Well, I was thinking an architectural diagram might have helped keep focus where it was needed. Yes, it does all come down to leadership. A developer with free rein will "write once, run everywhere else." But a solid architecture might have served as a "touchstone" of leadership for his team, even if he couldn't be there to personally supervise the day-to-day coding.
I think his project ultimately would have been successful if he'd started with a strong architectural design. Get the documentation out there first and get the developers coding to it, rather than to some nebulous desire for a GUI tool. An architect would also have made a GUI decision, either picking XUL or some other framework, or he certainly could have designed his own. But to let the programmers run without focus was simply asking for what he got.
I think you're confusing a "watermark" with a "signature", and both of them with DRM. The entire commercial purpose of a "digital watermark" is to uniquely identify the source of the data. The way they are used is to assign a unique watermark each time a piece of media is distributed, and keep track of who the marks are assigned to. So if you were to buy my latest song, foo.mp3, I'll watermark it with some random value like 17 and send you the copy with the 17 watermark. Later on when foo.mp3 hits bittorrent, I'll be pissed off, so I'll look at the watermark contained inside it. If it says "17", I'll look up the sales record and figure out that I sent it to you, so I'll be sending my lawyers your way.
Consider what happens if you download the file, and then you damage the watermark, or remove it. Now when I find foo.mp3 on bittorrent, I'll examine the file but all I find is random data. I have no way of knowing who leaked the copy of my song, or where to send the lawyers.
So, without knowing anything about the supersecret watermarking scheme, you can still take two (or more) otherwise identical watermarked files and compare them. Any differences at all will be the difference between the watermarks. As an attacker, if you can find those differences you can corrupt them. You don't need to "crack the code" to figure out the exact value of my watermark because it's irrelevant to you. You don't care if the hidden value is 17 or 42 -- it is simply enough for you to damage the watermark beyond my ability to decode it. Once you've done that, the file is untraceable and you can safely make it public without fear of retribution from me.
This is part of where security through obscurity enters the picture. As long as you don't know that I'm watermarking my media, I have successfully laid a trap for you. But if you suspect a watermark, you can simply diff the file from several sources. Any differences indicate a watermark, so it's time to start examining the differences in depth.
And this leads to the second half of security through obscurity. If the method for watermarking is made public, then anyone who knows the algorithm can easily corrupt the watermark beyond readability. Not only will you know the exact changes that would be made to the original, you also have a testing tool. You can read the file once, see the 17, and then keep corrupting the file until it is no longer possible to read a 17 from it.
Kerkhoff's Principle (paraphrased) says that a scheme that relies on the secrecy of the algorithm is not secure -- you should always assume your attacker knows your algorithm but not the key. In the case of digital watermarking, security has to rely on the secrecy of the algorithm for the reasons I mentioned above. That means the algorithm must be forever kept secret, and treated as part of the key. You can't even give the algorithm to your customer, in case he has an untrustworthy employee who reverse engineers it and publishes it. So the other half of watermark security comes from hiding the algorithm: it is classical security through obscurity. Digital watermarking schemes are all about hidden algorithms, the keys themselves are irrelevant.
DRM, on the other hand, does not necessarily rely on security through obscurity. Yes, any software-based DRM is bound to fail because it can be debugged and reverse engineered by anyone with the skills (so yes, that is security through obscurity.) But hardware-based DRM is different, and that's what "Trustworthy Computing" is all about. If the keys and the decryption routines are locked inside a silicon chip in your computer and not accessible to you, it will require serious laboratory grade equipment to ever extract them. You can sniff your code and your CPU all day long, but you cannot see inside that secret chip. There is one notable exception, however. If ANY of the parties involved in using hardware encryption/decryption ever slip up, even a tiny bit, the whole scheme collapses. That's what DVD Jon did -- he took advantage of a software-based DVD player (that shouldn't have been released) and extracted the secret key from it, and from there was able to extract the rest of the keys.
As far as the watermarking tools themselves, all the ones I'm aware of are proprietary (patented and/or trademarked.) They are certainly not open source. If you think about it, that's the only way watermarking software can ever be made practical. Watermarking is 100% "security through obscurity." Once an attacker is aware of a watermark, that watermark can be tampered with and/or destroyed. But GPL'd code is not obscure: it is transparent by fiat. So anyone attacking an open source watermarked document would either completely undo the mark or completely and perfectly obscure the meaning of the mark.
The better watermark schemes survive reencoding. But all are detectable and ultimately removable (or at least "damageable" to the point where the original watermark meaning is lost.)
Even if the price were to drop to below that of a decent optical mouse, there are good non-technological reasons it won't replace them.
Fatigue and precision are the two heavy hitters.
We've done extensive ergonomic testing of touch screens vs. keyboards. The biggest problem with a touch screen is that it requires the user to raise their hand and hold it up without support. Resting your palm on the screen will cause false-positive touches. If you are physically standing above the screen, it requires you to keep your wrist bent backwards a bit. With a mouse, you can use a wrist-rest to keep the muscles in the arm and hand relaxed. With a touch screen, the user must keep them under tension. Not good for long durations, and it leads to repetitive strain injuries.
Precision is another big problem. Your fingertip covers a fairly sizeable area, and is not necessarily center-weighted by the detection technology. Where do you put the aim point? More importantly, where do you put the aimpoint so that the user can see it while your finger is obscuring the display? When the user keeps their fingernails longer, they can also interfere with aiming (although they can be used in lieu of a stylus!) But we found with testing that most people have a hard time hitting a "default sized" OK box with their fingertips. The standard we settled on for a touch panel was a minimum of half an inch on each side. But we found the larger we made the buttons, the faster they were able to make their desired selection without error. On a nine-inch screen we would put no more than about eight buttons high. It also helped greatly to give them a graphical target inside the touch area, even though we accepted a touch anywhere in the containing box.
Another precision issue we had (that this technology is not affected by) was calibration. Capacitive and resistive touch technologies both drift over time for environmental reasons such as temperature, humidity, and dirt. They require periodic recalibration, which is tough to get an employee-end-user to do and a periodic maintenance point for interactive kiosks.
Surprisingly to us, a dirty environment was a positive in favor of touch screens. With a touch screen, dirt can obscure the displayed data, so we initially thought it would be a bad thing. But you can just give the user a bottle of Windex and they'll figure out what to do. With a traditional ball-and-roller mouse, dirt means it will jam up quickly. The cords are also fairly fragile, and the mice themselves are susceptible to being knocked to the floor. Mice are extremely high-maintenance when compared to touch screens (thus far more expensive.) With a mouse, they need to call the help desk every time it doesn't work, and that means a costly service call.
Now, we made our hardware decision before the advent of cheap optical mice, so we never repeated the tests with an optical mouse. That may have changed completely.
So, we decided touch screens are great for occasional use. But they're not good for long-term data entry, and they really slow down the users for precision input.
Motorolas do this already. They switch to the "loud" profile when they detect charging current. They switch back to your chosen profile when disconnected.
I'm not as happy with my RAZR as I was with my Sony-Ericsson T637.
My biggest gripes are about the Bluetooth stack -- it's buggy and quirky. If I connect to it with my PC, Bluetooth hangs and remains broken until I reboot the phone. It crashed Bluetooth every single time I tried to send it more than one contact from my previous phone. And it doesn't have S-E's "advanced mode" for the headset -- if it's in my car, the Bluetooth remains in session the entire time the car is on, keeping it busy so I can't use the Bluetooth from my Palm to access the network in the car. The S-E would attempt to establish headset communications only when the phone was ringing, otherwise I was free to use the network from my Palm.
Other minor nits are: slow response times (scrolling in the browser blows), the Address Book doesn't understand the concept of multiple numbers per contact (it creates a full separate contact for each number, but it can "join" them to one name if you find the hidden preference option,) and I can't leave Bluetooth in "discoverable" mode (no fun at lunch.:-) I'm in the process of replacing the browser with Opera Mini, but it's not terribly convenient yet. Oh, and the menus aren't as configurable as on the S-E.
On the plus side: it's small, has a very readable screen, the camera is quite sharp, and it has good audio. The battery life is pretty good, I think the constant car bluetooth connection is why mine drains faster than my wife's RAZR.
On the way plus side: it doesn't have a stupid asymmetric keypad like the Nokias. The stainless steel on silicone rubber keys feel weird and are a tiny bit uncomfortable (edge of fingernail on edge of key == grating), but they have been working OK for me. At least they're in the right places.
Since the building your in has radio shielding, you're not likely to get a call there anyway. So what is the difference between your phone not ringing in "vibrate mode" vs. your phone not ringing in "audible mode"?
Re:I heard something about this long ago
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Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Thankfully, restaurants and theaters are allowed to block cellphone transmissions here in the Netherlands.
We went to a nice restaurant yesterday morning for breakfast. The building was entirely copper clad. We got no signal inside, and we were just fine with that.
They call themselves "Copper Bleu", but I think a better name for them would be "Faraday's."
Re:I heard something about this long ago
on
Polite Cell Phones
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· Score: 1
I think it'd be great if the phone had an option I could turn on to say "Respect requests for silence via Bluetooth." Then places where silence is desired (nice restaurants, movie theaters, libraries, churches, funeral homes) could have a Bluetooth transmitter at the entryway saying "Go silent until X:00", or "Go silent for three hours."
Of course I'd like to have a bit more control than that. There are some places where I'd like the phone to go "dead" and others where I'd prefer it to go to vibrate mode. And my choice for behavior probably won't be the same as the institution setting up the transmitters. For example, I would want it to go absolutely silent for a funeral, but I would want vibrate mode if I went into a church.
Anyway, it's not an invasion of privacy if I request the feature and turn it on voluntarily. In that case, it's simply a convenience for me.
I suppose there's a question as to which computer was my first. About 1967 or 1968 I was given a Dr. Nym game. It was a roll-the-marble game where the marbles would toggle flipflops, affecting the next marble's path. It was a state machine, but I don't remember if it could do general-purpose functions other than addition. Certainly not electronic.
I think a better qualified first computer was my GENIAC, also from the 1960s. It was a piece of peg-board-like stuff about the size of an average board game, with six places for large rotary switches (circular pieces of peg-board with a matching hole pattern. Each switch had four concentric rings of holes in it radiating outwards in spokes. You programmed it by placing jumpers on the movable switch plates and nuts and bolts with wires under the main board. There was a row of holes down the middle where you screwed down indicator lights and a battery clip. Based on the positions of the switches and what the lights told you, you could perform simple calculations. It was electric, but not electronic. The last time I remember playing with it was to use it as a fire controller for a pyrotechnic show.
I suppose my first "real" computer was a VIC-20. 4KB RAM, baby! I couldn't even port my BASIC games from our school computer to that tiny box! Amazing how I went from a three-flip-flop game to a six-disc-switch, but suddenly 4KB wasn't enough!
The difference between mag stripe cards and RFID chips is that mag stripe cards cannot be read remotely. Your door access card is fairly safe, as long as you don't allow it to leave your possesion and don't run it through "strange" readers.
Regardless of manufacturer's claims of "short ranges", hackers have successfully read RFID tags at distances of up to 69 feet. That means a van stopped near the office building's door could pick up a card being energized by the door's reader.
Smartcards are definitely the route to take for "difficulty in cloning."
You're correct in stating that McCarthy was 100% wrong, if by wrong you mean ethically wrong as in "a fool laying waste to the reputations of anyone convenient in order to fuel his own rise to power."
However, some (certainly not 100%) of his suspicions that many members of the CPUSA and others were spying for the Soviets were factually correct. The CPUSA was riddled with KGB and GRU spies. "The Secret World of American Communism" and "The Soviet World of American Communism", both by Haynes and Klehr, that examine the relationship between the KGB and the CPUSA in detail. They presented Russian documents that revealed an "underground arm" of the CPUSA whose primary purpose was to host a spy network and recruit new spies. And check out their later book "VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America" for some clarifying details. One really interesting point is that even though they broke many of the intercepted messages, the simple use of aliases continued to protect the identity of some of their most important spies. Traffic analysis and corroborating evidence provided the identities of many of the spies mentioned, but not all. In some cases they narrowed them down to only a handful of suspects, but without enough evidence to identify a specific individual.
I also wouldn't claim that the Rosenbergs were the last of the major ideologically motivated spies. What about Agee? He certainly turned coat to the Soviets (OK, the Cubans after the Soviets rejected him,) based on his disillusion with American foreign practices.
(Your list of "All American Spies" contains names that came decades after McCarthyism swept the nation, by the way.)
Please note that I'm not defending McCarthy in any way, shape or form. The man was human garbage, and quite possibly the most evil American politician until Cheney arrived. But I've often wondered if his some of his earlier persecutions were fueled by information gleaned from the VENONA project. Did he have his own inside person in the FBI (perhaps on the VENONA project) feeding him those names?
So how much fixing is typically required on a non-infected PC? Isn't that like a doctor proclaiming "100% of people are sick" because everyone who comes to see him is sick?:-) I keed, I keed!
Anyway, I suspect you were intending to include people who are bringing them in because "the network card is broke" or "my 'W', 'T', and 'F' keys are worn out." But even in the case of things like a "broken network card" don't you find that many of those problems are actually malware related -- clean up the crap and suddenly the network comes back?
While I'm not sure you could pre-meditate it as you suggest, it might be possible for a company with an existing relationship to dredge up some old patent. Look what's just happened to RIM-Blackberry.
But no matter how you look at it or how the lawsuits go, only one thing is certain: it's only the lawyers who end up on the island. One side is much poorer after the suit, and the other is only a tiny bit richer. The difference ends up in mai-tais all around for the law firms involved.
Ahh, I see, you were just calling them on the bullshit factor. That's fair.
I'm reading a book you'd probably like: Laura Penney's "Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit" She does a good number on all the various bullshitters out there, and makes an important distinction between "lying" and "bullshit" -- liars choose their lies. Clinton lied about Lewinsky, for example. But bullshit is more pervasive, and chronic bullshitters see no difference between telling people the truth or lying as long as they get their message out. Every White House press secretary for the past 20 years has been a bullshitter, for example. (Although Ari Fleischer wasn't very good at it. I think he wanted to simply be a liar only when absolutely necessary, but the job requires a flawless bullshitter.)
The other thing I'd point out is that "monopolies" and "cartels" are really just the corporate face of unionization. We've outlawed them locally, but they still exist in the real world. And they're just as subject to market pressures as any individual producer. OPEC is a great example. They could choose to sell oil at $500 a barrel if they wanted, but then their customer base would collapse and they'd have nobody to sell to at all. So they're still tied to supply and demand.
And OPEC is subject to infighting as well: Saudi Arabia frequently 'overproduces' to sell to the U.S., which is really just another way of undercutting the other members. If OPEC was taken over by Iran and they said "hey, let's collapse western civilization and stop selling oil to the infidels" the other members of OPEC would bail. They're as addicted to our money as we are to their oil.
Wally world is the only major retailer that demands the producers censor their music. Target, Best Buy, etc., don't sell the censored versions. They'll sell them tagged with the "Tipper Gore Parental Warning label", but they don't sell only cut versions like WalMart.
Well, if you're planning to buy a 50" plasma TV for pr0n, you might want to rethink that decision anyway. A two-and-a-half-foot high picture of a vagina is exactly as appealing as it sounds.
I missed nothing. "Nicer" is a subjective word. "Quality" is subjective. "Perception" simply defines criteria used to make a subjective judgement, including experience, heuristics and information.
Hence all the advertising, marketing, branding...
Exactly. Just because you base a decision on some information you have doesn't make that original information factual or correct.
I don't understand your argument. The intrinsic value of an item is completely irrelevant to a free market (except in Wisconsin), regardless of whether or not you consider it fair. It all boils down to capitalism: the producers are free to charge whatever the market will bear. It doesn't matter if an LP cost more to produce than a CD. If the marketplace wants CDs for the convenience factor, they'll pay for them. If the marketplace wants CDs for the "better*" audio quality, they'll pay for them.
* By "better", I mean that the labels are also free to advertise and sell us on whatever feature (or drawback) they've included. "CD audio is 'better' because it doesn't have skips and pops!" or "Apple iTunes is 'better' because it now comes with enhanced DRM!!!" If you pay a P.R. firm to say it with enough exclamation points, glossy in-store signage and slick monochromatic commercials, people will believe you that it's "better". They may even pay a premium for it!
If they put BLU-RAY movies out for $100 each and labeled them "The Best Version Ever", and put out commercials featuring Donald Trump saying "I buy BLU-RAY because I buy only the best," thousands of idiot consumers will march into Best Buy and plunk down their $100 bills. If they then lower the price to $50, hundreds of thousands of consumers will see this as a "bargain" and buy them. The market will eventually reach equilibrium, but maybe not at the price you want to pay.
The producers are under absolutely no obligation to sell you the movies for $20, $10, cost + 25% or any price you care to claim is "fair". That's the deal with a free market. They put it out at whatever price they want to get, and it's up to the marketplace to accept the item at that price or reject it. It's not like you'll die if you don't get to see HDTV.
That's exactly correct. And HDTV is smack in the middle of the luxury category, too. NTSC-resolution televisions are going to be with us for many, many years, regardless of the switch from analog to digital.
HD-DVD and BLU-RAY are luxury items. They're not going to replace DVDs for at least 10 years and probably more. And as such, they'll command a premium in the marketplace even if they cost only a dollar to produce.
By the time HD-DVD or BLU-RAY becomes the "norm" over DVDs, the prices will have shrunk to reach the mass market.
You said For 90% of the population in the USA, you don't get a nicer product. These are the people with standard definition TVs.
and
many of them still have non-HDCP displays
You've made a completely pointless argument. It's like saying 90% of Americans won't buy BMW leather seat covers because 90% of Americans don't own BMWs.
For those of us who have spent the money and who own the equipment capable of displaying HDTV from either a BLU-RAY or HD-DVD disc, the HD factor is worth it. For the rest of you, keep buying DVDs. It's not hard.
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On an unrelated note, imagine a beowulf cluster of these things -- all stuck together and you can't pry them apart!
Well, I was thinking an architectural diagram might have helped keep focus where it was needed. Yes, it does all come down to leadership. A developer with free rein will "write once, run everywhere else." But a solid architecture might have served as a "touchstone" of leadership for his team, even if he couldn't be there to personally supervise the day-to-day coding.
I think his project ultimately would have been successful if he'd started with a strong architectural design. Get the documentation out there first and get the developers coding to it, rather than to some nebulous desire for a GUI tool. An architect would also have made a GUI decision, either picking XUL or some other framework, or he certainly could have designed his own. But to let the programmers run without focus was simply asking for what he got.
Consider what happens if you download the file, and then you damage the watermark, or remove it. Now when I find foo.mp3 on bittorrent, I'll examine the file but all I find is random data. I have no way of knowing who leaked the copy of my song, or where to send the lawyers.
So, without knowing anything about the supersecret watermarking scheme, you can still take two (or more) otherwise identical watermarked files and compare them. Any differences at all will be the difference between the watermarks. As an attacker, if you can find those differences you can corrupt them. You don't need to "crack the code" to figure out the exact value of my watermark because it's irrelevant to you. You don't care if the hidden value is 17 or 42 -- it is simply enough for you to damage the watermark beyond my ability to decode it. Once you've done that, the file is untraceable and you can safely make it public without fear of retribution from me.
This is part of where security through obscurity enters the picture. As long as you don't know that I'm watermarking my media, I have successfully laid a trap for you. But if you suspect a watermark, you can simply diff the file from several sources. Any differences indicate a watermark, so it's time to start examining the differences in depth.
And this leads to the second half of security through obscurity. If the method for watermarking is made public, then anyone who knows the algorithm can easily corrupt the watermark beyond readability. Not only will you know the exact changes that would be made to the original, you also have a testing tool. You can read the file once, see the 17, and then keep corrupting the file until it is no longer possible to read a 17 from it.
Kerkhoff's Principle (paraphrased) says that a scheme that relies on the secrecy of the algorithm is not secure -- you should always assume your attacker knows your algorithm but not the key. In the case of digital watermarking, security has to rely on the secrecy of the algorithm for the reasons I mentioned above. That means the algorithm must be forever kept secret, and treated as part of the key. You can't even give the algorithm to your customer, in case he has an untrustworthy employee who reverse engineers it and publishes it. So the other half of watermark security comes from hiding the algorithm: it is classical security through obscurity. Digital watermarking schemes are all about hidden algorithms, the keys themselves are irrelevant.
DRM, on the other hand, does not necessarily rely on security through obscurity. Yes, any software-based DRM is bound to fail because it can be debugged and reverse engineered by anyone with the skills (so yes, that is security through obscurity.) But hardware-based DRM is different, and that's what "Trustworthy Computing" is all about. If the keys and the decryption routines are locked inside a silicon chip in your computer and not accessible to you, it will require serious laboratory grade equipment to ever extract them. You can sniff your code and your CPU all day long, but you cannot see inside that secret chip. There is one notable exception, however. If ANY of the parties involved in using hardware encryption/decryption ever slip up, even a tiny bit, the whole scheme collapses. That's what DVD Jon did -- he took advantage of a software-based DVD player (that shouldn't have been released) and extracted the secret key from it, and from there was able to extract the rest of the keys.
As far as the watermarking tools themselves, all the ones I'm aware of are proprietary (patented and/or trademarked.) They are certainly not open source. If you think about it, that's the only way watermarking software can ever be made practical. Watermarking is 100% "security through obscurity." Once an attacker is aware of a watermark, that watermark can be tampered with and/or destroyed. But GPL'd code is not obscure: it is transparent by fiat. So anyone attacking an open source watermarked document would either completely undo the mark or completely and perfectly obscure the meaning of the mark.
The better watermark schemes survive reencoding. But all are detectable and ultimately removable (or at least "damageable" to the point where the original watermark meaning is lost.)
Fatigue and precision are the two heavy hitters.
We've done extensive ergonomic testing of touch screens vs. keyboards. The biggest problem with a touch screen is that it requires the user to raise their hand and hold it up without support. Resting your palm on the screen will cause false-positive touches. If you are physically standing above the screen, it requires you to keep your wrist bent backwards a bit. With a mouse, you can use a wrist-rest to keep the muscles in the arm and hand relaxed. With a touch screen, the user must keep them under tension. Not good for long durations, and it leads to repetitive strain injuries.
Precision is another big problem. Your fingertip covers a fairly sizeable area, and is not necessarily center-weighted by the detection technology. Where do you put the aim point? More importantly, where do you put the aimpoint so that the user can see it while your finger is obscuring the display? When the user keeps their fingernails longer, they can also interfere with aiming (although they can be used in lieu of a stylus!) But we found with testing that most people have a hard time hitting a "default sized" OK box with their fingertips. The standard we settled on for a touch panel was a minimum of half an inch on each side. But we found the larger we made the buttons, the faster they were able to make their desired selection without error. On a nine-inch screen we would put no more than about eight buttons high. It also helped greatly to give them a graphical target inside the touch area, even though we accepted a touch anywhere in the containing box.
Another precision issue we had (that this technology is not affected by) was calibration. Capacitive and resistive touch technologies both drift over time for environmental reasons such as temperature, humidity, and dirt. They require periodic recalibration, which is tough to get an employee-end-user to do and a periodic maintenance point for interactive kiosks.
Surprisingly to us, a dirty environment was a positive in favor of touch screens. With a touch screen, dirt can obscure the displayed data, so we initially thought it would be a bad thing. But you can just give the user a bottle of Windex and they'll figure out what to do. With a traditional ball-and-roller mouse, dirt means it will jam up quickly. The cords are also fairly fragile, and the mice themselves are susceptible to being knocked to the floor. Mice are extremely high-maintenance when compared to touch screens (thus far more expensive.) With a mouse, they need to call the help desk every time it doesn't work, and that means a costly service call.
Now, we made our hardware decision before the advent of cheap optical mice, so we never repeated the tests with an optical mouse. That may have changed completely.
So, we decided touch screens are great for occasional use. But they're not good for long-term data entry, and they really slow down the users for precision input.
Motorolas do this already. They switch to the "loud" profile when they detect charging current. They switch back to your chosen profile when disconnected.
My biggest gripes are about the Bluetooth stack -- it's buggy and quirky. If I connect to it with my PC, Bluetooth hangs and remains broken until I reboot the phone. It crashed Bluetooth every single time I tried to send it more than one contact from my previous phone. And it doesn't have S-E's "advanced mode" for the headset -- if it's in my car, the Bluetooth remains in session the entire time the car is on, keeping it busy so I can't use the Bluetooth from my Palm to access the network in the car. The S-E would attempt to establish headset communications only when the phone was ringing, otherwise I was free to use the network from my Palm.
Other minor nits are: slow response times (scrolling in the browser blows), the Address Book doesn't understand the concept of multiple numbers per contact (it creates a full separate contact for each number, but it can "join" them to one name if you find the hidden preference option,) and I can't leave Bluetooth in "discoverable" mode (no fun at lunch. :-) I'm in the process of replacing the browser with Opera Mini, but it's not terribly convenient yet. Oh, and the menus aren't as configurable as on the S-E.
On the plus side: it's small, has a very readable screen, the camera is quite sharp, and it has good audio. The battery life is pretty good, I think the constant car bluetooth connection is why mine drains faster than my wife's RAZR.
On the way plus side: it doesn't have a stupid asymmetric keypad like the Nokias. The stainless steel on silicone rubber keys feel weird and are a tiny bit uncomfortable (edge of fingernail on edge of key == grating), but they have been working OK for me. At least they're in the right places.
Since the building your in has radio shielding, you're not likely to get a call there anyway. So what is the difference between your phone not ringing in "vibrate mode" vs. your phone not ringing in "audible mode"?
We went to a nice restaurant yesterday morning for breakfast. The building was entirely copper clad. We got no signal inside, and we were just fine with that.
They call themselves "Copper Bleu", but I think a better name for them would be "Faraday's."
Of course I'd like to have a bit more control than that. There are some places where I'd like the phone to go "dead" and others where I'd prefer it to go to vibrate mode. And my choice for behavior probably won't be the same as the institution setting up the transmitters. For example, I would want it to go absolutely silent for a funeral, but I would want vibrate mode if I went into a church.
Anyway, it's not an invasion of privacy if I request the feature and turn it on voluntarily. In that case, it's simply a convenience for me.
I think a better qualified first computer was my GENIAC, also from the 1960s. It was a piece of peg-board-like stuff about the size of an average board game, with six places for large rotary switches (circular pieces of peg-board with a matching hole pattern. Each switch had four concentric rings of holes in it radiating outwards in spokes. You programmed it by placing jumpers on the movable switch plates and nuts and bolts with wires under the main board. There was a row of holes down the middle where you screwed down indicator lights and a battery clip. Based on the positions of the switches and what the lights told you, you could perform simple calculations. It was electric, but not electronic. The last time I remember playing with it was to use it as a fire controller for a pyrotechnic show.
I suppose my first "real" computer was a VIC-20. 4KB RAM, baby! I couldn't even port my BASIC games from our school computer to that tiny box! Amazing how I went from a three-flip-flop game to a six-disc-switch, but suddenly 4KB wasn't enough!
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/5e89/
You need one.
Regardless of manufacturer's claims of "short ranges", hackers have successfully read RFID tags at distances of up to 69 feet. That means a van stopped near the office building's door could pick up a card being energized by the door's reader.
Smartcards are definitely the route to take for "difficulty in cloning."
However, some (certainly not 100%) of his suspicions that many members of the CPUSA and others were spying for the Soviets were factually correct. The CPUSA was riddled with KGB and GRU spies. "The Secret World of American Communism" and "The Soviet World of American Communism", both by Haynes and Klehr, that examine the relationship between the KGB and the CPUSA in detail. They presented Russian documents that revealed an "underground arm" of the CPUSA whose primary purpose was to host a spy network and recruit new spies. And check out their later book "VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America" for some clarifying details. One really interesting point is that even though they broke many of the intercepted messages, the simple use of aliases continued to protect the identity of some of their most important spies. Traffic analysis and corroborating evidence provided the identities of many of the spies mentioned, but not all. In some cases they narrowed them down to only a handful of suspects, but without enough evidence to identify a specific individual.
I also wouldn't claim that the Rosenbergs were the last of the major ideologically motivated spies. What about Agee? He certainly turned coat to the Soviets (OK, the Cubans after the Soviets rejected him,) based on his disillusion with American foreign practices.
(Your list of "All American Spies" contains names that came decades after McCarthyism swept the nation, by the way.)
Please note that I'm not defending McCarthy in any way, shape or form. The man was human garbage, and quite possibly the most evil American politician until Cheney arrived. But I've often wondered if his some of his earlier persecutions were fueled by information gleaned from the VENONA project. Did he have his own inside person in the FBI (perhaps on the VENONA project) feeding him those names?
Anyway, I suspect you were intending to include people who are bringing them in because "the network card is broke" or "my 'W', 'T', and 'F' keys are worn out." But even in the case of things like a "broken network card" don't you find that many of those problems are actually malware related -- clean up the crap and suddenly the network comes back?
But no matter how you look at it or how the lawsuits go, only one thing is certain: it's only the lawyers who end up on the island. One side is much poorer after the suit, and the other is only a tiny bit richer. The difference ends up in mai-tais all around for the law firms involved.
I'm reading a book you'd probably like: Laura Penney's "Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit" She does a good number on all the various bullshitters out there, and makes an important distinction between "lying" and "bullshit" -- liars choose their lies. Clinton lied about Lewinsky, for example. But bullshit is more pervasive, and chronic bullshitters see no difference between telling people the truth or lying as long as they get their message out. Every White House press secretary for the past 20 years has been a bullshitter, for example. (Although Ari Fleischer wasn't very good at it. I think he wanted to simply be a liar only when absolutely necessary, but the job requires a flawless bullshitter.)
The other thing I'd point out is that "monopolies" and "cartels" are really just the corporate face of unionization. We've outlawed them locally, but they still exist in the real world. And they're just as subject to market pressures as any individual producer. OPEC is a great example. They could choose to sell oil at $500 a barrel if they wanted, but then their customer base would collapse and they'd have nobody to sell to at all. So they're still tied to supply and demand.
And OPEC is subject to infighting as well: Saudi Arabia frequently 'overproduces' to sell to the U.S., which is really just another way of undercutting the other members. If OPEC was taken over by Iran and they said "hey, let's collapse western civilization and stop selling oil to the infidels" the other members of OPEC would bail. They're as addicted to our money as we are to their oil.
Wally world is the only major retailer that demands the producers censor their music. Target, Best Buy, etc., don't sell the censored versions. They'll sell them tagged with the "Tipper Gore Parental Warning label", but they don't sell only cut versions like WalMart.
Well, if you're planning to buy a 50" plasma TV for pr0n, you might want to rethink that decision anyway. A two-and-a-half-foot high picture of a vagina is exactly as appealing as it sounds.
Hence all the advertising, marketing, branding...
Exactly. Just because you base a decision on some information you have doesn't make that original information factual or correct.
* By "better", I mean that the labels are also free to advertise and sell us on whatever feature (or drawback) they've included. "CD audio is 'better' because it doesn't have skips and pops!" or "Apple iTunes is 'better' because it now comes with enhanced DRM!!!" If you pay a P.R. firm to say it with enough exclamation points, glossy in-store signage and slick monochromatic commercials, people will believe you that it's "better". They may even pay a premium for it!
If they put BLU-RAY movies out for $100 each and labeled them "The Best Version Ever", and put out commercials featuring Donald Trump saying "I buy BLU-RAY because I buy only the best," thousands of idiot consumers will march into Best Buy and plunk down their $100 bills. If they then lower the price to $50, hundreds of thousands of consumers will see this as a "bargain" and buy them. The market will eventually reach equilibrium, but maybe not at the price you want to pay.
The producers are under absolutely no obligation to sell you the movies for $20, $10, cost + 25% or any price you care to claim is "fair". That's the deal with a free market. They put it out at whatever price they want to get, and it's up to the marketplace to accept the item at that price or reject it. It's not like you'll die if you don't get to see HDTV.
That's exactly correct. And HDTV is smack in the middle of the luxury category, too. NTSC-resolution televisions are going to be with us for many, many years, regardless of the switch from analog to digital.
HD-DVD and BLU-RAY are luxury items. They're not going to replace DVDs for at least 10 years and probably more. And as such, they'll command a premium in the marketplace even if they cost only a dollar to produce.
By the time HD-DVD or BLU-RAY becomes the "norm" over DVDs, the prices will have shrunk to reach the mass market.
You've made a completely pointless argument. It's like saying 90% of Americans won't buy BMW leather seat covers because 90% of Americans don't own BMWs.
For those of us who have spent the money and who own the equipment capable of displaying HDTV from either a BLU-RAY or HD-DVD disc, the HD factor is worth it. For the rest of you, keep buying DVDs. It's not hard.