Hey, I love long-life Lithium ion batteries as much as the next guy, but I would love to see an option for these devices to run on AAA batteries instead, even if means they last for a shorter amount of time.
Why?
I travel a lot. I try to visit a new country every year, and most countries do their own thing when it comes to their power grid. What this means is that if I want to bring along an iPod, I would have to buy (and carry) a power adapter for the battery charger for whatever country I'm going to - and at 1+ countries per year, this adds up to a lot of adapters over time!
The other major reason I've never wanted an iPod or similar device is that they have micro drives as opposed to flash drives. I don't need moving parts (even if they are fairly rugged these days) when I'm in a dusty, wet, or freezing environment. Have any other outdoors-ey types had good experiences with micro-drives? Is this really a non-issue?
Until Sony or Samsung offer a common battery version, I'm sticking with the smaller, solid-state MP3 player products.
Intelligent ID-ers like the ones mentioned above do bring a very critical scientific eye to areas of science that is mainstream scientists as dogmatic.
...of course, it helps when we write sentences in english instead of whatever that was that I just wrote.
BRAINFART.
Tangent: I got my undergrad in electrical engineering at a very conservative christian school (which also has a pretty decent engineering program). I was a devout evolutionist while I attended there. Later on, I went to a well known secular school to get a masters in applied biomedical engineering. It was there that I started buying into the ID side. When I saw how complex and beautifully intricate the inside of a single cell could be, the idea that it just kinda happened due to random mutations (almost all of which decrease genetic information, by the way) seemed impossible to me.
There is a whole bunch of information on both sides of the argument, and I'm only familiar with some of it. I like http://www.answersingenesis.org/ as well as http://icr.org/ for alternative viewpoints. Some of the better authors on the ID side are James Perloff, Dr. William A. Dembski, and A. E. Wilder-Smith.
It's worth reading just to find out what the non-crazy ID people come up with. Scientists have a bad habit of not questioning what is already accepted (how many models of the atom have we had in the last 70 years? How much bitching was there when we discovered that there was no Aether, and that Phlogiston was a myth?). Intelligent ID-ers like the ones mentioned above do bring a very critical scientific eye to areas of science that is mainstream scientists as dogmatic.
I'd just be happy if high schools would realize that there are some well-educated and intelligent ID-ers out there, instead of dismissing us as uneducated rednecks.
I don't understand why a large (or at least a loud) group of programmers like the ones here don't give Intelligent Design more credit. In particular, there have been a few arguments along the lines of "how would the designer evolve?"
Look at the designer as a programmer. Heck, I'll use myself as an example. Lets say that I sit down at my really fast computer and create a little artificial world, a la The Sims. The world is populated by intelligent agents (humans) as well as less intelligent agents (animals). Nothing too crazy yet, right?
The designer has complete control over the virtual world. The agents don't. They can only percieve other constructs within this world, and obviously have no idea that there's a fat guy with crumbs in his beard tapping away at a computer making all of this possible.
I tell the constructs that I created them, maybe mention the few parts of myself that are comparable to the game world just so they can put it in their own perspective, and they're cool with that for a while. Eventually they bitch, but I smite them a few dozen times and watch the world progress.
If these guys came up with their own little reasoning system that violently argued that I couldn't exist, I'd have a good laugh at them in their folly. They'd argue along the lines of "there are BILLIONS of 1's and 0's around me! Of course, over time, a few of them would randomly become the code that is me!" These little AIs would have no concept of what happened before the "Big Bang" (I turned powered on the computer), or how I could live outside of their rules of reality(which I laid down).
If I really wanted to teach them something, I might log in as Jesus_Of_Nazareth01 and hack that character a bit so it's not as constrained by the rules the other AIs have to follow. That'd be fun. Heck, it goes a ways towards explaining the God/Son paradigm.
If these people started noticing that monkeys shared similar structures to human agents, I'd roll my eyes and wonder why these AIs had against code re-use.
I almost forgot to mention -- some way to download permanent information about a certain site would make this a competition killer. (seeing how I don't typically have a highspeed connection when I'm climbing through the back country)
I downloaded the 7-day trial version, and I have to say, I've had most of my office stopping by my room to check out the absolute coolness of Keyhole.
This product seems extremely useful to me.
I'm a geocacher. (if you're a member, my username is "virosa") I have purchased several maps from Garmin, but their maps are fairly expensive (typically $100 or more), and don't have every little dirt trail clearly marked, which are usually what I wind up on eventually. The Keyhole maps may not have every road labelled, but you can visually SEE the dirt trails that are there. This is great for reconning a geocaching location for good ways to approach, and large hazards. After all, that thin line that says "creek" on my GPS may be an unfordable river, or it could be a dry bed. I don't have to guess with Keyhole.
I also like to travel to places that aren't your typical tourist fare. I try to pick one country a year and wander around backpacking for 2 or more weeks. This year was Turkey (OK, it isn't tourist fare for us in the U.S.). Last year was Romania. Garmin GPS maps SUCK for these locations, and for any location that isn't really metropolitan. While the Keyhole software doesn't have any resolution for Turkey (haven't checked Romania yet), the resolution for other backwoods places like Iraq and Afghanistan is remarkable! Places like these would maybe have one airport listed on them with Garmin maps, and here I get tons of detail, including topography!
Which leads me to another cool tie-in. I like first person shooter games. I also like watching current war events in the news. I went to Kumawar's website and learned to combine these two likes. Kumawar offers you missions that are based on recent world events, such as battles in Najaf, Sadr, and the assassination of Sadam's two sons. Kumawar has recreated these locals with real attention to the actual architecture of where these battles took place -- keyhole adds one more level of understanding to what was happening, since I can actually look at Sadr or Najaf and see how all the buildings are positioned. History always kinda bored me. With these two tools, it really cements current events into my mind.
If I'm going somewhere new by car, and I have the address, I used to use a free service like this one so that I could just GPS my way there. Keyhole gives me some more detail.
Did I mention the fact that most of these satellite shots are 6+ years more recent than Microsoft's terraserver images?
Now having said all that, there are a few things that Keyhole really has to work out.
1) No way to enter Lat/Lon coordinates. It will display them, sure, but if I really want to zoom in on 38N 77W, I have to do some tricky stuff with my mouse.
2) Puting in addresses is touchy. I have to say that Puerto Rico is the U.S. It will find "Kirby St", but not "Kirby Street". Little things like that.
3) Many countries have absolutely no resolution. I wanted to show some buddies of mine one of the most amazing sites in Turkey, but the entire country is a blur. Even a huge city like Istanbul has no imagery.
4) Right now, there's no support for any coordinate types other than Decimal degrees and Degrees/minutes/seconds. UTM and MGRS support would R0xx0r.
5) A way to export points of interest onto my GPS would double-r0xx0r.
I still think this is a winner. I'll definately be giving them my $30.
I briefly thought of doing a hobbit-flavored version of "Bye-Bye Birdie" in college. I had visions of Gollum dressed up in gold lamae, doing his Conrad Birdie boogey. He could be surrounded by swooning goblin hotties:
"One last Feeesh Oh Precious, One last feeeesh Riddle me! Suffer!"
Yup. I suppose that sitting through such a performance would be preferable to having your eyes put out by flaming weasels coated in barbed wire and hot sauce. But only barely.
I'm always amazed when people talk about freedom of speech as though there should never be limits. "Speech" can cause direct physical harm -- take well known examples in the media, such as published lists of abortion doctors, or NAMBLA instructions on the proper techniques for drugging and raping children.
There used to be a balance to this -- nutballs could write whatever they wanted, but no one had to publish them or give them a venue. Now every freak of nature has a pulpet, with zero accountability.
I think a lot of people just give "free speech" a blanket blessing because it's a whole lot easier than figuring out exactly where limits should be.
-Loooeeeee says "Screw your rights. Let's talk about your responsibilites"
My understanding of Bayesian analysis is that it puts together lists of words - one list for each words appearing in all messages marked "not crap", and one list of all words contained in all messages marked "crap". Incoming messages have their content compared against these 2 lists, and a semi-intelligent choice is made; if the "crap" content of the new message is above a threshold, it gets tossed.
By adding all these bogus words, could they be trying to make our Bayesian tools grow to the point where they're infeasable to use? If I have to check each message against a word list that's grown to 10MB (mostly with nonsense words like "ugumaquatii" and "skjfghak"), you can see the how things could start to choke...
Detecting encrypted steganography would be difficult. It would involve statistical analysis of the "unimportant" bits of a known good media sample (be it image, audio, even an executable) and comparing it to the suspect message.
This would involve a tremendous database on the part of the USAF. More importantly, if the people using the steganography had a similar database (and code that could encrypt their hidden text to match the properties of the "known good"s), then the messages would be undetectable.
A better (but more controversial) approach be this: The USAF modifies every picture/audio stream/etc that goes to the outside world. Only the least significant bits (the places where the encrypted message is likely to hide) would be changed -- to gibberish. Then it doesn't matter if the message was stego-ed or not -- it's unreadable now.
Only 2 problems I see with this:
1) Doesn't match what the USAF asked for, which was a way to DETECT stego. I feel that this is OK because the AF's original goal is WAY too broad an d open ended. Stego isn't limited to pictures. It can use music, text, code (using redundancy in certain instructions in the x86 instruction set). In short, there are too many possible channels for something to be stego-ed through.
2) It's an overt measure. If you wanted to let these stego-ed messages get to their intended recipients, and then monitor what Bob the Spy was then doing, you'd be SOL. But still, if this was a known policy, it would be tremendously useful.
Oh, and for those who say "The data is being tampered with! That's inherently wrong!", if the data was so important that it's modification would cause problems, then the original steganography would be automatically detected.
Slashdot Mirror
It may not be an official computer bag, but I think that this bag beats any of those 10, hands down.
I've never seen a laptop bag say "badass" more clearly. Or ever, actually.
Hey, I love long-life Lithium ion batteries as much as the next guy, but I would love to see an option for these devices to run on AAA batteries instead, even if means they last for a shorter amount of time. Why? I travel a lot. I try to visit a new country every year, and most countries do their own thing when it comes to their power grid. What this means is that if I want to bring along an iPod, I would have to buy (and carry) a power adapter for the battery charger for whatever country I'm going to - and at 1+ countries per year, this adds up to a lot of adapters over time! The other major reason I've never wanted an iPod or similar device is that they have micro drives as opposed to flash drives. I don't need moving parts (even if they are fairly rugged these days) when I'm in a dusty, wet, or freezing environment. Have any other outdoors-ey types had good experiences with micro-drives? Is this really a non-issue? Until Sony or Samsung offer a common battery version, I'm sticking with the smaller, solid-state MP3 player products.
Thanks for the thanks! I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed the vitriol that most people have against ID and Christian fundies in general.
Intelligent ID-ers like the ones mentioned above do bring a very critical scientific eye to areas of science that is mainstream scientists as dogmatic.
...of course, it helps when we write sentences in english instead of whatever that was that I just wrote.
BRAINFART.
Tangent: I got my undergrad in electrical engineering at a very conservative christian school (which also has a pretty decent engineering program). I was a devout evolutionist while I attended there. Later on, I went to a well known secular school to get a masters in applied biomedical engineering. It was there that I started buying into the ID side. When I saw how complex and beautifully intricate the inside of a single cell could be, the idea that it just kinda happened due to random mutations (almost all of which decrease genetic information, by the way) seemed impossible to me.
There is a whole bunch of information on both sides of the argument, and I'm only familiar with some of it. I like http://www.answersingenesis.org/ as well as http://icr.org/ for alternative viewpoints. Some of the better authors on the ID side are James Perloff, Dr. William A. Dembski, and A. E. Wilder-Smith.
It's worth reading just to find out what the non-crazy ID people come up with. Scientists have a bad habit of not questioning what is already accepted (how many models of the atom have we had in the last 70 years? How much bitching was there when we discovered that there was no Aether, and that Phlogiston was a myth?). Intelligent ID-ers like the ones mentioned above do bring a very critical scientific eye to areas of science that is mainstream scientists as dogmatic.
I'd just be happy if high schools would realize that there are some well-educated and intelligent ID-ers out there, instead of dismissing us as uneducated rednecks.
I don't understand why a large (or at least a loud) group of programmers like the ones here don't give Intelligent Design more credit. In particular, there have been a few arguments along the lines of "how would the designer evolve?"
Look at the designer as a programmer. Heck, I'll use myself as an example. Lets say that I sit down at my really fast computer and create a little artificial world, a la The Sims. The world is populated by intelligent agents (humans) as well as less intelligent agents (animals). Nothing too crazy yet, right?
The designer has complete control over the virtual world. The agents don't. They can only percieve other constructs within this world, and obviously have no idea that there's a fat guy with crumbs in his beard tapping away at a computer making all of this possible.
I tell the constructs that I created them, maybe mention the few parts of myself that are comparable to the game world just so they can put it in their own perspective, and they're cool with that for a while. Eventually they bitch, but I smite them a few dozen times and watch the world progress.
If these guys came up with their own little reasoning system that violently argued that I couldn't exist, I'd have a good laugh at them in their folly. They'd argue along the lines of "there are BILLIONS of 1's and 0's around me! Of course, over time, a few of them would randomly become the code that is me!" These little AIs would have no concept of what happened before the "Big Bang" (I turned powered on the computer), or how I could live outside of their rules of reality(which I laid down).
If I really wanted to teach them something, I might log in as Jesus_Of_Nazareth01 and hack that character a bit so it's not as constrained by the rules the other AIs have to follow. That'd be fun. Heck, it goes a ways towards explaining the God/Son paradigm.
If these people started noticing that monkeys shared similar structures to human agents, I'd roll my eyes and wonder why these AIs had against code re-use.
I almost forgot to mention -- some way to download permanent information about a certain site would make this a competition killer. (seeing how I don't typically have a highspeed connection when I'm climbing through the back country)
I downloaded the 7-day trial version, and I have to say, I've had most of my office stopping by my room to check out the absolute coolness of Keyhole.
This product seems extremely useful to me. I'm a geocacher. (if you're a member, my username is "virosa") I have purchased several maps from Garmin, but their maps are fairly expensive (typically $100 or more), and don't have every little dirt trail clearly marked, which are usually what I wind up on eventually. The Keyhole maps may not have every road labelled, but you can visually SEE the dirt trails that are there. This is great for reconning a geocaching location for good ways to approach, and large hazards. After all, that thin line that says "creek" on my GPS may be an unfordable river, or it could be a dry bed. I don't have to guess with Keyhole.
I also like to travel to places that aren't your typical tourist fare. I try to pick one country a year and wander around backpacking for 2 or more weeks. This year was Turkey (OK, it isn't tourist fare for us in the U.S.). Last year was Romania. Garmin GPS maps SUCK for these locations, and for any location that isn't really metropolitan. While the Keyhole software doesn't have any resolution for Turkey (haven't checked Romania yet), the resolution for other backwoods places like Iraq and Afghanistan is remarkable! Places like these would maybe have one airport listed on them with Garmin maps, and here I get tons of detail, including topography!
Which leads me to another cool tie-in. I like first person shooter games. I also like watching current war events in the news. I went to Kumawar's website and learned to combine these two likes. Kumawar offers you missions that are based on recent world events, such as battles in Najaf, Sadr, and the assassination of Sadam's two sons. Kumawar has recreated these locals with real attention to the actual architecture of where these battles took place -- keyhole adds one more level of understanding to what was happening, since I can actually look at Sadr or Najaf and see how all the buildings are positioned. History always kinda bored me. With these two tools, it really cements current events into my mind.
If I'm going somewhere new by car, and I have the address, I used to use a free service like this one so that I could just GPS my way there. Keyhole gives me some more detail.
Did I mention the fact that most of these satellite shots are 6+ years more recent than Microsoft's terraserver images?
Now having said all that, there are a few things that Keyhole really has to work out.
1) No way to enter Lat/Lon coordinates. It will display them, sure, but if I really want to zoom in on 38N 77W, I have to do some tricky stuff with my mouse.
2) Puting in addresses is touchy. I have to say that Puerto Rico is the U.S. It will find "Kirby St", but not "Kirby Street". Little things like that.
3) Many countries have absolutely no resolution. I wanted to show some buddies of mine one of the most amazing sites in Turkey, but the entire country is a blur. Even a huge city like Istanbul has no imagery.
4) Right now, there's no support for any coordinate types other than Decimal degrees and Degrees/minutes/seconds. UTM and MGRS support would R0xx0r.
5) A way to export points of interest onto my GPS would double-r0xx0r.
I still think this is a winner. I'll definately be giving them my $30.
I briefly thought of doing a hobbit-flavored version of "Bye-Bye Birdie" in college. I had visions of Gollum dressed up in gold lamae, doing his Conrad Birdie boogey. He could be surrounded by swooning goblin hotties:
"One last Feeesh
Oh Precious, One last feeeesh
Riddle me! Suffer!"
Yup. I suppose that sitting through such a performance would be preferable to having your eyes put out by flaming weasels coated in barbed wire and hot sauce. But only barely.
I'm always amazed when people talk about freedom of speech as though there should never be limits. "Speech" can cause direct physical harm -- take well known examples in the media, such as published lists of abortion doctors, or NAMBLA instructions on the proper techniques for drugging and raping children.
There used to be a balance to this -- nutballs could write whatever they wanted, but no one had to publish them or give them a venue. Now every freak of nature has a pulpet, with zero accountability.
I think a lot of people just give "free speech" a blanket blessing because it's a whole lot easier than figuring out exactly where limits should be.
-Loooeeeee says "Screw your rights. Let's talk about your responsibilites"
My understanding of Bayesian analysis is that it puts together lists of words - one list for each words appearing in all messages marked "not crap", and one list of all words contained in all messages marked "crap". Incoming messages have their content compared against these 2 lists, and a semi-intelligent choice is made; if the "crap" content of the new message is above a threshold, it gets tossed.
By adding all these bogus words, could they be trying to make our Bayesian tools grow to the point where they're infeasable to use? If I have to check each message against a word list that's grown to 10MB (mostly with nonsense words like "ugumaquatii" and "skjfghak"), you can see the how things could start to choke...
Any thoughts?
Detecting encrypted steganography would be difficult. It would involve statistical analysis of the "unimportant" bits of a known good media sample (be it image, audio, even an executable) and comparing it to the suspect message.
This would involve a tremendous database on the part of the USAF. More importantly, if the people using the steganography had a similar database (and code that could encrypt their hidden text to match the properties of the "known good"s), then the messages would be undetectable.
A better (but more controversial) approach be this: The USAF modifies every picture/audio stream/etc that goes to the outside world. Only the least significant bits (the places where the encrypted message is likely to hide) would be changed -- to gibberish. Then it doesn't matter if the message was stego-ed or not -- it's unreadable now.
Only 2 problems I see with this:
1) Doesn't match what the USAF asked for, which was a way to DETECT stego. I feel that this is OK because the AF's original goal is WAY too broad an d open ended. Stego isn't limited to pictures. It can use music, text, code (using redundancy in certain instructions in the x86 instruction set). In short, there are too many possible channels for something to be stego-ed through.
2) It's an overt measure. If you wanted to let these stego-ed messages get to their intended recipients, and then monitor what Bob the Spy was then doing, you'd be SOL. But still, if this was a known policy, it would be tremendously useful.
Oh, and for those who say "The data is being tampered with! That's inherently wrong!", if the data was so important that it's modification would cause problems, then the original steganography would be automatically detected.