Yeah, I forgot about that. That's not unique to Selectrics. I'm sure there were one-time-use ribbons for most typewriters back in the day. They made crisper, more professional-looking output.
The Ball-type IBM Selectric typewriters had a flaw that made it easy to tell what was being said just by the sound and delay between characters. You didn't even have to have the listening device in the typewriter, it could be across the room if it was "directional" enough.
While you could probably decode a lever-type typewriter's activity from just a good sound recording, it's probably much harder.
Oh, and as for trying to decode an inkjet- or thermal- electric typewriters just by the noise, "good luck with that."
Of course, today, if you can plant spy equipment in the room where the person is typing and you are good and well-funded, you don't need to rely on the noise the typewriter makes. Or, to put it another way, if you have a determined adversary who is significantly better than you, it's probably "game over" before the game even begins.
"If they make the bot good enough it'll become too hard to tell a bot from a kid with enough certainty for a botophile to be sure they are not chatting with an actual 14 year old, in which case the poor botophile will be arrested for doing something he had no intention of doing, namely, chatting up an underaged human being."
There, fixed that for you.
Botophile: Someone who loves to get it on with bots.
Some countries already have laws about animated stuff and written erotic fiction...
Yes. For example, the United States has a basic law that, according to the courts, say such things are legal unless they are actually obscene (a work doesn't have to portray under-aged characters to be obscene).
There are industries and use-cases when "smash first, don't bother asking questions later" this is the appropriate response.
However, such times are rare and they should be spelled out ahead of time and they should only include destroying equipment which either 1) is at least theoretically possible to infect in a way that cannot be cleaned, ever (e.g. an infected BIOS), or 2) is deemed too expensive to clean and the data-storage media cannot be sterilized in a cost-effective manner or at all (e.g. a very cheap but hard to sterilize device, or write-once media).
Basically, if you are one of the very few shops that would need to resort to such things, you should know ahead of time the scenarios in which: 1) after a short investigation, you know cleaning is sufficient 2) after a short investigation, you know cleaning will be insufficient so just skip it and go straight to data recovery and destruction 3) the "edge cases" where it's worth spending some amount of extra time figuring out if it's 1 or 2 or, if you still can't figure it out, assuming 2.
Unless you've got special mice and keyboard that can be infected in a way that makes them not cost effective to clean, there's no reason to destroy them just because of a virus infection. As for printers and cameras, the dumber the device, the more likely you have no reason to destroy it. As for uninfected systems - how can you be sure it's uninfected? You can be 99.999% or 99.999999% or some other "%" sure but if the system was connected to a compromised system, unless it's "infection-proof" like a dumb mouse or you are 100% sure that the compromised systems weren't infected with anything that could have been passed on to the allegedly-uninfected system, you can't really be sure.
By the way, there is one other element of the calculation I didn't mention: Unless you can be 100% sure the replacement systems aren't infected, you may be just as well off keeping a 99.999%-sure-we-are-uninfected system than buying a replacement that you are only 99.999% sure isn't uninfected. After all, if I were a state actor, and I managed to infiltrate the PC-provider for a US-government agency and was slipping in BIOS-spyware-hooks in newly-purchased equipment, and I knew that infecting 6 of agencies computers with run-of-the-mill malware would force them to buy all-new equipment... bwuhahahaha.
You think the sack of meat below your neck has anything to do with your consciousness?
By consciousness I assume you mean the "personality/soul/essence of your 'being'/whatever you want to call it."
Yes, it does.
I know my "personality" changes a bit when I'm hungry, tired, in physical pain, aroused (re: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3929305&cid=44166849 above), etc. That is, there are things that I would never do when thinking clearly but if I'm starving, fatigued, in pain, aroused, or otherwise operating far below my normal rational though, I might do (and later regret).
The "sack of meat below [my] neck" has a lot to do with this.
If you don't believe me, imagine how your personality would change at least temporarily if you were an 80 year old man who was in chronic pain whose libido left with his prostate removal a decade ago waking up with the body of a healthy 21 year old with a libido to match. You very well might forget your moral compass for a few seconds and make a remark to an attractive member of the hospital staff that you would regret as soon as your brain re-engaged and overrode your new hormones.
The point is to make the best use of the likely-decades-old "telephone wire" going from the "pole," "telephone box" (for underground wires), or in some cases, "neighborhood fiber box" to the customer's "internet box" (e.g. DSL modem).
This wire is typically no better than "CAT-3" and frequently far worse, electrically speaking. If it's older than a few decades, it's probably chosen for low cost and voice-grade capability. It may also be run close enough to other wiring that it will pick up noise that is tolerable on an analog-era POTS line but problematic on a digital line.
How can I build my own industrial-strength truck-mounted x-ray machine
then wade through the 90% of responses that amount to "do your own homework" and 9% of slightly-but-lethally-wrong answers in hopes of finding the 1% of answers that are close to correct and not lethally broken.
I don't need TV guide-type service. I just need a DVR with an OTA cable and some way to receive all available cable- or satellite channels that I'm paying for.
It would be NICE to subscribe and un-subscribe to services like Tivo's tv-guide, NetFlix, etc. later without making the box into e-waste.
I have - and still use - an analog DVR that used the old analog "cable tv over your PBS station" system but it lets you set things up manually if you want.
There are still a significant number of analog TVs, VCRs, etc. out there.
For the next few years, the FCC needs to encourage or require that manufacturers slow down the race to "planned obsolescence."
FOR THE TIME BEING, if I were the FCC I would require that manufacturers who provided any tuning capability at all and which market their devices as being able to receive OTA HD signals provide either analog-channel-3-in or offer a free adapter to any customer who asks if they do so within a reasonable time (a year, or the warranty period if less, for most products).
I would also require FOR THE TIME BEING that any device that is marketed as being able to "play to your TV" and which produces analog output (RGB, Svideo, component video, etc.) either provide channel-3 out or provide a free adapter as above.
Within 5-10 years these requirements should be lifted completely, and the "free adapter" requirement should be replaced with "make an adapter available at a reasonable cost, unless such adapters are already widely available at a reasonable cost" much, much sooner than 5 years.
As an example, if "channel 3 to component video" and "component video to channel 3" adapters are widely available for under $10-$15 each by the time the "free" requirement is lifted, this regulatory burden on manufacturers that provide component-video-in and -out will be pretty much nil beyond filling out some paperwork.
As soon as the "virtual" currency is traded for something in the real world, I would call that a "taxable event."
If it's traded "in-world" then I would hope the IRS would leave you alone until you incurred a "taxable event" unless perhaps the "in-world" things were proxies for real-world things. For example, if there was an "in-world bank" that let you make "e-coin-of-the-realm" deposits and there was a real-world "liquid" market for "e-coin-of-the-realm" money AND the predominant use of "e-coin-of-the-realm" deposits were to hold "money" until it was cashed out "in the real world" vs. to "hold money" until it was later spent "in-world," the IRS would be right to consider treating such deposits as if they were a "cash-out" into the real world. However, they should (but likely won't) give people a break until they issue specific guidance saying "From [some future date forward] deposits into this bank in this virtual world will be considered the same as a cash-out for tax purposes, and here is why" and issues similar guidance for any other "online banks" whose transactions meet the same criteria (fair is fair).
Now, don't forget, you only have to pay for your profit. If you mine bitcoins for business, all direct business costs are generally deductible. Electricity, the costs of hardware that are dedicated to mining, etc. For in-game entrepreneurship that you later cash in on, any "real-world" expenses might be deductible if you could demonstrate that the expense really was a business expense not an entertainment expense ("good luck with that" for online games, but for non-entertainment virtual-goods/currency entrepreneurship I would expect you to have a fighting chance).
This can even provide a small tax-write-off against your personal taxes as long as it doesn't trigger "hobby disguised as a business" rules. If you are doing it as a hobby you can generally deduct up to your gross profit, leaving you with a "net profit" of no lower than zero. This means there's no write-off against your other income but at least you won't pay taxes on your "gross" gains from mining.
If more than a few minutes of screen-time of a feature film were similar to a given image or video clip, would that film receive an NC-17 (United States) or equivalent (non-US) rating based on sexual content or sexual content in combination with other content (e.g. sexual violence, etc.).
For a video longer than about an hour, would the video as a whole receive an NC-17 or equivalent rating based on sexual content or sexual content in combination with other content (e.g. sexual violence, etc.)?
If the answer is "yes" then it's almost certainly porn in the legal sense of the word.
If the answer is "no" then it may or may not be "porn" in the legal sense of the word but IMHO it is deserving of "free speech" protection in countries with "free speech" protections as strong as those in the United States.
One modification that would apply in "non porn" sexually suggestive images of minors or which appeared to be minors:
If the actors or characters in the film are believed by the rating agency to be underage (18 in the US) or they appeared to be underage (or the ages were ambiguous), then modify the above to be "if the movie was re-shot so the actors and characters were believed to be of legal age and they appeared to be of legal age" to remove the situation where a given scene would be "rated R" if it had adult actors and characters but "NC-17" if the actors or characters were either minors or their status as adults was not clear.
All of the above applies to live-action shots. It's my understanding that in the United States at least, the Supreme Court has ruled that non-obscene hand-drawn and computer-drawn imagery which does not rely on an actual child being filmed is outside the scope of "child pornography" laws because it is protected as "free speech."
Slashdot Mirror
the internet is ... porn
There, fixed that for you.
Google Maps and the like presumably use feedback from smart phones (among other data sources) to build their real-time congestion maps.
I use my smart phone's map app to decide what route to take and whether to delay my trip.
So, even today, smart phones are helping reduce congestion even if they aren't actually reducing traffic.
In the United States, the Miller Test applies.
Yeah, I forgot about that. That's not unique to Selectrics. I'm sure there were one-time-use ribbons for most typewriters back in the day. They made crisper, more professional-looking output.
Yes, but every line is documented the same way, "don't touch this because I don't know what it does but sometimes it works".
Um, so, DON'T TOUCH IT already.
The Ball-type IBM Selectric typewriters had a flaw that made it easy to tell what was being said just by the sound and delay between characters. You didn't even have to have the listening device in the typewriter, it could be across the room if it was "directional" enough.
While you could probably decode a lever-type typewriter's activity from just a good sound recording, it's probably much harder.
Oh, and as for trying to decode an inkjet- or thermal- electric typewriters just by the noise, "good luck with that."
Of course, today, if you can plant spy equipment in the room where the person is typing and you are good and well-funded, you don't need to rely on the noise the typewriter makes. Or, to put it another way, if you have a determined adversary who is significantly better than you, it's probably "game over" before the game even begins.
"If they make the bot good enough it'll become too hard to tell a bot from a kid with enough certainty for a botophile to be sure they are not chatting with an actual 14 year old, in which case the poor botophile will be arrested for doing something he had no intention of doing, namely, chatting up an underaged human being."
There, fixed that for you.
Botophile: Someone who loves to get it on with bots.
Man.. this bot is going to get laid more than I do
What's the smallest whole number greater than zero?
PS: I think your statement applies to most /. readers.
Some countries already have laws about animated stuff and written erotic fiction...
Yes. For example, the United States has a basic law that, according to the courts, say such things are legal unless they are actually obscene (a work doesn't have to portray under-aged characters to be obscene).
Capital punishment for sex crimes that don't kill the victim is illegal in the United States.
However, in the country that brought you The Spanish Inquisition, this might just fly....
Obligatory question: Which head to chop off first?
Horny men looking for sex with underage extinct birds are all over the Internet, right?
Embed the data in cockroach genes. That ensures they will last as long as this planet supports insect life.
At least that's what my old B-school roommate told me.
There are industries and use-cases when "smash first, don't bother asking questions later" this is the appropriate response.
However, such times are rare and they should be spelled out ahead of time and they should only include destroying equipment which either 1) is at least theoretically possible to infect in a way that cannot be cleaned, ever (e.g. an infected BIOS), or 2) is deemed too expensive to clean and the data-storage media cannot be sterilized in a cost-effective manner or at all (e.g. a very cheap but hard to sterilize device, or write-once media).
Basically, if you are one of the very few shops that would need to resort to such things, you should know ahead of time the scenarios in which:
1) after a short investigation, you know cleaning is sufficient
2) after a short investigation, you know cleaning will be insufficient so just skip it and go straight to data recovery and destruction
3) the "edge cases" where it's worth spending some amount of extra time figuring out if it's 1 or 2 or, if you still can't figure it out, assuming 2.
Unless you've got special mice and keyboard that can be infected in a way that makes them not cost effective to clean, there's no reason to destroy them just because of a virus infection. As for printers and cameras, the dumber the device, the more likely you have no reason to destroy it. As for uninfected systems - how can you be sure it's uninfected? You can be 99.999% or 99.999999% or some other "%" sure but if the system was connected to a compromised system, unless it's "infection-proof" like a dumb mouse or you are 100% sure that the compromised systems weren't infected with anything that could have been passed on to the allegedly-uninfected system, you can't really be sure.
By the way, there is one other element of the calculation I didn't mention: Unless you can be 100% sure the replacement systems aren't infected, you may be just as well off keeping a 99.999%-sure-we-are-uninfected system than buying a replacement that you are only 99.999% sure isn't uninfected. After all, if I were a state actor, and I managed to infiltrate the PC-provider for a US-government agency and was slipping in BIOS-spyware-hooks in newly-purchased equipment, and I knew that infecting 6 of agencies computers with run-of-the-mill malware would force them to buy all-new equipment... bwuhahahaha.
You think the sack of meat below your neck has anything to do with your consciousness?
By consciousness I assume you mean the "personality/soul/essence of your 'being'/whatever you want to call it."
Yes, it does.
I know my "personality" changes a bit when I'm hungry, tired, in physical pain, aroused (re: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3929305&cid=44166849 above), etc. That is, there are things that I would never do when thinking clearly but if I'm starving, fatigued, in pain, aroused, or otherwise operating far below my normal rational though, I might do (and later regret).
The "sack of meat below [my] neck" has a lot to do with this.
If you don't believe me, imagine how your personality would change at least temporarily if you were an 80 year old man who was in chronic pain whose libido left with his prostate removal a decade ago waking up with the body of a healthy 21 year old with a libido to match. You very well might forget your moral compass for a few seconds and make a remark to an attractive member of the hospital staff that you would regret as soon as your brain re-engaged and overrode your new hormones.
Depending on local and state politics, political pressure and "public shame" can overrule bean-counters.
The point is to make the best use of the likely-decades-old "telephone wire" going from the "pole," "telephone box" (for underground wires), or in some cases, "neighborhood fiber box" to the customer's "internet box" (e.g. DSL modem).
This wire is typically no better than "CAT-3" and frequently far worse, electrically speaking. If it's older than a few decades, it's probably chosen for low cost and voice-grade capability. It may also be run close enough to other wiring that it will pick up noise that is tolerable on an analog-era POTS line but problematic on a digital line.
They are supposed to "Ask Slashdot"
How can I build my own industrial-strength truck-mounted x-ray machine
then wade through the 90% of responses that amount to "do your own homework" and 9% of slightly-but-lethally-wrong answers in hopes of finding the 1% of answers that are close to correct and not lethally broken.
Job security.
For someone.
By the way, I still sometimes use a graphite writing stick.
The cloud is in the basement, but the WiFi balloons are in the sky.
No wonder I can't find anything, I keep looking for the cloud in the sky and WiFi in the coffee shop.
I don't need TV guide-type service. I just need a DVR with an OTA cable and some way to receive all available cable- or satellite channels that I'm paying for.
It would be NICE to subscribe and un-subscribe to services like Tivo's tv-guide, NetFlix, etc. later without making the box into e-waste.
I have - and still use - an analog DVR that used the old analog "cable tv over your PBS station" system but it lets you set things up manually if you want.
There are still a significant number of analog TVs, VCRs, etc. out there.
For the next few years, the FCC needs to encourage or require that manufacturers slow down the race to "planned obsolescence."
FOR THE TIME BEING, if I were the FCC I would require that manufacturers who provided any tuning capability at all and which market their devices as being able to receive OTA HD signals provide either analog-channel-3-in or offer a free adapter to any customer who asks if they do so within a reasonable time (a year, or the warranty period if less, for most products).
I would also require FOR THE TIME BEING that any device that is marketed as being able to "play to your TV" and which produces analog output (RGB, Svideo, component video, etc.) either provide channel-3 out or provide a free adapter as above.
Within 5-10 years these requirements should be lifted completely, and the "free adapter" requirement should be replaced with "make an adapter available at a reasonable cost, unless such adapters are already widely available at a reasonable cost" much, much sooner than 5 years.
As an example, if "channel 3 to component video" and "component video to channel 3" adapters are widely available for under $10-$15 each by the time the "free" requirement is lifted, this regulatory burden on manufacturers that provide component-video-in and -out will be pretty much nil beyond filling out some paperwork.
As soon as the "virtual" currency is traded for something in the real world, I would call that a "taxable event."
If it's traded "in-world" then I would hope the IRS would leave you alone until you incurred a "taxable event" unless perhaps the "in-world" things were proxies for real-world things. For example, if there was an "in-world bank" that let you make "e-coin-of-the-realm" deposits and there was a real-world "liquid" market for "e-coin-of-the-realm" money AND the predominant use of "e-coin-of-the-realm" deposits were to hold "money" until it was cashed out "in the real world" vs. to "hold money" until it was later spent "in-world," the IRS would be right to consider treating such deposits as if they were a "cash-out" into the real world. However, they should (but likely won't) give people a break until they issue specific guidance saying "From [some future date forward] deposits into this bank in this virtual world will be considered the same as a cash-out for tax purposes, and here is why" and issues similar guidance for any other "online banks" whose transactions meet the same criteria (fair is fair).
Now, don't forget, you only have to pay for your profit. If you mine bitcoins for business, all direct business costs are generally deductible. Electricity, the costs of hardware that are dedicated to mining, etc. For in-game entrepreneurship that you later cash in on, any "real-world" expenses might be deductible if you could demonstrate that the expense really was a business expense not an entertainment expense ("good luck with that" for online games, but for non-entertainment virtual-goods/currency entrepreneurship I would expect you to have a fighting chance).
This can even provide a small tax-write-off against your personal taxes as long as it doesn't trigger "hobby disguised as a business" rules. If you are doing it as a hobby you can generally deduct up to your gross profit, leaving you with a "net profit" of no lower than zero. This means there's no write-off against your other income but at least you won't pay taxes on your "gross" gains from mining.
If more than a few minutes of screen-time of a feature film were similar to a given image or video clip, would that film receive an NC-17 (United States) or equivalent (non-US) rating based on sexual content or sexual content in combination with other content (e.g. sexual violence, etc.).
For a video longer than about an hour, would the video as a whole receive an NC-17 or equivalent rating based on sexual content or sexual content in combination with other content (e.g. sexual violence, etc.)?
If the answer is "yes" then it's almost certainly porn in the legal sense of the word.
If the answer is "no" then it may or may not be "porn" in the legal sense of the word but IMHO it is deserving of "free speech" protection in countries with "free speech" protections as strong as those in the United States.
One modification that would apply in "non porn" sexually suggestive images of minors or which appeared to be minors:
If the actors or characters in the film are believed by the rating agency to be underage (18 in the US) or they appeared to be underage (or the ages were ambiguous), then modify the above to be "if the movie was re-shot so the actors and characters were believed to be of legal age and they appeared to be of legal age" to remove the situation where a given scene would be "rated R" if it had adult actors and characters but "NC-17" if the actors or characters were either minors or their status as adults was not clear.
All of the above applies to live-action shots. It's my understanding that in the United States at least, the Supreme Court has ruled that non-obscene hand-drawn and computer-drawn imagery which does not rely on an actual child being filmed is outside the scope of "child pornography" laws because it is protected as "free speech."
Judges have already declared that porn is basically undefinable,
I've heard this was true of obscenity, but I've never heard that statement from a judicial source regarding porn.
I'm not saying it isn't a true statement, and I'm not saying judges haven't said it. I'm only saying I haven't heard of a judge saying it.