You know, this new regulation will stop Moore's Law cold. People will no longer want to buy new, restricted computers; instead, those old Pentium 4 2 GHZs will be in hot demand. There'll be no other way to display your content. Demand for new machines will drop, and the funds for research will no longer be there.
Ever since a Federal law was passed in 1994 banning certain features in new or imported guns, there has been a brisk market in "pre-ban" weapons; expect a similar situation in the computer market.
This should be really fun when computers get fast enough to run virtual machines that can decode MPEG. How's the hardware going to tell if you're viewing restricted content when the viewing operation isn't even in the same machine code?
I suspect your upbringing had more to do with your avoidance of pornography than its availability, and you don't realize it. Porn is ALWAYS available to kids; before the web, teens and pre-teens were swiping their parents' porno mags and bringing them to show their friends.
Let's say you put locks on all porno sites, with security so high that only a few determined kids could get in. What do you think those kids would do? Why, download the pics and swap them, via their handy peer-to-peer software! One stolen pic gets copied a thousand times, and it's "stylish" to have some on your computer.
So you start piling on more and more security; Java applets that don't let you save pics, or screen capture; watermarks that OS patches won't let be displayed unless from the original web site... But guess what? There'll always be ways around them, and those ways will spread like wildfire. Gotta taste that forbidden fruit! And in the meantime, even adults can't view porn, thanks to all these overlapping security features. Software monopolies will be enforced ("this page can only be viewed in IE 6.0"), kids will still be looking at porn, and everyone will be unhappy.
Trying to screen minors from accessing porn on the net is like -- well, like trying to screen MP3s from the net. You can't stop it, can't even put a significant dent in it without imposing drastic controls.
What happens when kids can't get onto adult websites? Well, they'll use stolen credit card numbers, or stolen adult ID codes, or just plain lie. How can you tell if the person on the other side of the monitor is below 17? Do you plan on implanting smartcard chips below the skin of everyone once they reach their majority?
Parents whine and wail because, after they've given their kids unrestricted access to the net, the little tykes are heading straight to XXX websites. The horror! But while they'll lobby and rally for all sorts of controls on this monster we call the world wide web, they'd never consider picking up and installing some parental control software. (For the most part, I don't think a majority of parents are even competent to install any software; that may be why.)
Renewable sources of hydrogen include cracking methane generated by decomposition, and cracking water using solar, wind or water generated electricity. Why not just use that electricity directly? Because it's often not there when you need it. Batteries expensive, but storing hydrogen can be cheap.
So how would you go about building, say, a 120V inverter to run off this gizmo without wasting too much energy or winding up with voltage stability problems on the output? Switching power supply to generate a fixed DC from the unregulated DC?
My Sony receiver came with a sophisticated remote control complete with LCD display.
I hate it.
I want a remote that has buttons. A lot of buttons. A whole lot of buttons. Something that doesn't make me go through 15 menus to get to the operating mode I want.
Eh? The terrorist finds someone who resembles him, marks his movements, and then when he's ready, gets the plane ticket, and kills his doppelganger and steals his ID hours before the plane leaves.
The 9/11 hijackers eliminated the victims' entire families to keep their replacement from being noticed. This was in a wartime situation, though, where a family could disappear without being remarked on; but still, it's a chilling situation.
Further, if things are planned properly, even if the corpse is discovered soon after the murder, without ID it would take time to identify that person; time that would allow the hijacker to board the plane.
Y'know, when I heard Michael Jackson's new single was being distributed on a copy protected CD, I immediately hit the Gnutella net looking for pirated copies. Of course I found several dozen.
I just took another look; it is now several hundred.
CD copy protection won't help prevent music piracy; a few people will always be able to break the protection, and everyone else will download from them. The only people this will inconvenience are the poor schlubs who only want to listen to the song on their Rio players.
So if I wanted to hijack an airplane, I'd need to find someone who looked very much like me, and then kill him, take his ID, and use that to board a plane.
Which is basically exactly what the 9/11 terrorists did, minus the sophisticated system that wouldn't have helped at all.
Because with my luck I'll look exactly like some wanted felon, and then fourteen times a day, every time I walk past a security camera, the alarms will go off and the cops will bust in and I'll wind-up handcuffed on the floor before they realize I'm not the droid they're looking for.
I think Salon is risking their reader base by using this sort of ad system. News and article meta-indexes, like World Net Daily and the Drudge Report and (yes) Slashdot will hesitate to put up links that are so annoying to their users. And that will ruin what revenue Salon was getting with their banner ads.
Does anyone know where I can get 512M DDR? I've seen a few places in the various price bots, but not at a decent price from anyone I'd trust to buy from.
Oh, but record labels and book publishers would LOVE to limit sales of used product. There was recently a push to prevent music stores from carrying used CDs; see this article. Garth Brooks, the country singer, was particularly outraged that his CDs could be resold without his getting a cut of the profit.
Further, book publishers have recently been getting miffed that public libraries let people read books without having to buy them, and are looking to set higher prices for public libraries, or worse yet, to ban libraries from making certain books available. (I'm having a problem finding a reference for this.)
Quench the sun? Not likely. The sun could swallow the entire Earth, much less its Cadmium content, with only mild indigestion (astronomically speaking). You'd need a lot more than that to actually put it out.
AMD isn't a small company, and its processor division is more valuable as a whole than if its assets are dispersed. Even if Intel managed to bankrupt AMD, someone would buy it. And after having bled itself for so long, Intel wouldn't have the resources to pick it up. TI or Fujitsu or NEC or some other happy semiconductor manufacturer would keep the CPUs coming.
Yes, I heard AMD was going to close 2 fabs, and take a $100 million charge against earnings. I also heard it'd save $125 million a year doing it. Getting your money back in ten months isn't a bad thing.
As for Gateway, most of the people who buy them are the ones who are charmed by the sexy "Intel Inside" logo. Those of us who know better don't buy from Gateway anyway.
This changes drastically if low-end crypto, even backdoored crypto, becomes used routinely for email traffic.
There are two reasons for this: First, it takes a significant amount of CPU time to break and decode an encrypted message, even if you have retrieved the key from the escrow agents. Decoding the traffic to and from a few selected email accounts is one thing, but having a system decoding and monitoring routine traffic is another matter entirely.
The second reason is that, if you take a message that's been encrypted using a military-grade cryptosystem, and then encrypt those results with a weak system (such as DES-40), it is impossible to tell that message apart from a routine message only encrypted with a weak system without decrypting both. In other words, there is no way to casually monitor lightly encrypted message traffic and pick out the people using unlawful encryption.
As a result, if weak encryption becomes common, people who wish to keep their messages secure can do so without tipping off the law. It is only if you are already suspect that your use of high-grade encryption would be discovered.
The way key escrow systems work is the decryption key is encrypted using a new randomly generated key. (This can be repeated for keys to be escrowed with more than two entities.) The new key(s) and the encrypted decryption key are then sent to different escrow agents. Since both the encrypted key and the key(s) used to encrypt it are required to recover the decryption key and decode messages, it requires the cooperation of all the escrow agents to gain such access.
All that is left is a method of preventing people from using key sets that haven't been escrowed; this can be done by designing cryptographic hardware to only use keys that have been digitally signed by the authority that generated the escrow keys.
Note that when using a general-purpose computer to perform encryption and decryption, there is no easy way to prevent people from using unescrowed keys. Software designed to check for such things can always be patched and disabled.
So how do you plan to enforce this backdoor rule? How do you keep me from using my copy of PGP that I've already downloaded from pgpi.org? If I take the results of encrypting my message with PGP and then further encrypt it with your backdoored protocol, you'll never even know I was using PGP unless you use my backdoor, and then you won't be able to read my messages. So how will this help anything?
If that software were proprietary, rather than published under the GPL, then that small company X wouldn't have access to that code either, or in fact might not even know it existed, much less that it was available. At least having the code available as open-source makes it possible for companies to consider such projects.
...So long as you're running 4 or 8 chips in parallel.:-P
I don't know why Intel is cutting its own throat, tying its processor to the most expensive memory around, especially since that same memory is holding the processor back. I suppose they signed some agreement years ago and now they're stuck.
Oh, I keep hitting websites every half-hour or hour, looking for more news; but I stopped watching the TV quite a while ago. It was getting too repetitive and depressing, and detailing positions I'd already got from the web. It's a terrible, thrilling event that has happened, but I'm already burnt out, at least TV-wise.
My Linksys router has to be reset every week or so, and seems to have problems "bouncing" packets back into the intranet; instead they seem to get lost. (ICQ doesn't work reliably between machines, for instance.) I'm strongly considering switching to another company's router.
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You know, this new regulation will stop Moore's Law cold. People will no longer want to buy new, restricted computers; instead, those old Pentium 4 2 GHZs will be in hot demand. There'll be no other way to display your content. Demand for new machines will drop, and the funds for research will no longer be there.
Ever since a Federal law was passed in 1994 banning certain features in new or imported guns, there has been a brisk market in "pre-ban" weapons; expect a similar situation in the computer market.
This should be really fun when computers get fast enough to run virtual machines that can decode MPEG. How's the hardware going to tell if you're viewing restricted content when the viewing operation isn't even in the same machine code?
I suspect your upbringing had more to do with your avoidance of pornography than its availability, and you don't realize it. Porn is ALWAYS available to kids; before the web, teens and pre-teens were swiping their parents' porno mags and bringing them to show their friends.
Let's say you put locks on all porno sites, with security so high that only a few determined kids could get in. What do you think those kids would do? Why, download the pics and swap them, via their handy peer-to-peer software! One stolen pic gets copied a thousand times, and it's "stylish" to have some on your computer.
So you start piling on more and more security; Java applets that don't let you save pics, or screen capture; watermarks that OS patches won't let be displayed unless from the original web site... But guess what? There'll always be ways around them, and those ways will spread like wildfire. Gotta taste that forbidden fruit! And in the meantime, even adults can't view porn, thanks to all these overlapping security features. Software monopolies will be enforced ("this page can only be viewed in IE 6.0"), kids will still be looking at porn, and everyone will be unhappy.
Trying to screen minors from accessing porn on the net is like -- well, like trying to screen MP3s from the net. You can't stop it, can't even put a significant dent in it without imposing drastic controls.
What happens when kids can't get onto adult websites? Well, they'll use stolen credit card numbers, or stolen adult ID codes, or just plain lie. How can you tell if the person on the other side of the monitor is below 17? Do you plan on implanting smartcard chips below the skin of everyone once they reach their majority?
Parents whine and wail because, after they've given their kids unrestricted access to the net, the little tykes are heading straight to XXX websites. The horror! But while they'll lobby and rally for all sorts of controls on this monster we call the world wide web, they'd never consider picking up and installing some parental control software. (For the most part, I don't think a majority of parents are even competent to install any software; that may be why.)
Renewable sources of hydrogen include cracking methane generated by decomposition, and cracking water using solar, wind or water generated electricity. Why not just use that electricity directly? Because it's often not there when you need it. Batteries expensive, but storing hydrogen can be cheap.
So how would you go about building, say, a 120V inverter to run off this gizmo without wasting too much energy or winding up with voltage stability problems on the output? Switching power supply to generate a fixed DC from the unregulated DC?
My Sony receiver came with a sophisticated remote control complete with LCD display.
I hate it.
I want a remote that has buttons. A lot of buttons. A whole lot of buttons. Something that doesn't make me go through 15 menus to get to the operating mode I want.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001320012-20 01330486,00.html
Eh? The terrorist finds someone who resembles him, marks his movements, and then when he's ready, gets the plane ticket, and kills his doppelganger and steals his ID hours before the plane leaves.
The 9/11 hijackers eliminated the victims' entire families to keep their replacement from being noticed. This was in a wartime situation, though, where a family could disappear without being remarked on; but still, it's a chilling situation.
Further, if things are planned properly, even if the corpse is discovered soon after the murder, without ID it would take time to identify that person; time that would allow the hijacker to board the plane.
Y'know, when I heard Michael Jackson's new single was being distributed on a copy protected CD, I immediately hit the Gnutella net looking for pirated copies. Of course I found several dozen.
I just took another look; it is now several hundred.
CD copy protection won't help prevent music piracy; a few people will always be able to break the protection, and everyone else will download from them. The only people this will inconvenience are the poor schlubs who only want to listen to the song on their Rio players.
So if I wanted to hijack an airplane, I'd need to find someone who looked very much like me, and then kill him, take his ID, and use that to board a plane.
Which is basically exactly what the 9/11 terrorists did, minus the sophisticated system that wouldn't have helped at all.
Because with my luck I'll look exactly like some wanted felon, and then fourteen times a day, every time I walk past a security camera, the alarms will go off and the cops will bust in and I'll wind-up handcuffed on the floor before they realize I'm not the droid they're looking for.
I think Salon is risking their reader base by using this sort of ad system. News and article meta-indexes, like World Net Daily and the Drudge Report and (yes) Slashdot will hesitate to put up links that are so annoying to their users. And that will ruin what revenue Salon was getting with their banner ads.
Does anyone know where I can get 512M DDR? I've seen a few places in the various price bots, but not at a decent price from anyone I'd trust to buy from.
Oh, but record labels and book publishers would LOVE to limit sales of used product. There was recently a push to prevent music stores from carrying used CDs; see this article. Garth Brooks, the country singer, was particularly outraged that his CDs could be resold without his getting a cut of the profit.
Further, book publishers have recently been getting miffed that public libraries let people read books without having to buy them, and are looking to set higher prices for public libraries, or worse yet, to ban libraries from making certain books available. (I'm having a problem finding a reference for this.)
Quench the sun? Not likely. The sun could swallow the entire Earth, much less its Cadmium content, with only mild indigestion (astronomically speaking). You'd need a lot more than that to actually put it out.
AMD isn't a small company, and its processor division is more valuable as a whole than if its assets are dispersed. Even if Intel managed to bankrupt AMD, someone would buy it. And after having bled itself for so long, Intel wouldn't have the resources to pick it up. TI or Fujitsu or NEC or some other happy semiconductor manufacturer would keep the CPUs coming.
Yes, I heard AMD was going to close 2 fabs, and take a $100 million charge against earnings. I also heard it'd save $125 million a year doing it. Getting your money back in ten months isn't a bad thing.
As for Gateway, most of the people who buy them are the ones who are charmed by the sexy "Intel Inside" logo. Those of us who know better don't buy from Gateway anyway.
This changes drastically if low-end crypto, even backdoored crypto, becomes used routinely for email traffic.
There are two reasons for this: First, it takes a significant amount of CPU time to break and decode an encrypted message, even if you have retrieved the key from the escrow agents. Decoding the traffic to and from a few selected email accounts is one thing, but having a system decoding and monitoring routine traffic is another matter entirely.
The second reason is that, if you take a message that's been encrypted using a military-grade cryptosystem, and then encrypt those results with a weak system (such as DES-40), it is impossible to tell that message apart from a routine message only encrypted with a weak system without decrypting both. In other words, there is no way to casually monitor lightly encrypted message traffic and pick out the people using unlawful encryption.
As a result, if weak encryption becomes common, people who wish to keep their messages secure can do so without tipping off the law. It is only if you are already suspect that your use of high-grade encryption would be discovered.
The way key escrow systems work is the decryption key is encrypted using a new randomly generated key. (This can be repeated for keys to be escrowed with more than two entities.) The new key(s) and the encrypted decryption key are then sent to different escrow agents. Since both the encrypted key and the key(s) used to encrypt it are required to recover the decryption key and decode messages, it requires the cooperation of all the escrow agents to gain such access.
All that is left is a method of preventing people from using key sets that haven't been escrowed; this can be done by designing cryptographic hardware to only use keys that have been digitally signed by the authority that generated the escrow keys.
Note that when using a general-purpose computer to perform encryption and decryption, there is no easy way to prevent people from using unescrowed keys. Software designed to check for such things can always be patched and disabled.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
So how do you plan to enforce this backdoor rule? How do you keep me from using my copy of PGP that I've already downloaded from pgpi.org? If I take the results of encrypting my message with PGP and then further encrypt it with your backdoored protocol, you'll never even know I was using PGP unless you use my backdoor, and then you won't be able to read my messages. So how will this help anything?
If that software were proprietary, rather than published under the GPL, then that small company X wouldn't have access to that code either, or in fact might not even know it existed, much less that it was available. At least having the code available as open-source makes it possible for companies to consider such projects.
...So long as you're running 4 or 8 chips in parallel. :-P
I don't know why Intel is cutting its own throat, tying its processor to the most expensive memory around, especially since that same memory is holding the processor back. I suppose they signed some agreement years ago and now they're stuck.
Oh, I keep hitting websites every half-hour or hour, looking for more news; but I stopped watching the TV quite a while ago. It was getting too repetitive and depressing, and detailing positions I'd already got from the web. It's a terrible, thrilling event that has happened, but I'm already burnt out, at least TV-wise.
My Linksys router has to be reset every week or so, and seems to have problems "bouncing" packets back into the intranet; instead they seem to get lost. (ICQ doesn't work reliably between machines, for instance.) I'm strongly considering switching to another company's router.