it's theoretically as easy for an Englishman to sell goods in Poland, as it is for a New Yorker to sell goods in Texas.
Theoretically, you're right. Theoretically, bees can't fly, either; that doesn't meant it's true. The EU has definitely brought down a lot of trade barriers within its member states, but there still are huge numbers of non-tariff barriers that prevent trade and "protect" national markets.
It should be as easy for a German to sell goods or services in France as it is for a New Yorker to sell goods or services in Texas, but it is not. That said, the EU has made a lot of progress in the time it's been around, and should be applauded if you are a fan of free and open competition; however you are engaging in a lot of self-deception if you think that theory is the same as practice. The EU still has a long way to go before its "join economy" is comparable to a large national economy like the US, or like China is becoming.
In the U.S., around 7% [1] of the population is self-employed, and roughly half are employed by small businesses [2], so I don't think the situation is all that different. Only a very small percentage of businesses compete for VC funding, but they happen to be in sectors that receive a lot of public attention, particularly technology. I doubt that venture capital is much more or less prevalent than it is in other nations with similar economic climates and legal restrictions on investment.
In the United States there's a very large cultural attraction to the idea of "striking it rich." People, for the most part, fantasize less about living comfortably (rather, they just assume they'll do that) than about being fabulously, stupendously rich. Thus there is a lot of attention paid to people who have made millions via VC funding and through garage startups, and less to the majority of small businesses that are actually typical, and get their funding from banks and private financing. People don't want to hear about the one pizza restaurant that expanded out to become three pizza restaurants and let the owner and his family live well, they want to hear about the one pizza restaurant that became a nationwide chain and let the owner buy a fleet of Gulfstream V's and retire to Bali.
On balance I don't think it is MITs and Stanfords that give the US the edge. You can always hire in elite engineers. And the people who succeed at places like MIT are people who would probably succeed almost anywhere. I think it is the large span of middle ranking institutions.
I think this is probably an excellent point. Historically, I don't think people probably thought the U.S. was that impressive in terms of education until pretty recently: after World War II. That period of time was a watershed for the U.S., because of the GI Bill and the number of middle-class Americans who went to college, who otherwise never would have.
For a while anyway, we had an edge because we made it a de facto standard for young people to go through four more years of schooling than they might have elsewhere, and this created a pool of workers more skilled than in other places. Combined with the ease of hiring and firing, this created an environment which was conducive to innovation.
Whether we can keep this up, now that many other countries have revamped their higher educational systems and have superior primary schools and talent-recognition and -development programs, remains to be seen. It's certainly something I'm more than a little concerned about, as an American. The solution is not just to send everyone on to PhD programs, either: IMO we need to go through our educational pipeline from kindergarten to '16th grade' and examine what's being taught in terms of relevance; we're burning a lot of years of people's lives with information they never use, and over time that's going to make us less competitive as a nation.
1200 whats? Unless that's "pounds of gold bullion," it's not much at all.
Even auditing a course for a single semester at a state college in the U.S. can cost more than that (depending on whether you're in- or out-of-state, on assistance, etc.), particularly if it's a course like compsci where there is a "lab fee" for use of their equipment. Not to mention books, which depending on how far in bed your faculty is with the publishing companies, can cost you from a few hundred to a thousand or more USD a year.
That said, I'm not bitching too hard: I think U.S. private-college educations are worth their cost, because of the social networks a person can build there, and the boost they provide when getting a first job. There are obviously many people who feel differently and I'm sensitive to the counter-arguments, but the social contacts I developed in college paid for the "initiation fee" that was tuition to that institution where I met those people, pretty quickly. YMMV.
Actually, it makes perfect sense: it in fact makes more sense than the backdoor explanation ever did, or does. The NSA made changes to the algorithm, which obviously made a lot of people suspicious (if they had wanted to backdoor it, why be so obvious about making changes? Why not just plant a compromised algorithm from Day 1 and play dumb?); more suspicious was their lack of information about the changes. In retrospect, they couldn't say anything about the changes because it had to do with a method of cryptanalysis that wasn't widely known at the time. Again: if their goal had been a back door, why patch it and arouse suspicion? They could have just kept quiet and had a thoroughly backdoored algorithm for a few years.
The answer is that the NSA isn't as one-sided a domestic spying institution as the tinfoil-hat crowd likes to believe it is. They are also quite interested -- far more interested, in my opinion -- in intelligence-gathering internationally, but also in the denial of intelligence to foreign countries. Thus, it is consistent with their mission to keep the U.S. from adopting as its encryption standard (which is used for many sensitive diplomatic functions, including secure telephones and the like) something that's easily broken. And it's consistent with the somewhat paranoid mindset of the intelligence community to assume that if we can break an encryption scheme, than our enemies probably can, also. So therefore it would make sense for the NSA to patch all known vunerabilities in AES, to the best of their ability, because of the probability that any backdoor would be exploited by an unknown third party to the disadvantage of the U.S.
Moreover, even if -- as you suggest -- the whole fixing of AES really was an elaborate ruse designed to cover for the insertion of a backdoor, it would make the backdoor so valuable of an asset as to basically preclude its routine use. Because of the fix, eyes will always be on the NSA and AES: if informtion started to filter out that could only have come as a result of an AES break (or even if the information could have been obtained from an AES break) it would destroy that source: the sort of people the NSA wants to monitor would stop using AES immediately. So even if the NSA does have a backdoor, the situations where a person or organization would have to be concerned about it being used are very small. (E.g., the NSA is not going to risk compromising their backdoor, if they have one, in order to blow the whistle on your tax evasion / marital infidelity / porn collection / etc. In fact the intelligence value of such a source might even outweigh its use to stop a small-scale terrorist attack.)
Such a standard would be openly published, for anybody to inspect. It would, in fact, be an open standard. That's why we have standards.
So... basically... like 802.11i, the proposed standard by the IEEE, and AES, which is at its core? And not like the Chinese standard?
You can download the IEEE spec here: http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802. 11i-2004.pdf. You're not allowed to modify or distribute it, and the IEEE retains copyright, but you can download, read, inspect, and archive it. That's a lot more than I can say about the Chinese version.
I think that, particularly here on Slashdot, but also among people of a certain demographic and political orientation in general, we risk sometimes losing sight of the forest for all the trees. That is to say, we're so aware of and infuriated by the relatively minor invasions of our privacy by our government here in the U.S., that we fail to put it in perspective and see that there are many places on this planet where the level of government interference in a private citizen's life is far, far worse -- and that this level of interference isn't even seen as problematic: it's just taken for granted as a fact of life.
People need to back off on the Daily Kos rhetoric from time to time and realize that the NSA is not (yet) running a Great Firewall, Gitmo is not a re-education center that you can get sent to for dissing the wrong Senator in your blog, and that the Bush administration -- regardless of how bad you may think they are -- does not massacre Democrats in the street, or run them over with tanks.
That is not to say that we should be complacent, or ignore the things that are going on in this country, but when having a discussion about oppression overseas, some perspective is necessary. I can only imagine that to people actually living under repressive governments, that the discussions and rhetoric from the U.S. about things like phone company call logs seem pretty ridiculous.
Don't be naive: just because the Chinese don't play by the rules domestically says nothing about whether they will expect other people to play by them with regards to their IP.
I fully expect that if their product was made the standard, and some Western nation started ripping it off without paying the licensing fees, the PRC would throw a full-on diplomatic/economic hissy fit. In exchange for royalties, they would agree to consider, in principle, someday, perhaps soon, to appoint a minister to draft a paper on the creation of a committee to enforce and respect other nation's IP within the Chinese domestic market. Or they'd make some noises and arrest some (preferably Western) person for making bootleg DVDs, and then forget about it until the next time trade negotiations roll around.
That's how they do business. Seems to be working for them, though.
In the military promotions are the result of seniority and heavily on performance.
Er, no. Familiarize yourself with the phases "time in service" and "time in grade," then you will have figured out the two biggest factors behind most military promotions. Reviews, evaluations, education, etc., all count as well, but those first two are the make-or-break. If you haven't done your time-in-service or time-in-grade, you basically can't move forwards in the military. (Although I heard they are putting a greater emphasis on educational requirements, but I don't know how this will change in wartime.)
The thing that makes the military superior in some ways to some large corporations that I've been in is that they have "up or out." That is, you either get promoted or you're done; in theory it cuts down on the dead wood, but in practice its benefits are mixed.
Re:The world is not a Dilbert strip...
on
The Living Dilbert?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Also, many smart people would also consider "hacking" social or political structures somewhat immoral.
And that is why they fail.
Political and social structures have rules, just like a programming language or operating system. Understand them, and their limitations, and underlying structure, and you can do a lot. Morals don't figure into it, until you start to use them maliciously. But there are people who are going to use those same sets of rules for personal gain without really even understanding the full extent of how they work, and deciding that you're going to try to "be a nice guy" isn't going to mean anything other than that you're going to get run over: over and over again.
The world doesn't like "nice" people. The world likes effective people, and people who make other people like them. Being nice for the sake of being nice is optional, and generally overrated.
I was going to write something similar to this... but you pretty much summed it up.
Go where the money is... save all you can, and retire as soon as you can feasibly do it. Or become an entrepreneur, and be somebody else's PHB. That's pretty much how the system works.
The military doesn't even hold a candle to the messed-upedness that is the private sector at some points, regardless of the disparaging comments that contractors (myself included) might sometimes make about government. It's all equally fucked.
I actually wasn't aware of the Model 700 in Titanium... although I've fired a different ultra-lightweight rifle: a Bushmaster Carbon 15 Type 97S. It uses a steel barrel and bolt assembly (bolt, bolt carrier, etc.), but replaces the upper and lower receiver, plus most of the hardware, with carbon fiber. It's 4.3 lbs unloaded, claimed to be 5.3 with a loaded 30-rd mag. It's an interesting concept, but even with the big AR-15 style recoil buffer system, it's a bit obnoxious to shoot. But rather than go with titanium, they retain the minimum number of steel components necessary, and then use carbon fiber everywhere that doesn't have to withstand tremendous amounts of force.
There is definitely a market for ultra-lightweight firearms, don't get me wrong, but I think it's basically been filled with today's technology. I don't think that it's being hampered much by the price of raw titanium -- I have a feeling that the metal is one of the smaller input costs into the making of a firearm, compared to labor and overhead on the factory / machines / etc., but I could be wrong. It is cool, though, that they can actually make the receiver out of titanium; you can't do that with aluminum (at least not that I'm aware of) or carbon fiber.
at over 800 degrees C titanium will burn in a nitrogen atmosphere
I'll admit it's been a while since I've taken a chemistry class, but how exactly does a metal oxidize without being in the presence of oxygen? Metallic Ti shouldn't be able to burn unless it's in an atmosphere that contains oxygen, or is in the presence of some other oxidizer. I mean, the way you weld most of the otherwise-flammable metals is by flooding the weld with an inert gas, thus preventing it from burning. I think welders use Argon and not Nitrogen, but I don't see how something would burn any more in pure N than it would in pure Ar, if it's nothing but the metal.
Actually you would not want a terribly lightweight shotgun. They in fact benefit from all that weight.
You could quite easily make a very lightweight firearm (in fact, some manufacturers do, especially with handguns [1]) by putting a thin steel sleeve inside a rigid aluminum alloy barrel, but the lower mass means more felt recoil and less accuracy. Likewise, you could make stocks out of equally rigid but very light carbon fiber or foam-core plastic, but people still buy heavy wood or Zytel ones because a certain weight and balance is desirable.
Cost isn't what's holding back anyone from making titanium firearms: everybody who really wants a titanium firearm already has one, and most people don't.
[1] - IIRC, it's Smith and Wesson that had/has a line of ultra-lightweight revolvers that used steel barrels sleeved into frames made of a pretty exotic Al alloy. I think they were called "Airlights" or "Airweights" or something like that. I've shot one in.22 LR before and it was so deceptively light you'd go to pick it up and end up almost throwing it off the bench accidentally because it would be so much lighter than you were expecting. I think the frame was Aluminum-Scandium alloy.
The "nearly" is just them doing the usual corporate CMA.
If I were overseeing a high-profile company who was releasing a product that in any way used encryption, you can bet I would couch every claim about its security with some sort of qualifier.
No intelligent person ever uses superlatives when discussing encryption, unless you want to be on the hook in case it ever gets broken.
On another note, I sure hope that company didn't send the stuff they collected unencrypted. That's a violation of a bunch of rules. Penetrating a network for a security audit shouldn't lower the overall security of the network, if they sent unecrypted that's exactly what they did though
They could have caused the data to be sent unencrypted to a test machine inside the corporate network somewhere, or directly connected to the corporate network for the purposes of the test but outside the firewalls. That would demonstrate the possibility that the data could be sent to an arbitrary machine somewhere, but without actually sending any data unencrypted over the corporate net.
Or they could have just SSHed to their remote test machine, that would probably be just as good and not that hard to implement.
This is possible: the price point of the original Mini was $499, and it slipped up a hundred bucks when Apple switched to Intel, and it's possible they might let it go back down to half a K in time for the holidays: getting below the 500-dollar mark is important, psychologically. However, I don't think you'll ever see Apple go below $499.
Historically, Apple has kept its price points pretty much static: the equipment available at a given time changes, but the prices generally don't decrease too much, unless they introduce a totally new model of computer. This is in contrast to other manufacturers who introduce new models at high price points, and then slip them down in cost over time, while constantly introducing new models at the top, and then discontinuing models when they're so cheap as to no longer be profitable. (This approach is nice from the company's perspective because it ensures that out of every particular model you wring the most profit: you sell it at $1000 to all the people willing to pay that; then you sell it to the people willing to pay $899, etc.)
Oddly enough, decreasing prices actually pisses off past buyers and intimidates would-be new buyers more than increasing them does. Nobody likes to see the computer they bought on sale for less than they paid -- it makes them think that they got ripped off. Instead, you keep the same price point but just upgrade features (and maybe raise prices): that way people who purchased six months ago don't see "their computer" on sale for cheap (unless they dig down to find the refurbished deals), instead they just see a better computer on sale for the same price. Some people may have wished that they had waited to buy (so they would have gotten new feature x), but they don't feel as ripped off. That's pretty basic consumer psychology.
It would be possible for Apple to go back down to $500, since that was the Mini's original base price, but even then I don't think they'd do it lightly.
This was held in the 7th Circuit, so if you live in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin, those EULAs are enforceable, so long as you can technically reject them by clicking "decline" and returning the software (or software+hardware). It's slightly more ambiguous in other areas but I wouldn't just cavalierly write them off.
It's wise to be very careful about what you might be agreeing to. You don't know which way the court might rule.
I'm not aware of anything that reconizes an EULA as a contract.
Now there you are, unfortunately, ill-informed. For example, see ProCD v. Zeidenberg, where the shrink-wrap license was held to be enforceable. There are other cases which have gone the other way in other District courts, but at least in some places the law of the land is that they're good, so long as some form of objective consent is given. Until the USSC takes up the issue, there won't be harmonization between various areas of the country on it, though.
But in general you're engaging in a lot of wishful thinking if you think you can just ignore EULAs and the court will defend you; depending on where you are, the Courts very well may see just the opposite.
You own the copy of the media on which the software was delivered to you; you don't own the software itself. You are merely licensed to use it.
Hence, you can resell the media (yours) and the license (yours) but you can't duplicate the software and sell it (not yours!).
It would be interesting to see what Microsoft would do if EULAs were ruled unenforceable; I suspect that they would simply send you out a paper contract in advance of the software, which you would have to read, sign, and return, before they would ship you anything. That's actually SOP for some big enterprise software packages: they don't do their licensing via click-thrus, but rather through contracts signed by the legal parties involved ahead of deployment. Really that's the way it ought to be done -- people would whine about it being an "inconvenience," but at least you could walk away if the agreement looked like crap and not have to worry about getting a refund. I suspect though that at least in some Districts, that EULAs will be found to be quite valid, however, since in theory you can disagree and take the computer/software back for a refund.
I can only assume that somewhere in the bowels of the NSA exists an "Office of Cyber-Warfare," and within that office is someone tasked with writing and keeping up-to-date the nastiest, most destructive computer and network worms ever. If there's no explicit law against a particular weapon, I think it's a good assumption to make that the U.S. has one (or three, or five thousand).
That said, I'm not sure if initiating a computer-virus war would really be a good idea. It seems like we're definitely throwing stones out the window of a glass house there; do we really want to give our enemy a really good virus that they could tweak and throw back at us? Especially given the totallyinappropriate places we use Windows? I think it's a mode of warfare that we have more to lose than to gain by employing, versus practically any other enemy.
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And I thought that advantage was because you didn't have to initialize your education variable by hand.
It should be as easy for a German to sell goods or services in France as it is for a New Yorker to sell goods or services in Texas, but it is not. That said, the EU has made a lot of progress in the time it's been around, and should be applauded if you are a fan of free and open competition; however you are engaging in a lot of self-deception if you think that theory is the same as practice. The EU still has a long way to go before its "join economy" is comparable to a large national economy like the US, or like China is becoming.
In the U.S., around 7% [1] of the population is self-employed, and roughly half are employed by small businesses [2], so I don't think the situation is all that different. Only a very small percentage of businesses compete for VC funding, but they happen to be in sectors that receive a lot of public attention, particularly technology. I doubt that venture capital is much more or less prevalent than it is in other nations with similar economic climates and legal restrictions on investment.
In the United States there's a very large cultural attraction to the idea of "striking it rich." People, for the most part, fantasize less about living comfortably (rather, they just assume they'll do that) than about being fabulously, stupendously rich. Thus there is a lot of attention paid to people who have made millions via VC funding and through garage startups, and less to the majority of small businesses that are actually typical, and get their funding from banks and private financing. People don't want to hear about the one pizza restaurant that expanded out to become three pizza restaurants and let the owner and his family live well, they want to hear about the one pizza restaurant that became a nationwide chain and let the owner buy a fleet of Gulfstream V's and retire to Bali.
[1] Source here. (Hopefully that link won't break.)
[2] http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/misc/entrepre.htm
For a while anyway, we had an edge because we made it a de facto standard for young people to go through four more years of schooling than they might have elsewhere, and this created a pool of workers more skilled than in other places. Combined with the ease of hiring and firing, this created an environment which was conducive to innovation.
Whether we can keep this up, now that many other countries have revamped their higher educational systems and have superior primary schools and talent-recognition and -development programs, remains to be seen. It's certainly something I'm more than a little concerned about, as an American. The solution is not just to send everyone on to PhD programs, either: IMO we need to go through our educational pipeline from kindergarten to '16th grade' and examine what's being taught in terms of relevance; we're burning a lot of years of people's lives with information they never use, and over time that's going to make us less competitive as a nation.
1200 whats? Unless that's "pounds of gold bullion," it's not much at all.
Even auditing a course for a single semester at a state college in the U.S. can cost more than that (depending on whether you're in- or out-of-state, on assistance, etc.), particularly if it's a course like compsci where there is a "lab fee" for use of their equipment. Not to mention books, which depending on how far in bed your faculty is with the publishing companies, can cost you from a few hundred to a thousand or more USD a year.
That said, I'm not bitching too hard: I think U.S. private-college educations are worth their cost, because of the social networks a person can build there, and the boost they provide when getting a first job. There are obviously many people who feel differently and I'm sensitive to the counter-arguments, but the social contacts I developed in college paid for the "initiation fee" that was tuition to that institution where I met those people, pretty quickly. YMMV.
Actually, it makes perfect sense: it in fact makes more sense than the backdoor explanation ever did, or does. The NSA made changes to the algorithm, which obviously made a lot of people suspicious (if they had wanted to backdoor it, why be so obvious about making changes? Why not just plant a compromised algorithm from Day 1 and play dumb?); more suspicious was their lack of information about the changes. In retrospect, they couldn't say anything about the changes because it had to do with a method of cryptanalysis that wasn't widely known at the time. Again: if their goal had been a back door, why patch it and arouse suspicion? They could have just kept quiet and had a thoroughly backdoored algorithm for a few years.
The answer is that the NSA isn't as one-sided a domestic spying institution as the tinfoil-hat crowd likes to believe it is. They are also quite interested -- far more interested, in my opinion -- in intelligence-gathering internationally, but also in the denial of intelligence to foreign countries. Thus, it is consistent with their mission to keep the U.S. from adopting as its encryption standard (which is used for many sensitive diplomatic functions, including secure telephones and the like) something that's easily broken. And it's consistent with the somewhat paranoid mindset of the intelligence community to assume that if we can break an encryption scheme, than our enemies probably can, also. So therefore it would make sense for the NSA to patch all known vunerabilities in AES, to the best of their ability, because of the probability that any backdoor would be exploited by an unknown third party to the disadvantage of the U.S.
Moreover, even if -- as you suggest -- the whole fixing of AES really was an elaborate ruse designed to cover for the insertion of a backdoor, it would make the backdoor so valuable of an asset as to basically preclude its routine use. Because of the fix, eyes will always be on the NSA and AES: if informtion started to filter out that could only have come as a result of an AES break (or even if the information could have been obtained from an AES break) it would destroy that source: the sort of people the NSA wants to monitor would stop using AES immediately. So even if the NSA does have a backdoor, the situations where a person or organization would have to be concerned about it being used are very small. (E.g., the NSA is not going to risk compromising their backdoor, if they have one, in order to blow the whistle on your tax evasion / marital infidelity / porn collection / etc. In fact the intelligence value of such a source might even outweigh its use to stop a small-scale terrorist attack.)
You can download the IEEE spec here: http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802
Information on AES can be had directly from the NIST (http://csrc.nist.gov/CryptoToolkit/aes/rijndael/
Thank you and well said.
I think that, particularly here on Slashdot, but also among people of a certain demographic and political orientation in general, we risk sometimes losing sight of the forest for all the trees. That is to say, we're so aware of and infuriated by the relatively minor invasions of our privacy by our government here in the U.S., that we fail to put it in perspective and see that there are many places on this planet where the level of government interference in a private citizen's life is far, far worse -- and that this level of interference isn't even seen as problematic: it's just taken for granted as a fact of life.
People need to back off on the Daily Kos rhetoric from time to time and realize that the NSA is not (yet) running a Great Firewall, Gitmo is not a re-education center that you can get sent to for dissing the wrong Senator in your blog, and that the Bush administration -- regardless of how bad you may think they are -- does not massacre Democrats in the street, or run them over with tanks.
That is not to say that we should be complacent, or ignore the things that are going on in this country, but when having a discussion about oppression overseas, some perspective is necessary. I can only imagine that to people actually living under repressive governments, that the discussions and rhetoric from the U.S. about things like phone company call logs seem pretty ridiculous.
Don't be naive: just because the Chinese don't play by the rules domestically says nothing about whether they will expect other people to play by them with regards to their IP.
I fully expect that if their product was made the standard, and some Western nation started ripping it off without paying the licensing fees, the PRC would throw a full-on diplomatic/economic hissy fit. In exchange for royalties, they would agree to consider, in principle, someday, perhaps soon, to appoint a minister to draft a paper on the creation of a committee to enforce and respect other nation's IP within the Chinese domestic market. Or they'd make some noises and arrest some (preferably Western) person for making bootleg DVDs, and then forget about it until the next time trade negotiations roll around.
That's how they do business. Seems to be working for them, though.
Er, no. Familiarize yourself with the phases "time in service" and "time in grade," then you will have figured out the two biggest factors behind most military promotions. Reviews, evaluations, education, etc., all count as well, but those first two are the make-or-break. If you haven't done your time-in-service or time-in-grade, you basically can't move forwards in the military. (Although I heard they are putting a greater emphasis on educational requirements, but I don't know how this will change in wartime.)
The thing that makes the military superior in some ways to some large corporations that I've been in is that they have "up or out." That is, you either get promoted or you're done; in theory it cuts down on the dead wood, but in practice its benefits are mixed.
Small companies ... bad.
... worse.
Big companies
Political and social structures have rules, just like a programming language or operating system. Understand them, and their limitations, and underlying structure, and you can do a lot. Morals don't figure into it, until you start to use them maliciously. But there are people who are going to use those same sets of rules for personal gain without really even understanding the full extent of how they work, and deciding that you're going to try to "be a nice guy" isn't going to mean anything other than that you're going to get run over: over and over again.
The world doesn't like "nice" people. The world likes effective people, and people who make other people like them. Being nice for the sake of being nice is optional, and generally overrated.
I was going to write something similar to this ... but you pretty much summed it up.
... save all you can, and retire as soon as you can feasibly do it. Or become an entrepreneur, and be somebody else's PHB. That's pretty much how the system works.
Go where the money is
The military doesn't even hold a candle to the messed-upedness that is the private sector at some points, regardless of the disparaging comments that contractors (myself included) might sometimes make about government. It's all equally fucked.
Neato.
... although I've fired a different ultra-lightweight rifle: a Bushmaster Carbon 15 Type 97S. It uses a steel barrel and bolt assembly (bolt, bolt carrier, etc.), but replaces the upper and lower receiver, plus most of the hardware, with carbon fiber. It's 4.3 lbs unloaded, claimed to be 5.3 with a loaded 30-rd mag. It's an interesting concept, but even with the big AR-15 style recoil buffer system, it's a bit obnoxious to shoot. But rather than go with titanium, they retain the minimum number of steel components necessary, and then use carbon fiber everywhere that doesn't have to withstand tremendous amounts of force.
I actually wasn't aware of the Model 700 in Titanium
There is definitely a market for ultra-lightweight firearms, don't get me wrong, but I think it's basically been filled with today's technology. I don't think that it's being hampered much by the price of raw titanium -- I have a feeling that the metal is one of the smaller input costs into the making of a firearm, compared to labor and overhead on the factory / machines / etc., but I could be wrong. It is cool, though, that they can actually make the receiver out of titanium; you can't do that with aluminum (at least not that I'm aware of) or carbon fiber.
Pretty much.
My, that was stupid. "Unbreakable" encryption... (sigh)
Actually you would not want a terribly lightweight shotgun. They in fact benefit from all that weight.
.22 LR before and it was so deceptively light you'd go to pick it up and end up almost throwing it off the bench accidentally because it would be so much lighter than you were expecting. I think the frame was Aluminum-Scandium alloy.
You could quite easily make a very lightweight firearm (in fact, some manufacturers do, especially with handguns [1]) by putting a thin steel sleeve inside a rigid aluminum alloy barrel, but the lower mass means more felt recoil and less accuracy. Likewise, you could make stocks out of equally rigid but very light carbon fiber or foam-core plastic, but people still buy heavy wood or Zytel ones because a certain weight and balance is desirable.
Cost isn't what's holding back anyone from making titanium firearms: everybody who really wants a titanium firearm already has one, and most people don't.
[1] - IIRC, it's Smith and Wesson that had/has a line of ultra-lightweight revolvers that used steel barrels sleeved into frames made of a pretty exotic Al alloy. I think they were called "Airlights" or "Airweights" or something like that. I've shot one in
The "nearly" is just them doing the usual corporate CMA.
If I were overseeing a high-profile company who was releasing a product that in any way used encryption, you can bet I would couch every claim about its security with some sort of qualifier.
No intelligent person ever uses superlatives when discussing encryption, unless you want to be on the hook in case it ever gets broken.
On another note, I sure hope that company didn't send the stuff they collected unencrypted. That's a violation of a bunch of rules. Penetrating a network for a security audit shouldn't lower the overall security of the network, if they sent unecrypted that's exactly what they did though
They could have caused the data to be sent unencrypted to a test machine inside the corporate network somewhere, or directly connected to the corporate network for the purposes of the test but outside the firewalls. That would demonstrate the possibility that the data could be sent to an arbitrary machine somewhere, but without actually sending any data unencrypted over the corporate net.
Or they could have just SSHed to their remote test machine, that would probably be just as good and not that hard to implement.
This is possible: the price point of the original Mini was $499, and it slipped up a hundred bucks when Apple switched to Intel, and it's possible they might let it go back down to half a K in time for the holidays: getting below the 500-dollar mark is important, psychologically. However, I don't think you'll ever see Apple go below $499.
Historically, Apple has kept its price points pretty much static: the equipment available at a given time changes, but the prices generally don't decrease too much, unless they introduce a totally new model of computer. This is in contrast to other manufacturers who introduce new models at high price points, and then slip them down in cost over time, while constantly introducing new models at the top, and then discontinuing models when they're so cheap as to no longer be profitable. (This approach is nice from the company's perspective because it ensures that out of every particular model you wring the most profit: you sell it at $1000 to all the people willing to pay that; then you sell it to the people willing to pay $899, etc.)
Oddly enough, decreasing prices actually pisses off past buyers and intimidates would-be new buyers more than increasing them does. Nobody likes to see the computer they bought on sale for less than they paid -- it makes them think that they got ripped off. Instead, you keep the same price point but just upgrade features (and maybe raise prices): that way people who purchased six months ago don't see "their computer" on sale for cheap (unless they dig down to find the refurbished deals), instead they just see a better computer on sale for the same price. Some people may have wished that they had waited to buy (so they would have gotten new feature x), but they don't feel as ripped off. That's pretty basic consumer psychology.
It would be possible for Apple to go back down to $500, since that was the Mini's original base price, but even then I don't think they'd do it lightly.
This was held in the 7th Circuit, so if you live in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin, those EULAs are enforceable, so long as you can technically reject them by clicking "decline" and returning the software (or software+hardware). It's slightly more ambiguous in other areas but I wouldn't just cavalierly write them off.
It's wise to be very careful about what you might be agreeing to. You don't know which way the court might rule.
But in general you're engaging in a lot of wishful thinking if you think you can just ignore EULAs and the court will defend you; depending on where you are, the Courts very well may see just the opposite.
You own the copy of the media on which the software was delivered to you; you don't own the software itself. You are merely licensed to use it.
Hence, you can resell the media (yours) and the license (yours) but you can't duplicate the software and sell it (not yours!).
It would be interesting to see what Microsoft would do if EULAs were ruled unenforceable; I suspect that they would simply send you out a paper contract in advance of the software, which you would have to read, sign, and return, before they would ship you anything. That's actually SOP for some big enterprise software packages: they don't do their licensing via click-thrus, but rather through contracts signed by the legal parties involved ahead of deployment. Really that's the way it ought to be done -- people would whine about it being an "inconvenience," but at least you could walk away if the agreement looked like crap and not have to worry about getting a refund. I suspect though that at least in some Districts, that EULAs will be found to be quite valid, however, since in theory you can disagree and take the computer/software back for a refund.
I can only assume that somewhere in the bowels of the NSA exists an "Office of Cyber-Warfare," and within that office is someone tasked with writing and keeping up-to-date the nastiest, most destructive computer and network worms ever. If there's no explicit law against a particular weapon, I think it's a good assumption to make that the U.S. has one (or three, or five thousand).
That said, I'm not sure if initiating a computer-virus war would really be a good idea. It seems like we're definitely throwing stones out the window of a glass house there; do we really want to give our enemy a really good virus that they could tweak and throw back at us? Especially given the totally inappropriate places we use Windows? I think it's a mode of warfare that we have more to lose than to gain by employing, versus practically any other enemy.