That reminds me of one of my very favorite old Peanuts cartoons: Lucy brings Linus a steaming mug, and says "I brought you a mug of hot cocoa." Linus tastes it and says "It tastes like hot water with a brown crayon dipped in it." Lucy tastes it and agrees, saying "You're right. I'll go add another crayon."
I wouldn't spend a lot on buying another high end device to rip the tapes. The difference in quality between digital and VHS is so striking that the quality difference between "good VHS" and "bad VHS" is almost insignificant.
It's the memories that will be important to you, and they'll be triggered by the content of the video, not the quality. You'll be happy just to see it again, and to share it with your friends.
Any CA trying to cover up a breach will go down the same path as Diginotar.
What makes you so certain that a CA who publicly acknowledged a breach would not also immediately die in a meltdown? There is no evidence that honestly in a similar situation would save a CA.
If Digital Signature Trust Co.* were to publicly announce "We discovered just this morning that we have been breached, and while we can't give complete details because of the ongoing investigation, we found the hackers forged Google certificates," the public reaction would be almost identical to that of DigiNotar. If I were a customer, the chances would be high that I'd be shopping elsewhere for new certs to replace the ones that I could no longer trust. If I weren't a customer, there are obviously more reputable places to buy a cert. The incident itself is enough to cause me to lose trust, and that's really the only thing they're able to sell. I predict they'd go bankrupt as well, it might just take a few months longer.
Perhaps hiding the breach for the extra months was a strategy to give the executive rats time to flee the sinking ship. If so, we can only hope their behavior catches up to their personal reputations.
* As far as I know Digital Signature Trust Co. is a healthy and secure firm, and is rightly trusted by companies and browsers worldwide. I am using their name only as an example because I like the way it sounds.
You can't use the same path to verify someones identity as you used to find out about the identity in the first place. Say for example that you encounter a man that claims to be a police officer. To verify this you could ask about some kind of paper verifying the mans identity but if he is a criminal that poses as an officer it is very likely that the paper verifying his identity also is falsified. A much better method would be to call the police station and ask them to verify that the police officer in question actually exists and is at your location.
If you want to verify that a website actually is what it claims to be you might need to call the ISP the website uses and ask them.
Then why bother with CAs? Why not just use the law to handle these sorts of things?
911 operator: How may I assist you?/Me: I need to do some banking over the internet right away, and I don't trust the CAs to securely issue certificates. 911: Sir, all banks use certificates. Just type https:/// and trust your bank./Me: Can't I just use http:/// and if a bad guy steals my account, you catch him, right? 911: Sir, there aren't enough police to catch every on-line bank hacker if nobody bothered to protect their communications. I also have real emergencies to deal with now, so you'll have to hang up.
Businesses have a strong profit motive. The people who run businesses are greedy.
In the case of this security firm, (yes, they were a security firm because selling certificates is participating in the security business,) insecurity has proven to be the ultimate risk to not only profits, but to their investments as well.
I only hope that the employees of other security firms will email copies of news articles like these to their management and investors. "If you don't take security seriously and fund it appropriately, you will go bankrupt."
Unless you can enforce Preussian dicipline, forget about color-coding cables. Sooner or later someone is going to use what they can find, or re-plug something, and it'll stay that way. Keep the mess easy to sort out, don't spend big time and money on trying to prevent it.
I think you're better off enforcing the security. Why are you letting untrained people in your server racks, much less move cables?
Having a well structured system also has the psychological advantage that some people would try to avoid messing it up. If you've got the bank of blue cables tied off and going up and to the left, and the bank of gray cables tied off and going down and to the right, someone might think twice about trying to cross the back of the rack with an ugly black cable. If they do, it's certainly easier to follow, you can maybe figure out who to yell at, and get it replaced with the right cable. "Keeping the mess easy to sort out" is easier when it's not a mess at all.
Ask your boss if you can get permission to take a photo of your cabling work, or if they would permit a photographer take a picture for you. Offer to let them supervise the process, check the SD card for stray images of secret stuff, whatever. But a picture of that would be great for your resume, or even to stick in your performance review.
Agreed. The right kind of labeling tape is really important, as is the marking pen you use. Some inks fade remarkably quickly over time, or are dissolved by the solvents evaporating from the adhesives. Even if that crappy painter's masking tape magically holds for ten years, you still can't read if the coax is going to the bedroom or the kitchen.
You can buy little booklets of purpose made cable labels, which are good for letters and digits, but not for descriptions or names. They're very cheap and portable, you can keep a supply in your toolbox, and they work great for tagging the in-wall socket ends of the cables as well as the sockets themselves.
If you're doing a lot of work in one area, or don't mind carrying a label printer with you, get something like a Brother P-Touch labeler. They make ruggedized portable printers that you can toss in your toolbox. Get tape that begins with the letters TZFX. It's the flexible ID labeling tape recommended for cables. It's suitable for flagging as well as sticking to itself if you have to wrap it around a cable you have yet to pull.
One more hint: if you have to trim the wires in the outlet boxes, be sure to add new labels to the part of the cable you won't be trimming before you cut them all short. Yes, that was another time I felt stupid.
I know exactly what you want, because I wanted them too. I really wanted to get rid of my collection of wall warts and replace them all with some unified wiring system. My power supply is rated to handle all the accessories I have plugged in, so it's not a question of capacity. Unfortunately, I have never found anyone selling 4-pin Molex to coaxial power plug type adapters. So I made do with house current solutions, like everyone else.
A few years ago I got sick of the rat's nest of wires beneath my desk, so I took a lazy Sunday afternoon to address the problem. I first used a labeler to mark every power brick with the name of the device it was powering. I then unplugged everything from everything, and moved all of it away from under and on top of the desk, completely opening the space. I bought two 12-outlet power strips of the industrial kind that use ordinary duplex outlets mounted inside a plain steel box. The spacing between outlets is large enough for most power bricks. I then screw mounted the strips high up under the desk, and have one plugged into the UPS, while the other isn't. Another label identifies the one that is battery powered. The wires from each are routed to the individual devices, in bundles through the holes in the desktop. The slack of each is bound up with a black twist tie near the transformer.
Because it's dark under the desk, I clipped a small $10 clip-on reading light from Target (the kind with the wheeled switch on the cord) to the underside of the desk, and can turn it on whenever I'm working down there. It really helps. Even with my old eyes, I can easily read the faint markings and see the colors of the audio connector plugins.
I have all the wires to the back of the PC routed and velcroed together so I can slide the whole cabinet in and out from under the desk without straining any of them (except for two peripherals with wires that are too short.)
I mounted a third power strip to the inside wall of the hutch over the monitor, where it is mostly out of sight, and I use its outlets for temporary devices such as camera chargers, family PC's being repaired, etc.
It's occasionally devolved over time as devices have come and gone and I didn't take the care to bundle things up nicely in their wake. Earlier this year I got sick of it again and did a bit of tidying up, but it was much easier this time. I just had to retie a few bundles and all was clean again.
It depends largely on the physical properties of the cable being tied. The softer the plastic of the outer insulation, the easier it is to damage. Wires designed for use in automotive or machinery applications are made with tough insulation to protect against vibration damage. Many types of cable sheaths include internal fibers to increase the physical strength, or maintain the shape and stability of the cable's cross section.
High performance cabling such as Cat 5e / Cat 6 is engineered so that all conductors work together to carry the signal successfully. They're not just simple conductors like telephone wire, and that's why you need Cat 5e and not telephone wire for Ethernet. The insulation properties can remain intact and the wire can still conduct electricity, but the cable can be invisibly damaged in terms of its high speed characteristics such as crosstalk prevention. Look up the specifications on your wire's minimum bend radius and maximum pull tension. Pinching the cable bundle too tight could cause a problem with operating at gigabit speeds, but it might work fine at 10MHz speeds.
2) When I do need to run cable, such as telephone wire for my fax machine, I put the cable in the middle of the room. Then I buy a big rug, and place it over the top of the cable.
Really? How many sites post IP addresses, cookies, and referrers of clients and URLs to a third party server for aggregate analysis? If I buy a FooWidget 2012 from Amazon, how do they find out that I read some positive reviews of FooWidget 2012 on slashdot before buying one? How do they know that I checked on ifixfoowidgets.com for the latest info on FooWidget reliability? Those sites are participating in omniture and google-analytics and quantcast and sitemeter and crazyegg. If they are doing it all server side, why do they still have these clunky external javascripts? Oh, right, because they aren't doing it server side.
I agree that there are technical ways to do this. But "Plenty of ways" does not mean that any of them are in use.
Two things. First, you personally are not their target market for UIs. If you don't like the ribbon, it doesn't matter because they won't change it.
Second, all the slamming of the ribbon is really tired tempest-in-a-teapot stuff. Find a more meaningful problem to worry about.. Right now, you sound pretty whiny because you can't get over something so trivial. Four years ago there was an insignificant change to a product with no more than a five year lifespan. Let it go.
In the grand scheme of life, do you really want to be known as "the guy who cried over the shifting of some menu items back in '07?"
You're assuming that two different compilers would output identical binary images, but why would they? Different authors would implement different instructions in different ways. I'd expect that behavior only from a simple assembler.
From there maybe you could go on to compile a fairly simple reference compiler to compile your higher level languages, as you were discussing. But I doubt you could do a meaningful binary diff of the output of the Intel C compiler and gcc.
But NoScript won't protect you against SEO trickery or planted reviews...
Statistically it may help via the community. I consider myself to be a part of this demographic. I also consider myself "above average" in my ability to spot fake reviews and reviewers, and I dig deeper into search engine results than most people. I visit various kinds of sites before making a major purchase, sites that marketers aren't necessarily targeting today. I'm assuming (a very big assumption based on the one sample of "me") that people in my group are better at spotting planted reviews and identifying rigged search results.
I'm making another big assumption here, but I'm expecting that a significant fraction of people in my demographic who also make decisions in this way are also aware of NoScript, and are employing anti-tracking defenses. If both of these assumptions are true, fewer of the NoScript users are revealing their excellent sleuthing abilities to the analysis firms. That means my demographic's anti-SEO-trickery and anti-planted-review skills are being revealed to the marketers at a slower rate.
It's all statistics, of course. I have very smart friends who insist on using Safari or IE, and they say they don't care if they're tracked. I don't know if they've thought the anti-tracking issue all the way through to how it hurts them as consumers, or if they're too lazy to care, or if they've weighed the benefits of being tracked (there are benefits) and made their decisions accordingly.
Not quite. NoScript provides for the transparent absence of most third party trackers. Its users are really in "the blind spot" of these firms, as nobody is gathering complete metrics on their surfing habits. They can't.
You may want to assume that NoScript users behave in the same way as non-NoScript users in the same demographic, but you can't be sure. After all, most NoScript users are concerned about their privacy or dislike intrusive advertising, and are self-selected people who better understand browsers and technology. This places them in their own demographic. The average NoScript user is further along the educated axis, which generally translates to people with higher wages and more disposable income. It includes early adopters, technology trendsetters, family experts, business technical experts, etc. These are desirable customers, the exact sort of people they'd love to influence with marketing.
And what kind of things are they missing out on? They want to know where technically literate people go for information before making a purchase. Do they visit epinons, ConsumerReports, eBay, Google shopping, or Amazon reviews? Other sites? All of the above? Do they stick to the first page of Google results? Do they trust Amazon reviewers more than NewEgg reviewers? Do they prefer to shop by price, or to buy from retailers with higher reputations? That's information you can't get by looking at a single retailer's results. If you don't know how they got there, you don't know what factors to influence to get others to show up.
Ultimately the marketers are trying to understand what kinds of astroturfing they can get away with. NoScript makes their job much harder. And as long as they can't identify my abilities to spot SEO trickery, planted reviews, etc., it means I personally get results that are somewhat more honest to me, and are less biased by the marketing firms. At least that's what I'm choosing to believe at this time.
It's not about making everyone poor, it's about making everyone equal.
Right, because a neurologist should receive the same compensation as the guy scraping lard off the floor of a greasy spoon.
Maybe while we're at it, we can just put all the smart kids in the same classes as all the developmentally disabled kids. That should level the playing field a bit.
Agreed, burning the entire product is wasteful, but burning some of it makes sense to smelt out the rare earth and precious metals. Trying to recover individual bits like chips is a bad idea, though, as there is no way to assure future customers that they don't contain hidden damage or have sustained stresses. Silicon is cheap.
That's pretty much the idea. And perl is smaller than XML, so it'd fit in a barcode.:-) But yeah, having a sequence to deconstruct an item, describing the physical characteristics needed to deconstruct in the optimum order is what's needed.
Given the quantities of discarded items, a fast and bulk handling method of decomposition is needed. Having to learn how to open each item isn't feasible. Imaging having a hundred thousand individual tear-down instructions like: twist the case of a Sony DVR-450 three-quarters of a turn to the right, followed by a push down, unhook, unscrew three tamperproof screws, then lift up to recover the plastic Gilmer belt. No, they need an easy way to pop every case, take out all the aluminum, take out all the copper, remove the circuit boards, recover the precious metals, etc. Solvents and temperatures are great because they don't require accuracy or human attention - bathe it in a certain solvent and the plastics float to the top, or heat it up and it melts off, blow on it with compressed air so the light bits fly away and the heavy bits remain. Simple and automatable.
Step N: solvent X plus Temperature K applying mechanical separation method Z over time T yields material W in quantity range Q.
It still preserves trade secrets. You don't have to have all Ws precisely identified or give away exact quantities, you could have broader classifications such as circuit boards, common metals, and plastics, or you could get more detailed and break it down to rare earths and precious metals, or you could go further and include specific recovery items such as indium, tantalum, gold, silver, platinum, etc. Knowing there's between 10 and 100 milligrams of gold in a cell phone is hardly giving away a trade secret, but would tell me enough to know if it's worth recovering or not. And knowing how to melt the device in order to retrieve it doesn't foster reverse engineering any more than exposing Philips screw heads.
[Following up to myself, whatever.] One formula won't work for all products. For example, toasters operate in a high-heat environment, and couldn't be made to work if the wiring harness melted at 150. Or products with no metal frame would have a different process. We'd need a set of formulas, and each product given a recycling process tag (like today's plastic number in the triangle) which would tell the decompositors which bin to drop this specific gizmo in. Or the unique formula could be stamped right on the part itself using a 2D barcode.
How about standardizing assembly on binders and connectors that are fully deactivated by a published list of specific temperatures and solvents? Imagine knowing that if you drop a laptop or a toaster or a TV set or a cell phone in one end of the process that you'll get the same breakdown of components out?
The formula might look like this: Heat to 120, tabs designed to melt fall apart and plastic case opens. Apply acetone, dissolves special parts of the clasps that hold internal electrical plug connectors together so all copper wiring harnesses fall out. Heat to 150, separates the plastic parts from the metal frame parts, and melts the circuit board mounting posts. Heat circuit board to 180, melts solder, components containing rare earths are collected. Heat metal frame to 240, special screws holding aluminum parts such as heat sinks melt. Heat metal frame to 280, special screws holding copper parts melt.
These are completely made up numbers and orders and products, but standardizing on this type of construction would allow for standardized decomposition.
My current machine draws something like 360 watt-hours when the CPU and GPUs are busy, but only 217 watt-hours when the system is idle. (Time to trot out the Kill-A-Watt again.) My computer room noticeably heats up if I run an OpenGL screensaver, distributed.net client, or WCG client.
You will increase your household energy usage (and add to your summertime air conditioning bill) if you run their client 24x7. Information may want to be free, but that doesn't fit the power company's profit model.
And I said it wrong, too. Obviously people can detect RF. Point a microwave transmitter at their head, dump in a couple of kilowatts of energy, and their head asplode. That's a fairly extreme form of detection. What we don't understand yet is the human detectable threshold. Is it watts/m^3? Milliwatts? Microwatts? At what wavelengths? What's the maximum sensitivity of the most sensitive individual?
There's also the problem of other noise, be it audio or visual. RF equipment often involves coils and transformers, which are capable of emitting very high audio frequencies. Many people found the 15kHz flyback transformer in their TV sets to be unbearable. I don't care for the sound emitted by incandescent lightbulbs that have electronic dimmers. It's possible that random coils of metal could be energized by RF oscillate. And the 60Hz flicker of various lighting technologies can be very stressful. I can understand why people could have headaches or other problems due to electronics or other technologies, and those could easily be tied to RF.
But what's probably not human detectable are the nanowatt levels of RF these paranoid hypochondriacs are claiming to cause problems. Unless they have a finely tuned metal antenna connected to their nervous systems, they simply weren't born with the physiology needed to detect them.
Unfortunately, most of these people are irrational beyond logic. Things cannot be proven to them, they cannot be explained to them. They simply don't have the intellectual capacity. Or they don't have the emotional maturity to admit they were wrong.
This is not a logical conclusion. It doesn't necessarily indicate there are any people who can detect RF. It might simply mean the minority of studies are faulty. They might have been poorly conducted, they might have been filled with statistical outliers (a statistical number of studies will have results that appear to be statistically significant but are not), or they might have been fraudulent studies being promoted by people with political or other agendas.
I rather doubt most of these people, but I don't doubt it's possible.
Certainly the studies haven't proven it's impossible. But nothing has proven it is.
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of one of my very favorite old Peanuts cartoons:
Lucy brings Linus a steaming mug, and says "I brought you a mug of hot cocoa."
Linus tastes it and says "It tastes like hot water with a brown crayon dipped in it."
Lucy tastes it and agrees, saying "You're right. I'll go add another crayon."
I wouldn't spend a lot on buying another high end device to rip the tapes. The difference in quality between digital and VHS is so striking that the quality difference between "good VHS" and "bad VHS" is almost insignificant.
It's the memories that will be important to you, and they'll be triggered by the content of the video, not the quality. You'll be happy just to see it again, and to share it with your friends.
Any CA trying to cover up a breach will go down the same path as Diginotar.
What makes you so certain that a CA who publicly acknowledged a breach would not also immediately die in a meltdown? There is no evidence that honestly in a similar situation would save a CA.
If Digital Signature Trust Co.* were to publicly announce "We discovered just this morning that we have been breached, and while we can't give complete details because of the ongoing investigation, we found the hackers forged Google certificates," the public reaction would be almost identical to that of DigiNotar. If I were a customer, the chances would be high that I'd be shopping elsewhere for new certs to replace the ones that I could no longer trust. If I weren't a customer, there are obviously more reputable places to buy a cert. The incident itself is enough to cause me to lose trust, and that's really the only thing they're able to sell. I predict they'd go bankrupt as well, it might just take a few months longer.
Perhaps hiding the breach for the extra months was a strategy to give the executive rats time to flee the sinking ship. If so, we can only hope their behavior catches up to their personal reputations.
* As far as I know Digital Signature Trust Co. is a healthy and secure firm, and is rightly trusted by companies and browsers worldwide. I am using their name only as an example because I like the way it sounds.
You can't use the same path to verify someones identity as you used to find out about the identity in the first place.
Say for example that you encounter a man that claims to be a police officer. To verify this you could ask about some kind of paper verifying the mans identity but if he is a criminal that poses as an officer it is very likely that the paper verifying his identity also is falsified.
A much better method would be to call the police station and ask them to verify that the police officer in question actually exists and is at your location.
If you want to verify that a website actually is what it claims to be you might need to call the ISP the website uses and ask them.
Using Skype, of course.
Then why bother with CAs? Why not just use the law to handle these sorts of things?
911 operator: How may I assist you? /Me: I need to do some banking over the internet right away, and I don't trust the CAs to securely issue certificates. /Me: Can't I just use http:/// and if a bad guy steals my account, you catch him, right?
911: Sir, all banks use certificates. Just type https:/// and trust your bank.
911: Sir, there aren't enough police to catch every on-line bank hacker if nobody bothered to protect their communications. I also have real emergencies to deal with now, so you'll have to hang up.
Businesses have a strong profit motive. The people who run businesses are greedy.
In the case of this security firm, (yes, they were a security firm because selling certificates is participating in the security business,) insecurity has proven to be the ultimate risk to not only profits, but to their investments as well.
I only hope that the employees of other security firms will email copies of news articles like these to their management and investors. "If you don't take security seriously and fund it appropriately, you will go bankrupt."
Unless you can enforce Preussian dicipline, forget about color-coding cables. Sooner or later someone is going to use what they can find, or re-plug something, and it'll stay that way. Keep the mess easy to sort out, don't spend big time and money on trying to prevent it.
I think you're better off enforcing the security. Why are you letting untrained people in your server racks, much less move cables?
Having a well structured system also has the psychological advantage that some people would try to avoid messing it up. If you've got the bank of blue cables tied off and going up and to the left, and the bank of gray cables tied off and going down and to the right, someone might think twice about trying to cross the back of the rack with an ugly black cable. If they do, it's certainly easier to follow, you can maybe figure out who to yell at, and get it replaced with the right cable. "Keeping the mess easy to sort out" is easier when it's not a mess at all.
Ask your boss if you can get permission to take a photo of your cabling work, or if they would permit a photographer take a picture for you. Offer to let them supervise the process, check the SD card for stray images of secret stuff, whatever. But a picture of that would be great for your resume, or even to stick in your performance review.
Agreed. The right kind of labeling tape is really important, as is the marking pen you use. Some inks fade remarkably quickly over time, or are dissolved by the solvents evaporating from the adhesives. Even if that crappy painter's masking tape magically holds for ten years, you still can't read if the coax is going to the bedroom or the kitchen.
You can buy little booklets of purpose made cable labels, which are good for letters and digits, but not for descriptions or names. They're very cheap and portable, you can keep a supply in your toolbox, and they work great for tagging the in-wall socket ends of the cables as well as the sockets themselves.
If you're doing a lot of work in one area, or don't mind carrying a label printer with you, get something like a Brother P-Touch labeler. They make ruggedized portable printers that you can toss in your toolbox. Get tape that begins with the letters TZFX. It's the flexible ID labeling tape recommended for cables. It's suitable for flagging as well as sticking to itself if you have to wrap it around a cable you have yet to pull.
One more hint: if you have to trim the wires in the outlet boxes, be sure to add new labels to the part of the cable you won't be trimming before you cut them all short. Yes, that was another time I felt stupid.
I know exactly what you want, because I wanted them too. I really wanted to get rid of my collection of wall warts and replace them all with some unified wiring system. My power supply is rated to handle all the accessories I have plugged in, so it's not a question of capacity. Unfortunately, I have never found anyone selling 4-pin Molex to coaxial power plug type adapters. So I made do with house current solutions, like everyone else.
A few years ago I got sick of the rat's nest of wires beneath my desk, so I took a lazy Sunday afternoon to address the problem. I first used a labeler to mark every power brick with the name of the device it was powering. I then unplugged everything from everything, and moved all of it away from under and on top of the desk, completely opening the space. I bought two 12-outlet power strips of the industrial kind that use ordinary duplex outlets mounted inside a plain steel box. The spacing between outlets is large enough for most power bricks. I then screw mounted the strips high up under the desk, and have one plugged into the UPS, while the other isn't. Another label identifies the one that is battery powered. The wires from each are routed to the individual devices, in bundles through the holes in the desktop. The slack of each is bound up with a black twist tie near the transformer.
Because it's dark under the desk, I clipped a small $10 clip-on reading light from Target (the kind with the wheeled switch on the cord) to the underside of the desk, and can turn it on whenever I'm working down there. It really helps. Even with my old eyes, I can easily read the faint markings and see the colors of the audio connector plugins.
I have all the wires to the back of the PC routed and velcroed together so I can slide the whole cabinet in and out from under the desk without straining any of them (except for two peripherals with wires that are too short.)
I mounted a third power strip to the inside wall of the hutch over the monitor, where it is mostly out of sight, and I use its outlets for temporary devices such as camera chargers, family PC's being repaired, etc.
It's occasionally devolved over time as devices have come and gone and I didn't take the care to bundle things up nicely in their wake. Earlier this year I got sick of it again and did a bit of tidying up, but it was much easier this time. I just had to retie a few bundles and all was clean again.
It depends largely on the physical properties of the cable being tied. The softer the plastic of the outer insulation, the easier it is to damage. Wires designed for use in automotive or machinery applications are made with tough insulation to protect against vibration damage. Many types of cable sheaths include internal fibers to increase the physical strength, or maintain the shape and stability of the cable's cross section.
High performance cabling such as Cat 5e / Cat 6 is engineered so that all conductors work together to carry the signal successfully. They're not just simple conductors like telephone wire, and that's why you need Cat 5e and not telephone wire for Ethernet. The insulation properties can remain intact and the wire can still conduct electricity, but the cable can be invisibly damaged in terms of its high speed characteristics such as crosstalk prevention. Look up the specifications on your wire's minimum bend radius and maximum pull tension. Pinching the cable bundle too tight could cause a problem with operating at gigabit speeds, but it might work fine at 10MHz speeds.
2) When I do need to run cable, such as telephone wire for my fax machine, I put the cable in the middle of the room. Then I buy a big rug, and place it over the top of the cable.
That's just a cheap raised floor.
Really? How many sites post IP addresses, cookies, and referrers of clients and URLs to a third party server for aggregate analysis? If I buy a FooWidget 2012 from Amazon, how do they find out that I read some positive reviews of FooWidget 2012 on slashdot before buying one? How do they know that I checked on ifixfoowidgets.com for the latest info on FooWidget reliability? Those sites are participating in omniture and google-analytics and quantcast and sitemeter and crazyegg. If they are doing it all server side, why do they still have these clunky external javascripts? Oh, right, because they aren't doing it server side.
I agree that there are technical ways to do this. But "Plenty of ways" does not mean that any of them are in use.
Two things. First, you personally are not their target market for UIs. If you don't like the ribbon, it doesn't matter because they won't change it.
Second, all the slamming of the ribbon is really tired tempest-in-a-teapot stuff. Find a more meaningful problem to worry about.. Right now, you sound pretty whiny because you can't get over something so trivial. Four years ago there was an insignificant change to a product with no more than a five year lifespan. Let it go.
In the grand scheme of life, do you really want to be known as "the guy who cried over the shifting of some menu items back in '07?"
You're assuming that two different compilers would output identical binary images, but why would they? Different authors would implement different instructions in different ways. I'd expect that behavior only from a simple assembler.
From there maybe you could go on to compile a fairly simple reference compiler to compile your higher level languages, as you were discussing. But I doubt you could do a meaningful binary diff of the output of the Intel C compiler and gcc.
But NoScript won't protect you against SEO trickery or planted reviews...
Statistically it may help via the community. I consider myself to be a part of this demographic. I also consider myself "above average" in my ability to spot fake reviews and reviewers, and I dig deeper into search engine results than most people. I visit various kinds of sites before making a major purchase, sites that marketers aren't necessarily targeting today. I'm assuming (a very big assumption based on the one sample of "me") that people in my group are better at spotting planted reviews and identifying rigged search results.
I'm making another big assumption here, but I'm expecting that a significant fraction of people in my demographic who also make decisions in this way are also aware of NoScript, and are employing anti-tracking defenses. If both of these assumptions are true, fewer of the NoScript users are revealing their excellent sleuthing abilities to the analysis firms. That means my demographic's anti-SEO-trickery and anti-planted-review skills are being revealed to the marketers at a slower rate.
It's all statistics, of course. I have very smart friends who insist on using Safari or IE, and they say they don't care if they're tracked. I don't know if they've thought the anti-tracking issue all the way through to how it hurts them as consumers, or if they're too lazy to care, or if they've weighed the benefits of being tracked (there are benefits) and made their decisions accordingly.
Not quite. NoScript provides for the transparent absence of most third party trackers. Its users are really in "the blind spot" of these firms, as nobody is gathering complete metrics on their surfing habits. They can't.
You may want to assume that NoScript users behave in the same way as non-NoScript users in the same demographic, but you can't be sure. After all, most NoScript users are concerned about their privacy or dislike intrusive advertising, and are self-selected people who better understand browsers and technology. This places them in their own demographic. The average NoScript user is further along the educated axis, which generally translates to people with higher wages and more disposable income. It includes early adopters, technology trendsetters, family experts, business technical experts, etc. These are desirable customers, the exact sort of people they'd love to influence with marketing.
And what kind of things are they missing out on? They want to know where technically literate people go for information before making a purchase. Do they visit epinons, ConsumerReports, eBay, Google shopping, or Amazon reviews? Other sites? All of the above? Do they stick to the first page of Google results? Do they trust Amazon reviewers more than NewEgg reviewers? Do they prefer to shop by price, or to buy from retailers with higher reputations? That's information you can't get by looking at a single retailer's results. If you don't know how they got there, you don't know what factors to influence to get others to show up.
Ultimately the marketers are trying to understand what kinds of astroturfing they can get away with. NoScript makes their job much harder. And as long as they can't identify my abilities to spot SEO trickery, planted reviews, etc., it means I personally get results that are somewhat more honest to me, and are less biased by the marketing firms. At least that's what I'm choosing to believe at this time.
It's not about making everyone poor, it's about making everyone equal.
Right, because a neurologist should receive the same compensation as the guy scraping lard off the floor of a greasy spoon.
Maybe while we're at it, we can just put all the smart kids in the same classes as all the developmentally disabled kids. That should level the playing field a bit.
Who do you think you are, Harrison Bergeron?
Agreed, burning the entire product is wasteful, but burning some of it makes sense to smelt out the rare earth and precious metals. Trying to recover individual bits like chips is a bad idea, though, as there is no way to assure future customers that they don't contain hidden damage or have sustained stresses. Silicon is cheap.
That's pretty much the idea. And perl is smaller than XML, so it'd fit in a barcode. :-) But yeah, having a sequence to deconstruct an item, describing the physical characteristics needed to deconstruct in the optimum order is what's needed.
Given the quantities of discarded items, a fast and bulk handling method of decomposition is needed. Having to learn how to open each item isn't feasible. Imaging having a hundred thousand individual tear-down instructions like: twist the case of a Sony DVR-450 three-quarters of a turn to the right, followed by a push down, unhook, unscrew three tamperproof screws, then lift up to recover the plastic Gilmer belt. No, they need an easy way to pop every case, take out all the aluminum, take out all the copper, remove the circuit boards, recover the precious metals, etc. Solvents and temperatures are great because they don't require accuracy or human attention - bathe it in a certain solvent and the plastics float to the top, or heat it up and it melts off, blow on it with compressed air so the light bits fly away and the heavy bits remain. Simple and automatable.
Step N: solvent X plus Temperature K applying mechanical separation method Z over time T yields material W in quantity range Q.
It still preserves trade secrets. You don't have to have all Ws precisely identified or give away exact quantities, you could have broader classifications such as circuit boards, common metals, and plastics, or you could get more detailed and break it down to rare earths and precious metals, or you could go further and include specific recovery items such as indium, tantalum, gold, silver, platinum, etc. Knowing there's between 10 and 100 milligrams of gold in a cell phone is hardly giving away a trade secret, but would tell me enough to know if it's worth recovering or not. And knowing how to melt the device in order to retrieve it doesn't foster reverse engineering any more than exposing Philips screw heads.
[Following up to myself, whatever.]
One formula won't work for all products. For example, toasters operate in a high-heat environment, and couldn't be made to work if the wiring harness melted at 150. Or products with no metal frame would have a different process. We'd need a set of formulas, and each product given a recycling process tag (like today's plastic number in the triangle) which would tell the decompositors which bin to drop this specific gizmo in. Or the unique formula could be stamped right on the part itself using a 2D barcode.
How about standardizing assembly on binders and connectors that are fully deactivated by a published list of specific temperatures and solvents? Imagine knowing that if you drop a laptop or a toaster or a TV set or a cell phone in one end of the process that you'll get the same breakdown of components out?
The formula might look like this:
Heat to 120, tabs designed to melt fall apart and plastic case opens.
Apply acetone, dissolves special parts of the clasps that hold internal electrical plug connectors together so all copper wiring harnesses fall out.
Heat to 150, separates the plastic parts from the metal frame parts, and melts the circuit board mounting posts.
Heat circuit board to 180, melts solder, components containing rare earths are collected.
Heat metal frame to 240, special screws holding aluminum parts such as heat sinks melt.
Heat metal frame to 280, special screws holding copper parts melt.
These are completely made up numbers and orders and products, but standardizing on this type of construction would allow for standardized decomposition.
My current machine draws something like 360 watt-hours when the CPU and GPUs are busy, but only 217 watt-hours when the system is idle. (Time to trot out the Kill-A-Watt again.) My computer room noticeably heats up if I run an OpenGL screensaver, distributed.net client, or WCG client.
You will increase your household energy usage (and add to your summertime air conditioning bill) if you run their client 24x7. Information may want to be free, but that doesn't fit the power company's profit model.
And I said it wrong, too. Obviously people can detect RF. Point a microwave transmitter at their head, dump in a couple of kilowatts of energy, and their head asplode. That's a fairly extreme form of detection. What we don't understand yet is the human detectable threshold. Is it watts/m^3? Milliwatts? Microwatts? At what wavelengths? What's the maximum sensitivity of the most sensitive individual?
There's also the problem of other noise, be it audio or visual. RF equipment often involves coils and transformers, which are capable of emitting very high audio frequencies. Many people found the 15kHz flyback transformer in their TV sets to be unbearable. I don't care for the sound emitted by incandescent lightbulbs that have electronic dimmers. It's possible that random coils of metal could be energized by RF oscillate. And the 60Hz flicker of various lighting technologies can be very stressful. I can understand why people could have headaches or other problems due to electronics or other technologies, and those could easily be tied to RF.
But what's probably not human detectable are the nanowatt levels of RF these paranoid hypochondriacs are claiming to cause problems. Unless they have a finely tuned metal antenna connected to their nervous systems, they simply weren't born with the physiology needed to detect them.
Unfortunately, most of these people are irrational beyond logic. Things cannot be proven to them, they cannot be explained to them. They simply don't have the intellectual capacity. Or they don't have the emotional maturity to admit they were wrong.
Majority can't tell = a minority CAN.
This is not a logical conclusion. It doesn't necessarily indicate there are any people who can detect RF. It might simply mean the minority of studies are faulty. They might have been poorly conducted, they might have been filled with statistical outliers (a statistical number of studies will have results that appear to be statistically significant but are not), or they might have been fraudulent studies being promoted by people with political or other agendas.
I rather doubt most of these people, but I don't doubt it's possible.
Certainly the studies haven't proven it's impossible. But nothing has proven it is.