Oh those poor morons in middle America. Thank goodness we on the coasts are all so smart as to never be fooled by crap from the government.
Don't be stupid - I meant middle class America. They're not morons, they're just the ones with political power who need to be convinced the the government is on the case. Other government security projects are better targeted towards real security - like the Air Marshal program.
But I think the last time I sat in hours of traffic to go to the store, I was in Alabama waiting for a turned over gas truck to be hauled off the 2-lane road.
Actually, you'll probably find yourself under suspicion at a smaller airfield. Small airfields are like small towns, except more so: everyone knows everyone else.
That's a common rejoinder, but it's knee-jerk. That's only my experience at the very small airfields (like the one I used to fly out of, 3FD1, before it was closed to be sold as strip mall real estate). The medium sized ones, large enough to handle some passenger jet traffic but small enough to handle a lot o general aviation, usually have next to no security. I've seen them all across the country, from Florida to California and all points in between (I usually fly the southern route, via El Paso). My range in my PA180 is about 400 nm, so I see a whole lot of 'em (it was still difficult two months ago to get hotel rooms in Louisiana and Alabama, by the way, thanks to FEMA overbooking).
And if I've flown into the field, well, then I have access to everything - my airplane is my passport. Never mind that I could easily have stolen it from one of a dozen unmanned fields across the south of the country that I could pull out of my log book.
Let's look at Austin as a concrete example - it's a regular overnight stop for me as I have friends there. Half of the field is international-rated airline traffic with all of the bells and whistles. The other half is GA. In order to get on to the GA half of the field in my rental car, all I have to do is ring a buzzer next to the gate at the high-end FBO. Sometimes a voice will come on and ask me for my tail number (clearly visible from off the field) before opening the gate - sometimes the gate will just open. Funny, they don't try to X-Ray and explosive-sniff the car.
At the county-owned field in Florida I fly out of, there is simply no security after 6pm. The gates are left open and anybody can come and go. I had $10,000 of avionics stolen out of my airplane one night, and my A&P had a King Air have a couple hundred gallons of AvGas siphoned out of it just after Katrina. My insurance company tells me that this is not at all uncommon (thankfully, they paid up with barely a blink - much to my surprise).
At best, security is highly variable - there are tons of fields that an attacker could cherry pick access to. I'm confident that anybody who's been in the GA world for more than a few months could easily plan to access a passenger airliner without being challenged. And don't get me started on cargo jets...
Well, of course. It's very simple, most people are misunderstanding the purpose of airline security.
The purpose is not to stop terrorists. It's abundantly clear that the measures that have been taken are ineffective at doing so. The purpose of airline security is assure middle America that Something Is Being Done.
Towards that end, it's much more important that people who look "Middle American" appear to be given much more scrutiny, because they're the ones footing the bill - they have to be the ones to get the warm fuzzies and thereby get assurance that it's safe to fly.
If you want some idea of how completely absurd the whole thing is, try being a pilot (or just pretending to be one) at a smaller airfield (yes, that still services larger jets) and see how easy it is to access airplanes without a single challenge from anybody. At most, you'll be asked for the tail number of your aircraft - which you can read from the big freakin' characters on the side of every airplane.
I don't care, so long as Vonage stops those freakin' annoying commercials. They're like when a three year old gets a hold of phrase they like and won't stop repeating it.
I mean, yeesh. I can be three rooms away from the TV and nearly be irritated out of my skin by those things.
Another one that I like is Infrant's ReadyNAS. There are several different forms factors - I've really liked the 4-SATA bay ReadyNAS NV, it's a solid piece of hardware (and runs their embedded version of Linux, has web-based configuration of everything including its Samba, servers as a printserver, supports external USB drives for backup, etc).
They have a default hybrid RAID 5 option that automatically grows volumes incrementally until the disks are full - and in order to grow the volumes you just slide in another drive without any configuration (the first drive becomes parity, and then further ones expand the space).
The only two gripes I have with the unit are related: they incorrectly portray SMB/CIFS as being the default network file system for MAC OS X (as opposed to AFP, which they say is only for Mac OS 9 and before), and they do not let you turn off SMB/CIFS.
Take a look at the background history of the Moller flying car (The red one always on Popular Science's cover). The guy developing it has made a killing off of licensing tech that he created for the car. The project is considered a spectacular success even though he may never actually deliver a working flying car.
Not to take away from your original point, which I think is correct...
Can you provide some sort of reference for that? Everything I've heard (including an SEC-filed complaint) about the Moller flying car is that the guy (Moller) is considered a spectacular fraud, and makes his money off of investors.
I'd love to learn that some useful tech had actually come out of the program but I've been watching him for 20 years and haven't seen a hint of it - just breathless popular technology "news" articles.
No - one can repeat a lie without knowing that it's a lie. They probably heard it from Microsoft, who has the fascinating position that licensing WMA is more open than licensing AAC, and couldn't rub two neurons together to do actually do the google.
We go over this pernicious nonsense often enough here that there really isn't any excuse for not knowing better.
making song files incompatible with any portable player other than an iPod.
What in the blue bloody hell is wrong with people that they keep claiming this?
ONCE AGAIN: AAC is the standard for MPEG4 audio, every bit as open as MP3 (both encumbered by licensed IP, less open than Ogg Vorbis). It's Apple's "Fair Play" DRM, wrapped around the AAC format, that's exclusive to the Apple iPods and the Motorola ROKR (excusably, people also like to forget that beast). Note that Fair Play is not a factor when you rip the songs yourself.
Er, no. Did you read my message? Go back and read it again. Look for the word "normalized." Look the word up if you're having a hard time with it.
As I said quite clearly, people doing real relativity work, instead of high school or freshman physics courses, normalize against C and use identical units for time and space, so that velocity is a unitless scalar. C is 1 in the normalized equations and, as I said in the example I wrote, half of C is the unitless 0.5.
Er, no. It has to do with the idea that cause must preceed effect in all reference frames.
Special relativity starts with the notion that you will measure light as going C no matter how fast you're going, or what direction you're going. (Why? Because that's what experiments showed when they tried to find an absolute frame of reference - if there were one, you could find it by looking at how light behaves). Briefly, something going faster than C means that you can find a reference frame in which cause follows effect - time travel.
The way the math shakes out, all of special relativity is based upon the notion that light in a vacuum travels along the geodesic:
dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2 - dt^2 = 0
and that simultaneity happens along those geodesics. C, the "speed of light in a vacuum" is critical as the normalizing factor for distance and time (in doing SR and GR, velocities are best expressed as fractions of C - so half the "speed of light in a vacuum" is the unitless 0.5 - unitless because time and distance have the same unit).
Now, if light travels slower than C in any particular medium, even in a vacuum, as long as it's consistent in all reference frames that's no great shakes for special relativity per se - it just means that light isn't as special to space-time as we thought and that the M-M experiments seemed to show. If light travels faster than C, *that* is what breaks special relativity and the definition of simultaneity. In essence, it means that you can define a reference frame in which an effect will preceed its cause.
If you want to learn more about it, google on terms (along with "special relativity") like "light cone," "simultaneity," "absolute past," "absolute future," and "absolute elsewhere." For the history of special relativity, start with the link I included earier, or "Michelson" and "Morley".
(yes, I know you can hack the 30 second skip back in.)
Hack?
Only if you consider hitting a quick sequence of buttons on your remote control ( select-play-3-0-select ) once per reboot of the TiVo hacking, I guess. It's more like a cheat code.
It's a little annoying, I suppose, but it's highly disingenuous to claim that TiVo doesn't have the feature - I use it every day, and friends with TiVos are always glad to learn about it and start using it as soon as they're shown the sequence.
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That's 400 nautical miles, in flying monkey units...
But I think the last time I sat in hours of traffic to go to the store, I was in Alabama waiting for a turned over gas truck to be hauled off the 2-lane road.
And if I've flown into the field, well, then I have access to everything - my airplane is my passport. Never mind that I could easily have stolen it from one of a dozen unmanned fields across the south of the country that I could pull out of my log book.
Let's look at Austin as a concrete example - it's a regular overnight stop for me as I have friends there. Half of the field is international-rated airline traffic with all of the bells and whistles. The other half is GA. In order to get on to the GA half of the field in my rental car, all I have to do is ring a buzzer next to the gate at the high-end FBO. Sometimes a voice will come on and ask me for my tail number (clearly visible from off the field) before opening the gate - sometimes the gate will just open. Funny, they don't try to X-Ray and explosive-sniff the car.
At the county-owned field in Florida I fly out of, there is simply no security after 6pm. The gates are left open and anybody can come and go. I had $10,000 of avionics stolen out of my airplane one night, and my A&P had a King Air have a couple hundred gallons of AvGas siphoned out of it just after Katrina. My insurance company tells me that this is not at all uncommon (thankfully, they paid up with barely a blink - much to my surprise).
At best, security is highly variable - there are tons of fields that an attacker could cherry pick access to. I'm confident that anybody who's been in the GA world for more than a few months could easily plan to access a passenger airliner without being challenged. And don't get me started on cargo jets...
Well, of course. It's very simple, most people are misunderstanding the purpose of airline security.
The purpose is not to stop terrorists. It's abundantly clear that the measures that have been taken are ineffective at doing so. The purpose of airline security is assure middle America that Something Is Being Done .
Towards that end, it's much more important that people who look "Middle American" appear to be given much more scrutiny, because they're the ones footing the bill - they have to be the ones to get the warm fuzzies and thereby get assurance that it's safe to fly.
If you want some idea of how completely absurd the whole thing is, try being a pilot (or just pretending to be one) at a smaller airfield (yes, that still services larger jets) and see how easy it is to access airplanes without a single challenge from anybody. At most, you'll be asked for the tail number of your aircraft - which you can read from the big freakin' characters on the side of every airplane.
I use the label, "monkey units."
...about what "Web 2.0" is doing to fonts...
Whenever I read the phrase "Web 2.0," I wonder what ever happened to Jon Katz.
I don't care, so long as Vonage stops those freakin' annoying commercials. They're like when a three year old gets a hold of phrase they like and won't stop repeating it. I mean, yeesh. I can be three rooms away from the TV and nearly be irritated out of my skin by those things.
A government job is a right??
Where's my check?
Another one that I like is Infrant's ReadyNAS. There are several different forms factors - I've really liked the 4-SATA bay ReadyNAS NV, it's a solid piece of hardware (and runs their embedded version of Linux, has web-based configuration of everything including its Samba, servers as a printserver, supports external USB drives for backup, etc).
They have a default hybrid RAID 5 option that automatically grows volumes incrementally until the disks are full - and in order to grow the volumes you just slide in another drive without any configuration (the first drive becomes parity, and then further ones expand the space).
The only two gripes I have with the unit are related: they incorrectly portray SMB/CIFS as being the default network file system for MAC OS X (as opposed to AFP, which they say is only for Mac OS 9 and before), and they do not let you turn off SMB/CIFS.
After all, we first made it to the moon 37 years ago... I don't think anybody dreamed that far ahead that we'd abandon it once we achieved it.
Can you provide some sort of reference for that? Everything I've heard (including an SEC-filed complaint) about the Moller flying car is that the guy (Moller) is considered a spectacular fraud, and makes his money off of investors.
I'd love to learn that some useful tech had actually come out of the program but I've been watching him for 20 years and haven't seen a hint of it - just breathless popular technology "news" articles.
As far as I can tell, they're just describing an instance of the well-known problem of the man-in-the-middle attack.
This is not a vulnerability if you know the other key's hash/residue and compare it each session, as ssh can be configured to do.
Nothing to see here, move along.
No - one can repeat a lie without knowing that it's a lie. They probably heard it from Microsoft, who has the fascinating position that licensing WMA is more open than licensing AAC, and couldn't rub two neurons together to do actually do the google.
We go over this pernicious nonsense often enough here that there really isn't any excuse for not knowing better.
Where does this ignorant FUD keep coming coming from?
ONCE AGAIN: AAC is the standard for MPEG4 audio, every bit as open as MP3 (both encumbered by licensed IP, less open than Ogg Vorbis). It's Apple's "Fair Play" DRM, wrapped around the AAC format, that's exclusive to the Apple iPods and the Motorola ROKR (excusably, people also like to forget that beast). Note that Fair Play is not a factor when you rip the songs yourself.
AAC is supported by tons of players, including (just from a quick Google) the Sony Network Walkman and the Viliv P1. Hell, there's a press release from 2000 when Toshiba first announced theirs.
I'm sure there are tons more, AAC support is integrated in a number of the chipsets available now.
Jackass.
Seems that you can fool 33% of the people all of the time.
...licensing "door bell tones."
Don't tell the RIAA.
OK, combine this tech with some really good piezoelectric bits, and we're starting to see the underlying tech of the future teledildonic rig.
Talk about force feedback...
Er, no. Did you read my message? Go back and read it again. Look for the word "normalized." Look the word up if you're having a hard time with it.
As I said quite clearly, people doing real relativity work, instead of high school or freshman physics courses, normalize against C and use identical units for time and space, so that velocity is a unitless scalar. C is 1 in the normalized equations and, as I said in the example I wrote, half of C is the unitless 0.5.
Special relativity starts with the notion that you will measure light as going C no matter how fast you're going, or what direction you're going. (Why? Because that's what experiments showed when they tried to find an absolute frame of reference - if there were one, you could find it by looking at how light behaves). Briefly, something going faster than C means that you can find a reference frame in which cause follows effect - time travel.
The way the math shakes out, all of special relativity is based upon the notion that light in a vacuum travels along the geodesic:and that simultaneity happens along those geodesics. C, the "speed of light in a vacuum" is critical as the normalizing factor for distance and time (in doing SR and GR, velocities are best expressed as fractions of C - so half the "speed of light in a vacuum" is the unitless 0.5 - unitless because time and distance have the same unit).
Now, if light travels slower than C in any particular medium, even in a vacuum, as long as it's consistent in all reference frames that's no great shakes for special relativity per se - it just means that light isn't as special to space-time as we thought and that the M-M experiments seemed to show. If light travels faster than C, *that* is what breaks special relativity and the definition of simultaneity. In essence, it means that you can define a reference frame in which an effect will preceed its cause.
If you want to learn more about it, google on terms (along with "special relativity") like "light cone," "simultaneity," "absolute past," "absolute future," and "absolute elsewhere." For the history of special relativity, start with the link I included earier, or "Michelson" and "Morley".
Only if you consider hitting a quick sequence of buttons on your remote control ( select-play-3-0-select ) once per reboot of the TiVo hacking, I guess. It's more like a cheat code.
It's a little annoying, I suppose, but it's highly disingenuous to claim that TiVo doesn't have the feature - I use it every day, and friends with TiVos are always glad to learn about it and start using it as soon as they're shown the sequence.
Apple sure likes to imply it, where viruses are concerned.