I find it amazing that nobody seems to notice that adding an ECHELON and a DCS1000 feed to Google is making it like the NSA, but where people actually VOLUNTEER data. In addition, it's Terms of Service give it more legal freedom to use and abuse your information and intellectual property than even the US border control can with accessing laptops of people entering the country.
It appears 8+ years of indoctrination is paying off big time - nobody appears to remember that privacy is a basic right. All it takes is some BS about "not being evil" for people to miss the shocking depth to which they can access all your personal data. Even the stuff they don't hold themselves will come up through the search engine. By matching up DNS records they will be able to add your entire Internet activity to your identity.
That's going to be fun when you catch some sort of virus downloading porn - and the next time you apply for a job..
I don't have a Mac yet, but I was planning to buy an OSX based laptop, basically because I don't have the time to mess around with my work laptop, so I'd stick neo or openoffice on it (no idea which is is better yet) and not fiddle with it other than keeping it up to date.
The main driver is to protect client information so I'll have to investigate available encryption, and I'm no fan of phone-home facilities. I'm OK with a one-off license check, but it would piss me off if I'm continuously checked like some tagged criminal (the main reason Windows is being replaced where I can with Linux). I am aware I'm changing one control fanatic for another so I'd be interested to hear just what a Mac calls home for, and how I can stop it without pulling the plug.
Otherwise I'll just buy a laptop and stick Linux on it (Ubuntu, OpenSuSE or Mandriva).
He is actually right, though. Rule 1 when travelling abroad unaccompanied is to assure your own physical security. This is not going to work if you start with painting a target on yourself. The larger the delta between what you consider a reasonable income and what the population earns, the lower the barrier to crime, and that frequently includes the police who have to risk their lives for peanuts.
I would add that your projected attitude should be one of wary but confident and alert reserve. It's better to remain hard to read that turn into Johnny Foreigner who is all of a sudden a bit more well off than the rest - I have seen plenty of defective personalities getting lifted for every penny. Although that is in principle funny and well deserved, the whining does eventually get irritating so I guess that's where his vitriol comes from: been there, and seen it. Ditto for me.
Well, I just have this sense of a recurring senseless debate, and I'm starting to get very fed up with having to argue with people that will insist on screwing things up for themselves.
Let them be, I say. Give in. Stop arguing and wasting your time. They will continue bending the law, bribing politicians and spout endless BS in the press until you do what they say, and I think we're wasting our time. Oh, and ISPs must ensure that the costs for all this effort comes squarely out of the music and film industry pockets - they should have 100% support then because they're paying for it. Not paid this month? Oh, damn, we can't run the blocking system then, terribly sorry.
It's a bit like what some civil servants do when they want to protest: they don't go onto the streets, no, they simply start applying the rules *precisely* and the whole system grinds to a halt.
Let it happen - I'm positive execs know full well that a 100% success will close their business in at most half a year (I reckon it'll be 2 months when it already starts showing up in sales figures). It'll give them a choice: finally stop this crap for good, or see the business fold. I reckon they'll choose the bit that retains money.
These people do positively do not know what they are doing, and they won't stop until they find out. So let them, and all that take their bribes, sorry, "campaign support". It'll show the game for what it is so we can finally move on.
What the EU wants to do is up to the EU, but if the system is installed in Switzerland you can bet on it that Swiss data isn't going to be provided because (AFAIK) it would break the Swiss banking law.
I think it would probably require a public vote before that would be legally permissible - there was already enough noise about this data uncontrolled going to Europe..
We've known for quite some time that exposure actually CREATES sales, not reduces it. As it so happens, I just came back from a party where one discussion was "I got this copy of xyz, and I liked it so much I went and bought the album" - which happened to be an answer to someone who did buy a whole book series of an author after reading a library book.
If I were leading some kind of ISP club I'd call all of them and ensure that indeed NOBODY carries that traffic anymore - absolutely nobody. I'd give it 2 months before the media industry realises just how deep they've cut their own flesh. At that point discussions will become a lot more sensible. There is really no better way to nuke their business that indeed following what they want to do and let them feel the resulting pain. Because it will prove just how Pyrrhic that victory is.
So, if you hang together you will either end up with a more reasonable discussion, or they'll go bankrupt - which also not a bad thing IMHO, that's merely another bubble where bursting was long overdue.
I don't think piracy is good, but there are pirates and home users - the two are different. One type will become your client if you treat them well, the other type does things in volume and belongs in jail (and has been proven to go out of business if you lower margins).
If you stick your *customers* in jail for being interested in your product the results will be pretty obvious. In the US there already a whole generation growing up knowing people of their own age whose life has been destroyed by the RIAA. Do you really think they will EVER buy another record in their life?
.. your laptop/notebook will be accessed when you travel BACK, not when you go to the UK.
Oh, and make sure you don't look like a Brazilian electrician when you travel on the London Underground, it's bad for your health. Speaking of health, smoking is banned on the London Underground but you'll see plenty people smoke as the worst that can happen is a gazillion repeats of the "smoking is forbidden" tape unless you are unlucky and the Transport police is around (see previous remark about not looking like a Brazilian electrician).
Personally I wouldn't bother with a laptop - plenty of cybercafes, and what you don't have cannot be stolen. Take a book on the Underground so you have something to do when it gets stuck. You could also amuse yourself with collecting all the Underground brochures and see which one mentions that you're entitled to a refund if you're 15 minutes delayed. I'm going to ruin that for you: the answer is "none" because they have been hiding that since it was introduced 12 years ago. You will also discover the system is saturated with people who tend to miss their annual baths, and it spreads viruses faster than Microsoft Outlook. Always wash your hands..
Make sure you go to the Science Museum - actually, you can lose whole days in there - South Kensington station. That also used to be the station to exit if you were planning to meet Mark Shuttleworth, but Canonical now has offices along the Thames instead.
Oh, and in case no-one has mentioned it - it rains quite often in London. This means taxis disappear and it gets even busier in the Underground.
Well, if I were Apple I'd look at the bright side. As a frequent smoker you're hardly likely to be a LONG-term problem:-).
The solution is very obvious: Apple needs to employ a few smokers. They can handle the vile stench of old smoke, and will not suffer *additional* health problems.
I've slowly started to wonder that as well. WiFi support has always been, well, rubbish, the KDE4 mess wasn't really their fault but didn't help either, and you need to add other repositories if you want to download stuff like Asterisk - which usually isn't properly integrated so you end up hunting for libraries and the whole DIY show starts that you were trying to avoid in the first place. And that's before you try to run it 64bit. I used to actually buy the commercial version, but with OpenSuSE not working for me that stopped.
On the flipside, when it works it works well and is quite easy to change into what you want (I tend to run a desktop which is halfway between desktop and server). I found Ubuntu in that respect more work - it really is a desktop where server facilities are still "old school" config files.
As I tend to run *one* version of Linux I'll torrent the OpenSuSE DVD once more and see if it works for me on a clean box (I never found upgrades work that well, and it's nice to clean out the crud). I also just grabbed the Mandriva DVD which is a distro I have never used before. We'll see which one wins, I'm not religious about it:-)
Damage for whatever motive. Economic, to cause damage to local economies by, for instance, causing food supplies to defrost or for industries to fail or as the result of blackmail that didn't work, revenge to get back to some neighbour, council or government or plain malice like people breaking windows and spraying graffiti.
The problem is that there is still SCADA kit out there that can be disabled with one single network packet and it will then fail in an undetermined state (you can't predict how it will fail). The problem with those devices is that you can't reset them by simply resetting them - most of them need reprogramming before they will work again. In addition, over time some bright spark (pardon the pun) came up with the idea to switch the base OS for those control systems from Unix to Windows, and it's only been over the last few years that anti-virus was finally an accepted add-on.
In some cases, network gateways perform the anti-virus function so the original installaion is left untouched as it works and is stable. That does, however, leave an insider threat risk - any engineer with an unclean laptop can accidentally nuke the plant..
Thanks for explaining the back-and-forth process, it was nice to read in just a short article how it all hangs together.
I appear to have been blessed with a fast metabolism which burns off what I eat. My body temperature rises dramatically when I fall asleep (so I can't fake that:)) which appears to have something to do with it, but it means I don't need to do much to stay in "shape" (body dimension wise), but I ought to go and do more sport for simple endurance reasons. I have at one point managed to add a good 6 kg, but I deliberately refused to adjust my clothes and got more active instead:-).
My son didn't have cartoons, but he got addicted to a BBC programme called "Words & pictures" which was shown every morning (and we ended up religiously taping). This starts with describing letters ("e" - "eel, egg") and then draws them very explicitly on a whiteboard with a "magic marker" ("straight across and rouuund"), and the series gradually moves into paired characters and then eventually words. This interest started at age 2.5 or so, and after a totally worn out video recorder (for seeing things again), a mountain of scrapbooks (at first, one character was enough to fill a page) and half a paycheck on whiteboard markers (until we found the liquid filled ones that don't dry out) he was writing and reading at age 3.5. I had not realised he picked up pre-reading as well until I asked him to read ME a story, and it was too fluent for him to read that word by word. A few years later I noticed him speed reading as well, he seems to follow the diagonal method.
All we did was give him the opportunity, the exposure. No pressure, just help if it didn't work or learning how to hold a pen properly and how to make letters the same size when fine motoric skills were up to it. I must admit I was a bit worried about how deep he got into this - on holidays, all it took was a pen and a notepad to keep him from getting bored. He seems to have my affinity for fast pattern recognition, maybe that helped - I remember having to slow him down so he switched from reading the words to understanding the sentence and its content.
At his school there was another girl who'd done exactly the same, so they ended up reading the story of the nativity play that year together.
Personally, if the BBC would put that series out on DVDs I would recommend this to any parent. Kids seem to pick things up at warp speed when they're ready for it and interested, just don't try to force it (especially when they're little - they will go to school soon enough). Most of the time exposing them to as many different things as possible and having fun with it is enough - if something resonates you'll know soon.
Funny that. My dad's a Toyota fan (must be his age, it used to be VW Passat:-), but I'll wind him up about this the next time I see him.
My Audi has its floor mats anchored so they don't shift (you unclip them from the pillars that hold them in place for cleaning), and thus don't get in the way.
I'm actually surprised that this can happen, AFAIK Toyota is normally pretty thorough in its design. OK, it still looks plasticky and very Japanese but it's normally all pretty thought through. Let's see what happens next.
I'm more in favour of hanging, just not by the neck:-)
On the (only slightly) more serious side, I wonder what would be an appropriate punishment. Making the guy go through 30 commercials before he can collect his food, go to the toilet or go to bed? Barring him from ever receiving soap on a rope so he'll always have to collect it off the floor in the showers?
No idea, but I feel that locking up will probably not be that effective.
Actually, clocks are the biggest challenge in especially complex systems.
It starts with the question "whose clock do we use?", which in earlier days used to be the gunner's watch. Now it's generally an atomic reference, but even that has its own challenges when things move really fast - at Mach 2, measuring in 0.1 second resolution you could be off by 60 meters (it's possibly more as 0.1 is actually "somewhere between 0.0 and 0.2"), and that's assuming you acquire target when it's at Mach 2 (as far as I could Google it's closer to Mach 5 on impact, a Scud is a ballistic missile). You've got various sources of latency which you have to incorporate (acquisition, transmission, processing, verification etc.).
Having said this, such deltas can you detect and compensate for, as proven by successful Patriot anti-SCUD shielding.
Before I forget: in your PC you actually have TWO clocks. You have a hardware clock which the system uses to set the software clock on boot up. Clever people then use a pool NTP server to keep the software clock accurate.
Not sure how it is in Windows, but if you run an NTP daemon under Unix it will initially sync like crazy with the NTP sources you have supplied until it some statistics build up, after which the checks and corrections taper off. The reason for this is that the corrections aren't just to set the clock from an external NTP source, the daemon also tunes the internal software clock to run as close as possible in sync with the external sources. That way, if the external reference disappears the clock can continue as accurate as possible until access to the external reference returns.
I have found the whole Network Time Protocol a fascinating example of how to create self correcting references - it's very clever stuff.
Are YOU going to be embarrassed when you get lost..:-)
I've got a better argument for standalone: privacy. I prefer NOT to leave my life with a totally untrusted 3rd party - even 8 years of attempted "think of terrorists" indoctrination hasn't changed that.
Well, given the amount of crap that lands in my spam filter, little improvement has been made It's only delivered faster./sarcasm
I do like the idea of starting a revolution with "ah.. bummer, that didn't quite work" - it fits right in with my personal theory of evolution (it was an unfortunate accident)..:-)
John, one of the ways I got people to use "good" passwords is by getting them a Yubikey and setting it to static mode. It then always generates the same password instead of an OTP, but it's a very long one and as it pretends to be a keyboard it types it in itself. The challenge is always to make it long enough to be safe, but short enough to actually fit in the entry field.
It is a simple way to both SET a decent password and to preserve that setting in other than a file..
Just a tip, and no, I don't work for Yubico. I just got one to play with any I like it (must go and buy some)..
Well, I'd give the "Gee thanks" to another "feature". Following the Google Terms of Service part 11, it means that every single call you make can be used by Google for their own purposes. I have no idea why the citizens were up in arms about the security services spying on them - now they go for this stuff voluntarily.
So, the new excuse to give up your privacy (formerly known as "terrorist threat") is now "we don't do evil"?
Slashdot Mirror
I find it amazing that nobody seems to notice that adding an ECHELON and a DCS1000 feed to Google is making it like the NSA, but where people actually VOLUNTEER data. In addition, it's Terms of Service give it more legal freedom to use and abuse your information and intellectual property than even the US border control can with accessing laptops of people entering the country.
It appears 8+ years of indoctrination is paying off big time - nobody appears to remember that privacy is a basic right. All it takes is some BS about "not being evil" for people to miss the shocking depth to which they can access all your personal data. Even the stuff they don't hold themselves will come up through the search engine. By matching up DNS records they will be able to add your entire Internet activity to your identity.
That's going to be fun when you catch some sort of virus downloading porn - and the next time you apply for a job..
.. with the added bonus of getting money for that installation too, allow me to omit the obligatory Microsoft joke in this context.
I think the primary -dangerous- underlying assumption is that an app you pay for is somehow safer..
Wasn't it Ford who calculated that it was cheaper to pay off people than to fix a fuel tank defect?. :-)
You may have accidentally chosen an example that is closer to MS than intended
OK, now you've made me curious.
I don't have a Mac yet, but I was planning to buy an OSX based laptop, basically because I don't have the time to mess around with my work laptop, so I'd stick neo or openoffice on it (no idea which is is better yet) and not fiddle with it other than keeping it up to date.
The main driver is to protect client information so I'll have to investigate available encryption, and I'm no fan of phone-home facilities. I'm OK with a one-off license check, but it would piss me off if I'm continuously checked like some tagged criminal (the main reason Windows is being replaced where I can with Linux). I am aware I'm changing one control fanatic for another so I'd be interested to hear just what a Mac calls home for, and how I can stop it without pulling the plug.
Otherwise I'll just buy a laptop and stick Linux on it (Ubuntu, OpenSuSE or Mandriva).
He is actually right, though. Rule 1 when travelling abroad unaccompanied is to assure your own physical security. This is not going to work if you start with painting a target on yourself. The larger the delta between what you consider a reasonable income and what the population earns, the lower the barrier to crime, and that frequently includes the police who have to risk their lives for peanuts.
I would add that your projected attitude should be one of wary but confident and alert reserve. It's better to remain hard to read that turn into Johnny Foreigner who is all of a sudden a bit more well off than the rest - I have seen plenty of defective personalities getting lifted for every penny. Although that is in principle funny and well deserved, the whining does eventually get irritating so I guess that's where his vitriol comes from: been there, and seen it. Ditto for me.
I would still be very hesitant to lodge personal data with a public provider. You won't catche me using Google services either.
Well, I just have this sense of a recurring senseless debate, and I'm starting to get very fed up with having to argue with people that will insist on screwing things up for themselves.
Let them be, I say. Give in. Stop arguing and wasting your time. They will continue bending the law, bribing politicians and spout endless BS in the press until you do what they say, and I think we're wasting our time. Oh, and ISPs must ensure that the costs for all this effort comes squarely out of the music and film industry pockets - they should have 100% support then because they're paying for it. Not paid this month? Oh, damn, we can't run the blocking system then, terribly sorry.
It's a bit like what some civil servants do when they want to protest: they don't go onto the streets, no, they simply start applying the rules *precisely* and the whole system grinds to a halt.
Let it happen - I'm positive execs know full well that a 100% success will close their business in at most half a year (I reckon it'll be 2 months when it already starts showing up in sales figures). It'll give them a choice: finally stop this crap for good, or see the business fold. I reckon they'll choose the bit that retains money.
These people do positively do not know what they are doing, and they won't stop until they find out. So let them, and all that take their bribes, sorry, "campaign support". It'll show the game for what it is so we can finally move on.
What the EU wants to do is up to the EU, but if the system is installed in Switzerland you can bet on it that Swiss data isn't going to be provided because (AFAIK) it would break the Swiss banking law.
I think it would probably require a public vote before that would be legally permissible - there was already enough noise about this data uncontrolled going to Europe..
We've known for quite some time that exposure actually CREATES sales, not reduces it. As it so happens, I just came back from a party where one discussion was "I got this copy of xyz, and I liked it so much I went and bought the album" - which happened to be an answer to someone who did buy a whole book series of an author after reading a library book.
If I were leading some kind of ISP club I'd call all of them and ensure that indeed NOBODY carries that traffic anymore - absolutely nobody. I'd give it 2 months before the media industry realises just how deep they've cut their own flesh. At that point discussions will become a lot more sensible. There is really no better way to nuke their business that indeed following what they want to do and let them feel the resulting pain. Because it will prove just how Pyrrhic that victory is.
So, if you hang together you will either end up with a more reasonable discussion, or they'll go bankrupt - which also not a bad thing IMHO, that's merely another bubble where bursting was long overdue.
I don't think piracy is good, but there are pirates and home users - the two are different. One type will become your client if you treat them well, the other type does things in volume and belongs in jail (and has been proven to go out of business if you lower margins).
If you stick your *customers* in jail for being interested in your product the results will be pretty obvious. In the US there already a whole generation growing up knowing people of their own age whose life has been destroyed by the RIAA. Do you really think they will EVER buy another record in their life?
I give it two months, maybe three.
It's called "beer". It also has a disaster recovery mode if it doesn't work: "MORE beer".
.. your laptop/notebook will be accessed when you travel BACK, not when you go to the UK.
Oh, and make sure you don't look like a Brazilian electrician when you travel on the London Underground, it's bad for your health. Speaking of health, smoking is banned on the London Underground but you'll see plenty people smoke as the worst that can happen is a gazillion repeats of the "smoking is forbidden" tape unless you are unlucky and the Transport police is around (see previous remark about not looking like a Brazilian electrician).
Personally I wouldn't bother with a laptop - plenty of cybercafes, and what you don't have cannot be stolen. Take a book on the Underground so you have something to do when it gets stuck. You could also amuse yourself with collecting all the Underground brochures and see which one mentions that you're entitled to a refund if you're 15 minutes delayed. I'm going to ruin that for you: the answer is "none" because they have been hiding that since it was introduced 12 years ago. You will also discover the system is saturated with people who tend to miss their annual baths, and it spreads viruses faster than Microsoft Outlook. Always wash your hands..
Make sure you go to the Science Museum - actually, you can lose whole days in there - South Kensington station. That also used to be the station to exit if you were planning to meet Mark Shuttleworth, but Canonical now has offices along the Thames instead.
Oh, and in case no-one has mentioned it - it rains quite often in London. This means taxis disappear and it gets even busier in the Underground.
Well, if I were Apple I'd look at the bright side. As a frequent smoker you're hardly likely to be a LONG-term problem :-).
The solution is very obvious: Apple needs to employ a few smokers. They can handle the vile stench of old smoke, and will not suffer *additional* health problems.
I've slowly started to wonder that as well. WiFi support has always been, well, rubbish, the KDE4 mess wasn't really their fault but didn't help either, and you need to add other repositories if you want to download stuff like Asterisk - which usually isn't properly integrated so you end up hunting for libraries and the whole DIY show starts that you were trying to avoid in the first place. And that's before you try to run it 64bit. I used to actually buy the commercial version, but with OpenSuSE not working for me that stopped.
On the flipside, when it works it works well and is quite easy to change into what you want (I tend to run a desktop which is halfway between desktop and server). I found Ubuntu in that respect more work - it really is a desktop where server facilities are still "old school" config files.
As I tend to run *one* version of Linux I'll torrent the OpenSuSE DVD once more and see if it works for me on a clean box (I never found upgrades work that well, and it's nice to clean out the crud). I also just grabbed the Mandriva DVD which is a distro I have never used before. We'll see which one wins, I'm not religious about it :-)
Damage for whatever motive. Economic, to cause damage to local economies by, for instance, causing food supplies to defrost or for industries to fail or as the result of blackmail that didn't work, revenge to get back to some neighbour, council or government or plain malice like people breaking windows and spraying graffiti.
The problem is that there is still SCADA kit out there that can be disabled with one single network packet and it will then fail in an undetermined state (you can't predict how it will fail). The problem with those devices is that you can't reset them by simply resetting them - most of them need reprogramming before they will work again. In addition, over time some bright spark (pardon the pun) came up with the idea to switch the base OS for those control systems from Unix to Windows, and it's only been over the last few years that anti-virus was finally an accepted add-on.
In some cases, network gateways perform the anti-virus function so the original installaion is left untouched as it works and is stable. That does, however, leave an insider threat risk - any engineer with an unclean laptop can accidentally nuke the plant..
Thanks for explaining the back-and-forth process, it was nice to read in just a short article how it all hangs together.
I appear to have been blessed with a fast metabolism which burns off what I eat. My body temperature rises dramatically when I fall asleep (so I can't fake that :)) which appears to have something to do with it, but it means I don't need to do much to stay in "shape" (body dimension wise), but I ought to go and do more sport for simple endurance reasons. I have at one point managed to add a good 6 kg, but I deliberately refused to adjust my clothes and got more active instead :-).
My son didn't have cartoons, but he got addicted to a BBC programme called "Words & pictures" which was shown every morning (and we ended up religiously taping). This starts with describing letters ("e" - "eel, egg") and then draws them very explicitly on a whiteboard with a "magic marker" ("straight across and rouuund"), and the series gradually moves into paired characters and then eventually words. This interest started at age 2.5 or so, and after a totally worn out video recorder (for seeing things again), a mountain of scrapbooks (at first, one character was enough to fill a page) and half a paycheck on whiteboard markers (until we found the liquid filled ones that don't dry out) he was writing and reading at age 3.5. I had not realised he picked up pre-reading as well until I asked him to read ME a story, and it was too fluent for him to read that word by word. A few years later I noticed him speed reading as well, he seems to follow the diagonal method.
All we did was give him the opportunity, the exposure. No pressure, just help if it didn't work or learning how to hold a pen properly and how to make letters the same size when fine motoric skills were up to it. I must admit I was a bit worried about how deep he got into this - on holidays, all it took was a pen and a notepad to keep him from getting bored. He seems to have my affinity for fast pattern recognition, maybe that helped - I remember having to slow him down so he switched from reading the words to understanding the sentence and its content.
At his school there was another girl who'd done exactly the same, so they ended up reading the story of the nativity play that year together.
Personally, if the BBC would put that series out on DVDs I would recommend this to any parent. Kids seem to pick things up at warp speed when they're ready for it and interested, just don't try to force it (especially when they're little - they will go to school soon enough). Most of the time exposing them to as many different things as possible and having fun with it is enough - if something resonates you'll know soon.
Thank you BBC.
I give this a week before someone puts other messages into that process. I'd keep an eye on bananas :-).
Funny that. My dad's a Toyota fan (must be his age, it used to be VW Passat :-), but I'll wind him up about this the next time I see him.
My Audi has its floor mats anchored so they don't shift (you unclip them from the pillars that hold them in place for cleaning), and thus don't get in the way.
I'm actually surprised that this can happen, AFAIK Toyota is normally pretty thorough in its design. OK, it still looks plasticky and very Japanese but it's normally all pretty thought through. Let's see what happens next.
I'm more in favour of hanging, just not by the neck :-)
On the (only slightly) more serious side, I wonder what would be an appropriate punishment. Making the guy go through 30 commercials before he can collect his food, go to the toilet or go to bed? Barring him from ever receiving soap on a rope so he'll always have to collect it off the floor in the showers?
No idea, but I feel that locking up will probably not be that effective.
Actually, clocks are the biggest challenge in especially complex systems.
It starts with the question "whose clock do we use?", which in earlier days used to be the gunner's watch. Now it's generally an atomic reference, but even that has its own challenges when things move really fast - at Mach 2, measuring in 0.1 second resolution you could be off by 60 meters (it's possibly more as 0.1 is actually "somewhere between 0.0 and 0.2"), and that's assuming you acquire target when it's at Mach 2 (as far as I could Google it's closer to Mach 5 on impact, a Scud is a ballistic missile). You've got various sources of latency which you have to incorporate (acquisition, transmission, processing, verification etc.).
Having said this, such deltas can you detect and compensate for, as proven by successful Patriot anti-SCUD shielding.
Before I forget: in your PC you actually have TWO clocks. You have a hardware clock which the system uses to set the software clock on boot up. Clever people then use a pool NTP server to keep the software clock accurate.
Not sure how it is in Windows, but if you run an NTP daemon under Unix it will initially sync like crazy with the NTP sources you have supplied until it some statistics build up, after which the checks and corrections taper off. The reason for this is that the corrections aren't just to set the clock from an external NTP source, the daemon also tunes the internal software clock to run as close as possible in sync with the external sources. That way, if the external reference disappears the clock can continue as accurate as possible until access to the external reference returns.
I have found the whole Network Time Protocol a fascinating example of how to create self correcting references - it's very clever stuff.
Are YOU going to be embarrassed when you get lost.. :-)
I've got a better argument for standalone: privacy. I prefer NOT to leave my life with a totally untrusted 3rd party - even 8 years of attempted "think of terrorists" indoctrination hasn't changed that.
Well, given the amount of crap that lands in my spam filter, little improvement has been made It's only delivered faster. /sarcasm
I do like the idea of starting a revolution with "ah.. bummer, that didn't quite work" - it fits right in with my personal theory of evolution (it was an unfortunate accident).. :-)
John, one of the ways I got people to use "good" passwords is by getting them a Yubikey and setting it to static mode. It then always generates the same password instead of an OTP, but it's a very long one and as it pretends to be a keyboard it types it in itself. The challenge is always to make it long enough to be safe, but short enough to actually fit in the entry field.
It is a simple way to both SET a decent password and to preserve that setting in other than a file..
Just a tip, and no, I don't work for Yubico. I just got one to play with any I like it (must go and buy some)..
Well, I'd give the "Gee thanks" to another "feature". Following the Google Terms of Service part 11, it means that every single call you make can be used by Google for their own purposes. I have no idea why the citizens were up in arms about the security services spying on them - now they go for this stuff voluntarily.
So, the new excuse to give up your privacy (formerly known as "terrorist threat") is now "we don't do evil"?
Nice joke..
I guess that might actually be the strategy, so they started with the one that was easiest to catch.
Next up: Roman Catholic church convicted of child labour exploitation, small choir boys..