Yes, I would care if you set up a listening post in my house, as your comment implies. However, I think what you meant is would I mind if you set up a listening post in your own house. That's fine with me. And if EMI from my cordless phone or 802.11b LAN reach into your house and you receive them. that's cool too. I don't talk about things on the cordless phone that I don't mind having the whole neighborhood hear. If I'm doing anything "sensitive" over the LAN it's double encrypted (SSH inside of WEP).
So, to answer your question, yes it is your right to listen to any radio transmissions that travel thru your house. At least in my opinion. Current US law does not reflect my opinion.
I find the whole idea that somebody can broadcast information over the radio waves to their whole neighborhood (or in the case of DirectTV, a whole continent) and have any expectation of privacy with respect to that information. That's just stupid. It's like claiming you have an expectation of privacy for a classified ad in the paper.
XOR is just used as a generic way of applying ciphers to plaintext. Use a secure algorithm such as IDEA or RC4 to create a pseudo random bitstream using your key as input, and XOR that with the plain text. On the other end, the recipient regenerates the same bitstream and XOR's it with the cipher text and out pops the plaintext.
In any well designed cipher system, the generated bitstream will never be repeated so the technique you describe isn't of much use. Technicially, the output of the cipher is the "key" and your passphrase or key or whatever is a "key generating key".
Actually, I think he makes the mistake of confusing television with the Internet. The current state of the nations intellect is not the fault of the Internet. If anything the Internet is the last great hope of intellectual discourse. Every other method of mass information dissemenation has been filled 100% to the gills with marketing and propaganda. Television is a lost cause. Even PBS runs what can only be described as commercials between the shows. Radio is no better. Print has a handful of alternative voices here and there, but these operations are usually a hair's width from going bankrupt.
Hell, look at slashdot. How many people do you think will read this post of mine? A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? I may not be reaching the whole country, but this is an effective way for me to make my opinion known and hopefully provoke some thought.
But, of course, this is exactly what Carr want's to prevent. After all, everyone knows that PBS is non-commercial and so doesn't air commercial advertisements. No fact rating for that. And everyone knows that there is no system of propaganda and censorship at work in the mass media. That's just a conspiracy theory! No fact rating for that.
Basically everything he is advocating is already being applied to the broadcast television networks. Gosh, let's make the Internet more like broadcast TV. That should improve the intellect of the nation! If I was in charge of his censorship program the first thing I would block would be this lame article. Fortunately, such power doesn't exist and salon.com can publish whatever they want. This is good, since some of their articles are worthwhile. This one, however, is not?
To a certain extent this is a zero sum game. Every server which is running Linux is not running Win2K. Vis a vis every server running Win2K is not running Linux. And if your company decides to ditch M$ stuff for it's servers, it might very well ditch it's MSCE's too.
Remember, in 1999 IDC found that Linux market share increased from 16% to 25% over 1999 while NT remained stable at 38%. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that at this growth rate Linux will be ruling the roost in a few years. Will that actually happen? Who knows. I personally can't wait to see the 2000 numbers. Also keep in mind that these numbers are actual shipments. While it probably acurately reflects the number of new NT installations, there are almost certainly several Linux installs per shipment.
I would not consider port scanning to be like actually trying locks. It is in fact the least intrusive method possible to determine whether or not a machine is offering services to the public. In this way, it's more like walking down a street looking to see which buildings have open doors and welcome mats.
Here's a real world example I just came across at work. Part of our address range is in use by a high school. It seems that one of their computers decided to scan for FTP ports on a whole lot of addresses. I don't know if it was a student doing it or if the machine was hacked first. But, do you think this is "a violation of property rights"? For someone to go out and ask machines on the internet if they allow anonymous FTP access?
I agree completely that if someone is doing things which can only be viewed as a hacking attempt such as scanning for ports with commonly known vulnerabilities which are not used for public services, that's a problem. But, if someone is just looking for machines which are allowing anonymous FTP, who cares? This isn't like "trying the locks" at all.
It seems like you have a pretty extreme view of what it means to "use" someone elses computer. Is trying to FTP to a machine something which deserves a stiff penalty? What about a ping? What if I happen to get an arp sent down your DSL line? What about when IIS tries to connect back to web clients to get name information? Is this a criminal act on the part of Microsoft to engage in illegal tresspass? Did Cable and Wireless give me implicit authorization to send packets thru their router when they connected it to the internet? Did you give me implicit authorization to send packets to your host when you connected it to the internet? Is it my responsibility to intuit that you don't want FTP sessions? Or is it your responsibility to block FTP packets if they are unwelcome?
Ogg Vorbis support is available today. Check out www.bebits.com and you can find Vorbis codecs for the BeOS. One nice feature of the BeOS is that it includes a robust API for handling audio and video. Once you install the codecs for a new file type, all of your existing applications can access it immediately.
So, you install the codecs by putting what amounts to some.so files in the proper place in your ~/config/add-ons directory. Once this is done the stock BeOS player app will play your Vorbis files, and the stock BeOS CDPlayer app will save CDDA tracks as Vorbis files if you want. Any well-written app will ask the OS for a list of available audio encoders and present the user with the choices.
I actually just got thru adding this functionality into one of my projects. It only takes a small handful of code to iterate thru all the encoders installed. Now, if a user adds a codec or upgrades an existing one, my program benefits automatically. No recompile needed.
While it's been tough to make people realize why DeCSS should be legal and the DMCA is bad, examples like this will make it much easier. I bet there are very few people who would not get their dander up at being told that they can't read a book to their kids.
This is a great argument against UCITA. I would presume that it is the shrink-wrap license on this "software" that might make these permissions enforceable. Let's face it, you couldn't make up a better villian than this. "See what these companies are doing with their licenses? They're telling you that you can't read to your kids anymore!" No longer do we have to make up "what if's", we have real world examples that every person can associate with!
Oh man, that brings back memories. When I took my first Operating Systems class at Illinois, I was thrust into C++. It was the same kind of deal. "Hello class. All of your MP's for this class will be written in C++. If you know C++, great. If you don't, we recommend that you learn it." At least we didn't have to use templates and exceptions. Never did have any classes in Modula-2 though.
Actually, most of these questions apply to the design of everything in the world. If I'm building a bridge, a car, a building, a plane, a chair, an adhesive, anything at all, these questions apply. So, by your logic, all design tasks should be subsumed under a single profession: engineering. This whole idea of having "Chemical Engineering" and "Software Engineering" and "Civil Engineering" and "Structural Engineering" just has a poor effect on the base strategies that all engineering tasks share. Right?
I remember doing this on my TI/99-4A. What a nightmare. I did pick up a copy of the Timex Sinclair List Manager software on cassette tape at a garage sale this summer. Best $0.25 I ever spent. It's still new in the shrink wrap!
Your flywheel drive is not a reactionless drive. The step that you leave out is how to accelerate and decelerate the flywheels. Your description just assumes that you can do it, but I can guarantee that the reaction you get from doing this will cancel out any motion you might hope to acheive. All your problem has done is reframe the question of "how to I build a reactionless drive" to "how to I spin flywheels without an opposite reaction".
There is no reason to believe that a reactionless drive is possible at all. With that said, it may be quite possible to build spaceships with drive systems that would be considered reactionless by todays standards. Space is not actually empty. Although it is almost devoid of matter, it does contain magnetic and gravitational fields. It may be quite possible that we could learn to push on those fields to create motion.
Think of it this way: For a long time people did not know what a vacuum was, and didn't really know what air was. After all, it's pretty much invisible. If you didn't know that air existed, and believed that we were surrounded by empty space, how would a propeller-driven airplane work? Forgetting that air was understood long before thermodynamics, the airplane would appear to be a reactionless drive. After all, it moves around without anything to push on!
On the same note, it may be possible to build spaceships that create motion by pushing on the fabric of the universe itself. By todays standards, they would behave like a reactionless drive. But, that's just because we don't understand how to push against "empty" space.
As for ramjets, the answer to your question is yes, you would get slowed down by the collecting of the hydrogen. The hope is that the power you gain by fusing the hydrogen would be powerful enough to overcome the drag of collecting the hydrogen. Just like your car. The air creates a lot of drag on your car as it moves through it. However, your car is able to take some of that air into the engine, combine it with gasoline, and create enough motive force to overcome the wind resistance. At least, up to a point. Same thing with a ramjet. Or a turbojet engine on an airplane.
Actually, the two party system in built in to the Electoral College. There are a lot of factors that build up to this, but here goes. The electoral system itself is geared to make it very hard for a new party to come onto the scene. Since a party get's no electoral votes until it can take a whole state, the final tally grossly under estimates how well a third party has done. By popular vote, Nader earned the equivelant of several electoral votes. However, the winner-take-all system means that he got no electoral votes whatsoever. Perot is even more striking. He got quite a significant chunk of the popular vote, but once again not a single electoral vote. Knowing that even getting 10, 20 or 30 percent of the popular vote can result in zip, nada, zilch, on the electoral level is a strong disincentive.
The electoral college is also geared towards two parties in another way: by requiring the winner to win a majority of the electoral votes, instead of a mere plurality. So, if somehow a third party did begin to get electoral votes (through reform at the state level), a three way split would result in no majority winner. Result: congress decides who the president is. So, if the people did actually choose among three parties, the people wouldn't get to choose at all! Now, most people don't even know about this little fact. But, if a third party ever does get a presidential election thrown to congress, you can bet everyone is going to freak out and want two parties again.
So, you in fact seem to have helped prove my point: most American's don't realize that the two-party bias is in fact built into the system. It isn't some kind of mystical truth that free people in any democracy will tend towards two parties. Our current system is built that way.
While you are right that any system can exhibit pathologies at the boundaries, our seems especially sick. Let's face it, the two parties are puting forth pretty crappy choices. They argree on almost everything, resulting in a lame mish-mash of middle-of-the-road pabulum. Most of the differences are in the details. Neither one is going to risk the soft-money bribes they are hooked on. Hell, the majority of the voters don't even bother to show up anymore. That's the most telling sign there: most people who could vote don't bother. Agh. Those fools could elect Bozo the Clown if they would just get together and do it.
Gore's nation-wide lead is an order of magnitude higher as a percentage of the vote. I'm quite aware that there are more votes in the nation than there are in FL. However, the nation-wide lead is ~200K/100M ~= 0.2%. The FL lead is (being generous) ~1K/6M ~= 0.017%.
I think you are quite right to guess that Bush would have conceded if it was up to the popular vote. It's one thing to ask a few counties for a recount to make up a few hundred votes. I don't think anyone actually believes that the Republican's would have the entire country recount hoping that they could make up almost a quarter million votes. Is 0.2% a slim margin? Sure is. Would anybody actually try to make that up with a recount? I seriously doubt it on a national scale.
I'm also guessing by your last comment that you think Gore would ask for a recount to make up 200,000 votes. Why is that? Because he is winning the popular vote, winning the electoral vote, but is losing in a problem-ridden, poorly run election by two one-hundredths of a percent? I don't understand why people give the Democrats a hard time for wanting to try and get an accurate recount. I find it more interesting why the Republicans are trying so hard to prevent one!
While we're at it, you can blame me! I voted for Ralph Nader;-)>
I don't know what you mean by "a result that's within the margin of error." If you mean that the margin of error far outmeasures the margin of victory, you are correct. But if that's what you mean, how should the result be "closed"?
The sad truth is that we will never know who won the popular vote in the state of Florida. The number of votes which are up for interpretation far outnumber the margin of victory. The scary part is that an election whose results will never be accurately known is going to decide the next president. We will truly have a government "Of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers" as we begin the 21st century.
Too bad nothing good will probably ever come of this. What is happening this year is just an extreme example of a systemic problem with the way we elect our President. The simple fact is that a margin of 1000 votes should not be deciding the election. The current electoral college system paired with winner-takes-all election in Florida is what created this mess. If Florida choose it's electors in proportion to the popular vote, this would be a non-issue. If the president was elected via popular vote, this would be a non-issue. Sure, the national popular vote was close also, but Gore's lead in the national popular vote is at least an order of magnitude larger than Bush's lead in FL.
Nothing will change, though. Most potential voters don't even bother to show up. The rest don't realize that the current two-party system is engineered in the election laws. They take it on faith that there are two parties because people want only two parties. Most Americans don't realize the severity of the current problem, much less see the systemic weaknesses causing it. Americans have no clue that the rest of the world is looking on thinking that our country is being run like some third rate "fledgling democracy" with rigged elections and everything (plus the largest nuclear arsonal in the world.)
By the same token, how do you know that we both perceive colors the same way? Perhaps the way I perceive blue in my mind looks just like the red that you perceive in your mind. We all kind of assume that we see the colors the same way. But, it could easily be the case that they we all see them differently.
Sure, things like the color wheel dictate a certain amount of consistency in each individuals perception. But the color wheel could be rotated to a different angle for each person. Or perhaps the world to me looks like an inverted negative to you. The fun part is that there is absolutely no way to tell.
I don't expect anyone will see this, but here goes. Most Unix TCP/IP stacks are perfectly happy to let you specify addresses in decimal or hexadecimal. For example, on my Sun all the following are equivalent:
I'm sure I could leave off the http:// to, and just jump around to random numbers.
The current system is rigged.
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 3
While person and paper might be simple, it is far from unmolestable. Were you asked for identification when you voted? I wasn't. I could have found all the info I needed to vote in my name in the phone book. Some consider it to be a legal problem to require anything to vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests were (rightly) thrown out. In at least some areas, this has be taken to mean that requiring identification is also wrong. So in quite a few areas, voter fraud is trivial.
Take a look at FL, and all the anomolies that are popping up there. Now they are saying that with nearly 6 million votes cast, the difference is less than 400 votes. I'm supposed to believe that Gore got 99.99% as many votes as Bush? I don't think that that's realistic at all without some outside influence pushing the totals together. It's just a little disturbing that this election might be decided by a few hundred "votes" when tens of thousands of votes have been thrown out for being double-punched (something which is easy to to do a ballot _after_ it's been cast.)
The simple fact is that this system is easily tampered with, and the amount of power and money that is at stake is capable of corruping a lot of people into being dishonest. We need a system which both allows people to verify that there votes were correctly included in the final tally, and also allows some random percentage of the votes to be audited after the fact to check for fraud. While secret ballots have advantages, one big disadvantage is that fraud is almost impossible to detect after the fact.
I know that the skydiver isn't going to need ceramic tiles like the space shuttle. But, there will be some heat produced during the fall. Think of it this way: a 100Kg body is at 165,000 feet above sea level. It contains a large amount of potential energy due to the height. Almost all of that potential energy has to be dissipated away as heat before the body comes to rest at the ground. Can anybody who still remembers their basic physics compute the amount of heat that should be produced? How much of it will end up in the skydiver? I guess a lot of the heat will end up in the air you are falling thru, so this probably isn't a big deal. But I bet the amount of heat involved would incinerate you if you weren't being air-cooled by a 100mph wind for most of the fall.
That's an interesting point about a direct routing table. In a couple of years, putting a 64-bit processor into your router with 48 bits of physical address space might be entirely possible. More than enough space to keep a route for every single address. Your route-lookup time should be O(1), right? If you actually had a network route, you could just store it as a bunch of individual host routes. Cool.
Sure, BGP would probably freak out, and it might not be a good idea to update the core routing table every time some laptop reboots. The table would never converge, but what the hell? Why not? In a few years, the necessary memory won't be worth squat. Embedded processors will be running at 1GHz. BGP would probably need some updates to keep route flapping down. It sounds scary, but in a few years this will be totally doable.
It gives quite a few advantages, also. 100% of address are portable. Addresses can be handed out without any concern for the effect on the routing table, making for very efficient distribution of IPv4 address. IP mobility becomes a non-existent problem. Most importantly, I can finally have my own personal, portable, routable/32 network. Maybe I'll multi-home my DSL connection. Yeehaw!:-0> What a great idea! I'm off to the patent office...
This seems to be more of a scare article than anything else. This is primarily a problem of memory. Given the rapid advances in the RAM industry, I would be suprised if the global routing table could grow too fast. Even the article itself says that within a couple of years, routers might need gigabits of memory. So what. Is spec'ing out a whole GB of RAM on a > $100K router really going to be a big deal in two years? Hell, if you bought 1GB of RAM for Cisco's top of the line router (12000 series GSR), you would spend ~$30K today. Moore's Law says that cost will drop to less than $10K within a couple of years. That's chump change on a serious router. Cisco charges that much for the power supplies alone.
Let's face it. The global routing table is never going to stop growing. It's certainly never going to get any smaller. Every year the core routers will need more memory than the year before. Is this a bad thing? That the Internet is growing? I don't think so. Personally I think everybody who wants it should be able to get portable address space. But, that probably would melt down the routers. Not to mention exhausing the IPv4 address space;-)>
I knew I had read that some local schools were dropping DARE. I don't know any details of the new program, and I'm not going to pay for the full article, but the intro has a nice summary. Oh, this is in Colorado in case you couldn't guess.
Article 26 of 33, Article ID: 0000226063
Published on 07/02/2000, DAILY CAMERA
COUNTY POLICE DROP DARE
BROOMFIELD POLICE ARE THE LATEST TO SWITCH DRUG EDUCATION
APPROACH
The end of the DARE program in Broomfield marks the slow demise of the once-popular drug education
curriculum throughout Boulder County.
The Broomfield Police Department recently scrapped DARE, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance
Education, and replaced it with a program that covers a variety of topics, including bullying and underage
drinking. By doing so, Broomfield joined other municipalities in the area __ including Boulder, Louisville,
Nederland and Longmont __ that now use local schoo
Your search terms appear 12 times in this article.
Using the Internet as a model of free enterprise is a joke. The "market" was busy building AOL and CompuServe while government funding was deploying the Internet. No company would have ever dumped the funding necessary to deploy the Internet without doing something to assure their future control over it. Even now most companies are doing their damnest to replace open protocols with closed. TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, along with the orginal web browsers and servers all came out of government funded institutions. It would do you well to remember that companies do not invent things to help people. Companies don't give a rat's ass about helping people. They exist to make money. Period. If they can make money helping people, they will. If they can make more money screwing people, they will do that instead.
Don't get me wrong, I voted for Browne in '96. And while I still consider myself a libertaian on social issues such as religion, war on some-drugs, etc, I have come to believe that their economic policy would turn this country into a shithole. The already disturbing amount of power that corporations would wield would increase dramatically. Pollution would increase. Poverty would increase (almost certainly increasing crime at the same time.) This would not be a pretty place to live.
The only part of this theory that doesn't fit is the almost total lack of donations the Libertarians get from large corporations. You would think their pro-business stance would get them millions in corporate donations, but that isn't happening. You can argue it's because they are a small party, but the money that corporations have available could create a viable third pary out of thin air. My main theory is that more large corporations believe that they are much better off with government regulation than without. Let's face it, the government spends trillions of dollars, large amounts of which are used to buy things from corporations. How many defense contractors would even exist if the budget was cut drastically? How many billions would the telecommunications giants lose if the goverment actually got smaller? In many industries, government regulation greatly increases the barrier to entry, decreasing competition and increasing corporate profits. All the rules and regulations also make the marketplace more stable. Changes get slowed down, which helps multi-nationals keep pace. Companies don't want no regulations. They want regulations which benefit them and hurt their competetors. For that matter, companies don't like competetion. Oh sure, they claim they do, but that's only when they are not the dominant player in a market. Once a company is dominant, it wants to be a monopoly since that allows for the highest profits.
The problem with NSI is that they are serving two roles. They run the root DNS servers. This gives them a guaranteed flow of income no matter how much the customers hate them. Their second role is that of a registrar.
Now, they seem to do a pretty good job of running the root name servers. The problem is that this position gives them an advantage over the other registrars. For one, they are guaranteed to have income. No matter how badly they screw up, or how much market share they lose, they will still have money rolling in because all of their competition has to pay them. In addition, as in this case, they can arbitrarily snap up domains without having to actually pay for them. Any other registrar that wanted to play this game would have to fork over cash to NSI to fund it.
What I think ICANN should dictate is this. One or more companies will be given contracts to register domain names, similar to what is done now. A second group of one or more companies will be given contracts to run the root servers. People who register a domain will pay the first group. The first group will pay some fee to the second group for each domain they want served. The contracts for both groups will stipulate that they are not allowed to own, be owned by, partner with, or be the same as any company in the other group.
The abuse that is happening with the current system is out of hand. NSI is acting like a greedy spoiled brat who is causing untold amounts of grief for thousands of hard working admins out there. Unfortunately, with the current system, they can and will keep doing it. In fact, I would expect their behavior to actually get worse as their market share declines. As they lose customers, past behavior indicates that they will abuse their power more to make up for the lost profits.
802.11 specifies three PHY layers: Direct Sequence (DSSS), Frequency Hopping (FHSS), and Infrared (IR). DSSS and FHSS both run at 1Mbps and 2Mbps (depending on signal strength.) I believe that IR also runs at 2Mbps, but I've never actually seen one.;-)>
802.11a is what you call 802.nextgen. It uses an orthogonal frequency domain multiplexing (OFDM) to deliver from 6Mbps to 54Mbps in the 5.0GHz N-UNII frequencies.
802.11b is High Rate DSSS physical layer (HR/DSSS). It is an extension to DSSS which adds 5.5Mbps and 11Mbps data rates.
There is no such thing as "802.11b - 11Mb Frequency Hopping". Only DSSS has been extended to 11Mbps.
Source: IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A Designer's Companion By Bob O'Hara and Al Petrick.
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Yes, I would care if you set up a listening post in my house, as your comment implies. However, I think what you meant is would I mind if you set up a listening post in your own house. That's fine with me. And if EMI from my cordless phone or 802.11b LAN reach into your house and you receive them. that's cool too. I don't talk about things on the cordless phone that I don't mind having the whole neighborhood hear. If I'm doing anything "sensitive" over the LAN it's double encrypted (SSH inside of WEP).
So, to answer your question, yes it is your right to listen to any radio transmissions that travel thru your house. At least in my opinion. Current US law does not reflect my opinion.
I find the whole idea that somebody can broadcast information over the radio waves to their whole neighborhood (or in the case of DirectTV, a whole continent) and have any expectation of privacy with respect to that information. That's just stupid. It's like claiming you have an expectation of privacy for a classified ad in the paper.
XOR is just used as a generic way of applying ciphers to plaintext. Use a secure algorithm such as IDEA or RC4 to create a pseudo random bitstream using your key as input, and XOR that with the plain text. On the other end, the recipient regenerates the same bitstream and XOR's it with the cipher text and out pops the plaintext.
In any well designed cipher system, the generated bitstream will never be repeated so the technique you describe isn't of much use. Technicially, the output of the cipher is the "key" and your passphrase or key or whatever is a "key generating key".
Actually, I think he makes the mistake of confusing television with the Internet. The current state of the nations intellect is not the fault of the Internet. If anything the Internet is the last great hope of intellectual discourse. Every other method of mass information dissemenation has been filled 100% to the gills with marketing and propaganda. Television is a lost cause. Even PBS runs what can only be described as commercials between the shows. Radio is no better. Print has a handful of alternative voices here and there, but these operations are usually a hair's width from going bankrupt.
Hell, look at slashdot. How many people do you think will read this post of mine? A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? I may not be reaching the whole country, but this is an effective way for me to make my opinion known and hopefully provoke some thought.
But, of course, this is exactly what Carr want's to prevent. After all, everyone knows that PBS is non-commercial and so doesn't air commercial advertisements. No fact rating for that. And everyone knows that there is no system of propaganda and censorship at work in the mass media. That's just a conspiracy theory! No fact rating for that.
Basically everything he is advocating is already being applied to the broadcast television networks. Gosh, let's make the Internet more like broadcast TV. That should improve the intellect of the nation! If I was in charge of his censorship program the first thing I would block would be this lame article. Fortunately, such power doesn't exist and salon.com can publish whatever they want. This is good, since some of their articles are worthwhile. This one, however, is not?
To a certain extent this is a zero sum game. Every server which is running Linux is not running Win2K. Vis a vis every server running Win2K is not running Linux. And if your company decides to ditch M$ stuff for it's servers, it might very well ditch it's MSCE's too.
Remember, in 1999 IDC found that Linux market share increased from 16% to 25% over 1999 while NT remained stable at 38%. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that at this growth rate Linux will be ruling the roost in a few years. Will that actually happen? Who knows. I personally can't wait to see the 2000 numbers. Also keep in mind that these numbers are actual shipments. While it probably acurately reflects the number of new NT installations, there are almost certainly several Linux installs per shipment.
I would not consider port scanning to be like actually trying locks. It is in fact the least intrusive method possible to determine whether or not a machine is offering services to the public. In this way, it's more like walking down a street looking to see which buildings have open doors and welcome mats.
Here's a real world example I just came across at work. Part of our address range is in use by a high school. It seems that one of their computers decided to scan for FTP ports on a whole lot of addresses. I don't know if it was a student doing it or if the machine was hacked first. But, do you think this is "a violation of property rights"? For someone to go out and ask machines on the internet if they allow anonymous FTP access?
I agree completely that if someone is doing things which can only be viewed as a hacking attempt such as scanning for ports with commonly known vulnerabilities which are not used for public services, that's a problem. But, if someone is just looking for machines which are allowing anonymous FTP, who cares? This isn't like "trying the locks" at all.
It seems like you have a pretty extreme view of what it means to "use" someone elses computer. Is trying to FTP to a machine something which deserves a stiff penalty? What about a ping? What if I happen to get an arp sent down your DSL line? What about when IIS tries to connect back to web clients to get name information? Is this a criminal act on the part of Microsoft to engage in illegal tresspass? Did Cable and Wireless give me implicit authorization to send packets thru their router when they connected it to the internet? Did you give me implicit authorization to send packets to your host when you connected it to the internet? Is it my responsibility to intuit that you don't want FTP sessions? Or is it your responsibility to block FTP packets if they are unwelcome?
Ogg Vorbis support is available today. Check out www.bebits.com and you can find Vorbis codecs for the BeOS. One nice feature of the BeOS is that it includes a robust API for handling audio and video. Once you install the codecs for a new file type, all of your existing applications can access it immediately.
.so files in the proper place in your ~/config/add-ons directory. Once this is done the stock BeOS player app will play your Vorbis files, and the stock BeOS CDPlayer app will save CDDA tracks as Vorbis files if you want. Any well-written app will ask the OS for a list of available audio encoders and present the user with the choices.
So, you install the codecs by putting what amounts to some
I actually just got thru adding this functionality into one of my projects. It only takes a small handful of code to iterate thru all the encoders installed. Now, if a user adds a codec or upgrades an existing one, my program benefits automatically. No recompile needed.
While it's been tough to make people realize why DeCSS should be legal and the DMCA is bad, examples like this will make it much easier. I bet there are very few people who would not get their dander up at being told that they can't read a book to their kids.
This is a great argument against UCITA. I would presume that it is the shrink-wrap license on this "software" that might make these permissions enforceable. Let's face it, you couldn't make up a better villian than this. "See what these companies are doing with their licenses? They're telling you that you can't read to your kids anymore!" No longer do we have to make up "what if's", we have real world examples that every person can associate with!
Oh man, that brings back memories. When I took my first Operating Systems class at Illinois, I was thrust into C++. It was the same kind of deal. "Hello class. All of your MP's for this class will be written in C++. If you know C++, great. If you don't, we recommend that you learn it." At least we didn't have to use templates and exceptions. Never did have any classes in Modula-2 though.
Actually, most of these questions apply to the design of everything in the world. If I'm building a bridge, a car, a building, a plane, a chair, an adhesive, anything at all, these questions apply. So, by your logic, all design tasks should be subsumed under a single profession: engineering. This whole idea of having "Chemical Engineering" and "Software Engineering" and "Civil Engineering" and "Structural Engineering" just has a poor effect on the base strategies that all engineering tasks share. Right?
I remember doing this on my TI/99-4A. What a nightmare. I did pick up a copy of the Timex Sinclair List Manager software on cassette tape at a garage sale this summer. Best $0.25 I ever spent. It's still new in the shrink wrap!
Your flywheel drive is not a reactionless drive. The step that you leave out is how to accelerate and decelerate the flywheels. Your description just assumes that you can do it, but I can guarantee that the reaction you get from doing this will cancel out any motion you might hope to acheive. All your problem has done is reframe the question of "how to I build a reactionless drive" to "how to I spin flywheels without an opposite reaction".
There is no reason to believe that a reactionless drive is possible at all. With that said, it may be quite possible to build spaceships with drive systems that would be considered reactionless by todays standards. Space is not actually empty. Although it is almost devoid of matter, it does contain magnetic and gravitational fields. It may be quite possible that we could learn to push on those fields to create motion.
Think of it this way: For a long time people did not know what a vacuum was, and didn't really know what air was. After all, it's pretty much invisible. If you didn't know that air existed, and believed that we were surrounded by empty space, how would a propeller-driven airplane work? Forgetting that air was understood long before thermodynamics, the airplane would appear to be a reactionless drive. After all, it moves around without anything to push on!
On the same note, it may be possible to build spaceships that create motion by pushing on the fabric of the universe itself. By todays standards, they would behave like a reactionless drive. But, that's just because we don't understand how to push against "empty" space.
As for ramjets, the answer to your question is yes, you would get slowed down by the collecting of the hydrogen. The hope is that the power you gain by fusing the hydrogen would be powerful enough to overcome the drag of collecting the hydrogen. Just like your car. The air creates a lot of drag on your car as it moves through it. However, your car is able to take some of that air into the engine, combine it with gasoline, and create enough motive force to overcome the wind resistance. At least, up to a point. Same thing with a ramjet. Or a turbojet engine on an airplane.
Actually, the two party system in built in to the Electoral College. There are a lot of factors that build up to this, but here goes. The electoral system itself is geared to make it very hard for a new party to come onto the scene. Since a party get's no electoral votes until it can take a whole state, the final tally grossly under estimates how well a third party has done. By popular vote, Nader earned the equivelant of several electoral votes. However, the winner-take-all system means that he got no electoral votes whatsoever. Perot is even more striking. He got quite a significant chunk of the popular vote, but once again not a single electoral vote. Knowing that even getting 10, 20 or 30 percent of the popular vote can result in zip, nada, zilch, on the electoral level is a strong disincentive.
The electoral college is also geared towards two parties in another way: by requiring the winner to win a majority of the electoral votes, instead of a mere plurality. So, if somehow a third party did begin to get electoral votes (through reform at the state level), a three way split would result in no majority winner. Result: congress decides who the president is. So, if the people did actually choose among three parties, the people wouldn't get to choose at all! Now, most people don't even know about this little fact. But, if a third party ever does get a presidential election thrown to congress, you can bet everyone is going to freak out and want two parties again.
So, you in fact seem to have helped prove my point: most American's don't realize that the two-party bias is in fact built into the system. It isn't some kind of mystical truth that free people in any democracy will tend towards two parties. Our current system is built that way.
While you are right that any system can exhibit pathologies at the boundaries, our seems especially sick. Let's face it, the two parties are puting forth pretty crappy choices. They argree on almost everything, resulting in a lame mish-mash of middle-of-the-road pabulum. Most of the differences are in the details. Neither one is going to risk the soft-money bribes they are hooked on. Hell, the majority of the voters don't even bother to show up anymore. That's the most telling sign there: most people who could vote don't bother. Agh. Those fools could elect Bozo the Clown if they would just get together and do it.
Gore's nation-wide lead is an order of magnitude higher as a percentage of the vote. I'm quite aware that there are more votes in the nation than there are in FL. However, the nation-wide lead is ~200K/100M ~= 0.2%. The FL lead is (being generous) ~1K/6M ~= 0.017%.
;-)>
I think you are quite right to guess that Bush would have conceded if it was up to the popular vote. It's one thing to ask a few counties for a recount to make up a few hundred votes. I don't think anyone actually believes that the Republican's would have the entire country recount hoping that they could make up almost a quarter million votes. Is 0.2% a slim margin? Sure is. Would anybody actually try to make that up with a recount? I seriously doubt it on a national scale.
I'm also guessing by your last comment that you think Gore would ask for a recount to make up 200,000 votes. Why is that? Because he is winning the popular vote, winning the electoral vote, but is losing in a problem-ridden, poorly run election by two one-hundredths of a percent? I don't understand why people give the Democrats a hard time for wanting to try and get an accurate recount. I find it more interesting why the Republicans are trying so hard to prevent one!
While we're at it, you can blame me! I voted for Ralph Nader
I don't know what you mean by "a result that's within the margin of error." If you mean that the margin of error far outmeasures the margin of victory, you are correct. But if that's what you mean, how should the result be "closed"?
The sad truth is that we will never know who won the popular vote in the state of Florida. The number of votes which are up for interpretation far outnumber the margin of victory. The scary part is that an election whose results will never be accurately known is going to decide the next president. We will truly have a government "Of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers" as we begin the 21st century.
Too bad nothing good will probably ever come of this. What is happening this year is just an extreme example of a systemic problem with the way we elect our President. The simple fact is that a margin of 1000 votes should not be deciding the election. The current electoral college system paired with winner-takes-all election in Florida is what created this mess. If Florida choose it's electors in proportion to the popular vote, this would be a non-issue. If the president was elected via popular vote, this would be a non-issue. Sure, the national popular vote was close also, but Gore's lead in the national popular vote is at least an order of magnitude larger than Bush's lead in FL.
Nothing will change, though. Most potential voters don't even bother to show up. The rest don't realize that the current two-party system is engineered in the election laws. They take it on faith that there are two parties because people want only two parties. Most Americans don't realize the severity of the current problem, much less see the systemic weaknesses causing it. Americans have no clue that the rest of the world is looking on thinking that our country is being run like some third rate "fledgling democracy" with rigged elections and everything (plus the largest nuclear arsonal in the world.)
By the same token, how do you know that we both perceive colors the same way? Perhaps the way I perceive blue in my mind looks just like the red that you perceive in your mind. We all kind of assume that we see the colors the same way. But, it could easily be the case that they we all see them differently.
Sure, things like the color wheel dictate a certain amount of consistency in each individuals perception. But the color wheel could be rotated to a different angle for each person. Or perhaps the world to me looks like an inverted negative to you. The fun part is that there is absolutely no way to tell.
I don't expect anyone will see this, but here goes. Most Unix TCP/IP stacks are perfectly happy to let you specify addresses in decimal or hexadecimal. For example, on my Sun all the following are equivalent:
http://slashdot.org
http://64.28.67.48
http://0x401c4330
http://1075594032
http://0010007041460
I'm sure I could leave off the http:// to, and just jump around to random numbers.
While person and paper might be simple, it is far from unmolestable. Were you asked for identification when you voted? I wasn't. I could have found all the info I needed to vote in my name in the phone book. Some consider it to be a legal problem to require anything to vote. Poll taxes and literacy tests were (rightly) thrown out. In at least some areas, this has be taken to mean that requiring identification is also wrong. So in quite a few areas, voter fraud is trivial.
Take a look at FL, and all the anomolies that are popping up there. Now they are saying that with nearly 6 million votes cast, the difference is less than 400 votes. I'm supposed to believe that Gore got 99.99% as many votes as Bush? I don't think that that's realistic at all without some outside influence pushing the totals together. It's just a little disturbing that this election might be decided by a few hundred "votes" when tens of thousands of votes have been thrown out for being double-punched (something which is easy to to do a ballot _after_ it's been cast.)
The simple fact is that this system is easily tampered with, and the amount of power and money that is at stake is capable of corruping a lot of people into being dishonest. We need a system which both allows people to verify that there votes were correctly included in the final tally, and also allows some random percentage of the votes to be audited after the fact to check for fraud. While secret ballots have advantages, one big disadvantage is that fraud is almost impossible to detect after the fact.
Why would a Quaker attend prom anyway? Aren't Quakers forbidden by their religion from dancing?
Sorry, couldn't resist the pun. Feel free to mod me down. My karma is maxed out anyway.
I know that the skydiver isn't going to need ceramic tiles like the space shuttle. But, there will be some heat produced during the fall. Think of it this way: a 100Kg body is at 165,000 feet above sea level. It contains a large amount of potential energy due to the height. Almost all of that potential energy has to be dissipated away as heat before the body comes to rest at the ground. Can anybody who still remembers their basic physics compute the amount of heat that should be produced? How much of it will end up in the skydiver? I guess a lot of the heat will end up in the air you are falling thru, so this probably isn't a big deal. But I bet the amount of heat involved would incinerate you if you weren't being air-cooled by a 100mph wind for most of the fall.
That's an interesting point about a direct routing table. In a couple of years, putting a 64-bit processor into your router with 48 bits of physical address space might be entirely possible. More than enough space to keep a route for every single address. Your route-lookup time should be O(1), right? If you actually had a network route, you could just store it as a bunch of individual host routes. Cool.
/32 network. Maybe I'll multi-home my DSL connection. Yeehaw! :-0> What a great idea! I'm off to the patent office...
Sure, BGP would probably freak out, and it might not be a good idea to update the core routing table every time some laptop reboots. The table would never converge, but what the hell? Why not? In a few years, the necessary memory won't be worth squat. Embedded processors will be running at 1GHz. BGP would probably need some updates to keep route flapping down. It sounds scary, but in a few years this will be totally doable.
It gives quite a few advantages, also. 100% of address are portable. Addresses can be handed out without any concern for the effect on the routing table, making for very efficient distribution of IPv4 address. IP mobility becomes a non-existent problem. Most importantly, I can finally have my own personal, portable, routable
This seems to be more of a scare article than anything else. This is primarily a problem of memory. Given the rapid advances in the RAM industry, I would be suprised if the global routing table could grow too fast. Even the article itself says that within a couple of years, routers might need gigabits of memory. So what. Is spec'ing out a whole GB of RAM on a > $100K router really going to be a big deal in two years? Hell, if you bought 1GB of RAM for Cisco's top of the line router (12000 series GSR), you would spend ~$30K today. Moore's Law says that cost will drop to less than $10K within a couple of years. That's chump change on a serious router. Cisco charges that much for the power supplies alone.
;-)>
Let's face it. The global routing table is never going to stop growing. It's certainly never going to get any smaller. Every year the core routers will need more memory than the year before. Is this a bad thing? That the Internet is growing? I don't think so. Personally I think everybody who wants it should be able to get portable address space. But, that probably would melt down the routers. Not to mention exhausing the IPv4 address space
Using the Internet as a model of free enterprise is a joke. The "market" was busy building AOL and CompuServe while government funding was deploying the Internet. No company would have ever dumped the funding necessary to deploy the Internet without doing something to assure their future control over it. Even now most companies are doing their damnest to replace open protocols with closed. TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, along with the orginal web browsers and servers all came out of government funded institutions. It would do you well to remember that companies do not invent things to help people. Companies don't give a rat's ass about helping people. They exist to make money. Period. If they can make money helping people, they will. If they can make more money screwing people, they will do that instead.
Don't get me wrong, I voted for Browne in '96. And while I still consider myself a libertaian on social issues such as religion, war on some-drugs, etc, I have come to believe that their economic policy would turn this country into a shithole. The already disturbing amount of power that corporations would wield would increase dramatically. Pollution would increase. Poverty would increase (almost certainly increasing crime at the same time.) This would not be a pretty place to live.
The only part of this theory that doesn't fit is the almost total lack of donations the Libertarians get from large corporations. You would think their pro-business stance would get them millions in corporate donations, but that isn't happening. You can argue it's because they are a small party, but the money that corporations have available could create a viable third pary out of thin air. My main theory is that more large corporations believe that they are much better off with government regulation than without. Let's face it, the government spends trillions of dollars, large amounts of which are used to buy things from corporations. How many defense contractors would even exist if the budget was cut drastically? How many billions would the telecommunications giants lose if the goverment actually got smaller? In many industries, government regulation greatly increases the barrier to entry, decreasing competition and increasing corporate profits. All the rules and regulations also make the marketplace more stable. Changes get slowed down, which helps multi-nationals keep pace. Companies don't want no regulations. They want regulations which benefit them and hurt their competetors. For that matter, companies don't like competetion. Oh sure, they claim they do, but that's only when they are not the dominant player in a market. Once a company is dominant, it wants to be a monopoly since that allows for the highest profits.
The problem with NSI is that they are serving two roles. They run the root DNS servers. This gives them a guaranteed flow of income no matter how much the customers hate them. Their second role is that of a registrar.
Now, they seem to do a pretty good job of running the root name servers. The problem is that this position gives them an advantage over the other registrars. For one, they are guaranteed to have income. No matter how badly they screw up, or how much market share they lose, they will still have money rolling in because all of their competition has to pay them. In addition, as in this case, they can arbitrarily snap up domains without having to actually pay for them. Any other registrar that wanted to play this game would have to fork over cash to NSI to fund it.
What I think ICANN should dictate is this. One or more companies will be given contracts to register domain names, similar to what is done now. A second group of one or more companies will be given contracts to run the root servers. People who register a domain will pay the first group. The first group will pay some fee to the second group for each domain they want served. The contracts for both groups will stipulate that they are not allowed to own, be owned by, partner with, or be the same as any company in the other group.
The abuse that is happening with the current system is out of hand. NSI is acting like a greedy spoiled brat who is causing untold amounts of grief for thousands of hard working admins out there. Unfortunately, with the current system, they can and will keep doing it. In fact, I would expect their behavior to actually get worse as their market share declines. As they lose customers, past behavior indicates that they will abuse their power more to make up for the lost profits.
Just a few corrections on your post.
;-)>
802.11 specifies three PHY layers: Direct Sequence (DSSS), Frequency Hopping (FHSS), and Infrared (IR). DSSS and FHSS both run at 1Mbps and 2Mbps (depending on signal strength.) I believe that IR also runs at 2Mbps, but I've never actually seen one.
802.11a is what you call 802.nextgen. It uses an orthogonal frequency domain multiplexing (OFDM) to deliver from 6Mbps to 54Mbps in the 5.0GHz N-UNII frequencies.
802.11b is High Rate DSSS physical layer (HR/DSSS). It is an extension to DSSS which adds 5.5Mbps and 11Mbps data rates.
There is no such thing as "802.11b - 11Mb Frequency Hopping". Only DSSS has been extended to 11Mbps.
Source: IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A Designer's Companion By Bob O'Hara and Al Petrick.