I never paid attention to it, but I noticed that when I use the right click button on my (non-Mighty) mouse, I tend to lift my index finger up and off the left mouse button. This would cause, based on what I've read, the Mighty Mouse to deliver a right-click correctly.
If you don't lift up your index finger, than it probably won't work for you.
It's not really a hardware bug any more than a car with a standard transmission is defective, just because you don't like lifting your foot up off the gas pedal while shifting. It's just the way it works; for some people it seems to work fine, for other people it won't, and that's why there are many different designs of mice.
Slightly offtopic -- has anyone ever used the Kensington Studio Mouse? It looks intriguing, although it's unfortunate they haven't come out with a cordless version, at least not one that I've seen.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I just wondered whether if someone was in a similar situation as yours in the future, it wouldn't be a bad idea to link your comments in some way; actually I was thinking about this when reading some AC posts that resembled posts of a registered user... sometimes you want to post something anonymously or pseudonymously, but leave open the possibility of claiming the comment later.
I was thinking that maybe the way to do it would just be to end one comment (the one from your alternate account, AC, whatever) with a MD5 hash of some secret phrase, and then if you later wanted to claim the post you could publish the secret using your main account. Not quite as effort intensive as actually signing the posts cryptographically (plus it's deniable, sort of) but it'd let you claim an anonymous body of work later on if you wanted.
Anyone have any immediate thoughts or criticisms?
It just seems like it's getting to the point where few people have just one account on one site anymore; most people have a bunch of accounts, sometimes using the same nickname and sometimes using different ones. Sometimes you don't want to link all the identities together, but there are definitely reasons why you'd want to be able to retroactively, if circumstances dictated. Has anyone put any serious thought into the problem, in a way that preserved psuedonymity until a user chose to reveal themselves?
Well you wouldn't be able to make a continuous hole, but you'd be able to make a hole in a particular place at a particular time, which actually might be more useful than a constant hole. (E.g.: you allow the system to remain in service so that the enemy becomes dependent on it, then take it out right before the attack/invasion/etc.) That's more what I was referring to by hole -- you're correct, you'd have to take out a big swath of satellites to interrupt coverage over any particular area constantly, since they're in LEO.
The only way to stop spam is to make it non-profitable for spammers.
Well, if sending spam results in your immediate and painful death, that sort of influences the risk versus profit equation, now doesn't it?
Sure, people would still do it -- people smuggle drugs in places where that earns you a one-way ticket down a trapdoor followed by an abrupt ending -- but you're naive if you don't think that the threat of punishment is a large disincentive to crime.
I don't go around robbing banks and stealing cars because I don't much enjoy the idea of becoming butt-buddies with a guy named Bubba down at the State pen, for the next decade or two.
If you don't hurt other people or steal things because of a lot of high-minded ideals regarding the value of human life, fine. Whatever works for you. But you're deceiving yourself if you think that's what drives everyone.
People commit crimes because the perceived gains outweigh the perceived risks. Thus you can reduce the number of a particular crime in two ways: you can lower the perceived gains or raise the perceived risks. You'll never reduce crime to zero (since there will always be people who will do crimes even when there isn't really any perceivable benefit, and always someone desperate enough to try something no matter how high the risks are for even miniscule gain), but you can certainly affect it.
Actually it was pretty conclusively said in the last Slashdot article on this topic that Blue Security wasn't compromised, what happened is that some spammer (which apparently they know but aren't releasing? That doesn't make much sense...anyway) took their spam-list, ran it through Blue's list-cleaning program which removes all BS subscribers, and then ran a diff on the result in order to get a list of people who'd signed up for Blue Security.
Then he/she/it sent the people on this resulting list a lot of threatening emails, implicating a breach of BS's security, when in truth nothing like this had to have happened. The people who got "compromised" were already on the spam lists anyway.
The rest is just a DDoS attack, nothing about that reflects on BS's security one way or the other.
Well, one assumes that if it wasn't hurting them in some way, then they wouldn't be wasting a lot of time, money, and resources (albeit stolen ones) to attack Blue Security. Their response alone is enough to make want to continue this. Obviously they're doing something right if they've gotten somebody evil this pissed.
The U.S. isn't really concerned about enemy spy satellites -- god knows our borders are so porous, you could just send a TV crew in and photograph almost anything you want, as long as they don't look Middle Eastern -- but navigation satellites are another matter.
The saving grace of the GPS system, from a U.S. military perspective, is that an enemy really can't depend on it; we can throw errors into it pretty much anywhere, anytime we want without having our equipment be affected (except all the guys using civilian GPS receivers because they haven't been issued real ones). I think there's a real concern that if there was a competing GPS-like system, that an enemy could use it to pilot a cruise missile at a U.S. target in such a way that we wouldn't get much warning.
Now, I think this is kind of a false threat: I think, given what I said earlier about our borders, that it's a whole lot easier to just drive a truck up to said U.S. target and blow it up than it would be to cobble together a homemade V-1 or V-2 with Galileo navigation, but apparently others disagree.
At any rate, any navigation system that provided GPS-like accuracy that wasn't within direct U.S. control would almost certainly necessitate the creation of a way to destroy it, or at least temporarily disable it in certain areas (if you de-orbited a satellite or two you might be able to make a hole in the system's coverage that would take a while for the operators to replace from spares).
Not that it would do any good against ICBMs, Chinese or otherwise, since they use astro- and inertial navigation systems anyway.
All you'd need is a large rotating mirror and a tracking system, and you could vaporize a human targ -- er, I mean, Intellectual Property Thief from space!
True, but in reality this couldn't work. What would happen is that they'd only make money (off of their securities or other investments) at a rate marginally above inflation. Probably substantially less, once you figured in how they're taxed. This would cause their stock to become a huge bear overnight -- why buy a share of MS that only gains a percent a year when you could buy a share of IBM or Apple? So Microsoft's share price would tank, and the company would suddenly have less market capitalization than they would have in assets. Buyers would swoop in and disassemble it; after they got done with the cash they'd sell all the fixed assets and real property, until nothing was left. Nobody is going to keep money invested in a company when their returns are worse than they could get if they took that money and invested it elsewhere.
Something like MS can't stop moving forwards, or it'll fall and never get up. And once something that big falls, the vultures swoop in, and it's all over.
It's one of those funny little twists of the language: "Document Retention" companies are very much in the business of destroying documents. They also retain and store them until they're ready to be destroyed.
Basically, you send them all of your paper records and archives, and they store them for whatever the legal period is, in some warehouse or bunker somewhere. Assuming you don't ever call them up and request the records, they'll destroy them at some preset date (2 years, etc.). Or whenever you stop paying for them to store them, whichever comes first I assume.
This is a big industry: the biggest player that I'm familiar with is Iron Mountain, but I'm sure there are others. Many of these companies also do secure document destruction, and will empty your "burn bags" around the office at the same time they come to pick up new boxes of files.
The advantage to a business is that you don't have tons of files sitting around that could become a liability later. When you get subpoenaed, you by law have to turn over all documents that you have concerning the subject of the subpoena. But if those documents were legally destroyed, after their required retention period was over, there's nothing to subpoena -- thus, there is a big industry in storing things for EXACTLY as long as is required, and then getting rid of them in a hurry.
Simply storing crap is easy; anyone with an empty warehouse could take your file boxes and stick them in a corner someplace. What companies pay for is the ability to retrieve information if it is needed, and the knowledge that after it doesn't need to be around any more, it'll be destroyed in such a way (and in a timely fashion) so that it won't come back and bite them in the ass. That's what they pay big bucks for.
I've read the FAQ and I don't think this is the case. ZPhone gives you an authentication string that you read to the person on the other end of the line, and they read (theirs) to you, so you can be sure that the node that your computer is connected to is the same one that the person at the other end of the call is sitting in front of. This seems to prevent most passive MiTM attacks that would insert a server somewhere into the middle of the connection that decrypted your side of the call and then re-encrypted it and sent it along to the person you wanted to talk to.
It of course doesn't guarantee that the person on the other end of the phone is the person you want to talk to -- but that's no more or less secure than any other telephone conversation, and really not much less secure than talking in person to a stranger you're unfamilar with. The authentication is to the phone, not to the person.
I don't really see the implementation as flawed for this. It seems significantly better than Skype, and as good as anything else that civilians have access to right now.
There are lots of products around which provide secure voice communications over your regular land-line; the weakness of nearly all of them are that it requires both the sender and receiver to have the same model and type of unit, and outside of the government there's not really any standard. (And unfortunately I don't think that they sell STU-IIIs, fun as that would be.) The old Mac-based PGPPhone was a software-based version of a "secure phone," if you had it and the person you were calling also had it, you could have a quite secure communication (of course it basically required a dedicated computer at each end). It was never very popular though, although cryptographically it was nicely done. I'm betting that two old Macs, two headsets and microphones, and two modems is probably the cheapest solution (aside from Skype, if you trust it) for secure voice that you can easily obtain.
I have heard that General Dynamics makes a module for some GSM cellphones called Sectera that gives them encrypted capabilities, but assumedly the recipient of the call also needs to have one, and I don't know whether they sell to the public or not (my feeling is probably not). I'm sure there are companies around that cater to corporate customers desiring secure voice communications, so the technology is undoubtedly out there, if you are willing to pay the right price.
Actually, I may have been wrong about the unavailibility of STU-IIIs; it seems you might be able to get them here, though I can't vouch for it (page looks a little old though).
but nothing that would permit me to call PSTN / mobile lines at an acceptable price with real encryption.
Seems like this requirement is the real killer, since it would require the person on the receiving end to have some sort of specialized equipment on their telephone, to decrypt the call. Much like a STU-III or its commercial equivalents.
Unless you meant encryption only while the call was traveling over the packet-switched network, but really what's the point of that? If someone wants to intercept your call, they can just go to wherever the gateway is (or any place on the far side) and do it -- you're just giving yourself a false sense of security at that point, which is worse than nothing in my opinion.
I'm active in a radio club that's major focus is disaster preparedness and management. We have a 2m repeater with a big diesel generator, a bunch of "go kits," coordination with local PD, FD, and Red Cross. It's interesting to think about what you'd do in a total loss-of-communication situation.
Anyone planning on using their cellphone when the lights go out may be in for a very nasty surprise: one that will come in the form of the 'fast busy' signal because the circuits are swamped, or "No Service" because the same thing that took out your power took out the local cell tower as well.
Although in the latter case (cell phone tower gets taken out) there's no more reason for the local 2m repeater to still be operating, at least you're doubling your chances. Also, a radio repeater doesn't have any backhaul to fail; I'm not sure whether cell towers can operate in a 'grid' mode and route calls from one tower to the other if their connection to the PSTN gets cut off, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.
Because Google doesn't advertise who they get their hosting from?
And because it's almost certainly more than one supplier; anyone running a datacenter has multiple connections to the net, just to reduce your downtime exposure if one of them fails. I wouldn't be surprised if Google had a leased fiber line to every major backbone provider on the West Coast.
They don't just call up Comcast and say "So, uh, can we get cable internet for our place? It's in Mountain view, commercial address..."
So really, the reason you don't here a straight answer to that question is 1) it's secret, and 2) it's complicated.
You think that's bad? I have a template that all of our meeting minutes gets typed into; this is a text-only (no embedded graphics) Word document. It has a bunch of tables and some formatting in it, but no tracked changes or anything. It's a very simple template.
It weighs in at (drumroll, please)... 275 KB.
This is for two pages, mostly consisting of blank space. I am absolutely at a loss as to why it's so huge; but it's a standard template that we have to use, long predating me, and I'm not going to rebuild it. Every week we generate two or three of these, which depending on how much actual content gets put into one, ends up being around 300 KB or so. Multiply by 50 weeks, multiply by six or seven years.... that's a lot of wasted disk space thanks to an inexplicably bloated template document.
I'm sure other people can come up with even more egregious examples, but that's mine. I've definitely seen Word docs that have ballooned to a MB or more from a few hundred KB just from turning track changes on and changing a line or two (what the heck does it store in there? Is a diff not good enough or something?). But probably nobody outside MS will be able to tell what the problem is, since the format is a black box.
That I think is the biggest and most important difference. OpenDocument also implies the use of basically standard and also-Open formats like SVG for graphics, Dublin Core for metadata, and zip for the final compression. Who knows what formats MS will specify, or whether anyone besides them will have software to read the ancillary formats (embedded graphics, etc.). It will become yet another situtation of "if you just want to pry out the text, use any software; if you want it to look right, you have to use Microsoft software."
Microsoft only exists because of vendor lock-in. It's the be-all and end-all of their business model; anything that they produce is going to have a hook or hooks somewhere. It's not an unfair assumption, it's one that has many years of their products behind it: that's how they work, and it's what they do.
I actually almost mentioned that in my original post, but decided it wasn't directly relelvant to my point.
But if you look at the selling points of most corporate/enterprise email systems (e.g. Notes, Exchange), one of the big features is "document expiration." You can make it so that emails just magically disappear after some preset time...unless of course someone printed them out or saved them to a text file. Although I would expect that future systems might prevent this on certain documents (if they don't already -- I can imagine a "no print / no save" flag that was really enforced would be a big feature). Ignoring how hard that would be to effectively implement, of course.
No, but they could just make it slow; cut the total throughput to Google's servers, or maybe inject some latency into every connection.
With GMail as it currently exists this might not seem like a big threat, but look at where "webmail" is headed. GMail already includes instant messenging / chat, and in a few years I could see it becoming much more interactive; instead of firing up Skype to make a VoIP call, you might just navigate to a particular web page.
AJAX and future interactive technologies could be greatly affected by network conditions, and two competing websites might be perceived very differently by consumers if one was always much faster or more responsive than the other. It doesn't take much to give something a reputation for slowness or unreliability, and that's a big turn-off to potential customers. (And not one that you can really argue against -- you as Google could say "it's not our fault, it's your cable company doing it!" to which the customer says "So, what? You're still slow and Yahoo is still fast, so I'm using Yahoo.")
Apple Computers is allowed to use the name Apple on the condition it never enters the music business.
There's the speculation.
Neither you nor I has any idea what Apple Computer and Apple Records agreed to or not; even if they did agree to something like that, the whole disagreement could hinge on how they defined "music business" within the contract.
You're making it seem like it's somehow a cut-and-dried issue when in reality it almost certainly is not.
Actually if you think in terms of who's really interested in processing, archiving, and dissemenating large volumes of text to people all over the world, it's not hard to imagine that religious organizations would be at the top of the list. They have huge archives, and probably desire both interoperability and stability (no "format of the week" syndrome).
It's honestly tough to find many organizations that really are thinking past the next quarter or fiscal year; in most industries people are buying software and hardware for the here-and-now. If that document isn't accessible in 15 years, who cares? Outside of their mandated recordkeeping obligations (Sarbannes-Oxley, etc.) a lot of large commercial organizations probably wouldn't care if their documents were written with magic disappearing ink that rendered them unreadable in a few years or a decade. (To be fair, the majority of commercial text is probably nothing that you'd want to read in a decade -- memos, meeting minutes, reams of emails; most of it probably makes little sense outside its original context anyway.)
I think this attitude is shortsighted, but it's pervasive. Nobody wants to think about long-term storage, nobody wants to think about accessibility 10 or 20 or 100 years from now, except libraries, governments, and religious institutions. (And perhaps some of the very largest and longest-lived corporations.) So it makes sense that if you're designing a data format that you want to be around for a while, you'd want to bring on board the people who have the most interest in making it successful.
Just for fun, I've created documents in both that when you print them, it is virtually impossible to distinguish what was the program used to ceate them. I don't believe any of them is any better in the quality department.
I have to disagree here. I have done the same thing; when I was in college I typed all of my humanities and english papers in LaTex, because I was trying to get comfortable with it for scientific use, and the difference in output quality was night and day from the ClarisWorks/MS-Word stuff that I was used to.
LaTeX produces output that looks like a book. Word produces output that looks like... well, like Word. The biggest and most obvious difference is just in how it handles inter-word spacing when you're using left and right justification; LaTeX is much more intelligent in how it chooses spacing and the result is obvious. Hypenation, ligatures, inter-sentence spacing are also all done better in LaTeX. Get used to reading stuff output by LaTeX, and going back to a plain-old word processed document is just painful.
I had people that had never heard of LaTeX comment on how good the output looked. In the end I'm not sure it's really worth the trouble for day-to-day memos (or depending on where you are in life, term papers), but I definitely have to disagree with you about the quality.
I suppose it's like arguing about the relative merits of 128kb MP3 versus FLAC; some people aren't going to notice or appreciate or care about the difference, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's more of a personal preference thing.
I never paid attention to it, but I noticed that when I use the right click button on my (non-Mighty) mouse, I tend to lift my index finger up and off the left mouse button. This would cause, based on what I've read, the Mighty Mouse to deliver a right-click correctly.
If you don't lift up your index finger, than it probably won't work for you.
It's not really a hardware bug any more than a car with a standard transmission is defective, just because you don't like lifting your foot up off the gas pedal while shifting. It's just the way it works; for some people it seems to work fine, for other people it won't, and that's why there are many different designs of mice.
Slightly offtopic -- has anyone ever used the Kensington Studio Mouse? It looks intriguing, although it's unfortunate they haven't come out with a cordless version, at least not one that I've seen.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I just wondered whether if someone was in a similar situation as yours in the future, it wouldn't be a bad idea to link your comments in some way; actually I was thinking about this when reading some AC posts that resembled posts of a registered user ... sometimes you want to post something anonymously or pseudonymously, but leave open the possibility of claiming the comment later.
I was thinking that maybe the way to do it would just be to end one comment (the one from your alternate account, AC, whatever) with a MD5 hash of some secret phrase, and then if you later wanted to claim the post you could publish the secret using your main account. Not quite as effort intensive as actually signing the posts cryptographically (plus it's deniable, sort of) but it'd let you claim an anonymous body of work later on if you wanted.
Anyone have any immediate thoughts or criticisms?
It just seems like it's getting to the point where few people have just one account on one site anymore; most people have a bunch of accounts, sometimes using the same nickname and sometimes using different ones. Sometimes you don't want to link all the identities together, but there are definitely reasons why you'd want to be able to retroactively, if circumstances dictated. Has anyone put any serious thought into the problem, in a way that preserved psuedonymity until a user chose to reveal themselves?
Well you wouldn't be able to make a continuous hole, but you'd be able to make a hole in a particular place at a particular time, which actually might be more useful than a constant hole. (E.g.: you allow the system to remain in service so that the enemy becomes dependent on it, then take it out right before the attack/invasion/etc.) That's more what I was referring to by hole -- you're correct, you'd have to take out a big swath of satellites to interrupt coverage over any particular area constantly, since they're in LEO.
The only way to stop spam is to make it non-profitable for spammers.
Well, if sending spam results in your immediate and painful death, that sort of influences the risk versus profit equation, now doesn't it?
Sure, people would still do it -- people smuggle drugs in places where that earns you a one-way ticket down a trapdoor followed by an abrupt ending -- but you're naive if you don't think that the threat of punishment is a large disincentive to crime.
I don't go around robbing banks and stealing cars because I don't much enjoy the idea of becoming butt-buddies with a guy named Bubba down at the State pen, for the next decade or two.
If you don't hurt other people or steal things because of a lot of high-minded ideals regarding the value of human life, fine. Whatever works for you. But you're deceiving yourself if you think that's what drives everyone.
People commit crimes because the perceived gains outweigh the perceived risks. Thus you can reduce the number of a particular crime in two ways: you can lower the perceived gains or raise the perceived risks. You'll never reduce crime to zero (since there will always be people who will do crimes even when there isn't really any perceivable benefit, and always someone desperate enough to try something no matter how high the risks are for even miniscule gain), but you can certainly affect it.
Actually it was pretty conclusively said in the last Slashdot article on this topic that Blue Security wasn't compromised, what happened is that some spammer (which apparently they know but aren't releasing? That doesn't make much sense...anyway) took their spam-list, ran it through Blue's list-cleaning program which removes all BS subscribers, and then ran a diff on the result in order to get a list of people who'd signed up for Blue Security.
Then he/she/it sent the people on this resulting list a lot of threatening emails, implicating a breach of BS's security, when in truth nothing like this had to have happened. The people who got "compromised" were already on the spam lists anyway.
The rest is just a DDoS attack, nothing about that reflects on BS's security one way or the other.
Well, one assumes that if it wasn't hurting them in some way, then they wouldn't be wasting a lot of time, money, and resources (albeit stolen ones) to attack Blue Security. Their response alone is enough to make want to continue this. Obviously they're doing something right if they've gotten somebody evil this pissed.
I think you are actually right on the money here.
The U.S. isn't really concerned about enemy spy satellites -- god knows our borders are so porous, you could just send a TV crew in and photograph almost anything you want, as long as they don't look Middle Eastern -- but navigation satellites are another matter.
The saving grace of the GPS system, from a U.S. military perspective, is that an enemy really can't depend on it; we can throw errors into it pretty much anywhere, anytime we want without having our equipment be affected (except all the guys using civilian GPS receivers because they haven't been issued real ones). I think there's a real concern that if there was a competing GPS-like system, that an enemy could use it to pilot a cruise missile at a U.S. target in such a way that we wouldn't get much warning.
Now, I think this is kind of a false threat: I think, given what I said earlier about our borders, that it's a whole lot easier to just drive a truck up to said U.S. target and blow it up than it would be to cobble together a homemade V-1 or V-2 with Galileo navigation, but apparently others disagree.
At any rate, any navigation system that provided GPS-like accuracy that wasn't within direct U.S. control would almost certainly necessitate the creation of a way to destroy it, or at least temporarily disable it in certain areas (if you de-orbited a satellite or two you might be able to make a hole in the system's coverage that would take a while for the operators to replace from spares).
Not that it would do any good against ICBMs, Chinese or otherwise, since they use astro- and inertial navigation systems anyway.
All you'd need is a large rotating mirror and a tracking system, and you could vaporize a human targ -- er, I mean, Intellectual Property Thief from space!
Sure, just take it down to your local recycling center and they'll take care of it.
True, but in reality this couldn't work. What would happen is that they'd only make money (off of their securities or other investments) at a rate marginally above inflation. Probably substantially less, once you figured in how they're taxed. This would cause their stock to become a huge bear overnight -- why buy a share of MS that only gains a percent a year when you could buy a share of IBM or Apple? So Microsoft's share price would tank, and the company would suddenly have less market capitalization than they would have in assets. Buyers would swoop in and disassemble it; after they got done with the cash they'd sell all the fixed assets and real property, until nothing was left. Nobody is going to keep money invested in a company when their returns are worse than they could get if they took that money and invested it elsewhere.
Something like MS can't stop moving forwards, or it'll fall and never get up. And once something that big falls, the vultures swoop in, and it's all over.
It's one of those funny little twists of the language: "Document Retention" companies are very much in the business of destroying documents. They also retain and store them until they're ready to be destroyed.
Basically, you send them all of your paper records and archives, and they store them for whatever the legal period is, in some warehouse or bunker somewhere. Assuming you don't ever call them up and request the records, they'll destroy them at some preset date (2 years, etc.). Or whenever you stop paying for them to store them, whichever comes first I assume.
This is a big industry: the biggest player that I'm familiar with is Iron Mountain, but I'm sure there are others. Many of these companies also do secure document destruction, and will empty your "burn bags" around the office at the same time they come to pick up new boxes of files.
The advantage to a business is that you don't have tons of files sitting around that could become a liability later. When you get subpoenaed, you by law have to turn over all documents that you have concerning the subject of the subpoena. But if those documents were legally destroyed, after their required retention period was over, there's nothing to subpoena -- thus, there is a big industry in storing things for EXACTLY as long as is required, and then getting rid of them in a hurry.
Simply storing crap is easy; anyone with an empty warehouse could take your file boxes and stick them in a corner someplace. What companies pay for is the ability to retrieve information if it is needed, and the knowledge that after it doesn't need to be around any more, it'll be destroyed in such a way (and in a timely fashion) so that it won't come back and bite them in the ass. That's what they pay big bucks for.
Could you explain why this is so?
I've read the FAQ and I don't think this is the case. ZPhone gives you an authentication string that you read to the person on the other end of the line, and they read (theirs) to you, so you can be sure that the node that your computer is connected to is the same one that the person at the other end of the call is sitting in front of. This seems to prevent most passive MiTM attacks that would insert a server somewhere into the middle of the connection that decrypted your side of the call and then re-encrypted it and sent it along to the person you wanted to talk to.
It of course doesn't guarantee that the person on the other end of the phone is the person you want to talk to -- but that's no more or less secure than any other telephone conversation, and really not much less secure than talking in person to a stranger you're unfamilar with. The authentication is to the phone, not to the person.
I don't really see the implementation as flawed for this. It seems significantly better than Skype, and as good as anything else that civilians have access to right now.
There are lots of products around which provide secure voice communications over your regular land-line; the weakness of nearly all of them are that it requires both the sender and receiver to have the same model and type of unit, and outside of the government there's not really any standard. (And unfortunately I don't think that they sell STU-IIIs, fun as that would be.) The old Mac-based PGPPhone was a software-based version of a "secure phone," if you had it and the person you were calling also had it, you could have a quite secure communication (of course it basically required a dedicated computer at each end). It was never very popular though, although cryptographically it was nicely done. I'm betting that two old Macs, two headsets and microphones, and two modems is probably the cheapest solution (aside from Skype, if you trust it) for secure voice that you can easily obtain.
I have heard that General Dynamics makes a module for some GSM cellphones called Sectera that gives them encrypted capabilities, but assumedly the recipient of the call also needs to have one, and I don't know whether they sell to the public or not (my feeling is probably not). I'm sure there are companies around that cater to corporate customers desiring secure voice communications, so the technology is undoubtedly out there, if you are willing to pay the right price.
Actually, I may have been wrong about the unavailibility of STU-IIIs; it seems you might be able to get them here, though I can't vouch for it (page looks a little old though).
but nothing that would permit me to call PSTN / mobile lines at an acceptable price with real encryption.
Seems like this requirement is the real killer, since it would require the person on the receiving end to have some sort of specialized equipment on their telephone, to decrypt the call. Much like a STU-III or its commercial equivalents.
Unless you meant encryption only while the call was traveling over the packet-switched network, but really what's the point of that? If someone wants to intercept your call, they can just go to wherever the gateway is (or any place on the far side) and do it -- you're just giving yourself a false sense of security at that point, which is worse than nothing in my opinion.
Glad somebody else mentioned it also.
I'm active in a radio club that's major focus is disaster preparedness and management. We have a 2m repeater with a big diesel generator, a bunch of "go kits," coordination with local PD, FD, and Red Cross. It's interesting to think about what you'd do in a total loss-of-communication situation.
Anyone planning on using their cellphone when the lights go out may be in for a very nasty surprise: one that will come in the form of the 'fast busy' signal because the circuits are swamped, or "No Service" because the same thing that took out your power took out the local cell tower as well.
Although in the latter case (cell phone tower gets taken out) there's no more reason for the local 2m repeater to still be operating, at least you're doubling your chances. Also, a radio repeater doesn't have any backhaul to fail; I'm not sure whether cell towers can operate in a 'grid' mode and route calls from one tower to the other if their connection to the PSTN gets cut off, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.
Because Google doesn't advertise who they get their hosting from?
And because it's almost certainly more than one supplier; anyone running a datacenter has multiple connections to the net, just to reduce your downtime exposure if one of them fails. I wouldn't be surprised if Google had a leased fiber line to every major backbone provider on the West Coast.
They don't just call up Comcast and say "So, uh, can we get cable internet for our place? It's in Mountain view, commercial address..."
So really, the reason you don't here a straight answer to that question is 1) it's secret, and 2) it's complicated.
You think that's bad? I have a template that all of our meeting minutes gets typed into; this is a text-only (no embedded graphics) Word document. It has a bunch of tables and some formatting in it, but no tracked changes or anything. It's a very simple template.
... 275 KB.
.... that's a lot of wasted disk space thanks to an inexplicably bloated template document.
It weighs in at (drumroll, please)
This is for two pages, mostly consisting of blank space. I am absolutely at a loss as to why it's so huge; but it's a standard template that we have to use, long predating me, and I'm not going to rebuild it. Every week we generate two or three of these, which depending on how much actual content gets put into one, ends up being around 300 KB or so. Multiply by 50 weeks, multiply by six or seven years
I'm sure other people can come up with even more egregious examples, but that's mine. I've definitely seen Word docs that have ballooned to a MB or more from a few hundred KB just from turning track changes on and changing a line or two (what the heck does it store in there? Is a diff not good enough or something?). But probably nobody outside MS will be able to tell what the problem is, since the format is a black box.
That I think is the biggest and most important difference. OpenDocument also implies the use of basically standard and also-Open formats like SVG for graphics, Dublin Core for metadata, and zip for the final compression. Who knows what formats MS will specify, or whether anyone besides them will have software to read the ancillary formats (embedded graphics, etc.). It will become yet another situtation of "if you just want to pry out the text, use any software; if you want it to look right, you have to use Microsoft software."
Microsoft only exists because of vendor lock-in. It's the be-all and end-all of their business model; anything that they produce is going to have a hook or hooks somewhere. It's not an unfair assumption, it's one that has many years of their products behind it: that's how they work, and it's what they do.
I actually almost mentioned that in my original post, but decided it wasn't directly relelvant to my point.
But if you look at the selling points of most corporate/enterprise email systems (e.g. Notes, Exchange), one of the big features is "document expiration." You can make it so that emails just magically disappear after some preset time...unless of course someone printed them out or saved them to a text file. Although I would expect that future systems might prevent this on certain documents (if they don't already -- I can imagine a "no print / no save" flag that was really enforced would be a big feature). Ignoring how hard that would be to effectively implement, of course.
No, but they could just make it slow; cut the total throughput to Google's servers, or maybe inject some latency into every connection.
With GMail as it currently exists this might not seem like a big threat, but look at where "webmail" is headed. GMail already includes instant messenging / chat, and in a few years I could see it becoming much more interactive; instead of firing up Skype to make a VoIP call, you might just navigate to a particular web page.
AJAX and future interactive technologies could be greatly affected by network conditions, and two competing websites might be perceived very differently by consumers if one was always much faster or more responsive than the other. It doesn't take much to give something a reputation for slowness or unreliability, and that's a big turn-off to potential customers. (And not one that you can really argue against -- you as Google could say "it's not our fault, it's your cable company doing it!" to which the customer says "So, what? You're still slow and Yahoo is still fast, so I'm using Yahoo.")
Apple Computers is allowed to use the name Apple on the condition it never enters the music business.
There's the speculation.
Neither you nor I has any idea what Apple Computer and Apple Records agreed to or not; even if they did agree to something like that, the whole disagreement could hinge on how they defined "music business" within the contract.
You're making it seem like it's somehow a cut-and-dried issue when in reality it almost certainly is not.
Actually if you think in terms of who's really interested in processing, archiving, and dissemenating large volumes of text to people all over the world, it's not hard to imagine that religious organizations would be at the top of the list. They have huge archives, and probably desire both interoperability and stability (no "format of the week" syndrome).
It's honestly tough to find many organizations that really are thinking past the next quarter or fiscal year; in most industries people are buying software and hardware for the here-and-now. If that document isn't accessible in 15 years, who cares? Outside of their mandated recordkeeping obligations (Sarbannes-Oxley, etc.) a lot of large commercial organizations probably wouldn't care if their documents were written with magic disappearing ink that rendered them unreadable in a few years or a decade. (To be fair, the majority of commercial text is probably nothing that you'd want to read in a decade -- memos, meeting minutes, reams of emails; most of it probably makes little sense outside its original context anyway.)
I think this attitude is shortsighted, but it's pervasive. Nobody wants to think about long-term storage, nobody wants to think about accessibility 10 or 20 or 100 years from now, except libraries, governments, and religious institutions. (And perhaps some of the very largest and longest-lived corporations.) So it makes sense that if you're designing a data format that you want to be around for a while, you'd want to bring on board the people who have the most interest in making it successful.
How would that be different from Docbook?
Just for fun, I've created documents in both that when you print them, it is virtually impossible to distinguish what was the program used to ceate them. I don't believe any of them is any better in the quality department.
... well, like Word. The biggest and most obvious difference is just in how it handles inter-word spacing when you're using left and right justification; LaTeX is much more intelligent in how it chooses spacing and the result is obvious. Hypenation, ligatures, inter-sentence spacing are also all done better in LaTeX. Get used to reading stuff output by LaTeX, and going back to a plain-old word processed document is just painful.
I have to disagree here. I have done the same thing; when I was in college I typed all of my humanities and english papers in LaTex, because I was trying to get comfortable with it for scientific use, and the difference in output quality was night and day from the ClarisWorks/MS-Word stuff that I was used to.
LaTeX produces output that looks like a book. Word produces output that looks like
I had people that had never heard of LaTeX comment on how good the output looked. In the end I'm not sure it's really worth the trouble for day-to-day memos (or depending on where you are in life, term papers), but I definitely have to disagree with you about the quality.
I suppose it's like arguing about the relative merits of 128kb MP3 versus FLAC; some people aren't going to notice or appreciate or care about the difference, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there.
Show me the legal agreement that they've broken.
Oh, wait, you can't. Because it's confidential and outside of a few leaks, has never been released. So really, you're just speculating.