I don't know for sure, but one option that biological geckos have that robots don't is that they can let the pads wear out and grow back, continually renewing the surface.
..you can install traffic monitors on a network and I'm pretty sure any weird traffic going out wouldn't be too hard to pick up on.
You're assuming that the signal is carried over normal tcp (or udp) packets. That's pretty crude. The signal could be embedded in slight timing variations, in unused bits of normal traffic packets, and so on.
That's even assuming the covert signal is going out over the net. Maybe it's using the wireless, frequency hopping on non-standard channels (thus not detectable without special gear), or sending something back over the AC lines (if plugged in), or any of several other ways of sending out-of-recognized-band signals. (Possibly at low bit rates, sure, but that's still bad.)
If there were ANY chips in the Lenovo that were built in China without a clear paper trail leading back to a non-Chinese supplier [...] then this would be justified. But it's an Intel CPU with an Intel northbridge/southbridge, Intel/ATI/NVidia graphics,
How do you know it's really an Intel CPU or northbridge/southbridge? Paper trails can be faked -- or if it's worth it, they just purchase the right number of Intel chips, then quietly scrap them and substitute their own modified counterfeits. You think a sufficiently large organization (such as the Chinese government) can't reverse engineer or steal copies of the chip masks? (If they even go to that extreme, they could use some lower tech level x86 -- do you suppose there's a program to randomly sample Lenovo PCs and send the chips back to Intel for reverse engineering and validation?)
Of course these days significant logic could be embedded in something the size and appearance of a surface mount resistor or capacitor, embedded between the layers of a circuit board, or even molded into the plastic of a connector jack.
Stop thinking at the average hacker level and think at the level of a manufacturer with government ownership and backing.
This is not to say that Lenovo is doing any of these things, but it's the job of counter-espionage to asses risk based on capabilities. Far more elaborate schemes than the above (ajusting for relative tech levels) have been carried out on all sides in the past.
(As for wiping it and installing their own software: duh. There's a disk image with the standard State Department software, and it is written to every computer. That's not even security: that's just the easist way to do the installs.) (Emphasis added)
Quite right that that's not even security. Were I putting those systems together with an intent to spy, I'd expect that. So I'd tweak the firmware in the drive electronics to either hide a portion of the drive space, or just embed my spying routines in that firmware. It would depend how much space I needed for the software.
After all, unless you're willing to disassemble the drive and/or monitor the low level signals coming directly of the read/write heads, the only way you have of knowing what's on that drive is by believing what the drive firmware tells the OS driver.
Counter-intelligence workers don't worry about being too paranoid, they worry about being paranoid enough.
If you're on daylight savings time, it's between the hour hand and 1.
North if you're in the Southern Hemisphere)
And if you're on the equator, you're SOL. (Actually, if you're anywhere between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, it will depend on what time of year it is.)
Generally, when an airliner crashes, the crew are doing their damndest to keep it from doing so. That usually means that the impact is at a low enough speed/angle for some debris to survive.
But not always. Some years ago (pre 9/11) there was an airliner (737 I think) that suffered a control surface failure and went into the ground, almost straight down and slightly inverted, short of the runway in Colorado Springs. They had to dig to find the flight recorder, not unlike Flight 93. There wasn't much else left. And there the pilot and co-pilot were trying not to hit, and were going relatively slowly (being on approach) to start with.
Now picture the result of someone deliberately slamming the plane into a building/the ground at two or three times that speed.
The old UK license was as far from an ID card as you can imagine, so far that when stopped by cops in the US they thought my UK license was some kind of joke.
Oh really? I got the same reaction in the UK from a couple of cops in Windsor, in 1976, when they looked at my Ontario, Canada, drivers license -- which at that time had no picture and wasn't much more than a piece of printed paper. They expressed surprise that there was no picture on or with it.
Trying to move a burning pot outside (especially in the case of a grease / oil fire) could be insanely dangerous!
Could be, yes, for the points you mention. In my case it was a small, relatively deep pot (not full, so less likely to spill) with an insulated handle. My older sister was just standing there freaking out so I opened the back door, grabbed the pot and dropped it in the snowbank. It was literally all of about 2 steps from the stove to the door -- any further and I'd have done something else.
I wouldn't do that in the kitchen in this house -- that's why there's a fire extinguisher handy.
You're probably right about the DC-10, I may be confusing it with another accident. The basic point holds, however -- routing your "redundant" systems through the same spot renders them vulnerable to a single point failure if that failure is unexpected mechanical damage.
Taking it outside is okay (as an above poster and I can attest to from personal experience) as long as you don't have to go more than a couple of feet to the door (carrying a pot of burning liquid through the house isn't a great idea) and you can do it without burning yourself (which would probably cause you to drop the pot, with disastrous consequences).
Water, of course is a mistake. (And for anyone that doesn't fully grasp why, consider that water is (a) denser than oil and (b) boils at below grease's flashpoint. It'll sink to the bottom of the pot and flash to steam, propelling the burning oil all over the place.)
If the fire's still in the pot, just put the damned lid on it. Or take the whole thing outside and dump it in a snowbank (as I did when I was about 13 -- the kitchen back door happened to be right beside the stove).
Otherwise use the fire extinguisher you keep in the kitchen.
A great shame that DeHavilland did all the work and a bunch of people died for Boeing to benefit.
They weren't the first, although Boeing did do a lot of early work.
During WW-II Boeing thoroughly analyzed the bombers that returned shot up from missions, noting carefully where the damage was. Then they improved the design of the places where the damage wasn't*, because planes which had been damaged there obviously hadn't made it back.
(* For the pedantic, in some cases they made the design change elsewhere, e.g. putting redundant systems in a different place. Douglas didn't learn that lesson until a DC-10 cargo door tore loose, simultaneously ripping all three "redundant" hydraulic lines to the tail because they routed through the same area.)
Stockholders are free to sell their stocks at any time (possibly at a loss, I'll grant you). Continuing to hold them in view of a company's unethical, immoral or illegal actions is tacit approval of those actions. As the saying goes, for evil to prosper it is enough for good men to do nothing; the lack of liability to stockholders encourages them to do nothing.
If the stockholders had more liability, we might see stockholder revolts more often.
Not that I have any problem with managers being held accountable too.
Buying Dead-tree books is fucking stupid,it harms nature
Nope. Buying Dead-tree books is good for the environment. Just think of all the CO2 that tree soaked up from the atmosphere and has now sequestered (as cellulose) in that book.
Help reduce greenhouse gases, buy and keep dead-tree editions.
If more libertarians were honest with themselves, they'd recognize that corporations are a government construct that shouldn't ought to exist in a true libertarian state. It's the government-granted limitation on corporate liability that helps cause what you call predatory behaviour.
If shareholders were as liable for the company's actions as the partners in a partnership are, they'd be a bit more concientious about said company's behaviour. At least after a few stockholders or fund managers went to jail or had their life savings sued out from under them.
Libertarianism is about personal responsibility -- the opposite of what a limited liability corporation is about.
Nope, not that either. Libertarians are fond of pointing out that the whole "left-right" thing is an artificial constriction to one axis what is better measured by at least two axes.
There are a number of ways of presenting this, but a common one is the amount of government control (or conversely, freedom) of personal issues on one axis and economic issues on the other. Democrats tend toward more personal freedom (except in some areas, eg gun ownership) and less economic freedom, whereas Republicans tend to less personal freedom (with that same exception) but more economic freedom (well, they used to, anyway). Libertarians tend to more of both personal and economic freedom.
Put another way, libertarians lean left on personal issues and right on economic issues.
And if anything, both parties seem to be tending toward more authoritarianism (ie less freedom) on both axes.
The episode I saw a couple of days ago, where he doesn't duck, is in the first season but towards the end of it. I'll have to watch the earlier eps again, you could be right.
I've done my taxes for 15 years in a row now using tax software that has saved me thousands of dollars. I consider this software worth my roughly $20/yr investment.
Q. How do I get it to run?
A. Well, back in the old days, I'd load MacInTax up on my lowly Mac Plus. When they upped the requirements on that (now known as TurboTax-Mac) so that it wouldn't run on System 7, I switched to an old 200 MHz Pentium running Windows 98 (and switched to Kiplinger TaxCut). The box sits in an out of the way corner of my office and gets powered up for a couple of days every year.
And I print it out and mail it rather than e-file. When they start making it cheaper for me to e-file (rather than charging me to), I'll think about it. Besides, gotta give those data-entry clerks something to do. (For my sins, in my youth I too was a data-entry clerk for the tax man, coding returns onto punch cards with an IBM 026.)
It is now. UPSTO rejected it several times before Microsoft finally found the right person to bribe^W^W^W way to submit their application.
Even at that, Microsoft was on its way to losing their trademark suit against Lindows until they came up with a way to pressure them into a settlement (by suing in non-English speaking countries where "Windows" wasn't a generic term). BTW, Microsoft payed off Lindows in that settlement, not the other way around.
I've been watching with my kids the old 1950s "The Adventures of Superman" TV show (on DVD) with George Reeves. He stands there and lets the bad guy throw the gun at him, which of course just bounces off. Rubber prop gun, no doubt, and Reeves doesn't even flinch.
"Meteors knocking stuff from earth is plausible because meteors have knocked stuff from other planets." "And how do you know that happened?"
We know because chemical and isotopic analysis of some of the meteors that have landed on Earth indicated that they originated from the Moon or Mars, because they match the chemical and isotopic ratios of moon rocks in the one case and gases trapped in the meteorite matched the chemical and isotopic ratios of Martian atmosphere the other. (Analysis of most meteorites shows they probably originated in the asteroid belt. For some classes of meteorites we can confidently ID the parent asteroid, as determined by its spectrum.)
Or think about it this way -- given random directions for the boulders,
That's not a given. The ejecta pattern from an impact isn't random, and what gets out of the atmosphere at all will fall within certain geometric constraints. The Sun's gravity and the general orbital motion of objects close to the plane of the ecliptic further constrain (indeed, tend to focus) trajectories, as does the gravitational influences of the planets. These things follow physical laws, which Newton mostly figured out hundreds of years ago.
You're making the same mistake that lots of folks who try to prove something couldn't happen by invoking incredible odds against it -- that the event chain is random. It isn't, it's influenced by natural forces. I mean, what are the odds that enough dust particles and gas molecules randombly drifting in space could coincide to form a single planet, let alone a whole solar system? Damn small -- but it isn't random, they're acting under mutual gravitation.
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How do the geckos keep their pads clean?
I don't know for sure, but one option that biological geckos have that robots don't is that they can let the pads wear out and grow back, continually renewing the surface.
..you can install traffic monitors on a network and I'm pretty sure any weird traffic going out wouldn't be too hard to pick up on.
You're assuming that the signal is carried over normal tcp (or udp) packets. That's pretty crude. The signal could be embedded in slight timing variations, in unused bits of normal traffic packets, and so on.
That's even assuming the covert signal is going out over the net. Maybe it's using the wireless, frequency hopping on non-standard channels (thus not detectable without special gear), or sending something back over the AC lines (if plugged in), or any of several other ways of sending out-of-recognized-band signals. (Possibly at low bit rates, sure, but that's still bad.)
If there were ANY chips in the Lenovo that were built in China without a clear paper trail leading back to a non-Chinese supplier [...] then this would be justified. But it's an Intel CPU with an Intel northbridge/southbridge, Intel/ATI/NVidia graphics,
How do you know it's really an Intel CPU or northbridge/southbridge? Paper trails can be faked -- or if it's worth it, they just purchase the right number of Intel chips, then quietly scrap them and substitute their own modified counterfeits. You think a sufficiently large organization (such as the Chinese government) can't reverse engineer or steal copies of the chip masks? (If they even go to that extreme, they could use some lower tech level x86 -- do you suppose there's a program to randomly sample Lenovo PCs and send the chips back to Intel for reverse engineering and validation?)
Of course these days significant logic could be embedded in something the size and appearance of a surface mount resistor or capacitor, embedded between the layers of a circuit board, or even molded into the plastic of a connector jack.
Stop thinking at the average hacker level and think at the level of a manufacturer with government ownership and backing.
This is not to say that Lenovo is doing any of these things, but it's the job of counter-espionage to asses risk based on capabilities. Far more elaborate schemes than the above (ajusting for relative tech levels) have been carried out on all sides in the past.
(As for wiping it and installing their own software: duh. There's a disk image with the standard State Department software, and it is written to every computer. That's not even security: that's just the easist way to do the installs.) (Emphasis added)
Quite right that that's not even security. Were I putting those systems together with an intent to spy, I'd expect that. So I'd tweak the firmware in the drive electronics to either hide a portion of the drive space, or just embed my spying routines in that firmware. It would depend how much space I needed for the software.
After all, unless you're willing to disassemble the drive and/or monitor the low level signals coming directly of the read/write heads, the only way you have of knowing what's on that drive is by believing what the drive firmware tells the OS driver.
Counter-intelligence workers don't worry about being too paranoid, they worry about being paranoid enough.
The point between the hour hand and 12 is South.
If you're on daylight savings time, it's between the hour hand and 1.
North if you're in the Southern Hemisphere)
And if you're on the equator, you're SOL. (Actually, if you're anywhere between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, it will depend on what time of year it is.)
Generally, when an airliner crashes, the crew are doing their damndest to keep it from doing so. That usually means that the impact is at a low enough speed/angle for some debris to survive.
But not always. Some years ago (pre 9/11) there was an airliner (737 I think) that suffered a control surface failure and went into the ground, almost straight down and slightly inverted, short of the runway in Colorado Springs. They had to dig to find the flight recorder, not unlike Flight 93. There wasn't much else left. And there the pilot and co-pilot were trying not to hit, and were going relatively slowly (being on approach) to start with.
Now picture the result of someone deliberately slamming the plane into a building/the ground at two or three times that speed.
Actually I have seen some pretty entertaining videos of less filling / tastes great cat fights on the internet lately.
What, no links?
The approach may not scale up?
Has the guy heard of humans? Ostriches? Kangaroos?
Small stuff. Think tyrannosaurs...
Well, yes. But the African toaster is nonmigratory.
The old UK license was as far from an ID card as you can imagine, so far that when stopped by cops in the US they thought my UK license was some kind of joke.
Oh really? I got the same reaction in the UK from a couple of cops in Windsor, in 1976, when they looked at my Ontario, Canada, drivers license -- which at that time had no picture and wasn't much more than a piece of printed paper. They expressed surprise that there was no picture on or with it.
So you've been here more than 30 years, then?
Trying to move a burning pot outside (especially in the case of a grease / oil fire) could be insanely dangerous!
Could be, yes, for the points you mention. In my case it was a small, relatively deep pot (not full, so less likely to spill) with an insulated handle. My older sister was just standing there freaking out so I opened the back door, grabbed the pot and dropped it in the snowbank. It was literally all of about 2 steps from the stove to the door -- any further and I'd have done something else.
I wouldn't do that in the kitchen in this house -- that's why there's a fire extinguisher handy.
You're probably right about the DC-10, I may be confusing it with another accident. The basic point holds, however -- routing your "redundant" systems through the same spot renders them vulnerable to a single point failure if that failure is unexpected mechanical damage.
Taking it outside is okay (as an above poster and I can attest to from personal experience) as long as you don't have to go more than a couple of feet to the door (carrying a pot of burning liquid through the house isn't a great idea) and you can do it without burning yourself (which would probably cause you to drop the pot, with disastrous consequences).
Water, of course is a mistake. (And for anyone that doesn't fully grasp why, consider that water is (a) denser than oil and (b) boils at below grease's flashpoint. It'll sink to the bottom of the pot and flash to steam, propelling the burning oil all over the place.)
If the fire's still in the pot, just put the damned lid on it. Or take the whole thing outside and dump it in a snowbank (as I did when I was about 13 -- the kitchen back door happened to be right beside the stove).
Otherwise use the fire extinguisher you keep in the kitchen.
What, you don't?
A great shame that DeHavilland did all the work and a bunch of people died for Boeing to benefit.
They weren't the first, although Boeing did do a lot of early work.
During WW-II Boeing thoroughly analyzed the bombers that returned shot up from missions, noting carefully where the damage was. Then they improved the design of the places where the damage wasn't*, because planes which had been damaged there obviously hadn't made it back.
(* For the pedantic, in some cases they made the design change elsewhere, e.g. putting redundant systems in a different place. Douglas didn't learn that lesson until a DC-10 cargo door tore loose, simultaneously ripping all three "redundant" hydraulic lines to the tail because they routed through the same area.)
Stockholders are free to sell their stocks at any time (possibly at a loss, I'll grant you). Continuing to hold them in view of a company's unethical, immoral or illegal actions is tacit approval of those actions. As the saying goes, for evil to prosper it is enough for good men to do nothing; the lack of liability to stockholders encourages them to do nothing.
If the stockholders had more liability, we might see stockholder revolts more often.
Not that I have any problem with managers being held accountable too.
and revert all power to HRH Elizabeth Regina.
I think she's a bit too old for the job. Not to mention a bit too dead.
Surely you meant HRH Elizabeth II Regina.
Buying Dead-tree books is fucking stupid ,it harms nature
Nope. Buying Dead-tree books is good for the environment. Just think of all the CO2 that tree soaked up from the atmosphere and has now sequestered (as cellulose) in that book.
Help reduce greenhouse gases, buy and keep dead-tree editions.
If more libertarians were honest with themselves, they'd recognize that corporations are a government construct that shouldn't ought to exist in a true libertarian state. It's the government-granted limitation on corporate liability that helps cause what you call predatory behaviour.
If shareholders were as liable for the company's actions as the partners in a partnership are, they'd be a bit more concientious about said company's behaviour. At least after a few stockholders or fund managers went to jail or had their life savings sued out from under them.
Libertarianism is about personal responsibility -- the opposite of what a limited liability corporation is about.
Technically, Libertarian IS really right wing.
Nope, not that either. Libertarians are fond of pointing out that the whole "left-right" thing is an artificial constriction to one axis what is better measured by at least two axes.
There are a number of ways of presenting this, but a common one is the amount of government control (or conversely, freedom) of personal issues on one axis and economic issues on the other. Democrats tend toward more personal freedom (except in some areas, eg gun ownership) and less economic freedom, whereas Republicans tend to less personal freedom (with that same exception) but more economic freedom (well, they used to, anyway). Libertarians tend to more of both personal and economic freedom.
Put another way, libertarians lean left on personal issues and right on economic issues.
And if anything, both parties seem to be tending toward more authoritarianism (ie less freedom) on both axes.
The episode I saw a couple of days ago, where he doesn't duck, is in the first season but towards the end of it. I'll have to watch the earlier eps again, you could be right.
I've done my taxes for 15 years in a row now using tax software that has saved me thousands of dollars. I consider this software worth my roughly $20/yr investment.
Q. How do I get it to run?
A. Well, back in the old days, I'd load MacInTax up on my lowly Mac Plus. When they upped the requirements on that (now known as TurboTax-Mac) so that it wouldn't run on System 7, I switched to an old 200 MHz Pentium running Windows 98 (and switched to Kiplinger TaxCut). The box sits in an out of the way corner of my office and gets powered up for a couple of days every year.
And I print it out and mail it rather than e-file. When they start making it cheaper for me to e-file (rather than charging me to), I'll think about it. Besides, gotta give those data-entry clerks something to do. (For my sins, in my youth I too was a data-entry clerk for the tax man, coding returns onto punch cards with an IBM 026.)
Windows is a trademark
It is now. UPSTO rejected it several times before Microsoft finally found the right person to bribe^W^W^W way to submit their application.
Even at that, Microsoft was on its way to losing their trademark suit against Lindows until they came up with a way to pressure them into a settlement (by suing in non-English speaking countries where "Windows" wasn't a generic term). BTW, Microsoft payed off Lindows in that settlement, not the other way around.
Actually he doesn't always duck the gun.
I've been watching with my kids the old 1950s "The Adventures of Superman" TV show (on DVD) with George Reeves. He stands there and lets the bad guy throw the gun at him, which of course just bounces off. Rubber prop gun, no doubt, and Reeves doesn't even flinch.
"Meteors knocking stuff from earth is plausible because meteors have knocked stuff from other planets." "And how do you know that happened?"
We know because chemical and isotopic analysis of some of the meteors that have landed on Earth indicated that they originated from the Moon or Mars, because they match the chemical and isotopic ratios of moon rocks in the one case and gases trapped in the meteorite matched the chemical and isotopic ratios of Martian atmosphere the other. (Analysis of most meteorites shows they probably originated in the asteroid belt. For some classes of meteorites we can confidently ID the parent asteroid, as determined by its spectrum.)
Or think about it this way -- given random directions for the boulders,
That's not a given. The ejecta pattern from an impact isn't random, and what gets out of the atmosphere at all will fall within certain geometric constraints. The Sun's gravity and the general orbital motion of objects close to the plane of the ecliptic further constrain (indeed, tend to focus) trajectories, as does the gravitational influences of the planets. These things follow physical laws, which Newton mostly figured out hundreds of years ago.
You're making the same mistake that lots of folks who try to prove something couldn't happen by invoking incredible odds against it -- that the event chain is random. It isn't, it's influenced by natural forces. I mean, what are the odds that enough dust particles and gas molecules randombly drifting in space could coincide to form a single planet, let alone a whole solar system? Damn small -- but it isn't random, they're acting under mutual gravitation.