No. Doesn't work that way. Feist vs. Rural Telephone. Copyright protects only originality, not facts. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone. That's why you can scan in a phone book and put a search engine online.
It's a good little project, but the components still cost too much for it to be a commercial product. A few more years, though, when it can retail for $4.95...
Re:Better idea: build one for a microwave oven
on
RFID Cookware
·
· Score: 1
Recently I've been going to a deli that has chicken pieces (Ninan Ranch, so it's worth it) in the cold case. You pick one, and they microwave it. The bigger pieces come out underdone in the center; a fixed setting isn't working for them.
There's this little box in your car. It starts out empty. It listens to satellite radio. All the channels. It keeps a copy of each new song, discarding duplicates. Soon, you have a big music library.
Soon, there's this little box on your belt....
This is completely legal under the Audio Home Recording Act. The RIAA gets nothing for it. They can't even stop radio stations from broadcasting the music. Not even with DRM; broadcast radio stations have the right to crack DRM. (That's actually in the DMCA.)
That's what scares the RIAA.
Better idea: build one for a microwave oven
on
RFID Cookware
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A more useful idea would be a wireless temperature probe that worked in, and with, a microwave oven. Then, when you're cooking something thick, like a chicken breast, the oven could sense interior temperature. Traditional ovens have had this since the 1950s, but microwave ovens usually have not.
There would certainly be no problem powering the thing; there's plenty of RF power in there. Interference could be overcome by programming the oven to shut off for a few milliseconds every second, during which period the probe would send a temp reading.
That's Pacheco Pass, California. That's one of the early wind sites. Many, many windmills, but only about 50KW to 150KW each. They're gradually being replaced with bigger models.
Major bird-kill problem there. That pass is a migratory bird route, and for a bird, it's like a trip through a row of blenders.
At long last, big megawatt-sized windmills work. They don't throw blades, they survive storms, they produce power under low wind conditions, they play nice with the power grid, and they don't take excessive maintenance. They're available from GE, Vesta, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Thousands of wind machines in the 1 MW to 3MW range are running today. After decades of work, these things are big enough to be useful.
And that's the problem. These things are big. 400 feet high, the size of a 40 story building. And that's the old 1MW model. The new 3MW units are even bigger, with a 341 foot blade diameter.
But that's only 3MW. These things need to installed in large numbers to generate enough power to drive whole cities. So thousands of these huge towers have to be built. This is happening. And, let's face it, the result looks like an industrial park. We're not talking about those little hippie windmills from the 1970s. This is serious machinery.
Upstate New York people are bitching about this, as mentioned in the original article. The Cape Cod and Nantucket people are furious. The plan there is to build a wind farm six miles offshore, with 130 turbines. This seems huge, but it will only provide about a quarter of Cape Cod's electricity. Residents are upset about how it will "ruin the ocean view". Six miles offshore.
Actually, the Cape Cod site probably should be about 10x bigger. Someday it will be.
I've noticed a marked increase in the use of Flash to track users. I've also noticed an annoying trend of scripts that request or post information to a tracker site every second. If you leave the page open it constantly hits the tracking site.
Is that theft of service, trespass to chattels, or exceeding authorized access? The site is stealing your line time. If you're on dialup, and have a few pages open, this will eat up a considerable fraction of your bandwidth.
Firefox will need blocking for this.
In fact, I think we've reached the point that Flash can't be allowed to run beyond the first displayed frame unless clicked on. User control over animated GIFs was added long ago, and now it's needed for Flash.
Another feature Firefox needs.
Firefox's big edge is becoming that it's "the browser that puts you in control". That needs to continue, and be strengthened.
Space travel isn't feasible
on
Return to the Moon
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Space travel with chemical fuels isn't feasible.
After half a century of building big rockets, we now know that they don't work very well. Half a century ago, they were use-once-and-throw-away devices, and they still are. Payloads are still tiny compared to the launch weight, even for the Shuttle. Compare the figures for jet aircraft, which can be half payload.
Reliability is still lousy, too. This is because so much weight reduction is required just to get the things off the ground that they don't have adequate safety margins. About 10-20% of satellite launches still fail, almost half a century after the first one. That number isn't improving, either; in fact, it was a little better in the 1970s. There have only been a few hundred Shuttle flights, and it's crashed once. (Update since I wrote this in 2002: twice). Commercial aircraft flights, by comparison, fail a few times per year, out of millions of flights.
Half a century in aviation took us from the Wright Brothers Flyer to the B-52. Half a century in rocketry took us from the Atlas I to the Atlas V. There's been little progress in launch vehicles since the 1960s. All the major launch systems were created decades ago.
So chemical fuels just don't have the power-to-weight ratio for useful space travel. People knew this in the Orion nuclear rocket days; it's a straightforward calculation. It's unfortunate that an Orion wasn't launched once or twice, just to demonstrate that nuclear propulsion is possible.
Someone involved in a WMA-related lawsuit needs to subpoena, from Microsoft, all the source code and all the change control information for this small part of Windows. Then the original programmers need to be found and deposed under oath. This is standard legal procedure for something like this.
It's possible to get to the bottom of this by legal means.
Wierdly, CAN-SPAM is working. But not as expected.
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Much of the improvement, surprisingly, is due to the CAN-SPAM act. Yes, it "legitimizes spamming". Yes, it's too weak. Yes, it overrides state law.
What CAN-SPAM does do is make it a criminal offense to forge headers. As a result, spam from any "legitimate business" is easily identifiable from the header. So it gets filtered out.
This wasn't what the Direct Marketing Association expected. But that's what happened. As a result, the spams from legitimate businesses don't get delivered. Attempts to get around this "problem", like Bonded Spammer, didn't really catch on. So spam is almost useless to legitimate businesses now.
This leaves the people who forge headers. They're now criminals. So they've been forced out of legitimate web hosting services onto "bulletproof" web servers in marginal countries. They can't send directly any more, or their connection will be pulled or IP addresses blocked.
So now they have to find some illegal way to send spam. Which is getting harder. Most of the open relays have been plugged. They've been reduced to spamming through zombies taken over by viruses. This means they're committing serious felonies, and long jail sentences are a very real possibility.
Spam is now a branch of organized crime, not marketing. And it's highly visible organized crime, which makes it vulnerable.
It's not that hard to follow the money. We need to push for more law enforcement priority in this area.
Certainly with some power cleanup on the front end, it could work, but it's not being shipped that way. The case-mod crowd is likely to think that if they just put a cigarette lighter plug on the thing, they'll have a car PC.
Microsoft's mission statement was "A computer on every desk, running Microsoft software".
Mission accomplished.
They've been struggling with what to do since they achieved that goal, but that's a problem of success. Here's their rather vague current mission statement.
Probably not. The data sheet says it's only intended for use with the manufacturer's matching 12V supply. Automotive power is very noisy, drops to around 6V during starting and can show big inductive spikes well above 12V. There are automotive power supplies which handle that just fine, but this isn't one of them.
The Xbox is an x86 PC with an NVidia graphics processor running a variant of Windows 2000. The Xbox 360, the PS2 and PS3 aren't even vaguely PC-like. Interesting trend.
Chuck Moore once produced a Forth system with a three-key keyboard. Chords were supported, so you could key seven different patterns. That system was an exercise in minimalism; the CPU only had about 4000 transistors, and generated the waveforms for a color TV in software. It was an elegant dead end.
I'll be more interested when either the results are confirmed or one of them gets radiation poisoning.
During the first cold fusion flap, back in the 1980s, I went to a talk by a physicist at Stanford who was trying to replicate the experiment. He mentioned that when they first started, they had radiation alarms set up around the equipment, but after a while, they moved those back. They measured neutron levels around twice background on occasion, but realized that people around the experiment were acting as neutron reflectors for background radiation and affecting the results. So the whole experiment was moved into a cube of lead bricks, after which no neutron emissions were observed.
Bear in mind that it's not that hard to generate fusion. There have been fusion lab setups since the 1950s. There are many ways to force large amounts of energy into a small volume and thus create the conditions for small-scale fusion. The hard part is getting out more energy than you put in.
What he is missing is the near-instant shutter response, manual zoom and focus and maybe motor drive.
One of the wierd things about digital cameras is that they tend to have long time delays. The delay between pressing the button and taking the picture can be considerable, and the interval between pictures can be seconds. This in devices that are entirely solid state. Sometimes the problem is that reading out the CCD is slow, but often it's something like a tiny CPU struggling to handle (and possibly compress) a big image.
Things apparently get better as the price passes $1000 and the cameras get physically bigger, but something is basically wrong when low end camcorders can compress encode 30FPS in real time and $500 cameras need 2s between shots.
No, you're not getting what this really is. This is a hydroponic farm of algae in glass tubes. Sunlight makes it grow. Excess C02 from the flue gases makes it grow faster. But you still need huge acreage. The farm for a power plant will be much bigger than the power plant. Their numbers indicate that we're talking about a square mile of glass-tube algae-filled solar collectors for a reasonable-sized coal plant.
It's not actually processing any significant fraction of the flue gases. It's just connected to a sampling line from the smokestack. The big question is how much equipment you need to process the output from a power plant. Numbers like a thousand acres of tube field are mentioned. And how much manual servicing does this gear take?
Maybe it wouldn't solve all the problems, but just making things a bit harder has a dramatic effect on the prevalence of malware.
Not any more. Read the original article. Malware now has enough of a profitable ecosystem that people are being paid for writing it. It's not just some kid in their parent's basement any more. Malware is far more complex than it was even two years ago. Just plugging holes one at a time isn't working any more. Patch-based security and signature-based detection are routinely being overcome by the current generation of malware.
What's really wrong with C++: denial
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The big problem with C++ is denial. Even Strostrup, who should know better, insists that C++ has no major problems.
As a result, the fundamental problems are not being fixed.
C++ is the only remaining major language which has hiding without safety. C has neither. Java, C#, the Pascal/Modula/Ada/Eiffel family, and all the scripting languages have both hiding and safety. That lack of safety is responsible for most of the crashes and exploits in today's software. When a virus takes over your machine due to a buffer overflow, it's probably because of that bad design decision in C++. Every day, hundreds of millions of people must suffer because of that mistake.
The largest single problem comes from the decision in C to treat a pointer and an array as the same thing. This seemed convenient thirty years ago, but created a language in which the size of an array is not permanently associated with the array. In particular, the fact that arrays are passed to functions without size information is a huge source of trouble. This, of course, is why we have buffer overflows.
Attempts were made in the STL to fix this problem, but it didn't really work out. Trying to retrofit strings to the language via the template mechanism was not all that successful, since so many libraries and system calls required the old-style strings.
Safety is not a performance issue. It's possible to do checking very efficiently, if the compiler knows what to check. Subscript checks can usually be hoisted out of inner loops at compile time.
But this is not possible for C++, because the subscript checking, when enabled, is in the STL, not the language.
The second big problem in C++ is the need to obsess on "who owns what". Memory allocation is the nightmare of C++. Again, the STL tried to address this, and again, it was botched. The auto_ptr debacle illustrates the limitations of the language. There have been many, many attempts to implement "smart pointers", and they're all unsafe. At some point, you have to extract a C-type pointer to get something done, which introduces a hole in reference counting. If you don't extract raw pointers, you spend too much time updating reference counts. Again, this is something that a compiler could optimize if the compiler knew more about what was going on. But with reference counting implemented at the macro level of templates, that's not possible.
Garbage collection is occasionally proposed as a panacea, but it's not compatible with the concept of destructors. In a garbage collected language, what destructors and finalizers do must be severely limited. This is contrary to the C++ concept of "resource allocation as initialization".
You don't want to close a window from the garbage collector. Also, introducing garbage collection introduces a form of concurrency, in a language that doesn't handle concurrency well.
There are workarounds for this, but like most workarounds, they're painful. Take a good look at how Microsoft's "Managed C++" approached the problem. It's wierd; read about "resurrection, where an object comes back to life during garbage collection.
Those are the two elephants in the living room of C++. Denying them will not make them go away. This is harsh. But it's not wrong.
This is a big step in the right direction, and it's been proposed before by many people. The problem is that it takes coordinated work in the OS and the browser to make it work. If you get it wrong, you block some current attack vectors but create new ones.
The right answer for security purposes is to run the renderer component of a browser in a kind of jail, with each page (or at least each site) rendered in its own jail. An instance of the renderer should be launched with a connection to a window, a connection to the net, and a connection to a cache subdirectory for the site being rendered. With the instance in a jail, unable to open files, damage is limited. The rendererer can be corrupted, but when the page is closed, the problem is gone.
Of course, this breaks tabbed browsing; can't have two sites in one window. Secure cut and paste requires a "guard", a firewall for the clipboard. Program invocation from the browser might be allowed, but confined to the same jail, such programs can't do much. Downloads all have to go into quarantine.
That's what it takes to achieve browser security that works. This has been known since the 1980s. A very few DoD systems work this way. Users hate it.
The necessary compartmentalization needs machinery like that in SELinux. Users and groups just aren't enough.
Would you give up tabbed browsing and browser toolbars to get security? Ask your users that.
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No. Doesn't work that way. Feist vs. Rural Telephone. Copyright protects only originality, not facts. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone. That's why you can scan in a phone book and put a search engine online.
It's a good little project, but the components still cost too much for it to be a commercial product. A few more years, though, when it can retail for $4.95...
Recently I've been going to a deli that has chicken pieces (Ninan Ranch, so it's worth it) in the cold case. You pick one, and they microwave it. The bigger pieces come out underdone in the center; a fixed setting isn't working for them.
Soon, there's this little box on your belt....
This is completely legal under the Audio Home Recording Act. The RIAA gets nothing for it. They can't even stop radio stations from broadcasting the music. Not even with DRM; broadcast radio stations have the right to crack DRM. (That's actually in the DMCA.)
That's what scares the RIAA.
There would certainly be no problem powering the thing; there's plenty of RF power in there. Interference could be overcome by programming the oven to shut off for a few milliseconds every second, during which period the probe would send a temp reading.
Major bird-kill problem there. That pass is a migratory bird route, and for a bird, it's like a trip through a row of blenders.
And that's the problem. These things are big. 400 feet high, the size of a 40 story building. And that's the old 1MW model. The new 3MW units are even bigger, with a 341 foot blade diameter.
But that's only 3MW. These things need to installed in large numbers to generate enough power to drive whole cities. So thousands of these huge towers have to be built. This is happening. And, let's face it, the result looks like an industrial park. We're not talking about those little hippie windmills from the 1970s. This is serious machinery.
Upstate New York people are bitching about this, as mentioned in the original article. The Cape Cod and Nantucket people are furious. The plan there is to build a wind farm six miles offshore, with 130 turbines. This seems huge, but it will only provide about a quarter of Cape Cod's electricity. Residents are upset about how it will "ruin the ocean view". Six miles offshore.
Actually, the Cape Cod site probably should be about 10x bigger. Someday it will be.
Is that theft of service, trespass to chattels, or exceeding authorized access? The site is stealing your line time. If you're on dialup, and have a few pages open, this will eat up a considerable fraction of your bandwidth.
Firefox will need blocking for this.
In fact, I think we've reached the point that Flash can't be allowed to run beyond the first displayed frame unless clicked on. User control over animated GIFs was added long ago, and now it's needed for Flash. Another feature Firefox needs.
Firefox's big edge is becoming that it's "the browser that puts you in control". That needs to continue, and be strengthened.
After half a century of building big rockets, we now know that they don't work very well. Half a century ago, they were use-once-and-throw-away devices, and they still are. Payloads are still tiny compared to the launch weight, even for the Shuttle. Compare the figures for jet aircraft, which can be half payload.
Reliability is still lousy, too. This is because so much weight reduction is required just to get the things off the ground that they don't have adequate safety margins. About 10-20% of satellite launches still fail, almost half a century after the first one. That number isn't improving, either; in fact, it was a little better in the 1970s. There have only been a few hundred Shuttle flights, and it's crashed once. (Update since I wrote this in 2002: twice). Commercial aircraft flights, by comparison, fail a few times per year, out of millions of flights.
Half a century in aviation took us from the Wright Brothers Flyer to the B-52. Half a century in rocketry took us from the Atlas I to the Atlas V. There's been little progress in launch vehicles since the 1960s. All the major launch systems were created decades ago. So chemical fuels just don't have the power-to-weight ratio for useful space travel. People knew this in the Orion nuclear rocket days; it's a straightforward calculation. It's unfortunate that an Orion wasn't launched once or twice, just to demonstrate that nuclear propulsion is possible.
It's possible to get to the bottom of this by legal means.
What CAN-SPAM does do is make it a criminal offense to forge headers. As a result, spam from any "legitimate business" is easily identifiable from the header. So it gets filtered out.
This wasn't what the Direct Marketing Association expected. But that's what happened. As a result, the spams from legitimate businesses don't get delivered. Attempts to get around this "problem", like Bonded Spammer, didn't really catch on. So spam is almost useless to legitimate businesses now.
This leaves the people who forge headers. They're now criminals. So they've been forced out of legitimate web hosting services onto "bulletproof" web servers in marginal countries. They can't send directly any more, or their connection will be pulled or IP addresses blocked.
So now they have to find some illegal way to send spam. Which is getting harder. Most of the open relays have been plugged. They've been reduced to spamming through zombies taken over by viruses. This means they're committing serious felonies, and long jail sentences are a very real possibility.
Spam is now a branch of organized crime, not marketing. And it's highly visible organized crime, which makes it vulnerable. It's not that hard to follow the money. We need to push for more law enforcement priority in this area.
That's why spam is declining.
Those cases are huge! They look like a PC/AT, circa 1984. This stuff needs some serious downsizing.
Certainly with some power cleanup on the front end, it could work, but it's not being shipped that way. The case-mod crowd is likely to think that if they just put a cigarette lighter plug on the thing, they'll have a car PC.
Microsoft's mission statement was "A computer on every desk, running Microsoft software".
Mission accomplished.
They've been struggling with what to do since they achieved that goal, but that's a problem of success. Here's their rather vague current mission statement.
Probably not. The data sheet says it's only intended for use with the manufacturer's matching 12V supply. Automotive power is very noisy, drops to around 6V during starting and can show big inductive spikes well above 12V. There are automotive power supplies which handle that just fine, but this isn't one of them.
The Xbox is an x86 PC with an NVidia graphics processor running a variant of Windows 2000. The Xbox 360, the PS2 and PS3 aren't even vaguely PC-like. Interesting trend.
Chuck Moore once produced a Forth system with a three-key keyboard. Chords were supported, so you could key seven different patterns. That system was an exercise in minimalism; the CPU only had about 4000 transistors, and generated the waveforms for a color TV in software. It was an elegant dead end.
During the first cold fusion flap, back in the 1980s, I went to a talk by a physicist at Stanford who was trying to replicate the experiment. He mentioned that when they first started, they had radiation alarms set up around the equipment, but after a while, they moved those back. They measured neutron levels around twice background on occasion, but realized that people around the experiment were acting as neutron reflectors for background radiation and affecting the results. So the whole experiment was moved into a cube of lead bricks, after which no neutron emissions were observed.
Bear in mind that it's not that hard to generate fusion. There have been fusion lab setups since the 1950s. There are many ways to force large amounts of energy into a small volume and thus create the conditions for small-scale fusion. The hard part is getting out more energy than you put in.
One of the wierd things about digital cameras is that they tend to have long time delays. The delay between pressing the button and taking the picture can be considerable, and the interval between pictures can be seconds. This in devices that are entirely solid state. Sometimes the problem is that reading out the CCD is slow, but often it's something like a tiny CPU struggling to handle (and possibly compress) a big image.
Things apparently get better as the price passes $1000 and the cameras get physically bigger, but something is basically wrong when low end camcorders can compress encode 30FPS in real time and $500 cameras need 2s between shots.
No, you're not getting what this really is. This is a hydroponic farm of algae in glass tubes. Sunlight makes it grow. Excess C02 from the flue gases makes it grow faster. But you still need huge acreage. The farm for a power plant will be much bigger than the power plant. Their numbers indicate that we're talking about a square mile of glass-tube algae-filled solar collectors for a reasonable-sized coal plant.
Here's the technical paper.
Not any more. Read the original article. Malware now has enough of a profitable ecosystem that people are being paid for writing it. It's not just some kid in their parent's basement any more. Malware is far more complex than it was even two years ago. Just plugging holes one at a time isn't working any more. Patch-based security and signature-based detection are routinely being overcome by the current generation of malware.
C++ is the only remaining major language which has hiding without safety. C has neither. Java, C#, the Pascal/Modula/Ada/Eiffel family, and all the scripting languages have both hiding and safety. That lack of safety is responsible for most of the crashes and exploits in today's software. When a virus takes over your machine due to a buffer overflow, it's probably because of that bad design decision in C++. Every day, hundreds of millions of people must suffer because of that mistake.
The largest single problem comes from the decision in C to treat a pointer and an array as the same thing. This seemed convenient thirty years ago, but created a language in which the size of an array is not permanently associated with the array. In particular, the fact that arrays are passed to functions without size information is a huge source of trouble. This, of course, is why we have buffer overflows.
Attempts were made in the STL to fix this problem, but it didn't really work out. Trying to retrofit strings to the language via the template mechanism was not all that successful, since so many libraries and system calls required the old-style strings.
Safety is not a performance issue. It's possible to do checking very efficiently, if the compiler knows what to check. Subscript checks can usually be hoisted out of inner loops at compile time. But this is not possible for C++, because the subscript checking, when enabled, is in the STL, not the language.
The second big problem in C++ is the need to obsess on "who owns what". Memory allocation is the nightmare of C++. Again, the STL tried to address this, and again, it was botched. The auto_ptr debacle illustrates the limitations of the language. There have been many, many attempts to implement "smart pointers", and they're all unsafe. At some point, you have to extract a C-type pointer to get something done, which introduces a hole in reference counting. If you don't extract raw pointers, you spend too much time updating reference counts. Again, this is something that a compiler could optimize if the compiler knew more about what was going on. But with reference counting implemented at the macro level of templates, that's not possible.
Garbage collection is occasionally proposed as a panacea, but it's not compatible with the concept of destructors. In a garbage collected language, what destructors and finalizers do must be severely limited. This is contrary to the C++ concept of "resource allocation as initialization". You don't want to close a window from the garbage collector. Also, introducing garbage collection introduces a form of concurrency, in a language that doesn't handle concurrency well. There are workarounds for this, but like most workarounds, they're painful. Take a good look at how Microsoft's "Managed C++" approached the problem. It's wierd; read about "resurrection, where an object comes back to life during garbage collection.
Those are the two elephants in the living room of C++. Denying them will not make them go away. This is harsh. But it's not wrong.
The right answer for security purposes is to run the renderer component of a browser in a kind of jail, with each page (or at least each site) rendered in its own jail. An instance of the renderer should be launched with a connection to a window, a connection to the net, and a connection to a cache subdirectory for the site being rendered. With the instance in a jail, unable to open files, damage is limited. The rendererer can be corrupted, but when the page is closed, the problem is gone.
Of course, this breaks tabbed browsing; can't have two sites in one window. Secure cut and paste requires a "guard", a firewall for the clipboard. Program invocation from the browser might be allowed, but confined to the same jail, such programs can't do much. Downloads all have to go into quarantine.
That's what it takes to achieve browser security that works. This has been known since the 1980s. A very few DoD systems work this way. Users hate it.
The necessary compartmentalization needs machinery like that in SELinux. Users and groups just aren't enough.
Would you give up tabbed browsing and browser toolbars to get security? Ask your users that.
That's the problem.
Yes. And because of that, the deep ocean stabilizes at 4C, as pressure forces the temperature to the minimum-volume point. Isn't thermodynamics neat?