Sentient mechlife (robots) has proliferated in the galaxy, and are driving biological life, including humans, toward extinction. Eventually it's discovered that there's a backdoor in the mechlife that rips through their 'sentience net' killing most of them and giving bio-life a chance to come back. Kind of a cross between disassemblers and the Iraqis' French Exocet missiles during GulfWarI.
Terrorist unleashes rogue disassemblers. Biggest obvious threat would be structures, as you say. But IMHO the more logical early use of nano would be medical diagnosis and implants. (There's already the M2A camera, named for the ingress and egress points.) Imagine unleashing disassemblers on diabetics with nano-based implanted insulin dosers, or cancer patients with nano-based, self-targeting chemo dosers. In the former case, they'd probably figure out something's wrong soon, hopefully before going hypoglycemic. In the latter case, they may not know anything's wrong until finding that their cancer therapy has been completely ineffective.
As I worked on the tester code, I tried to put in comments, as best I could. Still, there were a number of "B.I.T." comments. "Because It's There" - places where the tester had some hardware oddities that the designers apparently kludged through.
I moved on to a new position, and even years later my replacement would see me in the halls, mentioning seeing a "B.I.T." in the code.
For my first job, I didn't even get machine code, I did microcode.
Seriously though, I learned Algol, Fortran, PDP-11 asm, and 8080 asm in college. (a few year^H^H^H^decades ago) In my first job, I was involved in semiconductor memory test, and spent a fair amount of time microcoding test patterns.
Two things in particular made me appreciate cycle-by-cycle performance - coding a bit-banging UART on an 8080, and memory test patterns where every single cycle had to be correct - and validated.
I understand and agree with you. I thought that's what I said, I guess I didn't word it well enough. I like the other responses about 'unenumerated rights' to my post, I just wish those unenumerated rights were recognized and respected.
Throw in a little salt. Throw in the source IP, from whence you knock. Throw in the destination IP, upon which you knock.
Upon detection and acceptance, have IPTables open a point-to-point hole in the firewall between the two IPs, and not generally open the port. Of course this is still security-by-obscurity - barely a step beyond simply knocking.
It could become strong if you had a password-strength formula to turn source and destination IPs into the knock sequence, assuming Mr. l33t can't reuse your IP, later. At that point, you want to push a time/date stamp into the knock formula, too.
Re:They did (implicitly) encode a right to privacy
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 1
I'll grant 1029, red floyd, and you the point. Now we get to the real issue:
This is all about testing. Constitutional issues are best tested before the Supreme Court. Usually this is all about finding the right case - one that can get to the Supremes, one that they'll accept.
Finding and pursuing the right case is the real problem.
because the interrogating officer also happened to be a little short on cash. Not only does your future convenience hinge on his report, but other RFID traces show you going places your wife/employer/pick-another would be unhappy about if they knew. Now we could just keep this between the two of us, if...
No matter how cleanly you think you live, EVERYONE does something that either a) they're not entirely proud of, or b) could be misinterpreted in a much more sinister fashion. At the very least, RFID makes much more information available for misinterpretation.
Maybe eventually you'd be exonerated - like Jewell - the guy who wasn't behind the Atlanta Olympic bombing. In the meantime, he lost just about everything. Saying "Oops" didn't fix it.
But every now and then the debate is framed, and powerful forces point to the fact that privacy is not explicitely guaranteed by the constitution. There are strict constructioninsts from both sides of the debate. Unfortunately powerful lobbies and money are not on our side. That was my second constitutional point in my post.
Aaaah, but let's imagine RFID technology had been fully in place several years back.
"Well, Mr/Ms mwood, from data obtained from the RFID devices on your whitie tighties and those of Mohammed Atta, we see that on a regular basis you walked within talking range of him for a six month interval prior to the attacks. We'd like to talk to you about your potential conversations."
Never mind that your normal schedule and route to home/work/school just happened to bring you within range of his normal route to home/work/school/terrorist meetings. With all of this new data available, all sorts of new correlations can be drawn and investigated. With a whole raft of new data being mined, it will take intelligence agencies some time to sort out simple coincidence, especially when they're desperate for leads.
Some are quick to say that the US Constitution guarantees no right to privacy.
But IMHO, the US Constitution embodies the 1793 State-of-the-Art of distrust of Government and other concentrations of power. That's the whole reason that there are three branches with checks and balances - mistrust of the institution of government. No matter how trustworthy those in power may be today, there's no guarantee that the next batch will be so. Checks and balances were put in place to provide trust - through mistrust.
Had the Founding Fathers been able to foresee the capabilities of electronic surveillance, they would have codified Privacy into the Bill of Rights. Instead, they did what they could, focusing on late-18th century concerns.
Had the Founding Fathers known of the potential concentrations of power known as multinational corporations, they would have codified some sort of separation of Business and State. Instead, they focused on what they knew, separation of Church and State.
Because somehow they ALL think they can outsource and destroy the middle class, yet SOMEONE is going to continue to pay American Prices for their products?
Years back I heard Lester Thoroeau from MIT talk about the US changing to a service economy, and how this was supposed to be a good thing. IMHO, you need to look at some version of Maslo's hierarchy of needs: Food on the table... A roof over my head, and heat in the Winter... Clothing on my back, especially in the Winter... (Can you tell I live in the Northeast?)
My effective income has been in decline since the end of dot-com. No salary reductions, but it's been stable while my health care rises terribly and all of my other costs rise, thankfully less quickly. I'm cutting back - there isn't much choice.
Toy purchases are the first to go. My 'main' desktop is still an old K6-3, nothing shiny and new from Intel or AMD. My TV is 20+ years old. Services are next - I can do it, myself.
IMHO, a 'Service Economy' is a horribly brittle thing, and will fall apart when things get rough, because people fall back to the basics - food, shelter, and clothing.
Actually, they are in a niche of the business. Cyrix IP was bought by Via, who has brought out a low power series of CPUs. They don't play in the sheer horsepower arena, but especially considering the way Intel positions Centrino, (perhaps protecting P4?) Via has the fanless market pretty much to itself.
Any purchasing decision tie will go to the underdog. I might even de-optimize by a few percent in favor of the underdog, because competition benefits all of us, and therefore it's up to all of us to keep competition alive.
But if the underdog is clearly inferior, they've lost my purchase.
Another pet peeve, seen years back on Usenet, (paraphrased) "I like AMD and Cyrix in the market, because even though I'd never buy them, they keep pushing Intel on performance improvements."
My place of employment has glassed-in corridors between buildings, some of those corridors being multi-story. They have solved the bird problem by placing stick-on silhouettes of some sort of predatory bird, one on every other pane, or so. I haven't seen or heard of a collision, since.
But back when they were happening, the birds left a beautiful dust pattern on the windows as they hit. It captured incredible levels of detail to the feathers, etc.
...because less than a decade later the same folks (AOL and MSN, for two) who had the lesson smashed in their face in the mid 90's are trying to stick with the exact same mistake.
Back then, there were fiefdoms of online access and email, all kind of piddling along. They began getting a clue, first with email bridges to the Internet, and saw their business start to take off. They then got into the business of making their bridges better, and so did their business. Eventually they quit being Online Service Providers and became Internet Access Providers.
In the mainstream press, it was eventually stated that people wanted to go online to communicate with each other. Services that helped that, thrived. Services that hindered, withered.
What is IM but communication?
But IM providers are still in this stupid gatekeeper role. Perhaps one of the WORST things that Microsoft has done is to teach us all that the most successful business model is to become a gatekeeper or tax collector. IMHO a large part of the IM protocol mess is that businesses are paying more attention to the Microsoft model than to the Internet model.
You (or Intel) presume that the market is happy to be segmented by Intel.
The real problem for big companies is when they begin to pay more attention to their own strategies than they do to the market. IMHO, customers don't like markets to be segmented. As often as not, market segmentation is a tool for producers to inflate prices and profits in one "segment" while responding to competitive price pressure in another segment. In other words, sell the Celerons dirt-cheap to compete with AMD, while making higher profits on P4 and astronomical profits on Xeon because AMD doesn't have brand-penetration into those spaces.
Market segmentation is bad for gearheads like us, because it puts awkward gear-shift points into the price-performance curve. With the release of Opteron, AMD has at least made it out of the Celeron space, and may be encroaching into the Xeon space. AMD may have some segmentation with the Duron/Athlon/K8 stuff, and they have a confusing set of K8 offerings, but it's less rigid and easier to bridge than Intel's.
Incidentally, according to some Usenet sources, once upon a time, Intel planned for X86 to have withered in favor of IA-64-everywhere by around 2005.
The scary thing about WinFS will be the patent protection.
We've seen too many patents granted for which there certainly appears to be prior art. Someone else brought up the moniker, "Object Oriented Filesystems," and danced around the concept of single-level-store. That stuff goes back to the old IBM System/38, whose patents have probably expired. (It actually goes back further, but S/38 made it out the door.)
As others have said, metadata has been on the Apple resource fork since 1984, and OS/2's HPFS had Extended Attributes (OS/2 even had Extended Attributes kludged onto FAT.) prior to 1990. Then you (and others) bring up Reiser4.
I wonder what the patent filings on WinFS will look like. Reiser4 is obviously "published", but it would be good if there were some way to make the USPTO aware.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that Firefox will have thought-controlled anti-spam and popup suppression?
************SPOILER ALERT*********
Sentient mechlife (robots) has proliferated in the galaxy, and are driving biological life, including humans, toward extinction. Eventually it's discovered that there's a backdoor in the mechlife that rips through their 'sentience net' killing most of them and giving bio-life a chance to come back. Kind of a cross between disassemblers and the Iraqis' French Exocet missiles during GulfWarI.
Nuff said.
Terrorist unleashes rogue disassemblers. Biggest obvious threat would be structures, as you say. But IMHO the more logical early use of nano would be medical diagnosis and implants. (There's already the M2A camera, named for the ingress and egress points.) Imagine unleashing disassemblers on diabetics with nano-based implanted insulin dosers, or cancer patients with nano-based, self-targeting chemo dosers. In the former case, they'd probably figure out something's wrong soon, hopefully before going hypoglycemic. In the latter case, they may not know anything's wrong until finding that their cancer therapy has been completely ineffective.
As I worked on the tester code, I tried to put in comments, as best I could. Still, there were a number of "B.I.T." comments. "Because It's There" - places where the tester had some hardware oddities that the designers apparently kludged through.
I moved on to a new position, and even years later my replacement would see me in the halls, mentioning seeing a "B.I.T." in the code.
You mean you got to do machine code?
For my first job, I didn't even get machine code, I did microcode.
Seriously though, I learned Algol, Fortran, PDP-11 asm, and 8080 asm in college. (a few year^H^H^H^decades ago) In my first job, I was involved in semiconductor memory test, and spent a fair amount of time microcoding test patterns.
Two things in particular made me appreciate cycle-by-cycle performance - coding a bit-banging UART on an 8080, and memory test patterns where every single cycle had to be correct - and validated.
I understand and agree with you.
I thought that's what I said, I guess I didn't word it well enough.
I like the other responses about 'unenumerated rights' to my post, I just wish those unenumerated rights were recognized and respected.
Throw in a little salt.
Throw in the source IP, from whence you knock.
Throw in the destination IP, upon which you knock.
Upon detection and acceptance, have IPTables open a point-to-point hole in the firewall between the two IPs, and not generally open the port. Of course this is still security-by-obscurity - barely a step beyond simply knocking.
It could become strong if you had a password-strength formula to turn source and destination IPs into the knock sequence, assuming Mr. l33t can't reuse your IP, later. At that point, you want to push a time/date stamp into the knock formula, too.
I'll grant 1029, red floyd, and you the point. Now we get to the real issue:
This is all about testing. Constitutional issues are best tested before the Supreme Court. Usually this is all about finding the right case - one that can get to the Supremes, one that they'll accept.
Finding and pursuing the right case is the real problem.
because the interrogating officer also happened to be a little short on cash. Not only does your future convenience hinge on his report, but other RFID traces show you going places your wife/employer/pick-another would be unhappy about if they knew. Now we could just keep this between the two of us, if...
No matter how cleanly you think you live, EVERYONE does something that either a) they're not entirely proud of, or b) could be misinterpreted in a much more sinister fashion. At the very least, RFID makes much more information available for misinterpretation.
Maybe eventually you'd be exonerated - like Jewell - the guy who wasn't behind the Atlanta Olympic bombing. In the meantime, he lost just about everything. Saying "Oops" didn't fix it.
But every now and then the debate is framed, and powerful forces point to the fact that privacy is not explicitely guaranteed by the constitution. There are strict constructioninsts from both sides of the debate. Unfortunately powerful lobbies and money are not on our side. That was my second constitutional point in my post.
Aaaah, but let's imagine RFID technology had been fully in place several years back.
"Well, Mr/Ms mwood, from data obtained from the RFID devices on your whitie tighties and those of Mohammed Atta, we see that on a regular basis you walked within talking range of him for a six month interval prior to the attacks. We'd like to talk to you about your potential conversations."
Never mind that your normal schedule and route to home/work/school just happened to bring you within range of his normal route to home/work/school/terrorist meetings. With all of this new data available, all sorts of new correlations can be drawn and investigated. With a whole raft of new data being mined, it will take intelligence agencies some time to sort out simple coincidence, especially when they're desperate for leads.
Some are quick to say that the US Constitution guarantees no right to privacy.
But IMHO, the US Constitution embodies the 1793 State-of-the-Art of distrust of Government and other concentrations of power. That's the whole reason that there are three branches with checks and balances - mistrust of the institution of government. No matter how trustworthy those in power may be today, there's no guarantee that the next batch will be so. Checks and balances were put in place to provide trust - through mistrust.
Had the Founding Fathers been able to foresee the capabilities of electronic surveillance, they would have codified Privacy into the Bill of Rights. Instead, they did what they could, focusing on late-18th century concerns.
Had the Founding Fathers known of the potential concentrations of power known as multinational corporations, they would have codified some sort of separation of Business and State. Instead, they focused on what they knew, separation of Church and State.
Because somehow they ALL think they can outsource and destroy the middle class, yet SOMEONE is going to continue to pay American Prices for their products?
Years back I heard Lester Thoroeau from MIT talk about the US changing to a service economy, and how this was supposed to be a good thing. IMHO, you need to look at some version of Maslo's hierarchy of needs:
Food on the table...
A roof over my head, and heat in the Winter...
Clothing on my back, especially in the Winter...
(Can you tell I live in the Northeast?)
My effective income has been in decline since the end of dot-com. No salary reductions, but it's been stable while my health care rises terribly and all of my other costs rise, thankfully less quickly. I'm cutting back - there isn't much choice.
Toy purchases are the first to go. My 'main' desktop is still an old K6-3, nothing shiny and new from Intel or AMD. My TV is 20+ years old.
Services are next - I can do it, myself.
IMHO, a 'Service Economy' is a horribly brittle thing, and will fall apart when things get rough, because people fall back to the basics - food, shelter, and clothing.
Actually, they are in a niche of the business. Cyrix IP was bought by Via, who has brought out a low power series of CPUs. They don't play in the sheer horsepower arena, but especially considering the way Intel positions Centrino, (perhaps protecting P4?) Via has the fanless market pretty much to itself.
I'm mostly brand-blind, but...
Any purchasing decision tie will go to the underdog. I might even de-optimize by a few percent in favor of the underdog, because competition benefits all of us, and therefore it's up to all of us to keep competition alive.
But if the underdog is clearly inferior, they've lost my purchase.
Another pet peeve, seen years back on Usenet, (paraphrased) "I like AMD and Cyrix in the market, because even though I'd never buy them, they keep pushing Intel on performance improvements."
Where are the karma whores with mirror URLs, when we need them?
I keep hoping Gilliam really does get to do, "Good Omens." The project keeps coming and going.
My place of employment has glassed-in corridors between buildings, some of those corridors being multi-story. They have solved the bird problem by placing stick-on silhouettes of some sort of predatory bird, one on every other pane, or so. I haven't seen or heard of a collision, since.
But back when they were happening, the birds left a beautiful dust pattern on the windows as they hit. It captured incredible levels of detail to the feathers, etc.
The movie was only rated PG-13, and the bandageware protected it from getting an R. Even two very brief scenes in less didn't up the rating.
(5th Element is one of my favorites, because like Brazil, it strives to attain a 50's view of the future.)
...because less than a decade later the same folks (AOL and MSN, for two) who had the lesson smashed in their face in the mid 90's are trying to stick with the exact same mistake.
Back then, there were fiefdoms of online access and email, all kind of piddling along. They began getting a clue, first with email bridges to the Internet, and saw their business start to take off. They then got into the business of making their bridges better, and so did their business. Eventually they quit being Online Service Providers and became Internet Access Providers.
In the mainstream press, it was eventually stated that people wanted to go online to communicate with each other. Services that helped that, thrived. Services that hindered, withered.
What is IM but communication?
But IM providers are still in this stupid gatekeeper role. Perhaps one of the WORST things that Microsoft has done is to teach us all that the most successful business model is to become a gatekeeper or tax collector. IMHO a large part of the IM protocol mess is that businesses are paying more attention to the Microsoft model than to the Internet model.
You (or Intel) presume that the market is happy to be segmented by Intel.
The real problem for big companies is when they begin to pay more attention to their own strategies than they do to the market. IMHO, customers don't like markets to be segmented. As often as not, market segmentation is a tool for producers to inflate prices and profits in one "segment" while responding to competitive price pressure in another segment. In other words, sell the Celerons dirt-cheap to compete with AMD, while making higher profits on P4 and astronomical profits on Xeon because AMD doesn't have brand-penetration into those spaces.
Market segmentation is bad for gearheads like us, because it puts awkward gear-shift points into the price-performance curve. With the release of Opteron, AMD has at least made it out of the Celeron space, and may be encroaching into the Xeon space. AMD may have some segmentation with the Duron/Athlon/K8 stuff, and they have a confusing set of K8 offerings, but it's less rigid and easier to bridge than Intel's.
Incidentally, according to some Usenet sources, once upon a time, Intel planned for X86 to have withered in favor of IA-64-everywhere by around 2005.
Have to think about that one...
But have they threatened?
I seem to remember a Linux project or two shut down under 'suggestion' from Microsoft.
Chilling Effect is the key phrase.
The scary thing about WinFS will be the patent protection.
We've seen too many patents granted for which there certainly appears to be prior art. Someone else brought up the moniker, "Object Oriented Filesystems," and danced around the concept of single-level-store. That stuff goes back to the old IBM System/38, whose patents have probably expired. (It actually goes back further, but S/38 made it out the door.)
As others have said, metadata has been on the Apple resource fork since 1984, and OS/2's HPFS had Extended Attributes (OS/2 even had Extended Attributes kludged onto FAT.) prior to 1990. Then you (and others) bring up Reiser4.
I wonder what the patent filings on WinFS will look like. Reiser4 is obviously "published", but it would be good if there were some way to make the USPTO aware.
The IBM iSeries has been on the market for some time, as has its predecessor, the AS/400, and its predecessor, the System/38.
I hope the USPTO considers expired patents in their prior art searches on the WinFS IP submissions.
My wife and I have sublicensed our souls twice.
But now you're telling me that Daryl claims to own my derivative words. Does this mean he's going to fund their college expenses?