Good point. Boeing's aircraft research (such as the blended wing body they worked on with NASA in the 1990s) was on open servers. DES encrypted, sure, but even back then, nobody took single-pass DES seriously as an encryption system. Undoubtedly work on scramjets, rocket fuels, etc, were also on public systems with insignificant protection. So far, there is no evidence of India, Pakistan or North Korea having hypersonic intercontinental cruise missiles, which tells me that those nations too unstable to be safe with such technology were also too stupid to obtain it from open technological repositories and that those who had the necessary wits to break in also had the necessary wits to not hand over any such information they found to such people.
As a general rule, stupidity makes for a rather unreliable and unpredictable defense, even if you can practically guarantee an endless supply of it when it comes to politicians and military intelligence.
There are other considerations. How much of Iranian nuke technology was simply FTPed off US Department of Energy servers? Mr Nuke from Pakistan may well have obtained a fair amount of his knowledge by such means, as reports repeatedly indicate he worked from old US designs. So few departments have IT security scores worth a damn and it simply isn't safe to assume that hostile nations or even hostile organizations have voluntarily chosen to "do the decent thing" and not kick the US in the goolies. Again, though, we simply don't know the detection rate. It seems to be extremely low, if NASA is anything to go by, and it was reported a while back that the DoD mis-identified a scan by a US-based team of crackers as being overseas because they used nmap's spoof system.
Does this mean we should be all paranoid? Probably not. This level of sheer incompetence on the parts of all parties has gone on for many years, if not decades. It probably means that there should be better funding in IT security and a good, old-fashioned purge of delinquents in positions of authority, but that's not going to happen.
That would depend. If the geek is set !prisoner, then they always dereference to NAN (Not a Number). These are write-only geeks, as you can never get any information from them. European Geeks through the looking glass (or drinking glass) use RPN, in which case you would need to do 17094394 @geek.
Formal maths geeks would tend to use: for all geek in 17094394 : @geek
...it was standard practice to put.rhosts files on all of the servers and desktops, so that nobody needed to log in more than once and so that shell scripts on remote sites could transfer data. Frankly, I'm less surprised that people have broken into mission-critical systems than in the fact that only three (the two mentioned and a file swapper) have ever been caught. I witnessed truly godawful ignorance on security issues, not least from those in charge of IT security. From the annual reviews of security, it would seem that things have improved and are now merely very sickeningly bad, but I cannot find any reason to excuse ANY weakness in a computer network (a) run by very bright people, and (b) containing a mix of extremely sensitive and/or utterly unique data.
That these three have been caught is almost incidental, when you consider the probability that there are possibly several orders of magnitude more people who have not. Those who have been were not doing anything significant, except insofar that it was possible to do at all. Nobody - least of all NASA - knows what those who have NOT been caught are doing. We're constantly being reminded about how dangerous the world is and how important it is to track kitty litter as it comes into the country. Assuming the claims have any merit at all, I'd be just a little more concerned with what the Government itself is openly, passively and willingly handing out to whoever asks out there in that "dangerous world". If it's so bloody dangerous, shouldn't the Government be doing at least the very basic minimum?
(If, however, the real reason is that NASA isn't doing anything mission-critical and that all information it has has no value whatsoever, then just shut the bloody thing down and put the money into education. I think NASA is worthwhile, but then I'd have kicked their security into shape within the first five minutes of having the authority to do so. They aren't, so they clearly don't.)
Hmmm. Well, !Geek could either mean "Geek factorial" or "Spanish geek". @Geek would not be a Geek, but merely a pointer to one. &Geek would be a pointer to a Geek you could C.
I'd start by massively oversampling the data at initial recording time. 100 MHz, 26 bits per sample, 8 channels, etc. Something totally outrageous and utterly unusable for anything resembling sane. The next step is to split the sound up NOT according to source or frequency, but according to what groups together the best. Here's where the oversampling comes in - you don't NEED the actual data points to get lossless encoding, you only need to be able to recreate them. Thus, once we have grouped the compressable information, anything that is left over that can be reconstructed is of no further interest and we can ignore it. The same goes for any complete grouping that we have formed - if the complete group can be synthesized directly from one or more other groups, we don't need it. You then compress the groups - in isolation or as a simultaneous set of systems - either losslessly or using a lossy method. When you downsample, you eliminate the guesses that are wrong first and then eliminate duplicate guesses that are right between the groups.
What you will end up with is some set on N systems, which will be large amounts of noise with small amounts of useful sound in them, which when superimposed with each other AND a filter function produce the original sound and which when taken individually are highly compressable. (The noise is simply there to create fake patterns that we can compress. It won't be random noise, because that doesn't compress, but is noise in the sense that it has no meaning or purpose other than to produce nice mathematical functions. The filter is simply something that's used to extract this deliberately injected deluge, so that the output is valid.)
Is this a valid technique? Well, yes - it's not that unusual to add noise to simplify compression, then subtract the noise afterwards. That's fairly standard. Splitting the data up to simplify the noise is merely a variant on the idea, and is used in plenty of compression methods. Compressing individually seems to be the customary method, but computing power is more than adequate these days to use fancier techniques IF justified. (Since you can encode the decoding method at the start of any track, it should be wholly irrelevant as to what method is used, provided the computing power is there to run it in real-time.)
If there are enough contaminants of other isotopes and materials to have identified the country of origin, they have enough to specify which nuclear reactor it came from. By using the ratio of original isotopes to daughter products (the isotopes a radioisotope will decay into), you can also get an excellent idea of when the Polonium was formed. Atomic Mass Spectrometry can be used to identify the component isotopes and is routinely used for just that. When Daresbury's 20 MeV accelerator was still open, it was used to study concentrations of toxic metals with far greater differentiation between isotopes of near-identical mass, with hundreds of times below the threshold of most lab counter-top equipment. There are labs in the world still capable of doing such work. With the massive concentrations involved, unless the daughter products are just too similar to be distinguished, it should be possible to get a specific day and maybe a specific time of day.
Since we know the flights used to bring the material into Britain, if we knew the time it was removed from the reactor, we could infer the time it spent going from the known reactor site to the airport it was smuggled from. It shouldn't be hard to determine what set of scenarios would meet the constraints imposed by the known time interval and known distance,
If the British Government has any interest in solving the case, all of this will have been done already. Japan and Australia have accelerators capable of AMS runs at this level of sensitivity. Two days of travel, maybe two days to get the runs set up and producing repeatable results, and maybe two or three days work between nuclear chemists and physicists to interpret the results.
Sure, sure, this would be expensive. So's an anti-terror operation. Accelerators cost about $2,000 an hour just to operate (never mind staff), but that's still only $32,000 plus air-fare to eliminate 90% of the unknowns. Compared to how much to keep a special emergency working group in the House of Commons, plus who-knows how much of Scotland Yard ripping its hair out, plus MI5 and MI6 internal investigations on what was known, what was not known and what damn well should have been known.
MI5 deals with national security, MI6 on international intelligence/counterintelligence. As this was an internationally-planned infiltration of nationally secure territory, agents in both EITHER missed this entirely or were asked to kindly not bother the glowing green Russian agents. The latter is not impossible - if an agency is aware of a much bigger threat, they will allow the smaller one through in order to get more information. Britain allowed itself to be bombed, for that exact reason. So this is possible. Unlikely, but possible. It has been done. More likely, both divisions failed BADLY in their operations. Failures in that line of work seem to end up being buried, just not under paperwork.
GCHQ will also no doubt be asking a few questions, for the same reason. By now, they'll have certainly extracted every phonecall made and (if the suspects used European cell phones) will know exactly where those people were at all times, whether the phone was on or not. (The CIA was hauled over the coals for that one, after an operation in Italy, not too long ago. Let's see if this lot even bothered to read the papers first.)
Yes, they probably can't go after SCO's backers directly. However, there is hope that there may be incriminating evidence which can be seized and preserved until saner times in politics. Once Microsoft is back on trial in the US for anti-trust violations, then any evidence held in SCO's archives indicating Microsoft was paying heavies to "hit" the opposition -- or even if such evidence were to find its way into European hands -- then you can safely bet the bank on that evidence being extremely influential. Doubly in the US, as essentially the US judges are being used as weapons for antitrust violation purposes, and the US court system can't be seen to be promoting such conduct.
Better yet, if SCO's archives have sufficient evidence of such a conspiracy (Microsoft might be careful, but Darl???) to be a case in its own right, then we're also talking the crossing of State boundaries for the commission of a crime, and assorted other big-league charges that could do some serious damage.
Finally, back to Europe. They have not yet completely cleared Vista for Europe and if there is evidence of conspiracy to defraud consumers of choice, on the part of Microsoft, some of the mega-fines may be upgraded, additional charges may be levied, and Vista may be barred from sale by Microsoft. If this happens, it would not surprise me if Eminent Domain is used to seize Vista intellectual property in Europe, with the EU reselling the source and rights to the highest European bidder. (The US can't complain if this happens - the NSA routinely conducts industrial espionage and sells European trade secrets to American companies.)
Oh, and they imposed Roman religion and the Roman language on everyone, using all weapons at their disposal to eliminate alternatives. Yes, it does rather sound like a Certain Well-Known Organization. You think it might be good to run a complementary campaign to go along with Scott Adams', advocating the Imperial Purple be awarded to one who has been truthfully skillful in reviving the skills and power structures of the Caesars?
The Romans used a mixture of volcanic ash and limestone, which is very different from modern forms. One of the interesting properties of Roman concrete is that it chemically reacts with water to generate heat. This heat allows it to set. As such, it could be used to construct things that existed underwater.
Very likely the Romans did not invent this technique. Their written language was bought from the Etruscans and much of their science and philosophy was forcibly taken from the Greeks. Much of their religion was bought or stolen from other cultures. Original, they were not. As such, it seems extraordinarily likely that something as imaginative as exploiting chemistry to develop high-grade concrete was not Roman in origin but was extracted from elsewhere. As a rule, Greeks were more theoretical than practical and there's no obvious sign that they had much in the way of advanced material science. The Egyptians were much better on material science, so the idea that the Romans could have obtained concrete from them is very reasonable.
It would be better if we had some text in Egyptian that noted a technological exchange or even how they developed concrete - we could then compare the product of their recipe with the Roman product. However, the current view is that there's far more to discover, so this is entirely possible.
Ballot boxes go "walkies" all the time, which is important if you have specific districts that are likely to vote in opposition to however you happen to feel. As such, there needs to be much more security on such stuff before I'm willing to take it seriously.
One thing I'd like would be for the electronic machine to generate a cryptographically-secure hash generated from all the votes cast on it. The paper ballots can then be electronically scanned and the same hash algorithm applied to the scanned data. If ALL votes are present and unmodified, then the hashes should be the same. Provided there is no collusion between the voting machine and the scanning machine makers, the probability of the hashes coming out the same in the event of vote-tampering of any kind should be extremely low.
However, knowing that tampering has occurred doesn't solve the issue of what to do about it. I'd simply insist on the election being re-held until all districts came back clean from tampering. Oh, and all sports, adult and cartoon channels would be legally required to stop transmitting until everyone bloody well voted and/or adjudicated honestly. Also, anyone caught attempting (or practicing) voting fraud should be compelled to buy everyone the DVDs of the shows they missed, before being locked up in a psych ward in Romania for the rest of their unnatural life.
Depends on your definition of "free". Here are some that I made up earlier:
Free as in beer: Technically, Linux and a good 90% of everything a user may need for data center operations or enterprise activities can be downloaded for no cost beyond the cost of the bandwidth to obtain it, the cost of the physical storage used to hold it and the cost of the time to install and configure it. So if you define "net cost" as the cost to install after you subtract all the things you'd need to spend money on whatever you used, assuming you install yourself, then Open Source has a zero net cost and is therefore "free".
Free as in freedom: Local councils do not, as a rule, have needs that are 100% identical to everyone else. No, I don't just mean a bribes column in the accounting books, but they have to be able to interrelate all kinds of extremely different and often illogical information, and in an emergency have to be able to access any of that information with amazing speed. They are also dealing with information not for public consumption (except when deliberately leaked), so have security needs that differ a lot from the norm. This means they need to be able to tinker with the code in a way that, oh, certain vendors aren't keen on. This means they're free to obey their legal requirements.
Free as in TCO: The total cost of ownership is not merely the cost of installing something and maintaining it, but also considers the return on that investment. If it didn't, then it would not be the true cost of ownership, as it excludes any consideration of the penalty for NOT owning it. To be free, Linux merely needs to have a ROI that is equal to or greater than the cost of doing things manually plus the total investment made in having a Linux solution. If a computerized solution works at all, then the cost of doing things manually swamps all other concerns, and you're guaranteed a true total cost of ownership that is either extremely small or below zero. That's true for almost any solution, so for this definition, ALL systems are free in the long term.
Oh, quite often, yes. Once upon a time, Linus was the arch-enemy of anything graphical going into the kernel, was firmly set against kernel crypto (and not just for export reasons), the intermediate queueing was evil and version control systems were the spawn of Satan.
Sometimes, code doesn't get rolled in for reasons that are less clear. There are industrial-strength drivers out there that are (a) already provided under the GPL, (b) have most/all of the hooks needed in the kernel already, and (c) are officially recommended over the vanilla code in the kernel by the device manufacturers, but never goes upstream. There's a mega-package of drivers for robotic systems that's wonderfully segmented to have negligible impact on the rest of the kernel, provides masses of otherwise-unavailable functionality, and the developers of it are totally set against it getting merged - apparently, as best as I can tell, because those interested can psychically discover the existence of their project and telepathically acquire the necessary kernel skills to find the vendor-specific source, merge in the drivers using the vendor-specific methods, hack the vendor-specific configuration files to include the right options, hack the patches so that they'll all go in cleanly, then use the vendor-specific method to build and install the kernel. (Just because a programmer can do all that in their sleep does NOT mean the floor manager of a place using computer-aided manufacturing can even get past step 1 before throwing in the towel.)
There are also plenty of projects that probably would have been included - eventually - but the developer(s) lost interest before it reached a critical black mass. SGI's Scheduled Transfer Protocol, the MPLS patches, HP's pluggable scheduler system, IBCS support for foreign binaries, numerous Distributed Shared Memory schemes - the need for these hasn't faded, only the interest in keeping the code going.
Finally, there are plenty of projects out there that apparently only exist because the developer(s) mixed illegal substances and late-night coding marathons. I've yet to decide if running Linux on a VAX falls into this category. The ill-fated attempt to get it into a 286 is another candidate. Support for Solaris' "doors" API and the Sauron-inspired Streams mechanism almost have to belong to this group. Some of these projects have withered, presumably as soon as the supply ran out and the effects wore off. Others are still going strong. Now, just because something is totally insane does not mean it shouldn't be included, provided it poses no significant hazards to the rest of the code that aren't already there and isn't causing a license issue. (Full NTFS support by getting the actual Windows NTFS driver to run under Linux is provably insane and is no doubt the target of numerous Voodoo ceremonies as I type. Hundreds of graphics cards being smeared with chicken blood. It's useful, no question about it, but also very very dangerous to be too close to when the army of undead is unleashed by Redmond.)
Open Source, by its very nature, has no "employee/employer" structure. Anyone can contribute, employees of Novell are merely contributing during office hours, and those who are developers for OpenSuSE but not on Novell's payroll are merely developers of choice.
The Free Software Foundation has a whole bunch about the whole rewards mentality, but it really boils down to this: If a developer for OpenSuSE is obligated, then they cannot do their best work and will likely be far more counterproductive. This is because obligation to a "leader" (whatever the form of business, whether OSS or not) is feudal in nature and feudal systems emphasize pleasing the leader of the moment, rather than doing what needs to get done. The only way to do what needs to get done is to eliminate all feudal and monarchistic elements from the project.
(The Linux kernel is not an exception, because most of the modules that Linus ends up approving or disapproving have existed for some time and have an established track record. They were not developed to be pleasing to him, they were developed because it needed to get done. Those projects Linus turns down from the vanilla kernel often lead perfectly happy lives and are routinely patched in by assorted distros anyway.)
So the head of Ubuntu is trying to "poach" developers whose code SuSE will likely end up using anyway, as opposed to them being at SuSE and Ubuntu using the code if released. Big wah. It really doesn't impact SuSE, since they can still use the code developed. If it's not the code SuSE wanted done but nobody else thinks that SuSE's idea was worth coding for, then perhaps it was no big loss. If the idea was good, then the developers will develop it anyway. The only loser in this is whoever picks a scoring system that makes them lose.
Would I like it if people poached coders from my Open Source projects? Actually, yes. The SOBs rarely contribute anything as it is. I'd far prefer it if those who aren't interested left and those who were interested joined. It would make life much easier and progress much swifter.
Would I have always felt like that? Well, no, but the meds help a lot.:)
GEM and DesqView were (a) hardware-neutral, (b) worked on the PC architecture, (c) ran all of the legacy software - which was 99% of what people used - just fine, and (d) multitasked a whole lot better than the Windows of the day. So, by that token, Windows was not the technically superior option of the day. It was merely A solution of the day, no better than anyone else's and often worse.
Plan 9 existed at the time but was not Open Source. Nonetheless, it was not only hardware-neutral on a platform, it was hardware-neutral across an entire friggin' cluster - something even Windows Cluster Server fails to achieve today.
Many of the commercial PC unixes were - by definition - dependent only on there being an 80x86 processor and sufficient memory. They weren't tied to a damn thing and could run any PC device for which a driver existed or for which you wanted to write one. PC unixes that supported the IBCS standard (Linux was one for a while) were also OS-independent, capable of running ANY application written for ANY OS that ran on the Intel architecture.
(One of the major reasons Linux has Oracle today is that Linux users were capable of running Solaris binaries as if native on their platform. Enough did exactly that that Oracle decided it was loosing too much money by ignoring the platform any longer, especially as it was no longer viable to claim Linux was too immature to handle an RDBMS of that size.)
All in all, then, it's clear that Windows was NOT technically superior (it provably did less in some areas, as I've been able to list examples), nor was it the most hardware-agnostic (again, I've cited examples of far superior agnosticism).
Windows won the desktop for the following reasons alone. It had vastly better marketing, it was far more aggressively pushed, Microsoft had no hesitation about overstepping laws, the GUI received a lot of attention, Microsoft turned being dumb into an asset and a badge of honor amongst users, the price was hidden by folding it into the price of the hardware - thus creating the illusion of being free.
There have been famous geek girls since the times of Ancient Greece. I forget the name of the woman who graduated from Oxford with a starred degree, got her masters and completed her PhD in mathematics, all by the age of 17, going on to lecture at I think Harvard at 18. That's a fistfull of world records right there. Florence Nightingale was mentioned by another poster, but don't forget Mrs. Mary Seacole, a contemporary of Florence Nightingale who invented a number of surgical techniques in use today. Although I detest her, Margret Thatcher (who has an earned doctorate in chemistry) is certainly famous and has characteristics you could consider geeky. The there's Heather Mills - TV celebrity and world-renown astronomer.
There's an entire chart of about 100 famous women scientists in history up on the web, which is only a tiny fraction of the total number of real geek women. I'd say that there are probably in the order of a thousand plus who are TRULY famous and TRULY geeky (although there are many many more than that who are "merely" really good geeks).
I'd say that it might be much more interesting to compile a comprehensive list and then allow for ranked voting to find the most famous (now) of the truly amazing geek women who live (or have lived) truly amazing lives that go as far beyond what most would call hardcore geek as the hardcore geeks go beyond the mundane in "real life".
What you're saying would explain why the web is so astonishingly slow. (For chrissakes, we're in the era of broadband networks for users, multi-gigahertz, multi-core, hyperthreaded multi-CPU systems in load-balanced server farms connected with T3 lines for the servers, and multi-gigabit ECN-enabled backbones linking the lot together. Net usage is up, but nowhere near on the same order of magnitude as bandwidth availability and server performance are up. Yet access times for web sites has barely changed in the past decade - and in some cases has actually increased.)
However, it is not accurate. PHP, ASP, Zope, Cold Fusion, embedded Perl, CGI scripts in any language (including Java), Apache's amazing "SSI" scripts that are practically a language these days - these easily cover more than 50% of all server-side dynamic content. There is still a lot of static content as well, and "fat client" code (where an applet, embedded Tcl, embedded Shockwave/Flash or whatever does the dynamic stuff on the client end) is definitely hanging in there, as people realize that thin clients make no sense when each user has more computing power to spare than the largest server farms can dedicate to a given thread server-side.
For that matter, with the complexity of stored procedures (which even MySQL has added) and relational database "blades" (modules for handling specialized data types, mostly used in Informix databases), you don't really need sophisticated code on the web server - you just have something to translate URLs into SQL queries which pull up the necessary HTML code fragments.
But all of these techniques (with the exception of static content) have one thing in common - they are SLOOOOOW. If you don't want anything fancy, Gopher and WAIS would outstrip virtually any web-based information system out there. Even if you do want something fancy, why pay such gigantic overheads for so little gain? Why is the world settling for something that is technically superior but is implemented in such an inferior way that all gains are instantly neutralized?
HTML took off, not because it could do everything, but because the little it could do, it did well and did fast. XHTML is not taking off, because it tries to do everything badly. Most modern web developers stack together a number of technologies, each tuned to a relatively narrow range of tasks. This RISC-style of development is the way forward, with highly modular, highly pluggable, highly specialized technologies replacing the uber-generic.
AJAX, Java servlets, etc, are all dead-end technologies. They are the PHIGS and GKS of the web - nice in theory but not much more. Programming languages are simply too heavy for this kind of work. This is something that is simply not getting through to designers. You don't WANT a Turing-complete scripting language for a web browser, but you may very well want a large assembly of partial scripting languages that - when combined - are Turing-complete.
Overhead is the first problem. You don't want more than you absolutely need, for most cases, even if that means that in the corner cases of trying to do a lot, you end up using more resources than you would otherwise. Computing devices are getting bigger, overall, but are also getting smaller. Phones now support the web, and phones don't have the memory to run the sort of stuff people are using. PDAs could have the memory - if you don't want to use them for anything else, which rather eliminates their usefulness as a PDA.
Distributability is the second problem. Computers are now multi-threaded, multi-core, n-way SMP, clustered into Linus-knows-how-large a Beowulf cluster. But web pages are linear. You can't parallelize them, in the general case, and can't parallelize them well even in the better cases. Thus, browsers simply can't take advantage of the bulk of the CPU power available to them. You might as well hook up a paper tape reader to a SATA interface, whilst you're at it! If you can't benefit from the computing power, then all you're doing is burning energy and getting nothing back in the process.
CODECs need to be slashed. And dotted. Inefficient algorithms may work over broadband, but you can use a 40' truck to pick up the weekly groceries, too. Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you should. Inefficient algorithms will create more traffic at a faster pace than Internet providers can provide more bandwidth. The service you get is not much better than you'd have had using quality code and a 56K modem. Efficient use of the resources available will allow for better quality content, not merely noisier content.
Current CPUs are 64-bit. Current GPUs go as high as 256-bit. Dunno about you, but if someone offered me a full 256-bit multi-threaded multi-core CPU, I, sure as hell, won't be updating it for a few years. (Yeah, yeah, I doubt that's what AMD are planning, but it would be truly cool if they did. Or hot. Or is that the heatsink?)
Having worked at NASA - albeit NASA Langley - I can say that I'd laugh at the notion of rigorous standards in their engineering. However, it is important to note that their standards are nonetheless considerably higher than the majority of their competitors in the space industry. However unimpressed I may be by some of their actions, I can think of no-one who (yet) comes even remotely close in either the level of technology available or the ability to make use of that technology.
Now, others have caught up in places. The Australians had a functional Scramjet prior to NASA and an amateur rocket group in Scotland had a working blended-wing craft before the USAF. (NASA scrapped their BWB design in the late 1990s, due to budget cuts.) NASA should not be considered anywhere near the supreme pinnacle of achievement that it damn well SHOULD be, with decent funding, sufficient freedom and adequately brilliant engineers.
As an armchair observer, I would point out that these accomplishments by others are documented facts - facts that NASA cannot dispute no matter what type of armchair I'm observing from. Any claim by NASA that such observations get in the way of their mission raises some major red flags as to what their mission is. I'd say their mission includes (but is not exclusively) doing the work no other agency or organization - inside or outside the US - is capable of doing. NASA has a lot of money and a lot of extreme talent, so any time/effort spent on what others are doing is time/effort wasted at huge expense.
On the flip-side, FUD directed at NASA that genuinely does take away from cutting-edge work and real R&D in extreme vehicles, extreme science or any other extreme NASA does well, should be nailed to a barn door. Life is too short to be wasting it.
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(Seriously, what you are describing I can vouch for 100% at LARC.)
As a general rule, stupidity makes for a rather unreliable and unpredictable defense, even if you can practically guarantee an endless supply of it when it comes to politicians and military intelligence.
There are other considerations. How much of Iranian nuke technology was simply FTPed off US Department of Energy servers? Mr Nuke from Pakistan may well have obtained a fair amount of his knowledge by such means, as reports repeatedly indicate he worked from old US designs. So few departments have IT security scores worth a damn and it simply isn't safe to assume that hostile nations or even hostile organizations have voluntarily chosen to "do the decent thing" and not kick the US in the goolies. Again, though, we simply don't know the detection rate. It seems to be extremely low, if NASA is anything to go by, and it was reported a while back that the DoD mis-identified a scan by a US-based team of crackers as being overseas because they used nmap's spoof system.
Does this mean we should be all paranoid? Probably not. This level of sheer incompetence on the parts of all parties has gone on for many years, if not decades. It probably means that there should be better funding in IT security and a good, old-fashioned purge of delinquents in positions of authority, but that's not going to happen.
Formal maths geeks would tend to use: for all geek in 17094394 : @geek
That these three have been caught is almost incidental, when you consider the probability that there are possibly several orders of magnitude more people who have not. Those who have been were not doing anything significant, except insofar that it was possible to do at all. Nobody - least of all NASA - knows what those who have NOT been caught are doing. We're constantly being reminded about how dangerous the world is and how important it is to track kitty litter as it comes into the country. Assuming the claims have any merit at all, I'd be just a little more concerned with what the Government itself is openly, passively and willingly handing out to whoever asks out there in that "dangerous world". If it's so bloody dangerous, shouldn't the Government be doing at least the very basic minimum?
(If, however, the real reason is that NASA isn't doing anything mission-critical and that all information it has has no value whatsoever, then just shut the bloody thing down and put the money into education. I think NASA is worthwhile, but then I'd have kicked their security into shape within the first five minutes of having the authority to do so. They aren't, so they clearly don't.)
Hmmm. Well, !Geek could either mean "Geek factorial" or "Spanish geek". @Geek would not be a Geek, but merely a pointer to one. &Geek would be a pointer to a Geek you could C.
What you will end up with is some set on N systems, which will be large amounts of noise with small amounts of useful sound in them, which when superimposed with each other AND a filter function produce the original sound and which when taken individually are highly compressable. (The noise is simply there to create fake patterns that we can compress. It won't be random noise, because that doesn't compress, but is noise in the sense that it has no meaning or purpose other than to produce nice mathematical functions. The filter is simply something that's used to extract this deliberately injected deluge, so that the output is valid.)
Is this a valid technique? Well, yes - it's not that unusual to add noise to simplify compression, then subtract the noise afterwards. That's fairly standard. Splitting the data up to simplify the noise is merely a variant on the idea, and is used in plenty of compression methods. Compressing individually seems to be the customary method, but computing power is more than adequate these days to use fancier techniques IF justified. (Since you can encode the decoding method at the start of any track, it should be wholly irrelevant as to what method is used, provided the computing power is there to run it in real-time.)
Since we know the flights used to bring the material into Britain, if we knew the time it was removed from the reactor, we could infer the time it spent going from the known reactor site to the airport it was smuggled from. It shouldn't be hard to determine what set of scenarios would meet the constraints imposed by the known time interval and known distance,
If the British Government has any interest in solving the case, all of this will have been done already. Japan and Australia have accelerators capable of AMS runs at this level of sensitivity. Two days of travel, maybe two days to get the runs set up and producing repeatable results, and maybe two or three days work between nuclear chemists and physicists to interpret the results.
Sure, sure, this would be expensive. So's an anti-terror operation. Accelerators cost about $2,000 an hour just to operate (never mind staff), but that's still only $32,000 plus air-fare to eliminate 90% of the unknowns. Compared to how much to keep a special emergency working group in the House of Commons, plus who-knows how much of Scotland Yard ripping its hair out, plus MI5 and MI6 internal investigations on what was known, what was not known and what damn well should have been known.
MI5 deals with national security, MI6 on international intelligence/counterintelligence. As this was an internationally-planned infiltration of nationally secure territory, agents in both EITHER missed this entirely or were asked to kindly not bother the glowing green Russian agents. The latter is not impossible - if an agency is aware of a much bigger threat, they will allow the smaller one through in order to get more information. Britain allowed itself to be bombed, for that exact reason. So this is possible. Unlikely, but possible. It has been done. More likely, both divisions failed BADLY in their operations. Failures in that line of work seem to end up being buried, just not under paperwork.
GCHQ will also no doubt be asking a few questions, for the same reason. By now, they'll have certainly extracted every phonecall made and (if the suspects used European cell phones) will know exactly where those people were at all times, whether the phone was on or not. (The CIA was hauled over the coals for that one, after an operation in Italy, not too long ago. Let's see if this lot even bothered to read the papers first.)
Better yet, if SCO's archives have sufficient evidence of such a conspiracy (Microsoft might be careful, but Darl???) to be a case in its own right, then we're also talking the crossing of State boundaries for the commission of a crime, and assorted other big-league charges that could do some serious damage.
Finally, back to Europe. They have not yet completely cleared Vista for Europe and if there is evidence of conspiracy to defraud consumers of choice, on the part of Microsoft, some of the mega-fines may be upgraded, additional charges may be levied, and Vista may be barred from sale by Microsoft. If this happens, it would not surprise me if Eminent Domain is used to seize Vista intellectual property in Europe, with the EU reselling the source and rights to the highest European bidder. (The US can't complain if this happens - the NSA routinely conducts industrial espionage and sells European trade secrets to American companies.)
Oh, and they imposed Roman religion and the Roman language on everyone, using all weapons at their disposal to eliminate alternatives. Yes, it does rather sound like a Certain Well-Known Organization. You think it might be good to run a complementary campaign to go along with Scott Adams', advocating the Imperial Purple be awarded to one who has been truthfully skillful in reviving the skills and power structures of the Caesars?
The US government was patterned after deviants!
He was found stoned?
Very likely the Romans did not invent this technique. Their written language was bought from the Etruscans and much of their science and philosophy was forcibly taken from the Greeks. Much of their religion was bought or stolen from other cultures. Original, they were not. As such, it seems extraordinarily likely that something as imaginative as exploiting chemistry to develop high-grade concrete was not Roman in origin but was extracted from elsewhere. As a rule, Greeks were more theoretical than practical and there's no obvious sign that they had much in the way of advanced material science. The Egyptians were much better on material science, so the idea that the Romans could have obtained concrete from them is very reasonable.
It would be better if we had some text in Egyptian that noted a technological exchange or even how they developed concrete - we could then compare the product of their recipe with the Roman product. However, the current view is that there's far more to discover, so this is entirely possible.
...the archaeologists were trying to cement their relationship with the aliens, who were stealing all the limelight.
One thing I'd like would be for the electronic machine to generate a cryptographically-secure hash generated from all the votes cast on it. The paper ballots can then be electronically scanned and the same hash algorithm applied to the scanned data. If ALL votes are present and unmodified, then the hashes should be the same. Provided there is no collusion between the voting machine and the scanning machine makers, the probability of the hashes coming out the same in the event of vote-tampering of any kind should be extremely low.
However, knowing that tampering has occurred doesn't solve the issue of what to do about it. I'd simply insist on the election being re-held until all districts came back clean from tampering. Oh, and all sports, adult and cartoon channels would be legally required to stop transmitting until everyone bloody well voted and/or adjudicated honestly. Also, anyone caught attempting (or practicing) voting fraud should be compelled to buy everyone the DVDs of the shows they missed, before being locked up in a psych ward in Romania for the rest of their unnatural life.
Sometimes, code doesn't get rolled in for reasons that are less clear. There are industrial-strength drivers out there that are (a) already provided under the GPL, (b) have most/all of the hooks needed in the kernel already, and (c) are officially recommended over the vanilla code in the kernel by the device manufacturers, but never goes upstream. There's a mega-package of drivers for robotic systems that's wonderfully segmented to have negligible impact on the rest of the kernel, provides masses of otherwise-unavailable functionality, and the developers of it are totally set against it getting merged - apparently, as best as I can tell, because those interested can psychically discover the existence of their project and telepathically acquire the necessary kernel skills to find the vendor-specific source, merge in the drivers using the vendor-specific methods, hack the vendor-specific configuration files to include the right options, hack the patches so that they'll all go in cleanly, then use the vendor-specific method to build and install the kernel. (Just because a programmer can do all that in their sleep does NOT mean the floor manager of a place using computer-aided manufacturing can even get past step 1 before throwing in the towel.)
There are also plenty of projects that probably would have been included - eventually - but the developer(s) lost interest before it reached a critical black mass. SGI's Scheduled Transfer Protocol, the MPLS patches, HP's pluggable scheduler system, IBCS support for foreign binaries, numerous Distributed Shared Memory schemes - the need for these hasn't faded, only the interest in keeping the code going.
Finally, there are plenty of projects out there that apparently only exist because the developer(s) mixed illegal substances and late-night coding marathons. I've yet to decide if running Linux on a VAX falls into this category. The ill-fated attempt to get it into a 286 is another candidate. Support for Solaris' "doors" API and the Sauron-inspired Streams mechanism almost have to belong to this group. Some of these projects have withered, presumably as soon as the supply ran out and the effects wore off. Others are still going strong. Now, just because something is totally insane does not mean it shouldn't be included, provided it poses no significant hazards to the rest of the code that aren't already there and isn't causing a license issue. (Full NTFS support by getting the actual Windows NTFS driver to run under Linux is provably insane and is no doubt the target of numerous Voodoo ceremonies as I type. Hundreds of graphics cards being smeared with chicken blood. It's useful, no question about it, but also very very dangerous to be too close to when the army of undead is unleashed by Redmond.)
The Free Software Foundation has a whole bunch about the whole rewards mentality, but it really boils down to this: If a developer for OpenSuSE is obligated, then they cannot do their best work and will likely be far more counterproductive. This is because obligation to a "leader" (whatever the form of business, whether OSS or not) is feudal in nature and feudal systems emphasize pleasing the leader of the moment, rather than doing what needs to get done. The only way to do what needs to get done is to eliminate all feudal and monarchistic elements from the project.
(The Linux kernel is not an exception, because most of the modules that Linus ends up approving or disapproving have existed for some time and have an established track record. They were not developed to be pleasing to him, they were developed because it needed to get done. Those projects Linus turns down from the vanilla kernel often lead perfectly happy lives and are routinely patched in by assorted distros anyway.)
So the head of Ubuntu is trying to "poach" developers whose code SuSE will likely end up using anyway, as opposed to them being at SuSE and Ubuntu using the code if released. Big wah. It really doesn't impact SuSE, since they can still use the code developed. If it's not the code SuSE wanted done but nobody else thinks that SuSE's idea was worth coding for, then perhaps it was no big loss. If the idea was good, then the developers will develop it anyway. The only loser in this is whoever picks a scoring system that makes them lose.
Would I like it if people poached coders from my Open Source projects? Actually, yes. The SOBs rarely contribute anything as it is. I'd far prefer it if those who aren't interested left and those who were interested joined. It would make life much easier and progress much swifter.
Would I have always felt like that? Well, no, but the meds help a lot.
Plan 9 existed at the time but was not Open Source. Nonetheless, it was not only hardware-neutral on a platform, it was hardware-neutral across an entire friggin' cluster - something even Windows Cluster Server fails to achieve today.
Many of the commercial PC unixes were - by definition - dependent only on there being an 80x86 processor and sufficient memory. They weren't tied to a damn thing and could run any PC device for which a driver existed or for which you wanted to write one. PC unixes that supported the IBCS standard (Linux was one for a while) were also OS-independent, capable of running ANY application written for ANY OS that ran on the Intel architecture.
(One of the major reasons Linux has Oracle today is that Linux users were capable of running Solaris binaries as if native on their platform. Enough did exactly that that Oracle decided it was loosing too much money by ignoring the platform any longer, especially as it was no longer viable to claim Linux was too immature to handle an RDBMS of that size.)
All in all, then, it's clear that Windows was NOT technically superior (it provably did less in some areas, as I've been able to list examples), nor was it the most hardware-agnostic (again, I've cited examples of far superior agnosticism).
Windows won the desktop for the following reasons alone. It had vastly better marketing, it was far more aggressively pushed, Microsoft had no hesitation about overstepping laws, the GUI received a lot of attention, Microsoft turned being dumb into an asset and a badge of honor amongst users, the price was hidden by folding it into the price of the hardware - thus creating the illusion of being free.
It's blatantly obvious that Denmark is trying to identify the geeks "out there".
...they were the ancestors of C programmers, as it was indeed documented but only in obscure comments embedded in the code.
There's an entire chart of about 100 famous women scientists in history up on the web, which is only a tiny fraction of the total number of real geek women. I'd say that there are probably in the order of a thousand plus who are TRULY famous and TRULY geeky (although there are many many more than that who are "merely" really good geeks).
I'd say that it might be much more interesting to compile a comprehensive list and then allow for ranked voting to find the most famous (now) of the truly amazing geek women who live (or have lived) truly amazing lives that go as far beyond what most would call hardcore geek as the hardcore geeks go beyond the mundane in "real life".
However, it is not accurate. PHP, ASP, Zope, Cold Fusion, embedded Perl, CGI scripts in any language (including Java), Apache's amazing "SSI" scripts that are practically a language these days - these easily cover more than 50% of all server-side dynamic content. There is still a lot of static content as well, and "fat client" code (where an applet, embedded Tcl, embedded Shockwave/Flash or whatever does the dynamic stuff on the client end) is definitely hanging in there, as people realize that thin clients make no sense when each user has more computing power to spare than the largest server farms can dedicate to a given thread server-side.
For that matter, with the complexity of stored procedures (which even MySQL has added) and relational database "blades" (modules for handling specialized data types, mostly used in Informix databases), you don't really need sophisticated code on the web server - you just have something to translate URLs into SQL queries which pull up the necessary HTML code fragments.
But all of these techniques (with the exception of static content) have one thing in common - they are SLOOOOOW. If you don't want anything fancy, Gopher and WAIS would outstrip virtually any web-based information system out there. Even if you do want something fancy, why pay such gigantic overheads for so little gain? Why is the world settling for something that is technically superior but is implemented in such an inferior way that all gains are instantly neutralized?
AJAX, Java servlets, etc, are all dead-end technologies. They are the PHIGS and GKS of the web - nice in theory but not much more. Programming languages are simply too heavy for this kind of work. This is something that is simply not getting through to designers. You don't WANT a Turing-complete scripting language for a web browser, but you may very well want a large assembly of partial scripting languages that - when combined - are Turing-complete.
Overhead is the first problem. You don't want more than you absolutely need, for most cases, even if that means that in the corner cases of trying to do a lot, you end up using more resources than you would otherwise. Computing devices are getting bigger, overall, but are also getting smaller. Phones now support the web, and phones don't have the memory to run the sort of stuff people are using. PDAs could have the memory - if you don't want to use them for anything else, which rather eliminates their usefulness as a PDA.
Distributability is the second problem. Computers are now multi-threaded, multi-core, n-way SMP, clustered into Linus-knows-how-large a Beowulf cluster. But web pages are linear. You can't parallelize them, in the general case, and can't parallelize them well even in the better cases. Thus, browsers simply can't take advantage of the bulk of the CPU power available to them. You might as well hook up a paper tape reader to a SATA interface, whilst you're at it! If you can't benefit from the computing power, then all you're doing is burning energy and getting nothing back in the process.
CODECs need to be slashed. And dotted. Inefficient algorithms may work over broadband, but you can use a 40' truck to pick up the weekly groceries, too. Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you should. Inefficient algorithms will create more traffic at a faster pace than Internet providers can provide more bandwidth. The service you get is not much better than you'd have had using quality code and a 56K modem. Efficient use of the resources available will allow for better quality content, not merely noisier content.
For goodness' sake, enable multicast and IPv6!!!!
Current CPUs are 64-bit. Current GPUs go as high as 256-bit. Dunno about you, but if someone offered me a full 256-bit multi-threaded multi-core CPU, I, sure as hell, won't be updating it for a few years. (Yeah, yeah, I doubt that's what AMD are planning, but it would be truly cool if they did. Or hot. Or is that the heatsink?)
Now, others have caught up in places. The Australians had a functional Scramjet prior to NASA and an amateur rocket group in Scotland had a working blended-wing craft before the USAF. (NASA scrapped their BWB design in the late 1990s, due to budget cuts.) NASA should not be considered anywhere near the supreme pinnacle of achievement that it damn well SHOULD be, with decent funding, sufficient freedom and adequately brilliant engineers.
As an armchair observer, I would point out that these accomplishments by others are documented facts - facts that NASA cannot dispute no matter what type of armchair I'm observing from. Any claim by NASA that such observations get in the way of their mission raises some major red flags as to what their mission is. I'd say their mission includes (but is not exclusively) doing the work no other agency or organization - inside or outside the US - is capable of doing. NASA has a lot of money and a lot of extreme talent, so any time/effort spent on what others are doing is time/effort wasted at huge expense.
On the flip-side, FUD directed at NASA that genuinely does take away from cutting-edge work and real R&D in extreme vehicles, extreme science or any other extreme NASA does well, should be nailed to a barn door. Life is too short to be wasting it.