As for Elliptic Curve Cryptography as mentioned in this article - it's still in its infancy - at least compared to other ciphers. This is just a stupid publicity show. But I bet I can win that $1M with an investment of under $20.
I really wish Certicom had not done this in this particular way. Offering million dollar prizes is actually quite common in the crypto world. Nobody ever collects because when the schemes are broken the company offering the prize goes under.
Certicom are not that kind of fly-by-night so why do something that makes you look like a New Hampshire time-share scam?
ECC is certainly interesting and it turns out that there are several prizes rather than just one big prize. But even so it is a pretty hokey way to go.
Ron Rivest once told me that the reason they started the RSA series of challenges was that he was a bit bored being told of every incremental break of a slightly larger RSA modulus. So putting up a prize established clearly defined thresholds for improvements.
The problem with ECC is that the whole scheme depends on a hypothesis that manipulations of eliptic curves are intrinsically harder to reverse than manipulations in other fields such as modular arithmetic. The fact is that we know very little of eliptic curves, there are still very basic results being discovered.
This would not matter if ECC was a completely unencumbered technology. But at this point RSA is patent expired and ECC is encumbered. I just don't see the need to go for ECC technology. If RSA is broken in a modular field the same result will almost certainly smash the eliptics schemes.
I suggest we apply the Sharia-law on these cockroaches.
That is far too progressive.
During medieval times a common form of execution/torture was to insert a sharpened stake into the anus then let the victim's own weight impale them on it.
One of the more famous exponents of this particular method was 'Vlad the impaler', otherwise known as Dracula.
Alternatively if you are opposed to capital punishment, consider the total number of penis inches that a spammer has claimed to make available. Traction equipment would be applied to the genitalia in question and...
The only thing that has ever failed is one of the RAMS which went bad and this led to shutting down the machine for around 15 minutes.
Do you expect this sort of reliability from Dell?
Who said anything about Dell? I have run machine rooms with hundreds to thousands of machines. I simply could not put up with the level of reliability you describe.
Low end Intel boxes do have reliability issues, but the issue is not the chip, its the crappy construction, crappy power supplies and the rest. Sun do better than the lowest of the low but they do not do great. IBM do a vastly better job.
Sun got where it is today by being the cheap UNIX vendor, not the high qulity vendor. They priced at 20% less than DEC with a MTF of months rather than years.
How can Apple sell hardware? I mean, how could they possibly sell a single Mac?/me types away on my PowerMac G5
It is not the price issue, clearly doing the job is not the same as doing the job well, doing it quickly or doing it easily.
Linux is not on a par with the very best commercial O/S in terms of smooth integration. Which does not matter for most nerd types, Linux is good enough and the benefits of being able to fix it when it is broken is often a bigger advantage.
But Apple is certainly at least as good as Sun at providing a smooth integrated O/S that just works. It is a long time since I have used a Sun machine, when I did back in 1995 their integration was pathetic, they had all this multimedia gubbins and none of the drivers worked. It was worth paying the premium for Dec hardware.
For at least five years Intel boxes have been more than sufficient for most needs and Linux has looked at least as good as Solaris so why pay five times the price?
Apple hardware fetches a premium, but not a huge premium. It makes a lot of sense if you want a Unix machine, you get a product that is well integrated, things work as you expect them to. That is worth real money.
The only reason people buy Sun is that there is quite a bit of enterprise software that only runs on Sun or Windows NT.
To decide that since we aren't quite ready to send someone to Mars and then bring them back home we will instead just do what we can at the moment and send someone to die on Mars is idiotic in the extreme.
That depends on who is sent. I can think of quite a few spammers that we could send, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Paris Hilton.
Er, anybody see the irony in this snarky dogmatic theme?
So, you've done lots of original research and science in the field of evolution, have you?;) Because otherwise, you're just snidely repeating what you've been told, and thinking that it makes you some kind of independent-thinking iconoclast...
True fact: Spock was put in the background during the first 6 episodes of Star Trek because the network thought his pointy ears would get the bible belt fulminating against a character who looks like the devil. The ears were airbrushed out of some early PR photos.
There are pig ignorant folk in every country. But its only in the US that they get to control what the rest of the country watches, or run the country)
Things started going badly south during the Colin Baker era and the Sylvester McCoy episodes were just awful. What a shame that just as they finally had the ability to create decent special effects the writing fell apart.
One of my cousins used to do the special effects for Dr Who. He did K9 and wrote some of the scripts. He even spent some years trying to get another series off the ground after Terry Nation died
In their time they were not that bad. If you compare them to the Star Trek 'effects' of the same vintage there is no comparison, the BBC effects were low budget but they were much more imaginative. Star Trek's idea of originality was a new pattern of ridges on a new kind of alien's forehead.
Of course over in the UK we teach this thing called evolution in the schools so there is kind of an assumption that aliens are likely to be completely different.
The other thing is that the BBC still does a lot with radio, we are quite used to seeing stuff that leaves much to the imagination.
I know this is going to sound wrong but I really hope Network Solutions and Register.com win this and then countersue their asses.
Once upon a time registering a domain name was free. Then assholes started with asshole lawsuits. That was the point at which there was no way but to have a registration fee. The way the fee was originally fixed was to divide the $5 million they reconned would be needed for a legal fund by the number of domains out then.
I can't see how these guys think they can get away with suing folk who have been doing their business since 1995 on the basis of a 1999 patent.
It is a completely lame idea in any case. The patent is horseshit.
Interesting--can you give a bit of background on this? The barratry thing doesn't apply until after SCO starts sueing aix or linux users, which probably won't happen.
No, look into the Prince sports / prince.com case. The court awarded damages for making threats and demands.
In the UK even a threat of legal action can have legal consequences.
Actually, I think this is at the judges discretion. There have been libel cases where one side has won, but has been awarded 1p damages and told to pay costs, which is worse than losing!
There are two factors that come into this. The first is that a judge can refuse to award costs to a plaintif if they win an award that is derisory.
The second more interesting one is that the defendant can make an offer to settle for a particular sum. If the plaintif wins the case and the damages are less than or equal to the amount of the payment into court the plaintif has to pay the costs of both sides from the date of the payment into court if full.
Usually you only get about 70% of your costs paid (part and party costs), but the judge can award costs in full (indemnity costs) if the case should never been brought or alternatively should never have been necessary.
Doesn't the UK have a law against barratry, something the USA desperately needs? SCO could get royally fucked by playing their legal games in the UK. We can only hope
Damn right, first in the UK the loser pays the costs of both sides. SCO is a foreign corporation and could probably be required to put up a surety if they brought a claim.
Second and more interesting there is actually a tort in the UK that covers this exact type of case.
It is not a good idea to send out demand letters to a UK address unless you can substantiate the claim made.
The UK legal systen is not the place to start frivolous lawsuits unless you have no money to start with and so won't be worse off if you get made bankrupt.
Doesn't even NEED devices attached. Run this through an Xray machine and pray you have your receipt and owners manual with you when they are trying to figure out why your jacket is wired up like a Christmas tree.
Actually there is no problem, You have to take the jacket off anyway. When I put mine through an airport scanner the TSA generally know what it is and the sort of people who wear them. Unless the guy is a complete rube they generally look it through discretely without telling the whole concourse about it.
Of course the fact that mine has 'US Secret Service' on the front probably helps.
RTFM. You come on to this blatently pro Latin site, don't know shit about Latin and expect not to get modded down after posting such a crass newbie question? The big question is: will this baby run Latin? Or, imagine a forum of these. Or, in Ancient Rome the orgy finds you. etc...
That reminds me of the time that someone posted the Oxford trolleybus poem to soc.culture.british. It is dogrel, half latin, half English, mostly in the bits where the author's latin gave out.
Of course someone asked the group for a translation. So I obliged and translated all the English bits into Latin for them.
You are obviously not a lawyer and/or you have no idea how the law works in practice. Discovery deadlines were meant to be broken.
But in this particular case the 'discovery' is not really discovery as such but the defendant forcing the plaintif to actually reveal their true statement of claim in a form that makes it possible to actually mount a defense.
Courts tend to consider that type of issue rather more skeptically. You can dick arround making the other side perform makework for only so long before the court tells you to stop with the games and to start behaving in a manner that will allow the case to be set down for trial.
Closed-source cryptographic systems (which is essentially what this is) are often very insecure if they are not peer-reviewed.
The Yahoo scheme is not closed source, it is just not yet published, most likely explanation being that the spec is not finished.
The security of domain keys does not depend on the secrecy of the spec. The problem seems to be that they would like to get some other ISPs to endorse their efforts and they would like to be able to make a joint announcement. Meanwhile those efforts are clearly stalled and AOL implemented SPF a few days ago.
First we have to get the whole issue into an open standards working group. Then we have to sling out the managers from the various companies who clearly have no clue how to set up a technical standard so that the Internet buys in.
All the members of the big four ISP group (six to date) have really good technical people with great ideas to contribute. What happens is that the managers all go off to the meetings together and work PHB style (that is Pointy Haired Boss, not the other PHB).
Put the technical folk together in a room and we will have a spec PDQ. Just keep out the IETF politicians and the Manager politicians.
FYI, the odds on the street of IETF approving a new DNS RR type (as discussed today on the SPF mailing list) is that it would take at least 2 years and more likely 5 years.
This assement leaves out the worst part. The price of getting a RR issued would be that some completely useless and pointless change would be made to the spec that would be incompatible with existing deployments.
DNSSEC could have been deployed three years ago, the deal breaker for the IETF was changes to the spec to make it possible to deploy in existing large zones like dotCom without a major impact on the existing infrastructure. The WG chair turned this into a personal crusade and used a series of backroom tricks to stop it taking place. On the one hand you have the IETF chair congratulating himself for leading such a fine open and inclusive organization then when something that matters is discussed the peons find that the real discussion and the real power takes place in secret behind closed doors.
If Eric Raymond, IETF, et al. are interested in addressing the problem, then let's see their proposed solutions.
Actually Eric has been supporting the SPF spec which is public, has an open discussion group and is currently in pole position wrt other schemes.
The problem we have is that the standards process in the IETF/IRTF has essentially failled. First the original chair of the group hijacked it to use it as a platform to get his name and that of his company into every anti-spam puff piece in every newspaper arround. He contributed nothing of value and pushed out all the people who did have something to contribute.
There was an opportunity to get something going on the standards track but the IETF establishment decided to nix the idea - basically it will be July before it is possible to even start the process of forming a working group there.
It is no surprise then that most commercial proposals have been avoiding the IETF like it was a bad smell. The IETF has no concept of working to a commercially relevant time scale - like months rather than decades.
So we have ended up with about ten specs that have been circulating samizdat fashion amongst small circles since last February. The premise being that we have to short-circuit the standards process somehow. Only we have now been doing this for almost a year without result while in other areas it has taken less than a year to do a full spec - given the right circumstances.
Fortunately IETF is not the only game in town. OASIS is a far more professional outfit. In OASIS you have a defined membership of the group and you hold weekly or bi-weekly con-calls so that things get done on a weekly basis, not the week before the RFC-editor cuttoff before the next IETF meeting 3 times a year. You also have votes and clear lines of accountability. In the IETF the chair can basically do what the fuck they like and ignore the consensus of the group. You have the illusion of participation but the establishment hold all the cards. It is all about control.
W3C is also OK-ish but the membership fees are ludicrous ($55K) and you keep getting semantic web thrust at you.
OASIS does have the disadvantage of being a commercial consortium rather than a trully open volunteer body, but in practice we get to co-opt anyone we want to a group.
Better still, if it was really clever it could read the tags in their clothing too. So a bus-load of obese american tourists turns up, the rfid reader detects 40 US citizens with waist sizes of more than 80 inches and BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not very likely that the RFID signal gets through the bus...
The recent Al Qaeda attempt to assasinate President Musharraf, current military dictator of Pakistan onetime Taleban/Al Qaeda aly used a radio controlled charge set to destroy a bridge as the President's car went over.
In the event the charge went off late because the signal was jammed by some counter-measure on the car. That leads to the question of whether the countermeasure could have been used to trigger the bomb instead. After all there are not that many cars that go arround loaded up with high intensity radio jamming devices.
Exactly. Also, just because a US consumer pays $99.00 for a phone doesn't mean that the phone costs $99.00. Usually the cell phone company pays a substaintial amount of the handset and tries to make their money back during the life of a contract.
Or not.
The problem with the wireless industry is that there are huge up front capital costs and the marginal cost of an additional customer is essentially zero.
With competition the price of service tends towards the marginal cost and the carriers all lose money on their investment - but they can still make an operating profit if their cash inflow is greater than their cash outflow. Basically the initial capital investment may never be repaid.
So what the price of wirless service comes down to is really a reflection on the competative situation rather than intrinsic costs. The prices of the phones were all 'with service' so the price is basically fixed by the extent to which the US or Canadian carriers subsidise the phones.
Yet another variable is the curency fluctuations. The dollar is currently weak - down from 1.4 $ to the pound to $1.8 with a similar decline in almost every other currency market apart from some in the far east where the countries have been buying dollars to keep their own currencies from rising. The cost of the phone to the supplier will differ greatly depending on when they signed their contract with the supplier and the currency the contract is priced in.
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities.
Lets look at what the paid republican hack left out here, take the next sentence:
"The state's highest officials responsible for ensuring efficiency, uniformity, and fairness in the election failed to fulfill their responsibilities and were subsequently unwilling to take responsibility."
That is not all, the report also states "The Commission's findings make one thing clear: widespread voter disenfranchisement--not the dead-heat contest--was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. After carefully and fully examining all the evidence, the Commission found a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) occurred in Florida."
If a party goes to this length to fix an election they will certainly make sure they spread disinformation on slashdot to try to discredit reports of what went on. The poster substantially misrepresented the findings of the report by selective editing. They do not find Hariss and Bush blameless - they find them responsible.
As for plasma/LCD, why? Just because they are available doesn't mean that your CRT TVs are obsolete.
$3000 plus for a TV is a heck of a lot, but $3000 on home repairs or decorating vanishes pretty damn quick.
I suspect that quite a few of the people buying plasma TVs are doing so because it is cheaper to buy a plasma TV at current rates than to try to work a decent sized CRT TV into a decor scheme.
My Sony Wega works really well in the corner we have put it in, but there is no way we could have a CRT TV of any decent size in any other room downstairs. The original plan was to mount a plasma screen in the library over the fireplace.
On the HDTV thing, don't be too sure that the high definition feature is going to be the most important one. I can see the point of HD movies - HBO in high definition is a no-brainer. But CNN, CNBC and PBS? I just don't see the value add HD gives for monster garage or the new yankee workshop.
The real value of going digital is to have more over the air channels. In the US that is not a big thing since you can get 200 channels on satelite and at least 40 odd on most cable networks.
Looking at what they have deployed in the UK today you can see real value and a workable business model. I don't see any coherence, value or business model for the US HDTV scheme.
Which reminds me, I am just waiting for my 6 years old 29" Sony black triniton to break down so that I can buy myself a plasma screen. I just can't bring myself to swap the working tv with a flatscreen when comparing the quality of the picture.
You may be waiting many years then. You would be pretty unlucky to get less than ten years use out of a Sony Trinitron. They build those things pretty damn well.
Over Xmas I spent some time looking for a replacement for my parent's 14 year old Sony TV. The tube was fine but the tuner had some wierd fault (intermitent). In the end just got a new tuner box with the latest HDTV and the thing worked fine. This was in the UK and they have really good HDTV coverage now, 20 channels all for free, well the cost of the BBC license (#100 a year, $180 in US money at Bush era exchange rates)
We looked at new TVs but it was really clear that now is a lousy time to buy a TV. You either get a CRT TV which will be bulky and obsolete in 3 years or you plonk down $$$$ for plasma or LCD.
Wait two or three years and large flat panel displays will be as cheap as CRT is today or cheaper. They are pricey today only because of the volume thing and the kewlness premium. Intrinsic cost of manufacture and distribution of flat panel displays is much, much less than for CRT. They are much simpler designs.
People have been crying wolf over the addres space for decades. Year after year, it's the same prediction. We will eventually run out of IPv4 addresses, but I doubt I'll be alive then.
Actually they ran out years ago, it is only NAT that is keeping the system going.
The problem is a bunch of rubes on the IESG and IAB who think that the solution to every problem is for folk to wait patiently while the elite few work out a solution. Meanwhile they do their best to derail any pragmatic fixes folk apply that don't meet their notion of what the pure architecture should be.
The overall effect is that they diminish their credibility with the people who are in a position to deploy a fix.
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish Certicom had not done this in this particular way. Offering million dollar prizes is actually quite common in the crypto world. Nobody ever collects because when the schemes are broken the company offering the prize goes under. Certicom are not that kind of fly-by-night so why do something that makes you look like a New Hampshire time-share scam?
ECC is certainly interesting and it turns out that there are several prizes rather than just one big prize. But even so it is a pretty hokey way to go.
Ron Rivest once told me that the reason they started the RSA series of challenges was that he was a bit bored being told of every incremental break of a slightly larger RSA modulus. So putting up a prize established clearly defined thresholds for improvements.
The problem with ECC is that the whole scheme depends on a hypothesis that manipulations of eliptic curves are intrinsically harder to reverse than manipulations in other fields such as modular arithmetic. The fact is that we know very little of eliptic curves, there are still very basic results being discovered.
This would not matter if ECC was a completely unencumbered technology. But at this point RSA is patent expired and ECC is encumbered. I just don't see the need to go for ECC technology. If RSA is broken in a modular field the same result will almost certainly smash the eliptics schemes.
That is far too progressive.
During medieval times a common form of execution/torture was to insert a sharpened stake into the anus then let the victim's own weight impale them on it.
One of the more famous exponents of this particular method was 'Vlad the impaler', otherwise known as Dracula.
Alternatively if you are opposed to capital punishment, consider the total number of penis inches that a spammer has claimed to make available. Traction equipment would be applied to the genitalia in question and ...
I don't think I want to be around when you try out the next gadget your wife gives you then.
Particularly if it turns out to be a high tech corkscrew and not a vibrator.
Who said anything about Dell? I have run machine rooms with hundreds to thousands of machines. I simply could not put up with the level of reliability you describe.
Low end Intel boxes do have reliability issues, but the issue is not the chip, its the crappy construction, crappy power supplies and the rest. Sun do better than the lowest of the low but they do not do great. IBM do a vastly better job.
Sun got where it is today by being the cheap UNIX vendor, not the high qulity vendor. They priced at 20% less than DEC with a MTF of months rather than years.
It is not the price issue, clearly doing the job is not the same as doing the job well, doing it quickly or doing it easily.
Linux is not on a par with the very best commercial O/S in terms of smooth integration. Which does not matter for most nerd types, Linux is good enough and the benefits of being able to fix it when it is broken is often a bigger advantage.
But Apple is certainly at least as good as Sun at providing a smooth integrated O/S that just works. It is a long time since I have used a Sun machine, when I did back in 1995 their integration was pathetic, they had all this multimedia gubbins and none of the drivers worked. It was worth paying the premium for Dec hardware.
For at least five years Intel boxes have been more than sufficient for most needs and Linux has looked at least as good as Solaris so why pay five times the price?
Apple hardware fetches a premium, but not a huge premium. It makes a lot of sense if you want a Unix machine, you get a product that is well integrated, things work as you expect them to. That is worth real money.
The only reason people buy Sun is that there is quite a bit of enterprise software that only runs on Sun or Windows NT.
Bush would probably nomiate the author of this video
Even if you are a republican you will never be able to watch political attack ads in the same way ever again.
That depends on who is sent. I can think of quite a few spammers that we could send, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Paris Hilton.
True fact: Spock was put in the background during the first 6 episodes of Star Trek because the network thought his pointy ears would get the bible belt fulminating against a character who looks like the devil. The ears were airbrushed out of some early PR photos.
There are pig ignorant folk in every country. But its only in the US that they get to control what the rest of the country watches, or run the country)
One of my cousins used to do the special effects for Dr Who. He did K9 and wrote some of the scripts. He even spent some years trying to get another series off the ground after Terry Nation died
In their time they were not that bad. If you compare them to the Star Trek 'effects' of the same vintage there is no comparison, the BBC effects were low budget but they were much more imaginative. Star Trek's idea of originality was a new pattern of ridges on a new kind of alien's forehead.
Of course over in the UK we teach this thing called evolution in the schools so there is kind of an assumption that aliens are likely to be completely different.
The other thing is that the BBC still does a lot with radio, we are quite used to seeing stuff that leaves much to the imagination.
Once upon a time registering a domain name was free. Then assholes started with asshole lawsuits. That was the point at which there was no way but to have a registration fee. The way the fee was originally fixed was to divide the $5 million they reconned would be needed for a legal fund by the number of domains out then.
I can't see how these guys think they can get away with suing folk who have been doing their business since 1995 on the basis of a 1999 patent.
It is a completely lame idea in any case. The patent is horseshit.
No, look into the Prince sports / prince.com case. The court awarded damages for making threats and demands.
In the UK even a threat of legal action can have legal consequences.
There are two factors that come into this. The first is that a judge can refuse to award costs to a plaintif if they win an award that is derisory.
The second more interesting one is that the defendant can make an offer to settle for a particular sum. If the plaintif wins the case and the damages are less than or equal to the amount of the payment into court the plaintif has to pay the costs of both sides from the date of the payment into court if full.
Usually you only get about 70% of your costs paid (part and party costs), but the judge can award costs in full (indemnity costs) if the case should never been brought or alternatively should never have been necessary.
Damn right, first in the UK the loser pays the costs of both sides. SCO is a foreign corporation and could probably be required to put up a surety if they brought a claim.
Second and more interesting there is actually a tort in the UK that covers this exact type of case.
It is not a good idea to send out demand letters to a UK address unless you can substantiate the claim made.
The UK legal systen is not the place to start frivolous lawsuits unless you have no money to start with and so won't be worse off if you get made bankrupt.
Actually there is no problem, You have to take the jacket off anyway. When I put mine through an airport scanner the TSA generally know what it is and the sort of people who wear them. Unless the guy is a complete rube they generally look it through discretely without telling the whole concourse about it.
Of course the fact that mine has 'US Secret Service' on the front probably helps.
That reminds me of the time that someone posted the Oxford trolleybus poem to soc.culture.british. It is dogrel, half latin, half English, mostly in the bits where the author's latin gave out.
Of course someone asked the group for a translation. So I obliged and translated all the English bits into Latin for them.
But in this particular case the 'discovery' is not really discovery as such but the defendant forcing the plaintif to actually reveal their true statement of claim in a form that makes it possible to actually mount a defense.
Courts tend to consider that type of issue rather more skeptically. You can dick arround making the other side perform makework for only so long before the court tells you to stop with the games and to start behaving in a manner that will allow the case to be set down for trial.
The Yahoo scheme is not closed source, it is just not yet published, most likely explanation being that the spec is not finished.
The security of domain keys does not depend on the secrecy of the spec. The problem seems to be that they would like to get some other ISPs to endorse their efforts and they would like to be able to make a joint announcement. Meanwhile those efforts are clearly stalled and AOL implemented SPF a few days ago.
First we have to get the whole issue into an open standards working group. Then we have to sling out the managers from the various companies who clearly have no clue how to set up a technical standard so that the Internet buys in.
All the members of the big four ISP group (six to date) have really good technical people with great ideas to contribute. What happens is that the managers all go off to the meetings together and work PHB style (that is Pointy Haired Boss, not the other PHB).
Put the technical folk together in a room and we will have a spec PDQ. Just keep out the IETF politicians and the Manager politicians.
This assement leaves out the worst part. The price of getting a RR issued would be that some completely useless and pointless change would be made to the spec that would be incompatible with existing deployments.
DNSSEC could have been deployed three years ago, the deal breaker for the IETF was changes to the spec to make it possible to deploy in existing large zones like dotCom without a major impact on the existing infrastructure. The WG chair turned this into a personal crusade and used a series of backroom tricks to stop it taking place. On the one hand you have the IETF chair congratulating himself for leading such a fine open and inclusive organization then when something that matters is discussed the peons find that the real discussion and the real power takes place in secret behind closed doors.
Actually Eric has been supporting the SPF spec which is public, has an open discussion group and is currently in pole position wrt other schemes.
The problem we have is that the standards process in the IETF/IRTF has essentially failled. First the original chair of the group hijacked it to use it as a platform to get his name and that of his company into every anti-spam puff piece in every newspaper arround. He contributed nothing of value and pushed out all the people who did have something to contribute.
There was an opportunity to get something going on the standards track but the IETF establishment decided to nix the idea - basically it will be July before it is possible to even start the process of forming a working group there.
It is no surprise then that most commercial proposals have been avoiding the IETF like it was a bad smell. The IETF has no concept of working to a commercially relevant time scale - like months rather than decades.
So we have ended up with about ten specs that have been circulating samizdat fashion amongst small circles since last February. The premise being that we have to short-circuit the standards process somehow. Only we have now been doing this for almost a year without result while in other areas it has taken less than a year to do a full spec - given the right circumstances.
Fortunately IETF is not the only game in town. OASIS is a far more professional outfit. In OASIS you have a defined membership of the group and you hold weekly or bi-weekly con-calls so that things get done on a weekly basis, not the week before the RFC-editor cuttoff before the next IETF meeting 3 times a year. You also have votes and clear lines of accountability. In the IETF the chair can basically do what the fuck they like and ignore the consensus of the group. You have the illusion of participation but the establishment hold all the cards. It is all about control.
W3C is also OK-ish but the membership fees are ludicrous ($55K) and you keep getting semantic web thrust at you.
OASIS does have the disadvantage of being a commercial consortium rather than a trully open volunteer body, but in practice we get to co-opt anyone we want to a group.
Better still, if it was really clever it could read the tags in their clothing too. So a bus-load of obese american tourists turns up, the rfid reader detects 40 US citizens with waist sizes of more than 80 inches and BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not very likely that the RFID signal gets through the bus...
The recent Al Qaeda attempt to assasinate President Musharraf, current military dictator of Pakistan onetime Taleban/Al Qaeda aly used a radio controlled charge set to destroy a bridge as the President's car went over.
In the event the charge went off late because the signal was jammed by some counter-measure on the car. That leads to the question of whether the countermeasure could have been used to trigger the bomb instead. After all there are not that many cars that go arround loaded up with high intensity radio jamming devices.
Or not.
The problem with the wireless industry is that there are huge up front capital costs and the marginal cost of an additional customer is essentially zero.
With competition the price of service tends towards the marginal cost and the carriers all lose money on their investment - but they can still make an operating profit if their cash inflow is greater than their cash outflow. Basically the initial capital investment may never be repaid.
So what the price of wirless service comes down to is really a reflection on the competative situation rather than intrinsic costs. The prices of the phones were all 'with service' so the price is basically fixed by the extent to which the US or Canadian carriers subsidise the phones.
Yet another variable is the curency fluctuations. The dollar is currently weak - down from 1.4 $ to the pound to $1.8 with a similar decline in almost every other currency market apart from some in the far east where the countries have been buying dollars to keep their own currencies from rising. The cost of the phone to the supplier will differ greatly depending on when they signed their contract with the supplier and the currency the contract is priced in.
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities.
Lets look at what the paid republican hack left out here, take the next sentence: "The state's highest officials responsible for ensuring efficiency, uniformity, and fairness in the election failed to fulfill their responsibilities and were subsequently unwilling to take responsibility."
That is not all, the report also states "The Commission's findings make one thing clear: widespread voter disenfranchisement--not the dead-heat contest--was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election. After carefully and fully examining all the evidence, the Commission found a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) occurred in Florida."
If a party goes to this length to fix an election they will certainly make sure they spread disinformation on slashdot to try to discredit reports of what went on. The poster substantially misrepresented the findings of the report by selective editing. They do not find Hariss and Bush blameless - they find them responsible.
$3000 plus for a TV is a heck of a lot, but $3000 on home repairs or decorating vanishes pretty damn quick.
I suspect that quite a few of the people buying plasma TVs are doing so because it is cheaper to buy a plasma TV at current rates than to try to work a decent sized CRT TV into a decor scheme.
My Sony Wega works really well in the corner we have put it in, but there is no way we could have a CRT TV of any decent size in any other room downstairs. The original plan was to mount a plasma screen in the library over the fireplace.
On the HDTV thing, don't be too sure that the high definition feature is going to be the most important one. I can see the point of HD movies - HBO in high definition is a no-brainer. But CNN, CNBC and PBS? I just don't see the value add HD gives for monster garage or the new yankee workshop.
The real value of going digital is to have more over the air channels. In the US that is not a big thing since you can get 200 channels on satelite and at least 40 odd on most cable networks.
Looking at what they have deployed in the UK today you can see real value and a workable business model. I don't see any coherence, value or business model for the US HDTV scheme.
You may be waiting many years then. You would be pretty unlucky to get less than ten years use out of a Sony Trinitron. They build those things pretty damn well.
Over Xmas I spent some time looking for a replacement for my parent's 14 year old Sony TV. The tube was fine but the tuner had some wierd fault (intermitent). In the end just got a new tuner box with the latest HDTV and the thing worked fine. This was in the UK and they have really good HDTV coverage now, 20 channels all for free, well the cost of the BBC license (#100 a year, $180 in US money at Bush era exchange rates)
We looked at new TVs but it was really clear that now is a lousy time to buy a TV. You either get a CRT TV which will be bulky and obsolete in 3 years or you plonk down $$$$ for plasma or LCD.
Wait two or three years and large flat panel displays will be as cheap as CRT is today or cheaper. They are pricey today only because of the volume thing and the kewlness premium. Intrinsic cost of manufacture and distribution of flat panel displays is much, much less than for CRT. They are much simpler designs.
Actually they ran out years ago, it is only NAT that is keeping the system going.
The problem is a bunch of rubes on the IESG and IAB who think that the solution to every problem is for folk to wait patiently while the elite few work out a solution. Meanwhile they do their best to derail any pragmatic fixes folk apply that don't meet their notion of what the pure architecture should be.
The overall effect is that they diminish their credibility with the people who are in a position to deploy a fix.