Anyone who follows processor clock speeds will be aware that they suddenly stopped increasing a few years ago. While this is technically not a failure of Moore's law, at a minimum it does reflect some kind of failure to keep up with previous levels of progress. Certainly a few years ago the suggestion that we would still not have 4 GHz processors in 2006 would have been laughable, based on extrapolating previous trends.
Does anyone have any guesses on when we will finally see commercial 4 GHz processors? Will it never happen? Will we still have 3.75 GHz in 2010? 2020? Has progress in this area simply stopped? Or if not, when will it start up again?
Here's the problem I see with this concept. Right now we use radio waves to communicate. Suppose you're communicating with a probe on Mars. Mars emits essentially no RF energy. So almost all the signal you get is coming from your probe.
But with light waves it is another matter. The sun radiates enormous quantities of light, and substantial amounts are reflected from Mars. Imagine trying to see a light shining from Mars to Earth using a telescope. It would be impossible, the light from your probe would be totally swamped by the light from the entire surface of Mars.
You might think that you could fix this by going somewhat outside the visible spectrum, but there are third problems. First, going to longer wavelengths planets still radiate substantial amounts; second, I don't know of any technology for ultraviolet lasers; and third, the atmosphere becomes opaque pretty quickly when you move away from the visible spectrum.
Where this technology would be useful is in deep space probes, those that are not orbiting planets. In that case we would not have the reflected light from a planet to compete with and the use of high frequency light waves to carry more data would be a very promising approach. But for probes at planets, I don't think it will work.
So why is it that games alone have this problem, and not other media? Why are film reviews not always positive? Likewise with book reviews, TV reviews, music reviews, theater reviews, and reviews of every other art form and creative project?
One difference, it seems to me, is that none of these fields have the equivalent of "gaming magazines", at least not that have any significance or popularity. Yes, you can find magazines about movie stars and TV shows, and they are filled with promotional puff pieces about upcoming projects, but nobody takes them seriously. They are only read by starry-eyed teenagers and bored housewives.
Real movie reviews come out at the same time as the movie. And the same with the other art forms listed above. They review the work which the user will experience, and they give honest, tough, objective assessments of the quality of the work.
Why isn't the gaming world like this? Why do people still care about gaming magazines? I am amazed in this day and age that anybody still buys paper products. I would expect that, as with other creative works, games would be reviewed when they are published, and those would be the reviews that count. Yes, they could still publish fanboy promotional pieces for upcoming games, but nobody would care about that any more than they care because some magazine shows George Clooney or Brad Pitt in an adoring light.
I don't follow the gaming world, so I don't know why exactly they have fallen into this trap. Maybe it's because so many gamers are still children. Perhaps as the field matures, gamers will realize that these promotional magazines are as insignificant as Soap Opera Digest and will not pay them any more attention.
The whole point of TCPA is that "trust" is built in to the machine in a fundamentally inaccessbile (to the user) way.
You don't know anything about TCPA. The whole point is to do a "trusted boot" so that the state of the machine can be known and reported in an unforgeable way. This allows both users and remote parties to know that the machine is running a certain configuration, with no rootkits or malware installed. This process protects the user against attacks contrary to your statement above.
It also allows the user to prove to remote systems what his configuration is, which allows them to trust what his software will do. This is what you don't like, you don't want to be able to make convincing attestations about your software configuration, because then remote systems might refuse to talk to you unless you are running a configuration they approve of.
That's fine if you don't like this, but don't lie about the technology and say that it doesn't help the user to trust the machine. It helps everyone trust the machine. That's why it's called Trusted Computing.
Anecdotally, I get a terrible headache that lasts for hours if I talk even 30 seconds on a cell phone.
You should do a test, if you think it is radiation. Blindfold yourself and have someone hold a turned-on cell phone near your head, and also try it with one shut off and the battery removed. See if you can reliably tell the difference.
HDCP is destined to fail anyway. It is fundamentally a cryptographic protocol which does a handshake between video card and monitor that sets up a cryptographic key, then encrypts the data. This handshake portion was created without public crypto review, and as is often the case, is done very badly. As Niels Ferguson said when he examined the HDCP spec, "I was just reading it and it broke"!
See this posting to Perry Metzger's cryptography mailing list for a summary of known cryptographic attacks on HDCP. It is only a matter of time until the HDCP master key is reverse-engineered, and at that point it will become easy to create devices that mimic HDCP functionality, making HDCP essentially useless.
There are two questions here. The first is, why isn't the futures market forecasting price increases for oil? And the second is, if you do believe in Peak Oil, how should you invest?
There are a few answers to the first question. Maybe the futures market is wrong. However, everyone there is betting hard-earned money on future oil prices, so if anyone is informed about what is likely to happen with the oil situation, you'd think it would be oil traders. Or, maybe Peak Oil theory is wrong. The futures market only goes out about five years and maybe oil won't peak until, say, ten years from now. That's not Deffeyes' time line but there are a lot of other Peak Oil theorists and many of them put the peak in the 2010s.
An interesting third alternative is that we could see a peak but that the price of oil might not rise. This would mean there must be a serious drop in demand, and the most plausible scenario would be a worldwide recession. If $60 oil sends the U.S. and the rest of the world into a recession, and continued high prices make it an "I've fallen and can't get up" situation, we could see an ongoing economic crunch coupled with oil prices similar to today's levels, as the futures market predicts.
For the second question, suppose you're convinced that the futures market is simply wrong and that oil will be well over $100 by 2010, maybe even over $200. What should you do? The problem with buying futures is that people usually buy them on margin, basically putting 10% down or so. And then, if the price reverses for them by about that amount, 10%, they are wiped out. So even if they bet right in the long run, they are likely to be closed out before they get there, and they lose everything. You can fix this by not using margin, but then your profit opportunities are limited. If oil ends up being two or three times higher than everyone else thought, you would only double or triple your money, but that is not enough reward for being right on an issue that everyone else thought was a thousand-to-one shot.
The better choice is futures options. For a few thousand dollars you can buy an option whose value will be 1000 times (oil price - $100). If oil got to $200 your few thousand dollars would turn into $100,000. And you don't get wiped out by any fluctuations along the way; you pay up front, then sit tight and wait to get lucky. The down side is that you lose your entire investment if oil is less than $100 at the end, but it was only a few thousand dollars, which you should be able to afford if you're thinking about this.
This is what Deffeyes was talking about doing. I'm thinking of taking a flyer myself. It's safer for long-term investments because there's less chance of a temporary reversal wiping you out. For shorter terms the futures have some advantages over options, in that if the price doesn't quite reach your target but comes close, you can recover a substantial part of your investment.
The standard economic model for how an exhaustible resource would be optimally consumed is from Hotelling in the 1930s. Owners of oil, or any other similar resource, will attempt to control production levels such that the price of oil rises gradually as the supply dwindles. The price should increase at about the market rate of interest. This generally requires the oil to be produced at a fast rate initially, with the rate gradually declining so as to raise the price appropriately. The resulting policy maximizes each oil producer's profit, and also maximizes the net economic benefit of the resource to society as a whole.
Despite the simplicity and elegance of this theoretical result, the historical behavior of resource prices and production levels has not followed the Hotelling model. Prices of oil, gas, copper, etc. have been roughly constant, in constant dollars, for most of the industrial age. And production levels have been steadily rising, rather than falling as the model predicts. In fact, in most ways these natural resources have behaved more like theoretical models of renewable resources than exhaustible ones.
In the past few years there has been a change, and the price of not only oil but of almost all commodities has increased dramatically. Much of this is due to rapid economic growth from China and third world countries, straining existing supply.
It's possible that as we approach the midpoint of worldwide supply, the Hotelling model will become more relevant and resource owners will begin to manage their resources with an eye to extracting maximum value from a diminishing pool. If so then we should anticipate gradual increases in resource prices which continue until the resource is exhausted or a substitute replaces it.
Luckily for Chris, with Google's stock down over 100 points in the past few weeks, chance are he's not making any money, either. Love those deep underwater options!
The original paper is unfortunately not available without a subscription, but it has considerably more detail.
The cost breaks down as a capital outley of 45 billion dollars for the barges and equipment; and operating expenses of 1.3 billion dollars per year. The barges would be wind powered for the pumping operations so no substantial CO2 is generated.
8100 barges, with a wind power system, a low volume pump and two high volume pumps per barge. 32 helicopters, 4 harbors, 4 air bases and 1 control center, for the Thunderbirds, I guess.
This has been widelydiscussedonline and it is a pure hoax. The wymsey site also has such highly factual articles as hunting the wily tofu. Obligatory dig at slashdot editors elided for space.
This has similarities to the Santangelo case we discussed last year. There, the mother of four denied that she had ever used a file sharing program or downloaded any of the music the RIAA claimed.
Here is an article that describes recent news in that case:
The Wappingers Falls woman says she never downloaded any songs and if it was done on her computer by her children or their friends it's the fault of a file-sharing program for allowing them to do it.
Ah, yes... the old "it's the fault of a file-sharing program for allowing them to do it" defense. I wonder how well that one will fly.
Apparently Santangelo is receiving all kinds of donations from big hearted Internet file traders but frankly it looks like money down the drain to me. There is no way she is going to win when she's already basically admitting that she failed to supervise her kids and their friends when they were using her computer.
As far as this new case, who wants to bet that it won't turn out the same way? The lady maybe never touched the computer, but what about the kids? She's responsible for their actions! Saying "I didn't do it" won't help if it's your kids, like what appears to be the case with Santangelo.
If you were assessing the prospects of a 60-year-old man, how much longer would you expect him to live? If you were an executive evaluating the performance of a movie that had made 40 million dollars at the box office so far, what would you estimate for its total gross?
These questions have specific "right" answers, which can be achieved based on having the proper mental model for how lifespans and movie grosses are distributed. See how good a job you could do, without peeking, just based on your prior knowledge about the world.
As I understand it the problem is that Microsoft has to validate submitted drivers to see that they follow the DRM rules and don't have any back doors to let content be extracted. This is a big job so they can't afford to do it for every driver that any person feels like submitting, opening themselves up to a sort of DOS attack. By charging a fee for submissions they limit their work to only people who are really serious about it, and shut out the merely curious and those who hate DRM and would try to monkey-wrench it.
I'd worry that this could get to the point where the displayed synthetic image through the scope actually overshadowed the visible light you were trying to see. Using a backyard scope can be pretty disappointing to people who are used to stunning shots from space probes and Hubble. A few of the brighter nebulae and globular and open clusters are pretty, as well as the moon, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, but aside from that you have to really get into it to enjoy it. You have to get to the point where you get satisfaction just from finding and seeing an object, rather than being able to appreciate its beauty.
With AR technology they could superimpose a synthetic image of, say, the Andromeda galaxy (which is enormous but so faint as to be almost invisible in a backyard scope). It would look just like the pictures you see. You could also have a "digital zoom" which would let you see fine detail in some object, such as the Horsehead nebula which is very pretty but extremely small in a backyard scope.
The problem is that once you do this you are no longer doing astronomy but just looking at pictures, which you could do in more comfort inside at your computer than outside, bent over in a cramped position as you peer into a telescope eyepiece. It seems like it defeats the purpose of astronomy and will prevent beginners from sticking with it long enough to get into other aspects of the hobby.
One thing that should be made clear: this eavesdropping at 10 meters distance, while troubling, is only while the passport is being read at an official station. Passports in people's pockets or desks cannot be read at this distance. It's only when you are displaying the passport and having the chip read by an authorized reader that an eavesdropper with proper equipment can listen in on the data exchange and then decrypt it as described in the article.
David Pizer wakes up in the future and calls his accountant to find out how his account is doing. "Good news!" the man says. "Your ten million dollars has grown to almost one billion dollars!" David is ecstatic and they talk a minute more. Suddenly the phone chimes. "Please deposit one hundred million dollars for the next three minutes..."
Go to about:config and look for browser.send_pings, set it to false. This is defaulting to true in the overnight trunk builds, although you won't have it yet if you just run the official releases. But next time you get an update, check for it and you can disable it.
Those figures reported for the rootkit infections never made sense. Half a million computers? As respected security expert Bruce Schneier noted:
"Even more interesting is that there may be at least half a million infected computers... I say 'may be at least' because the data doesn't smell right to me. Look at the list of infected titles, and estimate what percentage of CD buyers will play them on their computers; does that seem like half a million sales to you? It doesn't to me, although I readily admit that I don't know the music business."
As Schneir notes, these are not big selling CDs. Here is the list from the EFF link above:
Trey Anastasio, Shine (Columbia) Celine Dion, On ne Change Pas (Epic) Neil Diamond, 12 Songs (Columbia) Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia) Chris Botti, To Love Again (Columbia) Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia) Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia) The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia) Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia) Susie Suh, Susie Suh (Epic) Amerie, Touch (Columbia) Life of Agony, Broken Valley (Epic) Horace Silver Quintet, Silver's Blue (Epic Legacy) Gerry Mulligan, Jeru (Columbia Legacy) Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie (Columbia Legacy) The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia) The Dead 60s, The Dead 60s (Epic) Dion, The Essential Dion (Columbia Legacy) Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (Epic) Ricky Martin, Life (Columbia) (labeled as XCP, but, oddly, our disc had no protection)
While Dan Kaminsky's methodology seems basically sound, if the results don't add up it suggests that there is something else going on. Maybe somehow each computer queried more than one DNS server, or some similar effect occured to artifically inflate the number of computers he is counting.
The actor, Dominic Purcell, also plays the older brother on this season's hit Prison Break - another show with an annoying cliff-hanger last fall. Fortunately it will be on again in the spring but I expect they will leave us hanging before next season.
For me, that length==1 trigger is the most convincing evidence.
I disagree. If you want to embed a back door and trigger on only specially-constructed data, you don't use the value of 1! That's too easy to happen by chance.
The length is a four-byte field. You use something like "0x3d07a19f", a random value that only you know and that the code tests for. Or maybe "0xfeedbacc" or some such easily rememberable value. Only then do you trigger your back door.
To me the current behavior sounds a lot more like a bug than a feature.
But why do we have to guess? Let's ask the guy who implemented it for WINE! What was he thinking when he did this? And more important, how did he know that he was supposed to implement this broken and undocumented functionality?
Can't we look at the changelog for WINE and see who worked on this? Let's get that guy's opinion, he'd be the most authoritative source of information at this point.
I don't want to ame, but the "fi" and "fl" ligatures have been stripped from the text, making it agrantly hard to read. I hope they x it soon. What a asco!
I'm disappointed that there was no new Intel IBook. This is the one the rumor sites were all sure would happen. $2K is too much for a laptop for me. I held off getting an iBook for Christmas waiting for today, and now I don't know what to do. I don't know whether to wait another six months and see what happens or go ahead and get one today. Very disappointing!
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who follows processor clock speeds will be aware that they suddenly stopped increasing a few years ago. While this is technically not a failure of Moore's law, at a minimum it does reflect some kind of failure to keep up with previous levels of progress. Certainly a few years ago the suggestion that we would still not have 4 GHz processors in 2006 would have been laughable, based on extrapolating previous trends.
Does anyone have any guesses on when we will finally see commercial 4 GHz processors? Will it never happen? Will we still have 3.75 GHz in 2010? 2020? Has progress in this area simply stopped? Or if not, when will it start up again?
Here's the problem I see with this concept. Right now we use radio waves to communicate. Suppose you're communicating with a probe on Mars. Mars emits essentially no RF energy. So almost all the signal you get is coming from your probe.
But with light waves it is another matter. The sun radiates enormous quantities of light, and substantial amounts are reflected from Mars. Imagine trying to see a light shining from Mars to Earth using a telescope. It would be impossible, the light from your probe would be totally swamped by the light from the entire surface of Mars.
You might think that you could fix this by going somewhat outside the visible spectrum, but there are third problems. First, going to longer wavelengths planets still radiate substantial amounts; second, I don't know of any technology for ultraviolet lasers; and third, the atmosphere becomes opaque pretty quickly when you move away from the visible spectrum.
Where this technology would be useful is in deep space probes, those that are not orbiting planets. In that case we would not have the reflected light from a planet to compete with and the use of high frequency light waves to carry more data would be a very promising approach. But for probes at planets, I don't think it will work.
So why is it that games alone have this problem, and not other media? Why are film reviews not always positive? Likewise with book reviews, TV reviews, music reviews, theater reviews, and reviews of every other art form and creative project?
One difference, it seems to me, is that none of these fields have the equivalent of "gaming magazines", at least not that have any significance or popularity. Yes, you can find magazines about movie stars and TV shows, and they are filled with promotional puff pieces about upcoming projects, but nobody takes them seriously. They are only read by starry-eyed teenagers and bored housewives.
Real movie reviews come out at the same time as the movie. And the same with the other art forms listed above. They review the work which the user will experience, and they give honest, tough, objective assessments of the quality of the work.
Why isn't the gaming world like this? Why do people still care about gaming magazines? I am amazed in this day and age that anybody still buys paper products. I would expect that, as with other creative works, games would be reviewed when they are published, and those would be the reviews that count. Yes, they could still publish fanboy promotional pieces for upcoming games, but nobody would care about that any more than they care because some magazine shows George Clooney or Brad Pitt in an adoring light.
I don't follow the gaming world, so I don't know why exactly they have fallen into this trap. Maybe it's because so many gamers are still children. Perhaps as the field matures, gamers will realize that these promotional magazines are as insignificant as Soap Opera Digest and will not pay them any more attention.
The whole point of TCPA is that "trust" is built in to the machine in a fundamentally inaccessbile (to the user) way.
You don't know anything about TCPA. The whole point is to do a "trusted boot" so that the state of the machine can be known and reported in an unforgeable way. This allows both users and remote parties to know that the machine is running a certain configuration, with no rootkits or malware installed. This process protects the user against attacks contrary to your statement above.
It also allows the user to prove to remote systems what his configuration is, which allows them to trust what his software will do. This is what you don't like, you don't want to be able to make convincing attestations about your software configuration, because then remote systems might refuse to talk to you unless you are running a configuration they approve of.
That's fine if you don't like this, but don't lie about the technology and say that it doesn't help the user to trust the machine. It helps everyone trust the machine. That's why it's called Trusted Computing.
Anecdotally, I get a terrible headache that lasts for hours if I talk even 30 seconds on a cell phone.
You should do a test, if you think it is radiation. Blindfold yourself and have someone hold a turned-on cell phone near your head, and also try it with one shut off and the battery removed. See if you can reliably tell the difference.
...the university President sees a possible link between electric and magnetic fields and brain tumors.
Easy solution: tinfoil hats. Keeps those nasty EM waves out and presto, no brain tumors.
HDCP is destined to fail anyway. It is fundamentally a cryptographic protocol which does a handshake between video card and monitor that sets up a cryptographic key, then encrypts the data. This handshake portion was created without public crypto review, and as is often the case, is done very badly. As Niels Ferguson said when he examined the HDCP spec, "I was just reading it and it broke"!
See this posting to Perry Metzger's cryptography mailing list for a summary of known cryptographic attacks on HDCP. It is only a matter of time until the HDCP master key is reverse-engineered, and at that point it will become easy to create devices that mimic HDCP functionality, making HDCP essentially useless.
There are two questions here. The first is, why isn't the futures market forecasting price increases for oil? And the second is, if you do believe in Peak Oil, how should you invest?
There are a few answers to the first question. Maybe the futures market is wrong. However, everyone there is betting hard-earned money on future oil prices, so if anyone is informed about what is likely to happen with the oil situation, you'd think it would be oil traders. Or, maybe Peak Oil theory is wrong. The futures market only goes out about five years and maybe oil won't peak until, say, ten years from now. That's not Deffeyes' time line but there are a lot of other Peak Oil theorists and many of them put the peak in the 2010s.
An interesting third alternative is that we could see a peak but that the price of oil might not rise. This would mean there must be a serious drop in demand, and the most plausible scenario would be a worldwide recession. If $60 oil sends the U.S. and the rest of the world into a recession, and continued high prices make it an "I've fallen and can't get up" situation, we could see an ongoing economic crunch coupled with oil prices similar to today's levels, as the futures market predicts.
For the second question, suppose you're convinced that the futures market is simply wrong and that oil will be well over $100 by 2010, maybe even over $200. What should you do? The problem with buying futures is that people usually buy them on margin, basically putting 10% down or so. And then, if the price reverses for them by about that amount, 10%, they are wiped out. So even if they bet right in the long run, they are likely to be closed out before they get there, and they lose everything. You can fix this by not using margin, but then your profit opportunities are limited. If oil ends up being two or three times higher than everyone else thought, you would only double or triple your money, but that is not enough reward for being right on an issue that everyone else thought was a thousand-to-one shot.
The better choice is futures options. For a few thousand dollars you can buy an option whose value will be 1000 times (oil price - $100). If oil got to $200 your few thousand dollars would turn into $100,000. And you don't get wiped out by any fluctuations along the way; you pay up front, then sit tight and wait to get lucky. The down side is that you lose your entire investment if oil is less than $100 at the end, but it was only a few thousand dollars, which you should be able to afford if you're thinking about this.
This is what Deffeyes was talking about doing. I'm thinking of taking a flyer myself. It's safer for long-term investments because there's less chance of a temporary reversal wiping you out. For shorter terms the futures have some advantages over options, in that if the price doesn't quite reach your target but comes close, you can recover a substantial part of your investment.
The standard economic model for how an exhaustible resource would be optimally consumed is from Hotelling in the 1930s. Owners of oil, or any other similar resource, will attempt to control production levels such that the price of oil rises gradually as the supply dwindles. The price should increase at about the market rate of interest. This generally requires the oil to be produced at a fast rate initially, with the rate gradually declining so as to raise the price appropriately. The resulting policy maximizes each oil producer's profit, and also maximizes the net economic benefit of the resource to society as a whole.
Despite the simplicity and elegance of this theoretical result, the historical behavior of resource prices and production levels has not followed the Hotelling model. Prices of oil, gas, copper, etc. have been roughly constant, in constant dollars, for most of the industrial age. And production levels have been steadily rising, rather than falling as the model predicts. In fact, in most ways these natural resources have behaved more like theoretical models of renewable resources than exhaustible ones.
In the past few years there has been a change, and the price of not only oil but of almost all commodities has increased dramatically. Much of this is due to rapid economic growth from China and third world countries, straining existing supply.
It's possible that as we approach the midpoint of worldwide supply, the Hotelling model will become more relevant and resource owners will begin to manage their resources with an eye to extracting maximum value from a diminishing pool. If so then we should anticipate gradual increases in resource prices which continue until the resource is exhausted or a substitute replaces it.
Luckily for Chris, with Google's stock down over 100 points in the past few weeks, chance are he's not making any money, either. Love those deep underwater options!
The original paper is unfortunately not available without a subscription, but it has considerably more detail.
The cost breaks down as a capital outley of 45 billion dollars for the barges and equipment; and operating expenses of 1.3 billion dollars per year. The barges would be wind powered for the pumping operations so no substantial CO2 is generated.
8100 barges, with a wind power system, a low volume pump and two high volume pumps per barge. 32 helicopters, 4 harbors, 4 air bases and 1 control center, for the Thunderbirds, I guess.
This has been widely discussed online and it is a pure hoax. The wymsey site also has such highly factual articles as hunting the wily tofu. Obligatory dig at slashdot editors elided for space.
Here is an article that describes recent news in that case:
http://www.forbes.com/business/energy/feeds/ap/20
However her defense has changed slightly:Ah, yes... the old "it's the fault of a file-sharing program for allowing them to do it" defense. I wonder how well that one will fly.
Apparently Santangelo is receiving all kinds of donations from big hearted Internet file traders but frankly it looks like money down the drain to me. There is no way she is going to win when she's already basically admitting that she failed to supervise her kids and their friends when they were using her computer.
As far as this new case, who wants to bet that it won't turn out the same way? The lady maybe never touched the computer, but what about the kids? She's responsible for their actions! Saying "I didn't do it" won't help if it's your kids, like what appears to be the case with Santangelo.
http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/Papers/prediction10.pd
It begins:
These questions have specific "right" answers, which can be achieved based on having the proper mental model for how lifespans and movie grosses are distributed. See how good a job you could do, without peeking, just based on your prior knowledge about the world.
As I understand it the problem is that Microsoft has to validate submitted drivers to see that they follow the DRM rules and don't have any back doors to let content be extracted. This is a big job so they can't afford to do it for every driver that any person feels like submitting, opening themselves up to a sort of DOS attack. By charging a fee for submissions they limit their work to only people who are really serious about it, and shut out the merely curious and those who hate DRM and would try to monkey-wrench it.
I'd worry that this could get to the point where the displayed synthetic image through the scope actually overshadowed the visible light you were trying to see. Using a backyard scope can be pretty disappointing to people who are used to stunning shots from space probes and Hubble. A few of the brighter nebulae and globular and open clusters are pretty, as well as the moon, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, but aside from that you have to really get into it to enjoy it. You have to get to the point where you get satisfaction just from finding and seeing an object, rather than being able to appreciate its beauty.
With AR technology they could superimpose a synthetic image of, say, the Andromeda galaxy (which is enormous but so faint as to be almost invisible in a backyard scope). It would look just like the pictures you see. You could also have a "digital zoom" which would let you see fine detail in some object, such as the Horsehead nebula which is very pretty but extremely small in a backyard scope.
The problem is that once you do this you are no longer doing astronomy but just looking at pictures, which you could do in more comfort inside at your computer than outside, bent over in a cramped position as you peer into a telescope eyepiece. It seems like it defeats the purpose of astronomy and will prevent beginners from sticking with it long enough to get into other aspects of the hobby.
One thing that should be made clear: this eavesdropping at 10 meters distance, while troubling, is only while the passport is being read at an official station. Passports in people's pockets or desks cannot be read at this distance. It's only when you are displaying the passport and having the chip read by an authorized reader that an eavesdropper with proper equipment can listen in on the data exchange and then decrypt it as described in the article.
A PDF of the 9th Circuit Court Opinion is available at the link.
David Pizer wakes up in the future and calls his accountant to find out how his account is doing. "Good news!" the man says. "Your ten million dollars has grown to almost one billion dollars!" David is ecstatic and they talk a minute more. Suddenly the phone chimes. "Please deposit one hundred million dollars for the next three minutes..."
Go to about:config and look for browser.send_pings, set it to false. This is defaulting to true in the overnight trunk builds, although you won't have it yet if you just run the official releases. But next time you get an update, check for it and you can disable it.
"Even more interesting is that there may be at least half a million infected computers... I say 'may be at least' because the data doesn't smell right to me. Look at the list of infected titles, and estimate what percentage of CD buyers will play them on their computers; does that seem like half a million sales to you? It doesn't to me, although I readily admit that I don't know the music business."
As Schneir notes, these are not big selling CDs. Here is the list from the EFF link above:While Dan Kaminsky's methodology seems basically sound, if the results don't add up it suggests that there is something else going on. Maybe somehow each computer queried more than one DNS server, or some similar effect occured to artifically inflate the number of computers he is counting.
The actor, Dominic Purcell, also plays the older brother on this season's hit Prison Break - another show with an annoying cliff-hanger last fall. Fortunately it will be on again in the spring but I expect they will leave us hanging before next season.
For me, that length==1 trigger is the most convincing evidence.
I disagree. If you want to embed a back door and trigger on only specially-constructed data, you don't use the value of 1! That's too easy to happen by chance.
The length is a four-byte field. You use something like "0x3d07a19f", a random value that only you know and that the code tests for. Or maybe "0xfeedbacc" or some such easily rememberable value. Only then do you trigger your back door.
To me the current behavior sounds a lot more like a bug than a feature.
But why do we have to guess? Let's ask the guy who implemented it for WINE! What was he thinking when he did this? And more important, how did he know that he was supposed to implement this broken and undocumented functionality?
Can't we look at the changelog for WINE and see who worked on this? Let's get that guy's opinion, he'd be the most authoritative source of information at this point.
I don't want to ame, but the "fi" and "fl" ligatures have been stripped from the text, making it agrantly hard to read. I hope they x it soon. What a asco!
I'm disappointed that there was no new Intel IBook. This is the one the rumor sites were all sure would happen. $2K is too much for a laptop for me. I held off getting an iBook for Christmas waiting for today, and now I don't know what to do. I don't know whether to wait another six months and see what happens or go ahead and get one today. Very disappointing!