Do you want to get into the specifics of making and maintaining the millions of ugly little windmills that are needed to make windpower practical?
The ugly little windmills of the late 70s and 80s are history (although some of the little buggers are still spinning.) Modern windmills are enormous, with blades the size of a 747's wingspan. New models can generate 2.5 Megawatts, but that's by no means a limit (output has jumped by 100-fold in the past 15 years.)
It'd still take a lot of those turbines to replace a nuclear power plant. On the other hand, there's a lot of development to be done (and lots of space in this country and offshore.) By the time we've finished building the next generation of nuclear plants, turbine output and efficiency will have increased significantly. When we're trying to figure out what to do with the first trainloads of waste, most non-nuclear countries will be building turbines and be generating power without fuel.
As to the ugliness... Well, I think they look pretty nice, actually. And if you've ever driven through the Great Plains, you'll probably agree that a few windmills aren't going to get in anyone's way.
I think there is an enormous opportunity for North America to move to a distributed power system. Imagine this: natural gas feeds into your basement fuel cell
The problem being, of course, that we would simply be exchanging a centralized power system with a centralized natural gas system. I suppose those of us lucky enough to have access to our own deposits will do well, though.
Your other points are good, though. This technology could be the equivalent of a very high-capacity battery. It'll also be a whole lot quieter than a gasoline generator, although the fuels are a bit less convenient.
Well... I know of a number of people who installed the patches and were still infected by the worms that the patch was supposed to prevent. I'm told that a major cause of this is people upgrading to the next service pack (and consequently rolling back the patch.) Apparently there are a whole lot of other ways to accidentally remove the patch, many of which are day-to-day operations.
At the time of the most recent worm outbreak (the one that used multiple exploits), I believe that there was no reliable patch available. Is that true?
In any case, these are bugs that should never have made it into the system. I think Microsoft should have issued a recall, and made an aggressive effort to contact its customers (by real mail) in order to get this problem fixed. If the brakes on my Toyota have a major flaw, Toyota doesn't sit back and wait for me to check their web page.
When talking about biological viruses, there's nothing wrong with referring to the nasties with regards to their target. Take, for instance: "Plant virus", "Human virus" or "Canine virus". If these worms/viruses start attacking other types of systems, then I think it would be highly propagandistic for us to refer to them as as "Microsoft ". But as a matter of terminology, at the moment...?
ah - you *do* realise that Scramdisk steganographic data is encrypted, and therefore is statistically random, yes?
I'm sorry, I was under the impression that many ciphers (even sophisticated ones) produced output that was statistically non-random (or at least, detectably non-random.)
Are you saying that an encrypted Scramdisk could fool a serious detection process? As far as I know, only a completely non-redundant message could do this reliably, and the only really reliable way of generating such a message is through the use of a good random noise source (or by XORing a non-redundant signal with a random noise source, as in the case of a OTP.)
I'm sorry, what I meant to say is that the steganographic "noise" is going to have differences from the random noise you'd get from a soundcard or analog source.
My point seems to have been lost somewhere. What I'm saying is that only way to detect sophisticated steg. is to run a statistical analysis on the redundant bits in a file. Even if the message is well encoded, you can still detect the presence of a message due to the abnormal statistical properties of the bits. It won't give you the message, but it's a good pointer that one is there.
For instance, if I hide a message in the low-order bits of an audio file, a statistical analysis of these bits might show them to be unusual (ie, not the typical output of a bad soundcard.) This doesn't give the message away, but detection is the first step on the road to decryption.
Many ciphers can be detected through statistical analysis. OTP output can masquerade as perfect white noise, assuming the random source from the OTP is truly random.
I *can* hear a noticable hiss, but no more than you would get from a poor quality recording from the radio.
One thing you can do is a frequency analysis of this hiss. It's going to have noticeable differences from analog noise. This analysis could conceivably be automated.
Software is like prostitution. You got the product. You sell the product. You still got the product.
There are plenty of instances where this simply isn't true. I remember a few months back when some university or lab was selling an old Cray computer of theirs. The computer required a proprietary OS to operate, and they had a licensed copy (which cost them a buttload.) Unfortunately, they couldn't sell it to the new potential owner because of the licensing restrictions. In effect, they were left holding a $200,000 set of disks that were useless without the computer. At the same time, the new customers were forced to go deep into the hole to purchase this exact same software from the company.
Seems like there're no issues there. In any case, software companies are developing increasingly sophisticated licensing and copy-protection systems for their products. If these systems work as advertised, one person can't copy the product and sell it off to somebody else. Of course all of these can be broken, but they can be broken regardless of whether software sales are allowed or not.
To me, it seems like you could say exactly the same thing about a book or a CD. Both can be copied before being resold.
Using 4-bits of each sample sounds like a lot. I would imagine that even untrained ears could discern the quality difference between a stegged file and an original.
I don't know the protocol, but I can only imagine that it's fairly simple to detect a stegged audio file produced by this utility, even if complicated statistical analysis isn't used.
The ideal system will use fewer bits, and will guarantee that there is no obvious formatting that can be detected without a careful statistical analysis. For audio files, it should be possible to encrypt your message with a one-time-pad, and insert it into the audio file as noise (possibly shaped...?) This would make the utility quite useful (although who transmits uncompressed Wave files nowadays?)
Maybe they assume in color-discretized images that images having RGBs one-off of their surrounding pixels are steganographic?
The images they scanned were JPEGs, so the steg. algorithm is a little bit more complicated than simply introducing noise into a bitmap. This complexity is also what makes the tampering more evident. There're fewer places to hide things in a compressed image without significantly affecting the output.
Essentially, they used a utility that checks redundant bits for statistical anomalies. This sort of scan wouldn't be effective against uncompressed photographs, I would imagine. If you used the least-significant-bit of each 32-bit pixel to hide a truly random message (generated by a one-time-pad, for instance), it would probably be much easier to hide information.
Same could go for audio files, or even large text files. If the statistical properties of the steg. modification are truly random, the message could easily be seen as noise. But IANAC (cryptographer.)
The whole point of stenography is that people CAN'T spot the fact that you're using it!
To elaborate... The whole point of good steganography is that people can't easily spot the fact that you're using it. If you use some common freeware steg. programs, people'll have no problem detecting it-- these programs make very little attempt to hide their trail if the files are carefully examined. In any case, except for the nefarious use by criminals, or a few people having fun, there's no reason to use steganography very much. The hope is not to be detected when you do use it.
As an aside, one imagines that with the hundreds of millions of dollars Bin Laden has access to, he can afford to create some half-decent steganography procedures... Perhaps using one-time-pads to conceal the data as noise.
Show me a single thread when a employee had justification to steal property for their unpaid wages and when there was not a single other creditor who had equal justification to recover money for their unpaid bills.
Whoa! Show me a single place in my post where I said that theft was justified! Why would you ever conclude that?
I just said that it was crappy for employers to do what some of these people did to their employees. And I said it in response to another AC's post (yours?) which seemed to be defending employers' right to fire people-- a right they certainly enjoy, but it seemed quite beside the point as the issue was paying out money employees had already earned, not guaranteeing their jobs.
It's ok to fire people, but there's nothing ok about screwing them for the money that they've already earned. We have bankruptcy courts to mitigate the disaster, but this does not make it morally correct to screw any creditor (be it a bank or an employee). And if you know that you are heading into bankruptcy, it's not acceptable to keep employees on to the last minute (when it's clear that you won't be able to pay them.)
As to why it's worse to screw your employees than your other creditors? Well, in the legal sense, it's not. But remember that the same laws place credit card payments above child-support. Does legal always == moral? Perhaps not.
Two things, in any case: one, once a check is cut, you've made the decision to spend that money in a certain way-- and (even in the case of bankrupcy) I think it should be considered money spent. Although it may be legal, I can't consider it excusable for a company to drain their bank accounts without first insuring that there are sufficient funds to cover the checks that they've already written.
Two, from a moral (rather than legal) standpoint, it's (only my opinion) that it's more important to pay back your employees (who have limited protection against your default) than it is to pay an insured bank. This comes back to the moral != legal thing, and perhaps we can agree to disagree here.
In case you haven't been reading the thread, there are a lot incidences where employers have failed to pay wages owed, or written bad checks. In this case, it seems morally bankrupt not to admit that these companies have done wrong.
"Hey," said a friend and senior manager, "we just announced we're whacking 200 people. If we spend three million bucks installing XP we're going to have to whack another 40. Is the ability to use a joystick worth those peoples' jobs?"
Agh, it sounds really awful when you put it in those terms. How much more productive will this product make your company, and how much of that productivity will be lost in job and budget cuts? Sounds like this should be a pretty straightforward equation for a CFO to work out.
The rocket will be fueled by 90 percent pure hydrogen peroxide... This fuel only has about 1/3 the energy of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. That's why it usually isn't used for a rocket. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are also very dangerous to deal with.
Er, isn't 90% pure hydrogen peroxide also very dangerous to deal with? I think Rocketman is a brave person to strap himself onto a hydrogen peroxide rocket and go straight up. God be with him.
Why does everyone think that the state and war departments are filled with morons that hadn't had far, far more education and history of the region?
Because that appears to be the situation. Read further up in the thread for Schwartzkopf's opinions on Dick Cheney's military prowess (and some of the wacky ideas he had around the time of the Gulf war.)
Rumsfeld recently told the press that they were "re-evaluating" their attack plan, having determined that there were no good targets in Afghanistan. The key word in that sentence is "re-evaluating", which would imply that a plan had already been arrived at, only to be scrapped.
Learn what? We haven't even committed any action yet! There are no reasons to believe that we have any desire to prosecute this war the same way the Russians did.
I see three options being bandied around. One: we go in with a ground-assault. That one's been pretty well discussed here. Two: we launch Tomohawks. You yourself don't seem to appreciate that option much. Three: we go in with Special Ops. The problem with this option is that we have no real idea if it'll work. So any claims that we know what we're doing are likely to be invented.
After all, we haven't done anything terribly rash and stupid in Afghanistan in the last 10 days.
Well, a couple of days ago, Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that we were re-evaluating our strategy (emphasis on the "re"... as in, our first evaluation was no good.) Apparently somebody's figured out that there are no good targets in Afghanistan. This gives me the impression that we would be bombing the crap out of them if we could just get a handle on the situation.
I worry about this war. Enraged Americans demand a war that they can see. They want to see bombs dropping, guts flying. I'm not sure that slow, sensible and covert is going to fit the bill, although that's probably the only chance we have to win this one.
Of course, we could just go in there with guns blazing and pull out when we feel like we've had enough. That'll satisfy everyone, at least until the terrorists strike again.
The bit about the effect of bombing was the most interesting part of the article. If what he's saying is true, our bombing could do more harm than good. So that means we're going to sneak around with special ops, while terrorists and suicide bombers do their best to loudly kill soldiers and civilians back in the US.
I don't suppose this is going to appeal very much to the voters.
Napster has the same basic appeal of left-wing politics: free candy for everyone
It's an interesting article. It's unfortunate that the author couldn't keep his politics out of it. It would have given him a lot more credibility to talk about the music industry.
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If you're the kind of person who only gets off on kiddies, I think you're doing a morally admirable thing by sticking to artificial kiddie porn.
Geez, it's better than entering the priesthood and messing around with altar boys.
If they start doing it to older movies, I'll be somewhat angry. That's a little bit too 1984 for me.
The ugly little windmills of the late 70s and 80s are history (although some of the little buggers are still spinning.) Modern windmills are enormous, with blades the size of a 747's wingspan. New models can generate 2.5 Megawatts, but that's by no means a limit (output has jumped by 100-fold in the past 15 years.)
It'd still take a lot of those turbines to replace a nuclear power plant. On the other hand, there's a lot of development to be done (and lots of space in this country and offshore.) By the time we've finished building the next generation of nuclear plants, turbine output and efficiency will have increased significantly. When we're trying to figure out what to do with the first trainloads of waste, most non-nuclear countries will be building turbines and be generating power without fuel.
As to the ugliness... Well, I think they look pretty nice, actually. And if you've ever driven through the Great Plains, you'll probably agree that a few windmills aren't going to get in anyone's way.
The problem being, of course, that we would simply be exchanging a centralized power system with a centralized natural gas system. I suppose those of us lucky enough to have access to our own deposits will do well, though.
Your other points are good, though. This technology could be the equivalent of a very high-capacity battery. It'll also be a whole lot quieter than a gasoline generator, although the fuels are a bit less convenient.
At the time of the most recent worm outbreak (the one that used multiple exploits), I believe that there was no reliable patch available. Is that true?
In any case, these are bugs that should never have made it into the system. I think Microsoft should have issued a recall, and made an aggressive effort to contact its customers (by real mail) in order to get this problem fixed. If the brakes on my Toyota have a major flaw, Toyota doesn't sit back and wait for me to check their web page.
How about Microsoft-targeted worm?
I'm sorry, I was under the impression that many ciphers (even sophisticated ones) produced output that was statistically non-random (or at least, detectably non-random.)
Are you saying that an encrypted Scramdisk could fool a serious detection process? As far as I know, only a completely non-redundant message could do this reliably, and the only really reliable way of generating such a message is through the use of a good random noise source (or by XORing a non-redundant signal with a random noise source, as in the case of a OTP.)
Perhaps I'm completely wrong...
I'm sorry, what I meant to say is that the steganographic "noise" is going to have differences from the random noise you'd get from a soundcard or analog source.
For instance, if I hide a message in the low-order bits of an audio file, a statistical analysis of these bits might show them to be unusual (ie, not the typical output of a bad soundcard.) This doesn't give the message away, but detection is the first step on the road to decryption.
Many ciphers can be detected through statistical analysis. OTP output can masquerade as perfect white noise, assuming the random source from the OTP is truly random.
One thing you can do is a frequency analysis of this hiss. It's going to have noticeable differences from analog noise. This analysis could conceivably be automated.
There are plenty of instances where this simply isn't true. I remember a few months back when some university or lab was selling an old Cray computer of theirs. The computer required a proprietary OS to operate, and they had a licensed copy (which cost them a buttload.) Unfortunately, they couldn't sell it to the new potential owner because of the licensing restrictions. In effect, they were left holding a $200,000 set of disks that were useless without the computer. At the same time, the new customers were forced to go deep into the hole to purchase this exact same software from the company.
Seems like there're no issues there. In any case, software companies are developing increasingly sophisticated licensing and copy-protection systems for their products. If these systems work as advertised, one person can't copy the product and sell it off to somebody else. Of course all of these can be broken, but they can be broken regardless of whether software sales are allowed or not.
To me, it seems like you could say exactly the same thing about a book or a CD. Both can be copied before being resold.
Using 4-bits of each sample sounds like a lot. I would imagine that even untrained ears could discern the quality difference between a stegged file and an original.
I don't know the protocol, but I can only imagine that it's fairly simple to detect a stegged audio file produced by this utility, even if complicated statistical analysis isn't used.
The ideal system will use fewer bits, and will guarantee that there is no obvious formatting that can be detected without a careful statistical analysis. For audio files, it should be possible to encrypt your message with a one-time-pad, and insert it into the audio file as noise (possibly shaped...?) This would make the utility quite useful (although who transmits uncompressed Wave files nowadays?)
The images they scanned were JPEGs, so the steg. algorithm is a little bit more complicated than simply introducing noise into a bitmap. This complexity is also what makes the tampering more evident. There're fewer places to hide things in a compressed image without significantly affecting the output.
Essentially, they used a utility that checks redundant bits for statistical anomalies. This sort of scan wouldn't be effective against uncompressed photographs, I would imagine. If you used the least-significant-bit of each 32-bit pixel to hide a truly random message (generated by a one-time-pad, for instance), it would probably be much easier to hide information.
Same could go for audio files, or even large text files. If the statistical properties of the steg. modification are truly random, the message could easily be seen as noise. But IANAC (cryptographer.)
To elaborate... The whole point of good steganography is that people can't easily spot the fact that you're using it. If you use some common freeware steg. programs, people'll have no problem detecting it-- these programs make very little attempt to hide their trail if the files are carefully examined. In any case, except for the nefarious use by criminals, or a few people having fun, there's no reason to use steganography very much. The hope is not to be detected when you do use it.
As an aside, one imagines that with the hundreds of millions of dollars Bin Laden has access to, he can afford to create some half-decent steganography procedures... Perhaps using one-time-pads to conceal the data as noise.
Whoa! Show me a single place in my post where I said that theft was justified! Why would you ever conclude that?
I just said that it was crappy for employers to do what some of these people did to their employees. And I said it in response to another AC's post (yours?) which seemed to be defending employers' right to fire people-- a right they certainly enjoy, but it seemed quite beside the point as the issue was paying out money employees had already earned, not guaranteeing their jobs.
It's ok to fire people, but there's nothing ok about screwing them for the money that they've already earned. We have bankruptcy courts to mitigate the disaster, but this does not make it morally correct to screw any creditor (be it a bank or an employee). And if you know that you are heading into bankruptcy, it's not acceptable to keep employees on to the last minute (when it's clear that you won't be able to pay them.)
As to why it's worse to screw your employees than your other creditors? Well, in the legal sense, it's not. But remember that the same laws place credit card payments above child-support. Does legal always == moral? Perhaps not.
Two things, in any case: one, once a check is cut, you've made the decision to spend that money in a certain way-- and (even in the case of bankrupcy) I think it should be considered money spent. Although it may be legal, I can't consider it excusable for a company to drain their bank accounts without first insuring that there are sufficient funds to cover the checks that they've already written.
Two, from a moral (rather than legal) standpoint, it's (only my opinion) that it's more important to pay back your employees (who have limited protection against your default) than it is to pay an insured bank. This comes back to the moral != legal thing, and perhaps we can agree to disagree here.
In case you haven't been reading the thread, there are a lot incidences where employers have failed to pay wages owed, or written bad checks. In this case, it seems morally bankrupt not to admit that these companies have done wrong.
What is the maximum sentence for child molestation? Life in prison?
Ok, then treat it the same way you would treat a broken plate glass window in a store. There are ways to handle these details.
Agh, it sounds really awful when you put it in those terms. How much more productive will this product make your company, and how much of that productivity will be lost in job and budget cuts? Sounds like this should be a pretty straightforward equation for a CFO to work out.
Er, isn't 90% pure hydrogen peroxide also very dangerous to deal with? I think Rocketman is a brave person to strap himself onto a hydrogen peroxide rocket and go straight up. God be with him.
Because that appears to be the situation. Read further up in the thread for Schwartzkopf's opinions on Dick Cheney's military prowess (and some of the wacky ideas he had around the time of the Gulf war.)
Rumsfeld recently told the press that they were "re-evaluating" their attack plan, having determined that there were no good targets in Afghanistan. The key word in that sentence is "re-evaluating", which would imply that a plan had already been arrived at, only to be scrapped.
Learn what? We haven't even committed any action yet! There are no reasons to believe that we have any desire to prosecute this war the same way the Russians did.
I see three options being bandied around. One: we go in with a ground-assault. That one's been pretty well discussed here. Two: we launch Tomohawks. You yourself don't seem to appreciate that option much. Three: we go in with Special Ops. The problem with this option is that we have no real idea if it'll work. So any claims that we know what we're doing are likely to be invented.
Well, a couple of days ago, Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that we were re-evaluating our strategy (emphasis on the "re"... as in, our first evaluation was no good.) Apparently somebody's figured out that there are no good targets in Afghanistan. This gives me the impression that we would be bombing the crap out of them if we could just get a handle on the situation.
I worry about this war. Enraged Americans demand a war that they can see. They want to see bombs dropping, guts flying. I'm not sure that slow, sensible and covert is going to fit the bill, although that's probably the only chance we have to win this one.
Of course, we could just go in there with guns blazing and pull out when we feel like we've had enough. That'll satisfy everyone, at least until the terrorists strike again.
I don't suppose this is going to appeal very much to the voters.
It's an interesting article. It's unfortunate that the author couldn't keep his politics out of it. It would have given him a lot more credibility to talk about the music industry.