Have you been "hooked"?

First, watch this video.

Second, check out this website.

Third, say "Wooooow."

You must admit, that's pretty cool.

Foxtrot

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2008/09/21/

RFID-ness

Inspired by my new Washington Enhanced Drivers License, I decided to dig a little into the RFID debate. There is quite a bit of information out there, and it's made me want to buy a little reader myself (if it's not too expensive) and play around with them a little. Who knows...

RFID: Radio Frequency IDentification, consists of two devices -- the Transponder and the Interrogator. The Transponder is the device with the information on it, usually the RFID chip containing some information (such as a number). In the case of the drivers licenses, this number is a unique identifier which is supposed to only make sense to those who have full access to your driving record. The Interrogator is a device that reads this information, emitting probes to query transponders nearby (if they are). This interrogator is the RFID reader, in a sense.

So, with the basics down, let's consider the ramifications of using RFID devices onto various things.

RFIDs are fairly inexpensive (~10-20 cents per ID) to manufacture, and I know that the retail-giant Walmart has had plans of incorporating RFID tags into each item within a store. This would definitely expedite peoples' check-out from the store, as you'd just pass your cart full of items through an Interrogator/reader of some sort, instead of having the cashier scan every single item one-at-a-time. Interesting, huh? But, I believe those plans have since halted (when they originally came about in 2004), as only the distribution centers have RFID-enabled palletes.. Individual items have yet to be RFID'ed.

Well, we enter a new realm when we start discussing the impact that RFID could have on security. It's not difficult to create an RFID with any specific data on it, making it very simple for someone to read an RFID and replicate it without any indication of duplication.

So, in theory, when you cross the border, and hand the customs official your passport, they should wave it in front of the reader, and your information should pop up. Hopefully there is some confirmation through visual-inspection (eg.: making sure the printed photo and the one inside the passport are the same), but as you may assume, there isn't any literature on this procedure... I just hope the RFID isn't the only form of verification of one's identity.

That then begs the question... Why? Why are the RFID devices so _awesome_ and everyone's so amped to use them? If it's only adding a layer of verification (mind you, a layer that is very easily replicated)... then why? I'm at a loss.

Wow, just did a little digging. I can get a reader for under 100$. I'm sure many other options exist.

Google doesn't even know its own power

In a recent article on Slashdot it was revealed that one of Google News' spider bots crawled an outdated story (from 2002) about United Airlines being on the brink of bankruptcy. It turns out that the article did not have a time stamp and thus Google's spider bot assumed "today" (why not?).

The story was published on Google News, which was then crawled by several other news spider bots and the story spread like wildfire.

Pretty soon, everyone heard of the "breaking news" that was actually from 2002. This news caused the United Airlines stock to plummet from $12 to $3. This was obviously not good times.

Eventually the cause of the disaster was discovered and the United Airlines stock rose back up to $9.62. But this still left a $300 million hole.

A $300 million hole and all Google can say is "Tough luck, Chuck."

Google Owns You

Continuing on the saga of Google may be not-so-nice...

You may or may not remember a week or so ago when Google's internet browser Chrome was released.

Someone read through the EULA and found that Google claimed to have "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through" Google Chrome.

Oops.

Google responded by saying that they created the EULA by pasting together parts of other EULAs, and leaving this in was simply an oversight.

An oversight that they left it in? or an oversight that they made it so easy to find?

Anywho, they went ahead and amended the EULA, making it retroactive for all users of Google Chrome who operated under the previous EULA. So, no harm, no foul...right?

This whole situation got some people thinking...and looking. It turns out that Google Chrome isn't the only product where Google claims "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

Google also has similar language in their EULAs for Blogger, Picasa, Google Docs, and Google Groups.

So, what does this mean for you?

In a post by one of Google's lawyers, Mike Yang speaks of how this language is a legal way of stating:

You retain the ownership. Google retains the rights to use the content.

This seems harmless...but it makes me want to scoot a little further away from Google.

An introduction to Google Books...

This is the first of what will probably be many posts about Google.

I (like many people) have been fascinated with Google for quite some time. I even did a report on them (Google Books) in one of my engineering classes on intellectual property.

The Google Books project is a project where Google has teamed up with many libraries across the world and begun scanning all of the books they have available. Once scanned, these books are OCR'ed and become text, which we all know is searchable. Google then indexes these books and allows people all over the world to search them.

Sounds great! What could possibly be bad about this??

Well, Google got greedy.

While Google started scanning books, some authors decided that they didn't want their books to be searchable. And, seeing as how the contents of the books were the intellectual property of the authors, this was certainly their right to keep from having their books searchable via the internet. So, Google created an "opt-out" program whereby authors would be able to opt-out of the Google Book project.

(Here's where it gets interesting)...

Even if the authors had opted out, the books were still scanned and archived. Why? -- Who knows, but I bet you have a pretty good guess.

But wait, that's not right. You can't just walk into a library and photocopy an entire book. Just like you can't borrow a CD or movie and go home and copy it. That's illegal. The library paid a higher license fee than an individual user so that they could lend the intellectual property to others, but they didn't pay to "resell" the content for nothing. And, when you check out a book, CD, or video from the library, you don't have the rights to copy that media.

So, while the authors argue that it is their right to have Google not scan their book at all, Google maintains that the author only has rights to keep the information off the internet.

So, how did Google Books get away with it?
You tell me.

How it all started...

So, thanks to Peter for setting this site up -- it's totally snazzy, and very fitting of the 10 nerds!

I spent the last few days trying to figure out how it all started... day one of our nerdified group. Peter, please feel free to add to the post accordingly!

So Peter and I went to Kansas State University, both of us nerds in the truest sense: working on our bachelor's computer engineering degrees, getting our hands dirty with our own computers -- which of course was our number one hobby no matter what anyone may have said, and both of us whole-heartedly dedicated our computer assistance to those who needed it. We enjoyed watching Nova, and really anything on The Discovery Channel or The Learning Channel.

The first class that I remember seeing Peter in was Circuit Theory I, with good ol' KHC. Remember KHC's infamous grading scale? And that effing line! Well, only those who've actually experienced the wonder that is KHC will ever understand...

Anyway, Circuit Theory I was quite a kick in the junk, if I may say so myself. I believe our first test was mediocre at best... with our third test having a class average of 30%. I believe I ended up with a 62% overall in the course, and received a B. It was quite the rollercoaster!

Speaking of which, I need to dig up my old list of quotes from these profs. Peter and I used to write them down in the middle of class -- as some of the EECE professors had some gems of quotes!

Well, at one point after Circuit Theory I, it could have been Linear Systems... he and Bobby and I decided that we should stick together and study. Some Hi-C Orange shots later, we passed all of our classes (sometimes by the skin on our chins), and the rest is history!

Now Peter and I frequently do what I call "nerd-out." We discuss some of the current tech things that may come up in the news or on the net, maybe also a new technique which enables us to be more efficient nerds, and we frequently have convos on the impact these tech things have on our lives. It's all really great!

Thus, the point of this whole blog! Hopefully this will give us an avenue to 1), get some of the crap out of our brains and 2), share it with anyone who wants to know!

Hope you all enjoy!

Jaiku or Twitter

Recently I got into Twitter and eventually (when they started allowing invitations again) Jaiku.

These mobile blogging platforms appealed very much to me as I have been struggling for quite some time to find the time and (more importantly) motivation to keep up sizable, respectable, worth-while posts on any blog.

These led me to understand just how important blog posts containing more than 140 characters (the limit on Twitter and Jaiku) really can be, especially when attempting to rouse up discussion on deserving subjects.

Perhaps this is why the introduction video to Twitter suggested that the service is simply a gap-filler for between-post events that are not large/important enough to merit an entire post (i.e. mowing the lawn, seeing the Oscar Mayer Wiener-mobile on the highway, etc.).

Well, it just so happens that both platforms were undergoing a bit of a face-lift when I was getting into them.

Leo Laporte (whom I have never heard of) apparently was a Twitter user, and decided to move from Twitter to a small company called Jaiku. Apparently Leo had quite a following, as his switch made news headlines over much of the internet. Not only that, it caused "the Leo Effect" whereby many Twitter users also abandoned Twitter for Jaiku. This overwhelmed the Jaiku servers, and they struggled for quite some time to regain control of their bandwidth and increase their capacity.

Well (as always) someone at Google was apparently paying attention, and lo-and-behold, Jaiku soon announced that it was being absorbed by Google.

Then, just in the past day or so, Twitter announced (or denied, depending on what article you read) that it is experimenting with adding advertisements to its Tweets. It also release that it's tired of "footing the bill" for you to send Tweets via SMS in some countries.

So, one one hand, you've got Twitter going with ads and retracting SMS features from some countries, and on one blog I saw I noticed that there were rumors of them creating a corporate product.

On the other hand, you've got Jaiku supporting RSS feeds (kind of, I'm having some issues with it right now), and being absorbed by Google, which was good for Blogger, Picasa, and others. Jaiku also does icons, which I can take or leave, and they don't support sleeping the SMS delivery like Twitter, so I just turn my phone down when I sleep.

I'm switching to Jaiku full time for now. We'll see how it goes...

Th3 Nam3 0xf th3 Gam3

"The 10 Nerds" -- inspired by the saying "There are only 10 kinds of people in this world: those that understand binary, and those that don't."

Binary ("bi-" indicating two), for those of you who don't know, is a method of counting using only two unique values (0 and 1) for each digit.

Decimal ("deci-" indicating ten) is the standard method for counting that we are all familiar with. In decimal, each digit can be one of 10 unique values (0-9 inclusive).

So, here is how to count to ten (from zero, so 11 digits) in each:

Decimal: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Binary: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010

Note that in decimal it is not necessary to use a second digit until we have exhausted all of the unique values with the first digit.

Also note that the same is true for binary, it just happens much faster.

Thus, the title "The 10 Nerds" is to be interpreted in decimal as "The 2 Nerds".

Welcome to our world...