From a slashdot article, this guy built a two-wheeled self balancing
device using a Lego robotics kit. He has some videos of it following a
black line on white paper. Very cool.
http://www.geocities.com/stevehassenplu
His site is being slashdot'ed right now. If it still is when you read this, here are some mirrors you can try.
http://perso.freelug.org/legway/Leg
http://legway.armorica.biz
http://home1.gte.net/res1g289/StevesLeg
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/biz
So they are getting closer to film, but still have a ways to go. For example, what about contrast, film speed, etc? Take a look at http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pi
Also, every "pixel" in film has at least 8 bits of red, green, and blue. But in most digital sensors, each pixel only record 8 bits of red, green, or blue; the pixels are laid out in a mosaic. So the effective resolution compared to film is only 1/2 to 1/3. The exception is the (still in prototype) Foveon X3 sensor. The Foveon does 8 bits of RGB for every pixel. They have a good discussion at http://www.foveon.com/X3_better.html with image comparisons at http://www.foveon.com/X3_comparison.html
This is very funny, mostly because of the writing style.
http://www.mrichter.com/cdr/primer/prim
Not exactly a tutorial, more like a reference.
The entertainment industry is desperate.
First they convince congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which, among other things, could make it illegal to loan a copy of your e-book to a friend.
Now they've convinced Rep. Howard Berman to submit the "Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act, a bill (PDF) that gives the entertainment industry the special right to hack your personal computer if they suspect you are violating copyright (they don't need to prove anything, just suspect). Think of it like this: If a mugger steals your wallet, are you allowed to burn down his house? No, that's called vigilantism and it's illegal. But that's what the entertainment industry is asking for the right to do.
Bruce Schneier this to say in the 15 Aug 2002 issue of Crypto-Gram (emphasis mine):
To me, it's another example of the insane lengths the entertainment companies are willing to go to preserve their business models. They're willing to destroy your privacy, have general-purpose computers declared illegal, and exercise special vigilante police powers that no one else has…just to make sure that no one watches "The Little Mermaid" without paying for it. They're trying to invent a new crime: interference with a business model.
Excerpts from an article in the Sept 2002 issue of "The Atlantic":
Indeed, he [Bruce Schneier] regards the national push for a high-tech salve for security anxieties as a reprise of his own early and erroneous beliefs about the transforming power of strong crypto. The new technologies have enormous capacities, but their advocates have not realized that the most critical aspect of a security measure is not how well it works but how well it fails.
[Here's an example of measuring how "good" security is by how well it fails]
… at Sea-Tac Airport, someone ran through the metal detector and disappeared onto the little subway that runs among the terminals. Although the authorities quickly identified the miscreant, a concession stand worker, they still had to empty all the terminals and re-screen everyone in the airport, including passengers who had already boarded planes. Masses of unhappy passengers stretched back hundreds of feet from the checkpoints. Planes by the dozen sat waiting at the gates.
In Seattle a single slip-up shut down the entire airport, which delayed flights across the nation. Sea-Tac had no adequate way to contain the damage from a breakdown — such as a button installed near the x-ray machines to stop the subway, so that idiots who bolt from checkpoints cannot disappear into another terminal. The shutdown would inconvenience subway riders, but not as much as being forced to go through security again after a wait of several hours. An even better idea would be to place the x-ray machines at the departure gates, as some are in Europe, in order to scan each group of passengers closely and minimize inconvenience to the whole airport if a risk is detected — or if a machine or a guard fails.
Renders an image-mapped picture of Earth (or other planets) as your background
http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/
Also has support for mapping a "cloud layer" onto the Earth, using real time(!) visible image data from satellites (eg. GOES). It can do a ton of other stuff too, including plotting satellite tracks, earthquake locations and magnitudes, city names, etc.
Available for unix and Windows.
This is a short summary of buffer-overrun attacks:
http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/tech
It's not especially technical, but it does use some simple examples written in C.
This is potentially scary stuff:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcp
Think of the TCPA/Palladium intiative as making your computer more trustworthy for software vendors and media companies, but makes you trust your computer less because you'd never know when files might be deleted or software would be disabled remotely.
Do you ever feel exploited…
… when a telemarketer calls?
… when you receive spam in your mailbox?
… when software you install spies on you?
Then this is the site to help you get even — exploit the exploiters.