The funny thing is that I bet the HX-20 had a better keyboard than virtually anything they're turning out today. (Although admittedly tough to use one handed, or without setting it down on something.)
That's one of the reasons I've never really gotten into the whole text-messaging/blackberry stuff. I could afford one (and my current phone does do texts) but it just seems obnoxious. I'm not going to sit there and type in a damn message with my thumbs, that's stupid, and probably unhealthy in the long run. (Some of these things -- like the blackberrys -- are big enough to have 2-hand, 4-finger chording keyboards on the back, too, or even miniature QWERTYs broken into two sections on the back for the fingers of each hand, with the spacebars on front for your thumbs. That would be a lot smarter than hunting-and-pecking with two fingers for the whole alphabet.) Obnoxious. When someone can come out with a portable message device that's comfortable to type on, and doesn't look like it was designed for a lobster instead of a ten-fingered human, maybe I'll be more interested.
It really mystifies me -- people are probably spending more hours per day, on average, sitting in front of a computer and typing, than ever before; certainly more than people were in the 1980s. However, as we've gotten to spending more time at computers, the keyboards have gotten crummier and crummier. I know part of the decline is probably because now people use the mouse as an input device a lot, but in terms of the volume of typing done by a person now versus in 1980, it's gotta be higher today with all the email people do. You'd think that people would pay more attention to things like their keyboards, but instead they seem to care less. I don't get it.
Read the actual claims; they're specifically including a software implementation as well, in Claim 1:
1. A debugging tool for debugging an application program having at least one software breakpoint function and a call statement for calling said software breakpoint function, said software breakpoint function being adapted to return program control to a next program statement following said call statement when said debugging tool is not running, said debugging tool comprising:
(a) a software breakpoint monitoring processor for monitoring said application program and recognizing said software breakpoint function, said software breakpoint function being a void function free from program instructions for performing any application program operation;
(b) a software breakpoint action determinator for determining an action to be performed based on said software breakpoint function;
(c) a software breakpoint action implementor for implementing said action;
(d) said software breakpoint monitoring processor, upon recognizing said software breakpoint function, calls said software breakpoint action determinator;
(e) said software breakpoint action determinator, in response to being called by said software breakpoint monitoring processor and upon determining said action to be performed, provides instructions to said software breakpoint action implementor; and
(f) said software breakpoint action implementor, upon receiving said instructions from said software breakpoint action determinator, implements said action.
I think this would effectively cover most breakpoint-triggered software debuggers; they go on in subsequent claims to get into the hardware, but this particular claim is all software.
Linux used to be able to operate in small spaces with low power requirements, the same with Windows, NT4 was very compact and stable. The problem comes in when you start adding all the unnecessary eye candy and comprehensive desktop environments.
And Linux still can (and for that matter Windows probably still could, too, except you can't get at the source, so you can't really strip it down and remove the GUI layers); the problem is that the OLPC people have decided, probably not unreasonably, that they want a GUI, which drives up the required resources.
You can still boot Linux from a 1.44MiB floppy if you want (and strip stuff out appropriately), and the stock Ubuntu kernel image is only a little over a meg. "Linux" itself is pretty slim -- some of its packages defintiely aren't, however.
I don't think the blame lies directly on Ebay...they were a part of the process of acquiring the parts needed for the massacre. I guess the hope is that somewhere in the process of buying weapons or weapon accessories someone could have seen what was coming and done something to prevent the slaughter of innocent people (background check or something like that). I think that's the frustration outside of the killings themselves: the loopholes in VA law that allowed for the weapons to be purchased and the ease of the online purchases....
Well, the only "loophole" in this case was that despite being treated involuntarily at an (outpatient) psychiatric facility, the shooter never made it on to the no-sale list. That was changed immediately after the shooting.
However, I think all this time people are spending on looking at the particular tools used in this particular massacre really miss the point. If this guy really wanted to kill people, he didn't even have to use guns. He could have used a 20lb propane tank and a few chemicals "borrowed" from the chemistry lab, and probably killed even more people than he did. (A fuel-air bomb going off in a crowded building, say when people are going from one class to another and the doors are open, would have done far more damage than a guy with a gun.)
Where everyone dropped the ball wasn't on the gun purchase, it was not seeing that this guy was borderline psychotic and belonged in a secure facility, not out in the world with the rest of us. Unfortunately, the mental healthcare system in the U.S. has been almost totally disassembled over the last 40 years, to the point where it's now nearly impossible to keep anyone in an inpatient facility for more than a few hours, without a court order, and the courts are very reluctant to do that.
The article is a little old, the links to the doom9 forum go to posts from early last month. Within a few days of those posts, there was a link to xboxhackers where they were able to accomplish the same thing without having to patch the firmware, ie, no desoldering.
That's pretty interesting. (In TFA the [hack|crack]er is quoted as saying that one of their goals is to eventually be able to pull the Volume Unique Key from the drive without a hardware hack, but he made it seem pretty far off.) I didn't know they had gotten to that point already.
Slightly OT: I'm really hoping that someone will write up a good introduction to how AACS works, in semi-layman's terms. I've read the official AACS documentation (as much of it is public, anyway) and it's not the easiest thing in the world to get your head around, if it's not your field already. It's obvious these Doom9 guys know their shit, but it would be nice if somebody made some documentation just so the rest of us know what the hell is going on; AACS has so many keys and keyblocks and keys-within-keys-within-keys that I'm never quite clear what exactly they've cracked, or which key is required to read the actual content without any other intervention from the player.
It would really be good if Wikipedia handled that, but right now the AACS article is just a lot of news-bites about the progress of the hacking, and it's very light on the technical stuff (and it's currently locked due to some pissing contest or other).
With the size of today's hard drives, carrying around physical DVDs to watch on one's Powerbook just seems silly. Rip 'em (I personally think most movies look fine using MPEG-4 2-pass, target size of 700MB) and chuck 'em on your hard drive; uses a lot less battery power and it's one less thing to have to keep in your laptop bag.
All apologies to those who feel that DRM is still a relevant freedom related issue... But I honestly feel that discussing this is just a drain on resources that could be directed towards more fertile topics.
Yeah, like arguing the relative merits of Linux versus Windows, or Apple versus MS... we were getting so close to a breakthrough there, I don't know how we got off-track.
Basically this crack relies on using a Microsoft HD-DVD drive for the XBox 360, with a special firmware patch (which requires you to remove the firmware chip, flash it, and then solder it back in). With a hacked drive, you can apparently get the Volume ID, which is one of the parameters used in the encryption, directly off of the disc. Normally the Volume ID isn't passed to the host computer, I think.
Anyway, in the bizarro-world that the people who write DRM systems inhabit, I think that this will probably just push them to make the drives harder to "tamper" with; I fully expect that they'll eventually just pot the circuit boards in epoxy or something, to keep you from desoldering the chips.
So if you're interested in this stuff, you might as well go out and get one of the MS drives or other first-gen drives, because I suspect the hacking possibilities may decrease over time; it's going to be these early drives which are the most hackable.
Something tells me that the people that the program is targeting are not going to be doing many spreadsheets for a Fortune500 company.
Yeah, you say that now, but 10 or 15 years ago I bet you'd probably never have thought that some guy in Bangalore would be on the other end of the line when you called tech support...
g. Consult with their immediate supervisor and their OPSEC Officer for an OPSEC review prior to publishing or posting information in a public forum. (1) This includes, but is not limited to letters, resumes, articles for publication, electronic mail (e-mail), Web site postings, web log (blog) postings, discussion in Internet information forums, discussion in Internet message boards or other forms of dissemination or documentation.
My reading of this was that they're including email as one of the possible methods that a person might publish or post information to a public forum, but they're not necessarily saying that all email implicitly qualifies as a "public forum."
You're right, it's not well written at all, but based on what the guy said in the interview, I think the correct way to parse the regulation is that the overriding rule is no information in a public forum without permission from your supervisor/OPSEC officer, and that g(1) is meant to clarify that the method of transmitting that information into the public forum doesn't matter.
Basically, what I think they were trying to address, was if someone was blogging, and then after the regulation went into place, continued to blog, only instead of using an HTML form, started doing it by email instead. They're saying it doesn't matter if you use email, web site / blog posting, or carrier pigeons, if it ends up in a public forum you have to get it vetted first. But email that wasn't being sent to a public forum -- email home to one's family, where the recipient would know not to disseminate or forward the information any further -- presumably wouldn't count as a 'public forum' and thus wouldn't be covered. That at least is I think how it's meant to be read; I suspect they'll have to put out some sort of clarification or guidance to commanders shortly to clear up the confusion.
No, what they just did was completely ruin his chances of getting into a good college.
Sounds like he was a reasonably bright kid, too; if he didn't hate the system and harbor dark fantasies of shooting the place up, I'm sure he will after spending a few months with the dead-enders in an "Alternative" school. (We used to just call them "Juvenile Hall" where I came from.)
Best chance for him is to get out of there with a GED as fast as he can, preferably one that doesn't have the name of that less-than-esteemed institution on it, and then get a job for a few years, and hope some college will look harder at his employment record than it will at his HS diploma. But even then, I doubt most decent private schools will touch him.
They might as well just have tattooed something on his forehead, it would have been cheaper and accomplished basically the same purpose.
Does anyone know enough about the patent who can comment on what specifics Verizon claims is original. As I recall, the idea of "voice over IP" has been around for quite some time, so I wonder what part of this technology Verizon claims is theirs and truly original and protected.
Based on another article on the topic that I read earlier today, Verizon's patents don't cover VoIP entirely, but they do cover some general schemes for translating IP addresses into phone numbers and vice versa. E.g., a Skype-like (dunno about SkypeOut, though) system wouldn't be covered by the patents, but systems that interface directly into the POTS system, give you a real phone number that's routed to the IP device, and allow you to direct-dial POTS lines from the IP device, are in trouble.
So the prior art you'd need to find isn't just some implementation of voice-over-IP, it would be something that actually interfaces the IP system to the telephone system and provides translation back and forth between the two, particularly in terms of switching and routing calls.
That was a superb essay. I might print that out to hand to people, and I wish I had mod points for you.
By all means feel free to distribute; consider it under the GFDL if you'd like to edit it.
One of the problems I see with the American future is that two of those products -- music and movies -- are to a large extent dependent on the health of the country in general. If/when things start to turn really sour and we don't have as much money as a country, we're not the glamour spot of the world, then our culture will no longer be a defining one and our movies and music will be relevant only to us. I think the long-term viability of entertainment is based on the long-term viability of the culture. So that reduces us to exporting natural resources -- of which we still have lots -- or reacquiring manufacturing capabilities once our economy has slowed to the point where we can do that at the same price as third-world nations.
I agree; and in fact this is one of the reasons why I think the position I outlined above is a bit shortsighted. Hollywood and the music industry are only able to export cultural products because 'Americana' in general carries a certain cachet in most of the world; if the perception of America as a nice/free/rich place slips, then over time, the popularity and marketability of those cultural exports will slip as well. (I think this is one of the reasons why the Bush administration is very unpopular among the Hollywood set -- they're dependent in large part on our image in the international arena in order to export their products.) And 'microcode' (which includes not only software but also pharmaceutical research and other IP) is dependent either on really being the best in the field -- which is tough, because our educational system is terrible at the hard sciences -- or on various forms of vendor lock-in, which are probably not stable in the long run.
However, the solutions to these problems are very, very hard, and they involve really taking a look in the mirror that most Americans -- and certainly most politicans -- would rather not do. Nobody wants to do it, both because it's fundamentally depressing: for starters, you have to throw away all the irrational exceptionalist garbage that says we'll somehow magically succeed no matter what, because we're just that damn cool (or blessed by God, or whatever), and beyond that, there are a whole lot of industries that just can't be reasonably expected to continue in a fully globalized market, and are going to disappear. Nobody wants to tell a large section of the workforce "I'm sorry, but you just really cost way too much for what you do, and nobody's going to pay you to do it anymore."
And even if you get past that, then you run into the hard issues about why we're failing to remain competitive; and IMO there are some serious cultural issues at work that need to be changed. A large part of America is borderline non-secular and strongly anti-intellectualist -- this is pretty deeply ingrained in our culture (and has not, historically, been a bad thing), but is probably not helpful if you're trying to find ways of leapfrogging the Chinese and Indians and remaining on the forefront of technological development purely on merit.
I don't have any cute solutions or dogma to push; I don't think there's any easy way out or any free lunch. But I think that in order to reasonably oppose laws and stances that seem to be bad or counterproductive (the DMCA, etc.) it helps to first understand the underlying feelings that cause people to support it.
And like I figured if all the men were gay...well, then you have the sex problem taken care of.
The problem with gay men, or gay women, or really any combination of crews where there's going to be mutual sexual attraction, is that there are serious opportunities for jealousy and infighting.
I don't know if it was ever proved or not, but there were some theories going around about the accident on the USS Iowa being caused by one sailor who was involved in a homosexual affair with another committing suicide by tossing a cigarette butt into a powder charge. I think the theory was later discredited, or at least there wasn't enough evidence to support it, but I think the fact that it was considered for a time ought to give anyone contemplating a space mission pause. There's no reason why male-male attraction and a jilted gay lover couldn't become just as distracting/destructive as male-female attraction.
I think the difference is in the number of people. According to WP, in 2005 there were almost 90 people in the winter-over crew at Amundsen/Scott. That changes the dynamic a whole lot from, say, 3 or 5 people, like you'd probably be talking about on a Mars mission. (There are probably some very remote towns/villages around the world with less than 90 people in them, effectively isolated most of the time...I suspect if you looked up in Canada you'd find some.)
I think the difference is that when you get get close to 100 people or so, you can really have a community, while when you just have a handful, there's a good chance of ending up with individuals feeling isolated and embittered from the rest of the group. Plus, you avoid some of the really bad male/female issues if you increase the numbers to that size and make the proportions about even; 40 men and 40 women gives each person a whole lot more possibilities -- which means competition isn't as dangerously cutthroat -- than in smaller crews. (Your worst possible scenario would be a small overall crew with more men than women; that's pretty much asking for a lot of "industrial accidents" to start happening.)
Overall though, if you want to look for what situations there's the most data on, I suspect it's probably all-male crews. I suspect that the original Navy crews at Amundsen/Scott, when it was smaller, were all-male, and there are a lot of very remote listening stations and stuff up in Alaska that are presumably crewed by the military with men. (And submarines, although they aren't in isolation, usually, for as long as any space mission would be.)
Maybe the solution is just to go with either all-male or all-female crews, hope they're all heterosexual, and tell them to solve their own needs on their own time. Yeah, they'll probably be sexually frustrated but they probably won't kill each other, either.
The regulation says that a Soldier or other U.S. Army personnel must consult with their immediate supervisor and OPSEC officer prior to posting information in a public forum. However, this is where unit commander or organization leadership specifies in orders, policies, or directives how this will be done. Some units may require that Soldiers register their blog with the unit for identification purposes with occasional spot checks after an initial review. Other units may require a review before every posting. A private e-mail message to Family Members is not considered posting information in a public forum, but U.S. Army personnel are informed that unclassified e-mails can be intercepted and that they shouldn't write anything that they wouldn't say on an unsecure phone. While it is not practical to check all communication, especially private communication, the U.S. Army trusts that Soldiers and U.S. Army personnel will do the right things to maintain proper security when they understand their role in it.
There seems to be a mistaken assumption going around that the new regs require all email home from U.S. personnel be vetted, and the guy clearly says that's not the case -- they're aiming the regulation specifically at messages posted to public forums, not 1:1 communication like email or voice phone. The only thing the guy said about email was basically not to treat it as if it were secure, which is basically what we'd like everyone to do, all the time, because it is screamingly insecure.
Dunno what your point was. Sure, the language is a little flowery, but to be honest he's not that bad of a writer -- I'll take honesty that may border on arrogance over false humility any day. And I don't really have any problem with his ideas in the Manifesto; there are some factual points I'd probably quibble with him on, but in terms of general beliefs I think the guy's got more going for him than anyone holding a major political office in the U.S. today. (Not that I'm setting a real high bar there...I guess that's 'damning with faint praise.' But seriously, based just on that I'd say he's probably an interesting guy to invite over to dinner -- at least he has opinions and they seem to be well thought out and basically consistent, cohesive, and rational; that's more than most people have.)
I've never read the guy's blog, but he certainly seems to be able to turn it on when he wants to.
I don't think anybody really has trouble seeing the economic logic in IP protectionism. We just don't like it.
Well, that's not terribly convincing. People who dislike protectionism 'religiously,' as many people do, really aren't helping anything -- they just make the free-trade argument look irrational (which in my book, is a pretty grave insult).
There are some fairly good arguments against protectionism on purely economic grounds, because it's allegedly self-defeating in the long run, and they fail anyway. E.g., it's not worth prohibiting outsourcing, because in the near-term, it's impossible to enforce, and in the long term, it just drives businesses away or leads to domestic ones being overrun by foreign competition; the further you fight this process the worse it ends up hurting you in the end.
Economic arguments like this are really the only valid basis for opposing protectionist policies -- just taking on faith that "protectionism is bad" and "free trade is good" is not going to satisfy people when the economy starts slowing down and they're looking for scapegoats. We're already starting to see this, and it's probably going to get worse.
It's really not that hard -- go down to Northern VA and look at the Orange Line on the Metro system.
It has many of its stations right in the median of Interstate 66, which is a busy stretch of road. The way the stations are laid out is that the platform is in the median, between the metro tracks. There is a little building in the median to shelter the platform, with an escalator up to a second level. This second level (which is probably 3 stories off the ground if it were a normal building, at least) has pedestrian walkways across the highway, on either side, to big parking garages.
So to ride the metro you park your car in either of the big lots, which are easily accessible from the highway (well, inasmuch as anything in the DC area is), cross the pedestrian bridge, go down the escalator, and board the train in either direction.
Now in reality the traffic patterns in the parking lots can be pretty hairy, because the exits on most of the highways are just retardedly designed (who the hell thought that the cloverleaf interchange was a good idea? -- it's a terrible idea, and it forces you to have miserably short entrance ramps; look at the Interstates in New England for how to do entrance and exit ramps, they're nice and long, with the exit BEFORE THE FUCKING ENTRANCE), so you have to be careful getting to the metro station... but aside from that they work pretty well.
Personally I think that Interstate medians are hugely underutilized transportation corridors -- there's no reason why every Interstate in every major city ought not also be a rail right-of-way and conduit for power and telecommunications lines; at the very least we should be building all our interstates wide enough to put rail or some future transportation line in the medians, just on the chance we'll need it.
But anyway, I'm told that the cost of the above-ground stations in I-66's median, while they look expensive, were dirt cheap compared to even the smallest underground tunnel section and station in the District proper; aboveground rail lines are just so much cheaper to run that even if they require strange stations, it's advantageous.
Re:Can't anyone create a GNU version of Mathematic
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I think the Student version is only valid until you leave school; how they tell this, I'm not sure, but given how aggressive they are about requiring revalidation for trivial hardware changes, I wouldn't assume that you could just keep using it forever -- eventually you might need to get it revalidated and they might ask for proof that you're still a student after 10 years.
I think the answer is staring you in the face: as a nation, the U.S. imports a lot of physical goods, but exports a lot of intellectual property. Therefore, we reward companies who chisel their foreign suppliers into squeezing their employees, because this results in cheap imports here in the States. Likewise, we punish IP 'theft,' because IP is one of the last things that we seem to be able to produce and sell.
Now, I'm no fan of the DMCA, because I think it causes more damage and economic loss, here in the U.S., than it can or will ever possibly create in new IP-export revenue. But the logic driving it, when you separate it from the implementation, isn't that hard to understand, at least from a certain point of view. Allow me to illustrate how I think many people see the problem:
When we set aside irrational feelings of American exceptionalism -- those warm feelings that politicians always play to, when they talk about the "American worker" being the "best in the world" as if it was self-evident -- it is not immediately clear exactly how our previous success over the past century [1], necessarily translates into continued success in the future. In short, although everyone likes to say reassuring things like "Americans have always been at the forefront of innovation!", those words ring pretty hollow -- it's not clear why we would continue to be. We're not smarter than everyone else, our education system basically sucks, and we have a culture that's increasingly anti-intellectual and in some cases bordering on non-secular.
What this boils down to is: in a fully globalized economy, it's not clear what areas the U.S. will have a comparative advantage in. We'll probably always be able to export some agricultural products, but agricultural products do not a first-world civilization pay for. Same with natural resources like coal and timber but we'll need them here eventually, so we'd just be selling ourselves down the river. So what do you have left, when you've outsourced everything that can be outsourced to lower-cost second- and third-world areas? I think Neal Stephenson was onto something: music, movies, microcode, and pizza delivery.
'Pizza delivery' is the remaining service-sector crap that can't be outsourced. Music and movies are 'cultural exports,' things that for whatever reason, have a certain cachet in the rest of the world, and so don't really fall victim to direct price competition with foreign competitors. And microcode [1A] -- even if we're not the best at that, either, we'll use our monopoly to milk the rest of the world pretty good for as long as we can. But we can only do that if we can get them to buy into the legal framework which lets you sell IP as if it were physical goods. Hence, the DMCA and other 'strong IP' laws.
All of this is just my rather long-winded way of trying to explain why so many people (people in government in particular) are hooked on strong IP law (including the DMCA, DRM, and anti-circumvention), and proprietary software: they see it as a way to ensure that the U.S. can still make money doing the only thing that we seem to be good at. It may not seem at first glance to make a whole lot of sense, particularly to non-Americans, but I've met a lot of fairly powerful people who are very, very nervous about where the New/Global Economy is headed, and how the U.S. is going to maintain its standard of living [2] in the future. If you're looking for a near-magic solution, which you are if you're a politician, grabbing onto intellectual property as the salvation of high-cost Western society probably isn't the stupidest thing you'll do all day.
[1] Much of which is attributable to having had the good luck not to get involved in any home-turf land wars (like Europe, which got flattened, some of it twice) and getting on board the capitalism bus early (unlike Asia, which is just coming around to this whole market-economy business).
[1A] I'm using "microcode" here to represent basically all IP-derived exports, which includes most pharmaceuti
Yeah, unfortunately the Wikipedia nerds have this love/hate thing going on with Slashdot, and I think that article got deleted. It was a shame, too, because it was pretty good -- and seriously, what are they afraid of, that Wikipedia is going to run out of paper? It's an online encyclopedia, you can have as many articles on as many bizarre topics as you want. I bet the Slashdot Trolling Phenomena article got more hits than a lot of stuff on WP, but no, they had to get their panties all up in a self-righteous bunch and pull it. Lamers.
What I think is particularly crappy is that when WP deletes an article, they not only delete the most recent version, but they also delete all the historical versions of it. To me that borders on offensive; there's really no reason they couldn't just mark the article as logically deleted but still allow people to see what content used to be there.
Yes I think many, if not most, modern filesystems will. I don't really see why a zero-length file should be any harder to handle than a directory, and they generally don't take up any storage space on disk (they obviously do take some space, but not in the way most users think of it). Seems like you could just create an empty file by writing an inode to the table and specifying a zero-byte length, so it wouldn't be linked to or take up any actual data blocks on disk. It would be like a hard link, but pointing to nothing. That doesn't sound like it would be that hard to do, if you really wanted to -- if it's not possible, it's probably less because of infeasibility than because somebody thinks it would be a misfeature or cause problems.
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The funny thing is that I bet the HX-20 had a better keyboard than virtually anything they're turning out today. (Although admittedly tough to use one handed, or without setting it down on something.)
That's one of the reasons I've never really gotten into the whole text-messaging/blackberry stuff. I could afford one (and my current phone does do texts) but it just seems obnoxious. I'm not going to sit there and type in a damn message with my thumbs, that's stupid, and probably unhealthy in the long run. (Some of these things -- like the blackberrys -- are big enough to have 2-hand, 4-finger chording keyboards on the back, too, or even miniature QWERTYs broken into two sections on the back for the fingers of each hand, with the spacebars on front for your thumbs. That would be a lot smarter than hunting-and-pecking with two fingers for the whole alphabet.) Obnoxious. When someone can come out with a portable message device that's comfortable to type on, and doesn't look like it was designed for a lobster instead of a ten-fingered human, maybe I'll be more interested.
It really mystifies me -- people are probably spending more hours per day, on average, sitting in front of a computer and typing, than ever before; certainly more than people were in the 1980s. However, as we've gotten to spending more time at computers, the keyboards have gotten crummier and crummier. I know part of the decline is probably because now people use the mouse as an input device a lot, but in terms of the volume of typing done by a person now versus in 1980, it's gotta be higher today with all the email people do. You'd think that people would pay more attention to things like their keyboards, but instead they seem to care less. I don't get it.
Is there anyone in the patent office? Or is it just a big rubber-stamp machine?
The answer to both questions is "yes."
Linux used to be able to operate in small spaces with low power requirements, the same with Windows, NT4 was very compact and stable. The problem comes in when you start adding all the unnecessary eye candy and comprehensive desktop environments.
And Linux still can (and for that matter Windows probably still could, too, except you can't get at the source, so you can't really strip it down and remove the GUI layers); the problem is that the OLPC people have decided, probably not unreasonably, that they want a GUI, which drives up the required resources.
You can still boot Linux from a 1.44MiB floppy if you want (and strip stuff out appropriately), and the stock Ubuntu kernel image is only a little over a meg. "Linux" itself is pretty slim -- some of its packages defintiely aren't, however.
I don't think the blame lies directly on Ebay...they were a part of the process of acquiring the parts needed for the massacre. I guess the hope is that somewhere in the process of buying weapons or weapon accessories someone could have seen what was coming and done something to prevent the slaughter of innocent people (background check or something like that). I think that's the frustration outside of the killings themselves: the loopholes in VA law that allowed for the weapons to be purchased and the ease of the online purchases....
Well, the only "loophole" in this case was that despite being treated involuntarily at an (outpatient) psychiatric facility, the shooter never made it on to the no-sale list. That was changed immediately after the shooting.
However, I think all this time people are spending on looking at the particular tools used in this particular massacre really miss the point. If this guy really wanted to kill people, he didn't even have to use guns. He could have used a 20lb propane tank and a few chemicals "borrowed" from the chemistry lab, and probably killed even more people than he did. (A fuel-air bomb going off in a crowded building, say when people are going from one class to another and the doors are open, would have done far more damage than a guy with a gun.)
Where everyone dropped the ball wasn't on the gun purchase, it was not seeing that this guy was borderline psychotic and belonged in a secure facility, not out in the world with the rest of us. Unfortunately, the mental healthcare system in the U.S. has been almost totally disassembled over the last 40 years, to the point where it's now nearly impossible to keep anyone in an inpatient facility for more than a few hours, without a court order, and the courts are very reluctant to do that.
The article is a little old, the links to the doom9 forum go to posts from early last month. Within a few days of those posts, there was a link to xboxhackers where they were able to accomplish the same thing without having to patch the firmware, ie, no desoldering.
That's pretty interesting. (In TFA the [hack|crack]er is quoted as saying that one of their goals is to eventually be able to pull the Volume Unique Key from the drive without a hardware hack, but he made it seem pretty far off.) I didn't know they had gotten to that point already.
Slightly OT: I'm really hoping that someone will write up a good introduction to how AACS works, in semi-layman's terms. I've read the official AACS documentation (as much of it is public, anyway) and it's not the easiest thing in the world to get your head around, if it's not your field already. It's obvious these Doom9 guys know their shit, but it would be nice if somebody made some documentation just so the rest of us know what the hell is going on; AACS has so many keys and keyblocks and keys-within-keys-within-keys that I'm never quite clear what exactly they've cracked, or which key is required to read the actual content without any other intervention from the player.
It would really be good if Wikipedia handled that, but right now the AACS article is just a lot of news-bites about the progress of the hacking, and it's very light on the technical stuff (and it's currently locked due to some pissing contest or other).
HandBrake is your friend.
With the size of today's hard drives, carrying around physical DVDs to watch on one's Powerbook just seems silly. Rip 'em (I personally think most movies look fine using MPEG-4 2-pass, target size of 700MB) and chuck 'em on your hard drive; uses a lot less battery power and it's one less thing to have to keep in your laptop bag.
All apologies to those who feel that DRM is still a relevant freedom related issue... But I honestly feel that discussing this is just a drain on resources that could be directed towards more fertile topics.
... we were getting so close to a breakthrough there, I don't know how we got off-track.
Yeah, like arguing the relative merits of Linux versus Windows, or Apple versus MS
Basically this crack relies on using a Microsoft HD-DVD drive for the XBox 360, with a special firmware patch (which requires you to remove the firmware chip, flash it, and then solder it back in). With a hacked drive, you can apparently get the Volume ID, which is one of the parameters used in the encryption, directly off of the disc. Normally the Volume ID isn't passed to the host computer, I think.
Anyway, in the bizarro-world that the people who write DRM systems inhabit, I think that this will probably just push them to make the drives harder to "tamper" with; I fully expect that they'll eventually just pot the circuit boards in epoxy or something, to keep you from desoldering the chips.
So if you're interested in this stuff, you might as well go out and get one of the MS drives or other first-gen drives, because I suspect the hacking possibilities may decrease over time; it's going to be these early drives which are the most hackable.
Something tells me that the people that the program is targeting are not going to be doing many spreadsheets for a Fortune500 company.
Yeah, you say that now, but 10 or 15 years ago I bet you'd probably never have thought that some guy in Bangalore would be on the other end of the line when you called tech support...
My reading of this was that they're including email as one of the possible methods that a person might publish or post information to a public forum, but they're not necessarily saying that all email implicitly qualifies as a "public forum."
You're right, it's not well written at all, but based on what the guy said in the interview, I think the correct way to parse the regulation is that the overriding rule is no information in a public forum without permission from your supervisor/OPSEC officer, and that g(1) is meant to clarify that the method of transmitting that information into the public forum doesn't matter.
Basically, what I think they were trying to address, was if someone was blogging, and then after the regulation went into place, continued to blog, only instead of using an HTML form, started doing it by email instead. They're saying it doesn't matter if you use email, web site / blog posting, or carrier pigeons, if it ends up in a public forum you have to get it vetted first. But email that wasn't being sent to a public forum -- email home to one's family, where the recipient would know not to disseminate or forward the information any further -- presumably wouldn't count as a 'public forum' and thus wouldn't be covered. That at least is I think how it's meant to be read; I suspect they'll have to put out some sort of clarification or guidance to commanders shortly to clear up the confusion.
Just because that's a really good word, and also absolutely applicable to the story as a whole.
No, what they just did was completely ruin his chances of getting into a good college.
Sounds like he was a reasonably bright kid, too; if he didn't hate the system and harbor dark fantasies of shooting the place up, I'm sure he will after spending a few months with the dead-enders in an "Alternative" school. (We used to just call them "Juvenile Hall" where I came from.)
Best chance for him is to get out of there with a GED as fast as he can, preferably one that doesn't have the name of that less-than-esteemed institution on it, and then get a job for a few years, and hope some college will look harder at his employment record than it will at his HS diploma. But even then, I doubt most decent private schools will touch him.
They might as well just have tattooed something on his forehead, it would have been cheaper and accomplished basically the same purpose.
Does anyone know enough about the patent who can comment on what specifics Verizon claims is original. As I recall, the idea of "voice over IP" has been around for quite some time, so I wonder what part of this technology Verizon claims is theirs and truly original and protected.
Based on another article on the topic that I read earlier today, Verizon's patents don't cover VoIP entirely, but they do cover some general schemes for translating IP addresses into phone numbers and vice versa. E.g., a Skype-like (dunno about SkypeOut, though) system wouldn't be covered by the patents, but systems that interface directly into the POTS system, give you a real phone number that's routed to the IP device, and allow you to direct-dial POTS lines from the IP device, are in trouble.
So the prior art you'd need to find isn't just some implementation of voice-over-IP, it would be something that actually interfaces the IP system to the telephone system and provides translation back and forth between the two, particularly in terms of switching and routing calls.
That was a superb essay. I might print that out to hand to people, and I wish I had mod points for you.
By all means feel free to distribute; consider it under the GFDL if you'd like to edit it.
One of the problems I see with the American future is that two of those products -- music and movies -- are to a large extent dependent on the health of the country in general. If/when things start to turn really sour and we don't have as much money as a country, we're not the glamour spot of the world, then our culture will no longer be a defining one and our movies and music will be relevant only to us. I think the long-term viability of entertainment is based on the long-term viability of the culture. So that reduces us to exporting natural resources -- of which we still have lots -- or reacquiring manufacturing capabilities once our economy has slowed to the point where we can do that at the same price as third-world nations.
I agree; and in fact this is one of the reasons why I think the position I outlined above is a bit shortsighted. Hollywood and the music industry are only able to export cultural products because 'Americana' in general carries a certain cachet in most of the world; if the perception of America as a nice/free/rich place slips, then over time, the popularity and marketability of those cultural exports will slip as well. (I think this is one of the reasons why the Bush administration is very unpopular among the Hollywood set -- they're dependent in large part on our image in the international arena in order to export their products.) And 'microcode' (which includes not only software but also pharmaceutical research and other IP) is dependent either on really being the best in the field -- which is tough, because our educational system is terrible at the hard sciences -- or on various forms of vendor lock-in, which are probably not stable in the long run.
However, the solutions to these problems are very, very hard, and they involve really taking a look in the mirror that most Americans -- and certainly most politicans -- would rather not do. Nobody wants to do it, both because it's fundamentally depressing: for starters, you have to throw away all the irrational exceptionalist garbage that says we'll somehow magically succeed no matter what, because we're just that damn cool (or blessed by God, or whatever), and beyond that, there are a whole lot of industries that just can't be reasonably expected to continue in a fully globalized market, and are going to disappear. Nobody wants to tell a large section of the workforce "I'm sorry, but you just really cost way too much for what you do, and nobody's going to pay you to do it anymore."
And even if you get past that, then you run into the hard issues about why we're failing to remain competitive; and IMO there are some serious cultural issues at work that need to be changed. A large part of America is borderline non-secular and strongly anti-intellectualist -- this is pretty deeply ingrained in our culture (and has not, historically, been a bad thing), but is probably not helpful if you're trying to find ways of leapfrogging the Chinese and Indians and remaining on the forefront of technological development purely on merit.
I don't have any cute solutions or dogma to push; I don't think there's any easy way out or any free lunch. But I think that in order to reasonably oppose laws and stances that seem to be bad or counterproductive (the DMCA, etc.) it helps to first understand the underlying feelings that cause people to support it.
And like I figured if all the men were gay...well, then you have the sex problem taken care of.
The problem with gay men, or gay women, or really any combination of crews where there's going to be mutual sexual attraction, is that there are serious opportunities for jealousy and infighting.
I don't know if it was ever proved or not, but there were some theories going around about the accident on the USS Iowa being caused by one sailor who was involved in a homosexual affair with another committing suicide by tossing a cigarette butt into a powder charge. I think the theory was later discredited, or at least there wasn't enough evidence to support it, but I think the fact that it was considered for a time ought to give anyone contemplating a space mission pause. There's no reason why male-male attraction and a jilted gay lover couldn't become just as distracting/destructive as male-female attraction.
I think the difference is in the number of people. According to WP, in 2005 there were almost 90 people in the winter-over crew at Amundsen/Scott. That changes the dynamic a whole lot from, say, 3 or 5 people, like you'd probably be talking about on a Mars mission. (There are probably some very remote towns/villages around the world with less than 90 people in them, effectively isolated most of the time...I suspect if you looked up in Canada you'd find some.)
I think the difference is that when you get get close to 100 people or so, you can really have a community, while when you just have a handful, there's a good chance of ending up with individuals feeling isolated and embittered from the rest of the group. Plus, you avoid some of the really bad male/female issues if you increase the numbers to that size and make the proportions about even; 40 men and 40 women gives each person a whole lot more possibilities -- which means competition isn't as dangerously cutthroat -- than in smaller crews. (Your worst possible scenario would be a small overall crew with more men than women; that's pretty much asking for a lot of "industrial accidents" to start happening.)
Overall though, if you want to look for what situations there's the most data on, I suspect it's probably all-male crews. I suspect that the original Navy crews at Amundsen/Scott, when it was smaller, were all-male, and there are a lot of very remote listening stations and stuff up in Alaska that are presumably crewed by the military with men. (And submarines, although they aren't in isolation, usually, for as long as any space mission would be.)
Maybe the solution is just to go with either all-male or all-female crews, hope they're all heterosexual, and tell them to solve their own needs on their own time. Yeah, they'll probably be sexually frustrated but they probably won't kill each other, either.
Dunno what your point was. Sure, the language is a little flowery, but to be honest he's not that bad of a writer -- I'll take honesty that may border on arrogance over false humility any day. And I don't really have any problem with his ideas in the Manifesto; there are some factual points I'd probably quibble with him on, but in terms of general beliefs I think the guy's got more going for him than anyone holding a major political office in the U.S. today. (Not that I'm setting a real high bar there...I guess that's 'damning with faint praise.' But seriously, based just on that I'd say he's probably an interesting guy to invite over to dinner -- at least he has opinions and they seem to be well thought out and basically consistent, cohesive, and rational; that's more than most people have.)
I've never read the guy's blog, but he certainly seems to be able to turn it on when he wants to.
I don't think anybody really has trouble seeing the economic logic in IP protectionism. We just don't like it.
Well, that's not terribly convincing. People who dislike protectionism 'religiously,' as many people do, really aren't helping anything -- they just make the free-trade argument look irrational (which in my book, is a pretty grave insult).
There are some fairly good arguments against protectionism on purely economic grounds, because it's allegedly self-defeating in the long run, and they fail anyway. E.g., it's not worth prohibiting outsourcing, because in the near-term, it's impossible to enforce, and in the long term, it just drives businesses away or leads to domestic ones being overrun by foreign competition; the further you fight this process the worse it ends up hurting you in the end.
Economic arguments like this are really the only valid basis for opposing protectionist policies -- just taking on faith that "protectionism is bad" and "free trade is good" is not going to satisfy people when the economy starts slowing down and they're looking for scapegoats. We're already starting to see this, and it's probably going to get worse.
It's really not that hard -- go down to Northern VA and look at the Orange Line on the Metro system.
... but aside from that they work pretty well.
It has many of its stations right in the median of Interstate 66, which is a busy stretch of road. The way the stations are laid out is that the platform is in the median, between the metro tracks. There is a little building in the median to shelter the platform, with an escalator up to a second level. This second level (which is probably 3 stories off the ground if it were a normal building, at least) has pedestrian walkways across the highway, on either side, to big parking garages.
So to ride the metro you park your car in either of the big lots, which are easily accessible from the highway (well, inasmuch as anything in the DC area is), cross the pedestrian bridge, go down the escalator, and board the train in either direction.
Now in reality the traffic patterns in the parking lots can be pretty hairy, because the exits on most of the highways are just retardedly designed (who the hell thought that the cloverleaf interchange was a good idea? -- it's a terrible idea, and it forces you to have miserably short entrance ramps; look at the Interstates in New England for how to do entrance and exit ramps, they're nice and long, with the exit BEFORE THE FUCKING ENTRANCE), so you have to be careful getting to the metro station
Personally I think that Interstate medians are hugely underutilized transportation corridors -- there's no reason why every Interstate in every major city ought not also be a rail right-of-way and conduit for power and telecommunications lines; at the very least we should be building all our interstates wide enough to put rail or some future transportation line in the medians, just on the chance we'll need it.
But anyway, I'm told that the cost of the above-ground stations in I-66's median, while they look expensive, were dirt cheap compared to even the smallest underground tunnel section and station in the District proper; aboveground rail lines are just so much cheaper to run that even if they require strange stations, it's advantageous.
I think the Student version is only valid until you leave school; how they tell this, I'm not sure, but given how aggressive they are about requiring revalidation for trivial hardware changes, I wouldn't assume that you could just keep using it forever -- eventually you might need to get it revalidated and they might ask for proof that you're still a student after 10 years.
I think the answer is staring you in the face: as a nation, the U.S. imports a lot of physical goods, but exports a lot of intellectual property. Therefore, we reward companies who chisel their foreign suppliers into squeezing their employees, because this results in cheap imports here in the States. Likewise, we punish IP 'theft,' because IP is one of the last things that we seem to be able to produce and sell.
Now, I'm no fan of the DMCA, because I think it causes more damage and economic loss, here in the U.S., than it can or will ever possibly create in new IP-export revenue. But the logic driving it, when you separate it from the implementation, isn't that hard to understand, at least from a certain point of view. Allow me to illustrate how I think many people see the problem:
When we set aside irrational feelings of American exceptionalism -- those warm feelings that politicians always play to, when they talk about the "American worker" being the "best in the world" as if it was self-evident -- it is not immediately clear exactly how our previous success over the past century [1], necessarily translates into continued success in the future. In short, although everyone likes to say reassuring things like "Americans have always been at the forefront of innovation!", those words ring pretty hollow -- it's not clear why we would continue to be. We're not smarter than everyone else, our education system basically sucks, and we have a culture that's increasingly anti-intellectual and in some cases bordering on non-secular.
What this boils down to is: in a fully globalized economy, it's not clear what areas the U.S. will have a comparative advantage in. We'll probably always be able to export some agricultural products, but agricultural products do not a first-world civilization pay for. Same with natural resources like coal and timber but we'll need them here eventually, so we'd just be selling ourselves down the river. So what do you have left, when you've outsourced everything that can be outsourced to lower-cost second- and third-world areas? I think Neal Stephenson was onto something: music, movies, microcode, and pizza delivery.
'Pizza delivery' is the remaining service-sector crap that can't be outsourced. Music and movies are 'cultural exports,' things that for whatever reason, have a certain cachet in the rest of the world, and so don't really fall victim to direct price competition with foreign competitors. And microcode [1A] -- even if we're not the best at that, either, we'll use our monopoly to milk the rest of the world pretty good for as long as we can. But we can only do that if we can get them to buy into the legal framework which lets you sell IP as if it were physical goods. Hence, the DMCA and other 'strong IP' laws.
All of this is just my rather long-winded way of trying to explain why so many people (people in government in particular) are hooked on strong IP law (including the DMCA, DRM, and anti-circumvention), and proprietary software: they see it as a way to ensure that the U.S. can still make money doing the only thing that we seem to be good at. It may not seem at first glance to make a whole lot of sense, particularly to non-Americans, but I've met a lot of fairly powerful people who are very, very nervous about where the New/Global Economy is headed, and how the U.S. is going to maintain its standard of living [2] in the future. If you're looking for a near-magic solution, which you are if you're a politician, grabbing onto intellectual property as the salvation of high-cost Western society probably isn't the stupidest thing you'll do all day.
[1] Much of which is attributable to having had the good luck not to get involved in any home-turf land wars (like Europe, which got flattened, some of it twice) and getting on board the capitalism bus early (unlike Asia, which is just coming around to this whole market-economy business).
[1A] I'm using "microcode" here to represent basically all IP-derived exports, which includes most pharmaceuti
Yeah, unfortunately the Wikipedia nerds have this love/hate thing going on with Slashdot, and I think that article got deleted. It was a shame, too, because it was pretty good -- and seriously, what are they afraid of, that Wikipedia is going to run out of paper? It's an online encyclopedia, you can have as many articles on as many bizarre topics as you want. I bet the Slashdot Trolling Phenomena article got more hits than a lot of stuff on WP, but no, they had to get their panties all up in a self-righteous bunch and pull it. Lamers.
What I think is particularly crappy is that when WP deletes an article, they not only delete the most recent version, but they also delete all the historical versions of it. To me that borders on offensive; there's really no reason they couldn't just mark the article as logically deleted but still allow people to see what content used to be there.
Yes I think many, if not most, modern filesystems will. I don't really see why a zero-length file should be any harder to handle than a directory, and they generally don't take up any storage space on disk (they obviously do take some space, but not in the way most users think of it). Seems like you could just create an empty file by writing an inode to the table and specifying a zero-byte length, so it wouldn't be linked to or take up any actual data blocks on disk. It would be like a hard link, but pointing to nothing. That doesn't sound like it would be that hard to do, if you really wanted to -- if it's not possible, it's probably less because of infeasibility than because somebody thinks it would be a misfeature or cause problems.