All news is created by people whose job it is to take events and make them seem interesting, to sell more issues. As such all news needs to be run past the bullshit detector. But New Scientist conveys science news much more accurately than any mainstream newspaper I've ever seen. And any speculation on their part is appropriately marked with lots of perhaps's, potentially's, etc.
And it contains much interesting stuff besides. Take for example the story in the 19th October issue (the latest that I have here in Australia), on the Lunar Society, a group of 18th century pro-science people. The print edition of the story features a picture of the society by Joseph Derby. Compare this to the cover art of The Science Of DiscWorld.
> how on earth did you Americans get to the insane pricing structure of your mobile phones?
Easy -- it's the whole centralised versus distributed thing again. In sensible countries, the telephone standards body (Oftel, Austel, whoever) mandated a new set of phone numbers specifically for cell phones. For example, in Australia, all mobile phone numbers begin with 04.
In the US, this sort of centralised control would be regarded as unamerican, and as such the work of Satan. Instead, each phone company set up their own numbering system. They all elected to work within the existing US ten-digit numbering scheme (I'd guess because they had to, based on what existing phone switches would handle). So in the US, a landline phone owned by a Las Vegas subscriber might have a number like 1 702 364 1234; but a Las Vegas cell phone subscriber might have a number like 1 702 682 1234.
Now, if I'm calling you on your Las Vegas number, I can tell from looking at the area code (702) whether or not it's going to be a long distance call, and therefore how much I'm going to be billed. But I cannot tell from looking at the number whether I'm calling a landline or a cell phone; and it would therefore be unfair to bill me differently. So the phone company can only reasonably charge me, the caller, the same that they would charge for a regular call. But of course cell phone infrastructure is expensive, so someone's got to pay for it, and the only person left is you, the owner of the cell phone.
Incidentally, when mobile phones first came out in Australia, there were several different payment plans that the subscriber could choose between. One was the American style, and one was the rest-of-the-world style. Guess which one everybody chose.
The American electoral system seems to me to be obsessed with mechanical and/or electronic voting systems.
Here in Australia, we use good ol' pencil and paper. It leaves a difficult-to-forge audit trail.
You go into a polling station, and there are a row of electoral staff behind tables. You go up to one, give them your name, and they cross you off a paper printout of the electoral roll. (Later, they will collate these crossings out to check for people who voted twice, or zero times. Voting is compulsory in state and federal elections. The paper roll is only printed out for your seat, but if you find yourself outside your seat , there is procedure to cover this.)
The elctoral staff give you two ballot papers, one for each house (plus a ballot for a referendum, if there is one). You walk to the voting booths, which are made of cardboard so that at the end of the day they can be folded and stowed for next year.
On the lower house ballot, you number all the boxes (we use a preferential voting scheme). The upper house ballot is more complicated, because we use a somewhat zany (but still quite nice) proportional system of electing people. But it's still philosophically straightforward for the voter to fill in.
Although all the ballots are paper, counting is quite fast -- lower house approximate results are available that night, and any close race results are usually available the following day. The upper house results usually take a bit longer, due to the way in which parts of votes get redistributed, which is a complete pig to do by hand. Despite this delay, doing everything on paper is totally worth it, because it makes the electoral system simple enough for any voter to understand, and makes the methods by which fraud might be perpetrated equally obvious. (Other posters have mentioned Ken Thompson's Reflections on trusting trust.)
Another poster mentioned Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Of all the possible voting schemes, I like preferential best; because the voter's best strategy is always to vote for the candidates he wants, in the order he wants them. This is in contrast to the American first-past-the-post scheme, in which voters must decide whether to vote for the candidate they truly want, and "throw their vote away".
Also, think of all the s/w that would have to be rewritten.... flight control systems, databases, operating systems, the list is endless!
I totally agree. Any whacko new time system which seeks to redefine the metric unit of time (namely the second) is doomed to go nowhere, because we have such a huge investment in systems that work by the second.
The correct way to metrify (is that a word) time is to work in seconds, kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc. Vernor Vinge does this in A Deepness In The Sky, and you get used to it after a fairly short time (just a few kiloseconds:-).
Incidentally, the article author, Michael Wolff, wrote a book called Burn Rate, the story of his ride on the internet IPO rollercoaster. Good read. I used to recommend it to friends who were joining their first.com company.
OK; I guess my joke is deeply inobvious now, but when the story first went up, there was a tag improperly closed in the first paragraph, with >i> instead of ; meaning that the entire rest of the story was in italics.
Unlike us plebs, of course, editors have the power to silently fix their typos.:-)
I use the same trick for the endless internet site logins I have. One character is set aside to be replaced by one character from the site's name. Thus, when I go to example.com, and it asks me for a password, I can figure out what it is, even though I've not been there for a year.
Note that the base string you choose should match the password policy of the most picky web site you're ever going to use this algorithm for -- e.g. it should mix alpha and numeric and be at least eight characters.
The downfall of this scheme is that anyone who successfully steals my password for four or so different sites can relatively easily figure out the passwords for all all my internet logins. So I use a completely unrelated password for my bank's web site.
No person shall [build or do anything that would] circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner
In other words, Nintendo are claiming that the fact that their games come on a cartridge is a technological measure that effectively makes it hard to make copies, and that the Flash Advance makes it easy to make copies, and therefore makes it easy to undermine the rights of the copyright holder.
If you believe that the cartridge form factor is a technological measure, and that copying does undermine the rights of the copyrightr holder, then, yeah, this part of the act does appear to apply. (IANAL, but I can read the text of the code just dandy.)
Take a wander around a fairground, circus, sideshow alley at a Royal Agricultural Show, whatever. Take a look at what they are doing for design, because to an extent they are solving the same problem as you.
One approach would be to get a large trailer, just small enough that it can be towed on a conventional vehicle like a ute or something, and set it up with a fold-down side or sides. This radically increases your available floor space. Set up your PCs on desks such that in travel mode, all the desks can simply be dragged into the centre of the trailer, and the side(s) folded up. In classroom mode, you just fold down the side(s) and drag out the desks. In travel mode, if all the desks fit snugly and the monitors and PCs are bolted to the desks, there wouldn't be an issue with gear moving around in transit.
The trailer wouldn't be open to the weather; you could set up some simple canvas tenting arrangement to cover over your folded down side, creating the necessary three walls and roof. Temperature management would obviously be an issue; so you'd want some fairly gutsy reverse-cycle airconditioning.
On a separate subject, when contemplating glass monitors vs. LCD monitors, think about the cost difference per monitor, and the cost per square metre of floor space in your chosen vehicle. A glass monitor takes maybe a quarter of a square metre of space, versus an LCD monitor taking negligible space. If an LCD monitor costs, say, NZ$300 more than a glass monitor, is it worth spending that, or would it be better to simply spend NZ$300 more on the vehicle, to get one that's a teeny bit bigger? Plus, the glass monitor has the advantage of being less theftable.
Try a Flytech PC. A range of ultra-compact PC's, mostly with one 3.5" and one 5.25" bay, plus about three PCI or ISA slots, at desktop PC prices. (Well, OK, I don't know their current prices, but when I used to buy from them three years ago, they were pretty competitive.)
Add an LCD screen (maybe even fix it onto the side of the case, or buy one of their POS PCs with screen already included), and the sound card(s) of your choice, and you're set. There is a potential for heat problems, because of the ultra-crowded case, but provided you don't lock it away in a small closet with junk crowded all around it (as my users tended to do), you'll be fine.
If you liked this, you'll probably like Dave Barry in Cyberspace (1996, Crown Publishers Inc, ISBN 0-517-59575-3). Despite the impression that he deliberately gives in this column, he does in fact understand what's going on, and the book comes across as one geek's very humorous spin on computers, the internet, and the industry.
The scariest part for me was that Focus is a plot device to let the author talk about us. The Focused people were, as you mention, hackers, and they were slaves. The point (for me, at least) is not that some super-biotech could be created to convert humans into willing slaves -- it's that we hackers already willingly enslave ouselves. Our central philosophy puts our focus on doing the work first, and being paid for the work second. As long as our employer continues to give us interesting puzzles to solve, and interesting tools to solve those puzzles with, we will be his willing slave.
you can't *get* this virus on M$ Outlook, if you're reasonably up to date on patches. Outlook "protects" users from viruses by simply disallowing you to look at *.exe attachments.
That won't necessarily cover it; the one copy of this virus I received had a.doc.lnk double extension; so that stupid users would think it was a Word doc, and Windows Explorer would think it was a shortcut. (And that's what it showed it as: size: 200K; type: shortcut.) The virus also adds other doubled extensions to file's names, including.com and who knows what else.
But now, in addition to laser tag gear, I'm doing some electronic scoring gear for fencing (the sport, not the stuff that keeps cows in); so I may have to change the first few words to "Electronic sport weaponry and peripherals designed..."
Yeah, I was thinking that. Presumably the revocation list is write-only; otherwise hackers like us would just be able to write a little proggy to un-revoke keys. But the flip side, as you mention, is that some nasty person could write a virus that adds all keys to the revocation list. It could revoke your video card and/or monitor, killing them permanently. It could also revoke particular brands or models: a nice piece of info warfare for a video card manufacturer who wants a competitor out of the way.
If it's in a capital city, then there's heaps of competition. Every phone company has an ISP on the side (Telstra, iPrimus, Dingo Blue, etc.) So you'd better not be planning on competing with those sorts of people on price, because they've got good access to phone company equipment, and good economy of scale.
There are still some opportunities to set up in country towns; look at kisser, for example. If this is the sort of thing you're into, then you need to be looking to someone who is running such a service for advice.
As to equipment, you have three choices: UNIX, Microsoft, or easy-to-admin embedded boxes. (Cobalt are a good starting point for these.) OK, so I'm simplifying a little. My point is that you have to decide what you're most experienced with, and then keep it simple, stupid. Don't mix Windows and UNIX. Yes, they can be made to play nice, but no, you don't want to double your learning curve.
One of the really fun bits in Australia is dealing with the phone company. 56k modems, at the non-customer end, don't reside on the ISP's property; they reside in the phone company's local exchange. (One of my friends was bemoaning the loss of huge racks of modems covered in cool flashy lights that used to impress the hell out of visitors.) That means that you hae to deal with Telstra, and since they are still all but a monopoly (particularly here in W.A.), they aren't particularly interested in dealing with you. The result is likely to be a nightmare. I dumped my previous ISP simply because the dialup I was using sucked -- the modem at the phone company end couldn't hear me clearly, and my modem couldn't hear them clearly, and the result was dropped connections galore. Of course, if you want to stay down in 33.6k land, then you can put rack modems on your own premises (and you could probably pick up some cheap secondhand from other ISP's).
In other words, if all the keys hardwired into your "receiver" (your monitor) are revoked, it stops working. Similarly, if all the keys hardwired into your "transmitter" (your video card) are revoked, it stops working.
And it will happen that all the keys for a given device will be compromised. When CSS was cracked, the recovery of one key allowed the recovery of all keys in a short time. In the case of CSS, Xing accidentally exposed a key. Similar things will happen with this technology: keys will be accidentally exposed, and whole sets of keys for given devices compromised.
Note that if all your keys are revoked, your monitor will not simply refuse to display a given movie -- it just won't display anything. The handshake and encryption occur when the device is connected and power up, not when you press "play" on your Quicktime viewer.
That means that the controlling body will be faced with the choice of leaving "protection-free" devices operating in the field, or of killing those devices. Neither is an acceptable alternative -- if they do revoke, users will be seriously pissed off when their screen suddenly stops working; and if they don't revoke, then what we have is a protection scheme that doesn't protect.
Hell, you can replace the paintball guns with virtual weapons. Stick an ID on each player (by painting a barcode on each player's T-shirt, on front, back and sides, for example), and all I have to do is point at you and mime pulling a trigger, and our respective pieces of computer hardware handle the rest. If I've shot straight, you get a visual/audible indication that you've been hit.
Cheaper in the long run, 'cos you don't have to keep buying paint. More flexible in that you can use absolutely anywhere as a field, 'cos you don't have to worry about accidentally whacking bystanders with paintballs to the eye. More flexible in weapons functionality: you can have multiple different weapons as per Doom et al.
/me runs through the food court shouting, "Woo hoo! I've got the BFG!"
Altronics in Australia have a lightweight crimper that does 8-way, 6-way and 4-way RJ crimps. It's no smaller than a normal crimper, but it is lighter. It doesn't look very gutsy, so it would only be suitable for occasional use.
My favourite RJ crimper is a Telemaster, as pictured in the link, with the blue plastic guard in front of the blades removed. Durable, reasonable weight, fair price, widely available, easy to use.
Re:I am not a nuclear physicist...
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 1
surely there must be a better way of harnessing this energy than using it to boil water [...] or heat up helium [...] to turn a turbine to create electricity.
If you're looking for compactness, you probably want a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. That's what they use on deep space probes, when you're going too far from the sun for solar panels to be effective. But you may notice that they stick those things on a long arm to keep it away from the rest of the space probe's delicate electronics.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree -- I rather like New Scientist.
All news is created by people whose job it is to take events and make them seem interesting, to sell more issues. As such all news needs to be run past the bullshit detector. But New Scientist conveys science news much more accurately than any mainstream newspaper I've ever seen. And any speculation on their part is appropriately marked with lots of perhaps's, potentially's, etc.
And it contains much interesting stuff besides. Take for example the story in the 19th October issue (the latest that I have here in Australia), on the Lunar Society, a group of 18th century pro-science people. The print edition of the story features a picture of the society by Joseph Derby. Compare this to the cover art of The Science Of DiscWorld.
> how on earth did you Americans get to the insane pricing structure of your mobile phones?
Easy -- it's the whole centralised versus distributed thing again. In sensible countries, the telephone standards body (Oftel, Austel, whoever) mandated a new set of phone numbers specifically for cell phones. For example, in Australia, all mobile phone numbers begin with 04.
In the US, this sort of centralised control would be regarded as unamerican, and as such the work of Satan. Instead, each phone company set up their own numbering system. They all elected to work within the existing US ten-digit numbering scheme (I'd guess because they had to, based on what existing phone switches would handle). So in the US, a landline phone owned by a Las Vegas subscriber might have a number like 1 702 364 1234; but a Las Vegas cell phone subscriber might have a number like 1 702 682 1234.
Now, if I'm calling you on your Las Vegas number, I can tell from looking at the area code (702) whether or not it's going to be a long distance call, and therefore how much I'm going to be billed. But I cannot tell from looking at the number whether I'm calling a landline or a cell phone; and it would therefore be unfair to bill me differently. So the phone company can only reasonably charge me, the caller, the same that they would charge for a regular call. But of course cell phone infrastructure is expensive, so someone's got to pay for it, and the only person left is you, the owner of the cell phone.
Incidentally, when mobile phones first came out in Australia, there were several different payment plans that the subscriber could choose between. One was the American style, and one was the rest-of-the-world style. Guess which one everybody chose.
There's a better story on this at The Register. It mentions that the exploit uses the INCLUDETEXT field, and works even if macros are disbled.
The American electoral system seems to me to be obsessed with mechanical and/or electronic voting systems.
Here in Australia, we use good ol' pencil and paper. It leaves a difficult-to-forge audit trail.
You go into a polling station, and there are a row of electoral staff behind tables. You go up to one, give them your name, and they cross you off a paper printout of the electoral roll. (Later, they will collate these crossings out to check for people who voted twice, or zero times. Voting is compulsory in state and federal elections. The paper roll is only printed out for your seat, but if you find yourself outside your seat , there is procedure to cover this.)
The elctoral staff give you two ballot papers, one for each house (plus a ballot for a referendum, if there is one). You walk to the voting booths, which are made of cardboard so that at the end of the day they can be folded and stowed for next year.
On the lower house ballot, you number all the boxes (we use a preferential voting scheme). The upper house ballot is more complicated, because we use a somewhat zany (but still quite nice) proportional system of electing people. But it's still philosophically straightforward for the voter to fill in.
Although all the ballots are paper, counting is quite fast -- lower house approximate results are available that night, and any close race results are usually available the following day. The upper house results usually take a bit longer, due to the way in which parts of votes get redistributed, which is a complete pig to do by hand. Despite this delay, doing everything on paper is totally worth it, because it makes the electoral system simple enough for any voter to understand, and makes the methods by which fraud might be perpetrated equally obvious. (Other posters have mentioned Ken Thompson's Reflections on trusting trust.)
Another poster mentioned Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Of all the possible voting schemes, I like preferential best; because the voter's best strategy is always to vote for the candidates he wants, in the order he wants them. This is in contrast to the American first-past-the-post scheme, in which voters must decide whether to vote for the candidate they truly want, and "throw their vote away".
The correct way to metrify (is that a word) time is to work in seconds, kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc. Vernor Vinge does this in A Deepness In The Sky, and you get used to it after a fairly short time (just a few kiloseconds
Incidentally, the article author, Michael Wolff, wrote a book called Burn Rate , the story of his ride on the internet IPO rollercoaster. Good read. I used to recommend it to friends who were joining their first .com company.
OK; I guess my joke is deeply inobvious now, but when the story first went up, there was a tag improperly closed in the first paragraph, with >i> instead of ; meaning that the entire rest of the story was in italics.
:-)
Unlike us plebs, of course, editors have the power to silently fix their typos.
And if you screwed up your formatting, well, you should have hit Preview...
I use the same trick for the endless internet site logins I have. One character is set aside to be replaced by one character from the site's name. Thus, when I go to example.com, and it asks me for a password, I can figure out what it is, even though I've not been there for a year.
Note that the base string you choose should match the password policy of the most picky web site you're ever going to use this algorithm for -- e.g. it should mix alpha and numeric and be at least eight characters.
The downfall of this scheme is that anyone who successfully steals my password for four or so different sites can relatively easily figure out the passwords for all all my internet logins. So I use a completely unrelated password for my bank's web site.
... and it would be called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
Section 1201 (b), very summarised, says:
In other words, Nintendo are claiming that the fact that their games come on a cartridge is a technological measure that effectively makes it hard to make copies, and that the Flash Advance makes it easy to make copies, and therefore makes it easy to undermine the rights of the copyright holder.
If you believe that the cartridge form factor is a technological measure, and that copying does undermine the rights of the copyrightr holder, then, yeah, this part of the act does appear to apply. (IANAL, but I can read the text of the code just dandy.)
Take a wander around a fairground, circus, sideshow alley at a Royal Agricultural Show, whatever. Take a look at what they are doing for design, because to an extent they are solving the same problem as you.
One approach would be to get a large trailer, just small enough that it can be towed on a conventional vehicle like a ute or something, and set it up with a fold-down side or sides. This radically increases your available floor space. Set up your PCs on desks such that in travel mode, all the desks can simply be dragged into the centre of the trailer, and the side(s) folded up. In classroom mode, you just fold down the side(s) and drag out the desks. In travel mode, if all the desks fit snugly and the monitors and PCs are bolted to the desks, there wouldn't be an issue with gear moving around in transit.
The trailer wouldn't be open to the weather; you could set up some simple canvas tenting arrangement to cover over your folded down side, creating the necessary three walls and roof. Temperature management would obviously be an issue; so you'd want some fairly gutsy reverse-cycle airconditioning.
On a separate subject, when contemplating glass monitors vs. LCD monitors, think about the cost difference per monitor, and the cost per square metre of floor space in your chosen vehicle. A glass monitor takes maybe a quarter of a square metre of space, versus an LCD monitor taking negligible space. If an LCD monitor costs, say, NZ$300 more than a glass monitor, is it worth spending that, or would it be better to simply spend NZ$300 more on the vehicle, to get one that's a teeny bit bigger? Plus, the glass monitor has the advantage of being less theftable.
Add an LCD screen (maybe even fix it onto the side of the case, or buy one of their POS PCs with screen already included), and the sound card(s) of your choice, and you're set. There is a potential for heat problems, because of the ultra-crowded case, but provided you don't lock it away in a small closet with junk crowded all around it (as my users tended to do), you'll be fine.
If you liked this, you'll probably like Dave Barry in Cyberspace (1996, Crown Publishers Inc, ISBN 0-517-59575-3). Despite the impression that he deliberately gives in this column, he does in fact understand what's going on, and the book comes across as one geek's very humorous spin on computers, the internet, and the industry.
Scares the shit out of me.
Laser guns designed, programmed,
built, maintained, operated.
Torches juggled.
Damsels rescued.
But now, in addition to laser tag gear, I'm doing some electronic scoring gear for fencing (the sport, not the stuff that keeps cows in); so I may have to change the first few words to "Electronic sport weaponry and peripherals designed..."
My other business card says:
Doug Burbidge
Super Genius
, which is of course a Wile E. Coyote reference.
To this day, the UK owns numerous territories around the world, such that at any given time, at least one of them is in daylight.
And there are 37 or so countries that list Queen Elizabeth II as head of state.
Yeah, I was thinking that. Presumably the revocation list is write-only; otherwise hackers like us would just be able to write a little proggy to un-revoke keys. But the flip side, as you mention, is that some nasty person could write a virus that adds all keys to the revocation list. It could revoke your video card and/or monitor, killing them permanently. It could also revoke particular brands or models: a nice piece of info warfare for a video card manufacturer who wants a competitor out of the way.
If it's in a capital city, then there's heaps of competition. Every phone company has an ISP on the side (Telstra, iPrimus, Dingo Blue, etc.) So you'd better not be planning on competing with those sorts of people on price, because they've got good access to phone company equipment, and good economy of scale.
There are still some opportunities to set up in country towns; look at kisser, for example. If this is the sort of thing you're into, then you need to be looking to someone who is running such a service for advice.
As to equipment, you have three choices: UNIX, Microsoft, or easy-to-admin embedded boxes. (Cobalt are a good starting point for these.) OK, so I'm simplifying a little. My point is that you have to decide what you're most experienced with, and then keep it simple, stupid. Don't mix Windows and UNIX. Yes, they can be made to play nice, but no, you don't want to double your learning curve.
One of the really fun bits in Australia is dealing with the phone company. 56k modems, at the non-customer end, don't reside on the ISP's property; they reside in the phone company's local exchange. (One of my friends was bemoaning the loss of huge racks of modems covered in cool flashy lights that used to impress the hell out of visitors.) That means that you hae to deal with Telstra, and since they are still all but a monopoly (particularly here in W.A.), they aren't particularly interested in dealing with you. The result is likely to be a nightmare. I dumped my previous ISP simply because the dialup I was using sucked -- the modem at the phone company end couldn't hear me clearly, and my modem couldn't hear them clearly, and the result was dropped connections galore. Of course, if you want to stay down in 33.6k land, then you can put rack modems on your own premises (and you could probably pick up some cheap secondhand from other ISP's).
And it will happen that all the keys for a given device will be compromised. When CSS was cracked, the recovery of one key allowed the recovery of all keys in a short time. In the case of CSS, Xing accidentally exposed a key. Similar things will happen with this technology: keys will be accidentally exposed, and whole sets of keys for given devices compromised.
Note that if all your keys are revoked, your monitor will not simply refuse to display a given movie -- it just won't display anything. The handshake and encryption occur when the device is connected and power up, not when you press "play" on your Quicktime viewer.
That means that the controlling body will be faced with the choice of leaving "protection-free" devices operating in the field, or of killing those devices. Neither is an acceptable alternative -- if they do revoke, users will be seriously pissed off when their screen suddenly stops working; and if they don't revoke, then what we have is a protection scheme that doesn't protect.
Cheaper in the long run, 'cos you don't have to keep buying paint. More flexible in that you can use absolutely anywhere as a field, 'cos you don't have to worry about accidentally whacking bystanders with paintballs to the eye. More flexible in weapons functionality: you can have multiple different weapons as per Doom et al.
My favourite RJ crimper is a Telemaster, as pictured in the link, with the blue plastic guard in front of the blades removed. Durable, reasonable weight, fair price, widely available, easy to use.