For most businesses, the cost of software represents a substantial portion of their cost structure. With open source software, the businesses will be better able to retain employees, which will strengthen the economy.
The beauty of open source software is that its value to society far exceeds the cost of the effort consumed by creating it. While it does require a fixed, up-front effort, the payoff is limited only by the number of people able to use such software. Contrast this with the closed source model, in which, in an effort to maximize vendor profit, always leaves out those unable or unwilling to pay.
Most Americans work in low-margin business - doing things like agriculture, retail, etc... - providing the goods and services necessary for civilized life. It is these businesses for which the cost of software means the difference between laying off, and retaining employees. Funding OSS development is like giving them an interest-free loan which never has to be repaid. But better yet, the benefit to the economy as a whole far exceeds the cost of creating OSS.
That way, no one on your UNIX systems will be able to read it.
But don't stop there!
Email the document to all of your users. Then, when they do something wrong, you can ask in a condescending tone, "Didn't you get the procedures document I sent?"
But don't stop there!
Use the latest version of Word - you know, the beta version, which means the format will be unreadable to everyone in the office except you. When you present to senior management, bring your laptop to show off how easy it is to follow this simple document. When things start to go awry, blame your subordinates and suggest that perhaps some of the work should be outsourced.
But don't stop there!
When you've finally outsourced the entire department, pull the same trick on the company with which you've contracted. When they can't meet deadlines/SLA, (because, of course, no one can read your stupid Word doc...) - blame them for breach of contract. Publicly berate them in front of your superiors for their ineptitude.
But don't stop there!
When senior management finally figures out that you're the problem, suggest that perhaps they should bring the work back in house. Save your word document as HTML and post it to the company's intranet site. When things start going smoothly once again, take all of the credit for "turning a troubled company around". Make sure you get your bonus.
The problem isn't that they'll automatically disqualify you. The problem is that they might not have time enough to interview every candidate, or do a full background search. These days, if a Google search shows a connection to something undesirable, they'll just move on to the next resume.
It's not a rejection, per se. It's just that someone else with nothing potentially undesirable got the interview, and they liked that person so much they hired them. Maybe the would have hired you, had you gotten an interview.
I wouldn't want to work for an employer that was so impersonal that they only did keyword scanning to select resumes. But now almost every employer does just that. Sure, I disagree with it in principle, but the interview and application process is an almost infitesimally small part of the job experience. Who cares if there's a nut in HR? Maybe the other people who work for the company are nice people; maybe management is more focused on their current employees than potential ones. There are a lot of explanations for why an otherwise good company might not call someone for an interview who could be mistaken for someone else, someone bad.
That I already pay taxes to maintain the roads. I pay a federal tax on gasoline, which is supposed to be used to maintain the interstate highway system.
I find it kind of unsettling that after taking my tax dollars to build and maintain their highways, certain states believe they can now charge an extra fee simply because the road passes through their state. If they can send me a bill for driving on a highway built with my tax dollars, perhaps I should be allowed to send them an invoice for reimbursement of the fuel taxes I paid while in their state.
The idea behind having federal funding of roads is that you create a system of roads by which everyone is allowed to travel, free of charge. If individual states want to get into the toll-road business, we're going to end up like we were in the 30's and 40's, where there was no consistency in road quality and signage from one state to the next.
You can get the sequential LEDs pattern with a simple shift register (74HC574 can be wired for this) and a 555 timer. If you want to add randomness, you can add a few xor gates (74HC86) to make a linear feedback shift register. So far, that's less than a dollar of IC's, and no programming required.
If I believe in evolution, I usually reply something to the effect of, "It's not a religion that one might believe in... You can either prove it or you can't." The notion of being able to falsify scientific hypothesis seems to be a bit beyond the conceptual grasp of a large portion of the population.
I'm a Christian. Yes, I've seen evidence that there's a God, in fact, rather recently. But my belief in God isn't based on evidence, it's based on faith. That's why it's called religion. Any time a belief system is based on faith rather than repeatable experiments, we have to call it a religion.
I know this is going to ruffle a few feathers, but I'm sick of this debate being rehashed again and again. For many, many years, what was taught as evolution in public schools was largely based on blind faith in evolution. The conflict over evolution in schools had nothing to do with science and everything to do with conflicting belief systems, i.e. atheism versus theism. And for that reason, the teaching of evolutionary theory was slanted toward whatever personal agenda the teacher had with respect to the above debate. Science got lost in the process.
And evolution itself was largely a matter of religious belief for the century after Darwin. Biology was one of the few sciences which accepted a theory which was provably false by anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics. The early theories of natural selection were mathematically sound, but to go the step beyond and claim that "random change" would differentiate species only indicated the discipline's misunderstanding of randomness, and was based largely on faith. It was as if, unable to find a specific cause of speciation, biologists just gave up critical thought and claimed "random chance did it". It was intellectually lazy, and Americans knew it. And this version of evolution would be taught as late as the 1990's.
So when you hear someone questioning darwinism, or evolution, this is what the debate is about. They are probably not aware of the more recent advances in the subject, probably cannot elaborate on any of the specific theories regarding speciation (which, to biology's credit, are actually listing falsifiable hypotheses now). It is not about science, but bad science put forward in the attempt to make a larger cultural change, a shift away from belief in God.
There is no conflict between science and religion, because both seek the truth, but work in different problem domains. That said, though, there's no place for faith in science, and one need not "believe" in it the way one might have faith in the second coming of Christ. The debate over evolution should serve as an indicator of how bad things can get when science attempts to step outside of its proper boundaries into the realm of philosophy and religion. I do not want future spacecraft designed by faith any more than I want future public policy governed solely by science. (While I'll admit that science can inform public opinion, it cannot resolve the ethical and moral questions.)
So before you go about bashing evolution bashers, please remember: most of these people were taught falsehoods in the name of science. Once you address that issue, you'll find that there's really very little left to debate.
If you don't plan to collect DNA except for cases which result in conviction, why incur the expense of taking the DNA of every arrestee in the first place? Can't you get it later?
Or will my tax dollars be used for yet another useless activity with substantial civil liberty implications?
What would happen if you crossed an Ivy-league educated politician with a rapper? And elected him President?
I can hear it now:
Pres: Yo, Yo, Yo! Bailout hos listen up! You ain't gettin' none of my money - you heeere me? None of it! What? - your outsourcin', no good, H1-B hirin' firm is going into the toilet? Welcome to the free market, bitches! Laissez faire muthafockers! Peace out.
What would happen if you crossed an Ivy-league educated politician with a rapper? And elected him President?
I can hear it now:
Pres: Yo, Yo, Yo! Bailout hos listen up! You ain't gettin' none of my money - you heeere me? None of it! What? - your outsourcin', no good, H1-B hirin' firm is going into the toilet? Welcome to the free market, bitches! Laissez faire muthafockers! Peace out.
- When it's taught in the classroom, it's survival of the fittest, because, as we all know, it's impossible for a school board to even hint at the existence of a god which might create living things... or dictate some kind of morality to his creation.
- But when it's a cute and fuzzy creature whose poor adaption to the environment results in its demise and extinction, somehow it becomes an ecological catastrophe about which all proper schoolchildren must be concerned. And oh, let's not forget, it's all our fault that said species doesn't taste good or have some other interesting property which can be commercialized.
Banks making decisions according to financial factors?! Say it ain't so!
Congressmen act surprised because they want their constituents to believe that by bailing out the banks, they're saving the American worker and the economy. But I have serious doubts that any of the Congressmen who voted for the bailout *really believed* that it would create jobs or help the economy.
The problem Congressmen *might* be facing next election is that those workers laid off by the banks receiving bailouts are not the ignoramuses they assume. These workers went to college, took courses in economics, and generally speaking, understand as much about the economy - if not more - than their congressional counterparts. They lived through eight years of the Bush White House, and can recognize cronyism when they see it. They lived through eight years of Reaganomics, and not only do they recognize it when they see it, they know it doesn't work.
And they, like me, are frustrated that the wool is being pulled over our collective eyes. We're frustrated that Congress is rewarding greed and avarice, and trying to sell it as creating jobs. They know better; we know better.
Oh, and that Change that Obama was talking about? Well, our government is going to take your dollars, and leave you with pocket change. Welcome to Democracy.
Bad puns aside, conception is the point at which the process of a person's growing starts. The natural process for egg and sperm, prior to their union, and without union, is that both die. It is when united that they begin the process which - apart from human intervention or natural death (disease, malformation, etc...) - results in a person. Living in the womb is nothing more than an early stage of human life.
It isn't a matter of *potential* persons, but of actual members of the human race who have not yet left the womb.
Even with automatic updates and AV software, the average user who connects a Windows machine to the internet becomes part of a botnet within 6 months. Sure, a network admin can setup firewalls, etc... to avoid this, but the average user isn't a computer expert. If they were, they would have switched to Linux years ago.
The fundamental problem remains: how do you keep the ordinary user's computer from getting owned? I can setup Linux once and have it run until the hardware fails. But Windows is just a minefield for the average user. Even Windows is so complicated the average user just buys another machine when theirs slows down. They don't have the time to figure out what is wrong. With Linux, they don't have to.
1.) A lost password causes complete loss of the data on the drive. The article hints that there's a reset facility, which would allow the drive to be reused, but the data would be lost.
2.) Google Ken Thompson's _Reflections on Trusting Trust_ It's a good read, and basically shows that, unless you personally verify the hardware, i.e., build it yourself, you have no way of proving your system secure. While it is true that you can inspect TrueCrypt's source code, the fact remains that malicious hardware could divulge your keys.
This is an important point, but generally speaking, you can usually trust hardware more than software. The reason is that software tends to be orders of magnitude more complex than hardware, and hardware testing is much easier to automate than software testing. True, your drive hardware could have bugs (Google the rz1000 chipset sometime), but that's going to be the case regardless of whether it contains encryption or not. That said, software encryption is far more vulnerable to compromise than hardware because it must run in an environment shared with unrelated functions. Compare the onboard hard drive encryption processor with TC - one is completely isolated from the rest of the system, while the other could be inspected by any process with root access. Running TC is pointless if your Windows machine gets owned by a virus which sends the keys over the network to the government. With HW encryption, the drive *can't* do this - it's not even electrically connected to the network in any meaningful way.
3.) Poorly written specs?! Say it ain't so! Sadly, this is common in the industry, and usually done to allow rather liberal interpretation (read: cheap) for those that want to claim compliance without doing a lot of work.
4.) Yes, hardware will always be more secure than software because it has limited, well defined interfaces. Granted, you can't verify it, but that's a moot point anyway, because TC runs on a CPU which could very well be compromised. Again, see reflections on trusting trust - it matters little if your source code is secure if your compiler, assembler, or CPU has been compromised.
Okay, we all know where this is going, so might as well collect all the trolls under one thread. Here goes:
Bush banned stem cell research, holding back cures that would have been available during the Obama administration.
Good, now that *that* little piece of misinformation is out of the way, I'd like to add just one thing more. It appears to me that while this discovery is promising, it will do nothing to mollify the supporters of embryonic stem cell research (ECS). It's not that ECS proponents really believe cures are around the corner, but that they believe science can do no wrong. The "miracle cures" are just a distraction (adult stem cells are already being used to cure) to what really amounts to a bigger issue: the role and authority of science in the public debate.
Science has typically enjoyed support among the urban elites - typically liberals who believe in abortion and stem cell research. They aren't keen on having any authority tell them what to do with their bodies - God, government, or otherwise. They believe in science, _except_ in certain circumstances. That circumstance is the subject of embryonic development. At the time Roe v Wade was decided, it was not commonly known that a person's physical characteristics were uniquely determined at conception. The problem with science - from the perspective of the urban elite - is that it confirmed that, indeed, a person is fully human from the point of conception onward. Thus, for the first time, there existed a scientific basis for the opposition of abortion. This represents a *very real* problem for a demographic which, in their zeal to eliminate God's influence from public policy decisions, replaced Him with science. Now, it seems, science is the enemy of social progress.
And this is why the issue of embryonic stem cell research is so salient to the Left. It has nothing to do with finding miracle cures, and everything to do with discrediting the scientific notion that a person's life begins at conception. The science is undeniable - but the conclusion that a fertilized egg is a person - need not be, at least not in public policy. The Left is rightly concerned, for if a court finds that indeed a fertilized egg is a person from a legal standpoint, then abortion is sure to be next. If the Left allows embryonic stem cell research to be scuttled under the premise of being unethical - that is, that we are experimenting on live human beings without their consent - then they pave the way for the repeal of abortion in the US. And *that* is what the ECS debate is really about.
It has nothing to do with finding cures, and everything to do with the influence of science vs. theology in politics.
First, if the main CPU doesn't do the encryption, another CPU of equal speed must be provided.
AES can be implemented in hardware for an almost trivial amount of gates these days. To encrypt/decrypt data at the rate a modern hard disk speeds is child's play for dedicated hardware. Typical performance is one AES block per clock cycle, meaning a 1 Mhz clock speed would give a 128 Mbs encode/decode.
Even lacking dedicated hardware, they're putting 100 Mhz processors in microcontrollers these days. Atmel advertises.5 mW (mA? - I forget) per Mhz microcontrollers these days, so a 100 Mhz crypto controller would consume the equivalent of five LEDs. The drive motor is going to be the largest power concern.
...he also found that MDY's founder, Michael Donnelly, was personally liable for the actions of his firm.
Strangely, though, those who perpetrated the recent Mortgage fiasco which resulted in the current recession are not personally responsible for the actions of their firms. I find it strange that CEOs incur personal liability for their firm's actions only when the victim is another corporation.
have let their game slide and now they are in a desperate economic state
They're not the only ones who let their game slide and have ended up in a desperate economic state. I know of a country which fought a war for oil only see their energy costs go through the roof, sending their economy into a recession and destroying the gains made by the middle class in the last decade. Currently, this country has the odd distinction that for most part, their children have a lower standard of living than their parents. To make matters worse, their current President is planning to increase the federal deficit even more - offering cash bonuses to those who fomented the crisis in the first place.
The fact is simply that everything I need and want to do, I can do in XP. The same is not true for Linux. It has huge gaps in its software availability. The cost of Windows in order to get access to all that software is negligible.
While true, it glosses over an important point: I can setup a Linux box *once*. I'm still running slackware 10 on some of my boxes. The annual reinstall is a rite of passage for most Windows users. In truth, most Windows users either buy another machine when theirs gets slow, or finds a geek who will reinstall the OS and their apps for them. That's why they tolerate it.
The cost of keeping Windows updated is not negligible.
The cost of the inevitable Windows reinstall is not negligible. While you may be able to increase the time it takes for a box to get owned by running antivirus software, you slow down the machine in the process. Virus cleanup is an inevitable part of using Windows.
And while the software availability is a problem for some - like gamers - for those of us who know how to use UNIX, there is simply no replacement. Sure, you can get cygwin for Windows, but it's just not the same. I've found that I'm perhaps a hundred times more productive when using a Linux system, simply because the UNIX paradigm allows me to be more productive. Furthermore, because most of the software on Linux is free of charge, I'm able to do things on Linux which I would never be able to do on a Windows system.
There is no silver bullet; you just pick which problems you want to deal with. Myself, I like a secure system which doesn't require constant updating and runs very fast. But I can understand why someone would use a slow, unreliable machine if it was required to be compatible with the rest of the business world.
Really short explanation of difference between TrueCrypt and native hard drive encryption: With TC, the laptop's cpu sees the key used for decryption; with native HD encryption, only the microcontroller on the hard drive sees the key - the laptop CPU never sees encrypted data, hence, it doesn't need the key.
If the hard drive microcontroller computes the key from, say, the hash of the password, then it can store the key in its internal registers, and the key itself never goes across the bus. When the drive is powered down, the key is lost. Hence, you have a securely encrypted drive which cannot be read without the password, and cannot reveal the password to a hacker.
Hate to burst your bubble here, but unless the content on the disk is actually 1080p, upconverting doesn't get you any better picture quality. Sure, they can upconvert the video signal by essentially blowing up each frame, but that's doing little more than watching standard def video on a high def screen - which most tvs already support anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
For most businesses, the cost of software represents a substantial portion of their cost structure. With open source software, the businesses will be better able to retain employees, which will strengthen the economy.
The beauty of open source software is that its value to society far exceeds the cost of the effort consumed by creating it. While it does require a fixed, up-front effort, the payoff is limited only by the number of people able to use such software. Contrast this with the closed source model, in which, in an effort to maximize vendor profit, always leaves out those unable or unwilling to pay.
Most Americans work in low-margin business - doing things like agriculture, retail, etc... - providing the goods and services necessary for civilized life. It is these businesses for which the cost of software means the difference between laying off, and retaining employees. Funding OSS development is like giving them an interest-free loan which never has to be repaid. But better yet, the benefit to the economy as a whole far exceeds the cost of creating OSS.
That way, no one on your UNIX systems will be able to read it.
But don't stop there!
Email the document to all of your users. Then, when they do something wrong, you can ask in a condescending tone, "Didn't you get the procedures document I sent?"
But don't stop there!
Use the latest version of Word - you know, the beta version, which means the format will be unreadable to everyone in the office except you. When you present to senior management, bring your laptop to show off how easy it is to follow this simple document. When things start to go awry, blame your subordinates and suggest that perhaps some of the work should be outsourced.
But don't stop there!
When you've finally outsourced the entire department, pull the same trick on the company with which you've contracted. When they can't meet deadlines/SLA, (because, of course, no one can read your stupid Word doc...) - blame them for breach of contract. Publicly berate them in front of your superiors for their ineptitude.
But don't stop there!
When senior management finally figures out that you're the problem, suggest that perhaps they should bring the work back in house. Save your word document as HTML and post it to the company's intranet site. When things start going smoothly once again, take all of the credit for "turning a troubled company around". Make sure you get your bonus.
Our government responded in like manner to bad policy...
The problem isn't that they'll automatically disqualify you. The problem is that they might not have time enough to interview every candidate, or do a full background search. These days, if a Google search shows a connection to something undesirable, they'll just move on to the next resume.
It's not a rejection, per se. It's just that someone else with nothing potentially undesirable got the interview, and they liked that person so much they hired them. Maybe the would have hired you, had you gotten an interview.
I wouldn't want to work for an employer that was so impersonal that they only did keyword scanning to select resumes. But now almost every employer does just that. Sure, I disagree with it in principle, but the interview and application process is an almost infitesimally small part of the job experience. Who cares if there's a nut in HR? Maybe the other people who work for the company are nice people; maybe management is more focused on their current employees than potential ones. There are a lot of explanations for why an otherwise good company might not call someone for an interview who could be mistaken for someone else, someone bad.
But it is probably valid. The courts have found that cell phone contracts, which allow the company to later determine terms of billing, are valid.
That I already pay taxes to maintain the roads. I pay a federal tax on gasoline, which is supposed to be used to maintain the interstate highway system.
I find it kind of unsettling that after taking my tax dollars to build and maintain their highways, certain states believe they can now charge an extra fee simply because the road passes through their state. If they can send me a bill for driving on a highway built with my tax dollars, perhaps I should be allowed to send them an invoice for reimbursement of the fuel taxes I paid while in their state.
The idea behind having federal funding of roads is that you create a system of roads by which everyone is allowed to travel, free of charge. If individual states want to get into the toll-road business, we're going to end up like we were in the 30's and 40's, where there was no consistency in road quality and signage from one state to the next.
Getting a cat to protect your Cat5 cable?
You can get the sequential LEDs pattern with a simple shift register (74HC574 can be wired for this) and a 555 timer. If you want to add randomness, you can add a few xor gates (74HC86) to make a linear feedback shift register. So far, that's less than a dollar of IC's, and no programming required.
If I believe in evolution, I usually reply something to the effect of, "It's not a religion that one might believe in... You can either prove it or you can't." The notion of being able to falsify scientific hypothesis seems to be a bit beyond the conceptual grasp of a large portion of the population.
I'm a Christian. Yes, I've seen evidence that there's a God, in fact, rather recently. But my belief in God isn't based on evidence, it's based on faith. That's why it's called religion. Any time a belief system is based on faith rather than repeatable experiments, we have to call it a religion.
I know this is going to ruffle a few feathers, but I'm sick of this debate being rehashed again and again. For many, many years, what was taught as evolution in public schools was largely based on blind faith in evolution. The conflict over evolution in schools had nothing to do with science and everything to do with conflicting belief systems, i.e. atheism versus theism. And for that reason, the teaching of evolutionary theory was slanted toward whatever personal agenda the teacher had with respect to the above debate. Science got lost in the process.
And evolution itself was largely a matter of religious belief for the century after Darwin. Biology was one of the few sciences which accepted a theory which was provably false by anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics. The early theories of natural selection were mathematically sound, but to go the step beyond and claim that "random change" would differentiate species only indicated the discipline's misunderstanding of randomness, and was based largely on faith. It was as if, unable to find a specific cause of speciation, biologists just gave up critical thought and claimed "random chance did it". It was intellectually lazy, and Americans knew it. And this version of evolution would be taught as late as the 1990's.
So when you hear someone questioning darwinism, or evolution, this is what the debate is about. They are probably not aware of the more recent advances in the subject, probably cannot elaborate on any of the specific theories regarding speciation (which, to biology's credit, are actually listing falsifiable hypotheses now). It is not about science, but bad science put forward in the attempt to make a larger cultural change, a shift away from belief in God.
There is no conflict between science and religion, because both seek the truth, but work in different problem domains. That said, though, there's no place for faith in science, and one need not "believe" in it the way one might have faith in the second coming of Christ. The debate over evolution should serve as an indicator of how bad things can get when science attempts to step outside of its proper boundaries into the realm of philosophy and religion. I do not want future spacecraft designed by faith any more than I want future public policy governed solely by science. (While I'll admit that science can inform public opinion, it cannot resolve the ethical and moral questions.)
So before you go about bashing evolution bashers, please remember: most of these people were taught falsehoods in the name of science. Once you address that issue, you'll find that there's really very little left to debate.
If you don't plan to collect DNA except for cases which result in conviction, why incur the expense of taking the DNA of every arrestee in the first place? Can't you get it later?
Or will my tax dollars be used for yet another useless activity with substantial civil liberty implications?
While it has its benefits in good times, in bad times the free market system is brutal, inhuman.
What would happen if you crossed an Ivy-league educated politician with a rapper? And elected him President?
I can hear it now:
Pres: Yo, Yo, Yo! Bailout hos listen up!
You ain't gettin' none of my money - you heeere me? None of it!
What? - your outsourcin', no good, H1-B hirin' firm is going into the toilet? Welcome to the free market, bitches!
Laissez faire muthafockers!
Peace out.
(to be fair, also posted here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1111355&cid=26689403 - but I thought it relevant nonetheless.)
What would happen if you crossed an Ivy-league educated politician with a rapper? And elected him President?
I can hear it now:
Pres: Yo, Yo, Yo! Bailout hos listen up!
You ain't gettin' none of my money - you heeere me? None of it!
What? - your outsourcin', no good, H1-B hirin' firm is going into the toilet? Welcome to the free market, bitches!
Laissez faire muthafockers!
Peace out.
- When it's taught in the classroom, it's survival of the fittest, because, as we all know, it's impossible for a school board to even hint at the existence of a god which might create living things... or dictate some kind of morality to his creation.
- But when it's a cute and fuzzy creature whose poor adaption to the environment results in its demise and extinction, somehow it becomes an ecological catastrophe about which all proper schoolchildren must be concerned. And oh, let's not forget, it's all our fault that said species doesn't taste good or have some other interesting property which can be commercialized.
Banks making decisions according to financial factors?! Say it ain't so!
Congressmen act surprised because they want their constituents to believe that by bailing out the banks, they're saving the American worker and the economy. But I have serious doubts that any of the Congressmen who voted for the bailout *really believed* that it would create jobs or help the economy.
The problem Congressmen *might* be facing next election is that those workers laid off by the banks receiving bailouts are not the ignoramuses they assume. These workers went to college, took courses in economics, and generally speaking, understand as much about the economy - if not more - than their congressional counterparts. They lived through eight years of the Bush White House, and can recognize cronyism when they see it. They lived through eight years of Reaganomics, and not only do they recognize it when they see it, they know it doesn't work.
And they, like me, are frustrated that the wool is being pulled over our collective eyes. We're frustrated that Congress is rewarding greed and avarice, and trying to sell it as creating jobs. They know better; we know better.
Oh, and that Change that Obama was talking about? Well, our government is going to take your dollars, and leave you with pocket change. Welcome to Democracy.
Bad puns aside, conception is the point at which the process of a person's growing starts. The natural process for egg and sperm, prior to their union, and without union, is that both die. It is when united that they begin the process which - apart from human intervention or natural death (disease, malformation, etc...) - results in a person. Living in the womb is nothing more than an early stage of human life.
It isn't a matter of *potential* persons, but of actual members of the human race who have not yet left the womb.
I want to connect my machines to the internet.
Even with automatic updates and AV software, the average user who connects a Windows machine to the internet becomes part of a botnet within 6 months. Sure, a network admin can setup firewalls, etc... to avoid this, but the average user isn't a computer expert. If they were, they would have switched to Linux years ago.
The fundamental problem remains: how do you keep the ordinary user's computer from getting owned? I can setup Linux once and have it run until the hardware fails. But Windows is just a minefield for the average user. Even Windows is so complicated the average user just buys another machine when theirs slows down. They don't have the time to figure out what is wrong. With Linux, they don't have to.
Okay, point by point:
1.) A lost password causes complete loss of the data on the drive. The article hints that there's a reset facility, which would allow the drive to be reused, but the data would be lost.
2.) Google Ken Thompson's _Reflections on Trusting Trust_ It's a good read, and basically shows that, unless you personally verify the hardware, i.e., build it yourself, you have no way of proving your system secure. While it is true that you can inspect TrueCrypt's source code, the fact remains that malicious hardware could divulge your keys.
This is an important point, but generally speaking, you can usually trust hardware more than software. The reason is that software tends to be orders of magnitude more complex than hardware, and hardware testing is much easier to automate than software testing. True, your drive hardware could have bugs (Google the rz1000 chipset sometime), but that's going to be the case regardless of whether it contains encryption or not. That said, software encryption is far more vulnerable to compromise than hardware because it must run in an environment shared with unrelated functions. Compare the onboard hard drive encryption processor with TC - one is completely isolated from the rest of the system, while the other could be inspected by any process with root access. Running TC is pointless if your Windows machine gets owned by a virus which sends the keys over the network to the government. With HW encryption, the drive *can't* do this - it's not even electrically connected to the network in any meaningful way.
3.) Poorly written specs?! Say it ain't so! Sadly, this is common in the industry, and usually done to allow rather liberal interpretation (read: cheap) for those that want to claim compliance without doing a lot of work.
4.) Yes, hardware will always be more secure than software because it has limited, well defined interfaces. Granted, you can't verify it, but that's a moot point anyway, because TC runs on a CPU which could very well be compromised. Again, see reflections on trusting trust - it matters little if your source code is secure if your compiler, assembler, or CPU has been compromised.
Okay, we all know where this is going, so might as well collect all the trolls under one thread. Here goes:
Bush banned stem cell research, holding back cures that would have been available during the Obama administration.
Good, now that *that* little piece of misinformation is out of the way, I'd like to add just one thing more. It appears to me that while this discovery is promising, it will do nothing to mollify the supporters of embryonic stem cell research (ECS). It's not that ECS proponents really believe cures are around the corner, but that they believe science can do no wrong. The "miracle cures" are just a distraction (adult stem cells are already being used to cure) to what really amounts to a bigger issue: the role and authority of science in the public debate.
Science has typically enjoyed support among the urban elites - typically liberals who believe in abortion and stem cell research. They aren't keen on having any authority tell them what to do with their bodies - God, government, or otherwise. They believe in science, _except_ in certain circumstances. That circumstance is the subject of embryonic development. At the time Roe v Wade was decided, it was not commonly known that a person's physical characteristics were uniquely determined at conception. The problem with science - from the perspective of the urban elite - is that it confirmed that, indeed, a person is fully human from the point of conception onward. Thus, for the first time, there existed a scientific basis for the opposition of abortion. This represents a *very real* problem for a demographic which, in their zeal to eliminate God's influence from public policy decisions, replaced Him with science. Now, it seems, science is the enemy of social progress.
And this is why the issue of embryonic stem cell research is so salient to the Left. It has nothing to do with finding miracle cures, and everything to do with discrediting the scientific notion that a person's life begins at conception. The science is undeniable - but the conclusion that a fertilized egg is a person - need not be, at least not in public policy. The Left is rightly concerned, for if a court finds that indeed a fertilized egg is a person from a legal standpoint, then abortion is sure to be next. If the Left allows embryonic stem cell research to be scuttled under the premise of being unethical - that is, that we are experimenting on live human beings without their consent - then they pave the way for the repeal of abortion in the US. And *that* is what the ECS debate is really about.
It has nothing to do with finding cures, and everything to do with the influence of science vs. theology in politics.
First, if the main CPU doesn't do the encryption, another CPU of equal speed must be provided.
AES can be implemented in hardware for an almost trivial amount of gates these days. To encrypt/decrypt data at the rate a modern hard disk speeds is child's play for dedicated hardware. Typical performance is one AES block per clock cycle, meaning a 1 Mhz clock speed would give a 128 Mbs encode/decode.
Even lacking dedicated hardware, they're putting 100 Mhz processors in microcontrollers these days. Atmel advertises .5 mW (mA? - I forget) per Mhz microcontrollers these days, so a 100 Mhz crypto controller would consume the equivalent of five LEDs. The drive motor is going to be the largest power concern.
Strangely, though, those who perpetrated the recent Mortgage fiasco which resulted in the current recession are not personally responsible for the actions of their firms. I find it strange that CEOs incur personal liability for their firm's actions only when the victim is another corporation.
have let their game slide and now they are in a desperate economic state
They're not the only ones who let their game slide and have ended up in a desperate economic state. I know of a country which fought a war for oil only see their energy costs go through the roof, sending their economy into a recession and destroying the gains made by the middle class in the last decade. Currently, this country has the odd distinction that for most part, their children have a lower standard of living than their parents. To make matters worse, their current President is planning to increase the federal deficit even more - offering cash bonuses to those who fomented the crisis in the first place.
The fact is simply that everything I need and want to do, I can do in XP. The same is not true for Linux. It has huge gaps in its software availability. The cost of Windows in order to get access to all that software is negligible.
While true, it glosses over an important point: I can setup a Linux box *once*. I'm still running slackware 10 on some of my boxes. The annual reinstall is a rite of passage for most Windows users. In truth, most Windows users either buy another machine when theirs gets slow, or finds a geek who will reinstall the OS and their apps for them. That's why they tolerate it.
The cost of keeping Windows updated is not negligible.
The cost of the inevitable Windows reinstall is not negligible. While you may be able to increase the time it takes for a box to get owned by running antivirus software, you slow down the machine in the process. Virus cleanup is an inevitable part of using Windows.
And while the software availability is a problem for some - like gamers - for those of us who know how to use UNIX, there is simply no replacement. Sure, you can get cygwin for Windows, but it's just not the same. I've found that I'm perhaps a hundred times more productive when using a Linux system, simply because the UNIX paradigm allows me to be more productive. Furthermore, because most of the software on Linux is free of charge, I'm able to do things on Linux which I would never be able to do on a Windows system.
There is no silver bullet; you just pick which problems you want to deal with. Myself, I like a secure system which doesn't require constant updating and runs very fast. But I can understand why someone would use a slow, unreliable machine if it was required to be compatible with the rest of the business world.
Really short explanation of difference between TrueCrypt and native hard drive encryption: With TC, the laptop's cpu sees the key used for decryption; with native HD encryption, only the microcontroller on the hard drive sees the key - the laptop CPU never sees encrypted data, hence, it doesn't need the key.
If the hard drive microcontroller computes the key from, say, the hash of the password, then it can store the key in its internal registers, and the key itself never goes across the bus. When the drive is powered down, the key is lost. Hence, you have a securely encrypted drive which cannot be read without the password, and cannot reveal the password to a hacker.
Hate to burst your bubble here, but unless the content on the disk is actually 1080p, upconverting doesn't get you any better picture quality. Sure, they can upconvert the video signal by essentially blowing up each frame, but that's doing little more than watching standard def video on a high def screen - which most tvs already support anyway.