True, although an LP is different because it's naturally broken into two sides, meaning you need a transition point between them.
In terms of continuous music that you can play without any breakpoint, a CD is obviously longer; I think that's what the GP was getting at. Although not having the ~90 minute overall length is annoying, personally I think having 74 minutes nonstop makes up for it -- although it obviously depends what kind of music that you listen to. In some ways, the LP was better for classical music that was built around an intermission.
Although I've never seen one (I guess it wasn't possible when CDs were introduced, and has never been desired since?), you could certainly now produce a CD that was double-sided, like an LP, with 74 minutes to a side, almost 160 minutes total...not that there'd be much demand for it now, when you can put hours onto a CD with modern compression, perhaps even having it sound better than 44.1/16 PCM.
In particular, their treatment of some Asian glyphs has some folks absolutely up in arms (cf. Han unification) and it falls short of what I'd call truly 'universal.'
Start mandating UTF-8 and you're going to have people breaking the standard in favor of national charsets faster than you can say "cultural imperialist."
Can anyone point to a way of downloading the plugin that's NOT wrapped in a Windows executable file, in order to install it on Mac Firefox?
The only Mac plugin option they offer is for Safari, and it doesn't seem to work or have any ability of installing itself on Firefox.
While I guess having it work in Safari is better than nothing at all, it's still a bit obnoxious. (Does anyone actually *use* Safari? It's fast and doesn't guzzle RAM like a sailor on shore leave like Firefox tends to do, but without any addons it's a pretty sorry thing if you've used the alternative.)
I wonder if there's a way to implement the whole viewer as a Java applet or a client-side Javascript or something...(I know, it'd be dog slow, but you can render a lot of pages in the 10 minutes that I've just wasted trying to get the plugin working to no avail in my browser -- sometimes ugly and foolproof is better than the correct but complicated way).
Also, there are more than twice as many books in Chinese as in English... I guess I should brush up on my Mandarin, if this is where the world's headed.
You assume, though, that the brass at NASA actually cares about doing science. I'm not so sure. I don't think it's hard to believe that the top people have already been replaced with political cronies who would happily kill whatever those scientists are doing (regardless of how many billions of dollars have been spent) as long as they have a convenient scapegoat to blame it on. In fact -- why wouldn't they? It's logical, since it's the only absolutely sure way, given that the success of space missions is never guaranteed, to make sure the mission doesn't fail on their watch later on. Let 'em all burn, blame it on those disloyal scientists (probably a bunch of dope-smoking terrorist-loving hippies) who wouldn't fill out the security questionnaires and walked out, and get NASA back to its real mission: funneling millions of bucks to certain contractors in return for their campaign donations.
How long would it take the average person to realize that the scientists had all walked out, though?
It's not like Tang would disappear, or their car's GPS system would suddenly turn off. It's just that things wouldn't advance. Progress would grind to a halt, but it's not like the immediate "oh shit" effect you get, when the garbagemen don't show up on Monday morning.
Probably the first thing most people would know is when they get told to start learning Mandarin, because their company just got bought.
Um, but in order for this transition to occur -- for people to want to drop their landlines and adopt cellphones -- you need (at least in the U.S., I can't speak for people's preferences in Finland) number portability. People don't want to give up phone numbers that they may have had for decades, and have printed on all sorts of business materials, or that everyone is familiar with.
I know some businesses (and I'm sure there are older residents, too) with numbers that have been the same -- at least in the trailing digits -- since the introduction of direct-dial. People don't want to give that up; if that's the cost of moving to a cellphone, a lot of people are just not going to be interested, because they're going to build in the cost of "renting" that number by paying for a POTS line and forwarding it. (Hell, in my area people still write phone numbers with five digits, because the first two digits are well-known and implied. If you have to write the full seven, you're an outsider and not to be trusted, and if you have the full ten...well, the Interstate's that way, why don't you get right back on it? I've been to other places where people give four digits because there's only one exchange for the whole town/city.)
So while I'm with you, at least to some degree, about cellphones eventually bringing about the demise of POTS, it's really the number portability that has let people really cut ties. Without that, I know many people who'd still be using copper lines.
I think what he's saying is that most students already have email addresses -- why make them use a new one? Just ask them for their email when they come to campus, plug that into a school-wide LDAP database, and use that.
The only people who would need school-supplied emails are those who don't have one already, or who for some reason don't want to use the one they already have.
Personally if I was entering college today this is what I'd want -- I'd just forward everything from any email address I got to my GMail Inbox, and reply to it there. Why would I want an address that's going to stop functioning in four years, and which is probably going to be much more limited in quota size than GMail?
Contrary to what some people seem to believe, I think email is still a critical network function, and that's not going to change anytime soon. But what is slowly changing is the attitude that email addresses come and go based on where you get your internet access (your ISP, your uni, your company). They're becoming more person-specific.
Prostitution is harmful to the prostitute, to the "customer," to their friends and families, and to the society that accepts it.
Bull; all of these things have to do with the social attitudes towards prostitution, not the behavior itself. It may be "harmful" to, or within the context of, a Puritan-derived social fabric that emphasizes sexual self-repression, monogamy, and child-bearing, but there are other social models where it would work just fine.
The fallacy you're committing is known as "reification," that is, taking a (in this case, socially-constructed) abstraction and treating it as if it were a universal truth.
Don't be a pedantic idiot; it's a "power the home" application so the time interval is "continuously" at least on a human scale... ie replace no more often than every few months. I may be being pedantic but you're trying to apply common sense to numbers being quoted at you by a marketdroid, a far more dangerous fallacy.
27MW continuous thermal output from something the size of a 'hot tub' is totally unrealistic. That's almost certainly an instantaneous, maximum, pulse, or similar low-duty-cycle figure.
By your logic, since an automobile engine is used in a "power the car" application, the time interval must be "continuously" or at least all the time you're driving...but you try getting the rated horsepower out of your econobox's engine continuously (meaning, at redline, because that's where the power is almost inevitably quoted) and tell me how long it lasts. Guess what? People pick inflated numbers based on artificial conditions all the time. When you're talking about product specs where conditions aren't clearly noted, it's the rule, not the exception.
It's quite simple. For a 'dialer pays' system to work, you need to know that a number is a mobile instead of a landline. That means giving out mobile numbers that are different from landline numbers.
That's just not how the U.S. system involved. When the first cellphones came out, the networks were operated by the local/regional telephone companies, and they gave out local telephone numbers for them, from the blocks they had been assigned, just like any other line. (In fact, getting a local number was pretty important, so that people calling you wouldn't have to pay long distance, and neither would you when you called them -- early AMPS plans frequently didn't have unlimited long distance.)
No regional cell operator was in a position to offer nationwide service early on, and there frankly just wasn't that much top-down coordination driving the process (and why should there have been? they were expensive toys for rich people). I doubt that the switching system could have handled a national cellular prefix or area code without a huge overhaul, anyway. That's just not how it was designed. Combined with the fact that there just aren't enough available area codes in the U.S. POTS namespace to give every current area code a secondary 'mobile area code,' and there's just not a feasible way to do dialer-pays.
Plus, I think dialer-pays plans in the U.S. would have held back the adoption of cellphones significantly. One of the reasons people liked cellphones was that it gave you a real, regular local phone number, which happened to be mobile. The calling party never had to know it was mobile. Really, what the U.S. system boils down to is "convenience pays." If you want the convenience of a mobile, you pay for it. The caller just pays for the landline call to wherever the area code that the number is located in, the person with the cell pays for the airtime over the cell network. I think this is pretty fair, actually, and judging by how quickly cellphones became popular, I think a lot of other people did, too. (Also: the only dialer-pays extra-fee numbers in the U.S. are the "1-900" numbers, and they're generally regarded as pretty sleazy; the domain of phone-sex operators and psychics, mostly. Not the sort of thing you want your budding technology associated with.)
In short, a caller-pays system just would not have been feasible in the U.S. given how the system developed, and I think if the issue had been forced, bad things (including a delay in uptake of the technology or consumer rejection) could have resulted. There are fundamental differences between the cellular market in the U.S. and Europe (which stem, in not insignificant part, from the fact that European phone systems were still a lot more centralized during the inception of cellular service than the U.S. was), and I don't think there's really any reason to assume that what works in one place is necessarily the best everywhere. The European system may seem conceptually more consistent, but the U.S. system allows for no-change number portability from landlines to cells, and makes cell lines 'equal' for a caller to a traditional landline.
Um, no; "joules per second" is a rate, which doesn't imply a time interval. A bullet coming out of a gun might go 600 miles per hour, but that doesn't mean that it covers 600 miles worth of distance. Likewise, I've worked on megawatt lasers that were a lot smaller than you might expect, because they only delivered a megawatt for a very small fraction of a second. A laser that delivered a million watts for a full second would be a big beast indeed.
Without another time term to get from a rate to a quantity, you have no idea whether '27 megawatts' is for a picosecond, a second, ten minutes, or from now until the heat death of the Universe.
If you wanted to (and I'm not going to do it out), you could easily calculate the maximum duration of a 27MW pulse into a bathtub-sized container of water, before you'd boil the water. (Or do the same thing with some other coolant medium; sodium or lead or what have you.)
True. But even at the upper end of that price range, it's substantially less than a manned helicopter, and most urban police forces have access to those right now. (And that's just the cost of the machine, not even getting into the cost of having a pilot standing by to fly the thing, maintenance, etc.)
$30k sounds like a lowball number; I have a hard time believing you could get any kind of complete UAV system delivered and functioning for that price. (Maybe that's the marginal cost of 'one additional aircraft' without the control system and other stuff?) $1M starts to sound reasonable when you include all the support infrastructure it has to have.
Either way, I think the point of that figure is that the entire range is less than a manned helicopter, and that's how you justify it.
I read the linked article and there's nothing in it but speculation. And even then, it seems very thin. It looks like typical complex-machine anthropomorphizing; put enough MIPS behind it, and even a toaster can play chess with "extraordinarily refined sophistication." Basically, the accusations of cheating mostly boil down to 'no machine can play that well,' which when you get down to it, is exactly what the Kasparov / Deep Blue match was all about. They're basically just rejecting the premise of the whole match.
Also, I don't think it's surprising that IBM decided not to try again. Why should they? They won; it was the best publicity they were going to get from the effort. Why keep going and risk a loss? Knowing a lot of engineers, it doesn't seem at all unbelievable that most of the team would probably want to move on to new things after a multiyear effort that had culminated in a win. Sometimes you just want to quit while you're ahead, take the resume line, and see what else is out there.
No, I think it's you who are mistaken. Take a quick look at U.S. v Hubbell; that was an entire indictment that was thrown out because the contents of the documents produced were incriminating, and the person in question hadn't been allowed to use the 5th to prevent their disclosure. It's exactly the opposite of what you're claiming.
Summary:
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hubbell. The Court held that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination protects a witness from being compelled to disclose the existence of incriminating documents that the Government is unable to describe with reasonable particularity. The Court also ruled that if the witness produces such documents, pursuant to a grant of immunity, the government may not use them to prepare criminal charges against him.
The prosecutor in the case argued pretty much what you stated, that only the act of producing the documents is protected under the Fifth Amendment, but not the contents of the documents themselves. The Supreme Court apparently found this uncompelling.
Justices Scalia and Thomas go even further, making it clear that they believe that compelled production of evidence is akin to other types of testimony:
The Fifth Amendment provides that "[n]o person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The key word at issue in this case is "witness." The Court's opinion, relying on prior cases, essentially defines "witness" as a person who provides testimony, and thus restricts the Fifth Amendment's ban to only those communications "that are 'testimonial' in character." Ante, at 6. None of this Court's cases, however, has undertaken an analysis of the meaning of the term at the time of the founding. A review of that period reveals substantial support for the view that the term "witness" meant a person who gives or furnishes evidence, a broader meaning than that which our case law currently ascribes to the term. If this is so, a person who responds to a subpoena duces tecum would be just as much a "witness" as a person who responds to a subpoena ad testificandum.
So, while prior to the late 90s what you said might have been true, in light of that case becoming the law of the land via the USSC, the rigid 'act of production doctrine' has been substantially affected.
That's not quite the point either. OTR doesn't make your conversation totally repudiable, because you still have the same logs as a normal, unencrypted conversation.
It just avoids the problem of having the encryption dig you deeper into a hole, by creating a mathematical proof that you said certain things.
It basically gives you exactly the same 'wiggle room' as you'd have with a regular logged IM conversation. It doesn't, and can't, guarantee that the person on the other end isn't logging the chat somehow (and how would it? even if you had some sort of "secure computing" platform preventing them from running an IM client that logged, they could still point a camcorder at the screen if they were determined enough).
OTR just tries to not be an additional part of the problem.
That said, you're right in pointing out how troublesome it is that emails and other unencrypted, trivially-edited digital communications are routinely accepted as evidence in court. That this happens so regularly is a big problem, and I wonder how often people do a little doctoring here or there, since the evidentiary rules are so lax.
Encrypting by default still doesn't prove the *log* is legit and only prevents a 3rd party from secretly watching along the way, so i don't see me encrypting everything effecting that. Huh? OTR is specifically designed not to prove that the log is legit. It goes to a lot of work, actually, to ensure that there's a trivial way to fake messages after the fact, just not when a conversation is occurring.
That means that when you're having a chat with someone, you know that what they're saying to you is their actual words, but that the same cryptography that's giving you privacy can't (theoretically) be used to hang you later, by proving absolutely that you said certain things.
OTR's logs are designed to be easily forgeable. This is a major difference in its design from many corporate IM clients (e.g. Sametime), which offer encryption but also create authoritative logs that can be referred back to later.
The point of OTR Messaging is to allow you to have the equivalent of a face-to-face, "off the record" conversation, in the digital, computer-mediated world. Just like when you have an in-person conversation, there's nothing stopping the other person from walking back to their car and blabbing about the whole thing to anyone who'll listen, the encryption itself tries to not serve as authentication after the fact as to what was said.
Encrypted RAM is admittedly hard, but you're creating a false dichotomy if you're assuming that just because you don't have encrypted RAM, it's not worthwhile to encrypt everything else.
Particularly if you have an encrypted swap file (which Mac OS X allows, and I assume Linux does too), just because a program was running wouldn't guarantee that a decryption key for it would be stored in memory. And even if it was, grabbing that key out of memory isn't trivial. (It means you have to keep the computer running and keep the data in memory while you extract it, for starters.)
A system where everything that's on the disk is encrypted, and all you have to do to secure the data is unplug the system and wait a few seconds for the RAM cells to discharge, seems like a big step over a system where you'd have to physically destroy the disks (big magnets? thermite?) in order to make sure that there isn't something incriminating there waiting to be found on casual inspection.
Even if all you have is a second or two of warning, it's not hard to hit a power strip or killswitch and turn the power off, and you've instantly bought yourself a decent margin of security -- if you've at least encrypted all the data stored in non-volatile media.
It works fine on all protocols. Since it handshakes with the other side by inserting some spaces in between words, it doesn't rely on the lower level of the protocols. As long as the IM service transfers text as typed (and doesn't reformat it or anything en route), it should work just fine. It's quite robust.
I've always been disappointed that Adium is the only IM client to build in OTR, so it's there for everyone who uses it without an additional install. If Gaim/Pidgin built OTR in too, it would mean a vastly expanded userbase; I think that would be getting close to the 'critical mass' that you need to push an encryption method into the mainstream (particularly if you could pick up Trillian and some of the other unofficial, multiprotocol IM clients from there).
As it is, having OTR in an additional download for all clients except Adium is a major stumbling block. It's awesome that it exists, but there are so many people around who only want security if they don't have to do anything to get it. Once you start asking people to install additional software or plugins, their eyes glaze over and you've lost them. (All except the people who really need security, and that's a situation you don't want, because now they stick out like sore thumbs. If you want security, you need to get the 'average folks' using it too, even if it's just for cover of whatever activities you're up to.)
If you're the Exalted and Supreme Leader of $PIPSQUEAK_NUCLEAR_NATION, you actually benefit from having PALs that prevent one of your generals from flying off the handle and glassing your neighbors: it makes you the only party worth negotiating with.
PALs concentrate authority; they push the nuclear decision all the way up to the top of the hierarchy. That means the person at the top of the pyramid holds all the power.
If you're a nuclear nation with an unstable chain of command and no PALs, suddenly those generals -- the guys who have actual physical control of the bombs -- are the ones who need to be negotiating with. The guy in the presidential palace is irrelevant if he can't control the weapons.
The low-tech, human solution to PALs is to keep the nuclear weapons themselves controlled by extremely loyal parties, or at least guarded by them. E.g., you, Generalissimo Exalted Leader, send out a cadre of your very best brownshirts with automatic weapons, a grenade, and a cellphone, to sit on each of the weapons. If anyone comes in and tries to arm the bomb without them getting a call first, they shoot the people in question and set off the grenade. Thus you prevent your internal political enemies from making use of the bombs.
Obviously, that's a less-optimal system than a cryptographic, tamper-resistant one, but it doesn't require anything more than a bunch of thoroughly brainwashed young men willing to die for your Exaltedness.
Even in a chaotic political climate, the advantage of PALs (human or electronic, low- or high-tech) is obvious, at least if you're the top dog.
That's because the "rogue insider" in the U.S. was never really the threat that PALs were designed to protect against. Or at least, they weren't the top priority. If you read the paper on PALs and the declassified memos that it links to, the real perceived threat were NATO allies.
The reason PALs were developed was mostly for forward-deployed weapons, particularly those in the hands of other armed forces besides the U.S.'s. The idea was to keep the Greeks from nuking the Turks, or vice versa, using U.S.-supplied nuclear weapons. (Interestingly, France in the early 60s was also thought to be a loose cannon.) Also, it was to keep weapons in parts of Eastern Europe that would probably be overrun by the Soviets during an invasion from being able to be turned around and used against the West.
Nuclear weapons in silos in North Dakota, where the only access was (theoretically) by very carefully vetted personnel, probably benefited the least from PALs, and it's not surprising that the military saw them more as an impediment there. On forward-deployed weapons, you could get the military to buy into such a system, because it means that you can be more aggressive in handing them out and positioning them; in the U.S., from the military perspective, they're just one more thing to have to worry about going wrong when you have 10 minutes to get the missiles in the air before you get vaporized.
Or will they decide that if record labels can charge $20 for a CD and give them a buck, they should be able to charge $20 and keep it all? Well, they're welcome to try and sell it for whatever they think people will pay. I don't think that $20 an album is really going to be a viable price point, though, but if they want to try, by all means go for it.
What I think will happen in the long term, if self-publishing or microlabels really take off, is that the price will slowly drop to a more reasonable level. Although music isn't a fungible good (it's not like people really shop for new artists based on price; ten tracks of artist X's music aren't worth the same to everyone as ten tracks of artist Y's), consumers are somewhat price sensitive. Success is going to be met by the artists who understand their fans, and deliver to them the music they want at a price they're willing to pay.
I agree that about $0.25/song is pretty reasonable for a digital download; that still means that your iPod represents a substantial investment in music, but I think it's something that people would be willing to pay, bought slowly over the course of years.
Slashdot Mirror
True, although an LP is different because it's naturally broken into two sides, meaning you need a transition point between them.
In terms of continuous music that you can play without any breakpoint, a CD is obviously longer; I think that's what the GP was getting at. Although not having the ~90 minute overall length is annoying, personally I think having 74 minutes nonstop makes up for it -- although it obviously depends what kind of music that you listen to. In some ways, the LP was better for classical music that was built around an intermission.
Although I've never seen one (I guess it wasn't possible when CDs were introduced, and has never been desired since?), you could certainly now produce a CD that was double-sided, like an LP, with 74 minutes to a side, almost 160 minutes total...not that there'd be much demand for it now, when you can put hours onto a CD with modern compression, perhaps even having it sound better than 44.1/16 PCM.
Not everyone is happy with Unicode.
In particular, their treatment of some Asian glyphs has some folks absolutely up in arms (cf. Han unification) and it falls short of what I'd call truly 'universal.'
Start mandating UTF-8 and you're going to have people breaking the standard in favor of national charsets faster than you can say "cultural imperialist."
Can anyone point to a way of downloading the plugin that's NOT wrapped in a Windows executable file, in order to install it on Mac Firefox?
The only Mac plugin option they offer is for Safari, and it doesn't seem to work or have any ability of installing itself on Firefox.
While I guess having it work in Safari is better than nothing at all, it's still a bit obnoxious. (Does anyone actually *use* Safari? It's fast and doesn't guzzle RAM like a sailor on shore leave like Firefox tends to do, but without any addons it's a pretty sorry thing if you've used the alternative.)
I wonder if there's a way to implement the whole viewer as a Java applet or a client-side Javascript or something...(I know, it'd be dog slow, but you can render a lot of pages in the 10 minutes that I've just wasted trying to get the plugin working to no avail in my browser -- sometimes ugly and foolproof is better than the correct but complicated way).
Also, there are more than twice as many books in Chinese as in English ... I guess I should brush up on my Mandarin, if this is where the world's headed.
You assume, though, that the brass at NASA actually cares about doing science. I'm not so sure. I don't think it's hard to believe that the top people have already been replaced with political cronies who would happily kill whatever those scientists are doing (regardless of how many billions of dollars have been spent) as long as they have a convenient scapegoat to blame it on. In fact -- why wouldn't they? It's logical, since it's the only absolutely sure way, given that the success of space missions is never guaranteed, to make sure the mission doesn't fail on their watch later on. Let 'em all burn, blame it on those disloyal scientists (probably a bunch of dope-smoking terrorist-loving hippies) who wouldn't fill out the security questionnaires and walked out, and get NASA back to its real mission: funneling millions of bucks to certain contractors in return for their campaign donations.
How long would it take the average person to realize that the scientists had all walked out, though?
It's not like Tang would disappear, or their car's GPS system would suddenly turn off. It's just that things wouldn't advance. Progress would grind to a halt, but it's not like the immediate "oh shit" effect you get, when the garbagemen don't show up on Monday morning.
Probably the first thing most people would know is when they get told to start learning Mandarin, because their company just got bought.
Um, but in order for this transition to occur -- for people to want to drop their landlines and adopt cellphones -- you need (at least in the U.S., I can't speak for people's preferences in Finland) number portability. People don't want to give up phone numbers that they may have had for decades, and have printed on all sorts of business materials, or that everyone is familiar with.
I know some businesses (and I'm sure there are older residents, too) with numbers that have been the same -- at least in the trailing digits -- since the introduction of direct-dial. People don't want to give that up; if that's the cost of moving to a cellphone, a lot of people are just not going to be interested, because they're going to build in the cost of "renting" that number by paying for a POTS line and forwarding it. (Hell, in my area people still write phone numbers with five digits, because the first two digits are well-known and implied. If you have to write the full seven, you're an outsider and not to be trusted, and if you have the full ten...well, the Interstate's that way, why don't you get right back on it? I've been to other places where people give four digits because there's only one exchange for the whole town/city.)
So while I'm with you, at least to some degree, about cellphones eventually bringing about the demise of POTS, it's really the number portability that has let people really cut ties. Without that, I know many people who'd still be using copper lines.
I think what he's saying is that most students already have email addresses -- why make them use a new one? Just ask them for their email when they come to campus, plug that into a school-wide LDAP database, and use that.
The only people who would need school-supplied emails are those who don't have one already, or who for some reason don't want to use the one they already have.
Personally if I was entering college today this is what I'd want -- I'd just forward everything from any email address I got to my GMail Inbox, and reply to it there. Why would I want an address that's going to stop functioning in four years, and which is probably going to be much more limited in quota size than GMail?
Contrary to what some people seem to believe, I think email is still a critical network function, and that's not going to change anytime soon. But what is slowly changing is the attitude that email addresses come and go based on where you get your internet access (your ISP, your uni, your company). They're becoming more person-specific.
Prostitution is harmful to the prostitute, to the "customer," to their friends and families, and to the society that accepts it.
Bull; all of these things have to do with the social attitudes towards prostitution, not the behavior itself. It may be "harmful" to, or within the context of, a Puritan-derived social fabric that emphasizes sexual self-repression, monogamy, and child-bearing, but there are other social models where it would work just fine.
The fallacy you're committing is known as "reification," that is, taking a (in this case, socially-constructed) abstraction and treating it as if it were a universal truth.
Would you want your townhall decorated with satanist art, possibly with "abandon all hope ye who enter" written on the front door?
That's not so much a religious endorsement as it is truth in advertising.
27MW continuous thermal output from something the size of a 'hot tub' is totally unrealistic. That's almost certainly an instantaneous, maximum, pulse, or similar low-duty-cycle figure.
By your logic, since an automobile engine is used in a "power the car" application, the time interval must be "continuously" or at least all the time you're driving...but you try getting the rated horsepower out of your econobox's engine continuously (meaning, at redline, because that's where the power is almost inevitably quoted) and tell me how long it lasts. Guess what? People pick inflated numbers based on artificial conditions all the time. When you're talking about product specs where conditions aren't clearly noted, it's the rule, not the exception.
Ugh...slay me.
That's "evolved" not "involved." In my defense, I plead 4AM.
It's quite simple. For a 'dialer pays' system to work, you need to know that a number is a mobile instead of a landline. That means giving out mobile numbers that are different from landline numbers.
That's just not how the U.S. system involved. When the first cellphones came out, the networks were operated by the local/regional telephone companies, and they gave out local telephone numbers for them, from the blocks they had been assigned, just like any other line. (In fact, getting a local number was pretty important, so that people calling you wouldn't have to pay long distance, and neither would you when you called them -- early AMPS plans frequently didn't have unlimited long distance.)
No regional cell operator was in a position to offer nationwide service early on, and there frankly just wasn't that much top-down coordination driving the process (and why should there have been? they were expensive toys for rich people). I doubt that the switching system could have handled a national cellular prefix or area code without a huge overhaul, anyway. That's just not how it was designed. Combined with the fact that there just aren't enough available area codes in the U.S. POTS namespace to give every current area code a secondary 'mobile area code,' and there's just not a feasible way to do dialer-pays.
Plus, I think dialer-pays plans in the U.S. would have held back the adoption of cellphones significantly. One of the reasons people liked cellphones was that it gave you a real, regular local phone number, which happened to be mobile. The calling party never had to know it was mobile. Really, what the U.S. system boils down to is "convenience pays." If you want the convenience of a mobile, you pay for it. The caller just pays for the landline call to wherever the area code that the number is located in, the person with the cell pays for the airtime over the cell network. I think this is pretty fair, actually, and judging by how quickly cellphones became popular, I think a lot of other people did, too. (Also: the only dialer-pays extra-fee numbers in the U.S. are the "1-900" numbers, and they're generally regarded as pretty sleazy; the domain of phone-sex operators and psychics, mostly. Not the sort of thing you want your budding technology associated with.)
In short, a caller-pays system just would not have been feasible in the U.S. given how the system developed, and I think if the issue had been forced, bad things (including a delay in uptake of the technology or consumer rejection) could have resulted. There are fundamental differences between the cellular market in the U.S. and Europe (which stem, in not insignificant part, from the fact that European phone systems were still a lot more centralized during the inception of cellular service than the U.S. was), and I don't think there's really any reason to assume that what works in one place is necessarily the best everywhere. The European system may seem conceptually more consistent, but the U.S. system allows for no-change number portability from landlines to cells, and makes cell lines 'equal' for a caller to a traditional landline.
Um, no; "joules per second" is a rate, which doesn't imply a time interval. A bullet coming out of a gun might go 600 miles per hour, but that doesn't mean that it covers 600 miles worth of distance. Likewise, I've worked on megawatt lasers that were a lot smaller than you might expect, because they only delivered a megawatt for a very small fraction of a second. A laser that delivered a million watts for a full second would be a big beast indeed.
Without another time term to get from a rate to a quantity, you have no idea whether '27 megawatts' is for a picosecond, a second, ten minutes, or from now until the heat death of the Universe.
If you wanted to (and I'm not going to do it out), you could easily calculate the maximum duration of a 27MW pulse into a bathtub-sized container of water, before you'd boil the water. (Or do the same thing with some other coolant medium; sodium or lead or what have you.)
True. But even at the upper end of that price range, it's substantially less than a manned helicopter, and most urban police forces have access to those right now. (And that's just the cost of the machine, not even getting into the cost of having a pilot standing by to fly the thing, maintenance, etc.)
$30k sounds like a lowball number; I have a hard time believing you could get any kind of complete UAV system delivered and functioning for that price. (Maybe that's the marginal cost of 'one additional aircraft' without the control system and other stuff?) $1M starts to sound reasonable when you include all the support infrastructure it has to have.
Either way, I think the point of that figure is that the entire range is less than a manned helicopter, and that's how you justify it.
I read the linked article and there's nothing in it but speculation. And even then, it seems very thin. It looks like typical complex-machine anthropomorphizing; put enough MIPS behind it, and even a toaster can play chess with "extraordinarily refined sophistication." Basically, the accusations of cheating mostly boil down to 'no machine can play that well,' which when you get down to it, is exactly what the Kasparov / Deep Blue match was all about. They're basically just rejecting the premise of the whole match.
Also, I don't think it's surprising that IBM decided not to try again. Why should they? They won; it was the best publicity they were going to get from the effort. Why keep going and risk a loss? Knowing a lot of engineers, it doesn't seem at all unbelievable that most of the team would probably want to move on to new things after a multiyear effort that had culminated in a win. Sometimes you just want to quit while you're ahead, take the resume line, and see what else is out there.
Summary:
The prosecutor in the case argued pretty much what you stated, that only the act of producing the documents is protected under the Fifth Amendment, but not the contents of the documents themselves. The Supreme Court apparently found this uncompelling.
Justices Scalia and Thomas go even further, making it clear that they believe that compelled production of evidence is akin to other types of testimony:So, while prior to the late 90s what you said might have been true, in light of that case becoming the law of the land via the USSC, the rigid 'act of production doctrine' has been substantially affected.
That's not quite the point either. OTR doesn't make your conversation totally repudiable, because you still have the same logs as a normal, unencrypted conversation.
It just avoids the problem of having the encryption dig you deeper into a hole, by creating a mathematical proof that you said certain things.
It basically gives you exactly the same 'wiggle room' as you'd have with a regular logged IM conversation. It doesn't, and can't, guarantee that the person on the other end isn't logging the chat somehow (and how would it? even if you had some sort of "secure computing" platform preventing them from running an IM client that logged, they could still point a camcorder at the screen if they were determined enough).
OTR just tries to not be an additional part of the problem.
That said, you're right in pointing out how troublesome it is that emails and other unencrypted, trivially-edited digital communications are routinely accepted as evidence in court. That this happens so regularly is a big problem, and I wonder how often people do a little doctoring here or there, since the evidentiary rules are so lax.
That means that when you're having a chat with someone, you know that what they're saying to you is their actual words, but that the same cryptography that's giving you privacy can't (theoretically) be used to hang you later, by proving absolutely that you said certain things.
OTR's logs are designed to be easily forgeable. This is a major difference in its design from many corporate IM clients (e.g. Sametime), which offer encryption but also create authoritative logs that can be referred back to later.
The point of OTR Messaging is to allow you to have the equivalent of a face-to-face, "off the record" conversation, in the digital, computer-mediated world. Just like when you have an in-person conversation, there's nothing stopping the other person from walking back to their car and blabbing about the whole thing to anyone who'll listen, the encryption itself tries to not serve as authentication after the fact as to what was said.
Encrypted RAM is admittedly hard, but you're creating a false dichotomy if you're assuming that just because you don't have encrypted RAM, it's not worthwhile to encrypt everything else.
Particularly if you have an encrypted swap file (which Mac OS X allows, and I assume Linux does too), just because a program was running wouldn't guarantee that a decryption key for it would be stored in memory. And even if it was, grabbing that key out of memory isn't trivial. (It means you have to keep the computer running and keep the data in memory while you extract it, for starters.)
A system where everything that's on the disk is encrypted, and all you have to do to secure the data is unplug the system and wait a few seconds for the RAM cells to discharge, seems like a big step over a system where you'd have to physically destroy the disks (big magnets? thermite?) in order to make sure that there isn't something incriminating there waiting to be found on casual inspection.
Even if all you have is a second or two of warning, it's not hard to hit a power strip or killswitch and turn the power off, and you've instantly bought yourself a decent margin of security -- if you've at least encrypted all the data stored in non-volatile media.
It works fine on all protocols. Since it handshakes with the other side by inserting some spaces in between words, it doesn't rely on the lower level of the protocols. As long as the IM service transfers text as typed (and doesn't reformat it or anything en route), it should work just fine. It's quite robust.
I've always been disappointed that Adium is the only IM client to build in OTR, so it's there for everyone who uses it without an additional install. If Gaim/Pidgin built OTR in too, it would mean a vastly expanded userbase; I think that would be getting close to the 'critical mass' that you need to push an encryption method into the mainstream (particularly if you could pick up Trillian and some of the other unofficial, multiprotocol IM clients from there).
As it is, having OTR in an additional download for all clients except Adium is a major stumbling block. It's awesome that it exists, but there are so many people around who only want security if they don't have to do anything to get it. Once you start asking people to install additional software or plugins, their eyes glaze over and you've lost them. (All except the people who really need security, and that's a situation you don't want, because now they stick out like sore thumbs. If you want security, you need to get the 'average folks' using it too, even if it's just for cover of whatever activities you're up to.)
That doesn't make sense.
If you're the Exalted and Supreme Leader of $PIPSQUEAK_NUCLEAR_NATION, you actually benefit from having PALs that prevent one of your generals from flying off the handle and glassing your neighbors: it makes you the only party worth negotiating with.
PALs concentrate authority; they push the nuclear decision all the way up to the top of the hierarchy. That means the person at the top of the pyramid holds all the power.
If you're a nuclear nation with an unstable chain of command and no PALs, suddenly those generals -- the guys who have actual physical control of the bombs -- are the ones who need to be negotiating with. The guy in the presidential palace is irrelevant if he can't control the weapons.
The low-tech, human solution to PALs is to keep the nuclear weapons themselves controlled by extremely loyal parties, or at least guarded by them. E.g., you, Generalissimo Exalted Leader, send out a cadre of your very best brownshirts with automatic weapons, a grenade, and a cellphone, to sit on each of the weapons. If anyone comes in and tries to arm the bomb without them getting a call first, they shoot the people in question and set off the grenade. Thus you prevent your internal political enemies from making use of the bombs.
Obviously, that's a less-optimal system than a cryptographic, tamper-resistant one, but it doesn't require anything more than a bunch of thoroughly brainwashed young men willing to die for your Exaltedness.
Even in a chaotic political climate, the advantage of PALs (human or electronic, low- or high-tech) is obvious, at least if you're the top dog.
That's because the "rogue insider" in the U.S. was never really the threat that PALs were designed to protect against. Or at least, they weren't the top priority. If you read the paper on PALs and the declassified memos that it links to, the real perceived threat were NATO allies.
The reason PALs were developed was mostly for forward-deployed weapons, particularly those in the hands of other armed forces besides the U.S.'s. The idea was to keep the Greeks from nuking the Turks, or vice versa, using U.S.-supplied nuclear weapons. (Interestingly, France in the early 60s was also thought to be a loose cannon.) Also, it was to keep weapons in parts of Eastern Europe that would probably be overrun by the Soviets during an invasion from being able to be turned around and used against the West.
Nuclear weapons in silos in North Dakota, where the only access was (theoretically) by very carefully vetted personnel, probably benefited the least from PALs, and it's not surprising that the military saw them more as an impediment there. On forward-deployed weapons, you could get the military to buy into such a system, because it means that you can be more aggressive in handing them out and positioning them; in the U.S., from the military perspective, they're just one more thing to have to worry about going wrong when you have 10 minutes to get the missiles in the air before you get vaporized.
What I think will happen in the long term, if self-publishing or microlabels really take off, is that the price will slowly drop to a more reasonable level. Although music isn't a fungible good (it's not like people really shop for new artists based on price; ten tracks of artist X's music aren't worth the same to everyone as ten tracks of artist Y's), consumers are somewhat price sensitive. Success is going to be met by the artists who understand their fans, and deliver to them the music they want at a price they're willing to pay.
I agree that about $0.25/song is pretty reasonable for a digital download; that still means that your iPod represents a substantial investment in music, but I think it's something that people would be willing to pay, bought slowly over the course of years.