I'm not sure it matters, considering that the time to compute either one of those is going to be on the order of nanoseconds. This isn't a performance-critical function.
I've done it. Party balloon, filled from an electrolysis source. The bang is indeed quite loud. I was about two meters away (Arm + meter-stick-with-candle-on-the-end) and didn't take any ear damage.
So legalise prostitution. The only reason it's illegal is because a load of self-rightous peachers keep saying it's somehow evil and immoral. Legalise, regulate, and a lot of the related crime will disappear.
Not intentionally so, but rather a consequence of an entirely different copyright law. European union copyright directive:
1. Member States shall provide for adequate legal protection against any person knowingly performing without authority any of the following acts: (a) the removal or alteration of any electronic rights-management information; (b) the distribution, importation for distribution, broadcasting, communication or making available to the public of works or other subject-matter protected under this Directive or under Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC from which electronic rights-management information has been removed or altered without authority, if such person knows, or has reasonable grounds to know, that by so doing he is inducing, enabling, facilitating or concealing an infringement of any copyright or any rights related to copyright as provided by law, or of the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.
2. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression "rights-management information" means any information provided by rightholders which identifies the work or other subject-matter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC, the author or any other rightholder, or information about the terms and conditions of use of the work or other subject-matter, and any numbers or codes that represent such information. The first subparagraph shall apply when any of these items of information is associated with a copy of, or appears in connection with the communication to the public of, a work or other subjectmatter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.
Exact details will vary by country. The EU directives say what a country must achieve, it's up to them how they will do it.
The bulb backlash is driven mostly by a political divide. The US is very much a two-faction country, politically - the liberals and the conservatives, represented by their respective political parties. Environmental causes have long been seen as a very liberal thing, so those on the conservative faction feel they are obliged to downplay the issue and oppose any solution.
The mac pro, because I insisted on dual-socket quad-cores and the capability to one day cram a ton of memory in when prices fell. When confined to checking professional workstations, the offerings from HP and such were similarily-priced. Consumer gear does not come with two sockets. There were no single-socket eight-core processors around at the time.
And the macbook was purely for the screen. Nothing else. There were no other options at WUXGA+ at the time. At all. I tried. I even looked at the crazy-spec gaming laptops - but Alienware's best still had crappy screens. I looked at mobile workstations, the same. I found that Dell had offered one, but had discontinued that feature at the time - they still sold the model, but without the option of a WUXGA+ screen. I tried buying that refurbished (I can't remember the model, but it had two hard drive bays, which much liked the idea of). The refurbished laptop I got had a fault though, a flakey graphics chip, so in the end I ended up giving in and getting the macbook. Which, once purged of OSX, is very nicely built hardware-wise. I understand there are a few more options for WUXGA+ laptops around now, but at the time it had to be Apple.
The mac pro needed a little hackery to boot linux - it still has OSX on, just to install rEFIt. Given how much harder Apple is making it to install unsupported operating systems now though (I've heard about the trouble that is getting linux on a retina macbook) I doubt I'll be buying any more Apple computers.
I have a mac. I run linux on it. Couldn't stand using OSX, I found it quite terrible for me, but I needed something with serious processing capability so got myself a dual-socket mac pro. I've also got a macbook, also running windows, purchased because it was the only laptop I could find anywhere with a decently high-resolution screen. I dislike Apple's software, and believe the company business method is quite oppressive towards their customers and potentially even a threat to free technology in general, but I still have to admit their hardware is very well built. The price tag reflects this though.
Depending where you are, different laws apply. If you're in the US, it'll be the DMCA. If you're in Europe, it'll be whatever your country passed to impliment the EUCD. Much of the world has laws against circumvention technology, of one form or another.
They failed to understand then the true purpose of Palladium. That one day, a distant descendent of the project would be used to make computers that are not capable of booting any untrusted operating system, and that Windows alone would be recognised as trusted by most motherboard manufacturers and OEMs. Palladium was always half about DRM and half about lock-in, over Intel's objection. It got so much bad press it was eventually renamed to NGSCB, and then quietly dropped, but some aspects do still remain.
CSS isn't just about stopping piracy. It also requires a license to impliment legally (Being both patented, and covered under the DMCA or your national equivilent). The terms for this license include a number of other conditions, including mandating that players respect the region code byte and that they not provide the ability to skip videos in a certain navigational area usually used for anti-piracy warnings and studio logos. As an anti-piracy measure it is useless today, but it still serves to keep consumer electronics manufacturers (Who cannot afford to go underground to avoid lawsuits) more-or-less in compliance with the region system.
The 'absolutly pointless' holds though. If that mirror goes down, ten more await. If TPB closes down forever, the exodus of users shall fuel the rise of those already waiting in the wings. There is no way to enforce copyright on the internet as it is, and I would rather see the entire entertainment industry destroyed than sacrifice the freedom and equality the internet provides to all.
Off-site backup isn't going to do it though. Paying for the space by credit card? Then the police will likely know of it, and sieze all that data either simutainously or shortly after. It has to be off-site backup they either won't know about (data left with a friend, no paper-trail) or can't access (Hosted overseas - even in a friendly country, international law enforcement cooperation is a nightmare of paperwork that could take weeks to complete before anything is done).
Traditional backup methods are good against media failure, or even natural disaster, but ineffective against seizure. The standard police procedure is 'if in doubt, take everything,' because it isn't practical to train frontline officers to work out what is and isn't potentially evidence. That's why they take cell phones and games consoles. That and, as the more cynical point out, the more miserable they can make the defendent the easier it is to force a plea bargin. So they'll take all your backups too.
You can forget about getting that back, too. Even if all charges are dropped. Law enforcement is well-known all around the world for their reluctance to return siezed evidence, espicially evidence that may one day go into police auction. Even if they are willing to return it, many areas have overwhelmed forensics staff and computers can sit in the locker for months before there is an expert available to poke around and declare them free of anything incriminating.
So if you do have reason to worry about being raided - eg, you run an open wireless hotspot or exit node - then a sensible precaution is to keep backups of critical data somewhere out of reach, like a cloud store hosted overseas, or drives left with trusted friends for safekeeping. Making sure, of course, that no-one else knows - you don't want them to get raided too!
Also beware of another police policy. It varies by country, and even by state and district, but many departments are loathe to let any accused off without charge or found not guilty - it makes them look incompetent, wrongly arresting someone. So they will likely resort to the 'throw the book' approach, going through the evidence looking for any other, unrelated crimes they can find. Sure, you may not have actually launched that attack or trafficked those illegal files they raided you for - but if, in the process of investigating, they discover you've been involved in piracy or find chat logs of you talking about your drunken vandalism or theft of office supplies, or something which would be otherwise borderline illegal, they will happily add more charges - insurance in case you were innocent of the original accusations, and to pile on more pressure for a plea bargin. Prosecutors love guilty pleas - much more reliable than actually having to prove something beyond reasonable doubt.
You can encrypt, of course. But that just makes you look even more suspicious, plus in most countries now it's either an explicit crime to withhold keys from police or considered a form of withholding evidence, either of which gets you jailed anyway. Even if you legally wriggle free from that, good luck getting a jury to see it as anything other than a sign you are trying to hide evidence of whatever terrible act you are accused of.
Data mineing. The value of data from an individual phone is low due to those noise factors, but if you've got a sufficiently huge number of them then you can still extract useful information via statistical processing.
But only if you can show it's actually a government attack. Hacking attacks usually have plausable deniability: From the perspective of the defenders, it's very hard to tell if you're facing a genuine attack from the Chinese government or merely a group of Chinese patriot hackers.
Not at all practical even then. You'd need some way other than scanning. Maybe a set of broadcasts designed to provoke a response in some way from common servers, tricking them into revealing their presence. Or passive monitoring.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure it matters, considering that the time to compute either one of those is going to be on the order of nanoseconds. This isn't a performance-critical function.
So prostitution is depressing and the prostitutes hate having to do it?
Welcome to the workplace.
I've done it. Party balloon, filled from an electrolysis source. The bang is indeed quite loud. I was about two meters away (Arm + meter-stick-with-candle-on-the-end) and didn't take any ear damage.
Lawnmower Man 2 had 'eyephones' before the iPhone was announced.
So legalise prostitution. The only reason it's illegal is because a load of self-rightous peachers keep saying it's somehow evil and immoral. Legalise, regulate, and a lot of the related crime will disappear.
I'm guessing true conservatives are no fans of sugared porridge?
Not intentionally so, but rather a consequence of an entirely different copyright law. European union copyright directive:
1. Member States shall provide for adequate legal protection against any person knowingly performing without authority any of the following acts:
(a) the removal or alteration of any electronic rights-management information;
(b) the distribution, importation for distribution, broadcasting, communication or making available to the public of works or other subject-matter protected under this Directive or under Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC from which electronic rights-management information has been removed or altered without authority, if such person knows, or has reasonable grounds to know, that by so doing he is inducing, enabling, facilitating or concealing an infringement of any copyright or any rights related to copyright as provided by law, or of the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.
2. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression "rights-management information" means any information provided by rightholders which identifies the work or other subject-matter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC, the author or any other rightholder, or information about the terms and conditions of use of the work or other subject-matter, and any numbers or codes that represent such information. The first subparagraph shall apply when any of these items of information is associated with a copy of, or appears in connection with the communication to the public of, a work or other subjectmatter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.
Exact details will vary by country. The EU directives say what a country must achieve, it's up to them how they will do it.
The bulb backlash is driven mostly by a political divide. The US is very much a two-faction country, politically - the liberals and the conservatives, represented by their respective political parties. Environmental causes have long been seen as a very liberal thing, so those on the conservative faction feel they are obliged to downplay the issue and oppose any solution.
This was pre-Retina. It's a 1920x1200 screen. Those extra 180 vertical pixels make a big difference to me.
The mac pro, because I insisted on dual-socket quad-cores and the capability to one day cram a ton of memory in when prices fell. When confined to checking professional workstations, the offerings from HP and such were similarily-priced. Consumer gear does not come with two sockets. There were no single-socket eight-core processors around at the time.
And the macbook was purely for the screen. Nothing else. There were no other options at WUXGA+ at the time. At all. I tried. I even looked at the crazy-spec gaming laptops - but Alienware's best still had crappy screens. I looked at mobile workstations, the same. I found that Dell had offered one, but had discontinued that feature at the time - they still sold the model, but without the option of a WUXGA+ screen. I tried buying that refurbished (I can't remember the model, but it had two hard drive bays, which much liked the idea of). The refurbished laptop I got had a fault though, a flakey graphics chip, so in the end I ended up giving in and getting the macbook. Which, once purged of OSX, is very nicely built hardware-wise. I understand there are a few more options for WUXGA+ laptops around now, but at the time it had to be Apple.
The mac pro needed a little hackery to boot linux - it still has OSX on, just to install rEFIt. Given how much harder Apple is making it to install unsupported operating systems now though (I've heard about the trouble that is getting linux on a retina macbook) I doubt I'll be buying any more Apple computers.
I have a mac. I run linux on it. Couldn't stand using OSX, I found it quite terrible for me, but I needed something with serious processing capability so got myself a dual-socket mac pro. I've also got a macbook, also running windows, purchased because it was the only laptop I could find anywhere with a decently high-resolution screen. I dislike Apple's software, and believe the company business method is quite oppressive towards their customers and potentially even a threat to free technology in general, but I still have to admit their hardware is very well built. The price tag reflects this though.
Depending where you are, different laws apply. If you're in the US, it'll be the DMCA. If you're in Europe, it'll be whatever your country passed to impliment the EUCD. Much of the world has laws against circumvention technology, of one form or another.
I'd use $0.04, $0.08, $0.32, $0.64 and $1.00 coins. But I'd also have 128 cents to the dollar, for I like round numbers.
They failed to understand then the true purpose of Palladium. That one day, a distant descendent of the project would be used to make computers that are not capable of booting any untrusted operating system, and that Windows alone would be recognised as trusted by most motherboard manufacturers and OEMs. Palladium was always half about DRM and half about lock-in, over Intel's objection. It got so much bad press it was eventually renamed to NGSCB, and then quietly dropped, but some aspects do still remain.
CSS isn't just about stopping piracy. It also requires a license to impliment legally (Being both patented, and covered under the DMCA or your national equivilent). The terms for this license include a number of other conditions, including mandating that players respect the region code byte and that they not provide the ability to skip videos in a certain navigational area usually used for anti-piracy warnings and studio logos. As an anti-piracy measure it is useless today, but it still serves to keep consumer electronics manufacturers (Who cannot afford to go underground to avoid lawsuits) more-or-less in compliance with the region system.
The 'absolutly pointless' holds though. If that mirror goes down, ten more await. If TPB closes down forever, the exodus of users shall fuel the rise of those already waiting in the wings. There is no way to enforce copyright on the internet as it is, and I would rather see the entire entertainment industry destroyed than sacrifice the freedom and equality the internet provides to all.
Off-site backup isn't going to do it though. Paying for the space by credit card? Then the police will likely know of it, and sieze all that data either simutainously or shortly after. It has to be off-site backup they either won't know about (data left with a friend, no paper-trail) or can't access (Hosted overseas - even in a friendly country, international law enforcement cooperation is a nightmare of paperwork that could take weeks to complete before anything is done).
Traditional backup methods are good against media failure, or even natural disaster, but ineffective against seizure. The standard police procedure is 'if in doubt, take everything,' because it isn't practical to train frontline officers to work out what is and isn't potentially evidence. That's why they take cell phones and games consoles. That and, as the more cynical point out, the more miserable they can make the defendent the easier it is to force a plea bargin. So they'll take all your backups too.
You can forget about getting that back, too. Even if all charges are dropped. Law enforcement is well-known all around the world for their reluctance to return siezed evidence, espicially evidence that may one day go into police auction. Even if they are willing to return it, many areas have overwhelmed forensics staff and computers can sit in the locker for months before there is an expert available to poke around and declare them free of anything incriminating.
So if you do have reason to worry about being raided - eg, you run an open wireless hotspot or exit node - then a sensible precaution is to keep backups of critical data somewhere out of reach, like a cloud store hosted overseas, or drives left with trusted friends for safekeeping. Making sure, of course, that no-one else knows - you don't want them to get raided too!
Also beware of another police policy. It varies by country, and even by state and district, but many departments are loathe to let any accused off without charge or found not guilty - it makes them look incompetent, wrongly arresting someone. So they will likely resort to the 'throw the book' approach, going through the evidence looking for any other, unrelated crimes they can find. Sure, you may not have actually launched that attack or trafficked those illegal files they raided you for - but if, in the process of investigating, they discover you've been involved in piracy or find chat logs of you talking about your drunken vandalism or theft of office supplies, or something which would be otherwise borderline illegal, they will happily add more charges - insurance in case you were innocent of the original accusations, and to pile on more pressure for a plea bargin. Prosecutors love guilty pleas - much more reliable than actually having to prove something beyond reasonable doubt.
You can encrypt, of course. But that just makes you look even more suspicious, plus in most countries now it's either an explicit crime to withhold keys from police or considered a form of withholding evidence, either of which gets you jailed anyway. Even if you legally wriggle free from that, good luck getting a jury to see it as anything other than a sign you are trying to hide evidence of whatever terrible act you are accused of.
Freenet should be safe, as it has no gateway functionality to the wider internet. It's self-contained.
Even the IRC bot I wrote does RPN calculations. Even though all it actually does is call dc.
Yes, I sanitised the input!
Data mineing. The value of data from an individual phone is low due to those noise factors, but if you've got a sufficiently huge number of them then you can still extract useful information via statistical processing.
But only if you can show it's actually a government attack. Hacking attacks usually have plausable deniability: From the perspective of the defenders, it's very hard to tell if you're facing a genuine attack from the Chinese government or merely a group of Chinese patriot hackers.
Augmented reality: Now you can look busy at work while checking Facebook continually!
Not at all practical even then. You'd need some way other than scanning. Maybe a set of broadcasts designed to provoke a response in some way from common servers, tricking them into revealing their presence. Or passive monitoring.
A claim that is demonstratably true, yet incomplete in addressing the issue. Technically correct is the best type of correct.