The US had no solid evidence of German Jet or nuclear programs at the time of US entry into the war. The rocket program was a joke to the US
The A4 (V2 to the propagandists) was just a first step. The Peenemunde rocket development station had it planned out to a multistage A10 that could throw a 1 ton bomb (a nuke, if available) as far as New York City. But it became difficult to concentrate on rocket engineering when the base was getting carpet bombed every few weeks. Likewise, although Hitler's antijewish policies sent Einstein, Fermi, and other top physicists fleeing to America, and other Nazi policies apparently forced Lise Meitner (the discoverer of the chain reaction) back into the kitchen, he still had enough scientific talent to have built a bomb within 10 years. We didn't know much about the specifics of German a-bomb work because it was kept a very tight secret (otherwise the sites would have been pounded much worse than Peenemunde), but we knew there were Germans had capable of the work, and they weren't visibly working on anything else...
Re:Everything you know is wrong
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Review: U-571
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· Score: 2
Everyone knew about the commercial Enigma machine - this was a German built 3-rotor machine sold openly in the late 1920's. However, the German military added more rotors and other complications so that even if the commercial machine was cracked (and most people thought that couldn't be done, aside from getting the key by human engineering, dumpster diving, etc.), the military codes were thought to be still safe.
But they also used the military machine in the diplomatic service. Machines should have been hand-carried to the embassies by couriers, but the Germans didn't think much of the Poles, so the embassy in Warsaw got it's machine by parcel post. And never realized that it had been entirely disassembled, measured, photographed, and reassembled before delivery. The Poles soon had a working duplicate built - but finding the keys used in German transmissions required also mathematical genius (which you could find in Poland), and a computer running much faster than the Enigma machine (which was a pretty big stretch for anyone in the 1930's, let alone a small country whose main industry was still farming).
The Poles achieved partial success with this. One final problem is that, with typical Prussian thoroughness, the German military gave different keys to each department and changed them frequently, so there were a lot of keys to crack. At any rate, no decryption would have helped them much - if an elephant is about to step on you and you can't move, seeing the foot coming doesn't help... But they did send their experts and machines to France, who sent them to England later, so it gave the British a starting point.
The final problem was that the Germans continued to improve the Enigma hardware. The "boffins" could deduce those changes given enough time, but capturing a machine saved a few months. So the British supplemented one or more of their sub-traps with boarding parties trained to quickly attack any sub forced to the surface and prevent them from deep-sixing the Enigma. This was a pretty long shot - first, while tossing depth charges blindly into the water, you had to damage a sub enough that it couldn't get away, but without caving it in (that's what depth charges were _supposed_ to do), or causing leaks bad enough the sub couldn't rise. Then, you had to get your guys right there almost immmediately... But eventually it worked, once.
Nevertheless, decryption of German messages was always well behind their receipt, with most of the decrypts being irrelevant by the time the key was cracked. (Most military secrets expire in a few hours or a few days - e.g., "Attack towards Bastogne" became irrelevant as soon as the Panzers rolled over American front lines, but if it had been decrypted the night before the Panzers would have been rolling into a trap instead of almost breaking through.)
Re:Everything you know is wrong
on
Review: U-571
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Note also that most Japanese codes used a Japanese-built Enigma machine, and the American Navy cracked that on their own. (It may have been simpler than the German military machines, and the Japanese changed the keys far less often than the Germans.) By December 1941, they could sometimes decrypt transmissions to the Japanese embassy in Washington faster than the Japanese enigma operators. There was a long message which the ambassador was supposed to hand to the American government at a particular time, just before the bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor. It didn't get decrypted and typed in time at the embassy, but analysts were reading it down in the basement of the Navy headquarters a few hours before the attack.
It wasn't exactly a declaration of war, but maybe this was a translation error. At any rate, given the history (in 1905, a declaration of war was handed over to the Russian foreign minister, just minutes before a surprise attack destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet at anchor in Port Arthur), there was no doubt that this message indicated the time at which the Japanese would attack somewhere. They just didn't know where, and since this was sunday morning it took hours to track down high-ranking officials in order to get permission to release any information derived from decrypts. (That we could decrypt the Japanese Enigma was probably the most highly classified secret of all...)
That still wasn't enough to prevent surprises - the Japanese fleet simply didn't allow anything about the Pearl Harbor attack to go out on the radio or anywhere else it might be intercepted. So once the Admiral in charge had been located, they sent warnings to Manila, Singapore, etc., of a possible night-time attack by surface ships (like Port Arthur), and tried but failed to contact Pearl Harbor about a possible dawn attack. Basically, no one thought the Japanese had that much nerve, or the ability to refuel destroyers at sea so their fleet could travel to Hawaii directly from the home islands. If an attack had been coming, they expected it would have stopped in at Japanese held islands southwest of Hawaii, where various patrols would have spotted them. There was a joint Army-Navy exercise run every year on the premise of some sort of Japanese sneak attack towards Hawaii, and in every exercise the attackers were beaten badly, and obviously Japanese intelligence was good enough to know this...
And besides that, everyone knew that torpedo planes, which were the main attack arms of the Japanese carriers, didn't work in harbors, because the torpedos dropped from an airplane would dive deep initially and get stuck in the mud at the bottom. Everyone except the British who had sank half the Italian fleet this way already, and the Japanese, who made the world's best torpedoes...
Page 24 of the March 25 ruling: While the court agrees that the Windows mark has acquired secondary meaning, no degree of secondary meaning will save a generic mark... no matter how much money or effort it pours into promoting the sale of the merchandise. ...otherwise a manufacturer could remove a common descriptive word from the public domain...
So "windows", "word", and "office" can't be trademarks. ("Microsoft Windows" is a solid trademark because "Microsoft" is not at all generic.) My only question, if "Windows" by itself can't be a trademark, why didn't this end the case right there?
Could there be allegations that, like "Bolex" watches, Lindows could be sold as a counterfeit MS Windows? I don't know if that would matter even if it was true, once "Windows" loses trademark status, but in any case it's not true and it's not a reasonable sales strategy for Lindows. A major part of their sales pitch is that it ISN'T MS Windows, but is (or will be, someday) better because Linux is underneath. Anyhow, they aren't selling this on street corners, and anyone who didn't understand what they were buying would soon bring it back - so accentuating the difference is in Lindows vendors' best interest.
Yes. A 1970 Cadillac is the same length as a van seating 14. The backseat of a '66 Buick sedan was roomy enough for 3 kids on a daylong drive, even fairly large kids (16, 11, and 6 in the last family vacation I remember in it). The Carryall was much roomier, although padding and heat were minimal - but it was a truck, and driving it was a quite different experience than the car. Dad picked it because it could haul a half-ton of cherries to the cannery, or take the family camping -- in Arizona, from Michigan...
So the government regulated the size of cars (not directly, but that's how CAFE works out), but they can't very well regulate the size of trucks because some people still have to haul a half-ton of cherries to market. And the people who missed those giant cars most started buying trucks instead. Eventually the auto companies noticed and started making some trucks less truck-like. Hence, minivans (some of which look very much like pregnant station wagons), and SUV's ("macho" station wagons).
OTOH, I _like_ driving a truck. My Dodge Dakota was the most truck-like of the small pickups I test drove. And unless the drivetrain goes disastrously bad, I'll still be driving it when the floor rusts out in spite of the best rustcoating...
I got rushed and left out one other factor: privacy. I hope that people in private life do have a certain right not to have their address, etc., published without their consent. (Actors and politicians have in effect waived most of their rights to privacy by choosing a career in the public eye, but the rest of us should have a choice.) Violating this should be a civil, not a criminal matter, and prior restraint should not be possible. That is, you can sue for damages, but you can't send the operator to jail, nor can you shut down a web site except by proving sufficient damages to make continuing operation of the web site too expensive...
What about phone books? You have several ways you can choose to stay out of that. You can pay for an unlisted line. I would like to know WHY unlisted lines cost more, but if that costs too much for you, there are lower-cost options. You can have no phone at all. You can have only a cell phone - even if the cell phone companies start selling directories, it is possible to buy the phone and the minutes for cash and operate anonymously. If you don't use the phone much, some cell phone plans cost less than a standard land-line.
The accepted definition of a threat unprotected by the First Amendment is one which "on its face and in the circumstances in which it is made is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific as to the person threatened, as to convey a gravity of purpose and imminent prospect of execution", and there is considerable dissent among the judges over whether a website can or cannot meet that standard.
Of course a web site can meet that standard: (16 pt type) KILL THIS MAN (picture) (name and address) (why he should die) (suggested assassination methods, where to buy sniper rifles, car bombs, etc).
It is illegal to say "Kill this man", when it's clear that you really mean it, and it's still illegal if you direct this message to the general public (through a web site, a broadcast, or a speech) rather than a specific person.
The question is whether this particular web site meets this standard, because it does not explicitly tell anyone to kill the abortionists it identifies. It's a borderline case. It's pretty clear that the authors of the web site hope someone will do something bad to the persons named, but it may not even say abortionists should be killed (or even harassed) - it just attracts those who do believe that. IMO that is the web site authors' intention, but if they were careful about what got recorded in e-mail or print, that may be impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Think about the principles here in a less emotional case. How about a web site that says "Commodity traders are scumbags who ought to be shot", and "John Doe is a commodity trader". It leaves it up to the reader to complete that syllogism. Is this protected speech? Is the author responsible if some unsuccessful investor reads the web site, then in fact shoots John Doe?
How about if the web site doesn't explicitly say anything against commodity traders, aside from a URL like "commodityfraud.com"? It just gives the traders' name, address and picture - and it is going to be found by people with a grudge against commodity traders.
I think the "nuremberg" web site lands somewhere between those cases. It is knowingly set up to be easily found by those who do want to kill abortionists, it makes it easy for them to find their victims, and it probably avoids directly telling them to kill but gives a certain amount of moral encouragement.
Cray may still be around - but it's in a small niche market, and doesn't seem to have any prospect of ever becoming bigger.
I didn't know CDC had other lines. I might have mixed up when they (first) went into receivership, although I thought it was before they got their antitrust settlement (middle 70's). This suit (or at least the conclusion of it) was much too late to "stop IBM from promoting vaporware". The background: In the early 1960's, some IBM engineers designed a much more powerful mainframe, but management killed the project. The engineers took their ideas to CDC, which started work on a mainframe at least 10x anything IBM had in regular production. IBM management suddenly realized their mainframes weren't big enough for big corporations anymore - but IBM also needed machines for smaller businesses, and didn't want to follow the previous pattern of making each new computer a unique and incompatible design. So they dumped the previous design efforts and started the 360 project, a full line of computers from rather small to the biggest mainframes possible, all running the same software, and including a grossly overambitious OS. At least that was the plan; the hardware design went slower than planned but as fast as a project of that magnitude ever actually goes, with some big iron on the market by 1968. However, OS/360 was much farther behind schedule. It seems to have been the most massively fouled up project to ever be finally successful (unless you lump all the USA's efforts in WWII together as one "project"). So for a few years you could buy a new 360 but the only thing one could do with it to run an emulation of an older and much less powerful machine. I saw a 360 still running an emulation of an old 1400 in 1973, although OS/360 had been out for at least a year...
IBM had hurt its customers as well as CDC with vaporware in two ways: first, by announcing the 360 line when they started designing it (1964?), they caused a good many companies that were thinking about CDC's to decide to wait a couple of years for IBM assured quality - and it turned into close to 8 years. (This also hurt IBM - nobody wanted to buy their older computers either, and by 1968 they must have really needed to sell something to bring in the cash). And then there were the companies that needed and bought IBM big iron starting in 1968, and waited maybe 4 years to be able to fully use it. Although IBM's antitrust violations were unintentional, they hurt both the competition and loyal IBM customers. But CDC's lawsuit didn't stop this - it stopped when IBM had real products to back up the vaporware, and CDC just skimmed some of IBM's profits years later.
But I must quibble with a few points. I suppose he knows more about it than I, but does all innovation in a given field necessarily take place on the low end? What about new products that may or may not be higher-end than existing products? (Example: The runaway popularity of SUVs, which are certainly NOT low-end impulse purchases, and newer models of SUVs seem to subscribe to the Micro$oft bloatware model: more, more, more [useless] features and a higher and higher price tag. But people sure buy 'em.)
SUV's were sold by existing companies to existing customers. This makes them a "sustaining innovation" in the language of the article -- listening to the existing customers and making improvements to the product. And that's if you call them an innovation at all; they are not much different from the GMC Carryall my father bought used in 1963, drove for 15 years, and replaced with a new Carryall.
Sustaining innovations often do tend towards the high-priced end. The customer demand an established company is least likely to respond to with major innovations is "lower price" - you know your existing customers have the money, so making things cheaper just reduces the part of it you get, while making the product better and more expensive might milk more money out of them.
It's not impossible for a new company to be successful selling high-priced products -- think fashion designers and fancy restaurants. But note that you don't get GMs, IBMs, or Microsofts out of such markets. I can remember two computer companies that tried to start at the top: CDC (tried to sell bigger mainframes than IBM in the 1960's, went bankrupt, "refinanced" via an antitrust suit against IBM, and lost the money in supercomputers, IIRC), and Cray (supercomputers). There's also Amdahl, which made imitation IBM mainframes (a little faster or a little cheaper) so I'd call that starting almost at the top. None of these ever did very well. By contrast, starting at the bottom produced the mini-computer companies, at least two of which (DEC & Data General) were apparently quite successful until the PC companies found a lower bottom. And many PC companies have been very successful, although not at all secure - PC's are a nasty bottom-end commodity market where any company that lets its cost control or marketing lapse for a moment is dog-meat for momentarily more efficient competitors. Or possibly to competitors that have managed to lower the quality even further without getting buried in bad units...
I'm not qualified to comment on the stock manipulation aspect, but I've got several questions on the science and engineering end:
They say it is solid-state, based on a "Vacuum Diode." What the f* does that mean?
Actual cooling has't been measured. Apparently they measure the current through it, and calculate a theoretical cooling rate from that -- assuming it works as expected, which hasn't been tested, if I understood correctly...
5,000W/cm^2 cooling: A TO-220 power transistor has approximately 1cm^2 of metal pad on the back to contact the heatsink. I can put a heatsink the size of a car on that, with the very best thermal grease made, and if I run the transistor at 20W of heat it will fry because the heat can't get out to the heatsink fast enough. That's 1/250 of what they claim their device can do. Maybe if they soldered fins right onto both sides of the device, and circulated water at high velocity on both sides... But that has nothing to do with useful applications.
A more realistic use would be to settle for a significantly lower W/cm^2, and mount tiny chips far apart so there is perhaps 1cm^2 of metal for.01cm^2 of chip.
Cost: Not mentioned at all. Aerospace companies like Boeing can use the best technology regardless of cost, the rest of us have to look at whether it's worth it...
Your assuming that the fan motors themselves make no heat.
Actually, ALL of the electric power going into the fan winds up as heat - a small percentage of losses in the motor, probably a larger percentage of losses around the fan blades to air friction, etc., and finally all the kinetic energy that is imparted to the air will eventually be lost to friction, both inside and outside of the case.
I'm not any sort of expert in this, however from what I know of video the process has to be something like this:
The phosphors in the CRT do not emit only when hit by the electron beam. They have a certain persistence, so a dot keeps on glowing while the beam moves on through other dots. If you get a perfect recording of the signal, then reconstructing the picture requires merely syncing onto the video scan by means of the long and short black intervals (vertical and horizontal retrace), calculating each pixel's actual output by subtracting the fading output of previous pixels, and feeding the resulting video and sync into your own monitor.
However in using this in a normal "spying" situation, you get room lights and other "noise" in the signal. You've got to guess at the average ambient level and compensate (subtract it out) so the picture isn't washed out. Then, you are probably working with such a low level of signal per pixel that quantum fluctuations add significant noise. Subtracting signals accentuates the noise, so you'll wind up with a pretty grainy picture -- after lots of trial and error adjustments to find the best background level compensation, pixel fade rate, etc. But most data on computers is presented in quite high contrast, and stays on the screen for quite a while, so you can improve the picture by averaging frames. So it does sound possible to get a good enough picture for most espionage purposes (extracting text and diagrams, or sometimes just finding out what the guy is reading).
What it probably won't do unless you get really close: -Spy on your Quake rivals; (I assume, not being a Quake player myself) the picture changes too fast for frame-averaging to help much, and in general it's a detailed, lower contrast picture so graininess would have a greater impact. -Pirate the Playboy channel from your rich neighbor, unless you are so hard up that just staring at a screen of approximately fleshtoned grains and imagining there's a nekkid woman somewhere in there is enough... -Steal passwords protected by the "*" character, unless the login was incompetently programmed and it shows the actual character for a frame before covering it up. And probably not even then, because frame-averaging will often be needed for legibility...
Just handwaving here, but I expect that if someone can get a camera where this process works for any of the above, they probably could have focused it right on the screen and also physically wire-tapped the machine.
Basically, if your monitor is radiating photons (read: turned on) someone can intercept those photons and reconstruct an image, given the right equipment and circumstances.
If by "right equipment and circumstances" you mean direct vision or a mirror-like reflection, then that's true. However, this article is about a technique for reconstructing CRT images when the monitor is facing away from the window and the only reflections are off of rough surfaces, which thoroughly scramble the pixels. You cannot directly determine what part of the screen a photon came from, but you can determine when it was emitted. Since the CRT scans one dot at a time, that creates the possibility of turning a recording of brightness & color vs time back into a picture.
However, most flat-panel displays will set a number of pixels at the same time (for example, writing to an entire row at a time). This makes it impossible to separate out one pixel or even one small area of the screen by the time when the light arrives. Also, LCD's don't create light, it is created by the backlights, generally flourescent lights running on high voltage, high frequency AC -- so the only thing time analysis gets you is the high frequency flicker of the backlights. The liquid crystals retain most of their "set" between scans through the display, so the light passed through a pixel doesn't vary much depending on how long it's been since the pixel was scanned.
OTOH, unless your video cable and electronics is all shielded very well, you are probably transmitting radio waves that could be turned back into the picture. This might be even more difficult than reconstructing a CRT image from the visible light, but certain three-letter government agencies can do it when they really want to. One limitation to the radio ("Tempest) method is that you've got to be able to isolate the target computer's signal from all the others; with optical methods this probably requires just pointing the scope in the right direction (if you are lucky enough to get a strong enough reflection in any direction), but radio waves bend around corners, reflect, and merge more so it's pretty unlikely that Tempest could find the one computer bringing up atomic bomb diagrams in a college dorm (say) among the hundreds downloading MP3's, playing Quake, or whatever.
I'll say it again: it's a fucking Pioneer drive. Apple didn't design it. They didn't build it. And they didn't decide whether to put an "eject" button on it.
When Apple picked this drive out of hundreds to put in their systems, they assumed responsibility for any obvious designed-in defects. And the lack of a manual eject is definitely a design defect...
IANAL, but I can read better than that. Actually, the court only threw out one patent completely ('355), decided certain claims of other patents are invalid but didn't throw them out (this could mean either that there was some small innovation cloaked in excessively broad claims, or else that the court simply didn't find it necessary to review the entire patent to decide this particular case), and decided other patents simply didn't apply to AA's Sabrevision reservation system.
1) The court decision cited above invalidated the '355 patent completely, yet PanIP lists it on their website, along with a section entitled "Choosing a Stock Portfolio Based on Patent Indicators". They are trying to sell stock based, in part, on an invalid patent. Isn't this fraud?
2) PanIP evidently makes no products and apparently does nothing but file vaguely worded patents, then attempt to collect royalties on them. Judging by the two patents I looked at ('319 and '355), they ignore obvious prior art in their filings -- isn't that fraudulent too?
3) Since their business plan seems to be based on obtaining income through actions verging on fraud, barratry, etc., would RICO apply?
How about a law (not aimed just at software) that says that when a company advertises a product as having certain qualities, then it is responsible for the product actually performing as advertised. I'm not sure _why_ such a law is needed in the first place, as it would seem to me that to advertise that a product is fit for a certain purpose and then to hide lawyerly gobbledygook in the EULA contradicting all their advertising is fraud....
The best way to guard something like this is to leave a little bit of the radioactive waste up on top, so those who sneak in there in spite of warning signs and what their parents told them will die horribly. And so, 50,000 years from now when even pyramid-sized warnings have worn away, the locals will still know, "Go up that mountain and you die. Happened to two brainless teenagers last year."
So every five or ten years, some nitwit kids will decide to show how fearless they are and die -- so what? They'd probably have killed themselves and others driving recklessly anyhow. And it will help keep the nitwits from outbreeding the humans with sense...
Tombrobbing seems to have been ancient Egypt's third biggest industry (after agriculture and tomb building), so superstitious fear wasn't much of a deterrent.
Or go read Tom Sawyer. Tom and Huck were terrified of cemeteries. So where did they go when they snuck out at night? Right to the cemetery....
The hammer must be self-propelled in some magical manner. That is, when Thor or someone else "worthy" picks it up, it provides part of the lift; for the "unworthy" it uses it's propulsion to stay right where it is. For flying, "throwing" it signals the speed and direction, then it takes off, dragging Thor after it...
Sounds familiar. I once worked on some top secret army electronics in a vault at Fort Huachuca. That is, the front door was like a bank vault, armor plated with a big combination lock. It was also inside the building, so you had to go through the battalion offices to reach it. The walls, ceiling, and floor were lined with copper plates welded together, to block any radio emissions that might give away details of the equipment. But then there was the fire-escape door, an ordinary metal door (like on your house), opening out the back of the building towards a runway, where there weren't any people except when some bigwig flew in on a cessna. And, because it got rather warm in that room when we started firing up the gear, that door was usually propped open.
Don't worry, the US military is watching over you... 8-)
I'm not sure how HP got into the printer business -- but the HP way started to die when they did. Their reputation was based on high-quality test instruments. For over half a century, if you wanted the best instruments regardless of cost, or wanted to make sure it would last 25 years (really!), you bought HP. As far as I can tell, that company is still alive and well -- even though it has the amazingly silly name "Agilent". We've got over $1 million worth of HP 3070 board testers running in this building right now, and we might be buying Agilent AOI soon...
I sure don't understand how those shitty printers came out of the same company.
Shitty PC's ... The HP you lament was dead long ago
Maybe it's still around, but it's called Agilent now. We've been looking at their automated optical inspection systems. Awesome, but extremely expensive. Truly in the H(igh)P(rice) tradition...
The old HP made instruments and test equipment, not PC's. It treated its employees exceptionally well. It stayed in the forefront of technology while building the highest possible quality into its products. It would service them forever. (I've used 25 year old HP oscilloscopes, they still worked fine, and aside from the great size and weight were still as good as analog scopes ever got.)
And the old HP had to charge premium prices, of course. That sort of quality and service costs money. The HP way also ran up the payroll costs, although I suspect it costs much more to treat your employees badly so the best ones leave. However, I think the great working conditions, topnotch work force, and premium products and service sort of go together -- I wouldn't feel good working where the corporate goal was to make the product as shitty as possible without losing too many customers, and if they raised my pay I'd just save it up until I could afford to quit...
I actually prefer MS's player over all the others... It's not a matter of which one is best for you, or for most people, it's that MS does not allow you to choose. This (1) prevents competition, which will eventually provide a better program, and (2) messes up anyone whose particular needs are better met by a different program.
Its nearly the only one left that doesn't carry add-on spyware. Maybe if you were willing to pay a few bucks you could buy a program from a company that doesn't have to support itself with spyware or pop-up ads.
I'll leave it to other people to comment on how far you can trust MS to not sneak in spyware, or to not leave gaping security holes for third parties to take over your computer...
Slashdot Mirror
The US had no solid evidence of German Jet or nuclear programs at the time of US entry into the war. The rocket program was a joke to the US
The A4 (V2 to the propagandists) was just a first step. The Peenemunde rocket development station had it planned out to a multistage A10 that could throw a 1 ton bomb (a nuke, if available) as far as New York City. But it became difficult to concentrate on rocket engineering when the base was getting carpet bombed every few weeks. Likewise, although Hitler's antijewish policies sent Einstein, Fermi, and other top physicists fleeing to America, and other Nazi policies apparently forced Lise Meitner (the discoverer of the chain reaction) back into the kitchen, he still had enough scientific talent to have built a bomb within 10 years. We didn't know much about the specifics of German a-bomb work because it was kept a very tight secret (otherwise the sites would have been pounded much worse than Peenemunde), but we knew there were Germans had capable of the work, and they weren't visibly working on anything else...
Everyone knew about the commercial Enigma machine - this was a German built 3-rotor machine sold openly in the late 1920's. However, the German military added more rotors and other complications so that even if the commercial machine was cracked (and most people thought that couldn't be done, aside from getting the key by human engineering, dumpster diving, etc.), the military codes were thought to be still safe.
But they also used the military machine in the diplomatic service. Machines should have been hand-carried to the embassies by couriers, but the Germans didn't think much of the Poles, so the embassy in Warsaw got it's machine by parcel post. And never realized that it had been entirely disassembled, measured, photographed, and reassembled before delivery. The Poles soon had a working duplicate built - but finding the keys used in German transmissions required also mathematical genius (which you could find in Poland), and a computer running much faster than the Enigma machine (which was a pretty big stretch for anyone in the 1930's, let alone a small country whose main industry was still farming).
The Poles achieved partial success with this. One final problem is that, with typical Prussian thoroughness, the German military gave different keys to each department and changed them frequently, so there were a lot of keys to crack. At any rate, no decryption would have helped them much - if an elephant is about to step on you and you can't move, seeing the foot coming doesn't help... But they did send their experts and machines to France, who sent them to England later, so it gave the British a starting point.
The final problem was that the Germans continued to improve the Enigma hardware. The "boffins" could deduce those changes given enough time, but capturing a machine saved a few months. So the British supplemented one or more of their sub-traps with boarding parties trained to quickly attack any sub forced to the surface and prevent them from deep-sixing the Enigma. This was a pretty long shot - first, while tossing depth charges blindly into the water, you had to damage a sub enough that it couldn't get away, but without caving it in (that's what depth charges were _supposed_ to do), or causing leaks bad enough the sub couldn't rise. Then, you had to get your guys right there almost immmediately... But eventually it worked, once.
Nevertheless, decryption of German messages was always well behind their receipt, with most of the decrypts being irrelevant by the time the key was cracked. (Most military secrets expire in a few hours or a few days - e.g., "Attack towards Bastogne" became irrelevant as soon as the Panzers rolled over American front lines, but if it had been decrypted the night before the Panzers would have been rolling into a trap instead of almost breaking through.)
Note also that most Japanese codes used a Japanese-built Enigma machine, and the American Navy cracked that on their own. (It may have been simpler than the German military machines, and the Japanese changed the keys far less often than the Germans.) By December 1941, they could sometimes decrypt transmissions to the Japanese embassy in Washington faster than the Japanese enigma operators. There was a long message which the ambassador was supposed to hand to the American government at a particular time, just before the bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor. It didn't get decrypted and typed in time at the embassy, but analysts were reading it down in the basement of the Navy headquarters a few hours before the attack.
It wasn't exactly a declaration of war, but maybe this was a translation error. At any rate, given the history (in 1905, a declaration of war was handed over to the Russian foreign minister, just minutes before a surprise attack destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet at anchor in Port Arthur), there was no doubt that this message indicated the time at which the Japanese would attack somewhere. They just didn't know where, and since this was sunday morning it took hours to track down high-ranking officials in order to get permission to release any information derived from decrypts. (That we could decrypt the Japanese Enigma was probably the most highly classified secret of all...)
That still wasn't enough to prevent surprises - the Japanese fleet simply didn't allow anything about the Pearl Harbor attack to go out on the radio or anywhere else it might be intercepted. So once the Admiral in charge had been located, they sent warnings to Manila, Singapore, etc., of a possible night-time attack by surface ships (like Port Arthur), and tried but failed to contact Pearl Harbor about a possible dawn attack. Basically, no one thought the Japanese had that much nerve, or the ability to refuel destroyers at sea so their fleet could travel to Hawaii directly from the home islands. If an attack had been coming, they expected it would have stopped in at Japanese held islands southwest of Hawaii, where various patrols would have spotted them. There was a joint Army-Navy exercise run every year on the premise of some sort of Japanese sneak attack towards Hawaii, and in every exercise the attackers were beaten badly, and obviously Japanese intelligence was good enough to know this...
And besides that, everyone knew that torpedo planes, which were the main attack arms of the Japanese carriers, didn't work in harbors, because the torpedos dropped from an airplane would dive deep initially and get stuck in the mud at the bottom. Everyone except the British who had sank half the Italian fleet this way already, and the Japanese, who made the world's best torpedoes...
Page 24 of the March 25 ruling: While the court agrees that the Windows mark has acquired secondary meaning, no degree of secondary meaning will save a generic mark... no matter how much money or effort it pours into promoting the sale of the merchandise.
...otherwise a manufacturer could remove a common descriptive word from the public domain...
So "windows", "word", and "office" can't be trademarks. ("Microsoft Windows" is a solid trademark because "Microsoft" is not at all generic.) My only question, if "Windows" by itself can't be a trademark, why didn't this end the case right there?
Could there be allegations that, like "Bolex" watches, Lindows could be sold as a counterfeit MS Windows? I don't know if that would matter even if it was true, once "Windows" loses trademark status, but in any case it's not true and it's not a reasonable sales strategy for Lindows. A major part of their sales pitch is that it ISN'T MS Windows, but is (or will be, someday) better because Linux is underneath. Anyhow, they aren't selling this on street corners, and anyone who didn't understand what they were buying would soon bring it back - so accentuating the difference is in Lindows vendors' best interest.
Yes. A 1970 Cadillac is the same length as a van seating 14. The backseat of a '66 Buick sedan was roomy enough for 3 kids on a daylong drive, even fairly large kids (16, 11, and 6 in the last family vacation I remember in it). The Carryall was much roomier, although padding and heat were minimal - but it was a truck, and driving it was a quite different experience than the car. Dad picked it because it could haul a half-ton of cherries to the cannery, or take the family camping -- in Arizona, from Michigan...
So the government regulated the size of cars (not directly, but that's how CAFE works out), but they can't very well regulate the size of trucks because some people still have to haul a half-ton of cherries to market. And the people who missed those giant cars most started buying trucks instead. Eventually the auto companies noticed and started making some trucks less truck-like. Hence, minivans (some of which look very much like pregnant station wagons), and SUV's ("macho" station wagons).
OTOH, I _like_ driving a truck. My Dodge Dakota was the most truck-like of the small pickups I test drove. And unless the drivetrain goes disastrously bad, I'll still be driving it when the floor rusts out in spite of the best rustcoating...
I got rushed and left out one other factor: privacy. I hope that people in private life do have a certain right not to have their address, etc., published without their consent. (Actors and politicians have in effect waived most of their rights to privacy by choosing a career in the public eye, but the rest of us should have a choice.) Violating this should be a civil, not a criminal matter, and prior restraint should not be possible. That is, you can sue for damages, but you can't send the operator to jail, nor can you shut down a web site except by proving sufficient damages to make continuing operation of the web site too expensive...
What about phone books? You have several ways you can choose to stay out of that. You can pay for an unlisted line. I would like to know WHY unlisted lines cost more, but if that costs too much for you, there are lower-cost options. You can have no phone at all. You can have only a cell phone - even if the cell phone companies start selling directories, it is possible to buy the phone and the minutes for cash and operate anonymously. If you don't use the phone much, some cell phone plans cost less than a standard land-line.
The accepted definition of a threat unprotected by the First Amendment is one which "on its face and in the circumstances in which it is made is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific as to the person threatened, as to convey a gravity of purpose and imminent prospect of execution", and there is considerable dissent among the judges over whether a website can or cannot meet that standard.
Of course a web site can meet that standard: (16 pt type) KILL THIS MAN (picture) (name and address) (why he should die) (suggested assassination methods, where to buy sniper rifles, car bombs, etc).
It is illegal to say "Kill this man", when it's clear that you really mean it, and it's still illegal if you direct this message to the general public (through a web site, a broadcast, or a speech) rather than a specific person.
The question is whether this particular web site meets this standard, because it does not explicitly tell anyone to kill the abortionists it identifies. It's a borderline case. It's pretty clear that the authors of the web site hope someone will do something bad to the persons named, but it may not even say abortionists should be killed (or even harassed) - it just attracts those who do believe that. IMO that is the web site authors' intention, but if they were careful about what got recorded in e-mail or print, that may be impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Think about the principles here in a less emotional case. How about a web site that says "Commodity traders are scumbags who ought to be shot", and "John Doe is a commodity trader". It leaves it up to the reader to complete that syllogism. Is this protected speech? Is the author responsible if some unsuccessful investor reads the web site, then in fact shoots John Doe?
How about if the web site doesn't explicitly say anything against commodity traders, aside from a URL like "commodityfraud.com"? It just gives the traders' name, address and picture - and it is going to be found by people with a grudge against commodity traders.
I think the "nuremberg" web site lands somewhere between those cases. It is knowingly set up to be easily found by those who do want to kill abortionists, it makes it easy for them to find their victims, and it probably avoids directly telling them to kill but gives a certain amount of moral encouragement.
Cray may still be around - but it's in a small niche market, and doesn't seem to have any prospect of ever becoming bigger.
I didn't know CDC had other lines. I might have mixed up when they (first) went into receivership, although I thought it was before they got their antitrust settlement (middle 70's). This suit (or at least the conclusion of it) was much too late to "stop IBM from promoting vaporware". The background: In the early 1960's, some IBM engineers designed a much more powerful mainframe, but management killed the project. The engineers took their ideas to CDC, which started work on a mainframe at least 10x anything IBM had in regular production. IBM management suddenly realized their mainframes weren't big enough for big corporations anymore - but IBM also needed machines for smaller businesses, and didn't want to follow the previous pattern of making each new computer a unique and incompatible design. So they dumped the previous design efforts and started the 360 project, a full line of computers from rather small to the biggest mainframes possible, all running the same software, and including a grossly overambitious OS. At least that was the plan; the hardware design went slower than planned but as fast as a project of that magnitude ever actually goes, with some big iron on the market by 1968. However, OS/360 was much farther behind schedule. It seems to have been the most massively fouled up project to ever be finally successful (unless you lump all the USA's efforts in WWII together as one "project"). So for a few years you could buy a new 360 but the only thing one could do with it to run an emulation of an older and much less powerful machine. I saw a 360 still running an emulation of an old 1400 in 1973, although OS/360 had been out for at least a year...
IBM had hurt its customers as well as CDC with vaporware in two ways: first, by announcing the 360 line when they started designing it (1964?), they caused a good many companies that were thinking about CDC's to decide to wait a couple of years for IBM assured quality - and it turned into close to 8 years. (This also hurt IBM - nobody wanted to buy their older computers either, and by 1968 they must have really needed to sell something to bring in the cash). And then there were the companies that needed and bought IBM big iron starting in 1968, and waited maybe 4 years to be able to fully use it. Although IBM's antitrust violations were unintentional, they hurt both the competition and loyal IBM customers. But CDC's lawsuit didn't stop this - it stopped when IBM had real products to back up the vaporware, and CDC just skimmed some of IBM's profits years later.
But I must quibble with a few points. I suppose he knows more about it than I, but does all innovation in a given field necessarily take place on the low end? What about new products that may or may not be higher-end than existing products? (Example: The runaway popularity of SUVs, which are certainly NOT low-end impulse purchases, and newer models of SUVs seem to subscribe to the Micro$oft bloatware model: more, more, more [useless] features and a higher and higher price tag. But people sure buy 'em.)
SUV's were sold by existing companies to existing customers. This makes them a "sustaining innovation" in the language of the article -- listening to the existing customers and making improvements to the product. And that's if you call them an innovation at all; they are not much different from the GMC Carryall my father bought used in 1963, drove for 15 years, and replaced with a new Carryall.
Sustaining innovations often do tend towards the high-priced end. The customer demand an established company is least likely to respond to with major innovations is "lower price" - you know your existing customers have the money, so making things cheaper just reduces the part of it you get, while making the product better and more expensive might milk more money out of them.
It's not impossible for a new company to be successful selling high-priced products -- think fashion designers and fancy restaurants. But note that you don't get GMs, IBMs, or Microsofts out of such markets. I can remember two computer companies that tried to start at the top: CDC (tried to sell bigger mainframes than IBM in the 1960's, went bankrupt, "refinanced" via an antitrust suit against IBM, and lost the money in supercomputers, IIRC), and Cray (supercomputers). There's also Amdahl, which made imitation IBM mainframes (a little faster or a little cheaper) so I'd call that starting almost at the top. None of these ever did very well. By contrast, starting at the bottom produced the mini-computer companies, at least two of which (DEC & Data General) were apparently quite successful until the PC companies found a lower bottom. And many PC companies have been very successful, although not at all secure - PC's are a nasty bottom-end commodity market where any company that lets its cost control or marketing lapse for a moment is dog-meat for momentarily more efficient competitors. Or possibly to competitors that have managed to lower the quality even further without getting buried in bad units...
I'm not qualified to comment on the stock manipulation aspect, but I've got several questions on the science and engineering end:
.01cm^2 of chip.
They say it is solid-state, based on a "Vacuum Diode." What the f* does that mean?
Actual cooling has't been measured. Apparently they measure the current through it, and calculate a theoretical cooling rate from that -- assuming it works as expected, which hasn't been tested, if I understood correctly...
5,000W/cm^2 cooling: A TO-220 power transistor has approximately 1cm^2 of metal pad on the back to contact the heatsink. I can put a heatsink the size of a car on that, with the very best thermal grease made, and if I run the transistor at 20W of heat it will fry because the heat can't get out to the heatsink fast enough. That's 1/250 of what they claim their device can do. Maybe if they soldered fins right onto both sides of the device, and circulated water at high velocity on both sides... But that has nothing to do with useful applications.
A more realistic use would be to settle for a significantly lower W/cm^2, and mount tiny chips far apart so there is perhaps 1cm^2 of metal for
Cost: Not mentioned at all. Aerospace companies like Boeing can use the best technology regardless of cost, the rest of us have to look at whether it's worth it...
Your assuming that the fan motors themselves make no heat.
Actually, ALL of the electric power going into the fan winds up as heat - a small percentage of losses in the motor, probably a larger percentage of losses around the fan blades to air friction, etc., and finally all the kinetic energy that is imparted to the air will eventually be lost to friction, both inside and outside of the case.
I'm not any sort of expert in this, however from what I know of video the process has to be something like this:
The phosphors in the CRT do not emit only when hit by the electron beam. They have a certain persistence, so a dot keeps on glowing while the beam moves on through other dots. If you get a perfect recording of the signal, then reconstructing the picture requires merely syncing onto the video scan by means of the long and short black intervals (vertical and horizontal retrace), calculating each pixel's actual output by subtracting the fading output of previous pixels, and feeding the resulting video and sync into your own monitor.
However in using this in a normal "spying" situation, you get room lights and other "noise" in the signal. You've got to guess at the average ambient level and compensate (subtract it out) so the picture isn't washed out. Then, you are probably working with such a low level of signal per pixel that quantum fluctuations add significant noise. Subtracting signals accentuates the noise, so you'll wind up with a pretty grainy picture -- after lots of trial and error adjustments to find the best background level compensation, pixel fade rate, etc. But most data on computers is presented in quite high contrast, and stays on the screen for quite a while, so you can improve the picture by averaging frames. So it does sound possible to get a good enough picture for most espionage purposes (extracting text and diagrams, or sometimes just finding out what the guy is reading).
What it probably won't do unless you get really close:
-Spy on your Quake rivals; (I assume, not being a
Quake player myself) the picture changes too fast for frame-averaging to help much, and in general it's a detailed, lower contrast picture so graininess would have a greater impact.
-Pirate the Playboy channel from your rich neighbor, unless you are so hard up that just staring at a screen of approximately fleshtoned grains and imagining there's a nekkid woman somewhere in there is enough...
-Steal passwords protected by the "*" character, unless the login was incompetently programmed and it shows the actual character for a frame before covering it up. And probably not even then, because frame-averaging will often be needed for legibility...
Just handwaving here, but I expect that if someone can get a camera where this process works for any of the above, they probably could have focused it right on the screen and also physically wire-tapped the machine.
Basically, if your monitor is radiating photons (read: turned on) someone can intercept those photons and reconstruct an image, given the right equipment and circumstances.
If by "right equipment and circumstances" you mean direct vision or a mirror-like reflection, then that's true. However, this article is about a technique for reconstructing CRT images when the monitor is facing away from the window and the only reflections are off of rough surfaces, which thoroughly scramble the pixels. You cannot directly determine what part of the screen a photon came from, but you can determine when it was emitted. Since the CRT scans one dot at a time, that creates the possibility of turning a recording of brightness & color vs time back into a picture.
However, most flat-panel displays will set a number of pixels at the same time (for example, writing to an entire row at a time). This makes it impossible to separate out one pixel or even one small area of the screen by the time when the light arrives. Also, LCD's don't create light, it is created by the backlights, generally flourescent lights running on high voltage, high frequency AC -- so the only thing time analysis gets you is the high frequency flicker of the backlights. The liquid crystals retain most of their "set" between scans through the display, so the light passed through a pixel doesn't vary much depending on how long it's been since the pixel was scanned.
OTOH, unless your video cable and electronics is all shielded very well, you are probably transmitting radio waves that could be turned back into the picture. This might be even more difficult than reconstructing a CRT image from the visible light, but certain three-letter government agencies can do it when they really want to. One limitation to the radio ("Tempest) method is that you've got to be able to isolate the target computer's signal from all the others; with optical methods this probably requires just pointing the scope in the right direction (if you are lucky enough to get a strong enough reflection in any direction), but radio waves bend around corners, reflect, and merge more so it's pretty unlikely that Tempest could find the one computer bringing up atomic bomb diagrams in a college dorm (say) among the hundreds downloading MP3's, playing Quake, or whatever.
Apple didn't design the drive. They didn't build it either. But they selected it.
I'll say it again: it's a fucking Pioneer drive. Apple didn't design it. They didn't build it. And they didn't decide whether to put an "eject" button on it.
When Apple picked this drive out of hundreds to put in their systems, they assumed responsibility for any obvious designed-in defects. And the lack of a manual eject is definitely a design defect...
IANAL, but I can read better than that. Actually, the court only threw out one patent completely ('355), decided certain claims of other patents are invalid but didn't throw them out (this could mean either that there was some small innovation cloaked in excessively broad claims, or else that the court simply didn't find it necessary to review the entire patent to decide this particular case), and decided other patents simply didn't apply to AA's Sabrevision reservation system.
1) The court decision cited above invalidated the '355 patent completely, yet PanIP lists it on their website, along with a section entitled "Choosing a Stock Portfolio Based on Patent Indicators". They are trying to sell stock based, in part, on an invalid patent. Isn't this fraud?
2) PanIP evidently makes no products and apparently does nothing but file vaguely worded patents, then attempt to collect royalties on them. Judging by the two patents I looked at ('319 and '355), they ignore obvious prior art in their filings -- isn't that fraudulent too?
3) Since their business plan seems to be based on obtaining income through actions verging on fraud, barratry, etc., would RICO apply?
How about a law (not aimed just at software) that says that when a company advertises a product as having certain qualities, then it is responsible for the product actually performing as advertised. I'm not sure _why_ such a law is needed in the first place, as it would seem to me that to advertise that a product is fit for a certain purpose and then to hide lawyerly gobbledygook in the EULA contradicting all their advertising is fraud....
But how do you explain the smell?
The best way to guard something like this is to leave a little bit of the radioactive waste up on top, so those who sneak in there in spite of warning signs and what their parents told them will die horribly. And so, 50,000 years from now when even pyramid-sized warnings have worn away, the locals will still know, "Go up that mountain and you die. Happened to two brainless teenagers last year."
So every five or ten years, some nitwit kids will decide to show how fearless they are and die -- so what? They'd probably have killed themselves and others driving recklessly anyhow. And it will help keep the nitwits from outbreeding the humans with sense...
Tombrobbing seems to have been ancient Egypt's third biggest industry (after agriculture and tomb building), so superstitious fear wasn't much of a deterrent.
Or go read Tom Sawyer. Tom and Huck were terrified of cemeteries. So where did they go when they snuck out at night? Right to the cemetery....
The hammer must be self-propelled in some magical manner. That is, when Thor or someone else "worthy" picks it up, it provides part of the lift; for the "unworthy" it uses it's propulsion to stay right where it is. For flying, "throwing" it signals the speed and direction, then it takes off, dragging Thor after it...
Sounds familiar. I once worked on some top secret army electronics in a vault at Fort Huachuca. That is, the front door was like a bank vault, armor plated with a big combination lock. It was also inside the building, so you had to go through the battalion offices to reach it. The walls, ceiling, and floor were lined with copper plates welded together, to block any radio emissions that might give away details of the equipment. But then there was the fire-escape door, an ordinary metal door (like on your house), opening out the back of the building towards a runway, where there weren't any people except when some bigwig flew in on a cessna. And, because it got rather warm in that room when we started firing up the gear, that door was usually propped open.
Don't worry, the US military is watching over you... 8-)
I'm not sure how HP got into the printer business -- but the HP way started to die when they did. Their reputation was based on high-quality test instruments. For over half a century, if you wanted the best instruments regardless of cost, or wanted to make sure it would last 25 years (really!), you bought HP. As far as I can tell, that company is still alive and well -- even though it has the amazingly silly name "Agilent". We've got over $1 million worth of HP 3070 board testers running in this building right now, and we might be buying Agilent AOI soon...
I sure don't understand how those shitty printers came out of the same company.
Shitty PC's
...
The HP you lament was dead long ago
Maybe it's still around, but it's called Agilent now. We've been looking at their automated optical inspection systems. Awesome, but extremely expensive. Truly in the H(igh)P(rice) tradition...
The old HP made instruments and test equipment, not PC's. It treated its employees exceptionally well. It stayed in the forefront of technology while building the highest possible quality into its products. It would service them forever. (I've used 25 year old HP oscilloscopes, they still worked fine, and aside from the great size and weight were still as good as analog scopes ever got.)
And the old HP had to charge premium prices, of course. That sort of quality and service costs money. The HP way also ran up the payroll costs, although I suspect it costs much more to treat your employees badly so the best ones leave. However, I think the great working conditions, topnotch work force, and premium products and service sort of go together -- I wouldn't feel good working where the corporate goal was to make the product as shitty as possible without losing too many customers, and if they raised my pay I'd just save it up until I could afford to quit...
I actually prefer MS's player over all the others... It's not a matter of which one is best for you, or for most people, it's that MS does not allow you to choose. This (1) prevents competition, which will eventually provide a better program, and (2) messes up anyone whose particular needs are better met by a different program.
Its nearly the only one left that doesn't carry add-on spyware. Maybe if you were willing to pay a few bucks you could buy a program from a company that doesn't have to support itself with spyware or pop-up ads.
I'll leave it to other people to comment on how far you can trust MS to not sneak in spyware, or to not leave gaping security holes for third parties to take over your computer...