Word has come down from the state of New Jersey that Saloncon, the first known neo-victorian convention in the United States, is no more. Following the tribulations of 2009, including the economy floating upside down in its fishbowl, the organizers are not able to set the wheels in motion for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the organizers have branched out in new directions in their personal lives and do not have the time or energy right now to put on a convention as a result. saloncon will certainly be missed; I know I shall miss the yearly trek to New Jersey with my finest clothing carefully packed in the trunk of the TARDIS. However, there are other conventions out there to satisfy our convention addictions, such as the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition and Steamcon in Seattle.
Next, RPG advocates The Escapist have announced Read An RPG Book In Public Week. Three of them, actually, to coincide with the weeks that creators of Dungeons and Dragons (Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson) were born and died, respectively (wow, that's awkward grammar...) For fifteen years, the Escapist has been fighting the crazy and ultimately senseless fight to get the hobby of gaming to stop being considered a dangerous, subversive, suicide-inducing pastime. I wish I were kidding when I write that, but there are many people who still consider co-telling a story and occasionally rolling polyhedral dice while so doing a threat to life, limb, sanity, and religion. At any rate, celebrating these weeks is simple: just sit in a public place and read a gaming book. It could be a core book, it could be an expansion, it could be the module you're planning to run soon. If people come up to you and ask about it, answer their questions politely and truthfully. Please try to be tasteful in the book you choose - the D20 Book of Erotic Fantasy is probably not going to reassure a parent concerned about their son or daughter's interest in fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons. The point is to help us stop looking like scary deviants (just interesting ones). You don't have to take part in all three weeks if you don't want to, and you're not obligated to. Think of it as having extra chances if you get too busy one week.
Last and certainly not least, the Department of Justice is being buffeted by civil liberties advocates port and starboard over the fact that people have been tracked by their cellphones without the issue of a warrant. Many people know that the location of a particular cellular phone can be ascertained if it has an on-board GPS receiver and the phone transmits its current co-ordinates, but it's less known that you can do the same thing by querying cell towers for a particular ESN, and then you look in the region of space wherever the zones covered by two or more towers overlap. Of course, the cell companies don't give just any that information, which means that you have to have pull with them... the thing is, for the past few years law enforcement has been getting this information without showing probable cause or even getting a warrant from a judge requiring the companies to give them this information. Oh, and this ability is being abused from time to time for unethical purposes: a sheriff in Alabama browbeat a local cell company into monitoring the movements of his daughter, claiming that a kidnapping had taken place.
It seems like everything is being steadily reduced to one of three categories these days: terrorism, child pornography, or piracy. Mention of any of them will stop intelligent discourse with the rapidity of a falling watermelon striking the ground, and within the halls of government will derail legislation as surely as 1+1=2. When the categories begin to blur, however, is when the trouble really starts. In the past week that I know of (and probably a bit before, because this sort of shitstorm takes a while to ramp up) blogger.com was forced to delete six music blogs due to allegations of copyright infringement. The DMCA takedown notices stated that music piracy was taking place and Blogger dutifully closed those accounts even though the bloggers had received written permission from the copyright holders to post the recordings in question. Once again, the IFPI is up to its old tricks and acting like a bull in a china shop.
Frankly, I'm worried. If the permission of the copyright holder isn't enough to keep your site intact and the IFPI off your back, what is? Only time and money for legal fees (plus hopefully keeping a backup of your site stashed away someplace) will help if the hammer comes down. Plus, what if the software they use to scan the Net can't tell the difference between a pirated song and something from the Podsafe Music Network? Or music licensed under the Creative Commons? Or even free samples put up by artists so you can try before you buy?
It's only a matter of time before things go too far.
Thirty-two years ago (plus a day or two - real life happens) two computer hobbyists stuck at home in a blizzard not unlike snowpocalypse named Randy Suess and Ward Christenson created something wholly new, which geek history remembers as the bulletin board system. At the time, the idea was revolutionary - with a computer, an auto-answer modem, and some disk space you could set up forums for people to leave public and private messages to one another. As disk space became less expensive, file archives were often added for people to trade files. By the mid-1980's boards were all over the place and there were even magazines devoted to hanging out on and running BBSes. There were picnics, bowling parties, bar crawls, and wing wars where users met offline, and discourse and flamewars alike raged online. By the time I got into BBSing in the early 90's, what wound up being the last generation of callers was just getting into the swing of things (!'s Land, Data's Exchange, Triumvirate, Lady Di's Place, Slacker BBS, Screaming In Digital... all requisat en pace). By late '95, the Net had taken over and that was pretty much all she wrote for dialup BBS culture though there are a few folks keeping the spirit alive (hey, Diamond Dave!).
I think I'm going to toast the Renegade and EBBS softwares this weekend.
I've only been to Philadelphia a couple of times, all of them by driving to and from there. After reading about some of the stuff going on there not only do I not particularly want to visit that city, but I'm not entirely certain that I really want to fly again.
This particular news story leaped out at me for its sheer WTF factor even though the incident seems to have taken place in March of 2009. Bob Thomas, a 53 year old Camden police officer, his wife Leona, and their four year old son Ryan were flying down to Orlando, Florida to celebrate Ryan's fourth birthday. It should be noted that Ryan was born three months premature and is developmentally delayed as a result (he's almost five as I write this). His lower legs are not properly formed, nor is the musculature of his legs. The family dutifully doffed all of their outerwear, broke down the stroller, and loaded everything onto the conveyor belt to be scanned. Ryan's leg braces set off the metal detector, but rather than follow established TSA procedure the screeners forced him to remove his braces and attempt to walk through the metal detector unassisted. The TSA extended an official apology to the family for the screener's actions, but that's beside the point. Why aren't some of the screeners working at PHY using their heads, or at least following the playbook the way they're trained?
On top of that the TSA has begun a program in which people will be swabbed at random to test for traces of explosives. They've been doing this to baggage on a more or less random basis for about a decade now; I got screened that way the first time I flew back in 2000. How accurate these measures will be remains to be seen. Depending on the particular test used, the number of type I errors could be high due to the prevalence of cosmetic products used today or it could actually be reasonable. Only time will tell. Nevermind the fact that someone trying to get a bomb onto a plane will just have someone else wire them up so they won't have explosive residue on their hands. Or maybe They'll stop going for planes and decide to detonate an antipersonnel device while standing in line at the security checkpoint while we're all crammed in there like sardines in a can. Or maybe common sense will be declared a sign of terrorist activity.
An article hit Boing Boing today that raised the hackles on the back of my neck as I read it. The Lower Merion School District just outside of Philadelphia received a grant a couple of years back for laptop computers to issue to its students to use as part of their coursework. In November of last year, the parents of student Blake Robbins received a disciplinary notice pertaining to something unspecified (referred to as "improper behavior") in the affidavit. The disciplinary notice was accompanied by a photograph of Blake while he was at home. The laptops issued by Lower Merion are all equipped with built-in webcams mounted just above the displays, which isn't uncommon for portable computers these days. As it turns out, the issued laptops contain software that phones home to the school district and makes it possible for any teacher to remotely turn on the webcam and record anything that happens to be going on in front of the computer. Neither parents nor students were informed of this capability; no one knows how often it was or is made use of at this time.
Blake's parents have filed a class action complaint against the school district, the district's board of directors, and the district's superintendent, claiming that a whole laundry list of federal and Pennsylvania state laws have been violated. Among them are the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (amended in 1994, 1996, and 2001), and the Fourth Amendment (whether or not the Blake family will be suspected of terrorism remains to be seen). Nobody knows how often students were spied upon in this way, exactly who was watching, or what was seen. Evidence will be trivial to get: Blake's laptop undergoes forensic analysis, the malware is detected (I doubt anything as sophisticated as a rootkit was used to conceal it), and the configuration of the malware is analyzed to determine where it reports to.
The first time I read through this article it threw me for a loop: a patient at a hospital in Geneva, Switzerland referred to by the initials 'TN' suffered two strokes a couple of weeks apart. Each CVA damaged one half of his visual cortex, thus rendering him completely blind for all intents and purposes. While he was recovering, physicians discovered that TN still had the ability to read the facial expressions of people around him and correctly interpret their emotional states. Some tests showed that his amygdala was still operational, which lead neurologists to wonder what else he was capable of without being consciously aware of it. Just to see what would happen, a group of visiting researchers set up a simple obstacle course in a hallway and convinced TN to walk through it even though he required a cane to navigate under normal circumstances.
As it turns out, TN's eyes are still fully operational even though his visual cortex is dead, for all intents and purposes. This means that information is still being transmitted to his brain by the optic nerves and the other parts of his brain involved in processing certain aspects of visual information are still functioning normally. Thus, while there is no conscious concept of what is around him the unconscious aspects of vision are still available to TN and are usable to a certain degree. Blindsight, defined as the ability to respond in the appropriate manner to visual input without the feeling of having perceived it is a rare condition but it is known and has been documented by the medical field.
Download the video recording from the article I linked to; give it a watch, it's wild.
Something that VMware quietly changed with the release of VMware Server v2.0 was that they deprecated the use of their stand-alone management console application - if you try to use it to connect to a v2.0 server it just won't work. What you need to do is plug the URL http://vmware-server-host:8222 or https://vmware-server-host:8333 into your web browser and log in with a user account that has admin privileges (which basically means that the account is part of the vmware group). If you're using Mozilla Firefox v3.5.x, the web interface will ask you to install an add-on to the browser which lets you interact with the virtual console. This is all fine and dandy until you upgrade past v3.5, like I did a couple of days ago. The add-on conks out and the VMware web console will quietly throw error messages in its logs. However, there is a fix for this: you can unpack the add-on's .xpi file and run the console app manually. I'm doing this right now on Windbringer and it seems to work pretty well - I can even run X sessions with it without any trouble. Just follow the directions given in the post on the VMware.com forums (in the post, option number two) and everything should be hunky-dory,
One thing I'd like to point out if you do this is that you should specify the box you're connecting to on the command line to be sure you get it right. I did this on Windbringer like so: /home/drwho/vmware-web-console/vmware-vmrc -h 127.0.0.1:8333
Once you're sure it works you can put it into a shortcut on your desktop and be done with it, or at least until VMware gets around to fixing their add-on.
Regular users of Gmail have no doubt noticed the new entry just below their Inbox tag called Buzz - if you haven't yet, chances are you will soon. From what I can tell it seems to work a lot like Twitter and Facebook status updates do: there's just enough room to post two or three sentences, links to other pages, comments on Buzz posts, and other stuff like that. It also hooks links to other sides listed in your Google Profile (if you've set one up) so that if you update one of them, it automatically posts a link in your feed. Conversely, responses and comments to your Buzz postings get routed to your Gmail account so you don't have to keep clicking on one more tab in your browser. In other words, it's pretty nifty, albeit a little scary if you think about the privacy implications of this.
While we're on the subject of privacy, it seems that Google Buzz shows the names and/or e-mail addresses of the people you correspond with most often. When you enable Buzz (or just click 'cancel', like I did (that's right, it ignored my request to not set up Buzz)) it goes through your Gmail and Gchat contact lists, figures out whom you communicate with most often, and populates your list of followed accounts automatically. The downside of this is that someone can go to your profile page and click the 'Foo has x followers' and 'Foo is following x' links on the right-hand side and see everyone on those lists along with their e-mail addresses, thus revealing everyone you talk to with any regularity. In fact, if you read the Buzz announcement they tell you this up front. A little experimentation has shown that the person poking around also has to be logged into their Gmail account to see this, but that's hardly a hurdle. You can't make these lists private, so the only thing you can really do is unfollow them, which presents problems if you actually plan on using Buzz for anything.
obCommon Sense: If you don't want people to know about it, don't put it online.
Around 0700 EST5EDT today, one of the warehouses maintained by the Smithsonian Institution sustained damage when its roof collapsed under the weight of all the snow. Technically referred to as the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, the warehouse is used to store artifacts not currently on display at any of the Smithsonian-related facilities. Some of the photographs taken today show that the walls of the warehouse buckled as the roof gave way. It is said that the artifacts stored therein are packed in protective containers but a full report is unavailable at this time because the building itself is considered unstable. For what it's worth, many of the artifacts stored there are in the process of being transferred to the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.
Looking at those pictures, I can't help but wonder: those walls look like tin siding and not much else. Does the Smith have other, better constructed warehouses? Is the reason this one's being phased out because, from appearances, it looks like a tin shack? Are they all like this? What's the status of its contents? How badly damaged is it?
Biomorph: Brown Jenkin
Concept: Horde of malevolent ferrets with distributed intelligence. Optimized for havoc, mass extermination, and piecewise theft.
The DC metroplex is still snowed under, so it's been a pretty slow day for everyone. Around the time that the snowfall slowed to a manageable level (near the end of it, actually) we headed outside to clear away the latest eight inches or so of powder. It was fresh and still fluffy, so we made pretty short work of it. The car's been brushed off and moved a bit so we know that we can get out of the parking space if we need to (whether or not we could escape the complex is another matter entirely) and the engine still turns over, so I think we're good to go. For an encore we cleared part of the sidewalk and the front steps of our apartment building and then headed back in.
In Herdon, Virginia a small group of friends spent Snowpocalypse constructing an honest-to-goodness igloo. It took them three days and a considerable amount of packed snow but the structure they built was not only large enough to stand up in, but they even built a small fire inside of it and toasted marshmallows. I seem to recall reading someplace that they poured water down the outside to reinforce the structure with a rime of ice but it's not in this particular article. Meanwhile, over in Baltimore, Nick and Anna Berte built a snowman with a flamethrower in its mouth. There's a picture of the snowman.. ahem.. fired up for the public over there, and it looks pretty nifty. I wonder what they're using for fuel; probably propane.
On the music front some long-awaited news has hit the 'wires: Poe is recording again after a six year hiatus. Word's been going around amongst fans for years that there was some kind of legal battle between Poe and her record label that resulted in her only releasing two albums, Hello in 1995 and Haunted in 2004. As it turns out her contract was bought out by a private interest and it somehow crippled her ability to publish music (though she's done some work here and there - I was surprised to see her name in the musical credits for Repo!). No specifics have gotten out that I can tell (then again, I've not been active in the fandom for many years).
The reasons for DC's generally poor response to Snowpocalypse II and III may have been discovered. WTOP News got hold of a leaked e-mail that seems to describe some of the things going on behind the curtain. Among the stuff going on that we didn't know about is the fact that approximately 25% of Washington, DC's snow plows are in the shop and they can't get enough parts to fix them all. The e-mail says that they're triaging the trucks to stretch the parts and vehicularr consumables they've got; they're working on getting hold of alternative snow clearing equipment (including Bobcat loaders, which I've seen a few of clearing snow in NOVA). Plus, they only have 4.5 tons of roadway salt on hand and they're waiting on another 16 tons to arrive to replenish their supplies. Staff's been working 12-on-12-off since the first snowfall without signs of a respite and, simply, they don't have very many places to push the snow. The streets of downtown DC are pretty cramped and there are really only two options for snow disposal: truck it away or stuff it someplace that not many people will try to traverse. The parts of northern Virginia I've been to seem to be in much the same fix. Ultimately, the second option is the best one they've got.
Consider this apocryphal, folks, even though it was in the e-mail: a couple of units from the National Guard are supposed to be activated tomorrow at 1200 EST5EDT to assist other organizations in getting the city running again. This probably includes using four Humvees to transport personnel and equipment in difficult-to-traverse areas, assisting the five shelters DHS will be opening (unfortunately, power loss during snow storms happens from time to time down here) and helping move people into and out of hospitals inside the DC metroplex.
We're hanging in there, folks. DC and the surrounding lands are looking at another day of enforced downtime at the very least.
If you haven't heard by now, the National Weather Service has predicted another blizzard headed for the DC metroplex, this time with up to twenty inches of snow in store for us. Yesterday afternoon the federal government called another code red, meaning that all non-essential personnel weren't supposed to drive in. Of course, in our infinite wisdom, Lyssa and I called up Hasufin (who owns a four wheel drive SUV) because we had to make a run to the supermarket to get a few things that we'd run out of (the stuff that spoils soon after you get it). Wholly unsurprisingly, everyone else and their backup had exactly the same idea judging by the carnage at our local supermarket. People were packed in there like sardines in a can and the shelves looked like a plague of locusts had blown through and eaten everything but the enamel on the shelves. Interestingly, you can tell how many people in the area care about eating healthy: the produce shelves were stripped almost bare, the skim, 1%, and 2% milk were entirely gone (but whole milk was left behind), there was no turkey or chicken left but pork products were still in the chiller cases, and there was practically no bottled water to be found. It was so absurd that I couldn't help but snap a few pictures with my smartphone while waiting for the crowds to thin so I could walk another couple of steps.
This morning I got up early to drive Lyssa to her dentist's appointment on the other side of town. I hadn't realized until then just how practical Hasufin's SUV was in this weather: while the roads are technically clear (which is to say that plows have been over them) if you're in a low-mass vehicle you're going to have a hell of a time getting anywhere. For starters I discovered the hard way that the runoff's been alternately thawing and freezing around the front wheels of my car because I had to chip the ice away this morning to back out of my parking spot. Second, the roads are technically clear due to all of the trucks that have been driving over them but not so much the plow blades. Unfortunately, all of the other vehicles have compacted and polished the snow into a slick not-quite-icy surface which affords sweet frag all for traction. A little over halfway to her dentist's office we stopped at a stop sign and discovered that we couldn't move forward again. Two guys jumped out of their trucks to give us a push through the intersection - thanks, guys. You saved our bacon.
Simply put, we're not going anywhere else today unless it involves a loss of power or some other emergency.
The top ten most often quoted people in my .plan file (myself excluded) as of 8 February 2010:
Lyssa (199 times)
Anonymous (114)
Hasufin (110 times)
Jason (49 times)
Pegritz (46 times)
Kyrin (41 times)
Unknown (34 times)
the.Silicon.Dragon (33 times)
The Ferrett (29 times)
Terrence McKenna (22 times)
All quotes of multiple people have been collapsed into a single name based upon the number of times all of the names appeared. People appearing under more than one name had all of their quotes totaled up.
Edited and uploaded at last (the power failure this morning notwithstanding), here are the first round of Snowpocalypse II pictures. While many of the people in our complex spent a good bit of last night and today digging out, we're still plowed in. Our complex is considered a side street, and the state of Virginia isn't going to clear the roads back here until sometime later this week (when more snow is predicted). Plus, a few brainiacs have decided to park right in the middle of some of the roads which have at most a single lane free, so no one can really get anywhere. We saw a few people on skis making pretty good time, and Hasufin's been working on a pair of snowshoes in his spare time.
The federal government's called a code red, so only emergency personnel are supposed to come in... which isn't most of us.
While it's probably common knowledge to everyone inside the beltway but me, I stumbled across a news article in the Politico that talks about CIA analysts hiring themselves out to the private sector as contractors who specialize in determining the veracity of what is said by people involved in corporate negotiations.
While I'm only slightly joking with the Dune reference, the way it's described they're doing much the same thing, only without the aid of external devices or mind-altering compounds. Apparently, the Agency maintains a cadre' of operatives who are trained in reading overt and covert physiological cues to determine if someone is lying about something and how important that something is to them as well as linguistic cues which are employed to qualify falsehoods or gloss over missing facts. They seem to refer to this technique as Tactical Behavior Assessment. It seems that they changed their internal policies to allow this because they got tired of their highly trained agents quitting to take jobs in the private sector where the pay and benefits are much better. They are, it should be noted, still bound by whatever security clearance and non-disclosure agreements they were granted when they signed on with the agency, though it would also not surprise at all if any interesting bits of information they picked up got passed up the food chain when they got back. An in depth description of work must be submitted to the Agency for review before a go/no go is returned to the agent in question. Any conflict of interest or hints of impropriety are grounds for an immediate refusal, backed up by the fearsome US legal system.
There is even an outfit based in Boston called Business Intelligence Advisors, which appears to be staffed by former Agency employees, though they seem to contract a fair number of active CIA employees for specific tasks. Not only can assets be contracted to carry out these tasks but sometimes they can be contracted to instruct non-assets in TBA methodologies.
It seems that the walls between worlds grow thinner and thinner as time goes by.
In the United States, genetic testing of newborns for inherited diseases began quietly sometime in the 1960's; the technology of the time, understandably, was in its infancy so it didn't detect a whole lot. Jump forward a half-decade, and you will find that the practice is still going on, plus it's mandatory in every state, and you might not be aware it's been done. Anna Brown gave birth to a bouncing baby girl a while ago (the article doesn't say when), and was understandably shocked when her pediatrician sat her down to tell her that her daughter Isabel carried a gene which put her at risk for cystic fibrosis. The real shocker came when she discovered that the tests were carried out without her knowledge or consent. The pediatrician wasn't the one who ordered the tests, he was only informed of the results by the state of Minnesota. The testing procedures are carried out by the GEnetic and NEwborn Screening Resource Center of the United States or GeNeS-R-US (a cute but tortured backronym, which seem to be all the rage these days). Even more interesting, genetic samples from babies are cryopreserved and archived indefinitely in some states, again without making a public deal out of it. It's possible for parents to ask the state to destroy the archived samples but it's not paticularly easy. There is also the fear that employers could refuse to hire someone and insurance companies could decline coverage to people who have certain genetic proclivities, even though it's been illegal to do so for a half-decade now.
It should be noted, however, that the insurance companies pay for this testing and get a free copy of the results to add to their records. Even if nothing is wrong. Even if you don't necessarily find out the results, for good or for ill.
What really gets some people's goats is that genetic samples can be passed along to researchers in the private sector without the parents being informed. Privacy laws state that the name of the infant must be kept separate from the sample, but that doesn't always happen. Plus, the security of the data systems which hold this information is always a matter of question. Still, the process through which researchers get hold of DNA samples isn't an easy one, and you have to prove how much you really want those samples to get them.
The ethics and legalities involved are under hot debate: in the past couple of years wrongful life lawsuits have begun to appear in the court system because sperm banks have distributed gametes to clients that weren't screened, and the children conceived were born with inherited genetic conditions. The most famous case involves a sperm donor who carries the gene for a disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which will leave you feeling hale and hearty until an odd combination of factors, which may not necessarily ever come to pass, causes you to fall over dead without warning. The defendant's sperm resulted in the conception of twenty-two children (plus two of his own); one died at age two of HCM, nine positively carry the genetic defect, and two evidence serious left ventricular hypertrophy.
This raises a whole host of thorny ethical questions. Is it ethical for everyone but the parents to know ahead of time what genetic glitches a child is carrying? Is it ethical to terminate a pregnancy because the fetus has better than a 50/50 chance of being born with an inherited disease that could cause them to die without warning? (Countries like Iran have this written into their legal code.) Is it ethical for the state of birth to put a DNA sample of an infant in deep freeze indefinitely for future unspecified purposes without the permission of the parents or donor? What sort of legal precedent does it set that a child born of donated genetic material can track down and sue the donor if they discover that they have a genetic defect? At what point does this cross over into selecting for specific genetic traits, and if it does when will we notice?
The Foresight Institute, a think tank concentrating on the possibilities and potential hazards of emerging and potentially disruptive technologies has announced the Kartik M. Gada Personal Manufacturing Prize totaling $100kus. Part of an effort to spur the development of rapid fabrication and manufacturing technologies at the grassroots level, the prize aims to help bootstrap the quality of life of people living in the twenty most poor economies on the planet. The idea is to lower the cost of entry to the field of manufacturing commodity personal goods by making use of recyclable materials and cheap to construct additive fabbers. The prize consists of two distinct awards, one of $20kus and one of $80kus.
The interim award of $20kus will be awarded by 31 December 2012 to the first project which meets a certain set of requirements. Namely, the fabber must be able to extrude three different construction materials, one of which must be electrically conductive, which dovetails nicely into the second requirement of being able to fabricate circuit boards. The fabber's feedstock must be reusable no less than twenty times before it must be replaced. The fabber must be cheap to construct, costing no more than $200us and at least 90% of the components must themselves be printable (in the same fashion as a RepRap's components). The fabber must be able to print a device larger than 12x12x4 (inches), which basically means that it must construct things you use every day (like moderately complex hand tools). It must be able to generate a single set of all of its printable parts within ten days' time with only one malfunction of the extruder. It must not rely upon a computer, though it may interface with one if such is available. It must also require less than 60 watts of power, which would lend it to being powered by wind, solar, or someone riding a jerry-rigged bicycle.
The grand prize of $80kus will be awarded three years after the interim prize to the project which meets a few more requirements than the first. Largely, it is focused upon speeding up the replication process (seven days instead of ten) but there are a few other aspects that the projects will be judged by. The grand prize winner must make use of relatively cheap feedstock, on the order of $4us/kg (which can be a lot of material if you think about it); additionally, recycling other materials into feedstock factors in prominently.
Participating teams are expected to publish their results regularly for peer review and collaboration. It is expected that the teams will bounce ideas and developments off of each other, and that the rosters of the teams could change over time. If, during the course of the competition teams co-operate with one another and thus improve all 3D printers they worked on, the grand prize may be divided up among the teams at the discretion of the judges. Also, all of their technologies must be made available to everyone under the GPL or BSD licenses for maximum availability.
The weather predictions are growing like the tales of Paul Bunyon in the DC metroplex as the second winter storm of the year comes rolling in. They're calling it Snowpocalypse II around here, and people have been getting ready for it for three days now. On Wednesday evening the stores were packed full of people buying groceries and snow shovels in preparation for today, and the moment a few flakes began sifting down from the ominous grey clouds most every agency in the area called a code red: if you're not security don't come in, stay warm, and stay safe. We got the message today shortly before lunchtime that Goddard was shutting down at 1300, so we wrapped things up early and headed for home shortly after 1200 local time in the hope of beating the worst of the traffic as the city emptied. While the beltway was more densely packed than usual for that time of day, it wasn't a maze of wrecked cars and panicked drivers. Looking out of the window, I'd guess we've got about three inches already and it's still coming down. About once an hour we can hear snow plows outside scraping the roads to stay ahead of the accumulation. Depending on where you are and what newswire you hit, they're predicting anywhere from twenty to thirty inches by midnight tomorrow.
HacDC has canceled tonight's Shmoocon lounge, and last evening a few hardy hackers got together for a sled-making workshop at the 'space.
If you're down this way, don't go out unless you have to. Don't risk it.
Late last year, the bank account of an outfit in Texas called Hillary Machinery, Inc. was siphoned to the tune of $800kus after their online banking credentials were compromised. The bank they did business with, PlainsCapital, required customers to supply a username and passphrase and then enter a single-use passphrase e-mailed to a certain address a few minutes later to complete the authentication process. Investigation showed that IP addresses roughly corresponding to networks in Italy and Romania were used to initiate the transfer of funds to bank accounts in the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe. From this evidence, it seems reasonable to state that their primary login credentials were compromised, and the e-mail address the one-time authenticator was sent to was also being monitored by the attackers, hence, the successful login. The hell of it is PlainsCapital has filed a lawsuit against Hillary Machinery because they had the audacity to accuse them of having lousy security.
Not that this is much of a stretch today, but that's beside the point.
PlainsCapital was able to recover $600kus of the $800kus stolen. The lawsuit filed asks the US District Court in charge of eastern Texas to certify that PlainsCapital's information security is, in fact, reasonable, and thus the electronic funds transfers were carried out in good faith. Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that because the authentication procedure was carried out with valid credentials, their security posture is compliant (nevermind the fact that having valid credentials and having decent security are two entirely different things). Hillary Machinery claims that they never received the authentication e-mails, so it could not have been anyone on their end who transferred the money. This isn't implausible; all you have to do is delete an e-mail before the contents of the mail server get backed up and unless someone audits the mail server's logs (if it's a busy server, this is a nontrivial task) the mail may as well have never been there. When you get right down to it, even being certified compliant to some set of official regulations or other aren't a guarantee that your security's any good, because compliance and actual security are two very different things.
The lawsuit is still ongoing, so neither side is saying much until they get in front of a judge.
It's not that great, though - we passed one of these around at a party a few weeks ago and agreed that it tastes like Kool-Aid made with Ringer's solution.
Yes, Virginia, there apparently is a Pac-Man energy drink. I'm willing to bet that it tastes like transmission fluid and Swee-tarts; I haven't actually opened it because the untouched product itself amuses me. It's sitting on my bookshelf.
This is the weblog of the Doctor, who is (in no particular order), a computer geek, a writer, a musician, a mystech, occasionally a coder, a traveler, an adventurer, and is interested in just about everything to some extent.
The Doctor's life is quite busy so he posts whenever the opportunity arises. It isn't as often as he would like.
is probably not going to reassure a parent concerned about their son or daughter's interest in 
. The point is to help us stop looking like scary deviants (just interesting ones). You don't have to take part in all three weeks if you don't want to, and you're not obligated to. Think of it as having extra chances if you get too busy one week.
in 1995 and 
in 2004. As it turns out her contract was bought out by a private interest and it somehow crippled her ability to publish music (though she's done some work here and there - I was surprised to see her name in the musical credits for 
