It is damn sure worth it for my wife, who is adopted. We've tried the family research - dead end. No family history for disease. Genetic profile to get that same info would be great. Nice to see the price falling.
I need to do research to see if this individual service is the best price/performance out there. Within that "best deal" framework, the general idea is desperately needed and very worthwhile.
Heck, I've spent $1000 on a hobby in a day. To save my wife's life, or even just know the risks, it's cheap at twice the price.
"Velocity of the bullet?", he says, "A bit hard to define. Do you mean in relation to my chest or the surface of the earth or the surrounding solar wind? Yes, I'm being pedantic, but one has to subtract out the rotational velocity of the earth, which depends on lon..."
Suddenly, he falls over dead. By any practical definition.
There are definitions that just make sense and do not need to be nit-picked. The visible diameter of the sun and the visible diameter of Holmes comet's coma is one such definition. Point out another comet in the last 100 (or 1000?) years or so that fits this definition.
+5 Informative? Sheesh... Where are the Robot Chicken A--hole Police when you really need them?
The article mentioned patenting the concept. I remember driving over a "rumble strip" designed to warn of an approaching tollboth back in about 1971. My immediate thought was "gee, change the spacing and you could get music". It's obvious.
Does teh Japanese patent system recognize "obviousness"? Of course, the US patent system claims to recognize obviousness, but obviously does not.
There are some forms of damage that accumulate, and point (3) does hold for "1 cigarette" vs "N cigarettes" for these forms of damage.
But...
There are other forms, most notably cancer, that don't work that way. Any given cigarette either does or does not trigger the replicator cascade that is cancer. "Odds" and "infection rates" and similar apply to groups. As an individual, a given single cigarette either gives you cancer, or it doesn't. It's like playing "Russian Roulette" with a million cylinder gun.
I was very disappointed that they ommitted other composite aircraft. The vast majority of homebuilts are now composite. This transition started in the 1970s. Not the exact same tech, as airliners are oven cured carbon fiber and homebuilts are room-temp cured glass... but still, lots of airframe experience and lots of flight hours.
Also check out the Beech Starship. This is a turboprop and used oven cured carbon extensivly. The aircraft was an economic failure; one primary reason was the FAA didn't believe in composites and forced lots of compromises into the airframe, such as aluminum spars and lightning strike channels.
That, and the scare mongering about compsosite rudders breaking... many more aluminum parts have departed aircraft than the one or two incidents they could dig up on composites. If you've ridden on nearly any airliner built in the last 10 years, you've ridden with composite control surfaces.
Given that OS2 and Windows NT were the same product before the IBM/Microsoft "divorce", given that after the divorce, Microsoft shipped NT 3.5.1 with a Bootloader that still said "OS2" (hexdump the boot sector on an NT 3.5.1 drive, if you still have a copy - You'll see it). Given that OS2 evolved directly into Win NT and therefore has a heritage that reaches all the way into Longhorn... He was right!
The fact that a reporter missed this bit of history is typical. No sense of history or heritage.
Don't confuse the brand, owned by IBM, with the code, originated with Microsoft, that became Windows server.
So, the attack is a snippet of Javascript that uses Linksys/D-Link, and so forth's default passwords. Let's use those defaults for "good" instead of "evil". How about a site that documents the problem and has a "Click here to fix the problem" link that tries those exact same defaults, but CHANGES THE PASSWORD (with the user's help) rather than changing the DNS?
How about the big boys of Internet 2.0 each create a page (or series of pages) that non-nerds can visit that fix these kinds of things? Google's "Defend yourself" page sounds pretty good to me.
I am a 30 year+ subscriber to Scientific American. It has slipped a lot in the last decade or so... still, this article is a new low.
The article is intensly MS biased. It is not a "survey" of an industry or segment, it makes almost no testable predictions (just vague directional guesses), nor is it a technical "deep dive" into any focus area. Just pure crap. It did clearly contain "commercials" for MS's POV on development environments; that came through loud and clear!
Back to the magazing: At one point I thought I would buy a lifetime subscription to SciAm (if they offered it). This article may be the straw that breaks the camel's back and causes me to cancel my subscription.
P.S. I have never been much of a MS (or Bill) hater. I don't believe I'm being biased... the article was just so bad in so many ways.
You say that Oracle will support only on Unbreakable, and link to a document from Oracle that says the exact opposite. From page 5:
Will Oracle continue to support customers that are using Oracle products on Red Hat RHEL, Novell SLES, and Asianux?,
Yes. Oracle is fully committed to all of its customers that have deployed or will deploy Oracle products on other Linux distributions that are currently supported, including Red Hat, Novell and Asianux. We will continue to certify and offer support for Oracle products running on these Linux distributions. For operating system issues, users will need to work with their vendor.
There were experiments done from the 50s forward that showed massively increased frame rates enhance the "immersive" quality of an image much more than resolution. Douglass Trumbull's work with "Showscan" (70mm film at 60 frames per second) proved people see a "window into reality" instead of "just a film" as the frame rate approaches, and passes, 60 frames. Later work showed that even higher frame rates are even more immersive.
Early DLP home theatre projectors discovered that having the color wheel synced to the frame rate produced "rainbow" effects that made many people nauseous. Projectors now turn the wheel at 4, 5 or more times the frame rate of the underlying video.
60hz was selected for early TV to avoid interference from power line hum creeping into the analog electronics. Despite the "install base" of 24fps and 60i or 60p, is it time to move on? When will so called "High Def" increase frame rates?
It's nice to see a "Citizen" win against "The Man..." but...
This ruling basically stated that an existing law wherein the city can keep snail-mail addresses confidential does not cover e-mail addresses. Is this not the exact opposite of what we on./ typically preach? We typically advocate that the courts and legislature not make a big deal about cyberspace issues that are covered by existing laws; rather, we prefer they apply existing law? Right?
In this case, the court said e-mail addresses were not covered by the confidentiality rules. So, now, with this precedent; what a can of worms.
Active RFID tags have a range of 50 to 100 meters, but they're also battery-powered, huge and heavy. An active RFID tag is about 2"x3" and about ten inches long. Weighs about a pound and as I said, has a replaceable battery about the size of a AA cell. I don't think we could convince folks to wear them around their necks.
I can see how placing a tag on a body can keep the body from being counted twice - I don't see the advantage to tagging automobiles, though. If you're gonna have to get within three feet of the vehicle to read the RFID tag it seems to me you oughtta just record the VIN instead;-)
Wrong!
I pass through a 20 foot wide 20 foot high gate while traveling at 60-70 MPH and the Toll Authority gets a reliable read on the "Tolltag" in my car. This device is 2x3x1/8", weighs a couple of ounces, and, if it has a battery in it, that battery has lasted 5 years so far.
They are reading many thousands of cars an hour. Yes, they use cameras reading the lic plate as a backup - but I as a driver can tell a good read at some of the toll barriers via a green/red light system, and the green/good read rate is very very high.
Such tags could be easily coupled to a barrier gate at a border crossing to ensure 100% read rate - failed reads leave the barrier down.
I don't know diddly about the details of the tech; I just know it works and is nowhere near the size you quote above. Google "North Texas Toll Authority Tolltag" and go from there.
Having lived in the car-theft capitol of the world, El Paso Texas, I'd like to see a VOLUNTARY program for RFID "the other way around" at border checkpoints.
May I volunteer to have an RFID tag on my car; that tag is scanned at any/all Bridges to Mexico; my car is NOT ALLOWED across the border.
Should I ever want to go, I will either use mass transit, or a pre-arranged (web based) way to temporarily authorize my tag.
Absolutely voluntary; all the gov has to do is install the readers and run a simple web site; this can all be contracted out...
Having the corporate directory (in a separate category from my personal contacts) is the main reason I have a Palm phone instead of some other phone.
It's also the reason I've shunned WinCE and PocketPC variants for years. My PalmVx could handle many many more contacts than the much vaunted CE variants of that era... and Palm has stayed ahead in storage efficiency. Until now.
Many moons ago I was installing a multi-port serial card in a "Cubix". These boxes could be powered down in sections to allow clean install of hardware, and re-boot of just that section.
The &%^$#$^ serial card would not work! Tried three different serial cards in three different Cubix boxes... no joy. After many, many tries, I finally got tired enough that I committed the error I'd been trying to avoid all night: I plugged the serial board in to a Cubix section that still had the power ON!! Instead of frying, the darn thing instantly worked (including across reboots).
After no more than a moment's thought, I plugged the other two with power ON and lo-and-behold had three working boxes...
It was approx. the 54th flight of the carrier aircraft and the 14th flight of the spacecraft.
'Third flight' refers to the third time they fired the rocket on the spacecraft.
Source: The "Test Updates" page on the scaled composites web site (link in article).
1) Read an RFID tag, get an EPC.
2) EPC is 96 bits: Header, company, product, serial #
4) Extract "company" bits (exact length set by header flags). Make a lookup call to root ONS server. It will return IP address of "company"'s ONS server.
5) Extract "product" and "serial", call company's server for information on that instance of that product
Note that steps 4-6 are likely to be buried off in a single API call that accepts the whole EPC as an argument... and that (local) caching likely means that step 4 is often skipped. Caching can also help step 5, mostly when were only interested in product and not serial... but I digress from the point.
Further note that Verisign is only involved at "Company bits -> IP address of company's ONS" in step 4. No other involvment from Versign... so lots of scenarios suggsted above are just BS. Verisign either answers the query; or not.
If they attempt to "squat" like they did on unused domains, they can only do so on unused COMPANY codes (more like TLDs than unused domains)... and why would a real world RFID tag ever have an unused company code?
As for perverting any deeper information about that product or that instance... they are not involved in those calls... no can do.
Uh, No, not ASN like at all.
RFID tags respond with EPC codes. Once you read the EPC, you take it to the ONS (Object Naming System). The EPC has a header (fixed length), Manufacturer Code (fixed length), product code (fixed), and a serial number.
The ONS works by taking the Manufacuring Code ONLY and going to a "root" ONS server. This points at that manufacturer's ONS... which is then queried to see what the product code means, is that serial number valid and if so for what object, etc.
Verisign is running the ROOT only... no walking trees, no ASN vulnerabilities.
I've had a regular Tivo and a DirecTivo for several years. Both have enhanced hard drives.
We never watch TV live. Even sporting events are started a few minutes to an hour into the event to create enough padding to skip commercials.
However...
We do, and do frequently, back up and watch a commercial in which we are actually interested.
At least in my household, a given commercial stands more chance of being seen on the Tivo than it did back in the bad old days when we just muted the volume and went to the bathroom/kitchen...
Other Tivo owners that I talk to seem to also do this (re-watch commercials) at least some. Do the Tivo stats capture this? Can broadcasters charger MORE for commercials that get re-viewed on Tivo at any significant percentage?
Once again, lots of slashdot comments by people who didn't read the source link...
All speculation about EMF puleses, legality of blocking transmission by flooding a given frequency, etc. : That ain't how RSA's tag works.
When an RFID reader senses multiple tags, it "walks" a binary tree to find each tag in range. RSA's proposed 'blocker' tag responds to every branch of the tree... to the reader it appears that all tags are present, thus making it impossible to determine which tags are in reality present.
The blocker tag obeys or violates laws or regulations exactly the same as a 'regular' tag... because it's doing the exact same thing, except it answers for every branch point.
No EMF, no 'interference', no 'scrambling', nothing bad, just verbose!
Slashdot Mirror
It is damn sure worth it for my wife, who is adopted. We've tried the family research - dead end. No family history for disease. Genetic profile to get that same info would be great. Nice to see the price falling.
I need to do research to see if this individual service is the best price/performance out there. Within that "best deal" framework, the general idea is desperately needed and very worthwhile.
Heck, I've spent $1000 on a hobby in a day. To save my wife's life, or even just know the risks, it's cheap at twice the price.
"Velocity of the bullet?", he says, "A bit hard to define. Do you mean in relation to my chest or the surface of the earth or the surrounding solar wind? Yes, I'm being pedantic, but one has to subtract out the rotational velocity of the earth, which depends on lon..."
Suddenly, he falls over dead. By any practical definition.
There are definitions that just make sense and do not need to be nit-picked. The visible diameter of the sun and the visible diameter of Holmes comet's coma is one such definition. Point out another comet in the last 100 (or 1000?) years or so that fits this definition.
+5 Informative? Sheesh... Where are the Robot Chicken A--hole Police when you really need them?
The article mentioned patenting the concept. I remember driving over a "rumble strip" designed to warn of an approaching tollboth back in about 1971. My immediate thought was "gee, change the spacing and you could get music". It's obvious.
Does teh Japanese patent system recognize "obviousness"? Of course, the US patent system claims to recognize obviousness, but obviously does not.
The medical mechanics of point (3) are wrong.
There are some forms of damage that accumulate, and point (3) does hold for "1 cigarette" vs "N cigarettes" for these forms of damage.
But...
There are other forms, most notably cancer, that don't work that way. Any given cigarette either does or does not trigger the replicator cascade that is cancer. "Odds" and "infection rates" and similar apply to groups. As an individual, a given single cigarette either gives you cancer, or it doesn't. It's like playing "Russian Roulette" with a million cylinder gun.
To bad none of your $1 "checkers" caught that...
I Tivo skimmed Rather's report. Junk.
I was very disappointed that they ommitted other composite aircraft. The vast majority of homebuilts are now composite. This transition started in the 1970s. Not the exact same tech, as airliners are oven cured carbon fiber and homebuilts are room-temp cured glass... but still, lots of airframe experience and lots of flight hours.
Also check out the Beech Starship. This is a turboprop and used oven cured carbon extensivly. The aircraft was an economic failure; one primary reason was the FAA didn't believe in composites and forced lots of compromises into the airframe, such as aluminum spars and lightning strike channels.
That, and the scare mongering about compsosite rudders breaking... many more aluminum parts have departed aircraft than the one or two incidents they could dig up on composites. If you've ridden on nearly any airliner built in the last 10 years, you've ridden with composite control surfaces.
Given that OS2 and Windows NT were the same product before the IBM/Microsoft "divorce", given that after the divorce, Microsoft shipped NT 3.5.1 with a Bootloader that still said "OS2" (hexdump the boot sector on an NT 3.5.1 drive, if you still have a copy - You'll see it). Given that OS2 evolved directly into Win NT and therefore has a heritage that reaches all the way into Longhorn... He was right!
The fact that a reporter missed this bit of history is typical. No sense of history or heritage.
Don't confuse the brand, owned by IBM, with the code, originated with Microsoft, that became Windows server.
So, the attack is a snippet of Javascript that uses Linksys/D-Link, and so forth's default passwords. Let's use those defaults for "good" instead of "evil". How about a site that documents the problem and has a "Click here to fix the problem" link that tries those exact same defaults, but CHANGES THE PASSWORD (with the user's help) rather than changing the DNS?
How about the big boys of Internet 2.0 each create a page (or series of pages) that non-nerds can visit that fix these kinds of things? Google's "Defend yourself" page sounds pretty good to me.
I am a 30 year+ subscriber to Scientific American. It has slipped a lot in the last decade or so... still, this article is a new low.
The article is intensly MS biased. It is not a "survey" of an industry or segment, it makes almost no testable predictions (just vague directional guesses), nor is it a technical "deep dive" into any focus area. Just pure crap. It did clearly contain "commercials" for MS's POV on development environments; that came through loud and clear!
Back to the magazing: At one point I thought I would buy a lifetime subscription to SciAm (if they offered it). This article may be the straw that breaks the camel's back and causes me to cancel my subscription.
P.S. I have never been much of a MS (or Bill) hater. I don't believe I'm being biased... the article was just so bad in so many ways.
Will Oracle continue to support customers that are using Oracle products on Red Hat RHEL, Novell SLES, and Asianux?,
Yes. Oracle is fully committed to all of its customers that have deployed or will deploy Oracle products on other Linux distributions that are currently supported, including Red Hat, Novell and Asianux. We will continue to certify and offer support for Oracle products running on these Linux distributions. For operating system issues, users will need to work with their vendor.
We need T-Shirts that say "Kip Hawley is an idiot" and we need lots of folks to wear them while flying!
More and more pixel resolution - fine!
There were experiments done from the 50s forward that showed massively increased frame rates enhance the "immersive" quality of an image much more than resolution. Douglass Trumbull's work with "Showscan" (70mm film at 60 frames per second) proved people see a "window into reality" instead of "just a film" as the frame rate approaches, and passes, 60 frames. Later work showed that even higher frame rates are even more immersive.
Early DLP home theatre projectors discovered that having the color wheel synced to the frame rate produced "rainbow" effects that made many people nauseous. Projectors now turn the wheel at 4, 5 or more times the frame rate of the underlying video.
60hz was selected for early TV to avoid interference from power line hum creeping into the analog electronics. Despite the "install base" of 24fps and 60i or 60p, is it time to move on? When will so called "High Def" increase frame rates?
This ruling basically stated that an existing law wherein the city can keep snail-mail addresses confidential does not cover e-mail addresses. Is this not the exact opposite of what we on ./ typically preach? We typically advocate that the courts and legislature not make a big deal about cyberspace issues that are covered by existing laws; rather, we prefer they apply existing law? Right?
In this case, the court said e-mail addresses were not covered by the confidentiality rules. So, now, with this precedent; what a can of worms.
Can you say "Digital Camera"? I knew you could!
I can see how placing a tag on a body can keep the body from being counted twice - I don't see the advantage to tagging automobiles, though. If you're gonna have to get within three feet of the vehicle to read the RFID tag it seems to me you oughtta just record the VIN instead ;-)
Wrong!
I pass through a 20 foot wide 20 foot high gate while traveling at 60-70 MPH and the Toll Authority gets a reliable read on the "Tolltag" in my car. This device is 2x3x1/8", weighs a couple of ounces, and, if it has a battery in it, that battery has lasted 5 years so far.
They are reading many thousands of cars an hour. Yes, they use cameras reading the lic plate as a backup - but I as a driver can tell a good read at some of the toll barriers via a green/red light system, and the green/good read rate is very very high.
Such tags could be easily coupled to a barrier gate at a border crossing to ensure 100% read rate - failed reads leave the barrier down.
I don't know diddly about the details of the tech; I just know it works and is nowhere near the size you quote above. Google "North Texas Toll Authority Tolltag" and go from there.
Having lived in the car-theft capitol of the world, El Paso Texas, I'd like to see a VOLUNTARY program for RFID "the other way around" at border checkpoints. May I volunteer to have an RFID tag on my car; that tag is scanned at any/all Bridges to Mexico; my car is NOT ALLOWED across the border. Should I ever want to go, I will either use mass transit, or a pre-arranged (web based) way to temporarily authorize my tag. Absolutely voluntary; all the gov has to do is install the readers and run a simple web site; this can all be contracted out...
Good generic GPS info plus specific tips for mapping in Africa to be found here: http://www.gpswaypoints.co.za/
Having the corporate directory (in a separate category from my personal contacts) is the main reason I have a Palm phone instead of some other phone.
It's also the reason I've shunned WinCE and PocketPC variants for years. My PalmVx could handle many many more contacts than the much vaunted CE variants of that era... and Palm has stayed ahead in storage efficiency. Until now.
Anyone have a link to information regarding the frequency(s) that are used vs. "Notched" out? There's a lot more than just HAM to be worried about...
The &%^$#$^ serial card would not work! Tried three different serial cards in three different Cubix boxes... no joy. After many, many tries, I finally got tired enough that I committed the error I'd been trying to avoid all night: I plugged the serial board in to a Cubix section that still had the power ON!! Instead of frying, the darn thing instantly worked (including across reboots).
After no more than a moment's thought, I plugged the other two with power ON and lo-and-behold had three working boxes...
Jan
Source: The "Test Updates" page on the scaled composites web site (link in article).
Jan
2) EPC is 96 bits: Header, company, product, serial #
4) Extract "company" bits (exact length set by header flags). Make a lookup call to root ONS server. It will return IP address of "company"'s ONS server.
5) Extract "product" and "serial", call company's server for information on that instance of that product
Note that steps 4-6 are likely to be buried off in a single API call that accepts the whole EPC as an argument... and that (local) caching likely means that step 4 is often skipped. Caching can also help step 5, mostly when were only interested in product and not serial... but I digress from the point.
Further note that Verisign is only involved at "Company bits -> IP address of company's ONS" in step 4. No other involvment from Versign... so lots of scenarios suggsted above are just BS. Verisign either answers the query; or not.
If they attempt to "squat" like they did on unused domains, they can only do so on unused COMPANY codes (more like TLDs than unused domains)... and why would a real world RFID tag ever have an unused company code?
As for perverting any deeper information about that product or that instance... they are not involved in those calls... no can do.
Jan
Uh, No, not ASN like at all. RFID tags respond with EPC codes. Once you read the EPC, you take it to the ONS (Object Naming System). The EPC has a header (fixed length), Manufacturer Code (fixed length), product code (fixed), and a serial number. The ONS works by taking the Manufacuring Code ONLY and going to a "root" ONS server. This points at that manufacturer's ONS... which is then queried to see what the product code means, is that serial number valid and if so for what object, etc. Verisign is running the ROOT only... no walking trees, no ASN vulnerabilities.
We never watch TV live. Even sporting events are started a few minutes to an hour into the event to create enough padding to skip commercials.
However...
We do, and do frequently, back up and watch a commercial in which we are actually interested.
At least in my household, a given commercial stands more chance of being seen on the Tivo than it did back in the bad old days when we just muted the volume and went to the bathroom/kitchen... Other Tivo owners that I talk to seem to also do this (re-watch commercials) at least some. Do the Tivo stats capture this? Can broadcasters charger MORE for commercials that get re-viewed on Tivo at any significant percentage?
All speculation about EMF puleses, legality of blocking transmission by flooding a given frequency, etc. : That ain't how RSA's tag works.
When an RFID reader senses multiple tags, it "walks" a binary tree to find each tag in range. RSA's proposed 'blocker' tag responds to every branch of the tree... to the reader it appears that all tags are present, thus making it impossible to determine which tags are in reality present. The blocker tag obeys or violates laws or regulations exactly the same as a 'regular' tag... because it's doing the exact same thing, except it answers for every branch point. No EMF, no 'interference', no 'scrambling', nothing bad, just verbose!