I wish I could help, but I do intend to travel to the US at some later time in my life, and I don't want to be arrested for circumventig a protection device or something... Boy, do you americans have stupid laws...
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted (...)
What exactly does this mean? That the GPL sets specific rules on copying and distributing and modyfing, but makes no claim as to limitations on RUNNING the program?
So in effect, I can impose an additional license on you stating that you must pay me a per seat licensing fee if you want to run the program?
First of all, let me challenge some of your "non-useful" assumptions:
Bluetooth was designed so that the Bluetooth device (read: network adapter) could be very small and use as little power as possible.
This effectively means that YES, it is useful for internet access from your laptop, because your cell-phone is not going to be doing battery-powered 802.11 for a couple of hours in the near future. It's not about what the laptop can do, it's about what the internet access device can do.
Of course, since your cellphone has bluetooth, if your PDA has it, you can go on the net with it (and edit your dial list, and dial straight from your PDA, etc).
And if your laptop has both bluetooth and 802.11, it can be usead as a bridge to let your PDA talk to your 802.11 network, and so on.
And, of course, it makes sense to use bluetooth for mouse/keyboard/whatever, since you have on all your devices anyway. Why bother with another radio protocol? Besides, you can now use the keyboard to type into your PDA if you want to, no cables involved, no adapter needed on the PDA.
Now for the creative usages:
Redefining "phone": Your phone can now be just a black box that sits in your pocket/briefcase/backpack. Your phonebook is in your PDA, of course, and you talk into a wireless lightweight earset/mic combo. The phone is nothing but a relay station and gateway to the cell network.
Ubiquity:Bluetooth adapters are cheaper and smaller, which means they can be embedded into mostly whatever you want. Your camera will have it, so you can send pictures immediately to your PDA and even store them there instead of in the camera. And you can even print them from your PDA, all you have to do is go near a printer.
Information Exchange:Yes, you will be able to exchange information with other people using bluetooth from your PDA/cellphone/laptop/whatever, even if it's a different brand. More, you will be able to go to a museum and download info and a set of links about a particular piece on show. Or get detailed specs about a video camera you see on a radio shack shelf.
The uses for any technology are unlimited, as long as standards exist. Standards are the basis for interoperability, and that in itself is the basis for competitionand innovation, which in turn stems progress.
If one takes the "oh, we already have a protocol for that, I don't care if it's proprietary" approach, we would never have had TCP/IP and would be stuck inside millions of little islands running OSI and SNA. Or, god forbid, NetBEUI.
For those of you who haven't read the article, the tool works, like so many others, in 2 ways: detection and reaction.
As far as detection goes, they use both traffic signatures and statistical anomaly detection. Meaning that yes, it can effectively block the/. effect (if not too well configured). Any rise in traffic that falls way outside the "usual" traffic pattern gets flagged as an attack.
Now as far as reaction goes, this is where it gets interesting. Not only can they configure local traffic control devices (router, firewall, etc) to block traffic, they can also escalate the traffic block to the next upstream router/firewall/etc. That, of course, requires some degree of collaboration from the upstream party.
As an example, this means that if you, at home, detect a SYN flood from a specific netblock, you can not only block it but you can tell your ISP to block it for you, automatically, in real time.
What remains to be seen is a) whether this is secure at all, or if there are flaws in the block-requesting protocol and algorithm, b) if service providers are willing and able to implement this kind of collaborative system to work on behalf of their users, and c) what kind of investment will service providers need in order to upgrade their routers/firewalls/etc so that they can process a potentially huge number of specific blocking rules for their customers. Yes, every rule requires router CPU, and yes, if you have too many of them, you need a bigger router or things start to slow to a crawl.
This kind of system is definitely good for you, but will it ever see light in commercial terms?
I'm not a heck of a good typist. Still, I manage to get a few wpm out of me, even by "hunt-and-peck". (Well, I guess I know the keyboard by heart anyway, so it's mainly "peck".)
My right wrist hurts sometimes, after a long session. But guess what? It's not the keyboard.
In my case, and maybe in many other people's cases, it the mouse. God, how I hate mouses. Having to sustain your arm in the air while you move the mouse around, your hand always resting on the same position, your fingers having to repeatedly perform the same movements...
I've tried a lot of different things, from changing mouses to changing the way I hold them, to changing the way I sit. I've tried trackballs and touchpads, I even tried a foot-operated gizmo I got to build with a couple of guys from work. Some things work, some things don't. All in all, I'd go for trackballs, wirelless ones, the kind you can place wherever you want to (desk, arm of chair, lap) and still do your stuff.
Many people in the (computer) business don't type all day long. Still, every time I hear about ergonomics people only talk about the keyboards. And, no, I don't think I'm alone in this.
All of them seem like great things to happen! But are they? Let's take a look...
Biointeractive Material: An idea with a lot of potential, and that may see light sooner than we think. The risk here is reverse interaction, that may allow your shirt to be hacked into heating just a bit too much...
Biofuel Production Plants: They mention the risks themselves: using bio-engineered plants for fuel production may create mutated species that grow beyond our control. And on another issue, growing GMO for fuel will legitimise using GMO for food, won't it?
Bionics: A wonderful potential, but so many risks: yes, it can be use to cure the deaf, and the blind, but as you go on it allows you to replace organs, even to enhance them, and in due time it will allow you to slowly become a bit like a cyborg. It sounds great to me, but maybe it will create even a greater divide between the "have"s and the "have not"s. Will humanity (the poor of the world, their strenght being the numbers) rebel against the cyborgs (the bionic we) someday?
Cognitronics: The greatest of all greats, but... If ir can control, can it be controlled? If it interacts, can you read my mind? It kind of redefines the notion of "0wn3d"...
Genotyping: Hmmm... What was this one good for, again? Too much potential for the wrong things happening...
Combinatorial Science: Wow! At last, a way for the government to find all about life, the universe and everything without having to bother with those pesky scientists and their silly notions of "moral" and "ethics"...! Anyway, anything that is comparable to Excel has to be a bad thing.:)
Molecular Manufacturing: One of the coolest technologies ever. And yet, a great potential for being abused. This effectively removes the limit of scale on anything we build, be it large or small. But the planet isn't large enough for us to start building our private megalopolis and robot armies anytime soon. This had better come true after generalized space travel and colonization.
The way the article is written , it seems that most of this is just around the corner. But so is cold fusion, and has been, for a number of yeras now. [/sarcasm]
One of the ideas that attract me the most, "cognitronics", as they call them, is reportedly based upon sensors, advanced analytics and smart materials. And none of those will be sufficiently advanced in the next 10 years to allow for any kind of practical widescale use.
The company also complained that the Pentagon is funding research on making free software more secure, which in effect subsidizes Microsoft's open-source competitors, Stenbit said.
This is wrong and ridiculous. Take a real world comparison:
Publishing cooking books and sharing cooking tips effectively enables people to cook their own meals and enjoy meals cooked by friends, undermining the Commercial Restaurant Industry and subsidizing the Restaurant industry's competitors.
Should the cooking book editors pay money to restaurants, for "damages"? Great idea, no?
Any decent security system, as you put it, requires that you, and only you, have access/knowledge of two of the mentioned things, either of them providing proof by Knowledge, by Posession of by Characteristic.
Proof by two independent methods is good because the probability of successful unlawful authentication is then much lower, being the probability of proof A being compromised times the probability of proof B being compromised.
Now, for this to happen, each and all of the proof methods must remain secure.
In any well implemented system, the access/no-access result will not be ascertained to any of the proof methods, in other words, the system will not tell you if it is the pin or the fingerprint that is wrong.
This contributes to added security on any by-knowledge proof, since it can never be independently verified.
Fingerprints can obviously be independently verified, and so can any proof-by-posession device. Either you have it, or not, and you can know whether you have it just by looking at it.
The difference is that with any system that involves replaceable proof, you can simply revoke the compromised part before the other part is compromised. If someone steals my SecureID card, I report it as stolen and get myself a new one, the original one being cancelled. Even if the card is "cloned" without being stolen, I won't know it wa stolen right away, but as soon as Security sees the card being used but access being denied because they don't know my PIN, they can revoke the card and issue me a new one.
Now think for a minute. If my fingerprint is cloned, what are they going to do? Security can't issue me a new one. If it is revoked, I lose access to the system. And I only have 10 fingers to switch from one to the other.
If they don't revoke, all that's left to the cracker is to figure out my PIN.
The NSA will have to recruit people from somewhere. If you start imposing limits on crypto research then you'll soon stop having cryptography classes on universities. Cryptographers will still exist, but they will be "locked" into working for either the NSA/etc or any kind of criminal organization.
If you reduce the total number of cryptographers, you effectively reduce the number of good cryptographers around.
Did Blowfish/Twofish/Rijndael/RSA/whatever get created inside or outside the government?
I don't even care, I haven't bought a CD _or_ downloaded music in months, but I still care very much about my right, as a researcher, to do my work, to seek my limits, to test the work of my peers. And yes, that involves codebreaking, too.
If you let things like the DMCA go on, next thing you know you'll be saying that searching for vulnerabilities in a piece of software is against the law. And where does that leave you? If you cannot search, you cannot find causes, if you do not find causes, you cannot find fixes, if you can't find fixes, you are own3d, 4ever.
Outlawing cryptography because of the DMCA will effectively undermine any nations capability to crack the next code the next Hitler tries to use.
Ban crypto, stop people from researching and creating circumvention devices for academic purposes, and you may never have sufficient cryptographers to empower you if the need should arise.
On the other hand, I don't see India or China or the Arab Nations rushing to implement their own version of DMCA...
Right On.
One of the most impressive texts on the matter, albeit more than 30 years old, is Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, which I read when I was about 9.
Believe it or not, a lot of people learn better this way. How did you learn Perl? College?
1) Install a distro (preferably one that will have the easiest time with the hardware)
They'll say: Windows is easier
2) Configure a windowing environment (prefereably one that looks the most like Windows)
They'll say: Windows is prettier, and you don't need to configure it by hand
3) Show them an Office suite (preferably one that's comperable to MS-Office)
They'll say: Office does it better
4) Fire up some awesome games (preferably XPilot;-) or LBreakout)
They'll say: These games are lame, even solitaire beats that
5) Start up a variety of browsers (preferable w/ Quicktime, Flash, RealPlayer, XMMS)
They'll say: why so many? isn't there one that works all around? anyway, IE is better
6) Configure and use an e-mail client, Jabber/Yahoo/AIM client (Gaim's good)
They'll say: The GUI isn't consistent with the browser... This Linux software thing isn't integrated at all...
7) Spend some time on XMMS with various skinns -- and point to http://www.jazzradio.net/ and say, "This is coming from Germany"
They'll say: Windows does it better, I think
8) Show them Palm Pilot support (Jpilot's the best)
They'll say: The windows app for the pilot is better, and comes bundled with the original CD
9) Show them Quanta's HTML, PHP, SQL, Java and C/C++ syntax coloring
They'll say: yeah, cool. so what?
10) Show them a GUI file manager (e.g. Konqueror, et al)
They'll say: Windows explorer is more intuitive
So... It's really not a good way to go about it...
Show them scripting, show them administrative task automation, show them remote consoles and X, out of the box, no additional software, show them the C API, clean, documented, show them the daemons. If they dig it, good. If they don't understand... well, they won't understand.
Let it burn, make it break, turn every computer and piece of software in the US into a toy for your silly MPAA and RIAA and Hollywoods.
Now let me break the news to you: there is this thing called "the rest of the world".
And yes, we tend to follow US lead, but we only do that as long as it suits us. (GSM, anyone?)
Be stupid, lock yourselves into a DRM no-evolution prison, and watch Europe and India and Australia and everybody else evolve while you sit in your couch, get fat, and watch Hollywood crap in your DRMBox.
The concept in itself is not too bad, but the whole notion of "open-source tv" is ridiculous.
It's basicaly the same as "open-source cooking". And no, open source cooking doesn't just mean you make the recipe available.
How is open source cooking any different from closed source cooking? Not much.
To have true open source cooking, you need to share the recipe, share the methods, and, more importantly, let other people contribute to the recipe, create derivation dishes, integrate your recipe with their own.
What about open source tv?
What is TV about? Creating? Sharing? No. It's about distributing. If I make a video tape of myself goofing around, it's just a video tape. If I distribute it on a TV network, suddenly it's TV.
So, if you want open source TV, you have to provide a means of open sourcing the distribution process, making it available for comment and participation, for knowledge and for change. It's not about making raw footage available. It's about letting people contribute to the footage, influence the editing process, influence the selection of themes, contribute their own.
That's what open source is. That's not what I read in the article. We're not there yet.
A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant.
Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum.
Software rots if not used.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could help, but I do intend to travel to the US at some later time in my life, and I don't want to be arrested for circumventig a protection device or something... Boy, do you americans have stupid laws...
So in effect, I can impose an additional license on you stating that you must pay me a per seat licensing fee if you want to run the program?
Comments, please...
First of all, let me challenge some of your "non-useful" assumptions:
Bluetooth was designed so that the Bluetooth device (read: network adapter) could be very small and use as little power as possible. This effectively means that YES, it is useful for internet access from your laptop, because your cell-phone is not going to be doing battery-powered 802.11 for a couple of hours in the near future. It's not about what the laptop can do, it's about what the internet access device can do.
Of course, since your cellphone has bluetooth, if your PDA has it, you can go on the net with it (and edit your dial list, and dial straight from your PDA, etc).
And if your laptop has both bluetooth and 802.11, it can be usead as a bridge to let your PDA talk to your 802.11 network, and so on.
And, of course, it makes sense to use bluetooth for mouse/keyboard/whatever, since you have on all your devices anyway. Why bother with another radio protocol? Besides, you can now use the keyboard to type into your PDA if you want to, no cables involved, no adapter needed on the PDA.
Now for the creative usages:
Redefining "phone": Your phone can now be just a black box that sits in your pocket/briefcase/backpack. Your phonebook is in your PDA, of course, and you talk into a wireless lightweight earset/mic combo. The phone is nothing but a relay station and gateway to the cell network.
Ubiquity:Bluetooth adapters are cheaper and smaller, which means they can be embedded into mostly whatever you want. Your camera will have it, so you can send pictures immediately to your PDA and even store them there instead of in the camera. And you can even print them from your PDA, all you have to do is go near a printer.
Information Exchange:Yes, you will be able to exchange information with other people using bluetooth from your PDA/cellphone/laptop/whatever, even if it's a different brand. More, you will be able to go to a museum and download info and a set of links about a particular piece on show. Or get detailed specs about a video camera you see on a radio shack shelf.
The uses for any technology are unlimited, as long as standards exist. Standards are the basis for interoperability, and that in itself is the basis for competitionand innovation, which in turn stems progress.
If one takes the "oh, we already have a protocol for that, I don't care if it's proprietary" approach, we would never have had TCP/IP and would be stuck inside millions of little islands running OSI and SNA. Or, god forbid, NetBEUI.
As far as detection goes, they use both traffic signatures and statistical anomaly detection. Meaning that yes, it can effectively block the /. effect (if not too well configured). Any rise in traffic that falls way outside the "usual" traffic pattern gets flagged as an attack.
Now as far as reaction goes, this is where it gets interesting. Not only can they configure local traffic control devices (router, firewall, etc) to block traffic, they can also escalate the traffic block to the next upstream router/firewall/etc. That, of course, requires some degree of collaboration from the upstream party.
As an example, this means that if you, at home, detect a SYN flood from a specific netblock, you can not only block it but you can tell your ISP to block it for you, automatically, in real time.
What remains to be seen is a) whether this is secure at all, or if there are flaws in the block-requesting protocol and algorithm, b) if service providers are willing and able to implement this kind of collaborative system to work on behalf of their users, and c) what kind of investment will service providers need in order to upgrade their routers/firewalls/etc so that they can process a potentially huge number of specific blocking rules for their customers. Yes, every rule requires router CPU, and yes, if you have too many of them, you need a bigger router or things start to slow to a crawl.
This kind of system is definitely good for you, but will it ever see light in commercial terms?
My right wrist hurts sometimes, after a long session. But guess what? It's not the keyboard.
In my case, and maybe in many other people's cases, it the mouse. God, how I hate mouses. Having to sustain your arm in the air while you move the mouse around, your hand always resting on the same position, your fingers having to repeatedly perform the same movements...
I've tried a lot of different things, from changing mouses to changing the way I hold them, to changing the way I sit. I've tried trackballs and touchpads, I even tried a foot-operated gizmo I got to build with a couple of guys from work.
Some things work, some things don't. All in all, I'd go for trackballs, wirelless ones, the kind you can place wherever you want to (desk, arm of chair, lap) and still do your stuff.
Many people in the (computer) business don't type all day long. Still, every time I hear about ergonomics people only talk about the keyboards. And, no, I don't think I'm alone in this.
Biointeractive Material: An idea with a lot of potential, and that may see light sooner than we think. The risk here is reverse interaction, that may allow your shirt to be hacked into heating just a bit too much...
Biofuel Production Plants: They mention the risks themselves: using bio-engineered plants for fuel production may create mutated species that grow beyond our control. And on another issue, growing GMO for fuel will legitimise using GMO for food, won't it?
Bionics: A wonderful potential, but so many risks: yes, it can be use to cure the deaf, and the blind, but as you go on it allows you to replace organs, even to enhance them, and in due time it will allow you to slowly become a bit like a cyborg. It sounds great to me, but maybe it will create even a greater divide between the "have"s and the "have not"s. Will humanity (the poor of the world, their strenght being the numbers) rebel against the cyborgs (the bionic we) someday?
Cognitronics: The greatest of all greats, but... If ir can control, can it be controlled? If it interacts, can you read my mind? It kind of redefines the notion of "0wn3d"...
Genotyping: Hmmm... What was this one good for, again? Too much potential for the wrong things happening...
Combinatorial Science: Wow! At last, a way for the government to find all about life, the universe and everything without having to bother with those pesky scientists and their silly notions of "moral" and "ethics"...! Anyway, anything that is comparable to Excel has to be a bad thing. :)
Molecular Manufacturing: One of the coolest technologies ever. And yet, a great potential for being abused. This effectively removes the limit of scale on anything we build, be it large or small. But the planet isn't large enough for us to start building our private megalopolis and robot armies anytime soon. This had better come true after generalized space travel and colonization.
Quantum Nucleonics: Hmmm.. Boom?
The way the article is written , it seems that most of this is just around the corner. But so is cold fusion, and has been, for a number of yeras now. [/sarcasm]
One of the ideas that attract me the most, "cognitronics", as they call them, is reportedly based upon sensors, advanced analytics and smart materials. And none of those will be sufficiently advanced in the next 10 years to allow for any kind of practical widescale use.
Learning coding styles from Microsoft is like getting cooking tips from McDonalds...
What are you trying to do, take /. to new levels?
Proof by two independent methods is good because the probability of successful unlawful authentication is then much lower, being the probability of proof A being compromised times the probability of proof B being compromised.
Now, for this to happen, each and all of the proof methods must remain secure.
In any well implemented system, the access/no-access result will not be ascertained to any of the proof methods, in other words, the system will not tell you if it is the pin or the fingerprint that is wrong.
This contributes to added security on any by-knowledge proof, since it can never be independently verified.
Fingerprints can obviously be independently verified, and so can any proof-by-posession device. Either you have it, or not, and you can know whether you have it just by looking at it.
The difference is that with any system that involves replaceable proof, you can simply revoke the compromised part before the other part is compromised. If someone steals my SecureID card, I report it as stolen and get myself a new one, the original one being cancelled. Even if the card is "cloned" without being stolen, I won't know it wa stolen right away, but as soon as Security sees the card being used but access being denied because they don't know my PIN, they can revoke the card and issue me a new one.
Now think for a minute. If my fingerprint is cloned, what are they going to do? Security can't issue me a new one. If it is revoked, I lose access to the system. And I only have 10 fingers to switch from one to the other.
If they don't revoke, all that's left to the cracker is to figure out my PIN.
How long did you say those PINs were, anyway??
The NSA will have to recruit people from somewhere. If you start imposing limits on crypto research then you'll soon stop having cryptography classes on universities.
Cryptographers will still exist, but they will be "locked" into working for either the NSA/etc or any kind of criminal organization.
If you reduce the total number of cryptographers, you effectively reduce the number of good cryptographers around.
Did Blowfish/Twofish/Rijndael/RSA/whatever get created inside or outside the government?
I don't even care, I haven't bought a CD _or_ downloaded music in months, but I still care very much about my right, as a researcher, to do my work, to seek my limits, to test the work of my peers. And yes, that involves codebreaking, too.
If you let things like the DMCA go on, next thing you know you'll be saying that searching for vulnerabilities in a piece of software is against the law.
And where does that leave you? If you cannot search, you cannot find causes, if you do not find causes, you cannot find fixes, if you can't find fixes, you are own3d, 4ever.
Welcome to the Digital Millenium, buster.
Ban crypto, stop people from researching and creating circumvention devices for academic purposes, and you may never have sufficient cryptographers to empower you if the need should arise.
On the other hand, I don't see India or China or the Arab Nations rushing to implement their own version of DMCA...
Right On.
One of the most impressive texts on the matter, albeit more than 30 years old, is Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, which I read when I was about 9.
Believe it or not, a lot of people learn better this way. How did you learn Perl? College?
The famous lovers, in case you don't remember, were well below 18...
What has happened in the last 300 years? Did we all get dumber?
Doesn't seem very effective to me...
;-) or LBreakout)
1) Install a distro (preferably one that will have the easiest time with the hardware)
They'll say: Windows is easier
2) Configure a windowing environment (prefereably one that looks the most like Windows)
They'll say: Windows is prettier, and you don't need to configure it by hand
3) Show them an Office suite (preferably one that's comperable to MS-Office)
They'll say: Office does it better
4) Fire up some awesome games (preferably XPilot
They'll say: These games are lame, even solitaire beats that
5) Start up a variety of browsers (preferable w/ Quicktime, Flash, RealPlayer, XMMS)
They'll say: why so many? isn't there one that works all around? anyway, IE is better
6) Configure and use an e-mail client, Jabber/Yahoo/AIM client (Gaim's good)
They'll say: The GUI isn't consistent with the browser... This Linux software thing isn't integrated at all...
7) Spend some time on XMMS with various skinns -- and point to http://www.jazzradio.net/ and say, "This is coming from Germany"
They'll say: Windows does it better, I think
8) Show them Palm Pilot support (Jpilot's the best)
They'll say: The windows app for the pilot is better, and comes bundled with the original CD
9) Show them Quanta's HTML, PHP, SQL, Java and C/C++ syntax coloring
They'll say: yeah, cool. so what?
10) Show them a GUI file manager (e.g. Konqueror, et al)
They'll say: Windows explorer is more intuitive
So... It's really not a good way to go about it...
Show them scripting, show them administrative task automation, show them remote consoles and X, out of the box, no additional software, show them the C API, clean, documented, show them the daemons. If they dig it, good. If they don't understand... well, they won't understand.
Oooohhhhhhhh, the undead are rising.......
Now let me break the news to you: there is this thing called "the rest of the world".
And yes, we tend to follow US lead, but we only do that as long as it suits us. (GSM, anyone?)
Be stupid, lock yourselves into a DRM no-evolution prison, and watch Europe and India and Australia and everybody else evolve while you sit in your couch, get fat, and watch Hollywood crap in your DRMBox.
</rant>
still, if the concept does not allow for contributing, can you still call it open source?
It's basicaly the same as "open-source cooking". And no, open source cooking doesn't just mean you make the recipe available.
How is open source cooking any different from closed source cooking? Not much.
To have true open source cooking, you need to share the recipe, share the methods, and, more importantly, let other people contribute to the recipe, create derivation dishes, integrate your recipe with their own.
What about open source tv?
What is TV about? Creating? Sharing? No. It's about distributing. If I make a video tape of myself goofing around, it's just a video tape. If I distribute it on a TV network, suddenly it's TV.
So, if you want open source TV, you have to provide a means of open sourcing the distribution process, making it available for comment and participation, for knowledge and for change. It's not about making raw footage available. It's about letting people contribute to the footage, influence the editing process, influence the selection of themes, contribute their own.
That's what open source is. That's not what I read in the article. We're not there yet.
Doc writers will use the tapes in order to assist them in writing the documents for the project.
The main problems are:
To solve this, i propose a novel approach:
Video Tape everything
Record:
- Brainstorming sessions
- Developers describing their code (highlighting it, showing it on screen, explaining what it does)
- Building and integrating activites
- Everything else you can remember
Seems like a weird thing, but try it. When you document, having the tapes around is a precious resource.A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant.
Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum.
Software rots if not used.
These are great mysteries.