i wonder from a legal point of view can these emails constitute as evidence in a court,
The provenance of them is not verifiable, so their value as evidence is questionable, but if it came to a court case the originals could be subpoenaed in discovery. Whether they'd be available depends on their email retention plan, existence of backups, etc. but some of it would be, from them or gmail.
I can't help but wonder why things like spreadsheets containing sensitive data like SSNs and the like are being emailed around in the first place, and what position this Jay Mairs held (I sincerely doubt he still holds it after this leak) to be on the mailing list for same.
Oh, I understand why the stuff was in a spreadsheet at all instead of an appropriate place like a secured database -- that's just because people are stupid about that sort of thing in the first place, and it's just too easy to throw the data into a spreadsheet instead of a DB. Then you end up with umpteen different and incompatible versions of it (which people then try to solve by putting the thing on Sharepoint or something similarly awful) and copies getting emailed around inappropriately.
Okay, I'll stop ranting now.
It really doesn't surprise me that a company like MediaDefender made these kinds of stupid errors, but I've seen it at places that really do know better too.
but the actual changes themselves were indeed random)
Not completely random, there are natural laws of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, etc than influence the changes.
Anyone who doubts that order can arise from disorder has never seen a crystal (salt crystals, snowflakes, whatever) form, or has seen it but never considered the implications. (Gee, what are the odds of a few billion trillion (etc) sodium and chlorine atoms randomly assembling themselves into a cube? Pretty good, actually.)
I'd be among the first to say that there's no way to make it completely foolproof. That said, I have some reasonable confidence in the setup in my home.
The kids each have their own PCs (nothing fancy, not for the latest games by a long shot, more than adequate for homework, web, and older games) with static private IPs. They all feed to the firewall between the home LAN and the DMZ. That has squid and dansguardian running on it for the web, and pretty much everything else is firewalled. Email is via my mail server in the DMZ. Of course there's another (NAT'ed) firewall between the DMZ and the internet. (I have a stack of old P-133 low profile Dells that I picked up for $15 each, perfectly adequate to run an older and stripped down distro of Linux on, just add a cheap NIC to the built-in for the firewalls, and a larger disk drive for the proxy and email.)
The kids also know I can read the logs (not that I bother). There's nothing to physically prevent them from trying to hack in to the servers, of course, but it'll be a few years before they have that kind of skill (at which point I probably won't be much worried about them dl'ing porn.)
Finally, the computers aren't private -- the kid's computers are all in one of the family rooms.
I know this won't completely protect them from what's on line, but at least they'll be forced to do what I did at their age and find their porn at a friend's house.
Of course, extension cords that long would probably be pretty heavy, and impractical, so we'll make them out of something with negligible or zero mass -- like photons. Like microwaves, or lasers.
No, to the extent that he (along with a cadre of other congresscritters) may have authorized federal funding for it, we funded it.
But the Internet's roots go back to 1969. Al Gore was working as a military journalist at Fort Rucker back then, shortly before his brief stint in Vietnam. He wasn't inventing or funding anything.
Yeah, Gore's 1991 bill that expanded funding for it helped (and he certainly supported the technologies in general in his earlier congressional career) but the Internet was already 22 years old then. Hardly "inventing" it.
Well, IBM was and would have been successful without Bell Labs. They (and predecessor the Hollerith Tabulating Company) trace their lineage back through the Jacquard loom and perhaps Smith (of Smith & Wesson, later Smith Corona) who helped popularize typewriters.
Sorry, I've been reading too much James Burke recently. Loved your string of connections otherwise.
One can only wonder how things would be now if they hadn't decided to go quick-and-cheap.
Their PC (model 5150) would have been another very limited success like its forerunner, the 5100. (That had a built-in CRT, ran a ROM-based BASIC and/or APL, and used digital tape. And cost several times what an Apple II cost.)
IBM overall didn't take the PC very seriously back then, so there wasn't much budget to start with. The "cheap" dictated an 8-bit data bus, although they were smart enough to recognize the need for an overall 16-bit (minimum) architecture. They did approach Motorola about using M68008 - an 8-bit bus version of their M68000 - but apparently Motorola couldn't guarantee production volume of the new chip and weren't willing to license the design to a third party. (Or at least, negotiations were dragging on too slowly for the "quick".) So IBM went with the 8088.
This is the first I'd heard that they'd ever considered the 801.
Who made DOS and Windows a large part of the market?
IBM
Until IBM came along and blessed it, the PC industry consisted of Apple (Apple DOS) and a handful of makers of mostly Z-80 based systems (CP/M), plus the mostly game/home use systems from Atari etc. For business use, PCs were either AppleDOS or CP/M. Microsoft's presence was pretty much limited to Microsoft Basic.
Through a combination of underhandedness, blind luck, and opportunism, Microsoft got the contract for the OS that IBM would put on their PC, and (even more luck, because IBM still wasn't taking the PC market very seriously) would retain rights that let them sell MS-DOS to the PC clone makers.
The ubuquitous platform would have been whatever IBM went with for their OS. That was very nearly CP/M-86. It might even have been a Unix-derivative, if Motorola had been able to guarantee a sufficient supply of 68008 processors. (IBM originally wanted to go with that chip, a 68000 with an 8-bit external data bus (analogous to the 8088), because frankly the architecture of the Intel part sucked, but Motorola couldn't guarantee the volume production (it was a new chip), so IBM went Intel instead. Microsoft (and Intel, to a degree) just lucked out.
Surveyor was pretty big (here's a picture of Pete Conrad standing beside Surveyor 3), and the Soviet Lunokhod was similarly sized (including the lander, picture of the rover here). Modern robotics technology and the lesser mission requirements (Lunakhod drove for miles and survived several lunar nights) makes for a smaller spacecraft.
That said, yes, getting to LEO is more than half the problem.
No, but if it has a small fraction of radioisotope components they could be decaying and the mass loss be mostly e.g. alpha particles.
Although I suspect that the radioactivity to account for that much mass loss would make the block rather warm. (Haven't done the math -- 50 ug of alpha would be about 1.3*10^18 particles? Over 110 years (110*365*24*60*60 seconds, about 3.47*10^9, so 3.7*10^8 alphas/second. I'd have to go look up the typical energy of an alpha decay, and right now dinner's calling.)
Yeah. GP would have been better off complaining about infringement of his freedom of speech, eg if he wants to talk about it with somebody. First Amendment.
I seem to recall a case where just having a reasonably well equipped machine shop was enough for the BATF to consider that the guy was in the business of manufacturing machine guns. Presumably there was some other evidence of that, if no actual machine gun parts in the shop at the time.
Mind, considering the sensitivity of a nominally semi-automatic rifle like the FN-C1A1 (old Canadian standard 7.62mm NATO rifle), even a match stick could be considered a "conversion kit" (you just need to jam it into the right place). I've even seen an FN fail to full-auto (so full that releasing the trigger didn't stop it, it kept firing until the mag was empty). That was exciting. Fortunately the soldier had the presence of mind to keep it pointed downrange.
I think AMD said almost as much when they announced that they'd be releasing specs and open drivers for these GPUs. The next step in processor development will be to combine the CPU and GPU on the same chip, and AMD wants to be sure that Linux and other OSS is there to support it.
the word "Ether" inclines one to think of sending messages through a mysterious invisible medium which connects all things in space
No, you're thinking of "Aether" (as in "lumineferous Aether"), whose existence was shown unlikely by the Michelson-Morely and follow-on experiments.
Ethernet is talking about "ether", the class of compounds where e.g. two alkyl groups are linked with an oxygen atom in between (eg diethyl ether). The network tubes are filled with this stuff. You might think that the reason is ether's high volatility means signals can go faster, but the real reason is far more subtle than that.
Take a look at the diagram of molecular structures here. The one at the top is ether. Now, what does that remind you of? Right! RFC-1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. (Not to be confused with Evian carriers -- filling those tubes with water doesn't work at all well.) Being so much smaller (many orders of magnitude) than, say, Columba livia, those little ether molecules can travel a lot faster, with a corresponding increase in bandwidth.
The technology is still used in camping lanterns (eg Coleman lanterns), although of course they have their own portable gas supply (which could also be vaporized gasoline or propane as well as methane (natural gas), depending on the design).
One point that uplevel posters haven't mentioned is the innovation in gas lamp technology introduced about the same time that Edison was developing practical electric lights -- the mantle. This is a little perforated shell of chemicals (typically formed using a chemical-impregnated cloth bag, the cloth burns away leaving a delicate ash shell) that fits over the gas outlet. The chemicals are thermoluminescent, they convert much of the heat energy to light resulting in a much brighter lamp than a gas flame alone.
But suppose you've got a bunch of journalists trooping through corporate offices for some tour or other, and someone who didn't get the memo has sensitive information like that up on his whiteboard with the office door open?
That's why you have the journalists sign the NDAs. It certainly isn't so that they won't write about what you're planning to show them anyway.
Re:AMD more evil than once we thought?
on
AMD NDA Scandal
·
· Score: 1
Or the f00f bug.
Re:If the journalist was stupid enough to sign it.
on
AMD NDA Scandal
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Reporters sign NDAs all the time, especially in the technology business. That's how they get sneak previews of technology not-yet-released, so that (for example) when it is released the articles will be already written and ready for press.
Maybe the terms of this particular NDA were more restrictive than normal, maybe not. Usually there's a date on which the NDA expires and the info can be released without review (because the company is issuing a press release on that day anyway). But that's typically for upcoming product releases, not visits to R&D labs or the like.
If they don't want a trade secret or confidential material to be reported, don't show it to a bunch of reporters.
Well, they didn't show it to anyone who didn't want to sign the NDA, so what's the big deal? It's up to each individual reporter to decide whether getting that kind of deep background info is worth the restrictions. At least AMD made the offer, giving the choice to the reporters.
I remember back when SCO provided a decent PC-based version of UNIX..
You're probably thinking of the Santa Cruz Operation, not these bozos at Caldera doing business as The SCO Group, after they bought Santa Cruz's Unix business and Santa Cruz changed its name to Tarantella.
SCOG (The SCO Group aka Caldera) has deliberately blurred this distinction all along.
Slashdot Mirror
I just happened to pick up other traits geeks don't seem to have.
Sanctimoniousness, for one.
Don't the editors at least read the stories themselves before they post them to Slashdot?
You must be new here.
i wonder from a legal point of view can these emails constitute as evidence in a court,
The provenance of them is not verifiable, so their value as evidence is questionable, but if it came to a court case the originals could be subpoenaed in discovery. Whether they'd be available depends on their email retention plan, existence of backups, etc. but some of it would be, from them or gmail.
I can't help but wonder why things like spreadsheets containing sensitive data like SSNs and the like are being emailed around in the first place, and what position this Jay Mairs held (I sincerely doubt he still holds it after this leak) to be on the mailing list for same.
Oh, I understand why the stuff was in a spreadsheet at all instead of an appropriate place like a secured database -- that's just because people are stupid about that sort of thing in the first place, and it's just too easy to throw the data into a spreadsheet instead of a DB. Then you end up with umpteen different and incompatible versions of it (which people then try to solve by putting the thing on Sharepoint or something similarly awful) and copies getting emailed around inappropriately.
Okay, I'll stop ranting now.
It really doesn't surprise me that a company like MediaDefender made these kinds of stupid errors, but I've seen it at places that really do know better too.
but the actual changes themselves were indeed random)
Not completely random, there are natural laws of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, etc than influence the changes.
Anyone who doubts that order can arise from disorder has never seen a crystal (salt crystals, snowflakes, whatever) form, or has seen it but never considered the implications. (Gee, what are the odds of a few billion trillion (etc) sodium and chlorine atoms randomly assembling themselves into a cube? Pretty good, actually.)
I'd be among the first to say that there's no way to make it completely foolproof. That said, I have some reasonable confidence in the setup in my home.
The kids each have their own PCs (nothing fancy, not for the latest games by a long shot, more than adequate for homework, web, and older games) with static private IPs. They all feed to the firewall between the home LAN and the DMZ. That has squid and dansguardian running on it for the web, and pretty much everything else is firewalled. Email is via my mail server in the DMZ. Of course there's another (NAT'ed) firewall between the DMZ and the internet. (I have a stack of old P-133 low profile Dells that I picked up for $15 each, perfectly adequate to run an older and stripped down distro of Linux on, just add a cheap NIC to the built-in for the firewalls, and a larger disk drive for the proxy and email.)
The kids also know I can read the logs (not that I bother). There's nothing to physically prevent them from trying to hack in to the servers, of course, but it'll be a few years before they have that kind of skill (at which point I probably won't be much worried about them dl'ing porn.)
Finally, the computers aren't private -- the kid's computers are all in one of the family rooms.
I know this won't completely protect them from what's on line, but at least they'll be forced to do what I did at their age and find their porn at a friend's house.
"Send enough energy back". Um....how, exactly?
Really, really long extension cords.
Of course, extension cords that long would probably be pretty heavy, and impractical, so we'll make them out of something with negligible or zero mass -- like photons. Like microwaves, or lasers.
See Doc Ruby's post above for details.
He funded it
Oh? Out of his own pocket, no doubt.
No, to the extent that he (along with a cadre of other congresscritters) may have authorized federal funding for it, we funded it.
But the Internet's roots go back to 1969. Al Gore was working as a military journalist at Fort Rucker back then, shortly before his brief stint in Vietnam. He wasn't inventing or funding anything.
Yeah, Gore's 1991 bill that expanded funding for it helped (and he certainly supported the technologies in general in his earlier congressional career) but the Internet was already 22 years old then. Hardly "inventing" it.
Well, IBM was and would have been successful without Bell Labs. They (and predecessor the Hollerith Tabulating Company) trace their lineage back through the Jacquard loom and perhaps Smith (of Smith & Wesson, later Smith Corona) who helped popularize typewriters.
Sorry, I've been reading too much James Burke recently. Loved your string of connections otherwise.
One can only wonder how things would be now if they hadn't decided to go quick-and-cheap.
Their PC (model 5150) would have been another very limited success like its forerunner, the 5100. (That had a built-in CRT, ran a ROM-based BASIC and/or APL, and used digital tape. And cost several times what an Apple II cost.)
IBM overall didn't take the PC very seriously back then, so there wasn't much budget to start with. The "cheap" dictated an 8-bit data bus, although they were smart enough to recognize the need for an overall 16-bit (minimum) architecture. They did approach Motorola about using M68008 - an 8-bit bus version of their M68000 - but apparently Motorola couldn't guarantee production volume of the new chip and weren't willing to license the design to a third party. (Or at least, negotiations were dragging on too slowly for the "quick".) So IBM went with the 8088.
This is the first I'd heard that they'd ever considered the 801.
Who made DOS and Windows a large part of the market?
IBM
Until IBM came along and blessed it, the PC industry consisted of Apple (Apple DOS) and a handful of makers of mostly Z-80 based systems (CP/M), plus the mostly game/home use systems from Atari etc. For business use, PCs were either AppleDOS or CP/M. Microsoft's presence was pretty much limited to Microsoft Basic.
Through a combination of underhandedness, blind luck, and opportunism, Microsoft got the contract for the OS that IBM would put on their PC, and (even more luck, because IBM still wasn't taking the PC market very seriously) would retain rights that let them sell MS-DOS to the PC clone makers.
The ubuquitous platform would have been whatever IBM went with for their OS. That was very nearly CP/M-86. It might even have been a Unix-derivative, if Motorola had been able to guarantee a sufficient supply of 68008 processors. (IBM originally wanted to go with that chip, a 68000 with an 8-bit external data bus (analogous to the 8088), because frankly the architecture of the Intel part sucked, but Motorola couldn't guarantee the volume production (it was a new chip), so IBM went Intel instead. Microsoft (and Intel, to a degree) just lucked out.
Surveyor was pretty big (here's a picture of Pete Conrad standing beside Surveyor 3), and the Soviet Lunokhod was similarly sized (including the lander, picture of the rover here). Modern robotics technology and the lesser mission requirements (Lunakhod drove for miles and survived several lunar nights) makes for a smaller spacecraft.
That said, yes, getting to LEO is more than half the problem.
No, but if it has a small fraction of radioisotope components they could be decaying and the mass loss be mostly e.g. alpha particles.
Although I suspect that the radioactivity to account for that much mass loss would make the block rather warm. (Haven't done the math -- 50 ug of alpha would be about 1.3*10^18 particles? Over 110 years (110*365*24*60*60 seconds, about 3.47*10^9, so 3.7*10^8 alphas/second. I'd have to go look up the typical energy of an alpha decay, and right now dinner's calling.)
Heh, thanks. What's amazing is that somebody modded it "insightful". Not that I'm complaining, but "funny" was what I was going for.
That's the Declaration of Independence.
Yeah. GP would have been better off complaining about infringement of his freedom of speech, eg if he wants to talk about it with somebody. First Amendment.
I seem to recall a case where just having a reasonably well equipped machine shop was enough for the BATF to consider that the guy was in the business of manufacturing machine guns. Presumably there was some other evidence of that, if no actual machine gun parts in the shop at the time.
Mind, considering the sensitivity of a nominally semi-automatic rifle like the FN-C1A1 (old Canadian standard 7.62mm NATO rifle), even a match stick could be considered a "conversion kit" (you just need to jam it into the right place). I've even seen an FN fail to full-auto (so full that releasing the trigger didn't stop it, it kept firing until the mag was empty). That was exciting. Fortunately the soldier had the presence of mind to keep it pointed downrange.
I think AMD said almost as much when they announced that they'd be releasing specs and open drivers for these GPUs. The next step in processor development will be to combine the CPU and GPU on the same chip, and AMD wants to be sure that Linux and other OSS is there to support it.
the word "Ether" inclines one to think of sending messages through a mysterious invisible medium which connects all things in space
No, you're thinking of "Aether" (as in "lumineferous Aether"), whose existence was shown unlikely by the Michelson-Morely and follow-on experiments.
Ethernet is talking about "ether", the class of compounds where e.g. two alkyl groups are linked with an oxygen atom in between (eg diethyl ether). The network tubes are filled with this stuff. You might think that the reason is ether's high volatility means signals can go faster, but the real reason is far more subtle than that.
Take a look at the diagram of molecular structures here. The one at the top is ether. Now, what does that remind you of? Right! RFC-1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. (Not to be confused with Evian carriers -- filling those tubes with water doesn't work at all well.) Being so much smaller (many orders of magnitude) than, say, Columba livia , those little ether molecules can travel a lot faster, with a corresponding increase in bandwidth.
The technology is still used in camping lanterns (eg Coleman lanterns), although of course they have their own portable gas supply (which could also be vaporized gasoline or propane as well as methane (natural gas), depending on the design).
One point that uplevel posters haven't mentioned is the innovation in gas lamp technology introduced about the same time that Edison was developing practical electric lights -- the mantle. This is a little perforated shell of chemicals (typically formed using a chemical-impregnated cloth bag, the cloth burns away leaving a delicate ash shell) that fits over the gas outlet. The chemicals are thermoluminescent, they convert much of the heat energy to light resulting in a much brighter lamp than a gas flame alone.
Miles ahead doesn't help much if you're going down the wrong road.
Not deliberately, no probably not.
But suppose you've got a bunch of journalists trooping through corporate offices for some tour or other, and someone who didn't get the memo has sensitive information like that up on his whiteboard with the office door open?
That's why you have the journalists sign the NDAs. It certainly isn't so that they won't write about what you're planning to show them anyway.
Or the f00f bug.
Reporters sign NDAs all the time, especially in the technology business. That's how they get sneak previews of technology not-yet-released, so that (for example) when it is released the articles will be already written and ready for press.
Maybe the terms of this particular NDA were more restrictive than normal, maybe not. Usually there's a date on which the NDA expires and the info can be released without review (because the company is issuing a press release on that day anyway). But that's typically for upcoming product releases, not visits to R&D labs or the like.
If they don't want a trade secret or confidential material to be reported, don't show it to a bunch of reporters.
Well, they didn't show it to anyone who didn't want to sign the NDA, so what's the big deal? It's up to each individual reporter to decide whether getting that kind of deep background info is worth the restrictions. At least AMD made the offer, giving the choice to the reporters.
I think the coffin is already nailed shut. This is throwing dirt on it.
I remember back when SCO provided a decent PC-based version of UNIX..
You're probably thinking of the Santa Cruz Operation, not these bozos at Caldera doing business as The SCO Group, after they bought Santa Cruz's Unix business and Santa Cruz changed its name to Tarantella.
SCOG (The SCO Group aka Caldera) has deliberately blurred this distinction all along.