I've got XP, and it could be demonstrated that this doesn't work correctly. Sometimes it pops up the box, sometimes not. And it consistently ignores my requests to "Take no Action" and "Do this every time a CD is inserted". Why can't the system just shut up?!
Yes, I know my "local area network" cable is unplugged. It was never plugged in in the first place, you idiot. Stupid Microsoft.
IIRC, Autoplay has been shipped in MS operating systems since 1996. TVI has been sitting on this for eight years. Which means, of course, that if the statute of limitations hasn't expired, they will be severely limited in the remedies they are allowed to seek. It's not like this escaped their attention for 8 years.
Of course, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that even if TVI wins the case, they won't be able to collect damages for past infringement because they clearly did not demonstrate "due diligence" in protecting their patent. They might end up with a compulsory license agreement; or to avoid infringement, Microsoft OS's may end up simply popping up a dialog box ("Would you like to play this CD?") when a disk is inserted.
Yeah, I'd put TVI at net loss on this one. Their lawyers are going to make more money than they will.
Once again, it's the human factors. The primary problem with digital evidence is that most police departments aren't savvy enough to build a system which has the equivalent of an electronic-chain-of-custody.
I know a locksmith. He tells me that even the most difficult, secure locks wouldn't take him more than 5 minutes to pick. On average, it takes him about 30 seconds to turn a lock. If he was left alone next to the evidence locker, he could probably swap out physical evidence in a matter of minutes.
But I doubt this will ever happen. The police are usually very good about physical security. A locksmith has a slim-to-none chance of being left alone with his tools next to the evidence locker. But there is absolutely nothing which would prevent a corrupt cop from bringing in a (corrupt) locksmith on the graveyard shift to swap out physical evidence.
Even with correct chain-of-custody, it still comes down to a matter of trusting humans. While checksumming and encrypting methods can make it more difficult to fake digital evidence, they do not eliminate the fundamental difficulty of electronic chain-of-custody. Just because it's digital doesn't mean it can be trusted. The only thing that these methods provide is the assurance that the images were not altered by a non-technical party. They do nothing to show that the images weren't outright fakes in the first place, or that a corrupt cop didn't employ the services of a cracker (the digital equivalent of a locksmith).
Isn't this just Yet Another Microsoft Security Hole? How is this news? Move along folks, nothing to see here....
Sometimes I wonder about the slashdot crowd (Okay, I wonder all the time). Don't we ever learn? Do we really expect a company with a financial incentive to release software prematurely to produce good code?
Wake up folks! This isn't news. This is business as usual for Microsoft. It shouldn't surprise us because, after all, this is the same Microsoft that successfully convinced the rest of the world that system crashes are a normal part of computer operation.
MS systems are buggy, crash-prone, and insecure. Don't act surprised, just deal with it.
...original pictures of fingerprints and other evidence are encrypted so they can't be changed, and burned onto a CD, giving the lab the equivalent of a film negative to reference later.
Um, yeah. Well, if they're encrypted, you either:
have the key and can change the image, or
don't have the key, and you can't see the image
I think what he meant to say was checksummed and encrypted. While this does provide a reasonable degree of security against tampering, it in no way establishes that the pictures were real in the first place. It is a very trivial matter to write a CD today with a date of 01/01/1998.
Yes, checksumming does provide a reasonable degree of security provided other safegaurds are taken. However, defeating this scheme is still too simple. Consider:
Murder takes place in 1998. Detective has a hunch that suspect X has done it, but can't prove it.
It's 2004 - suspect X is arrested on an unrelated charge, and fingerprinted.
Said detective takes pictures of X's fingerprints.
He then sets the clock on his PC back to 1998, a few days after the murder.
Then he downloads the fingerprints he's just photographed to the machine, and burns the photos to CD. When he's done, he sets the PC's date back to the current date.
Said detective files the freshly minted CD in the 1998 storage locker.
A few days later, the detective suggests to his subordinate that he run X's fingerprints against the crime-scene database. Lo and behold! - suspect X's fingerprints match those found at the crime scene!
Tell me I'm more secure now. Evidence fakery has been around since mankind learned to lie. The digital age just makes it more convenient.
In theory, your premise is valid. But it's not that simple. One of the biggest problems with the laize-fare ideology is that it fails to account for differences in economic base. For example, to live comfortably in the Chicago area requires an income almost double that of downstate Illinois - this is primarily due to the high cost of real estate. I simply don't have the option of charging less because otherwise I couldn't afford the rent.
But the bigger problem is outright anti-American discrimination. Overseas outsourcing has become trendy in CEO-land, and the big corps are doing it to at least give the appearance of being more profitable.
But in reality, it's not just about the money.
There's a double standard for the American worker:
Indians are allowed to telecommute, but I can't.
Corporations will hire Indian programmers sight-unseen, but I have to show up for an interview and convince them that I'm capable of doing the job.
I don't have the option of reducing my living expenses and taking a pay cut - American programmers are expected to work on site.
Most corporate decisions become evident only after several years. I simply don't have that kind of time for them to discover that overseas outsourcing is more of a minefield than a greener pasture. And when I am shown right, they will inevitably ask, "So why haven't you worked in the past few years?" - to which I'd like to reply: "Because your CEO is an idiot who thought he could save money on outsourcing,"; but I know that that response won't get me a job.
The problem is that it has everything to do with perception, and nothing to do with merit. Yes, there are good Indian programmers. But American programmers risk downsizing not because they are greedy, but simply because they can't live in America on anything less. And even if a programmer was willing to cut his costs and move to the sticks, most corporations wouldn't hire him.
The one thing that never sits well with me is the lack of observable planets. If these other galaxies have so much dark matter, why doesn't it accrete into planets? Indeed, if our own galaxy has so much dark matter, why can't we observe it? If dark matter is indeed cosmic dust, our solar system would be relatively planet-deprived, from a standpoint of mass - the 9 planets certainly don't compromise 15 to 25% of the mass of our solar system. I'm left with two fundamental problems:
If dark matter is dust, our theories about planet formation through accretion are in need of serious revision.
It would seem that dark matter cannot be subatomic particles - that is, a particle of "dark matter" would have to possess sufficient energy to escape the star-formation process, yet not enough to be observed. Furthermore, it would have to possess sufficient mass to (on a large scale) affect the rotation of galaxies.
That wasn't the starting salary. That was what a manager could make after being with the company 5 years. Presumably, by that time one would be managing a few stores - though maybe not quite a district manager.
But I think the point is still valid. One can spend 5 years working in food service, or 5 years in college, and in the end your salary is more indicative of the revenue you bring to the company rather than your level of education.
While my life is certainly enriched by my education, and I do enjoy my career, I could have done just as well without a college degree, financially speaking. The problem I have is that society sees a college degree as a means to a financial end rather than an end in itself. Someone who's just seeking to get rich would do just as well, or better, without college.
The myth that a college degree is going to gaurantee wealth, or the lack thereof will deny someone wealth is just that - a myth. I know of many people without college degrees who have managed to find secure jobs and decent income by merely sticking with something and working hard. If you like to learn, and enjoy the arts and sciences, or just want to become better educated, by all means, go to college. But don't think that you will be buying job security; you won't.
After all, when was the last time you heard of construction workers getting outsourced....
I had a similar case with a lease. There were some rather egregious clauses - for example, if I was even accused of a crime I could be evicted before trial. What I did was to simply cross out the offending sentences, initial them, sign and return the lease.
The landlord accepted the lease, no questions asked.
Unless the company is really rigorous, in most cases you can simply strike out the clauses you find egregious, sign and return the contract. Most of the time, these kinds of employment agreements are simply part of boilerplate procedure - the company simply buys the forms in bulk from a business services reseller and never bothers to review the details. Keep a copy indicating your modified agreement with the company, and you'll be home free.
IIRC, and IANAL, but I was under the impression that unless you signed an employment contract for a specific time period, an employer can fire you for any or no reason whatsoever.
It's what they call at will employment.
So unless there wasn't an "at will" clause in the employment contract (and almost all contracts have them), he doesn't gain anything by signing it. If he does sign it, he still doesn't have any job security, and he's just given the company all of his ideas.
11K a year is about minimum wage, BTW. So the people in most US cities who are making your lattes, flipping your burgers, and bagging your groceries are expected to live off of that.
First, they aren't expected to live off this. These jobs are expected to be filled by part time workers - house wives, students, etc - to provide them with a little extra income. But should a person with any shred of ambition decide to make a career in fast food, they can end up drawing a larger salary than someone who spends that same amount of time in college.
In 1998, I was asked if I wanted a job making 70k a year. At first I did - until I found out that it was managing a Taco Bell. The stigma of fast food management keeps a lot of qualified people out of the field, hence, someone able to do it successfully can make quite a bit of money.
One of the things which irks me still is that I bought the whole "college is the way to success" bs back in high school. I know people younger than me, without a degree, who make comparable wages simply because they found a niche position in the economy - they took the jobs that no one else wanted and stuck with them. Trust me, it's a lot easier to move up into management when the business has a high turnover rate. Some people I've known have been made managers by force of longevity - they are the only ones who have stayed long enough to learn the whole business.
The problem is not a lack of privacy, but lack of personal dignity. In the late 90's, the FBI paid a sniper to shoot the wife and infant son of a man suspected of trying to sell a sawed off shotgun (Ruby Ridge). His alleged crime was attempting to sell one of his old shotguns in which the barrel was a mere two inches too short. He had been arraigned and given a court date. Then the FBI changed the court date without informing him, and when he failed to show up in court, they raided his place.
They didn't need his biometric information. It had been speculated that he was a white separatist - in other words, someone who had a different view of race relations than the politically correct multi-culti. His solution to the problem of racial tension was to merely move away from it.
And for this, his wife was killed - because, of course, the FBI thought that she was the ringleader in an illegal weapons trade. Never mind any notion of justice, fair trials, or whatnot.
Privacy is just a red herring folks. Stories like Ruby Ridge happen all the time, but the media attaches to a "privacy rights" story to keep things like this out of the public consciousness.
Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet, but do not possess. You kill and envy, but cannot obtain; you fight and wage war. You do not possess because you do not ask. You ask but do not receive, because you asked wrongly, to spend on your passions.
James 4,1:3
Violence has been around since Biblical times, and I don't think video games have, nor will they ever have, anything to do with it.
Violence springs not from playing, but from unfulfilled desires or irrational fears. If anything, video games provide a healthy outlet for working out aggression in a non-destructive manner. Only someone already mentally ill would fail to see the difference between killing a mass of pixels in a video game and killing in real life.
Video games, OTOH, provide a much needed escape from reality. Much like drugs and alcohol, except that they are not addicting (or only trivially so, compared to drugs such as heroin and alcohol). Furthermore, they don't have the negative effect on health that illegal drugs do. What I find interesting is that no one is mentioning the vast number of kids who chose video games over alcohol and drugs. Doesn't anyone else see video games as a tool in the "War On Drugs"? While it is easy to show a correlation between drug use and violence, no such correlation has been shown for video games.
My suspicion is that the video-games-cause-violence theories come from selfish parents who would rather blame a video game than take responsibility for their children's development.
The Massachussetts case was specifically about marriage, not civil unions. If anything, it demonstrates the extent to which the gay lobby will go to force their version of morality on the rest of the population. Civil unions which granted their partners the rights you describe had been legal in Massachussetts for about a year, but gays weren't satisfied.
Instead, they are actively trying to destroy the notion of marriage as a union between a man and woman. It isn't about rights anymore, its about forcing the homosexual lifestyle and viewpoint on the rest of society. The time is coming when a faithful marriage will be seen as old-fashioned, merely a formal indication that two people are sleeping together. Once sacredness has been stripped from marriage, the reason for conferring special priviledges and legal rights to spouses will likewise cease. This has nothing to do with being treated as human and everything to do with destroying marriage as a social institution.
...ideas we weren't raised with.
If it's some wierd religious-based exclusionary thing, then they could call it something else, but the same rights ought to be retained for both gay and straight couples.
Again, I'd have to take you to task for this. While a married couple may choose not to have children, the potential always exists. Homosexual unions, OTOH, explicitly deny the possibility of children being raised by both biological parent. Study after study has shown that children without both natural parents in the home are much more likely to become criminals. As the State is responsible for protecting the public at large, they have a vested interest in preventing the formation of criminals, and is hence justified in giving married couples special privileges as opposed to gay unions.
This is what people aren't getting. Marital status is afforded to the union of a man and a woman precisely because it is a relationship unlike homosexual unions, and even heterosexual dating. Marriage contains an element of committment and selfless service which is both beneficial to society and worthy of respect. Even if a couple never bears children, the experience of learning to live with someone fundamentally different contributes to a person's character and improves society in general. While men and women may marry out of lust, such is generally the exception. Homosexual unions, OTOH, are rooted not in self-sacrifice and community service, but rather in mutual selfishness; their sole aim is to secure the object of lust for their participants. This is neither commendable nor deserving of respect.
Unfortunately, most people don't make this distinction. It is as if gays want to have the legitimacy society affords married couples without making the corresponding sacrifices married couples make. It's not a matter of unfair discrimination, but rather recognizing merit. If you can't make a lifelong commitment to a person of the opposite sex, through richer or poorer, through sickness and health, for better or worse, your union is simply not worthy of the same respect as someone who has made such a promise. No amount of redefining marriage will ever change this fact.
I used to own a Canon that bubblejet would tilt the paper slightly so that my images and documents would not only be offset, but crooked. And this was in 1998! Stupid HP just can't get it right, I guess...
Who would have thought the inability to line up a print head or feed straight would ever be thought of as a feature....
Well, I'll give you that one. I think I overreacted a little. HLL's do have a place - in fact, I'm using them right now.
What disturbs me is that I mistook you for the "assembly sucks" troll. I guess I got trolled.... but I do hate to hear programmers knock assembly simply because of some preconceived notions.
And assembly has come a long way since its inception. The macro processing facilities make it look more and more like a HLL every day.
Granted, it's not portable. Poorly written code can be a real pain to debug and maintain. But then, a well-coded piece of assembly is a thing of beauty. I've seen insertion sorts coded in 12 instructions. And the examples above - list traversal in 7, and binary tree traversal in 13 instructions, only bring home my point. No instruction is wasted, there's no overhead at all....
What it really comes down to is being open minded and picking the right tool for the job. Often times, the best language for the job is not necessarily the one you like best. The fundamental problem I often run into with HLL's is that the lack of language features makes implementing a particular algorithm very difficult, or in some cases, impossible (try building a linked list in VB?!). Even worse are the languages for which the algorithm can be implemented, but only by using a number of arcane language features and confusing constructs.
The timeless components of computer science
are the algorithms, not the languages. There isn't a an algorithm which can't be implemented in assembly, but there are many which can't be implemented in HLL's. There is a certain mental appeal to working with a language in which the only restrictions are the physical limits of the machine.
With assembly, I trade portability and increased development time for the assurance that I can implement any algorithm necessary. With HLL's, I trade some fundamental algorithms for the ability to write portable code, and get it done on time.
Yeah, it's a trade off. But I think I've learned to refrain from the One True Way(tm). When you have a choice of languages, its important to recognize the relative strengths and weaknesses. When you don't have a choice, at least you are in a better position if you understand the underlying algorithms.
As an aside, I've had to write applications in assembly language. At first, I thought it was going to be a nightmare. After a while, though, I learned that it was much easier if I obeyed a few simple rules:
Pass arguments in registers; if you run out of registers, refactor your code.
A function must preserve every register not used to pass a parameter.
Always return a value in eax, a pointer in ebx.
A linear list is an area of memory whose first word contains the count of the items in the list.
A linked list node is 2 or 3 words and the first word always points to the data. The second node points forward (for single link), and the third node backward. This allows a doubly-linked list to use the same forward traversal function that a singly-linked list uses.
Use the first word of a buffer to store the size of the buffer. This allows you to safely write routines using the movsb and
stosb instructions rather than coding a loop. Since these objects determine their size at runtime, they reduce the potential for array out of bounds errors.
Write a reusable memory allocator.
Write a reusable string library.
Write macros for system calls. That way when you change OS'es, you can simply use a different set of macros.
Following these rules, I've got just about the same functionality of an HLL without the overhead.
When it comes to matters of public policy, yes, the majority should rule. The problem with "gay marriage" as opposed to "civil unions" is that a minority group has essentially dictated public policy to the majority. While the state might not rightfully interfere with the private lives of its citizens, it does have the right to place restrictions on a person's public life.
The fundamental issue is not discrimination, but rather promotion. As traditional marriages serve as the foundation for future societies, the state has a very real and significant interest in promoting their well-being. A person unable to commit to the traditional marriage and its attendant responsibilities has no right to claim married status. In this case, the State of Massachussetts failed to convince the judges that gay "marriage" is fundamentally different from traditional marriage, and that this difference is the reason why one is recognized and worthy of recognition, while the other is not.
Gay "marriages" simply cannot function as a source of new citizens, nor does their dissolution have devastating financial and public consequences. They haven't made the same kind of committment that I have to my wife, and therefore don't deserve the same recognition.
And how am I being high-and-mighty if I point out the obvious? (or what should be obvious to anyone who has used assembly for a while).
Or better, what part of:
traverse: cmp esi,0
je endpoint
mov eax,[esi]
call ebx
mov esi,[esi + 4]
jmp traverse
endpoint: ret
don't you understand? This is a standard linked list traversal in assembly: it takes a pointer to a function as an argument in ebx, the head node of the list in esi, and it will traverse the entire list, calling the function in ebx for every node in the list. It's seven instructions, and it will work for any datatype.
In C++, the above would probably be written as:
template <class T>
class Node{ T data; class Node * next;
};
template <class T>
void traverse (void (*func)(T),Node * list){
T tmp; while (list){ tmp = list->data;
func(tmp);
list = list->next;
} }
So, in C++, I've got to write 14 lines, where in assembly I have to write 7.
How is that harder?
How is this cliche? I can demonstrate with examples. I'm not repeating some tired old mantra - I've spent a considerable amount of thought on this. At one point in my career, I couldn't use anything but assembly; the experience taught me that assembly is a very versatile language, provided one follows some very basic coding standards (register usage, calling conventions, etc...)
It never ceases to amaze me the number of programmers who can't or won't write in assembly, almost to the point where it's a superstition. Perhaps they had a bad experience, so they've written it off. Perhaps they learned computer programming rather than computer science.
I understand assembly can present some difficulties. There are definitely some situations in which the project requirements would exclude its use - and this can be said for any language - but to say that data structures are more difficult to implement in assembly is more an indication of ignorance than enlightenment. Any data structure with a heavy dependence upon pointers is almost always easier to implement in assembly.
I'll leave you with this, though:
traverse:cmp esi,0
je breturn
push esi
mov esi,[esi + 4]
call traverse
pop esi
mov eax,[esi]
call ebx
push esi
mov esi,[esi + 8]
call traverse
pop esi
breturn: ret
What this does is left as an exercise for the reader, but its very close to what you mentioned in the original post...
an RB tree or an A* search an assembly would be a huge pain in the ass, if you ask me.
I know 2 assembly languages (IBM mainframe and PC), as well as C/C++, Java, VB, etc... What I've found is that when it comes to complex data structures, it is often easier to code them in assembly than in a HLL. For one, assembly is truly generic - I don't have to tell the compiler what kind of pointer I'm using - a pointer is a pointer. Anyone who relies on compiler type safety to catch programming errors probably shouldn't be writting code in the first place. If you don't know what's going into a list, I gaurantee you won't be able to figure out what comes out.
Sorry if it sounds like a flame, but you're just a little naive. While I wouldn't use assembly for everything (nor call it the One True Language(tm)), I recognize that it has some strengths. Data structures such as stacks and queues, and even trees, are trivially implemented in assembler, where to create a usable implementation in an HLL often requires substantially more time and effort.
Generally speaking, if you're working with pointers, you want to work as close to the machine level as possible. Believe me, I've hated C++ because of the level of semantic indirection - that is, I'm storing objects in a list, and I've forgotten whether an insert occurs before or after the current node. You never get this kind of problem with assembly.
This was the founding fathers' first fundamental mistake: They created a governmental structure in which liberty was shielded by the impotence of government institutions.
The second fundamental flaw was that they underestimated the manner in which special interest groups could manipulate society at large through the use of such "checks and balances". Witness, for example, the recent Massachussetts Supreme Court ruling on gay "marriage". In this case, the will of the people is simply irrelevant - a group of at most 12 judges has simply decided that regardless of the will of the people, Massachussetts is going to recognize same-sex "marriages".
It doesn't matter what you believe on the issue - the law could have been repealed through the legislative process. But it wasn't. Instead, a small minority have effectively forced their version of morality on the rest of the state through the use of the courts. It doesn't matter how you vote. The offense to your religion doesn't matter, either, because in this case "their" rights are considered more important than "your" rights.
The net result is that we no longer live in a true democracy, but rather, in a republic in which those with the ability to pervert justice can use the courts to thwart the will of the people. It doesn't matter what you and I think; what matters is what the judges on the Supreme Court think - they have been the de facto censors of public policy since the Kennedy days.
The degree of tracking which privacy advocates envision is simply impossible from a technical standpoint. Even if Moore's law holds, computers will never catch up with the data growth.
Consider the case in which every person in the US is assigned a 16 byte (128 bit) key, and every RFID pass (128bit) is registered with a central server:
Or about 3.3 TB per year, assuming that a person visits on average 7 "tracking points" per week. To locate a given entry using a binary search would, on average, require 37 accesses. Such a tracking program would more than likely put entries into a database, which would be an utter waste of time.
The brute-force algorithm for finding pattern matches is (O) = (N*M), where N and M are the lengths of the pattern and the search field, respectively. Because the notion of profiling is to identify criminals, we would first have to establish a link between a pattern and criminality. With 285 million people tracked, there would be 104 billion activity records gathered per year. There are (N * (N/2)) possible patterns in an array of length N, thus, there would be 5.41 pentillion patterns in the aforementioned database. To locate all* of these, we would have to do the same 5.41 pentillion comparisons, and take up an additional 5.41 pentillion * 32 = 173.2 pentabytes of memory.
Furthermore, the fastest mainframes can only access about 100 records per second. At this rate, 85 billion records per year can be accessed. Thus, to profile every American would require 6.4 million years.
It just isn't feasible.
* - Yes, I realize that there are pattern matching algorithms which can find matches faster (against a known pattern), but the fundamental problem with profiling remains that law enforcement doesn't know for what they are looking. Thus, every pattern must be generated and correlated. But even given that they know what they are looking for, the sheer volume of data would render the system useless. To locate a non-trivial pattern of say 10 sequential significant events would require a lookup of at least ((365 logged events/person/year / 10 events = 36.5) * 285 million) = 10.4 billion record lookups. At.37s per lookup, that would take 3.848 billion seconds, or about 122 years in the theoretically best case!
They disconnect their antenna if they sense a surge to protect their circuitry.
While there might be a degree of truth to your statement, the fact is that any RFID device small enough to go undetected could not adequately insulate its antenna against a sufficiently large magnetic pulse. (An EMP from a thermonuclear blast could induce 1000 volts into a 1 mm long antenna. If a mechanical shock can produce such intense magnetic fields, how hard could it be to build an electromagnet which did the same for a very small location?)
Such a pulse could be easily created with an unshielded automotive ignition coil. Carrying a car battery and ignition coil is beyond the practical means of most shoplifters, but it is a rather trivial thing for a geek to build in his garage. So yes, they are protected against Billy Bob junior's science experiment, but not against a determined libertarian.
An RFID can easily be detected by something which detects changes in inductance, such as a metal detector. Once the general location is found, the aforementioned electromagnetic coil can be used to disable it. And even should the magnetic field fail to induce enough voltage into the antenna, the 80kV to 100kV from the coil would certainly do it.
I didn't say the explosion killed people directly. Think about what happens in the dead of winter when it's 40 below and the gas goes out for the winter...
No gas, no heat, no electricity. No electricity - no clean water.
It was estimated by the previous Bush administration that in the first Iraq war, 70,000 civilians died as a result of damage to infrastructure. Without clean water, electricity, and heat, disease runs rampant.
Granted, Safire's credibility may be suspect. But an explosion yielding 3 kilotons (especially from gas) isn't going to get fixed overnight. The Russians aren't saying how many died, if any, which makes me suspect that some did - after all, wouldn't they rather downplay the significance if they could?
Basically, the Soviets got suckered because they outsourced the software and chips to US firms.
Doesn't anybody see the similarity between what companies are doing now (with outsourcing) and the Soviet Union did 20 years ago?
And in case you're wondering, this is why Congress is afraid of cyber-terrorism - we literally used computers to kill people in Siberia in the 80's. Perhaps they are scared that the same thing could happen here?
I realize the fears of cyber-terrorism are overblown, but it is a real threat. The threat isn't from outside hackers, but rather, from insiders who plant trojan software programs and sabotage hardware. What would happen if a nuclear power plant computer was programmed to silently vent small quatities of nuclear waste over a period of months or years? By the time it would be noticed, it would be too late to avert disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a 700 Watt microwave.
A P4 is 100+ Watts. So yes, it would take a little longer, but it could definately fry an egg.
I've got XP, and it could be demonstrated that this doesn't work correctly. Sometimes it pops up the box, sometimes not. And it consistently ignores my requests to "Take no Action" and "Do this every time a CD is inserted". Why can't the system just shut up?!
Yes, I know my "local area network" cable is unplugged. It was never plugged in in the first place, you idiot. Stupid Microsoft.
IIRC, Autoplay has been shipped in MS operating systems since 1996. TVI has been sitting on this for eight years. Which means, of course, that if the statute of limitations hasn't expired, they will be severely limited in the remedies they are allowed to seek. It's not like this escaped their attention for 8 years.
Of course, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that even if TVI wins the case, they won't be able to collect damages for past infringement because they clearly did not demonstrate "due diligence" in protecting their patent. They might end up with a compulsory license agreement; or to avoid infringement, Microsoft OS's may end up simply popping up a dialog box ("Would you like to play this CD?") when a disk is inserted.
Yeah, I'd put TVI at net loss on this one. Their lawyers are going to make more money than they will.
Once again, it's the human factors. The primary problem with digital evidence is that most police departments aren't savvy enough to build a system which has the equivalent of an electronic-chain-of-custody.
I know a locksmith. He tells me that even the most difficult, secure locks wouldn't take him more than 5 minutes to pick. On average, it takes him about 30 seconds to turn a lock. If he was left alone next to the evidence locker, he could probably swap out physical evidence in a matter of minutes.
But I doubt this will ever happen. The police are usually very good about physical security. A locksmith has a slim-to-none chance of being left alone with his tools next to the evidence locker. But there is absolutely nothing which would prevent a corrupt cop from bringing in a (corrupt) locksmith on the graveyard shift to swap out physical evidence.
Even with correct chain-of-custody, it still comes down to a matter of trusting humans. While checksumming and encrypting methods can make it more difficult to fake digital evidence, they do not eliminate the fundamental difficulty of electronic chain-of-custody. Just because it's digital doesn't mean it can be trusted. The only thing that these methods provide is the assurance that the images were not altered by a non-technical party. They do nothing to show that the images weren't outright fakes in the first place, or that a corrupt cop didn't employ the services of a cracker (the digital equivalent of a locksmith).
Isn't this just Yet Another Microsoft Security Hole? How is this news? Move along folks, nothing to see here....
Sometimes I wonder about the slashdot crowd (Okay, I wonder all the time). Don't we ever learn? Do we really expect a company with a financial incentive to release software prematurely to produce good code?
Wake up folks! This isn't news. This is business as usual for Microsoft. It shouldn't surprise us because, after all, this is the same Microsoft that successfully convinced the rest of the world that system crashes are a normal part of computer operation.
MS systems are buggy, crash-prone, and insecure. Don't act surprised, just deal with it.
Um, yeah. Well, if they're encrypted, you either:
I think what he meant to say was checksummed and encrypted. While this does provide a reasonable degree of security against tampering, it in no way establishes that the pictures were real in the first place. It is a very trivial matter to write a CD today with a date of 01/01/1998.
Yes, checksumming does provide a reasonable degree of security provided other safegaurds are taken. However, defeating this scheme is still too simple. Consider:
- Murder takes place in 1998. Detective has a hunch that suspect X has done it, but can't prove it.
- It's 2004 - suspect X is arrested on an unrelated charge, and fingerprinted.
- Said detective takes pictures of X's fingerprints.
- He then sets the clock on his PC back to 1998, a few days after the murder.
- Then he downloads the fingerprints he's just photographed to the machine, and burns the photos to CD. When he's done, he sets the PC's date back to the current date.
- Said detective files the freshly minted CD in the 1998 storage locker.
A few days later, the detective suggests to his subordinate that he run X's fingerprints against the crime-scene database. Lo and behold! - suspect X's fingerprints match those found at the crime scene!Tell me I'm more secure now. Evidence fakery has been around since mankind learned to lie. The digital age just makes it more convenient.
In theory, your premise is valid. But it's not that simple. One of the biggest problems with the laize-fare ideology is that it fails to account for differences in economic base. For example, to live comfortably in the Chicago area requires an income almost double that of downstate Illinois - this is primarily due to the high cost of real estate. I simply don't have the option of charging less because otherwise I couldn't afford the rent.
But the bigger problem is outright anti-American discrimination. Overseas outsourcing has become trendy in CEO-land, and the big corps are doing it to at least give the appearance of being more profitable.
But in reality, it's not just about the money. There's a double standard for the American worker:
The problem is that it has everything to do with perception, and nothing to do with merit. Yes, there are good Indian programmers. But American programmers risk downsizing not because they are greedy, but simply because they can't live in America on anything less. And even if a programmer was willing to cut his costs and move to the sticks, most corporations wouldn't hire him.
That wasn't the starting salary. That was what a manager could make after being with the company 5 years. Presumably, by that time one would be managing a few stores - though maybe not quite a district manager.
But I think the point is still valid. One can spend 5 years working in food service, or 5 years in college, and in the end your salary is more indicative of the revenue you bring to the company rather than your level of education.
While my life is certainly enriched by my education, and I do enjoy my career, I could have done just as well without a college degree, financially speaking. The problem I have is that society sees a college degree as a means to a financial end rather than an end in itself. Someone who's just seeking to get rich would do just as well, or better, without college.
The myth that a college degree is going to gaurantee wealth, or the lack thereof will deny someone wealth is just that - a myth. I know of many people without college degrees who have managed to find secure jobs and decent income by merely sticking with something and working hard. If you like to learn, and enjoy the arts and sciences, or just want to become better educated, by all means, go to college. But don't think that you will be buying job security; you won't.
After all, when was the last time you heard of construction workers getting outsourced....
I had a similar case with a lease. There were some rather egregious clauses - for example, if I was even accused of a crime I could be evicted before trial. What I did was to simply cross out the offending sentences, initial them, sign and return the lease.
The landlord accepted the lease, no questions asked.
Unless the company is really rigorous, in most cases you can simply strike out the clauses you find egregious, sign and return the contract. Most of the time, these kinds of employment agreements are simply part of boilerplate procedure - the company simply buys the forms in bulk from a business services reseller and never bothers to review the details. Keep a copy indicating your modified agreement with the company, and you'll be home free.
IIRC, and IANAL, but I was under the impression that unless you signed an employment contract for a specific time period, an employer can fire you for any or no reason whatsoever.
It's what they call at will employment.
So unless there wasn't an "at will" clause in the employment contract (and almost all contracts have them), he doesn't gain anything by signing it. If he does sign it, he still doesn't have any job security, and he's just given the company all of his ideas.
First, they aren't expected to live off this. These jobs are expected to be filled by part time workers - house wives, students, etc - to provide them with a little extra income. But should a person with any shred of ambition decide to make a career in fast food, they can end up drawing a larger salary than someone who spends that same amount of time in college.
In 1998, I was asked if I wanted a job making 70k a year. At first I did - until I found out that it was managing a Taco Bell. The stigma of fast food management keeps a lot of qualified people out of the field, hence, someone able to do it successfully can make quite a bit of money.
One of the things which irks me still is that I bought the whole "college is the way to success" bs back in high school. I know people younger than me, without a degree, who make comparable wages simply because they found a niche position in the economy - they took the jobs that no one else wanted and stuck with them. Trust me, it's a lot easier to move up into management when the business has a high turnover rate. Some people I've known have been made managers by force of longevity - they are the only ones who have stayed long enough to learn the whole business.
The problem is not a lack of privacy, but lack of personal dignity. In the late 90's, the FBI paid a sniper to shoot the wife and infant son of a man suspected of trying to sell a sawed off shotgun (Ruby Ridge). His alleged crime was attempting to sell one of his old shotguns in which the barrel was a mere two inches too short. He had been arraigned and given a court date. Then the FBI changed the court date without informing him, and when he failed to show up in court, they raided his place.
They didn't need his biometric information. It had been speculated that he was a white separatist - in other words, someone who had a different view of race relations than the politically correct multi-culti. His solution to the problem of racial tension was to merely move away from it.
And for this, his wife was killed - because, of course, the FBI thought that she was the ringleader in an illegal weapons trade. Never mind any notion of justice, fair trials, or whatnot.
Privacy is just a red herring folks. Stories like Ruby Ridge happen all the time, but the media attaches to a "privacy rights" story to keep things like this out of the public consciousness.
Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet, but do not possess. You kill and envy, but cannot obtain; you fight and wage war. You do not possess because you do not ask. You ask but do not receive, because you asked wrongly, to spend on your passions.
James 4,1:3
Violence has been around since Biblical times, and I don't think video games have, nor will they ever have, anything to do with it.
Violence springs not from playing, but from unfulfilled desires or irrational fears. If anything, video games provide a healthy outlet for working out aggression in a non-destructive manner. Only someone already mentally ill would fail to see the difference between killing a mass of pixels in a video game and killing in real life.
Video games, OTOH, provide a much needed escape from reality. Much like drugs and alcohol, except that they are not addicting (or only trivially so, compared to drugs such as heroin and alcohol). Furthermore, they don't have the negative effect on health that illegal drugs do. What I find interesting is that no one is mentioning the vast number of kids who chose video games over alcohol and drugs. Doesn't anyone else see video games as a tool in the "War On Drugs"? While it is easy to show a correlation between drug use and violence, no such correlation has been shown for video games.
My suspicion is that the video-games-cause-violence theories come from selfish parents who would rather blame a video game than take responsibility for their children's development.
Instead, they are actively trying to destroy the notion of marriage as a union between a man and woman. It isn't about rights anymore, its about forcing the homosexual lifestyle and viewpoint on the rest of society. The time is coming when a faithful marriage will be seen as old-fashioned, merely a formal indication that two people are sleeping together. Once sacredness has been stripped from marriage, the reason for conferring special priviledges and legal rights to spouses will likewise cease. This has nothing to do with being treated as human and everything to do with destroying marriage as a social institution.
Again, I'd have to take you to task for this. While a married couple may choose not to have children, the potential always exists. Homosexual unions, OTOH, explicitly deny the possibility of children being raised by both biological parent. Study after study has shown that children without both natural parents in the home are much more likely to become criminals. As the State is responsible for protecting the public at large, they have a vested interest in preventing the formation of criminals, and is hence justified in giving married couples special privileges as opposed to gay unions.
This is what people aren't getting. Marital status is afforded to the union of a man and a woman precisely because it is a relationship unlike homosexual unions, and even heterosexual dating. Marriage contains an element of committment and selfless service which is both beneficial to society and worthy of respect. Even if a couple never bears children, the experience of learning to live with someone fundamentally different contributes to a person's character and improves society in general. While men and women may marry out of lust, such is generally the exception. Homosexual unions, OTOH, are rooted not in self-sacrifice and community service, but rather in mutual selfishness; their sole aim is to secure the object of lust for their participants. This is neither commendable nor deserving of respect.
Unfortunately, most people don't make this distinction. It is as if gays want to have the legitimacy society affords married couples without making the corresponding sacrifices married couples make. It's not a matter of unfair discrimination, but rather recognizing merit. If you can't make a lifelong commitment to a person of the opposite sex, through richer or poorer, through sickness and health, for better or worse, your union is simply not worthy of the same respect as someone who has made such a promise. No amount of redefining marriage will ever change this fact.
I used to own a Canon that bubblejet would tilt the paper slightly so that my images and documents would not only be offset, but crooked. And this was in 1998! Stupid HP just can't get it right, I guess...
Who would have thought the inability to line up a print head or feed straight would ever be thought of as a feature....
Well, I'll give you that one. I think I overreacted a little. HLL's do have a place - in fact, I'm using them right now.
What disturbs me is that I mistook you for the "assembly sucks" troll. I guess I got trolled.... but I do hate to hear programmers knock assembly simply because of some preconceived notions.
And assembly has come a long way since its inception. The macro processing facilities make it look more and more like a HLL every day.
Granted, it's not portable. Poorly written code can be a real pain to debug and maintain. But then, a well-coded piece of assembly is a thing of beauty. I've seen insertion sorts coded in 12 instructions. And the examples above - list traversal in 7, and binary tree traversal in 13 instructions, only bring home my point. No instruction is wasted, there's no overhead at all....
What it really comes down to is being open minded and picking the right tool for the job. Often times, the best language for the job is not necessarily the one you like best. The fundamental problem I often run into with HLL's is that the lack of language features makes implementing a particular algorithm very difficult, or in some cases, impossible (try building a linked list in VB?!). Even worse are the languages for which the algorithm can be implemented, but only by using a number of arcane language features and confusing constructs.
The timeless components of computer science are the algorithms, not the languages. There isn't a an algorithm which can't be implemented in assembly, but there are many which can't be implemented in HLL's. There is a certain mental appeal to working with a language in which the only restrictions are the physical limits of the machine.
With assembly, I trade portability and increased development time for the assurance that I can implement any algorithm necessary. With HLL's, I trade some fundamental algorithms for the ability to write portable code, and get it done on time.
Yeah, it's a trade off. But I think I've learned to refrain from the One True Way(tm). When you have a choice of languages, its important to recognize the relative strengths and weaknesses. When you don't have a choice, at least you are in a better position if you understand the underlying algorithms.
As an aside, I've had to write applications in assembly language. At first, I thought it was going to be a nightmare. After a while, though, I learned that it was much easier if I obeyed a few simple rules:
- Pass arguments in registers; if you run out of registers, refactor your code.
- A function must preserve every register not used to pass a parameter.
- Always return a value in eax, a pointer in ebx.
- A linear list is an area of memory whose first word contains the count of the items in the list.
- A linked list node is 2 or 3 words and the first word always points to the data. The second node points forward (for single link), and the third node backward. This allows a doubly-linked list to use the same forward traversal function that a singly-linked list uses.
- Use the first word of a buffer to store the size of the buffer. This allows you to safely write routines using the movsb and
stosb instructions rather than coding a loop. Since these objects determine their size at runtime, they reduce the potential for array out of bounds errors.
- Write a reusable memory allocator.
- Write a reusable string library.
- Write macros for system calls. That way when you change OS'es, you can simply use a different set of macros.
Following these rules, I've got just about the same functionality of an HLL without the overhead.When it comes to matters of public policy, yes, the majority should rule. The problem with "gay marriage" as opposed to "civil unions" is that a minority group has essentially dictated public policy to the majority. While the state might not rightfully interfere with the private lives of its citizens, it does have the right to place restrictions on a person's public life.
The fundamental issue is not discrimination, but rather promotion. As traditional marriages serve as the foundation for future societies, the state has a very real and significant interest in promoting their well-being. A person unable to commit to the traditional marriage and its attendant responsibilities has no right to claim married status. In this case, the State of Massachussetts failed to convince the judges that gay "marriage" is fundamentally different from traditional marriage, and that this difference is the reason why one is recognized and worthy of recognition, while the other is not. Gay "marriages" simply cannot function as a source of new citizens, nor does their dissolution have devastating financial and public consequences. They haven't made the same kind of committment that I have to my wife, and therefore don't deserve the same recognition.
What part was anecdotal?
And how am I being high-and-mighty if I point out the obvious? (or what should be obvious to anyone who has used assembly for a while).
Or better, what part of:
traverse: cmp esi,0
je endpoint
mov eax,[esi]
call ebx
mov esi,[esi + 4]
jmp traverse
endpoint: ret
don't you understand? This is a standard linked list traversal in assembly: it takes a pointer to a function as an argument in ebx, the head node of the list in esi, and it will traverse the entire list, calling the function in ebx for every node in the list. It's seven instructions, and it will work for any datatype.
In C++, the above would probably be written as:
template <class T>
class Node{
T data;
class Node * next;
};
template <class T>
void traverse (void (*func)(T),Node * list){
T tmp;
while (list){
tmp = list->data;
func(tmp);
list = list->next;
}
}
So, in C++, I've got to write 14 lines, where in assembly I have to write 7.
How is that harder?
How is this cliche? I can demonstrate with examples. I'm not repeating some tired old mantra - I've spent a considerable amount of thought on this. At one point in my career, I couldn't use anything but assembly; the experience taught me that assembly is a very versatile language, provided one follows some very basic coding standards (register usage, calling conventions, etc...)
It never ceases to amaze me the number of programmers who can't or won't write in assembly, almost to the point where it's a superstition. Perhaps they had a bad experience, so they've written it off. Perhaps they learned computer programming rather than computer science.
I understand assembly can present some difficulties. There are definitely some situations in which the project requirements would exclude its use - and this can be said for any language - but to say that data structures are more difficult to implement in assembly is more an indication of ignorance than enlightenment. Any data structure with a heavy dependence upon pointers is almost always easier to implement in assembly.
I'll leave you with this, though:
traverse:cmp esi,0
je breturn
push esi
mov esi,[esi + 4]
call traverse
pop esi
mov eax,[esi]
call ebx
push esi
mov esi,[esi + 8]
call traverse
pop esi
breturn: ret
What this does is left as an exercise for the reader, but its very close to what you mentioned in the original post...
IDIOT! so bad its not even funny.
an RB tree or an A* search an assembly would be a huge pain in the ass, if you ask me.I know 2 assembly languages (IBM mainframe and PC), as well as C/C++, Java, VB, etc... What I've found is that when it comes to complex data structures, it is often easier to code them in assembly than in a HLL. For one, assembly is truly generic - I don't have to tell the compiler what kind of pointer I'm using - a pointer is a pointer. Anyone who relies on compiler type safety to catch programming errors probably shouldn't be writting code in the first place. If you don't know what's going into a list, I gaurantee you won't be able to figure out what comes out.
Sorry if it sounds like a flame, but you're just a little naive. While I wouldn't use assembly for everything (nor call it the One True Language(tm)), I recognize that it has some strengths. Data structures such as stacks and queues, and even trees, are trivially implemented in assembler, where to create a usable implementation in an HLL often requires substantially more time and effort.
Generally speaking, if you're working with pointers, you want to work as close to the machine level as possible. Believe me, I've hated C++ because of the level of semantic indirection - that is, I'm storing objects in a list, and I've forgotten whether an insert occurs before or after the current node. You never get this kind of problem with assembly.
mistrust of the institution of government.
This was the founding fathers' first fundamental mistake: They created a governmental structure in which liberty was shielded by the impotence of government institutions.
The second fundamental flaw was that they underestimated the manner in which special interest groups could manipulate society at large through the use of such "checks and balances". Witness, for example, the recent Massachussetts Supreme Court ruling on gay "marriage". In this case, the will of the people is simply irrelevant - a group of at most 12 judges has simply decided that regardless of the will of the people, Massachussetts is going to recognize same-sex "marriages".
It doesn't matter what you believe on the issue - the law could have been repealed through the legislative process. But it wasn't. Instead, a small minority have effectively forced their version of morality on the rest of the state through the use of the courts. It doesn't matter how you vote. The offense to your religion doesn't matter, either, because in this case "their" rights are considered more important than "your" rights.
The net result is that we no longer live in a true democracy, but rather, in a republic in which those with the ability to pervert justice can use the courts to thwart the will of the people. It doesn't matter what you and I think; what matters is what the judges on the Supreme Court think - they have been the de facto censors of public policy since the Kennedy days.
The degree of tracking which privacy advocates envision is simply impossible from a technical standpoint. Even if Moore's law holds, computers will never catch up with the data growth.
Consider the case in which every person in the US is assigned a 16 byte (128 bit) key, and every RFID pass (128bit) is registered with a central server:
285,000,000 * 365 * 32 (record size) = 3,328,800,000,000
Or about 3.3 TB per year, assuming that a person visits on average 7 "tracking points" per week. To locate a given entry using a binary search would, on average, require 37 accesses. Such a tracking program would more than likely put entries into a database, which would be an utter waste of time.
The brute-force algorithm for finding pattern matches is (O) = (N*M), where N and M are the lengths of the pattern and the search field, respectively. Because the notion of profiling is to identify criminals, we would first have to establish a link between a pattern and criminality. With 285 million people tracked, there would be 104 billion activity records gathered per year. There are (N * (N/2)) possible patterns in an array of length N, thus, there would be 5.41 pentillion patterns in the aforementioned database. To locate all* of these, we would have to do the same 5.41 pentillion comparisons, and take up an additional 5.41 pentillion * 32 = 173.2 pentabytes of memory.
Furthermore, the fastest mainframes can only access about 100 records per second. At this rate, 85 billion records per year can be accessed. Thus, to profile every American would require 6.4 million years.
It just isn't feasible.
* - Yes, I realize that there are pattern matching algorithms which can find matches faster (against a known pattern), but the fundamental problem with profiling remains that law enforcement doesn't know for what they are looking. Thus, every pattern must be generated and correlated. But even given that they know what they are looking for, the sheer volume of data would render the system useless. To locate a non-trivial pattern of say 10 sequential significant events would require a lookup of at least ((365 logged events/person/year / 10 events = 36.5) * 285 million) = 10.4 billion record lookups. At .37s per lookup, that would take 3.848 billion seconds, or about 122 years in the theoretically best case!
They disconnect their antenna if they sense a surge to protect their circuitry.
While there might be a degree of truth to your statement, the fact is that any RFID device small enough to go undetected could not adequately insulate its antenna against a sufficiently large magnetic pulse. (An EMP from a thermonuclear blast could induce 1000 volts into a 1 mm long antenna. If a mechanical shock can produce such intense magnetic fields, how hard could it be to build an electromagnet which did the same for a very small location?)
Such a pulse could be easily created with an unshielded automotive ignition coil. Carrying a car battery and ignition coil is beyond the practical means of most shoplifters, but it is a rather trivial thing for a geek to build in his garage. So yes, they are protected against Billy Bob junior's science experiment, but not against a determined libertarian.
An RFID can easily be detected by something which detects changes in inductance, such as a metal detector. Once the general location is found, the aforementioned electromagnetic coil can be used to disable it. And even should the magnetic field fail to induce enough voltage into the antenna, the 80kV to 100kV from the coil would certainly do it.
I didn't say the explosion killed people directly. Think about what happens in the dead of winter when it's 40 below and the gas goes out for the winter...
No gas, no heat, no electricity. No electricity - no clean water.
It was estimated by the previous Bush administration that in the first Iraq war, 70,000 civilians died as a result of damage to infrastructure. Without clean water, electricity, and heat, disease runs rampant.
Granted, Safire's credibility may be suspect. But an explosion yielding 3 kilotons (especially from gas) isn't going to get fixed overnight. The Russians aren't saying how many died, if any, which makes me suspect that some did - after all, wouldn't they rather downplay the significance if they could?
Basically, the Soviets got suckered because they outsourced the software and chips to US firms.
Doesn't anybody see the similarity between what companies are doing now (with outsourcing) and the Soviet Union did 20 years ago?
And in case you're wondering, this is why Congress is afraid of cyber-terrorism - we literally used computers to kill people in Siberia in the 80's. Perhaps they are scared that the same thing could happen here?
I realize the fears of cyber-terrorism are overblown, but it is a real threat. The threat isn't from outside hackers, but rather, from insiders who plant trojan software programs and sabotage hardware. What would happen if a nuclear power plant computer was programmed to silently vent small quatities of nuclear waste over a period of months or years? By the time it would be noticed, it would be too late to avert disaster.