Stupidly sucksessful bands are just shipped in in large quantities and if they don't sell the basically the record shop suffers for getting it wrong. So? If the record shop suffers, they'll never order another copy protected CD.
Of course, stay strictly legal here. If the label says "for CD players only" (go over it with a magnifying glass before buying), then you need a car or portable CD player that will reject the disk. Portable is best -- if they try to give you a replacement disk, just bring it into the store and let the store try to find a disk that plays...
There are three successful ways that man has produced fusion: Hydrogen bombs which are heated by one or more fission bombs, confined plasma (ie. tokomaks), and pulsed laser pellet experiments.
There are also various particle-beam approaches:
The simple brute force attack: shoot deuterium or tritium ions through an accelerator at a target, and some of them may hit hard enough to fuse with the target atoms. There's no chance of getting back even 1% of the energy you put in, but you can get _some_ fusion.
Muon-catalyzed fusion: Muons replace electrons and fly much closer to the nuclei, so atoms pack so close that now and then two nuclei will overlap. I think producing a few muons takes acres of equipment and the output of a very large power plant, so this is not a practical way of generating power.
Electron-beam inertial confinement: This is like the laser approach, only using electron beam(s) instead of the laser. The potential advantage here is that generating a powerful pulsed beam should be easier and more efficient with electrons than with lasers. You just charge up an enormous bank of capacitors to a really high voltage and connect it to anode and cathode, and much of the charging energy will turn into flying electrons. The disadvantages: (1) Getting several e-beams to converge on one tiny fuel pellet from all directions is somewhere between difficult and impossible. (2) There are no military applications for high-amperage electron beams, so it's hard to raise money...
I've heard of some particle-beam method being in actual use in some research labs as a controllable neutron source. Of course, in that application you aren't trying for a positive energy balance, but just for a machine that's smaller and easier to handle than a fission reactor. I'm not sure if this is a brute-force method, or a single electron beam doing inertial-confinement very inefficiently.
Thanks for the info. I've seen a mix of tar, glass fibers, and Al flakes used to coat roofs (the Al to reflect the heat), so using powdered Al in zeppelin coating does make a sort of sense. (The tar mix is of course potentially flammable, but I don't think it's at all easy to light it in the solid form.) It certainly seems possible to make a powdered-Al paint that was at least difficult to ignite, and maybe wouldn't support combustion (that is, in a thin film it would radiate heat away faster than it could ignite more paint). Maybe they didn't consider the flammability of the skin too important, considering the contents. But when the skin burned away, it released LOTS of H2 -- so even with maybe 90% of the heat going up, the downward-radiated heat was still too much.
404 error... 404 error... Both those links are down. At any rate, I've seen plenty of newspaper articles quoting some government official _claiming_ that Bin Laden used crypto, but not a single encrypted message or other evidence. And in my long experience, the word of a gov't official looking for an excuse to snoop on citizens isn't worth diddly-squat.
Some people on the Hindenburg survived. I don't know how considering that they were about 100 feet up hanging from a burning balloon, but somehow some of them got down to the ground...
I think the Hindenburg construction included a number of flexible gas bags inside of a rigid aluminum shell. NOT canvas, AFAIK. Blimps were coated canvas. The gas cells were probably coated canvas. Zeppelin's outer construction was aluminum sheet on aluminum ribs. The shell was vented so that the flexible gas cells could expand and contract, pushing air in and out of the vents. But any excess leakage of the cells would put a hydrogen - oxygen mixture in the space between the gas cells and the metal skin. The vents were supposed to allow enough circulation to flush the hydrogen before it reached ignitable concentrations, but if age and wear made the material more permeable, there was a possibility of creating an explosive mixture. I don't think this happened, or not in most of the craft, because there wasn't a big bang that instantly killed everyone.
The hydrogen in the gas bags (or in a tank) won't burn because of no oxygen. If something knocks or burns a hole, then you get a jet of gas coming out, and flame at the end where it finally mixes with enough air to burn. The color of the flame depends far more on what other substances got carried along in the jet than on the fuel -- a quick non-quantative chemistry test for many metal atoms is to hold one drop of a solution in a flame and see the color.
The hydrogen was low pressure, so it wasn't jetting out really fast, although the holes would have kept burning bigger. It would have tended to rise. This certainly helped the survival rate, but the radiated heat would have been fierce. And of course, there were diesel fuel tanks and wood paneling inside the cabin, so anyone who didn't get out fast was dead...
Now, about the weird chemistry: Aluminum oxide is definitely not flammable -- Al2O3 is the ash from burning Al. (Sheet aluminum is hard to ignite, but it can burn, emitting considerable heat.)Other posters have claimed that the coating was powdered Al metal plus iron oxide. That formula is called "thermite" and it will certainly burn (even under water -- the iron gives up oxygen to burn the aluminum), but it was well known as an incendiary long before the Hindenburg was built, so it would have been insane to use it as a paint. Of course, a few years earlier the Germans had elected Adolf Hitler president, so you might question their sanity...
A tank full of hot sodium hydroxide is probably more dangerous than a tank full of hydrogen. NaOH makes a great drain opener -- and you are chemically quite similar to the stuff clogging the drains...
As I remember the tech manual for Kirk's Enterprise, warp was supposed to be a cubic formula. Warp 1 = c, warp 2= 8c, warp 3 = 27c,... warp 10 = 1000c. (The last number makes sense out of Voyager's 70 years home at almost warp 10: 70,000 light years is indeed a good ways across the galaxy. Not that there is any reason that 1000c should be harder to break than 729c = warp 9.) Of course, this makes nonsense out of all Kirk's puttering around at warp 2 or 3. That's a couple of months to Proximus Centauri, and maybe you'd find one inhabitable planet a year, allowing the producers to compress the "five year mission" into five episodes...
However, the producers of SNG might have had different ideas, and in general interpreting warp was in the hands of various scriptwriters, most of whom can't do enough math to balance a checkbook.
Why do us old geeks love Star Trek so much? You should see the other crap that counted as SF in film and TV back then. Wait, that's cruel and unusual punishment -- force Bin Laden to watch it, instead...
It's not entirely clear, but this case doesn't seem to hinge on a shrinkwrap EULA. The court decision as reported doesn't even say that One Stop ever saw a EULA -- they weren't installing the software, but reselling it, so if the on-screen license is the only notice, they wouldn't have. It looks like the court just seized on "licensing" as a way to avoid thinking about the tougher issues. And One Stop might do just as well to take their lumps for license infringement rather than taking the case to a smarter judge who might find other grounds to leave them on the hook for copyright infringement, and also wonder whether selling the educational version as the full version was fraud.
The "Off Campus Reseller Agreement" seems to be a contract which was actually _signed_ by Adobe's educational distributor. One Stop "bought" discounted software from that distributor in bulk and sold it on the open market as the full, not the educational, version. So without thinking about licenses at all, One Stop was claiming that it's purchase gave it rights that the unnamed distributor does not have to sell. An analogy here is that an innocent buyer of stolen property is still out his money and the property -- and it's a whole lot worse if the judge decides that your behavior shows you weren't all that innocent...
You seem to be associating my $100/hour proposed charge with a lot more than I intended. It's for (shrink-wrap purchased) software remotely shut down by the vendor in error -- that should be a rare occurrence. I think $100 is fair for a home user that's been deliberately shut down, if they fix it promptly. If a vendor has their tech support screwed up, so the hours tick away -- that deserves a much bigger cost. If they screw up so many times that this bankrupts them, putting them out of business is probably a good thing. If the possibility of such a screw-up persuades software vendors to leave out the remote shutdown "feature", that's even better, IMO. But I don't like just flat out banning it.
I didn't consider the possibility that it might not be the vendor shutting software down in the mistaken belief that the software is pirated, but malicious hackers instead. E.g., if Microsoft puts that into their server version of Windows, a lot of people would think it served them right to have it used to crash their own servers. (Oh wait, some of them are still running *nix/Apache...) If the hackers weren't satisfied with that and hit third parties -- what should MS's liability be???
I do know there are servers where the cost of an unscheduled shutdown might be far over $100/hour, maybe even $100K/hour. I'd expect that in that case (1) you won't use an OS that has such vulnerabilities, and (2) you ought to be negotiating the license and warranty terms with the vendors rather than relying on the warranty that's sufficient for Joe Sixpack's porno browser.
Target shooting. Backup weapon when bow-hunting bears. (My brother-in-law does that, and bear meat tastes pretty good -- but his hunting buddy didn't aim the arrow just right one fall, and if not for Ralph's.357 the bear would have ate them.) Shooting terrorists. Scaring off muggers, burglars, and robbers. (Occasionally shooting them, but most will run away when their victim pulls a gun, and normal people don't chase them and shoot them in the back.)
The legitimate uses of fire-arms are grossly under-reported, in crime reports because usually just showing the gun prevented any crime from occuring, and in the media because it's so far outside the typical big-city reporter or editors experience they can't think what to do with the story. E.g., an NRA member finally found a reporter that seemed willing to listen and sent him documentation of 20 cases of people using guns to defend themselves against crime. Then at the interview, the first question was "People really use guns to defend themselves?"... It's a mental block, similar to the one that let a copyeditor at the WP turn "anger and grief" into "overwhelming guilt."
As someone with a very strange cognomen pointed out earlier, a long time ago some book publisher tried this "licensed, not sold" stuff with a contract printed on the flyleaf of the book. The courts disallowed this, and created the first sale doctrine. That is, when you sell it, you have no say over what they buyer does with it.
The difference with software is less because of the less tangible nature of the product (bits aren't tangible, but the CD and manuals certainly are), but that judges are over-impressed with arguments that cyberspace is different. And precedents concerning software license agreements were set several decades ago, when the judges were not sure whether copyright law covered bits at all, and software patents were even more dubious, so the (then generally quite reasonable) license agreements were the only real protection software writers had. Since then the copyright law has been amended to clearly protect bits, the old ban on patenting mathematical algorithms has somehow disappeared, and so software does not need license agreements to protect against piracy. But they are still putting out those license agreements, and getting more unreasonable about the terms every year.
Maybe eventually enough technical savvy will filter into the courts that the judges will decide that software should sell under the same rules as everything else. That does not imply just the first sale doctrine -- what would really hurt MS is if the courts decide to apply the UCC's mandatory warranty of merchantibility to consumer software sales -- that is, if software follows the usual rules, the software vendor would be responsible for the software working _right_ in home computers. Given that possibility, their continued pushing of egregious license agreements and on-line activation seems almost like a corporate death wish, an attempt to push until they fatally tick off some judge.
But right now it might be more effective to agitate for legislative action, instead. The software vendors may be flooding Congress with contributions, but the corporations that buy software instead of selling it outnumber them many times, and they are getting hurt by this !@#$%^.
We need an anti-UCITA:
First Sale: Purchasing an individual software distribubution gives you the right to put it on any one computer of your choosing, to resell it, give it away, or even loan it as long as you can ensure it is operable on only one computer at a time. (Note that this does not apply if it is leased, not purchased, but the package had better make it clear that this is a lease for a specific time period. Also, it does not apply to site licenses, IF the full licensing agreement is presented before the sale.) Nor can individually purchased software be locked to the first computer you install it in, or shut itself down after a time period. If the vendor chooses to install and use a remote-shutdown feature to combat piracy, then if they shutdown a legal copy, they are liable for $100/hour until it's back up, and all incidental and consequential damages.
Implied Warranty: The UCC law makes many common "limited warranty" clauses null and void, like one saying that if the steering linkage falls off your car, your heirs are entitled only to a new steering linkage. Per UCC, the carmaker is responsible for the accident, too. Putting software fully under that now would put software vendors out of business, but as long as they get off scot-free for bad quality and even get to charge you for the bug-fixed version, most of them won't improve their quality. We need at a minimum the right to take the software back and get a full refund if bugs, which prevent it from operating as advertised, are not fixed promptly and at no cost. Also there should be compensation for phone bills and time and hold, and punitive damages when tech support tells you it isn't a bug and they already know about it.
So are you going to go withdraw all the copies of old journals with the formula for public-key encryption from the libraries? Or maybe license mathematicians so nobody is out there that understands how to turn those formulae into code? And nuke Russia, since their gov't is too weak to ensure their many excellent mathematicians obey such a law.
Robin, anyone could think of a lot better ways to cut "feelings of anger and grief" than "overwhelmed by guilt".
I don't think this was a deliberate attempt to slant the story, but it sure looks like an unconscious one. That is, the editor was in a hurry when reading the story, and interpreted it according to his expectations -- as guilt, not grief...
I was wrong, it was incompetence. Just found a Washington Post article about how the FBI did know that suspected terrorists were taking flight lessons, and convicted one man in 1995 of plotting to kamikaze CIA headquarters.
But intelligence failures like this are common where any really daring plan is concerned. Intelligence analysis is like trying to build a jigsaw puzzle with only 10% of the pieces -- it's easy to get it totally wrong, and the analysts are quite aware of this. So when the analysts just don't believe the other guys can be thinking that big or would take such risks, they might make the connections, but then don't believe it. Pearl Harbor is one obvious example, but not the worst one -- that's a tie between Stalin's utter surprise when Hitler invaded in spite of all sorts of warnings (not to mention the obvious fact that Hitler HAD to go for the Soviets' oil fields while his tanks still had enough fuel to get there), and Hitler's total belief in the disinformation spread by the OSS that the big landing was going to be in Brittany, Normandy was just a feint...
Just one thing I would disagree with here: because our intelligence organizations are incompetent. They often seem to be incompetent, and certainly are overly cautious about sending agents into dangerous situations, but to be fair, no one has had much success at infiltrating middle-eastern terrorist organizations. Their cells are usually family-based, in societies where family comes before everything else. An agent can't get in unless he IS related -- and then he wouldn't betray his family... And Bin Laden has thousands of such families to choose from. This plot may have involved less than 100 people, with only a dozen that knew the plan. If Bin Laden couldn't find a team that were completely loyal, not known to our agencies, and had the sense not to inadvertently reveal the plan or themselves, then _he_ would be quite incompetent.
So what could have stopped it? It's quite simple. In defending a military position, you need at least three rings of defense. Outermost is a light screen that you hope will provide advance warning of an attack; in this case, that's intelligence, and it's not ever going to be completely reliable. Second is an area defense: that's the metal detectors and x-ray machines at the airports, and in spite of depending on $6/hr rent-a-cops, it worked as planned. No weapon worthy of the name was used. Third, you need to defend the target itself -- and that is where we failed. The hijackings could have been stopped by one air marshal, one copilot with a gun, two on-leave marines with sticks, or a dozen passengers throwing carry-on luggage. But the passengers and crew were not only disarmed, but also brainwashed into not resisting...
This is really the key point: Terrorists DO NOT need cryptography if they are capable of planning ahead a little in face to face meetings. If you are making it up as you go along, then you have to send lots of detailed messages back and forth. But if you can meet somewhere that CIA agents cannot operate (Afghanistan, for instance), and decide what everyone will be doing in two years (flying airliners into buildings), then the messages requireed as the plan unfolds can all be easily disguised as routine business or family communications.
Of course, if you force banks and other businesses to put back doors into their crypto, then you are giving the more sophisticated terrorists one hell of an opportunity. Why bother blowing up Americans a few thousand at a time when you can foul up the financial system until millions of them are starving? It would be tough to do -- but remember that under our laws, Arab or Afghan origins is no reason to keep a person out of sensitive government positions, like in the key escrow department...
Excuse me Major, but you really don't get it. Civilian companies are in the habit of tossing out thousands of people, without regard to their job performance, and with no warning. Then the executives go pat themselves on the back for the temporary increase in profits achieved by permanently shrinking the business, or by losing many of the people who know how to keep it running and making the rest nervous, overworked, and ready to jump at any decent job offer. (I can't speak as to why the stockholders are gullible enough to agree that this was a good idea...) I was in the air force as an enlisted man 10 years (and got my BSEE while in uniform), and I never saw anything like that in the service.
The services bounce you from assignment to assignment, but they do not cut off your paycheck just because one assignment has ended. You can get kicked out because you screwed up, and probably more easily than getting fired in a large corporation -- but if you follow all the regs, you are OK. There are RIF's (equivalent to layoffs), but if they come as a surprise you really weren't paying attention, and the services cushion it as much as possible.
As an employer, what right would I have to expect advanced warning from an employee that is going to quit?
Huh??? Employers do expect two to four weeks notice when an employee quits. It's generally not enforced by contract, but by a general agreement about what is "right", and the certainty that if you just walk out you won't get a good recommendation. And I have never seen a professional or manager who did not give at least two weeks notice. (There was one who notified HR only, and they forgot to pass it on to his supervisor...) Even the engineer that died last year had given notice that he was retiring early due to health problems. 8-\
On the other hand, it is standard operating procedure for many corporations to pretend everything is fine and no one is going to be laid off, until the security guards arrive to escort you off the premises.
And what really bites is the executives who award themselves big bonuses for a temporary boost in profits achieved by permanently shrinking the business.
At present (and a century ago, as well): not-too-bright criminals rob banks. Moronic criminals mug you when you walk out of the bank. Smart criminals go to work for the bank -- and the geniuses stay honest until they reach a high enough level to steal legally.
A cashless society will certainly slow down the first two types; they can still steal _goods_, but they have to lug them around, find a fence to buy them, not get caught by the police with them, and in general it's more work for less money, not to mention complicated enough to challenge their mentality. However, this provides increased opportunities for the smart criminals. And mainly, I would be concerned about the opportunities this gives to both corporations and governments for dishonest dealings.
Forty years ago, in any sort of sales business the motto was "the customer is always right". Nowadays, most corporate customer service depts run on the motto "the customer is always wrong". Do you really want to let them hold your money as bits in their computers, with no hard-copy proof of your account?
And then there are all the privacy aspects -- corporations tracking everything you purchase, g-men able to track your movements every time you stick a card in a machine, etc. I'll use cash, thank you. And if I become worried about muggers, CCW permits aren't that hard to get in Michigan... (A dead mugger is a non-recidivist.)
Do remember that the first Unix was written for the PDP-11. An original IBM PC (8088 4.7MHz) is a powerhouse next to that. I suspect that the first Unix was security-free. It was written for the computer shared by Bell Labs programmers -- any security you could have implemented on that pitiful machine wouldn't have lasted an hour against one of those guys, so it was better to just trust them not to foul their own nests.
That was in 1971, I think. Unix has come a very long way since then, including many security patches. One advantage it has is that it's 10 years older than DOS/Windows, so more holes have been patched. Another is that it was on multi-user computers from the beginning, while I think MS's first OS for servers (Win NT) first came out in the 90's -- so the unices may have a 20 year lead in thinking about security. And finally, some unices are open sourced, and even the proprietary ones are far more open about the way things work than Windows -- so there have been more friendly eyes looking for holes.
There used to be mainframe OS's that were designed for security from the ground up. I wonder how those would stack up against the unices and Windoze where security was patched in after the original design was set? I think not so good anymore -- they haven't been exposed to decades of probing...
C came out of a similar environment at about the same time. Hence all the standard string functions that simply trust the users not to do something that overflows the buffers. Actually checking for overflow ate up too many cycles, so they trusted the users instead. But why are we still using these unsafe functions?
This is contract law, pure and simple. No, if the contract was actually presented prior to purchasing FP, then it would be pure and simple. As it is, they have to be counting on most people either never reading the EULA, not understanding the legalese, or finding it too much trouble to take it back and get a refund. Because if their customers took that clause seriously, half of them wouldn't be MS customers.
Not that this is the worst thing in EULA's. The worst thing is perfectly standard in software and only in software: the combination of clauses stating that they don't guarantee the program will actually work, you aren't allowed to fix it (no modifications allowed), and they aren't responsible for losses due to bugs (e.g. lost data, time rebuilding crashed systems).
I saw a film once of albatrosses trying to take off from the beach. Hilarious. It's quite obvious why this is called a "goony bird". This is a quite large bird that spends days in the air. It has extremely long wings for efficient gliding, and has a surprisingly low glide speed for it's weight. But to get off the ground, it has to run fast enough to generate lift and it keeps tripping over the wings...
Yeah, small birds can just jump and flap. They have light wing loading, and short enough wings that running the tips into the ground isn't much of a problem. Tiny hummingbirds maybe don't even have to jump. But big birds have more wing loading and getting into the air is more of a job. A man-carrying ornithopter must be at least 10 times the weight of any bird capable of flight -- it's going to need quite a takeoff roll, or else something rather special to launch it high enough for the wing flapping to cut in before it crashes.
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Stupidly sucksessful bands are just shipped in in large quantities and if they don't sell the basically the record shop suffers for getting it wrong. So? If the record shop suffers, they'll never order another copy protected CD.
Of course, stay strictly legal here. If the label says "for CD players only" (go over it with a magnifying glass before buying), then you need a car or portable CD player that will reject the disk. Portable is best -- if they try to give you a replacement disk, just bring it into the store and let the store try to find a disk that plays...
There are three successful ways that man has produced fusion: Hydrogen bombs which are heated by one or more fission bombs, confined plasma (ie. tokomaks), and pulsed laser pellet experiments.
There are also various particle-beam approaches:
The simple brute force attack: shoot deuterium or tritium ions through an accelerator at a target, and some of them may hit hard enough to fuse with the target atoms. There's no chance of getting back even 1% of the energy you put in, but you can get _some_ fusion.
Muon-catalyzed fusion: Muons replace electrons and fly much closer to the nuclei, so atoms pack so close that now and then two nuclei will overlap. I think producing a few muons takes acres of equipment and the output of a very large power plant, so this is not a practical way of generating power.
Electron-beam inertial confinement: This is like the laser approach, only using electron beam(s) instead of the laser. The potential advantage here is that generating a powerful pulsed beam should be easier and more efficient with electrons than with lasers. You just charge up an enormous bank of capacitors to a really high voltage and connect it to anode and cathode, and much of the charging energy will turn into flying electrons. The disadvantages: (1) Getting several e-beams to converge on one tiny fuel pellet from all directions is somewhere between difficult and impossible. (2) There are no military applications for high-amperage electron beams, so it's hard to raise money...
I've heard of some particle-beam method being in actual use in some research labs as a controllable neutron source. Of course, in that application you aren't trying for a positive energy balance, but just for a machine that's smaller and easier to handle than a fission reactor. I'm not sure if this is a brute-force method, or a single electron beam doing inertial-confinement very inefficiently.
Thanks for the info. I've seen a mix of tar, glass fibers, and Al flakes used to coat roofs (the Al to reflect the heat), so using powdered Al in zeppelin coating does make a sort of sense. (The tar mix is of course potentially flammable, but I don't think it's at all easy to light it in the solid form.) It certainly seems possible to make a powdered-Al paint that was at least difficult to ignite, and maybe wouldn't support combustion (that is, in a thin film it would radiate heat away faster than it could ignite more paint). Maybe they didn't consider the flammability of the skin too important, considering the contents. But when the skin burned away, it released LOTS of H2 -- so even with maybe 90% of the heat going up, the downward-radiated heat was still too much.
404 error... 404 error... Both those links are down. At any rate, I've seen plenty of newspaper articles quoting some government official _claiming_ that Bin Laden used crypto, but not a single encrypted message or other evidence. And in my long experience, the word of a gov't official looking for an excuse to snoop on citizens isn't worth diddly-squat.
Propane tanks aren't in the house. They are outside, where most leaks just blow away on the wind. You'd do the same thing with hydrogen tanks.
Some people on the Hindenburg survived. I don't know how considering that they were about 100 feet up hanging from a burning balloon, but somehow some of them got down to the ground...
I think the Hindenburg construction included a number of flexible gas bags inside of a rigid aluminum shell. NOT canvas, AFAIK. Blimps were coated canvas. The gas cells were probably coated canvas. Zeppelin's outer construction was aluminum sheet on aluminum ribs. The shell was vented so that the flexible gas cells could expand and contract, pushing air in and out of the vents. But any excess leakage of the cells would put a hydrogen - oxygen mixture in the space between the gas cells and the metal skin. The vents were supposed to allow enough circulation to flush the hydrogen before it reached ignitable concentrations, but if age and wear made the material more permeable, there was a possibility of creating an explosive mixture. I don't think this happened, or not in most of the craft, because there wasn't a big bang that instantly killed everyone.
The hydrogen in the gas bags (or in a tank) won't burn because of no oxygen. If something knocks or burns a hole, then you get a jet of gas coming out, and flame at the end where it finally mixes with enough air to burn. The color of the flame depends far more on what other substances got carried along in the jet than on the fuel -- a quick non-quantative chemistry test for many metal atoms is to hold one drop of a solution in a flame and see the color.
The hydrogen was low pressure, so it wasn't jetting out really fast, although the holes would have kept burning bigger. It would have tended to rise. This certainly helped the survival rate, but the radiated heat would have been fierce. And of course, there were diesel fuel tanks and wood paneling inside the cabin, so anyone who didn't get out fast was dead...
Now, about the weird chemistry: Aluminum oxide is definitely not flammable -- Al2O3 is the ash from burning Al. (Sheet aluminum is hard to ignite, but it can burn, emitting considerable heat.)Other posters have claimed that the coating was powdered Al metal plus iron oxide. That formula is called "thermite" and it will certainly burn (even under water -- the iron gives up oxygen to burn the aluminum), but it was well known as an incendiary long before the Hindenburg was built, so it would have been insane to use it as a paint. Of course, a few years earlier the Germans had elected Adolf Hitler president, so you might question their sanity...
A tank full of hot sodium hydroxide is probably more dangerous than a tank full of hydrogen. NaOH makes a great drain opener -- and you are chemically quite similar to the stuff clogging the drains...
Mr. bin Laden is KNOWN to use crypto
Can you cite any real evidence of that whatsoever?
As I remember the tech manual for Kirk's Enterprise, warp was supposed to be a cubic formula. Warp 1 = c, warp 2= 8c, warp 3 = 27c, ... warp 10 = 1000c. (The last number makes sense out of Voyager's 70 years home at almost warp 10: 70,000 light years is indeed a good ways across the galaxy. Not that there is any reason that 1000c should be harder to break than 729c = warp 9.) Of course, this makes nonsense out of all Kirk's puttering around at warp 2 or 3. That's a couple of months to Proximus Centauri, and maybe you'd find one inhabitable planet a year, allowing the producers to compress the "five year mission" into five episodes...
However, the producers of SNG might have had different ideas, and in general interpreting warp was in the hands of various scriptwriters, most of whom can't do enough math to balance a checkbook.
Why do us old geeks love Star Trek so much? You should see the other crap that counted as SF in film and TV back then. Wait, that's cruel and unusual punishment -- force Bin Laden to watch it, instead...
It's not entirely clear, but this case doesn't seem to hinge on a shrinkwrap EULA. The court decision as reported doesn't even say that One Stop ever saw a EULA -- they weren't installing the software, but reselling it, so if the on-screen license is the only notice, they wouldn't have. It looks like the court just seized on "licensing" as a way to avoid thinking about the tougher issues. And One Stop might do just as well to take their lumps for license infringement rather than taking the case to a smarter judge who might find other grounds to leave them on the hook for copyright infringement, and also wonder whether selling the educational version as the full version was fraud.
The "Off Campus Reseller Agreement" seems to be a contract which was actually _signed_ by Adobe's educational distributor. One Stop "bought" discounted software from that distributor in bulk and sold it on the open market as the full, not the educational, version. So without thinking about licenses at all, One Stop was claiming that it's purchase gave it rights that the unnamed distributor does not have to sell. An analogy here is that an innocent buyer of stolen property is still out his money and the property -- and it's a whole lot worse if the judge decides that your behavior shows you weren't all that innocent...
You seem to be associating my $100/hour proposed charge with a lot more than I intended. It's for (shrink-wrap purchased) software remotely shut down by the vendor in error -- that should be a rare occurrence. I think $100 is fair for a home user that's been deliberately shut down, if they fix it promptly. If a vendor has their tech support screwed up, so the hours tick away -- that deserves a much bigger cost. If they screw up so many times that this bankrupts them, putting them out of business is probably a good thing. If the possibility of such a screw-up persuades software vendors to leave out the remote shutdown "feature", that's even better, IMO. But I don't like just flat out banning it.
I didn't consider the possibility that it might not be the vendor shutting software down in the mistaken belief that the software is pirated, but malicious hackers instead. E.g., if Microsoft puts that into their server version of Windows, a lot of people would think it served them right to have it used to crash their own servers. (Oh wait, some of them are still running *nix/Apache...) If the hackers weren't satisfied with that and hit third parties -- what should MS's liability be???
I do know there are servers where the cost of an unscheduled shutdown might be far over $100/hour, maybe even $100K/hour. I'd expect that in that case (1) you won't use an OS that has such vulnerabilities, and (2) you ought to be negotiating the license and warranty terms with the vendors rather than relying on the warranty that's sufficient for Joe Sixpack's porno browser.
What alternative use does a handgun have?
.357 the bear would have ate them.) Shooting terrorists. Scaring off muggers, burglars, and robbers. (Occasionally shooting them, but most will run away when their victim pulls a gun, and normal people don't chase them and shoot them in the back.)
... It's a mental block, similar to the one that let a copyeditor at the WP turn "anger and grief" into "overwhelming guilt."
Target shooting. Backup weapon when bow-hunting bears. (My brother-in-law does that, and bear meat tastes pretty good -- but his hunting buddy didn't aim the arrow just right one fall, and if not for Ralph's
The legitimate uses of fire-arms are grossly under-reported, in crime reports because usually just showing the gun prevented any crime from occuring, and in the media because it's so far outside the typical big-city reporter or editors experience they can't think what to do with the story. E.g., an NRA member finally found a reporter that seemed willing to listen and sent him documentation of 20 cases of people using guns to defend themselves against crime. Then at the interview, the first question was "People really use guns to defend themselves?"
As someone with a very strange cognomen pointed out earlier, a long time ago some book publisher tried this "licensed, not sold" stuff with a contract printed on the flyleaf of the book. The courts disallowed this, and created the first sale doctrine. That is, when you sell it, you have no say over what they buyer does with it.
The difference with software is less because of the less tangible nature of the product (bits aren't tangible, but the CD and manuals certainly are), but that judges are over-impressed with arguments that cyberspace is different. And precedents concerning software license agreements were set several decades ago, when the judges were not sure whether copyright law covered bits at all, and software patents were even more dubious, so the (then generally quite reasonable) license agreements were the only real protection software writers had. Since then the copyright law has been amended to clearly protect bits, the old ban on patenting mathematical algorithms has somehow disappeared, and so software does not need license agreements to protect against piracy. But they are still putting out those license agreements, and getting more unreasonable about the terms every year.
Maybe eventually enough technical savvy will filter into the courts that the judges will decide that software should sell under the same rules as everything else. That does not imply just the first sale doctrine -- what would really hurt MS is if the courts decide to apply the UCC's mandatory warranty of merchantibility to consumer software sales -- that is, if software follows the usual rules, the software vendor would be responsible for the software working _right_ in home computers. Given that possibility, their continued pushing of egregious license agreements and on-line activation seems almost like a corporate death wish, an attempt to push until they fatally tick off some judge.
But right now it might be more effective to agitate for legislative action, instead. The software vendors may be flooding Congress with contributions, but the corporations that buy software instead of selling it outnumber them many times, and they are getting hurt by this !@#$%^.
We need an anti-UCITA:
First Sale: Purchasing an individual software distribubution gives you the right to put it on any one computer of your choosing, to resell it, give it away, or even loan it as long as you can ensure it is operable on only one computer at a time. (Note that this does not apply if it is leased, not purchased, but the package had better make it clear that this is a lease for a specific time period. Also, it does not apply to site licenses, IF the full licensing agreement is presented before the sale.) Nor can individually purchased software be locked to the first computer you install it in, or shut itself down after a time period. If the vendor chooses to install and use a remote-shutdown feature to combat piracy, then if they shutdown a legal copy, they are liable for $100/hour until it's back up, and all incidental and consequential damages.
Implied Warranty: The UCC law makes many common "limited warranty" clauses null and void, like one saying that if the steering linkage falls off your car, your heirs are entitled only to a new steering linkage. Per UCC, the carmaker is responsible for the accident, too. Putting software fully under that now would put software vendors out of business, but as long as they get off scot-free for bad quality and even get to charge you for the bug-fixed version, most of them won't improve their quality. We need at a minimum the right to take the software back and get a full refund if bugs, which prevent it from operating as advertised, are not fixed promptly and at no cost. Also there should be compensation for phone bills and time and hold, and punitive damages when tech support tells you it isn't a bug and they already know about it.
So are you going to go withdraw all the copies of old journals with the formula for public-key encryption from the libraries? Or maybe license mathematicians so nobody is out there that understands how to turn those formulae into code? And nuke Russia, since their gov't is too weak to ensure their many excellent mathematicians obey such a law.
Robin, anyone could think of a lot better ways to cut "feelings of anger and grief" than "overwhelmed by guilt".
I don't think this was a deliberate attempt to slant the story, but it sure looks like an unconscious one. That is, the editor was in a hurry when reading the story, and interpreted it according to his expectations -- as guilt, not grief...
Darn, I got that once. But somehow the first file and randomly deleted was the email...
I was wrong, it was incompetence. Just found a Washington Post article about how the FBI did know that suspected terrorists were taking flight lessons, and convicted one man in 1995 of plotting to kamikaze CIA headquarters.
But intelligence failures like this are common where any really daring plan is concerned. Intelligence analysis is like trying to build a jigsaw puzzle with only 10% of the pieces -- it's easy to get it totally wrong, and the analysts are quite aware of this. So when the analysts just don't believe the other guys can be thinking that big or would take such risks, they might make the connections, but then don't believe it. Pearl Harbor is one obvious example, but not the worst one -- that's a tie between Stalin's utter surprise when Hitler invaded in spite of all sorts of warnings (not to mention the obvious fact that Hitler HAD to go for the Soviets' oil fields while his tanks still had enough fuel to get there), and Hitler's total belief in the disinformation spread by the OSS that the big landing was going to be in Brittany, Normandy was just a feint...
Just one thing I would disagree with here: because our intelligence organizations are incompetent. They often seem to be incompetent, and certainly are overly cautious about sending agents into dangerous situations, but to be fair, no one has had much success at infiltrating middle-eastern terrorist organizations. Their cells are usually family-based, in societies where family comes before everything else. An agent can't get in unless he IS related -- and then he wouldn't betray his family... And Bin Laden has thousands of such families to choose from. This plot may have involved less than 100 people, with only a dozen that knew the plan. If Bin Laden couldn't find a team that were completely loyal, not known to our agencies, and had the sense not to inadvertently reveal the plan or themselves, then _he_ would be quite incompetent.
So what could have stopped it? It's quite simple. In defending a military position, you need at least three rings of defense. Outermost is a light screen that you hope will provide advance warning of an attack; in this case, that's intelligence, and it's not ever going to be completely reliable. Second is an area defense: that's the metal detectors and x-ray machines at the airports, and in spite of depending on $6/hr rent-a-cops, it worked as planned. No weapon worthy of the name was used. Third, you need to defend the target itself -- and that is where we failed. The hijackings could have been stopped by one air marshal, one copilot with a gun, two on-leave marines with sticks, or a dozen passengers throwing carry-on luggage. But the passengers and crew were not only disarmed, but also brainwashed into not resisting...
This is really the key point: Terrorists DO NOT need cryptography if they are capable of planning ahead a little in face to face meetings. If you are making it up as you go along, then you have to send lots of detailed messages back and forth. But if you can meet somewhere that CIA agents cannot operate (Afghanistan, for instance), and decide what everyone will be doing in two years (flying airliners into buildings), then the messages requireed as the plan unfolds can all be easily disguised as routine business or family communications.
Of course, if you force banks and other businesses to put back doors into their crypto, then you are giving the more sophisticated terrorists one hell of an opportunity. Why bother blowing up Americans a few thousand at a time when you can foul up the financial system until millions of them are starving? It would be tough to do -- but remember that under our laws, Arab or Afghan origins is no reason to keep a person out of sensitive government positions, like in the key escrow department...
Excuse me Major, but you really don't get it. Civilian companies are in the habit of tossing out thousands of people, without regard to their job performance, and with no warning. Then the executives go pat themselves on the back for the temporary increase in profits achieved by permanently shrinking the business, or by losing many of the people who know how to keep it running and making the rest nervous, overworked, and ready to jump at any decent job offer. (I can't speak as to why the stockholders are gullible enough to agree that this was a good idea...) I was in the air force as an enlisted man 10 years (and got my BSEE while in uniform), and I never saw anything like that in the service.
The services bounce you from assignment to assignment, but they do not cut off your paycheck just because one assignment has ended. You can get kicked out because you screwed up, and probably more easily than getting fired in a large corporation -- but if you follow all the regs, you are OK. There are RIF's (equivalent to layoffs), but if they come as a surprise you really weren't paying attention, and the services cushion it as much as possible.
As an employer, what right would I have to expect advanced warning from an employee that is going to quit?
Huh??? Employers do expect two to four weeks notice when an employee quits. It's generally not enforced by contract, but by a general agreement about what is "right", and the certainty that if you just walk out you won't get a good recommendation. And I have never seen a professional or manager who did not give at least two weeks notice. (There was one who notified HR only, and they forgot to pass it on to his supervisor...) Even the engineer that died last year had given notice that he was retiring early due to health problems. 8-\
On the other hand, it is standard operating procedure for many corporations to pretend everything is fine and no one is going to be laid off, until the security guards arrive to escort you off the premises.
And what really bites is the executives who award themselves big bonuses for a temporary boost in profits achieved by permanently shrinking the business.
At present (and a century ago, as well): not-too-bright criminals rob banks. Moronic criminals mug you when you walk out of the bank. Smart criminals go to work for the bank -- and the geniuses stay honest until they reach a high enough level to steal legally.
A cashless society will certainly slow down the first two types; they can still steal _goods_, but they have to lug them around, find a fence to buy them, not get caught by the police with them, and in general it's more work for less money, not to mention complicated enough to challenge their mentality. However, this provides increased opportunities for the smart criminals. And mainly, I would be concerned about the opportunities this gives to both corporations and governments for dishonest dealings.
Forty years ago, in any sort of sales business the motto was "the customer is always right". Nowadays, most corporate customer service depts run on the motto "the customer is always wrong". Do you really want to let them hold your money as bits in their computers, with no hard-copy proof of your account?
And then there are all the privacy aspects -- corporations tracking everything you purchase, g-men able to track your movements every time you stick a card in a machine, etc. I'll use cash, thank you. And if I become worried about muggers, CCW permits aren't that hard to get in Michigan... (A dead mugger is a non-recidivist.)
Do remember that the first Unix was written for the PDP-11. An original IBM PC (8088 4.7MHz) is a powerhouse next to that. I suspect that the first Unix was security-free. It was written for the computer shared by Bell Labs programmers -- any security you could have implemented on that pitiful machine wouldn't have lasted an hour against one of those guys, so it was better to just trust them not to foul their own nests.
That was in 1971, I think. Unix has come a very long way since then, including many security patches. One advantage it has is that it's 10 years older than DOS/Windows, so more holes have been patched. Another is that it was on multi-user computers from the beginning, while I think MS's first OS for servers (Win NT) first came out in the 90's -- so the unices may have a 20 year lead in thinking about security. And finally, some unices are open sourced, and even the proprietary ones are far more open about the way things work than Windows -- so there have been more friendly eyes looking for holes.
There used to be mainframe OS's that were designed for security from the ground up. I wonder how those would stack up against the unices and Windoze where security was patched in after the original design was set? I think not so good anymore -- they haven't been exposed to decades of probing...
C came out of a similar environment at about the same time. Hence all the standard string functions that simply trust the users not to do something that overflows the buffers. Actually checking for overflow ate up too many cycles, so they trusted the users instead. But why are we still using these unsafe functions?
This is contract law, pure and simple. No, if the contract was actually presented prior to purchasing FP, then it would be pure and simple. As it is, they have to be counting on most people either never reading the EULA, not understanding the legalese, or finding it too much trouble to take it back and get a refund. Because if their customers took that clause seriously, half of them wouldn't be MS customers.
Not that this is the worst thing in EULA's. The worst thing is perfectly standard in software and only in software: the combination of clauses stating that they don't guarantee the program will actually work, you aren't allowed to fix it (no modifications allowed), and they aren't responsible for losses due to bugs (e.g. lost data, time rebuilding crashed systems).
I saw a film once of albatrosses trying to take off from the beach. Hilarious. It's quite obvious why this is called a "goony bird". This is a quite large bird that spends days in the air. It has extremely long wings for efficient gliding, and has a surprisingly low glide speed for it's weight. But to get off the ground, it has to run fast enough to generate lift and it keeps tripping over the wings...
Yeah, small birds can just jump and flap. They have light wing loading, and short enough wings that running the tips into the ground isn't much of a problem. Tiny hummingbirds maybe don't even have to jump. But big birds have more wing loading and getting into the air is more of a job. A man-carrying ornithopter must be at least 10 times the weight of any bird capable of flight -- it's going to need quite a takeoff roll, or else something rather special to launch it high enough for the wing flapping to cut in before it crashes.