"And it is overall not a pretty picture."
Why not, they are prospering pretty well overall - don't you think?
I agree that to the inventors of IP it's a hassle, but the argument that patents in it's current form are a benefit from an overall systemic point of view has yet to be provided.
Imho it would probably be more effective overall if we had no IP protection at all. The argument that no-one would take the financial risk to innovate does not hold - if I look at the local Chinese market where someone steals a jewellery design it kind of seems a proven point to me.
I don't think I can fully agree. I think software development may be hard, but that's never the main reason projects fail. The main reason projects fail in my 10+ years experience is because of product managers, not coders.
Product managers I have seen (and I have seen many) often don't know zilch about technology, but even worse they usually also don't know much about their market, target audience/users, User Interfaces, project management, etc. Consequently they simply don't know what they want and aren't able to explain it in one coherent paragraph of sentences. Once they would be able to explain it, the actual coding would be half as bad.
So if this guy complains that their projects back in the days at salon went bad, I'm not suprised. He's not a coder after all, he was a typical clueless product manager - started out as a journalist and suddenly he was responsible for a type of product he knew nothing about: CMSs, in addition to having no other qualification in software development or a related area (UI design, project management).
So am I surprised this project didn't succeed? LOL, of course not.
You wouldn't let a journalist build a space shuttle or a car now would you? But software? Sure, software is easy, anyone can do it. In the end, it's probably not harder than building a car, but not easier either. it just takes proper skills for all roles in the team, is all.
The problem I see here and that most readers seem to be overlooking, is that the RIAA/music industry representatives "helped" the police to decide wether a user actually shared copyrighted content.
So assume you you share, but only free/legal stuff. But you share a lot, so at first you are on their radar. Then some music industry rep searches through the stuff you shared to determine if it's legal or not. Assume he is wrong (on purpose or not).
As a result, the police will break down your door with a search warrant, seize all your computers, CDs, and DVDs as evidence and it will take months for you to see them back. In the meantime, try to prove that you are innocent. Even if they eventually figure out that you are innocent, they have effectively scared you from using P2P sharing (regardless of legal content).
That because the music industry isn't only hurt by the legal songs shared, they are hurt and afraid by the principle of P2P distribution, it fundamentally challenges not only their business model but their whole "raison d'etre".
That's what is really outrageous about this action.
Yeah, but would they admit not finding evidence or would the AP owner have to prove it? In any case, you can be sure they'd seize all his IT equipment and burned CDs/DVDs and it would be gone for months while the investigation is in process...
I can see that being a big issue with fon.com for example
Yup and how many people know who first crossed the Atlantic in a plane? Charles Lindbergh? Nope, he was the first to fly from NY to Paris nonstop.
The first to cross the Atlantic were John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, two british chaps.
IMHO they didn't even do the quantifiable part very well. For example they should have checked how well the browsers fit Apple human interface guidelines, which would in part reflect the overall "browsing experience".
Things like klicks in the URL address bar:
single klick: place the cursor
double klick: mark a word
triple klick: mark the whole line (URL)
Or drag-n-drop support:
Can I drag-n-drop a URL address or HTML file item onto an open browser window? Onto the browser icon in the task bar or on the desktop? Can I mark text in a HTML window and drag it to an open editor window? Is text from HTML tables tab separated? etc.
All in all a pretty shallow review, but then it's only MacWorld, and not a serious computer magazine suited for geeks...
I'm surpirsed nobody mentioned CERN yet, a huge kick-ass particle accelerator among many things and the birthplace of the WWW by the way.
A must-see for any self-respected geek!
While I agree with your analysis of the users, I don't agree with your conclusion.
IMHO the mere possibility that everyone could take a look at the source would force the companies to clean it up. It's not necessary that everyone actually can understand it. I'm sure computer magazines would take over that part and we would have ratings based on source code quality, it would just be another parameter in the evaluation process of software packages.
Of course, software makers don't want others to be able to look behind their curtains, this would prevent them from selling their overhyped crappy shit. So it's never going to happen (copyright issues, IP theft, etc. aside).
So I think it's going to stay a good argument of Open Source software packages that actually do produce quality code (not all OS software is), because they give away the source anyway. IMHO, this is a good thing, since being able to say "what you get is what you see" will remain an advantage of Open Source (I don't think the author was arguing for open source, just for more transparency/visibility).
In that case it would be a cool hack to send the trojanned machine a windows message saying "Your machine got hacked and trojanned! Secure it!" and then sending it some kind of ping-of-death so it freezes in exactly such a way that the above windows message can be seen but nothing works anymore (but no BSOD, since we want the user to see the message).
That would really drive the point home with the machines user to fix his system (and it would keep the machine from spewing more spam).
And I would not consider that hurting since neither the user nor his machine would take any permanent damage.
Civil disobedience also means that you are willing to accept the consequences of your illegal or potentially illegal activities.
Even more than that. Civil disobedience means that you explicitly break a law that you consider wrong, and do so in public or with a maximum of publicity and turn yourself in. The point is you want everyone to know that you broke the law because you consider it wrong, because you want it changed.
This means you are ready to accept any actions (prison, etc.) on the authorities part.
Read some books about Gandhi to understand how the principle works.
Yeah but can't we do something about it? AFAIK, in contrast to email that comes in via someone elses open relay, a windows messaging request is a direct connection, so it's possible to get the senders IP adress.
Instead of firewalling the port, hack a small script that listens on the port and launches a "countermeasures" against the source IP adress.
Would some kind Windows hacker please program this?!
Yes I am aware that there may be legal implications, I'm just thinking about the tech here. That's why I'm saying countermeasures and not counterattacks, e.g. some kind of teergrube
Yeah exactly. In the company I work for, the manager chose to ignore the programmers, techs and sysadmins decision (which, not out of coincidence, were all for the same product) and went for another because it looked so cute. Regardless to say the thing turned out to be a complete crap (and lots of money wasted).
Luckily the managers superiors saw his faults and fired him eventually (but not before the damage was already done). But the worst part is that the replacement they hired is just as bad.
So I cannot agree with the article, it should read instead:
Increasingly incompetent managers are creeping their way into important projects. Considering that most good managers are pretty bad at security decisions, bad managers with roles in important projects are guaranteed to doom the world to oblivion.
Indeed it changes everything, but not for the better. In some urban areas WiFi is already close to unusable due to the number of participants, or at least the effective bandwidth per participant slows down to a crawl.
If there is an easy and cheap way to boost the range by that magnitude, this will only speed up the process, since everyone will now not only pollute the airspace of their direct neighbors but also 5 blocks away (their target are business customers offices).
It will be completely disruptive indeed, but of WiFi communications. Imagine 50+ hosts on a single coax ethernet cable trying to get medium access with CSMA/CD. It just won't work anymore.
Out on the countryside it's another issue and I agree with you that in some cases this hopefully will help break up telecomm monopolies.
But I fear the first effects we'll see is Starbucks and McDo fight for the airspace on the neighboring parking lot/plaza.
I think its news because of the way blogger.com works (it works pretty stupid IMHO). blogger.com is a centralized approach, you give it an FTP account and password to your web folder on your machine and it generates the HTML for you.
This has the obvious advantage that simple web space will do for your, you don't need PHP MySQL, etc., all the code runs at blogger.com, it generates your (static) pages at its servers.
The downside is that you have to give them an account and password which makes them very attractive to crackers (I'm surprised it took so long). That's why I would never use blogger. And that's why it's news I guess.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not glad they are communists either, having been to Tibet myself. I completely agree with your asessment there.
I guess I was rather trying to ask hwo much people are willing to give up themselves as a price to pay for communism in another country to end. Or for the situation of others to improve.
You seem to express the hope that for you there would be not much change, because they would not come to your country.
To use your example, after the fall of the iron curtain a lot of german descendant Russians from Russia in fact came to Germany, because Germany has this strange law that grants them the right to do so and get German citizenship if they have german ancestors.
The net result is that some communities in Germany now have a population of up to 30% of these Russian Germans most of whom only speak russian and are unemployed. As you can imagine this is not appreciated by all and leads to conflicts.
So would you be willing to live in a community with 30% Chinese immigrants if that would mean no more communism in China?
Fortunately, in the US we have constitutional democracy. In other words, we have checks and balances to prevent the majority from violating constitutionally protected rights of minorities.
I'm glad you didn't say "working democracy". Check your facts: In the US, the voter turnout during national elections is pretty steady around 50%. That means if about 50% of the voters voted for the current government (Bush), he only has the votes of 25% of the population. In other words: a minority of the population sets the rules for the whole country.
In Germany for example, the voter turnout during national elections is pretty steady around 80%. While not perfect it seems a whole lot better than 50%, wouldn't you agree?
IMHO a working democracy requires citizens taking an (active) part in it.
Figuring out where the democracy is working better is left as an exercise for the reader.
Personally, I wholehartedly agree with your opinion on cencsorship though. On the other hand, if people are not even responsible enough to go vote, what will stupid lying hate propaganda do with them? Lead them to believe their country must start a war, perhaps?
If Natural Selection were intelligent then the dinosaurs would not be extinct...
Why not? This sound like intelligence requires some kind of morale?
If a process is just following rules and laws (of physics or your environment or whatever) then playing chess for example would be just a process too, by your definition. Similar to natural selection, no intelligence behind it.
You don't explain much the difference between process and intelligence, at least in terms of what intelligence would do or be in addition to process (only what it would not).
So where is the extra in intelligence, on top of or opposed to process then?
Now try to imagine what would happen if China wasn't a communist country that keeps its people in the country, but a "free" form of government that would let people leave if they wanted.
They would flood the US like a tsunami tidal wave, just like they flood into HongKong now. And they wouldn't care about green cards either (maybe an armada of illegal ships like in Neal Stephensons Snow Crash).
So aren't you glad that China is communist after all? And don't you hope it stays that way a little longer?
Essentially you have to create a binary that runs IF AND ONLY IF it is in the hardware enforced portion of the system.
I think you'd have to do more. As a simulated client scenario, imagine something like a Linux box with vmware and a Palladium-Windows running inside that.
Your binary is running in the secure palladium hardware. But somewhere this hardware returns a decoded unecrypted media stream back to the OS (for output), at which point it can be intercepted. If you want to avoid that interception, your palladium hardware has to pass the decrypted media stream directly to your media output hardware (e.g. sound and video card), in other words some kind of DMA, and you have to make sure the OS cannot access the memory of the media output hardware either.
The upshot of all this seems to me that you have to implement a lot of functionality directly in hardware, at which point you loose all the flexibility that a software OS on a general purpose computer gives you.
can be found in the Mesh AP Documentation.
Essentially all nodes that have an internet connection on eth0 broadcast the fact that they are a gateway into the real internet. This model extends by hops, out into the WIFI mesh network.
So all the system does, is route you to the internet via a path with the fewest hops. It does not provide interconnectivity between WIFI nodes themselves at all (they are all NATed). It does not provide a handover from one cell to the next as you move, so it just works for stationary nodes. It just offers a multi-hop VPN to the nearest AP with a "real" internet connection, adding a NAT layer with every hop out.
This is pretty cool, but still a far cry away from spontaneous self-organizing WIFI-only networks, where there is no "root gateway" and no hierarchy as in this case (which is one of the problems).
A short excerpt from the doc before it gets slashdotted:
The software provided, the "Mesh AP", is designed to be run on a node, eg a system designed to serve others. It has the dual purpose of also connecting in to the network. So even if you are just a repeater and using the software to reach the Internet, you are also providing an extension to the mesh and a standard DHCP cell for any non-mesh clients which wish to sign on.
The software boots, it then allocates itself an address, typically in the 10.x.x.x range. Initially the allocated address is random.
Then, it attempts to find an internet gateway, first probing 192.168.1.1/255.255.128.0 and then using a DHCP client on the Ethernet interface to try to sign on to a gateway. If no gateway can be found, the software considers that it has only wireless links and is a repeater-cell.
The cell starts an internal dns server and transparent web proxy on port 80 and 8080, a dhcp server is also started an a random class C network is picked in the range 192.168.128.0/255.255.128.0
Clients connecting to the dhcp cell are pointed to the wireless interface for default gateway and dns server. The dns server running on the repeater always returns the address of the gateway, no matter what domain name is resolved.
At this point, the node still cannot serve clients, but it will sign them on.
Meanwhile, the kernel AODV(11) module is loaded and the node then finds neighbour cells in its local range by sending/receiving UDP packets to the broadcast address.
Any cells within the mesh which are gateways, periodically broadcast a route to a bogus address which implies an internet gateway. This route is repeated outwards in a "ring" fashion as per the AODV protocol.
Any cell without a gateway receiving this address then attempts to establish a compressed encrypted IP-tunnel VPN via the "vtund" package. Compression uses LZO and encryption is blowfish. (ip ranges 172.16.x.x)
This IP tunnel could be over multiple hops to the destination gateway, AODV handles the optimised routing between linked cells. Eg, multi-hop routes eg.
The cell then switches all its outbound dns and ip traffic to go via this VPN gateway link. The DHCP configuration is also updated to now serve the remote gateway address as a dns server (gateway nodes run a real dns proxy) - Any clients who signed on before the link was found will forward traffic to the local cell which will proxy it via http proxy etc, any clients signing on after a gateway is found will receive the remote gateway details and will have full IP routing.
Any client signing directly on to a cell which has a local internet gateway will go directly via that gateway.
Threats need three things:
* weapons
* delivery system
* motivation
Most western democracies have the first two, but lack the third.
I would like to add that to use a nuke, you don't have to fire it. You can "use" it by threatening others quite well (worked in the cold war). A threat also implies that you are willing to fire. So I would say that countries who have the first two certainly have the third, in other words the motivation to "use" them, one way or another. And they do quite frequently, the US, China, India, Pakistan, etc. do it all the time (implicitly threatening).
Your statement is also wrong in another aspect: in fact, most "western" countries do not have nukes, even though they may have the technology to build them should they so desire. Most European countries do not have their own nukes, Germany being one particular example that you got wrong. Germany never built their own nukes, though nukes of NATO allies were stationed in Germany during the cold war (though not under direct control of the German military).
So maybe you should catch up on some history reading. I suggest you start with Sun Tsu's "The Art of War", quote: "All warfare is based on deception." So much for perceived threats.
They were not convicted of a crime by a court (unfortunately), at least the article doesn't say that. It also says they still claim to have done nothing wrong (even though they agreed to stop the MAP practices - contradicting eh?).
So technically speaking, the voluntarily settled for a sum of 67 mil. Which means it's not a fine because the settlement is not enforced, but a voluntary deal.
The reason they most likely did this is that the damage of being convicted for violating anti-trust laws would be much greater to them. Seen in this light the sums seems low indeed.
So I wouldn't call the settlement a "victory", the industry escaped from being held responsible for their actions once again. Too bad. Having a court rule that they are indeed guilty of price-fixing, now that would be some truly good news.
Well, no need to write corewars robots. While graphically less exiting than robocode, core wars redcode pseudo-assembler is a lot easier to improve via genetic algorithms than robocode.
So instead of seti@home, just run that as a screensaver and you should have a decent core wars bot in a couple of months. Many good bots to pit him against for evolution too.
:-)
The ongoing King Of The Hill tournament showed signs of a fractal pattern though, imho. Certain strategies would be good and certain would be bad against others. So after a while there was kind of a repeating circle of strategies, like a paper, scissors, stone game.
Now it would be interesting to know how robocode differs in that aspect?
Indeed I find that some of the more interesting implications of the test is the fact that at 128 kbps, most people can't differentiate between the real thing (WAV aka CD quality) and any of the used codecs.
Consider the following results (I have the full magazine article):
Wav: best to worst: 21%/17%/15%/13%/13%/11%/10%
What this means is that of all users 21% thought the WAV file had the best sound of all samples, 17% thought it was second best, etc., while at the lower end 10% still thought it had the worst (all encoded versions were rated better).
The statistical average (just guessing which is the original) is 1/7=14,29%
This means that the truth of the whole matter is:
users (probably including you and me) cannot really tell much difference between the original and encoded versions, even though everyone likes to think he has superior hearing (some exceptions such as music professionals only prove the rule).
Just to be on the safe side, a VBR recording with a minimum of 192 kbps should probably do it (which is what I use for my personal stuff on my MP3 player).
I can already hear many scream and shout, but why don't you do a test yourself? Have a friend encode some songs with different encoders at different settings and write a script that randomizes the playing order (and writes the order to a log file). Listen to it and see if you scored much higher to the statistical average afterwards.
But be fair and make it double-blind, like you should not know which encoders and which settings were used and whether and how many originals are among the samples. Then just say which ones you believe to be closest to the reference original.
Maybe you'll really surprise yourself.
??
And since all the modern planes are fly-by-wire, if your electronics are screwed, so are you and your pilot (and the rest of the plane).
As a matter of fact, EMP or radio signals from a device physically on board a plane could easily yield the same final result as explosives and are so easy to get on board that I am very surprised no one has tried it yet.
The idea certainly doesn't make me feel any safer flying than all the stupid people too dumb to understand basic physics of cellphones and choosing to ignore announcements. I mean, which part of "Leave your phone completely switched off while on the plane." didn't they understand?
Slashdot Mirror
"And it is overall not a pretty picture." Why not, they are prospering pretty well overall - don't you think? I agree that to the inventors of IP it's a hassle, but the argument that patents in it's current form are a benefit from an overall systemic point of view has yet to be provided. Imho it would probably be more effective overall if we had no IP protection at all. The argument that no-one would take the financial risk to innovate does not hold - if I look at the local Chinese market where someone steals a jewellery design it kind of seems a proven point to me.
I don't think I can fully agree. I think software development may be hard, but that's never the main reason projects fail. The main reason projects fail in my 10+ years experience is because of product managers, not coders.
Product managers I have seen (and I have seen many) often don't know zilch about technology, but even worse they usually also don't know much about their market, target audience/users, User Interfaces, project management, etc.
Consequently they simply don't know what they want and aren't able to explain it in one coherent paragraph of sentences. Once they would be able to explain it, the actual coding would be half as bad.
So if this guy complains that their projects back in the days at salon went bad, I'm not suprised. He's not a coder after all, he was a typical clueless product manager - started out as a journalist and suddenly he was responsible for a type of product he knew nothing about: CMSs, in addition to having no other qualification in software development or a related area (UI design, project management).
So am I surprised this project didn't succeed? LOL, of course not.
You wouldn't let a journalist build a space shuttle or a car now would you? But software? Sure, software is easy, anyone can do it. In the end, it's probably not harder than building a car, but not easier either. it just takes proper skills for all roles in the team, is all.
The problem I see here and that most readers seem to be overlooking, is that the RIAA/music industry representatives "helped" the police to decide wether a user actually shared copyrighted content. So assume you you share, but only free/legal stuff. But you share a lot, so at first you are on their radar. Then some music industry rep searches through the stuff you shared to determine if it's legal or not. Assume he is wrong (on purpose or not). As a result, the police will break down your door with a search warrant, seize all your computers, CDs, and DVDs as evidence and it will take months for you to see them back. In the meantime, try to prove that you are innocent. Even if they eventually figure out that you are innocent, they have effectively scared you from using P2P sharing (regardless of legal content). That because the music industry isn't only hurt by the legal songs shared, they are hurt and afraid by the principle of P2P distribution, it fundamentally challenges not only their business model but their whole "raison d'etre". That's what is really outrageous about this action.
Yeah, but would they admit not finding evidence or would the AP owner have to prove it?
In any case, you can be sure they'd seize all his IT equipment and burned CDs/DVDs and it would be gone for months while the investigation is in process...
I can see that being a big issue with fon.com for example
The first to cross the Atlantic were John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, two british chaps.
Go figure for the rest of similar "thruths". :-)
Things like klicks in the URL address bar:
single klick: place the cursor
double klick: mark a word
triple klick: mark the whole line (URL)
Or drag-n-drop support:
Can I drag-n-drop a URL address or HTML file item onto an open browser window? Onto the browser icon in the task bar or on the desktop? Can I mark text in a HTML window and drag it to an open editor window? Is text from HTML tables tab separated? etc.
All in all a pretty shallow review, but then it's only MacWorld, and not a serious computer magazine suited for geeks...
I'm surpirsed nobody mentioned CERN yet, a huge kick-ass particle accelerator among many things and the birthplace of the WWW by the way.
A must-see for any self-respected geek!
IMHO the mere possibility that everyone could take a look at the source would force the companies to clean it up. It's not necessary that everyone actually can understand it. I'm sure computer magazines would take over that part and we would have ratings based on source code quality, it would just be another parameter in the evaluation process of software packages.
Of course, software makers don't want others to be able to look behind their curtains, this would prevent them from selling their overhyped crappy shit. So it's never going to happen (copyright issues, IP theft, etc. aside).
So I think it's going to stay a good argument of Open Source software packages that actually do produce quality code (not all OS software is), because they give away the source anyway. IMHO, this is a good thing, since being able to say "what you get is what you see" will remain an advantage of Open Source (I don't think the author was arguing for open source, just for more transparency/visibility).
That would really drive the point home with the machines user to fix his system (and it would keep the machine from spewing more spam).
And I would not consider that hurting since neither the user nor his machine would take any permanent damage.
Even more than that. Civil disobedience means that you explicitly break a law that you consider wrong, and do so in public or with a maximum of publicity and turn yourself in. The point is you want everyone to know that you broke the law because you consider it wrong, because you want it changed. This means you are ready to accept any actions (prison, etc.) on the authorities part.
Read some books about Gandhi to understand how the principle works.
Instead of firewalling the port, hack a small script that listens on the port and launches a "countermeasures" against the source IP adress.
Would some kind Windows hacker please program this?!
Yes I am aware that there may be legal implications, I'm just thinking about the tech here. That's why I'm saying countermeasures and not counterattacks, e.g. some kind of teergrube
Luckily the managers superiors saw his faults and fired him eventually (but not before the damage was already done). But the worst part is that the replacement they hired is just as bad.
So I cannot agree with the article, it should read instead:
Increasingly incompetent managers are creeping their way into important projects. Considering that most good managers are pretty bad at security decisions, bad managers with roles in important projects are guaranteed to doom the world to oblivion.
If there is an easy and cheap way to boost the range by that magnitude, this will only speed up the process, since everyone will now not only pollute the airspace of their direct neighbors but also 5 blocks away (their target are business customers offices).
It will be completely disruptive indeed, but of WiFi communications. Imagine 50+ hosts on a single coax ethernet cable trying to get medium access with CSMA/CD. It just won't work anymore.
Out on the countryside it's another issue and I agree with you that in some cases this hopefully will help break up telecomm monopolies.
But I fear the first effects we'll see is Starbucks and McDo fight for the airspace on the neighboring parking lot/plaza.
I think its news because of the way blogger.com works (it works pretty stupid IMHO). blogger.com is a centralized approach, you give it an FTP account and password to your web folder on your machine and it generates the HTML for you.
This has the obvious advantage that simple web space will do for your, you don't need PHP MySQL, etc., all the code runs at blogger.com, it generates your (static) pages at its servers.
The downside is that you have to give them an account and password which makes them very attractive to crackers (I'm surprised it took so long). That's why I would never use blogger. And that's why it's news I guess.
I guess I was rather trying to ask hwo much people are willing to give up themselves as a price to pay for communism in another country to end. Or for the situation of others to improve.
You seem to express the hope that for you there would be not much change, because they would not come to your country.
To use your example, after the fall of the iron curtain a lot of german descendant Russians from Russia in fact came to Germany, because Germany has this strange law that grants them the right to do so and get German citizenship if they have german ancestors.
The net result is that some communities in Germany now have a population of up to 30% of these Russian Germans most of whom only speak russian and are unemployed. As you can imagine this is not appreciated by all and leads to conflicts.
So would you be willing to live in a community with 30% Chinese immigrants if that would mean no more communism in China?
I'm glad you didn't say "working democracy". Check your facts: In the US, the voter turnout during national elections is pretty steady around 50%. That means if about 50% of the voters voted for the current government (Bush), he only has the votes of 25% of the population. In other words: a minority of the population sets the rules for the whole country.
In Germany for example, the voter turnout during national elections is pretty steady around 80%. While not perfect it seems a whole lot better than 50%, wouldn't you agree?
IMHO a working democracy requires citizens taking an (active) part in it. Figuring out where the democracy is working better is left as an exercise for the reader.
Personally, I wholehartedly agree with your opinion on cencsorship though. On the other hand, if people are not even responsible enough to go vote, what will stupid lying hate propaganda do with them? Lead them to believe their country must start a war, perhaps?
Why not? This sound like intelligence requires some kind of morale?
If a process is just following rules and laws (of physics or your environment or whatever) then playing chess for example would be just a process too, by your definition. Similar to natural selection, no intelligence behind it.
You don't explain much the difference between process and intelligence, at least in terms of what intelligence would do or be in addition to process (only what it would not).
So where is the extra in intelligence, on top of or opposed to process then?
They would flood the US like a tsunami tidal wave, just like they flood into HongKong now. And they wouldn't care about green cards either (maybe an armada of illegal ships like in Neal Stephensons Snow Crash).
So aren't you glad that China is communist after all? And don't you hope it stays that way a little longer?
Strange if you look at it this way, isn't it?
I think you'd have to do more. As a simulated client scenario, imagine something like a Linux box with vmware and a Palladium-Windows running inside that.
Your binary is running in the secure palladium hardware. But somewhere this hardware returns a decoded unecrypted media stream back to the OS (for output), at which point it can be intercepted. If you want to avoid that interception, your palladium hardware has to pass the decrypted media stream directly to your media output hardware (e.g. sound and video card), in other words some kind of DMA, and you have to make sure the OS cannot access the memory of the media output hardware either.
The upshot of all this seems to me that you have to implement a lot of functionality directly in hardware, at which point you loose all the flexibility that a software OS on a general purpose computer gives you.
Essentially all nodes that have an internet connection on eth0 broadcast the fact that they are a gateway into the real internet. This model extends by hops, out into the WIFI mesh network.
So all the system does, is route you to the internet via a path with the fewest hops. It does not provide interconnectivity between WIFI nodes themselves at all (they are all NATed). It does not provide a handover from one cell to the next as you move, so it just works for stationary nodes. It just offers a multi-hop VPN to the nearest AP with a "real" internet connection, adding a NAT layer with every hop out.
This is pretty cool, but still a far cry away from spontaneous self-organizing WIFI-only networks, where there is no "root gateway" and no hierarchy as in this case (which is one of the problems).
A short excerpt from the doc before it gets slashdotted:
The software provided, the "Mesh AP", is designed to be run on a node, eg a system designed to serve others. It has the dual purpose of also connecting in to the network. So even if you are just a repeater and using the software to reach the Internet, you are also providing an extension to the mesh and a standard DHCP cell for any non-mesh clients which wish to sign on.
The software boots, it then allocates itself an address, typically in the 10.x.x.x range. Initially the allocated address is random.
Then, it attempts to find an internet gateway, first probing 192.168.1.1/255.255.128.0 and then using a DHCP client on the Ethernet interface to try to sign on to a gateway. If no gateway can be found, the software considers that it has only wireless links and is a repeater-cell.
The cell starts an internal dns server and transparent web proxy on port 80 and 8080, a dhcp server is also started an a random class C network is picked in the range 192.168.128.0/255.255.128.0
Clients connecting to the dhcp cell are pointed to the wireless interface for default gateway and dns server. The dns server running on the repeater always returns the address of the gateway, no matter what domain name is resolved.
At this point, the node still cannot serve clients, but it will sign them on.
Meanwhile, the kernel AODV(11) module is loaded and the node then finds neighbour cells in its local range by sending/receiving UDP packets to the broadcast address.
Any cells within the mesh which are gateways, periodically broadcast a route to a bogus address which implies an internet gateway. This route is repeated outwards in a "ring" fashion as per the AODV protocol.
Any cell without a gateway receiving this address then attempts to establish a compressed encrypted IP-tunnel VPN via the "vtund" package. Compression uses LZO and encryption is blowfish. (ip ranges 172.16.x.x)
This IP tunnel could be over multiple hops to the destination gateway, AODV handles the optimised routing between linked cells. Eg, multi-hop routes eg.
The cell then switches all its outbound dns and ip traffic to go via this VPN gateway link. The DHCP configuration is also updated to now serve the remote gateway address as a dns server (gateway nodes run a real dns proxy) - Any clients who signed on before the link was found will forward traffic to the local cell which will proxy it via http proxy etc, any clients signing on after a gateway is found will receive the remote gateway details and will have full IP routing.
Any client signing directly on to a cell which has a local internet gateway will go directly via that gateway.
Threats need three things:
* weapons
* delivery system
* motivation
Most western democracies have the first two, but lack the third.
I would like to add that to use a nuke, you don't have to fire it. You can "use" it by threatening others quite well (worked in the cold war). A threat also implies that you are willing to fire. So I would say that countries who have the first two certainly have the third, in other words the motivation to "use" them, one way or another. And they do quite frequently, the US, China, India, Pakistan, etc. do it all the time (implicitly threatening).
Your statement is also wrong in another aspect: in fact, most "western" countries do not have nukes, even though they may have the technology to build them should they so desire. Most European countries do not have their own nukes, Germany being one particular example that you got wrong. Germany never built their own nukes, though nukes of NATO allies were stationed in Germany during the cold war (though not under direct control of the German military).
So maybe you should catch up on some history reading. I suggest you start with Sun Tsu's "The Art of War", quote: "All warfare is based on deception." So much for perceived threats.
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So technically speaking, the voluntarily settled for a sum of 67 mil. Which means it's not a fine because the settlement is not enforced, but a voluntary deal.
The reason they most likely did this is that the damage of being convicted for violating anti-trust laws would be much greater to them. Seen in this light the sums seems low indeed.
So I wouldn't call the settlement a "victory", the industry escaped from being held responsible for their actions once again. Too bad. Having a court rule that they are indeed guilty of price-fixing, now that would be some truly good news.
So instead of seti@home, just run that as a screensaver and you should have a decent core wars bot in a couple of months. Many good bots to pit him against for evolution too.
:-)
The ongoing King Of The Hill tournament showed signs of a fractal pattern though, imho. Certain strategies would be good and certain would be bad against others. So after a while there was kind of a repeating circle of strategies, like a paper, scissors, stone game.
Now it would be interesting to know how robocode differs in that aspect?
Consider the following results (I have the full magazine article):
Wav: best to worst: 21%/17%/15%/13%/13%/11%/10%
What this means is that of all users 21% thought the WAV file had the best sound of all samples, 17% thought it was second best, etc., while at the lower end 10% still thought it had the worst (all encoded versions were rated better).
The statistical average (just guessing which is the original) is 1/7=14,29%
This means that the truth of the whole matter is: users (probably including you and me) cannot really tell much difference between the original and encoded versions, even though everyone likes to think he has superior hearing (some exceptions such as music professionals only prove the rule).
Just to be on the safe side, a VBR recording with a minimum of 192 kbps should probably do it (which is what I use for my personal stuff on my MP3 player).
I can already hear many scream and shout, but why don't you do a test yourself? Have a friend encode some songs with different encoders at different settings and write a script that randomizes the playing order (and writes the order to a log file). Listen to it and see if you scored much higher to the statistical average afterwards.
But be fair and make it double-blind, like you should not know which encoders and which settings were used and whether and how many originals are among the samples. Then just say which ones you believe to be closest to the reference original.
Maybe you'll really surprise yourself.
And since all the modern planes are fly-by-wire, if your electronics are screwed, so are you and your pilot (and the rest of the plane).
As a matter of fact, EMP or radio signals from a device physically on board a plane could easily yield the same final result as explosives and are so easy to get on board that I am very surprised no one has tried it yet.
The idea certainly doesn't make me feel any safer flying than all the stupid people too dumb to understand basic physics of cellphones and choosing to ignore announcements. I mean, which part of "Leave your phone completely switched off while on the plane." didn't they understand?