You would be rather surprised and intrigued by what you'll read.
In a nut shell, the evidence via ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc do show a correlation between increased global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels. However, it seems that the carbon dioxide levels increase about 40 to 50 years *after* the temperature increase.
Additionally, the archeological evidence coming to light now isn't that the naming of of Greenland by the vikings wasn't a propaganda triumph, but instead a quite literal statement. Interestingly enough, *farms* are being discovered under the glaciers.
One thing you'll frequently see is the US complaining about "dumping" of products with the counter claim that the country "dumping" isn't. As it turns out, both claims are true because the cost calculations done by both sides are different.
In order to produce products, you need 3 things that you have to pay for.
Infrastructure - Things like factories, machines. Employees - The people who perform the work. Materials - What is converted into the product.
And in order to make money, you need to sell the product.
I'll use the following values for this example:
F = Fixed costs to support Infrastructure. W = Wages to pay employees M = Material costs for producing the product. S = Price of sold product.
The key thing to remember is that firing employees in the US is fairly easy. However, in many Europian countries, it's much harder. So during economic down turns, the unemployment in the US climbs fairly rapidly, while the unemployment in Europe climbs much slower.
So US companies tend to consider the incremental cost of producing a product to be:
W + M
While Europian companies tend to consider the incremental cost of producing a product to be:
M
and if you're attempting to survive an economic downturn, the main priority of a company is to last as long as possible without running out of their cash reserves and going out of business. So they do what they can to reduce their fixed costs and also do what they can to produce income.
In the US, fixed costs can be quickly reduced by firing "excess" employees and only retaining enough to produce the amount of product that can be sold. However, most Europian companies can't fire their employees so what they do is reduce the cost of their product to try to maximize their income.
So when companies in the US see an Europian company selling a product for less than (W + M), they'll accuse that company of "dumping". While the Europian company will claim it's not dumping because the product is being sold for more than M.
This entire point of this whole article is to point out that due to legal reasons, you'll find the unemployment in Europe to be frequently lower than the unemployment in the US. However, that unemployment figure does not mean that your economy is in better shape. It simply means that the legal structure means that different decisions have to be made to deal with the economy.
Considering that an engineering log book has every page signed and dated by the engineer. Add in the other little detail that key pages are signed and dated by an independent observer. It's those signatures and fact that missing or added pages are obvious that makes the logbook valuable.
Is it possible to replace an engineering logbook using computers? From what I can see, there's no technical reason it can't be done. What you would need is a reliable time stamping and signature service. Every time the engineer wants to add to his logbook, he'ld submit the document (or a hash of the document) to the timestamping service which would then append a timestamp and sign the document/hash & timestamp. Then publish the hash/timestamp/signature to an archive (say the classified section of the New York Times).
Would this serve the purpose of an engineers logbook? Yes it would.
Would it currently be legally acceptable by current law? I doubt it. But that's just a matter of the legal system catching up.
the issue isn't just one of redoing the drawings along with the various checks and cross checks to make certain the units were converted properly. I'm sure they could that, but the resulting set of new drawings would be extremely prone to encouraging mistakes. As a minor example. Let's assume that on one piece they currently have a dimension of 12 inches +/- 0.01 inches. So they convert this dimension to metric giving a new value of 30.48 cm +/- 0.025 cm. Excuse me?!?!? That's a rather odd and strange dimensional target to hand off to the machinest. And you'll be getting these rather strange dimensions for everything on the original design. Frankly using the metric measurements would make that rocket utterly hell to construct. So the "proper" solution would be to use the original design and then stretch/shrink various dimensions in order to make the dimensions "rounder" and easier to manufacture. But upon doing that, they have effectively come up with a new design that has to be recertified.
When in reality, most people when asked "What greenhouse gas contributes the most to the green house effect?" don't know the answer.
Those who buy into the current panic will reflexive say "Carbon Dioxide".
The correct answer is "Water Vapor".
But water vapor can't be taxed and vilified. So carbon dioxide gets the blame.
Anyone who's truly interested in Global Warming (as well as many other things) would do well to read the book "Kicking the Sacred Cow" by James P. Hogan. It's a rather interesting collection of articles on different subject. And to the best of my knowledge, very well researched.
Only if the encryption method used is broken.... badly....
If you have a file and encrypt it with an algorithm, it will become encrypted and look like nonsense.
True. After you encrypt it, it looks like nonsense.
If you take another copy of the original file and encrypt it, it will become encrypted and look like nonsense... but still be identical to the first encrypted file.
True and False. It's true if you use Electronic Code Book with your encryption. And that's reason EBC is not recommended for use. If you use Cipher Block Chaining, you can encrypt the same file thousands of times and every time, the encrypted output would be different.
And one of the things I've seen all too frequently is quick sort implementations that always use the 1st element in the array segment as the pivot element. Yes, it's a nice easy element to select. But it's also the worst possible element to use as well.
The problem with picking the 1st element in the subarray as the pivot for quicksort is that it means that you have just guaranteed the O(N^2) behavior of quicksort if you pass in a presorted, or inverse sorted array. And unfortunately, that use case happens with disturbing frequency.
Why?
Because a lot of sort users do sorts on already sorted arrays or mostly sorted arrays.
The GNU Hurd is under active development. Because of that, there is no stable version. We distribute the Hurd sources only through CVS at present.
Although it is possible to bootstrap the GNU/Hurd system from the sources by cross-compiling and installing the system software and the basic applications, this is a difficult process. It is not recommended that you do this. Instead, you should get a binary distribution of the GNU/Hurd, which comes with all the GNU software precompiled and an installation routine which is easy to use.
The Debian project has commited to provide such a binary distribution. Debian GNU/Hurd is currently under development and available in the unstable branch of the Debian archive.
Given the above disclaimer on the Hurd parent site, I have to continue to believe and state that Hurd is still vaporware.
If the world does not conform to his ideals, then the world itself must be in error.
And he's still using the incorrect name "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux". It must really gnaw at him that Hurd has never progressed past the stage of vaporware. Yes, there's a LOT of extremely useful software in FSF and yes the GNU compilers, tools, etc are absolutely wonderful.
Re:This is the future.(copying & extending)
on
Robotic Penguins
·
· Score: 1
I usually ignore trolls, but this one does need a response.
Not at all. Look at some of the other languages at the time that had string lengrh limits of 255 characters. You'll find that the limit of 255 wasn't random. So in that case you can terminated a string with a zero byte costing 1 byte to indicate the length, or you can explicitly store the length in 1 byte at the beginning of the string. Both methods have an overhead of 1 byte.
But what if you want a string with a length greater than 255 characters? Then you will have an extra bit of memory overhead. Namely store the length of the string in 2 bytes for a nice limit of 65535 characters. And if you want a string longer than 64K, just use 4 bytes for a max length of 4 gig.
Nice thing about this, is that as your desirable string lengths go up, the amount of memory you have also goes up, so the overhead is still quite reasonable.
Heck, in order to not have a lot of overhead for encoding the string lengths, you could use something like the encoding that's used for UTF-8 at the beginning of a string to encode the length of the string.
0 to 127 characters long - Prefix with 0xxxxxxx 128 to 2047 characters long - Prefix with 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx 2048 to 65535 characters long - Prefix with 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx etc.
And if the upper limit of only 2^31-1 characters is deemed too short, you could instead use the method of encoding OIDS using BER. e.g
No real upper limit to this length encoding method. And by having an explicit length in the string, there's no real limitation on the contents of the string.
This is a cat that has a lot of ways to be skinned.
The agent asked Boucher to show him the files he downloads. Boucher navigated to drive "Z" of the laptop, and the agent began searching the Z drive. The agent located and examined several videos or images that appeared to meet the definition of child pornography.
The agent arrested Boucher, seized the laptop and shut it down. He applied for and obtained a search warrant for the laptop. In the course of creating a mirror image of the contents of the laptop, however, the government discovered that it could not find or open the Z drive because it is protected by encryption algorithms from the computer software "Pretty Good Protection," which requires a password to obtain access. The government is not able to open the encrypted files without knowing the password. In order to gain access to the Z drive, the government is using an automated system which attempts to guess the password, a process that could take years.
So it's most definitely NOT a case of "Oh, these file names sound nasty. I guess that they have something nasty in them that I haven't seen yet."
Nope. Public Key encryption doesn't work that way.
What happens is that a random encryption key is generated and used to encrypt the file via a symmetric encryption algorythm. And the public key encryption is used to encrypt the symmetric key.
This is done because quite frankly the public key encryption is slow. Very very slow. So it's faster to use a good fast symmetric encryption and then use the slow public key encryption to just encrypt the key.
Net result? I can typically take the same file and encrypt it 2^64 times and only have about a 50% chance that any 2 of that massive number of encrypted files will be identical to each other (assuming a 128 bit symmetric key in use).
And I've remembered a bit more about what things were like in WHCA after an administration change. When Clinton took over from Bush, in order to preserve the contents of the PCs (remember the backups made of the mainframe), what happened is that the hard disk drives themselves were removed and transported to the national archives. I will say that it's a effective way to make certain that everything on the PC is preserved. However, it also means you have a rather non-functional PC until a new hard drive is installed and the OS reloaded.
I used to work in WHCA (White House Communications Agency). I don't know how the PC side of things was or is being handled, however I'm quite aware of how the mainframe side of things is handled. And I'd be very surprised that things are working at 12:01. For the mainframe, on the day of inauguration, full system backups are performed. These backups are then sent to the national archives. After the backups are made, then *everything* associated with the old administration is removed from the system. Only after this is done are new accounts created. I think it would be reasonable to assume that simular procedures are done on the PC side of the house. And somehow I don't think that PDC's are designed to be effectively wiped at the "flip of a switch". Additionally, I don't think that the PCs sitting on each person's desk can be remotely sanitized. And yes, even though they're instructed to not save anything on the local PC, they still do. And it still needs to be cleaned up.
And unfortunately, this can't be done ahead of time since frankly the government continues to function under the old administration until the new one enters. So effectively none of this work can even start until after business hours on the day before inauguration.
Oddly enough, in order to even attempt to enforce this law, they would have to produce a document that violates that law.
To quote: It is unlawful for a person in a public forum or place of public accommodation wilfully and knowingly to publish orally or in writing, exhibit, or otherwise make available material containing words, language, or actions of a profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent nature.
The logical problem is creating a document that specifies what is "profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent". Such a document would have to actually have the prohibited words and since the bill specifies "publish orally or in writing" and "in a public forum or place of public accommodation", and finally since laws need to be made publically available, such a document would in itself be in violation. And if for some reason, they actually manage to get such a brain dead law passed, people would adapt and simply use "new" words with the same meaning and emotional release. Fuck goes away, frack, fsk, etc., enter stage left.
All you need to do is have the grid power feed some high wattage light bulbs. And near the light bulbs is some solar cells. The output from the solar cells is used to charge batteries which feed an inverter that actually powers the computer. Of course there is some power loss in the conversion process, and you need to have some (ok, a lot), of the input power to the system commited towards running a cooling unit to keep things at a reasonable temperature. But the resulting device provides clean power with no possibility of any surges getting thru to the protected equipment.
Of course, if you go to this level of trouble for your power source, then I'd also suggest opto-isolating all signal lines to and from the server. And enclose the server in a well grounded faraday cage. And it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a dedicated comm link to a duplicate server located else where. Preferably on a different tectonic plate.
Look at the 2nd link in the slashdot article. What happens is the mirrors are "enabled" in pseudo-random patterns and the summation of the pixels seleced for each pattern is sent to the single detector. This process is repeated for each sample. So no, the mirrors are NOT scanned one at a time.
The "tar xfz spoofer-xxx-0.4.tar.gz" command will work just fine is using GNU tar. However, the "z" option isn't available for the original tar command and frankly the portability of pipelined version is better.
Actually, they have a rather serious security problem. From the article, "all 'KnocKeys' are the same" This is so that if you lose the KnocKey, it can be easily replaced. However, if they use a hash of your pin and the time to determine the Knock sequence, then the attack is simply an exhaustive search of the potential pin values. After all, the pins are relatively short. I would be real surprised if they were as long as 5 digits.
You disable/kill the things by carrying a jammer. Something about having something that claims that all 2^128 possible ID chips are *right here, right now* tends to mask the few that are actually here.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest reading a bit of:
Kicking the Sacred Cow
by James P Hogan.
You would be rather surprised and intrigued by what you'll read.
In a nut shell, the evidence via ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc do show a correlation between increased global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.
However, it seems that the carbon dioxide levels increase about 40 to 50 years *after* the temperature increase.
Additionally, the archeological evidence coming to light now isn't that the naming of of Greenland by the vikings wasn't a propaganda triumph, but instead a quite literal statement. Interestingly enough, *farms* are being discovered under the glaciers.
And how is your economics?
One thing you'll frequently see is the US complaining about "dumping" of products with the counter claim that the country "dumping" isn't. As it turns out, both claims are true because the cost calculations done by both sides are different.
In order to produce products, you need 3 things that you have to pay for.
Infrastructure - Things like factories, machines.
Employees - The people who perform the work.
Materials - What is converted into the product.
And in order to make money, you need to sell the product.
I'll use the following values for this example:
F = Fixed costs to support Infrastructure.
W = Wages to pay employees
M = Material costs for producing the product.
S = Price of sold product.
The key thing to remember is that firing employees in the US is fairly easy. However, in many Europian countries, it's much harder. So during economic down turns, the unemployment in the US climbs fairly rapidly, while the unemployment in Europe climbs much slower.
So US companies tend to consider the incremental cost of producing a product to be:
W + M
While Europian companies tend to consider the incremental cost of producing a product to be:
M
and if you're attempting to survive an economic downturn, the main priority of a company is to last as long as possible without running out of their cash reserves and going out of business. So they do what they can to reduce their fixed costs and also do what they can to produce income.
In the US, fixed costs can be quickly reduced by firing "excess" employees and only retaining enough to produce the amount of product that can be sold. However, most Europian companies can't fire their employees so what they do is reduce the cost of their product to try to maximize their income.
So when companies in the US see an Europian company selling a product for less than (W + M), they'll accuse that company of "dumping". While the Europian company will claim it's not dumping because the product is being sold for more than M.
This entire point of this whole article is to point out that due to legal reasons, you'll find the unemployment in Europe to be frequently lower than the unemployment in the US. However, that unemployment figure does not mean that your economy is in better shape. It simply means that the legal structure means that different decisions have to be made to deal with the economy.
Considering that an engineering log book has every page signed and dated by the engineer. Add in the other little detail that key pages are signed and dated by an independent observer. It's those signatures and fact that missing or added pages are obvious that makes the logbook valuable.
Is it possible to replace an engineering logbook using computers? From what I can see, there's no technical reason it can't be done. What you would need is a reliable time stamping and signature service. Every time the engineer wants to add to his logbook, he'ld submit the document (or a hash of the document) to the timestamping service which would then append a timestamp and sign the document/hash & timestamp. Then publish the hash/timestamp/signature to an archive (say the classified section of the New York Times).
Would this serve the purpose of an engineers logbook?
Yes it would.
Would it currently be legally acceptable by current law?
I doubt it. But that's just a matter of the legal system catching up.
the issue isn't just one of redoing the drawings along with the various checks and cross checks to make certain the units were converted properly. I'm sure they could that, but the resulting set of new drawings would be extremely prone to encouraging mistakes. As a minor example. Let's assume that on one piece they currently have a dimension of 12 inches +/- 0.01 inches. So they convert this dimension to metric giving a new value of 30.48 cm +/- 0.025 cm. Excuse me?!?!? That's a rather odd and strange dimensional target to hand off to the machinest. And you'll be getting these rather strange dimensions for everything on the original design. Frankly using the metric measurements would make that rocket utterly hell to construct. So the "proper" solution would be to use the original design and then stretch/shrink various dimensions in order to make the dimensions "rounder" and easier to manufacture. But upon doing that, they have effectively come up with a new design that has to be recertified.
The sad thing is, you think there's more than one party.
When in reality, most people when asked "What greenhouse gas contributes the most to the green house effect?" don't know the answer.
Those who buy into the current panic will reflexive say "Carbon Dioxide".
The correct answer is "Water Vapor".
But water vapor can't be taxed and vilified. So carbon dioxide gets the blame.
Anyone who's truly interested in Global Warming (as well as many other things) would do well to read the book "Kicking the Sacred Cow" by James P. Hogan. It's a rather interesting collection of articles on different subject. And to the best of my knowledge, very well researched.
Only if the encryption method used is broken.... badly....
True. After you encrypt it, it looks like nonsense.
True and False. It's true if you use Electronic Code Book with your encryption. And that's reason EBC is not recommended for use. If you use Cipher Block Chaining, you can encrypt the same file thousands of times and every time, the encrypted output would be different.
Precisely.
And one of the things I've seen all too frequently is quick sort implementations that always use the 1st element in the array segment as the pivot element. Yes, it's a nice easy element to select. But it's also the worst possible element to use as well.
The problem with picking the 1st element in the subarray as the pivot for quicksort is that it means that you have just guaranteed the O(N^2) behavior of quicksort if you pass in a presorted, or inverse sorted array. And unfortunately, that use case happens with disturbing frequency.
Why?
Because a lot of sort users do sorts on already sorted arrays or mostly sorted arrays.
Odd. Looking at http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html (which I assume is the definitive site for Hurd), I see:
Given the above disclaimer on the Hurd parent site, I have to continue to believe and state that Hurd is still vaporware.
the more I see him as an extremist.
If the world does not conform to his ideals, then the world itself must be in error.
And he's still using the incorrect name "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux". It must really gnaw at him that Hurd has never progressed past the stage of vaporware. Yes, there's a LOT of extremely useful software in FSF and yes the GNU compilers, tools, etc are absolutely wonderful.
I usually ignore trolls, but this one does need a response.
No Minix code in Linux Ever -- More Evidence
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090419181306570
Wasteful?
Not at all.
Look at some of the other languages at the time that had string lengrh limits of 255 characters. You'll find that the limit of 255 wasn't random. So in that case you can terminated a string with a zero byte costing 1 byte to indicate the length, or you can explicitly store the length in 1 byte at the beginning of the string. Both methods have an overhead of 1 byte.
But what if you want a string with a length greater than 255 characters? Then you will have an extra bit of memory overhead. Namely store the length of the string in 2 bytes for a nice limit of 65535 characters. And if you want a string longer than 64K, just use 4 bytes for a max length of 4 gig.
Nice thing about this, is that as your desirable string lengths go up, the amount of memory you have also goes up, so the overhead is still quite reasonable.
Heck, in order to not have a lot of overhead for encoding the string lengths, you could use something like the encoding that's used for UTF-8 at the beginning of a string to encode the length of the string.
0 to 127 characters long - Prefix with 0xxxxxxx
128 to 2047 characters long - Prefix with 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
2048 to 65535 characters long - Prefix with 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
etc.
And if the upper limit of only 2^31-1 characters is deemed too short, you could instead use the method of encoding OIDS using BER. e.g
0 - 127 = 0xxxxxxx
128 - 4095 = 1xxxxxxx 0xxxxxxx
4096 - 2097152 = 1xxxxxxx 1xxxxxxx 0xxxxxxx
No real upper limit to this length encoding method. And by having an explicit length in the string, there's no real limitation on the contents of the string.
This is a cat that has a lot of ways to be skinned.
Nope, go to the link in the article and then the link to decision at http://volokh.com/files/BoucherDCT.1.pdf
To quote the items of interest:
So it's most definitely NOT a case of "Oh, these file names sound nasty. I guess that they have something nasty in them that I haven't seen yet."
Nope. Public Key encryption doesn't work that way.
What happens is that a random encryption key is generated and used to encrypt the file via a symmetric encryption algorythm. And the public key encryption is used to encrypt the symmetric key.
This is done because quite frankly the public key encryption is slow. Very very slow. So it's faster to use a good fast symmetric encryption and then use the slow public key encryption to just encrypt the key.
Net result?
I can typically take the same file and encrypt it 2^64 times and only have about a 50% chance that any 2 of that massive number of encrypted files will be identical to each other (assuming a 128 bit symmetric key in use).
And have it functional afterwards?
And I've remembered a bit more about what things were like in WHCA after an administration change. When Clinton took over from Bush, in order to preserve the contents of the PCs (remember the backups made of the mainframe), what happened is that the hard disk drives themselves were removed and transported to the national archives. I will say that it's a effective way to make certain that everything on the PC is preserved. However, it also means you have a rather non-functional PC until a new hard drive is installed and the OS reloaded.
I used to work in WHCA (White House Communications Agency). I don't know how the PC side of things was or is being handled, however I'm quite aware of how the mainframe side of things is handled. And I'd be very surprised that things are working at 12:01. For the mainframe, on the day of inauguration, full system backups are performed. These backups are then sent to the national archives. After the backups are made, then *everything* associated with the old administration is removed from the system. Only after this is done are new accounts created. I think it would be reasonable to assume that simular procedures are done on the PC side of the house. And somehow I don't think that PDC's are designed to be effectively wiped at the "flip of a switch". Additionally, I don't think that the PCs sitting on each person's desk can be remotely sanitized. And yes, even though they're instructed to not save anything on the local PC, they still do. And it still needs to be cleaned up.
And unfortunately, this can't be done ahead of time since frankly the government continues to function under the old administration until the new one enters. So effectively none of this work can even start until after business hours on the day before inauguration.
Oddly enough, in order to even attempt to enforce this law, they would have to produce a document that violates that law.
To quote:
It is unlawful for a person in a public forum or place of public accommodation wilfully and knowingly to publish orally or in writing, exhibit, or otherwise make available material containing words, language, or actions of a profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent nature.
The logical problem is creating a document that specifies what is "profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, or indecent". Such a document would have to actually have the prohibited words and since the bill specifies "publish orally or in writing" and "in a public forum or place of public accommodation", and finally since laws need to be made publically available, such a document would in itself be in violation. And if for some reason, they actually manage to get such a brain dead law passed, people would adapt and simply use "new" words with the same meaning and emotional release. Fuck goes away, frack, fsk, etc., enter stage left.
Without access to the Internet, how are you supposed to buy a computer from http://www.dell.com/ ?
Did I say anything about efficiency?
And I can see that my tongue in cheek wasn't obvious enough.
All you need to do is have the grid power feed some high wattage light bulbs. And near the light bulbs is some solar cells. The output from the solar cells is used to charge batteries which feed an inverter that actually powers the computer. Of course there is some power loss in the conversion process, and you need to have some (ok, a lot), of the input power to the system commited towards running a cooling unit to keep things at a reasonable temperature. But the resulting device provides clean power with no possibility of any surges getting thru to the protected equipment.
Of course, if you go to this level of trouble for your power source, then I'd also suggest opto-isolating all signal lines to and from the server. And enclose the server in a well grounded faraday cage. And it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a dedicated comm link to a duplicate server located else where. Preferably on a different tectonic plate.
Look at the 2nd link in the slashdot article.
What happens is the mirrors are "enabled" in pseudo-random patterns and the summation of the pixels seleced for each pattern is sent to the single detector. This process is repeated for each sample.
So no, the mirrors are NOT scanned one at a time.
You need to go back even further. The Apple ][ used that same method.
The "tar xfz spoofer-xxx-0.4.tar.gz" command will work just fine is using GNU tar. However, the "z" option isn't available for the original tar command and frankly the portability of pipelined version is better.
Actually, they have a rather serious security problem. From the article, "all 'KnocKeys' are the same" This is so that if you lose the KnocKey, it can be easily replaced. However, if they use a hash of your pin and the time to determine the Knock sequence, then the attack is simply an exhaustive search of the potential pin values. After all, the pins are relatively short. I would be real surprised if they were as long as 5 digits.
You disable/kill the things by carrying a jammer. Something about having something that claims that all 2^128 possible ID chips are *right here, right now* tends to mask the few that are actually here.