Ahem, what? Iran was a liberal, tolerant place with no fundamentalists in government in 1999? Maybe President Khatami was trying, but Ayatollah Khamene'i, the real power wasn't. I won't go into the the events of July when riot police raided Tehran University and beat at least 4 students to death, but lets take a quick look at what Human Rights Watch (a strong critic of the US War on Terror) has to say about the rest of the year:
General Yahya Rahim Safavi warned reformers in April, "we are seeking to root out counterrevolutionaries wherever they are. We have to cut the throats of some and cut off the tongues of others." A few days later he threatened, "we will go after them when the time is ripe...fruit has to be picked when it is ripe. The fruit is unripe now."
Executions after unfair trials proliferated, including cases of stoning to death in public. For the first time since 1992 a follower of the Baha'i faith was executed in prison. Other religious minorities, including Sunni Muslims, Evangelical Christians, and Jews were subjected to discrimination and persecution. Prominent dissidents, including writers and editors, were subjected to arbitrary detention and independent newspapers were closed down. New laws were passed discriminating against women and aimed at restricting debate about women's rights. Torture was widespread during interrogation, and the government failed to take steps to halt violent attacks by vigilante groups which serve as enforcers for conservative clerics, known as the Partisans of the Party of God (Ansar-e Hezbollahi) . As tensions with the Taleban rulers of neighboring Afghanistan mounted, Afghan refugees, more than a million of whom have lived in Iran for many years seeking refuge from civil war, were attacked and beaten by crowds leading to several deaths.
Hundreds of people were executed after trials that failed to comply with minimum international standards. In June, the daily newspaper Hamshahri, reported the public hanging of four young men in the city of Ahvaz, in the south, for "insulting" Leader Khamene'i and "armed robbery." Seven people were reported by opposition groups to have been convicted of adultery and stoned to death in October 1997 and six more were reported to have been sentenced to stoning in January. On July 21, Ruhollah Rowhani was executed in the city of Mashhad on charges of converting a Muslim to the Baha'i faith. This execution marked a deterioration in the situation of this intensely persecuted minority. At least fifteen other Baha'is were held in prison and seven were facing death sentences because of their faith. There were further detentions of Baha'is in September when dozens were detained in a new wave of repression. In May, Jewish businessman Ruhollah Kakhodah-Zadeh was arrested and later hanged in prison. His crime was never declared in public and any legal proceedings which occurred did so in secret.
Uhm, no. I swam competitively for about 8 years in school and been scuba diving on and off since. You are swimming more efficiently under water because you don't break the surface and because you don't create a bow wave. This is exactly why you are only allowed one underwater stroke at the start in all national and international swimming competitions.
The same is incidentially true for nuclear submarines which can cruise faster when fullu submerged.
Not because of the price, but because it doesn't have any meaningful storage options. 128MB Flash is not going to do anything for movies, images or other downloads. Now if they'd put in a hard drive, or a expansion slot so you can get a few gigs of storage, you could download a movie to watch when you get out of range of broadband. And even in a few years, that's still going to be a lot of places. Ten years from now, wireless broadband will be truely everywhere, but even in places like Japan and Korea it's fiarly common to get out of 3G or WiFiMax range.
I am certainly no grammar Nazi--actually, English is my third language, so I am far from perfect. But for the love of God, could the people at Security Focus please try to do some rudimentary editing and proofreading? I don't mind typos, but some of their questions are so wrong that they are very hard to read and understand.
"Do you think that NSA is promoting ECC based crypto because they cannot crack RSA/DSA based one?"
What?
"Or maybe just because they can crack RSA/DSA they prefer to protect USbusiness with ECC (supposed to be harder to crack)?"
Huh?
"What about crypto monopoly? Don't you think that having just a couple of public-key algorithms based on the same math problem could lead to a catastrophe if cracked ?"
This doesn't follow any European-language grammar.
But the next question takes the cake:
"Why is often used a money-rewarded challenge to verify a crypto algorithm?"
Wrong way around. Lions can sleep more because (a) their primary food has a much higher nutritional density, so they do not have to spend 10 hours a day feeding. GNUs need to eat lots of vegitation and that doesn't come around in handy 200 pound chunks. (b) Gnus sleep less because they have to stay aware and alert to escape predators (aka lions, hyenas,...). Very few animals prey on lions. For a lion, a sleeping Gnu is dinner--for a Gnu, a sleeping lion is something to stay the hell away from.
Seriously, it seem like this is an unsolvable problem and neither the users nor the administration seem to want to spend any effort in fixing it. So the sooner you realize that there is nothing you can do, the better. Help out with the IT system at your local Humane Society, womens shelter, or similar instead.
Actually, no, this doesn't fly in the phase of the "physics of old", it does fly in the face of Newtonian physics, but that's been a fact of life since either 1900 (Planck's paper on black body radiation) or 1905 (Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect).
All of the experimental results of the last decade or two are still explained by the theories of quantum mechanics or general relativity. In fact, these theories have prompted experimental physicists to run these experiments.
And no, light slowing down in a medium DOES NOT "blow the constant out of the water", c is defined as the speed of light in a vaccuum. And I have not found anyone yet who has been able to slow down light in a vaccuum.
I know it's almost unheard of, but I did RTA. The only mention of NiMHs is "You can recharge NiMH batteries hundreds of times, and each charge lasts longer than Oxyride or any sort of alkaline."
It doesn't say by how much, and it only covers digital cameras. For those, NiMHs are pretty much a no brainer unless you leave the batteries in the camera for months. But high drain or constant drain devices might act differently.
And I don't know how much I trust the author--the article also claims that NiMHs aren't widely available. Heck, every BestBuy, Meijers, CircuitCity and even my local Walmart carries them. They just happen to be in the photo section, not in the big box at the checkout.
Is there actually any way to compare the life times of alkaline batteries with NiMHs? Short of buying both and running them in the same appliance, that is. So, for example, what is going to last longer in a digital camera or a flash light, a Duracell copper head, or a 2100mAh NiMH AA?
According to President Bush, Arizona DOES have a border with Canada.
"But we've got a big border in Texas, with Mexico, obviously -- and we've got a big border with Canada -- Arizona is affected."
$37,000 for 30 years in the S&P 500 at the average annual return for the last 100 years (10.3%) is 700,595. Also, no $200,000 house in the US is going to appreciate at 5% per year for 30 years. There is maintenance and age deprecation.
I still plan on owning a home at some time, but counting your primary residence as an investment is risky to say the least. As an investment, property can make a lot of sense, though.
The other thing I loved about the Soviet Army was that they were so inflexible and tightly regulated. I don't know if they still do this, but for months one of the units that we were listening to requested the same information at the same time, and in the same order.
If you ask for the BWX every morning in your third transmission, your COMSEC is shot to hell no matter how often to change the cods.
On the other hand, the people we are likely to fight in the near future are probably using fairly low tech methods.
Back when I was doing SigInt for a living in the late 80s, we used all kinds of stuff like burst transmission, line of sight radio relays, and encryption computers. At the same time, the Russians and Czech units we were listening to were using fairly basic cyphers up to batallion and even brigade level. The one I remember most were fairly simple extensions of Polybios squares that encrypted pairs of letters instead of single letters. The sheets changed daily, or a bit more often, so our days were fairly close to the ones described in Codebreakers. The codes switched early in the morning, so we listened to garbage until we had enough cyphertext to break them, then spend the rest of the day decyphering their conversations, and started over again the next morning.
Unfortunately, it was a lot less glamorous than it sounds. Routine military radio traffic is really really dull and predictable.
The higher level radio traffic was usually a bit better protected.
If you don't need the internet in the kitchen, you are not enough off a geek. I frequently cook from recipes I find on the web, so I do have my laptop up next to the stove and cutting board. Really convenient.
Oh, I forgot---geeks don't cock anything that can't be done with a can opener and a microwave.
The "the U.S. has lower broadband coverage because so many people live waaay out in the country" argument doesn't really cut it. In 1990 over three quarters of Americans lived in cities. And the numbers have definitely not gone down since. So yes, it might be hard to cover 99% of the US, but getting to 75% should be fairly easy. At least I don't know of a town of any size that doesn't have some cables running into it.
Oh boy, I don't even know where to start. It's probably to much to ask to RTFA--after all it's 471 pages long. But lets take just some of you claims.
"One problem is how we count money. $1 in the US is not $1 in the Czech republic. "
If you had even glanced at the report, you might have noticed that it counts spending as percentage of GDP, so it's not a dollar to dollar
comparison.
Also, school IS mandatory in all of the countries tested. And pretty rigorously enforced across the board. In most cases much more rigerously than in the US.
There has been some argument from countries with a high number of immigrants like Germany, France and the US that the number of immigrants in classes have some impact, especially on the reading comprehension scores, but that still doesn't explain why two countries with high level of immigration (Australia and Canada) do extremely well in this study. The reason is definitely that these two countries make a strong effort to support immigrants, for example by offering free language classes and early integration into the school system.
By the way, first and second generation immigrant children, especially from Asia and Europe score a lot better in the US than the ones that have been here a while.
Ok, putting the sensors in the cars might be a new approach. But "traffic lights that respond ot local conditions" have been around for a least a decade. Even my back-of-beyond home town of 35,000 has them throughout the city. If you drive between 45kph and 55kph, you stop at two out of about 20 lights at most--no matter where you are driving. Heck, there were even classes about this at my university back in '88. For the connesseurs of long German words, the name of the class was "Verkehrslastabhängige Signalsteuerungssyteme."
But maybe the sumitterlives in a town with a large engineering and CS school and no #&*@ clue how to manage traffic flow--like I do nowadays. Yes, I am talking about University Park, PA or Champaign-Urbana, IL or Cambridge, MA, or....
Once again: Just because something doesn't exist in the good old US of A doesn't mean that it's not common in other parts of the world.
So have the U.S. There's been one on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for at least three years. Another one opened a fairly long time ago in the Metreon just a block off Market.
Slashdot Mirror
While the average Simpsons episode might not be as funny or biting anymore, the current season had a few really good ones.
Thank God, It's Doomsday, where Homer predicts the rapture was, IMO, the funniest and most critical episode in years.
Home Away From Homer ran a close second, and On A Clear Day I Can't See My Sister and The Seven Beer Snitch were also not bad.
bash:
echo $PATH
Monad:
Private Sub echo1_CLI(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As
System.EventArgs) Handles echo1.CLI
Try
AddHandler EchoCL1.PrintLine, AddressOf Me.PrintCL1_PrintLine
PrintLine1.Print(Sys.Init.Windows.PATH)
Catch ex As Exception
Message.Show("An error occurred while printing PATH ", _
ex.ToString())
End Try
Ahem, what? Iran was a liberal, tolerant place with no fundamentalists in government in 1999? Maybe President Khatami was trying, but Ayatollah Khamene'i, the real power wasn't. I won't go into the the events of July when riot police raided Tehran University and beat at least 4 students to death, but lets take a quick look at what Human Rights Watch (a strong critic of the US War on Terror) has to say about the rest of the year:
General Yahya Rahim Safavi warned reformers in April, "we are seeking to root out counterrevolutionaries wherever they are. We have to cut the throats of some and cut off the tongues of others." A few days later he threatened, "we will go after them when the time is ripe...fruit has to be picked when it is ripe. The fruit is unripe now."
Executions after unfair trials proliferated, including cases of stoning to death in public. For the first time since 1992 a follower of the Baha'i faith was executed in prison. Other religious minorities, including Sunni Muslims, Evangelical Christians, and Jews were subjected to discrimination and persecution. Prominent dissidents, including writers and editors, were subjected to arbitrary detention and independent newspapers were closed down. New laws were passed discriminating against women and aimed at restricting debate about women's rights. Torture was widespread during interrogation, and the government failed to take steps to halt violent attacks by vigilante groups which serve as enforcers for conservative clerics, known as the Partisans of the Party of God (Ansar-e Hezbollahi) . As tensions with the Taleban rulers of neighboring Afghanistan mounted, Afghan refugees, more than a million of whom have lived in Iran for many years seeking refuge from civil war, were attacked and beaten by crowds leading to several deaths.
Hundreds of people were executed after trials that failed to comply with minimum international standards. In June, the daily newspaper Hamshahri, reported the public hanging of four young men in the city of Ahvaz, in the south, for "insulting" Leader Khamene'i and "armed robbery." Seven people were reported by opposition groups to have been convicted of adultery and stoned to death in October 1997 and six more were reported to have been sentenced to stoning in January. On July 21, Ruhollah Rowhani was executed in the city of Mashhad on charges of converting a Muslim to the Baha'i faith. This execution marked a deterioration in the situation of this intensely persecuted minority. At least fifteen other Baha'is were held in prison and seven were facing death sentences because of their faith. There were further detentions of Baha'is in September when dozens were detained in a new wave of repression. In May, Jewish businessman Ruhollah Kakhodah-Zadeh was arrested and later hanged in prison. His crime was never declared in public and any legal proceedings which occurred did so in secret.
Read the other 10 pages on HRW's site.
Uhm, no. I swam competitively for about 8 years in school and been scuba diving on and off since. You are swimming more efficiently under water because you don't break the surface and because you don't create a bow wave. This is exactly why you are only allowed one underwater stroke at the start in all national and international swimming competitions.
The same is incidentially true for nuclear submarines which can cruise faster when fullu submerged.
Not because of the price, but because it doesn't have any meaningful storage options. 128MB Flash is not going to do anything for movies, images or other downloads. Now if they'd put in a hard drive, or a expansion slot so you can get a few gigs of storage, you could download a movie to watch when you get out of range of broadband. And even in a few years, that's still going to be a lot of places. Ten years from now, wireless broadband will be truely everywhere, but even in places like Japan and Korea it's fiarly common to get out of 3G or WiFiMax range.
I am certainly no grammar Nazi--actually, English is my third language, so I am far from perfect. But for the love of God, could the people at Security Focus please try to do some rudimentary editing and proofreading? I don't mind typos, but some of their questions are so wrong that they are very hard to read and understand.
"Do you think that NSA is promoting ECC based crypto because they cannot crack RSA/DSA based one?"
What?
"Or maybe just because they can crack RSA/DSA they prefer to protect USbusiness with ECC (supposed to be harder to crack)?"
Huh?
"What about crypto monopoly? Don't you think that having just a couple of public-key algorithms based on the same math problem could lead to a catastrophe if cracked ?"
This doesn't follow any European-language grammar.
But the next question takes the cake:
"Why is often used a money-rewarded challenge to verify a crypto algorithm?"
Wrong way around. Lions can sleep more because
(a) their primary food has a much higher nutritional density, so they do not have to spend 10 hours a day feeding. GNUs need to eat lots of vegitation and that doesn't come around in handy 200 pound chunks.
(b) Gnus sleep less because they have to stay aware and alert to escape predators (aka lions, hyenas,...). Very few animals prey on lions. For a lion, a sleeping Gnu is dinner--for a Gnu, a sleeping lion is something to stay the hell away from.
Seriously, it seem like this is an unsolvable problem and neither the users nor the administration seem to want to spend any effort in fixing it. So the sooner you realize that there is nothing you can do, the better. Help out with the IT system at your local Humane Society, womens shelter, or similar instead.
Oh, and get your own DSL or cable modem.
Actually, no, this doesn't fly in the phase of the "physics of old", it does fly in the face of Newtonian physics, but that's been a fact of life since either 1900 (Planck's paper on black body radiation) or 1905 (Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect).
All of the experimental results of the last decade or two are still explained by the theories of quantum mechanics or general relativity. In fact, these theories have prompted experimental physicists to run these experiments.
And no, light slowing down in a medium DOES NOT "blow the constant out of the water", c is defined as the speed of light in a vaccuum. And I have not found anyone yet who has been able to slow down light in a vaccuum.
I know it's almost unheard of, but I did RTA. The only mention of NiMHs is "You can recharge NiMH batteries hundreds of times, and each charge lasts longer than Oxyride or any sort of alkaline."
It doesn't say by how much, and it only covers digital cameras. For those, NiMHs are pretty much a no brainer unless you leave the batteries in the camera for months. But high drain or constant drain devices might act differently.
And I don't know how much I trust the author--the article also claims that NiMHs aren't widely available. Heck, every BestBuy, Meijers, CircuitCity and even my local Walmart carries them. They just happen to be in the photo section, not in the big box at the checkout.
Is there actually any way to compare the life times of alkaline batteries with NiMHs? Short of buying both and running them in the same appliance, that is. So, for example, what is going to last longer in a digital camera or a flash light, a Duracell copper head, or a 2100mAh NiMH AA?
On the other hand, you never have to show your passport if you travel between most of the 25 countries in the European Union.
According to President Bush, Arizona DOES have a border with Canada. "But we've got a big border in Texas, with Mexico, obviously -- and we've got a big border with Canada -- Arizona is affected."
Well, you could always google for this kind of information.
10 Terabytes: Printed collection of the U. S. Library of Congress
"Funniest advice ever this is. A heap of molten lava their server will become."--Yoda
My heart goes out to the poor admin--I just hope they don't have any daylies on the same machine.
$37,000 for 30 years in the S&P 500 at the average annual return for the last 100 years (10.3%) is 700,595. Also, no $200,000 house in the US is going to appreciate at 5% per year for 30 years. There is maintenance and age deprecation.
I still plan on owning a home at some time, but counting your primary residence as an investment is risky to say the least. As an investment, property can make a lot of sense, though.
Find every occurence of a name in 400MB worth of email in less than a second. Something that crashes Eudora and takes forever in Outlook.
You mean by turing it into an inhospitable barren wasteland?
The other thing I loved about the Soviet Army was that they were so inflexible and tightly regulated. I don't know if they still do this, but for months one of the units that we were listening to requested the same information at the same time, and in the same order.
If you ask for the BWX every morning in your third transmission, your COMSEC is shot to hell no matter how often to change the cods.
On the other hand, the people we are likely to fight in the near future are probably using fairly low tech methods.
Back when I was doing SigInt for a living in the late 80s, we used all kinds of stuff like burst transmission, line of sight radio relays, and encryption computers. At the same time, the Russians and Czech units we were listening to were using fairly basic cyphers up to batallion and even brigade level. The one I remember most were fairly simple extensions of Polybios squares that encrypted pairs of letters instead of single letters. The sheets changed daily, or a bit more often, so our days were fairly close to the ones described in Codebreakers. The codes switched early in the morning, so we listened to garbage until we had enough cyphertext to break them, then spend the rest of the day decyphering their conversations, and started over again the next morning.
Unfortunately, it was a lot less glamorous than it sounds. Routine military radio traffic is really really dull and predictable.
The higher level radio traffic was usually a bit better protected.
Oh, I forgot---geeks don't cock anything that can't be done with a can opener and a microwave.
The "the U.S. has lower broadband coverage because so many people live waaay out in the country" argument doesn't really cut it. In 1990 over three quarters of Americans lived in cities. And the numbers have definitely not gone down since. So yes, it might be hard to cover 99% of the US, but getting to 75% should be fairly easy. At least I don't know of a town of any size that doesn't have some cables running into it.
"One problem is how we count money. $1 in the US is not $1 in the Czech republic. "
If you had even glanced at the report, you might have noticed that it counts spending as percentage of GDP, so it's not a dollar to dollar comparison.
Also, school IS mandatory in all of the countries tested. And pretty rigorously enforced across the board. In most cases much more rigerously than in the US.
There has been some argument from countries with a high number of immigrants like Germany, France and the US that the number of immigrants in classes have some impact, especially on the reading comprehension scores, but that still doesn't explain why two countries with high level of immigration (Australia and Canada) do extremely well in this study. The reason is definitely that these two countries make a strong effort to support immigrants, for example by offering free language classes and early integration into the school system.
By the way, first and second generation immigrant children, especially from Asia and Europe score a lot better in the US than the ones that have been here a while.
Ok, putting the sensors in the cars might be a new approach. But "traffic lights that respond ot local conditions" have been around for a least a decade. Even my back-of-beyond home town of 35,000 has them throughout the city. If you drive between 45kph and 55kph, you stop at two out of about 20 lights at most--no matter where you are driving. Heck, there were even classes about this at my university back in '88. For the connesseurs of long German words, the name of the class was "Verkehrslastabhängige Signalsteuerungssyteme."
... .
But maybe the sumitterlives in a town with a large engineering and CS school and no #&*@ clue how to manage traffic flow--like I do nowadays. Yes, I am talking about University Park, PA or Champaign-Urbana, IL or Cambridge, MA, or
Once again: Just because something doesn't exist in the good old US of A doesn't mean that it's not common in other parts of the world.
So have the U.S. There's been one on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for at least three years. Another one opened a fairly long time ago in the Metreon just a block off Market.
So how is this news?