This morning I asked my Android "where can I buy a good pair of fur-lined leather gloves" and it thought I said "where can I buy a good pair of for lined leather gloves" and returned no useful results at all. The programmer was a southerner, I guess? "How much does them go fer?"
No it actually thought you wanted to buy "purloined" leather gloves. The programmer is a Sherlock Holmes afficianado.
Human memory is a funny thing. It does not really remember what we saw, except for a few savants with photographic memory. What we generally remember is what we felt. I will cit two personal examples.
When I was in seventh grade I saw a movie with a typical bollywood number set on the Moon. Craters and boulders and stuff with the leading pair dancing and singing. I remembered it as a magnificent big set. After some 40 years I happened to see the same sequence, in an old is gold DVD set. The set was cheesy, tacky, at most 40 feet by 30 feet, craters were of just two sizes, nearly perfect circles, in a kind of semi uniform spacing. The leading pair looked horribly over made up. The only thing that was still great was the song. I was humming it for a couple of days. [*]
Whan I was young my dad used to take to the bank and I used to think the tellers were sitting on very tall chairs behind impossibly tall counters. Turns out that was just the perspective of a child who has to look up at everything. Once I grew up these counters seemed quite normal, at most 4 or 4.5 feet tall.
The point is, even if we unearth all those missing 106 episodes, the actual episodes might not stand up to all the hype and expectation heaped up on them.
It is not the farmers' losses that drives up the insurance cost for the rest of us. The cost passed to us do not come from these farmers. They have the same cookie cutter homes that is totally unsuitable for tornado alley, miles and miles of exurbia. Farmers have a reason to live in the middle of tornado alley far away from everyone. What about those office workers who prefer to stay in half-acre lot 25 miles from city center? They contribute to the maximum amount of tax payer subsidized disaster relief. This sprawl would not happen if we ask them to pay for the full cost living like that. They would congregate into tight clusters of concrete buildings if they are paying for the whole thing.
And those urban sprawl would do greatly once they revert back to farmland.
It will let people survive to rebuild in an area unsuitable for human occupation again and again. They will take our tax dollars through FEMA again and again. Unless people are asked to pay full price of their decisions, such shelters would lead to more financial pain, tax burden to others. People who decided not to live in plywood boxes in tornado country, or in wildfire area or below the sea level between a lake and the sea, or below the river level etc should not be asked to shoulder the burden of supporting people who made foolish decisions on where to build their homes. One unexpected natural disaster? We all should pitch in. But supporting unviable habitation through taxes, insurance subsidies, and disaster relief on known and predictable disasters distorts the marketplace.
You want the freedom to live anywhere in America? Go for it, and pay full price for it. No disaster relief, no insurance subsidies. FEMA should annonce phased withdrawal of tornado support in known tornado regions, wildfire suppression in scrub country, flood insurance in known flood prone areas, or hurricane relief in known hurricane prone coastal areas. Emergency relief is only for areas where the disaster is very infrequent. It is not a routine operation.
Probably the right solution for tornado country is to stop the stupid urban sprawl, create towns with a nucleus of concrete condos, two or three stories
tall, tightly built in a circle with a pool and courtyard in the middle. Windows with aluminium shutters that can be closed, cars parked at ground
level below these condos. You need concrete structures to survive tornadoes and do the compromise necessary to do it. Or pay full price for freedom. I am sick and tired of supporting your unnatural life style choice to live in plastic and plywood boxes in tornado country.
First you need to download and install a neural network program in your smartphone, train it with loads and loads of data. Then turn it on and leave it running. Then it can become a keystroke logger. At this point it worse than the proverbial unix virus, "You got a unix virus. It works on honor system. Please forward this mail to all addresses in your .mailrc and sudo \rm -rf / Thank you."
Yes, the cheaters who knew this have not been caught. It does not mean they don't exist. I am sure there is a whole bunch of them pissed off by this greedy hack who have derailed their gravy train they have been riding for a long time.
The law mandates comparable, fair market value wages for the starting salary. H1B is for three years, extendable to six years and if a green card application is filed, it is extended infinitely. No requirement to even give COLA for those years. And in practice, they hire H1Bs in Tulsa OK, and transfer them to Boston or Chicago or New York. It is a joke. H1Bs lower American salaries, there is no question about it.
But that is the lesser of the two evils. The businesses have a knife at the throat of America and are saying, "Gimme H1B here or I export the job to Bangalore, Bangkok or Beijing". At least these H1Bs get nominally American wages, live and spend some of it in USA and pay taxes to the USA.
It recently blasted Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] by accusing it of deceptive marketing and pricing practices in the information it shows on its website.
The "It" in this quote is the auto dealers, a very well known group to be the paragons of virtue and personification of integrity when it comes to selling automobiles and providing accurate information.
Henry Ford fought the cartel of car manufacturers called American Motor Manufacturers Association which claimed patent rights to the automobile and demanded royalty payment for all car makers. Ford defied them, fought them all the way to the Supreme Court and won back in 1900s. Hope Musk fights the dealers, their cartels and their political shenanigans and win. As soon as I can afford it, I will buy a Tesla.
The drones as used by the US now a days are on very long loiter and patrol missions. More than six hours. Fighters have limited range, limited loiter time, and limited combat time. F16 drones might be very good research platforms, but not very useful operationally. Further drone pilots like the stable slow reacting planes. May be there are some training opportunities with a fast agile plane as drone. But still it operational use is not very clear.
When this future arrives, the taxi fare will be zero. But there will be a video camera that will record you in the cab all the way, and a robot will rifle through all the papers and bags you are carrying and record it. Then it will upload it all to your google+ account and nag you to share it with rest of the world. And somehow it will figure out from all this, what you want to buy next and pitch ads to you all along the ride.
Wow! I think the highest profit margins ever recorded in an android universe must have been this project in Nokia. Just a couple of engineers writing a few header files, and one middle manager producing a presentation of a product development plan, one double agent ratting it out to Microsoft..., boom, the take over negotiations with Microsoft goes at combat speed and the offer bumped up by a billion or two!
Well done, Nokia, you have learned the lessons of all those municipalities and governments threatening to go to Linux to wrangle a better deal from Microsoft well.
So this bogus "maintenance engineer" was able to get access to the physical machine and install a KVM switch and snake cables out of the bank to another location controlled by the crooks. It is not clear how this was detected and how he was tracked.
Well, he could have easily slipped in an unobstrusive thumbdrive with a key logger in to a back usb port, and collected it back in the next "maintenance" visit! One could imagine a usb device based KVM without cables transmitting data wirelessly. Such devices are very useful, I could stash my tower in a sound proofed cooling enclosure far away and keep my KVM on my desk. So they will be in the market, if they are not already in the market. At that point all the bogus engineer had to do was to slip in an unobstrusive usb device in a back port.
Once the crooks have physical access to the machine, it becomes very difficult to protect against. Once a crook and an insider cooperate it becomes very very difficult to guard against.
That is a big problem for most slashdotters. Most regular folks will have friends they meet face to face who will happily sit in the drive way and press the garage door opener when you yell, "now". But for people with only cyberfriends (and freaks and fans) it is a real problem. Not to worry. Pretty soon we will develop remote presence robots controlled by our cyberfriends who would see us face to feet.
From what I could make out from wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_code ), looks like the password is 16bits, it is encrypted with a 32 bit pattern. Thinking back, to make the car "learn" the garage door, you need to put the door opener in the "synch" mode or "learn" mode first. Then the first key press transmitts the random seed value. Both the car and the door opener intercepts this seed value. That is how the car is able to become an authorized transmitter. It further needs a few more key presses for it to guess the rolling algorithm. So if the first key press that sets the seed value is not intercepted, then subsequent transmissions are relatively safe. But still, it is just a 32 bit encryption. NSA will break it in 2 milli seconds. Local hoodlum might take a few seconds.
My home alarm system is almost a decade old. It is armed with a dial pad on egress door usually. It has one arm/disarm remote in the second floor. But it is not IR. It is RF, similar to garage door opener. It has rolling codes. Wondering how common is the IR disarming remotes for home security.
But I am more worried about the garage door openers coming with cars. They have usually three buttons in the rear view mirror. You hold the regular garage door open close to it and operate the door two or three times. Somehow the car gets not only the code but also the "rolling codes" and becomes a new duplicate garage door opener. Wondering what kind of security has been implemented there. If I use a sophisticated and powerful radio receiver to capture the code transmitted by the garage door opener two or three times, would it be enough to get the rolling code algorithm?
The PC industry has been selling to the customers far more than what they need for a long time. It is true for most gadgets. How many million VCRs blinked 00:00 as the time for their entire service lives? How many people say even now, "I don't use even 1 % of the features of my camcorder"?
No, not everybody hacks C/java, they don't need a video editor, or sound editor or image editor. 90% of the people consume content, and the only content they create are simple letters and emails. Even the other 10% who create content using photo editors, video editors, audio editors, IDEs, apps, web pages etc, they don't need all this in all their computer. The market for full fledged content creation computers is 100 times smaller than the market for content consuming computers. Chromebooks are great playback devices for all kinds of media, audio, video, books, photos etc even when they are off line. When they are online, they can do everything that can be done through a browser.
The net effect of it is, our gravy train is coming to a halt. All these content consumers were subsidizing the general purpose computers we slashdotters typically love. Let us be prepared to pay high prices for a general purpose computer in the coming years.
... only outlaws will have hand grenades. Hand grenades don't kill people, people kill people. Our founding fathers realized the need of free citizens to keep and carry tactical nuclear warheads to guard against tyranny.
Go ahead and mod me troll or flame bait. But never question if there is a dividing line somewhere in the spectrum of weapons from.22 six shooter to shoulder fired anti tank bazookas.
India's Godrej company ended production of manuals in 2011. For millions of rural Indians the ticket out of poverty has been typewriting and shorthand certificates. My dad used a portable Remington to pound out inspection reports. He stopped using it once he became a superintendent and got his own stenographer. I used it as a toy and kept it going for long time. Lacking a proper machine shop all my repairs were done using bent paper clips and bits of nylon strings. These machines are indestructible. Eventually it was sold for scrap for a few cents per pound. Sad, I miss the smell of metal and oil and the ink and the ribbon.
The seax was found in the River Thames near Battersea by Henry J. Briggs, a labourer, in early 1857.[note 1] Briggs sold it to the British Museum, and on 21 May 1857 it was exhibited at the Society of Antiquaries of London by Augustus Wollaston Franks (an antiquary who worked at the Antiquities Department of the British Museum), when it was described as "resembling the Scramasax of the Franks, of which examples are very rare in England; and bears a row of runic characters inlaid in gold".[2] Since then the weapon has usually been called the Thames scramasax; but the term scramasax (from Old Frankish *scrâmasahs) is only attested once, in the History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, and the meaning of the scrama- element is uncertain,[3] so recent scholarship prefers the term long seax or long sax for this type of weapon.[4][5]
For an individual, yes, smithing is very hard. I think we had smithy in my third semester, I think and probably made a C. For a society? Smithy does not require great flights of imagination or crucial insight. People have been making stone tools for 2 million years, fire for half a million years, constantly looking to harden stone/wood/bone tools by charring them in fire etc. So they would have noticed, unlike flint, the meteorite rock bends, but it could be beaten into a sharp edge repeatedly.
On the other hand, it boggles my mind how they discovered smelting. Definitely by poking around the remnants of campfires serendipitously started on ore rich ground would have been the starting point. But still that is the difficult part, identifying ore deposits and coming up with a process to make the metal without fully understanding the chemistry, purely by trial and error. That was incredible.
The metal working mastery consisted of basically heating the damn thing and beating the hell out of it with a hammer. Finding iron ore, smelting it down and extracting the metal are the difficult thing to do. Once you have the metal, beating it into shape is no big deal. For example the legendary Viking swords +Ulfberht were made by the Vikings by importing high carbon steel from the Middle East via the Volga trade routes. (Of course, the Viking might have discovered and then lost the technology to produce high carbon steel, but the facts Viking were trading with Middle East via Volga, and the Middle East was making high carbon Wootz steels by that time lends credence to this theory).
Making the metal from ore require mastery, making non load bearing artifacts out of metal requires just muscle.
One of the old posts in slashdot suggested people with desirable phones like iPhones and Samsung androids to get fake blackberry like skin to make the phone less attractive to thieves and snatchers. So if Blackberry copyrights the skin design they can actually make some money off their own suckitude.
Slashdot Mirror
This morning I asked my Android "where can I buy a good pair of fur-lined leather gloves" and it thought I said "where can I buy a good pair of for lined leather gloves" and returned no useful results at all. The programmer was a southerner, I guess? "How much does them go fer?"
No it actually thought you wanted to buy "purloined" leather gloves. The programmer is a Sherlock Holmes afficianado.
When I was in seventh grade I saw a movie with a typical bollywood number set on the Moon. Craters and boulders and stuff with the leading pair dancing and singing. I remembered it as a magnificent big set. After some 40 years I happened to see the same sequence, in an old is gold DVD set. The set was cheesy, tacky, at most 40 feet by 30 feet, craters were of just two sizes, nearly perfect circles, in a kind of semi uniform spacing. The leading pair looked horribly over made up. The only thing that was still great was the song. I was humming it for a couple of days. [*]
Whan I was young my dad used to take to the bank and I used to think the tellers were sitting on very tall chairs behind impossibly tall counters. Turns out that was just the perspective of a child who has to look up at everything. Once I grew up these counters seemed quite normal, at most 4 or 4.5 feet tall.
The point is, even if we unearth all those missing 106 episodes, the actual episodes might not stand up to all the hype and expectation heaped up on them.
[*]: For the Desis out there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6UeorX-aVo
And those urban sprawl would do greatly once they revert back to farmland.
You want the freedom to live anywhere in America? Go for it, and pay full price for it. No disaster relief, no insurance subsidies. FEMA should annonce phased withdrawal of tornado support in known tornado regions, wildfire suppression in scrub country, flood insurance in known flood prone areas, or hurricane relief in known hurricane prone coastal areas. Emergency relief is only for areas where the disaster is very infrequent. It is not a routine operation.
Probably the right solution for tornado country is to stop the stupid urban sprawl, create towns with a nucleus of concrete condos, two or three stories tall, tightly built in a circle with a pool and courtyard in the middle. Windows with aluminium shutters that can be closed, cars parked at ground level below these condos. You need concrete structures to survive tornadoes and do the compromise necessary to do it. Or pay full price for freedom. I am sick and tired of supporting your unnatural life style choice to live in plastic and plywood boxes in tornado country.
First you need to download and install a neural network program in your smartphone, train it with loads and loads of data. Then turn it on and leave it running. Then it can become a keystroke logger. At this point it worse than the proverbial unix virus, "You got a unix virus. It works on honor system. Please forward this mail to all addresses in your .mailrc and sudo \rm -rf / Thank you."
Yes, the cheaters who knew this have not been caught. It does not mean they don't exist. I am sure there is a whole bunch of them pissed off by this greedy hack who have derailed their gravy train they have been riding for a long time.
I think it would be New England Patriots coach who really really wanted this.
But that is the lesser of the two evils. The businesses have a knife at the throat of America and are saying, "Gimme H1B here or I export the job to Bangalore, Bangkok or Beijing". At least these H1Bs get nominally American wages, live and spend some of it in USA and pay taxes to the USA.
It recently blasted Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] by accusing it of deceptive marketing and pricing practices in the information it shows on its website.
The "It" in this quote is the auto dealers, a very well known group to be the paragons of virtue and personification of integrity when it comes to selling automobiles and providing accurate information.
Henry Ford fought the cartel of car manufacturers called American Motor Manufacturers Association which claimed patent rights to the automobile and demanded royalty payment for all car makers. Ford defied them, fought them all the way to the Supreme Court and won back in 1900s. Hope Musk fights the dealers, their cartels and their political shenanigans and win. As soon as I can afford it, I will buy a Tesla.
The drones as used by the US now a days are on very long loiter and patrol missions. More than six hours. Fighters have limited range, limited loiter time, and limited combat time. F16 drones might be very good research platforms, but not very useful operationally. Further drone pilots like the stable slow reacting planes. May be there are some training opportunities with a fast agile plane as drone. But still it operational use is not very clear.
When this future arrives, the taxi fare will be zero. But there will be a video camera that will record you in the cab all the way, and a robot will rifle through all the papers and bags you are carrying and record it. Then it will upload it all to your google+ account and nag you to share it with rest of the world. And somehow it will figure out from all this, what you want to buy next and pitch ads to you all along the ride.
Well done, Nokia, you have learned the lessons of all those municipalities and governments threatening to go to Linux to wrangle a better deal from Microsoft well.
Well, he could have easily slipped in an unobstrusive thumbdrive with a key logger in to a back usb port, and collected it back in the next "maintenance" visit! One could imagine a usb device based KVM without cables transmitting data wirelessly. Such devices are very useful, I could stash my tower in a sound proofed cooling enclosure far away and keep my KVM on my desk. So they will be in the market, if they are not already in the market. At that point all the bogus engineer had to do was to slip in an unobstrusive usb device in a back port.
Once the crooks have physical access to the machine, it becomes very difficult to protect against. Once a crook and an insider cooperate it becomes very very difficult to guard against.
That is a big problem for most slashdotters. Most regular folks will have friends they meet face to face who will happily sit in the drive way and press the garage door opener when you yell, "now". But for people with only cyberfriends (and freaks and fans) it is a real problem. Not to worry. Pretty soon we will develop remote presence robots controlled by our cyberfriends who would see us face to feet.
From what I could make out from wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_code ), looks like the password is 16bits, it is encrypted with a 32 bit pattern. Thinking back, to make the car "learn" the garage door, you need to put the door opener in the "synch" mode or "learn" mode first. Then the first key press transmitts the random seed value. Both the car and the door opener intercepts this seed value. That is how the car is able to become an authorized transmitter. It further needs a few more key presses for it to guess the rolling algorithm. So if the first key press that sets the seed value is not intercepted, then subsequent transmissions are relatively safe. But still, it is just a 32 bit encryption. NSA will break it in 2 milli seconds. Local hoodlum might take a few seconds.
But I am more worried about the garage door openers coming with cars. They have usually three buttons in the rear view mirror. You hold the regular garage door open close to it and operate the door two or three times. Somehow the car gets not only the code but also the "rolling codes" and becomes a new duplicate garage door opener. Wondering what kind of security has been implemented there. If I use a sophisticated and powerful radio receiver to capture the code transmitted by the garage door opener two or three times, would it be enough to get the rolling code algorithm?
No, not everybody hacks C/java, they don't need a video editor, or sound editor or image editor. 90% of the people consume content, and the only content they create are simple letters and emails. Even the other 10% who create content using photo editors, video editors, audio editors, IDEs, apps, web pages etc, they don't need all this in all their computer. The market for full fledged content creation computers is 100 times smaller than the market for content consuming computers. Chromebooks are great playback devices for all kinds of media, audio, video, books, photos etc even when they are off line. When they are online, they can do everything that can be done through a browser.
The net effect of it is, our gravy train is coming to a halt. All these content consumers were subsidizing the general purpose computers we slashdotters typically love. Let us be prepared to pay high prices for a general purpose computer in the coming years.
Go ahead and mod me troll or flame bait. But never question if there is a dividing line somewhere in the spectrum of weapons from .22 six shooter to shoulder fired anti tank bazookas.
India's Godrej company ended production of manuals in 2011. For millions of rural Indians the ticket out of poverty has been typewriting and shorthand certificates. My dad used a portable Remington to pound out inspection reports. He stopped using it once he became a superintendent and got his own stenographer. I used it as a toy and kept it going for long time. Lacking a proper machine shop all my repairs were done using bent paper clips and bits of nylon strings. These machines are indestructible. Eventually it was sold for scrap for a few cents per pound. Sad, I miss the smell of metal and oil and the ink and the ribbon.
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers,
Some hack to overcome the lameness filter:
The seax was found in the River Thames near Battersea by Henry J. Briggs, a labourer, in early 1857.[note 1] Briggs sold it to the British Museum, and on 21 May 1857 it was exhibited at the Society of Antiquaries of London by Augustus Wollaston Franks (an antiquary who worked at the Antiquities Department of the British Museum), when it was described as "resembling the Scramasax of the Franks, of which examples are very rare in England; and bears a row of runic characters inlaid in gold".[2] Since then the weapon has usually been called the Thames scramasax; but the term scramasax (from Old Frankish *scrâmasahs) is only attested once, in the History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, and the meaning of the scrama- element is uncertain,[3] so recent scholarship prefers the term long seax or long sax for this type of weapon.[4][5]
On the other hand, it boggles my mind how they discovered smelting. Definitely by poking around the remnants of campfires serendipitously started on ore rich ground would have been the starting point. But still that is the difficult part, identifying ore deposits and coming up with a process to make the metal without fully understanding the chemistry, purely by trial and error. That was incredible.
Making the metal from ore require mastery, making non load bearing artifacts out of metal requires just muscle.
Call me when the AI program commits suicide because it is not able to crack the entrance examination. Then you are talking.
One of the old posts in slashdot suggested people with desirable phones like iPhones and Samsung androids to get fake blackberry like skin to make the phone less attractive to thieves and snatchers. So if Blackberry copyrights the skin design they can actually make some money off their own suckitude.