Re:I'm not an American...
on
TIA Project to End
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Except that, in turn, is illegal. You can't collect domestic intelligence, and you cannot accept domestic intelligence from outside sources.
This goes back to Nixon when the put a wall up between the FBI and the CIA. The CIA has no law enforcement role, and can gather all of the speculative information it cares to.
The FBI's mission is law enforcement. Everything the FBI gathers has the possibility of being dragged into a courtroom. They have to play by the books, or they cannot use their evidence in a trial.
The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui is a textbook reason why such a division exists. All of the evidence gathered about him is non-admissible in court, according to the rules laid out in the Constitution. Had the FBI gathered this information on their own, they would have a much stronger case. Instead, they nabbed a few CIA files, and took depositions from witnesses they had no intention of allowing Mr. Moussaoui to confront, and are citing intelligence that they don't want in the public record.
The Judge in the case has declared Shenanigans on the Justice Department, mostly on 6th admendment grounds:
Admendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
Because belt-fed autocannons are more fun to animate.
When you think about it, though, the EMP isn't their ONLY weapon. It's just the only weapon against a shitload of sentinals. They are too small and fast to target. They attack in swarms. They do a lot of damage in a short amount of time, once they get inside of your defenses.
Say, why the hell do they need human pilots for those gunships? They probably have a computer doing the targeting, the rest could be automated.
And with all those forcefields and wicked gizmos, they are still using belt-fed ammunition? Can I get a laser beam? Or a Fire-and-forget missle?
And with all that focus on the Dock-Wall, the siege mentality, and the primative weapons, I keep expecting to see an Orc with a torch and a White wizard...
Cute theory, lot of problems with it. This is my theory:
The "real" world, is in fact just an outer layer of the Matrix. I'm going to describe the Matrix as an operating system. Indeed, its been described as that in the story.
Now in any good operating system you have users. Users can do random things, many of them dumb, so you limit their abilities. They are given a finite amount of space to play in, a finite time to play, and strict rules to play by. In an ideal world they would be so oblivious to the actual rules that they just assume that's how reality works.
We do this now with daemons under Linux. My bind daemon runs as a special user named. Named has its own filesystem within a filesystem through the magic of CHROOT. CHROOT fools a process into thinking the origin of the universe exists at an arbitrary location of a larger filesystem, instead of at the convention I-Node 0.
When named runs, it can't see anything but what is below/var/bind. Indeed, it sees/var/bind as/.
Thus, if a hacker manages to hijack the bind daemon, all he/she will see is the contents of/var/bind. They can't see anything else in the file system.
Now, suppose we found there was a special band of Hackers who found a way out of the chroot environment? It is my theory that the machines devise a honeypot in the form of Zion. Zion looks like a working system, but in fact the/etc/bin/var et all are fabrications designed to fool the cracker into thinking they have 0wned the box.
In fact all the 0wn is a little rubber room, that exists as/zion on my file system. It's a cheapy spare drive that I don't care about.
I monitor the activity on the/zion drive, and it gives me all the info I need to prevent a further breach. When I have learned all that I care to, I reformat the volume with a fresh image.
Our IMAX screen is domed, compounding the problem.
The problem is the difference in the way IMAX is filmed, and standard movies are filmed. IMAX is designed to completely fill the vision of the viewer. You have to move your head to see what's going on, which gives you that sense of realism. Filmmakers take pains to keep the camera moving with the action, and keep the focus of the shot in the center. (Lest they make the audience motion sick.)
Standard movies are designed to only fill the fovial region of the viewer's eyes. The proportions of the screen, the size of the screen relative to your seat, and the level of detail on the film are all optimised for yor head to remain still and your eyes follow the detail. It's the same principle that allows computer screens and TV's to occupy your vision, without surrounding you completely.
When you blow up a standard movie to IMAX you find that editors are not nearly as carefule about where action takes place on the screen. Your eyes can scan fast enough, but when you have to crane your neck, and twist your head, you wear yourself out quick trying to keep up with the action.
My first job at the Museum (that I'm presently the Network Admin at) was Imax console operator. I had to sit through every show montoring the sound, and cleaning the dust of the screen.
My wife also had this job for a while.
There is only 1 movie theater we can go to in town, because everywhere else the picture is cruddy of the sound is out of sync. It drives us both nuts.
Ack no! At the risk of trolling, the faustian overtones of the Episode 5, and the uncertain ending make it my favorite of the 3.
4 was cool, but a little less polished than 5 and 6. 6 was a giant setup for the massive battle at the end of the film. Granted, that's true with every trilogy, going back to LOTR.
Then again, LOTR in book form can make the last book as long as it wants. It doesn't have to try to compress the entire story to 2 (ok 3) hours. If the writer needs more story before, or more wrapup after, he/she can add more chapters. In the movies, you just end up with a money shot battle, some setup and afterglow.
For all the trouble of looping this sucker through a terminal server plugged into the web, you could also wire the reset switch to some remotely controlled embedded device. My thought is have a watchdog computer tied to a BASIC-stamp device with a mux connected to the reset switches of a bank of computers. With the right programming, you could close the contact on each computer individually. Said device could also be controlled from a touchtone phone, laser beam, or the DOW Jones Industrial Average.
Of course, there is also the option of calling your intern 999 miles away and telling him/her to hit the reset switch.
Odds are it's has pins with +/1 12V and +/- 5V (or +/- 3.3 V).
Figure out which pin is which, and you could build a power supply yourself. An AC adaptor is a little easier than a car adapter, because you can ramp AC voltage up and down with a transformer. DC voltage changes require some parlor tricks. I'll describe AC voltage conversion first.
The first stage is a transformer that takes the voltage from 120VAC (in N America) or 240VAC (just about everywhere else) and steps it down to about 24VAC. Once you have the voltage right, we need to convert the current from AC, or Alternative Curren, a wave bouncing between positive and negative to DC, or Direct Current, a constant stream of electrons.
We use a parlor trick of 4 diodes and some resitors known as a wheatstone bridge. This bridge only lets current flow one way, and actually caputures the reverse current too. The resulting waveform is a triangle. This is not very useful, as our circuitry would keep dropping out at the low points.
Enter the capacitor. We put a big capacitor in series to catch these bursts of current and smooth them out. You still have some dips and sags though. To smooth them, behind the capacitor place a voltage regulator. The voltage regulator chops off any excess voltage, and shunts it to ground (and heat.)
At the end you have a smooth 24V DC waveform.
To go from 24VDC to +/- 12VDC and +/- 3.3 VDC we use a trick called voltage division. We use 4 resistors (A,B,C,D) to divide up the voltage into the parts we need. A and D are the same resistance, as are B an C. We wire them in series:
<- REGULATOR
+24 ------ +12VDC D --- +3.3VDC C --- GND B --- -3.3VDC A GND ------ -12VDC
D and A are identical, as are C and B. The ratio of the voltage between A/D and B/C are 12:3.3, with the smaller resistors being B and C.
Take those 5 nodes, wire them to a connector, and viola.
For a car adapter you have to devise a slightly more complicated devices: a DC-DC converter. Actually, its a DC-AC-DC converter, but in this blackbox world no one really wants to be bothered with implementation details.
We start off with 12VDC (assuming your battery, alternator, and groundwire are all in good shape.) We need to convert that to 24VDC. Now a layman might say "use a transformer", but we can't. AC transformers work because alternating current generates a magnetic field. By coiling the wire, we can focus that magenetic field on an iron coil, and then use that field to induce current in another loop of wire.
DC doesn't to that. The solution? Turn DC into AC. But how? By turning it on and off REALLY fast. You see all we need is a change in the current. A 555 timer, a Triac, a transform, a few resitors, and a bit of know how will do the trick.
But I'll leave that for another discussion. Gotta get back to work...
Why not demand the system run CP/M too while you are at it?
You could easily run Linux and run your old DOS apps through an emulator. To tell you the truth, the Linux DOS emulators are starting to work better than the Windows DOS emulator.
I there are that many GE and Motorola radios, odds are someone has already written replacement software the runs natively under Linux.
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This goes back to Nixon when the put a wall up between the FBI and the CIA. The CIA has no law enforcement role, and can gather all of the speculative information it cares to.
The FBI's mission is law enforcement. Everything the FBI gathers has the possibility of being dragged into a courtroom. They have to play by the books, or they cannot use their evidence in a trial.
The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui is a textbook reason why such a division exists. All of the evidence gathered about him is non-admissible in court, according to the rules laid out in the Constitution. Had the FBI gathered this information on their own, they would have a much stronger case. Instead, they nabbed a few CIA files, and took depositions from witnesses they had no intention of allowing Mr. Moussaoui to confront, and are citing intelligence that they don't want in the public record.
The Judge in the case has declared Shenanigans on the Justice Department, mostly on 6th admendment grounds:
There is also that feeling of having gone nowhere. I hate that. Ever since the Wizard of Oz.
Thank you, I was digging for that line from Clerks.
Of course, how they fished it out of the bottom of the Rabbit's Hole, I don't know. Maybe the Zion equivilent to AAA.
Um, can't be the Nebuchadnezzer. The Neb was blown up at the end of Reloaded.
In Soviet Russia, Agent Smith misses YOU!
When you think about it, though, the EMP isn't their ONLY weapon. It's just the only weapon against a shitload of sentinals. They are too small and fast to target. They attack in swarms. They do a lot of damage in a short amount of time, once they get inside of your defenses.
You have to figure they would put a DMZ betwen the Matrix and the Machine's main computers.
There is probably a Peter's Evil Overlord rule about that...
And with all those forcefields and wicked gizmos, they are still using belt-fed ammunition? Can I get a laser beam? Or a Fire-and-forget missle?
And with all that focus on the Dock-Wall, the siege mentality, and the primative weapons, I keep expecting to see an Orc with a torch and a White wizard...
The "real" world, is in fact just an outer layer of the Matrix. I'm going to describe the Matrix as an operating system. Indeed, its been described as that in the story.
Now in any good operating system you have users. Users can do random things, many of them dumb, so you limit their abilities. They are given a finite amount of space to play in, a finite time to play, and strict rules to play by. In an ideal world they would be so oblivious to the actual rules that they just assume that's how reality works.
We do this now with daemons under Linux. My bind daemon runs as a special user named. Named has its own filesystem within a filesystem through the magic of CHROOT. CHROOT fools a process into thinking the origin of the universe exists at an arbitrary location of a larger filesystem, instead of at the convention I-Node 0.
When named runs, it can't see anything but what is below /var/bind. Indeed, it sees /var/bind as /.
Thus, if a hacker manages to hijack the bind daemon, all he/she will see is the contents of /var/bind. They can't see anything else in the file system.
Now, suppose we found there was a special band of Hackers who found a way out of the chroot environment? It is my theory that the machines devise a honeypot in the form of Zion. Zion looks like a working system, but in fact the /etc /bin /var et all are fabrications designed to fool the cracker into thinking they have 0wned the box.
In fact all the 0wn is a little rubber room, that exists as /zion on my file system. It's a cheapy spare drive that I don't care about.
I monitor the activity on the /zion drive, and it gives me all the info I need to prevent a further breach. When I have learned all that I care to, I reformat the volume with a fresh image.
I'm on rev 6 of this system...
The problem is the difference in the way IMAX is filmed, and standard movies are filmed. IMAX is designed to completely fill the vision of the viewer. You have to move your head to see what's going on, which gives you that sense of realism. Filmmakers take pains to keep the camera moving with the action, and keep the focus of the shot in the center. (Lest they make the audience motion sick.)
Standard movies are designed to only fill the fovial region of the viewer's eyes. The proportions of the screen, the size of the screen relative to your seat, and the level of detail on the film are all optimised for yor head to remain still and your eyes follow the detail. It's the same principle that allows computer screens and TV's to occupy your vision, without surrounding you completely.
When you blow up a standard movie to IMAX you find that editors are not nearly as carefule about where action takes place on the screen. Your eyes can scan fast enough, but when you have to crane your neck, and twist your head, you wear yourself out quick trying to keep up with the action.
My wife also had this job for a while.
There is only 1 movie theater we can go to in town, because everywhere else the picture is cruddy of the sound is out of sync. It drives us both nuts.
Or emerge xine-ui for Gentoo users...
4 was cool, but a little less polished than 5 and 6. 6 was a giant setup for the massive battle at the end of the film. Granted, that's true with every trilogy, going back to LOTR.
Then again, LOTR in book form can make the last book as long as it wants. It doesn't have to try to compress the entire story to 2 (ok 3) hours. If the writer needs more story before, or more wrapup after, he/she can add more chapters. In the movies, you just end up with a money shot battle, some setup and afterglow.
It just goes to show that just because it's legal doesn't make something right.
Will badmouth Microsoft for Steak!
Ooo, ooo, and the Aqueduct!
Of course, there is also the option of calling your intern 999 miles away and telling him/her to hit the reset switch.
No, it's a desktop. But rip the base off, it could be used as a screen for a portable.
Figure out which pin is which, and you could build a power supply yourself. An AC adaptor is a little easier than a car adapter, because you can ramp AC voltage up and down with a transformer. DC voltage changes require some parlor tricks. I'll describe AC voltage conversion first.
The first stage is a transformer that takes the voltage from 120VAC (in N America) or 240VAC (just about everywhere else) and steps it down to about 24VAC. Once you have the voltage right, we need to convert the current from AC, or Alternative Curren, a wave bouncing between positive and negative to DC, or Direct Current, a constant stream of electrons.
We use a parlor trick of 4 diodes and some resitors known as a wheatstone bridge. This bridge only lets current flow one way, and actually caputures the reverse current too. The resulting waveform is a triangle. This is not very useful, as our circuitry would keep dropping out at the low points.
Enter the capacitor. We put a big capacitor in series to catch these bursts of current and smooth them out. You still have some dips and sags though. To smooth them, behind the capacitor place a voltage regulator. The voltage regulator chops off any excess voltage, and shunts it to ground (and heat.)
At the end you have a smooth 24V DC waveform.
To go from 24VDC to +/- 12VDC and +/- 3.3 VDC we use a trick called voltage division. We use 4 resistors (A,B,C,D) to divide up the voltage into the parts we need. A and D are the same resistance, as are B an C. We wire them in series:
D and A are identical, as are C and B. The ratio of the voltage between A/D and B/C are 12:3.3, with the smaller resistors being B and C.
Take those 5 nodes, wire them to a connector, and viola.
For a car adapter you have to devise a slightly more complicated devices: a DC-DC converter. Actually, its a DC-AC-DC converter, but in this blackbox world no one really wants to be bothered with implementation details.
We start off with 12VDC (assuming your battery, alternator, and groundwire are all in good shape.) We need to convert that to 24VDC. Now a layman might say "use a transformer", but we can't. AC transformers work because alternating current generates a magnetic field. By coiling the wire, we can focus that magenetic field on an iron coil, and then use that field to induce current in another loop of wire.
DC doesn't to that. The solution? Turn DC into AC. But how? By turning it on and off REALLY fast. You see all we need is a change in the current. A 555 timer, a Triac, a transform, a few resitors, and a bit of know how will do the trick.
But I'll leave that for another discussion. Gotta get back to work...
You could easily run Linux and run your old DOS apps through an emulator. To tell you the truth, the Linux DOS emulators are starting to work better than the Windows DOS emulator.
I there are that many GE and Motorola radios, odds are someone has already written replacement software the runs natively under Linux.
And never underestimate the power of a touchscreen.
Hey, at that size it could be stuffed into some PDA cases. My newton was bigger than that.