It's fine grained control of privelege. This is to the basic unix concept of running as a uid and setuid what ACLs are to normal unix filesystem permissions. For a really simplistic example - with this you could run your apache binary with literally zero priveleges, like "nobody" (from start to finish, no run as root then drop privs), and the explicitly enable it to have root-like privs only for the one system call it uses to listen to port 80.
Re:segway vs. legway
on
Lego Segway
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
BSD is for leftover hippies that never liked AT&T, Linux is for free-thinking modern unix fans.
I'm sure that a high percentage is spontaneous and opportunistic, but still I believe that those most likely to commit a gun crime and get away with it won't bein the database to begin with. If you're likely to ever have your gun tracked, you probably kinda have an idea you're that type of person, and probably are likely to buy something that doesn't get recorded. My point is that you shouldn't restrict privacy or rights unless you can really well prove that there's a good reason, and that's not the case here.
Anyways, gun deaths will always occur, and there's no silver bullet for tracking down the perps. Gun control has never proven effective and lowering the number of shootings or increasing anyone's safety. As pointed out in another reply (and I've read this many times from many sources, none of which was Thatcher) concealed carry laws have been proven to reduce violent crime. Another corollary thought is this: Gun control advocates (who think that for the most part Police should be the ones with guns protecting us, rather than us having guns and protecting ourselves) fail to realize that police are statistically a very very poor defense against armed assailants. Their primary role is to show up after the fact, make a report, and investigate the crime - there's not enough of them to be there when it happens. If you want actual protection from armed assailants, you have to arm yourself, no two ways about it.
That all being said, another good alternative to widespread concealed carry laws and private gun ownership would be to dump money into the further development and commercialization (for the public's use) of new high-tech non-lethal defense mechanisms. A really good example that comes is the Tetanizing Beam Weapon (http://www.hsvt.org/main.html). These guys page has been around forever and I've yet to hear of the product in use, so perhaps it's all smoke. But it sounds scientifcally sound and possible, and it's a nonlethal alternative to a gun.
As stated in other responses, the main problem is that the fingerprint is likely to change over the course of the gun's life. Even supposing someone can come up with a better model for fingerprinting that can account for this, the next problem is that if fingerprinting were made to work, criminals would get their barrels custom made by a freind who's a gunsmith. They wouldn't be in the database.
If you think you can do it, by all means do us the favor of proving it - make it your life's work and write the tool. I'm only being half sarcastic, it would be wonderful if someone actually accomplished it and we'd all be in your debt.
However, on a realistic level, I don't think it's really possible to write a generic code audit engine that fixes the problem, or even makes it go away. I think it more likely that the tool would just cause coders to care less about security because it's supposedly handled by the tool - they'll forget about or never learn about good security practices - and their lack of care will more than make up for the obvious holes plugged by the automaton.
To go out on a controversial simile here - this seems very much like the promise of OO languages and methodologies to cure the software of the world of crappy coding pratices. What it has brought us is 10 times the programmers, writing 10 times as much code 10 times sloppier. It's still riddled with bugs, and it's 10 times more bloated. The really good coders that did it "right" were doing it right before OO became popular and still code circles around your average corporate java or c++ coder. In my eyes and opinion, the OO revolution has decreased rather than increased the overall quality and design of the world's source code taken as a whole.
In both cases, I feel the right answer is that coders need to be taught better, and companies need to be more choosy about the coders they employ and the work they consider acceptable from these people.
Ok, I've gone and dug up some data. PM was there in 1.1 in some form or other. OS/2 was branded as "Microsoft OS/2" at least to version 1.1, and Microsoft was involved up to 1.3. Depending on who you believe Microsoft only worke don the GUI, or participated in the kernel as well. In either case when they split Microsoft did retain kernel code and used it in NT and 95. Lots of other interesting data too, here comes a cut and paste of data I gathered from an old book I had laying around and some net searching:
"Vijay Mukhi's The 'C' Odyssey OS/2 & PM - Into Infinite Worlds" Tech Publications Pte Ltd First Edition 1992 10, Jalan Besar, #B1-39 Sim Lim Tower, Singapore 0820 ISBN 981-214-012-3
Appears to hav emostly been written in 1990, with a final chapter called "Perspectives 1991", but actually published in '92.
Pg 1, Prologue, 4th paragraph:
"This gap that DOS's eventual demise is going to be filled by is none other than OS/2. The brainchild of Microsoft and IBM. And with backing like that can it go wrong?"
Pg 340, Section 2, 5th paragraph:
"... The PM is a combination of a protection mode multi-tasking OS with the application architecture and user interface of Microsoft Windows, plus a powerful graphics system from IBM. It is this graphics system from IBM that makes the PM far more sophisticated and cleaner than Windows...."
Pg 341, 1st paragraph:
"A hard fact: The PM requires machines that are based on the INTEL 80286 and upwards microprocessors. And it comes with OS/2 version 1.1 and above. Besides, it requires at least 4MB of RAM"
"Microsoft Os/2 Programmer's Reference" Microsoft Press Sep 1, 1990 ISBN 1556153457
http://www.neonatology.org/rgd.cv.html Curricul um Vitae - Raymond Glenn Duncan, M.D.
Invited Lectures, Symposia, and Workshops
"LMI Forth for Microsoft OS/2," presented at the 1987 Rochester Forth Conference, June 12, 1987.
http://www.quasarbbs.net/pido2/home/gamba/ADVOS2 .T XT Appears to be the full text of a book called "Advanced OS/2 Programming" by Microsoft Press, written by the sam Ray Duncan as the above CV link. ISBN 1556150458.
First paragraph of Intro:
"Operating System/2, Microsoft's protected mode operating system for 80286-based and 80386-based microcomputers, provides programmers with a powerful new platform for application design. It also challenges them to assimilate a body of technical information whose size is unprecedented in the microcomputer world. The reference manuals for OS/2 and its extensions (such as the Presentation Manager and LAN Manager) already fill several shelves only a year after the system was first released and the Microsoft or IBM Programmer's Toolkit, along with the necessary development tools and libraries, can devour a sizable fixed disk."
First paragraph of chapter one:
OS/2 is the Microsoft multitasking, virtual memory, single-user operating system for personal computers based on the Intel 80286 and 80386 microprocessors. It is the first software product to be brought to market as a result of the Joint Development Agreement signed by IBM and Microsoft in August 1985.
Shortly down from that, there's a text/graphical table that makes mention of both "MS OS/2 1.0" and "MS OS/2 1.1".
http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2Warp.html Very interesting info, although it itself has no references to back it up. Among it's relevant claims, it says IBM and Microsoft joint ventured OS/2 up to version 1.3, and that Microsoft mainly did GUI work while IBM mainly did kernel work. It also mentions that Windows 3.0 re-used some GUI "elements" from OS/2, and that "The Windows NT kernel was partially based on the OS/2 kernel that they created with IBM, and Windows 95 also borrows heavily from this code.", and "When Windows 95 was released in August, 1995, resellers reported record sales on OS/2, as many people saw how Microsoft's hack of the OS/2 kernel didn't quite cut it for real-world, mission-critical usage."
I only started using OS/2 in the 2.1 days, everything I know about 1.x is what I've read or heard somewhere. I'm pretty sure 1.0 had no GUI at all, and perhaps 1.3 had a very basic GUI similar to Windows 2.x/3.x. It wasn't until OS/2 2.x that they had a real PM as everyone came to know it (Win95-level GUI).
I don't have any references on Microsoft having rights to the early kernels offhand, but I bet I can dredge up something or other, I'll reply back here in hopefully not too long:)
The user makes all the difference. What software you choose to run, and how you choose to configure and audit things. How much care you give to security issues and how much knowledge of basic security you have.
However, if you are competent and security-minded, it is quite easy to make a Linux box extremely secure against all but the most directed and knowledgeable attackers, which are quite rare. If you run Windows, no matter how hard you try you're still gonna be fairly hosed. Some things just can't be fixed reasonably on that platform.
It is based on OS/2 code though. Breifly and somewhat inaccurately - the history goes that IBM and Microsoft were originally jointly developing OS/2 as a next-generation graphical multitasking OS for the PC. I believe version 1.0 of OS/2 was actually called "Microsoft OS/2", but it didn't get much notice. Microsoft and IBM had a falling out - they split up, each retaining the rights to re-use the existing OS/2 code, but only IBM keeping the actual OS/2 name. From at least OS/2 1.3 onwards it was all IBM.
Microsoft used the OS/2 kernel to base NT off of. As late as NT4, and quite likely still in 2k and XP, if you search the binaries in winnt\system32\.... you can still find OS2 error messages embedded deep in some DLLs - so apparently the code is still in use to this day.
I might, just for the record - that IBM released OS/2 2.1 (which had a Win95-level GUI and better-than-NT true protection and multitasking, and Win3.1 application compatibility) before Microsoft ever released Win95 or the first commercial NT. But Microsoft actually beat this released product into the ground with FUD about the upcoming offerings. Sure enough well down the road they did eventually release 95 with a decent GUI, and NT with a half-decent kernel. But at the time of OS/2 2.1, all they had to compete with was Win 3.1.
I migh also add it took until NT4 years later for Microsoft to put a 95-style GUI into their NT kernel, and it took until the recent release of XP before an NT system was considered good enough for home/desktop use to replace the 95 line of products. OS/2 was always a good desktop OS.
A salesman I used to party with back at my old ISP job took me to a few parties a Joe Wright's house, I even did coke with him. Houston, owned a Car Audio store, had to be the same guy. Same time frame too, would have been during 1995. He and his freinds seemed a little shady, but who doesn't in the small business world. Never heard anything about him being involved with any rocket belt, but I guess it was probably a hush thing.
The guy was kinda wierd. He stocked up some sort of vitamin-B supplement in liquid injectable form in his kitchen. He loaded it in a hypo and shot himself with it every morning. Not sure if this was for some kind of medical problem, or he just thought it made him healthy.
And a hearty fuck you to whoever modded me redundant. No shit it's redundant, the point of the post is to bolset the opinion of the parent post. Multiple voices speak stronger than one. Redundant would be if two people both cut-n-pasted an article text or something like that.
My comment was a reply to a reply to a this comment:
Ibiquity's IBOC system Sucks. Plain and simple. Am quality sounds like a 56k rated mp3. The side frequencies are hosed for advertising, and FM is no better, the side frequencies, are again hosed, and the sound quality is NOT CD, it's not even 128k!!! It's like 112! Seriously, the fcc is smoking the reefer. They cannot let this happen to radio.
It's reasonable for me to assume there's some merit to this guy's conclusions that the audio quality is similar to 64-128kbit mp3. I'm doing slashdot a favor just like everyone else here by discussing the issue. I'm not spreading FUD. You need to shut the fuck up. Thanks.
Every device has different standards on what voltage it wants, what connector it uses, how many amps it needs, etc... Power adaptors for various devices can be:
AC or DC, 1-48 V, 50ma - 5A, any of a slew of connectors and polarities.
The intelligent thing to do would be to pick a relatively common denominator, and make all equipment standardize to it (they're all capable of using voltage regulators, many devices in fact already accept a wider range of voltages than advertised).
The ideal would probably be something like 24 VDC on a medium sized cylindrical connector with negative on the outside, positive in the center. You'd buy a universal power source with several of these dongles hanging off that supplies say 2A max to each connector.
A lot fo the above is arbitrary, but the point is that these things have been obvious for a long time, but device manufacturers just don't care, and there's not real standard out there for them to conform to.
On a related note - I've long wanted to see DC power in houses. Of course the utility should still deliver AC the way it always has - but I'd like to see a stepdown to 48VDC near the breaker panel, and have that 48VDC wired to DC outlets all over the house where many of the AC outlets are. Motorized devices (washer/dryer/fridge/ac) and traditional incandescent lights will still need the AC, but MANY of the other devices you plug into the wall all step down to a low DC voltage inside the unit. Your PC, clocks, kitchen appliances, chargers/power adaptors for all those electronic gadgets, etc.
If you had 48VDC on the wall for these things, you'd be far more efficient with a central stepdown in your garage, you'd be safer, and the devices themselves could be smaller and lighter since they just need a small voltage regulator circuit instead of a transformer/rectifier/etc.
When you say tone hearing loss are you talking about the gradual loss of high frequencies that all humans endure as they age, or something else that makes it hard for you to distinguish notes of different pitch from each other?
Congrats on the job offer, I know how tough it is out there, I was out of a job for months at one point.
Any normal person can easily discern the difference between 64k mp3, 128k mp3, and the original CD - especially if they hear the same song from all three in a row. Even with no reference, if you hear a song you know well on 64k mp3, you'll certainly notice that it sounds "different" than you remember.
Audio quality does make a difference, and I'm sure lots of artists would agree and not want their music spoiled, aside from the audiophiles.
They gave a rough figure of 50g of sugar powering a 40W light bulb for eight hours.
40W x 8hrs = 0.32 kWh 50g * 2.204623 = 0.110 lbs Cheap bags of sugar at netgrocer are $0.66/lb. 0.11 lbs * $0.66 = $0.073 1/0.32 = 3.125 $0.073*3.125 = $0.23
So by my rough calculations, if you bought bags of sugar to feed the fuel cell for house power, you'd be paying $0.23/kWh, which is significantly higher than I pay for electricity here in Texas.
Their currently technology only uses pure sugar. They're working towards carrots they claim - but I would imagine the efficiency can only decrease from the raw sugar efficiency per dollar unless the fundamentals of their technology improve.
I've visited california several times and have a few freinds and relatives there, but I've never lived there. In my opinion, California is culturally to the US what the US is to the rest of the world. They're an extreme example of US-ism in that sense, and I think they've gone a bit too far. Aside from that (well, in some ways related), California has too much hype for my taste. Moreso than the rest of the country, I see them as inflating artificial economies and jobs built around mutual hype. By doing this they help push the economy upwards in good times, but they also make the crashes harder.
He is a very distinguished law professor in this country, I'm sure he's up to snuff as much as any other judicial candidate on basic skills. My point is that having someone like him who seems to have a better-than-average grasp of modern issues as one of the members of the supreme court is a good idea.
In response to this and the other replies - I still feel it's possible. If enough support was out there, the president and his party would be compelled to side with the people. People just aren't organized and motivated enough to do it. Bush Jr is probably more likely to elect a liberal judge than any other, seeing as he has an image he's trying to push of being fair an non-partisan.
"XXX XXXXXX XXX XX XX XXXXXXX XX XXX World Trade Center"
(I tried to use asterisks, but the asinine slashdot junk character filter killed it)
In other words, the only thing your "attack" will uncover is the exact words you already knew were present in the document and nothing more. The partial-decode that you show is how thinks look after a partial known-plaintext attack on a letter substitution cipher (like puzzle-book cryptograms). OTP is absolutely perfect - you can never recover any information from it without knowing the key, there is no know plaintext attack on the rest of the plaintext, and knowning N bits of the key only uncovers N bits of the plaintext.
As you and other have said of course, the downside is you need keys as big as your plaintexts securely held by both parties. If you can transmit the pad securely, you may as well have just trasmitted the plaintext securely. The only practical application of a one time pad is in situations where you have absolute secure communication at one point in time, but will not have it later. (e.g. Spy and Master exchange One Time Pads in a secret NSA facility where they are safe - then weeks later they can communicate internationally over unsecured mediums by using their pads).
First, it's not obvious where it's coming from without smoke, dust or something else for it to reflect off of. In a normal clean indoor setting, a laser sight is only visible by it's dot, or by looking straight at the gun barrel (like the target would be doing). Come to think of it, I would imagine the laser light coming frmo the shooter would obscue the target's vision, making it ahrd to return fire accurately.
Well, it's a matter of debate whether they're useful, I'm sure lots of shooters disagree on this. It's not always three feet, close quarters can include targets on the other side of a 20 foot room for example.
Hitting the bullseye using the instinctive point and shoot method is easy at 20 feet at the range, but when you add the stress and whatnot in a "real" situation, it becomes more difficult. Some people argue that the dot helps - others say finding and focusing on the dot as you aim takes just as much effort as any other method, and adds distraction from all the other things you should be concentrating on.
Well, I guess you're screwed:) It's always an arms race, generally the technologies work best when you've got the tech advantage over the opponent, as is often the case with US-backed military teams versus some small-time third world guys they're raiding.
In any case, in a close quarters tactical situation nobody stares at their own chest, so it's not like visible or IR dots matter all that much in that sense. They only matter in that if the room is dusty or smoky the beam traces a path back to the shooter. For the most part laser sights for close quarters are an assault technology more than a defensive one - and it's assumed the assailant has the advantage of op planning and the element of surprise - like blowing the lights and going in with night gear in a place that was previously well-lit.
Slashdot Mirror
It's fine grained control of privelege. This is to the basic unix concept of running as a uid and setuid what ACLs are to normal unix filesystem permissions. For a really simplistic example - with this you could run your apache binary with literally zero priveleges, like "nobody" (from start to finish, no run as root then drop privs), and the explicitly enable it to have root-like privs only for the one system call it uses to listen to port 80.
BSD is for leftover hippies that never liked AT&T, Linux is for free-thinking modern unix fans.
I'm sure that a high percentage is spontaneous and opportunistic, but still I believe that those most likely to commit a gun crime and get away with it won't bein the database to begin with. If you're likely to ever have your gun tracked, you probably kinda have an idea you're that type of person, and probably are likely to buy something that doesn't get recorded. My point is that you shouldn't restrict privacy or rights unless you can really well prove that there's a good reason, and that's not the case here.
Anyways, gun deaths will always occur, and there's no silver bullet for tracking down the perps. Gun control has never proven effective and lowering the number of shootings or increasing anyone's safety. As pointed out in another reply (and I've read this many times from many sources, none of which was Thatcher) concealed carry laws have been proven to reduce violent crime. Another corollary thought is this: Gun control advocates (who think that for the most part Police should be the ones with guns protecting us, rather than us having guns and protecting ourselves) fail to realize that police are statistically a very very poor defense against armed assailants. Their primary role is to show up after the fact, make a report, and investigate the crime - there's not enough of them to be there when it happens. If you want actual protection from armed assailants, you have to arm yourself, no two ways about it.
That all being said, another good alternative to widespread concealed carry laws and private gun ownership would be to dump money into the further development and commercialization (for the public's use) of new high-tech non-lethal defense mechanisms. A really good example that comes is the Tetanizing Beam Weapon (http://www.hsvt.org/main.html). These guys page has been around forever and I've yet to hear of the product in use, so perhaps it's all smoke. But it sounds scientifcally sound and possible, and it's a nonlethal alternative to a gun.
As stated in other responses, the main problem is that the fingerprint is likely to change over the course of the gun's life. Even supposing someone can come up with a better model for fingerprinting that can account for this, the next problem is that if fingerprinting were made to work, criminals would get their barrels custom made by a freind who's a gunsmith. They wouldn't be in the database.
If you think you can do it, by all means do us the favor of proving it - make it your life's work and write the tool. I'm only being half sarcastic, it would be wonderful if someone actually accomplished it and we'd all be in your debt.
However, on a realistic level, I don't think it's really possible to write a generic code audit engine that fixes the problem, or even makes it go away. I think it more likely that the tool would just cause coders to care less about security because it's supposedly handled by the tool - they'll forget about or never learn about good security practices - and their lack of care will more than make up for the obvious holes plugged by the automaton.
To go out on a controversial simile here - this seems very much like the promise of OO languages and methodologies to cure the software of the world of crappy coding pratices. What it has brought us is 10 times the programmers, writing 10 times as much code 10 times sloppier. It's still riddled with bugs, and it's 10 times more bloated. The really good coders that did it "right" were doing it right before OO became popular and still code circles around your average corporate java or c++ coder. In my eyes and opinion, the OO revolution has decreased rather than increased the overall quality and design of the world's source code taken as a whole.
In both cases, I feel the right answer is that coders need to be taught better, and companies need to be more choosy about the coders they employ and the work they consider acceptable from these people.
Ok, I've gone and dug up some data. PM was there in 1.1 in some form or other. OS/2 was branded as "Microsoft OS/2" at least to version 1.1, and Microsoft was involved up to 1.3. Depending on who you believe Microsoft only worke don the GUI, or participated in the kernel as well. In either case when they split Microsoft did retain kernel code and used it in NT and 95. Lots of other interesting data too, here comes a cut and paste of data I gathered from an old book I had laying around and some net searching:
..."
l um Vitae - Raymond Glenn Duncan, M.D.
2 .T XT
y interesting info, although it itself has no references to back it up. Among it's relevant claims, it says IBM and Microsoft joint ventured OS/2 up to version 1.3, and that Microsoft mainly did GUI work while IBM mainly did kernel work. It also mentions that Windows 3.0 re-used some GUI "elements" from OS/2, and that "The Windows NT kernel was partially based on the OS/2 kernel that they created with IBM, and Windows 95 also borrows heavily from this code.", and "When Windows 95 was released in August, 1995, resellers reported record sales on OS/2, as many people saw how Microsoft's hack of the OS/2 kernel didn't quite cut it for real-world, mission-critical usage."
"Vijay Mukhi's The 'C' Odyssey OS/2 & PM - Into Infinite Worlds"
Tech Publications Pte Ltd
First Edition 1992
10, Jalan Besar, #B1-39 Sim Lim Tower, Singapore 0820
ISBN 981-214-012-3
Appears to hav emostly been written in 1990, with a final chapter called "Perspectives 1991", but actually published in '92.
Pg 1, Prologue, 4th paragraph:
"This gap that DOS's eventual demise is going to be filled by is none other than OS/2. The brainchild of Microsoft and IBM. And with backing like that can it go wrong?"
Pg 340, Section 2, 5th paragraph:
"... The PM is a combination of a protection mode multi-tasking OS with the application architecture and user interface of Microsoft Windows, plus a powerful graphics system from IBM. It is this graphics system from IBM that makes the PM far more sophisticated and cleaner than Windows.
Pg 341, 1st paragraph:
"A hard fact: The PM requires machines that are based on the INTEL 80286 and upwards microprocessors. And it comes with OS/2 version 1.1 and above. Besides, it requires at least 4MB of RAM"
"Microsoft Os/2 Programmer's Reference"
Microsoft Press
Sep 1, 1990
ISBN 1556153457
http://www.neonatology.org/rgd.cv.html
Curricu
Invited Lectures, Symposia, and Workshops
"LMI Forth for Microsoft OS/2," presented at the 1987 Rochester Forth Conference, June 12, 1987.
http://www.quasarbbs.net/pido2/home/gamba/ADVOS
Appears to be the full text of a book called "Advanced OS/2 Programming" by Microsoft Press, written by the sam Ray Duncan as the above CV link. ISBN 1556150458.
First paragraph of Intro:
"Operating System/2, Microsoft's protected mode operating system for
80286-based and 80386-based microcomputers, provides programmers with a
powerful new platform for application design. It also challenges them to
assimilate a body of technical information whose size is unprecedented in
the microcomputer world. The reference manuals for OS/2 and its extensions
(such as the Presentation Manager and LAN Manager) already fill several
shelves only a year after the system was first released and the
Microsoft or IBM Programmer's Toolkit, along with the necessary
development tools and libraries, can devour a sizable fixed disk."
First paragraph of chapter one:
OS/2 is the Microsoft multitasking, virtual memory, single-user operating
system for personal computers based on the Intel 80286 and 80386
microprocessors. It is the first software product to be brought to market
as a result of the Joint Development Agreement signed by IBM and Microsoft
in August 1985.
Shortly down from that, there's a text/graphical table that makes mention of both "MS OS/2 1.0" and "MS OS/2 1.1".
http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2Warp.html
Ver
I only started using OS/2 in the 2.1 days, everything I know about 1.x is what I've read or heard somewhere. I'm pretty sure 1.0 had no GUI at all, and perhaps 1.3 had a very basic GUI similar to Windows 2.x/3.x. It wasn't until OS/2 2.x that they had a real PM as everyone came to know it (Win95-level GUI).
I don't have any references on Microsoft having rights to the early kernels offhand, but I bet I can dredge up something or other, I'll reply back here in hopefully not too long
The user makes all the difference. What software you choose to run, and how you choose to configure and audit things. How much care you give to security issues and how much knowledge of basic security you have.
However, if you are competent and security-minded, it is quite easy to make a Linux box extremely secure against all but the most directed and knowledgeable attackers, which are quite rare. If you run Windows, no matter how hard you try you're still gonna be fairly hosed. Some things just can't be fixed reasonably on that platform.
It is based on OS/2 code though. Breifly and somewhat inaccurately - the history goes that IBM and Microsoft were originally jointly developing OS/2 as a next-generation graphical multitasking OS for the PC. I believe version 1.0 of OS/2 was actually called "Microsoft OS/2", but it didn't get much notice. Microsoft and IBM had a falling out - they split up, each retaining the rights to re-use the existing OS/2 code, but only IBM keeping the actual OS/2 name. From at least OS/2 1.3 onwards it was all IBM.
Microsoft used the OS/2 kernel to base NT off of. As late as NT4, and quite likely still in 2k and XP, if you search the binaries in winnt\system32\.... you can still find OS2 error messages embedded deep in some DLLs - so apparently the code is still in use to this day.
I might, just for the record - that IBM released OS/2 2.1 (which had a Win95-level GUI and better-than-NT true protection and multitasking, and Win3.1 application compatibility) before Microsoft ever released Win95 or the first commercial NT. But Microsoft actually beat this released product into the ground with FUD about the upcoming offerings. Sure enough well down the road they did eventually release 95 with a decent GUI, and NT with a half-decent kernel. But at the time of OS/2 2.1, all they had to compete with was Win 3.1.
I migh also add it took until NT4 years later for Microsoft to put a 95-style GUI into their NT kernel, and it took until the recent release of XP before an NT system was considered good enough for home/desktop use to replace the 95 line of products. OS/2 was always a good desktop OS.
I don't think he was a drug dealer if that's what you mean. Just had stuff at parties.
A salesman I used to party with back at my old ISP job took me to a few parties a Joe Wright's house, I even did coke with him. Houston, owned a Car Audio store, had to be the same guy. Same time frame too, would have been during 1995. He and his freinds seemed a little shady, but who doesn't in the small business world. Never heard anything about him being involved with any rocket belt, but I guess it was probably a hush thing.
The guy was kinda wierd. He stocked up some sort of vitamin-B supplement in liquid injectable form in his kitchen. He loaded it in a hypo and shot himself with it every morning. Not sure if this was for some kind of medical problem, or he just thought it made him healthy.
And a hearty fuck you to whoever modded me redundant. No shit it's redundant, the point of the post is to bolset the opinion of the parent post. Multiple voices speak stronger than one. Redundant would be if two people both cut-n-pasted an article text or something like that.
Every device has different standards on what voltage it wants, what connector it uses, how many amps it needs, etc... Power adaptors for various devices can be:
AC or DC, 1-48 V, 50ma - 5A, any of a slew of connectors and polarities.
The intelligent thing to do would be to pick a relatively common denominator, and make all equipment standardize to it (they're all capable of using voltage regulators, many devices in fact already accept a wider range of voltages than advertised).
The ideal would probably be something like 24 VDC on a medium sized cylindrical connector with negative on the outside, positive in the center. You'd buy a universal power source with several of these dongles hanging off that supplies say 2A max to each connector.
A lot fo the above is arbitrary, but the point is that these things have been obvious for a long time, but device manufacturers just don't care, and there's not real standard out there for them to conform to.
On a related note - I've long wanted to see DC power in houses. Of course the utility should still deliver AC the way it always has - but I'd like to see a stepdown to 48VDC near the breaker panel, and have that 48VDC wired to DC outlets all over the house where many of the AC outlets are. Motorized devices (washer/dryer/fridge/ac) and traditional incandescent lights will still need the AC, but MANY of the other devices you plug into the wall all step down to a low DC voltage inside the unit. Your PC, clocks, kitchen appliances, chargers/power adaptors for all those electronic gadgets, etc.
If you had 48VDC on the wall for these things, you'd be far more efficient with a central stepdown in your garage, you'd be safer, and the devices themselves could be smaller and lighter since they just need a small voltage regulator circuit instead of a transformer/rectifier/etc.
When you say tone hearing loss are you talking about the gradual loss of high frequencies that all humans endure as they age, or something else that makes it hard for you to distinguish notes of different pitch from each other?
Congrats on the job offer, I know how tough it is out there, I was out of a job for months at one point.
Any normal person can easily discern the difference between 64k mp3, 128k mp3, and the original CD - especially if they hear the same song from all three in a row. Even with no reference, if you hear a song you know well on 64k mp3, you'll certainly notice that it sounds "different" than you remember.
Audio quality does make a difference, and I'm sure lots of artists would agree and not want their music spoiled, aside from the audiophiles.
Here Here!
Perl would be excellent for this job.
They gave a rough figure of 50g of sugar powering a 40W light bulb for eight hours.
40W x 8hrs = 0.32 kWh
50g * 2.204623 = 0.110 lbs
Cheap bags of sugar at netgrocer are $0.66/lb.
0.11 lbs * $0.66 = $0.073
1/0.32 = 3.125
$0.073*3.125 = $0.23
So by my rough calculations, if you bought bags of sugar to feed the fuel cell for house power, you'd be paying $0.23/kWh, which is significantly higher than I pay for electricity here in Texas.
Their currently technology only uses pure sugar. They're working towards carrots they claim - but I would imagine the efficiency can only decrease from the raw sugar efficiency per dollar unless the fundamentals of their technology improve.
I vote for the loud-mouthed hippies theory
I've visited california several times and have a few freinds and relatives there, but I've never lived there. In my opinion, California is culturally to the US what the US is to the rest of the world. They're an extreme example of US-ism in that sense, and I think they've gone a bit too far. Aside from that (well, in some ways related), California has too much hype for my taste. Moreso than the rest of the country, I see them as inflating artificial economies and jobs built around mutual hype. By doing this they help push the economy upwards in good times, but they also make the crashes harder.
Anyways, enough uninformed speculation for now
He is a very distinguished law professor in this country, I'm sure he's up to snuff as much as any other judicial candidate on basic skills. My point is that having someone like him who seems to have a better-than-average grasp of modern issues as one of the members of the supreme court is a good idea.
In response to this and the other replies - I still feel it's possible. If enough support was out there, the president and his party would be compelled to side with the people. People just aren't organized and motivated enough to do it. Bush Jr is probably more likely to elect a liberal judge than any other, seeing as he has an image he's trying to push of being fair an non-partisan.
We should all use some hacktivism points to start a grassroots campaign to get Lessig nominated by some party for a Supreme Court seat when one is up.
Actually, the message you get back would be:
"XXX XXXXXX XXX XX XX XXXXXXX XX XXX World Trade Center"
(I tried to use asterisks, but the asinine slashdot junk character filter killed it)
In other words, the only thing your "attack" will uncover is the exact words you already knew were present in the document and nothing more. The partial-decode that you show is how thinks look after a partial known-plaintext attack on a letter substitution cipher (like puzzle-book cryptograms). OTP is absolutely perfect - you can never recover any information from it without knowing the key, there is no know plaintext attack on the rest of the plaintext, and knowning N bits of the key only uncovers N bits of the plaintext.
As you and other have said of course, the downside is you need keys as big as your plaintexts securely held by both parties. If you can transmit the pad securely, you may as well have just trasmitted the plaintext securely. The only practical application of a one time pad is in situations where you have absolute secure communication at one point in time, but will not have it later. (e.g. Spy and Master exchange One Time Pads in a secret NSA facility where they are safe - then weeks later they can communicate internationally over unsecured mediums by using their pads).
First, it's not obvious where it's coming from without smoke, dust or something else for it to reflect off of. In a normal clean indoor setting, a laser sight is only visible by it's dot, or by looking straight at the gun barrel (like the target would be doing). Come to think of it, I would imagine the laser light coming frmo the shooter would obscue the target's vision, making it ahrd to return fire accurately.
Well, it's a matter of debate whether they're useful, I'm sure lots of shooters disagree on this. It's not always three feet, close quarters can include targets on the other side of a 20 foot room for example.
Hitting the bullseye using the instinctive point and shoot method is easy at 20 feet at the range, but when you add the stress and whatnot in a "real" situation, it becomes more difficult. Some people argue that the dot helps - others say finding and focusing on the dot as you aim takes just as much effort as any other method, and adds distraction from all the other things you should be concentrating on.
Well, I guess you're screwed
In any case, in a close quarters tactical situation nobody stares at their own chest, so it's not like visible or IR dots matter all that much in that sense. They only matter in that if the room is dusty or smoky the beam traces a path back to the shooter. For the most part laser sights for close quarters are an assault technology more than a defensive one - and it's assumed the assailant has the advantage of op planning and the element of surprise - like blowing the lights and going in with night gear in a place that was previously well-lit.