> using turboprops would mean using many smaller aircraft as opposed to a single larger aircraft.
Only because airlines got bitten by the jet bug and turned their backs on the 100+
seat turboprops. Look at Southwest, Ryanair and Easyjet - vast fleets of single-aisle jets that almost exactly match the capacity of Electras, Britannias and Il-18s.
A demonstration by Vickers in the late 1960s proved that the 120-seat turboprop-powered Vanguard could offer lower seat-mile costs than a Greyhound coach whilst also hauling a full load of underfloor cargo.
There is no reason that a modern 150-seat prop couldn't be built ( the engines exist ) but neither of the incumbents would do so lest they undermine their vast order backlogs.
> Going further and changing policy to allow everything and anything would put significant strain on Wikipedia's servers.
There are an infinite set of possible articles grounded in the real World, so per your position Wikipedia cannot handle this set of all possible articles and must therefore be selective.
For example, if I wrote an article on the history of magnesium ammunition boxes this might displace an allocation that could have been used to discuss temporary landing strips in South Wales. Both made a contribution to the war effort and both meet the verifiability requirements, so which is to be deleted?
Until Wikipedia answers such questions it will remain an incoherent battlefield and will continue to lose authorship.
4. Termination. If you breach any provision of Paragraphs 1 -3,
including the terms of the MPL incorporated by reference, your
right to use the Product will terminate immediately and without
notice.
> which would make Google the first military-capable corporation outside of mercenary "consultancies"
With the exception of the British East India Company, which raised an army of 24,000 within India and which maintained the ``Honourable East India Company's Marine'' of warships. As well as protecting trade against pirates they engaged regular French and Portugese units to ``discourage'' trading in Company areas.
In 1830 the Marine became ``Her Majesty's Indian Navy'' which later formed the cadre of the Royal Indian Navy.
The EIC also funded the building and commissioning of vessels for the Royal Navy to patrol and protect the trade routes back to Blighty.
``Offering to buy the Pro a drink or a meal is always in order.''
I disagree with this on the principle that the pro is already being rewarded, perhaps handsomely, for attending the event in return for the expectation that he or she will entertain or inform the audience.
If a fan were to meet their hero in the street, then by all means buy them a drink in return for their time. But they shouldn't require additional inducements to perform their contracted duties at a convention. As the article continues:
``The Pros are here to talk to you.''
And don't let them away with anything less! They are as dependent on their fans for success as their fans are on them for entertainment.
> In the end, I guess it just boils down to what all you'll be asking of your web browser.
But the end-user is not asking for these developments.
As you noted, Adobe has released a photo editing web application. Who asked for this? Not the users since they still need a powerful computer to execute the fat browser, so there is no advantage over a native app ( and several disadvantages ). Adobe, or whomever, though, see web apps as a guaranteed ongoing revenue stream.
The vendors are driving the expansion of browser capabilities for their own purposes, not the whims of users. Have you honestly sat down in front of, say, a DTP program and thought ``I wish this were a web app?''.
> The British newspaper The Independent started a campaign to save Betchley Park on 20 August 2008.
On 29 May 2008 a friend started a petition on the Downing Street site to shame the Government into acting to save this element of World history. It is now the sixth largest petition on the site with over 14,000 signatures:
If you are a UK citizen please consider taking five minutes to sign the petition. Since it was started we have seen a lot of media interest in this topic and BP report that donations via their web site are increasing.
Credit to MK News which originally broke this story back in May.
The Shenzhou 6 launch in October 2005 was the first to be broadcast live in China, so they may yet surprise you.
After all. if something does go wrong there is little that can be done to hide it. This isn't Leonov's era - telemetry and communications will be under constant scrutiny.
> But I have never heard of any tech company including legal in the test and release process as a standard practice.
At a company where I previously worked, every single word and punctuation mark, every clause and every image on every one of our public-facing pages had to be approved by Legal to avoid liability.
Even emergency releases were subject to review if they changed any verbiage.
> Except, you know, anybody with even an ounce of common sense could see this was just a mistake right from the start.
A legally binding ``mistake''. Try that in court.
Contract law is not like code releases. Sometimes bad code gets out to the field because it wasn't reviewed. Legal documents are always reviewed and it takes WEEKS.
There are many objects omitted by the released elements. You may recall a spat in August 2007 wherein the French authorities threatened to release elements for what were assumed to be classified US assets.
Also the StratCom elements are subject to an end-user license that prohibits dissemination of the data or any analysis based thereupon. Many amateur observers therefore refrain from using the elements:
> If I use it, I have to obey the licensing conditions.
is incorrect:
``Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted...''
The GPL does not require anyone to accept its terms simply to run the program.
Option 3: Send the certificate fingerprint to the customer via old-style letter mail. The customer checks the fingerprint when first visiting the website and if the cert matches he accepts the cert until its expiration date. The browser stays out of the loop; after all what does it know about digital identification?
If banks took authentication seriously like this then phishing attacks such as c1tibank.com simply wouldn't work. Instead, today, if c1tibank.com's cert is issued by Verisign et al. then the browser silently accepts the cert and the customer loses. Do you think that the Mozilla Foundation will accept liability as a result of such automated functionality in their software? Or the banks?!
Isn't there some way we could serve certs from the zone file using DNSSEC?
> There's another reason for everyone to switch to Gmail.
No, not really. The problem here is one of lack of endeavour on the part of the users combined with their complete ignorance of and indifference to the consequences of their actions.
Moving the entire set of users to another service will result in the propagation of the problem. Where do you suggest that subscribers move once Google Mail's global filters have been trained to regard this list as spam? An indivual will always be at the mercy of the majority on such a service.
For anyone who truly relies on e-mail, the only viable alternative is to manage one's own e-mail service. Shock! Horror! this will require time and expense and it also means taking responsibility for protecting one's investment by considered and sensible use of e-mail addresses; does that shopping site really require one's personal address or would a use-and-delete alias suffice?
> It took several years to the NASA in order to achieve their current success ratio.
Ahem. It took several years for Lockheed-Martin, Boeing and ( P&W ) Rocketdyne to achieve their current success ratio, building on the previous work of Douglas, North American and Rockwell.
> If you want encryption guaranteed against major governments you have to go with a one time pad.
Well yes, but what proportion of encrypted communications are intended to be elided from government view?
When Insurance_Company_A uses 3DES to encrypt rate files sent to Field_Agent_A, they're doing so because they don't want Insurance_Company_B reading their trade secrets.
When I connect to Amazon via SSL using 256-bit AES, I do so because I don't want HaXX0R_C from grabbing my debit card details.
When I GPG-encrypt e-mails to friends it is to prevent Bored_Sysop_D from reading my e-mails as they spool on the recipient's MX.
I contend that the fear of Government snooping accounts for a very small proportion of encrypted data.
> Sixteen rounds through S-boxes of your own choosing is nigh unto impossible to crack even with a dedicated supercomputer
Err, actually that's a particulary BAD thing. Random selection of S-box values can lead to differential cryptanalysis vulnerabilities. For example, IBM's original arbitrary values for Lucifer's S-boxes were corrected by the NSA prior to adoption as DES.
Nothing in cryptography comes down to chance.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe
on
Is Hushmail Still Safe?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> where some genius commented some lines that were spouting a warning in GnuPG
Point 1:
No-one changed anything in GnuPG. Valgrind issued warnings regarding OpenSSL which resulted in some unfortunate changes in one distro of one OS.
GnuPG and OpenSSL are entirely discrete projects, please don't confuse people with supposition and half-truths.
Point 2:
Neither you nor I can write a robust encryption algorithm. On the contrary, Rindjael and Twofish have been published in the wild now for eight years and no-one has demonstrated a weakness. If the former is acceptable as AES for US Government crypto then it is secure enough for the rest of us. Even if we assume that the NSA is 20 years ahead of the field in mathematics, if you're not dealing with the NSA then you've got 20 years lead time before Company-X can crack your files.
> Use a bunch of IR LEDs. Cameras see IR, eyes don't.
Most CMOS and CCD cameras today incorporate filters which block wavelengths above c. 700 nanometres. This is particularly annoying in the context of DSLRs, which require a hardware hack to remove the filter for serious astrophotography.
Even the much-vaunted Canon D20a retained the IR filter, despite being targeted at astronomers, though it was tweaked for sensitivity in the red end of the visible spectrum around 650 nanometres.
> When I see an application play that is meant to hurt our operating system
``Our'' operating system? Which one would that be; FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly,
NetBSD, PC-BSD, FreeDOS or ReactOS?
The World is bigger than Linux because of CHOICE and FREEDOM, which ironically are
the tenets of the GPL. If people and companies wish to run Apache on
MS Windows then that is their right, though I do not agree with their choice.
Neither do I agree with rabble-rousing against a $100,000 investment that will
result in better software for everyone, regardless of their philosophy.
> now that it won't be free for all the spammers and trolls anymore.
Indeed, there are at least two Usenet providers that drop all posts originating from Google Groups, so that we can enjoy spam-free feeds today.
I previously paid for a feed from Giganews, but they did not support the NNTP commands required to drop GG at the server so I was paying for their downloads as part of my monthly quota.
I have subsequently found a free Swedish provider with an agreeable degree of snobbery...
Nope - Chamberlain thought, correctly, that the UK and France were not ready to face-down the threat. ``Peace in our time'' was a pragmatic ploy to buy time for the expansion.
It worked, just, at a very high cost ( five free
countries lost ) but allowed the UK to hold the line for the fight back. *That* is realpolitik.
> Why...Do you need to access the Amnesty International website to cover the Olympics?
Amnesty International have been maintaining a running journal of the Chinese Government's crackdown in the run-up to the Olympics. On Monday they published a major report entitled ``The Olympics Countdown: Broken Promises'' which followed-up from an equally stinging April report:
Perhaps you missed this on the BBC? After all, it was only on every half-hourly World Service bulletin ( alongside a report on how those journalists already in China could not read it ).
If I were a journalist in Beijing, monitoring the AI website to determine where unrest was being quashed would be a fairly important daily activity.
Slashdot Mirror
> using turboprops would mean using many smaller aircraft as opposed to a single larger aircraft.
Only because airlines got bitten by the jet bug and turned their backs on the 100+ seat turboprops. Look at Southwest, Ryanair and Easyjet - vast fleets of single-aisle jets that almost exactly match the capacity of Electras, Britannias and Il-18s.
A demonstration by Vickers in the late 1960s proved that the 120-seat turboprop-powered Vanguard could offer lower seat-mile costs than a Greyhound coach whilst also hauling a full load of underfloor cargo.
There is no reason that a modern 150-seat prop couldn't be built ( the engines exist ) but neither of the incumbents would do so lest they undermine their vast order backlogs.
> Going further and changing policy to allow everything and anything would put significant strain on Wikipedia's servers.
There are an infinite set of possible articles grounded in the real World, so per your position Wikipedia cannot handle this set of all possible articles and must therefore be selective.
For example, if I wrote an article on the history of magnesium ammunition boxes this might displace an allocation that could have been used to discuss temporary landing strips in South Wales. Both made a contribution to the war effort and both meet the verifiability requirements, so which is to be deleted?
Until Wikipedia answers such questions it will remain an incoherent battlefield and will continue to lose authorship.
> I don't understand what the big deal is here.
The big deal is clauses such as this:
4. Termination. If you breach any provision of Paragraphs 1 -3, including the terms of the MPL incorporated by reference, your right to use the Product will terminate immediately and without notice.
from the latest proposed verbiage at
http://lockshot.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/firefox-eula-in-linux-distributions/
That's a pretty serious condition imposed on the end-user with nothing in the World to do with trademark law.
> which would make Google the first military-capable corporation outside of mercenary "consultancies"
With the exception of the British East India Company, which raised an army of 24,000 within India and which maintained the ``Honourable East India Company's Marine'' of warships. As well as protecting trade against pirates they engaged regular French and Portugese units to ``discourage'' trading in Company areas.
In 1830 the Marine became ``Her Majesty's Indian Navy'' which later formed the cadre of the Royal Indian Navy.
The EIC also funded the building and commissioning of vessels for the Royal Navy to patrol and protect the trade routes back to Blighty.
From the linked article:
``Offering to buy the Pro a drink or a meal is always in order.''
I disagree with this on the principle that the pro is already being rewarded, perhaps handsomely, for attending the event in return for the expectation that he or she will entertain or inform the audience.
If a fan were to meet their hero in the street, then by all means buy them a drink in return for their time. But they shouldn't require additional inducements to perform their contracted duties at a convention. As the article continues:
``The Pros are here to talk to you.''
And don't let them away with anything less! They are as dependent on their fans for success as their fans are on them for entertainment.
> In the end, I guess it just boils down to what all you'll be asking of your web browser.
But the end-user is not asking for these developments.
As you noted, Adobe has released a photo editing web application. Who asked for this? Not the users since they still need a powerful computer to execute the fat browser, so there is no advantage over a native app ( and several disadvantages ). Adobe, or whomever, though, see web apps as a guaranteed ongoing revenue stream.
The vendors are driving the expansion of browser capabilities for their own purposes, not the whims of users. Have you honestly sat down in front of, say, a DTP program and thought ``I wish this were a web app?''.
> The British newspaper The Independent started a campaign to save Betchley Park on 20 August 2008.
On 29 May 2008 a friend started a petition on the Downing Street site to shame the Government into acting to save this element of World history. It is now the sixth largest petition on the site with over 14,000 signatures:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/BletchleyPark/
If you are a UK citizen please consider taking five minutes to sign the petition. Since it was started we have seen a lot of media interest in this topic and BP report that donations via their web site are increasing.
Credit to MK News which originally broke this story back in May.
> I doubt that the film is going to be "Live"
The Shenzhou 6 launch in October 2005 was the first to be broadcast live in China, so they may yet surprise you.
After all. if something does go wrong there is little that can be done to hide it. This isn't Leonov's era - telemetry and communications will be under constant scrutiny.
Plus, they have to be lofted in public view and there is an entire art to determining their missions based on their project patches:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1
> But I have never heard of any tech company including legal in the test and release process as a standard practice.
At a company where I previously worked, every single word and punctuation mark, every clause and every image on every one of our public-facing pages had to be approved by Legal to avoid liability.
Even emergency releases were subject to review if they changed any verbiage.
> Except, you know, anybody with even an ounce of common sense could see this was just a mistake right from the start.
A legally binding ``mistake''. Try that in court.
Contract law is not like code releases. Sometimes bad code gets out to the field because it wasn't reviewed. Legal documents are always reviewed and it takes WEEKS.
There are many objects omitted by the released elements. You may recall a spat in August 2007 wherein the French authorities threatened to release elements for what were assumed to be classified US assets.
Also the StratCom elements are subject to an end-user license that prohibits dissemination of the data or any analysis based thereupon. Many amateur observers therefore refrain from using the elements:
http://www.space-track.org/perl/user_agreement.pl
Ted Molczan and the guys on the SeeSat list do an amazing job of tracking these sats.
I prefer BSD licensing personally, but:
> If I use it, I have to obey the licensing conditions.
is incorrect:
``Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted...''
The GPL does not require anyone to accept its terms simply to run the program.
> This was roughly in 240BC, which was "merely" 2250 years ago, not 4000.
One must be careful, when disposing of one theory, not to make an appeal to the authority of another theory which itself lacks supporting evidence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)#Brief_summary
We don't really know when Eratosthenes, or anyone else from ``ancient'' history, actually lived.
Option 3: Send the certificate fingerprint to the customer via old-style letter mail. The customer checks the fingerprint when first visiting the website and if the cert matches he accepts the cert until its expiration date. The browser stays out of the loop; after all what does it know about digital identification?
If banks took authentication seriously like this then phishing attacks such as c1tibank.com simply wouldn't work. Instead, today, if c1tibank.com's cert is issued by Verisign et al. then the browser silently accepts the cert and the customer loses. Do you think that the Mozilla Foundation will accept liability as a result of such automated functionality in their software? Or the banks?!
Isn't there some way we could serve certs from the zone file using DNSSEC?
> There's another reason for everyone to switch to Gmail.
No, not really. The problem here is one of lack of endeavour on the part of the users combined with their complete ignorance of and indifference to the consequences of their actions.
Moving the entire set of users to another service will result in the propagation of the problem. Where do you suggest that subscribers move once Google Mail's global filters have been trained to regard this list as spam? An indivual will always be at the mercy of the majority on such a service.
For anyone who truly relies on e-mail, the only viable alternative is to manage one's own e-mail service. Shock! Horror! this will require time and expense and it also means taking responsibility for protecting one's investment by considered and sensible use of e-mail addresses; does that shopping site really require one's personal address or would a use-and-delete alias suffice?
> It took several years to the NASA in order to achieve their current success ratio.
Ahem. It took several years for Lockheed-Martin, Boeing and ( P&W ) Rocketdyne to achieve their current success ratio, building on the previous work of Douglas, North American and Rockwell.
NASA doesn't launch jack shit.
> If you want encryption guaranteed against major governments you have to go with a one time pad.
Well yes, but what proportion of encrypted communications are intended to be elided from government view?
When Insurance_Company_A uses 3DES to encrypt rate files sent to Field_Agent_A, they're doing so because they don't want Insurance_Company_B reading their trade secrets.
When I connect to Amazon via SSL using 256-bit AES, I do so because I don't want HaXX0R_C from grabbing my debit card details.
When I GPG-encrypt e-mails to friends it is to prevent Bored_Sysop_D from reading my e-mails as they spool on the recipient's MX.
I contend that the fear of Government snooping accounts for a very small proportion of encrypted data.
> Sixteen rounds through S-boxes of your own choosing is nigh unto impossible to crack even with a dedicated supercomputer
Err, actually that's a particulary BAD thing. Random selection of S-box values can lead to differential cryptanalysis vulnerabilities. For example, IBM's original arbitrary values for Lucifer's S-boxes were corrected by the NSA prior to adoption as DES.
Nothing in cryptography comes down to chance.
Point 1:
No-one changed anything in GnuPG. Valgrind issued warnings regarding OpenSSL which resulted in some unfortunate changes in one distro of one OS.
GnuPG and OpenSSL are entirely discrete projects, please don't confuse people with supposition and half-truths.
Point 2:
Neither you nor I can write a robust encryption algorithm. On the contrary, Rindjael and Twofish have been published in the wild now for eight years and no-one has demonstrated a weakness. If the former is acceptable as AES for US Government crypto then it is secure enough for the rest of us. Even if we assume that the NSA is 20 years ahead of the field in mathematics, if you're not dealing with the NSA then you've got 20 years lead time before Company-X can crack your files.
> Use a bunch of IR LEDs. Cameras see IR, eyes don't.
Most CMOS and CCD cameras today incorporate filters which block wavelengths above c. 700 nanometres. This is particularly annoying in the context of DSLRs, which require a hardware hack to remove the filter for serious astrophotography.
Even the much-vaunted Canon D20a retained the IR filter, despite being targeted at astronomers, though it was tweaked for sensitivity in the red end of the visible spectrum around 650 nanometres.
> When I see an application play that is meant to hurt our operating system
``Our'' operating system? Which one would that be; FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly, NetBSD, PC-BSD, FreeDOS or ReactOS?
The World is bigger than Linux because of CHOICE and FREEDOM, which ironically are the tenets of the GPL. If people and companies wish to run Apache on MS Windows then that is their right, though I do not agree with their choice. Neither do I agree with rabble-rousing against a $100,000 investment that will result in better software for everyone, regardless of their philosophy.
> now that it won't be free for all the spammers and trolls anymore.
Indeed, there are at least two Usenet providers that drop all posts originating from Google Groups, so that we can enjoy spam-free feeds today.
I previously paid for a feed from Giganews, but they did not support the NNTP commands required to drop GG at the server so I was paying for their downloads as part of my monthly quota.
I have subsequently found a free Swedish provider with an agreeable degree of snobbery...
> That's what Neville Chamberlain thought, too.
Nope - Chamberlain thought, correctly, that the UK and France were not ready to face-down the threat. ``Peace in our time'' was a pragmatic ploy to buy time for the expansion.
It worked, just, at a very high cost ( five free countries lost ) but allowed the UK to hold the line for the fight back. *That* is realpolitik.
> Why...Do you need to access the Amnesty International website to cover the Olympics?
Amnesty International have been maintaining a running journal of the Chinese Government's crackdown in the run-up to the Olympics. On Monday they published a major report entitled ``The Olympics Countdown: Broken Promises'' which followed-up from an equally stinging April report:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/chinese-authorities-broken-promises-threaten-olympic-legacy-20080728
Perhaps you missed this on the BBC? After all, it was only on every half-hourly World Service bulletin ( alongside a report on how those journalists already in China could not read it ).
If I were a journalist in Beijing, monitoring the AI website to determine where unrest was being quashed would be a fairly important daily activity.