The fundamental technology is still distance limited. In fact, given natural and artificial interference factors from pre-existing spectrum users (not just ham radio operators, but everything on Shortwave) the distance limitations may be even more severe than those imposed by the telcos.
Hams aren't the only objecting group. They're merely the loudest. Most of the others, such as short wave broadcasters and trans-oceanic air traffic, Ship to shore Marine communications and the like don't have a constituency that the FCC will give much credence to.
Of most of the exploits we have seen thus far, the vast majority have been script kiddies. Very few worms and viruses have used undocumented attack vectors. Now, that doesn't mean that All of them are like this, but it does mean that there is some security to be had through obscurity.
Given that IOS is entirely proprietary, it would be wise to give Cisco plenty of notice of the vulnerability and let them patch the problem first. After all, you probably don't have access to the IOS software sources. Patching your own routers with just the information presented by Lynn would be a monumental achievement. I doubt you or most slashdot readers could do it in a timely fashion.
I am not defending Cisco's attempt to sweep this under the rug. However, computer networks are a fragile technology built on a thin veneer of civilization. Telling people how to tear it apart before we can even take measures to reinforce it is nothing less than irresponsible.
I'd have to think long and hard before hiring a guy like Lynn.
Sure, free speech and all that... He did nothing illegal, but he should have put a bit more thought in to the whys and hows of the release.
First, nobody has yet attacked via this vector. There are no examples of concept code out there. Had someone exploited this vector, then it makes sense to educate the public that it exists and why. Until then, I think the moral thing would be to STFU. Cisco has a right to be angry (though not to use heavy-handed tactics).
Second, I would find his position to be much more moral if he had given this information anonymously to the conference, or some other such forum. The fact that he put his name on it smacks of a grab for infamy. His goals, if they were truly altruistic, should not have included his identity because that was irrelevant to his presentation.
He's no hero in my book. I'll give him credit for trying to do the right thing, but I still see his actions as ultimately counterproductive.
You Wi-Fi worshipping USians may not believe it, but I personally hear high pitched noises (akin to the PAL 15 kHz flyback frequency hou hear with old TVs) and/or experience subtle memory and concentration losses around plain 100 mW 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi APs.
Wait a moment here...
I'm not worshiping Wi-Fi. I'm a ham radio operator with experience working on everything from shortwave radios running several hundred watts to VHF packet radio, licensed spread spectrum activity (not the computer stuff, but the stuff that pre-dates it by many years) and microwave. I have worked on terrestrial commuications systems for many years. I care about this stuff because if anyone is at risk, I am.
That said, a photo flash affects many nerve cells directly when it fires because your eyes are coupled directly in to your brain and they're sensitive to this sort of light. They're not sensitive to RF.
And the high pitched noises are not electro-magnetic in any way. They are mechanical vibrations. Sure, many USians are ignorant, but you ought to know better than to tar us all with same brush. It makes you look just as ignorant.
But it isn't even nearly the whole story. Have you ever considered the biochemistry going on in your head right now? There's all kinds of stuff going on. And yes, it can be affected by electric and magnetic fields.
How does that work? I'm serious. What mechanism would cause permenant change to biological tissue at low levels which don't appear to be thermally related? Keep in mind that we are exposed to this sort of thing every day from natural sources such as the sun.
I mean, whoever discovers this mechanism will be eligible for not one but at least two Nobel prizes for new ground breaking research in physics, chemistry, and who knows what else.
People have been researching the "dangers" of electromagnetic exposure since the very beginnings of radio and to date no study of any positive sort has been shown to be repeatable in any complementary experiments. Meanwhile there are far too many who fudge (deliberately or inadvertently) their data to show all sorts of things so that they can get more funding. Some do it out of ignorance because they didn't understand near field behavior of antennas. (That's my answer for why researchers need someone with an EE degree to help out on these experiments)
In any case, the link, if there is one at all, must be obscure and nearly insignificant. No, we don't fully understand the chemistry of cellular tissue. But that's no reason to invent new physics to explain what we have no concept of what's going on...
Well, I'll stack my electrical engineering degree and three decades of experience against your physics degree(s) any day.:-)
You're right. There are resonances. Modeling the near field effects of cell phone radiation is not simple.
Were I constructing an NEC model to evaluate cell phone safety, I might try taking an NMR scan of a person's head and using the assumption of antenna reciprocity to figure out heat absorbtion. It's not a perfect assumption as we know because the nuclear resonance frequencies can change based upon many things, but it would put us in the right ballpark for the sake of making general policy.
Second, keep in mind where the antenna is: It's on the side, toward the back of your head when your phone is close to your ear. It's nowhere near your eyes. Couple that with the likelyhood that the phone is running much less than 300 mW (the maximum power these things put out) wherever cell coverage is good, and the total risk is quite small.
I've seen many studies come and go. This latest Israeli study is yet another one for the pile. It may well be true that some parts of the body (such as your eyes) are more sensitive to microwave radiation than we first thought --but this research ignores that fact that most phones don't put anything close the levels of radiation he used near the eyes.
If it were true, vast segments of society would be quite blind by now. It hasn't happened. I am not worried.
By using such despicable harassment techniques against these scientists, all Joe Barton has managed to accomplish here is to certify their findings.
You could help your argument by identifying exactly what was so despicable about Barton's request. I am not quite sure about that point.
It's high time we all acknowledge that there ARE biases among researchers. These are human failings. Horace Freeland Judson wrote an entire book about how these things happen, why they happen, how utterly undiscriminating these failings are, and how flimsy the edifice of peer review really is.
We'd all like to believe that scientists are above these human failings. Well, they're not. Barton may only be guilty of asking some of the very same questions as Judson asked. There isn't enough data in the article to evaluate whether this was the case. In fact, I doubt most journalists understand the issues (not that I'd trust a politician to do any better).
As for Global Warming: Honestly, the preponderance of studies seems to show that it probably is warming. However, we can't reliably predict at what rate it will warm. We can guess at likely sources for the extra heat we seem to be measuring, but the models simply aren't accurate enough to know whether these sources are just a drop in the ocean or a significant problem.
Those answers that you may hear are usually from someone with a political agenda of some sort --not from a serious scientist. Frankly, I get skeptical when someone gets up on such flimsy evidence to tell us all that the world is going to end tomorrow. If Barton is conducting a character assasination, then its a problem. If, on the other hand, Barton is questioning their motives, then I would call that skepticism. Would you trust a newspaper editorial written by a committee to know the difference?
I look at it in pretty much the same way as those who insist on riding horses. Yes, there are places and applications where this sort of thing is still the best fit for the job. But for the most part, we're talking about a hobby here.
I say this as one who passed the original 20 word per minute test and who can still converse comfortably at 25 WPM on the air. I don't understand what all the fuss is about.
The important question here is not whether there will ever be anyone using morse code. The question is whether the Federal Communications Commission should have any interest to perpetuate this mostly impractical mode of communication. To wit: Do examiners demand that you demonstrate a proficiency for riding horses before issuing you a motor vehicle license?
The ARRL has in the past issued certificates for those who can demonstrate the ability to copy morse code at speeds of up to 40 Words Per Minute. It can be fun to prove that you can pass such a test. Thus, there always can be achievement tests for those who seek to prove a degree of totally impractical performance. Hey, we still have horse races, rodeos, trail rides, and fox hunts. But almost nobody seriously uses a horse to commute to work.
My question for the FCC is basically, does this test have sufficient value that we should maintain it as a prerequisite for receiving a federally regulated license? Or can we finally say that, despite the few applications where it might be useful, that Morse Code performance should be relegated to a hobby interest?
First, spammers that use their own machines DO pay for raw bandwidth, so they DO have a higher cost for sending a million emails a day than for a thousand.
Yeah, and as their operations get bigger, the overhead cost goes down. It really isn't expensive to do this sort of thing and it will get even less expensive as time goes on...
Now, as for the spammers that use stolen cycles, "Book 'em, Danno."
And you would find these spammers --how? Gosh, you could "borrow" the cycles from computers in one country and use them against another country.
Spammers tend to hide on the other side of international boundaries. Only Money is traceable because laws exist almost world wide regarding the tracking of money. However even legal systems in first world countries are struggling to keep up with the pace of Internet.
If you really want to "Book 'em, Danno" you need a money trail. Even if the money trail is only fractions of a cent...
This is an informal declaration of Net-War. This reminds me of the Scientology tactics years ago with the cancel and repost 'bots. The end result is that we all lose. The Net gets polluted with an endless barrage of spam versus spam --and what does it accomplish?
What we need here (and I'm not advocating anyone's system) is a way to charge for sending "certified" e-mail. It should be a small amount. Most of us would not notice the extra cost if it were just 1/100 of one cent per-email. But a Spammer would.
An e-mail "postage stamp" server of some sort would be an appropriate response for this problem. --Not the waste of bandwidth suggested by Blue Security.
You should really read this book by Horace Freeland Judson.
He outlines the motivations, the excuses, the history, and even plenty of known and not so well known case studies. It is not an easy read; but it is a recent, scholarly, and very comprehensive treatment of this subject.
Judson may have his critics. However, his arguments are quite well thought out and well founded. This is a festering problem, not just with current medical research, but also with many other hard sciences. It discusses the very manner in which we conduct modern scientific research. It even opens up a substantial can of worms by questioning the supposed value of peer review.
Like it or hate it, it's worth your time to read it.
They can also ask the Pilot In Command for permission to snoop. Once granted, they don't need a judge. It's a lot faster and I seriously doubt that a reasonable request from the FBI to the Pilot In Command will be refused.
By the way, no airline operates under CFR part 91.
It's a good thing that you're wrong about this. 14CFR91 applies to ALL operations. I suspect you're thinking of 14CFR121. That part includes additional regulations ABOVE and BEYOND the standards in 14CFR91.
Read the applicability sections in the beginning of these regulations. It will explain everything.
...because there are already laws they can use against those who use the internet access to coordinate acts of terrorism.
It's 14CFR91.21 --All the FBI has to do is call the air traffic control centers (or approaches) and tell them that they have reason to think the Internet is being used for a coordinated attack against the country. Then each airline pilot would merely push the OFF switch on the internet access gear onboard the aircraft.
The bottom line is that 14CFR91.21 says that you're using whatever wireless gizmo on board the aircraft at the express permission of the Pilot-in-Command. The instant the Pilot thinks something might jeapordize the safety of others, they already have express permission to take whatever measures are neccesary to maintain safety of flight.
This is not about your rights, folks. You're a passenger onboard an international vessel and subject to the orders of the captain or pilot in command of that vessle. You can whine about the indignity once you're safely at port or on the ground. Until then, live with it or don't go.
It's prohibitive. Ignore the costs of shielding the cable for a moment (though they're technically difficult and hardly insignificant). Consider just the cost of stringing up new wire EVERYWHERE.
In effect you'd have to do almost as much work as it took to build the grid in the first place.
The whole technology behind BPL was flawed to begin with. I'm surpised anyone a Google thinks it's worth their money.
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...And how long before Microsoft issues an updated TweakUI to handle this monstrosity?
Like most critics, I'm not good at leading large companies. But I know good leadership when I see it. This guy Lutz has his head bolted on right.
The first thing most CIOs usually throw at their workforce is not to re-invent anything. If a product exists off the shelf at a reasonable cost, there are lots of disadvantages for taking the risk of inventing another one and few advantages if you succeed.
However, most of us workers have known that the "big iron" mainframe technologies of yesteryear are starting to "rust." It's getting difficult to find technical help who understand this stuff reasonably well. That brings me to the second point: Follow the technology market. The people will be there.
I suspect that in the not too distant future, many big-iron mainframers are going to be asking theselves whether the many millions they're spending are a good ROI. Open source databases and distributed computing are starting to look awfully attractive.
It's scary from a CIO's position because the old systems are working, even if they're not well understood any more. They're leaping from the systems they know, toward a high cost potential boondoggle. This guy apparently knew how to hire and retain good technical help, he knew how to organize that help, and he knew how to keep them focused on the goal.
Most leaders aren't that good. All too many businesses operate by habit. Only the red tape holds them together. Those organizations won't be making this leap until a certain critical mass has been reached to convince them one by one to make the effort.
We should be doing everything we can to encourage others like Lutz to push these efforts. This is how you really evangelize Linux. And when all this is over, the desktop will be an afterthought.
What exactly would you expect the State Department to say to these folks?
1) All airspace above Flight Level 600 ("60,000 feet") is outside the territorial control of any country by international agreement.
2) Most first and second world countries have ready access to all the spy satellite data they can handle. What's the big deal here?
3) This UAV is probably not the first of its kind, nor will it be the last. Drones like this have been researched for the last couple decades. I'd be surprised if there weren't quite a few more vehicles of this ilk that we don't know about --some made by this country and some made by others.
The main thing with flying is that it would be great if it was just flying, and didn't include the stressy stuff like getting to the airport, baggage check and claiming, passport control, checking in, security checks, etc.
...That's probably one of the biggest mistakes people make with travel security. Trains are every bit as vulnerable to terrorism as aircraft. Ask someone from Madrid.
Yes, aircraft tend to be more fragile to onboard attacks. However trains have tracks which can't easily be monitored or defended. Why terrorize those onboard an aircraft? Because we already have a substantial population with an irrational fear of flying. An act of terrorism will build upon that fear.
Keep in mind, a bullet train has to rely on aerodynamics every bit as much as an aircraft. Furthermore, if you come to a sudden stop for any reason at all, you'll die just as fast and randomly as you would in an aircraft.
One final thing: High speed trains make at least as much noise as a low flying aircraft. The bow shock from the train is quite substantial too. Few are willing to reserve the space for an airfield, but most don't think twice about carving huge rights of way to mitigate the noise a train makes. What a bunch of luddite foolishness...
At best the removal of lead from solder formulas is expensive, and protectionist. At worst, it will trigger widespread failures in high relibility gear when tin whiskers start forming wherever the new solder was used.
This reminds me of those who were so eager to get Tetra-Ethyl-Lead (TEL) out of gasolene that they replaced it with MTBE. TEL is not particularly soluble in water; MTBE is. So instead of polluting the air, we're polluting the water supply. Some improvement that was!
Besides, this doesn't remove all lead. It removes only the lead in solder. Each use of lead should be carefully considered, but it should not be eliminated outright. The alternatives may be worse.
In a broader sense, recycling electronics is not trivial. There are lots of toxic materials in electronic componenents. It would be nice if someone could devise a system where everything went through a shredder and all the elemental materials were recovered somehow.
I haven't heard of anyone who has developed a process of this sort. Could there be a business opportunity here?
...Morse transmitters are relatively inefficient in terms of their power usage, because they have to switch current on and off fairly rapidly
There are two issues here:
First, the use of "continuous wave" or CW transmitters can be quite efficient. They can use Class C amplifiers, just like FM. The amount of power required to establish contact is minimal compared to a voice frequency bandwidth single sideband amplitude modulated signal. Although this is like comparing apples and oranges, Morse Code can be used to establish contact with stations that are 10 to 15 dB too weak to use SSB with.
Second, Morse code does not have to be sent from a CW transmitter. It has been sent as PSK, FSK, AFSK, and lots of other wonderful modulation alphabet soup.
In addition, in Morse code (DSB-SC) all of the energy at the image frequency is wasted; a SSB scheme is more efficient, albeit harder to detect.
Theoretically, a morse signal is a double sideband signal, though it does not have a fully suppressed carrier. However, to make it human-readable, there has to be a reasonably shaped pulse. A pulse which is too abrupt will leave "clicks" on the air. A pulse which takes too long to get to full power will be difficult to copy.
Thus, the bandwidth consumed by most common methods of sending morse code is really an issue of the keying nature of the transmitter --not the protocol itself.
Considering the protocol itself, if you knew when a dot or a dot space were about to happen, and you integrated over each individual period to measure the total energy of each element, then you're doing coherent, synchronous detection. Synchronous reception of a DSB signal with a DSB receiver does not have the overall link s/n penalty you'd get by receiving a DSB signal with an SSB receiver.
Furthermore, you seem to be assuming that a human receiver is a single sideband receiver. Not true. A morse operator knows what speed of morse code is being sent. They integrate each dot and dash in their heads depending on what they're expecting with each dot rhythm beat. In other words, they're listening for the rhythms of various letters. It is not unreasonable to think of the human ear/brain combination as a synchronous reception device.
If you have an at all reliable means of communication, it becomes rather worthless.
Ah, but the very lack of those conditions is one of the most common motivations for using Morse code, and why it has lingered in the world of communications for more than a century.
1) Morse requires much less bandwidth, power, and probably the simplest transmitter and receiver technology ever devised.
2) You can send morse traffic through very poor signal to noise ratios which you could not use for speech.
3) You can also send morse code identification underneath someone's voice message. It is still used for automatic identification of VHF repeaters for this reason.
Now from an information theory perspective, morse code is not ideal. There are ways of sending data with error correction coding which may be able to squeak through a poorer s/n situation better than an intelligent Morse receiver. But the processing required to do so is not small.
The beauty of Morse code is its simplicity, its durability in poor signal conditions, and its efficiency. Think about that the next time your call drops offline...
It doesn't matter WHY they say it, they pay his salary, he either listens or goes elsewhere.
Actually, it does matter. Most western societies consider colleges and universities to be places where the exchange of ideas should be paramount. Any censorship in this regard should be cause for great concern.
Many are pointing out that this guy was not a professor, so what's the big deal? The answer is that this was in connection to a discussion about IP law. If they can't discuss the specifics of the applications of technology, then what are they there for? Shall we wait for an exalted professor to get chastised for saying the same thing before we get worked up over this?
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I can't imagine where you got that silly idea...
The fundamental technology is still distance limited. In fact, given natural and artificial interference factors from pre-existing spectrum users (not just ham radio operators, but everything on Shortwave) the distance limitations may be even more severe than those imposed by the telcos.
Hams aren't the only objecting group. They're merely the loudest. Most of the others, such as short wave broadcasters and trans-oceanic air traffic, Ship to shore Marine communications and the like don't have a constituency that the FCC will give much credence to.
Gosh, where to begin?
Of most of the exploits we have seen thus far, the vast majority have been script kiddies. Very few worms and viruses have used undocumented attack vectors. Now, that doesn't mean that All of them are like this, but it does mean that there is some security to be had through obscurity.
Given that IOS is entirely proprietary, it would be wise to give Cisco plenty of notice of the vulnerability and let them patch the problem first. After all, you probably don't have access to the IOS software sources. Patching your own routers with just the information presented by Lynn would be a monumental achievement. I doubt you or most slashdot readers could do it in a timely fashion.
I am not defending Cisco's attempt to sweep this under the rug. However, computer networks are a fragile technology built on a thin veneer of civilization. Telling people how to tear it apart before we can even take measures to reinforce it is nothing less than irresponsible.
I'd have to think long and hard before hiring a guy like Lynn.
Sure, free speech and all that... He did nothing illegal, but he should have put a bit more thought in to the whys and hows of the release.
First, nobody has yet attacked via this vector. There are no examples of concept code out there. Had someone exploited this vector, then it makes sense to educate the public that it exists and why. Until then, I think the moral thing would be to STFU. Cisco has a right to be angry (though not to use heavy-handed tactics).
Second, I would find his position to be much more moral if he had given this information anonymously to the conference, or some other such forum. The fact that he put his name on it smacks of a grab for infamy. His goals, if they were truly altruistic, should not have included his identity because that was irrelevant to his presentation.
He's no hero in my book. I'll give him credit for trying to do the right thing, but I still see his actions as ultimately counterproductive.
I'm not worshiping Wi-Fi. I'm a ham radio operator with experience working on everything from shortwave radios running several hundred watts to VHF packet radio, licensed spread spectrum activity (not the computer stuff, but the stuff that pre-dates it by many years) and microwave. I have worked on terrestrial commuications systems for many years. I care about this stuff because if anyone is at risk, I am.
That said, a photo flash affects many nerve cells directly when it fires because your eyes are coupled directly in to your brain and they're sensitive to this sort of light. They're not sensitive to RF.
And the high pitched noises are not electro-magnetic in any way. They are mechanical vibrations. Sure, many USians are ignorant, but you ought to know better than to tar us all with same brush. It makes you look just as ignorant.
How does that work? I'm serious. What mechanism would cause permenant change to biological tissue at low levels which don't appear to be thermally related? Keep in mind that we are exposed to this sort of thing every day from natural sources such as the sun.
I mean, whoever discovers this mechanism will be eligible for not one but at least two Nobel prizes for new ground breaking research in physics, chemistry, and who knows what else.
People have been researching the "dangers" of electromagnetic exposure since the very beginnings of radio and to date no study of any positive sort has been shown to be repeatable in any complementary experiments. Meanwhile there are far too many who fudge (deliberately or inadvertently) their data to show all sorts of things so that they can get more funding. Some do it out of ignorance because they didn't understand near field behavior of antennas. (That's my answer for why researchers need someone with an EE degree to help out on these experiments)
In any case, the link, if there is one at all, must be obscure and nearly insignificant. No, we don't fully understand the chemistry of cellular tissue. But that's no reason to invent new physics to explain what we have no concept of what's going on...
You're right. There are resonances. Modeling the near field effects of cell phone radiation is not simple.
Were I constructing an NEC model to evaluate cell phone safety, I might try taking an NMR scan of a person's head and using the assumption of antenna reciprocity to figure out heat absorbtion. It's not a perfect assumption as we know because the nuclear resonance frequencies can change based upon many things, but it would put us in the right ballpark for the sake of making general policy.
Second, keep in mind where the antenna is: It's on the side, toward the back of your head when your phone is close to your ear. It's nowhere near your eyes. Couple that with the likelyhood that the phone is running much less than 300 mW (the maximum power these things put out) wherever cell coverage is good, and the total risk is quite small.
I've seen many studies come and go. This latest Israeli study is yet another one for the pile. It may well be true that some parts of the body (such as your eyes) are more sensitive to microwave radiation than we first thought --but this research ignores that fact that most phones don't put anything close the levels of radiation he used near the eyes.
If it were true, vast segments of society would be quite blind by now. It hasn't happened. I am not worried.
It's high time we all acknowledge that there ARE biases among researchers. These are human failings. Horace Freeland Judson wrote an entire book about how these things happen, why they happen, how utterly undiscriminating these failings are, and how flimsy the edifice of peer review really is.
We'd all like to believe that scientists are above these human failings. Well, they're not. Barton may only be guilty of asking some of the very same questions as Judson asked. There isn't enough data in the article to evaluate whether this was the case. In fact, I doubt most journalists understand the issues (not that I'd trust a politician to do any better).
As for Global Warming: Honestly, the preponderance of studies seems to show that it probably is warming. However, we can't reliably predict at what rate it will warm. We can guess at likely sources for the extra heat we seem to be measuring, but the models simply aren't accurate enough to know whether these sources are just a drop in the ocean or a significant problem.
Those answers that you may hear are usually from someone with a political agenda of some sort --not from a serious scientist. Frankly, I get skeptical when someone gets up on such flimsy evidence to tell us all that the world is going to end tomorrow. If Barton is conducting a character assasination, then its a problem. If, on the other hand, Barton is questioning their motives, then I would call that skepticism. Would you trust a newspaper editorial written by a committee to know the difference?
I look at it in pretty much the same way as those who insist on riding horses. Yes, there are places and applications where this sort of thing is still the best fit for the job. But for the most part, we're talking about a hobby here.
I say this as one who passed the original 20 word per minute test and who can still converse comfortably at 25 WPM on the air. I don't understand what all the fuss is about.
The important question here is not whether there will ever be anyone using morse code. The question is whether the Federal Communications Commission should have any interest to perpetuate this mostly impractical mode of communication. To wit: Do examiners demand that you demonstrate a proficiency for riding horses before issuing you a motor vehicle license?
The ARRL has in the past issued certificates for those who can demonstrate the ability to copy morse code at speeds of up to 40 Words Per Minute. It can be fun to prove that you can pass such a test. Thus, there always can be achievement tests for those who seek to prove a degree of totally impractical performance. Hey, we still have horse races, rodeos, trail rides, and fox hunts. But almost nobody seriously uses a horse to commute to work.
My question for the FCC is basically, does this test have sufficient value that we should maintain it as a prerequisite for receiving a federally regulated license? Or can we finally say that, despite the few applications where it might be useful, that Morse Code performance should be relegated to a hobby interest?
Yeah, and as their operations get bigger, the overhead cost goes down. It really isn't expensive to do this sort of thing and it will get even less expensive as time goes on...
And you would find these spammers --how? Gosh, you could "borrow" the cycles from computers in one country and use them against another country.
Spammers tend to hide on the other side of international boundaries. Only Money is traceable because laws exist almost world wide regarding the tracking of money. However even legal systems in first world countries are struggling to keep up with the pace of Internet.
If you really want to "Book 'em, Danno" you need a money trail. Even if the money trail is only fractions of a cent...
This is an informal declaration of Net-War. This reminds me of the Scientology tactics years ago with the cancel and repost 'bots. The end result is that we all lose. The Net gets polluted with an endless barrage of spam versus spam --and what does it accomplish?
What we need here (and I'm not advocating anyone's system) is a way to charge for sending "certified" e-mail. It should be a small amount. Most of us would not notice the extra cost if it were just 1/100 of one cent per-email. But a Spammer would.
An e-mail "postage stamp" server of some sort would be an appropriate response for this problem. --Not the waste of bandwidth suggested by Blue Security.
You should really read this book by Horace Freeland Judson.
He outlines the motivations, the excuses, the history, and even plenty of known and not so well known case studies. It is not an easy read; but it is a recent, scholarly, and very comprehensive treatment of this subject.
Judson may have his critics. However, his arguments are quite well thought out and well founded. This is a festering problem, not just with current medical research, but also with many other hard sciences. It discusses the very manner in which we conduct modern scientific research. It even opens up a substantial can of worms by questioning the supposed value of peer review.
Like it or hate it, it's worth your time to read it.
They can also ask the Pilot In Command for permission to snoop. Once granted, they don't need a judge. It's a lot faster and I seriously doubt that a reasonable request from the FBI to the Pilot In Command will be refused.
It's a good thing that you're wrong about this. 14CFR91 applies to ALL operations. I suspect you're thinking of 14CFR121. That part includes additional regulations ABOVE and BEYOND the standards in 14CFR91.
Read the applicability sections in the beginning of these regulations. It will explain everything.
...because there are already laws they can use against those who use the internet access to coordinate acts of terrorism.
It's 14CFR91.21 --All the FBI has to do is call the air traffic control centers (or approaches) and tell them that they have reason to think the Internet is being used for a coordinated attack against the country. Then each airline pilot would merely push the OFF switch on the internet access gear onboard the aircraft.
The bottom line is that 14CFR91.21 says that you're using whatever wireless gizmo on board the aircraft at the express permission of the Pilot-in-Command . The instant the Pilot thinks something might jeapordize the safety of others, they already have express permission to take whatever measures are neccesary to maintain safety of flight.
This is not about your rights, folks. You're a passenger onboard an international vessel and subject to the orders of the captain or pilot in command of that vessle. You can whine about the indignity once you're safely at port or on the ground. Until then, live with it or don't go.
It's prohibitive. Ignore the costs of shielding the cable for a moment (though they're technically difficult and hardly insignificant). Consider just the cost of stringing up new wire EVERYWHERE.
In effect you'd have to do almost as much work as it took to build the grid in the first place.
The whole technology behind BPL was flawed to begin with. I'm surpised anyone a Google thinks it's worth their money.
...And how long before Microsoft issues an updated TweakUI to handle this monstrosity?
Like most critics, I'm not good at leading large companies. But I know good leadership when I see it. This guy Lutz has his head bolted on right.
The first thing most CIOs usually throw at their workforce is not to re-invent anything. If a product exists off the shelf at a reasonable cost, there are lots of disadvantages for taking the risk of inventing another one and few advantages if you succeed.
However, most of us workers have known that the "big iron" mainframe technologies of yesteryear are starting to "rust." It's getting difficult to find technical help who understand this stuff reasonably well. That brings me to the second point: Follow the technology market. The people will be there.
I suspect that in the not too distant future, many big-iron mainframers are going to be asking theselves whether the many millions they're spending are a good ROI. Open source databases and distributed computing are starting to look awfully attractive.
It's scary from a CIO's position because the old systems are working, even if they're not well understood any more. They're leaping from the systems they know, toward a high cost potential boondoggle. This guy apparently knew how to hire and retain good technical help, he knew how to organize that help, and he knew how to keep them focused on the goal.
Most leaders aren't that good. All too many businesses operate by habit. Only the red tape holds them together. Those organizations won't be making this leap until a certain critical mass has been reached to convince them one by one to make the effort.
We should be doing everything we can to encourage others like Lutz to push these efforts. This is how you really evangelize Linux. And when all this is over, the desktop will be an afterthought.
Sound dampening walls wouldn't work well around a bullet train, anyway. What's your point?
What exactly would you expect the State Department to say to these folks?
1) All airspace above Flight Level 600 ("60,000 feet") is outside the territorial control of any country by international agreement.
2) Most first and second world countries have ready access to all the spy satellite data they can handle. What's the big deal here?
3) This UAV is probably not the first of its kind, nor will it be the last. Drones like this have been researched for the last couple decades. I'd be surprised if there weren't quite a few more vehicles of this ilk that we don't know about --some made by this country and some made by others.
Yes, aircraft tend to be more fragile to onboard attacks. However trains have tracks which can't easily be monitored or defended. Why terrorize those onboard an aircraft? Because we already have a substantial population with an irrational fear of flying. An act of terrorism will build upon that fear.
Keep in mind, a bullet train has to rely on aerodynamics every bit as much as an aircraft. Furthermore, if you come to a sudden stop for any reason at all, you'll die just as fast and randomly as you would in an aircraft.
One final thing: High speed trains make at least as much noise as a low flying aircraft. The bow shock from the train is quite substantial too. Few are willing to reserve the space for an airfield, but most don't think twice about carving huge rights of way to mitigate the noise a train makes. What a bunch of luddite foolishness...
...is this sort of power management a feature of typical Linux kernels? Who wrote it? Has LT reviewed it?
...are we really talking about an advanced low power processor which happens to run Linux?
...what is it about Linux that facilitates this low power consumption? Is it that the OS is free, so the development was cheap?
...and they're replacing it with WHAT?
At best the removal of lead from solder formulas is expensive, and protectionist. At worst, it will trigger widespread failures in high relibility gear when tin whiskers start forming wherever the new solder was used.
This reminds me of those who were so eager to get Tetra-Ethyl-Lead (TEL) out of gasolene that they replaced it with MTBE. TEL is not particularly soluble in water; MTBE is. So instead of polluting the air, we're polluting the water supply. Some improvement that was!
Besides, this doesn't remove all lead. It removes only the lead in solder. Each use of lead should be carefully considered, but it should not be eliminated outright. The alternatives may be worse.
In a broader sense, recycling electronics is not trivial. There are lots of toxic materials in electronic componenents. It would be nice if someone could devise a system where everything went through a shredder and all the elemental materials were recovered somehow.
I haven't heard of anyone who has developed a process of this sort. Could there be a business opportunity here?
There are two issues here:
First, the use of "continuous wave" or CW transmitters can be quite efficient. They can use Class C amplifiers, just like FM. The amount of power required to establish contact is minimal compared to a voice frequency bandwidth single sideband amplitude modulated signal. Although this is like comparing apples and oranges, Morse Code can be used to establish contact with stations that are 10 to 15 dB too weak to use SSB with.
Second, Morse code does not have to be sent from a CW transmitter. It has been sent as PSK, FSK, AFSK, and lots of other wonderful modulation alphabet soup.
Theoretically, a morse signal is a double sideband signal, though it does not have a fully suppressed carrier. However, to make it human-readable, there has to be a reasonably shaped pulse. A pulse which is too abrupt will leave "clicks" on the air. A pulse which takes too long to get to full power will be difficult to copy.
Thus, the bandwidth consumed by most common methods of sending morse code is really an issue of the keying nature of the transmitter --not the protocol itself.
Considering the protocol itself, if you knew when a dot or a dot space were about to happen, and you integrated over each individual period to measure the total energy of each element, then you're doing coherent, synchronous detection. Synchronous reception of a DSB signal with a DSB receiver does not have the overall link s/n penalty you'd get by receiving a DSB signal with an SSB receiver.
Furthermore, you seem to be assuming that a human receiver is a single sideband receiver. Not true. A morse operator knows what speed of morse code is being sent. They integrate each dot and dash in their heads depending on what they're expecting with each dot rhythm beat. In other words, they're listening for the rhythms of various letters. It is not unreasonable to think of the human ear/brain combination as a synchronous reception device.
DE AB3A
Ah, but the very lack of those conditions is one of the most common motivations for using Morse code, and why it has lingered in the world of communications for more than a century.
1) Morse requires much less bandwidth, power, and probably the simplest transmitter and receiver technology ever devised.
2) You can send morse traffic through very poor signal to noise ratios which you could not use for speech.
3) You can also send morse code identification underneath someone's voice message. It is still used for automatic identification of VHF repeaters for this reason.
Now from an information theory perspective, morse code is not ideal. There are ways of sending data with error correction coding which may be able to squeak through a poorer s/n situation better than an intelligent Morse receiver. But the processing required to do so is not small.
The beauty of Morse code is its simplicity, its durability in poor signal conditions, and its efficiency. Think about that the next time your call drops offline...
DE AB3A
It doesn't matter WHY they say it, they pay his salary, he either listens or goes elsewhere.
Actually, it does matter. Most western societies consider colleges and universities to be places where the exchange of ideas should be paramount. Any censorship in this regard should be cause for great concern.
Many are pointing out that this guy was not a professor, so what's the big deal? The answer is that this was in connection to a discussion about IP law. If they can't discuss the specifics of the applications of technology, then what are they there for? Shall we wait for an exalted professor to get chastised for saying the same thing before we get worked up over this?
No, this is not good news...