I like how all that theoretical thing is followed by the anticlimax of, "of course we don't have tha amount of RAM". I do have one objection however: Compression. It's maybe possible just a bit possible that the number of atoms in a RAM chip can be modelled by it, if they're really, really, really, really redundant? like, really, really?
I parsed that sentence with emphasis on card. "I always thought a video/card/ [as opposed to a big rackmounted behemoth] was selling your video [potential] short."
A) $120 gets you 7 minute full CD burn time on a $200 computer pre-pre-last generation computer.
For something more commercial, it would take significantly longer than 30 minutes, my guess being somewhere in the vicinity of a moderately long checkout line.
B) There would be 0% flaw. There is 0% flaw in home burner systems, given enough feed. CD burners are as reliable as floppy disk drives. With a dedicated system it wouldn't be difficult to include a quick full read to ensure it burned right.
C) However, you miss utterly the whole "mass production" thing we got going from the industrial revoltion: Manufacturing in large quantities significantly reduces the cost. Right now a burned CD will run you upwards of 25 cents at least, while if you get 10,000 manufactured, the per-disk cost will be roughly 2 pennies. Manufactured CD's far outlast burned CD's -- think about it, you 'burn' a CD by etching information onto a special receptive surface using light (lasers), in levels that because they must be safe for home use are relatively low compared with commercial manufacting . Wouldn't you expect a light-sensitive medium to deteriorate over time as it is exposed to light, if it is activated by not that great a factor compared with everyday light conditions? A burned CD's life expectancy with use is 4 years before errors are expected to start cropping up.
D) All of which is of course totally irrelevant: it is absolutely impossible under the way things work now, it is impossible to conclusively restrict who accesses information, once that information is made available to someone in private.
Do you think you could control the content on a book, limiting it to being read by a single person, by restricting the book somehow magically to only show letters in that person's house? Of course not. He could simply photocopy the information in the privacy of his own home, and then disseminate it.
In the same way, if you allow a computer to play sound, then it is 'displayed'. Once it is displayed, it is free to be recorded.
The only trade-off is quality: However, with present schemes, it is possible to have perfect quality, ie, the player playing the ripped content gets the same quality as the player playing the original. Because it is possible yet to keep everything digital while transferring to an unsecure medium (and if you allow an unsecure computer to be doing the unencrypting, this necessarily is allowed), right now no encryption can keep content from being distributed. The question is one of how much trouble it is for a hacker to rip it into a different format.
It should be obvious that anything an eye can see, anything an ear can hear, a device with the same proportions can also access. This means it is futile to encrypt, as long as any hacker worth her salt will concern herself with unencrypting it.
Further, the only way to restrict the quality is by having your own output system, as opposed to that of the user, much as a movie theater can keep you from copying a movie, while a VHS player cannot. Neither can encrypted DVD. If it is allowed to go unencrypted through a line, it is allowed to go into a separate medium without detriment.
However, there is the small caveat:
All this only applies to static content.
I can rip someone's web site and disseminate it onto the world, but only if I can find every bit and their connection. With static content, this is easy. With dynamic content, much more difficult. How would you rip {xyz} company's site with a complex search engine? In the same way, how would you rip content that is dynamic, such as an encrypted DVD movie that displays things on the screen (as most do) besides content running beginning to end.
It is at this point, once the "content" you're delivering is mixed with interaction with it, that encryption begins to play a key role. If you get root access to see {xyz} company's server, you can before too long rip their site.
However, you need root access to their server. Interacting with their content isn't enough. In the same way, if you have a standalone player system, then it would be difficult to get at encrypted information (not just content) on whatever it's playing. It is difficult to make such a system, however, because once a piece of hardware is in someone's hands, it's difficult to hide how it functions. With dedicated hardware, though, it is certainly possible. No for the helluvit hacker has the resources to analyze what a gigahertz processer does internally, and in the same way if you make a piece of hardware complex enough, it can handle unencrypting content internally, feed it out, and handle interaction with it. It becomes virtually impossible to rip, just as {xyz} company's web site with it's complex search tools is, even though every page of/content/ on it is public.
Once industry realizes that any content can be ripped, the focus will shift drastically to dynamic content, and to interaction. It is unclear how this would work for music. It is by nature static: and therefore, it is by nature prone to full interception bettween being played and being heard, whether it is a local computer running it, which makes such a task easy, or dedicated hardware, which makes it more difficult. Short of hooking up a piece of hardware that interacts directly with one and only one person's specific brain structure, music content will always be rippable. While this may dismay old-school groups such as Metallica. Let me reiterate. Old-school groups such as Metallica. Oh, how the world goes! Anyway, groups like Metallica might oppose such a movement (you catch my reference to their vehemently opposing napster, right?), younger upstarts will be sure to embrace dynamic content. And what does that mean? Can you say {annoying sex queen music star} stripping to your cursor? A little to the left, baby. That's it...Now bounce a little. ahhh....
Flamers:
No! Of course I mean stripping RJ-45 cables! Don't be perverted! Uh, did I say bouncing? I meant uh...{step step step...SLAM!}
Uh, that was kinda' sorta' SHAKESPEARE.
Jesus Christ, now they're taking credit for our geniuses too. Next you know, they'll say, "yeah, well who CREATED Einstein? Huh? HUH?? I thought so!"
Actually, your point would be better made to say that you can "easily" opt out not from a weird URL you give, but with a single click on a page that is prominently linked from their main page.
It takes a lot for a company to do that, and whatever else they may be doing, I respect their being upfront about opting out.
Read the cons, though. Fact is, I didn't opt out myself. You'll see advertising either way, wouldn't you like it NOT to be 24/7 over stuff that has nothing to do with your surfing preferences?
go to www.doubleclick.com to see what I mean.
Where does it "imply" it's a DNA based microbe? It only said that's what previous "panspermia" theorists had postulated as the possibility of primitive organisms, possibly DNA, from other worlds (which would then have germinated life here on Earth).
In this case, however, no one hinted at evidence of DNA structure -- given the ramifications you correctly point out, I don't think the researchers would have lightly dropped such a hint if they had evidence of it!
"Extraordinary claims," she said, "need extraordinary evidence."
Your sig... ("It's bad luck to be superstitious")
on
Taxing Free Software
·
· Score: 1
A math professor, ardent realist, is asked why he hangs a horseshoe up in his class.
"For good luck."
"But I thought you didn't believe in that sort of thing."
"I don't... but I'm told it works anyway."
Yes, you correctly see that I was making a clever point about both the lack of distance specification in the specs and the fact that most of our office lives won't change from wireless networking -- how many people walk around needing to be connected on a laptop? -- when there is already a network drop every few feet, using for this purpose a pseudo top-ten list of current office activities and saying these will be the same for wireless networking.
Nevertheless, even if something is incorrectly moded, if you don't have moderation points, do not request someone else to moderate something up: your not having moderation points probably means that you aren't deserving of them, which view your posting anonymously of course bolsters.
In the past I have not used moderation points I otherwise would have to mod something up just because some jerk said "mod this up!!!": If it actually resulted in a mod up, then the 10X as many MOD UP!!! posts that are by idiots who aren't part of the community (or else would have mod points themselves) would think that their opinion matters on slashdot.
If you happen to have mod points, mod something up. Otherwise, let someone else. No one will if you post MOD THIS UP!!!.
Without a distance specification, I assume this newfangled wireless thing will work
within 10 feet
of a hub/repeater/etc (perhaps including another end unit). (This assumption rises from the fact that they're obviously very proud of the capabilities it/does/ have, so they would have shoved the distance in your face if it were impressive.)
So, with that in mind, a list of the top ten activities you can do 10 feet farther than your present office network drop:
10 - Quake/other FPS (uh, only on your lunch break;])
9 - AIM/ICQ/IRC/ABC/XYZ
8 - Internet.."research". (email)
7 - Internet.."research". (/.)
6 - Internet.."research". (pr0n...uh, only on your lunch break:])
5 - Internet.."research". (build up ur homepage)
4 - Editing office reports (your resume)
3 - Editing office reports (your letter of resignation)
2 - Doing productive work. (Churning code out)
1 - Pretending to do productive work. (Staring at the beautiful code you've churned out)
Well, you don't need to have anything to do with the brain to get the monkey's limbs to move. Remember the old frog-legs-on-the-electric-line? Well, it's easy enough to implant such lines in muscles in such a way that you can coerce them into jerking taught to a quantified extent, without being hurtful to the host of the muscle.
So how do I have the misfortune of knowing this? Well, let's just allude vaguely to some bet that didn't exist anyway, so hush, and fifty monkeys that wouldn't quite sit and type Shakespeare of their own accord.
You're way behind the curve, man. Do you think it will do you a lick of good to encrypt emails, if when you're typing those emails in the first place, they appear on your screen open wide to the whole world?
Do you think the hardware keystroke monitor you look for in the back of your computer can't just as easily be incorporated into the motherboard? These corporations have deep pockets...
That's old shit man. What do I do?
A) I use special goggles (LCD ones that emit NO radiation someone might peek at to follow the refresh cycle)...but, of course, you can't just plug that into a computer! They could have the video card tapped!
No, what these bad babies do is run strong encryption on anything they see that has their "encryption tag" on it...Anything on the computer screen between certain tags (they look like funky barcodes) is translated using 128-bit RSA encryption into a corresponding real image. They work within a 100 degree field of view, take megapixel shots, and analyze them surprisingly fast (you get like 3 fps), putting them back in the same aspect they were originally in. So you end up with a screen that has part of it looking like it has static on it, the rest normal. When you put on the goggles, you get the static stuff to look normal, except only changing about three times per second. Naturally, the rest of the goggles (the part not doing any unencrypting) have good refresh rates, so everything else looks the same as without the glasses.
B) But then, of course, it's not enough to have the computer print out garbled (encrypted) output, They could just have memory snoops! So, what I do, is I run NOTHING on my local machine. I run it all off of a server I have set up at home for which I have, essentially a custom remote access tool, which will serve you a page that via java gets the garbled screen (that is, its not even sent out unencrypted) and puts it out on your screen. Of course, it doesn't get plaintext keyboard/mouse commands, either, which brings me to
C) I use a special mouse and keyboard which both strong-encrypt (again, 128-bit) every keystroke and mouse-movement (each key ends up sending a few hundred, each mouse movement, too, since for java reasons I send only ASCII text keys and translate everything into that), and so it's no problem if They see exactly what's sent out from the keyboard...They'd have to see the keyboard physically to know what keys I'm hitting....which, of course, They can't, because I cover the whole portion of my desk that I type over with a thick blanket of industrial-level (not just medical-level) radiation shielding that blocks all visual clues to where my hands are, as well as infrared and xray. Not even radio noise escapes, which might otherwise let them analyze what the keyboard does internally. A portion of the shileding even goes all the way to my elbows, so They can't analyze the muscle movement of my forearms to see what keys I might be pressing.
D) The mouse and keyboard have a private key based on the goggle's changing public key, and my home server invalidates them every 15 seconds, so that when the goggle is not connected to the keyboard/mouse, or to put it another way, if the keyboard and mouse are every picked up by Them and anaylzed, They won't be able to talk with my server anymore. So how does the goggle get its private key? Based on both 1) scanning my retina, which alone isn't enough, of course, since They could also do that and get my private key anytime, but also 2) having a SHIELDED component that accepts a miniture disk with closed casing that's light-encoded, so that with a single motion I can destroy all data on it by exposing it to light.
Now, granted, it might seem excessive to spend upwards of $75,000 on equipment only to end up wearing this heavy goggle set physically connected to a keyboard and mouse that are all under heavy xray/radio/infrared shielding, but, gentlemen, I assure you, with my setup, I can be totally 100% sure that my Company has absolutely no idea that I'm really just playing Quake. And that kind of peace of mind, my friends, is worth 3 fps.
Actually, "buyer beware" is subjunctive in English!
It's not "Buyer, beware!" which is an imperative (with or without the !), but rather without the comma to set off what in Latin would be the vocative.
Compare: God bless you. (In which case, clearly, you are not addressing God, since he is contrasted with "you", but rather are saying "may God bless you")
The devil take you!
Slashdot Mirror
I like how all that theoretical thing is followed by the anticlimax of, "of course we don't have tha amount of RAM". I do have one objection however: Compression. It's maybe possible just a bit possible that the number of atoms in a RAM chip can be modelled by it, if they're really, really, really, really redundant? like, really, really?
I parsed that sentence with emphasis on card. "I always thought a video /card/ [as opposed to a big rackmounted behemoth] was selling your video [potential] short."
A) $120 gets you 7 minute full CD burn time on a $200 computer pre-pre-last generation computer. For something more commercial, it would take significantly longer than 30 minutes, my guess being somewhere in the vicinity of a moderately long checkout line.
B) There would be 0% flaw. There is 0% flaw in home burner systems, given enough feed. CD burners are as reliable as floppy disk drives. With a dedicated system it wouldn't be difficult to include a quick full read to ensure it burned right.
C) However, you miss utterly the whole "mass production" thing we got going from the industrial revoltion: Manufacturing in large quantities significantly reduces the cost. Right now a burned CD will run you upwards of 25 cents at least, while if you get 10,000 manufactured, the per-disk cost will be roughly 2 pennies. Manufactured CD's far outlast burned CD's -- think about it, you 'burn' a CD by etching information onto a special receptive surface using light (lasers), in levels that because they must be safe for home use are relatively low compared with commercial manufacting . Wouldn't you expect a light-sensitive medium to deteriorate over time as it is exposed to light, if it is activated by not that great a factor compared with everyday light conditions? A burned CD's life expectancy with use is 4 years before errors are expected to start cropping up.
D) All of which is of course totally irrelevant: it is absolutely impossible under the way things work now, it is impossible to conclusively restrict who accesses information, once that information is made available to someone in private.
Do you think you could control the content on a book, limiting it to being read by a single person, by restricting the book somehow magically to only show letters in that person's house? Of course not. He could simply photocopy the information in the privacy of his own home, and then disseminate it. In the same way, if you allow a computer to play sound, then it is 'displayed'. Once it is displayed, it is free to be recorded.
The only trade-off is quality: However, with present schemes, it is possible to have perfect quality, ie, the player playing the ripped content gets the same quality as the player playing the original. Because it is possible yet to keep everything digital while transferring to an unsecure medium (and if you allow an unsecure computer to be doing the unencrypting, this necessarily is allowed), right now no encryption can keep content from being distributed. The question is one of how much trouble it is for a hacker to rip it into a different format.
It should be obvious that anything an eye can see, anything an ear can hear, a device with the same proportions can also access. This means it is futile to encrypt, as long as any hacker worth her salt will concern herself with unencrypting it.
Further, the only way to restrict the quality is by having your own output system, as opposed to that of the user, much as a movie theater can keep you from copying a movie, while a VHS player cannot. Neither can encrypted DVD. If it is allowed to go unencrypted through a line, it is allowed to go into a separate medium without detriment.
However, there is the small caveat: All this only applies to static content. I can rip someone's web site and disseminate it onto the world, but only if I can find every bit and their connection. With static content, this is easy. With dynamic content, much more difficult. How would you rip {xyz} company's site with a complex search engine? In the same way, how would you rip content that is dynamic, such as an encrypted DVD movie that displays things on the screen (as most do) besides content running beginning to end.
It is at this point, once the "content" you're delivering is mixed with interaction with it, that encryption begins to play a key role. If you get root access to see {xyz} company's server, you can before too long rip their site.
However, you need root access to their server. Interacting with their content isn't enough. In the same way, if you have a standalone player system, then it would be difficult to get at encrypted information (not just content) on whatever it's playing. It is difficult to make such a system, however, because once a piece of hardware is in someone's hands, it's difficult to hide how it functions. With dedicated hardware, though, it is certainly possible. No for the helluvit hacker has the resources to analyze what a gigahertz processer does internally, and in the same way if you make a piece of hardware complex enough, it can handle unencrypting content internally, feed it out, and handle interaction with it. It becomes virtually impossible to rip, just as {xyz} company's web site with it's complex search tools is, even though every page of /content/ on it is public.
Once industry realizes that any content can be ripped, the focus will shift drastically to dynamic content, and to interaction. It is unclear how this would work for music. It is by nature static: and therefore, it is by nature prone to full interception bettween being played and being heard, whether it is a local computer running it, which makes such a task easy, or dedicated hardware, which makes it more difficult. Short of hooking up a piece of hardware that interacts directly with one and only one person's specific brain structure, music content will always be rippable. While this may dismay old-school groups such as Metallica. Let me reiterate. Old-school groups such as Metallica. Oh, how the world goes! Anyway, groups like Metallica might oppose such a movement (you catch my reference to their vehemently opposing napster, right?), younger upstarts will be sure to embrace dynamic content. And what does that mean? Can you say {annoying sex queen music star} stripping to your cursor? A little to the left, baby. That's it...Now bounce a little. ahhh....
Flamers:
No! Of course I mean stripping RJ-45 cables! Don't be perverted! Uh, did I say bouncing? I meant uh...{step step step...SLAM!}
Jesus Christ, now they're taking credit for our geniuses too. Next you know, they'll say, "yeah, well who CREATED Einstein? Huh? HUH?? I thought so!"
Hey, no offense eh? =))
Read the cons, though. Fact is, I didn't opt out myself. You'll see advertising either way, wouldn't you like it NOT to be 24/7 over stuff that has nothing to do with your surfing preferences?
go to www.doubleclick.com to see what I mean.
In this case, however, no one hinted at evidence of DNA structure -- given the ramifications you correctly point out, I don't think the researchers would have lightly dropped such a hint if they had evidence of it!
"Extraordinary claims," she said, "need extraordinary evidence."
A math professor, ardent realist, is asked why he hangs a horseshoe up in his class. ... but I'm told it works anyway."
"For good luck."
"But I thought you didn't believe in that sort of thing."
"I don't
Yes, you correctly see that I was making a clever point about both the lack of distance specification in the specs and the fact that most of our office lives won't change from wireless networking -- how many people walk around needing to be connected on a laptop? -- when there is already a network drop every few feet, using for this purpose a pseudo top-ten list of current office activities and saying these will be the same for wireless networking. Nevertheless, even if something is incorrectly moded, if you don't have moderation points, do not request someone else to moderate something up: your not having moderation points probably means that you aren't deserving of them, which view your posting anonymously of course bolsters. In the past I have not used moderation points I otherwise would have to mod something up just because some jerk said "mod this up!!!": If it actually resulted in a mod up, then the 10X as many MOD UP!!! posts that are by idiots who aren't part of the community (or else would have mod points themselves) would think that their opinion matters on slashdot. If you happen to have mod points, mod something up. Otherwise, let someone else. No one will if you post MOD THIS UP!!!.
within 10 feet
of a hub/repeater/etc (perhaps including another end unit). (This assumption rises from the fact that they're obviously very proud of the capabilities it
So, with that in mind, a list of the top ten activities you can do 10 feet farther than your present office network drop:
10 - Quake/other FPS (uh, only on your lunch break ;]) :])
9 - AIM/ICQ/IRC/ABC/XYZ
8 - Internet.."research". (email)
7 - Internet.."research". (/.)
6 - Internet.."research". (pr0n...uh, only on your lunch break
5 - Internet.."research". (build up ur homepage)
4 - Editing office reports (your resume)
3 - Editing office reports (your letter of resignation)
2 - Doing productive work. (Churning code out)
1 - Pretending to do productive work. (Staring at the beautiful code you've churned out)
[...]
Clay lies still, but blood's a rover,
Breath's a ware that will not keep,
Up, Lad, when the journey's over.
There'll be time enough to sleep.
So how do I have the misfortune of knowing this? Well, let's just allude vaguely to some bet that didn't exist anyway, so hush, and fifty monkeys that wouldn't quite sit and type Shakespeare of their own accord.
I didn't! It truncated it and wouldn't let me edit it! This did NOT happen in preview mode. Fsck that.
Do you think the hardware keystroke monitor you look for in the back of your computer can't just as easily be incorporated into the motherboard? These corporations have deep pockets...
That's old shit man. What do I do?
A) I use special goggles (LCD ones that emit NO radiation someone might peek at to follow the refresh cycle)...but, of course, you can't just plug that into a computer! They could have the video card tapped!
No, what these bad babies do is run strong encryption on anything they see that has their "encryption tag" on it...Anything on the computer screen between certain tags (they look like funky barcodes) is translated using 128-bit RSA encryption into a corresponding real image. They work within a 100 degree field of view, take megapixel shots, and analyze them surprisingly fast (you get like 3 fps), putting them back in the same aspect they were originally in. So you end up with a screen that has part of it looking like it has static on it, the rest normal. When you put on the goggles, you get the static stuff to look normal, except only changing about three times per second. Naturally, the rest of the goggles (the part not doing any unencrypting) have good refresh rates, so everything else looks the same as without the glasses.
B) But then, of course, it's not enough to have the computer print out garbled (encrypted) output, They could just have memory snoops! So, what I do, is I run NOTHING on my local machine. I run it all off of a server I have set up at home for which I have, essentially a custom remote access tool, which will serve you a page that via java gets the garbled screen (that is, its not even sent out unencrypted) and puts it out on your screen. Of course, it doesn't get plaintext keyboard/mouse commands, either, which brings me to
C) I use a special mouse and keyboard which both strong-encrypt (again, 128-bit) every keystroke and mouse-movement (each key ends up sending a few hundred, each mouse movement, too, since for java reasons I send only ASCII text keys and translate everything into that), and so it's no problem if They see exactly what's sent out from the keyboard...They'd have to see the keyboard physically to know what keys I'm hitting....which, of course, They can't, because I cover the whole portion of my desk that I type over with a thick blanket of industrial-level (not just medical-level) radiation shielding that blocks all visual clues to where my hands are, as well as infrared and xray. Not even radio noise escapes, which might otherwise let them analyze what the keyboard does internally. A portion of the shileding even goes all the way to my elbows, so They can't analyze the muscle movement of my forearms to see what keys I might be pressing.
D) The mouse and keyboard have a private key based on the goggle's changing public key, and my home server invalidates them every 15 seconds, so that when the goggle is not connected to the keyboard/mouse, or to put it another way, if the keyboard and mouse are every picked up by Them and anaylzed, They won't be able to talk with my server anymore. So how does the goggle get its private key? Based on both 1) scanning my retina, which alone isn't enough, of course, since They could also do that and get my private key anytime, but also 2) having a SHIELDED component that accepts a miniture disk with closed casing that's light-encoded, so that with a single motion I can destroy all data on it by exposing it to light.
Now, granted, it might seem excessive to spend upwards of $75,000 on equipment only to end up wearing this heavy goggle set physically connected to a keyboard and mouse that are all under heavy xray/radio/infrared shielding, but, gentlemen, I assure you, with my setup, I can be totally 100% sure that my Company has absolutely no idea that I'm really just playing Quake. And that kind of peace of mind, my friends, is worth 3 fps.
Actually, "buyer beware" is subjunctive in English! It's not "Buyer, beware!" which is an imperative (with or without the !), but rather without the comma to set off what in Latin would be the vocative. Compare: God bless you. (In which case, clearly, you are not addressing God, since he is contrasted with "you", but rather are saying "may God bless you") The devil take you!
Bonus points to anyone who can quote the whole paragraph.