It's more like joules per coulomb. Electricty travels at the same speed regardless of the power.
No, if you study the common usage of 'speed' you'll realise that the correct usage in networking would be latency.
Otherwise you would be saying things like: "This 747 is so much faster than this 737." No, it's not but it hauls four times as many passengers at the same speed. Or, "This train is so much faster than this other train", when in fact the first one has ten cars and the other has twenty. Same speed, different 'bandwidth.'
If you then consider that the average webpage requires (say) six roundtrips, then latency becomes for real. If you have a low latency low bandwidth connection it could well be finished in shorter time than a higher latency higher bandwidth connection. And in that case, shorter files would only help the lower latency link more than the higher latency one. In effect helping 'speed' more than anything else.
Somehow I got a picture of a heavy-duty daily cron-job into my head. Like the update-db stuff.
Embedded systems don't need that.
On the contrary, testing for embedded systems needs just that, if that's what it takes to find the outliers. We're trying to find the worst case here you know.
Sort of works most of the time, if you don't run any cron jobs, or a similar load, doesn't quite cut it in semi hard real time systems.
This is true, but after you have gotten an IP to your device, this IP is what you look after to charge you. If you can change it (and the router back to you offcourse) you wouldn't be charged, would you?
Actually, yes you would be charged. It's not the IP-address per se that the network looks as in a 3G network to decide who sent (or received) how many bytes to whom (or was active for a certain period of time, 3G allows both), but the tunnel ID.
You see, all end user traffic in a 3G core network (which does the charging part) is tunnled over a protocol called GTP, each user (i.e. active PDP-context of each user and QoS level) has it's own tunnel. The network never really looks at the end user traffic, it just switches tunnels. So in effect, changing your IP address would only prevent your IP stack at the mobile/laptop from accepting the packets, not the network from actually delivering and charging you for them. (Assuming PDP-type-IP).
This is the way it must work if the operator is to be able to correctly isolate corporate customers, without any overlap with other customers. Corporates, that is that may use private addresses and NAT to connect to the Internet per se. So, in effect your phone may not be the only one in the network with that very IP address.
Now, IPv6 complicates matters some, but not much, the basic IPv4 3G infrastructure is still there.
If you want to know more about these matters, it's no longer a secret. All the 3G specs can be found at 3GPP. Start with the 23.060 specification, it's the overview. From there on you can dvelve deeper into the charging and the GTP specs, though they are not for the faint of heart (and heavy to carry around to).
But it looks pretty clear to me that these legal experts suggest that copyright infringement steals at least the right of reproduction, if not the right to distribution as well.
I don't buy it. Then we could call murder "theft" as well, on the grounds that you've just "stolen" my right to life. Or why not call "driving while under the influence" "stealing", after all you've "stolen" my right to travel public roads in relative safety. No, IMHO that doesn't work.
And no, I don't buy into the usage in many cases of "theft of service" either. I think most speakers of English takes "theft" to mean that you deprive someone of something, as in they cannot use said thing any more. And that's not the case here. You can still copy all you want, or broadcast your cable TV or whatever. Nothing's been "stolen" in this case.
It's still a crime, but it's another crime.
Re:boot disks, further implications
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FreeDOS
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companies that use DOS for their firmware/bios/eeprom flash utilities
Or individuals, I've already used freeDOS to flash two mother boards, and one DVD-player. Worked like a charm.
Calm down, everyone.
Typically, academic journals need to maintain a staff, space, equipment, travel, conference, and other associated costs. This doesn't mean that all academic journals are priced correctly. And, yes, authors usually do pay per-page costs.
Oh sure some of the "flasiher" ones, i.e. the ones that don't amount to as much scientifically. The ones I'm talking about don't maintain any staff, i.e. they share staff between several. All the real work is done by unsalaried researchers.
The problem is neither of these things but the reaction to them. Don't like the costs? Think you can do better? Start your own journal.
Well, that's just the point. With the web we're currently debating doing just that. There have already been a few attempts.
If the good authors were all into giving away their research for free to begin with, they'd have just published it on the Web in the first place!
Well, we do "give our research away for free", there's no-one paying us. Not one single journal ever pays for published work, ever. That's the point. And we do also give it away on the side. I cannot remember when I actually had to go to the library to read an article I was interested in last. Since all the journals I'm talking about do allow publishing on your own website, that's where we actually go to get the papers.
Meanwhile, lead researchers won't dare get involved in that mess, and their co-authors won't dare abandon that gravy train either.
Are you on drugs? What gravy train? There's no money to be had in research publication unless you own a publishing house. None, zero, nada, zilch! Re-read my first post, you typically have to pay the journal money to have them print it!They don't pay you to peer review either!
but don't pretend like never charging the end user can ever be sustainable (without a millionaire standing behind the operation who's taking money to fund it from somewhere else).
Researchers get their grants elsewhere, their work has already been "paid for" when the publication process begins. The only reason to publish is to have your work submitted to the peer review, and hence measured against the competitors of your field, so that you can get more grants. That you get a dead tree copy of your work, doesn't even enter into the equation. It has no financial bearing on your work what so ever. In my field we don't even publish in journals much, opting instead for conferences.
Stop whining and write a research paper that's worthy of publication.
Well, I for one, have. Haven't you read any of the posts your responding to. Sheesh, no-one peer reviewed your submission, that's for sure.
You quote a cost of $20 to $50 per page for typesetting. In my experience (physics journals), there is a required electronic format (usually TeX), and the journal provides templates. I can see the article exactly as it will appear in the journal before I send it to the journal. The writer does the typesetting. I have heard the claim of typesetting costs before, but it sounds false to me. Is this the case in other disciplines?
Well, my discipline is computer security, and even though you may have gathered that I'm not exactly thrilled at the situation, there is usually typesetting involved in our field. In my case yes there was indeed the required LaTeX templates, but then the typesetting people hacked up what I sent to them, and as I never got to see the actual galley proofs, managed to intruduce quite a lot of irritating errors and typos.
But when it comes to the economy of the situation, the money ends up in Herr Springer's pockets (if there is a Herr Springer, but you catch my drift). I've certainly been told that Elsevier (another European publisher) is nothing short of a cash cow.
So, yes in essence, you cover all the cost, and they keep all the proceeds...
Scientific journals serve a purpose, despite the rants by frustrated pseudoscientists who can't get their work published. Though the system may not work perfectly, at least they make some attempt to review articles and weed out the crap. Words like "free" and "open" and "no censorship" are not necessarily good for science, because it really just means "hey! we'll publish your manifestoes on how the world *really* works, even if those self-proclaimed scientist types keep telling you to talk to a psychologist..."
You've obviously never published anything in a scientific journal, or you wouldn't equate "costs several thousand dollars for a year's worth (four) issues" with "checks their facts."
The economy of the situation is that you as the author typically pays the journal to have your work published. This is ostensibly to cover the cost of printing/typesetting at about $20 to $50 per page. The journal charges exhorbitant amounts for a subscription, and the editors and reviewers typically work for free. (Well, in practice that often means that their PhD students work for free.
The only one making any money out of this (and in some cases it's serious money) is the publisher (Springer Verlag is notorious in this regard.)
And that's only when it works the way it's supposed to. In the field of biology for example, there's been a recent outcry about the reviewers actually stealing results and publishing them as their own, from papers they were set to review. It's gotten to the point where papers submittet will be intentionally falsified, to be able to track who's trying to steal what research from whom.
About the only silver lining is that they (at least ACM and IEEE, don't know about Springer) even though they have you sign over the copyright, still let you publish on your own, i.e. via the web. And let me tell you that they'd have a real revolution on their hands if they didn't.
That's why there is growing pressure to revolutionise the system of academic publishing. No-one's talking about doing away with peer-review. It's not like we haven't noticed that no-one doing the actual work isn't getting paid by the publisher anyway! We might as well just publish electronically and be done with the middle man.
That's great if you want to watch a movie on the computer, like I do thanks to a large monitor and a lack of space for a separate TV. This leaves out the few million people who watch movies on their standalone DVD players.
Well, I watch all my movies on my TV, don't you? In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find new computers sold in stores today that don't contain S-Video or composite out. Our TV:s here have had the inputs for five-seven years now (we've had SCART for quite some time, and then it was an easy upgrade to add).
I don't think DivX supports Dolby Digital 5.1 sound yet, either, although I understand that's in the works.
Well, you're mixing and maching now. How many people have a home movie setup, compared to the people that have TV-out and S-video in on their TV:s and computers respectively? If the market here is anything to go by, then the latter is the majority by far. Hint, think that when daddy gets a new computer from work (there are tax exemptions etc that makes that very favourable here) his kids make sure (and the employers too) that it has TV-out (and DVD incidentally). Ericsson's offer three years ago was so equipped. But when said kids whine for a home movie setup, they sure as h*ll isn't going to get one. The computer is a benefit to the family, everyone "knows" that whether it's true or not, and the fact that you don't need to buy a DVD is a bonus. The home theatre setup OTOH is what turns your kids into hyperactive couch potatoes (yes, there's very little reasoning to parenting propaganda) and it costs thousands of dollars to boot, not on your life sonny!
We're discussing more or less convenience copying here, and then the absence of a few sound channels we're still at "CD" quality (yeah right) and stereo here remember, and a bit worse resolution isn't going to make one bit of difference. Compare MP3 if you will, which more often than not sounds like crap to the trained ear, and that still hasn't hindered it's widespread adoption. You yourself made the comparison. If you've come to that insight (i.e. that good enough does it), I cannot understand why you argue against DivX;-) doing for video (DVD) what MP3 did for audio (CD)?
And I don't get the VHS analogy. There's no easy way to mass duplicate it "casually" and distribute it digitally (as in via my cable modem to my friends), quality or no quality. It's really the same reason that casette tapes weren't a problem for CD:s, but MP3:s are. VHS isn't a problem for DVD, but DivX;-) is. And it has nothing to do with presentation quality.
Please, this isn't a flame, I'm just trying to understand your point of view. Thus far your reasoning hasn't managed to convince me.
not exactly at the same time... it has to be during an appropriate place in the plot...
Until of course you realise that the plot has been adapted to allow for the commercial break. Which is fairly obvious here where we get the break in the plot but not always the commercial.
Re:In 10 years you'll be glad your Mac runs Linux
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Linux on the iMac G4
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There were 486 boxen in 1989? I'm not even sure 386's were widespread then.
Well there were no 486:es they became widespread around '93 I think, and I don't know about 386:es but the one I have from '89 was hellishly expensive, and you know what, it's still put to good use.
In my case I use it as a firewall/NATing router towards my cable modem (only 512kbit/s -- 128 kbit/s) with two 3c509B cards in it.
Works like a charm and with a variable series resistor in the fan of the PSU i have to have my ear in contact with the case to hear it. (Pulled the old 100MB HD and run floppyfw from the diskette and of course no processor fan or other newfangled junk.) This enables me to have the small micro tower sit quitely in the corner of my livingroom.
Sure, I'm in the process of upgrading, to a P75 because I want to do other things with it, but not because I really have to. The beauty of this machine is that even though there is no way I could have fit anything more modern than MSDOS/WIN 3.11 on it, it still runs Linux, and always have, from vs 0.11 all the way to 2.4.x. Try to do that with a "commercial" OS...
If you're seriously paranoid about it, get an old dot-matrix printer and hook it up as the logging output device. You'll have a logging device that nobody could alter no matter how compromised the system gets, without having to mount anything read-write.
Ah, kids today, no knowledge of history etc, etc, we had to get up three hours before we went to bet, ate a handfull of cold gravel etc, etc.
No, seriously, it's been done. In the days of yore, when a dot-matrix (or other line printer) was routinely used as a logging device (think mainframe, computer room and all that) there were still ways around it. The first and foremost trick of course was to send several kilobytes worth of formfeeds to the printer port. Sure, the admin would recognise something was amiss when he found a carton or two of paper on the floor, and the first few entries would survive, but that's would be it. And the admin wouldn't necessarily smell foul play, they're not all good, and shit happens.
However, a friend of mine, wasn't satisfied with those few first entries surviving either and more as a prank than anything else, instead decided to reverse feed the printer a few lines and then 'X' over them (actually he overwrote them with a semi random pattern). Rinse and repeat, then run the printer out of paper. Worked like a charm.
Then there was the incident whereby someone used his access card to enter a large office building in the Netherlands I think, and proceeded to carry off a whole lot of computers. Now, the access was logged, but the logging printer, which was the only output device, was located in a public access cleaning cubord adjacent to the entrance, he was sure to take the paper with him to. With a few thousand employees with access he (or she) got away clean. While that takes physical access or should never forgett that that's all it takes... You need to tech savy to rip paper out of a printer.
Widespread paranoia over piracy is completely unfounded, the only example of an unprotected format, the CD, was wildly successful, while overly protected ones have failed miserably. I would even go so far as to attribute DVDs success to the cracking of its copy-protection.
Well, taking myself as an example, of course I wouldn't buy a region locked DVD player if they sold for $1, and in fact for the two DVD players I now own, the fact that they could be made region free was an absolute requirement. I settled for a lower quality set-top player than I wanted to, simply because of this.
And yet, of all the discs I own, only a handful are region 1, with the vast majority being region 2. Why is that? Well, convenience mainly. Importing them on my own is a bit of a hassle, with added charges for sales tax (@ 25%) customs and what not. Buying direct imported over the counter isn't that much cheaper, why would the retailer cut into his margins if he didn't have to?
And besides, on the US only version I don't get the subtitles I want (even though I most often view with the english sub titles) often US discs have only "english for the hearing impared" and even though I have a hearing problem and want those subtitles, "for the hearing impared" is too much of a good thing.(And your closed captioning system doesn't work here, and is also a bit much).
I guess my position here is pretty common, after all it's part of the male culture in Sweden to be technologically minded. In my case, having to research the issue of region coding, and feeling as though the industry (read MPAA) is trying to screw me over delayed my purchase, it didn't help it.
My point about burning may be nullfied by reality. One issue with consumer DVD burning technology is the single-layer nature of the formats; you can burn a single layer with a maximum capacity of either 4.7 or 3.95 GB, and that's about it. Many movies require two layers to fit.
Hint, think DivX;-), that will fit the movie comfortably in a 700 CD-ROM, at a quality that most people will be quite happy with. (DVD's not that good to begin with.)
The hottest PCs today (i.e. next years comodity PC) rip/convert to DivX;-) in real-time speeds, which I think many/most people can live with, if they intend to burn it anyway.
Unless of course, the goal isn't to detect terrorists, just to highlight people who should get a bit more attention, attention that might reveal something really incriminating. In that case, a couple of false alarms is no real big deal, provided that the response to the alarm is relatively easy, like asking a few extra questions.
I think you're missing the point. Yes the point is to "detect" terrorists, i.e. single them out for further investigation. I sincerly hope that you weren't suggesting we'd shoot people on the spot just because they drew a "yellow." My point is exactly that with the number of false alarms that this system would generate you might as well just start asking every passenger the same questions. With the number of false alarms that this system will generate then you'd be looking at hundreds if not thousands of people erroneously marked as suspicious and then you're not going to have a whole lot of time to spend on each one. I.e. you'll have drowned in the flood of false alarms.
Now, I'd say that given this there's a slim chance to hope for "highly strung" terrorists, or that people will buckle under the pressure. More training would probably do away with much if not most of that, and what is left is easily controlled with drugs, such as beta blockers. And no, it's a common enough heart medication that you cannot begin to screen for that to.
Look, I'm not providing any answers here, I'm just making sure that you lot understand that you can spend your limited security resouces a lot better than this. The question is not whether this system would work or not (even though it won't) but whether you can get a bigger bang for you buck by doing something else, and given the absymal performance such a system will have I'm sure you can.
P.S. And if you want to worry, ponder that 9/11 was really the first time that we saw the principle of the coordinated attack applied successfully by terrorists. A principle we've known for a couple of thousand years. Now, consider what will happen when they discover the principle of combined arms, and expand that into the airport context. You're screening system is clearly inadequate from that perspective.
If you believe this so thorougly, carry some implement of hijacking on your next flight.
Wait, you won't? Why?
Oh, I've already beaten you to that. I have carried an "implement of hijacking" on a flight, just after 9/11, and you know what, there was no interrogation whatsoever. I was just given the option to either take my pen-knife back to the check in, or throw it away. Without as much as a second glance by the security guard.
And that's my point. These people had been up in their ears with "false alarms" i.e. people trying to carry sharp objects onto airplanes for 48 hours straight by that time, and by then couldn't care less if there was actually a real threat involved. If they had even considered starting to interview suspects, they would have had to line up people outside the airport, they might as well just have shut down the airport and told everyone to go home.
If you increase the number of false alarms to the levels I'm talking about then a few high-strung people won't be detected (even if the terrorists would be highly strung next time around, I'd train specifically for that, or administer the appropriate drug), if you have litterally hundreds (or thousands) of people to question.
Sure they could have been detected when they were the only ones sticking out, but now they wouldn't be, they'd just drown in the unending mass of false alarms.
Well, I don't know whether to laugh or cry, reading this, but the people designing these systems obviously slept through most of their statistics class(es) in high school and college.
The problem with massive screening systems like these the reverend Thomas Bayes (of Bayes's theorem) is not the detection part, i.e. being able to actually detect all the bad guys, but not drowning in false alarms when doing so. And the base-rate fallacy says that there's not a whole lot you can do about it.
I've developed the argument further in an intrusion detection context see for example The base rate-fallacy and it's implications for the difficulty of intrusion detection, and it's directly applicable here. The article has an introductory example, that explains that under certain conditions a 99% accurate medical test, won't work at all. The references lists a few other papers by Matthews that are well worth a read also.
In short, since there are precious few passengers that are actually "terrorists" for any real definition of the world, the system must be several (perhaps 1x10^5 -- 1x10^6) times better at suppressing false alarms, than at detecting actual terrorist, to avoid the situation where "all" alarms (from a practical standpoint) are false alarms, i.e. the fact that you were flagged says nothing about you being a danger or not.
What's worse of course is that people when faced with such systems start to ignore their output sooner rather than later, and then the system becomes completely useless even from a narrow security perspective.
So, no, it won't work. It could have worked against the "casual" threat, its very existence could have served as a deterrent, but there are hardly any spur-of-the-moment suicide bombers, so, no, scrap that to. It can't work, because Bayes says so.
So you share a "cell" but each person sharing still pays for minutes at the voice rate. And that is in addition to a $30/month fee just to play. Wonderful.
Not necessarily. One of the selling points of GSM/GPRS (GPRS: General Packet Radio System, the same packet data system is specified for use with both GSM and UMTS) is that the operator can charge for either time or volume, or a combination of both, or or course neither, aka flat fee.
Now, I don't know what Verizon has decided to do or even if it's true GPRS they're going to implement, the article didn't say. But if it's GSM/GPRS they sure do have the option of charging by volume.
Almost all of the packet data system, i.e. what we're interested in here, is the same going from 2.5G i.e. GSM/GPRS to 3G i.e. UMTS/GPRS. Most notably roaming between the two systems is specified, and since GSM typically has lower bit rates but longer range from the base stations, most operators envison a mixed 2.5G/3G system whereby most of the area is covered by GSM, with hot spots such as cities, major roads etc are covered by UMTS. (And then hotter spots still could be covered by WLAN, but that sort of roaming is not specified within the GSM/UMTS framework).
P.S. And to sort out some of the 3G acronym confusion, WCDMA and CDMA2000 are two ways of implementing UMTS, the Universal Mobile Telephony System. Currently WCDMA is the "world" standard, with the exception of the US who has decided to go with WCDMA 2000. This may well change, one has only to look at GSM, but probably not in the short term.
Theft is when you illegally deprive someone of something that is rightfully theirs. Software piracy deprives the retailer, distributor and manufacturers of the software you stole of some revenue.
Logically that argument holds water only if you were going to provide them with that revenue had you not violated their copyright in the first place. Hence if I illegaly copy a program that I wouldn't otherwise have bought, then I have not deprived the retailer of any revenue or potiential revenue.
Now this has little to do with theft as such. Dictionary.com gives the following definition of Larceny:
The unlawful taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of permanently depriving the owner; theft.
Now the property you're refering to here is money. The copying of the software is clearly not 'stealing' in the sense above, since you do not deprive the owner of his software, he still has his copy. However, you're clearly not stealing his money either, since he still has his software to sell. What you may or may not have done is deprive him of possible future earnings, and that's a different crime entirely. It's called copyright violation in most of the world, and is still a crime.
Why is this important? Well, words and their intended meanings are the only means of communication we have, and going around calling copyright violation 'stealing' is akin to calling "driving while under the influence," "possession of narcotics with the intent to sell", or calling "murder", "tax evasion."
Such usage can only serve to dilute the commonly understood meaning of the words we use to communicate, and those who do so intentionally, in order to further their own agenda, deserve nothing but contempt.
Stealing software is when you grab a copy of Windows from the shelfs of CompUSA and exit without paying for it. Copying the same software off a server somewhere is a different crime entirely.
Yes, the article with the "canaries" is
StackGuard.
And besides, you often don't need any shell code as such, there is enough cruft in different libraries that you can call to do your dirty work for you. See for example the last (windows) link of of sans buffer overrun page. Which is a good page to get you started on buffer overruns.
Well I don't know about "quickly and easily", but the book for Scheme (or rather for programming, but based on Scheme) is: The Structure and interpretation of computer languages", by Abelson and Sussman, MIT Press. It's even online.
While I would certainly recommend some programming background, and perhaps The little Schemer. (Many more tips on www.schemers.org even a few worthwhile tutorials online such as "Teach yourself Scheme in fixnum days"). SICP as it's affectionately known is one of the best books on programming, period. It may not be in the "teach yourself xx in n days" category, and rather heavy going at times, but the rewards are worth it.
This is IMHO the book that makes Scheme worthwhile.
Well, we (in Sweden) still do you know. It's just that we keep them locked up 'till we need them.
When we do, we won't have to resort to those puny little revolers and pistols that you Yanks like to toot around either. When it comes to a real armed revolution anything smaller than an 80mm recoiles rifle just doesn't cut it. Accept no substitute.;-)
P.S. And our last, was actually a bloodless one, in 1920, through an election no less. So it's still not to late. With or without guns.
Slashdot Mirror
No, if you study the common usage of 'speed' you'll realise that the correct usage in networking would be latency.
Otherwise you would be saying things like: "This 747 is so much faster than this 737." No, it's not but it hauls four times as many passengers at the same speed. Or, "This train is so much faster than this other train", when in fact the first one has ten cars and the other has twenty. Same speed, different 'bandwidth.'
If you then consider that the average webpage requires (say) six roundtrips, then latency becomes for real. If you have a low latency low bandwidth connection it could well be finished in shorter time than a higher latency higher bandwidth connection. And in that case, shorter files would only help the lower latency link more than the higher latency one. In effect helping 'speed' more than anything else.
On the contrary, testing for embedded systems needs just that, if that's what it takes to find the outliers. We're trying to find the worst case here you know.
Sort of works most of the time, if you don't run any cron jobs, or a similar load, doesn't quite cut it in semi hard real time systems.
Actually, yes you would be charged. It's not the IP-address per se that the network looks as in a 3G network to decide who sent (or received) how many bytes to whom (or was active for a certain period of time, 3G allows both), but the tunnel ID.
You see, all end user traffic in a 3G core network (which does the charging part) is tunnled over a protocol called GTP, each user (i.e. active PDP-context of each user and QoS level) has it's own tunnel. The network never really looks at the end user traffic, it just switches tunnels. So in effect, changing your IP address would only prevent your IP stack at the mobile/laptop from accepting the packets, not the network from actually delivering and charging you for them. (Assuming PDP-type-IP).
This is the way it must work if the operator is to be able to correctly isolate corporate customers, without any overlap with other customers. Corporates, that is that may use private addresses and NAT to connect to the Internet per se. So, in effect your phone may not be the only one in the network with that very IP address.
Now, IPv6 complicates matters some, but not much, the basic IPv4 3G infrastructure is still there.
If you want to know more about these matters, it's no longer a secret. All the 3G specs can be found at 3GPP. Start with the 23.060 specification, it's the overview. From there on you can dvelve deeper into the charging and the GTP specs, though they are not for the faint of heart (and heavy to carry around to).
No, you better check again. Don't think that people all over the world are arrested for crimes other than theft, do you?
Murder isn't theft, and neither is copyright violation. Both may or may not land you in jail, depending.
I don't buy it. Then we could call murder "theft" as well, on the grounds that you've just "stolen" my right to life. Or why not call "driving while under the influence" "stealing", after all you've "stolen" my right to travel public roads in relative safety. No, IMHO that doesn't work.
And no, I don't buy into the usage in many cases of "theft of service" either. I think most speakers of English takes "theft" to mean that you deprive someone of something, as in they cannot use said thing any more. And that's not the case here. You can still copy all you want, or broadcast your cable TV or whatever. Nothing's been "stolen" in this case.
It's still a crime, but it's another crime.
Or individuals, I've already used freeDOS to flash two mother boards, and one DVD-player. Worked like a charm.
Oh sure some of the "flasiher" ones, i.e. the ones that don't amount to as much scientifically. The ones I'm talking about don't maintain any staff, i.e. they share staff between several. All the real work is done by unsalaried researchers.
Well, that's just the point. With the web we're currently debating doing just that. There have already been a few attempts.
Well, we do "give our research away for free", there's no-one paying us. Not one single journal ever pays for published work, ever. That's the point. And we do also give it away on the side. I cannot remember when I actually had to go to the library to read an article I was interested in last. Since all the journals I'm talking about do allow publishing on your own website, that's where we actually go to get the papers.
Are you on drugs? What gravy train? There's no money to be had in research publication unless you own a publishing house. None, zero, nada, zilch! Re-read my first post, you typically have to pay the journal money to have them print it!They don't pay you to peer review either!
Researchers get their grants elsewhere, their work has already been "paid for" when the publication process begins. The only reason to publish is to have your work submitted to the peer review, and hence measured against the competitors of your field, so that you can get more grants. That you get a dead tree copy of your work, doesn't even enter into the equation. It has no financial bearing on your work what so ever. In my field we don't even publish in journals much, opting instead for conferences.
Well, I for one, have. Haven't you read any of the posts your responding to. Sheesh, no-one peer reviewed your submission, that's for sure.
Well, my discipline is computer security, and even though you may have gathered that I'm not exactly thrilled at the situation, there is usually typesetting involved in our field. In my case yes there was indeed the required LaTeX templates, but then the typesetting people hacked up what I sent to them, and as I never got to see the actual galley proofs, managed to intruduce quite a lot of irritating errors and typos.
But when it comes to the economy of the situation, the money ends up in Herr Springer's pockets (if there is a Herr Springer, but you catch my drift). I've certainly been told that Elsevier (another European publisher) is nothing short of a cash cow.
So, yes in essence, you cover all the cost, and they keep all the proceeds...
You've obviously never published anything in a scientific journal, or you wouldn't equate "costs several thousand dollars for a year's worth (four) issues" with "checks their facts."
The economy of the situation is that you as the author typically pays the journal to have your work published. This is ostensibly to cover the cost of printing/typesetting at about $20 to $50 per page. The journal charges exhorbitant amounts for a subscription, and the editors and reviewers typically work for free. (Well, in practice that often means that their PhD students work for free.
The only one making any money out of this (and in some cases it's serious money) is the publisher (Springer Verlag is notorious in this regard.)
And that's only when it works the way it's supposed to. In the field of biology for example, there's been a recent outcry about the reviewers actually stealing results and publishing them as their own, from papers they were set to review. It's gotten to the point where papers submittet will be intentionally falsified, to be able to track who's trying to steal what research from whom.
About the only silver lining is that they (at least ACM and IEEE, don't know about Springer) even though they have you sign over the copyright, still let you publish on your own, i.e. via the web. And let me tell you that they'd have a real revolution on their hands if they didn't.
That's why there is growing pressure to revolutionise the system of academic publishing. No-one's talking about doing away with peer-review. It's not like we haven't noticed that no-one doing the actual work isn't getting paid by the publisher anyway! We might as well just publish electronically and be done with the middle man.
Well, I watch all my movies on my TV, don't you? In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find new computers sold in stores today that don't contain S-Video or composite out. Our TV:s here have had the inputs for five-seven years now (we've had SCART for quite some time, and then it was an easy upgrade to add).
Well, you're mixing and maching now. How many people have a home movie setup, compared to the people that have TV-out and S-video in on their TV:s and computers respectively? If the market here is anything to go by, then the latter is the majority by far. Hint, think that when daddy gets a new computer from work (there are tax exemptions etc that makes that very favourable here) his kids make sure (and the employers too) that it has TV-out (and DVD incidentally). Ericsson's offer three years ago was so equipped. But when said kids whine for a home movie setup, they sure as h*ll isn't going to get one. The computer is a benefit to the family, everyone "knows" that whether it's true or not, and the fact that you don't need to buy a DVD is a bonus. The home theatre setup OTOH is what turns your kids into hyperactive couch potatoes (yes, there's very little reasoning to parenting propaganda) and it costs thousands of dollars to boot, not on your life sonny!
We're discussing more or less convenience copying here, and then the absence of a few sound channels we're still at "CD" quality (yeah right) and stereo here remember, and a bit worse resolution isn't going to make one bit of difference. Compare MP3 if you will, which more often than not sounds like crap to the trained ear, and that still hasn't hindered it's widespread adoption. You yourself made the comparison. If you've come to that insight (i.e. that good enough does it), I cannot understand why you argue against DivX ;-) doing for video (DVD) what MP3 did for audio (CD)?
And I don't get the VHS analogy. There's no easy way to mass duplicate it "casually" and distribute it digitally (as in via my cable modem to my friends), quality or no quality. It's really the same reason that casette tapes weren't a problem for CD:s, but MP3:s are. VHS isn't a problem for DVD, but DivX ;-) is. And it has nothing to do with presentation quality.
Please, this isn't a flame, I'm just trying to understand your point of view. Thus far your reasoning hasn't managed to convince me.
Until of course you realise that the plot has been adapted to allow for the commercial break. Which is fairly obvious here where we get the break in the plot but not always the commercial.
Well there were no 486:es they became widespread around '93 I think, and I don't know about 386:es but the one I have from '89 was hellishly expensive, and you know what, it's still put to good use.
In my case I use it as a firewall/NATing router towards my cable modem (only 512kbit/s -- 128 kbit/s) with two 3c509B cards in it.
Works like a charm and with a variable series resistor in the fan of the PSU i have to have my ear in contact with the case to hear it. (Pulled the old 100MB HD and run floppyfw from the diskette and of course no processor fan or other newfangled junk.) This enables me to have the small micro tower sit quitely in the corner of my livingroom.
Sure, I'm in the process of upgrading, to a P75 because I want to do other things with it, but not because I really have to. The beauty of this machine is that even though there is no way I could have fit anything more modern than MSDOS/WIN 3.11 on it, it still runs Linux, and always have, from vs 0.11 all the way to 2.4.x. Try to do that with a "commercial" OS...
Ah, kids today, no knowledge of history etc, etc, we had to get up three hours before we went to bet, ate a handfull of cold gravel etc, etc.
No, seriously, it's been done. In the days of yore, when a dot-matrix (or other line printer) was routinely used as a logging device (think mainframe, computer room and all that) there were still ways around it. The first and foremost trick of course was to send several kilobytes worth of formfeeds to the printer port. Sure, the admin would recognise something was amiss when he found a carton or two of paper on the floor, and the first few entries would survive, but that's would be it. And the admin wouldn't necessarily smell foul play, they're not all good, and shit happens.
However, a friend of mine, wasn't satisfied with those few first entries surviving either and more as a prank than anything else, instead decided to reverse feed the printer a few lines and then 'X' over them (actually he overwrote them with a semi random pattern). Rinse and repeat, then run the printer out of paper. Worked like a charm.
Then there was the incident whereby someone used his access card to enter a large office building in the Netherlands I think, and proceeded to carry off a whole lot of computers. Now, the access was logged, but the logging printer, which was the only output device, was located in a public access cleaning cubord adjacent to the entrance, he was sure to take the paper with him to. With a few thousand employees with access he (or she) got away clean. While that takes physical access or should never forgett that that's all it takes... You need to tech savy to rip paper out of a printer.
And yet, of all the discs I own, only a handful are region 1, with the vast majority being region 2. Why is that? Well, convenience mainly. Importing them on my own is a bit of a hassle, with added charges for sales tax (@ 25%) customs and what not. Buying direct imported over the counter isn't that much cheaper, why would the retailer cut into his margins if he didn't have to?
And besides, on the US only version I don't get the subtitles I want (even though I most often view with the english sub titles) often US discs have only "english for the hearing impared" and even though I have a hearing problem and want those subtitles, "for the hearing impared" is too much of a good thing.(And your closed captioning system doesn't work here, and is also a bit much).
I guess my position here is pretty common, after all it's part of the male culture in Sweden to be technologically minded. In my case, having to research the issue of region coding, and feeling as though the industry (read MPAA) is trying to screw me over delayed my purchase, it didn't help it.
Hint, think DivX ;-), that will fit the movie comfortably in a 700 CD-ROM, at a quality that most people will be quite happy with. (DVD's not that good to begin with.)
The hottest PCs today (i.e. next years comodity PC) rip/convert to DivX ;-) in real-time speeds, which I think many/most people can live with, if they intend to burn it anyway.
I think you're missing the point. Yes the point is to "detect" terrorists, i.e. single them out for further investigation. I sincerly hope that you weren't suggesting we'd shoot people on the spot just because they drew a "yellow." My point is exactly that with the number of false alarms that this system would generate you might as well just start asking every passenger the same questions. With the number of false alarms that this system will generate then you'd be looking at hundreds if not thousands of people erroneously marked as suspicious and then you're not going to have a whole lot of time to spend on each one. I.e. you'll have drowned in the flood of false alarms.
Now, I'd say that given this there's a slim chance to hope for "highly strung" terrorists, or that people will buckle under the pressure. More training would probably do away with much if not most of that, and what is left is easily controlled with drugs, such as beta blockers. And no, it's a common enough heart medication that you cannot begin to screen for that to.
Look, I'm not providing any answers here, I'm just making sure that you lot understand that you can spend your limited security resouces a lot better than this. The question is not whether this system would work or not (even though it won't) but whether you can get a bigger bang for you buck by doing something else, and given the absymal performance such a system will have I'm sure you can.
P.S. And if you want to worry, ponder that 9/11 was really the first time that we saw the principle of the coordinated attack applied successfully by terrorists. A principle we've known for a couple of thousand years. Now, consider what will happen when they discover the principle of combined arms, and expand that into the airport context. You're screening system is clearly inadequate from that perspective.
Oh, I've already beaten you to that. I have carried an "implement of hijacking" on a flight, just after 9/11, and you know what, there was no interrogation whatsoever. I was just given the option to either take my pen-knife back to the check in, or throw it away. Without as much as a second glance by the security guard.
And that's my point. These people had been up in their ears with "false alarms" i.e. people trying to carry sharp objects onto airplanes for 48 hours straight by that time, and by then couldn't care less if there was actually a real threat involved. If they had even considered starting to interview suspects, they would have had to line up people outside the airport, they might as well just have shut down the airport and told everyone to go home.
If you increase the number of false alarms to the levels I'm talking about then a few high-strung people won't be detected (even if the terrorists would be highly strung next time around, I'd train specifically for that, or administer the appropriate drug), if you have litterally hundreds (or thousands) of people to question.
Sure they could have been detected when they were the only ones sticking out, but now they wouldn't be, they'd just drown in the unending mass of false alarms.
The problem with massive screening systems like these the reverend Thomas Bayes (of Bayes's theorem) is not the detection part, i.e. being able to actually detect all the bad guys, but not drowning in false alarms when doing so. And the base-rate fallacy says that there's not a whole lot you can do about it.
I've developed the argument further in an intrusion detection context see for example The base rate-fallacy and it's implications for the difficulty of intrusion detection, and it's directly applicable here. The article has an introductory example, that explains that under certain conditions a 99% accurate medical test, won't work at all. The references lists a few other papers by Matthews that are well worth a read also.
In short, since there are precious few passengers that are actually "terrorists" for any real definition of the world, the system must be several (perhaps 1x10^5 -- 1x10^6) times better at suppressing false alarms, than at detecting actual terrorist, to avoid the situation where "all" alarms (from a practical standpoint) are false alarms, i.e. the fact that you were flagged says nothing about you being a danger or not.
What's worse of course is that people when faced with such systems start to ignore their output sooner rather than later, and then the system becomes completely useless even from a narrow security perspective.
So, no, it won't work. It could have worked against the "casual" threat, its very existence could have served as a deterrent, but there are hardly any spur-of-the-moment suicide bombers, so, no, scrap that to. It can't work, because Bayes says so.
Not necessarily. One of the selling points of GSM/GPRS (GPRS: General Packet Radio System, the same packet data system is specified for use with both GSM and UMTS) is that the operator can charge for either time or volume, or a combination of both, or or course neither, aka flat fee.
Now, I don't know what Verizon has decided to do or even if it's true GPRS they're going to implement, the article didn't say. But if it's GSM/GPRS they sure do have the option of charging by volume.
Almost all of the packet data system, i.e. what we're interested in here, is the same going from 2.5G i.e. GSM/GPRS to 3G i.e. UMTS/GPRS. Most notably roaming between the two systems is specified, and since GSM typically has lower bit rates but longer range from the base stations, most operators envison a mixed 2.5G/3G system whereby most of the area is covered by GSM, with hot spots such as cities, major roads etc are covered by UMTS. (And then hotter spots still could be covered by WLAN, but that sort of roaming is not specified within the GSM/UMTS framework).
P.S. And to sort out some of the 3G acronym confusion, WCDMA and CDMA2000 are two ways of implementing UMTS, the Universal Mobile Telephony System. Currently WCDMA is the "world" standard, with the exception of the US who has decided to go with WCDMA 2000. This may well change, one has only to look at GSM, but probably not in the short term.
Logically that argument holds water only if you were going to provide them with that revenue had you not violated their copyright in the first place. Hence if I illegaly copy a program that I wouldn't otherwise have bought, then I have not deprived the retailer of any revenue or potiential revenue.
Now this has little to do with theft as such. Dictionary.com gives the following definition of Larceny:
Now the property you're refering to here is money. The copying of the software is clearly not 'stealing' in the sense above, since you do not deprive the owner of his software, he still has his copy. However, you're clearly not stealing his money either, since he still has his software to sell. What you may or may not have done is deprive him of possible future earnings, and that's a different crime entirely. It's called copyright violation in most of the world, and is still a crime.
Why is this important? Well, words and their intended meanings are the only means of communication we have, and going around calling copyright violation 'stealing' is akin to calling "driving while under the influence," "possession of narcotics with the intent to sell", or calling "murder", "tax evasion."
Such usage can only serve to dilute the commonly understood meaning of the words we use to communicate, and those who do so intentionally, in order to further their own agenda, deserve nothing but contempt.
Stealing software is when you grab a copy of Windows from the shelfs of CompUSA and exit without paying for it. Copying the same software off a server somewhere is a different crime entirely.
And besides, you often don't need any shell code as such, there is enough cruft in different libraries that you can call to do your dirty work for you. See for example the last (windows) link of of sans buffer overrun page. Which is a good page to get you started on buffer overruns.
While I would certainly recommend some programming background, and perhaps The little Schemer. (Many more tips on www.schemers.org even a few worthwhile tutorials online such as "Teach yourself Scheme in fixnum days"). SICP as it's affectionately known is one of the best books on programming, period. It may not be in the "teach yourself xx in n days" category, and rather heavy going at times, but the rewards are worth it.
This is IMHO the book that makes Scheme worthwhile.
When we do, we won't have to resort to those puny little revolers and pistols that you Yanks like to toot around either. When it comes to a real armed revolution anything smaller than an 80mm recoiles rifle just doesn't cut it. Accept no substitute. ;-)
P.S. And our last, was actually a bloodless one, in 1920, through an election no less. So it's still not to late. With or without guns.
In fact many of us had a few... ;-) It's never too late though. ;-)