While I think that the 50% threshold is unreachable, I don't think that the overall aim of this measure is so bad.
Since the government buys their equipment using money from the US taxpayers, it seems in the best interests of the taxpayers and the country to keep as much of that money in the country as possible. Consider the following:
The US government outsources everything to companies in other countries - everything from highway construction to phone support to the IRS. Making up a number for the tax rate, call it 40%, that people pay, including the federal taxes in gas, phone service, licensing, income taxes, etc. This means that every year 40% of the countries GDP goes to another country or countries. That reduces the overall "value" of our country by that much. At the other end, if we pay nothing to other countries for services or aid or anything, the "value" of the country remains the same.
Now, I understand that this isn't realistic economically, but it illustrates the point. As a government, isn't it better for their citizens if as much of their expenditures as possible remain in the country? Yes, it is possible that buying from an outside source is cheaper, (for the nation as a whole), than buying locally. (For example, many food crops won't grow in the US and to irrigate/climate control the fields to support those crops would cost more than buying them outright from somewhere else.) However, for a few percentage points difference in the price, I doubt it, since we have to consider income taxes that the country "gets back" by taxing the workers who produce it. (Assuming all other aspects are equal.)
With that said, I think it would be better overall to embrace a true global economy, so if someone in India can do a job better/faster/cheaper then they can do it. However, since we don't have a world government, and we still have this annoying habit of killing each other over things like imaginary lines on a map, I don't see any real alternative to being somewhat protective of the country you happen to reside in, whether that is the US, the UK, China or India.
Actually, there are plenty of positions available in the US. Of course, they aren't "generic" IT positions. For example, I am in the Information Assurance field and there are plenty of positions available. (Just search using "security" on your favorite IT job site.) Sure it takes a lot of work to specialize, but it is done in many high paying professions. How about a cardiologist, neurosurgeon or podiatrist? They want the big bucks, but it can take another 10 years to finish training and certification.
I guess my point is that we need to start whining that there is so much competition and no jobs available and determine where to specialize, so that Joe Nobody who lives in another country can do the same job. Another good aspect of Information Assurance is companies may trust sending some development/support work overseas, but not many trust the laws in another country enough to outsource their security. (They need someone to make sure they don't get hosed by someone they can't easily take to court.)
First, I agree with you that good crypto is required for the control and data channels of a remote military device, such as a drone. However, there are some far more important considerations...
First, you want to prevent the enemy from being able to jam your communications. This means you want some frequency hopping built in to your communications. This increases the amount of power needed by the enemy jammer by an amount equal to:
(hopping bandwidth)/(signal bandwidth)
The GPS system has a signal bandwidth of 50bits/sec and 10Mb/sec hopping bandwidth. If it would require 10 Watts of power to jam this signal without frequency hopping, because of the frequency hopping it would require 2 megawatts (assuming a barrage jammer). Which just ASKS for a high-speed antiradiation missile (HARM) to come calling.
Also, you don't want the enemy to detect the signals coming from your remote military device or THEY will fire their own HARM at it, and a drone doesn't move as fast as HARM. This calls for some application of spread spectrum so the signal can be hidden in the environmental noise. This is also why the drones use satellite communications - the signals are directed upwards, and presumably away, from any enemies listening for the signal, and a satellite is much harder to hit than a drone.
While crypto would be important, it is also VERY simple to preload the drone with the appropriate keys that will be used for the duration of its mission. This is how some military radios work currently. Before the patrol goes out, one of the comm guys comes over with their little green box and plugs it into the radio until it beeps and the radio is set for a couple of days.
I do disagree with you on the battle robots though. Why produce robots when for a couple of hot meals a day and a few hundred bucks a month you can have a person do the fighting? Overall they are much cheaper than producing battle robots, and are much more adaptable in combat situations. (OK - SkyNet would be more adaptable, but it isn't around yet.) Also, a well-trained infantryman can take out pretty much anything if they are sneaky about it. That's why tanks have Bradleys with them, and the Bradleys have infantry in them - to make sure no one gets really close to a tank. Finally, a person is required to make repairs. If a tank throws a track, someone has to get out and put it back on, otherwise someone is going to call artillery in and destroy the tank.
Of course, I would love to see powered armor/mechs on the battlefield, but I don't think they are coming any time soon.
There is nothing really exciting about this other than the overkill usage of quantum cryptography (also called quantum key exchange).
Basically, they are trying to generate enough keys so any succesful breaking of the cipher used gets only one frame of video. The only "exciting" part is they are using quantum cryptography to do this. However, this is like using a sledgehammer to push in a thumb tack - It uses a lot more hardware, and isn't the easiest or best method.
Another way to do this would be to conduct a large number of Diffie-Hellman key exchanges or STS exchanges, (one for each frame), and use the new key for each frame.
Or, even easier, both sides could use identical Linear Feedback Shift Registers to generate the same keys that they need. They cost way less than $20k and since a compromise of the system at either end would destroy the privacy afforded by the quantum encryption, just as secure.
Or, they could exchange one-time pads on a DVD and use the bits on there as the key. If my math is right, then a 4GB CD could hold enough keys for over 1100 hours of video, assuming a 256 bit key and 30 frames/sec. Exchanging 2 or 3 DVDs a year (if that) doesn't seem unreasonable.
None of these methods require a dedicated fiber line connecting the two groups. It can be performed over regular Ethernet if the groups want to. Translation: I can use it to talk to someone more than 120km away.
This isn't to say that some groups wouldn't want quantum security for something - if I was a Swiss bank that made daily transfers of a billion dollars to a German or Italian or French bank, then sure, I should spend the extra couple hundred k for an obscenely secure system.
This also begs the question of why encrypt each frame differently? Since it is VIDEO, then something in the picture is probably important - like a PowerPoint slide or graph or something. Since a presenter usually spends a minute or two on each slide, this means that an attacker would only need to decrypt one out of every 1800 slides (assuming 30 frames/second) to get the information they wanted. I think that it is a good idea to change keys as often as possible, but you have to ask what is the benefit for the added cost/overhead. In this case, I don't think it is very much.
So nice use of the "quantum cryptography" buzzword, but bad application of crypto technology in general.
Actually that is a standard feature with cell tower management software. It has support for door alarms, humidity alarms, temperature alarms, motions sensors, voltage irregularities, toxic material sensors and, yes, those blinky red lights on top.
When you have a small building with millions of dollars of equipment in it, and it is placed in the middle of nowhere, you tend to alarm the heck out of it.
For the love of God, don't so that! Without some time in the business world for some experience the MBA is a waste of time. You get some good information, but without the experience to get the deep understanding and insights that go with it.
Does an MBA look nice? Yes. But it looks way better to have work experience first.
Actually my GPA went up when I started to MUD. When I went to class I got too bored with the material and blew off studying for my finals.
With MUDing the material was still new and interesting when it got to final time and I studied a lot more. Acing a final worth 65% of your grade helps a LOT.
Ask them whether their camera is using RAW version 11a or RAW version 11b. When they say they don't know ask them what kind of camera it is and you can tell them.
Not really. I was an assistant coach for my school's team in 1998 and had a long discussion with the department chair about this.
Basically, with the rules that are in place from the school and the board of regents for the state colleges, there isn't a lot of incentives that can be given to students to participate in something like this. I talked with a member of the Waterloo team and they were getting a couple of class credits for being on the team, which is something our school couldn't give. It wasn't considered appropriate - should we then give credits to someone in athletic studies for being a member of a school athletic team? Another issue (back in 1998) was that most US students didn't need the line on their resume, or the job offer from IBM if they won the contest. (Note: The job offer from IBM to the winning team was anecdotal, but IBM seemed interested in talking to everyone there about job opportunities.) Also, the "good students" don't participate in these contests since most of them have some sort of programming job on the side. I talked to several people about being on the team and they told me they would rather go to work and make US$20-30/hr being a part-time programmer than practicing for a contest.
First, you need to be careful defining what you "own". If I rent/lease a car I can't do anything I want with it. Even if I own the car, I can't use it in a reckless manner or give it to someone to use in a crime. If I rent a DVD from a store I can't do anything I want with it. For example, I am not allowed to melt the DVD itself or scratch it so it is unusable.
As to your second point, there is a lot of software that is hideously complex and expensive to create and cannot just be made "free". How many companies can create controller software for a cellular base station (I used to work at Motorola) and then give it away free? It doesn't work well as an open source project since there is no way to test the software without purchasing specific hardware that costs US$100k or more. So how does a cellular provider get this software? Develop it themselves? Oh wait, then their competitors get it for free (according to your premise) and they can undercut your price because you had the cost to develop it in the first place.
Third point - so if I have a world changing idea then I should just give it away? Unfortunately, I have to eat and prefer to live in a house instead of a tent (winter can be harsh in my part of the world) so I need some money for those things. Sorry, but that is just the way it is. If you will guarantee to give me food and shelter then I might give it my ideas for free. Communism tried this and it didn't work out (at least in the USSR).
DRM is flawed, but since people prefer free to costing something it is required if you want any compensation for what you do. Imagine making music and only being able to sell 1 copy of your music and everyone on Earth then gets a copy. Who is going to pay US$10k for a song to cover the cost of the recording equipment when everyone else gets it for free? If I wait for a few days I can be the one who gets it for free.
Final point - spoken like someone who never had their roommate "borrow" some of their software/movies/pictures/etc. My wedding pictures are my property and I don't want someone else to have/look at/post them without my approval.
Personally I think DRM is hideously broken in our current state of law/society. However, I think it is required since most people prefer to get something free instead of paying for it.
It is 10 years in the future and the density of storage media has kept up with its own version of Moore's law. I have a device the size of an iPod that can hold over a terabyte of data. What can I do with this? I could hold hundreds of movies in HDTV format.
Another nice thing is my iMoviePod can be carried anywhere - which means my kids can watch any movie in the car that they want, and when I go on business trips I can bring my movie collection with me.
All this is due to the Hollywood Movie Company, Inc. which bought the rights to every movie they could get their hands on - and created a new format that would play on their new super-HDTV plasma-projecting Super Sound(TM) video systems. Sales weren't keeping the company afloat until Bob in Marketing had the idea that you could sell TVs and other hardware devices at a huge profit if you could include massive amounts of free entertainment. Everyone agreed (since the company was going bankrupt anyway) and boom sales took off.
While the company had to spend a lot to get the rights to the older movies, it was well worth it - the people with the most spare money were older and LIKED the older movies and were disappointed they couldn't get them at the Holly-Buster Video store down the block.
Seriously though - as storage gets more dense new formats are going to show up. If an optical disk ends up being able to hold over a terabyte of data, what are you going to use it all for? A movie with extras in any format will take up maybe 10-20% of the storage, so what is the rest for? We'll see smaller disks or more movies per disk. Maybe not new movies, but you could get all of the Tremors movies on a single disk. (Did anyone else know there was a Tremors 4?!?)
I don't see downloading of movies being a reality until there is REALLY scary bandwidth on the planet. Think how many copies of The Matrix were bought on the day that it released - or any Harry Potter movie. Even with intelligent forwarding and caching it would overload whatever network is in place. Oh, and would you want to wait an hour or two while you and everyone else in your neighborhood download the same movie? No - I want to wait in line at watever store and get my copy at midnight so I can watch it before anyone else. This attitude might be rare, but it exists.
So, I for one welcome our (perhaps old) optical storage overlords.
Do you really think that we lack the capability to make something that was made in the 1960s? Yes, there might be a large start up cost since many of the tools are no longer in use, but we also have technologies and automation that was unimagined in the 60s.
I have heard this argument time and again - we can't make the parts anymore, we don't know how. I am waving the BS flag on that. I challenge you, or anyone else, to point to a part used on the Saturn V rockets that can no longer be made. I am not saying that it can be made inexpensively or mass produced in a factory, but point to something that absolutley cannot be made.
Also, do you need something made to spec? What size? I'll measure it with my laser. Need to examine it for flaws? I can use my PC and a camera to look it over for you. Need an X-Ray of it? I can do the same thing. Need to check calculations? Forget your slide rule, I've got a TI-92.
In short, I doubt there is anything technologically impossible about creating more Saturn V rockets. I doubt there is even a financial reason it can't be done - NASA declaring they are spending billions to buy a new "fleet" of Saturn V rockets will motivate companies to produce what is needed for a reasonable cost (in most cases). What we really need is the political will to say this is important and we need to fund it.
From the article: "This survey demonstrates that awareness and action are replacing fear," Robert Holleyman, BSA's chief executive, said in a statement.
How is awareness and action replacing fear when people are afraid to shop/bank online but don't handle their passwords any differently?
Oh, wait... It was an executive who made the statement so all meanings should be reversed.
According to Amazon UK Season 1, Part 1 will be released March 28. However, it will be region 2 encoding. So for all of you in Europe, Japan, etc. please make sure to set up a BitTorrent so all of us in the US have a chance to get it.
Actually, sitting in rush hour traffic shouldn't matter with an electric car. If you aren't moving, you shouldn't be draining your battery. (Power requirement for cell phone/music/other device should be minimal compared to actually moving the car.)
That's one of the great advantages of electric cars (and hybrids) - there isn't any wasteful idling of the engine.
When my father-in-law was having problems with a company regarding a warranty, (Best Buy wrote down the wrong warranty code), he told the customer service rep that he wasn't going to sue or anything, but he was going to forward his complaint to the Better Business Bureau with a recommendation to submit it to the State Attorney's office. The wrong warranty code was immediately overlooked and a repair shop called him within 5 minutes asking him what he had said to the company since they were all over him to set up a service call immediately.
Alternatively, if you send them an email, Cc it to your States Attorney's office and explicitly mention having done so in the email. If nothing else it will get their attention. Corporate lawyers may not be affraid of an individual's lawyer, but they don't like going up against the government.
It really bothers me that simple studies such as this grab the headlines. If you really want to determine which server is more vulnerable, study real servers belonging to real companies handling real traffic/data that someone wants to get.
Also, deciding on a configuration that an "average administrator" would have instead of a "wizard" seems questionable unless they determined those settings by examing dozens (or hundreds) of actual system configurations. Determining something is "too advanced" for an average administrator to use without actually examining real systems seems too arbitrary. Can anyone define the skill level of an average administrator?
You can't determine how secure something is if you aren't going to use its security features. If M$ has all of their security features turned on by default and Linux doesn't, that doesn't mean M$ products are more secure than Linux, it just means that they have a better configuration out of the box. (Not that I believe that, but I use it for the sake of arguement.) While it is important to have fail-safe defaults, it is far more important for someone to know what they are doing. Unfortunately, too many companies don't understand that and hire people who don't know what they are doing.
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Since the government buys their equipment using money from the US taxpayers, it seems in the best interests of the taxpayers and the country to keep as much of that money in the country as possible. Consider the following:
The US government outsources everything to companies in other countries - everything from highway construction to phone support to the IRS. Making up a number for the tax rate, call it 40%, that people pay, including the federal taxes in gas, phone service, licensing, income taxes, etc. This means that every year 40% of the countries GDP goes to another country or countries. That reduces the overall "value" of our country by that much. At the other end, if we pay nothing to other countries for services or aid or anything, the "value" of the country remains the same.
Now, I understand that this isn't realistic economically, but it illustrates the point. As a government, isn't it better for their citizens if as much of their expenditures as possible remain in the country? Yes, it is possible that buying from an outside source is cheaper, (for the nation as a whole), than buying locally. (For example, many food crops won't grow in the US and to irrigate/climate control the fields to support those crops would cost more than buying them outright from somewhere else.) However, for a few percentage points difference in the price, I doubt it, since we have to consider income taxes that the country "gets back" by taxing the workers who produce it. (Assuming all other aspects are equal.)With that said, I think it would be better overall to embrace a true global economy, so if someone in India can do a job better/faster/cheaper then they can do it. However, since we don't have a world government, and we still have this annoying habit of killing each other over things like imaginary lines on a map, I don't see any real alternative to being somewhat protective of the country you happen to reside in, whether that is the US, the UK, China or India.
Get your project linked from the Slashdot homepage.
Actually, there are plenty of positions available in the US. Of course, they aren't "generic" IT positions. For example, I am in the Information Assurance field and there are plenty of positions available. (Just search using "security" on your favorite IT job site.) Sure it takes a lot of work to specialize, but it is done in many high paying professions. How about a cardiologist, neurosurgeon or podiatrist? They want the big bucks, but it can take another 10 years to finish training and certification.
I guess my point is that we need to start whining that there is so much competition and no jobs available and determine where to specialize, so that Joe Nobody who lives in another country can do the same job. Another good aspect of Information Assurance is companies may trust sending some development/support work overseas, but not many trust the laws in another country enough to outsource their security. (They need someone to make sure they don't get hosed by someone they can't easily take to court.)
First, you want to prevent the enemy from being able to jam your communications. This means you want some frequency hopping built in to your communications. This increases the amount of power needed by the enemy jammer by an amount equal to:
(hopping bandwidth)/(signal bandwidth)
The GPS system has a signal bandwidth of 50bits/sec and 10Mb/sec hopping bandwidth. If it would require 10 Watts of power to jam this signal without frequency hopping, because of the frequency hopping it would require 2 megawatts (assuming a barrage jammer). Which just ASKS for a high-speed antiradiation missile (HARM) to come calling.Also, you don't want the enemy to detect the signals coming from your remote military device or THEY will fire their own HARM at it, and a drone doesn't move as fast as HARM. This calls for some application of spread spectrum so the signal can be hidden in the environmental noise. This is also why the drones use satellite communications - the signals are directed upwards, and presumably away, from any enemies listening for the signal, and a satellite is much harder to hit than a drone.
While crypto would be important, it is also VERY simple to preload the drone with the appropriate keys that will be used for the duration of its mission. This is how some military radios work currently. Before the patrol goes out, one of the comm guys comes over with their little green box and plugs it into the radio until it beeps and the radio is set for a couple of days.
I do disagree with you on the battle robots though. Why produce robots when for a couple of hot meals a day and a few hundred bucks a month you can have a person do the fighting? Overall they are much cheaper than producing battle robots, and are much more adaptable in combat situations. (OK - SkyNet would be more adaptable, but it isn't around yet.) Also, a well-trained infantryman can take out pretty much anything if they are sneaky about it. That's why tanks have Bradleys with them, and the Bradleys have infantry in them - to make sure no one gets really close to a tank. Finally, a person is required to make repairs. If a tank throws a track, someone has to get out and put it back on, otherwise someone is going to call artillery in and destroy the tank.
Of course, I would love to see powered armor/mechs on the battlefield, but I don't think they are coming any time soon.
There is nothing really exciting about this other than the overkill usage of quantum cryptography (also called quantum key exchange).
Basically, they are trying to generate enough keys so any succesful breaking of the cipher used gets only one frame of video. The only "exciting" part is they are using quantum cryptography to do this. However, this is like using a sledgehammer to push in a thumb tack - It uses a lot more hardware, and isn't the easiest or best method.
Another way to do this would be to conduct a large number of Diffie-Hellman key exchanges or STS exchanges, (one for each frame), and use the new key for each frame.
Or, even easier, both sides could use identical Linear Feedback Shift Registers to generate the same keys that they need. They cost way less than $20k and since a compromise of the system at either end would destroy the privacy afforded by the quantum encryption, just as secure.
Or, they could exchange one-time pads on a DVD and use the bits on there as the key. If my math is right, then a 4GB CD could hold enough keys for over 1100 hours of video, assuming a 256 bit key and 30 frames/sec. Exchanging 2 or 3 DVDs a year (if that) doesn't seem unreasonable.
None of these methods require a dedicated fiber line connecting the two groups. It can be performed over regular Ethernet if the groups want to. Translation: I can use it to talk to someone more than 120km away.
This isn't to say that some groups wouldn't want quantum security for something - if I was a Swiss bank that made daily transfers of a billion dollars to a German or Italian or French bank, then sure, I should spend the extra couple hundred k for an obscenely secure system.
This also begs the question of why encrypt each frame differently? Since it is VIDEO, then something in the picture is probably important - like a PowerPoint slide or graph or something. Since a presenter usually spends a minute or two on each slide, this means that an attacker would only need to decrypt one out of every 1800 slides (assuming 30 frames/second) to get the information they wanted. I think that it is a good idea to change keys as often as possible, but you have to ask what is the benefit for the added cost/overhead. In this case, I don't think it is very much.
So nice use of the "quantum cryptography" buzzword, but bad application of crypto technology in general.
Everyone knows that the fossils are present because the mice require them for the proper functioning of their computer.
Actually that is a standard feature with cell tower management software. It has support for door alarms, humidity alarms, temperature alarms, motions sensors, voltage irregularities, toxic material sensors and, yes, those blinky red lights on top.
When you have a small building with millions of dollars of equipment in it, and it is placed in the middle of nowhere, you tend to alarm the heck out of it.
I know that it can be tough to know what tense to use given that there was a temporal cold war and all that, but it should be:
where Zeframe Cochrane will launch his first warp ship from.
and not:
where Zeframe Cochrane launched his first warp ship from.
Then again...
if you were there when it happened before, but in the future, then I guess you could use the past tense.
There's more focus on it in the Mac world because they don't suck, they work properly and don't come preloaded with spyware.
For the love of God, don't so that! Without some time in the business world for some experience the MBA is a waste of time. You get some good information, but without the experience to get the deep understanding and insights that go with it.
Does an MBA look nice? Yes. But it looks way better to have work experience first.
Actually my GPA went up when I started to MUD. When I went to class I got too bored with the material and blew off studying for my finals.
With MUDing the material was still new and interesting when it got to final time and I studied a lot more. Acing a final worth 65% of your grade helps a LOT.
Ask them whether their camera is using RAW version 11a or RAW version 11b. When they say they don't know ask them what kind of camera it is and you can tell them.
so I can tell my wife we -need- to get a new iMac (clutter is bad)...
Not really. I was an assistant coach for my school's team in 1998 and had a long discussion with the department chair about this.
Basically, with the rules that are in place from the school and the board of regents for the state colleges, there isn't a lot of incentives that can be given to students to participate in something like this. I talked with a member of the Waterloo team and they were getting a couple of class credits for being on the team, which is something our school couldn't give. It wasn't considered appropriate - should we then give credits to someone in athletic studies for being a member of a school athletic team? Another issue (back in 1998) was that most US students didn't need the line on their resume, or the job offer from IBM if they won the contest. (Note: The job offer from IBM to the winning team was anecdotal, but IBM seemed interested in talking to everyone there about job opportunities.) Also, the "good students" don't participate in these contests since most of them have some sort of programming job on the side. I talked to several people about being on the team and they told me they would rather go to work and make US$20-30/hr being a part-time programmer than practicing for a contest.
Just my US$0.02
Eddie Murphy was right... everyone would mess up his jokes. You were supposed to stick with the rabbit joke.
To answer your points:
First, you need to be careful defining what you "own". If I rent/lease a car I can't do anything I want with it. Even if I own the car, I can't use it in a reckless manner or give it to someone to use in a crime. If I rent a DVD from a store I can't do anything I want with it. For example, I am not allowed to melt the DVD itself or scratch it so it is unusable.
As to your second point, there is a lot of software that is hideously complex and expensive to create and cannot just be made "free". How many companies can create controller software for a cellular base station (I used to work at Motorola) and then give it away free? It doesn't work well as an open source project since there is no way to test the software without purchasing specific hardware that costs US$100k or more. So how does a cellular provider get this software? Develop it themselves? Oh wait, then their competitors get it for free (according to your premise) and they can undercut your price because you had the cost to develop it in the first place.
Third point - so if I have a world changing idea then I should just give it away? Unfortunately, I have to eat and prefer to live in a house instead of a tent (winter can be harsh in my part of the world) so I need some money for those things. Sorry, but that is just the way it is. If you will guarantee to give me food and shelter then I might give it my ideas for free. Communism tried this and it didn't work out (at least in the USSR).
DRM is flawed, but since people prefer free to costing something it is required if you want any compensation for what you do. Imagine making music and only being able to sell 1 copy of your music and everyone on Earth then gets a copy. Who is going to pay US$10k for a song to cover the cost of the recording equipment when everyone else gets it for free? If I wait for a few days I can be the one who gets it for free.
Final point - spoken like someone who never had their roommate "borrow" some of their software/movies/pictures/etc. My wedding pictures are my property and I don't want someone else to have/look at/post them without my approval.
Personally I think DRM is hideously broken in our current state of law/society. However, I think it is required since most people prefer to get something free instead of paying for it.
The IRS has teamed with some companies to give you free (as in beer) tax filing. See for yourself at the IRS website. Link: here
Let me pull out my crystal ball...
It is 10 years in the future and the density of storage media has kept up with its own version of Moore's law. I have a device the size of an iPod that can hold over a terabyte of data. What can I do with this? I could hold hundreds of movies in HDTV format.
Another nice thing is my iMoviePod can be carried anywhere - which means my kids can watch any movie in the car that they want, and when I go on business trips I can bring my movie collection with me.
All this is due to the Hollywood Movie Company, Inc. which bought the rights to every movie they could get their hands on - and created a new format that would play on their new super-HDTV plasma-projecting Super Sound(TM) video systems. Sales weren't keeping the company afloat until Bob in Marketing had the idea that you could sell TVs and other hardware devices at a huge profit if you could include massive amounts of free entertainment. Everyone agreed (since the company was going bankrupt anyway) and boom sales took off.
While the company had to spend a lot to get the rights to the older movies, it was well worth it - the people with the most spare money were older and LIKED the older movies and were disappointed they couldn't get them at the Holly-Buster Video store down the block.
Seriously though - as storage gets more dense new formats are going to show up. If an optical disk ends up being able to hold over a terabyte of data, what are you going to use it all for? A movie with extras in any format will take up maybe 10-20% of the storage, so what is the rest for? We'll see smaller disks or more movies per disk. Maybe not new movies, but you could get all of the Tremors movies on a single disk. (Did anyone else know there was a Tremors 4?!?)
I don't see downloading of movies being a reality until there is REALLY scary bandwidth on the planet. Think how many copies of The Matrix were bought on the day that it released - or any Harry Potter movie. Even with intelligent forwarding and caching it would overload whatever network is in place. Oh, and would you want to wait an hour or two while you and everyone else in your neighborhood download the same movie? No - I want to wait in line at watever store and get my copy at midnight so I can watch it before anyone else. This attitude might be rare, but it exists.
So, I for one welcome our (perhaps old) optical storage overlords.
Do you really think that we lack the capability to make something that was made in the 1960s? Yes, there might be a large start up cost since many of the tools are no longer in use, but we also have technologies and automation that was unimagined in the 60s.
I have heard this argument time and again - we can't make the parts anymore, we don't know how. I am waving the BS flag on that. I challenge you, or anyone else, to point to a part used on the Saturn V rockets that can no longer be made. I am not saying that it can be made inexpensively or mass produced in a factory, but point to something that absolutley cannot be made.
Also, do you need something made to spec? What size? I'll measure it with my laser. Need to examine it for flaws? I can use my PC and a camera to look it over for you. Need an X-Ray of it? I can do the same thing. Need to check calculations? Forget your slide rule, I've got a TI-92.
In short, I doubt there is anything technologically impossible about creating more Saturn V rockets. I doubt there is even a financial reason it can't be done - NASA declaring they are spending billions to buy a new "fleet" of Saturn V rockets will motivate companies to produce what is needed for a reasonable cost (in most cases). What we really need is the political will to say this is important and we need to fund it.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Hopefully he gets some frequent flyer miles for this trip. It would be great if he could go back to the places he flew over and actually visit them.
From the article: "This survey demonstrates that awareness and action are replacing fear," Robert Holleyman, BSA's chief executive, said in a statement.
How is awareness and action replacing fear when people are afraid to shop/bank online but don't handle their passwords any differently?
Oh, wait... It was an executive who made the statement so all meanings should be reversed.
According to Amazon UK Season 1, Part 1 will be released March 28. However, it will be region 2 encoding. So for all of you in Europe, Japan, etc. please make sure to set up a BitTorrent so all of us in the US have a chance to get it.
Thanks in advance.
Actually, sitting in rush hour traffic shouldn't matter with an electric car. If you aren't moving, you shouldn't be draining your battery. (Power requirement for cell phone/music/other device should be minimal compared to actually moving the car.)
That's one of the great advantages of electric cars (and hybrids) - there isn't any wasteful idling of the engine.
When my father-in-law was having problems with a company regarding a warranty, (Best Buy wrote down the wrong warranty code), he told the customer service rep that he wasn't going to sue or anything, but he was going to forward his complaint to the Better Business Bureau with a recommendation to submit it to the State Attorney's office. The wrong warranty code was immediately overlooked and a repair shop called him within 5 minutes asking him what he had said to the company since they were all over him to set up a service call immediately.
Alternatively, if you send them an email, Cc it to your States Attorney's office and explicitly mention having done so in the email. If nothing else it will get their attention. Corporate lawyers may not be affraid of an individual's lawyer, but they don't like going up against the government.
It really bothers me that simple studies such as this grab the headlines. If you really want to determine which server is more vulnerable, study real servers belonging to real companies handling real traffic/data that someone wants to get.
Also, deciding on a configuration that an "average administrator" would have instead of a "wizard" seems questionable unless they determined those settings by examing dozens (or hundreds) of actual system configurations. Determining something is "too advanced" for an average administrator to use without actually examining real systems seems too arbitrary. Can anyone define the skill level of an average administrator?
You can't determine how secure something is if you aren't going to use its security features. If M$ has all of their security features turned on by default and Linux doesn't, that doesn't mean M$ products are more secure than Linux, it just means that they have a better configuration out of the box. (Not that I believe that, but I use it for the sake of arguement.) While it is important to have fail-safe defaults, it is far more important for someone to know what they are doing. Unfortunately, too many companies don't understand that and hire people who don't know what they are doing.