AI is the industrial revolution finally arriving at the land of information and software development, full stop. Read Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope if you want to understand whats happening and see a roadmap of whats ahead. What happened during the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, and financial revolution is already happening to software development. IR brings cheap material goods to everyone in your civilization, not just the elite. Before, only the king and his court could afford to have skilled tradesmen hand-crafting clocks and pocket watches. After the IR, now everyone has a cheap wrist watch available to them for pennies. It doesn't mean everyone has the best stuff, but it raises the quantity of whats practically available to everyone at the base level and it does this cheaply. The timex wrist watch works fine and is only $15. Not everyone has a Rolex, and there will always be a market for artisanally crafted items that predate the IR. A lot of people don't care how the Timex works, they just need to get back to work from lunch on time. There will always be a market for those that desire (and have the money) to have a wrist watch that works the way they want it to work. In the future, artisanally crafted code will matter to some people who understand code. Most people just need a program to do the thing. Humans will still be able to outperform AI when it comes to making clever, compact, and beautiful code. Go to any local pottery show if you want to see the future. Everyone already has IR manufactured cups, plates, and silverware at home. Yet people still go out and buy hand-crafted versions of these items because they have more character in various dimensions they care about. On the downside, everything will become slop. But it increases the slop available to everyone, while smaller numbers of those who care will still buy artisinally crafted code.
But there's another downside too that Quigley talks about: the arrival of the railroad at your previously isolated village. Suddenly now you have food, medicine and people arriving at a far greater pace. Your towns demographic suddenly starts to shift as your townspeople start to live longer as knowledge can instantly penetrate from the outside world. People can leave much easier too which facilitates brain drain. The railroad brings the industrial revolution to your door. The countries that survived the best were the ones that created these revolutions and then exported them. If the railroad did not originate from your country then the railroad arrived at your doorstep quite literally before you were ready for it. I don't fully understand what this means for AI, but I'm certain this is part of the reason the US is trying to lead the charge. You absolutely do not want the railroad arriving at your doorstep: you want to be the one pushing the railroad out to your neighbors. The only guarantee is change whether you want it or not. If you want some control over that change then you had better be driving the change rather than just reacting to it.
Teaching is rewarding which is why people do it, but you're asking them to take less pay for what is often a harder job - convincing kids to learn something when they have dozens of other things competing for their interest. The math aligns on the side with the teacher having the knowledge you would expect in this scenario - with a fair number of teachers not as much knowledge as one would hope they would have. On the students side, if they are bright then this is a soft-skill learning opportunity - how to navigate knowing more than your superior to the benefit of you both.
Robotic sputnik tool, it is very slick. Something that's not obvious is that these work best on ABUS or other locks that have one solid driver pin and spools in every remaining pin stack. This way, when you locate and lift the solid driver pin, you gain a ton of "back and forth slack" in the plug. As you lift each successive spool driver the slack reduces until the shear line is hit on that pin stack and suddenly full slack again; repeat the process until the lock is open.
The devil is in the details though, there are some subtle features that need to be incorporated into the mechanics for the sputnik to work right. I have built a sputnik from scratch before, only after talking to Oli Diederichsen at a LockCon did I get some additional clues.
Also, I think there are plenty of other interesting things one could do besides brute forcing the lock with a simpler tool. Falle Safe has a single-wire variant on this for decoding locks. Again, the devil is in the details, just ramming wire up a pin stack doesn't get the job done.
It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents.
If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
Man, this brings back memories of playing with Festival back in the day. I wrote a bunch of scripts to generate dynamic Festival text2speech audio for a Part15 AM radio station, a virtual radio station DJ over 15 years ago. The intelligibility was not great back then, the funny thing was after spending many hours listening and tweaking my input text I trained myself to understand the default voice a lot better. Other people had a hard time with the default voice but I could understand it perfectly. Thankfully some of the improved voices available back then helped it a lot.
To fix pronunciation problems I had developed a set of domain-specific "dictionaries", sed substitution scripts that would translate certain words and phrases into their phonetic versions that would be pronounced better by Festival. Besides announcing the names of songs being played, I was also feeding news articles and some other web-scraped info through it. Tons of fun to hear your project working on the air in public as you drive around town.
Ohm lordy, we're blaming the student for not having years of homebrew experience before he entered school? Sure any hobbiest knows what a 555 is, but when the lab assistant doesn't even catch it and the chip was handed out to the student this is not an entry-level students fault.
Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.
Ah yes, memories of my laptop, an Orinoco card, and Netstumbler cruising down the highway during my day-job. Shortly after that I added an X-10 video receiver and a USB Hauppauge WinTV adapter to capture video transmitters too. I'd reach over and trigger a screen-shot whenever live video came into view. Once in a while I'd even capture myself driving through a parking lot or something on the feed.
I think this was the plot of an episode of CSI (don't recall which sub-series, maby Miami?) in the 2000's. Eventually they determine a guy dies of lead poisoning and they figure out he ate massive amounts of chocolate candy. Conclusion: leaded gas used in other countries caused lead buildup on coco plants there and eventually gets shipped back to US chocolate makers.
Very interesting. A TL-15 is an excellent container, but I'm not familiar with a 5 wheel combination lock in commercial service in the US. I have a S&G vault lock which has 4 wheels. I don't doubt 5 wheel locks exist though, especially if the safe was possibly installed for a US Senator. Would definitely be interesting to see some photos of the lock (both outside and inside) if you still have any.
Same company makes both combination dials and the large padlocks like the 831, 833, 851. I was lucky enough to tour their manufacturing facility, it's a typical machine shop plus a small foundry as they do their own casting on-site too.
This is called the "soft drill". And strangely, this can still be a destructive attack. There are systems that can do proper manipulation by graphing out the gates, and there are systems that just do brute force attacks by dialing every combination. I've been told that the brute force machines that try every combination typically wear the lock out and it needs to be replaced afterwords.
MSDOS 4 was reportedly an overall bad release and was not in wide circulation, in all my days I think I only came across it once. This is why DOS 3.3 and 5.0 were much more common to find in circulation together.
I'm sure the source for 4 will make for some interesting bug hunting. Anyone remember the MUF list? "Microsofts Undocumented Features".
While I do remember a vague connection between beepers and drug dealers in the 90's (probably from movies), I don't ever remember people just assuming you were a drug dealer just because you had a beeper in middle and high school. I don't believe I started carrying one until after high school though, so maby I missed out on all the fun.
But there's another downside too that Quigley talks about: the arrival of the railroad at your previously isolated village. Suddenly now you have food, medicine and people arriving at a far greater pace. Your towns demographic suddenly starts to shift as your townspeople start to live longer as knowledge can instantly penetrate from the outside world. People can leave much easier too which facilitates brain drain. The railroad brings the industrial revolution to your door. The countries that survived the best were the ones that created these revolutions and then exported them. If the railroad did not originate from your country then the railroad arrived at your doorstep quite literally before you were ready for it. I don't fully understand what this means for AI, but I'm certain this is part of the reason the US is trying to lead the charge. You absolutely do not want the railroad arriving at your doorstep: you want to be the one pushing the railroad out to your neighbors. The only guarantee is change whether you want it or not. If you want some control over that change then you had better be driving the change rather than just reacting to it.