Ah, nitpicking are we? It was the comment on oxygen that set me off...so to speak. You're right though, "explosion" is a pretty loose word. So much so that a certain textbook defines an "explosive" as a material...which is capable of producing an explosion by its own energy. It seems unnecessary to define an explosion, for everyone knows what it is...
Mind you, the book goes on to describe the various characteristics of many, many explosives in satisfying detail.
Throwing ammonium nitrate into a Bunsen burner? That's something I actually never did. If you have the vents all the way open, the flame probably doesn't need more oxidizer, though.
Adolescent and irresponsible. 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate. What were they thinking?
Surely you're joking...right? I mean, isn't the attractiveness of this proposition inherently obvious? Or have I just made one too many self-revelatory postings?
I think you fail to grok the essence of Mythbusters: this is about guys having an immense amount of fun by blowing things up. The only thing they want to learn is how to make bigger booms. That's all there's really to it; that's the whole point. They rationalize this with a bunch of clever "scientific" patter—but really this is about those guys having fun (and me watching them and enjoying every minute of it). It is my fondest wish that I could get a job on this show. I have some myths about how it's possible to make a fission bomb with off-the-shelf parts that I want to disprove...
Could still be ammonium nitrate. Just think, what happens if you grab a bottle of medical-grade oxygen and put the open outlet near an open flame?
I don't follow you. I suppose that if you hose something that is already burning with oxygen, the burn rate will increase. It certainly won't explode...just flare. And when the fuel is consumed, the fire will go out, no matter how hard you blow oxygen onto the ashes. To make ammonium nitrate into an explosive, you have to add something else...usually fuel oil. That's why the explosive is called "ANFO". And it can't just be "ignited", or it will burn, but not explode. An initiator (primary explosive) is required to trigger an actual explosion.
There, now you know things that will get your brain impounded by the Department of Homeland Security.
When someone has been whooshed, make really sure you haven't missed the joke yourself before stating that there isn't one.
Actually, you seem to be one of those rare but delightful individuals who has an over-reactive sense of humor. It's not absolutely clear, I grant you, but I think it most probable that the poster believed exactly what he said: that Potassium is slightly less reactive than Sodium, but that the teacher had used way too much K because it's only slightly less reactive.
Once more, MS wants to sell an operating system on the merits of its GUI. Once more, they have completely missed the point. They have failed to address the number one issue that faces all classes of PC users: the lamentable lack of security that is characteristic of all Microsoft operating systems. Please note that this is not an "MS is trash Unix is cool" rant; I think the only reason there aren't more hijacked Unix boxes is that they're a small target, and the people who own them catch on too fast.
I'm particularly hot on this topic because I just blew my last three weekends salvaging two Windows XP boxes that were riddled by multiple trojans, virii, and just plain annoying trash. (They belong to two family members who shall remain unnamed—but I'm married to one of them, and cutting off her internet access could be deleterious to the climate around the ol' homestead.)
Now, I understand that no one can make an OS completely secure, except perhaps by removing all networking features. However, it should not be so easy to infect a PC, and it most certainly should be possible to recover from a malware infection without going through the pain I experienced.
Yes, I had backups—full image backups of the C drives (I use Acronis, and it's very good at what it does). The question was how far back I had to go to find a clean image. And how can I be sure it's clean, when the virus scans themselves couldn't detect all the contamination? For example, one machine was pronounced "clean"—but every time I rebooted it, several Internet Explorer processes not associated with any GUI windows would spawn and start sending packets to all sorts of interesting places. (I think I figured that one out—the malefactor was hiding in the OS System Restore file.)
What do I think MS could do about this? Well, for one thing they could provide an actually useful system recovery capability. I do not consider the "Fix your Windows installation (y/n)? that comes with the installation disk remotely useful. A truly useful recovery capability would reside on bootable media provided along with the OS that does things like:
Run an integrity check on every OS process image on the hard drive to verify that it's not contaminated. (Yes, the recovery system would have to determine what the patch level of the machine is, but given that information, it should be possible to run checksum verification of every system file. The same could be done for every third-party.dll and executable (I'm sure most legitimate vendors would give MS the requisite information to keep in their database.)
Check all the holes, like System Restore, that malware can hide in, and kill it.
Let me run an antivirus scan (either MS's or an AV program of my choice, and support that AV program by helping it eradicate all traces of any found malware (like registry entries).
Repair the damage done by the malware by replacing damaged system processes with good ones; repair damage to the disk's boot record
Let me start the on-disk OS in a sandbox, and give me diagnostic tools to determine if anything's misbehaving (like making changes to the registry that aren't kosher).
I'm sure you can think of lots more (and probably better) items to go on this list.
Until MS "hardens" their OS and provides tools that do what I've described, I see no point in buying any further MS operating systems. One is just as bad as the other.
I don't think it's going to happen, though. You see, building a hardened OS would not be in Microsoft's interests. I talked to the guy who takes care of my swimming pool the other day, and mentioned my malware hassles. He furrowed his brow and said that maybe he had had some viruses too; his computer was running really slow and would reboot a lot. I asked him how he fixed the problem. "I bought a new computer" was his answer. When he said that, it hit me—just how many people decide to buy a new computer for precisely th
...The interesting thing about the theorem is that the proof skips all that, and with a very simple setup, demonstrates that if humans can do something (pick which measurement to make) independently of the past, then elementary particles can too, without making any assumptions on what exactly makes humans act the way they do.
Oh, that sounds like fun. Let's start off with, "If humans can engage in trans-species sex, then so can electrons."
...but if we take the reverse case, particles being incapable of free will would seem to imply that we oursleves don't have free will.
No, the "if...then" conditional proposition implies no assertion about its grammatical inverse. For example, consider the conditional "If white's next move is Q x P, then black will checkmate him in three moves". If we assume the conditional to be true, this does not imply that if white does something else, he will not be checkmated in three moves. In other words, the inverse of the conditional ("If white is checkmated in three moves, then his next move is Q x P") is not necessarily true. There might be various moves that will result in the poor putz being checkmated in three moves.
Or is that a gross oversimplification resulting from me not being a whizz at maths?
Actually, the relevant field of deficiency here is logic. Oh, they don't teach that anymore, do they? No big loss—it's very boring.
Last time I reported for Jury Duty they wouldn't even let me bring an iPod into the building, let alone anything with Internet access...I guess it's a state-by-state thing.
You're right, it's definitely worse here in Texas. Last time I was on a jury, they wouldn't let me bring my gun into the courthouse.
Attributing the improvement to the spider bite is very thin.
Well, the title is accurate, in a very loose sense of "accurate". The spider bite set off a chain of events that "healed" the paraplegic. If you take the headline to mean NEW MIRACLE CURE FOR PARALYSIS DISCOVERED...well, the purpose of headlines is not to inform, but to sell papers (and get people to read/. articles, apparently).
See, if the paraplegic hadn't been bitten by a spider, the man wouldn't have been sent to the hospital. If he hadn't been sent to the hospital, the neurologist wouldn't have been able to do the nerve conduction study that showed his nerves had regenerated, which led to the bite victim being given physical therapy. So the spider did him a favor. (I doubt it was intentional.) But you don't find all this out until you read the story below the headline.
Oh I'm not sure that there's nothing to gain from it. Does nobody remember the Morris Worm? If that's all I have to do to get a professorship position at MIT, hey, there's something to gain there!
Oh, you mean they let Robert Morris out of jail? I kind of assumed he'd be out on parole by now...but I didn't know about the teaching post. Ah, I looked it up...Associate Professor at MIT, no less (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Worm). And looks like he never had to do any hard time.
I feel a certain fondness for Morris, because I worked for the same company where he was a summer intern once. Sigh...my brush with fame. You have to give him points for originality: after all, his was the first worm. And it was 100% Unix compatible. Of course, the fact that his dad worked for the NSA as a computer security specialist may have given him something of an advantage...
the JPG exploit is actually an old one (I thought even ms got this exploit in sp2 or something like that) and is really easy. Basically you take a jpg image , open it with a file compression app and then drop your payload in. When the Image is loaded, the payload is executed, effectively infecting systems....
Now, granted there is a little more to it than that, however that is the basics of the jpg exploit and how it works.
I'm sure there must be "a little more to it than that", because what you've said so far doesn't make sense. What does it mean to "open a JPG image with a file compression app"? I open WinZip and put the file in a new archive? Then I add some malicious program to the zip file? I don't see how this would work. If I execute the zip file, WinZip opens up and shows me that the archive file contains a jpg and some mysterious program. Why would I run the program? Why would loading the jpg image run the program? Or do I change the extension of the archive file from zip to jpg? That's not going to work--anything that displays graphics will just say that it's not a jpg.
Maybe you do know what you're talking about, but you haven't explained it very well.
nice writeup of a mashup where the writer shares some random youtube mashup video that you maybe have seen before called the Mother of all Funk Chords.
I don't have to read the article (sorry, "writeup"). I already know: the Death of Western Culture is being announced in willfully bad and ugly grammar. And "mashup" itself should be in the running for "Most Unfortunate Neologism of the Decade".
Um, yes, why not do that? If the sale of knives creates some danger in society, than it should be taxed equal to that danger and the funds should go toward extra police or similar.
Raising taxes can indeed be a way of fighting crime.
Oh really. Do you have any examples or argument for this astonishingly fatuous assertion? To the extent that taxes affect crime, it is that they create an opportunity for it. If you raise taxes on a commodity enough, it becomes profitable to bypass the tax—in other words, a black market springs into existence to satisfy the economic imbalance created by the tax. Of course, outright prohibition works even better at creating crime, because people must necessarily pay the going price for outlawed commodities. And that means profit. Or did you think that people would say, "oh no, coke is too expensive now because it's illegal, so I guess I'll stop using it". (Substitute substance of your choice, if you like.)
I suppose one could argue that the British prohibition of civilian gun ownership has had an effect: instead of "gun crime", they now have hysterics over "knife crime". But I would like to think that the true objective of the British government was to stop violent crime; I would like to think that the commodity to be limited was violence, not firearms per se. If so, they would have to admit the failure of their prohibitive laws. I would be naive if I really believed anything of the sort, of course.
I suppose that when they ban knives, they will have "club crime" and "rock crime". (Sounds like a new sort of music, doesn't it?)
The more I think about this less than astonishing breakthrough, the less sense it makes to me. It seems to me that, as described, the technique is useful only in proving that a piece of paper is identical to itself. Unless you're fascinated by tautologies, this is not exactly exciting; furthermore, none of the uses cited in the article seem plausible.
For example, how could this technique be used to detect counterfeit currency? As everyone who has ever thought of combining a 20 dollar bill and a Xerox machine knows, just copying the bill doesn't produce a convincing fake, because the mint uses special paper to print currency. Is the author of this article suggesting that we scan every bill that's printed, file the scans by serial number, then scan every bill that's spent, and compare the scan against the database? Even comparing only suspect bills seems impractical to me—besides, if the counterfeit is that good, not even the government wants to know.
The pharmaceutical label verification is equally ludicrous. Remember, you'd have to authenticate each particular label against the database to verify it. This is nuts. You don't just rely on the label to authenticate lab-grade products—you rely on procedures that include traces, accountability, and a documented chain of custody. If we're talking aspirin, then the cost would be ludicrously out of proportion to the gain. If we're really worried, say if we're dealing with plutonium or something, then we're not going to rely on a silly label for authentication. How do we know the label isn't real, and the stuff in the container was stolen in transit, and something else substituted?
Could we imagine a case where it would make sense to use this scanning method to verify the authenticity of a document? Say we have a very, very, important document. We want to make sure it doesn't get swapped out for a fake document that looks just like it? Aside from the question of why it would matter, I'd have to ask: which is more vulnerable to malicious tampering—a paper document or a database record?
There might be applications to this technology, but if so, the article isn't telling us.
Quantum foam of "virtual" wavicles, eh? And here I used to think that the concept of aether was silly. Turns out that the aether has been updated a bit with quantum theory...but there's once again stuff that fills the universe, and explains certain otherwise inexplicable phenomena. Not that I have an objection to this, mind you. I just think it's interesting.
I disagree. Electronic voting, properly implemented would have clear and significant advantages over traditional paper or punchcard ballots. Electronic voting could be both faster and more accurate than the older methods.
It should be obvious that electronic results can be tabulated much more quickly than hand counted ballots. If you're talking about punch cards processed by machine readers, then a purely electronic process would still be faster. There's no need to handle any sort of physical media—you just transfer the vote count electronically to a CPU, and add it up.
As far as accuracy in reflecting the true intent of the voters, an electronic process could also be significantly superior. Each voting machine would have an exact digital record of every vote cast. There would be none of the problems associated with analog ballots—like the famous "hanging chads" of Florida, or poorly marked paper ballots that give false results when processed by OCR. A properly designed voting machine would be capable of detecting user error (like voting for opposing candidates for the same office, or not voting for anyone at all), and notify the voter immediately.
So what do I mean by "properly implemented"? Well, pretty much everyone here will agree that closed, proprietary hardware and software are absolutely not a good idea for voting machines. The design and code must be public, so that the public (or the more technically sophisticated members thereof) can examine them for flaws. There must also be public discussion of the procedures used to safeguard the integrity of the machines and their data. Given such openness, there's no reason why a reliable electronic voting system can't be built and used with confidence.
My strongest objection to electronic voting as it's now implemented is that it leaves no audit trail. Once the electronic votes are tabulated, there's no way to check that the votes were, indeed, counted honestly. I think there's a pretty simple solution to this: print out a copy of the voter's ballot, and allow him to review it when he leaves the voting booth. If the voter agrees that the printout is legible and reflects how he actually voted, the paper goes into a box.
But doesn't that obviate the whole point of electronic voting; aren't we ultimately back to counting paper ballots? Not at all! First, the paper exists only as an audit trail. The votes are counted electronically. Only if a candidate demands a recount are the boxes of paper ballots ever opened and counted.
More importantly, though, the paper printouts provide a way to verify that the system is working correctly on a continual basis. To prove that the electronic system is honest, it's not necessary to count every single ballot to see if the electronic and paper totals are equal. If you have a paper trail, then you can do a statistical analysis of only a small sample of the voting results from randomly chosen districts and machines to verify that the vote was honest. This can—and should—be done continually on a random basis to detect any corruption of the process.
It's great to talk about the Japanese market, the cool gadgets, and how much better they are. But guess what? If we can't get/use them here it's irrelevant.
But do we want all those Japanese gadgets? I've wondered for some time where the notion of watching TV on your phone came from...I thought maybe it was Mars. But now I know: Japan.
I went to Tokyo once, and was overwhelmed with the feeling that the place was at once alien and eerily familiar. Then I realized where I'd seen Tokyo before: a lot of the science fiction books I've read have alien societies and cities in them that look and feel just like Tokyo. I figure that when Western science fiction authors visit Japan, they acquire a definitive conception of alieness that is reflected in all their subsequent writing. I can just imagine the thought process: "Hmm. I need some really weird aliens in my story. I've got it...a warrior-society of infallibly deadly—but always smiling—fighters who watch TV on their phones, and use toilets that have more controls than a 747."
If they're going to mark you as leaving 'on bad terms', you may as well move the date up and quit now. It's not like they can do anything additional to screw you. Move on to your next (and presumably better) job and forget about the last one.
What, and lose half of the best times you have at work? —That's the last 2 weeks of the job you're quitting, because you don't really do any work, and the first couple of weeks of a new job, because you're just learning the ropes.
Seriously, in a situation like this, the new job is of paramount importance. You do not want to tell your new employer that you can't start on the date agreed. If you delay, they may just change their mind about hiring you. Perhaps that's what your boss wants. I've had lots of jobs, and I've never given more than 2 weeks notice. It doesn't matter how tight the schedule is, whether you're in the middle of a project, or if they can't replace you. Too bad—they can fire you any time they want, and you can quit any time you want.
But I learned: don't rely on HR. They can be slaves to the people who pay their checks...it is a position that is very close to having a built-in conflict of interest.
Poor naif, you have no idea: HR is staffed by Uranian ice-snakes who animate human cadavers bought from the Chinese penitentiary system at a deep discount. As for "conflict of interest", Humanoid Reptiles never experience such a thing because they have no interest in your welfare, their only interest is in furthering their own positions within the corporations who pay them. That, and increasing their cadaver collection, of course.
Nice. Hey, we have the backup part done, that's already 50% of the problem solved! We can worry about the restore part later, after we start bringing in the big bucks.
This happens more often than you think in the real world. I once lost an internal web site I was running for an HP lab when IT found out that the "restore" part of their backup and restore software didn't work. I made them do a test restore of the server to a spare machine every month after that. Come to think of it, that's probably why they laid me off...
(Yes PDF can display anything, but most advanced drawn graphics have to be rasterized because the language cannot inherently draw them.
That's a puzzling remark. You're saying there are graphics so complex that they can't be represented by a vector algorithm, but can be represented as a bitmap? Forgive me, perhaps you know what you are talking about, but I swear I just caught a whiff of bullshit.
PDF has become what it set out to be, the de facto truly portable document format.
Portable document format for those who are obsessed with print , you mean. HTML is more portable, and allows you to re-size and re-flow text to suit your preferences, eyesight, and screen size. The only advantage PDF offers is the ability to control how printed output looks. And of course it is the document author who exercises this control.
Nothing used to annoy me more than web sites that consist of nothing but PDF. Now there is something even more annoying: web sites that are nothing but one big Flash. And of course, Flash is owned by...Adobe. Coincidence? I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, nitpicking are we? It was the comment on oxygen that set me off...so to speak. You're right though, "explosion" is a pretty loose word. So much so that a certain textbook defines an "explosive" as a material...which is capable of producing an explosion by its own energy. It seems unnecessary to define an explosion, for everyone knows what it is...
Mind you, the book goes on to describe the various characteristics of many, many explosives in satisfying detail.
Throwing ammonium nitrate into a Bunsen burner? That's something I actually never did. If you have the vents all the way open, the flame probably doesn't need more oxidizer, though.
The Myth Busters truly are gods among geeks.
Adolescent and irresponsible. 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate. What were they thinking?
Surely you're joking...right? I mean, isn't the attractiveness of this proposition inherently obvious? Or have I just made one too many self-revelatory postings?
I think you fail to grok the essence of Mythbusters: this is about guys having an immense amount of fun by blowing things up. The only thing they want to learn is how to make bigger booms. That's all there's really to it; that's the whole point. They rationalize this with a bunch of clever "scientific" patter—but really this is about those guys having fun (and me watching them and enjoying every minute of it). It is my fondest wish that I could get a job on this show. I have some myths about how it's possible to make a fission bomb with off-the-shelf parts that I want to disprove...
Could still be ammonium nitrate. Just think, what happens if you grab a bottle of medical-grade oxygen and put the open outlet near an open flame?
I don't follow you. I suppose that if you hose something that is already burning with oxygen, the burn rate will increase. It certainly won't explode...just flare. And when the fuel is consumed, the fire will go out, no matter how hard you blow oxygen onto the ashes. To make ammonium nitrate into an explosive, you have to add something else...usually fuel oil. That's why the explosive is called "ANFO". And it can't just be "ignited", or it will burn, but not explode. An initiator (primary explosive) is required to trigger an actual explosion.
There, now you know things that will get your brain impounded by the Department of Homeland Security.
When someone has been whooshed, make really sure you haven't missed the joke yourself before stating that there isn't one.
Actually, you seem to be one of those rare but delightful individuals who has an over-reactive sense of humor. It's not absolutely clear, I grant you, but I think it most probable that the poster believed exactly what he said: that Potassium is slightly less reactive than Sodium, but that the teacher had used way too much K because it's only slightly less reactive.
Once more, MS wants to sell an operating system on the merits of its GUI. Once more, they have completely missed the point. They have failed to address the number one issue that faces all classes of PC users: the lamentable lack of security that is characteristic of all Microsoft operating systems. Please note that this is not an "MS is trash Unix is cool" rant; I think the only reason there aren't more hijacked Unix boxes is that they're a small target, and the people who own them catch on too fast.
I'm particularly hot on this topic because I just blew my last three weekends salvaging two Windows XP boxes that were riddled by multiple trojans, virii, and just plain annoying trash. (They belong to two family members who shall remain unnamed—but I'm married to one of them, and cutting off her internet access could be deleterious to the climate around the ol' homestead.)
Now, I understand that no one can make an OS completely secure, except perhaps by removing all networking features. However, it should not be so easy to infect a PC, and it most certainly should be possible to recover from a malware infection without going through the pain I experienced.
Yes, I had backups—full image backups of the C drives (I use Acronis, and it's very good at what it does). The question was how far back I had to go to find a clean image. And how can I be sure it's clean, when the virus scans themselves couldn't detect all the contamination? For example, one machine was pronounced "clean"—but every time I rebooted it, several Internet Explorer processes not associated with any GUI windows would spawn and start sending packets to all sorts of interesting places. (I think I figured that one out—the malefactor was hiding in the OS System Restore file.)
What do I think MS could do about this? Well, for one thing they could provide an actually useful system recovery capability. I do not consider the "Fix your Windows installation (y/n)? that comes with the installation disk remotely useful. A truly useful recovery capability would reside on bootable media provided along with the OS that does things like:
Until MS "hardens" their OS and provides tools that do what I've described, I see no point in buying any further MS operating systems. One is just as bad as the other.
I don't think it's going to happen, though. You see, building a hardened OS would not be in Microsoft's interests. I talked to the guy who takes care of my swimming pool the other day, and mentioned my malware hassles. He furrowed his brow and said that maybe he had had some viruses too; his computer was running really slow and would reboot a lot. I asked him how he fixed the problem. "I bought a new computer" was his answer. When he said that, it hit me—just how many people decide to buy a new computer for precisely th
...The interesting thing about the theorem is that the proof skips all that, and with a very simple setup, demonstrates that if humans can do something (pick which measurement to make) independently of the past, then elementary particles can too, without making any assumptions on what exactly makes humans act the way they do.
Oh, that sounds like fun. Let's start off with, "If humans can engage in trans-species sex, then so can electrons."
...but if we take the reverse case, particles being incapable of free will would seem to imply that we oursleves don't have free will.
No, the "if...then" conditional proposition implies no assertion about its grammatical inverse. For example, consider the conditional "If white's next move is Q x P, then black will checkmate him in three moves". If we assume the conditional to be true, this does not imply that if white does something else, he will not be checkmated in three moves. In other words, the inverse of the conditional ("If white is checkmated in three moves, then his next move is Q x P") is not necessarily true. There might be various moves that will result in the poor putz being checkmated in three moves.
Or is that a gross oversimplification resulting from me not being a whizz at maths?
Actually, the relevant field of deficiency here is logic. Oh, they don't teach that anymore, do they? No big loss—it's very boring.
Last time I reported for Jury Duty they wouldn't even let me bring an iPod into the building, let alone anything with Internet access...I guess it's a state-by-state thing.
You're right, it's definitely worse here in Texas. Last time I was on a jury, they wouldn't let me bring my gun into the courthouse.
Well, the title is accurate, in a very loose sense of "accurate". The spider bite set off a chain of events that "healed" the paraplegic. If you take the headline to mean NEW MIRACLE CURE FOR PARALYSIS DISCOVERED ...well, the purpose of headlines is not to inform, but to sell papers (and get people to read /. articles, apparently).
See, if the paraplegic hadn't been bitten by a spider, the man wouldn't have been sent to the hospital. If he hadn't been sent to the hospital, the neurologist wouldn't have been able to do the nerve conduction study that showed his nerves had regenerated, which led to the bite victim being given physical therapy. So the spider did him a favor. (I doubt it was intentional.) But you don't find all this out until you read the story below the headline.
Oh I'm not sure that there's nothing to gain from it. Does nobody remember the Morris Worm? If that's all I have to do to get a professorship position at MIT, hey, there's something to gain there!
Oh, you mean they let Robert Morris out of jail? I kind of assumed he'd be out on parole by now...but I didn't know about the teaching post. Ah, I looked it up...Associate Professor at MIT, no less (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Worm). And looks like he never had to do any hard time.
I feel a certain fondness for Morris, because I worked for the same company where he was a summer intern once. Sigh...my brush with fame. You have to give him points for originality: after all, his was the first worm. And it was 100% Unix compatible. Of course, the fact that his dad worked for the NSA as a computer security specialist may have given him something of an advantage...
the JPG exploit is actually an old one (I thought even ms got this exploit in sp2 or something like that) and is really easy. Basically you take a jpg image , open it with a file compression app and then drop your payload in. When the Image is loaded, the payload is executed, effectively infecting systems. ...
Now, granted there is a little more to it than that, however that is the basics of the jpg exploit and how it works.
I'm sure there must be "a little more to it than that", because what you've said so far doesn't make sense. What does it mean to "open a JPG image with a file compression app"? I open WinZip and put the file in a new archive? Then I add some malicious program to the zip file? I don't see how this would work. If I execute the zip file, WinZip opens up and shows me that the archive file contains a jpg and some mysterious program. Why would I run the program? Why would loading the jpg image run the program? Or do I change the extension of the archive file from zip to jpg? That's not going to work--anything that displays graphics will just say that it's not a jpg.
Maybe you do know what you're talking about, but you haven't explained it very well.
I don't have to read the article (sorry, "writeup"). I already know: the Death of Western Culture is being announced in willfully bad and ugly grammar. And "mashup" itself should be in the running for "Most Unfortunate Neologism of the Decade".
Um, yes, why not do that? If the sale of knives creates some danger in society, than it should be taxed equal to that danger and the funds should go toward extra police or similar.
Raising taxes can indeed be a way of fighting crime.
Oh really. Do you have any examples or argument for this astonishingly fatuous assertion? To the extent that taxes affect crime, it is that they create an opportunity for it. If you raise taxes on a commodity enough, it becomes profitable to bypass the tax—in other words, a black market springs into existence to satisfy the economic imbalance created by the tax. Of course, outright prohibition works even better at creating crime, because people must necessarily pay the going price for outlawed commodities. And that means profit. Or did you think that people would say, "oh no, coke is too expensive now because it's illegal, so I guess I'll stop using it". (Substitute substance of your choice, if you like.)
I suppose one could argue that the British prohibition of civilian gun ownership has had an effect: instead of "gun crime", they now have hysterics over "knife crime". But I would like to think that the true objective of the British government was to stop violent crime; I would like to think that the commodity to be limited was violence, not firearms per se. If so, they would have to admit the failure of their prohibitive laws. I would be naive if I really believed anything of the sort, of course.
I suppose that when they ban knives, they will have "club crime" and "rock crime". (Sounds like a new sort of music, doesn't it?)
If raising taxes is a method of fighting crime (it's not, but supposing it is) then why not raise taxes on the sale of knives ?
Because the vaunted chefs of England would rise in revolt, brandishing their filet knives!
The more I think about this less than astonishing breakthrough, the less sense it makes to me. It seems to me that, as described, the technique is useful only in proving that a piece of paper is identical to itself. Unless you're fascinated by tautologies, this is not exactly exciting; furthermore, none of the uses cited in the article seem plausible.
For example, how could this technique be used to detect counterfeit currency? As everyone who has ever thought of combining a 20 dollar bill and a Xerox machine knows, just copying the bill doesn't produce a convincing fake, because the mint uses special paper to print currency. Is the author of this article suggesting that we scan every bill that's printed, file the scans by serial number, then scan every bill that's spent, and compare the scan against the database? Even comparing only suspect bills seems impractical to me—besides, if the counterfeit is that good, not even the government wants to know.
The pharmaceutical label verification is equally ludicrous. Remember, you'd have to authenticate each particular label against the database to verify it. This is nuts. You don't just rely on the label to authenticate lab-grade products—you rely on procedures that include traces, accountability, and a documented chain of custody. If we're talking aspirin, then the cost would be ludicrously out of proportion to the gain. If we're really worried, say if we're dealing with plutonium or something, then we're not going to rely on a silly label for authentication. How do we know the label isn't real, and the stuff in the container was stolen in transit, and something else substituted?
Could we imagine a case where it would make sense to use this scanning method to verify the authenticity of a document? Say we have a very, very, important document. We want to make sure it doesn't get swapped out for a fake document that looks just like it? Aside from the question of why it would matter, I'd have to ask: which is more vulnerable to malicious tampering—a paper document or a database record?
There might be applications to this technology, but if so, the article isn't telling us.
Quantum foam of "virtual" wavicles, eh? And here I used to think that the concept of aether was silly. Turns out that the aether has been updated a bit with quantum theory...but there's once again stuff that fills the universe, and explains certain otherwise inexplicable phenomena. Not that I have an objection to this, mind you. I just think it's interesting.
Well, since Jesus disagrees with me, I can pretty well regard myself as refuted. Some days, it doesn't pay to post.
I disagree. Electronic voting, properly implemented would have clear and significant advantages over traditional paper or punchcard ballots. Electronic voting could be both faster and more accurate than the older methods.
It should be obvious that electronic results can be tabulated much more quickly than hand counted ballots. If you're talking about punch cards processed by machine readers, then a purely electronic process would still be faster. There's no need to handle any sort of physical media—you just transfer the vote count electronically to a CPU, and add it up.
As far as accuracy in reflecting the true intent of the voters, an electronic process could also be significantly superior. Each voting machine would have an exact digital record of every vote cast. There would be none of the problems associated with analog ballots—like the famous "hanging chads" of Florida, or poorly marked paper ballots that give false results when processed by OCR. A properly designed voting machine would be capable of detecting user error (like voting for opposing candidates for the same office, or not voting for anyone at all), and notify the voter immediately.
So what do I mean by "properly implemented"? Well, pretty much everyone here will agree that closed, proprietary hardware and software are absolutely not a good idea for voting machines. The design and code must be public, so that the public (or the more technically sophisticated members thereof) can examine them for flaws. There must also be public discussion of the procedures used to safeguard the integrity of the machines and their data. Given such openness, there's no reason why a reliable electronic voting system can't be built and used with confidence.
My strongest objection to electronic voting as it's now implemented is that it leaves no audit trail. Once the electronic votes are tabulated, there's no way to check that the votes were, indeed, counted honestly. I think there's a pretty simple solution to this: print out a copy of the voter's ballot, and allow him to review it when he leaves the voting booth. If the voter agrees that the printout is legible and reflects how he actually voted, the paper goes into a box.
But doesn't that obviate the whole point of electronic voting; aren't we ultimately back to counting paper ballots? Not at all! First, the paper exists only as an audit trail. The votes are counted electronically. Only if a candidate demands a recount are the boxes of paper ballots ever opened and counted.
More importantly, though, the paper printouts provide a way to verify that the system is working correctly on a continual basis. To prove that the electronic system is honest, it's not necessary to count every single ballot to see if the electronic and paper totals are equal. If you have a paper trail, then you can do a statistical analysis of only a small sample of the voting results from randomly chosen districts and machines to verify that the vote was honest. This can—and should—be done continually on a random basis to detect any corruption of the process.
But do we want all those Japanese gadgets? I've wondered for some time where the notion of watching TV on your phone came from...I thought maybe it was Mars. But now I know: Japan.
I went to Tokyo once, and was overwhelmed with the feeling that the place was at once alien and eerily familiar. Then I realized where I'd seen Tokyo before: a lot of the science fiction books I've read have alien societies and cities in them that look and feel just like Tokyo. I figure that when Western science fiction authors visit Japan, they acquire a definitive conception of alieness that is reflected in all their subsequent writing. I can just imagine the thought process: "Hmm. I need some really weird aliens in my story. I've got it...a warrior-society of infallibly deadly—but always smiling—fighters who watch TV on their phones, and use toilets that have more controls than a 747."
If they're going to mark you as leaving 'on bad terms', you may as well move the date up and quit now. It's not like they can do anything additional to screw you. Move on to your next (and presumably better) job and forget about the last one.
What, and lose half of the best times you have at work? —That's the last 2 weeks of the job you're quitting, because you don't really do any work, and the first couple of weeks of a new job, because you're just learning the ropes.
Seriously, in a situation like this, the new job is of paramount importance. You do not want to tell your new employer that you can't start on the date agreed. If you delay, they may just change their mind about hiring you. Perhaps that's what your boss wants. I've had lots of jobs, and I've never given more than 2 weeks notice. It doesn't matter how tight the schedule is, whether you're in the middle of a project, or if they can't replace you. Too bad—they can fire you any time they want, and you can quit any time you want.
Poor naif, you have no idea: HR is staffed by Uranian ice-snakes who animate human cadavers bought from the Chinese penitentiary system at a deep discount. As for "conflict of interest", Humanoid Reptiles never experience such a thing because they have no interest in your welfare, their only interest is in furthering their own positions within the corporations who pay them. That, and increasing their cadaver collection, of course.
Nice. Hey, we have the backup part done, that's already 50% of the problem solved! We can worry about the restore part later, after we start bringing in the big bucks.
This happens more often than you think in the real world. I once lost an internal web site I was running for an HP lab when IT found out that the "restore" part of their backup and restore software didn't work. I made them do a test restore of the server to a spare machine every month after that. Come to think of it, that's probably why they laid me off...
That's a puzzling remark. You're saying there are graphics so complex that they can't be represented by a vector algorithm, but can be represented as a bitmap? Forgive me, perhaps you know what you are talking about, but I swear I just caught a whiff of bullshit.
PDF has become what it set out to be, the de facto truly portable document format.
Portable document format for those who are obsessed with print , you mean. HTML is more portable, and allows you to re-size and re-flow text to suit your preferences, eyesight, and screen size. The only advantage PDF offers is the ability to control how printed output looks. And of course it is the document author who exercises this control.
Nothing used to annoy me more than web sites that consist of nothing but PDF. Now there is something even more annoying: web sites that are nothing but one big Flash. And of course, Flash is owned by...Adobe. Coincidence? I think not.