All the terrorists have to do is get a forged passport from one of those countries and they'll slip through.
I got a new passport just a couple of weeks ago. It is quite tough to counterfeit, since the photo page is laminated and has embedded holograms of all kinds. That only counts security features that I could see... and I am sure there are some that can't be seen (such as microscopic print, or UV fibers/spots, or magnetic strips...)
Given that, the weakest link here is not the authentication of visitors, but visitors themselves. They can be either from exempt country, or they come through exempt routes (land borders are such, for now), or they can be simply US nationals. No identity check can tell the border guard what is in your head.
In my experience, one can't tell his business partners to redo all the documents in a format that you want. There are just too many documents, and there is more than one user. Also, many partners do not even understand the problem. They are not computer geeks, they are often business people. If you tell them "I can't open X because I don't have MS Word" they only would tell you "go and buy one".
The way to overcome this lock-in is twofold. First, better import/export filters in SO/OO. Second, proliferation of SO/OO native formats. Maybe MS Office should have a filter for.sxw files.
Not just that. Why would a Web site even want to limit access to DRM-only clients? I can't think of any reason, beyond some paid services. Most of the Web will stay DRM-free simply because there is nothing to protect there.
I know how things are in Toronto. But move to Mississauga and in some areas you can literally die from hunger without a car. Buses come every hour if there is no snow. It's not possible to live this way. I don't say it is good, and I'd take a teleportation booth any time, it's just they don't have them over there:-) Territory is large, and it is not economically possible to cover it with buses; look at the buses - usually just a few people in each; they already pay for themselves and for the other riders who are not there - their empty seats still travel, and the bus still burns fuel all the same.
I feel your pain with the groceries that time. Myself I transported a TV set on a hand cart back then. Good that it was only a mile. But you agree that it is not a good way to live your life when there are choices. Car = freedom, and quite a few people value the latter. Otherwise you will stay at a party or with your friend only until the last bus departs; and if you are too late - too bad, walk or take a taxi or try to find an all-night bus if you know where they normally graze...
Three block walk is fine. It would be ridiculous to argue that. But where I live now people typically drive for 30-40 minutes to get to work; and there is no public transit even in principle. Maybe if you walk for 2-3 hours you can reach one, but that is hardly an option... and some roads are steep; most people can't climb these hills.
So generally I fully agree that we can do with less cars. But we need to have something else instead; a good public transportation, automatic or otherwise, would be sufficient. As it is now, in most areas of both Canada and USA there is simply no replacement for a car. Only downtown dwellers don't need a car. Everyone's else life in many aspects depends on ability to drive, and it would be awfully selfish to deny them this necessity of modern life just because someone else can afford to live near amenities.
Fully automated cars are inevitable. They will appear as soon as the profit from their sales exceeds the danger of the lawsuits.
I can already make such a car, as a matter of fact, and right now if you want. I only need a monorail track installed all over the city, and my cars will be the only users. Then I will install triple collision avoidance system (computer, RF, IR, mechanical etc.) and that will keep me mostly out of trouble. Sure, they will be problems sometimes, but not fatal accidents.
That was just an example, but what I mean is clear - you can have a reliable transportation system. You only need to design it properly. In particular, you shouldn't allow your vehicles on the same road that any drunken person can use.
Perhaps someday we'll get past the idea that we have a RIGHT to everything and things like driving will be a privilege with tests that are actually difficult to pass, and a driving age that isn't shrinking toward the preteen crowd.
Perhaps also at that time we will figure out how to get people and their belongings to school or work or hospital or supermarket without driving.
Without this necessary requirement you will be cutting large groups of people from the society. As it stands now, the society as a whole is willing to take some risks but continue to function. What you propose is safety for some, and death for everyone who can't pass those difficult tests. Not everyone is born Andretti. Today's tests and requirements are reasonable.
The reason is simple. If you say that X is possible, you only need to know one method how to do it. If you say that X is not possible, you must know all relevant methods in the Universe and show that none of them can do the job. The word "all", together with "the Universe", is a tough requirement to meet.
Anyone have a hack for a nokia 3589i do completely disable the GPS functionality?
If you worry about GPS as such, the signals from satellites are very weak, and so you need clear view of the sky to receive them. This means that the GPS will not work within buildings, for example, or in the streets of some larger cities (Manhattan, for example, might be one; it's even dark there.)
If you worry about cruder methods of locating you - turn the phone off (remove the battery to be sure, though I don't think it transmits when powered off. But it may receive - and may listen for a magic packet, if your tinfoil hat is slightly off:-) If you use the phone, your location is instantly known to the base station(s) that service your call, and the GPS only improves the accuracy.
But the general rule is simple - do not take the phone with you into places which you are not willing to disclose to the whole world. A grocery store might be OK; a spare wife's house probably is not:-)
3G is not dead yet, but it is not alive either. From a few reports that I read, the network is a solution in search of a problem. Who would regularly need to stream real time video on the phone, paying 10 cents (or something) per minute, all the while trying to make out details of a tiny 2" barely visible picture?
Maybe in Japan, or in Europe, train or bus passengers would want the network to entertain them in some way while in transit. But most likely IP rights will make it impossible anyway, so they will be limited to simple Web browsing (on a phone? come on...) In USA there are no trains or buses, for all intents & purposes; people fly. But you can't use 3G in flight, so back to old trusty laptop with all the wealth of video and audio one can only imagine...
If anyone really wants to make a killer phone, make it just small enough to be worn as a wristwatch. That would be much more useful than all those petabytes per second. My friends always leave their phones where they themselves are not - on the desk, in a bag, in a car, at home - you name it, they left it there. And of course once someone leaves the phone on the desk and walks out, the phone rings...
Many best things that we enjoy are not marvelous novelties, but something well known, but perfected to absolute excellence, to its limit. I dare say, the phone shall follow this path.
The engineers decided on Linux, but the PHBs don't want to take risks (correctly, by the way.) So they, in their usual manner, tell us something while telling us nothing, and not committing to anything.
But seriously, Linux is great on embedded systems. I am right now working with Arcom's PC/104 board that has XScale CPU on it. I left the board plugged in for several months, and when I checked it was still working fine:-) It's Debian, btw, and takes only 8 MB Flash (other 8 MB are free, and I have larger CompactFlash plugged in as/dev/hda for development).
Well, the article says that they jailed six people recently for this offense. I would assume they don't watch everyone, but known activists can be easily monitored.
However this still does not tell me which of Koreas is more democratic. And this prohibition does not seem to be of any use whatsoever, unless South is paranoid about spies...
your analog TV will still work - it's just there won't be any signal that it can receive
I am sure this argument will explain everything, and the angry crowd will put the pitchforks down:-)
The TV sets were sold with implicit guarantee that the broadcasts will be provided indefinitely. Termination of those will be noticed with great displeasure by people who still watch TV. However I agree with other posters: nothing will happen; people will whine and then either buy some new hardware, or just give up TV alltogether (which may be a good idea regardless.)
Slashdot is not the best place for political discussions. However, here is a fact. In USSR dissidents were also persecuted, jailed, etc. Time came, and they were victorious. However soon after that most of those dissidents are out of favor again (and "out of favor" is very mild expression - some were shot.)
Why is that? Well, reasons depend on the country, I guess. Lenin was one such dissident in 1900's, and see what he did when he got the power... examples are plentiful. Today ex-dissidents in Russia are accused of treason, of selling out, of helping to steal national wealth...
This is not unique to Russia in any way. Look at Georgia, for example. They got Gamsakhurdia - and he failed miserably. They replaced him with Shevardnadze - and guess what, he failed miserably. They replaced him with ${don't know yet} and he will fail, probably. Same happened in Poland, same happened in Yugoslavia, same happens everywhere. This is because being a dissident does not really mean that you think better than other people; it only means that you think differently.
The point is, not all dissidents are "freedom fighters", and not all countries need, or want, the freedom, and not all societies can take the cold shower of total, uncontrollable, unrestricted freedom (North Korea is one.) I don't know much about this guy, he may be great. I just want to show you the larger picture (which was painted without my involvement, BTW, I am only an observer here).
Of course it is bad to jail dissidents just because they are thinking differently and talking about something. If your political system can't prove its benefits in an open discussion, then probably the system does not deserve to exist.
There is a catch, however, and the catch is called "populism". Basically, unwashed masses are told fairy tales, promised infinite wealth in no time, as long as they vote in a certain way or behave in a certain way (such as siege of Presidential Palace demanding resignation of the President). If a society is well controlled and sufficiently dumb, then this works. It worked before many times. This is exactly the reason why democracy fails in many countries - because the people of the country must be smart and active to vote right. This is often not the case, and quite possibly China is afraid that sweet talk of dissidents promoting ${some_other_system} can cause severe disturbance, maybe even a civil war. This is something worth avoiding, maybe even by jailing one person. Basically, the question is this: "How many people you are willing to kill to save 1 million people?" Dostoevsky gave a lot of thought to this dilemma, see his "Demons" and "Crime and Punishment" for details. And of course "Ringworld Engineers" touches this subject too.
Encryption is a very difficult thing to do, but not because of software. Planning, key management and physical security of keys (where applicable) are the tough parts.
With regard to "statistics", probably a wireless network that measures rainfall in some field is indeed a low value target. However what would you say about building access controls, door locks, cameras, card readers, store inventory controls, payment mechanisms? It all depends on how much the technology will be misused. Given that humanity misuses every technology given half a chance, the answer appears to be obvious.
But if so, odds are that the 2.4 GHz spectrum will become so saturated with clueless users' useless networks, it will deny access to anyone, and then things just break down.
This is not a guess, this is already a fact where I work. 2.4 GHz telephones are useless here (nothing but clicking and noise), and 2.4 GHz networks work in short bursts, and very unreliably. We stopped using 802.11G already, so useless it became.
because it's so easy to build almost undetectable (not just undecipherable) radios.
It is actually quite opposite. UWB is very difficult to build, that's why it does not work outside of a lab. Any RF engineer will give you ten most obvious reasons why it is difficult, starting from the antenna's inability to operate in such a wide band.
This is true, but only if you need higher sensitivity and higher power level, to for example affect meshes that are far from you. But this often is not needed, such as inside buildings.
If the mote can receive transmissions from other motes, then the kiddie only needs to hack a mote to get a set of working receiver and transmitter. For example, a regular fire alarm mote can be used to send a "Fire Alarm" message when the teacher asks him where is his homework:-)
With low cost and widespread usage of motes, there will be plenty of them to hack. Because of low cost, they must be made universal, and then programmable through some sort of JTAG or SPI connector. Make one, and you can rule the world:-)
Without a good security these wireless meshes soon will become a plaything for script kiddies. Not even mentioning terr'ists... who knows how much one can mess up the system if you know what you are doing.
Looks like another dream world to me, even less real than IPv6 is.
Well, it *must* lean backward in order to stop, otherwise your deceleration would be next to nothing. This applies to Segway too.
However it is not an advantage; it is a necessity which motorcycles (or cars) do not require. Imagine yourself sitting in a chair (or even try that.) Then imagine that the chair jerks forward so violently that you have to lean back... I wouldn't want that. In a car, or on a bike you don't have to move; on this Embrio you *must* move in order to brake or accelerate. Take a bottle of milk on a ride, and you will end up with some butter by the time you are there:-)
It is possible to slide the rider's seat back & forward but keep it horizontal. I don't know if this is practical, though, and such sliding will take time as well - maybe too long to compensate. It is not easy to achieve stability of such a complex system, and even your luggage can cause the vehicle to literally spin out of control...
Not sure it is lighter. This single mega-wheel still has to make a good contact with the road; and it has to carry all the weight. So this one big wheel may be actually heavier than two motorbike's wheels. And if it blows out, you are as good as dead.
So the design is cool, granted. And quite maybe it should have been done, as a design, as an exercise in mad science. Engineers need to relax too:-)
But from the practical POV, this thing is a no-go. Anyone who ride motorbikes probably would agree. The mechanics of braking is none too gentle, and even if your bike has two wheels (and you on top, which is usually the case;-), it can easily fight the gravity. And if anyone thinks that the riders of this Embrio will never exceed 30 mph, and will never need deceleration more than 1g, for example, they haven't learned a thing about humans:-) Fact is, humans tend to go as fast as they can, and as result they need to stop equally fast too.
Besides, what's the point? A motorbike (or a bicycle as its little brother) is already perfect. It exists pretty much unchanged for how much - 100 years? It's fun to ride, it's reliable, it's powerful (kW per pound ratio is good!), and it's small - so you can park it anywhere. You only shouldn't ride it in winter; but this Embrio is not any better traction-wise.
So again, why? Why exactly two wheels are bad? Why exactly it is so inherently evil to lose power and still be able to coast safely to a stop anywhere you choose? Why it is so bad to be able to brake hard when you have to? Why it is ungood to be able to fishtail on a wet road but still stay up & smiling? There is no such explanation in the article. My guess is, they made it because they could.
But as I said, the design is cool. Hydrogen fuel cell should be used in other vehicles (bikes #included). That would be good for the planet. But one wheel... leave it for the circus.
d) grab a spray can and seal the hole. Since the air escapes from within, it would be a very good patch. They do have such a sealant up there, and you can get one too (sold at local Kragen store to repair tires.)
Of course, it would be bad for business if someone without an NDA got ahold of the complete longhorn source code.
Not necessarily. It would be extremely hard to compile, and why bother if there are millions of perfectly compiled copies already? If you want only to look at it to find exploitables, you don't even need to try that hard; most Windows boxes have plenty of well known and unpatched vulnerabilities. Finally, if you are some sort of uber-spy and have to break into a very specific Windows box, you either will get access to the source, or will just walk into the building pretending to be a plumber;-)
If you want to feel how Longhorn code would look like, grab an old source tree of Netscape 4.x and enjoy whatever little sanity you will have left after that:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I got a new passport just a couple of weeks ago. It is quite tough to counterfeit, since the photo page is laminated and has embedded holograms of all kinds. That only counts security features that I could see... and I am sure there are some that can't be seen (such as microscopic print, or UV fibers/spots, or magnetic strips...)
Given that, the weakest link here is not the authentication of visitors, but visitors themselves. They can be either from exempt country, or they come through exempt routes (land borders are such, for now), or they can be simply US nationals. No identity check can tell the border guard what is in your head.
The way to overcome this lock-in is twofold. First, better import/export filters in SO/OO. Second, proliferation of SO/OO native formats. Maybe MS Office should have a filter for .sxw files.
Not just that. Why would a Web site even want to limit access to DRM-only clients? I can't think of any reason, beyond some paid services. Most of the Web will stay DRM-free simply because there is nothing to protect there.
I feel your pain with the groceries that time. Myself I transported a TV set on a hand cart back then. Good that it was only a mile. But you agree that it is not a good way to live your life when there are choices. Car = freedom, and quite a few people value the latter. Otherwise you will stay at a party or with your friend only until the last bus departs; and if you are too late - too bad, walk or take a taxi or try to find an all-night bus if you know where they normally graze...
Three block walk is fine. It would be ridiculous to argue that. But where I live now people typically drive for 30-40 minutes to get to work; and there is no public transit even in principle. Maybe if you walk for 2-3 hours you can reach one, but that is hardly an option... and some roads are steep; most people can't climb these hills.
So generally I fully agree that we can do with less cars. But we need to have something else instead; a good public transportation, automatic or otherwise, would be sufficient. As it is now, in most areas of both Canada and USA there is simply no replacement for a car. Only downtown dwellers don't need a car. Everyone's else life in many aspects depends on ability to drive, and it would be awfully selfish to deny them this necessity of modern life just because someone else can afford to live near amenities.
I can already make such a car, as a matter of fact, and right now if you want. I only need a monorail track installed all over the city, and my cars will be the only users. Then I will install triple collision avoidance system (computer, RF, IR, mechanical etc.) and that will keep me mostly out of trouble. Sure, they will be problems sometimes, but not fatal accidents.
That was just an example, but what I mean is clear - you can have a reliable transportation system. You only need to design it properly. In particular, you shouldn't allow your vehicles on the same road that any drunken person can use.
Perhaps also at that time we will figure out how to get people and their belongings to school or work or hospital or supermarket without driving.
Without this necessary requirement you will be cutting large groups of people from the society. As it stands now, the society as a whole is willing to take some risks but continue to function. What you propose is safety for some, and death for everyone who can't pass those difficult tests. Not everyone is born Andretti. Today's tests and requirements are reasonable.
The reason is simple. If you say that X is possible, you only need to know one method how to do it. If you say that X is not possible, you must know all relevant methods in the Universe and show that none of them can do the job. The word "all", together with "the Universe", is a tough requirement to meet.
If you worry about GPS as such, the signals from satellites are very weak, and so you need clear view of the sky to receive them. This means that the GPS will not work within buildings, for example, or in the streets of some larger cities (Manhattan, for example, might be one; it's even dark there.)
If you worry about cruder methods of locating you - turn the phone off (remove the battery to be sure, though I don't think it transmits when powered off. But it may receive - and may listen for a magic packet, if your tinfoil hat is slightly off :-) If you use the phone, your location is instantly known to the base station(s) that service your call, and the GPS only improves the accuracy.
But the general rule is simple - do not take the phone with you into places which you are not willing to disclose to the whole world. A grocery store might be OK; a spare wife's house probably is not :-)
Maybe in Japan, or in Europe, train or bus passengers would want the network to entertain them in some way while in transit. But most likely IP rights will make it impossible anyway, so they will be limited to simple Web browsing (on a phone? come on...) In USA there are no trains or buses, for all intents & purposes; people fly. But you can't use 3G in flight, so back to old trusty laptop with all the wealth of video and audio one can only imagine...
If anyone really wants to make a killer phone, make it just small enough to be worn as a wristwatch. That would be much more useful than all those petabytes per second. My friends always leave their phones where they themselves are not - on the desk, in a bag, in a car, at home - you name it, they left it there. And of course once someone leaves the phone on the desk and walks out, the phone rings...
Many best things that we enjoy are not marvelous novelties, but something well known, but perfected to absolute excellence, to its limit. I dare say, the phone shall follow this path.
But seriously, Linux is great on embedded systems. I am right now working with Arcom's PC/104 board that has XScale CPU on it. I left the board plugged in for several months, and when I checked it was still working fine :-) It's Debian, btw, and takes only 8 MB Flash (other 8 MB are free, and I have larger CompactFlash plugged in as /dev/hda for development).
However this still does not tell me which of Koreas is more democratic. And this prohibition does not seem to be of any use whatsoever, unless South is paranoid about spies...
I am sure this argument will explain everything, and the angry crowd will put the pitchforks down :-)
The TV sets were sold with implicit guarantee that the broadcasts will be provided indefinitely. Termination of those will be noticed with great displeasure by people who still watch TV. However I agree with other posters: nothing will happen; people will whine and then either buy some new hardware, or just give up TV alltogether (which may be a good idea regardless.)
Why is that? Well, reasons depend on the country, I guess. Lenin was one such dissident in 1900's, and see what he did when he got the power... examples are plentiful. Today ex-dissidents in Russia are accused of treason, of selling out, of helping to steal national wealth...
This is not unique to Russia in any way. Look at Georgia, for example. They got Gamsakhurdia - and he failed miserably. They replaced him with Shevardnadze - and guess what, he failed miserably. They replaced him with ${don't know yet} and he will fail, probably. Same happened in Poland, same happened in Yugoslavia, same happens everywhere. This is because being a dissident does not really mean that you think better than other people; it only means that you think differently.
The point is, not all dissidents are "freedom fighters", and not all countries need, or want, the freedom, and not all societies can take the cold shower of total, uncontrollable, unrestricted freedom (North Korea is one.) I don't know much about this guy, he may be great. I just want to show you the larger picture (which was painted without my involvement, BTW, I am only an observer here).
Of course it is bad to jail dissidents just because they are thinking differently and talking about something. If your political system can't prove its benefits in an open discussion, then probably the system does not deserve to exist.
There is a catch, however, and the catch is called "populism". Basically, unwashed masses are told fairy tales, promised infinite wealth in no time, as long as they vote in a certain way or behave in a certain way (such as siege of Presidential Palace demanding resignation of the President). If a society is well controlled and sufficiently dumb, then this works. It worked before many times. This is exactly the reason why democracy fails in many countries - because the people of the country must be smart and active to vote right. This is often not the case, and quite possibly China is afraid that sweet talk of dissidents promoting ${some_other_system} can cause severe disturbance, maybe even a civil war. This is something worth avoiding, maybe even by jailing one person. Basically, the question is this: "How many people you are willing to kill to save 1 million people?" Dostoevsky gave a lot of thought to this dilemma, see his "Demons" and "Crime and Punishment" for details. And of course "Ringworld Engineers" touches this subject too.
With regard to "statistics", probably a wireless network that measures rainfall in some field is indeed a low value target. However what would you say about building access controls, door locks, cameras, card readers, store inventory controls, payment mechanisms? It all depends on how much the technology will be misused. Given that humanity misuses every technology given half a chance, the answer appears to be obvious.
But if so, odds are that the 2.4 GHz spectrum will become so saturated with clueless users' useless networks, it will deny access to anyone, and then things just break down.
This is not a guess, this is already a fact where I work. 2.4 GHz telephones are useless here (nothing but clicking and noise), and 2.4 GHz networks work in short bursts, and very unreliably. We stopped using 802.11G already, so useless it became.
It is actually quite opposite. UWB is very difficult to build, that's why it does not work outside of a lab. Any RF engineer will give you ten most obvious reasons why it is difficult, starting from the antenna's inability to operate in such a wide band.
If the mote can receive transmissions from other motes, then the kiddie only needs to hack a mote to get a set of working receiver and transmitter. For example, a regular fire alarm mote can be used to send a "Fire Alarm" message when the teacher asks him where is his homework :-)
With low cost and widespread usage of motes, there will be plenty of them to hack. Because of low cost, they must be made universal, and then programmable through some sort of JTAG or SPI connector. Make one, and you can rule the world :-)
Looks like another dream world to me, even less real than IPv6 is.
However it is not an advantage; it is a necessity which motorcycles (or cars) do not require. Imagine yourself sitting in a chair (or even try that.) Then imagine that the chair jerks forward so violently that you have to lean back... I wouldn't want that. In a car, or on a bike you don't have to move; on this Embrio you *must* move in order to brake or accelerate. Take a bottle of milk on a ride, and you will end up with some butter by the time you are there :-)
It is possible to slide the rider's seat back & forward but keep it horizontal. I don't know if this is practical, though, and such sliding will take time as well - maybe too long to compensate. It is not easy to achieve stability of such a complex system, and even your luggage can cause the vehicle to literally spin out of control...
Not sure it is lighter. This single mega-wheel still has to make a good contact with the road; and it has to carry all the weight. So this one big wheel may be actually heavier than two motorbike's wheels. And if it blows out, you are as good as dead.
But from the practical POV, this thing is a no-go. Anyone who ride motorbikes probably would agree. The mechanics of braking is none too gentle, and even if your bike has two wheels (and you on top, which is usually the case ;-), it can easily fight the gravity. And if anyone thinks that the riders of this Embrio will never exceed 30 mph, and will never need deceleration more than 1g, for example, they haven't learned a thing about humans :-) Fact is, humans tend to go as fast as they can, and as result they need to stop equally fast too.
Besides, what's the point? A motorbike (or a bicycle as its little brother) is already perfect. It exists pretty much unchanged for how much - 100 years? It's fun to ride, it's reliable, it's powerful (kW per pound ratio is good!), and it's small - so you can park it anywhere. You only shouldn't ride it in winter; but this Embrio is not any better traction-wise.
So again, why? Why exactly two wheels are bad? Why exactly it is so inherently evil to lose power and still be able to coast safely to a stop anywhere you choose? Why it is so bad to be able to brake hard when you have to? Why it is ungood to be able to fishtail on a wet road but still stay up & smiling? There is no such explanation in the article. My guess is, they made it because they could.
But as I said, the design is cool. Hydrogen fuel cell should be used in other vehicles (bikes #included). That would be good for the planet. But one wheel ... leave it for the circus.
That would be a solid piece of evidence in your favor - exactly as the presence of your knife at the crime scene would be used against you.
d) grab a spray can and seal the hole. Since the air escapes from within, it would be a very good patch. They do have such a sealant up there, and you can get one too (sold at local Kragen store to repair tires.)
There is usually no need to use ln - see Apache Log Configuration directives.
Not necessarily. It would be extremely hard to compile, and why bother if there are millions of perfectly compiled copies already? If you want only to look at it to find exploitables, you don't even need to try that hard; most Windows boxes have plenty of well known and unpatched vulnerabilities. Finally, if you are some sort of uber-spy and have to break into a very specific Windows box, you either will get access to the source, or will just walk into the building pretending to be a plumber ;-)
If you want to feel how Longhorn code would look like, grab an old source tree of Netscape 4.x and enjoy whatever little sanity you will have left after that :-)