If everyone knows how much a disk drive costs, and nobody can find out how long a disk drive really will last, there is no way the marketplace can reward the vendors of durable and reliable products.
The inevitable result is a race to the bottom. Buyers will reason they might was well buy cheap, because they at least know they're saving money, rather then paying for quality and likely not getting it.
The thing is... and if anyone else was there and still has their notes I'd appreciate it if they'd confirm or deny this... I could swear that Apple pledged at WWDC 2000 that Carbon and Cocoa would be co-equal on Mac OS X.
I do not remember Apple saying that Carbon would be discontinued, and I do not remember their suggesting that there was any reason to move to Cocoa _other than its intrinsic merits_.
I realize that computer companies have a very bad track record of keeping any long-term commitments, and that a sophisticated developer should take whatever is said with a grain of salt, but my recollection was that Apple was very, very definite at the time.
The part I never understand about stories like this is why it never seems to be possible for the government to sue and recover costs from the contractors who failed.
Are government procuring agents not sophisticated enough to write a binding contract? Or are these contracts really sweetheart deals, in which it's a tacit understanding that Harris gets $595 million as a gift, and in return are not actually expected to deliver anything more than paper proof that they kept themselves really busy?
Why isn't Harris on the hook for the $3 billion in extra costs?
I don't get it. I understand why faulty code in a graphics driver might make the screen go black, or blue, or display garbage, or whatever, but I don't see why any operating system should allow it to anything that would crash the system.
The essential relation between a graphics device and an operating system is unidirectional. The graphics subsystem acquires data from the OS. The OS can and should be read-only from the point of view of the graphics subsystem.
If it wants to, the OS might well allocate some RAM for the sole use of the graphics driver, and the graphics driver might choose to do some local processing in that space, but that should all be a walled-of area and the OS ought to be able to enforce that.
Undoubtedly the graphics card will want to do high-speed data transfers using DMA or whatever specialized capabilities the hardware provides, but again, I don't see why an OS shouldn't be able to manage this in a safe way, so that if the graphics code malfunctions it only impacts the graphic operations themselves and doesn't affect or bring down the rest of the system.
Obviously, an OS can't protect itself entirely from faults in a driver that handles operations that the OS requires for its own operation... the driver that access the disk drives, for example. But a graphics driver? Surely it can and it should.
For decades now, Windows has been crashing and Microsoft has been blaming the drivers. Microsoft ought to write the critical drivers (like those for disk drive access) itself, and it ought to design the OS so that non-critical drivers (e.g. graphics, sound output) simply can't damage the OS.
That's funny. Have you actually tried measuring yours? Mine only gets about four. A friend of mine also gets about four hours. He recently hacked up some code to make it easier to shut off WiFi for travelling in airliners, and he says shutting off WiFi only extends battery life to about five hours.
There were great plans for power management that were intended to give a twenty-hour battery life, but apparently they haven't been implemented yet.
So, are you describing the real XO you actually have, or the XO of your imagination?
Michael Hart (of Project Gutenberg) has it right. He's been saying for about a decade now that publishers, music companies, software companies, etc. are trying to move us into a world where ownership as we know it will no longer exist; nothing will be owned (at least not by consumers), everything will be rented. E.g. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2003&post=2003-01-22,3>here
This is an issue that both liberals and conservatives should be united on. The desire to own stuff goes deep in the human psyche. The person who rents everything is utterly dependent on a high, steady stream of income can't survive even a short interruption or reduction in that stream. It's a very insecure and anxiety-provoking way to live.
"the options beyond satellite radio--digital recordings, high-definition radio, Web radio--mean that XM and Sirius could merge without diminishing competition"
Yeah, they've been using that rationale a lot lately.
It's like saying it's OK to like saying that the options beyond gasoline--coal, natural gas, bicycles--mean that all the oil companies could merge without diminishing competition.
Digital recordings: you mean like buying and playing Howard Stern CDs instead of listening to what he's saying today? Not that what he's saying today is exactly profound, but timeliness is an essential component of "radio" as we know it. Web radio: it's probably possible to get it in your car, but I don't know exactly how and it's probably not cheap.
Without disagreeing with anything at all the article, I'd like to raise the point that an awful lot of things have no security, or very porous security.
What saves society is three things.
First, mischief and curiosity aren't a powerful enough motivator to create a real problem. I don't know whether Schneier ever sent live ants to strangers... or how many Slashdot readers will try it... but most likely not very many.
Second, for most security holes it is difficult to think of a way to make money from the exploits.
Third, even if you can make money, it's even more difficult to find a way that will make significant amounts of money and to repeat the exploit often enough to make a living wage, without being caught.
Case in point: newspaper vending boxes which allow you to pay for one newspaper and access a whole stack of them. If you have a "security mindset" (or even if you don't), it occurs to you that you could pay for one and take two... or ten... or the whole stack. And, indeed, you can. The problem is that it doesn't benefit you to get more than one newspaper. So, can you take two and sell the extra? Maybe. Net profit $0.50. Could you take the entire stack out of the machine and dress up as a street vendor and sell them on a street corner? Maybe. Net profit $25. Could you do it more than half-a-dozen times? Probably not.
How about self-checkout lines in supermarkets? You can buy produce at them, and the produce isn't bar-coded. So, you can buy orange bell peppers at $3.99 a pound, put them on the scanner scale, and enter the code for green peppers at $1.69 a pound. Most supermarkets seem to rely on someone at a nearby counter keeping an eye on the self-checkout lanes while doing other things, and they don't usually come over unless a customer calls or the machine goes into an error state. Again, it's hard to see how you can make money, rather than saving a little on your grocery bill... and if you managed to do this to the extent where you were stealing hundreds of dollars, I think your chances of being detected get to be high. (I'm thinking of people who got caught recently pasting barcodes for two-dollar items over things like boom-boxes and DVD players...).
This seems like interesting and cool technology. But I'm not sure exactly how far it takes us, because if the total distance between the most extreme lenses in the array is only a few inches, it's not as if you could reconstruct the full scene and synthesize views from any viewpoint: the background objects are still concealed behind the foreground objects and the lenses don't have much capability to look "around" them, which in turn means that the finished product will still have to be "viewed" from a very narrow range of viewpoints.
This seems to imply a viewing system in which either the picture falls apart if you move your head more than a few inches... or a stereoscope-like device holds your head in one position... or glasses or a lenticular screen cause the stereo image to "move with" your head and become geometrically distorted if viewed from the wrong viewpoint. (That's the Achilles heel of all theatrical 3D movies: they look bizarre to any viewer seated outside a tiny "sweet spot" in the middle of the house).
The idea that this will revolutionize ordinary consumer photography seems unlikely. The market has been thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly tested. The basic stereoscope, which requires nothing more than a pair of cameras, was invented in 1840, and "prerecorded" cards were very popular in Victorian times, just as the ViewMaster was in the last century.
Various consumer-level stereo cameras have been around forever. Various models have been at least reasonably compact, reasonably inexpensive. Processing has been reasonably available. At worst, mail-order, and mail-order is viable enough to keep Shutterfly and Snapfish in business. IIRC Sawyer had processing service that let consumers receive their 3D happy snaps in the form of Viewmaster reels. A few years ago some company offered a cheap one-use camera... I think Ritz carried them... with IIRC four lenses and a processing service that returned no-glasses-or-stereoscope-needed direct-view lenticular 3D images.
What people seems to want around 4x6" color still 2D prints. The resolution doesn't even really need to be more than about 2 megapixels! If anything, the trend is to email pictures, implying even lower resolution, or pass around the camera (or cell phone or iPod) and let friends see the grandchildren, or Fred acting goofy on a snowboard, or amateur pr0n, on a 2.5 inch 200 dpi screen.
Offhand, I'd say the evidence of the marketplace... for a century... is that people don't even care much about 3D pr0n. Remember, the technology for viewing commercially produced stereo images has been available and cheap, and even the equipment for producing them has been inexpensive by commercial standards. Although I remember getting, um excited, around age 16, by an arcade stereoscopic device featuring color stereoscopic views of topless women, because, you know, they seemed so close and so real.)
There are three problems with this. The first is that you're framing the problem too narrowly. It's not "denying use of USB thumb drives," it's "creating a culture for proper handling of data." If they can use USB drives, they'll email attachments to themselves. Or use a WebDAV account. Or use a Bluetooth-enabled portable hard drive. Or whatever. The problem that needs to be addressed is "why are people taking data with them? If it's for a legitimate reason, how do we facilitate their doing it properly? If it's not legitimate, how do we convince them not to do it?"
The second is that you can't do this stuff in a top-down way. You can create the illusion that you've done it, with a paper trail showing that every employee has signed a memo or whatever, but you need to get employee buy-in. The second is... and I hinted at this point in my original post... very often the set of people who are not in compliance includes people who are in upper management. The CEO may _say_ "you have my backing," but is he really going to fire the CFO for using a thumb drive?
The third is that if employees get the idea that you are, as Dilbert calls it, "the preventer of information services," you've already lost the battle. You can instill a corporate culture that says "as government professionals, we are proud of our ability to work effectively within a secure information framework." But you can't achieve this by putting superglue in the USB ports.
It's like trying to stop people from bringing in cell phones or iPods or PDAs... or creating personal Yahoo mail accounts from company machines... or playing solitaire at work. They are just too ubiquitous and there are just too many of them. Unless you get draconian (make it cause for immediate termination, and frisk every employee at the door... and I mean every employee, including all the vice presidents and directors and department heads).
Even employees that mean to comply will forget, will be at work and need one, reach in their pocket, and find they've got one of their own instead of the corporate-issued one.
I don't know what the answer is, but banning ubiquitous technology is like Canute holding back the waves.
The most dramatic case of the utter failure of this sort of thing I've seen occurred at a company in the 1990s which didn't quite understand that personal computers were personal. This was in the days before antivirus software was standard on any business machine. The company became seriously infected with a boot-sector virus. They had the entire IT department, SQA department, and tech support departments literally stop all their work for about a week while they went throughout the company collecting diskettes and disinfecting them, then pronounced the company clean. Apparently it never occurred to anyone that there were diskettes that weren't in the building.
Even then there were laptops, and, without pointing fingers--OK, pointing fingers--laptops were expensive at the time, and it was mostly the high-income and high-ranking employees, and, of course, people with good reason to have them--salespeople typically--that had them.
The company was reinfected by the same boot virus within less than a month.
About as much as Westinghouse could do about alternating current being used to electrocute criminals, or Lee de Forest could do about television commercials, or Leo Szilard could do about the atomic bomb being used against Japan.
I think the article confuses the reactor vessel with the containment vessel.
A reactor vessel is a large-room-sized steel vessel, that holds the fuel and steam transfer pipes and so forth and is subjected to huge internal pressures in normal operation.
A containment vessel is the building-sized concrete structure that gives many reactors buildings their impressive dome shape. It is only important in the case of an accident, when it might be subjected to pressures on the order of an atmosphere or so. It is intended to hold in or contain any radioactive materials released after an accident has occurred.
Interestingly enough, in light of his demonization by anti-nuclear factions, it was Edward Teller who was largely responsible for insisting on containment vessels, a nice simple brute-force protection measure.
Every reactor has a reactor vessel, but not all reactors have containment vessels. Some reactors, such as Chernobyl, and, in the United States, GE boiling-water reactors such as the one in Plymouth, Massachusetts have very ordinary-looking block-like buildings rather than containment domes. These reactors are designed to "suppress" pressure in an accident rather than "contain" it, by the use of engineered mechanisms that open valves at the right time and direct steam through big tanks of water, cooling it down and condensing it.
The era of real competition in mainframe hardware did not begin until the U. S. Government started requiring a COBOL compiler, capable of passing a validation suite, as a condition for government purchase of computers.
On a much smaller scale, the era of real competition in the MUMPS language did not begin until the VA started requiring a MUMPS system, capable of passing a validation suite, as a condition for government of computers.
The U. S. Government should require, as a condition for purchasing computers, that the default browser on the supplied OS be standards-compliant... e.g. should achieve a specified score, such as, say, 100%, on the ACID3 test.
When it procures things, the government is part of the free market. And it is one of the few entities powerful enough to engage with Microsoft in a real negotiation between equals. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has the technical expertise to know what standards are, and what compliance is, and how to test it.
Just as with tanker aircraft, the government should buy what best serves the government's needs, without regard to what best serves the needs of The Boeing Company, or Microsoft Corporation.
If these machines could do what they are supposed to do, then news stories would show examples of what the airport screener sees. They never do. So far, it's all been "trust us."
An absolute minimum requirement on these machines is that they should at least have a display in them that shows the passenger being scanned exactly what image is being registered, and allows the passenger to decide for him- or herself whether privacy is being respected or not.
That doesn't even get into question of whether the "modesty-preserving" algorithms can be disabled by the airport screener or not, whether the system stores uncensored images or not, how difficult it is for a randy hacker to disable the censorship feature, and, once hacked, how difficult it is for a randy non-expert employee to obtain and install the hack.
OK, let me spell it out for you. Taxes pay for the library to buy _one_ copy of the book. _Twenty_ people read that copy, but the publisher only gets paid _once_. That's not wrong, that's the way the established laws regarding books and libraries and copyrights and "right of first sale" play out.
How are books any different from recordings or video streams or what have you? The simple answer is, they aren't. The only difference is that the shock and impact of book technology occurred centuries ago, and the law and societal bargains about books were all hashed out and codified long ago.
Every time someone invents new media, the publishers of that media initially believe that this time they can strike a completely one-sided bargain. They're always wrong, and eventually they realize that their profits don't actually depend on it.
It's hard to believe it now, but theatrical showings of motion pictures are priced based on attendance, and, originally, the movie studios objected to home VCR showings even of prerecorded tapes, because, they said, "we have no way of knowing how many people are in the room." They would have liked to enforce a business model in which four viewers meant four rental payments.
Pssst! Listen up! I've just discovered that an address where you can access intellectual property for free! The address is 700 Boylston St., Boston MA 02116. You know what? Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day they leave the door unlocked! That's right! You can walk right in!
And you know what you'll find? Millions and millions of books, including current bestsellers like Stephen King's Duma Key. Yep, you can just take it right off the shelf, sit down, and read it right there. Instead of paying $17 to $28 dollars, you can read it for free!
In fact, with a Massachusetts driver's license and a little sweet-talk it's not at all hard to do social engineering on the guy at the security desk and talk him into giving you an access card that will let you take that book right through security, right out of the building! For three weeks or more.
Is it a hack? Not really.
Does it allow people to read books that they didn't pay for? Yes
Does it prevent Scribners from receiving revenue that it would otherwise have received? Yes.
James E. Gunn's 1955 story, "The Cave of Night," concerns an astronaut whose retrorockets fail, and for some reason I forget is left with the ability to transmit but not receive radio. The space program only had money to build the single ship. He's marooned in orbit, with oxygen that can be stretched only for a few weeks. He gives a dramatic running commentary on what he can see, his state of mind, and his philosophical acceptance of impending death.
In one dramatic moment, the citizens of Kansas City set up a plan and turn all their lights off and on at the same time, just as he is passing over, as a signal so that he knows they can hear him... a moment that was later duplicated in real life when the citizens of Perth flashed their lights for John Glenn (who was in no trouble).
Spurred by the astronaut's plight, the government initiates crash program to build a rescue ship, which is completed, launched, and arrives just slightly too late, and gives a moving account of their decision to leave his dead body in space, where he wanted to be, staring at the stars for eternity.
One of the things that people tend to forget is the whole point of James E. Gunn's story. The narrator personally knew the astronaut. After the astronaut's supposed death, the narrator encounters a man on the street and is certain that he recognizes him as the astronaut. The man on the street denies it of course, but the narrator is left wondering, and, we sense, believing, that the whole thing was a hoax.
The government did not have enough money for even a single manned launch, so they launched a small satellite with a tape recording, knowing that the dramatic plight of the marooned astronaut would give them a moment of spare-no-expense public support, giving them the opportunity, under the guise of a rescue mission, for building the real thing.
Not that am a conspiracy theorist, or that I think such a hoax could have been successfully brought off then... or now... but...
I remember being fascinated by stories of how IBM's top management was afraid of microprocessors, because they sensed from the very beginning how they were a disruptive threat to mainframes. For a while they tried to keep them under control by limiting them to specialized appliances such as word processors and the DataMaster. As I recall, the original IBM PC team was ordered to use the 8088 because they wanted to reserve the 8086 for their high-margin $10,000-and-up devices.
This is all very reminiscent of the disk drive manufacturer story in Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma." It's time for a $100 laptop, but they won't come from the companies making $1000 laptops. They'll come from elsewhere, e.g. the XO, and the mainstream will scorn them as underpowered toys, and they'll find a market among people who want underpowered toys, and as time goes on they'll get more and more powerful and start eating the $1000 laptop-makers' lunch.
Then someone will introduce a $10 laptop and the cycle will repeat...
I'm not joking about a $10 laptop. Calculators went from $4000 desktops to $300 palmtops to $5 calculators in blister packs at grocery stores (and free advertising giveaways). And it was a different set of manufacturers at each level. Electromechanical rotary calculators: Marchant and Monroe, IIRC. Electronic desktops: Monroe trying and dropping out, Wang and HP leading. Palmtops: Wang drops out without even trying, HP makes an elegant transition, TI jumps in. Cheap four-function palmtops: HP and TI are out, I'm not even sure who makes them now.
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone knows how much a disk drive costs, and nobody can find out how long a disk drive really will last, there is no way the marketplace can reward the vendors of durable and reliable products.
The inevitable result is a race to the bottom. Buyers will reason they might was well buy cheap, because they at least know they're saving money, rather then paying for quality and likely not getting it.
No, my recollection is that they said exactly the opposite: that Carbon and Cocoa were co-equal and would be kept feature-comparable.
I don't have my notes from WWDC 2000, however.
The thing is... and if anyone else was there and still has their notes I'd appreciate it if they'd confirm or deny this... I could swear that Apple pledged at WWDC 2000 that Carbon and Cocoa would be co-equal on Mac OS X.
I do not remember Apple saying that Carbon would be discontinued, and I do not remember their suggesting that there was any reason to move to Cocoa _other than its intrinsic merits_.
I realize that computer companies have a very bad track record of keeping any long-term commitments, and that a sophisticated developer should take whatever is said with a grain of salt, but my recollection was that Apple was very, very definite at the time.
The part I never understand about stories like this is why it never seems to be possible for the government to sue and recover costs from the contractors who failed.
Are government procuring agents not sophisticated enough to write a binding contract? Or are these contracts really sweetheart deals, in which it's a tacit understanding that Harris gets $595 million as a gift, and in return are not actually expected to deliver anything more than paper proof that they kept themselves really busy?
Why isn't Harris on the hook for the $3 billion in extra costs?
...and prohibit providers from calling it "HD" unless it meets all of those standards--not just pixel count.
Let the marketplace decide, but make sure that consumers know what they are actually buying.
I don't get it. I understand why faulty code in a graphics driver might make the screen go black, or blue, or display garbage, or whatever, but I don't see why any operating system should allow it to anything that would crash the system.
The essential relation between a graphics device and an operating system is unidirectional. The graphics subsystem acquires data from the OS. The OS can and should be read-only from the point of view of the graphics subsystem.
If it wants to, the OS might well allocate some RAM for the sole use of the graphics driver, and the graphics driver might choose to do some local processing in that space, but that should all be a walled-of area and the OS ought to be able to enforce that.
Undoubtedly the graphics card will want to do high-speed data transfers using DMA or whatever specialized capabilities the hardware provides, but again, I don't see why an OS shouldn't be able to manage this in a safe way, so that if the graphics code malfunctions it only impacts the graphic operations themselves and doesn't affect or bring down the rest of the system.
Obviously, an OS can't protect itself entirely from faults in a driver that handles operations that the OS requires for its own operation... the driver that access the disk drives, for example. But a graphics driver? Surely it can and it should.
For decades now, Windows has been crashing and Microsoft has been blaming the drivers. Microsoft ought to write the critical drivers (like those for disk drive access) itself, and it ought to design the OS so that non-critical drivers (e.g. graphics, sound output) simply can't damage the OS.
That's funny. Have you actually tried measuring yours? Mine only gets about four. A friend of mine also gets about four hours. He recently hacked up some code to make it easier to shut off WiFi for travelling in airliners, and he says shutting off WiFi only extends battery life to about five hours.
There were great plans for power management that were intended to give a twenty-hour battery life, but apparently they haven't been implemented yet.
So, are you describing the real XO you actually have, or the XO of your imagination?
Michael Hart (of Project Gutenberg) has it right. He's been saying for about a decade now that publishers, music companies, software companies, etc. are trying to move us into a world where ownership as we know it will no longer exist; nothing will be owned (at least not by consumers), everything will be rented. E.g. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2003&post=2003-01-22,3>here
This is an issue that both liberals and conservatives should be united on. The desire to own stuff goes deep in the human psyche. The person who rents everything is utterly dependent on a high, steady stream of income can't survive even a short interruption or reduction in that stream. It's a very insecure and anxiety-provoking way to live.
"the options beyond satellite radio--digital recordings, high-definition radio, Web radio--mean that XM and Sirius could merge without diminishing competition"
Yeah, they've been using that rationale a lot lately.
It's like saying it's OK to like saying that the options beyond gasoline--coal, natural gas, bicycles--mean that all the oil companies could merge without diminishing competition.
Digital recordings: you mean like buying and playing Howard Stern CDs instead of listening to what he's saying today? Not that what he's saying today is exactly profound, but timeliness is an essential component of "radio" as we know it. Web radio: it's probably possible to get it in your car, but I don't know exactly how and it's probably not cheap.
Without disagreeing with anything at all the article, I'd like to raise the point that an awful lot of things have no security, or very porous security.
What saves society is three things.
First, mischief and curiosity aren't a powerful enough motivator to create a real problem. I don't know whether Schneier ever sent live ants to strangers... or how many Slashdot readers will try it... but most likely not very many.
Second, for most security holes it is difficult to think of a way to make money from the exploits.
Third, even if you can make money, it's even more difficult to find a way that will make significant amounts of money and to repeat the exploit often enough to make a living wage, without being caught.
Case in point: newspaper vending boxes which allow you to pay for one newspaper and access a whole stack of them. If you have a "security mindset" (or even if you don't), it occurs to you that you could pay for one and take two... or ten... or the whole stack. And, indeed, you can. The problem is that it doesn't benefit you to get more than one newspaper. So, can you take two and sell the extra? Maybe. Net profit $0.50. Could you take the entire stack out of the machine and dress up as a street vendor and sell them on a street corner? Maybe. Net profit $25. Could you do it more than half-a-dozen times? Probably not.
How about self-checkout lines in supermarkets? You can buy produce at them, and the produce isn't bar-coded. So, you can buy orange bell peppers at $3.99 a pound, put them on the scanner scale, and enter the code for green peppers at $1.69 a pound. Most supermarkets seem to rely on someone at a nearby counter keeping an eye on the self-checkout lanes while doing other things, and they don't usually come over unless a customer calls or the machine goes into an error state. Again, it's hard to see how you can make money, rather than saving a little on your grocery bill... and if you managed to do this to the extent where you were stealing hundreds of dollars, I think your chances of being detected get to be high. (I'm thinking of people who got caught recently pasting barcodes for two-dollar items over things like boom-boxes and DVD players...).
...for a second I thought it said self-COOKING chips. We already have those.
This seems like interesting and cool technology. But I'm not sure exactly how far it takes us, because if the total distance between the most extreme lenses in the array is only a few inches, it's not as if you could reconstruct the full scene and synthesize views from any viewpoint: the background objects are still concealed behind the foreground objects and the lenses don't have much capability to look "around" them, which in turn means that the finished product will still have to be "viewed" from a very narrow range of viewpoints.
This seems to imply a viewing system in which either the picture falls apart if you move your head more than a few inches... or a stereoscope-like device holds your head in one position... or glasses or a lenticular screen cause the stereo image to "move with" your head and become geometrically distorted if viewed from the wrong viewpoint. (That's the Achilles heel of all theatrical 3D movies: they look bizarre to any viewer seated outside a tiny "sweet spot" in the middle of the house).
The idea that this will revolutionize ordinary consumer photography seems unlikely. The market has been thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly tested. The basic stereoscope, which requires nothing more than a pair of cameras, was invented in 1840, and "prerecorded" cards were very popular in Victorian times, just as the ViewMaster was in the last century.
Various consumer-level stereo cameras have been around forever. Various models have been at least reasonably compact, reasonably inexpensive. Processing has been reasonably available. At worst, mail-order, and mail-order is viable enough to keep Shutterfly and Snapfish in business. IIRC Sawyer had processing service that let consumers receive their 3D happy snaps in the form of Viewmaster reels. A few years ago some company offered a cheap one-use camera... I think Ritz carried them... with IIRC four lenses and a processing service that returned no-glasses-or-stereoscope-needed direct-view lenticular 3D images.
What people seems to want around 4x6" color still 2D prints. The resolution doesn't even really need to be more than about 2 megapixels! If anything, the trend is to email pictures, implying even lower resolution, or pass around the camera (or cell phone or iPod) and let friends see the grandchildren, or Fred acting goofy on a snowboard, or amateur pr0n, on a 2.5 inch 200 dpi screen.
Offhand, I'd say the evidence of the marketplace... for a century... is that people don't even care much about 3D pr0n. Remember, the technology for viewing commercially produced stereo images has been available and cheap, and even the equipment for producing them has been inexpensive by commercial standards. Although I remember getting, um excited, around age 16, by an arcade stereoscopic device featuring color stereoscopic views of topless women, because, you know, they seemed so close and so real.)
There are three problems with this. The first is that you're framing the problem too narrowly. It's not "denying use of USB thumb drives," it's "creating a culture for proper handling of data." If they can use USB drives, they'll email attachments to themselves. Or use a WebDAV account. Or use a Bluetooth-enabled portable hard drive. Or whatever. The problem that needs to be addressed is "why are people taking data with them? If it's for a legitimate reason, how do we facilitate their doing it properly? If it's not legitimate, how do we convince them not to do it?"
The second is that you can't do this stuff in a top-down way. You can create the illusion that you've done it, with a paper trail showing that every employee has signed a memo or whatever, but you need to get employee buy-in. The second is... and I hinted at this point in my original post... very often the set of people who are not in compliance includes people who are in upper management. The CEO may _say_ "you have my backing," but is he really going to fire the CFO for using a thumb drive?
The third is that if employees get the idea that you are, as Dilbert calls it, "the preventer of information services," you've already lost the battle. You can instill a corporate culture that says "as government professionals, we are proud of our ability to work effectively within a secure information framework." But you can't achieve this by putting superglue in the USB ports.
It's like trying to stop people from bringing in cell phones or iPods or PDAs... or creating personal Yahoo mail accounts from company machines... or playing solitaire at work. They are just too ubiquitous and there are just too many of them. Unless you get draconian (make it cause for immediate termination, and frisk every employee at the door... and I mean every employee, including all the vice presidents and directors and department heads).
Even employees that mean to comply will forget, will be at work and need one, reach in their pocket, and find they've got one of their own instead of the corporate-issued one.
I don't know what the answer is, but banning ubiquitous technology is like Canute holding back the waves.
The most dramatic case of the utter failure of this sort of thing I've seen occurred at a company in the 1990s which didn't quite understand that personal computers were personal. This was in the days before antivirus software was standard on any business machine. The company became seriously infected with a boot-sector virus. They had the entire IT department, SQA department, and tech support departments literally stop all their work for about a week while they went throughout the company collecting diskettes and disinfecting them, then pronounced the company clean. Apparently it never occurred to anyone that there were diskettes that weren't in the building.
Even then there were laptops, and, without pointing fingers--OK, pointing fingers--laptops were expensive at the time, and it was mostly the high-income and high-ranking employees, and, of course, people with good reason to have them--salespeople typically--that had them.
The company was reinfected by the same boot virus within less than a month.
About as much as Westinghouse could do about alternating current being used to electrocute criminals, or Lee de Forest could do about television commercials, or Leo Szilard could do about the atomic bomb being used against Japan.
...to use ten animated web pages to display data that could have been presented better in ten lines of text using old-fashioned print media.
I think the article confuses the reactor vessel with the containment vessel.
A reactor vessel is a large-room-sized steel vessel, that holds the fuel and steam transfer pipes and so forth and is subjected to huge internal pressures in normal operation.
A containment vessel is the building-sized concrete structure that gives many reactors buildings their impressive dome shape. It is only important in the case of an accident, when it might be subjected to pressures on the order of an atmosphere or so. It is intended to hold in or contain any radioactive materials released after an accident has occurred.
Interestingly enough, in light of his demonization by anti-nuclear factions, it was Edward Teller who was largely responsible for insisting on containment vessels, a nice simple brute-force protection measure.
Every reactor has a reactor vessel, but not all reactors have containment vessels. Some reactors, such as Chernobyl, and, in the United States, GE boiling-water reactors such as the one in Plymouth, Massachusetts have very ordinary-looking block-like buildings rather than containment domes. These reactors are designed to "suppress" pressure in an accident rather than "contain" it, by the use of engineered mechanisms that open valves at the right time and direct steam through big tanks of water, cooling it down and condensing it.
The era of real competition in mainframe hardware did not begin until the U. S. Government started requiring a COBOL compiler, capable of passing a validation suite, as a condition for government purchase of computers.
On a much smaller scale, the era of real competition in the MUMPS language did not begin until the VA started requiring a MUMPS system, capable of passing a validation suite, as a condition for government of computers.
The U. S. Government should require, as a condition for purchasing computers, that the default browser on the supplied OS be standards-compliant... e.g. should achieve a specified score, such as, say, 100%, on the ACID3 test.
When it procures things, the government is part of the free market. And it is one of the few entities powerful enough to engage with Microsoft in a real negotiation between equals. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has the technical expertise to know what standards are, and what compliance is, and how to test it.
Just as with tanker aircraft, the government should buy what best serves the government's needs, without regard to what best serves the needs of The Boeing Company, or Microsoft Corporation.
If these machines could do what they are supposed to do, then news stories would show examples of what the airport screener sees. They never do. So far, it's all been "trust us."
An absolute minimum requirement on these machines is that they should at least have a display in them that shows the passenger being scanned exactly what image is being registered, and allows the passenger to decide for him- or herself whether privacy is being respected or not.
That doesn't even get into question of whether the "modesty-preserving" algorithms can be disabled by the airport screener or not, whether the system stores uncensored images or not, how difficult it is for a randy hacker to disable the censorship feature, and, once hacked, how difficult it is for a randy non-expert employee to obtain and install the hack.
OK, let me spell it out for you. Taxes pay for the library to buy _one_ copy of the book. _Twenty_ people read that copy, but the publisher only gets paid _once_. That's not wrong, that's the way the established laws regarding books and libraries and copyrights and "right of first sale" play out.
How are books any different from recordings or video streams or what have you? The simple answer is, they aren't. The only difference is that the shock and impact of book technology occurred centuries ago, and the law and societal bargains about books were all hashed out and codified long ago.
Every time someone invents new media, the publishers of that media initially believe that this time they can strike a completely one-sided bargain. They're always wrong, and eventually they realize that their profits don't actually depend on it.
It's hard to believe it now, but theatrical showings of motion pictures are priced based on attendance, and, originally, the movie studios objected to home VCR showings even of prerecorded tapes, because, they said, "we have no way of knowing how many people are in the room." They would have liked to enforce a business model in which four viewers meant four rental payments.
Pssst! Listen up! I've just discovered that an address where you can access intellectual property for free! The address is 700 Boylston St., Boston MA 02116. You know what? Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day they leave the door unlocked! That's right! You can walk right in!
And you know what you'll find? Millions and millions of books, including current bestsellers like Stephen King's Duma Key. Yep, you can just take it right off the shelf, sit down, and read it right there. Instead of paying $17 to $28 dollars, you can read it for free!
In fact, with a Massachusetts driver's license and a little sweet-talk it's not at all hard to do social engineering on the guy at the security desk and talk him into giving you an access card that will let you take that book right through security, right out of the building! For three weeks or more.
Is it a hack? Not really.
Does it allow people to read books that they didn't pay for? Yes
Does it prevent Scribners from receiving revenue that it would otherwise have received? Yes.
Is it wrong? No.
James E. Gunn's 1955 story, "The Cave of Night," concerns an astronaut whose retrorockets fail, and for some reason I forget is left with the ability to transmit but not receive radio. The space program only had money to build the single ship. He's marooned in orbit, with oxygen that can be stretched only for a few weeks. He gives a dramatic running commentary on what he can see, his state of mind, and his philosophical acceptance of impending death.
In one dramatic moment, the citizens of Kansas City set up a plan and turn all their lights off and on at the same time, just as he is passing over, as a signal so that he knows they can hear him... a moment that was later duplicated in real life when the citizens of Perth flashed their lights for John Glenn (who was in no trouble).
Spurred by the astronaut's plight, the government initiates crash program to build a rescue ship, which is completed, launched, and arrives just slightly too late, and gives a moving account of their decision to leave his dead body in space, where he wanted to be, staring at the stars for eternity.
One of the things that people tend to forget is the whole point of James E. Gunn's story. The narrator personally knew the astronaut. After the astronaut's supposed death, the narrator encounters a man on the street and is certain that he recognizes him as the astronaut. The man on the street denies it of course, but the narrator is left wondering, and, we sense, believing, that the whole thing was a hoax.
The government did not have enough money for even a single manned launch, so they launched a small satellite with a tape recording, knowing that the dramatic plight of the marooned astronaut would give them a moment of spare-no-expense public support, giving them the opportunity, under the guise of a rescue mission, for building the real thing.
Not that am a conspiracy theorist, or that I think such a hoax could have been successfully brought off then... or now... but...
...teachers who elect to teach their students scientific material about homosexuality or birth control.
Or does the bill only protect the "freedom" to teach material on certain selected sides of certain selected controversies?
Oh, good, another cycle begins.
I remember being fascinated by stories of how IBM's top management was afraid of microprocessors, because they sensed from the very beginning how they were a disruptive threat to mainframes. For a while they tried to keep them under control by limiting them to specialized appliances such as word processors and the DataMaster. As I recall, the original IBM PC team was ordered to use the 8088 because they wanted to reserve the 8086 for their high-margin $10,000-and-up devices.
This is all very reminiscent of the disk drive manufacturer story in Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma." It's time for a $100 laptop, but they won't come from the companies making $1000 laptops. They'll come from elsewhere, e.g. the XO, and the mainstream will scorn them as underpowered toys, and they'll find a market among people who want underpowered toys, and as time goes on they'll get more and more powerful and start eating the $1000 laptop-makers' lunch.
Then someone will introduce a $10 laptop and the cycle will repeat...
I'm not joking about a $10 laptop. Calculators went from $4000 desktops to $300 palmtops to $5 calculators in blister packs at grocery stores (and free advertising giveaways). And it was a different set of manufacturers at each level. Electromechanical rotary calculators: Marchant and Monroe, IIRC. Electronic desktops: Monroe trying and dropping out, Wang and HP leading. Palmtops: Wang drops out without even trying, HP makes an elegant transition, TI jumps in. Cheap four-function palmtops: HP and TI are out, I'm not even sure who makes them now.
While I had the edit screen open and was talking to a colleague, someone else answered the question: no.