You're saying you want up to date and new stuff, but don't want to accept the instability that results from things being so new/untested/undeveloped. Its one or the other:) I understand Mac "just works" but with no doubt testing slows down development. Quality vs Quantity, same ole debate.
You'll never get all three. At best, you can pick two. OSX gives you costly, rapid, quality development. Linux gives you low-cost, rapid, "beta-ish" development. Windows gives you a little of all three, but doesn't do particularly well at any of them.
and because if you can avoid it, public transit is by and by large garbage
Which is just so much horse-shit. At least, more than you might realize.
I have a large number of business connections in the San Fransisco Bay area. I live about about a 4 hour drive away, or about a 1 hour flight. (I'm a private pilot)
When I need to meet in the Bay area, I frequently will fly in to Oakland or Hayward airport and then take the local trains to within a mile or two of my destination. (BART = Bay Area Rapid Transit) And, on BART, I'm completely relaxed. I'm not driving, I'm reading a book, magazine, or whatever.
BART is fast. I've never known it to be "grid locked", though I have had to stand a few times. It's cheap. Why would anybody not use BART? I think of all those people driving across the Bay bridge to work every day, and I think... what IDIOTS....
The combination of private air travel and BART allow me to make an economical day trip out of a painful overnighter!
To this day I am happy that I was able to have those two years of C, letting me get close to the guts of the OS, forcing me to think about what I was doing every step of the way. There is no question in my mind that it made me a better programmer in general, regardless of the language.
Reminds me of the debate I often see in aviation: "tricycle gear" vs "tail draggers". Tricycle gear planes have a steering nosewheel, and two main wheels under the wings. Tail-draggers, the "old" way, have two main wheels in the front and 1 small wheel (the "tail dragger") on the tail.
It's considerably easier to land/takeoff in a tricycle-gear. But there are plenty of pilots who are dead-set on flying tail draggers because it makes them "a better pilot". Which, then, sparks another debate about whether or not new pilots should be taught on tail-draggers or tricycle gear.
In short, it all comes down to whatever the student wants. They can choose which way they prefer. Myself, I learned in a tricycle gear Cessna 172, and I don't regret my decision. Flying is fun!
That's OK then, we all know that computers couldn't possibly have any problems counting votes.
Ignoring the obvious sarcasm, I can say with confidence that computers generally have no problem whatsoever counting votes. What computers have a problem with is in preventing malicious people from convincing them to count irrelevant numbers.
Computers have no moral compass.
If it's your job to count votes, and somebody comes into the room and orders you to add 10,000 for A and subtract 10,000 for B, you'll become suspicious. Computers won't do this.
In this case, it's highly unlikely that somebody was telling the computers to shut down the engines. Thus, the problems that Diebold (et al) have had with voting machines simply don't apply here.
I fail to see how an exchange of a random number stops this, when Party A never actually received Party B's key to begin with, because said key was replaced by Party E.
Yep, you're right. I missed a step... The public key (certificate) is *signed* by a CA. That's the purpose of Verisign/Thawte/etc. Signing is another public key process, only its used to verify that the public key delivered by Party A and B are registered with Verisign.
Thus, if Party E tries to intercept A and B's public keys to replace its own, it will not be properly signed, so the Man-in-the-middle attack is foiled.
Exactly. And as it is, 90% of the people on the road these days should never have been granted a DL. They can't drive for shit. I'd hate to think of them going airborne.
Sadly, the same could be said of pilots. Yet somehow, it generally works out. I guess it's good news....
Sure about that? What's to stop them from using man in the middle attacks to decrypt the communications? Are we going to have a certificate registry for pirated material? Not very likely.
This was written, and then modded "insightful" by somebody who does not understand how encryption.
Encryption uses a "two key" system - a public key and a private key. Anything encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted by somebody with the private key. How it works is this:
Party A contacts party B, and gives out its public key. This can be completely, 100% "in the clear". Party B replies with its public key. Party A uses party B's public key to encrypt a random number, and sends it to Party B. Party B decrypts this random value, and re-encrypts this random value with Party A's public key, sending it on to Party A.
Party A can now confirm the random value, and this provides very, very strong assurance against a "man-in-the-middle" attack. Anybody watching this connection has ready access to both public keys. Yet, if you were paying attention, you'd notice that this fact is not particularly relevant.
The only way to get "in the middle" is to get the private key that matches the public key, and so far as is known, the only way to do this is with very, very computationally expensive brute-force attacks.
It's 2008. We still don't have flying cars, practical nuclear fusion, fission-powered cars, or multi-petabyte holographic storage devices. In the real world, advances in technology are usually incremental and evolutionary in nature, or a serious tradeoff at best (As an example, the move underway from platter-based hard drives to solid-state hard drives, while revolutionary in nature, involves massive tradeoffs in price-per-gigabyte which are only slowly lessening). It took CD technology a decade or two to give way to a successor with 10 times the storage capacity (dual-layer DVD-R), and making bits smaller is (arguably) a lot easier than increasing energy density (barring the use of nuclear technology or other exotic things which-- again-- isn't realistically going to happen any time soon).
Flying cars don't need flying drivers, they need driving pilots. There are about 650,000 pilots in the United States with a certificate of Private Pilot or better. (the minimum license necessary to take more than 1 passenger in a flying vehicle) Compared to the population of 300 MILLION people, and you find that there are an awful few people who could "drive" a flying car. You find the economics of scale that will work at this level. Certainly, Detroit won't. Flying isn't the same as driving. There are no roads, and you have to pay careful attention to long-established procedures designed to avoid situations like running out of gas. (a minor inconvenience in a car, potentially fatal in a plane if you aren't well trained to handle it) I hate to diss flying, since I'm a pilot by hobby, and I love my hobby. But the requirements to pilot are significantly greater than the requirements to drive.
Nuclear Fusion is widely available. Look up. (you have to go outside to see it - it's called the "sun") As a source for electricity, it's coming at prices comparable to coal which is the cheapest non-renewable form of energy today in the USA.
Data storages has generally followed Moore's law, with a doubling time of about 18 months. What more do you want? I remember when a 100 MB HDD was big. Now, a little over 2 decades later, I routinely transfer files bigger than that all around the world via the Internet, and save to a flash disk the size of my thumb that requires no external power source, while my LAPTOP hard disk is 2,500 MB in size. I won't highlight my workstation/home-server with > 3 TB of storage.
Amazing!
Try using a 10 year old computer sometime. You'll be amazed at just how far we've really come.
And, technology is advancing on ALL fronts.
I recently added on to my home, doubling its size. Along with that came new regulations for insulation, higher-efficiency heating/cooling unit, insulation, double-paned windows, etc. I DOUBLED the size of my home, but my heating/cooling bill is about HALF what it used to be. Progress? Suffice it to say that the money I'm saving on my utility bill easily beats the monthly cost of the financed retrofit upgrades to my original home! In other words: it would be cheaper to buy the upgrades to an existing 100 year old home to get these improvements than to keep using whatever you had in the first place.
I drive a 10 year-old Saturn. It gets 30 MPG fully loaded at 90 MPH, quietly, with air conditioning, decent radio, and air bags. Back in the 1980s, I drove a VW diesel Rabbit that did about the same at the same speed. It was noisy, shook lots, had an AM-only radio, and didn't have A/C. Relative prices (inflation adjusted) makes the Saturn CHEAPER than the VW Rabbit. Hello progress ?!?
I use CFL lights throughout my home. Over their lifetimes, they are cheaper than incandescents in replacement costs alone, and 5 of these things use less electricity than a SINGLE incandescent bulb. I can light up my whole house for what it used to cost to turn on the porch light. I've banished incandescents from my home. And, I'm still not particularly good at turning
Elephants Dream was a success? You mean a film which almost no-one ever heard of, and almost all of those who watched it didn't like?
Who cares if it sucks? Fantasmagoria wasn't exactly an amazing piece of work by today's standards, but as the world's first cartoon (1908) it was a good indicator of things to come.
Yes, including your beloved Family Guy...
This is a trend-setting movie, underscored by the woes of the MPAA and RIAA. Media is moving away from centralized cathedrals and moving inexorably towards individualized bazaars. Nothing that the **AA can do will change this fact, since it's really a consequence of technology getting forever cheaper.
The plot is weak, the voice acting is terrible. But like Fantasmagoria, it kicks off a trend of forever-improving material.
Wow. What a mixed bag. Do you support the US Constitution?
3. Abolish the two-party system
Remember the FIRST AMMENDMENT to the Constitution? Here's a refresher:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Notice that bit about "assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"?
4. Erase all censorship from all media...This includes: Internet, Television, print, video games, music, etc.
This fits nicely with the aforementioned 1st ammendment.
9. Require application for parental certificates (the program would be known as "If you can't feed em, don't breed em". It would be based on the financial situation of the parents, as well as their mental well being and relationship status...i.e. do they constantly fight, or are they constantly in love, etc.)
Whoah! Whoah! WHOAH THERE! WHOAH! Here's the FOURTH ammendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The idea that you would license the right to parent - well, guess what?!? You'd be assassinated for this one! Too bad other people don't have your standards in parenting. But that doesn't give you the right to dictate THEIR standards...
10. Legalize (and actively regulate) vigalante justice. (if everyone knows they can get their ass kicked by their gun toting neighbor, they are more likely to behave themselves)
I see. So might makes right!?!? Sorry. You have a bat's chance in hell to get this one through. The United States is a nation of laws. Our laws are as effective as they are sensible and uniformly applied.
Besides, looking at that beautiful document, the US Constitution, we have the Sixth ammendment:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence. But "vigilante justice" denies the victim his right to a speedy and public trial by jury!
You are a political whack-job. Your policies would return us to medieval culture, and reflect an astonishing lack of education. I am intensely thankful that we have a process that mostly prevents people like you from ever getting to office.
I strongly encourage you to read a bit of history - those who suffer in ignorance of history are bound to repeat it. I don't want a repeat of 1500 AD!
Oh, no, they won't install them in any commercial location, only private homes. Making people uncomfortable in their own homes, no problem; Interfering with Holy Commerce, now, they just don't play games there. Won't happen.
Actually, my Brother-in-law's Father-in-law works as an HVAC engineer. (Heating, Ventilation, Air-Conditioning) He gets flown all over the country to large buildings in order to install their Heating && A/C units.
His specialty is to install "time-deferred" air conditioning units. They apparently build large tanks on/near the building, and run the Air Conditioning at night, to cool the tank of coolant. Then, during the day, the business cools their buildings from the tank rather than directly from the grid.
The businesses get a significant credit for using energy when it's "cheap" rather than during the daytime when the grid is near its peak load, and this cost reduction is what pays for the fancy tanks and equipment.
He makes a very comfortable living installing these units...
Now, when we're talking about HOME units, I'd suggest that rather than institute a state link to the thermostat, we should institute variable rate meters. Not just keep track of how much was used, but WHEN it was used. Then, mandate a bill that's easy to read to indicate how much was used during the peak times and how much money could be saved.
People will program that into their thermostats, or thermostats will be developed to track peak usage, and this problem will pretty much take care of itself without pissing everybody off. (How many people would crow about how "smart" they are for programming their $10 thermostat to not run between 2 and 4 PM, saving $50/month?)
If most of the cost of the energy grid is maintaining the peak load, then utility companies should do themselves the favor of passing that information along to the consumer (in the form of a bill that reflects this fact), and then determine just how valuable that really is to them!
First, you say that the "Linux community" is ignoring the fact that "there is tons of software that is not on Linux". (your words)
I correct you, with many, many examples of how you can use software built for Windows on Linux-based systems. Some better than others, some costlier than others.
Then, you start with a beautiful strawman argument, with "So you want me to buy hardware and put Linux and VMWare on it just to buy a licensed copy of Windows so that I can run cross platform software why?"
Hint: I don't care what you use. I care that you misrepresent what I use.
Then after providing many examples of you "ignoring" the many efforts the "Linux community" have made to make non-Linux software available to you, I try to lighten things up with the standard, Slashbot-joke about living in your mother's basement.
Your response?
What an asshole.
I'm really sorry your surroundings are so incredibly insulting to you. Remember that people see in others what they see in themselves - this is something that you should note. From what I see here, I'm quite glad that I don't know you personally.
Or maybe you've noticed that software like Open Office and FireFox is cross platform, running on Win/Mac/Linux ? Toolkits such as GTKJava, Flash and QT allow for easy, straightforward cross-platform development?
Or, perhaps, that there's a whole operating system being put together utilizing all these parts?
Get your head out from under that rock! (or is it... Mom's basement?)
You're missing the psychology of the situation. He wanted everyone in the company in a complete panic at once, so they would be really sorry they laid off poor old Andy Lin. It wasn't the damage, it was the psychological effect he was looking for.
Except that you are wrong. He didn't want them to be sorry they laid him off. He just wanted them in a complete panic. If you had read TFA, you'd know that:
1) He wrote the script,
2) It failed to "go off" on his birthday,
3) He modified the script to "go off" on his following birthday, and
4) The script was discovered by somebody else before it went off on his following birthday.
This guy is a malicious weenie, and deserves time in PMITA prison. I mean, what kind of stupid, setting it to go off on your birthday?
Unless they came up with some radically cheaper method of producting them this will basically probably require a mortgage to go out and buy.
Not really. See below for a price guesstimate that puts the price at between $1,000 and $6,000. I paid around $1,000 for a 300 GB, 10k SCSI "Enterprise level" drive a year ago. This price has dropped to about $700 today, but you can't get drives bigger than 300 GB.
If this flash drive offered similar/better performance (or in this case, bigger size) then the price could easily be worth it to the right customer.
And no, I don't keep SpongeBob torrents on any of my eight, $1,000, 10k SCSI drives. But the money that they make for me makes their price cheap.
You want some kind of bridge from one to the other - lots of aircraft can show a whole range of flight data to passengers ("ooh, we've got a headwind over Greenland today! Guess we won't be early after all.") - but that should be strictly one-way. Which is probably the problem; there shouldn't be any way for anyone in the passenger cabin to issue instructions to the plane contrary to those from the flight deck, but I bet they found they couldn't prove it...
An interesting point I hadn't considered. My first thought was to use some kind of "bridge device" which allows for the transfer of this information in some locked-down, fundamentally incompatible protocol, such as RS-232 Serial (which can be one-way only) to transfer this data.
However, there's another consideration: What are the security concerns of this data? How much data would be made available to the passengers in real-time, and how useful would this information be in light of potential security concerns?
Could it cause a breach of security if the "bad guy" (terrorist/criminal/psychopath) knew what transponder code was being broadcast by the plane? (yes: what if a missile could be programmed to hone in on a transponder radio beacon?)
Could it cause a breach of security if the "bad guy" knew the exact status of pilot communications? What if "bad guy" knew the exact location, altitude, direction of travel, etc?
Yes, yes, and YES!
One-way communication is minimally a requirement, but I don't think that it's a good idea to even provide the information you mention. It offers NO advantage to the passengers other than for its ability to help in a breach of security - the passenger will arrive at the same time whether or not they know about the 15-knot headwind, or the fact that the pilots have (or have not) established communication with New York approach control.
Queue up 11,000 A/C posts about H4X0RZ Cr45h1n6 for REALZ Do0DEZ!.
This is not a "Windows vs Linux" thing. These are highly specialized data networks designed specifically for aircraft. The typical running life of a big jet is some 40 years or more - the idea of a consumer O/S such as Windows (or even Linux) being suitable for such a situation is simply stupid. Everything is coded in firmware, micro-processor based, with a likelyhood of actually crashing accidentally being somewhat less likely than getting struck by lightning on a sunny day while sitting in the cellar of your 4-story house.
Not bloody likely.
But, actual, malicious attack? Possible - and if there was *ANY* connection between the passenger data networks and the main control networks, that's an issue that must be addressed.
Most likely, the FAA found some part that was connected to both networks, that itself was not capable of actually transmitting data. But they're being car eful, as is their job, since lives are on the line.
I have no doubt that temporary security issues exist. The hard part is turning these temporary situations into real, exploitable, predictable vulnerabilities.
I'm a private pilot. I walk into the local FBO (like an airport terminal, but for private planes) and after a very brief check, I'm able to freely roam the "secure" side of the airport. Not just where the "small" planes are, the whole "other side" of the airport. I can drive a truck out to the plane I'm flying, without any check whatsoever of the truck's contents. I have to remember to stop after passing thru the gate so that only my car passes thru. That's about it. This is normal and typical, but my shoes never come off, and I can certainly have a 12 oz soda (or a 2-liter bottle) in my hand while this happens. A private plane (such as a Cessna 172) is not so different than car, except that it flies. Remember that the building blast in Oklahoma was done with a simple car bomb.
Next time you take off your shoes, remember this tidbit of wisdom: 9/11 might have been prevented if we had then today's general paranoia, but the specific measures out there today would not have stopped it. Today's meaures, if effective from 9/1/2001 forward would not specifically have prevented the horrible attacks on 9/11/2001. It's in large part, a sham, designed to inconvenience tax payers so that they are lulled into thinking that their tax dollars are at work. Except that it kinda works, because it's hard to predict which of the various security measures will be enforced on whatever day.
The truth is that truly effective security is often misunderstood and almost never implemented. What we get instead is a pile of rules, regulations, and "inconveniences" that, combined, make it difficult to organize any kind of grand scheme, even if the individual components are horribly insecure.
In short, it's the random nature of security enforcement that makes it effective, not the universal enforcement. Random enforcement is much cheaper, and is truthfully "good enough". And it will, occasionally, fail. And that the price of the occasional failure will generally be less than the cost of the improve security all along.
However, energy use also peaks at times of extreme cold. In milder climates, sure, this isn't much of a concern, but I think people in Alaska would disagree with that assertion (but then again, who knows what climate change will occur). Of course, some environments may benefit from a mix of photovoltaic and solar-heated water, but in any event, photovoltaics isn't the universal answer.
Electricity is the "universal solvent". It can be easily converted into many other forms. We can use it to split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, to be recombined later for power. We can charge a battery. We can pump water uphill, (and let it out again to generate power on demand) compress air (and let the air out when we want to use its power) and it can be moved fairly cheaply over long(ish) distances.
Is solar the 100% answer? No. But it's a damned good start. If we covered 1/16 of the American Southwest with these dollar-a-watt solar cells, we have all the power we need to supply the US electricity and transportation bills. Since we can now do this at prices close to what the very cheapest source of electrical power (coal) can, simple economics indicates that this puts an upper bound on the cost of energy.
In short, we've already locked in electricity at prices not much more expensive than the very cheapest form of energy around.
And those guys in Alaska can use something a bit more exotic if they want. The point really is this: the energy crises is all but gone. Already. Peak oil will come and go, (if it hasn't already) and we will barely notice it. It will be an inconvenience, and may entail people replacing their cars with newer, more reliable, electrical cars when their old one dies. Like people in California soon will by law, switching from old-style light bulbs to CFLs will cut power usage dramatically without any noticeable loss in the "quality" of life. (other than a mild increase in disposable income)
Whoopdeedoo.
The future is (potentially) rosier than we ever thought. Peak oil is a reality, but it doesn't mean the end of much of anything but oil. And those religious whack jobs in the middle east that want to blow up buildings with their carcasses? They can pound sand for all I care, since their oil (and power) will be gone, and with global warming hitting them the hardest, that's all they'll have left.
Hopefully, they'll be smart enough to cover their deserts with solar panels and create some wealth with them. I'm hopeful, but I'm sure not holding my breath. In any event, their power/wealth will be largely mitigated by the simple forces of technology and economics.
if solar power were already that cheap and easy today, it would have already experienced sudden massive deployments.
Edison Electric, in southern California, recently signed on a contract for the largest single deployment of solar power IN THE WORLD. Over the next several years, they'll be building more solar power capacity than exists in the United States previously. All without any tax incentives, or any government funding of any kind, and profitably, simply because solar power provides the power that's needed at competitive rates at the time it's most needed.
Changes this big do take time. But they are already happening. The trend is real, and accelerating.
Technology is the wild card that throws predictions to the wind. It's what differentiates modern civilization from the ancient Greeks, Romans, Sumerians, and every other now-dead civilization.
The cheapest form of Energy widely available today is coal, providing the majority of electrical power in the United States. It produces power as cheaply as $0.05 per watt, a rate that has now been matched by Solar power. Nicely enough, solar power is at its peak right at the same time that energy use is at its peak, (during hot, sunny days!) so the usual complaints about "peak load" are largely mitigated.
Combine that with our improved efficiencies of everything from lights to household heating, and the effect is magnified.
I predict that energy will be cheaper in 2050 per KWH than today. Nonetheless, technologies that save power will be in far greater use than they are today, simply because the cost of being efficient is also dropping. We're moving from an economy of scarcity to an economy of plenty, and one of the first industries to be hit by this is the recording industry.
Technology is advancing, and is continuing to advance, driven by the combination of cheap resources, a highly refined economic / capital investment system, and a generally well-educated population. Now, the interconnectedness of internet-based technologies takes the whole dynamic of education and technology and kicks it into hyperdrive.
There will be many challenges, of that I am certain. But I'm equally certain that we'll face the challenges faster than they accumulate. Technology continues to advance the power of the able, and meet the needs of the weak.
As someone who works within a few feet of what was once an aircraft hangar for dirigibles, I can confirm that as big as Fry's can be, they're pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
But the moral is that it is quite possible that someone, completely innocently, took the domain you were researching, within a day or so you doing it, because that's exactly what happened with my domain. In my case, I just got lucky... 2 days later, the domain would have been gone.
Except that I've had this happen, several times, when using RedHat linux' "whois" command, for domains that were REALLY weird. More than once.... I mean... COME ON!!!!!
I don't whois, even at the command line, unless I'm pretty much ready to buy the domain immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
You're saying you want up to date and new stuff, but don't want to accept the instability that results from things being so new/untested/undeveloped. Its one or the other
You're close to the mark, but not quite there.
1) Low-cost development.
2) Rapid development.
3) Quality development.
You'll never get all three. At best, you can pick two. OSX gives you costly, rapid, quality development. Linux gives you low-cost, rapid, "beta-ish" development. Windows gives you a little of all three, but doesn't do particularly well at any of them.
and because if you can avoid it, public transit is by and by large garbage
Which is just so much horse-shit. At least, more than you might realize.
I have a large number of business connections in the San Fransisco Bay area. I live about about a 4 hour drive away, or about a 1 hour flight. (I'm a private pilot)
When I need to meet in the Bay area, I frequently will fly in to Oakland or Hayward airport and then take the local trains to within a mile or two of my destination. (BART = Bay Area Rapid Transit) And, on BART, I'm completely relaxed. I'm not driving, I'm reading a book, magazine, or whatever.
BART is fast. I've never known it to be "grid locked", though I have had to stand a few times. It's cheap. Why would anybody not use BART? I think of all those people driving across the Bay bridge to work every day, and I think... what IDIOTS....
The combination of private air travel and BART allow me to make an economical day trip out of a painful overnighter!
To this day I am happy that I was able to have those two years of C, letting me get close to the guts of the OS, forcing me to think about what I was doing every step of the way. There is no question in my mind that it made me a better programmer in general, regardless of the language.
Reminds me of the debate I often see in aviation: "tricycle gear" vs "tail draggers". Tricycle gear planes have a steering nosewheel, and two main wheels under the wings. Tail-draggers, the "old" way, have two main wheels in the front and 1 small wheel (the "tail dragger") on the tail.
It's considerably easier to land/takeoff in a tricycle-gear. But there are plenty of pilots who are dead-set on flying tail draggers because it makes them "a better pilot". Which, then, sparks another debate about whether or not new pilots should be taught on tail-draggers or tricycle gear.
In short, it all comes down to whatever the student wants. They can choose which way they prefer. Myself, I learned in a tricycle gear Cessna 172, and I don't regret my decision. Flying is fun!
That's OK then, we all know that computers couldn't possibly have any problems counting votes.
Ignoring the obvious sarcasm, I can say with confidence that computers generally have no problem whatsoever counting votes. What computers have a problem with is in preventing malicious people from convincing them to count irrelevant numbers.
Computers have no moral compass.
If it's your job to count votes, and somebody comes into the room and orders you to add 10,000 for A and subtract 10,000 for B, you'll become suspicious. Computers won't do this.
In this case, it's highly unlikely that somebody was telling the computers to shut down the engines. Thus, the problems that Diebold (et al) have had with voting machines simply don't apply here.
Where the f--- is my flying car?
You will find it here.
I fail to see how an exchange of a random number stops this, when Party A never actually received Party B's key to begin with, because said key was replaced by Party E.
Yep, you're right. I missed a step... The public key (certificate) is *signed* by a CA. That's the purpose of Verisign/Thawte/etc. Signing is another public key process, only its used to verify that the public key delivered by Party A and B are registered with Verisign.
Thus, if Party E tries to intercept A and B's public keys to replace its own, it will not be properly signed, so the Man-in-the-middle attack is foiled.
Exactly. And as it is, 90% of the people on the road these days should never have been granted a DL. They can't drive for shit. I'd hate to think of them going airborne.
Sadly, the same could be said of pilots. Yet somehow, it generally works out. I guess it's good news....
Sure about that? What's to stop them from using man in the middle attacks to decrypt the communications? Are we going to have a certificate registry for pirated material? Not very likely.
This was written, and then modded "insightful" by somebody who does not understand how encryption.
Encryption uses a "two key" system - a public key and a private key. Anything encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted by somebody with the private key. How it works is this:
Party A contacts party B, and gives out its public key. This can be completely, 100% "in the clear". Party B replies with its public key. Party A uses party B's public key to encrypt a random number, and sends it to Party B. Party B decrypts this random value, and re-encrypts this random value with Party A's public key, sending it on to Party A.
Party A can now confirm the random value, and this provides very, very strong assurance against a "man-in-the-middle" attack. Anybody watching this connection has ready access to both public keys. Yet, if you were paying attention, you'd notice that this fact is not particularly relevant.
The only way to get "in the middle" is to get the private key that matches the public key, and so far as is known, the only way to do this is with very, very computationally expensive brute-force attacks.
It's 2008. We still don't have flying cars, practical nuclear fusion, fission-powered cars, or multi-petabyte holographic storage devices. In the real world, advances in technology are usually incremental and evolutionary in nature, or a serious tradeoff at best (As an example, the move underway from platter-based hard drives to solid-state hard drives, while revolutionary in nature, involves massive tradeoffs in price-per-gigabyte which are only slowly lessening). It took CD technology a decade or two to give way to a successor with 10 times the storage capacity (dual-layer DVD-R), and making bits smaller is (arguably) a lot easier than increasing energy density (barring the use of nuclear technology or other exotic things which-- again-- isn't realistically going to happen any time soon).
Flying cars don't need flying drivers, they need driving pilots. There are about 650,000 pilots in the United States with a certificate of Private Pilot or better. (the minimum license necessary to take more than 1 passenger in a flying vehicle) Compared to the population of 300 MILLION people, and you find that there are an awful few people who could "drive" a flying car. You find the economics of scale that will work at this level. Certainly, Detroit won't. Flying isn't the same as driving. There are no roads, and you have to pay careful attention to long-established procedures designed to avoid situations like running out of gas. (a minor inconvenience in a car, potentially fatal in a plane if you aren't well trained to handle it) I hate to diss flying, since I'm a pilot by hobby, and I love my hobby. But the requirements to pilot are significantly greater than the requirements to drive.
Nuclear Fusion is widely available. Look up. (you have to go outside to see it - it's called the "sun") As a source for electricity, it's coming at prices comparable to coal which is the cheapest non-renewable form of energy today in the USA.
Data storages has generally followed Moore's law, with a doubling time of about 18 months. What more do you want? I remember when a 100 MB HDD was big. Now, a little over 2 decades later, I routinely transfer files bigger than that all around the world via the Internet, and save to a flash disk the size of my thumb that requires no external power source, while my LAPTOP hard disk is 2,500 MB in size. I won't highlight my workstation/home-server with > 3 TB of storage.
Amazing!
Try using a 10 year old computer sometime. You'll be amazed at just how far we've really come.
And, technology is advancing on ALL fronts.
I recently added on to my home, doubling its size. Along with that came new regulations for insulation, higher-efficiency heating/cooling unit, insulation, double-paned windows, etc. I DOUBLED the size of my home, but my heating/cooling bill is about HALF what it used to be. Progress? Suffice it to say that the money I'm saving on my utility bill easily beats the monthly cost of the financed retrofit upgrades to my original home! In other words: it would be cheaper to buy the upgrades to an existing 100 year old home to get these improvements than to keep using whatever you had in the first place.
I drive a 10 year-old Saturn. It gets 30 MPG fully loaded at 90 MPH, quietly, with air conditioning, decent radio, and air bags. Back in the 1980s, I drove a VW diesel Rabbit that did about the same at the same speed. It was noisy, shook lots, had an AM-only radio, and didn't have A/C. Relative prices (inflation adjusted) makes the Saturn CHEAPER than the VW Rabbit. Hello progress ?!?
I use CFL lights throughout my home. Over their lifetimes, they are cheaper than incandescents in replacement costs alone, and 5 of these things use less electricity than a SINGLE incandescent bulb. I can light up my whole house for what it used to cost to turn on the porch light. I've banished incandescents from my home. And, I'm still not particularly good at turning
Heh... as soon as you get below 1 million, and you n00bs think you are the 5sh1zn1t....
Elephants Dream was a success? You mean a film which almost no-one ever heard of, and almost all of those who watched it didn't like?
Who cares if it sucks? Fantasmagoria wasn't exactly an amazing piece of work by today's standards, but as the world's first cartoon (1908) it was a good indicator of things to come.
Yes, including your beloved Family Guy...
This is a trend-setting movie, underscored by the woes of the MPAA and RIAA. Media is moving away from centralized cathedrals and moving inexorably towards individualized bazaars. Nothing that the **AA can do will change this fact, since it's really a consequence of technology getting forever cheaper.
The plot is weak, the voice acting is terrible. But like Fantasmagoria, it kicks off a trend of forever-improving material.
3. Abolish the two-party system
Remember the FIRST AMMENDMENT to the Constitution? Here's a refresher: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Notice that bit about "assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"?
4. Erase all censorship from all media...This includes: Internet, Television, print, video games, music, etc.
This fits nicely with the aforementioned 1st ammendment.
9. Require application for parental certificates (the program would be known as "If you can't feed em, don't breed em". It would be based on the financial situation of the parents, as well as their mental well being and relationship status...i.e. do they constantly fight, or are they constantly in love, etc.)
Whoah! Whoah! WHOAH THERE! WHOAH! Here's the FOURTH ammendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The idea that you would license the right to parent - well, guess what?!? You'd be assassinated for this one! Too bad other people don't have your standards in parenting. But that doesn't give you the right to dictate THEIR standards...
10. Legalize (and actively regulate) vigalante justice. (if everyone knows they can get their ass kicked by their gun toting neighbor, they are more likely to behave themselves)
I see. So might makes right!?!? Sorry. You have a bat's chance in hell to get this one through. The United States is a nation of laws. Our laws are as effective as they are sensible and uniformly applied.
Besides, looking at that beautiful document, the US Constitution, we have the Sixth ammendment: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence. But "vigilante justice" denies the victim his right to a speedy and public trial by jury!
You are a political whack-job. Your policies would return us to medieval culture, and reflect an astonishing lack of education. I am intensely thankful that we have a process that mostly prevents people like you from ever getting to office.
I strongly encourage you to read a bit of history - those who suffer in ignorance of history are bound to repeat it. I don't want a repeat of 1500 AD!
Oh, no, they won't install them in any commercial location, only private homes. Making people uncomfortable in their own homes, no problem; Interfering with Holy Commerce, now, they just don't play games there. Won't happen.
Actually, my Brother-in-law's Father-in-law works as an HVAC engineer. (Heating, Ventilation, Air-Conditioning) He gets flown all over the country to large buildings in order to install their Heating && A/C units.
His specialty is to install "time-deferred" air conditioning units. They apparently build large tanks on/near the building, and run the Air Conditioning at night, to cool the tank of coolant. Then, during the day, the business cools their buildings from the tank rather than directly from the grid.
The businesses get a significant credit for using energy when it's "cheap" rather than during the daytime when the grid is near its peak load, and this cost reduction is what pays for the fancy tanks and equipment.
He makes a very comfortable living installing these units...
Now, when we're talking about HOME units, I'd suggest that rather than institute a state link to the thermostat, we should institute variable rate meters. Not just keep track of how much was used, but WHEN it was used. Then, mandate a bill that's easy to read to indicate how much was used during the peak times and how much money could be saved.
People will program that into their thermostats, or thermostats will be developed to track peak usage, and this problem will pretty much take care of itself without pissing everybody off. (How many people would crow about how "smart" they are for programming their $10 thermostat to not run between 2 and 4 PM, saving $50/month?)
If most of the cost of the energy grid is maintaining the peak load, then utility companies should do themselves the favor of passing that information along to the consumer (in the form of a bill that reflects this fact), and then determine just how valuable that really is to them!
I correct you, with many, many examples of how you can use software built for Windows on Linux-based systems. Some better than others, some costlier than others.
Then, you start with a beautiful strawman argument, with "So you want me to buy hardware and put Linux and VMWare on it just to buy a licensed copy of Windows so that I can run cross platform software why?"
Hint: I don't care what you use. I care that you misrepresent what I use.
Then after providing many examples of you "ignoring" the many efforts the "Linux community" have made to make non-Linux software available to you, I try to lighten things up with the standard, Slashbot-joke about living in your mother's basement.
Your response?
What an asshole.
I'm really sorry your surroundings are so incredibly insulting to you. Remember that people see in others what they see in themselves - this is something that you should note. From what I see here, I'm quite glad that I don't know you personally.
Let's face facts, there is tons of software that is not on Linux that people want. How much longer is the Linux community going to ignore this fact?
WTF?
Maybe you've heard of VMWare?
Or, perhaps, Wine?
Or maybe you've noticed that software like Open Office and FireFox is cross platform, running on Win/Mac/Linux ? Toolkits such as GTK Java, Flash and QT allow for easy, straightforward cross-platform development?
Or, perhaps, that there's a whole operating system being put together utilizing all these parts?
Get your head out from under that rock! (or is it... Mom's basement?)
You're missing the psychology of the situation. He wanted everyone in the company in a complete panic at once, so they would be really sorry they laid off poor old Andy Lin. It wasn't the damage, it was the psychological effect he was looking for.
Except that you are wrong. He didn't want them to be sorry they laid him off. He just wanted them in a complete panic. If you had read TFA, you'd know that:
1) He wrote the script,
2) It failed to "go off" on his birthday,
3) He modified the script to "go off" on his following birthday, and
4) The script was discovered by somebody else before it went off on his following birthday.
This guy is a malicious weenie, and deserves time in PMITA prison. I mean, what kind of stupid, setting it to go off on your birthday?
Unless they came up with some radically cheaper method of producting them this will basically probably require a mortgage to go out and buy.
Not really. See below for a price guesstimate that puts the price at between $1,000 and $6,000. I paid around $1,000 for a 300 GB, 10k SCSI "Enterprise level" drive a year ago. This price has dropped to about $700 today, but you can't get drives bigger than 300 GB.
If this flash drive offered similar/better performance (or in this case, bigger size) then the price could easily be worth it to the right customer.
And no, I don't keep SpongeBob torrents on any of my eight, $1,000, 10k SCSI drives. But the money that they make for me makes their price cheap.
You want some kind of bridge from one to the other - lots of aircraft can show a whole range of flight data to passengers ("ooh, we've got a headwind over Greenland today! Guess we won't be early after all.") - but that should be strictly one-way. Which is probably the problem; there shouldn't be any way for anyone in the passenger cabin to issue instructions to the plane contrary to those from the flight deck, but I bet they found they couldn't prove it...
An interesting point I hadn't considered. My first thought was to use some kind of "bridge device" which allows for the transfer of this information in some locked-down, fundamentally incompatible protocol, such as RS-232 Serial (which can be one-way only) to transfer this data.
However, there's another consideration: What are the security concerns of this data? How much data would be made available to the passengers in real-time, and how useful would this information be in light of potential security concerns?
Could it cause a breach of security if the "bad guy" (terrorist/criminal/psychopath) knew what transponder code was being broadcast by the plane? (yes: what if a missile could be programmed to hone in on a transponder radio beacon?)
Could it cause a breach of security if the "bad guy" knew the exact status of pilot communications? What if "bad guy" knew the exact location, altitude, direction of travel, etc?
Yes, yes, and YES!
One-way communication is minimally a requirement, but I don't think that it's a good idea to even provide the information you mention. It offers NO advantage to the passengers other than for its ability to help in a breach of security - the passenger will arrive at the same time whether or not they know about the 15-knot headwind, or the fact that the pilots have (or have not) established communication with New York approach control.
Queue up 11,000 A/C posts about H4X0RZ Cr45h1n6 for REALZ Do0DEZ!.
This is not a "Windows vs Linux" thing. These are highly specialized data networks designed specifically for aircraft. The typical running life of a big jet is some 40 years or more - the idea of a consumer O/S such as Windows (or even Linux) being suitable for such a situation is simply stupid. Everything is coded in firmware, micro-processor based, with a likelyhood of actually crashing accidentally being somewhat less likely than getting struck by lightning on a sunny day while sitting in the cellar of your 4-story house.
Not bloody likely.
But, actual, malicious attack? Possible - and if there was *ANY* connection between the passenger data networks and the main control networks, that's an issue that must be addressed.
Most likely, the FAA found some part that was connected to both networks, that itself was not capable of actually transmitting data. But they're being car eful, as is their job, since lives are on the line.
Go FAA!
I have no doubt that temporary security issues exist. The hard part is turning these temporary situations into real, exploitable, predictable vulnerabilities.
I'm a private pilot. I walk into the local FBO (like an airport terminal, but for private planes) and after a very brief check, I'm able to freely roam the "secure" side of the airport. Not just where the "small" planes are, the whole "other side" of the airport. I can drive a truck out to the plane I'm flying, without any check whatsoever of the truck's contents. I have to remember to stop after passing thru the gate so that only my car passes thru. That's about it. This is normal and typical, but my shoes never come off, and I can certainly have a 12 oz soda (or a 2-liter bottle) in my hand while this happens. A private plane (such as a Cessna 172) is not so different than car, except that it flies. Remember that the building blast in Oklahoma was done with a simple car bomb.
Next time you take off your shoes, remember this tidbit of wisdom: 9/11 might have been prevented if we had then today's general paranoia, but the specific measures out there today would not have stopped it. Today's meaures, if effective from 9/1/2001 forward would not specifically have prevented the horrible attacks on 9/11/2001. It's in large part, a sham, designed to inconvenience tax payers so that they are lulled into thinking that their tax dollars are at work. Except that it kinda works, because it's hard to predict which of the various security measures will be enforced on whatever day.
The truth is that truly effective security is often misunderstood and almost never implemented. What we get instead is a pile of rules, regulations, and "inconveniences" that, combined, make it difficult to organize any kind of grand scheme, even if the individual components are horribly insecure.
In short, it's the random nature of security enforcement that makes it effective, not the universal enforcement. Random enforcement is much cheaper, and is truthfully "good enough". And it will, occasionally, fail. And that the price of the occasional failure will generally be less than the cost of the improve security all along.
However, energy use also peaks at times of extreme cold. In milder climates, sure, this isn't much of a concern, but I think people in Alaska would disagree with that assertion (but then again, who knows what climate change will occur). Of course, some environments may benefit from a mix of photovoltaic and solar-heated water, but in any event, photovoltaics isn't the universal answer.
Electricity is the "universal solvent". It can be easily converted into many other forms. We can use it to split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, to be recombined later for power. We can charge a battery. We can pump water uphill, (and let it out again to generate power on demand) compress air (and let the air out when we want to use its power) and it can be moved fairly cheaply over long(ish) distances.
Is solar the 100% answer? No. But it's a damned good start. If we covered 1/16 of the American Southwest with these dollar-a-watt solar cells, we have all the power we need to supply the US electricity and transportation bills. Since we can now do this at prices close to what the very cheapest source of electrical power (coal) can, simple economics indicates that this puts an upper bound on the cost of energy.
In short, we've already locked in electricity at prices not much more expensive than the very cheapest form of energy around.
And those guys in Alaska can use something a bit more exotic if they want. The point really is this: the energy crises is all but gone. Already. Peak oil will come and go, (if it hasn't already) and we will barely notice it. It will be an inconvenience, and may entail people replacing their cars with newer, more reliable, electrical cars when their old one dies. Like people in California soon will by law, switching from old-style light bulbs to CFLs will cut power usage dramatically without any noticeable loss in the "quality" of life. (other than a mild increase in disposable income)
Whoopdeedoo.
The future is (potentially) rosier than we ever thought. Peak oil is a reality, but it doesn't mean the end of much of anything but oil. And those religious whack jobs in the middle east that want to blow up buildings with their carcasses? They can pound sand for all I care, since their oil (and power) will be gone, and with global warming hitting them the hardest, that's all they'll have left.
Hopefully, they'll be smart enough to cover their deserts with solar panels and create some wealth with them. I'm hopeful, but I'm sure not holding my breath. In any event, their power/wealth will be largely mitigated by the simple forces of technology and economics.
if solar power were already that cheap and easy today, it would have already experienced sudden massive deployments.
Edison Electric, in southern California, recently signed on a contract for the largest single deployment of solar power IN THE WORLD. Over the next several years, they'll be building more solar power capacity than exists in the United States previously. All without any tax incentives, or any government funding of any kind, and profitably, simply because solar power provides the power that's needed at competitive rates at the time it's most needed.
Changes this big do take time. But they are already happening. The trend is real, and accelerating.
his reminds me of the time President Bush dismissed an EPA http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/06/03/tech/main510920.shtml? [cbsnews.com] Bush dismisses global warming warning on global sarming as the work of the the bureaucracy.
... eh, eh, what was that you said?
Oh yeah... that was so funny, I
Technology is the wild card that throws predictions to the wind. It's what differentiates modern civilization from the ancient Greeks, Romans, Sumerians, and every other now-dead civilization.
The cheapest form of Energy widely available today is coal, providing the majority of electrical power in the United States. It produces power as cheaply as $0.05 per watt, a rate that has now been matched by Solar power. Nicely enough, solar power is at its peak right at the same time that energy use is at its peak, (during hot, sunny days!) so the usual complaints about "peak load" are largely mitigated.
Combine that with our improved efficiencies of everything from lights to household heating, and the effect is magnified.
I predict that energy will be cheaper in 2050 per KWH than today. Nonetheless, technologies that save power will be in far greater use than they are today, simply because the cost of being efficient is also dropping. We're moving from an economy of scarcity to an economy of plenty, and one of the first industries to be hit by this is the recording industry.
Technology is advancing, and is continuing to advance, driven by the combination of cheap resources, a highly refined economic / capital investment system, and a generally well-educated population. Now, the interconnectedness of internet-based technologies takes the whole dynamic of education and technology and kicks it into hyperdrive.
There will be many challenges, of that I am certain. But I'm equally certain that we'll face the challenges faster than they accumulate. Technology continues to advance the power of the able, and meet the needs of the weak.
As someone who works within a few feet of what was once an aircraft hangar for dirigibles, I can confirm that as big as Fry's can be, they're pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
I've been to Moffett field. In fact, it was Hangar One I was thinking of. Perhaps this might make things more clear?
But the moral is that it is quite possible that someone, completely innocently, took the domain you were researching, within a day or so you doing it, because that's exactly what happened with my domain. In my case, I just got lucky... 2 days later, the domain would have been gone.
Except that I've had this happen, several times, when using RedHat linux' "whois" command, for domains that were REALLY weird. More than once.... I mean... COME ON!!!!!
I don't whois, even at the command line, unless I'm pretty much ready to buy the domain immediately.