I think I may have confused the issues somewhat; having been recently introduced to the hot new buzzword "grid computing," my dreams have been filled with visions of large processor cores with no fixed pipeline that can reconfigure themselves for different tasks, and have several operations in progress at once, taking several pathways through the core.
Contrast this to my real-life experience with asynchronous circuits--a single undergrad course that involved hours of checking for race conditions, twiddling bits, and verifying timing--and you can see why my romantic side got carried away!
I suppose, for the immediate future, that asynchronous logic elements will simply augment current processor designs as you (and others) have outlined in this discussion. How long, then, until we reach a paradigm shift and start designing our processors in a fundamentally different way?
A pipeline stall would defeat the purpose of the asynchronous circuit in the first place, but I suppose OOO could, as you say, take up the slack.
I can't say I've ever gotten as far as designing a CPU gate by gate, but part of the undergrad CS curriculum at my school was a hands-off study of RISC CPU design, including pipelining. With the proper tools, I can see how it wouldn't be all that taxing.
My (also limited) experience with asynchronous circuits, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. To quote Walter Sobchek, you're entering a world of pain.
One of the final requirements to graduation is an EE course--just so we lousy CS undergrads can get our feet wet, I guess--and the bulk of the course revolves around designing and implementing asynchronous sequential circuits. So I have an inkling of how to deal with propagation delays, in that domain. The answer is: you fudge everything.
Usually, you try and arrange the encoding of the input and also of the state, so that no two output bits ever change as the result of one input change. Next, you eliminate output transients by eyeballing all possible state transitions and making sure you take care of any situation in which a transient may arise. Finally, you have to carefully inspect the timing of the implementation and manually insert delays or flip gates around until you've taken care of all the race conditions.
Ah; I think I see what you're getting at. IANEE (I Am Not An Electrical Engineer), so forgive me if I'm asking a naive question, but...
For clarification, can you give a specific example of a situation where an asynchronous circuit would be useful as part of a clocked chip?
If it's simply a matter of an async circuit helping a more complex synchronous machine do its job, then the machine's output is ultimately still tied to the clock, no?
Perhaps you're saying that it's possible to build async circuits to accomplish discrete computational tasks that, while they take longer than a single clock cycle to complete, still get the job done faster than an equivalent synchronous circuit? In this case, I might issue an asynchronous instruction which "completes" in one clock cycle, but the results only become available several cycles later, in a special register. This would call for the additional of special async instructions to a machine's instruction set, and all the accompanying compiler antics.
I don't see how your statement is in any way different from mine. I brought up the fact that CPUs make use of asynchronous logic within a single clock cycle, and explained that this does not make them asynchronous machines.
I think you parsed my sentence incorrectly.
I could say "The US might be a free country, but we still have laws to protect others' freedoms from impinging on our own."
Does this mean that I am in doubt, as to whether the US is a free country? No; the US is a free country by definition, the Constitution having defined it as such.
The "Might...but" construct is frequently used in the English language to introduce a fact, and then qualify it.
You could mitigate this problem somewhat by including redunant computation as part of your asynchronous workload. If radiation only causes local transients, then any sensitive operations could be performed by two different units, and their results compared in a third unit.
The disadvantage is that a glitch in any of the three units would result in a computation being detected as invalid. And, of course, it adds even more complexity to an already staggeringly complex intra-unit communication problem.
The advantage is that you don't need to spend as much time radiation-hardening your chips. Also, they become more naturally fault tolerant. For the longest time, system design in the space exploration field has been dominated by multiple redundancy; I think they would really dig multiple redundancy within a single chip.
Within the space of a single clock cycle, the Pentium (or other designs) might make use of asynchronous logic, but (and this is the important bit) the asynchronicity only exists within the domain of the CPU. The external interface to the CPU is still governed by a clock: you supply the CPU with inputs, trigger its clock, and a short (fixed) while later it supplies you with outputs. Asynchronous logic removes the clock entirely.
In a way, an asynchronous circuit design already is a parallel computer. An asynchronous machine contains many (largely) independent components that communicate with each other in order to solve computational problems more efficiently by breaking them down into small pieces and working on them in parallel.
In this context, your notions of parallel computing will change greatly. Currently, individual nodes in a cluster are islands of computation, separated by (comparably) vast distances. Messages between nodes take orders of magnitude more time than messages within a node.
When you set out to build a supercomputing cluster in the asynchronous world, ideally the entire cluster would be within a single die. Then the latency between nodes would be reduced to microseconds or nanoseconds, and nodes could split work more effectively. The high-speed buses and complex arbitration schemes required for asynchronous computing will be equally useful for designing massively parallel clusters-on-a-chip.
Just so! Only without the English charm. And with much better dental work.
(I've never understood how a nation of grey-haired white men with green back accounts and yellow bellies can claim to represent a nation that is diverse enough to contain all the colors of the rainbow.)
1) In a surprise move, the Taliban will announce its hostile takeover of the Disney corporation. The company's long-standing "no facial hair" policy will be replaced by a "mandatory beard" policy and animators will immediately commence work on a new flagship character, Mullah Mouse.
2) Nevada, Arizona and British Columbia will all pass legislation legalizing marijuana, prompting Bush to name them as part of the "axis of evil" and authorize a retaliatory nuclear strike.
3) RIAA will introduce a surgical throat implant that that causes people to gag and choke when they try to hum or sing copyrighted music. Marketing the device as the "iMusicFreedomSexChoicePod," they will offer it through major chain stores for $99 for a limited time only, while supplies last. After November, the price will increase to $399.
and, finally
4) Sometime in August, independent polls will indicate that Slashdot's daily readership has surpassed that of the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today combined. In response to this market pressure, all major print dailies will target a 1st grade reading level. Headlines such as "Lame Senator Says He's Rubber, Opponent Is Glue" and "Superfund Site Smells Like Total Ass" will abound.
Let's get this straight: they want me to buy a device that, when I press a button, will deliver a 10-second spiel and hang up. And for this miraculous device, they want me to pay between $10 and $60?
For my money, I'd rather take 10 seconds to bitch out the telemarketer myself. It's therapeutic, and on occasion can even be amusing.
I suppose the call screening devices linked to in the article are slightly more noteworthy, and might even be valuable to some people. Just the same, I've had a device for several years now that will play a prerecorded spiel and hang up on people unless they enter a code. It's called an answering machine.
Of course, I would never use my answering machine in that way, since it would be extremely discourteous to ask all my friends and acquaintances to remember an extra three or four digits on top of my phone number, if they wanted to talk to me. With the proliferation of area codes, it's bad enough getting people to remember a 10-digit number; with an effective 14-digit phone number, I imagine I wouldn't be very popular at all!
Up until a few months ago I had cell phone service through Cingular, and I noticed something peculiar: a blocked number would still show up correctly, if the number exists in my phonebook.
When my mother called, for instance, the phone would display the name of her phonebook entry, "Mom@home," even though her caller ID at home is blocked.
I hypothesized the following cause: Cingular, being a national carrier, probably owns its own national network of landlines. When someone places a call to a Cingular customer, his exchange opens a virtual circuit with one of Cingular's exchanges and the call setup includes the caller ID information as well as a "do not reveal identity" flag--this is necessary, of course, for 800 numbers and 911 to see your caller ID even when it's blocked. Cingular honors the "do not reveal" request by instructing the cell phone not to display the number, but still passes it along.
Nicotine is also highly addictive (and toxic) but since it's produced by Americans that can't be embargoed...
This is a great example of the richest country getting all the power, and it's a shame. Nicotine being even more addictive than heroin, it seems all the more criminal. But in the US' defense, there are few nations in the world whose populations would stand for a cigarette embargo. Europe dearly loves its cancer sticks, as does Asia.
I disagree that Afghanistan (or any other country) should be allowed to pump out any drug it pleases..
Heroin is one of the most addictive substances on the books. If Afghanistan wants to sell it on the international market, then it is our right to conduct a trade embargo against them as a form of protest.
The problem with international law, is that it favors the rich countries over the poor countries. But this isn't some evil of Western civilization--this is how the human mind works. The rich ones get all the power.
Until there is more economic parity, there cannot be more equality.
Open source development is hindered by a lack of skilled developers, and a lack of development money. Keeping this in mind...
If warez suddenly became impossible, I agree that it might cause open souce funding to increase (though that does beg the question: who would this money be coming from?) But I don't see how the elimination of software piracy would increase the number of developers capable of (or willing to do) open source development.
Would it convert commercial Win32 developers? Of course not! Their concerns about piracy having been eliminated, they are going to work harder than ever before to crank out ever-more-expensive products.
I agree with you completely. However, I'd like to point out that if 33 months of prison were imminent in your future, you too might feel obliged to discourage people from following in your footsteps.
You need to be very careful when you ask if it's "wrong" to do something. In all cases, if the cure for cancer is patented/copyrighted, and you do not have permission from the owner of the rights to redistribute the cure, then yes, stealing the cure for cancer is "wrong" in the sense that it is illegal. By stealing the cure for cancer, you're depriving the owner of his rights.
However, it is "wrong" for the owner of the cure to withhold it from the world in the first place, in the sense that it is immoral.
So here we have a sticky situation: he's doing something wrong, you're doing something wrong in order to counteract the effects of his doing something wrong. Do two wrongs make a right? No; they don't cancel each other out. But your wrong cures the world of cancer, whereas his wrong prolongs human suffering.
Given the choice in this situation I would steal the cure for cancer every time, and damn the jail sentences. Ultimately, the effects that your actions have on the world matter much more than whether they weigh as right or wrong on someone else's moral scales.
Of course, warez are not a cure for cancer. They're a relief valve, a way for people who cannot afford the exhorbitant price of commercial software to obtain the benefits of that software without selling a testacle to do so. Warez are wrong, but that has never stopped me from engaging in light warez trading, and it never will. I'll buy the games and apps I think are worth the price, but if I can't afford it then I wouldn't have bought it in the first place, and I'm not hurting anyone by stealing it.
Marijuana is illegal, despite the fact that it is neither wrong nor harmful, and would save countless lives if legalized--from medical marijuana users, to people who smoke deadly cigarettes because they are "right," to the thousands of people who are killed or exploited every year in the underground drug trade.
Until recently, the perfectly normal act of homosexuality was illegal, despite the fact that it is a naturally occuring biological phenomenon.
The Patriot Act and DMCA have made free speech illegal in circumstances, despite the fact that our nation was founded on the belief that free speech is an inalienable right.
Right and wrong have nothing to do with legal and illegal. By diluting the lawbooks with meaningless rubbish, legislators are depreciating the value of the judicial system in the eye of the common citizen. I cannot abide by a system of laws that I do not respect. If you wish me to follow the reasonable laws, then get rid of the unreasonable laws, and show me that the legal system makes sense.
See my reply to someone else's reply, for a clarification of my point #1. I misspoke, but if you look at the remark in the context of the paragraph, you'll see that I'm talking about identity, and not trustworthiness.
Of course, there is an indirect cost associated with issuing a certificate. There's recurring overhead, the cost of the hardware on which the certificate servers reside, legal costs, etc. But the certificate itself is just a handy mathematical abstraction, and I'm damned sure that the cost to VeriSign per certificate they issue is a damned sight less than $400. If it isn't, that's their problem and they need to seriously reconsider their business practices.
People who run businesses are entitled to target any subset of potential customers they choose. Usually this means the people most willing to spend money will get the most attention.
Correct. But when the businesses are trying to establish themselves as providers of an essential service, it is their responsibility to make the service available in some form to all parties, and not just to those willing to pay through the nose.
There're always self-signed certs, true. But some browsers will not accept self-signed certs. VeriSign paint hemselves as providers of critical infrastructure, and people believe them. At my workplace our browsers are configured not to accept certificates without a root CA signature, and we're not allowed to change the list of trusted root CAs. As a result, I can't check my email, visit the secure areas of my website, or easily get at the files on my PC. That's really what pisses me off. Perhaps I went overboard, blaming everybody and his mother for my personal security woes. But I think we agree that a privatized certification system is a terrible idea.
An end-entity certificate certifies that you are who you say you are, not that you are trustworthy.
Sorry, I misspoke. That's what I meant to say, but it was the end of a long workday. If you look at the remark in the context of the paragraph that follows it, you'll see my point: I am who I say I am, regardless of my hostname. "mail", "www", "ldap", "ftp" and "games" are all part of the xeger.net organization, and I see no good reason to pay VeriSign $200 for each of them. I should be able to partition my namespace however I choose.
Politics and moneymaking are a legitimate part of society.
That they are. But the browser vendors are treating this rash of moneymaking politickers as some sort of authority, in which we're supposed to place our absolute trust. They're not. IANA is an authority; VeriSign is a glorified notary public. Want to form an impartial, not-for-profit CA? Fine. But let's see you persuade Microsoft to distribute your public key with MSIE. Without the support of an extant governing body, or a whole lot of cash, you won't get very far.
1) Almost every known root CA targets businesses as their primary customers. The prevailing mentality seems to be that if you want to secure your HTTP server's connections to members of the general public, you must be running some sort of business. Their cost per certificate is nothing; you are paying them not for the certificate itself, but for a certification of your trustworthiness as a business.
But what if I'm offering a free service, which nonetheless requires that my users have absolute trust in their browsing security? What if I'm running a nonprofit organization? If the CAs were truly interested in security, they would offer a low-cost alternative for people who are offering free services, and perhaps a free certificate for non-profit organizations.
You may point out that I can now get a cheap certificate for $50. While this is true, the low price of certificates these days is the result of market pressure. These guys aren't lowering their prices out of the goodness of their hearts, or to help Joe Q. Webmaster who wants a secure website. They're doing it only in response to competition.
2) 'Wildcard' certificates cost an absurd amount of money, usually $500 or more.
Excuse me? The entire premise of the certification, is that Thawte (or VeriSign, or whoever) is certifying my trustworthiness as an organization. As such, it shouldn't matter whether I have one, ten or a hundred DNS names associated with my website and with my organization. By forcing you to buy separate certificates for your web server's DNS name, your mail server's DNS name, your LDAP server's DNS name and others, they are extracting even more money from your wallet. Even if all my services are hosted on the same machine, I must pay hundreds of dollars extra for the privilege of giving them separate aliases. The only other alternative is to host all of my services on one machine, under one DNS name. Thank you so much, VeriSign, for sticking your nose into my system administration.
And, finally,
3) VeriSign, the biggest fish in the pond, has demonstrated on more than one occasion that it is in fact not trustworthy.
Remember the incident involving a falsely-issued code signing certificate for Microsoft? That's right! This supposed paragon of trustworthiness gave some unknown cracker free reign to masquerade as the largest software company in the world. If they're that damned vulnerable to simple social engineering...then why did I pay them $200 or more, again? What exactly were they certifying?
From the start, the entire digital certificate business has been about politics and moneymaking, nothing more. It's a pity that we're forced to live with it.
Problem is, in order to be a patent buster, the messages on the buy/sell area had to be carried over some regional network to other BBSes (or over the Internet, though in your case and mine, the Internet was just a twinkle in some committee's eye.)
I know that when I ran a dialup BBS back in the mid 90's, I had a message forum where my users could offer items to buy and sell. When more than one person wanted to buy something, they would typically move into private bidding with the seller through the system's email.
If someone else on some BBS somewhere had a similar service, and their message forum was carried on any network, such as the WWIVNet BBS messaging network or one of its smaller derivatives--then bingo, we have prior art. A message forum, after all, can be considered a database
This isn't quite true. While I agree that electric cars are not final solution, they do have a number of benefits over dead-dinosaur cars.
Let's look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint. Your gasoline engine is a very good engine indeed if it achieves 20% efficiency. This means that 20% of the energy liberated from the gasoline goes toward doing work (spinning your wheels), and 80% escapes into the surrounding environment, as waste heat.
In contrast, the electric motor(s) that power your EV are more along the lines of 80% efficient. This means that a whopping four-fifths of the energy coming out of your batteries is directly converted into work! That's four times as efficient as a gasoline engine.
Electricity may not grow on trees, true. But most methods of generating electricity are far more than efficient than 20%. Nuclear power has a bad rap, but if done properly it's quite safe. Advances in solar power may soon make it a viable option, and there are a whole slew of experimental technologies out there--nuclear fusion, fuel cell, zero-point--enough that one of them will pan out.
For the past five years I've run my system exclusively with SCSI components. When I first went out and bought a SCSI controller and a disk I paid a fortune for the privilege. At the time, the UW controller cost me $150 and a 9Gb IBM drive ran me another $300. The controller's SCSI BIOS added another 5 seconds to my boot time, and the IBM drive was full-height and loud as hell on account of it spinning at 10,000rpm. Regardless, I was a happy camper. I had consistently fast disk access, low latency and--best of all--I didn't get those annoying entire-system pauses while waiting for disk accesses to complete!
Over the years the benefit running SCSI decreased. First bus-mastering IDE channels came along and got rid of the annoying pauses. Then they started turning up the clock speeds with UDMA 66, 100, and so forth, until my aging SCSI drives could barely compete with even an average IDE drive.
Naturally, I did what any self-respecting bithead would do: I upgraded my SCSI components. By that time (circa 1999) the price gap between IDE and SCSI had narrowed somewhat (this was before IDE storage prices bottomed out) and I was able to purchase two 18Gb SCSI drives for a mere 25% than the equivalent IDE drives would cost me. And once again, I was happy with decent performance, low latency and high throughput.
Two weeks ago, I found myself scrabbling to free up a few megs and realized it was that time again, time to upgrade my storage. Looking at Pricewatch, I noticed that IDE drives are now cheaper than Big Macs and come in similarly absurdly-sized portions. Would you like 160Gb of space for your MP3s? No problem--they've got you covered, at $200 a pop! Meanwhile, relatively few vendors have stayed on the SCSI bandwagon, demand for SCSI drives is mostly limited to legacy systems that don't support an IDE bus, and a 160Gb SCSI drive will cost you $900.
In the face of this incredible price ratio, I did what any self-respecting bithead would do: I threw in the damn towel. Now I'm in a transitional period where I run 36Gb of fast UW SCSI storage and 160Gb of even faster IDE storage; I have a SCSI DVD-ROM drive, a SCSI CD burner, and an IDE DVD+RW burner, I/O controllers are fighting each other to the death to secure an interrupt, and the inside of my case looks like the aftermath of a tragic explosion at a cabling factory. I'm damned lucky my system is water-cooled, because I doubt any system fan could pull enough air through that morass of ribbon cables to make a difference in cooling.
The moral of the story: SCSI had its glory days, but it just ain't cost-effective anymore. And with Serial ATA looming on the horizon and promising God's own transfer rates, it just doesn't make any sense to buy SCSI.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I may have confused the issues somewhat; having been recently introduced to the hot new buzzword "grid computing," my dreams have been filled with visions of large processor cores with no fixed pipeline that can reconfigure themselves for different tasks, and have several operations in progress at once, taking several pathways through the core.
Contrast this to my real-life experience with asynchronous circuits--a single undergrad course that involved hours of checking for race conditions, twiddling bits, and verifying timing--and you can see why my romantic side got carried away!
I suppose, for the immediate future, that asynchronous logic elements will simply augment current processor designs as you (and others) have outlined in this discussion. How long, then, until we reach a paradigm shift and start designing our processors in a fundamentally different way?
A pipeline stall would defeat the purpose of the asynchronous circuit in the first place, but I suppose OOO could, as you say, take up the slack.
I can't say I've ever gotten as far as designing a CPU gate by gate, but part of the undergrad CS curriculum at my school was a hands-off study of RISC CPU design, including pipelining. With the proper tools, I can see how it wouldn't be all that taxing.
My (also limited) experience with asynchronous circuits, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. To quote Walter Sobchek, you're entering a world of pain.
One of the final requirements to graduation is an EE course--just so we lousy CS undergrads can get our feet wet, I guess--and the bulk of the course revolves around designing and implementing asynchronous sequential circuits. So I have an inkling of how to deal with propagation delays, in that domain. The answer is: you fudge everything.
Usually, you try and arrange the encoding of the input and also of the state, so that no two output bits ever change as the result of one input change. Next, you eliminate output transients by eyeballing all possible state transitions and making sure you take care of any situation in which a transient may arise. Finally, you have to carefully inspect the timing of the implementation and manually insert delays or flip gates around until you've taken care of all the race conditions.
It sucks.
Ah; I think I see what you're getting at. IANEE (I Am Not An Electrical Engineer), so forgive me if I'm asking a naive question, but...
For clarification, can you give a specific example of a situation where an asynchronous circuit would be useful as part of a clocked chip?
If it's simply a matter of an async circuit helping a more complex synchronous machine do its job, then the machine's output is ultimately still tied to the clock, no?
Perhaps you're saying that it's possible to build async circuits to accomplish discrete computational tasks that, while they take longer than a single clock cycle to complete, still get the job done faster than an equivalent synchronous circuit? In this case, I might issue an asynchronous instruction which "completes" in one clock cycle, but the results only become available several cycles later, in a special register. This would call for the additional of special async instructions to a machine's instruction set, and all the accompanying compiler antics.
I don't see how your statement is in any way different from mine. I brought up the fact that CPUs make use of asynchronous logic within a single clock cycle, and explained that this does not make them asynchronous machines.
I think you parsed my sentence incorrectly.
I could say "The US might be a free country, but we still have laws to protect others' freedoms from impinging on our own."
Does this mean that I am in doubt, as to whether the US is a free country? No; the US is a free country by definition, the Constitution having defined it as such.
The "Might...but" construct is frequently used in the English language to introduce a fact, and then qualify it.
You could mitigate this problem somewhat by including redunant computation as part of your asynchronous workload. If radiation only causes local transients, then any sensitive operations could be performed by two different units, and their results compared in a third unit.
The disadvantage is that a glitch in any of the three units would result in a computation being detected as invalid. And, of course, it adds even more complexity to an already staggeringly complex intra-unit communication problem.
The advantage is that you don't need to spend as much time radiation-hardening your chips. Also, they become more naturally fault tolerant. For the longest time, system design in the space exploration field has been dominated by multiple redundancy; I think they would really dig multiple redundancy within a single chip.
Within the space of a single clock cycle, the Pentium (or other designs) might make use of asynchronous logic, but (and this is the important bit) the asynchronicity only exists within the domain of the CPU. The external interface to the CPU is still governed by a clock: you supply the CPU with inputs, trigger its clock, and a short (fixed) while later it supplies you with outputs. Asynchronous logic removes the clock entirely.
In a way, an asynchronous circuit design already is a parallel computer. An asynchronous machine contains many (largely) independent components that communicate with each other in order to solve computational problems more efficiently by breaking them down into small pieces and working on them in parallel.
In this context, your notions of parallel computing will change greatly. Currently, individual nodes in a cluster are islands of computation, separated by (comparably) vast distances. Messages between nodes take orders of magnitude more time than messages within a node.
When you set out to build a supercomputing cluster in the asynchronous world, ideally the entire cluster would be within a single die. Then the latency between nodes would be reduced to microseconds or nanoseconds, and nodes could split work more effectively. The high-speed buses and complex arbitration schemes required for asynchronous computing will be equally useful for designing massively parallel clusters-on-a-chip.
Just so! Only without the English charm. And with much better dental work.
(I've never understood how a nation of grey-haired white men with green back accounts and yellow bellies can claim to represent a nation that is diverse enough to contain all the colors of the rainbow.)
1) In a surprise move, the Taliban will announce its hostile takeover of the Disney corporation. The company's long-standing "no facial hair" policy will be replaced by a "mandatory beard" policy and animators will immediately commence work on a new flagship character, Mullah Mouse.
2) Nevada, Arizona and British Columbia will all pass legislation legalizing marijuana, prompting Bush to name them as part of the "axis of evil" and authorize a retaliatory nuclear strike.
3) RIAA will introduce a surgical throat implant that that causes people to gag and choke when they try to hum or sing copyrighted music. Marketing the device as the "iMusicFreedomSexChoicePod," they will offer it through major chain stores for $99 for a limited time only, while supplies last. After November, the price will increase to $399.
and, finally
4) Sometime in August, independent polls will indicate that Slashdot's daily readership has surpassed that of the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today combined. In response to this market pressure, all major print dailies will target a 1st grade reading level. Headlines such as "Lame Senator Says He's Rubber, Opponent Is Glue" and "Superfund Site Smells Like Total Ass" will abound.
Let's get this straight: they want me to buy a device that, when I press a button, will deliver a 10-second spiel and hang up. And for this miraculous device, they want me to pay between $10 and $60?
For my money, I'd rather take 10 seconds to bitch out the telemarketer myself. It's therapeutic, and on occasion can even be amusing.
I suppose the call screening devices linked to in the article are slightly more noteworthy, and might even be valuable to some people. Just the same, I've had a device for several years now that will play a prerecorded spiel and hang up on people unless they enter a code. It's called an answering machine.
Of course, I would never use my answering machine in that way, since it would be extremely discourteous to ask all my friends and acquaintances to remember an extra three or four digits on top of my phone number, if they wanted to talk to me. With the proliferation of area codes, it's bad enough getting people to remember a 10-digit number; with an effective 14-digit phone number, I imagine I wouldn't be very popular at all!
Up until a few months ago I had cell phone service through Cingular, and I noticed something peculiar: a blocked number would still show up correctly, if the number exists in my phonebook.
When my mother called, for instance, the phone would display the name of her phonebook entry, "Mom@home," even though her caller ID at home is blocked.
I hypothesized the following cause: Cingular, being a national carrier, probably owns its own national network of landlines. When someone places a call to a Cingular customer, his exchange opens a virtual circuit with one of Cingular's exchanges and the call setup includes the caller ID information as well as a "do not reveal identity" flag--this is necessary, of course, for 800 numbers and 911 to see your caller ID even when it's blocked. Cingular honors the "do not reveal" request by instructing the cell phone not to display the number, but still passes it along.
Nicotine is also highly addictive (and toxic) but since it's produced by Americans that can't be embargoed...
This is a great example of the richest country getting all the power, and it's a shame. Nicotine being even more addictive than heroin, it seems all the more criminal. But in the US' defense, there are few nations in the world whose populations would stand for a cigarette embargo. Europe dearly loves its cancer sticks, as does Asia.
I disagree that Afghanistan (or any other country) should be allowed to pump out any drug it pleases..
Heroin is one of the most addictive substances on the books. If Afghanistan wants to sell it on the international market, then it is our right to conduct a trade embargo against them as a form of protest.
The problem with international law, is that it favors the rich countries over the poor countries. But this isn't some evil of Western civilization--this is how the human mind works. The rich ones get all the power.
Until there is more economic parity, there cannot be more equality.
Seriously, this isn't far off. Industrial espionage is only one step away from the scenario you describe.
Open source development is hindered by a lack of skilled developers, and a lack of development money. Keeping this in mind...
If warez suddenly became impossible, I agree that it might cause open souce funding to increase (though that does beg the question: who would this money be coming from?) But I don't see how the elimination of software piracy would increase the number of developers capable of (or willing to do) open source development.
Would it convert commercial Win32 developers? Of course not! Their concerns about piracy having been eliminated, they are going to work harder than ever before to crank out ever-more-expensive products.
I agree with you completely. However, I'd like to point out that if 33 months of prison were imminent in your future, you too might feel obliged to discourage people from following in your footsteps.
You need to be very careful when you ask if it's "wrong" to do something. In all cases, if the cure for cancer is patented/copyrighted, and you do not have permission from the owner of the rights to redistribute the cure, then yes, stealing the cure for cancer is "wrong" in the sense that it is illegal. By stealing the cure for cancer, you're depriving the owner of his rights.
However, it is "wrong" for the owner of the cure to withhold it from the world in the first place, in the sense that it is immoral.
So here we have a sticky situation: he's doing something wrong, you're doing something wrong in order to counteract the effects of his doing something wrong. Do two wrongs make a right? No; they don't cancel each other out. But your wrong cures the world of cancer, whereas his wrong prolongs human suffering.
Given the choice in this situation I would steal the cure for cancer every time, and damn the jail sentences. Ultimately, the effects that your actions have on the world matter much more than whether they weigh as right or wrong on someone else's moral scales.
Of course, warez are not a cure for cancer. They're a relief valve, a way for people who cannot afford the exhorbitant price of commercial software to obtain the benefits of that software without selling a testacle to do so. Warez are wrong, but that has never stopped me from engaging in light warez trading, and it never will. I'll buy the games and apps I think are worth the price, but if I can't afford it then I wouldn't have bought it in the first place, and I'm not hurting anyone by stealing it.
Marijuana is illegal, despite the fact that it is neither wrong nor harmful, and would save countless lives if legalized--from medical marijuana users, to people who smoke deadly cigarettes because they are "right," to the thousands of people who are killed or exploited every year in the underground drug trade.
Until recently, the perfectly normal act of homosexuality was illegal, despite the fact that it is a naturally occuring biological phenomenon.
The Patriot Act and DMCA have made free speech illegal in circumstances, despite the fact that our nation was founded on the belief that free speech is an inalienable right.
Right and wrong have nothing to do with legal and illegal. By diluting the lawbooks with meaningless rubbish, legislators are depreciating the value of the judicial system in the eye of the common citizen. I cannot abide by a system of laws that I do not respect. If you wish me to follow the reasonable laws, then get rid of the unreasonable laws, and show me that the legal system makes sense.
See my reply to someone else's reply, for a clarification of my point #1. I misspoke, but if you look at the remark in the context of the paragraph, you'll see that I'm talking about identity, and not trustworthiness.
Of course, there is an indirect cost associated with issuing a certificate. There's recurring overhead, the cost of the hardware on which the certificate servers reside, legal costs, etc. But the certificate itself is just a handy mathematical abstraction, and I'm damned sure that the cost to VeriSign per certificate they issue is a damned sight less than $400. If it isn't, that's their problem and they need to seriously reconsider their business practices.
People who run businesses are entitled to target any subset of potential customers they choose. Usually this means the people most willing to spend money will get the most attention.
Correct. But when the businesses are trying to establish themselves as providers of an essential service, it is their responsibility to make the service available in some form to all parties, and not just to those willing to pay through the nose.
There're always self-signed certs, true. But some browsers will not accept self-signed certs. VeriSign paint hemselves as providers of critical infrastructure, and people believe them. At my workplace our browsers are configured not to accept certificates without a root CA signature, and we're not allowed to change the list of trusted root CAs. As a result, I can't check my email, visit the secure areas of my website, or easily get at the files on my PC. That's really what pisses me off. Perhaps I went overboard, blaming everybody and his mother for my personal security woes. But I think we agree that a privatized certification system is a terrible idea.
An end-entity certificate certifies that you are who you say you are, not that you are trustworthy.
Sorry, I misspoke. That's what I meant to say, but it was the end of a long workday. If you look at the remark in the context of the paragraph that follows it, you'll see my point: I am who I say I am, regardless of my hostname. "mail", "www", "ldap", "ftp" and "games" are all part of the xeger.net organization, and I see no good reason to pay VeriSign $200 for each of them. I should be able to partition my namespace however I choose.
Politics and moneymaking are a legitimate part of society.
That they are. But the browser vendors are treating this rash of moneymaking politickers as some sort of authority, in which we're supposed to place our absolute trust. They're not. IANA is an authority; VeriSign is a glorified notary public. Want to form an impartial, not-for-profit CA? Fine. But let's see you persuade Microsoft to distribute your public key with MSIE. Without the support of an extant governing body, or a whole lot of cash, you won't get very far.
Accept them and get busy making things better.
To that I can only say...after you, good sir. =)
1) Almost every known root CA targets businesses as their primary customers. The prevailing mentality seems to be that if you want to secure your HTTP server's connections to members of the general public, you must be running some sort of business. Their cost per certificate is nothing; you are paying them not for the certificate itself, but for a certification of your trustworthiness as a business.
But what if I'm offering a free service, which nonetheless requires that my users have absolute trust in their browsing security? What if I'm running a nonprofit organization? If the CAs were truly interested in security, they would offer a low-cost alternative for people who are offering free services, and perhaps a free certificate for non-profit organizations.
You may point out that I can now get a cheap certificate for $50. While this is true, the low price of certificates these days is the result of market pressure. These guys aren't lowering their prices out of the goodness of their hearts, or to help Joe Q. Webmaster who wants a secure website. They're doing it only in response to competition.
2) 'Wildcard' certificates cost an absurd amount of money, usually $500 or more.
Excuse me? The entire premise of the certification, is that Thawte (or VeriSign, or whoever) is certifying my trustworthiness as an organization. As such, it shouldn't matter whether I have one, ten or a hundred DNS names associated with my website and with my organization. By forcing you to buy separate certificates for your web server's DNS name, your mail server's DNS name, your LDAP server's DNS name and others, they are extracting even more money from your wallet. Even if all my services are hosted on the same machine, I must pay hundreds of dollars extra for the privilege of giving them separate aliases. The only other alternative is to host all of my services on one machine, under one DNS name. Thank you so much, VeriSign, for sticking your nose into my system administration.
And, finally,
3) VeriSign, the biggest fish in the pond, has demonstrated on more than one occasion that it is in fact not trustworthy.
Remember the incident involving a falsely-issued code signing certificate for Microsoft? That's right! This supposed paragon of trustworthiness gave some unknown cracker free reign to masquerade as the largest software company in the world. If they're that damned vulnerable to simple social engineering...then why did I pay them $200 or more, again? What exactly were they certifying?
From the start, the entire digital certificate business has been about politics and moneymaking, nothing more. It's a pity that we're forced to live with it.
Problem is, in order to be a patent buster, the messages on the buy/sell area had to be carried over some regional network to other BBSes (or over the Internet, though in your case and mine, the Internet was just a twinkle in some committee's eye.)
I know that when I ran a dialup BBS back in the mid 90's, I had a message forum where my users could offer items to buy and sell. When more than one person wanted to buy something, they would typically move into private bidding with the seller through the system's email.
If someone else on some BBS somewhere had a similar service, and their message forum was carried on any network, such as the WWIVNet BBS messaging network or one of its smaller derivatives--then bingo, we have prior art. A message forum, after all, can be considered a database
This isn't quite true. While I agree that electric cars are not final solution, they do have a number of benefits over dead-dinosaur cars. Let's look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint. Your gasoline engine is a very good engine indeed if it achieves 20% efficiency. This means that 20% of the energy liberated from the gasoline goes toward doing work (spinning your wheels), and 80% escapes into the surrounding environment, as waste heat. In contrast, the electric motor(s) that power your EV are more along the lines of 80% efficient. This means that a whopping four-fifths of the energy coming out of your batteries is directly converted into work! That's four times as efficient as a gasoline engine. Electricity may not grow on trees, true. But most methods of generating electricity are far more than efficient than 20%. Nuclear power has a bad rap, but if done properly it's quite safe. Advances in solar power may soon make it a viable option, and there are a whole slew of experimental technologies out there--nuclear fusion, fuel cell, zero-point--enough that one of them will pan out.
Interesting! I'm going to look into this -- thanks for the tip!
For the past five years I've run my system exclusively with SCSI components. When I first went out and bought a SCSI controller and a disk I paid a fortune for the privilege. At the time, the UW controller cost me $150 and a 9Gb IBM drive ran me another $300. The controller's SCSI BIOS added another 5 seconds to my boot time, and the IBM drive was full-height and loud as hell on account of it spinning at 10,000rpm. Regardless, I was a happy camper. I had consistently fast disk access, low latency and--best of all--I didn't get those annoying entire-system pauses while waiting for disk accesses to complete!
Over the years the benefit running SCSI decreased. First bus-mastering IDE channels came along and got rid of the annoying pauses. Then they started turning up the clock speeds with UDMA 66, 100, and so forth, until my aging SCSI drives could barely compete with even an average IDE drive.
Naturally, I did what any self-respecting bithead would do: I upgraded my SCSI components. By that time (circa 1999) the price gap between IDE and SCSI had narrowed somewhat (this was before IDE storage prices bottomed out) and I was able to purchase two 18Gb SCSI drives for a mere 25% than the equivalent IDE drives would cost me. And once again, I was happy with decent performance, low latency and high throughput.
Two weeks ago, I found myself scrabbling to free up a few megs and realized it was that time again, time to upgrade my storage. Looking at Pricewatch, I noticed that IDE drives are now cheaper than Big Macs and come in similarly absurdly-sized portions. Would you like 160Gb of space for your MP3s? No problem--they've got you covered, at $200 a pop! Meanwhile, relatively few vendors have stayed on the SCSI bandwagon, demand for SCSI drives is mostly limited to legacy systems that don't support an IDE bus, and a 160Gb SCSI drive will cost you $900.
In the face of this incredible price ratio, I did what any self-respecting bithead would do: I threw in the damn towel. Now I'm in a transitional period where I run 36Gb of fast UW SCSI storage and 160Gb of even faster IDE storage; I have a SCSI DVD-ROM drive, a SCSI CD burner, and an IDE DVD+RW burner, I/O controllers are fighting each other to the death to secure an interrupt, and the inside of my case looks like the aftermath of a tragic explosion at a cabling factory. I'm damned lucky my system is water-cooled, because I doubt any system fan could pull enough air through that morass of ribbon cables to make a difference in cooling.
The moral of the story: SCSI had its glory days, but it just ain't cost-effective anymore. And with Serial ATA looming on the horizon and promising God's own transfer rates, it just doesn't make any sense to buy SCSI.