How can we tell, unless everything that they're doing is completely transparent? Sure, doing so will completely undermine security, but people who value security aren't deserving of liberty, blah blah, right?
If the government really cares about the security of their intelligence operations, then they should be careful to follow the law. Otherwise, they risk having details of the operations revealed in the course of efforts to bring to justice the criminals in the government who ignore the laws.
Apparently, the government doesn't seem care all that much about the laws, so they must not think that there's much real security risk in revealing this stuff.
I've got a new TV that only has one HDCP input, and it's the only digital input on the set. Right now I've got it hooked to my MythTV box with a DVI adapter cable, so I currently still don't have a way to connect one of these HD-DVD players (unless I go out and buy an expensive VGA->component adapter box for the computer).
I'm guessing that the vast majority of HDTVs in existence right now don't have more than 1 HDCP input. What happens when every media source wants to hog it? The cable company, the DVD makers, DRMd internet movie download vendors, etc. are all going to insist on HDCP connections. Do they expect people to plug and unplug cables on the back of their TVs every time they switch playback devices?
Apple's real innovation didn't have anything to do with building a computer that had component X, feature Y, or interface Z. The two Steves realized that what they had wasn't just an incrementally-better computer -- just another toy for geeks -- but something capable of changing civilization. Once they realized that they were holding the football, they took off running in the right direction with it. That's not as easy as it sounds.
Which just reinforces my point that it was the reality distortion field that was behind their success, not anything about the system or its design.
Don't get me wrong, the reality distortion field is truly a marvel that generates $Billions of revenue, and it continues just as strong today: Witness a vast army of fanbois gladly transitioning over to their former arch nemesis CPU, and countless supposed "live free or die" slashdotters blithely buying into proprietary DRM lockin.
Here's a man who was used by Steve Jobs to launch a brand and didn't even get justly compensated
But what did he do that was so unique? He designed a computer using off-the-shelf parts, which had already been done by Altair. Apple's innovation was to attach a keyboard and monitor and sell it pre-assembled. If Wozniak and Jobs hadn't done it, somebody else would have certainly come up with this same obvious idea within a matter of months.
Technically, the Apple II was basically equivalent to many of the ordinary microcomputer systems sold in the 70s, most of which were designed by unsung anonymous engineers who only ended up with a few $thousand in salary. Most of the Apple II's perceived value over its competitors was derived from Jobs' reality distortion field and the bragging rights to say "we thought of it a few weeks before anyone else did".
The untrustworthiness of the plants' owners and operators is part of the security equation. Proliferation of nuclear weapons is part of the security equation. Insecure nuclear technology is unsafe nuclear technology. The track record over the last 50 years of stopping countries from using nuclear power programs as a cover for nuclear weapons development has been abysmal.
If a large portion of the world can't be trusted with nuclear power technology (or won't be trustable after their next coup d'etat), then nuclear power is never going to be the solution to the world's energy needs.
Except in the world of your analogy where information is exactly equivalent to physical property, the general public is legally entitled to take a portion of the stuff from your house, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Honoring your sticky note is just a courtesy commonly practiced by Internet search providers. They're not required to do it.
Nevertheless, that's how it works once you start piling them together in bulk. The sizes of the electrons' orbitals, which are determined by their probabilistic wave functions, largely define the sizes of the atoms.
Without this source of parts, the creative genius of american youth will not be able to grow to understand technology the way our national security needs.
I have to agree. When I was a kid Radio Shack gave me a real head start in electrical engineering principles like series and parallel resistance calculations: By never having the actual values that I needed in stock, I had to learn to mentally rig together an equivalent value with whatever scraps I could actually find on their shelves. And with their markup of $1.79 for a pair of 1/2-cent resistors, there was a real financial incentive to find the most efficient solution. Radio Shack shopping was a valuable part of my technical education.
I don't care what the chips have in them. If you don't have enough fundamental particles to build the features, Moore's law must come to an end. By my math, with 18-month doubling, the chip feature count exceeds the number of particles in the known universe in less than 400 years.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the lower the mass of a particle, the greater the uncertainty in its position. The "size" of atoms is determined mainly by the uncertainty in position of the low-mass electrons that surround them. (The nucleus of an atom is far smaller than the atom as a whole because the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are orders of magnitude more massive than the electrons.)
To create matter with stable features packed more densely than ordinary atoms, you'd have to use only particles that weigh more than electrons. Otherwise, the uncertainty in their positions would inflate their effective sizes to be just as big as what we work with today.
Examples of such matter have been created. For example, replacing an electron with a negatively charged muon (which is ~100 times heavier than an electron) in a hydrogen atom creates a very compact atom. However, muons are unstable and these atoms live only a few microseconds. (That may be a good thing since the compactness also allows the atoms to undergo nuclear fusion at room temperature, so a bunch of that stuff in one place would be an extremely dangerous and volatile mixture.)
Generally, the smaller the particle, the higher the mass and/or energy of that particle. Neither one of those properties seem to be helpful for trying to create high speed or low power circuits.
So even if you could find a stable form of matter with a much denser structure than atomic matter, and even if this matter could be safely handled (although I suspect that the most likely application of such matter would be for WMDs or interstellar rocket fuel), it's not clear that you could use it to create high-performance logic circuits.
It's not a law. It's just incorrectly called a law.
It should be plainly obvious that any exponentially increasing phenomenon can't be a "law". If this so-called law were to continue unabated for a couple of centuries, the number of transistors in a chip would exceed the number of atoms on planet earth. Clearly, a limit is going to be reached well before that happens.
Any chance of "whoops we made an Ebola variant that spreads like the common cold" ?
No problem. Just take new NyQuil-EB: It's the one cold medication especially designed for when you have those itchy, sneezy, bleeding-out-of-every-orifice cold symptoms.
Nothing worse than being at a job you're more than qualified for but not getting to use all you know.
Well, that really shouldn't be surprising in this case. Any time your job is in some specialized "lab" that deals with stuff outside of your company's core line of business, you're very likely to end up marginalized. Such labs often include things like competitive product analysis, interfacing your products with 3rd-party products, labs that build demos for dog-and-pony shows, etc.
I've seen lots of people unhappy in those kinds of positions, and I've been stuck in them myself once or twice. I would have told him think it over long and hard before accepting that job offer.
If you're worried about that, then you should be frightened that the contents of your bank account is currently represented by the quantum spin states of a tiny handful of electrons on some magnetic disk. The tiniest jolt of energy could nudge those electrons and wipe you out financially!
Thanks for continuing to propagate irrational fear of nuclear materials. Fallout is associated with the older, "dirtier" fission nukes. We haven't seen one like that in, what... 45 or 50 years? This is also different - not only because the amount of emissions are small - but because it's neutrons.
And what are neutrons? Oh yeah, just one of the most penetrating and dangerous forms of radiation. Why else do you think that when they had to find a form of radiation that could kill tank crews inside their vehicles, the viable choice was the neutron bomb?
Pure fusion bombs create huge numbers of neutrons. If the explosion is near the ground, these neutrons can activate the debris that gets sucked into the mushroom cloud and create plenty of fallout. (Not to mention, most bombs use a natural uranium case to get a cheap energy boost when it's fissioned by the extra fusion neutrons. Most of total the energy output is often still fission.)
And any amount of emissions that's intense enough to kill cancer tumors isn't exactly "small".
Also: Nowhere in the article does it mention anything about breaking apart massive atoms and leaving behind radioactive isotopes that are chemically reactive in the human body; Which, I assume, is what you're so worried about.
Instead, you add neutrons to the the elements already inside your body, thereby turning them into dangerous radioactive isotopes where they sit.
Whatever you may think humans have done to the planet, it's gone through much bigger changes before we were ever here.
That's true. However, at some of those times this planet has been just about totally uninhabitable by humans. Are you suggesting that in the worst case we just kill ourselves off and then wait for the planet to recover so some new species can evolve to take our place?
Wouldn't it made more sense to sue the fleeing criminal?
In many cases the criminal may be found to be acting irrationally because he's mentally ill or on drugs. If so, the police should be liable because they know what's likely to happen if they start chasing someone who's acting crazy. In the case of mental illness, the criminal is unlikely to be effectively held liable anyway.
The ability to sue the police over this is a good thing, because there are already too many high speed chases that put innocent bystanders in danger. The risk of lawsuits forces police to find alternatives such as this which help catch the criminals without putting more lives at risk. Lamenting about how the criminals are the only ones responsible doesn't change anything. There have always been reckless criminals loose in society, and there always will be. Only the police have the ability to change the methods that are used to apprehend criminals.
I've got news for you, naive AC. Throughout history, people have generally never honored any "terms of agreement" without some kind of enforcement. Lamenting about that doesn't change anything. And copyrights aren't an "agreement" anyway, they're a dictum from above.
DRM is an attempt to implement enforcement of the current system in a world where the technological limitations that originally enabled the current system have been lifted. The result is both the loss of the benefits of the new technology and the content producers placing *new* restrictions on their products that never existed before. My point is, the bargain isn't worth it. We'd be better off without the extra content supposedly provided by DRM.
BTW, your "fair use" and "right of first sale" are some of the first victims of DRM, so your point about that is moot.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government really cares about the security of their intelligence operations, then they should be careful to follow the law. Otherwise, they risk having details of the operations revealed in the course of efforts to bring to justice the criminals in the government who ignore the laws.
Apparently, the government doesn't seem care all that much about the laws, so they must not think that there's much real security risk in revealing this stuff.
I'm guessing that the vast majority of HDTVs in existence right now don't have more than 1 HDCP input. What happens when every media source wants to hog it? The cable company, the DVD makers, DRMd internet movie download vendors, etc. are all going to insist on HDCP connections. Do they expect people to plug and unplug cables on the back of their TVs every time they switch playback devices?
Which just reinforces my point that it was the reality distortion field that was behind their success, not anything about the system or its design.
Don't get me wrong, the reality distortion field is truly a marvel that generates $Billions of revenue, and it continues just as strong today: Witness a vast army of fanbois gladly transitioning over to their former arch nemesis CPU, and countless supposed "live free or die" slashdotters blithely buying into proprietary DRM lockin.
But what did he do that was so unique? He designed a computer using off-the-shelf parts, which had already been done by Altair. Apple's innovation was to attach a keyboard and monitor and sell it pre-assembled. If Wozniak and Jobs hadn't done it, somebody else would have certainly come up with this same obvious idea within a matter of months.
Technically, the Apple II was basically equivalent to many of the ordinary microcomputer systems sold in the 70s, most of which were designed by unsung anonymous engineers who only ended up with a few $thousand in salary. Most of the Apple II's perceived value over its competitors was derived from Jobs' reality distortion field and the bragging rights to say "we thought of it a few weeks before anyone else did".
If a large portion of the world can't be trusted with nuclear power technology (or won't be trustable after their next coup d'etat), then nuclear power is never going to be the solution to the world's energy needs.
Maybe because when you take security issues into account, it's not safe at all.
Honoring your sticky note is just a courtesy commonly practiced by Internet search providers. They're not required to do it.
Nevertheless, that's how it works once you start piling them together in bulk. The sizes of the electrons' orbitals, which are determined by their probabilistic wave functions, largely define the sizes of the atoms.
I have to agree. When I was a kid Radio Shack gave me a real head start in electrical engineering principles like series and parallel resistance calculations: By never having the actual values that I needed in stock, I had to learn to mentally rig together an equivalent value with whatever scraps I could actually find on their shelves. And with their markup of $1.79 for a pair of 1/2-cent resistors, there was a real financial incentive to find the most efficient solution. Radio Shack shopping was a valuable part of my technical education.
In the context of a stationary solid material as I was discussing, it's true enough.
I don't care what the chips have in them. If you don't have enough fundamental particles to build the features, Moore's law must come to an end. By my math, with 18-month doubling, the chip feature count exceeds the number of particles in the known universe in less than 400 years.
To create matter with stable features packed more densely than ordinary atoms, you'd have to use only particles that weigh more than electrons. Otherwise, the uncertainty in their positions would inflate their effective sizes to be just as big as what we work with today.
Examples of such matter have been created. For example, replacing an electron with a negatively charged muon (which is ~100 times heavier than an electron) in a hydrogen atom creates a very compact atom. However, muons are unstable and these atoms live only a few microseconds. (That may be a good thing since the compactness also allows the atoms to undergo nuclear fusion at room temperature, so a bunch of that stuff in one place would be an extremely dangerous and volatile mixture.)
Please go learn something about quantum mechanics before you post your judgements.
Generally, the smaller the particle, the higher the mass and/or energy of that particle. Neither one of those properties seem to be helpful for trying to create high speed or low power circuits.
So even if you could find a stable form of matter with a much denser structure than atomic matter, and even if this matter could be safely handled (although I suspect that the most likely application of such matter would be for WMDs or interstellar rocket fuel), it's not clear that you could use it to create high-performance logic circuits.
It's not a law. It's just incorrectly called a law.
It should be plainly obvious that any exponentially increasing phenomenon can't be a "law". If this so-called law were to continue unabated for a couple of centuries, the number of transistors in a chip would exceed the number of atoms on planet earth. Clearly, a limit is going to be reached well before that happens.
No problem. Just take new NyQuil-EB: It's the one cold medication especially designed for when you have those itchy, sneezy, bleeding-out-of-every-orifice cold symptoms.
Well, that really shouldn't be surprising in this case. Any time your job is in some specialized "lab" that deals with stuff outside of your company's core line of business, you're very likely to end up marginalized. Such labs often include things like competitive product analysis, interfacing your products with 3rd-party products, labs that build demos for dog-and-pony shows, etc.
I've seen lots of people unhappy in those kinds of positions, and I've been stuck in them myself once or twice. I would have told him think it over long and hard before accepting that job offer.
If you're worried about that, then you should be frightened that the contents of your bank account is currently represented by the quantum spin states of a tiny handful of electrons on some magnetic disk. The tiniest jolt of energy could nudge those electrons and wipe you out financially!
And what are neutrons? Oh yeah, just one of the most penetrating and dangerous forms of radiation. Why else do you think that when they had to find a form of radiation that could kill tank crews inside their vehicles, the viable choice was the neutron bomb?
Pure fusion bombs create huge numbers of neutrons. If the explosion is near the ground, these neutrons can activate the debris that gets sucked into the mushroom cloud and create plenty of fallout. (Not to mention, most bombs use a natural uranium case to get a cheap energy boost when it's fissioned by the extra fusion neutrons. Most of total the energy output is often still fission.)
And any amount of emissions that's intense enough to kill cancer tumors isn't exactly "small".
Also: Nowhere in the article does it mention anything about breaking apart massive atoms and leaving behind radioactive isotopes that are chemically reactive in the human body; Which, I assume, is what you're so worried about.
Instead, you add neutrons to the the elements already inside your body, thereby turning them into dangerous radioactive isotopes where they sit.
I say go for the mountaintop landing. It's much harder, but if you survive you score way more points, and you get an extra fuel bonus.
Okeeedokeey.... You go first.
That's true. However, at some of those times this planet has been just about totally uninhabitable by humans. Are you suggesting that in the worst case we just kill ourselves off and then wait for the planet to recover so some new species can evolve to take our place?
In many cases the criminal may be found to be acting irrationally because he's mentally ill or on drugs. If so, the police should be liable because they know what's likely to happen if they start chasing someone who's acting crazy. In the case of mental illness, the criminal is unlikely to be effectively held liable anyway.
The ability to sue the police over this is a good thing, because there are already too many high speed chases that put innocent bystanders in danger. The risk of lawsuits forces police to find alternatives such as this which help catch the criminals without putting more lives at risk. Lamenting about how the criminals are the only ones responsible doesn't change anything. There have always been reckless criminals loose in society, and there always will be. Only the police have the ability to change the methods that are used to apprehend criminals.
DRM is an attempt to implement enforcement of the current system in a world where the technological limitations that originally enabled the current system have been lifted. The result is both the loss of the benefits of the new technology and the content producers placing *new* restrictions on their products that never existed before. My point is, the bargain isn't worth it. We'd be better off without the extra content supposedly provided by DRM.
BTW, your "fair use" and "right of first sale" are some of the first victims of DRM, so your point about that is moot.