"I mean, how often in this day and age do they have to tell colors from the cockpit window on the ground?"
When they're looking at landing-lights, and want to know which ones are on the runway and which are on the fields at the end of the runway? (yeah I know it's an obvious pattern even without colour)
Other aircrafts' port and starboard lights would be quite handy to see in their true colours as well...
"I can see a reporter in a repressive country using it to get the stories out before the police take away their camera."
Actually I've thought for a while how useful this would be for demonstrations in the UK and the USA, where it would be incredibly useful to have immediate image-upload even if your camera gets taken. You would need a nearby laptop in a safe place, presumably.
"Since you're an AC and I can't message you privately, I'll just have to reply. Beeping soil moisture indicators -- sounds great. How'd you make them, and are they cheap enough to have *lots* in a home?"
I'm not the AC you seek but you it's a typical high-school technology project. Pity that slashdot can't do sketches (well probably not really..)
Sensor: double-sided PCB. Solder one connection to each side and stick it in the soil.
Measurement: Connect a resistor (10K?) and the sensor in series across the power supply. Call the point inbetween them "A". Then connect a potentiometer (variable resistor, 100K?) across the power supply, and call it's centre connection "B"
Triggering: put A and B as the inputs to a comparator. (like an operational amplifier but more sensitive). Adjust the potentiometer until the output is one voltage when the sensor is wet, and a completely different voltage when it's dry.
Low-current outputs: connect buzzer, LED etc. between the output of the comparator and the appropriate power connection (choose which one so that it turns on when it's dry, obviously)
High-current outputs: Send the output of the comparator into the "base" of an NPN transistor, attach its emitter to negative, and put the buzzer between its collector and positive.
Oscillating output to drive the simplest, cheapeast piezo-buzzers: look up "multivibrator" (oscillator made out of 2 logic gates), or the 7555 timer chip, to see how you can make the output toggle between + and - volts several thousand times per second when it's dry, so you can send that signal to a buzzer.
Better timed output: lookup how to connect 2 or 3 7555 timer chips in sequence to get something which beeps momentarily every 10 minutes (thus not wasting your battery, but still telling you about the plant's need of refreshment)
"Do you see any way to experimentally back up their claims of 200,000 years longevity? "Accelerated weathering" isn't a valid answer."
NASA management report that it has survived the previous 10 years, therefore it's probably going to last another 200,000 years. But they had to redefine "survive". And "year".
"But don't forget to keep administrative control from the users and limited to the a few users."
Specifically, make sure you transfer power to yourself and your friends. It's fun having complete control over people, isn't it? Good thing power doesn't corrupt.
"Run security audits to make sure only the chosen few have administrator rights."
After the third time missing a meeting due to the PC having an incorrect clock, no administrator access to fix it, and a big wait-time for the IT department to do anything, I decided I never want to work for an organisation with someone like you in it. Other people feel the same way about their wallpapers, their favourite browser (you do lock down people's PCs so they only run Internet Explorer, don't you?) and other similar things.
The classic one is getting a tar.gz or a.pdf or other such file from a client and realizing that the IT department never even considered the possibility that you might need to download additional software occasionally to open such things. Of course, it makes you feel important when people have to telephone you many times per day to do trivial things like installing software (as if you know the difference between good and bad software just by looking at the name)
"Remove the ability to disable AV."
Watch as your developers' machines take 25 minutes to recompile an application that used to take 3 minutes, as the virus-scanner scans every single file they open, including all standard headers and libraries...
Indeed, watch as the emails relating to the bespoke software you're buying get mysteriously deleted (quarrantined, delayed, or just disappear) as the software company has attached the new build of your software as an EXE file. You have no idea how much time we waste trying to communicate with customers that use such AV solutions.
From the article: "In spite of the Policies in place that prohibit download and installation of software, inspite of the policies in place that prohibit P2P applications"... etc., etc.
In response to articles like this by the network nazis selling lockdown software ["your employees are downloading programs - stop them now!"] , let's imagine that for some unknown reason I want to download and run a program from the internet. (Say for example, I've just discovered that our core business requires that I can decode a certain type of file, or that we've just discovered we need a WAV editor or a video converter or something...)
Imagine that it comes as a Windows.exe file.
Handler on Duty believes that downloading and running that program should be prohibited, with severe consequences if I were to download and run the program. I would be blamed if it were to be a virus, spyware, or adware. Even if it was a reputable GPL project, some companies would turn purple-faced and declare that it mustn't run on the company computers.
Exactly how much use is such a policy? It seems that if you were to allow a manager such as he into your organisation, you simply wouldn't be able to obtain software to do your work. Assuming that IT department won't provide virtual-machines to test with, won't test programs for you, and has no access to the source-code of any of these programs (and don't have the resources to audit them even if source were available), if the virus-scanners can't detect viruses less than a day old, and assuming it takes days if not months (years, at any university) for the IT dept to certify a program as "safe to run", the answer presumably, is to force people not to do their work, or to use inadequate tools. (how many people have you seen using powerpoint to edit a picture because they can't download a real program?)
Just seems quite odd, this "despite our warnings not to run programs from the internet" stuff. Exactly how are you supposed to know that Win2KSP4 is ok, realplayer isn't ok, XMLedit is okay but XMLeditor isn't, RSSfeed is okay but the plugin formerly known as claria isn't, that the barney toolbar will crap on your PC but the google toolbar won't?
Either you need a whole big IT department to test all these programs on isolated networks, or you need to show people how to run a program as an unpriviledged username other than their own (and give permissions on their PC to allow this). Telling people not to run EXEs from the internet just isn't any use to anybody.
""Middle-earth Atlas: Tracing the Journeys of the Fellowship" interactive map "New Zealand as Middle-earth" interactive map w/on-location footage"
Putting an actual physical map in the box would probably add a fair amount of value to these things... wonder if they'll consider that in future releases?
"Get the Return of the King Extended version, and soon after they will release a complete box set of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and Return of the King, that have even more footage than all the previous extended versions combined"
"The US Govt can't own a copyright. Thats why its publications are free. This is one area where the US is ahead of other countries in copyright law."
If anyone doesn't realise quite how far the US is ahead on this one, you can get digital maps showing streets, rivers, some buildings, rail, boundaries, ZIP codes, etc. for the whole of the US for free. Needless to say this is extremely useful for a whole host of things.
In Britain, this information is 'owned' by the Ordnance survey (their surveying was done using government money) and will cost you around $100 per square kilometre to use their data (nevermind redistribution rights, you have to enumerate each person who might have access to the data).
If $100/sq.km sounds a lot, the US covers 9 million sq.km
Here in UK (and probably elsewhere too), everyone uses 15-year old mapping data, because that's all that they can get for reasonable cost. And that data is available for free because the USA created it. (The NOAA/VMAP data of course). By everyone, I mean military, councils, government and probably even aviation. Ordnance Survey maps may have been created for the benefit of the military, but damned if they're not going to demand $10 per paper sheet for each one, to the extent that even defence research people always use the free american data instead.
So it can get pretty bad if your government ever starts restricting map data. It may sound trivial from where you stand, but you stand to become like the UK, where not even the government can use its own data, the departments are so territorial (no pun intended)
"My gf has fallen in love with the "Nuke anything" extension, she thinks its cool to make geek stuff go away bit by bit (she sits and wipes out bits of/.)."
"The purpose of a lock is to keep honest and semi-honest people from taking your stuff. If someone is damned and determined to take your bike, he's going to get it, regardless of what lock you use."
That would be a problem with using only one layer of security (i.e. a bike-lock). If you have your bike in a locked shed, with an alarm that sounds when someone breaks into the shed, and a lock inside the shed that takes longer to break than the time between the previous alarm sounding and the ambulance arriving to pick-up the remnants of the thief, then the system can be provably secure.
Same thing when you leave your bike at work. It's in a locked cycle-locker which takes 3 minutes to open. When someone starts trying to break in, the security-guard sees them on CCTV, and 2 minutes later they have to stop working on the lock, to deal with the attention of the security-guards.
Again, same thing works in public areas. Assuming you live in a civilised modern city, you put your bike in a locker, lock it, and if anyone tries to break-in, the car-park attendant phones the police, who arrive to demonstrate some different types of lock to the thief.
Of course, this all fails when you have just one layer of security and no notification when the outer layer fails. Really, bike-locks should have an "outer layer" which pages you when someone starts taking the covers off your lock to get-at the real lock inside. But bike alarms are damn-near impossible to get right, as the combination of constraints (size) and requirements becomes ridiculously difficult to solve.
It would be nice to make a bike-alarm which lights a smoke-cannister when it's tampered with, but the problem always seems to be (a) how to make sure it can't be set-off until someone's already proven their intent to break-in (i.e. can't kick it to set it off), and (b) how to make sure it's the first thing to be attacked, so you can't pick/break the bike-lock first, then set-off the alarm when you're nearly finished.
"it sounds like they are only offering to let you spend more money on a new product by a company that sold you a defective product the first time around. "Please reward us for our mistake.""
As you say, that's going to be a big problem for everyone who doesn't keep £30 receipts for longer than a year... I'm hoping the terms will be more flexible than that (indeed, having the offer available in the UK would make a good start).
Why? Well look at what kryptonite stand to lose. Their entire reputation. Imagine if somebody actually uses this, and one day, every bike with a kryptonite lock disappears because the owners didn't have their receipts. Kryptonite will never sell a product again if that happens. So here's hoping they'll do the sensible thing, and replace all locks regardless. After all, the key number tells you when the lock was made, regardless of whether it was registered or not.
And with locks I use everyday, I'm hoping it won't be a "send it away and get a replacement in 2 months" job either...
"Um, I'm listening to Binkley, who did his Biography and the Chicago Tribune, both of whom state there are some two hundred pages of records which HAVE NOT been released. I'm also looking at the Defense Department which states that Kerry has NOT signed form 180 authorizing full disclosure of his military records."
Because now is a good time to distract voters from any of the issues which affect them, by giving them 200 pages of what will surely become conspiracy theory, to discuss to death in the next few months?
C'mon, you saw every single newspaper and radio station waste 3-4 days just discussing those two sheets of paper on the Bush letter. Give them a folder full of documents, and they'll never get around to asking who's the best person to run the country. It'll just be nitpicking over typewriter fonts, for the rest of the election campaign, and at the end, people will realise (or maybe not) that they don't have enough information on who's the best candidate.
"Build more nuclear reactors. Develop a working plutonium breeder"
Or just build your stores closer together so you don't have to drive 50m to get from one store to its neighbour, or drive 3 miles from your home to get to anything resembling a mall.
Come to think of it, having houses in the same city as where people work might help too. Why mix offices and houses, when everyone can have a 40-minute drive to prepare them for the day's work?
The recent update to the jargon file of course, includes this:
[In 2003, SCO sued IBM in an action which, among other things, alleged SCO's proprietary control of Linux. The SCO suit rapidly became infamous for the number and magnitude of falsehoods alleged in SCO's filings. In October 2003, SCO's lawyers filed a memorandum in which they actually had the temerity to link to the web version of this entry in furtherance of their claims. Whilst we appreciate the compliment of being treated as an authority, we can return it only by observing that SCO has become a nest of liars and thieves compared to which IBM at its historic worst looked positively angelic. Any judge or law clerk reading this should surf through to my collected resources on this topic for the appalling details.--ESR]
"A blue screen in XP isn't even the same screen. The only time it ever comes up is for a hardware problem -- the kind of thing that will be unrecoverable in any modern operating system."
such as running a Java program, installing a soundcard, or using USB-devices during the full moon...
Slashdot Mirror
"I mean, how often in this day and age do they have to tell colors from the cockpit window on the ground?"
When they're looking at landing-lights, and want to know which ones are on the runway and which are on the fields at the end of the runway? (yeah I know it's an obvious pattern even without colour)
Other aircrafts' port and starboard lights would be quite handy to see in their true colours as well...
"For a terrorist, they'd be shooting several miles at a target the size of... your eye."
With a laser whose spot size might easily be a metre wide or more at that distance.
"Stay where you are, we'll be over in black vans to pick you up in a couple of minutes.."
Make sure you blindfold the pilots of your black helicopters as they fly in, so they don't get blinded by his laser...
"is there any way to justify a camera that costs more than a used Toyota?"
Costs less to maintain? Takes better pictures? Makes you look cool?
"I can see a reporter in a repressive country using it to get the stories out before the police take away their camera."
Actually I've thought for a while how useful this would be for demonstrations in the UK and the USA, where it would be incredibly useful to have immediate image-upload even if your camera gets taken. You would need a nearby laptop in a safe place, presumably.
"How Napster used to be."
Or how MP3.com used to be
What was the point of deleting that, the only useful internet record store ever to operate?
"Since you're an AC and I can't message you privately, I'll just have to reply. Beeping soil moisture indicators -- sounds great. How'd you make them, and are they cheap enough to have *lots* in a home?"
I'm not the AC you seek but you it's a typical high-school technology project. Pity that slashdot can't do sketches (well probably not really..)
Sensor: double-sided PCB. Solder one connection to each side and stick it in the soil.
Measurement: Connect a resistor (10K?) and the sensor in series across the power supply. Call the point inbetween them "A". Then connect a potentiometer (variable resistor, 100K?) across the power supply, and call it's centre connection "B"
Triggering: put A and B as the inputs to a comparator. (like an operational amplifier but more sensitive). Adjust the potentiometer until the output is one voltage when the sensor is wet, and a completely different voltage when it's dry.
Low-current outputs: connect buzzer, LED etc. between the output of the comparator and the appropriate power connection (choose which one so that it turns on when it's dry, obviously)
High-current outputs: Send the output of the comparator into the "base" of an NPN transistor, attach its emitter to negative, and put the buzzer between its collector and positive.
Oscillating output to drive the simplest, cheapeast piezo-buzzers: look up "multivibrator" (oscillator made out of 2 logic gates), or the 7555 timer chip, to see how you can make the output toggle between + and - volts several thousand times per second when it's dry, so you can send that signal to a buzzer.
Better timed output: lookup how to connect 2 or 3 7555 timer chips in sequence to get something which beeps momentarily every 10 minutes (thus not wasting your battery, but still telling you about the plant's need of refreshment)
"Nothing that a human hand has made has lasted much past 10,000 years"
Almost exactly 10,000 years, it seems, although I don't know what condition those houses are in. Is there anything older?
"Do you see any way to experimentally back up their claims of 200,000 years longevity? "Accelerated weathering" isn't a valid answer."
NASA management report that it has survived the previous 10 years, therefore it's probably going to last another 200,000 years. But they had to redefine "survive". And "year".
"But don't forget to keep administrative control from the users and limited to the a few users."
.pdf or other such file from a client and realizing that the IT department never even considered the possibility that you might need to download additional software occasionally to open such things. Of course, it makes you feel important when people have to telephone you many times per day to do trivial things like installing software (as if you know the difference between good and bad software just by looking at the name)
Specifically, make sure you transfer power to yourself and your friends. It's fun having complete control over people, isn't it? Good thing power doesn't corrupt.
"Run security audits to make sure only the chosen few have administrator rights."
After the third time missing a meeting due to the PC having an incorrect clock, no administrator access to fix it, and a big wait-time for the IT department to do anything, I decided I never want to work for an organisation with someone like you in it. Other people feel the same way about their wallpapers, their favourite browser (you do lock down people's PCs so they only run Internet Explorer, don't you?) and other similar things.
The classic one is getting a tar.gz or a
"Remove the ability to disable AV."
Watch as your developers' machines take 25 minutes to recompile an application that used to take 3 minutes, as the virus-scanner scans every single file they open, including all standard headers and libraries...
Indeed, watch as the emails relating to the bespoke software you're buying get mysteriously deleted (quarrantined, delayed, or just disappear) as the software company has attached the new build of your software as an EXE file. You have no idea how much time we waste trying to communicate with customers that use such AV solutions.
From the article: "In spite of the Policies in place that prohibit download and installation of software, inspite of the policies in place that prohibit P2P applications"... etc., etc.
.exe file.
In response to articles like this by the network nazis selling lockdown software ["your employees are downloading programs - stop them now!"] , let's imagine that for some unknown reason I want to download and run a program from the internet. (Say for example, I've just discovered that our core business requires that I can decode a certain type of file, or that we've just discovered we need a WAV editor or a video converter or something...)
Imagine that it comes as a Windows
Handler on Duty believes that downloading and running that program should be prohibited, with severe consequences if I were to download and run the program. I would be blamed if it were to be a virus, spyware, or adware. Even if it was a reputable GPL project, some companies would turn purple-faced and declare that it mustn't run on the company computers.
Exactly how much use is such a policy? It seems that if you were to allow a manager such as he into your organisation, you simply wouldn't be able to obtain software to do your work. Assuming that IT department won't provide virtual-machines to test with, won't test programs for you, and has no access to the source-code of any of these programs (and don't have the resources to audit them even if source were available), if the virus-scanners can't detect viruses less than a day old, and assuming it takes days if not months (years, at any university) for the IT dept to certify a program as "safe to run", the answer presumably, is to force people not to do their work, or to use inadequate tools. (how many people have you seen using powerpoint to edit a picture because they can't download a real program?)
Just seems quite odd, this "despite our warnings not to run programs from the internet" stuff. Exactly how are you supposed to know that Win2KSP4 is ok, realplayer isn't ok, XMLedit is okay but XMLeditor isn't, RSSfeed is okay but the plugin formerly known as claria isn't, that the barney toolbar will crap on your PC but the google toolbar won't?
Either you need a whole big IT department to test all these programs on isolated networks, or you need to show people how to run a program as an unpriviledged username other than their own (and give permissions on their PC to allow this). Telling people not to run EXEs from the internet just isn't any use to anybody.
""Middle-earth Atlas: Tracing the Journeys of the Fellowship" interactive map
"New Zealand as Middle-earth" interactive map w/on-location footage"
Putting an actual physical map in the box would probably add a fair amount of value to these things... wonder if they'll consider that in future releases?
"Get the Return of the King Extended version, and soon after they will release a complete box set of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and Return of the King, that have even more footage than all the previous extended versions combined"
All that footage, yet still no Tom Bombadil...
"The US Govt can't own a copyright. Thats why its publications are free. This is one area where the US is ahead of other countries in copyright law."
If anyone doesn't realise quite how far the US is ahead on this one, you can get digital maps showing streets, rivers, some buildings, rail, boundaries, ZIP codes, etc. for the whole of the US for free. Needless to say this is extremely useful for a whole host of things.
In Britain, this information is 'owned' by the Ordnance survey (their surveying was done using government money) and will cost you around $100 per square kilometre to use their data (nevermind redistribution rights, you have to enumerate each person who might have access to the data).
If $100/sq.km sounds a lot, the US covers 9 million sq.km
Here in UK (and probably elsewhere too), everyone uses 15-year old mapping data, because that's all that they can get for reasonable cost. And that data is available for free because the USA created it. (The NOAA/VMAP data of course). By everyone, I mean military, councils, government and probably even aviation. Ordnance Survey maps may have been created for the benefit of the military, but damned if they're not going to demand $10 per paper sheet for each one, to the extent that even defence research people always use the free american data instead.
So it can get pretty bad if your government ever starts restricting map data. It may sound trivial from where you stand, but you stand to become like the UK, where not even the government can use its own data, the departments are so territorial (no pun intended)
"They seem to have no conception of a need to foster public good will, which is just bizarre for a corporate entity."
Perhaps that's why they setup a separate entity with a separate name to do all the evil stuff.
How many people here claim to hate the MPAA, but have no such dispute with New Line Cinema? Maybe they're playing the public more than you think.
"How are they going to enforce it when a large portion of those registrants are actually non-US?"
In the UK at least, ICANN policy overrides national laws (yes I got a letter from the Information Commissioner basically admitting this)
"Why did they move from Unix to Windows in the first place?"
Maybe they didn't want to have to reboot on January 19, 2038
"My gf has fallen in love with the "Nuke anything" extension, she thinks its cool to make geek stuff go away bit by bit (she sits and wipes out bits of /.)."
Out of interest, how does she eat jelly-babies?
"The purpose of a lock is to keep honest and semi-honest people from taking your stuff. If someone is damned and determined to take your bike, he's going to get it, regardless of what lock you use."
That would be a problem with using only one layer of security (i.e. a bike-lock). If you have your bike in a locked shed, with an alarm that sounds when someone breaks into the shed, and a lock inside the shed that takes longer to break than the time between the previous alarm sounding and the ambulance arriving to pick-up the remnants of the thief, then the system can be provably secure.
Same thing when you leave your bike at work. It's in a locked cycle-locker which takes 3 minutes to open. When someone starts trying to break in, the security-guard sees them on CCTV, and 2 minutes later they have to stop working on the lock, to deal with the attention of the security-guards.
Again, same thing works in public areas. Assuming you live in a civilised modern city, you put your bike in a locker, lock it, and if anyone tries to break-in, the car-park attendant phones the police, who arrive to demonstrate some different types of lock to the thief.
Of course, this all fails when you have just one layer of security and no notification when the outer layer fails. Really, bike-locks should have an "outer layer" which pages you when someone starts taking the covers off your lock to get-at the real lock inside. But bike alarms are damn-near impossible to get right, as the combination of constraints (size) and requirements becomes ridiculously difficult to solve.
It would be nice to make a bike-alarm which lights a smoke-cannister when it's tampered with, but the problem always seems to be (a) how to make sure it can't be set-off until someone's already proven their intent to break-in (i.e. can't kick it to set it off), and (b) how to make sure it's the first thing to be attacked, so you can't pick/break the bike-lock first, then set-off the alarm when you're nearly finished.
"it sounds like they are only offering to let you spend more money on a new product by a company that sold you a defective product the first time around. "Please reward us for our mistake.""
As you say, that's going to be a big problem for everyone who doesn't keep £30 receipts for longer than a year... I'm hoping the terms will be more flexible than that (indeed, having the offer available in the UK would make a good start).
Why? Well look at what kryptonite stand to lose. Their entire reputation. Imagine if somebody actually uses this, and one day, every bike with a kryptonite lock disappears because the owners didn't have their receipts. Kryptonite will never sell a product again if that happens. So here's hoping they'll do the sensible thing, and replace all locks regardless. After all, the key number tells you when the lock was made, regardless of whether it was registered or not.
And with locks I use everyday, I'm hoping it won't be a "send it away and get a replacement in 2 months" job either...
"Um, I'm listening to Binkley, who did his Biography and the Chicago Tribune, both of whom state there are some two hundred pages of records which HAVE NOT been released. I'm also looking at the Defense Department which states that Kerry has NOT signed form 180 authorizing full disclosure of his military records."
Because now is a good time to distract voters from any of the issues which affect them, by giving them 200 pages of what will surely become conspiracy theory, to discuss to death in the next few months?
C'mon, you saw every single newspaper and radio station waste 3-4 days just discussing those two sheets of paper on the Bush letter. Give them a folder full of documents, and they'll never get around to asking who's the best person to run the country. It'll just be nitpicking over typewriter fonts, for the rest of the election campaign, and at the end, people will realise (or maybe not) that they don't have enough information on who's the best candidate.
"Build more nuclear reactors. Develop a working plutonium breeder"
Or just build your stores closer together so you don't have to drive 50m to get from one store to its neighbour, or drive 3 miles from your home to get to anything resembling a mall.
Come to think of it, having houses in the same city as where people work might help too. Why mix offices and houses, when everyone can have a 40-minute drive to prepare them for the day's work?
"Viola! A 75 watt server."
That was deliberate, wasn't it?
"A blue screen in XP isn't even the same screen. The only time it ever comes up is for a hardware problem -- the kind of thing that will be unrecoverable in any modern operating system."
such as running a Java program, installing a soundcard, or using USB-devices during the full moon...