I think you are mistaken about who gave you the Internet. It was, as is the case for most of the innovations you cherish, the Americans (who sometimes think they are God...)
No, Apple can't match that price, but if you are only going to spend $1k on a system you do not need 64 bits because you wouldn't know what to do with the extra bits. There are no applications you need that can take advantage of the difference between 32 and 64 bits, and you are obviously too cheap to cough up for more than 4G of memory (which is the _only_ practical reason you might have for wanting a 64 bits sytem.)
Would you care to check your logic on how a mutation is any different than the introduction of a trans-species gene sequence? Eventually, a single ear of corn out there would have mutated sufficiently to express the Bt protein (I will grant you that "eventually" here is a very unlikely probability, but do not dare deny the possiblity.) When this lucky mutation occurs our dilligent corn-breeding descendants will take these seeds and begin reproducing them.
A GMO is just an organism that we have pushed to express a particular gene sequence that we did not feel like waiting for mutation to develop. If we were to hand someone an ear of modern hybrid corn (non-GMO) and an ear of that corn's ancient ancestor they would assume that the modern version was the result of genetic engineering. And they would be right (although they might be mistaken about the process.)
The problem with your suggest is that Python has no sandboxed execution stack (bastion/rexec has been removed as of the 2.2 branch because it was fundementally insecure.) There is a lot of discussion about what to put into Python to replace this feature set. Personally, I favor a capabilities approach but Guide seems to disagree so we will see what happens.
Either way, only one of your two tools meets the required specs. Try again...
Not sure how to go about sensing that though, so a passive option i probably better.
How about using a piezoelectric effect? Deforming the outer surface (e.g. a bullet strike) creates a charge that propogates through the fluid beneath the outer sheath and causes it to stiffen.
I'm guessing prices would be competitive with the price of a new ICE car
Why? Because it has a warm fuzzy feeling to you? The economics of producing an internal combustion vehicle is something humanity has gotten down to a finely honed science. Toyota (no slouch in the efficient production arena) cannot even produce a hybrid vehicle at a profit, what makes you think that eliminating the last bits of the drivetrain that we actually know how to produce efficiently and on a global scale will drop the price of this vehicle any time soon?
And it is not like the existing battery production technology has much further it can go either. Demand from mobile technology vendors have pushed battery manufacturers hard and fast for almost a decade and battery capacity is still only inching forward while the price for each new jump in capacity, and the associated demand driven by this new capacity, is not going down (which would be the case if there were economies of scale to reap here.)
There are also reasons why the stunt pulled by AC Propulsion (using a lot of laptop batteries to run an electric car) would be completely infeasible as a real world solution. For starters, how is the charge on your two-year old lithium ion laptop battery pal? My two-year old internal combusion vehicle still gets at least 95% of the milage that it got when it was fresh off the lot.
except that electric drivers won't ever have to worry about gas going to $3/gal.
No, they would have to worry about electricity going to $3/kw. Here in California we know what an electricity crunch is like, and while it is nice to be able to complain about how ChevronTexaco and Shell are ripping us off, the electricity market is even easier to game (there are no strategic electricy reserves or built-in systemic tolerance for large supply/demand fluctutations.) Electric vehicles are not a zero emission vehicle, they are an "emission elsewhere -- hopefully not near where I live" vehicle. That electricity (at least in the US) comes from either coal or natural gas, and while the power station that generated your electricity may be more efficient than the power station in my car, once you factor in the transmission losses to get that power to your electric car I win in the efficiency contest.
Yeah, it would be nice if green energy sources were available to power those cars, but they aren't so why not start on that problem first?
Many european countries may have multi-party systems, but you can walk down the list of these states and in every country there are two major parties and a small collection of minor groups whose sole hope is to gain influence by choosing to support a major party at the right time.
In each case the parties generally break down into "right" or "left" with the minor parties heding off to the extremes. This situation becomes more entrenched as the population of a country gets larger, the only European countries with vibrant multi-party systems (e.g. those in which a "third party" has any chance of actually wielding power) are the smallest of the EU states.
If you are going to list "those who made all this possible" you cannot ignore Claude Shannon. Creating information theory was important, but what is equally remarkable was his master's thesis: "Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" (1941) was what proved that Boole's logic could be implemented in digital hardware.
It was, by a long margin, the most important master's thesis in history.
You're kidding right? Niebaum-Coppola has a huge tasting room & merchandising area to push various food and wine knick-knacks. What really draws people to N-C is the fact that it also has a collection of FFC's movie props (Don Corleone's desk, a Huey shell with surfboards from Apocalypse Now, his Tucker Torpedo, etc.)
Ha ha ho ho... thanks, that was the best laugh I have had today.
For starters your packets are never going to be sent different ways around the world, they will all follow the same path until something disrupts that path and forces it to choose a new route. Packetized voice offers no security advantages over analog landline connections. None whatsoever.
Now quantum security is real security.
Except for that annoying fact that it breaks down once you hit the first exchange/router or non-optical component. If everyone you talk to is within your line of sight or is on the other end of an uninterrupted strand of fiber you get real security, for everything else you are SOL.
Example: the NTSC, PAL, SECAM, MESECAM, etc standards for broadcast TV. Why do we have so many of them?
Because TV was invented before the computer chip. Back in the dark mists of time you needed a way to get a clock cycle for your video signal. The easiest way to do this was to use the cycles in your AC mains power. In the US that is 60Hz while in Europe 50Hz was used, leading to two different framerate standards (NTSC is not 30 fps because of a hack performed when color was added to the broadcast signal.) PAL was developed after NTSC and fixed a few problems with the earlier standard, and Brazil created a PAL variant (M-PAL) that worked with a 60 Hz clock signal from the mains power.
SECAM was closer to the example being set here with the China wireless standard, it was created to be different for the sake of being different (we are French so our standard must be different, vive la difference...) as a way to help the French electronics industry of the time. Of course it was then chosen as the Soviet-block standard and then modified for the Middle East market into MESECAM.
It is all too wierd for words, but there was a method to the madness...
Generally I find "let's go to the moon" arguments rather silly and self-serving, but the vast ignorance that is being paraded about here is quite stunning. It seems to be begging for a response...
Vast numbers of solar panels could be set up in earth orbit. They would be less expensive.
Can you create a solar panal in orbit out of local materials? It has been demonstrated that it is possible to create a solar panel with materials available on the moon, which means that you can send up a small solar panel factory and let it churn out solar panels until it breaks down, the resulting panels can then be moved from the moon to earth orbit for a far lower energy cost than lifting something up from the bottom of the gravity well.
Vast numbers of solar panels could be setup up on earth. They would be WAY less expensive.
They would also be WAY less efficient. For starters they are stuck in a 24 hour day-night cycle so you lose 50% of the possible efficiency over the year right off the top. They are also getting sunlight that has been filtered through miles of air and water vapor, dropping the amount of energy they are receiving by a significant fraction.
The microwave transmission method that everybody keeps harping on has not been demonstrated to effectively WORK!!! Why isn't it being used today given it would be cheaper than high-tension lines. If it doens't work in earth's atmosphere, how would receive the power??????
Of course it has been demonstrated to work you moron. In 1964 a demonstration of microwave power transmission was used to power a helicopter. The reason that this is not considered a suitable replacement for existing power transmission is that to move enough energy to make this worthwhile either need a very tight beam (e.g. a maser) or a very wide beam. A maser would cause problems for anything that stumbled into the beam (like birds, etc.) so most people suggest a very wide beam. A beam that was several kilometers in diameter could be turned back into energy with a rectenna array but would have a low power density per square foot of the beams "footprint", preventing it from causing too much damage to birds and luddites who happened to wander into the area.
HiveCache is a distributed RAID system similar to what you are asking for, albeit one that is pitched to more of the enterprise backup environment than the home user. Strong security, error-correction and data replication, and multi-source data publiication and retrieval to eliminate the network hotspots that might otherwise occur.
While a pure linux solution seems to score the most points here, this particular one lets you combine your windows, OS X, and linux systems into a single distributed storage mesh. There is safety in numbers, and the more systems you can add to these sort of distributed storage systems the more reliable they become.
HiveCache is more of a backup solution, but I do know that it is possible to use this with a webDAV front-end for archival storage and other intersting storage possibilities.
Heh. Let me tell you why tapes are good. Tapes are very, very simple and well understood.
Tapes are also slow, expensive, hard to verify, labor intensive, and did I mention slow?
Now, when a hard drive fails, what're you going to do?
Clever solutions spread the risk around multiple hard drives and allow you to recapture some of the idle disk space on desktop system. When a tape drive fails are you even going to know about it? I have had numerous tape drives fail silently, and the only time you know that you weren't getting a good backup was then the time came to restore the data and you found your tapeset to be useless. Disk drives are cheap, and with RAID and distributed-RAID solutions you can use error correction techniques to eliminate the problems of losing multiple drives across the system -- and when any component fails you know about it and can act to eliminate the potential for cascading failures that might actually lead to data loss.
The biggest win from dumping tapes is that you can restore data quickly and eliminate the IT burden by turning most data restore operations into a user self-help situation. Let the user restore their own data and give them the additional advantage of being able to do file versioning and online backup verification. Offline media (like tapes) will continue to have a small role as a solution for catestrophic failures like the building burning down, but when it comes to day to day disaster recovery (and the all-too-frequent "pilot error" events) tape backup's time has come and gone.
Disk-based backup is also much more efficient than tape, allowing you to do all sorts of fun tricks like single-instance storage (e.g. only one copy of word.exe needs to be backed up, the rest of the systems can just point to this copy) and using disk-based backup systems as an intermediate cache (a la Data Domain boxes) is the smarter solution if you can't quite give up your tape habit just yet.
Tapes are cheap and high density.
Oh really? I can buy 1 TB of IDE disk for 1K and drop it into a cheap Linux box that was previously acting as a doorstop. How much does your tape drive cost? And the tapes? And the server to front the tape drives? And the additional networking hardware to provide a fat pipe to this data funnel you have just put into place? Tape is no longer even the cheap solution, it is just the one you are used to....
Distributed backups is another thing I'd like to have now, rather than tomorrow...
Ask and you shall receive...
Check out HiveCache for grid-based backups for your enterprise. There are lots of great distributed systems out there that do more than just provide a cheap supercomputer replacement. Some of them can actually save your biz money and eliminate some of the more unpleasant tasks your IT staff has to deal with.
Wow, one could almost taste the bile you must have been choking back as you typed that...
Just as a datapoint, according to the most recent surveys by Fenwick and West the SV venture market is picking up again. The bottom was probably Q1 of this year, in the past quarter the number of down rounds decreased and the number of companies getting seed and A round funding increased.
VCs move in herds, and at the moment the herd is breaking out its checkbook again. BTW, Mr. Lunn is full of it. I know from personal experience that at this moment you do not need multi-million dollar revenue, 50% quarter to quarter growth, or first-mover in a multi-billion dollar market to get funding. OTOH, if it keeps people like you out of my way, please do follow his advice:)
I will leave aside the hysterical responses others have proposed and suggest two simple actions that you can take to deal with this attempted coup by Verisign.
Contact your ISP (or do yourself if you run your own DNS) and be sure that they have implemented the update to BIND which locks out this behavior. The truly obsessives will also go out and start finding random DNS servers and testing them to see if they are allowing anything more than delegation from *.com and *.net and then notifying DNS admins as appropriate.
Make your feelings known to the other co-conspirator in this system: Overture. They are providing the back-end to this service and since they have been recently acquired by a publicly traded company (Yahoo) you may feel the need to contact Yahoo to express your opinion on this particular product line (or perhaps express your views in forums where Yahoo shareholders may be found.
Hit them where it hurts, in the bottom-line. Complaining to everyone may get this fixed, but patching your nameserver and then going after the back-end may also get results.
- Are property and trade secrets rights a constitutional right?
Yes. Property rights are broadly covered by the fifth amendment to the constitution when it states "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation" and also by reference in a varity of other clauses in the constitution. Trade secrets are covered in Article one, section eight where it states that Congress shall have the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" which covers copyright, patents, and trade secrets.
- Can anything outweigh a constitutional right?
No. One section of the constitution clearly states that it is "the supreme law of the land" (Article six, paragraph two.) Nothing can trump the constitution, which is why so many tricky questions in US law end up being decided by the US Supreme Court; once the supremes rule on how a law fits (or does not fit) into the contitutional framework that is the end of the discussion unless the people amend the constitution. [The court will occasionally reverse itself and say that it was wrong before about what the governing principle was for a partiicular law, but they have to find their support in the constitution itself - they cannot say that the constitution is wrong, only that a prior court made a mistake in how it read the constitution.]
A photo (even a well protected photo with hologram overlays and other cool bits) can be hacked with enough money and sufficient skills. If the digital photo stored on the passport also include a hash of the photo data and passport ID number which is signed by a state department public key you are not going to be able to drop another photo in an make it work. This also means that JoeBob working the immigration desk at the airport will only need to confirm that the photo and ID number printed on the passport match the digitally encoded data, he will not need to examine the printed photo closely to make sure that it has not been tampered with. This is probably the largest point of failure in the current system and adding some digital backup to the person manning the front lines is a good thing.
As far as your claim about people taking apart the mechanisms goes, that does not happen in this sort of crypto. Anyone who can break the public key crypto has better things to do than forge a passport, like taking down global banking systems. There is also no protocol to be negotiated between signer and verifier, so the hacks that occasionally hit online crypto protocols do not apply (e.g. tampering with random number generators or causing discrete failures in the protocol, etc.)
It should also be noted that the FEC libraries that are being passed around now (including the Java library from Swarmcast) are all based upon the Vandermonde FEC library provided by Luigi Rizzo. This seed has sprouted the Java library previously mentioned as well as Python bindings that will appear soon coming from the MNet and HiveCache efforts.
I ask this question because it is going to be very, very tricky for Sony to pack much of a battery into the case with the size specs given (especially when using a 2.5" drive) and 802.11b is not exactly the most power-efficient spec. I guess that Sony was between a rock and a hard place on this particular choice, 802.11g is too new and there are not going to be any low power chips any time soon while bluetooth is too slow. By eating up the battery with a wireless link you are going to increase the number of charge cycles on the battery and decrease the lifespan of this battery.
The system you describe already exists. Check out HiveCache for a system that does what you describe and adds nice features like strong encryption to stored data, error-correction to create a distributed RAID across the PCs on the LAN, and efficient storage by only keeping enough copies of redundant files (e.g. word.exe, windows DLLs, etc.) to ensure reliable recovery.
If you want to see what a system like this looks like when it is applied to the proper environment (like across PCs within the enterprise) then check out HiveCache.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are mistaken about who gave you the Internet. It was, as is the case for most of the innovations you cherish, the Americans (who sometimes think they are God...)
No, Apple can't match that price, but if you are only going to spend $1k on a system you do not need 64 bits because you wouldn't know what to do with the extra bits. There are no applications you need that can take advantage of the difference between 32 and 64 bits, and you are obviously too cheap to cough up for more than 4G of memory (which is the _only_ practical reason you might have for wanting a 64 bits sytem.)
Would you care to check your logic on how a mutation is any different than the introduction of a trans-species gene sequence? Eventually, a single ear of corn out there would have mutated sufficiently to express the Bt protein (I will grant you that "eventually" here is a very unlikely probability, but do not dare deny the possiblity.) When this lucky mutation occurs our dilligent corn-breeding descendants will take these seeds and begin reproducing them.
A GMO is just an organism that we have pushed to express a particular gene sequence that we did not feel like waiting for mutation to develop. If we were to hand someone an ear of modern hybrid corn (non-GMO) and an ear of that corn's ancient ancestor they would assume that the modern version was the result of genetic engineering. And they would be right (although they might be mistaken about the process.)
The problem with your suggest is that Python has no sandboxed execution stack (bastion/rexec has been removed as of the 2.2 branch because it was fundementally insecure.) There is a lot of discussion about what to put into Python to replace this feature set. Personally, I favor a capabilities approach but Guide seems to disagree so we will see what happens.
Either way, only one of your two tools meets the required specs. Try again...
How about using a piezoelectric effect? Deforming the outer surface (e.g. a bullet strike) creates a charge that propogates through the fluid beneath the outer sheath and causes it to stiffen.
Why? Because it has a warm fuzzy feeling to you? The economics of producing an internal combustion vehicle is something humanity has gotten down to a finely honed science. Toyota (no slouch in the efficient production arena) cannot even produce a hybrid vehicle at a profit, what makes you think that eliminating the last bits of the drivetrain that we actually know how to produce efficiently and on a global scale will drop the price of this vehicle any time soon?
And it is not like the existing battery production technology has much further it can go either. Demand from mobile technology vendors have pushed battery manufacturers hard and fast for almost a decade and battery capacity is still only inching forward while the price for each new jump in capacity, and the associated demand driven by this new capacity, is not going down (which would be the case if there were economies of scale to reap here.)
There are also reasons why the stunt pulled by AC Propulsion (using a lot of laptop batteries to run an electric car) would be completely infeasible as a real world solution. For starters, how is the charge on your two-year old lithium ion laptop battery pal? My two-year old internal combusion vehicle still gets at least 95% of the milage that it got when it was fresh off the lot.
except that electric drivers won't ever have to worry about gas going to $3/gal.
No, they would have to worry about electricity going to $3/kw. Here in California we know what an electricity crunch is like, and while it is nice to be able to complain about how ChevronTexaco and Shell are ripping us off, the electricity market is even easier to game (there are no strategic electricy reserves or built-in systemic tolerance for large supply/demand fluctutations.) Electric vehicles are not a zero emission vehicle, they are an "emission elsewhere -- hopefully not near where I live" vehicle. That electricity (at least in the US) comes from either coal or natural gas, and while the power station that generated your electricity may be more efficient than the power station in my car, once you factor in the transmission losses to get that power to your electric car I win in the efficiency contest.
Yeah, it would be nice if green energy sources were available to power those cars, but they aren't so why not start on that problem first?
Many european countries may have multi-party systems, but you can walk down the list of these states and in every country there are two major parties and a small collection of minor groups whose sole hope is to gain influence by choosing to support a major party at the right time.
In each case the parties generally break down into "right" or "left" with the minor parties heding off to the extremes. This situation becomes more entrenched as the population of a country gets larger, the only European countries with vibrant multi-party systems (e.g. those in which a "third party" has any chance of actually wielding power) are the smallest of the EU states.
If you are going to list "those who made all this possible" you cannot ignore Claude Shannon. Creating information theory was important, but what is equally remarkable was his master's thesis: "Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" (1941) was what proved that Boole's logic could be implemented in digital hardware.
It was, by a long margin, the most important master's thesis in history.
Sounds like you are describing the last couple of years of Bordeaux... I think a 2000 Pomerol would fit your requirements quite nicely.
You're kidding right? Niebaum-Coppola has a huge tasting room & merchandising area to push various food and wine knick-knacks. What really draws people to N-C is the fact that it also has a collection of FFC's movie props (Don Corleone's desk, a Huey shell with surfboards from Apocalypse Now, his Tucker Torpedo, etc.)
For starters your packets are never going to be sent different ways around the world, they will all follow the same path until something disrupts that path and forces it to choose a new route. Packetized voice offers no security advantages over analog landline connections. None whatsoever.
Now quantum security is real security.
Except for that annoying fact that it breaks down once you hit the first exchange/router or non-optical component. If everyone you talk to is within your line of sight or is on the other end of an uninterrupted strand of fiber you get real security, for everything else you are SOL.
Google is your friend...
Because TV was invented before the computer chip. Back in the dark mists of time you needed a way to get a clock cycle for your video signal. The easiest way to do this was to use the cycles in your AC mains power. In the US that is 60Hz while in Europe 50Hz was used, leading to two different framerate standards (NTSC is not 30 fps because of a hack performed when color was added to the broadcast signal.) PAL was developed after NTSC and fixed a few problems with the earlier standard, and Brazil created a PAL variant (M-PAL) that worked with a 60 Hz clock signal from the mains power.
SECAM was closer to the example being set here with the China wireless standard, it was created to be different for the sake of being different (we are French so our standard must be different, vive la difference...) as a way to help the French electronics industry of the time. Of course it was then chosen as the Soviet-block standard and then modified for the Middle East market into MESECAM.
It is all too wierd for words, but there was a method to the madness...
Vast numbers of solar panels could be set up in earth orbit. They would be less expensive.
Can you create a solar panal in orbit out of local materials? It has been demonstrated that it is possible to create a solar panel with materials available on the moon, which means that you can send up a small solar panel factory and let it churn out solar panels until it breaks down, the resulting panels can then be moved from the moon to earth orbit for a far lower energy cost than lifting something up from the bottom of the gravity well.
Vast numbers of solar panels could be setup up on earth. They would be WAY less expensive.
They would also be WAY less efficient. For starters they are stuck in a 24 hour day-night cycle so you lose 50% of the possible efficiency over the year right off the top. They are also getting sunlight that has been filtered through miles of air and water vapor, dropping the amount of energy they are receiving by a significant fraction.
The microwave transmission method that everybody keeps harping on has not been demonstrated to effectively WORK!!! Why isn't it being used today given it would be cheaper than high-tension lines. If it doens't work in earth's atmosphere, how would receive the power??????
Of course it has been demonstrated to work you moron. In 1964 a demonstration of microwave power transmission was used to power a helicopter. The reason that this is not considered a suitable replacement for existing power transmission is that to move enough energy to make this worthwhile either need a very tight beam (e.g. a maser) or a very wide beam. A maser would cause problems for anything that stumbled into the beam (like birds, etc.) so most people suggest a very wide beam. A beam that was several kilometers in diameter could be turned back into energy with a rectenna array but would have a low power density per square foot of the beams "footprint", preventing it from causing too much damage to birds and luddites who happened to wander into the area.
While a pure linux solution seems to score the most points here, this particular one lets you combine your windows, OS X, and linux systems into a single distributed storage mesh. There is safety in numbers, and the more systems you can add to these sort of distributed storage systems the more reliable they become.
HiveCache is more of a backup solution, but I do know that it is possible to use this with a webDAV front-end for archival storage and other intersting storage possibilities.
Tapes are also slow, expensive, hard to verify, labor intensive, and did I mention slow?
Now, when a hard drive fails, what're you going to do?
Clever solutions spread the risk around multiple hard drives and allow you to recapture some of the idle disk space on desktop system. When a tape drive fails are you even going to know about it? I have had numerous tape drives fail silently, and the only time you know that you weren't getting a good backup was then the time came to restore the data and you found your tapeset to be useless. Disk drives are cheap, and with RAID and distributed-RAID solutions you can use error correction techniques to eliminate the problems of losing multiple drives across the system -- and when any component fails you know about it and can act to eliminate the potential for cascading failures that might actually lead to data loss.
The biggest win from dumping tapes is that you can restore data quickly and eliminate the IT burden by turning most data restore operations into a user self-help situation. Let the user restore their own data and give them the additional advantage of being able to do file versioning and online backup verification. Offline media (like tapes) will continue to have a small role as a solution for catestrophic failures like the building burning down, but when it comes to day to day disaster recovery (and the all-too-frequent "pilot error" events) tape backup's time has come and gone.
Disk-based backup is also much more efficient than tape, allowing you to do all sorts of fun tricks like single-instance storage (e.g. only one copy of word.exe needs to be backed up, the rest of the systems can just point to this copy) and using disk-based backup systems as an intermediate cache (a la Data Domain boxes) is the smarter solution if you can't quite give up your tape habit just yet.
Tapes are cheap and high density.
Oh really? I can buy 1 TB of IDE disk for 1K and drop it into a cheap Linux box that was previously acting as a doorstop. How much does your tape drive cost? And the tapes? And the server to front the tape drives? And the additional networking hardware to provide a fat pipe to this data funnel you have just put into place? Tape is no longer even the cheap solution, it is just the one you are used to....
Ask and you shall receive...
Check out HiveCache for grid-based backups for your enterprise. There are lots of great distributed systems out there that do more than just provide a cheap supercomputer replacement. Some of them can actually save your biz money and eliminate some of the more unpleasant tasks your IT staff has to deal with.
Wow, one could almost taste the bile you must have been choking back as you typed that...
:)
Just as a datapoint, according to the most recent surveys by Fenwick and West the SV venture market is picking up again. The bottom was probably Q1 of this year, in the past quarter the number of down rounds decreased and the number of companies getting seed and A round funding increased.
VCs move in herds, and at the moment the herd is breaking out its checkbook again. BTW, Mr. Lunn is full of it. I know from personal experience that at this moment you do not need multi-million dollar revenue, 50% quarter to quarter growth, or first-mover in a multi-billion dollar market to get funding. OTOH, if it keeps people like you out of my way, please do follow his advice
Hit them where it hurts, in the bottom-line. Complaining to everyone may get this fixed, but patching your nameserver and then going after the back-end may also get results.
- Are property and trade secrets rights a constitutional right?
Yes. Property rights are broadly covered by the fifth amendment to the constitution when it states "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation" and also by reference in a varity of other clauses in the constitution. Trade secrets are covered in Article one, section eight where it states that Congress shall have the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" which covers copyright, patents, and trade secrets.
- Can anything outweigh a constitutional right?
No. One section of the constitution clearly states that it is "the supreme law of the land" (Article six, paragraph two.) Nothing can trump the constitution, which is why so many tricky questions in US law end up being decided by the US Supreme Court; once the supremes rule on how a law fits (or does not fit) into the contitutional framework that is the end of the discussion unless the people amend the constitution. [The court will occasionally reverse itself and say that it was wrong before about what the governing principle was for a partiicular law, but they have to find their support in the constitution itself - they cannot say that the constitution is wrong, only that a prior court made a mistake in how it read the constitution.]
Jim
A photo (even a well protected photo with hologram overlays and other cool bits) can be hacked with enough money and sufficient skills. If the digital photo stored on the passport also include a hash of the photo data and passport ID number which is signed by a state department public key you are not going to be able to drop another photo in an make it work. This also means that JoeBob working the immigration desk at the airport will only need to confirm that the photo and ID number printed on the passport match the digitally encoded data, he will not need to examine the printed photo closely to make sure that it has not been tampered with. This is probably the largest point of failure in the current system and adding some digital backup to the person manning the front lines is a good thing.
As far as your claim about people taking apart the mechanisms goes, that does not happen in this sort of crypto. Anyone who can break the public key crypto has better things to do than forge a passport, like taking down global banking systems. There is also no protocol to be negotiated between signer and verifier, so the hacks that occasionally hit online crypto protocols do not apply (e.g. tampering with random number generators or causing discrete failures in the protocol, etc.)
It should also be noted that the FEC libraries that are being passed around now (including the Java library from Swarmcast) are all based upon the Vandermonde FEC library provided by Luigi Rizzo. This seed has sprouted the Java library previously mentioned as well as Python bindings that will appear soon coming from the MNet and HiveCache efforts.
I ask this question because it is going to be very, very tricky for Sony to pack much of a battery into the case with the size specs given (especially when using a 2.5" drive) and 802.11b is not exactly the most power-efficient spec. I guess that Sony was between a rock and a hard place on this particular choice, 802.11g is too new and there are not going to be any low power chips any time soon while bluetooth is too slow. By eating up the battery with a wireless link you are going to increase the number of charge cycles on the battery and decrease the lifespan of this battery.
The system you describe already exists. Check out HiveCache for a system that does what you describe and adds nice features like strong encryption to stored data, error-correction to create a distributed RAID across the PCs on the LAN, and efficient storage by only keeping enough copies of redundant files (e.g. word.exe, windows DLLs, etc.) to ensure reliable recovery.
If you want to see what a system like this looks like when it is applied to the proper environment (like across PCs within the enterprise) then check out HiveCache.