Exotic animals don't just disrupt the eco-system directly, they bring parasites and disease that cause havoc. For example the Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas which wiped out much of the indigenous population.
This type of thing is still going on. There is a plausible theory that BSE did not suddenly jump from sheep to cow but was introduced by a particular wilderbeast at a safari park that died with BSE type symptoms and whose body was sold for rendering. Wilderbeast in their natural habbitat are subject to a prion type disease similar to BSE.
The theory is still controvertial, the MAAF are ridiculing it. Unfortunately they have little credibility after it was discovered that three years of research into 'sheep brain' turned out to have been examining cow. The MAAF theory was used to reassure the public that BSE was the bovine form of scrapie, a disease of sheep that people have been eating for centuries without contracting CJD, the human form. However people have been contracting CJD so the 'scrapie' theory requires the emergence of a new form of scrapie prion while the wilderbeast theory does not.
Whether or not the 'wilderbeast' theory is true the risk of introducing exotic diseases is significant.
Yes. MusicMatch Jukebox [musicmatch.com]. It's ugly nagware, but it works.
I used MusicMatch under Win98. I can't recommend it very highly. The ripping was not very reliable. If the disk had any scratches Musicmatch would switch to analog mode and record silence.
The biggest problem was management of the volume control. Each time IE or any other application grabbed focus the volume would change. This made it impossible to use the PC for anything other than playback.
I switched to XP and the problems are fixed. However MSFT's player is pretty slick and is not nagware. You have to buy a third party MP3 encoder but the WAV support is built in.
Media player does not handle multple CD Rom drives very well. There is no feature to queue up several disks. But there is an open API and a plug in architecture. So CDROM jukebox vendors should be imposed upon to provide the appropriate plug in.
The state's suggestion is based on some pretty clueless and downright weird assumptions.
First off there is no point in a half baked office clone. If you want that you can use Star Office for free. For Office for Linux to add value you have to do the job properly.
So you have to port the code so the product works well. The easiest way to do that is to simply port the parts of the Windows stack that Office calls. So you will end up with Office for Windows on Linux, and not really office for Linux.
There might be a market for such a product. If it existed the chances are that Microsoft would aleady be looking to exploit it. No other company could produce the code for less or market it as effectively.
If Microsoft went out and did Office for Linux voluntarily all the anti-MSFT crowd would be squeaking 'monopoly'. Strategically their office monoploy is much more important than their desktop monopoly.
Even with Office, Linux would still be unable to run many important productivity tools, Civ3 for example.
Office for Linux would probably require a particular distribution to run well. Configuration would be harder than for Windows simply because of the variation between systems. I don't think that anyone wants to suggest a Microsoft distribution.
Right. A good number of physicists never expected to see the Higgs until the LHC comes online. In fact, it is the prime motivation for such an expensive project.
Yes and no. Until recently nobody had any idea what the Higgs mass was beyond 'more than LEP, HERA, Tevatron can deliver'.
The LHC has been in design for over 15 years. When the project started the Higgs theory was not even the leading contender.
Contrary to many people's belief, experimentalists don't build the experiments to test the theories of the theoreticians. Its more like have tunnel, will use it, what is there that is kewl to look at in that energy range? The design of the LHC is intended to give the greatest probability of finding the Higgs without boring a new tunnel. But it is not a one trick pony and if Peter Higg's theory was demolished tommorow there would be plenty of other stuff to do with it. After all if the Higgs is not there then the Standard model is still broken, still fails to explain gravity and still is 100% in compliance with all experimental observations on the sub-atomic scale. So there is something else to find.
One of the main issues that is missed by the reporters is that there is no 'Higgs Particle', there is a Higgs field type thingie wich if it exisits is manifested in at least one particle. Chances are that there will be multiple generations of Higgs particles, just as there are six quarks etc. Well thats the story I got from Cashmore and Rubia,
Er, The solve time is expondential in the length of the key so moores law won't help you very much. You can happily double your computational power every 18 months but still run out of time before the end of the universe.
Untrue.
Each bit of key size doubles the computational cost of brute force attack. So AES is 2^(128-56) = 2^72 times harder to break than DES.
If Moores law continues and computing power doubles every 18 months AES will be broken in precisely 105 years (it being 2 years since the DES cracks).
I don't know about you, but I have no plans to use AES personally after 2075.
In practice the quantum limits of silicon computing will be reached earlier, although it may prove possible to move from 2D slices to 3D systems...
Your signature hints that you're not yet a college graduate, as you are either going to MIT or want to. This might be an assumption, as you COULD have graduated from there. Tell me if I'm wrong
You might not be aware of the fact but MIT also happens to have a large faculty and many non-faculty research staff. As is pretty well known on Slashdot I was a researcher there about ten years after I got my doctorate.
Your digression on statistics would have more weight if you were familliar with the material.
The probability that one HIV strain would wait until 1952 to jump from monkey to human is not high, the probability that the first known case would be discovered in Kinshasa a year after one of the first polio trials occured there is also not high.
But HIV is not one virus, it is two, HIV-1 and HIV-2 are completely different strains. What is the probability of two money viruses changing species within the same narrow geographical area in the same time?
Yes, I have taken a statistics class, and am aware of what statistics can do. You insult my intelligence when you assume that I don't know what I'm talking about.
Pot, kettle, black. You attempt to dismiss statements on grounds of authority you do not posses.
As for the reasons we still operate Nuclear power plants, without them the lights would go out which would be very unsafe indeed. However the plants that are operating are being operated in a very different manner to before TMI. The high cost of maintaining that level of vigilance is the main factor that has changed the economics of nuclear power from cheap to expensive.
Not enough, I'm afraid. "Scientists using experimental vaccines caused AIDS" is a hypothesis. But it is not a testable hypothesis as it currently stands, and the evidence you've provided is only the most circumstantial sort.
So is the evidence that smoking causes cancer. All evidence in the public health field is circumstantial.
My field is security. You do not refuse to act until a hypothesis is proven beyond doubt. The issues are 'what is the most likely hypothesis' and 'is it a credible hypothesis'. If there is a credible hypothesis that suggests there might be a major threat to public health you don't allow the research to proceed.
The fact that scientists don't wish to investigate the hypothesis may be troubling, but it says nothing about the truth value of the hypothesis
'Don't wish to investigate' is not exactly the reaction the hypothesis received. It was a couple of degrees worse than the initial reaction to Folkman's theory of angiogenesis. The field made it clear early on that it did not wish to hear the theory and would not tolerate any discussion in the forums they controlled.
I came across the polio virus theory as the attacks on the proponents grew nastier, including libel actions to force reporters to withdraw their stories on the theory.
The point being that when a field begins to behave like that it is time for the rest of the sicentific community to step in and tell them that they have to earn the trust of the community generally before they do anything that might be dangerous to public health.
Sorry, I'm tired of reading anti-atomic energy diatribes packed with technical nonsense written by PhD's in "Education",
Mine is in Nuclear physics, what is yours in?
and of petitions to ignore global warming where most of the scientific "Dr."s who signed turn out to be medical doctors
I missed that particular one, but the Bush rationale for ignoring global warning appears to be based on an economist, not a medical doctor who told him that the Internet takes 26% of the energy of the US. A somewhat surprising figure given that energy usage per capita has been declining even in California since the 1990s.
That is missing the point however, the anti-global warning 'research' is funded by the oil companies, as are their 'astro-turf' anti-Kyoto campaigns. I don't think anyone disputes the sincerity of the anti-nuclear lobby which in any case has plenty of people with bona-fide qualifications to support their case.
The point is that no sicentific discipline has the right to conduct experiments that may be dangerous to the public at large. When it comes to assesing those risks the onus is on the researchers to prove that their experiment is safe. It is like building a bridge, you have to prove it will stay up, the planning authorities do not have to demonstrate it will fall down to reject you an safety grounds.
While it is no longer possible to be a polymath on the scale of Sir Thomas More, there is no scientific discipline that can claim to be so specialised that only they can understand it.
Certainly we are all well qualified to judge when a field does not poses an understanding of the fundamental principles that are acting. If I believed that such a model existed in genetics I would probably be working in the field.
Getting back to the original topic. There are two approaches that are possible. One is to do the job properly and to grow organs from human stem cells. The other is to take a possible short cut and to develop xenotransplants.
Off the two paths the first does not appear to carry significant risks and has the beneficial side effect of pissing off the religious reich. The other has intrinsic risks that the researchers cannot hope to prove have been controlled.
Thus far the US and UK research bodies have prohibited xeno-transplants for precisely the reasons that I gave. Moreover it appears that the Japanese group has only got permission to grow the organs, not to actually implant them. The only group that appears to be going ahead with human xenot-transplants at present is a latin-american outfit that is looking to cure diabetes. Even then it may prove to be the case that their ability to conduct research has more to do with the lax regulatory regime in which they are operating.
If nuclear power was clearly economically *un*-viable, why would France produce >70% of their energy that way?
It is never justified on economic grounds, it is for the French an issue of national pride. France has little coal and no oil so energy policy there is a little out of whack.
The French power system is 100% state owned and the finances are secret. This is a country where until it was discovered a few months ago, the President used to receive several million dollars a week in cash, delivered by armored lorry that was used to fund the secret service, tax free bonuses for everyone in the office, mistresses, holidays, etc.
The French power system is notoriously inefficient economically. 70% is simply too high a percentage for any country to generate from a capital intensive source. As a result the French sell their surplus off-peak power at very heavy discount rates while having the highest domestic tarrifs in Europe.
As for the British nuclear industry being corrupt, of course it was. But the UK is like Germany, corruption of that kind is pretty rare. The corruption was the result of self-deception, cowardice and the result of trying to live up to the promise of 'power too cheap to meter'.
People saw this as a disaster. The fact is that the plant worked as it was suposed to during a meltdown
The list of faults that occurred at three mile island is very long. One of the worst of these is the fact that the plant management denied to reporters that there was any problem several hours after they had reported that there was a serious problem to the govenor.
Having begun by lying to the press, the plant management contined to try to lie their way out of it until the NRC took over the media relations and told metropolitan edison to shut up.
The actions of the plant management were not compatible with a concern for public safety, they were however compatible with a desire to protect the reputation of nuclear power by covering up incidents.
TMI is an example of what happens when a company puts its bottom line before safety. Metropolitan Edison had massive tax and rate hike incentives for getting TMI commissioned before the end of 1978. The Washington Post has a retrospective that gives the side of the story the nuclear industry PR flaks try to play down.
The response to TMI was not irrational or unfair. It is not superstition that made it impossible to deploy new reactors after TMI. The regulatory regime had failled.
We understand nuclear physics a lot better than we do genetics. Nobody has any means of predicting the outcome of DNA modifications. This is science, but the experimenters want to do engineering.
Every time a new scientific field gets to the point genetics has there are people who stampede towards production use. They did it in the victorian era building long bridges before they understood resonance, they did it in the aviation industry, building jet planes before they understood the consequences of metal fatigue. But resonance and metal fatigue were both known about long before bridges collapsed and planes started to fall out of the sky.
What is the answer to the simple matter of waste disposal?
Well the pebble bed reactor starts off with the fuel already encased in an inert moderator so you can simply mix the balls up in cement and drop them down a mine shaft.
However the chances of getting pebble bed off the ground are small to none, this is largely because of the lies told by the established nuclear industry, both then and now. Few politicians are going to risk their careers for the sake of an industry that lied to them and to the people.
The biggest risk of premature Xenotransplants is that any failure will give the religious reich an excuse to close down theraputic cloning to allow organs to be grown for transplantation.
All nuclear reactors in the US were built with negative temperature coefficients.
Well nobody would build a nuclear reactor if they thought it had a positive temperature coefficients. The Russians discovered that they had not the hard way.
I wrote some of the basic simulation packages that are used to model chemical and nuclear processes. Until the 1980s the computing power did not exist to model any of the reactor designs in sufficient detail to discover the particular bug in the Chernobyl design.
The Russian designers performed a 2d model and used standard techniques to extrapolate to 3d using experimental results on test reactors. They simply did not have the option of doing 3d modelling because the none of the computer systems in existence at the time were capable of that.
Science is a lot of experimentation, trial-and-error, and guesswork. A lot of things are discovered by accident
Oh dear we have just accidentally created a black hole, awfully bad luck, see you in future lives.
Accidental discoveries are one thing, unintended consequences of an intentional act are another. There are plenty of medical experiments that are rejected as being too dangerous to risk trying.
The most credible theory for transfer of the virus to humans involves a person hunting chimpanzees for food who had a cut or sore which came in contact with the blood of an infected chimp they killed.
As I said in the original post, people have been hunting and eating chimps for millenia. If there was the potential for the virus jumping species why did it wait until the 1950s to do so?
Of course, this does nevertheless support your conclusion.
If we accept the cut hunter theory then the probability of diseases jumping speies is very high. But it does have the advantage of shifting blame from the intervention of western medicine to the ignorance of native hunters.
My biggest concern over the 'cut hunter' theory is that when the theory was the behavior of the field when the theory was challenged. There were calls to have the proponents dismissed from their posts, their research grants terminated, people tried to link them to the loony who is still trying to prove HIV does not cause AIDS. In short a witch hunt, not a discourse.
I am not a geneticist. However I have worked in enough academic disciplines to be able to use a certain degree of meta-logic. If you see a discipline that responds to criticism with certain tactics you can make a pretty good guess as to the quality of their work. Science is a process, Engineering is a profession. Problems tend to arise when scientists start trying to do engineering and end up following the principles of neither field.
Your post takes a lot of unrelated scientific stuff, and tries to form a causal relationship. This is simply not acceptible. Ask your statistics teacher. It is all FUD. You have given no real data to back up your slamming of the genetics researchers.
You assume that we allow everything until it is proven to be dangerous.
US medical ethics assumes the opposite, it is the duty and responsibility of the researchers to prove that their plan is safe and that there is no possibility of unexpected side effects.
For your information, transgenic implantation is prohibited in the US for precisely the reasons I stated. The risk of viruses moving from one species to another is not considered to be acceptable.
My original point was that the people who shriek 'science' tend not to be scientists, equally those who invite people to talk to statistics teachers tend not to know what statistics can and cannot tell you.
A great example of this might be your mentioning Three Mile Island. You may not be aware of this, but Three Mile Island was not a disaster.
I have a PhD in Nuclear physics and I am a chartered engineer.
Three mile island came within seconds of a melt down. It demonstrates conclusively that the nuclear industry was nowhere near as safe as it had claimed. I don't accept the spin from the PR flaks of the nuclear industry that we have to trust them until they kill 5,000 people for real.
If the dice had rolled only slightly differently, the operators at Cherobyl might have succeeded in shutting down the reactor, had the three mile island operators not been lucky the reactor might have gone. The design flaw at Chernobyl was one that could not have been predicted with the design tools available in the USSR or the US when the plants were built. It was an area of positive feedback in the control regime that could only be detected using 3d modelling. That did not become possible until the introduction of the first CRAY series - and even then it took quite a long time for the simulation software to appear.
Moreover, the placement of any potentially hazardous industrial complex on three mile island should never have been allowed, let alone a nuclear plant. The bridges to the island simply cannot support an evacuation in an acceptable time. Building a nuclear plant that close to manhattan was gross negligence.
I used the term 'intrinsicaly safe' in a technical sense, no light water design is intrinsically safe, there is a critical mass that is damped down to prevent runnaway. If the safety systems fail and do not fail safe as planned you get a heck of a bang.
The Canadian CANDU heavy water system is intrinsically safe. It employs heavy water as the moderator, if there is a failure of the pressure vessel etc, etc the glass containers shatter and the moderator drains away shutting down the reaction. In pebble bed each fuel element is encapsulated in a moderator shell, again no critical mass, no chance of a big bang.
Do not assume that because there are some ignorant critics of nuclear power that all critics are ignorant. If the nuclear industry had not told so many blatant and deliberate lies in the 60s and 70s there might have been fewer ignorant critics today.
Jim Cramer (The Street.com) has a rule - financial irregularities means sell. Basically when ypou have been lied to by the management of a company it is time to take the exit door (e.g. Enron). In the UK the Thatcher govt. discovered during their privatization of the electricity industry that far from being low cost, the nuclear stations were barely economic on an operating basis - there was no possibility of paying of the original capital costs or eventual decommissioning costs. As a result a government that started ideologically committed to nuclear power discovered that the books had been cooked and they could not sell the plants to anyone at any price.
Further, the irrational fear of nuclear-anything means that most Americans miss out on some important technologies: for example, all of the E coli outbreaks of the last decade could have been prevented through irradiation.
Irradiation is banned for good reason. If you irradiate food you kill off the bugs but not the toxins they create. If technology allows food that is unfit for human consumption to be passed of as fresh you can be 100% sure that it will happen in the US.
Transgenic implants are a terrible idea. The most credible theory on the origin of HIV is that it jumped species after a bunch of vaccinations with a trial vaccine that had been incubated in monkeys. The first known cases of AIDS turn out to map pretty well to the trial sites.
Needless to say the medical community would prefer the 'cut hunter' theory which is on the face of it hard to credit. Humand have been eating monkeys in that part of the world for millenia. What changed to cause HIV to hop from one species to another?
The people who promote these schemes in the name of science should not be allowed to claim (as they usually do) that opposition is due to ignorance and superstition. The Nuclear industry tried that one in the fifties, the result was Three mile island, Chernobyl and several thousand power stations throughout the world built on an intrinsically unsafe technology that is unecconomic to operate. If there had been more skeptical enquiry in the fifties and sixties we might have ended up with fission power systems based on intrinsically safe designs - CANDU, Pebble bed etc.
These issues are vastly more complex than the glib statements made by the genetics industry would have people believe. They don't really know what they are doing, if they did they would have decipherted the human genome and be able to explain how it does what it does.
It ain't the first course by a long way
on
Hacker U.
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· Score: 3, Informative
SecureIT (now owned by VeriSign) had a hacker course out four years ago. Only it was a 2 day course and cost about $1500. It was to train sysops in the techniques they would face.
The french course appears to be aimed at crackers rather than legitimate white hat hackers. I doubt it will last long at that price, the first true crackers who attend the course will rip off the material.
Before too long the dweebs will come to the same realisation that the l0pht did, that there is much more money to be made on the enterprise side. They will then get VC, set up a carbon copy of @stake and start wearing suits according to Zeinfeld's law: security consultants who are ex-NSA or MI5 wear jeans and a T shirt, security consultants who are ex-hackers wear suits.
When will people get it through their thick skulls - I don't WANT content from my ISP, the excite part of Excite@Home was therefore useless to me and anyone who is halfway clueful, and the @home part had the worst service ever.
The morons in AT&T management were probably trying to copy the AOL model. What people like that cannot understand is that AOL have already captured the market for internet access targetted at clueless dweebs. The people who want that type of service will buy it from AOL anyway.
The first I knew that Excite had become involved was when I got the mail explaining how my cable modem service might go out. This appears to explain why I now get two bills for my cable modem, one that always reads zero and the other that has a balance. And these guys wonder why they sometime don't get paid for a month.
I suspect that what AT&T have done is to get the service delivery part of the network up. The piece that tends to be time consuming is dealing with billing issues etc - the part that excite was meant to be doing. So a few hundered folk will probably be able to steal internet service for a month or two.
The ironic thing is that the bondholders turned off the network to try to get more cash out of AT&T by holding their customers to ransom, the end result of their machinations is likely to be that they get nothing.
You guys all have it wrong. The OSI approved the Monty Python license, not the one for the programing language.
1. No Poofters
2. This program may not be used in a bat of custard if there is anyone looking
3. Three shall be the number of the count and the number of the count shall be three, thou shalt not count to two unless thou also counteth to three, nor shall thou count to four, five is right out.
7. The program to which this license is attached may be used for any purpose whatsoever without payment provided that (1) this license is included in its entirety intact and (2) the provisions of sections 2, 4, 5 and 8 are complied with on alternate Wednesdays and sections 8, 9 and 4 are complied with at all other times
8. All copies of this program be distributed with the distributors choice of (a) the program source or (b) a bottle of Wostershire Sauce made from genuine Wostershires.
I just installed XP. Before reinstalling Musicmatch I tried out the Microsoft media player. First thing I noticed was that the sound output was much better, no more whizzes, pops and burps as Win98 tries to context switch, no sudden changes in volume as other programs try to gra control of the mixer.
The other big change is that ripping is way more reliable than under Win98. I have a lot of old CDs, including one or two that are 15 years old. As a result I have quite a few with the odd scratch. Under Win98 this was a major hassle as each scratch would cause the ripper to do something innane - often trying analog mode which does not work on my machine since its a USB drive.
These alleged copy protection schemes are not in general designed to defeat linux users. The people who peddle these hacks do not go arround testing out every system on the planet, they just pick the most popular, Win98 and Mac. Fortunately for the alleged copy protection vendors the default drivers on those machines are pretty crappy. They are essentially designed to read data cds and have a minimal ability to read audio CDs.
What the alleged copy protection really does is to exploit bugs in the standard drivers which were written in a different age. Now that people care about ripping music Microsoft have carefully rewritten the O/S so that it plays music really well. I am seriously thinking about buying a PC to use as a dedicated music server as a part of my home audio system. It does the integration job pretty well.
Microsoft don't support MP3 encoding, but you can buy the encoder from three other suppliers for $10. Given that the microsoft encoding uses half the space for like quality and MP3 is also encumbered I don't think that is a bad trade off.
The other item of note is that Microsoft have also given CDDB the push and are running their own music database. This leads to occasional problems with some of my older and somewhat more obscure disks. It will be interesting to see the rate at which this improves since that will indicate the length of time it will take open source alternatives to get off the ground.
So in summary, the reason the anti copy companies are striking now may well be because they know that their wares (often waerez) may not be seen to be very effective in a very short time. It would be very interesting to see what XP does in response to the alleged protected CDs. My skepticism is a result of dealing with the crooks who run companies of that ilk. Cryptographic snakeoil is a plentiful commodity, there will always be companies selling anti-gravity devices.
First step to mitigate exposure is to get yourself an email address that is independent of your ISP. You can get that for free from the likes of Yahoo and Hotmail or paractically any registrar will offer pop3 or IMAP email along with a domain name for $60 ish - thats about $5 a month which is not bad in return for getting price control away from your ISP. You can even forward that email address to an ISP account. Many universities offer their alumni email forwarding accounts which serve the same purpose (but are likely to end up costing far more as the university knows how to chase you for donnations).
ISPs love the idea of giving out email addresses that create high switching costs. They call it 'stickyness' they want to increase stickiness so that they reduce 'churn' - people closing accounts.
I think the bondholders have screwed up big time here. The fact is that the offer made by AT&T is probably way over the resale value of the equipment. Three year old switching hardware is usually worth less than a tenth of its purchase price.
The excite scheme was idiotic from the start. Excite did not own the lines they were selling the internet connectivity over, they did not own the customer relationship, they did not even own the distribution systems at the cable heads.
So all that it would ever take for the ISPs to switch to a lower cost provider was to yank a connection and redirect their traffic elsewhere. That is not a good thing if your business model is to underprice your services in the startup phase.
I use NTFS on my zip 100 disks all the time. Its not that it won't work on removable disks, its that they disable the use of NTFS on small disks (and i guess flash cards? never used them.).
Could be that the limit is 128 Mb, I tried with a 64Mb compact flash, that is the largest I have so far. A friend told me they had problems with a 128Mb in a Nicon Coolpix 900 (he could only see 80Mb) so I didn't get any larger ones.
Let me see, you are posting an offtopic commit on/. and you use windows to keep sensitive info for a Nasdaq 100 company. Oh, I get it you work for Microsoft. Duh.
No, not close.
And since the topic is encrypting file stores I don't think the issue is off-topic. The point is not that encrypting file stores are a bad idea. It is just that the typical uses of Linux don't have a great deal of overlap with the areas where you really need encrypting file stores.
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This type of thing is still going on. There is a plausible theory that BSE did not suddenly jump from sheep to cow but was introduced by a particular wilderbeast at a safari park that died with BSE type symptoms and whose body was sold for rendering. Wilderbeast in their natural habbitat are subject to a prion type disease similar to BSE.
The theory is still controvertial, the MAAF are ridiculing it. Unfortunately they have little credibility after it was discovered that three years of research into 'sheep brain' turned out to have been examining cow. The MAAF theory was used to reassure the public that BSE was the bovine form of scrapie, a disease of sheep that people have been eating for centuries without contracting CJD, the human form. However people have been contracting CJD so the 'scrapie' theory requires the emergence of a new form of scrapie prion while the wilderbeast theory does not.
Whether or not the 'wilderbeast' theory is true the risk of introducing exotic diseases is significant.
I used MusicMatch under Win98. I can't recommend it very highly. The ripping was not very reliable. If the disk had any scratches Musicmatch would switch to analog mode and record silence.
The biggest problem was management of the volume control. Each time IE or any other application grabbed focus the volume would change. This made it impossible to use the PC for anything other than playback.
I switched to XP and the problems are fixed. However MSFT's player is pretty slick and is not nagware. You have to buy a third party MP3 encoder but the WAV support is built in.
Media player does not handle multple CD Rom drives very well. There is no feature to queue up several disks. But there is an open API and a plug in architecture. So CDROM jukebox vendors should be imposed upon to provide the appropriate plug in.
First off there is no point in a half baked office clone. If you want that you can use Star Office for free. For Office for Linux to add value you have to do the job properly.
So you have to port the code so the product works well. The easiest way to do that is to simply port the parts of the Windows stack that Office calls. So you will end up with Office for Windows on Linux, and not really office for Linux.
There might be a market for such a product. If it existed the chances are that Microsoft would aleady be looking to exploit it. No other company could produce the code for less or market it as effectively.
If Microsoft went out and did Office for Linux voluntarily all the anti-MSFT crowd would be squeaking 'monopoly'. Strategically their office monoploy is much more important than their desktop monopoly.
Even with Office, Linux would still be unable to run many important productivity tools, Civ3 for example.
Office for Linux would probably require a particular distribution to run well. Configuration would be harder than for Windows simply because of the variation between systems. I don't think that anyone wants to suggest a Microsoft distribution.
Yes and no. Until recently nobody had any idea what the Higgs mass was beyond 'more than LEP, HERA, Tevatron can deliver'.
The LHC has been in design for over 15 years. When the project started the Higgs theory was not even the leading contender.
Contrary to many people's belief, experimentalists don't build the experiments to test the theories of the theoreticians. Its more like have tunnel, will use it, what is there that is kewl to look at in that energy range? The design of the LHC is intended to give the greatest probability of finding the Higgs without boring a new tunnel. But it is not a one trick pony and if Peter Higg's theory was demolished tommorow there would be plenty of other stuff to do with it. After all if the Higgs is not there then the Standard model is still broken, still fails to explain gravity and still is 100% in compliance with all experimental observations on the sub-atomic scale. So there is something else to find.
One of the main issues that is missed by the reporters is that there is no 'Higgs Particle', there is a Higgs field type thingie wich if it exisits is manifested in at least one particle. Chances are that there will be multiple generations of Higgs particles, just as there are six quarks etc. Well thats the story I got from Cashmore and Rubia,
Untrue.
Each bit of key size doubles the computational cost of brute force attack. So AES is 2^(128-56) = 2^72 times harder to break than DES.
If Moores law continues and computing power doubles every 18 months AES will be broken in precisely 105 years (it being 2 years since the DES cracks).
I don't know about you, but I have no plans to use AES personally after 2075.
In practice the quantum limits of silicon computing will be reached earlier, although it may prove possible to move from 2D slices to 3D systems...
You might not be aware of the fact but MIT also happens to have a large faculty and many non-faculty research staff. As is pretty well known on Slashdot I was a researcher there about ten years after I got my doctorate.
Your digression on statistics would have more weight if you were familliar with the material. The probability that one HIV strain would wait until 1952 to jump from monkey to human is not high, the probability that the first known case would be discovered in Kinshasa a year after one of the first polio trials occured there is also not high.
But HIV is not one virus, it is two, HIV-1 and HIV-2 are completely different strains. What is the probability of two money viruses changing species within the same narrow geographical area in the same time?
Yes, I have taken a statistics class, and am aware of what statistics can do. You insult my intelligence when you assume that I don't know what I'm talking about.
Pot, kettle, black. You attempt to dismiss statements on grounds of authority you do not posses.
As for the reasons we still operate Nuclear power plants, without them the lights would go out which would be very unsafe indeed. However the plants that are operating are being operated in a very different manner to before TMI. The high cost of maintaining that level of vigilance is the main factor that has changed the economics of nuclear power from cheap to expensive.
So is the evidence that smoking causes cancer. All evidence in the public health field is circumstantial.
My field is security. You do not refuse to act until a hypothesis is proven beyond doubt. The issues are 'what is the most likely hypothesis' and 'is it a credible hypothesis'. If there is a credible hypothesis that suggests there might be a major threat to public health you don't allow the research to proceed.
The fact that scientists don't wish to investigate the hypothesis may be troubling, but it says nothing about the truth value of the hypothesis
'Don't wish to investigate' is not exactly the reaction the hypothesis received. It was a couple of degrees worse than the initial reaction to Folkman's theory of angiogenesis. The field made it clear early on that it did not wish to hear the theory and would not tolerate any discussion in the forums they controlled.
I came across the polio virus theory as the attacks on the proponents grew nastier, including libel actions to force reporters to withdraw their stories on the theory.
The point being that when a field begins to behave like that it is time for the rest of the sicentific community to step in and tell them that they have to earn the trust of the community generally before they do anything that might be dangerous to public health.
Mine is in Nuclear physics, what is yours in?
and of petitions to ignore global warming where most of the scientific "Dr."s who signed turn out to be medical doctors
I missed that particular one, but the Bush rationale for ignoring global warning appears to be based on an economist, not a medical doctor who told him that the Internet takes 26% of the energy of the US. A somewhat surprising figure given that energy usage per capita has been declining even in California since the 1990s.
That is missing the point however, the anti-global warning 'research' is funded by the oil companies, as are their 'astro-turf' anti-Kyoto campaigns. I don't think anyone disputes the sincerity of the anti-nuclear lobby which in any case has plenty of people with bona-fide qualifications to support their case.
The point is that no sicentific discipline has the right to conduct experiments that may be dangerous to the public at large. When it comes to assesing those risks the onus is on the researchers to prove that their experiment is safe. It is like building a bridge, you have to prove it will stay up, the planning authorities do not have to demonstrate it will fall down to reject you an safety grounds.
While it is no longer possible to be a polymath on the scale of Sir Thomas More, there is no scientific discipline that can claim to be so specialised that only they can understand it.
Certainly we are all well qualified to judge when a field does not poses an understanding of the fundamental principles that are acting. If I believed that such a model existed in genetics I would probably be working in the field.
Getting back to the original topic. There are two approaches that are possible. One is to do the job properly and to grow organs from human stem cells. The other is to take a possible short cut and to develop xenotransplants.
Off the two paths the first does not appear to carry significant risks and has the beneficial side effect of pissing off the religious reich. The other has intrinsic risks that the researchers cannot hope to prove have been controlled.
Thus far the US and UK research bodies have prohibited xeno-transplants for precisely the reasons that I gave. Moreover it appears that the Japanese group has only got permission to grow the organs, not to actually implant them. The only group that appears to be going ahead with human xenot-transplants at present is a latin-american outfit that is looking to cure diabetes. Even then it may prove to be the case that their ability to conduct research has more to do with the lax regulatory regime in which they are operating.
It is never justified on economic grounds, it is for the French an issue of national pride. France has little coal and no oil so energy policy there is a little out of whack.
The French power system is 100% state owned and the finances are secret. This is a country where until it was discovered a few months ago, the President used to receive several million dollars a week in cash, delivered by armored lorry that was used to fund the secret service, tax free bonuses for everyone in the office, mistresses, holidays, etc.
The French power system is notoriously inefficient economically. 70% is simply too high a percentage for any country to generate from a capital intensive source. As a result the French sell their surplus off-peak power at very heavy discount rates while having the highest domestic tarrifs in Europe.
As for the British nuclear industry being corrupt, of course it was. But the UK is like Germany, corruption of that kind is pretty rare. The corruption was the result of self-deception, cowardice and the result of trying to live up to the promise of 'power too cheap to meter'.
The list of faults that occurred at three mile island is very long. One of the worst of these is the fact that the plant management denied to reporters that there was any problem several hours after they had reported that there was a serious problem to the govenor.
Having begun by lying to the press, the plant management contined to try to lie their way out of it until the NRC took over the media relations and told metropolitan edison to shut up.
The actions of the plant management were not compatible with a concern for public safety, they were however compatible with a desire to protect the reputation of nuclear power by covering up incidents.
TMI is an example of what happens when a company puts its bottom line before safety. Metropolitan Edison had massive tax and rate hike incentives for getting TMI commissioned before the end of 1978. The Washington Post has a retrospective that gives the side of the story the nuclear industry PR flaks try to play down.
The response to TMI was not irrational or unfair. It is not superstition that made it impossible to deploy new reactors after TMI. The regulatory regime had failled.
We understand nuclear physics a lot better than we do genetics. Nobody has any means of predicting the outcome of DNA modifications. This is science, but the experimenters want to do engineering.
Every time a new scientific field gets to the point genetics has there are people who stampede towards production use. They did it in the victorian era building long bridges before they understood resonance, they did it in the aviation industry, building jet planes before they understood the consequences of metal fatigue. But resonance and metal fatigue were both known about long before bridges collapsed and planes started to fall out of the sky.
Well the pebble bed reactor starts off with the fuel already encased in an inert moderator so you can simply mix the balls up in cement and drop them down a mine shaft.
However the chances of getting pebble bed off the ground are small to none, this is largely because of the lies told by the established nuclear industry, both then and now. Few politicians are going to risk their careers for the sake of an industry that lied to them and to the people.
The biggest risk of premature Xenotransplants is that any failure will give the religious reich an excuse to close down theraputic cloning to allow organs to be grown for transplantation.
Well nobody would build a nuclear reactor if they thought it had a positive temperature coefficients. The Russians discovered that they had not the hard way.
I wrote some of the basic simulation packages that are used to model chemical and nuclear processes. Until the 1980s the computing power did not exist to model any of the reactor designs in sufficient detail to discover the particular bug in the Chernobyl design.
The Russian designers performed a 2d model and used standard techniques to extrapolate to 3d using experimental results on test reactors. They simply did not have the option of doing 3d modelling because the none of the computer systems in existence at the time were capable of that.
Science is a lot of experimentation, trial-and-error, and guesswork. A lot of things are discovered by accident
Oh dear we have just accidentally created a black hole, awfully bad luck, see you in future lives.
Accidental discoveries are one thing, unintended consequences of an intentional act are another. There are plenty of medical experiments that are rejected as being too dangerous to risk trying.
As I said in the original post, people have been hunting and eating chimps for millenia. If there was the potential for the virus jumping species why did it wait until the 1950s to do so?
Of course, this does nevertheless support your conclusion.
If we accept the cut hunter theory then the probability of diseases jumping speies is very high. But it does have the advantage of shifting blame from the intervention of western medicine to the ignorance of native hunters.
My biggest concern over the 'cut hunter' theory is that when the theory was the behavior of the field when the theory was challenged. There were calls to have the proponents dismissed from their posts, their research grants terminated, people tried to link them to the loony who is still trying to prove HIV does not cause AIDS. In short a witch hunt, not a discourse.
I am not a geneticist. However I have worked in enough academic disciplines to be able to use a certain degree of meta-logic. If you see a discipline that responds to criticism with certain tactics you can make a pretty good guess as to the quality of their work. Science is a process, Engineering is a profession. Problems tend to arise when scientists start trying to do engineering and end up following the principles of neither field.
You assume that we allow everything until it is proven to be dangerous.
US medical ethics assumes the opposite, it is the duty and responsibility of the researchers to prove that their plan is safe and that there is no possibility of unexpected side effects.
For your information, transgenic implantation is prohibited in the US for precisely the reasons I stated. The risk of viruses moving from one species to another is not considered to be acceptable.
My original point was that the people who shriek 'science' tend not to be scientists, equally those who invite people to talk to statistics teachers tend not to know what statistics can and cannot tell you.
I have a PhD in Nuclear physics and I am a chartered engineer.
Three mile island came within seconds of a melt down. It demonstrates conclusively that the nuclear industry was nowhere near as safe as it had claimed. I don't accept the spin from the PR flaks of the nuclear industry that we have to trust them until they kill 5,000 people for real.
If the dice had rolled only slightly differently, the operators at Cherobyl might have succeeded in shutting down the reactor, had the three mile island operators not been lucky the reactor might have gone. The design flaw at Chernobyl was one that could not have been predicted with the design tools available in the USSR or the US when the plants were built. It was an area of positive feedback in the control regime that could only be detected using 3d modelling. That did not become possible until the introduction of the first CRAY series - and even then it took quite a long time for the simulation software to appear.
Moreover, the placement of any potentially hazardous industrial complex on three mile island should never have been allowed, let alone a nuclear plant. The bridges to the island simply cannot support an evacuation in an acceptable time. Building a nuclear plant that close to manhattan was gross negligence.
I used the term 'intrinsicaly safe' in a technical sense, no light water design is intrinsically safe, there is a critical mass that is damped down to prevent runnaway. If the safety systems fail and do not fail safe as planned you get a heck of a bang.
The Canadian CANDU heavy water system is intrinsically safe. It employs heavy water as the moderator, if there is a failure of the pressure vessel etc, etc the glass containers shatter and the moderator drains away shutting down the reaction. In pebble bed each fuel element is encapsulated in a moderator shell, again no critical mass, no chance of a big bang.
Do not assume that because there are some ignorant critics of nuclear power that all critics are ignorant. If the nuclear industry had not told so many blatant and deliberate lies in the 60s and 70s there might have been fewer ignorant critics today.
Jim Cramer (The Street.com) has a rule - financial irregularities means sell. Basically when ypou have been lied to by the management of a company it is time to take the exit door (e.g. Enron). In the UK the Thatcher govt. discovered during their privatization of the electricity industry that far from being low cost, the nuclear stations were barely economic on an operating basis - there was no possibility of paying of the original capital costs or eventual decommissioning costs. As a result a government that started ideologically committed to nuclear power discovered that the books had been cooked and they could not sell the plants to anyone at any price.
Further, the irrational fear of nuclear-anything means that most Americans miss out on some important technologies: for example, all of the E coli outbreaks of the last decade could have been prevented through irradiation.
Irradiation is banned for good reason. If you irradiate food you kill off the bugs but not the toxins they create. If technology allows food that is unfit for human consumption to be passed of as fresh you can be 100% sure that it will happen in the US.
Needless to say the medical community would prefer the 'cut hunter' theory which is on the face of it hard to credit. Humand have been eating monkeys in that part of the world for millenia. What changed to cause HIV to hop from one species to another?
The people who promote these schemes in the name of science should not be allowed to claim (as they usually do) that opposition is due to ignorance and superstition. The Nuclear industry tried that one in the fifties, the result was Three mile island, Chernobyl and several thousand power stations throughout the world built on an intrinsically unsafe technology that is unecconomic to operate. If there had been more skeptical enquiry in the fifties and sixties we might have ended up with fission power systems based on intrinsically safe designs - CANDU, Pebble bed etc.
These issues are vastly more complex than the glib statements made by the genetics industry would have people believe. They don't really know what they are doing, if they did they would have decipherted the human genome and be able to explain how it does what it does.
The french course appears to be aimed at crackers rather than legitimate white hat hackers. I doubt it will last long at that price, the first true crackers who attend the course will rip off the material.
Before too long the dweebs will come to the same realisation that the l0pht did, that there is much more money to be made on the enterprise side. They will then get VC, set up a carbon copy of @stake and start wearing suits according to Zeinfeld's law: security consultants who are ex-NSA or MI5 wear jeans and a T shirt, security consultants who are ex-hackers wear suits.
Sure, go for it.
The morons in AT&T management were probably trying to copy the AOL model. What people like that cannot understand is that AOL have already captured the market for internet access targetted at clueless dweebs. The people who want that type of service will buy it from AOL anyway.
The first I knew that Excite had become involved was when I got the mail explaining how my cable modem service might go out. This appears to explain why I now get two bills for my cable modem, one that always reads zero and the other that has a balance. And these guys wonder why they sometime don't get paid for a month.
I suspect that what AT&T have done is to get the service delivery part of the network up. The piece that tends to be time consuming is dealing with billing issues etc - the part that excite was meant to be doing. So a few hundered folk will probably be able to steal internet service for a month or two.
The ironic thing is that the bondholders turned off the network to try to get more cash out of AT&T by holding their customers to ransom, the end result of their machinations is likely to be that they get nothing.
1. No Poofters
2. This program may not be used in a bat of custard if there is anyone looking
3. Three shall be the number of the count and the number of the count shall be three, thou shalt not count to two unless thou also counteth to three, nor shall thou count to four, five is right out.
4. There is no 4
5. Is right out
6. SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM! Wonder SPAM! Wonderful SPAM
7. The program to which this license is attached may be used for any purpose whatsoever without payment provided that (1) this license is included in its entirety intact and (2) the provisions of sections 2, 4, 5 and 8 are complied with on alternate Wednesdays and sections 8, 9 and 4 are complied with at all other times
8. All copies of this program be distributed with the distributors choice of (a) the program source or (b) a bottle of Wostershire Sauce made from genuine Wostershires.
9. EEEK!
10. Naaawwwwww...
However my car is turning into a pumpkin
The other big change is that ripping is way more reliable than under Win98. I have a lot of old CDs, including one or two that are 15 years old. As a result I have quite a few with the odd scratch. Under Win98 this was a major hassle as each scratch would cause the ripper to do something innane - often trying analog mode which does not work on my machine since its a USB drive.
These alleged copy protection schemes are not in general designed to defeat linux users. The people who peddle these hacks do not go arround testing out every system on the planet, they just pick the most popular, Win98 and Mac. Fortunately for the alleged copy protection vendors the default drivers on those machines are pretty crappy. They are essentially designed to read data cds and have a minimal ability to read audio CDs.
What the alleged copy protection really does is to exploit bugs in the standard drivers which were written in a different age. Now that people care about ripping music Microsoft have carefully rewritten the O/S so that it plays music really well. I am seriously thinking about buying a PC to use as a dedicated music server as a part of my home audio system. It does the integration job pretty well.
Microsoft don't support MP3 encoding, but you can buy the encoder from three other suppliers for $10. Given that the microsoft encoding uses half the space for like quality and MP3 is also encumbered I don't think that is a bad trade off.
The other item of note is that Microsoft have also given CDDB the push and are running their own music database. This leads to occasional problems with some of my older and somewhat more obscure disks. It will be interesting to see the rate at which this improves since that will indicate the length of time it will take open source alternatives to get off the ground.
So in summary, the reason the anti copy companies are striking now may well be because they know that their wares (often waerez) may not be seen to be very effective in a very short time. It would be very interesting to see what XP does in response to the alleged protected CDs. My skepticism is a result of dealing with the crooks who run companies of that ilk. Cryptographic snakeoil is a plentiful commodity, there will always be companies selling anti-gravity devices.
ISPs love the idea of giving out email addresses that create high switching costs. They call it 'stickyness' they want to increase stickiness so that they reduce 'churn' - people closing accounts.
I think the bondholders have screwed up big time here. The fact is that the offer made by AT&T is probably way over the resale value of the equipment. Three year old switching hardware is usually worth less than a tenth of its purchase price.
The excite scheme was idiotic from the start. Excite did not own the lines they were selling the internet connectivity over, they did not own the customer relationship, they did not even own the distribution systems at the cable heads.
So all that it would ever take for the ISPs to switch to a lower cost provider was to yank a connection and redirect their traffic elsewhere. That is not a good thing if your business model is to underprice your services in the startup phase.
Could be that the limit is 128 Mb, I tried with a 64Mb compact flash, that is the largest I have so far. A friend told me they had problems with a 128Mb in a Nicon Coolpix 900 (he could only see 80Mb) so I didn't get any larger ones.
The help file is less than helpfull
No, not close.
And since the topic is encrypting file stores I don't think the issue is off-topic. The point is not that encrypting file stores are a bad idea. It is just that the typical uses of Linux don't have a great deal of overlap with the areas where you really need encrypting file stores.