No, it doesn't. That's the grade-school version of things. I work at a particle accelerator, and we also have to worry about X-rays (lower energy than gamma, but still dangerous), neutrons, and protons (they're what the cyclotron accelerates).
3. Gamma Radiation - This is what cellphones give off. They are simply high energy photons with a specific frequency. Light might be considered gamma radiation. The higher the frequency, the more damaging they are.
Here, you're just plain wrong. Gamma and visible light are both subsets of electromagnetic radiation, but they are not the same thing. Gamma photons are much higher energy than visible light photons, and microwave photons (what cell phones emit) are lower energy. This is extremely important, because, below a certain threshold (I believe in the UV region), electromagnetic radiation is non-ionizing, meaning that the photons don't have enough energy to ionize atoms and create free radicals.
Why does that matter? That mechanism is the main way electromagnetic radiation can cause tissue damage, besides thermal effects. Since cell phones emit microwaves, which are non-ionizing, we don't have to worry about it too much. As for thermal effects, cell phones don't put out nearly enough power to dangerously heat your brain.
It's still possible there's some mechanism by which microwaves affect the rate of some chemical process in the brain, which, through some complicated, indirect mechanism, increases the risk of cancer, but it's very unlikely. Nobody has found such a mechanism, and there's no good evidence to suggest a cancer link. If you're worried about radiation, get your basement checked for radon. About half of your annual dose of radiation probably comes from radon decay (more if you live in France or certain other places), and, if you're going to be paranoid, installing good ventillation in your basement is the easiest, cheapest, and least foolish way of doing so...
Interesting argument. And one that I am not sure I can refute.
Touche.
First of all, thank you for the civilized debate. It's a rare thing on slashdot... You seem to be a rational, open-minded individual, and the world needs more like you.
I guess we've come to the conclusion that the government may have important 20 year-old secrets, but we can't reasonably find out if they do.
I figure their security experts probably know best, so they should be the ones making the decisions, not politicians who think the internet is synonymous with the web.
for i in `seq 1 16`; do cat/dev/urandom | cat >/dev/hda; done what the fuck can you recover after that? you can't do wizard things... What the hell can the NSA know more about filesystems that us, who understand and write filesystems?
There is a world beyond software, fool. Read this article. In case you're too lazy to click the link, you can recover data from a drive by disassembling it and using magnetic force microscopy with a scanning tunneling microscope. Even after you overwrite a bit, there are still traces of its previous value.
I stand my ground that 20 year old secrets are quite lame and not worth protecting. Your post was the one that seemed most rational, as it focused on things such as spy networks. No problem. That almost makes sense. If the network hasn't already been compromised (Aldrigde Ames, et al.)
So, in other words, you're saying my point about spy networks would isn't valid, since the secret had been blown. There's a bit of a problem, though: If there is any 20 year-old info that needs to stay secret (and has), how the hell am I supposed to know about it to rebut your argument? The government probably has all sorts of stuff that's 20 years old that is still secret, and it's not about to surface on Slashdot.
I have largely reversed my opinion, based on one small thing that I haven't (yet) seen mentioned: most of these machines don't have 20-50 year old data on them. Most like, it is just a few months.
I wasn't saying the data was necessarily old now, but that, even if the technology doesn't currently exist to recover the drives, it could still be a problem if such technology is developed in 10 years. If they're just retiring the computers now, then, in all likelyhood, the data isn't too old.
This happens daily already. It's called middle management.
That was exactly my point:-) Except, imagine your boss has the power to create new laws if he doesn't like the current ones. See, things could be worse:-)
A few years ago, in France (ok, not the best example for clever militaries
LOL!!! Think "Maginot Line", folks! Still, it's a good point.
Seriously, though, why not just take all the money that was to be spent on wiping the drives (most likely 200 MB deals on 486s), and use it to buy decent computers for the schools? As if schools can't get enough 486s as it is... Hell, most schools won't even take them anymore.
All Soviet troop movements from the spring of 1979 to the summer of 1980,
The latest blueprints for their newest fighter,
These are fairly lame examples, but I'll work with them anyway... Troop movements would reveal tactics and doctrine, which don't change very quickly. Fighters and other military hardware often stay in service for 30 or 40 years (think--when was the F-15 introduced). Hell, the Russians are about 20 years behind the US in sub quieting technology, so getting old info there could probably still help them, and then we'd see the technology show up in subs sold to the Chinese (and, in turn, to every two-bit rogue nation in the world).
A much better example of something that would still need to be secret after 20 years would be the names of agents operating in foreign countries. Admittedly, that would be classified, but the original poster was talking about releasing drives that had held classified data (and I pointed out that it's hard to be sure a computer wasn't ever used for classified stuff).
Why take chances with national security just to get some crappy 486s into schools? For the cost of proper data wiping (remember, the Pentagon never does anything cheap), you could probably buy them Pentiums.
... even the computers that had classified information on their harddrives should be allowed to be re-used.
No, no, no! Information can be recovered long after the second or third overwrite. Here's my
source. And that's just what the public knows how to do. Who knows what the NSA and their foreign counterparts can manage.
Remember that, when dealing with data security, you don't just need to worry about what your enemy can do now, you need to worry about their capabilities 20 years from now. If the data has to stay secure for 50 years, then the only choice is to destroy the drive (we may have nanotech by then, and then you'd probably be able to uncover everything that was ever written to the drive).
Please, people, the NSA and the Pentagon have people who know way the fuck more about security than you or me. Leave matters of national security up to them, and go back to worrying about how to make your home linux box secure... Write to your politicians, and tell them to stop meddling. Getting 486s for schools may sound like a noble cause, but if it costs the lives of American soldiers 5 years from now, was it worth it?
This is a very bad decision, which I'm sure is being mad for political and not security reasons. From the article:
Others supported it after an audit found sensitive information such as lists of names and addresses had been left on hard drives of donated computers. Though unclassified, they said such cases still present risks.
This is entirely true. There's a lot of information that, when taken individually, isn't dangerous, but, when combined with large amounts of other info, could present a security hazard. Maybe one piece of unclassified info says the Air Force is building a new stealth fighter, and another piece of info is an Air Force requisition order for 20 tons of titanium. Put 2 and 2 together, and you know that the new fighter will be made of titanium... (Example borrowed from The Cuckoo's Egg). Also, are you sure that none of those computers was ever used for classified information?
Now I know the Slashdot editors (and more than a few Slashdotters) think that they're left-wing 31337 political h4X0rs, and that the Pentagon is completely incompetent, but maybe, just maybe, you should do some fucking research before your criticize somebody.
Completely deleting data is very, very hard. Wiping a drive securely against a determined and experienced foe may take more than 20 passes. Considering the physical security at most schools, giving the drives to schools is as good as handing them to the Russians/Chinese/Martians or whoever is the enemy of the day. If the drives haven't been properly wiped, you might as well give them accounts on all the DoD computer networks so they don't have to steal computers from school kids. I also would say it's a lot easier to smash a drive into itty bitty pieces and burn them than it is to properly erase it.
When dealing with national security, one should generally err on the side of caution.
Finally, for all you sysadmins and security experts out there, how would you like it if politicians with no computer knowledge whatsoever were second-guessing all your security decisions, while making sure you'd still take the fall if anything went wrong?
No, it's not theft, it's breach of contract. Copyright law prevents you from making any copies (with the exeception of fair use). Fair use applies only to certain educational, satirical, and journalistic uses, but does not apply to regular use, and does not give you permission to make any copies for normal use, even if it is necessary to do so to use the copyrighted item.
In other words, since the software/DVD has to be copied into memory to be used, you can't use it without a contract permitting you to do so. I believe this has been upheld in court, and if you read the fine print on a software license agreement, you'll see that they explicitly grant you permission to use the software (if they didn't, you couldn't use it). Company X can set whatever terms they want in their contract, including no reverse engineering, no use on non-authorized players, no playback in front of large audiences, etc. If you don't like the terms of the agreement and don't agree, then you can't watch, use, or install your DVD or software.
This is a rather braindead legal way of dealing with material that must be copied to be used, but that's the way things work...
According to Judy Elder, head of Microsoft Canada's Consumer Division, Canada generates more porn search requests than any other English-speaking country in the world. And that's total searches, not per capita. This is not a troll, nor is it a joke (although it's damn funny).
Maybe that's why we're leaders in the telecom business, and have better internet access options--we have the demand.
It is only wrong to make an unauthorized copy of a digital work if you did not intend to purchase the work in the first place.
i.e., I wouldn't have paid for it, but if I can get it for free, sure.
I'd say the exact opposite. It's only wrong to make an unauthorized copy if you were going to pay for it. In that case, you're depriving the copyright owner of revenues. Otherwise, there's no loss to them.
Some stores are paid to place fixtures with specific products on certain locations. But the product that a grocery store provides isn't the location, or quantity of new and improved Crap-in-a-can. The stores provide the availability of all the stuff you want, or might want, to buy. A better anology would be the collusion of some soft drink companies to "buy" more linear feet to prevent other soft drink companies from selling their wares.
The soda companies are just an extreme. I used to work in a grocery store that was part of a small chain, and virtually all product manufacturers paid for shelf space. It's not a huge deal.
Radio stations are free to play whatever they want without accepting kickbacks, and, if doing so meant the quality of their content was so much superior that the increase in listenership made up for the lost payola, they'd do it. Why don't they? Most people like teen-bopper mass-produced crap. This is unfortunate, but it's true. How many Britney Spears-loving pre-teens do you know?
They run (at the time I worked there) the worlds most powerful Ion Beam Implanter, which is about 10 meters long and sends ionized Oxygen into a chamber in which wafers are spinning through the ion beam at 200 RPM.
I have a feeling it's no longer the world's most powerful ion beam implanter... ISAC at TRIUMF can be run at 30keV, and the target can be floated anywhere from -29 to +60 keV, giving you a total range of 1 to 90 keV for implantation energy. We expect to be able to get (Li-8) ions to implant at around 60nm in gold at 30keV, which is a heck of a lot more dense than silicon. I haven't run any SRIM calculations with oxygen yet, but I'm guessing you could get way deeper than 60nm in silicon, even with oxygen.
As of three years ago, Motorola was a big purchaser of these wafers, and IBM was just getting into buying their own implanter.
SOI technology is now standard in at least some of the commercial PowerPC chips used by Apple (forget which ones), so they may just be using stock chips.
Who cares how many they sold--we are looking at it from a business prospective, right? What matters is net profit. If IBM sold twice as many boxes as Apple, but IBM's profit margin was one quarter of Apple's due to competition from clones, Apple comes out ahead.
The PowerPC 750 is also known as the G3, BTW. PowerPCs in space? Not the first time we've heard about such a plan. Of course, SkyCorp is using Apple-built G4 systems, while 3CS is probably just using the G3 with some off-the-shelf embedded controller-style board.
Does anybody know about the vulnerability of PowerPC chips to radiation, or how "rad-hardening" works in chips like the modified 386s the military uses? Cosmic rays tend to be very high energy, so shielding is probably not practical.
From what I understand, there are two types of radiation-induced errors. Hard errors involve damage to the chip, and are very bad. Soft errors are a matter of erroneously flipped bits, and are only somewhat bad. Soft errors could be compensated for through good software design, error correction, etc., but I would think the only real defense against hard errors would be to make the wires on the chip so damn big that a few defects here and there wouldn't matter.
I happen to work at a particle accelerator with an isotope seperator and accelerator, so you'd think I'd know this stuff, but I've never really thought about this particular application before. Oh well, if nobody answers me, I can always try a SRIM simulation at work tommorow (don't have a Windows box at home to run it on), to see how much shielding you'd need to stop cosmic rays, and how many defects they'd cause in silicon. If anybody wants easy karma points, download the SRIM software, run a simulation on a thick silicon layer with some high-energy alpha particles (helium nuclei at, say 1GeV), turn on damage calculations, and report the results back here, please. I'm sure somebody will mod you up.
While you may be of the opinion that Windows sucks more than ever, or that linux/OS X/BSD/BeOS/AmigaOS is more threatening than ever, that's largely irrelevant. Microsoft is a business, and their strength is reflected by business forcasts, price-to-earning ratios, and other financial indicators.
While Eazel is going out of business, Mandrake is asking resorting to donations, and countless other tech companies are hurting, Microsoft is doing just fine. They're not instituting mass layoffs. I know people who work there, and things are the same-old, same-old.
Linux may be a better OS, but it's not a better business plan, unfortunately.
As a PowerPC owner, why should I care? There are already a bunch of PPC Linux distros (which I've tried and wasn't hugely impressed with), and then there's Mac OS X. OS X has most of the cool stuff you can get out of a *NIX box, plus a really nice GUI.
I'd much rather see the effort go into making some of the existing PPC distros actually work. Too many things are broken after install, and it shouldn't be that way. I don't think I've ever seen a PPC linux install that didn't have at least two broken out of networking, sound, and X. You'd think that, given the relatively much smaller range of PPC hardware, making things work out of the box wouldn't be too hard.
I know the old battle cry of the open source zealot, "choice is always a good thing," but when my options are 'choice' or 'quality', I'll take quality. I think the open source world sometimes tends to do too much dividing and not enough conquering. All too often, new projects and distros are born out of internal conflicts between developers or other political reasons, rather than genuine technical necessity. In the infamous words of Rodney King,
Why can't we all just get along?
Maybe I'm being too hard on Mandrake--maybe they'll be the first to make a Linux distro for PPC that doesn't suck and actually works out of the box. Maybe Linus will stop putting out release kernels (not dev) that don't even compile on PPC. Maybe RMS will go work for Microsoft.
This is starting to sound like a troll. It's not. It's more of a bitter rant. I'm bitter that PPC linux has always been a second-class citizen to x86 Linux (despite claims of being a cross-platform OS). I'm bitter that people's efforts on the PPC side seem to be divided for petty reasons, rather than working together to produce one decent distro. I'm bitter that the PPC developers and Linus have such a poor relationship. I'm bitter the open source world can't do much better than imitate Windows when it comes to GUI design (and don't talk to me about skins or custom themes in Gnome or KDE--if you think those are what makes a GUI great, you have much to learn).
This is going to get me some angry KDE or Gnome zealots, for sure. People are going to accuse me of being wowed by the eye candy in OS X while being critical of KDE/Gnome for the same. For starters, OS X has better eye candy:-) but that's mostly irrelevant. What really is important is the system-wide consistency of the GUI on the Mac OS (and I'm talking mainly OS 9, since I haven't used X too much). Once you learn a few apps, you pretty much know where everything will be in every app. The same is not true of *nix. Hell, even emacs and xemacs have significantly different menu structures (at least the keyboard shortcuts are the same). Everybody has their own ideas on what's right, and they insist on doing it that way. Sometimes being consistent is more important than being right, at least with GUI design.
In the end it boils down to a simple question which you have yet to answer: would you like nuclear waste buried in your county?
Yes. In fact, nuclear waste is already buried in my country, along with your country, and every other fucking country in the world. It's called naturally-occuring uranium. Natural decay products from naturally-occuring radioactive elements account for about half your yearly exposure to radiation (and more if you live in certain parts of the world, like France, with high natural radon levels). Nuclear power accounts for much less than 1% of your yearly exposure.
Any movie about the pissant bombing of Pearl Harbor should also show the amazing "punishment" that we doled out to the Japanese. Millions of innocent civilians getting fried to a crisp. It pretty much dwarfs what little the Japanese were able to do to our Hawaiin base.
First of all, your numbers are wrong. About 200,000 Japanese died in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Predicted casualties in the case of an invasion of the Japanese "home islands" were in the millions (for each side).
Yes, the bomb killed lots of people, but many more would have died if it had not been used.Two other facts you don't often hear:
Before the bombing of Hiroshima, the US dropped leaflets warning citizens that the city would be destroyed, and telling them to evacuate.
Even though there were three days between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese did not surrender during this interval. Even after the second nuclear bombing, the Japanese war council wanted to continue the war. They were overruled by the emperor. Most people simply don't understand how committed and determined the Japanese were. You have to study battles like Iwo Jima and Okinawa to really understand the WWII Japanese psyche. They were incredibly ferocious warriors, and it took the seemingly-magical powers of the atomic bomb to make them surrender.
Oh, and does it show the US concentration camps for US citizens that happened to be of Japanese descent?
Oh, fuck off. The film didn't show the American treatment of Japanese-Americans (which was a shameful atrocity), but it also didn't show the Japanese treatment of foreign nations (which was far, far worse--instead of concentration camps, try prison camps with forced labor and high death rates among prisoners). The movie was already 3 hours long, and none of that was relevant to Pearl Habor, which, if you didn't notice, was the title of the movie.
I am alive today because the Americans used nuclear weapons on the Japanese in WWII. My grandfather served in the occupation forces in Japan. If the bomb had not been used, he would have been in the invasion force, where casualties were expected to hit the 50% mark.
I was going to flame you for posting your ignorant drivel that dishonors the memories of the men and women who died for your freedom. Then I realized you probably just don't know the truth, and that it's not really your fault. This history is unfortunately not taught in American schools anymore (or so it would seem--I'm not American, so I don't know).
As a final note, I haven't yet seen this movie. Long before it was released, I could have told you Jon Katz would review it negatively, simply because of the subject matter. Consequently, I have no way of knowing if his review is accurate or not. I would appreciate a review from someone less hostile to American patriotism (and less whiney) before I make a decision as to whether I should see the movie.
The reason diesel supporters claim they produce less soot is because the soot particles are smaller now--too small to be detected by current tests, so it seems like there's less soot, even though total soot output hasn't really changed. Unfortunately, these smaller soot particles are harder for your lungs to clear out, because they can more easily embed in the lung walls, instead of getting swept out by the natural mucous flow. Because of this, they're likely worse for you. (These new diesels are known as Clean Diesels, and are a favourite of my local bus company, which is how I know about them.)
If you Americans really want to save the environment, switch to nuclear power. Build the freaking Yucca Mountain repository, and stop worrying. You're all getting more than 50 times as much radiation from naturally-occuring radon as you are from the nuclear industry. Even if you happened to be living at the outer fence of Three Mile Island during the accident, you still only would have taken a dose equivalent to the normal naturally-occuring yearly dose (~1 milisievert). It's just not a big deal. If you still feel concerned about radiation, get your house tested for radon, and don't fly to France (flying exposes you to higher levels of cosmic radiation, and France has high levels of naturally-occuring radon).
Once you have clean electricity, electric cars actually make sense. As it is, you're mostly just moving the pollution around. (Yes, yes, I know you can produce electricity more cleanly on a large scale than you can produce power in a car, but, when you factor in transmission losses and other inefficiencies involved in electric cars, it's all about the same, so screw off).
That's because running Aqua puts a serious load on your CPU. I know just using the GUI for mundane navigational tasks puts my CPU (a 233 MHz G3, I admit) at about 30% load.
Try logging in as "console" (or was it ">console"?), and see if the fan comes on.
Slashdot Mirror
Radiation falls into three main categories:
No, it doesn't. That's the grade-school version of things. I work at a particle accelerator, and we also have to worry about X-rays (lower energy than gamma, but still dangerous), neutrons, and protons (they're what the cyclotron accelerates).
3. Gamma Radiation - This is what cellphones give off. They are simply high energy photons with a specific frequency. Light might be considered gamma radiation. The higher the frequency, the more damaging they are.
Here, you're just plain wrong. Gamma and visible light are both subsets of electromagnetic radiation, but they are not the same thing. Gamma photons are much higher energy than visible light photons, and microwave photons (what cell phones emit) are lower energy. This is extremely important, because, below a certain threshold (I believe in the UV region), electromagnetic radiation is non-ionizing, meaning that the photons don't have enough energy to ionize atoms and create free radicals.
Why does that matter? That mechanism is the main way electromagnetic radiation can cause tissue damage, besides thermal effects. Since cell phones emit microwaves, which are non-ionizing, we don't have to worry about it too much. As for thermal effects, cell phones don't put out nearly enough power to dangerously heat your brain.
It's still possible there's some mechanism by which microwaves affect the rate of some chemical process in the brain, which, through some complicated, indirect mechanism, increases the risk of cancer, but it's very unlikely. Nobody has found such a mechanism, and there's no good evidence to suggest a cancer link. If you're worried about radiation, get your basement checked for radon. About half of your annual dose of radiation probably comes from radon decay (more if you live in France or certain other places), and, if you're going to be paranoid, installing good ventillation in your basement is the easiest, cheapest, and least foolish way of doing so...
Interesting argument. And one that I am not sure I can refute.
Touche.
First of all, thank you for the civilized debate. It's a rare thing on slashdot... You seem to be a rational, open-minded individual, and the world needs more like you.
I guess we've come to the conclusion that the government may have important 20 year-old secrets, but we can't reasonably find out if they do.
I figure their security experts probably know best, so they should be the ones making the decisions, not politicians who think the internet is synonymous with the web.
for i in `seq 1 16`; do cat /dev/urandom | cat > /dev/hda; done what the fuck can you recover after that? you can't do wizard things... What the hell can the NSA know more about filesystems that us, who understand and write filesystems?
There is a world beyond software, fool. Read this article. In case you're too lazy to click the link, you can recover data from a drive by disassembling it and using magnetic force microscopy with a scanning tunneling microscope. Even after you overwrite a bit, there are still traces of its previous value.
I stand my ground that 20 year old secrets are quite lame and not worth protecting. Your post was the one that seemed most rational, as it focused on things such as spy networks. No problem. That almost makes sense. If the network hasn't already been compromised (Aldrigde Ames, et al.)
So, in other words, you're saying my point about spy networks would isn't valid, since the secret had been blown. There's a bit of a problem, though: If there is any 20 year-old info that needs to stay secret (and has), how the hell am I supposed to know about it to rebut your argument? The government probably has all sorts of stuff that's 20 years old that is still secret, and it's not about to surface on Slashdot.
I have largely reversed my opinion, based on one small thing that I haven't (yet) seen mentioned: most of these machines don't have 20-50 year old data on them. Most like, it is just a few months.
I wasn't saying the data was necessarily old now, but that, even if the technology doesn't currently exist to recover the drives, it could still be a problem if such technology is developed in 10 years. If they're just retiring the computers now, then, in all likelyhood, the data isn't too old.
This happens daily already. It's called middle management.
:-) Except, imagine your boss has the power to create new laws if he doesn't like the current ones. See, things could be worse :-)
That was exactly my point
Not stuff encrypted with one-time pads...
A few years ago, in France (ok, not the best example for clever militaries
LOL!!! Think "Maginot Line", folks! Still, it's a good point.
Seriously, though, why not just take all the money that was to be spent on wiping the drives (most likely 200 MB deals on 486s), and use it to buy decent computers for the schools? As if schools can't get enough 486s as it is... Hell, most schools won't even take them anymore.
All Soviet troop movements from the spring of 1979 to the summer of 1980,
The latest blueprints for their newest fighter,
These are fairly lame examples, but I'll work with them anyway... Troop movements would reveal tactics and doctrine, which don't change very quickly. Fighters and other military hardware often stay in service for 30 or 40 years (think--when was the F-15 introduced). Hell, the Russians are about 20 years behind the US in sub quieting technology, so getting old info there could probably still help them, and then we'd see the technology show up in subs sold to the Chinese (and, in turn, to every two-bit rogue nation in the world).
A much better example of something that would still need to be secret after 20 years would be the names of agents operating in foreign countries. Admittedly, that would be classified, but the original poster was talking about releasing drives that had held classified data (and I pointed out that it's hard to be sure a computer wasn't ever used for classified stuff).
Why take chances with national security just to get some crappy 486s into schools? For the cost of proper data wiping (remember, the Pentagon never does anything cheap), you could probably buy them Pentiums.
... even the computers that had classified information on their harddrives should be allowed to be re-used.
No, no, no! Information can be recovered long after the second or third overwrite. Here's my
source. And that's just what the public knows how to do. Who knows what the NSA and their foreign counterparts can manage.
Remember that, when dealing with data security, you don't just need to worry about what your enemy can do now, you need to worry about their capabilities 20 years from now. If the data has to stay secure for 50 years, then the only choice is to destroy the drive (we may have nanotech by then, and then you'd probably be able to uncover everything that was ever written to the drive).
Please, people, the NSA and the Pentagon have people who know way the fuck more about security than you or me. Leave matters of national security up to them, and go back to worrying about how to make your home linux box secure... Write to your politicians, and tell them to stop meddling. Getting 486s for schools may sound like a noble cause, but if it costs the lives of American soldiers 5 years from now, was it worth it?
Now I know the Slashdot editors (and more than a few Slashdotters) think that they're left-wing 31337 political h4X0rs, and that the Pentagon is completely incompetent, but maybe, just maybe, you should do some fucking research before your criticize somebody.
Completely deleting data is very, very hard. Wiping a drive securely against a determined and experienced foe may take more than 20 passes. Considering the physical security at most schools, giving the drives to schools is as good as handing them to the Russians/Chinese/Martians or whoever is the enemy of the day. If the drives haven't been properly wiped, you might as well give them accounts on all the DoD computer networks so they don't have to steal computers from school kids. I also would say it's a lot easier to smash a drive into itty bitty pieces and burn them than it is to properly erase it.
When dealing with national security, one should generally err on the side of caution.
Finally, for all you sysadmins and security experts out there, how would you like it if politicians with no computer knowledge whatsoever were second-guessing all your security decisions, while making sure you'd still take the fall if anything went wrong?
No, it's not theft, it's breach of contract. Copyright law prevents you from making any copies (with the exeception of fair use). Fair use applies only to certain educational, satirical, and journalistic uses, but does not apply to regular use, and does not give you permission to make any copies for normal use, even if it is necessary to do so to use the copyrighted item.
In other words, since the software/DVD has to be copied into memory to be used, you can't use it without a contract permitting you to do so. I believe this has been upheld in court, and if you read the fine print on a software license agreement, you'll see that they explicitly grant you permission to use the software (if they didn't, you couldn't use it). Company X can set whatever terms they want in their contract, including no reverse engineering, no use on non-authorized players, no playback in front of large audiences, etc. If you don't like the terms of the agreement and don't agree, then you can't watch, use, or install your DVD or software.
This is a rather braindead legal way of dealing with material that must be copied to be used, but that's the way things work...
(IANAL, YMMV, RTFM, etc...)
No, it was something she said at a speech given to the Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Information Processing Society.
Try Apple.com. I believe the whole site (which has a hell of a lot of dynamic content) runs on MacOS X.
According to Judy Elder, head of Microsoft Canada's Consumer Division, Canada generates more porn search requests than any other English-speaking country in the world. And that's total searches, not per capita. This is not a troll, nor is it a joke (although it's damn funny).
Maybe that's why we're leaders in the telecom business, and have better internet access options--we have the demand.
It is only wrong to make an unauthorized copy of a digital work if you did not intend to purchase the work in the first place.
i.e., I wouldn't have paid for it, but if I can get it for free, sure.
I'd say the exact opposite. It's only wrong to make an unauthorized copy if you were going to pay for it. In that case, you're depriving the copyright owner of revenues. Otherwise, there's no loss to them.
Some stores are paid to place fixtures with specific products on certain locations. But the product that a grocery store provides isn't the location, or quantity of new and improved Crap-in-a-can. The stores provide the availability of all the stuff you want, or might want, to buy. A better anology would be the collusion of some soft drink companies to "buy" more linear feet to prevent other soft drink companies from selling their wares.
The soda companies are just an extreme. I used to work in a grocery store that was part of a small chain, and virtually all product manufacturers paid for shelf space. It's not a huge deal.
Radio stations are free to play whatever they want without accepting kickbacks, and, if doing so meant the quality of their content was so much superior that the increase in listenership made up for the lost payola, they'd do it. Why don't they? Most people like teen-bopper mass-produced crap. This is unfortunate, but it's true. How many Britney Spears-loving pre-teens do you know?
They run (at the time I worked there) the worlds most powerful Ion Beam Implanter, which is about 10 meters long and sends ionized Oxygen into a chamber in which wafers are spinning through the ion beam at 200 RPM.
I have a feeling it's no longer the world's most powerful ion beam implanter... ISAC at TRIUMF can be run at 30keV, and the target can be floated anywhere from -29 to +60 keV, giving you a total range of 1 to 90 keV for implantation energy. We expect to be able to get (Li-8) ions to implant at around 60nm in gold at 30keV, which is a heck of a lot more dense than silicon. I haven't run any SRIM calculations with oxygen yet, but I'm guessing you could get way deeper than 60nm in silicon, even with oxygen.
As of three years ago, Motorola was a big purchaser of these wafers, and IBM was just getting into buying their own implanter.
SOI technology is now standard in at least some of the commercial PowerPC chips used by Apple (forget which ones), so they may just be using stock chips.
Who cares how many they sold--we are looking at it from a business prospective, right? What matters is net profit. If IBM sold twice as many boxes as Apple, but IBM's profit margin was one quarter of Apple's due to competition from clones, Apple comes out ahead.
3CS will utilize a PowerPC 750 flight processor.
The PowerPC 750 is also known as the G3, BTW. PowerPCs in space? Not the first time we've heard about such a plan. Of course, SkyCorp is using Apple-built G4 systems, while 3CS is probably just using the G3 with some off-the-shelf embedded controller-style board.
Does anybody know about the vulnerability of PowerPC chips to radiation, or how "rad-hardening" works in chips like the modified 386s the military uses? Cosmic rays tend to be very high energy, so shielding is probably not practical.
From what I understand, there are two types of radiation-induced errors. Hard errors involve damage to the chip, and are very bad. Soft errors are a matter of erroneously flipped bits, and are only somewhat bad. Soft errors could be compensated for through good software design, error correction, etc., but I would think the only real defense against hard errors would be to make the wires on the chip so damn big that a few defects here and there wouldn't matter.
I happen to work at a particle accelerator with an isotope seperator and accelerator, so you'd think I'd know this stuff, but I've never really thought about this particular application before. Oh well, if nobody answers me, I can always try a SRIM simulation at work tommorow (don't have a Windows box at home to run it on), to see how much shielding you'd need to stop cosmic rays, and how many defects they'd cause in silicon. If anybody wants easy karma points, download the SRIM software, run a simulation on a thick silicon layer with some high-energy alpha particles (helium nuclei at, say 1GeV), turn on damage calculations, and report the results back here, please. I'm sure somebody will mod you up.
While you may be of the opinion that Windows sucks more than ever, or that linux/OS X/BSD/BeOS/AmigaOS is more threatening than ever, that's largely irrelevant. Microsoft is a business, and their strength is reflected by business forcasts, price-to-earning ratios, and other financial indicators.
While Eazel is going out of business, Mandrake is asking resorting to donations, and countless other tech companies are hurting, Microsoft is doing just fine. They're not instituting mass layoffs. I know people who work there, and things are the same-old, same-old.
Linux may be a better OS, but it's not a better business plan, unfortunately.
I'd much rather see the effort go into making some of the existing PPC distros actually work. Too many things are broken after install, and it shouldn't be that way. I don't think I've ever seen a PPC linux install that didn't have at least two broken out of networking, sound, and X. You'd think that, given the relatively much smaller range of PPC hardware, making things work out of the box wouldn't be too hard.
I know the old battle cry of the open source zealot, "choice is always a good thing," but when my options are 'choice' or 'quality', I'll take quality. I think the open source world sometimes tends to do too much dividing and not enough conquering. All too often, new projects and distros are born out of internal conflicts between developers or other political reasons, rather than genuine technical necessity. In the infamous words of Rodney King, Maybe I'm being too hard on Mandrake--maybe they'll be the first to make a Linux distro for PPC that doesn't suck and actually works out of the box. Maybe Linus will stop putting out release kernels (not dev) that don't even compile on PPC. Maybe RMS will go work for Microsoft.
This is starting to sound like a troll. It's not. It's more of a bitter rant. I'm bitter that PPC linux has always been a second-class citizen to x86 Linux (despite claims of being a cross-platform OS). I'm bitter that people's efforts on the PPC side seem to be divided for petty reasons, rather than working together to produce one decent distro. I'm bitter that the PPC developers and Linus have such a poor relationship. I'm bitter the open source world can't do much better than imitate Windows when it comes to GUI design (and don't talk to me about skins or custom themes in Gnome or KDE--if you think those are what makes a GUI great, you have much to learn).
This is going to get me some angry KDE or Gnome zealots, for sure. People are going to accuse me of being wowed by the eye candy in OS X while being critical of KDE/Gnome for the same. For starters, OS X has better eye candy
In the end it boils down to a simple question which you have yet to answer: would you like nuclear waste buried in your county?
Yes. In fact, nuclear waste is already buried in my country, along with your country, and every other fucking country in the world. It's called naturally-occuring uranium. Natural decay products from naturally-occuring radioactive elements account for about half your yearly exposure to radiation (and more if you live in certain parts of the world, like France, with high natural radon levels). Nuclear power accounts for much less than 1% of your yearly exposure.
Any movie about the pissant bombing of Pearl Harbor should also show the amazing "punishment" that we doled out to the Japanese. Millions of innocent civilians getting fried to a crisp. It pretty much dwarfs what little the Japanese were able to do to our Hawaiin base.
First of all, your numbers are wrong. About 200,000 Japanese died in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Predicted casualties in the case of an invasion of the Japanese "home islands" were in the millions (for each side).
Yes, the bomb killed lots of people, but many more would have died if it had not been used.Two other facts you don't often hear:
Before the bombing of Hiroshima, the US dropped leaflets warning citizens that the city would be destroyed, and telling them to evacuate.
Even though there were three days between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese did not surrender during this interval. Even after the second nuclear bombing, the Japanese war council wanted to continue the war. They were overruled by the emperor. Most people simply don't understand how committed and determined the Japanese were. You have to study battles like Iwo Jima and Okinawa to really understand the WWII Japanese psyche. They were incredibly ferocious warriors, and it took the seemingly-magical powers of the atomic bomb to make them surrender.
Oh, and does it show the US concentration camps for US citizens that happened to be of Japanese descent?
Oh, fuck off. The film didn't show the American treatment of Japanese-Americans (which was a shameful atrocity), but it also didn't show the Japanese treatment of foreign nations (which was far, far worse--instead of concentration camps, try prison camps with forced labor and high death rates among prisoners). The movie was already 3 hours long, and none of that was relevant to Pearl Habor, which, if you didn't notice, was the title of the movie.
I am alive today because the Americans used nuclear weapons on the Japanese in WWII. My grandfather served in the occupation forces in Japan. If the bomb had not been used, he would have been in the invasion force, where casualties were expected to hit the 50% mark.
I was going to flame you for posting your ignorant drivel that dishonors the memories of the men and women who died for your freedom. Then I realized you probably just don't know the truth, and that it's not really your fault. This history is unfortunately not taught in American schools anymore (or so it would seem--I'm not American, so I don't know).
As a final note, I haven't yet seen this movie. Long before it was released, I could have told you Jon Katz would review it negatively, simply because of the subject matter. Consequently, I have no way of knowing if his review is accurate or not. I would appreciate a review from someone less hostile to American patriotism (and less whiney) before I make a decision as to whether I should see the movie.
The reason diesel supporters claim they produce less soot is because the soot particles are smaller now--too small to be detected by current tests, so it seems like there's less soot, even though total soot output hasn't really changed. Unfortunately, these smaller soot particles are harder for your lungs to clear out, because they can more easily embed in the lung walls, instead of getting swept out by the natural mucous flow. Because of this, they're likely worse for you. (These new diesels are known as Clean Diesels, and are a favourite of my local bus company, which is how I know about them.)
If you Americans really want to save the environment, switch to nuclear power. Build the freaking Yucca Mountain repository, and stop worrying. You're all getting more than 50 times as much radiation from naturally-occuring radon as you are from the nuclear industry. Even if you happened to be living at the outer fence of Three Mile Island during the accident, you still only would have taken a dose equivalent to the normal naturally-occuring yearly dose (~1 milisievert). It's just not a big deal. If you still feel concerned about radiation, get your house tested for radon, and don't fly to France (flying exposes you to higher levels of cosmic radiation, and France has high levels of naturally-occuring radon).
Once you have clean electricity, electric cars actually make sense. As it is, you're mostly just moving the pollution around. (Yes, yes, I know you can produce electricity more cleanly on a large scale than you can produce power in a car, but, when you factor in transmission losses and other inefficiencies involved in electric cars, it's all about the same, so screw off).
That's because running Aqua puts a serious load on your CPU. I know just using the GUI for mundane navigational tasks puts my CPU (a 233 MHz G3, I admit) at about 30% load.
Try logging in as "console" (or was it ">console"?), and see if the fan comes on.