I don't claim to be any sort of crypto nerd, but I wonder if its not simply a really odd position shift code. for example, If i needed a code i could decrypt quickly from my head, but wanted it to be obscure enough that the average person looking at it was not going to get it, I would write lines of code on multiple pages. Heck it can be in straight english, if your shift is complex enough.
for example, imagine on page 1, i wrote "TISAILGTCFDU" and on page 2 i wrote " ESTANOAOOFEN" Now, each of those pages alone are useless. this reads decoded 'TESTING CODES IS A LOT OF FUN" It is done by writing the first letter on the first page, going to the second page, looking for your pen mark, and writing the next letter, then returning to the first page, seeing your second letter as though you would trace it, and writeing the third letter after it, leaving a space between the first and third letters. You finish a line across the pages, and then continue the phrase, this time filling in available spaces left in the previous lines. the result is a garglemesh of letters. If you did this, and added random word breaks, you have a coded message on multiple pages that reqires both of them to decipher a readable message. if you know how to look at it, you can hold the two pages up to the light, put one line above the other, and read the message with a little effort.
A code like this is its own codex, and relies on the entire message being available to decrypt it. I've played with the images the FBI provided in photoshop, and don't see that this is exactly what has been done, but I figure that whatever sort of code it is, it had to be easily readable/create-able for this guy, and could easily rely on some physical form of cryptography like i demonstrated here.
I feel the same way looking at it. In the first line, when my eyes scan over it, it reads something like "The impulses get" and then my brain goes 'wait what?' and i go back to re-read, and it vanishes back into the text. Its almost as if someone took two messages, dyslexiaed/letterdropped from both of them, then mingled the messages letter by letter or word by word. Most codes i see don't look like much of anything, but looking at this, it seems like a message is about to just fall out of it, if only my eyes moved in the right pattern.
perhaps he was trying to translate the Voynich manuscript, and got to close, and a secret society had him killed. (lots of his words end in e, lots of the words in the Voynich manuscript end in the same symbol. Just saying)
Look at it like this: people always ask for a Kleenex, but Kimberly-Clark Worldwide Inc. is not a monopoly, even though there branding is synonymous with 'facial tissue' in common language. Same with dozens of other products; band-aid, Xerox, Asprin, velcro, and many others, its a genericized trademark. While most companys fight tooth and nail to prevent this from happening to there trademarks, Google has sort of let it slide. Now, If Google was out buying up and/or forcing other search engines out of business (which it really has not, sure, some have fallen by the wayside, but there are more search engines than you can shake a stick at still) THEN it would be a monopoly.
I've also read that a high vantage point over a search area can help, assuming the area is uniform (dry lake bed), because it is possible to see very small ejection blankets, craters, and skids that you would not see from ground level. I'm thinking weather balloon and a camera with some sort of steadycam rig.
not to far from the truth actually. However, it works better if you don't have shingles (terrestrial ferrous materials in the sand on the shingles can lead to false positives.) So, metal roof, which you hose once to clean, then ignore for a year, and hose again for meteor droppings.
What's with the snarky editorial tone of this submission?
"Utah lawmakers passed a bill today to force public school teachers to teach that the USA is a republic, not a democracy, because a 'Democracy' would have 'Democrat' in it."
was not found anywhere in the linked article, and the utopia comment was uncalled for. Especially since, as many others have pointed out, the US *is* a Representative Republic. I was not aware that the submission form was a place to blog our feelings about the political atmospheres of various states.
Yeah, and as such, I had always been under the impression that silk was NOT a low cost product, based on the time and effort required to harvest it, and form it unto a usable sized piece of cloth.
You know, it really sucks that the movie bombed. I had not discovered firefly until the previews for the movie came out. I saw that trailer, and told all my friends at the time that 'we are going to X city to see this movie in the good theatre when it comes out'. And then we poked around and discovered the show, got the dvd's which we watched in one setting, then watched again. And we all made the 200 mile pilgrimage to the good theatre and we watched the movie. The movie should not have bombed, because it stood so well on its own.
You make a good point. Lots of people have started to point out the fact that men are downright paranoid about this nowdays. I've talked with people who are afraid to hug there own kids, because they know someone who's wife decided she hated her husband, and threw him under the 'sexual abuse' bus.
Just saying that he 'was so loving with the kids, maybe a little to loving' to a lawyer can ruin a guys life. Sure, he may never be convicted of anything (because he never did anything) but a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees, and a reputation smeared across every local paper for a year or so will ruin a life.
we are manufacturing a population of men who are loathe to be involved with children in any way, because we are so trigger happy with our 'child protection'
Honestly, that nearly amounts to the answer. If you have personal information on ANY drive and are paranoid enough to worry about it to the degree that you think someone with the tech to do recover it after that degree of erasing, Then render the thing down into its base elements with the best cleaning agent ever; Fire. Lots and Lots of Fire.
due to listening to radio shows that included giving out the address so you could send away for materials, I know the zip code of Grand Rapids Michigan by heart, despite having never even been to the state, much less the city. it has served me well.
I'm with you on that one. Sure, I may be saving the environment, but first I'm going to save my cash by lowering my electric bill. Call me self centered, but thats what works for me. If all the AGW people would quit telling people to save the world, and tell them to save money on fuel and electricity, they could accomplish twice as much in half the time. People are naturally greedy and self centered, and you have to work with that, not force some altruistic mindset on them.
that, and i totally mouse by feel. Unless they have some way of changing the tactile feedback of the lines between the buttons, this is useless. I don't want to have to *look* at my mouse constantly to find all the weird touch screen function buttons.
Thats ok, from what i've seen, way to many ISP's are doing things so wrongly that when IPv6 comes out, you won't even notice, because they will kludge it into there network anyways. For example, My home router does not have to work with IPv6 as far as i can tell, because my DSL modem sets up an internal network. It is giving me 198.168.0.* addresses for my home computers, but addresses itself with a totally different block to the actual internet. what i'm saying is that home users are not going to be throwing away routers, they are going to be shipping back DSL modems when there shiny new IPv6 compatible one is delivered to them during a 'network upgrade' that will apear as a line item on their bill that month. And that's just the modems that can't learn to support IPv6 via a firmware update.
then you stomp on the first batch of them and go back to the drawing board. Its not like they are whilly nilly making thousands of them on the first try. One mammoth is not going to escape and repopulate the species (seeing as we are skipping the frog DNA this time and the asexual reproduction) If they screw it up on this one, best bet is that they give up, Its not like they have infinite funding to create mammoth hordes of mammoths.
You make a good Point. Perhaps i should have specified that I was referring to Beef Cattle. You are quite correct in your information on hogs, chickens and dairy cattle. perhaps this is an indication that the food use of animals kept in confined areas and unable to forage for food on their own is a practice that may need to end.
Ok, that is a freakishly un-informed response in terms of efficiency of meat.
Yes, it takes X Kg of Food to produce Y meat where X > Y. HOWEVER, what you are not factoring in, is the fact that more than 90% of X is derived from Plant sources that are inedible to humans, and Grow in regions that are impossible to farm and produce plant foods that humans can eat. scrub desert, mountainsides, and VAST portions of the world that you can't make a wheat seed eek out a living, or reach with a tractor to farm in the first place are the places where Cattle gain the vast portion of their total size. The whole "feeding of grain to cattle to make meat' Only occurs in the last month or less of their lives, and amounts to a tiny fraction of the total lifetime diet of the animal.
You may insist i cite sources on all of this, which is where I explain that I come from a long line of people deeply ingrained in the livestock trade, and have a full working knowledge of the process, from birth of an animal until it lands on your plate.
by the explanation you just gave, that means there could be 11 armed people in america for each 100, and 30 armed people in sweden for each 100. Remember, statistics can point both ways.
the problem with that is, it is unfairly lumping assults/homicides against lawful gun use. It is safe to assume that the assults/homicides are not committed by persons who legally owned a gun and just randomly decided to murder the hell out of someone. People that do that sort of thing tend to have prior criminal records, which results in them being forbidden to own a firearm. Thus, your are weighting your statistics with illegal gun possession and use against a smaller statistic of Legal Possession and use of a firearm. As it turns out, Criminals tend to commit more crimes than Non Criminals. (go figure) thus, the weight of your statistics is skewed, and results in a biased presentation of the information at hand.
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aha, no, "TESTING A CODE IS A LOT OF FUN". see? even the guy that designed it gets screwed up..
er, i think it actually decodes as "TESTING OUT CODES IS A LOT OF FUN". was not paying attention to my own work there.
I don't claim to be any sort of crypto nerd, but I wonder if its not simply a really odd position shift code. for example, If i needed a code i could decrypt quickly from my head, but wanted it to be obscure enough that the average person looking at it was not going to get it, I would write lines of code on multiple pages. Heck it can be in straight english, if your shift is complex enough.
for example, imagine on page 1, i wrote "TISAILGTCFDU" and on page 2 i wrote " ESTANOAOOFEN" Now, each of those pages alone are useless. this reads decoded 'TESTING CODES IS A LOT OF FUN" It is done by writing the first letter on the first page, going to the second page, looking for your pen mark, and writing the next letter, then returning to the first page, seeing your second letter as though you would trace it, and writeing the third letter after it, leaving a space between the first and third letters. You finish a line across the pages, and then continue the phrase, this time filling in available spaces left in the previous lines. the result is a garglemesh of letters. If you did this, and added random word breaks, you have a coded message on multiple pages that reqires both of them to decipher a readable message. if you know how to look at it, you can hold the two pages up to the light, put one line above the other, and read the message with a little effort.
A code like this is its own codex, and relies on the entire message being available to decrypt it. I've played with the images the FBI provided in photoshop, and don't see that this is exactly what has been done, but I figure that whatever sort of code it is, it had to be easily readable/create-able for this guy, and could easily rely on some physical form of cryptography like i demonstrated here.
as much as i love XKCD, i admit, this re-write is better.
I feel the same way looking at it. In the first line, when my eyes scan over it, it reads something like "The impulses get" and then my brain goes 'wait what?' and i go back to re-read, and it vanishes back into the text. Its almost as if someone took two messages, dyslexiaed/letterdropped from both of them, then mingled the messages letter by letter or word by word. Most codes i see don't look like much of anything, but looking at this, it seems like a message is about to just fall out of it, if only my eyes moved in the right pattern.
perhaps he was trying to translate the Voynich manuscript, and got to close, and a secret society had him killed. (lots of his words end in e, lots of the words in the Voynich manuscript end in the same symbol. Just saying)
I once accidentally reinvented fractals trying to design a method to animate ants running in what appeared to be a random pattern.
I lost several brain cells trying to read your post. I hope your happy.
Look at it like this: people always ask for a Kleenex, but Kimberly-Clark Worldwide Inc. is not a monopoly, even though there branding is synonymous with 'facial tissue' in common language. Same with dozens of other products; band-aid, Xerox, Asprin, velcro, and many others, its a genericized trademark. While most companys fight tooth and nail to prevent this from happening to there trademarks, Google has sort of let it slide.
Now, If Google was out buying up and/or forcing other search engines out of business (which it really has not, sure, some have fallen by the wayside, but there are more search engines than you can shake a stick at still) THEN it would be a monopoly.
I've also read that a high vantage point over a search area can help, assuming the area is uniform (dry lake bed), because it is possible to see very small ejection blankets, craters, and skids that you would not see from ground level. I'm thinking weather balloon and a camera with some sort of steadycam rig.
not to far from the truth actually. However, it works better if you don't have shingles (terrestrial ferrous materials in the sand on the shingles can lead to false positives.) So, metal roof, which you hose once to clean, then ignore for a year, and hose again for meteor droppings.
"Utah lawmakers passed a bill today to force public school teachers to teach that the USA is a republic, not a democracy, because a 'Democracy' would have 'Democrat' in it."
was not found anywhere in the linked article, and the utopia comment was uncalled for. Especially since, as many others have pointed out, the US *is* a Representative Republic. I was not aware that the submission form was a place to blog our feelings about the political atmospheres of various states.
Yeah, and as such, I had always been under the impression that silk was NOT a low cost product, based on the time and effort required to harvest it, and form it unto a usable sized piece of cloth.
You know, it really sucks that the movie bombed. I had not discovered firefly until the previews for the movie came out. I saw that trailer, and told all my friends at the time that 'we are going to X city to see this movie in the good theatre when it comes out'. And then we poked around and discovered the show, got the dvd's which we watched in one setting, then watched again. And we all made the 200 mile pilgrimage to the good theatre and we watched the movie. The movie should not have bombed, because it stood so well on its own.
You make a good point. Lots of people have started to point out the fact that men are downright paranoid about this nowdays. I've talked with people who are afraid to hug there own kids, because they know someone who's wife decided she hated her husband, and threw him under the 'sexual abuse' bus.
Just saying that he 'was so loving with the kids, maybe a little to loving' to a lawyer can ruin a guys life.
Sure, he may never be convicted of anything (because he never did anything) but a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees, and a reputation smeared across every local paper for a year or so will ruin a life.
we are manufacturing a population of men who are loathe to be involved with children in any way, because we are so trigger happy with our 'child protection'
Honestly, that nearly amounts to the answer. If you have personal information on ANY drive and are paranoid enough to worry about it to the degree that you think someone with the tech to do recover it after that degree of erasing, Then render the thing down into its base elements with the best cleaning agent ever; Fire. Lots and Lots of Fire.
due to listening to radio shows that included giving out the address so you could send away for materials, I know the zip code of Grand Rapids Michigan by heart, despite having never even been to the state, much less the city.
it has served me well.
I'm with you on that one. Sure, I may be saving the environment, but first I'm going to save my cash by lowering my electric bill. Call me self centered, but thats what works for me. If all the AGW people would quit telling people to save the world, and tell them to save money on fuel and electricity, they could accomplish twice as much in half the time. People are naturally greedy and self centered, and you have to work with that, not force some altruistic mindset on them.
that, and i totally mouse by feel. Unless they have some way of changing the tactile feedback of the lines between the buttons, this is useless. I don't want to have to *look* at my mouse constantly to find all the weird touch screen function buttons.
Thats ok, from what i've seen, way to many ISP's are doing things so wrongly that when IPv6 comes out, you won't even notice, because they will kludge it into there network anyways. For example, My home router does not have to work with IPv6 as far as i can tell, because my DSL modem sets up an internal network. It is giving me 198.168.0.* addresses for my home computers, but addresses itself with a totally different block to the actual internet. what i'm saying is that home users are not going to be throwing away routers, they are going to be shipping back DSL modems when there shiny new IPv6 compatible one is delivered to them during a 'network upgrade' that will apear as a line item on their bill that month. And that's just the modems that can't learn to support IPv6 via a firmware update.
then you stomp on the first batch of them and go back to the drawing board. Its not like they are whilly nilly making thousands of them on the first try. One mammoth is not going to escape and repopulate the species (seeing as we are skipping the frog DNA this time and the asexual reproduction) If they screw it up on this one, best bet is that they give up, Its not like they have infinite funding to create mammoth hordes of mammoths.
see what i did there?
You make a good Point. Perhaps i should have specified that I was referring to Beef Cattle. You are quite correct in your information on hogs, chickens and dairy cattle.
perhaps this is an indication that the food use of animals kept in confined areas and unable to forage for food on their own is a practice that may need to end.
Ok, that is a freakishly un-informed response in terms of efficiency of meat.
Yes, it takes X Kg of Food to produce Y meat where X > Y. HOWEVER, what you are not factoring in, is the fact that more than 90% of X is derived from Plant sources that are inedible to humans, and Grow in regions that are impossible to farm and produce plant foods that humans can eat. scrub desert, mountainsides, and VAST portions of the world that you can't make a wheat seed eek out a living, or reach with a tractor to farm in the first place are the places where Cattle gain the vast portion of their total size. The whole "feeding of grain to cattle to make meat' Only occurs in the last month or less of their lives, and amounts to a tiny fraction of the total lifetime diet of the animal.
You may insist i cite sources on all of this, which is where I explain that I come from a long line of people deeply ingrained in the livestock trade, and have a full working knowledge of the process, from birth of an animal until it lands on your plate.
by the explanation you just gave, that means there could be 11 armed people in america for each 100, and 30 armed people in sweden for each 100. Remember, statistics can point both ways.
the problem with that is, it is unfairly lumping assults/homicides against lawful gun use. It is safe to assume that the assults/homicides are not committed by persons who legally owned a gun and just randomly decided to murder the hell out of someone. People that do that sort of thing tend to have prior criminal records, which results in them being forbidden to own a firearm. Thus, your are weighting your statistics with illegal gun possession and use against a smaller statistic of Legal Possession and use of a firearm. As it turns out, Criminals tend to commit more crimes than Non Criminals. (go figure) thus, the weight of your statistics is skewed, and results in a biased presentation of the information at hand.