Yes, I own a laptop. I travel with it for business. In some cities I've been, by the time you can walk 20m from your laptop it's already gone.
Sure, if you're in a closed room or a quiet little cafe or something, you can safely walk a short distance from the machine without its getting stolen. But if you're somewhere safe, why bother with the alarm anyway?
I still think this is a totally pointless invention; it won't stop a thief in a high-crime area, and in a low-crime area there are no thieves to be stopped. And the nuisance value is even worse than that of a car alarm, because people usually don't carry car alarms into the library.
Even an Olympic athlete can't cover hundreds of meters in no time. Realistically, by the time you realize you're being paged and get back to where the laptop was, neither it nor the thief is anywhere to be seen.
If you don't want your laptop stolen, the real solution is not to leave it unattended in public. Unlike a car, it's light enough to carry around.
Personally, if somebody is moving my laptop in my absence, you can bet I'm going to assume the worst and correct their behavior...
Actually you're not, because as you said, you're absent. If you were there with the laptop, no one would be stealing it. (Or, if a thief was bold enough to grab it out from under your fingers, he wouldn't be fazed by an alarm anyhow.)
This could conceivably be an intentional limitation to protect user privacy. It's known that Bluetooth isn't always secure; some other devices have flaws that allow anyone to read or modify their data. If anyone with a Bluetooth gadget could capture your phone number and GPS coordinates, it would be easy to map your movements over time.
That's just an optimistic guess though. I like to think that techies do everything on purpose. But it's more likely to be a simple missing feature; they just never bothered connecting the GPS gizmo to the Bluetooth hoobajoo, because they never realized it would be useful.
I once got 343 kills on a CS server, with maybe a dozen deaths, over the course of a whole day. I wasn't cheating, I was just a lot better than the people on the other team. And they absolutely refused to learn from their mistakes.
Example 1: The idiot who always, always ran to the same hiding place to try for an ambush. After about two rounds, I started shooting through the crate to kill him. He claimed I was using a wall hack, but I really just knew he'd be sitting in the same place again.
Example 2: The other idiot who didn't know the map. He kept accusing me of using a speed hack to get to the target before him, but the real problem was that he was taking the long way around.
You didn't actually see it working. You saw it claim to be working.
All you saw was a message from PB claiming that it kicked off a cheater. For all you know it kicked off an innocent person, and left one or more cheaters on the map.
Don't get me wrong, I like the program and use it, but its own activity reports do not constitute proof of effectiveness.
Problem 1: Shallow burial is a very short-term carbon sink. As soon as the buried biomass decomposes, its constituent elements will be released back into the system.
Plankton can be a long-term sink. If a sufficient portion of them do sink to the sea bottom, the carbon can stay out of the system for a geologically significant period.
Problem 2: Speed. Even with optimum fertilization, only so many plants can grow on one acre of land in a year.
Plankton aren't as limited because they live in a three-dimensional environment. That gives them more room to grow and easier access to nutrients.
Problem 3: Efficiency. You'd waste lots of energy on cutting, moving, and burying all those plants. That would require an army of tractors and backhoes and cranes, each of which contributes to the problem.
Plankton doesn't need to be moved or manipulated. A tanker of iron solution could fertilize many, many cubic kilometers of ocean, and the plankton would merrily "harvest" and "bury" themselves without further intervention.
Case-sensitivity is often used to distinguish the kind of thing a symbol refers to.
Person is the name of a class. perSon is the name of a function, which performs an operation once for each male child of a certain parent. pErson is a pointer to an Erson object, if your language has pointers. (Okay, I'm reaching here, but assume "Erson" means something to the programmer.)
It's easier to understand in a two-dimensional version.
Visualize a balloon filled with air. The surface of its rubber sheet represents the universe. Get a marker and make some dots on the balloon's surface; those are galaxies.
Now start heating the balloon, so the air inside expands. This will make the balloon bigger. As it enlarges, the dots will get further apart. This is the expansion of the universe.
Note that there is no spot on the balloon that can be called the "center" of the expansion. The expansion is happening everywhere. Every spot on the surface is the same, and nothing is closer or further from the "middle".
(Remember that the 2D rubber sheet is the whole universe. You can't say the expansion is centered on a point in 3D space inside the balloon, because there is no 3D space anywhere. There's nothing except the universe.)
The expansion of the real universe is like that. The real thing is just a lot harder to visualize, because it's expanding in 4 dimensions instead of 2. The point is, it is geometrically meaningless to talk about the "center" of the expansion, because there is no such place.
You don't quite have the point. This surprise has nothing to do with distance from the "center" of the big bang, since there is no center.
What's important about these galaxies is their age. Since they are ten billion light years away, the light that is reaching us now is an image of their state ten billion years ago. When the universe was that young, galaxies wouldn't yet have had time to organize themselves into strings.
The most straightforward explanation is that the universe is older than we thought. That has already been postulated as a component of other theories-- various ideas about dark matter, the cosmological constant, etc.-- meaning it's not entirely contrary to current thinking.
So you're partially right, in saying this discovery will force changes in Big Bang theory. But that does not mean what you think it means.
It has nothing to do with "approach vectors." Large objects don't usually fall in from outside the solar system.
The problem is leftover crumbs of planetary formation-- asteroids, planetesimals, the assorted random junk that has been circling the sun as long as the Earth has. In our system, Jupiter had the effect of removing that junk from our vicinity. It consumed a lot of rocks, and flung others out of the system by the slingshot effect. The remaining ones got shepherded into their own fairly circular orbits, in what we call the asteroid belt.
Without Jupiter (and the other giants), there would be lots more big rocks flying around the place. They also wouldn't be confined to the asteroid belt; they'd be zooming all over the place, and crossing over other planets' orbits. Those crossovers are what make a rock likely to hit a planet and cause extinctions.
Jupiter is not like a linebacker who jumps in front of asteroids for us. It's more like a maid, who swept the system clean a long time ago and made sure we wouldn't trip over anything.
Your real mistake was leaving the office machine logged in. That means anyone could have walked over and run arbitrary commands, and the logs would show that you did it.
You probably have an enemy in the office, who killed a table using your ID to make you look bad. (Another explanation is that an insufficiently gruntled employee wanted to annoy the company, and you were just a convenient scapegoat. But in that case I'd expect a lot more damage.)
That's why the packets are routed through multiple hosts. If you send out parts of that mp3, the recipient can't tell whether you are sharing it yourself or only relaying from somebody else.
Plus, since the packets are encrypted, it's impossible for you to know what is being relayed through your machine. You could theoretically claim that you were not sharing any files, and had no idea that copyrighted material was being relayed through your connection. (Of course, making that claim doesn't mean a court would believe you.)
From a technical standpoint it's a rather neat trick. Socially I'm not sure it's a great idea, because it may tend to enhance the perception that file sharing is a shameful, illegal act that must be hidden. But then I suppose geeks are seldom concerned about what the rest of society thinks.
That'd be a more secure way to do it, sure. But I've seen the board-swapping trick work, so at least one model of drive uses the insecure way. (I didn't physically wield the screwdriver myself, but I was present for the entire process.)
If you do forget your password, you aren't entirely screwed. The locking doesn't actually encrypt anything, it just prevents access. Your data is still physically stored "in the clear" on the platters.
So all you need to do is find an exact duplicate of the drive-- same model, same size, same revision, same everything. Make sure the password is null, or at least known. Remove the circuit board from the bad drive, replace it with the board from the good drive, and you're done.
This is enough of a pain in the ass that it's not worth doing to rescue a few documents on a corporate drone's desk machine, or to preserve the Half-Life saved games on your personal PC. But if the "dead" drive stores the novel you've been working on for thirty years, be assured that you can eventually get it back. (Of course if that's the case, this post is moot because you could just restore the file from backup. You do have regular backups, right?)
Great idea. Clearly there is not the slightest danger in placing highly radioactive material in the hands of every single car owner on the road. The average citizen is so intelligent, thoughtful, and environmentally conscious, there would be not even be any waste problem. No person on the entire planet would ever do something stupid like disposing of a car improperly. Even if they did, it's really easy to clean heavy metals out of groundwater.::eyeroll::
The real problem isn't with terrorists. It's with everyday morons, who are less predictable, more randomly destructive, and far more common.
A curious teenager once seriously contaminated most of his neighborhood, just with the insides of a bunch of smoke detectors. Consider what would happen if someone just as curious, but even stupider, started playing with a few pounds of plutonium. It's not a pretty thought.
AFAIK they haven't given any reason, they just mumble and stall and change the subject. Even in the court filings, when IBM asks them straight out, they don't give any kind of straight answer.
Even that Forbes reporter could (kind of) tell the difference between GNU/Linux the OS and Linux the kernel...
Of course the reporter could tell the difference, he had just gotten done interviewing RMS. He probably heard "GNU/Linux" a hundred times in ten minutes.
The guy claims that treaty does not apply, because he is not trying to annex the asteroid as part of a nation. He claims it as personal property, like a house or a wristwatch.
Assuming any offending bits exist, they can and will be removed from the source tree.
This is exactly what makes SCO's attitude of secrecy so frustrating. If they would just point to the infringing part of Linux, a metric boatload of kernel hackers would instantly descend upon that section of code. In short order the bad stuff would be gone, and a shiny new scratch-written replacement would be there instead.
Cynics (like me) think this is exactly why SCO is refusing to identify infringing code; the repair would cripple their attempt to collect license fees. New Linux users couldn't possibly be made to pay, because the new version would be certifiably free of SCO code. Even existing users, when threatened with a lawsuit to force license payment, could upgrade their systems and say "Sorry, we don't use any of your code here."
Removing the potential for Linux license fees would leave SCO without any revenue stream for the forseeable future. That would of course kill their stock price, sending the company (and possibly its large shareholders) into bankruptcy.
(Of course there's an even more cynical explanation: SCO doesn't reveal the infringing code because it can't find any, and this whole case is at best a gigantic fishing expeditionBut if this were true, anyone with half a brain would have dropped the lawsuit before it got to this point. Even SCO isn't that dumb... right?)
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the article?
It explains what really happened.
Perhaps you might want to read the article.
Yes, I own a laptop. I travel with it for business. In some cities I've been, by the time you can walk 20m from your laptop it's already gone.
Sure, if you're in a closed room or a quiet little cafe or something, you can safely walk a short distance from the machine without its getting stolen. But if you're somewhere safe, why bother with the alarm anyway?
I still think this is a totally pointless invention; it won't stop a thief in a high-crime area, and in a low-crime area there are no thieves to be stopped. And the nuisance value is even worse than that of a car alarm, because people usually don't carry car alarms into the library.
Even an Olympic athlete can't cover hundreds of meters in no time. Realistically, by the time you realize you're being paged and get back to where the laptop was, neither it nor the thief is anywhere to be seen.
If you don't want your laptop stolen, the real solution is not to leave it unattended in public. Unlike a car, it's light enough to carry around.
Personally, if somebody is moving my laptop in my absence, you can bet I'm going to assume the worst and correct their behavior...
Actually you're not, because as you said, you're absent. If you were there with the laptop, no one would be stealing it. (Or, if a thief was bold enough to grab it out from under your fingers, he wouldn't be fazed by an alarm anyhow.)
This could conceivably be an intentional limitation to protect user privacy. It's known that Bluetooth isn't always secure; some other devices have flaws that allow anyone to read or modify their data. If anyone with a Bluetooth gadget could capture your phone number and GPS coordinates, it would be easy to map your movements over time.
That's just an optimistic guess though. I like to think that techies do everything on purpose. But it's more likely to be a simple missing feature; they just never bothered connecting the GPS gizmo to the Bluetooth hoobajoo, because they never realized it would be useful.
I once got 343 kills on a CS server, with maybe a dozen deaths, over the course of a whole day. I wasn't cheating, I was just a lot better than the people on the other team. And they absolutely refused to learn from their mistakes.
Example 1: The idiot who always, always ran to the same hiding place to try for an ambush. After about two rounds, I started shooting through the crate to kill him. He claimed I was using a wall hack, but I really just knew he'd be sitting in the same place again.
Example 2: The other idiot who didn't know the map. He kept accusing me of using a speed hack to get to the target before him, but the real problem was that he was taking the long way around.
The short version: if you do enough verification to be totally cheatproof, your game will be so slow as to be totally unplayable.
You didn't actually see it working. You saw it claim to be working.
All you saw was a message from PB claiming that it kicked off a cheater. For all you know it kicked off an innocent person, and left one or more cheaters on the map.
Don't get me wrong, I like the program and use it, but its own activity reports do not constitute proof of effectiveness.
Problem 1: Shallow burial is a very short-term carbon sink. As soon as the buried biomass decomposes, its constituent elements will be released back into the system.
Plankton can be a long-term sink. If a sufficient portion of them do sink to the sea bottom, the carbon can stay out of the system for a geologically significant period.
Problem 2: Speed. Even with optimum fertilization, only so many plants can grow on one acre of land in a year.
Plankton aren't as limited because they live in a three-dimensional environment. That gives them more room to grow and easier access to nutrients.
Problem 3: Efficiency. You'd waste lots of energy on cutting, moving, and burying all those plants. That would require an army of tractors and backhoes and cranes, each of which contributes to the problem.
Plankton doesn't need to be moved or manipulated. A tanker of iron solution could fertilize many, many cubic kilometers of ocean, and the plankton would merrily "harvest" and "bury" themselves without further intervention.
Case-sensitivity is often used to distinguish the kind of thing a symbol refers to.
Person is the name of a class.
perSon is the name of a function, which performs an operation once for each male child of a certain parent.
pErson is a pointer to an Erson object, if your language has pointers. (Okay, I'm reaching here, but assume "Erson" means something to the programmer.)
I think I'll call it "Bob."
Bah, kids these days are so spoiled. At least you've got wireless. And a laptop. ...and a bathroom.
It's easier to understand in a two-dimensional version.
Visualize a balloon filled with air. The surface of its rubber sheet represents the universe. Get a marker and make some dots on the balloon's surface; those are galaxies.
Now start heating the balloon, so the air inside expands. This will make the balloon bigger. As it enlarges, the dots will get further apart. This is the expansion of the universe.
Note that there is no spot on the balloon that can be called the "center" of the expansion. The expansion is happening everywhere. Every spot on the surface is the same, and nothing is closer or further from the "middle".
(Remember that the 2D rubber sheet is the whole universe. You can't say the expansion is centered on a point in 3D space inside the balloon, because there is no 3D space anywhere. There's nothing except the universe.)
The expansion of the real universe is like that. The real thing is just a lot harder to visualize, because it's expanding in 4 dimensions instead of 2. The point is, it is geometrically meaningless to talk about the "center" of the expansion, because there is no such place.
You don't quite have the point. This surprise has nothing to do with distance from the "center" of the big bang, since there is no center.
What's important about these galaxies is their age. Since they are ten billion light years away, the light that is reaching us now is an image of their state ten billion years ago. When the universe was that young, galaxies wouldn't yet have had time to organize themselves into strings.
The most straightforward explanation is that the universe is older than we thought. That has already been postulated as a component of other theories-- various ideas about dark matter, the cosmological constant, etc.-- meaning it's not entirely contrary to current thinking.
So you're partially right, in saying this discovery will force changes in Big Bang theory. But that does not mean what you think it means.
It has nothing to do with "approach vectors." Large objects don't usually fall in from outside the solar system.
The problem is leftover crumbs of planetary formation-- asteroids, planetesimals, the assorted random junk that has been circling the sun as long as the Earth has. In our system, Jupiter had the effect of removing that junk from our vicinity. It consumed a lot of rocks, and flung others out of the system by the slingshot effect. The remaining ones got shepherded into their own fairly circular orbits, in what we call the asteroid belt.
Without Jupiter (and the other giants), there would be lots more big rocks flying around the place. They also wouldn't be confined to the asteroid belt; they'd be zooming all over the place, and crossing over other planets' orbits. Those crossovers are what make a rock likely to hit a planet and cause extinctions.
Jupiter is not like a linebacker who jumps in front of asteroids for us. It's more like a maid, who swept the system clean a long time ago and made sure we wouldn't trip over anything.
Your real mistake was leaving the office machine logged in. That means anyone could have walked over and run arbitrary commands, and the logs would show that you did it.
You probably have an enemy in the office, who killed a table using your ID to make you look bad. (Another explanation is that an insufficiently gruntled employee wanted to annoy the company, and you were just a convenient scapegoat. But in that case I'd expect a lot more damage.)
That's why the packets are routed through multiple hosts. If you send out parts of that mp3, the recipient can't tell whether you are sharing it yourself or only relaying from somebody else.
Plus, since the packets are encrypted, it's impossible for you to know what is being relayed through your machine. You could theoretically claim that you were not sharing any files, and had no idea that copyrighted material was being relayed through your connection. (Of course, making that claim doesn't mean a court would believe you.)
From a technical standpoint it's a rather neat trick. Socially I'm not sure it's a great idea, because it may tend to enhance the perception that file sharing is a shameful, illegal act that must be hidden. But then I suppose geeks are seldom concerned about what the rest of society thinks.
That'd be a more secure way to do it, sure. But I've seen the board-swapping trick work, so at least one model of drive uses the insecure way. (I didn't physically wield the screwdriver myself, but I was present for the entire process.)
If you do forget your password, you aren't entirely screwed. The locking doesn't actually encrypt anything, it just prevents access. Your data is still physically stored "in the clear" on the platters.
So all you need to do is find an exact duplicate of the drive-- same model, same size, same revision, same everything. Make sure the password is null, or at least known. Remove the circuit board from the bad drive, replace it with the board from the good drive, and you're done.
This is enough of a pain in the ass that it's not worth doing to rescue a few documents on a corporate drone's desk machine, or to preserve the Half-Life saved games on your personal PC. But if the "dead" drive stores the novel you've been working on for thirty years, be assured that you can eventually get it back. (Of course if that's the case, this post is moot because you could just restore the file from backup. You do have regular backups, right?)
Great idea. Clearly there is not the slightest danger in placing highly radioactive material in the hands of every single car owner on the road. The average citizen is so intelligent, thoughtful, and environmentally conscious, there would be not even be any waste problem. No person on the entire planet would ever do something stupid like disposing of a car improperly. Even if they did, it's really easy to clean heavy metals out of groundwater. ::eyeroll::
The real problem isn't with terrorists. It's with everyday morons, who are less predictable, more randomly destructive, and far more common.
A curious teenager once seriously contaminated most of his neighborhood, just with the insides of a bunch of smoke detectors. Consider what would happen if someone just as curious, but even stupider, started playing with a few pounds of plutonium. It's not a pretty thought.
AFAIK they haven't given any reason, they just mumble and stall and change the subject. Even in the court filings, when IBM asks them straight out, they don't give any kind of straight answer.
Even that Forbes reporter could (kind of) tell the difference between GNU/Linux the OS and Linux the kernel ...
Of course the reporter could tell the difference, he had just gotten done interviewing RMS. He probably heard "GNU/Linux" a hundred times in ten minutes.
The guy claims that treaty does not apply, because he is not trying to annex the asteroid as part of a nation. He claims it as personal property, like a house or a wristwatch.
Yeah, but 80 of them point to various pages on erosproject.com, and one points to orbdev.com, which probably lives on the same machine.
Assuming any offending bits exist, they can and will be removed from the source tree.
This is exactly what makes SCO's attitude of secrecy so frustrating. If they would just point to the infringing part of Linux, a metric boatload of kernel hackers would instantly descend upon that section of code. In short order the bad stuff would be gone, and a shiny new scratch-written replacement would be there instead.
Cynics (like me) think this is exactly why SCO is refusing to identify infringing code; the repair would cripple their attempt to collect license fees. New Linux users couldn't possibly be made to pay, because the new version would be certifiably free of SCO code. Even existing users, when threatened with a lawsuit to force license payment, could upgrade their systems and say "Sorry, we don't use any of your code here."
Removing the potential for Linux license fees would leave SCO without any revenue stream for the forseeable future. That would of course kill their stock price, sending the company (and possibly its large shareholders) into bankruptcy.
(Of course there's an even more cynical explanation: SCO doesn't reveal the infringing code because it can't find any, and this whole case is at best a gigantic fishing expeditionBut if this were true, anyone with half a brain would have dropped the lawsuit before it got to this point. Even SCO isn't that dumb... right?)