I had been using Windows forever but I had thrown up ProFTPd a few times on a Mandrake machine to serve up music on the local dorm network...
I knew the reputation Windows had and it was frustrating to use sometimes even when I used it primarily. One of the really irritating parts was having to reboot at the drop of a hat. By early 2005 I'd been using that FTP service for a year or so and I hadn't really gotten together the initiative to make the jump to Linux full time. Then I was reading one day and I found out about Windows Palladium and NGSCB and TPM enforced DRM and all the bullshit that was supposed to be possible with Trusted (Treacherous?) Computing. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I went to the book store around that time and found a Fedora Core 4 book. It looked nice and I got it. The summer of 2005 is when I went cold turkey to Linux and I have never looked back.
The first thing I remember doing after really moving to Linux was setting up a network between my laptop in the living room and my desktop in my bedroom. I played music on my desktop loudly enough that I could hear it in the living room and I telnetted [sorry SSH:(] into my desktop and killed the process that was playing the music and it stopped! Man, that was so exciting.
Since then, I've gotten more into it. I've set up software RAID and LVM volumes and compiled custom kernels and all that stuff. I've been using Slackware the last two years or so and I really feel comfortable. I have all the tools I need in terms of programming C/C++/Python (those are just the ones I use), serving FTP/HTTP/SSH/etc. , the RAID stuff I was talking about earlier (mdadm is a godsend)... I can even play a lot of the games I like under WINE (because the games I like are Starcraft and Diablo 2) (my gaming 'career' became stunted when I moved to Linux but my programming skills and knowledge of my hardware shot through the roof!).
I know this wasn't supposed to be some evangelical Linux thing... but I really enjoy and appreciate Linux. If I want to make backups of my hard disks, I don't go buy some expensive Windows software. I use dd or add the drive to my active soft RAID volumes long enough for it to sync and then remove it... If I want to modify or transcode audio or video, I don't go buy some expensive software, I use MEncoder. I don't go buy compilers, I use gcc and g++. I didn't have to beg the writers of kasteroids to make bullets last forever and fire more frequently, I downloaded the source and made them do that myself!!
Linux just allows you to control your machine on a level that's just not possible in Windows and I hate hearing about how Linux users "just don't like to pay for things." I can't afford to pay $30-$80 for some crap utility to convert gifs to jpegs. Why not just use GIMP? I'm not going to pay $80-$100+ for some utility to sync my drives when I could use a one line command to do the same thing (dd,rsync). It's like a bad joke.
I'm finished with my rant. Sorry for letting my "first linux experience" turn into "linux fanboy hour".
So why is it alright for governments to abuse private information about its citizenry so blatantly but it's not okay for a few people to share files on p2p networks?
I'm not condoning anything, but one glaringly obvious difference is that, in the physical world, security measures are made of things. Things like wood and metal. Bring in a battering ram, thermite, plasma cutter,... fire... explosives... I mean, materials that security measures are made of have inherent vulnerabilities.
In the computer world, on the other hand, you can set what are equivalent to physical laws in the physical world. To the extent that you can have exponentially complex problems to solve before you can get in (cryptography). Look at OpenBSD, for example.
You could easily argue that it's really really difficult to secure a computer, given a lot of the time, the computer isn't the weakness. The people using it are. But I'd say that's the big difference. In reality, things are made of things and those materials have inherent weaknesses. On the computational side, you can be specific about what is allowed and what is not.
Of course, that scenario ends with the girl running past a space-time anomaly that sucks the arm with the RFID into another dimension and she ends up locked out of the house. Been there, done that.
Somebody please think of the children... I'm only half joking. These "people" are really out to get college kids kicked out of school and to pay huge fines which would probably ruin their lives. College kids are still children and you're going to take away their chance at getting an education because they listen to music?
Exactly! If artists are being compensated through a tax on blank media, then that means we don't need to compensate them further on what we download! Open season, everybody!! Fire up those p2p clients cause our dues are being paid automagically.
Science hasn't teleported squat. They've just caused one particle to mimic the quantum state of another. The number of particles at the source hasn't changed. The number of particles at the destination hasn't changed. So in what way was anything "teleported"? The "teleported" part is in that the particles were entangled. So, while they didn't actually move the particle, they "teleported" the properties of one atom onto another at a distance. It's the same as teleportation in that sense, but there are things we call conservation laws that prevent what you're talking about with literally teleporting matter as in moving it somewhere else instantly without it crossing the space between (or falling into a wormhole).
Most states have computer crime laws that pretty much say this: It is illegal to access a computer that you are not authorized to access.
This basically means that if you don't have written permission to access a computer, you can't access it legally.
So everyone who uses computers breaks the law, and the law is only truly defined by who prosecutors decide to prosecute.
This state of affairs is completely ridiculous, but unless you find a tech savvy Judge, the situation is unlikely to be changed through the courts. Doesn't this mean that people who share copyrighted files aren't breaking the law, but that you, by downloading the files, are breaking the law?
From the Wikipedia article:
On January 2, 2008 the United States appealed the magistrate's opinion to the District Court in a sealed motion (court docket, case #: 2:06-mj-00091-wks-jjn-1).
Yeah. More secrecy. How much do you want to bet G-Man claimed something related to terrorism or national security. Those are magic words that seem to be able to overcome any obstacle and instantly rally unlimited support.
You forgot Gonzales and the former Director of FEMA who claimed he didn't know that formaldahyde was dangerous and then suggested that people in those trailers "crack a window".
Should that Russian guy have been held up in California defending himself against the United States who decided to charge him with violation of the DMCA while doing his *job* in *Russia*!?
I like the part about paying $5.00 to people who have incurred damages from their software. It's like the "if everyone gives me a penny" thing in reverse. Imagine if everyone who used Windows tried to cash in on that... Microsoft would drown in paperwork and go broke at the same time!
Actually, the Earth's magnetic field is about 6 gauss and there are 10,000 gauss in a Tesla... So not quite 20,000 times.
One thing that's really cool about this is its application in NMR. The reason for having such tiny little bores on those things and having them essentially inaccessible from the outside save for the tiny little hole in the top where the sample is dropped is that the goal is to have really high field homogeneity. If you can, for instance, get a field homogenous on the ppb level, then you can confidently report signals on the ppm level. I think the reason they can have a device open enough to let light in is that the field is so strong anyway that they can achieve a reasonable homogeneity even with the device open like that.
Now building copper bridges is a whole different kind of animal. It's more akin to chemistry. Reliability is likely to be poor, as impurities and dust bollix things up. Speed and power consumption are not going to be great, as you're moving copper atoms, many thousands of times heavier than electrons.
Did you even read the article? It talked about the technology being 1000 times more energy efficient than what's currently in use. This isn't actually that hard to believe. The statement from the article that the process is nearly reversible speaks to the thermodynamically reversible case in which infinitesimal amounts of energy are used in each step of a reaction. Considering they're talking about assembling copper ions into nanowires, I think the speed will be quite reasonable. I mean, on the atomic level, reactions happen at the femtosecond scale and the actual solution is probably also going to be optimized for ion mobility. In terms of reliability, there isn't much you can do to screw something up at that scale if the thing is produced properly to begin with. I imagine if anything were to 'wear out', it'd be the array to which these ions affix to form the bridge.
I'm really interested to see how this technology matures, but as for now it sounds like a perfectly natural progression from what we have.
Slashdot Mirror
I had been using Windows forever but I had thrown up ProFTPd a few times on a Mandrake machine to serve up music on the local dorm network...
I knew the reputation Windows had and it was frustrating to use sometimes even when I used it primarily. One of the really irritating parts was having to reboot at the drop of a hat. By early 2005 I'd been using that FTP service for a year or so and I hadn't really gotten together the initiative to make the jump to Linux full time. Then I was reading one day and I found out about Windows Palladium and NGSCB and TPM enforced DRM and all the bullshit that was supposed to be possible with Trusted (Treacherous?) Computing. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I went to the book store around that time and found a Fedora Core 4 book. It looked nice and I got it. The summer of 2005 is when I went cold turkey to Linux and I have never looked back.
The first thing I remember doing after really moving to Linux was setting up a network between my laptop in the living room and my desktop in my bedroom. I played music on my desktop loudly enough that I could hear it in the living room and I telnetted [sorry SSH :(] into my desktop and killed the process that was playing the music and it stopped! Man, that was so exciting.
Since then, I've gotten more into it. I've set up software RAID and LVM volumes and compiled custom kernels and all that stuff. I've been using Slackware the last two years or so and I really feel comfortable. I have all the tools I need in terms of programming C/C++/Python (those are just the ones I use), serving FTP/HTTP/SSH/etc. , the RAID stuff I was talking about earlier (mdadm is a godsend)... I can even play a lot of the games I like under WINE (because the games I like are Starcraft and Diablo 2) (my gaming 'career' became stunted when I moved to Linux but my programming skills and knowledge of my hardware shot through the roof!).
I know this wasn't supposed to be some evangelical Linux thing... but I really enjoy and appreciate Linux. If I want to make backups of my hard disks, I don't go buy some expensive Windows software. I use dd or add the drive to my active soft RAID volumes long enough for it to sync and then remove it... If I want to modify or transcode audio or video, I don't go buy some expensive software, I use MEncoder. I don't go buy compilers, I use gcc and g++. I didn't have to beg the writers of kasteroids to make bullets last forever and fire more frequently, I downloaded the source and made them do that myself!!
Linux just allows you to control your machine on a level that's just not possible in Windows and I hate hearing about how Linux users "just don't like to pay for things." I can't afford to pay $30-$80 for some crap utility to convert gifs to jpegs. Why not just use GIMP? I'm not going to pay $80-$100+ for some utility to sync my drives when I could use a one line command to do the same thing (dd,rsync). It's like a bad joke.
I'm finished with my rant. Sorry for letting my "first linux experience" turn into "linux fanboy hour".
So why is it alright for governments to abuse private information about its citizenry so blatantly but it's not okay for a few people to share files on p2p networks?
The only other cable related hardware in here, that I know of, is cable.
In the computer world, on the other hand, you can set what are equivalent to physical laws in the physical world. To the extent that you can have exponentially complex problems to solve before you can get in (cryptography). Look at OpenBSD, for example.
You could easily argue that it's really really difficult to secure a computer, given a lot of the time, the computer isn't the weakness. The people using it are. But I'd say that's the big difference. In reality, things are made of things and those materials have inherent weaknesses. On the computational side, you can be specific about what is allowed and what is not.
Of course, that scenario ends with the girl running past a space-time anomaly that sucks the arm with the RFID into another dimension and she ends up locked out of the house. Been there, done that.
Somebody please think of the children... I'm only half joking. These "people" are really out to get college kids kicked out of school and to pay huge fines which would probably ruin their lives. College kids are still children and you're going to take away their chance at getting an education because they listen to music?
Exactly! If artists are being compensated through a tax on blank media, then that means we don't need to compensate them further on what we download! Open season, everybody!! Fire up those p2p clients cause our dues are being paid automagically.
What about "electric gas stations" where you change out battery modules and the guys at the station recharge the depleted ones...
From the Wikipedia article: On January 2, 2008 the United States appealed the magistrate's opinion to the District Court in a sealed motion (court docket, case #: 2:06-mj-00091-wks-jjn-1). Yeah. More secrecy. How much do you want to bet G-Man claimed something related to terrorism or national security. Those are magic words that seem to be able to overcome any obstacle and instantly rally unlimited support.
You forgot Gonzales and the former Director of FEMA who claimed he didn't know that formaldahyde was dangerous and then suggested that people in those trailers "crack a window".
Should that Russian guy have been held up in California defending himself against the United States who decided to charge him with violation of the DMCA while doing his *job* in *Russia*!?
Correction! Before the War on Drugs, there was the War on Poverty.
I like the part about paying $5.00 to people who have incurred damages from their software. It's like the "if everyone gives me a penny" thing in reverse. Imagine if everyone who used Windows tried to cash in on that... Microsoft would drown in paperwork and go broke at the same time!
One thing that's really cool about this is its application in NMR. The reason for having such tiny little bores on those things and having them essentially inaccessible from the outside save for the tiny little hole in the top where the sample is dropped is that the goal is to have really high field homogeneity. If you can, for instance, get a field homogenous on the ppb level, then you can confidently report signals on the ppm level. I think the reason they can have a device open enough to let light in is that the field is so strong anyway that they can achieve a reasonable homogeneity even with the device open like that.
Did you even read the article? It talked about the technology being 1000 times more energy efficient than what's currently in use. This isn't actually that hard to believe. The statement from the article that the process is nearly reversible speaks to the thermodynamically reversible case in which infinitesimal amounts of energy are used in each step of a reaction. Considering they're talking about assembling copper ions into nanowires, I think the speed will be quite reasonable. I mean, on the atomic level, reactions happen at the femtosecond scale and the actual solution is probably also going to be optimized for ion mobility. In terms of reliability, there isn't much you can do to screw something up at that scale if the thing is produced properly to begin with. I imagine if anything were to 'wear out', it'd be the array to which these ions affix to form the bridge.
I'm really interested to see how this technology matures, but as for now it sounds like a perfectly natural progression from what we have.