Sure. Women won't pull the trigger, or rather, it would be very rare. I'd play the odds. I can cover 3 metres and turn her skull into mush before she can muster the courage to pull the trigger. After all, if I'm the one advancing on her with a baseball bad, then she's the one with a conscience, not me.
Sadly, I think that's true of far too many people; defending yourself does take more than just a weapon, I agree.
Why not just live in a place where violence is 3 to 5 (or even 10) times lower?
Lower than what? It's pretty low round here, thanks largely to shall-issue and tough sentencing. Any attacker is playing Russian roulette with the victim, and if he survives is headed for a long stay in jail. Few people are dumb enough to try.
I guess that wouldn't occur to you. Why not try to actually REDUCE violence where you live?
That's exactly what I want: fight violent crime, and it goes away. When some parts of the country have people who will defend themselves to the point of putting criminals in a wooden box, and others can't or won't, where do you think the criminals target? Result: here, violent crime is low, and criminals don't get away with it. Not true of LA, DC or NY.
Cyberdyne wrote, in part: "No, pointing it would often be enough:..." I must disagree with you on this one, though I agreed with most of your post. I believe that if you have to point a gun at someone, that should be the last damn thing he ever sees. I believe in keeping the weapon out of sight until you need it (within various Unconstitutional state laws, of course), but if I have to pull one I WILL fire it, and I won't be trying to scare anyone. If I had a wife I'd advise her to do the same. At the very least, if you must point a gun, be sure it's loaded and be prepared to pull the trigger.
Oh, I agree very strongly with all of that: when I point a weapon, that will usually mean I'm planning to fire. I was referring to the point that most women wouldn't have the guts to fire: I suspect that, of the women who would carry a pistol in their purse, enough would be prepared to fire that most attackers would run before finding out! Sadly, a lot would be hesitant enough to be attacked anyway - OTOH, how many of those would be carrying in the first place?
That's probably one (unintended) advantage to concealed-carry laws; in TX at least, getting one means paying $140 and doing a 10-hour course first - so anyone carrying is either exempt (you're mugging a cop: Darwin award time!) or very likely to be willing to use it, she's not just someone who bought a gun on impulse "just in case"!
Most of the women I know probably would shoot anyway, but then that category's full of assorted military/government types; bad targets for an attacker, gun or not!
Haven't you watched the video on this? The guy touching her isn't incapacitated or anything, he just can't keep his hands on her. You'll see he tries several times with no ill effect. Though wearing gloves might prevent the effects of the jacket.
Not very useful.
Also, I'd imagine firearms are used more offensively than defensively; the advantages don't outweigh the disadvantages, at least in my opinion.
In which case you'd be imagining wrongly. Where guns are legal (otherwise the statistics are obviously skewed!), legitimate defensive usage outnumbers offensive usage very substantially; in the US, for every gun homicide, there are several hundred (successful) cases of self-defense using a gun. (Knives and other weapons, incidentally, are statistically less than no use for self-defense, compared to being unarmed.)
Also bear in mind the "disadvantages" aren't optional: what criminals do with guns is already illegal, and they really don't care. Look at the many tonnes of illegal drugs entering every day, and ask yourself how effective any gun ban would be on disarming criminals. (Experience in the UK suggests the answer is "not at all".) All gun control achieves is victim disarmament!
Re:Get one for your wife??!
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Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Or if your wife is the kind of person who might not be inclined to fire a gun at someone who hasn't laid a hand on her yet --- for a gun to be an effective 'defensive weapon' the person carrying it has to be willing to fire at someone while they are still more than an arm's length away from you.
No, pointing it would often be enough: if you're (say) advancing towards your target with a baseball bat, and when you're 10' away she whips out a gun - are you really going to keep coming? Maybe she doesn't have the will to use it - it might not even be loaded, or indeed real - but are you willing to take that chance just to take her wallet? (Or whatever you're attacking for.)
Oh yeah, be willing to fire randomly behind then in case there's back there that they haven't seen.
Don't be silly. Keeping this thing 'live' without any apparent threat would never work: one person brushes against you, gets 50kV for it, and sues you into the ground. Or dies, leaving you with some very difficult questions to answer (and probably a long jail sentence) about why you electrocuted the person. Very useful. Whatever your chosen weapon, you need to be aware of a threat in order to react to it; only a defensive system (some kind of armor) could help there.
I agree that this jacket isn't a first best solution, but it seems better to me than the alternative technologies: guns, mace, pepper spray.
I'm not sure it beats any of them! With any of the three you list, pull it out and threaten a would-be attacker - end of attack, unless they're really desperate and/or stupid; with this jacket, they'll just hit you over the head and switch it off while you're out cold.
2^45 tries as reported by Adi is a little steep to listen in on your kid sisters talk with her boy-friend. If you really need to sample two minutes conversation and pre-process it to 200 GB of data before starting the attack - Well in comparison with the cellular networks prevalent in the US I dont think that is that bad.
IMO, that's a pretty trivial attack - a normal PC and a single fairly large IDE hard drive? Also, remember the crypto is used for more than just call privacy...
How is CDMA2K voice data encrypted??
AES (Rijndael). Good luck breaking that with a $1000 PC this century...
I would still say that if I was interested in eavesdropping on somebody using GSM I would much rather go for tapping into the infrastructure than go for the encrypted data being transmitted over the air.
Not practical: far higher risk for lower reward than simply sniffing some radio signals, feeding them into a PC and waiting a very short time. By the time you've found the right fibre to tap, I've already got the crypto key - and without leaving any traces I ever tried. You, meanwhile, were caught apparently trying to sabotage the telephone network, and have a lot of awkward questions to answer from some people in uniform.
If you have some reason to want greater safety then what can be acheived by the over-the-air GSM speach encryption I would suggest you make a circuit switched data call instead, use any old VoIP solution and tripple-DES the whole lot.
I'd use AES (as CDMA does) or possibly Serpent (since the main developer was my old supervisor). I wouldn't try either variant of A5, that's for sure;-)
How much sooner than the United States will Iraq get a GSM/GPRS network? AT&T, T-Mobile and Cingular are taking their time. Maybe the Iraqi people will get affordable data plans, too.
It already has GSM operators; I wouldn't be too eager to make that move, though: GSM's encryption is a joke. Info about the weaker algorithm from a crypto list here; the followup post from John Gilmore about breaking the stronger of the two. Basically: GSM is half a step above ROT-13 - burn it!
The great irony, of course, is that when Iraq comes to upgrade to 3G, they'll almost certainly be upgrading to a CDMA variant anyway, unless they go with the TDMA derivative... (Article on the subject here.)
From here, GSM vs CDMA looks a lot like VHS vs Betamax: the inferior standard (at least in security) is much more common. Let's hope operators take the opportunity to move to the (3G) W-CDMA, which is backwards compatible with GSM as well...
Clearly http://c-jdbc.objectweb.org/ looks promising, but there's still the problem of "order by" queries, since eahc node will answer its own order and the final appended result won't be valid.
Merging n ordered lists into a single list with the same ordering is pretty trivial: consider the first item of each list, and take the first of those. Rinse, repeat. Extremely fast and simple; where the lists cover discrete ranges (e.g. node 1 has the first X items in this ordering, node 2 has the 2nd, etc) it is as simple as appending the lists!
Latency is the name of the game, with Ethernet in 10s of miliseconds and memory in the 10s of nanoseconds, there will always be a huge penalty for sincronization through network.
There's alway ways to add throughput (http://geocities.com/feromus/db-scalability.html) but latency will always have to increase...
You can also do much better than Ethernet for latency, although cost explodes as a result; look at Dolphin for example. (Microsecond latency on data transfers between nodes.) Not quite RAM speeds, but much much faster (and with lower CPU usage) than Ethernet.
Have you ever thought why Linus Torvalds is hosting the tree on BitKeeper in Australia?
It's hosted by BitKeeper - in San Francisco. Nothing to do with Linus, either: it's a BitKeeper-owned server, along with all their others. For that matter, kernel.org (the main "home" of the kernel) is hosted by the ISC, about 15 minutes' drive from San Francisco Airport. Not only are they not outside the US, both servers are in Linus's home state!
He, personally, works in Sillicon Valley. But b/c of the collective nature of the project and often anonymous participation (at least no personal ID is required - so no personal proof) - he can live and work safe in California even if some crazy guys from SCO would publish their company's IP code into the kernel and later SCO will try to sue him personally (it's just an example, no real connection to the recent SCO lawsuit).
It doesn't matter if he hosts a server on Mars, SCO can sue him in California equally easily: it's the person's location which matters, not any server they may use. Which is probably one reason he doesn't host anything in Australia - that, and the high price of bandwidth there. Why would he, and where did you get the idea he did?
Remember PGP? Well, there was no any infringement of the pattented process, but the way how the code has left USA was certainly a violation of US export rules.
Not true. PGP was exported entirely legally, in printed form (crypto legislation would have barred a disk or CD ROM from being exported, but not a printed copy) then scanned and OCRed. Result: an entirely legal copy of PGP outside the US. Once there, it could be freely compiled and distributed.
And what has US govt done about to prevent, stop or revert it?
Since it was entirely legal, nothing. (Yes, there were lots of battles over the crypto laws, but PGP was exported legally.)
I agree software patents can be a major barrier to entry for small companies (Microsoft and IBM both have patents on a great many fundamental things; MS apparently hold a patent on the use of a particular privileged x86 instruction to trigger an OS exception!) - I'm not at all convinced ignoring the law is a good idea, though. Much better to replace the patented algorithm: look at Ogg Vorbis and PNG. Not particularly widely used, but entirely patent-safe. If, for example, Red Hat wanted a Linux iTunes clone, they'd have to use Ogg Vorbis rather than MP3. Individuals may not care (at least until they get sued) but companies certainly should - too easy a target otherwise!
A lot of things are possible. A similar argument to yours is that we needn't worry about making energy-efficient electronic devices, because we could conceivably generate more solar/wind/hydro power.
No. I wasn't trying to claim "the shuttle's inefficient, but that's OK because it's clean" - I was pointing out that the present engines are both clean and efficient. Some future ramjet vehicle might theoretically be more efficient; right now, the small detail of not existing makes any comparison quite difficult;-)
Furthermore, most liquid hydrogen comes from hydrocarbons, not direct cracking of water. Doing it with electricity and water is possible, but requires even more juice.
OK, so the supplier might be generating some pollution at present. Will those ramjets be hydrogen burning...? (If you're going to compare hypothetical engines, I'll use hypothetical sources of hydrogen:P)
Ethenet-over-power, short range for home and long range for ISPs, currently being deployed in the U.S. Check it out.
That's the other way round from the article! It isn't Ethernet over power, it's data over powerlines; this article is about sending electrical power over Ethernet wiring. Both are interesting, but have very different applications; power over Ethernet is already being used to power low-power devices, such as VoIP telephones and wireless access points.
Power over Ethernet is limited to a matter of watts - much less power than a normal light bulb needs - but can deliver full speed Ethernet data (100 Mbps or better). Data over powerlines isn't limited by power - you can run the house off such a powerline - but has limits on the data speed (a couple of Mbps, depending on distance and wiring condition).
Copies of windows don't tend to blow into offices of their own accord.
They can and do arrive by mistake. How you obtained the material you copied is irrelevant - it is the copying which is wrong and illegal, and that's precisely what this character did.
My point isn't againt IP rights, I'm saying that Monsanto should be held responsible for cleaning up their messes.
This isn't a "mess" Monsanto made, though - the farmer found some of their patented seed, and started copying it. He thought "I didn't buy the thing I copied, I just found it by chance" would be a defence in court. It isn't.
Which is why I think patenting a breed of plant is stupid, there's no way to keep it out of other farmer's fields.
There is, actually, but Monsanto get even more whining from eco-nuts when they use it. (The "Terminator" gene, which ensures there are no seeds produced in the first place. No seeds, hence no seeds get into the wrong field.)
but they do use gasoline and we really should work on cutting back on our dependance on fossil fuels.
Probably; I'm a big fan of the hybrid concept for this. Like a "normal" car in every respect - same fuel, handling, driving etc - but far less pollution, far better fuel consumption. IMHO, they're a far better short/medium-term bet than electric cars (no infrastructure changes at all, much lower barrier to acceptance) - possibly even more efficient (power stations are more efficient, but that's offset by transmission losses over long distances.)
The one downside, though, is terrorism: as you cut Western oil consumption, you're cutting the throat of Middle East economies like Saudi. The influx of oil money gave them relatively high standards of living, and well-paid jobs - now that's starting to collapse, with soaring unemployment and a prolonged recession in Saudi Arabia. Contrary to Huffington's theory, terrorism needs very little money: bombs, guns and cars are all cheap. It's angry unemployed Arabs who hate the West which were in short supply: cut off their one significant source of income, and there will be no shortage...
Nope. Walking's fine; that's why they have sidewalks ("pavements" to UKians).
someone I knew went to Los Angeles and was arrested for walking ("jaywalking"):-)
That's illegal in Germany, too, and rightly so. It's dangerous, and those sidewalks and pedestrian crossings are put there for a reason. Roads are for cars (and other wheeled vehicles), not for walking on.
I guess somewhere along the line someone decided that cars have right of way over humans (I think this only applies on motorways in the UK - they have signposts on the entrances).
They decided roads are for cars, and sidewalks are for people. Much safer that way.
Well ok, it was probably because he got lippy to the cop...
How much oil/coal/plutonium do you have to go through in order to produce the tons of hydrogen and oxygen used by the main engines in a single launch?
"Have to"? None! (It can all be done with solar or wind power.) Right now, ISTR it's supplied by a specialist contractor who probably use regular grid electricity - which they could buy from someone like Green Mountain (who offer electricity in Texas generated exclusively from wind + hydro schemes). Using renewables to convert water into a totally clean-burning fuel is about as clean as it gets;-)
Do they do it like that? Probably not, but it's possible.
The best solution will be some sort of ramjet-powered passenger vehicle. It won't necessarily help with satellite launches, but it would help reduce the costs of manned flights. Of course, that technology isn't ready for prime time, but it will be eventually (at this rate, probably before NASA gets around to selecting a replacement.)
It might get there one day, but in the mean time the Shuttle's present engines do just about the best you can expect, environmentally as well as fiscally.
The thing that bothers me about this whole thing is that Monsanto isn't being held responsible for contaminating Percy's field. I think clearly he made the decision to keep the Roundup resistant plants, but the Monsanto seed had essentially polluted his crop.
If I decide to patent toxic waste can I sue a farmer when it ends up on his field?
You could if the farmer found your patented toxic waste happened to make great fertilizer, and started making and using his own copy of it, which seems to be what happened here: this farmer discovered the Monsanto plants were better, and started breeding them.
If Harvard was given their patent on the mice, how would the courts react if they released them into the wild and started suing people for the content of their mousetraps?
I suspect Harvard would prevail in court against anyone breeding Harvard's patented mice commercially without a license, which is what this farmer was doing with Monsanto seed...
If I were to find a copy of Windows "accidentally", am I then entitled to start selling copies without a license from MS? I don't think so!
Atlantis, Discovery, Enterprise, Endeavor, Challenger and Columbia.
Technically correct - Enterprise, OV-101, is listed as being a "space shuttle" - but is not equipped for orbital flight: it was purely a test vehicle, for testing the adapted 747 shuttle transporter's characteristics, and practising landings at a dry lake bed and Edwards AFB. (It's now owned by the Smithsonian as an exhibit.) Only the other 5 you list have been into orbit, with the original two now listed as being "retired"; Endeavour was ordered in 1987 as a replacement for Challenger, but incorporates a crew module built in 1982.
Trivia for you: Enterprise was originally supposed to be named Constitution, but a letter-writing campaign by Trek fans convinced the government to change it...
But a single space launch uses a hell of a lot of fuel and creates a lot of pollution - this is not sustainable.
The present shuttle's main engines burn hydrogen + oxygen --> H2O. The "pollution" in question is... WATER!
Admittedly, the solid rocket boosters use ammonium perchlorate and aluminum, which does produce nastier stuff - but they're replaced with more liquid fueled rockets in all the proposed shuttle replacements, too.
Yes, rocket propulsion is efficient in a chemical-kinetic energy transfer way, but not efficient if all other costs are taken into account. Use geo-thermal energy to power such a mag-lev launcher thing... I find that preferable.
Why? It can't be cleaner environmentally, and I very much doubt you could build such a "mag-lev launcher thing": for starters, a vehicle accelerating along a maglev track to escape velocity would require either insane lengths of track (on a Great Wall of China scale) or acceleration which would pulp the occupants. A rocket, meanwhile, can give a reasonable acceleration throughout the climb to orbit - spreading the acceleration out over a few minutes.
A space elevator might one day be a feasible approach. Maglev won't, unless/until you find a way to project the magnetic field a few hundred miles away from the ground equipment producing it...
Not unless they have a source of heading--if they don't know which way your car is pointing, integrating velocity over time will only yield total distance traveled. But that doesn't tell whether you were headed straight down I-95 or driving around in circles.
With a tacograph recorder (required by law in the UK, logs your speed constantly) it's possible to figure out someone's route given a good map. For example, if you're stopped by the police, they know where the recording ends; then they just work backwards. You'd stopped 1.7 miles earlier, then been driving steadily? Looks like you came out of that road 1.7 miles from where you were stopped...
If you were going round in circles, the laws of physics mean the engine power demands are different from straight-line driving at the same speed. (In a circle, you're constantly accelerating towards the center.)
So some idiot with a hacked OBC drives into me at 90mph, but then uses the data in his OBC to prove that the accident must have been my fault? No Way.
Fortunately (for any victim of this) you can still analyse the crash the old-fashioned way: damage to each car, length of any skid marks, where the cars stopped. If you're driving along at 30, and the idiot hits you at 90, it will be pretty clear to the police that he was going a lot faster than the 30 his OBC claims - you'll also have readings from your own OBC which would conflict, indicating one or the other is wrong and making the police look more carefully.
This would be a big problem if the police (or insurance company) relied entirely on one OBC. Fortunately, they won't...
just destroy the damn box before you get the supeona. As long as you haven't been served its not illegal.
Destroy? Whacking them with a hammer does the job pretty well, apparently. (I was surprised just how fragile they can be; I expected them to be much more robust, but they seem to rely on being protected by the chassis around them.) Or, if you're paranoid, just unplug it beforehand - wiring works loose all the time, so that's totally deniable.
The usual system has two memories: a rewritable ring buffer of the last X "events" - impacts, fault reports, whatever - and a one-time-programmable memory which is only programmed on an impact which triggers the airbag. Basically, each event is recorded as a snapshot of the car's status (pedal positions, engine RPM, gear, speed, acceleration etc) for a few seconds before and after the trigger. So, the accident investigator could see you were doing 45 prior to impact, had the brakes on (but no grip) and hit a solid object at 45. Or (as happened in the example data I was shown) you were doing 110, didn't attempt to brake, and hit a pair of fairly squashable 19 year old objects, making a very nasty mess and getting a long jail sentance for it.
I was not aware that horse crap produced global warming...
A huge amount of it, in fact: methane is much more potent (c 50 times) than CO2 in terms of warming effects. Then factor in the many health problems caused - with horses, the roads were literally open sewers, with all the associated flies, bacteria etc.
As for global warming: the upper bound on climate change is around 0.1 degree C per decade increase. At that rate, my grandchildren will have died of old age before the climate is noticeably different...
There are certainly atmospheric (and water) pollutants we should be concerned about. CO2 really isn't very high up the list - it's just an easy target for environmentalist types, unlike farming (which produces huge amounts of methane). Want to help the environment? Get old cars (and buses and trains) off to the scrapyard!
It seems to me that this would be far more effective than a soldier's dog tags. It would not only identify a soldier, it would also locate him or her. Though this might not be the best idea, it could get pretty gruesome if enemy forces were aware of a POW's internal beacon.
Have it passive-only until certain criteria are met - the soldier goes missing (as in MIA), their lifesigns indicate severe injury or death, or they trigger it manually (little remote control). If it can only be activated locally, or remotely using some crypto key, it should be safe and useful.
From the life-sign reference - think about medical use. A patient who has just had a heart bypass, or a transplant, or some other major surgery - with this, as soon as anything goes wrong, help can automatically be summoned immediately, instead of relying on somebody to dial 911!
As for the "abuse" - I'd say it's usually difficult to perform surgery on someone without them knowing, especially when you're fitting them with something resembling a cellphone! It could be useful for tagging offenders (much less prone to abuse than the leg-cuff approach used now), or protecting people with a high kidnap risk, but trying to do this without the person's knowledge would be... difficult...
No it doesn't. Belgian police are generally fat and cowardly; British squaddies generally aren't. So, any copper walking up to an army barracks is either much braver or much stupider than the average.
Or just waits until said soldier is on holiday elsewhere - at which point, half a dozen Belgian cops (or any other cops they can rent for the day from a proper country) versus one soldier, told he's being arrested on the basis of a valid warrant? That's a very different picture.
What would Belgium do, invade Britain to enforce their stupid law in the first place? That's the funniest thing I've heard in weeks.
Not "invade" - just put a few cops on a plane. Or, as I said above, wait to catch their target outside the UK, alone. It's much harder to resist arrest on your own in a foreign country...
In practice, I agree British soldiers should be safe from arrest - but what about me? Under French law, "offending against the dignity of the Republic" is a crime, as is insulting "anyone who serves the public" (i.e. any government employee). What about me visiting the US - and the INS passport check shows an outstanding arrest warrant for me?! (Or for any soldier, for that matter.) Presumably the INS would investigate, and ignore the offending entry eventually - but it's still a major hassle, even if I never visit Belgium or France again myself!
Then bear in mind, with the proposed warrant system, any British soldier could simply be arrested, in Britain, by Belgian police, to face similar charges.
History suggests that the Belgians would be lucky to even come second in such an encounter.
If it came to an actual military confrontation, yes - but that would require the British government using military force to override European law. That would require a major change of heart...
For that matter, Blair himself could be arrested that way - and the UK would be powerless to stop it legally.
Legally by whose definition?
Legally as in EU law prohibits Britain from interfering. Remaining members of the EU would be virtually impossible at that point. Although they would never try to use military force, the diplomatic and economic fallout would be... messy.
Not that I'm a fan of Blair, but I'd really like to see them try, if they think they're hard enough.
That's the trouble: they would just turn up in the UK with a valid warrant under EU law. Britain would then be the side having to stop them - illegally, by the EU's rules - and that would take a degree of courage few politicians have. What would Britain do - invade Belgium to get them back?!
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Sadly, I think that's true of far too many people; defending yourself does take more than just a weapon, I agree.
Why not just live in a place where violence is 3 to 5 (or even 10) times lower?
Lower than what? It's pretty low round here, thanks largely to shall-issue and tough sentencing. Any attacker is playing Russian roulette with the victim, and if he survives is headed for a long stay in jail. Few people are dumb enough to try.
I guess that wouldn't occur to you. Why not try to actually REDUCE violence where you live?
That's exactly what I want: fight violent crime, and it goes away. When some parts of the country have people who will defend themselves to the point of putting criminals in a wooden box, and others can't or won't, where do you think the criminals target? Result: here, violent crime is low, and criminals don't get away with it. Not true of LA, DC or NY.
Oh, I agree very strongly with all of that: when I point a weapon, that will usually mean I'm planning to fire. I was referring to the point that most women wouldn't have the guts to fire: I suspect that, of the women who would carry a pistol in their purse, enough would be prepared to fire that most attackers would run before finding out! Sadly, a lot would be hesitant enough to be attacked anyway - OTOH, how many of those would be carrying in the first place?
That's probably one (unintended) advantage to concealed-carry laws; in TX at least, getting one means paying $140 and doing a 10-hour course first - so anyone carrying is either exempt (you're mugging a cop: Darwin award time!) or very likely to be willing to use it, she's not just someone who bought a gun on impulse "just in case"!
Most of the women I know probably would shoot anyway, but then that category's full of assorted military/government types; bad targets for an attacker, gun or not!
Not very useful.
Also, I'd imagine firearms are used more offensively than defensively; the advantages don't outweigh the disadvantages, at least in my opinion.
In which case you'd be imagining wrongly. Where guns are legal (otherwise the statistics are obviously skewed!), legitimate defensive usage outnumbers offensive usage very substantially; in the US, for every gun homicide, there are several hundred (successful) cases of self-defense using a gun. (Knives and other weapons, incidentally, are statistically less than no use for self-defense, compared to being unarmed.)
Also bear in mind the "disadvantages" aren't optional: what criminals do with guns is already illegal, and they really don't care. Look at the many tonnes of illegal drugs entering every day, and ask yourself how effective any gun ban would be on disarming criminals. (Experience in the UK suggests the answer is "not at all".) All gun control achieves is victim disarmament!
No, pointing it would often be enough: if you're (say) advancing towards your target with a baseball bat, and when you're 10' away she whips out a gun - are you really going to keep coming? Maybe she doesn't have the will to use it - it might not even be loaded, or indeed real - but are you willing to take that chance just to take her wallet? (Or whatever you're attacking for.)
Oh yeah, be willing to fire randomly behind then in case there's back there that they haven't seen.
Don't be silly. Keeping this thing 'live' without any apparent threat would never work: one person brushes against you, gets 50kV for it, and sues you into the ground. Or dies, leaving you with some very difficult questions to answer (and probably a long jail sentence) about why you electrocuted the person. Very useful. Whatever your chosen weapon, you need to be aware of a threat in order to react to it; only a defensive system (some kind of armor) could help there.
I agree that this jacket isn't a first best solution, but it seems better to me than the alternative technologies: guns, mace, pepper spray.
I'm not sure it beats any of them! With any of the three you list, pull it out and threaten a would-be attacker - end of attack, unless they're really desperate and/or stupid; with this jacket, they'll just hit you over the head and switch it off while you're out cold.
IMO, that's a pretty trivial attack - a normal PC and a single fairly large IDE hard drive? Also, remember the crypto is used for more than just call privacy...
How is CDMA2K voice data encrypted??
AES (Rijndael). Good luck breaking that with a $1000 PC this century...
I would still say that if I was interested in eavesdropping on somebody using GSM I would much rather go for tapping into the infrastructure than go for the encrypted data being transmitted over the air.
Not practical: far higher risk for lower reward than simply sniffing some radio signals, feeding them into a PC and waiting a very short time. By the time you've found the right fibre to tap, I've already got the crypto key - and without leaving any traces I ever tried. You, meanwhile, were caught apparently trying to sabotage the telephone network, and have a lot of awkward questions to answer from some people in uniform.
If you have some reason to want greater safety then what can be acheived by the over-the-air GSM speach encryption I would suggest you make a circuit switched data call instead, use any old VoIP solution and tripple-DES the whole lot.
I'd use AES (as CDMA does) or possibly Serpent (since the main developer was my old supervisor). I wouldn't try either variant of A5, that's for sure ;-)
It already has GSM operators; I wouldn't be too eager to make that move, though: GSM's encryption is a joke. Info about the weaker algorithm from a crypto list here; the followup post from John Gilmore about breaking the stronger of the two. Basically: GSM is half a step above ROT-13 - burn it!
The great irony, of course, is that when Iraq comes to upgrade to 3G, they'll almost certainly be upgrading to a CDMA variant anyway, unless they go with the TDMA derivative... (Article on the subject here.)
From here, GSM vs CDMA looks a lot like VHS vs Betamax: the inferior standard (at least in security) is much more common. Let's hope operators take the opportunity to move to the (3G) W-CDMA, which is backwards compatible with GSM as well...
Merging n ordered lists into a single list with the same ordering is pretty trivial: consider the first item of each list, and take the first of those. Rinse, repeat. Extremely fast and simple; where the lists cover discrete ranges (e.g. node 1 has the first X items in this ordering, node 2 has the 2nd, etc) it is as simple as appending the lists!
Latency is the name of the game, with Ethernet in 10s of miliseconds and memory in the 10s of nanoseconds, there will always be a huge penalty for sincronization through network. There's alway ways to add throughput (http://geocities.com/feromus/db-scalability.html) but latency will always have to increase...
You can also do much better than Ethernet for latency, although cost explodes as a result; look at Dolphin for example. (Microsecond latency on data transfers between nodes.) Not quite RAM speeds, but much much faster (and with lower CPU usage) than Ethernet.
It's hosted by BitKeeper - in San Francisco. Nothing to do with Linus, either: it's a BitKeeper-owned server, along with all their others. For that matter, kernel.org (the main "home" of the kernel) is hosted by the ISC, about 15 minutes' drive from San Francisco Airport. Not only are they not outside the US, both servers are in Linus's home state!
He, personally, works in Sillicon Valley. But b/c of the collective nature of the project and often anonymous participation (at least no personal ID is required - so no personal proof) - he can live and work safe in California even if some crazy guys from SCO would publish their company's IP code into the kernel and later SCO will try to sue him personally (it's just an example, no real connection to the recent SCO lawsuit).
It doesn't matter if he hosts a server on Mars, SCO can sue him in California equally easily: it's the person's location which matters, not any server they may use. Which is probably one reason he doesn't host anything in Australia - that, and the high price of bandwidth there. Why would he, and where did you get the idea he did?
Not true. PGP was exported entirely legally, in printed form (crypto legislation would have barred a disk or CD ROM from being exported, but not a printed copy) then scanned and OCRed. Result: an entirely legal copy of PGP outside the US. Once there, it could be freely compiled and distributed.
And what has US govt done about to prevent, stop or revert it?
Since it was entirely legal, nothing. (Yes, there were lots of battles over the crypto laws, but PGP was exported legally.)
I agree software patents can be a major barrier to entry for small companies (Microsoft and IBM both have patents on a great many fundamental things; MS apparently hold a patent on the use of a particular privileged x86 instruction to trigger an OS exception!) - I'm not at all convinced ignoring the law is a good idea, though. Much better to replace the patented algorithm: look at Ogg Vorbis and PNG. Not particularly widely used, but entirely patent-safe. If, for example, Red Hat wanted a Linux iTunes clone, they'd have to use Ogg Vorbis rather than MP3. Individuals may not care (at least until they get sued) but companies certainly should - too easy a target otherwise!
No. I wasn't trying to claim "the shuttle's inefficient, but that's OK because it's clean" - I was pointing out that the present engines are both clean and efficient. Some future ramjet vehicle might theoretically be more efficient; right now, the small detail of not existing makes any comparison quite difficult ;-)
Furthermore, most liquid hydrogen comes from hydrocarbons, not direct cracking of water. Doing it with electricity and water is possible, but requires even more juice.
OK, so the supplier might be generating some pollution at present. Will those ramjets be hydrogen burning...? (If you're going to compare hypothetical engines, I'll use hypothetical sources of hydrogen :P)
That's the other way round from the article! It isn't Ethernet over power, it's data over powerlines; this article is about sending electrical power over Ethernet wiring. Both are interesting, but have very different applications; power over Ethernet is already being used to power low-power devices, such as VoIP telephones and wireless access points.
Power over Ethernet is limited to a matter of watts - much less power than a normal light bulb needs - but can deliver full speed Ethernet data (100 Mbps or better). Data over powerlines isn't limited by power - you can run the house off such a powerline - but has limits on the data speed (a couple of Mbps, depending on distance and wiring condition).
They can and do arrive by mistake. How you obtained the material you copied is irrelevant - it is the copying which is wrong and illegal, and that's precisely what this character did.
My point isn't againt IP rights, I'm saying that Monsanto should be held responsible for cleaning up their messes.
This isn't a "mess" Monsanto made, though - the farmer found some of their patented seed, and started copying it. He thought "I didn't buy the thing I copied, I just found it by chance" would be a defence in court. It isn't.
Which is why I think patenting a breed of plant is stupid, there's no way to keep it out of other farmer's fields.
There is, actually, but Monsanto get even more whining from eco-nuts when they use it. (The "Terminator" gene, which ensures there are no seeds produced in the first place. No seeds, hence no seeds get into the wrong field.)
Probably; I'm a big fan of the hybrid concept for this. Like a "normal" car in every respect - same fuel, handling, driving etc - but far less pollution, far better fuel consumption. IMHO, they're a far better short/medium-term bet than electric cars (no infrastructure changes at all, much lower barrier to acceptance) - possibly even more efficient (power stations are more efficient, but that's offset by transmission losses over long distances.)
The one downside, though, is terrorism: as you cut Western oil consumption, you're cutting the throat of Middle East economies like Saudi. The influx of oil money gave them relatively high standards of living, and well-paid jobs - now that's starting to collapse, with soaring unemployment and a prolonged recession in Saudi Arabia. Contrary to Huffington's theory, terrorism needs very little money: bombs, guns and cars are all cheap. It's angry unemployed Arabs who hate the West which were in short supply: cut off their one significant source of income, and there will be no shortage...
Nope. Walking's fine; that's why they have sidewalks ("pavements" to UKians).
someone I knew went to Los Angeles and was arrested for walking ("jaywalking") :-)
That's illegal in Germany, too, and rightly so. It's dangerous, and those sidewalks and pedestrian crossings are put there for a reason. Roads are for cars (and other wheeled vehicles), not for walking on.
I guess somewhere along the line someone decided that cars have right of way over humans (I think this only applies on motorways in the UK - they have signposts on the entrances).
They decided roads are for cars, and sidewalks are for people. Much safer that way.
Well ok, it was probably because he got lippy to the cop...
That doesn't help matters, certainly! ;-)
"Have to"? None! (It can all be done with solar or wind power.) Right now, ISTR it's supplied by a specialist contractor who probably use regular grid electricity - which they could buy from someone like Green Mountain (who offer electricity in Texas generated exclusively from wind + hydro schemes). Using renewables to convert water into a totally clean-burning fuel is about as clean as it gets ;-)
Do they do it like that? Probably not, but it's possible.
The best solution will be some sort of ramjet-powered passenger vehicle. It won't necessarily help with satellite launches, but it would help reduce the costs of manned flights. Of course, that technology isn't ready for prime time, but it will be eventually (at this rate, probably before NASA gets around to selecting a replacement.)
It might get there one day, but in the mean time the Shuttle's present engines do just about the best you can expect, environmentally as well as fiscally.
If I decide to patent toxic waste can I sue a farmer when it ends up on his field?
You could if the farmer found your patented toxic waste happened to make great fertilizer, and started making and using his own copy of it, which seems to be what happened here: this farmer discovered the Monsanto plants were better, and started breeding them.
If Harvard was given their patent on the mice, how would the courts react if they released them into the wild and started suing people for the content of their mousetraps?
I suspect Harvard would prevail in court against anyone breeding Harvard's patented mice commercially without a license, which is what this farmer was doing with Monsanto seed...
If I were to find a copy of Windows "accidentally", am I then entitled to start selling copies without a license from MS? I don't think so!
Atlantis, Discovery, Enterprise, Endeavor, Challenger and Columbia.
Technically correct - Enterprise, OV-101, is listed as being a "space shuttle" - but is not equipped for orbital flight: it was purely a test vehicle, for testing the adapted 747 shuttle transporter's characteristics, and practising landings at a dry lake bed and Edwards AFB. (It's now owned by the Smithsonian as an exhibit.) Only the other 5 you list have been into orbit, with the original two now listed as being "retired"; Endeavour was ordered in 1987 as a replacement for Challenger, but incorporates a crew module built in 1982.
Trivia for you: Enterprise was originally supposed to be named Constitution, but a letter-writing campaign by Trek fans convinced the government to change it...
The present shuttle's main engines burn hydrogen + oxygen --> H2O. The "pollution" in question is... WATER!
Admittedly, the solid rocket boosters use ammonium perchlorate and aluminum, which does produce nastier stuff - but they're replaced with more liquid fueled rockets in all the proposed shuttle replacements, too.
Yes, rocket propulsion is efficient in a chemical-kinetic energy transfer way, but not efficient if all other costs are taken into account. Use geo-thermal energy to power such a mag-lev launcher thing... I find that preferable.
Why? It can't be cleaner environmentally, and I very much doubt you could build such a "mag-lev launcher thing": for starters, a vehicle accelerating along a maglev track to escape velocity would require either insane lengths of track (on a Great Wall of China scale) or acceleration which would pulp the occupants. A rocket, meanwhile, can give a reasonable acceleration throughout the climb to orbit - spreading the acceleration out over a few minutes.
A space elevator might one day be a feasible approach. Maglev won't, unless/until you find a way to project the magnetic field a few hundred miles away from the ground equipment producing it...
With a tacograph recorder (required by law in the UK, logs your speed constantly) it's possible to figure out someone's route given a good map. For example, if you're stopped by the police, they know where the recording ends; then they just work backwards. You'd stopped 1.7 miles earlier, then been driving steadily? Looks like you came out of that road 1.7 miles from where you were stopped...
If you were going round in circles, the laws of physics mean the engine power demands are different from straight-line driving at the same speed. (In a circle, you're constantly accelerating towards the center.)
Fortunately (for any victim of this) you can still analyse the crash the old-fashioned way: damage to each car, length of any skid marks, where the cars stopped. If you're driving along at 30, and the idiot hits you at 90, it will be pretty clear to the police that he was going a lot faster than the 30 his OBC claims - you'll also have readings from your own OBC which would conflict, indicating one or the other is wrong and making the police look more carefully.
This would be a big problem if the police (or insurance company) relied entirely on one OBC. Fortunately, they won't...
Destroy? Whacking them with a hammer does the job pretty well, apparently. (I was surprised just how fragile they can be; I expected them to be much more robust, but they seem to rely on being protected by the chassis around them.) Or, if you're paranoid, just unplug it beforehand - wiring works loose all the time, so that's totally deniable.
The usual system has two memories: a rewritable ring buffer of the last X "events" - impacts, fault reports, whatever - and a one-time-programmable memory which is only programmed on an impact which triggers the airbag. Basically, each event is recorded as a snapshot of the car's status (pedal positions, engine RPM, gear, speed, acceleration etc) for a few seconds before and after the trigger. So, the accident investigator could see you were doing 45 prior to impact, had the brakes on (but no grip) and hit a solid object at 45. Or (as happened in the example data I was shown) you were doing 110, didn't attempt to brake, and hit a pair of fairly squashable 19 year old objects, making a very nasty mess and getting a long jail sentance for it.
A huge amount of it, in fact: methane is much more potent (c 50 times) than CO2 in terms of warming effects. Then factor in the many health problems caused - with horses, the roads were literally open sewers, with all the associated flies, bacteria etc.
As for global warming: the upper bound on climate change is around 0.1 degree C per decade increase. At that rate, my grandchildren will have died of old age before the climate is noticeably different...
There are certainly atmospheric (and water) pollutants we should be concerned about. CO2 really isn't very high up the list - it's just an easy target for environmentalist types, unlike farming (which produces huge amounts of methane). Want to help the environment? Get old cars (and buses and trains) off to the scrapyard!
Have it passive-only until certain criteria are met - the soldier goes missing (as in MIA), their lifesigns indicate severe injury or death, or they trigger it manually (little remote control). If it can only be activated locally, or remotely using some crypto key, it should be safe and useful.
From the life-sign reference - think about medical use. A patient who has just had a heart bypass, or a transplant, or some other major surgery - with this, as soon as anything goes wrong, help can automatically be summoned immediately, instead of relying on somebody to dial 911!
As for the "abuse" - I'd say it's usually difficult to perform surgery on someone without them knowing, especially when you're fitting them with something resembling a cellphone! It could be useful for tagging offenders (much less prone to abuse than the leg-cuff approach used now), or protecting people with a high kidnap risk, but trying to do this without the person's knowledge would be ... difficult...
Or just waits until said soldier is on holiday elsewhere - at which point, half a dozen Belgian cops (or any other cops they can rent for the day from a proper country) versus one soldier, told he's being arrested on the basis of a valid warrant? That's a very different picture.
What would Belgium do, invade Britain to enforce their stupid law in the first place? That's the funniest thing I've heard in weeks.
Not "invade" - just put a few cops on a plane. Or, as I said above, wait to catch their target outside the UK, alone. It's much harder to resist arrest on your own in a foreign country...
In practice, I agree British soldiers should be safe from arrest - but what about me? Under French law, "offending against the dignity of the Republic" is a crime, as is insulting "anyone who serves the public" (i.e. any government employee). What about me visiting the US - and the INS passport check shows an outstanding arrest warrant for me?! (Or for any soldier, for that matter.) Presumably the INS would investigate, and ignore the offending entry eventually - but it's still a major hassle, even if I never visit Belgium or France again myself!
If it came to an actual military confrontation, yes - but that would require the British government using military force to override European law. That would require a major change of heart...
Legally as in EU law prohibits Britain from interfering. Remaining members of the EU would be virtually impossible at that point. Although they would never try to use military force, the diplomatic and economic fallout would be ... messy.
That's the trouble: they would just turn up in the UK with a valid warrant under EU law. Britain would then be the side having to stop them - illegally, by the EU's rules - and that would take a degree of courage few politicians have. What would Britain do - invade Belgium to get them back?!