>Please explain the moral foundation of one's "entitlement to property" after death,
Reductio ad absurdum:
If you believe that there is no right to property after death, but there is a right to property before death, surely you oppose the portions of the IRS code which prohibit people from giving away their wealth while they're still alive.
Lemme get this straight - it's immoral for me to die and bequeath $10M estate to someone after I have no use for it. But it would be just fine for me to sign over that $10M estate when I'm on the operating table. Or when I'm 65. Or today, for that matter.
If you don't see a glaring inconsistency there (or more accurately, if you do see the inconsistency, but choose to resolve it by saying that gifts made on my deathbed - or at any other time - ought to be taxed too), then I can only conclude that you do not believe in the moral foundation of property rights to begin with, whether before or after death.
In which case, I might just as well declare "all your assets are belong to me" - because you must also deny yourself the right to property on pain of logical inconsistency.
Please explain the moral foundation of your denial of property rights.
Property rights are like religion - you either believe they have a moral foundation or you don't. The "after death" bit is a red herring.
>A bunch of the richest people in the US came out against repealing the death tax. But they don't get it. Their kids will get
hundreds of millions or billions after the death tax.
And - most of these folks aren't even paying the death tax. They can afford a $1M/y accountant to structure their affairs so that they don't pay a cent.
If Warren Buffett and the other signatories believe it's moral to pay half their net worth to Uncle Sam when they die, they will retain every right to do so whether the death tax is repealed or not -- the IRS will be happy to accept a check from their estates.
As for me and my house, we'd prefer to keep what we managed to purchase (with after-tax dollars, no less!) during our lives, and pass those assets down to our heirs.
For those who don't have kids and don't want any - given the probability that you'll outlive your parents... have you considered naming the EFF or FSF as beneficiaries?
Assuming you're in the United States (and that this isn't an exquisite troll;-), if your state has any anti-spam laws, read up on 'em. If your company is breaking them, consider blowing the whistle to the Attorney-General.
That business about "making quotas" of spams makes me suspect that your employer is engaged in shady business to begin with. Something just smells fishy - like those "$10/hour college jobs". The Federal Trade Commission may also be interested if there's a violation of any one of a number of laws. The spam may not matter if they're doing pump-and-dump stock promotion (call the SEC) or unfair credit card billing practices.
Read news.admin.net-abuse.email. Maybe some properly-anonymized mail to the right places would be helpful in bringing others into the fray to enclue your employer, say, if there were sufficient evidence for an RBL nomination.
>Suppose YOU had a time machine and got stuck in some medieval time. Would
you survive more than a day?
Probably not. I wouldn't smell like the rest of the peasants, my haircut, clothing, and speech patterns would be "all wrong", and I'd be burned as a witch/warlock within a few hours.
> I feel that I could live comfortably if I
could improve the life and health of a king and his court. Perhaps by building a
plumbing or central heating system for his castle.
And if you didn't get burned as a witch, this would clinch it:)
But speaking hypothetically - if you could avoid the stake - yes, this would be where to start.
> How would
we produce a transistor without the knowledge and equipment to produce a
diode?
Read "A Canticle for Leibowitz", probably the best "manual for rebooting civilization" ever written.
You've glommed onto part of the problem, but not all of it. The real key is "why would you want to make a diode?" To want to make a diode, you need to understand semiconductors. To do that, you need to understand "conductor" and "nonconductor". To do that you need to understand electricity.
I'd start by using a steam engine (the "big sphere with two jets sticking out of it" from Greek times) to turn a wheel. I'd ask the blacksmith to make me something that approximated metal wire, wrap some around some wooden dowels, grab some lodestone for magnets, etc...
If (again, building a generator would likely get you burned as a witch - look, the witch makes lightning from a spinning wheel! Unholy!) I didn't burn at the stake for it, I'd have electricity.
Electricity gives you better smelting capabilities, electroplating, and opens up lots of cool physics - radio, etc. as well as motors to drive pumps. Radio would give my King superior communications, and superior communications would allow him to defend the Kingdom against opponents.
The rest would take care of itself - pump-vaccum-tube-semiconductor. Semiconductor-diode-transistor. Throw in the notion of the Turing machine and programmability (no software, just the idea that state machines can be made to do things), and you've got computing again.
To rephrase the question -- would you rather that a hyperadvanced alien species give you a device that could communicate faster than light? Or would you rather they give you the physics breakthroughs that explains how to build such a device.
If they give you the device, you have a nifty toy.
If they give you the physics textbook, you've just advanced your civilization by $BIGNUM years.
>While making and importing decoding devices will be banned, their personal use will not.
In other words, if you can get your hands on a device, you are allowed to use it
This sounds so much like (alcohol) prohibition in the 1920s... you couldn't make booze, you couldn't import it, you couldn't sell it, but if you had it, you could drink it.
So instead of bars, they had speakeasies. You paid for memberships in "private clubs", and when you got there, the owner just happened to have some booze, and he'd generously give some to you and your guests.
The irony, of course, is that the Bronfmans - yes, those Bronfmans - got their start in running booze across the Canadian/US border during the Prohibition era. The company ended up being called "Seagram's". Maybe you've heard of it?
MEM>> My old IBM XT hard drive had a little paper filter that allowed pressure equalization between the inside
of the drive and the outside air.
I can vouch for the same technology used on current (well, 1997-era) drives. The hotter the drive runs, in fact, the more likely it is that such tech is required.
I don't know if the filters are impermeable to the particles in cigarette smoke, though.
That said, I've seen smoke and tar inside PCs. It's not pretty, and the heat buildup on the components must be pretty foul. I've seen flyback transformers on televisions that are positively furry.
> [Give me all your money and we'll give you more back]
This is the "Nigerian 419 scam", or the "419 scam". Any keyword search will tell you what you need to know.
The short version: Report it to the US Secret Service - it's their bailiwick under the auspices of the US Treasury. It's a popular scam among organized criminals - so popular that the Government of Nigeria periodically takes out full-page ads in financial dailies to warn people.
419 scam victims have been killed on occasion. Not "lost their account", not "busted and wound up in a nice American jail". Just killed.
>Does anyone have any experience with Sun monitors, and if so, can they share any reason why you'd
pay the outrageous $370 that they're asking for a 17" monitor??
Go to your local surplus store and get a Sony GDM20D11. It'll be a Sun-branded 21" monitor or an SGI-branded 21" monitor.
Anyone grok Ultra 5 RAM? I'd love to throw another 128M into this box, but I'm damned if I'm gonna pay "certified Sun" prices for my desktop. Is it really just PC100 with a brand name?
If it's Sun, it works with Sun gear. If it's SGI, it needs a hack to accept separate sync.
Pinouts may vary depending on your cable. And you may have to use some "m64config" commands in your init scripts and X start up scripts to brute-force the card, but it's doable.
>And you are thinking that these people who could not figure out how to close their shares are going
to be smart enough to know that they're being sniffed?
Most dialup spammers die pretty quickly, even with an estimated one-in-10000 abuse reporting rate.
If sharesniffing becomes widespread, I'd expect to see people running "honeypot" share-simulating clients and/or automated "log all probes and report to abuse after 10 probes from any single netblock within a 7-day period" tools.
> The result of this will be successful at first, but after a time people will learn to filter out the
new bigger ads too. Then advertisers will call to make them even larger.
>
Where will it all end? It won't.
Bevy of lawyers or not, there's nothing to stop you from reporting sniffs for shares as potential violations of the sniffer's ISP's AUP.
Remember - in many states, spamming is "legal" - but accounts still get whacked because an AUP that says "we nuke spammers" is every bit as legal.
Same thing applies here: Sniffing for shares may be legal (though morally questionable). Using the shares may even be legal (though even more morally questionable). But reporting sniffers to abuse@sniffer's-ISP is also legal, and it's just as legal for that ISP to LART the offender for TOS violation when a sufficient number of abuse reports pile up.
>I really hate to see common extensions (.wav ,.avi , etc)
being non-standardized into different sub-types that may or may not work with my applications.
Paranoid theory: Maybe that's what RIAA's plan is.
Fact: Napster has a large userbase.
Fact: The new napster will also have a large userbase, at least for a period of time
Fact: Users trade MP3s offline
Fact: Newbies are often "compulsive upgraders"
Therefore, we can assume that when NewNapster says "You need to update your MP3 player" to play these MP3s-that-aren't-MP3s, they'll do it.
We can further assume that they'll share these files over other media.
We can conclude that if these files continue to be shared, that not everything that ends in ".mp3" will be playable in old-sk00l MP3 players (hardware or software).
Thus, the base of existing MP3s is sufficiently-contaminated that clued-in users no longer trust that a file ending in ".MP3" is playable, and they stop trading en masse and go back to trading amongst themselves, a few files at a time.
The widespread sharing of MP3 files is stopped. The USENET MP3 groups are also abandoned (think: flood of clueless n00bies with cable modems and NewNapsterized MP3s), and we go back to the dark ages.
I don't think it'll happen - but it's a possibility. All that has to happen is that NewNapster not suck as much as we think it will;-)
>Dumbass. That's in the frame headers, not the idiotic ID3 tags.
Whups. Thanks for the clue, deeznutsclan.
Moderators: He may have been inflammatory, but he was right. See table 2-1 in the O'Reilly chapter I linked to.
If the protection bit is on, then a checksum follows the header. They can do this in every frame of the file.
My original point still stands - a third-party utility can just as easily strip or reset the bits after downloading through the NewNapster client. But the bits are in the frame headers, not the ID3 tags. (Serves me right for taking the output of TinAMP seriously:)
>
Browser interfaces are often counter-intuitive because the cure is hidden in
deep menu items, e.g. edit--prefs--advanced--....
Yet another reason why I prefer Netscape 3.0 (Option--uncheck-image-autoload, Option--uncheck-enable-Java/shit) over Netscape 4.x (Edit-prefs-advanced-click/click/click-ok)
The more inconvenient you can make it for the user to toggle shit like Java, proxying, etc., the more likely they are to see the ads.
Now watch my UNIX port of Netscape 4 take 20 seconds to render a pile of tables where Netscape 3 would have done it in less than one.
When Mozilla shows they want to write a great browser, not a "look at how deep we can bury the features" (NS4) or a "k00l, itz gawt sk1nz!" memory hog (XUL)... oh hell, why bother finishing the sentence. We know they won't.
> Haven't they heard about all the troubles NASA has had trying to develop this technology?
Yeah, when NASA sends something straight down at Mach 7.6, it costs way more than a million bucks. And sometimes it doesn't even achieve Mach 7.6 on impact.
Anyone want a couple of slightly-used Mars probes?
>Memory is recoverable from DRAM/SRAM for some time. Not trivially, but it takes a long time for the electron density
in all of the cells to return to a statistically meaningless state.
True. An old stunt we used to love doing as kids was to load an image into an Apple ]['s graphics RAM, then power-cycle the machine and go into graphics mode on power-up.
Most of the time, there was corruption, but the image remained recognizable - the chips retained the ability to return a TTL signal to within spec - even after 5-10 seconds of power-down.
I have no doubt the data was recoverable (i.e. measure analog voltages) for power-down periods of time much longer than that.
>Several wiping programs are available that will overwrite data multiple times with binary patterns - checkerboards,
solid 0's, solid 1's, random patterns, etc.
You correctly point out that physical destruction of media is the only way to be sure.
One thing to be aware of when overwriting data with patterns is that what you think you write to disk isn't what you write to disk.
A string of "00000000" isn't "all magnetic north poles up", and a string of "11111111" isn't "all magnetic north poles down".
Drive firmware maps these bit streams into encodings that are broken up into patterns of ones and zeroes that the heads can always read - much the same way that your serial port would get very confused if you tried to download a 100K file of "all zeroes" by just holding the ReceiveData line low for 30 seconds with no parity or stop bits.
The actual encoding method by which the bitstream is encoded into alternating magnetic patterns is probably drive-dependent. As a result, the "ideal" pattern of bytes the controller should write to the drive to create patterns of alternating, or mostly-North, or mostly-South, magnetism, will also be drive-dependent.
Practical application: The Apple ]['s "disk ][" floppy controller used to have a feature where you could tell the floppy drive to give you the data as seen by the read/write head. By changing the encoding scheme to a less-redundant, but equally-reliable one, you went from 13 sectors per track to 16 sectors per track. Many copy-protection-breaking programs of the day would give you the bytes as seen by the drive head and use this to determine what encoding (or if a custom encoding) was in use.
In hard drives - MFM and RLL are two encoding schemes. RLL drives were exactly the same hardware inside, but used a different encoding scheme. RLL stood for Run-Length-Limited, where "Run-Length" can be loosely translated into "number of consecutive all-north-poles-in-a-row the drive firmware will tell the head to read/write for any given input bit sequence. As such, the RLL version of a drive typically had 30M of user space, whereas the MFM-encoded drive - same hardware - had 20M of user space.
Today's drives work on the same mechanism at the head/platter level, it's just buried under many more levels (BIOS, C/H/S remapping, LBA, etc. etc. etc.) of abstraction.
Others have posted links to this paper. I've merely summarized section 3. It's a damn good paper.
If it's important - whether military or corporate secrets - physically destroy the media and buy a new drive.
>if you're not going to damage the surface of the drive, you're going to need to format like crazy, and fill it
with junk every time.
Yup. And even this won't work. Suppose you've got data in marginal sectors on the drive - the data gets mapped to spare tracks, and the marginal sectors are blocked out and remapped by the drive's firmware.
No amount of repartitioning and reformatting and "overwriting with junk" will overwite the mapped-out sectors, because the OS (and BIOS) never sees the mapped-out sectors.
Whether this is sufficient depends on who your imagined adversary is.
If it's Joe Average, who bought your used P166, repartition and don't even bother reformatting.
If it's Joe Linuxgeek, who bought your used P166, repartition and overwrite with junk.
If it's Fred the Fed, degauss. This will likely ruin the drive, as there's lots of information embedded between tracks on the platters that the drive heads use to figure out whether they're tracking correctly. This is why you can't "low-level" format (in the sense that you could with old-sk00l MFM drives) an IDE drive.
If you are Fred the Fed, and just got busted for selling secrets to the Russians... it's too late to use thermite.
There are reasons why military and intelligence organizations require physical destruction of drives on which classified material has been stored.
>There isn't a fact out there that can challenge their beliefs. That's the whole point of faith, isn't it?
Try this on your fundie friends:
"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science
and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is
much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more
elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god,
and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that
stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern
science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and
awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
- Carl Sagan
I agree with Sagan here - IMHO it takes more faith to believe in a "big God" than the small-minded God of the Genesis literalists.
(Just don't tell 'em the religious insight came from Carl Sagan until after they see the light;-)
> Sorry, but the genetic code is much more like bare assembly than a high level language.
Yup. As someone who's reverse-engineered code from raw assembler dumps, I'm struck by the similarities I see in molecular/computational biology.
Oftentimes, you get "dead wood" in a hex dump, bytes that aren't used by anything. As you grok more and more of the code, you find that it's not junk after all - it's a data stash read by a linked list, for instance.
I've got a standing bet with a cow orker that a good chunk of that "junk DNA" is just data for which we haven't found the code that reads it yet.
(On the other hand, since DNA isn't hand-tuned assembly, it's quite plausible that there are huge portions of space that contain "whatever stuff was in RAM at assembly-time half a billion years ago" and are neither executed nor read as data by any active code.)
The most exciting things I've read about the assembly-language:DNA mapping are the papers where you see things like "the bacterium can survive with only 300 of its 500 genes working". Then you see the catchphrase "when disabled one at a time".
This sounds remarkably like the technique I learned as "filling the code with water and seeing where it leaks" - stuff a data stash full of 0xFF and if you see white blocks on the screen where there used to be airplanes, you've found the graphics. Replace a subroutine with a "Return" instruction and if the airplanes disappear, you've found the routine that displays them. Fill too much stuff with 0xFF or return-out too many subroutines and you crash hard and reboot;-)
> Maybe these virtually identical strands of DNA
are God's creative signature -- his way of demonstrating that all life is connected to its Creator. I
don't believe it, but hey, you can't disprove it.
Nor can I disprove that God didn't create the whole universe (including this Slashdot post, and my memories of my life up to and including the moment when I clicked "reply") out of whole cloth fifteen seconds ago.
In science, the burden of proof lies on the person or group making the claim.
If it's not falsifiable (i.e. if it's impossible to find data that disproves the theory), it's not science.
It's quite possible to find evidence that would disprove evolution. Regrettably, much of the evidence for "Scientific" Creationism has already been falsified.
Evolution remains the most likely explanation for the origin of life. What's important in the MSNBC article is that genomics has discovered additional evidence (unrelated to rock-dating techniques) that supports the evolutionary theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, it's Mozilla. Even if you had a memory cache for HTTP, it all ends up being swapped to disk anyway when you run out of RAM, right? ;-)
Reductio ad absurdum:
If you believe that there is no right to property after death, but there is a right to property before death, surely you oppose the portions of the IRS code which prohibit people from giving away their wealth while they're still alive.
Lemme get this straight - it's immoral for me to die and bequeath $10M estate to someone after I have no use for it. But it would be just fine for me to sign over that $10M estate when I'm on the operating table. Or when I'm 65. Or today, for that matter.
If you don't see a glaring inconsistency there (or more accurately, if you do see the inconsistency, but choose to resolve it by saying that gifts made on my deathbed - or at any other time - ought to be taxed too), then I can only conclude that you do not believe in the moral foundation of property rights to begin with, whether before or after death.
In which case, I might just as well declare "all your assets are belong to me" - because you must also deny yourself the right to property on pain of logical inconsistency.
Please explain the moral foundation of your denial of property rights.
Property rights are like religion - you either believe they have a moral foundation or you don't. The "after death" bit is a red herring.
And - most of these folks aren't even paying the death tax. They can afford a $1M/y accountant to structure their affairs so that they don't pay a cent.
If Warren Buffett and the other signatories believe it's moral to pay half their net worth to Uncle Sam when they die, they will retain every right to do so whether the death tax is repealed or not -- the IRS will be happy to accept a check from their estates.
As for me and my house, we'd prefer to keep what we managed to purchase (with after-tax dollars, no less!) during our lives, and pass those assets down to our heirs.
For those who don't have kids and don't want any - given the probability that you'll outlive your parents... have you considered naming the EFF or FSF as beneficiaries?
Or to get us back on topic -- how about The Planetary Society?
That business about "making quotas" of spams makes me suspect that your employer is engaged in shady business to begin with. Something just smells fishy - like those "$10/hour college jobs". The Federal Trade Commission may also be interested if there's a violation of any one of a number of laws. The spam may not matter if they're doing pump-and-dump stock promotion (call the SEC) or unfair credit card billing practices.
Read news.admin.net-abuse.email. Maybe some properly-anonymized mail to the right places would be helpful in bringing others into the fray to enclue your employer, say, if there were sufficient evidence for an RBL nomination.
You do have options.
Probably not. I wouldn't smell like the rest of the peasants, my haircut, clothing, and speech patterns would be "all wrong", and I'd be burned as a witch/warlock within a few hours.
> I feel that I could live comfortably if I could improve the life and health of a king and his court. Perhaps by building a plumbing or central heating system for his castle.
And if you didn't get burned as a witch, this would clinch it :)
But speaking hypothetically - if you could avoid the stake - yes, this would be where to start.
> How would we produce a transistor without the knowledge and equipment to produce a diode?
Read "A Canticle for Leibowitz", probably the best "manual for rebooting civilization" ever written.
You've glommed onto part of the problem, but not all of it. The real key is "why would you want to make a diode?" To want to make a diode, you need to understand semiconductors. To do that, you need to understand "conductor" and "nonconductor". To do that you need to understand electricity.
I'd start by using a steam engine (the "big sphere with two jets sticking out of it" from Greek times) to turn a wheel. I'd ask the blacksmith to make me something that approximated metal wire, wrap some around some wooden dowels, grab some lodestone for magnets, etc...
If (again, building a generator would likely get you burned as a witch - look, the witch makes lightning from a spinning wheel! Unholy!) I didn't burn at the stake for it, I'd have electricity.
Electricity gives you better smelting capabilities, electroplating, and opens up lots of cool physics - radio, etc. as well as motors to drive pumps. Radio would give my King superior communications, and superior communications would allow him to defend the Kingdom against opponents.
The rest would take care of itself - pump-vaccum-tube-semiconductor. Semiconductor-diode-transistor. Throw in the notion of the Turing machine and programmability (no software, just the idea that state machines can be made to do things), and you've got computing again.
To rephrase the question -- would you rather that a hyperadvanced alien species give you a device that could communicate faster than light? Or would you rather they give you the physics breakthroughs that explains how to build such a device.
If they give you the device, you have a nifty toy.
If they give you the physics textbook, you've just advanced your civilization by $BIGNUM years.
This sounds so much like (alcohol) prohibition in the 1920s... you couldn't make booze, you couldn't import it, you couldn't sell it, but if you had it, you could drink it.
So instead of bars, they had speakeasies. You paid for memberships in "private clubs", and when you got there, the owner just happened to have some booze, and he'd generously give some to you and your guests.
The irony, of course, is that the Bronfmans - yes, those Bronfmans - got their start in running booze across the Canadian/US border during the Prohibition era. The company ended up being called "Seagram's". Maybe you've heard of it?
I can vouch for the same technology used on current (well, 1997-era) drives. The hotter the drive runs, in fact, the more likely it is that such tech is required.
I don't know if the filters are impermeable to the particles in cigarette smoke, though.
That said, I've seen smoke and tar inside PCs. It's not pretty, and the heat buildup on the components must be pretty foul. I've seen flyback transformers on televisions that are positively furry.
See the web scams for $99? Sheee-it, I get more scams than this in my incoming spamload every day!
This is the "Nigerian 419 scam", or the "419 scam". Any keyword search will tell you what you need to know.
The short version: Report it to the US Secret Service - it's their bailiwick under the auspices of the US Treasury. It's a popular scam among organized criminals - so popular that the Government of Nigeria periodically takes out full-page ads in financial dailies to warn people.
419 scam victims have been killed on occasion. Not "lost their account", not "busted and wound up in a nice American jail". Just killed.
Go to your local surplus store and get a Sony GDM20D11. It'll be a Sun-branded 21" monitor or an SGI-branded 21" monitor.
Anyone grok Ultra 5 RAM? I'd love to throw another 128M into this box, but I'm damned if I'm gonna pay "certified Sun" prices for my desktop. Is it really just PC100 with a brand name? If it's Sun, it works with Sun gear. If it's SGI, it needs a hack to accept separate sync.
Pinouts may vary depending on your cable. And you may have to use some "m64config" commands in your init scripts and X start up scripts to brute-force the card, but it's doable.
Most dialup spammers die pretty quickly, even with an estimated one-in-10000 abuse reporting rate.
If sharesniffing becomes widespread, I'd expect to see people running "honeypot" share-simulating clients and/or automated "log all probes and report to abuse after 10 probes from any single netblock within a 7-day period" tools.
> Where will it all end? It won't.
Frightening quote of the day:
An ad exec quoted in an article on thestreet.com: Flagging Sales Have Net Advertisers Lowering the Banner
"It's [the banner ad's] not big enough [ ... ] It's not targetable enough. It's not intrusive enough."
Except Junkbuster doesn't really care how big the ad is, as long as the URL is expressible as a regexp. Fsck 'em.
ObMemePropagation:
All the ad agencies' base are belong to us!
Remember - in many states, spamming is "legal" - but accounts still get whacked because an AUP that says "we nuke spammers" is every bit as legal.
Same thing applies here: Sniffing for shares may be legal (though morally questionable). Using the shares may even be legal (though even more morally questionable). But reporting sniffers to abuse@sniffer's-ISP is also legal, and it's just as legal for that ISP to LART the offender for TOS violation when a sufficient number of abuse reports pile up.
Paranoid theory: Maybe that's what RIAA's plan is.
Fact: Napster has a large userbase.
Fact: The new napster will also have a large userbase, at least for a period of time
Fact: Users trade MP3s offline
Fact: Newbies are often "compulsive upgraders"
Therefore, we can assume that when NewNapster says "You need to update your MP3 player" to play these MP3s-that-aren't-MP3s, they'll do it.
We can further assume that they'll share these files over other media.
We can conclude that if these files continue to be shared, that not everything that ends in ".mp3" will be playable in old-sk00l MP3 players (hardware or software).
Thus, the base of existing MP3s is sufficiently-contaminated that clued-in users no longer trust that a file ending in ".MP3" is playable, and they stop trading en masse and go back to trading amongst themselves, a few files at a time.
The widespread sharing of MP3 files is stopped. The USENET MP3 groups are also abandoned (think: flood of clueless n00bies with cable modems and NewNapsterized MP3s), and we go back to the dark ages.
I don't think it'll happen - but it's a possibility. All that has to happen is that NewNapster not suck as much as we think it will ;-)
Whups. Thanks for the clue, deeznutsclan.
Moderators: He may have been inflammatory, but he was right. See table 2-1 in the O'Reilly chapter I linked to.
If the protection bit is on, then a checksum follows the header. They can do this in every frame of the file.
My original point still stands - a third-party utility can just as easily strip or reset the bits after downloading through the NewNapster client. But the bits are in the frame headers, not the ID3 tags. (Serves me right for taking the output of TinAMP seriously :)
Already been done and reported on /.
The X-Ray project is very cool. But as others have pointed out, not something you want to build without proper training.
Betcha the "new" Napster simply flips these bits, and "asks you" to "upgrade" your MP3 player to something that honors those bits.
WTF else could they do and still have the downloaded files play in an MP3 player?
Yet another reason why I prefer Netscape 3.0 (Option--uncheck-image-autoload, Option--uncheck-enable-Java/shit) over Netscape 4.x (Edit-prefs-advanced-click/click/click-ok)
The more inconvenient you can make it for the user to toggle shit like Java, proxying, etc., the more likely they are to see the ads.
Now watch my UNIX port of Netscape 4 take 20 seconds to render a pile of tables where Netscape 3 would have done it in less than one.
When Mozilla shows they want to write a great browser, not a "look at how deep we can bury the features" (NS4) or a "k00l, itz gawt sk1nz!" memory hog (XUL)... oh hell, why bother finishing the sentence. We know they won't.
Yeah, when NASA sends something straight down at Mach 7.6, it costs way more than a million bucks. And sometimes it doesn't even achieve Mach 7.6 on impact.
Anyone want a couple of slightly-used Mars probes?
True. An old stunt we used to love doing as kids was to load an image into an Apple ]['s graphics RAM, then power-cycle the machine and go into graphics mode on power-up.
Most of the time, there was corruption, but the image remained recognizable - the chips retained the ability to return a TTL signal to within spec - even after 5-10 seconds of power-down.
I have no doubt the data was recoverable (i.e. measure analog voltages) for power-down periods of time much longer than that.
You correctly point out that physical destruction of media is the only way to be sure.
One thing to be aware of when overwriting data with patterns is that what you think you write to disk isn't what you write to disk.
A string of "00000000" isn't "all magnetic north poles up", and a string of "11111111" isn't "all magnetic north poles down".
Drive firmware maps these bit streams into encodings that are broken up into patterns of ones and zeroes that the heads can always read - much the same way that your serial port would get very confused if you tried to download a 100K file of "all zeroes" by just holding the ReceiveData line low for 30 seconds with no parity or stop bits.
The actual encoding method by which the bitstream is encoded into alternating magnetic patterns is probably drive-dependent. As a result, the "ideal" pattern of bytes the controller should write to the drive to create patterns of alternating, or mostly-North, or mostly-South, magnetism, will also be drive-dependent.
Practical application: The Apple ]['s "disk ][" floppy controller used to have a feature where you could tell the floppy drive to give you the data as seen by the read/write head. By changing the encoding scheme to a less-redundant, but equally-reliable one, you went from 13 sectors per track to 16 sectors per track. Many copy-protection-breaking programs of the day would give you the bytes as seen by the drive head and use this to determine what encoding (or if a custom encoding) was in use.
In hard drives - MFM and RLL are two encoding schemes. RLL drives were exactly the same hardware inside, but used a different encoding scheme. RLL stood for Run-Length-Limited, where "Run-Length" can be loosely translated into "number of consecutive all-north-poles-in-a-row the drive firmware will tell the head to read/write for any given input bit sequence. As such, the RLL version of a drive typically had 30M of user space, whereas the MFM-encoded drive - same hardware - had 20M of user space.
Today's drives work on the same mechanism at the head/platter level, it's just buried under many more levels (BIOS, C/H/S remapping, LBA, etc. etc. etc.) of abstraction.
Others have posted links to this paper. I've merely summarized section 3. It's a damn good paper.
If it's important - whether military or corporate secrets - physically destroy the media and buy a new drive.
Yup. And even this won't work. Suppose you've got data in marginal sectors on the drive - the data gets mapped to spare tracks, and the marginal sectors are blocked out and remapped by the drive's firmware.
No amount of repartitioning and reformatting and "overwriting with junk" will overwite the mapped-out sectors, because the OS (and BIOS) never sees the mapped-out sectors.
Whether this is sufficient depends on who your imagined adversary is.
If it's Joe Average, who bought your used P166, repartition and don't even bother reformatting.
If it's Joe Linuxgeek, who bought your used P166, repartition and overwrite with junk.
If it's Fred the Fed, degauss. This will likely ruin the drive, as there's lots of information embedded between tracks on the platters that the drive heads use to figure out whether they're tracking correctly. This is why you can't "low-level" format (in the sense that you could with old-sk00l MFM drives) an IDE drive.
If you are Fred the Fed, and just got busted for selling secrets to the Russians... it's too late to use thermite.
There are reasons why military and intelligence organizations require physical destruction of drives on which classified material has been stored.
Try this on your fundie friends:
I agree with Sagan here - IMHO it takes more faith to believe in a "big God" than the small-minded God of the Genesis literalists.
(Just don't tell 'em the religious insight came from Carl Sagan until after they see the light ;-)
Yup. As someone who's reverse-engineered code from raw assembler dumps, I'm struck by the similarities I see in molecular/computational biology.
Oftentimes, you get "dead wood" in a hex dump, bytes that aren't used by anything. As you grok more and more of the code, you find that it's not junk after all - it's a data stash read by a linked list, for instance.
I've got a standing bet with a cow orker that a good chunk of that "junk DNA" is just data for which we haven't found the code that reads it yet.
(On the other hand, since DNA isn't hand-tuned assembly, it's quite plausible that there are huge portions of space that contain "whatever stuff was in RAM at assembly-time half a billion years ago" and are neither executed nor read as data by any active code.)
The most exciting things I've read about the assembly-language:DNA mapping are the papers where you see things like "the bacterium can survive with only 300 of its 500 genes working". Then you see the catchphrase "when disabled one at a time".
This sounds remarkably like the technique I learned as "filling the code with water and seeing where it leaks" - stuff a data stash full of 0xFF and if you see white blocks on the screen where there used to be airplanes, you've found the graphics. Replace a subroutine with a "Return" instruction and if the airplanes disappear, you've found the routine that displays them. Fill too much stuff with 0xFF or return-out too many subroutines and you crash hard and reboot ;-)
Nor can I disprove that God didn't create the whole universe (including this Slashdot post, and my memories of my life up to and including the moment when I clicked "reply") out of whole cloth fifteen seconds ago.
In science, the burden of proof lies on the person or group making the claim.
If it's not falsifiable (i.e. if it's impossible to find data that disproves the theory), it's not science.
It's quite possible to find evidence that would disprove evolution. Regrettably, much of the evidence for "Scientific" Creationism has already been falsified.
Evolution remains the most likely explanation for the origin of life. What's important in the MSNBC article is that genomics has discovered additional evidence (unrelated to rock-dating techniques) that supports the evolutionary theory.