I think we are missing the bigger point here. If Vista is implementing the IPv6 spec correctly then any problem here is due to the spec being incorrectly written, not Microsoft.
The underlying problem here is that the people who wrote IPv6 had not got a clue about how they were going to deploy it and most still don't. They still treat NAT as if it was the cause of the problem rather than relizing the potential to use NAT as a means of achiving the necessary transition.
I have yet to see anyone write a coherent document that explains how an IPv6 connected machine can do anything usefull with their IPv6 address. Who is going to be putting up IPv6 sites to visit? To be on the Internet you are going to need an IPv4 address for a very long time.
Another clueless issue in the IPv6 spec is the assumption that there will be no NAT and that everyone will be happy to broadcast their MAC addresses to the rest of the world. Not a chance. Enterprises will still be NATed and Firewalled. So will home networks if users have a clue.
Deposing a lawyer is unlikely to result in much information. First lawyers are trained to deal with this type of thing, secondly most of the interesting stuff would be covered by client-attorney privilege.
The other problem SCO faces is time, no new discovery means just that. SCO does not get extra time to follow up leads here.
SCO still faces a major problem in their suit, they have failed to state their claim with specificity. They might just possibly avoid summary judgement but they would have to come up with something pretty amazing at this stage and it would have to be something that really shows bad faith by IBM.
The problem is not software patents, its crap USPTO patents that should never have been issued.
The EU Patent office is not the diploma mill that the USPTO has become. And the USPTO itself was much more sensible until the 1980s when Reagan tried to turn it into a profit center.
There are legit software patents, the RSA algorithm for example is a non trivial piece of intellectual work. 98% of software, business model and genetic patents are unadulterated crap but that does not mean that there is no legitimacy possible.
The Free Software movement is fixated on ending software patents because that is the personal obsession of RMS. It is not a realistic political goal. Reform of the USPTO on the other hand is very realistic and can gain support from both Open Source advocates and from the major software companies like IBM and Microsoft. The diploma mill even hurts the legitimate small inventor who has actually invented something. Send a notice of infringement to any large company today and it will be ignored. There are simply too many notices sent, to get attention you now have to file suit.
I wrote an essay on how we could reform the USPTO its on my blog some time I will get round to finishing part 4.
OBL claims his motivation for 911 was "US bombs raining down on Lebanon during the 80's" - how many new OBL's is the current bombing campain creating?
And Zaquawi became a terrorist after being tortured by the Jordanian police. How many new terrorists have been created at Abu Graihb and Guantanamo?
Of course there are people for whom every source is biased except Fox News. Quite what the point here is I don't know. Ann Coulter is a heck of a lot more prominent in Conservative circles than this photojournalist and she has given up even the pretense of honesty. Her latest polemic claims that liberals are in favor of teaching kindergarteners about fisting and anal sex, the footnote she uses to support this claim leads to a twenty year old paper on a program teaching adult students.
The first victim in any war is the truth. Both sides have propaganda teams trying to spin every story.
Where the Little Green Football wingnuts go wrong is when they say with a straight face that there is only liberal bias in the media.
Take a look at the video CNN used to show to demonstrate support for Bin Laden amongst Palestinians immediately after 9/11. You might think that they would show a demonstration with a hundred people or more. Instead they showed one family celebrating while everyone else ignored them.
If you look at the number of cases that LGF comes up with it is insignificant compared to the number that come up in the Daily Howler or on Huffington Post or the other liberal blogs every day.
None of the major news outlets have covered Abramoff in a tenth the detail that they covered just one of the Clinton pseudo-scandals. Yet today DeLay is indicted over a campaign contribution scandal that involved Abramoff (he was the chair of the corrupt committee) and is facing other Abramoff related corruption scandals. Ney announced he is not going to stand this November, again with pending Abramoff related perjury and corruption charges and Doolittle is about to go the same way.
That leaves Hastert as the only GOP leader not expected to face criminal charges. And we have heard nothing from the press about it.
Amazing that a Good Thing gets turned into a big-brother or privacy issue just because it's Microsoft. Shadow copy has saved my ass twice in the past year and the more it's available, the better. If employees are worried about the boss checking up on them, then maybe they should just do their job.
If this was a Linux feature you can be certain it would be tooted as the best thing ever.
Instead we have this bogus issue of the dangers of keeping old data. Version numbering was a feature on VMS from day one, nobody ever suggested that there was a security issue. Many companies and most competent programers use version control systems, you know CVS fof the same thing.
From a forensics point of view Microsoft is not revealling any new data. All they are doing is making data available to the user that was always available to the forensics team. The fact is that all modern O/S use file systems that leave old copies of file strewn around the disk at random unless you happen to have one with a strong delete turned on.
Ollie North was convicted of destroying evidence after he deleted files that turned out not to really be deleted. Plenty of hackers go to jail every year for the same carelessness.
They're worried about how you'd have to pay your lawyer by the hour, and the MPAA could afford to drag the case on and on while you go into debt paying your lawyer with little or no hope of getting that money back from the MPAA.
That is why they have much more to fear from an in person defendant. The court is highly unlikely to allow the MPAA to extract any more in damages than they are entitled to.
In this case the MPAA can only demonstrate a loss of a few tens of dollars at most with respect to that one title. Their demand for $2500 is blowing smoke. They have no proof of any other damages.
It would probably not take much to persuade the judge to reduce the case to only consider the specific damages actually alleged. Once that happens the MPAA is going to court expensively to win damages of $10.
The discovery process is itself going to be highly damaging to the MPAA as they will inevitably reveal methods they would rather keep secret.
That sort of opposition might have had an impact. Iraqi guerilla defenses do nothing except put a finer point on the fact that nobody was willing to do the slightest thing in their defense.
The 'little war' in Spain toppled Napoleon in the end. Without the Guerilla Wellington's Peninsular campaign would have been much less successful.
There was a time when knowledge of this type of history was a prerequisite for being considered an expert. Today we have know nothings and learn nothings in charge.
Re:Has to be asked...
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Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
"You see! You see! Your stupid minds! STUPID! STUPID!"
Which pretty much sums up the mindset of the inventors, the 'needle in haystack' school of user experience design.
Genera did that sooo much better. An IQ test disguised as an operating system.
The lack of success of the successor tends to confirm the beleif that the success of Unix was a fluke due to marketting (it free!) rather than technical merit (you get what you paid for).
The US has demonstrated that it is possible for a nation to invade another, sovreign nation, replace its government, and torture and kill its people, and no nation will raise the slightest opposition to this. Other nations are now learning this lesson, and following suit.
On the contrary, the people of Iraq are opposing it.
And the people of this country will have the chance to repudiate the crimes committed in their name this November.
The actions of one utter fool can be reversed if enough people are willing to make it so. Ask you Congressman what their position on torture is, ask what they are doing to question the administration's torture policy. If they don't give the right answers ask the person challenging them in November. If they give the right answer help them defeat the incumbent, if not find a candidate who does, consider standing yourself.
By the plain text of the language, the same holds true of the US Constitution. It doesn't use the word 'citizen' at all - it speaks of the rights of 'people' instead
The constitution states that treaties shall be the supreme law of the land. No ifs, no buts, no jurisdiction stripping, the supreme law of the land
And article 3 of the Geneva convention absolutely prohibits use of torture without exception. It is irrelevant what status the administration claims the prisoners have, the convention recognizes no exceptions.
And waterboarding was one of the favorite tortures of the Spanish inquisition, Torquemada himself describes its use. Ergo there is no doubt whatsoever that the administration has been illegally using torture and that the President, Vice President and Defense Secretary are unindicted war criminals.
The crimes are war crimes because the US has a specific law that states that crimes against the Geneva convention are war crimes.
The broader picture here though is that torture is a near useless form of interrogation. It is easy to make someone talk, impossible to work out whether they are telling the truth or not. Forget the ticking bomb scenario, the interrogation subject will lie.
Every victim of torture is a new potential terrorist. Al Zarqawi was merely a petty thief until the Jordanian secret police tortured him and gave him the grudge that he acted on for the next ten years after his release.
The reason that we won the cold war is because even the communists knew that the West had the moral high ground. Senior communists would defect or pass intelligence because they knew that the West had the moral cause and the Soviet Union was a tissue of corruption, lies and oppression. The pictures of the actions George W. Bush is responsible for at Abu Graihb, the knowledge that the same actions took place and take place today in the Guantanamo gulag, those attorcities serve as daily recruitment sargents for our enemies and the result is that we are not only less free we are less safe.
If you do the math it is impossible for the Democrats to win a sufficient majority in the Senate to convict after impeachment without Republican support. Every day it appears that the the administration gives new reason for Republicans to convict.
The administration has demonstrated a degree of incompetence, ignorance and stupidity that is without comparison in US history. They failled to complete the elimination of Al Qaeda and the Taleban because they were more interested in starting a new war in Iraq.
They will be recycled. Almost all lead-acid batteries get recycled today, and lithium is far more valuable than lead.
Actually in recycling terms its not. Lithium batteries are not expensive because the raw materials are more expensive, its the cost of manufacture.
It makes much more sense to use Lithium Ion batteries in an electric car than lead and it is quite possible that this will be the way that some of the more exotic technologies are finaly made cheap enough to become mainstream.
Despite the number of Li batteries that go into laptops they are still a small fraction of the battery market because each battery lasts for many hundred cycles. The other problem is that every battery is custom and the production runs are tiny.
What may well make more sense than the all electric car is the Li battery based hybrid or even a battery/fuel cell all electric car.
One point I did not understand in the article is how or why they would be using a Tesla AC induction motor in a vehicle with a DC power source. This is surely a mistake, not least because the principle disadvantage of the Tesla design is that the motor only works at a single speed.
Hell, why not just use an e-meter? They'd get just as meaningful of a result, and could at least give applicants the cop-out that their Thetan level disqualified them.
Because the Scientologists would charge more than the poligraphers?
My understanding of the FIPS140 program is that they are required to give reasons for rejection. It is ten years since I did one but that was the case then.
There is a difference though between providing an instant reply in email and spending a couple of months crafting a fully documented explanation that states exactly why the module is not in conformance and the full set of steps required to bring it into conformance.
FOIA discovery is fully applicable to NIST so its not like they can hide the reason.
We've also created entirely new fields of work, and we've made it possible for new industries to be created. Our technologies make things possible, making products and services possible, that could never be dreamt of without our help.
Not too long ago the general sentiment here was to send H1B workers as I then was 'back home'. Only I came over from CERN to help set up the Web consortium and bring the Web to the US. So net-net I think most people would say I created jobs here.
The point I was making is that most people only look at how these issues affect themselves, they are completely oblivious to what they are doing to the small guy themselves.
Some folk in this thread seem to think that their situation is somehow worse than the folk in the third world countries that the outsourcing is going to. Some even go on to suggest a policy of autarky for the developing world. Which is of course what India did for the first forty years or so after independence. They have done much better after realising this was a big mistake.
There are only two ways for large numbers of people to get richer. One is for the economy to make more, the other is to redistribute the wealth generated. Over the past six years there has been a deliberate effort to redistribute wealth in favor of the richest of the rich. But even if this was corrected it would have only a modest effect on the general population.
If we are to grow wealthier we must get more work from fewer people. Over the next decade or so a lot of people are going to be retiring and the workforce will shrink. Outsourcing is one way to adapt to that situation.
In the long term the Indian currency is going to grow stronger against the dollar and the benefits of outsourcing will decline. Already the advantage is much more marginal than it was five years ago. The wages are lower but so is productivity when your programmers are round the other side of the planet.
Maybe it's time to consider moving those outsourced tech jobs back to a safe, terrorism-free city like London, Madrid or New York.
Completely right there. This is just self interested posturing, not a genuine concern. Besides which we don't usually talk about the Israeli IT industry as 'outsourcing'.
Many of the people who flame endlessly about outsourcing are the same people who flame endlessly about libertarianism and how great the free market is.
What do slashdotters tell the people whose clerical jobs are being replaced by the systems they are developing? There is a bizare doublespeak here: Outsourcing bad, automation good. Historically IT people have been really good at protecting their own job security while making everyone else's job insecure.
Given the state of the IT job market I have a hard time feeling sorry for folk being outsourced. There are plenty of IT jobs around - if you actually have the skills that are in demand. And that should not be a problem if you really are worth the prices IT people expect.
The people who have difficulty getting a new position are the folk without formal qualifications and without a depth of knowledge in a useful field. Back in the dotcom boom I came across a consultant 'programmer' who did not know C, Fortran or Java. The only 'programming language' he knew was Delphi.
Viral marketting is just a dotbomb buzzword. The idea behind it predates the Internet, predates print in fact. This is not viral marketting, its simply a conduit for malware.
The same problem appeared on blogger a year back. I don't know if they ever got the problem under control (I learned to stop using the next blog button), but it was a real pain.
There are two problems here, first MySpace should get a clue and eradicate the infestations. Second IE should have taken steps against forced downloads back in 1998 when it was only realplayer and flash that kept asking if they could install fifty times a day. At least that was only a consequence of the pages having the active content rather than a deliberate attack to put the malware on the machine.
The reason I use Windows is precisely because you don't notice this sort of stuff if you spend your time using Firefox. I want to know the next attack while it is going on.
As an absolute rule it should never be possible for active content running in a user application to crap on the operating system internals. It should never be possible for any program to install itself in a way that is intended to prevent removal.
Windows is trying to introduce this separation but running a Windows box without access to administrator or super user privs is pretty miserable. And to an attacker super user is administrator in any case.
Your statement seems correct, but I think assuming that no such technology will be developed is wrong, esp. given that there is a real incentive to do so.
It is possible that someone will invent a working time machine, warp drive, transmat beam or other device that works on physical principles currently entirely unknown to us. And yes, quantum computing effects are undestood, they are not an issue for symmetric ciphers.
It is not very likely that this will happen and if it did happen it is more than likely Gallileo becomes obsolete first.
Cryptanalysis effort has pretty much developed at exactly the speed predicted. DES was broken several years AFTER the original design life had expired. Even today I would have no real concern using DES for a DRM scheme, the cost of breaking DES is much higher than most rewards.
A much more likely event would be someone developing a better attack than brute force. This never happened for DES (except for the inversion effect which was always known), at least not in the sense that someone found an attack that was in total less effort than brute force (some people had attacks that they claimed were 2^50 or so but the amount of effort required per step was prohibitive.
The size of a computer and the circuits within have little to do with how capable that computer is of performign the specific operations for breaking AES efficiently.
On the contrary. Assuming that no technology is developed that uses an entirely different form of computation we can create a lower bound for the computation effort required.
The clock size cannot be any faster than the Planc time. A circuit cannot possibly check more than one key per clock cycle. A circuit must have at least one atom. We have a finite supply of atoms (one planet) and a finite supply of time (age of the universe).
The point is that when we chose to adopt 128 bit keys we did know pretty much what we are doing. There is no real probability that the state of the art in cryptography is going to advance from its current state (breaking 64 bit keys) to breaking 128 bit keys any time soon.
The only reasons to use the 256 bit AES are if you are told to or you are nervous about the algorithm (the 256 bit version has more rounds).
Encryption will always be crackable, we are just playing with the fact it would take 512 or so years to crack a particular scheme with the actual technology.
The point of encryption is that as the cryptographer I can choose to make the problem as hard for the attacker as I want to. The cost of performing the encryption is roughly proportional to the square of the number of bits. The cost of breaking the encryption increases as 2 to the power of the number of bits.
2^128 is a very big number. If the entire planet was turned into a vast computer with circuits an atom across it would take longer than the life of the universe to break an AES key by brute force.
I blogged earlier on the cluelessness of the Gallileo business model. Charging for something someone else is giving away is so 1990s. It only makes sense if there is something going on here we have not been told about. A requirement for europeans to pay to use Gallileo for example.
This reminds me of a conversation at an IETF some time ago.
Everyone was sitting round showing of their latest geek toys. The short wave radio that fits in a matchbox, a GPS unit fitted into a pen, a working two-way pager/cell phone combo, that sort of stuff.
So its the turn of this guy from the MIT Media Lab. He taps on the back of his hand a few times as if he is typing on a keypad, then he starts talking. Seeing that we are not at all impressed he says "oh hold on have to put them on speaker phone". And it is Nicholas Negroponte himself telling us the wonders of the subcutaneous telephone implant.
OK so if they are so great why doesn't he have one?
A while later they are closing up the bar and the Media Lab guy has disappeared and left his bag behind. I go off to the loo to look for him and I find him crouched over the toilet with his trousers down by his ankles and a bog roll shoved up his bum. "Are you alright", I ask. "Yeah fine, just receiving a fax".
Its worse than that, it treats each OSS project as if it was a geographically concentrated entity. Most are not.
The Apache group worked together for years without most of the principals so much as meeting. It began in Chicago at NCSA and spread.
The origin of the OSS movement was quite definitely Cambridge MA and Stallman. He may be mad as a hatter but he did start things.
OK so there are more OSS startups based in the valley than elsewhere. That merely shows that there is more VC in the Valley and they don't like to travel. If people are going to treat the OSS startups as if they are OSS then we might as well close up show now.
Most of the OSS startups have business models that make no more sense than Dilbert and Wally's attempt to corner the maket for Internet sales of tuna sandwiches. Boy it sure looks like 1997 again. Only difference this time is that OSS is the new Java.
The software and hardware should be exactly what the car needs to run, nothing more nothing less, and it should be made expressly for that purpose, to ensure that it is the proper fit.
You are assuming that the point here is to provide the best, fastest, most efficient engine management unit.
That is absolutely NOT the point here. The point is to restrict the degree of innovation that goes into the electronics area so that the skill of the driver plays a greater role than the skill of the programmer.
Traction control is a prime example, it was banned for several years until some of the teams worked out a way to create a traction control scheme that was barely within the rules. The ban was lifted in the end because it was unenforceable rather than being undesirable. Same goes for 'launch control'.
If I was designing an F1 EMU I would probably want to remove the CPU from things like the engine timing chain completely. Put in a set of table driven ASICs and do the whole thing in hardware. Use the CPU to download new parameter tables.
Given the complexity of the electonics on F1 cars I would certainly want an O/S in the master control unit. Otherwise there is simply too much going on. I do not want a faulty radio link to end up shutting down the engine. An O/S can help prevent that type of failure.
As I said before though, there is simply no comparison between any US motor sport and F1. Its like comparing the PGA tour to a works charity tournament. The top F1 drivers earn more than Tiger Woods. The Ferrari team has a budget of at least $450 million. The electronics division alone will be larger than the entire crew of a top NASCAR or Indiecar team.
The point is that at the moment only about four of the F1 teams are actually competative at any given time and only two or three have a realistic chance of winning the title.
The response from the ODF spokesperson was hardly what I would hope to see from an organization that was genuinely seeking to promote an open standard as opposed to being a way to sabotage a competitor.
If you have a genuine interest in ODF then the Microsoft news should be wellcomed. It will mean that there is a way for Office users to generate documents in a format that can be easily read by applications that comply with the ODF standard. I will probably get the plug in so that I can send editable documents to Linux users.
The ODF standard is far too new to be considered as a government mandate. UNIX was around for a decade before POSIX was mooted and then there was another decade before there was a requirement to support POSIX.
If there is a government mandate for a particular format then one would expect that Microsoft would provide a supported version of the plug in. At this point though there is no proven market for ODF and one can hardly expect Microsoft to commit to building the ODF market.
A much better way to deal with the news would have been to have hailed the step as an endorsement of ODF and glossed over the limited nature of the support on offer. As it is the article does more to highlight the contentious nature of ODF, the belief that Microsoft continues to be hostile to it and the beleif that the whole point of ODF is simply to attack Microsoft.
That might be an accurate description of the actual situation but that is hardly one that I would want to spend company time encouraging journalists to publicize.
Slashdot Mirror
The underlying problem here is that the people who wrote IPv6 had not got a clue about how they were going to deploy it and most still don't. They still treat NAT as if it was the cause of the problem rather than relizing the potential to use NAT as a means of achiving the necessary transition.
I have yet to see anyone write a coherent document that explains how an IPv6 connected machine can do anything usefull with their IPv6 address. Who is going to be putting up IPv6 sites to visit? To be on the Internet you are going to need an IPv4 address for a very long time.
Another clueless issue in the IPv6 spec is the assumption that there will be no NAT and that everyone will be happy to broadcast their MAC addresses to the rest of the world. Not a chance. Enterprises will still be NATed and Firewalled. So will home networks if users have a clue.
The other problem SCO faces is time, no new discovery means just that. SCO does not get extra time to follow up leads here.
SCO still faces a major problem in their suit, they have failed to state their claim with specificity. They might just possibly avoid summary judgement but they would have to come up with something pretty amazing at this stage and it would have to be something that really shows bad faith by IBM.
The EU Patent office is not the diploma mill that the USPTO has become. And the USPTO itself was much more sensible until the 1980s when Reagan tried to turn it into a profit center.
There are legit software patents, the RSA algorithm for example is a non trivial piece of intellectual work. 98% of software, business model and genetic patents are unadulterated crap but that does not mean that there is no legitimacy possible.
The Free Software movement is fixated on ending software patents because that is the personal obsession of RMS. It is not a realistic political goal. Reform of the USPTO on the other hand is very realistic and can gain support from both Open Source advocates and from the major software companies like IBM and Microsoft. The diploma mill even hurts the legitimate small inventor who has actually invented something. Send a notice of infringement to any large company today and it will be ignored. There are simply too many notices sent, to get attention you now have to file suit.
I wrote an essay on how we could reform the USPTO its on my blog some time I will get round to finishing part 4.
And Zaquawi became a terrorist after being tortured by the Jordanian police. How many new terrorists have been created at Abu Graihb and Guantanamo?
Of course there are people for whom every source is biased except Fox News. Quite what the point here is I don't know. Ann Coulter is a heck of a lot more prominent in Conservative circles than this photojournalist and she has given up even the pretense of honesty. Her latest polemic claims that liberals are in favor of teaching kindergarteners about fisting and anal sex, the footnote she uses to support this claim leads to a twenty year old paper on a program teaching adult students.
The first victim in any war is the truth. Both sides have propaganda teams trying to spin every story.
Where the Little Green Football wingnuts go wrong is when they say with a straight face that there is only liberal bias in the media.
Take a look at the video CNN used to show to demonstrate support for Bin Laden amongst Palestinians immediately after 9/11. You might think that they would show a demonstration with a hundred people or more. Instead they showed one family celebrating while everyone else ignored them.
If you look at the number of cases that LGF comes up with it is insignificant compared to the number that come up in the Daily Howler or on Huffington Post or the other liberal blogs every day.
None of the major news outlets have covered Abramoff in a tenth the detail that they covered just one of the Clinton pseudo-scandals. Yet today DeLay is indicted over a campaign contribution scandal that involved Abramoff (he was the chair of the corrupt committee) and is facing other Abramoff related corruption scandals. Ney announced he is not going to stand this November, again with pending Abramoff related perjury and corruption charges and Doolittle is about to go the same way.
That leaves Hastert as the only GOP leader not expected to face criminal charges. And we have heard nothing from the press about it.
That is real bias.
If this was a Linux feature you can be certain it would be tooted as the best thing ever.
Instead we have this bogus issue of the dangers of keeping old data. Version numbering was a feature on VMS from day one, nobody ever suggested that there was a security issue. Many companies and most competent programers use version control systems, you know CVS fof the same thing.
From a forensics point of view Microsoft is not revealling any new data. All they are doing is making data available to the user that was always available to the forensics team. The fact is that all modern O/S use file systems that leave old copies of file strewn around the disk at random unless you happen to have one with a strong delete turned on.
Ollie North was convicted of destroying evidence after he deleted files that turned out not to really be deleted. Plenty of hackers go to jail every year for the same carelessness.
I pay for my TV service. If the advertisers object to my editing out their ads they can stick it.
I would much rather have standard definition TV without ads than high definition TV with adverts.
That is why they have much more to fear from an in person defendant. The court is highly unlikely to allow the MPAA to extract any more in damages than they are entitled to.
In this case the MPAA can only demonstrate a loss of a few tens of dollars at most with respect to that one title. Their demand for $2500 is blowing smoke. They have no proof of any other damages.
It would probably not take much to persuade the judge to reduce the case to only consider the specific damages actually alleged. Once that happens the MPAA is going to court expensively to win damages of $10.
The discovery process is itself going to be highly damaging to the MPAA as they will inevitably reveal methods they would rather keep secret.
The 'little war' in Spain toppled Napoleon in the end. Without the Guerilla Wellington's Peninsular campaign would have been much less successful.
There was a time when knowledge of this type of history was a prerequisite for being considered an expert. Today we have know nothings and learn nothings in charge.
Which pretty much sums up the mindset of the inventors, the 'needle in haystack' school of user experience design.
Genera did that sooo much better. An IQ test disguised as an operating system.
The lack of success of the successor tends to confirm the beleif that the success of Unix was a fluke due to marketting (it free!) rather than technical merit (you get what you paid for).
On the contrary, the people of Iraq are opposing it.
And the people of this country will have the chance to repudiate the crimes committed in their name this November.
The actions of one utter fool can be reversed if enough people are willing to make it so. Ask you Congressman what their position on torture is, ask what they are doing to question the administration's torture policy. If they don't give the right answers ask the person challenging them in November. If they give the right answer help them defeat the incumbent, if not find a candidate who does, consider standing yourself.
The constitution states that treaties shall be the supreme law of the land. No ifs, no buts, no jurisdiction stripping, the supreme law of the land
And article 3 of the Geneva convention absolutely prohibits use of torture without exception. It is irrelevant what status the administration claims the prisoners have, the convention recognizes no exceptions.
And waterboarding was one of the favorite tortures of the Spanish inquisition, Torquemada himself describes its use. Ergo there is no doubt whatsoever that the administration has been illegally using torture and that the President, Vice President and Defense Secretary are unindicted war criminals.
The crimes are war crimes because the US has a specific law that states that crimes against the Geneva convention are war crimes.
The broader picture here though is that torture is a near useless form of interrogation. It is easy to make someone talk, impossible to work out whether they are telling the truth or not. Forget the ticking bomb scenario, the interrogation subject will lie.
Every victim of torture is a new potential terrorist. Al Zarqawi was merely a petty thief until the Jordanian secret police tortured him and gave him the grudge that he acted on for the next ten years after his release.
The reason that we won the cold war is because even the communists knew that the West had the moral high ground. Senior communists would defect or pass intelligence because they knew that the West had the moral cause and the Soviet Union was a tissue of corruption, lies and oppression. The pictures of the actions George W. Bush is responsible for at Abu Graihb, the knowledge that the same actions took place and take place today in the Guantanamo gulag, those attorcities serve as daily recruitment sargents for our enemies and the result is that we are not only less free we are less safe.
If you do the math it is impossible for the Democrats to win a sufficient majority in the Senate to convict after impeachment without Republican support. Every day it appears that the the administration gives new reason for Republicans to convict.
The administration has demonstrated a degree of incompetence, ignorance and stupidity that is without comparison in US history. They failled to complete the elimination of Al Qaeda and the Taleban because they were more interested in starting a new war in Iraq.
This is what evil looks like.
Actually in recycling terms its not. Lithium batteries are not expensive because the raw materials are more expensive, its the cost of manufacture.
It makes much more sense to use Lithium Ion batteries in an electric car than lead and it is quite possible that this will be the way that some of the more exotic technologies are finaly made cheap enough to become mainstream.
Despite the number of Li batteries that go into laptops they are still a small fraction of the battery market because each battery lasts for many hundred cycles. The other problem is that every battery is custom and the production runs are tiny.
What may well make more sense than the all electric car is the Li battery based hybrid or even a battery/fuel cell all electric car.
One point I did not understand in the article is how or why they would be using a Tesla AC induction motor in a vehicle with a DC power source. This is surely a mistake, not least because the principle disadvantage of the Tesla design is that the motor only works at a single speed.
Because the Scientologists would charge more than the poligraphers?
My understanding of the FIPS140 program is that they are required to give reasons for rejection. It is ten years since I did one but that was the case then.
There is a difference though between providing an instant reply in email and spending a couple of months crafting a fully documented explanation that states exactly why the module is not in conformance and the full set of steps required to bring it into conformance.
FOIA discovery is fully applicable to NIST so its not like they can hide the reason.
Not too long ago the general sentiment here was to send H1B workers as I then was 'back home'. Only I came over from CERN to help set up the Web consortium and bring the Web to the US. So net-net I think most people would say I created jobs here.
The point I was making is that most people only look at how these issues affect themselves, they are completely oblivious to what they are doing to the small guy themselves.
Some folk in this thread seem to think that their situation is somehow worse than the folk in the third world countries that the outsourcing is going to. Some even go on to suggest a policy of autarky for the developing world. Which is of course what India did for the first forty years or so after independence. They have done much better after realising this was a big mistake.
There are only two ways for large numbers of people to get richer. One is for the economy to make more, the other is to redistribute the wealth generated. Over the past six years there has been a deliberate effort to redistribute wealth in favor of the richest of the rich. But even if this was corrected it would have only a modest effect on the general population.
If we are to grow wealthier we must get more work from fewer people. Over the next decade or so a lot of people are going to be retiring and the workforce will shrink. Outsourcing is one way to adapt to that situation.
In the long term the Indian currency is going to grow stronger against the dollar and the benefits of outsourcing will decline. Already the advantage is much more marginal than it was five years ago. The wages are lower but so is productivity when your programmers are round the other side of the planet.
Completely right there. This is just self interested posturing, not a genuine concern. Besides which we don't usually talk about the Israeli IT industry as 'outsourcing'.
Many of the people who flame endlessly about outsourcing are the same people who flame endlessly about libertarianism and how great the free market is.
What do slashdotters tell the people whose clerical jobs are being replaced by the systems they are developing? There is a bizare doublespeak here: Outsourcing bad, automation good. Historically IT people have been really good at protecting their own job security while making everyone else's job insecure.
Given the state of the IT job market I have a hard time feeling sorry for folk being outsourced. There are plenty of IT jobs around - if you actually have the skills that are in demand. And that should not be a problem if you really are worth the prices IT people expect.
The people who have difficulty getting a new position are the folk without formal qualifications and without a depth of knowledge in a useful field. Back in the dotcom boom I came across a consultant 'programmer' who did not know C, Fortran or Java. The only 'programming language' he knew was Delphi.
That is a smart move and one that Linux distributions should take note of. Xen potentially has a lot to offer here.
The same problem appeared on blogger a year back. I don't know if they ever got the problem under control (I learned to stop using the next blog button), but it was a real pain.
There are two problems here, first MySpace should get a clue and eradicate the infestations. Second IE should have taken steps against forced downloads back in 1998 when it was only realplayer and flash that kept asking if they could install fifty times a day. At least that was only a consequence of the pages having the active content rather than a deliberate attack to put the malware on the machine.
The reason I use Windows is precisely because you don't notice this sort of stuff if you spend your time using Firefox. I want to know the next attack while it is going on.
As an absolute rule it should never be possible for active content running in a user application to crap on the operating system internals. It should never be possible for any program to install itself in a way that is intended to prevent removal.
Windows is trying to introduce this separation but running a Windows box without access to administrator or super user privs is pretty miserable. And to an attacker super user is administrator in any case.
It is possible that someone will invent a working time machine, warp drive, transmat beam or other device that works on physical principles currently entirely unknown to us. And yes, quantum computing effects are undestood, they are not an issue for symmetric ciphers.
It is not very likely that this will happen and if it did happen it is more than likely Gallileo becomes obsolete first.
Cryptanalysis effort has pretty much developed at exactly the speed predicted. DES was broken several years AFTER the original design life had expired. Even today I would have no real concern using DES for a DRM scheme, the cost of breaking DES is much higher than most rewards.
A much more likely event would be someone developing a better attack than brute force. This never happened for DES (except for the inversion effect which was always known), at least not in the sense that someone found an attack that was in total less effort than brute force (some people had attacks that they claimed were 2^50 or so but the amount of effort required per step was prohibitive.
On the contrary. Assuming that no technology is developed that uses an entirely different form of computation we can create a lower bound for the computation effort required.
The clock size cannot be any faster than the Planc time. A circuit cannot possibly check more than one key per clock cycle. A circuit must have at least one atom. We have a finite supply of atoms (one planet) and a finite supply of time (age of the universe).
The point is that when we chose to adopt 128 bit keys we did know pretty much what we are doing. There is no real probability that the state of the art in cryptography is going to advance from its current state (breaking 64 bit keys) to breaking 128 bit keys any time soon.
The only reasons to use the 256 bit AES are if you are told to or you are nervous about the algorithm (the 256 bit version has more rounds).
The point of encryption is that as the cryptographer I can choose to make the problem as hard for the attacker as I want to. The cost of performing the encryption is roughly proportional to the square of the number of bits. The cost of breaking the encryption increases as 2 to the power of the number of bits.
2^128 is a very big number. If the entire planet was turned into a vast computer with circuits an atom across it would take longer than the life of the universe to break an AES key by brute force.
I blogged earlier on the cluelessness of the Gallileo business model. Charging for something someone else is giving away is so 1990s. It only makes sense if there is something going on here we have not been told about. A requirement for europeans to pay to use Gallileo for example.
NCSA is part of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.
Everyone was sitting round showing of their latest geek toys. The short wave radio that fits in a matchbox, a GPS unit fitted into a pen, a working two-way pager/cell phone combo, that sort of stuff.
So its the turn of this guy from the MIT Media Lab. He taps on the back of his hand a few times as if he is typing on a keypad, then he starts talking. Seeing that we are not at all impressed he says "oh hold on have to put them on speaker phone". And it is Nicholas Negroponte himself telling us the wonders of the subcutaneous telephone implant.
OK so if they are so great why doesn't he have one?
A while later they are closing up the bar and the Media Lab guy has disappeared and left his bag behind. I go off to the loo to look for him and I find him crouched over the toilet with his trousers down by his ankles and a bog roll shoved up his bum. "Are you alright", I ask. "Yeah fine, just receiving a fax".
The Apache group worked together for years without most of the principals so much as meeting. It began in Chicago at NCSA and spread.
The origin of the OSS movement was quite definitely Cambridge MA and Stallman. He may be mad as a hatter but he did start things.
OK so there are more OSS startups based in the valley than elsewhere. That merely shows that there is more VC in the Valley and they don't like to travel. If people are going to treat the OSS startups as if they are OSS then we might as well close up show now.
Most of the OSS startups have business models that make no more sense than Dilbert and Wally's attempt to corner the maket for Internet sales of tuna sandwiches. Boy it sure looks like 1997 again. Only difference this time is that OSS is the new Java.
You are assuming that the point here is to provide the best, fastest, most efficient engine management unit.
That is absolutely NOT the point here. The point is to restrict the degree of innovation that goes into the electronics area so that the skill of the driver plays a greater role than the skill of the programmer.
Traction control is a prime example, it was banned for several years until some of the teams worked out a way to create a traction control scheme that was barely within the rules. The ban was lifted in the end because it was unenforceable rather than being undesirable. Same goes for 'launch control'.
If I was designing an F1 EMU I would probably want to remove the CPU from things like the engine timing chain completely. Put in a set of table driven ASICs and do the whole thing in hardware. Use the CPU to download new parameter tables.
Given the complexity of the electonics on F1 cars I would certainly want an O/S in the master control unit. Otherwise there is simply too much going on. I do not want a faulty radio link to end up shutting down the engine. An O/S can help prevent that type of failure.
As I said before though, there is simply no comparison between any US motor sport and F1. Its like comparing the PGA tour to a works charity tournament. The top F1 drivers earn more than Tiger Woods. The Ferrari team has a budget of at least $450 million. The electronics division alone will be larger than the entire crew of a top NASCAR or Indiecar team.
The point is that at the moment only about four of the F1 teams are actually competative at any given time and only two or three have a realistic chance of winning the title.
If you have a genuine interest in ODF then the Microsoft news should be wellcomed. It will mean that there is a way for Office users to generate documents in a format that can be easily read by applications that comply with the ODF standard. I will probably get the plug in so that I can send editable documents to Linux users.
The ODF standard is far too new to be considered as a government mandate. UNIX was around for a decade before POSIX was mooted and then there was another decade before there was a requirement to support POSIX.
If there is a government mandate for a particular format then one would expect that Microsoft would provide a supported version of the plug in. At this point though there is no proven market for ODF and one can hardly expect Microsoft to commit to building the ODF market.
A much better way to deal with the news would have been to have hailed the step as an endorsement of ODF and glossed over the limited nature of the support on offer. As it is the article does more to highlight the contentious nature of ODF, the belief that Microsoft continues to be hostile to it and the beleif that the whole point of ODF is simply to attack Microsoft.
That might be an accurate description of the actual situation but that is hardly one that I would want to spend company time encouraging journalists to publicize.