So I'm hoping all of this means you'll be putting some thought into what you'd make with something like this.
The tool's value to me would be pretty high. I'm just pointing out to people that if they don't know what to make or how to design it, then being able to do the fabrication won't mean as much to them as they are thinking it will at first glance.
The best thing about an at-home fabrication setup of any kind is that it allows the little guy with a great idea to make that great idea, not that it lets Joe Dolt fab a "My team's #1" foam finger yet again every day. Don't get me wrong, I'd probably make a coffee cup or something featuring my favorite sports teams. I could do that now, though. The real value of a 3d printer, especially once it handles multiple materials and such, is to drastically reduce the prototyping time of cool new things or to make full-custom one-offs.
Using it solely as a copier for existing consumer items is a bit of a waste of its potential.
It's more likely, I think, that we'd be inundated with crap products from crap designers. Then there'd be the crap knockoffs of crap products from crappy knockoff artists knocking off crappy products.
Maybe the world would suddenly realize how valuable the creative types are, and all the value would move to the designs rather than the manufacturing, shipping, warehousing, retail, and other markups. If the means to make anything became suddenly available, people would become much more specific about what they wanted to make.
I mean, seriously, Toyota hasn't grown to #2 auto maker in the world only because they have machines doing the assembly. They've grown so large because people were able to figure out reliability, safety, and at least a minimum level of style. Lots of car companies could beat Toyota senseless on manufacturing costs, but few have been able to match the quality of their products. If I can print a Yugo vs. buying a Camry, a Ford 500, or a BMW 5 series, I'm still buying. If I could print a Camry, or even a Honda Accord or Chevy Cobalt, I'd probably go that route over something buying something else.
If Windows 3.1 or even Windows 98 was free, most people would still buy (or steal) Windows XP. Some of us would rather pay for OS X or for a Linux distro than to pay less for Windows. A CD costs what a CD costs. What's on it and what that allows you to do is where the value is found.
If MS, the RIAA, the MPAA, and Metallica are protective of IP, just think about the patent wars and espionage that'll happen when Philips, Sony, Canon, LG, General Motors, Kawasaki, Matsushita, the Solo plastic cup people, etc come whining to lawmakers about their products being copied exactly in garages.
Red Dwarf aside, I've never seen a cat that could be confused with a human. When your cat or dog starts to interact with your starship's computer's AI verbally, let me know.
Evolution from one species to another, substantially different species does not happen within a generation. No accepted theory of evolution allows for it. So the time to concern ourselves with a dog or cat's descendents becoming sufficiently genetically similar to humans that we can interbreed and produce fertile offspring is when those descendents happen to reach that point. The likelihood of dog-descended humanoids or cat-descended humanoids ever becoming that close to our ape-descended selves is another matter entirely, since it is nearly nil.
Actually, rat poison is sometimes one of the ingredients in the mix to create crystal meth. You may be making their job easier for them if you lace it that way.
With rat poison, starter fluid, and anhydrous ammonia being ingredients and mixing being done in wooden shacks and moldy basements, is it any wonder this stuff kills people?
Please, if you're going to do illegal drugs, people, at least get something grown in the ground or made in a lab by people with training as chemists. Don't let "Three-tooth Junior" sell you something he made in the toilet of his grandparent's broken-down RV out behind the trailer park.
Define life please. And do so without including any philosophical arguments.
You seem to have lost sight of what science is. Science is a branch of philosophy. It is a different branch of philosophy from gnosticism or nihilism, sure. Science is a set of beliefs built on the central belief that to start with an acceptable premise, make an argument, and support your argument makes a point believable. The level of physical evidence required by science is a mark of the branch of philosophy, not a sign of a lack of philosophy.
In short, a scientific argument is a philosophical argument.
As for a definition of life, how about definition 1.a. from The Free Dictionary: The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism.
Does an embryo have a metabolism? Each cell does, and it is in the process of developing one separate from the mother. Does it grow? Well, yeah. It is in the process of being reproduced, and if allowed to mature will likely be able to reproduce in the future. Does it respond to stimuli? It does implant itself and develop a placenta, umbilical cord, etc only upon finding something within which to implant. Does it adapt to the environment? Well, it does grow based on its genes into a human, if allowed to do so. Humans not only adapt to the environment, but adapt the environment to us. The small bundle of cells itself doesn't have too much control over becoming suited to the environment, but it does cause hormonal changes in its mother that are beneficial to itself.
Is the previous paragraph incontrovertible proof that embryos are alive? Well, no, it probably is not. It does support the case that a human embryo is alive.
Well, a dog or cat embryo doesn't grow up to be a human adult. I'd say there's a pretty big distinction there that makes a human embryo a human worth caring about.
If you and some person you cared about very much were going to have a baby, and someone came along and killed your baby, I think you'd care. So does that mean it's just a matter of the embryo being wanted? That implies ownership. Do you believe you own your children as property? At what point do you not own your child -- if not embryo, if not fetus, if not 3rd trimester, if not birth, if not 5 years old... It's a slippery slope. Do you think parents own children until they are the age of majority? The courts in the U.S. very much make a distinction between ownership of a person and custody of minors.
That'd be a little misleading, because "Crash" connotes an unexpected, tragic event. This bit of booster was meant to reenter the atmosphere and hit something. True, it was probably hoped it'd hit an ocean instead of farmland or someone's house, but it was meant to come back to Earth.
"Lands" is a little misleading because it connotes a safe touchdown. "Hits" when talking about a rocket connotes a target. "Comes to rest" just sounds silly in this context. "Plummets into" might be okay, I guess.
This is why RFTA is suggested when a headline could be misinterpreted. A short snippet of text can be completely factually accurate and still interpreted to mean something utterly different than what was intended. Accuracy != precision.
In other news, "American sailor rescued by Navy". Of course, it's not a U.S. Navy seaman, nor was it the U.S. Navy that rescued him. It was some guy doing a solo sailing trip, and he was rescued by the Chilean Navy. Kudos to the Chilean Navy, BTW.
Let's see, is the long-time extend-and-embrace techno-maverick to blame, or is it the hundreds of other systems that interoperate with each other properly according to the international specification for what it is they are written to do?
Obviously you've never watched an episode of the TV shows that make fun of dumb criminals. Guys holding up liquor stores and gas stations get caught and convicted precisely because they were caught on tape all the time, apparently. That, and because some of them try to use a candy bar inside a sweatshirt pocket to look like a pistol. After all, the shows are about stupid criminals.
From the article summary, it sounds like they used multiple private video records. That is not the same as government-owned, government controlled cameras just monitoring everyone for no good reason. I have a right to video my property for security, and I have the right to assist the police in an investigation of a murderer in my neighborhood. The courts could issue a subpoena for this type of record if the police are aware of it and file for such an order.
Now, whether it's right or legal or should be legal to turn over, without a warrant or subpoena, a video record to the police when there has been no crime committed on the property the camera is installed to protect is another matter. I'm of mixed feelings on that.
Re:Response from Kevin Finisterre, second bug
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Funny, I don't recall having any issues viewing William's Money Video on my Linux machines.
I see you've never lost a letter sent through the postal service. Good for you. Will you be contacting Guinness and Ripley's, or shall I?
A programmer or an administrator has the possibility of much more control over his or her email than a person dropping a scrap of paper in a steel box.
Of course, any idea of absolute control over anything is misguided and even a bit silly. You don't have absolute control over your own body. If you did, you'd never get sick. You probably don't have absolute control over your own mind, either.
For those of you who think you do have complete control over your own mind, here's a thought for you: Danny DeVito outside on a cold day wearing nothing but some peanut butter and a smile. See? If you really had complete control over your mind, you probably wouldn't have pictured that visually.
Yeah, running a mail server could be useful on a laptop, but I'm sure the Windows ones don't queue mail. Why should the Linux ones?/var could be one of the partitions that's encrypted as a partition.
The database server should be running setuid to the uid of the user on a single-user laptop where security is a top concern. The databases should be in ~/mysql or similar.
Having a rootkit to install while the smartcard is in the system lets you snoop what the user is doing. Having a rootkit to install while the smartcard is out of the machine gives you the ability to snoop the fact that the data you want is unable to be mounted and decrypted. A rootkit installed with the smartcard could give one the ability to send the data through the network or write the encrypted data of interest to the unencrypted portions of the disk for later. A rootkit without the smartcard still does squat unless the partition/file you need the key for has the key.
I'd be tempted to do full file system instead of file-by-file or full disk. Have a root directory read-only on one partition, and a data partition with encrypted loopback files for/var,/home, and possibly/usr (in case you have any super-secret software). That would make it easy to move the data to a new machine while keeping it encrypted, yet allows you to deal with a few big units instead of thousands of small ones. I'm not sure the disk partitioning utilities are yet up to imaging encrypted partitions other than byte-by-byte.
/var/log contains lots of email addresses on a mail server. Why would someone concerned about security let an end user run their own personal mail server on an agency laptop? Network connections can be set not to be logged, or to be logged somewhere else. A syslog daemon that does encryption isn't that hard, either.
Databases can only be placed where the user has rights to place them. The end-user of an agency laptop shouldn't even be the one setting up the DB software anyway. The directory containing the database files could be encrypted, or a database/database application that only stores encrypted data could be used.
So, I have a rootkit, and I'm now an admin. That doesn't give me access to a directory that's encrypted with a key from a smartcard or a remote server.
Still, full-disk encryption gets past all these little gotchas. It'd be great to see this accomplished this way:
1. have a small OS in non-flash ROM 2. the OS in ROM gets the key from the card/central server 3. have this OS decrypt the kernel from the encrypted partition into memory 4. pass the encryption key data to the now memory-resident kernel and hand it control of the system 5. the main OS kernel mounts the partition
I'm thinking LinuxBIOS, or maybe something based on OpenFirmware for the ROMable boot loader that handles decryption. TPM support is listed as a nice-to-have in the requirement document, BTW. That may actually be useful in this type of scenario -- use the TPM controller to help with the decryption and the storage of a PC-specific key in addition to the smartcard/central key server.
The currently selected computer for keyboard, video, and mouse on my KVM gets to use the USB devices, too. Call it a KVMU switch if you like. I call it Natalie.:-\
It's made by Zonet, or at least sold under that brand name. It's called the KVM3204 and it seems it is already discontinued.
It's one of their PS/2-to-USB KVMs, which lets me use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse with my USB-capable PCs and Macs. My Windows XP box, Mandriva box, and Xandros box even let me use a USB keyboard through the KVM's USB hub. The Mac (PowerMac G4) will use the USB keyboard through the KVM if the machine's booted with the KVM pointed to it and sometimes for the first few switches back and forth. Ironically, though, I have to use a PS/2 keyboard with this switch to get it work work reliably with my Mac.
So, I guess, damn the standards and full steam ahead with the product, or something. It works really well with a PS/2 scroll mouse and my favorite PS/2 keyboard on all my systems.
Microsoft sells an OS that runs on Apple hardware.
Apple sells an OS preloaded on machines that can have Windows installed on them.
Apple is specifically marketing that they compete favorably with non-Apple x86 hardware by running both OS X and Windows. So Apple is competing directly with Microsoft's OS biggest customers (the pre-loaders like Dell and HP where the bulk of Windows sales go), who are reselling copies of Windows. They are taking sales from Microsoft's resellers.
How is that not competition again?
Linux isn't strictly competition for Windows if you limit Windows to competing with Windows-compatible operating systems. CP/M for the x86 wasn't directly competing with DOS, either.
Sure, there's still part of the original distinctions, so the line's not completely gone. But to say it hasn't blurred and to assume that one judge will see things exactly as another did is just plain silliness.
Funny, but someone too shy and unsure to sign his own words doesn't seem the type to be calling me an unworldly nerd. Go back to junior high, kiss a girl, and figure out how to hold your liquor before we start comparing party stories.
Except Shakespeare was writing in the English of his day, and to translate it to the English of our times would be a shame of sorts, but could be a decent trranslation.
The KJV of the Bible was translated from Latin. The Bible was written in Greek and Hebrew. So Bibles that are translated from Greek and Hebrew into modern English tend to bear a closer resemblance to the original meaning than ones translated from Greek and Hebrew to Latin to Middle English to Modern English.
I'm not saying the writing is any different, or that you'll like it any more, but there are Bibles in plainer English than the King James translation. Many of them are better translations, too. If you really want to read the Bible in plain English -- whether for your own beliefs, for literary purposes, in order to refute it, or any reason at all, you can go to your local religious bookstore and ask about the New International Version, a student edition Bible, or the Good News Bible.
"My Ford will outrun your Chevy any day." Seriously, some people just take brand loyalty too far.
I don't hate Microsoft, but I can tell you three reasons I like Microsoft a lot less than I could: I've been in the computer hobbyist scene heavily since the early 90's, I've been working in the field full time since 1998, and I have a good memory.
There was a time when you had more than one solid, corporate-backed choice for an OS on your PC. OS/2 version 3.0 was solid as a rock and it was reasonably easy to port software between OS/2 and Unix-based OSes. It ran DOS software, and even ran Windows 3.x software. Digital Research had a good alternative DOS version. What did Microsoft do? They told whitebox computer stores that if they wanted to preload DOS and/or Windows on any systems, they had to have a license for every system they sold. So if you bought a box with OS/2 preloaded, you paid for DOS and OS/2. If you wanted DR/DOS, you paid for two versions of DOS. That trick is not just dirty, but patently illegal. They also signed a cross-license deal with IBM on MS-DOS & PC-DOS and Windows & OS/2. They pretty much committed to IBM that OS/2 would replace Windows 3.1 and that they'd both profit from it. Then, at the height of OS/2's rise, Windows 95 came out using much of what IBM taught Microsoft and its programs were conveniently incompatible with OS/2.
Microsoft loves to spread FUD about other companies and about Free Software / Open Source projects. They've been so busy telling people that other products won't meet their needs that Windows, Office, IIS, and Internet Explorer had security almost totally neglected until Slammer, Nimda, and other widespread problem attacks made non-techie news. They have a habit of buying small companies "for their innovative products", then canceling all of their products or keeping just one product out of a broad catalog (Visio, anyone?). They make gratuitous changes to file formats and network protocols without any technical merit just to thwart compatibility efforts by the competition. Meanwhile, their upper management talks about Linus Torvalds being anti-competition, suggest Richard M. Stallman is some kind of Trotskyite, and says that small businesses having access to less expensive software will _hurt_ the economy.
Microsoft has some real quality products. They have some people there who really know what they are doing, and I'm sure many of their employees are willing to coexist with other sources of software. Their operating systems, office suite, and web browser have traditionally been their poorest quality software while they really should be some of the highest. Their management should focus more on making Microsoft's products better and their operations more lean while spending less time attacking others. It would probably help them more in the long run.
Besides, it's just downright distasteful for the biggest player to resort to such desperate tactics all the time. They haven't been the underdog in about 30 years, but they act like they are guerrilla freedom fighters doing their business in back alleys. It's time to stop being the bully and to show some confidence in your products, Mssrs. Ballmer and Gates. If you make your software so much better than the competition as you claim it is, you'll have nothing to fear.
Cheap hardware is less likely to get Linux drivers because the driver is often responsible for much of the basic functionality of the device that in a more expensive piece of hardware is in the firmware. Winmodems for example didn't have Linux drivers for a long time, and some I think still don't. Motherboard RAID solutions are often Windows-driver based as much as based on the motherboard. Linux's md software RAID is usually a better solution than even messing with drivers for those.
The latest enthusiast video cards sometimes take a little longer to get top-notch drivers for Linux than for Windows because NVidia and ATI have less resources dedicated to the drivers and it's a little more complicated to test against an OS with more branches and fewer overall users. They do a pretty good job of catching the Linux drivers up to the Windows drivers just a generation or two of enthusiast cards back, which means all their mainstream cards tend to have at least solid functionality if not good performance. A generation of enthusiast cards could mean two months or eight months, depending on the current market and any major changes by the two big players.
I actually happen to have Pentium III machines and Athlon XP machines with one or two ISA slots. The last time I checked, these machines run XP pretty comfortably. My Athlon XP 2400+ plays Battlefield 1942 without a stutter, and would probably play Battlefield 2142 pretty well if I updated the video card. It has two ISA slots (well, one ISA and one shared ISA/PCI). True, under most circumstances I'd use just the 10/100 on the board, and I happen to also have some spare PCI NICs around. At one point, though, that very 2400+ had every PCI slot full and I needed it to have a second NIC for about two hours. I had to pull a card out of a PCI slot and use a spare PCI NIC because I coul not find a driver anywhere for the ISA NIC in question. That NIC has been working at one point or another under Linux distros from Slackware 3 and RedHat 5.2 up to Mandriva 2006.0 with no problem.
I have several 16Mbit TR cards, two MAUs, and lots of really old systems with Linux and TR drivers installed. Because I can. Sometimes I hook my main Linux box up to the ring and route between the older systems and my everyday LAN. Because I can.
Yes, I'm a retro hobbyist. No, that's not a huge market for Windows XP. It's still great to know that Linux lets me have a modern OS that will still support my old-ass hardware if I want it to do so.
While the early specimen found is thought to have only been capable of gliding flight (think flying squirrels of today), that's about 80 million years before there's a fossil record of actual flapping bats, apparently. So maybe in New Zealand there's a partial fossil of a proto-bat that is an ancestor to the true bats. Maybe not.
Unqualified assertions that a single curious fossil find prove anything are pretty silly. The idea of the find is fun, exciting, and certainly worth a deeper look. To claim it alone validates or invalidates anything is a bit of stretch.
I'm not a paleontologist, but it'd be interesting to know how they can be absolutely sure the differences between a land mammal and a flying mammal by the jaw alone. An argument that the jaw is better suited to a land mammal is not an argument that the creature couldn't have overcome a weakness of being a flying mammal with a jaw more suited to a land mammal.
If a person saw a detached bill in the mud, their first thoughts would probably be of a duck, goose, or swan. Platypuses have bills, though. There are snakes with claws, blind salamanders with eyes, plants that feed on animals, plants that feed on plants, plants that smell, fish that walk, birds that can't fly, and a lizard that's asexual. I'm not saying an expert couldn't tell for sure that the jaw is from a land mammal, but I'd really like to know how they are so sure.
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So I'm hoping all of this means you'll be putting some thought into what you'd make with something like this.
The tool's value to me would be pretty high. I'm just pointing out to people that if they don't know what to make or how to design it, then being able to do the fabrication won't mean as much to them as they are thinking it will at first glance.
The best thing about an at-home fabrication setup of any kind is that it allows the little guy with a great idea to make that great idea, not that it lets Joe Dolt fab a "My team's #1" foam finger yet again every day. Don't get me wrong, I'd probably make a coffee cup or something featuring my favorite sports teams. I could do that now, though. The real value of a 3d printer, especially once it handles multiple materials and such, is to drastically reduce the prototyping time of cool new things or to make full-custom one-offs.
Using it solely as a copier for existing consumer items is a bit of a waste of its potential.
It's more likely, I think, that we'd be inundated with crap products from crap designers. Then there'd be the crap knockoffs of crap products from crappy knockoff artists knocking off crappy products.
Maybe the world would suddenly realize how valuable the creative types are, and all the value would move to the designs rather than the manufacturing, shipping, warehousing, retail, and other markups. If the means to make anything became suddenly available, people would become much more specific about what they wanted to make.
I mean, seriously, Toyota hasn't grown to #2 auto maker in the world only because they have machines doing the assembly. They've grown so large because people were able to figure out reliability, safety, and at least a minimum level of style. Lots of car companies could beat Toyota senseless on manufacturing costs, but few have been able to match the quality of their products. If I can print a Yugo vs. buying a Camry, a Ford 500, or a BMW 5 series, I'm still buying. If I could print a Camry, or even a Honda Accord or Chevy Cobalt, I'd probably go that route over something buying something else.
If Windows 3.1 or even Windows 98 was free, most people would still buy (or steal) Windows XP. Some of us would rather pay for OS X or for a Linux distro than to pay less for Windows. A CD costs what a CD costs. What's on it and what that allows you to do is where the value is found.
If MS, the RIAA, the MPAA, and Metallica are protective of IP, just think about the patent wars and espionage that'll happen when Philips, Sony, Canon, LG, General Motors, Kawasaki, Matsushita, the Solo plastic cup people, etc come whining to lawmakers about their products being copied exactly in garages.
Red Dwarf aside, I've never seen a cat that could be confused with a human. When your cat or dog starts to interact with your starship's computer's AI verbally, let me know.
Evolution from one species to another, substantially different species does not happen within a generation. No accepted theory of evolution allows for it. So the time to concern ourselves with a dog or cat's descendents becoming sufficiently genetically similar to humans that we can interbreed and produce fertile offspring is when those descendents happen to reach that point. The likelihood of dog-descended humanoids or cat-descended humanoids ever becoming that close to our ape-descended selves is another matter entirely, since it is nearly nil.
Actually, rat poison is sometimes one of the ingredients in the mix to create crystal meth. You may be making their job easier for them if you lace it that way.
With rat poison, starter fluid, and anhydrous ammonia being ingredients and mixing being done in wooden shacks and moldy basements, is it any wonder this stuff kills people?
Please, if you're going to do illegal drugs, people, at least get something grown in the ground or made in a lab by people with training as chemists. Don't let "Three-tooth Junior" sell you something he made in the toilet of his grandparent's broken-down RV out behind the trailer park.
You seem to have lost sight of what science is. Science is a branch of philosophy. It is a different branch of philosophy from gnosticism or nihilism, sure. Science is a set of beliefs built on the central belief that to start with an acceptable premise, make an argument, and support your argument makes a point believable. The level of physical evidence required by science is a mark of the branch of philosophy, not a sign of a lack of philosophy.
In short, a scientific argument is a philosophical argument.
As for a definition of life, how about definition 1.a. from The Free Dictionary: The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism.
Does an embryo have a metabolism? Each cell does, and it is in the process of developing one separate from the mother. Does it grow? Well, yeah. It is in the process of being reproduced, and if allowed to mature will likely be able to reproduce in the future. Does it respond to stimuli? It does implant itself and develop a placenta, umbilical cord, etc only upon finding something within which to implant. Does it adapt to the environment? Well, it does grow based on its genes into a human, if allowed to do so. Humans not only adapt to the environment, but adapt the environment to us. The small bundle of cells itself doesn't have too much control over becoming suited to the environment, but it does cause hormonal changes in its mother that are beneficial to itself.
Is the previous paragraph incontrovertible proof that embryos are alive? Well, no, it probably is not. It does support the case that a human embryo is alive.
Well, a dog or cat embryo doesn't grow up to be a human adult. I'd say there's a pretty big distinction there that makes a human embryo a human worth caring about.
If you and some person you cared about very much were going to have a baby, and someone came along and killed your baby, I think you'd care. So does that mean it's just a matter of the embryo being wanted? That implies ownership. Do you believe you own your children as property? At what point do you not own your child -- if not embryo, if not fetus, if not 3rd trimester, if not birth, if not 5 years old... It's a slippery slope. Do you think parents own children until they are the age of majority? The courts in the U.S. very much make a distinction between ownership of a person and custody of minors.
That'd be a little misleading, because "Crash" connotes an unexpected, tragic event. This bit of booster was meant to reenter the atmosphere and hit something. True, it was probably hoped it'd hit an ocean instead of farmland or someone's house, but it was meant to come back to Earth.
"Lands" is a little misleading because it connotes a safe touchdown. "Hits" when talking about a rocket connotes a target. "Comes to rest" just sounds silly in this context. "Plummets into" might be okay, I guess.
This is why RFTA is suggested when a headline could be misinterpreted. A short snippet of text can be completely factually accurate and still interpreted to mean something utterly different than what was intended. Accuracy != precision.
In other news, "American sailor rescued by Navy". Of course, it's not a U.S. Navy seaman, nor was it the U.S. Navy that rescued him. It was some guy doing a solo sailing trip, and he was rescued by the Chilean Navy. Kudos to the Chilean Navy, BTW.
Let's see, is the long-time extend-and-embrace techno-maverick to blame, or is it the hundreds of other systems that interoperate with each other properly according to the international specification for what it is they are written to do?
Obviously you've never watched an episode of the TV shows that make fun of dumb criminals. Guys holding up liquor stores and gas stations get caught and convicted precisely because they were caught on tape all the time, apparently. That, and because some of them try to use a candy bar inside a sweatshirt pocket to look like a pistol. After all, the shows are about stupid criminals.
From the article summary, it sounds like they used multiple private video records. That is not the same as government-owned, government controlled cameras just monitoring everyone for no good reason. I have a right to video my property for security, and I have the right to assist the police in an investigation of a murderer in my neighborhood. The courts could issue a subpoena for this type of record if the police are aware of it and file for such an order.
Now, whether it's right or legal or should be legal to turn over, without a warrant or subpoena, a video record to the police when there has been no crime committed on the property the camera is installed to protect is another matter. I'm of mixed feelings on that.
Funny, I don't recall having any issues viewing William's Money Video on my Linux machines.
I see you've never lost a letter sent through the postal service. Good for you. Will you be contacting Guinness and Ripley's, or shall I?
A programmer or an administrator has the possibility of much more control over his or her email than a person dropping a scrap of paper in a steel box.
Of course, any idea of absolute control over anything is misguided and even a bit silly. You don't have absolute control over your own body. If you did, you'd never get sick. You probably don't have absolute control over your own mind, either.
For those of you who think you do have complete control over your own mind, here's a thought for you: Danny DeVito outside on a cold day wearing nothing but some peanut butter and a smile. See? If you really had complete control over your mind, you probably wouldn't have pictured that visually.
Yeah, running a mail server could be useful on a laptop, but I'm sure the Windows ones don't queue mail. Why should the Linux ones? /var could be one of the partitions that's encrypted as a partition.
/var, /home, and possibly /usr (in case you have any super-secret software). That would make it easy to move the data to a new machine while keeping it encrypted, yet allows you to deal with a few big units instead of thousands of small ones. I'm not sure the disk partitioning utilities are yet up to imaging encrypted partitions other than byte-by-byte.
The database server should be running setuid to the uid of the user on a single-user laptop where security is a top concern. The databases should be in ~/mysql or similar.
Having a rootkit to install while the smartcard is in the system lets you snoop what the user is doing. Having a rootkit to install while the smartcard is out of the machine gives you the ability to snoop the fact that the data you want is unable to be mounted and decrypted. A rootkit installed with the smartcard could give one the ability to send the data through the network or write the encrypted data of interest to the unencrypted portions of the disk for later. A rootkit without the smartcard still does squat unless the partition/file you need the key for has the key.
I'd be tempted to do full file system instead of file-by-file or full disk. Have a root directory read-only on one partition, and a data partition with encrypted loopback files for
/var/log contains lots of email addresses on a mail server. Why would someone concerned about security let an end user run their own personal mail server on an agency laptop? Network connections can be set not to be logged, or to be logged somewhere else. A syslog daemon that does encryption isn't that hard, either.
Databases can only be placed where the user has rights to place them. The end-user of an agency laptop shouldn't even be the one setting up the DB software anyway. The directory containing the database files could be encrypted, or a database/database application that only stores encrypted data could be used.
So, I have a rootkit, and I'm now an admin. That doesn't give me access to a directory that's encrypted with a key from a smartcard or a remote server.
Still, full-disk encryption gets past all these little gotchas. It'd be great to see this accomplished this way:
1. have a small OS in non-flash ROM
2. the OS in ROM gets the key from the card/central server
3. have this OS decrypt the kernel from the encrypted partition into memory
4. pass the encryption key data to the now memory-resident kernel and hand it control of the system
5. the main OS kernel mounts the partition
I'm thinking LinuxBIOS, or maybe something based on OpenFirmware for the ROMable boot loader that handles decryption. TPM support is listed as a nice-to-have in the requirement document, BTW. That may actually be useful in this type of scenario -- use the TPM controller to help with the decryption and the storage of a PC-specific key in addition to the smartcard/central key server.
The currently selected computer for keyboard, video, and mouse on my KVM gets to use the USB devices, too. Call it a KVMU switch if you like. I call it Natalie. :-\
It's made by Zonet, or at least sold under that brand name. It's called the KVM3204 and it seems it is already discontinued.
It's one of their PS/2-to-USB KVMs, which lets me use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse with my USB-capable PCs and Macs. My Windows XP box, Mandriva box, and Xandros box even let me use a USB keyboard through the KVM's USB hub. The Mac (PowerMac G4) will use the USB keyboard through the KVM if the machine's booted with the KVM pointed to it and sometimes for the first few switches back and forth. Ironically, though, I have to use a PS/2 keyboard with this switch to get it work work reliably with my Mac.
So, I guess, damn the standards and full steam ahead with the product, or something. It works really well with a PS/2 scroll mouse and my favorite PS/2 keyboard on all my systems.
You mean besides sanitation? And roads? And the aquaduct? ;-)
So with what specific part of my earlier post:
-- which pretty clearly speaks only about what _might_ happen -- did you take issue?
Microsoft sells an OS that runs on Apple hardware.
Apple sells an OS preloaded on machines that can have Windows installed on them.
Apple is specifically marketing that they compete favorably with non-Apple x86 hardware by running both OS X and Windows. So Apple is competing directly with Microsoft's OS biggest customers (the pre-loaders like Dell and HP where the bulk of Windows sales go), who are reselling copies of Windows. They are taking sales from Microsoft's resellers.
How is that not competition again?
Linux isn't strictly competition for Windows if you limit Windows to competing with Windows-compatible operating systems. CP/M for the x86 wasn't directly competing with DOS, either.
Sure, there's still part of the original distinctions, so the line's not completely gone. But to say it hasn't blurred and to assume that one judge will see things exactly as another did is just plain silliness.
Now that Apple runs on x86, that line is blurring a little more. One judge could make a big difference if there was another suit.
Funny, but someone too shy and unsure to sign his own words doesn't seem the type to be calling me an unworldly nerd. Go back to junior high, kiss a girl, and figure out how to hold your liquor before we start comparing party stories.
Except Shakespeare was writing in the English of his day, and to translate it to the English of our times would be a shame of sorts, but could be a decent trranslation.
The KJV of the Bible was translated from Latin. The Bible was written in Greek and Hebrew. So Bibles that are translated from Greek and Hebrew into modern English tend to bear a closer resemblance to the original meaning than ones translated from Greek and Hebrew to Latin to Middle English to Modern English.
I'm not saying the writing is any different, or that you'll like it any more, but there are Bibles in plainer English than the King James translation. Many of them are better translations, too. If you really want to read the Bible in plain English -- whether for your own beliefs, for literary purposes, in order to refute it, or any reason at all, you can go to your local religious bookstore and ask about the New International Version, a student edition Bible, or the Good News Bible.
"My Ford will outrun your Chevy any day." Seriously, some people just take brand loyalty too far.
I don't hate Microsoft, but I can tell you three reasons I like Microsoft a lot less than I could: I've been in the computer hobbyist scene heavily since the early 90's, I've been working in the field full time since 1998, and I have a good memory.
There was a time when you had more than one solid, corporate-backed choice for an OS on your PC. OS/2 version 3.0 was solid as a rock and it was reasonably easy to port software between OS/2 and Unix-based OSes. It ran DOS software, and even ran Windows 3.x software. Digital Research had a good alternative DOS version. What did Microsoft do? They told whitebox computer stores that if they wanted to preload DOS and/or Windows on any systems, they had to have a license for every system they sold. So if you bought a box with OS/2 preloaded, you paid for DOS and OS/2. If you wanted DR/DOS, you paid for two versions of DOS. That trick is not just dirty, but patently illegal. They also signed a cross-license deal with IBM on MS-DOS & PC-DOS and Windows & OS/2. They pretty much committed to IBM that OS/2 would replace Windows 3.1 and that they'd both profit from it. Then, at the height of OS/2's rise, Windows 95 came out using much of what IBM taught Microsoft and its programs were conveniently incompatible with OS/2.
Microsoft loves to spread FUD about other companies and about Free Software / Open Source projects. They've been so busy telling people that other products won't meet their needs that Windows, Office, IIS, and Internet Explorer had security almost totally neglected until Slammer, Nimda, and other widespread problem attacks made non-techie news. They have a habit of buying small companies "for their innovative products", then canceling all of their products or keeping just one product out of a broad catalog (Visio, anyone?). They make gratuitous changes to file formats and network protocols without any technical merit just to thwart compatibility efforts by the competition. Meanwhile, their upper management talks about Linus Torvalds being anti-competition, suggest Richard M. Stallman is some kind of Trotskyite, and says that small businesses having access to less expensive software will _hurt_ the economy.
Microsoft has some real quality products. They have some people there who really know what they are doing, and I'm sure many of their employees are willing to coexist with other sources of software. Their operating systems, office suite, and web browser have traditionally been their poorest quality software while they really should be some of the highest. Their management should focus more on making Microsoft's products better and their operations more lean while spending less time attacking others. It would probably help them more in the long run.
Besides, it's just downright distasteful for the biggest player to resort to such desperate tactics all the time. They haven't been the underdog in about 30 years, but they act like they are guerrilla freedom fighters doing their business in back alleys. It's time to stop being the bully and to show some confidence in your products, Mssrs. Ballmer and Gates. If you make your software so much better than the competition as you claim it is, you'll have nothing to fear.
Cheap hardware is less likely to get Linux drivers because the driver is often responsible for much of the basic functionality of the device that in a more expensive piece of hardware is in the firmware. Winmodems for example didn't have Linux drivers for a long time, and some I think still don't. Motherboard RAID solutions are often Windows-driver based as much as based on the motherboard. Linux's md software RAID is usually a better solution than even messing with drivers for those.
The latest enthusiast video cards sometimes take a little longer to get top-notch drivers for Linux than for Windows because NVidia and ATI have less resources dedicated to the drivers and it's a little more complicated to test against an OS with more branches and fewer overall users. They do a pretty good job of catching the Linux drivers up to the Windows drivers just a generation or two of enthusiast cards back, which means all their mainstream cards tend to have at least solid functionality if not good performance. A generation of enthusiast cards could mean two months or eight months, depending on the current market and any major changes by the two big players.
I actually happen to have Pentium III machines and Athlon XP machines with one or two ISA slots. The last time I checked, these machines run XP pretty comfortably. My Athlon XP 2400+ plays Battlefield 1942 without a stutter, and would probably play Battlefield 2142 pretty well if I updated the video card. It has two ISA slots (well, one ISA and one shared ISA/PCI). True, under most circumstances I'd use just the 10/100 on the board, and I happen to also have some spare PCI NICs around. At one point, though, that very 2400+ had every PCI slot full and I needed it to have a second NIC for about two hours. I had to pull a card out of a PCI slot and use a spare PCI NIC because I coul not find a driver anywhere for the ISA NIC in question. That NIC has been working at one point or another under Linux distros from Slackware 3 and RedHat 5.2 up to Mandriva 2006.0 with no problem.
I have several 16Mbit TR cards, two MAUs, and lots of really old systems with Linux and TR drivers installed. Because I can. Sometimes I hook my main Linux box up to the ring and route between the older systems and my everyday LAN. Because I can.
Yes, I'm a retro hobbyist. No, that's not a huge market for Windows XP. It's still great to know that Linux lets me have a modern OS that will still support my old-ass hardware if I want it to do so.
I just saw on MSNBC that flying mammals may have been around 130 million years ago.
While the early specimen found is thought to have only been capable of gliding flight (think flying squirrels of today), that's about 80 million years before there's a fossil record of actual flapping bats, apparently. So maybe in New Zealand there's a partial fossil of a proto-bat that is an ancestor to the true bats. Maybe not.
Unqualified assertions that a single curious fossil find prove anything are pretty silly. The idea of the find is fun, exciting, and certainly worth a deeper look. To claim it alone validates or invalidates anything is a bit of stretch.
That's a very interesting bit of information.
I'm not a paleontologist, but it'd be interesting to know how they can be absolutely sure the differences between a land mammal and a flying mammal by the jaw alone. An argument that the jaw is better suited to a land mammal is not an argument that the creature couldn't have overcome a weakness of being a flying mammal with a jaw more suited to a land mammal.
If a person saw a detached bill in the mud, their first thoughts would probably be of a duck, goose, or swan. Platypuses have bills, though. There are snakes with claws, blind salamanders with eyes, plants that feed on animals, plants that feed on plants, plants that smell, fish that walk, birds that can't fly, and a lizard that's asexual. I'm not saying an expert couldn't tell for sure that the jaw is from a land mammal, but I'd really like to know how they are so sure.