And also it has a privilege "grant yourself any
privilege:)"
And anyone who has the priv is automatically reconned to have SYSTEM.
There is a major advantage to be able to have an account where you can turn on privs when you need them but run with them turned off by default. What you do is to grant the exact privs needed by specific applications, the least privillege principle.
Of course never having used a secure O/S, you probably think UNIX is a great model with only 2 priv levels, nothing and absofuckinglutelyeverything.
Psst: Columia's next mission (STS-118 [nasa.gov]) was scheduled to dock to ISS to deliver supplies and a truss.
That data is inconsistent with statements elsewhere that the Columbia was not outfitted to dock with the ISS despite a recent $90 million refit. Of course it may have been planned to outfit the orbiter when it returned from this mission.
I doubt that we are going to see another shuttle launch, unless it is needed to rescue the ISS crew. The shuttle fleet is another 17 years older than it was when challenger exploded. There are three orbiters left out of a fleet of five. It is one thing to redesign a spacecraft that has twenty years of design life left in it, quite another to make radical changes to a craft that is 20 years old.
The orbiters are now getting old. Discovery first launched in 1984, Atlantis in 1985, Endeavour in 1992 as a replacement for Challenger. Columbia was only slightly older than Discovery and Atlantis, being launched in 1981. More significantly perhaps Atlantis and Discovery have both done as many or more missions as Columbia (28). Even Endeavour is almost caught up. More significantly perhaps, each one of those flights is 13 million flight miles which means that each one of those orbiters has travelled ten times the distance a very well used commercial jet has flown and under conditions that are considerably more severe.
I don't think there is a large chance that the existing shuttles will fly again. There is perhaps an outside chance that Congress will fund a completely new fleet.
The problem is that at one end of the spectrum you have Richard Feynman's observation that about 4% of unmanned flights end in disaster. Allowing for more care with manned flights he considered the risk to be maybe 1%. With Columbia 2 flights out of about 100 have crashed which would put the risk at about 2% per launch.
The other way to look at it is in terms of flight miles. The orbiters have done a total of about one billion miles and 14 people have been killed. 747s have flown a total of 60 billion miles and something like 3 have come down over the years with something like 300 casualties a time. If you do the math you find that that works out to 15 people per billion miles. So manned space flight turns out to be about as risky as you might expect by rough extrapolation from really large samples.
Is this an admission that the hundreds of CDs each and everyone here will have recieved were just a stunt to get the numbers up?
I think it is really the result of Case being given the heave ho a few weeks back. Time Warner is back under Time Warner management. It is very clear that the business will soon be called Time Warner again. At this point the AOL division is a liability the management would be happy to get rid of for the price of the debt it carries ($8 billion or so).
Another property that might well be detached in the near future is the CNN division which Ted Turner is rumoured to be attempting to buy back. It appears that Ted believes CNN is dropping in the ratings for the same reason I do, they stopped doing news and did human interest bullshit with empty headed bimbos like Paula Zahn and Connie Chung.
I LOVE this quote! it just shows the level of intelligence of the 'expert' they quote in the article. Ya, theres nothing like good ol' emperical evidence...
In the meantime, Schneier
It actualy means very little other than Bruce is not quite as good with the press as he thinks he is.
He probably gave a ten minute telephone interview and said lots of sensible stuff, the reporter then chose the one soundbite that make him look like a bit of a jerk.
Bruce became known as a security expert because he wrote an early book on cryptography that was the first mass market book. At this stage however he is known as a security expert because he is the first person in every journalist's rolodex.
Bruce returns calls promptly and gives good copy in time for the deadline. He also talks without any PR person on the line which is a big mistake. I always have a PR person on the line because (1) its company policy and (2) I want to have a witness in case we get into disputes as to who said what.
Bruce has calmed down a lot these days. But he has been known for putting out papers without enough consideration. A few years ago he blew much of his credibility in the IETF with an off target attack on the security of IPSEC.
So, no Bruce is not an idiot, doing that type of media interview is really hard, particularly if you do them at short notice on breaking news. But no, he is not that smart for wanting to attract so much attention. He is in danger of becomming a security pundit rather than a security expert.
At this point he could do a lot better for his company in a somewhat more relaxed guru mode. Compare the number of press comments made by Bruce to those of Butler Lampson or Whit Diffie, nobody in the business doubts their skills.
NASA probably has a good idea whaat happened, but it's pretty safe to assume that they won't speculate until they know for sure.
It would seem more likely that at this point they don't know what happened. If they knew what happened that would suggest they knew enough to fix it.
The Challenger disaster O ring problem only came to light several months after the disaster. And it took Dick Feynman's demonstration with the ice water for the theory to be accepted as fact. Before that NASA was claiming that the O rings were fine. Feynman had been tipped off by engineers who thought otherwise. It was not an accident he had very cold ice water to hand.
I doubt the fuel lines would have anything to do with disaster on re-entry. The orbiter has no fuel at that point. It is the famous flying brick.
Where the hell do you get that "In this case we have essentially a single individual, George W Bush who is the advocate of this war." ?
40 other nations have endorsed it, 11 in Europe (including Ireland expressing hurt feelings for not being asked to sign the "letter of eight").
I read the world press rather than Fox news. 85% of people in the UK oppose war. I am a member of Blair's own party.
Support from Ireland, Spain and Poland is all very nice but they don't intend to do anything that would actually inconvenience themselves.
The polls in the US say pretty much the same thing, support for Bush's war is conditional on demonstrating international support.
Apart from Blair and Sharon there isn't any national leader that is actually supporting Bush.
Perhaps if war supporters had the guts to actually post under their own nyms the claim that there is lots of support would have more credibility.
You wish to enslave the world with systems just like the old Soviet Union, North Korea, Iraq and Cuba (the only places who's governments you support, see the weblink).
You know that type of argument was discredited when Joe McCarthy and Nixon used it. There is nothing I am saying that Norman Schwatzkof has not also said.
You support tyrants like Chamorra in Venezuela and use propoganda,
I believe in democracy, it appears that you do not. The guy was democratically elected. I am not in favor of military coups. Pinochet murdered at least 20,000 people to maintain his rule. The regimes in the rest of Latin America murdered similar numbers of people. I would prefer to see this matter solved at the ballot box rather than have the CIA go back to its old practices.
I found the quotes predictable and illogical. First the vulnerability was clearly there before the trustworthy computing initiative, a patch was released in June that almost certainly was as a result of the vulnerability being discovered as part of that initiative. So there is no way the idiot from TruSecure can fairly use the slapper worm to grade trustworthy computing.
The bit that gets missed here is that security is not a product, its a process (something Bruce only seems to remember when writing his books). If we really want to go pointing fingers than how about the folk who designed buffer overflow bugs into the C programming language? Before C every programming language had array bounds checking built in. So who were the turkeys who decided that we should run without elimentary safety checking? Oh yes the same folk who gave us what people would now have us believe is the so-secure UNIX O/S.
It took over ten years for the elimentary security boo-boos to get sorted in UNIX. For years the UNIX crew told us that shadow passwords were dangerous security through obscurity, only the world readable password file and the salt gave genuine security. Then along came crack. It still took four years for shadow passwords to become mainstream.
Even today sendmail is installed by default in most UNIX installations, even though it is historically a security nightmare. Some of the bugs have been fixed but as a sendmail inc. employee admitted to me last week, it is still too dammn complicated for most people to understand how to configure it.
I don't think that this point scoring does any good. UNIX and Windows both have major security problems. Windows has security problems in implementation, UNIX has them built into the architecture. There are still UNIX boxes shipping with rhosts, even though it has been demoinstrated time and again that rhosts is completely insecure. Instaling ssh does nothing to improve the security of the box unless you actually uninstall the rhost commands and the daemon.
Folk who go on about how braindamaged Microsoft is should ask themselves how UNIX programmers managed to botch a command as simple as finger!
Just because there's been a tragedy doesn't mean that news concerning a war (which will be fought; if you think war is anything but inevitable, you're deluded) is irrelevant.
Nothing in politics is inevitable. People can always make the difference. In this case we have essentially a single individual, George W Bush who is the advocate of this war. Without him there would be no war. In a constitution of checks and balances individual power is seriously limited.
The numbers of casualties in the war are likely to dwarf this disaster. It is likely that the civilian casualties alone will be tens of thousands. The number of US troops killed is unlikely to be less than hundreds.
I don't agree that the war is inevitable though. Blair just got an extension of six weeks to try to convince other allies. In particular they really need permission from Turkey to use bases there. Blix has stated that the Bush administration deliberately misrepresented his report. The diplomatic initiative could well swing against Bush and his chickenhawks.
It is one thing to say you will start a war with no allies, no UN support and little domestic support. It is quite another to actually send the troops in for a land invasion.
What is very likely to happen is a prolonged bombing campaign launched from air craft carriers and Diego Garcia. The real issue will be whether Bush can keep the attacks going long enough to get Saddam before the news reports of hospitals, schools etc. being bombed take their toll. The British press don't think Blair will last more than a few weeks if there is a war, he does not have party support, even the Tory opposition, Thatcher's party is opposed.
The bulk of the US casualties would come from an actual land invasion. Bush may habe the theoretical ability to launch an invasion with no other support, in practice there are real limits to his authority. It is very unlikely he could launch an invasion if there was serious opposition to the war and people such as Schwatzkof and Powell went to Congress and said that there would likely be thousands of casualties if the land invasion went ahead.
The GOP has set a very dangerous precedent with their frivolous impeachment of Clinton. It would only take a small number of disaffected Republicans to bring an impeachment.
They said on CNN that ejector seats were built for the original shuttles,
Columbia was the first space shuttle. The Enterprise was actually only a test vehicle that never went into space.
None of the space shuttles have ever had ejector seats, they were rejected as too expensive, bulky and heavy. The only scheme which would be likely to have been practical would have been one where the whole crew module separated as a unit and descended on a parachute. This introduces a whole rack of additional safety problems due to the need for all the explosive bolts etc.
It looks like this is going to be the final nail in the coffin for the space station. The Russians can't afford to run the Soyuz program any more which is already a problem because they provide the escape vehicle. It looks like the shuttles are going to be grounded for at least a year, after a second disaster it is very likely they will be grounded permenently.
This is probably the end of manned space flight for the next 10 or 20 years, possibly for our lifetimes.
It may also be the end for the SDI program. It will be very much harder to justify the program on the basis of fuzzy 'Americans can do anything, don't denigrate American genius etc.' argument.
The nuclear power industry almost recovered from Three Mile Island but it never recovered from Chernobyl afterwards.
Just think, if you took that 5K and spent 1K of it to buy yourself a new pc every year, for four aout of the next five years you would have a faster computer than you do now.
Not really, the only reason I have had that box so long is that the speed is not gated on the cpu or memory anymore. I don't know what the bottleneck is but it certainly ain't memory - I have a full compliment, it does not seem to be the cpu cycles either.
I think that we are now at the point where the main bottleneck is stupid programmers who have useless delay loops waiting for peripherals to sync.
Re:Painful? Yes. Helps long term? I don't see it.
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Don't forget the European Governments subsidise steel companies.
Another untrue nationalist fable. The EU has prohibited all national government subsidies of industry, including nationalized industries for more than ten years. The EU was doing this before the GATTII round turned into the WTO.
The only 'subsidies' currently allowed in the EU are payments for plant improvements to meet environmental regulations that the US does not have.
The US lobbyists attempt to claim that the EU ays 'subsidies' by misrepresenting the way the VAT purchase tax system works.
The EU does have a tax policy under which goods that are exported from the EU are not subject to purchase taxes. This is exactly the same in the US, a New York company that sells goods out of state does not pay New York sales tax. And in any case an EU company that buys product from another EU company will pay the VAT to the seller and then reclaim the same amount from the government. It is simply the way that the tax system works, the idea is that the end customer alone pays 20percent on the total goods bought, the government gets the amount paid in the form of a tax on the Value Added at each stage.
As a result of the nationalist fable the failure in the Whitehouse has slapped a punitive tarrif on imports of steel. The reason the EU is not retaliating much is that as a direct result their car industry is now much more competative. Instead of importing the raw steel, GM and Ford are going to switch production to the EU and import engines, gearboxes and complete cars.
The really big problem in this space is the stupid business model of razor and blades. People won't pay an economic price for the console so they are sold below cost but tricked out so the vendor can recoup their costs selling overpriced games.
So anyone trying to sell a really innovative platform is going to end up charging way more than the market will bear.
BTW $2K is not too much in principle for a games system. I know plenty of people with MUCH more expensive systems. Mine cost $5K, only they are called PCs, not consoles. Mind you these days it would take a lot of dedication to go above $2K for a desktop machine. It took some doing to spend $5K two years ago. I paid $400 for the upgrade to my Son's machine a few months ago and he basically got a new machine with almost the same spec as mine.
When is Lara Croft comming out, thats what I want to know.
Re:Painful? Yes. Helps long term? I don't see it.
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Think about all of the jobs in the steel industry and raw goods refining that used to be housed in the US. I was born in a region that housed booming towns that thrived on the steel, zinc, coal and cement in Pennsylvania. I can tell you firsthand that when refining was able to be done for 87 cents in Asia, the companies left town, the towns dwindled,
Self serving baloney pumped out by the steel companies. If that fable was true the European steel industry would have gone as well.
Asian steel producers costs are considerably greater than the 87 cents you quote. It costs them considerably more to ship their finished product than it costs the Us producers. They also have much longer lead times because of the transport time and so they are unable to address markets where quick turnarround is important.
If you read 'the Innovator's dilema' you will find the real reason for the decline of the US integrated steel mills, they were made obsolete by the cheaper to build mini-mills. There are still successful and profitable steel producers in the US, they are the ones the use mini-mill.
The integrated refiners have two major problems, the first is that they massively underfunded their pension plans for the past 20 odd years so they could claim to be profitable when in reality they were not. This allowed them to delay restructuring for 20 years past the time when the EU producers restructured.
The second big problem is that the integrated steel plants are not earning their cost of capital. This is the same in every country regardless of labor costs. 30 years ago when mini-mill technology first appeared the product was only fit for the least demanding uses. Over time the mini-mills have gradually more efficient and produced higher quality output so that today they provduce steel for car body panels which is pretty much the most demanding mass application. About the only market that is not well served by mini-mill today is steel for hand-fashioning by blacksmiths.
Of course the nationalist fable is a much easier sell, even though the message it sends is ultimately defeatist.
The signigicant line in the article was "The DMA are plainly going though the motions that they must know will be ineffective simply to placate some of their members,".
The DMA are certainly going to have to put up a fight even if that means they end up being inconsistent. They are paid whores to push the interests of their paymasters.
Another aspect of the K street thing I only realised after being involved with them is that in most companies the policy people are completely disconnected from the business unit. One would expect that whatever line was being pushed by the K street people would have its origins in some Machiavellian scheme of the strategy people.
What you find happens in practice is that the lobbyists are really out for their own self interests and their real objective is to get themselves enmeshed in some policy making cabal.
And since you have to hire lobbyists in pairs, Democrats and Republicans it is not unusual to find that your two lobbyists are actually promoting policies that are actually contradictory.
The DMA's support for opt-out lists is like Bush's idea of cars running on hydrogen. The only reason Bush is talking about hydrogen cars is to try to fend off demands for fuel efficiency requirements for SUVs. The only reason the DMA mouths off on opt-out lists is because they want to avoid regulation that would have teeth. The sooner both (Bush and the DMA that is) are consigned to the trash can of history the better.
Tom Berners-Lee will undoubtedly and correctly be remembered as the Father of the Interweb
or
You mean Tim is a fraud? Is Tom somehow related? Or has MarcA got jealous and changed his name?
As for Tolkein, he'd surely be rotating in his grave if he knew claims being made on his name and work. His anti-technology stance is made very clear in his works and thrown vividly on the screen by Peter Johnson's recent hit movies. It is only orcs and Uruk Hi that use machines, everyone else is "in touch with nature".
Actually Tolkein himself said that the Elves were responsible for the wars of the Ring because they had tried to make middle earth unchanging.
Tolkein was actually trying to recreate a mythology for the British Isles. He knew that it had had one before the Roman invasion and X-tianization.
If you made a chip that ran at 10 ghz right now because of your skill with iron-steel-copper interconnecting rails, and patented it in September of 2003, and the following year Intel used the same process, would you like it?
No!
Wrong analogy.
The right analogy would be you design a very specific way of running at 10GHz. You apply for a patent in secret. You then attempt to extort money from people who adopted your particular design unaware that you had secretly applied for the patent.
It is the secrecy that leads to the extortion racket here.
Speaking of Yahoo, Yahoo's site, which premiered in 1995, was always designed around a tree-based structure in which the majority of the site design was static, with dynamically generated content backing it.
I am pretty sure Yahoo was arround quite a bit earlier. The Yang/Filo dorm room version of Yahoo was built in the same way and obviously pre-dated the corporate version.
Also Rohit Khare's Fork had a similar set-up at arround the same time.
Best Troll-like case of sour-grapes 'Gore actually won' liberal bias I've seen is awhile.
Why post as AC? Don't they teach you how to register for an account down at GOP HQ?
I never even mentioned Gore, sounds to me like the complaint was more of a Freudian association than a response.
Its like when you go ask a small child what they are eating and they say 'I didn't have any cookies, honest'. You guys know how history is going to place using the court to stop the counting of the votes. It clearly worries you. And so you have to keep having to bring it up in the hope that you might find someone who tells you 'oh no stealling the election was no big deal'.
Same goes for the anguished GOP cries of 'class warfare' whenever anyone mentions that most benefits from Bush's first tax cut went to the rich and most of the second planned tax cut goes the same way. They bring it up even though they are the only ones thinking about the issue in terms of class, everyone else is arguing that for any plan to stimulate the economy to work it has to go to people who are going to spend the money. But try to make that point and the organized GOP goons will be out there trying to shout you down with their class warfare nonsense. Class warfare is at the front of their minds because thats what their party has become, a vehicle for hyper-rich oil barrons to loot the economy through class warfare. Why else would they support scams like Enron unless they have a deep seated ideological commitment to helping billionaires like Kenny boy Lay loot the state of California and his own employee's pension plans?
In psychology this is called projection. The GOP lies and cheats and so they project those attributes onto their opponents. One would think that a party led by two adulterers would have avoided the Lewinsky mess at all costs. Instead they got so wrapped up in their projections they dug right in and ended up starting the impeachment proceedings in the house with the resignation of their leadership.
The GOP scheme of the moment is to try to con everyone into thinking that there is tremendous support for the war they want to start with 'the allies'. Only the only two they can mention are the UK and Israel. Then when they go off to Europe to drum up support they say 80% of the US supports a war, only they don't, the 80% figure is conditional on the allies and the UN sanctioning their war.
Once the war starts and people start arriving home in body bags the administration will be loudly blaming us for wanting a war but not being prepared for the consequences. The little homily being rounded off with a lecture on the need to take responsibility. Expect this fake letters to the editor scam they have worked out to be joined by many more. They have to convince Joe public that it is disloyal to fail to back the President once he has started a war.
So, lets leave the stolen election asside, the lies about the tax cut not hurting the economy or leading to defecits, take that all off the table. The fact that Bush has to resort to such desperation measures to prop up his sagging opinion poll ratings demonstrates a remarkable lack of confidence. Its the sort of tactics you would expect tin pot third world dictators to be involved in. It is not the sort of thing you expect of the 'leader of the free world'.
We can probably find prior art going back to Tim's presentation at the Annecy conference in '92.
Tim's original idea for a 'home page' was more like a bookmarks file, a page of links to stuff that the user found useful. The idea was that people could share them as a way to share access to content - this was a pre-Google, pre-Yahoo world.
Over time the links started to dwindle and the biography got larger so now we have these home pages where the assumption is that people are actually interested in you and your collection of pictures of 17th century windmills.
$180 per year would be bearable, if you didn't have to do a whole fucking server upgrade every year.
Minimum $800/yr is NOT reasonable.
Looks to me like a desperation type move. Anyone know how things are going financially down Red Hat way?
Microsoft has been lengthening its life cycles of late, from three years to five. There are pretty good reasons to tell people to steer clear of Windows 95, for a start there is no support for USB so it does not work on pretty much any system you buy in the shops today.
It is pretty reasonable to expect the O/S to be supported for the reasonable life expectancy of the machine. I have some boxes that were bought with Windows 95 on them but I haven't booted any of them recently.
The thing that is really fishy here is that servers are the one type of machine I could imagine keeping running for five years or more. There is precious little reason to keep upgrading your DNS servers and print spoolers.
I think that as the market comoditizes we will start to see more applicance type boxes. I already use appliances for my firewalls and there are now appliances that run print spoolers.
... if I write a letter to my congresscritter supporting an issue, I support that issue whether or not the original words are entirely mine
Yes but the congresscritters want to know how committed you are to that point of view. So believe it or not a five line handwritten 'kitchen table' letter is regarded far more highly than a laser printed form letter.
Thats not quite what is being talked about here which is bogus letters to the editor. Looks like the GOP is getting really rattled by the drop in Bush's opinion ratings which are now lower than his father's at the same point in the cycle. So they have a Web site that pumps out bogus letters to the editor under the names and addresses of local supporters. They need the local addresses because even the most ludicrous GOP lapdogs like the New York Post are not going to publish a letter saying 'President Bush is the greatest President ever, he has been demonstrating genuine leadership, blah blah' if it is from GOP HQ. And even if they did publish it readers would ignore it as a piece of ludicrous propaganda.
The GOP 'aliengrams' only have force if their source is disguised. They are written as independent letters of support. The only thing that makes them of interest to a local paper is that they come from a local person. Hence the need for the lie.
Campaign tactics of this sort say a lot about the character (or rather lack of it) of the politicians who use them. The intention is to deceive people into believing that there is widespread support for Bush's policies such as the invasion of Iraq.
The major newspapers like the London Times or the New York Times will almost always call before publishing, at least in my experience. The London Times wants to know that the letter has only been sent to them, and will quite often want to edit for length (although my style is compact enough to usually not need this).
There does not seem to be any info on the camera apart from the press release. However the size is 64 x 33.5 x 103 (mmm one presumes) which suggests that the drive. So this is NOT a 2.5" drive, the microdrive theory sounds most plausible.
I don't think that the 1hr limit is a huge problem. I did some tests and found that I could do quite well with a 15Min tape, provided it was removable. 1 hr fixed is really quite constraining in comparison. My comparison points here are that I rarely found battery life of 15 mins a problem on the early camcorders, except of course when I ran out of the batteries...
What would be interesting would be the emergence of better quality USB2.0 camera peripherals. It should be possible to make one of those with a full VGA resolution. My ideal system would allow me to carry a recording device the size of an archos on my waist and plug the camera part in.
I know that the really early VHS systems were like this. That format was abandoned when it became possible to put everything in one huge package, but this was done for cost, not for convenience.
Apart from being easier to manage, the separate head format would allow for multiple cameras recording at once to a single source. This would allow me to record presentations using separate cameras pointing to the presenter, whiteboard and the audience and end up with a single synchronized master.
Hopefully systems of this type will start to become available when the planne 80Gb removable drives start appearing. Even if nobody makes one that is packaged it will be pretty easy to make one, just take a shuttle PC and stick a carrying handle onto the top... The higher resolution USB 2.0 cameras will definitely start comming available. All that will be required therefore is the capture software.
It looks to me like it is a reputation attack. Its not enough for these systems to be secure they have to be seen to be secure.
A while back when I was security consultant to a certain well known federal site we had a bunch of Russian hackers claim that they had done a DDos on the site. In fact the claim was completely untrue, the site was down because a router had gone out. But the hackers managed to get their claim into wired.
It is like when there is a terrorist outrage and seventeen organizations claim responsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
And anyone who has the priv is automatically reconned to have SYSTEM.
There is a major advantage to be able to have an account where you can turn on privs when you need them but run with them turned off by default. What you do is to grant the exact privs needed by specific applications, the least privillege principle.
Of course never having used a secure O/S, you probably think UNIX is a great model with only 2 priv levels, nothing and absofuckinglutelyeverything.
That data is inconsistent with statements elsewhere that the Columbia was not outfitted to dock with the ISS despite a recent $90 million refit. Of course it may have been planned to outfit the orbiter when it returned from this mission.
I doubt that we are going to see another shuttle launch, unless it is needed to rescue the ISS crew. The shuttle fleet is another 17 years older than it was when challenger exploded. There are three orbiters left out of a fleet of five. It is one thing to redesign a spacecraft that has twenty years of design life left in it, quite another to make radical changes to a craft that is 20 years old.
The orbiters are now getting old. Discovery first launched in 1984, Atlantis in 1985, Endeavour in 1992 as a replacement for Challenger. Columbia was only slightly older than Discovery and Atlantis, being launched in 1981. More significantly perhaps Atlantis and Discovery have both done as many or more missions as Columbia (28). Even Endeavour is almost caught up. More significantly perhaps, each one of those flights is 13 million flight miles which means that each one of those orbiters has travelled ten times the distance a very well used commercial jet has flown and under conditions that are considerably more severe.
I don't think there is a large chance that the existing shuttles will fly again. There is perhaps an outside chance that Congress will fund a completely new fleet.
The problem is that at one end of the spectrum you have Richard Feynman's observation that about 4% of unmanned flights end in disaster. Allowing for more care with manned flights he considered the risk to be maybe 1%. With Columbia 2 flights out of about 100 have crashed which would put the risk at about 2% per launch.
The other way to look at it is in terms of flight miles. The orbiters have done a total of about one billion miles and 14 people have been killed. 747s have flown a total of 60 billion miles and something like 3 have come down over the years with something like 300 casualties a time. If you do the math you find that that works out to 15 people per billion miles. So manned space flight turns out to be about as risky as you might expect by rough extrapolation from really large samples.
I think it is really the result of Case being given the heave ho a few weeks back. Time Warner is back under Time Warner management. It is very clear that the business will soon be called Time Warner again. At this point the AOL division is a liability the management would be happy to get rid of for the price of the debt it carries ($8 billion or so).
Another property that might well be detached in the near future is the CNN division which Ted Turner is rumoured to be attempting to buy back. It appears that Ted believes CNN is dropping in the ratings for the same reason I do, they stopped doing news and did human interest bullshit with empty headed bimbos like Paula Zahn and Connie Chung.
It actualy means very little other than Bruce is not quite as good with the press as he thinks he is.
He probably gave a ten minute telephone interview and said lots of sensible stuff, the reporter then chose the one soundbite that make him look like a bit of a jerk.
Bruce became known as a security expert because he wrote an early book on cryptography that was the first mass market book. At this stage however he is known as a security expert because he is the first person in every journalist's rolodex.
Bruce returns calls promptly and gives good copy in time for the deadline. He also talks without any PR person on the line which is a big mistake. I always have a PR person on the line because (1) its company policy and (2) I want to have a witness in case we get into disputes as to who said what.
Bruce has calmed down a lot these days. But he has been known for putting out papers without enough consideration. A few years ago he blew much of his credibility in the IETF with an off target attack on the security of IPSEC.
So, no Bruce is not an idiot, doing that type of media interview is really hard, particularly if you do them at short notice on breaking news. But no, he is not that smart for wanting to attract so much attention. He is in danger of becomming a security pundit rather than a security expert.
At this point he could do a lot better for his company in a somewhat more relaxed guru mode. Compare the number of press comments made by Bruce to those of Butler Lampson or Whit Diffie, nobody in the business doubts their skills.
It would seem more likely that at this point they don't know what happened. If they knew what happened that would suggest they knew enough to fix it.
The Challenger disaster O ring problem only came to light several months after the disaster. And it took Dick Feynman's demonstration with the ice water for the theory to be accepted as fact. Before that NASA was claiming that the O rings were fine. Feynman had been tipped off by engineers who thought otherwise. It was not an accident he had very cold ice water to hand.
I doubt the fuel lines would have anything to do with disaster on re-entry. The orbiter has no fuel at that point. It is the famous flying brick.
40 other nations have endorsed it, 11 in Europe (including Ireland expressing hurt feelings for not being asked to sign the "letter of eight").
I read the world press rather than Fox news. 85% of people in the UK oppose war. I am a member of Blair's own party.
Support from Ireland, Spain and Poland is all very nice but they don't intend to do anything that would actually inconvenience themselves.
The polls in the US say pretty much the same thing, support for Bush's war is conditional on demonstrating international support.
Apart from Blair and Sharon there isn't any national leader that is actually supporting Bush.
Perhaps if war supporters had the guts to actually post under their own nyms the claim that there is lots of support would have more credibility.
You wish to enslave the world with systems just like the old Soviet Union, North Korea, Iraq and Cuba (the only places who's governments you support, see the weblink).
You know that type of argument was discredited when Joe McCarthy and Nixon used it. There is nothing I am saying that Norman Schwatzkof has not also said.
You support tyrants like Chamorra in Venezuela and use propoganda,
I believe in democracy, it appears that you do not. The guy was democratically elected. I am not in favor of military coups. Pinochet murdered at least 20,000 people to maintain his rule. The regimes in the rest of Latin America murdered similar numbers of people. I would prefer to see this matter solved at the ballot box rather than have the CIA go back to its old practices.
The bit that gets missed here is that security is not a product, its a process (something Bruce only seems to remember when writing his books). If we really want to go pointing fingers than how about the folk who designed buffer overflow bugs into the C programming language? Before C every programming language had array bounds checking built in. So who were the turkeys who decided that we should run without elimentary safety checking? Oh yes the same folk who gave us what people would now have us believe is the so-secure UNIX O/S.
It took over ten years for the elimentary security boo-boos to get sorted in UNIX. For years the UNIX crew told us that shadow passwords were dangerous security through obscurity, only the world readable password file and the salt gave genuine security. Then along came crack. It still took four years for shadow passwords to become mainstream.
Even today sendmail is installed by default in most UNIX installations, even though it is historically a security nightmare. Some of the bugs have been fixed but as a sendmail inc. employee admitted to me last week, it is still too dammn complicated for most people to understand how to configure it.
I don't think that this point scoring does any good. UNIX and Windows both have major security problems. Windows has security problems in implementation, UNIX has them built into the architecture. There are still UNIX boxes shipping with rhosts, even though it has been demoinstrated time and again that rhosts is completely insecure. Instaling ssh does nothing to improve the security of the box unless you actually uninstall the rhost commands and the daemon.
Folk who go on about how braindamaged Microsoft is should ask themselves how UNIX programmers managed to botch a command as simple as finger!
Nothing in politics is inevitable. People can always make the difference. In this case we have essentially a single individual, George W Bush who is the advocate of this war. Without him there would be no war. In a constitution of checks and balances individual power is seriously limited.
The numbers of casualties in the war are likely to dwarf this disaster. It is likely that the civilian casualties alone will be tens of thousands. The number of US troops killed is unlikely to be less than hundreds.
I don't agree that the war is inevitable though. Blair just got an extension of six weeks to try to convince other allies. In particular they really need permission from Turkey to use bases there. Blix has stated that the Bush administration deliberately misrepresented his report. The diplomatic initiative could well swing against Bush and his chickenhawks.
It is one thing to say you will start a war with no allies, no UN support and little domestic support. It is quite another to actually send the troops in for a land invasion.
What is very likely to happen is a prolonged bombing campaign launched from air craft carriers and Diego Garcia. The real issue will be whether Bush can keep the attacks going long enough to get Saddam before the news reports of hospitals, schools etc. being bombed take their toll. The British press don't think Blair will last more than a few weeks if there is a war, he does not have party support, even the Tory opposition, Thatcher's party is opposed.
The bulk of the US casualties would come from an actual land invasion. Bush may habe the theoretical ability to launch an invasion with no other support, in practice there are real limits to his authority. It is very unlikely he could launch an invasion if there was serious opposition to the war and people such as Schwatzkof and Powell went to Congress and said that there would likely be thousands of casualties if the land invasion went ahead.
The GOP has set a very dangerous precedent with their frivolous impeachment of Clinton. It would only take a small number of disaffected Republicans to bring an impeachment.
Columbia was the first space shuttle. The Enterprise was actually only a test vehicle that never went into space.
None of the space shuttles have ever had ejector seats, they were rejected as too expensive, bulky and heavy. The only scheme which would be likely to have been practical would have been one where the whole crew module separated as a unit and descended on a parachute. This introduces a whole rack of additional safety problems due to the need for all the explosive bolts etc.
It looks like this is going to be the final nail in the coffin for the space station. The Russians can't afford to run the Soyuz program any more which is already a problem because they provide the escape vehicle. It looks like the shuttles are going to be grounded for at least a year, after a second disaster it is very likely they will be grounded permenently.
This is probably the end of manned space flight for the next 10 or 20 years, possibly for our lifetimes.
It may also be the end for the SDI program. It will be very much harder to justify the program on the basis of fuzzy 'Americans can do anything, don't denigrate American genius etc.' argument.
The nuclear power industry almost recovered from Three Mile Island but it never recovered from Chernobyl afterwards.
You can fix DVDs the same way, just get a blue marker pen and draw a line arround the edge of the DVD.
If that fails send the DVD to Craig Shergold.
The problem I have with the stories is that they are very brief, only giving one side. One wonders if there was more history here.
Not really, the only reason I have had that box so long is that the speed is not gated on the cpu or memory anymore. I don't know what the bottleneck is but it certainly ain't memory - I have a full compliment, it does not seem to be the cpu cycles either.
I think that we are now at the point where the main bottleneck is stupid programmers who have useless delay loops waiting for peripherals to sync.
Another untrue nationalist fable. The EU has prohibited all national government subsidies of industry, including nationalized industries for more than ten years. The EU was doing this before the GATTII round turned into the WTO.
The only 'subsidies' currently allowed in the EU are payments for plant improvements to meet environmental regulations that the US does not have.
The US lobbyists attempt to claim that the EU ays 'subsidies' by misrepresenting the way the VAT purchase tax system works. The EU does have a tax policy under which goods that are exported from the EU are not subject to purchase taxes. This is exactly the same in the US, a New York company that sells goods out of state does not pay New York sales tax. And in any case an EU company that buys product from another EU company will pay the VAT to the seller and then reclaim the same amount from the government. It is simply the way that the tax system works, the idea is that the end customer alone pays 20percent on the total goods bought, the government gets the amount paid in the form of a tax on the Value Added at each stage.
As a result of the nationalist fable the failure in the Whitehouse has slapped a punitive tarrif on imports of steel. The reason the EU is not retaliating much is that as a direct result their car industry is now much more competative. Instead of importing the raw steel, GM and Ford are going to switch production to the EU and import engines, gearboxes and complete cars.
So anyone trying to sell a really innovative platform is going to end up charging way more than the market will bear.
BTW $2K is not too much in principle for a games system. I know plenty of people with MUCH more expensive systems. Mine cost $5K, only they are called PCs, not consoles. Mind you these days it would take a lot of dedication to go above $2K for a desktop machine. It took some doing to spend $5K two years ago. I paid $400 for the upgrade to my Son's machine a few months ago and he basically got a new machine with almost the same spec as mine.
When is Lara Croft comming out, thats what I want to know.
Self serving baloney pumped out by the steel companies. If that fable was true the European steel industry would have gone as well.
Asian steel producers costs are considerably greater than the 87 cents you quote. It costs them considerably more to ship their finished product than it costs the Us producers. They also have much longer lead times because of the transport time and so they are unable to address markets where quick turnarround is important.
If you read 'the Innovator's dilema' you will find the real reason for the decline of the US integrated steel mills, they were made obsolete by the cheaper to build mini-mills. There are still successful and profitable steel producers in the US, they are the ones the use mini-mill.
The integrated refiners have two major problems, the first is that they massively underfunded their pension plans for the past 20 odd years so they could claim to be profitable when in reality they were not. This allowed them to delay restructuring for 20 years past the time when the EU producers restructured.
The second big problem is that the integrated steel plants are not earning their cost of capital. This is the same in every country regardless of labor costs. 30 years ago when mini-mill technology first appeared the product was only fit for the least demanding uses. Over time the mini-mills have gradually more efficient and produced higher quality output so that today they provduce steel for car body panels which is pretty much the most demanding mass application. About the only market that is not well served by mini-mill today is steel for hand-fashioning by blacksmiths.
Of course the nationalist fable is a much easier sell, even though the message it sends is ultimately defeatist.
The DMA are certainly going to have to put up a fight even if that means they end up being inconsistent. They are paid whores to push the interests of their paymasters.
Another aspect of the K street thing I only realised after being involved with them is that in most companies the policy people are completely disconnected from the business unit. One would expect that whatever line was being pushed by the K street people would have its origins in some Machiavellian scheme of the strategy people.
What you find happens in practice is that the lobbyists are really out for their own self interests and their real objective is to get themselves enmeshed in some policy making cabal.
And since you have to hire lobbyists in pairs, Democrats and Republicans it is not unusual to find that your two lobbyists are actually promoting policies that are actually contradictory.
The DMA's support for opt-out lists is like Bush's idea of cars running on hydrogen. The only reason Bush is talking about hydrogen cars is to try to fend off demands for fuel efficiency requirements for SUVs. The only reason the DMA mouths off on opt-out lists is because they want to avoid regulation that would have teeth. The sooner both (Bush and the DMA that is) are consigned to the trash can of history the better.
or You mean Tim is a fraud? Is Tom somehow related? Or has MarcA got jealous and changed his name?
As for Tolkein, he'd surely be rotating in his grave if he knew claims being made on his name and work. His anti-technology stance is made very clear in his works and thrown vividly on the screen by Peter Johnson's recent hit movies. It is only orcs and Uruk Hi that use machines, everyone else is "in touch with nature".
Actually Tolkein himself said that the Elves were responsible for the wars of the Ring because they had tried to make middle earth unchanging.
Tolkein was actually trying to recreate a mythology for the British Isles. He knew that it had had one before the Roman invasion and X-tianization.
Wrong analogy.
The right analogy would be you design a very specific way of running at 10GHz. You apply for a patent in secret. You then attempt to extort money from people who adopted your particular design unaware that you had secretly applied for the patent.
It is the secrecy that leads to the extortion racket here.
Hopefully the en-banc will agree,
I am pretty sure Yahoo was arround quite a bit earlier. The Yang/Filo dorm room version of Yahoo was built in the same way and obviously pre-dated the corporate version.
Also Rohit Khare's Fork had a similar set-up at arround the same time.
Why post as AC? Don't they teach you how to register for an account down at GOP HQ?
I never even mentioned Gore, sounds to me like the complaint was more of a Freudian association than a response. Its like when you go ask a small child what they are eating and they say 'I didn't have any cookies, honest'. You guys know how history is going to place using the court to stop the counting of the votes. It clearly worries you. And so you have to keep having to bring it up in the hope that you might find someone who tells you 'oh no stealling the election was no big deal'.
Same goes for the anguished GOP cries of 'class warfare' whenever anyone mentions that most benefits from Bush's first tax cut went to the rich and most of the second planned tax cut goes the same way. They bring it up even though they are the only ones thinking about the issue in terms of class, everyone else is arguing that for any plan to stimulate the economy to work it has to go to people who are going to spend the money. But try to make that point and the organized GOP goons will be out there trying to shout you down with their class warfare nonsense. Class warfare is at the front of their minds because thats what their party has become, a vehicle for hyper-rich oil barrons to loot the economy through class warfare. Why else would they support scams like Enron unless they have a deep seated ideological commitment to helping billionaires like Kenny boy Lay loot the state of California and his own employee's pension plans?
In psychology this is called projection. The GOP lies and cheats and so they project those attributes onto their opponents. One would think that a party led by two adulterers would have avoided the Lewinsky mess at all costs. Instead they got so wrapped up in their projections they dug right in and ended up starting the impeachment proceedings in the house with the resignation of their leadership.
The GOP scheme of the moment is to try to con everyone into thinking that there is tremendous support for the war they want to start with 'the allies'. Only the only two they can mention are the UK and Israel. Then when they go off to Europe to drum up support they say 80% of the US supports a war, only they don't, the 80% figure is conditional on the allies and the UN sanctioning their war.
Once the war starts and people start arriving home in body bags the administration will be loudly blaming us for wanting a war but not being prepared for the consequences. The little homily being rounded off with a lecture on the need to take responsibility. Expect this fake letters to the editor scam they have worked out to be joined by many more. They have to convince Joe public that it is disloyal to fail to back the President once he has started a war.
So, lets leave the stolen election asside, the lies about the tax cut not hurting the economy or leading to defecits, take that all off the table. The fact that Bush has to resort to such desperation measures to prop up his sagging opinion poll ratings demonstrates a remarkable lack of confidence. Its the sort of tactics you would expect tin pot third world dictators to be involved in. It is not the sort of thing you expect of the 'leader of the free world'.
Tim's original idea for a 'home page' was more like a bookmarks file, a page of links to stuff that the user found useful. The idea was that people could share them as a way to share access to content - this was a pre-Google, pre-Yahoo world.
Over time the links started to dwindle and the biography got larger so now we have these home pages where the assumption is that people are actually interested in you and your collection of pictures of 17th century windmills.
Looks to me like a desperation type move. Anyone know how things are going financially down Red Hat way?
Microsoft has been lengthening its life cycles of late, from three years to five. There are pretty good reasons to tell people to steer clear of Windows 95, for a start there is no support for USB so it does not work on pretty much any system you buy in the shops today.
It is pretty reasonable to expect the O/S to be supported for the reasonable life expectancy of the machine. I have some boxes that were bought with Windows 95 on them but I haven't booted any of them recently.
The thing that is really fishy here is that servers are the one type of machine I could imagine keeping running for five years or more. There is precious little reason to keep upgrading your DNS servers and print spoolers.
I think that as the market comoditizes we will start to see more applicance type boxes. I already use appliances for my firewalls and there are now appliances that run print spoolers.
Yes but the congresscritters want to know how committed you are to that point of view. So believe it or not a five line handwritten 'kitchen table' letter is regarded far more highly than a laser printed form letter.
Thats not quite what is being talked about here which is bogus letters to the editor. Looks like the GOP is getting really rattled by the drop in Bush's opinion ratings which are now lower than his father's at the same point in the cycle. So they have a Web site that pumps out bogus letters to the editor under the names and addresses of local supporters. They need the local addresses because even the most ludicrous GOP lapdogs like the New York Post are not going to publish a letter saying 'President Bush is the greatest President ever, he has been demonstrating genuine leadership, blah blah' if it is from GOP HQ. And even if they did publish it readers would ignore it as a piece of ludicrous propaganda.
The GOP 'aliengrams' only have force if their source is disguised. They are written as independent letters of support. The only thing that makes them of interest to a local paper is that they come from a local person. Hence the need for the lie.
Campaign tactics of this sort say a lot about the character (or rather lack of it) of the politicians who use them. The intention is to deceive people into believing that there is widespread support for Bush's policies such as the invasion of Iraq.
The major newspapers like the London Times or the New York Times will almost always call before publishing, at least in my experience. The London Times wants to know that the letter has only been sent to them, and will quite often want to edit for length (although my style is compact enough to usually not need this).
I don't think that the 1hr limit is a huge problem. I did some tests and found that I could do quite well with a 15Min tape, provided it was removable. 1 hr fixed is really quite constraining in comparison. My comparison points here are that I rarely found battery life of 15 mins a problem on the early camcorders, except of course when I ran out of the batteries...
What would be interesting would be the emergence of better quality USB2.0 camera peripherals. It should be possible to make one of those with a full VGA resolution. My ideal system would allow me to carry a recording device the size of an archos on my waist and plug the camera part in.
I know that the really early VHS systems were like this. That format was abandoned when it became possible to put everything in one huge package, but this was done for cost, not for convenience.
Apart from being easier to manage, the separate head format would allow for multiple cameras recording at once to a single source. This would allow me to record presentations using separate cameras pointing to the presenter, whiteboard and the audience and end up with a single synchronized master.
Hopefully systems of this type will start to become available when the planne 80Gb removable drives start appearing. Even if nobody makes one that is packaged it will be pretty easy to make one, just take a shuttle PC and stick a carrying handle onto the top... The higher resolution USB 2.0 cameras will definitely start comming available. All that will be required therefore is the capture software.
It looks to me like it is a reputation attack. Its not enough for these systems to be secure they have to be seen to be secure.
A while back when I was security consultant to a certain well known federal site we had a bunch of Russian hackers claim that they had done a DDos on the site. In fact the claim was completely untrue, the site was down because a router had gone out. But the hackers managed to get their claim into wired.
It is like when there is a terrorist outrage and seventeen organizations claim responsibility.