The institutions that emerged (world bank, IMF, UN) were really just codified the result of WWII. The likely reason nothing has emerged to replace it is that we haven't had WWIII yet.
It might be interesting to speculate how all this could change w/o fighting another world war, but it seems unlikely given the inertia of the current institutions.
On the currency issue, I think most of the people that talk about a non-us-dollar reserve currency are totally unaware of the history of the Bank for International Settlement and the IMF which denominates their reserves in SDRs (special drawing rights) which is a weighted basket of currency (USD, Euro, Yen, and British Pound).
The problem with any kind of currency reserves, is that countries need to be willing to put up significant assets to back up any denomination of wealth (or you might find them being attacked like George Soros once attacked the British Pound). The one thing about the USD that's hard to substitute is that it's really hard to attack it now as there are many greenbacks out there and many contracts are denominated in USD. Any transition to an alternate reserve is likely to be attackable which means it must be very quick or as part of a big movement (perhaps even war-like).
It's a bit more complicated, but it's possible to think about this a couple of ways...
"Inverse" electro-magnetic waves can certainly exist, however, like audio waves, there are some issues... In general, waves carry energy and that energy often implies a momentum (or more abstractly an average propagation direction for the energy). To exactly cancel something, you pretty much are restricted to certain distributions and if you start from different places, but you have to have the same momentum, you really can't cancel it everywhere because of energy and momentum issues.
Another way to think about is in acoustic case you might imagine something like "perfect" sound cancelling headphones. You might be able to generate an "inverse" wave to minimize the sound in a few places (e.g. near your eardrums), but not the same sounds from other people's perspective. Electromagetic waves are very similar to that respect. You can generate an interference pattern where in certain areas, the energy will be nearly zero, but it of course can't cancel things out everywhere...
Of course when you dive deeper and start talking about photons, even stranger things happen. One approximate way to look at the relationship between photons and EM-waves is that a wave is just a stream of "virtual" photons that only pop into existance when the wave interacts with something (that requires a force carrier particle). With this interpretation, in places where the electromagnetic fields cancel, you don't have any EM-interaction so no force carrier particles (aka photons) will appear (well technically, a very low probability given the uncertainty pricincple) so you might think of photons being cancelled out in that location by an "inverse" wave.
Canada, just like everywhere else I've been, this depends.
At least in some restaurants in Vancouver, if you ask before you order, they might be reasonably accommodating. If you ask after the bill came the first time, you'd end up waiting 2 hours for your bill... Go to a high-volume restaurant with a high-end point-of-sale system**, life is much easier...
Same is true in the USA.
In most places in Asia, you'd generally get a blank stare.
In the UK, in some of the better restaurants, you would get a blank look... Don't have much other experience. Never tried this on the continent...
Other places, well, don't know...
** Because of the change to HST for restaurants in BC in 2010, many high-volume restaurants took the opportunity to modernize their point-of-sale systems which makes stuff like check-splitting stuff easier for the wait-staff, but not all restaurants did this and not all wait-staff are well versed on their restaurants pos systems...
Similarly restaurants in other countries may or may not have modern point-of-sale system, but unlike Canada they probably didn't have a recent legal change that stimulated a technology upgrade cycle.
Ever looked how many DIY GPS receivers are out there? On a six figure budget it wouldn't be much trouble getting something made.
Although there are many so-called DIY GPU receivers out there, all of them I know about use off the shelf GPS modules (like the MTK3339 or perhaps some of the SiRF stuff), not doing the RF stuff themselves. There are some people making the RF stuff as DIY projects, but then they have to stuff the signal into an FPGA and drive the thing with a lump of software.
Having tried the later myself, I can tell you it's generally a bit finicky even in the simple case. I suppose if you know what you are doing you might have better luck (because of w/o a lot of experience, ionospheric noise modelling isn't very easy, it's much easier to just average stuff and hope for the best). Another roadblock is that most folks I know don't have many 60K/Mach velocity platforms to test on to perfect their dopper shift algorithms (remember, the satellites are moving too and you have to account for that)...
I don't think you are just going to download some DIY GPS receiver in the webosphere and have to work for missle guidance applications.
...but he was right. In North America, the *carriers* are the cell phone manufacturers' customers, not the end-users. In the USA, Samsung has something like six customers.
When dealing with gatekeeper like this, you need to understand there are 2 directions, you can push products through the gatekeeper, and you help the end customer pull things through the gatekeeper. The iPhone is more of a pull-through product. Of course initially, BBry was push product, but its success created a pull-dynamic (employees kind of demanded it because their buddies in other companies had one and it was somewhat of a status symbol). I think somehow BBry forgot that lesson and decided to mostly focus their message on the corporate CIO gatekeepers (since it's easier to track from a business account salesperson bean-counter perspective) and tried to simply push their products through them taking for granted that it was the pull-side that really made them successful and they needed to foster that as well.
A little understood fact is the iPhone's secret to success is Jobs managed to get AT&T on board.
I don't know that it was little understood. Way back then, wired ran an interesting article on it. Here are some interesting excerpts...
Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself... For Cingular, Apple's ambitions were both tantalizing and nerve-racking. A cozy relationship with the maker of the iPod would bring sex appeal to the company's brand. And some other carrier was sure to sign with Jobs if Cingular turned him down — Jobs made it clear that he would shop his idea to anyone who would listen.
Sigman's team made a simple bet: The iPhone would result in a surge of data traffic that would more than make up for any revenue it lost on content deals.... It may appear that the carriers' nightmares have been realized, that the iPhone has given all the power to consumers, developers, and manufacturers, while turning wireless networks into dumb pipes. But by fostering more innovation, carriers' networks could get more valuable, not less. Consumers will spend more time on devices, and thus on networks, racking up bigger bills and generating more revenue for everyone.
Look, we don't have to re-invent the wheel. A hurricane preparedness kit is EXACTLY the same as Zombie Survival Kit minus the shotguns.
Depending on what state you live in, a hurricane preparedness kit would necessarily include a shotgun (of course that means an extra shotgun in those states).
Basically this theorized malware would use the GPU (or other DMA capable device in the system) to bypass page permissions. Since most operating systems depend on virtual addressing and CPU page permissions to protect things, having a DMA capabile device that didn't respect page permission could easily bypass the assumptions made by most OS's and malware detection programs.
The problem is of course with the limitations of current malware detection programs. They could of course theoretically detect GPU viruses as they need to exist somwhere (even GPUs execute instructions and have page tables for their memory). The problem is that there are so many different types of GPUs and each has a different proprietary driver architecture, current malware detection companies don't have enough information or experience to even attempt to try this even if they had the desire and the resources. Then again maybe the GPU vendors have built in malware in their drivers (kinda like some of the phone-home free-pdf/fax printer drivers). If so, you are just screwed.
FWIW, there was an attempt a few years ago to impose an IOMMU into the PC architecture that could filter DMA requests from devices. The idea was that if the OS was in control of the IOMMU, like the page tables, it could disallow a DMA request from a rogue device request similar to how it could trap a CPU access. I lost track of this, but I doubt it will go anywhere...
However, this isn't usually the weak point in the chain, this is merely a theoretical threat kind of like warning people about how installing random program on their PC is a "highly critical threat to system security and integrity" when most folks have a browser setting that allows running just about any browser plugin suggested by a random web-page by merely clicking "OK" when the warning dialog box comes up. It's just scary because you've never heard of it before and it's yet another thing to worry about.
From what I can tell, they are simply creating a system of quantum-mechanically entangled photons, not a "molecule" of photons...
Apparently trick is that they created a medium (a laser cooled "gas" of rubidium atoms), and excited it with photons from a laser at a frequency that created a condition for the formation of a Rydberg state in the gas. This state is basically kind-of a pseudo-atom (i.e., a group of atoms that behave somewhat like a "scaled-up" atom). The gas made up of the pseudo-atom has a different apparent index of refraction than the unexcited medium looks to the first photon but it can effectively keep a second photon nearby the first photon in a type of quantum entanglement
This is what is described as a photon "molecule". Of course the energy levels required to create a similar Rydberg state in air (at room-temperature) would be slightly different orders of magnitude because you are pumping in enough energy into the air so that hyper-energized pseudo-molecules of air are resisting your opponent's light sabre... Not so sure you want to be actually holding a device that does that;^)
In my book that is the one thing they got right. It is a cumbersome combination as it should be since you do not want to reboot your computer by accident.
For users of the original Apple ][, which had a single-finger "reset" key, this was a real-world concern since it was hard-wired to send a reset signal and drop you into the monitor rom shell. Of course the reset key was sadly positioned right above the return key which made it really easy to hit accidentally at the end of every line you typed.
In later revisions of Apple ][ computers, I believe they put a thick rubber ring washer inside the key which required you to really push down to squish the washer make mechanical/electrical contact (I think that was probably inspired by a "hard-hack" made by many folks who did this one too many times). Finally, when they got to the Apple ][+, they changed to a CTRL-RESET two-finger reset (of course the newer auto-start ROM-monitor and the OS's got better at trapping/recovering the reset by then, so it was less important).
By then the IBM-PC was out and perhaps they avoided this pitfall by having a 3-finger reset from the get-go...
AFAIK, as we collectively understand it, all 4 dimensions are effectively space-time. Because of relativistic effects, you cannot separate space from time as the rate of time passage relative to other objects is dependent on the velocity relative to those objects and the influence of gravitational fields.
In the simple case w/o gravity, you can sort of describe intervals between space-time events as space-like, time-like, or even "light-like" (which if thought of in a 3D sense with classical time as an interval along a light cone trajectory).
In some sense, once you throw gravity in there, it gets more complicated because distance measured along the intervals tracks the warp.
FWIW, just like the movie airplane, Mr. Feyman spent a significant amount of time often joking...
But in case anyone is interested, the title of this book apparently comes from this exchange...
Mrs. E: "Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman?" RF: "I'll have both, thank you," Mrs. E:"Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman."
Apparently, Sheldon's lack of awareness of social graces is a bit reminicent of Mr. Feynman's account of his own persona... But don't call him Sheldon...;^)
Silicon wafers are generally "electrically passified" before being diced and sent to packaging. This is often done by growing a reasonably thick layer of Silicon dioxide on top to insulate the planar circuits below.
FWIW, often during pre-production, a small number of wafers are made w/o the passification step so that engineers can use FIBs (focused ion beams) to modify the circuitry to assist in finding workarounds for bugs. The reason for this is that FIBs can't easily penetrate this layer w/o doing lots of collateral damage to nearby circuits. These un-passified chips generally will fail after a short life because the circuits tend to thermal "age' much faster than normal w/o this protective top layer. Also actually finding a specific transistor on a die under a passification layer is a challenge in itself (having tried to do this myself, it's not as easy as you might think) and the FIB is like digging holes in this layer with a mortar shell.
If someone were to attempt to "re-dope" a standard passivated production die (which already has this layer put on top), good luck to them...
What these folks are talking about is actually changing the masks in the fab so that all the chips are made "defective" to start with. Standard checks made by most manufactuers only check that the layout vs the schematic (e.g., an electronic device in the layout matches the same device you have in the schematic or gate netlist). Once the layout is done, the design in "fractured" to be imaged on to masks. If you then muck with the masks to change the function of a transistor at this point, generally, nobody will know since there are no current automated checks that the verify that the final mask matches the layout.
FWIW, the "trick" that these folks used to attack the Intel RNG, was to attack a part of the circuit that was only protected by BIST (built-in-self-test), so they modified the circuit in a way that compromised the entropy input in a way that was not detectable by the BIST function (which relied on a 32-bit CRC for detection), but the BIST function would still be able to detect defects in the silicon. You can bet that next-time, someone is gonna look harder at that BIST function.
When something like the humble Voyager 1 probe can continue giving usable data for such a long time, it should cause us to ask, why haven't our other missions been as successful?
FYI, the Voyager program was a happy accident. It was designed as part of the Grand-tour of the outer planets that could only happen because of rare alignment of the outer planet that apparently only occurs every 176 years. W/o this alignment and the mutiple gravity assist trajectories available, there would be no Voyager program because the budget to keep the ground support going for the duration of such a long journey was not in the cards (even the actual Voyager mission was a scaled down version of the original Grand-tour plan because of budget cuts).
Contrary to popular belief, the Voyager spacecraft were actually designed for the mission that it is currently on (that's why it launched with an RTG that could last this long). Although not officially part of the main mission, the interstellar phase was always part of the "extended" mission component that is part of most Nasa projects (funding has to be separatly approved for the support-costs required for the extended mission).
Also Voyager wasn't so "humble". Launching a 815kg spacecraft about the size of a car in 1977 wasn't really just a faster/cheaper project. According to the JPL website,
A total of 11,000 workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.
Also, other extended missions for Nasa project have been reasonably successful. For example, most recently, Fermi just entered it's extended mission phase, and of course there are the more pop-culture Sojourner and Spirit and Opportunity...
No franchisee has given money to Telsa to start selling their cars, so there's no one who needs those protections.
You forgot about the domino theory. The reason the dealerships oppose this is that it simply opens the door to question their position. It's the same reason that pro-choice folks fight so hard against any laws that restrict abortion and pro-gun folks fight so hard against any laws that restrict gun-ownership. Maybe it even explains why Amazon used to fire all of it's employees in a state if they threated impose sales taxes on internet sales. The rationale often given is that if only one domino falls, then the others are at risk.
I say to you, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a DRM. It is a DRM deeply rooted in the American DRM. I have a DRM that one day this nation will rise up, live up the true meaning of it's creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all [content] is created [protected].".... I have a DRM so that my four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but [can profit] by the content [of this speech].
Of course, placing the long-term benefit of the community before ones own is something that requires altruism, or for those of simpler spirit "patriotism". The latter is often claimed, but rarely lived.
Some might think the braver thing to do is to boycott the old institution instead of attempting work within the system.
I'm sure the folks involved in the Montgomery bus boycott would have been just as effective if they just continued to take the bus and work within the system such as to not cause the bus system any economic hardship.
Yeah, that might the altruistic/patriotic thing to do... But not necessarily the right thing to do which means maybe it's the wrong thing to do? Just food for thought...
IANAL, but I think many are confusing what is criminal, what is liable, vs a contract.
It may be simply illegal to text whilst driving in many locations (a crime, although usually an infraction or misdemeanor).
You may be liable for damages because of your action of texting (often a tort)
You might get fired for texting on the job (probably an implied or perhaps unwritten contract you have with your employer which may or may not have any basis in the law).
And it could be all three. However, the peanut butter sandwich or perfume situation seems at best a tort or a implied contract which probably has no criminal component.
However, sometimes a tort can reach a level of criminal liablity (usually due to a criminal levels of negligence or perhaps specific intent).
The reason that this texting ruling is significant is that it seems to increase the level responsiblity of the text-er to avoid creating a level of criminal negligence.
As another car analogy, perhaps this is like handing the keys to a car to someone that you know is drunk. Do you have a legal duty to not hand the person the keys if you know the person is drunk? Do you have the duty to make that assessment in every circumstance? Are some more equal than others? What if some automation or service is performing the action? Is the service not somehow criminally liable?
Shiva is an aspect of god that humanity is capable of attaining.
AFAIK Parama-Shiva (or the highest or ultimate understanding of god) is considered in many writings to be beyond human capability of understanding.
There are some that believe Vishnu is Shiva, there are some believe in the trinity. I'm not an expert in either of these belief systems, but my orginal assertion stands: humans have hubris about understanding in spades.
Although I don't have the energy to argue with this in detail, the general idea of there being multiple descriptions of reality and the illusion of self awareness yielding self control (yoga-style) is probably best an analogy for attempting to "root" your own body processes.
Of course just because someone can hack parts of a system, it doesn't mean that person understands the system, perhaps that person is merely just a wet-ware script-kiddie, following someone else's accidental discovery of a few design problems/backdoors.
There may or may not be true knowledge of certain things, as the system as we understand it may be incomplete (in the Gödel sense) pretending that we understand it and/or control it is probably just hubris (and human beings have that in spades)...
In a sense, we are all living the allegory of the caves... We likely cannot perceive true reality, only a shadow or projection of it. It doesn't mean that there isn't value in knowledge about how our shadows work (e.g., like yoga), or that if you are the master of the shadows you can do some manipulation to your benefit, but it is likely we will never know about the things that are casting these shadows, which some might argue means any knowledge based on manipulation of shadows isn't the true knowledge or form...
Give the west a break, they're relatively new at this...
Or perhaps there is an alternate theory like there is no human understandable concept of self at all (similar to Plato's Republic** TMA which apparently nobody studies anymore)... If it requires a "third" person to distinguish between self and non-self, then it is perhaps the concept of self is contradictory, unless the concept of self exists beyond human comprehension...
**It's a relatively new release, but sometimes the OTA update yields a better end-user experience...
The rise of HFT is similar to bitcoin. To encourage liquidity in the market, exchanges started to offer a slight rebate to organizations that put standing side orders to trade a stock at the current best price (buy or sell) which would be executed if there was a temporary liquidity problem. Analgously, Bitcoin offered a little bit of payback to those that did the transaction hash work to help assure short transaction validation times.
Initially, large trading platforms that were acting as Supplemental Liquidity Providers (SLP) were dabbling in HFT as a way of indirectly chasing these rebates (by gaming the price and acting as a SLP, you had a net price advantage in that stock due to the rebate). With bitcoin, the miners dabbled with high performance hardware to chase the early large bitcoin rewards, but really didn't try to game it (e.g., flooding other node with bogus transactions, whilst you worked on the most promising hashchain) since the economic didn't work that way.
Of course once you have this high-tech high-speed trading platform, you can attempt to use it to game the price even in non-liquidity crunch situations. With bitcoin there is this potential fear that with enough computing resources you can force your own hash chain, but it probably isn't worth it. With stocks... well, that's where we are with HFT...
Slashdot Mirror
The institutions that emerged (world bank, IMF, UN) were really just codified the result of WWII. The likely reason nothing has emerged to replace it is that we haven't had WWIII yet.
It might be interesting to speculate how all this could change w/o fighting another world war, but it seems unlikely given the inertia of the current institutions.
On the currency issue, I think most of the people that talk about a non-us-dollar reserve currency are totally unaware of the history of the Bank for International Settlement and the IMF which denominates their reserves in SDRs (special drawing rights) which is a weighted basket of currency (USD, Euro, Yen, and British Pound).
The problem with any kind of currency reserves, is that countries need to be willing to put up significant assets to back up any denomination of wealth (or you might find them being attacked like George Soros once attacked the British Pound). The one thing about the USD that's hard to substitute is that it's really hard to attack it now as there are many greenbacks out there and many contracts are denominated in USD. Any transition to an alternate reserve is likely to be attackable which means it must be very quick or as part of a big movement (perhaps even war-like).
There's always the Porsche 918 Spyder hybrid (although that is a little bit pricier alternative)
It's a bit more complicated, but it's possible to think about this a couple of ways...
"Inverse" electro-magnetic waves can certainly exist, however, like audio waves, there are some issues... In general, waves carry energy and that energy often implies a momentum (or more abstractly an average propagation direction for the energy). To exactly cancel something, you pretty much are restricted to certain distributions and if you start from different places, but you have to have the same momentum, you really can't cancel it everywhere because of energy and momentum issues.
Another way to think about is in acoustic case you might imagine something like "perfect" sound cancelling headphones. You might be able to generate an "inverse" wave to minimize the sound in a few places (e.g. near your eardrums), but not the same sounds from other people's perspective. Electromagetic waves are very similar to that respect. You can generate an interference pattern where in certain areas, the energy will be nearly zero, but it of course can't cancel things out everywhere...
Of course when you dive deeper and start talking about photons, even stranger things happen. One approximate way to look at the relationship between photons and EM-waves is that a wave is just a stream of "virtual" photons that only pop into existance when the wave interacts with something (that requires a force carrier particle). With this interpretation, in places where the electromagnetic fields cancel, you don't have any EM-interaction so no force carrier particles (aka photons) will appear (well technically, a very low probability given the uncertainty pricincple) so you might think of photons being cancelled out in that location by an "inverse" wave.
Canada, just like everywhere else I've been, this depends.
At least in some restaurants in Vancouver, if you ask before you order, they might be reasonably accommodating. If you ask after the bill came the first time, you'd end up waiting 2 hours for your bill... Go to a high-volume restaurant with a high-end point-of-sale system**, life is much easier...
Same is true in the USA.
In most places in Asia, you'd generally get a blank stare.
In the UK, in some of the better restaurants, you would get a blank look... Don't have much other experience. Never tried this on the continent...
Other places, well, don't know...
** Because of the change to HST for restaurants in BC in 2010, many high-volume restaurants took the opportunity to modernize their point-of-sale systems which makes stuff like check-splitting stuff easier for the wait-staff, but not all restaurants did this and not all wait-staff are well versed on their restaurants pos systems...
Similarly restaurants in other countries may or may not have modern point-of-sale system, but unlike Canada they probably didn't have a recent legal change that stimulated a technology upgrade cycle.
Ever looked how many DIY GPS receivers are out there? On a six figure budget it wouldn't be much trouble getting something made.
Although there are many so-called DIY GPU receivers out there, all of them I know about use off the shelf GPS modules (like the MTK3339 or perhaps some of the SiRF stuff), not doing the RF stuff themselves. There are some people making the RF stuff as DIY projects, but then they have to stuff the signal into an FPGA and drive the thing with a lump of software.
Having tried the later myself, I can tell you it's generally a bit finicky even in the simple case. I suppose if you know what you are doing you might have better luck (because of w/o a lot of experience, ionospheric noise modelling isn't very easy, it's much easier to just average stuff and hope for the best). Another roadblock is that most folks I know don't have many 60K/Mach velocity platforms to test on to perfect their dopper shift algorithms (remember, the satellites are moving too and you have to account for that)...
I don't think you are just going to download some DIY GPS receiver in the webosphere and have to work for missle guidance applications.
...but he was right. In North America, the *carriers* are the cell phone manufacturers' customers, not the end-users. In the USA, Samsung has something like six customers.
When dealing with gatekeeper like this, you need to understand there are 2 directions, you can push products through the gatekeeper, and you help the end customer pull things through the gatekeeper. The iPhone is more of a pull-through product. Of course initially, BBry was push product, but its success created a pull-dynamic (employees kind of demanded it because their buddies in other companies had one and it was somewhat of a status symbol). I think somehow BBry forgot that lesson and decided to mostly focus their message on the corporate CIO gatekeepers (since it's easier to track from a business account salesperson bean-counter perspective) and tried to simply push their products through them taking for granted that it was the pull-side that really made them successful and they needed to foster that as well.
A little understood fact is the iPhone's secret to success is Jobs managed to get AT&T on board.
I don't know that it was little understood. Way back then, wired ran an interesting article on it. Here are some interesting excerpts...
Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself... For Cingular, Apple's ambitions were both tantalizing and nerve-racking. A cozy relationship with the maker of the iPod would bring sex appeal to the company's brand. And some other carrier was sure to sign with Jobs if Cingular turned him down — Jobs made it clear that he would shop his idea to anyone who would listen.
Sigman's team made a simple bet: The iPhone would result in a surge of data traffic that would more than make up for any revenue it lost on content deals.... It may appear that the carriers' nightmares have been realized, that the iPhone has given all the power to consumers, developers, and manufacturers, while turning wireless networks into dumb pipes. But by fostering more innovation, carriers' networks could get more valuable, not less. Consumers will spend more time on devices, and thus on networks, racking up bigger bills and generating more revenue for everyone.
Look, we don't have to re-invent the wheel. A hurricane preparedness kit is EXACTLY the same as Zombie Survival Kit minus the shotguns.
Depending on what state you live in, a hurricane preparedness kit would necessarily include a shotgun (of course that means an extra shotgun in those states).
Basically this theorized malware would use the GPU (or other DMA capable device in the system) to bypass page permissions. Since most operating systems depend on virtual addressing and CPU page permissions to protect things, having a DMA capabile device that didn't respect page permission could easily bypass the assumptions made by most OS's and malware detection programs.
The problem is of course with the limitations of current malware detection programs. They could of course theoretically detect GPU viruses as they need to exist somwhere (even GPUs execute instructions and have page tables for their memory). The problem is that there are so many different types of GPUs and each has a different proprietary driver architecture, current malware detection companies don't have enough information or experience to even attempt to try this even if they had the desire and the resources. Then again maybe the GPU vendors have built in malware in their drivers (kinda like some of the phone-home free-pdf/fax printer drivers). If so, you are just screwed.
FWIW, there was an attempt a few years ago to impose an IOMMU into the PC architecture that could filter DMA requests from devices. The idea was that if the OS was in control of the IOMMU, like the page tables, it could disallow a DMA request from a rogue device request similar to how it could trap a CPU access. I lost track of this, but I doubt it will go anywhere...
However, this isn't usually the weak point in the chain, this is merely a theoretical threat kind of like warning people about how installing random program on their PC is a "highly critical threat to system security and integrity" when most folks have a browser setting that allows running just about any browser plugin suggested by a random web-page by merely clicking "OK" when the warning dialog box comes up. It's just scary because you've never heard of it before and it's yet another thing to worry about.
From what I can tell, they are simply creating a system of quantum-mechanically entangled photons, not a "molecule" of photons...
Apparently trick is that they created a medium (a laser cooled "gas" of rubidium atoms), and excited it with photons from a laser at a frequency that created a condition for the formation of a Rydberg state in the gas. This state is basically kind-of a pseudo-atom (i.e., a group of atoms that behave somewhat like a "scaled-up" atom). The gas made up of the pseudo-atom has a different apparent index of refraction than the unexcited medium looks to the first photon but it can effectively keep a second photon nearby the first photon in a type of quantum entanglement
This is what is described as a photon "molecule". Of course the energy levels required to create a similar Rydberg state in air (at room-temperature) would be slightly different orders of magnitude because you are pumping in enough energy into the air so that hyper-energized pseudo-molecules of air are resisting your opponent's light sabre... Not so sure you want to be actually holding a device that does that ;^)
In my book that is the one thing they got right. It is a cumbersome combination as it should be since you do not want to reboot your computer by accident.
For users of the original Apple ][, which had a single-finger "reset" key, this was a real-world concern since it was hard-wired to send a reset signal and drop you into the monitor rom shell. Of course the reset key was sadly positioned right above the return key which made it really easy to hit accidentally at the end of every line you typed.
In later revisions of Apple ][ computers, I believe they put a thick rubber ring washer inside the key which required you to really push down to squish the washer make mechanical/electrical contact (I think that was probably inspired by a "hard-hack" made by many folks who did this one too many times). Finally, when they got to the Apple ][+, they changed to a CTRL-RESET two-finger reset (of course the newer auto-start ROM-monitor and the OS's got better at trapping/recovering the reset by then, so it was less important).
By then the IBM-PC was out and perhaps they avoided this pitfall by having a 3-finger reset from the get-go...
AFAIK, as we collectively understand it, all 4 dimensions are effectively space-time. Because of relativistic effects, you cannot separate space from time as the rate of time passage relative to other objects is dependent on the velocity relative to those objects and the influence of gravitational fields.
In the simple case w/o gravity, you can sort of describe intervals between space-time events as space-like, time-like, or even "light-like" (which if thought of in a 3D sense with classical time as an interval along a light cone trajectory).
In some sense, once you throw gravity in there, it gets more complicated because distance measured along the intervals tracks the warp.
FWIW, just like the movie airplane, Mr. Feyman spent a significant amount of time often joking...
But in case anyone is interested, the title of this book apparently comes from this exchange...
Mrs. E: "Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman?"
RF: "I'll have both, thank you,"
Mrs. E:"Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman."
Apparently, Sheldon's lack of awareness of social graces is a bit reminicent of Mr. Feynman's account of his own persona... ;^)
But don't call him Sheldon...
Silicon wafers are generally "electrically passified" before being diced and sent to packaging. This is often done by growing a reasonably thick layer of Silicon dioxide on top to insulate the planar circuits below.
FWIW, often during pre-production, a small number of wafers are made w/o the passification step so that engineers can use FIBs (focused ion beams) to modify the circuitry to assist in finding workarounds for bugs. The reason for this is that FIBs can't easily penetrate this layer w/o doing lots of collateral damage to nearby circuits. These un-passified chips generally will fail after a short life because the circuits tend to thermal "age' much faster than normal w/o this protective top layer. Also actually finding a specific transistor on a die under a passification layer is a challenge in itself (having tried to do this myself, it's not as easy as you might think) and the FIB is like digging holes in this layer with a mortar shell.
If someone were to attempt to "re-dope" a standard passivated production die (which already has this layer put on top), good luck to them...
What these folks are talking about is actually changing the masks in the fab so that all the chips are made "defective" to start with. Standard checks made by most manufactuers only check that the layout vs the schematic (e.g., an electronic device in the layout matches the same device you have in the schematic or gate netlist). Once the layout is done, the design in "fractured" to be imaged on to masks. If you then muck with the masks to change the function of a transistor at this point, generally, nobody will know since there are no current automated checks that the verify that the final mask matches the layout.
FWIW, the "trick" that these folks used to attack the Intel RNG, was to attack a part of the circuit that was only protected by BIST (built-in-self-test), so they modified the circuit in a way that compromised the entropy input in a way that was not detectable by the BIST function (which relied on a 32-bit CRC for detection), but the BIST function would still be able to detect defects in the silicon. You can bet that next-time, someone is gonna look harder at that BIST function.
When something like the humble Voyager 1 probe can continue giving usable data for such a long time, it should cause us to ask, why haven't our other missions been as successful?
FYI, the Voyager program was a happy accident. It was designed as part of the Grand-tour of the outer planets that could only happen because of rare alignment of the outer planet that apparently only occurs every 176 years. W/o this alignment and the mutiple gravity assist trajectories available, there would be no Voyager program because the budget to keep the ground support going for the duration of such a long journey was not in the cards (even the actual Voyager mission was a scaled down version of the original Grand-tour plan because of budget cuts).
Contrary to popular belief, the Voyager spacecraft were actually designed for the mission that it is currently on (that's why it launched with an RTG that could last this long). Although not officially part of the main mission, the interstellar phase was always part of the "extended" mission component that is part of most Nasa projects (funding has to be separatly approved for the support-costs required for the extended mission).
Also Voyager wasn't so "humble". Launching a 815kg spacecraft about the size of a car in 1977 wasn't really just a faster/cheaper project. According to the JPL website,
A total of 11,000 workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.
Also, other extended missions for Nasa project have been reasonably successful. For example, most recently, Fermi just entered it's extended mission phase, and of course there are the more pop-culture Sojourner and Spirit and Opportunity...
No franchisee has given money to Telsa to start selling their cars, so there's no one who needs those protections.
You forgot about the domino theory. The reason the dealerships oppose this is that it simply opens the door to question their position. It's the same reason that pro-choice folks fight so hard against any laws that restrict abortion and pro-gun folks fight so hard against any laws that restrict gun-ownership. Maybe it even explains why Amazon used to fire all of it's employees in a state if they threated impose sales taxes on internet sales. The rationale often given is that if only one domino falls, then the others are at risk.
I say to you, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a DRM. It is a DRM deeply rooted in the American DRM. I have a DRM that one day this nation will rise up, live up the true meaning of it's creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all [content] is created [protected]." .... I have a DRM so that my four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but [can profit] by the content [of this speech].
Of course, placing the long-term benefit of the community before ones own is something that requires altruism, or for those of simpler spirit "patriotism". The latter is often claimed, but rarely lived.
Some might think the braver thing to do is to boycott the old institution instead of attempting work within the system.
I'm sure the folks involved in the Montgomery bus boycott would have been just as effective if they just continued to take the bus and work within the system such as to not cause the bus system any economic hardship.
Yeah, that might the altruistic/patriotic thing to do... But not necessarily the right thing to do which means maybe it's the wrong thing to do? Just food for thought...
Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
IANAL, but I think many are confusing what is criminal, what is liable, vs a contract.
It may be simply illegal to text whilst driving in many locations (a crime, although usually an infraction or misdemeanor).
You may be liable for damages because of your action of texting (often a tort)
You might get fired for texting on the job (probably an implied or perhaps unwritten contract you have with your employer which may or may not have any basis in the law).
And it could be all three. However, the peanut butter sandwich or perfume situation seems at best a tort or a implied contract which probably has no criminal component.
However, sometimes a tort can reach a level of criminal liablity (usually due to a criminal levels of negligence or perhaps specific intent).
The reason that this texting ruling is significant is that it seems to increase the level responsiblity of the text-er to avoid creating a level of criminal negligence.
As another car analogy, perhaps this is like handing the keys to a car to someone that you know is drunk. Do you have a legal duty to not hand the person the keys if you know the person is drunk? Do you have the duty to make that assessment in every circumstance? Are some more equal than others? What if some automation or service is performing the action? Is the service not somehow criminally liable?
Shiva is an aspect of god that humanity is capable of attaining.
AFAIK Parama-Shiva (or the highest or ultimate understanding of god) is considered in many writings to be beyond human capability of understanding.
There are some that believe Vishnu is Shiva, there are some believe in the trinity. I'm not an expert in either of these belief systems, but my orginal assertion stands: humans have hubris about understanding in spades.
Although I don't have the energy to argue with this in detail, the general idea of there being multiple descriptions of reality and the illusion of self awareness yielding self control (yoga-style) is probably best an analogy for attempting to "root" your own body processes.
Of course just because someone can hack parts of a system, it doesn't mean that person understands the system, perhaps that person is merely just a wet-ware script-kiddie, following someone else's accidental discovery of a few design problems/backdoors.
There may or may not be true knowledge of certain things, as the system as we understand it may be incomplete (in the Gödel sense) pretending that we understand it and/or control it is probably just hubris (and human beings have that in spades)...
In a sense, we are all living the allegory of the caves... We likely cannot perceive true reality, only a shadow or projection of it. It doesn't mean that there isn't value in knowledge about how our shadows work (e.g., like yoga), or that if you are the master of the shadows you can do some manipulation to your benefit, but it is likely we will never know about the things that are casting these shadows, which some might argue means any knowledge based on manipulation of shadows isn't the true knowledge or form...
Give the west a break, they're relatively new at this...
Or perhaps there is an alternate theory like there is no human understandable concept of self at all (similar to Plato's Republic** TMA which apparently nobody studies anymore)... If it requires a "third" person to distinguish between self and non-self, then it is perhaps the concept of self is contradictory, unless the concept of self exists beyond human comprehension...
**It's a relatively new release, but sometimes the OTA update yields a better end-user experience...
Don't forget that wonderful SCSI termination scheme...
You never really knew how to set up the termination unless you dug up all the documentation.
Obligitory...
The rise of HFT is similar to bitcoin. To encourage liquidity in the market, exchanges started to offer a slight rebate to organizations that put standing side orders to trade a stock at the current best price (buy or sell) which would be executed if there was a temporary liquidity problem. Analgously, Bitcoin offered a little bit of payback to those that did the transaction hash work to help assure short transaction validation times.
Initially, large trading platforms that were acting as Supplemental Liquidity Providers (SLP) were dabbling in HFT as a way of indirectly chasing these rebates (by gaming the price and acting as a SLP, you had a net price advantage in that stock due to the rebate). With bitcoin, the miners dabbled with high performance hardware to chase the early large bitcoin rewards, but really didn't try to game it (e.g., flooding other node with bogus transactions, whilst you worked on the most promising hashchain) since the economic didn't work that way.
Of course once you have this high-tech high-speed trading platform, you can attempt to use it to game the price even in non-liquidity crunch situations. With bitcoin there is this potential fear that with enough computing resources you can force your own hash chain, but it probably isn't worth it. With stocks... well, that's where we are with HFT...