lucasjung

The military has been making a huge push in recent years to grow capabilities for "cyber warfare." The Air Force has pushed especially hard to establish themselves in this area, because they see some of their existing core capabilities being marginalized, and they need to keep finding ways to keep themselves relevant. Although the Air Force is pushing hardest in this direction, the other services are also trying to expand their cyber capabilities, and the Navy even recently established a designator for officers to basically be hackers: http://www.informationwarriors.net/showthread.php?t=623

I don't know about carrier tone, but each key on a touch-tone phone has two freqs: one for the row, one for the column.

>It's a pretty city, in some parts, but "Europe's greenest city" is just bullshit. And maybe technically there are more canals than in Venice and Amsterdam, but in reality you'll find that you have to walk quite a bit to get from one canal to the next, where in Venice and Amsterdam they are a defining part of the city.

I grew up in Berlin, when the wall was still up (it came down when I was in the 4th grade, and we left the summer after I finished 5th grade). We flew out of the city to spend major holidays with family back in the states, but in the eleven years I lived there, I left the city via ground transportation exactly three times (all for class trips). Despite hardly ever leaving the city, I regularly went on camping trips with the scouts where it felt like I was in the middle of the wilderness. I also regularly went on walks through sections of the Grünewald (forest/parkland) near my home, and could get so far in that city noise would completely disappear. People would get lost in the Grünewald in the winter and wander around for days before either finally stumbling out onto a street, dying of exposure, or being killed by wild boars. I don't know any other city on Earth that contains such large tracts of wildlands inside the city.

As for the canals, they're completely different. They are best enjoyed via river boat cruises, not on walks.

>I like kebabs as much as the next guy and it's probably true that you can get the best ones in Berlin, but let's be honest, it's drunk food and often made from questionable ingredients.

I was way too young to be drinking when I lived in Berlin, but they were still my favorite food. I've been back since, and have consumed them both drunk and sober as an adult, and still think that Berliner Dönners are one of the best foods on Earth. I've been all over the world, and I've never had a Dönner Kebab that stacks up to the ones in Berlin. I've eaten Dönner Kebabs and equivalents (Shwarma, Gyros, etc.) all over the middle east and mediteranean (Turkey, Greece, Israel, Bahrain, Dubai, etc.), places where you would expect the Kebabs to be better, but they're not as good as in Berlin. The only thing that came close were some Shwarma I bought from a Lebanese cafe in Cyprus.

There are some things I don't like about Berlin. The biggest is that the public transportation is dirty, and in some places unsafe at certain hours. When I grew up there, the public transportation was clean and safe (as a grade-schooler, I was allowed to range all over the city with my friends, riding the buses and subways with no adult supervision). When I went back to visit for the first time a few years later, I was shocked at how dirty and poorly-kept they had become.

I don't think that would work. When it absorbs light, it converts that energy into heat, then re-radiates that heat. That re-radiated heat will show up to the infrared motion sensors.

I see one way you might be able to work around this: if you made a suit out of this stuff, and were somehow able to rig it so that all of the heat is dumped inside the suit, then it would be "invisible" to IR sensors. However, it would get really uncomfortable inside that suit really fast.

Also, even if it somehow magically absorbed all of the IR without re-radiating, it would still be possible to build IR sensors that detect it: if it's perfectly black in IR, it will show up as a "shadow" against a warmer background. To be invisible to IR, you need a suit that matches its temperature to the surroundings.

You're clearly correct about vent sexing, but the story about the planes rings more true. It reminded me of a study that shows that car enthusiasts and bird watchers access the area of the brain normally used for facial recognition when identifying cars and birds, respectively[1]. I would expect that plane enthusiasts learn to identify planes much in the same way that car or bird enthusiasts do.

I think another factor is almost certainly sound. The study I just cited dealt with photographs, but the plane watchers in the story would also have been able to hear the sounds of the planes. There are certain models of aircraft I can identify by the sounds of their engines alone because I have been around (or in) them so much. However, to most people they just sound like "jet noise" or "prop noise." Even though I can tell the difference, I would have a hard time explaining it because the vocabulary we have for describing sounds is not nearly as complete as the vocabulary we have for describing images (or at least my vocabulary is that way).

1: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/courses/concepts/...

I've heard this sentiment phrased much better:

"There are three things that mostly determine how well your life goes: what you're doing, who you're with, and where you are. If you can get two of the three right, you're ahead of 90% of the human race."

Sometimes there are tradeoffs between the three, sometimes not, but it's really, really hard to get all three to line up together.

To be honest, snprbob86's criteria are a lot more robust than mine and probably work for more people, but since you asked, I'll share.

My initial policy was to look for old games that had been so successful that they were re-released in new bargain versions. For example, my senior year I bought a jewel-case pack of Fallout and Fallout II. Basically, my thought process was: If it's so good that they're still pressing new CDs, I'll give it a try. Of course, I still had to apply my "repeat simple action, increment arbitrary number" filter, because Diablo and Diablo II were released in a similar way.

I still generally only play older games. It makes it easier to tell the good from the bad (plenty of reviews) and it saves me money. EDIT: Another advantage of old games is that when you buy a stinker (and you will, no matter how picky you are, occasionally buy a game that turns out to be no fun at all), you don't feel the same pressure to finish the game anyway that you might feel if you had dropped $40+ on a brand new title.

After college I removed the Windows partition from my computer and stopped dual-booting, so ever since then I've only played games that I can run on Linux. I prefer games that actually have Linux versions, but I run plenty of stuff on dosbox and even some stuff on wine. I played a lot of Neverwinter Nights: it has an amazing community that still produces new modules even today. I'm also a big fan of Descent (all three versions). For a long time, my main criteria was only to pick games that really resonated with my imagination (and, of course, apply my filter to avoid exercises in "incrementing the number"). For example, I'm a sucker for steampunk so I picked up Arcanum, and it was excellent. I couldn't get it to run on Wine, but I wanted to play it so badly that I set up Windows on VirtualBox so I could play it.

I like first-person shooters, and find that they're not as prone to the "incrementing" problem; ditto for strategy games. Story-driven games are generally immune to that problem, but can fall prey to a different problem: excessive linearity (i.e. you might as well just read a book). About four years ago I went on a kick where I re-played a bunch of old Sierra adventure games on ScummVM. I think that there are some indie developers out there now making similar games.

We had our first kid three and a half years ago, and as a result I've had to change my gaming habits yet again (work also got way busier at about the same time, so it's not just the kids). I now prefer games that I can play for short spurts. I was playing QuakeLive for a while, but got bored with it eventually (and all the trash talk didn't help). I re-discovered nethack (I still suck at it, but that doesn't make it any less fun), and you can't go wrong with minecraft. I played Steambirds on Android, and that was a lot of fun but didn't last long. Also on Android I've found a couple of pretty good games that remind me of "Incredible Machine:" "Clever Contraption" and "Electric Box."

EDIT: I forgot to mention Wii! There are a lot of Wii games that are just plain crap, but there are a few real gems. Wii Sports Resort is simplistic but still lots of fun, and fits great with my "short spurts" approach. It's also something my wife and I can enjoy together with our eldest. The only really "serious" game I've enjoyed on the Wii was Red Steel II (don't play the first one--it was awful!).

The major cities of the Pacific Northwest actually have at least one serious problem that stems from making the homeless lifestyle too easy: too many runaway teens. One of my sisters lives in Portland, and for several years she worked as a social worker for teenage girls. The network of shelters, kitchens, and other services for the homeless is so extensive there that a lot of teens choose to leave home and just live on the streets. It is (or was, at least) so pervasive that there was actually some name for the phenomenon (can't remember what it was, off the top of my head), and it was a major concern to the organizations my sister worked with. Part of the problem is that there are policies in place that made it extremely difficult for parents to find their kids and bring them home. These policies exist for good reasons (e.g. abused children who shouldn't be found and brought home), but they are so one-sided that kids can just choose to run away because they feel like it, and their parents have no recourse if the kids are in the city's shelter system.

I had an experience similar to what you describe (waking up and thinking "What the fuck am I doing with my life?"), but it predates these games.

I was in college (can't remember which year, probably my junior year) and my roommates and I were all hooked on Diablo II. So were our friends across the hall. We'd often play together as a group on the LAN, but we also enjoyed playing independently. We all played on headphones so as to not have the sounds of several simultaneous games clashing.

One afternoon, we were all playing simultaneously but independently. I decided to take a break, paused my game, removed my headphones, and stood up. Then I heard it: the sounds of rapid clicking coming from my roommates' mouses (and the mouses of the guys across the hall--we usually kept our doors open). I had decided to take a break right then because I had just leveled up, and that fact combined with the sound of the clicking gave me a moment of clarity: the whole game consisted of me clicking a mouse as fast as I could in order to make an arbitrary number (experience points) go up. Everything else is just embellishment. The fundamentals are: you click the mouse, the number goes up.

I felt like one of those lab rats or monkeys that has two buttons: one that delivers a serving of food, and another that stimulates its pleasure centers. They starve to death because they neglect the food button in favor of the pleasure button. Except I was worse, in a way: I wasn't getting a jolt to my pleasure centers, I was just watching a meaningless number get higher. Of course, I wasn't completely neglecting my well-being, either, but I was wasting a lot of time that could have been spent on more rewarding pursuits.

I uninstalled the game immediately and gave it away as fast as I could. I didn't give up video games, because not all games are such complete wastes of time, but ever since then I have set the bar very high for any game I play (similar to the post by snprbob86 about strict selection criteria). I'm especially watchful for signs that a game is just an exercise in "repeat simple task, increment arbitrary number."

I know for a fact that some aircraft are able to operate on three by using altimeter information to resolve the ambiguity between the two possible points. It's not as accurate as using four satellites, but it's still pretty damn accurate. In a boat you could get similar results by assuming that you are at MSL.

I took a class on GPS in grad school. We built a GPS receiver in software (MATLAB, actually), and I remember that we had to account for relativistic effects. I do not remember exactly what the math was, though. I think that it was just a correction provided by each satellite, which was added/subtracted from the time/distance from that satellite to the receiver. If I can find the textbook, I'll try to look up exactly how it works.

My experience with these is that you must either use your PKI certificate or a password as the key to decrypt the drive. The default configuration is generally to use the PKI certificate on the chip embedded in your ID card. Since you have to have that card in your computer to be logged in to begin with, using it to access other stuff is essentially effortless.

They have at least two religions: Shinto and Buddhist.

I don't know how much following either of them gets today, but I do know that during the feudal period the two religions were associated very strongly with the upper castes (Buddhism) and the lower castes (Shinto).

I do know that religion is not an identity to the Japanese in the way Judaism is for Jews. I know people who simultaneously consider themselves Jewish and atheistic or agnostic. That seems bizarrely contradictory unless you understand that "Jewish" is both an ethnic identity and a religious identity, so even individuals who reject the religious part can still embrace the ethnic part.

Like the gp, I would be very interested to know of any other group that ties religion, ancestry, and culture together into a single unique identity the way Judaism does. I think that Persia under Zoroastrianism might have been like that, but the conversion to Islam ended that.

I'm pretty sure it won't mount that, either. The only external storage they'll mount are external hard drives that have been encrypted with their approved software.

Military acquisitions take a long time. To give one example, I know for a fact that there are airplanes flying right now that use DEC Alphas to control their weapons systems. Those planes first came into use in the early 2000's. An older version of that plane is still in use, and will be for several more years; you don't even want to know what it's using.

The hard drive has to be scanned by an administrator before you're allowed to use it (not sure what this process entails). It also has to be encrypted, and won't mount unless it is encrypted with the proper DOD-approved software.

As far as I know, SSDs are not allowed, only magnetic drives.

You can actually still do that: drawing 5V doesn't require the phone to mount as a drive.

>they are just wined and dined by the contractor when they should be directly overseeing and controlling.

There are actually very strict controls on how much government personnel are allowed to accept from contractors. IIRC, the limit is something like $20-$50 per year in gifts. When contractors host large events with catered lunches, they put out bowls or some other sort of receptacle so that government personnel can pay for their lunch, otherwise it would count towards that annual limit.

Enforcement at the level of "you didn't pay for that six-inch sub and can of coke" is not really practical, but quite a few government personnel have gone to jail in recent memory for accepting more lavish gifts from contractors.

Now, if you send your lobbyists to buy expensive meals for legislators (you know, the ones who actually decide how the money gets spent) and write them big checks, that's generally perfectly legal.

USB flash drives are banned DOD-wide. Most DOD computers are setup up to not even mount them when they are plugged in.

There are also really odd things like streets that seemingly dead-end, but which actually continue in the same direction but offset by one or more blocks; in other words, a street that takes a dog-leg via a crossing street. The problem is that there are almost never signs to tell you which way to turn to stay with the street you're on, or even that the street does, in fact, continue.

Even with a GPS, DC can be hard to navigate because there are so many discrepancies between most map databases and the actual streets. For example, I have a relatively recent Garmin, and every time I'm in DC it tries at least once to turn me the wrong way down a one-way street, or tries to send me down a street that isn't there. The one-way streets aren't alternated logically like the ones in NW Portland, either; there may be some rhyme or reason to the one-ways, but I have yet to decipher it. Another experience I often have in DC: a street I'm on suddenly becomes one-way in the opposite direction.

That was my initial idea. But then there's no good way to divide them neatly into seasons, whether you want to have two, four, or six.

It does have the advantage that it comes very close to lining up with the lunar cycle, so that the lunar month would only slide very slowly against the calendar month (about half a lunar-month of phase shift per year). And since the definition of "season" is very mushy anyway, maybe thirteen months would be the way to go.

I actually gave some consideration to that. There are also places that have six seasons. However, I'm pretty sure that a majority of the world's population lives in temperate zones (I didn't bother researching that, so I could be wrong), which have four seasons.

Even if you decide to go with four seasons, the definitions of the seasons get tricky. You can define them by the solar calendar, or you can define them by environmental conditions; the two tend to be out of phase by about six weeks. I actually figured out a way to make the months line up reasonably well with the four environmental seasons and with the six environmental seasons (which are not of equal length); it wasn't perfect for either, but it was OK for both. I didn't bother keeping notes...

I wanted the months to be equally-divisible into weeks of equal length. It turns out that the 7-day week is the only really good way to divide the year equally into smallish units and only have one or two days left over.

So you could have four season-months of 13 weeks (91 days) each. But I like the idea of months that are in the same ballpark as lunar cycles. Lunar cycles and solar cycles don't mesh, so you can't have months that perfectly match lunar cycles unless you're willing to have months that float against years the way weeks currently float against months, but then again some people might find that appealing.

>The world would be a better place with only one (and simple) calendar. Go ahead, propose one.

A hobby of mine is thinking up "better" ways to do things that I know will never be implemented because the current way is good enough and the barriers to change are huge. My personal favorites are a combination of a new calendar, new lat/long system, and new set of timezones.

The calendar has eight months of 28 days and four months of 35 days (so that every month has an exact number of weeks, so that a given day of the month is always the same day of the week). The first day of the year exists outside of the months (month zero, day one), and would colloquially be "new year's day." When a leap day is needed, it is added as an extra day at the end of the year (month thirteen, day one), and would colloquially be "leap day." The order of the months would be short-long-short-short-long-short-etc (so that each season has one long and two short months).

Whenever I'm in a situation where I can't keep myself engaged by reading or conversation (e.g. waiting in line with no wireless signal), I amuse myself by dreaming up crap like this.

It's actually a truncation of the term "empty suit." In other words: all style, no substance; all looks, no accomplishments; all money, no ideas; etc.

It's a Greek myth, so how much realism do you really expect? For what it's worth, the way I've always heard it was that the boy and the calf did grow up together.

Seriously: your only problem with the story is that the cow and the boy grew up at about the same rate? Really?

I've seen people get pulled over for driving too slow, but never on U.S. highways.

I think the idea is more that ineffective (or at least terribly inefficient) programs would be much less likely to survive in such an environment. If program a is designed to achieve effect B, some people will argue for it because they think that B is desirable, and others will argue against it because they think that B is undesirable, or because it produces some side effect C which they find undesirable. However, if it is shown that program a does not achieve effect B, or is terribly inefficient at doing so, then even proponents of effect B would have to agree that it should be eliminated. Presumably, those proponents would then push for some new program aimed at achieving effect B, but that's a separate issue.

Affordable health care that doesn't include all of the advances in treatment (procedures, pharmaceuticals, technologies, etc.) that have come about in the past 36 years?

To give an example that affects most people in small ways: in 1975 I would be wearing heavy, uncomfortable glasses all day, and would fully expect to wear dentures after a certain age. Instead, my vision has been corrected to be perfect and I will almost certainly chew my last meal with my own teeth. My Dad had cataract surgery a couple of years ago: the new lenses are so great that he no longer even needs reading glasses. They had cataract surgery in 1975, but not with the kind of results my Dad experienced.

To give an example that affects a smaller number of people in a bigger way: since 1975, survival rates for many types of cancer have increased dramatically. Similar effects for heart disease.

I'm not trying to say that all of the increases in cost of health care are due to increased availability of treatment options, but it's almost certainly a big driver. Would you accept a health care plan that charges 1970s rates (in real dollars) but restricts you to 1970s medicine? If you are young and healthy, it might actually be a good deal, except for the dental plan.

In this case it's especially relevant: how many of those top 5% are in the top 5% because they were able to grab a disproportionate portion of the economy's gains? In other words, a lot of people will look at this and think, "Rich people used their power and influence to fleece the economy," when in many cases it might be, "People who won when others lost are now rich." Most likely it was some of each.