They’re not going to be launching the whole rocket, just the second stage (Starship) for hops between cities. Also, even if they land say 20-30 km outside of the city limits and then transfer by train/hyperloop that’s still way faster than a plane, even the Concorde.
This isn't really true. Starship when fully fueled can't even get off the pad under it's own power. It has a thrust-to-weight of under 1. Point to point will absolutely require the first stage, even if it needs less fuel load than normal.
I find it very funny that this article came out right after the deadline for university applications passed here (Greece).
Anyway, I chose a CS Bachelor’s program with just enough EE classes to qualify for a MEng in EE later. I was thinking about starting from EE (I’m equally interested in both subjects, if not a bit more in EE) but I was discouraged by comparing salary info and seeing many dissatisfied electrical engineers. If things look better in 4 years I’ll do my Master’s in EE.
I would prefer if I could do both degrees at the same time, even if it meant more coursework and slightly longer time to complete. I can do a version of this with the degree I chose, studying n subjects in CS and n subjects in EE instead of 2n in only one of these, but ideally it should be 2n in both.
You could study both. CS degree is worthless, nobody asks for it. So take EE degree and study CS in parallel. You can attend classes without being signed.
My best guess is receiving positive attention to compensate for a lack of it elsewhere.
I you want to see this escalated to an Olympic level, watch Meta Stack Exchange over time. It has quite a few characters that are writing lecture-length posts on a daily basis. About...nothing of any remote importance or relevance. Usually concerning some petty complaint or idea about the site, none of which any actual user will ever know about.
In a way, they are 5 star trolls. The most difficult ones to recognize as they seem to well-worded.
For status. You can make up nonsense if you're a little bit clever without much effort and be a sort of Pied Piper for fools. Having status among fools is a kind of power as then you're able to manipulate them in other ways.
I would just render each page of such a PDF in two colors (black or white without shades) and turn the images into a new PDF to upload. If that doesn’t make the steganography fail, maybe add a lot of static? Or censor illustrations anyway since many journals provide them independently of the text.
"I would just" [do this slightly more complicated transformation] really misses the point. Nobody disputes the fact that you could turn any given human-readable pdf into an untraceable version. E.g. you could copy it all out longhand and make sketches of all the plots. Certainly it would work. The point is that as the necessary transformation becomes more complicated/more work, the fraction of the population that will actually do it will vanish, and the surveillance scheme will be effective again.
It wouldn't work since we were allowed to manipulate certain aspects of text, too, to a certain extent, in a way that looked pretty much statistically random. That is, by comparing several copies of the same file, the bits were very much different, and the differences were distributed over the whole document. One of the main aims was to make sure the watermark gets preserved over various transformations, and we automatically tested each new document to make sure it works.
You could even just move a few words around, depending on the language.
Depending on the language, you could even just move a few words around.
Do that randomly, combine the products, and you might get enough entropy to create unique fingerprints for each download.
Randomly do that, combine the products, and you might get enough entropy to create unique fingerprints for each download.
(This silly example can create 4 unique fingerprints)
When I write, I put a great deal of thought into how to arrange sentences for maximum clarity or effectiveness. I would not appreciate an eBook service messing with that, even if the meaning was unchanged.
In the most extreme case, imagine if this was a book of poetry.
For PDF you can do this in a much more subtle way. In a typical block of text every individual letter comes with its own kerning adjustment. You can adjust those in a way that's invisible to the reader but still allows fingerprinting. There's probably 1000 different options too - don't think of moving words as in swapping positions in a sentence. (I know parent suggested it, but that's silly)
Replacing characters with identical-looking unicode chars, adding extra spaces here and there, adding newlines (and more spaces :)), adding random typos, use dictionary with "safe" word/phrase replacements etc. And don't forget about formulas, charts etc - pure text version is not too useful on its own
If you deal with fiction and the like where you basically have just text then I think that's correct: it would be trivial to detect the watermarks in various copies by simply comparing them. I was dealing with PDFs containing tables, formulas, illustrations, etc., so a plain-text version would be unusable.
Randomly choose 3 big paragraphs in the entire ebook to add an extra newline in the middle of at the end of a random sentence. This would be my choice if I had to do some kind of invisible watermarking, at least.
Closer to home and a bit more extreme, a few transposed numbers in a scholarly article would be enough to rekindle another autism/vaccine conspiracy theory!
No, this would not work for a couple of reasons. Manipulating the content itself such as changing the order of words is very dangerous as it can influence the meaning, and if you process things at scale it could lead to devastating consequences. But there are many other aspects of text such as kerning and others (a dozen or so in this particular case) that are virtually invisible to the reader but are detectable by a machine. I'd prefer not to get into the details of the implementation here but of course a dedicated team with enough resources could successfully break it after some time - but I believe it wouldn't make any sense economically.
it's arguably much easier (nowadays) to use an off-the-shelf app like TimeLimit[0] to achieve the same kind of functionality on smartphones, without ever having to flash custom firmware using undocumented/unsupported techniques. Granted, back in <=2014 this probably made more sense.
I imagine all commands have to get signed for the rover to accept them, but even if their keys were compromised and some vulnerability was found in the software, wouldn't you also need a network of really big dishes (see DSN) to actually send the commands to the rover?
While some innovate, once again AWS reaps the margins of the whole space conquest by discretely providing the infrastructure that everyone needs. Clever!
