While the comment quality has not gone that much down, editorial quality did, in my opinion. I agree that comments convey much more than story "summary".
Corporations - yes, as they do not have an owner. People who hold stock are too dispersed to make much influence. CEO and others cannot be effectively controlled unless there is someone who has interest in company doings, and enough power (=stocks, or other instrument) to enforce it. I fully agree that CYA, consultants etc. are present there as well.
In "true" private companies, where there is a single owner, it is usually different. Company has to be small enough so the owner can still grasp what is going on.
Software by itself does not matter, be it commercial of open source. The waste is in the way such projects are handled - money that could have been spend to achieve something, goes instead to all intermediate companies. Why governement pays that? To shift blame if something goes wrong. They can say "oh, we don't know anything, we asked consultants and THEY told us to do it in this way." Consulting companies are used as a CYA device. If money spent were private money, owner would make sure that he gets most for it. Public money is "nobody" money and nobody puts as much attention to making most of it. People in institutions pretend they do, but as it's easy-come-easy-go, they do not care enough. Worst case the taxes will go up to cover for inefficiencies.
Governement projects are cash-cows for everyone, except citizens.
Because by studying the photos one could find out how good US optics/photo equipment is. For this reason such photos were not released during Cold War and later. Once they got classified, they remained so because nobody bothered to change it (until now).
Actually, this is a very similar situation right now - you can be sure that today's military satellites have much better resolution than 1m, you just don't get to see such 1cm resolution photos.
When energy efficiency comes into play, EU usually does not "ban" something, but it tries to inform people so they can make beter choice (=support "free market at play" argument). The second method is to establish some minimum/maximum value (such as for emissions from vehicles) to push manufacturers research better options. EU own wording is:
The energy demand in households accounts for 25% of the final energy needs in the EU. Electricity used for domestic appliances in households show the sharpest increase. Higher standards of living and comfort, multiple purchases of electric appliances and the growing need for air-conditioning are main reasons for this trend to prevail. Energy consumption by consumer electronics and new media as Internet is also steadily growing.
The response is to act in two complementary ways:
* Energy Labelling of household appliances: Seen that the market of household appliances such as washing machines, dishwasher, oven, air-conditioning systems etc. are highly visible to the consumer, the intention is to increase consumer's awareness on the real energy use of household appliances through a liable and clear labelling in their sales points.
* Minimum Efficiency Requirements: Compulsory minimum efficiency requirements will encourage producers of household appliances to improve the product design in view to lower the energy consumption at their use.
Electric appliances in EU are labelled according to their energy consumption. When you go to buy refrigerator or washer, you will find such standardized label on the device. Many people use these labels (or in effect device energy efficiency class) to choose better. Following page shows such label: http://www.greenlabelspurchase.net/ha-eu-energy-labelling.html
Now, to put things in perspective: average electricity usage per year is 4000..16000kWh in US (source: Wikipedia), ~3000kWh in UK (source: electricity company), ~1600..2200kWH in PL (source: electricity company). In Poland this would calculate to 300-500USD (depending on exchange rate, which varies wildly).
According to studies done in Poland, TV is the fourth largest household electricity consumer. The first is refrigerator (33%), 2nd lighting and small appliances (25%), 3rd washing machine (10%). This assumes that you use gas for cooking.
Classic 21" TV (max ~55W) uses about 7-8% of energy consumed per year (in UK/US this might be much more), so you end up paying around 30-50USD per year just for TV electricity. Using large LCD (42", max ~200W) almost quadruples that number (yes, I know that depending on settings LCD might use less energy). Using Plasma (max ~400W) makes the situation even worse (yes, there are some optimization techniques claimed by manufacturers). You end up paying 4-7x as much for new TV as you used to. Given these calculations it is clear that EU has started to do something about TV efficiency, as more and more people buy LCD/Plasma.
And computer? it's under 3%. Less than an electric kettle.
Waiver of Rights: I have read and understand that I hereby waive for the duration of my travel authorization obtained via ESTA any rights to review or appeal of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer's determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than on the basis of an application for asylum, any removal action arising from an application for admission under the Visa Waiver Program. In addition to the above waiver, as a condition of each admission into the United States under the Visa Waiver Program, I agree that the submission of biometric identifiers (including fingerprints and photographs) during processing upon arrival in the United States shall reaffirm my waiver of any rights to review or appeal of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer's determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than on the basis of an application for asylum, any removal action arising from an application for admission under the Visa Waiver Program.
So if you decide to travel, you do not have any right to question/appeal decision of the officer at the arrival airport. If he says you go back, you go back, without any possibility to talk with supervisor or explaining your case (you just waived that by submitting online request).
Apologies for the link. Looking around cities in places where something new is being built, I found a few more examples of such white areas that would suggest fresh concrete. If "censored" theory is right, then at the airports it doesn't really make sense that only some areas seem to be whitish, while ramp parts right next to them aren't. Also "whiteout" levels are various, as you have pointed out.
Yup, there is wrong information, but in your comment: - MAC address is rewritten by every router along way, so you need to be in the same network segment to see it. If you are far away, you might know IP address, but not MAC. - MAC address would need to be changed between wardriving time and time you intercept it to break association. Most routers do not change address, or change it just once to match cable modem's address.
"Everyone" is waiting for either 40Gbit/s or 100Gbit/s Ethernet. The first one is what server-people push (they claim they do not need more, that's why 40Gbit/s was put into Ethernet standard), while network people want full 100 Gbit/s.
> But what about all the LAN vendors, which have a real market for 100Gbps
They don't. There seems to be market either for 40Gbit/s in LAN/local connections or for 100Gbit/s for core/long haul. At least judging but what happened with high-speed ethernet standard.
It seems that we talk about completely different things. Anycast that you describe is very different from anycast as I understand it: the one described in the RFC 3513 (IPv6 addressing) and one used in IPv4 networks:-/
> Anycast is not routed to the nearest device
RFC 3513, point 2.6 "packet sent to an anycast address is routed to the 'nearest' interface having that address [...]"
> anycasting is multicast to ALL devices
RFC 3513, point 2.6 "Anycast addresses are allocated from the unicast address space, using any of the defined unicast address formats. Thus, anycast addresses are syntactically indistinguishable from unicast addresses."
> There is no single point of failure.
Agreed, this is probably the greatest advantage of anycast, and the main application of anycast IPv4.
> No, IPv4 does not support anycast except as a userspace layer on top of multicast
IPv4 does support anycast. Anycast works exactly like unicast. The only thing that differs anycast from unicast is that more than one server has the same IP address, but device sending traffic doesn't even need to know about it. The whole "magic" happens thanks to routers and routing to the nearest server with that destination address.
> there are no anycast-aware applications in IPv4 that I am aware of.
Application doesn't even need to be aware of anycast in IPv4. It just accepts requests at one of it's configured addressess. An example of anycast application is DNS. It is publicly known that F-root uses IPv4 anycast.
> Network programmers and ISPs should feel utterly ashamed with themselves at the pathetic, tardy and haphazard use of one of the most elegant networking tools available to software engineers.
Agreed:(
> You are also incorrect about the hardcoding. Anycasting doesn't require a hardcoded address for the service.
You need to have service identifier hardcoded somewhere, otherwise how do you select the service? Say, device wants to register to FAFU service and obtain information specific to that service. What should be destination IPv6 address? And what about service DANDY? the same, or a different address? With DHCP you just receive all necessary information within the DHCP reply.
> Let us say you have a hundred IP phones, all in factory default state. You pneous DHCP hits is going to more than inconvenience most servers. You'd damn-near melt them.
That would be a hundred DHCP requests, once, upon a boot of every phone. If the server cannot handle this, even after simultaneous restart of all equipment, I'd be surprised.
>> Want to tell your IP phone where the call manager is? DHCP. >> Want to tell your Netware clients where the nearest replica server is? DHCP. > > IPv6 Anycast returns the nearest server that supports the capability you want.
Apples to oranges.
If a device has a hardcoded destination IP address (or DNS name for that matter, as it can be easily converted to IP address), Anycast will route the traffic to the nearest node with that address. That does _not_ help finding a service in the first place. You need to somehow hardcode such information in the device. This is where DHCP comes useful, as it provides autoconfiguration capabilities.
If you imagine that you have multitude of IP phones (all in factory default state) to install... with DHCP you just plug them in, they will learn correct settings from DHCP. You will not achieve the same effect with IPv6 Anycast. It would only be useful if all network users in the world have used the same IP address for their service and manufacturers have hardcoded it as factory default. Of course this brings another risk - if you mess your addressing, your IP phone (or other device) will happily connect to ANY OTHER server with the same address. security risk. IMVHO anycast is not a solution to the problem.
BTW: Anycast isn't anything new in IPv6, it's been used in IPv4 for years.
The press release is about the physical attributes of the iPhone, so the comparison charts deal strictly with physical attributes, not things like GPS. You are not correct (or even strict).
If "wi-fi" is a physical attribute (it is on that list), then "GPS" is a physical attribute as well.
Going further, the list lacks some important physical attributes: iPhone doesn't have UMTS nor HSDPA (Samsung and Nokia have it), even such simple and important attribute as weight is not shown (iPhone is heavier)
Regardless of my subjective opinion about iPhone (I love the big screen!) that chart is a pure example of marketing "truth" (similar to "Safari 2x faster, secure from day one" because it presents only the convenient part of the story) .
Australians were the first to launch scramjet, although a few years ago. Quote from the wikipedia:
The X-43A's successful second flight made it the fastest free flying air-breathing aircraft in the world, though it was preceded by an Australian HyShot as the first operating scramjet engine flight. (emphasis mine)
If you are not aware - there was an official investigation to find out the origins of the low quality meat. Using shipping records it has been traced back: bad meat was shipped by sea from USA to Klaipeda in Lithuania and then to Moscow in Russia. Counterfeited certificates of Polish origin were then used at the Russian border. The meat itself was not from Poland, it didn't even transit Poland. After Polish investigators gave all the details to their Russian colleagues there was no further progress that I know of.
The funny thing that allowed Russians to check that certificates were falsified was that they were done most likely by a person using Russian as their native language. There were silly mistakes in spelling, common to Russians using Polish. A certificate was posted on the web when the problem started, but since then the issue has become political and a few people remember what was the cause.
Except for the complex political factors (which I ignore here) of "me boss, you not" the main real problem that Russia signalled was that certificates are too easy to counterfeit.
And BTW - Poland does sell meat to other countries instead of Russia.
PS: can't comment on Georgian wine, as I didn't drink it. I guess you've had your share;)
"Rogue access point" is an issue that has been discussed long ago, even such giants as Cisco have picked it up and describe fighting with them in "security best practices" whitepaper: wireless security best practices
They also have a neat management system that can detect rogue clients/access points, display their location on them map and trace/disconnect them from Ethernet port: wireless management system
Sure, Cisco's not a startup and not Linus, but you cannot deny that they already have the technology and products. While not exactly cheap (as in for an average person or knowledgeable geek) such security functions do make them attractive to bigger customers.
Golly, if you had the source, you might be able to do something like... hmmm... I dunno... disable the default password, maybe?
Golly, if you bothered to actually read the advisory, you would have found the sections "Software Versions and Fixes" and "Obtaining Fixed Software".
While Cisco is closed source, at least they do publish (as in "make public") security advisories and provide quality tested and verified fixes.
In "open source" world you would probably have had N fixes from X different people, each claiming that theirs is the best. If you want to see a real open source mess, check out Zaurus - just as an example there is a large number of libSDL ports, each different, each having different problems, each compatible with different games, none fully usable.
"Open Source" has become nowadays a real(tm) marketing term. In many cases it just demonstrates theoretical possibilities of doing something, not the reality. It is just like those TV Sell channels when they say "our EZkook enables you to prepare thousands of fantastic meals!", everybody drools, but a tiny portion of buyers actually ever uses the tool for something more than mashed potatoes. Still, they get excited thinking about the possibilities...
"Emergency calls" means for example that if someone at the audience has a heart attack, it is possible to call emergency right away, even if jamming is active for other calls.
It doesn't apply to receiving calls from outside. While I agree that people "on-call" shouldn't go to the cinema, original poster most likely misunderstood the intent.
Out of hundreds of their products one (and based on Linux!) has a problem. Big deal...
Cisco at least provides publicly information about their security problems and makes timely fixes. It makes no sense bashing them - everyone else will have a problem sooner or later...
"Given Linux security history, switching to someone else might be a good idea."
Wireless Network Configuration Wizard - simplifies configuring through three simple steps. The application prompts users through the 3-step setup process which simultaneously configures both a wireless router/AP and the Intel Centrino mobile technology notebook computer. The wizard automatically pops up on a notebook computer when the Intel PROSet/Wireless Wi-Fi client software senses a new and unconfigured Linksys wireless router*. There is nothing to install or run – it runs users through the steps automatically.
The site have more windows devices in PDA, tablets and thin clients where the user could find comfortable using the same interface as in his desktop.
This could be a very wrong assumption: I do not want my PDA applications to mimic what's on the desktop. Screen size is limited and input methods of PDA are usually different, so applications should take it into account! Desktop apps don't...
Having used both Linux-based devices (Zaurus) and EPOC PDAs (Psion) I would not hesitate to choose EPOC: software authors follow Symbian GUI design guidelines, making apps very consistent and PDA-friendly to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, the same one - welcome to the club ;-)
While the comment quality has not gone that much down, editorial quality did, in my opinion. I agree that comments convey much more than story "summary".
Corporations - yes, as they do not have an owner. People who hold stock are too dispersed to make much influence. CEO and others cannot be effectively controlled unless there is someone who has interest in company doings, and enough power (=stocks, or other instrument) to enforce it. I fully agree that CYA, consultants etc. are present there as well.
In "true" private companies, where there is a single owner, it is usually different. Company has to be small enough so the owner can still grasp what is going on.
This is a _very_ valid comment.
Software by itself does not matter, be it commercial of open source. The waste is in the way such projects are handled - money that could have been spend to achieve something, goes instead to all intermediate companies. Why governement pays that? To shift blame if something goes wrong. They can say "oh, we don't know anything, we asked consultants and THEY told us to do it in this way." Consulting companies are used as a CYA device.
If money spent were private money, owner would make sure that he gets most for it.
Public money is "nobody" money and nobody puts as much attention to making most of it. People in institutions pretend they do, but as it's easy-come-easy-go, they do not care enough. Worst case the taxes will go up to cover for inefficiencies.
Governement projects are cash-cows for everyone, except citizens.
Because by studying the photos one could find out how good US optics/photo equipment is.
For this reason such photos were not released during Cold War and later. Once they got classified, they remained so because nobody bothered to change it (until now).
Actually, this is a very similar situation right now - you can be sure that today's military satellites have much better resolution than 1m, you just don't get to see such 1cm resolution photos.
It's not, it is Deutsche Bahn query, of course.
When energy efficiency comes into play, EU usually does not "ban" something, but it tries to inform people so they can make beter choice (=support "free market at play" argument). The second method is to establish some minimum/maximum value (such as for emissions from vehicles) to push manufacturers research better options. EU own wording is:
The energy demand in households accounts for 25% of the final energy needs in the EU. Electricity used for domestic appliances in households show the sharpest increase. Higher standards of living and comfort, multiple purchases of electric appliances and the growing need for air-conditioning are main reasons for this trend to prevail. Energy consumption by consumer electronics and new media as Internet is also steadily growing.
The response is to act in two complementary ways:
* Energy Labelling of household appliances: Seen that the market of household appliances such as washing machines, dishwasher, oven, air-conditioning systems etc. are highly visible to the consumer, the intention is to increase consumer's awareness on the real energy use of household appliances through a liable and clear labelling in their sales points.
* Minimum Efficiency Requirements: Compulsory minimum efficiency requirements will encourage producers of household appliances to improve the product design in view to lower the energy consumption at their use.
Electric appliances in EU are labelled according to their energy consumption. When you go to buy refrigerator or washer, you will find such standardized label on the device. Many people use these labels (or in effect device energy efficiency class) to choose better. Following page shows such label:
http://www.greenlabelspurchase.net/ha-eu-energy-labelling.html
Actual EU legislation is here:
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/demand/legislation/domestic_en.htm
Now, to put things in perspective: average electricity usage per year is 4000..16000kWh in US (source: Wikipedia), ~3000kWh in UK (source: electricity company), ~1600..2200kWH in PL (source: electricity company). In Poland this would calculate to 300-500USD (depending on exchange rate, which varies wildly).
According to studies done in Poland, TV is the fourth largest household electricity consumer. The first is refrigerator (33%), 2nd lighting and small appliances (25%), 3rd washing machine (10%). This assumes that you use gas for cooking.
Classic 21" TV (max ~55W) uses about 7-8% of energy consumed per year (in UK/US this might be much more), so you end up paying around 30-50USD per year just for TV electricity. Using large LCD (42", max ~200W) almost quadruples that number (yes, I know that depending on settings LCD might use less energy). Using Plasma (max ~400W) makes the situation even worse (yes, there are some optimization techniques claimed by manufacturers). You end up paying 4-7x as much for new TV as you used to.
Given these calculations it is clear that EU has started to do something about TV efficiency, as more and more people buy LCD/Plasma.
And computer? it's under 3%. Less than an electric kettle.
Waiver of Rights: I have read and understand that I hereby waive for the duration of my travel authorization obtained via ESTA any rights to review or appeal of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer's determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than on the basis of an application for asylum, any removal action arising from an application for admission under the Visa Waiver Program.
In addition to the above waiver, as a condition of each admission into the United States under the Visa Waiver Program, I agree that the submission of biometric identifiers (including fingerprints and photographs) during processing upon arrival in the United States shall reaffirm my waiver of any rights to review or appeal of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer's determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than on the basis of an application for asylum, any removal action arising from an application for admission under the Visa Waiver Program.
So if you decide to travel, you do not have any right to question/appeal decision of the officer at the arrival airport. If he says you go back, you go back, without any possibility to talk with supervisor or explaining your case (you just waived that by submitting online request).
They just need to tune it to motorbike speed, instead of car speed ;-)
Got a grip :-)
Apologies for the link. Looking around cities in places where something new is being built, I found a few more examples of such white areas that would suggest fresh concrete. If "censored" theory is right, then at the airports it doesn't really make sense that only some areas seem to be whitish, while ramp parts right next to them aren't. Also "whiteout" levels are various, as you have pointed out.
I do agree with the fact that this has to do with infrared (as you pointed out), probably including more materials than fresh concrete (although all seem to be connected to building sites).
Just right to the previous airport there is an area of rubble that is white. At the time of photo this was preparations for construction site for a road/viaduc, actually just some dirt roads and piles of building materials (sand etc). Either dirt surface, or the rubble material itself must have contributed to the "whiteness":
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=warszawa&ie=UTF8&om=1&ll=52.163732,20.986054&spn=0.003139,0.007414&t=k&z=17
Next one is a temporary parking in a place where buildings were torn down. They've made a rough flattened surface out of the rubble and laid a temporary gravel surface on it. Something must have been in the gravel/rubble:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=warszawa&ie=UTF8&om=1&t=k&ll=52.1843,21.001117&spn=0.003138,0.007414&z=17&iwloc=addr
PS: thanks for constructive, informative posts!
It's _not_ a new-constructed ramp or fresh concrete.
"White-out" technique is used on other airports as well:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=warszawa&ie=UTF8&ll=52.237051,21.020966&spn=0.386015,0.98877&z=10&om=1
The funny thing is that you can get the same area in much higher resolution (air-photos instead of satelite) on other sites.
Yup, there is wrong information, but in your comment:
- MAC address is rewritten by every router along way, so you need to be in the same network segment to see it. If you are far away, you might know IP address, but not MAC.
- MAC address would need to be changed between wardriving time and time you intercept it to break association. Most routers do not change address, or change it just once to match cable modem's address.
In practical use the article is correct.
"Everyone" is waiting for either 40Gbit/s or 100Gbit/s Ethernet.
The first one is what server-people push (they claim they do not need more, that's why 40Gbit/s was put into Ethernet standard),
while network people want full 100 Gbit/s.
> But what about all the LAN vendors, which have a real market for 100Gbps
They don't.
There seems to be market either for 40Gbit/s in LAN/local connections or for 100Gbit/s for core/long haul. At least judging but what happened with high-speed ethernet standard.
It seems that we talk about completely different things. Anycast that you describe is very different from anycast as I understand it: the one described in the RFC 3513 (IPv6 addressing) and one used in IPv4 networks :-/
:(
> Anycast is not routed to the nearest device
RFC 3513, point 2.6
"packet sent to an anycast address is routed to the 'nearest' interface having that address [...]"
> anycasting is multicast to ALL devices
RFC 3513, point 2.6
"Anycast addresses are allocated from the unicast address space, using any of the defined unicast address formats. Thus, anycast addresses are syntactically indistinguishable from unicast addresses."
> There is no single point of failure.
Agreed, this is probably the greatest advantage of anycast, and the main application of anycast IPv4.
> No, IPv4 does not support anycast except as a userspace layer on top of multicast
IPv4 does support anycast. Anycast works exactly like unicast. The only thing that differs anycast from unicast is that more than one server has the same IP address, but device sending traffic doesn't even need to know about it. The whole "magic" happens thanks to routers and routing to the nearest server with that destination address.
> there are no anycast-aware applications in IPv4 that I am aware of.
Application doesn't even need to be aware of anycast in IPv4. It just accepts requests at one of it's configured addressess. An example of anycast application is DNS. It is publicly known that F-root uses IPv4 anycast.
A great article about what IPv4 anycast is can be found here:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/12/31/173152/86
> Network programmers and ISPs should feel utterly ashamed with themselves at the pathetic, tardy and haphazard use of one of the most elegant networking tools available to software engineers.
Agreed
> You are also incorrect about the hardcoding. Anycasting doesn't require a hardcoded address for the service.
You need to have service identifier hardcoded somewhere, otherwise how do you select the service? Say, device wants to register to FAFU service and obtain information specific to that service. What should be destination IPv6 address? And what about service DANDY? the same, or a different address? With DHCP you just receive all necessary information within the DHCP reply.
> Let us say you have a hundred IP phones, all in factory default state. You pneous DHCP hits is going to more than inconvenience most servers. You'd damn-near melt them.
That would be a hundred DHCP requests, once, upon a boot of every phone. If the server cannot handle this, even after simultaneous restart of all equipment, I'd be surprised.
>> Want to tell your IP phone where the call manager is? DHCP.
>> Want to tell your Netware clients where the nearest replica server is? DHCP.
>
> IPv6 Anycast returns the nearest server that supports the capability you want.
Apples to oranges.
If a device has a hardcoded destination IP address (or DNS name for that matter, as it can be easily converted to IP address), Anycast will route the traffic to the nearest node with that address. That does _not_ help finding a service in the first place. You need to somehow hardcode such information in the device. This is where DHCP comes useful, as it provides autoconfiguration capabilities.
If you imagine that you have multitude of IP phones (all in factory default state) to install... with DHCP you just plug them in, they will learn correct settings from DHCP. You will not achieve the same effect with IPv6 Anycast. It would only be useful if all network users in the world have used the same IP address for their service and manufacturers have hardcoded it as factory default. Of course this brings another risk - if you mess your addressing, your IP phone (or other device) will happily connect to ANY OTHER server with the same address. security risk. IMVHO anycast is not a solution to the problem.
BTW: Anycast isn't anything new in IPv6, it's been used in IPv4 for years.
If "wi-fi" is a physical attribute (it is on that list), then "GPS" is a physical attribute as well.
Going further, the list lacks some important physical attributes: iPhone doesn't have UMTS nor HSDPA (Samsung and Nokia have it), even such simple and important attribute as weight is not shown (iPhone is heavier)
Regardless of my subjective opinion about iPhone (I love the big screen!) that chart is a pure example of marketing "truth" (similar to "Safari 2x faster, secure from day one" because it presents only the convenient part of the story) .
"smart" with a lowercase "s" is the correct brand and car name.
Quote from the wikipedia: The X-43A's successful second flight made it the fastest free flying air-breathing aircraft in the world, though it was preceded by an Australian HyShot as the first operating scramjet engine flight. (emphasis mine)
Thank you for posting the links! Good to get some more information about the meat problem.
You did not bother to put facts in your post.
;)
If you are not aware - there was an official investigation to find out the origins
of the low quality meat. Using shipping records it has been traced back: bad meat
was shipped by sea from USA to Klaipeda in Lithuania and then to Moscow in Russia.
Counterfeited certificates of Polish origin were then used at the Russian border.
The meat itself was not from Poland, it didn't even transit Poland.
After Polish investigators gave all the details to their Russian colleagues
there was no further progress that I know of.
The funny thing that allowed Russians to check that certificates were falsified
was that they were done most likely by a person using Russian as their native language.
There were silly mistakes in spelling, common to Russians using Polish.
A certificate was posted on the web when the problem started, but since then
the issue has become political and a few people remember what was the cause.
Except for the complex political factors (which I ignore here) of "me boss, you not"
the main real problem that Russia signalled was that certificates are too easy
to counterfeit.
And BTW - Poland does sell meat to other countries instead of Russia.
PS: can't comment on Georgian wine, as I didn't drink it.
I guess you've had your share
"Rogue access point" is an issue that has been discussed long ago, even such giants as Cisco have picked it up and describe fighting with them in "security best practices" whitepaper:
wireless security best practices
They also have a neat management system that can detect rogue clients/access points, display their location on them map and trace/disconnect them from Ethernet port:
wireless management system
Sure, Cisco's not a startup and not Linus, but you cannot deny that they already have the technology and products. While not exactly cheap (as in for an average person or knowledgeable geek) such security functions do make them attractive to bigger customers.
Golly, if you had the source, you might be able to do something like... hmmm... I dunno... disable the default password, maybe?
Golly, if you bothered to actually read the advisory, you would have found the sections "Software Versions and Fixes" and "Obtaining Fixed Software".
While Cisco is closed source, at least they do publish (as in "make public") security advisories and provide quality tested and verified fixes.
In "open source" world you would probably have had N fixes from X different people, each claiming that theirs is the best. If you want to see a real open source mess, check out Zaurus - just as an example there is a large number of libSDL ports, each different, each having different problems, each compatible with different games, none fully usable.
"Open Source" has become nowadays a real(tm) marketing term. In many cases it just demonstrates theoretical possibilities of doing something, not the reality. It is just like those TV Sell channels when they say "our EZkook enables you to prepare thousands of fantastic meals!", everybody drools, but a tiny portion of buyers actually ever uses the tool for something more than mashed potatoes. Still, they get excited thinking about the possibilities...
That comment is pointless, no insightful.
"Emergency calls" means for example that if someone at the audience has a heart attack, it is possible to call emergency right away, even if jamming is active for other calls.
It doesn't apply to receiving calls from outside. While I agree that people "on-call" shouldn't go to the cinema, original poster most likely misunderstood the intent.
Out of hundreds of their products one (and based on Linux!) has a problem. Big deal...
Cisco at least provides publicly information about their security problems and makes timely fixes. It makes no sense bashing them - everyone else will have a problem sooner or later...
"Given Linux security history, switching to someone else might be a good idea."
http://www.linksys.com/press/press.asp?prid=172
This could be a very wrong assumption: I do not want my PDA applications to mimic what's on the desktop. Screen size is limited and input methods of PDA are usually different, so applications should take it into account! Desktop apps don't...
Having used both Linux-based devices (Zaurus) and EPOC PDAs (Psion) I would not hesitate to choose EPOC: software authors follow Symbian GUI design guidelines, making apps very consistent and PDA-friendly to use.