"the entire internet was shut down for a day or so to switch over to IPV4"
Slashdot vs MIT Tech Review, well Simson Garfinkel...
If people actually read the article... so it is Slashdot blathering as usual.
Simson is only saying out loud what everyone who has anything to do with the real Internet has known for years. There is a crushing need for IPv6 and the IETF plan for transition is about as practical as a manned space trip to Mars - not impossible but likely to cost a couple of trillion dollars and take until 2030.
The IETF have been blowing smoke on this one for ten years now. The IPv4 transition took place when the users of the Internet could all meet together in the same room.
Rather than daemonizing NAT, the IETF should have worked out a way to co-opt NAT technology as a means of gatewaying between the IPv4 and IPv6 worlds. Instead a bunch of people got all bent out of shape because the real world did not fit their architecture the way they thought it should.
Simson does not get the security issue quite right, NAT is not a perfect security solution, but it does have definite advantages. I don't have to worry about any of the machines behind my NAT box being probed on an unexpected port - important if you run alpha releases of stuff. Basically you need some form of perimeter security, you also need protocols designed to play nice with perimeter security. Unfortunately a lot of videoconference protocols are completely unworkable firewall wise - they use hundreds of ports for no real reason.
The Google IPO is not a major issue, they have what - 10,000 machines, call it 20,000. Max damages that would be awarded if they lost is $699 times that. 14 million is not worth a sneeze when an IPO of Google's size is concerned.
SCO can wave their claims arround and splutter about vast damages but the fact is no judge is going to allow a penal award. Google have every reason to believe that they have the rights to the code they are using.
Google can probably even claim the cost off their insurance.
You've been reading way too much of the Weekly World News and other supermarket tabloids if you're ignorant enough to believe that machines were programmed to cheat black voters in this way. There is ZERO evidence to support this crazy notion, unless you're part of the left-wing equivalent of the black helicopter crowd.
Right, that would be why the inquiry found that there had been a deliberate attempt to keep black voters of the electoral rolls.
The way they did it was by manipulating the 'scrub lists' supposed to keep fellons from voting. Basically any voter who had the same birthday as a convicted criminal and had a name that shared four consecutive letters that were the same AND WAS THE SAME COLOR as a convicted criminal LOST THEIR VOTE.
The contract to scrub the lists went to a company whose office manager was a "close personal friend" of Katherine Harris - despite the fact that they bid over ten times more than the next most expensive bid.
I'm rarely dismissive about someone's intelligence just from such a short post, but your acceptance of this makes me question your ability to reason and to gather relevant facts.
I don't think it takes a degree in nuclear physics to see that Harris and Bush were and are corrupt, but I have one anyway.
What it takes to ignore the stench of Harken, Haliburton, Enron and the rest of the scandals of the Texan crowd I don't know, cash stuffed in brown envelopes I guess.
Although if you note the great?-grandparent post, you will see that the Machines are supposedly identical. Which means that there should be no variation.
The machines were identical, the configuration was not. These are
Pallister has done a bunch of research as has the civil rights commission. See my sig for details. The GOP flacks on slashdot have been making the standard ad-hominem attacks to try to avoid dealing with the substance of his claims.
Note also that the guy the GOP dredged up to dispute the civil rights commission report is the same right wing crank that was caught peddling bogus statistics about gun safety recently.
Some people just will NOT vote correctly. They will NOT follow instructions. They just won't.
You are guilty of common problem amongst computer types - blame the user when the machine is at fault.
The cause of large number of Florida vote counting errors in 2000 was purely machine errors. A crease or smudge or even a speck of dust could be interpreted as a vote causing the whole ballot to be rejected.
In the white, republican voting areas the voting machines were programmed to buzz and alert the workers to the fact that there was a problem and the ballot would be put through again or the voter got a fresh ballot.
In the black areas the exact same voting machines were programmed to silently eat up the ballot and ignore the vote.
It had nothing to do with the users, it was purely the way the machines were configured.
Yes, however there are ways around this. Ianal, however, I believe that in the case of bankrupy, bond holds are always paid first, hence why I think that the Unix source code may have been put up as collateral for a bond.
Secured creditors usually get preference over unsecured creditors. However there are certain exceptions to this rule. In particular bankruptcy courts tend to regard 'close' transactions with particular suspicion, since they can be used to decant assets in precisely this manner.
I don't see the point in playing games with the unix rights in this case however, when the court case is lost they will be worthless.
An excellent overview of this trend is found in the book "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg. They missed the revolution that technology is creating in corporate copyright, but they foresaw everything else.
Lord Rees-Mogg is an avid fan of the war in Iraq, although from his somewhat eccentric point of view wellcoming the rise of an American empire. Lord William was famously described by Tony Benn as 'an Edwardian figure' and that was back in the 1960s.
I really do not believe that he holds the views that you ascribe to him, his regular articles in The Times show no trace of them.
There is certainly a risk of the US going the way you describe. This is exactly the type of historical circumstance that causes great states to be brought low by their own arrogance and greed. But things are by no means past the point where the end is inevitable. We could still see a government committed to a balanced budget and regaining its place as leader of the free world, primus inter pares rather than oderint dum metuant.
The histrionics of tinpot nationalism do bear a close resemblance to those of the SCO lawyers. Unsubstantiated claims are pressed, impregnable defenses ridiculed.
Fortunately the SCO case is subject to the arbitration of the courts. There is no such limit on states, and so they must suffer the consequences of their misleader's arrogance and hubris. In the case of the US correction will eventually be made by means of a currency crisis once the asians decide not to buy dollars to keep their own currencies artificially low. That will be followed by inflation and rapidly rising interest rates (so make sure you get a fixed price mortgage). The only way to bring the budget under control will be to cut corporate welfare and the bloated pentagon (which amounts to the same thing). Wars are won by armies, but armies are only possible because of the economy.
with these loonys getting their temps down so low, i wonder what the limit is. i believe at around -200 the silicon seperates from the housing, destroying the chip.
I can't remember how low we went with the Transputers but they ran damn fast dunked in liquid helium. The processors did not reach the level of the helium because it was constantly evaporating.
The limit to overclocking is highly processor dependent. Some designs will simply end up in a race condition because some parts of the chip will work much faster than others and you end up missing the right edge of a pulse. Basically you give yourself a whole new region to discover timing errors in the design.
I don't think that the physical process is going to be a fixed limit, clearly this will be very dependent on the physical packaging. Chips are sent into space to face some pretty unpleasant temperature ranges.
Depending on your material there is a point when your band gap goes all wonky and things start breaking down. Most times what you are worried about is the effect in the high temperature region, but there are equally wierd things in the low temperature region.
This is definitely not something that is recommended for most applications. There are a couple of oddball ones, like cryptanalysis where it is really hard to get a result but once you get one it is trivial to check. I would not be surprised if GCHQ has a swimingpool sized machine for brute force key cracking dunked in some type of cooling liquid. The NSA would just chuck money at the problem.
Meanwhile, Cheney had to put his assets in a blind trust - where the trustee will by now have sold it off and converted the proceeds to a pot of random stuff.
Cheney's options are not currently in the money and are not transferable. They have not been sold because they cannot.
Even if Cheney does carry out his promise to give away the after tax profits to charity he has not said he will not take a tax deduction for the donation. Because of the way options work you can recover 70% of the after tax profits by a tax efficient charitable donation. Cheney's financial advice will be at least as good as the advice I got.
So the fact is that Cheney has a current interest worth up to $50 million in a company he is handing out no bid contracts to. Haliburton did win contracts under the Clinton administration as you point out. They are currently facing demands to repay large sums of money fraudulently charged to the government while Cheney was the CEO.
Nobody has suggested that Clinton had any financial interest in Haliburton, so raising the issue is irrelevant.
True, SCO should not get off that easy. Copyright law is strict.
OK there is strict liability, so SCO only need to prove the fact of infringement, not intent to infringe.
But I have a big problem stretching that to allowing SCO to enforce a claim on a party who has no intent to infringe when SCO refuses to provide the information which would allow the infringement to be ended.
SCO's claim is like someone claiming that they own the copyright to the Oxford English Dictionary because they own the copyright on one single entry and refuse to state which one.
I'm starting to think that there might be a similar doctrine to fair use that could emerge here. Fair use began as a judicial doctrine to avoid cluttering the court with de minimis cases. There is also an equitable issue, the balance of interests. The courts could easily conclude that in a case like this where the alleged owner of the copyright refuses to specify what parts of the whole infringe that it be automatically considered fair use.
The law was necessary and inevitable. Not doing anything is not an option when the US is the second major source of criminal spam scams. Do you want the US business reputation to sink to that of Nigeria?
Actually, whitelisting is even dumber than SPF and won't work. The other ideas are good, though.
SPF was shot to ribbons on the IETF ASRG list, but obviously someone decided to go ahead with it anyway.
The people doing the shooting down made no substantive arguments and instead engaged in a series of vitriolic personal attacks against the people making constructive proposals. Basically some folk who had a position in the anti-spam world wanted to make sure nothing challenged it.
IETF is pretty much an irrelevant organization these days (ASRG is actually in IRTF but same difference). The power and influence lies with the large ISPs and the major Internet companies. At this point so does most of the expertise. There are very few of the original Internet pioneers left in the IETF, expertise is a property of individuals, not organizations.
That said the SPF list is not a particularly resonsive or accountable list. Basically there is no mechanism for accountability. Those of us asking for a simpler design have no real say in the process. But at least doing it this way we don't have to wait three years for the IESG to make arbitrary changes to the spec for reasons that defy reality.
No. This is a special case. This story is extremely important. It mentions Eric Raymond, Linux, and even/.
I think Taco just showed the real cultural difference. A windows programmer would have implemented a system to warn editors of potential dupes. UNIX wizards simply don't believe in such wimpy protection systems.
The other big difference is that a Windows user would look at what the slashdot market is interesting in discussing and look at a way to support that. With UNIX there is a curious one way street, Taco and co do not read slashdot, they are the priesthood who edits it. User participation only goes so far, the plebs can comment on the stories but Taco and the priesthood will forever set the agenda.
The game is giving out the appearance of power so that the elite can continue to enjoy the substance.
Slashdot's biggest stories are consistently the non-tech ones. People who have an interest in the RIAA issues tend to also have views on Ashcroft, the PATRIOT act, Iraq, Bin Laden, Haliburton/Harken.
When we created the Web the idea was to enable disintermediation. Today people realise the power because of the Dean campaign, but we first ran a Web campaign in 1992 for Clinton/Gore.
The point is not left/right politics, in fact early on it was the right wing who felt that the media failled to represent their interests. Today people understand that the Web is a serious threat to the power of the press and the press barrons who want to control what people think. Fox News was just as biased four years ago as it is today, the reason most people are now aware that it is a propaganda station is because the Web provides a feedback loop and there are now a large number of bloggers who are actively rebutting Fox's distortions.
Sooner or later the Web community is going to move to a forum where the masses get to set the agenda rather than the priesthood.
On that score the most secure O/S would be CP/M or MSDOS...
Shaddow passwords are more complex than the original UNIX design,. they are empirically substantially more secure.
Unix is a very complex operating system. There are dozens of different formats for configuration files. A large part of the operating system is written using scripting languages and for some reason these will typically be written in four or five different variants of the same scripting language. There is little or no consistency in the architecture, where there is consistency (everything is a file) it causes strange contortions as an object that is clearly not a file is crammed into the same impoverished data model.
You can bolt on an encrypting file system to Linux, but the crypto layer used as a result will be entirely disjoint with any crypto for messaging, single sign on etc. As a result almost no Linux users have an encrypting file system even installed on their laptop. This has been standard on Windows for some time.
Complexity is certainly to be avoided in security systems. But not at the expense of functionality. If you took an original UNIX machine and stood it up on the net it would be rooted in minutes.
Releasing new code won't get SCO off of Linux's back. They claimed that the use of the bits of code that were stolen were integral in later parts of the Linux kernel..parts that had nothing to do with the code. And it's impossible to prove them wrong; it's only possible for a court to decide where the boundary is.
Fortunately the burden of proof lies on SCO in this case. They have to prove that UNIX is a trade secret (very hard since the code was made public at one time), they have to prove that the trade secret was in fact disclosed, they have to prove that the Linux code was created by someone subject to a duty of non-disclosure. They have to somehow get arround the fact that SCO itself disclosed Linux under the GPL.
Then they have to persuade a judge that the most equitable form of relief would be to give SCO effective interest in the whole of Linux, including the parts they did not create.
I do not believe that there is any theory of equitable relief that is going to give SCO what it is seeking - effectively a royalty on the work of others.
Sco's trade secrets malarkey is bogus because every littigant knows that bringing an action on a trade secrets issue is likely to result in disclosure of the material at issue. Trade secrets are a weak form of IP protection, Copyrights, patents and trademarks were created as a means of creating strong protections.
More likely that the judge gave permission for the code to be presented in a closed court, but can later be opened.
I am guessing that SCO wants to refer to something else here so wants the closed court to hide whatever else they are up to.
Right think about it from the point of view of the court. A request to present evidence in closed court will almost always be granted - unless it appears completely frivolous. Publishing is irreversible, evidence presented in closed court can always be released later.
Once SCO has stated with specificity the fragments of code that it claims are stolen IBM will get the chance to argue that they should be made public. They have a very strong claim here since the basis of SCO's claim is that the code has been stolen and included in Linux and is therefore public.
IBM can very fairly claim that their ability to defend the case would be unfairly harmed by keeping the code fragments secret. There is no way they can approach the community to ask for information with a bearing on the case.
There is also the issue of failure to mitigate damages. It is very clear that any allegedly infringing code will be replaced as soon as SCO states the code in question. I don't see how the court could order IBM not to use the evidence provided by SCO to end the alleged infringement. That would be illogical.
I expect that once SCO has shown the code there will be a rulling to make some of the information available, at a minimum the corresponding Linux fragments that are alleged to infringe. The rulling will then be appealed to the apeals court which will kick it down promptly. 24 hours after the data is released there will be a new Linux distribution with the fragments eliminated.
At that point SCO's potential damages will sink to a few tens of millions at best, most likely negligible. The SCO stock price will collapse and there wont be enough money to keep the case going. IBM then buy SCO at discount prices out of Chapter 11 to avoid further littigation from the next bucket shop to buy the rights. UNIXWare is made open sauce. Cheney is impeached for helping Haliburton's war profiteering, the Red Sox win the world series, pigs fly and Commander Taco fixes the slashdot code to warn editors of imminent dupes.
Why automation is considered more important than security is one thing, but why do people feel the need to defend that wierd choice of values?
The problem has nothing to do with automation. The problem is that some idiot made a program that would execute an arbitrary script sent in email.
This type of idiocy is not unique to windows. I have seen people do exactly the same thing in UNIX. They just did not make it to the UNIX core because that has barely changed in twenty years.
So the argument that UNIX is good security wise starts to look remarkably like the argument that a stopped clock is right twice a day.
UNIX has a set of security pathologies all of its own. The UNIX designers did not take security seriously, they were developing a single user computer with multi-tasking capabilities. The main features they left out from MULTICS were the security core. Heck, before Dennis Riche and C, buffer overrun bugs basically did not exist. There is no O/S before UNIX that was vulnerable to smashing the stack.
Eric seems to understand that there is a culture gap between UNIX and Windows but he really does not understand the Windows side of it. The point of Windows is that it is deomocratizing computing, making it available to the masses. This is of course precisely the reason why so many die-hard UNIX priests hate windows.
We got the same attitude with the Web. There were a lot of IETF people who really hated the idea of the Web because it was bringing AOL users and other worthless beings to the Internet.
I have seen plenty of folk clinging to the most ludicrous O/S imaginable. There are few enviroments more pathetic than MVS, but you will find lots of aged COBOL types defending it.
One of Freuds ideas was projection, highly ideological groups project their own internal failings onto the percieved enemy. The big problem with OSS is that it has spent the past ten years copying an O/S that was obsolete when they started so they attack Microsoft for their own sin - copying.
Ahahaha. So let me get this straight - Bush apparently said words that "magically" created nuclear weapons for NKorea and Iran?
Stating that you intend to invade a country is a good way to cause it to build a defense. The axis of evil statement was a clear invasion threat.
North Korea has been playing with nuclear weapons for some time but has been playing an extortion game where they have been trading not actually assembling the components for foreign aid. The GOP in Congress decided to kill Clinton's deal to buy off North Korea, then Bush killed the North/South dialogue. Result we now have no dialogue, no talks on unification and North Korea pointing three to five nuclear warheads at Seoul.
The situation in Iran is that they had been persuing nuclear technology but the democratic and clerical factions had both avoided actually building a device lest the other faction gain control of it. When Bush threatened to invade the Iranian factions agreed it was necessary to bury their differences and build weapons as fast as possible.
Bush's fifteen seconds of talking trash have made the world a much more dangerous place.
2-3GB on a 0.85" drive isn't much compared to the 30GB+ on a 1.5" drive.
Try building an IPOD into a pair of headphones. The advantage of compact flash is you can now store enough data for almost any conceivable portable use. Like when did you last listen to 30Gb worth of MP3 without recharging your batteries?
The role of an iPod formfactor device is to provide a portable repository from which to fill up the wearable media. No an ipod is too heavy to count as wearable.
The big problem with these disk ideas is that they end up costing a lot - $500 to $200, there is no low end version like there is for flash rom. I typically buy whatever memory is $60 at costco these days, but then again for photography that is easily sufficient, I do not fill up 256K chips before I can reach my laptop.
"Iraq was invaded because the administration knew it had no WMD." I don't follow. The reason for the invasion was because Iraq had no WMD? Huh?
If the administration had really been concerned about the WMD issue they would have allowed the UN inspectors to complete their work. The principal advocates of the war, Wolfowitz and Perle barely mentioned the WMD issue until Blair made it clear that he could not invade without causus belli. Reports of the administration discussions were that nobody considered WMD the top reason for war but it was the only one that everyone could agree on.
Once the administration had made WMD into their purported reason for war they were stuck, if the UN came out and said that Saddam was WMD free the opportunity to invade would be ended. On the other hand if they invaded and found no WMD they could probably fool the US public into believing the operation was a success. After all it was going to be a cakewalk - remember?
There is really no reason for him to hold back. I think the real reason for the lack of WMD's is that the chemical and biological weapons were used within the country against the kurds and so forth.
The dirty little secret here is that chemical weapons don't really work. You require pretty high concentrations to actually kill people. A case in point here is the Tokyo subway sarin attack which lead to 11 deaths out of 5000 people seriously affected. Even in the highly confined subway spaces the actual deaths were relatively light compared to the deaths that could have been caused with a moderately large explosive device.
In a battlefield setting chemical weapons make even less sense, you can't use anything that you don't have a protective suit for or else your troops get killed when the wind changes.
There are a couple of chemical weapons like napalm that can arguably be effective in limited circumstances - e.g. dropped on civilians from helicopters. But conventional weapons can typically achieve the same effects more easily.
Nuclear is a completely different issue. The one concrete verdict the UN inspectors delivered is that they did not believe Saddam had nuclear weapons capability.
However as a direct result of the idiot in the Whitehouse's big stupid mouth the other two members of the axis of evil have either aquired nuclear weapons (North Korea) or will soon acquire them (Iran). And with the US army currently over committed in Iraq there is not the slightest chance that the US will be able to do anything about the fact.
OK Iran has recently made suggestions about inspections. Don't believe them, they would be complete and utter fools not to develop a nuclear weapon, if Bush is elected in 2004 the only way Iran will be able to avoid an invasion is by being able to plausibly threaten a retaliatory attack on Israel.
Hey, they did find the botulinum. Not quite 38,000 litres, but they did find a vial with 50mg or so of the toxin in someone's fridge.
After being trumpeted on Fox News for a week the serious press pointed out that you can hardly go arround invading countries for possession of Botox.
The thing that gets me about the whole business is the idiots who ask 'if Saddam didn't have WMD why didn't he allow the inspectors in?'. Its a clever trick, you ask a question with a completely false statement. The UN weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq and did a very thorough job of investigating. Iraq was forced to destroy a number of rockets whose range exceeded the range allowed by 5-10%.
It should be obvious to anyone but a complete administration dupe that the US did not invade Iraq to find WMD. The decision to invade had been taken long before. The risk of leaving the inspectors in place was that they would report back that Iraq had no WMD. Iraq was invaded because the administration knew it had no WMD.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot vs MIT Tech Review, well Simson Garfinkel...
If people actually read the article... so it is Slashdot blathering as usual.
Simson is only saying out loud what everyone who has anything to do with the real Internet has known for years. There is a crushing need for IPv6 and the IETF plan for transition is about as practical as a manned space trip to Mars - not impossible but likely to cost a couple of trillion dollars and take until 2030.
The IETF have been blowing smoke on this one for ten years now. The IPv4 transition took place when the users of the Internet could all meet together in the same room.
Rather than daemonizing NAT, the IETF should have worked out a way to co-opt NAT technology as a means of gatewaying between the IPv4 and IPv6 worlds. Instead a bunch of people got all bent out of shape because the real world did not fit their architecture the way they thought it should.
Simson does not get the security issue quite right, NAT is not a perfect security solution, but it does have definite advantages. I don't have to worry about any of the machines behind my NAT box being probed on an unexpected port - important if you run alpha releases of stuff. Basically you need some form of perimeter security, you also need protocols designed to play nice with perimeter security. Unfortunately a lot of videoconference protocols are completely unworkable firewall wise - they use hundreds of ports for no real reason.
SCO can wave their claims arround and splutter about vast damages but the fact is no judge is going to allow a penal award. Google have every reason to believe that they have the rights to the code they are using.
Google can probably even claim the cost off their insurance.
Right, that would be why the inquiry found that there had been a deliberate attempt to keep black voters of the electoral rolls.
The way they did it was by manipulating the 'scrub lists' supposed to keep fellons from voting. Basically any voter who had the same birthday as a convicted criminal and had a name that shared four consecutive letters that were the same AND WAS THE SAME COLOR as a convicted criminal LOST THEIR VOTE.
The contract to scrub the lists went to a company whose office manager was a "close personal friend" of Katherine Harris - despite the fact that they bid over ten times more than the next most expensive bid.
I'm rarely dismissive about someone's intelligence just from such a short post, but your acceptance of this makes me question your ability to reason and to gather relevant facts.
I don't think it takes a degree in nuclear physics to see that Harris and Bush were and are corrupt, but I have one anyway.
What it takes to ignore the stench of Harken, Haliburton, Enron and the rest of the scandals of the Texan crowd I don't know, cash stuffed in brown envelopes I guess.
The machines were identical, the configuration was not. These are
Pallister has done a bunch of research as has the civil rights commission. See my sig for details. The GOP flacks on slashdot have been making the standard ad-hominem attacks to try to avoid dealing with the substance of his claims.
Note also that the guy the GOP dredged up to dispute the civil rights commission report is the same right wing crank that was caught peddling bogus statistics about gun safety recently.
You are guilty of common problem amongst computer types - blame the user when the machine is at fault.
The cause of large number of Florida vote counting errors in 2000 was purely machine errors. A crease or smudge or even a speck of dust could be interpreted as a vote causing the whole ballot to be rejected.
In the white, republican voting areas the voting machines were programmed to buzz and alert the workers to the fact that there was a problem and the ballot would be put through again or the voter got a fresh ballot.
In the black areas the exact same voting machines were programmed to silently eat up the ballot and ignore the vote.
It had nothing to do with the users, it was purely the way the machines were configured.
Secured creditors usually get preference over unsecured creditors. However there are certain exceptions to this rule. In particular bankruptcy courts tend to regard 'close' transactions with particular suspicion, since they can be used to decant assets in precisely this manner.
I don't see the point in playing games with the unix rights in this case however, when the court case is lost they will be worthless.
Lord Rees-Mogg is an avid fan of the war in Iraq, although from his somewhat eccentric point of view wellcoming the rise of an American empire. Lord William was famously described by Tony Benn as 'an Edwardian figure' and that was back in the 1960s.
I really do not believe that he holds the views that you ascribe to him, his regular articles in The Times show no trace of them.
There is certainly a risk of the US going the way you describe. This is exactly the type of historical circumstance that causes great states to be brought low by their own arrogance and greed. But things are by no means past the point where the end is inevitable. We could still see a government committed to a balanced budget and regaining its place as leader of the free world, primus inter pares rather than oderint dum metuant.
The histrionics of tinpot nationalism do bear a close resemblance to those of the SCO lawyers. Unsubstantiated claims are pressed, impregnable defenses ridiculed.
Fortunately the SCO case is subject to the arbitration of the courts. There is no such limit on states, and so they must suffer the consequences of their misleader's arrogance and hubris. In the case of the US correction will eventually be made by means of a currency crisis once the asians decide not to buy dollars to keep their own currencies artificially low. That will be followed by inflation and rapidly rising interest rates (so make sure you get a fixed price mortgage). The only way to bring the budget under control will be to cut corporate welfare and the bloated pentagon (which amounts to the same thing). Wars are won by armies, but armies are only possible because of the economy.
I can't remember how low we went with the Transputers but they ran damn fast dunked in liquid helium. The processors did not reach the level of the helium because it was constantly evaporating.
The limit to overclocking is highly processor dependent. Some designs will simply end up in a race condition because some parts of the chip will work much faster than others and you end up missing the right edge of a pulse. Basically you give yourself a whole new region to discover timing errors in the design.
I don't think that the physical process is going to be a fixed limit, clearly this will be very dependent on the physical packaging. Chips are sent into space to face some pretty unpleasant temperature ranges.
Depending on your material there is a point when your band gap goes all wonky and things start breaking down. Most times what you are worried about is the effect in the high temperature region, but there are equally wierd things in the low temperature region.
This is definitely not something that is recommended for most applications. There are a couple of oddball ones, like cryptanalysis where it is really hard to get a result but once you get one it is trivial to check. I would not be surprised if GCHQ has a swimingpool sized machine for brute force key cracking dunked in some type of cooling liquid. The NSA would just chuck money at the problem.
Cheney's options are not currently in the money and are not transferable. They have not been sold because they cannot.
Even if Cheney does carry out his promise to give away the after tax profits to charity he has not said he will not take a tax deduction for the donation. Because of the way options work you can recover 70% of the after tax profits by a tax efficient charitable donation. Cheney's financial advice will be at least as good as the advice I got.
So the fact is that Cheney has a current interest worth up to $50 million in a company he is handing out no bid contracts to. Haliburton did win contracts under the Clinton administration as you point out. They are currently facing demands to repay large sums of money fraudulently charged to the government while Cheney was the CEO.
Nobody has suggested that Clinton had any financial interest in Haliburton, so raising the issue is irrelevant.
OK there is strict liability, so SCO only need to prove the fact of infringement, not intent to infringe.
But I have a big problem stretching that to allowing SCO to enforce a claim on a party who has no intent to infringe when SCO refuses to provide the information which would allow the infringement to be ended.
SCO's claim is like someone claiming that they own the copyright to the Oxford English Dictionary because they own the copyright on one single entry and refuse to state which one.
I'm starting to think that there might be a similar doctrine to fair use that could emerge here. Fair use began as a judicial doctrine to avoid cluttering the court with de minimis cases. There is also an equitable issue, the balance of interests. The courts could easily conclude that in a case like this where the alleged owner of the copyright refuses to specify what parts of the whole infringe that it be automatically considered fair use.
Hey I am not saying that SCO has a valid claim. Just that long before the claim is tested in court the issues will be moot.
The fact that the code can be quickly replaced will show that there was negligible value in the copyright SCO claimed.
Would people please stop emailing me reminders about Enron? How the heck did you get my new email address anyway? Don't you people have a life?
The law was necessary and inevitable. Not doing anything is not an option when the US is the second major source of criminal spam scams. Do you want the US business reputation to sink to that of Nigeria?
The people doing the shooting down made no substantive arguments and instead engaged in a series of vitriolic personal attacks against the people making constructive proposals. Basically some folk who had a position in the anti-spam world wanted to make sure nothing challenged it.
IETF is pretty much an irrelevant organization these days (ASRG is actually in IRTF but same difference). The power and influence lies with the large ISPs and the major Internet companies. At this point so does most of the expertise. There are very few of the original Internet pioneers left in the IETF, expertise is a property of individuals, not organizations.
That said the SPF list is not a particularly resonsive or accountable list. Basically there is no mechanism for accountability. Those of us asking for a simpler design have no real say in the process. But at least doing it this way we don't have to wait three years for the IESG to make arbitrary changes to the spec for reasons that defy reality.
I think Taco just showed the real cultural difference. A windows programmer would have implemented a system to warn editors of potential dupes. UNIX wizards simply don't believe in such wimpy protection systems.
The other big difference is that a Windows user would look at what the slashdot market is interesting in discussing and look at a way to support that. With UNIX there is a curious one way street, Taco and co do not read slashdot, they are the priesthood who edits it. User participation only goes so far, the plebs can comment on the stories but Taco and the priesthood will forever set the agenda.
The game is giving out the appearance of power so that the elite can continue to enjoy the substance.
Slashdot's biggest stories are consistently the non-tech ones. People who have an interest in the RIAA issues tend to also have views on Ashcroft, the PATRIOT act, Iraq, Bin Laden, Haliburton/Harken.
When we created the Web the idea was to enable disintermediation. Today people realise the power because of the Dean campaign, but we first ran a Web campaign in 1992 for Clinton/Gore.
The point is not left/right politics, in fact early on it was the right wing who felt that the media failled to represent their interests. Today people understand that the Web is a serious threat to the power of the press and the press barrons who want to control what people think. Fox News was just as biased four years ago as it is today, the reason most people are now aware that it is a propaganda station is because the Web provides a feedback loop and there are now a large number of bloggers who are actively rebutting Fox's distortions.
Sooner or later the Web community is going to move to a forum where the masses get to set the agenda rather than the priesthood.
On that score the most secure O/S would be CP/M or MSDOS...
Shaddow passwords are more complex than the original UNIX design,. they are empirically substantially more secure.
Unix is a very complex operating system. There are dozens of different formats for configuration files. A large part of the operating system is written using scripting languages and for some reason these will typically be written in four or five different variants of the same scripting language. There is little or no consistency in the architecture, where there is consistency (everything is a file) it causes strange contortions as an object that is clearly not a file is crammed into the same impoverished data model.
You can bolt on an encrypting file system to Linux, but the crypto layer used as a result will be entirely disjoint with any crypto for messaging, single sign on etc. As a result almost no Linux users have an encrypting file system even installed on their laptop. This has been standard on Windows for some time.
Complexity is certainly to be avoided in security systems. But not at the expense of functionality. If you took an original UNIX machine and stood it up on the net it would be rooted in minutes.
Fortunately the burden of proof lies on SCO in this case. They have to prove that UNIX is a trade secret (very hard since the code was made public at one time), they have to prove that the trade secret was in fact disclosed, they have to prove that the Linux code was created by someone subject to a duty of non-disclosure. They have to somehow get arround the fact that SCO itself disclosed Linux under the GPL.
Then they have to persuade a judge that the most equitable form of relief would be to give SCO effective interest in the whole of Linux, including the parts they did not create.
I do not believe that there is any theory of equitable relief that is going to give SCO what it is seeking - effectively a royalty on the work of others.
Sco's trade secrets malarkey is bogus because every littigant knows that bringing an action on a trade secrets issue is likely to result in disclosure of the material at issue. Trade secrets are a weak form of IP protection, Copyrights, patents and trademarks were created as a means of creating strong protections.
Right think about it from the point of view of the court. A request to present evidence in closed court will almost always be granted - unless it appears completely frivolous. Publishing is irreversible, evidence presented in closed court can always be released later.
Once SCO has stated with specificity the fragments of code that it claims are stolen IBM will get the chance to argue that they should be made public. They have a very strong claim here since the basis of SCO's claim is that the code has been stolen and included in Linux and is therefore public.
IBM can very fairly claim that their ability to defend the case would be unfairly harmed by keeping the code fragments secret. There is no way they can approach the community to ask for information with a bearing on the case.
There is also the issue of failure to mitigate damages. It is very clear that any allegedly infringing code will be replaced as soon as SCO states the code in question. I don't see how the court could order IBM not to use the evidence provided by SCO to end the alleged infringement. That would be illogical.
I expect that once SCO has shown the code there will be a rulling to make some of the information available, at a minimum the corresponding Linux fragments that are alleged to infringe. The rulling will then be appealed to the apeals court which will kick it down promptly. 24 hours after the data is released there will be a new Linux distribution with the fragments eliminated.
At that point SCO's potential damages will sink to a few tens of millions at best, most likely negligible. The SCO stock price will collapse and there wont be enough money to keep the case going. IBM then buy SCO at discount prices out of Chapter 11 to avoid further littigation from the next bucket shop to buy the rights. UNIXWare is made open sauce. Cheney is impeached for helping Haliburton's war profiteering, the Red Sox win the world series, pigs fly and Commander Taco fixes the slashdot code to warn editors of imminent dupes.
The problem has nothing to do with automation. The problem is that some idiot made a program that would execute an arbitrary script sent in email.
This type of idiocy is not unique to windows. I have seen people do exactly the same thing in UNIX. They just did not make it to the UNIX core because that has barely changed in twenty years.
So the argument that UNIX is good security wise starts to look remarkably like the argument that a stopped clock is right twice a day.
UNIX has a set of security pathologies all of its own. The UNIX designers did not take security seriously, they were developing a single user computer with multi-tasking capabilities. The main features they left out from MULTICS were the security core. Heck, before Dennis Riche and C, buffer overrun bugs basically did not exist. There is no O/S before UNIX that was vulnerable to smashing the stack.
Eric seems to understand that there is a culture gap between UNIX and Windows but he really does not understand the Windows side of it. The point of Windows is that it is deomocratizing computing, making it available to the masses. This is of course precisely the reason why so many die-hard UNIX priests hate windows.
We got the same attitude with the Web. There were a lot of IETF people who really hated the idea of the Web because it was bringing AOL users and other worthless beings to the Internet.
I have seen plenty of folk clinging to the most ludicrous O/S imaginable. There are few enviroments more pathetic than MVS, but you will find lots of aged COBOL types defending it.
One of Freuds ideas was projection, highly ideological groups project their own internal failings onto the percieved enemy. The big problem with OSS is that it has spent the past ten years copying an O/S that was obsolete when they started so they attack Microsoft for their own sin - copying.
Stating that you intend to invade a country is a good way to cause it to build a defense. The axis of evil statement was a clear invasion threat.
North Korea has been playing with nuclear weapons for some time but has been playing an extortion game where they have been trading not actually assembling the components for foreign aid. The GOP in Congress decided to kill Clinton's deal to buy off North Korea, then Bush killed the North/South dialogue. Result we now have no dialogue, no talks on unification and North Korea pointing three to five nuclear warheads at Seoul.
The situation in Iran is that they had been persuing nuclear technology but the democratic and clerical factions had both avoided actually building a device lest the other faction gain control of it. When Bush threatened to invade the Iranian factions agreed it was necessary to bury their differences and build weapons as fast as possible.
Bush's fifteen seconds of talking trash have made the world a much more dangerous place.
Try building an IPOD into a pair of headphones. The advantage of compact flash is you can now store enough data for almost any conceivable portable use. Like when did you last listen to 30Gb worth of MP3 without recharging your batteries?
The role of an iPod formfactor device is to provide a portable repository from which to fill up the wearable media. No an ipod is too heavy to count as wearable.
The big problem with these disk ideas is that they end up costing a lot - $500 to $200, there is no low end version like there is for flash rom. I typically buy whatever memory is $60 at costco these days, but then again for photography that is easily sufficient, I do not fill up 256K chips before I can reach my laptop.
If the administration had really been concerned about the WMD issue they would have allowed the UN inspectors to complete their work. The principal advocates of the war, Wolfowitz and Perle barely mentioned the WMD issue until Blair made it clear that he could not invade without causus belli. Reports of the administration discussions were that nobody considered WMD the top reason for war but it was the only one that everyone could agree on.
Once the administration had made WMD into their purported reason for war they were stuck, if the UN came out and said that Saddam was WMD free the opportunity to invade would be ended. On the other hand if they invaded and found no WMD they could probably fool the US public into believing the operation was a success. After all it was going to be a cakewalk - remember?
The dirty little secret here is that chemical weapons don't really work. You require pretty high concentrations to actually kill people. A case in point here is the Tokyo subway sarin attack which lead to 11 deaths out of 5000 people seriously affected. Even in the highly confined subway spaces the actual deaths were relatively light compared to the deaths that could have been caused with a moderately large explosive device.
In a battlefield setting chemical weapons make even less sense, you can't use anything that you don't have a protective suit for or else your troops get killed when the wind changes.
There are a couple of chemical weapons like napalm that can arguably be effective in limited circumstances - e.g. dropped on civilians from helicopters. But conventional weapons can typically achieve the same effects more easily.
Nuclear is a completely different issue. The one concrete verdict the UN inspectors delivered is that they did not believe Saddam had nuclear weapons capability.
However as a direct result of the idiot in the Whitehouse's big stupid mouth the other two members of the axis of evil have either aquired nuclear weapons (North Korea) or will soon acquire them (Iran). And with the US army currently over committed in Iraq there is not the slightest chance that the US will be able to do anything about the fact.
OK Iran has recently made suggestions about inspections. Don't believe them, they would be complete and utter fools not to develop a nuclear weapon, if Bush is elected in 2004 the only way Iran will be able to avoid an invasion is by being able to plausibly threaten a retaliatory attack on Israel.
Hey, they did find the botulinum. Not quite 38,000 litres, but they did find a vial with 50mg or so of the toxin in someone's fridge.
After being trumpeted on Fox News for a week the serious press pointed out that you can hardly go arround invading countries for possession of Botox.
The thing that gets me about the whole business is the idiots who ask 'if Saddam didn't have WMD why didn't he allow the inspectors in?'. Its a clever trick, you ask a question with a completely false statement. The UN weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq and did a very thorough job of investigating. Iraq was forced to destroy a number of rockets whose range exceeded the range allowed by 5-10%.
It should be obvious to anyone but a complete administration dupe that the US did not invade Iraq to find WMD. The decision to invade had been taken long before. The risk of leaving the inspectors in place was that they would report back that Iraq had no WMD. Iraq was invaded because the administration knew it had no WMD.
Yep, they started by printing up a goofy 'how build a spaceship' manual back in the 70s... This makes about as much sense.