Who cares if there's a single universal input/output connector? All you need if you're actually trying to accomplish something is to connect *your specific setup* together.
I care. But that is because right now various digital sources have different kinds of digital video output connections. Some have Firewire. Some have HDMI. Some have SDI. The video world went into this with too little planning.
But for the time being, *my specific setup* has analog component. It looks like HDMI would be the first digital source. So you know of a card that handles HDMI input (HDCP is not needed... this is not about ripping protected content) and works in Linux?
S-Video is not real component. S-Video still has NTSC subcarrier modulation. Its only benefit over composite is that the subcarrier is not mixed with the luminance, making it unnecessary to filter them apart later. That reduces the artifacts of NTSC, but it does not eliminate them. Component is all baseband; there is no modulated subcarrier.
Additionally, S-Video only supports the NTSC format, which is 480i59.94. Component can support all the video formats used by ATSC and DVB video transmission standards. Many DVD and BR-DVD players have component output. I've seen one DVD recorder with component input. Many high-definition, and a few standard-definition, TVs and TV-oriented monitors have component input. You can recognize component input/output with 5 RCA or BNC connectors (1 for luminance referred to as Y, one for Y-B chroma, one for Y-R chroma, and 2 for stereo audio).
As for "going digital", suggest a digital input/output that is universally available (e.g. is input for monitors, output for cameras, input/output for computers including Linux supported, and input/output for recording devices like DVD-R, DVR, etc)... and supports HD. Hint: I doubt you can find one.
It's one thing to make an OS fully secure. It's something else entirely to make it enforce security on other products. I want the former and not the latter. It is then my responsibility, delegated to the makers of the applications I add on, to make sure the applications themselves are secure. The OS only needs to provide the necessary facilities that applications might need. If an application specifically allows anyone that can reach that computer to login and erase crucial files, that is an issue of the application, not the OS. If the OS provides useful tools that the application can make use of to do this in a more convenient way (for example, convenient to the computer owner to specify who is allowed to login to more than one application, done at a single point of control), that is a good thing. But forcing all applications to use that is a bad thing.
An OS, even a secure one, should not have any kind of "approved software" that is a requirement for the software to work.
If someone wants to avoid the issue of multiple vendors pointing blame at each other for an undiagnosable issue, then they need to find an integration vendor who is willing to take responsibility for the packaging of the OS and the application together. What already comes in the OS can be considered integrated. Maybe some application vendors are willing to "integrate" with the OS and support all issues if you have their application installed.
But I do not want some OS telling me I can't use some application just because it thinks the application may not be secure, or the application vendor didn't pay the OS vendor to become approved. I may even want to write my own application.
The same should apply to drivers. The OS vendor is off the hook if you use such a driver. But it shouldn't prevent me from doing so.
Embedding security in other products may be hard (I don't entirely agree with this), but it is what is essential. Security should not be a separate product.
For example, if you have a router between your LAN and your link to the internet, that router should be performing the security function for you. If you want to block certain ports from being connected to via the internet, block it there. If you want to establish a VLAN tunnel to another office, you could do it there.
To the extent that any separate product can make something else more secure, that something else could have been made just as secure on its own. Don't confuse this with separate kinds of security that should be in different products.
Much of the problem is how things are marketed. Something marketed as a firewall may well really be a full router that can be a drop in replacement to an insecure router. But it should be marketed as a router that also happens to include state of the art security in the way it operates.
There is a market for separate security devices and tools only because existing products are just not secure. This is simply a reflection of the bad state of affairs of way too many products. For example, if Windows were secure, there would be no market for add-on security tools and products.
Personally, while I do worry about Tibetan culture being diluted and people being oppressed, I'm not sure that (a) I have the moral standing to tell others not to opppress people (It's not like we're going to offer Hawaii autonomy now, is it?) (b) it's generally good for every ethnic group to live in its own autonomous enclave.
You personally do have such a moral standing if you make such accusations fairly and justly. If you can just as easily accuse other governments regarding the wrongs they do, then that is fine. The problem is too often oppression gets justified because some other country, culture, or government, did it somewhere else, to someone else, in the past. We want to avoid that.
As for Hawaii, ask the Hawaiians. If they want to break away from the USA, then I would support that. If the Tibetans wanted to stay with China, I'd support that, too.
Different cultures should be retained. It doesn't take creating autonomous enclaves to do that. Tibetan culture could be retained under China. But China doesn't seem to want to do that. In fact, religion (a basis of so many cultures) of any kind seems to be something the Chinese government is unable to deal with. That's why they have the issue. My bet is if Tibet were under control of India, none of this would be an issue.
I do wish the Chinese would confront the human rights abuses in their past more fully. I wish they had better protections for workers and better labor laws. Communist regimes seem to always have this problem. If the government is made of labor unions ("soviets"), but the union is no longer responsive to the workers needs, who can they turn to?
The big failing of Marxism is that it didn't provide for a check against abuses by the people that get into power.
The protection is a matter of degree. The thicker cover can protect to a high level of impact... not infinite, but higher. Matte and thicker means more fuzzy, so those are basically incompatible. Ultimately what is needed is a multicoated surface that eliminates the reflections much like a top quality camera lens. But then you can't touch it until they find material that can't be scratched off.
The grid of all those tiny little liquid crystal cells is where you need to focus to see the image clearly. In addition to that, you need some kind of cover over those cells to protect them. Thinner covers provide less protection than thicker covers. When the cover has a matte surface, a thicker cover increases the fuzziness caused by the matte surface. So a tradeoff is between fuzziness vs. physical protection. The glossy surface avoids the fuzziness and allows the eye to focus below the cover surface, right where the cells are. Glossy avoids that fuzziness vs. physical protection issue and allows a thicker cover to provide better protection.
Glossy also works better in higher ambient light levels, except for the few cases where the reflection angle is at its worst.
A laptop screen needs more physical protection than a desktop monitor screen. That favors choosing thicker glossy for the laptop when thin matte would otherwise be preferred for the desktop.
A laptop is easier to move to a less problematic light environment than a desktop. That favors matte for the desktop when glossy would otherwise be usable.
They can't turn analog back on because a lot of the changes being made (e.g. stations changing channels, stations doing flash cuts, etc) depend on other changes, and many of those depend on the way digital works. For example there are a set of specific interference avoidance technical requirements to avoid one station interfering with another. These rules differ for analog and digital. So the actual operating frequencies had to change. Quite many of the stations will be switching to an all new channel different than either the analog or the digital channel they previously had. Many of them never went to full power on digital. Some never got their old digital on the air. A few never even got a 2nd digital channel to work with. And a few others have already shut off their analog (most stations can shut off their analog now, if they wish).
Digital does allow a tighter packing of TV channels geographically and spectrally. Channels 52 to 69 are mostly in use now, but will not be available after 2009-2-17. The existing set of available channels can't support so many stations operating in analog. Once the transisition is complete, the frequencies occupied by the defunct channels go to other services, many of which are getting ready to make use of them.
Unlike rolling out a new database server or such, this is a change that simply cannot be undone. It may be possible at the last minute to delay the change a few days or weeks. You may find the FCC could delay the analog cutoff, or the move from transitional digital frequency to final digital frequency, for individual stations for a very short time from (possibly with interim low power to avoid interference). While I won't be surprised if a few of these happen, there will be very few at most. Otherwise they really are committed; they cannot undo this without catastrophic consequences.
The one event I fear most in getting this transition done on time is a possible serious winter storm that could happen. They chose a bad date for this; a time when the midwest and northeast often see higher levels of winter precipitation. Given that the cutover requires changes at remote transmitter sites in many cases, and changes up on the tower in others, a few stations could be in a position of being unable to make the changes on the designated date if bad winter weather happens to be active on that date. A few have planned to make the change in the fall before then.
BTW, digital does work. I and many other people are getting more channels clearer than before. In my case, I have tested with "rabbit ears". With analog, I cannot get any watchable signals at all (blocked by a hill in one direction toward closer stations, and more distant from stations in the other clear direction). With digital, I can get 2 stations crystal clear. I'll be ordering a full size antenna in the next week or so. I may well be able to get enough local stations to get off the Comcast teat.
Collecting sales tax is horribly complicated. It's not just a simple percentage for each state. There have been some attempts to simplify it, but they have so far failed (to come up with something basically simple). Even if they did simplify things enough to have a known percentage for each state or zip code of delivery, what about electronic delivery (stuff you pay for then get to download)? I once suggested states be required to standardize tax rates based on zip code (or just one percentage for the whole state). But some internet sales won't have a zip code of delivery.
I suggest a major change to the way the taxes are collected. Instead of the retailers collecting it, have the credit/debit cards and other payment handlers like PayPal collect it. That way there would not be a million retailers for all the states to have to deal with. And these payment handlers know where most of their account holders live (for those cases where the retailer doesn't need to know). The retailers would simply include as part of the charge to the payment handler, a breakdown of the amount into the various standardized classes of product and service categories that might have different tax rates.
I called Comcast today to find out if they are still non-neutral. I was informed that they still do not support Linux. While Linux and BSD can be made to work on Comcast easily enough today, how do we know that this level of access will continue? They could change things tomorrow and break the ability of Linux and BSD to access the internet.
It would NOT surprise ME if the court did NOT fine the lawyer. Many courts (maybe most) do let lawyers get away with abuse of process like this quite often. We'll have to see how this one turns out.
This is a good example why this procedure needs to be changed to require the approval of a judge before any subpoena can be issued to any outside party.
This does put her free speech at risk. That is not necessarily through a process that would order her to stop. Instead, this is a case of harassment and invasion of privacy as a result of her having exercised her free speech rights. It may well be an attempt by Mr. Shoemaker to discourage her from speaking. She, or someone else considering speaking on these matters, may be discouraged from doing so for fear of the costs and invasion of privacy due to such a subpoena.
If Mr. Shoemaker had believed she had information relevant to the case, he could have simply asked for that. Instead, what he is asking for goes beyond what this case is about. We need to have legal procedures that mandate all subpoenas, even for discovery not carried out in the courtroom, be reviewed by the judge for relevance.
Yes, merchants are screwed. But this is still better under the credit/debit card system than under PayPal. With the cards, the merchant can at least continue doing business on other transactions, even while the disputed ones are in dispute. With PayPal, the merchant's account can be completely frozen. Money can still be sent to a frozen PayPal account, but it is still frozen. The merchant gets no money coming in at all from any of the undisputed transactions.
Someone who is just unhappy with the product they got might (inappropriately) dispute the charge and force a chargeback with the merchant account passes on to the merchant (often through deductions on the settlement transfers, since disputes tend to be a small percentage of total transactions). While PayPal could do that, they too often do a whole account freeze, just because of a handful of idiot customers.
Many regular EBAY sellers have to have multiple PayPal accounts to handle these issues better. EBAY may eventually disallow that as it ties things closer to its PayPal operations.
There's more to it than simply some command that says "Shut down the generators" or "Open the switch to the grid". There are hundreds of operational parameters to controlling just how the generators are working. You don't need to just shut things down (and likely, you probably cannot just simply do that with a command, anyway). Much of the risk exists in tweaking the way things operate in such a way as to cause problematic situations that could necessitate shutting something down, or cause damage to generation facilities, or worse. One critical step that needs to be taken is total isolation from the internet. And that is because other steps need to be thought out more carefully, and time is needed for that.
SCADA systems are in the Ford Model T days. You want to bolt a seat-belt and airbags to it. These things may help, but if you really want things to be secure, we need to rethink the entire infrastructure. And that will not be cheap...
Fixing it means making the decision for either the whole thing, or individually for the many parts of it, what is to be changed and what is to stay as it was. Given the way software development is done these days, anything and everything that gets changed is almost certain to not work effectively for years, if not decades. It won't necessarily be that the software actually written is wrong, but rather, the tools it uses don't work precisely as expected (which is usually some interpretation of the 2 versions old documentation).
Today's software systems, whether Microsoft Windows based, or Free Open Source Software based (e.g. Linux, glibc, etc), are just too complex to be sure things are working right. Things will have too many failure modes and security exposures because no one can really understand all of it to analyze things enough to avoid it.
SCADA is the result of decades of gradual migration to computer control. It may not be pretty, but it has that advantage of slow, careful, methodical development, adoption, and deployment. How are you even going to do any live tests of a new system? How rapidly are you going to try to implement it in the first place (hint: rapid development is a curse to any critical system design).
They only have one camera/recorder combination that uses memory cards. And they are limited to SD cards no larger than 2G (e.g. no SDHC cards). Maybe this is because they are doing 640x480 at 30fps. I don't need that much. 320x240 at 6fps will meet my need. But I do need 9 hours recording time (and that long on one battery charge).
I'm looking for a wearable video camera. Resolution can be low, as well as frame rate. 320x240 at 6 frames per second would be enough. It should store on an SD or micro SD card. Maybe it can run from a watch battery or a rechargeable battery (recharged via USB maybe). The smaller the better.
What if the ISP that provides BBC with bandwidth for all that video wanted to charge all the broadband users for the cost of extra capacity for having caused BBC to use what BBC is already paying for?
The site that has all the ads and big images and videos already pays their own provider to move all that content into the cloud. So each end (web site on one end, viewer on the other) are paying for their respective bandwidths. It's not right that one end should go over to the other customer and demand a double payment.
The suggestion is that consumer grade accounts could be set up that charge by the megabyte actually downloaded. If you don't want to see all those images, turn images off in your browser, or don't go there. Hint: that's not all that much compared to the people that surf YouTube all day and catch up on BBC the next day.
Who cares if there's a single universal input/output connector? All you need if you're actually trying to accomplish something is to connect *your specific setup* together.
I care. But that is because right now various digital sources have different kinds of digital video output connections. Some have Firewire. Some have HDMI. Some have SDI. The video world went into this with too little planning.
But for the time being, *my specific setup* has analog component. It looks like HDMI would be the first digital source. So you know of a card that handles HDMI input (HDCP is not needed ... this is not about ripping protected content) and works in Linux?
S-Video is not real component. S-Video still has NTSC subcarrier modulation. Its only benefit over composite is that the subcarrier is not mixed with the luminance, making it unnecessary to filter them apart later. That reduces the artifacts of NTSC, but it does not eliminate them. Component is all baseband; there is no modulated subcarrier.
Additionally, S-Video only supports the NTSC format, which is 480i59.94. Component can support all the video formats used by ATSC and DVB video transmission standards. Many DVD and BR-DVD players have component output. I've seen one DVD recorder with component input. Many high-definition, and a few standard-definition, TVs and TV-oriented monitors have component input. You can recognize component input/output with 5 RCA or BNC connectors (1 for luminance referred to as Y, one for Y-B chroma, one for Y-R chroma, and 2 for stereo audio).
As for "going digital", suggest a digital input/output that is universally available (e.g. is input for monitors, output for cameras, input/output for computers including Linux supported, and input/output for recording devices like DVD-R, DVR, etc) ... and supports HD. Hint: I doubt you can find one.
... a video input/output card for Linux that supports component (YPbPr) video.
It's one thing to make an OS fully secure. It's something else entirely to make it enforce security on other products. I want the former and not the latter. It is then my responsibility, delegated to the makers of the applications I add on, to make sure the applications themselves are secure. The OS only needs to provide the necessary facilities that applications might need. If an application specifically allows anyone that can reach that computer to login and erase crucial files, that is an issue of the application, not the OS. If the OS provides useful tools that the application can make use of to do this in a more convenient way (for example, convenient to the computer owner to specify who is allowed to login to more than one application, done at a single point of control), that is a good thing. But forcing all applications to use that is a bad thing.
An OS, even a secure one, should not have any kind of "approved software" that is a requirement for the software to work.
If someone wants to avoid the issue of multiple vendors pointing blame at each other for an undiagnosable issue, then they need to find an integration vendor who is willing to take responsibility for the packaging of the OS and the application together. What already comes in the OS can be considered integrated. Maybe some application vendors are willing to "integrate" with the OS and support all issues if you have their application installed.
But I do not want some OS telling me I can't use some application just because it thinks the application may not be secure, or the application vendor didn't pay the OS vendor to become approved. I may even want to write my own application.
The same should apply to drivers. The OS vendor is off the hook if you use such a driver. But it shouldn't prevent me from doing so.
Embedding security in other products may be hard (I don't entirely agree with this), but it is what is essential. Security should not be a separate product.
For example, if you have a router between your LAN and your link to the internet, that router should be performing the security function for you. If you want to block certain ports from being connected to via the internet, block it there. If you want to establish a VLAN tunnel to another office, you could do it there.
To the extent that any separate product can make something else more secure, that something else could have been made just as secure on its own. Don't confuse this with separate kinds of security that should be in different products.
Much of the problem is how things are marketed. Something marketed as a firewall may well really be a full router that can be a drop in replacement to an insecure router. But it should be marketed as a router that also happens to include state of the art security in the way it operates.
There is a market for separate security devices and tools only because existing products are just not secure. This is simply a reflection of the bad state of affairs of way too many products. For example, if Windows were secure, there would be no market for add-on security tools and products.
You personally do have such a moral standing if you make such accusations fairly and justly. If you can just as easily accuse other governments regarding the wrongs they do, then that is fine. The problem is too often oppression gets justified because some other country, culture, or government, did it somewhere else, to someone else, in the past. We want to avoid that.
As for Hawaii, ask the Hawaiians. If they want to break away from the USA, then I would support that. If the Tibetans wanted to stay with China, I'd support that, too.
Different cultures should be retained. It doesn't take creating autonomous enclaves to do that. Tibetan culture could be retained under China. But China doesn't seem to want to do that. In fact, religion (a basis of so many cultures) of any kind seems to be something the Chinese government is unable to deal with. That's why they have the issue. My bet is if Tibet were under control of India, none of this would be an issue.
I do wish the Chinese would confront the human rights abuses in their past more fully. I wish they had better protections for workers and better labor laws. Communist regimes seem to always have this problem. If the government is made of labor unions ("soviets"), but the union is no longer responsive to the workers needs, who can they turn to?The big failing of Marxism is that it didn't provide for a check against abuses by the people that get into power.
Basically, you have identified the party of big corporate monopolies and the party of big government socialism. Try again.
The protection is a matter of degree. The thicker cover can protect to a high level of impact ... not infinite, but higher. Matte and thicker means more fuzzy, so those are basically incompatible. Ultimately what is needed is a multicoated surface that eliminates the reflections much like a top quality camera lens. But then you can't touch it until they find material that can't be scratched off.
The grid of all those tiny little liquid crystal cells is where you need to focus to see the image clearly. In addition to that, you need some kind of cover over those cells to protect them. Thinner covers provide less protection than thicker covers. When the cover has a matte surface, a thicker cover increases the fuzziness caused by the matte surface. So a tradeoff is between fuzziness vs. physical protection. The glossy surface avoids the fuzziness and allows the eye to focus below the cover surface, right where the cells are. Glossy avoids that fuzziness vs. physical protection issue and allows a thicker cover to provide better protection.
Glossy also works better in higher ambient light levels, except for the few cases where the reflection angle is at its worst.
A laptop screen needs more physical protection than a desktop monitor screen. That favors choosing thicker glossy for the laptop when thin matte would otherwise be preferred for the desktop.
A laptop is easier to move to a less problematic light environment than a desktop. That favors matte for the desktop when glossy would otherwise be usable.
... I put up site that supports the corruption of the party in control?
They can't turn analog back on because a lot of the changes being made (e.g. stations changing channels, stations doing flash cuts, etc) depend on other changes, and many of those depend on the way digital works. For example there are a set of specific interference avoidance technical requirements to avoid one station interfering with another. These rules differ for analog and digital. So the actual operating frequencies had to change. Quite many of the stations will be switching to an all new channel different than either the analog or the digital channel they previously had. Many of them never went to full power on digital. Some never got their old digital on the air. A few never even got a 2nd digital channel to work with. And a few others have already shut off their analog (most stations can shut off their analog now, if they wish).
Digital does allow a tighter packing of TV channels geographically and spectrally. Channels 52 to 69 are mostly in use now, but will not be available after 2009-2-17. The existing set of available channels can't support so many stations operating in analog. Once the transisition is complete, the frequencies occupied by the defunct channels go to other services, many of which are getting ready to make use of them.
Unlike rolling out a new database server or such, this is a change that simply cannot be undone. It may be possible at the last minute to delay the change a few days or weeks. You may find the FCC could delay the analog cutoff, or the move from transitional digital frequency to final digital frequency, for individual stations for a very short time from (possibly with interim low power to avoid interference). While I won't be surprised if a few of these happen, there will be very few at most. Otherwise they really are committed; they cannot undo this without catastrophic consequences.
The one event I fear most in getting this transition done on time is a possible serious winter storm that could happen. They chose a bad date for this; a time when the midwest and northeast often see higher levels of winter precipitation. Given that the cutover requires changes at remote transmitter sites in many cases, and changes up on the tower in others, a few stations could be in a position of being unable to make the changes on the designated date if bad winter weather happens to be active on that date. A few have planned to make the change in the fall before then.
BTW, digital does work. I and many other people are getting more channels clearer than before. In my case, I have tested with "rabbit ears". With analog, I cannot get any watchable signals at all (blocked by a hill in one direction toward closer stations, and more distant from stations in the other clear direction). With digital, I can get 2 stations crystal clear. I'll be ordering a full size antenna in the next week or so. I may well be able to get enough local stations to get off the Comcast teat.
Collecting sales tax is horribly complicated. It's not just a simple percentage for each state. There have been some attempts to simplify it, but they have so far failed (to come up with something basically simple). Even if they did simplify things enough to have a known percentage for each state or zip code of delivery, what about electronic delivery (stuff you pay for then get to download)? I once suggested states be required to standardize tax rates based on zip code (or just one percentage for the whole state). But some internet sales won't have a zip code of delivery.
I suggest a major change to the way the taxes are collected. Instead of the retailers collecting it, have the credit/debit cards and other payment handlers like PayPal collect it. That way there would not be a million retailers for all the states to have to deal with. And these payment handlers know where most of their account holders live (for those cases where the retailer doesn't need to know). The retailers would simply include as part of the charge to the payment handler, a breakdown of the amount into the various standardized classes of product and service categories that might have different tax rates.
I called Comcast today to find out if they are still non-neutral. I was informed that they still do not support Linux. While Linux and BSD can be made to work on Comcast easily enough today, how do we know that this level of access will continue? They could change things tomorrow and break the ability of Linux and BSD to access the internet.
She is no expert in the field. The landsha^h^h^h^h^hwyer is just trying to shut her up and wasn't able to find a way to use the DMCA to do a takedown.
It would NOT surprise ME if the court did NOT fine the lawyer. Many courts (maybe most) do let lawyers get away with abuse of process like this quite often. We'll have to see how this one turns out.
Thiomersal is one of those words that is more misspelled (as "thimerosal") than spelled correctly (according to hit counts from a Google Search). Both the blogger and the lawyer in this case have it wrong. More info is at http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/thiomersal/questions/en/ and http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/thiomersal/en/index.html. Also see http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=516680.
This is a good example why this procedure needs to be changed to require the approval of a judge before any subpoena can be issued to any outside party.
This does put her free speech at risk. That is not necessarily through a process that would order her to stop. Instead, this is a case of harassment and invasion of privacy as a result of her having exercised her free speech rights. It may well be an attempt by Mr. Shoemaker to discourage her from speaking. She, or someone else considering speaking on these matters, may be discouraged from doing so for fear of the costs and invasion of privacy due to such a subpoena.
If Mr. Shoemaker had believed she had information relevant to the case, he could have simply asked for that. Instead, what he is asking for goes beyond what this case is about. We need to have legal procedures that mandate all subpoenas, even for discovery not carried out in the courtroom, be reviewed by the judge for relevance.
Yes, merchants are screwed. But this is still better under the credit/debit card system than under PayPal. With the cards, the merchant can at least continue doing business on other transactions, even while the disputed ones are in dispute. With PayPal, the merchant's account can be completely frozen. Money can still be sent to a frozen PayPal account, but it is still frozen. The merchant gets no money coming in at all from any of the undisputed transactions.
Someone who is just unhappy with the product they got might (inappropriately) dispute the charge and force a chargeback with the merchant account passes on to the merchant (often through deductions on the settlement transfers, since disputes tend to be a small percentage of total transactions). While PayPal could do that, they too often do a whole account freeze, just because of a handful of idiot customers.
Many regular EBAY sellers have to have multiple PayPal accounts to handle these issues better. EBAY may eventually disallow that as it ties things closer to its PayPal operations.
There's more to it than simply some command that says "Shut down the generators" or "Open the switch to the grid". There are hundreds of operational parameters to controlling just how the generators are working. You don't need to just shut things down (and likely, you probably cannot just simply do that with a command, anyway). Much of the risk exists in tweaking the way things operate in such a way as to cause problematic situations that could necessitate shutting something down, or cause damage to generation facilities, or worse. One critical step that needs to be taken is total isolation from the internet. And that is because other steps need to be thought out more carefully, and time is needed for that.
Fixing it means making the decision for either the whole thing, or individually for the many parts of it, what is to be changed and what is to stay as it was. Given the way software development is done these days, anything and everything that gets changed is almost certain to not work effectively for years, if not decades. It won't necessarily be that the software actually written is wrong, but rather, the tools it uses don't work precisely as expected (which is usually some interpretation of the 2 versions old documentation).
Today's software systems, whether Microsoft Windows based, or Free Open Source Software based (e.g. Linux, glibc, etc), are just too complex to be sure things are working right. Things will have too many failure modes and security exposures because no one can really understand all of it to analyze things enough to avoid it.
SCADA is the result of decades of gradual migration to computer control. It may not be pretty, but it has that advantage of slow, careful, methodical development, adoption, and deployment. How are you even going to do any live tests of a new system? How rapidly are you going to try to implement it in the first place (hint: rapid development is a curse to any critical system design).
They only have one camera/recorder combination that uses memory cards. And they are limited to SD cards no larger than 2G (e.g. no SDHC cards). Maybe this is because they are doing 640x480 at 30fps. I don't need that much. 320x240 at 6fps will meet my need. But I do need 9 hours recording time (and that long on one battery charge).
I'm looking for a wearable video camera. Resolution can be low, as well as frame rate. 320x240 at 6 frames per second would be enough. It should store on an SD or micro SD card. Maybe it can run from a watch battery or a rechargeable battery (recharged via USB maybe). The smaller the better.
What if the ISP that provides BBC with bandwidth for all that video wanted to charge all the broadband users for the cost of extra capacity for having caused BBC to use what BBC is already paying for?
The site that has all the ads and big images and videos already pays their own provider to move all that content into the cloud. So each end (web site on one end, viewer on the other) are paying for their respective bandwidths. It's not right that one end should go over to the other customer and demand a double payment.
The suggestion is that consumer grade accounts could be set up that charge by the megabyte actually downloaded. If you don't want to see all those images, turn images off in your browser, or don't go there. Hint: that's not all that much compared to the people that surf YouTube all day and catch up on BBC the next day.