If you'll notice, it's not the folks who are researching pure "explosives detection" who are making the advances, it's folks who have been working on all sorts of other tech (mostly in the private sector) who are getting things done.
You want dramatic, practical scientific advances? Don't fund it with government money.
Note that it was a New Zealand company, not the New Zealand government, in the article...
Actually, the amount of TATP you could put inside a notebook battery wouldn't be enough to blow a modern jet out of the air, (unless you got really lucky). It's a decent explosive, but not that powerful, and not very dense (you couldn't get that much inside a battery). You also need a more-definitive trigger, since they make you open up laptops and boot them at many airports.
A hydrogen explosion would be hard to manage, since you'd need a whole lot of it, and need to confine it somewhere in just the right concentration.
The "innocuous chemicals" bit mentioned in the article is pretty misleading, too. "Innocuous" only goes so far, since acetone (for the lighter stuff) or nitromethane (for the heavier stuff) aren't innocuous to even the most casual inspection, and are HAZMATs in themselves.
The fact that the bad guys tend to use TATP as an explosive is actually a good thing. It shows that their technical skills are pretty minimal, since they'd be using better explosives like nitroglycerine over TATP if they had the choice (more powerful and less sensitive to shock).
These guys used a 3rd party card because they don't want to reveal what hardware is vulnerable....and then turned right around and said that Apple's hardware was vulnerable, anyway.
Sounds like they need to get their stories straight.
About half of the claims they make about this exploit aren't shown in the video, and much of the rest of the claims are exactly the opposite of what's actually shown ("any open wireless connection," yet they do a connection directly to the hacking computer, and we don't get to see the settings of the defending Mac - which could be the big problem, if the firewall or other settings were disabled first).
I think the hole is probably there, but I'm betting we find it (as usual in these claims) to be much smaller and much harder to exploit than the hackers pretend.
6. If you're in a non-poor neighborhood, there are going to be several wireless nets in range of any given spot. Even if Bob Niceguy decides to share his bandwidth and tells his friends it's okay, they might not know which access point is his, and just link up to any random place....and if you're living right next to (for example) a coffee shop, you could get a dozen random freeloaders on at any given time who all think it's okay, since the "free wireless" sign is right there for all to see.
They're not actually *to* the systems they're next to, but it's funny how long some baby cracker-d00d will just sit there and keep fiddling with them, trying to get them to work.
When I go see local bands, they sell their CDs in the clubs for about $10 a pop.
"I don't buy two more doublings from there to the stores."
Then you don't know how business works. People need to make profit, and that includes things like making more on the popular CDs so you don't go out of business when you get stuck with a million dollars or so of crappys titles.
"someone's going to come in and buy from the distributor and ship directly to their stores,"...and that's not going to happen. Big retailers don't want ot rely on other folks for prompt inventory fixes. They do beetter by buying a couple of hundred thousand copies of a CD for a little bit less per copy, then shipping it to their own distribution centers and rerouting it to their stores.
All your model does is move the middleman over to the "middleman" of the warehouses of places like Best Buy and Target. Which is why you get new Cds for $10 at those places...
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. The store is who pays for shipping. Even if the distributor "pays" it, they increase their prices to cover the costs.
And that cost goes into the pot when they figure out how much to sell the CD for. They don't add it on later, they *start* with what the thing cost them to _get it in the door and sell it_. That's cost to the middleman + shipping + rent + labor + utilities + advertising + state and local taxes + legal fees, et cetera. Then they increase the price some more so they actually make a profit, plus have some cushion for next week, when they have to dump all of those shitty little albums that never sold (AKA "a loss")....UPS and the like don't give 80% discounts, no matter how much crap you ship. They have static costs, too.
...but you get it *now*, instead of a week or so later, and you don't have to worry about that "get an $18 CD from someone you don't want to listen to because you didn't opt out" situation...
I *know* they pay regular business UPS rates. You can find this out by looking at the box when they come into the store. Which I have.
You, obviously, have not.
Especially if you believe the big record companies (or the middlemen distributors) pay *1/8* the price other businesses pay (they get a few percent discount, not 80%+).
"It costs significantly less than $0.25 to ship a CD, as in around a tenth of that."
Really? Put fifty of them in a box and ask UPS if they'll ship it across the country for $1.25. With a ten pound package, shipping UPS ground, regular pickup, you're looking at about *eight times* that, not even considering the costs of assembling the order, putting it all in the package, having someone deal withe the UPS paperwork, or billing.
The rest of your numbers come from similar (really, really flawed) assumptions about the real world. Your comments about labels and staffing, recording costs, and royalties are particularly humorous.
"Presumably when I buy a $6 CD, Sony is not losing money..."
You presume wrong, or at least, you presume halfway.
That's for a direct shot from Sony to you, without the middleman, getting rid of excess inventory (rather than throw them away, they sell them to folks like you for a cut price). These aren't "profit CDs, they're "cutting our losses" CDs.
Those $6 to $7 CDs are part of the *costs* of the expensive ones (where they make the profit that they don't make on the cheap "get them out of the warehouse for the new issues" discs).
And you might note that they charge you (ta-daa!) *shipping* for those CDs...
Hell, it would cost more than a quarter just to *ship* one CD.
Let's look at some more realistic assumptions.
First: Let's say a "typical" CD sells 100,000 copies (they don't, on the average, but we'll go with the 100K number).
We'll assume the band is made up of five guys.
If they're using a good studio (not the cheap-ass garage-based kind), you're looking at $10,000 for studio time alone. A good producer will want to pay for a good engineer, so there's another $10,000 or so. Add in design costs, and actual physical production, and you're looking at upwards of $50,000 for a serious production (yeah, you can get an album hammered out at your cousin Phil's for a couple of thousand, but you can also drink Budweiser).
So you're up to 50 cents a pop, just for recording and preproduction.
CDs in bulk cost about 25 cents each for actual physical production in huge quantities, with labels and in boxes.
So there's 75 cents in real production costs, and everyone concerned is going to make *zero* profit.
Now, the label gets into the act, they have a bunch of people out there looking for the Next Big Thing, and they have to be paid for. The people who own the studio also need to be paid. Then there's the band. Suppose each of these groups make 50 cents a pop for each CD sold (a not-extreme number).
So you're up to $2.25 in actual physical production costs plus royalties and a moderate amount of profit.
Now, here's the hard part: Moving the damned things around. They have to go from the factory that prints the CDs, to the warehouse owned by the label, then to the first middleman. You're up to $2.50 a pop now.
That first-level middleman is going to want to make some profit, too. So he's going to take that $2.50 in costs and double it (he has to pay his warehouse crew, plus his staff, plus pay the rent on the building, et cetera - doubling is pretty common in order to make a decent profit). So you're at $5 a shot, and it's in a big buildding out in St. Loius or something.
Now, the middleman takes orders from all of those little retailers, plus all of the big retailers, and ships them out UPS (or the like). Every Tuesday, those retailers get that week's stock of CDs in, and what to they do? They double the cost (what the middleman charged with shipping coss, then a markup for the store's costs, which include rent, staff, and al otehr costs).
So even for the "cheap" model of production, you're looking at $10 CDs.
Which is, oddly enough, what the price is for "discount" CDs of fairly popular bands, and what most local bands charge or their locally-producred discs.
NOTE:
The numbers above assume a fairly high number for a "typical" CD. The real average is closer to 5,000 than 100,000...
There's also the "risk taker" model to be included. They don't charge $16.99 ($12.99 at Best Buy) for a successful CD to rip you off. They charge that much to pay for the next CD they put out that tanks in the market, where they eat all production costs yet still have to pay those folks all up and down the line.
I do this sort of stuff for a living, and while most of the shows I do are more on the "hey gang, let's do a meeting" level, when someone's spending a couple of million bucks to fly in a few thousand folks, put them in hotels, and cram them into one ballroom, there's a very high level of expectation.
Sure, a lot of companies have Really Dull Meetings, but some others are much like the "Jobs Model." Slick, professionally-produced presentations, lots of cool videos and music, light shows, several HDTV-level projection screens, 100 kilowatt sound systems, and expensive pro talent to help entertain the crowd between product demos.
You also get stuff like Larry Ellison rappelling down from the ceiling of the ballroom, the head of a soft drink company crashing a golf cart through a frangible projection screen, rotating platforms for the audience (to turn them to different stages) for another soft drink company, or any of a hundred different Big Show stories.
You also get the Big Disasters when they don't prepare right. Like the above-mentioned rotating platforms not turning when the weight of the crowd is actually on them, or a full-sized luxury car on a raft in a lake doing a quick 180 degree roll and ending up suspended under water...
A couple of years ago, I was working on a corporate meeting, and the company had banners with their mission statement hanging on the walls.
You couldn't read them.
I mean, the words were there and all, but you could only get about halfway down the paragraph before you lost the whole train of thought. Ths worried me, so I got some other folks to try and read it. Nobody could actually finish reading the damned thing.
The language used was so inane that it was impossible to hold in your head...
The Cappuccino listed in your link for $389 is without processor, RAM, and has no drives. In other words, it's a motherboard, case, and power supply ONLY.
When you up the specs to something vaguely like the Mac Mini, it's pushing a thousand bucks, and still depends on integrated Intel graphics.
It's worse than that. If you get a Cappuccino PC with anything like the Mini's specs, and with Windows XP Pro loaded, it's over a thousand bucks, and *still* has a slower processor.
...about pretty much everything he's ever promoted.
Resource shortages, overpopulation causing mass famine, worsening pollution... he's been wrong about all of them, every time, over the course of decades.
What in the world would lead you to think he's right about anything *now*? Just the fact that he's promoting Global Warming is a great sign that it's not happening for the reasons he's pushing.
When CDs started to get popular, the "audiophile" stores were making a big effort to sell high-end turntables for "discriminating" listeners. They had a turntable and a CD player with the same tunes playing, and would switch back and forth to show the difference in the sound, talking about how much "warmer" the LP sounded than the CD.
Sooooo... I set up a little test. First, I rolled the high frequencies off of the CD player, then added a bit more low end. When switching between the LP and the CD, most folks couldn't tell the difference, even the supposed "golden ear" audiophiles selling the equipment.
You *can* have an LP sound better than a CD, but most of the time, you don't.
Slashdot Mirror
If you'll notice, it's not the folks who are researching pure "explosives detection" who are making the advances, it's folks who have been working on all sorts of other tech (mostly in the private sector) who are getting things done.
You want dramatic, practical scientific advances? Don't fund it with government money.
Note that it was a New Zealand company, not the New Zealand government, in the article...
Actually, the amount of TATP you could put inside a notebook battery wouldn't be enough to blow a modern jet out of the air, (unless you got really lucky). It's a decent explosive, but not that powerful, and not very dense (you couldn't get that much inside a battery). You also need a more-definitive trigger, since they make you open up laptops and boot them at many airports.
A hydrogen explosion would be hard to manage, since you'd need a whole lot of it, and need to confine it somewhere in just the right concentration.
The "innocuous chemicals" bit mentioned in the article is pretty misleading, too. "Innocuous" only goes so far, since acetone (for the lighter stuff) or nitromethane (for the heavier stuff) aren't innocuous to even the most casual inspection, and are HAZMATs in themselves.
The fact that the bad guys tend to use TATP as an explosive is actually a good thing. It shows that their technical skills are pretty minimal, since they'd be using better explosives like nitroglycerine over TATP if they had the choice (more powerful and less sensitive to shock).
These guys used a 3rd party card because they don't want to reveal what hardware is vulnerable. ...and then turned right around and said that Apple's hardware was vulnerable, anyway.
Sounds like they need to get their stories straight.
About half of the claims they make about this exploit aren't shown in the video, and much of the rest of the claims are exactly the opposite of what's actually shown ("any open wireless connection," yet they do a connection directly to the hacking computer, and we don't get to see the settings of the defending Mac - which could be the big problem, if the firewall or other settings were disabled first).
I think the hole is probably there, but I'm betting we find it (as usual in these claims) to be much smaller and much harder to exploit than the hackers pretend.
6. If you're in a non-poor neighborhood, there are going to be several wireless nets in range of any given spot. Even if Bob Niceguy decides to share his bandwidth and tells his friends it's okay, they might not know which access point is his, and just link up to any random place. ...and if you're living right next to (for example) a coffee shop, you could get a dozen random freeloaders on at any given time who all think it's okay, since the "free wireless" sign is right there for all to see.
Back in the 1960s, a company called Turbonique made (along with a rocket-powered turbocharger for "normal" engines), rocket engines for automobiles.
One of these gadgets pushed a VW Beetle (the old, cool kind, not those new toys) to a 9.36 ET at 168 mph in the quarter mile.
Later, someone built a rocket-powered go-kart which managed about 240 MPH...
Well, they *look* like passwords.
They're not actually *to* the systems they're next to, but it's funny how long some baby cracker-d00d will just sit there and keep fiddling with them, trying to get them to work.
I know a lot of skinny, fit, crazy people.
The common accepted price for CDs is about $10.
...and that's not going to happen. Big retailers don't want ot rely on other folks for prompt inventory fixes. They do beetter by buying a couple of hundred thousand copies of a CD for a little bit less per copy, then shipping it to their own distribution centers and rerouting it to their stores.
When I go see local bands, they sell their CDs in the clubs for about $10 a pop.
"I don't buy two more doublings from there to the stores."
Then you don't know how business works. People need to make profit, and that includes things like making more on the popular CDs so you don't go out of business when you get stuck with a million dollars or so of crappys titles.
"someone's going to come in and buy from the distributor and ship directly to their stores,"
All your model does is move the middleman over to the "middleman" of the warehouses of places like Best Buy and Target. Which is why you get new Cds for $10 at those places...
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. The store is who pays for shipping. Even if the distributor "pays" it, they increase their prices to cover the costs.
...UPS and the like don't give 80% discounts, no matter how much crap you ship. They have static costs, too.
And that cost goes into the pot when they figure out how much to sell the CD for. They don't add it on later, they *start* with what the thing cost them to _get it in the door and sell it_. That's cost to the middleman + shipping + rent + labor + utilities + advertising + state and local taxes + legal fees, et cetera. Then they increase the price some more so they actually make a profit, plus have some cushion for next week, when they have to dump all of those shitty little albums that never sold (AKA "a loss").
...but you get it *now*, instead of a week or so later, and you don't have to worry about that "get an $18 CD from someone you don't want to listen to because you didn't opt out" situation...
I *know* they pay regular business UPS rates. You can find this out by looking at the box when they come into the store. Which I have.
You, obviously, have not.
Especially if you believe the big record companies (or the middlemen distributors) pay *1/8* the price other businesses pay (they get a few percent discount, not 80%+).
"It costs significantly less than $0.25 to ship a CD, as in around a tenth of that."
Really? Put fifty of them in a box and ask UPS if they'll ship it across the country for $1.25. With a ten pound package, shipping UPS ground, regular pickup, you're looking at about *eight times* that, not even considering the costs of assembling the order, putting it all in the package, having someone deal withe the UPS paperwork, or billing.
The rest of your numbers come from similar (really, really flawed) assumptions about the real world. Your comments about labels and staffing, recording costs, and royalties are particularly humorous.
"Presumably when I buy a $6 CD, Sony is not losing money..."
You presume wrong, or at least, you presume halfway.
That's for a direct shot from Sony to you, without the middleman, getting rid of excess inventory (rather than throw them away, they sell them to folks like you for a cut price). These aren't "profit CDs, they're "cutting our losses" CDs.
Those $6 to $7 CDs are part of the *costs* of the expensive ones (where they make the profit that they don't make on the cheap "get them out of the warehouse for the new issues" discs).
And you might note that they charge you (ta-daa!) *shipping* for those CDs...
...your numbers are just plain wrong.
Hell, it would cost more than a quarter just to *ship* one CD.
Let's look at some more realistic assumptions.
First: Let's say a "typical" CD sells 100,000 copies (they don't, on the average, but we'll go with the 100K number).
We'll assume the band is made up of five guys.
If they're using a good studio (not the cheap-ass garage-based kind), you're looking at $10,000 for studio time alone. A good producer will want to pay for a good engineer, so there's another $10,000 or so. Add in design costs, and actual physical production, and you're looking at upwards of $50,000 for a serious production (yeah, you can get an album hammered out at your cousin Phil's for a couple of thousand, but you can also drink Budweiser).
So you're up to 50 cents a pop, just for recording and preproduction.
CDs in bulk cost about 25 cents each for actual physical production in huge quantities, with labels and in boxes.
So there's 75 cents in real production costs, and everyone concerned is going to make *zero* profit.
Now, the label gets into the act, they have a bunch of people out there looking for the Next Big Thing, and they have to be paid for. The people who own the studio also need to be paid. Then there's the band. Suppose each of these groups make 50 cents a pop for each CD sold (a not-extreme number).
So you're up to $2.25 in actual physical production costs plus royalties and a moderate amount of profit.
Now, here's the hard part: Moving the damned things around. They have to go from the factory that prints the CDs, to the warehouse owned by the label, then to the first middleman. You're up to $2.50 a pop now.
That first-level middleman is going to want to make some profit, too. So he's going to take that $2.50 in costs and double it (he has to pay his warehouse crew, plus his staff, plus pay the rent on the building, et cetera - doubling is pretty common in order to make a decent profit). So you're at $5 a shot, and it's in a big buildding out in St. Loius or something.
Now, the middleman takes orders from all of those little retailers, plus all of the big retailers, and ships them out UPS (or the like). Every Tuesday, those retailers get that week's stock of CDs in, and what to they do? They double the cost (what the middleman charged with shipping coss, then a markup for the store's costs, which include rent, staff, and al otehr costs).
So even for the "cheap" model of production, you're looking at $10 CDs.
Which is, oddly enough, what the price is for "discount" CDs of fairly popular bands, and what most local bands charge or their locally-producred discs.
NOTE:
The numbers above assume a fairly high number for a "typical" CD. The real average is closer to 5,000 than 100,000...
There's also the "risk taker" model to be included. They don't charge $16.99 ($12.99 at Best Buy) for a successful CD to rip you off. They charge that much to pay for the next CD they put out that tanks in the market, where they eat all production costs yet still have to pay those folks all up and down the line.
The best explanation is that he needed some press, and figured that "I'm being hassled by The Man" was a good tack for his audience.
...and then you'd end up with "fucallahandthehorseherodeinon"
I do this sort of stuff for a living, and while most of the shows I do are more on the "hey gang, let's do a meeting" level, when someone's spending a couple of million bucks to fly in a few thousand folks, put them in hotels, and cram them into one ballroom, there's a very high level of expectation.
Sure, a lot of companies have Really Dull Meetings, but some others are much like the "Jobs Model." Slick, professionally-produced presentations, lots of cool videos and music, light shows, several HDTV-level projection screens, 100 kilowatt sound systems, and expensive pro talent to help entertain the crowd between product demos.
You also get stuff like Larry Ellison rappelling down from the ceiling of the ballroom, the head of a soft drink company crashing a golf cart through a frangible projection screen, rotating platforms for the audience (to turn them to different stages) for another soft drink company, or any of a hundred different Big Show stories.
You also get the Big Disasters when they don't prepare right. Like the above-mentioned rotating platforms not turning when the weight of the crowd is actually on them, or a full-sized luxury car on a raft in a lake doing a quick 180 degree roll and ending up suspended under water...
Some of the smaller flash drives and memory sticks will fit quite nicely in a 35mm film canister.
The larger flash drives will go into an empty aspirin bottle.
A couple of years ago, I was working on a corporate meeting, and the company had banners with their mission statement hanging on the walls.
You couldn't read them.
I mean, the words were there and all, but you could only get about halfway down the paragraph before you lost the whole train of thought. Ths worried me, so I got some other folks to try and read it. Nobody could actually finish reading the damned thing.
The language used was so inane that it was impossible to hold in your head...
...you're saying that trolling is caused by proton storms?
The Cappuccino listed in your link for $389 is without processor, RAM, and has no drives. In other words, it's a motherboard, case, and power supply ONLY.
When you up the specs to something vaguely like the Mac Mini, it's pushing a thousand bucks, and still depends on integrated Intel graphics.
It's worse than that. If you get a Cappuccino PC with anything like the Mini's specs, and with Windows XP Pro loaded, it's over a thousand bucks, and *still* has a slower processor.
...about pretty much everything he's ever promoted.
Resource shortages, overpopulation causing mass famine, worsening pollution... he's been wrong about all of them, every time, over the course of decades.
What in the world would lead you to think he's right about anything *now*? Just the fact that he's promoting Global Warming is a great sign that it's not happening for the reasons he's pushing.
"The iPod ear-bud headphones are among the best we've tested."
When CDs started to get popular, the "audiophile" stores were making a big effort to sell high-end turntables for "discriminating" listeners. They had a turntable and a CD player with the same tunes playing, and would switch back and forth to show the difference in the sound, talking about how much "warmer" the LP sounded than the CD.
Sooooo... I set up a little test. First, I rolled the high frequencies off of the CD player, then added a bit more low end. When switching between the LP and the CD, most folks couldn't tell the difference, even the supposed "golden ear" audiophiles selling the equipment.
You *can* have an LP sound better than a CD, but most of the time, you don't.