Printing the wrong bar code should be pretty easy to check against though. If a name has the wrong bar code next to it (and these could be read by a hand scanner easily), then that's pretty damming proof that there is a problem. Spot checking is all you'd need to keep a high confidence in the bar codes.
I'd much rather have a paper tape under a window that prints out your votes in a clearly legible form (you vote for Candidate X and it prints his name on the tape. At the end of your session, it prints the tape out and lets you watch it go by, then it hides your tape for the next person and prints his votes right on the same spot. The printer should be a generic receipt printer like you see at checkouts, and noisy like one (dot matrix) so it's obvious when it's printing.
The problem with a system like this is that it's more work for the polling place volunteers to replace the paper tape when it runs out, but it should be very very easy to count (the system could add little barcodes next to each name to make them machine readable for faster recounting if need be, but a person checking each one by hand would also work).
The accounting on whole rolls of paper tape should be pretty straightforward too. It'll be hard for someone to toss in another roll like they can toss in an extra 1000 votes because the number of rolls should be a small. In fact if it's designed properly, I suspect you could run a whole day on a single roll and avoid having to change them out. For true paranoia, you could have the machine print out some sort of crypto key (public key) on the roll when it first starts printing so you can verify that it came from a particular voting machine later on (and wasn't swapped out by an unscrupulous worker).
Yeah, at the end of the article he talked about how the performance wasn't as good as what he was getting with the card normally, especially with uploads.
IMHO, the loss of 802.11 was too much. The Air is built around the 802.11 support.
The thing is, there's no reason a PNG has to be larger than the GIF it replaces. The problem is that people encode PNGs poorly (admittedly it's much harder to get right than GIF), like encoding an image as a 24 bit truecolor when all you need is an 8 bit palleted image.
On the other hand, often times the PNG is completely redone and looks a lot nicer than the older GIF, at which point the tradeoff is between quality and file size. I don't think most web users mind an increase in quality, especially if it amounts to something like 100ms of loading time (total) on even a slow DSL link.
IIRC, that's actually smaller than it was before the 2.0 makeover. Before that you have to look back a long way to find a thinner and lighter Slashdot. Probably back before the sidebar was added. Slashdot has always been a fairly heavy website unless you use the lite mode, but at least it has a lot of content so that's not such a bad thing.
The biggest thing I'd argue is that advertisements have gotten heavier over the years, with static images giving way to animated images giving way to flash objects.
NetBSD is for people who want to install Unix on their Ukranian made MIPS powered PDA like device.
OpenSolaris was supposed to be for people who really like Solaris but don't much care for official support or something. I've only ever used it once, for a precompiled application that was built on it. It's not really that bad to configure although it did require several trips to google to get everything set up properly. My subjective opinion was that it was kinda slow for the hardware we were running it on.
The good news is that it's so damn hard to implement a crypto system properly that the botnet authors have probably screwed something up, especially since they can't just rely on a single host (or pool of hosts) to store the crypto keys (those would be an easy target for the anti-botnet folks). Key management is the #1 area where people screw up their crypto systems.
Shoot, I was getting upwards of 8Mbps on the i386 torrent. Strangely now that I have the file (only took 20 minutes or so), my upload rate hasn't jumped through the roof like I expected. I'm not even on Comcast.
"Most FreeBSD users are die-hard twm fanatics"? Where did you get this idea? About the only good thing I can say about TWM is that it doesn't require much in the way of resources, and it's installed by default I guess. Pretty much everybody installs a different window manager though if they can.
I saw a demo awhile back for a game for iPhone that used the tilt sensor as the input device. Plus, you do have one button on it. Directional control and a button are enough for Sonic, or any Atari 2600 game.
While I'll agree with you on wanting a third party to verify that yes, it is actually encrypting your data (handing the drive off to a data recovery type place and see if they can get anything off of it should do the trick, since that's pretty much what an attacker would do), but all of the other stuff you mentioned are probably too paranoid for a consumer level device like this. I'm not sure what "non-imprinting" memory is either. I'm sure the key will be stored in volatile memory, but if you're worried about people deep freezing the drive while it's running so they can read the data out of the RAM chip later, well, that's a bit too paranoid for something that regular people might be able to afford. Maybe if Fujitsu encased all of the drive logic in epoxy? Ultimately any security measure could theoretically be defeated if the guy has physical access to your drive and the will (and budget!) to do it, Ultimately you have to choose which threats are most realistic and guard against them.
Where do you see that? The article is so light on details that you can't have gotten that from it. I thought it would just install a bios module that asks you for the password when it boots, and use that password until it is power cycled or whatever. That should even be compatible with the hibernate mode of most laptops, which would make it useful against laptop theft.
Storing the key on the drive with no authentication would be retarded, the only thing it would protect you from are those data recovery places that people who don't have proper backups use.
I think the concerns run deeper. What if the modifications are in the ASICs instead of in the flash?
Luckily, while there is a theoretical possibility of an attack using that vector, it seems unlikely to me once I consider the difficulty of adding a full speed packet sniffer on a Cisco that doesn't impact performance noticeably and has some way to get data out of a network you don't know. It's not like the government says "I'm buying this router to install in classified network X", rather they buy from a big lot in a warehouse and install them where needed.
A bigger concern might be a hacked PIX that (for instance) allows an IP address through if it sends a series of carefully crafted packets. The bad guys could then spam the internet with these packets looking for suddenly vulnerable networks. They wouldn't even have to be government related, there are plenty of private sector networks that would be a treasure trove for some malicious party.
Of course if someone was going to this amount of trouble, they could probably get the same vulnerabilities in official Cisco gear (especially stuff that is manufactured in China or Southeast Asia, which is almost all of it I think). The only major stumbling block is that if it ever is discovered, then there will be hell to pay.
Given the maximum reflectivity of the materials of the day, I suspect you'd have a lot of trouble with your dish melting. Also, parabolic surfaces are surprisingly difficult to create, especially with ancient world technology. The other problem is that it would have one specific focal length (albeit a longer area of near-focus) which means it would only be really effective against ships a certain distance away.
When I was a kid my brother got a model kit of a "YF-21", which was apparently some sort of concept for a SR-71 with a drone attached to the back and missile bays on the bottom. The model had room for 4 missiles. I have no idea how close that was to any plane that never made it into production, but it seemed pretty cool to me at the time.
Eh? Mythbusters did a followup of that death ray episode where they actually invited the professor and his students out from MIT to recreate the experiment in the actual conditions (a boat on the water, not standing on a sawhorse in a parking lot 10' from the mirrors), and it turns out that while it's possible to aim mirrors at a stationary target, it is very difficult or impossible to ignite an anchored boat 200' away, at least not without computer guided mirrors (which Archimedes did not have) or some sort of mechanical aiming system far more sophisticated than has ever been described in any of the ancient texts.
Ultimately, even if you could get the death ray to work, it would be far less practical than the other solutions of the day (firing lit arrows at the ships). It's an interesting idea, and one that has promise at the small scale (testing on land with just a few mirrors to see if you can heat something up with concentrated sun beams), but on the large scale against a moving (hostile!) adversary you have almost no chance of success. Plus, the city was on the wrong coast anyway, so the whole idea was dead before it even started.
Most DVDs are released in both widescreen and fullscreen formats if there is a widescreen version. As far as I understand, the pan and scan (fullscreen) version is typically the better seller and will be the one a retailer will tend to stock if they have to choose.
WRT projectors and widescreen laptops, it can be made to work, but the widescreen on the laptop is one more point of possible failure. I've seen plenty of instances where the laptop's screen is widescreen and the left and right bars are just cut off in the projected image, and other times where the text gets squished, or the laptop's display gets stretched and looks horrible. While the fix should be easy, sometimes it isn't. I've had plenty of cases where someone sets everything in a way that seems correct (3:4 aspect, resolution the projector can handle, etc...) and it still doesn't work. On the other hand, I've never had trouble with my own laptop, it's always "that coworker" the one who manages to always have trouble with everything tech related.
Also, it's time to set up a formal debate with the Flat Earth guys--don't supress them man! You are just biased in your round Earth worldview! Sure, they'll handle themselves just about as well as creationists in such a debate (at least when the real scientists come prepared), but that's no reason not to keep going back and debating it over and over again.
I can't say that I'm entirely sad that Michael Bay isn't creating an Alita movie. Sure he may be preventing other people from working on it, but at least we won't have to sit through a summer blockbuster where she hacks Tiphares with a mac and everything explodes constantly.
The smaller ones would have more surface area though, which means more of it would burn up in the atmosphere. Also, if it hit the ocean a bunch of small strikes would almost certainly be better because a lot of the wave energy could be canceled out by other strikes (some energy will be added together, but it should be less than the total energy of a single massive strike).
What's more, it's a game where the entire metagame revolves around how badly you can screw other players. If there is anybody who is going to go through the source code line by line to find some sort of exploit they can use to screw over other customers it is an Eve player.
Slashdot Mirror
Printing the wrong bar code should be pretty easy to check against though. If a name has the wrong bar code next to it (and these could be read by a hand scanner easily), then that's pretty damming proof that there is a problem. Spot checking is all you'd need to keep a high confidence in the bar codes.
I'd much rather have a paper tape under a window that prints out your votes in a clearly legible form (you vote for Candidate X and it prints his name on the tape. At the end of your session, it prints the tape out and lets you watch it go by, then it hides your tape for the next person and prints his votes right on the same spot. The printer should be a generic receipt printer like you see at checkouts, and noisy like one (dot matrix) so it's obvious when it's printing.
The problem with a system like this is that it's more work for the polling place volunteers to replace the paper tape when it runs out, but it should be very very easy to count (the system could add little barcodes next to each name to make them machine readable for faster recounting if need be, but a person checking each one by hand would also work).
The accounting on whole rolls of paper tape should be pretty straightforward too. It'll be hard for someone to toss in another roll like they can toss in an extra 1000 votes because the number of rolls should be a small. In fact if it's designed properly, I suspect you could run a whole day on a single roll and avoid having to change them out. For true paranoia, you could have the machine print out some sort of crypto key (public key) on the roll when it first starts printing so you can verify that it came from a particular voting machine later on (and wasn't swapped out by an unscrupulous worker).
Yeah, at the end of the article he talked about how the performance wasn't as good as what he was getting with the card normally, especially with uploads.
IMHO, the loss of 802.11 was too much. The Air is built around the 802.11 support.
Clearly the OP wants some sort of nuclear powered laptop.
Of all of the laptops on the market, the Air is really the closest to his vision. The only cord you need is a power cord.
If only they would do the same thing to the guys writing these worms.
The thing is, there's no reason a PNG has to be larger than the GIF it replaces. The problem is that people encode PNGs poorly (admittedly it's much harder to get right than GIF), like encoding an image as a 24 bit truecolor when all you need is an 8 bit palleted image.
On the other hand, often times the PNG is completely redone and looks a lot nicer than the older GIF, at which point the tradeoff is between quality and file size. I don't think most web users mind an increase in quality, especially if it amounts to something like 100ms of loading time (total) on even a slow DSL link.
IIRC, that's actually smaller than it was before the 2.0 makeover. Before that you have to look back a long way to find a thinner and lighter Slashdot. Probably back before the sidebar was added. Slashdot has always been a fairly heavy website unless you use the lite mode, but at least it has a lot of content so that's not such a bad thing.
The biggest thing I'd argue is that advertisements have gotten heavier over the years, with static images giving way to animated images giving way to flash objects.
That's exactly my point. Real encryption is hard and it's not likely that even a well organized bot author is going to get it right.
NetBSD is for people who want to install Unix on their Ukranian made MIPS powered PDA like device.
OpenSolaris was supposed to be for people who really like Solaris but don't much care for official support or something. I've only ever used it once, for a precompiled application that was built on it. It's not really that bad to configure although it did require several trips to google to get everything set up properly. My subjective opinion was that it was kinda slow for the hardware we were running it on.
The good news is that it's so damn hard to implement a crypto system properly that the botnet authors have probably screwed something up, especially since they can't just rely on a single host (or pool of hosts) to store the crypto keys (those would be an easy target for the anti-botnet folks). Key management is the #1 area where people screw up their crypto systems.
Shoot, I was getting upwards of 8Mbps on the i386 torrent. Strangely now that I have the file (only took 20 minutes or so), my upload rate hasn't jumped through the roof like I expected. I'm not even on Comcast.
"Most FreeBSD users are die-hard twm fanatics"? Where did you get this idea? About the only good thing I can say about TWM is that it doesn't require much in the way of resources, and it's installed by default I guess. Pretty much everybody installs a different window manager though if they can.
I saw a demo awhile back for a game for iPhone that used the tilt sensor as the input device. Plus, you do have one button on it. Directional control and a button are enough for Sonic, or any Atari 2600 game.
I thought they just make up a completely arbitrary number that was kind of big and said "this is how much data is in the Library of Congress."
Clearly what we need is the ISO standardizing the LoC into a proper unit.
While I'll agree with you on wanting a third party to verify that yes, it is actually encrypting your data (handing the drive off to a data recovery type place and see if they can get anything off of it should do the trick, since that's pretty much what an attacker would do), but all of the other stuff you mentioned are probably too paranoid for a consumer level device like this. I'm not sure what "non-imprinting" memory is either. I'm sure the key will be stored in volatile memory, but if you're worried about people deep freezing the drive while it's running so they can read the data out of the RAM chip later, well, that's a bit too paranoid for something that regular people might be able to afford. Maybe if Fujitsu encased all of the drive logic in epoxy? Ultimately any security measure could theoretically be defeated if the guy has physical access to your drive and the will (and budget!) to do it, Ultimately you have to choose which threats are most realistic and guard against them.
Where do you see that? The article is so light on details that you can't have gotten that from it. I thought it would just install a bios module that asks you for the password when it boots, and use that password until it is power cycled or whatever. That should even be compatible with the hibernate mode of most laptops, which would make it useful against laptop theft.
Storing the key on the drive with no authentication would be retarded, the only thing it would protect you from are those data recovery places that people who don't have proper backups use.
I think the concerns run deeper. What if the modifications are in the ASICs instead of in the flash?
Luckily, while there is a theoretical possibility of an attack using that vector, it seems unlikely to me once I consider the difficulty of adding a full speed packet sniffer on a Cisco that doesn't impact performance noticeably and has some way to get data out of a network you don't know. It's not like the government says "I'm buying this router to install in classified network X", rather they buy from a big lot in a warehouse and install them where needed.
A bigger concern might be a hacked PIX that (for instance) allows an IP address through if it sends a series of carefully crafted packets. The bad guys could then spam the internet with these packets looking for suddenly vulnerable networks. They wouldn't even have to be government related, there are plenty of private sector networks that would be a treasure trove for some malicious party.
Of course if someone was going to this amount of trouble, they could probably get the same vulnerabilities in official Cisco gear (especially stuff that is manufactured in China or Southeast Asia, which is almost all of it I think). The only major stumbling block is that if it ever is discovered, then there will be hell to pay.
Given the maximum reflectivity of the materials of the day, I suspect you'd have a lot of trouble with your dish melting. Also, parabolic surfaces are surprisingly difficult to create, especially with ancient world technology. The other problem is that it would have one specific focal length (albeit a longer area of near-focus) which means it would only be really effective against ships a certain distance away.
When I was a kid my brother got a model kit of a "YF-21", which was apparently some sort of concept for a SR-71 with a drone attached to the back and missile bays on the bottom. The model had room for 4 missiles. I have no idea how close that was to any plane that never made it into production, but it seemed pretty cool to me at the time.
Eh? Mythbusters did a followup of that death ray episode where they actually invited the professor and his students out from MIT to recreate the experiment in the actual conditions (a boat on the water, not standing on a sawhorse in a parking lot 10' from the mirrors), and it turns out that while it's possible to aim mirrors at a stationary target, it is very difficult or impossible to ignite an anchored boat 200' away, at least not without computer guided mirrors (which Archimedes did not have) or some sort of mechanical aiming system far more sophisticated than has ever been described in any of the ancient texts.
Ultimately, even if you could get the death ray to work, it would be far less practical than the other solutions of the day (firing lit arrows at the ships). It's an interesting idea, and one that has promise at the small scale (testing on land with just a few mirrors to see if you can heat something up with concentrated sun beams), but on the large scale against a moving (hostile!) adversary you have almost no chance of success. Plus, the city was on the wrong coast anyway, so the whole idea was dead before it even started.
Most DVDs are released in both widescreen and fullscreen formats if there is a widescreen version. As far as I understand, the pan and scan (fullscreen) version is typically the better seller and will be the one a retailer will tend to stock if they have to choose.
WRT projectors and widescreen laptops, it can be made to work, but the widescreen on the laptop is one more point of possible failure. I've seen plenty of instances where the laptop's screen is widescreen and the left and right bars are just cut off in the projected image, and other times where the text gets squished, or the laptop's display gets stretched and looks horrible. While the fix should be easy, sometimes it isn't. I've had plenty of cases where someone sets everything in a way that seems correct (3:4 aspect, resolution the projector can handle, etc...) and it still doesn't work. On the other hand, I've never had trouble with my own laptop, it's always "that coworker" the one who manages to always have trouble with everything tech related.
Also, it's time to set up a formal debate with the Flat Earth guys--don't supress them man! You are just biased in your round Earth worldview! Sure, they'll handle themselves just about as well as creationists in such a debate (at least when the real scientists come prepared), but that's no reason not to keep going back and debating it over and over again.
I can't say that I'm entirely sad that Michael Bay isn't creating an Alita movie. Sure he may be preventing other people from working on it, but at least we won't have to sit through a summer blockbuster where she hacks Tiphares with a mac and everything explodes constantly.
The smaller ones would have more surface area though, which means more of it would burn up in the atmosphere. Also, if it hit the ocean a bunch of small strikes would almost certainly be better because a lot of the wave energy could be canceled out by other strikes (some energy will be added together, but it should be less than the total energy of a single massive strike).
What's more, it's a game where the entire metagame revolves around how badly you can screw other players. If there is anybody who is going to go through the source code line by line to find some sort of exploit they can use to screw over other customers it is an Eve player.