The only way it's coming down is intentionally. China would have to get rather desperate to drop a space station as a weapon though, and I imagine every country with a telescope will be watching for the installation of anything that looks like an aerodynamically shaped rod.
Plus you can use them as a deniable weapons system. Nothing but a power supply in peacetime, but come war it's a matter of minutes to retarget and refocus the beams.
How? There simply isn't that much to do up there. There are a few manufacturing advantages (You can grow absolutly perfect silicon crystals - might up the yield on semicondunctor manufacture), but not enough to justify the huge expense of getting things up and down. There are only enough idle rich to support a very small tourist industry. The only way you're going to see a profit on human space travel is some revolutionary new technology to bring the price down. That's why public and academic funding is so important. Do it for science!
DNSSEC should also prevent them from doing that, but it isn't widely implimented. Even if it were, I imagine that if they were to simply block it most clients would fall back to DNS-nonsec by default.
Slashdot is anti-Apple now. It wasn't always this way. They were even seen as champions once, fighting for Unix against the otherwise unstoppable monster of Microsoft. Then they grew, and were no longer the David fighting the MS Goliath - they were just another big company embracing DRM, locking down their technology to keep tinkerers from hacking it, trying to control everything to increase profit and finding new ways to prevent interoperability and keep competitors out. Just another evil empire now. The final straw was when they introduced the app store, but for hardware that was locked down and designed to be incapable of executing any code not explicitly signed and approved by Apple - to a community of open-source enthusiasts, this is one of the worst crimes a company can commit.
There was an incident some years ago when one of the ISPs (I forget which) started redirecting name-not-found DNS queries to it's own ad-filled error page. An incidential effect of which was to crash HP printers - some obsolete models were trying to connect to a disused update server to fetch updates. When they were instead directed to the ad-page, they did as they were programmed and tried to update. Fortunatly they didn't go so far as to install an ad-banner in place of their firmware, but it still resulted in very difficult to diagnose printer failures. I've been trying to find details on google, but can't seem to dig it up any more.
You're both right, actually. In the US anyway. It is a natural monopoly, yes - that is why competing cable companies rarely serve the same area. Once the first gets established, the second has no incentive to chase the same customers. The very high initial investment of cables makes it non-viable to enter a market unless the customers have no other alternatives. But it is also a regulated monopoly: Many local authorities (And I'm taking county or municipal level here, not state or federal) do grant service monopolies.
A T1 line is 1.5mbit/s. It's less than almost all consumer broadband connections. There was a time when it was really impressive though, which is where the reputation comes from. They still get some use in situations where a user wants a low-latency, zero-contention link between two points. 11y maxes out at 54mbit under ideal conditions. You've also got to include the cost of physically connecting your base station to the internet - chances are it's going to involve laying fiber, which means right-of-way costs and crews actually burying it. It's not infeasible, but the business case is stacked heavily against the small guy. The only way I can see it working would be if you could get enough customers together in advance who were all fed up with the current options and willing to pay a high premium plus a significent startup cost for a better service.
Depends how good your propaganda specialists are. A really good dictator can convince the population that he is all that protects them from an even worse outside world. North Korea does something like that. It's difficult though, as it requires a complete communications blackout - no internet, no international phone calls, no television, no radio.
Better: "I have $100,000 to spend. If I put it into research, there is a 99% chance I'll lose the lot, and a 1% chance I'll make millions off it. If I invest it in conventional bonds and such, I'll end up with maybe $200,000. Much as I like millions, I just can't risk spending on something so unlikely to pay off."
Don't forget that the cheap sources of oil are running out. As the easily-extracted oilfields run dry, the only way to get more will be to drill deeper and in less accessible places - which means it's going to become more expensive no matter what political or economic solutions are tried. You can fiddle with treaties and numbers all you want, but a kilometers-thick layer of rock between you and the precious black liquid remains just as hard to get through.
Which is the problem. HFCS has a huge energy content. It's also found in just about all processed foods, due to it's very low cost and almost magic ability to make any food taste nice. It's more difficult to watch your calorie intake when your small lunchtime snack contains 30% of your daily allowance.
I am unfortunatly very familier with the CFL conspiracy theory. Like all good conspiracy theories it starts with a grain of truth, then goes on with wild speculation. CFLs do indeed contain toxins. Specifically mercury (which will screw up your nervous system) and phosphors (Which will give you cancer) - but both of them are held safely contained inside the glass. Even if the glass were broken, the amount in an individual bulb is insignificent. It's a danger if you work in their manufacture or disposal, in which case appropriate precautions must be taken, but no danger to the people who use them. Not unless they plan on eating the things.
There may be no real danger, but there are a lot of false reports and paniced stories on the internet claiming that CFLs will cause everything from cancer to epilepsy. It's a political thing. The US recently passed new efficiency standards for light bulbs which no conventional incandescent can achieve, and this has annoyed a lot of people of the more libertarian political stance - people who believe the federal government should have no business regulating what type of light bulbs are permitted. It's also annoyed anyone who is strictly partisan on the republican or conservative side - as the efficiency standards are a democrat idea, those who support the republicans are in some way obliged to oppose them. As a result the 'CFLs will kill you' story can join the ranks of the modern myth, alongside 'vaccines cause autism' and 'Bush organised the 9/11 attacks.' False stories that keep spreading because some people just want them to be true.
As the above commenters said: There are non-chinese deposits, but they don't have mines yet. The reason for this is just economics - China was always a far cheaper source, due to a combination of it's ready supply of expendable workers and very lax environmental laws. It's a very dirty process, extracting rare earth metals, and the more toxic byproducts you can dump in the nearest river the less you have to spend money to clean.
I suspect it's because the rar files are mostly on a network drive, but I havn't got anything strange going on in the config. It's just a plain network share with rar files on. Windows classifies it as an internet zone thing though, so is suspicious of anything on there.
Embedded icons are not related to UAC, that's a seperate issue. The problem comes when they are combined with hiding extensions. That means that it's easy for someone to take some malware, call it 'Holiday photo.exe' and change the icon to the default image for a jpeg. Now, to casual inspection, it looks like an image file. Why? There is no practical benefit to executeables with custom icons at all.. It's pure eye candy.
I was not aware they'd fixed the clipboard access. That they ever allowed something so obviously abuseable at all still shows the problem though - MS's policy of functionality over security. This isn't some obscure little buffer overflow exploit, it's a function that it should be obvious to anyone with five minutes thought would be ripe for easy exploitation, and they put it in anyway.
You could set the volume to 10*(n-1)%, where n is the number of words in the command, and the command must contain the string 'sound,' 'volume' or 'audio.' That way the more treknobabble you make up, the louder it gets. 'Mute audio' gets you silence. 'Activate sound system' gets you 10%. 'Sound system to low' for 20%. Right up to 'Initialse the multiaural projectors for enhanced signal transmission via atmospheric vibrations' to get full volume.
By that point you're dealing with someone so determined, they'd probably be willing to take photos of the screen with their mobile phone - or buy an ultra-small spy camera. I'm sure you can get them on ebay. Espionage predates computers.
UAC is a bit of a joke, but this can be blamed as much on third-party devs as Microsoft. The dialog pops up so often, users - even the more technical ones - just get into the habbit of clicking OK and ignoring it. I have it do the chime-and-grey-screen thing every time I open a RAR file. Don't know why. It's a nice try, but just not quite there. In large part because many windows devs are used to just assuming admin access would always be there. We've been through this once before, when migrating from each app storing config in it's own directory (c:\program files\app, usually) which played hell when networked desktops started becoming common and users no longer were running as admin. The devs got used to the new, tidier convention of appdata, but it took a while. Compare to *nix, where it's been known for decades that the only programs that can be expected to run as root are those that actually need to.
A lot of it is little things. Like embedding icons in executables (Yes, seven still does it, I'm looking at some right now) together with hideing file extensions by default. Just perfect for tricking users.
IE is still terrible, because it's designed to be maximally functional. For one example, script on a website can access the clipboard. Wonderfully useful for things like web-apps, which is why it's there - but it can also be used by a malicious script which just submits the contents secretly to it's master. Snag enough clipboards, sooner or later you'll get something juicy like a bank number. To contrast, firefox does support this functionality, but it's disabled by default - you have to change an obscure option yourself to enable it, and even then you can limit it to some domains only.
Seven is leaps beyond XP, but it's still got a long way to go. It's not so much actual holes that can exploited as poor design choices made to maximise either useability or functionality. There is a fundamental conflict between making software do what it should and making software not do what it shouldn't - MS leans heavily towards the former.
I gather the government of China is trying to go to linux now. Not for technical reasons, but because they really don't want to be so dependant upon a US company. That's still a lot of stations, so it will provide quite the incentive for companies to support it.
It does seem to be rarer on 7. I've seen it happen many times, but always as a result of a hardware problem or filesystem corruption. Perhaps better process isolation?
The filesystem corruption is still a bother though, just because it shouldn't happen. Why - really, WHY? - does Windows have vital system files open for writing at all times? Perhaps something to do with how it crams all it's configuration data into the registry. It makes it quite prone to getting horribly mangled if you don't shut it down cleanly. Even Linux hasn't been that bad since the non-journaling ext2 days.
I once found a user who managed her files by opening Word, going to the open dialog and using that window to create folders and place files in them. When I went to support her on an unrelated issue I clicked the 'my documents' icon and she was so amazed, she submitted another ticket the next day asking me to teach her how to do that.
Users should not have to learn all the technology of a computer in order to use it (That's our job), but never underestimate just how incredibly ignorant they are. I imagine they feel the same way when they see a non-expert trying to do their job too.
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The only way it's coming down is intentionally. China would have to get rather desperate to drop a space station as a weapon though, and I imagine every country with a telescope will be watching for the installation of anything that looks like an aerodynamically shaped rod.
Somewhere out there is a giant hunk of rock, and it's heading our way.
Plus you can use them as a deniable weapons system. Nothing but a power supply in peacetime, but come war it's a matter of minutes to retarget and refocus the beams.
That, and do you really want to share a planet with the rest of humanity? Because they really don't make good neighbours.
How? There simply isn't that much to do up there. There are a few manufacturing advantages (You can grow absolutly perfect silicon crystals - might up the yield on semicondunctor manufacture), but not enough to justify the huge expense of getting things up and down. There are only enough idle rich to support a very small tourist industry. The only way you're going to see a profit on human space travel is some revolutionary new technology to bring the price down. That's why public and academic funding is so important. Do it for science!
DNSSEC should also prevent them from doing that, but it isn't widely implimented. Even if it were, I imagine that if they were to simply block it most clients would fall back to DNS-nonsec by default.
It's not illegal if the user consents. Even if the consent is found in paragraph seven, clause c, page 79 of 115 in the contract.
Slashdot is anti-Apple now. It wasn't always this way. They were even seen as champions once, fighting for Unix against the otherwise unstoppable monster of Microsoft. Then they grew, and were no longer the David fighting the MS Goliath - they were just another big company embracing DRM, locking down their technology to keep tinkerers from hacking it, trying to control everything to increase profit and finding new ways to prevent interoperability and keep competitors out. Just another evil empire now. The final straw was when they introduced the app store, but for hardware that was locked down and designed to be incapable of executing any code not explicitly signed and approved by Apple - to a community of open-source enthusiasts, this is one of the worst crimes a company can commit.
There was an incident some years ago when one of the ISPs (I forget which) started redirecting name-not-found DNS queries to it's own ad-filled error page. An incidential effect of which was to crash HP printers - some obsolete models were trying to connect to a disused update server to fetch updates. When they were instead directed to the ad-page, they did as they were programmed and tried to update. Fortunatly they didn't go so far as to install an ad-banner in place of their firmware, but it still resulted in very difficult to diagnose printer failures. I've been trying to find details on google, but can't seem to dig it up any more.
You're both right, actually. In the US anyway. It is a natural monopoly, yes - that is why competing cable companies rarely serve the same area. Once the first gets established, the second has no incentive to chase the same customers. The very high initial investment of cables makes it non-viable to enter a market unless the customers have no other alternatives. But it is also a regulated monopoly: Many local authorities (And I'm taking county or municipal level here, not state or federal) do grant service monopolies.
A T1 line is 1.5mbit/s. It's less than almost all consumer broadband connections. There was a time when it was really impressive though, which is where the reputation comes from. They still get some use in situations where a user wants a low-latency, zero-contention link between two points. 11y maxes out at 54mbit under ideal conditions. You've also got to include the cost of physically connecting your base station to the internet - chances are it's going to involve laying fiber, which means right-of-way costs and crews actually burying it. It's not infeasible, but the business case is stacked heavily against the small guy. The only way I can see it working would be if you could get enough customers together in advance who were all fed up with the current options and willing to pay a high premium plus a significent startup cost for a better service.
Depends how good your propaganda specialists are. A really good dictator can convince the population that he is all that protects them from an even worse outside world. North Korea does something like that. It's difficult though, as it requires a complete communications blackout - no internet, no international phone calls, no television, no radio.
Better: "I have $100,000 to spend. If I put it into research, there is a 99% chance I'll lose the lot, and a 1% chance I'll make millions off it. If I invest it in conventional bonds and such, I'll end up with maybe $200,000. Much as I like millions, I just can't risk spending on something so unlikely to pay off."
Don't forget that the cheap sources of oil are running out. As the easily-extracted oilfields run dry, the only way to get more will be to drill deeper and in less accessible places - which means it's going to become more expensive no matter what political or economic solutions are tried. You can fiddle with treaties and numbers all you want, but a kilometers-thick layer of rock between you and the precious black liquid remains just as hard to get through.
Which is the problem. HFCS has a huge energy content. It's also found in just about all processed foods, due to it's very low cost and almost magic ability to make any food taste nice. It's more difficult to watch your calorie intake when your small lunchtime snack contains 30% of your daily allowance.
I think that is more the fact that CNG equipment has a tendency to go 'boom' and leave a small crater where once your car stood.
I am unfortunatly very familier with the CFL conspiracy theory. Like all good conspiracy theories it starts with a grain of truth, then goes on with wild speculation. CFLs do indeed contain toxins. Specifically mercury (which will screw up your nervous system) and phosphors (Which will give you cancer) - but both of them are held safely contained inside the glass. Even if the glass were broken, the amount in an individual bulb is insignificent. It's a danger if you work in their manufacture or disposal, in which case appropriate precautions must be taken, but no danger to the people who use them. Not unless they plan on eating the things.
There may be no real danger, but there are a lot of false reports and paniced stories on the internet claiming that CFLs will cause everything from cancer to epilepsy. It's a political thing. The US recently passed new efficiency standards for light bulbs which no conventional incandescent can achieve, and this has annoyed a lot of people of the more libertarian political stance - people who believe the federal government should have no business regulating what type of light bulbs are permitted. It's also annoyed anyone who is strictly partisan on the republican or conservative side - as the efficiency standards are a democrat idea, those who support the republicans are in some way obliged to oppose them. As a result the 'CFLs will kill you' story can join the ranks of the modern myth, alongside 'vaccines cause autism' and 'Bush organised the 9/11 attacks.' False stories that keep spreading because some people just want them to be true.
As the above commenters said: There are non-chinese deposits, but they don't have mines yet. The reason for this is just economics - China was always a far cheaper source, due to a combination of it's ready supply of expendable workers and very lax environmental laws. It's a very dirty process, extracting rare earth metals, and the more toxic byproducts you can dump in the nearest river the less you have to spend money to clean.
I suspect it's because the rar files are mostly on a network drive, but I havn't got anything strange going on in the config. It's just a plain network share with rar files on. Windows classifies it as an internet zone thing though, so is suspicious of anything on there.
Embedded icons are not related to UAC, that's a seperate issue. The problem comes when they are combined with hiding extensions. That means that it's easy for someone to take some malware, call it 'Holiday photo.exe' and change the icon to the default image for a jpeg. Now, to casual inspection, it looks like an image file. Why? There is no practical benefit to executeables with custom icons at all.. It's pure eye candy.
I was not aware they'd fixed the clipboard access. That they ever allowed something so obviously abuseable at all still shows the problem though - MS's policy of functionality over security. This isn't some obscure little buffer overflow exploit, it's a function that it should be obvious to anyone with five minutes thought would be ripe for easy exploitation, and they put it in anyway.
You could set the volume to 10*(n-1)%, where n is the number of words in the command, and the command must contain the string 'sound,' 'volume' or 'audio.' That way the more treknobabble you make up, the louder it gets. 'Mute audio' gets you silence. 'Activate sound system' gets you 10%. 'Sound system to low' for 20%. Right up to 'Initialse the multiaural projectors for enhanced signal transmission via atmospheric vibrations' to get full volume.
By that point you're dealing with someone so determined, they'd probably be willing to take photos of the screen with their mobile phone - or buy an ultra-small spy camera. I'm sure you can get them on ebay. Espionage predates computers.
UAC is a bit of a joke, but this can be blamed as much on third-party devs as Microsoft. The dialog pops up so often, users - even the more technical ones - just get into the habbit of clicking OK and ignoring it. I have it do the chime-and-grey-screen thing every time I open a RAR file. Don't know why. It's a nice try, but just not quite there. In large part because many windows devs are used to just assuming admin access would always be there. We've been through this once before, when migrating from each app storing config in it's own directory (c:\program files\app, usually) which played hell when networked desktops started becoming common and users no longer were running as admin. The devs got used to the new, tidier convention of appdata, but it took a while. Compare to *nix, where it's been known for decades that the only programs that can be expected to run as root are those that actually need to.
A lot of it is little things. Like embedding icons in executables (Yes, seven still does it, I'm looking at some right now) together with hideing file extensions by default. Just perfect for tricking users.
IE is still terrible, because it's designed to be maximally functional. For one example, script on a website can access the clipboard. Wonderfully useful for things like web-apps, which is why it's there - but it can also be used by a malicious script which just submits the contents secretly to it's master. Snag enough clipboards, sooner or later you'll get something juicy like a bank number. To contrast, firefox does support this functionality, but it's disabled by default - you have to change an obscure option yourself to enable it, and even then you can limit it to some domains only.
Seven is leaps beyond XP, but it's still got a long way to go. It's not so much actual holes that can exploited as poor design choices made to maximise either useability or functionality. There is a fundamental conflict between making software do what it should and making software not do what it shouldn't - MS leans heavily towards the former.
I gather the government of China is trying to go to linux now. Not for technical reasons, but because they really don't want to be so dependant upon a US company. That's still a lot of stations, so it will provide quite the incentive for companies to support it.
It does seem to be rarer on 7. I've seen it happen many times, but always as a result of a hardware problem or filesystem corruption. Perhaps better process isolation?
The filesystem corruption is still a bother though, just because it shouldn't happen. Why - really, WHY? - does Windows have vital system files open for writing at all times? Perhaps something to do with how it crams all it's configuration data into the registry. It makes it quite prone to getting horribly mangled if you don't shut it down cleanly. Even Linux hasn't been that bad since the non-journaling ext2 days.
I once found a user who managed her files by opening Word, going to the open dialog and using that window to create folders and place files in them. When I went to support her on an unrelated issue I clicked the 'my documents' icon and she was so amazed, she submitted another ticket the next day asking me to teach her how to do that.
Users should not have to learn all the technology of a computer in order to use it (That's our job), but never underestimate just how incredibly ignorant they are. I imagine they feel the same way when they see a non-expert trying to do their job too.