Is that counting cases when the owners weren't around?
Kind of a useless statistic unless it's only looking at so-called "hot burglaries" (which are in many states classed as "robberies" anyway, because they only define 'burglary' as a property crime where there's no confrontation).
Anyway, although that paper is interesting (its thesis is basically 'humans tend to overestimate rare events'), I don't think it really is particularly germane, since you could make the same argument about the straw men that anti-gun commentators draw up (people accidentally shooting themselves / each other / whatever). I don't think there's any reason why the overestimation on one would be greater than the overestimation on the other.
In the 90's we had a sharp drop in violent crime, because a bill was passed that funded putting 100,000 police officers on the streets of American cities. People were able to rely on police nominally for protection.
This has been widely discredited. Like the theories that chalked up the drop in crime to the passage of concealed-carry legislation, nobody has been able to find a strong causative relationship between increased police presence and crime on the macro scale. On small scales, sure; but going from there to the overall national crime trend is thin.
I don't think that anyone knows for certain why the crime trend reversed itself in the 1990s, but I suspect that the economy had a lot more to do with it than anything else.
Were it not for willing suspension of disbelief, the entire genre of fiction would not even be viable.
Fixed that for you. Suspension of disbelief is just as much a requirement for other fiction subgenres as it is for SF, in greater or lesser amounts. In some ways I think 'hard' SF requires less than other types of fiction, because it gives you plausible arguments for setting aside your disbelief.
But were it not for people's willingness to set aside their disbelief in order to be entertained, we wouldn't have a whole lot of art. (Certainly there would be very little theater; how do you cope with some of the tortured plotlines common in classical theater, or for that matter, why people are standing in front of you and paying no attention to the fact that they're on stage?)
That's dumb. An application should never assume that the network it's connected to is secure. It doesn't matter whether you're plugged into switched Ethernet, a wireless LAN, or IP over carrier pigeon -- if you're designing an application that's going to transmit sensitive/assumed-private data (which email clearly is), it's a mistake to just blithely assume that the network is in any way secure.*
An application like Gmail should be treating all network connections as though they're unencrypted Wifi (or hubbed/shared-media Ethernet -- let's not call out 802.11 when there are so many other networking options that can also be trivially compromised); anything else is bad design.
* I'm aware that SMTP is designed like that (as are many other core Internet protocols), but that doesn't mean it's a good idea or even close to technically correct; it was designed in kinder, gentler, and clearly more naive time, and it's caused a whole lot of pain as a result. To do the same thing today is pretty ridiculous.
You're right that the exploit itself really isn't that new. What's new is twofold:
1) It's being done to Gmail, a service provided by People Who Should Know Better. 2) There is now a tool that allows any script kiddie to do it, meaning that it's no longer a theoretical exploit; it's something that your next-door neighbor is going to be doing to you (or your slightly less-technically-savvy family/friends) if you don't take precautions.
#2 is probably most significant, since it's really what's going to cause #1 to change. Sometimes, producing a GUIed, Windows-based exploit tool is the fastest way to get a problem fixed, because it's the easiest way to turn an academic argument into a real-world security issue that will get resources thrown at it. (Of course, it may also land you in jail.)
In summary, secure your wireless AP if you're a user and buy some SSL acceleration hardware so you can support forcing all traffic on your website to use SSL if you're a service provider.
I agree with the latter recommendation about using SSL, but saying 'secure your wireless AP' doesn't do a lot to help the many public wifi locations; I think it's unhealthy to ever assume that a wireless connection will be secure. As more wireless networks are rolled out, and more people get laptops with built-in wireless and traipse happily from home to their local coffeeshop, where they're sharing an IP and an unencrypted connection with many untrusted users, opportunities for sniffing and hijacking are only going to become more common.
As users demand more portability, security and authentication need to be moved (and kept) up at the application layer, and not simply assumed as part of the datalink or physical layers.
I think the upshot of this isn't really "look at us, we can sniff plaintext Wifi connections," but "look at one of the biggest players in web mail use plaintext connections even though they ought to know it's a hideously bad idea."
It's more of an indictment of Google than anything, because they default to unencrypted HTTP rather than HTTPS, and most users won't know that they can go to https://mail.google.com/mail/ to force smarter behavior.
Well, and this is just me speculating here, I think the person is shot in front of a plain background for 'security' reasons; the background (the room with the bookshelf is dropped in (rather than just distributing the video with the plain background) for PR.
Having the background gives the impression of a more stable organization than a clearly handi-cammed video in front of a bedsheet would. Also, I don't know what the books are in the background, but there's probably some symbolism in them (and the cannon). It gives the thing an air of legitimacy that you just wouldn't have in front of a plain backdrop.
What'choo talking 'bout Willis? Over the past couple of years, Linux has been slowly evolving toward a hybrid kernel design. Between the common use of FUSE for powerful new file systems and the recent merging of user space driver support into the kernel, Linux is showing more and more Microkernel attributes every day. True, and I'm not unaware. But it's still predominantly a monolithic kernel, although it's starting to get some more hybrid/microkernel-esque features, and has been developed monolithically throughout much of its history.
What I was supposing was basically 'if desktop computers hadn't advanced at the rate that they did throughout most of the 1990s, would the Linux kernel be even further along the path towards microkernelization than it is today.' Because it seems like it's only the pace of hardware developments that allows a monolithic kernel to continue to develop (and increase in size/features) while still retaining performance.
It seems likely that one of the things that's driving the architectural changes recently, is that people's upgrade cycles seem to have slowed somewhat. I know a lot more people in 2007 that are using 5+ year-old computers, than I did in 1995 or 1992. It could be just coincidental, but it seems that as people have become less interested in shelling out for the latest and greatest hardware, the kernel has turned towards more loadable modules and userspace drivers.
So in essence, I'm agreeing with exactly what you said; I'm just interested in why it's happening.
What it sounds like is that the guy was actually taped standing in front of a black sheet, and then the background was dropped in during postproduction.
It's really not much different from the chroma-keying that lets the TV weatherman stand in front of a map instead of a blue screen. (Except it's not really "chroma" keying with a black screen.)
And my assumption would be that it's to avoid giving anything away about the location where it was filmed.
I always wondered why there wasn't some video showing Bin Laden (and all of the big shots with Al Qaeda) eating bacon while jerking off to Barbie Dolls and getting it up the ass.
Mininova aside, why would they relaunch Suprnova, when TPB is already one of the biggest (if not the biggest) BT trackers around?
Is there really a market for that many different tracker/aggregators? I guess I can understanding having different sites tailored to different purposes; a site that's designed expressly for tracking TV-episode.torrents is probably going to be designed differently than one built around general-purpose dvdimage/iso/rar torrents, but it seems like this is something where bigger is better. The more files that are tracked, the more useful a site is.
I don't want to start the everlasting monolithic/microkernel flame war up again, but I think it's pretty clear that it's only the pace at which hardware has advanced in the last decade or so that has allowed Linux to continue monolithically.
There's a lot to be said for the microkernel architecture, and if Moore's Law ever does start to level off, then I think we're going to see a move away from monolithic designs for good. It's just not practical to keep stuffing more features into a monolithic kernel if you're not constantly getting more and more memory to run it on, and only a very small body of users can be expected to ever compile their own. (True, you can always recompile a specialized version of a monolithic kernel, ripping out all the stuff you don't need, but this is a PITA and it only becomes harder as the thing gets bigger.)
Along with probably most other Linux users, I've always wondered how things would be if Tanenbaum had released MINIX under a free license earlier in the game (Torvalds has said at several points that had MINIX been more free, he probably would have simply modified it, keeping its architecture, but since Tanenbaum had no interest in "turn[ing] MINIX in BSD UNIX" [1]...the rest, of course, is history.)
Or perhaps more interestingly, what would have happened if a free version of BSD had been produced for low-end hardware just a little earlier than it actually was. (In reality, 386BSD came out in a working form in July 1992 [so sayeth Wikipedia], nine months after the first Linux release, and 4.4BSDLite didn't come out until '94 [2].) It seems to me that had "real UNIX" been available for low-end systems in the early 90s, much of the impetus to create a from-scratch clone would have disappeared. (Although, maybe not; perhaps the philosophical differences that drive Linux and the BSDs in different directions would have eventually caused a from-scratch rewrite.)
Ultimately I don't think either alternative would really have brought us out at much of a different place than we are right now, at least from an end-user's perspective; the majority of users don't really care about kernels as such anyway. But it's always fun to play 'what-if,' as long as one keeps in mind that although it's easy to fixate on how things could be better, it could always be far, far worse.
[1] Great archive of Torvalds / Tanenbaum Usenet discussions here. There's so much ego going on there, from both sides, ASCII text can barely contain it... [2] I'm partial to fellow Slashdotter connorbd's BSD History, which is a good primer.
If it had a competitive advantage, then it would be happening already. But it doesn't seem to be happening, so presumably everyone thinks the costs outweigh the benefits.
There's no competitive advantage yet, because we haven't really hit the end of the IPv4 address space. There are a finite number there, and there's a nonzero burn rate: eventually we're going to run out. Before that happens, the price of IPv4 address allocations is going to spike.
That's what's going to drive people onto IPv6, and nothing before is going to do a bit of good.
I missed the EULA on my last Audio CD. Want to remind me where it was?
The "content industry" has attempted to create, from whole cloth, the idea that you only get an "implied license" to use a digital recording, instead of owning it in the same sense that you own an analog recording. This is silly, and completely arbitrary; it exists only because they see the transition to digital media as an opportunity to destroy First Sale and completely control all future markets, in a way they were unable to do under previous theories of copyright.
There is no reasonable justification for deciding that digital works are "licensed" (and thus can't be sold, format-shifted, or acted on in other ways as allowed by traditional copyright law) while analog ones are "sold."
While buying a music recording does not mean that you own the copyright to the music fixed in the record, you do own that copy of it, and can sell or dispose of it as you choose.
The attempts by the RIAA (and in smaller part, the software industry) to muddy the waters are just a power grab.
Yup. The the stuff that makes the internet cool is the simplicity of the implementation, and the anonymity. The first step with all "new" internets is to break both of those things in the name of making it "better".
You got that right.
Every time some idiot starts blabbering on about the "new internet" that they want to create, usually with lots of authentication, encryption, or error-correction / security features built in at very low levels, I can't help but point out what happened the first time such people tried to create a global packet-switched network: it was called X.25. And except in niche applications, it's dead.
It died for a lot of good reasons, too. Compared to the Internet-standard protocols that eventually won out, X.25 was complex and too heavy at low levels; it was difficult to implement, and the equipment was expensive. (Although, X.25 with a lot of the error-correction stripped out is still around, as ATM.)
Whenever people design protocols, particularly low-level ones, there is a tendency to try and "forklift upgrade"; force any features that seem like they'd be useful on everyone. In many ways I think this is one of the things that's currently holding IPv6 back -- rather than just replacing IPv4, they gave in to the siren song of additional features, and mandated stuff like IPSec, which would be better (and in most current implementations are) done at higher levels when users want security.
It's important to understand why the protocols that we use today, succeeded -- they didn't win because they offered the most features. They became dominant because they were flexible, cheap to implement, and worked. They let developers and engineers do what they wanted to do, without having to implement a lot of crap that's unnecessary in most applications... and that sort of overhead is exactly what a lot of people seem to want to put back in.
Fully functional hardware is readily available and cheap
Is there a regularly-updated list around, anywhere, of what wireless hardware is well supported under particular distributions, and whether it has drivers in the kernel, or from some additional source, or requires binary blobs?
The problem I've always had is that whenever I go to a store to buy a WL card, there are always 10 different ones on the shelves, none of which I've ever heard of, and I can never find any of the supposedly-compatible ones around.
It's not hard to find reports where people will say "oh, yeah, my FOO3549 works perfectly, right out of the box!" but then if you try to go to a store and buy a FOO3549, you'll find out it was discontinued six months ago and replaced with the FOO3649, which uses some totally different, highly proprietary chipset, that there's no support for. (Heck, sometimes they don't even bother to change the model numbers.)
This isn't entirely the fault of Linux or any of the OSS driver developers, but it is a major fucking pain in the ass to buy Linux-compatible wireless cards, and I have a stack of incompatible ones sitting around as a testament to this. I've basically given up -- finally I realized that wireless internet was more frustration than it's worth, and I bought a 500' spool of CAT-5e plenum cable and started drilling holes throughout my house. At least running cables feels like a solvable problem. (Hint: the easiest way to run Ethernet between floors is to route it through the heating ducts...particularly if your walls are all insulated.)
But as far as I know, there's no good centralized repository of information concerning the compatibility of different models, or even of which models have which chipsets. It's all scattered around the internet in a dozen different wikis and forums.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas is well known in patent and IP litigation. It's frequently called the "second rocket docket" (the 4th District, in Virginia, being the original one) because of its rules for discovery, and very firm deadlines during trials. They also have a jury pool that's pretty conservative, arguably biased towards rightsholders, and judges that are receptive towards patent plaintiffs (certainly moreso than the average jury pool in the 9th District, which includes California).
I just find that odd. If it was Reagan, more people would relate I think. I mean, yes, ok, we get it, Nixon was a bad president, ha ha ha. But he's already been parodied in every comedy show there is, we don't need yet another go at it.
Lots of people really like Reagan. Heck, some people even remember Carter fondly. Go after anybody but Nixon, and you're just going to start a flamewar. But Nixon... hell, nobody likes him.
I'm not arguing about the sodomy, but I know a guy who's a cook at a maximum-security (state, not Federal) prison, and the food they serve isn't half bad. It's definitely better than what gets served in many schools.
Unless you're talking about situations where someone's food is repeatedly being stolen by other prisoners or something, nobody's starving.
But yeah, they're probably being ass-raped and beaten, so being well-fed is probably small comfort.
I can with absolute clarity remember seeing albums/tapes of "DNA music" being sold in the gift shops of various museums -- notably the Boston Museum of Science -- in the mid/late 1990s. I remember because I saw it there one day when they were playing it, but didn't buy it, and then I was never able to find it again (I had really wanted to get it as a gift for a biologist friend).
But even beyond that, just typing "DNA music" into Google turns up lots of results, some of which have a lot of history behind them.
The people at AlgoArt (not sure if they're the people behind the patent or not) have been making (transcribing?) music from DNA sequences since 1992. They have three CDs available. I rather suspect that it might have been one of these that I heard in Boston those years ago.
And this summary page contains a reference to a paper published in 1984 which contained specific references to the idea of making music from DNA sequences. ("Hayashi and Munakata , using a system that assigned pitches to the four DNA bases according to their thermal stability within the interval of a fifth, found that converting the DNA sequences to music helped to expose the meaning of specific sequences and made remembering and recognizing specific DNA patterns easier.")
From the photos, it looks like the 7" and 10" models use the same case/chassis. The smaller screen just has a giant black bezel around it, taking up the space where the larger screen would go. Although this brings up interesting upgrade possibilities, I think it's fairly obnoxious; I wouldn't mind a 7"-screen laptop if the entire thing were only 7" diagonal (example, something like the Psion Series 7), but a 7" screen in a case that's built for 10" would just annoy me.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that counting cases when the owners weren't around?
Kind of a useless statistic unless it's only looking at so-called "hot burglaries" (which are in many states classed as "robberies" anyway, because they only define 'burglary' as a property crime where there's no confrontation).
Anyway, although that paper is interesting (its thesis is basically 'humans tend to overestimate rare events'), I don't think it really is particularly germane, since you could make the same argument about the straw men that anti-gun commentators draw up (people accidentally shooting themselves / each other / whatever). I don't think there's any reason why the overestimation on one would be greater than the overestimation on the other.
In the 90's we had a sharp drop in violent crime, because a bill was passed that funded putting 100,000 police officers on the streets of American cities. People were able to rely on police nominally for protection.
This has been widely discredited. Like the theories that chalked up the drop in crime to the passage of concealed-carry legislation, nobody has been able to find a strong causative relationship between increased police presence and crime on the macro scale. On small scales, sure; but going from there to the overall national crime trend is thin.
I don't think that anyone knows for certain why the crime trend reversed itself in the 1990s, but I suspect that the economy had a lot more to do with it than anything else.
Were it not for willing suspension of disbelief, the entire genre of fiction would not even be viable.
Fixed that for you. Suspension of disbelief is just as much a requirement for other fiction subgenres as it is for SF, in greater or lesser amounts. In some ways I think 'hard' SF requires less than other types of fiction, because it gives you plausible arguments for setting aside your disbelief.
But were it not for people's willingness to set aside their disbelief in order to be entertained, we wouldn't have a whole lot of art. (Certainly there would be very little theater; how do you cope with some of the tortured plotlines common in classical theater, or for that matter, why people are standing in front of you and paying no attention to the fact that they're on stage?)
That's dumb. An application should never assume that the network it's connected to is secure. It doesn't matter whether you're plugged into switched Ethernet, a wireless LAN, or IP over carrier pigeon -- if you're designing an application that's going to transmit sensitive/assumed-private data (which email clearly is), it's a mistake to just blithely assume that the network is in any way secure.*
An application like Gmail should be treating all network connections as though they're unencrypted Wifi (or hubbed/shared-media Ethernet -- let's not call out 802.11 when there are so many other networking options that can also be trivially compromised); anything else is bad design.
* I'm aware that SMTP is designed like that (as are many other core Internet protocols), but that doesn't mean it's a good idea or even close to technically correct; it was designed in kinder, gentler, and clearly more naive time, and it's caused a whole lot of pain as a result. To do the same thing today is pretty ridiculous.
You're right that the exploit itself really isn't that new. What's new is twofold:
1) It's being done to Gmail, a service provided by People Who Should Know Better.
2) There is now a tool that allows any script kiddie to do it, meaning that it's no longer a theoretical exploit; it's something that your next-door neighbor is going to be doing to you (or your slightly less-technically-savvy family/friends) if you don't take precautions.
#2 is probably most significant, since it's really what's going to cause #1 to change. Sometimes, producing a GUIed, Windows-based exploit tool is the fastest way to get a problem fixed, because it's the easiest way to turn an academic argument into a real-world security issue that will get resources thrown at it. (Of course, it may also land you in jail.)
In summary, secure your wireless AP if you're a user and buy some SSL acceleration hardware so you can support forcing all traffic on your website to use SSL if you're a service provider.
I agree with the latter recommendation about using SSL, but saying 'secure your wireless AP' doesn't do a lot to help the many public wifi locations; I think it's unhealthy to ever assume that a wireless connection will be secure. As more wireless networks are rolled out, and more people get laptops with built-in wireless and traipse happily from home to their local coffeeshop, where they're sharing an IP and an unencrypted connection with many untrusted users, opportunities for sniffing and hijacking are only going to become more common.
As users demand more portability, security and authentication need to be moved (and kept) up at the application layer, and not simply assumed as part of the datalink or physical layers.
I think he's making a reference to this event.
I think the upshot of this isn't really "look at us, we can sniff plaintext Wifi connections," but "look at one of the biggest players in web mail use plaintext connections even though they ought to know it's a hideously bad idea."
It's more of an indictment of Google than anything, because they default to unencrypted HTTP rather than HTTPS, and most users won't know that they can go to https://mail.google.com/mail/ to force smarter behavior.
Well, and this is just me speculating here, I think the person is shot in front of a plain background for 'security' reasons; the background (the room with the bookshelf is dropped in (rather than just distributing the video with the plain background) for PR.
Having the background gives the impression of a more stable organization than a clearly handi-cammed video in front of a bedsheet would. Also, I don't know what the books are in the background, but there's probably some symbolism in them (and the cannon). It gives the thing an air of legitimacy that you just wouldn't have in front of a plain backdrop.
What I was supposing was basically 'if desktop computers hadn't advanced at the rate that they did throughout most of the 1990s, would the Linux kernel be even further along the path towards microkernelization than it is today.' Because it seems like it's only the pace of hardware developments that allows a monolithic kernel to continue to develop (and increase in size/features) while still retaining performance.
It seems likely that one of the things that's driving the architectural changes recently, is that people's upgrade cycles seem to have slowed somewhat. I know a lot more people in 2007 that are using 5+ year-old computers, than I did in 1995 or 1992. It could be just coincidental, but it seems that as people have become less interested in shelling out for the latest and greatest hardware, the kernel has turned towards more loadable modules and userspace drivers.
So in essence, I'm agreeing with exactly what you said; I'm just interested in why it's happening.
What it sounds like is that the guy was actually taped standing in front of a black sheet, and then the background was dropped in during postproduction.
It's really not much different from the chroma-keying that lets the TV weatherman stand in front of a map instead of a blue screen. (Except it's not really "chroma" keying with a black screen.)
And my assumption would be that it's to avoid giving anything away about the location where it was filmed.
I always wondered why there wasn't some video showing Bin Laden (and all of the big shots with Al Qaeda) eating bacon while jerking off to Barbie Dolls and getting it up the ass.
I guarantee you it's out there.
Mininova aside, why would they relaunch Suprnova, when TPB is already one of the biggest (if not the biggest) BT trackers around?
Is there really a market for that many different tracker/aggregators? I guess I can understanding having different sites tailored to different purposes; a site that's designed expressly for tracking TV-episode .torrents is probably going to be designed differently than one built around general-purpose dvdimage/iso/rar torrents, but it seems like this is something where bigger is better. The more files that are tracked, the more useful a site is.
Why create another one?
I don't want to start the everlasting monolithic/microkernel flame war up again, but I think it's pretty clear that it's only the pace at which hardware has advanced in the last decade or so that has allowed Linux to continue monolithically.
There's a lot to be said for the microkernel architecture, and if Moore's Law ever does start to level off, then I think we're going to see a move away from monolithic designs for good. It's just not practical to keep stuffing more features into a monolithic kernel if you're not constantly getting more and more memory to run it on, and only a very small body of users can be expected to ever compile their own. (True, you can always recompile a specialized version of a monolithic kernel, ripping out all the stuff you don't need, but this is a PITA and it only becomes harder as the thing gets bigger.)
Along with probably most other Linux users, I've always wondered how things would be if Tanenbaum had released MINIX under a free license earlier in the game (Torvalds has said at several points that had MINIX been more free, he probably would have simply modified it, keeping its architecture, but since Tanenbaum had no interest in "turn[ing] MINIX in BSD UNIX" [1]...the rest, of course, is history.)
Or perhaps more interestingly, what would have happened if a free version of BSD had been produced for low-end hardware just a little earlier than it actually was. (In reality, 386BSD came out in a working form in July 1992 [so sayeth Wikipedia], nine months after the first Linux release, and 4.4BSDLite didn't come out until '94 [2].) It seems to me that had "real UNIX" been available for low-end systems in the early 90s, much of the impetus to create a from-scratch clone would have disappeared. (Although, maybe not; perhaps the philosophical differences that drive Linux and the BSDs in different directions would have eventually caused a from-scratch rewrite.)
Ultimately I don't think either alternative would really have brought us out at much of a different place than we are right now, at least from an end-user's perspective; the majority of users don't really care about kernels as such anyway. But it's always fun to play 'what-if,' as long as one keeps in mind that although it's easy to fixate on how things could be better, it could always be far, far worse.
[1] Great archive of Torvalds / Tanenbaum Usenet discussions here. There's so much ego going on there, from both sides, ASCII text can barely contain it...
[2] I'm partial to fellow Slashdotter connorbd's BSD History, which is a good primer.
If it had a competitive advantage, then it would be happening already. But it doesn't seem to be happening, so presumably everyone thinks the costs outweigh the benefits.
There's no competitive advantage yet, because we haven't really hit the end of the IPv4 address space. There are a finite number there, and there's a nonzero burn rate: eventually we're going to run out. Before that happens, the price of IPv4 address allocations is going to spike.
That's what's going to drive people onto IPv6, and nothing before is going to do a bit of good.
I missed the EULA on my last Audio CD. Want to remind me where it was?
The "content industry" has attempted to create, from whole cloth, the idea that you only get an "implied license" to use a digital recording, instead of owning it in the same sense that you own an analog recording. This is silly, and completely arbitrary; it exists only because they see the transition to digital media as an opportunity to destroy First Sale and completely control all future markets, in a way they were unable to do under previous theories of copyright.
There is no reasonable justification for deciding that digital works are "licensed" (and thus can't be sold, format-shifted, or acted on in other ways as allowed by traditional copyright law) while analog ones are "sold."
While buying a music recording does not mean that you own the copyright to the music fixed in the record, you do own that copy of it, and can sell or dispose of it as you choose.
The attempts by the RIAA (and in smaller part, the software industry) to muddy the waters are just a power grab.
Yup. The the stuff that makes the internet cool is the simplicity of the implementation, and the anonymity. The first step with all "new" internets is to break both of those things in the name of making it "better".
... and that sort of overhead is exactly what a lot of people seem to want to put back in.
You got that right.
Every time some idiot starts blabbering on about the "new internet" that they want to create, usually with lots of authentication, encryption, or error-correction / security features built in at very low levels, I can't help but point out what happened the first time such people tried to create a global packet-switched network: it was called X.25. And except in niche applications, it's dead.
It died for a lot of good reasons, too. Compared to the Internet-standard protocols that eventually won out, X.25 was complex and too heavy at low levels; it was difficult to implement, and the equipment was expensive. (Although, X.25 with a lot of the error-correction stripped out is still around, as ATM.)
Whenever people design protocols, particularly low-level ones, there is a tendency to try and "forklift upgrade"; force any features that seem like they'd be useful on everyone. In many ways I think this is one of the things that's currently holding IPv6 back -- rather than just replacing IPv4, they gave in to the siren song of additional features, and mandated stuff like IPSec, which would be better (and in most current implementations are) done at higher levels when users want security.
It's important to understand why the protocols that we use today, succeeded -- they didn't win because they offered the most features. They became dominant because they were flexible, cheap to implement, and worked. They let developers and engineers do what they wanted to do, without having to implement a lot of crap that's unnecessary in most applications
Fully functional hardware is readily available and cheap
Is there a regularly-updated list around, anywhere, of what wireless hardware is well supported under particular distributions, and whether it has drivers in the kernel, or from some additional source, or requires binary blobs?
The problem I've always had is that whenever I go to a store to buy a WL card, there are always 10 different ones on the shelves, none of which I've ever heard of, and I can never find any of the supposedly-compatible ones around.
It's not hard to find reports where people will say "oh, yeah, my FOO3549 works perfectly, right out of the box!" but then if you try to go to a store and buy a FOO3549, you'll find out it was discontinued six months ago and replaced with the FOO3649, which uses some totally different, highly proprietary chipset, that there's no support for. (Heck, sometimes they don't even bother to change the model numbers.)
This isn't entirely the fault of Linux or any of the OSS driver developers, but it is a major fucking pain in the ass to buy Linux-compatible wireless cards, and I have a stack of incompatible ones sitting around as a testament to this. I've basically given up -- finally I realized that wireless internet was more frustration than it's worth, and I bought a 500' spool of CAT-5e plenum cable and started drilling holes throughout my house. At least running cables feels like a solvable problem. (Hint: the easiest way to run Ethernet between floors is to route it through the heating ducts...particularly if your walls are all insulated.)
But as far as I know, there's no good centralized repository of information concerning the compatibility of different models, or even of which models have which chipsets. It's all scattered around the internet in a dozen different wikis and forums.
better skip the hardcopy entirely.
And irradiate myself by using a computer monitor? No way!
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas is well known in patent and IP litigation. It's frequently called the "second rocket docket" (the 4th District, in Virginia, being the original one) because of its rules for discovery, and very firm deadlines during trials. They also have a jury pool that's pretty conservative, arguably biased towards rightsholders, and judges that are receptive towards patent plaintiffs (certainly moreso than the average jury pool in the 9th District, which includes California).
9 8
However some people have speculated that since rolling out the red carpet for patent cases, that they're beginning to become overwhelmed:
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=11035497289
I just find that odd. If it was Reagan, more people would relate I think. I mean, yes, ok, we get it, Nixon was a bad president, ha ha ha. But he's already been parodied in every comedy show there is, we don't need yet another go at it.
... hell, nobody likes him.
Lots of people really like Reagan. Heck, some people even remember Carter fondly. Go after anybody but Nixon, and you're just going to start a flamewar. But Nixon
I'm not arguing about the sodomy, but I know a guy who's a cook at a maximum-security (state, not Federal) prison, and the food they serve isn't half bad. It's definitely better than what gets served in many schools.
Unless you're talking about situations where someone's food is repeatedly being stolen by other prisoners or something, nobody's starving.
But yeah, they're probably being ass-raped and beaten, so being well-fed is probably small comfort.
the other would have connected a city of 300,000 people and skyrocketing property prices to a large area of undeveloped land.
Great! Sounds like a solid business plan for a developer somewhere, and a few investment bankers.
I can with absolute clarity remember seeing albums/tapes of "DNA music" being sold in the gift shops of various museums -- notably the Boston Museum of Science -- in the mid/late 1990s. I remember because I saw it there one day when they were playing it, but didn't buy it, and then I was never able to find it again (I had really wanted to get it as a gift for a biologist friend).
But even beyond that, just typing "DNA music" into Google turns up lots of results, some of which have a lot of history behind them.
The people at AlgoArt (not sure if they're the people behind the patent or not) have been making (transcribing?) music from DNA sequences since 1992. They have three CDs available. I rather suspect that it might have been one of these that I heard in Boston those years ago.
And this summary page contains a reference to a paper published in 1984 which contained specific references to the idea of making music from DNA sequences. ("Hayashi and Munakata , using a system that assigned pitches to the four DNA bases according to their thermal stability within the interval of a fifth, found that converting the DNA sequences to music helped to expose the meaning of specific sequences and made remembering and recognizing specific DNA patterns easier.")
From the photos, it looks like the 7" and 10" models use the same case/chassis. The smaller screen just has a giant black bezel around it, taking up the space where the larger screen would go. Although this brings up interesting upgrade possibilities, I think it's fairly obnoxious; I wouldn't mind a 7"-screen laptop if the entire thing were only 7" diagonal (example, something like the Psion Series 7), but a 7" screen in a case that's built for 10" would just annoy me.