Actually, as long as you did it for a really short period of time, the main effects would be:
particles would fall due to gravity (unless this effect also weakened gravity,
but current theory wouldn't support that). But it would take a signifigant
portion of a second for the particles to move much due to gravity.
particles vibrating due to brownean motion would possibly continue past each other
possibly rearranging crystaline structures
Once you turned the field back off, the forces between the atoms would reappear, and most
of the molecules would snap back into place.
If you left the field on a long time, yes you would possibly get a tunnel, as the particles would
fall to the bottom of the region at which point their fields would turn back on, and there would possibly
be... fusion? an explosion?
Disclaimer: I am not a particle physicist, but I do talk with them in the cafeteria...
The problem is, now that the case has been going on forever, IBM has numerous counterclaims in
the suit. Even if SCO tries to back out now, IBM still has numerous counterclaims to settle
at trial. Groklaw has lots of details if you want them, but basically IBM is claiming that
SCO has:
It isn't that companies cannot or should not sponsor scientific resaearch relating to their products.
It is that when they do so, they should do it in a way that doesn't taint the results, and they should
publish the results whether they are favorable to them or not -- that is, do it scientifically.
If companies actually started doing this, there wouldn't be complaints.
However the history
of companies like the big tobacco companies doing research and then showing it to their lawyers so
they could claim it was "priveleged communications" to bury it, rather than publishing it,
gives people a bad taste about corporate sponsored research.
How much of what Microsoft makes goes to the actual programmers at Microsoft, and/or the programmers
at the companies Microsoft has consumed (assimilated?) over the years?
How much of the money taken in by your local grocery store goes to the farmers who grew the
food?
Fortunately, many Open Source programmers have a job, even a job programming; and many have jobs
that include developing their open source code. IBM for example has at least a few people with
that sort of job description.
As long as you are "doing normal maintenance" on your systems at home, and "happen to notice"
something, your kids just feel like they have bad luck and "happen" to get caught.
I mean, come on, you don't tell your kids you are monitoring their chats...
And you're not going through their drawers checking for drugs, you're "putting away laundry".
And you're not checking under the mattress for Playboy magazines, you're making the bed.
And you're not snooping around their PC, you're making sure the virus signatures are up to
date and the latest patches are installed.
Assuming you have a one-each binary payload, you just put them all on the same web page.
And it's not like this is a new idea, the original Morris Worm was cross-platform.
(Solaris and BSD on DEC. hardware).
That one had to actually make several network connections to a system, trying a different payload each time.
But a web browser, it will make multiple connections for you, and download multiple attack payloads for you. Isn't that convenient?
... its a "playback prevention" mechanism. You can copy DVD's, etc. all you want and the mechanism doesn't mind.
It will play exact copies of the media just as well as originals, and it makes no difference.
It just controls where/when you can play a DVD. That is, it is a play control mechanism, not a copy
control mechanism.
So as long as they only outlawed circumventing copy-protection mechanisms, they haven't actually affected
DRM. The MPAA rhetoric basically comes back and bites them here -- by lying about what the issue is,
they get a law that doesn't actually do what they want.
Last time we got one of those calls, we got as much info as we could from them, and reported them to our local police.
I can't say if it's related, but a few months later a group of ex-cons a few suburbs over did get busted for something
very similar... Your local police do not like these people; they make them look bad....
I think you have to consider what the Real Goal of these searches is -- it is not to make airplanes safer, it is
to make passengers feel safer, so they will still fly in airplanes.
Once you realize this, then the practice of profiling makes perfect sense -- you pull aside the people
that you think the other passengers are nervous about, and you search them. The other passengers
see "dangerous looking" people being checked, and they feel safer. And you pull aside a few other
random folks just to make it look sort-of fair.
And for folks who have the Unabomber look, or the fundamentalist Muslim look, or who generally wear
any sort of non-standard clothing, you pull them aside for the full body-cavity search etc.
This trains people to clean themselves up and not look dangerous when they fly, which makes the
public feel safer.
And of course, there is the other mechanism; you announce it is random, and you look for people who
look nervous, and check them. I had a math professor in college who used to do this; he had a deck of
3x5 cards with everyone's name on it, and he would make a great show of shuffling the deck and picking
someone to put each homework question on the board. Of course, he actually picked whoever was squirming
in their chair, or otherwise looking nervous, thus training folks to do their homework.
That's the best summary I've seen so far in this discussion...
I think that at one level, all software limits what you can do with your computer;
but the fix is that you get a computer that lets you install other software which hopefully
does what you want it to do.
Once the computer companies start defining what software you can run, it isn't really
your computer anymore...
Actually, it doesn't have to violate any laws of physics, if it does something like:
slow down the rotation of the earth
slow the rotation of magma in the earths core
drag the earth closer to the sun
etc.
(assuming those sorts of changes are lower-energy states). Now how it would do any of those
without forcibly sliding you along the ground/driving you into the earth if you were holding
it is a mystery to me, but...) The problem is if it does do something like that, it's hard
to measure at the 1kW level, but if enough people do it, the day starts getting longer, the earth gets hotter, etc.
Another possibility is that they've accidentally made a Really Good Antenna, and they're just receiving
broadcast radio and converting it to DC...
The Fermilab Spires database lists over 50 titles, including:
The discovery of anti-matter : the autobiography of Carl David Anderson, the youngest man to win the Nobel prize
Cockcroft and the atom
Atoms in the family My life with Enrico Fermi (by Laura Fermi)
Strong force : the story of physicist Shirley Ann Jackson
Living with nuclei : 50 years in the nuclear age, memoirs of a Japanese physicist
Lawrence and his laboratory : a history of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Schrèodinger, life and thought
The day after Trinity : J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb
Strange beauty : Murray Gell-Mann and the revolution in twentieth-century physics
and of course the obligatory dozen or so books about Einstein, Feynmann, etc.
Boy, whenever you have to start your argument with
In any circumstance or scenario, is it ever acceptable, you should know you've already
lost the argument.
The problem in this particular scenario (RIIAA lawsuits over file "sharing") is that
you have a party with large resources (translation -- a Bully) intimidating people
with very few resources and demanding cash, by threatening them with a lawsuit with very
little, if any, evidence; and doing it over and over and over again.
Sure, there are circumstances (self defense? stopping someone setting off a bomb?) where
you could justify hitting someone on the head with a baseball bat, but it doesn't mean
you can or should go off doing it over and over and over again without evidence of
those circumstances. (But officer, all 50 of them looked at me threateningly, and I struck
them each in self defense. They all had hands in their pockets that looked to me like gun...)
I was just about to post that very idea (900 numbers). Not to mention you could send people trying to call Dominos to Pizza Hut, etc. Not to mention the "requires user action" tidbit -- once you get control of the phone, every keypress to dial a number is a "user action" that could do *something*.
That is not to say that folks might not be over-hyping the risks, but the start of this discussion was definitely UNDER-hyping the risks.
The 3d to 2d mapping is actually pretty easy, with a little Linear Algebra. If you don't know
any, grab a Linear algebra textbook and read up on vectors, dot products, cross products, etc.
You pick a viewpoint V = (x_v, y_v, z_v)
and a direction vector D = (d_x, d_y, d_z) ( D is a unit vector, it's length should
be 1). and an "up" vector U (which way is up, also a unit vector, perpendicular to D). Next we need a "right"
vector, R, which is always D x U (vector cross product)
So now our mapped coordinates for any location P are:
z = (V - P)*D [where * is the dot product]
x = ((V - P)*R) / z
y = ((V - P)*U) / z
So next we need to deal with hidden lines. There's an old trick for this, make a list of line endpoints, and
compute z, above, for the center of each line. Sort the lines by increasing z. Now start at the first
positive z value, and draw each line that would not cross an existing line.
While there's a clear Ed Wood movie reference, the reason it's something-9 is that it was the Next Thing after Version 8 Unix, which was the Bell Labs release after Version 7 Unix, the one that Started It All. So clearly, rather than call it Version 9 Unix, when it wasn't really Unix underneath anymore, etc. they needed a new name...
We've started a project using AlphaFlow in Plone from our Oracle database;
we've had to do some work to define things like who has what role related to
what object; but of course you have to do that no matter what package you use.
And the costs are similar to other Open Source packages -- paying your own people to read the source, rather than paying some other big company to do it for you.
Actually, if it's a stack-smasher kind of bug, you can often exploit it from
a fuzzer without ever looking at the code, because very often what the code
ends up doing is jumping to an address contained in the fuzz sequence.
So your program crashes with a PC=0xdeadbeef (as an example), you search the
fuzz data for the sequence 0xdeadbeef, and try changing the fuzz data
to 0xbeefdead, and if that's the new PC in the crash, you simply put a
really short break-me sequence in front of it, and change the PC to the
return address in the crash minus the length of the break-me sequence...
Sure, not every bug that the fuzzer findes will be one like that, but I suspect
many of the ones listed in the MS code were found that way.
... we'll use the following equivalence:
fingerprint == username
something else == password
Your username is easily seen, easily copied, and not kept secret, it's
just convenient to use something that's hard to lose (i.e. your fingerprint)
for it. I might even want to have a copy of my fingerprint on a keyring
or something that I can give to someone who I'm authorising to act on my behalf.
The password part should be something you can change if someone
gets ahold of it. Possibly even an actual password, or PIN number, or
whatever.
Unfortunately, at places like my local grocery store, they're using
fingerprints as combination username and password -- one swipe and you've
paid. This is a Really Bad Idea in my book. I mean, all someone has to do is
follow you to a restaurant, pretend to be a bus boy, grab the glass you were
using, and transfer a fingerprint to a piece of Saran wrap, wrap it around their
finger, and buy out the grocery store on your credit card.
One of the fundamentals of the quantum theory, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle,
is that you can't understand it any better than we do, because there's no way to tell -- there's
a limit to the resolution to which we can measure fundamental particles. I find the fact that you can
make any predictions based on that (statistical ones, yes, but predictions that work) pure
genius.
So yes, we don't understand light "completely" as you define "completely"; but we do understand light as completely as is possible given the constraints we currently have. (like having nothing smaller/lighter
than electrons to bounce off of things to see where they are...)
And don't forget that most of the quantities you deal with on a regular basis (i.e strength, hardness,
concentration, and temperature of materials) are "statistical values"; they're really averages of a very
complicated mix of simple properties. Thats why engineers have to do things like "overengineer" -- because
there's a measurable probability that a bolt isn't as strong as it's supposed to be, even though it was
heated and cooled to the same temperature, etc. as all the others.
Slashdot Mirror
- particles would fall due to gravity (unless this effect also weakened gravity,
but current theory wouldn't support that). But it would take a signifigant
portion of a second for the particles to move much due to gravity.
- particles vibrating due to brownean motion would possibly continue past each other
possibly rearranging crystaline structures
Once you turned the field back off, the forces between the atoms would reappear, and most of the molecules would snap back into place.If you left the field on a long time, yes you would possibly get a tunnel, as the particles would fall to the bottom of the region at which point their fields would turn back on, and there would possibly be... fusion? an explosion?
Disclaimer: I am not a particle physicist, but I do talk with them in the cafeteria...
- lied publicly about IBM's behaviour
- violated the GPL, including for IBM's GPL-ed code
- violated the Lanham act
etc.If companies actually started doing this, there wouldn't be complaints.
However the history of companies like the big tobacco companies doing research and then showing it to their lawyers so they could claim it was "priveleged communications" to bury it, rather than publishing it, gives people a bad taste about corporate sponsored research.
How much of the money taken in by your local grocery store goes to the farmers who grew the food?
Fortunately, many Open Source programmers have a job, even a job programming; and many have jobs that include developing their open source code. IBM for example has at least a few people with that sort of job description.
I mean, come on, you don't tell your kids you are monitoring their chats...
And you're not going through their drawers checking for drugs, you're "putting away laundry". And you're not checking under the mattress for Playboy magazines, you're making the bed. And you're not snooping around their PC, you're making sure the virus signatures are up to date and the latest patches are installed.
'Nuff said.
And it's not like this is a new idea, the original Morris Worm was cross-platform. (Solaris and BSD on DEC. hardware). That one had to actually make several network connections to a system, trying a different payload each time.
But a web browser, it will make multiple connections for you, and download multiple attack payloads for you. Isn't that convenient?
The w3c Slidy package, from the folks who brought you "tidy", is also excellent.
It just controls where/when you can play a DVD. That is, it is a play control mechanism, not a copy control mechanism.
So as long as they only outlawed circumventing copy-protection mechanisms, they haven't actually affected DRM. The MPAA rhetoric basically comes back and bites them here -- by lying about what the issue is, they get a law that doesn't actually do what they want.
Yeah, especially the root password for your KDC...
There's a script wrapper for this, it's called escrow... We've used it for a while and it's really quite handy.
Last time we got one of those calls, we got as much info as we could from them, and reported them to our local police. I can't say if it's related, but a few months later a group of ex-cons a few suburbs over did get busted for something very similar... Your local police do not like these people; they make them look bad....
Once you realize this, then the practice of profiling makes perfect sense -- you pull aside the people that you think the other passengers are nervous about, and you search them. The other passengers see "dangerous looking" people being checked, and they feel safer. And you pull aside a few other random folks just to make it look sort-of fair.
And for folks who have the Unabomber look, or the fundamentalist Muslim look, or who generally wear any sort of non-standard clothing, you pull them aside for the full body-cavity search etc. This trains people to clean themselves up and not look dangerous when they fly, which makes the public feel safer.
And of course, there is the other mechanism; you announce it is random, and you look for people who look nervous, and check them. I had a math professor in college who used to do this; he had a deck of 3x5 cards with everyone's name on it, and he would make a great show of shuffling the deck and picking someone to put each homework question on the board. Of course, he actually picked whoever was squirming in their chair, or otherwise looking nervous, thus training folks to do their homework.
I think that at one level, all software limits what you can do with your computer; but the fix is that you get a computer that lets you install other software which hopefully does what you want it to do.
Once the computer companies start defining what software you can run, it isn't really your computer anymore...
- slow down the rotation of the earth
- slow the rotation of magma in the earths core
- drag the earth closer to the sun
- etc.
(assuming those sorts of changes are lower-energy states). Now how it would do any of those without forcibly sliding you along the ground/driving you into the earth if you were holding it is a mystery to me, but...) The problem is if it does do something like that, it's hard to measure at the 1kW level, but if enough people do it, the day starts getting longer, the earth gets hotter, etc.Another possibility is that they've accidentally made a Really Good Antenna, and they're just receiving broadcast radio and converting it to DC...
...or ping pong balls dipped in licence-plate paint.
The Fermilab Spires database lists over 50 titles, including:
The discovery of anti-matter : the autobiography of Carl David Anderson, the youngest man to win the Nobel prize
Cockcroft and the atom
Atoms in the family My life with Enrico Fermi (by Laura Fermi)
Strong force : the story of physicist Shirley Ann Jackson
Living with nuclei : 50 years in the nuclear age, memoirs of a Japanese physicist
Lawrence and his laboratory : a history of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Schrèodinger, life and thought
The day after Trinity : J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb
Strange beauty : Murray Gell-Mann and the revolution in twentieth-century physics
and of course the obligatory dozen or so books about Einstein, Feynmann, etc.
The problem in this particular scenario (RIIAA lawsuits over file "sharing") is that you have a party with large resources (translation -- a Bully) intimidating people with very few resources and demanding cash, by threatening them with a lawsuit with very little, if any, evidence; and doing it over and over and over again.
Sure, there are circumstances (self defense? stopping someone setting off a bomb?) where you could justify hitting someone on the head with a baseball bat, but it doesn't mean you can or should go off doing it over and over and over again without evidence of those circumstances. (But officer, all 50 of them looked at me threateningly, and I struck them each in self defense. They all had hands in their pockets that looked to me like gun...)
That is not to say that folks might not be over-hyping the risks, but the start of this discussion was definitely UNDER-hyping the risks.
- the 3d to 2d mapping from a viewpoint
- dealing with hidden points
The 3d to 2d mapping is actually pretty easy, with a little Linear Algebra. If you don't know any, grab a Linear algebra textbook and read up on vectors, dot products, cross products, etc.You pick a viewpoint V = (x_v, y_v, z_v) and a direction vector D = (d_x, d_y, d_z) ( D is a unit vector, it's length should be 1). and an "up" vector U (which way is up, also a unit vector, perpendicular to D). Next we need a "right" vector, R, which is always D x U (vector cross product) So now our mapped coordinates for any location P are:
z = (V - P)*D [where * is the dot product]
x = ((V - P)*R) / z
y = ((V - P)*U) / z
So next we need to deal with hidden lines. There's an old trick for this, make a list of line endpoints, and compute z, above, for the center of each line. Sort the lines by increasing z. Now start at the first positive z value, and draw each line that would not cross an existing line.
While there's a clear Ed Wood movie reference, the reason it's something-9 is that it was the Next Thing after Version 8 Unix, which was the Bell Labs release after Version 7 Unix, the one that Started It All. So clearly, rather than call it Version 9 Unix, when it wasn't really Unix underneath anymore, etc. they needed a new name...
And the costs are similar to other Open Source packages -- paying your own people to read the source, rather than paying some other big company to do it for you.
So your program crashes with a PC=0xdeadbeef (as an example), you search the fuzz data for the sequence 0xdeadbeef, and try changing the fuzz data to 0xbeefdead, and if that's the new PC in the crash, you simply put a really short break-me sequence in front of it, and change the PC to the return address in the crash minus the length of the break-me sequence...
Sure, not every bug that the fuzzer findes will be one like that, but I suspect many of the ones listed in the MS code were found that way.
fingerprint == username
something else == password
Your username is easily seen, easily copied, and not kept secret, it's just convenient to use something that's hard to lose (i.e. your fingerprint) for it. I might even want to have a copy of my fingerprint on a keyring or something that I can give to someone who I'm authorising to act on my behalf.
The password part should be something you can change if someone gets ahold of it. Possibly even an actual password, or PIN number, or whatever.
Unfortunately, at places like my local grocery store, they're using fingerprints as combination username and password -- one swipe and you've paid. This is a Really Bad Idea in my book. I mean, all someone has to do is follow you to a restaurant, pretend to be a bus boy, grab the glass you were using, and transfer a fingerprint to a piece of Saran wrap, wrap it around their finger, and buy out the grocery store on your credit card.
One of the fundamentals of the quantum theory, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is that you can't understand it any better than we do, because there's no way to tell -- there's a limit to the resolution to which we can measure fundamental particles. I find the fact that you can make any predictions based on that (statistical ones, yes, but predictions that work) pure genius.
So yes, we don't understand light "completely" as you define "completely"; but we do understand light as completely as is possible given the constraints we currently have. (like having nothing smaller/lighter than electrons to bounce off of things to see where they are...)
And don't forget that most of the quantities you deal with on a regular basis (i.e strength, hardness, concentration, and temperature of materials) are "statistical values"; they're really averages of a very complicated mix of simple properties. Thats why engineers have to do things like "overengineer" -- because there's a measurable probability that a bolt isn't as strong as it's supposed to be, even though it was heated and cooled to the same temperature, etc. as all the others.