That would work for graphics cards too, except their lifespan in the marketplace is so short that by the time you made one completely stable, reverse-engineered driver, that card would be both obsolete and impossible to find.
If there were only two graphics cards in the world, one from ATI and one from NVidia, and they only produced new ones every 5 years, I suspect that the reverse-engineered drivers would be substantially better in quality. Unfortunately, the upgrade/release cycle for new graphics technologies seems to be one of the fastest things in the computer-hardware world right now; it's certainly faster than the upgrade cycle on network hardware or most peripherals.
That said, I've found that the free drivers do seem to work well enough for basic desktop and office-type tasks, they just suck rather hard for gaming. Maybe ATI's are terrible even for basic stuff, I wouldn't know; I've only used NVidia gear.
I wish it was floating around the 'net somewhere, but if it is, I haven't found it.
It was produced for a British TV channel by a company that does mostly public television and documentary programming, their name escapes me at the moment but I found them online a while back, and as far as I can tell it's never been released on DVD and they don't have any immediate plans to do so (although they will happily sell you the rights if you want to run it on your network, I'm sure).
It's one of those situations where I'd buy it if I was able, but since it's not I wouldn't exactly lose a lot of sleep being racked with guilt if I found a way to download it instead.
I get the feeling that someone who dropped out of school at 8 and became a mob boss may not have been keeping up to date on the latest management training strategies.
He was really just ahead of his time. You just wait, I'll be he'll write a tell-all book from prison: "10 Habits of Highly Effective Mobsters."
I can just imagine....
Manager: "Hi Joe, what's happening." Cubie: "Oh, hi Stan.... What's with the baseball bat?" Manager: "It's a new team-building technique I'm trying out." Manager beats Cubie savagely with bat, until his head completely dissolves. Manager: (to office) I WARNED YOU, NO READING SLASHDOT AT WORK.
(The article does exist in the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20050206214237/http://w ww.ciphergoth.org/crypto/solitaire/ It does describe what sound like they might be some problems with the randomness of the keystream, but it doesn't seem like a complete break. Sorry for pasting the address, but Slashdot doesn't seem to like IA links much.)
Anyway, I'd be curious in knowing what the problems with it are.
Reminds me a little of something that happened to me a while back. I was driving on a very rural interstate in Maine, late at night. I'd been driving for about 12 hours, and I had started to feel fatigued and sleepy. (If you've ever driven on an empty concrete highway at night, the road hypnosis is a serious problem, it can get to you very quickly.) So I pulled over to the side of the road to take a break. Less than a minute later, a trooper came up behind me and told me I couldn't stop unless the car was disabled. I explained the situation to him and pointed out that the next exit was more than 30 miles and the next open rest area almost 100. His helpful solution was that if I didn't start driving, he could arrest me and have my car towed.
Not true. The standard Interstate speed limit is 65 MPH, although it frequently drops to 55 in urban areas. Out South and West (basically anywhere except New England), on long stretches of rural freeway, it's very common to have 75 MPH zones. I don't know if there are any areas higher than that, I think 75 is the highest standard, but there might be 80MPH areas that I haven't been to yet.
They used to have areas in Montana that were autobahn-like, with no daytime limit, but I've been told that's been eliminated in the past few years, I guess they had too many tourists pretending they were at Daytona.
I don't know how this myth got started... perhaps it's just a convenient way for law-makers to appease people while still letting them have cell phones, perhaps it's just cluelessness, and perhaps it's the hands-free kit manufacturers.
Bingo -- you got it. I followed the progress of the law in Connecticut with some interest, being a New Englander (at the time), and there was intense lobbying both by citizens who wanted to use cellphones and by the major cell carriers against a complete ban. Verizon, which is the dominant company in CT, I believe may have had a hand in making sure the hands-free exemption went through. (They also had a hand in the NY law, which the CT one was based on.)
Neither the people nor the cell companies were going to stand for a complete prohibition against using cellphones, and I think even the more boneheaded legislators realized that would be unenforceable (not that the current law is enforceable, it's widely ignored), so they created the "hands free kit" exemption. This had the effect of basically making everyone in the State run out to their local car phone store and buy an earpiece or handsfree kit--the stores must have loved it--while not really impacting phone use.
And like I mentioned in an earlier comment, there's nothing in the law that requires you to use voice-dial or anything, so people still need to look away from the road in order to dial their phone and make a call, which in my opinion is the most dangerous part of using a phone on the road. Once you've done that, which you have to do regardless of whether you're using an earpiece or not, using a phone is just like any other activity that uses your right hand.
I am convinced that the law is a prime example of "just do something" legislation. The politicians were desperate to come up with something that they could get a lot of public support for, and there's a widespread perception that idiots who drive while using a cellphone are a hazard. Unfortunately, making people use a hands-free device doesn't really get rid of either 'problem,' the phones, or the idiots.
The legislators know that people see "idiots driving while talking on cellphones" as a problem, thus they pass a law and ban it. It's knee-jerk legislation at its best, something which has a long history in Connecticut.
After all, the law doesn't do a damn thing about what has to be the most dangerous part of using a cellphone: dialing it, and like you pointed out, once you've started the call on a cellphone and are just holding it to your head, it's really not any more dangerous or distracting than holding a cup of Starbucks in that hand. Actually, I'd argue that it's far less dangerous and distracting, since you can drop that cellphone in an emergency with a lot more ease than you can drop a cup of hot liquid.
However, rational thought has never been an impediment to legislators desperate to justify their own existence to their constituencies by getting their names down on some law or another, and thus we get this kind of crap.
Seatbelts save lives, and not just those of the wearer.
Huh?
Who else are they saving? People you would have accidentally hit and killed while flying out the windshield of your car?
I admit I've never seen the numbers on that, but I think the number of people killed by being hit by flying unrestrained bodies is pretty low. The primary function of a seatbelt is to protect you, nothing more.
I wasn't sure whether India or China were doing research in that area when the US clamped down on it in the late-70s, that's why I didn't mention them (it was "continue" research, although I should have been more clear) in terms of countries that basically defied the US when we said such things were verboten domestically.
The Thorium stuff in India is fairly interesting (if you're a country that has a lot of Thorium and not a whole lot of Uranium), although I've been following the news recently the shift in relations between the Australians and the Indians; I wonder whether they'll still continue to develop Th technology if they are allowed to import U-235 from Australia. I hope so, just from a technical standpoint.
Because Lenovo is based out of Hong Kong, which is predominantly (to the best of my knowledge) a Cantonese-speaking area, although I expect you could get along with Mandarin there pretty well also.
I have no idea where their design facilities are within China, I was basing my comment solely on their headquarters.
That 48 tons of waste per plant per year could be greatly reduced with spent fuel reprocessing. Most other nuclear nations, including the UK and France, go this route, which is a lot more sensible than just burying everything, however due to some really boneheaded decisions made by President Carter, it's never been done recently in the United States.
Until it was banned, we had a whole system under construction for reprocessing spent fuel that would have reduced the scope of the problem we're now faced with. However, in 1977 the research was cut off, and further development and implementation was banned; although President Reagan quietly reversed the ban, nobody has been willing to put money into it. Except of course the military, their ability to manufacture plutonium for weapons purposes was never affected, something which strikes me as endlessly ironic, given that Carter's justification for banning reprocessing was ostensibly to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
By processing the spent fuel assemblies promptly (before they sit around and create a lot of secondary contamination) you reduce the volume of waste that has to be stored for long periods, and you also get a non-trivial amount of new fuel back (even out of reactors that aren't specifically designed to breed new fuel). Either one of those goals would make the procedure worthwhile in my opinion, pick your favorite and count the other one as a bonus. Right now we're burying tons of waste which isn't itself that radioactive or long-lived or even toxic, but because it's physically joined to stuff that is. The actual volume of long-lived high-level waste produced by a plant isn't that much, if you do the right reprocessing first.
The plan in the United States was a process called PUREX; you can Google it for more information. The French do their reprocessing at COGMA LaHague, and the Brits do it at a commercial facility called THORP.
If you're looking to talk about how biased someone is, it's more than a little bit ironic to try and do it by quoting "Mother Jones Magazine," which isn't exactly a paragon of journalistic neutrality. They make NPR look like a bastion of conservative thought.
Your point may have merit, but that's somewhat less than convincing.
I hadn't seen that in a few years... thanks for the laugh.
In case anyone is wondering what it is (and is so lazy they can't click on it), it's titled "Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics."
I never saw this, but I have seen a lot of variation in the "number of years nuclear energy will power us for" figures. I think there are a few different things that get done to the statistics depending on which outcome you want to show.
Probably the biggest is whether you just take today's energy consumption figures and use them for the future, or whether you project the rate of increase of energy into the future, in order to get your numbers. Obviously a source of energy that could power us for 100 years in 1955 might only last 15 today, and might only last 1 in another 40 or 50 years.
The other major issue is whether you pretend that we'll use the uranium intelligently, or we'll keep squandering it in wasteful reactors like we do today. Right now, our nuclear reactors here in the US (and pretty much everywhere else in the world) are the atomic-age equivalents of an open-hearth coal-fired boiler, giant and inefficient. We shovel enriched uranium into them, use it to make some electricity, and out comes waste. It's terrible, and it wastes a non-renewable resource (fissile uranium). Although I don't know exactly how long we'd last doing this, if you told me it was less than a generation or two before we used up all the fissile uranium, I'd believe you. It's a hellacious waste.
If we were using all that uranium in breeder reactors, using it's neutrons to enrich naturally non-fissile uranium into plutonium, then we'd greatly extend the length of time we'd be able to run on atoms as a civilization. I'm not sure exactly how much plutonium you can produce per pound of fissile uranium, but if you compare it to just wasting those neutrons by crashing them into the shielding, it's basically like making free fuel.
Although I generally dislike the French government, I have to give them kudos in this area for being the only government with the balls to continue civilian research in this area, when the US decided to ban it (thanks, President Carter!) and hitch our wagon to the horses of Persian Gulf oil. Ironically, although the excuse for banning fuel reprocessing was because it could be used to create nuclear weapons, it was the breeder reactors used for creating nuclear weapons (and not peaceful energy) that remained in operation, both here and in the Soviet Union.
I'm a pretty big proponent of nuclear technologies, but I seriously wonder whether it's good in the long run (multi-generational outlook here) for us to build nuclear reactors that do nothing but "burn" U-235 and produce waste, rather than waiting until we come to grips with breeder technology and decide to build facilities that encompass the whole nuclear fuel cycle. I have this fear that if we don't do that, our (grand)children will be left fighting over the world's remaining stocks of U-235, wondering why we wasted all of it so quickly, or digging up Yucca Mountain for the U-238 that we so casually threw away.
It sucks almost as bad on Linux as it does on Windows. Except that you're not adding the 'suck factor' of Java to Windows, so your 'net suckage' is less, of course.
Seriously; I'm using it to run a Freenet node and the JVM sucks up 128MB of RAM, this is to run a headless P2P program which doesn't have any open windows/GUI/widgets/etc. It's kind of a pain to install also, you have to download some weird BIN file from Sun, turn it into a Debian package with fakeroot, and then install it (alternately you could let Sun's BIN file run on your system, but damned if I'm going to do that). You can't just grab it from the repositories.
Mac OS X's Java is still a bit of a RAM hog, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as it is on Linux or Windows. I think you're right, there definitely has to be some optimization on Apple's part.
This is true, however it seems as though Lenovo is slowly cutting those people and moving the design jobs over to China as well.
The short story is in this article, Lenovo cuts jobs in restructuring push: In short, they've dumped the US design teams for their desktop line, but retained the Thinkpad people (based in N.C.). However if I was working there, I think I'd be either polishing my resume or taking a Berlitz course in Cantonese.
If their marketshare in the US continues to slip, it's not hard to imagine that they'll cut the design teams here (which are probably expensive to operate, versus having a few people on the payroll in an office they already own in Hong Kong) and retreat to the Chinese domestic market. That's pretty much what they've already done with the desktop lineup; if, given a year or so, they don't make up the lost ground to Dell and HP with notebooks, I could see it happening there as well.
Only if I get a box to check that says "Please spend all of my tax dollars on giant killer robots, and none of it on educating poor people or any other pansy shit."
Seriously -- that's not a road you want to go down. Given a choice, I think a lot more people will put their money towards Things That Go Boom instead of rather boring stuff like education, libraries, or highway maintenance.
Does anybody else remember a little Mac utility that came out of one of the hacking conventions, probably about 6 or 7 years ago (not that long after Apple brought out the first Air Port Base Stations -- so maybe more than that) that would grab and display JPEG and GIF images that were being transmitted over an unencrypted WLAN?
I think I recall reading about it in Mac World or MacUser, although it was a pretty quick-and-dirty app, it won some sort of award at whatever conference it was presented at. I've never heard about it again, but I've always thought it would be funny to use it as part of some kind of installation: hook it up to a big projector and just let it run.
In the case of your "black box" decryption chip, all you're doing is burying the "secret" that you hope the consumer can't access into a chip. If someone figures out how to extract the key off of your secret-decoder chip, though, your security is shot. It's not really a "secure" system in the mathematical, theoretical sense that cryptographers like to talk about; really all you're doing is hoping that that your adversaries, combined, don't have the resources to open your system up and figure out how it works.
Of course, not all consumers are going to be stupid, and not all of them are going to be without resources. Some tinkerers have access to some pretty impressive equipment: whether they're technically allowed to use it or not. I could imagine that if some system were implemented that depended on a secret, sealed chip that nobody knew what was inside, it could easily become a big race to figure it out. People who had access to everything from surplus medical X-ray machines to MRI scanners would be taking a peek inside; it's simply not realistic to think that you can design a black box that takes in scrambled content and outputs de-scrambled content and that nobody is ever going to figure out how it works.
There are going to be a whole lot of very smart people trying to break such a system, not only for economic reasons (organized crime, and piracy) but mostly just for the intellectual challenge of being the next "DVD Jon."
You can certainly make a system very hard for an outsider to understand: you could have the decoding all be done on a single, totally undocumented, custom IC, and put that on a circuit board with a bunch of other dummy ICs and then put the whole thing in a box and fill it with alternating layers of epoxy and lead and white phosphorous (or some similar material that ignites on contact with air) to discourage tampering or photographic investigation, but all you're going to do is raise the stakes for figuring out how the thing works. On some very limited-production prototype, or military device, this might be worthwhile. But on a consumer appliance which has to be manufactured cheaply in order to be successful, it's probably not very practical.
All you're doing in all this, fundamentally, is making the secret to the system more and more obscure. It's not real security: it's not the same as the security of Diffie-Hellman key exchange, that's based on commonly understood mathematics. It's just a secret, and once that secret gets out, your system is just a whole lot of wasted money.
Actually I think you're the one who's using the too-narrow definition. Although the FCC in the case of Janet Jackson's nipple didn't actually censor anything, they just punished people after the fact for not censoring themselves. A related issue, but not really the same thing. A better example (although not one I find personally compelling) was this year's Super Bowl half-time show; there was a word blanked out of the musical performance by the Rolling Stones. This was definitely censorship -- although not by the FCC, it was actually done by the network in order to comply with an FCC rule. There were actual "censors," people who's job it is to judge the acceptability of content and who oversaw the removal.
It doesn't mean that it's not possible to go out and get the uncensored version of the song, in fact to do so is trivial. There's nothing about the act of censorship that implies or requires that it be total: stuff is censored on network television all the time which is easy to find uncensored on cable. (Think "Sex and the City," for example.) This doesn't make the network versions any less censored, they definitely are; few people complain, though, because it's so easy to find alternative ways to get the HBO version, if that's what you want.
As I said in another post, censorship doesn't require that you remove something from every possible information source that's available to a particular group of people. It just means that you remove some piece of information from some distribution medium over which you have control. Whether or not that act of censorship has a widespread effect depends on how much control over the dissemination of information you have, but it doesn't change the essential act.
Regardless of whether or not you think his definition is "corrupted" or "meaningless," it's widely accepted by many people, therefore in the context of the English language, which is a moving target, it's a correct definition.
To say that it's only a government official that can censor is ridiculous; anyone can censor within the bounds of their own authority. A parent can censor information within their own household, a corporation can censor its employees internet access, the State Council censors any number of information sources in China, and apparently Jimbo Wales censors Wikipedia.
You are of course free to use whatever narrow definition you personally want to use, but I think you are in the minority here, and it will only cause confusion when talking to others. You can tell people that they're wrong and you're right all you want, but given that the definition of words is established predominantly by general consensus, I think you're always going to be wrong.
Bull. Just because an article is going to be inherently unflattering to a person by telling the truth, doesn't mean that we should self-censor. That's really what you're saying; in fact you're not just implying self-censorship, but the censorship of other people as well, so that they don't disparage some third person BY TELLING THE TRUTH.
Here's something that I think ought to be engraved in the minds of every person who has ever written anything for public consumption: The truth is an absolute defense.
Not necessarily in the legal sense -- although it should be -- but at the very least in the moral and ethical. If you did something, you have no right to prevent other people from discussing it, provided that they stick to what's true. And no one, I repeat no one, has any right to keep others from repeating the truth, regardless of how unflattering or damaging it may be to someone.
The best way to combat the spread of lies and misinformation is by spreading truth: we can argue whether or not Wikipedia does that well or poorly (I think it does it fairly well, actually; at the very least it gives you a good cross-section of what a significant population of individuals believes is true at any given time), but there is no place for censorship simply to protect people from "ridicule," if that ridicule stems from truth.
Actually I have definitely seen the "Dell" logo a few times in this season of "24," which makes me think that they ponied up the big bucks for all that product placement. I'm thinking specifically of a few times when they have shown somebody's face over the top of their monitor from the back, you can rather clearly make out the word "Dell" on the rear side.
Of course, I'm watching this on a fairly large screen, so I'm not sure how obvious this would be on a smaller TV, or what the 'standards' are for a 'visible trademark.' If it's out of focus but still legible, is it visible?
It seems like really sloppy work if it's being shown by accident, which makes me think that it's a paid placement.
I have a dim recollection also of back in the first season or so of "24" that there were Macs, but now it seems to be entirely Dells in the past few. In fact, back in the first season (maybe two) it seemed like all the bad guys used PCs and Jack and friends used Apple gear. I wasn't the only one to notice this, Wired even had an article on it here.
Slashdot Mirror
That would work for graphics cards too, except their lifespan in the marketplace is so short that by the time you made one completely stable, reverse-engineered driver, that card would be both obsolete and impossible to find.
If there were only two graphics cards in the world, one from ATI and one from NVidia, and they only produced new ones every 5 years, I suspect that the reverse-engineered drivers would be substantially better in quality. Unfortunately, the upgrade/release cycle for new graphics technologies seems to be one of the fastest things in the computer-hardware world right now; it's certainly faster than the upgrade cycle on network hardware or most peripherals.
That said, I've found that the free drivers do seem to work well enough for basic desktop and office-type tasks, they just suck rather hard for gaming. Maybe ATI's are terrible even for basic stuff, I wouldn't know; I've only used NVidia gear.
I wish it was floating around the 'net somewhere, but if it is, I haven't found it.
It was produced for a British TV channel by a company that does mostly public television and documentary programming, their name escapes me at the moment but I found them online a while back, and as far as I can tell it's never been released on DVD and they don't have any immediate plans to do so (although they will happily sell you the rights if you want to run it on your network, I'm sure).
It's one of those situations where I'd buy it if I was able, but since it's not I wouldn't exactly lose a lot of sleep being racked with guilt if I found a way to download it instead.
I get the feeling that someone who dropped out of school at 8 and became a mob boss may not have been keeping up to date on the latest management training strategies.
... What's with the baseball bat?"
He was really just ahead of his time. You just wait, I'll be he'll write a tell-all book from prison: "10 Habits of Highly Effective Mobsters."
I can just imagine....
Manager: "Hi Joe, what's happening."
Cubie: "Oh, hi Stan.
Manager: "It's a new team-building technique I'm trying out."
Manager beats Cubie savagely with bat, until his head completely dissolves.
Manager: (to office) I WARNED YOU, NO READING SLASHDOT AT WORK.
Do you have any information on the break? I just did some searching and couldn't find anything about it. At the bottom of Bruce Schneier's page on Solitaire there is a link to an article Problems with Bruce Schneier's "Solitaire" by Paul Crowley, but it's dead. Is this what you're referring to?
w ww.ciphergoth.org/crypto/solitaire/
(The article does exist in the Internet Archive at
http://web.archive.org/web/20050206214237/http://
It does describe what sound like they might be some problems with the randomness of the keystream, but it doesn't seem like a complete break. Sorry for pasting the address, but Slashdot doesn't seem to like IA links much.)
Anyway, I'd be curious in knowing what the problems with it are.
Reminds me a little of something that happened to me a while back. I was driving on a very rural interstate in Maine, late at night. I'd been driving for about 12 hours, and I had started to feel fatigued and sleepy. (If you've ever driven on an empty concrete highway at night, the road hypnosis is a serious problem, it can get to you very quickly.) So I pulled over to the side of the road to take a break. Less than a minute later, a trooper came up behind me and told me I couldn't stop unless the car was disabled. I explained the situation to him and pointed out that the next exit was more than 30 miles and the next open rest area almost 100. His helpful solution was that if I didn't start driving, he could arrest me and have my car towed.
Needless to say, I took my chances driving.
Plus their speed limit is only 55mph
Not true. The standard Interstate speed limit is 65 MPH, although it frequently drops to 55 in urban areas. Out South and West (basically anywhere except New England), on long stretches of rural freeway, it's very common to have 75 MPH zones. I don't know if there are any areas higher than that, I think 75 is the highest standard, but there might be 80MPH areas that I haven't been to yet.
They used to have areas in Montana that were autobahn-like, with no daytime limit, but I've been told that's been eliminated in the past few years, I guess they had too many tourists pretending they were at Daytona.
I don't know how this myth got started ... perhaps it's just a convenient way for law-makers to appease people while still letting them have cell phones, perhaps it's just cluelessness, and perhaps it's the hands-free kit manufacturers.
Bingo -- you got it. I followed the progress of the law in Connecticut with some interest, being a New Englander (at the time), and there was intense lobbying both by citizens who wanted to use cellphones and by the major cell carriers against a complete ban. Verizon, which is the dominant company in CT, I believe may have had a hand in making sure the hands-free exemption went through. (They also had a hand in the NY law, which the CT one was based on.)
Neither the people nor the cell companies were going to stand for a complete prohibition against using cellphones, and I think even the more boneheaded legislators realized that would be unenforceable (not that the current law is enforceable, it's widely ignored), so they created the "hands free kit" exemption. This had the effect of basically making everyone in the State run out to their local car phone store and buy an earpiece or handsfree kit--the stores must have loved it--while not really impacting phone use.
And like I mentioned in an earlier comment, there's nothing in the law that requires you to use voice-dial or anything, so people still need to look away from the road in order to dial their phone and make a call, which in my opinion is the most dangerous part of using a phone on the road. Once you've done that, which you have to do regardless of whether you're using an earpiece or not, using a phone is just like any other activity that uses your right hand.
I am convinced that the law is a prime example of "just do something" legislation. The politicians were desperate to come up with something that they could get a lot of public support for, and there's a widespread perception that idiots who drive while using a cellphone are a hazard. Unfortunately, making people use a hands-free device doesn't really get rid of either 'problem,' the phones, or the idiots.
Don't they *think* before making these laws?
No.
They really don't.
The legislators know that people see "idiots driving while talking on cellphones" as a problem, thus they pass a law and ban it. It's knee-jerk legislation at its best, something which has a long history in Connecticut.
After all, the law doesn't do a damn thing about what has to be the most dangerous part of using a cellphone: dialing it, and like you pointed out, once you've started the call on a cellphone and are just holding it to your head, it's really not any more dangerous or distracting than holding a cup of Starbucks in that hand. Actually, I'd argue that it's far less dangerous and distracting, since you can drop that cellphone in an emergency with a lot more ease than you can drop a cup of hot liquid.
However, rational thought has never been an impediment to legislators desperate to justify their own existence to their constituencies by getting their names down on some law or another, and thus we get this kind of crap.
Seatbelts save lives, and not just those of the wearer.
Huh?
Who else are they saving? People you would have accidentally hit and killed while flying out the windshield of your car?
I admit I've never seen the numbers on that, but I think the number of people killed by being hit by flying unrestrained bodies is pretty low. The primary function of a seatbelt is to protect you, nothing more.
I wasn't sure whether India or China were doing research in that area when the US clamped down on it in the late-70s, that's why I didn't mention them (it was "continue" research, although I should have been more clear) in terms of countries that basically defied the US when we said such things were verboten domestically.
The Thorium stuff in India is fairly interesting (if you're a country that has a lot of Thorium and not a whole lot of Uranium), although I've been following the news recently the shift in relations between the Australians and the Indians; I wonder whether they'll still continue to develop Th technology if they are allowed to import U-235 from Australia. I hope so, just from a technical standpoint.
Because Lenovo is based out of Hong Kong, which is predominantly (to the best of my knowledge) a Cantonese-speaking area, although I expect you could get along with Mandarin there pretty well also.
I have no idea where their design facilities are within China, I was basing my comment solely on their headquarters.
That 48 tons of waste per plant per year could be greatly reduced with spent fuel reprocessing. Most other nuclear nations, including the UK and France, go this route, which is a lot more sensible than just burying everything, however due to some really boneheaded decisions made by President Carter, it's never been done recently in the United States.
Until it was banned, we had a whole system under construction for reprocessing spent fuel that would have reduced the scope of the problem we're now faced with. However, in 1977 the research was cut off, and further development and implementation was banned; although President Reagan quietly reversed the ban, nobody has been willing to put money into it. Except of course the military, their ability to manufacture plutonium for weapons purposes was never affected, something which strikes me as endlessly ironic, given that Carter's justification for banning reprocessing was ostensibly to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
By processing the spent fuel assemblies promptly (before they sit around and create a lot of secondary contamination) you reduce the volume of waste that has to be stored for long periods, and you also get a non-trivial amount of new fuel back (even out of reactors that aren't specifically designed to breed new fuel). Either one of those goals would make the procedure worthwhile in my opinion, pick your favorite and count the other one as a bonus. Right now we're burying tons of waste which isn't itself that radioactive or long-lived or even toxic, but because it's physically joined to stuff that is. The actual volume of long-lived high-level waste produced by a plant isn't that much, if you do the right reprocessing first.
The plan in the United States was a process called PUREX; you can Google it for more information. The French do their reprocessing at COGMA LaHague, and the Brits do it at a commercial facility called THORP.
More information here as well:
http://chemcases.com/nuclear/nc-13.htm
If you're looking to talk about how biased someone is, it's more than a little bit ironic to try and do it by quoting "Mother Jones Magazine," which isn't exactly a paragon of journalistic neutrality. They make NPR look like a bastion of conservative thought.
Your point may have merit, but that's somewhat less than convincing.
I hadn't seen that in a few years ... thanks for the laugh.
In case anyone is wondering what it is (and is so lazy they can't click on it), it's titled "Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics."
The top photo is really priceless, though.
I never saw this, but I have seen a lot of variation in the "number of years nuclear energy will power us for" figures. I think there are a few different things that get done to the statistics depending on which outcome you want to show.
Probably the biggest is whether you just take today's energy consumption figures and use them for the future, or whether you project the rate of increase of energy into the future, in order to get your numbers. Obviously a source of energy that could power us for 100 years in 1955 might only last 15 today, and might only last 1 in another 40 or 50 years.
The other major issue is whether you pretend that we'll use the uranium intelligently, or we'll keep squandering it in wasteful reactors like we do today. Right now, our nuclear reactors here in the US (and pretty much everywhere else in the world) are the atomic-age equivalents of an open-hearth coal-fired boiler, giant and inefficient. We shovel enriched uranium into them, use it to make some electricity, and out comes waste. It's terrible, and it wastes a non-renewable resource (fissile uranium). Although I don't know exactly how long we'd last doing this, if you told me it was less than a generation or two before we used up all the fissile uranium, I'd believe you. It's a hellacious waste.
If we were using all that uranium in breeder reactors, using it's neutrons to enrich naturally non-fissile uranium into plutonium, then we'd greatly extend the length of time we'd be able to run on atoms as a civilization. I'm not sure exactly how much plutonium you can produce per pound of fissile uranium, but if you compare it to just wasting those neutrons by crashing them into the shielding, it's basically like making free fuel.
Although I generally dislike the French government, I have to give them kudos in this area for being the only government with the balls to continue civilian research in this area, when the US decided to ban it (thanks, President Carter!) and hitch our wagon to the horses of Persian Gulf oil. Ironically, although the excuse for banning fuel reprocessing was because it could be used to create nuclear weapons, it was the breeder reactors used for creating nuclear weapons (and not peaceful energy) that remained in operation, both here and in the Soviet Union.
I'm a pretty big proponent of nuclear technologies, but I seriously wonder whether it's good in the long run (multi-generational outlook here) for us to build nuclear reactors that do nothing but "burn" U-235 and produce waste, rather than waiting until we come to grips with breeder technology and decide to build facilities that encompass the whole nuclear fuel cycle. I have this fear that if we don't do that, our (grand)children will be left fighting over the world's remaining stocks of U-235, wondering why we wasted all of it so quickly, or digging up Yucca Mountain for the U-238 that we so casually threw away.
It sucks almost as bad on Linux as it does on Windows. Except that you're not adding the 'suck factor' of Java to Windows, so your 'net suckage' is less, of course.
Seriously; I'm using it to run a Freenet node and the JVM sucks up 128MB of RAM, this is to run a headless P2P program which doesn't have any open windows/GUI/widgets/etc. It's kind of a pain to install also, you have to download some weird BIN file from Sun, turn it into a Debian package with fakeroot, and then install it (alternately you could let Sun's BIN file run on your system, but damned if I'm going to do that). You can't just grab it from the repositories.
Mac OS X's Java is still a bit of a RAM hog, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as it is on Linux or Windows. I think you're right, there definitely has to be some optimization on Apple's part.
This is true, however it seems as though Lenovo is slowly cutting those people and moving the design jobs over to China as well.
The short story is in this article, Lenovo cuts jobs in restructuring push: In short, they've dumped the US design teams for their desktop line, but retained the Thinkpad people (based in N.C.). However if I was working there, I think I'd be either polishing my resume or taking a Berlitz course in Cantonese.
If their marketshare in the US continues to slip, it's not hard to imagine that they'll cut the design teams here (which are probably expensive to operate, versus having a few people on the payroll in an office they already own in Hong Kong) and retreat to the Chinese domestic market. That's pretty much what they've already done with the desktop lineup; if, given a year or so, they don't make up the lost ground to Dell and HP with notebooks, I could see it happening there as well.
Only if I get a box to check that says "Please spend all of my tax dollars on giant killer robots, and none of it on educating poor people or any other pansy shit."
Seriously -- that's not a road you want to go down. Given a choice, I think a lot more people will put their money towards Things That Go Boom instead of rather boring stuff like education, libraries, or highway maintenance.
Does anybody else remember a little Mac utility that came out of one of the hacking conventions, probably about 6 or 7 years ago (not that long after Apple brought out the first Air Port Base Stations -- so maybe more than that) that would grab and display JPEG and GIF images that were being transmitted over an unencrypted WLAN?
I think I recall reading about it in Mac World or MacUser, although it was a pretty quick-and-dirty app, it won some sort of award at whatever conference it was presented at. I've never heard about it again, but I've always thought it would be funny to use it as part of some kind of installation: hook it up to a big projector and just let it run.
Yep, I think you answered your own question. :)
In the case of your "black box" decryption chip, all you're doing is burying the "secret" that you hope the consumer can't access into a chip. If someone figures out how to extract the key off of your secret-decoder chip, though, your security is shot. It's not really a "secure" system in the mathematical, theoretical sense that cryptographers like to talk about; really all you're doing is hoping that that your adversaries, combined, don't have the resources to open your system up and figure out how it works.
Of course, not all consumers are going to be stupid, and not all of them are going to be without resources. Some tinkerers have access to some pretty impressive equipment: whether they're technically allowed to use it or not. I could imagine that if some system were implemented that depended on a secret, sealed chip that nobody knew what was inside, it could easily become a big race to figure it out. People who had access to everything from surplus medical X-ray machines to MRI scanners would be taking a peek inside; it's simply not realistic to think that you can design a black box that takes in scrambled content and outputs de-scrambled content and that nobody is ever going to figure out how it works.
There are going to be a whole lot of very smart people trying to break such a system, not only for economic reasons (organized crime, and piracy) but mostly just for the intellectual challenge of being the next "DVD Jon."
You can certainly make a system very hard for an outsider to understand: you could have the decoding all be done on a single, totally undocumented, custom IC, and put that on a circuit board with a bunch of other dummy ICs and then put the whole thing in a box and fill it with alternating layers of epoxy and lead and white phosphorous (or some similar material that ignites on contact with air) to discourage tampering or photographic investigation, but all you're going to do is raise the stakes for figuring out how the thing works. On some very limited-production prototype, or military device, this might be worthwhile. But on a consumer appliance which has to be manufactured cheaply in order to be successful, it's probably not very practical.
All you're doing in all this, fundamentally, is making the secret to the system more and more obscure. It's not real security: it's not the same as the security of Diffie-Hellman key exchange, that's based on commonly understood mathematics. It's just a secret, and once that secret gets out, your system is just a whole lot of wasted money.
Actually I think you're the one who's using the too-narrow definition. Although the FCC in the case of Janet Jackson's nipple didn't actually censor anything, they just punished people after the fact for not censoring themselves. A related issue, but not really the same thing. A better example (although not one I find personally compelling) was this year's Super Bowl half-time show; there was a word blanked out of the musical performance by the Rolling Stones. This was definitely censorship -- although not by the FCC, it was actually done by the network in order to comply with an FCC rule. There were actual "censors," people who's job it is to judge the acceptability of content and who oversaw the removal.
It doesn't mean that it's not possible to go out and get the uncensored version of the song, in fact to do so is trivial. There's nothing about the act of censorship that implies or requires that it be total: stuff is censored on network television all the time which is easy to find uncensored on cable. (Think "Sex and the City," for example.) This doesn't make the network versions any less censored, they definitely are; few people complain, though, because it's so easy to find alternative ways to get the HBO version, if that's what you want.
As I said in another post, censorship doesn't require that you remove something from every possible information source that's available to a particular group of people. It just means that you remove some piece of information from some distribution medium over which you have control. Whether or not that act of censorship has a widespread effect depends on how much control over the dissemination of information you have, but it doesn't change the essential act.
Regardless of whether or not you think his definition is "corrupted" or "meaningless," it's widely accepted by many people, therefore in the context of the English language, which is a moving target, it's a correct definition.
To say that it's only a government official that can censor is ridiculous; anyone can censor within the bounds of their own authority. A parent can censor information within their own household, a corporation can censor its employees internet access, the State Council censors any number of information sources in China, and apparently Jimbo Wales censors Wikipedia.
You are of course free to use whatever narrow definition you personally want to use, but I think you are in the minority here, and it will only cause confusion when talking to others. You can tell people that they're wrong and you're right all you want, but given that the definition of words is established predominantly by general consensus, I think you're always going to be wrong.
Bull. Just because an article is going to be inherently unflattering to a person by telling the truth, doesn't mean that we should self-censor. That's really what you're saying; in fact you're not just implying self-censorship, but the censorship of other people as well, so that they don't disparage some third person BY TELLING THE TRUTH.
Here's something that I think ought to be engraved in the minds of every person who has ever written anything for public consumption: The truth is an absolute defense.
Not necessarily in the legal sense -- although it should be -- but at the very least in the moral and ethical. If you did something, you have no right to prevent other people from discussing it, provided that they stick to what's true. And no one, I repeat no one, has any right to keep others from repeating the truth, regardless of how unflattering or damaging it may be to someone.
The best way to combat the spread of lies and misinformation is by spreading truth: we can argue whether or not Wikipedia does that well or poorly (I think it does it fairly well, actually; at the very least it gives you a good cross-section of what a significant population of individuals believes is true at any given time), but there is no place for censorship simply to protect people from "ridicule," if that ridicule stems from truth.
Actually I have definitely seen the "Dell" logo a few times in this season of "24," which makes me think that they ponied up the big bucks for all that product placement. I'm thinking specifically of a few times when they have shown somebody's face over the top of their monitor from the back, you can rather clearly make out the word "Dell" on the rear side.
Of course, I'm watching this on a fairly large screen, so I'm not sure how obvious this would be on a smaller TV, or what the 'standards' are for a 'visible trademark.' If it's out of focus but still legible, is it visible?
It seems like really sloppy work if it's being shown by accident, which makes me think that it's a paid placement.
I have a dim recollection also of back in the first season or so of "24" that there were Macs, but now it seems to be entirely Dells in the past few. In fact, back in the first season (maybe two) it seemed like all the bad guys used PCs and Jack and friends used Apple gear. I wasn't the only one to notice this, Wired even had an article on it here.
Fortunately I was able to mod you down a little as your post is complete flamebait.
... wait.
That's okay, I just modded him up, so there! Oh