Do you have a CD player in your 1991 Saab? If you don't could you get one for it? Do you not want a CD player integrated into your car for the reasons you state above? Would a phone be any different? In 1991 car CD players were crap. I would never want one of those in my car today. They skipped all the time and often had components that broke easily.
But having an old car doesn't mean having an old CD player.
I went into the X-Files as SF earlier, but let me tackle it this way.
What if I told you that an episode of the X-Files was about monks who were bringing about the end of the world by calculating the permutations of the name of God on a computer. Sounds like a fairly plausible episode to me, and would not stick out from other X-Files episodes.... It also happens to be the plot of The Nine Billion Names of God, which won the World Science Fiction Convention's Retrospective Hugo for 1953.
Science fiction is about the nature of science and discovery and our relationship to them, not just the technology and aparatus of science. When we question what the nature of belief and skeptecism are in fiction, we are very much engaging in science fiction just as the great short story authors of the 30s-60s did and just as Twilight Zone did.
The presence of space ships and ray guns is not reasonable benchmark for the genre.
That's not sci-fi, that's pseudo-scientific psychic crap
You may not like science fiction of the X-Files variety, but that's tough. It is, in fact, speculative fiction, though almost always very soft SF (the difference between hard and soft SF being the extent to which it is rooted in science, and no there's no absolute line between the two).
And what are the odds that this show gives legitmacy to The Department of Fath^H^H^H^H Homeland Security
Ha! You don't know Ellis very well do you? Read Transmetropolitan someday (essentially it comes down to a distopian near-future with our protagonist, a reporter modeled on Hunter S Thompson, attempting to expose the corruption of society to itself). Ellis is anything but the kind of status-quo apologist that you suggest, and I suspect that the fact that he was willing to be involved in this series indicates a) that it was of a quality we have rarely if ever seen on television and b) the very reason that the WB couldn't stomach it.
I'll be glad if it never airs. So much crap on TV. I've got a grand total of four shows I bother to watch: 1) Enterprise, 2) Stargate, 3) MythBusters, and 4) BattleStar Galactica
Ulch. You're worried about status-quo apologism, and you hail modern Star Trek? I mean, I'm a softy for Star Trek too because I grew up with it, but to put those two concepts in the same post, suggesting that they are not so mutually exclusive as to be dangerous together is rather striking.
Absolutely. This is the idea behind many of the safety measures that are build into our society. The reason, for example, that you face a jury instead of just a judge is so that, in extreme situations, conscience will win out, and jurors will feel compelled to vote their conscience. They are your last recourse.
Now, I will say that I have no problems with robots with guns, as long as the robots are just waldos or slightly smarter. What I will not tollerate, and will quit my job and become a full-time political activist in the face of, is robot soldiers that are autonomous enough that a small group of individuals (say 1000 or less) can wield enough power to wrest control of the country away from elected officials.
I may dispise the current adminstration, but I will admit that they are a far cry better than a military dictatorship (if you disagree, then I admire your optimism... you have no idea how bad it can get), and what keeps a military dictatorship from happening is the fact that unit after unit after unit would refuse to follow orders if their superior officers told them to take action against their chain of command.
Let's go a step further. I don't want a phone! I want a house and a car and a computer and whatever else... and they should all have build-in phones. We should stop thinking of the phone as a device with low-end appliances built in. We should be building phones into the best-of-breed appliances. Why shouldn't an iPod come with a cell phone build in? Reduces the number of items you have to carry by one, and doesn't even require a form-factor change.
Why not have that base-unit for your wireless keyboard and mouse also provide a (physically switched, thank you very much) speakerphone that speaks VoIP? Why do I need a second device on my desk?
Why should a car ever ship without a built-in phone?
Of course, much of the reason for this is financial. The cell companies fight hard against making it easy to move your phone between services, and if appliances came with built-in phones, people would demand that they be able to sign up or not sign up for a service of their choosing at their leisure, otherwise it's more of an extra fee, and they'll prefer devices without phones.
I think that can be overcome, though, regardless of how much the industry likes it.
Not trivially, no. There are many reasons for this. First, "just a phone" is a term that is in flux. Certainly 15 years ago, that meant a device that was attached to a wall either directly or by a short cord, and converted your face-noise to analog signal on a copper wire.
So, what you're saying now is you want a wireless phone-like device. Then you say you want to block numbers... well that's not really a phone-like thing at all. Certainly not a phone-like thing when measured against what phones have done for the last 50 years!
You're asking for a new device. While your wish list is nice, to ignore the wish list of the vast majority of other customers would be neglegent on the part of the management of the cell phone manufacturers.
No I don't want a crappy digital camera on my phone.
And yet, the idea of camera phones has caught on like wildfire, and is one of the single most popular modifications to the basic cell phone since user-downloadable ring-tones. I'm not saying you're wrong not to want this, but to act as if the industry is going off half cocked and ignoring the customer is putting blinders on to who the customer really is.
No I don't want a crappy music player on my phone. No I don't want a crappy web browser on my phone.
Granted, implementations of these features have been lame to say the best.
What the world really IS waiting for is a decent, way to manage contacts. Now that phones are portable, we NEED a way to have our numbers move with us as trivially as that note-pad that we used to keep by the phone pre-cell. Replacing a phone should not be traumatic, but because of the proprietary formats involved it IS. You usually need a for-pay version of Outlook on Windows just to read the data from your phone. This makes no sense.
You've obviously never worked for the US Government as a contractor or employee.
Contractor, yes. Employee, no. I've worked for the DoT (Volpe Center) and DoJ (INS, St. Albans) and done small amounts of sub-sub-contractor work for the DoD. The fact that you consider it obvious that I cannot have done this speaks to our differing experiences, which is to be expected, I guess, when you're talking about the nation's largest employer.
when silly nerds working on documentation get bored, they tend to stick some really stupid stuff in there
And hence, my statement: this is a joke. When the DoD says, "yes we published that in all seriousness," then get upset over wasted science dollars, until then I would ignore it as at best misinformation and at worst disgrunteled AF contractors trying to embarass the DoD.
No, I meant Bush. Clinton pushed hard against Microsoft's monopoly (and the mountains of money that MS funnelled into the Republican party as a result probably hurt the Democrats far more than the impeachment hearings). I also didn't mean Republicans in general. There are many republicans that find the idea of protecting businesses from the law to be repugnant, but Bush is not one of them. Backing off of the Microsoft prosecution was one of Bush's first actions, and it was a dramatic and undisputable move.
The Justice dept. could easily have pushed Bill up against a wall with the conviction that they'd gained, and forced them to open the protocols and formats that they'd been using to lock in their customers. They were close... very close... and then Bush took over and they stopped.
I meant Bush, not "a Republocrat", whatever that is.
Has to be a joke. Read the PDF. The name of the sub-contractor is "Warp Drive" and the end of the document contains discussions of "negative energy" and all kinds of totally bogus junk that looks like it was culled from a Star Trek script.
Seriously, this is some fan-boy trying to rile up the millitary conspiracy theorists (and apparently doing quite well).
Until the DoD comes out and says, "yes, this is ours and we published it in all seriousness," please stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
I've been using Linux for years, but what value is linux going to add for a machine like this?
What Linux adds to the mix is highly questionable. Microsoft has done an excellent job of partitioning the market so that only their proprietary codecs play the hot-new-release-of-the-week video streams correctly and as others have pointed out, DRM will magnify the problem by orders of magnitude.
There are also patent concerns. Much of the software under Linux that views video is either having to use binary-only codecs that have been... ahem... "extracted" from Windows software or they are violating patents in writing their own versions of the codecs that, in many cases, don't work correctly.
On the other hand, a strong Linux-baaed consortium of media device manufacturers including HP and TiVo might have prevented Microsoft lock-in of the coming general purpose media computing revolution, which will allow Microsoft to dictate terms to the hardware vendors in the same way that they did (continue to do) with the PC.
As long as Bush is in office (no jab against Republicans in general, but this is simply a fact of his administration's policies) Microsoft knows that they need not fear the Justice department, so unless HP is planning in such long-range terms that the next four years of Microsoft power-consolidation are of no concern, this was probably a tragic move for HP and the industry.
Check out Gnutella. It now has many of BitTorrent's features while being a tool you can leave running and connected for on-the-fly searches, etc.
I've used it to download ISOs of Fedora Core 3 test 3, some home-made movies like the lunar eclipse clip that Slashdot talked about the other day and many other legit things.
I also use it to share my photos, which I distribute under a creative commons license which allows redistribution. Try searching for South_Dartmouth for an example.
I missed an episode of a TV show recently, and found that not only did someone have it, but it was the HDTV version. Very slick... probably saved the studio a viewer, since a) I didn't lose continuity in the show b) it was a great episode and c) there's still nothing to beat the convinience of my TiVo.
P2P is the second best way (next to email) to stay in touch with the world, IMHO.
They are not designed to break down. The press release / news report (feh!) is misleading, but what if you strip away the points that they imply, and just keep the ones that they actually SAY, this is a disk made from polymers (platic) that come from corn instead of oil. The only interesting part of it in terms of decay is that if you BURN it, you don't get some of the toxins you get from regular CDs. However, it is coated in thick resin which would prevent this from degrading just as much (or little) as your current discs are protected (by the same resin).
What I was thinking was that by broadcasting enough RF at the satellite, the s/n ratio would be low
I'm not sure if that's practical. Sat uplinks would, I would think, need to be pretty high-powered already to overcome all of the sources of noise from the earth and Sun. Anyone else listening in who has practical experience in this realm?
Oh, you had it alright...except it involved setting off a nuke in the upper atmosphere.
Well, this is specifically a selective tool that's reversable. Quite different from a giant EM pulse.
what is "copy(\*R, \*F) or last;" from the File::Copy module giving you that you can't get from "seek F, 0;print F read S, $size"
Well, other than the fact that it doesn't work, it's fine;-)
This is exactly why I wrote File::Copy and why it was picked up in the core: people always get the subtleties of File::Copy wrong because there are so many.
First off, the return value of "read" is a nunber, not the buffer that was read.
Second, you're not accounting for partial reads and/or writes (and, yes they happen all the time).
Third, there's no error checking in what you wrote.
Now, as for your example in shell... it's fine except for doing things in blocks. I'd drop down to bytes to avoid rounding errors (bytes left unreplaced at the end of the file).
Quite so, and whith such excellent options as Evolution, Thunderbirt and others for Linux you really have no excuse these days (I'm running Evolution's latest under FC3test3 and it's amazing as ever, but more so).
Actually, thinking about it, that won't work because when you truncate the file, you're going to (potentially) alter where the subsequent blocks are allocated.
A better version (in Perl this time):
#!/usr/bin/perl use File::Copy;
foreach $file (@ARGV) {
$size = -s $file;
for($i=0;$i<3;$i++) {
open(F,">>+",$file) or last;
seek(F,0,0);
open(R,"head -c $size/dev/urandom |") or die "urandom: $!";
copy(\*R, \*F) or last;
}
unlink $file or warn "unlink $file: $!\n"; }
#!/bin/sh # file wiper # # I recommend against ever using this. It is often # the case that you DON'T want to make sure that # no effort used to recover a file can work.
for file in $* ; do
size=$(stat -c '%s' $file)
for i in 1 2 3 ; do
head -c $size/dev/urandom > $file
done
rm $file done
Along similar lines, a co-worker at one of my recent jobs had installed a machine for one of our remote users. He mounted the file-server's storage array directly in order to create the user's home directory. Unfortunately he did 3 things wrong:
1. He left the root of the storage array mounted 2. He left it mounted under/tmp 3. He left the tmp-cleaning cron job enabled
When we started to see user file go away (but directories left intact) we thought we were under some kind of attack... we were right in a way;-)
Could Soviet-era aircraft/ICBM tracking radars be modified for significantly increased power?
I dunno. I would *think* that the technology involved is much more difficult than that because it's taken the US this long to come up with something that can do it...
The real difficulty is that ground stations know weere the satellite is and the satellite has a fairly narrow area to which it broadcasts (e.g. the surface of the planet, which occupies substantially less than 180 degrees of the satellite's view). This makes the signal very hard to block. You would need to overwhelm ground-stations (a hell of a lot of power required) or directly target the satellite with some sort of jamming signal (e.g. interfering with either the uplink or downlink communications).
I would think that while any directed transmitter could be used as a starting point, it's more the knowledge of the specs for the satellite in question and its uplink protocol that would be needed as well as some top-notch RF hackers.
So what you are saying is that it just isn't possible that someone other than China could get a microwave tranceiver, connect it to an antenna, and pump a lot of power through.
No, that's not what I'm saying. It's a much harder problem than that. It requires the engineering capabilities, I would think, of at least a substantially develped nation. Certainly the G8 count (as I pointed out, these are our allies, except for China). Brazil might be up to it... I'm not sure. They could potentially count as someone who is not strictly an ally of the US and yet has this capability... still, they're not hostile to the US in any substantial way.
NK could potentially work this out, but not having a satellite program (to my knowledge, anyone want to confirm or deny?) I don't see them having ready access to the specs needed unless they could steal them.
The US knows how everyone's devices work in orbit. We know where they are at all times. We know what they transmit and who listens. These alone are huge advantages in jamming their output.
If you can think of counter examples, I'm all ears (and willing to believe I've overlooked something).
Rest assured that if another country was in our position they would be doing the same things and probably more.
I disagree, though the more traditional argument (and one which obviously cannot be disproven) is to say that any other country would have to do what we've done in order to be in our position. That is, if we had not been listening to the world's communications (with the help of the UK and Australia) since World War II, then we could not have continued to dominate would finance and technology.
Personally, if my country feels that it needs to fry someone's sattellite in orbit with a suped-up HERF gun, so be it. If they need to monitor every single international radio, fiber, internet, and tin-cup-and-wire communication originating outside the USA, more power to them. If they want to unilaterally develop technology that can cause someone to lose the ability to move their pinky finger from a jillion miles away with the flick of a switch I am ok with that too.
Wow... ok, well if that's how you feel, then good for you I guess, but I'll just point out that that weakens any attempt to argue that other countries should not act in whatever way suits their percieved need for security (e.g. North Korea), and when we want to convince ally nations (e.g. NATO) to join us in controling the threat of terror, the probe into Echelon by the EU hurts our cause deeply.
In short, by doing what you suggest, our country has damaged our national interests and security in the long term for short term rewards. From a purely US-motivated point of view, that is a huge problem, and one for which blame rests on the shoulders of all political officials (elected or not) who had significant influence, regardless of party or views in the last 50+ years.
If it uses EM to do jamming, then it has the potential to fry stuff.
I want to hope that you're trolling and that you don't actually believe that.
Let's just construct one simple example device that uses EM to do jamming, and yet runs no risk of "frying" anything: your device produces a signal which is bounced off of the target satellite, such that it appears to be "coming from" that source to an earth-based observer. Your bounced signal conforms closely to the carrier used by the satellite's communications, but differs in such a way as to make it very difficult for even the most sensitive equipment to process the signal.
I could come up with a dozen of those, and they're certainly all MUCH simpler to make and test than some satellite-frying beam (the power required to fry a device which is built to survive even low-orbit solar EM would be staggering).
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a CD player in your 1991 Saab? If you don't could you get one for it? Do you not want a CD player integrated into your car for the reasons you state above? Would a phone be any different? In 1991 car CD players were crap. I would never want one of those in my car today. They skipped all the time and often had components that broke easily.
But having an old car doesn't mean having an old CD player.
I went into the X-Files as SF earlier, but let me tackle it this way.
What if I told you that an episode of the X-Files was about monks who were bringing about the end of the world by calculating the permutations of the name of God on a computer. Sounds like a fairly plausible episode to me, and would not stick out from other X-Files episodes.... It also happens to be the plot of The Nine Billion Names of God, which won the World Science Fiction Convention's Retrospective Hugo for 1953.
Science fiction is about the nature of science and discovery and our relationship to them, not just the technology and aparatus of science. When we question what the nature of belief and skeptecism are in fiction, we are very much engaging in science fiction just as the great short story authors of the 30s-60s did and just as Twilight Zone did.
The presence of space ships and ray guns is not reasonable benchmark for the genre.
That's not sci-fi, that's pseudo-scientific psychic crap
You may not like science fiction of the X-Files variety, but that's tough. It is, in fact, speculative fiction, though almost always very soft SF (the difference between hard and soft SF being the extent to which it is rooted in science, and no there's no absolute line between the two).
And what are the odds that this show gives legitmacy to The Department of Fath^H^H^H^H Homeland Security
Ha! You don't know Ellis very well do you? Read Transmetropolitan someday (essentially it comes down to a distopian near-future with our protagonist, a reporter modeled on Hunter S Thompson, attempting to expose the corruption of society to itself). Ellis is anything but the kind of status-quo apologist that you suggest, and I suspect that the fact that he was willing to be involved in this series indicates a) that it was of a quality we have rarely if ever seen on television and b) the very reason that the WB couldn't stomach it.
I'll be glad if it never airs. So much crap on TV. I've got a grand total of four shows I bother to watch: 1) Enterprise, 2) Stargate, 3) MythBusters, and 4) BattleStar Galactica
Ulch. You're worried about status-quo apologism, and you hail modern Star Trek? I mean, I'm a softy for Star Trek too because I grew up with it, but to put those two concepts in the same post, suggesting that they are not so mutually exclusive as to be dangerous together is rather striking.
Specifically, the grandparent is a cut-and-paste of MY post, and the context has been sadly removed.
Absolutely. This is the idea behind many of the safety measures that are build into our society. The reason, for example, that you face a jury instead of just a judge is so that, in extreme situations, conscience will win out, and jurors will feel compelled to vote their conscience. They are your last recourse.
Now, I will say that I have no problems with robots with guns, as long as the robots are just waldos or slightly smarter. What I will not tollerate, and will quit my job and become a full-time political activist in the face of, is robot soldiers that are autonomous enough that a small group of individuals (say 1000 or less) can wield enough power to wrest control of the country away from elected officials.
I may dispise the current adminstration, but I will admit that they are a far cry better than a military dictatorship (if you disagree, then I admire your optimism... you have no idea how bad it can get), and what keeps a military dictatorship from happening is the fact that unit after unit after unit would refuse to follow orders if their superior officers told them to take action against their chain of command.
Let's go a step further. I don't want a phone! I want a house and a car and a computer and whatever else... and they should all have build-in phones. We should stop thinking of the phone as a device with low-end appliances built in. We should be building phones into the best-of-breed appliances. Why shouldn't an iPod come with a cell phone build in? Reduces the number of items you have to carry by one, and doesn't even require a form-factor change.
Why not have that base-unit for your wireless keyboard and mouse also provide a (physically switched, thank you very much) speakerphone that speaks VoIP? Why do I need a second device on my desk?
Why should a car ever ship without a built-in phone?
Of course, much of the reason for this is financial. The cell companies fight hard against making it easy to move your phone between services, and if appliances came with built-in phones, people would demand that they be able to sign up or not sign up for a service of their choosing at their leisure, otherwise it's more of an extra fee, and they'll prefer devices without phones.
I think that can be overcome, though, regardless of how much the industry likes it.
Can I get a phone that is just a phone please?
Not trivially, no. There are many reasons for this. First, "just a phone" is a term that is in flux. Certainly 15 years ago, that meant a device that was attached to a wall either directly or by a short cord, and converted your face-noise to analog signal on a copper wire.
So, what you're saying now is you want a wireless phone-like device. Then you say you want to block numbers... well that's not really a phone-like thing at all. Certainly not a phone-like thing when measured against what phones have done for the last 50 years!
You're asking for a new device. While your wish list is nice, to ignore the wish list of the vast majority of other customers would be neglegent on the part of the management of the cell phone manufacturers.
No I don't want a crappy digital camera on my phone.
And yet, the idea of camera phones has caught on like wildfire, and is one of the single most popular modifications to the basic cell phone since user-downloadable ring-tones. I'm not saying you're wrong not to want this, but to act as if the industry is going off half cocked and ignoring the customer is putting blinders on to who the customer really is.
No I don't want a crappy music player on my phone. No I don't want a crappy web browser on my phone.
Granted, implementations of these features have been lame to say the best.
What the world really IS waiting for is a decent, way to manage contacts. Now that phones are portable, we NEED a way to have our numbers move with us as trivially as that note-pad that we used to keep by the phone pre-cell. Replacing a phone should not be traumatic, but because of the proprietary formats involved it IS. You usually need a for-pay version of Outlook on Windows just to read the data from your phone. This makes no sense.
I WANT A PHONE THAT IS A PHONE. Jesus christ.
Once again, define phone.
You've obviously never worked for the US Government as a contractor or employee.
Contractor, yes. Employee, no. I've worked for the DoT (Volpe Center) and DoJ (INS, St. Albans) and done small amounts of sub-sub-contractor work for the DoD. The fact that you consider it obvious that I cannot have done this speaks to our differing experiences, which is to be expected, I guess, when you're talking about the nation's largest employer.
when silly nerds working on documentation get bored, they tend to stick some really stupid stuff in there
And hence, my statement: this is a joke. When the DoD says, "yes we published that in all seriousness," then get upset over wasted science dollars, until then I would ignore it as at best misinformation and at worst disgrunteled AF contractors trying to embarass the DoD.
No, I meant Bush. Clinton pushed hard against Microsoft's monopoly (and the mountains of money that MS funnelled into the Republican party as a result probably hurt the Democrats far more than the impeachment hearings). I also didn't mean Republicans in general. There are many republicans that find the idea of protecting businesses from the law to be repugnant, but Bush is not one of them. Backing off of the Microsoft prosecution was one of Bush's first actions, and it was a dramatic and undisputable move.
The Justice dept. could easily have pushed Bill up against a wall with the conviction that they'd gained, and forced them to open the protocols and formats that they'd been using to lock in their customers. They were close... very close... and then Bush took over and they stopped.
I meant Bush, not "a Republocrat", whatever that is.
Has to be a joke. Read the PDF. The name of the sub-contractor is "Warp Drive" and the end of the document contains discussions of "negative energy" and all kinds of totally bogus junk that looks like it was culled from a Star Trek script.
Seriously, this is some fan-boy trying to rile up the millitary conspiracy theorists (and apparently doing quite well).
Until the DoD comes out and says, "yes, this is ours and we published it in all seriousness," please stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
I've been using Linux for years, but what value is linux going to add for a machine like this?
... ahem ... "extracted" from Windows software or they are violating patents in writing their own versions of the codecs that, in many cases, don't work correctly.
What Linux adds to the mix is highly questionable. Microsoft has done an excellent job of partitioning the market so that only their proprietary codecs play the hot-new-release-of-the-week video streams correctly and as others have pointed out, DRM will magnify the problem by orders of magnitude.
There are also patent concerns. Much of the software under Linux that views video is either having to use binary-only codecs that have been
On the other hand, a strong Linux-baaed consortium of media device manufacturers including HP and TiVo might have prevented Microsoft lock-in of the coming general purpose media computing revolution, which will allow Microsoft to dictate terms to the hardware vendors in the same way that they did (continue to do) with the PC.
As long as Bush is in office (no jab against Republicans in general, but this is simply a fact of his administration's policies) Microsoft knows that they need not fear the Justice department, so unless HP is planning in such long-range terms that the next four years of Microsoft power-consolidation are of no concern, this was probably a tragic move for HP and the industry.
Check out Gnutella. It now has many of BitTorrent's features while being a tool you can leave running and connected for on-the-fly searches, etc.
I've used it to download ISOs of Fedora Core 3 test 3, some home-made movies like the lunar eclipse clip that Slashdot talked about the other day and many other legit things.
I also use it to share my photos, which I distribute under a creative commons license which allows redistribution. Try searching for South_Dartmouth for an example.
I missed an episode of a TV show recently, and found that not only did someone have it, but it was the HDTV version. Very slick... probably saved the studio a viewer, since a) I didn't lose continuity in the show b) it was a great episode and c) there's still nothing to beat the convinience of my TiVo.
P2P is the second best way (next to email) to stay in touch with the world, IMHO.
They are not designed to break down. The press release / news report (feh!) is misleading, but what if you strip away the points that they imply, and just keep the ones that they actually SAY, this is a disk made from polymers (platic) that come from corn instead of oil. The only interesting part of it in terms of decay is that if you BURN it, you don't get some of the toxins you get from regular CDs. However, it is coated in thick resin which would prevent this from degrading just as much (or little) as your current discs are protected (by the same resin).
You're right about partial reads, but NOT partial writes. I got kicked in the butt by that several times.
I did not know that about du... good tidbit!
What I was thinking was that by broadcasting enough RF at the satellite, the s/n ratio would be low
I'm not sure if that's practical. Sat uplinks would, I would think, need to be pretty high-powered already to overcome all of the sources of noise from the earth and Sun. Anyone else listening in who has practical experience in this realm?
Oh, you had it alright...except it involved setting off a nuke in the upper atmosphere.
Well, this is specifically a selective tool that's reversable. Quite different from a giant EM pulse.
what is "copy(\*R, \*F) or last;" from the File::Copy module giving you that you can't get from "seek F, 0;print F read S, $size"
;-)
Well, other than the fact that it doesn't work, it's fine
This is exactly why I wrote File::Copy and why it was picked up in the core: people always get the subtleties of File::Copy wrong because there are so many.
First off, the return value of "read" is a nunber, not the buffer that was read.
Second, you're not accounting for partial reads and/or writes (and, yes they happen all the time).
Third, there's no error checking in what you wrote.
Now, as for your example in shell... it's fine except for doing things in blocks. I'd drop down to bytes to avoid rounding errors (bytes left unreplaced at the end of the file).
Quite so, and whith such excellent options as Evolution, Thunderbirt and others for Linux you really have no excuse these days (I'm running Evolution's latest under FC3test3 and it's amazing as ever, but more so).
Ok, this is why you don't post to Slashdot when you're home sick. That should be "+>>" not ">>+".
A better version (in Perl this time):
Along similar lines, a co-worker at one of my recent jobs had installed a machine for one of our remote users. He mounted the file-server's storage array directly in order to create the user's home directory. Unfortunately he did 3 things wrong:
/tmp
;-)
1. He left the root of the storage array mounted
2. He left it mounted under
3. He left the tmp-cleaning cron job enabled
When we started to see user file go away (but directories left intact) we thought we were under some kind of attack... we were right in a way
Could Soviet-era aircraft/ICBM tracking radars be modified for significantly increased power?
I dunno. I would *think* that the technology involved is much more difficult than that because it's taken the US this long to come up with something that can do it...
The real difficulty is that ground stations know weere the satellite is and the satellite has a fairly narrow area to which it broadcasts (e.g. the surface of the planet, which occupies substantially less than 180 degrees of the satellite's view). This makes the signal very hard to block. You would need to overwhelm ground-stations (a hell of a lot of power required) or directly target the satellite with some sort of jamming signal (e.g. interfering with either the uplink or downlink communications).
I would think that while any directed transmitter could be used as a starting point, it's more the knowledge of the specs for the satellite in question and its uplink protocol that would be needed as well as some top-notch RF hackers.
So what you are saying is that it just isn't possible that someone other than China could get a microwave tranceiver, connect it to an antenna, and pump a lot of power through.
No, that's not what I'm saying. It's a much harder problem than that. It requires the engineering capabilities, I would think, of at least a substantially develped nation. Certainly the G8 count (as I pointed out, these are our allies, except for China). Brazil might be up to it... I'm not sure. They could potentially count as someone who is not strictly an ally of the US and yet has this capability... still, they're not hostile to the US in any substantial way.
NK could potentially work this out, but not having a satellite program (to my knowledge, anyone want to confirm or deny?) I don't see them having ready access to the specs needed unless they could steal them.
The US knows how everyone's devices work in orbit. We know where they are at all times. We know what they transmit and who listens. These alone are huge advantages in jamming their output.
If you can think of counter examples, I'm all ears (and willing to believe I've overlooked something).
Rest assured that if another country was in our position they would be doing the same things and probably more.
I disagree, though the more traditional argument (and one which obviously cannot be disproven) is to say that any other country would have to do what we've done in order to be in our position. That is, if we had not been listening to the world's communications (with the help of the UK and Australia) since World War II, then we could not have continued to dominate would finance and technology.
Personally, if my country feels that it needs to fry someone's sattellite in orbit with a suped-up HERF gun, so be it. If they need to monitor every single international radio, fiber, internet, and tin-cup-and-wire communication originating outside the USA, more power to them. If they want to unilaterally develop technology that can cause someone to lose the ability to move their pinky finger from a jillion miles away with the flick of a switch I am ok with that too.
Wow... ok, well if that's how you feel, then good for you I guess, but I'll just point out that that weakens any attempt to argue that other countries should not act in whatever way suits their percieved need for security (e.g. North Korea), and when we want to convince ally nations (e.g. NATO) to join us in controling the threat of terror, the probe into Echelon by the EU hurts our cause deeply.
In short, by doing what you suggest, our country has damaged our national interests and security in the long term for short term rewards. From a purely US-motivated point of view, that is a huge problem, and one for which blame rests on the shoulders of all political officials (elected or not) who had significant influence, regardless of party or views in the last 50+ years.
If it uses EM to do jamming, then it has the potential to fry stuff.
I want to hope that you're trolling and that you don't actually believe that.
Let's just construct one simple example device that uses EM to do jamming, and yet runs no risk of "frying" anything: your device produces a signal which is bounced off of the target satellite, such that it appears to be "coming from" that source to an earth-based observer. Your bounced signal conforms closely to the carrier used by the satellite's communications, but differs in such a way as to make it very difficult for even the most sensitive equipment to process the signal.
I could come up with a dozen of those, and they're certainly all MUCH simpler to make and test than some satellite-frying beam (the power required to fry a device which is built to survive even low-orbit solar EM would be staggering).