cheaper on average because people will alter their behavior
I disagree. Let's look at one example of prior art...Cell phones. I have a "standard" cell phone plan. It is X dollars a month, with several hundred minutes of free airtime per month. Let's give an arbitrary 400 minutes a month, for argument's sake. The plan is $50 per month.
My son wanted a particular phone with all the bells and whistles. So he gets one of these pay-as-you-go plans. This plan costs him $0.25 per minute for the first 10 minutes each day, and $0.15 after that. So to use up his $50 of airtime, he only has to use 326 minutes, or 5 hours of airtime total to spend $50 (assuming he uses it in the same day), and that is still less than the free airtime of the other plan.
Privacy issues notwithstanding (and I do not in any way minimize them, private industry should have absolutely as little personal information as humanly possible), they will most likely tend to lie about the total cost, like the retail industry tends to do. Car ads do not give the price of a car, but a monthly payment, which is an arbitrary number. Cell plans, you name it, retailers are trying to hide the fact that you are paying more and more and more.
I don't see insurance companies doing any differently.
Starbucks, with their deployment of wireless APs in their stores, and now with the music concept, is really working hard to keep customers sitting down longer in their stores, consuming their products.
What does Starbucks have going for it?
Expensive mediocre products
Expensive sandwiches and other "nibblers" I actually ate a full lunch in a restaraunt listed in the Washingtonian as one of the best in its class for less than one of their stale sandwiches.)
Expensive wireless access
and now
Expensive cd listening/burning stations (its the only way that the RIAA can get their pound of flesh, plus starbucks make a ridiculous profit on the venture).
Hmmm...Look at the common denominator...
Wonder if they will ban my Archos/IPod/MP3-enabled PDA...
Everything you listed is just a download away. I fail to see the problem.
I see two problems. First, pretty much everything you mentioned involves a third-party "strap-on" items. This works fine for some things, but many apps suffer a fate that Windows either overrides them or just don't work quite right with them, causing random lockups of the machine or the app. Most times, there is nothing wrong with the app itself, since it runs under Unix/Linux/OSX/whatever (a perfect example is gnupg, which runs fine on Linux, but when I tried to run it on XP Pro, problems). Unix uses what may be considered third party apps, however, Unix (and Linux) were designed from the beginning as a collection of tools which do one or two things, and do them exceedingly well. These tools can be mixed and matched as needed to accomplish tasks. Therefore, plugging a tool in to a *nix box is absolutely natural. Windows, OTOH, was designed and built as a monolithic entity (some would say belligerently so). Adding third-party tools to Windows can be akin to strapping a JATO pod to a '65 Ford Fairlane.It doesn't make it an airplane, but it can sometimes make a mess.
The second issue is security. I hear every day from Windows advocates that "Linux has as many or more security holes as Windows." This is a straw-man, since many Windows security problems of a higher level of risk than the average Linux one. If I have 10 rifles, I am still less of a risk than if you have one nuke. Either because of the difficulty in exploitation of the Linux holes, or because they are local-only exploits.
Many Windows problems are a result of the "point and click" mindset. IE autoinstalling malware, Outlook auto-opening unknown attachments, and so forth, and being configured to behave this way. Can Linux be configured this way? Sure. Is it out of the box? Not generally. And this doesn't even begin to address the disparity in fix release time.
Traditionally, the designations for Warsaw-Pact hardware was based on function. Fighters were given names beginning with the letter F, e.g. Su.27 Flanker, MiG-29 Foxbat, etc. Bombers began with B (e.g. Bear, Badger, Backfire), and mulitpurpose or miscellaneous aircraft began with M (e.g. Mainstay, May).
Missiles had a similar designation system, with Air-to-Surface beginning with K and Surface-to-Surface beginning with S. I doubt it was an effort to demonize the Soviets, more likely some computer spit out the word when they discovered there was a new missile on the block, since there are probably a hundred or so missiles designated in this way.
Amen to that. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are the main downfalls of the Star Trek legacy, with their mealy-mouth, politically correct scripts, production and direction.
Look at past shows. TNG? Mostly lame with a few excellent episodes...(though, in fact, The Inner Light is probably one of the best episodes ever.)
DS9? First three seasons lame with seasons 4-7 taking off. Why? Because after the 3rd season, Berman and Braga left DS9 to its own devices and went to work on Voyager. (Although Berman kept his name in as Executive Producer, I don't think he took much creative control in the later seasons.)
Voyager and Enterprise almost don't bear mentioning. Voyager had a few good episodes (The Year of Hell comes to mind), but overall pretty lackluster.
You know, this would be really cool for a jet's cockpit. Remember, in the day, the Concorde had to have a drop-down nose so the pilot can see the runway on landing.
Put this technology in the cockpit to give better visibility. Better yet, putting it in a fighter's cockpit to give 360x360 degree (or close to it) visiblilty would give extreme advantage in a dogfight. Of course, the video updates would have to be faster than, say, moving a transparent window around on your X display...
I'm not sure a laptop will ever make a reasonable replacement for a PDA given the whole PDA thing is about size and convenience.
I agree. Laptops are more bulky than a PDA, and the latest generation of laptops seem to be getting heavier, with the larger displays and the added cooling equipment to keep these heat-intensive modern processors.
I think the major reason "PDAs" are dying is because virtually every cellphone on sale these days has most of the functionality PDAs are generally used for, with the exception of efficient note taking (a feature I rarely see my PDA-owning friends using in practice)
I actually use mine for not only note taking, the occasional game and contacts, thanks to Baen Books, I use it as my primary book reader. Add to that the security apps (OTP app, encryption programs, etc) that I wouldn't feel comfortable having on my phone.
While I appreciate your motive, how much good do you think this will do? Sysadmins and security engineers (I'm both) have, for years, told users...(Join in if you've heard this)...
Don't run IE, run Mozilla
Don't run IIS, run Apache
Don't open attachments
Don't water your plant when its sitting on top of your monitor
Don't open attachments
Don't open attachments
Please please PLEASE, I beg of you, don't open attachments.
Give a user an attachment and make it a 27-step process and you will still have repeated infections.
I just did a vulnerability scan of a mid-sized client (large enough to have subcontractors doing their lan). You know what I found? Ancient (read Vulnerable) OpenSSH, ancient OpenSSL, MySQL databases without passwords, unpatched windows boxes, windows boxes with no admin password, you name it. And these guys are computer professionals. I don't know how much good training is going to do...Unless you were to start fining people of their computer gets infected due to negligence...Or switch everyone over to a more useful OS...
Well, there's a thought. Though some would say the punishment wouldn't really fit the crime.
Thats part of the problem today. The punishment doesn't fit the crime. Computer crimes are not understood by governments worldwide. Consider the average homeowner. If a company or individual put listening devices in their home, tapped their phone line or trailed them or their kids, that company would face some pretty severe penalties. Everything from stalking to home invasion. And if they broke in and stole things or even just broke in, there are laws covering it from stalking to home invasion to illegal wiretaps.
Now consider that same homeowner's pc, running winxx on their home pc. Companies like Gator (or whatever their name is this week), Alexia, and others are placing spyware on their computers that are tracking there activity, and even more, some use keyboard loggers, so if Joe Average goes to their bank's website, this spyware records it all and sends it to their parent organization. Does this get punished? Script kiddies are sending out these worms that break into computers not belonging to them, and with a very few exceptions they get away unscathed.
The government doesn't make the parallel between the real world, but after a while, the complaints rise onto the legislators' radars and they implement some draconian measure to appease the complainers.
I agree with James. I have a Tungsten E ($200 instead of $450 for the T series), and I use MobiPocket reader to read Baen Sci-Fi books (the free library has the first couple of books in each series, and the first-run dead-tree books come with a public domain CD of books that generally have the entire series and more on them).
I haven't read any dead-tree fiction in over a year. And with Plucker, I have been able to get rid of most of my binders of Linux HOWTOs, and docs downloaded from the web.
It works great with Linux (except for the POS Adobe acrobat software that requires all pdfs be mangled by the (windows/Mac) desktop software.
I agree with the original poster of this thread.
As much as I love Deep Space 9 and its battles, books do so much better of a job painting a canvas in the "theater of the mind."
Not a troll, and I am not looking for a flamewar (/.ers either love or hate them, I don't understand why), but some of the best sci-fi space combat had to be in the early Honor Harrington books.
Everything from a Q-ship vs light cruiser in On Basilisk Station to some of the massive Ship of the Wall battles in the later books. And unlike most of the tv/movie battles, the ones in the books tend to be more "realistic", with combatants being millions of kilometers apart, slinging guided missiles, lasers and grazers from way beyond visual range.
A news story in the late 70s or early 80s about a girl that died of a caffeine overdose. She had taken No-Doz or Vivarin, and the authorities said it was the equivalent of drinking 200 cups of coffee in an hour.
That said, drinking 100 cups of coffee in a 24 hour period will cause some discomfort. When I was younger, I drank two pots of coffee in a day, and wound up going to the infirmary the next day with dehydration.
Intrustion cleanup is a real bastard to carry out with any degree of success. There's really no way to prove that there isn't just one more subtle little backdoor hiding in the system, in your repository or in your/home area.
Basically, what you generally do is to rebuild from scratch, then carefully check and restore your repository.
How well would TripWire have worked in this kind of situation? Or is that ineffective against an all-out rooting?
This is why the authors of the host-based IDS recommend that you keep your database on media that is read-only or kept off of the machine. At that point, it becomes an administrative problem.
How do you write the updated database to read-only media on a remote box?
When on a shared box that is not your own, especially with a development box, what changes are valid?
Who/how many admins do you need or use for the boxes?
You could use something like Samhain, which automates a lot of the detection of changes, and supports a management console.
Remember, if it were easy, anybody could do it. Microsoft has tried this approach to system administration, and look how successful its been.:)
Basically, its similar to a drug dealer giving free samples. Its a tactic to get you "hooked" to make it easier to come back later and set prices. At that point, the dealer does not want anyone giving freebies, because that eats into his profits, and the amount is all the larger for the perceived loss.
The MPAA and RIAA fit this model as well. The "need" for music and movies drove the technology forward for the VCR and the DVD player, as well as cassette, LP, CD, you name it. Once those became common items in the home, the MPAA/RIAA wanted to stop the record function because they wanted you to rent any content you watched. This is also why the MPAA maintains that content on television is a delivery system for advertisements, and that removing the commercials is tantamount to stealing the content.
The difference (in the MPAA/RIAA's eyes) between earlier piracy and current methods (e.g. p2p networks serving digital copies) is that the copies are digital and do not degrade as much as analog sources. Whereas early analog videos would degrade to the point of unwatchability after about the 3rd generation. Today's digital copies are nearly as good quality as the originals, and therefore people do not need to go out and buy the originals. This is, as the numbers show, not true, of course, but again, the loss of revenue is all the larger in its perception.
Another thing the article didn't really cover (unless I missed it) was the type of attacks. To take an extreme example, there is a fundamental difference between a denial-of-service attack and a remote root buffer overflow.
Another question that pops into my head is how were these boxes configured? If the windows box or the MacOS box was configured for security, but the Linux box was an out-of-the-box RedHat 6, then the test is obviously skewed to give results which the body who paid for the study wanted. Then again, the discarding of several "types" of attacks pretty much proves this...
You know, its interesting that Palm seems to be throwing its lot in with Micro$oft. They have ignored the OpenSource community, and now they are snubbing Apple.
Of course, this just gives the OpenSource folks another place to shine. After all, we have already come up with some dynamite palm tools...
Can you imagine all of the evil tricks I could do with one of these? Like shutting down all of my coworkers' Windows PCs with nothing more than an evil glare?
Reminds me of Scott Adams' The Dilbert Future, where he was discussing Star Trek Technology:
It would be great to be able to beam your molecules across space and then reassemble them. The only problem is that you have to trust your co-worker to operate the transporter. These are the same people who won't add paper to the photocopier or make a new pot of coffee after taking the last drop. I don't think they'll be double-checking the transporter coordinates. They'll be accidentally beaming people into walls, pets, and furniture. People will spend all their time apologizing for having inanimate objects protruding from parts of their bodies.
Now that I think about it, maybe there should be some long consideration before releasing this on humanity...
The problem with this approach is that most compromises are not detected immediately. Most are found days, weeks or months after the actual breakin. Meanwhile, the compromised files are faithfully backed up. This means that restoring from backup will most likely place the same compromised files in place.
You could set up your backup script to md5sum or a similar mechanism to check files, but it still requires "situational awareness" to know what the differences are and why these diffs occurred. Most diffs are innocuous, caused by upgrading packages, changing passwords, etc. An intrusion detection system (e.g. Samhain, Integrit, Tripwire, AIDE) does similar functions on the live files, and is a must-have security tool, and must be properly employed (e.g. database on "safe" media).
Security? Hell, if it were easy, anybody could do it.
Its the process at NASA. In the Challenger explosion, the managers at NASA were told repeatedly that the O-rings became brittle at temperatures below 56 degrees F. Up to the night before the launch, the engineers from Thyacol (sp?), the makers of the solid rocket boosters, refused to sign off on the launch. The NASA managers basically browbeat them into signing off on a launch the next day, even though the temperature was 26 degrees F that morning. NASA was getting all sorts of bad press regarding the three previous delays, and was hell-bent to launch.
From what I have seen on the subject, Columbia was much the same issue. NASA knew at launch that there might have been damage, but management seemed more concerned about getting egg on its face than the fate of the shuttle. No, thats not fair. Perhaps they didn't think it was that big of a deal, but given that space flight and re-entry pushes the hardware to its limits, there is not a whole lot of extra flex built into the system. It just seems that decisions of that magnitude are made with almost careless abandon. Technology, while good, cannot fix a fundamentally flawed system.
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I disagree. Let's look at one example of prior art...Cell phones. I have a "standard" cell phone plan. It is X dollars a month, with several hundred minutes of free airtime per month. Let's give an arbitrary 400 minutes a month, for argument's sake. The plan is $50 per month.
My son wanted a particular phone with all the bells and whistles. So he gets one of these pay-as-you-go plans. This plan costs him $0.25 per minute for the first 10 minutes each day, and $0.15 after that. So to use up his $50 of airtime, he only has to use 326 minutes, or 5 hours of airtime total to spend $50 (assuming he uses it in the same day), and that is still less than the free airtime of the other plan.
Privacy issues notwithstanding (and I do not in any way minimize them, private industry should have absolutely as little personal information as humanly possible), they will most likely tend to lie about the total cost, like the retail industry tends to do. Car ads do not give the price of a car, but a monthly payment, which is an arbitrary number. Cell plans, you name it, retailers are trying to hide the fact that you are paying more and more and more.
I don't see insurance companies doing any differently.
What does Starbucks have going for it?
- Expensive mediocre products
- Expensive sandwiches and other "nibblers" I actually ate a full lunch in a restaraunt listed in the Washingtonian as one of the best in its class for less than one of their stale sandwiches.)
- Expensive wireless access
- Expensive cd listening/burning stations (its the only way that the RIAA can get their pound of flesh, plus starbucks make a ridiculous profit on the venture).
Hmmm...Look at the common denominator...and now
Wonder if they will ban my Archos/IPod/MP3-enabled PDA...
I see two problems. First, pretty much everything you mentioned involves a third-party "strap-on" items. This works fine for some things, but many apps suffer a fate that Windows either overrides them or just don't work quite right with them, causing random lockups of the machine or the app. Most times, there is nothing wrong with the app itself, since it runs under Unix/Linux/OSX/whatever (a perfect example is gnupg, which runs fine on Linux, but when I tried to run it on XP Pro, problems). Unix uses what may be considered third party apps, however, Unix (and Linux) were designed from the beginning as a collection of tools which do one or two things, and do them exceedingly well. These tools can be mixed and matched as needed to accomplish tasks. Therefore, plugging a tool in to a *nix box is absolutely natural. Windows, OTOH, was designed and built as a monolithic entity (some would say belligerently so). Adding third-party tools to Windows can be akin to strapping a JATO pod to a '65 Ford Fairlane.It doesn't make it an airplane, but it can sometimes make a mess.
The second issue is security. I hear every day from Windows advocates that "Linux has as many or more security holes as Windows." This is a straw-man, since many Windows security problems of a higher level of risk than the average Linux one. If I have 10 rifles, I am still less of a risk than if you have one nuke. Either because of the difficulty in exploitation of the Linux holes, or because they are local-only exploits.
Many Windows problems are a result of the "point and click" mindset. IE autoinstalling malware, Outlook auto-opening unknown attachments, and so forth, and being configured to behave this way. Can Linux be configured this way? Sure. Is it out of the box? Not generally. And this doesn't even begin to address the disparity in fix release time.
Those are some of the problems I see.
Traditionally, the designations for Warsaw-Pact hardware was based on function. Fighters were given names beginning with the letter F, e.g. Su.27 Flanker, MiG-29 Foxbat, etc. Bombers began with B (e.g. Bear, Badger, Backfire), and mulitpurpose or miscellaneous aircraft began with M (e.g. Mainstay, May).
Missiles had a similar designation system, with Air-to-Surface beginning with K and Surface-to-Surface beginning with S. I doubt it was an effort to demonize the Soviets, more likely some computer spit out the word when they discovered there was a new missile on the block, since there are probably a hundred or so missiles designated in this way.
Look at past shows. TNG? Mostly lame with a few excellent episodes...(though, in fact, The Inner Light is probably one of the best episodes ever.)
DS9? First three seasons lame with seasons 4-7 taking off. Why? Because after the 3rd season, Berman and Braga left DS9 to its own devices and went to work on Voyager. (Although Berman kept his name in as Executive Producer, I don't think he took much creative control in the later seasons.)
Voyager and Enterprise almost don't bear mentioning. Voyager had a few good episodes (The Year of Hell comes to mind), but overall pretty lackluster.
You know, this would be really cool for a jet's cockpit. Remember, in the day, the Concorde had to have a drop-down nose so the pilot can see the runway on landing.
Put this technology in the cockpit to give better visibility. Better yet, putting it in a fighter's cockpit to give 360x360 degree (or close to it) visiblilty would give extreme advantage in a dogfight. Of course, the video updates would have to be faster than, say, moving a transparent window around on your X display...
I agree. Laptops are more bulky than a PDA, and the latest generation of laptops seem to be getting heavier, with the larger displays and the added cooling equipment to keep these heat-intensive modern processors.
I think the major reason "PDAs" are dying is because virtually every cellphone on sale these days has most of the functionality PDAs are generally used for, with the exception of efficient note taking (a feature I rarely see my PDA-owning friends using in practice)
I actually use mine for not only note taking, the occasional game and contacts, thanks to Baen Books, I use it as my primary book reader. Add to that the security apps (OTP app, encryption programs, etc) that I wouldn't feel comfortable having on my phone.
While I appreciate your motive, how much good do you think this will do? Sysadmins and security engineers (I'm both) have, for years, told users...(Join in if you've heard this)...
Give a user an attachment and make it a 27-step process and you will still have repeated infections.
I just did a vulnerability scan of a mid-sized client (large enough to have subcontractors doing their lan). You know what I found? Ancient (read Vulnerable) OpenSSH, ancient OpenSSL, MySQL databases without passwords, unpatched windows boxes, windows boxes with no admin password, you name it. And these guys are computer professionals. I don't know how much good training is going to do...Unless you were to start fining people of their computer gets infected due to negligence...Or switch everyone over to a more useful OS...
He's the Mr. Wizard of the kitchen...Though his delivery strikes me as more Beakman's World at times. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
All he needs is a hot babe and a Harvard-educated guy in a rat suit...
Thats part of the problem today. The punishment doesn't fit the crime. Computer crimes are not understood by governments worldwide. Consider the average homeowner. If a company or individual put listening devices in their home, tapped their phone line or trailed them or their kids, that company would face some pretty severe penalties. Everything from stalking to home invasion. And if they broke in and stole things or even just broke in, there are laws covering it from stalking to home invasion to illegal wiretaps.
Now consider that same homeowner's pc, running winxx on their home pc. Companies like Gator (or whatever their name is this week), Alexia, and others are placing spyware on their computers that are tracking there activity, and even more, some use keyboard loggers, so if Joe Average goes to their bank's website, this spyware records it all and sends it to their parent organization. Does this get punished? Script kiddies are sending out these worms that break into computers not belonging to them, and with a very few exceptions they get away unscathed.
The government doesn't make the parallel between the real world, but after a while, the complaints rise onto the legislators' radars and they implement some draconian measure to appease the complainers.
I agree with James. I have a Tungsten E ($200 instead of $450 for the T series), and I use MobiPocket reader to read Baen Sci-Fi books (the free library has the first couple of books in each series, and the first-run dead-tree books come with a public domain CD of books that generally have the entire series and more on them).
I haven't read any dead-tree fiction in over a year. And with Plucker, I have been able to get rid of most of my binders of Linux HOWTOs, and docs downloaded from the web.
It works great with Linux (except for the POS Adobe acrobat software that requires all pdfs be mangled by the (windows/Mac) desktop software.
Not a troll, and I am not looking for a flamewar (/.ers either love or hate them, I don't understand why), but some of the best sci-fi space combat had to be in the early Honor Harrington books.
Everything from a Q-ship vs light cruiser in On Basilisk Station to some of the massive Ship of the Wall battles in the later books. And unlike most of the tv/movie battles, the ones in the books tend to be more "realistic", with combatants being millions of kilometers apart, slinging guided missiles, lasers and grazers from way beyond visual range.
That said, drinking 100 cups of coffee in a 24 hour period will cause some discomfort. When I was younger, I drank two pots of coffee in a day, and wound up going to the infirmary the next day with dehydration.
Basically, what you generally do is to rebuild from scratch, then carefully check and restore your repository.
How well would TripWire have worked in this kind of situation? Or is that ineffective against an all-out rooting?
This is why the authors of the host-based IDS recommend that you keep your database on media that is read-only or kept off of the machine. At that point, it becomes an administrative problem.
You could use something like Samhain, which automates a lot of the detection of changes, and supports a management console.
Remember, if it were easy, anybody could do it. Microsoft has tried this approach to system administration, and look how successful its been. :)
Basically, its similar to a drug dealer giving free samples. Its a tactic to get you "hooked" to make it easier to come back later and set prices. At that point, the dealer does not want anyone giving freebies, because that eats into his profits, and the amount is all the larger for the perceived loss.
The MPAA and RIAA fit this model as well. The "need" for music and movies drove the technology forward for the VCR and the DVD player, as well as cassette, LP, CD, you name it. Once those became common items in the home, the MPAA/RIAA wanted to stop the record function because they wanted you to rent any content you watched. This is also why the MPAA maintains that content on television is a delivery system for advertisements, and that removing the commercials is tantamount to stealing the content.
The difference (in the MPAA/RIAA's eyes) between earlier piracy and current methods (e.g. p2p networks serving digital copies) is that the copies are digital and do not degrade as much as analog sources. Whereas early analog videos would degrade to the point of unwatchability after about the 3rd generation. Today's digital copies are nearly as good quality as the originals, and therefore people do not need to go out and buy the originals. This is, as the numbers show, not true, of course, but again, the loss of revenue is all the larger in its perception.
Another question that pops into my head is how were these boxes configured? If the windows box or the MacOS box was configured for security, but the Linux box was an out-of-the-box RedHat 6, then the test is obviously skewed to give results which the body who paid for the study wanted. Then again, the discarding of several "types" of attacks pretty much proves this...
Figures never lie, but liars often figure.
You know, its interesting that Palm seems to be throwing its lot in with Micro$oft. They have ignored the OpenSource community, and now they are snubbing Apple.
Of course, this just gives the OpenSource folks another place to shine. After all, we have already come up with some dynamite palm tools...
...Does this mean if I don't pay, I won't get another email from yahoo or msn?
Remind me again, where's the downside of this?
Reminds me of Scott Adams' The Dilbert Future, where he was discussing Star Trek Technology:
It would be great to be able to beam your molecules across space and then reassemble them. The only problem is that you have to trust your co-worker to operate the transporter. These are the same people who won't add paper to the photocopier or make a new pot of coffee after taking the last drop. I don't think they'll be double-checking the transporter coordinates. They'll be accidentally beaming people into walls, pets, and furniture. People will spend all their time apologizing for having inanimate objects protruding from parts of their bodies.
Now that I think about it, maybe there should be some long consideration before releasing this on humanity...
The problem with this approach is that most compromises are not detected immediately. Most are found days, weeks or months after the actual breakin. Meanwhile, the compromised files are faithfully backed up. This means that restoring from backup will most likely place the same compromised files in place.
You could set up your backup script to md5sum or a similar mechanism to check files, but it still requires "situational awareness" to know what the differences are and why these diffs occurred. Most diffs are innocuous, caused by upgrading packages, changing passwords, etc. An intrusion detection system (e.g. Samhain, Integrit, Tripwire, AIDE) does similar functions on the live files, and is a must-have security tool, and must be properly employed (e.g. database on "safe" media).
Security? Hell, if it were easy, anybody could do it.
...With no LOTR releases slated for 2005...
Quick, somebody call Peter Jackson. Get him working on a Silmarillion release for December 2005...
Its gotta be the same pockets that we used to carry around 5.25" floppies in before they introduced the 3.5".
No wonder fashion was so atrocious back then. 5.25" pockets...Helicopter collars...Platform shoes...ick.
Its the process at NASA. In the Challenger explosion, the managers at NASA were told repeatedly that the O-rings became brittle at temperatures below 56 degrees F. Up to the night before the launch, the engineers from Thyacol (sp?), the makers of the solid rocket boosters, refused to sign off on the launch. The NASA managers basically browbeat them into signing off on a launch the next day, even though the temperature was 26 degrees F that morning. NASA was getting all sorts of bad press regarding the three previous delays, and was hell-bent to launch.
From what I have seen on the subject, Columbia was much the same issue. NASA knew at launch that there might have been damage, but management seemed more concerned about getting egg on its face than the fate of the shuttle. No, thats not fair. Perhaps they didn't think it was that big of a deal, but given that space flight and re-entry pushes the hardware to its limits, there is not a whole lot of extra flex built into the system. It just seems that decisions of that magnitude are made with almost careless abandon. Technology, while good, cannot fix a fundamentally flawed system.