The
website that appears in the product photograph seems to list the product as unavailable. It doesn't say if it is out of stock or if there is some other reason. And the product page seems to indicate it is targeted at older student (college, for instance) to help them study rather than for parents to use on their kids. I'm not sure if it is meant as a joke or not.
Many high security establishments, both government and commercial, realize that they can't stop technology without serious concessions. What some do are to put a special tamper-proof tag over the camera. Then they just inspect the tag when you exit and, if tampered, confiscate the device until it can be validated.
What good would confiscating the device after the fact do? If these are really "high security" establishments as you say, wouldn't they be concerned that you might "tamper" with the tag,
use the camera to photograph or record video of sensitive materials or discussions, then encrypt and transmit said photos or videos to a far-off website, all before leaving the establishment? Confiscating the device at that point would be like closing the barn door after the horses escaped.
If I manage to decrypt and open the file and find it is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem instead of NTFS I will be very suspicious that this was done because there is a hidden "plausibly deniable" inner volume.
Actually, all of my Truecrypt volumes are formatted as FAT32, and I don't use hidden volumes at all. The reason I use FAT32 is that it makes it easier to mount and read/write the volumes in Linux as well as Windows.
I may be missing something here, but the hardware doesn't appear to be the first choice of people building server farms.
Yes, but it isn't just people running server farms that use virtualization. Desktop users, including myself, routinely use products like VMWare to run things like Linux under Windows XP, often creating virtual machines when testing potentially "dangerous" software downloaded from the Internet, or visiting websites that may not be fully trusted. Given that new web browser vulnerabilities are being found all the time, I generally do my random web surfing under VMWare, and do serious stuff like banking in a different VM. This exploit means this won't provide the safety it did after all. It is a very serious issue.
Thats nonsense, the exploit requires access to the MTRR registers, and no sane virtualization environment would let its guests touch those registers in the real CPU.
He also said "Solaris is the best unix techonology available in the market."
Solaris isn't going anywhere.
So why is there still no Oracle 11g for Solaris/x86, when its already been released for most of the other major platforms, including Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX. It has been released for Solaris/Sparc, but as of yet, no 11g for Solaris/x86.
Doesn't a good encryption system stop DPI from giving any useful information?
Any useful information? Sure! There is lots of useful information that can be gleaned even when encryption is used. Who are you communicating with? What protocol are you using? By looking at packet timing and packet sizes, much more information can be obtained than you might think, such as: are you web surfing vs. interactive keyboard login? Are you tranferring large files or reading short web pages? And if the structure of the web pages of the target site is known, the size of the packets transferred might even reveal which pages you were visiting. Some have even reported the ability to make educated guesses about keystrokes in interactive sessions based on timing of packets. Admittedly some of these features will have to wait for the next generation of DPI technology, but even today, a great deal of information can be collected.
I thought in the U.S., anyone could grant any degrees they like, and it was up to various private accrediting organizations to decide whether or not to accredit them. Since when did the government get to say who can and can't issue degrees? Aren't there First Amendment issues here?
Yes, quarks produced via the strong (or electromagnetic) interaction are always produced in quark/anti-quark pairs. So a strongly produced top quark would always be produced with an anti-top quark. Those two quarks would not generally end up in the same hadron, but they would both be produced at the same time.
The weak interaction can change quark flavors, so a top quark could be produced from some other flavor of quark, with no anti-top quark being produced in the event. All the quarks will end up in hadrons, though.
Predictably, physics and engineering students scored high on math and lower on verbal; liberal arts students scored higher on verbal and lower on math. Management students tended to score lower than almost everyone on both sections (with education students averaging lowest of all, though there may be some interesting "continuing education" reasons for this).
And where's the part where you show that GRE scores correlate with contribution to society and the economy later in life?
Maybe I'm just lame with your annoying legal policies, but I fail to see how materially, a tax shouldn't be applied on internet purchases vs. store-fronts.
If the vendor is located in your state, then the tax should and usually does apply. But according the to the U.S. constitution, interstate commerce is regulated by the federal, not the state government. So blame the founding fathers if you don't like it, or write to your senator and state legislators asking for a constitutional ammendment.
Why not make it the law that all non-registered cellphones using the prinsons cell site coverage are automatically logged (phone details AND voice recorded..) - surely that would make the value of the phones almost nothing.
Wrong. Most prisoners couldn't care less if their calls are being monitored. The reason cell phones are valuable to prisoners and the reason the prison administration doesn't want them used is that use of the standard prison phone is a HUGE source of revenue for the prisons, as all calls are collect, calling card numbers (often all 800 numbers) are typically blocked, and the prison's carrier often charges more than 10 times standard rates. There are companies that cater especially to hospitals and prisons that charge exorbitant rates because they have a (literally) captive market. (Ever wonder why hospitals don't allow cell phones?) If you don't believe me, do a Google search for a company called Zero Point Dialing, and read some of the things that people have to say about them.
Parent is quite correct. I read the paper expecting to find sophisticated calculations about the properties of micro black holes, and instead I found a rather pedestrian discussion of probability theory.
The basic argument for the safety of the LHC still stands: nature has frequently produced collisions at much higher energies than we can ever hope to achieve in the LHC, many such occurring in the Earth's atmosphere, and yet the Earth has stayed around long enough for intelligent (or maybe not so much) life to evolve here.
You're mad because the government is turning off a service that is provided to you essentially for free,
No, I'm sorry, but the government isn't turning off a service. The government is MANDATING that private companies (broadcasters) stop sending analog signals, and they've done so through LEGISLATION. And the signals aren't "free", they are paid for with ad revenues generated when you watch the commercials. And these broadcasters would be happy to continue to provide analog signals except for the fact that they will be FORBIDDEN by the GOVERNMENT from doing so.
So the government wasn't providing the signals, but they will take active steps to stop them from being provided to you by willing parties. They created the problem, they can damn well pay for the solution!
Lithium is expensive, but it will come done like anything else.
Actually lithium is an element, like gold, so it can't be manufactured. There's only so much of it. Therefore, unlike manufactured goods, as demand goes up, price goes up, not down.
and that the personal account(s) could be audited during the presidency to ensure that no funny business is taking place.
Are you serious? So you think the president should not be allowed any truly private communication whatsoever? Should the president give up the right to use Truecrypt and Tor on his personal laptop in the residential wing of the Whitehouse? Should this extend to his family? What if the president used Tor running on his daughter's computer to access a private gmail account? Would all people living in the Whitehouse be subject to having their personal computers searched for unapproved software? It's one thing to require that all government correspondence be archived, but quite another to require that all communications be subject to search in order to determine if they should be archived. Should the president and his family really be treated like sex offenders?
This discussion of transition to digital TV makes me think of a question I have been meaning to ask. Perhaps it is more appropriate for Ask Slashdot, but it is related to the topic under discussion, and I am sure I'm not the only one in this situation.
I have a friend on a fixed income (and yes, it really is a friend--I have cable), who has a roof antenna and gets her programming off the air on an analog TV. She understands about the transition to digital and is perfectly willing to buy a converter box.
She works during the day and is a fan of soaps. She has an analog VCR which she programs to record her shows. They are on multiple channels at different times, eg. 12:00 to 12:30 on channel 7, 1:00 to 2:00 on channel 5, 3:00 to 3:30 on channel 9, etc.
She has been asking me about her VCR. As I understand, if she hooks up the converter box to her VCR, she will be able to record only one channel since the tuning is done in the converter box. So she realizes she will have to buy some sort of DVR, and I have been enlisted to help her shop. (She incorrectly assumes that since I'm a computer geek, I must also be an A/V geek) The problem is I know nothing about DVRs, but I'd really like to help.
I suggested a Tivo, but a friend told me it works only if you have cable, not for off-the-air. Is that true? And what other options are available? I also have been told that you need to pay a monthly fee to operate a DVR. Is that true? She doesn't need program guides as she is perfectly willing to program the start/stop times and channels manually, just as she now does with her VCR. I also understand that some units use a hard drive, some others burn the programs to DVD and some do both. As she is more interested in time shifting than archiving, it seems a HDD solution is probably best. Her budget isn't huge, about $300 max for this device. I've been doing some research, both online and at local stores, and haven't yet found something exactly suitable. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. Any Slashdoters out there who have been looking for something similar? What do people recommend? She's not a computer person, and her computer is very old, so I don't think a PC based solution is right for her.
(And please don't suggest that she get a life and quit watching soaps. While I don't disagree with that sentiment, I'm really looking for a more technical solution here.)
Wrong. For purposes of the child pornography statute, nudity alone is certainly sufficient, as long as there is a "lascivious exhibition of the genitals" (in fact, nudity isn't even required). The scene referred to from the Simpsons movie could arguably fit that definition.
You do realize, don't you, that we're talking about K-12 here, not college?
They can't learn until they can think. Knuth is a good start on that.
It's not just an issue of how advanced the book is. In K-12 education, cost of textbooks is a huge issue. I really don't think Knuth is appropriate here, for economic reasons as much as anything else.
Putting the fakes on, driving through a light that just turned red, pulling off on a side road and removing the plates should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes. The chances of a cop pulling you over in that amount of time is close to nil.
Except that now this is a known problem, so cops in unmarked cars might start targeting areas where newly publicized photo radar cameras have been placed and pulling over speeders and checking their plates.
This might have been a relatively low-risk crime at first, but the more common it becomes, the riskier it will become.
Slashdot Mirror
The website that appears in the product photograph seems to list the product as unavailable. It doesn't say if it is out of stock or if there is some other reason. And the product page seems to indicate it is targeted at older student (college, for instance) to help them study rather than for parents to use on their kids. I'm not sure if it is meant as a joke or not.
Many high security establishments, both government and commercial, realize that they can't stop technology without serious concessions. What some do are to put a special tamper-proof tag over the camera. Then they just inspect the tag when you exit and, if tampered, confiscate the device until it can be validated.
What good would confiscating the device after the fact do? If these are really "high security" establishments as you say, wouldn't they be concerned that you might "tamper" with the tag, use the camera to photograph or record video of sensitive materials or discussions, then encrypt and transmit said photos or videos to a far-off website, all before leaving the establishment? Confiscating the device at that point would be like closing the barn door after the horses escaped.
If I manage to decrypt and open the file and find it is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem instead of NTFS I will be very suspicious that this was done because there is a hidden "plausibly deniable" inner volume.
Actually, all of my Truecrypt volumes are formatted as FAT32, and I don't use hidden volumes at all. The reason I use FAT32 is that it makes it easier to mount and read/write the volumes in Linux as well as Windows.
The advertisement says the software runs on Windows. It doesn't say that it is incapable of scanning non-Windows disks or filesystems.
I may be missing something here, but the hardware doesn't appear to be the first choice of people building server farms.
Yes, but it isn't just people running server farms that use virtualization. Desktop users, including myself, routinely use products like VMWare to run things like Linux under Windows XP, often creating virtual machines when testing potentially "dangerous" software downloaded from the Internet, or visiting websites that may not be fully trusted. Given that new web browser vulnerabilities are being found all the time, I generally do my random web surfing under VMWare, and do serious stuff like banking in a different VM. This exploit means this won't provide the safety it did after all. It is a very serious issue.
Thats nonsense, the exploit requires access to the MTRR registers, and no sane virtualization environment would let its guests touch those registers in the real CPU.
Does anyone know, for example, if VMWare does?
You need something like a monitoring tool on your router, or in another machine.
And even that won't help you if the site delivering the payload is SSL enabled.
He also said "Solaris is the best unix techonology available in the market."
Solaris isn't going anywhere.
So why is there still no Oracle 11g for Solaris/x86, when its already been released for most of the other major platforms, including Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX. It has been released for Solaris/Sparc, but as of yet, no 11g for Solaris/x86.
Doesn't a good encryption system stop DPI from giving any useful information?
Any useful information? Sure! There is lots of useful information that can be gleaned even when encryption is used. Who are you communicating with? What protocol are you using? By looking at packet timing and packet sizes, much more information can be obtained than you might think, such as: are you web surfing vs. interactive keyboard login? Are you tranferring large files or reading short web pages? And if the structure of the web pages of the target site is known, the size of the packets transferred might even reveal which pages you were visiting. Some have even reported the ability to make educated guesses about keystrokes in interactive sessions based on timing of packets. Admittedly some of these features will have to wait for the next generation of DPI technology, but even today, a great deal of information can be collected.
I thought in the U.S., anyone could grant any degrees they like, and it was up to various private accrediting organizations to decide whether or not to accredit them. Since when did the government get to say who can and can't issue degrees? Aren't there First Amendment issues here?
Yes, quarks produced via the strong (or electromagnetic) interaction are always produced in quark/anti-quark pairs. So a strongly produced top quark would always be produced with an anti-top quark. Those two quarks would not generally end up in the same hadron, but they would both be produced at the same time.
The weak interaction can change quark flavors, so a top quark could be produced from some other flavor of quark, with no anti-top quark being produced in the event. All the quarks will end up in hadrons, though.
Predictably, physics and engineering students scored high on math and lower on verbal; liberal arts students scored higher on verbal and lower on math. Management students tended to score lower than almost everyone on both sections (with education students averaging lowest of all, though there may be some interesting "continuing education" reasons for this).
And where's the part where you show that GRE scores correlate with contribution to society and the economy later in life?
Maybe I'm just lame with your annoying legal policies, but I fail to see how materially, a tax shouldn't be applied on internet purchases vs. store-fronts.
If the vendor is located in your state, then the tax should and usually does apply. But according the to the U.S. constitution, interstate commerce is regulated by the federal, not the state government. So blame the founding fathers if you don't like it, or write to your senator and state legislators asking for a constitutional ammendment.
Our government should not be in the business of making it more expensive for me to go see my family 100 miles away.
What do you think a gasoline tax is?
...navigate the twisted corridors of the law instead of technology or computer code.
That y'all built yourselves... talk about job-preserving legacy code... ;)
As opposed to techies?
Why not make it the law that all non-registered cellphones using the prinsons cell site coverage are automatically logged (phone details AND voice recorded..) - surely that would make the value of the phones almost nothing.
Wrong. Most prisoners couldn't care less if their calls are being monitored. The reason cell phones are valuable to prisoners and the reason the prison administration doesn't want them used is that use of the standard prison phone is a HUGE source of revenue for the prisons, as all calls are collect, calling card numbers (often all 800 numbers) are typically blocked, and the prison's carrier often charges more than 10 times standard rates. There are companies that cater especially to hospitals and prisons that charge exorbitant rates because they have a (literally) captive market. (Ever wonder why hospitals don't allow cell phones?) If you don't believe me, do a Google search for a company called Zero Point Dialing, and read some of the things that people have to say about them.
Parent is quite correct. I read the paper expecting to find sophisticated calculations about the properties of micro black holes, and instead I found a rather pedestrian discussion of probability theory.
The basic argument for the safety of the LHC still stands: nature has frequently produced collisions at much higher energies than we can ever hope to achieve in the LHC, many such occurring in the Earth's atmosphere, and yet the Earth has stayed around long enough for intelligent (or maybe not so much) life to evolve here.
You're mad because the government is turning off a service that is provided to you essentially for free,
No, I'm sorry, but the government isn't turning off a service. The government is MANDATING that private companies (broadcasters) stop sending analog signals, and they've done so through LEGISLATION. And the signals aren't "free", they are paid for with ad revenues generated when you watch the commercials. And these broadcasters would be happy to continue to provide analog signals except for the fact that they will be FORBIDDEN by the GOVERNMENT from doing so.
So the government wasn't providing the signals, but they will take active steps to stop them from being provided to you by willing parties. They created the problem, they can damn well pay for the solution!
Lithium is expensive, but it will come done like anything else.
Actually lithium is an element, like gold, so it can't be manufactured. There's only so much of it. Therefore, unlike manufactured goods, as demand goes up, price goes up, not down.
and that the personal account(s) could be audited during the presidency to ensure that no funny business is taking place.
Are you serious? So you think the president should not be allowed any truly private communication whatsoever? Should the president give up the right to use Truecrypt and Tor on his personal laptop in the residential wing of the Whitehouse? Should this extend to his family? What if the president used Tor running on his daughter's computer to access a private gmail account? Would all people living in the Whitehouse be subject to having their personal computers searched for unapproved software? It's one thing to require that all government correspondence be archived, but quite another to require that all communications be subject to search in order to determine if they should be archived. Should the president and his family really be treated like sex offenders?
This discussion of transition to digital TV makes me think of a question I have been meaning to ask. Perhaps it is more appropriate for Ask Slashdot, but it is related to the topic under discussion, and I am sure I'm not the only one in this situation.
I have a friend on a fixed income (and yes, it really is a friend--I have cable), who has a roof antenna and gets her programming off the air on an analog TV. She understands about the transition to digital and is perfectly willing to buy a converter box.
She works during the day and is a fan of soaps. She has an analog VCR which she programs to record her shows. They are on multiple channels at different times, eg. 12:00 to 12:30 on channel 7, 1:00 to 2:00 on channel 5, 3:00 to 3:30 on channel 9, etc.
She has been asking me about her VCR. As I understand, if she hooks up the converter box to her VCR, she will be able to record only one channel since the tuning is done in the converter box. So she realizes she will have to buy some sort of DVR, and I have been enlisted to help her shop. (She incorrectly assumes that since I'm a computer geek, I must also be an A/V geek) The problem is I know nothing about DVRs, but I'd really like to help.
I suggested a Tivo, but a friend told me it works only if you have cable, not for off-the-air. Is that true? And what other options are available? I also have been told that you need to pay a monthly fee to operate a DVR. Is that true? She doesn't need program guides as she is perfectly willing to program the start/stop times and channels manually, just as she now does with her VCR. I also understand that some units use a hard drive, some others burn the programs to DVD and some do both. As she is more interested in time shifting than archiving, it seems a HDD solution is probably best. Her budget isn't huge, about $300 max for this device. I've been doing some research, both online and at local stores, and haven't yet found something exactly suitable. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. Any Slashdoters out there who have been looking for something similar? What do people recommend? She's not a computer person, and her computer is very old, so I don't think a PC based solution is right for her.
(And please don't suggest that she get a life and quit watching soaps. While I don't disagree with that sentiment, I'm really looking for a more technical solution here.)
Why should children have to be fed in a toilet? do you routinely eat in the toilet?
No, but if I'm eating breakfast in a public place, and if I'm having milk on my cereal, I don't invite the cow to stand on the table while I milk it.
Wrong. For purposes of the child pornography statute, nudity alone is certainly sufficient, as long as there is a "lascivious exhibition of the genitals" (in fact, nudity isn't even required). The scene referred to from the Simpsons movie could arguably fit that definition.
How so?
You do realize, don't you, that we're talking about K-12 here, not college?
They can't learn until they can think. Knuth is a good start on that.
It's not just an issue of how advanced the book is. In K-12 education, cost of textbooks is a huge issue. I really don't think Knuth is appropriate here, for economic reasons as much as anything else.
Putting the fakes on, driving through a light that just turned red, pulling off on a side road and removing the plates should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes. The chances of a cop pulling you over in that amount of time is close to nil.
Except that now this is a known problem, so cops in unmarked cars might start targeting areas where newly publicized photo radar cameras have been placed and pulling over speeders and checking their plates.
This might have been a relatively low-risk crime at first, but the more common it becomes, the riskier it will become.