And what stoopid trade-off he's proposing. Sure, Airport stations can be both AP's and bridges. But, as he notes...
There's only one major caveat on the AirPort: You'll need a Mac to configure it. Since you'll only need to do this once, though, it's not a big problem. Only a small percentage of us own an Apple computer, but we all know someone who does and never stops reminding us. Not only will your Mac Buddy come over and set up your AirPorts, he'll be hurt if you don't let him. Go ahead, ask him and see.
WTF?! What kind of trade-off is this for a PC owner? Thanks, Paul, you saved me from (gasp!) buying two kinds of hardware, but now I have to call my smug "Mac Buddy" over every time I want to manage it. AND, this smug Mac Buddy of mine has administrative rights on my LAN. I better stop calling him smug.
Airport is great, Macs are great, but this is a horrible solution for the mission he set up for himself: Propose the dead-simplest full-coverage wireless home network for your average (i.e. Windows-using) person.
It's true. You need Mac's Airpot Setup Assistant, which is not HTTP based. Maybe one these/. geeks will tell us what protocol it does use and if some incipent OSS project will soon allow non-Mac machines to manage Aiport base stations.
What are they going to do? Will they send cops to break down a door?
Yes. Ignoring a summons is contempt of court and a bench warrant will be issued for your arrest. You just turned a civil matter into a criminal one. You're waging your civil disobedience against the legal system, not RIAA.
Man, fhqwhgads, you're just making yourself look worse, you know? I mean, everybody's just gonna feel sorry for you. I mean, I do.
Re:What consumer privacy concerns? Answer: Choice
on
Walmart to Push RFID
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
But with RFID, customers have no such option. Everyone can be tracked, regardless of whether they approve or not.
Uh..How?
I'm as big as a privacy buff as the next guy, but how the hell are the amassing a database about you simply by virtue of RFIDs?!
Like I mention below, the uproar with Benetton's plan was that the RFID was embedded in the CLOTHING. So that when you came BACK to the store, they could, ostensibly, compile a profile of your Benetton purchases by surrepitiously scanning your clothes as you came back in.
I'm going to assume, unless someone can demonstrate otherwise, that Walmart is interested in putting the RFIDs on the PACKAGING. On the long shot that the RFID *is* in the product itself, who cares? How often are you coming back to Walmart, with, say, the TV or the twizzlers you just bought there? And as for clothes...well, really, if you're dressing yourself at Walmart, you're on you're own, buddy.
But seriously, Walmart, unlike Benetton, doesn't sell high-ticket item clothes, and probably isn't interested in profiling their typical customers clothes buying habits, really. I doubt Walmart socks will have RFIDs embedded. Probably only the packages will.
Re:RFID abuse is almost certain
on
Walmart to Push RFID
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe not.
The problem with the Benetton plan was that the RFIDs were suppose to be embedded in the clothing itself. No one has ever said Walmart is asking for this.
Certainly, for non-clothing products, I doubt the RFID will be embedded in the product itself. That would be far too costly a change for the manufacturing process. Rather, it will probably be embedded in the packaging itself (like UPCs). Even for clothes, I imagine (in Walmart's case) the RFID will be in the clothing tags or packages. I can't imagine Walmart convincing Fruit of the Loom to embed RFIDs in every pair of briefs.
I think the article does not mention privacy concerns because, frankly, unless the RFID is somehow permanently associated with the product, there are no privacy concerns.
I urge all Slashdotters to read the Google cache of this story. Wow. It's unbelievably crass, misogynistic, and utterly puerile.
It's also the stuff of life you're completely missing out on sitting at home playing Counter-Strike and Evercrack.
Seriously, Tucker is a ridiculous caricature of the antithesis of geekdom (which is not to see he's not a really bright guy). But use his extremism to find the golden mean: Especially you younger Slashdotters, go out and make some MEMORIES. Do something STUPID. Take some (respectful) CHANCES with women.
Tangents: The shocking of hilarity of Tucker's story is that it has the ring of truth...Even Katy accuses him of "invading privacy" by conveying "accurate details" of her life.
On the other hand, the shocking hilarity of Katy's site is its utter vapidity that resonates with Tucker's assessment. Her cartoons...wow...I mean, I could draw better cartoons and I'm so bad at drawing I'd be ashamed to show them to my own mother. And the humor(?!). Wow.
NEW YORK--A report released Monday by NYU's Center For Media Studies has found that television, accused by experts of diminishing children's attention spans and discouraging them from interacting with others, can actually help children as young as six months develop essential looking skills.
(...snip...)
See the news outlet linked above for rest. They were on top of this shit back in 1999.
I think this was the bit where the "Saul Rosenberg" character (the whiny, New Yorky, bad-Woody-Allen-impression one) drove his motorbike and sidecar ("speedin' all up n' down da road") while drunk and smashed into a bunch people. Who are now about sue him. So he wants to sue them back. The lawyer politely explains that thats crazy, he doesn't handle "that type of case" (i.e. frivolous).
"Well, then can I sue YOU?"
"Sue ME?"
"Yeah."
"Why would you wanna sue ME?"
"For the damages you're causing me."
"The dam..! I'm causing you damages?! How?"
"The damages you're causing me now. I'm tryin' to get help here, and you're not..."
"How am I causing you damages?!"
"And the people you represent...I'll sue them too."
"What do the people I represent have anything to do..!"
"Sue you, sue everybody!"
"But wha...? What do the people I rep..."
"The sidecar smashed into these people! I'm tryin' to explain to you!"
"What does that have to do with the people I represent?!!"
And so. This is from memory. Just thought I'd share.
a small religious group known as "Christian Science" (offically "The Church of Christ, Scientist"), which has very little in common with Christianity.
Or, for that matter, very little do with "science" either. Thanks for the clarification. In my post, when I said, "Christian Scientists," I meant members of this sect, not, you know, Christian scientists.
Despite it's name, and the fact that it is, indeed, owned by Christian Scientists, the Christian Science Monitor is actually considered a reputable paper (scroll down for CSM), with high-quality journalism. It has a more centrist or even liberal bent, not Christian right.
Here's some advice to bright-eyed undergrads hoping to glean knowledge from the professorial elite: Do not be surprised if they just don't care.
My graduate advisor is one of these shooting-star big shots on his way up. He's been tenured for a while, and now holds several high-powered positions of responsibility under his belt, federal grant review committees, editorships, directorship of a research center, yadda yadda. He does not give a flying fuck about office hours or undergrads. Really.
He understands one thing: Science. If you ain't talkin the talk, you're wasting his time. He doesn't want to hear about your trifles and personal dilemmas. He doesn't want to hear your frustration with course conflicts and hand-wringing about your grades. Unless you are a *brilliant* undergrad who has thought about research, preferably his research, and you have new ideas and are there to make your impressive intellect available at his disposal...you're meaningless.
Alas, I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect only a little bit. Yeah, he's cognizant of his duty to teaching. In an annoyed way. Yeah, he'll do his service to his undergraduate advisees--begrudgingly--but with the correct outward social demeanor. But, damn. He's BUSY. And not with you.
I mean shit..his postdocs and grad students barely get a moment of face time...which MAY, in his less sociopathic moments, give him a twinge of guilt...but how hapless are you if you think neglecting the UNDERGRADS gives him pause.
And so much for those of you who think tenure leads to lazy sitting on laurels. This guy is seriously busy. Just not with mentoring YOU. Orchestrating large-scale research endeavors? Yes. Marshalling serious funding dollars? Yes. Preaching the theoretic gospel to better-positioned colleagues? Yes. Shmoozing deans and politicians? Yes. YOU? No.
Not every prof is like this. Even some of the most elite are still very fond of the unwashed undergraduate masses. But when I think back, as an undergrad, to how important I thought my academic issues were to my professors, and how entitled I felt to their time, and how high priority undergraduate mentoring must be to research faculty. Wow. I was silly. Professors, in my experience, do not think in terms of the "merchant/client" model like most kids who throw out the "hey, I'm PAYING for this" argument do. Professors see their money coming from granting agencies, not your mom and dad.
OK, can ya tell I've got issues with this guy's style? He's brilliant, but what a dick.
Anyway...if you have a professor who's both a credit to his field and a credit to your education, give him your thanks. It's a rare combination.
(BTW, this guy's office hours are strictly "by appointment only," which, I've noticed, is a growing trend in scheduling office hours. You think he's got time to leave hours open for unannounced interruption?! No, no, no.)
It's a shame that cord just sticks out like that, it just makes the thing look ridiculous.
It doesn't. Look at some of the other pics. The cord wraps around, hugging a groove in the band, and the connector snaps in at the band's buckle. Looks like it's actually concealed quite nicely.
Uhm, for that matter every single species on the planet has had just as much time to evolve. That is, if you believe in a single common ancestor, which most evolutionary biologists do. Certainly for multicellular organisms, there's somewhere back there a single common ancestor.
Let's put every species in our genus!
Why not put them in the same Genus as us? Cuz Linnaean taxonomy is an artificial human convention imposed on the world. It's not up to the world to divide itself neatly into kingdom, phyllum, class, order, family, genus, and species. And while most modern taxonomy is debated based on genetic distance, things don't divide up neatly into those slots.
The debate is a pedantic one that has no bearing on how the world works, or really, on our understanding of it.
OK, now flip your argument over to the analog realm. Somewere out there is a service point were all the analog broadcasts are coming from. One, why isn't anyone DDoSing it? Two, why isn't anyone hacking it?
Good question, but the answer's kind of obvious. The equipment necessary to hack a digital system over IP is cheap and commoditized (that is, a personal computer). Millions of people have capability (maybe thousands have the know-how?). The equipment needed to hack the analog signal is prohibitively expensive (transponders, distribution amplifiers, etc. etc.). Plus, the interface for hacking in the digital realm is all via software, whereas you have to engineer the hardware to accomplish the same in the analog domain.
This isn't to say that analog "hacking" isn't done. Phreaking? Pirate radio, pirate television? The infamous "Captain Midnight" overtaking HBO's uplink in 1986?
You know, I'm as anti monopoly as the next guy, but c'mon. Cable companies already provide internet and television. They're just throwing in telephony too. Likewise, most telephone companies already provide internet service via DSL. Some (like BellSouth), provide all three already! If anything, this puts all the big dogs on even ground because you can get all your digital connectivity from any of the players. So, now your erstwhile phone co's compete with your erstwhile cable co's.
Really, the insight here is distributing other modalities of data (telephone, TV) wirelessly at the home like we can do with internet today. That's the insight. I don't think there's any monopolistic conspiracy any worse than the ones unfolding due to other factors anyway. What we need is other smaller, viable players in the field, not hand-wringing over consolidation of information. I mean, information is information. HTML, video, audio or otherwise.
Agreed..and some of the technical hurdles, while not insurmountable, introduce their own plethora of vulnerabilities.
For example, they mention VoD, but really it's ALL television broadcasts on demand. I mean, presumably the first service of a cable company is television programming. Their system implies that all broadcasts be streamed over IP. Which means some server out there is hosting every digital broadcast available all the time. This server instantly becomes the most hacked at system ever. Not only will there be a huge vulnerability for theft of service, but unless there's massive colocalization, you can imagine DoS attacks on your TV programs.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey asshole
Hey!
Jeez Mr. Touchy, I didn't read your goddamn post. I posted at most 1 min. later than you (7:19 vs. 7:20). Like it's such an original joke anyway.
Would it make it all better if I replied to your post and demand it get modded up?
Brave face, insulting me as AC. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it's just some Slashnazi jerk posing as you.
Condoms.
Probably, like, not ever.
It would be trivial to get a broadband or frequency hopping high power radio onboard an aircraft and disrupt systems during critical junct...
D UP !!!
Gaw!.Geez!..SHHHHH!..Shut-upShut-upShut-upSHADD
You da man.
And what stoopid trade-off he's proposing. Sure, Airport stations can be both AP's and bridges. But, as he notes...
There's only one major caveat on the AirPort: You'll need a Mac to configure it. Since you'll only need to do this once, though, it's not a big problem. Only a small percentage of us own an Apple computer, but we all know someone who does and never stops reminding us. Not only will your Mac Buddy come over and set up your AirPorts, he'll be hurt if you don't let him. Go ahead, ask him and see.
WTF?! What kind of trade-off is this for a PC owner? Thanks, Paul, you saved me from (gasp!) buying two kinds of hardware, but now I have to call my smug "Mac Buddy" over every time I want to manage it. AND, this smug Mac Buddy of mine has administrative rights on my LAN. I better stop calling him smug.
Airport is great, Macs are great, but this is a horrible solution for the mission he set up for himself: Propose the dead-simplest full-coverage wireless home network for your average (i.e. Windows-using) person.
It's true. You need Mac's Airpot Setup Assistant, which is not HTTP based. Maybe one these /. geeks will tell us what protocol it does use and if some incipent OSS project will soon allow non-Mac machines to manage Aiport base stations.
What are they going to do? Will they send cops to break down a door?
Yes. Ignoring a summons is contempt of court and a bench warrant will be issued for your arrest. You just turned a civil matter into a criminal one. You're waging your civil disobedience against the legal system, not RIAA.
Yeah, Amnesty International's been ridin' those damn Martians for years about their climate. It's oppressive!
Man, fhqwhgads, you're just making yourself look worse, you know? I mean, everybody's just gonna feel sorry for you. I mean, I do.
But with RFID, customers have no such option. Everyone can be tracked, regardless of whether they approve or not.
Uh..How?
I'm as big as a privacy buff as the next guy, but how the hell are the amassing a database about you simply by virtue of RFIDs?!
Like I mention below, the uproar with Benetton's plan was that the RFID was embedded in the CLOTHING. So that when you came BACK to the store, they could, ostensibly, compile a profile of your Benetton purchases by surrepitiously scanning your clothes as you came back in.
I'm going to assume, unless someone can demonstrate otherwise, that Walmart is interested in putting the RFIDs on the PACKAGING. On the long shot that the RFID *is* in the product itself, who cares? How often are you coming back to Walmart, with, say, the TV or the twizzlers you just bought there? And as for clothes...well, really, if you're dressing yourself at Walmart, you're on you're own, buddy.
But seriously, Walmart, unlike Benetton, doesn't sell high-ticket item clothes, and probably isn't interested in profiling their typical customers clothes buying habits, really. I doubt Walmart socks will have RFIDs embedded. Probably only the packages will.
Maybe not.
The problem with the Benetton plan was that the RFIDs were suppose to be embedded in the clothing itself. No one has ever said Walmart is asking for this.
Certainly, for non-clothing products, I doubt the RFID will be embedded in the product itself. That would be far too costly a change for the manufacturing process. Rather, it will probably be embedded in the packaging itself (like UPCs).
Even for clothes, I imagine (in Walmart's case) the RFID will be in the clothing tags or packages. I can't imagine Walmart convincing Fruit of the Loom to embed RFIDs in every pair of briefs.
I think the article does not mention privacy concerns because, frankly, unless the RFID is somehow permanently associated with the product, there are no privacy concerns.
I urge all Slashdotters to read the Google cache of this story. Wow. It's unbelievably crass, misogynistic, and utterly puerile.
It's also the stuff of life you're completely missing out on sitting at home playing Counter-Strike and Evercrack.
Seriously, Tucker is a ridiculous caricature of the antithesis of geekdom (which is not to see he's not a really bright guy). But use his extremism to find the golden mean: Especially you younger Slashdotters, go out and make some MEMORIES. Do something STUPID. Take some (respectful) CHANCES with women.
Tangents:
The shocking of hilarity of Tucker's story is that it has the ring of truth...Even Katy accuses him of "invading privacy" by conveying "accurate details" of her life.
On the other hand, the shocking hilarity of Katy's site is its utter vapidity that resonates with Tucker's assessment. Her cartoons...wow...I mean, I could draw better cartoons and I'm so bad at drawing I'd be ashamed to show them to my own mother. And the humor(?!). Wow.
Check out these tortured puns:
Make it your philosophy not to be Gossipy! GOSSIP -> G(R)OSS(L)IP. Get it? Gross Lip! Ha. Ha?
It's unfair that most comics are drawn by men. It's time for DISS*"WOMAN"ATION to end! Please kill me.
The groaners keep coming. It's amazing. I mean staggering.
REPORT: TV HELPS BUILD VALUABLE LOOKING SKILLS
NEW YORK--A report released Monday by NYU's Center For Media Studies has found that television, accused by experts of diminishing children's attention spans and discouraging them from interacting with others, can actually help children as young as six months develop essential looking skills.
(...snip...)
See the news outlet linked above for rest. They were on top of this shit back in 1999.
Hahah. I wondered who else would think of this.
..."
I think this was the bit where the "Saul Rosenberg" character (the whiny, New Yorky, bad-Woody-Allen-impression one) drove his motorbike and sidecar ("speedin' all up n' down da road") while drunk and smashed into a bunch people. Who are now about sue him. So he wants to sue them back. The lawyer politely explains that thats crazy, he doesn't handle "that type of case" (i.e. frivolous).
"Well, then can I sue YOU?"
"Sue ME?"
"Yeah."
"Why would you wanna sue ME?"
"For the damages you're causing me."
"The dam..! I'm causing you damages?! How?"
"The damages you're causing me now. I'm tryin' to get help here, and you're not
"How am I causing you damages?!"
"And the people you represent...I'll sue them too."
"What do the people I represent have anything to do..!"
"Sue you, sue everybody!"
"But wha...? What do the people I rep..."
"The sidecar smashed into these people! I'm tryin' to explain to you!"
"What does that have to do with the people I represent?!!"
And so. This is from memory. Just thought I'd share.
Good memories.
Thanks for the auto-degredation of Christian people doing scientific research as not solid.
You either jest or misunderstand. Read this post.
a small religious group known as "Christian Science" (offically "The Church of Christ, Scientist"), which has very little in common with Christianity.
Or, for that matter, very little do with "science" either. Thanks for the clarification. In my post, when I said, "Christian Scientists," I meant members of this sect, not, you know, Christian scientists.
Despite it's name, and the fact that it is, indeed, owned by Christian Scientists, the Christian Science Monitor is actually considered a reputable paper (scroll down for CSM), with high-quality journalism. It has a more centrist or even liberal bent, not Christian right.
Here's some advice to bright-eyed undergrads hoping to glean knowledge from the professorial elite: Do not be surprised if they just don't care.
My graduate advisor is one of these shooting-star big shots on his way up. He's been tenured for a while, and now holds several high-powered positions of responsibility under his belt, federal grant review committees, editorships, directorship of a research center, yadda yadda. He does not give a flying fuck about office hours or undergrads. Really.
He understands one thing: Science. If you ain't talkin the talk, you're wasting his time. He doesn't want to hear about your trifles and personal dilemmas. He doesn't want to hear your frustration with course conflicts and
hand-wringing about your grades. Unless you are a *brilliant* undergrad who has thought about research, preferably his research, and you have new ideas and are there to make your impressive intellect available at his disposal...you're meaningless.
Alas, I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect only a little bit. Yeah, he's cognizant of his duty to teaching. In an annoyed way. Yeah, he'll do his service to his undergraduate advisees--begrudgingly--but with the correct outward social demeanor. But, damn. He's BUSY. And not with you.
I mean shit..his postdocs and grad students barely get a moment of face time...which MAY, in his less sociopathic moments, give him a twinge of guilt...but how hapless are you if you think neglecting the UNDERGRADS gives him pause.
And so much for those of you who think tenure leads to lazy sitting on laurels. This guy is seriously busy. Just not with mentoring YOU. Orchestrating large-scale research endeavors? Yes. Marshalling serious funding dollars? Yes. Preaching the theoretic gospel to better-positioned colleagues? Yes. Shmoozing deans and politicians? Yes. YOU? No.
Not every prof is like this. Even some of the most elite are still very fond of the unwashed undergraduate masses. But when I think back, as an undergrad, to how important I thought my academic issues were to my professors, and how entitled I felt to their time, and how high priority undergraduate mentoring must be to research faculty. Wow. I was silly. Professors, in my experience, do not think in terms of the "merchant/client" model like most kids who throw out the "hey, I'm PAYING for this" argument do. Professors see their money coming from granting agencies, not your mom and dad.
OK, can ya tell I've got issues with this guy's style? He's brilliant, but what a dick.
Anyway...if you have a professor who's both a credit to his field and a credit to your education, give him your thanks. It's a rare combination.
(BTW, this guy's office hours are strictly "by appointment only," which, I've noticed, is a growing trend in scheduling office hours. You think he's got time to leave hours open for unannounced interruption?! No, no, no.)
Made it look nice? With that honking USB connector wrapped around the wrist strap? Why not brand the word "NERD" across your forehead?
Done and done!
It's a shame that cord just sticks out like that, it just makes the thing look ridiculous.
It doesn't. Look at some of the other pics. The cord wraps around, hugging a groove in the band, and the connector snaps in at the band's buckle. Looks like it's actually concealed quite nicely.
One of TV Funhouse's best bits
They've had just as much time to evolve.
Uhm, for that matter every single species on the planet has had just as much time to evolve. That is, if you believe in a single common ancestor, which most evolutionary biologists do. Certainly for multicellular organisms, there's somewhere back there a single common ancestor.
Let's put every species in our genus!
Why not put them in the same Genus as us?
Cuz Linnaean taxonomy is an artificial human convention imposed on the world. It's not up to the world to divide itself neatly into kingdom, phyllum, class, order, family, genus, and species. And while most modern taxonomy is debated based on genetic distance, things don't divide up neatly into those slots.
The debate is a pedantic one that has no bearing on how the world works, or really, on our understanding of it.
OK, now flip your argument over to the analog realm. Somewere out there is a service point were all the analog broadcasts are coming from. One, why isn't anyone DDoSing it? Two, why isn't anyone hacking it?
Good question, but the answer's kind of obvious. The equipment necessary to hack a digital system over IP is cheap and commoditized (that is, a personal computer). Millions of people have capability (maybe thousands have the know-how?). The equipment needed to hack the analog signal is prohibitively expensive (transponders, distribution amplifiers, etc. etc.). Plus, the interface for hacking in the digital realm is all via software, whereas you have to engineer the hardware to accomplish the same in the analog domain.
This isn't to say that analog "hacking" isn't done. Phreaking? Pirate radio, pirate television? The infamous "Captain Midnight" overtaking HBO's uplink in 1986?
You know, I'm as anti monopoly as the next guy, but c'mon. Cable companies already provide internet and television. They're just throwing in telephony too. Likewise, most telephone companies already provide internet service via DSL. Some (like BellSouth), provide all three already! If anything, this puts all the big dogs on even ground because you can get all your digital connectivity from any of the players. So, now your erstwhile phone co's compete with your erstwhile cable co's.
Really, the insight here is distributing other modalities of data (telephone, TV) wirelessly at the home like we can do with internet today. That's the insight. I don't think there's any monopolistic conspiracy any worse than the ones unfolding due to other factors anyway. What we need is other smaller, viable players in the field, not hand-wringing over consolidation of information. I mean, information is information. HTML, video, audio or otherwise.
Agreed..and some of the technical hurdles, while not insurmountable, introduce their own plethora of vulnerabilities.
For example, they mention VoD, but really it's ALL television broadcasts on demand. I mean, presumably the first service of a cable company is television programming. Their system implies that all broadcasts be streamed over IP. Which means some server out there is hosting every digital broadcast available all the time. This server instantly becomes the most hacked at system ever. Not only will there be a huge vulnerability for theft of service, but unless there's massive colocalization, you can imagine DoS attacks on your TV programs.