Well, the obvious 'when that one human being is a corporate officer who makes the decision in favor of "serious pollution"' and "Sure, hang the fucker high" respectively.
If you accept the legitimacy of the death penalty(obviously, if you don't, that's another story, and you aren't likely to approve of it for this purpose, or any other) serious pollution is actually highly logical:
The death penalty is usually assessed in cases of murder(esp. premeditated) or grievous bodily harm(especially premeditated or particularly gruesome in some way).
Well, guess what? Serious pollution is usually called 'serious' because it does, albeit at some epidemiological remove, cause some mixture of death and serious chronic health impairment, sometimes also nasty birth defects and the like.
It doesn't have the emotional punch of a nice juicy murder or a photogenic teenager getting raped or something; but pollution is a totally logical thing to punish by death(if you accept the traditional uses of the death penalty). Probably even better, in fact, because polluters are highly likely to be committing their crimes out of pure greed, not out of fear, passion, or other possible-to-rehabilitate/unlikely to reoffend motive.
But this was during WWII and it's reasonable to adjust your views of what is acceptable when your country is in an existential conflict.
That's one of the reasons why he qualifies as a 'non-radical' terrorist. He's pretty definitely using terror tactics, he goes so far as to specifically deny the then-current excuse(if you were basically OK with bombing the fuck out of your enemies; but didn't want to sound crass, then you would just be attacking 'military infrastructure and factories' with some unfortunate-but-inevitable collateral damage, he was more honest than that); but he's using them in service of about the least controversial objective in Britain at the time.
Obviously, as a practical matter, you aren't going to get 100% identical binaries from a given chunk of source unless your build environment is very carefully set up to achieve that end(something that people don't typically bother with).
However, as a matter of theory, I'm left with a question: If I give you a piece of source code and a complete build environment, you can compile and produce a binary in a certain number of operations. If I were to give you a piece of source code, a build environment, and a binary, would there be any general algorithm more efficient than just compiling it and checking whether the output is identical to answer the question "Is this binary a product of that source and build environment?"
Is there any property that you can exploit, if provided with the alleged binary output, to perform a 'verification' operation that is less computationally expensive than a naive 'compilation', or would that be possible only in certain special cases, with no useful general method?
Am I missing something that makes this idea different from RFC3161?
Ever since the invention of cryptography capable of 'signature', 'virtual notary' has merely been a matter of finding somebody you'd actually trust to be a notary, and then having them sign stuff. If you give them a clock, you can even have 'trusted' timestamps!
The bigger trick, and something that would actually be worth writing home about, is doing this without trusting somebody who almost certainly doesn't deserve it.
Ditching the old-school iron ballasts might not be a bad idea, either. They are seriously inefficient, and suffer from hum and flicker. Contemporary electronic ballasts perform considerably better.
White LEDs actually do have a nonzero rise and fall time(because if it says 'white' on the label, that means 'glob of phosphor being pumped by a blue or UV die, since we don't have wideband LEDs'). Also, a quick look through the datasheets shows advertised PWM frequencies in the 200KHz-1MHz+ range. Are the cheap seats substantially slower?
"Given", eh? Since the protections for electronic communications on the wire are (briefly stated) "Haha, fuck all" and the protections for stored communications are triviallly breached with (at most) a warrant, often a 2703(d) order, sometimes just a nasty note, that isn't terribly helpful even if true.
This is such good news! All the complaints about 'Surface RT' that I've heard so far have centered on how the Tegra3 is too slow, and doesn't have enough LTE. Nothing about how the hilariously perfunctory not-quite-office version of office is deeply touch-unfriendly, or being locked into Microsoft's walled garden store, or the relatively tiny application library. This should fix everything!
Such bullshit. Scorched earth tactics, which is what Sir Harris is describing and are intended to create the exact same circumstances he articulates, have been employed during wars for centuries.
Did I say anything about him pioneering or inventing such tactics? Indeed, didn't I specifically say: "relatively staid people who execute what are unambiguously terror tactics aren't especially uncommon, or confined to any particular nation"?
Do you seriously expect something refined from a KKK member? Their sole existence seems to be oriented towards being used for parody.
It's kind of a nuisance that the biggest fans of the 'white race' tend to be walking arguments against it. Why don't they try the "Ha! I'll show the mud races what's what by being a successful human being!" a bit more often?
Headline says the they're accused of building a weapon. Summary says they're accused of conspiracy to commit murder. Who to believe? I could RTFA, but what if that lists a third possibility?
These two things are not mutually exclusive. In this case, I'd assume that he is accused of attempting to build a weapon; but that the 'weapon' he was trying to build (by virtue of having no ballistic, explosive, or even particularly sharp, components) probably doesn't fall under any of the stock weapons possession charges, so the feds, in lieu of maybe getting some hilariously tiny occupational health and safety violation fine assessed, are going after him on the 'conspiracy to commit murder' angle, which is actually a crime for which nontrivial penalties exist.
"radical terrorist" is something interesting. That suggests there could be some "moderate terrorist". Anyone encountered that weird kind of terrorist?
They don't tend to be called 'terrorists'(because, by virtue of being moderate, they use violence to achieve ends that good, upstanding, people agree with); but nothing about being a terrorist actually requires any particular flavor of agenda, just the presence of somebody opposed to whatever your agenda is, and the willingness and capability to employ coercive violence and fear.
Somebody like Sir Arthur Harris would arguably qualify. He was an ideologically unexceptional commander of British air forces during WWII, and implemented the British 'saturation bombing' efforts against civilian targets and infrastructure. As he candidly described it:
"the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."
If that doesn't qualify as 'terrorism', I'm not certain what would; but he's a deeply un-radical figure, pretty much heading to the office every day to implement the (widely prevailing) logic of "Total War" in the service of his government, a not-exactly-radical line of business.
(I don't particularly mean to pick on the British, relatively staid people who execute what are unambiguously terror tactics aren't especially uncommon, or confined to any particular nation, he just happened to be a good example that I hit on quickly.)
is this whole thing a joke? why would the terrorists solicit money from jewish organizations? also, doesn't the TSA have similar vans already?
It's possible (read, likely) that this guy was not exactly a mental giant. That said, there is an interesting subcultural twist in certain subsections of American conservatism: they don't necessarily like judaism; but their particular flavor of Christian millennialism requires Jews in order to fulfill assorted 'prophesy' related events shortly before the end times.
Oh hey, it's JUST like the presidential elections!
You wish: The computer systems security expertise that goes into enforcing XBL DRM is far more sophisticated than that that goes into securing our voting systems.
"Hey guys! I used to be for DRM; but when I saw that it would ruin my launch, I became totally against it! Don't worry, though, just because it would be trivial to alter the deal at any future time, either over the internet or through exciting and mandatory system updates baked into new disk releases, you can still trust me!"
Why shouldn't they use drones? They use surveillance helicopters. This is just another method of doing the same thing.
Presumably because it's a markedly cheaper, easier, and quieter method of doing the same thing: Given the.. er... 'robust' state of law enforcement oversight, your major protection from any given investigative method is that it's a pain in the ass and/or expensive, and you aren't worth the effort. Reduce the effort, and you increase the number of people who are worth the effort.
I'm guessing the High Performance Computing guys might be interested as well.
I'd imagine that it depends on how heavily current GPU/CPU compute systems lean on the 'CPU' side of the arrangement:
If the CPU actually keeps reasonably busy(either with aspects of the problem that aren't amenable to GPU work, or with assorted housekeeping tasks required to keep the GPUs fed and coordinated across the cluster), Intel or AMD offer pretty good prices for chips that provide a lot of PCIe lanes, support tons of RAM, and are supported by most of the world's horrid legacy software. Plus, motherboards and other supporting gear are brutally commodified, which is always nice.
If the CPU is mostly idle, and mostly gets included because it's the cheapest way to get a bunch of PCIe lanes and boot an OS that can run CUDA drivers and a NIC, then a Tesla-like card that includes a weedy little ARM core and can run on a simple backplane, without any PC server components, would seem like a logical thing to produce.
Yeah because designing a GPU is not really making stuff. A bit like how writing software is done by lawyers and executives.
This sounds like good news and an obvious step to me. It should lead to smaller and more energy efficient computing devices in the future.
I suspect that they also don't have too much of a choice: the cost and energy savings of die-level integration with the CPU are difficult to ignore(and, even if they were less impressive, AMD and Intel both have pet GPUs that they integrate into most of their cores, and can freeze out anything more tightly integrated than a PCIe device at their whim, as Intel indeed did when they changed Northbridge interfaces). Either Nvidia commits to building SoCs that are all things to all people(a rather tall order), or they allow existing SoC-spinners to choose a GPU architecture with rather punchier PC roots than some of the traditional low-power/embedded guys.
We want to transition to an IP company. Then we only have to employ lawyers and executives, and save ourselves the trouble of all that making stuff.
Nvidia has been fabless since the beginning, the only difference with this announcement is that they'll sell you the ability to put their GPU on your die, rather than exclusively buying and reselling TSMC-fabbed GPUs of their design...
I'd be delighted if standards existed in this area; but they don't(to my knowledge, if they do, please let me know).
Keyboard, video, and mouse? Well, VNC is pretty antiquated; but at least it runs on almost anything. Your other options get thin, fast.
USB over network? Assorted proprietary implementations exist, no standard. (Even the capabilities of serial over LAN, as ostensibly standardized in IPMI, can be a bit...uncertain... from vendor to vendor and product to product).
pick up a bunch of Surface tablets, and put Linux or Android on them
"Secure boot" is mandatory on Windows RT(ARM) devices. I think that x86 Win8 devices are required to support it; but OEMs can do whatever key-fill they like, and can, at their option, support turning it off or end-user added keys.
I'm not saying that they didn't make a mistake somewhere, more than a few locked bootloaders have gone down; but it isn't going to be trivial.
If there isn't I can see it being abused by people.
I suspect that the inconvenience offers a built-in deterrent. To use one, you have to plug something into it, and the design offers no means of securing a device(as the pay-charge stations often do, in the form of little 'lockers' or similar that will hold a cellphone until you return).
How long are you going to stand around babysitting your phone in exchange for a few watts of free electricity? It's a convenient thing to have if you are taking a walk and need to top up your phone; but that's a pretty lousy hourly rate.
Aside from pure vandalism, which is possible; but wouldn't be deterred by fees, the only potentially sticky use case I can see would be the homeless. They have the fewest other options, and comparatively low opportunity costs for being near one of these as opposed to elsewhere. I suppose we'll see what team NYPD decides to do if they show up...
Thin clients should basically never need to be replaced until they HCF, at which point theyre much cheaper than your average desktop.
Unless the vendor doesn't support some update that you need because of a change on the server side(either a sufficient version bump that the protocol isn't totally interoperable, or something like moving from Citrix to VDI).
At work, we've had nothing but nightmares with HP's support for their thin clients. One of their WinCE models had a mystery timekeeping issue that kept the clock stubbornly out of sync. After a couple of weeks of hammering they escalated it to engineering, who confirmed the problem and then told us they had no intention of fixing it. The next model ironed that one out; but the last citrix client that HP supports is old enough that Citrix support people start making nervous noises when you mention it, and the official solution for VDI is 'buy a new one'. They also have a Linux based build; but that has (and has had for at least four years, despite my attempts to find somebody who would listen) a pathetic excuse for a 'kiosk' interface that allows you to dump unsanitized commands directly to the shell, along with at least one trivial root-escalation technique). On the plus side, these things are just overpriced VIA x86 boxes with limited RAM and IDE flash-disk-on-module units, and a nearly stock AMI BIOS, so we were able to just spin our own minimal Linux image, and most of the thin client software vendors have an x86 linux client freely available.
The hardware has been sturdy enough, only a few deaths over the entire deployment; but it was massively overpriced for its specs, and HP must have recruited its printer driver team to make the software suck so badly.
Why would ASIC be concerned about software-based traders? They know that, while it renders them somewhat inflexible, they are both far faster and substantially more power efficient by doing it in hardware...
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Well, the obvious 'when that one human being is a corporate officer who makes the decision in favor of "serious pollution"' and "Sure, hang the fucker high" respectively.
If you accept the legitimacy of the death penalty(obviously, if you don't, that's another story, and you aren't likely to approve of it for this purpose, or any other) serious pollution is actually highly logical:
The death penalty is usually assessed in cases of murder(esp. premeditated) or grievous bodily harm(especially premeditated or particularly gruesome in some way).
Well, guess what? Serious pollution is usually called 'serious' because it does, albeit at some epidemiological remove, cause some mixture of death and serious chronic health impairment, sometimes also nasty birth defects and the like.
It doesn't have the emotional punch of a nice juicy murder or a photogenic teenager getting raped or something; but pollution is a totally logical thing to punish by death(if you accept the traditional uses of the death penalty). Probably even better, in fact, because polluters are highly likely to be committing their crimes out of pure greed, not out of fear, passion, or other possible-to-rehabilitate/unlikely to reoffend motive.
But this was during WWII and it's reasonable to adjust your views of what is acceptable when your country is in an existential conflict.
That's one of the reasons why he qualifies as a 'non-radical' terrorist. He's pretty definitely using terror tactics, he goes so far as to specifically deny the then-current excuse(if you were basically OK with bombing the fuck out of your enemies; but didn't want to sound crass, then you would just be attacking 'military infrastructure and factories' with some unfortunate-but-inevitable collateral damage, he was more honest than that); but he's using them in service of about the least controversial objective in Britain at the time.
Obviously, as a practical matter, you aren't going to get 100% identical binaries from a given chunk of source unless your build environment is very carefully set up to achieve that end(something that people don't typically bother with).
However, as a matter of theory, I'm left with a question: If I give you a piece of source code and a complete build environment, you can compile and produce a binary in a certain number of operations. If I were to give you a piece of source code, a build environment, and a binary, would there be any general algorithm more efficient than just compiling it and checking whether the output is identical to answer the question "Is this binary a product of that source and build environment?"
Is there any property that you can exploit, if provided with the alleged binary output, to perform a 'verification' operation that is less computationally expensive than a naive 'compilation', or would that be possible only in certain special cases, with no useful general method?
Am I missing something that makes this idea different from RFC3161?
Ever since the invention of cryptography capable of 'signature', 'virtual notary' has merely been a matter of finding somebody you'd actually trust to be a notary, and then having them sign stuff. If you give them a clock, you can even have 'trusted' timestamps!
The bigger trick, and something that would actually be worth writing home about, is doing this without trusting somebody who almost certainly doesn't deserve it.
Ditching the old-school iron ballasts might not be a bad idea, either. They are seriously inefficient, and suffer from hum and flicker. Contemporary electronic ballasts perform considerably better.
White LEDs actually do have a nonzero rise and fall time(because if it says 'white' on the label, that means 'glob of phosphor being pumped by a blue or UV die, since we don't have wideband LEDs'). Also, a quick look through the datasheets shows advertised PWM frequencies in the 200KHz-1MHz+ range. Are the cheap seats substantially slower?
"Given", eh? Since the protections for electronic communications on the wire are (briefly stated) "Haha, fuck all" and the protections for stored communications are triviallly breached with (at most) a warrant, often a 2703(d) order, sometimes just a nasty note, that isn't terribly helpful even if true.
This is such good news! All the complaints about 'Surface RT' that I've heard so far have centered on how the Tegra3 is too slow, and doesn't have enough LTE. Nothing about how the hilariously perfunctory not-quite-office version of office is deeply touch-unfriendly, or being locked into Microsoft's walled garden store, or the relatively tiny application library. This should fix everything!
Such bullshit. Scorched earth tactics, which is what Sir Harris is describing and are intended to create the exact same circumstances he articulates, have been employed during wars for centuries.
Did I say anything about him pioneering or inventing such tactics? Indeed, didn't I specifically say: "relatively staid people who execute what are unambiguously terror tactics aren't especially uncommon, or confined to any particular nation"?
Do you seriously expect something refined from a KKK member? Their sole existence seems to be oriented towards being used for parody.
It's kind of a nuisance that the biggest fans of the 'white race' tend to be walking arguments against it. Why don't they try the "Ha! I'll show the mud races what's what by being a successful human being!" a bit more often?
Headline says the they're accused of building a weapon. Summary says they're accused of conspiracy to commit murder. Who to believe? I could RTFA, but what if that lists a third possibility?
These two things are not mutually exclusive. In this case, I'd assume that he is accused of attempting to build a weapon; but that the 'weapon' he was trying to build (by virtue of having no ballistic, explosive, or even particularly sharp, components) probably doesn't fall under any of the stock weapons possession charges, so the feds, in lieu of maybe getting some hilariously tiny occupational health and safety violation fine assessed, are going after him on the 'conspiracy to commit murder' angle, which is actually a crime for which nontrivial penalties exist.
"radical terrorist" is something interesting. That suggests there could be some "moderate terrorist". Anyone encountered that weird kind of terrorist?
They don't tend to be called 'terrorists'(because, by virtue of being moderate, they use violence to achieve ends that good, upstanding, people agree with); but nothing about being a terrorist actually requires any particular flavor of agenda, just the presence of somebody opposed to whatever your agenda is, and the willingness and capability to employ coercive violence and fear.
Somebody like Sir Arthur Harris would arguably qualify. He was an ideologically unexceptional commander of British air forces during WWII, and implemented the British 'saturation bombing' efforts against civilian targets and infrastructure. As he candidly described it:
"the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."
If that doesn't qualify as 'terrorism', I'm not certain what would; but he's a deeply un-radical figure, pretty much heading to the office every day to implement the (widely prevailing) logic of "Total War" in the service of his government, a not-exactly-radical line of business.
(I don't particularly mean to pick on the British, relatively staid people who execute what are unambiguously terror tactics aren't especially uncommon, or confined to any particular nation, he just happened to be a good example that I hit on quickly.)
is this whole thing a joke? why would the terrorists solicit money from jewish organizations? also, doesn't the TSA have similar vans already?
It's possible (read, likely) that this guy was not exactly a mental giant. That said, there is an interesting subcultural twist in certain subsections of American conservatism: they don't necessarily like judaism; but their particular flavor of Christian millennialism requires Jews in order to fulfill assorted 'prophesy' related events shortly before the end times.
Oh hey, it's JUST like the presidential elections!
You wish: The computer systems security expertise that goes into enforcing XBL DRM is far more sophisticated than that that goes into securing our voting systems.
"Hey guys! I used to be for DRM; but when I saw that it would ruin my launch, I became totally against it! Don't worry, though, just because it would be trivial to alter the deal at any future time, either over the internet or through exciting and mandatory system updates baked into new disk releases, you can still trust me!"
Why shouldn't they use drones? They use surveillance helicopters. This is just another method of doing the same thing.
Presumably because it's a markedly cheaper, easier, and quieter method of doing the same thing: Given the.. er... 'robust' state of law enforcement oversight, your major protection from any given investigative method is that it's a pain in the ass and/or expensive, and you aren't worth the effort. Reduce the effort, and you increase the number of people who are worth the effort.
I'm guessing the High Performance Computing guys might be interested as well.
I'd imagine that it depends on how heavily current GPU/CPU compute systems lean on the 'CPU' side of the arrangement:
If the CPU actually keeps reasonably busy(either with aspects of the problem that aren't amenable to GPU work, or with assorted housekeeping tasks required to keep the GPUs fed and coordinated across the cluster), Intel or AMD offer pretty good prices for chips that provide a lot of PCIe lanes, support tons of RAM, and are supported by most of the world's horrid legacy software. Plus, motherboards and other supporting gear are brutally commodified, which is always nice.
If the CPU is mostly idle, and mostly gets included because it's the cheapest way to get a bunch of PCIe lanes and boot an OS that can run CUDA drivers and a NIC, then a Tesla-like card that includes a weedy little ARM core and can run on a simple backplane, without any PC server components, would seem like a logical thing to produce.
Yeah because designing a GPU is not really making stuff. A bit like how writing software is done by lawyers and executives.
This sounds like good news and an obvious step to me. It should lead to smaller and more energy efficient computing devices in the future.
I suspect that they also don't have too much of a choice: the cost and energy savings of die-level integration with the CPU are difficult to ignore(and, even if they were less impressive, AMD and Intel both have pet GPUs that they integrate into most of their cores, and can freeze out anything more tightly integrated than a PCIe device at their whim, as Intel indeed did when they changed Northbridge interfaces). Either Nvidia commits to building SoCs that are all things to all people(a rather tall order), or they allow existing SoC-spinners to choose a GPU architecture with rather punchier PC roots than some of the traditional low-power/embedded guys.
We want to transition to an IP company.
Then we only have to employ lawyers and executives, and save ourselves the trouble of all that making stuff.
Nvidia has been fabless since the beginning, the only difference with this announcement is that they'll sell you the ability to put their GPU on your die, rather than exclusively buying and reselling TSMC-fabbed GPUs of their design...
I'd be delighted if standards existed in this area; but they don't(to my knowledge, if they do, please let me know).
Keyboard, video, and mouse? Well, VNC is pretty antiquated; but at least it runs on almost anything. Your other options get thin, fast.
USB over network? Assorted proprietary implementations exist, no standard. (Even the capabilities of serial over LAN, as ostensibly standardized in IPMI, can be a bit...uncertain... from vendor to vendor and product to product).
pick up a bunch of Surface tablets, and put Linux or Android on them
"Secure boot" is mandatory on Windows RT(ARM) devices. I think that x86 Win8 devices are required to support it; but OEMs can do whatever key-fill they like, and can, at their option, support turning it off or end-user added keys.
I'm not saying that they didn't make a mistake somewhere, more than a few locked bootloaders have gone down; but it isn't going to be trivial.
Is there a charge to use it?
If there isn't I can see it being abused by people.
I suspect that the inconvenience offers a built-in deterrent. To use one, you have to plug something into it, and the design offers no means of securing a device(as the pay-charge stations often do, in the form of little 'lockers' or similar that will hold a cellphone until you return).
How long are you going to stand around babysitting your phone in exchange for a few watts of free electricity? It's a convenient thing to have if you are taking a walk and need to top up your phone; but that's a pretty lousy hourly rate.
Aside from pure vandalism, which is possible; but wouldn't be deterred by fees, the only potentially sticky use case I can see would be the homeless. They have the fewest other options, and comparatively low opportunity costs for being near one of these as opposed to elsewhere. I suppose we'll see what team NYPD decides to do if they show up...
Thin clients should basically never need to be replaced until they HCF, at which point theyre much cheaper than your average desktop.
Unless the vendor doesn't support some update that you need because of a change on the server side(either a sufficient version bump that the protocol isn't totally interoperable, or something like moving from Citrix to VDI).
At work, we've had nothing but nightmares with HP's support for their thin clients. One of their WinCE models had a mystery timekeeping issue that kept the clock stubbornly out of sync. After a couple of weeks of hammering they escalated it to engineering, who confirmed the problem and then told us they had no intention of fixing it. The next model ironed that one out; but the last citrix client that HP supports is old enough that Citrix support people start making nervous noises when you mention it, and the official solution for VDI is 'buy a new one'. They also have a Linux based build; but that has (and has had for at least four years, despite my attempts to find somebody who would listen) a pathetic excuse for a 'kiosk' interface that allows you to dump unsanitized commands directly to the shell, along with at least one trivial root-escalation technique). On the plus side, these things are just overpriced VIA x86 boxes with limited RAM and IDE flash-disk-on-module units, and a nearly stock AMI BIOS, so we were able to just spin our own minimal Linux image, and most of the thin client software vendors have an x86 linux client freely available.
The hardware has been sturdy enough, only a few deaths over the entire deployment; but it was massively overpriced for its specs, and HP must have recruited its printer driver team to make the software suck so badly.
Why would ASIC be concerned about software-based traders? They know that, while it renders them somewhat inflexible, they are both far faster and substantially more power efficient by doing it in hardware...