their shareholders happy, not the customers.
The Epia is often used to build car-puters, whereas I haven't yet heard of something using a Mini for that purpose.
Whilst it's probably not exactly what you were thinking of, there is always Team Banzai's DARPA Grand Challenge entry, Dora, powered by three Mac Mini computers
How would people feel if, in a theoretical universe just like our own, there was the liklihood that Preference Engines could be tweaked by donations from manufacturers and suppliers? To continue the music example from the article, "Like Coldplay? How about trying [some obscure music clogging-up our warehouses because we haven't been able to sell it, but we threw $10,000 at the Preference Engine vendor because it's cheaper than the cost of destruction]?"
Whilst it's not all the fault of the credit card companies, Credit Card Security is nothing better than pathetic.
You don't need to look far to see stories about millions of credit card details getting stolen, or Hotel chains putting full unencrypted card details and address information on their swipe cards. Whilst Google, Yahoo and major search engines are very good now at filtering them from their results, online shopping sites for small businesses are still lax in their security by having their online order files with customer names, addresses and credit card details freely downloadable (if you know the URL), often in something as simple as a CSV file maintained by FrontPage extensions.
So why would Johnny Hacker spend time and money acquiring an RFID Card Reader so he can tour buses and trains to swipe card details for a few individuals, with the increased risk of getting caught, when he can stay in front of his computer to get hundreds, thousands or millions of cardholder details with far more ease? Again I say: The issue of Card ID theft isn't really that much more than it already is.
I'm not sure what the benefit of these are since you still have to take your card out of your pocket/wallet/handbag to swipe it over the scanner (only works within an inch). Anyone who has trouble swiping cards with mag stripes (which seems to be becoming a more-common problem as technology progresses) will likely think this a good thing - one swipe and that's it.
The issue of Card ID theft isn't really that much more than it already is.
Home/Professional versions of Windows should: (1) Not allow new Local Users to be in the Administrators group, and (2) Force the Administrator account to logout after five minutes.
It seems to have all of the benefits of Water Injection technology that has been around pretty much since the I.C.E., being used on many forms of sports vehicles including rally cars. In its simplest form you can use a pre-loved coffee pot as a water reservoir, punch a hole in the lid for ventilation, and run a length of aquarium airline from the pot into the carburettor allowing it to form a mist in the venturi. Maybe $1 for all the benefits and complexity of this $7,500.00 beast.
I've gotta admit that I don't subscribe to New York Times and so haven't read the article, but didn't we cover the "theft" of the "Xena", "Santa" and "Easterbunny" Kuiper objects nearly two weeks ago?:
The beauty of this algorithm is that it isn't tied to a particular language, like English (in fact it's even been used to analyze DNA genome sequences), and using "known good" texts as a reliable source the resultant data sets can be used to gauge the "badness" of your grammer under test.
There are practical considerations for conversion of documents in older formats which apparently have not been considered.
Once again, whoever wrote this had a lot of nerve accusing Massachusetts of failing to consider obvious issues. Let me tell a little story. A couple of months ago, I bought my Mom a new Macintosh, and also Microsoft Office for the Mac. We transferred her files over from her old Windows computer, but Office wouldn't open a bunch of them. That was OK, I went and got NeoOffice/J, a free OpenOffice-based software suite, and it opened most of them just fine. This is a story you hear over and over, on the net.
This is probably not the best example. Yes, the average government worker could probably download NeoOffice/J free of charge as well and then convert all their documents to a newer format, but there is a cost here and it is in man hours - they aren't working for free.
This cost probably occurs every time Microsoft updates Office, though, so would likley be much the same whether they stuck with MS-Office or migrated to anything like OpenOffice.
Scientists have developed an ultra-light limb that they claim can mimic the movement in a real hand better than any currently available.
Not to detract from the good work these guys are doing to restore mobility to the disabled, but... They can claim all they want about "any currently available," doesn't make it any less b*llsh*t. The Shadow Dextrous Hand has been available since 2002 and has way more degrees of freedom (they have all five DoF on the thumb for starters, not just two). The only things these guys have got going for them is that theirs is powered electrically (Shadow's is pneumatic) and they have a bio-interface to trigger their electronics from muscle contractions.
Some guy once made a smart comment along the lines of "no computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM" and now he's one of the richest dudes on the planet.
Someone give this guy a company so I can invest in it!:)
Any five-year-old earth child has probably already figured out that the screen corners are the easiest points to hit - the only locations hittable without looking.
Obviously neither you nor TFA's author have ever used a multi-screen system.
Try this: Dual-screen system, identical resolutions, and a unified desktop with the left-hand being the "primary" screen. Anything that uses screen corners is usually too-stupid to realize that top-right and bottom-right corners should probably be on the right-hand screen, so try flicking your mouse to land "just right" in the top-right or bottom-right corner of your left-hand screen!
Even though a nearly-identical story is being run on a number of online news sites (not just The Inquirer), I'm not convinced it's at all valid - none but one of them has a source attribution (the article on Addict3d points to a source on FlexBeta, but that goes nowhere).
I can't find anything in Sony/SCUS/SCEA media releases about it.
That's just as good an excuse as saying "you need to buy Office 95 because we can't read your Office XP files with our copy of Office 95."
It's up to the government to get with the times and update their forensics software. If their software vendor can't do it for them (no pun intended) then change vendors.
Those lasers must have some pretty impressive control systems to hit such a small target (2-feet across) from 385,000km away, especially when you consider that the earth's surface is (on average) rotating at 73.773m/s.
Now if only the US military's laser-guided weapons were half as good!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, geologists have been watching Mount St. Helens very closely of late.
Actually, they only disproved their own design and construction methods on this one. A properly-designed and -constructed working model was demonstrated on BBC Two's practical archeology programme, What The Ancients Did For Us
None of the methods you have mentioned have actually fixed the problem of financial fraud. They've all been stop-gap patches-on-patches solutions.
I only wish we did live in Bruce Schneier's world where having law-makers push the problem onto banks to get the problem fixed would have any real effect. Unfortunately for us, in the world in which we live, banks' "fixes" for the problems are insufficient and they "defray the costs" by increasing loan interest rates and adding "administration charges" to their accounts.
Bottom line: banks are businesses. If they feel they can reduce the problem with a cheap-ass "fix" then they will - to keep their shareholders happy, not the customers.
Actually, Episodes I and II were so crappy I didn't even bother seeing III. I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt that way. Way to go, George!
KeePass Password Safe
Whilst it's probably not exactly what you were thinking of, there is always Team Banzai's DARPA Grand Challenge entry, Dora, powered by three Mac Mini computers
Are Preference Engines are truly unbiased?
How would people feel if, in a theoretical universe just like our own, there was the liklihood that Preference Engines could be tweaked by donations from manufacturers and suppliers? To continue the music example from the article, "Like Coldplay? How about trying [some obscure music clogging-up our warehouses because we haven't been able to sell it, but we threw $10,000 at the Preference Engine vendor because it's cheaper than the cost of destruction]?"
Whilst it's not all the fault of the credit card companies, Credit Card Security is nothing better than pathetic.
You don't need to look far to see stories about millions of credit card details getting stolen, or Hotel chains putting full unencrypted card details and address information on their swipe cards. Whilst Google, Yahoo and major search engines are very good now at filtering them from their results, online shopping sites for small businesses are still lax in their security by having their online order files with customer names, addresses and credit card details freely downloadable (if you know the URL), often in something as simple as a CSV file maintained by FrontPage extensions.
So why would Johnny Hacker spend time and money acquiring an RFID Card Reader so he can tour buses and trains to swipe card details for a few individuals, with the increased risk of getting caught, when he can stay in front of his computer to get hundreds, thousands or millions of cardholder details with far more ease? Again I say: The issue of Card ID theft isn't really that much more than it already is.
PayPass FAQ page: http://www.paypass.com/faq.html
I'm not sure what the benefit of these are since you still have to take your card out of your pocket/wallet/handbag to swipe it over the scanner (only works within an inch). Anyone who has trouble swiping cards with mag stripes (which seems to be becoming a more-common problem as technology progresses) will likely think this a good thing - one swipe and that's it.
The issue of Card ID theft isn't really that much more than it already is.
Home/Professional versions of Windows should:
(1) Not allow new Local Users to be in the Administrators group, and
(2) Force the Administrator account to logout after five minutes.
Maybe they should be worried about these new fangled photocopier thingymajigs.
It seems to have all of the benefits of Water Injection technology that has been around pretty much since the I.C.E., being used on many forms of sports vehicles including rally cars.
In its simplest form you can use a pre-loved coffee pot as a water reservoir, punch a hole in the lid for ventilation, and run a length of aquarium airline from the pot into the carburettor allowing it to form a mist in the venturi.
Maybe $1 for all the benefits and complexity of this $7,500.00 beast.
Yeah, I don't think the marketing info on that page is going to help much.
Trying looking through the Intel Annual Reports, copies of which must be filed with the SEC and so probably contain more "reliable" figures.
In fact, the Quarterly SEC filings with more up-to-date figures can be found here.
Intel doesn't just make Pentium 4 processors. The $40 dollar average is based on the annual manufacturing costs of their entire portolio.
I've gotta admit that I don't subscribe to New York Times and so haven't read the article, but didn't we cover the "theft" of the "Xena", "Santa" and "Easterbunny" Kuiper objects nearly two weeks ago?:
Actually, there was something about this very subject on Slashdot just a couple of weeks ago:
The beauty of this algorithm is that it isn't tied to a particular language, like English (in fact it's even been used to analyze DNA genome sequences), and using "known good" texts as a reliable source the resultant data sets can be used to gauge the "badness" of your grammer under test.
From TFA:
This is probably not the best example. Yes, the average government worker could probably download NeoOffice/J free of charge as well and then convert all their documents to a newer format, but there is a cost here and it is in man hours - they aren't working for free.
This cost probably occurs every time Microsoft updates Office, though, so would likley be much the same whether they stuck with MS-Office or migrated to anything like OpenOffice.
From TFA:
Not to detract from the good work these guys are doing to restore mobility to the disabled, but... They can claim all they want about "any currently available," doesn't make it any less b*llsh*t. The Shadow Dextrous Hand has been available since 2002 and has way more degrees of freedom (they have all five DoF on the thumb for starters, not just two). The only things these guys have got going for them is that theirs is powered electrically (Shadow's is pneumatic) and they have a bio-interface to trigger their electronics from muscle contractions.
Some guy once made a smart comment along the lines of "no computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM" and now he's one of the richest dudes on the planet.
:)
Someone give this guy a company so I can invest in it!
Obviously neither you nor TFA's author have ever used a multi-screen system.
Try this: Dual-screen system, identical resolutions, and a unified desktop with the left-hand being the "primary" screen. Anything that uses screen corners is usually too-stupid to realize that top-right and bottom-right corners should probably be on the right-hand screen, so try flicking your mouse to land "just right" in the top-right or bottom-right corner of your left-hand screen!
Ban 'em, I say, or make them multi-screen aware!
Even though a nearly-identical story is being run on a number of online news sites (not just The Inquirer), I'm not convinced it's at all valid - none but one of them has a source attribution (the article on Addict3d points to a source on FlexBeta, but that goes nowhere).
I can't find anything in Sony/SCUS/SCEA media releases about it.
X-box in a 1979 Millenium Falcon model
That's just as good an excuse as saying "you need to buy Office 95 because we can't read your Office XP files with our copy of Office 95."
It's up to the government to get with the times and update their forensics software. If their software vendor can't do it for them (no pun intended) then change vendors.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Yeah, I read that article, too: The Most Important Thing Armstrong Left on the Moon
Those lasers must have some pretty impressive control systems to hit such a small target (2-feet across) from 385,000km away, especially when you consider that the earth's surface is (on average) rotating at 73.773m/s.
Now if only the US military's laser-guided weapons were half as good! :)