That mountain might protect the vault from a nuclear airburst, but what about someone driving a nuke (or ordinary fertilizer truck bomb) into the vault? They could probably powder everything inside pretty good, and collapse the tunnel enough so that stuff wouldn't get dug out again for a looong time.
Also, while the mountain may protect your stuff from any kind of physical catastrophe like meteors or mad bombers, it will do nothing to protect it from frothing lawyers and government agents (SCO, RIAA, BATF or whatever) or plain old industrial spies with briefcases full of cash, seeking access to the stuff from the people who run the facility. The perils of putting your goodies in someone else's care in a publicly known location are the same as those of storing your backups on someone else's computer over the net (and the obviousness of that peril is one reason why the net-backup business didn't do so well).
If you want to keep something really safe, protect it well and don't tell anyone where it is. Also, if all you're trying to protect is data, rather than physical artifacts, you're better off replicating it all over the place than trying to bomb-proof it at a single site.
AT&T vs BSD was settled, not tried. The settlement was confidential by the agreement of both parties. In the SCO-IBM case, it sounds like SCO wants it confidential, IBM wants it open, and the court took SCO's side. That's stupid of the court.
The Microdrive "1 inch" drive actually uses 1.3 inch platters, IIRC. It's a bit to large to want to put into a tiny mobile phone. This 0.8" thing should fit more easily.
An awful lot of tollbooths also have license plate cameras, so who needs EZpass? Maybe they're just going to analog video recordings for now, but one assumes the license plate images are easy to OCR and that can be done in real time soon enough. I'm sure I could easily do it with a webcam. Of course once all tires have RFID, then every magnetic traffic light sensor and parking meter can have RFID readers built in.
That guy is not in danger. He has already been rescued, which is why he's not starved and frozen by now. What's under discussion now is whether he gets to fly himself home like a returning hero, or deal with some additional inconvenience and expense as a result of this situation of his own making and have to come back on the next regular flight.
They never said they were short of fuel. We can assume that they have plenty of fuel. They're just not willing to supply it to people who they see as idiots. They want to make sure he gets home safe and sound, but they also want to make sure he regrets creating the situation that forced him to land there in the first place, so he and others won't be encouraged to try it again.
In what way was he not helped? If he hadn't been helped, he would be an ice cube right now. Instead he's being kept warm and fed and put on the next available flight back home. What more do you want? As they say in the article, the Antarctic bases are not running a gas station and while the folks there are trying to keep Johansen alive and healthy, in no way do they want to encourage him or anyone else to try such a stunt again. Therefore, they're putting some effort into making it inconvenient--read that word again, not dangerous but just inconvenient--for him to get out of the predicament that he single-handedly and unnecessarily got himself into.
All that same stuff is true if you sell something claiming to be today's newspaper that turns out to be last month's newspaper. That's strictly a matter of whether what you've sold is what you claim it is. As long as you don't make any claims, you're fine. Just about every commercial software package I've seen back when I used them basically said your recourse if you didn't like what the software did was you could get a refund. The idea of having some government agency certifying/censoring the software before commercial publication is nuts.
By your logic, the New York Post newspaper (published by Rupert Murdoch) should be enjoined from publication because their product isn't fit for informing the public of what's going on in the world. Fact is, they have the right to print and sell it even if all it's really good for is wrapping fish.
While some kind of voluntary certification is a perfectly fine idea, mandatory approval would be crazy and oppressive. Computer code is protected free speech which is why we were able to (although so far only partially) beat back the export controls on cryptography.
There are federal standards for code that runs inside medical instruments and code that runs in avionics. It would be great if there were some similar standard for internet desktop software that was mandated for all software license purchases by the government (that would give any serious vendor in someplace like Redmond a big incentive to gets its act together to meet the standard). But it should never be mandated for the public. We the people have the inalienable right to write and publish whatever software we want, just like we have the right to publish articles and songs that criticize the government. That right stays in force even if our software turns out to be buggy.
is for the standard version of mkfs to fill empty disk blocks with random data (from/dev/urandom) BY DEFAULT instead of zeroing them. That way you can run a stego file system in the unused blocks and it will be indistinguishable from ordinary randomized free blocks. If every BSD (and ideally every GNU/Linux) distro shipped with that feature turned on, there would be no way to tell a stego user from a non-user.
It's ridiculous to think that just because you have a camcorder (that's not actually in operation) in a theater, that you intend to pirate the movie. I've never recorded a movie with a camcorder. But there are plenty of times I've gone around with a camcorder in my belt pack (including into theaters) just in case I felt like filming something, or even because I was travelling and didn't want to leave the camcorder in my room (typically some seedy youth hostel) where it might disappear, or because I had some reason to use it earlier or later in the day and didn't have anyplace to drop it off. Lots of people have camcorders and like to take them places and it's easy to forget that there's one in your backpack. I also usually carry a Swiss army knife in the same pack, and forgetting that it's there has caused me hassles at airports. It's the same thing except with the pocket knife, you say "oops" and put it in your checked bag. With a camcorder, you go to jail? Give me a break.
And of course, carrying a camcorder (small ones typically weigh a pound or so) is somewhat geeky now, but what happens when they become the size of cigarette lighters? Panasonic already has a
solid state one the size of a cigarette pack, though it records only 10 minutes of DVD-quality video so it won't hold a whole movie. That 10 minute limitation won't last, and it can already hold a whole movie at lower resolution.
There's a simple cure. They should have security checkpoints with baggage X-rays at every movie theater, just like at airports. That will really solve the MPAA problem once and for all, since ticket sales will drop to zero.
I think RFID makes the tracking a lot easier. Sure, they can put license plate cameras in high-maintenance locations like tollbooths and border crossings, but they can put RFID readers in a lot more places (think of one in every parking meter in every city) since the RFID reader can be completely out of site, doesn't have to worry about its lens getting dirty, doesn't need a sophisticated computer or large amounts of storage behind it, etc.
Now wait til they start putting RFID's in US passports (starting 2007, I think). As Markus Kuhn pointed out, that will make it possible for terrorists to plant bombs that only blow up when Americans are nearby.
Why does the Copyright office (an agency of the Executive branch) get to make a legal decision about the DMCA? Only a court can do that. Congress cannot delegate the authority to make judicial decisions because Congress doesn't have the authority in the first place. What am I missing?
Assuming the obvious stuff (i.e. it was work you did as a company employee at the company's direction on the company's dime), the company doesn't owe you anything beyond your regular paycheck if a patent issues. Nonetheless most companies I've been at have had a practice of giving some kind of recognition when a patent issues. A couple have had written policies where they give some bonus (maybe a few hundred dollars) if the company files a patent application and another bonus (maybe 1k or so) if a patent actually issues. I think the purpose of those bonuses is mainly to motivate employees to call patentable work to the attention of management, keep careful notes etc.
In practice I've never personally never gotten anything from patent applications. One company I worked for filed an application listing my boss and the company CEO as the inventors, for work that I did. I found out about that years after I left the company and was a little bit ticked off, but really, they paid me quite handsomely (at least by my standards at the time) for doing the work, so I can't claim to have been ripped off in the usual sense. I think they knew of my opposition to software patents and were concerned that I would have opposed an application if I knew about it. (I would have recognized the necessity of applying--I don't think the government should issue patents on software to anyone, but I don't believe in unilateral disarmament against competitors who are filing them anyway). Also, I may have been gone from that company by the time they filed the application.
Another company I was at had a semi-official policy of paying bonuses for patents, and I had to file a couple applications, but I think the bonuses fell through the cracks at application time and the company was gone (dotcom casualty) by the time the patent actually issued. However, again, the bonuses involved would have been fairly small potatoes compared to what my salary already was, so not getting it was no big deal.
Your family time is more important than your money, so instead of vacuuming so your wife appreciates that you're helping around the house, you buy another techno-gizmo and get wrapped up in it so she becomes a computer widow even more than she is already.
If you want to deal with your vacuuming problem by throwing money at it, do what anyone else does. Hire a cleaning lady/guy to come in once a week and tidy things up. Your wife will love that.
This chip sounds like a big parallel DSP. All those transistors on a Pentium 4 that go into the virtual memory system or the branch prediction or out of order pipeline juggling, in the DSP are dedicated to number crunching. I don't know how much the crunch power of this chip exceeds those of a current high end graphics chip (NVidia, etc). but it's probably not that big a ratio. The graphics chip also beats the heck out of a Pentium 4 in raw parallel arithmetic speed. The graphic chip is of course very specialized (for crunching display lists) while the DSP is a little more general (crunching 64-element vectors, like a Cray-1). It's likely that some multimedia applications like MPEG encoders can be sped up a lot by this chip, but don't expect it to make MS Word or GCC run any faster.
Graham suggests automatically retrieving the contents of any url contained in suspected spam messages, and analyzing the contents for further spammy content.
That asks for trouble: a lot of the URL's have unique identifiers, like http://spammersite.com/idiot?moron=asdjicn98niucdn 23d where the identifier is linked to your email address on the spam server. Retrieving the url is then like clicking a remove link: it confirms to the spammer that your address is live, so he works harder to get through your filters. You may get more spam just from using the spider strategy.
Besides the headers you mentioned, requesting the 1x1 gif also sends any cookies that were set by the referring page. You can use javascript on the referring page to set a cookie containing stuff like the user's screen resolution, and then log the cookie when the browser requests that 1x1 gif. Of course if JS is disabled, as for this particular gif, you don't get the resolution that way.
There was a program called "Chesster" which kibitzed like that. Much more amusingly, back in the 80's, the builders of the Belle chess computer interfaced an industrial robot to it to let the computer move actual pieces on a real chessboard. The robot was something they had around the lab for some other project, and it had very powerful motors (it was designed for automobile assembly or something like that). They had to carefully program the robot to pick up the chess pieces gently and put them down without slamming them through the table. Unfortunately, due to a software bug, the story goes, the robot would sometimes lift a captured piece and crush it into powder. I would imagine that to be a scarier put-down than any silly heckling coming out of a console terminal or speech synthesizer.
Nah. Kasparov didn't get his ass kicked in '96, he WON that match, 3.5-2.5. He lost the '97 match by the same score. However, the '97 loss wasn't all that convincing. He certainly would have won a longer match, or a rematch against the same hardware and software. On the other hand, if a rematch had happened, it would not have been against an identical Deep Blue 2. The designers would have kept making improvements and speedups and gotten an even stronger machine, that might well have been convincingly stronger than Kasparov.
I think it will be several years before anyone builds anything as strong as Deep Blue II. At that point, the top grandmasters will have something to worry about. For now, the claims that PC programs like Fritz are as strong as DB2 was are mostly marketing hype.
For more info, see Deep Blue designer Feng-Hsiung Hsu's book "Building Deep Blue", about the work that went into the machine and how the Kasparov matches went.
He says Deep Blue II hasn't been improved on since 1997 and therefore computers have maxed out. That's dumb. Deep Blue II hasn't been improved on because nobody has spent the bucks since then to improve on it. It's simply stronger than its successors, which is not surprising since DB2 used massive amounts of custom VLSI hardware built by PhD researchers with megabucks of IBM Research funding, while everything since then has been programs running on ordinary PC's programmed by small companies and hobbyists. PC's keep advancing but it will be a while before they catch up with what DB2's massive parallelism could do. It's also possible that chess hardware (maybe using FPGA's) will make a comeback.
Meanwhile, the fastest airplane ever built is still the SR-71A made in the 1960's. That doesn't mean aircraft technology has come to a standstill. It just means outrunning the SR-71A hasn't been a priority of aircraft builders since then. If they wanted to expend the resources to make a faster plane today, they could do it.
Deep Blue II was the SR-71A of chess computers. What's come afterwards has been a lot more economical and practical, but hasn't tried to match it in pure performance, and hasn't done so.
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That only works if it's just data that you're trying to protect. If it's the company's shrunken head collection, you can't manage it that way.
Also, while the mountain may protect your stuff from any kind of physical catastrophe like meteors or mad bombers, it will do nothing to protect it from frothing lawyers and government agents (SCO, RIAA, BATF or whatever) or plain old industrial spies with briefcases full of cash, seeking access to the stuff from the people who run the facility. The perils of putting your goodies in someone else's care in a publicly known location are the same as those of storing your backups on someone else's computer over the net (and the obviousness of that peril is one reason why the net-backup business didn't do so well).
If you want to keep something really safe, protect it well and don't tell anyone where it is. Also, if all you're trying to protect is data, rather than physical artifacts, you're better off replicating it all over the place than trying to bomb-proof it at a single site.
AT&T vs BSD was settled, not tried. The settlement was confidential by the agreement of both parties. In the SCO-IBM case, it sounds like SCO wants it confidential, IBM wants it open, and the court took SCO's side. That's stupid of the court.
The Microdrive "1 inch" drive actually uses 1.3 inch platters, IIRC. It's a bit to large to want to put into a tiny mobile phone. This 0.8" thing should fit more easily.
An awful lot of tollbooths also have license plate cameras, so who needs EZpass? Maybe they're just going to analog video recordings for now, but one assumes the license plate images are easy to OCR and that can be done in real time soon enough. I'm sure I could easily do it with a webcam. Of course once all tires have RFID, then every magnetic traffic light sensor and parking meter can have RFID readers built in.
That guy is not in danger. He has already been rescued, which is why he's not starved and frozen by now. What's under discussion now is whether he gets to fly himself home like a returning hero, or deal with some additional inconvenience and expense as a result of this situation of his own making and have to come back on the next regular flight.
They never said they were short of fuel. We can assume that they have plenty of fuel. They're just not willing to supply it to people who they see as idiots. They want to make sure he gets home safe and sound, but they also want to make sure he regrets creating the situation that forced him to land there in the first place, so he and others won't be encouraged to try it again.
In what way was he not helped? If he hadn't been helped, he would be an ice cube right now. Instead he's being kept warm and fed and put on the next available flight back home. What more do you want? As they say in the article, the Antarctic bases are not running a gas station and while the folks there are trying to keep Johansen alive and healthy, in no way do they want to encourage him or anyone else to try such a stunt again. Therefore, they're putting some effort into making it inconvenient--read that word again, not dangerous but just inconvenient--for him to get out of the predicament that he single-handedly and unnecessarily got himself into.
All that same stuff is true if you sell something claiming to be today's newspaper that turns out to be last month's newspaper. That's strictly a matter of whether what you've sold is what you claim it is. As long as you don't make any claims, you're fine. Just about every commercial software package I've seen back when I used them basically said your recourse if you didn't like what the software did was you could get a refund. The idea of having some government agency certifying/censoring the software before commercial publication is nuts.
By your logic, the New York Post newspaper (published by Rupert Murdoch) should be enjoined from publication because their product isn't fit for informing the public of what's going on in the world. Fact is, they have the right to print and sell it even if all it's really good for is wrapping fish.
There are federal standards for code that runs inside medical instruments and code that runs in avionics. It would be great if there were some similar standard for internet desktop software that was mandated for all software license purchases by the government (that would give any serious vendor in someplace like Redmond a big incentive to gets its act together to meet the standard). But it should never be mandated for the public. We the people have the inalienable right to write and publish whatever software we want, just like we have the right to publish articles and songs that criticize the government. That right stays in force even if our software turns out to be buggy.
is for the standard version of mkfs to fill empty disk blocks with random data (from /dev/urandom) BY DEFAULT instead of zeroing them. That way you can run a stego file system in the unused blocks and it will be indistinguishable from ordinary randomized free blocks. If every BSD (and ideally every GNU/Linux) distro shipped with that feature turned on, there would be no way to tell a stego user from a non-user.
And of course, carrying a camcorder (small ones typically weigh a pound or so) is somewhat geeky now, but what happens when they become the size of cigarette lighters? Panasonic already has a solid state one the size of a cigarette pack, though it records only 10 minutes of DVD-quality video so it won't hold a whole movie. That 10 minute limitation won't last, and it can already hold a whole movie at lower resolution.
There's a simple cure. They should have security checkpoints with baggage X-rays at every movie theater, just like at airports. That will really solve the MPAA problem once and for all, since ticket sales will drop to zero.
Now wait til they start putting RFID's in US passports (starting 2007, I think). As Markus Kuhn pointed out, that will make it possible for terrorists to plant bombs that only blow up when Americans are nearby.
Why does the Copyright office (an agency of the Executive branch) get to make a legal decision about the DMCA? Only a court can do that. Congress cannot delegate the authority to make judicial decisions because Congress doesn't have the authority in the first place. What am I missing?
In practice I've never personally never gotten anything from patent applications. One company I worked for filed an application listing my boss and the company CEO as the inventors, for work that I did. I found out about that years after I left the company and was a little bit ticked off, but really, they paid me quite handsomely (at least by my standards at the time) for doing the work, so I can't claim to have been ripped off in the usual sense. I think they knew of my opposition to software patents and were concerned that I would have opposed an application if I knew about it. (I would have recognized the necessity of applying--I don't think the government should issue patents on software to anyone, but I don't believe in unilateral disarmament against competitors who are filing them anyway). Also, I may have been gone from that company by the time they filed the application.
Another company I was at had a semi-official policy of paying bonuses for patents, and I had to file a couple applications, but I think the bonuses fell through the cracks at application time and the company was gone (dotcom casualty) by the time the patent actually issued. However, again, the bonuses involved would have been fairly small potatoes compared to what my salary already was, so not getting it was no big deal.
If you want to deal with your vacuuming problem by throwing money at it, do what anyone else does. Hire a cleaning lady/guy to come in once a week and tidy things up. Your wife will love that.
This parody of a Diebold ad explains the whole situation quite lucidly.
Does Florida have an anti-SLAPP statute? This case seems to cry out for an anti-SLAPP countersuit.
This chip sounds like a big parallel DSP. All those transistors on a Pentium 4 that go into the virtual memory system or the branch prediction or out of order pipeline juggling, in the DSP are dedicated to number crunching. I don't know how much the crunch power of this chip exceeds those of a current high end graphics chip (NVidia, etc). but it's probably not that big a ratio. The graphics chip also beats the heck out of a Pentium 4 in raw parallel arithmetic speed. The graphic chip is of course very specialized (for crunching display lists) while the DSP is a little more general (crunching 64-element vectors, like a Cray-1). It's likely that some multimedia applications like MPEG encoders can be sped up a lot by this chip, but don't expect it to make MS Word or GCC run any faster.
That asks for trouble: a lot of the URL's have unique identifiers, like http://spammersite.com/idiot?moron=asdjicn98niucdn 23d where the identifier is linked to your email address on the spam server. Retrieving the url is then like clicking a remove link: it confirms to the spammer that your address is live, so he works harder to get through your filters. You may get more spam just from using the spider strategy.
Besides the headers you mentioned, requesting the 1x1 gif also sends any cookies that were set by the referring page. You can use javascript on the referring page to set a cookie containing stuff like the user's screen resolution, and then log the cookie when the browser requests that 1x1 gif. Of course if JS is disabled, as for this particular gif, you don't get the resolution that way.
There was a program called "Chesster" which kibitzed like that. Much more amusingly, back in the 80's, the builders of the Belle chess computer interfaced an industrial robot to it to let the computer move actual pieces on a real chessboard. The robot was something they had around the lab for some other project, and it had very powerful motors (it was designed for automobile assembly or something like that). They had to carefully program the robot to pick up the chess pieces gently and put them down without slamming them through the table. Unfortunately, due to a software bug, the story goes, the robot would sometimes lift a captured piece and crush it into powder. I would imagine that to be a scarier put-down than any silly heckling coming out of a console terminal or speech synthesizer.
I think it will be several years before anyone builds anything as strong as Deep Blue II. At that point, the top grandmasters will have something to worry about. For now, the claims that PC programs like Fritz are as strong as DB2 was are mostly marketing hype.
For more info, see Deep Blue designer Feng-Hsiung Hsu's book "Building Deep Blue", about the work that went into the machine and how the Kasparov matches went.
Meanwhile, the fastest airplane ever built is still the SR-71A made in the 1960's. That doesn't mean aircraft technology has come to a standstill. It just means outrunning the SR-71A hasn't been a priority of aircraft builders since then. If they wanted to expend the resources to make a faster plane today, they could do it.
Deep Blue II was the SR-71A of chess computers. What's come afterwards has been a lot more economical and practical, but hasn't tried to match it in pure performance, and hasn't done so.