"Where I work they require 3 out of the 4 rules to be met such as mixed case, numbers and special characters... of course they also make us change our password every 30 days so i've discovered that people have taken to doing things like Asdf1234 and then when the password requires changing changing it to Asdf2345... Doh."
Even so, the use of caps and symbols open the universe of possible characters in a password so as to make brute forcing harder and dictionary attacks neigh impossible. Who the heck keeps Asdf2345 in their dictionary as opposed to asdf1234?
A new competitor must consider what happens if the monopolist does it again, and if the barrier to entry is already high (a fab, for example), the competitor will think twice and walk away instead.
Sure, if competitors keep showing up, the monopolist cannot withstand the losses forever. However, everybody except the last competitor who dethrones the monopolist loses, and nobody wants to be cannon fodder.
The predatory price behavior in duopolistic markets has been compared to an auction for a monopoly where both sides pay what they bid. Where there are high costs of entry, competition will be non-competitive because all your opponents are known and each party has a large effect on the market as a whole. Each side "bids" how much money it is willing to lose by underpricing their products, and the guy who bids more wins the whole market. The kicker is that the loser pays his own bid as well, even though he got nothing. Given these dynamics, few would be willing to take on an AMD or an Intel, especially since IP issues have allowed entry costs to be raised to obscene levels. Furthermore, Intel is willing to pay a lot to keep its dominant position, and it has a lot to spend to keep its power. Everyone looks at Intel's market cap, thinks about competing for a second, shrugs, and then walks away.
Suspending someone in animation has at least one application: the military. I don't know how complicated the process is, but if you can suspend a wounded soldier in a forward area and ship him back to a proper hospital for treatment, then two hours would be an eternity. Of course, suspended animation won't keep a guy alive if he were blown in half, but the forward MASH could do some quick stabilization, freeze him, and send him back for delicate neurosurgery to remove shrapnel from his brain, for example, to minimize damage.
Well, there's also the Whipple Shield, which puts a thin layer of material a distance from the main vehicle. Small space debris will hit the thin piece of metal and disintegrate because of the high velocity/energy. The main shield then has to protect against a force diffused over a larger surface area.
Given what we have seen of insurgent guerilla tactics in Iraq, popping RPGs at departing flights would bring do wn a plane. Perhaps not everyone on board will get killed because of the low altitude, but terrorism is all about terrorizing a population. That laser shield isn't going to do much, is it? Moreover, the laser is pointless unless it is deployed at all airports because terrorists with a man-portable surface to air missile would certainly do enough research to figure out which airports do not have the defense system and act accordingly. Or they would just go to Japan and knock down a plane bound for the United States. This appears to be more comfort food for a worried nation's spirit.
Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the doomed U-2, was issued a lethal dose of cyanide in case he fell into enemy hands. One of many pages. Powers did not use the poison upon his capture by the Russians. When asked by his captors why he didn't use the suicide pin, he said, "Because I want to live."
Certainly spaceflight is different from espionage. The astronauts certainly deny any such method of suicide. But I keep thinking about the contingency for a rapid-onset space illness. At the time, no one was sure whether there were alien "bacteria" on the moon. Indeed, returning astronauts were quarantined upon return. I always figured that cyanide would be a better way to go than moon Ebola or something. I'm not a big conspirationalist, though, so perhaps suicidal astronauts would just vent the cabin atmosphere. That would hurt, though, no?
LCDs become fuzzy when set to a non-native resolution. Furthermore, most operating systems display things using a pixel-based rendering system as opposed to a "real-life" size, so the icons become either tiny or huge. Vista should have vector-based rendering so that everything is rendered at the "right" size regardless of the resolution of the display. I can't wait, because my laptop has a 1920x1200 15.4 display. Of course, it probably can't run Vista. Dang.
Spacewalkers must have balls of steel. Prior to an early Gemini mission that involved the first U.S. spacewalk, the crewmember staying in the craft was instructed to cut the tether of the spacewalker in the event he could not return to the craft before they both ran out of oxygen. During the spacewalk, the suit ballooned up to a point where the spacewalker could not fit into the cramped confines of their primative spacecraft. Even though the spacewalker wasn't told of the standing orders to cut him loose in case of an emergency, he must have thought of it as time ticked down. Pretty much at the last second, he squeezed himself into the craft and secured the latch. Crew and vehicle returned safely to earth and later spacesuits were made more rigid.
There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity. I wonder if astronauts on spacewalks are told to depressurize if they find themselves irretrievably lost in space. (Is there even a way to intentionally depressurize their suits? I guess they can take it off, right, unless this requires some help.)
Moreover, at least something good is coming out of the International Space Station: modern experience in large-scale construction in outer space. Even though the ISS is a loss in terms of substantive science conducted, I would bet it has helped a lot in the applied sciences involving in building the structure. Not quite in terms of "make spacesuits more rigid" but probably in the minutiae of designing structures and methods of assembly that are easier using actual lessons learned.
A kid last year was jumped by another student who stabbed him with a sharpened lead pencil, and when he fought back, eventually knocking the attacker to the ground and kicking him, he got suspended. He didn't even know his attacker.
Well, duh. That's not self-defense anymore if you're just kicking a guy who is on the floor. I would have said the idiot got what he deserved, but school teacher types might not want to foster that attitude.
These "high profile" cases the FBI is coming up with are pretty disgraceful. All they are uncovering are gullible people that can be convinced to do or say stupid things by a paid informant. If the FBI has uncovered any serious threats, hopefully they're using the info to work up the chain of command (and we're not hearing about them, of course) to actually disrupt terrorist networks.
But what we're seeing so far is the FBI setting up some clowns to take a fall and provide publicity.
I do not mean to denigrate Muslims so read carefully. The gullible, domestic Muslims taking up the terrorist cause are not the sharpest tools in the shed, as they are only foot soldiers. Suicidal idiocy is the only requirement for that position. The brains behind the operation crafts a suicide belt or builds up a cache of automatic weapons and the idiotic footsoldiers deploy, blow stuff up, and promptly get wiped out. Look at the Palestinian terrorists: the suicide bombers are 18 year old boys, and the masterminds are 70 year old men. Or, more relevantly, consider George Reid. He was wearing a shoe bomb that could have taken down an airplane. Query who made the plastic explosives in the shoe. I'm guessing not a man who couldn't light a fuse.
All the same, though, I agree with your conclusion. I hope that the FBI is really taking out the masterminds and not the putative foot soldiers. I hope the FBI is just keeping the high-level stuff on the hush-hush, but who knows?
My favorite was Senator Edward Kennedy. It's hard to imagine a good reason to put him on the no-fly list, unless they were afraid he was going to seize the controls over water.
That's kind of like the goons at TSA making the pilot of a flight take off his shoes. The pilot correctly noted that he would not need a shoe bomb to take the plane down. Of course, this was perceived as a threat and the pilot was taken into custody and eventually reprimanded. Bureaucracy sucks when people do things just because they were told to do it without regard for the reason they were told to do it.
1) Ebay isn't an auction site. and 2) Paypal isn't a bank.
Quite ironically, being a heavily-regulated bank gets you out of antitrust troubles. The theory is that there are specialized state and federal agencies taking care of the banks, so the antitrust laws should not have a big role regulating banks. The fact that eBay and PayPal can do whatever they want hurts them in the antitrust sphere. Furthermore, Ebay and PayPal are vertical: Ebay is a dominant auction site and they use PayPal for payment services. Thus, eBay is using its dominance of its field to exert market power into another field on a basis other than merit. That's pretty much an antitrust violation right there. It's doubtful eBay can come back with a reasonable, non-malicious explanation for not accepting GCheckout. Oops.
Mosquitos inject their saliva into you when they first bite. The spit contains an anticoagulant that keeps the blood flowing into their greedy little mouths. When the mosquito is killed before it can suck a lot of blood out, the saliva gets left behind and initiates an inflammatory response. However, if you let the mosquito complete the feeding, it will suck a lot of the saliva out. Mosquitos don't tap into veins and arteries (hopefully, the super ones don't) so that the bloodflow is not strong enough to just wash the saliva out before the bug has a chance to suck it back out.
1. The fine has to be big enough to sway the company receiving it. A billion dollar fine would be overkill for most companies, but MS isn't most companies. Consider that they made much more than this from the European Market in the meantime.
Well, I guess parking and speeding tickets should be based on how much money you have, too. That's how some countries do it, but do you really want to get fined $30,000 for parking at a hydrant?
You're not the first person to feel this way. An insanity defense in a criminal case cannot be based on a disease whose symptom is criminality.
Re:"The mst complex machine ever built, blaah, bla
on
Shuttle Launch Success
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Unnecessary complexity is your enemy in any mission critical system. I don't know if it's necessary, but the Shuttle is capable of doing a lot more than the Russian launch vehicles. Hubble and the International Space Station were possible only because of the Shuttle's capability to allow extended spacewalks, as well as the use of the Canadarm.
Just the same, the next generation of American spacecraft should be based on the SRB/ET system but with a robust reentry/crew vehicle, and not one covered in glass. At some point complexity isn't your enemy as much as common sense should be your friend.
The Russians have done a great job, but the technology to take the leap to Mars or back to the moon is not going to come from the Russians, if only due to the lack of funding. I hope the US gets back on track.
A future version of Halo won't run on current hardware. It's gonna be a killer app, and everyone is going to get a new system just to run that game. Or they are going to get an Xbox 360 or whatever.
We'd also have more wacko treehuggers wearing earplugs and living in the trees. I think the nuts would balance each other out; each side would claim that the other has been going overboard.
Nope. The Supreme Court last visited patents when it decided Markman in 1997. The Supreme Court did not take this case along with Metabolite just to rule narrowly on the facts. Indeed, it the fact-specific nature of patent courts that has been one of the largest complaints the patent bar has had with the Federal Circuit. Most notably, the Fed. Circuit's treatment of claim construction has been abysmal. Claim construction is when the judge decides exactly what the patent purports to have patented. Obviously, this is crucial and in many instances result-determining. Markman said it was the judge's job to interpret patent claims. The Federal Circuit then refused to take appeals of claim constructions before the entire trial had concluded. Once the entire 2-3 year trial has ended, the loser can appeal the claim construction to the Federal Circuit. About 40% of the cases on appeal on this point are overruled. So that's 2-3 years of litigation down the drain.
I'm guessing the US Supreme Court wants to make it easier to beat down patents. Instead of making everything dependent on whether a patent for a three-bladed razor is infringed by a razor with four blades, the question is whether the subject matter is obvious or unpatentable, which is less depdendent on the ultra-fact specific lawyer games everyone plays on what "includes" means in a patent.
Slashdot Mirror
"Where I work they require 3 out of the 4 rules to be met such as mixed case, numbers and special characters... of course they also make us change our password every 30 days so i've discovered that people have taken to doing things like Asdf1234 and then when the password requires changing changing it to Asdf2345... Doh."
Even so, the use of caps and symbols open the universe of possible characters in a password so as to make brute forcing harder and dictionary attacks neigh impossible. Who the heck keeps Asdf2345 in their dictionary as opposed to asdf1234?
I meant that a guy blown in half would not have time for even the suspended animation process.
A new competitor must consider what happens if the monopolist does it again, and if the barrier to entry is already high (a fab, for example), the competitor will think twice and walk away instead.
Sure, if competitors keep showing up, the monopolist cannot withstand the losses forever. However, everybody except the last competitor who dethrones the monopolist loses, and nobody wants to be cannon fodder.
The predatory price behavior in duopolistic markets has been compared to an auction for a monopoly where both sides pay what they bid. Where there are high costs of entry, competition will be non-competitive because all your opponents are known and each party has a large effect on the market as a whole. Each side "bids" how much money it is willing to lose by underpricing their products, and the guy who bids more wins the whole market. The kicker is that the loser pays his own bid as well, even though he got nothing. Given these dynamics, few would be willing to take on an AMD or an Intel, especially since IP issues have allowed entry costs to be raised to obscene levels. Furthermore, Intel is willing to pay a lot to keep its dominant position, and it has a lot to spend to keep its power. Everyone looks at Intel's market cap, thinks about competing for a second, shrugs, and then walks away.
Suspending someone in animation has at least one application: the military. I don't know how complicated the process is, but if you can suspend a wounded soldier in a forward area and ship him back to a proper hospital for treatment, then two hours would be an eternity. Of course, suspended animation won't keep a guy alive if he were blown in half, but the forward MASH could do some quick stabilization, freeze him, and send him back for delicate neurosurgery to remove shrapnel from his brain, for example, to minimize damage.
Well, there's also the Whipple Shield, which puts a thin layer of material a distance from the main vehicle. Small space debris will hit the thin piece of metal and disintegrate because of the high velocity/energy. The main shield then has to protect against a force diffused over a larger surface area.
Every airport in the whole world with flights to the United States would have to adopt the system.
Given what we have seen of insurgent guerilla tactics in Iraq, popping RPGs at departing flights would bring do wn a plane. Perhaps not everyone on board will get killed because of the low altitude, but terrorism is all about terrorizing a population. That laser shield isn't going to do much, is it? Moreover, the laser is pointless unless it is deployed at all airports because terrorists with a man-portable surface to air missile would certainly do enough research to figure out which airports do not have the defense system and act accordingly. Or they would just go to Japan and knock down a plane bound for the United States. This appears to be more comfort food for a worried nation's spirit.
Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the doomed U-2, was issued a lethal dose of cyanide in case he fell into enemy hands. One of many pages. Powers did not use the poison upon his capture by the Russians. When asked by his captors why he didn't use the suicide pin, he said, "Because I want to live."
Certainly spaceflight is different from espionage. The astronauts certainly deny any such method of suicide. But I keep thinking about the contingency for a rapid-onset space illness. At the time, no one was sure whether there were alien "bacteria" on the moon. Indeed, returning astronauts were quarantined upon return. I always figured that cyanide would be a better way to go than moon Ebola or something. I'm not a big conspirationalist, though, so perhaps suicidal astronauts would just vent the cabin atmosphere. That would hurt, though, no?
LCDs become fuzzy when set to a non-native resolution. Furthermore, most operating systems display things using a pixel-based rendering system as opposed to a "real-life" size, so the icons become either tiny or huge. Vista should have vector-based rendering so that everything is rendered at the "right" size regardless of the resolution of the display. I can't wait, because my laptop has a 1920x1200 15.4 display. Of course, it probably can't run Vista. Dang.
Spacewalkers must have balls of steel. Prior to an early Gemini mission that involved the first U.S. spacewalk, the crewmember staying in the craft was instructed to cut the tether of the spacewalker in the event he could not return to the craft before they both ran out of oxygen. During the spacewalk, the suit ballooned up to a point where the spacewalker could not fit into the cramped confines of their primative spacecraft. Even though the spacewalker wasn't told of the standing orders to cut him loose in case of an emergency, he must have thought of it as time ticked down. Pretty much at the last second, he squeezed himself into the craft and secured the latch. Crew and vehicle returned safely to earth and later spacesuits were made more rigid.
There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity. I wonder if astronauts on spacewalks are told to depressurize if they find themselves irretrievably lost in space. (Is there even a way to intentionally depressurize their suits? I guess they can take it off, right, unless this requires some help.)
Moreover, at least something good is coming out of the International Space Station: modern experience in large-scale construction in outer space. Even though the ISS is a loss in terms of substantive science conducted, I would bet it has helped a lot in the applied sciences involving in building the structure. Not quite in terms of "make spacesuits more rigid" but probably in the minutiae of designing structures and methods of assembly that are easier using actual lessons learned.
A kid last year was jumped by another student who stabbed him with a sharpened lead pencil, and when he fought back, eventually knocking the attacker to the ground and kicking him, he got suspended. He didn't even know his attacker.
Well, duh. That's not self-defense anymore if you're just kicking a guy who is on the floor. I would have said the idiot got what he deserved, but school teacher types might not want to foster that attitude.
These "high profile" cases the FBI is coming up with are pretty disgraceful. All they are uncovering are gullible people that can be convinced to do or say stupid things by a paid informant. If the FBI has uncovered any serious threats, hopefully they're using the info to work up the chain of command (and we're not hearing about them, of course) to actually disrupt terrorist networks.
But what we're seeing so far is the FBI setting up some clowns to take a fall and provide publicity.
I do not mean to denigrate Muslims so read carefully. The gullible, domestic Muslims taking up the terrorist cause are not the sharpest tools in the shed, as they are only foot soldiers. Suicidal idiocy is the only requirement for that position. The brains behind the operation crafts a suicide belt or builds up a cache of automatic weapons and the idiotic footsoldiers deploy, blow stuff up, and promptly get wiped out. Look at the Palestinian terrorists: the suicide bombers are 18 year old boys, and the masterminds are 70 year old men. Or, more relevantly, consider George Reid. He was wearing a shoe bomb that could have taken down an airplane. Query who made the plastic explosives in the shoe. I'm guessing not a man who couldn't light a fuse.
All the same, though, I agree with your conclusion. I hope that the FBI is really taking out the masterminds and not the putative foot soldiers. I hope the FBI is just keeping the high-level stuff on the hush-hush, but who knows?
My favorite was Senator Edward Kennedy. It's hard to imagine a good reason to put him on the no-fly list, unless they were afraid he was going to seize the controls over water.
That's kind of like the goons at TSA making the pilot of a flight take off his shoes. The pilot correctly noted that he would not need a shoe bomb to take the plane down. Of course, this was perceived as a threat and the pilot was taken into custody and eventually reprimanded. Bureaucracy sucks when people do things just because they were told to do it without regard for the reason they were told to do it.
And don't forget:
1) Ebay isn't an auction site.
and
2) Paypal isn't a bank.
Quite ironically, being a heavily-regulated bank gets you out of antitrust troubles. The theory is that there are specialized state and federal agencies taking care of the banks, so the antitrust laws should not have a big role regulating banks. The fact that eBay and PayPal can do whatever they want hurts them in the antitrust sphere. Furthermore, Ebay and PayPal are vertical: Ebay is a dominant auction site and they use PayPal for payment services. Thus, eBay is using its dominance of its field to exert market power into another field on a basis other than merit. That's pretty much an antitrust violation right there. It's doubtful eBay can come back with a reasonable, non-malicious explanation for not accepting GCheckout. Oops.
A simple solution involves solving these spelling problems around the world. It's a simple, six letter word.
It's called SCHOOL.
You misspelled "skool".
Mosquitos inject their saliva into you when they first bite. The spit contains an anticoagulant that keeps the blood flowing into their greedy little mouths. When the mosquito is killed before it can suck a lot of blood out, the saliva gets left behind and initiates an inflammatory response. However, if you let the mosquito complete the feeding, it will suck a lot of the saliva out. Mosquitos don't tap into veins and arteries (hopefully, the super ones don't) so that the bloodflow is not strong enough to just wash the saliva out before the bug has a chance to suck it back out.
I'm an a repository of useless information.
1. The fine has to be big enough to sway the company receiving it. A billion dollar fine would be overkill for most companies, but MS isn't most companies. Consider that they made much more than this from the European Market in the meantime.
Well, I guess parking and speeding tickets should be based on how much money you have, too. That's how some countries do it, but do you really want to get fined $30,000 for parking at a hydrant?
You're not the first person to feel this way. An insanity defense in a criminal case cannot be based on a disease whose symptom is criminality.
Unnecessary complexity is your enemy in any mission critical system. I don't know if it's necessary, but the Shuttle is capable of doing a lot more than the Russian launch vehicles. Hubble and the International Space Station were possible only because of the Shuttle's capability to allow extended spacewalks, as well as the use of the Canadarm.
Just the same, the next generation of American spacecraft should be based on the SRB/ET system but with a robust reentry/crew vehicle, and not one covered in glass. At some point complexity isn't your enemy as much as common sense should be your friend.
The Russians have done a great job, but the technology to take the leap to Mars or back to the moon is not going to come from the Russians, if only due to the lack of funding. I hope the US gets back on track.
A future version of Halo won't run on current hardware. It's gonna be a killer app, and everyone is going to get a new system just to run that game. Or they are going to get an Xbox 360 or whatever.
We'd also have more wacko treehuggers wearing earplugs and living in the trees. I think the nuts would balance each other out; each side would claim that the other has been going overboard.
Nope. Bad patents are causing big business to complain.
It says Tech People who don't matter.
I mean, Jessica Simpson isn't on the list, either.
Nope. The Supreme Court last visited patents when it decided Markman in 1997. The Supreme Court did not take this case along with Metabolite just to rule narrowly on the facts. Indeed, it the fact-specific nature of patent courts that has been one of the largest complaints the patent bar has had with the Federal Circuit. Most notably, the Fed. Circuit's treatment of claim construction has been abysmal. Claim construction is when the judge decides exactly what the patent purports to have patented. Obviously, this is crucial and in many instances result-determining. Markman said it was the judge's job to interpret patent claims. The Federal Circuit then refused to take appeals of claim constructions before the entire trial had concluded. Once the entire 2-3 year trial has ended, the loser can appeal the claim construction to the Federal Circuit. About 40% of the cases on appeal on this point are overruled. So that's 2-3 years of litigation down the drain.
I'm guessing the US Supreme Court wants to make it easier to beat down patents. Instead of making everything dependent on whether a patent for a three-bladed razor is infringed by a razor with four blades, the question is whether the subject matter is obvious or unpatentable, which is less depdendent on the ultra-fact specific lawyer games everyone plays on what "includes" means in a patent.
Like any of the participants will accept that randomness. Sniping programs will just snipe every damn minute throughout that hour.