Synthetic sapphire is way cheaper than that. I bought one about an inch across for under $10. Real synthetic sapphire too, leaves a horrific gouge in quartz if the two come into contact.
You are absolutely right. I could probably manage the request, even, but it would take years and require a lot of equipment that I don't have (and can't afford). The task isn't so much difficult (in the sense of complexity) as it is massive and expensive.
$100k up front, $500k by the end sounds about right.
I like many of the anarchist ideals (and your Zenarchism thing makes *perfect* sense to me), but it falls apart simply because most people are followers, not leaders.
I'd say if it were easier for people with the drive and ability to lead to become leaders in some capacity, then there wouldn't be so much cry about changing the system. As it is now, there isn't much opportunity left. Totalitarianism is *worse* than anarchy (and corporatism is just a totalitarian form of capitalism), especially for those with the ability and drive to lead.
Anarchy is too unstructured to be of real use, though. If we had *no* structure, we would be in just as bad a shape as we are with too much.
The problem at the moment isn't really capitalism, so much as corporatism. The value of society is best defined in terms of the "ability to achieve prosperity". In terms of this score, small-scale capitalism works very well, and in fact, is what worked for a long while to make the USA what it is today.
Unfortunately, capitalism really depends on a free flow of capital. It works best when resources are plentiful and flowing freely. Some concentration is a good thing; someone will succeed, and their success will propel them forward. The problem is when the concentration continues unchecked, with no balance.
Economies are a lot like living things. Companies within them form, grow, wither, die, and are replaced, in the natural cycle of life. Corporatism tosses a new factor in there: immortality. And immortal companies are very literally a cancer. They suck the capital out of the system, never to be returned, and the system starves.
That said, the idea of simply stripping corporate charters and putting strict limits on inheritance is entirely sound.
That's why I use a hand-tuned privoxy. By default, I let all ad content come through. If someone does something untoward to my browser, like take it over, play sounds, launch large flash banners, eat half my page, or the like, I enter a rule into my privoxy rules file, thus deleting all ads from that page.
It's social contract. If they're responsible with ads, I will, at worst, just leave them there and ignore them. I often click google ads, including the ones in the right-hand side. If they try hijacking my browser, then they just lost all ad revenue they will ever get from me.
As much as I dislike Windows, I have to agree. While IIS and Exchange are usually (but not always) slower and always more expensive than their open-source counterparts, competently administered they should be nearly as secure. Certainly, the simple existance of either of these products does not constitute a security risk by itself.
That said, unpatched, Exchange and sendmail will both take you down just as fast.
Well okay. I'm Canadian, outside of a few select cities, the police are generally sort-of mostly friendly around here. Of course, there are always still exceptions.
"the tin-foil-hat-crowd" is arguably one of the most brilliant successes of modern propaganda. It causes people to innately dismiss any opinion different from the official stance of the government, no matter how reasonable, as nothing more than the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic. I don't think it's deliberate (it could be, but that reeks of aluminum), but it certainly is effective.
Heck, toss in a few truly bizarre government research projects (HAARP, anyone?), a few good unsolved mysteries (oooh, magic bullets), and suddenly every actual paranoid schizophrenic is clamoring to point out all the various government conspiracies that may or may not exist - whether or not those conspiracies are valid or even credible.
At this point, the corporate media could sell the general public any outrageous story, no matter how much a bald-faced lie, and they would eat it up and ask for more.
But unless you're living in a police state, the cops on the street aren't going to treat you like a criminal. If they notice you at all, they'll sorta smile and wish you a good day.
Now, if the police on the street cuff you and haul you down to the station for no reason, then there's a problem.
Funny, they all look like virii to me. I mean, they get onto the systems of unsuspecting users surreptitiously, reproduce themselves, spread, cause degradations in performance or usability. They are, by definition, a virus.
Why can't the creators of these monstrosities be brought up on charges under the computer fraud and abuse act or similar statutes? Plenty of people have met jail cells for either benign or designed-benign viral code before, I don't see why this is any different - except, of course, that corporations are above the law.
Speaking as an autistic person (although probably not a savant... although I have been accused of it at times), I highly doubt that it's possible to seperate these two. I also doubt the reasons for even wanting to.
Actually, it *does* include many enhanced cryptography features that cannot be designed entirely in software.
While I have a problem with the uses of this platform that Microsoft no doubt intends, TCPA can be quite useful for making secure systems based on open standards.
One part of these modules is the ability to send keys to the hardware module in a way that cannot be read back out (but with encryption performed using this write-only data). This allows public-key encryption with the private key stored in a very secure way.
That's mostly a myth. Ethernet has rediculously overspecced magnetic and semiconductor isolation on either side, and is designed to be completely floating. Ground loops don't happen except with especially poor quality ethernet hardware. Of course, with lightning strikes, all bets are off.
You could just run a short length of fiber though. These days the cable itself is really cheap, and with plenty of older technologies available now, it's possible to get some interface cards inexpensively as well.
That's not a showstopper. You could take a page from the watercooler's books on how to deal with condensation, or you could simply put some dessicant inside the unit. Or you could improvise a condensing apparatus at the coldest part of the unit.
Boat registration numbers tend to be lettered 6" big. The text only needs to be about 5 or 6 pixels high to make out (granted, a letter or two was fuzzy). This example isn't as crazy as the ones on TV these days, but it is one that I did actually do.
I didn't see the episode, and you didn't mention if it was digital or traditional photography, but that could be quite possible with a traditional photograph.
I once, using a high-resolution scanner, enhanced a photograph that contained a small boat in the distance to the point that I could read the registration number and name painted on the side.
It's still impossible from a 320x200 video camera, but a real camera does get that sort of resolution.
Well, while that certainly violates plenty of optics laws, flash memory *does* keep a residual charge. It takes special equipment to read it, often requiring decapsulation of the IC followed by the application of a magnetic force or scanning tunneling microscope, but the charge is there.
It's generally considered possible to read the two most recently erased bit values from a flash memory cell in this way. Of course, this sort of analysis is incredibly difficult and very expensive.
I didn't see that particular show, so I can't verify exactly what sort of deletion was done. Since most digital cameras these days use the FAT filesystem, it's also entirely possible that the data was still all present, with just the directory updated. Because of issues of flash wear, secure deletion is essentially never done on it, so a simple hex editor could read the data back.
I don't think there is any way they can fail with this. They'll just buy so many patents that they can sue anyone except another patent house (who they will NEVER sue directly) into oblivion using a shotgun method. Citing several infringements in a single case also ensures that even if one patent is invalidated, they still recover the investment in litigation.
Besides, when the company is composed almost entirely of lawyers, legal costs aren't nearly as high as they would be if the lawyers had to be hired seperately.
"We have been enslaved to technology, and as a result those that produce that technology own us all."
That's doublethink. You're confusing those that produce the technology with those who own the people who produce the technology. Or else the engineers of the world would be rich. While we often make quite decent livings, we're certainly not wealthy.
Actually, from what I understand, many hardware RAID controllers have notoriously bad records for data safety. My partner, who works in a datacenter, has described one particularly bad controller that has a nasty habit of erasing all data and reinitializing the drives if anything unexpected happens. It can be something relatively small, shuffling the drives, or mismatching drives of different volumes. This isn't just a case of "the array doesn't come up". It will actually ERASE ALL DATA on the drives.
From what I understand, this isn't exactly uncommon behavior for the high-end hardware RAID controllers. Linux software RAID is much more permissive, even recognizing a drive shuffling and bringing up the RAID safely. We thoroughly stress-tested the array before deploying it, and we could not make it break.
Hotswapping SATA drives is easy, if the OS supports it (Linux, regrettably, does not yet). Just get hotswap drive enclosures. They fit in a 5 1/4" bay, and make drive swapping quite simple.
I'm not a server tech, but I am an EE, and I wouldn't find that even remotely surprising. The XOR engines on hardware RAID cards operate at core clocks no faster than a couple hundred MHz (simply by virtue of the fact that they are made with inexpensive CMOS processes). Now, they can benefit to a certain extent from parallelization, but modern CPUs with SIMD instructions can make the same statement.
About the only time now that a hardware RAID card makes sense is when the number of drives and total thoroughput would saturate the PCI bus. The hardware RAID card would be a lot less likely to encounter this situation, since it uses only internal busses for drive communication.
That said, hardware RAID cards generally have only a very limited cache RAM onboard, and a properly designed software RAID that integrates with the block cache could potentially make big wins in performance in systems with lots of RAM.
Oddly enough, we took advantage of that in our household. We bought a Promise TX4 4-port SATA "RAID" card, knowing that it only pretended to be a hardware RAID through tricks of the BIOS and proprietary driver.
It was a simple matter to reflash the card's BIOS with the 0xAA55 boot signature removed (a bit of hexediting later), disabling the option ROM and turning it into a standard 4-channel SATA controller. We've been running a Linux software RAID on it since then across 4 160GB Maxtor drives, and overall we are very impressed with it. Performance is good, and it worked flawlessly through a drive failure and replacement.
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Synthetic sapphire is way cheaper than that. I bought one about an inch across for under $10. Real synthetic sapphire too, leaves a horrific gouge in quartz if the two come into contact.
$100k up front, $500k by the end sounds about right.
I like many of the anarchist ideals (and your Zenarchism thing makes *perfect* sense to me), but it falls apart simply because most people are followers, not leaders.
I'd say if it were easier for people with the drive and ability to lead to become leaders in some capacity, then there wouldn't be so much cry about changing the system. As it is now, there isn't much opportunity left. Totalitarianism is *worse* than anarchy (and corporatism is just a totalitarian form of capitalism), especially for those with the ability and drive to lead.
The problem at the moment isn't really capitalism, so much as corporatism. The value of society is best defined in terms of the "ability to achieve prosperity". In terms of this score, small-scale capitalism works very well, and in fact, is what worked for a long while to make the USA what it is today.
Unfortunately, capitalism really depends on a free flow of capital. It works best when resources are plentiful and flowing freely. Some concentration is a good thing; someone will succeed, and their success will propel them forward. The problem is when the concentration continues unchecked, with no balance.
Economies are a lot like living things. Companies within them form, grow, wither, die, and are replaced, in the natural cycle of life. Corporatism tosses a new factor in there: immortality. And immortal companies are very literally a cancer. They suck the capital out of the system, never to be returned, and the system starves.
That said, the idea of simply stripping corporate charters and putting strict limits on inheritance is entirely sound.
It's social contract. If they're responsible with ads, I will, at worst, just leave them there and ignore them. I often click google ads, including the ones in the right-hand side. If they try hijacking my browser, then they just lost all ad revenue they will ever get from me.
That said, unpatched, Exchange and sendmail will both take you down just as fast.
Well okay. I'm Canadian, outside of a few select cities, the police are generally sort-of mostly friendly around here. Of course, there are always still exceptions.
Heck, toss in a few truly bizarre government research projects (HAARP, anyone?), a few good unsolved mysteries (oooh, magic bullets), and suddenly every actual paranoid schizophrenic is clamoring to point out all the various government conspiracies that may or may not exist - whether or not those conspiracies are valid or even credible.
At this point, the corporate media could sell the general public any outrageous story, no matter how much a bald-faced lie, and they would eat it up and ask for more.
Now, if the police on the street cuff you and haul you down to the station for no reason, then there's a problem.
Why can't the creators of these monstrosities be brought up on charges under the computer fraud and abuse act or similar statutes? Plenty of people have met jail cells for either benign or designed-benign viral code before, I don't see why this is any different - except, of course, that corporations are above the law.
Well, the CPUs might not get hot enough to cook with, but the poor 7805 sure will (dissipating 7W in an area that small! yikes.)
Speaking as an autistic person (although probably not a savant... although I have been accused of it at times), I highly doubt that it's possible to seperate these two. I also doubt the reasons for even wanting to.
While I have a problem with the uses of this platform that Microsoft no doubt intends, TCPA can be quite useful for making secure systems based on open standards.
One part of these modules is the ability to send keys to the hardware module in a way that cannot be read back out (but with encryption performed using this write-only data). This allows public-key encryption with the private key stored in a very secure way.
That's mostly a myth. Ethernet has rediculously overspecced magnetic and semiconductor isolation on either side, and is designed to be completely floating. Ground loops don't happen except with especially poor quality ethernet hardware. Of course, with lightning strikes, all bets are off. You could just run a short length of fiber though. These days the cable itself is really cheap, and with plenty of older technologies available now, it's possible to get some interface cards inexpensively as well.
Get one of the no-steel model-M's, and just throw it in the dishwasher when it gets dirty.
That's not a showstopper. You could take a page from the watercooler's books on how to deal with condensation, or you could simply put some dessicant inside the unit. Or you could improvise a condensing apparatus at the coldest part of the unit.
Boat registration numbers tend to be lettered 6" big. The text only needs to be about 5 or 6 pixels high to make out (granted, a letter or two was fuzzy). This example isn't as crazy as the ones on TV these days, but it is one that I did actually do.
I once, using a high-resolution scanner, enhanced a photograph that contained a small boat in the distance to the point that I could read the registration number and name painted on the side.
It's still impossible from a 320x200 video camera, but a real camera does get that sort of resolution.
It's generally considered possible to read the two most recently erased bit values from a flash memory cell in this way. Of course, this sort of analysis is incredibly difficult and very expensive.
I didn't see that particular show, so I can't verify exactly what sort of deletion was done. Since most digital cameras these days use the FAT filesystem, it's also entirely possible that the data was still all present, with just the directory updated. Because of issues of flash wear, secure deletion is essentially never done on it, so a simple hex editor could read the data back.
I don't think there is any way they can fail with this. They'll just buy so many patents that they can sue anyone except another patent house (who they will NEVER sue directly) into oblivion using a shotgun method. Citing several infringements in a single case also ensures that even if one patent is invalidated, they still recover the investment in litigation. Besides, when the company is composed almost entirely of lawyers, legal costs aren't nearly as high as they would be if the lawyers had to be hired seperately.
"We have been enslaved to technology, and as a result those that produce that technology own us all." That's doublethink. You're confusing those that produce the technology with those who own the people who produce the technology. Or else the engineers of the world would be rich. While we often make quite decent livings, we're certainly not wealthy.
From what I understand, this isn't exactly uncommon behavior for the high-end hardware RAID controllers. Linux software RAID is much more permissive, even recognizing a drive shuffling and bringing up the RAID safely. We thoroughly stress-tested the array before deploying it, and we could not make it break.
Hotswapping SATA drives is easy, if the OS supports it (Linux, regrettably, does not yet). Just get hotswap drive enclosures. They fit in a 5 1/4" bay, and make drive swapping quite simple.
About the only time now that a hardware RAID card makes sense is when the number of drives and total thoroughput would saturate the PCI bus. The hardware RAID card would be a lot less likely to encounter this situation, since it uses only internal busses for drive communication.
That said, hardware RAID cards generally have only a very limited cache RAM onboard, and a properly designed software RAID that integrates with the block cache could potentially make big wins in performance in systems with lots of RAM.
Oddly enough, we took advantage of that in our household. We bought a Promise TX4 4-port SATA "RAID" card, knowing that it only pretended to be a hardware RAID through tricks of the BIOS and proprietary driver. It was a simple matter to reflash the card's BIOS with the 0xAA55 boot signature removed (a bit of hexediting later), disabling the option ROM and turning it into a standard 4-channel SATA controller. We've been running a Linux software RAID on it since then across 4 160GB Maxtor drives, and overall we are very impressed with it. Performance is good, and it worked flawlessly through a drive failure and replacement.