MTBF for hard drives, at least in my experience, is much shorter than for flash drives. I've owned five USB flash drives and four compactflash cards, as well as several dozen hard drives. Three of those drives have failed. Zero of the flash units have failed. At work I have seen dozens of hard drives fail, and not a single usb drive die. (though I did have to do data recovery on one flash drive with a corrupt partition) Nodding to another poster, yes, about 50% of those drives were deathstars. Half of the rest were quantum fireball 6.4gb. A few I was able to salvage data from, but drives like the chirping deathstars were a total loss. (if it won't spin, you're pretty much out of options) Not having any flash drives fail I can't say how easy they are to data recover, but I will admit I don't expect to have good odds.
There are data recovery businesses you can ship HDDs and flash drives to for recovery. Their odds of success seem to be better for flash drives, I think since a head crash is physical damage that has no real workaround. If you have enough money you can pay a lab to pop the top off the flash nand and stick it in a test fixture and pull the data straight off the storage arrays on the die.
Currently all flash drives are of a small enough capacity to be very easy and convenient to back up. I carry a 4gb cruzer, (large even by today's thumb drive standards) and it gets rsynced to my laptop about once a week, taking about 10 seconds. The laptop and its 80gb HDD get rsynced to the server about twice a month, and takes 10-30 minutes to complete. This makes the loss of a flash drive somewhat less serious of a problem for me at least. Less data to lose, and more recent backups available.
Comparing a hard drive to a flash drive, they appear to both have very similar structure. Both have an interface - the HDD has an onboard controller card for IDE interface and the flash has a USB interface chip. Both HDD and flash nand can experience "pinhole" failures, loss of a block or loss of a storage cell, and both have programming to compensate and "spare" the bad block so the error does not affect the user. A flash drive totally dying is no different than losing the onboard controller card on a HDD. (though in that case, admittedly, you might be able to scrounge up a replacement)
Hard drives are very vulnerable to physical shock while in use. I have seen warnings on almost all flash drives and CF cards I have bought that also warn against physical shock though I don't know why and have never heard of a flash drive failing due to impact. Twice I've seen a HD head-crash due to mishandling while spun up, and twice I've seen a HD require "impact maintenance" to get it to spin up.
I have a lot more confidence in flash storage than I do in magnetic storage. I also expect flash-based hard drives to be in at least 20% of new laptops five years from now.
I believe the point was "if you're looking for racism, you are more likely to 'find' it than if you were not looking". So actions that were not intended to be racist but were either poorly worded, short-sighted, or coincidence start getting interpereted by people as racist.
Just because someone thinks you have an agenda does not mean you do.
If the recommendation system was 100% random, you'd be guaranteed to find some combinations that someone would find offensive, and yet a truly random selection by definition cannot be biased. While this system is probably not entirely random, I'm sure there's a good deal of randomness in it, given that human interaction is involved. This just means that more of the "sensitive" individuals are going to be "seeing red" so to speak.
Also, given the human interaction, it's not unreasonable to assume that someone looking for attention has found a way to influence the system in a direction that gets someone else all flustered, which is how they entertain themselves. So if you must insist that someone is trying to upset you, maybe you're right, but the intention may simply have been to tick you off. (mission accomplished?)
If you think about it, it makes sense that a scientist in his era would shine brightly. At the time he was in his prime, there were a lot of important discoveries being made which opened up a lot of new territory in which to make new discoveries. Now you could view science as a much more mature study... there may still be a lot of room for new discoveries but they are not the easy ones that can be expressed with 5 characters like "e=mc2". Now such similar discoveries require collaboration of teams of scientists several years of work to publish papers that would require hundreds of pages of text to describe.
I suppose I can summarize this by saying it's not that the people are not as brilliant as they used to be, but that the noteworthy acheivements that are yet to be found are much more difficult to conquer, so we see them much less frequently.
Another possible influence on this may be that at Einstein's time, there was a world war going on. There's nothing quite like the military to concentrate talented people for research and development, and to provide a nearly limitless source of funding to speed up the research. We don't have that now.
I was just going to point out the kW ps's in the new quad core macs. Looks like the "Power Mac G5 (Late 2005)" models ship either with a 710W or 1kW supply. Probably the ones with the quad 2.5's are shipping with the 1kW, and the slower quads (2.0 and possibly 2.3) ship with the 710W. I know the 1kW monsters ship with an industrial power cord on them - it's not the standard 3 pin "D" connector cord you see on 99% of current computers, it's a rectangular block with three blades, and a much thicker cord.
Funny I haven't seen any sort of warnings or advisements on the power draw on that cord - the 2.5QP can probably draw enough power to overheat some of the cheaper extension cords and power strips. (I have seen some that are only rated 7A, which would be about 840W) They must assume everyone that's using those is plugging directly into 15A service convenience outlets. (1800W)
Now I'm curious - I think I'll take a watt meter into work on Tuesday and see how much juice a taxed 2.5QP draws from the wall. I'll need to push the graphics card as well as the CPUs for greatest draw - any suggestions on what app to run? Maybe UT 2004 with all the goodies on, on a nice 30" display?
The EULA is a way for the company to get you to agree to certain terms (usually surrendering certain rights) in exchange for getting the software. If the software installs even when you click DISAGREE, all that means is you are getting the software (for better or worse, as the case may be) without having agreed to surrender the righs listed in the EULA. (the EULA is NOT for your protection, it's to protect the manufacturer from YOU)
NOW, one standard subset of the rights you surrender when agreeing with the EULA basically says you agree that the software is "as-is", "not fit for any particular purpose", etc. Basically you agree not to sue the manufacturer for any ill-effects caused by the software, even if the effects are known or the manufacturer was grossly neglegent in their design. Oftentimes these provisions are actually illegal or legally unenforceable though, but they basically stuff anything in there they can think of that makes them feel warm and fuzzy that they are bulletproof.
So this does not represent an illegal act, but rather it opens up the software distributor to numerous legal liabilities that the EULA would otherwise have afforded them some protection from. Given the extremely nasty nature of the software it installs, this should make a perfect target for lawsuits, since by installing the software without getting an agreement to the EULA, they have essentially taken off all their legal armor and stand naked before the courts.
I don't know if the installer basically behaves the same for the agree button as it does for the disagree, but from the article it rather souds that way. That being the case, it would be extremely difficult for Sony to prove that anyone agreed to the EULA. (normally the fact that the software got installed indicates you agreed, but not in this case) That means anyone that ran the installer has an opportunity to file a lawsuit based on harm received from their software, since Sony has no proof you agreed to their terms. (agreed to not sue them)
Since we now know how to build a mammoth, the question becomes "how do we DO it?" The trick at this point appears to be to reverse the previous process we just completed... to take a known sequence as a map and to produce intact strands of DNA that corresponds to that sequence. Once that is completed, we already have the technology to place other DNA in an egg and then we can grow our first mammoth!
There are actualy quite a few good reasons for that investment. Pens will draw a lot more than pencils, by weight. And weight is everything when you are delivering groceries to orbit.
Also, pencils must be sharpened. NASA is crazy about anything that makes a mess. Keeping a capsule clean in zero g is very hard to do - dust and crud can gather on ALL SURFACES including the "ceiling". And there's a lot of delicate equipment up there. Pencil shavings are not something NASA wants to have to deal with. (it also increases the amount of trash generated, and all garbage has to be hauled back to earth, it cannot simply be jettisoned) I can just imagine their reaction to eraser-crumbs.
Peltiers are nice in theory but they have one major drawback not many know about. They are not efficient. I have a development peltier here (1" x 1", 128 junctions, 12v) and it will condense water on the cold side almost instantly. BUT... on the hot side, I have a heat sink and it's pumping out lots of heat - a lot more than what's being pulled from the cold side. It draws about 2 amps at 12v, so it's dissipating about 25 watts of heat in addition to what's being pumped from the cold side.
So peltiers actually work to generate heat in your vicinity, and have to be kept cooled. This peltier will try to hold about a 45 degree temp difference between the hot and cold side. So if the hot side heats up to say, 95 degrees due to inefficiency, it can only drop the cold side down to 50 degrees.
I've also heard people comment about "stacking" peltiers, to increase the cooling. (temp differential) This is great if they are not each producing 25 watts of heat. If you have two of them stacked, the "downwind" peltier is having to dump what... 35 or so watts of heat to its hot side, in addition to the 25 it's adding, so you're getting closer to 60 watts of heat being sent to the heat sink now, so you know it's going to get a lot hotter than with one peltier - which will raise your cold side temp which is what you were trying NOT to do. Stacking peltiers is rarely useful or productive.
However, I haven't and wouldn't want to try to remove safari to see if Apple allows it so easily
"Uninstalling" safari is just as simple. drag to trash, empty. done.
Unlike IE on windows, safari is a stand-alone user-level application that is not used for anything besides web browsing, so removing it does not cripple anything.
If I'm reading this correctly, the reward for a prime > 10k digits is twice that the reward for the next prime 10k. So wouldn't it make more sense for them to skip ahead to 10k digits and start looking there instead?
With just the server records, it's not possible to prove that someone infringed. As you pointed out, no copyrighted data is sent to the server. The clients merely report that they are completing pieces. It would be trivially easy to modify a BT client to lie throug its teeth all day long saying it's receiving pieces when in fact it is merely connecting to the swarm and ignoring all the peers. What the server has we would call "circumstancial evidence". It may help increase the likelyhood of guilt or make real evidence look more credible, but in and of itself it proves nothing.
If I write a letter to a friend and say "I robbed FSB bank last week", and the bank was indeed robbed last week, that letter is circumstancial evidence and makes me a suspect. It does NOT prove that I robbed the bank. For that you require evidence.
I suspect this is why the case was dropped. The only reason he was roughed up the way he was is because either (A) as some suspect, some money changed hands, or (B) the prossicutor did not have a good understanding of what laws had ellegedly been broken. The proessicutors are on a budget just like the rest of the world, and it wastes their money to chase around a case that cannot be brought to trial, money that could be spent investigating cases that are more likely to result in a conviction. So unless someone was funding them or someone screwed up, this would not have happened.
I personally believe some money changed hands, and that the prossicutor knew there was no case, but still took it on to get himself or his department their cut. Just a matter of the RIAA or some derivitive thereof paying off a legal system to scare someone to quit doing something that technically isn't illegal. Considering the impact they got, they probably consider it to have been a very good deal for the money. Since they were only rewarded for their actions, this means they'll probably do it again.
If the machine comes with say, XP, on a restore partition and without install CDs, and say you want to install XP... that means you get to buy XP again. Most people would find offense with that.
Clint Eastwood, in Pale Rider, said it well... "A man's gotta know his limitations." Quadrapolegics don't make good fighter pilots either. That doesn't mean we need to modify the planes to accomodate them. There's nothing wrong with making small changes to allow disabled people an easier life - a ramp on a curb is not too much of an inconvenience for society to provide for people in wheelchairs. But expecting an entertainment system to be totally redesigned to accomodate 1% of the population, is presumptuous.
Good spook action is invisible, the quiet defenders of Truth, Justice and the American Way of life and all that stuff.
I'd disagree with that. Do you not mind if your rights are violated, just so long as you are not aware of it? That seems like a more scarry proposition, to be getting wronged over and over without even knowing it happened. (that'd be the 'see no evil' of the three monkeys wouldn't it?)
Let me explain why "let things run their course" does not work with credit reports.
Someone I used to work with got an unpleasant surprise when he was applying for a car loan. He was rejected due to bad credit. He got a credit report and found out that he had a bounced check from a gas station in Oregon a year previous. He had never been to Oregon before.
He contacted the station owner to find out that someone with the same first and last name as him had passed a bad check. The account had long since been closed and that name was no longer living at the account's address, so the owner searched the web and found a hit on the name, my coworker, and filed a nonpayment record on his credit report.
Now whether the owner believed him or not that it was not him, it really did not matter. The owner wanted his $28 and was not going to remove the mark until he paid him. This is extortion. And in this case, there's really nothing you can do about it.
He ended up sending a money order for $28 plus bounced check charge to the owner, who then removed the mark from his credit report.
Now in this case the owner had at least something tangible (the check) and at least a very weak reason to point the finger, (same name) but really, he didn't even need that. He could have just decided to thumb through the phonebook and file a false report on anyone he spotted, and really there is no easy recourse for the victim. Eventually the mark on the report will expire, but all you can do is wait if the person really does not want to remove it or is extorting you and you don't feel like paying him off.
Whoever set up the credit reporting system with so weak of safeguards and checks/balances, needs to be slapped repeatedly.
"Ultimately the TPM itself isn't inherently evil or good. It will depend entirely on how it's used, and in that sphere, market and political forces will be more important than technology."
When it comes right down to it, this statement is totally false. In society, you will always get a completely diverse slice of people. To say "a gun is not dangerous - it's just a matter of the care with which people use it" is laughable. Of course a gun is dangerous. You cannot simply dismiss this by saying that if handled correctly, the gun need not be dangerous. There will always be a small subset of society that doesn't care about your morals or how you think the world should behave, and they will do as they please. And when that happens, you'll see the worst possible outcomes turn into reality.
So to say that this Orwellian behavior is not a bad thing just so long as everyone in power uses it morally and responsibly basically means we can safely assume that someone out there in power is going to willingly and gladly abuse the system to their greatest advantage. Which means we can fully expect the worst possible outcome of any given situation as long as people are involved in it.
Anyone that says this "every citizen under the magnifying glass" is a good thing is either (A) completely oblivious to how those in power will immediately take advantage of and abuse it, or (B) are one of those people in power that want to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, the people proposing these laws are in group B, while most of the voters are in group A. So, I guess we're just plain screwed.
In fact, couldn't an open WAP be an "attractive nuisance"
Almost anything can be considered an "attractive nuisance". (any act that doesn't constitute "paranoid" could probably be justified as an "attractive nuisance" by someone) This point of view goes nicely with the "blame the victim" mentality.
Just because I leave my car parked on the curb with the door unlocked does not mean it's "my fault" if the car gets stolen. I certainly increased the odds by my behavior, but it's still the thief that is ultimately responsible for his actions. I didn't make him steal my car by leaving the door unlocked. Making a crime more likely to occur does not equal being primarily responsible for it if it does occur.
I am however in favor of "partial liability", where the owner of a WAP used illegally by someone else be held partially responsible. Not so much because he is responsible for the actions of the other, but rather that his actions greatly increased the likelyhood of a crime being comitted. I think I should append "knowingly" as well - I'd make it a requirement to prove that the person knew or should have known his actions would greatly increase the probability of illegal activities, say to 30% or higher probability, for him to be held partly liable.
Walk down a dark street at night while counting your stack of 20's and you will very likely get mugged. Are you responsible for the mugging? No, but you deserve little pity for having been mugged.
Spoofing the mac may not be effective for masking yourself from the target machine, but may be very effective in masking yourself from being identified by an investigator. Imagine spoofing the MAC of your wireless card, and connecting to your neighbor's access point, using his laptop's wireless mac address. It would be a farily tight frame, with your neighbor's wap log files indicating his MAC during the time/date of the intrusions. Possibly enough for "reasonable doubt." Unfortunately this is almost trivially simple to do. (on a Macintosh or unix box anyway)
sudo ifconfig en1 lladdr 00:11:22:33:44:55
(requires Mac OS 10.3.6'ish or later, works fine on 10.3.9, nonfunctional in 10.3.5)
ya, the annoying thing here is, when a customer stuffs in a CD from a manufacturer of a product, and it asks them for their admin password, almost 100% of users just blindly type it in, so there's really nothing to stop them from pulling a Sony on the rest of us too. (and 98% of software doesnt need admin rights to install, locally for that user) Though I wonder what restrictions software manufacturers have to agree to, to get that Macintosh logo on their box? That'd be a case I'd like to see... somebody try to pull a sony on us and have Apple come down on them with a BFH.
As it is with the sony rootkit, it makes you wonder... (1) do the manufacturers have to agree to anything to get that Windows logo on their box? (besides paying MS a mint?) Like that their installers may not intentionally compromise the security of the computer? and if so, (2) why has microsoft not gone after them with a vengence?
These things always come with software, which you must install
Depends on the computer. Some have adequate support software right out of the box. My mom just bought a new digicam and was asking me how to set it up. "Just plug it in". "But what about the CD? It says I have to install the software!" "Ignore that. Plug in the camera." "OK it's in... oh there it is, iPhoto just opened up. It's working!"
but organic mercury is small enough to find it's way into your body fats
I thought mercury was an element? (Hg?) It's not like hydrocarbons where you can have long chains and short chains. An atom is an atom, no matter if you find it in nature or in industry, and it does not vary in size from one atom of mercury to another. Maybe you are thinking of some compounds that include mercury? (being a metal, I'd expect mercury combines quite readily with oxygen)
Maybe the view's a little paranoid, but with business a little paranoia is a good thing. Several times I've seen it suggested that a competitor might hire some cheap labor to click on their competition's ads, to cause them to get charged more for their advertisement. I wonder has this company even explored this option? It doesn't sound like they have made any connection between Google and the clicks, and are just aiming for what to them appears to be the most obvious source, without any evidence whatsoever. Most obvious != guilty. There is no way they can get "reasonable doubt" out of this.
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MTBF for hard drives, at least in my experience, is much shorter than for flash drives. I've owned five USB flash drives and four compactflash cards, as well as several dozen hard drives. Three of those drives have failed. Zero of the flash units have failed. At work I have seen dozens of hard drives fail, and not a single usb drive die. (though I did have to do data recovery on one flash drive with a corrupt partition) Nodding to another poster, yes, about 50% of those drives were deathstars. Half of the rest were quantum fireball 6.4gb. A few I was able to salvage data from, but drives like the chirping deathstars were a total loss. (if it won't spin, you're pretty much out of options) Not having any flash drives fail I can't say how easy they are to data recover, but I will admit I don't expect to have good odds.
There are data recovery businesses you can ship HDDs and flash drives to for recovery. Their odds of success seem to be better for flash drives, I think since a head crash is physical damage that has no real workaround. If you have enough money you can pay a lab to pop the top off the flash nand and stick it in a test fixture and pull the data straight off the storage arrays on the die.
Currently all flash drives are of a small enough capacity to be very easy and convenient to back up. I carry a 4gb cruzer, (large even by today's thumb drive standards) and it gets rsynced to my laptop about once a week, taking about 10 seconds. The laptop and its 80gb HDD get rsynced to the server about twice a month, and takes 10-30 minutes to complete. This makes the loss of a flash drive somewhat less serious of a problem for me at least. Less data to lose, and more recent backups available.
Comparing a hard drive to a flash drive, they appear to both have very similar structure. Both have an interface - the HDD has an onboard controller card for IDE interface and the flash has a USB interface chip. Both HDD and flash nand can experience "pinhole" failures, loss of a block or loss of a storage cell, and both have programming to compensate and "spare" the bad block so the error does not affect the user. A flash drive totally dying is no different than losing the onboard controller card on a HDD. (though in that case, admittedly, you might be able to scrounge up a replacement)
Hard drives are very vulnerable to physical shock while in use. I have seen warnings on almost all flash drives and CF cards I have bought that also warn against physical shock though I don't know why and have never heard of a flash drive failing due to impact. Twice I've seen a HD head-crash due to mishandling while spun up, and twice I've seen a HD require "impact maintenance" to get it to spin up.
I have a lot more confidence in flash storage than I do in magnetic storage. I also expect flash-based hard drives to be in at least 20% of new laptops five years from now.
The final report will affect enterprises such as Sir Richard Branson's SpaceShipOne."
Sorry, but the SpaceShipOne is no Enterprise.
I believe the point was "if you're looking for racism, you are more likely to 'find' it than if you were not looking". So actions that were not intended to be racist but were either poorly worded, short-sighted, or coincidence start getting interpereted by people as racist.
Just because someone thinks you have an agenda does not mean you do.
If the recommendation system was 100% random, you'd be guaranteed to find some combinations that someone would find offensive, and yet a truly random selection by definition cannot be biased. While this system is probably not entirely random, I'm sure there's a good deal of randomness in it, given that human interaction is involved. This just means that more of the "sensitive" individuals are going to be "seeing red" so to speak.
Also, given the human interaction, it's not unreasonable to assume that someone looking for attention has found a way to influence the system in a direction that gets someone else all flustered, which is how they entertain themselves. So if you must insist that someone is trying to upset you, maybe you're right, but the intention may simply have been to tick you off. (mission accomplished?)
If you think about it, it makes sense that a scientist in his era would shine brightly. At the time he was in his prime, there were a lot of important discoveries being made which opened up a lot of new territory in which to make new discoveries. Now you could view science as a much more mature study... there may still be a lot of room for new discoveries but they are not the easy ones that can be expressed with 5 characters like "e=mc2". Now such similar discoveries require collaboration of teams of scientists several years of work to publish papers that would require hundreds of pages of text to describe.
I suppose I can summarize this by saying it's not that the people are not as brilliant as they used to be, but that the noteworthy acheivements that are yet to be found are much more difficult to conquer, so we see them much less frequently.
Another possible influence on this may be that at Einstein's time, there was a world war going on. There's nothing quite like the military to concentrate talented people for research and development, and to provide a nearly limitless source of funding to speed up the research. We don't have that now.
I was just going to point out the kW ps's in the new quad core macs. Looks like the "Power Mac G5 (Late 2005)" models ship either with a 710W or 1kW supply. Probably the ones with the quad 2.5's are shipping with the 1kW, and the slower quads (2.0 and possibly 2.3) ship with the 710W. I know the 1kW monsters ship with an industrial power cord on them - it's not the standard 3 pin "D" connector cord you see on 99% of current computers, it's a rectangular block with three blades, and a much thicker cord.
Funny I haven't seen any sort of warnings or advisements on the power draw on that cord - the 2.5QP can probably draw enough power to overheat some of the cheaper extension cords and power strips. (I have seen some that are only rated 7A, which would be about 840W) They must assume everyone that's using those is plugging directly into 15A service convenience outlets. (1800W)
Now I'm curious - I think I'll take a watt meter into work on Tuesday and see how much juice a taxed 2.5QP draws from the wall. I'll need to push the graphics card as well as the CPUs for greatest draw - any suggestions on what app to run? Maybe UT 2004 with all the goodies on, on a nice 30" display?
What I was wondering is, when exactly is moondust considered toxic? When inhaled I would venture a guess.
And just who do they think is breathing on the moon?
The EULA is a way for the company to get you to agree to certain terms (usually surrendering certain rights) in exchange for getting the software. If the software installs even when you click DISAGREE, all that means is you are getting the software (for better or worse, as the case may be) without having agreed to surrender the righs listed in the EULA. (the EULA is NOT for your protection, it's to protect the manufacturer from YOU)
NOW, one standard subset of the rights you surrender when agreeing with the EULA basically says you agree that the software is "as-is", "not fit for any particular purpose", etc. Basically you agree not to sue the manufacturer for any ill-effects caused by the software, even if the effects are known or the manufacturer was grossly neglegent in their design. Oftentimes these provisions are actually illegal or legally unenforceable though, but they basically stuff anything in there they can think of that makes them feel warm and fuzzy that they are bulletproof.
So this does not represent an illegal act, but rather it opens up the software distributor to numerous legal liabilities that the EULA would otherwise have afforded them some protection from. Given the extremely nasty nature of the software it installs, this should make a perfect target for lawsuits, since by installing the software without getting an agreement to the EULA, they have essentially taken off all their legal armor and stand naked before the courts.
I don't know if the installer basically behaves the same for the agree button as it does for the disagree, but from the article it rather souds that way. That being the case, it would be extremely difficult for Sony to prove that anyone agreed to the EULA. (normally the fact that the software got installed indicates you agreed, but not in this case) That means anyone that ran the installer has an opportunity to file a lawsuit based on harm received from their software, since Sony has no proof you agreed to their terms. (agreed to not sue them)
Since we now know how to build a mammoth, the question becomes "how do we DO it?" The trick at this point appears to be to reverse the previous process we just completed... to take a known sequence as a map and to produce intact strands of DNA that corresponds to that sequence. Once that is completed, we already have the technology to place other DNA in an egg and then we can grow our first mammoth!
So, how goes the gene de-sequencing?
There are actualy quite a few good reasons for that investment. Pens will draw a lot more than pencils, by weight. And weight is everything when you are delivering groceries to orbit.
Also, pencils must be sharpened. NASA is crazy about anything that makes a mess. Keeping a capsule clean in zero g is very hard to do - dust and crud can gather on ALL SURFACES including the "ceiling". And there's a lot of delicate equipment up there. Pencil shavings are not something NASA wants to have to deal with. (it also increases the amount of trash generated, and all garbage has to be hauled back to earth, it cannot simply be jettisoned) I can just imagine their reaction to eraser-crumbs.
Peltiers are nice in theory but they have one major drawback not many know about. They are not efficient. I have a development peltier here (1" x 1", 128 junctions, 12v) and it will condense water on the cold side almost instantly. BUT... on the hot side, I have a heat sink and it's pumping out lots of heat - a lot more than what's being pulled from the cold side. It draws about 2 amps at 12v, so it's dissipating about 25 watts of heat in addition to what's being pumped from the cold side.
So peltiers actually work to generate heat in your vicinity, and have to be kept cooled. This peltier will try to hold about a 45 degree temp difference between the hot and cold side. So if the hot side heats up to say, 95 degrees due to inefficiency, it can only drop the cold side down to 50 degrees.
I've also heard people comment about "stacking" peltiers, to increase the cooling. (temp differential) This is great if they are not each producing 25 watts of heat. If you have two of them stacked, the "downwind" peltier is having to dump what... 35 or so watts of heat to its hot side, in addition to the 25 it's adding, so you're getting closer to 60 watts of heat being sent to the heat sink now, so you know it's going to get a lot hotter than with one peltier - which will raise your cold side temp which is what you were trying NOT to do. Stacking peltiers is rarely useful or productive.
However, I haven't and wouldn't want to try to remove safari to see if Apple allows it so easily
"Uninstalling" safari is just as simple. drag to trash, empty. done.
Unlike IE on windows, safari is a stand-alone user-level application that is not used for anything besides web browsing, so removing it does not cripple anything.
If I'm reading this correctly, the reward for a prime > 10k digits is twice that the reward for the next prime 10k. So wouldn't it make more sense for them to skip ahead to 10k digits and start looking there instead?
With just the server records, it's not possible to prove that someone infringed. As you pointed out, no copyrighted data is sent to the server. The clients merely report that they are completing pieces. It would be trivially easy to modify a BT client to lie throug its teeth all day long saying it's receiving pieces when in fact it is merely connecting to the swarm and ignoring all the peers. What the server has we would call "circumstancial evidence". It may help increase the likelyhood of guilt or make real evidence look more credible, but in and of itself it proves nothing.
If I write a letter to a friend and say "I robbed FSB bank last week", and the bank was indeed robbed last week, that letter is circumstancial evidence and makes me a suspect. It does NOT prove that I robbed the bank. For that you require evidence.
I suspect this is why the case was dropped. The only reason he was roughed up the way he was is because either (A) as some suspect, some money changed hands, or (B) the prossicutor did not have a good understanding of what laws had ellegedly been broken. The proessicutors are on a budget just like the rest of the world, and it wastes their money to chase around a case that cannot be brought to trial, money that could be spent investigating cases that are more likely to result in a conviction. So unless someone was funding them or someone screwed up, this would not have happened.
I personally believe some money changed hands, and that the prossicutor knew there was no case, but still took it on to get himself or his department their cut. Just a matter of the RIAA or some derivitive thereof paying off a legal system to scare someone to quit doing something that technically isn't illegal. Considering the impact they got, they probably consider it to have been a very good deal for the money. Since they were only rewarded for their actions, this means they'll probably do it again.
If the machine comes with say, XP, on a restore partition and without install CDs, and say you want to install XP... that means you get to buy XP again. Most people would find offense with that.
Clint Eastwood, in Pale Rider, said it well... "A man's gotta know his limitations." Quadrapolegics don't make good fighter pilots either. That doesn't mean we need to modify the planes to accomodate them. There's nothing wrong with making small changes to allow disabled people an easier life - a ramp on a curb is not too much of an inconvenience for society to provide for people in wheelchairs. But expecting an entertainment system to be totally redesigned to accomodate 1% of the population, is presumptuous.
Though I can't help but feel he's giving our money to charity...
Good spook action is invisible, the quiet defenders of Truth, Justice and the American Way of life and all that stuff.
I'd disagree with that. Do you not mind if your rights are violated, just so long as you are not aware of it? That seems like a more scarry proposition, to be getting wronged over and over without even knowing it happened. (that'd be the 'see no evil' of the three monkeys wouldn't it?)
Let me explain why "let things run their course" does not work with credit reports.
Someone I used to work with got an unpleasant surprise when he was applying for a car loan. He was rejected due to bad credit. He got a credit report and found out that he had a bounced check from a gas station in Oregon a year previous. He had never been to Oregon before.
He contacted the station owner to find out that someone with the same first and last name as him had passed a bad check. The account had long since been closed and that name was no longer living at the account's address, so the owner searched the web and found a hit on the name, my coworker, and filed a nonpayment record on his credit report.
Now whether the owner believed him or not that it was not him, it really did not matter. The owner wanted his $28 and was not going to remove the mark until he paid him. This is extortion. And in this case, there's really nothing you can do about it.
He ended up sending a money order for $28 plus bounced check charge to the owner, who then removed the mark from his credit report.
Now in this case the owner had at least something tangible (the check) and at least a very weak reason to point the finger, (same name) but really, he didn't even need that. He could have just decided to thumb through the phonebook and file a false report on anyone he spotted, and really there is no easy recourse for the victim. Eventually the mark on the report will expire, but all you can do is wait if the person really does not want to remove it or is extorting you and you don't feel like paying him off.
Whoever set up the credit reporting system with so weak of safeguards and checks/balances, needs to be slapped repeatedly.
"Ultimately the TPM itself isn't inherently evil or good. It will depend entirely on how it's used, and in that sphere, market and political forces will be more important than technology."
When it comes right down to it, this statement is totally false. In society, you will always get a completely diverse slice of people. To say "a gun is not dangerous - it's just a matter of the care with which people use it" is laughable. Of course a gun is dangerous. You cannot simply dismiss this by saying that if handled correctly, the gun need not be dangerous. There will always be a small subset of society that doesn't care about your morals or how you think the world should behave, and they will do as they please. And when that happens, you'll see the worst possible outcomes turn into reality.
So to say that this Orwellian behavior is not a bad thing just so long as everyone in power uses it morally and responsibly basically means we can safely assume that someone out there in power is going to willingly and gladly abuse the system to their greatest advantage. Which means we can fully expect the worst possible outcome of any given situation as long as people are involved in it.
Anyone that says this "every citizen under the magnifying glass" is a good thing is either (A) completely oblivious to how those in power will immediately take advantage of and abuse it, or (B) are one of those people in power that want to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, the people proposing these laws are in group B, while most of the voters are in group A. So, I guess we're just plain screwed.
In fact, couldn't an open WAP be an "attractive nuisance"
Almost anything can be considered an "attractive nuisance". (any act that doesn't constitute "paranoid" could probably be justified as an "attractive nuisance" by someone) This point of view goes nicely with the "blame the victim" mentality.
Just because I leave my car parked on the curb with the door unlocked does not mean it's "my fault" if the car gets stolen. I certainly increased the odds by my behavior, but it's still the thief that is ultimately responsible for his actions. I didn't make him steal my car by leaving the door unlocked. Making a crime more likely to occur does not equal being primarily responsible for it if it does occur.
I am however in favor of "partial liability", where the owner of a WAP used illegally by someone else be held partially responsible. Not so much because he is responsible for the actions of the other, but rather that his actions greatly increased the likelyhood of a crime being comitted. I think I should append "knowingly" as well - I'd make it a requirement to prove that the person knew or should have known his actions would greatly increase the probability of illegal activities, say to 30% or higher probability, for him to be held partly liable.
Walk down a dark street at night while counting your stack of 20's and you will very likely get mugged. Are you responsible for the mugging? No, but you deserve little pity for having been mugged.
Spoofing the mac may not be effective for masking yourself from the target machine, but may be very effective in masking yourself from being identified by an investigator. Imagine spoofing the MAC of your wireless card, and connecting to your neighbor's access point, using his laptop's wireless mac address. It would be a farily tight frame, with your neighbor's wap log files indicating his MAC during the time/date of the intrusions. Possibly enough for "reasonable doubt." Unfortunately this is almost trivially simple to do. (on a Macintosh or unix box anyway)
sudo ifconfig en1 lladdr 00:11:22:33:44:55
(requires Mac OS 10.3.6'ish or later, works fine on 10.3.9, nonfunctional in 10.3.5)
ya, the annoying thing here is, when a customer stuffs in a CD from a manufacturer of a product, and it asks them for their admin password, almost 100% of users just blindly type it in, so there's really nothing to stop them from pulling a Sony on the rest of us too. (and 98% of software doesnt need admin rights to install, locally for that user) Though I wonder what restrictions software manufacturers have to agree to, to get that Macintosh logo on their box? That'd be a case I'd like to see... somebody try to pull a sony on us and have Apple come down on them with a BFH.
As it is with the sony rootkit, it makes you wonder... (1) do the manufacturers have to agree to anything to get that Windows logo on their box? (besides paying MS a mint?) Like that their installers may not intentionally compromise the security of the computer? and if so, (2) why has microsoft not gone after them with a vengence?
These things always come with software, which you must install
Depends on the computer. Some have adequate support software right out of the box. My mom just bought a new digicam and was asking me how to set it up. "Just plug it in". "But what about the CD? It says I have to install the software!" "Ignore that. Plug in the camera." "OK it's in... oh there it is, iPhoto just opened up. It's working!"
That's how things should work.
but organic mercury is small enough to find it's way into your body fats
I thought mercury was an element? (Hg?) It's not like hydrocarbons where you can have long chains and short chains. An atom is an atom, no matter if you find it in nature or in industry, and it does not vary in size from one atom of mercury to another. Maybe you are thinking of some compounds that include mercury? (being a metal, I'd expect mercury combines quite readily with oxygen)
Maybe the view's a little paranoid, but with business a little paranoia is a good thing. Several times I've seen it suggested that a competitor might hire some cheap labor to click on their competition's ads, to cause them to get charged more for their advertisement. I wonder has this company even explored this option? It doesn't sound like they have made any connection between Google and the clicks, and are just aiming for what to them appears to be the most obvious source, without any evidence whatsoever. Most obvious != guilty. There is no way they can get "reasonable doubt" out of this.