These other devices you've named are all low-Hz radio devices, operating at levels which occur naturally in nature. You can test this yourself by tuning to a non-existant station. What we call "static" is naturally occuring radio waves. FM radio is simply the modulation of those radio waves. Cellular technology operates at frequencies usually reserved for cosmic events, and do so right next to your head.
Comparing FM radios to Cellular phones is like comparing iron to uranium. They both decay, however the radiation from one is a lot more dangerous than the other.
That being said, I don't care either way in the debate. If people do use cellphones for 2 hours a day and get cancer from them, their problem. I use a cell phone for less than 2 hours a quarter. If they don't, hey - nobody's problem. Just answering your question for you. While you mock, the difference between radio and cell technology is quite marked.
No. It is not specifically the "digital signal processor" which is proprietary. It is the entire braking mechanism and the fact that a electrical signal change sets it off. In fact, the electrical circuits will be a very simple resistance based trigger. It's clever, but they haven't done anything new here. The patentable state is that they've applied it to a saw. There have been plenty of prior applications of devices sensitive to skin contact.
In regards to software, if the controller actually requires it instead of a simple resistor, finding a "FOSS" equivalent for [IF EXPECTEDCURRENT()-ACTUALCURRENT() > 0.05 THEN OMGSETOFFBRAKE()] isn't going to be that difficult.
Basically - you're trying to defend a hopeless guy who hasn't even read the article. It's got nothing to do with software. He doesn't even appear to understand what the SawStop is. I applaud your attempt, but OP was simply wrong. The patent is nothing to do with either patented software or finding a FOSS altenative.
Not recognising the relevance of BASIC as described in the article, it's possible you're around a decade or two younger than the individuals the article is referring to.
This tab thing makes Slashdot front page and the following didnt?
Windows 7 way hotter than Vista off the line, now more popular than all OS X versions
It's kdawson's shift. He'll never post any article that's even mildly favorable of anything Microsoft related. However, if you can find a story that says some kid in Sweden doesn't like the Windows 7 box-colors, you've got yourself a kdawson front-pager!:)
And then from virtually every ancient culture before that.. The swastika is a basic geometric pattern that's been on cave walls since prehistoric man learned to scratch.
I guess you're maybe going for a +funny mod, but its too subtle to be sure.;)
In relation to the claim, pirates have been paying shares in rewards to their support groups for some time now. This appears to be simply formalising the process. This is real, and she WILL get her share.
If it was such that it was buried to not present itself until called upon, then yes - easily. You could even have a backdoor that wasn't even active code, that is triggered by a Windows Update targeted at a specific PC (this is very simple, if you have to question the specifics of how this would be implemented, you don't really belong in this discussion).
However, most likely, NSA involvement would be in creating a master key to defeat the encryption and protection algorithms of systems such as Bitlocker built into the OS. Only 2% of users use Bitlocker as their main encryption method? Well then thats 2% more than the NSA can decrypt if they were using Truecrypt, etc.
Who said the NSA was liasing with Microsoft for free? Where does it say they weren't paid a consultancy fee for their services? You based your entire argument around a supposition?
Besides, if they were really putting in a backdoor and NOT actually improving the security accredation, then even if they *did* do it for free, it doesn't actually gain Microsoft anything. That's for the government.
Lol - people have been busy there. I like this inflection someone posted:
This photo is Creative Commons–licensed. That means anybody can edit it, as long as they credit him. Say, if you wanted to write some word on it and post it a bunch of places.
Addendum: In relation to your bit at the end there about consumption rather than income based tax and other user-pays systems, that's something we could possibly agree on. However, realise that in my post I was merely answering someone else's question - and that was comparing a "tax everyone equally" system to a "means-assessed tax system". I wasn't out to debate or argue against any other possible tax systems, or even wether means-assessed is the best way to go.
Bob should be taxed at the same rate as Joe, because according the American ideals, we were all created equal.
Right, and I'll agree with everything else in your post working, as soon as you eliminate: Racism, sexism, age discrimination, social discrimination, appearance discimination, religious discrimination - just, all discrimination.
Then, when everyone is equal, having a chance to an equal education, equal opportunities for equal effort after completing education, pay equality, and peference in advancement only to those best suited to the job rather than ANY discriminatory factors such as friendship or being part of the "old boys club" or sex, and I'll agree - everyone should be taxed equally because they're earning relative to the effort they put in.
However, this is not the case. Not even close. It's completely the opposite in fact. Frequently, the people making the *most* money are those who selfishly screwed over everyone else they could, while disguising their actions from those above them.
I'll admit, there *are* Bob's who worked hard to get where they are. And they do suffer in a means-assessed tax system. And no - means-assessed tax systems are not "Communism". Not even close. You can still make $40 million a year if you want to. It just means that you get taxed more than others do, but you don't get taxed down to $20k a year.
Complaining about things being "unfair" in a blatantly unfair world is splitting hairs. We're simply trying to decide where to best apply the unfairness. If we can raise the minimum standard of living in the process - is that not a better thing?
Addendum: Read the article further, and it appears that the author misunderstood. Each PS3 isn't processing 4 million keys a second - the entire cluster is. So, turn the number down to a couple of hundred thousand per PS3, but apply the same process.
For the first point, this is true - different algorithims take differing times to process. One would expect that this is a "best case scenario" with a relatively fast algorithim like AES-128.
As for trying 4-million passwords per seconds, its the way the process is broken down. They don't get the original laptop, network 20 PS3s into it, and have it spam the hell out of Truecrypt. They take a small header portion of the original data - enough only to verify their decryption. Then you program in a specific decryption algorithim in at a low processing level. You don't even have the same PS3 verifying the successful results. It just runs through it's parameters, applying keys to the data as a natural process, and sending the output to a secondary system. This secondary system (or cluster) is what verifies if any of the keys hit a result. The result checking is a lot faster than the algorithmic application, and can process the input from several systems simultaneously.
It isn't that one PS3 is capable of decrypting a pr0n file 4 million times a second. It's simply that a PS3 can be programmed with a algorithim and apply that to a sample string 4 million times a second. Something else processes the results. Remember - it's not trying to brute force the key, just the container password.
I find it amusing how you believe there's some sort of correlatin between intelligence and income. Third generation whores make more than I do, and I'm no spring chicken. Being smart and hard working will improve your chances of getting a better income, but it certainly doesn't guarantee it. Certainly, very few people get "rich" with hard work. It's simply not a factor in most wealth distribution.
If you're talking about solely in the commercial workplace then your argument might have merit, however - there is no such thing as a "level playing field".
My girlfriend is an actress. She's working successfully now, but has previously been passed over for roles she should have had and was in training for, simply because "successful candidate" was a daughter of a friend of director, etc. This is why "social networking" is so important these days. Income is only partially a reflection of talent, intelliegence or work ethic. I'm sure we all know plenty of people who earn a lot of money, don't really do the job well, and get there because they're in the right "circle of friends".
So - why should people who earn more be taxed more? Because it has less impact on them. If you take Joe, earning $20,000 a year and tax him 20 percent, that leaves him with $16000, and has a severe impact on his quality of life. Then, take Bob, who's earning $180k a year, and tax him 40 percent, that leaves him with $108k. Your quality of life between these two points is hardly going to change. Only how much crap you don't need that you can by.
If your sole alibi was "I was at home on Facebook.. look! here's my logs!" then that wouldn't get you off at all. Especially if they had someone identify you, as in this case.
Facebook in this case was simply the straw that broke the camels back, as they had plenty of evidence that he *didn't* do it (eye witnesses providing his alibi at home) and one piece of evidence that he did (a witness at the robbery who swears it was him). Now, if you've got no other suspects, you hold on to the one person you've got if you think the witness can take it through trial. However, once FB was thrown into the mess as well, the prosecutor realised that six people AND Facebook would be a better alibi than the testiomony of one witness, and dropped the case.
I see a lot of posts here all about "so i can just murder someone and tunnel into my home PC to provide an alibi?". No. If it was murder and you were suspected, then then merely presume you had an accomplice (unwitting or not) who was at your home updating your Facebook *or* that such a script/tunnel had been implemented, and proceed to nail you with forensics.
I hit up Wolfram a few minutes ago to test out the search with such queries as "what is the temperature in beijing?" and "how far is it between earth and mars?" which it handled nicely with lots of relative graphs and links.
However, I was very pleased to see this search turn up a result:
They do have strict auditing practices in place, specifically regarding interoperability, buffer overflows (and the like), and checking to ensure the code hasn't been wholesale copy/pasted from public libraries.
However, they cannot ensure that someone hasn't copied a dozen lines of code from some other obscure program. They don't have the worlds entire source-code archive sitting in a database waiting to do comparison searches.
Furthermore, i find the ENTIRE situation very, very unlikely. It's almost as if it was all orchestrated. The story that we're supposed to buy is that: 1. Some random pundit was rooting through Microsoft functions because he "felt there was too much code there". 2. Pundit noticed some code that, despite it not having any reference to ImageReader, and despite this individual having nothing to do with ImageReader, immediately recognised that a dozen-line ReadBytes method was "obviously lifted from the CodePlex-hosted (yikes) GPLv2-licensed ImageMaster project". 3. No evidence is ever produced that there are any references to ImageReader, CodePlex, or anything else in the source. The researcher simply magically recognised the source code from a project that he'd had nothing to do with and never seen before.
Why do some idiots persist in claiming that a near miss is actually a "near hit". Every time there's an article about an asteroid missing earth, or a plane coming close to another plane, some retard argues against a statement in the article saying it was a "near miss" and insists that their superior knowledge points to the obvious fact that it was a "near hit". However, this is completely wrong. There's no real term as a "near hit".
"Near" in this context defines distance rather than relative causality. A "Near Miss" means "The objects came near to eachother, and missed" as opposed to the clear misinterpretation that it must mean "The objects nearly missed eachother."
Oh hell.. I'm lazy.. Here you go.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_miss_(safety) The damn phrase is a term. Whatever you may believe it to mean, no matter how you semantically break it down and decide that reporters must be wrong, the phrase DOES actually have a definitive meaning. Go with it.
I did think of adding after my post "BTW, even QuickTime is compressed and not a true representation, but a good indication of HD if your previous experience is DVDs or YouTube HD videos." but didn't want to confuse the issue any further.
Slashdot Mirror
These other devices you've named are all low-Hz radio devices, operating at levels which occur naturally in nature. You can test this yourself by tuning to a non-existant station. What we call "static" is naturally occuring radio waves. FM radio is simply the modulation of those radio waves. Cellular technology operates at frequencies usually reserved for cosmic events, and do so right next to your head.
Comparing FM radios to Cellular phones is like comparing iron to uranium. They both decay, however the radiation from one is a lot more dangerous than the other.
That being said, I don't care either way in the debate. If people do use cellphones for 2 hours a day and get cancer from them, their problem. I use a cell phone for less than 2 hours a quarter. If they don't, hey - nobody's problem. Just answering your question for you. While you mock, the difference between radio and cell technology is quite marked.
8 Pages, and 3 of them are test entries, and two are one-liners. Extremely slow news day? :\
No. It is not specifically the "digital signal processor" which is proprietary. It is the entire braking mechanism and the fact that a electrical signal change sets it off. In fact, the electrical circuits will be a very simple resistance based trigger. It's clever, but they haven't done anything new here. The patentable state is that they've applied it to a saw. There have been plenty of prior applications of devices sensitive to skin contact.
In regards to software, if the controller actually requires it instead of a simple resistor, finding a "FOSS" equivalent for [IF EXPECTEDCURRENT()-ACTUALCURRENT() > 0.05 THEN OMGSETOFFBRAKE()] isn't going to be that difficult.
Basically - you're trying to defend a hopeless guy who hasn't even read the article. It's got nothing to do with software. He doesn't even appear to understand what the SawStop is. I applaud your attempt, but OP was simply wrong. The patent is nothing to do with either patented software or finding a FOSS altenative.
Only on Slashdot could a post suggesting to use "free open source software" on a sawing table be marked "insightful".
Hopefully OP was joking.. but then.. people are replying to it seriously. :\
Not recognising the relevance of BASIC as described in the article, it's possible you're around a decade or two younger than the individuals the article is referring to.
Okay, but from a scientific point of view, you know none of that is true, right?
This tab thing makes Slashdot front page and the following didnt?
Windows 7 way hotter than Vista off the line, now more popular than all OS X
versions
It's kdawson's shift. He'll never post any article that's even mildly favorable of anything Microsoft related. However, if you can find a story that says some kid in Sweden doesn't like the Windows 7 box-colors, you've got yourself a kdawson front-pager! :)
And then from virtually every ancient culture before that.. The swastika is a basic geometric pattern that's been on cave walls since prehistoric man learned to scratch.
Whoosh? Really? Shall we suppose that you haven't seen Star Trek IV then? Hint: The above was a quote.
I guess you're maybe going for a +funny mod, but its too subtle to be sure. ;)
In relation to the claim, pirates have been paying shares in rewards to their support groups for some time now. This appears to be simply formalising the process. This is real, and she WILL get her share.
Don't worry - I LOL'd when I saw it. ;)
The kernel is not developed in VS. Maybe you're thinking of some of the apps, like Control Panel?
If it was such that it was buried to not present itself until called upon, then yes - easily. You could even have a backdoor that wasn't even active code, that is triggered by a Windows Update targeted at a specific PC (this is very simple, if you have to question the specifics of how this would be implemented, you don't really belong in this discussion).
However, most likely, NSA involvement would be in creating a master key to defeat the encryption and protection algorithms of systems such as Bitlocker built into the OS. Only 2% of users use Bitlocker as their main encryption method? Well then thats 2% more than the NSA can decrypt if they were using Truecrypt, etc.
Who said the NSA was liasing with Microsoft for free? Where does it say they weren't paid a consultancy fee for their services? You based your entire argument around a supposition?
Besides, if they were really putting in a backdoor and NOT actually improving the security accredation, then even if they *did* do it for free, it doesn't actually gain Microsoft anything. That's for the government.
Lol - people have been busy there. I like this inflection someone posted:
This photo is Creative Commons–licensed. That means anybody can edit it, as long as they credit him. Say, if you wanted to write some word on it and post it a bunch of places.
Just sayin'.
Addendum: In relation to your bit at the end there about consumption rather than income based tax and other user-pays systems, that's something we could possibly agree on. However, realise that in my post I was merely answering someone else's question - and that was comparing a "tax everyone equally" system to a "means-assessed tax system". I wasn't out to debate or argue against any other possible tax systems, or even wether means-assessed is the best way to go.
Bob should be taxed at the same rate as Joe, because according the American ideals, we were all created equal.
Right, and I'll agree with everything else in your post working, as soon as you eliminate: Racism, sexism, age discrimination, social discrimination, appearance discimination, religious discrimination - just, all discrimination.
Then, when everyone is equal, having a chance to an equal education, equal opportunities for equal effort after completing education, pay equality, and peference in advancement only to those best suited to the job rather than ANY discriminatory factors such as friendship or being part of the "old boys club" or sex, and I'll agree - everyone should be taxed equally because they're earning relative to the effort they put in.
However, this is not the case. Not even close. It's completely the opposite in fact. Frequently, the people making the *most* money are those who selfishly screwed over everyone else they could, while disguising their actions from those above them.
I'll admit, there *are* Bob's who worked hard to get where they are. And they do suffer in a means-assessed tax system. And no - means-assessed tax systems are not "Communism". Not even close. You can still make $40 million a year if you want to. It just means that you get taxed more than others do, but you don't get taxed down to $20k a year.
Complaining about things being "unfair" in a blatantly unfair world is splitting hairs. We're simply trying to decide where to best apply the unfairness. If we can raise the minimum standard of living in the process - is that not a better thing?
Addendum: Read the article further, and it appears that the author misunderstood. Each PS3 isn't processing 4 million keys a second - the entire cluster is. So, turn the number down to a couple of hundred thousand per PS3, but apply the same process.
For the first point, this is true - different algorithims take differing times to process. One would expect that this is a "best case scenario" with a relatively fast algorithim like AES-128.
As for trying 4-million passwords per seconds, its the way the process is broken down. They don't get the original laptop, network 20 PS3s into it, and have it spam the hell out of Truecrypt. They take a small header portion of the original data - enough only to verify their decryption. Then you program in a specific decryption algorithim in at a low processing level. You don't even have the same PS3 verifying the successful results. It just runs through it's parameters, applying keys to the data as a natural process, and sending the output to a secondary system. This secondary system (or cluster) is what verifies if any of the keys hit a result. The result checking is a lot faster than the algorithmic application, and can process the input from several systems simultaneously.
It isn't that one PS3 is capable of decrypting a pr0n file 4 million times a second. It's simply that a PS3 can be programmed with a algorithim and apply that to a sample string 4 million times a second. Something else processes the results. Remember - it's not trying to brute force the key, just the container password.
I find it amusing how you believe there's some sort of correlatin between intelligence and income. Third generation whores make more than I do, and I'm no spring chicken. Being smart and hard working will improve your chances of getting a better income, but it certainly doesn't guarantee it. Certainly, very few people get "rich" with hard work. It's simply not a factor in most wealth distribution.
If you're talking about solely in the commercial workplace then your argument might have merit, however - there is no such thing as a "level playing field".
My girlfriend is an actress. She's working successfully now, but has previously been passed over for roles she should have had and was in training for, simply because "successful candidate" was a daughter of a friend of director, etc. This is why "social networking" is so important these days. Income is only partially a reflection of talent, intelliegence or work ethic. I'm sure we all know plenty of people who earn a lot of money, don't really do the job well, and get there because they're in the right "circle of friends".
So - why should people who earn more be taxed more? Because it has less impact on them. If you take Joe, earning $20,000 a year and tax him 20 percent, that leaves him with $16000, and has a severe impact on his quality of life. Then, take Bob, who's earning $180k a year, and tax him 40 percent, that leaves him with $108k. Your quality of life between these two points is hardly going to change. Only how much crap you don't need that you can by.
If your sole alibi was "I was at home on Facebook.. look! here's my logs!" then that wouldn't get you off at all. Especially if they had someone identify you, as in this case.
Facebook in this case was simply the straw that broke the camels back, as they had plenty of evidence that he *didn't* do it (eye witnesses providing his alibi at home) and one piece of evidence that he did (a witness at the robbery who swears it was him). Now, if you've got no other suspects, you hold on to the one person you've got if you think the witness can take it through trial. However, once FB was thrown into the mess as well, the prosecutor realised that six people AND Facebook would be a better alibi than the testiomony of one witness, and dropped the case.
I see a lot of posts here all about "so i can just murder someone and tunnel into my home PC to provide an alibi?". No. If it was murder and you were suspected, then then merely presume you had an accomplice (unwitting or not) who was at your home updating your Facebook *or* that such a script/tunnel had been implemented, and proceed to nail you with forensics.
I hit up Wolfram a few minutes ago to test out the search with such queries as "what is the temperature in beijing?" and "how far is it between earth and mars?" which it handled nicely with lots of relative graphs and links.
However, I was very pleased to see this search turn up a result:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+there+an+easter+egg%3F
They do have strict auditing practices in place, specifically regarding interoperability, buffer overflows (and the like), and checking to ensure the code hasn't been wholesale copy/pasted from public libraries.
However, they cannot ensure that someone hasn't copied a dozen lines of code from some other obscure program. They don't have the worlds entire source-code archive sitting in a database waiting to do comparison searches.
Furthermore, i find the ENTIRE situation very, very unlikely. It's almost as if it was all orchestrated. The story that we're supposed to buy is that:
1. Some random pundit was rooting through Microsoft functions because he "felt there was too much code there".
2. Pundit noticed some code that, despite it not having any reference to ImageReader, and despite this individual having nothing to do with ImageReader, immediately recognised that a dozen-line ReadBytes method was "obviously lifted from the CodePlex-hosted (yikes) GPLv2-licensed ImageMaster project".
3. No evidence is ever produced that there are any references to ImageReader, CodePlex, or anything else in the source. The researcher simply magically recognised the source code from a project that he'd had nothing to do with and never seen before.
I'm not buying it at all. This feels intentional.
Why do some idiots persist in claiming that a near miss is actually a "near hit". Every time there's an article about an asteroid missing earth, or a plane coming close to another plane, some retard argues against a statement in the article saying it was a "near miss" and insists that their superior knowledge points to the obvious fact that it was a "near hit". However, this is completely wrong. There's no real term as a "near hit".
"Near" in this context defines distance rather than relative causality. A "Near Miss" means "The objects came near to eachother, and missed" as opposed to the clear misinterpretation that it must mean "The objects nearly missed eachother."
Oh hell.. I'm lazy.. Here you go.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_miss_(safety) The damn phrase is a term. Whatever you may believe it to mean, no matter how you semantically break it down and decide that reporters must be wrong, the phrase DOES actually have a definitive meaning. Go with it.
I did think of adding after my post "BTW, even QuickTime is compressed and not a true representation, but a good indication of HD if your previous experience is DVDs or YouTube HD videos." but didn't want to confuse the issue any further.