You couldnt be more wrong... You are charged by the post office when the mail is returned.
From the Domestic Mail Manual available at http://pe.usps.gov
S-58 3.0 p. 914 DMM issue 56
"Each piece of returned BRM is charged the applicable single-piece First-Class or Priority Mail postage. Cards must meet the standards in C100 to qualify for card rate postage. Any card larger than those dimensions is charged the applicable First-Class Mail letter rated. For Priority Mail over 5 pounds if the zone cannot be determined from a return address or cancellation, then the permit holder is charged zone 4 postage for the weight of the piece.
Furthermore, for all you people "strap a brick to the BRM and throw it in a mail box... yeah that will get them"
p. 913 S922 1.6
BRM may not be used for any purpose other than that intended by the permit holder, even if postage is affixed. In cases where a BRM card or letter is used improperly as a label, the USPS treats the item as waste.
Please moderate this up, and that other idiot dowm.
I did not claim that the study wouldn't have scientific value, simply that the researchers themselves claimed that the volunteer work would have no scientific value. I was commenting on that. It would be like me asking you to volunteer for the feed the hungry association, but then tell you your volunteer work will consist of moving rocks, and that it will in no way help hungry people.
Secondly, the more I read this - and look at how much work was put into the website - it sounds like this is just some low level NASA guy who is supposed to catalogue craters all day in a basement of some NASA building, who want's to pawn his work off on "volunteers" from the internet.
"Frankly if properly analysed, this work will DO have some scientific value."
Read the FAQ, they are stating that it won't DO have some scientific value.:P
"Science is not an activity for dusty shelves and old professors in glasses 1cm. thick"
Where did I imply that it was?
As for the rest of your post, I couldn't understand what your point is, could you please clarify? I have no idea what your metaphor comparing mars to a once thought of moon is getting at. Nor can I fathom how teaching without practice relates to my post.
And thank you for informing me that Mars has a complex history of craterization.
I think its kind of insulting to be handing out work to volunteers that has no scientific value (see FAQ quote at end of my post) other than determining in this specific context, "the public is ready willing and able to help science." Even if this study proves that the public can help NASA out - how does it prove that the public will help in the future? Furthermore, couldn't they find something more worthwhile for volunteers to do, and still use that experience to determine if the public can help out.
I find a similar problem often when I volunteer to help various organizations in and around my community, I am assigned some menial task or there is no important work to be done. (i.e. It would have been better for me to work an extra hour and donate the money I would of made to the organization, so they could hire someone for at least 5 hours of menial work) Even worse, a lot of times they might make me do something in a ridiculously inefficient manner. In other words if I used my "geek" background and somehow implement a computer or what have you - the task would be accomplished much more efficiently. If that's awkwardly put sorry, but I am sure the/. community will understand.
Sorry about this ranting, but I just had to vent. Don't get me wrong, sometimes volunteer work can be very worthwhile, but it seems more often than not - it isn't.
From the FAQ :
Q. What scientific questions can be answered by the data that we clickworkers are providing?
A. The first stage of this pilot project is only trying to answer some meta-science questions:
Is the public ready, willing, and able to help science?
Does this new way of powering science analysis produce just as good results as the traditional way?
So, at first, we will not be breaking new ground, just reprocessing Mars images that have already been analyzed.
Seriously, The problem is you know all your coworkers on a work level basis only. I think that if you hung out with them on a purely social level, you would begin to understand them better - and they would begin to understand you better.
It just not going to work in a forced workplace environment.
There is a phenomena known as "Iridium-Flares" by which one can see the very bright sun reflections off of the iridium satellites. Go to Heavens-Above.com for predictions when you can see this from your hometown.
"The new owners, led by Dan Colussy, president of Pan American World Airways from 1978 to 1980,"... so now the guy who ran Pan-Am into the ground, is going to run Iridium? Wouldn't this just increase "anxiety on re-entry" ?
Cessna's CJ1 just got certified recently by the FAA as flight worthy. You can fly it yourself - (Only 1 pilot needed.) The avionics in it are as advanced as jets much more expensive. Flying it is as easy as keeping your targeting reticle on the Quake 3 bot in Q3DM0 with difficulty set to "I CAN WIN."
It has a range of 1,475 nautical miles, so from slashdot HQ in Michigan you can pretty much cover the majority of North American in one hop.
It has a usable payload of 3,895 lbs. when fully fueled. Think about the bandwith of a CJ1 with a almost 4,000 pounds of backup tapes in the back.
I couldn't even set up a nationwide backbone capable of routing gigabytes of data with 11.9 million dollars. Let alone petabytes of data which not only have to be routed, but have the additional overhead of abstraction of jobs that have to be completed, and output returned to the original user?
Even if this happens, what if some scientist from geneva wants to use all this distributing power to give his distributed.net scores a boost? It's supposed to be as easy as using the electrical grid. "When scientists submit a processing job to this worldwide network of computers, the only thing they care about is that the job gets done. They don't know which machine (or machines) the work gets farmed out to." Who's going to pay for all this processor time? I guess they will have to install meters on the side of the scientist's building, and someone will have to come check it monthly.
Something tells me the author of this article, Katherine Freese, had to sit down and listen to alot of frustrated but free-publicity-loving people give metaphors so she could begin to comprehend.
Scientist says : "No, if we do this the ship won't fall over the edge of the earth, the earth is round."
She writes : "Scientists develop new technology to allow ships to stick to the bottom of the earth."
These IP lawyers at Kenyon & Kenyon, with offices worldwide, are probably pretty smart dudes. They probably have some idea that it could be postulated that they are threatening people without any good reason.
Can't they be sued for harassment, or wrongful prosecution if they ever did take action on this? What prevents a lawyer from being a hired gun to harass people? - it seems these days that your average slashdot user is running into more and more of these guys/gals.
I worked for different politicians in several "districts" around the country. Politicians ignore email only when demographics tell them to. For example, a state assemblyman in California or North Carolina is much more likely to pay attention to pile of email, then a legislator whose allegiance is to Kansas.
One second you slashdot guys are complaining that there is not very many english word domain names left, and the minute something gets done to do something about it _most_ of you are whining. Network Solutions should of always recieved payment up front unless you passed a credit check. Network Solutions caused this mess by allowing all these cybersquatters to register every name under the sun and then not pay for it, until someone came along offering said cybersquatter thousands of dollars. My corporation has been dealing with people like this for 2 years ago, with one of these jokers who registered pratically all three letter word registrations. Don't we want the fair market economy to reign? History has proven that if you don't allow normal economic pressures to balance the market, things just get all screwed up. I'll give you the great depression for starters. Network Solutions should stop giving the milk away for free.
I just bought a pioneer rear projection display. And in the manual it has very large very distinct warnings against using them with video game consoles.
First of all, people always speak of being able to brute force crypto algorithms. The real world feasibility of brute forcing a crypto algorithm is typically very low.
Consider Dk[C] = P : that is decryption function D using key K on ciphertext C to get plaintext P.
For every key K that you try in a brute force approach, you are going to produce a unique* plaintext P. All these stupid contests like distributed.net know what the beginning of the plaintext P should look like. Typically the beginning of plaintext P in a contest like the one previously mentioned is "The secret message is : "
Hopefully you see what I am getting at by now, every time in a brute force attack you try another key you are going to get another unique* plaintext. How are you going to check them all? Even if the plaintext is known to be ASCII english this is no trivial task. But what if plaintext P is just a number, for example a bank account #. Literally every possible key is going to produce a unique* number and there is not much to tell you which number is correct.
Anyways, I am just trying to put some perspective on these so called brute force attacks that have "cracked" certain algorithms.
As for the enigma rotor, I believe there is 5 rotors with 26 charachters each. 26^5 = 11,881,376 possible keys. Keeping in mind the limitations of brute force attacks, the only real method to crack this encryption is cryptanalysis.
D. Kahn wrote in "The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing" :
"A period of that length (26^5) thwarts any practical possibility of a straightforward solution on the basis of letter frequency...The cipher text would have to be as long as all the speeches made on the floor of the Senate and the House of Representatives in three sucessive sessions of Congress."
Oh yeah about my * for unique, i meant relatively unique depending on the properties of the encryption function. Most are designed to have this property. (obviously)
William Stallings points out in Cryptography and Network Security principles and practice that the real modern day significance of the rotor machines was the implementation of using multiple rounds of encryption (i.e. multiple rotors) to strengthen the encryption. This is what DES does.
It is my belief that if you know enough about the workings of the rotor machine the problem becomes as simple or as hard as solving systems of linear equations.
So my final answer for a million dollars is :
(26^5) decryption cycles which can be done relatively quickly, but ~ 11 million possible decryptions which could be sifted through very slowly.
Since the site is/.'d to volunteer you can email me - I am the volunteer coordinator. I will forward you details. (Again volunteers please moderate this up.)
Slashdot Mirror
You couldnt be more wrong... You are charged by the post office when the mail is returned.
From the Domestic Mail Manual available at http://pe.usps.gov
S-58 3.0 p. 914 DMM issue 56
"Each piece of returned BRM is charged the applicable single-piece First-Class or Priority Mail postage. Cards must meet the standards in C100 to qualify for card rate postage. Any card larger than those dimensions is charged the applicable First-Class Mail letter rated. For Priority Mail over 5 pounds if the zone cannot be determined from a return address or cancellation, then the permit holder is charged zone 4 postage for the weight of the piece.
Furthermore, for all you people "strap a brick to the BRM and throw it in a mail box... yeah that will get them"
p. 913 S922 1.6
BRM may not be used for any purpose other than that intended by the permit holder, even if postage is affixed. In cases where a BRM card or letter is used improperly as a label, the USPS treats the item as waste.
Please moderate this up, and that other idiot dowm.
I did not claim that the study wouldn't have scientific value, simply that the researchers themselves claimed that the volunteer work would have no scientific value. I was commenting on that. It would be like me asking you to volunteer for the feed the hungry association, but then tell you your volunteer work will consist of moving rocks, and that it will in no way help hungry people.
Secondly, the more I read this - and look at how much work was put into the website - it sounds like this is just some low level NASA guy who is supposed to catalogue craters all day in a basement of some NASA building, who want's to pawn his work off on "volunteers" from the internet.
Or maybe not.
Read the FAQ, they are stating that it won't DO have some scientific value. :P
"Science is not an activity for dusty shelves and old professors in glasses 1cm. thick"
Where did I imply that it was?
As for the rest of your post, I couldn't understand what your point is, could you please clarify? I have no idea what your metaphor comparing mars to a once thought of moon is getting at. Nor can I fathom how teaching without practice relates to my post.
And thank you for informing me that Mars has a complex history of craterization.
I think its kind of insulting to be handing out work to volunteers that has no scientific value (see FAQ quote at end of my post) other than determining in this specific context, "the public is ready willing and able to help science." Even if this study proves that the public can help NASA out - how does it prove that the public will help in the future? Furthermore, couldn't they find something more worthwhile for volunteers to do, and still use that experience to determine if the public can help out.
I find a similar problem often when I volunteer to help various organizations in and around my community, I am assigned some menial task or there is no important work to be done. (i.e. It would have been better for me to work an extra hour and donate the money I would of made to the organization, so they could hire someone for at least 5 hours of menial work) Even worse, a lot of times they might make me do something in a ridiculously inefficient manner. In other words if I used my "geek" background and somehow implement a computer or what have you - the task would be accomplished much more efficiently. If that's awkwardly put sorry, but I am sure the
Sorry about this ranting, but I just had to vent. Don't get me wrong, sometimes volunteer work can be very worthwhile, but it seems more often than not - it isn't.
From the FAQ :
Q. What scientific questions can be answered by the data that we clickworkers are providing?
A. The first stage of this pilot project is only trying to answer some meta-science questions:
Is the public ready, willing, and able to help science?
Does this new way of powering science analysis produce just as good results as the traditional way?
So, at first, we will not be breaking new ground, just reprocessing Mars images that have already been analyzed.
Seriously, The problem is you know all your coworkers on a work level basis only. I think that if you hung out with them on a purely social level, you would begin to understand them better - and they would begin to understand you better.
It just not going to work in a forced workplace environment.
Oh really,
/ 03 -31-00.htm
s ho p_8-13-98/Iridium_Flares.pdf
well then I guess these NASA astronomers are wrong.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980402.html
http://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/educ/science/2000
http://mcauley1.grc.nasa.gov/ISU/NOTES-LEO_Work
So, what do you base your definition on?
There is a phenomena known as "Iridium-Flares" by which one can see the very bright sun reflections off of the iridium satellites. Go to Heavens-Above.com for predictions when you can see this from your hometown.
-Jason
"The new owners, led by Dan Colussy, president of Pan American World Airways from 1978 to 1980,"... so now the guy who ran Pan-Am into the ground, is going to run Iridium? Wouldn't this just increase "anxiety on re-entry" ?
The slashdot headline is premature in stating that a tetrachromat had actually been found.
"Nevertheless, Dr. Jordan declines to say that she has finally found a tetrachromat, partly because her testing is still a work in progress."
Oh yeah it costs like between 11 and 14 million dollars depending on the options.
It has a range of 1,475 nautical miles, so from slashdot HQ in Michigan you can pretty much cover the majority of North American in one hop.
It has a usable payload of 3,895 lbs. when fully fueled. Think about the bandwith of a CJ1 with a almost 4,000 pounds of backup tapes in the back.
Check it out for yourself.
CitationJet 1 Homepage
I couldn't even set up a nationwide backbone capable of routing gigabytes of data with 11.9 million dollars. Let alone petabytes of data which not only have to be routed, but have the additional overhead of abstraction of jobs that have to be completed, and output returned to the original user?
Even if this happens, what if some scientist from geneva wants to use all this distributing power to give his distributed.net scores a boost? It's supposed to be as easy as using the electrical grid. "When scientists submit a processing job to this worldwide network of computers, the only thing they care about is that the job gets done. They don't know which machine (or machines) the work gets farmed out to." Who's going to pay for all this processor time? I guess they will have to install meters on the side of the scientist's building, and someone will have to come check it monthly.
Something tells me the author of this article, Katherine Freese, had to sit down and listen to alot of frustrated but free-publicity-loving people give metaphors so she could begin to comprehend.
Scientist says : "No, if we do this the ship won't fall over the edge of the earth, the earth is round."
She writes : "Scientists develop new technology to allow ships to stick to the bottom of the earth."
Its more expensive than just stamps silly. They are using fedex "to be absolutely sure" they will get tons of free publicity.
These IP lawyers at Kenyon & Kenyon, with offices worldwide, are probably pretty smart dudes. They probably have some idea that it could be postulated that they are threatening people without any good reason.
Can't they be sued for harassment, or wrongful prosecution if they ever did take action on this? What prevents a lawyer from being a hired gun to harass people? - it seems these days that your average slashdot user is running into more and more of these guys/gals.
I worked for different politicians in several "districts" around the country. Politicians ignore email only when demographics tell them to. For example, a state assemblyman in California or North Carolina is much more likely to pay attention to pile of email, then a legislator whose allegiance is to Kansas.
One second you slashdot guys are complaining that there is not very many english word domain names left, and the minute something gets done to do something about it _most_ of you are whining. Network Solutions should of always recieved payment up front unless you passed a credit check. Network Solutions caused this mess by allowing all these cybersquatters to register every name under the sun and then not pay for it, until someone came along offering said cybersquatter thousands of dollars. My corporation has been dealing with people like this for 2 years ago, with one of these jokers who registered pratically all three letter word registrations. Don't we want the fair market economy to reign? History has proven that if you don't allow normal economic pressures to balance the market, things just get all screwed up. I'll give you the great depression for starters. Network Solutions should stop giving the milk away for free.
I just bought a pioneer rear projection display. And in the manual it has very large very distinct warnings against using them with video game consoles.
First of all, people always speak of being able to brute force crypto algorithms. The real world feasibility of brute forcing a crypto algorithm is typically very low.
Consider Dk[C] = P : that is decryption function D using key K on ciphertext C to get plaintext P.
For every key K that you try in a brute force approach, you are going to produce a unique* plaintext P. All these stupid contests like distributed.net know what the beginning of the plaintext P should look like. Typically the beginning of plaintext P in a contest like the one previously mentioned is "The secret message is : "
Hopefully you see what I am getting at by now, every time in a brute force attack you try another key you are going to get another unique* plaintext. How are you going to check them all? Even if the plaintext is known to be ASCII english this is no trivial task. But what if plaintext P is just a number, for example a bank account #. Literally every possible key is going to produce a unique* number and there is not much to tell you which number is correct.
Anyways, I am just trying to put some perspective on these so called brute force attacks that have "cracked" certain algorithms.
As for the enigma rotor, I believe there is 5 rotors with 26 charachters each. 26^5 = 11,881,376 possible keys. Keeping in mind the limitations of brute force attacks, the only real method to crack this encryption is cryptanalysis.
D. Kahn wrote in "The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing" :
"A period of that length (26^5) thwarts any practical possibility of a straightforward solution on the basis of letter frequency...The cipher text would have to be as long as all the speeches made on the floor of the Senate and the House of Representatives in three sucessive sessions of Congress."
Oh yeah about my * for unique, i meant relatively unique depending on the properties of the encryption function. Most are designed to have this property. (obviously)
William Stallings points out in Cryptography and Network Security principles and practice that the real modern day significance of the rotor machines was the implementation of using multiple rounds of encryption (i.e. multiple rotors) to strengthen the encryption. This is what DES does.
It is my belief that if you know enough about the workings of the rotor machine the problem becomes as simple or as hard as solving systems of linear equations.
So my final answer for a million dollars is :
(26^5) decryption cycles which can be done relatively quickly, but ~ 11 million possible decryptions which could be sifted through very slowly.
jason@4u.net