Some time ago all software was licensed much the same as this bill would allow, except that it was done under the terms "trade secret agreements". These were done with big corporations (there were only three at the time, and really only One...) and they insisted that you sign up for a serious chunk of change and your first-born to be able to use their products, and they wanted organ-donor status for you to be allowed to actually write your own programs.
A number of companies didn't like this, and took it upon themselves to fix it for a buck or two. One dude slapped some wires in a box and started hustling S-100 cards. Another took a freely published academic programming software (open source...) and turned it into a billion dollar industry. This was all heavily frowned upon by the "extremely evil corporate coven of One".
These three companies tried to lock things down. Big deal. We built others. They set up restrictions. We simply went around them. If the current crop of on-tops (remember the guy with the BASIC?) trys to work things the same way as his ancestors, we will deal with it as we always have. By using ingenuity to come up with a better (or at least different and unlicensed) way.
Not only that, but I can make a buck in the process. Never underestimate the ability of a businessman to get out of paying a dollar. And never get between a businessman and a dollar. If he's got a choice between a hundred-thousand and seventy-five, all things being equal, he picks the seventy-five. I intend to be standing there to collect.
Partially. I had a number of systems in mind, but I was mainly thinking about the "instant demand" nature that most of us use when driving versus thermal inertia, in the case of heat-based engines.
Stirling (and it's liquid analog, Malone) engines still need redesign to overcome thermal inertia problems. Granted, they are far more tolerant than turbines or terry wheels to speed/power changes, but there is a long way to go.
Stirling-electric strikes me as a really good way to go. Batteries for that instantaneous get-up-and-go, and microprocessor-controlled Stirling engine for primary drive. Generators can be easily designed to fall withing the best RPM range for such an engine, rather than the extreme gear-down (or gen. redesign) needed to use turbines for same.
I was going to make a lightbulb joke, but just couldn't bring myself to do it.
If you could get people to wait five minutes after getting into their car before they could drive away, then practical low-emmision vehicles would probably already be here.
If you could get people to stop speeding up above the limit so thay can brake in a short distance and wait at the light to go, then low-emmsions vehicles would already be here.
If you could get folks to wait more than five minutes to fill up their gas tank (battery, whatever) the low-emmision vehicles would already be here.
And most importantly, if you could convince people that being the first off the line at an intersection was not terribly important, low-emmission vehicles would probably already be here.
As long as autos are primarily self-driven, then you are not going to have low-emmission vehicles without massive increase in technology. The technology in place already was driven by the convienience factors involved for the driver, and it is the driver's comfort that sells cars. If it doesn't sell, it doesn't work.
Just think what this would do for the open software and information movement.
Suppose for a minute that you are an IT director of a medium-sized business. You've probably got an admin, a couple of programmer analysts, and a couple of guys that fix PCs, and the dude who runs the server farm. You don't have the resources to fix much of anything, just keep day-to-day ops running, and maybe diddle some reports together for special purposes.
Now suppose you are going in front of your board (or owner) and you tell him that the next software upgrade you are going to purchase will lock him in, and if it doesn't work you can't do anything about it, he can't get the money back, and if he complains about it, he could get sued. What is he going to say?
How much should a little company trust a big one? A basic rule in business is that you should try to do business with companies your own size. This give you some leverage when the inevitable problems show up. Does the business owner want to do business with big software company? Or maybe he starts looking for other ways out? As IT manager you know you can't write your own, way too expensive, but maybe you could find someone to do it for you. Or maybe you could switch vendors. If you do switch vendors, are you going to pick one that has the same grief as the one you left? or maybe you want to buy something with an open license, that you can get fixed anywhere, or maybe (if you absolutely have to) fix yourself?
I see this as an opportunity to snatch some of the vertical market money away from the entrenched closed software folks, and get some real apps based on open software. That would ensure its existence far better than any foundations or grants, let me tell you.
I was amazed at the laxness of this RFP critter. Under definitions you have:
(2) For purposes of Objectives 1 and 2 in Section C.3, the term "assuming proper usage"
includes assuming the existence of proper legal authority; the assistance and cooperation
of the relevant ISP or system administrator, including the timely and accurate provision of
any necessary system information; and observance, by those using the Carnivore system,
of any relevant statutes, policies, procedures, methods, and practices.
However, skipping down a bit, to the actual request:
C.3 Contract Objective
(a) The Contractor's technical review of the Carnivore system should address the following four
questions:
(1) Assuming proper usage, will the Carnivore system provide investigators with all the
information, and only the information, that it is designed and set to provide in accordance
with a given court order?
(2) Assuming proper usage, will use of the Carnivore system introduce new, material risks of
operational or security impairment of an ISP's network?
(3) Does use of the Carnivore system introduce new, material risks of the unauthorized
acquisition, whether intentional or unintentional, of electronic communication information
by (i) FBI personnel or (ii) persons other than FBI personnel?
(4) Are the protections built into the Carnivore system, including both audit functions and
operational procedures or practices, commensurate with the level of the risks, if any,
identified in response to (3) above?
(b) Additional, relevant questions may be added to the above list.
So what is the point? If we play by the rules, then will rules be broken? Seems like this is a rather limited view of the situation. The problems with Carnivore is that it is like the butt-set in the trunk of the police detective's car. "Only to be used in case of court order" Uh, right. "Don't worry that the information we obtain by listening to his phone is not admissible, just as long as we can dig up evidence some other way..."
When I am programming, I often crank ten screens worth per day. By the time I finish editing these, I have probably typed ten times that. I would hate to speak all of this, especially if working in the classic "open cube farm".
This could be worse than those annoying jackals from the marketing department, who when cubed near us insist on monitoring their voicemail by speakerphone, and always at top volume. Grrhh! Or the admin from hell who insists that everyone benefits from decibelic exposure to retro radio. "All disco, all the time..." Smash! Whump! Mrphf! (sound of small boom-box radio receiver being forced up human orifice)
Maybe you could get a better keyboard, and some macros for it?
It would have to include Voice-Over-IP. I might want to make a phone call, and won't want to interrupt my feed. I also have to make it battery powered, and account for wireless connections (bluetooth) to PDAs and stuff I might be carrying.
Damn! I forgot which pocket I put the file server in...
Rats! I left my ISP in my other backpack...
Spoken on a mountain top in the middle of nowhere: "Hold up. I've got to change a backup tape..."
Anybody got a handle on the retro schedule? Should be a pretty good show, probably best somewhere over the Indian Ocean.
I liked the phones, personally. I took them all over the place, as Alaska is "heavily rural", and has almost no cell coverage. They worked really well after I figured out that you had to hold down the freaking '0' key to make a plus sign in front of dialing the number.
What I can't figure out is whether they were intended as a combination of "background" microwave noise and messaging, or had something else built in. Let's face it, if you use a spread spectrum microwave Tac radio, the opposing side doesn't really need to know what you are sending. All they need to do is fix you long enough put something through your position. A sky full of spread spectrum microwave transmitters pointed at the ground must have looked pretty handy to some folks.
On the other hand, putting a downlink and control station in Quantico, Va. might have made economic sense. After all, real estate is so inexpensive there;-).
Also, the handheld units are showing up in pawn shops for dirt nothing. Has anybody got a use for the little beggars?
There is not much comparison.
I have had to clean up a great number of TIGER files, in an effort to match them to Sat IR data and Photogrammetry. During this process, I have noticed:
1. Things are not where they are supposed to be. In the files for Alaska, points were often plus or minus five percent. The town of Bethel was off by about eight miles.
2. Numerous duplications. We found one subdvision in Anchorage was duplicated three times, in slightly different spots.
3. Don't know where they got the base maps, but I figure it was a historical archive. The towns of Whitney and Spenard havn't existed for thirty years or more...
I thought I was going to have to send my father-in-law off to Japan or Brazil to get something done about his Alzhiemers.
George Bush Sr. pays off some of his political debts to some foaming-at-the-mouth radical right-wingers who are deluded enough to think they know what God has wants for the rest of us, and we are left to suffer the consequences of lack of basic research. I wonder what those people who exhorted president Bush to cut off funding for embryo research will say when they hit seventy and start forgetting where they live? I'll bet you they run right off to other countries and get their treatments. After all it isn't sinful if the neighbors don't know. Maybe stem cell treatments will become the old folk's version of "visiting her aunt in Duluth".
I love this country, but I swear I worry about seeing Handmaidens on the streets, any day now.
There are some good organic molecular modeling programs out there. Oh, sorry, wrong kind of trip...;)
The problem is not so much the programming, as there are several good public-licensed Geographic Information Systems softwares out there that could be cut down to do the job. The problems is where are you going to get the mapping database?
The owners of the database need to have a huge number of copies sold in order to cover their considerable cost in labor for cleaning up raw data. Maybe what is needed is for the software publishers to piggyback a linux program on to their existing Windoze package.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but where I'm located a good used Pentium with modem, screen, and eight meg is about a hundred bucks. Pay another hundred to some middle-school techno-geek to have them lock everything down except the browser and Quicken. Set the modem to auto-dial and have the techling set up your internet account. Save one hundred bucks, and you can run Doom on it later after you get to the right side of your learning curve (although sloooowly...)
The net is not the only way to keep track of folks info. What about supermarkets that track your every purchase through card entry? What about your doctor, in the form of his or her personal corporation's medical records?
Suppose I find a doctor that has gone bankrupt, make an offer to the trustees to take all those old musty files off their hands for cash. Wonder how much I could make off of that in a medium sized community?
"Yes sir, Mr. Vinkman, I have your medical records right here, including notes about the time you were treated for herpes duplex after visiting Ms. Wong's Hottub Parlour. I can mail the originals to your home for free, in an envelope addressed to Mr. or Mrs. Vinkman, or I can deliver them personally to you for a small fee..."
You, yes, you, can create a modular well-designed website in just a few minutes using our special programming methodology. Yes, just a simple invocation of the container and you to can churn out pages of absolutely perfect web design with out all that muss and fuss of actual thought or design work. Order today! Just call 1-800-666-2222, operators are standing by. Allow four to six weeks for delivery. Cash, money order, Visa or mastercard only, sorry no CODs.
Eaargh! HTML meets 4D. Bambi meets Godzilla. Both flicks turn out the same.
Granted, HTML was, in my opinion, a great step backward in terms of representation and structure. Reminded me of editing documents in Runoff and QED. But it did have the advantage of being the lowest common denominator, and as such became an instant standard.
Yet, the purpose of most web sites is to advertise or sell. This is done most effectively by making the customer WANT to look at the site. In this day that means that you have to have a serious difference factor. Why should customers pick any one of you if you all look the same. Folks will focus on the different item in any list (try being the only guy in the squad with glasses). This leads me to believe the working (sale curve increasing) website is one that has a different look and feel to it, thus requiring high degrees of individuality in design. This is not easily accomplished with high level design tools. The time spent in customising the tools to fit the requirements often outstrips the time saved in design.
I will grant that maintenance will be simplified, though.
All of the above is predicated on the public use of a website to sell or persuade. Other uses should fit better.
The coding used for ISDN "U" lines depends partly on summing the previous power contents in the transmission line. You have to know what was sent in order to interpret what is being received.
This makes intelligible intercept difficult from a point in the middle of the circut, which does not have access to the originating data.
This has been a problem for the industry, so much so that most ISDN test instrumentation does not include the most basic monitoring features, execept at the ST and TE points in the path.
Now, having said this, it is not impossible to decode raw 2B1Q from the middle, it is just very unlikely that the local cop is going to have such equipment in the trunk of his car. Neither is the local phone guy. After the first electronics, however, the signaling is all standard 64K channel, the CO guy can hear all..
I agree about the STU III, but they aren't perfect, either;)
Maybe there will be enough ionization residue from the beam passing through the atmosphere to fill up the seasonal variations over the Antarctic.
It may also cause more space debris than it eliminates. If you put a ten centimeter hole in a foreign government's "communications satellite", it will certainly qualify as debris...
Let's see, three hundred and seventy-five million miles divided by six and one half gallons (I'm making some assumptions about how NASA would store liquid xenon gas...) is 57692307 miles per gallon.
The above subject should be sung by a chorus of munchkins, who immediately afterwards will be hired by outsource companies to take care of corporate legacy Vaxen until well into my retirement.
Due to less than legal uses to which payphones are put, a great deal of them are recorded full time, at the CO. This way the cops simply have to get warrant and run back through CDR until they find the volume they want.
You can expect to find this setup on payphones in seedier bars, courthouses and police stations (oh, yes!), transit centers, and high schools.
Certain types of cell phones offer the greatest security. Get any CDMA-based pay-cash-in-advance cellphone from you local convienience store for about a hundred bucks, use nefariously while riding about, wipe fingerprints from same, slosh a little vodka over it, and throw in convienient river. No intercept, no billing record, no owner record, no location data, just an ESN they can track to the local wholesaler, who has no idea who bought the damn thing.
If you have to have a land-line, get an ISDN-based voice phone. Because of the way ISDN is encoded, this will prevent all intercept up to the first electronics.
Craftsman. Yeah, sure. Here's twenty-five cents, go buy yourself a real tool set.
You can have my MAC tools after you pry them from my dead, bloody fingers.
After use, do you have to get an MSDS tattoo?
on
Blood Type: NULL
·
· Score: 1
AFAIR, This stuff was developed in the early eighties for use in military trauma units.
One of the problems was the long half-life of CHCs and CFCs in bodily processes. Once it is in, it stays there for quite some time.
Since containers for these chemicals are required to have warning labels, even if the levels contained in them are in the parts per million range, what about the patient? The nurse would have adequate warning (read: labeling) if working with bottled liquids containing this stuff, what is the difference between that and handling bodily fluids? Where does the warning label go?
Slashdot Mirror
A number of companies didn't like this, and took it upon themselves to fix it for a buck or two. One dude slapped some wires in a box and started hustling S-100 cards. Another took a freely published academic programming software (open source...) and turned it into a billion dollar industry. This was all heavily frowned upon by the "extremely evil corporate coven of One".
These three companies tried to lock things down. Big deal. We built others. They set up restrictions. We simply went around them. If the current crop of on-tops (remember the guy with the BASIC?) trys to work things the same way as his ancestors, we will deal with it as we always have. By using ingenuity to come up with a better (or at least different and unlicensed) way.
Not only that, but I can make a buck in the process. Never underestimate the ability of a businessman to get out of paying a dollar. And never get between a businessman and a dollar. If he's got a choice between a hundred-thousand and seventy-five, all things being equal, he picks the seventy-five. I intend to be standing there to collect.
Stirling (and it's liquid analog, Malone) engines still need redesign to overcome thermal inertia problems. Granted, they are far more tolerant than turbines or terry wheels to speed/power changes, but there is a long way to go.
Stirling-electric strikes me as a really good way to go. Batteries for that instantaneous get-up-and-go, and microprocessor-controlled Stirling engine for primary drive. Generators can be easily designed to fall withing the best RPM range for such an engine, rather than the extreme gear-down (or gen. redesign) needed to use turbines for same.
If you could get people to wait five minutes after getting into their car before they could drive away, then practical low-emmision vehicles would probably already be here.
If you could get people to stop speeding up above the limit so thay can brake in a short distance and wait at the light to go, then low-emmsions vehicles would already be here.
If you could get folks to wait more than five minutes to fill up their gas tank (battery, whatever) the low-emmision vehicles would already be here.
And most importantly, if you could convince people that being the first off the line at an intersection was not terribly important, low-emmission vehicles would probably already be here.
As long as autos are primarily self-driven, then you are not going to have low-emmission vehicles without massive increase in technology. The technology in place already was driven by the convienience factors involved for the driver, and it is the driver's comfort that sells cars. If it doesn't sell, it doesn't work.
Suppose for a minute that you are an IT director of a medium-sized business. You've probably got an admin, a couple of programmer analysts, and a couple of guys that fix PCs, and the dude who runs the server farm. You don't have the resources to fix much of anything, just keep day-to-day ops running, and maybe diddle some reports together for special purposes.
Now suppose you are going in front of your board (or owner) and you tell him that the next software upgrade you are going to purchase will lock him in, and if it doesn't work you can't do anything about it, he can't get the money back, and if he complains about it, he could get sued. What is he going to say?
How much should a little company trust a big one? A basic rule in business is that you should try to do business with companies your own size. This give you some leverage when the inevitable problems show up. Does the business owner want to do business with big software company? Or maybe he starts looking for other ways out? As IT manager you know you can't write your own, way too expensive, but maybe you could find someone to do it for you. Or maybe you could switch vendors. If you do switch vendors, are you going to pick one that has the same grief as the one you left? or maybe you want to buy something with an open license, that you can get fixed anywhere, or maybe (if you absolutely have to) fix yourself?
I see this as an opportunity to snatch some of the vertical market money away from the entrenched closed software folks, and get some real apps based on open software. That would ensure its existence far better than any foundations or grants, let me tell you.
(2) For purposes of Objectives 1 and 2 in Section C.3, the term "assuming proper usage" includes assuming the existence of proper legal authority; the assistance and cooperation of the relevant ISP or system administrator, including the timely and accurate provision of any necessary system information; and observance, by those using the Carnivore system, of any relevant statutes, policies, procedures, methods, and practices.
However, skipping down a bit, to the actual request:
C.3 Contract Objective
(a) The Contractor's technical review of the Carnivore system should address the following four questions:
(1) Assuming proper usage, will the Carnivore system provide investigators with all the information, and only the information, that it is designed and set to provide in accordance with a given court order?
(2) Assuming proper usage, will use of the Carnivore system introduce new, material risks of operational or security impairment of an ISP's network?
(3) Does use of the Carnivore system introduce new, material risks of the unauthorized acquisition, whether intentional or unintentional, of electronic communication information by (i) FBI personnel or (ii) persons other than FBI personnel?
(4) Are the protections built into the Carnivore system, including both audit functions and operational procedures or practices, commensurate with the level of the risks, if any, identified in response to (3) above?
(b) Additional, relevant questions may be added to the above list.
So what is the point? If we play by the rules, then will rules be broken? Seems like this is a rather limited view of the situation. The problems with Carnivore is that it is like the butt-set in the trunk of the police detective's car. "Only to be used in case of court order" Uh, right. "Don't worry that the information we obtain by listening to his phone is not admissible, just as long as we can dig up evidence some other way..."
This could be worse than those annoying jackals from the marketing department, who when cubed near us insist on monitoring their voicemail by speakerphone, and always at top volume. Grrhh! Or the admin from hell who insists that everyone benefits from decibelic exposure to retro radio. "All disco, all the time..." Smash! Whump! Mrphf! (sound of small boom-box radio receiver being forced up human orifice)
Maybe you could get a better keyboard, and some macros for it?
It would have to include Voice-Over-IP. I might want to make a phone call, and won't want to interrupt my feed. I also have to make it battery powered, and account for wireless connections (bluetooth) to PDAs and stuff I might be carrying.
Damn! I forgot which pocket I put the file server in...
Rats! I left my ISP in my other backpack...
Spoken on a mountain top in the middle of nowhere: "Hold up. I've got to change a backup tape..."
I liked the phones, personally. I took them all over the place, as Alaska is "heavily rural", and has almost no cell coverage. They worked really well after I figured out that you had to hold down the freaking '0' key to make a plus sign in front of dialing the number.
What I can't figure out is whether they were intended as a combination of "background" microwave noise and messaging, or had something else built in. Let's face it, if you use a spread spectrum microwave Tac radio, the opposing side doesn't really need to know what you are sending. All they need to do is fix you long enough put something through your position. A sky full of spread spectrum microwave transmitters pointed at the ground must have looked pretty handy to some folks.
On the other hand, putting a downlink and control station in Quantico, Va. might have made economic sense. After all, real estate is so inexpensive there ;-).
Also, the handheld units are showing up in pawn shops for dirt nothing. Has anybody got a use for the little beggars?
1. Things are not where they are supposed to be. In the files for Alaska, points were often plus or minus five percent. The town of Bethel was off by about eight miles.
2. Numerous duplications. We found one subdvision in Anchorage was duplicated three times, in slightly different spots.
3. Don't know where they got the base maps, but I figure it was a historical archive. The towns of Whitney and Spenard havn't existed for thirty years or more...
I sure hope they get better with practice.
White or yellow, business directory, etc. All you need.
Or do you like paying fifty cents (or more) per lookup?
Sometimes, just a plain, simple calculator would be nice, too.
George Bush Sr. pays off some of his political debts to some foaming-at-the-mouth radical right-wingers who are deluded enough to think they know what God has wants for the rest of us, and we are left to suffer the consequences of lack of basic research. I wonder what those people who exhorted president Bush to cut off funding for embryo research will say when they hit seventy and start forgetting where they live? I'll bet you they run right off to other countries and get their treatments. After all it isn't sinful if the neighbors don't know. Maybe stem cell treatments will become the old folk's version of "visiting her aunt in Duluth".
I love this country, but I swear I worry about seeing Handmaidens on the streets, any day now.
The problem is not so much the programming, as there are several good public-licensed Geographic Information Systems softwares out there that could be cut down to do the job. The problems is where are you going to get the mapping database?
The owners of the database need to have a huge number of copies sold in order to cover their considerable cost in labor for cleaning up raw data. Maybe what is needed is for the software publishers to piggyback a linux program on to their existing Windoze package.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but where I'm located a good used Pentium with modem, screen, and eight meg is about a hundred bucks. Pay another hundred to some middle-school techno-geek to have them lock everything down except the browser and Quicken. Set the modem to auto-dial and have the techling set up your internet account. Save one hundred bucks, and you can run Doom on it later after you get to the right side of your learning curve (although sloooowly...)
Suppose I find a doctor that has gone bankrupt, make an offer to the trustees to take all those old musty files off their hands for cash. Wonder how much I could make off of that in a medium sized community?
"Yes sir, Mr. Vinkman, I have your medical records right here, including notes about the time you were treated for herpes duplex after visiting Ms. Wong's Hottub Parlour. I can mail the originals to your home for free, in an envelope addressed to Mr. or Mrs. Vinkman, or I can deliver them personally to you for a small fee..."
Eaargh! HTML meets 4D. Bambi meets Godzilla. Both flicks turn out the same.
Granted, HTML was, in my opinion, a great step backward in terms of representation and structure. Reminded me of editing documents in Runoff and QED. But it did have the advantage of being the lowest common denominator, and as such became an instant standard.
Yet, the purpose of most web sites is to advertise or sell. This is done most effectively by making the customer WANT to look at the site. In this day that means that you have to have a serious difference factor. Why should customers pick any one of you if you all look the same. Folks will focus on the different item in any list (try being the only guy in the squad with glasses). This leads me to believe the working (sale curve increasing) website is one that has a different look and feel to it, thus requiring high degrees of individuality in design. This is not easily accomplished with high level design tools. The time spent in customising the tools to fit the requirements often outstrips the time saved in design.
I will grant that maintenance will be simplified, though.
All of the above is predicated on the public use of a website to sell or persuade. Other uses should fit better.
presently staring at a wall of 4gl manuals...
This makes intelligible intercept difficult from a point in the middle of the circut, which does not have access to the originating data.
This has been a problem for the industry, so much so that most ISDN test instrumentation does not include the most basic monitoring features, execept at the ST and TE points in the path.
Now, having said this, it is not impossible to decode raw 2B1Q from the middle, it is just very unlikely that the local cop is going to have such equipment in the trunk of his car. Neither is the local phone guy. After the first electronics, however, the signaling is all standard 64K channel, the CO guy can hear all..
I agree about the STU III, but they aren't perfect, either ;)
It may also cause more space debris than it eliminates. If you put a ten centimeter hole in a foreign government's "communications satellite", it will certainly qualify as debris...
I want my van to get this...
Excuse me, I feel old now...
You can expect to find this setup on payphones in seedier bars, courthouses and police stations (oh, yes!), transit centers, and high schools.
Certain types of cell phones offer the greatest security. Get any CDMA-based pay-cash-in-advance cellphone from you local convienience store for about a hundred bucks, use nefariously while riding about, wipe fingerprints from same, slosh a little vodka over it, and throw in convienient river. No intercept, no billing record, no owner record, no location data, just an ESN they can track to the local wholesaler, who has no idea who bought the damn thing.
If you have to have a land-line, get an ISDN-based voice phone. Because of the way ISDN is encoded, this will prevent all intercept up to the first electronics.
I love this country...
You can have my MAC tools after you pry them from my dead, bloody fingers.
One of the problems was the long half-life of CHCs and CFCs in bodily processes. Once it is in, it stays there for quite some time.
Since containers for these chemicals are required to have warning labels, even if the levels contained in them are in the parts per million range, what about the patient? The nurse would have adequate warning (read: labeling) if working with bottled liquids containing this stuff, what is the difference between that and handling bodily fluids? Where does the warning label go?
I want mine on my rump...