There isn't a single US manufacturer of motherboards any more; that would be the most sturdy place to insert any nefariousness (at least, nefariousness by the PC manufacturer.) Who knows where BIOS code is written these days; but I doubt it's the US.
Not to mention the whole stack of drivers you need, like those for on-board peripherals. It'd be just as easy to put a back-door in a Windows I/O driver as it would the BIOS.
The skin on the tips of your fingers is both thick and generally well-vascularized, (but not so much that there is any chance of hitting a larger vessel). They don't have to pinch your skin to force sufficient blood to the surface to collect. (This causes bruising in people with fragile skin.) There is a very high concentration of nerve endings, the pain receptors are not nearly as dense. There's no muscle, which is sore for some time when injured. It's consistent from person to person; a forearm stick will vary widely depending on the thickness of the skin, fat, and muscle layers. That's not a worry on the fingertip, where everybody will have enough skin that that's the layer they'll always be drawing from.
I've been looking at all the cheap Chinese Android Sticks that have been coming out lately, but have been hesitant to buy since they each have their own little quirks and none are really supported. If they can increase the app availability, I'm there...
Of course, adding BlueTooth so you could interact with at least a mouse would be better.
Why would you think it's not considered a legitimate security? A Ponzi scheme can be built on anything you like; if it's an investment, the SEC has jurisdiction.
The feds may not like BitCoins, but that's mainly due to their use for money-laundering, not because they have some sort of deep-seated fear that the USD will start feeling the heat of competition.
Just like with the paeans to older computer games often printed here, you simply don't remember all the derivative crap that was produced before. While Hollywood may be blowing more money on individual bad movies these days, there is hardly much change in the number of good vs. bad movies being made. Most were crap before, most are crap now.
Theaters get half the gross, right off the top. Marketing is usually roughly half the production budget (though this varies widely of course.) Movies with "big names" attached (either stars or directors) may take off even more of the gross.
You can expect some DVD revenue, but this varies as widely as the marketing budget.
"provid[ing] tactical solutions and operational support to business users of information exploitation systems" does not mean "Industrial Espionage".
This is an ad for Data Mining staff, nothing more. The ad doesn't say anything about where the information comes from, what it's for, or what it is. "Business users" refers to non-IT staff, not people outside government being given access to privileged information. Even in government, they use the same terms as private-sector IT to refer to end-users (a.k.a. "business users") vs. IT.
I'm not saying MI5 isn't doing anything evil, but I AM saying this ad doesn't give you any new information one way or another.
Paraphrasing another poster: I see a new customer for the "Jumping to Conclusions Mat" from Office Space!
We know, when watching a horror film, that real people did not die to make the movie. Showing the death of a real person as "entertainment" is a different matter entirely.
Does it cross the line? I don't know. It would make an interesting test case; if it was porn instead, it would seem to be over the line established in the Miller test.
If this guy had ever worked IT, he'd know that if you have a serious problem that needs to be solved NOW, and you are already dead-in-the-water, this is 100% standard practice, and something that is self-evident without the help of a mathematical model.
I used to work Enterprise-level tech-support for a large maker of computer equipment, and our first response to a customer that was complaining he was essentially out of business until his computers were back online was to request he reboot plausible sources of the problem until things started working again. (Pulling a logset first if he could spare the time and didn't want it to happen again.) Unless the problem is obvious, this is usually the fastest way to fix things unless you care about root cause.
I'm pretty sure the US would need to agree for the simple reason that if control could be taken without US consent, then it would be gone already. There'd be no need to "demand" anything.
It looks like the primary problem was they had all kinds of big ideas, and utterly failed to hire anybody with any land-use planning or large-scale development experience to put them on paper in a language likely to be approved.
Just like computer people have their own language and lingo when dealing with technology, so do government land-use officials when reviewing development plans. If your plans don't cover what they expect them to cover, fail to counter objections the planner is likely to have, etc., your proposed development is probably not going to be approved, no matter how meritorious.
As I've pointed out every time this idea gets floated, why on earth would the US agree to this? Diplomatic efforts are only effective if there is a carrot or stick behind them. Neither is in evidence.
You can't "prove" religion is false (or true) or that there is (or is not) the presence of God(s). The very essence of religious claims are usually outside falsability. That doesn't mean the claims are true, or should be taught in schools, or have any relation to science. You can believe in God without being an irrational person, even if you could be accused of wishful thinking.
The things I listed ARE falsafiable, yet people continue to believe in them.
If the idea was to intimidate people through the use of "security theater", there are cheaper ways to do so. Fake surveillance cameras are cheap. These bogus bomb detectors were not.
Also, it sounds like you are making the common mistake of assuming the bad guys are morons. They can read the internet too; this $hit's been splashed all over the New York Times... if they know the devices are bogus then they'll target checkpoints that have them, knowing they don't work.
And believing you are screening for explosives when you are doing nothing of the sort is worse than useless. There ARE viable means of detecting explosives, but if you think your bases are already covered you are never going to deploy them.
Whatever this issue is, it's a different problem. This fire occurred near the tail of the aircraft near the crew rest area. The batteries in question were in the avionics bay near the front.
I don't doubt that the Top500 list has a bunch of iDataPlex boxes on it; it's built from the ground up to be a budget-oriented pre-integrated HPC solution.
But nobody at IBM, even the most greedy iDataPlex sales drone, would ever call that thing a mainframe, which are dedicated to transaction and business data processing, not FLOPS.
That'll teach me to post before Googling. It makes sense that coupling links (previously using wholly propriatary "magic") would shift to Infiniband to save cost.
Redundant internal engineering and resulting high reliability and security Extensive input-output facilities Strict backward compatibility with older software High hardware and computational utilization rates to support massive throughput
There's no drive to design machines this way anymore? Somebody better tell IBM, as they haven't gotten the memo. They keep rolling out new models and customers keep buying them. (I think the latest estimates are that they are, after all these years, still responsible for about 40% of IBM's net profit.)
While they get little respect, IBM mainframes still meet all of those requirements (and no other significant architectures do.) The toughest is the backwards compatibility. You can, with a daisy-chain of dusty interface adapters, load any punch-card-based program (or a reel of tape), and run them just as if you would on a S/360 from the 1960's without changing a single line of code. And you can do this with a box just rolling off the line in Poughkeepsie today. It doesn't even involve a troublesome and bug-prone software emulator; every instruction supported on an S/360 is supported with current processors natively.
The I/O capabilities are still massive, and it's quite common for a mainframe to have more space dedicated to I/O adapters than CPU modules. (It's only in the last couple of years that the I/O offload capabilities on PC/UNIX boxes have come anywhere near to what mainframes have been doing since the 70's.)
And due to their cost and licensing structure, most of them do indeed run flat-out as much as possible.
Have you ever actually laid eyes on a mainframe? You seem to be confusing them with low-budget HPC clusters. IBM is the largest mainframe vendor and I can assure you that they are not "a bunch of PC servers with Infiniband."
They use processors unique to mainframes; they don't even use IBM's POWER CPUs. They certainly don't use "PC" processors. The internal I/O architecture is also unique to the box. (This is why they were, for many, many, years, the king of transaction processing; they had some unique advantages over the PC/UNIX way of doing I/O.) Externally, they can talk several different protocols; communication to the "outside world" is mostly TCP/IP, and communication to peripherals is done via FICON (mainframe I/O over Fibre Channel), although Linux partitions can use FCP. (SCSI over Fibre Channel.)
I don't think the boxes can talk infiniband at all. Why would they? That's mainly an HPC protocol, and you'd be a complete blithering idiot to be running HPC applications on a really-expensive business-oriented transaction-processing monster.
He's gone a bit beyond just saying that he thinks society is doomed if it accepts homosexuals. He's wrong, of course, but that's not something to get in a lather over. He's gone well beyond that and thinks its also perfectly justified to call for the violent overthrow of the US Government if it makes the mistake of not keeping gay marriage illegal. Yes, you heard that right, gay marriage is apparently a moral issue worthy of wholesale civil war.
Of course, now that gay marriage IS legal (at least in places), he's saying (due to his upcoming movie) that we should just let bygones be bygones and let the whole thing slide. (Maybe he wants to delay the revolution until after his movie comes out.)
When the story first broke, I believed Snowden was a hero. This was when the leaked information was regarding legally-questionable, at best, domestic spying on it's own citizens.
The leaks since then have shown that Snowden isn't just "blowing the whistle", he's leaking whatever details he could carry on whatever electronic intelligence programs he could get his hands on. It's not as if it should have come as a big shock to him (or anybody) that the NSA spies on the communications of foreign countries; that's kind of what we created the NSA for, and it's what we pay intelligence agencies for in general.
Firstly, he's not stateless. The US is not denying the fact he is currently a United States Citizen. A stateless person is one with no citizenship anywhere. A stateless person has no right of entry into any country; he has the right to return to the US any time he wants.
Second, nothing in international law obligates any country to not object to an asylum application. It would be a treaty violation to make asylum seeking in and of itself a crime, but that's not happening.
That UN treaty does protect asylum seekers from purely political prosecutions, but Snowden has moved well away from whistleblowing on domestic surveillance programs (I could certainly classify that as "political"), and has progressed to apparently spilling the beans on every electronic intelligence gathering operation he could get his hands on.
When he was still talking about domestic surveillance of questionably constitutionality, I could see him as a civil liberties hero. But he's gone well beyond that by now.
And, as a side note, how did he NOT think going from Hong Kong to Moscow was going from The Frying Pan Into the Fire? Hong Kong was a strange choice to begin with. (He could be successfully hiding almost anywhere in Western Europe, had he fled there.) Leaving Hong Kong to head to Moscow was even stranger. If he wanted the "Court of Public Opinion" on his side, this was not necessarily the best way to go about it. Not to mention the danger inherent in relying on the goodwill of the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of Russia.
No, McDonalds doesn't own the Real Estate either. They do not buy the land for the restaurants, they do not own the buildings, they do not lease the restaurants to the franchise owners. (I don't know about the equipment... I expect they don't own that either.)
They don't provide payroll processing, they have nothing to do with hiring, they don't even provide POS systems to the restaurants.
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There isn't a single US manufacturer of motherboards any more; that would be the most sturdy place to insert any nefariousness (at least, nefariousness by the PC manufacturer.) Who knows where BIOS code is written these days; but I doubt it's the US.
Not to mention the whole stack of drivers you need, like those for on-board peripherals. It'd be just as easy to put a back-door in a Windows I/O driver as it would the BIOS.
The skin on the tips of your fingers is both thick and generally well-vascularized, (but not so much that there is any chance of hitting a larger vessel).
They don't have to pinch your skin to force sufficient blood to the surface to collect. (This causes bruising in people with fragile skin.)
There is a very high concentration of nerve endings, the pain receptors are not nearly as dense.
There's no muscle, which is sore for some time when injured.
It's consistent from person to person; a forearm stick will vary widely depending on the thickness of the skin, fat, and muscle layers. That's not a worry on the fingertip, where everybody will have enough skin that that's the layer they'll always be drawing from.
I've been looking at all the cheap Chinese Android Sticks that have been coming out lately, but have been hesitant to buy since they each have their own little quirks and none are really supported. If they can increase the app availability, I'm there...
Of course, adding BlueTooth so you could interact with at least a mouse would be better.
Why would you think it's not considered a legitimate security? A Ponzi scheme can be built on anything you like; if it's an investment, the SEC has jurisdiction.
The feds may not like BitCoins, but that's mainly due to their use for money-laundering, not because they have some sort of deep-seated fear that the USD will start feeling the heat of competition.
Just like with the paeans to older computer games often printed here, you simply don't remember all the derivative crap that was produced before. While Hollywood may be blowing more money on individual bad movies these days, there is hardly much change in the number of good vs. bad movies being made. Most were crap before, most are crap now.
Theaters get half the gross, right off the top. Marketing is usually roughly half the production budget (though this varies widely of course.) Movies with "big names" attached (either stars or directors) may take off even more of the gross.
You can expect some DVD revenue, but this varies as widely as the marketing budget.
"provid[ing] tactical solutions and operational support to business users of information exploitation systems" does not mean "Industrial Espionage".
This is an ad for Data Mining staff, nothing more. The ad doesn't say anything about where the information comes from, what it's for, or what it is. "Business users" refers to non-IT staff, not people outside government being given access to privileged information. Even in government, they use the same terms as private-sector IT to refer to end-users (a.k.a. "business users") vs. IT.
I'm not saying MI5 isn't doing anything evil, but I AM saying this ad doesn't give you any new information one way or another.
Paraphrasing another poster: I see a new customer for the "Jumping to Conclusions Mat" from Office Space!
We know, when watching a horror film, that real people did not die to make the movie. Showing the death of a real person as "entertainment" is a different matter entirely.
Does it cross the line? I don't know. It would make an interesting test case; if it was porn instead, it would seem to be over the line established in the Miller test.
If this were to occur in the US, would a prosecution under obscenity laws be legal?
The bar is high, but compared with other things subject to the law, (i.e. the "Miller" test applied to pornography) this would seem to cross it.
If this guy had ever worked IT, he'd know that if you have a serious problem that needs to be solved NOW, and you are already dead-in-the-water, this is 100% standard practice, and something that is self-evident without the help of a mathematical model.
I used to work Enterprise-level tech-support for a large maker of computer equipment, and our first response to a customer that was complaining he was essentially out of business until his computers were back online was to request he reboot plausible sources of the problem until things started working again. (Pulling a logset first if he could spare the time and didn't want it to happen again.) Unless the problem is obvious, this is usually the fastest way to fix things unless you care about root cause.
I'm pretty sure the US would need to agree for the simple reason that if control could be taken without US consent, then it would be gone already. There'd be no need to "demand" anything.
It looks like the primary problem was they had all kinds of big ideas, and utterly failed to hire anybody with any land-use planning or large-scale development experience to put them on paper in a language likely to be approved.
Just like computer people have their own language and lingo when dealing with technology, so do government land-use officials when reviewing development plans. If your plans don't cover what they expect them to cover, fail to counter objections the planner is likely to have, etc., your proposed development is probably not going to be approved, no matter how meritorious.
As I've pointed out every time this idea gets floated, why on earth would the US agree to this? Diplomatic efforts are only effective if there is a carrot or stick behind them. Neither is in evidence.
You can't "prove" religion is false (or true) or that there is (or is not) the presence of God(s). The very essence of religious claims are usually outside falsability. That doesn't mean the claims are true, or should be taught in schools, or have any relation to science. You can believe in God without being an irrational person, even if you could be accused of wishful thinking.
The things I listed ARE falsafiable, yet people continue to believe in them.
If the idea was to intimidate people through the use of "security theater", there are cheaper ways to do so. Fake surveillance cameras are cheap. These bogus bomb detectors were not.
Also, it sounds like you are making the common mistake of assuming the bad guys are morons. They can read the internet too; this $hit's been splashed all over the New York Times... if they know the devices are bogus then they'll target checkpoints that have them, knowing they don't work.
And believing you are screening for explosives when you are doing nothing of the sort is worse than useless. There ARE viable means of detecting explosives, but if you think your bases are already covered you are never going to deploy them.
Shocker: In the face of conclusive evidence understandable to anybody with an IQ higher than a kumquat, people still believe in:
Ponzi schemes
Homeopathy
Dowsing
Young-earth creationism
Psychics
Never underestimate the stubbornness of otherwise-rational people.
Whatever this issue is, it's a different problem. This fire occurred near the tail of the aircraft near the crew rest area. The batteries in question were in the avionics bay near the front.
I don't doubt that the Top500 list has a bunch of iDataPlex boxes on it; it's built from the ground up to be a budget-oriented pre-integrated HPC solution.
But nobody at IBM, even the most greedy iDataPlex sales drone, would ever call that thing a mainframe, which are dedicated to transaction and business data processing, not FLOPS.
That'll teach me to post before Googling. It makes sense that coupling links (previously using wholly propriatary "magic") would shift to Infiniband to save cost.
Redundant internal engineering and resulting high reliability and security
Extensive input-output facilities
Strict backward compatibility with older software
High hardware and computational utilization rates to support massive throughput
There's no drive to design machines this way anymore? Somebody better tell IBM, as they haven't gotten the memo. They keep rolling out new models and customers keep buying them. (I think the latest estimates are that they are, after all these years, still responsible for about 40% of IBM's net profit.)
While they get little respect, IBM mainframes still meet all of those requirements (and no other significant architectures do.) The toughest is the backwards compatibility. You can, with a daisy-chain of dusty interface adapters, load any punch-card-based program (or a reel of tape), and run them just as if you would on a S/360 from the 1960's without changing a single line of code. And you can do this with a box just rolling off the line in Poughkeepsie today. It doesn't even involve a troublesome and bug-prone software emulator; every instruction supported on an S/360 is supported with current processors natively.
The I/O capabilities are still massive, and it's quite common for a mainframe to have more space dedicated to I/O adapters than CPU modules. (It's only in the last couple of years that the I/O offload capabilities on PC/UNIX boxes have come anywhere near to what mainframes have been doing since the 70's.)
And due to their cost and licensing structure, most of them do indeed run flat-out as much as possible.
Have you ever actually laid eyes on a mainframe? You seem to be confusing them with low-budget HPC clusters. IBM is the largest mainframe vendor and I can assure you that they are not "a bunch of PC servers with Infiniband."
They use processors unique to mainframes; they don't even use IBM's POWER CPUs. They certainly don't use "PC" processors.
The internal I/O architecture is also unique to the box. (This is why they were, for many, many, years, the king of transaction processing; they had some unique advantages over the PC/UNIX way of doing I/O.)
Externally, they can talk several different protocols; communication to the "outside world" is mostly TCP/IP, and communication to peripherals is done via FICON (mainframe I/O over Fibre Channel), although Linux partitions can use FCP. (SCSI over Fibre Channel.)
I don't think the boxes can talk infiniband at all. Why would they? That's mainly an HPC protocol, and you'd be a complete blithering idiot to be running HPC applications on a really-expensive business-oriented transaction-processing monster.
He's gone a bit beyond just saying that he thinks society is doomed if it accepts homosexuals. He's wrong, of course, but that's not something to get in a lather over. He's gone well beyond that and thinks its also perfectly justified to call for the violent overthrow of the US Government if it makes the mistake of not keeping gay marriage illegal. Yes, you heard that right, gay marriage is apparently a moral issue worthy of wholesale civil war.
Of course, now that gay marriage IS legal (at least in places), he's saying (due to his upcoming movie) that we should just let bygones be bygones and let the whole thing slide. (Maybe he wants to delay the revolution until after his movie comes out.)
When the story first broke, I believed Snowden was a hero. This was when the leaked information was regarding legally-questionable, at best, domestic spying on it's own citizens.
The leaks since then have shown that Snowden isn't just "blowing the whistle", he's leaking whatever details he could carry on whatever electronic intelligence programs he could get his hands on. It's not as if it should have come as a big shock to him (or anybody) that the NSA spies on the communications of foreign countries; that's kind of what we created the NSA for, and it's what we pay intelligence agencies for in general.
Firstly, he's not stateless. The US is not denying the fact he is currently a United States Citizen. A stateless person is one with no citizenship anywhere. A stateless person has no right of entry into any country; he has the right to return to the US any time he wants.
Second, nothing in international law obligates any country to not object to an asylum application. It would be a treaty violation to make asylum seeking in and of itself a crime, but that's not happening.
That UN treaty does protect asylum seekers from purely political prosecutions, but Snowden has moved well away from whistleblowing on domestic surveillance programs (I could certainly classify that as "political"), and has progressed to apparently spilling the beans on every electronic intelligence gathering operation he could get his hands on.
When he was still talking about domestic surveillance of questionably constitutionality, I could see him as a civil liberties hero. But he's gone well beyond that by now.
And, as a side note, how did he NOT think going from Hong Kong to Moscow was going from The Frying Pan Into the Fire? Hong Kong was a strange choice to begin with. (He could be successfully hiding almost anywhere in Western Europe, had he fled there.) Leaving Hong Kong to head to Moscow was even stranger. If he wanted the "Court of Public Opinion" on his side, this was not necessarily the best way to go about it. Not to mention the danger inherent in relying on the goodwill of the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of Russia.
No, McDonalds doesn't own the Real Estate either. They do not buy the land for the restaurants, they do not own the buildings, they do not lease the restaurants to the franchise owners. (I don't know about the equipment... I expect they don't own that either.)
They don't provide payroll processing, they have nothing to do with hiring, they don't even provide POS systems to the restaurants.