November 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

A wheelchair and an atifficial Limb
by adiele egbukole 27 Nov '01

27 Nov '01

Sir, I greet you with the Glorious peace of ower Lord Jesus christ, hoping that this email of mine gets to you in good faith. Be that as it may, kindly alow me to introduce myself to you,as we have not met before. my name is ADIELE EGBUKOLE, i am a christian by religion. But unfortunately i am a handicap, although i was not born a handicap but as faith could have it i had an accident two years back that was during my last year in the university.I thank God to that am alive to testify to the wonderful things that the lord have been doing in my live.Today i am an accountant,but the unfortunate situation there is that i lost my right limb due to the accident that i had.this condition has made life immensely difficult for me,this have made me to seek for your much needed help.Please,kindly help me as i cant work and i need to buy a[plastic Right Limb]and a wheel chair to enable me to move freely from one place to ther other. I am very sorry for this, as it's not in my character to ask for such favour, but presently i dont have a choice than to seek for your help.Please, i must beg you that you should'nt hesitate to help me if you can...I want to live a happy live againe.You may want to know how much the wheel chair and the plastic limb will cost me. I have gone for the price; it will cost me $250 to buy a fairly used wheel chair and the plastic limb.PLEASE KINDLY ASSIST ME WITH WHAT EVER AMOUNT THAT YOU CAN, ACTUALLY NOTHING IS TOO SMALL,AND I WILL APPRICIATE WHATEVER HELP YOU CAN RENDER TO ME. You can get in touch with me through my email address, Thank you very much for having the time to go through my mail. Godbless you.perhaps i hope to get a respose from you...Take care of your self and stay bless. Bye for now, Best regards. ADIELE EGBUKOLE. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month. http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1

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update.565 (fwd)
by Jim Choate 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 15:53:42 -0500 (EST) From: AIP listserver <physnews(a)aip.org> To: physnews-mailing(a)aip.org Subject: update.565 PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 565 November 14, 2001 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon QUANTUM ACOUSTICS. The flatland world of electrons [SSZ: Text deleted] SINGING LIKE A CANARY requires little thought, but simple actions, to yield complex vocal physics, researchers have found, yielding potential insights into how humans generate speech sounds. Human speech and the songs of many bird species share a central similarity: the skills are not present at birth, but are only learned through early-life experiences. To determine how brain activity leads to the production of sound, scientists strive to understand how much of the sound comes from complicated instructions from the brain and how much comes from complex physics of vocal organs. Now, a US-Argentina research collaboration (Gabriel Mindlin, University of Buenos Aires, Gabriel(a)birkhoff.df.uba.ar) has designed a simple physical model that accurately reproduces notes of a canary song. The researchers modeled the canary's vocal organ, called the syrinx. According to previous experimental evidence, the syrinx generates sound through vibrations of its labial "folds"---flaps of tissue which open and close the air passage between the throat and the lungs. In their model, the researchers make the key assumption that these labial folds behave like a simple spring, moving back and forth to change the size of the air passage. They further assume that a canary controls its vocalizations through two actions: changing the pressure of the air from the lungs and using muscles to modify the stiffness of the folds. By varying these two parameters, the researchers found that the spring-like labia could produce faithful recreations of three canary notes. Therefore, simple changes to a basic system, rather than sophisticated instructions from the brain, can reproduce the rich, complex vocal physics which give rise to complicated sounds. (Gardner et al., Physical Review Letters, 12 November 2001) THE FEMTOSECOND DELAY IN THE ADVENT OF collective [SSZ: Text deleted]

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The Register - Kevin Spacey loses pivotal cybersquatting court case (Good!)
by Jim Choate 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23030.html -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ Day by day the Penguins are making me lose my mind. Bumper Sticker The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [e-gold-list] HavenCo? -- fell over.
by Steve Schear 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

>Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 11:39:52 +1100 >To: e-gold-list(a)talk.e-gold.com, dgc.chat(a)lists.goldmoney.com >From: jpm(a)interestingsoftware.com >Subject: [dgc.chat] Re: [e-gold-list] HavenCo? -- fell over. >Reply-To: <dgc.chat(a)lists.goldmoney.com> > >Yes! Every havenco site is down, TGC has been down for days -- >havenco has completely fallen over. I imagine they'll be up within a >couple days! > >Here's a message from Havenco (below) > >It's all on the planetgold news page! >JP > > > > >Hello, > > > >I have repeatedly tried to access 3pgold/3ppay et. al. today with no > >success. I also tried loading havenco (3ppay's hoster), and it seems they > >are down. Anyone else having problems connecting to havenco, or their > >hosted sites? > > > >Tristan Petersen > > >At 11:09 AM +0000 11/26/01, Ryan Lackey wrote: > > > >There have been 3 faults in the past 24 hours which combined have > >eliminated all connectivity to/from Sealand (except for 2 x 9.6kbps cell > >links). > > > >1) Our backup VSAT sessions, all with the same satellite, have moved to a > >new satellite; they have been down since Thursday, but since this was > backup, > >repositioning is delayed until this week. > > > >2) Our London primary router was down for several hours; a backup and > >load sharing spare is still on Sealand awaiting deployment. This will also > >enable several additional transit sessions to improve reliability in the > >event of provider outages (such as in the past). This may be done today, > >but depends on the weather. > > > >3) Our intra-UK leased circuits, all 4, seem to be down. Since the VSAT > >sessions are down as well, this is a critical fault; we can't do any kind of > >backup service. We are in contact with the provider for these circuits now > >and trying to determine what happened and how to fix. > > > > > >Time to fix right now is whatever is required to fix the leased circuits; > >as of yet there is no estimate. I am hoping to have it resolved by 1300h > >UTC if at all possible.

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Re: Moving beyond "Reputation"--the Market View of Reality
by mattd 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

Faustine wrote... ."..good old boring long-faced church-every-Sunday solid-citizen Robert P. Hanssen. If his FBI colleagues had been asked to rate him by your above criteria, he probably would have been in the high 200s all across the board. And maybe deservedly so. But since those factors weren't in any way, shape, or form relevant to the fact that he was also the kind of person who could sell out his country for the sheer pleasure of the game of it, he got away with murder for years until he got careless and his shitty tradecraft finally caught up with him." His tradecraft was rather good I thought,especially in not trusting his handlers with direct contact.Possibly he was done in by sex addiction common to many repressed septic tanks(yanks) W.Reichs,mass psychology of facism describes syndrome.Also wanted on some level to get caught,much like Ted special K.(and USAma bin laden?) Did he really get away with murder? Feh.Aldrich ames did and his rep survived polygraphs so reputations are bollocks unless panocoptincons and regular stings/tests are done.Hanssen didnt tell the russkies anything they couldnt have worked out them selves.

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update.566 (fwd)
by Jim Choate 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 14:10:33 -0500 (EST) From: AIP listserver <physnews(a)aip.org> To: physnews-mailing(a)aip.org Subject: update.566 PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 566 November 21, 2001 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon HIDDEN OBJECTS REVEALED WITH QUANTUM HOLOGRAPHY. Second sight and remote viewing are terms used to explain charlatans' supposed psychic ability to see hidden objects in terms of pseudoscientific gibberish. Quantum holography, on the other hand, is a method firmly grounded in modern physics that permits the imaging of hidden objects with entangled photons. Of the quantum entanglement phenomena that Einstein described as "spooky action at a distance," quantum holography may be the spookiest to date. Researchers at Boston University's Quantum Imaging Laboratory (Bahaa Saleh, 617-353-7176, besaleh(a)bu.edu) propose to create holographic images of objects concealed in a spherical chamber. Ideally, a small opening in the chamber wall permits light to enter, but lets no light out. The photons in a beam of light directed through the hole scatter from the enclosed object, and ultimately strike the inner wall of the chamber (see figure at http://www.aip.org/mgr/png) According to the scheme, the inside of chamber would be designed to detect the time when a photon hits the wall but not where it hits. Classically, there is no way to generate an image of an object with this sort of configuration. Quantum mechanically, however, it's possible to build a hologram of the hidden object provided that the photons in the illuminating beam are entangled with photons in another beam. Each photon in an entangled pair has properties (such as momentum or polarization) that are unknown until a measurement is performed on one photon or the other. When a property of one of the photons is measured, corresponding information about its entangled mate is instantly determined. That may seem spooky enough, but in quantum holography, things get spookier still. Holograms are typically constructed with interfering beams of light, which provides more information about a subject than simple illumination can. The additional information helps build a three dimensional image of a three dimensional object. In quantum holography, the researchers measure the simultaneous arrivals of an illuminating photon that is sent into the chamber and a companion photon in the other entangled beam. This measurement tells the researchers about the interference of various possible paths that the single photon inside the chamber could travel. And it's the interference of the possible paths that encodes the holographic image of the hidden object. Very spooky indeed. For the moment, quantum holography exists only on paper. But the researchers assert that there are no technological obstacles to the proposal, and they hope to begin building an experimental system soon. (Ayman F. Abouraddy, Bahaa E. A. Saleh, Alexander V. Sergienko, and Malvin C. Teich, Optics Express, 5 November 2001.) PUZZLING NEUTRINO RESULTS AT FERMILAB. Particle [SSZ: Text deleted]

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Re: Pricing spare resources and options?
by Nomen Nescio 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

David Molnar writes: > The recent comments on Mojo Nation prompted me to look at their site > again. I don't see much guidance on how to set prices for network > services. There's a mention someplace that business customers will build > pricing schemes on top of Mojo Nation, but not much indication of what > these schemes might be. > > So what is the "right" way to price resources? (Preferably beyond the > obvious "supply and demand.") In a competitive market, prices will tend to stabilize at the cost to the supplier, plus profit. Demand comes in by setting the production level, which in turn influences costs due to economies of scale and diminishing returns. However at least initially the resources supplied via network services, like storage, will be a small part of the overall market and so network demand will not affect costs much and we can treat them as fixed and given. The price of a network service, then, should be roughly the cost to the provider based on today's market prices. This will be derived from the initial costs divided by the depreciation period, plus ongoing costs. With disk drive prices dropping so rapidly they probably should be depreciated in just a couple of years despite the fact that they will last longer. So at about $100 for 50 GB for two years the cost would be $2 per GB of data stored per year. Then you'd add in your network costs, divided by the number of users for a per-user cost, and costs of other fixed equipment like the computer itself, appropriately depreciated. > A related question - I ran into a friend of mine who had just finished an > internship in options trading. He suggested it might be worth looking at > options on spare disk space or other resources, as a means of figuring out > how to make Mojo-type systems eventually profitable in the real world. Now > I have a copy of Natenberg's _Option Volatility and Pricing_ to look at... Generally the purpose of futures and options, in the big picture, is to allow management of risk. People can protect themselves against price changes by transferring the risk to speculators. (Of course each market participant has his own motivations, but collectively this is the emergent behavior which justifies options trading.) Disk space doesn't seem to be a very good candidate for options because its price has so far been very stable and predictable. We don't see too many price spikes in the disk drive market that someone might want to protect themselves against. The prices follow a generally consistent Moore's law although the exact rate of decline varies somewhat from year to year. Similarly, with other computer commodities like CPU and network bandwidth, price trends are generally stable. A more promising candidate might be RAM memory options. RAM prices has been somewhat volatile over the past decade and computer manufacturers might benefit from an option market to purchase risk protection. But it's certainly not going to be at the scale of the currency, stock index and agricultural futures and options which are widely traded today.

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Slashdot | European Space Agency Developing GPS Rival
by Jim Choate 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/11/27/009214.shtml -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ Day by day the Penguins are making me lose my mind. Bumper Sticker The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Moving beyond "Reputation"--the Market View of Reality
by Faustine 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Declan wrote: > Sure, one can say: let's just have a complicated reputation space > (think an array of arrays) for each one of these characteristics. To > use a silly example: > * truthtelling [0-255] > * maturity [0-255] > * morality [0-255] > * netiquette [0-255] > * spelling [0-255] > * etc. In addition to the interesting points you and Tim made about the value of trying to quantify the subjective, deception and gullibility (or trust, if you're feeling charitable) are factors worth taking account as well. How sensitized are the raters to the possibility that someone is acting in bad faith and taking them for a ride? What specific triggers erode or establish trust, and how easily are the individual factors manipulated? Given that the DoD is putting an ever-increasing amount of money into this sort of research, it seems like any "reputation rating system" which doesn't address the idea of deception and bad-faith actors is a juicy target for being subverted and corrupted from the foundation up. Deception is problematic enough as it is, offline: I can't think of a more spectacular failure of "reputation" than the case of good old boring long-faced church-every-Sunday solid-citizen Robert P. Hanssen. If his FBI colleagues had been asked to rate him by your above criteria, he probably would have been in the high 200s all across the board. And maybe deservedly so. But since those factors weren't in any way, shape, or form relevant to the fact that he was also the kind of person who could sell out his country for the sheer pleasure of the game of it, he got away with murder for years until he got careless and his shitty tradecraft finally caught up with him. How many thousands of man - -hours were wasted spinning in circles over "suspicious people" when the real bastard was nice and comfy right in the middle of their own ant-heap. Absolutely nauseating, how easy putting stock in a "good reputation" makes it to be compromised beyond repair. Something to consider, anyway. And bad-faith actors aside, if everyone in a group becomes fixated on boosting their ratings, they'll become less and less likely to contradict "the wrong (high-status) people" and more likely to go for cheap shots at the designated whipping boys to the point that the whole list becomes a pointless pecking - -order exercise in kissing the ass of the alpha baboons. Or something. Here's to saying what you think, popularity be damned. ~Faustine. *** The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms. - --William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1 (C) 1997-1999 Network Associates, Inc. and its affiliated companies. (Diffie-Helman/DSS-only version) iQA/AwUBPAMFDvg5Tuca7bfvEQIAzwCg2T7jO5Piut/3i9+6DJZ0veUEVY4AoJmM PZQUIq5LoYBapWpQlBBrp58p =5nZk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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reputation capital in rodentia
by David Honig 26 Nov '01

26 Nov '01

Ground squirrels maintain reputations. Scientists played back alarm calls both with (to enhance) and without (to degrade) different individuals' calls. After 10 false alarms, that call was ignored; but the high S/N call caused alarms even without the threat (a stuffed badger) being present. J Hare, B Atkins, Behav Ecol & Sociobio reported in Sci News 160 p 312

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