The nice thing is a lot of the work can be done from home, and most of the guys I worked with live outside of boulder since housing is so expensive.
Well, all 5 canyons to west of Boulder are closed because of washed-out roads. There's flooding in Lafayette, Louisville, Broomfield, Erie, & Longmont to the east. Hell, even Aurora is flooded. I-25 closed to the Wyoming border. Parts of I-70 closed off and on. 93 closed from 64th to 128th...
What makes this "Biblical" flood something of more than local concern is that Boulder/Ft. Collins is the site of the WWV/WWVB radio clocks and transmitters. Since the Maryland facilities closed down, the only other US time standard radio transmitters are located in Honolulu. Atomic wristwatches everywhere are in peril!
Wow, your experience differs from mine! Who would have thought such a thing? I've had multiple boards go bad (capacitor failures, fried electronics).
Virtuous living. Obviously. Semi-virtuous anyway. I live in a high-lightning region. It has fried 2 electronic thermostats, popped Ground-Fault Interruptors, and blown an alarm sensor, but the garage door opener goes on. And it's 105 in there at the moment.
As I said, the only thing I've ever had to do to it was scrape down the contacts on the switch at the wall. And lube the drive every year or 3.
The thermostats, incidentally, blew out their changeover relays. The part that determines "heat" or "cool". So I'd come home and the heater would be trying to cool down the house from 90 to 80. Didn't work too well. By the time I get home it's "cooled" to 100.
That's true for current methods of developing software. Which is typing in code.
Programming hasn't changed very much in 50 or so years. And I think it's ludicrous that we're using a language to prgram a computer to do mathematical operations.
What we really need is a symbolic programming "language" and it would rock on a touch screen.
Why not go directly from dragging and dropping logic to machine code directly? There is no physcal law that says we have to program computers the way we do now.
These "verbal" type of programming languages are so 20th century, inefficient and just old fashioned. Their time has passed.
I have a box on my shelf. It contains a product named AmigaVision and that's exactly how it worked. It was briefly very popular around 1990.
It didn't spawn any notable imitators and I doubt you'll find a modern-day version of it. The paradigm remains, but primarily for use by data transformation utilities such as Pentaho DI (Kettle).
Neither the drag/drop flowchart nor the strung-together filecards programming methods have ever really taken off.
If there's a more productive way to program than the keyboarding style first seen in the 1950s, we've yet to see it.
Quite a few are still in service. The rolling code systems didn't come out until the mid 90s.
I don't know if you're a garage-door guy or something, but my experience with the controller boards is that they do not last anywhere near 20 years.
Your experience has holes in it, then. Installed 1992. Still in use. The only maintenance required has been to de-oxidize the contacts on the manual switch.
We're talking about the federal government here. It no longer has to abide by this "Constitution you speak of, and if you invoke it in a court case, the feds can declare your argument "frivolous" and ignore it.
Just invoke National Security. A flag can be used to cover anything.
Reminder to self: stick to day job, do not follow dreams of becoming writer. In event of success, death before 70th birthday due to disease is certain.
Write SF, then. Arthur C. Clarke. Isaac Asimov. Fred Pohl. Jack Vance. Andre Norton.
The last time King wrote a book worth reading was a decade ago.
The last time King wrote a book worth reading it wasn't a book, it was a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, and it was more than ten years ago.
Milk the blood flowing out of the elevators scene until it it makes you want to scream ("Not AGAIN!"). The ballroom shocker was straight out of 1950's Vincent Price shlock. and the "Red Rum" thing was just plain deja vu.
If you want a King movie worth watching, I'd vote for Shawshank any day.
The Dark Tower made me weep for him. Really. It's supposed to be his magnum opus and yet it's so flawed.
King has never been that appealing to me because so much of what I have read of his work (which isn't as much as I should have) has been stuff like recycled Lovecraft, recycled Hitchcock, recycled someone else.
But the Dark Tower has some genuinely brilliant concepts in it. Sadly, they glitter like gems in the mud. Some of the most fascinating and fantastic aspects were never really taken to their conclusions, while a lot of the book read like a bunch of unrelated stories bound together with wattle and daub.
Jake's death in volume 1 made me itch. Then Roland just sits on the beach while crustaceans munch his fingers off. Neither he nor the crustaceans were believable at that point.
By the end of the series, it had degenerated into a mish-mash of throwing in chunks of stuff from his other works, then added insult to injury by writing himself into it. That's a trick that only the most capable of writers can pull off, and sadly, he wasn't one of them.
Then, when it all wrapped up, there were loose ends galore, and it turned out to be just a recycled version of The Never-ending Story.
Successful businesses get fat and bloated until they are taken apart by smaller more nimble competitors.
That is unless they can buy themselves some barriers to entry to keep from being eaten.
Even if they can buy themselves barriers to entry (government based or otherwise) their monopoly fails as soon as they start monopoly pricing. If their barrier to entry is government based their monopoly might be to the extent of the legal market, but they will have competition as soon as they go for the gravy.
Interesting work of fiction. Doesn't match the real world too well, however.
Consider Microsoft. How many people bought DR-DOS or one of the also-ran OS's when Microsoft got fat and bloated? How many times, in fact, have you stopped buying a brand because the product support consists of phone menu hell? Not very many, based on where we are today.
Being fat and bloated means that you can undercut your competitors, endure long periods of losses, and, if you want, simply purchase a competitor, then pump cash into it until it has totally destroyed the competition. Ashton-Tate, anyone? Borland? Or am I supposed to believe that these once-venerable companies are now history because Microsoft bought a few congressmen?
I'm not a fan of Big Government myself, but the idea that in the absence of government interference excellence will drive out inferiority doesn't ring true. If that was the case, McDonalds wouldn't be what it is today. We wouldn't have evolved from people who had other people paid to shine our shoes, pump our gas, deliver our milk into unpaid self-service "employees". People will not only put up with a lot of crap, they'll even volunteer to do so.
What's the case for your claim that libertarianism leads to "monopolism"? The ideology deliberately weaken government which is the both the most powerful sort of monopoly out there and the principal creator of monopolies historically.
And what's supposed to be wrong with vulture capitalism? Capitalism has always been fairly good at disposing of dying businesses and obsolete capital. I think part of the problem here is arbitrary moral rules that don't actually help anyone.
There is an old business adage: "Nothing Succeeds like Success". It breeds corollaries such as "Nobody got fired for buying IBM". (Microsoft, for the younger generation).
A successful business breeds a positive feedback process just as failing businesses tend to nosedive. As a business becomes more and more successful, it attracts more and more customers. It also can afford to negotiate for favorable supply contracts, buy up smaller competitors, and do other things that accelerate the growth curve even more by diving it an edge on the competition. Eventually, it gets so big that it can buy government on its own terms.
It doesn't need government to get there. Government - with the sometimes exception of local government - actually prefers to avoid dealing with smaller businesses, so you have to be well on your way towards monopoly before you can even start getting governmental favors.
And "moral rules" generally do help people. Otherwise they wouldn't exist. Even (or perhaps, especially) the ones that seem anti-common-sense. One of the most dangerous business fallacies is the pseudo-Darwinistic conceit that only the strong and the nasty survive. In the natural world which Darwin formulated his theories on, we have cute fluffy bunnies, delicate pretty butterflies and ape tribes which prosper because some members take care of others progeny instead of breeding themselves.
Just because it is old, maybe 3 years, and newer ones are better doesn't mean it needs to be replaced. I don't just get an "ohh shiny" new tv because it is newer. When it breaks in maybe 5 years from now I might replace it.
I said the same thing in in another topic just the other day.
Then last night, for no apparent reason, it got massively downvoted to oblivion.
I don't expect everything I say to be well-received, but this was just bizarre, since I've never had THAT many downvotes, even on topics that were far more controversial. Especially considering that it had spent 2 days or so at a neutral level. It made me wonder if we've been invaded by Digg Patriots or something.
But I'll be glad to repeat myself. I like my old digital TV just fine, thank you. It has a decent picture, only pulls 150 watts, and I'll wait for it to blow out before getting a new one. Regardless of what kinky new and incompatible DRM schemes come along for the attachments.
And if I buy a new peripheral device whose DRM hates my older TV, the peripheral device goes back to the store. Just like the last one did.
Think of letting them grow up in a world where freedom is the norm and not a special privilege.
Think of them growing up in a world where sharp edges abound and ugly sights are to be seen and won't come as a massive traumatic event because they grew up in a big fuzzy mind-numbing cocoon.
Think of the parents taking responsibility for their own children and teaching them how to deal with the seamier sides of life as they encounter them. Many of the most scarring events of life aren't going to come in from an Internet connection or random strangers on the street. They're going to come from Wicked Uncle Ernie and Crazy Auntie Jean.
I don't know that I'd call assembler "exploits", since in assembler you're allowed to do any darn thing you want to. High-level languages exist as much to limit that ability as anything else.
None of the early FORTRAN implementations I worked with supported pointers as such. But the Primos OS was mostly written in FORTRAN (in fact the instruction set was optimized for FORTRAN), and I think there was a pre-defined integer array whose first element was memory location 0 and each word in that array thus had a 1-to-1 correspondence to a memory address.
On IBM machines, RAM was byte-addressable, so you would use a character array instead. FORTRAN wasn't a good fit for that but COBOL was. While the language didn't come with a built-in memory map array, it's about 5 lines of assembly language to add one in an external library.
The early Unix C compilers also generated assembly language. The original C++ generated C, and as an early licensee, at one point I was running C++-to-C-to-assembler-to.aout builds. I never worked with it, but supposedly Xerox had a FORTRAN that allowed inline assembler.
Regardless of the history, though, there are apples and oranges here. One is an discussion of an exploiting compiler. The other is a discussion of exploitable (but otherwise innocent) languages and runtime environments. Either one is fair game for the maliciously-inclined, but an exploiting compiler is especially insidious, since I can avoid exploits in code I write myself, but have no control over any back doors that a compiler, linker, or system loader might inject.
Fortunately, modern OS environments are so hellishly complex that specialized exploits are virtually guaranteed to fail in very visible ways on at least a few of the thousands of permutations of systems and work environments in use across the planet. The only practical way to do that sort of exploit is when you are targeting a very specific environment, such as Iranian Windows machines running a certain brand and model of centrifuge. And even then, the unrelated incidental victims are likely to expose it.
Could a public library scan a book, and loan it out online for virtual access using a reader application, as long as they restrict access to one patron at a time?
A) Not without violating copyright laws.
B) That's the whole problem with public libraries and the Overdrive service. My city has as far as I know exactly ONE copy of each ebook in its inventory and a waiting list for them that's obscene. Go to the dead-tree branch libraries and they may have 2, 3, maybe more copies of the same book in physical form with more copies in other branches.
And the maddening thing is that if Overdrive was set up properly, multiple ebook copies would be less trouble than multiple physical copies. I can think of several possible ways that it could be done profitably if the whole publishing/distributing world wasn't so insistent on setting their own rules based on pre-electronic concepts.
Additionally, you'd need to check the source of all the HW-components that come with their own BIOS, including the system's BIOS, networking chip's onboard software, and a lot more.
Which components outside of the motherboard come with their own BIOS? Are you conflating firmware with BIOS? They are not one and the same. It's like suggesting a mouse be checked to see if it contains a keyboard.
Pedantry aside, everything else is right on the money.
I seem to recall that some disk controllers did, in fact jack themselves into the BIOS. Also video cards, and NICs (PXE boot support, for example).
This argument is much, much too complicated. Plus, it can indeed be tracked down in the compiler binary. Compiling the compiler with an unrelated compiler will remove the malware in the compiler binary. You can use a really slow one for this effort, as you must use it only once. In reality, there are more than enough bugs of the "Ping of death" style, which can be used. Read "confessions of a cyber warrior". The worst thing Bell Labs brought into this world was the C and C++ languages and the associated programming style. Like char* pointers, uninitialized pointers possible and so on.
If Bell Labs had no foisted C and C++ on this world for "free", the government would have had to invent something to make their "cyber war space" possible. Wait, Bell Labs WAS the government.
If that's not enough, a single buffer overflow in firefox or Acrobat reader can trigger something like the Pentium F00F bug, and then they OWN THE CPU. Your stinking sandbox is wholly irrelevant at this time.
Go figure, sucker. Me, I am a C and C++ software engineering sucker, too.
Before C, much less C++, there were languages like FORTRAN, COBOL, and PL/1. They were not as rigid about checking types and ranges as Java and Ada, for example. Even some versions of BASIC allowed definition of an "array" that was, in fact, a map of the entire system RAM. And, of course, peek() and poke. PL/1 has actual pointer support built into the language.
So don't blame C. The problems go way, way back. Some systems and languages were more secure than others, but none of them were all that airtight. The onlu commercial hardware architecture that I know of that approached being REALLY secure was the Intel iAPX 432, which practically gave each stackframe its own private address space. But that one never caught on.
... but while the ACLU pursues matters through leveraging law, the NRA advocates remedying government amok with a more pointed (or hollow pointed) approach.
There's a big difference between advocating and pursuing.
I continue to maintain that the position that the best way to protect your rights is BEFORE you get pushed to the point where you have to break out the arms caches. I know there are those who have wet dreams about being the backwoods guerilla patriots against the tank-and-drone forces of an overbearing US Government, but I'm not one of them. I'd rather order pizza delivery, pick up the UPS package with the latest electronic toy in it, and play with it, thanks to those who pursued instead of just advocating.
I would say it actually promotes being passive. Hide behind rules, do only what you are told, cover your arse well because otherwise someone will manage to put blame for their own faults on you. Then only 'pro-active' approach allowed is to create more rules to hide behind.
No, "pro-active" means that simply doing your job wasn't good enough. You're expected to come up with new things to do. Never mind if they're horrible things to do, just as long as you're doing things above and beyond your remit.
Bingo! Although avoiding physical risk is the most visible way in which our lives have become warped, the dangers of pursuing the asymptote are not limited to just that one area.
We've also spent the last half-century or so pursuing efficiency. The projected end to that path is seen as a case where everything is cheap, but no one has a job to be able to afford to buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
The nice thing is a lot of the work can be done from home, and most of the guys I worked with live outside of boulder since housing is so expensive.
Well, all 5 canyons to west of Boulder are closed because of washed-out roads. There's flooding in Lafayette, Louisville, Broomfield, Erie, & Longmont to the east. Hell, even Aurora is flooded. I-25 closed to the Wyoming border. Parts of I-70 closed off and on. 93 closed from 64th to 128th...
What makes this "Biblical" flood something of more than local concern is that Boulder/Ft. Collins is the site of the WWV/WWVB radio clocks and transmitters. Since the Maryland facilities closed down, the only other US time standard radio transmitters are located in Honolulu. Atomic wristwatches everywhere are in peril!
Wow, your experience differs from mine! Who would have thought such a thing? I've had multiple boards go bad (capacitor failures, fried electronics).
Virtuous living. Obviously. Semi-virtuous anyway. I live in a high-lightning region. It has fried 2 electronic thermostats, popped Ground-Fault Interruptors, and blown an alarm sensor, but the garage door opener goes on. And it's 105 in there at the moment.
As I said, the only thing I've ever had to do to it was scrape down the contacts on the switch at the wall. And lube the drive every year or 3.
The thermostats, incidentally, blew out their changeover relays. The part that determines "heat" or "cool". So I'd come home and the heater would be trying to cool down the house from 90 to 80. Didn't work too well. By the time I get home it's "cooled" to 100.
That's true for current methods of developing software. Which is typing in code.
Programming hasn't changed very much in 50 or so years. And I think it's ludicrous that we're using a language to prgram a computer to do mathematical operations.
What we really need is a symbolic programming "language" and it would rock on a touch screen.
Why not go directly from dragging and dropping logic to machine code directly? There is no physcal law that says we have to program computers the way we do now.
These "verbal" type of programming languages are so 20th century, inefficient and just old fashioned. Their time has passed.
I have a box on my shelf. It contains a product named AmigaVision and that's exactly how it worked. It was briefly very popular around 1990.
It didn't spawn any notable imitators and I doubt you'll find a modern-day version of it. The paradigm remains, but primarily for use by data transformation utilities such as Pentaho DI (Kettle).
Neither the drag/drop flowchart nor the strung-together filecards programming methods have ever really taken off.
If there's a more productive way to program than the keyboarding style first seen in the 1950s, we've yet to see it.
Quite a few are still in service. The rolling code systems didn't come out until the mid 90s.
I don't know if you're a garage-door guy or something, but my experience with the controller boards is that they do not last anywhere near 20 years.
Your experience has holes in it, then. Installed 1992. Still in use. The only maintenance required has been to de-oxidize the contacts on the manual switch.
We're talking about the federal government here. It no longer has to abide by this "Constitution you speak of, and if you invoke it in a court case, the feds can declare your argument "frivolous" and ignore it.
Just invoke National Security. A flag can be used to cover anything.
Reminder to self: stick to day job, do not follow dreams of becoming writer. In event of success, death before 70th birthday due to disease is certain.
Write SF, then. Arthur C. Clarke. Isaac Asimov. Fred Pohl. Jack Vance. Andre Norton.
The last time King wrote a book worth reading was a decade ago.
The last time King wrote a book worth reading it wasn't a book, it was a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, and it was more than ten years ago.
Milk the blood flowing out of the elevators scene until it it makes you want to scream ("Not AGAIN!"). The ballroom shocker was straight out of 1950's Vincent Price shlock. and the "Red Rum" thing was just plain deja vu.
If you want a King movie worth watching, I'd vote for Shawshank any day.
The Dark Tower made me weep for him. Really. It's supposed to be his magnum opus and yet it's so flawed.
King has never been that appealing to me because so much of what I have read of his work (which isn't as much as I should have) has been stuff like recycled Lovecraft, recycled Hitchcock, recycled someone else.
But the Dark Tower has some genuinely brilliant concepts in it. Sadly, they glitter like gems in the mud. Some of the most fascinating and fantastic aspects were never really taken to their conclusions, while a lot of the book read like a bunch of unrelated stories bound together with wattle and daub.
Jake's death in volume 1 made me itch. Then Roland just sits on the beach while crustaceans munch his fingers off. Neither he nor the crustaceans were believable at that point.
By the end of the series, it had degenerated into a mish-mash of throwing in chunks of stuff from his other works, then added insult to injury by writing himself into it. That's a trick that only the most capable of writers can pull off, and sadly, he wasn't one of them.
Then, when it all wrapped up, there were loose ends galore, and it turned out to be just a recycled version of The Never-ending Story.
Successful businesses get fat and bloated until they are taken apart by smaller more nimble competitors.
That is unless they can buy themselves some barriers to entry to keep from being eaten.
Even if they can buy themselves barriers to entry (government based or otherwise) their monopoly fails as soon as they start monopoly pricing. If their barrier to entry is government based their monopoly might be to the extent of the legal market, but they will have competition as soon as they go for the gravy.
Interesting work of fiction. Doesn't match the real world too well, however.
Consider Microsoft. How many people bought DR-DOS or one of the also-ran OS's when Microsoft got fat and bloated? How many times, in fact, have you stopped buying a brand because the product support consists of phone menu hell? Not very many, based on where we are today.
Being fat and bloated means that you can undercut your competitors, endure long periods of losses, and, if you want, simply purchase a competitor, then pump cash into it until it has totally destroyed the competition. Ashton-Tate, anyone? Borland? Or am I supposed to believe that these once-venerable companies are now history because Microsoft bought a few congressmen?
I'm not a fan of Big Government myself, but the idea that in the absence of government interference excellence will drive out inferiority doesn't ring true. If that was the case, McDonalds wouldn't be what it is today. We wouldn't have evolved from people who had other people paid to shine our shoes, pump our gas, deliver our milk into unpaid self-service "employees". People will not only put up with a lot of crap, they'll even volunteer to do so.
Being delicious to humans ensures your success as a species as long as humans exist.
Chickens, cows, pigs... millions of 'em
Tigers, lions, elephants? Not so much
People do eat elephants, you know.
Tastes kind of like mammoth, I hear.
leads to monopolism and vulture capitalism
What's the case for your claim that libertarianism leads to "monopolism"? The ideology deliberately weaken government which is the both the most powerful sort of monopoly out there and the principal creator of monopolies historically.
And what's supposed to be wrong with vulture capitalism? Capitalism has always been fairly good at disposing of dying businesses and obsolete capital. I think part of the problem here is arbitrary moral rules that don't actually help anyone.
There is an old business adage: "Nothing Succeeds like Success". It breeds corollaries such as "Nobody got fired for buying IBM". (Microsoft, for the younger generation).
A successful business breeds a positive feedback process just as failing businesses tend to nosedive. As a business becomes more and more successful, it attracts more and more customers. It also can afford to negotiate for favorable supply contracts, buy up smaller competitors, and do other things that accelerate the growth curve even more by diving it an edge on the competition. Eventually, it gets so big that it can buy government on its own terms.
It doesn't need government to get there. Government - with the sometimes exception of local government - actually prefers to avoid dealing with smaller businesses, so you have to be well on your way towards monopoly before you can even start getting governmental favors.
And "moral rules" generally do help people. Otherwise they wouldn't exist. Even (or perhaps, especially) the ones that seem anti-common-sense. One of the most dangerous business fallacies is the pseudo-Darwinistic conceit that only the strong and the nasty survive. In the natural world which Darwin formulated his theories on, we have cute fluffy bunnies, delicate pretty butterflies and ape tribes which prosper because some members take care of others progeny instead of breeding themselves.
Just because it is old, maybe 3 years, and newer ones are better doesn't mean it needs to be replaced.
I don't just get an "ohh shiny" new tv because it is newer.
When it breaks in maybe 5 years from now I might replace it.
I said the same thing in in another topic just the other day.
Then last night, for no apparent reason, it got massively downvoted to oblivion.
I don't expect everything I say to be well-received, but this was just bizarre, since I've never had THAT many downvotes, even on topics that were far more controversial. Especially considering that it had spent 2 days or so at a neutral level. It made me wonder if we've been invaded by Digg Patriots or something.
But I'll be glad to repeat myself. I like my old digital TV just fine, thank you. It has a decent picture, only pulls 150 watts, and I'll wait for it to blow out before getting a new one. Regardless of what kinky new and incompatible DRM schemes come along for the attachments.
And if I buy a new peripheral device whose DRM hates my older TV, the peripheral device goes back to the store. Just like the last one did.
I'm trying to come up with an appropriate island.
Oh! Got it! Antartica will work wonders.
And they can debate global warming too!
The problem with Antarctica is that once the ice has all melted, there will still be a lot of land.
The North Pole on the other hand...
Think of the children.
Think of letting them grow up in a world where freedom is the norm and not a special privilege.
Think of them growing up in a world where sharp edges abound and ugly sights are to be seen and won't come as a massive traumatic event because they grew up in a big fuzzy mind-numbing cocoon.
Think of the parents taking responsibility for their own children and teaching them how to deal with the seamier sides of life as they encounter them. Many of the most scarring events of life aren't going to come in from an Internet connection or random strangers on the street. They're going to come from Wicked Uncle Ernie and Crazy Auntie Jean.
Think of the children. Just think.
I don't know that I'd call assembler "exploits", since in assembler you're allowed to do any darn thing you want to. High-level languages exist as much to limit that ability as anything else.
None of the early FORTRAN implementations I worked with supported pointers as such. But the Primos OS was mostly written in FORTRAN (in fact the instruction set was optimized for FORTRAN), and I think there was a pre-defined integer array whose first element was memory location 0 and each word in that array thus had a 1-to-1 correspondence to a memory address.
On IBM machines, RAM was byte-addressable, so you would use a character array instead. FORTRAN wasn't a good fit for that but COBOL was. While the language didn't come with a built-in memory map array, it's about 5 lines of assembly language to add one in an external library.
The early Unix C compilers also generated assembly language. The original C++ generated C, and as an early licensee, at one point I was running C++-to-C-to-assembler-to.aout builds. I never worked with it, but supposedly Xerox had a FORTRAN that allowed inline assembler.
Regardless of the history, though, there are apples and oranges here. One is an discussion of an exploiting compiler. The other is a discussion of exploitable (but otherwise innocent) languages and runtime environments. Either one is fair game for the maliciously-inclined, but an exploiting compiler is especially insidious, since I can avoid exploits in code I write myself, but have no control over any back doors that a compiler, linker, or system loader might inject.
Fortunately, modern OS environments are so hellishly complex that specialized exploits are virtually guaranteed to fail in very visible ways on at least a few of the thousands of permutations of systems and work environments in use across the planet. The only practical way to do that sort of exploit is when you are targeting a very specific environment, such as Iranian Windows machines running a certain brand and model of centrifuge. And even then, the unrelated incidental victims are likely to expose it.
Could a public library scan a book, and loan it out online for virtual access using a reader application, as long as they restrict access to one patron at a time?
A) Not without violating copyright laws.
B) That's the whole problem with public libraries and the Overdrive service. My city has as far as I know exactly ONE copy of each ebook in its inventory and a waiting list for them that's obscene. Go to the dead-tree branch libraries and they may have 2, 3, maybe more copies of the same book in physical form with more copies in other branches.
And the maddening thing is that if Overdrive was set up properly, multiple ebook copies would be less trouble than multiple physical copies. I can think of several possible ways that it could be done profitably if the whole publishing/distributing world wasn't so insistent on setting their own rules based on pre-electronic concepts.
Additionally, you'd need to check the source of all the HW-components that come with their own BIOS, including the system's BIOS, networking chip's onboard software, and a lot more.
Which components outside of the motherboard come with their own BIOS? Are you conflating firmware with BIOS? They are not one and the same. It's like suggesting a mouse be checked to see if it contains a keyboard.
Pedantry aside, everything else is right on the money.
I seem to recall that some disk controllers did, in fact jack themselves into the BIOS. Also video cards, and NICs (PXE boot support, for example).
This argument is much, much too complicated. Plus, it can indeed be tracked down in the compiler binary. Compiling the compiler with an unrelated compiler will remove the malware in the compiler binary. You can use a really slow one for this effort, as you must use it only once.
In reality, there are more than enough bugs of the "Ping of death" style, which can be used. Read "confessions of a cyber warrior".
The worst thing Bell Labs brought into this world was the C and C++ languages and the associated programming style. Like char* pointers, uninitialized pointers possible and so on.
If Bell Labs had no foisted C and C++ on this world for "free", the government would have had to invent something to make their "cyber war space" possible. Wait, Bell Labs WAS the government.
If that's not enough, a single buffer overflow in firefox or Acrobat reader can trigger something like the Pentium F00F bug, and then they OWN THE CPU. Your stinking sandbox is wholly irrelevant at this time.
Go figure, sucker. Me, I am a C and C++ software engineering sucker, too.
Before C, much less C++, there were languages like FORTRAN, COBOL, and PL/1. They were not as rigid about checking types and ranges as Java and Ada, for example. Even some versions of BASIC allowed definition of an "array" that was, in fact, a map of the entire system RAM. And, of course, peek() and poke. PL/1 has actual pointer support built into the language.
So don't blame C. The problems go way, way back. Some systems and languages were more secure than others, but none of them were all that airtight. The onlu commercial hardware architecture that I know of that approached being REALLY secure was the Intel iAPX 432, which practically gave each stackframe its own private address space. But that one never caught on.
Next week it's: "You broke a website's TOS! Terrorist! Off to Gitmo with you!"
Could be worse. They could use the DMCA on you!
So you've never heard of the quagmire in Iraq?
You're thinking about the NIEDA, not the NRA.
And do YOU want to live in a quagmire?
There's a big difference between advocating and pursuing.
I continue to maintain that the position that the best way to protect your rights is BEFORE you get pushed to the point where you have to break out the arms caches. I know there are those who have wet dreams about being the backwoods guerilla patriots against the tank-and-drone forces of an overbearing US Government, but I'm not one of them. I'd rather order pizza delivery, pick up the UPS package with the latest electronic toy in it, and play with it, thanks to those who pursued instead of just advocating.
Talk, as they say, is cheap.
Really all you need to know about Polygraphs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROhp2aS9pQU
Polygraphs are a reminder that showy useless security measures do, in fact pre-date the kind of silliness that is currently practiced in airports.
Maybe they should make them take "truth serum".
I would say it actually promotes being passive. Hide behind rules, do only what you are told, cover your arse well because otherwise someone will manage to put blame for their own faults on you. Then only 'pro-active' approach allowed is to create more rules to hide behind.
No, "pro-active" means that simply doing your job wasn't good enough. You're expected to come up with new things to do. Never mind if they're horrible things to do, just as long as you're doing things above and beyond your remit.
"Version 2.0 of the HDMI Specification, which is backward compatible with earlier versions of the Specification[...]"
I bought a Blu-Ray player. I returned it because the copy-protection scheme wasn't backwards compatible with my digital TV.
Screw it. I don't want Blu-Ray bad enough to replace a perfectly good TV. My legacy DVD player works with it just fine.
Bingo! Although avoiding physical risk is the most visible way in which our lives have become warped, the dangers of pursuing the asymptote are not limited to just that one area.
We've also spent the last half-century or so pursuing efficiency. The projected end to that path is seen as a case where everything is cheap, but no one has a job to be able to afford to buy it.