You set up the machines to all boot over the network, from a common image, and to load all system files from a NFS share.
The only thing on the workstation is the user's $HOME directory, and some local stuff like/tmp,/var, etc.
Your users don't get root on their workstations. They shouldn't need it. This isn't like Windows, where a huge number of apps don't run correctly if you don't have admin rights. Linux is designed under the assumption that users don't have admin rights.
A while back we (Canada) had a right-wing politician (Stockwell Day) trying to pass a law that would force a binding referendum if a particular number of citizens signed a petition for it. I think he wanted to stamp out gay marriage, or immigration, or some other thing that "white skin and red neck guys don't like". (Sorry I don't recall the details.)
Before the "force a referendum with a petition" law passed, Rick Mercer (Canadian comedian who hosts a fake news show) started a petition to force a referendum to have Stockwell Day's name changed to Doris Day.
IIRC, there were enough names on the petition to trigger the referendum, but the law itself didn't actually pass, so the referendum didn't happen.
The job of a reporter is to obtain, verify, and evaluate information.
Nope, the job of a reporter is to write enough column-inches per day to fill the newspaper, and to make it interesting enough that people buy the newspaper and read the advertisements. Reporters are judged firstly on the amount they produce, and secondly on how interesting the writing is. Correctness only factors in because a correct article may be more somewhat interesting than an incorrect one.
"Eyes on Ads" is all that really matters to any media company. Having correct news may help to get eyes on ads, but it is not the objective. And if a reporter takes twice as long to write a correct story, but only delivers 10% more eyes on ads, then it's not cost-effective.
If there is any factor other than pure profit controlling what gets reported, then it is the ideology of the owner of the media outlet (e.g. Fox News).
This is the harsh reality that the "news professionals" don't want to admit. It will remain this way until we get news sources that are paid for by the readers, not the advertisers.
Notice that the parent starts his post with "Once upon a time", which is the standard opening for fairy tales.
News has always been mostly biased and sloppy. The "good old days", when men were men, everyone was honest, people didn't get sick, child abuse didn't exist and everyone loved their spouses never existed. It's just a romantic notion, best viewed in sepa or black-and-white.
Also, nowdays we have the technology (access to other sources of news) to know when the a particular source of news is wrong, so we are often disgusted at how wrong the news is. Back then, the average user had no way of knowing if the news was correct or not, so they just trusted it. That is why the news appears more incorrect now than in the past.
The more I hear about this kind of "monetizing" effort, the more I imagine the water cooler conversation like: "I used to use the internet before it became totally useless. Now I just get my news from the newspaper."
ISPs and "content producers" are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
One thing that bothers me about this story (and the NYT article mentioned above) is the fact that hospitals are looking for Dr. Pronovost to help them set up a program, and (presumably) the fact that he is only one person is limiting the speed of adoption.
The key lesson that checklists should teach is that instead of relying on the brilliant person doing it right, you rely on the average person to do it correctly, according to the checklist.
Each hospital in the world should read this and say "I can do that!", rather than "We need to get the world-renowned expert in checklists here to do that for us." All they need to do is in their own hospital, watch and record what they do each time. Then look at it and ask what they should have done every time. Then build a checklist based on what they should have done every time. Then use the checklist. As an optional step, they could even share the checklists with other hospitals.
The key thing about checklists is that you write down what you already know, and it just helps you not forget details when you are executing on it. You don't need the smartest person in the world to create the checklist, you just need the people you already have.
Unfortunately, this seems to be contrary to doctor's way of thinking. The successful doctor has become successful by being smarter than 99.99% of the other people in the world. And when that doctor has a problem too hard to solve, he has to work really hard to find someone smarter than he is to help. The idea that a smart doctor can solve a problem by consulting with someone who is less smart (but a bit more methodical and with more spare time to create checklists) seems contrary to medical thinking.
The theory is interesting, but I don't think it fits with reality. If it did, there would be many more aircraft accidents than there currently are.
Most pilots-- almost all pilots-- know that some flying mistakes can kill them and their passengers. And many of the non-fatal mistakes can be career-killers. So the pilots pay attention. They don't want to die. Even worse, they don't want get fired.
There are some careless pilots who get lazy and don't pay attention. But they are the same ones who would think "I've done this a million times before" and not pay attention to what they are doing even without a checklist.
Likewise, there are some lazy and careless doctors. Without a checklist, they will be lazy and careless, and accidentally kill a few people. With a checklist, they will be lazy and careless, but hopefully kill fewer people. The evidence from aviation is that they will not kill more people.
The other thing that many people don't realize is that a checklist is not the same as a to-do list. A checklist is a list of things that you must examine and verify. You can decide not to do some of them (but you must document that decision), and you can decide to do other things that are not on the list. The list is just a tool to make sure you don't forget the stuff you already know. The checklist is designed to force you to pay attention, and experience shows that it works.
Finally, I think that the article shows very convincingly that we do see a net gain. The advantages are real, measurable, and significant. The disadvantages are theoretical, unmeasurable, and insignificant.
That only works if it is the same person asking each time, or if each person is writing it down, and comparing to the earlier answers.
If each medical professional asks for the history, and does not also consult the written record of the previous histories, then there is no benefit to asking many times, and you increase risk as different medical professionals are working with different data.
I don't know if the doctors were reading the previous histories or not.
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The point of checklists is not to stifle creativity, it is to bolster memory and stifle mistakes.
If you look at the checklist, think about it, and decide to not do one of the steps or do that step differently, that's innovation. It may have a good result or a bad result, and your reward or punishment will depend on the result. But it was intentional. If you make an intentional choice and the result is good, you can change the checklist.
If you don't have a checklist, and you forget an important step or you do it wrong, that's a stupid mistake that should never happen. If you make an accident like that, most of the time you don't notice, you just wonder why this patient died. And even if your accident works out for the better, you cannot change the way things are done because nobody knows what you did differently.
The problem appears to be one of trust. Maybe I'm reading the repliers' paranoia into the original poster, but it seems that you are worried that the company is trying to screw you.
When you think your employer is out to screw you, that cannot make for a good working environment.
By all means you should ensure the employment contract is fair to both you and the employer (and get your lawyer's help if you have any doubt), but you should also have a "gut check". If you don't trust them on day one, how can you expect to work successfully with them?
Not that I think this is likely to happen, but I think the idea is that there is energy inside the helium, lots of lots of quarks, quacks, glue-ons, thingies and pico-atomic dohickies. And when those dohickies do the Bosonova, then some of the atoms disappear, which means matter is being converted to energy.
If there was a chain reaction that caused all of the 96 tonnes of liquid helium to be converted to energy, that would be a very big boom. Specifically, if 96 tonnes of He4 were to be fully converted to energy, that's about 8 x 10^21 J of energy, which is a hundred times more energy than the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (ref). That's still a lot less energy than a real supernova, which is 10^44 J of energy.
Note that the Netherlands is not under water, and all those man-made lakes behind dams have not all drained. And when it comes to warming up the planet by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, Science has done a great job against nature. When science fights nature, science generally wins, but nature does always get a few really good hits in first.
The idea from TFA is not to use additional energy to hinder the tsunami, but to merely redirect the tsunami's energy. It's like the Judo of climate control. If I understand the article correctly, the posts do not have to be strong enough to stop the tsunami. That's the entire point of it.
You know, I usually merge early and queue into the slow line if that is where I need to be, and I used to complain about the people that breeze past the traffic until they are forced to merge at the end. I had lots of nasty names for them.
Then I realized, I'm the one doing it wrong, not them. The road builders put two lanes there for a reason. If everyone is in one lane, and leaving the 2nd lane empty, then the slow/stopped traffic line is twice as long as it needs to be, and soon it starts to interfere with the cross traffic on streets further back.
If there are two lanes that can be used for traffic, then two lanes should be used for traffic. And at the merge point, those two lanes should merge, but not before. The line of slow or stopped traffic should use both lanes, and be exactly as long in each. But if a bunch of people intentionally chose to get in the long line, making it even longer than it needs to be, why is that my problem? I'm going to do the smart thing and queue into the shorter line. That decision is better for me (shorter wait) and better for everyone else (I don't take an already long line of traffic and make it longer).
At the merge point, there's no need to force anything. You merge one car at a time. One car from lane A, then one from lane B. It's simple. If you're in lane B and you are not letting someone from lane A in front, then you are being rude. If you're from lane A and you are letting 2 cars from B in front, you're being an foolish.
As for riding your ass, that's only because my brakes aren't very good. Sorry.
There is also the idea of stupid selflessness. Whenever I see a door being held open by two people, both deadlocked in a game of "after you", "no, after you!", I just charge through the door in front of both of them. It usually shocks them enough that they then figure out how to go through the door. I always wonder how long it would be if I did actually wait for them to figure out how to use a door.
My system is configured that after several failed ssh password attempts, or one incorrect userid, the offending IP address is blacklisted for 15 minutes. This is short enough a time that if anyone trying to connect remotely and makes a mistake they can just wait for a while before trying again, but it makes brute-force attacks impossible. If it takes 15 minutes to try 3 passwords, there's almost no chance of hitting the correct password this century.
Of course, this is just 20/20 hindsight for you, but if there is a sysadmin out there who doesn't yet have a defense against the brute-force script kiddies, you really have no excuse now.
Actually, no that's exactly what they are claiming. The nature of a PUF is that you cannot copy it (at least not with any reasonable amount of work).
The system works by what is basically garbage that is intentionally and randomly introduced into the circuit. You might be able to take the chip apart and look at where the garbage is, but with current technology (or foreseeable technology), you cannot make another chip with the garbage in exactly (down to an atom's width or less) the same place. And the position of the garbage drives how the circuit responds to inputs.
You are right that "with enough money and resources", but the idea behind this is that nobody, not even the dreaded Three-Letter-Agencies have enough money or resources to do it.
Of course this can be defeated by simply looking at a different part of the system. E.g. if I manage to hack into their secure database of challenge-response pairs, then I can clone this chip with a simple table lookup.
The key problem is the "... and responds in all the same ways to input". There are 2^64 possible challenges, so you cannot possibly hear all possible inputs. And the nature of the PUF is that you cannot predict what the response to a given challenge will be, without actually issuing the challenge.
For those who like to RTFM, but didn't quite understand how it works, here what Wiki has to say:
Basically, it is a one-time-pad algorithm. You can't clone it by listening to the conversation, because the authentication part of the conversation relies on each challenge being only used once.
Originally, the word "troll" (when referring to fishing) was a verb, and the noun to describe someone who trolls would be "troller". However, after comments about a person "trolling", many people made an obvious back-formation to the noun "troll".
This is exactly how language evolves and changes: people start using a word "incorrectly", but once enough people are using it that way, and enough other people know what it means, then the meaning of the word has changed.
you obviously thought you were doing Palm a favour by buying directly from them, but you weren't.
For a company to be successful, they need to focus on their core job. This is even more true when a company needs to turn around and become successful *again* like Palm does.
They are in the business of designing and manufacturing phones, not selling to the end-user. I think they have to offer direct-to-customer sales because it looks really stupid when a company isn't willing to sell their own product, but they would really rather not. That is why they charge more than most discount sellers. They want the resellers to go through all the hassle of dealing with customers, so they can focus the majority of their attention on design and manufacturing.
Clearly they have a customer service problem. But I don't think they should put a lot of attention on that. They should put the majority of their attention on designing great new products, and manufacturing them for as little money as possible. Let the resellers worry about the distribution and customer service side of things.
When I first moved to the 'States from Canada, I spent about a week trying to mail a letter. OK, I wasn't working on that 24x7, but I had the letter with me, and I was aware that I needed to stop at the first mailbox I saw.
And I was getting annoyed that there just wasn't any mailboxes anywhere.
Eventually I realized that in this country, mailboxes aren't big red things with round tops, they are smaller blue things with flat angled tops stuck to posts. And I realized that I had looked past many of them, because my idea of what a mailbox should look like didn't match the current reality I was in. It was one of those "we're not in Kansas anymore" moments (which is a rather ironic phrase, but still applies).
They do make it out of the lab, and you do see them. We just don't have the breathless "this is cool" announcements when they start to be commercially available, we get it when they are invented.
Ni-Cd was a "wow, this is cool and will be on the market in 2 to 3 years" technology once. So was Li-Ion. Heck, so was Alkine (a long time ago).
Your laptop still dies after 1.5 hours because some engineer decided that 1.5 hours was all you needed. Some of today's laptops draw 2 or 3 times as much current as older ones, and some have smaller batteries. So battery technology has improved radically in order to get the same run-time.
The laptop designers need to trade off processing power, run-time, weight, cost and size. Because of constantly improving battery technology, they can improve many of the factors without hurting others. But they still need to make that trade-off, and they seem to have have picked a run-time to remain constant. When this new technology does find it's way into production, I don't think it will result in laptops with 2 or 3 times as much run-time. I think it will result in smaller and lighter, and more powerful, and possibly cheaper laptops. That's the pattern we've seen for the past few years.
If you don't like the trade-off they made, you can purchase a 3rd party batter with much better run-time. It may cost more, weigh more and take up more space than the one in your laptop, but you'll get the runtime you want. I suggest you look at http://www.electrovaya.com/product/powerpad_produc t.html for some batteries that are designed for max life.
There are two problems with this. 1) In general, when a person acts as an agent of an organization and screws up, the organization is responsible for the cost, not the individual. The organization can internally deal with it through education and/or discipline, but that's an internal matter. A case must be very extreme for legal action to be brought against the individual. Example: If a United Airlines check-in agent makes a mistake and writes the wrong gate number on a boarding pass, causing the person to miss the flight, UA might reasonably be expected to reimburse that person for the cost of the inconvience. But it's not reasonable to take it out of the check-in agent's wages. That kind of punitive attitude will make all workers too afraid to take any chances at all, and the entire system will grind to a halt. 2) Which brings me to the 2nd point, punitive attitude. People are innocent until proven guilty, and that goes for the cops too. There are a few bad cops who give nice people a hard time. There are also a lot of good cops who have to deal with really shitty people all the time. And those really shitty people always say that they are nice people, and the cop is bad. And if those shitty people are convincing, they can get a good cop punished.
Remember, every time you hear about these stories in the paper, realize you're only hearing one side of the story. And you're hearing it through a news media that has a vested interest in making it as exciting as possible. When you hear these stories from your friend, realize you're still only hearing one side of the story, and that person has a vested interest in making himself look like a good victim.
I mean, really, who's going to tell all their friends, "I was really shitfaced drunk the other day, barely able to keep the SUV on the road, when I was pulled over. I puked on the cop's shoes, and then told him to 'fuck off'. He might have read me my rights, I was too drunk to notice. I passed out on the road (maybe that's where my black eye came from), and woke up in a jail cell."? Instead, that person is much more likely to say "I was driving along, minding my own busines, when this asshole pig pulled me over for no reason. He swore at me, hit me in the face, and threw me down on the road, knocking me out."
(And yes, I know that the original start of this thread was about a video tape, so it's fairly clear what actually happened. But there was some comments about how 'my friend' got this bad treatment in secret by a cop, and I'm commenting on that.)
If a cop really can't do his or her job properly, that cop shouldn't be doing that job. But like in any job, there are some people who are going to be really good, some who are fairly good, some who are barely good, and some who are not too bad. And some who are "not too bad" at doing their jobs, but really good at looking like they are good at doing their jobs.
Really, I'd love it if all my co-workers were perfect at what they did. And if all the sales/support/other people I dealt with from other companies were perfect, that'd be great, too. But I'm a realist. We hire people, and 50% of those people are below average. Likewise police forces hire people, and 50% of those peolple are below average, too.
Copyright law exists (should exist) to balance the rights of the creators to profit from their works and the rights of society to profit from the works. That's why there is a limited monopoly.
You are right that current laws are skewing the blance greatly toward the creator (actually, to the corporation that paid the creator), and I think that's wrong.
However, I interperted the grandparent poster as saying there should be no copyright at all, and that the balance should be skewed to the public. I think that would be equally wrong.
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You set up the machines to all boot over the network, from a common image, and to load all system files from a NFS share.
The only thing on the workstation is the user's $HOME directory, and some local stuff like /tmp, /var, etc.
Your users don't get root on their workstations. They shouldn't need it. This isn't like Windows, where a huge number of apps don't run correctly if you don't have admin rights. Linux is designed under the assumption that users don't have admin rights.
Maybe I'm being naive, but what more do you need?
Colbert's naming games are nothing.
A while back we (Canada) had a right-wing politician (Stockwell Day) trying to pass a law that would force a binding referendum if a particular number of citizens signed a petition for it. I think he wanted to stamp out gay marriage, or immigration, or some other thing that "white skin and red neck guys don't like". (Sorry I don't recall the details.)
Before the "force a referendum with a petition" law passed, Rick Mercer (Canadian comedian who hosts a fake news show) started a petition to force a referendum to have Stockwell Day's name changed to Doris Day.
IIRC, there were enough names on the petition to trigger the referendum, but the law itself didn't actually pass, so the referendum didn't happen.
Now that's a naming game.
When I read this post, the one-line summary was cut off at "TAKEN FROM ASS". I always thought that was where Fox news got their content from.
Nope, the job of a reporter is to write enough column-inches per day to fill the newspaper, and to make it interesting enough that people buy the newspaper and read the advertisements. Reporters are judged firstly on the amount they produce, and secondly on how interesting the writing is. Correctness only factors in because a correct article may be more somewhat interesting than an incorrect one.
"Eyes on Ads" is all that really matters to any media company. Having correct news may help to get eyes on ads, but it is not the objective. And if a reporter takes twice as long to write a correct story, but only delivers 10% more eyes on ads, then it's not cost-effective.
If there is any factor other than pure profit controlling what gets reported, then it is the ideology of the owner of the media outlet (e.g. Fox News).
This is the harsh reality that the "news professionals" don't want to admit. It will remain this way until we get news sources that are paid for by the readers, not the advertisers.
Notice that the parent starts his post with "Once upon a time", which is the standard opening for fairy tales.
News has always been mostly biased and sloppy. The "good old days", when men were men, everyone was honest, people didn't get sick, child abuse didn't exist and everyone loved their spouses never existed. It's just a romantic notion, best viewed in sepa or black-and-white.
Also, nowdays we have the technology (access to other sources of news) to know when the a particular source of news is wrong, so we are often disgusted at how wrong the news is. Back then, the average user had no way of knowing if the news was correct or not, so they just trusted it. That is why the news appears more incorrect now than in the past.
The more I hear about this kind of "monetizing" effort, the more I imagine the water cooler conversation like: "I used to use the internet before it became totally useless. Now I just get my news from the newspaper."
ISPs and "content producers" are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
One thing that bothers me about this story (and the NYT article mentioned above) is the fact that hospitals are looking for Dr. Pronovost to help them set up a program, and (presumably) the fact that he is only one person is limiting the speed of adoption.
The key lesson that checklists should teach is that instead of relying on the brilliant person doing it right, you rely on the average person to do it correctly, according to the checklist.
Each hospital in the world should read this and say "I can do that!", rather than "We need to get the world-renowned expert in checklists here to do that for us." All they need to do is in their own hospital, watch and record what they do each time. Then look at it and ask what they should have done every time. Then build a checklist based on what they should have done every time. Then use the checklist. As an optional step, they could even share the checklists with other hospitals.
The key thing about checklists is that you write down what you already know, and it just helps you not forget details when you are executing on it. You don't need the smartest person in the world to create the checklist, you just need the people you already have.
Unfortunately, this seems to be contrary to doctor's way of thinking. The successful doctor has become successful by being smarter than 99.99% of the other people in the world. And when that doctor has a problem too hard to solve, he has to work really hard to find someone smarter than he is to help. The idea that a smart doctor can solve a problem by consulting with someone who is less smart (but a bit more methodical and with more spare time to create checklists) seems contrary to medical thinking.
The theory is interesting, but I don't think it fits with reality. If it did, there would be many more aircraft accidents than there currently are.
Most pilots-- almost all pilots-- know that some flying mistakes can kill them and their passengers. And many of the non-fatal mistakes can be career-killers. So the pilots pay attention. They don't want to die. Even worse, they don't want get fired.
There are some careless pilots who get lazy and don't pay attention. But they are the same ones who would think "I've done this a million times before" and not pay attention to what they are doing even without a checklist.
Likewise, there are some lazy and careless doctors. Without a checklist, they will be lazy and careless, and accidentally kill a few people. With a checklist, they will be lazy and careless, but hopefully kill fewer people. The evidence from aviation is that they will not kill more people.
The other thing that many people don't realize is that a checklist is not the same as a to-do list. A checklist is a list of things that you must examine and verify. You can decide not to do some of them (but you must document that decision), and you can decide to do other things that are not on the list. The list is just a tool to make sure you don't forget the stuff you already know. The checklist is designed to force you to pay attention, and experience shows that it works.
Finally, I think that the article shows very convincingly that we do see a net gain. The advantages are real, measurable, and significant. The disadvantages are theoretical, unmeasurable, and insignificant.
That only works if it is the same person asking each time, or if each person is writing it down, and comparing to the earlier answers.
If each medical professional asks for the history, and does not also consult the written record of the previous histories, then there is no benefit to asking many times, and you increase risk as different medical professionals are working with different data.
I don't know if the doctors were reading the previous histories or not.
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The point of checklists is not to stifle creativity, it is to bolster memory and stifle mistakes.
If you look at the checklist, think about it, and decide to not do one of the steps or do that step differently, that's innovation. It may have a good result or a bad result, and your reward or punishment will depend on the result. But it was intentional. If you make an intentional choice and the result is good, you can change the checklist.
If you don't have a checklist, and you forget an important step or you do it wrong, that's a stupid mistake that should never happen. If you make an accident like that, most of the time you don't notice, you just wonder why this patient died. And even if your accident works out for the better, you cannot change the way things are done because nobody knows what you did differently.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
The problem appears to be one of trust. Maybe I'm reading the repliers' paranoia into the original poster, but it seems that you are worried that the company is trying to screw you. When you think your employer is out to screw you, that cannot make for a good working environment. By all means you should ensure the employment contract is fair to both you and the employer (and get your lawyer's help if you have any doubt), but you should also have a "gut check". If you don't trust them on day one, how can you expect to work successfully with them?
Not that I think this is likely to happen, but I think the idea is that there is energy inside the helium, lots of lots of quarks, quacks, glue-ons, thingies and pico-atomic dohickies. And when those dohickies do the Bosonova, then some of the atoms disappear, which means matter is being converted to energy. If there was a chain reaction that caused all of the 96 tonnes of liquid helium to be converted to energy, that would be a very big boom. Specifically, if 96 tonnes of He4 were to be fully converted to energy, that's about 8 x 10^21 J of energy, which is a hundred times more energy than the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (ref). That's still a lot less energy than a real supernova, which is 10^44 J of energy.
Note that the Netherlands is not under water, and all those man-made lakes behind dams have not all drained. And when it comes to warming up the planet by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, Science has done a great job against nature. When science fights nature, science generally wins, but nature does always get a few really good hits in first.
The idea from TFA is not to use additional energy to hinder the tsunami, but to merely redirect the tsunami's energy. It's like the Judo of climate control. If I understand the article correctly, the posts do not have to be strong enough to stop the tsunami. That's the entire point of it.
You know, I usually merge early and queue into the slow line if that is where I need to be, and I used to complain about the people that breeze past the traffic until they are forced to merge at the end. I had lots of nasty names for them.
Then I realized, I'm the one doing it wrong, not them. The road builders put two lanes there for a reason. If everyone is in one lane, and leaving the 2nd lane empty, then the slow/stopped traffic line is twice as long as it needs to be, and soon it starts to interfere with the cross traffic on streets further back.
If there are two lanes that can be used for traffic, then two lanes should be used for traffic. And at the merge point, those two lanes should merge, but not before. The line of slow or stopped traffic should use both lanes, and be exactly as long in each. But if a bunch of people intentionally chose to get in the long line, making it even longer than it needs to be, why is that my problem? I'm going to do the smart thing and queue into the shorter line. That decision is better for me (shorter wait) and better for everyone else (I don't take an already long line of traffic and make it longer).
At the merge point, there's no need to force anything. You merge one car at a time. One car from lane A, then one from lane B. It's simple. If you're in lane B and you are not letting someone from lane A in front, then you are being rude. If you're from lane A and you are letting 2 cars from B in front, you're being an foolish.
As for riding your ass, that's only because my brakes aren't very good. Sorry.
There is also the idea of stupid selflessness. Whenever I see a door being held open by two people, both deadlocked in a game of "after you", "no, after you!", I just charge through the door in front of both of them. It usually shocks them enough that they then figure out how to go through the door. I always wonder how long it would be if I did actually wait for them to figure out how to use a door.
My system is configured that after several failed ssh password attempts, or one incorrect userid, the offending IP address is blacklisted for 15 minutes. This is short enough a time that if anyone trying to connect remotely and makes a mistake they can just wait for a while before trying again, but it makes brute-force attacks impossible. If it takes 15 minutes to try 3 passwords, there's almost no chance of hitting the correct password this century.
Of course, this is just 20/20 hindsight for you, but if there is a sysadmin out there who doesn't yet have a defense against the brute-force script kiddies, you really have no excuse now.
Actually, no that's exactly what they are claiming. The nature of a PUF is that you cannot copy it (at least not with any reasonable amount of work).
The system works by what is basically garbage that is intentionally and randomly introduced into the circuit. You might be able to take the chip apart and look at where the garbage is, but with current technology (or foreseeable technology), you cannot make another chip with the garbage in exactly (down to an atom's width or less) the same place. And the position of the garbage drives how the circuit responds to inputs.
You are right that "with enough money and resources", but the idea behind this is that nobody, not even the dreaded Three-Letter-Agencies have enough money or resources to do it.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physically_Unclonable_Function for more details on how PUF work.
Of course this can be defeated by simply looking at a different part of the system. E.g. if I manage to hack into their secure database of challenge-response pairs, then I can clone this chip with a simple table lookup.
The key problem is the "... and responds in all the same ways to input". There are 2^64 possible challenges, so you cannot possibly hear all possible inputs. And the nature of the PUF is that you cannot predict what the response to a given challenge will be, without actually issuing the challenge.
For those who like to RTFM, but didn't quite understand how it works, here what Wiki has to say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physically_Unclonable_Function
Basically, it is a one-time-pad algorithm. You can't clone it by listening to the conversation, because the authentication part of the conversation relies on each challenge being only used once.
Originally, the word "troll" (when referring to fishing) was a verb, and the noun to describe someone who trolls would be "troller". However, after comments about a person "trolling", many people made an obvious back-formation to the noun "troll".
This is exactly how language evolves and changes: people start using a word "incorrectly", but once enough people are using it that way, and enough other people know what it means, then the meaning of the word has changed.
you obviously thought you were doing Palm a favour by buying directly from them, but you weren't.
For a company to be successful, they need to focus on their core job. This is even more true when a company needs to turn around and become successful *again* like Palm does.
They are in the business of designing and manufacturing phones, not selling to the end-user. I think they have to offer direct-to-customer sales because it looks really stupid when a company isn't willing to sell their own product, but they would really rather not. That is why they charge more than most discount sellers. They want the resellers to go through all the hassle of dealing with customers, so they can focus the majority of their attention on design and manufacturing.
Clearly they have a customer service problem. But I don't think they should put a lot of attention on that. They should put the majority of their attention on designing great new products, and manufacturing them for as little money as possible. Let the resellers worry about the distribution and customer service side of things.
When I first moved to the 'States from Canada, I spent about a week trying to mail a letter. OK, I wasn't working on that 24x7, but I had the letter with me, and I was aware that I needed to stop at the first mailbox I saw.
And I was getting annoyed that there just wasn't any mailboxes anywhere.
Eventually I realized that in this country, mailboxes aren't big red things with round tops, they are smaller blue things with flat angled tops stuck to posts. And I realized that I had looked past many of them, because my idea of what a mailbox should look like didn't match the current reality I was in. It was one of those "we're not in Kansas anymore" moments (which is a rather ironic phrase, but still applies).
They do make it out of the lab, and you do see them. We just don't have the breathless "this is cool" announcements when they start to be commercially available, we get it when they are invented.
c t.html for some batteries that are designed for max life.
Ni-Cd was a "wow, this is cool and will be on the market in 2 to 3 years" technology once. So was Li-Ion. Heck, so was Alkine (a long time ago).
Your laptop still dies after 1.5 hours because some engineer decided that 1.5 hours was all you needed. Some of today's laptops draw 2 or 3 times as much current as older ones, and some have smaller batteries. So battery technology has improved radically in order to get the same run-time.
The laptop designers need to trade off processing power, run-time, weight, cost and size. Because of constantly improving battery technology, they can improve many of the factors without hurting others. But they still need to make that trade-off, and they seem to have have picked a run-time to remain constant. When this new technology does find it's way into production, I don't think it will result in laptops with 2 or 3 times as much run-time. I think it will result in smaller and lighter, and more powerful, and possibly cheaper laptops. That's the pattern we've seen for the past few years.
If you don't like the trade-off they made, you can purchase a 3rd party batter with much better run-time. It may cost more, weigh more and take up more space than the one in your laptop, but you'll get the runtime you want. I suggest you look at http://www.electrovaya.com/product/powerpad_produ
There are two problems with this.
1) In general, when a person acts as an agent of an organization and screws up, the organization is responsible for the cost, not the individual. The organization can internally deal with it through education and/or discipline, but that's an internal matter. A case must be very extreme for legal action to be brought against the individual. Example: If a United Airlines check-in agent makes a mistake and writes the wrong gate number on a boarding pass, causing the person to miss the flight, UA might reasonably be expected to reimburse that person for the cost of the inconvience. But it's not reasonable to take it out of the check-in agent's wages. That kind of punitive attitude will make all workers too afraid to take any chances at all, and the entire system will grind to a halt.
2) Which brings me to the 2nd point, punitive attitude. People are innocent until proven guilty, and that goes for the cops too. There are a few bad cops who give nice people a hard time. There are also a lot of good cops who have to deal with really shitty people all the time. And those really shitty people always say that they are nice people, and the cop is bad. And if those shitty people are convincing, they can get a good cop punished.
Remember, every time you hear about these stories in the paper, realize you're only hearing one side of the story. And you're hearing it through a news media that has a vested interest in making it as exciting as possible. When you hear these stories from your friend, realize you're still only hearing one side of the story, and that person has a vested interest in making himself look like a good victim.
I mean, really, who's going to tell all their friends, "I was really shitfaced drunk the other day, barely able to keep the SUV on the road, when I was pulled over. I puked on the cop's shoes, and then told him to 'fuck off'. He might have read me my rights, I was too drunk to notice. I passed out on the road (maybe that's where my black eye came from), and woke up in a jail cell."? Instead, that person is much more likely to say "I was driving along, minding my own busines, when this asshole pig pulled me over for no reason. He swore at me, hit me in the face, and threw me down on the road, knocking me out."
(And yes, I know that the original start of this thread was about a video tape, so it's fairly clear what actually happened. But there was some comments about how 'my friend' got this bad treatment in secret by a cop, and I'm commenting on that.)
If a cop really can't do his or her job properly, that cop shouldn't be doing that job. But like in any job, there are some people who are going to be really good, some who are fairly good, some who are barely good, and some who are not too bad. And some who are "not too bad" at doing their jobs, but really good at looking like they are good at doing their jobs.
Really, I'd love it if all my co-workers were perfect at what they did. And if all the sales/support/other people I dealt with from other companies were perfect, that'd be great, too. But I'm a realist. We hire people, and 50% of those people are below average. Likewise police forces hire people, and 50% of those peolple are below average, too.
Copyright law exists (should exist) to balance the rights of the creators to profit from their works and the rights of society to profit from the works. That's why there is a limited monopoly.
You are right that current laws are skewing the blance greatly toward the creator (actually, to the corporation that paid the creator), and I think that's wrong.
However, I interperted the grandparent poster as saying there should be no copyright at all, and that the balance should be skewed to the public. I think that would be equally wrong.