Except that you want the external temperatures to be sufficient to get water to condense, and you want it to boil when it's placed next to the CPU.
Therefore, you'd probably want to set the boiling point somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees C, or (referring to that same page) air pressure of about 10% of one standard atmosphere. It should be quite possible to generate this by building a heat pipe, putting some water in it, heating one end until the pipe is filled with steam, and then capping the end without letting things cool down and having air back in there.
Of course, doing that without getting seriously scalded is going to be very difficult, and you'll need to work out the pressure equations for what the pressure will be inside the heat pipe while the whole thing is in operation - it'd be a shame to have your pipe stop its cooling properties once the CPU boils off enough water.
http://www.house.gov/writerep/ lets anyone find out who the US congressional representative is for a given area. However, in densely populated areas, you'll first need the complete Zip+4 postal code.
For posting that; the law in the US is indeed this bizarre and the more people that realize it, the better. (That is: it is illegal to download an mp3 of a song you own; not because it's morally wrong, but because the law in the US really is that insane)
How hard would it be to add an affirmative defense into the copyright laws to make it legal to download re-encoded versions of songs you already own, and to provide immunity for those who provide encoded versions of songs so long as they do due diligence to make sure the downloader has a legal copy of the song?
I seem to remember that there was some talk by a few representatives of introducing such a bill back when the whole mp3.com case was going on, but I haven't heard anything about that since then. (Since mp3.com has been absorbed into the music cartel and no one else seems willing to try their business model, I suppose I can understand why no one in power would care much these days)
Of course, they stretch the bounds of free/libre a slight bit more than some people by allowing, e.g., povray in.
The povray license doesn't let you distribute a modified/fixed version, nor does it let you distribute compiled unix binaries without a case-by-case review. (So no povray in Debian, since not needing a specific-to-Debian agreement is part of the conditions for qualifying software as free) This isn't really the fault of the povray team, and they claim that the license will get better with v4, but at the moment the license is in many respects similar to qmail or pine.
The 25 kB/s figure is the read time; the write time is 100 times faster than that.
So accounting for the correction in the other post, it would take 13 days to read (as much data as) a DVD, but only 13% of one day to write one. (a bit over 3 hours)
13 days to read a DVD's worth of data is a bit problematic.
You'd like to think so, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, this is almost the same defense mp3.com used (with their mymp3 service). And they lost, badly enough to wipe them out.
Yes, it flies in the face of reason, but sometimes the law is just that stupid; in this case it mattered which CD had been ripped to produce the mp3, as though the bits remembered who they belonged to.
Basic PNG can store images with up to 48 bits of depth without a problem, and the basic compression algorithm is what's used in gz - it's deliberately patent-unencumbered.
Also, the statements of some slimy money-grubbers to the contrary, the jpeg compression scheme is patent-unencumbered as well, and the JNG format (one of the PNG family) allows 12 bits per channel per pixel.
See the technical specs on libpng.org for more details.
However much I might disagree with ESR's grandstanding over the whole Halloween documents thing, he was clearly acting as a journalist, and the Supreme Court has said some very strong things about the freedom of jounalists to publish, most recently in the 1999 case BARTNICKI v. VOPPER. (a.k.a. US v. VOPPER)
In that case, a jounalist revealed the content of an intercepted cellphone telephone call recorded by an unknown person. Clearly, this is illegally obtained information, at least as illegal as trade secret violations. The USSC upheld this disclosure and explicitly threw out civil liability against the journalist.
As for the subpoena to surrender the source, that would depend (I assume) on what state-by-state journalist shield laws exist in whichever state attempts to assert jurisdiction.
And no, IANAL either, but the Supreme Court decision is pretty definitive.
Don't believe the common image of the state as a toxic hellhole - that's just the view from NYC (from NYC, you look out onto Newark and Jersey City, so I can understand the confusion). Most of the state is gorgeous, and the real estate prices, while not nearly the deal that they are in some parts of the midwest, are sane.
There's plenty of work as you get closer to New York, especially if you're at all inclined to work in financial or biotech places. (The New Brunswick-Princeton corridor is good too)
As you get closer to Philadelphia, the places that are hiring techs tend more towards regional offices of large corporations. (It's also my impression that there's a good deal of embedded stuff that people aren't allowed to talk about going on in Burlington and Atlantic counties) If you don't mind suburbia, I keep hearing that the Rt. 202 corridor NW from Philadelphia is a reasonably warm tech spot. (And I suppose I should point you at the local job website that found me my job)
If you head further south, into Delaware, you get companies that are all feeding off of subsidiary businesses surrounding the great DuPont, (or weasel businesses playing shell games with Delaware's loose corporate laws) and sales-tax-free shopping too.
I understand that there's tech. stuff both further north and further south, but what I've heard about both the NC (Research Triangle) and Boston area job markets is not encouraging.
Blame the UI on this one. Not some draconian legal team.
Ah, but whatever "technological measures" that "control access" that the UI exposes to me, the user, are under the DMCA illegal to circumvent.
Blame the law
(Yes, this example is contrived and silly, but the law says that I'm not allowed to use my own reasonable discretion as to which measures that prevent access are UI bugs and which are illegal-to-circumvent copy protection measures - remember that at one time Microsoft claimed that opening a self-extracting.EXE in winzip was a DMCA violation)
Except that in a death penalty case, the prosecutor can eliminate anyone who says "I don't support the death penalty" for cause.
This is different than eliminating a juror because you think they wouldn't be overly sympathetic to your viewpoint, or than eliminating a juror because you really wanted to stack the jury with fathers with daughters; those are peremptory challenges and each side has a limited number. On those types of challenges, there is a bit of a balance.
However, there is no limit on eliminating jurors for cause - the prosecution can hunt through the entire jury pool to find candidates who do not categorically oppose the death penalty.
If you just have a human person speak all the different phonetic sounds shouldn't it be a simple matter of stringing together those sounds in a relatively seemless way?
No. For the complete answer take an introductory linguistics course and pester the professor.
Short answer: speech doesn't work that way. When you cut phonemes away from the surrounding ones, they no longer sound like speech and you can't string them back together - the result isn't heard as speech at all, but a bunch of random chirps and vowel sounds.
This is also part of why speech to text is so hard; the sound graph of, for example,/k/ looks completely different depending on what other phonemes are in the same syllable. (and so speech to text can't really match at the level of phoneme very well, and has to back off matches to the syllable level or longer) Sounds which we interpret as "identical" when used in speech look completely different when you plot out the frequencies involved (or take a look at the data). About the only phonemes which can be cut-and-pasted in isolation are vowels, and only the middle parts of long vowel sounds do that particularly well.
It frustrates your intuition, but the initial and final sounds of "cook" are not the same to some sound-sensing device that isn't connected to the human brain's special speech processors. That's because the human brain processes speech-like sound so that you hear as similar those sounds which require similar positions of the tongue, mouth, and other organs humans speak with. There's also noise correction in there like you wouldn't believe, which is how you can still understand stilted Hawking-like text to speech.
I suppose that the ultimate text to speech machine would run an intense physical simulation of air being forced over human vocal chords and through a human mouth with a tongue moving just right for each word, but:
the processing time would be, to put it mildly, massive
Doing the motion capture for that would be difficult and possibly quite painful
You'd still have the issue of pronouncing words within the context of a sentence
The post pointing to zdnet forums. Note that it is on the ZDNet forums that this format code first appeared - I find it most odd that Wired chose not to mention that. [Nov. 11]
I'm assuming that you have no issue with Bugtraq's posting of the initial advisory from Andreas Sandblad on the 6th. Now, the code that was posted on the 14th (over a week later) that is causing all this ruckus was cut-and-pasted from a discussion going on on ZDNet forums. In other words, those that would do harm already had the code.
I'll grant you that posting it to Bugtraq probably doesn't add all that much information for the "good guys" (except that the javascript in the "format a:" version is simpler to read), but it has the added benefit of getting someone like Wired to make a big stink out of the whole affair. The publicity is important as a way of getting the bug fixed. Security bugs are viewed by Microsoft (and anyone in the consumer software industry) as PR problems - posting this to Bugtraq doesn't make the bug any worse for users of Microsoft's systems (since the kiddies already have it), but does make it much worse for Microsoft. It's much harder to spin away a bug when live, functioning exploit code is staring you in the face.
Posting to usenet seems to work well, especially if it's in one of the groups that are constantly full of flames.
Just pick a few flamewars in alt.scientology, or comp.lang.basic.visual (or whatever the vb group is), and join in with something that's basically a repeat of what someone else just said, only with worse grammar and spelling.
Even if you somehow miss the regular spam email harvesters, if you piss off enough people, they'll sign you up to all the spam lists they can find. Let them do your work for you.
Most of the time, with a hammer, you're not supposed to care that some hammers have a wooden handle with a metal bit on top or that some are all metal, or metal and graphite, etc. Sometimes, however, it becomes very relevant (say if for some reason the head of your hammer is touching high voltage lines).
You're also not supposed to need to remember that with many hammers the metal head is held onto the wooden handle with glue and friction, and that on an old hammer the head can come if you swing it too hard.
As a wooden hammer handle starts to break, it's also suddenly very relevant how the grain of the wood goes along the handle.
A hammer is an abstraction of the pieces that make it up, just as a high level programming concept is an abstraction of the machine actions that implement it.
Xerox, when it was first getting started, had the same problem with getting offices to install and pay for copy machines, so they came up with a scheme of installing machines that tracked how many copies were made for free, with a bill at the end of the month at some cheap rate per copy. Of course, once people got used to how convenient they were, they started using the copier like crazy, and the businesses quickly bought machines that they weren't billed for at the end of the month.
I wonder if the PVR folks can't have a free unit that is somehow metered, so that with a little bit of use people will soon realize that it's cheaper to buy the unit outright, and will do so.
You're confusing three (at least) different things. The nondocumentation of security fixes has to do with the DMCA, which behemoth I'm not even going to get into. Nor was I talking about the encryption export controls.
What I was talking about was the implications of the general US economic embargoes against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria, and Libya. Even with the relaxation of encryption regulations, you still need to watch what gets sent to those countries.
Now, I hate to spoil a good session of "you're wrong" / "No, you're wrong" with actual references, but here goes:
In the Encryption export FAQ, several questions specifically mention how you're allowed to export encryption under various conditions unless it's going to one of those countries I named above.
Now, to show that my speculation about "reason to believe that a piece of software was going to Iran" bit in my initial post wasn't baseless paranoia, here's a quote from an informational memo from the Office of Foreign Assets Control about exports to Iran:
In general, a person may not export from the U.S. any goods, technology or services, if that person knows or has reason to know such items are intended specifically for supply, transshipment or reexportation to Iran. Further, such exportation is prohibited if the exporter knows or has reason to know the U.S. items are intended specifically for use in the production of, for commingling with, or for incorporation into goods, technology or services to be directly or indirectly supplied, transshipped or reexported exclusively or predominately to Iran or the Government of Iran.
Now, that entire document does seem to apply very specifically to people actually in Iran or agents of the Iranian government, so I'd presumably be off the hook in the scenario I initially considered. However, what happens when someone inside Iran submits a bug report?
The next time you are installing some piece of commercial software that comes with a big old lawyerese EULA, search it for references to these countries. I seem to remember that Netscape's old license even made it illegal for any citizen of these countries to ever install or use their software.
I've actually seen variants of this argument proposed as serious - heck, the US government supports a variant of this argument itself: it is illegal for anyone in a bunch of countries the US has decreed sufficiently bad (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, etc.) to download linux off a US server. Or indeed, for a US citizen to send software of any kind to those regimes or to give it to a citizen of one of those countries.
I sometimes wonder if it would be against the law for me to fix a bug in one of my debian packages reported by a citizen of one of those countries (considering the number of Iranian citizens in the US, not impossible), since at that point I would have direct knowledge that they were using my packages and very likely would gain some material benefit from my fixing the bug. I don't think that's ever come up, but I only maintain a few relatively unused packages.
The only thing I can think of is a set of nice verified references and a varied work history, but those are so often faked, and usually the best way to a varied work history is a tendency to switch jobs frequently - not necessarily a trait you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that you want the external temperatures to be sufficient to get water to condense, and you want it to boil when it's placed next to the CPU.
Therefore, you'd probably want to set the boiling point somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees C, or (referring to that same page) air pressure of about 10% of one standard atmosphere. It should be quite possible to generate this by building a heat pipe, putting some water in it, heating one end until the pipe is filled with steam, and then capping the end without letting things cool down and having air back in there.
Of course, doing that without getting seriously scalded is going to be very difficult, and you'll need to work out the pressure equations for what the pressure will be inside the heat pipe while the whole thing is in operation - it'd be a shame to have your pipe stop its cooling properties once the CPU boils off enough water.
Ugh. Better leave this design to professionals.
You know, some of those old TI tapes make good techno music...
http://www.house.gov/writerep/ lets anyone find out who the US congressional representative is for a given area. However, in densely populated areas, you'll first need the complete Zip+4 postal code.
For posting that; the law in the US is indeed this bizarre and the more people that realize it, the better. (That is: it is illegal to download an mp3 of a song you own; not because it's morally wrong, but because the law in the US really is that insane)
How hard would it be to add an affirmative defense into the copyright laws to make it legal to download re-encoded versions of songs you already own, and to provide immunity for those who provide encoded versions of songs so long as they do due diligence to make sure the downloader has a legal copy of the song?
I seem to remember that there was some talk by a few representatives of introducing such a bill back when the whole mp3.com case was going on, but I haven't heard anything about that since then. (Since mp3.com has been absorbed into the music cartel and no one else seems willing to try their business model, I suppose I can understand why no one in power would care much these days)
Of course, they stretch the bounds of free/libre a slight bit more than some people by allowing, e.g., povray in.
The povray license doesn't let you distribute a modified/fixed version, nor does it let you distribute compiled unix binaries without a case-by-case review. (So no povray in Debian, since not needing a specific-to-Debian agreement is part of the conditions for qualifying software as free) This isn't really the fault of the povray team, and they claim that the license will get better with v4, but at the moment the license is in many respects similar to qmail or pine.
"Protocol". Repeat it with me:
P R O T O C O L
Note the lack of any "a".
The 25 kB/s figure is the read time; the write time is 100 times faster than that.
So accounting for the correction in the other post, it would take 13 days to read (as much data as) a DVD, but only 13% of one day to write one. (a bit over 3 hours)
13 days to read a DVD's worth of data is a bit problematic.
You'd like to think so, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, this is almost the same defense mp3.com used (with their mymp3 service). And they lost, badly enough to wipe them out.
Yes, it flies in the face of reason, but sometimes the law is just that stupid; in this case it mattered which CD had been ripped to produce the mp3, as though the bits remembered who they belonged to.
Basic PNG can store images with up to 48 bits of depth without a problem, and the basic compression algorithm is what's used in gz - it's deliberately patent-unencumbered.
Also, the statements of some slimy money-grubbers to the contrary, the jpeg compression scheme is patent-unencumbered as well, and the JNG format (one of the PNG family) allows 12 bits per channel per pixel.
See the technical specs on libpng.org for more details.
However much I might disagree with ESR's grandstanding over the whole Halloween documents thing, he was clearly acting as a journalist, and the Supreme Court has said some very strong things about the freedom of jounalists to publish, most recently in the 1999 case BARTNICKI v. VOPPER. (a.k.a. US v. VOPPER)
c ourt=US&navby=case&vol=000&invol=99-16 87.
In that case, a jounalist revealed the content of an intercepted cellphone telephone call recorded by an unknown person. Clearly, this is illegally obtained information, at least as illegal as trade secret violations. The USSC upheld this disclosure and explicitly threw out civil liability against the journalist.
Findlaw reference: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?
As for the subpoena to surrender the source, that would depend (I assume) on what state-by-state journalist shield laws exist in whichever state attempts to assert jurisdiction.
And no, IANAL either, but the Supreme Court decision is pretty definitive.
Well have you considered New Jersey?
Don't believe the common image of the state as a toxic hellhole - that's just the view from NYC (from NYC, you look out onto Newark and Jersey City, so I can understand the confusion). Most of the state is gorgeous, and the real estate prices, while not nearly the deal that they are in some parts of the midwest, are sane.
There's plenty of work as you get closer to New York, especially if you're at all inclined to work in financial or biotech places. (The New Brunswick-Princeton corridor is good too)
As you get closer to Philadelphia, the places that are hiring techs tend more towards regional offices of large corporations. (It's also my impression that there's a good deal of embedded stuff that people aren't allowed to talk about going on in Burlington and Atlantic counties) If you don't mind suburbia, I keep hearing that the Rt. 202 corridor NW from Philadelphia is a reasonably warm tech spot. (And I suppose I should point you at the local job website that found me my job)
If you head further south, into Delaware, you get companies that are all feeding off of subsidiary businesses surrounding the great DuPont, (or weasel businesses playing shell games with Delaware's loose corporate laws) and sales-tax-free shopping too.
I understand that there's tech. stuff both further north and further south, but what I've heard about both the NC (Research Triangle) and Boston area job markets is not encouraging.
As a lifelong Daniel Martin, I know how it is.
So what you're saying is that you're not my roommate from junior year?
Blame the law
(Yes, this example is contrived and silly, but the law says that I'm not allowed to use my own reasonable discretion as to which measures that prevent access are UI bugs and which are illegal-to-circumvent copy protection measures - remember that at one time Microsoft claimed that opening a self-extracting
Except that in a death penalty case, the prosecutor can eliminate anyone who says "I don't support the death penalty" for cause.
This is different than eliminating a juror because you think they wouldn't be overly sympathetic to your viewpoint, or than eliminating a juror because you really wanted to stack the jury with fathers with daughters; those are peremptory challenges and each side has a limited number. On those types of challenges, there is a bit of a balance.
However, there is no limit on eliminating jurors for cause - the prosecution can hunt through the entire jury pool to find candidates who do not categorically oppose the death penalty.
No. For the complete answer take an introductory linguistics course and pester the professor.
Short answer: speech doesn't work that way. When you cut phonemes away from the surrounding ones, they no longer sound like speech and you can't string them back together - the result isn't heard as speech at all, but a bunch of random chirps and vowel sounds.
This is also part of why speech to text is so hard; the sound graph of, for example, /k/ looks completely different depending on what other phonemes are in the same syllable. (and so speech to text can't really match at the level of phoneme very well, and has to back off matches to the syllable level or longer) Sounds which we interpret as "identical" when used in speech look completely different when you plot out the frequencies involved (or take a look at the data). About the only phonemes which can be cut-and-pasted in isolation are vowels, and only the middle parts of long vowel sounds do that particularly well.
It frustrates your intuition, but the initial and final sounds of "cook" are not the same to some sound-sensing device that isn't connected to the human brain's special speech processors. That's because the human brain processes speech-like sound so that you hear as similar those sounds which require similar positions of the tongue, mouth, and other organs humans speak with. There's also noise correction in there like you wouldn't believe, which is how you can still understand stilted Hawking-like text to speech.
I suppose that the ultimate text to speech machine would run an intense physical simulation of air being forced over human vocal chords and through a human mouth with a tongue moving just right for each word, but:
corvi42 wrote:
Then that's easy to fix: (all links to the neohapsis archive, since it's just nicer to look at than securityfocus)
One especially noteworthy point: Microsoft was informed of the bug on October 4th.
So:
My opinion? A wired writer needed a story.
I'm assuming that you have no issue with Bugtraq's posting of the initial advisory from Andreas Sandblad on the 6th. Now, the code that was posted on the 14th (over a week later) that is causing all this ruckus was cut-and-pasted from a discussion going on on ZDNet forums. In other words, those that would do harm already had the code.
I'll grant you that posting it to Bugtraq probably doesn't add all that much information for the "good guys" (except that the javascript in the "format a:" version is simpler to read), but it has the added benefit of getting someone like Wired to make a big stink out of the whole affair. The publicity is important as a way of getting the bug fixed. Security bugs are viewed by Microsoft (and anyone in the consumer software industry) as PR problems - posting this to Bugtraq doesn't make the bug any worse for users of Microsoft's systems (since the kiddies already have it), but does make it much worse for Microsoft. It's much harder to spin away a bug when live, functioning exploit code is staring you in the face.
Low amplitude, not low frequency.
Posting to usenet seems to work well, especially if it's in one of the groups that are constantly full of flames.
Just pick a few flamewars in alt.scientology, or comp.lang.basic.visual (or whatever the vb group is), and join in with something that's basically a repeat of what someone else just said, only with worse grammar and spelling.
Even if you somehow miss the regular spam email harvesters, if you piss off enough people, they'll sign you up to all the spam lists they can find. Let them do your work for you.
Most of the time, with a hammer, you're not supposed to care that some hammers have a wooden handle with a metal bit on top or that some are all metal, or metal and graphite, etc. Sometimes, however, it becomes very relevant (say if for some reason the head of your hammer is touching high voltage lines).
You're also not supposed to need to remember that with many hammers the metal head is held onto the wooden handle with glue and friction, and that on an old hammer the head can come if you swing it too hard.
As a wooden hammer handle starts to break, it's also suddenly very relevant how the grain of the wood goes along the handle.
A hammer is an abstraction of the pieces that make it up, just as a high level programming concept is an abstraction of the machine actions that implement it.
Xerox, when it was first getting started, had the same problem with getting offices to install and pay for copy machines, so they came up with a scheme of installing machines that tracked how many copies were made for free, with a bill at the end of the month at some cheap rate per copy. Of course, once people got used to how convenient they were, they started using the copier like crazy, and the businesses quickly bought machines that they weren't billed for at the end of the month.
I wonder if the PVR folks can't have a free unit that is somehow metered, so that with a little bit of use people will soon realize that it's cheaper to buy the unit outright, and will do so.
You're confusing three (at least) different things. The nondocumentation of security fixes has to do with the DMCA, which behemoth I'm not even going to get into. Nor was I talking about the encryption export controls.
What I was talking about was the implications of the general US economic embargoes against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria, and Libya. Even with the relaxation of encryption regulations, you still need to watch what gets sent to those countries.
Now, I hate to spoil a good session of "you're wrong" / "No, you're wrong" with actual references, but here goes:
In the general export FAQ there's a question about whether certain embargoes (against Iran, Syria, and the Sudan) have been lifted. (Short answer: they haven't been)
In the Encryption export FAQ, several questions specifically mention how you're allowed to export encryption under various conditions unless it's going to one of those countries I named above.
Now, to show that my speculation about "reason to believe that a piece of software was going to Iran" bit in my initial post wasn't baseless paranoia, here's a quote from an informational memo from the Office of Foreign Assets Control about exports to Iran:
In general, a person may not export from the U.S. any goods,
technology or services, if that person knows or has reason to know
such items are intended specifically for supply, transshipment or
reexportation to Iran. Further, such exportation is prohibited if
the exporter knows or has reason to know the U.S. items are
intended specifically for use in the production of, for commingling
with, or for incorporation into goods, technology or services to be
directly or indirectly supplied, transshipped or reexported
exclusively or predominately to Iran or the Government of Iran.
Now, that entire document does seem to apply very specifically to people actually in Iran or agents of the Iranian government, so I'd presumably be off the hook in the scenario I initially considered. However, what happens when someone inside Iran submits a bug report?
The next time you are installing some piece of commercial software that comes with a big old lawyerese EULA, search it for references to these countries. I seem to remember that Netscape's old license even made it illegal for any citizen of these countries to ever install or use their software.
I've actually seen variants of this argument proposed as serious - heck, the US government supports a variant of this argument itself: it is illegal for anyone in a bunch of countries the US has decreed sufficiently bad (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, etc.) to download linux off a US server. Or indeed, for a US citizen to send software of any kind to those regimes or to give it to a citizen of one of those countries.
I sometimes wonder if it would be against the law for me to fix a bug in one of my debian packages reported by a citizen of one of those countries (considering the number of Iranian citizens in the US, not impossible), since at that point I would have direct knowledge that they were using my packages and very likely would gain some material benefit from my fixing the bug. I don't think that's ever come up, but I only maintain a few relatively unused packages.
How on earth do you test for "ability to adapt"?
The only thing I can think of is a set of nice verified references and a varied work history, but those are so often faked, and usually the best way to a varied work history is a tendency to switch jobs frequently - not necessarily a trait you want.
Every time there's a silly patent story here on slashdot, this comment (or close variations of it) get made. Over, and over, and over.
Please, please start marking this stuff redundant. It was possibly funny once. Maybe. It's over now.