show of hands please...who here has to log into their answer machine to get messages? What manufacturer makes these password-protected answer machines?
You could argue that your house key acts like a password, if you have the key you can access the message. If the police want to get access to a tape in an answering machine they could do it two different ways.
Ask someone who has access to the answering machine to give them the tape (i.e. The girl who owns the answering machine)
Get a court order to obtain the tape (Warrent)
To assume that only the girl would be able to receive the message is absurd. She could give the tape or copies of it to anyone she wished.
Two rights that most of the World believes in but the US goverment does not, is the right to privacy and the right to food.
Believe it or not the US does not believe that people have a fundimental human right to food.
Spliting and Merging
on
Modular Robots
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Something that they really don't talk about in the article is spliting and merging robots. They talk about reconfiguration of a single robot, but I think spliting and merging with a group of robot would be very interesting.
Imagine a robot being able to break a portion of itself off and send it to perform a sub task. Imagine two robot getting together to cooperate on a task by combining and spliting apart again once the task was completed.
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops. Even as the Afghanistan campaign began, pundits flooded cable talk shows asserting that air power alone wasn't enough, that there would be substantial human sacrifice. Both Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq and the Kosovo conflicts involved the growing used of so-called "smart" laser-guided weaponry, deployed with varying degrees of reliability. But those conflicts also involved either the use of enormous numbers of soldiers on the ground and were controversial in terms of the bomb's precision and effectiveness.
There have been ground troops used on the American side all during this war, they just happened to be Afghans (Northern Alliciance, Eastern Alliciance, etc...).
... you would be forced to degrade the video quality until the watermark is lost, losing the advantage of digital copies.
It is fairly easy to prove that you can remove any watermark without significantly changing the signal to noise ratio of the image. Several people, including myself (as part of my PhD research in 1995) have proven this and published the proof. Unfortunately, the people watermarking digital media don't pay attention to research that doesn't match what they want to hear.
It is the tape that they manufacture not the tape drive. You don't need to buy new tape to read 20 year old tapes. You don't need new tape to even transcribe the data. Not much risk of historical loss.
When I was at IBM, we had KLOC counting macros for the editors which eliminated this problem. For example a C language KLOC macro would count semicolons (with some logic to handle special case like a for statement). It almost never counted newlines to determine source lines of code.
It is a process know as statistical multiplexing. All packet based networks us it. If with any internet connectivity you think that you are purchasing 100% of the bandwidth 100% of the time for anything more than 1 hop away then you are deluding yourself.
This is really funny. I used to work for the NYSE (Stock Exchange) and it wasn't uncommon to transmit 10GB of data over night via FTP to a single brokerage. The data that they were transmitting was at least as valuable as chip designs. It would allow you to alter trade position after trades had been transacted but before they cleared. (e.g. cancel a bad transaction or increase the amount of a good transaction)
No need to do this with the long haul lines, only with the "last mile". If you want a long haul line (e.g. T-1 circuit from NYC to Chicago) You have many player that will be happy to sell (lease really) you the circuit, e.g. AT&T, Sprint, Qwest, etc... But to use any of them you need to get a local loop (circuit between you and the CO) and a back haul circuit (circuit between CO and IXC) to the IXC's closest POP.
What really needs to be done is that we need break the ILEC's apart. One company owns local loop physical plant. They do not own any switch and are legally barred from doing anything except leasing physical point to point circuits. e.g. They can lease you a copper pair from your house to the CO. They can also lease space in the CO. They cannot offer any other services. We'll call this company the LineCo. The LineCo is a classically regulated monopoly, their profits are limited to a fixed percentage of investment. (i.e. they install $100 of new cable, they can only make a profit of $15 on this cable.) This gives LineCo a reason to constantly upgrade and expand their physical plant (out of room at the CO is no longer a problem since , if they build a new addition to the CO they can make more money)
The rest of the telco becomes a private company which leases space in the CO from the first company. The relationship between the two companies is regulated like the relationship was regulated between AT&T and the RBOCs. (We will refer to this company at the ILEC)
Other providers (CLECs, IXCs, Cable companies) can lease space from LineCo just like the ILEC. LineCo has no benefit from making facilities availble to the ILEC and not the CLEC, LineCo profit is the same. In fact LineCo should try and get as many different providers into each CO since this will cause the CO to need expansion and allow LineCo to make more money.
ILEC will lose their special status which allows them to have a limited monopoly since that would be transfered to LineCo.
This will give true competition in the local circuit market.
Re:Not bad, but not as big as one might think.
on
NYSE Goes To Linux
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· Score: 4, Informative
I would speculate they weren't running NT before if it was that easy to port their software over. So this takes a chunk out of the proprietary Unix market, sure, but if we were to consider this a Zero Sum game, Unix loses, Linux gains, Microsoft doesn't change a thing.
I was the network engineer for the artmail project. The orignal version of artmail was running on a Sun Ultra 5 and Solaris. It didn't take more that a few days for a summer intern to actually write the artmail application. The whole project had a very small budget, the machine was a extra order for a different project and the network was sort of tacked onto another network.
The actual push for Linux on the SDC (Shared Data Center) mainframe (not the NYSE mainframe, it is not an IBM) came from the Network System Engineer in the mainframe group.
He had set up an LPAR running Linux about a year and a half ago, so that he could server test pages from Apache.
The SDC is primarily used by NSCC, National Security Clearing Corp and a few applications from NYSE, but the NYSE trading system are running on Tandem systems. Only one NYSE application involving option trading is actually run on IBM mainframes.
Ok, now we have a shared T1, for 25 people (who i'm assuming will all be geeks, and will be downloading stuff late at night...) Assume a T1 can get maybe 160k/s throughput (you can't get 100% util on a T1 w/o severe latency problems), you get 6.4k/s.
You are assuming that every user will be using the system 100% of the time, which isn't typical. If on average a user has a duty cycle of 10% (10% active packet transmission, 90% idle), which is still high, you'll see average bandwidth of 64KB/s.
Burn in store, I don't think it'll ever happen, given the current (technological) trends: a burned copy can't carry the watermarking and macrovision and whatnot.
Actually, with watermarking it could be to the record labels advantage. The watermark each CD sold with a unique serial number embedded into the music. Once an MP3 is rip'd from this CD, the record label would be able to determine whose copy an MP3 came from.
Dimitri broke no law, American, Russian or otherwise. One simple reason: the DMCA is not a law.
The U.S. Constitution lays out clearly the process for something to become law. It also gives a specific set of powers and a specific set of limits to what things can become law by proclamation of the U.S. congress.
Some of the things in the DMCA are outside of what the U.S. congress has the power to declare law.
This is misleading. The DCMA is a law. Once congress passed it and the president signed it, it became law. It is not up to congress or the president to decide if the law is constitutional or valid; that is left for the courts to decide. The Skylarov case could be a test case for the DMCA, if the charges are worded correctly. But if it ends up being just a dispute over whose laws have jurisdiction (Russian or US), it won't be a test case. It seems on the face of it that this second option is the most likely.
Most of those things were inherited from CP/M, a popular operating system for 8080 and Z-80 microprocessors. MS-DOS was originally an 8086 clone of CP/M.
Almost right. CP/M ran on the Z-80 and 8086 (The version was called CP/M-86). MS-DOS was meant to run on the IBM PC which were 8088 machines. The 8088 was a scaled down version of the 8086.
True, Carl is still bound by other laws and regulations (such as Copyright law), but the point I was trying to make is that Carl is not bound by the contract.
This means, that for anyone to be released from a confidentiality clause, then teh information has to be legally published.
Let us say that Alice and Bob enter into a contract, with a confidentiality clause. Bob's computer is infected with SirCam and it mails the contract to Carl. Carl then publishes the contract in a news paper. Alice may have grounds to sue Bob for breach of contract (Bob's copy was leaked) but doesn't have grounds to sue Carl for a breach since Carl was never a party to the contract.
Now for Bob or Alice to release any information may still be a breach, but Carl can do whatever he wants.
What you fail to realize, is that MSFT is a business that spent billions of dollars on that product. I don't care if you like that or not. The kernel itself is still used today in Win2K and XP, and it is THEIR property.
But it's not suppost to be THEIR properity forever. Whether is protected by patent or copyright, the term of the protection is suppost to be limited, so that when the developer has received a fair return for developing it, it become public domain. Without some protection, it has been argued that there would be no incentive to develop new works. But, neither patents nor copyright was meant to be perminient nor last as long as it does now.
Five years is probably enough for software developers to extract a profit from their development. Just think of the real innovation that would occur if five years after release it becomes legal to free copy software. Developers would have to make sure that every five years you really see a benefit from upgrading.
A lot of early IBM computers where named for the buildings they were designed in. This is true of the 70X machines (701 was the RISC computer ever designed and lives on as an IO processor in the modern mainframes) designed in Poughkeepsie, and probably of the 604.
What scares me is that this could mean more commercials. Once the cable companies can insert commercials at will, and we aren't tied to a fixed start and end time then there is very little incentive to keep the commercial time so breif. Right now if cable companies are limited to how much time that they can use for commercials due to the length of the content and the need to fit the content in a fixed amount of time. If cable companies don't have to fit the content into a fixed amount of time, then the commercial can run longer. Already the local cable company cuts off the end of CNN Headline News to insert extra comercials.
Slashdot Mirror
They will probably name the first particle they discover the "vertitron" (or any other particle of the week)
To assume that only the girl would be able to receive the message is absurd. She could give the tape or copies of it to anyone she wished.
Believe it or not the US does not believe that people have a fundimental human right to food.
Imagine a robot being able to break a portion of itself off and send it to perform a sub task. Imagine two robot getting together to cooperate on a task by combining and spliting apart again once the task was completed.
So he ran a fiber optic cable between the plants, allowing them to compensate by sharing power when one was hit by a shortage.
I really doubt that the power plants are sharing power via a fiber optic cable.
Or how about the network speed, is it 100 Mbps (Fast Ethernet) or 1,000 Mbps (Gig Ethernet).
From the article:
Citylink runs at Fast Ethernet speeds of up to 1,000Mbps
This article is so full of errors, I don't know if I should believe it.
There have been ground troops used on the American side all during this war, they just happened to be Afghans (Northern Alliciance, Eastern Alliciance, etc...).
It is fairly easy to prove that you can remove any watermark without significantly changing the signal to noise ratio of the image. Several people, including myself (as part of my PhD research in 1995) have proven this and published the proof. Unfortunately, the people watermarking digital media don't pay attention to research that doesn't match what they want to hear.
It is the tape that they manufacture not the tape drive. You don't need to buy new tape to read 20 year old tapes. You don't need new tape to even transcribe the data. Not much risk of historical loss.
The Metropolitan Planning Council has information about this project from the initial RFI's.
When I was at IBM, we had KLOC counting macros for the editors which eliminated this problem. For example a C language KLOC macro would count semicolons (with some logic to handle special case like a for statement). It almost never counted newlines to determine source lines of code.
It is a process know as statistical multiplexing. All packet based networks us it. If with any internet connectivity you think that you are purchasing 100% of the bandwidth 100% of the time for anything more than 1 hop away then you are deluding yourself.
This is really funny. I used to work for the NYSE (Stock Exchange) and it wasn't uncommon to transmit 10GB of data over night via FTP to a single brokerage. The data that they were transmitting was at least as valuable as chip designs. It would allow you to alter trade position after trades had been transacted but before they cleared. (e.g. cancel a bad transaction or increase the amount of a good transaction)
What really needs to be done is that we need break the ILEC's apart. One company owns local loop physical plant. They do not own any switch and are legally barred from doing anything except leasing physical point to point circuits. e.g. They can lease you a copper pair from your house to the CO. They can also lease space in the CO. They cannot offer any other services. We'll call this company the LineCo. The LineCo is a classically regulated monopoly, their profits are limited to a fixed percentage of investment. (i.e. they install $100 of new cable, they can only make a profit of $15 on this cable.) This gives LineCo a reason to constantly upgrade and expand their physical plant (out of room at the CO is no longer a problem since , if they build a new addition to the CO they can make more money)
The rest of the telco becomes a private company which leases space in the CO from the first company. The relationship between the two companies is regulated like the relationship was regulated between AT&T and the RBOCs. (We will refer to this company at the ILEC)
Other providers (CLECs, IXCs, Cable companies) can lease space from LineCo just like the ILEC. LineCo has no benefit from making facilities availble to the ILEC and not the CLEC, LineCo profit is the same. In fact LineCo should try and get as many different providers into each CO since this will cause the CO to need expansion and allow LineCo to make more money.
ILEC will lose their special status which allows them to have a limited monopoly since that would be transfered to LineCo.
This will give true competition in the local circuit market.
I was the network engineer for the artmail project. The orignal version of artmail was running on a Sun Ultra 5 and Solaris. It didn't take more that a few days for a summer intern to actually write the artmail application. The whole project had a very small budget, the machine was a extra order for a different project and the network was sort of tacked onto another network.
The actual push for Linux on the SDC (Shared Data Center) mainframe (not the NYSE mainframe, it is not an IBM) came from the Network System Engineer in the mainframe group.
He had set up an LPAR running Linux about a year and a half ago, so that he could server test pages from Apache.
The SDC is primarily used by NSCC, National Security Clearing Corp and a few applications from NYSE, but the NYSE trading system are running on Tandem systems. Only one NYSE application involving option trading is actually run on IBM mainframes.
You are assuming that every user will be using the system 100% of the time, which isn't typical. If on average a user has a duty cycle of 10% (10% active packet transmission, 90% idle), which is still high, you'll see average bandwidth of 64KB/s.
Burn in store, I don't think it'll ever happen, given the current (technological) trends: a burned copy can't carry the watermarking and macrovision and whatnot. Actually, with watermarking it could be to the record labels advantage. The watermark each CD sold with a unique serial number embedded into the music. Once an MP3 is rip'd from this CD, the record label would be able to determine whose copy an MP3 came from.
The U.S. Constitution lays out clearly the process for something to become law. It also gives a specific set of powers and a specific set of limits to what things can become law by proclamation of the U.S. congress.
Some of the things in the DMCA are outside of what the U.S. congress has the power to declare law.
This is misleading. The DCMA is a law. Once congress passed it and the president signed it, it became law. It is not up to congress or the president to decide if the law is constitutional or valid; that is left for the courts to decide. The Skylarov case could be a test case for the DMCA, if the charges are worded correctly. But if it ends up being just a dispute over whose laws have jurisdiction (Russian or US), it won't be a test case. It seems on the face of it that this second option is the most likely.
Almost right. CP/M ran on the Z-80 and 8086 (The version was called CP/M-86). MS-DOS was meant to run on the IBM PC which were 8088 machines. The 8088 was a scaled down version of the 8086.
True, Carl is still bound by other laws and regulations (such as Copyright law), but the point I was trying to make is that Carl is not bound by the contract.
Let us say that Alice and Bob enter into a contract, with a confidentiality clause. Bob's computer is infected with SirCam and it mails the contract to Carl. Carl then publishes the contract in a news paper. Alice may have grounds to sue Bob for breach of contract (Bob's copy was leaked) but doesn't have grounds to sue Carl for a breach since Carl was never a party to the contract.
Now for Bob or Alice to release any information may still be a breach, but Carl can do whatever he wants.
I couldn't get the link in the story to work, and found this while searching for the story.
42 of course. :)
But it's not suppost to be THEIR properity forever. Whether is protected by patent or copyright, the term of the protection is suppost to be limited, so that when the developer has received a fair return for developing it, it become public domain. Without some protection, it has been argued that there would be no incentive to develop new works. But, neither patents nor copyright was meant to be perminient nor last as long as it does now.
Five years is probably enough for software developers to extract a profit from their development. Just think of the real innovation that would occur if five years after release it becomes legal to free copy software. Developers would have to make sure that every five years you really see a benefit from upgrading.
A lot of early IBM computers where named for the buildings they were designed in. This is true of the 70X machines (701 was the RISC computer ever designed and lives on as an IO processor in the modern mainframes) designed in Poughkeepsie, and probably of the 604.
What scares me is that this could mean more commercials. Once the cable companies can insert commercials at will, and we aren't tied to a fixed start and end time then there is very little incentive to keep the commercial time so breif. Right now if cable companies are limited to how much time that they can use for commercials due to the length of the content and the need to fit the content in a fixed amount of time. If cable companies don't have to fit the content into a fixed amount of time, then the commercial can run longer. Already the local cable company cuts off the end of CNN Headline News to insert extra comercials.