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As the other poster said, you'll probably have to write this yourself. I recommend looking at TIGER and FIPS, which may allow you to have your program be completely dynamic--people could choose to be alerted of seismic events within 100, 500, 1000 miles of their home relatively easily. (I'm not familiar with either of these services, but I remembered their use by the winner of the Google Programming Contest.)

Now for magnitude, you can just flag each seismic event with an appropriate value and see if it meets the threshold the citizens want. And since you have the distance from the epicenter to the citizen's home, you can calculate the effective magnitude that the citizen feels, or you can just leave it as the magnitude found at the epicenter.

What effect would that have on the other atoms in the area? Could that cause a chain reaction that results in a black hole?

Not a black hole, the earth and anything that falls into its orbit will become one giant Bose-Einstein condensate. :J

while i agree that they are confusing and lame, you might want to check out this site before you attempt to "educate" others about your supposed knowledge. google is your friend.

Yep

There are many, many methods of hashing out there and different p2p apps use different methods. The newest, and arguably best is the Secure Hashing Algorithms (SHA1, SHA2, SHA256....), that have been defined by NIST. Link

"We're excited about this unique opportunity to whore around 's name for free. Now we no longer have to get paid under the counter from for doing so. I'm really excited considering I was about to hit the unemployment line pretty soon." stated Slashdot's Hemos who was watching streaming video from .

Industry insiders say the move was planned all along and that staff secretly conspired to generate free publicity for which is no longer struggling thanks to 's repeated mention of their name. "We think that, all along the plan was for to keep posting about until at least one in every one article mentioned because after all has become such a hot topic that we poop or just thinking about it.

staff would not elaborate more on this but stay tuned for upcoming posts regarding this groundbreaking news. And now for real news you can lose: Folks over at posted maps of the nations infrastructure free for terrorists to Download. Hooray you go Department of Homegrownland InSecurity. Folks over at have posted the guidelines for "National Information Security Systems" and it can be viewed at . A hacker snitch is in 's website after being caught doing sleazy shit. Now he wants the people at to violate his as promised. And finally, Scientists

"We're excited about this unique opportunity to whore around 's name for free. Now we no longer have to get paid under the counter from for doing so. I'm really excited considering I was about to hit the unemployment line pretty soon." stated Slashdot's Hemos who was watching streaming video from .

Industry insiders say the move was planned all along and that staff secretly conspired to generate free publicity for which is no longer struggling thanks to 's repeated mention of their name. "We think that, all along the plan was for to keep posting about until at least one in every one article mentioned because after all has become such a hot topic that we poop or just thinking about it.

staff would not elaborate more on this but stay tuned for upcoming posts regarding this groundbreaking news. And now for real news you can lose: Folks over at posted maps of the nations infrastructure free for terrorists to Download. Hooray you go Department of Homegrownland InSecurity. Folks over at have posted the guidelines for "National Information Security Systems" and it can be viewed at . A hacker snitch is in 's website after being caught doing sleazy shit. Now he wants the people at to violate his as promised. And finally, Scientists

"We're excited about this unique opportunity to whore around 's name for free. Now we no longer have to get paid under the counter from for doing so. I'm really excited considering I was about to hit the unemployment line pretty soon." stated Slashdot's Hemos who was watching streaming video from .

Industry insiders say the move was planned all along and that staff secretly conspired to generate free publicity for which is no longer struggling thanks to 's repeated mention of their name. "We think that, all along the plan was for to keep posting about until at least one in every one article mentioned because after all has become such a hot topic that we poop or just thinking about it.

staff would not elaborate more on this but stay tuned for upcoming posts regarding this groundbreaking news. And now for real news you can lose: Folks over at posted maps of the nations infrastructure free for terrorists to Download. Hooray you go Department of Homegrownland InSecurity. Folks over at have posted the guidelines for "National Information Security Systems" and it can be viewed at . A hacker snitch is in 's website after being caught doing sleazy shit. Now he wants the people at to violate his as promised.

"We're excited about this unique opportunity to whore around 's name for free. Now we no longer have to get paid under the counter from for doing so. I'm really excited considering I was about to hit the unemployment line pretty soon." stated Slashdot's Hemos who was watching streaming video from .

Industry insiders say the move was planned all along and that staff secretly conspired to generate free publicity for which is no longer struggling thanks to 's repeated mention of their name. "We think that, all along the plan was for to keep posting about until at least one in every one article mentioned because after all has become such a hot topic that we poop or just thinking about it.

staff would not elaborate more on this but stay tuned for upcoming posts regarding this groundbreaking news. And now for real news you can lose: Folks over at posted maps of the nations infrastructure free for terrorists to Download. Hooray you go Department of Homegrownland InSecurity. Folks over at have posted the guidelines for "National Information Security Systems" and it can be viewed at . A hacker snitch is in 's website after being caught doing sleazy shit. Now he wants the people at to violate his as promised.

In Yahoo and other search engines (but not Google, that I've seen), you often get a "click-through" that goes to their system before transparently redirecting to the actual URL you clicked. This is relevance feedback. It's true that the system can't determine whether you LIKED the site (aka, whether it was "relevant"), but at least it's some sort of feedback the system can use to tune.

The other most familiar type of system I can think of is Alexa (now owned by Amazon.com, and the brainchild of the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle). With Alexa, they could count not just that you visited a site, but how long you spent and where else you went. This is at least part of the basis for Amazon's recommendation system for books and other geegaws they sell.

Can this work in a search engine? Yes, certainly. Does it mean that a search engine that implements relevance feedback will instantly be better than Google? Definitely not! There are many other things (about 20, from what I've heard) that go in to the ranking system that Google uses...Pagerank is one of them, but there are many other factors (such as term frequency, document HTML structure, etc.). Some these, notably Pagerank, work poorly on relatively small collections (in the TREC conference, people have almost never found that Pagerank, HITS or similar algorithmns improve performance with "only" a few tens of GB of Web documents -- a few million pages).

Wanna know more about information retrieval? The TREC page above is very good for state-of-the-art research reports (see the Publications area -- it's all online and free). More general texts are mostly in libraries, but one good one online is Managing Gigabytes, which covers the IR aspects thoroughly and also has lots of ideas about how to use compression in an IR system (something that I'm curious whether Google & others do).

Actually, the testers don't assign the EAL. It, too, must be claimed in the target, and determines how much work the evaluators do. (And the evaluators must follow a specific procedure, called the Common Evaluation Methodology, that is overseen by an approved government organization. See the NIAP Web Page for more information.

Daniel

Ignoring the fact that IBM markets Linux and not BSD, why haven't corporations made genuine efforts to get it accepted in environments such as the government. The article doesn't make it clear whether or not they're talking about serving or usability.


Because no one (e.g. BSDi) has spent the money to prepare the documentation, and pay for the independant evaluation from an approved lab.

IIRC, it's about 9 million for EAL7 test as it has the NSA certify all the source, compiled binaries, default configuration, and configuability. The hardware is also certified the same way, so that the OS is joined to the exact brand of chip. And EAL7 takes about 1-3 years of rigorus testing.

Well considering no OS has ever been evaluated to EAL7, I think you're wrong. Especially since you apparently have no clue what is entailed at that level. Hint: formal proofs of security.

I think the largest system certified to this level was a reimplementation of the first intel 4004 based calculator (add, subtract, multiple, divide).

None are "user-tested." They have to be all evaluated at an approved independant testing lab

The highest level completed is EAL4+
for an Operating System.

Common Criteria's CCPL (Centralised Certified Product List)- OS
and the NIST's Validated Products List (Operating Systems).

AIX 5L for PowerPC V5.2, Program Number 5765-E62
B1/EST-X, V2.0.1 with AIX, V 4.3 (Bull)
HP-UX (11i) Version 11.11
IRIX v 6.5.13, with patches 4354, 4451, 4452
IPSO 3.5 and 3.5.1 (Nokia)
Trusted IRIX /CMW v 6.5.13, with patches 4354, 4451, 4452, 4373, 4473
Solaris 8 2/02
Trusted Solaris 8 4/01
Sun Solaris Version 8 with AdminSuite v3.0.1
Windows 2000 Professional, Server, and Advanced Server with SP3 and Q326886

The common criteria is about an standardized approach to security. The CC itself is not about the system security, just the general approach to the security. CC is also more about information security and information assurance, it is not focused on system vulnrenabilities.

What does this mean?

It is basically just a bunch of paperwork to cover the a** of the civil servant who approves the computer system purchases.

You need to read the actual NIST docs about exactly what hardware the system had. The old NT4 C2 was a specific Compaq with no networking and no floppy drive, IIRC.

Then you need to look at what they claim to protect against. You can use a standard form letter like protection plan which says it won't get viruses or hacked as long the system has no networking and no removable media or you can use a protection plan which is useful.

This doesn't mean much in general, other than the usual misunderstanding and misquoting by sales people to management. It doesn't make any difference to Linux itself.

You can read lots more about this by choosing from the links in the rejected post below. Also, it's important to note that EAL2 is NOT the highest Common Criteria certification level. The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation v2.1 describes the security assurance requirements and EALs in detail. For a look at the details read about the Evaluation Assurance Levels at NIST.

IBM, SuSE Linux Get Common Criteria Security Certification

Linux has reached a new milestone: IBM and SuSE Linux have received the Common Criteria Security Certification from the U.S. government (mirror), specifically from the Defense Information Security Agency (DISA) arm of the Pentagon. 'Right now it is the only Linux distribution available that has this. This certification is used as a standard by 14 countries including the U.S. and Canada,' says the SuSE U.S. general manager. Linux Enterprise Server 8 is certified at Evaluation Assurance Level 2+ EAL2 with the companies jointly pursuing a Controlled Access Protection Profile EAL3 certification by year-end, then on to EAL4. More details at CNet, AP via Detnews/CNN and Reuters/Forbes. It looks like they beat Red Hat to the punch.

You can read lots more about this by choosing from the links in the rejected post below. Also, it's important to note that EAL2 is NOT the highest Common Criteria certification level. The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation v2.1 describes the security assurance requirements and EALs in detail. For a look at the details read about the Evaluation Assurance Levels at NIST.

IBM, SuSE Linux Get Common Criteria Security Certification

Linux has reached a new milestone: IBM and SuSE Linux have received the Common Criteria Security Certification from the U.S. government (mirror), specifically from the Defense Information Security Agency (DISA) arm of the Pentagon. 'Right now it is the only Linux distribution available that has this. This certification is used as a standard by 14 countries including the U.S. and Canada,' says the SuSE U.S. general manager. Linux Enterprise Server 8 is certified at Evaluation Assurance Level 2+ EAL2 with the companies jointly pursuing a Controlled Access Protection Profile EAL3 certification by year-end, then on to EAL4. More details at CNet, AP via Detnews/CNN and Reuters/Forbes. It looks like they beat Red Hat to the punch.

Linux received it's evaluation at a level of EAL2; according to the CC guidelines, this is "structurally tested" and means that it should "not demand more effort on the part of the developer that is consistent with good commercial practice"; applicable where "a low to moderate level of independently assured security" is required.
Windows 2K received an EAL4+, according to NIAP's evaluated product list; which is *supposed* to show it was "methodically designed, tested, and reviewed". This is probably about on par with the old Orange Book (TCSEC) C3 it used to have. EAL4 does "not require substantial specialist knowledge" and is the "highest level in which it is likely to be economically feasible to retrofit in an existing product line." It's intended that an EAL4 system shows "low-level design for the Target of Evaluation (ToE)"; with testing that supports "independent search for obvious vulnerabilities."
That being said, having an EAL2 or EAL4 will probably not get you into a job that involves holding classified data.
All of this is accessible from , the CC website.

Try the CCEVS home page... Here you can find the Validated Products List.

ZigBee and the IEEE 802.15.4 Task Group are both well aware of security. No one wants to relive the WEP debacle in any 802 working group, and ZigBee has gone to the point of establishing a Security Working Group, to make sure things are done correctly in the upper layers.

15.4 specifies the well-known AES-128 algorithm for encryption, source authentication, and message integrity. ZigBee will also use AES-128 (enabling reuse of the hardware/software to minimize implementation cost), plus add a public-key algorithm and other techniques to control key distribution and other security policies a needed by specific applications.

Like this?

See http://clinton1.nara.gov/White_House/EOP/OMB/html/ omb-a130.html for more info.

Also, NIST produces lots of standards documents for the civilan side of the gov't. See http://csrc.nist.gov/

Possibly because software encryption kills performance?

AES ceratinly was designed with performance in mind. And it can be implemented efficiently on 8-bit and 32-bit general purpose architectures as well as dedicated hardware. What interests me even more is what mode of operation they are using. I'm researching in modes aimed at disk encryption. It certainly is more complicated than just using CBC and be done with that.

Now if all you wanted to do was ECB mode encryption of the disk, that could be done very efficient in hardware. With 512 byte sectors and 256 bit blocks, you would have 16 blocks per sector, which could be encrypted and decrypted in parallel by 16 independend AES circuits. But of course that is not particular secure.

I have designed a more secure encryption that uses a tree structure on the disk. And involves both hashing and symmetric and assymetric encryption. Obviously it does have a price in terms of disk space, memory requirements, and I/O efficiency. But you get impressive security properties.

I doubt ABIT have done any of that, because the customers probably only want encryption if they can get it for free. Besides it would be stupid anyway considering the ridiculously small key of just 40 bits as mentioned in the specification. They claim it is adequate for general users. I say it is adequate for anybody who doesn't need encryption.

Also, here's the key.

Not going to stop the RIAA from catching you (although they'd have difficulty decrypted the drive once they did I guess), but looks moderately useful for protecting a harddrive from theft. I'd love one on a laptop. If someone stole it in an airport or somesuch - at least they couldn't get my data without some effort.

Oops! I'm wrong. See ssomeone who knows what they're talking about.

KM/S = kelvinmegas/siemens
km/s = kilometers/second

Reference 1
Reference 2

I don't know enough about what Canada has to offer, so this is limited to the U.S.

When folks around here say they're "going backpacking" they usually mean they'll be hiking in the wildnerness with just what they can carry on their back. Such trips rarely include visits to bookstores, musea, and other geek centers. Such trips are best in mountainous areas -- I can't imagine backpacking in North Dakota, for instance -- and can be done on a pretty low daily budget (but make sure you invest in high quality boots, tents, etc.). Some folks have mentioned the Appalachian Trail, which spans from Vermont to Georgia. On the other side of the country are lots of swell backpacking areas from the Rocky Mountains west. The national parks in Utah and Arizona (Canyonlands, Staircase, Zion, Grand Canyon, etc.) are especially popular for such trips, though if you've spent much time in the outback you may be sick of such a climate (though the terrain here is more impressive). Almost any national park or national forest is a good backpacking experience, and entrance fees (especially if you get a year-long pass) are astonishingly cheap.

Unfortunately, you'll be arriving at the tail end of good backpacking season. Beginning in late September you can't trust in a lack of snow anywhere inland in the northern two thirds of the country, though places like southern Arizona are quite enjoyable. Unless you're staying until late next spring, you should hit any outdoor areas in the north first and work your way south.

Unfortunatey, U.S. public transportaion leaves much to be desired. There's nothing like a Eurail pass, and Amtrak stops mostly in larger cities, which is sad, because trains played such a large part in building America. Greyhound has excellent coverage and fairly reasonable rates, but if you're going to a lot of places, your pocketbook could take a big hit. Finally, hitchhiking across the country is probably no longer a viable plan, but it may be invaluable in a pinch. Hitchhikers are, generally, assumed to be dangerous until proven otherwise. On the plus side, most cities have a bus system decent enough for tourists to enjoy the town.

Unless you have access to a car, my advice is to pick a handfull of (relatively small) areas you want to visit and then figure out what all the great things to do there are.

Some geeky things in my neck of the woods (Boulder, Colorado): National Institute of Standards and Technology (home of the most accurate clock in this hemisphere) is right next to a branch of National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association and a beautiful two-hour mountain hike away from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They've all got free tours and such, though I haven't taken one since security got tightened after 9/11/01. About 10 miles south of town is the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and more beautiful mountain hike areas. 30 miles or so to the north west is Rocky Mountain National Park, which gets pretty cold in September and later. Denver, CO has Forney Museum of Tranportation and also the nation's only major airport built in the last 20 years, so it's full of neat engineering bits.

Your post sounds quite ambitious, and there's no way you can really experience all of what's neat in America in even a year, so find some of it and enjoy the hell out of that! Cheerio!

More to the point, Putnam is a Republican kid whose dad owns some orange groves in Florida.

I recently attended one of Putnam's subcommittee hearings. His subcommittee is responsible for government agency IT legislation (e.g. FISMA [pdf]) and presumably has no jurisdiction over private sector businesses. (There's no way this Republican Congress is going to pass any legislation that mandates that private industry spend $ on cyber security.)

Neither Putnam nor the Federal agency CIOs he was grilling seemed very technically knowledgeable at all. It seemed to me Putnam was trying to make political hay about some GAO cyber security letter-grades that are over a year old. Some agencies spend so much of their time writing reports for Congress and OMB (Office of Management and Budget) when they could be spending more time actually improving their security. Worse yet, the nongeeks are starting to attempt to set technical policy. OMB recently demanded that Federal agencies install a specific sendmail patch. Remember, OMB are supposed to be bean counters.

And just after everyone gets happy with gigabytes, we'll have to remind them that the correct term would now be gibibytes.

Nah, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm also a big python advocate. I gotta say though, I didn't stop to consider the BaseHTTPServer/etc modules to handle a standalone, easily maintainable web "application".

RE: Point 2 comments

About wxPython docs and how wxWindows has extensive documentation. I saw that when I last checked it. For me it seemed like a potential waste of time to wade through it all in order to get at what I needed. If the tcl/tk option hadn't worked out for me, I probably would've fallen back to this option.

RE: Point 3 comments

The final reason for me choosing tcl/tk over python was knowing that the one constant in the project would be my use of Expect. This being part of the ActiveTcl distribution meant that distribution the interpereter and the scripts would be easier. Also, the pyExpect scripts (when I last checked) seemed to have fallen behind or stopped development.

My personal preference will almost always be Python for server-side scripting. Primarily because its syntax requirements result in easier-to-maintain code, and also because of its wealth of libraries (sockets, BaseHTTP*, re, ftplib, etc), and portability. But I think I'll be using Tcl/Tk (for portable GUI apps) until wxPython comes of age.

I sort of assumed there was such a thing all along. Something like those "pinpression" toys with all the parallel pins that you can push on and make an imprint of your hand, only driven by actuators. Why wouldn't this work?

(Hold on...after a little Googling, I found this instance of the exact thing I'm proposing. Go and buy it, blind people! And not just for anti-spam graphics; as with any new medium, just imagine the pr0n possibilities.)

http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec-c.html

You are however correct to point out that the start of the art has advanced quite a bit since the 1880 census

I'm really impressed by those figures - 132 milligram-hecto-zeptos isn't something you see every day, although I'm sure you're correct in saying that 200 would be even better.

NIST Reference to SI Units

(14) Waivers to this policy may be granted by the NSTISSC on a case-by-case basis. Requests for waivers, including a justification and explanatory details, shall be forwarded through the Director, National Security Agency (DIRNSA), ATTN: V1, who shall provide appropriate recommendations for NSTISSC consideration. Where time and circumstances may not allow for the full review and approval of the NSTISSC membership, the Chairman of the NSTISSC is authorized to approve waivers to this policy which may be necessary to support U.S. Government operations which are time-sensitive, or where U.S. lives may be at risk.

Although it would be interesting to make it easier to send mail to another country, this isn't something that's very likely to be adopted, especially as it's being put together by some company wanting to sell a product as opposed to a standards organization.

Even if several countries were to adopt this, it's still doubtful that the USPS would. Aside from the fact that the US isn't exactly big on coforming to other sorts of international methods of reckoning, the fact that the Post Office doesn't even realize the address they assigned to my house is imaginary (since the road changes names and numberings due to a short jaunt into another county) isn't very encouraging.

• huge developer base
• almost all universities teach it
• It works equally good (if not better) on linux and OS X
• JDBC - works equally well on all databases
• JBoss Hey it's free, and it's good.
• IntelliJ IDEA not free, but worth every euro!
• Jakarta community is unrivalled.
• ANT simply the best build tool.
• Options, options, options. No single vendor lock in.

A "gb" is a groucho bit.
There are 10^30 * 8 * 2^30 grouchobits in a gibibyte.

Well, I haven't read this thread till now, so I'm probably the only one reading by now, but....

This is a really good question with a complicated answer, which has not been done justice here. But take a look at NIST's web site.

Following the diagram, we see that the volt is defined as 1 W/A. In other words, if you have a circuit that is using 1 Watt of power and requires 1 Ampere of current, then, by definition, the "voltage" across it is 1 volt.

Okay, so what's a Watt and what's an Ampere? Well, an Ampere is another fundamental SI unit. When two nearby wires have current passing through them, they attract one another. An ampere is defined as the amount of current needed for a certain amount of force between wires in a certain configuration.

A Watt is a measure of power, 1 J / s. So what's a Joule? Well a Joule is an amount of energy, which is defined as 1 N m. In other words, 1 J is the amount of energy you have to expend to move something one meter if the amount of force needed to move it is one Newton.

Great, so what's a Newton? Well, a Newton is defined by Newton's (pun definitely intended) law, F=ma. I.e. a Newton is the amount of force needed to accelerate a 1 kg object at a rate of 1 m/s^2. (And if you wonder how Newton's law can be both a law and a definition of force, well that's a whole 'nother discussion, so just trust me on that.)

So, phew, we finally know how the Volt is (at least on the theoretical level) related to the kilogram.

Now the only people who do this in practice are the standards bodies. They then publish "practical standards" for working scientists who need high precision. These amount to something like, build such-and-such a circuit and then the voltage across it will be so-many volts. It is their job to go through the whole process described above to compare the practical standard's voltage to the ONE TRUE VOLT. Then companies that make multimeters use the practical standards to calibrate their devices, which, finally, are what almost everyone in the world actually uses to measure voltage.

There are standard prefixes for the powers of 2^10:

• 2^10 kibi Ki kilobinary: (2^10 )^1
• 2^20 mebi Mi megabinary: (2^10 )^2
• 2^30 gibi Gi gigabinary: (2^10 )^3
• etc.

See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html for details, history, etc.

The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

I'm assuming the photons resulting from this transition would have a single and known wavelength, so you could say the mass equivalent to N photons resulting from this transition is a kg. IANAP, but this seems possible to me. It would also define mass in terms of time, which is apparently desirable. Then again, people much smarter than me have thought about this...

Why not just use definitions that can already be made, such as 1/12.0107(8)-th the mass of one Avogadro's constant of a sample of 100% pure carbon-12? or 1/132.90545(2)-th the mass of one Avogadro's constant of a sample of 100% pure cesium-133 (which is its only naturally occurring isotope)? Or base it from the half the energy of the gamma ray generated by the annihilation of a positron-electron pair having no energy from acceleration, or something similar? Yes, it is a bit problematic that most of the physical features it could be based on now seem difficult to measure in a lab, because they relate back to something on the atomic scale, and the counting of objects at that scale or in such a number to be useful daily is difficult. At least, though, it would then be reproducible.

Having read the NIST article referenced by another respondent earlier, I can agree with their reasons for considering the adoption of another, more accessible standard. One of the cornerstones of science is the ability to reproduce results. Perhaps it is overdue that the unit of mass (kilogram) join its other basic breathern, the units of time (second) and length (meter), in being based not upon one physical sample, but upon a physical quantity that is reproducible and available to laboratories world-wide.

Reference for constants: The NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty

Why not just use definitions that can already be made, such as 1/12.0107(8)-th the mass of one Avogadro's constant of a sample of 100% pure carbon-12? or 1/132.90545(2)-th the mass of one Avogadro's constant of a sample of 100% pure cesium-133 (which is its only naturally occurring isotope)? Or base it from the half the energy of the gamma ray generated by the annihilation of a positron-electron pair having no energy from acceleration, or something similar? Yes, it is a bit problematic that most of the physical features it could be based on now seem difficult to measure in a lab, because they relate back to something on the atomic scale, and the counting of objects at that scale or in such a number to be useful daily is difficult. At least, though, it would then be reproducible.

Having read the NIST article referenced by another respondent earlier, I can agree with their reasons for considering the adoption of another, more accessible standard. One of the cornerstones of science is the ability to reproduce results. Perhaps it is overdue that the unit of mass (kilogram) join its other basic breathern, the units of time (second) and length (meter), in being based not upon one physical sample, but upon a physical quantity that is reproducible and available to laboratories world-wide.

Reference for constants: The NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty

Actually, the definition of the meter is based on the definition of the second. See the history of the meter.

As you can see, the National Institute of Standards and Technology already has the joule-kilogram relationship calculated out and referenced as a "Fundamental Physics Constant"

Nice info. Here it is Linkified

It doesn't exactly have to be measured. They just do that to check it's still right. Go read about the history of the Systeme International the NIST site and the definition of a kilogram at the same place

But essentially, its part of a way of ensuring that the measuring units Scientists use around the world are the same, not slightly different.

For instance, anyone around the world can reproduce (in a well equipped lab anyway) the definition for time (The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom).

There are only 7 base SI units (meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, and candela) from which many more units are derived. Hence, if kilo is out/changing many of these are changing too.

and why should I care if it detoritates?

Presuming you're American, you would use feet, pounds, find metric too complicated, etc, etc - so probably wont care if it does.

It doesn't exactly have to be measured. They just do that to check it's still right. Go read about the history of the Systeme International the NIST site and the definition of a kilogram at the same place

But essentially, its part of a way of ensuring that the measuring units Scientists use around the world are the same, not slightly different.

For instance, anyone around the world can reproduce (in a well equipped lab anyway) the definition for time (The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom).

There are only 7 base SI units (meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, and candela) from which many more units are derived. Hence, if kilo is out/changing many of these are changing too.

and why should I care if it detoritates?

Presuming you're American, you would use feet, pounds, find metric too complicated, etc, etc - so probably wont care if it does.

Whoops... here's a slightly better link about MiB and GiB: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

Yeah, you say that now. But with FLAC, the files are compressed losslessly, and in my experience, I generally get about a 33% size reduction. And with subtle music with a lot of will placed percussion (e.g. my jazz albums) FLAC does give a noticeable improvement over ogg vorbis encoded at 9.1 quality.

So assuming you'd get about 74 minutes of audio on the standard CD, you'd get 747 MiB of wave files per disc.

Note: CD Audio encoding is different than regular data encoding. You cannot fit 747 MiB of wave files on a CD-R in a regular file 74 or 80 minute system because of redundant error correction data that does not exist in the CD Audio format.

So with a 20 GiB Neuros Audio Player you would be able to fit 27.4 CDs on one player. With FLAC, assuming a 33% file size reduction, you would be able to get 40.9 CDs onto the player.

Lossless support in the Neuros player IS a big deal because it allows you to put a significantly larger quantity of non-lossy music on it. And furthermore, if you want, you can just convert the FLAC back to RIFF wave format whenever you want because, one again, the conversion is lossless in both directions.