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The Year In Ideas

Posted by timothy on Sun Dec 12, 2004 01:13 PM
from the what'dja-think? dept.
Science Technology
No_Weak_Heart writes "The New York Times Magazine (registration required) presents its annual compendium of ideas. The list ranges from acoustic keyboard eavesdropping to land-mine-detecting plants to water that isn't wet. What catches your fancy? And what do you think is missing?"
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  • What's obviously missing is not having to register at nytimes! Come on guys, how hard of a concept is that?

  • Ski Bike (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BossMC (696762)
    I didn't RTFA, but I noticed my ski bike isn't on there. Neither is my shopping cart grocery trailer! Whats is this, a popularity contest?

    http://craig.backfire.ca/imgbrowse/ski-bike/

    • Re:Ski Bike (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mrjb (547783)
      > I didn't RTFA, but I noticed my ski bike isn't on there

      You did NOT rfta but you DID notice your ski bike isnt there?

      Forget the ski bike! Tell us about your paranormal brain plugin invention!

  • You must admire the irony... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jarich (733129) on Sunday December 12 2004, @01:26PM (#11067177) Homepage Journal
    A list of new and innovative ideas hidden behind a required login.
    • I wouldn't call them "new and innovative." First of all, they aren't even all that new. And just by looking on the list (non-reg, btw), you'll find that most of them are either of dubious value (Criminalizing Reckless Sex, Professional Amateurs, Psychopathic C.E.O.'s) or plain silly (The Best Way to Skip a Stone, The Car That Emotes).

      • Dambuster bombs (Score:4, Informative)

        by Mal-2 (675116) on Sunday December 12 2004, @02:22PM (#11067450) Homepage Journal
        "The Best Way to Skip a Stone" isn't silly. In fact, skipping stones was the basis of the concept of Dambuster bombs [ideas21.co.uk] back in WW2.

        One rather bizarre note appears here [bris.ac.uk] . "If the bomb breaches the dam, code word is Nigger but if it does not breach, code word is Gonner."

        In any case, skipping objects off water is hardly a new area of research and does not belong on a list of things "new and innovative" as it is neither. But it is not at all silly.

        Mal-2

  • What is missing? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 12 2004, @01:27PM (#11067181)
    Flying cars.
  • ...and if one learns Dvorak and Qwerty keyboard methods, and switches back and forth between them, wouldn't that cause audio monitoring of the typist and/or keyboard to be inconclusive? Or more interesting yet, have multiple keyboards, so to never leave an audio bug knowing which keyboard one is using at any given point so that they can't develop a profile of a given piece of equipm$#@^&

    NO CARRIER
    • You don't need to know the make and model of the keyboard to be able to decipher the keystrokes. As long as each key makes a slightly different sound, you can give each sound a number and it becomes a letter-substitution code. More complex because there are more keys, but really not all that hard. Now what's the relative frequency of e and ,?
      • If you don't use the keyboard enough to give them a large enough sampling to determine which sound corresponds to which key (which they'd have to figure out with a best guess method) then they might not be able to build a profile on a given piece of equipment.

        If you had many, many keyboards of the same manufacturer and model it'd be even more difficult, since the sounds would be so similar that they might not have an easy time telling keyboards apart, especially if you switched keyboards many times in th
        • >You can even use the time between strokes as a crude measure of distance between (unknown) keys, or as a hint as to what kind of stuff is being typed (c code will sound different from a memo, even if the keys are all the same) to improve your frequency analysis

          My advisor (Dawn Song) has a paper (with other people, of course) about timing analysis of interactive ssh sessions. Basically, the upshot is that you can watch how long it is between packets that come out, and you get one packet per keystroke (iirc), so you can use this to learn about what they're typing. It's reasonably difficult, of course, but the microphone attack does gain extra information which the ssh attack does not.

          If you're interested, a pdf is at http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~dawnsong/papers/ssh-timing .pdf

          Lea
    • And if people changed passwords regularly, breaking into people's systems would be much more difficult. But neither is very likely.
  • The whole point of Liberal Arts education is to produce human beings incapable of doing something worthwhile, thus successfully eliminating them from the work pool (yay, more jobs for others). For decades, nay, centuries, this scheme has functioned flawlessly, keeping the World well oiled and working like a chronometer. And now, someone's trying to spoil it by teaching Liberal Arts majors Real World Stuff. I swear, if this is allowed to continue, you'll face the consequences pretty real soon.

  • Quote from article... (Score:5, Funny)

    by criordan (733016) on Sunday December 12 2004, @01:38PM (#11067221) Homepage Journal
    "Worse, cows might be attracted to the weeds growing over mines, with disastrous consequences."

    I think it's pretty obvious we have a winner.

  • Water that "isn't wet" is hardly water... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sarcastic Assassin (788575) on Sunday December 12 2004, @01:39PM (#11067229) Journal
    Apparently, it's a "carbon-based molecule" with "fire-safety applications". Last time I checked, water only contained hydrogen and oxygen, not carbon.
  • They're the only things that will survive a nuclear war, right? So why not build bomb shelters out of them?

    Secondly, given that anything buttered always lands butter side down, has anyone considered buttering a kitten's back? Caught between the duel imperatives of landing on it's feet and landing on the butter, it would rotate endlessly in the air. Stick on some magnets and voila, instant free energy

    • Re:Cockroach bomb shelters and buttered kitten pow (Score:5, Funny)

      by mr_snarf (807002) on Sunday December 12 2004, @02:09PM (#11067370)
      Yes, many many people have considered and attempted to build the butter-cat core reactors. Currently more energy must be put into the system than can be drawn from it.

      As the core spins, the butter is flung outwards, causing the system to shut down quickly. Researchers have overcome this problem by cooling the system and containing the core inside a super-conductive bread 'bottle'. As any final year physics student will tell you, cold butter can not be spread onto bread, infact, it is repelled by it. By surrounding the core with high-intensity bread fields, the butter is pushed towards the centre of the reactor, sticking to the cat. Of course, this system requires large amounts of energy.

      Much research has gone into this technology, and scientists believe that they have a design that will produce more energy than is put into the system.

      Construction of the prototype is due to commence shortly, however it is an international effort. Currently progress has been halted because France and Japan are arguing over who should have the reactor on their soil. Supporters of the french claim that their skills in making french toast will allow for a higher quality core. On the other hand, Japan's extensive collection of 'hello kitty' products puts them at the forefront of feline technology.

      Where ever the prototype is constructed, this is an exciting time to be alive. Cheap, clean power is just around the corner.
  • FACT: websites with free content that force readers to surrender their details end up collecting garbage information, and also annoy said readers who end up reading some other website with similar content.

    IDEA: uuh, like, stop the registration thing perhaps?
    • FACT: websites with free content that force readers to surrender their details end up collecting garbage information, and also annoy said readers who end up reading some other website with similar content.

      The NYT has my real e-mail address and in return I find real NYT news content in my in-box each morning, something I want and need. I suspect that is true of most of those who register.

      The tinfoil hat market being what it is this days, I doubt the Times worries much about the Slashdot demographic.

  • My dads invention is missing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by matsh (30900) on Sunday December 12 2004, @02:02PM (#11067338) Homepage
    It is a hydraulic engine with which you can build motors of any size. Want to rotate the Pentagon? It is possible with the Hercules motor:

    http://www.indrives.com/frameset.html
  • How can we have a list of anything without a Cowboy Neil optioin?

  • Land mines (Score:4, Interesting)

    by t_allardyce (48447) on Sunday December 12 2004, @02:14PM (#11067396) Journal
    I think that land-mine plant could have an extra benifit - if countries who refuse to sign land-mine bans continue to use them (COUGH USA COUGH) someone needs to fill a plane with these seeds and drop them everywhere they think land mines are being used - but not after the war, during the war! render them totally useless as a weapon by revealing their locations days after they have been set! Although the plant still seems a little creepy...
    • That's a great idea. Then once you get the enemy to trust that the plants will tell them where the mines are, you swap out a batch of reactive plants with non-reactive plants and when they go strolling through recklesslly, blammo.
    • Um, if the war is still on, this "someone" would likely have their plane shot down in short order.

  • A few more ideas of 2004 (Score:5, Informative)

    by akuzi (583164) on Sunday December 12 2004, @03:54PM (#11067883)
    I don't know if any of these are really new ideas but they seem to have come up a lot in 2004.
    - Affordable space tourism for the masses [virgingalatic.com]
    - Podcasting [podca.st]. ipod+time shifting+rss
    - The Seriousness of Fake news [cnn.com]. It seems like even the mainstream news channels like CNN have started to incorporate comedians and irony in their shows. Jon Stewart interviews John Kerry, and the daily show book is a best seller. Many articles are written about why people are so turned off the real news channels.
    - Global Economic Crash imminent [globalresearch.ca]. The declining US dollar is at risk of being dumped by Asia and losing its status as world currency to the Euro - potentially trigger global economic crisis. Another scenario involves the 'peak oil' theory and the increasing price of oil.
    - Fighting Terrorism using Drug War tactics [dar-al-harb.com]. An interview with John Kerry in the NY Times magazine reveiled that his view of terrorism as a problem you fight locally in a similar fashion to drug cartels and not as a global war fought at the level of nations.
    - Sex Slavery in America [healthdev.net]. A controversial piece of investigative journalism in the NY Times posited that sex slavery is widespread in the US.

  • Vernor Vinge's Powers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jerf (17166) on Sunday December 12 2004, @03:56PM (#11067896) Journal
    In the "A Fire Upon The Deep" universe, the Powers of the higher computational zones are hypothesized to be able to perform powerful computations on minimal data.

    The keyboard thing is a great example of that; with scanty data you can reverse engineer what keys are being tapped.

    I'd bet with a bit more work you wouldn't even need to calibrate the device, just collect a lot of keypresses, classify them blind, and apply known probability distributions to the data. With that you could get a high probability analysis of the keypresses. (After all, if the two most probable passwords are "thebeatles" or "theb]atles", which do you think it is?)

    A single picture or a short sound doesn't have a lot of data in it, but a long sound sample or video file has a lot of data in it. Expect this to be just the beginning.

  • the year in patents (Score:4, Funny)

    by evilmousse (798341) on Sunday December 12 2004, @03:58PM (#11067906) Homepage Journal

    i bet the year in patents is a much longer list than the year in ideas.

  • Two words: Paper Ballots (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MarkusQ (450076) on Sunday December 12 2004, @06:01PM (#11068591) Journal
    Two more words: Counted Honestly --MarkusQ
    • Linux is fractured between two dominant desktop enviorments; which is hindering it's market penetration.

      No, the fact that one company already held 90% of the market share when Linux became viable as a desktop OS is hindering its market share. If your average Linux distro was 100% compatible with MS-Windows XP, Microsoft would disappear.

      So, therefore, why don't we merge gnome into kde so that we have one major desktop enviroment with two 'sub-desktops' (the original kde and gnome) that users can choose
      • 1gb of hard disk space makes every meg precious.
        Then you won't want to use a desktop enviroment at all. In fact, you might want to consider using one of the BSD's instead; NetBSD would probably work great on such an old system.

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