Does anyone who's installed this thing know if you can switch kernel preemption on and off on the fly (through/proc or something)? And if not, how difficult would that be to achieve? Sorry, I'm not a kernel hacker so I have no clue how to find this out from the source.
This powerball thing is very interesting, but I find their web site a little disturbing. In addition to its cartoonish simplicity, it says the production process begins with "waste NaOH, which is an abundant waste from several industries." Then in the last "recycle waste" step, it says "most professionals in the hydroxide industry would chuckle at the term waste when used to describe sodium hydroxide. NaOH is the 9th most commonly produced chemical in the U.S."
Ok, so is NaOH a waste product or not??? It really doesn't matter here - they're not consuming any more than they produce so it's just a hydrogen-carrier. It just left me thinking:
Well, lots of people have propane tanks in the house without much fear of cataclysm, so I don't think that's a concern. Surely the appropriate safety measures will be taken on tanks.
The short-term question is where are people going to get the hydrogen from? That infrastructure's not in place yet.
I think one scenario that would make this thing particularly kick-ass right away is this: if the generator is to be used just for backup and emergencies - i.e. it will be idle most of the time - then you could slowly generate your own hydrogen at home from tap water and a solar-powered hydrolysis rig. FREE! Take that, Exxon.
True freedom requires security of those freedoms. To be secure, you might have to give up some of your liberties.
So what you're saying is that in order to have freedom you must give up some of your liberties. Fascinating semantic distinction.
As to the rest of your bizarrely illogical rant, may I take a few issues?
We all know that encryption is hardly used except by criminals and the paranoid.... Personally, I don't use it nor does anyone I know.
So you don't know anyone who uses it, and the only people who use it are criminals and paranoids. How did you manage that conclusion if you don't know any of them?
We hire these people to protect us, we pay them taxes, yet you don't want to allow them to do their jobs?
Forgive me, but does this mean that if I don't pay taxes I am exempt to having my civil liberties taken away? Or was there some checkbox on the 1040 form that read "Yes, I want to be spied on."?
As others have pointed out, this kind of bullshit proposal only has two ways of succeeding. The first is if we convice all the terrorists to upgrade to backdoored software. Good luck.
The second is if we convince everyone else to upgrade and hope the terrorists don't hear about it. Then we can construe their use of strong crypto as an admission of guilt. How many seconds of profound thought do you think it will take the next terrorist to figure out to wrap his strongly encrypted messagse in a weakly encrypted envelope?
"Aha," one might say, "but that can still be detected by decrypting the outer layer!" Yes indeed, but only if the government routinely decrypts every message sent anywhere by any means. Perhaps including the U.S. postal service. So in order to preserve our freedom we must all be spied on by means that continuously and actively compromise the privacy of every law-abiding citizen. In exchange we will learn the identities (but not the encrypted messages) of the terrorists. Then we can haul them into court and charge them with having a secret. I'm sure people willing to die a fiery death for their cause are going to tremble at the thought of being jailed for contempt of court. Or will that become a death-penalty offense as well?
Is this vaccine to prevent people from getting addicted to nicotine or to help those already addicted to nicotine? Because I don't see how this will help those already addicted by preventing nicotine molecules from getting to the brain. You can do that right now by just not lighting up. If you're addicted and the vaccine makes nicotine less deliverable, won't you just smoke more to satisfy your craving?
Let me guess.. you've just recently been re-reading your Ayn Rand collection?
I don't think the world is as black and white as you sketch here. For example, those terrible airline delays aren't only caused by aging FAA equipment, they're caused by the deregulated industry's capitalistic incentive to minimize costs by having fewer and larger hubs and maintaining fleets of the barest minimum possible size.
Being taxed half your income sucks and does seem unconstitutional, but it's better than the 90% brackets that used to exist (most ironically even through the 50's, when the nation was in a frenzy to rid itself of those damn communists), and still much lower than most other nations.
I don't see why you think government regulation is responsible for the high cost of health care. Don't you think the insurance industry has a whole lot more say in this? Ask a doctor.
The free market is difficult to apply to health care - you can't really comparison shop. Are you going to have the same operation done by three different surgeons to see who has the best price/performance ratio? Should you have no more qualifications on which to judge your doctors than the content of their advertisements? The unregulated free market solution to health care led to such great products as snake oil and heroin powder.
In principle (yeah, I know), the goverment funds research for things that will serve the public good. If all of this research were only done for a profit motive, then it would benefit only the highest bidder.
The driving force of capitalism is greed. You want your stuff. I don't know who I'm quoting here, but someone said "your property is only yours through the courtesy of those who don't take it from you." Who's protecting your property rights? The police - the government. Care to privatize the police force? That's great if you're the one with the most money to hire soldiers, and it will quickly lead to feudalism, the ultimate in freedom.
Part of government's function is to deal with the fact that we're living in a society and have to have a better way of getting along than just the law of the jungle. Centralized government clearly isn't the answer, but neither is a loose geographic agglomeration of 300,000,000 independent countries.
I've been ranting so long I forgot what I was saying. Well anyway, um, I disagree.
Are the words contained in the duplicate not EXACTLY the same as the words in the original? Or do Xerox machines scramble some percentage of the letters they see?
I'm pretty sure the target of copyright protection is the words, not the perfectly bound soft cover.
If Adobe is having problems with its feelings, perhaps it should get some therapy instead of lashing out at the other boys and girls and crying that they stole its imaginary ball.
Re:We haven't done this yet..
on
Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Yeah, back when it was just geeks on the net, things were so much better. No AOLusers clogging up Usenet and we had all this broadband access to ourselves.
Oh wait, there *was* no broadband access until all these losers showed up. Must just be a coincidence.
I asked myself the same question when I heard about it on the radio. The only answer I can come up with is that in both cases there are large and very well heeled corporations that are being "protected" from us dangerous little citizens.
The room was indeed packed - standing room only. (Only they don't let people in the gallery stand except for the security guards.)
Sklyarov was handcuffed and wearing a fetching orange T-shirt from the Santa Clara County Main Jail collection.
The proceeding itself was mostly dull and could just as easily have been done over the phone. No controversy or disagreement. The judge seemed to just want to get the whole thing over with as routinely as possible. The only additional information he asked for was some assurance that Dmitry's immigration status would not interfere with the trial proceedings. And while the papers are reporting that the U.S. attorney is still holding Sklyarov's passport, he did make clear that it would be handed over to the court at their discretion.
The next court appearance is scheduled for August 23, so Dmitry must be indicted within that time for the case to go forward.
After the hearing was over, nine tenths of the people left the room, and the whole proceeding only took about twenty minutes.
Clearly theoretical in my case, but suppose I do not understand the language in which the license is written, or even the words "I Agree" that I clicked on to get the program to work. It's not hard to imagine that even illiterate people would quickly learn that the program does something if you click on the highlighted box and does nothing if you click on the other one. If this was the case and they were using software without being competent to even read the license, let alone agree to it, how can they possibly be bound by its terms?
I think this is a fundamental problem with trying to automate contracts. It clearly couldn't happen if all parties involved were conscious beings.
Xfree86 3.3.6 used to lock up the display, mouse, and keyboard quite a bit on my laptop, so I kept a paperclip in my bag. A daemon was set up to monitor the parallel port, and when I shorted two
particular pins it would do a clean shutdown.
Xfree 4 fixed it. But I sort of liked the MacGyver factor.
The studios argue that they would never have distributed movies in digital format without the DMCA.
This is the crux of MPAA's leverage - they're essentially holding a gun to their own product's head and shouting "everyone back off or we'll kill the movie industry!".
It's utter bullshit. If lack of access controls is really a reason not to release works, why do the record companies keep releasing unencrypted CDs in ever-growing numbers?
The MPAA's only business is producing and distributing movies. The DMCA is a nice little present they bought for themselves from Congress, but you can rest assured that without it they'll still find a way to stay in business with obscene margins.
It seems clear that this whole hullabaloo boils down to stopping people from copying movies. This is in the movie studios' interest. But with the exception of Sony, are there any monitor manufacturers who are in bed with movie producers? If not, why would a manufacturer want to go to all the trouble and added expense?
I think the only answer would be customer demand. So how can the movie studios create this demand? By releasing movies that will ONLY be playable on conforming equipment.
But this is going to be a huge hurdle, much bigger than the introduction of DVDs. With a DVD, at most you have to buy a DVD-ROM drive or a DVD player that now costs under $200. But this new protected videostream is going to require you to buy a new protected DVD player AND a new protected TV. (Or for PC folks, a new video card and a new monitor.) Now you're paying at least $500, probably closer to $1000. That's pretty severe! These movies are going to have to be awfully good to make it worthwhile for anyone who isn't rolling in money.
The eventual disappearance of NTSC broadcasts is going to be tough enough to sell even when "all" most folks have to do is buy a set-top box. But tell everyone that they must replace every TV they own, and I don't think they'll go for it.
Therefore, I think the only way for this to go through in a big way is for the movie studios to get together and buy all the major monitor manufacturers. Good luck, fellas.
This is a perfect example. The DMCA, as applied to academic research on video encoding, effectively says that there are some things you must not think about.
I doubt you'll find any law that says it's illegal to take apart a clock and figure out how it works. Or a padlock. Or a nuclear bomb if you happen to have one. But the DMCA magically blesses DVDs (ok not explicitly - but who's kidding who?) and says you are not allowed to figure out how they work.
But I guess these protections are necessary. After all, remember when people figure out how CDs worked and the entire music industry was destroyed? Scary.
It doesn't matter that the little company/person had the name first, the "big boy" with more money and lawyers will win in the end
The complication in this case is that the big boy with the money and lawyers is the little person who had the name first. Tatu invented SSH, gave it its name, and released it to the public. What's upsetting the community is that he's trying to take it back now that it's becoming an official standard.
I agree. I may be highly misinformed, but I also don't trust SSH2 over SSH1. Although there is the insertion attack for SSH1, isn't it true that all recent implementations detect it and shut the connection down?
And doesn't SSH2 rely on DSA public keys? I don't trust them either, for pretty much the same reason that PuTTY doesn't (see the non-wish-list) - namely, that if anything goes wrong with the random number generator, it's the private key that gets compromised, not just a single session.
Can anyone more knowledgeable confirm or deny this?
I'll second that opinion. I got a DTT2500 for the computer, but it sounds so good hooked up to the DVD player I may leave it in the living room. And I've yet to see a standalone Surround decoder that costs less than the entire DTT2500 system did.
If your DVD player only has optical 5.1 output like mine, you can use a MidiMan CO2 coaxial/optical converter to plug it into the DTT2500.
Well I can't hope to make a contribution nearly as large as yours, but let me point out that Carnivore has roughly the same justification - that they need to have taps built in to the infrastructure because they're afraid they can't do email surveillance the old fashioned way at the endpoints.
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Does anyone who's installed this thing know if you can switch kernel preemption on and off on the fly (through /proc or something)? And if not, how difficult would that be to achieve? Sorry, I'm not a kernel hacker so I have no clue how to find this out from the source.
Ok, so is NaOH a waste product or not??? It really doesn't matter here - they're not consuming any more than they produce so it's just a hydrogen-carrier. It just left me thinking:
Phase 1: Create NaH
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!
The short-term question is where are people going to get the hydrogen from? That infrastructure's not in place yet.
I think one scenario that would make this thing particularly kick-ass right away is this: if the generator is to be used just for backup and emergencies - i.e. it will be idle most of the time - then you could slowly generate your own hydrogen at home from tap water and a solar-powered hydrolysis rig. FREE! Take that, Exxon.
No, Lostman. The only thing that is encrypted twice is the symmetric key, not the whole message.
So what you're saying is that in order to have freedom you must give up some of your liberties. Fascinating semantic distinction.
As to the rest of your bizarrely illogical rant, may I take a few issues?
So you don't know anyone who uses it, and the only people who use it are criminals and paranoids. How did you manage that conclusion if you don't know any of them?
Forgive me, but does this mean that if I don't pay taxes I am exempt to having my civil liberties taken away? Or was there some checkbox on the 1040 form that read "Yes, I want to be spied on."?
As others have pointed out, this kind of bullshit proposal only has two ways of succeeding. The first is if we convice all the terrorists to upgrade to backdoored software. Good luck.
The second is if we convince everyone else to upgrade and hope the terrorists don't hear about it. Then we can construe their use of strong crypto as an admission of guilt. How many seconds of profound thought do you think it will take the next terrorist to figure out to wrap his strongly encrypted messagse in a weakly encrypted envelope?
"Aha," one might say, "but that can still be detected by decrypting the outer layer!" Yes indeed, but only if the government routinely decrypts every message sent anywhere by any means. Perhaps including the U.S. postal service. So in order to preserve our freedom we must all be spied on by means that continuously and actively compromise the privacy of every law-abiding citizen. In exchange we will learn the identities (but not the encrypted messages) of the terrorists. Then we can haul them into court and charge them with having a secret. I'm sure people willing to die a fiery death for their cause are going to tremble at the thought of being jailed for contempt of court. Or will that become a death-penalty offense as well?
Is this vaccine to prevent people from getting addicted to nicotine or to help those already addicted to nicotine? Because I don't see how this will help those already addicted by preventing nicotine molecules from getting to the brain. You can do that right now by just not lighting up. If you're addicted and the vaccine makes nicotine less deliverable, won't you just smoke more to satisfy your craving?
I don't think the world is as black and white as you sketch here. For example, those terrible airline delays aren't only caused by aging FAA equipment, they're caused by the deregulated industry's capitalistic incentive to minimize costs by having fewer and larger hubs and maintaining fleets of the barest minimum possible size.
Being taxed half your income sucks and does seem unconstitutional, but it's better than the 90% brackets that used to exist (most ironically even through the 50's, when the nation was in a frenzy to rid itself of those damn communists), and still much lower than most other nations.
I don't see why you think government regulation is responsible for the high cost of health care. Don't you think the insurance industry has a whole lot more say in this? Ask a doctor.
The free market is difficult to apply to health care - you can't really comparison shop. Are you going to have the same operation done by three different surgeons to see who has the best price/performance ratio? Should you have no more qualifications on which to judge your doctors than the content of their advertisements? The unregulated free market solution to health care led to such great products as snake oil and heroin powder.
In principle (yeah, I know), the goverment funds research for things that will serve the public good. If all of this research were only done for a profit motive, then it would benefit only the highest bidder.
The driving force of capitalism is greed. You want your stuff. I don't know who I'm quoting here, but someone said "your property is only yours through the courtesy of those who don't take it from you." Who's protecting your property rights? The police - the government. Care to privatize the police force? That's great if you're the one with the most money to hire soldiers, and it will quickly lead to feudalism, the ultimate in freedom.
Part of government's function is to deal with the fact that we're living in a society and have to have a better way of getting along than just the law of the jungle. Centralized government clearly isn't the answer, but neither is a loose geographic agglomeration of 300,000,000 independent countries.
I've been ranting so long I forgot what I was saying. Well anyway, um, I disagree.
I'm pretty sure the target of copyright protection is the words, not the perfectly bound soft cover.
If Adobe is having problems with its feelings, perhaps it should get some therapy instead of lashing out at the other boys and girls and crying that they stole its imaginary ball.
Oh wait, there *was* no broadband access until all these losers showed up. Must just be a coincidence.
I asked myself the same question when I heard about it on the radio. The only answer I can come up with is that in both cases there are large and very well heeled corporations that are being "protected" from us dangerous little citizens.
Sklyarov was handcuffed and wearing a fetching orange T-shirt from the Santa Clara County Main Jail collection.
The proceeding itself was mostly dull and could just as easily have been done over the phone. No controversy or disagreement. The judge seemed to just want to get the whole thing over with as routinely as possible. The only additional information he asked for was some assurance that Dmitry's immigration status would not interfere with the trial proceedings. And while the papers are reporting that the U.S. attorney is still holding Sklyarov's passport, he did make clear that it would be handed over to the court at their discretion.
The next court appearance is scheduled for August 23, so Dmitry must be indicted within that time for the case to go forward.
After the hearing was over, nine tenths of the people left the room, and the whole proceeding only took about twenty minutes.
I think this is a fundamental problem with trying to automate contracts. It clearly couldn't happen if all parties involved were conscious beings.
Xfree 4 fixed it. But I sort of liked the MacGyver factor.
This is the crux of MPAA's leverage - they're essentially holding a gun to their own product's head and shouting "everyone back off or we'll kill the movie industry!".
It's utter bullshit. If lack of access controls is really a reason not to release works, why do the record companies keep releasing unencrypted CDs in ever-growing numbers?
The MPAA's only business is producing and distributing movies. The DMCA is a nice little present they bought for themselves from Congress, but you can rest assured that without it they'll still find a way to stay in business with obscene margins.
I think the only answer would be customer demand. So how can the movie studios create this demand? By releasing movies that will ONLY be playable on conforming equipment.
But this is going to be a huge hurdle, much bigger than the introduction of DVDs. With a DVD, at most you have to buy a DVD-ROM drive or a DVD player that now costs under $200. But this new protected videostream is going to require you to buy a new protected DVD player AND a new protected TV. (Or for PC folks, a new video card and a new monitor.) Now you're paying at least $500, probably closer to $1000. That's pretty severe! These movies are going to have to be awfully good to make it worthwhile for anyone who isn't rolling in money.
The eventual disappearance of NTSC broadcasts is going to be tough enough to sell even when "all" most folks have to do is buy a set-top box. But tell everyone that they must replace every TV they own, and I don't think they'll go for it.
Therefore, I think the only way for this to go through in a big way is for the movie studios to get together and buy all the major monitor manufacturers. Good luck, fellas.
I doubt you'll find any law that says it's illegal to take apart a clock and figure out how it works. Or a padlock. Or a nuclear bomb if you happen to have one. But the DMCA magically blesses DVDs (ok not explicitly - but who's kidding who?) and says you are not allowed to figure out how they work.
But I guess these protections are necessary. After all, remember when people figure out how CDs worked and the entire music industry was destroyed? Scary.
The complication in this case is that the big boy with the money and lawyers is the little person who had the name first. Tatu invented SSH, gave it its name, and released it to the public. What's upsetting the community is that he's trying to take it back now that it's becoming an official standard.
Somewhere near the end of his sentence, he said "citizens" and you heard "consumers". Think about that for a bit.
Good call on "your", which unfortunately seems to be merging with "you're" on the net in much the same manner that "lose" and "loose" are. Jeez.
As long as you're being all holier-than-thou about grammar, why not try looking up "lot" and discovering that it's a noun, not an adjective.
And doesn't SSH2 rely on DSA public keys? I don't trust them either, for pretty much the same reason that PuTTY doesn't (see the non-wish-list) - namely, that if anything goes wrong with the random number generator, it's the private key that gets compromised, not just a single session.
Can anyone more knowledgeable confirm or deny this?
If your DVD player only has optical 5.1 output like mine, you can use a MidiMan CO2 coaxial/optical converter to plug it into the DTT2500.
"Authentification"? Is this some sort of subliminible message?
Well I can't hope to make a contribution nearly as large as yours, but let me point out that Carnivore has roughly the same justification - that they need to have taps built in to the infrastructure because they're afraid they can't do email surveillance the old fashioned way at the endpoints.