Remember the laws in question only apply to closed system. Is his design a closed system? Like you said, there's conservation of energy- it can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form or another. It's a known fact that within a single cubic centimeter of volume resides sufficient instantaneous energy to condense out the entire rest-mass of the solar system and then some.
While I am not saying that he's tapping that energy, what is to say that he isn't?
You've got an interesting anomaly going on there with his engine- time to go find a new model for physics that jives with what we already know AND Minato's gaget.
Having worked with these chips for a while (since they're pretty much the new pet CPU for the x86 set-top box crowd...) I can say that your claims aren't accurate in the slightest.
Integer performance on a Nehemiah (key word there- previous incarnations of the C3 CPU were good low-power offerings for embedded designs, and showed poorer performance...) core is on a par with a comparably clocked Celeron (i.e. it's in the ballpark of a 1GHz Celeron with the chip on the EPIA M10000 board...) and it's FP performance is somewhere in the ballpark of a 750MHz Celeron- give or take. If it were like you claim, you'd not be able to play DivX streams on the M10000 (You can...). The chips just aren't ball-busters like P4's, Athlon XP/64's, or Opterons are.
Now, had you been talking about a Samuel or Ezra core C3, you'd be closer to the mark. They have an integer performance similar to a identically clocked Celeron- with a FP performance that is abyssmal at best (FP portion of the core is clocked at 1/2 the clock speed of the CPU...)
If it's ease of learning, then yeah, a picture is probably worth a thousand words. If it's actual ease of use (which is NOT to be confused with the latter- even though everyone and his dog keeps doing it...), then a CLI may well be the thing.
There's a lot of things that are purely cumbersome because of the GUI under XP or MacOS.
Seriously, the last thing we need is slow hardware.
1) Some of the fastest hard crypto (i.e. military grade...) came from the very person I mention as an example.
2) Variety can only take you so far- chaff, etc. can make it difficult, but in the end, you basically end up with the same level of vulnerability you had in the system to begin with. Even variety doesn't make up for a weakness in your system.
I can't alleviate your fears with regard to your wireless router.
While Cisco owns Linksys, they don't use LEAP on that device (LEAP is typically used in enterprise contexts for wireless access...). However, your WEP based device is actually every bit as vulnerable because WEP's been cracked for pretty much any number of bits and has been for some time. LEAP was being touted as the fix to the problem and Cisco was flogging it pretty heavily- we now know that LEAP's not any better than WEP in all practical use.
It's WHY you really, really ought to have a cryptologist design your subsystems if at all possible. If it's not possible, you need to have them AUDIT it at the very least. Suffice it to say, each and every one of the wireless designs so far seem to be fairly flawed- and I don't believe that a single one was designed by or audited by a competent cryptographer (Someone like Schneier comes immediately to mind- never mind how expensive this sort of person will be for you with the design work or an audit, the embarassment and increased liability for exploits on the system make it far, far more expensive to NOT hire them...).
I'm a fairly competant amateur- I know better than to assume anything I or anyone else that's not an SME produces in this arena is anything but vulnerable until proven otherwise.
All one has to do to "unprotect" the files is have a player that unlocks them and a high-fidelity digitizer (you know, something like an Audigy card or pod...) to record it with. The loss is not going to be noticeable (i.e. even AAC inserts worse loss than this process does in the first place...) and as long as you use AAC or something that doesn't distort the results appreciably worse, you win.
All this program does is make it easy for a legitimate user to shift it into other formats for their own use. They don't want you to do that. They want you to pay for the CD, the AAC/MP3, and any other format you want to use. In all honesty, they want you to pay for each time you listen to it, but they've not figured out how to do that without drawing too much attention to their damn greed.
If anyone needs a break, it's me- I'm tired of hearing about piracy when it's not about friggin' piracy. Get it in your head about that. They lose FAR more to real IP pirates in Asia where they crank it out by the tons in spite of the protections these jokers keep adding. Why in the hell don't they go shut those SOB's down first? It's because the "public" is an easier target and provides for nice, nifty laws bought with their money that give them all the advantages and the consumers nothing in return.
And as such, it's harder to defend- I'm actually surprised that the Apple Records and Apple Computer thing got as far as it did. It's actually rather STUPID of them continuing on like that considering there's OTHER record companies out there with "Apple" names, etc...
http://www.screaming-apple-records.de/ is but one example thereof and has been since 1989. This is a definite example of Apple Records going after the big pockets players and not the little guy- and they could very well lose the trademark over it...
...that most people associate "Power Plant" with this huge generation facility- which is what typically is built because of the economies of scale, etc.
You can do the Denmark thing rather easily with much smaller power plants. Something on the order of 100kW to 10MW that would nearly be unobtrusive compared to the traditional 100+MW plants people see. The big reason why you don't see micro plants is that they're more expensive to operate and therefore cut into the power companies' margins.
In 2001, only roughly 16% of the 1.9 trillion on books amount spent on the operations of the US Federal Government was spent on "two million dollar" bombs (Defense spending...).
In contrast, in that same year, nearly 62% of that 1.9 trillion was spent on "Human Resources" spending. Welfare, Social Security, etc. The breakdown's interesting (and better yet, it's appalling how much of that spending's "off budget"...)- roughly a third is in the form of Social Security spending, the other two thirds comprises Medicare, Welfare, health services (like the CDC...) and Veteran's Benefits with Welfare and Medicare comprising the lion's share of the remaining amount.
You want to know where your taxes are spent? It's being spent on "Income Insurance" (Unemployment and Welfare...) and the retired in the form of their Soc Security payments and their institutionalized healthcare. It's also being wasted on a bunch of projects that suit a small minority of individuals that are all feeding from the Federal feed trough.
1) A Windows app. It doesn't use ANY special features of Linux/Unix
2) Still slower than GTK+ for many things because it's abstracting the Windows API to the X11 one and has to do many things in an inefficient manner to duplicate Windows behaviors.
...not "Reality TV", which are two absolutely and completely different things altogether. Most of what they're calling "Reality" TV is rigged in the first place- something or most everything is under the control of the producer and director for the show.
I mean, tripe like Friends and Survivor just do NOT appeal to me- I'm sure the people that they seem to be losing numbers on are the same way.
Really now, most of the "reality" TV stuff is frigging fixed anyhow- it's NOT reality shows for the most part. And better yet, if they weren't fixed, they're doing some of the damnedest cruel things to the "contestants" with things like Joe Millionare.
I find much more worthwile pursuits to keep my attention when I'm not at work like spending time with my Wife, reading e-books online, etc.
In the case of Copyright, it grants the holder thereof a time limited (though it's an insanely long one, all the same) monopoly on the production and the initial distribution thereof for a given piece of literary or artistic work. To duplicate or distribute duplicates is to infringe upon that government granted monopoly. Hence, the term infringement. If I take, say a DVD, and sell it to you, it's not infringement, per rights of "first sale", meaning that Copyright distribution rights only extend to the first sale of the media that a work is placed upon.
You see, contrary to what all the business people have been saying about "intellectual" property, it's not property per se- it's not a tangible thing. Making copies doesn't take the original item away from the owner. It does lower the amount of money they might see, but it does not directly take money out of their hands, nor does it deprive the holder of the so-called property.
Stealing is the taking of something in a manner that directly deprives someone of the thing taken. There's legal terms for this- theft and larceny come immediately to mind.
Infringement is not stealing in any legal sense of the concept- you can apply less than common dictionary definitions for the term or moral arguments to the mix, but you'd still be wrong because there IS a distinction for the whole thing all the same.
"DragonBall" is more of a marketing term than a CPU designation- it refers to Motorolla's SOC solutions line. The chip in question is an "i.MX1 MDragonBall", to be more specific.
From the press release about the same:
Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector today unveiled two new DragonBall microprocessor products -- DragonBall MX1 and DragonBall Super VZ. The DragonBall MX1, which is Motorola's first ARM-based DragonBall product, targets high-end, wirelessly connected mobile products that can leverage its ARM920T core-based microprocessor with speeds up to 200 MHz.
As you can see, it is not a 68k architechture SOC- it's an ARM based one, just like most of the other PDA's out today.
...is only possible on a platform that has insecurities in the FIRST place. An OS shouldn't allow the vector, let alone the actual processing of the attack.
It doesn't just write the the MBR. It pushes 64k of data to RANDOM locations on a randomly selected hard-disk. At some point it bombs the MBR, but it bombs other portions of the disks on a machine.
NASTY worm. Definitely old-school in nature- I wondered when someone would get around to making something along these lines.
Loki only "needed" to sell 30k units to break even because they set themselves up in situations that NEEDED those numbers.
MacOS titles only sell about 5k units, typically- and the companies that are selling the titles in question seem to be doing okay for themselves (Though they sometimes end up making Windows versions if the game came from the MacOS side of the equation to really rake in the dough- and it's merely because of the numbers on that side of the equation...). They typically work out deals so that 3-5k units makes some small amount of profit- or they would also go out of business.
And yes, typically, the royalties on the deals done for MacOS titles are such that everybody makes some small money out of the niche. Loki, from what I understand, didn't get as good a deal on many of the titles they ported as they could have. Combine that with stupid things like the tins and ridiculously large production runs which ate up the company's coffers (Along with some rather shady dealings done under the table by some of the principals...), they couldn't have ever "made it"- they'd have closed their doors, even if they were a Windows game house.
Loki's not so much an example of a "no market for your product" as it is bad business decisions combined with the retail channel NOT selling the stuff. Yes, they were supposed to have their games on the shelves in places like CompUSA, Best Buy, etc. Their distributor dropped the ball on that one and then shortly went out of business. The Q3A debacle was one of Loki delaying the game so that people that couldn't wait for the official Linux installer went and bought the Windows version and "patched" it with the binary set for Linux- that and you just couldn't find a copy of the Linux version on the shelves until months AFTER the release of the game.
One of the PBS stations, WMET 13 in New York, didmanage to film the thing pretty much perfectly- AND, while the production values on the movie were comparable to early Dr. Who episodes, the acting is QUITE good and the movie is more than watchable.
I don't know about the A&E attempt at the same, since I didn't see that one yet. (Though, to hear it, it doesn't sound quite as good as the original attempt- reviews are mixed and lean towards making statements about it being "an inspired adaptation" and that people that saw the original movie or read the book would be disappointed.
Loki died, not because the people talking about buying Linux games were lying, but for other reasons.
Loki took on the porting or support of 21 different titles at a tune of at least $20-50k per title and royalties proportionate to if someone was selling an actual Windows game.
Loki went about the process of doing the actual publishing of the games in a manner that one would expect of a Windows publisher- thereby making the break-even levels nigh impossible to achieve.
Loki went about doing incredible, amazingly stupid things like ordering 50k units of CD's and those little metal tins for Q3:A, causing a delay in the ship date, creating impossible margins on the product when they should have ordered about 5k of the CD's and used DVD boxes to cut costs and get the official Linux version in people's hands in about the same timeframe as the official release (So that people wouldn't have went and bought the Windows version and "patched" it with the binaries set from Id...).
Most of the silos on the 'net have been older Atlas silos. Very, very few of the Titan I silos ever got into public hands AND have no apparent water seepage into any parts of the building (Typically, the actual missle bays would fill up with water because of location- they'd sump pump it out, but with them being abandoned...).
If it's for real, it's something somewhat special. The last one that went up was some 2-3 years ago in Colorado.
We're not talking about line jobs here. We're talking about those skilled people you refer to losing their jobs, not because they're not skilled enough- but because the cost of living here is too high and they're too "expensive" for the companies to hire compared to the Indian labor. Something that your professed world-view doesn't seem to take into account.
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Remember the laws in question only apply to closed system. Is his design a closed system? Like you said, there's conservation of energy- it can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form or another. It's a known fact that within a single cubic centimeter of volume resides sufficient instantaneous energy to condense out the entire rest-mass of the solar system and then some.
While I am not saying that he's tapping that energy, what is to say that he isn't?
You've got an interesting anomaly going on there with his engine- time to go find a new model for physics that jives with what we already know AND Minato's gaget.
Having worked with these chips for a while (since they're pretty much the new pet CPU for the x86 set-top box crowd...) I can say that your claims aren't accurate in the slightest.
Integer performance on a Nehemiah (key word there- previous incarnations of the C3 CPU were good low-power offerings for embedded designs, and showed poorer performance...) core is on a par with a comparably clocked Celeron (i.e. it's in the ballpark of a 1GHz Celeron with the chip on the EPIA M10000 board...) and it's FP performance is somewhere in the ballpark of a 750MHz Celeron- give or take. If it were like you claim, you'd not be able to play DivX streams on the M10000 (You can...). The chips just aren't ball-busters like P4's, Athlon XP/64's, or Opterons are.
Now, had you been talking about a Samuel or Ezra core C3, you'd be closer to the mark. They have an integer performance similar to a identically clocked Celeron- with a FP performance that is abyssmal at best (FP portion of the core is clocked at 1/2 the clock speed of the CPU...)
If it's ease of learning, then yeah, a picture is probably worth a thousand words. If it's actual ease of use (which is NOT to be confused with the latter- even though everyone and his dog keeps doing it...), then a CLI may well be the thing.
There's a lot of things that are purely cumbersome because of the GUI under XP or MacOS.
1) Some of the fastest hard crypto (i.e. military grade...) came from the very person I mention as an example.
2) Variety can only take you so far- chaff, etc. can make it difficult, but in the end, you basically end up with the same level of vulnerability you had in the system to begin with. Even variety doesn't make up for a weakness in your system.
I can't alleviate your fears with regard to your wireless router.
While Cisco owns Linksys, they don't use LEAP on that device (LEAP is typically used in enterprise contexts for wireless access...). However, your WEP based device is actually every bit as vulnerable because WEP's been cracked for pretty much any number of bits and has been for some time. LEAP was being touted as the fix to the problem and Cisco was flogging it pretty heavily- we now know that LEAP's not any better than WEP in all practical use.
It's WHY you really, really ought to have a cryptologist design your subsystems if at all possible. If it's not possible, you need to have them AUDIT it at the very least. Suffice it to say, each and every one of the wireless designs so far seem to be fairly flawed- and I don't believe that a single one was designed by or audited by a competent cryptographer (Someone like Schneier comes immediately to mind- never mind how expensive this sort of person will be for you with the design work or an audit, the embarassment and increased liability for exploits on the system make it far, far more expensive to NOT hire them...).
I'm a fairly competant amateur- I know better than to assume anything I or anyone else that's not an SME produces in this arena is anything but vulnerable until proven otherwise.
It's not about piracy.
All one has to do to "unprotect" the files is have a player that unlocks them and a high-fidelity digitizer (you know, something like an Audigy card or pod...) to record it with. The loss is not going to be noticeable (i.e. even AAC inserts worse loss than this process does in the first place...) and as long as you use AAC or something that doesn't distort the results appreciably worse, you win.
All this program does is make it easy for a legitimate user to shift it into other formats for their own use. They don't want you to do that. They want you to pay for the CD, the AAC/MP3, and any other format you want to use. In all honesty, they want you to pay for each time you listen to it, but they've not figured out how to do that without drawing too much attention to their damn greed.
If anyone needs a break, it's me- I'm tired of hearing about piracy when it's not about friggin' piracy. Get it in your head about that. They lose FAR more to real IP pirates in Asia where they crank it out by the tons in spite of the protections these jokers keep adding. Why in the hell don't they go shut those SOB's down first? It's because the "public" is an easier target and provides for nice, nifty laws bought with their money that give them all the advantages and the consumers nothing in return.
And as such, it's harder to defend- I'm actually surprised that the Apple Records and Apple Computer thing got as far as it did. It's actually rather STUPID of them continuing on like that considering there's OTHER record companies out there with "Apple" names, etc...
http://www.screaming-apple-records.de/ is but one example thereof and has been since 1989. This is a definite example of Apple Records going after the big pockets players and not the little guy- and they could very well lose the trademark over it...
...that most people associate "Power Plant" with this huge generation facility- which is what typically is built because of the economies of scale, etc.
You can do the Denmark thing rather easily with much smaller power plants. Something on the order of 100kW to 10MW that would nearly be unobtrusive compared to the traditional 100+MW plants people see. The big reason why you don't see micro plants is that they're more expensive to operate and therefore cut into the power companies' margins.
In 2001, only roughly 16% of the 1.9 trillion on books amount spent on the operations of the US Federal Government was spent on "two million dollar" bombs (Defense spending...).
In contrast, in that same year, nearly 62% of that 1.9 trillion was spent on "Human Resources" spending. Welfare, Social Security, etc. The breakdown's interesting (and better yet, it's appalling how much of that spending's "off budget"...)- roughly a third is in the form of Social Security spending, the other two thirds comprises Medicare, Welfare, health services (like the CDC...) and Veteran's Benefits with Welfare and Medicare comprising the lion's share of the remaining amount.
You want to know where your taxes are spent? It's being spent on "Income Insurance" (Unemployment and Welfare...) and the retired in the form of their Soc Security payments and their institutionalized healthcare. It's also being wasted on a bunch of projects that suit a small minority of individuals that are all feeding from the Federal feed trough.
The problem with that is that it's still:
1) A Windows app. It doesn't use ANY special features of Linux/Unix
2) Still slower than GTK+ for many things because it's abstracting the Windows API to the X11 one and has to do many things in an inefficient manner to duplicate Windows behaviors.
How many awesome hoaxes are completely blown because the dupes have been tipped off because there's NOTHING but hoaxes- and mostly lame ones at that.
...not "Reality TV", which are two absolutely and completely different things altogether. Most of what they're calling "Reality" TV is rigged in the first place- something or most everything is under the control of the producer and director for the show.
I mean, tripe like Friends and Survivor just do NOT appeal to me- I'm sure the people that they seem to be losing numbers on are the same way.
Really now, most of the "reality" TV stuff is frigging fixed anyhow- it's NOT reality shows for the most part. And better yet, if they weren't fixed, they're doing some of the damnedest cruel things to the "contestants" with things like Joe Millionare.
I find much more worthwile pursuits to keep my attention when I'm not at work like spending time with my Wife, reading e-books online, etc.
In the case of Copyright, it grants the holder thereof a time limited (though it's an insanely long one, all the same) monopoly on the production and the initial distribution thereof for a given piece of literary or artistic work. To duplicate or distribute duplicates is to infringe upon that government granted monopoly. Hence, the term infringement. If I take, say a DVD, and sell it to you, it's not infringement, per rights of "first sale", meaning that Copyright distribution rights only extend to the first sale of the media that a work is placed upon.
You see, contrary to what all the business people have been saying about "intellectual" property, it's not property per se- it's not a tangible thing. Making copies doesn't take the original item away from the owner. It does lower the amount of money they might see, but it does not directly take money out of their hands, nor does it deprive the holder of the so-called property.
Stealing is the taking of something in a manner that directly deprives someone of the thing taken. There's legal terms for this- theft and larceny come immediately to mind.
Infringement is not stealing in any legal sense of the concept- you can apply less than common dictionary definitions for the term or moral arguments to the mix, but you'd still be wrong because there IS a distinction for the whole thing all the same.
"DragonBall" is more of a marketing term than a CPU designation- it refers to Motorolla's SOC solutions line. The chip in question is an "i.MX1 MDragonBall" , to be more specific.
From the press release about the same:
As you can see, it is not a 68k architechture SOC- it's an ARM based one, just like most of the other PDA's out today.
...is only possible on a platform that has insecurities in the FIRST place. An OS shouldn't allow the vector, let alone the actual processing of the attack.
It doesn't just write the the MBR. It pushes 64k of data to RANDOM locations on a randomly selected hard-disk. At some point it bombs the MBR, but it bombs other portions of the disks on a machine.
NASTY worm. Definitely old-school in nature- I wondered when someone would get around to making something along these lines.
Loki only "needed" to sell 30k units to break even because they set themselves up in situations that NEEDED those numbers.
MacOS titles only sell about 5k units, typically- and the companies that are selling the titles in question seem to be doing okay for themselves (Though they sometimes end up making Windows versions if the game came from the MacOS side of the equation to really rake in the dough- and it's merely because of the numbers on that side of the equation...). They typically work out deals so that 3-5k units makes some small amount of profit- or they would also go out of business.
And yes, typically, the royalties on the deals done for MacOS titles are such that everybody makes some small money out of the niche. Loki, from what I understand, didn't get as good a deal on many of the titles they ported as they could have. Combine that with stupid things like the tins and ridiculously large production runs which ate up the company's coffers (Along with some rather shady dealings done under the table by some of the principals...), they couldn't have ever "made it"- they'd have closed their doors, even if they were a Windows game house.
Loki's not so much an example of a "no market for your product" as it is bad business decisions combined with the retail channel NOT selling the stuff. Yes, they were supposed to have their games on the shelves in places like CompUSA, Best Buy, etc. Their distributor dropped the ball on that one and then shortly went out of business. The Q3A debacle was one of Loki delaying the game so that people that couldn't wait for the official Linux installer went and bought the Windows version and "patched" it with the binary set for Linux- that and you just couldn't find a copy of the Linux version on the shelves until months AFTER the release of the game.
That is WNET in New York... :-)
(If only I could type instead of typo...
One of the PBS stations, WMET 13 in New York, did manage to film the thing pretty much perfectly- AND, while the production values on the movie were comparable to early Dr. Who episodes, the acting is QUITE good and the movie is more than watchable.
I don't know about the A&E attempt at the same, since I didn't see that one yet. (Though, to hear it, it doesn't sound quite as good as the original attempt- reviews are mixed and lean towards making statements about it being "an inspired adaptation" and that people that saw the original movie or read the book would be disappointed.
Considering that Visio's a Microsoft property right now, it'd be a cold day in Hell before we see that one come over to Linux in a usable fasion.
Loki died, not because the people talking about buying Linux games were lying, but for other reasons.
Loki took on the porting or support of 21 different titles at a tune of at least $20-50k per title and royalties proportionate to if someone was selling an actual Windows game.
Loki went about the process of doing the actual publishing of the games in a manner that one would expect of a Windows publisher- thereby making the break-even levels nigh impossible to achieve.
Loki went about doing incredible, amazingly stupid things like ordering 50k units of CD's and those little metal tins for Q3:A, causing a delay in the ship date, creating impossible margins on the product when they should have ordered about 5k of the CD's and used DVD boxes to cut costs and get the official Linux version in people's hands in about the same timeframe as the official release (So that people wouldn't have went and bought the Windows version and "patched" it with the binaries set from Id...).
Most of the silos on the 'net have been older Atlas silos. Very, very few of the Titan I silos ever got into public hands AND have no apparent water seepage into any parts of the building (Typically, the actual missle bays would fill up with water because of location- they'd sump pump it out, but with them being abandoned...).
If it's for real, it's something somewhat special. The last one that went up was some 2-3 years ago in Colorado.
We're not talking about line jobs here. We're talking about those skilled people you refer to losing their jobs, not because they're not skilled enough- but because the cost of living here is too high and they're too "expensive" for the companies to hire compared to the Indian labor. Something that your professed world-view doesn't seem to take into account.