It's interesting seeng how bright the Pakistan/India border is, and in comparison the Afghanistan/Pakistan border is undeveloped.
Anyone who knows more--Why is the north-west region of India darker than the rest? Farmland?
Northwest India (the state of Rajasthan) is mostly desert and therefore dark. Also, that bright line you see just beyond the desert is NOT the India-Pakistan border. It is the Indus river, which lies entirely in Pakistan and on whose banks lie several large towns and cities. While it it true that the entire India-Pakistan border is fully illuminated and mostly electrified (good fences make good neighbors), I doubt you can see it from space. You *can* see it from an aircraft though as it flies over the border. Looks pretty cool too.
a video of me performing the signature as well as paper samples
I remember watching some signature-detection algorithm on BBC (program was QED actually) a while back which involved a fine grid on which you sign with a touch-pen. The hardware was pretty standard, like the pad which the UPS delivery guy carries around. The algorithm recorded which pixel was toggled (pressed) at what time; it compared this time-delay information to a known good signature time sequence, adjusting for spatial and temporal offsets. And then of course it also did a standard pattern-match between the final signatures. The advantage was that it could easily detect your normal signature from a slowly forged one, even if the end results looked identical. As I recall, it did not give *any* false positives at all under the test runs, but it did reject your own signature a little too often for it to be used widely.
I must add that even when the product seems promising when it comes to usability, it seems to ruin itself with a completely deranged description, like the Infinity Climber. The product is basically a twisted circular loop (it has two twists hence it's not a Mobius strip). I concede that it's an inspired product because it presents a wide range of angles for kids to climb and it's very compact for the range of angles it provides. BUT I vehemently disagree with phrases like "presents an appearance of organic movement" and "constantly flowing shape".
This description looks like it was written by someone with zero knowledge of even basic science and no sense of what words like "organic" mean. In addition he/she must be reminded that the shape isn't flowing anywhere, it's just a rigid stationary plastic sculpture.
As an aside, I've always wondered what would happen if my local grocery store started selling bottled benzene in the "Organic" division. Hey, benzene has at least as much claim to the word "organic" as does spinach!
Scientists are wonderful people who advance our knowledge from a 50,000 foot level, and do so for little pay. These guys dream math calculations that make my mind gloss over just thinking about it.
Reminds me of a quote:
"Science looks at the world that never was.
Engineering creates the world that has never been."
Exchange rate is about 45 rupees per dollar. $1.35 is Rs 60.75, which is much too expensive. Usual rates in urban India vary from Rs 15 to Rs 30 per hour, which is 33 to 66 cents per minute. I'm excluding the special deals that some cafes offer (loyalty programs and stuff).
As the grandparent said, things might be different in rural India. I hear that there are still some villages where people must dial long-distance to connect, so maybe that skews things a bit.
That "something" would be the "tachyon field generator". And the scriptwriters were hard at work fiddling with the polarity of the technobabble modulator.
Brad Lucier at Purdue founded an online publishing group called Trillia, which does something similar. He has submitted a related story on Slashdot before.
Purdue has similar rules. Most tunnels (except the ones marked Accessible Tunnels)are banned because of safety reasons - apparently several have live bus bars running down the ceiling which is apparently quite low. And some really old (~80 years) steam tunnels have asbestos insulation with signs next to them saying "Danger! Asbestos!" or something similar.
But the bigger mystery at Purdue is how to get to the campus particle accelerator beneath the Engineering Mall. Everybody knows it's accessible from the MSEE building, but nobody knows exactly which entrance to take, unless they go with someone who already knows where it is situated (like a faculty member).
There is also a nuclear reactor in the basement of the EE building's annexe, of which there used to be occasional tours. I don't know if they still have those tours.
author's point seems to be that optimization and performance are not all that important, and that you can achieve better results with how you do things and not what you use
I have to disagree with the author too, but on a different point. What the author has done is to write some image-processing code, manually profile it (recognizing that several pixels get the value FF00FF looks like profiling to me) and then modified the algorithm (made those pixels transparent) to make it faster.
I would say that any such changes to the algorithm after knowing the nature of the data is bound to make it faster than blind compiler-level or language-level optimization that's oblivious to data.
Ahh - that's easy. You should have routed the ion core voltages through a phase discriminator; would have cleared that right up.
No no and no. Before even considering that step, you should try to reverse the polarity of the tachyon pulse generator.
Scotty: Capn, she cannae take it much longer!
Kirk: Reverse the polarity of the tachyon pulse generator!
Spock: Captain, may I suggest it might be more logical to invert the phase of the technobabble modulator?
I wonder how many man-years of outsourcing it will take to make back that 100 mil AT&T lost?
I see your point, but I'd like to remind you that $100M is not as much as you think it is. Another proponent of outsourcing - Carly Fiorina of HP - nearly got a $115M bonus deal (to have been shared with Michael Cappelas of Compaq) for the HP-Compaq merger.
My point is that if some companies are prepared to throw money like this at their CEOs, they probably don't really care about losing some customers.
Then again, I could be wrong. In this particular case, AT&T Wireless lost customer goodwill more than money.
"I realize that my views are probably in the minority here, but techno-fiction appeals to more than just liberal readers, and I wish Stephenson would realize that."
Funny. I'd have thought Stephenson would have annoyed more liberals than conservatives with this passage from Chapter 65:
To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.
One would think he is pushing his own brand of Church philosophy here. Or is he merely putting himself in the shoes of Randy Waterhouse?
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...'
True story:
A professor narrates the Archimedes-bathtub incident to a class of freshman engineers. Concludes with "Eureka! Eureka!" and after a pause, asks his class if anyone knows what it means.
Guy in the back row yells out "I'm naked! I'm naked!".
I've heard MBA students spouting something about how all the "work" will be outsourced and people in the US will just "manage" everything. I fail to see how this is a viable model for a country.
Very good point. Lee Iacocca mentions this sentiment in his autobiography. He was a mechanical engineering graduate (from Lehigh IIRC) and after his first day on the job (designing a clutch spring for Ford) he decided he didn't like dealing with objects. Apparently it took him that long to realize that an engineer spends more time with the problem than in talking with people. He says something to the effect "Take care of the people who take care of things", which is a *wonderful* argument to perpetuate pure (ie clueless, PHB-style) management while at the same time not contributing anything oneself.
To be fair, I don't think it is desirable to have the same persons dealing with both the core work and the administrative stuff. A management layer is probably necessary in society. Think of it like a small dedicated fraction of a Beowulf cluster that deals only with evaluating results and not crunching numbers. The trouble is of course having too many managers without enough techies or engineers. The Dot Bomb was partly caused by this - too many VCs, not enough good ideas to go around.
I applied this method to the lastest 100 spam mail and got the following results:
44.3% of the spammers want to get me rich, too. 32.2% want to enlarge my penis
Unbelievable! I never knew you could get 0.1% precision by analyzing a mere 100 discrete samples of email. Or does the 33rd spammer want to enlarge only 20% of your penis? Or is he only 20% sure that he wants to enlarge your entire penis?
Shouldn't the government do something about spam: It's a national security issue. OTOH, if the NSA has a good spam filter they use before reading my mail, i'd be happy if they could share the technology with the rest of the world.
Consider this steganographic method:
1. Take a brief secret message you want to send (less than about 12 characters).
2. Take a standard spam email.
3. Set i to 0.
4. Search for the next occurrence of (the ith character of the secret message) in the spam email.
5. Replace that letter in the spam email with something else, such that the new word which is formed is NOT in the dictionary.
6. Increment i and repeat for the whole secret message.
7. Send the new spam email (with the grotesque misspellings) to intended recipient.
To decrypt:
1. Search the spam email for the first misspelled word and suggest replacements from the dictionary (knowing that exactly one letter was misspelled). Compare with the misspelled word and get all possible candidate letters for that position.
2. Repeat for all such misspelled words.
3. You will now have a (hopefully small) number of possible letters for each position. Do an exhaustive permutation of them all (hopefully it will not be larger than about 10^7) and search for messages with sequences of letters which DO exist in the dictionary.
4. You will now have a small number of candidate decrypted messages. Decide for yourself (context-based) what the intended message was.
I personally know someone who implemented this exact scheme and tried it with a few individual words (he wanted to send one word of secret message per spam email to keep the combinatorial explosion within bounds). Unfortunately most his fake spam emails were deleted by his spam filters. But it's an intriguing idea nonetheless.
My point is: how would you keep track of all that spam and analyze them for such stunts? God knows we have enough spam with intentional misspellings to defeat Bayesian filtering already. Just add strong crypto to the plaintext message before embedding it in the fake spam and we now have much harder problems. Is there even a theoretical way to detect (leave alone decrypt) such messages?
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting seeng how bright the Pakistan/India border is, and in comparison the Afghanistan/Pakistan border is undeveloped. Anyone who knows more--Why is the north-west region of India darker than the rest? Farmland?
Northwest India (the state of Rajasthan) is mostly desert and therefore dark. Also, that bright line you see just beyond the desert is NOT the India-Pakistan border. It is the Indus river, which lies entirely in Pakistan and on whose banks lie several large towns and cities. While it it true that the entire India-Pakistan border is fully illuminated and mostly electrified (good fences make good neighbors), I doubt you can see it from space. You *can* see it from an aircraft though as it flies over the border. Looks pretty cool too.
a video of me performing the signature as well as paper samples
I remember watching some signature-detection algorithm on BBC (program was QED actually) a while back which involved a fine grid on which you sign with a touch-pen. The hardware was pretty standard, like the pad which the UPS delivery guy carries around. The algorithm recorded which pixel was toggled (pressed) at what time; it compared this time-delay information to a known good signature time sequence, adjusting for spatial and temporal offsets. And then of course it also did a standard pattern-match between the final signatures. The advantage was that it could easily detect your normal signature from a slowly forged one, even if the end results looked identical. As I recall, it did not give *any* false positives at all under the test runs, but it did reject your own signature a little too often for it to be used widely.
To quote Bruce Perens, if security really matters, you should base it on three things
Did you perhaps mean Bruce Schneier? He would be more relevant to security than Bruce Perens is.
I must add that even when the product seems promising when it comes to usability, it seems to ruin itself with a completely deranged description, like the Infinity Climber. The product is basically a twisted circular loop (it has two twists hence it's not a Mobius strip). I concede that it's an inspired product because it presents a wide range of angles for kids to climb and it's very compact for the range of angles it provides. BUT I vehemently disagree with phrases like "presents an appearance of organic movement" and "constantly flowing shape".
This description looks like it was written by someone with zero knowledge of even basic science and no sense of what words like "organic" mean. In addition he/she must be reminded that the shape isn't flowing anywhere, it's just a rigid stationary plastic sculpture.
As an aside, I've always wondered what would happen if my local grocery store started selling bottled benzene in the "Organic" division. Hey, benzene has at least as much claim to the word "organic" as does spinach!
Flush your browser cache and try again.
Scientists are wonderful people who advance our knowledge from a 50,000 foot level, and do so for little pay. These guys dream math calculations that make my mind gloss over just thinking about it.
Reminds me of a quote:
"Science looks at the world that never was.
Engineering creates the world that has never been."
Exchange rate is about 45 rupees per dollar. $1.35 is Rs 60.75, which is much too expensive. Usual rates in urban India vary from Rs 15 to Rs 30 per hour, which is 33 to 66 cents per minute. I'm excluding the special deals that some cafes offer (loyalty programs and stuff).
As the grandparent said, things might be different in rural India. I hear that there are still some villages where people must dial long-distance to connect, so maybe that skews things a bit.
by reversing the polarity of something!"
That "something" would be the "tachyon field generator". And the scriptwriters were hard at work fiddling with the polarity of the technobabble modulator.
Brad Lucier at Purdue founded an online publishing group called Trillia, which does something similar.
He has submitted a related story on Slashdot before.
Not if you see this. But then again, this.
Caltech...underground tunnel system
Purdue has similar rules. Most tunnels (except the ones marked Accessible Tunnels)are banned because of safety reasons - apparently several have live bus bars running down the ceiling which is apparently quite low. And some really old (~80 years) steam tunnels have asbestos insulation with signs next to them saying "Danger! Asbestos!" or something similar.
But the bigger mystery at Purdue is how to get to the campus particle accelerator beneath the Engineering Mall. Everybody knows it's accessible from the MSEE building, but nobody knows exactly which entrance to take, unless they go with someone who already knows where it is situated (like a faculty member).
There is also a nuclear reactor in the basement of the EE building's annexe, of which there used to be occasional tours. I don't know if they still have those tours.
author's point seems to be that optimization and performance are not all that important, and that you can achieve better results with how you do things and not what you use
I have to disagree with the author too, but on a different point. What the author has done is to write some image-processing code, manually profile it (recognizing that several pixels get the value FF00FF looks like profiling to me) and then modified the algorithm (made those pixels transparent) to make it faster.
I would say that any such changes to the algorithm after knowing the nature of the data is bound to make it faster than blind compiler-level or language-level optimization that's oblivious to data.
Moderators! The link in the parent goes to a pic of an outhouse. Who the hell (two people actually) modded parent Informative?
I remember there was similar research at Purdue University some months back. Here's the link and here's a pic.
Ahh - that's easy. You should have routed the ion core voltages through a phase discriminator; would have cleared that right up.
No no and no. Before even considering that step, you should try to reverse the polarity of the tachyon pulse generator.
Scotty: Capn, she cannae take it much longer!
Kirk: Reverse the polarity of the tachyon pulse generator!
Spock: Captain, may I suggest it might be more logical to invert the phase of the technobabble modulator?
Geeves has been very good at coordinating all the work,
Did you perchance mean Jeeves, by Wodehouse?
"we will all have a particle accelerator hooked up to eth0?"
1. cat </dev/random >/dev/particleaccelerator
2. ???*
3. Profit!
* Run away quickly.
yoda?
Is that you master?
L. Skywalker
No, he's not Yoda. He's just getting used to the HP RPN calculator.
I wonder how many man-years of outsourcing it will take to make back that 100 mil AT&T lost?
I see your point, but I'd like to remind you that $100M is not as much as you think it is. Another proponent of outsourcing - Carly Fiorina of HP - nearly got a $115M bonus deal (to have been shared with Michael Cappelas of Compaq) for the HP-Compaq merger.
My point is that if some companies are prepared to throw money like this at their CEOs, they probably don't really care about losing some customers.
Then again, I could be wrong. In this particular case, AT&T Wireless lost customer goodwill more than money.
"I realize that my views are probably in the minority here, but techno-fiction appeals to more than just liberal readers, and I wish Stephenson would realize that."
Funny. I'd have thought Stephenson would have annoyed more liberals than conservatives with this passage from Chapter 65:
To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.
One would think he is pushing his own brand of Church philosophy here. Or is he merely putting himself in the shoes of Randy Waterhouse?
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...'
True story:
A professor narrates the Archimedes-bathtub incident to a class of freshman engineers. Concludes with "Eureka! Eureka!" and after a pause, asks his class if anyone knows what it means.
Guy in the back row yells out "I'm naked! I'm naked!".
I've heard MBA students spouting something about how all the "work" will be outsourced and people in the US will just "manage" everything. I fail to see how this is a viable model for a country.
Very good point. Lee Iacocca mentions this sentiment in his autobiography. He was a mechanical engineering graduate (from Lehigh IIRC) and after his first day on the job (designing a clutch spring for Ford) he decided he didn't like dealing with objects. Apparently it took him that long to realize that an engineer spends more time with the problem than in talking with people. He says something to the effect "Take care of the people who take care of things", which is a *wonderful* argument to perpetuate pure (ie clueless, PHB-style) management while at the same time not contributing anything oneself.
To be fair, I don't think it is desirable to have the same persons dealing with both the core work and the administrative stuff. A management layer is probably necessary in society. Think of it like a small dedicated fraction of a Beowulf cluster that deals only with evaluating results and not crunching numbers. The trouble is of course having too many managers without enough techies or engineers. The Dot Bomb was partly caused by this - too many VCs, not enough good ideas to go around.
Some of my friends cling to the notion that the two greatest things in this world are duct tape and Gold Bond.
This of course is sheer nonsense. Any connoisseur would know that the two greatest things in the world are duct tape and WD-40.
But sadly there are still some things that they cannot do.
I applied this method to the lastest 100 spam mail and got the following results:
44.3% of the spammers want to get me rich, too.
32.2% want to enlarge my penis
Unbelievable! I never knew you could get 0.1% precision by analyzing a mere 100 discrete samples of email. Or does the 33rd spammer want to enlarge only 20% of your penis? Or is he only 20% sure that he wants to enlarge your entire penis?
Shouldn't the government do something about spam: It's a national security issue. OTOH, if the NSA has a good spam filter they use before reading my mail, i'd be happy if they could share the technology with the rest of the world.
Consider this steganographic method:
1. Take a brief secret message you want to send (less than about 12 characters).
2. Take a standard spam email.
3. Set i to 0.
4. Search for the next occurrence of (the ith character of the secret message) in the spam email.
5. Replace that letter in the spam email with something else, such that the new word which is formed is NOT in the dictionary.
6. Increment i and repeat for the whole secret message.
7. Send the new spam email (with the grotesque misspellings) to intended recipient.
To decrypt:
1. Search the spam email for the first misspelled word and suggest replacements from the dictionary (knowing that exactly one letter was misspelled). Compare with the misspelled word and get all possible candidate letters for that position.
2. Repeat for all such misspelled words.
3. You will now have a (hopefully small) number of possible letters for each position. Do an exhaustive permutation of them all (hopefully it will not be larger than about 10^7) and search for messages with sequences of letters which DO exist in the dictionary.
4. You will now have a small number of candidate decrypted messages. Decide for yourself (context-based) what the intended message was.
I personally know someone who implemented this exact scheme and tried it with a few individual words (he wanted to send one word of secret message per spam email to keep the combinatorial explosion within bounds). Unfortunately most his fake spam emails were deleted by his spam filters. But it's an intriguing idea nonetheless.
My point is: how would you keep track of all that spam and analyze them for such stunts? God knows we have enough spam with intentional misspellings to defeat Bayesian filtering already. Just add strong crypto to the plaintext message before embedding it in the fake spam and we now have much harder problems. Is there even a theoretical way to detect (leave alone decrypt) such messages?