While your friendly local scientific/industrial materials supplier can hook you up with fancy glass designed not to, the mixture of low-purity glass and embedded mineral bits that this thing is putting out will almost certainly eat pretty much all the UV and much of the visible light. The cancer risk would be essentially nonexistent.
You'd arguably have something that made the previous desert look like a verdant paradise... Deserts aren't exactly the world's lushest biomes; but they beat the hell out of an apocalyptic sun-baked glass/sand aggregate layer, which would likely take decades of weathering to support much more than lichens and microbes even if the climate suddenly became moist and temperate...
It's hard to tell from the pictures exactly how porous that stuff is(it certainly looks rather rough; but it might be fully vitrified in the center with just a cosmetic crust of sand clinging to it); but, in principle, there certainly doesn't seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with using thermally-fused-whatever-mineral-dust-is-local-there as a construction material...
The engineering might well get a bit hairy, especially for the moon, though... Temperatures high enough to sinter the stuff, much less to vitrify it enough to be gas tight, would probably give you a nontrivial amount of evaporation/sublimation in a vacuum(after all, you'd basically be unintentionally running a gigantic vacuum sputtering operation right above your vitrification attempt...)
An unintentional sputtered film of mixed whatever-is-in-lunar-regolith would probably be lousy for lenses and mirrors, and, as it would likely crack into fragments of razor-sharp flintlike material if mechanically disturbed, potentially be murder on robots and astronauts. I'm sure people could figure out ways to at least mitigate the problem; but it wouldn't just be a magic sun+sand=unlimited building scenario.
I was mostly joking; but(with the exception of physical cloning attacks by people in prolonged possession of the dongle, which you can choose to make more or less costly based on how much you want to spend; but can't really defeat), implementation should be substantially easier for this hypothetical dongle than for the SecurIDs:
RSA's real fuckup was keeping copies of all their customers' token seeds, rather then destroying or offline-archiving after transfer to the customer; but the need to keep two copies(one in the token, one on the auth server) is imposed by the fact that the tokens are totally freestanding. Once they get seeded and have their RTC set, they never communicate with their environment again. This makes cryptographically desirable tricks like challenge/response impossible.
In the hypothetical dongle setup, the motherboard and the dongle could each have a private key, which they would be designed not to reveal under operating conditions(obviously, anyone with prolonged physical control and sufficient resources could attack the silicon; but that is inevitable). During the pairing, each would send the other its public key, and receive a signature from the other's private key. Each would also note that it had performed a pairing operation and refuse to do another one(either permanently, by burning a fused, or until a complete reset was performed, depending on how expendable you consider the hardware to be).
At that point, attempting to impersonate the dongle would require both knowledge of the dongle's private key and a copy of the object signed with the motherboard's private key. Attempting to impersonate the motherboard would require the motherboard's private key and the dongle's signed object(and wouldn't be all that useful, since the only thing that the dongle would do, after initial pairing, is participate in a mutual challenge/response session with you, netting you only its not very useful public key). Requiring physical access would be hugely obnoxious to the poor admins, and being able to brick a machine just by losing a dongle would suck; but it is at least conceivable.
The trouble with nukes(true to a lesser extent of coal and oil, not true of gas turbine, not true of hydro(though some different constraints apply)) is that they do not take kindly to rapid adjustments in output power. Even when SCRAMed, they take a while to cool down, and they are sufficiently expensive(both absolutely and in terms of the ratio between capital costs + fixed costs of operation vs. variable and fuel costs) that if you aren't running them at full output except when servicing them, you are shoveling money away.
Because of that, you try to set them up so that you have nuclear capacity less than or equal to the lowest continuous(base) load on your grid, and run it at full power all the time. Then, during times of heavier usage, you fire up the cheap, fast-responding; but comparatively expensive per unit fuel gas units, or increase the flow rate at the hydro plants, or whatever.
If it came to it, you could build nukes to match your peak load; but (since you can't scale them up and down fast enough to match demand) you would have to generate continuously near peak, and then figure out something to do with the excess during off-peak. That isn't an impossible problem(if you have the geography for it, you can used pumped hydro or pressurized gas storage as relatively inefficient; but not hopeless, 'batteries', or you can try to align the demands of certain power-heavy industries toward off-peak times, or try to reduce the peak/base swing by increasing adoption of thermal storage systems in building climate control and other measures, or, worst case, just burning the excess in some huge resistors); but it isn't ideal.
Nuclear can scale as high as you wish to build it, it just can't adjust output very fast, so you either run it higher than needed in off-peak, or run it at baseload levels all the time.
CMSes certainly have their virtues(even if you don't use the comments and logins and stuff, you can do rather worse than using a CMS internally as a rapid-publishing mechanism to dump your text, along with handy consistent formatting, style, and site navigation, to a static site structure that can then be hosted); but not caching or being able to degrade gracefully to a static version seems a bit sloppy.
Why do I get the sneaking sense that taking web-design guidance from a site at "flashuser.net" that managed to get its DB hosed while attempting to serve up a slab of largely static content is probably not the best of ideas?
Clearly, with the size and complexity of the human neural network, and the amount of gooey analog stuff going on in there, humans should be physically capable of generating reasonably high quality entropy for cryptographic purposes. In the same vein, the occasional appearance of atypical or well-trained subjects demonstrates our theoretical capacity for storing reasonably large keys.
Unfortunately, the African savanna environments of ~500,000 years ago had a dearth of predators that culled according to weakness of RNG, rather than weakness of body. To ensure the future of computer security, it seems obvious that we must supply this unfortunate evolutionary deficit.
Even if one were to accept the (dubious) notion that pet-dom is an unpleasant experience for pets, their criteria seem absurdly broad. Banning based on type of locomotion, rather than, say, neural net complexity, means freaking out more or less equally about the treatment of everything from arthropods and annelids with some degree of stimulus response up to great apes(while more or less arbitrarily allowing you to buy and slaughter anything culturally sanctioned as edible).
The idea seems profoundly divorced from anything resembling actual concern for animal welfare.
I'm not sure, I've only really dealt with them in the linux context. I know that the commercial arm of the Tripwire name has gotten all "enterprise compliance solution" of late, which involves a price tag and some serious buzzwords; but also support for Windows and some of the more enterprise-exclusive unixes.
From descriptions of the condition, it would seem to me that drugs substantially nastier and more dangerous than mere LSD would likely be quite well accepted if they demonstrated efficacy. Not being Schedule I would certainly be a convenient feature of the new compound; but even standard LSD would seem to be considerably less disabling(and rather more pleasant) than the alternative...
I hate to be the one to break this to you; but did you remember to tell the minions that, for security reasons, every dongle is paired at the factory with the computer whose flash sector it unlocks, and the TPM won't accept any unlock dongle that wasn't signed with its internal private key?
In what is probably not the world's best news for Symantec, even Microsoft has gotten around to developing a Windows imaging tool that(mostly) works. The "Windows Automated Installation Kit" is something of a baroque monstrosity; but it exists and is offered at no additional cost to Windows customers.
It took 20 years and alarming complexity increases; but it's almost like being able to tar your OS install and then untar it onto a newly created filesystem!
At least that requires much more platform-specific knowledge(more comforting on some platforms than others, admittedly...)
Some standardized mechanism for offline inspection of a machine's entire nonvolatile storage space by an outside probe, without requiring the cooperation of any of the firmware or programmable embedded hardware would be nice, if probably Not Going To Happen.
Good policy, if a bit upkeep-heavy for your average desktop system. AIDE, Tripwire, Samhain, OSSEC, and quite possibly others will do it for you(at the cost of some administration and system resources) if you have a sufficiently static configuration that it won't drive you to madness...
Back before the damn hippies forced us to can Project Plowshare we would have just dusted off a couple of bits and pieces from the back room and showed that fire what a real man's 'controlled burn' looks like. Kids these days. A few trees catch fire and they run around panicking. In my day, 'threat' meant 50 MIRVed megatons return-addressed 'Ivan', not an overgrown burn pit.
The lackluster acceptance of one of Nintendo's weaker offerings in the mobile arena, where it traditionally excels, along with the fact that any use that isn't a complete gimmick will restrict the 3D game to a very limited selection of devices(and we all know how developers love cutting into their potential install base), and the assertion that the feature is big in Asia, a market well known for normally not embracing gimmicks and for accurately forecasting the development of the mobile phone markets of Europe and the Americas, will, in combination with the present unavailability of such screens for larger devices, serve to drive adoption?
The average TDP and real world numbers have indeed fallen since the brief reign of the dual-die Prescott parts, those suckers were toasty. High end i7s(not the 95w Sandy Bridge ones, the original QPI-based LGA-1366 ones), though, still quote a 130 watt TDP(though they can also be had as low as 18watts, and I suspect that the market is vastly larger in the 18-60 range). Xeons are in the same boat. The Nehalem ones, still available, are up to 130 watts TDP, the Sandy Bridge ones up to 95.
Your point is largely correct, in terms of CPUs that people generally buy, most of the 130s are either crazed enthusiast parts or painfully expensive Xeons; but the 130s do exist on the shelf, as do the utterly boring business desktops with cooling hardware that would have made those PIII overclockers mad with jealousy...
Slashdot Mirror
While your friendly local scientific/industrial materials supplier can hook you up with fancy glass designed not to, the mixture of low-purity glass and embedded mineral bits that this thing is putting out will almost certainly eat pretty much all the UV and much of the visible light. The cancer risk would be essentially nonexistent.
You'd arguably have something that made the previous desert look like a verdant paradise... Deserts aren't exactly the world's lushest biomes; but they beat the hell out of an apocalyptic sun-baked glass/sand aggregate layer, which would likely take decades of weathering to support much more than lichens and microbes even if the climate suddenly became moist and temperate...
It's hard to tell from the pictures exactly how porous that stuff is(it certainly looks rather rough; but it might be fully vitrified in the center with just a cosmetic crust of sand clinging to it); but, in principle, there certainly doesn't seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with using thermally-fused-whatever-mineral-dust-is-local-there as a construction material...
The engineering might well get a bit hairy, especially for the moon, though... Temperatures high enough to sinter the stuff, much less to vitrify it enough to be gas tight, would probably give you a nontrivial amount of evaporation/sublimation in a vacuum(after all, you'd basically be unintentionally running a gigantic vacuum sputtering operation right above your vitrification attempt...)
An unintentional sputtered film of mixed whatever-is-in-lunar-regolith would probably be lousy for lenses and mirrors, and, as it would likely crack into fragments of razor-sharp flintlike material if mechanically disturbed, potentially be murder on robots and astronauts. I'm sure people could figure out ways to at least mitigate the problem; but it wouldn't just be a magic sun+sand=unlimited building scenario.
I bet you typed that on 'just a bunch of tiny little switches'. What use could those possibly be?
I was mostly joking; but(with the exception of physical cloning attacks by people in prolonged possession of the dongle, which you can choose to make more or less costly based on how much you want to spend; but can't really defeat), implementation should be substantially easier for this hypothetical dongle than for the SecurIDs:
RSA's real fuckup was keeping copies of all their customers' token seeds, rather then destroying or offline-archiving after transfer to the customer; but the need to keep two copies(one in the token, one on the auth server) is imposed by the fact that the tokens are totally freestanding. Once they get seeded and have their RTC set, they never communicate with their environment again. This makes cryptographically desirable tricks like challenge/response impossible.
In the hypothetical dongle setup, the motherboard and the dongle could each have a private key, which they would be designed not to reveal under operating conditions(obviously, anyone with prolonged physical control and sufficient resources could attack the silicon; but that is inevitable). During the pairing, each would send the other its public key, and receive a signature from the other's private key. Each would also note that it had performed a pairing operation and refuse to do another one(either permanently, by burning a fused, or until a complete reset was performed, depending on how expendable you consider the hardware to be).
At that point, attempting to impersonate the dongle would require both knowledge of the dongle's private key and a copy of the object signed with the motherboard's private key. Attempting to impersonate the motherboard would require the motherboard's private key and the dongle's signed object(and wouldn't be all that useful, since the only thing that the dongle would do, after initial pairing, is participate in a mutual challenge/response session with you, netting you only its not very useful public key). Requiring physical access would be hugely obnoxious to the poor admins, and being able to brick a machine just by losing a dongle would suck; but it is at least conceivable.
The trouble with nukes(true to a lesser extent of coal and oil, not true of gas turbine, not true of hydro(though some different constraints apply)) is that they do not take kindly to rapid adjustments in output power. Even when SCRAMed, they take a while to cool down, and they are sufficiently expensive(both absolutely and in terms of the ratio between capital costs + fixed costs of operation vs. variable and fuel costs) that if you aren't running them at full output except when servicing them, you are shoveling money away.
Because of that, you try to set them up so that you have nuclear capacity less than or equal to the lowest continuous(base) load on your grid, and run it at full power all the time. Then, during times of heavier usage, you fire up the cheap, fast-responding; but comparatively expensive per unit fuel gas units, or increase the flow rate at the hydro plants, or whatever.
If it came to it, you could build nukes to match your peak load; but (since you can't scale them up and down fast enough to match demand) you would have to generate continuously near peak, and then figure out something to do with the excess during off-peak. That isn't an impossible problem(if you have the geography for it, you can used pumped hydro or pressurized gas storage as relatively inefficient; but not hopeless, 'batteries', or you can try to align the demands of certain power-heavy industries toward off-peak times, or try to reduce the peak/base swing by increasing adoption of thermal storage systems in building climate control and other measures, or, worst case, just burning the excess in some huge resistors); but it isn't ideal.
Nuclear can scale as high as you wish to build it, it just can't adjust output very fast, so you either run it higher than needed in off-peak, or run it at baseload levels all the time.
CMSes certainly have their virtues(even if you don't use the comments and logins and stuff, you can do rather worse than using a CMS internally as a rapid-publishing mechanism to dump your text, along with handy consistent formatting, style, and site navigation, to a static site structure that can then be hosted); but not caching or being able to degrade gracefully to a static version seems a bit sloppy.
Politicians are similar, in many respects, to companies that derive their revenue from advertising.
They are, in truth, extremely focused on customers service. It's just that voters aren't the customers.
Why do I get the sneaking sense that taking web-design guidance from a site at "flashuser.net" that managed to get its DB hosed while attempting to serve up a slab of largely static content is probably not the best of ideas?
Keep your government hands off my pet rock!
Clearly, with the size and complexity of the human neural network, and the amount of gooey analog stuff going on in there, humans should be physically capable of generating reasonably high quality entropy for cryptographic purposes. In the same vein, the occasional appearance of atypical or well-trained subjects demonstrates our theoretical capacity for storing reasonably large keys.
Unfortunately, the African savanna environments of ~500,000 years ago had a dearth of predators that culled according to weakness of RNG, rather than weakness of body. To ensure the future of computer security, it seems obvious that we must supply this unfortunate evolutionary deficit.
I just want to know if kittens with no legs will be legal...
Even if one were to accept the (dubious) notion that pet-dom is an unpleasant experience for pets, their criteria seem absurdly broad. Banning based on type of locomotion, rather than, say, neural net complexity, means freaking out more or less equally about the treatment of everything from arthropods and annelids with some degree of stimulus response up to great apes(while more or less arbitrarily allowing you to buy and slaughter anything culturally sanctioned as edible).
The idea seems profoundly divorced from anything resembling actual concern for animal welfare.
I'm not sure, I've only really dealt with them in the linux context. I know that the commercial arm of the Tripwire name has gotten all "enterprise compliance solution" of late, which involves a price tag and some serious buzzwords; but also support for Windows and some of the more enterprise-exclusive unixes.
From descriptions of the condition, it would seem to me that drugs substantially nastier and more dangerous than mere LSD would likely be quite well accepted if they demonstrated efficacy. Not being Schedule I would certainly be a convenient feature of the new compound; but even standard LSD would seem to be considerably less disabling(and rather more pleasant) than the alternative...
I hate to be the one to break this to you; but did you remember to tell the minions that, for security reasons, every dongle is paired at the factory with the computer whose flash sector it unlocks, and the TPM won't accept any unlock dongle that wasn't signed with its internal private key?
Just be sure they don't lose any of them...
In what is probably not the world's best news for Symantec, even Microsoft has gotten around to developing a Windows imaging tool that(mostly) works. The "Windows Automated Installation Kit" is something of a baroque monstrosity; but it exists and is offered at no additional cost to Windows customers.
It took 20 years and alarming complexity increases; but it's almost like being able to tar your OS install and then untar it onto a newly created filesystem!
At least that requires much more platform-specific knowledge(more comforting on some platforms than others, admittedly...)
Some standardized mechanism for offline inspection of a machine's entire nonvolatile storage space by an outside probe, without requiring the cooperation of any of the firmware or programmable embedded hardware would be nice, if probably Not Going To Happen.
Good policy, if a bit upkeep-heavy for your average desktop system. AIDE, Tripwire, Samhain, OSSEC, and quite possibly others will do it for you(at the cost of some administration and system resources) if you have a sufficiently static configuration that it won't drive you to madness...
Back before the damn hippies forced us to can Project Plowshare we would have just dusted off a couple of bits and pieces from the back room and showed that fire what a real man's 'controlled burn' looks like. Kids these days. A few trees catch fire and they run around panicking. In my day, 'threat' meant 50 MIRVed megatons return-addressed 'Ivan', not an overgrown burn pit.
Let's get this straight:
The lackluster acceptance of one of Nintendo's weaker offerings in the mobile arena, where it traditionally excels, along with the fact that any use that isn't a complete gimmick will restrict the 3D game to a very limited selection of devices(and we all know how developers love cutting into their potential install base), and the assertion that the feature is big in Asia, a market well known for normally not embracing gimmicks and for accurately forecasting the development of the mobile phone markets of Europe and the Americas, will, in combination with the present unavailability of such screens for larger devices, serve to drive adoption?
Srsly?
Don't be hating. NGage 4 lyfe!
Oh, wait. You mentioned "good gaming", didn't you...
It is a well known fact that applying skeptical empiricism sharply increases the risk of terrorist attacks.
Only through obedience and faith can we hope to preserve our way of life against authoritarian fanaticism.
I'm pretty sure that respect is one of those things that you have to earn...
The average TDP and real world numbers have indeed fallen since the brief reign of the dual-die Prescott parts, those suckers were toasty. High end i7s(not the 95w Sandy Bridge ones, the original QPI-based LGA-1366 ones), though, still quote a 130 watt TDP(though they can also be had as low as 18watts, and I suspect that the market is vastly larger in the 18-60 range). Xeons are in the same boat. The Nehalem ones, still available, are up to 130 watts TDP, the Sandy Bridge ones up to 95.
Your point is largely correct, in terms of CPUs that people generally buy, most of the 130s are either crazed enthusiast parts or painfully expensive Xeons; but the 130s do exist on the shelf, as do the utterly boring business desktops with cooling hardware that would have made those PIII overclockers mad with jealousy...