The release was so uninformative to be misleading. I agree about the impact of reducing the solid oxide fuel cell temperature. A few hundred degrees C cooler makes a big difference when you are starting at 900C. Unless a lot of progress is made with nonotubes or metal hydrides, the highest volumetric hydrogen density is probably anhydrous ammonia, which destabalizes at ~ 300 C for cheap catalysts. If I remember properly, membrane materials don't like NH3, but high temperature cells don't care, it decomposes directly.
While we want fuel cells for transportation purposes to run at low temperatures, it is not obvious that this is appropriate for fixed-point fuel cells. Low temperature fuel cells can handle hydrogen, but I am unaware of them being able to handle hydrocarbon fuels at reasonable loadings. Typically you need temperatures of a few hundred degrees C to enable the molecular reforming for handling of hydrocarbons. This is reasonable for fixed point systems which can be kept at temperature. The higher temperature also allows the use of lower cost catalysts.
There is no requirement that a user rely upon the web service for functionality, but it may well be more convenient and cost effective. You need local computing power and storage if your connectivity is uncertain or if you trust your service provider less than you do yourself. If you have reliable networking, then other options come into play. Given most user's difficulty in properly administering their systems, a "managed cloud" is a reasonable solution. Given the economies of scale here, you will have a major service centers in the cloud - Google, Live, probably Yahoo, and a few others. The cloud approach will be particularily important as increasing numbers of users use their phones as their primary device. In such cases, having available back-end services and storage will be particularily important. It is not at all evident that PC's are more cost effective than back-end based approaches, particularily for users who are willing to consume targeted advertising (note: I am NOT such a user).
MS got burned for licensing terms in the past. It is very careful now. As I understand it, the cost of an OS license is dependent upon the number that the vendor buys, the more you buy, the lower the price. I would assume that this is defined in a pricing table. It is clear that the volume discount is very high.
It is not clear to me that vendors such as Dell even make money on their standard machines. I would not be surprised to find that they are sold for a bit below cost, with the profit comming from the "crapware" that third parties pay to put on the systems. If the Linux distros do not yet have comparable third party SW, the price would need to be increased to compensate. The vendors then add their own SW to reduce their support costs.
Since the "crapware" included with the systems is of dubious security value, when I bought my PC last fall, I immediately flattened the disc and installed a clean Vista system on it (I work at MS so I can buy Vista at a substantial discount). I suspect that I am out of Dell support, as there is none of their support software on it.
I very much doubt that Dell, HP, and the other vendors are behaving improperly. They are looking for vendors that can provide a rich feature set that justifies users going out and replacing a functional PC with a "new and improved" PC that does things that their old one doesn't. If your usage is satisfied by your old PC, why spend the money? Otherwise you might see vendors shipping much more minimal systems, say one of the minimal BSD distros.
But this says nothing about monitoring a person's movements in public - where and when you go anywhere. Something that anybody in a public space can see is public. The lack of privacy in small towns is legendary - and not necesarily all bad. This issue is being framed as a governmental monitoring issue alone. This is an oversight. What if all the monitoring were publically available (say on the local cable network) so that you had to assume that everybody - the police, your family, your friends, and your minister could know where you went and what you did in public? Would that be better or worse? In some respects, that is what living in a small town still is. And a small town in Utah even more.
I personally prefer the smaller and leaner approach. Clearly the general customers buy the feature-rich approach. It is easy to market "Now, with more features and gizmos than ever before". Your point is valid, but I think that you will find that the difference between MS and the upcomming rich-featured *nix distros is between a factor of 2 or 4 and in either case, the advancment of disc capacity has rendered the difference moot. The small USB drive I bought from Costco last year had 4 GB on it and it cost me ~ $70. The USB hard drive I bought recently for my PC data storage cost me ~ 120 delivered, and it had 500 GB.
I will be installing Vista home basic soon on my old ME and then XP box (I upgraded the memory to 768 MB). The reason the disc image is so large is that it carries the CAB's for all the upgrades (ultimate, etc), which I will not license. This is a convenience feature that I could undo by blowing away the CABs. It is not worth the trouble.
Dell, HP, etc are Microsoft's largest and best customers and Microsoft listens carefully to them. What do you think that the vendors want? They do not want a small and simple OS and application suite! Customers for such a product would buy once and never be seen again -- I have a cousin who is still writing papers on a Win 3.21 system running on a 286. The vendors want "improved" OS's and applications that have features and improvements that can be used to induce customers to replace their existing PC's (which are still doing what they were bought to do) with new improved machines. Microsoft has commissioned studies that show that the "ecosystem" gets ~ $18 for every $1 spent on MS products. This is a rather nice deal for the "ecosystem". The major *nix distros are now going down the "bloatware" river. My latest download of Suse required a DVD to store it.
RMS is an enterprise feature that provides (in strongly managed enterprise environments where the users do not have the ability to install either software or drivers) the ability for a company to confine data against accidental release (forwarding, etc). It does not hinder copying via camera/camera phone or related analog attacks. But in the environments for which RMS is intended for deployment, such usage is ground for immediate termination plus other potential penalties.
Most of the market is going to a model of always connected, and connected with a rather high speed connection at that. There is value to be had in the phone home model. As long as you can fall back to work effectively in disconnected mode, all is well. To the best of my knowledge, Vista does do this fallback well. I certainly work disconnected on my notebook frequently (which is running a beta of LongHorn server, a Vista variant).
Routine updates for the Malware detection and removal tool, windows updates, certificate updates, phishing block lists, are all reasonable -- indeed, not to have them would border on negligence.
Google is a far more likely big brother candidate than MS.
Partly as an experiment, partly because as my CFO used to say "you are one cheap bastard". After all, I just had to replace a 12+ year old monitor because it wore out. I know I could run BSD on the system (I was a BSD'er before I joined MS), but my wife and kids want to run software targeted at the windows platform. The real reason to upgrade is the improved security. When you turn off the bells and whistles Vista isn't as demanding as is generally believed. I don't want them running as an administrative user, and it is much easier to get SW to work on normal user accounts in Vista.
If they need to play with a media capable system, they can use the Core2 system I bought 6 months ago. The legacy system should be fine for browsing, e-mail, and office type apps. I make extensive and heavy handed use of parental controls and monitoring on the Vista system, which restricts what they can get into. IM'ing is blocked.
If you are using marginal HW with Vista, turn off the sidebar and under advanced system properties set it to optimize for performance. This will blow your UI back to a 2K/XP classic look, but it helps a lot. I have been running Vista and LongHorn server beta builds on old HW since pre beta 1 days. As long as you have drivers, you can make it work pretty well. Memory is the most important thing.
I will shortly be doing the experiment and trying to convert an old PC to Vista (an old Dell with a 1.7 Ghz P4 that came with Win ME). I upgraded the ram to 768 MB when I upgraded it to XP SP2. It has a nice LCD monitor as of 3 months ago when the 17" monitor I got with my Win 95 box finally died. I have ordered a copy of Vista Home Basic, which has all the security functionality of the full Vista versions. I will set it to optimize for performance and I will have my wife and children run as normal users only.
For security reasons alone Win 2K should be killed. XP SP2 and the upcomming XP SP3 are far more secure. Microsoft will be supporting XP with the then current service pack until something like 2013 under extended support, for both enterprises and normal users. Vista is more secure than XP. One of the major advantages of Vista that is not discussed in public is that it is FAR easier to run as a normal user in Vista than it is in XP. This has major security advantages.
I will shortly be doing the experiment and trying to convert an old PC to Vista (an old Dell with a 1.7 Ghz P4 that came with Win ME). I upgraded the ram to 768 MB when I upgraded it to XP SP2. It has a nice LCD monitor as of 3 months ago when the 17" monitor I got with my Win 95 box finally died. I have ordered a copy of Vista Home Basic, which has all the security functionality of the full Vista versions. I will set it to optimize for performance and I will have my wife and children run as normal users only.
If you are using marginal HW with Vista, turn off the sidebar and under advanced system properties set it to optimize for performance. This will blow your UI back to a 2K/XP classic look, but it helps a lot. I have been running Vista and LongHorn server beta builds on old HW since pre beta 1 days.
Neither the Internet (Peter G. Neumann, Practical Architectures for Survivable Systems and Networks, 63-
66 (2000), at http://www.csl.sri.com/~neumann/arl-one.pdf) nor the PC were designed to provide trustworthy critical services. The Internet model was designed to be robust against significant physical destruction of communications links and nodes. The PC started as a personal hobbiest device and migrated to more general usages. The UNIX systems started from timesharing and migrated both up and down. No system, unless it is properly installed, managed, and controlled has any hope of being trustworthy. This includes Windows, *nix, and *BSD based systems. Properly handled, these systems can be quite secure.
The Web 2 model of browser-based scripting and interactivity has made the overall security model exceptionally difficult. It is too hard to develop secure web sites without XSS or XRF vulns, and it is too easy to use human engineering to overcome technical defenses on the end user platform -- "install this update for improved security", etc. I am highly dubious that general consumer devices are adequate for usage for arbitrary financial transactions -- features sell and what you need is assurance.
Payment of bills to known organizations / vendors can be done with reasonable risk from a home system. Monitoring accounts can be done as well. I do not believe that home systems have the necessary assurance for stock trading or similar operations without use of adjunct trusted devices to validate specific transactions as screen displays and keyboard interactions can be modified by malware.
I have a security professional friend who is now making a living as a trader. She uses locked down Windows PC's for her trading and does nothing else from them. She keeps them updated, but uses a different system for her browsing, e-mail, and general web activities. When doing security critical operations, harden the system, minimize the system functionality, and do nothing else but those operations from the system -- rather similar to a domain admin who uses a dedicated machine for their administrative tasks.
This is not what users want to believe. Sorry.
As for me, I do not do general financial operations over the web at all. I do not use ATM / debit cards. I do my selected purchases via credit card from trusted retailers from my notebook, which is running a beta of LongHorn server with me running as a normal user, not as a member of the administrators group. No one else has an account on the notebook and I don't install or run snap-ins or apps without careful consideration. My family uses the desktops, which are relatively untrusted.
I do not agree with this ruling, but I don't view it as likley to that much impact on me -- I am not brand / image concious. Each manufacturer is and remains free to set its prices. This ruling, allows - in some circumstances - the manufacturer to set a floor price for the consumer. This guarantees the retailer a profit level that they would not have had otherwise. The consumer can buy comparable products from other manufacturers who are more willing to compete on price. If your media device has to be from Apple, or your zingbat has to be from foobar, then you are stuck. If on the otherhand, you are willing to buy a competing product, this ruling is unlikely to have much impact - indeed, the sales on the branded item may drop.
I don't see how Microsoft gains by this or would have driven it. Microsoft is aware of its competitors, its partners, and their various value propositions. Customers are free to buy from other vendors and use different products. For all the claims about Microsoft trying to drive everyone else out of business, Microsoft's primary competition is earlier versions of Microsoft products, which continue to do what they did very well. I believe that this is the primary reason for Microsoft's focus upon adding features to every release.
This is important for the luxury products industry / branding consumer item industry, where brand image and management allows the manufacturer to command a premium price. For the rest of the economy, I am dubious about the impact.
We are already moving our satellites much further out. There isn't much being said about it in public, and I wouldn't expect much to be public. Those who know aren't talking and it appears that most of the others who could deduce the probable configurations aren't saying much either. There are reasons for this. Welcome to the world of shadows and mirrors.
I did strategic defense system modelling ~ 20 years ago. In addition to working on basing of land based missiles for the American Physical Society, I also considered anti-satellite weapons in the context of disabling orbital SDI platform systems. The cheapest weapons against relatively low orbital platforms was water-rich sub-surface very high yield (100 MT +) bursts. The first ~ 25 MT of yield has enough energy to displace the atmosphere in a 45 degree halfcone above the weapon. The energy above that allowed the lofting of megatons of debris into low space, where the orbital platforms would run into it at orbital velocities. A dirty, but cheap and effective technique. Of course, you don't want to be very close to the launching explosions. In the context of a nuclear war, such an approach is reasonable. Note that if you use borated water immediately around the device and have no uranium shell, the radioactive fallout would be modest, as there would be little neutron activation of the material and minimal actinide mass.
A slower but non-radioactive approach was to place kilotons of debris into ~ equatorial orbit. The reconisance satellites cross this every 90 minutes at delta V's or 4 to 6 Km/sec. The launchers could be very cheap and have a high failure rate. As the platforms / satellites were destroyed, they would add to the debris mass. Of course the affected regions of space would be destroyed for all usage for a long time.
Unfortunately, the debris problem will get much worse even without any intentional generation. There is enough material in orbit and enough existing debris that we are at the start of a (hopefully) slow exponential climb in debris density. NASA did a lot of work on this.
Wings have a particularily high cyclic load. When the plane is on the ground, they are hanging from the fuselage (with a significant portion of the plane weight of fuel in them) and in flight the fuselage is hanging from them. Hence the severe fatigue problems. Carbon fiber compostites have better strength to weight ratio's than aluminum alloys, hence their usage.
Very reasonable answer. Carbon fiber does have an exceptionally high elastic modulus, far higher than aluminum. I would have expected higher deflection situations with glass, which has a much lower modulus.
I rather expect so. Transverse fibers would tend to blunt cracks. I would expect the problems are more around delamination and environmental degradation of the binder and binder - fiber bonds. The military experience should be invaluable here. Certainly, repairs are far harder to do in composites, but they are very tough. I have seen pictures of military planes with astonishing levels of damage that were flown back to base and landed.
There is no need to do so. As you bend the wings enough you are going to loose lift. You need to test to a good safety factor. The testing would be very expensive. You would want the thing heavily instrumented. The amount of mechanical energy would be very large and you would have to clean the mess up afterwards.
My doctorate is in Mechanical Engineering - Materials, in this case fracture mechanics. The fact that the wing is so strong suggests that it may be being over-designed. My graduate structures professor, who worked on the 747, point out that airplanes are designed for what might be called simultaneous mode failures -- there is no point in having the wings significantly stronger than the fuselage, as once the fuselage breaks the wings don't do you any good, you have just been carrying too much material in the wings. The same is true for all sub-systems. Hence, you have to do a very exhaustive analysis of the expected situations and make sure that all of them are appropriately covered, then you add a safety factor.
Typically, fatigue cracking has been the limiting factor in aircraft structures, and has caused numerous crashes. With the experience that has been gained in military programs, we should now know enough to use these composites properly.
XP RTM and XP SP1 predated the security push and had security issues. XP SP2 was a major release (and caused compatability issues) that greatly improved the security status. At roughly the same time Microsoft hardened Windows 2003 with the SP1 release. Microsoft STRONGLY encouraged customer's moving to XP SP2 and W2K3 SP1. Unless they specifically refer to XP RTM or SP1, when Microsoft people refer to XP, they are referring to SP2.
Too many of these comparisons are apples and oranges things. If you run you Ubuntu box as root, you are heading for trouble. Running Windows as an administrator also exposes the user to significantly enhanced risk. If you are concerned with this risk, run as a normal user. I do. Your risk will be much lower. Vista makes it much easier to run as a normal user. My wife and kids have normal user accounts on our modern machine. I will be trying to "upgrade" my old XP box (an older Win ME box I upgraded to XP with an additional 512 MB of RAM 3 years ago) to Vista home basic for the improved security support.
By we, I did not mean Microsoft. I first worked on a GUI on a Xerox Star in 82 when I joined Siemens Research. The SW researchers were working on windowing systems on Perq's at that time. Apple picked it up from Xerox.
All single level OS's run in system high. Systems intended for use with sensitive data have to be appropriately configured. In the past, you started for this by running the hisec template with the security configuration editor to reset system ACL's and permissions. Microsoft publishes very lengthy security guides that allow security administrators to appropriately configure systems. One of the most important issues is to have users run as normal users without administrative privledges. There is a definite tradeoff between security and functionality. In the Vista security guide there is a chapter titled "Specialized Security - Limited Functionality".
I am writing this from a notebook that is running a beta of LongHorn Server. As a standard server, I do not have the client UI -- it looks rather like Win 2K (no glass, sidebar, or media support). My account is not a member of the admin group and IE is in locked down mode. It is quite secure. It is also faster.
There is a virtually universal tradeoff between functionality and security. With attacks moving from the OS to the user-space apps, we are seeing wide ranging compromises of sensitive user data without associated system compromise. The issue in this thread concerns the quality of the voting machine code itself.
Third parties do have access to the Microsoft source code. The evaluation laboratories that do the Common Criteria evaluations have essentially unlimited access to internal documentation and source code (under appropriate non-disclosure).
Microsoft's software can be configured for high security applications -- otherwise it would not be found suitable for use in classified environments. Consumer - focused feature-rich configurations have a far larger attack surface than minimal hardened configurations. Rich products such as OSX, Linux, and Open Office have been doing no better and in many ways worse than Microsoft's newer products. This does not mean that any of them are suitable for a high assurance application -- none of them are high assurance products.
I assume the Microsoft product in question here is Embedded XP, which would be a reasonable foundation for such an application. When building Embedded XP, the builder should include only the needed components. This is standard for embedded system programming. The real question here is what is the electronic voting machine vendor doing? What is their code doing and what modules are included? What interfaces are exposed? How is the system composed and what are the relevant data flow diagrams and associated threat models?
We have trained the world to know and love GUI's. If you are trying to build a high assurance target, you would have a much easier time doing so with a text-based approach. Once you start going down that road, you soon realize that your assurance objectives are starting to get in the way of useability. Having something that is high assurance, but unuseable by a significant fraction of the population is unacceptable as well.
Using paper ballots which are then scanned is a more robust solution in that it allows examination of the original ballots and provides support for recounting.
The problem with steam engines is the condenser system, which tends to be bulky and weigh a lot. If you are going to go open cycle, an appropriate choice for a short distance racer, a high pressure system can have very high power. In such a situation you have your high power boilers fed by a high pressure pump and exiting a turbine, which is geared down to the wheels. ZOOM!
There is good reason to believe that eta carniae will emit a powerfull gamma ray burst when it collapses. Since the axis of rotation is not pointed anywhere near us, we are at no risk from the gamma beam. It is also possible that it is massive enough to suffer a pair creation supernovae. A recent supernovae of this type in a presumed LBV (luminus blue variable) was ~ 100 X brighter than most core collapse supernovae. Regardless, it is to far away from us to create any type of radiation hazard or even cause problems with perturbing the day - night balance.
Slashdot Mirror
Informative response.
While we want fuel cells for transportation purposes to run at low temperatures, it is not obvious that this is appropriate for fixed-point fuel cells. Low temperature fuel cells can handle hydrogen, but I am unaware of them being able to handle hydrocarbon fuels at reasonable loadings. Typically you need temperatures of a few hundred degrees C to enable the molecular reforming for handling of hydrocarbons. This is reasonable for fixed point systems which can be kept at temperature. The higher temperature also allows the use of lower cost catalysts.
There is no requirement that a user rely upon the web service for functionality, but it may well be more convenient and cost effective. You need local computing power and storage if your connectivity is uncertain or if you trust your service provider less than you do yourself. If you have reliable networking, then other options come into play. Given most user's difficulty in properly administering their systems, a "managed cloud" is a reasonable solution. Given the economies of scale here, you will have a major service centers in the cloud - Google, Live, probably Yahoo, and a few others. The cloud approach will be particularily important as increasing numbers of users use their phones as their primary device. In such cases, having available back-end services and storage will be particularily important. It is not at all evident that PC's are more cost effective than back-end based approaches, particularily for users who are willing to consume targeted advertising (note: I am NOT such a user).
It is not clear to me that vendors such as Dell even make money on their standard machines. I would not be surprised to find that they are sold for a bit below cost, with the profit comming from the "crapware" that third parties pay to put on the systems. If the Linux distros do not yet have comparable third party SW, the price would need to be increased to compensate. The vendors then add their own SW to reduce their support costs.
Since the "crapware" included with the systems is of dubious security value, when I bought my PC last fall, I immediately flattened the disc and installed a clean Vista system on it (I work at MS so I can buy Vista at a substantial discount). I suspect that I am out of Dell support, as there is none of their support software on it.
I very much doubt that Dell, HP, and the other vendors are behaving improperly. They are looking for vendors that can provide a rich feature set that justifies users going out and replacing a functional PC with a "new and improved" PC that does things that their old one doesn't. If your usage is satisfied by your old PC, why spend the money? Otherwise you might see vendors shipping much more minimal systems, say one of the minimal BSD distros.
But this says nothing about monitoring a person's movements in public - where and when you go anywhere. Something that anybody in a public space can see is public. The lack of privacy in small towns is legendary - and not necesarily all bad. This issue is being framed as a governmental monitoring issue alone. This is an oversight. What if all the monitoring were publically available (say on the local cable network) so that you had to assume that everybody - the police, your family, your friends, and your minister could know where you went and what you did in public? Would that be better or worse? In some respects, that is what living in a small town still is. And a small town in Utah even more.
I will be installing Vista home basic soon on my old ME and then XP box (I upgraded the memory to 768 MB). The reason the disc image is so large is that it carries the CAB's for all the upgrades (ultimate, etc), which I will not license. This is a convenience feature that I could undo by blowing away the CABs. It is not worth the trouble.
Dell, HP, etc are Microsoft's largest and best customers and Microsoft listens carefully to them. What do you think that the vendors want? They do not want a small and simple OS and application suite! Customers for such a product would buy once and never be seen again -- I have a cousin who is still writing papers on a Win 3.21 system running on a 286. The vendors want "improved" OS's and applications that have features and improvements that can be used to induce customers to replace their existing PC's (which are still doing what they were bought to do) with new improved machines. Microsoft has commissioned studies that show that the "ecosystem" gets ~ $18 for every $1 spent on MS products. This is a rather nice deal for the "ecosystem". The major *nix distros are now going down the "bloatware" river. My latest download of Suse required a DVD to store it.
Most of the market is going to a model of always connected, and connected with a rather high speed connection at that. There is value to be had in the phone home model. As long as you can fall back to work effectively in disconnected mode, all is well. To the best of my knowledge, Vista does do this fallback well. I certainly work disconnected on my notebook frequently (which is running a beta of LongHorn server, a Vista variant).
Routine updates for the Malware detection and removal tool, windows updates, certificate updates, phishing block lists, are all reasonable -- indeed, not to have them would border on negligence.
Google is a far more likely big brother candidate than MS.
If they need to play with a media capable system, they can use the Core2 system I bought 6 months ago. The legacy system should be fine for browsing, e-mail, and office type apps. I make extensive and heavy handed use of parental controls and monitoring on the Vista system, which restricts what they can get into. IM'ing is blocked.
My wife monitors the e-mail.
If you are using marginal HW with Vista, turn off the sidebar and under advanced system properties set it to optimize for performance. This will blow your UI back to a 2K/XP classic look, but it helps a lot. I have been running Vista and LongHorn server beta builds on old HW since pre beta 1 days. As long as you have drivers, you can make it work pretty well. Memory is the most important thing. I will shortly be doing the experiment and trying to convert an old PC to Vista (an old Dell with a 1.7 Ghz P4 that came with Win ME). I upgraded the ram to 768 MB when I upgraded it to XP SP2. It has a nice LCD monitor as of 3 months ago when the 17" monitor I got with my Win 95 box finally died. I have ordered a copy of Vista Home Basic, which has all the security functionality of the full Vista versions. I will set it to optimize for performance and I will have my wife and children run as normal users only.
I will shortly be doing the experiment and trying to convert an old PC to Vista (an old Dell with a 1.7 Ghz P4 that came with Win ME). I upgraded the ram to 768 MB when I upgraded it to XP SP2. It has a nice LCD monitor as of 3 months ago when the 17" monitor I got with my Win 95 box finally died. I have ordered a copy of Vista Home Basic, which has all the security functionality of the full Vista versions. I will set it to optimize for performance and I will have my wife and children run as normal users only.
If you are using marginal HW with Vista, turn off the sidebar and under advanced system properties set it to optimize for performance. This will blow your UI back to a 2K/XP classic look, but it helps a lot. I have been running Vista and LongHorn server beta builds on old HW since pre beta 1 days.
The Web 2 model of browser-based scripting and interactivity has made the overall security model exceptionally difficult. It is too hard to develop secure web sites without XSS or XRF vulns, and it is too easy to use human engineering to overcome technical defenses on the end user platform -- "install this update for improved security", etc. I am highly dubious that general consumer devices are adequate for usage for arbitrary financial transactions -- features sell and what you need is assurance.
Payment of bills to known organizations / vendors can be done with reasonable risk from a home system. Monitoring accounts can be done as well. I do not believe that home systems have the necessary assurance for stock trading or similar operations without use of adjunct trusted devices to validate specific transactions as screen displays and keyboard interactions can be modified by malware.
I have a security professional friend who is now making a living as a trader. She uses locked down Windows PC's for her trading and does nothing else from them. She keeps them updated, but uses a different system for her browsing, e-mail, and general web activities. When doing security critical operations, harden the system, minimize the system functionality, and do nothing else but those operations from the system -- rather similar to a domain admin who uses a dedicated machine for their administrative tasks.
This is not what users want to believe. Sorry.
As for me, I do not do general financial operations over the web at all. I do not use ATM / debit cards. I do my selected purchases via credit card from trusted retailers from my notebook, which is running a beta of LongHorn server with me running as a normal user, not as a member of the administrators group. No one else has an account on the notebook and I don't install or run snap-ins or apps without careful consideration. My family uses the desktops, which are relatively untrusted.
I don't see how Microsoft gains by this or would have driven it. Microsoft is aware of its competitors, its partners, and their various value propositions. Customers are free to buy from other vendors and use different products. For all the claims about Microsoft trying to drive everyone else out of business, Microsoft's primary competition is earlier versions of Microsoft products, which continue to do what they did very well. I believe that this is the primary reason for Microsoft's focus upon adding features to every release.
This is important for the luxury products industry / branding consumer item industry, where brand image and management allows the manufacturer to command a premium price. For the rest of the economy, I am dubious about the impact.
We are already moving our satellites much further out. There isn't much being said about it in public, and I wouldn't expect much to be public. Those who know aren't talking and it appears that most of the others who could deduce the probable configurations aren't saying much either. There are reasons for this. Welcome to the world of shadows and mirrors.
A slower but non-radioactive approach was to place kilotons of debris into ~ equatorial orbit. The reconisance satellites cross this every 90 minutes at delta V's or 4 to 6 Km/sec. The launchers could be very cheap and have a high failure rate. As the platforms / satellites were destroyed, they would add to the debris mass. Of course the affected regions of space would be destroyed for all usage for a long time.
Unfortunately, the debris problem will get much worse even without any intentional generation. There is enough material in orbit and enough existing debris that we are at the start of a (hopefully) slow exponential climb in debris density. NASA did a lot of work on this.
Wings have a particularily high cyclic load. When the plane is on the ground, they are hanging from the fuselage (with a significant portion of the plane weight of fuel in them) and in flight the fuselage is hanging from them. Hence the severe fatigue problems. Carbon fiber compostites have better strength to weight ratio's than aluminum alloys, hence their usage.
Very reasonable answer. Carbon fiber does have an exceptionally high elastic modulus, far higher than aluminum. I would have expected higher deflection situations with glass, which has a much lower modulus.
I rather expect so. Transverse fibers would tend to blunt cracks. I would expect the problems are more around delamination and environmental degradation of the binder and binder - fiber bonds. The military experience should be invaluable here. Certainly, repairs are far harder to do in composites, but they are very tough. I have seen pictures of military planes with astonishing levels of damage that were flown back to base and landed.
My doctorate is in Mechanical Engineering - Materials, in this case fracture mechanics. The fact that the wing is so strong suggests that it may be being over-designed. My graduate structures professor, who worked on the 747, point out that airplanes are designed for what might be called simultaneous mode failures -- there is no point in having the wings significantly stronger than the fuselage, as once the fuselage breaks the wings don't do you any good, you have just been carrying too much material in the wings. The same is true for all sub-systems. Hence, you have to do a very exhaustive analysis of the expected situations and make sure that all of them are appropriately covered, then you add a safety factor.
Typically, fatigue cracking has been the limiting factor in aircraft structures, and has caused numerous crashes. With the experience that has been gained in military programs, we should now know enough to use these composites properly.
Too many of these comparisons are apples and oranges things. If you run you Ubuntu box as root, you are heading for trouble. Running Windows as an administrator also exposes the user to significantly enhanced risk. If you are concerned with this risk, run as a normal user. I do. Your risk will be much lower. Vista makes it much easier to run as a normal user. My wife and kids have normal user accounts on our modern machine. I will be trying to "upgrade" my old XP box (an older Win ME box I upgraded to XP with an additional 512 MB of RAM 3 years ago) to Vista home basic for the improved security support.
By we, I did not mean Microsoft. I first worked on a GUI on a Xerox Star in 82 when I joined Siemens Research. The SW researchers were working on windowing systems on Perq's at that time. Apple picked it up from Xerox.
I am writing this from a notebook that is running a beta of LongHorn Server. As a standard server, I do not have the client UI -- it looks rather like Win 2K (no glass, sidebar, or media support). My account is not a member of the admin group and IE is in locked down mode. It is quite secure. It is also faster.
There is a virtually universal tradeoff between functionality and security. With attacks moving from the OS to the user-space apps, we are seeing wide ranging compromises of sensitive user data without associated system compromise. The issue in this thread concerns the quality of the voting machine code itself.
Third parties do have access to the Microsoft source code. The evaluation laboratories that do the Common Criteria evaluations have essentially unlimited access to internal documentation and source code (under appropriate non-disclosure).
I assume the Microsoft product in question here is Embedded XP, which would be a reasonable foundation for such an application. When building Embedded XP, the builder should include only the needed components. This is standard for embedded system programming. The real question here is what is the electronic voting machine vendor doing? What is their code doing and what modules are included? What interfaces are exposed? How is the system composed and what are the relevant data flow diagrams and associated threat models?
We have trained the world to know and love GUI's. If you are trying to build a high assurance target, you would have a much easier time doing so with a text-based approach. Once you start going down that road, you soon realize that your assurance objectives are starting to get in the way of useability. Having something that is high assurance, but unuseable by a significant fraction of the population is unacceptable as well.
Using paper ballots which are then scanned is a more robust solution in that it allows examination of the original ballots and provides support for recounting.
The problem with steam engines is the condenser system, which tends to be bulky and weigh a lot. If you are going to go open cycle, an appropriate choice for a short distance racer, a high pressure system can have very high power. In such a situation you have your high power boilers fed by a high pressure pump and exiting a turbine, which is geared down to the wheels. ZOOM!
There is good reason to believe that eta carniae will emit a powerfull gamma ray burst when it collapses. Since the axis of rotation is not pointed anywhere near us, we are at no risk from the gamma beam. It is also possible that it is massive enough to suffer a pair creation supernovae. A recent supernovae of this type in a presumed LBV (luminus blue variable) was ~ 100 X brighter than most core collapse supernovae. Regardless, it is to far away from us to create any type of radiation hazard or even cause problems with perturbing the day - night balance.