Representatives of bands around here tend to get lynched. Just use the word copyright. Comeon now, just one little word... it's all we need. I dare 'ya!
... Nevermind that the vast majority of gun crimes are from unlicensed gun users. Very rarely is a crime committed by someone with a license, because they receive training and take their responsibility seriously.
Why not just spin it, and while it's spinning, lower the ambient temperature so that it freezes? And if you remember your thermodynamics, you'll remember that raising or lowering *pressure* raises or lowers the temperature of a gas -- seal it up, spin it, then freeze it. Easy peasy.
After all, we are looking at 20-30% of the economy disappearing in the US overnight.
Yeah, because we moved to a service-based economy and then signed treaties and laws which put those services in a global marketplace, competing with a vastly larger labor pool. The net result is we lost all those jobs to other countries, who now sell their cheaper services back to us. End result is less of our dollars are circulating in the country where they can contribute to the multiplier effect.
Richard, I love ya and everything you've done for the open source community, just want that clear. Now what the sam hell are you doing telling us to "recover" our freedoms? You don't recover freedom -- you fight for it. You disobey, you protest, you drum up support, tear down walls, and throw wrenches in the establishment. Freedom isn't free, and you won't get it by firing off strongly worded letters.
Look at it from the other side -- the ACTA is about trying to make a global police framework to try and stop file sharinng. Let them pass it. Let the government sink billions upon billions tryinng to solve the problem, while we come up with ever more clever ways to evade detection, and eat away at their bottom lines. The ACTA is about moving the costs from an industry to a global support group of governments. Now is the time to maximize damage -- gut their bank accounts, make free copies pervasive.
Slip how-to manuals into people's mailboxes, leave CDs on the bus with instructions on how to get stuff for free, build and distribute new tools that are harder to track, use stronger encryption, and frustrate traffic analysis efforts. Bury these fuckers to the point where for every dollar they can recover through this kind of legislation they have to pay five more. Keep the hurt machine running at full power.
That's how you defeat the ACTA and protect your freedoms -- by going on the offensive. If they have no rules, neither should we. They want to hand this mess over to the government and we should be only too happy to obliege them -- let's make it cost more than the combined budget of all of law enforcement to recover what little cash they're getting back now. Eventually the costs for this will make it a public spectacle and people will question why we're diverting so much money and throwing all these people in jail and ruining their lives and the general public will finally ask the question it should have been asking years ago:
Assuming there isn't a weakness in the key, or how it's stored on the chip. Perhaps simply having physical possession of the card for a minute is enough to 'scan' it and reveal the key.
Apparently it's more complicated than some hand waving at "other inputs" or nobody would use the RSA security cards that operate on the same principal.
No, it is not complicated: There's a number being displayed on the card every six seconds. For it to have any value in authentication, that number needs to be somewhere else every six seconds too. Which means it's not "random". It might pass every test for random, but it isn't. Which means there is an algorithm in place. That algorithm requires two things: First, that it stay syncronized (time), and second that there's a reference point shared between the circuitry on the card and the bank where that number is validated.
Those requirements all lead to one conclusion: PRNG. The seed is probably a key of some kind plus time. There are at least two places that key is kept: On the card, and at the bank, and probably more places. Access any of them, and you recover the key. It's just a question of cost.
Now here's the kicker: 100,000 credit cards linked to a random cross-section of the population is worth a fair amount of money. Probably more than the cost of cracking that protection. And that means it's still profitable and practical to crack it.
Unless the card is radioactive it's not "random"... it's pseudorandom, and therefore based on an algorithm. Figure out the seed (initial vector) and other inputs, and you're right where you started, only your clients feel more secure and the criminals have to spend an extra few bucks. Given that there are multinational laboratories churning out thousands of dup cards, and assuming they have an active distribution network... it's safe to say these aren't the only guys or the first.
Turn to page 5...paragraph 4, sentence 3, word 4. Write it in the box. Insert dongle to continue. Serial numbers, online activation, warder, blah blah blah, and the list goes on.
Guys, no matter how you want to fuck with the technology, you can't erase one simple fact: At some point it needs to be viewed by a human, listened to by a human, interpreted... by a human. That means that at some point the data comes out analog, and can be scanned, manipulated, copied, and everything else.
Slashdot's role is to provide a mostly uninformed but passionate argument between a few straw-man positions based on little evidence, but Pinker & Carr beat us to it.
Which is exactly why we have NASA engineers and some of IT's top minds making posts and comment submissions, amongst many others. I'd say slashdot's average post quality is a lot more informed than, say, 4Chan.
our use of the Net is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers.
Our education (or lack thereof) is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers. A constant deluge of advertisements, commercials, billboards, 30 second sound-clips, etc., isn't helping. Critical thinking is a skill, not a talent -- as such, it is learned. Blaming an inanimate pile of wires, servers, and routers on that is absurd.
The Net and other digital technologies 'are the only things that will keep us smart'
Human intellectual capacity hasn't significantly altered in over 16,000 years. The internet is not, in the span of one or even five generations, going to change it.
'We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors -- important skills, to be sure -- but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.'
That training has nothing to do with the internet. It is the byproduct of paradigm shifts in how we socialize with one another. The internet may have enabled that, but by no means is it solely or even largely responsible for it.
Why would you need to? What is the basis of your assumption?
The majority of wells show rising levels of pollutant, and the water tables in many places shows a consistent downward trend because we've been using it for irrigation and industrial processes -- and it's not an entirely closed system.
It's a helluva lot easier than making more oil.
So what do you use to keep chicken from sticking to the pan when cooking? Fuel oil doesn't have to come from dinosaurs. But regardless, that's not the point. Crude oil is used because it has a high energy density by volume, and it's still relatively easy to get to -- you stick a straw in the ground and suck. Viola, instant high energy density fuel. Science can find a replacement for this. It might be expensive, require infrastructure retooling, etc., but it can be done.
But if we run out of drinking water because our wells and lakes are filled with poisons, all the oil in the world won't save our sorry asses. Every human being that ever existed needed water to survive -- daily. It's only the past few iterations of humanity that have needed it, and I'm certain we'll survive as a species without it, and without having to look at making large sections of land uninhabitable or reducing the population to do so. Water is serious business. Oil is a plaything for scientists and engineers to work out an alternative for. There is no alternative for water.
Let me just say that fusion power is aweful; we should be using solar power instead.
The difference is I'm about 93 million miles from the reactor that produces "solar" power, but the nearest nuclear reactor to me is about 15 miles away. Now, considering the one 93 million miles away has been running without any malfunction for about 4.6 billion years, give or take a few million. So far, we've only managed to make a few hundred nuclear plants around the world, and we've had about a dozen accidents since the first one was created in the past 100 years.
Now, if I had to choose which one was more likely to last and be reliable, I'd pick the one 93 million miles away.
But its pretty easy to desalinate water if need be, its non-trivial to make more oil.
Easy? No. What follows is a lot of statistics I pulled from a lot of sources. I can't footnote them all here, because it would make the post hideously long and unintelligible.
The largest desalination plant on the planet is the Jebel Ali Desalination Plant in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is scheduled to go online this month. The estimated cost construction cost is $550m USD and requires 2,000MW of power. It houses 8 desalination plants, each capable of producing 17.5m gallons of water. The power plant will cost another $1.7B USD. There was also a 400/132kW substation built for the project, at a cost of $60m USD.
Operating costs for the project cannot yet be determined, however in the past about 45-50% of the operating costs of a desalination plant was energy costs. Right now, a coal-fired base plant costs about $1.6-2m per MW of output. For simplicity and to low-ball our estimate, we'll say that it costs $1.6 per MW. $1.6m x 2k = $3.2B USD, or a yearly operating cost estimate of $6.4B
Total construction cost: $2.31B USD. Water purified daily: 140m gallons Operating costs: $6.4B/yr Cost per gallon per day: $0.13
Now, let's assume that we had to switch to desalination and purification of potable water in this country. The per capita usage of water in the United States from 1996-1998 was 160.6 gallons per day. We'll ignore any adjustments or looking for more recent data in the interests of getting a ballpark estimate. The current estimated population in the US as of July is ~310.2m. That means our yearly use of water is somewhere around 49.82B gallons of water, per day. To purify that much water using desalination would cost us around $236.4B USD per year, just in maintenance costs.
Unrelated, but I've always wondered so I have to ask... are you a girl who is training for something (if so, what?), or are you training to be a girl? (whether you are or are not currently female). Your name makes me curious every time I see it:)
You might be a little behind the curve here. The purpose of the Green movement isn't to create economical and sustainable energy; It's to allow the Boomers to purchase indulgences in the form of carbon credits and other non-sense to relieve their guilt over having cut investments in every major social institution from education to medicine, so that they could live the most hedonistic lifestyle possible.
If they were serious about creating sustainable and renewable energy, they would invest more in physics to prevent the eventual heat death of the universe. Or, of more immediate concern, how we're going to survive as a civilization when we run out of drinkable water. Because of all the resources we have on the planet, oil is not the one I'm worried about: I can live without oil. I can't live without water. And guess which one's disappearing faster?/sarcasm
ITER, Europe -- Physicists at the ITER Fusion Reactor announce new physics particle, known as the Existention. Previously only observed being emitted by cats placed in trap boxes filled with deadly acid, the creation of synthetic Existentions will open up a whole new line of research in quantum bogodynamics. An anonymous source close to the research team said it happened when the tight jeans worn by one of the research assistants distracted the operator of the reactor, causing what she loosely termed a "man event".
I cringe everytime I hear english. It's the language of borrowed words, and I'm pretty sure the rules for it were invented a lot later, when people realized they might have to teach it. This is why when it comes to english, I prefer to be practical: If it's understandable by everyone involved, it is "good" language. If nobody understands it, it is "bad" language. Whether the words are on the approved list or not is pedantic and not useful.
We need a data-literate citizenry, not just a small elite [group] of hackers...
You aren't going to get that, because what you're talking about is citizen-to-citizen education. Hackers do that already amongst themselves, and as a result they are constantly watched by the government and often viewed as a threat to the state. The government only wants people educated to a certain level -- that level being whatever is necessary so they can become a wage slave. Anything more than that, and you're abnormal, and therefore a threat.
You'll never have a data-literate citizentry, because you'll never have a government that wants citizens to be capable of independent thought, critical thinking, and access to the facts and circumstances in realtime (or even a reasonable time) because that's a security risk. All that data being released without form or processing ability is not to help you, it's to overwhelmn you and divide you to the point where no criticism can be effectively leveraged against the government because it's simply too large, too entrenched, to make any form of protest useful.
As far as I can tell, any place with "prohibited area" in the name doesn't sound hospitable.
Oh sure, just because the place is teeming with unexploded munitions, you think it's somehow less hospitable than most of the bush? Please -- it's more hospitable! I mean, there's signs of civilization in there and stuff...
Slashdot Mirror
Representatives of bands around here tend to get lynched. Just use the word copyright. Comeon now, just one little word... it's all we need. I dare 'ya!
... Nevermind that the vast majority of gun crimes are from unlicensed gun users. Very rarely is a crime committed by someone with a license, because they receive training and take their responsibility seriously.
Why not just spin it, and while it's spinning, lower the ambient temperature so that it freezes? And if you remember your thermodynamics, you'll remember that raising or lowering *pressure* raises or lowers the temperature of a gas -- seal it up, spin it, then freeze it. Easy peasy.
After all, we are looking at 20-30% of the economy disappearing in the US overnight.
Yeah, because we moved to a service-based economy and then signed treaties and laws which put those services in a global marketplace, competing with a vastly larger labor pool. The net result is we lost all those jobs to other countries, who now sell their cheaper services back to us. End result is less of our dollars are circulating in the country where they can contribute to the multiplier effect.
Richard, I love ya and everything you've done for the open source community, just want that clear. Now what the sam hell are you doing telling us to "recover" our freedoms? You don't recover freedom -- you fight for it. You disobey, you protest, you drum up support, tear down walls, and throw wrenches in the establishment. Freedom isn't free, and you won't get it by firing off strongly worded letters.
Look at it from the other side -- the ACTA is about trying to make a global police framework to try and stop file sharinng. Let them pass it. Let the government sink billions upon billions tryinng to solve the problem, while we come up with ever more clever ways to evade detection, and eat away at their bottom lines. The ACTA is about moving the costs from an industry to a global support group of governments. Now is the time to maximize damage -- gut their bank accounts, make free copies pervasive.
Slip how-to manuals into people's mailboxes, leave CDs on the bus with instructions on how to get stuff for free, build and distribute new tools that are harder to track, use stronger encryption, and frustrate traffic analysis efforts. Bury these fuckers to the point where for every dollar they can recover through this kind of legislation they have to pay five more. Keep the hurt machine running at full power.
That's how you defeat the ACTA and protect your freedoms -- by going on the offensive. If they have no rules, neither should we. They want to hand this mess over to the government and we should be only too happy to obliege them -- let's make it cost more than the combined budget of all of law enforcement to recover what little cash they're getting back now. Eventually the costs for this will make it a public spectacle and people will question why we're diverting so much money and throwing all these people in jail and ruining their lives and the general public will finally ask the question it should have been asking years ago:
Is it worth it?
WARNING: The Sun is radioactive! Avoid using it to make phone calls. -- San Francisco.
Assuming there isn't a weakness in the key, or how it's stored on the chip. Perhaps simply having physical possession of the card for a minute is enough to 'scan' it and reveal the key.
Facts about the cost to obtain and crack one RSA token...
Why do people on slashdot invariably assume that the most difficult to attack component is the measure of the security of the system? O_o
Apparently it's more complicated than some hand waving at "other inputs" or nobody would use the RSA security cards that operate on the same principal.
No, it is not complicated: There's a number being displayed on the card every six seconds. For it to have any value in authentication, that number needs to be somewhere else every six seconds too. Which means it's not "random". It might pass every test for random, but it isn't. Which means there is an algorithm in place. That algorithm requires two things: First, that it stay syncronized (time), and second that there's a reference point shared between the circuitry on the card and the bank where that number is validated.
Those requirements all lead to one conclusion: PRNG. The seed is probably a key of some kind plus time. There are at least two places that key is kept: On the card, and at the bank, and probably more places. Access any of them, and you recover the key. It's just a question of cost.
Now here's the kicker: 100,000 credit cards linked to a random cross-section of the population is worth a fair amount of money. Probably more than the cost of cracking that protection. And that means it's still profitable and practical to crack it.
178 people. Remember that number.
Unless the card is radioactive it's not "random"... it's pseudorandom, and therefore based on an algorithm. Figure out the seed (initial vector) and other inputs, and you're right where you started, only your clients feel more secure and the criminals have to spend an extra few bucks. Given that there are multinational laboratories churning out thousands of dup cards, and assuming they have an active distribution network... it's safe to say these aren't the only guys or the first.
Turn to page 5...paragraph 4, sentence 3, word 4. Write it in the box. Insert dongle to continue. Serial numbers, online activation, warder, blah blah blah, and the list goes on.
Guys, no matter how you want to fuck with the technology, you can't erase one simple fact: At some point it needs to be viewed by a human, listened to by a human, interpreted... by a human. That means that at some point the data comes out analog, and can be scanned, manipulated, copied, and everything else.
DRM will always be an excercise in fail.
Slashdot's role is to provide a mostly uninformed but passionate argument between a few straw-man positions based on little evidence, but Pinker & Carr beat us to it.
Which is exactly why we have NASA engineers and some of IT's top minds making posts and comment submissions, amongst many others. I'd say slashdot's average post quality is a lot more informed than, say, 4Chan.
our use of the Net is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers.
Our education (or lack thereof) is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers. A constant deluge of advertisements, commercials, billboards, 30 second sound-clips, etc., isn't helping. Critical thinking is a skill, not a talent -- as such, it is learned. Blaming an inanimate pile of wires, servers, and routers on that is absurd.
The Net and other digital technologies 'are the only things that will keep us smart'
Human intellectual capacity hasn't significantly altered in over 16,000 years. The internet is not, in the span of one or even five generations, going to change it.
'We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors -- important skills, to be sure -- but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.'
That training has nothing to do with the internet. It is the byproduct of paradigm shifts in how we socialize with one another. The internet may have enabled that, but by no means is it solely or even largely responsible for it.
Either you hiccup'd or slashdot did. Wrong thread, dude.
Why would you need to? What is the basis of your assumption?
The majority of wells show rising levels of pollutant, and the water tables in many places shows a consistent downward trend because we've been using it for irrigation and industrial processes -- and it's not an entirely closed system.
It's a helluva lot easier than making more oil.
So what do you use to keep chicken from sticking to the pan when cooking? Fuel oil doesn't have to come from dinosaurs. But regardless, that's not the point. Crude oil is used because it has a high energy density by volume, and it's still relatively easy to get to -- you stick a straw in the ground and suck. Viola, instant high energy density fuel. Science can find a replacement for this. It might be expensive, require infrastructure retooling, etc., but it can be done.
But if we run out of drinking water because our wells and lakes are filled with poisons, all the oil in the world won't save our sorry asses. Every human being that ever existed needed water to survive -- daily. It's only the past few iterations of humanity that have needed it, and I'm certain we'll survive as a species without it, and without having to look at making large sections of land uninhabitable or reducing the population to do so. Water is serious business. Oil is a plaything for scientists and engineers to work out an alternative for. There is no alternative for water.
Well, I tried. :\ Thanks.
Let me just say that fusion power is aweful; we should be using solar power instead.
The difference is I'm about 93 million miles from the reactor that produces "solar" power, but the nearest nuclear reactor to me is about 15 miles away. Now, considering the one 93 million miles away has been running without any malfunction for about 4.6 billion years, give or take a few million. So far, we've only managed to make a few hundred nuclear plants around the world, and we've had about a dozen accidents since the first one was created in the past 100 years.
Now, if I had to choose which one was more likely to last and be reliable, I'd pick the one 93 million miles away.
But its pretty easy to desalinate water if need be, its non-trivial to make more oil.
Easy? No. What follows is a lot of statistics I pulled from a lot of sources. I can't footnote them all here, because it would make the post hideously long and unintelligible.
The largest desalination plant on the planet is the Jebel Ali Desalination Plant in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is scheduled to go online this month. The estimated cost construction cost is $550m USD and requires 2,000MW of power. It houses 8 desalination plants, each capable of producing 17.5m gallons of water. The power plant will cost another $1.7B USD. There was also a 400/132kW substation built for the project, at a cost of $60m USD.
Operating costs for the project cannot yet be determined, however in the past about 45-50% of the operating costs of a desalination plant was energy costs. Right now, a coal-fired base plant costs about $1.6-2m per MW of output. For simplicity and to low-ball our estimate, we'll say that it costs $1.6 per MW. $1.6m x 2k = $3.2B USD, or a yearly operating cost estimate of $6.4B
Total construction cost: $2.31B USD.
Water purified daily: 140m gallons
Operating costs: $6.4B/yr
Cost per gallon per day: $0.13
Now, let's assume that we had to switch to desalination and purification of potable water in this country. The per capita usage of water in the United States from 1996-1998 was 160.6 gallons per day. We'll ignore any adjustments or looking for more recent data in the interests of getting a ballpark estimate. The current estimated population in the US as of July is ~310.2m. That means our yearly use of water is somewhere around 49.82B gallons of water, per day. To purify that much water using desalination would cost us around $236.4B USD per year, just in maintenance costs.
Still think desalination is "easy" ?
Unrelated, but I've always wondered so I have to ask... are you a girl who is training for something (if so, what?), or are you training to be a girl? (whether you are or are not currently female). Your name makes me curious every time I see it :)
Ever tried clicking on my name?
How do these people expect us to get electricity?
You might be a little behind the curve here. The purpose of the Green movement isn't to create economical and sustainable energy; It's to allow the Boomers to purchase indulgences in the form of carbon credits and other non-sense to relieve their guilt over having cut investments in every major social institution from education to medicine, so that they could live the most hedonistic lifestyle possible.
If they were serious about creating sustainable and renewable energy, they would invest more in physics to prevent the eventual heat death of the universe. Or, of more immediate concern, how we're going to survive as a civilization when we run out of drinkable water. Because of all the resources we have on the planet, oil is not the one I'm worried about: I can live without oil. I can't live without water. And guess which one's disappearing faster? /sarcasm
ITER, Europe -- Physicists at the ITER Fusion Reactor announce new physics particle, known as the Existention. Previously only observed being emitted by cats placed in trap boxes filled with deadly acid, the creation of synthetic Existentions will open up a whole new line of research in quantum bogodynamics. An anonymous source close to the research team said it happened when the tight jeans worn by one of the research assistants distracted the operator of the reactor, causing what she loosely termed a "man event".
I cringe every time I hear the word 'tweet'.
I cringe everytime I hear english. It's the language of borrowed words, and I'm pretty sure the rules for it were invented a lot later, when people realized they might have to teach it. This is why when it comes to english, I prefer to be practical: If it's understandable by everyone involved, it is "good" language. If nobody understands it, it is "bad" language. Whether the words are on the approved list or not is pedantic and not useful.
We need a data-literate citizenry, not just a small elite [group] of hackers...
You aren't going to get that, because what you're talking about is citizen-to-citizen education. Hackers do that already amongst themselves, and as a result they are constantly watched by the government and often viewed as a threat to the state. The government only wants people educated to a certain level -- that level being whatever is necessary so they can become a wage slave. Anything more than that, and you're abnormal, and therefore a threat.
You'll never have a data-literate citizentry, because you'll never have a government that wants citizens to be capable of independent thought, critical thinking, and access to the facts and circumstances in realtime (or even a reasonable time) because that's a security risk. All that data being released without form or processing ability is not to help you, it's to overwhelmn you and divide you to the point where no criticism can be effectively leveraged against the government because it's simply too large, too entrenched, to make any form of protest useful.
Wait, the iPad suffered a leak? That's why you always buy pads with wings. (groan)
As far as I can tell, any place with "prohibited area" in the name doesn't sound hospitable.
Oh sure, just because the place is teeming with unexploded munitions, you think it's somehow less hospitable than most of the bush? Please -- it's more hospitable! I mean, there's signs of civilization in there and stuff...