Frozen CO2, also known as dry ice, is available from a lot of places. You used to be able to get it from just about anywhere that did a lot of food freezing, though they're a bit more stringent about selling it these days. It's not terribly dangerous, either; you're putting out CO2 all the time. You just need to have decent ventilation in the room. We use dry ice/alcohol mixtures in the lab all the time, and everyone agrees that it's more of a hazard as a freezing risk than from a poison standpoint.
It's also important to point out that CO2 is a powerful stimulant, so if it starts building up you'll get very twitchy and often start to panic. This will generally cause you to run out of the room, which is exactly what you need to do to save yourself. This is not an accident but an evolved survival behavior. Your body is also quite good at getting rid of CO2, so once you reach clean air you'll recover quite quickly.
My point was simply this - the focus of the average user went from large timesharing systems to the personal computer, and now
it's almost as if networked, timesharing systems have come back into vouge. i know, the whole while, there were multiuser
computers running networks and databases and whatnot, but now we're even getting that sort of os on our desktop (i forgot to
mention winnt as a multiuser os.)
But the deeper point is that the hypothetical "average user" changed his focus by changing who he was, not by individuals changing focus that much. The big thing that the PC did was to break the computer from being a piece of equipment used by a comparatively small number of people who could wrangle terminal time on an expensive time-sharing system to anyone who could plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a cheap desktop machine. Most of the business types who were using big iron kept using big iron, and today they're laughing at the PC zealots who claimed big iron was obsolete- only to find that their PCs are relying heavily on centralized servers.
Can't we at least find prior art for this bit? usr/bin/fortune ring a bell?:-)
I don't think that fortune quite fits the bill, since it doesn't download a new version customized to your usage. OTOH, it does sound very, very similar to something that Mattel did, discussed in this Slashdot article a couple of months ago.
On a serious note, they wouldn't actually have to ship a CD with the source code with every refrigerator. They only have to include a copy of the GPL (probably after the fine legal notice that suffocation may result from climbing inside the fridge to use it as an airconditioner) and an offer to ship the source code to anyone who asks. Of course they'll probably need to include a CD-ROM with instructions on how to use the beer auto-ordering function anyway, and they can slip the source code in there.
In fairness, they do list both in terms of revenue and in terms of copies (actually licenses) shipped. It's especially informative to compare the revenue streams v.s. the copies sold. Linux (which is the only free software OS separated out) has a lot of licenses shipped but very little revenue, while mainframes have huge revenue but a tiny number of licenses shipped.
They're couting shipments of Linux, which totally misses out on all of the downloads.
Yeah, this is an important point. They give Linux 4.1% of 98.8 million client shipments and 24% of 5.7 million server shipments. That suggests that Linux is now shipping more units for use as desktops than for servers.
The question, though, is whether that accurately represents the usage patterns. I'd expect that a lot of server farms either use downloads or a single install disk for multiple machines. At the same time, I'd expect a lot of home user/hobbyist types (like me) to try out multiple different versions of Linux to find the best distribution. Heck, you can get CD's for $2 or less from places like Linux Mall, and I have probably 10 different versions that I've bought either there or as the full distribution, while I have only 3 computers with Linux installed. When you look at the revenue from Linux (apparently less than $100 million on about 5 million copies sold) that suggests that a lot of the copies are the very low cost ones.
There are lots of obvious reasons that declassification works very slowly. Some simple ones:
Budget Any government agency has limited funds- even NSA. Declassifying documents has a pretty low priority, so there aren't as many people working on declassification as classification.
Ass Covering Nobody ever got fired for deciding that something was too hot to release. OTOH, people do get fired for releasing things they shouldn't have.
Security To work on declassifying documents, you have to have clearance high enough to read them. Trustworthy people are hard to find, so it seems like a waste to put them to work declassifying instead of "real" work. See Budget, above.
It must be a change that was made as part of 95, then. I never tried programming much under older versions of DOS. I encountered this problem when developing some programs on my home computer, which rans Win95, and tried to run them at work on machines that run NT. I had to add a file name expander, which I found most annoying.
If it's the case that versions of DOS up to 6 didn't do this, and that NT actually uses a third party DOS emulator, I can understand why this problem cropped up. Still, though, I think that not expanding filename arguments with wildcards is lousy.
Also on Win2k I find the command prompt less responsive than when i'm working on a remote linux machine. That is definitely not true dos.
It has some other interesting and unpleasant problems. Unlike the "real" dos, for instance, it won't do command line argument interpolation. If you feed a program you've written a filename including a whildcard, it doesn't recognize it as such and just feeds the name, wildcard and all, to the program. In "real" DOS, OTOH, it expands the wildcard so that your program actually receives a list. Very annoying.
Even if the technology evolve, cellular phones must be kept tiny or
just small. There will never be used for regular browsing. Reading mail, OK, getting quotes, OK, but not reading./ for
example.
But why must cellphones be kept small? Why can't they be used for browsing? In any case, even if you accept the idea that cell phones must be kept small, you can't get any smaller than folding their functionality into another device that you already have. That makes them effectively zero size, though in practice you'll need at least a plug-in headset.
The big driving force for convergence is that many people already have multiple gadgets with somewhat overlapping functionality, and it makes sense to combine the functions into a single gadget instead. For instance, many people already have a PDA and a cell phone. The PDA has a contact list that contains phone numbers, and the phone has an autodialer list. The PDA may be a wireless one, like the Palm VII, and the phone may have wireless web. At that point, you're severely duplicating functions and adding needless complexity and cost.
It might very well be simpler and cheaper just to design a Palm IX that has all of the functions of the Palm VII and also lets you plug in a headset to get phone functionality. You can also get some additional advantages, like being instantly able to phone anyone after they've beamed you their business card. You can even get new functions, like being able to update a person's information every time you phone them, guarantee that appointments that you arrange over the phone are automatically entered in both people's calendar list, etc.
I expect the police to enforce the law. In the 1980's, there were MANY protests which were largely non-violent, with a few violent people. The police dealt with most of them quite well. It's only now that "police riots" are happening repeatedly.
There are undoubtedly several causes working together here. One, I suspect, is memories of the L.A. riots in 1992. Until that point, I think that police tried pretty hard to stay clear and let protests go unmolested and maybe move in and grab a few people who were being unruly. In 1992, the LAPD tried that and the whole thing spiraled rapidly out of control. Now the police are afraid of letting things get out of hand, so they move in rapidly and aggressively and, paradoxically, increase the violence by provoking some people who might be inclined to behave decently.
Another factor is that protestors are changing their tactics. They see how bad the police look on TV, and they deliberately go out there to start those police riots because they think that it gets them public sympathy.
Of course, what should really happen is that the default is opt-out, not opt-in. This will never happen though. How many people are going to look at a box that says "Click here to have your privacy invaded" and think "Oooh, I'd better do that, sounds like a greate idea"? That's right, none.
Of course no site would put up a box saying "click here to have your privacy invaded." Instead, they'd set up a system so that the user gained some small benefit from having their privacy invaded- like not having to re-enter their password every time they visited the site or having customized content- and ask customers if that's what they wanted. If they worded it right, you'd be surprised at how many people would opt in.
Actually, the well known grocery card business is a good example of this. People are willing to give supermarkets personally identifying information on an opt-in system in order to get marginal price benefits. They're even willing to swipe their card when they don't have anything in their cart that actually gets a price break based on minute chances of winning a car or something. Don't overestimate people's desire for privacy.
Not only is his claim that Linux has the most bugs disengenuous because he admits that no attempt is made to grade the bugs on severity or whether or not their fixed, but he's patently dishonest. An important part of his claim is that:
In 1999, the year it took over the server market in earnest, Windows NT totaled 99 new vulnerabilities on the BugTraq list. (So far in 2000, the count stands at 37.) This looks like an alarmingly high number in comparison with Solaris' 34 or NetBSD's 10, but it is significantly less than the 122 racked up by Red Hat and the other Linuxes (their 2000 count stands at 47).
This is a bogus claim, though, because he's getting that number by adding up the count for each different version of Linux. That means that, for example, a kernel exploit being discovered will result in not just one but several vulnerabilities on his list- one for each version of Linux that uses that kernel.
To account for this, in fact, Bugtrax has its own Linux aggregate that avoids such double counting and has 84 total Linux bugs last year and 30 this year. (Actually, even that 122 figure seems a bit odd, since if you add up the figures separately you still only reach 98 for all of the distributions listed. It appears that he got it by adding the Linux(aggregate) figure to that of Red Hat, which is totally ridiculous.) Of course someone who uses only one version of Linux would experience only a fraction of these, but an honest count shows that even if you used Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, and SuSe in a heterogeneous network you'd still have fewer vulnerabilities than NT.
Well, back in the good old days, people settled their complaints in much more civilized fashion. If somebody did something that you didn't like, you'd challenge him to a duel, and God would grant victory to the party in the right. Our curent legal system is obviously a much worse idea than this. I'd love to see some old lady who burned herself by spilling coffee on her lap send her champion to fight McDonald's champion in single combat...
I don't think that this is surprising at all. There's the old saying, "In for a penny, in for a pound." If the MPAA is really serious that DeCSS is a threat to their business, they have to be serious about tracking it down in all of its manifestations. Hell, it was the defense that made that point to start out with- they've basically dared the MPAA to do this very thing by bringing up the issue of the tee shirts in court.
If the defense is going to stand up and say, in essence, that it's vital to stop the tee shirts for the injunction to mean anything, it's pretty silly of them to complain when the plaintiff goes ahead and does exactly that. Personally, I think that this is a great thing for the defense. The plaintiff is left in the rather difficult position of either refusing to take all steps necessary to protect themselves, in which case their seriousness has to be questioned, or of grossly overreacting by going after apparently trivial and silly violators. Of course it looks that way because it's true.
IMO, this is a great demonstration of what is really meant by the statement, "Information wants to be free." That's free as in speech, not as in beer. Once you let information out of your tight control, it's out of anyone's control; you can't prevent its unlimited replication.
The new Microsoft (and presumably Apple) mice use CCD cameras, which means that they don't require some easily-cracked-or-dented, hard-to-replace mouse pad.
They actually use the same component. The optical detector is made by Agilent (my father was one of the engineers who designed it), and for some unknown reason Microsoft didn't decide to go for exclusive licensing. I'm actually a little bit surprised that Logitech isn't making one already.
The music industry has power over poeple, power that is clearly illustrated by the fact that as sharaing technologies became more prevalent, the majority of what you see is MAINSTREAM music, Nsync, Brittany Spears, Eminem, ect. Most of the music is fun yes, but talented and emotional, probably not. However it is what is getting crammed down peoples nural pathways by radio and MTV at the cost of millions of dollars. That in and of itself show the gullibility of the masses, and that is what the RIAA and the MPAA exploit.
I realize that this is an unpopular opinion in some quarters, but it's entirely possible that the reason that so many people are downloading those groups is because they actually like that kind of music. Maybe, just maybe, the music companies aren't cramming that music down unwilling throats, but instead are responding to a substantial and real demand. Not everyone shares your taste in music, and there are quite a lot people who are more interested in music that is fun and energetic than deep and meaningful.
That certainly goes along with the way that many people "listen" to music, which is to have it playing in the background rather than actually paying attention to it. It also explains why the most popular music retains the same kind of cheerful, energetic, contentlessness even when the underlying style changes. It's not as though this is a new phenomenon, either; there's an endless well of Baroque and earlier music that comes from the same light, fluffy mold, and that was made long before there was a recording industry to cram it down people's throats.
Yeah, everything the government touches turns to shit. Just take computers as an example. They got a hold of perfectly good stand alone computers and invented this really shitty idea of putting them on a global network, called it the somethingnet, or was it the intersomething. Anyway, it's turned out to be a real disaster.
Unfortunately, this isn't a joke. Scientists are already starting to see some quite nasty effects of very loud underwater sounds on whales and dolphins. There was, for instance, a recent mass beaching incident in which loud sounds deafening the whales was implicated; they were showing classic signs like ruptured eardrums. This is particularly nasty because whales and dolphins depend so heavily on sound for navigation.
Re:Groupthink? Yes! Here's how it happened...
on
The Myth Of The Borg
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· Score: 1
This shouldn't be terribly surprising. This represents, I think, a persistence of corporate culture over very long time periods.
HP, for instance, started out as (and Agilent remains) an instrument company, rather than a computer company per se. Instruments are generally much more tightly focused on a single purpose than computers. Honestly, I think that some of this being "printer-like" represents more HP's dominance in the printer business driving our perceptions of what a printer should be like, rather than the other way around. The G in SGI stands for Graphics, so it shouldn't be surprising that their products still have a graphics focus. Similarly, the B in IBM stands for Business, so their focus on typical business concerns, like scalability and meeting deadlines, over bare cost shouldn't be surprising.
I don't see why the FBI can't continue to simply tap the phone lines, the traditional practice under current law. They would just need a modem and a computer to listen to the connection instead of an agent and a pair of head phones, and all the traffic would be traffic from the suspect, none of it traffic not pertinent that would have to be filtered out.
Because not all traffic travels via modem. The computer I'm writing this on, for instance, is hooked to the net via ethernet feeding to a T1. One thing that characterizes a lot of the kinds of criminals that they're going to want to tap the net connections of is that they have a lot of money and can easily afford connections other than modem. In order for their taps to be effective at all, they have to be able to tap connections that are always in the form of IP packets and never travel over the phone.
While it's certainly true that we need to allow a certain amount of policing of the populace in order to maintain the safety of the individuals. I have to question this method. What guarantees do we have that Carnivore will be used only on the "criminals"? How would we even know if they were monitoring our personal e-mails? It seems like we need some sort of system within the government it self to monitor the monitors.
There are some checks on the system. For one thing, the FBI is only allowed to use Carnivore with a court order. That means that its use is reviewed by a judge, who while still a part of the government is at least a part of a different branch of the government.
I also think that there are some advantages to having the system set up with a big black box. While the idea that we don't know exactly how it works, or if it's actually grabbing more information than it's supposed to, is scary the box aspect has some advantages. It means that the FBI actually has to go to the ISP with the box and the court order authorizing it to set up the tap. That inherently lessens the chances of an unauthorized tap because it involves somebody who's not from the FBI in the process. It also means that agents who want to tap somebody's internet access have to apply within the FBI to get the equipment, and you can bet that there will be internal safeguards as well. I think that it's important to point out that the existing safeguards on phone taps have done a pretty good job of ensuring that the major risk of unauthorized taps is from individual agents deciding to do things on their own hook, rather than from the agency as a whole deciding to ignore the legal restrictions on searches.
I would certainly be happier to know that some independent third party has gone over Carnivore to ensure that it doesn't record anything that it shouldn't. But until that happens I take a certain amount of comfort in that the FBI has already done some things to make it hard for anyone to initiate taps without needed controls.
The entire point of a GUI is that *all your applications look and act the same way*.
Actually, IIRC, this is one of the Mac ideas that the writers of the paper on the Anti-Mac interface discussed breaking. It's true that it's great to have all of your apps work the exact same way when you're learning them because it makes it less work to learn. Unfortunately, ease of learning, which the Mac interface gets down quite well, does not necessarily translate well into ease of use for true experts- the people who often spend the most total time using an application. The user interface should be driven by the logic of the program being interfaced with, not with some rigid set of UI design documents.
That's not to say that program designers should be free to do things however they damn well please. There should be a well agreed upon default standard of where each menu item goes, etc. But programmers should be allowed to break with the standards when there's a good reason to do so. The goal of standards is to make things work better, so we shouldn't stop programmers from departing from the standard if it enhances the higher goal of greater usability.
For someone who's just visiting China temporarily and needs to send something like status updates, you may be trying overkill by writing messages on the fly and trying to smuggle them out. Instead you could try a more classic technique using a code instead of encryption. You simply have a series of code phrases or words, each of which has a specific meaning. You just sprinkle the codeword into an otherwise boring message.
As an example, you might only be interested in sending back three or four different status updates. So you just change your closing in the letter you send to indicate your mesage:
"Sincerely" means that everything is going according to plan
"Yours truly" means that you were unable to get to a meeting for mundane reasons, so arrange the backup meeting time
"Love" means that you couldn't meet because you saw security, but you don't think that they're on to you
"Your humble and obedient servant" means that your cover is blown, abort, abort, abort
This scheme is obviously something that you could modify fairly easily. Just send a letter with no hidden content at all and hide the message in who you send it to, or discuss different topics depending on what message you want to send. The code can't be broken by technical means, only by getting the code book (which might be small enough to memorize) or getting a member of the group to spill the beans. Of course the range of messages you can send is comparatively small- with a bit of work you could probably arrange 50 or 100 canned messages- but if that fits with your mission it's an approach that can't be beat.
Actually, I think that this is an excellent example of a case where security by obscurity is needed. A country like China is certainly capable of setting up a system to squash protocols that they don't like, and anything encrypted is likely to fall into that category. Even if people can't be punished because the government can't read what they're sending, they can be foiled by not being able to get the message through. You're really going to have to conceal the fact that there even is a conversation going on in order to accomplish anything.
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Frozen CO2, also known as dry ice, is available from a lot of places. You used to be able to get it from just about anywhere that did a lot of food freezing, though they're a bit more stringent about selling it these days. It's not terribly dangerous, either; you're putting out CO2 all the time. You just need to have decent ventilation in the room. We use dry ice/alcohol mixtures in the lab all the time, and everyone agrees that it's more of a hazard as a freezing risk than from a poison standpoint.
It's also important to point out that CO2 is a powerful stimulant, so if it starts building up you'll get very twitchy and often start to panic. This will generally cause you to run out of the room, which is exactly what you need to do to save yourself. This is not an accident but an evolved survival behavior. Your body is also quite good at getting rid of CO2, so once you reach clean air you'll recover quite quickly.
But the deeper point is that the hypothetical "average user" changed his focus by changing who he was, not by individuals changing focus that much. The big thing that the PC did was to break the computer from being a piece of equipment used by a comparatively small number of people who could wrangle terminal time on an expensive time-sharing system to anyone who could plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a cheap desktop machine. Most of the business types who were using big iron kept using big iron, and today they're laughing at the PC zealots who claimed big iron was obsolete- only to find that their PCs are relying heavily on centralized servers.
I don't think that fortune quite fits the bill, since it doesn't download a new version customized to your usage. OTOH, it does sound very, very similar to something that Mattel did, discussed in this Slashdot article a couple of months ago.
On a serious note, they wouldn't actually have to ship a CD with the source code with every refrigerator. They only have to include a copy of the GPL (probably after the fine legal notice that suffocation may result from climbing inside the fridge to use it as an airconditioner) and an offer to ship the source code to anyone who asks. Of course they'll probably need to include a CD-ROM with instructions on how to use the beer auto-ordering function anyway, and they can slip the source code in there.
In fairness, they do list both in terms of revenue and in terms of copies (actually licenses) shipped. It's especially informative to compare the revenue streams v.s. the copies sold. Linux (which is the only free software OS separated out) has a lot of licenses shipped but very little revenue, while mainframes have huge revenue but a tiny number of licenses shipped.
Yeah, this is an important point. They give Linux 4.1% of 98.8 million client shipments and 24% of 5.7 million server shipments. That suggests that Linux is now shipping more units for use as desktops than for servers.
The question, though, is whether that accurately represents the usage patterns. I'd expect that a lot of server farms either use downloads or a single install disk for multiple machines. At the same time, I'd expect a lot of home user/hobbyist types (like me) to try out multiple different versions of Linux to find the best distribution. Heck, you can get CD's for $2 or less from places like Linux Mall, and I have probably 10 different versions that I've bought either there or as the full distribution, while I have only 3 computers with Linux installed. When you look at the revenue from Linux (apparently less than $100 million on about 5 million copies sold) that suggests that a lot of the copies are the very low cost ones.
There are lots of obvious reasons that declassification works very slowly. Some simple ones:
It must be a change that was made as part of 95, then. I never tried programming much under older versions of DOS. I encountered this problem when developing some programs on my home computer, which rans Win95, and tried to run them at work on machines that run NT. I had to add a file name expander, which I found most annoying.
If it's the case that versions of DOS up to 6 didn't do this, and that NT actually uses a third party DOS emulator, I can understand why this problem cropped up. Still, though, I think that not expanding filename arguments with wildcards is lousy.
It has some other interesting and unpleasant problems. Unlike the "real" dos, for instance, it won't do command line argument interpolation. If you feed a program you've written a filename including a whildcard, it doesn't recognize it as such and just feeds the name, wildcard and all, to the program. In "real" DOS, OTOH, it expands the wildcard so that your program actually receives a list. Very annoying.
But why must cellphones be kept small? Why can't they be used for browsing? In any case, even if you accept the idea that cell phones must be kept small, you can't get any smaller than folding their functionality into another device that you already have. That makes them effectively zero size, though in practice you'll need at least a plug-in headset.
The big driving force for convergence is that many people already have multiple gadgets with somewhat overlapping functionality, and it makes sense to combine the functions into a single gadget instead. For instance, many people already have a PDA and a cell phone. The PDA has a contact list that contains phone numbers, and the phone has an autodialer list. The PDA may be a wireless one, like the Palm VII, and the phone may have wireless web. At that point, you're severely duplicating functions and adding needless complexity and cost.
It might very well be simpler and cheaper just to design a Palm IX that has all of the functions of the Palm VII and also lets you plug in a headset to get phone functionality. You can also get some additional advantages, like being instantly able to phone anyone after they've beamed you their business card. You can even get new functions, like being able to update a person's information every time you phone them, guarantee that appointments that you arrange over the phone are automatically entered in both people's calendar list, etc.
There are undoubtedly several causes working together here. One, I suspect, is memories of the L.A. riots in 1992. Until that point, I think that police tried pretty hard to stay clear and let protests go unmolested and maybe move in and grab a few people who were being unruly. In 1992, the LAPD tried that and the whole thing spiraled rapidly out of control. Now the police are afraid of letting things get out of hand, so they move in rapidly and aggressively and, paradoxically, increase the violence by provoking some people who might be inclined to behave decently.
Another factor is that protestors are changing their tactics. They see how bad the police look on TV, and they deliberately go out there to start those police riots because they think that it gets them public sympathy.
Of course no site would put up a box saying "click here to have your privacy invaded." Instead, they'd set up a system so that the user gained some small benefit from having their privacy invaded- like not having to re-enter their password every time they visited the site or having customized content- and ask customers if that's what they wanted. If they worded it right, you'd be surprised at how many people would opt in.
Actually, the well known grocery card business is a good example of this. People are willing to give supermarkets personally identifying information on an opt-in system in order to get marginal price benefits. They're even willing to swipe their card when they don't have anything in their cart that actually gets a price break based on minute chances of winning a car or something. Don't overestimate people's desire for privacy.
Not only is his claim that Linux has the most bugs disengenuous because he admits that no attempt is made to grade the bugs on severity or whether or not their fixed, but he's patently dishonest. An important part of his claim is that:
This is a bogus claim, though, because he's getting that number by adding up the count for each different version of Linux. That means that, for example, a kernel exploit being discovered will result in not just one but several vulnerabilities on his list- one for each version of Linux that uses that kernel.
To account for this, in fact, Bugtrax has its own Linux aggregate that avoids such double counting and has 84 total Linux bugs last year and 30 this year. (Actually, even that 122 figure seems a bit odd, since if you add up the figures separately you still only reach 98 for all of the distributions listed. It appears that he got it by adding the Linux(aggregate) figure to that of Red Hat, which is totally ridiculous.) Of course someone who uses only one version of Linux would experience only a fraction of these, but an honest count shows that even if you used Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, and SuSe in a heterogeneous network you'd still have fewer vulnerabilities than NT.
Well, back in the good old days, people settled their complaints in much more civilized fashion. If somebody did something that you didn't like, you'd challenge him to a duel, and God would grant victory to the party in the right. Our curent legal system is obviously a much worse idea than this. I'd love to see some old lady who burned herself by spilling coffee on her lap send her champion to fight McDonald's champion in single combat...
I don't think that this is surprising at all. There's the old saying, "In for a penny, in for a pound." If the MPAA is really serious that DeCSS is a threat to their business, they have to be serious about tracking it down in all of its manifestations. Hell, it was the defense that made that point to start out with- they've basically dared the MPAA to do this very thing by bringing up the issue of the tee shirts in court.
If the defense is going to stand up and say, in essence, that it's vital to stop the tee shirts for the injunction to mean anything, it's pretty silly of them to complain when the plaintiff goes ahead and does exactly that. Personally, I think that this is a great thing for the defense. The plaintiff is left in the rather difficult position of either refusing to take all steps necessary to protect themselves, in which case their seriousness has to be questioned, or of grossly overreacting by going after apparently trivial and silly violators. Of course it looks that way because it's true.
IMO, this is a great demonstration of what is really meant by the statement, "Information wants to be free." That's free as in speech, not as in beer. Once you let information out of your tight control, it's out of anyone's control; you can't prevent its unlimited replication.
They actually use the same component. The optical detector is made by Agilent (my father was one of the engineers who designed it), and for some unknown reason Microsoft didn't decide to go for exclusive licensing. I'm actually a little bit surprised that Logitech isn't making one already.
I realize that this is an unpopular opinion in some quarters, but it's entirely possible that the reason that so many people are downloading those groups is because they actually like that kind of music. Maybe, just maybe, the music companies aren't cramming that music down unwilling throats, but instead are responding to a substantial and real demand. Not everyone shares your taste in music, and there are quite a lot people who are more interested in music that is fun and energetic than deep and meaningful.
That certainly goes along with the way that many people "listen" to music, which is to have it playing in the background rather than actually paying attention to it. It also explains why the most popular music retains the same kind of cheerful, energetic, contentlessness even when the underlying style changes. It's not as though this is a new phenomenon, either; there's an endless well of Baroque and earlier music that comes from the same light, fluffy mold, and that was made long before there was a recording industry to cram it down people's throats.
Yeah, everything the government touches turns to shit. Just take computers as an example. They got a hold of perfectly good stand alone computers and invented this really shitty idea of putting them on a global network, called it the somethingnet, or was it the intersomething. Anyway, it's turned out to be a real disaster.
Unfortunately, this isn't a joke. Scientists are already starting to see some quite nasty effects of very loud underwater sounds on whales and dolphins. There was, for instance, a recent mass beaching incident in which loud sounds deafening the whales was implicated; they were showing classic signs like ruptured eardrums. This is particularly nasty because whales and dolphins depend so heavily on sound for navigation.
This shouldn't be terribly surprising. This represents, I think, a persistence of corporate culture over very long time periods.
HP, for instance, started out as (and Agilent remains) an instrument company, rather than a computer company per se. Instruments are generally much more tightly focused on a single purpose than computers. Honestly, I think that some of this being "printer-like" represents more HP's dominance in the printer business driving our perceptions of what a printer should be like, rather than the other way around. The G in SGI stands for Graphics, so it shouldn't be surprising that their products still have a graphics focus. Similarly, the B in IBM stands for Business, so their focus on typical business concerns, like scalability and meeting deadlines, over bare cost shouldn't be surprising.
Because not all traffic travels via modem. The computer I'm writing this on, for instance, is hooked to the net via ethernet feeding to a T1. One thing that characterizes a lot of the kinds of criminals that they're going to want to tap the net connections of is that they have a lot of money and can easily afford connections other than modem. In order for their taps to be effective at all, they have to be able to tap connections that are always in the form of IP packets and never travel over the phone.
There are some checks on the system. For one thing, the FBI is only allowed to use Carnivore with a court order. That means that its use is reviewed by a judge, who while still a part of the government is at least a part of a different branch of the government.
I also think that there are some advantages to having the system set up with a big black box. While the idea that we don't know exactly how it works, or if it's actually grabbing more information than it's supposed to, is scary the box aspect has some advantages. It means that the FBI actually has to go to the ISP with the box and the court order authorizing it to set up the tap. That inherently lessens the chances of an unauthorized tap because it involves somebody who's not from the FBI in the process. It also means that agents who want to tap somebody's internet access have to apply within the FBI to get the equipment, and you can bet that there will be internal safeguards as well. I think that it's important to point out that the existing safeguards on phone taps have done a pretty good job of ensuring that the major risk of unauthorized taps is from individual agents deciding to do things on their own hook, rather than from the agency as a whole deciding to ignore the legal restrictions on searches.
I would certainly be happier to know that some independent third party has gone over Carnivore to ensure that it doesn't record anything that it shouldn't. But until that happens I take a certain amount of comfort in that the FBI has already done some things to make it hard for anyone to initiate taps without needed controls.
Actually, IIRC, this is one of the Mac ideas that the writers of the paper on the Anti-Mac interface discussed breaking. It's true that it's great to have all of your apps work the exact same way when you're learning them because it makes it less work to learn. Unfortunately, ease of learning, which the Mac interface gets down quite well, does not necessarily translate well into ease of use for true experts- the people who often spend the most total time using an application. The user interface should be driven by the logic of the program being interfaced with, not with some rigid set of UI design documents.
That's not to say that program designers should be free to do things however they damn well please. There should be a well agreed upon default standard of where each menu item goes, etc. But programmers should be allowed to break with the standards when there's a good reason to do so. The goal of standards is to make things work better, so we shouldn't stop programmers from departing from the standard if it enhances the higher goal of greater usability.
For someone who's just visiting China temporarily and needs to send something like status updates, you may be trying overkill by writing messages on the fly and trying to smuggle them out. Instead you could try a more classic technique using a code instead of encryption. You simply have a series of code phrases or words, each of which has a specific meaning. You just sprinkle the codeword into an otherwise boring message.
As an example, you might only be interested in sending back three or four different status updates. So you just change your closing in the letter you send to indicate your mesage:
This scheme is obviously something that you could modify fairly easily. Just send a letter with no hidden content at all and hide the message in who you send it to, or discuss different topics depending on what message you want to send. The code can't be broken by technical means, only by getting the code book (which might be small enough to memorize) or getting a member of the group to spill the beans. Of course the range of messages you can send is comparatively small- with a bit of work you could probably arrange 50 or 100 canned messages- but if that fits with your mission it's an approach that can't be beat.
Mod this up!
Actually, I think that this is an excellent example of a case where security by obscurity is needed. A country like China is certainly capable of setting up a system to squash protocols that they don't like, and anything encrypted is likely to fall into that category. Even if people can't be punished because the government can't read what they're sending, they can be foiled by not being able to get the message through. You're really going to have to conceal the fact that there even is a conversation going on in order to accomplish anything.