"The discrete mechanical knocks open the lock and are produced by a small device that can be carried by any authorized person.....Since there is no keyhole or contact point on the door, this unique mechanism offers a significantly higher level of security then existing technology.""
[1] what keeps an unauthorized person from usinging this device? if is biometric or combination coded, why not just put those features in the door?
[2] the key is the weak point of any keyed system. The most that typical attackers can do to a well designed lock if they dont have the key is brute force.
this little dark secret would have put off a lot of purchases.
Do you remember how fast processors were in 1996? Businesses,[i.e the cows that Microsoft and Intel were already good at milking] were already in the habit of trashing boxes every two years. That year an old box ran at 25 mHz and a new one at over 100 mHz. I joined a startup that year. We moved into space another co had just left...they left behind "obsolete" equipment. The 25 mHz PC runing linux that I found in a data closet was still loaded with firewall [and all the logs and a admin pswd written on the case]. it would have been good for another two years but an upgrade to a CD reader would have cost too much for the value added.
I have a garage full of old PC's that are going to come back to life like dawn of the dead, running Linux...any day now, really.
Here, it is The ocean does not have 70% less sharks than at some time in the past. The fact that sharks don't and cant live in the deep ocean, probably due to energy metabolism, is not new and their distribution in ocean waters is not new, its just that we don't have to guess any longer about where they do live.
cost: It depends strongly on quality of finish materials: stone floors and counters or linoleum and formica? I built 4000 sq.ft, including an indoor swimming pool, passive solar heated for around $30/sq.ft. circa 1981. Its all red oak frame, with arched kneebraces. The land and the taxes in my particular town are outrageously expensive but sticks and bricks cost the same whereever you put them together...if you do the putting.
The frame technique is modified barn frame. Horizontally in the middle of this picture you see a beam that has tracklighting somehow sprouting downward from it. To the right is one of the joints. The modificatin is to use steel tubing welded up into an X anchored to the top of the posts and beams laminated of 2x10+2x6+2x10 producing a channel in the beam that fits over the projecting metal of the X's. Goes together like tinkertoys rather than traditional "bents"...you build it up one floor at a time more like steel skyscraper construction. We liked the tracklighting in our old place and made provision for it in a plank-on-joist floor sytem [no drop ceiling to hide the wires!] so the ability to do additional wiring is really more of a fortunate accident than the plan I would like to claim. Only real wood peg construction is where the knee braces are tennoned into the posts and the cathedral roof structure.
I have had occasion to move a few walls. Thats the real beauty of the frame: just take a sledge hammer and erase the wall. There are no bearing walls.
post & beam frame elments have built-in chaseways to handle horizontal distribution. The house is 25 years old and the wiring has had a steady progression of upgrades without fishing wires or drilling holes in things.
Whole house 8000watt back-up generator.
separate breakers for study and other rooms [4 so far but there is a request for a "recipe book computer and pantry inventory system" in the kitchen] that require "rich infrastructure".
you also should answer this question: is it just your hobby or do you have to share the house resources with other computerliterate and demanding users. I have to keep my firewall machine [an ancient win2k sytem about be replaced by a small linksys firewall/router box] utterly up to date and maintain VPN capability for my wife's telecommuting. When Junior is home from college there is wireless subnetted from his bedroom drop...and we used to have to negotiate fileswapping schedules because his little operation [he had the hotrod system two-up display for music studio work ]could suck up all our cable bandwidth.
.
So, on any given day that all the kids are home from college, the netowrks might be loaded up like this:
500mhz pentium win2k firewall machine [sygate, sometimes ZA]
3x 5-port ethernet hubs
Linksys wireless router with a few clients
2.4ghz athlon custom box, XP [audigy II sound and 5.1 sound system]
thinkpad
HP vectra [
two lexmark inkjets
floating 750 USB zip drive [fileshares are iffy in a network where the boxes come and go, junior changes the network names to suit his wim and MS patches its security bugs behind your back.]
floating 80gig USB external HD
Optionally, a 500 mhz AMD box [it was once a CompUSA product but now more of a frankenbox] booting up either Solaris or some slightly less than up to date RedHat flavored Linux]
iMac
iBook
hp inkjet
home theater machine: junior's selection of components from NewEgg, half a terabyte for the ATI All-In-Wonder to scribble TV shows onto..[.damned if I will pay a monthly fee just to let some marketing co know what I watch.]Small [200w?] 7.1 sound system. scanner, wirless interfaces, this is where we load up thumbdrives with mp3's taken off-air. still shoping for the right 30" monitor.
Juniors decrepit presario chewing gum holds the power connector in, theres a nylon wire tie jammed into the pcmcia slot...I don't ask.
Juniors muscular new presario with extralife battery.
and the garage has a pile of monitors and older PC's in varios states of disrepair, most are organ donors and destined for the dump except for the fax machines that I still haven't found the right drivers or network interfaces.
off all the pictures I could put illustrating this managerie, the rats nest of power cords, ethernet, USB cables and peripheral power supplies and powerstrips where all this connectivity lands on my desk is the most ammusing.
One other thing. Junior knows how to put passwords on things and the house is about 100yards from the road so no wardriving here...but our neigbors are bit sloppier so we have access to more network than we maintain. But I don't think its ethical to list their stuff in my inventory.;)
it puts the lie to claims, now greenlighted to go to trial, that Apple Ipod/Itunes is a monopoly.
Well, of course Amazon will seek to make the music files it sells iPod compatible.
Right?
if you read the chart on page 81 of this 1998 edition of Sci Am. you will see the World Total line hits its maxima around 2004. Only Bush administration hacks and kids who have read nothing but comic books for the last 8 years would be unaware of these facts. By the time a former executive of a failed oil company tells the nation "we are addicted to oil" we have already run out of veins to stick the needle in.
I suppose I shouldn't gripe at what a bunch of retards my courtymen have been on energy conservation issues...it could be worse: yet another article on oil depletion could have been ignored. The matter could have been framed as if it were some kind of questionable theory, similar to the treatment bushco wanted to give evolution. Really, I ought to be glad that everybody finally gets it. I'm sure Hummer sales will go to zero day after tomorrow.
Yeah, right.
[We are so screwed. any of you know how to saddle a horse?]
You are right and deserve a mod up but we've all been trampled by the stampede of commenters. For a question that has no "current events" value, this sure got a lot of traffic: clear sign of where the average/. reader's mind is at.
needed to haul enough fresh water to cover the arctic area, atomize it all into the air and then pump half an ocean of water up on top of the ice thus formed will be supplied from the petroleum reserves in the researcher's province of Alberta.
The addition of CO2 to artic air masses entailed in such an operation would have to work against the desired effect of mimicing the condtions in the arctic before we had global warming.
take all this as only an indication of how desperate we are.
is that NONE of us can RTFA. All that is posted here is the write-up by a Dartmouth PR person. The link to the journal article hits a roadblock unless you can toss it a Wiley Interscience license cookie...you may be lucky enough to be near a university library..you probably aren't.
When I submitted this to the Agonist.org yesterday, I had such access. The paper is long, spends 2/3 of its pages clarifying and justifying its particular use of the somewhat controversialVBM technique and otherwise qualifying its results. The authors are fairly up front about distancing their work from claiming a universal result...how "average" could your findings be based only on 19 Dartmouth freshmen. [did they control for alcohol use?].
Even with all the disclaimers, they had two supportable contentions:
whatever change it is,[myelination was their pick] higly localized changes in brain areas that integrate emotion and decision ARE changeing.
their data do little to pick apart the nature vs nurture issues that may rule such changes...only supporting the conclusion that at 18 something is still rewiring your brain.
yup. The conclusions at the end of the paper [I can see the Wiley Interscience via my library site license] implies that the changes in brain activity they measured are the result of both nature and nurture...the old debate can rage on.
tis the classic freedom-for-security tradeoff
on
Cell Tracking on the Rise
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A woman was kidnapped from a Boston suburb 2 or 3 years ago, killed and her body driven to a remote site in NH and dumped. No evidence at the scene pointed to who did it, how or where they'e taken her. But her cellphone was still on. The time of the crime and roughly the route taken in its perpetration were established. The body, then the car and finally the cultprit were all found.
You win some, you lose something. take your choice.
we can reduce health costs, even for unisured by using the same biometric ID sensor [retina scan IS in use already] but fork the data stream to the medical analyser software along with the ID processing.
By the time you exit the ID station, an annucniator can tell you your fate as accurately as a doctor or a fortuneteller:
Robotic Male Voice: "Good morning Abdulla Massoud You are on our no-fly list because we suspect you want to blow yourself up and take a few others with you." followed immediately by
Robotic Femle Voice:" You will find Dr Jones in the examining room on the left. You have an 85% chance of a fatal aneurism in the next two months and should be seen immediately."
they should be hamstrung and dropped off in a bad part of Falujah for all the %^$#^&@* spam they unleashed. Who here HASN'T been inundated with emails for cut rate software lately?
These claims that the technology will work are unsubstantiated by any test results that have been published, as far as I know. What backs up your claims? What would give an engineer with no paycheck at stake in the matter any confidence that, as you assert, this is not a question of technological possibility? [I half expect you work in the arms industry and can't actually say more than you have already said]
When kill rates do reach 90% under adverse condtions, I will be impressed. Right now I would like a pointer to any confirmable test results. Until then, its all just talk and damn expensive talk at that. What is the rationale that makes 90% or any number less than 100, "good enough" to ignore the much healthier approach of treaties or economic cooperation?
We could render N Korea a radioactive slag pit in 12 hours. Teheran too. World protests at US military adventures have been shown to be toothless. And our tendency to favor lethal military means for geopolitical objectives is clearly demonstrated. Why spend ourselves into the poorhouse when we NOW possess the means to silence these potential enemies? WHY? Because Boeing, LockMart etc can lobby congress much more effectively than they can lob missles.
Kurzwiel had been on record as predicting the singularity, which would probably include artificial intelligence achieving self-awareness, would occur in 45 years.
now its "...StrongBot became aware of, one day in January 2072
Thats ok...its a lot safer to move the horizons than to say we will never reach them.
why'd yall have to go and blab about this? don't you think the people who
most benefit from this loophole could learn by word of mouth? No the chinese
govt knows to go beat up Google.
can't you just see the RFQ:
"prease submit bid to peopers minsitry of truth. We seek bids and proposars for sperring checker prug-ins and key roggers"
You sell early access to stories as a premium service. You need the money. I can afford the stamp when I mail a letter. I would be willing to purchase as a premium, the privelege of telling slashdot that I do not grant permission to alter my credits along with my submission of the storey. The guys who saturate you with submissions will either wise up or buy you a sweet new server and a condo on the riviera. I have 60 or so submissions and my batting average is around 200...I can afford that much vanity.
Alternatively, cache the credits and when a reader WANTS to know more about who submitted, ping the submitter who then is given a choice whether or not to let you,/., broker [for a fee if you wish] the contact. This latter method will put off many who follow links impulsively and haven't got the capacity for delayed gratification that a call-back protocol entails.
does not rate the "best ideas of 2005" category implied by TFA. This is a stunt to prop up circulation. [Time mag. did a similar cover storey two weeks ago. Today they layed off a few hundred people.] Not a good sign of the "Times" if you ask me.
god bless you.
Just get back here alive, then update.
yes there is always some fresh Improvised Explosive Data lurking on random pages and attachments every week but as careful as you seem to be about stuff like that,
you'd notice if you got infected....you DO have your firewall set to squawk if unexpected outbound traffic crops up, right?
http://diuf.unifr.ch/pai/publications/2002/paper/L ei-ICMLC02.pdf offers a bibliography full of similar ideas including the sciam art [which came out in nov 97]. Do the researchers say who will pay for the honeypots and the extra-secure protocol trick by which they communicate their warnings? [no, I did not RTFA, why do you ask?]
A Scientific American article, pointing to its similarity to the idea of biological immunity mechanisms, put forth an idea like this 4 or 5 years ago [sorry, too lazy to go look it up]. The biological parallel was that the signatures sent out by the honeypots were analagous to antibodies manufactured to help killer cells recognize foreign cells.
I think the pitfalls of this idea can also be extrapolated from the biology of autoimmune diseases. The worst thing that could happen would be for a malware coder to figure out a virus whose signature would cause the "forewarned" systems to block legitimate traffic.
I see comments to the effect that much of the big breakthrough is behind us.
But think of how the world looked to the nerds of 1905:
There was "just a few little details" to be worked out about the atom, why for instance did it radiate and how.
The universe was euclidian and straight lines, by god, were just straight.
few doubted that you could, though it would be costly, know the exact position of everything and calculate the future positions.
A nagging little absence of an aether, to wave for electromagnetic waves as water or air do for their waves.
But mostly, we were pretty sure we had it all but figured out.
Take heart nerds. We have ALWAYS percieved ourselves as being at that point on the great learning curve of omniscience and we probably always will...its a comfortable place to hang out.
Slashdot Mirror
"The discrete mechanical knocks open the lock and are produced by a small device that can be carried by any authorized person. ....Since there is no keyhole or contact point on the door, this unique mechanism offers a significantly higher level of security then existing technology.""
[1] what keeps an unauthorized person from usinging this device? if is biometric or combination coded, why not just put those features in the door?
[2] the key is the weak point of any keyed system. The most that typical attackers can do to a well designed lock if they dont have the key is brute force.
this little dark secret would have put off a lot of purchases. Do you remember how fast processors were in 1996? Businesses,[i.e the cows that Microsoft and Intel were already good at milking] were already in the habit of trashing boxes every two years. That year an old box ran at 25 mHz and a new one at over 100 mHz. I joined a startup that year. We moved into space another co had just left...they left behind "obsolete" equipment. The 25 mHz PC runing linux that I found in a data closet was still loaded with firewall [and all the logs and a admin pswd written on the case]. it would have been good for another two years but an upgrade to a CD reader would have cost too much for the value added. I have a garage full of old PC's that are going to come back to life like dawn of the dead, running Linux...any day now, really.
Here, it is The ocean does not have 70% less sharks than at some time in the past. The fact that sharks don't and cant live in the deep ocean, probably due to energy metabolism, is not new and their distribution in ocean waters is not new, its just that we don't have to guess any longer about where they do live.
cost: It depends strongly on quality of finish materials: stone floors and counters or linoleum and formica? I built 4000 sq.ft, including an indoor swimming pool, passive solar heated for around $30/sq.ft. circa 1981. Its all red oak frame, with arched kneebraces. The land and the taxes in my particular town are outrageously expensive but sticks and bricks cost the same whereever you put them together...if you do the putting.
The frame technique is modified barn frame. Horizontally in the middle of this picture you see a beam that has tracklighting somehow sprouting downward from it. To the right is one of the joints. The modificatin is to use steel tubing welded up into an X anchored to the top of the posts and beams laminated of 2x10+2x6+2x10 producing a channel in the beam that fits over the projecting metal of the X's. Goes together like tinkertoys rather than traditional "bents"...you build it up one floor at a time more like steel skyscraper construction. We liked the tracklighting in our old place and made provision for it in a plank-on-joist floor sytem [no drop ceiling to hide the wires!] so the ability to do additional wiring is really more of a fortunate accident than the plan I would like to claim. Only real wood peg construction is where the knee braces are tennoned into the posts and the cathedral roof structure.
I have had occasion to move a few walls. Thats the real beauty of the frame: just take a sledge hammer and erase the wall. There are no bearing walls.
you also should answer this question: is it just your hobby or do you have to share the house resources with other computerliterate and demanding users. I have to keep my firewall machine [an ancient win2k sytem about be replaced by a small linksys firewall/router box] utterly up to date and maintain VPN capability for my wife's telecommuting. When Junior is home from college there is wireless subnetted from his bedroom drop...and we used to have to negotiate fileswapping schedules because his little operation [he had the hotrod system two-up display for music studio work ]could suck up all our cable bandwidth.
. So, on any given day that all the kids are home from college, the netowrks might be loaded up like this:
- 500mhz pentium win2k firewall machine [sygate, sometimes ZA]
-
3x 5-port ethernet hubs
- Linksys wireless router with a few clients
-
2.4ghz athlon custom box, XP [audigy II sound and 5.1 sound system]
-
thinkpad
-
HP vectra [
-
two lexmark inkjets
-
floating 750 USB zip drive [fileshares are iffy in a network where the boxes come and go, junior changes the network names to suit his wim and MS patches its security bugs behind your back.]
-
floating 80gig USB external HD
-
Optionally, a 500 mhz AMD box [it was once a CompUSA product but now more of a frankenbox] booting up either Solaris or some slightly less than up to date RedHat flavored Linux]
-
iMac
-
iBook
-
hp inkjet
-
home theater machine: junior's selection of components from NewEgg, half a terabyte for the ATI All-In-Wonder to scribble TV shows onto..[.damned if I will pay a monthly fee just to let some marketing co know what I watch.]Small [200w?] 7.1 sound system. scanner, wirless interfaces, this is where we load up thumbdrives with mp3's taken off-air. still shoping for the right 30" monitor.
-
Juniors decrepit presario chewing gum holds the power connector in, theres a nylon wire tie jammed into the pcmcia slot...I don't ask.
-
Juniors muscular new presario with extralife battery.
and the garage has a pile of monitors and older PC's in varios states of disrepair, most are organ donors and destined for the dump except for the fax machines that I still haven't found the right drivers or network interfaces.off all the pictures I could put illustrating this managerie, the rats nest of power cords, ethernet, USB cables and peripheral power supplies and powerstrips where all this connectivity lands on my desk is the most ammusing.
One other thing. Junior knows how to put passwords on things and the house is about 100yards from the road so no wardriving here...but our neigbors are bit sloppier so we have access to more network than we maintain. But I don't think its ethical to list their stuff in my inventory.
it puts the lie to claims, now greenlighted to go to trial, that Apple Ipod/Itunes is a monopoly. Well, of course Amazon will seek to make the music files it sells iPod compatible. Right?
if you read the chart on page 81 of this 1998 edition of Sci Am. you will see the World Total line hits its maxima around 2004. Only Bush administration hacks and kids who have read nothing but comic books for the last 8 years would be unaware of these facts. By the time a former executive of a failed oil company tells the nation "we are addicted to oil" we have already run out of veins to stick the needle in.
I suppose I shouldn't gripe at what a bunch of retards my courtymen have been on energy conservation issues...it could be worse: yet another article on oil depletion could have been ignored. The matter could have been framed as if it were some kind of questionable theory, similar to the treatment bushco wanted to give evolution. Really, I ought to be glad that everybody finally gets it. I'm sure Hummer sales will go to zero day after tomorrow.
Yeah, right.
[We are so screwed. any of you know how to saddle a horse?]
fascinating insight, ironic even, and, IMO, valid. Too bad nobody will notice this among the thousand+ comments.
You are right and deserve a mod up but we've all been trampled by the stampede of commenters. For a question that has no "current events" value, this sure got a lot of traffic: clear sign of where the average /. reader's mind is at.
Did I ask you who was your first girl? and would you answer with a question: first girl I fooled around with or first girl I married?
Oh, this is about computers!
first computer owned was a TI-99. still have it. then a Mac I bought in March of 84...still have that and it runs.
First computer programmed? a SDS Sigma 7, 1969, writing Fortran IVh.
needed to haul enough fresh water to cover the arctic area, atomize it all into the air and then pump half an ocean of water up on top of the ice thus formed will be supplied from the petroleum reserves in the researcher's province of Alberta.
The addition of CO2 to artic air masses entailed in such an operation would have to work against the desired effect of mimicing the condtions in the arctic before we had global warming.
take all this as only an indication of how desperate we are.
Even with all the disclaimers, they had two supportable contentions:
yup. The conclusions at the end of the paper [I can see the Wiley Interscience via my library site license] implies that the changes in brain activity they measured are the result of both nature and nurture...the old debate can rage on.
A woman was kidnapped from a Boston suburb 2 or 3 years ago, killed and her body driven to a remote site in NH and dumped. No evidence at the scene pointed to who did it, how or where they'e taken her. But her cellphone was still on. The time of the crime and roughly the route taken in its perpetration were established. The body, then the car and finally the cultprit were all found. You win some, you lose something. take your choice.
we can reduce health costs, even for unisured by using the same biometric ID sensor [retina scan IS in use already] but fork the data stream to the medical analyser software along with the ID processing.
By the time you exit the ID station, an annucniator can tell you your fate as accurately as a doctor or a fortuneteller:
Robotic Male Voice: "Good morning Abdulla Massoud You are on our no-fly list because we suspect you want to blow yourself up and take a few others with you." followed immediately by
Robotic Femle Voice:" You will find Dr Jones in the examining room on the left. You have an 85% chance of a fatal aneurism in the next two months and should be seen immediately."
they should be hamstrung and dropped off in a bad part of Falujah for all the %^$#^&@* spam they unleashed. Who here HASN'T been inundated with emails for cut rate software lately?
These claims that the technology will work are unsubstantiated by any test results that have been published, as far as I know. What backs up your claims? What would give an engineer with no paycheck at stake in the matter any confidence that, as you assert, this is not a question of technological possibility? [I half expect you work in the arms industry and can't actually say more than you have already said]
When kill rates do reach 90% under adverse condtions, I will be impressed. Right now I would like a pointer to any confirmable test results. Until then, its all just talk and damn expensive talk at that. What is the rationale that makes 90% or any number less than 100, "good enough" to ignore the much healthier approach of treaties or economic cooperation?
We could render N Korea a radioactive slag pit in 12 hours. Teheran too. World protests at US military adventures have been shown to be toothless. And our tendency to favor lethal military means for geopolitical objectives is clearly demonstrated. Why spend ourselves into the poorhouse when we NOW possess the means to silence these potential enemies? WHY? Because Boeing, LockMart etc can lobby congress much more effectively than they can lob missles.
Kurzwiel had been on record as predicting the singularity, which would probably include artificial intelligence achieving self-awareness, would occur in 45 years.
now its "...StrongBot became aware of, one day in January 2072
Thats ok...its a lot safer to move the horizons than to say we will never reach them.
why'd yall have to go and blab about this? don't you think the people who most benefit from this loophole could learn by word of mouth? No the chinese govt knows to go beat up Google. can't you just see the RFQ: "prease submit bid to peopers minsitry of truth. We seek bids and proposars for sperring checker prug-ins and key roggers"
You sell early access to stories as a premium service. You need the money. I can afford the stamp when I mail a letter. I would be willing to purchase as a premium, the privelege of telling slashdot that I do not grant permission to alter my credits along with my submission of the storey. The guys who saturate you with submissions will either wise up or buy you a sweet new server and a condo on the riviera. I have 60 or so submissions and my batting average is around 200...I can afford that much vanity.
/., broker [for a fee if you wish] the contact. This latter method will put off many who follow links impulsively and haven't got the capacity for delayed gratification that a call-back protocol entails.
Alternatively, cache the credits and when a reader WANTS to know more about who submitted, ping the submitter who then is given a choice whether or not to let you,
does not rate the "best ideas of 2005" category implied by TFA. This is a stunt to prop up circulation. [Time mag. did a similar cover storey two weeks ago. Today they layed off a few hundred people.] Not a good sign of the "Times" if you ask me.
god bless you.
Just get back here alive, then update.
yes there is always some fresh Improvised Explosive Data lurking on random pages and attachments every week but as careful as you seem to be about stuff like that, you'd notice if you got infected....you DO have your firewall set to squawk if unexpected outbound traffic crops up, right?
http://diuf.unifr.ch/pai/publications/2002/paper/L ei-ICMLC02.pdf offers a bibliography full of similar ideas including the sciam art [which came out in nov 97]. Do the researchers say who will pay for the honeypots and the extra-secure protocol trick by which they communicate their warnings? [no, I did not RTFA, why do you ask?]
A Scientific American article, pointing to its similarity to the idea of biological immunity mechanisms, put forth an idea like this 4 or 5 years ago [sorry, too lazy to go look it up]. The biological parallel was that the signatures sent out by the honeypots were analagous to antibodies manufactured to help killer cells recognize foreign cells. I think the pitfalls of this idea can also be extrapolated from the biology of autoimmune diseases. The worst thing that could happen would be for a malware coder to figure out a virus whose signature would cause the "forewarned" systems to block legitimate traffic.
I see comments to the effect that much of the big breakthrough is behind us. But think of how the world looked to the nerds of 1905: There was "just a few little details" to be worked out about the atom, why for instance did it radiate and how. The universe was euclidian and straight lines, by god, were just straight. few doubted that you could, though it would be costly, know the exact position of everything and calculate the future positions. A nagging little absence of an aether, to wave for electromagnetic waves as water or air do for their waves. But mostly, we were pretty sure we had it all but figured out. Take heart nerds. We have ALWAYS percieved ourselves as being at that point on the great learning curve of omniscience and we probably always will...its a comfortable place to hang out.