Competition (or the lack thereof) IS a solid bet. But the reasonsfor the lack may be uclear:
1) Government regulation. It cosst a LOT of moey to get ANY medical device approved for sale. This raises barriers to entry and prevents typically cash-starve startups from entering the marketplace.
2) Insurance. By insulating the buyer from the purchase, insurance prevents companies from having to compete on price. Sure, they COULD cut costs, but then they'd make less money per item without increasing sale. Do a GIS for 'price elasticity'.
3) Small market. Yes, there are lots of old, deaf people, but each hearing device lats a long time, so volume is kept low.
4) Liability. If ANYTHING goes wrong with a medical device, no matter how generally effective, losses range from severe to bankrupting! Once a design has been proven safe/effective, there's a strong isincentive to change anything
Result? few options an high prices. Private aircraft fall into similar market forces. Planes aren't much more complicated than go-carts with a laptop computer bolted into the panel but cost orders of magnitude more.
Signed hashes only assure you of the source of the files. They don't in themselves provide any assurance of trust.
In the majority of these cases, the only thing it would achieve would be that you can state with some confidence that it's definitely the fault of a particular asshat.
How don't they provide provide assurance of trust?
If you trust Vendor A, and you install Vendor A's repo, then the number of things to worry about has just been sharply reduced, because you can reasonably trust that packages signed by Vendor A's repo do, in fact, come from Vendor A.
I think what you meant to say is that hashes only assure that the files came from a specific vendor, and that's self-evident. It's like saying that water is wet.
You don't see how this is a dramtic net improvement?
Strangely, at $90,000 a pop, this strikes me as rather cheap. I wonder if that's a "rate limited" model so that you have to pay big bux more in order to get the full capacity?
Of COURSE there are people onsite. Most likely they have anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people onsite. But what's that going to do for you in the case of a large-scale problem?
The otherwise top rated 365 Main facility in San Francisco went down a few years ago. They had all the shizz, multipoint redundant power, multiple data feeds, earthquake-resistant building, the works. Yet, their equipment wasn't well equipped to handle what actually took them down - a recurring brown-out. It confused their equipment, which failed to "see" the situation as one requiring emergency power, causing the whole building to go dark.
So there you are, with perhaps 25 staff a 4-story building with tens of thousands of servers, the power is out, nobody can figure out why, and the phone lines are so loaded it's worthless. Even when the power comes back on, it's not like you are going to get "hot hands" in anything less than a week!
Hey, even with all the best planning, disasters like this DO happen! I had to spend 2 wracking days driving to S.F. (several hours drive) to witness a disaster zone. HUNDREDS of techs just like myself carefully nursing their servers back to health, running disk checks, talking in tense tones on cell phones, etc.
But what pissed me off (and why I don't host with them anymore) was the overly terse statement that was obviously carefully reviewed to make it damned hard to sue them. Was I ever going to sue them? Probably not, maybe just ask for a break on that month's hosting or something. I mean, I just want the damned stuff to work, and I appreciate that even in the best of situations, things *can* go wrong.
So now I host with Herakles data center which is just as nice as the S.F. facility, except that it's closer, and it's even noticably cheaper. Redundant power, redundant network feeds, just like 365 main. (Better: they had redundancy all the way into my cage, 365 Main just had redundancy to the cage's main power feed)
And, after a year or two of hosting with Herakles, they had a "brown-out" situation, where one of their main Cisco routers went partially dark, working well enough that their redundant router didn't kick in right away, leaving some routes up and others down while they tried to figure out what was going on.
When all was said and done, they simply sent out a statement of "Here's what happened, it violates some of your TOS agreements, and here's a claim form". It was so nice, and so open, that out of sheer goodwill, I didn't bother to fill out a claim form, and can't praise them highly enough!
I type perfect touch type style. At my best, I do about 90-120 WPM, same as you. I know I'm quite a rapid typist, almost able to keep up with natural-rate speech. If you are matching me, what are you really trying to achieve?
It's pretty obvious that whatever the metric, you are well within the realm of where other factors are far more likely to make a difference than typing speed. Of course, if you want to "touch type" like other "trained" folks, do like anybody else, and force yourself to actually do it.
I recommend any of the many touch-typing software packages out there. You don't even have to pay much, 30 seconds of GIS brought this up and it seems quite serviceable!
DISABLE PASSWORD AUTHENTICATION! I wish I had points to mod you up with! I use several strategies:
1) Nonstandard port (despite what you say, it does stop you from getting the automated SSH scans hitting you)
2) Disable password Auth
3) RSA keys with passphrases.
4) Disable the root password. Yes, I'm serious. If I'm remote, I can become root with my passphrase protected RSA key. If I'm local, I can reboot and run kernel mode single. The root password is simply not something I need, so it's only a liability.
I've done a significant amount of contract work over the years, "flying solo" so to speak. I've only once had a contention about copyrights, and since then, I've never done work where I don't own what I write!
My explanation goes something like this:
I have years of experience and have developed a standard set of tools that I use to solve different types of problems. I intend to use these tools to cut costs for you, and it's that time savings that makes me worth the money that I'm charging - I'll do a good job in a short time. But I'm writing the software for YOU, not for somebody else, and if I develop a new idea working on your code, I intend to use that same tool elsewhere. So I'll keep the copyrights, leaving me free to do my job elsewhere, and grant you a license letting you use the software as you see fit. You can do what you want to do, I can do what I want to do, and we can both be happy! I will grant you unlimited use license, including access to the sources, and I will make it transferrable - if you sell the business, it's no problem. The only right I won't grant is the right the resell the software, because I don't want to compete with myself!
This has never been a problem - when explained this way, nobody objects and everybody sees what I'm after.
Loads of comments, alternating between disk and tape, and a few ridiculous, impractical options (Amazon, etc) but nobody here's found the best, cheapest, and most highly redundant method!
You take your 2 TB file, zip compress it, Encrypt it, rename it "Britney Spears Gang Bang kdiaKiS93kDw.mpeg" and stick it on Bit Torrent! It's highly redundant, very secure, costs basically nothing, and your chances of finding it again in 10 years are at least as good as finding a tape 10 years in the future!
PS: I'm a pilot, and if you don't think that "look out!" isn't an explicit part of instruction, think again! The pilot in command, at all times, has the right, privilege, and responsibility to ignore ATC commands if and when the safety of the aircraft is in question! I can't count the number of times I've been given instructions such as "keep your head on a swivel" and/or "don't trust ATC - ALWAYS look for yourself!". When I'm cleared for takeoff, I always double check before turning onto the runway, and given clearance to land, I'm still trying to see if anything is in the way. It's true that you have to ignore your gut feeling, but you should *never* ignore what you see.
But pilots, no matter the instruction given by ATC, have to look at the runway to line the plane up. Instruments get you to within a few hundred feet of the runway, and while there are auto-landers in bigger jets, the last 30 seconds are nearly always performed by a person with his/her hands on the yoke, because auto-landers aren't very "smooth".
So here's the pilot, actually looking AT THE RUNWAY and preparing to land the plane, with a big, bright, yellow schoolbus parked right in the middle. Because their minds are attuned to looking at things like the location of the landing lines, the VASI lights at the side (which given information about your height relative to the runway and distance) and the overal "shape" of the runway, they never saw the big, yellow bus parked in the middle.
And I believe it, because with training, I don't look at the whole runway, even when I try to!
As far as Ice on the wings, I've NEVER heard of instructions like "steer a little manually to determine if there's ice buildup on the wings". Ice forms on the leading edges of wings and struts. You determine that there's ice when you see things like:
A) The plane has difficulty maintaining altitude.
B) The airspeed indicator and/or altitude indicator stop moving. (Ice covering your pitot tube, turn on pitot heater for the former, if the latter, you switch to the cabin pressure source, and compare to the GPS until you land ASAP)
C) The windshield becomes opaque.
D) You see ice on the wings and/or struts.
I suppose it's possible you'd feel the attitude of the plane shift nose up as you tried ot maintain altitude, but that comes back to #1. I don't fly a plane with anti-ice equipment, (EG: wing boots, wind shield heaters, etc) so the general rule is: look out, and if I see any ice, TURN AROUND/GET OUT ASAP!
There was one guy in a suit over stuff like this. So, they sent out a doctor to go with the patient to confirm the symptoms. The guy demonstrated when and where the problems occurred, and sure enough, they did! But what he didn't know was that the cellular company had TURNED OFF the nearby tower on that day, thus was emitting no "low level" radiation at all.
Killed the lawsuit, the guy turned out to be a crazy, and there will be plenty more. Not saying that there aren't some symptoms of low-level radiation, but when somebody turns out to be "ultra sensitive" to these kinds of things, it's a near certainty is all cooked up in their brains.
Is it plugged in? yes? LIER! It it turned on? yes? LIER! Can you see any messeges on the screen? no? LIER!
Why do they lie!??!?
They aren't lying. They literally do not see it.
Your mind is pelted with information every day. Vast, huge, massive swaths of information that make what goes over an OC3 pipe pale in comparison. Your eyes generate a super-hi-Def video stream chock full of useful details about your life and everything around you. Your ears, your sense of smell, all are being monitored 24x7, and don't forget your senses of touch, hunger, and numerous other "metasenses".
There's far more information streaming into your brain than could possibly be processed. So what your mind does is exactly the same thing that your spam filter does at your local ISP: Your mind filters out information that you don't find useful before you are even consciously aware of it!
Studies have shown:
1) People will change lanes into a lane occupied by a motorcycle, even after clearly looking directly at the motorcycle! It's commonplace, as a motorcycle rider myself, I've seen this happen more than once! The reason is that the person isn't looking over to see if there's *anything* there, they're looking to see if a *car* is there. Since my motorcycle isn't a car, the other driver's mind actually filters that fact out before they are consciously aware of it, and to their mind, I'm simply not there. (thanks, brain!)
2) In simulation, highly skilled, trained pilots were instructed to land the "airplane" on a runway littered with stuff. Garbage trucks, buses, big, huge things that were hard to miss. In only a very small number of cases did the otherwise highly skilled, demonstrated, and experienced pilots ever see the junk on the runway, even though they could be seen to be LOOKING DIRECTLY AT THE RUNWAY. Why? Because their minds were only looking for information that was already known to be useful, and filtering out the rest.
3) Think back to when you learned to drive! Everything was bewildering, you were overwhelmed by details too numerous to process easily. Signs and lines seemed to jump out of nowhere. But somehow, it became easier and easier as your mind learned what information was actually needed, and began filtering out the rest. Your mind is trained to look for the red octagonal stop sign, and the street sign that, within your state, looks very consistent. But think about when you experience something new. For example, in my area, they started installing roundabouts where we never had them before. They were a bit disconcerting and bewildering the first few times, and I am a very safe, effective driver. (20 years, no accidents, knock on wood!) My lower brain hadn't learned to filter out all the details of the roundabout, so I had to slow down and process EVERYTHING until I had a chance to train it.
They aren't lying. They literally cannot see what's clearly and demonstrably in front of them. The lower parts of your brain filter out detail and deliver highly processed, compressed information to your cerebrum (the part that's self-conscious) in order to save expensive processing time. Be gentle, be understanding, and accept that the reason why they are calling you is because they need you to see what's wrong and fix it! Accept your pay scale accordingly, and suck it up, because that's human nature, it will always be human nature, and there's not a damned thing you or anybody else can do about it!
However, one thing I've found is that if an error or confirmation is very important, you put red lettering and make somebody type a word, such as "I will pay you $50", or "I'm ready to pay you $200 if I want to delete this" or something before proceeding. Make sure it's different for each situation! I used to just make end users type "confirm" or "accept" but they got used to that.
I don't think the "overreached" was about the contributor agreements, but rather the MySQL claim that the protocol for talking to the database (sending SQL queries) was GPL. Thus non-GPL software was not allowed to use the database, and you should buy the commercial versions.
To programmers and tech weenies such as ourselves, this statement seems absurd: An SQL stream is part of the product? Surely you jest! We can all point to many products that are database agnostic: there are perhaps a billion such products available for download on SourceForge that work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and maybe Oracle and/or SqlServer.
But, for a moment step out of nerd land and into the life of an executive. When you say "database engine" he hears "mwah mah fua bua!" And when you say "SQL Stream" he hears "Muff wa ha dia". But when he sets up a product (such as a Customer Relationship Manager) it's a single product. It might have a half-dozen distinct codebases (DBMS, SQL, PHP, HTML, Javascript, etc.) but even though they are all distinct products in their own right, they are "one product" It's the "Augustus CRM!". It's what he bought.
So do these technical distinctions mean anything at all? Not in the least. And thus, the terms of the GPL would easily and happily apply to the entire product, no matter how technically distinct the pieces.
I've often wondered what makes a product "separate". It's a distinction that's forever being debated on the LKML. Is VMWare in violation of Linux Kernel's GPL License? What about ATI's binary driver? What about somebody who sells hardware with a Linux kernel?
And sure, you have your opinions on each of these examples, but each of these examples have their own gotchas that would make sense to a significant portion of the population, especially the non-technical part(s) of humanity.
What... you think these cars are all about research? Really?
Cars like this are being built by students at schools and Universities. No matter how many times it's been done before, it's still a good idea to do it again to educate another crop of soon-to-be-highly-qualified engineering students. By developing projects such as this one, they get an intimate, first-hand understanding of engineering concepts like systemic efficiency, operational constraints, and the value of weighing costs/benefits.
Engineers who are successful at projects like this get to put this on their resume and then go on to develop cars that are a touch more pragmatic, such as the VW 1-liter.
This isn't a "pshaw" - IT'S THE POINT of exercises like this. And being able to drive from coast to coast on slightly more than 1 gallon of gasoline is pretty f***ing impressive, even if it is on a mylar-covered bicycle with a weed-eater engine on the back!
IF YOU ARE A SCHOOL OFFICIAL PEEKING AT KIDS' PRIVATE MOMENTS, HOW MUCH OF A FREAKIN' BONEHEAD DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO CONFRONT THEM WITH EVIDENCE OBTAINED BY SUCH QUESTIONABLE MEANS?
Bonehead is practically the definition of low-level admin staff in K12 schools. I deal with technology and provide services for K12 schools. So I pretty much have to deal with the high school administrators and tech staff at schools. All the time. And while there are people I certainly admire, there are far more than follow a certain mold:
1) They are not only incompetent, they are grossly so. Their main claim to fame is that they can reload windows. Sometimes they follow the lead of Mordac, Preventer of Information Services and make life a living hell for the other staff, in order to show that they are actually doing something and are "needed".
2) They are terrified that somebody might come along and expose them for the useless consumers of oxygen that they are. So they are very, VERY quick to dismiss any technology or solution that doesn't involve them installing and/or administering it. Especially if there's a cost benefit to doing so. I've seen such people actually shoot down proposals that would benefit the school by over a million dollars because the change was specifically recommended against earlier. In spite of the fact that there were no security or legal risks that could be enumerated by the party involved!
3) They purposefully use barely applicable technical jargon as often as possible to sound intelligent and "on the ball". Often the words are used in a laughably inappropriate manner. Phrases like "The FTP protocol probably had a virus that caused the network routr to hang up". No, I'm not kidding.
4) It seems that they avoid any situation where they might learn something for fear of giving away what they don't know. I think it's a variation of "better to keep quiet and have them wonder if you are a moron than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". Thus, not only are they clueless, they will forever remain so.
5) The school administrators often have a deep-down fear that the tech weenies are incompetent and/or malevolent, but because they can't understand what's going on or why, they are uniquely incapable of doing anything about it. They are afraid of being held "hostage", and rightly so, because it does happen!.
When I'm faced with such people, I have to make sure that every solution or mention of a solution includes mentions of the "capable tech staff" and brown nose until my eyes hurt from the smell. People who think that being "secure" means having an FTP password like "1337god" or their login name spelled backwards.
I'm not at ALL surprised that one such tech got the idea of enforcing their version of justice when they found that they had the technical ability.
They don't do it because they aren't criminals. Who the heck else would we blame but the person responsible for committing the crime?
A highly insightful comment! I wrote a DOS tool the other day, using basic knowledge of HTML and Javascript, that could be used by online groups to make a DDOS. It took me all of about 1 minute to crank out something capable of generating well over a million hits an hour. But despite its stone-age level of technology, did I publish it? Did I make any effort to use it for anything other than my own knowledge and research?
No. I am not a criminal, and although the security knowledge I gained is very valuable to me, I have no interest in being associated with use of a tool like this, no matter how simple and "public knowledge" the underlying concepts. Because I'm not a criminal!
However, this simple fact of human behavior leaves the FBI forever in a lurch: they need to understand how the criminals are operating, but can't really employ the people who operate criminally because "criminals turned white-hat" have a terrible record of keeping their nose clean when getting paid normal wages for what they used to make millions of dollars doing.
Pure white hats (like me) simply never learn the skills of a true black hat hacker, because we don't have any interest in botnets. Put simply: black hats with the skill to be hired lack the ethical skills to be good hires.
And so the FBI/DHS cybercrime divisions are eternally staffed by people of questionable qualifications...
So, I became curious when I read about this DDOS on the Australian websites. I wondered: how hard would it be to write a simple, DDOS tool? Something that didn't require anything fancy, that anybody could do without installing anything special?
So, I wrote something, and tested it on my own local webserver. Surprisingly, it took me less than 10 minutes to write a simple javascript webpage with iframes that generated in excess of a million hits an hour in about 20 lines of HTML + javascript, armed with nothing more than a browser and notepad. I didn't even have to host it; the file was saved locally on my HDD!
The method was simple: a webpage with a bunch of iframes that sourced the target, and a javascript onload that refreshed the page. How could it get any simpler? My conclusion? A DDOS attack is the digital equivalent of peasants throwing rocks. Anybody can do it. It requires nothing. It's still a rather effective form of attack!
... or about 35 TB to record a lifetime at 128k MP3, stereo, "near CD quality".
Really - do you need your entire life recorded in CD quality? Mostly, you'll worry about proving crimes you didn't commit, so anything better than 32 Kbps MP3 is probably a waste. And while there will be those precious moments, most of your life will consist of you sitting and consuming media that's already recorded elsewhere anyway. Really, do you want hi-def audio copies of the Dresden and Star Trek reruns that you watched?
A TB now costs about $90. If trends of the last 20 years continue, in about 10 years, a lifetime of audio at 128k MP3 will cost about $90, inflation adjusted.
Except "Anonymous" is the bastard hybrid of a punch of bored 14 year old script kiddies, an unholy horde of angry-at-the-world genuinely decent at coding 20 somethings, and a frightning legion of bored in-it-for-the-lulz near or middle aged men.
So.... anonymous is mostly people between ages of 14 and 50?
Actually, the beauty of closed source is that the OS "supports" it out of the box, except that it's buggy as all get out, works very slowly for stuff that was much faster in 1995, and despite many users noticing and complaining about the problem both to the vendor and in various blogs and online forums, it doesn't get fixed for months or years while a qualified dev is finally diverted when the problem is so severe that even the US Army won't buy until it's fixed.
The MBA's just can not conceive that people will pay for quality and innovation.
I think this is an artifact of being thinking beings. People cannot conceive of anybody smarter than they. Similarly, they cannot conceive of innovations that they have not seen or experienced.
MBAs are not trained to innovate. They are trained to deal with what is. MBAs do a great job at dealing with commodity businesses - those where innovation isn't nearly as important as streamlining and efficiency. Want to run a steel foundry? Want to run a trucking company? MBAs are exactly what's needed there.
But MBAs are incompetent to run a company that bases itself on innovation! They were pretty consistently kill them. Witness 1990s Apple. Witness DEC. Witness... Motorola. Further, even though they are, practically by definition, incapable of running an innovation company, they are completely unaware of their shortcomings thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect!
So what you have is a whole class of highly educated, intelligent people with a gaping blind spot in their vision who, because of their education and intelligent, are like submarine missiles torpedoing high-performance tech companies - the very type of company the USA most needs to survive!
Going cheap? I've had to. Here are a couple options that are surprisingly cheap:
1) If your UPS can actually handle the whole amperage of the servers, but the batteries only give you a few minutes, consider going to Wal-Mart or the nearest auto parts store and buying a few deep-cycle marine batteries. They aren't cheap, but they aren't exactly bank-busters, either. Find out how many volts your UPS is (typical voltages range from 12 to 48 volts and are basically always in 12-volt increments, EG: 12/24/48. If you are frightened by wiring work, finding an electrician buddy isn't too hard typically, but it's barely more complicated than jumper cables.
Years ago, I got ahold of 4 deep-cycle marine batteries that were about a year old for a song from an upgrade. I took apart my craptastic APC UPS and wired in the deep-cycle marine batteries. It worked fabulously for about 3-4 years, and gave me some 8 hours of battery life for my two small servers. With the bigger batteries, the UPS wouldn't even start a low-voltage warning beep for nearly an hour when the power went out!
2) The other option is probably one you hadn't considered, because you thought it would be "expensive" - and that's a dedicated colo. Surprisingly, you can get a half-rack and a burstable 100 Mbit Internet connection at a colo starting at about $200 or so per month. And as the amount of bandwidth being consumed climbs, the deal gets even sweeter.
I have 10 servers in a half rack serving hundreds of high-paying clients, our company's primary revenue is in a complex, hosted application, and our hosting bill is less than either our office power or our phone bill. Despite this, we make sure to brag everywhere we can about the high quality of our hosting! If your needs exceed a certain minimum, dedicated hosting is the way to go, and we have redundant power, redundant network feeds, all the bandwidth we could ever use, and 24x7 monitoring to boot! It's a really, really good deal if your needs are compatible.
I find that if any programmer writes code in such a way where it's too complex for others to follow, he's the one who's a moron.
There. Fixed that for you! Pure genius is pure simplicity. Anybody of average intelligence can come up with a a complex answer to a complex problem. But it's somebody of far more intelligence who can come up with a simple answer to a complex problem!
Many problem are, at first look, very complex, but, when given sufficient genius, succumb to the genius of simplicity. And even when the problem is very complex, the code used to solve it should be easily read and understood!
Some safety features or systems could save lives at a few hundred bucks each. But often we get safety laws put in place where it saves lives at the cost of trillions of dollars each (aka, it will likely never save a single life), certain types of chemical bans is an example of that.
It's rare to see somebody who understands this! But, of course, this is Slashdot and NOT the MSM (Main-Street-Media) which is today all about getting people worked up over SOMETHING regardless of the cost to greater society. (Witness: the idiocy around vaccinations - some researcher does some laughably bad science, people get excited about it, and suddenly it's not so laughable anymore)
I find it astounding that, when implementing safety regulations, there isn't even the concept that the impact of the regulation isn't even considered.
I read someplace that infant safety seats save lives at a cost of about $500,000 for each life saved. Sure, every loving parent wants their kid safe, but for that cost, you could simply drive a standard passenger car rather than an SUV, and not only save far more lives than the infant safety seats, but do so with a significant net savings! (the vehicle with the least fatalities is a mid-sized, 5-seat sedan)
Another example, when I was a kid, going to the dentist meant that I saw the dentist. He stuck his fingers in my mouth, drilled out the cavity, whatever, and then filled it. Wearing gloves was simply not done (washing hands in the little sink next to the chair was expected) and face masks were rare.
I go in today, and it's like the dentist is getting ready for brain surgery! It's idiotic - as if the human mouth wasn't already one of the most bacteria-laden parts of the body!
Has there been any kind of study showing that even one life was saved with all this "protection"? Somehow, I sincerely doubt it. But I still get to pay extra for all that...
It's a few years late, but a prototype has already been built, and it actually works. It has met DOT requirements, and now the issue is scaling: manufacturing, roll-out, and delivery. They've been taking pre-orders for some time now.
And despite decades of humor, I'm pretty sure it's for real this time: The flying car!
Looking something like a cross between a VW Bug and a teardrop with spider legs, it's a light sport aircraft with 500 mile range, seating and weight capacity for two, and the ability to land at an airport and drive away without any special wagons. It literally can land and be "roadable" in under 2 minutes!
Don't expect a Lear Jet meeting a limousine, this is a compromise vehicle with an emphasis on airplane performance. It's not quiet inside, and just about everything that could be stripped out has been in order to meet weight and balance limitations. You wouldn't want to drive this to work every day.
Pricing is reasonable for a light-sport aircraft: estimated price of around $200,000! (A Cessna 172, by comparison, seats 4 (3 adults if you take weight limits into consideration) flies about 20% faster, can't drive on a road, and costs about $300,000.
I think we have a winner, here! And as a private pilot, I'm just itching to get my fingers wrapped around one, though I'd personally want to spring for the inevitably bigger, faster model in 5 years! Something that will fly 150-175 MPH instead of 100, seats 3 or 4 people, and costs maybe $350,000.
With this method, my colleagues could be buried deep underground in a sealed lab with no way of getting anything in or out except for a limited range of radio signals carried by equipment incapable of carrying high-power signals... and still I can "beam" them arbitrary amounts of energy straight into their lab just beaming energy into some particles in my lab and then telling them over the radio what to do in their lab to receive it.
OK, so let's say that you send them (via radio, or penguin-post, a flung shoebox, whatever) a series of expected time sequences that you will be transmitting data, minutes, hours, days, or weeks in advance. And then, at the expected times, you either send X joules of information, or not, indicating a binary state. (or perhaps you send anywhere from 1-10 joules of energy, indicating 10 possible information states)
In a way, you aren't sending any information faster than the speed of light, because the real information is being sent via penguin-post. But you could still instantly notify the other side that Obama won his 2nd election without having to wait for classical physics transmits that data, correct?
Slashdot Mirror
Competition (or the lack thereof) IS a solid bet. But the reasonsfor the lack may be uclear:
1) Government regulation. It cosst a LOT of moey to get ANY medical device approved for sale. This raises barriers to entry and prevents typically cash-starve startups from entering the marketplace.
2) Insurance. By insulating the buyer from the purchase, insurance prevents companies from having to compete on price. Sure, they COULD cut costs, but then they'd make less money per item without increasing sale. Do a GIS for 'price elasticity'.
3) Small market. Yes, there are lots of old, deaf people, but each hearing device lats a long time, so volume is kept low.
4) Liability. If ANYTHING goes wrong with a medical device, no matter how generally effective, losses range from severe to bankrupting! Once a design has been proven safe/effective, there's a strong isincentive to change anything
Result? few options an high prices. Private aircraft fall into similar market forces. Planes aren't much more complicated than go-carts with a laptop computer bolted into the panel but cost orders of magnitude more.
Signed hashes only assure you of the source of the files. They don't in themselves provide any assurance of trust.
In the majority of these cases, the only thing it would achieve would be that you can state with some confidence that it's definitely the fault of a particular asshat.
How don't they provide provide assurance of trust?
If you trust Vendor A, and you install Vendor A's repo, then the number of things to worry about has just been sharply reduced, because you can reasonably trust that packages signed by Vendor A's repo do, in fact, come from Vendor A.
I think what you meant to say is that hashes only assure that the files came from a specific vendor, and that's self-evident. It's like saying that water is wet.
You don't see how this is a dramtic net improvement?
Strangely, at $90,000 a pop, this strikes me as rather cheap. I wonder if that's a "rate limited" model so that you have to pay big bux more in order to get the full capacity?
Of COURSE there are people onsite. Most likely they have anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people onsite. But what's that going to do for you in the case of a large-scale problem?
The otherwise top rated 365 Main facility in San Francisco went down a few years ago. They had all the shizz, multipoint redundant power, multiple data feeds, earthquake-resistant building, the works. Yet, their equipment wasn't well equipped to handle what actually took them down - a recurring brown-out. It confused their equipment, which failed to "see" the situation as one requiring emergency power, causing the whole building to go dark.
So there you are, with perhaps 25 staff a 4-story building with tens of thousands of servers, the power is out, nobody can figure out why, and the phone lines are so loaded it's worthless. Even when the power comes back on, it's not like you are going to get "hot hands" in anything less than a week!
Hey, even with all the best planning, disasters like this DO happen! I had to spend 2 wracking days driving to S.F. (several hours drive) to witness a disaster zone. HUNDREDS of techs just like myself carefully nursing their servers back to health, running disk checks, talking in tense tones on cell phones, etc.
But what pissed me off (and why I don't host with them anymore) was the overly terse statement that was obviously carefully reviewed to make it damned hard to sue them. Was I ever going to sue them? Probably not, maybe just ask for a break on that month's hosting or something. I mean, I just want the damned stuff to work, and I appreciate that even in the best of situations, things *can* go wrong.
So now I host with Herakles data center which is just as nice as the S.F. facility, except that it's closer, and it's even noticably cheaper. Redundant power, redundant network feeds, just like 365 main. (Better: they had redundancy all the way into my cage, 365 Main just had redundancy to the cage's main power feed)
And, after a year or two of hosting with Herakles, they had a "brown-out" situation, where one of their main Cisco routers went partially dark, working well enough that their redundant router didn't kick in right away, leaving some routes up and others down while they tried to figure out what was going on.
When all was said and done, they simply sent out a statement of "Here's what happened, it violates some of your TOS agreements, and here's a claim form". It was so nice, and so open, that out of sheer goodwill, I didn't bother to fill out a claim form, and can't praise them highly enough!
I type perfect touch type style. At my best, I do about 90-120 WPM, same as you. I know I'm quite a rapid typist, almost able to keep up with natural-rate speech. If you are matching me, what are you really trying to achieve?
It's pretty obvious that whatever the metric, you are well within the realm of where other factors are far more likely to make a difference than typing speed. Of course, if you want to "touch type" like other "trained" folks, do like anybody else, and force yourself to actually do it.
I recommend any of the many touch-typing software packages out there. You don't even have to pay much, 30 seconds of GIS brought this up and it seems quite serviceable!
DISABLE PASSWORD AUTHENTICATION! I wish I had points to mod you up with! I use several strategies:
1) Nonstandard port (despite what you say, it does stop you from getting the automated SSH scans hitting you)
2) Disable password Auth
3) RSA keys with passphrases.
4) Disable the root password. Yes, I'm serious. If I'm remote, I can become root with my passphrase protected RSA key. If I'm local, I can reboot and run kernel mode single. The root password is simply not something I need, so it's only a liability.
5) Sleep peacefully at night.
I've done a significant amount of contract work over the years, "flying solo" so to speak. I've only once had a contention about copyrights, and since then, I've never done work where I don't own what I write!
My explanation goes something like this:
I have years of experience and have developed a standard set of tools that I use to solve different types of problems. I intend to use these tools to cut costs for you, and it's that time savings that makes me worth the money that I'm charging - I'll do a good job in a short time. But I'm writing the software for YOU, not for somebody else, and if I develop a new idea working on your code, I intend to use that same tool elsewhere. So I'll keep the copyrights, leaving me free to do my job elsewhere, and grant you a license letting you use the software as you see fit. You can do what you want to do, I can do what I want to do, and we can both be happy! I will grant you unlimited use license, including access to the sources, and I will make it transferrable - if you sell the business, it's no problem. The only right I won't grant is the right the resell the software, because I don't want to compete with myself!
This has never been a problem - when explained this way, nobody objects and everybody sees what I'm after.
Loads of comments, alternating between disk and tape, and a few ridiculous, impractical options (Amazon, etc) but nobody here's found the best, cheapest, and most highly redundant method!
You take your 2 TB file, zip compress it, Encrypt it, rename it "Britney Spears Gang Bang kdiaKiS93kDw.mpeg" and stick it on Bit Torrent! It's highly redundant, very secure, costs basically nothing, and your chances of finding it again in 10 years are at least as good as finding a tape 10 years in the future!
PS: I'm a pilot, and if you don't think that "look out!" isn't an explicit part of instruction, think again! The pilot in command, at all times, has the right, privilege, and responsibility to ignore ATC commands if and when the safety of the aircraft is in question! I can't count the number of times I've been given instructions such as "keep your head on a swivel" and/or "don't trust ATC - ALWAYS look for yourself!". When I'm cleared for takeoff, I always double check before turning onto the runway, and given clearance to land, I'm still trying to see if anything is in the way. It's true that you have to ignore your gut feeling, but you should *never* ignore what you see.
But pilots, no matter the instruction given by ATC, have to look at the runway to line the plane up. Instruments get you to within a few hundred feet of the runway, and while there are auto-landers in bigger jets, the last 30 seconds are nearly always performed by a person with his/her hands on the yoke, because auto-landers aren't very "smooth".
So here's the pilot, actually looking AT THE RUNWAY and preparing to land the plane, with a big, bright, yellow schoolbus parked right in the middle. Because their minds are attuned to looking at things like the location of the landing lines, the VASI lights at the side (which given information about your height relative to the runway and distance) and the overal "shape" of the runway, they never saw the big, yellow bus parked in the middle.
And I believe it, because with training, I don't look at the whole runway, even when I try to!
As far as Ice on the wings, I've NEVER heard of instructions like "steer a little manually to determine if there's ice buildup on the wings". Ice forms on the leading edges of wings and struts. You determine that there's ice when you see things like:
A) The plane has difficulty maintaining altitude.
B) The airspeed indicator and/or altitude indicator stop moving. (Ice covering your pitot tube, turn on pitot heater for the former, if the latter, you switch to the cabin pressure source, and compare to the GPS until you land ASAP)
C) The windshield becomes opaque.
D) You see ice on the wings and/or struts.
I suppose it's possible you'd feel the attitude of the plane shift nose up as you tried ot maintain altitude, but that comes back to #1. I don't fly a plane with anti-ice equipment, (EG: wing boots, wind shield heaters, etc) so the general rule is: look out, and if I see any ice, TURN AROUND/GET OUT ASAP!
Be careful!
There was one guy in a suit over stuff like this. So, they sent out a doctor to go with the patient to confirm the symptoms. The guy demonstrated when and where the problems occurred, and sure enough, they did! But what he didn't know was that the cellular company had TURNED OFF the nearby tower on that day, thus was emitting no "low level" radiation at all.
Killed the lawsuit, the guy turned out to be a crazy, and there will be plenty more. Not saying that there aren't some symptoms of low-level radiation, but when somebody turns out to be "ultra sensitive" to these kinds of things, it's a near certainty is all cooked up in their brains.
Is it plugged in? yes? LIER!
It it turned on? yes? LIER!
Can you see any messeges on the screen? no? LIER!
Why do they lie!??!?
They aren't lying. They literally do not see it.
Your mind is pelted with information every day. Vast, huge, massive swaths of information that make what goes over an OC3 pipe pale in comparison. Your eyes generate a super-hi-Def video stream chock full of useful details about your life and everything around you. Your ears, your sense of smell, all are being monitored 24x7, and don't forget your senses of touch, hunger, and numerous other "metasenses".
There's far more information streaming into your brain than could possibly be processed. So what your mind does is exactly the same thing that your spam filter does at your local ISP: Your mind filters out information that you don't find useful before you are even consciously aware of it!
Studies have shown:
1) People will change lanes into a lane occupied by a motorcycle, even after clearly looking directly at the motorcycle! It's commonplace, as a motorcycle rider myself, I've seen this happen more than once! The reason is that the person isn't looking over to see if there's *anything* there, they're looking to see if a *car* is there. Since my motorcycle isn't a car, the other driver's mind actually filters that fact out before they are consciously aware of it, and to their mind, I'm simply not there. (thanks, brain!)
2) In simulation, highly skilled, trained pilots were instructed to land the "airplane" on a runway littered with stuff. Garbage trucks, buses, big, huge things that were hard to miss. In only a very small number of cases did the otherwise highly skilled, demonstrated, and experienced pilots ever see the junk on the runway, even though they could be seen to be LOOKING DIRECTLY AT THE RUNWAY. Why? Because their minds were only looking for information that was already known to be useful, and filtering out the rest.
3) Think back to when you learned to drive! Everything was bewildering, you were overwhelmed by details too numerous to process easily. Signs and lines seemed to jump out of nowhere. But somehow, it became easier and easier as your mind learned what information was actually needed, and began filtering out the rest. Your mind is trained to look for the red octagonal stop sign, and the street sign that, within your state, looks very consistent. But think about when you experience something new. For example, in my area, they started installing roundabouts where we never had them before. They were a bit disconcerting and bewildering the first few times, and I am a very safe, effective driver. (20 years, no accidents, knock on wood!) My lower brain hadn't learned to filter out all the details of the roundabout, so I had to slow down and process EVERYTHING until I had a chance to train it.
They aren't lying. They literally cannot see what's clearly and demonstrably in front of them. The lower parts of your brain filter out detail and deliver highly processed, compressed information to your cerebrum (the part that's self-conscious) in order to save expensive processing time. Be gentle, be understanding, and accept that the reason why they are calling you is because they need you to see what's wrong and fix it! Accept your pay scale accordingly, and suck it up, because that's human nature, it will always be human nature, and there's not a damned thing you or anybody else can do about it!
However, one thing I've found is that if an error or confirmation is very important, you put red lettering and make somebody type a word, such as "I will pay you $50", or "I'm ready to pay you $200 if I want to delete this" or something before proceeding. Make sure it's different for each situation! I used to just make end users type "confirm" or "accept" but they got used to that.
I don't think the "overreached" was about the contributor agreements, but rather the MySQL claim that the protocol for talking to the database (sending SQL queries) was GPL. Thus non-GPL software was not allowed to use the database, and you should buy the commercial versions.
To programmers and tech weenies such as ourselves, this statement seems absurd: An SQL stream is part of the product? Surely you jest! We can all point to many products that are database agnostic: there are perhaps a billion such products available for download on SourceForge that work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and maybe Oracle and/or SqlServer.
But, for a moment step out of nerd land and into the life of an executive. When you say "database engine" he hears "mwah mah fua bua!" And when you say "SQL Stream" he hears "Muff wa ha dia". But when he sets up a product (such as a Customer Relationship Manager) it's a single product. It might have a half-dozen distinct codebases (DBMS, SQL, PHP, HTML, Javascript, etc.) but even though they are all distinct products in their own right, they are "one product" It's the "Augustus CRM!". It's what he bought.
So do these technical distinctions mean anything at all? Not in the least. And thus, the terms of the GPL would easily and happily apply to the entire product, no matter how technically distinct the pieces.
I've often wondered what makes a product "separate". It's a distinction that's forever being debated on the LKML. Is VMWare in violation of Linux Kernel's GPL License? What about ATI's binary driver? What about somebody who sells hardware with a Linux kernel?
And sure, you have your opinions on each of these examples, but each of these examples have their own gotchas that would make sense to a significant portion of the population, especially the non-technical part(s) of humanity.
What... you think these cars are all about research? Really?
Cars like this are being built by students at schools and Universities. No matter how many times it's been done before, it's still a good idea to do it again to educate another crop of soon-to-be-highly-qualified engineering students. By developing projects such as this one, they get an intimate, first-hand understanding of engineering concepts like systemic efficiency, operational constraints, and the value of weighing costs/benefits.
Engineers who are successful at projects like this get to put this on their resume and then go on to develop cars that are a touch more pragmatic, such as the VW 1-liter.
This isn't a "pshaw" - IT'S THE POINT of exercises like this. And being able to drive from coast to coast on slightly more than 1 gallon of gasoline is pretty f***ing impressive, even if it is on a mylar-covered bicycle with a weed-eater engine on the back!
IF YOU ARE A SCHOOL OFFICIAL PEEKING AT KIDS' PRIVATE MOMENTS, HOW MUCH OF A FREAKIN' BONEHEAD DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO CONFRONT THEM WITH EVIDENCE OBTAINED BY SUCH QUESTIONABLE MEANS?
Bonehead is practically the definition of low-level admin staff in K12 schools. I deal with technology and provide services for K12 schools. So I pretty much have to deal with the high school administrators and tech staff at schools. All the time. And while there are people I certainly admire, there are far more than follow a certain mold:
1) They are not only incompetent, they are grossly so. Their main claim to fame is that they can reload windows. Sometimes they follow the lead of Mordac, Preventer of Information Services and make life a living hell for the other staff, in order to show that they are actually doing something and are "needed".
2) They are terrified that somebody might come along and expose them for the useless consumers of oxygen that they are. So they are very, VERY quick to dismiss any technology or solution that doesn't involve them installing and/or administering it. Especially if there's a cost benefit to doing so. I've seen such people actually shoot down proposals that would benefit the school by over a million dollars because the change was specifically recommended against earlier. In spite of the fact that there were no security or legal risks that could be enumerated by the party involved!
3) They purposefully use barely applicable technical jargon as often as possible to sound intelligent and "on the ball". Often the words are used in a laughably inappropriate manner. Phrases like "The FTP protocol probably had a virus that caused the network routr to hang up". No, I'm not kidding.
4) It seems that they avoid any situation where they might learn something for fear of giving away what they don't know. I think it's a variation of "better to keep quiet and have them wonder if you are a moron than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". Thus, not only are they clueless, they will forever remain so.
5) The school administrators often have a deep-down fear that the tech weenies are incompetent and/or malevolent, but because they can't understand what's going on or why, they are uniquely incapable of doing anything about it. They are afraid of being held "hostage", and rightly so, because it does happen!.
When I'm faced with such people, I have to make sure that every solution or mention of a solution includes mentions of the "capable tech staff" and brown nose until my eyes hurt from the smell. People who think that being "secure" means having an FTP password like "1337god" or their login name spelled backwards.
I'm not at ALL surprised that one such tech got the idea of enforcing their version of justice when they found that they had the technical ability.
They don't do it because they aren't criminals. Who the heck else would we blame but the person responsible for committing the crime?
A highly insightful comment! I wrote a DOS tool the other day, using basic knowledge of HTML and Javascript, that could be used by online groups to make a DDOS. It took me all of about 1 minute to crank out something capable of generating well over a million hits an hour. But despite its stone-age level of technology, did I publish it? Did I make any effort to use it for anything other than my own knowledge and research?
No. I am not a criminal, and although the security knowledge I gained is very valuable to me, I have no interest in being associated with use of a tool like this, no matter how simple and "public knowledge" the underlying concepts. Because I'm not a criminal!
However, this simple fact of human behavior leaves the FBI forever in a lurch: they need to understand how the criminals are operating, but can't really employ the people who operate criminally because "criminals turned white-hat" have a terrible record of keeping their nose clean when getting paid normal wages for what they used to make millions of dollars doing.
Pure white hats (like me) simply never learn the skills of a true black hat hacker, because we don't have any interest in botnets. Put simply: black hats with the skill to be hired lack the ethical skills to be good hires.
And so the FBI/DHS cybercrime divisions are eternally staffed by people of questionable qualifications...
So, I became curious when I read about this DDOS on the Australian websites. I wondered: how hard would it be to write a simple, DDOS tool? Something that didn't require anything fancy, that anybody could do without installing anything special?
So, I wrote something, and tested it on my own local webserver. Surprisingly, it took me less than 10 minutes to write a simple javascript webpage with iframes that generated in excess of a million hits an hour in about 20 lines of HTML + javascript, armed with nothing more than a browser and notepad. I didn't even have to host it; the file was saved locally on my HDD!
The method was simple: a webpage with a bunch of iframes that sourced the target, and a javascript onload that refreshed the page. How could it get any simpler? My conclusion? A DDOS attack is the digital equivalent of peasants throwing rocks. Anybody can do it. It requires nothing. It's still a rather effective form of attack!
... or about 35 TB to record a lifetime at 128k MP3, stereo, "near CD quality".
Really - do you need your entire life recorded in CD quality? Mostly, you'll worry about proving crimes you didn't commit, so anything better than 32 Kbps MP3 is probably a waste. And while there will be those precious moments, most of your life will consist of you sitting and consuming media that's already recorded elsewhere anyway. Really, do you want hi-def audio copies of the Dresden and Star Trek reruns that you watched?
A TB now costs about $90. If trends of the last 20 years continue, in about 10 years, a lifetime of audio at 128k MP3 will cost about $90, inflation adjusted.
Except "Anonymous" is the bastard hybrid of a punch of bored 14 year old script kiddies, an unholy horde of angry-at-the-world genuinely decent at coding 20 somethings, and a frightning legion of bored in-it-for-the-lulz near or middle aged men.
So.... anonymous is mostly people between ages of 14 and 50?
Actually, the beauty of closed source is that the OS "supports" it out of the box, except that it's buggy as all get out, works very slowly for stuff that was much faster in 1995, and despite many users noticing and complaining about the problem both to the vendor and in various blogs and online forums, it doesn't get fixed for months or years while a qualified dev is finally diverted when the problem is so severe that even the US Army won't buy until it's fixed.
The MBA's just can not conceive that people will pay for quality and innovation.
I think this is an artifact of being thinking beings. People cannot conceive of anybody smarter than they. Similarly, they cannot conceive of innovations that they have not seen or experienced.
MBAs are not trained to innovate. They are trained to deal with what is. MBAs do a great job at dealing with commodity businesses - those where innovation isn't nearly as important as streamlining and efficiency. Want to run a steel foundry? Want to run a trucking company? MBAs are exactly what's needed there.
But MBAs are incompetent to run a company that bases itself on innovation! They were pretty consistently kill them. Witness 1990s Apple. Witness DEC. Witness... Motorola. Further, even though they are, practically by definition, incapable of running an innovation company, they are completely unaware of their shortcomings thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect!
So what you have is a whole class of highly educated, intelligent people with a gaping blind spot in their vision who, because of their education and intelligent, are like submarine missiles torpedoing high-performance tech companies - the very type of company the USA most needs to survive!
Going cheap? I've had to. Here are a couple options that are surprisingly cheap:
1) If your UPS can actually handle the whole amperage of the servers, but the batteries only give you a few minutes, consider going to Wal-Mart or the nearest auto parts store and buying a few deep-cycle marine batteries. They aren't cheap, but they aren't exactly bank-busters, either. Find out how many volts your UPS is (typical voltages range from 12 to 48 volts and are basically always in 12-volt increments, EG: 12/24/48. If you are frightened by wiring work, finding an electrician buddy isn't too hard typically, but it's barely more complicated than jumper cables.
Years ago, I got ahold of 4 deep-cycle marine batteries that were about a year old for a song from an upgrade. I took apart my craptastic APC UPS and wired in the deep-cycle marine batteries. It worked fabulously for about 3-4 years, and gave me some 8 hours of battery life for my two small servers. With the bigger batteries, the UPS wouldn't even start a low-voltage warning beep for nearly an hour when the power went out!
2) The other option is probably one you hadn't considered, because you thought it would be "expensive" - and that's a dedicated colo. Surprisingly, you can get a half-rack and a burstable 100 Mbit Internet connection at a colo starting at about $200 or so per month. And as the amount of bandwidth being consumed climbs, the deal gets even sweeter.
I have 10 servers in a half rack serving hundreds of high-paying clients, our company's primary revenue is in a complex, hosted application, and our hosting bill is less than either our office power or our phone bill. Despite this, we make sure to brag everywhere we can about the high quality of our hosting! If your needs exceed a certain minimum, dedicated hosting is the way to go, and we have redundant power, redundant network feeds, all the bandwidth we could ever use, and 24x7 monitoring to boot! It's a really, really good deal if your needs are compatible.
I find that if any programmer writes code in such a way where it's too complex for others to follow, he's the one who's a moron.
There. Fixed that for you! Pure genius is pure simplicity. Anybody of average intelligence can come up with a a complex answer to a complex problem. But it's somebody of far more intelligence who can come up with a simple answer to a complex problem!
Many problem are, at first look, very complex, but, when given sufficient genius, succumb to the genius of simplicity. And even when the problem is very complex, the code used to solve it should be easily read and understood!
Some safety features or systems could save lives at a few hundred bucks each. But often we get safety laws put in place where it saves lives at the cost of trillions of dollars each (aka, it will likely never save a single life), certain types of chemical bans is an example of that.
It's rare to see somebody who understands this! But, of course, this is Slashdot and NOT the MSM (Main-Street-Media) which is today all about getting people worked up over SOMETHING regardless of the cost to greater society. (Witness: the idiocy around vaccinations - some researcher does some laughably bad science, people get excited about it, and suddenly it's not so laughable anymore)
I find it astounding that, when implementing safety regulations, there isn't even the concept that the impact of the regulation isn't even considered.
I read someplace that infant safety seats save lives at a cost of about $500,000 for each life saved. Sure, every loving parent wants their kid safe, but for that cost, you could simply drive a standard passenger car rather than an SUV, and not only save far more lives than the infant safety seats, but do so with a significant net savings! (the vehicle with the least fatalities is a mid-sized, 5-seat sedan)
Another example, when I was a kid, going to the dentist meant that I saw the dentist. He stuck his fingers in my mouth, drilled out the cavity, whatever, and then filled it. Wearing gloves was simply not done (washing hands in the little sink next to the chair was expected) and face masks were rare.
I go in today, and it's like the dentist is getting ready for brain surgery! It's idiotic - as if the human mouth wasn't already one of the most bacteria-laden parts of the body!
Has there been any kind of study showing that even one life was saved with all this "protection"? Somehow, I sincerely doubt it. But I still get to pay extra for all that...
It's a few years late, but a prototype has already been built, and it actually works. It has met DOT requirements, and now the issue is scaling: manufacturing, roll-out, and delivery. They've been taking pre-orders for some time now.
And despite decades of humor, I'm pretty sure it's for real this time: The flying car!
Looking something like a cross between a VW Bug and a teardrop with spider legs, it's a light sport aircraft with 500 mile range, seating and weight capacity for two, and the ability to land at an airport and drive away without any special wagons. It literally can land and be "roadable" in under 2 minutes!
Don't expect a Lear Jet meeting a limousine, this is a compromise vehicle with an emphasis on airplane performance. It's not quiet inside, and just about everything that could be stripped out has been in order to meet weight and balance limitations. You wouldn't want to drive this to work every day.
Pricing is reasonable for a light-sport aircraft: estimated price of around $200,000! (A Cessna 172, by comparison, seats 4 (3 adults if you take weight limits into consideration) flies about 20% faster, can't drive on a road, and costs about $300,000.
I think we have a winner, here! And as a private pilot, I'm just itching to get my fingers wrapped around one, though I'd personally want to spring for the inevitably bigger, faster model in 5 years! Something that will fly 150-175 MPH instead of 100, seats 3 or 4 people, and costs maybe $350,000.
With this method, my colleagues could be buried deep underground in a sealed lab with no way of getting anything in or out except for a limited range of radio signals carried by equipment incapable of carrying high-power signals... and still I can "beam" them arbitrary amounts of energy straight into their lab just beaming energy into some particles in my lab and then telling them over the radio what to do in their lab to receive it.
OK, so let's say that you send them (via radio, or penguin-post, a flung shoebox, whatever) a series of expected time sequences that you will be transmitting data, minutes, hours, days, or weeks in advance. And then, at the expected times, you either send X joules of information, or not, indicating a binary state. (or perhaps you send anywhere from 1-10 joules of energy, indicating 10 possible information states)
In a way, you aren't sending any information faster than the speed of light, because the real information is being sent via penguin-post. But you could still instantly notify the other side that Obama won his 2nd election without having to wait for classical physics transmits that data, correct?