Can we finish locking the News of the World staff in their headquarters and burning it to the ground, along with anybody found to have aided or abetted them(given that their contacts with the Met and right up to the PM are well known, this probably includes a few people in addition to their shady PIs...) and get on to an important matter:
Why are phones, particularly the VM box that is more or less an automatic part of today's cell phone, so damn vulnerable? The Telcoes seem to have no trouble tracking our activities in great detail if those activities are something for which we can be billed, and they also seem eminently willing to cooperate with law enforcement. Why, then, do I have absolutely no way of knowing when, and from where, my VM box was called into, and why would the VM box of a phone that is subject to police investigation be accessible from the outside at all?
I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a bunch of tabloid flacks roasted in their own slime; but if voicemail hacking and phone intercepts by random PIs are that easy, we have a problem that needs to be solved by better security, not just crushing malefactors after the fact...
I have no idea if these are really high-powered types, or if they are basically the washouts of academia who don't want to admit that they have essentially moved into Intel's 'Theoretical Marketing' department; but Intel has way more of them than you'd expect from a chip company.
I've always found it (darkly) humorous that the precious, precious, Women and Children! are terribly delicate flowers whenever a technology that makes society squeamish comes up; but are magically judged fit for whatever duty is required when it is in our interest:
50MPH train ride? Clear and present danger of uterine escape! Unremitting and dubiously voluntary childbirth, with a side of pre-appliance housework, from age 15? As nature intended!
Electric lighting? Probably a paedophile lurking behind every bush, stoking their vile lusts with children's silhouettes in the newly lit windows. Coal needs mining? A child on all fours should be able to pull a loaded cart through a tunnel only a couple of feet high, think of the savings on digging costs!
I realize that you are the resident quack-doctor-troll; but here goes:
Asbestos: Wonderful stuff for serious fireproofing/insulation applications. Just don't bloody breath it. (And, incidentally, don't let those sociopathic fuckers we call 'lobbyists' anywhere near public policy. The curious little quirk of physical geography that puts some of the major asbestos deposits in Quebec, whose always-restive local government the national government is always trying to placate, made for decades of obfuscation, stalling, and straight-out lies about the stuff's safety...)
Thalidomide: Crazy teratogenic(which is why the evil, evil, FDA didn't approve it in the US). On the other hand, as long as you aren't pregnant, it shows a great deal of promise in the treatment of Leprosy and certain cancers. Use as Directed, kids.
Obviously, not all new technologies are good, and there is always the risk that we either won't know that, or that the people who do know that will have an interest in ignoring the fact(Thanks for all the lead, Ethyl Corporation...). That doesn't mean that many of them aren't progress, though.
Wait: "This new release system" has resulted in a 20% speedup; but you are this close to dumping it because its version numbering scheme is inaesthetic?
I agree that the race-to-the-highest-number game is silly; but it is the silly, albeit visible, symptom of the FF team having a fire lit under its collective ass by Chrome. Arguably, while a lot of what gets full numbers really should just be point releases, FF's quality today is relatively better than it has been in some time. Are you really going to let the version numbers get in the way?
Gigantic cross-licensed patent arsenals certainly do help keep the little people in their place; but there is one additional factor: The patent troll.
Large patent-holders are mostly locked in a cold war with one another, lots of needless expenditure; but relatively little blood most of the time, and they get to be superpowers and crush smaller competitors like insects(or buy them out when the smaller competitor discovers that they have something quite innovative; but would need to license 3,000 patents to make it to market...)
Patent trolls, though, by possessing patents; but never doing anything that could infringe on patents(because their only business is patent trolling) disrupt this cushy equilibrium. They are sort of the non-state suitcase bombers with nothing to lose in the patent wars.
Perversely, if we want meaningful patent reform, it might actually be best to applaud and encourage patent trolling as much as possible. As long as 'defensive' patents build up in the arsenals of incumbents, the incumbents have very limited incentive to change things. The lawyers cost money, sure; but the strategic advantage is worth it. Add enough patent trolls to the mix, though, and they'll have to deal with an enemy who has no interest in cross-licensing and friendship, and who has nothing they can threaten...
At the notion that you could get a patent on the idea of transferring a playlist from a computer to an MP3 player(ie. a second computer, but smaller...)
M3Us have been around for ages, and playlists generally are really just a special case of programs accepting lists of files as arguments, which is downright ancient. And transferring a set of commands from one computer to a second, more embedded, computer? I'm pretty sure I was FTPing postscript to some HP from back when they knew how to build them properly(only print commands that went through the windows spooler system were caught by the billing system, you see...) back in highschool...
Yes, and Apple was using it before that time. Presumably to avoid a repeat of firewire, they made it available under acceptable terms and it became part of the spec.
You are aware that HDMI and Displayport are completely different digital video interfaces? Now, Apple did jump on the 'too cool for displayport' bus and went with their own 'mini displayport'; but Displayport is a completely different interface, with a different spec, drawn up by a different consortium. The only Apple product with an HDMI port is their newer mini, and it's just a boring old HDMI port, they didn't even go with the mini version.
They may well have HDMI-specific patents; but HDCP is something that(while obligatory for HDMI-compliant sources and sinks) is available separately from Intel for DVI, HDMI, Displayport, and a couple of others as of HDMI 1.3 and Displayport 1.1, so a setup involving a recent Displayport source would presumably be covered in terms of HDCP. Additionally, ordinary passive cabling doesn't interact with HDCP at all, it just has to deliver the signals more or less unmangled to the sink, so that would only seem to be an issue for active cabling that has to be an HDCP-licensed device in order to process the signal in some way...
I have no idea what their precious spec says; but it may help that DVI and HDMI are much more closely related to one another, and that HDMI was drawn up, in its initial iteration as pretty much "Single-link DVI+audio+CEC+HDCP". There have been a number of widely released commercial products(video cards from both Nvidia and ATI) that have run HDMI signals through a DVI connector to make compatibility in either direction easier, and a few oddballs that have(probably with less approval from team HDMI) used the HDMI connector as a mini-DVI port.
Whether or not they like it, the HDMI spec people would at least have been abundantly familiar with the existence of DVI, and of the value of doing a "superset, then supersede" style replacement... Displayport, much less mini-displayport, came a bit later, and has a much more adversarial relationship.
With the possible exception of a few bespoke audiophile outfits, and possibly some contractor-service outfits where turnaround times on custom cables matter, those precious American companies merely consisted of parasites slapping their stickers and their markups on the same Chinese stuff...
My question is, if these displayport-HDMI cables are not within the HDMI spec, and thus not licit in the eyes of the HDMI people, by what mechanism does that make them illegal?
Does the HDMI consortium have some sort of patent pool, licensed only to conformant devices(in which case everybody except grey market Chinese cheapies is screwed), or is it merely the HDMI trademark, in which case a bunch of packaging will have to be redone, possibly even some cables with moulded symbols/text ground down or destroyed; but the HDMI consortium won't be able to do fuck-all about the sudden appearance of "mini-displayport Digital AV adapters" which promise to "Connect your mini displayport device to your HDMI(TM) compatible display*" (*All trademarks are property of their respective owners)...
If the HDMI guys have some patent juice behind them, things could get rather ugly. If this is simply a trademark thing, they are being quite petty; but they also have pretty limited power. People will still be able to make the same damn cables, albeit with slightly cagier language on the packaging, and your friendly local geek and/or AV salesdude will still know exactly what you need.
Ever since I discovered that the "THX Certified" sticker had fallen off my cheap and nasty set of speakers and stuck it back on, I've been simply astonished at how much more delightsome to the senses a product is when it has a paper cert from some once-authoritative body that is now cashing in on its reputation.
I suspect that LG's new system will experience similar benefits.
Your solution certainly makes more sense thermally(and, I assume for that reason, along with the fact that PSU fans always seem to exhaust rather than intake, most cases are designed along those lines). I think the logic, in the case I described, was that the builder was fed up with the system inhaling relatively heavy pet hair/carpet fuzz/etc, which tended to be most concentrated near the floor, and that he wanted to do as little mucking with filters as possible, hence the single filter module located on top of the PC. Had he been dealing with finer dusts, the location would have made less difference and he probably would have been better off doing something along the lines of what you describe.
From a thermal engineering standpoint, I'd hardly stand by that solution; but 3-4 120mm fans can overkill that problem away for most systems, and he got what he wanted in terms of filter location. Mostly a matter of application and what you really want out of the system, I suppose.
One thing that I would like to see; but never have(commercial or homebrew) would be an 'automated cleaning cycle', where the system reverses airflow direction and runs all fans at maximum power for a short while every few months. Especially with a lot of modern systems coming with one or more ferociously powerful fans that spend most of their life running at minimal power, I would think that it would be possible to do some degree of self cleaning just by letting the system blow its own dust out....
They aren't network engineers, true, so why did they skip all the politician-stuff that they do know how to do(legislation, process, etc.) and skip right to making demands on the network side?
I'm just going to go out on a limb here and suggest that they have no interest in there being any sort of oversight, due process, or other such inefficient meddling with their precious little plan.
I can't speak for parent's setup; but I once saw something similar done with case fans: The modder cut a slot in the top of the case sized to accommodate a row of 120mm(maybe 140, I forget) fans, blowing in. They improvised a mounting bracket right above the fans allowing a furnace-filter or similar household air filter, cut to size, to be slid into place. The system's other fans were either removed or mounted to blow out, if a particular hot spot required it. This fairly effectively kept the system from sucking up hair and dust and whatnot, even when on the floor.
Frankly, this seems like a very pragmatic move on the studio's part: If all you can do is create two-dimensional characters, a classic arcade game is perfect source material...
Unfortunately, there will be more to it than that, with a finished motherboard: solder, quite possibly pre-ROHS and whatever other components are left on the board are going to be getting the saw treatment as well.
We can only hope that no beryllium copper is present in any of the components requiring excellent conductivity and spring properties...
Once it gets into the air, fine fiberglass dust is going to remain there a good while. It's light enough that it will effectively never settle in any useful amount of time, and your typical house probably doesn't completely recycle its internal atmosphere nearly fast enough to solve the problem that way.
If you are going to be doing much of this, you might want to consider building a negative-pressure work area large enough for your tools and workpiece to be comfortably manipulated:
Basically, a reasonably adequately sealed box(doesn't need to, and won't, be airtight, because of the negative pressure) with a slot for you to stick your hands in, a plexiglass window to see what you are doing, and a shop vac or similar pulling air out of the box and through a HEPA filter. Because of the suction, air will continually be flowing into the box(preventing the egress of most dust, even though the box isn't fully sealed) and the dust-contaminated air will be filtered before it leaves to ruin your day. Still probably not a bad idea to have the outflow vent outdoors, rather than into the room; but the filter should scrub most of it.
But would the DHS want a situation where others have backdoors?
When you have broad legal rights to flash a warrant and a gun(or skip the warrant, if that is too much hassle) and get the access you want within your area of jurisdiction, insecure systems are not in your interest: you want highly secure systems that people are legally obligated to unlock at your request.
The legal right to demand access to a system is a monopoly. The ability to access a system by exploiting its bugs is a power shared with everybody who knows how to exploit them, a much longer list. Why would the entity with the monopoly over the legal right encourage its competitors by tolerating insecure systems?
It would be even cheaper to buy a nice, respectable-looking pre-aged shell company(complete with years of respectable history, in a state with corporate disclosure rules approximately as stiff as Somalia's... Add a lawyer as a corporate officer to gain attorney-client privilege for just a small additional fee!) and then sell counterfeit parts re-marked as True, Blue, All-American ones.
If you suffer the comparatively unlikely misfortune of getting caught, just fold the shell and buy another one! It's not like you are dealing pot or anything serious, so the risk of having the consequences make it past your corporate person and back to you personally are well worth the profit...
I cant really think of any conditions under which that would be "useable". Speed of light limitations and all of that.
It is certainly going to suck; but the cynic would note that satellite service providers seem to have satellite phones working adequately enough. If there is a substantial delta between the quality of properly set up VOIP installation over a satellite link and the satellite phone connection that the company would likely prefer that you buy as a separate item from them, I'd raise my skepticism eyebrow more than a touch...
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Can we finish locking the News of the World staff in their headquarters and burning it to the ground, along with anybody found to have aided or abetted them(given that their contacts with the Met and right up to the PM are well known, this probably includes a few people in addition to their shady PIs...) and get on to an important matter:
Why are phones, particularly the VM box that is more or less an automatic part of today's cell phone, so damn vulnerable? The Telcoes seem to have no trouble tracking our activities in great detail if those activities are something for which we can be billed, and they also seem eminently willing to cooperate with law enforcement. Why, then, do I have absolutely no way of knowing when, and from where, my VM box was called into, and why would the VM box of a phone that is subject to police investigation be accessible from the outside at all?
I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a bunch of tabloid flacks roasted in their own slime; but if voicemail hacking and phone intercepts by random PIs are that easy, we have a problem that needs to be solved by better security, not just crushing malefactors after the fact...
I know nothing about the particular credentials of the person quoted; but Intel actually has its very own cultural anthropology research unit. Apparently, we are talking 100+ anthropologists and social scientists.
I have no idea if these are really high-powered types, or if they are basically the washouts of academia who don't want to admit that they have essentially moved into Intel's 'Theoretical Marketing' department; but Intel has way more of them than you'd expect from a chip company.
I've always found it (darkly) humorous that the precious, precious, Women and Children! are terribly delicate flowers whenever a technology that makes society squeamish comes up; but are magically judged fit for whatever duty is required when it is in our interest:
50MPH train ride? Clear and present danger of uterine escape! Unremitting and dubiously voluntary childbirth, with a side of pre-appliance housework, from age 15? As nature intended!
Electric lighting? Probably a paedophile lurking behind every bush, stoking their vile lusts with children's silhouettes in the newly lit windows. Coal needs mining? A child on all fours should be able to pull a loaded cart through a tunnel only a couple of feet high, think of the savings on digging costs!
I realize that you are the resident quack-doctor-troll; but here goes:
Asbestos: Wonderful stuff for serious fireproofing/insulation applications. Just don't bloody breath it. (And, incidentally, don't let those sociopathic fuckers we call 'lobbyists' anywhere near public policy. The curious little quirk of physical geography that puts some of the major asbestos deposits in Quebec, whose always-restive local government the national government is always trying to placate, made for decades of obfuscation, stalling, and straight-out lies about the stuff's safety...)
Thalidomide: Crazy teratogenic(which is why the evil, evil, FDA didn't approve it in the US). On the other hand, as long as you aren't pregnant, it shows a great deal of promise in the treatment of Leprosy and certain cancers. Use as Directed, kids.
Obviously, not all new technologies are good, and there is always the risk that we either won't know that, or that the people who do know that will have an interest in ignoring the fact(Thanks for all the lead, Ethyl Corporation...). That doesn't mean that many of them aren't progress, though.
Wait: "This new release system" has resulted in a 20% speedup; but you are this close to dumping it because its version numbering scheme is inaesthetic?
I agree that the race-to-the-highest-number game is silly; but it is the silly, albeit visible, symptom of the FF team having a fire lit under its collective ass by Chrome. Arguably, while a lot of what gets full numbers really should just be point releases, FF's quality today is relatively better than it has been in some time. Are you really going to let the version numbers get in the way?
Gigantic cross-licensed patent arsenals certainly do help keep the little people in their place; but there is one additional factor: The patent troll.
Large patent-holders are mostly locked in a cold war with one another, lots of needless expenditure; but relatively little blood most of the time, and they get to be superpowers and crush smaller competitors like insects(or buy them out when the smaller competitor discovers that they have something quite innovative; but would need to license 3,000 patents to make it to market...)
Patent trolls, though, by possessing patents; but never doing anything that could infringe on patents(because their only business is patent trolling) disrupt this cushy equilibrium. They are sort of the non-state suitcase bombers with nothing to lose in the patent wars.
Perversely, if we want meaningful patent reform, it might actually be best to applaud and encourage patent trolling as much as possible. As long as 'defensive' patents build up in the arsenals of incumbents, the incumbents have very limited incentive to change things. The lawyers cost money, sure; but the strategic advantage is worth it. Add enough patent trolls to the mix, though, and they'll have to deal with an enemy who has no interest in cross-licensing and friendship, and who has nothing they can threaten...
At the notion that you could get a patent on the idea of transferring a playlist from a computer to an MP3 player(ie. a second computer, but smaller...)
M3Us have been around for ages, and playlists generally are really just a special case of programs accepting lists of files as arguments, which is downright ancient. And transferring a set of commands from one computer to a second, more embedded, computer? I'm pretty sure I was FTPing postscript to some HP from back when they knew how to build them properly(only print commands that went through the windows spooler system were caught by the billing system, you see...) back in highschool...
Yes, and Apple was using it before that time. Presumably to avoid a repeat of firewire, they made it available under acceptable terms and it became part of the spec.
You are aware that HDMI and Displayport are completely different digital video interfaces? Now, Apple did jump on the 'too cool for displayport' bus and went with their own 'mini displayport'; but Displayport is a completely different interface, with a different spec, drawn up by a different consortium. The only Apple product with an HDMI port is their newer mini, and it's just a boring old HDMI port, they didn't even go with the mini version.
They may well have HDMI-specific patents; but HDCP is something that(while obligatory for HDMI-compliant sources and sinks) is available separately from Intel for DVI, HDMI, Displayport, and a couple of others as of HDMI 1.3 and Displayport 1.1, so a setup involving a recent Displayport source would presumably be covered in terms of HDCP. Additionally, ordinary passive cabling doesn't interact with HDCP at all, it just has to deliver the signals more or less unmangled to the sink, so that would only seem to be an issue for active cabling that has to be an HDCP-licensed device in order to process the signal in some way...
I have no idea what their precious spec says; but it may help that DVI and HDMI are much more closely related to one another, and that HDMI was drawn up, in its initial iteration as pretty much "Single-link DVI+audio+CEC+HDCP". There have been a number of widely released commercial products(video cards from both Nvidia and ATI) that have run HDMI signals through a DVI connector to make compatibility in either direction easier, and a few oddballs that have(probably with less approval from team HDMI) used the HDMI connector as a mini-DVI port.
Whether or not they like it, the HDMI spec people would at least have been abundantly familiar with the existence of DVI, and of the value of doing a "superset, then supersede" style replacement... Displayport, much less mini-displayport, came a bit later, and has a much more adversarial relationship.
With the possible exception of a few bespoke audiophile outfits, and possibly some contractor-service outfits where turnaround times on custom cables matter, those precious American companies merely consisted of parasites slapping their stickers and their markups on the same Chinese stuff...
My question is, if these displayport-HDMI cables are not within the HDMI spec, and thus not licit in the eyes of the HDMI people, by what mechanism does that make them illegal?
Does the HDMI consortium have some sort of patent pool, licensed only to conformant devices(in which case everybody except grey market Chinese cheapies is screwed), or is it merely the HDMI trademark, in which case a bunch of packaging will have to be redone, possibly even some cables with moulded symbols/text ground down or destroyed; but the HDMI consortium won't be able to do fuck-all about the sudden appearance of "mini-displayport Digital AV adapters" which promise to "Connect your mini displayport device to your HDMI(TM) compatible display*" (*All trademarks are property of their respective owners)...
If the HDMI guys have some patent juice behind them, things could get rather ugly. If this is simply a trademark thing, they are being quite petty; but they also have pretty limited power. People will still be able to make the same damn cables, albeit with slightly cagier language on the packaging, and your friendly local geek and/or AV salesdude will still know exactly what you need.
Ever since I discovered that the "THX Certified" sticker had fallen off my cheap and nasty set of speakers and stuck it back on, I've been simply astonished at how much more delightsome to the senses a product is when it has a paper cert from some once-authoritative body that is now cashing in on its reputation.
I suspect that LG's new system will experience similar benefits.
Your solution certainly makes more sense thermally(and, I assume for that reason, along with the fact that PSU fans always seem to exhaust rather than intake, most cases are designed along those lines). I think the logic, in the case I described, was that the builder was fed up with the system inhaling relatively heavy pet hair/carpet fuzz/etc, which tended to be most concentrated near the floor, and that he wanted to do as little mucking with filters as possible, hence the single filter module located on top of the PC. Had he been dealing with finer dusts, the location would have made less difference and he probably would have been better off doing something along the lines of what you describe.
From a thermal engineering standpoint, I'd hardly stand by that solution; but 3-4 120mm fans can overkill that problem away for most systems, and he got what he wanted in terms of filter location. Mostly a matter of application and what you really want out of the system, I suppose.
One thing that I would like to see; but never have(commercial or homebrew) would be an 'automated cleaning cycle', where the system reverses airflow direction and runs all fans at maximum power for a short while every few months. Especially with a lot of modern systems coming with one or more ferociously powerful fans that spend most of their life running at minimal power, I would think that it would be possible to do some degree of self cleaning just by letting the system blow its own dust out....
They are actually just small regions where the seawater is held together in semi-solid form by magnetism...
I suspect that it is rather worse than that:
They aren't network engineers, true, so why did they skip all the politician-stuff that they do know how to do(legislation, process, etc.) and skip right to making demands on the network side?
I'm just going to go out on a limb here and suggest that they have no interest in there being any sort of oversight, due process, or other such inefficient meddling with their precious little plan.
I can't speak for parent's setup; but I once saw something similar done with case fans: The modder cut a slot in the top of the case sized to accommodate a row of 120mm(maybe 140, I forget) fans, blowing in. They improvised a mounting bracket right above the fans allowing a furnace-filter or similar household air filter, cut to size, to be slid into place. The system's other fans were either removed or mounted to blow out, if a particular hot spot required it. This fairly effectively kept the system from sucking up hair and dust and whatnot, even when on the floor.
Frankly, this seems like a very pragmatic move on the studio's part: If all you can do is create two-dimensional characters, a classic arcade game is perfect source material...
Unfortunately, there will be more to it than that, with a finished motherboard: solder, quite possibly pre-ROHS and whatever other components are left on the board are going to be getting the saw treatment as well.
We can only hope that no beryllium copper is present in any of the components requiring excellent conductivity and spring properties...
Once it gets into the air, fine fiberglass dust is going to remain there a good while. It's light enough that it will effectively never settle in any useful amount of time, and your typical house probably doesn't completely recycle its internal atmosphere nearly fast enough to solve the problem that way.
If you are going to be doing much of this, you might want to consider building a negative-pressure work area large enough for your tools and workpiece to be comfortably manipulated:
Basically, a reasonably adequately sealed box(doesn't need to, and won't, be airtight, because of the negative pressure) with a slot for you to stick your hands in, a plexiglass window to see what you are doing, and a shop vac or similar pulling air out of the box and through a HEPA filter. Because of the suction, air will continually be flowing into the box(preventing the egress of most dust, even though the box isn't fully sealed) and the dust-contaminated air will be filtered before it leaves to ruin your day. Still probably not a bad idea to have the outflow vent outdoors, rather than into the room; but the filter should scrub most of it.
But would the DHS want a situation where others have backdoors?
When you have broad legal rights to flash a warrant and a gun(or skip the warrant, if that is too much hassle) and get the access you want within your area of jurisdiction, insecure systems are not in your interest: you want highly secure systems that people are legally obligated to unlock at your request.
The legal right to demand access to a system is a monopoly. The ability to access a system by exploiting its bugs is a power shared with everybody who knows how to exploit them, a much longer list. Why would the entity with the monopoly over the legal right encourage its competitors by tolerating insecure systems?
It would be even cheaper to buy a nice, respectable-looking pre-aged shell company(complete with years of respectable history, in a state with corporate disclosure rules approximately as stiff as Somalia's... Add a lawyer as a corporate officer to gain attorney-client privilege for just a small additional fee!) and then sell counterfeit parts re-marked as True, Blue, All-American ones.
If you suffer the comparatively unlikely misfortune of getting caught, just fold the shell and buy another one! It's not like you are dealing pot or anything serious, so the risk of having the consequences make it past your corporate person and back to you personally are well worth the profit...
I cant really think of any conditions under which that would be "useable". Speed of light limitations and all of that.
It is certainly going to suck; but the cynic would note that satellite service providers seem to have satellite phones working adequately enough. If there is a substantial delta between the quality of properly set up VOIP installation over a satellite link and the satellite phone connection that the company would likely prefer that you buy as a separate item from them, I'd raise my skepticism eyebrow more than a touch...
You need an excuse for drinking? Shit.