So the US government is creating a generation of black hat security experts: pros who define the cutting edge of hostile attacks on infosystems. That's all right and proper as part of the US military, the necessary maintenance of infiltration and coercive force that is required to operate as a last resort of public policy produced under the Constitution, like any military power.
Leaving aside the separate and important issue of Congressional and other oversight to ensure the military crackers operate always under proper law and in the formal national interest, what happens to these people when they leave government service? We'll have created dangerous people whose careers are dedicated to acts that are illegal, and threaten national (and private) security if they are used in attacks outside the proper military context. Sure they're like any other armed soldier, whose many other developed skills are valuable in many contexts not violence. But the fact is that many retired soldiers do find their skills and interests best fit a police or private security career, and even as paramilitary mercenaries - some of which private armies are emerging as serious threats to world stability in its balance of power. Military crackers are different, though: there is little or no role in non-military police, and virtually no legal role in private employ cracking anything.
We are creating an army of high-end crackers who will find themselves leaving the military, and available for hire by the legions of private employers whose use of them to crack systems is mostly illegal, or even acts of war.
We should consider how to track these people and their later activities. Working to secure and to test secure systems with permission of their owners is a valuable asset to keeping us all safe, whether as national service or in private employment. But leaving lots of them floating around loose practically guarantees that at least some of them will find jobs illegally cracking systems without the owners' permission, to do crimes, or perhaps even working for foreign militaries running attacks without coordination with proper US foreign policy, perhaps against our allies, perhaps against us, perhaps even just destabilizing some balance worked out among our enemies.
We are creating many serious potential threats, as part of our programme to reduce and eliminate threats. Part of that programme should be minimizing the increased threat we're creating with them. There's got to be a way to help these people continue their careers with the most freedom, which will overall increase security (and their personal benefit) that doesn't let some few people turn against their training (and likely oaths to "be good").
Americans paid $billions over decades to produce all that NASA film. How about Discovery releases it all free for download, after they've gotten all the advertising revenue from the premiere (and then the reruns after the downloads are released)?
And how about NASA releases for download all their HD video they've shot? Let's see any American (or foreigner benefiting from our generosity) take a crack at editing these movies that we all paid to produce. I've seen a few HD NASA movies floating around the Net, specifically a recent Shuttle launch, and a montage of its full mission. I thought the US government doesn't actually have the power to retain copyrights (which aren't necessary "to promote progress in science and the useful arts" by the government directed by policy, not profit). Where is the whole archive, for public consumption?
The more the world sees what America does with its best spent non-social budgets, the better we will start to look again.
If the reader were small enough to fit in my pocket like a cellphone, but unrolled/unfolded to be about 4x7" like a paperback book, I'd be more interested. The screen would have to be extremely high contrast, and at least 300dpi. And get at least 12-15 hours on a single battery charge, rechargable in under 15 minutes.
Then, let me download my own copy for $1 without DRM of any book I already own on paper, and deliver on paper through the mail any digital book I like at a discount.
You'll have me. And I read a lot of books every year.
What Myhrvold demonstates is that helping run a monopoly is a great way to make enough money to hire people to create patent monopolies to make more money to make more patent monopolies.
Great idea, but Myhrvold didn't invent it. Luckily, he can't patent it, either.
We must of course give the Bush regime unlimited powers to spy on us. Because then they can keep all our most private info someplace where it can all be stolen at once.
This story is tagged "flamebait". I guess telling the truth to Microsoft fanboys is bad, because the fanboys will flame you.
I'm fascinated by how simulated security like DRM attracts anonymous, cowardly snipers blackmailing the world with threats that they'll melt down when their delusion is confronted with the truth.
Server drives with high density need to be faster (seek and transfer times) to support more multiple users accessing different sequences of the disk's storage addresses in rapid interleaved succession.
But personal drives don't need as high speeds for one person's use, especially when the high capacity is for large media content objects that are stored unfragmented. We don't need to spend the money on transfer speeds so much faster than our playback speeds that it's never used. Large builtin caches are useful for real random-access data in small chunks, like programs or numerical datasets, not media.
Blu-Ray's max transfer speed is 54Mbps, though that's for recording - 48Mbps is max playback. 3x for buffering during FWD/REV scanning playback would be 144Mbps, 2.25MBps. Big drives currently recommended for personal use, like Seagate's 1TB Barracuda ES.2, get at least 53MBps transfer, over 23x as fast as the fastest it will ever really be asked to deliver. If it weren't so unnecessarily fast, maybe it would cost less, and an array of them for the same hundreds of dollars would hold more content.
With 50GB Blu-Ray HD titles to store, getting more sets of 20 titles in each HD in a RAID is a lot more important than getting them faster than they can be played.
Is anyone using these kinds of turbines to drive production of fuelcell fuel as storage (and discharge) more efficient than batteries? Is there any mechanical alternative to electrolysis that uses say, pressure, to charge the fuel that gets discharged and then recycled back into fuel by the turbines?
Doesn't anyone remember reading Negroponte's "last word" column in the first few years of _Wired_ magazine? He was always wrong, every month. He even published a book as monument to his wrongness, _Being Digital_ (which could have been called "0" for its return value).
He also helped start the OLPC project, which couldn't get anywhere while he was "helping".
Why does anyone listen to him anymore, just because MIT was fool enough to give him money for a Media Lab once upon a time (a long long time ago)?
If Windows runs well on an XO laptop, then that makes the XO laptop the best PC in the world. Because I've never seen Windows run well on any other machine.
Maybe it "runs well" because it doesn't run at all. Probably the only way to get it to run in a "secure mode", anyway.
Have you noticed that none of the corporate mass media outlets that are fundamentally condemned by the research results in that report have talked about it at all, even though the cat is now out of the bag?
That sound of crickets is the strongest proof that the corporate mass media is totally broken, and far worse than useless. It helped lie us into a catastrophic war, it helped distract us first from destroying our real enemies in the Qaeda, other terrorist networks, and their soulmates in office in this country, and now continues to lie and distract as we finally get another chance to pick a new government to lead us out of this valley of death.
But who cares, if someone, somewhere, isn't wearing a (made in China) lapel pin?
At least there's some coverage of this epochal story, on the Web. I wish the corporate mass media would hurry up and die already. It's blocking the view of the wreckage it's wrought.
No, I just don't bother giving you Republicans - oh, er, I meant libertarians - any more respect for your intellectual games. Not after what you've done to the country, and while you're still blathering like you deserve some respect.
I'm not going to justify anything to you. I'm just going to keep tagging you for your part in what you people have done to this country. Get used to it.
Blah blah blah. You're the one who tried to pull the straw man by lying about which of debt or deficit I was talking about.
But you Republicans are so corrupt and addled that I'm not even disappointed. You really should just shut up about either money or logic already. No one wants to hear it from you, after you voted that straw man (with scarecrow brains) into office twice, and ruined the country.
If you've got an apology to offer, then get it out there already. Otherwise all we want to hear from you is nothing.
2001 was 7 years ago. And that stock market crash doesn't seem to have reduced bank profits any - not that they're paying taxes on those profits. Where's your sense of proportion?
No, it's you, Anonymous Republican Coward, who's making mud of the whole thing. The debt when Clinton left was nearly all Republican Reagan/Bush debt (more than every president before them combined). Clinton did indeed leave Bush with a budget surplus, in the hundreds of $billions. Bush has doubled that debt, never shown a surplus. But, like all you Republicans, Bush has lied every year to project a surplus to con us into living with yet more debt.
The current committed US debt (according to the laws written by Bush's Republican Congress, that sailed through his power monopoly) is between $45-65 TRILLION into the foreseeable future. Plus another $10+ TRILLION state/municipal/local debt, $10+ TRILLION credit card debt, $10+ TRILLION mortgage debt, and who knows how many $10s of TRILLIONS in corporate debt. Since you Republicans don't do math, I'll help you out: that's probably over $100 TRILLION in debt already, before our country collapses into first recession, and then likely even an extended depression. We only produce $14T a year, and that's with the dollar still retaining some value, with oil at "only" $115 a barrel. That means we're already committed to spending over 7 year's total production just to repay what we've already spent operating in the red, before we turn that red into a sea of blood. Not really like the 1990s boom Clinton managed into surpluses, not funded on mortgaging the next century to make quarterly reports look good enough to rip off the world.
I really wish you Republicans would shut up about money. You do nothing but steal and squander it every time you smell it. We don't have any left for you to beg for, pipe down already.
The US purchasing power is now built on unsupportable borrowing power that is already hitting the wall. That purchasing power was never used to make China behave (except to behave as a global capitalist exploiter, now clearly the mutual plan all along), and now it's disappearing fast.
You shouldn't make so much noise about economics just because you're delusional that US indebtedness makes us strong, and Chinese manufacturing dominance makes them replaceable.
I'm glad to see Europe finally start to do more global work that has been left to the US for so long, since WWII. Especially that (continuing) ghastly collapse in their backyard in Yugoslavia, which the US bailed their region out of.
They've got the money, and the interest in self-defense. Though it really all looks like Orwell's _1984_ with the spyglass turned around: now it's Eurasia's turn to always have been at war with Eastasia.
How can we be expected to believe these contracts will do anything but make some "biotech entrepreneurs" rich, without ever showing any medical benefit to the general population, when Bush's Pentagon won't even fund normal veterans services like healthcare, insurance, education, or even reasonable salary increases?
I know the Pentagon is sending badly wounded soldiers back into fighting in Iraq. But how do they expect people to volunteer to go through the ringer without keeping our promises to these making the ultimate sacrifices, especially if the only medical care they'll get will be to rotate their tires after they get blasted to bits, until there's nothing left to put together and send back?
Although I guess a draft combined with regrowing body parts could do the trick. "Frankenstein's Army" for the 21st Century. I'll be scanning the Pentagon budgets for new funding for zombies, the real cutting edge.
Clinton and the Republican 1990s Congress sold us Most Favored Nation and "Fast Track" status for China on the appeal that the US would be manufacturing high-tech gear like Cisco routers and selling it into the emerging Chinese market. Making China dependent on US manufacturing and retailers so we could dictate political terms to them, like not torturing Tibetan monks.
They got it. Then they flipped the script. Now the US is dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Stepping up the game, Bush and the Republican 2000s Congress sent us $9 TRILLION into Federal debt (after a Clinton left him with a surplus), making $400 BILLION in debt bought by China necessary to keep the illusion that our economy hasn't collapsed - an illusion rapidly vaporizing, even before China applies much pressure to force us to comply with their Communist mafia government's global expansion plans. Meanwhile the Chinese are not just torturing monks (or stopping us from torturing around the world), they're also sending weapons, including machetes, to fuel a slaughter in Zimbabwe.
They baited and switched us. And by "they", I mean a lot of Americans with Washington addresses, and now obviously Chinese bank accounts.
I can tell we agree. And I think you're right about it taking an amendment. But I don't have to like it. We're so far from that direction in this Unitary Executive country now that all I can do is bitch about it when someone praises it.
FWIW, I don't like your queen much, either. Between the monument here in Brooklyn to the Prison Ship Martyrs to my Irish wife's many scores to settle, your queen owes the world much more than even she's got left to repay it.
That fake "Bill of Rights" is a scam to require customers accept that ComCast service can suck whenever ComCast wants it to, and customers have to suck it up:
Now just two days before the FCC's Stanford hearing, Comcast issued yet another press release, probably aimed at dissuading the FCC from taking any action against it. Comcast and another peer-to-peer company, Pando Networks, said they created their own "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for file sharing, much to the amusement of some legal experts..
After speaking with Comcast, it appears that their "Bill of Rights," is really about informing the consumer that their Internet traffic could suffer delays. The cable company also says it could "de-prioritize" very heavy users of Internet bandwidth, and it will work with Pando Networks to learn how to work with peer-to-peer traffic.
Clearly, Comcast is trying to have it both ways, playing the role of the cable monolith and at the same time, trying to present a nicer face to the peer-to- peer community and consumers.
But in the prior tests conducted by the Associated Press, which uncovered Comcast's "delays," many consumers were essentially blocked from accessing certain peer-to-peer networks and sites because their connections timed out. Critics said this was anticompetitive behavior, as it blocked access to sites where consumers could have gotten movies or videos that were also being offered by Comcast.
Slashdot Mirror
So the US government is creating a generation of black hat security experts: pros who define the cutting edge of hostile attacks on infosystems. That's all right and proper as part of the US military, the necessary maintenance of infiltration and coercive force that is required to operate as a last resort of public policy produced under the Constitution, like any military power.
Leaving aside the separate and important issue of Congressional and other oversight to ensure the military crackers operate always under proper law and in the formal national interest, what happens to these people when they leave government service? We'll have created dangerous people whose careers are dedicated to acts that are illegal, and threaten national (and private) security if they are used in attacks outside the proper military context. Sure they're like any other armed soldier, whose many other developed skills are valuable in many contexts not violence. But the fact is that many retired soldiers do find their skills and interests best fit a police or private security career, and even as paramilitary mercenaries - some of which private armies are emerging as serious threats to world stability in its balance of power. Military crackers are different, though: there is little or no role in non-military police, and virtually no legal role in private employ cracking anything.
We are creating an army of high-end crackers who will find themselves leaving the military, and available for hire by the legions of private employers whose use of them to crack systems is mostly illegal, or even acts of war.
We should consider how to track these people and their later activities. Working to secure and to test secure systems with permission of their owners is a valuable asset to keeping us all safe, whether as national service or in private employment. But leaving lots of them floating around loose practically guarantees that at least some of them will find jobs illegally cracking systems without the owners' permission, to do crimes, or perhaps even working for foreign militaries running attacks without coordination with proper US foreign policy, perhaps against our allies, perhaps against us, perhaps even just destabilizing some balance worked out among our enemies.
We are creating many serious potential threats, as part of our programme to reduce and eliminate threats. Part of that programme should be minimizing the increased threat we're creating with them. There's got to be a way to help these people continue their careers with the most freedom, which will overall increase security (and their personal benefit) that doesn't let some few people turn against their training (and likely oaths to "be good").
Americans paid $billions over decades to produce all that NASA film. How about Discovery releases it all free for download, after they've gotten all the advertising revenue from the premiere (and then the reruns after the downloads are released)?
And how about NASA releases for download all their HD video they've shot? Let's see any American (or foreigner benefiting from our generosity) take a crack at editing these movies that we all paid to produce. I've seen a few HD NASA movies floating around the Net, specifically a recent Shuttle launch, and a montage of its full mission. I thought the US government doesn't actually have the power to retain copyrights (which aren't necessary "to promote progress in science and the useful arts" by the government directed by policy, not profit). Where is the whole archive, for public consumption?
The more the world sees what America does with its best spent non-social budgets, the better we will start to look again.
If you define BSD as a collection of bugs, this story proves that BSD is dying.
If the reader were small enough to fit in my pocket like a cellphone, but unrolled/unfolded to be about 4x7" like a paperback book, I'd be more interested. The screen would have to be extremely high contrast, and at least 300dpi. And get at least 12-15 hours on a single battery charge, rechargable in under 15 minutes.
Then, let me download my own copy for $1 without DRM of any book I already own on paper, and deliver on paper through the mail any digital book I like at a discount.
You'll have me. And I read a lot of books every year.
What Myhrvold demonstates is that helping run a monopoly is a great way to make enough money to hire people to create patent monopolies to make more money to make more patent monopolies.
Great idea, but Myhrvold didn't invent it. Luckily, he can't patent it, either.
We must of course give the Bush regime unlimited powers to spy on us. Because then they can keep all our most private info someplace where it can all be stolen at once.
This story is tagged "flamebait". I guess telling the truth to Microsoft fanboys is bad, because the fanboys will flame you.
I'm fascinated by how simulated security like DRM attracts anonymous, cowardly snipers blackmailing the world with threats that they'll melt down when their delusion is confronted with the truth.
But will it?
And when it doesn't abandon this exercise in demonstrably worthless tyranny, what crimes will we have seen the government has committed in public?
Server drives with high density need to be faster (seek and transfer times) to support more multiple users accessing different sequences of the disk's storage addresses in rapid interleaved succession.
But personal drives don't need as high speeds for one person's use, especially when the high capacity is for large media content objects that are stored unfragmented. We don't need to spend the money on transfer speeds so much faster than our playback speeds that it's never used. Large builtin caches are useful for real random-access data in small chunks, like programs or numerical datasets, not media.
Blu-Ray's max transfer speed is 54Mbps, though that's for recording - 48Mbps is max playback. 3x for buffering during FWD/REV scanning playback would be 144Mbps, 2.25MBps. Big drives currently recommended for personal use, like Seagate's 1TB Barracuda ES.2, get at least 53MBps transfer, over 23x as fast as the fastest it will ever really be asked to deliver. If it weren't so unnecessarily fast, maybe it would cost less, and an array of them for the same hundreds of dollars would hold more content.
With 50GB Blu-Ray HD titles to store, getting more sets of 20 titles in each HD in a RAID is a lot more important than getting them faster than they can be played.
Is anyone using these kinds of turbines to drive production of fuelcell fuel as storage (and discharge) more efficient than batteries? Is there any mechanical alternative to electrolysis that uses say, pressure, to charge the fuel that gets discharged and then recycled back into fuel by the turbines?
Doesn't anyone remember reading Negroponte's "last word" column in the first few years of _Wired_ magazine? He was always wrong, every month. He even published a book as monument to his wrongness, _Being Digital_ (which could have been called "0" for its return value).
He also helped start the OLPC project, which couldn't get anywhere while he was "helping".
Why does anyone listen to him anymore, just because MIT was fool enough to give him money for a Media Lab once upon a time (a long long time ago)?
If Windows runs well on an XO laptop, then that makes the XO laptop the best PC in the world. Because I've never seen Windows run well on any other machine.
Maybe it "runs well" because it doesn't run at all. Probably the only way to get it to run in a "secure mode", anyway.
Have you noticed that none of the corporate mass media outlets that are fundamentally condemned by the research results in that report have talked about it at all, even though the cat is now out of the bag?
That sound of crickets is the strongest proof that the corporate mass media is totally broken, and far worse than useless. It helped lie us into a catastrophic war, it helped distract us first from destroying our real enemies in the Qaeda, other terrorist networks, and their soulmates in office in this country, and now continues to lie and distract as we finally get another chance to pick a new government to lead us out of this valley of death.
But who cares, if someone, somewhere, isn't wearing a (made in China) lapel pin?
At least there's some coverage of this epochal story, on the Web. I wish the corporate mass media would hurry up and die already. It's blocking the view of the wreckage it's wrought.
No, I just don't bother giving you Republicans - oh, er, I meant libertarians - any more respect for your intellectual games. Not after what you've done to the country, and while you're still blathering like you deserve some respect.
I'm not going to justify anything to you. I'm just going to keep tagging you for your part in what you people have done to this country. Get used to it.
Blah blah blah. You're the one who tried to pull the straw man by lying about which of debt or deficit I was talking about.
But you Republicans are so corrupt and addled that I'm not even disappointed. You really should just shut up about either money or logic already. No one wants to hear it from you, after you voted that straw man (with scarecrow brains) into office twice, and ruined the country.
If you've got an apology to offer, then get it out there already. Otherwise all we want to hear from you is nothing.
The fact is that Bush's debt is now $9 TRILLION, while Clinton left it at under $6T.
Even your Iraq War only accounts for about a half-trillion of that so far.
How are we supposed to "deal with it" when you Republicans have stolen and wasted all the money we'd use to deal with it?
2001 was 7 years ago. And that stock market crash doesn't seem to have reduced bank profits any - not that they're paying taxes on those profits. Where's your sense of proportion?
No, it's you, Anonymous Republican Coward, who's making mud of the whole thing. The debt when Clinton left was nearly all Republican Reagan/Bush debt (more than every president before them combined). Clinton did indeed leave Bush with a budget surplus, in the hundreds of $billions. Bush has doubled that debt, never shown a surplus. But, like all you Republicans, Bush has lied every year to project a surplus to con us into living with yet more debt.
The current committed US debt (according to the laws written by Bush's Republican Congress, that sailed through his power monopoly) is between $45-65 TRILLION into the foreseeable future. Plus another $10+ TRILLION state/municipal/local debt, $10+ TRILLION credit card debt, $10+ TRILLION mortgage debt, and who knows how many $10s of TRILLIONS in corporate debt. Since you Republicans don't do math, I'll help you out: that's probably over $100 TRILLION in debt already, before our country collapses into first recession, and then likely even an extended depression. We only produce $14T a year, and that's with the dollar still retaining some value, with oil at "only" $115 a barrel. That means we're already committed to spending over 7 year's total production just to repay what we've already spent operating in the red, before we turn that red into a sea of blood. Not really like the 1990s boom Clinton managed into surpluses, not funded on mortgaging the next century to make quarterly reports look good enough to rip off the world.
I really wish you Republicans would shut up about money. You do nothing but steal and squander it every time you smell it. We don't have any left for you to beg for, pipe down already.
The US purchasing power is now built on unsupportable borrowing power that is already hitting the wall. That purchasing power was never used to make China behave (except to behave as a global capitalist exploiter, now clearly the mutual plan all along), and now it's disappearing fast.
You shouldn't make so much noise about economics just because you're delusional that US indebtedness makes us strong, and Chinese manufacturing dominance makes them replaceable.
I'm glad to see Europe finally start to do more global work that has been left to the US for so long, since WWII. Especially that (continuing) ghastly collapse in their backyard in Yugoslavia, which the US bailed their region out of.
They've got the money, and the interest in self-defense. Though it really all looks like Orwell's _1984_ with the spyglass turned around: now it's Eurasia's turn to always have been at war with Eastasia.
How can we be expected to believe these contracts will do anything but make some "biotech entrepreneurs" rich, without ever showing any medical benefit to the general population, when Bush's Pentagon won't even fund normal veterans services like healthcare, insurance, education, or even reasonable salary increases?
I know the Pentagon is sending badly wounded soldiers back into fighting in Iraq. But how do they expect people to volunteer to go through the ringer without keeping our promises to these making the ultimate sacrifices, especially if the only medical care they'll get will be to rotate their tires after they get blasted to bits, until there's nothing left to put together and send back?
Although I guess a draft combined with regrowing body parts could do the trick. "Frankenstein's Army" for the 21st Century. I'll be scanning the Pentagon budgets for new funding for zombies, the real cutting edge.
Clinton and the Republican 1990s Congress sold us Most Favored Nation and "Fast Track" status for China on the appeal that the US would be manufacturing high-tech gear like Cisco routers and selling it into the emerging Chinese market. Making China dependent on US manufacturing and retailers so we could dictate political terms to them, like not torturing Tibetan monks.
They got it. Then they flipped the script. Now the US is dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Stepping up the game, Bush and the Republican 2000s Congress sent us $9 TRILLION into Federal debt (after a Clinton left him with a surplus), making $400 BILLION in debt bought by China necessary to keep the illusion that our economy hasn't collapsed - an illusion rapidly vaporizing, even before China applies much pressure to force us to comply with their Communist mafia government's global expansion plans. Meanwhile the Chinese are not just torturing monks (or stopping us from torturing around the world), they're also sending weapons, including machetes, to fuel a slaughter in Zimbabwe.
They baited and switched us. And by "they", I mean a lot of Americans with Washington addresses, and now obviously Chinese bank accounts.
I can tell we agree. And I think you're right about it taking an amendment. But I don't have to like it. We're so far from that direction in this Unitary Executive country now that all I can do is bitch about it when someone praises it.
:).
FWIW, I don't like your queen much, either. Between the monument here in Brooklyn to the Prison Ship Martyrs to my Irish wife's many scores to settle, your queen owes the world much more than even she's got left to repay it.
But I like you OK