Fortunately we don't have to. There is no need for any such central root authority, which is precisely why dnssec has gained no traction at all - it solves no problems that we actually face. The status quo (security applied end-to-end at the application level) is not only adequate, it's better than dnssec because there's no central source of corruption involved. We have no need or desire for a secure DNS system.
Now, a DNS system that was largely immune to DoS attacks, that would be useful. That's the real problem we face with DNS. But dnssec doesn't help with that at all.
I recently heard that 10% of high school senior girls report having been raped. These are girls under 18.
Only because they count all the cases where a girl had sex while drunk. The definition for statistical purposes is "non-consensual sex", and a person is legally incapable of giving consent if they are intoxicated - so if they're sufficiently drunk, any form of sexual activity is classified as rape (even if the people involved are in some kind of stable relationship at the time!). These are never prosecuted, but they're listed in the crime statistics in order to create a culture of fear, letting people secure more funding and pass more laws than would otherwise be possible.
Once you rephrase it as "10% of high school senior girls have had sex while drunk and/or stoned", it's not really very interesting (and you have to wonder why the figure is so low). The number of 'rapes' worthy of prosecution is really very small.
People should be allowed to do harm to themselves.
Yes.
People should be allowed to smoke in public.
No.
walking past someone smoking a cigarette will not cause significant harm
Nor will walking past somebody who is defecating in the street, but it's still illegal to do so. Smoking in public should be classified under "creating an offensive public nuisance, specifically a foul stench", a misdemeanour punishable by a fine (and a night in the cells if you won't stop doing it when the police show up). The police should treat it in exactly the same manner as they do "drunk and disorderly".
Not "because it's bad for you, so don't do it", but "because it's just gross and very annoying, so don't do it in public". Not a nanny state, but a well-mannered one.
Advertising all forms of self-harm, including alcohol and tobacco products, should be a felony punishable by jail time. People should be allowed to do it to themselves, but they should not be allowed to encourage others to do it for their own profit.
It seems from the story, and just pragmatism, the best option is to hope the folks who have the best weapons are the most friendly types.
We're screwed.
If any lesson is to be learned from history, let it be this one: the most friendly types will always turn into the most unfriendly types given sufficient time. All those care-bears with nukes will eventually turn into politicians with nukes. The only question is how long we have left.
I cool water in a controlled laboratory experiment, and it freezes. Water in the real world... who knows what could happen when it's cooled?? There are so many uncontrolled variables! Maybe it will boil!
Yes, if the pressure drops far enough, the water will boil. Alternatively, unexpected things in the air may contaminate the water and alter its properties. That would be the point - in the real world, the uncontrollable factors can completely change the observed result.
There are many variables in the Earth's climate, but none of them change the fact that CO2 and other gases produce a greenhouse effect, and they don't change the magnitude of that greenhouse effect. Those are physical facts.
And the essential uncertainty is what effect CO2 and other gases have on the planet's normal ecological processes. This planet is not an unstable balance - there are extremely large forces at work to maintain the levels of atmospheric gases at certain ratios. For example, CO2 is mediated by the blue-green algae in the oceans, which happens to be one of the most populous species on the planet (measured by the ton, there's far more algae than people).
We don't know what's going on there and we don't know why the CO2 levels are increasing instead of being maintained.
It doesn't help that all the theories say that a warmer planet will generate higher CO2 levels. Correlation != causation: we don't know whether the CO2 is causing the temperature or whether the temperature is causing the CO2. We can demonstrate in the lab that both are possible, and that tells us nothing about which one is actually happening.
The fact that we have warmed the Earth is, however, supported by evidence at this point that is now beyond reasonable doubt.
That is a bare-faced lie. The fact that the planet has warmed and that CO2 is somehow involved in that is now beyond reasonable doubt. The causes of that warming are still in the realm of speculation.
You can start by reading the IPCC reports.
The recent IPCC report is very clear on this: planet hotter, causes uncertain (human-related causes "likely" to be a significant factor, but that could be anything from 1/10 to 9/10 of the problem), solution impossible at current level of knowledge.
It doesn't "mean" anything. There's an origin for the term, but that doesn't relate to the current use. There is no zen here - there is no special significance to the name of the directory. It's just a more or less arbitrary name for the place where the config files are kept. Searching for some deeper meaning is an exercise in futility.
There's no way that an ISP could sell bandwidth at a reasonable price without oversubscribing at some point.
I disagree. ISPs are perfectly capable of selling bandwidth at a reasonable price. The problem is that they are currently selling unreasonable packages, where the price is far too low for the advertised capacity. That's not because they've set their prices too low, but because they wanted to advertise larger capacity - so they just made the numbers bigger by lying about them. The result is an ISP that just sucks - cutting costs everywhere they can, which gives us a "tech support" line that goes to an Indian callcenter where you get told that they aren't going to do anything about your problem, and a program of banning all the people who try to use the capacity they were sold.
Without oversubscription your 1.5Mbit DSL line would be $500 a month, not $50. Those in the business know I'm not exaggerating here, given the cost of service provider network equipment and fiber capacity (which continues to fall, but not nearly fast enough).
Closer to $200-$300, although it depends exactly what you're buying. If you use a leased line instead of DSL (higher reliability but higher operating costs) and include a real SLA, that'll easily push the price up over $500. The bandwidth itself is only about half that (although it's hard to find somebody who will sell you real bandwidth without a business-type SLA).
ISPs simply can't stay in business if customers actually use all the bandwidth they're given, and if we all built our networks such that everyone could, no consumer would pay for it.
So the solution is for the ISP to sell the product that they're actually providing. Don't sell "8Mbit DSL". Sell a service that's clearly labelled as "512kbit DSL, plus up to 10Gb per month of 8Mbit bursts", or whatever numbers you can arrange. People would be happy to buy a service like that. They aren't so happy about buying a service that's "8Mbit bursts but when we decide you're using too much we'll just cut you off and keep your money".
Make real, sensible rules about what people can transfer, that aren't overcommitted. Implement them via traffic shaping and stick to them. Problem solved.
If you want real free markets, then you don't regulate at all. No spectrum allocations, no power regulations, nothing. Of course, that's chaos. So what do we do?
We create protocols that work anyway. All of the 802.11{a,b,g,whatever's next} wireless protocols are running on unregulated frequency bands (they get put through testing by the FCC and other national agencies, but these are just the regular emissions tests - there are *no* tests for the correctness of the protocol implementation).
The claim that an unregulated spectrum "can't work" is a deliberate lie put out by the people who want to own the spectrum. Wireless networks across the world have been proving otherwise for decades - in fact, they work better than the regulated bands (because there's actual competition forcing continual improvement).
The Google paper shows that relatively high temperatures and high usage rates don't affect disk life.
Hrnghk!
The Google paper shows that relatively high temperatures do significantly affect disk life, and pins the safety point at about 45 degrees. Which is about where the manufacturers said it should be in the operating specs for the disks, if you bothered to read them.
They absolutely do not show that high temperatures don't affect disk life. Quite the opposite. Their graphs clearly show increased failure rates as the temperature rises above 45 degrees.
What they do show is that abnormally low (below 40 degree) temperatures don't improve it. That disproves the sanity of attaching watercooling rigs to your hard drive, but apart from that it's not very significant (did anybody seriously think that was a good idea?).
Normal operating temperature for a correctly installed disk in a 1-drive PC is typically 35-40 degrees. 10k RPM disks are hotter. Densely packed stacks of disks in servers can reach 50-60 degrees if not cooled *very* carefully, and that's *bad*, as the Google study shows. No myth was disproved - rather, one of the few figures which the manufacturer can and does test properly was demonstrated to be correct (it's really easy for them to find the safe operating temperature, so this is no surprise).
Love the RAID5 stat, though... Perhaps this study will finally convince people to only use RAID for performance or huge-JBOD reasons, never for (the illusion of) reliability.
It's true that you should never buy anything for the illusion of reliability, but the article does not claim RAID is not a good way to get reliability.
First, let's look at the common mistake when people think about RAID: "If the probability of a drive failure is X, then the probability of two drives in a RAID volume failing is X*X, which is much smaller". That's nonsense, as the article demonstrates - the probability is only X*X if the events are independent, which they are clearly not.
But the idea was nonsense even before that. The statement is taking the wrong attitude to the problem - it is considering the probability of data loss at *one point in time*. That's not actually what you care about - if your server dies on Tuesday, it is no comfort to you that it did not die on Monday. Here is a more sensible way to look at what is going on (ignoring backups for the moment):
Every drive is going to fail, typically within the first ten years of its life. So if you have a non-RAID system, the probability of data loss is 100% - certain. Really. Without RAID, sooner or later, you are going to lose that volume. What RAID gives you is a moderate chance of getting through the inevitable drive failures without losing the volume, and that's a chance that you never had at all without RAID. Different configurations can modify how large that chance is, but the essential feature of RAID is that you get the chance.
So what do backups get you? It's basically the same thing, except that you've got to rebuild the server. So if you just have backups and no RAID, it is a certainty that sooner or later your server is going to have significant amounts of downtime while it's being rebuilt from the backup. If downtime bothers you, you need RAID, period. Exactly what kind of RAID depends on what chance you want to take (standard risk management calculation), but there's just no contest between "certain failure" and "chance of avoiding failure" - even a 10% chance of surviving a disk failure is infinitely better than no chance (and the actual figure should be much better than that).
Lastly, what happens if you have RAID and no backups? It should be apparent that you get the same scenario as RAID with backups, only with a higher chance of failure. So there's no fundamental reason not to do that - line up the figures along with RAID+backup solutions in your risk management analysis, and pick the cheapest option for the level of risk you (or your insurance company) are willing to accept.
The impact of this study is a nice improvement in the accuracy of that analysis. Neither more nor less. If you're running large servers, this would be a good time to pull out those numbers and take another look at them (if you don't have those numbers on file, this study is not for you).
got a 1 gig usb flash drive here dead in less than 8 weeks and very few read and writes
Which just goes to show what anybody can tell you: there is huge variation in both quality and price of USB flash drives. You can get 1Gb of flash storage for the price of a cup of coffee. And it'll last about as long.
You can also buy drives that last a lot longer. Those cost more.
Some newer 20GB on up, there was a downright scandal about extremely high failure rates on certain lines. It sounds like 1 plant producing them was turning out duds with a near 100% failure rate. IBM sold off the storage division to Hitachi, who now sells Hitachi Deskstars. I can only assume they closed the bad plant, or made sure the clean room was actually clean 8-).
This is how some guys I used to know in the storage division told the story - hearsay, but probably a reasonable approximation to what happened:
At the time, IBM had two disk fabrication plants. Certain lines of deskstars were being migrated to a new kind of platter technology (glass composition? something like that), which necessitated completely rebuilding the production lines.
One of those rebuilds was screwed. All the disks it produced were DOA, but not quite DOA enough to get the problem caught by their standard QA procedures. In the end they had to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it again.
In the end, about half the drives shipped in the affected product lines were defective. Because of how stock allocation from the two plants works, if the store you got your drive from gave you a defective one, most likely every single other drive in their storeroom was from the same plant and therefore also defective, so taking it back there for a warranty replacement was a joke. The deskstars got a bad reputation more from this than from anything else. IBM knew what was going on, but could do little to stop it, because until they got that plant rebuilt they just didn't *have* any replacement drives to hand out. A classic example of how a failure in the QA process can leave a company completely screwed.
By the time Hitachi bought the storage division, the bad production line was long gone and the QA procedures fixed.
I don't know why they didn't just throw in the towel and issue a product recall. Must have been a management decision. There's a lawsuit pending that might find out.
If they had to recoup all the costs and get profits in 5 years imagine how much a bottle of pills would cost.
Most of the price tag on drugs is profit. If it was about recouping costs, they would be far cheaper than they currently are. Drugs are priced as high as the market will bear, so the prices won't go up just because you reduce patent lifetimes.
You do not "simply" do that, even if you've figured out how. It still involved stripping ICs and electron microscope scanning them.
Every hardware DRM system that mattered (like every game console) has been cracked. None of them involved stripping ICs and electron microscopes. Mostly they're bus-snooping attacks, quite straightforward when you know where to look on a given piece of hardware.
Revoking hardware player keys is a lot easier and less of a hassle, because hardware players have essentially individual keys.
That doesn't help. Those hardware players also have essentially identical designs - so the method used to extract the key from one of them also works to extract the key from the next one.
You simply pick up a new hardware player each month and fetch a new key, which can be used to decrypt all of the previous month's disks. They can revoke it, but you'll just get another one for the next month's batch.
Giving individual keys to hardware players actually makes this sort of attack *more* effective - instead of a key that works once, you get a limitless supply of keys.
But if the industry decides that SW players are too weak, they simply revoke keys for them and don't issue new ones. The end of software players and the end of the risk.
You appear to be assuming that nobody can break a pure-hardware 'protection' scheme, even when they have motivation to do so. The existence of many modchips (and even chipless hacks) for the PS2 and xbox systems disproves this. Just because software engineers don't normally know how it's done does not mean that reverse-engineering hardware is any harder than reverse-engineering software.
Microsoft has never cared about this. They do not care about stopping "piracy".
The purpose of DRM to Microsoft is control over the distribution channels. Nothing more, nothing less.
Re:Ethics Rules and Devil's Advocate
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 1
Additionally there are ethical guidelines with real force that prohibit attorneys from using lies in the course of their representation.
Those rules are extremely weak and ineffective. Basically, if an attorney cannot work around them, they are a bad attorney who doesn't deserve to be paid anyway. The problem is that it's not a "lie" if the attorney can claim they believed it - and people are well-known for believing all kinds of stupid nonsense, so unless the attorney is actually caught in a contradiction (claiming one thing in one place and the opposite in another), it is more or less impossible for them to be penalised under these rules.
You seemed to have missed the word SAFELY in my post.
Not at all. No significant numbers of people have died from nuclear waste disposal yet. It's considered "safe" until it is killing significantly more people than cars (ie, thousands per year).
It may be a really *stupid* way to deal with the waste, but it's not actually "unsafe", by any reasonable measure.
It's called blue-green algae - the reason why our planet still has an oxygen atmosphere and not a carbon dioxide one (which is, contrary to media belief, not plants - as you rightly point out, those are not major carbon sinks).
Curiously, the best way to increase the amount of blue-green algae on the planet is to increase the carbon dioxide level - the stuff breeds extremely fast if you give it enough CO2 to breathe. It's a self-regulating process that maintains the ratio of O2 to CO2 on the planet (in both directions - reduce the CO2 levels, the algae population drops, so the CO2 levels balance out again).
And now you should begin to see why the question of "what the heck is going on with the CO2 levels in the atmosphere?" is a complicated one that we don't really know the answer to (all current theories are largely unsubstantiated, and most of them disagree with each other).
Also, exploit space; send robot mining ships to obtain 10000-ton platinum and gold asteroids and the like; one or two of these will pay for everything.
That doesn't actually work. If you put platinum and gold on the market in 10k ton lots, they will be virtually worthless. There just is not very much demand for platinum and gold - they aren't very useful metals - and if supply exceeds demand by that much, the price drops to almost nothing.
Go grab yourself some iron asteroids, the sort of stuff that industry can use to build cars, and satellites for delivering more TV channels. That'll make money, and has the advantage that iron asteroids are plentiful (the sort of junk that collects in asteroid belts tends to be elements have weights close to iron - something to do with how star systems form).
DONT tell me its not possible due to variability in the power source
Okay. I'll tell you the real reason why it's not possible:
If you plated the entire US with solar panels, using the most efficient panels we currently know how to make, and you assume that there is no cloud cover or other weather obscuring the sun at any point during the year... you still wouldn't have a significant fraction of the power used by the entire US. You could manage the residential power usage (just about, assuming that the unpopulated regions of the southern states would make up for the low light levels in the northern ones), but not the commercial and industrial demands (which are considerably higher). And that's before you start cranking up the electricity demands by running all those cars on grid power instead of petroleum.
Wind power is even worse, the output is effectively zero compared to the demands. That's the problem with wind and solar power - the efficiency is poor (solar panels are less than 10% efficient) and the total land area available, multiplied by the power per unit area, multiplied by the efficiency, is a small number compared to the amount of power you need.
We're just using too damn much power for wind and solar to be viable energy sources, at least at our current technology level.
You know... if there was a large industry for getting rid of nuclear waste... someone would find a way to do it quickly, safely, and cheaply just so they can be a rich bastard off of it.
This has already happened. The quick, "safe", and cheap way to get rid of nuclear waste is to put it in big steel containers, put a fence around it, and ignore it. Sometimes you might bury it in the ground if necessary to get political cover.
The nuclear power industry is making a fortune from doing this. They actually get paid for it (by the governments).
We aren't dealing with nuclear waste like this because it's the best thing we know how to do. We're doing it because it's the most profitable way.
In practice, that right has only been exercised in wartime
Wartime is the normal state for the US. In its short history, it has been at war with somebody on a pretty regular basis (although as a matter of principle the US always fights undeclared wars). Here's the embarrassing list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Wars
It is an open question as to whether the large military-industrial complex grew up to support the wars, or the wars grew up to support the large military-industrial complex.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately we don't have to. There is no need for any such central root authority, which is precisely why dnssec has gained no traction at all - it solves no problems that we actually face. The status quo (security applied end-to-end at the application level) is not only adequate, it's better than dnssec because there's no central source of corruption involved. We have no need or desire for a secure DNS system.
Now, a DNS system that was largely immune to DoS attacks, that would be useful. That's the real problem we face with DNS. But dnssec doesn't help with that at all.
Only because they count all the cases where a girl had sex while drunk. The definition for statistical purposes is "non-consensual sex", and a person is legally incapable of giving consent if they are intoxicated - so if they're sufficiently drunk, any form of sexual activity is classified as rape (even if the people involved are in some kind of stable relationship at the time!). These are never prosecuted, but they're listed in the crime statistics in order to create a culture of fear, letting people secure more funding and pass more laws than would otherwise be possible.
Once you rephrase it as "10% of high school senior girls have had sex while drunk and/or stoned", it's not really very interesting (and you have to wonder why the figure is so low). The number of 'rapes' worthy of prosecution is really very small.
Yes.
No.
Nor will walking past somebody who is defecating in the street, but it's still illegal to do so. Smoking in public should be classified under "creating an offensive public nuisance, specifically a foul stench", a misdemeanour punishable by a fine (and a night in the cells if you won't stop doing it when the police show up). The police should treat it in exactly the same manner as they do "drunk and disorderly".
Not "because it's bad for you, so don't do it", but "because it's just gross and very annoying, so don't do it in public". Not a nanny state, but a well-mannered one.
Advertising all forms of self-harm, including alcohol and tobacco products, should be a felony punishable by jail time. People should be allowed to do it to themselves, but they should not be allowed to encourage others to do it for their own profit.
We're screwed.
If any lesson is to be learned from history, let it be this one: the most friendly types will always turn into the most unfriendly types given sufficient time. All those care-bears with nukes will eventually turn into politicians with nukes. The only question is how long we have left.
Yes, if the pressure drops far enough, the water will boil. Alternatively, unexpected things in the air may contaminate the water and alter its properties. That would be the point - in the real world, the uncontrollable factors can completely change the observed result.
And the essential uncertainty is what effect CO2 and other gases have on the planet's normal ecological processes. This planet is not an unstable balance - there are extremely large forces at work to maintain the levels of atmospheric gases at certain ratios. For example, CO2 is mediated by the blue-green algae in the oceans, which happens to be one of the most populous species on the planet (measured by the ton, there's far more algae than people).
We don't know what's going on there and we don't know why the CO2 levels are increasing instead of being maintained.
It doesn't help that all the theories say that a warmer planet will generate higher CO2 levels. Correlation != causation: we don't know whether the CO2 is causing the temperature or whether the temperature is causing the CO2. We can demonstrate in the lab that both are possible, and that tells us nothing about which one is actually happening.
That is a bare-faced lie. The fact that the planet has warmed and that CO2 is somehow involved in that is now beyond reasonable doubt. The causes of that warming are still in the realm of speculation.
The recent IPCC report is very clear on this: planet hotter, causes uncertain (human-related causes "likely" to be a significant factor, but that could be anything from 1/10 to 9/10 of the problem), solution impossible at current level of knowledge.
It doesn't "mean" anything. There's an origin for the term, but that doesn't relate to the current use. There is no zen here - there is no special significance to the name of the directory. It's just a more or less arbitrary name for the place where the config files are kept. Searching for some deeper meaning is an exercise in futility.
I disagree. ISPs are perfectly capable of selling bandwidth at a reasonable price. The problem is that they are currently selling unreasonable packages, where the price is far too low for the advertised capacity. That's not because they've set their prices too low, but because they wanted to advertise larger capacity - so they just made the numbers bigger by lying about them. The result is an ISP that just sucks - cutting costs everywhere they can, which gives us a "tech support" line that goes to an Indian callcenter where you get told that they aren't going to do anything about your problem, and a program of banning all the people who try to use the capacity they were sold.
Closer to $200-$300, although it depends exactly what you're buying. If you use a leased line instead of DSL (higher reliability but higher operating costs) and include a real SLA, that'll easily push the price up over $500. The bandwidth itself is only about half that (although it's hard to find somebody who will sell you real bandwidth without a business-type SLA).
So the solution is for the ISP to sell the product that they're actually providing. Don't sell "8Mbit DSL". Sell a service that's clearly labelled as "512kbit DSL, plus up to 10Gb per month of 8Mbit bursts", or whatever numbers you can arrange. People would be happy to buy a service like that. They aren't so happy about buying a service that's "8Mbit bursts but when we decide you're using too much we'll just cut you off and keep your money".
Make real, sensible rules about what people can transfer, that aren't overcommitted. Implement them via traffic shaping and stick to them. Problem solved.
We create protocols that work anyway. All of the 802.11{a,b,g,whatever's next} wireless protocols are running on unregulated frequency bands (they get put through testing by the FCC and other national agencies, but these are just the regular emissions tests - there are *no* tests for the correctness of the protocol implementation).
The claim that an unregulated spectrum "can't work" is a deliberate lie put out by the people who want to own the spectrum. Wireless networks across the world have been proving otherwise for decades - in fact, they work better than the regulated bands (because there's actual competition forcing continual improvement).
Hrnghk!
The Google paper shows that relatively high temperatures do significantly affect disk life, and pins the safety point at about 45 degrees. Which is about where the manufacturers said it should be in the operating specs for the disks, if you bothered to read them.
They absolutely do not show that high temperatures don't affect disk life. Quite the opposite. Their graphs clearly show increased failure rates as the temperature rises above 45 degrees.
What they do show is that abnormally low (below 40 degree) temperatures don't improve it. That disproves the sanity of attaching watercooling rigs to your hard drive, but apart from that it's not very significant (did anybody seriously think that was a good idea?).
Normal operating temperature for a correctly installed disk in a 1-drive PC is typically 35-40 degrees. 10k RPM disks are hotter. Densely packed stacks of disks in servers can reach 50-60 degrees if not cooled *very* carefully, and that's *bad*, as the Google study shows. No myth was disproved - rather, one of the few figures which the manufacturer can and does test properly was demonstrated to be correct (it's really easy for them to find the safe operating temperature, so this is no surprise).
It's true that you should never buy anything for the illusion of reliability, but the article does not claim RAID is not a good way to get reliability.
First, let's look at the common mistake when people think about RAID: "If the probability of a drive failure is X, then the probability of two drives in a RAID volume failing is X*X, which is much smaller". That's nonsense, as the article demonstrates - the probability is only X*X if the events are independent, which they are clearly not.
But the idea was nonsense even before that. The statement is taking the wrong attitude to the problem - it is considering the probability of data loss at *one point in time*. That's not actually what you care about - if your server dies on Tuesday, it is no comfort to you that it did not die on Monday. Here is a more sensible way to look at what is going on (ignoring backups for the moment):
Every drive is going to fail, typically within the first ten years of its life. So if you have a non-RAID system, the probability of data loss is 100% - certain. Really. Without RAID, sooner or later, you are going to lose that volume. What RAID gives you is a moderate chance of getting through the inevitable drive failures without losing the volume, and that's a chance that you never had at all without RAID. Different configurations can modify how large that chance is, but the essential feature of RAID is that you get the chance.
So what do backups get you? It's basically the same thing, except that you've got to rebuild the server. So if you just have backups and no RAID, it is a certainty that sooner or later your server is going to have significant amounts of downtime while it's being rebuilt from the backup. If downtime bothers you, you need RAID, period. Exactly what kind of RAID depends on what chance you want to take (standard risk management calculation), but there's just no contest between "certain failure" and "chance of avoiding failure" - even a 10% chance of surviving a disk failure is infinitely better than no chance (and the actual figure should be much better than that).
Lastly, what happens if you have RAID and no backups? It should be apparent that you get the same scenario as RAID with backups, only with a higher chance of failure. So there's no fundamental reason not to do that - line up the figures along with RAID+backup solutions in your risk management analysis, and pick the cheapest option for the level of risk you (or your insurance company) are willing to accept.
The impact of this study is a nice improvement in the accuracy of that analysis. Neither more nor less. If you're running large servers, this would be a good time to pull out those numbers and take another look at them (if you don't have those numbers on file, this study is not for you).
Which just goes to show what anybody can tell you: there is huge variation in both quality and price of USB flash drives. You can get 1Gb of flash storage for the price of a cup of coffee. And it'll last about as long.
You can also buy drives that last a lot longer. Those cost more.
Sure. Which is why every other operating system has done it for years. Some have done it for decades. I think even fricking *minix* does it.
Yet again, Windows is so far behind that it's just not funny. Seriously, is this the best they've got?
This is how some guys I used to know in the storage division told the story - hearsay, but probably a reasonable approximation to what happened:
At the time, IBM had two disk fabrication plants. Certain lines of deskstars were being migrated to a new kind of platter technology (glass composition? something like that), which necessitated completely rebuilding the production lines.
One of those rebuilds was screwed. All the disks it produced were DOA, but not quite DOA enough to get the problem caught by their standard QA procedures. In the end they had to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it again.
In the end, about half the drives shipped in the affected product lines were defective. Because of how stock allocation from the two plants works, if the store you got your drive from gave you a defective one, most likely every single other drive in their storeroom was from the same plant and therefore also defective, so taking it back there for a warranty replacement was a joke. The deskstars got a bad reputation more from this than from anything else. IBM knew what was going on, but could do little to stop it, because until they got that plant rebuilt they just didn't *have* any replacement drives to hand out. A classic example of how a failure in the QA process can leave a company completely screwed.
By the time Hitachi bought the storage division, the bad production line was long gone and the QA procedures fixed.
I don't know why they didn't just throw in the towel and issue a product recall. Must have been a management decision. There's a lawsuit pending that might find out.
Most of the price tag on drugs is profit. If it was about recouping costs, they would be far cheaper than they currently are. Drugs are priced as high as the market will bear, so the prices won't go up just because you reduce patent lifetimes.
Every hardware DRM system that mattered (like every game console) has been cracked. None of them involved stripping ICs and electron microscopes. Mostly they're bus-snooping attacks, quite straightforward when you know where to look on a given piece of hardware.
That doesn't help. Those hardware players also have essentially identical designs - so the method used to extract the key from one of them also works to extract the key from the next one.
You simply pick up a new hardware player each month and fetch a new key, which can be used to decrypt all of the previous month's disks. They can revoke it, but you'll just get another one for the next month's batch.
Giving individual keys to hardware players actually makes this sort of attack *more* effective - instead of a key that works once, you get a limitless supply of keys.
You appear to be assuming that nobody can break a pure-hardware 'protection' scheme, even when they have motivation to do so. The existence of many modchips (and even chipless hacks) for the PS2 and xbox systems disproves this. Just because software engineers don't normally know how it's done does not mean that reverse-engineering hardware is any harder than reverse-engineering software.
Microsoft has never cared about this. They do not care about stopping "piracy".
The purpose of DRM to Microsoft is control over the distribution channels. Nothing more, nothing less.
Those rules are extremely weak and ineffective. Basically, if an attorney cannot work around them, they are a bad attorney who doesn't deserve to be paid anyway. The problem is that it's not a "lie" if the attorney can claim they believed it - and people are well-known for believing all kinds of stupid nonsense, so unless the attorney is actually caught in a contradiction (claiming one thing in one place and the opposite in another), it is more or less impossible for them to be penalised under these rules.
Not at all. No significant numbers of people have died from nuclear waste disposal yet. It's considered "safe" until it is killing significantly more people than cars (ie, thousands per year).
It may be a really *stupid* way to deal with the waste, but it's not actually "unsafe", by any reasonable measure.
It's called blue-green algae - the reason why our planet still has an oxygen atmosphere and not a carbon dioxide one (which is, contrary to media belief, not plants - as you rightly point out, those are not major carbon sinks).
Curiously, the best way to increase the amount of blue-green algae on the planet is to increase the carbon dioxide level - the stuff breeds extremely fast if you give it enough CO2 to breathe. It's a self-regulating process that maintains the ratio of O2 to CO2 on the planet (in both directions - reduce the CO2 levels, the algae population drops, so the CO2 levels balance out again).
And now you should begin to see why the question of "what the heck is going on with the CO2 levels in the atmosphere?" is a complicated one that we don't really know the answer to (all current theories are largely unsubstantiated, and most of them disagree with each other).
That doesn't actually work. If you put platinum and gold on the market in 10k ton lots, they will be virtually worthless. There just is not very much demand for platinum and gold - they aren't very useful metals - and if supply exceeds demand by that much, the price drops to almost nothing.
Go grab yourself some iron asteroids, the sort of stuff that industry can use to build cars, and satellites for delivering more TV channels. That'll make money, and has the advantage that iron asteroids are plentiful (the sort of junk that collects in asteroid belts tends to be elements have weights close to iron - something to do with how star systems form).
Okay. I'll tell you the real reason why it's not possible:
If you plated the entire US with solar panels, using the most efficient panels we currently know how to make, and you assume that there is no cloud cover or other weather obscuring the sun at any point during the year... you still wouldn't have a significant fraction of the power used by the entire US. You could manage the residential power usage (just about, assuming that the unpopulated regions of the southern states would make up for the low light levels in the northern ones), but not the commercial and industrial demands (which are considerably higher). And that's before you start cranking up the electricity demands by running all those cars on grid power instead of petroleum.
Wind power is even worse, the output is effectively zero compared to the demands. That's the problem with wind and solar power - the efficiency is poor (solar panels are less than 10% efficient) and the total land area available, multiplied by the power per unit area, multiplied by the efficiency, is a small number compared to the amount of power you need.
We're just using too damn much power for wind and solar to be viable energy sources, at least at our current technology level.
This has already happened. The quick, "safe", and cheap way to get rid of nuclear waste is to put it in big steel containers, put a fence around it, and ignore it. Sometimes you might bury it in the ground if necessary to get political cover.
The nuclear power industry is making a fortune from doing this. They actually get paid for it (by the governments).
We aren't dealing with nuclear waste like this because it's the best thing we know how to do. We're doing it because it's the most profitable way.
Wartime is the normal state for the US. In its short history, it has been at war with somebody on a pretty regular basis (although as a matter of principle the US always fights undeclared wars). Here's the embarrassing list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Wars
It is an open question as to whether the large military-industrial complex grew up to support the wars, or the wars grew up to support the large military-industrial complex.