How about eatable RFID embedded in food, someone ?
I don't know about edible, but I do like this idea; for most fruit, you could embed the tag in the skin, for example. I'd actually really like to be able to get a list of stuff in the fridge, be warned when something's approaching the eat-by date...
Better still: some RFID tags have sensors in. A simple Perl script could track a shopping list for me, and either order replacements online or be synced to a PDA for shopping. Maybe even couple it with a Pricewatch-type site, so I know which supermarket would be cheapest for that particular list; work out what recipe I could make, or what I'd need to add.
Alternatively - if this device can do 300 Kbit/sec in this version, how about cable-modem/ADSL routers? Up the bandwidth a bit, it would handle the load OK; as it is, it could make a nice easy dialup router. $33 with a serial port - add a simple modem, and you have the ultimate plug+play ISP: one end in the phone socket, the other in the NIC, and it's all preconfigured!
We talking bricks & mortar or online here? If the former, most places don't call in charges below the "floor limit". In the UK this is usually around £50 - depending on the store and the nature of the transaction. This is simply because it takes a while to do a verify even when it is all automated. Of course all online places call in every txn, because the time is less critical.
Personally, I can't even remember the last time I bought something on CC using anything other than an EFTPOS terminal - which automatically verifies every transaction with the bank operating it, as well as keeping an internal 'hotlist' of stolen cards, updated nightly. (Done properly, the call costs somewhere around 1p - at which point, even on a 50p transaction, the 2.5% cut will cover it. The modem racks and servers will cost more, of course, but you need most of that infrastructure in place anyway...)
Are you thinking of the "manual" verification procedures used on suspicious or very large transactions, where the store telephones the bank, who then ask you questions to confirm your identity??
If I were the issuing bank, I'd put a 'verify' flag on the cards immediately (vendor must confirm identity directly, i.e. have you call the bank to check it's really you), and rush a replacement card out to each cardholder. That way, the cardholders are only inconvenienced for the day or two it takes to FedEx (or whatever) the new card out - yes, it's expensive to repeat this for 2.2m people, but compared to the cost of having to honor a string of dishonest transactions you can't bill the cardholder for?
Seriously, I can imagine this being (ab)used a great deal; think of the fuss over people registering domains like "fordsucks.com" and pointing them at GM's website, or whatever - but multipled a thousandfold. Just run a "whois microsoft.com", then tell me that "microsoft.bankrupt" would stay unregistered for long!
Legally, you have no automatic rights to use or redistribute anything. This is how copyright works.
Not entirely; in the UK at least, you do have an automatic right to use any software "lawfully obtained". So, if I walk into a shop in the UK and buy a retail copy of, say, Windows or Office, I am entitled to use that software - whatever the license says. (I also have a right to make backup copies, and limited reverse-engineering rights.) The "lawfully obtained" bit is what stops warez being legal, of course: if the warez site is distributing the software illegally, you still aren't allowed to use it.
Having said that, most of the items in an MS EULA are redundant anyway: stripping out the lawyer-speak, they basically say "you're allowed to use this software and make legal backups, and that's it. Oh, and don't sue us." All the rest just clarifies that they are not giving you any extra rights you don't get automatically.
It's possible to get a proper, signed contract governing software; I've had software under NDA before, for example, and once got a free copy of Visual Studio Enterprise on condition I used it for research only and didn't give or sell it to others. The usual EULA however is meaningless: it doesn't give or take away anything, under UK law at least! (Some of the recent licenses may differ; apparently FrontPage now has a prohibition on anti-MS sites? I don't think that would stand up in court, but IANAL - I just advise a group of lawyers on technical matters!)
Since the cops have a speed trap right behind my house (about 30 feet from my kitchen wall), it looks like I'm going to have to cover my entire house with a Faraday cage.
You've got that all wrong; the economical thing is to encase the speed trap instead, since it'll be smaller;-)
(In fact, as others have pointed out, police use much higher frequencies - all 10GHz or higher - which won't affect any WiFi type kit. It's just the older military radars - as in aircraft - which use 5GHz, and would conflict with 802.11a's use unless you're careful.)
But those virtual CPUs are on the same physical chip with the same cache state so how can their distance to memory be different?
Not different from each other, different from the other virtual CPUs, on other chips.
If you have two threads, both accessing the same chunk of memory, think about these two options:
1. Put both threads on different virtual processors of the same chip. That block of memory gets cached once, and both threads get cache hits.
2. You put each thread on a different physical chip. Now, that block of memory is being cached by both chips at once, which means lots more bus traffic for each modification (each chip needs to tell the other what just happened); meanwhile, both threads are 'fighting' for cache with threads from other programs.
Clearly, the first is better (more efficient) from a memory point of view: more data cache hits, less traffic between CPUs as they invalidate each other's cache lines. Similarly, it's better for the I-cache (instruction cache): you only cache and execute a single set of instructions, because both threads will tend to use the same code.
I say that her heart is in the right place, and where was this kind of commitment four years ago?
Well, four years ago she was just about to launch the EFF's Campaign for Audio-visual Free Expression (CAFE). (According to her bio, she's the Director of said Campaign, as well as the EFF's Staff Attorney.)
My best wishes and I will support this kind of thing with all of my soul.
I'd certainly expect a lot of support from this kind of community, as the other groups have already found - the question is whether or not that support can be translated into progress... (The DMCA is still there, the EU version is now coming into force, and DRM is starting to appear already - despite the existence of the EFF and co. Will one more really make a big difference??)
Is she married?
Yes. (To a musician, with whom she co-founded this site.)
Correct me if I'm wrong (probably no need to ask for that), but hasn't Alan Ralsky already done this to a large extent? He claims he has servers in India, Canada, China, and Russia, and most of his mail is now sent from overseas countries. (This is taken from the second link provided.)
Would it even matter? It's the person who commits the crime, not the server; I'm sure if an American were storing, say, child porn or national secrets on a Russian server, the FBI would still be able to bust him - why would illegal spam stop being illegal just by going via a foreign relay? (UK law certainly makes it a crime for anyone under UK jurisdiction to crack ANY computer, wherever it is, so I think a US spam law could do the same...)
Er... half-right. Caldera sued MS and won: back in the days when you had a choice of which DOS to run Windows under, Microsoft put a lot of effort into making Windows MS-DOS specific, in order to wipe out the competition. Since doing that is illegal, Caldera got a big pile of MS cash in an out-of-court settlement.
Having said that, Caldera split in two - one half was 'UNIX' things (their Linux distro, the bits of SCO, etc) and the other was DOS/embedded, so it seems the part doing the suing this time is not the half that beat MS previously... (Which, incidentally, seems to have disappeared; DR DOS has been sold to these guys.
OTOH, I am pleased that Toyota and Honda continue to actually manufacture and ship the greenest vehicles we can buy [epa.gov] (Toyota Prius, Toyota RAV4 EV, Honda Civic Hybrid, Honda Insight).
Whoops - looks like you spoke too soon. The RAV4 is being discontinued. Meanwhile, Honda rejects Mozilla, suggesting I 'upgrade' to IE or Netscape 4.x...
Unfortunately, all the green vehicles in the world won't do a bit of good if nobody buys them. Actual average fuel economy of all cars bought in the U.S. is currently as low as it was in 1980. [epa.gov] To turn this around we either have to mandate better economy by raising the CAFE standards, or push it economically by raising the cost of gasoline with taxes, and then offset them by giving tax breaks to people who buy more fuel-efficient, less-polluting vehicles.
Or, rather than trying to force people to buy cars which - by definition - they don't want (otherwise, why do you need to force them?), try persuading them. Make an attractive hybrid car (the RAV4 looks nice, apart from the small detail of being discontinued...) and I'll buy it. Hopefully, my next car will be an SUV - probably gasoline-burning despite the fuel consumption/pollution, because fuel-cell or hybrid versions aren't there yet.
Instead of trying to modify the public to fit your preferred car, modify the car to fit the public: it'll be much more popular that way. I actually WANT a 'clean' car - but I won't drive a Honda Civic, however clean it might be.
Ok, what ithe heck is with the quotes around president? Yes people, George Bush is the president of the United States. You may not like him or agree with his politics, you may even think he's a moron, that's fine you aren't alone. He is, however, the president and of that there is no debate.
I took it as meaning "the email doesn't really go to GWB himself, just his office/staff/whatever", but if it meant what you think, may I just point out that Tony Blair is not elected - not 'the election was questionable', but there was no election for PM. Instead Blair became PM because Labour dominates the Commons (British version of the House of Representatives) and he is Labour leader ('elected' mostly by the unions).
However inaccurate the counting in Florida is - and I think virtually everyone agrees it was a close run thing, however you count it - at least Americans had an election for President, where you could vote for or against Bush; Britain did not hold one in the first place!
I guess the real question is how much research money goes into chip development? IBM sell many different products (including intel servers, Unix servers, software products, consultancy, mainframes etc, etc) while Intel sell (mainly) Pentium CPUs with some sidelines in graphics etc. So while IBM is 4 times the size of Intel, I'd imagine Intel probably spends more on CPU development.
Except every machine IBM sells (excluding their x86 systems, which just buy in Intel chips) is based around a single CPU architecture - POWER, the heavy-duty PowerPC variant. So, everything IBM does in 'CPU development' is going into the POWER/PowerPC core, although they seem to share a lot of generic fabrication advances (copper interconnect, silicon-on-insulator etc) with AMD for the Athlon/Hammer line.
Granted, IBM do a lot more than just CPU design, whereas Intel are almost exclusively CPU vendors (although Intel divide their efforts between IA-64, x86, i960 and StrongARM/Xscale) with some sidelines (NICs, switches, chipsets). Overall, I'd say IBM put a lot more muscle behind POWER/PowerPC than Intel can behind IA-64 and x86.
I have had 2 drives fail well within the warranty period, and did not return them for just this reason.
This is a big problem for DoD-type datacenters; for non-classified (as in "this stuff shouldn't get out") stuff, they open the disk up, sand-blast the platters to remove the magnetic material, then return the carcass to the manufacturer for a warranty claim. For the really secret stuff (as in "people will die if this stuff gets out"), they just destroy the disk completely, then buy a new drive.
Of course, if you kept all the data on the disk encrypted, you'd be fairly safe, but once you're making a warranty claim, the disk probably isn't working well enough for you to wipe using 'dd'...
Speaking of 'dd': Beware of sector remapping. Any sectors on the disk which the firmware has marked 'bad' won't be touched by any user-level command - and those 'bad' sectors could still be recovered if they open the disk up. For most people, 'leaking' a couple of sectors wouldn't be the end of the world, but for (say) VISA's customer records, there are probably a couple of valid CC numbers and other info in those sectors...
This makes a lot of sense. Sure, I'm a libertarian who believes in a very limited government, but I also believe that taxes should be used to pay for infrastructure and civil defense. So, with the Internet becoming an increasingly important part of our national infrastructure, it only makes sense for the states to be able to tax us for the upkeep and maintainence of this valuable service.
This would only make sense if the state/local governments in question were actually the ones providing the service! In this case, they aren't - they are just trying to profit from other people's work (AT&T, Exodus/C&W etc).
I'm all in favor of people paying for the services they use - the roads, for example, through tolls (on toll roads, major bridges) and something like gas tax (provided it's set at a level which covers road costs, without funding non-road items). The trouble is, governments tend to engage in cost-hiding which makes Enron's accounts seem clear and honest: they try to provide all sorts of things 'free', then hike the fees on other services to compensate. STOP!!
Before anyone starts the whine from the Simpsons ("think of the children!") - yes, there are people who cannot pay for the services they need (education, healthcare) - but since when was a fscking huge sports stadium essential enough to force or others into paying for it through taxes?! Things like airports and sports fields, though, should be paid for by the users, through their tickets, NOT by the public through tax: it's the only fair way of doing it!
Your sentiment is pleasantly honest and common to most people, though maybe not consciously or quite as extreme (for example, to be drawn and quartered after hanging is unnecessary:).
No - in this punishment, the hanging is not the same as in execution by hanging. A proper explanation from here:
The victim is first hung by the neck but taken from the scaffold while still alive. The entrails and genitals are then removed and the torso hacked into four quarters.
Lovely stuff... I think I'd reserve that one for spammers, personally;-)
Stored in the holds, or simply stacked on deck,of the Mont Blanc were 35 tons of benzol, 300 rounds of ammunition, 10 tons of gun cotton, 2,300 tons of picric acid (used in explosives), and 400,000 pounds of TNT.
Is that a typo, or did they think 300 rounds was worth mentioning? Did they also list the packet of matches in the captain's shirt pocket?
Or is it like big-ole-country ammunition like for a howitzer or some such?
The latter, I imagine, since these are ships they are talking about. In which case, those 'rounds' are each a couple of inches across, very heavy, and packed with enough explosive to kick it through a warship's armored hull a couple of miles away. Not something you want to drop on your foot...
tell me how wonderful this is when it's standard in a Kia Rio or other Sub $8,000.00 car that real people can afford.
until there is an OPENLY SHARED and publically free system that all manufacturers are FORCED to use it will stay an "exclusive-benifit" of the rich.
GM's OnStar does exactly this (plus other neat things - driving directions, breakdown help etc). If by 'openly shared and publicly free' you mean the bits are based on open standards, just look at OnStar. It's a GPS receiver plus cellphone, wired into the car in a clever way. In theory, you could build your own - the only difficult element is the call-center to handle calls using the system;-)
Before the privacy-obsessed chime in, your GPS coordinates are sent only if 1. You press that button (it's hard to get directions otherwise!), 2. You're unconscious (i.e. the car has been in a crash bad enough to trigger the airbags, and you aren't answering the phone) or 3. The car has been reported stolen to the police. (So you can't use it to spy on a cheating spouse, or whatever.)
And AOL probably presses more discs than every record label in the world combined..
Er, AOL Time Warner is one of the Big Five* labels. Home to Madonna, among others. Still, I bet their junkmail department accounts for a huge volume - is there actually any point to it? Surely by now everyone with a PC has several, and is sick of the sight of them by now...
* - Soon to be the Big Four, perhaps; Mariah Carey's old label is in a pretty bad way, laying off a lot of staff and cutting artists...
As I understand it D-notices was/is a somewhat bizarre scheme, a kind of gentleman's agreement between newspaper editors and the Department of Defense whereby the DoD would supply the newspaper editors with privilaged access to certain information if they agreed not to publish it. It wasn't a legal thing as far as I am aware - the editors could (and some did) tell the DoD to stuff their D-notices.
No. It involves the Offical Secrets Act, and basically amounts to "information about the theft of that anthrax from Porton Down is classified. If you tell anyone about it, we'll lock you up." There's a specific exemption to our Freedom of Expression for "national security" - basically, the Ministry of Defence (MoD; DoD is the US version) can just turn up and gag you on any matter they feel like. They can't gag you about, say, a politician screwing his secretary, but anything military or relating to the security services is another matter: just ask David Shayler...
(The theft I mention was actually referred to by one paper at the time: the British lab at Porton Down was broken into, and had three things stolen - one being a sample of Foot and Mouth, another being Anthrax. For some strange reason, it wasn't referred to again...)
I want a device to track my car down when I cant remember where I parked it in a large parking complex. Possibly a gps location sent to mobile phone though that relies on owner carrying an accurate GPS and phone. In my ideal world it would be a small device which triggers an ultrasonic or other beacon. The device can then act like a compass and points towards the car.
OnStar does something similar; if you forget where your car is parked, you can call OnStar and they'll make the lights flash or sound the horn, as well as unlocking the car remotely (great if you lock yourself out!)
It's not quite on the same level as Bond's car (anyone remember his remote-control BMW?!) but still pretty neat, IMHO...
A few years ago I saw a neat (expensive!) disc array that could 'freeze' the disc image at a single point in time so that a backup could be taken from the frozen image. The backup software saw only the frozen image, while the rest of the OS saw the disc as normal including updates made after the freeze occurred. The disc array maintained the frozen image until the backup was complete, guaranteeing a true snapshot as at a specific instant in time.
Sounds like the Network Appliance Filer's "snapshot" feature, but less advanced. (You can also get exactly the feature described under Linux purely in software, via LVM, now.) Under the NetApp version, you gain an extra directory ".snapshot", which contains previous versions of each file. So, if you screw up editing some file (delete/corrupt it, whatever) you can just grab a previous snapshot copy. Like having a series of online backups - but without all the extra space+hardware needs. Like CVS, but without the hassle (or fine-grained control) of doing "commits". Just tell the Filer "take a snapshot now" and 30 seconds later, it's done. Or "take snapshots every hour".
Neat feature - you could almost get this using LVM under Linux, but not quite...
Re:Yes, this is good news for me as well.
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Covad On The Mend
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Funny how Covad uses Verizon lines, yet Verizon can't qualify me for DSL and Covad can..
Interesting; I had the opposite experience. On my brother's line (Houston, TX) Covad said they could only offer 192kbps SDSL: no ADSL at all, and only slow SDSL. Meanwhile, SWBell are quite happily feeding 2.2Mbps (measured peak traffic - slightly MORE than we're paying for!) down the same copper...
Does Covad put their equipment somewhere other than the CO? If not, how the hell can line tests return such varying results - duff hardware? Bad database of line lengths? Do they skip line tests entirely, and say "no, we can only give you a crap service" because their DSLAM is maxed out already and they can't afford more linecards?;-)
Should I just add in MACs to the WiFi allow list by hand?
Nope. It's fairly easy, but doesn't contribute much to security.
Then I can keep the WiFi behind the firewall, and I don't have to worry about a VPN or any of that mess. Does this sound reasonably safe?
NO! The easiest approach should be (depending on the firewall and wiring, of course) is to add a third NIC to the firewall. Connect the basestation(s) to THAT NIC, and block everything from it except VPN or IPSECed traffic.
I'm 802.11-less for now, but starting to plan a firewall+802.11a/b setup for once I move: probably a mini-PC from these guys with one of their PCI crypto accelerators. Add OpenBSD with the built-in IPSEC, and I'm a few client-side tweaks away from a fully secure WLAN and firewall, all in one! (That's the theory, anyway...)
While I really hate some of the exaggeration that gets played up in the US media (comparing the WTC disaster to Hiroshima, for example), what's the largest loss of life that an IRA attack has ever caused? 29, right? ("Real IRA" car bomb in 1998)
Have one hundred incidents that bad and then tell me that the UK has had comparable experience.
2,711 deaths in Northern Ireland up to 1988, versus recent figures of under 3,000 for the WTC. Close enough, I think?
If a laptop can play havoc with navigation and landing systems, there is something wrong with the navigation and landing systems. Banning laptops isn't going to fix this. Installing shielding or more robust airplane electronics are solutions.
Damn right!
A year or two ago, I went to a lecture from an expert in radio interference from DERA (UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency - the guys who write the UK's rules on this stuff) and he showed us a graph of the requirements for noise immunity (as in, if your plane's electronics can't take this level of noise at this frequency, it's grounded). Then he showed us the maximumoutput of a cellphone. In short: find me a plane which is genuinely affected by use of a phone inside, and I'll show you a plane which won't be leaving the ground any time soon...
Not to mention, as others have pointed out, any aircraft system that vulnerable to interference is just begging to be knocked down by terrorists - forget planting a bomb, just get a little battery-powered RF transmitter on! A slightly modified electric shaver would probably do just fine...
There is a genuine reason not to use cellphones in aircraft, though: cellphone networks are carefully designed to avoid frequency conflicts between towers with the phone being at ground level. Put a phone at 30,000 feet, and it "sees" multiple cells on each frequency - which apparently can upset the phone network.
Of course, the airlines don't like you using phones (other than their $5/min "skyphones", of course) or anything else interactive, because it stops you buying expensive drinks (on domestic flights), duty free (on international flights) etc. How "convenient" that United just found a "safety" reason to stop you doing anything that doesn't involve paying them more money, huh?
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I don't know about edible, but I do like this idea; for most fruit, you could embed the tag in the skin, for example. I'd actually really like to be able to get a list of stuff in the fridge, be warned when something's approaching the eat-by date...
Better still: some RFID tags have sensors in. A simple Perl script could track a shopping list for me, and either order replacements online or be synced to a PDA for shopping. Maybe even couple it with a Pricewatch-type site, so I know which supermarket would be cheapest for that particular list; work out what recipe I could make, or what I'd need to add.
Alternatively - if this device can do 300 Kbit/sec in this version, how about cable-modem/ADSL routers? Up the bandwidth a bit, it would handle the load OK; as it is, it could make a nice easy dialup router. $33 with a serial port - add a simple modem, and you have the ultimate plug+play ISP: one end in the phone socket, the other in the NIC, and it's all preconfigured!
Personally, I can't even remember the last time I bought something on CC using anything other than an EFTPOS terminal - which automatically verifies every transaction with the bank operating it, as well as keeping an internal 'hotlist' of stolen cards, updated nightly. (Done properly, the call costs somewhere around 1p - at which point, even on a 50p transaction, the 2.5% cut will cover it. The modem racks and servers will cost more, of course, but you need most of that infrastructure in place anyway...)
Are you thinking of the "manual" verification procedures used on suspicious or very large transactions, where the store telephones the bank, who then ask you questions to confirm your identity??
If I were the issuing bank, I'd put a 'verify' flag on the cards immediately (vendor must confirm identity directly, i.e. have you call the bank to check it's really you), and rush a replacement card out to each cardholder. That way, the cardholders are only inconvenienced for the day or two it takes to FedEx (or whatever) the new card out - yes, it's expensive to repeat this for 2.2m people, but compared to the cost of having to honor a string of dishonest transactions you can't bill the cardholder for?
I thought .com got there first? ;-)
Seriously, I can imagine this being (ab)used a great deal; think of the fuss over people registering domains like "fordsucks.com" and pointing them at GM's website, or whatever - but multipled a thousandfold. Just run a "whois microsoft.com", then tell me that "microsoft.bankrupt" would stay unregistered for long!
Not entirely; in the UK at least, you do have an automatic right to use any software "lawfully obtained". So, if I walk into a shop in the UK and buy a retail copy of, say, Windows or Office, I am entitled to use that software - whatever the license says. (I also have a right to make backup copies, and limited reverse-engineering rights.) The "lawfully obtained" bit is what stops warez being legal, of course: if the warez site is distributing the software illegally, you still aren't allowed to use it.
Having said that, most of the items in an MS EULA are redundant anyway: stripping out the lawyer-speak, they basically say "you're allowed to use this software and make legal backups, and that's it. Oh, and don't sue us." All the rest just clarifies that they are not giving you any extra rights you don't get automatically.
It's possible to get a proper, signed contract governing software; I've had software under NDA before, for example, and once got a free copy of Visual Studio Enterprise on condition I used it for research only and didn't give or sell it to others. The usual EULA however is meaningless: it doesn't give or take away anything, under UK law at least! (Some of the recent licenses may differ; apparently FrontPage now has a prohibition on anti-MS sites? I don't think that would stand up in court, but IANAL - I just advise a group of lawyers on technical matters!)
You've got that all wrong; the economical thing is to encase the speed trap instead, since it'll be smaller ;-)
(In fact, as others have pointed out, police use much higher frequencies - all 10GHz or higher - which won't affect any WiFi type kit. It's just the older military radars - as in aircraft - which use 5GHz, and would conflict with 802.11a's use unless you're careful.)
Not different from each other, different from the other virtual CPUs, on other chips.
If you have two threads, both accessing the same chunk of memory, think about these two options:
1. Put both threads on different virtual processors of the same chip. That block of memory gets cached once, and both threads get cache hits.
2. You put each thread on a different physical chip. Now, that block of memory is being cached by both chips at once, which means lots more bus traffic for each modification (each chip needs to tell the other what just happened); meanwhile, both threads are 'fighting' for cache with threads from other programs.
Clearly, the first is better (more efficient) from a memory point of view: more data cache hits, less traffic between CPUs as they invalidate each other's cache lines. Similarly, it's better for the I-cache (instruction cache): you only cache and execute a single set of instructions, because both threads will tend to use the same code.
Well, four years ago she was just about to launch the EFF's Campaign for Audio-visual Free Expression (CAFE). (According to her bio, she's the Director of said Campaign, as well as the EFF's Staff Attorney.)
My best wishes and I will support this kind of thing with all of my soul.
I'd certainly expect a lot of support from this kind of community, as the other groups have already found - the question is whether or not that support can be translated into progress... (The DMCA is still there, the EU version is now coming into force, and DRM is starting to appear already - despite the existence of the EFF and co. Will one more really make a big difference??)
Is she married?
Yes. (To a musician, with whom she co-founded this site.)
Would it even matter? It's the person who commits the crime, not the server; I'm sure if an American were storing, say, child porn or national secrets on a Russian server, the FBI would still be able to bust him - why would illegal spam stop being illegal just by going via a foreign relay? (UK law certainly makes it a crime for anyone under UK jurisdiction to crack ANY computer, wherever it is, so I think a US spam law could do the same...)
Er... half-right. Caldera sued MS and won: back in the days when you had a choice of which DOS to run Windows under, Microsoft put a lot of effort into making Windows MS-DOS specific, in order to wipe out the competition. Since doing that is illegal, Caldera got a big pile of MS cash in an out-of-court settlement.
Having said that, Caldera split in two - one half was 'UNIX' things (their Linux distro, the bits of SCO, etc) and the other was DOS/embedded, so it seems the part doing the suing this time is not the half that beat MS previously... (Which, incidentally, seems to have disappeared; DR DOS has been sold to these guys.
Whoops - looks like you spoke too soon. The RAV4 is being discontinued. Meanwhile, Honda rejects Mozilla, suggesting I 'upgrade' to IE or Netscape 4.x...
Unfortunately, all the green vehicles in the world won't do a bit of good if nobody buys them. Actual average fuel economy of all cars bought in the U.S. is currently as low as it was in 1980. [epa.gov] To turn this around we either have to mandate better economy by raising the CAFE standards, or push it economically by raising the cost of gasoline with taxes, and then offset them by giving tax breaks to people who buy more fuel-efficient, less-polluting vehicles.
Or, rather than trying to force people to buy cars which - by definition - they don't want (otherwise, why do you need to force them?), try persuading them. Make an attractive hybrid car (the RAV4 looks nice, apart from the small detail of being discontinued...) and I'll buy it. Hopefully, my next car will be an SUV - probably gasoline-burning despite the fuel consumption/pollution, because fuel-cell or hybrid versions aren't there yet.
Instead of trying to modify the public to fit your preferred car, modify the car to fit the public: it'll be much more popular that way. I actually WANT a 'clean' car - but I won't drive a Honda Civic, however clean it might be.
I took it as meaning "the email doesn't really go to GWB himself, just his office/staff/whatever", but if it meant what you think, may I just point out that Tony Blair is not elected - not 'the election was questionable', but there was no election for PM. Instead Blair became PM because Labour dominates the Commons (British version of the House of Representatives) and he is Labour leader ('elected' mostly by the unions).
However inaccurate the counting in Florida is - and I think virtually everyone agrees it was a close run thing, however you count it - at least Americans had an election for President, where you could vote for or against Bush; Britain did not hold one in the first place!
Except every machine IBM sells (excluding their x86 systems, which just buy in Intel chips) is based around a single CPU architecture - POWER, the heavy-duty PowerPC variant. So, everything IBM does in 'CPU development' is going into the POWER/PowerPC core, although they seem to share a lot of generic fabrication advances (copper interconnect, silicon-on-insulator etc) with AMD for the Athlon/Hammer line.
Granted, IBM do a lot more than just CPU design, whereas Intel are almost exclusively CPU vendors (although Intel divide their efforts between IA-64, x86, i960 and StrongARM/Xscale) with some sidelines (NICs, switches, chipsets). Overall, I'd say IBM put a lot more muscle behind POWER/PowerPC than Intel can behind IA-64 and x86.
This is a big problem for DoD-type datacenters; for non-classified (as in "this stuff shouldn't get out") stuff, they open the disk up, sand-blast the platters to remove the magnetic material, then return the carcass to the manufacturer for a warranty claim. For the really secret stuff (as in "people will die if this stuff gets out"), they just destroy the disk completely, then buy a new drive.
Of course, if you kept all the data on the disk encrypted, you'd be fairly safe, but once you're making a warranty claim, the disk probably isn't working well enough for you to wipe using 'dd'...
Speaking of 'dd': Beware of sector remapping. Any sectors on the disk which the firmware has marked 'bad' won't be touched by any user-level command - and those 'bad' sectors could still be recovered if they open the disk up. For most people, 'leaking' a couple of sectors wouldn't be the end of the world, but for (say) VISA's customer records, there are probably a couple of valid CC numbers and other info in those sectors...
This would only make sense if the state/local governments in question were actually the ones providing the service! In this case, they aren't - they are just trying to profit from other people's work (AT&T, Exodus/C&W etc).
I'm all in favor of people paying for the services they use - the roads, for example, through tolls (on toll roads, major bridges) and something like gas tax (provided it's set at a level which covers road costs, without funding non-road items). The trouble is, governments tend to engage in cost-hiding which makes Enron's accounts seem clear and honest: they try to provide all sorts of things 'free', then hike the fees on other services to compensate. STOP!!
Before anyone starts the whine from the Simpsons ("think of the children!") - yes, there are people who cannot pay for the services they need (education, healthcare) - but since when was a fscking huge sports stadium essential enough to force or others into paying for it through taxes?! Things like airports and sports fields, though, should be paid for by the users, through their tickets, NOT by the public through tax: it's the only fair way of doing it!
No - in this punishment, the hanging is not the same as in execution by hanging. A proper explanation from here:
Lovely stuff... I think I'd reserve that one for spammers, personally ;-)
tell me how wonderful this is when it's standard in a Kia Rio or other Sub $8,000.00 car that real people can afford.
until there is an OPENLY SHARED and publically free system that all manufacturers are FORCED to use it will stay an "exclusive-benifit" of the rich.
GM's OnStar does exactly this (plus other neat things - driving directions, breakdown help etc). If by 'openly shared and publicly free' you mean the bits are based on open standards, just look at OnStar. It's a GPS receiver plus cellphone, wired into the car in a clever way. In theory, you could build your own - the only difficult element is the call-center to handle calls using the system ;-)
Before the privacy-obsessed chime in, your GPS coordinates are sent only if 1. You press that button (it's hard to get directions otherwise!), 2. You're unconscious (i.e. the car has been in a crash bad enough to trigger the airbags, and you aren't answering the phone) or 3. The car has been reported stolen to the police. (So you can't use it to spy on a cheating spouse, or whatever.)
Er, AOL Time Warner is one of the Big Five* labels. Home to Madonna, among others. Still, I bet their junkmail department accounts for a huge volume - is there actually any point to it? Surely by now everyone with a PC has several, and is sick of the sight of them by now... * - Soon to be the Big Four, perhaps; Mariah Carey's old label is in a pretty bad way, laying off a lot of staff and cutting artists...
No. It involves the Offical Secrets Act, and basically amounts to "information about the theft of that anthrax from Porton Down is classified. If you tell anyone about it, we'll lock you up." There's a specific exemption to our Freedom of Expression for "national security" - basically, the Ministry of Defence (MoD; DoD is the US version) can just turn up and gag you on any matter they feel like. They can't gag you about, say, a politician screwing his secretary, but anything military or relating to the security services is another matter: just ask David Shayler...
(The theft I mention was actually referred to by one paper at the time: the British lab at Porton Down was broken into, and had three things stolen - one being a sample of Foot and Mouth, another being Anthrax. For some strange reason, it wasn't referred to again...)
OnStar does something similar; if you forget where your car is parked, you can call OnStar and they'll make the lights flash or sound the horn, as well as unlocking the car remotely (great if you lock yourself out!)
It's not quite on the same level as Bond's car (anyone remember his remote-control BMW?!) but still pretty neat, IMHO...
Sounds like the Network Appliance Filer's "snapshot" feature, but less advanced. (You can also get exactly the feature described under Linux purely in software, via LVM, now.) Under the NetApp version, you gain an extra directory ".snapshot", which contains previous versions of each file. So, if you screw up editing some file (delete/corrupt it, whatever) you can just grab a previous snapshot copy. Like having a series of online backups - but without all the extra space+hardware needs. Like CVS, but without the hassle (or fine-grained control) of doing "commits". Just tell the Filer "take a snapshot now" and 30 seconds later, it's done. Or "take snapshots every hour".
Neat feature - you could almost get this using LVM under Linux, but not quite...
Interesting; I had the opposite experience. On my brother's line (Houston, TX) Covad said they could only offer 192kbps SDSL: no ADSL at all, and only slow SDSL. Meanwhile, SWBell are quite happily feeding 2.2Mbps (measured peak traffic - slightly MORE than we're paying for!) down the same copper...
Does Covad put their equipment somewhere other than the CO? If not, how the hell can line tests return such varying results - duff hardware? Bad database of line lengths? Do they skip line tests entirely, and say "no, we can only give you a crap service" because their DSLAM is maxed out already and they can't afford more linecards? ;-)
Nope. It's fairly easy, but doesn't contribute much to security.
Then I can keep the WiFi behind the firewall, and I don't have to worry about a VPN or any of that mess. Does this sound reasonably safe?
NO! The easiest approach should be (depending on the firewall and wiring, of course) is to add a third NIC to the firewall. Connect the basestation(s) to THAT NIC, and block everything from it except VPN or IPSECed traffic.
I'm 802.11-less for now, but starting to plan a firewall+802.11a/b setup for once I move: probably a mini-PC from these guys with one of their PCI crypto accelerators. Add OpenBSD with the built-in IPSEC, and I'm a few client-side tweaks away from a fully secure WLAN and firewall, all in one! (That's the theory, anyway...)
2,711 deaths in Northern Ireland up to 1988, versus recent figures of under 3,000 for the WTC. Close enough, I think?
Damn right!
A year or two ago, I went to a lecture from an expert in radio interference from DERA (UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency - the guys who write the UK's rules on this stuff) and he showed us a graph of the requirements for noise immunity (as in, if your plane's electronics can't take this level of noise at this frequency, it's grounded). Then he showed us the maximumoutput of a cellphone. In short: find me a plane which is genuinely affected by use of a phone inside, and I'll show you a plane which won't be leaving the ground any time soon...
Not to mention, as others have pointed out, any aircraft system that vulnerable to interference is just begging to be knocked down by terrorists - forget planting a bomb, just get a little battery-powered RF transmitter on! A slightly modified electric shaver would probably do just fine...
There is a genuine reason not to use cellphones in aircraft, though: cellphone networks are carefully designed to avoid frequency conflicts between towers with the phone being at ground level. Put a phone at 30,000 feet, and it "sees" multiple cells on each frequency - which apparently can upset the phone network.
Of course, the airlines don't like you using phones (other than their $5/min "skyphones", of course) or anything else interactive, because it stops you buying expensive drinks (on domestic flights), duty free (on international flights) etc. How "convenient" that United just found a "safety" reason to stop you doing anything that doesn't involve paying them more money, huh?