In an attempt to figure out how statistically significant the article's 6-in-a-million chance of the asteroid hitting earth is, exactly, I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million. So was this asteroid statistically significant? Turn to Mark Twain for that one.
The whole "on collision course" phrasing thing was, in my opinion, poor choice of a headline, but news is a product just like any other media item, and sensationalism sells.
Yeah, this is pretty offtopic, but whatever. My complaint is with the gas stations that have signs loudly saying "Pay at the pump!" and then don't have any options for debit card/credit card payments, but rather a generic bank machine so that you can take out money, to pay inside. I almost laughed in the cashier's face when he told me that story...talk about a) inconvenient and b) expensive (a $2 bank fee is one thing when I'm withdrawing $60-100, it's quite another when I only need $20 to pay for gas...)
Oops. Good point...so basically the "scratch cards" will be the same as existing phone cards. I was thinking they'd be actually integrated into the phone in some way. Weird name for a phone card by the way, and this is the most interesting part of the phone to me...how you buy extra minutes can make or break it.
Customers buy scratch cards in increments of additional talk time of 60, 90 and 120 minutes, according to company officials.
So maybe I don't understand--do you buy another disposable phone or do you buy some sort of "scratch card" to get extra minutes? If you buy some card, how long til someone figures out how to engineer a similar card? I did read the whole article and didn't see any further details about these cards.
Another factor delayed by censorship of research is semi-public knowledge, among academics, that such terrorist methods/technologies exist, which cuts back on the demand for defenses against them. A small concern but a concern nonetheless.
There are consequences when you move from meatspace to cyberspace, and that means that direct analogies are inadequate. - Wind_Walker, one post up
You don't seem to have a problem making these analogies, but whenever someone else does, they're completely irrelevant. Nevermind that in "meatspace", stealing something means someone actually loses something of value.
Bottom line: yes, I'd like people to be ignorant of how to (for instance) engineer aerosol Ebola in their basements.
As nice a fantasy as this is, the reality is that I can already download The Anarchist's Cookbook to learn about conventional terrorist tactics. It's almost a certainty that biological terrorist tactics will similarly be available in the near future--and the dangerous-type people you're trying to keep it away from are the first people that will get past the ways you have of trying to keep them ignorant. You can't defeat the flow of information. Here's where the question lies--do you try, by keeping research with potential terrorist applications out of scientific journals? I'll let others debate that for now, since I don't have the answer, or a solid opinion for that matter.
DeCSS already doesn't care about region encoding. Not to mention it is the right of the MPAA, or anyone else to say who can use what DVD where. If it wasn't their right to do that, then I have the right to modify the linux kernel, and sell it, without distributing the source.
This analogy to the Linux kernel doesn't make sense to me. You say it is the right of the MPAA to say where I can play the DVD I purchased (non-commercial, personal usage of a purchased product), and then you say that this same right is what makes selling slightly modified code illegal (commercial, public sale of a free-as-in-beer product).
These people don't want some movies viewable in Japan, and some Japanese movies viewable here. If you bought a Japanese movie, too bad for you, you should have read the license... Oh yeah, you did, and you still bought it, thumbing your nose at the owner of the property.
I don't buy this either. If I bought a Japanese movie, and I want to watch it, then "too bad for me"...what? One would think that I AM the "property owner"...at least as applies to viewing it...what difference should it make where I choose to view it?
Just because you don't like what they are doing with their IP doesn't mean you have the right to steal it. It also doesn't make any efforts to aid in this theft honorable.
"Theft" is not an appropriate term for viewing what I lawfully purchased (by the laws of the country of purchase). If I buy firecrackers in a state in which they are legal and transport them over state lines to a state where they are illegal, does that constitute "theft"? It may be breaking another law, but your legal terms need revision. And that's where the muddying of the water occurs--what Perens was trying to demonstrate was the idiocy of the DMCA, and calling his demonstration "theft" is just trying to turn the breaking of a bad law into a justifiable crime.
Oops, I did miss that in your post. Sorry. But the point is there's still ways around the drive's security, and that doesn't even deal with the issue of hacks that don't necessarily have to "write" to the drive to steal data.
That's not what I meant--the read/write head will still be used by users to write changes in their preferences. Example: any site that lets you change your login password.
It seems like this would be fairly useful for sites that just serve content, and are completely static to the typical user--but there aren't too many of those. Most sites in real life are still going to have databases that will be using the "unsecured" read/write head (for example, when a user changes preferences), and will still be hackable...definitely an innovative solution to the problem though.
What exactly did he lie about, is my question. Before looking at Yahoo's take on it, I looked at our statistics for the year we were #1--nothing really surprised me except perhaps the support availability, which to me is not so massive an issue that it causes a university to go from #1 in the nation to off the polls...
Oh God, someone else remembers that great day...wonder if you've seen the video commemorating the prank...it should still be around on CWRUnet. The look on his face was PRICELESS. I still remember him laughing.
Funny, but you're closer to the truth than you might realize. Not for actual lectures though. CWRU uses the "blackboard" system to hold after-hour chats that are like recitations; one of my classes last fall had one. It was very helpful, and though I can't say videoconfrencing would have helped it a great deal, I suppose seeing my professor talk in response to our typed questions might have been useful. He certainly could have responded faster had this been the case. I'm sure you'll see lots more uses come this fall.
When I was on campus last semester, I had a fiberoptic cable running directly into my computer, as did most CWRU students. Only those with laptops or special needs use ethernet transceivers.
They've already had some of this--I remember when a prank utilizing the moving chalkboards was to be pulled in the chemistry building...it never worked. I think what they have to be more worried about is the chairs in Rockefeller 301 and their probability of being turned backwards on a given morning...
Not all of us were "rejects". I suspect that a lot of CWRU students got accepted to other schools but couldn't pay their high tuition. CWRU's scholarships are very competitive. However if they keep ramping up tuition at these rates, they're going to become just as expensive as peer institutions in the University Athletic Association, and that is when students are going to start expecting more.
Do your homework. We have an OC-3 type pipe to the outside internet, though I don't even think the intended value of GigE was for outside internet sites--the purpose is for oncampus connections and connections to other Internet 2 universities. Just read above a little bit for further explanation, as it's already been said.
You're exactly right, but the point is that with the increased bandwidth, you can be downloading more streams of 6 k/s songs on kazaa. So you won't get a single song faster but you can still utilize that bandwidth. There will always be a way to utilize the excess bandwidth, trust me. Of course, before too much longer we're going to start hitting the PCI bandwidth threshold, but we haven't hit it yet, not even with gigabit ethernet.
It's not so much the fiber that's a big deal as it is the "gigabit ethernet" part. CWRU had fiberoptic for awhile as well, but it was running 155 MBPS ATM switches (and ATM never took off as it was supposed to). What are the backbone switches at George Washington?
Slashdot Mirror
In an attempt to figure out how statistically significant the article's 6-in-a-million chance of the asteroid hitting earth is, exactly, I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million. So was this asteroid statistically significant? Turn to Mark Twain for that one.
The whole "on collision course" phrasing thing was, in my opinion, poor choice of a headline, but news is a product just like any other media item, and sensationalism sells.
But is the lost hard disk space worth the compromise? Personally I opt for LAME VBR.
Yeah, this is pretty offtopic, but whatever. My complaint is with the gas stations that have signs loudly saying "Pay at the pump!" and then don't have any options for debit card/credit card payments, but rather a generic bank machine so that you can take out money, to pay inside. I almost laughed in the cashier's face when he told me that story...talk about a) inconvenient and b) expensive (a $2 bank fee is one thing when I'm withdrawing $60-100, it's quite another when I only need $20 to pay for gas...)
Oops. Good point...so basically the "scratch cards" will be the same as existing phone cards. I was thinking they'd be actually integrated into the phone in some way. Weird name for a phone card by the way, and this is the most interesting part of the phone to me...how you buy extra minutes can make or break it.
Another factor delayed by censorship of research is semi-public knowledge, among academics, that such terrorist methods/technologies exist, which cuts back on the demand for defenses against them. A small concern but a concern nonetheless.
It'll be interesting to see them use the defense that "it was the moon rock gnomes!" ...can't resist this one.
1. Steal moon rocks.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Oops, I did miss that in your post. Sorry. But the point is there's still ways around the drive's security, and that doesn't even deal with the issue of hacks that don't necessarily have to "write" to the drive to steal data.
That's not what I meant--the read/write head will still be used by users to write changes in their preferences. Example: any site that lets you change your login password.
It seems like this would be fairly useful for sites that just serve content, and are completely static to the typical user--but there aren't too many of those. Most sites in real life are still going to have databases that will be using the "unsecured" read/write head (for example, when a user changes preferences), and will still be hackable...definitely an innovative solution to the problem though.
What exactly did he lie about, is my question. Before looking at Yahoo's take on it, I looked at our statistics for the year we were #1--nothing really surprised me except perhaps the support availability, which to me is not so massive an issue that it causes a university to go from #1 in the nation to off the polls...
Oh God, someone else remembers that great day...wonder if you've seen the video commemorating the prank...it should still be around on CWRUnet. The look on his face was PRICELESS. I still remember him laughing.
Return it, just like I'm going to do with my ATM card. They give it to you for free and you return it when you leave. Pretty simple.
Funny, but you're closer to the truth than you might realize. Not for actual lectures though. CWRU uses the "blackboard" system to hold after-hour chats that are like recitations; one of my classes last fall had one. It was very helpful, and though I can't say videoconfrencing would have helped it a great deal, I suppose seeing my professor talk in response to our typed questions might have been useful. He certainly could have responded faster had this been the case. I'm sure you'll see lots more uses come this fall.
When I was on campus last semester, I had a fiberoptic cable running directly into my computer, as did most CWRU students. Only those with laptops or special needs use ethernet transceivers.
They've already had some of this--I remember when a prank utilizing the moving chalkboards was to be pulled in the chemistry building...it never worked. I think what they have to be more worried about is the chairs in Rockefeller 301 and their probability of being turned backwards on a given morning...
Not all of us were "rejects". I suspect that a lot of CWRU students got accepted to other schools but couldn't pay their high tuition. CWRU's scholarships are very competitive. However if they keep ramping up tuition at these rates, they're going to become just as expensive as peer institutions in the University Athletic Association, and that is when students are going to start expecting more.
Do your homework. We have an OC-3 type pipe to the outside internet, though I don't even think the intended value of GigE was for outside internet sites--the purpose is for oncampus connections and connections to other Internet 2 universities. Just read above a little bit for further explanation, as it's already been said.
You know technically CWRU combined their EE and CS departments so as not to lose said accreditation...
Heh heh, I get the same feeling of never leaving CWRU, Braden...I may be here for 6 years if I finish out my co-op (2 terms) and BS/MS...
:)
But hey, more college is never a bad thing when you can get someone else to pay for it
You're exactly right, but the point is that with the increased bandwidth, you can be downloading more streams of 6 k/s songs on kazaa. So you won't get a single song faster but you can still utilize that bandwidth. There will always be a way to utilize the excess bandwidth, trust me. Of course, before too much longer we're going to start hitting the PCI bandwidth threshold, but we haven't hit it yet, not even with gigabit ethernet.
It's not so much the fiber that's a big deal as it is the "gigabit ethernet" part. CWRU had fiberoptic for awhile as well, but it was running 155 MBPS ATM switches (and ATM never took off as it was supposed to). What are the backbone switches at George Washington?