Here's a nice warm thought to keep everyone up at night: What is to keep hackers who enjoy this sort of thing from buying devices at BestBuy, hacking them to insert remote back doors, and then returning them to BestBuy the next day? If they put it back in the packaging, possibly with new shrink-wrap, they could claim they never even opened it, and it would go right back on the shelf for some unsuspecting victim to buy.
But... that could never happen. There's yellow tape on the box assuring me that it was inspected and repackaged by Best Buy experts. Experts! And we all know only experts are permitted access to the yellow tape dispenser.
I have little doubt the same experts refurbished one of the returned washing machines I was looking at. I wanted to see how the drain filter would work so I opened it, and while I looked disgustedly at the slimy lint still trapped in the filter, about a gallon of water poured into their carpets. I guess that's what karma looks like.
My point was only that publishing this code isn't likely to benefit anyone, even those who have an interest. "Legitimate" anti-virus companies aren't likely to need it, because they generally deal with the binary code anyway. If there are a few such companies that could benefit from it, the code could be made available to them via special arrangement instead of a public publishing process. It certainly doesn't have to be an exclusive deal; if you think Symantec, ESET, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro are all legitimate AV companies that deserve a copy, send them all a copy.
1) Making malware code public helps malware programmers (current and aspiring) write better malware programs.
This request is specific to ransomware, not generic malware. Anyone with poor ethics can deploy either, but ransomware has the potential to make an irreversible impact on victims. Yes, malware can reformat a drive and wipe data, but ransomware provides greater motivation to attackers because of the potential for direct profit.
2) Making malware code public helps anti-malware programmers (current and aspiring) write better anti-malware programs.
Anti-malware code is a specialized field, and there are fewer than 50 companies who have much marketshare. Entry into this field is a high bar, requiring the trust of many people. Even then, many of the products are of poor quality, and/or have their own unethical behavior. An aspiring anti-malware author will have much greater difficulty breaking into the field than an ordinary app developer. There isn't much of a market for specialized anti-ransomware.
Who benefits more? I honestly don't know. However, my bias is towards openness over secrecy, and I think it needs to demonstrated that the risks of making malware code public outweigh any potential benefits.
Publishing the ransomware code creates very specific risks. If perfectly executed, ransomware results in absolute hijacking of the user's data. But as we know from legions of flawed security software, writing perfect code and implementing cryptographic algorithms perfectly is very difficult. Recent ransomware made the news because it was imperfect, allowing investigators to recover the encrypted data for all clients without paying the extortionists. The fear is that publishing the ransomware code will give a working example of properly executed encryption that researchers can't break.
You also have to consider how anti-malware code typically works. Much of it is still signature based, meaning that a working copy of the code can simply be tweaked or recompiled to evade signature detection, and the recompiled code will remain effective. Source code won't help the anti-malware authors much.
So overall, publishing the code will greatly benefit the attackers, and will be of only marginal benefit to anti-malware authors. It is hoped that anyone in possession of ransomware source code already understands these points, and will not be compelled to release the code for "noble purposes", as there would be virtually no nobility in the gesture.
If you are still interested in how ransomware works, I would recommend "Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology", by Drs. Young and Yung (Wiley, 2004.) This book was one of the first scholarly works on ransomware. You don't need the source code to learn about it.
It wasn't the summary's fault. It's an accurate summary of a really stupid article. But it's in CSO Online magazine, so consider the audience is not the sharpest technical group. To them, it's all technobabble.
Three keys for satellites up in the sky Seven for the hackers, in their mommies' homes Nine keys for sysadmins in collusion with the spies One for the Dark Lord, in his Oval Office. In the land of Bruce, where the Schneier lies. One key to crack them all, one key to find them One key to bring them all and in the HSM bind them. In the land of Bruce, where the Schneier lies.
The request came from the Department of Justice. These are to be installed in fixed locations, such as the roof of a prison. Just because Airbus created them does not mean they intend to install them on their aircraft.
And very few prisons are traveling at 4 miles per minute, even those on final approach.:-)
Disrupting the control signal to a simple drone may cause it to fly erroneously and crash (not necessarily straight down). Who to blame for damage then?
The pilot, 100%. If this is a "no fly zone" for models, it's nobody's fault but the person who chose to fly their model into the zone. And they aren't going to mess with GPS -- too much risk, too many legal issues.
As I posted above, they're not looking to solve every problem, and jam every possible frequency, and stop every possible type of navigational system. They're looking to stop the gang members from buying a quadcopter at the mall, duct-taping a gun or cell phone to it, then flying it into their buddy's prison. This is a practical approach to reducing the current problems, not a perfect fix that eliminates every possible type of R/C aircraft.
Even The Fine Summary said they'd selectively jam the drone's communication, not the GPS signals. That means if they detect a 2.4GHz signal in the direction of the radar signature of the drone, they'll jam 2.4GHz. To avoid interfering with legitimate radio traffic I suspect their system discriminates, and only identifies transmissions in bands assigned to RC control or transmissions on the unlicensed bands. It probably wouldn't jam cell frequencies or other licensed bands.
And that will be good enough to stop virtually all of the model aircraft being flown into prison yards today. Their problems today are not caused by sophisticated electrical engineers who illegally mod their radios to transmit on illicit frequencies. Their problems are coming from the buddies of inmates who go to the mall, buy a cheap RC quadcopter, duct-tape a cell phone and a few packets of powdered substances to it, and send it over the wall during the exercise period. If they can stop the hundreds of those guys today, they can worry about the EE types later after they become a real threat.
There's perfect, and then there's good enough to be effective now. This falls into the latter category.
... the same way the webMD spelled the end of doctors.
Did anyone ever predict that?
IBM's Watson has been touted as a diagnostic tool for busy doctors, but it's never been suggested as a replacement in the developed world. However, in countries that are drastically underserved by doctors (Liberia had 40 doctors to serve 4 million people back in 2008 -- that was before Ebola killed half of them), it's possible access to Watson could take the place of a trained physician for many people.
Is anyone else tired of increasingly 'advanced' fridges and appliances which have ever-decreasing ability to be maintained or upgraded, and aren't nearly as fundamentally reliable as older fridges?
Replace that 20 year old fridge and before you know it the replacement's on the fritz...
When my grandma passed, we hauled her old fridge to the dump, where the guy commented, 'hey, this thing's still cold!' And we all saw the manufacturing date was stenciled across the back: "1941". That little fridge had been running constantly for over 50 years. There's definitely something to be said for reliability.
But that tiny little fridge drew more current than a large modern fridge, and ran longer and louder. It was horribly inefficient by the standards of the 1990s. She could have bought a new fridge 10 years before she passed and it would have paid for itself in energy savings. And that was over 20 years ago; refrigerators today are even more energy efficient than the 20 year old models.
Reliability isn't the only measure of quality. Many attributes factor into Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If the 1080p monitor and interior cameras keep the door from being opened just one extra time per day, the energy saved could easily pay for the fancy electronics plus the additional maintenance. Or if the 'intelligence' helps keep people from consuming spoiled food that's sat in the fridge too long, what price would you put on that?
Every time I hear someone say "they don't make them like they used to," I know there's probably a good reason for it.
Remember the Northeast blackout of 2003? A single failure on the grid, starting with incorrect load data during a heavy demand day (aka SCADA reporting failures), which caused a peak load generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio to shut itself down. The lack of power caused higher than allowable demand on Ohio's existing transmission lines, causing some of them to sag into trees where the safety systems automatically shut them down. This larger outage resulted in higher demand, so more sets of lines sagged into more trees, causing more failures. The resultant failures cascaded across the grid, ultimately causing safety systems at as many as 256 generating plants to automatically take themselves offline, and leaving 55 million customers from Detroit to New York without power overnight.
Even the smallest push in the wrong place at the wrong time could be enough to trigger another cascade of failures. And don't think for a moment that an attacker can't figure out when and where to push - readily available public information is more than enough to draw some logical conclusions.
What about Hoberman spheres, or a similar self-unfolding structure? They could deploy clusters of them, perhaps skinned with mylar or other foldable materials.
I still think the bigger problem is the lifetime of supplies needed. Everyone talks about recycling wastewater, but energy still has to be expended to crack the waste CO2 back into breathable oxygen. And then there's food. If they're in "deep" space, they're a long way from sunlight, so their plants are going to need energy from another source. And grow lamps don't last forever, not even LED lamps - 50,000 hours if they're lucky, which is only a half dozen years. Solar panels might last 25-30 years. They're going to need replacement power supplies, replacement computers, replacement everything. It's not like they can send them a supply ship - by the time the ship gets to where they were, they'll have moved on an additional 5 years or more.
I think the only viable plan is to prove we can successfully colonize Mars first. Demonstrate the capability of landing and thriving on a non-living rock. Then we can talk about what kinds of modules we need for "deep" space.
The video linked in the article is terrible. The footage of the squid looked like it might have been fantastic, but we'll never know because it was covered up by talking heads and half a dozen gigantic tentacled text-overlay monsters.
To take sonic readings, they'd have to shut the machine off first to eliminate the noise it would generate; even then, road noise from the surface might be too disruptive. Or maybe it was all muck, with no good way to ping it.
They certainly should have been aware of the location of the pipe, as it was purportedly documented in the spec. Maybe there was an error in the doc, or maybe the engineers failed to notify the bore operator, or maybe the operators just weren't paying attention.
They might be able to measure the slurry, but that wouldn't tell them anything about upcoming surprises. I'm not sure what kind of electrodes you could use for checking conductivity of the cut face (that would survive a constant rock grinding), or if anyone felt it would be worth the expense.
A couple of people have mentioned sonar. It might be possible to peek into the upcoming rock, but the machine would have to be silenced to execute the tests. That might be more downtime than they want, given the normal course of boring. Maybe the operators could have pinged the rock when they first encountered the obstruction, but maybe it was already too late by that time.
Oh, and one other method of control they have is depth of cut. I believe they can adjust each cutting head assembly as to how deep they want it to cut. I presume they can adjust it for different kinds of material, or change out the cutting bits as needed.
I don't know how they'd be set up for boring earth, as I've only ever bored steel with a straight fixed cutter, and the depth of cut in steel is on the order of a few thousandths of an inch per revolution. The dimensions don't relate at all to a tunnel borer.
Rock is more brittle than steel. Hit rock with a hard enough cutter blade, pushing with enough force, and you will chip away at it. Hit a malleable and tough steel pipe with the same cutter blade and the same amount of force, and the blade may dig in to the steel and get caught in it.
The operator doesn't exactly have visibility into the obstruction, so when progress stops, he may not recognize what's going wrong. He can add more force in an attempt to break through. Add enough force and something will eventually give, but there's no guarantee if it will be the obstruction that gives way, or the engine, or the power train, or the frame of his machine.
And what kinds of sensors do you think you can deploy on the face of a giant cutting disk that will survive the thousands of horsepower of force mashing it into the earth? (Trick question, the answer is none.) About all they can effectively monitor is from the back side of the cutting face. That means indirect measurements only, like the amount of power, rotational speed, rate of travel, temperature of the cutting face, sound of the cutting face, and the composition of the tailings. It's not exactly like looking out the windshield and seeing you're about to drive into a big steel pipe. The amount of power is regulated by the operator, but what are his options when it stops going forward? It's not like he can back up and turn left to go around it. He can pretty much decide "add power" or "stay stuck".
Meh, everyone who knows anything about true hi fidelity knows that only Persian porcelain power standoffs are the real deal, and that Egyptian porcelain does virtually nothing to prevent the cross-induced eddy currents that raise the dynamic transversal power cord impedance. You'll get so much hum you'd think the amp was housed in a beehive. If you're going that low-brow, what's next? Are you going to suggest heresy, and use garden-variety extension cords instead of oxygen-free-copper speaker cables? I say, you may have to cancel your subscription to Audiophile magazine.
My/dev/null has a hand rubbed walnut finish, a tube stage feeding a hand-wound transformer, polarized cables, Ukranian porcelain stand-offs, and anti-magnetic monopoles crafted from moon rocks to lower the noise floor. It's extremely danceable.
Ahh. That certainly wasn't clear from your post, but it explains a lot.
I don't know that I trust the carriers to make any such choices on my behalf, though. A VPN to a home network and privoxy would at least keep it in semi-trustworthy hands, except for https everywhere.
You're dealing with limited processor power on cellphones and tablets, so blocking ads is just adding extra strain. Adblock plus isn't exactly known for its efficiency.
The prime 'strain' on cellphones and tablets is power consumption, which directly reduces battery life, the number one complaint of phone owners. It takes very little energy or time to run some regexps - even a lot of regexps will run in just a few milliseconds on any modern smart phone, and consume microwatts in the process. But it takes an exponential amount of energy to operate the radio, up to 600 milliwatts, and to keep that radio powered up while retrieving the tens or hundreds of kilobytes of ad materials and images; followed by the energy spent on parsing the incoming data stream, formatting it for display, and executing all the javascripts contained within. Displaying the ads takes at least 10^4 times as much energy as that spent by adblock. And energy/battery life isn't the only cost. There's time spent downloading those hundreds of kilobytes, which turns into time wasted by the user who doesn't see the desired content until the ads are loaded and processed (and 4G speeds certainly don't apply to all cellular customers; despite your personal experiences in the city and the colorful coverage maps delivered by these ads, much of the world is still on 3G, EDGE or even slower connections.) There's the milliseconds of user time spent flicking past the unwanted ads, which is what the advertisers actually paid for. And for those on limited data plans, those tens or hundreds of kilobytes eat into their data allowances, which counts against them in their phone bills and bank accounts. On top of all that, every third party ad server you don't visit is one less potential source of a malware infection, reducing risk.
If you still feel the need to shill for ad delivery services in the future I recommend you find a more cogent argument, because whatever you've been smoking, it's either not enough or too much.
They did. They shot him down back in '58, and as part of a massive cover-up, Eisenhower wrote out a secret directive ordering parents to 'play Santa' and wrap gifts for their kids.
Gotta go, it sounds like someone's whispering outside and making helicopter noises, so I ought to check on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a nice warm thought to keep everyone up at night: What is to keep hackers who enjoy this sort of thing from buying devices at BestBuy, hacking them to insert remote back doors, and then returning them to BestBuy the next day? If they put it back in the packaging, possibly with new shrink-wrap, they could claim they never even opened it, and it would go right back on the shelf for some unsuspecting victim to buy.
But ... that could never happen. There's yellow tape on the box assuring me that it was inspected and repackaged by Best Buy experts. Experts! And we all know only experts are permitted access to the yellow tape dispenser.
I have little doubt the same experts refurbished one of the returned washing machines I was looking at. I wanted to see how the drain filter would work so I opened it, and while I looked disgustedly at the slimy lint still trapped in the filter, about a gallon of water poured into their carpets. I guess that's what karma looks like.
My point was only that publishing this code isn't likely to benefit anyone, even those who have an interest. "Legitimate" anti-virus companies aren't likely to need it, because they generally deal with the binary code anyway. If there are a few such companies that could benefit from it, the code could be made available to them via special arrangement instead of a public publishing process. It certainly doesn't have to be an exclusive deal; if you think Symantec, ESET, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro are all legitimate AV companies that deserve a copy, send them all a copy.
1) Making malware code public helps malware programmers (current and aspiring) write better malware programs.
This request is specific to ransomware, not generic malware. Anyone with poor ethics can deploy either, but ransomware has the potential to make an irreversible impact on victims. Yes, malware can reformat a drive and wipe data, but ransomware provides greater motivation to attackers because of the potential for direct profit.
2) Making malware code public helps anti-malware programmers (current and aspiring) write better anti-malware programs.
Anti-malware code is a specialized field, and there are fewer than 50 companies who have much marketshare. Entry into this field is a high bar, requiring the trust of many people. Even then, many of the products are of poor quality, and/or have their own unethical behavior. An aspiring anti-malware author will have much greater difficulty breaking into the field than an ordinary app developer. There isn't much of a market for specialized anti-ransomware.
Who benefits more? I honestly don't know. However, my bias is towards openness over secrecy, and I think it needs to demonstrated that the risks of making malware code public outweigh any potential benefits.
Publishing the ransomware code creates very specific risks. If perfectly executed, ransomware results in absolute hijacking of the user's data. But as we know from legions of flawed security software, writing perfect code and implementing cryptographic algorithms perfectly is very difficult. Recent ransomware made the news because it was imperfect, allowing investigators to recover the encrypted data for all clients without paying the extortionists. The fear is that publishing the ransomware code will give a working example of properly executed encryption that researchers can't break.
You also have to consider how anti-malware code typically works. Much of it is still signature based, meaning that a working copy of the code can simply be tweaked or recompiled to evade signature detection, and the recompiled code will remain effective. Source code won't help the anti-malware authors much.
So overall, publishing the code will greatly benefit the attackers, and will be of only marginal benefit to anti-malware authors. It is hoped that anyone in possession of ransomware source code already understands these points, and will not be compelled to release the code for "noble purposes", as there would be virtually no nobility in the gesture.
If you are still interested in how ransomware works, I would recommend "Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology", by Drs. Young and Yung (Wiley, 2004.) This book was one of the first scholarly works on ransomware. You don't need the source code to learn about it.
It wasn't the summary's fault. It's an accurate summary of a really stupid article. But it's in CSO Online magazine, so consider the audience is not the sharpest technical group. To them, it's all technobabble.
Three keys for satellites up in the sky
Seven for the hackers, in their mommies' homes
Nine keys for sysadmins in collusion with the spies
One for the Dark Lord, in his Oval Office.
In the land of Bruce, where the Schneier lies.
One key to crack them all, one key to find them
One key to bring them all and in the HSM bind them.
In the land of Bruce, where the Schneier lies.
The request came from the Department of Justice. These are to be installed in fixed locations, such as the roof of a prison. Just because Airbus created them does not mean they intend to install them on their aircraft.
And very few prisons are traveling at 4 miles per minute, even those on final approach. :-)
Disrupting the control signal to a simple drone may cause it to fly erroneously and crash (not necessarily straight down). Who to blame for damage then?
The pilot, 100%. If this is a "no fly zone" for models, it's nobody's fault but the person who chose to fly their model into the zone. And they aren't going to mess with GPS -- too much risk, too many legal issues.
As I posted above, they're not looking to solve every problem, and jam every possible frequency, and stop every possible type of navigational system. They're looking to stop the gang members from buying a quadcopter at the mall, duct-taping a gun or cell phone to it, then flying it into their buddy's prison. This is a practical approach to reducing the current problems, not a perfect fix that eliminates every possible type of R/C aircraft.
Even The Fine Summary said they'd selectively jam the drone's communication, not the GPS signals. That means if they detect a 2.4GHz signal in the direction of the radar signature of the drone, they'll jam 2.4GHz. To avoid interfering with legitimate radio traffic I suspect their system discriminates, and only identifies transmissions in bands assigned to RC control or transmissions on the unlicensed bands. It probably wouldn't jam cell frequencies or other licensed bands.
And that will be good enough to stop virtually all of the model aircraft being flown into prison yards today. Their problems today are not caused by sophisticated electrical engineers who illegally mod their radios to transmit on illicit frequencies. Their problems are coming from the buddies of inmates who go to the mall, buy a cheap RC quadcopter, duct-tape a cell phone and a few packets of powdered substances to it, and send it over the wall during the exercise period. If they can stop the hundreds of those guys today, they can worry about the EE types later after they become a real threat.
There's perfect, and then there's good enough to be effective now. This falls into the latter category.
Did anyone ever predict that?
IBM's Watson has been touted as a diagnostic tool for busy doctors, but it's never been suggested as a replacement in the developed world. However, in countries that are drastically underserved by doctors (Liberia had 40 doctors to serve 4 million people back in 2008 -- that was before Ebola killed half of them), it's possible access to Watson could take the place of a trained physician for many people.
Is anyone else tired of increasingly 'advanced' fridges and appliances which have ever-decreasing ability to be maintained or upgraded, and aren't nearly as fundamentally reliable as older fridges?
Replace that 20 year old fridge and before you know it the replacement's on the fritz...
When my grandma passed, we hauled her old fridge to the dump, where the guy commented, 'hey, this thing's still cold!' And we all saw the manufacturing date was stenciled across the back: "1941". That little fridge had been running constantly for over 50 years. There's definitely something to be said for reliability.
But that tiny little fridge drew more current than a large modern fridge, and ran longer and louder. It was horribly inefficient by the standards of the 1990s. She could have bought a new fridge 10 years before she passed and it would have paid for itself in energy savings. And that was over 20 years ago; refrigerators today are even more energy efficient than the 20 year old models.
Reliability isn't the only measure of quality. Many attributes factor into Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If the 1080p monitor and interior cameras keep the door from being opened just one extra time per day, the energy saved could easily pay for the fancy electronics plus the additional maintenance. Or if the 'intelligence' helps keep people from consuming spoiled food that's sat in the fridge too long, what price would you put on that?
Every time I hear someone say "they don't make them like they used to," I know there's probably a good reason for it.
No more going to the kitchen in my skivvies then.
The cameras look inside your fridge, not at you when you open the door.
Unless, of course, you're ... oh. Never mind.
Remember the Northeast blackout of 2003? A single failure on the grid, starting with incorrect load data during a heavy demand day (aka SCADA reporting failures), which caused a peak load generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio to shut itself down. The lack of power caused higher than allowable demand on Ohio's existing transmission lines, causing some of them to sag into trees where the safety systems automatically shut them down. This larger outage resulted in higher demand, so more sets of lines sagged into more trees, causing more failures. The resultant failures cascaded across the grid, ultimately causing safety systems at as many as 256 generating plants to automatically take themselves offline, and leaving 55 million customers from Detroit to New York without power overnight.
Even the smallest push in the wrong place at the wrong time could be enough to trigger another cascade of failures. And don't think for a moment that an attacker can't figure out when and where to push - readily available public information is more than enough to draw some logical conclusions.
What about Hoberman spheres, or a similar self-unfolding structure? They could deploy clusters of them, perhaps skinned with mylar or other foldable materials.
I still think the bigger problem is the lifetime of supplies needed. Everyone talks about recycling wastewater, but energy still has to be expended to crack the waste CO2 back into breathable oxygen. And then there's food. If they're in "deep" space, they're a long way from sunlight, so their plants are going to need energy from another source. And grow lamps don't last forever, not even LED lamps - 50,000 hours if they're lucky, which is only a half dozen years. Solar panels might last 25-30 years. They're going to need replacement power supplies, replacement computers, replacement everything. It's not like they can send them a supply ship - by the time the ship gets to where they were, they'll have moved on an additional 5 years or more.
I think the only viable plan is to prove we can successfully colonize Mars first. Demonstrate the capability of landing and thriving on a non-living rock. Then we can talk about what kinds of modules we need for "deep" space.
"Hello, OnStar? I'm looking for nearby Chinese take out. Can you let me know the nearest restaurant, thanks!"
The video linked in the article is terrible. The footage of the squid looked like it might have been fantastic, but we'll never know because it was covered up by talking heads and half a dozen gigantic tentacled text-overlay monsters.
To take sonic readings, they'd have to shut the machine off first to eliminate the noise it would generate; even then, road noise from the surface might be too disruptive. Or maybe it was all muck, with no good way to ping it.
They certainly should have been aware of the location of the pipe, as it was purportedly documented in the spec. Maybe there was an error in the doc, or maybe the engineers failed to notify the bore operator, or maybe the operators just weren't paying attention.
They might be able to measure the slurry, but that wouldn't tell them anything about upcoming surprises. I'm not sure what kind of electrodes you could use for checking conductivity of the cut face (that would survive a constant rock grinding), or if anyone felt it would be worth the expense.
A couple of people have mentioned sonar. It might be possible to peek into the upcoming rock, but the machine would have to be silenced to execute the tests. That might be more downtime than they want, given the normal course of boring. Maybe the operators could have pinged the rock when they first encountered the obstruction, but maybe it was already too late by that time.
Oh, and one other method of control they have is depth of cut. I believe they can adjust each cutting head assembly as to how deep they want it to cut. I presume they can adjust it for different kinds of material, or change out the cutting bits as needed.
I don't know how they'd be set up for boring earth, as I've only ever bored steel with a straight fixed cutter, and the depth of cut in steel is on the order of a few thousandths of an inch per revolution. The dimensions don't relate at all to a tunnel borer.
Rock is more brittle than steel. Hit rock with a hard enough cutter blade, pushing with enough force, and you will chip away at it. Hit a malleable and tough steel pipe with the same cutter blade and the same amount of force, and the blade may dig in to the steel and get caught in it.
The operator doesn't exactly have visibility into the obstruction, so when progress stops, he may not recognize what's going wrong. He can add more force in an attempt to break through. Add enough force and something will eventually give, but there's no guarantee if it will be the obstruction that gives way, or the engine, or the power train, or the frame of his machine.
And what kinds of sensors do you think you can deploy on the face of a giant cutting disk that will survive the thousands of horsepower of force mashing it into the earth? (Trick question, the answer is none.) About all they can effectively monitor is from the back side of the cutting face. That means indirect measurements only, like the amount of power, rotational speed, rate of travel, temperature of the cutting face, sound of the cutting face, and the composition of the tailings. It's not exactly like looking out the windshield and seeing you're about to drive into a big steel pipe. The amount of power is regulated by the operator, but what are his options when it stops going forward? It's not like he can back up and turn left to go around it. He can pretty much decide "add power" or "stay stuck".
Another boring story on slashdot.
You know the drill..
This does not augur well for the New Year.
All right, which of you musical heathens modded this funny? My /dev/null far outperforms the stock /dev/null, you just can't hear it.
Meh, everyone who knows anything about true hi fidelity knows that only Persian porcelain power standoffs are the real deal, and that Egyptian porcelain does virtually nothing to prevent the cross-induced eddy currents that raise the dynamic transversal power cord impedance. You'll get so much hum you'd think the amp was housed in a beehive. If you're going that low-brow, what's next? Are you going to suggest heresy, and use garden-variety extension cords instead of oxygen-free-copper speaker cables? I say, you may have to cancel your subscription to Audiophile magazine.
My /dev/null has a hand rubbed walnut finish, a tube stage feeding a hand-wound transformer, polarized cables, Ukranian porcelain stand-offs, and anti-magnetic monopoles crafted from moon rocks to lower the noise floor. It's extremely danceable.
Ahh. That certainly wasn't clear from your post, but it explains a lot.
I don't know that I trust the carriers to make any such choices on my behalf, though. A VPN to a home network and privoxy would at least keep it in semi-trustworthy hands, except for https everywhere.
You're dealing with limited processor power on cellphones and tablets, so blocking ads is just adding extra strain. Adblock plus isn't exactly known for its efficiency.
The prime 'strain' on cellphones and tablets is power consumption, which directly reduces battery life, the number one complaint of phone owners. It takes very little energy or time to run some regexps - even a lot of regexps will run in just a few milliseconds on any modern smart phone, and consume microwatts in the process. But it takes an exponential amount of energy to operate the radio, up to 600 milliwatts, and to keep that radio powered up while retrieving the tens or hundreds of kilobytes of ad materials and images; followed by the energy spent on parsing the incoming data stream, formatting it for display, and executing all the javascripts contained within. Displaying the ads takes at least 10^4 times as much energy as that spent by adblock. And energy/battery life isn't the only cost. There's time spent downloading those hundreds of kilobytes, which turns into time wasted by the user who doesn't see the desired content until the ads are loaded and processed (and 4G speeds certainly don't apply to all cellular customers; despite your personal experiences in the city and the colorful coverage maps delivered by these ads, much of the world is still on 3G, EDGE or even slower connections.) There's the milliseconds of user time spent flicking past the unwanted ads, which is what the advertisers actually paid for. And for those on limited data plans, those tens or hundreds of kilobytes eat into their data allowances, which counts against them in their phone bills and bank accounts. On top of all that, every third party ad server you don't visit is one less potential source of a malware infection, reducing risk.
If you still feel the need to shill for ad delivery services in the future I recommend you find a more cogent argument, because whatever you've been smoking, it's either not enough or too much.
They did. They shot him down back in '58, and as part of a massive cover-up, Eisenhower wrote out a secret directive ordering parents to 'play Santa' and wrap gifts for their kids.
Gotta go, it sounds like someone's whispering outside and making helicopter noises, so I ought to check on it.