Why not use a water heat exchanger outside the case to cool the oil (while keeping water away from system components, and getting full contact with the entire system)? The water could then go into a loop to cool it. Other coolants could also be used, although water is great from a heat capacity standpoint.
Since the water doesn't touch anything important, it can be dumped into a cooling tower/etc.
To cool one system I doubt it is worth all the trouble, but for a datacenter I bet you could make it very efficient. It is a lot easier to run pipes of water than sufficient ductwork for A/C.
Component replacements could be a pain, unless the rack made it really easy to drain a given case.
However, the tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor Níniel is probably too tragic for today's Hollywood. They could include Túrin's reappearance at the Dagor Dagorath as its epilogue if the tragedy is too much...
Hmm, I didn't know that Tolkein's head of character naming went on to work for Canonical...
Do you think they would have run all that fiber if they weren't expecting to host a lot of bandwidth-intensive services?
In any case, they're paying for the service. If I own a trash company and give somebody free trash delivery in exchange for free doctor's visits that doesn't mean that my doctor's visits didn't cost me something.
Simple - just make a website that you post names on to the effect of "If you see your name on this website, it is because you're indicted for serious crimes against US national security, so you better turn yourself in before we find you."
Then the accused can simply present themselves for arrest and I'm sure nobody will object to their receiving a trial.
I do see the validity in having some debate over this issue, but this is something I'm torn on.
In WWII it was completely acceptable to bomb Tokyo every night or whatever.
Suppose a sniper could have gotten in and assassinated a few key politicians who were leading the war, leaving more peaceful elements of government intact. Would that be immoral?
For that matter, was it wrong to intentionally target a flight of aircraft that was transporting Yamamoto? He wasn't at that moment leading any particular military activity. He was just a key person of strategic value to the enemy.
In the Iraq war, is it wrong to carpet-bomb 47 bunkers known to be sometimes inhabited by Sadam, killing thousands of soldiers? Is it more wrong to instead just have somebody with a rifle shoot him, killing one person but likely accomplishing most of the political goals of the war?
If you have a beef with some terrorist leader, why is it necessary to mow down his cannon fodder before taking him out?
At the same time I do appreciate the problems inherent in essentially trying these people in absentia.
How about this - when you think that John Smith is a terrorist agent, you post an indictment in a few major newspapers, broadcast it on the radio, and post it on a website. Then John Smith can report to the nearest embassy or whatever and get a fair trial. If John Smith doesn't show up then you capture or kill him in whatever way is necessary.
I don't think that confederate soliders are a good comparison here. Soldiers fighting in uniform are fundamentally different than anybody fighting out of uniform.
Confederate soldiers who surrendered would have been imprisoned until the end of the war, but they would not have otherwise been punished in any way.
In any case, if somebody is conducting military activities against the US, then they are a valid military target. There is a fundamental difference between civilian law enforcement and military operations.
That said, I'm all for capturing such fighters when practical, and enemy soldiers (even illegal combatants) should be offered a means of surrender. That doesn't mean that when you sneak up on somebody that you have to stand up and ask them to surrender before you start shooting - only that in general you need to respect the white flag and allow people to lay down their arms if they proactively choose to do so.
I think the issue of armed drones is a red herring. The same issues apply anytime forces collide outside of small personal encounters. When you're a bomber at 30k feet you drop a bomb on your target - you don't first do a room-by-room search of the target to see who is inside and ask them politely if they want to go to jail instead of being blown up.
Hopefully they don't kill off this opportunity for themselves by overdoing or abusing it.
Yup - I RARELY see movies in 3D when I have the option. I was very reluctant to even see Avatar in 3D although I was glad that I did.
If 3D movies manage to consistently hit the Avatar level of quality or better (in terms of quality of the 3D - not the overall CGI/etc), then I might start seeing them more often. However, most of the time the 2D version is just as immersive and far less distracting with visual distortions.
I'm not holding my breath though - I'll pay more for a better experience, but I won't pay more just to be sea-sick.
Yup, this is why I scratch my head when I see so much EU-vs-US posturing.
In many of these issues the EU and the US are arguing over whether some environmental standard should be set at 2057 or 2063, when the standard in many places their citizens purchase goods from is 2.
The US and the EU have far more in common than they have at odds when it comes to worker safety and environmental controls. They should really join forces in setting trade barriers against countries that are vastly more lax. I have nothing against outsourcing, but not as a means to avoid reasonable environmental and safety controls.
Countries that allow free trade of goods manufactured in an unsafe manner are just cutting their own throats.
Actually, the Japanese aren't exactly perfect at following international standards, either.
If I'm not mistaken they don't use ordinary GSM (at least, a European I knew couldn't get his cell phone to work there a few years ago), and I think they use a different HDTV standard as well.
The country also has two different power frequencies, and I could never figure out how many digits long the phone numbers were supposed to be since it apparently seems to vary by telco. Granted, neither of these are international standards.
The Japanese tend to push the envelope, which often means they can't wait and see what the standard ends up being.
The problem is that nobody ever got fired for turning on the password aging setting on their OS. Nobody ever gets flagged in security audits for it either.
The IT guy's job is to keep his job. An easy way to keep your job is to do whatever it is that will make anybody who looks over your shoulder happy, regardless of whether it benefits the shareholders.
Likewise, if you're a boss make sure you keep your employees on-site from sunup to sundown and don't let them work from home. It shows that you run a productive department.
And make sure you buy security products from Symantec, McAfee, or somebody else who is at least as expensive. Better still, pay a consultant big bucks to have them tell you to do this, and then follow their advice. Now when you get rooted you can point out that you followed best practices.
I recently traveled by high-speed train in the US (well, it was high-speed half the way at least) and found:
1. I had to drive to the train station. It cost a fortune to park there since it was in city-center. However, based on my travel times if I took a train into the city I'd have had to wait a LONG time for the return route.
2. The train was pretty expensive. Cheaper than air, but definitely more expensive than driving.
3. Once I arrived I had no car. Now, I was at a major city so I was able to do fine on public transit. However, I had to research that carefully before I left as even in major cities public transit can be dicey in the US.
Every time I've looked at trains for a family trip over moderate distances it never made any sense at all. For anything other than the NE Corridor a train ride can take more than double the time of driving, at a cost of $100 EACH WAY PER PASSENGER in COACH. Why would I spend $800 to replace an 11 hour car ride with a 24 hour train ride, even if I didn't need a car when I arrived?
But Apple specifically provides the iTunes/iPod integration as a benefit of purchasing an iPod.
Any compensation Apple requires for the purchase of iTunes should be collected prior to sale. They cannot impose restrictions on use after the sale.
I say again, would you expect HP to support Epson scanners in their scanning software?
No, and I don't expect Apple to support syncing with Palms either. However, software changes made solely for the purpose of breaking compatibility with a 3rd-party product are still wrong. This has nothing to do with support.
Ditto for ATI/Nvidia. They don't need to support each other's drivers, but they can't go out of their way to break each other's devices either.
They are definitely intentionally breaking compatibility, but that's because Palm are freeloading in order to benefit from the tight integration that Apple have reserved exclusively for their own media player.
You don't get to dictate how your products are used - only that people pay for them. That's essentially the first-sale doctrine.
Linux is provided for free, but compatibility is still broken regularly for high-profile devices in order to fit in with some sort of philosophical decision.
Citation please? I'm not aware of Linux being modified solely and repeatedly for the purpose of breaking compatibility with some 3rd-party product. In my post I specifically stated that if Linus modified the kernel repeatedly solely with the goal of breaking the Nvidia binary drivers I'd certainly find that objectionable as well.
What Apple is doing is nothing more than restraint of trade - somebody makes a better widget and Apple is trying to use dominance in one field to obtain dominance in another. No consumers benefit from these kinds of actions.
How about ubiquitous smartcards and let's just get rid of passwords entirely?
Ditto for credit card numbers, or any other technology that involves having somebody authenticate your identity by being provided with a static piece of information that now allows them to authenticate themselves as you.
If Schmidt was planning on competing with Apple, he should have left Apple's board much earlier than he did.
Uh, they're both big companies in the same industry. Why on earth would anybody elect the CEO of a competing company to your board of directors? It isn't like he snuck into the board meetings, or lied about his day job.
If you want a board of directors that actually looks after shareholder interests, you might start by not hiring somebody who works for (let alone runs) your competition at the same time.
The idiots here are shareholders that vote "Yes" on every proxy statement, and regulators who allow companies to have near-complete control over their boards.
It's easy enough for third parties such as Palm to make their own app that interfaces into the iTunes library via the easily parse-able XML file that drives the program; there was no reason for Palm to break the USB standard.
It is also easy enough for Apple to define standards that would actually allow other companies to interface their mp3 players without the need to use external software. Apple is trying to use software market share to sell hardware (not unusual for them).
Palm did nothing wrong, and courts have repeatedly ruled that IP law generally should not prevent device interoperability. If it was strictly necessary to copy some of Apple's firmware onto the Palm to allow it to interface as an ipod chances are a court would allow this. If you don't believe me, just google for the original gameboy license enforcement scheme and what a court did to it. Courts have backed violations of both trademarks and copyrights when used as schemes to prevent interoperability, and I'm sure Apple will fare no better.
The method you propose won't work unless you install additional software on the computer. What if you just want your device to work with itunes without any changes to it? There is nothing wrong with emulating a device for compatibility purposes, and courts have ruled that you can even violate copyright law to do so.
Palm wasn't asking Apple to support their device. Apple's behavior was not a mere refusal to support the Palm - it was intentional breaking of the interface. That's just dirty no matter what. Would anybody think highly of Linus if every kernel minor update were designed to force nvidia to completely rewrite their kernel modules?
Why go to all that trouble then? Why not just have a device sit on the bus looking for suspicious stuff in RAM. Every once in a while it can halt the clock line to the CPU while it does a memory scan.
Mathematical induction proofs demand that you not only prove that k=1, k=2... k=1000 happen, but that the "important" process is self-replicating all the way to the k=n (total) happens.
Uh, mathematical induction requires you to prove that a statement is true in the n=n0 case, and that if the statement holds for n (and/or its predecessors back to n0) that it holds for n+1. Then the statement is true for all n >= n0.
However, you can't use mathematical induction to prove just about anything in the real world, since you can't even prove to my satisfaction that you even exist.:)
That said, if you want to go ahead and download whatever you want. I just think that it is more likely that you get away with downloading classified information because it isn't actually that sensitive so nobody will bother going after you than because the government lacks the ability to detect and track this activity.
Uh, did you read the immediately following sentence?
It was publicized some time ago that at least one major switch was being monitored, using equipment capable of intercepting every packet going over a particular overseas link of considerable bandwidth.
So, what you are proposing is that the US Government has decided to do incredibly intensive monitoring of one particular switch, and no monitoring of any others.
What the previous poster (and I) am suggesting is that it is far more likely that they just monitor everything, or at least quite a bit of everything.
No, I don't think the NSA has a recording box in every dinky ISP in the country, but it does seem likely that they would monitor significant access points. Why wouldn't they? If they wanted to they could intentionally ignore purely local traffic and focus on international stuff, but that is just a matter of the filters that are applied.
What if the malware didn't take action specific to a malware detector?
If a program attempts to read the memory occupied by the malware, give it zeros. If a program writes to this memory, save what it writes and return this for any future ready by any other program. When a program asks for the time when it does these kinds of memory reads, return values that indicate that only enough time has passed to account for an ordinary amount of clock time.
Vmware and other hypervisors do this sort of thing all the time. It is not possible via software alone to detect whether a program is running on bare hardware, or on a perfect emulation of real hardware. For that matter, it isn't possible for you or I to know if we are real biological beings or if we're some simulation in some gigantic computer somewhere. Indeed, even our perception of the nature of space and time could be nothing more than the result of a bunch of 14-dimensional beings saying "gee, what would life be like if there were only three dimensions of space - what if we go ahead and create a 3D world and stick a bunch of AIs in it?"
Of course, the malware author does have to be fairly clever. Such a piece of malware would also be susceptible to hardware-level detection.
I think that it can be safely assumed. Clearly monitoring of at least one major switch in California was discovered a year or two ago and made the news.
If you use something like Tor it probably would be impossible to track, except to the extent that they can look at traffic timing on Tor nodes (which would require VERY pervasive monitoring).
If you use a proxy that isn't encrypted, then they can track the proxy downloading the file, and then track who received it from the proxy, since the contents of the connection aren't protected.
Honestly, true internet anonymity against an attacker with extensive backbone monitoring is very difficult. Mixmaster is probably the closest we've ever come to it. Even Freenet has some weaknesses. There are lots of possible attacks, even against encrypted content. Usually defeating these attacks requires adding considerable latency to a connection, and nobody likes that.
I'm sure some people would be willing to donate to anyone, but the majority would choose the new third option.
This sounds like the subject of a psychological experiment. However, instead of playing games with tokens or money handed out by researchers, they are playing it with their own organs.
Perhaps this one will be called the "Donor's Dilemma..."
Yup - the argument usually goes that life and organs are priceless.
In reality, priceless just means worthless.
That said, I do believe that there are legal transactions people should not be allowed to agree to, such as selling themselves into slavery. Organ sales starts to go in that direction. I think they should be permissible in situations where the donation is not likely to have a substantial health impact on the donor (such as just about any situation where somebody is allowed to donate organs today).
First, I agree with you, but I'll go ahead and toss something really controversial and maybe burn some karma:
How is a society that allows children to die from parental withholding of medication any different than a society that allows children to grow up into a life of crime, or poverty, or obesity, or any number of other things that can happen to kids because they don't have great parents?
Withholding of medicine is an easy target, but the fact is that society is quite content to let kids fail in numerous ways simply for being born to the wrong parents. The problem is that fixing this is EXTREMELY difficult if not impossible - it isn't just a matter of throwing a moderate amount of money at the problem. Avoiding the problem is also highly repugnant to most people since the only way to avoid it is to mandate contraception implants for everybody unless you have a breeding license, or abort children post-conception (and figure out what to do with kids that manage to survive past birth).
In reality, the odd kid that dies from treatable pneumonia makes the news but is a blip in the statistics. The real problem (size-wise) is the millions of kids who go on to live in slums or prisons. As a society we seem to be willing to accept a LOT of the latter but none of the former, and I'm not sure it really has anything to do with being genuinely interested in child welfare.
And that law is about as useful to you as the paper it is written on, unless somebody is willing to enforce it to the letter.
I actually admire quite a bit of the European healthcare system, don't get me wrong. However, I do get annoyed when people talk high-and-mighty about how ethics and rationality are at the heart of everything, and that nobody would stoop to discriminating on medical care.
Sure, maybe nobody pays in cash, but I can assure you that not all people are treated equally. If you and Tony Blair or some other bigshot both end up in a car crash, and Tony needs a heart, and you are pretty iffy survival-wise, you better hope you aren't a histocompatibilty match. Oh, I'm sure they'll make a "best effort" to save you.
In the US dollars are used to differentiate between those who get care and those who do not. In many socialized nations nobody pays, but as a result there tend to be queues around non-acute procedures. Ask yourself, do you think that your local MP has to wait as long to get an X-ray read as you would? I'm sure you both end up in the same queue, and doctors don't take care of requests in any particular order, but I'm pretty sure that if somebody important needs care they are sure to get it.
At least in the US they're honest about how things work...
Again, I'm actually a fan of many elements of EU healthcare, but I'm under no illusions that it is the great brotherhood of equality that everybody makes it out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use a water heat exchanger outside the case to cool the oil (while keeping water away from system components, and getting full contact with the entire system)? The water could then go into a loop to cool it. Other coolants could also be used, although water is great from a heat capacity standpoint.
Since the water doesn't touch anything important, it can be dumped into a cooling tower/etc.
To cool one system I doubt it is worth all the trouble, but for a datacenter I bet you could make it very efficient. It is a lot easier to run pipes of water than sufficient ductwork for A/C.
Component replacements could be a pain, unless the rack made it really easy to drain a given case.
However, the tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor Níniel is probably too tragic for today's Hollywood. They could include Túrin's reappearance at the Dagor Dagorath as its epilogue if the tragedy is too much...
Hmm, I didn't know that Tolkein's head of character naming went on to work for Canonical...
Do you think they would have run all that fiber if they weren't expecting to host a lot of bandwidth-intensive services?
In any case, they're paying for the service. If I own a trash company and give somebody free trash delivery in exchange for free doctor's visits that doesn't mean that my doctor's visits didn't cost me something.
And this has been proven in a court of law?
Simple - just make a website that you post names on to the effect of "If you see your name on this website, it is because you're indicted for serious crimes against US national security, so you better turn yourself in before we find you."
Then the accused can simply present themselves for arrest and I'm sure nobody will object to their receiving a trial.
I do see the validity in having some debate over this issue, but this is something I'm torn on.
In WWII it was completely acceptable to bomb Tokyo every night or whatever.
Suppose a sniper could have gotten in and assassinated a few key politicians who were leading the war, leaving more peaceful elements of government intact. Would that be immoral?
For that matter, was it wrong to intentionally target a flight of aircraft that was transporting Yamamoto? He wasn't at that moment leading any particular military activity. He was just a key person of strategic value to the enemy.
In the Iraq war, is it wrong to carpet-bomb 47 bunkers known to be sometimes inhabited by Sadam, killing thousands of soldiers? Is it more wrong to instead just have somebody with a rifle shoot him, killing one person but likely accomplishing most of the political goals of the war?
If you have a beef with some terrorist leader, why is it necessary to mow down his cannon fodder before taking him out?
At the same time I do appreciate the problems inherent in essentially trying these people in absentia.
How about this - when you think that John Smith is a terrorist agent, you post an indictment in a few major newspapers, broadcast it on the radio, and post it on a website. Then John Smith can report to the nearest embassy or whatever and get a fair trial. If John Smith doesn't show up then you capture or kill him in whatever way is necessary.
I don't think that confederate soliders are a good comparison here. Soldiers fighting in uniform are fundamentally different than anybody fighting out of uniform.
Confederate soldiers who surrendered would have been imprisoned until the end of the war, but they would not have otherwise been punished in any way.
In any case, if somebody is conducting military activities against the US, then they are a valid military target. There is a fundamental difference between civilian law enforcement and military operations.
That said, I'm all for capturing such fighters when practical, and enemy soldiers (even illegal combatants) should be offered a means of surrender. That doesn't mean that when you sneak up on somebody that you have to stand up and ask them to surrender before you start shooting - only that in general you need to respect the white flag and allow people to lay down their arms if they proactively choose to do so.
I think the issue of armed drones is a red herring. The same issues apply anytime forces collide outside of small personal encounters. When you're a bomber at 30k feet you drop a bomb on your target - you don't first do a room-by-room search of the target to see who is inside and ask them politely if they want to go to jail instead of being blown up.
Hopefully they don't kill off this opportunity for themselves by overdoing or abusing it.
Yup - I RARELY see movies in 3D when I have the option. I was very reluctant to even see Avatar in 3D although I was glad that I did.
If 3D movies manage to consistently hit the Avatar level of quality or better (in terms of quality of the 3D - not the overall CGI/etc), then I might start seeing them more often. However, most of the time the 2D version is just as immersive and far less distracting with visual distortions.
I'm not holding my breath though - I'll pay more for a better experience, but I won't pay more just to be sea-sick.
Yup, this is why I scratch my head when I see so much EU-vs-US posturing.
In many of these issues the EU and the US are arguing over whether some environmental standard should be set at 2057 or 2063, when the standard in many places their citizens purchase goods from is 2.
The US and the EU have far more in common than they have at odds when it comes to worker safety and environmental controls. They should really join forces in setting trade barriers against countries that are vastly more lax. I have nothing against outsourcing, but not as a means to avoid reasonable environmental and safety controls.
Countries that allow free trade of goods manufactured in an unsafe manner are just cutting their own throats.
Actually, the Japanese aren't exactly perfect at following international standards, either.
If I'm not mistaken they don't use ordinary GSM (at least, a European I knew couldn't get his cell phone to work there a few years ago), and I think they use a different HDTV standard as well.
The country also has two different power frequencies, and I could never figure out how many digits long the phone numbers were supposed to be since it apparently seems to vary by telco. Granted, neither of these are international standards.
The Japanese tend to push the envelope, which often means they can't wait and see what the standard ends up being.
The problem is that nobody ever got fired for turning on the password aging setting on their OS. Nobody ever gets flagged in security audits for it either.
The IT guy's job is to keep his job. An easy way to keep your job is to do whatever it is that will make anybody who looks over your shoulder happy, regardless of whether it benefits the shareholders.
Likewise, if you're a boss make sure you keep your employees on-site from sunup to sundown and don't let them work from home. It shows that you run a productive department.
And make sure you buy security products from Symantec, McAfee, or somebody else who is at least as expensive. Better still, pay a consultant big bucks to have them tell you to do this, and then follow their advice. Now when you get rooted you can point out that you followed best practices.
Couldn't agree more.
I recently traveled by high-speed train in the US (well, it was high-speed half the way at least) and found:
1. I had to drive to the train station. It cost a fortune to park there since it was in city-center. However, based on my travel times if I took a train into the city I'd have had to wait a LONG time for the return route.
2. The train was pretty expensive. Cheaper than air, but definitely more expensive than driving.
3. Once I arrived I had no car. Now, I was at a major city so I was able to do fine on public transit. However, I had to research that carefully before I left as even in major cities public transit can be dicey in the US.
Every time I've looked at trains for a family trip over moderate distances it never made any sense at all. For anything other than the NE Corridor a train ride can take more than double the time of driving, at a cost of $100 EACH WAY PER PASSENGER in COACH. Why would I spend $800 to replace an 11 hour car ride with a 24 hour train ride, even if I didn't need a car when I arrived?
But Apple specifically provides the iTunes/iPod integration as a benefit of purchasing an iPod.
Any compensation Apple requires for the purchase of iTunes should be collected prior to sale. They cannot impose restrictions on use after the sale.
I say again, would you expect HP to support Epson scanners in their scanning software?
No, and I don't expect Apple to support syncing with Palms either. However, software changes made solely for the purpose of breaking compatibility with a 3rd-party product are still wrong. This has nothing to do with support.
Ditto for ATI/Nvidia. They don't need to support each other's drivers, but they can't go out of their way to break each other's devices either.
They are definitely intentionally breaking compatibility, but that's because Palm are freeloading in order to benefit from the tight integration that Apple have reserved exclusively for their own media player.
You don't get to dictate how your products are used - only that people pay for them. That's essentially the first-sale doctrine.
Linux is provided for free, but compatibility is still broken regularly for high-profile devices in order to fit in with some sort of philosophical decision.
Citation please? I'm not aware of Linux being modified solely and repeatedly for the purpose of breaking compatibility with some 3rd-party product. In my post I specifically stated that if Linus modified the kernel repeatedly solely with the goal of breaking the Nvidia binary drivers I'd certainly find that objectionable as well.
What Apple is doing is nothing more than restraint of trade - somebody makes a better widget and Apple is trying to use dominance in one field to obtain dominance in another. No consumers benefit from these kinds of actions.
How about ubiquitous smartcards and let's just get rid of passwords entirely?
Ditto for credit card numbers, or any other technology that involves having somebody authenticate your identity by being provided with a static piece of information that now allows them to authenticate themselves as you.
If Schmidt was planning on competing with Apple, he should have left Apple's board much earlier than he did.
Uh, they're both big companies in the same industry. Why on earth would anybody elect the CEO of a competing company to your board of directors? It isn't like he snuck into the board meetings, or lied about his day job.
If you want a board of directors that actually looks after shareholder interests, you might start by not hiring somebody who works for (let alone runs) your competition at the same time.
The idiots here are shareholders that vote "Yes" on every proxy statement, and regulators who allow companies to have near-complete control over their boards.
It's easy enough for third parties such as Palm to make their own app that interfaces into the iTunes library via the easily parse-able XML file that drives the program; there was no reason for Palm to break the USB standard.
It is also easy enough for Apple to define standards that would actually allow other companies to interface their mp3 players without the need to use external software. Apple is trying to use software market share to sell hardware (not unusual for them).
Palm did nothing wrong, and courts have repeatedly ruled that IP law generally should not prevent device interoperability. If it was strictly necessary to copy some of Apple's firmware onto the Palm to allow it to interface as an ipod chances are a court would allow this. If you don't believe me, just google for the original gameboy license enforcement scheme and what a court did to it. Courts have backed violations of both trademarks and copyrights when used as schemes to prevent interoperability, and I'm sure Apple will fare no better.
The method you propose won't work unless you install additional software on the computer. What if you just want your device to work with itunes without any changes to it? There is nothing wrong with emulating a device for compatibility purposes, and courts have ruled that you can even violate copyright law to do so.
Palm wasn't asking Apple to support their device. Apple's behavior was not a mere refusal to support the Palm - it was intentional breaking of the interface. That's just dirty no matter what. Would anybody think highly of Linus if every kernel minor update were designed to force nvidia to completely rewrite their kernel modules?
Why go to all that trouble then? Why not just have a device sit on the bus looking for suspicious stuff in RAM. Every once in a while it can halt the clock line to the CPU while it does a memory scan.
Mathematical induction proofs demand that you not only prove that k=1, k=2 ... k=1000 happen, but that the "important" process is self-replicating all the way to the k=n (total) happens.
Uh, mathematical induction requires you to prove that a statement is true in the n=n0 case, and that if the statement holds for n (and/or its predecessors back to n0) that it holds for n+1. Then the statement is true for all n >= n0.
However, you can't use mathematical induction to prove just about anything in the real world, since you can't even prove to my satisfaction that you even exist. :)
That said, if you want to go ahead and download whatever you want. I just think that it is more likely that you get away with downloading classified information because it isn't actually that sensitive so nobody will bother going after you than because the government lacks the ability to detect and track this activity.
Uh, did you read the immediately following sentence?
It was publicized some time ago that at least one major switch was being monitored, using equipment capable of intercepting every packet going over a particular overseas link of considerable bandwidth.
So, what you are proposing is that the US Government has decided to do incredibly intensive monitoring of one particular switch, and no monitoring of any others.
What the previous poster (and I) am suggesting is that it is far more likely that they just monitor everything, or at least quite a bit of everything.
No, I don't think the NSA has a recording box in every dinky ISP in the country, but it does seem likely that they would monitor significant access points. Why wouldn't they? If they wanted to they could intentionally ignore purely local traffic and focus on international stuff, but that is just a matter of the filters that are applied.
What if the malware didn't take action specific to a malware detector?
If a program attempts to read the memory occupied by the malware, give it zeros.
If a program writes to this memory, save what it writes and return this for any future ready by any other program.
When a program asks for the time when it does these kinds of memory reads, return values that indicate that only enough time has passed to account for an ordinary amount of clock time.
Vmware and other hypervisors do this sort of thing all the time. It is not possible via software alone to detect whether a program is running on bare hardware, or on a perfect emulation of real hardware. For that matter, it isn't possible for you or I to know if we are real biological beings or if we're some simulation in some gigantic computer somewhere. Indeed, even our perception of the nature of space and time could be nothing more than the result of a bunch of 14-dimensional beings saying "gee, what would life be like if there were only three dimensions of space - what if we go ahead and create a 3D world and stick a bunch of AIs in it?"
Of course, the malware author does have to be fairly clever. Such a piece of malware would also be susceptible to hardware-level detection.
I think that it can be safely assumed. Clearly monitoring of at least one major switch in California was discovered a year or two ago and made the news.
If you use something like Tor it probably would be impossible to track, except to the extent that they can look at traffic timing on Tor nodes (which would require VERY pervasive monitoring).
If you use a proxy that isn't encrypted, then they can track the proxy downloading the file, and then track who received it from the proxy, since the contents of the connection aren't protected.
Honestly, true internet anonymity against an attacker with extensive backbone monitoring is very difficult. Mixmaster is probably the closest we've ever come to it. Even Freenet has some weaknesses. There are lots of possible attacks, even against encrypted content. Usually defeating these attacks requires adding considerable latency to a connection, and nobody likes that.
I'm sure some people would be willing to donate to anyone, but the majority would choose the new third option.
This sounds like the subject of a psychological experiment. However, instead of playing games with tokens or money handed out by researchers, they are playing it with their own organs.
Perhaps this one will be called the "Donor's Dilemma..."
Yup - the argument usually goes that life and organs are priceless.
In reality, priceless just means worthless.
That said, I do believe that there are legal transactions people should not be allowed to agree to, such as selling themselves into slavery. Organ sales starts to go in that direction. I think they should be permissible in situations where the donation is not likely to have a substantial health impact on the donor (such as just about any situation where somebody is allowed to donate organs today).
First, I agree with you, but I'll go ahead and toss something really controversial and maybe burn some karma:
How is a society that allows children to die from parental withholding of medication any different than a society that allows children to grow up into a life of crime, or poverty, or obesity, or any number of other things that can happen to kids because they don't have great parents?
Withholding of medicine is an easy target, but the fact is that society is quite content to let kids fail in numerous ways simply for being born to the wrong parents. The problem is that fixing this is EXTREMELY difficult if not impossible - it isn't just a matter of throwing a moderate amount of money at the problem. Avoiding the problem is also highly repugnant to most people since the only way to avoid it is to mandate contraception implants for everybody unless you have a breeding license, or abort children post-conception (and figure out what to do with kids that manage to survive past birth).
In reality, the odd kid that dies from treatable pneumonia makes the news but is a blip in the statistics. The real problem (size-wise) is the millions of kids who go on to live in slums or prisons. As a society we seem to be willing to accept a LOT of the latter but none of the former, and I'm not sure it really has anything to do with being genuinely interested in child welfare.
In my country, the law says...
And that law is about as useful to you as the paper it is written on, unless somebody is willing to enforce it to the letter.
I actually admire quite a bit of the European healthcare system, don't get me wrong. However, I do get annoyed when people talk high-and-mighty about how ethics and rationality are at the heart of everything, and that nobody would stoop to discriminating on medical care.
Sure, maybe nobody pays in cash, but I can assure you that not all people are treated equally. If you and Tony Blair or some other bigshot both end up in a car crash, and Tony needs a heart, and you are pretty iffy survival-wise, you better hope you aren't a histocompatibilty match. Oh, I'm sure they'll make a "best effort" to save you.
In the US dollars are used to differentiate between those who get care and those who do not. In many socialized nations nobody pays, but as a result there tend to be queues around non-acute procedures. Ask yourself, do you think that your local MP has to wait as long to get an X-ray read as you would? I'm sure you both end up in the same queue, and doctors don't take care of requests in any particular order, but I'm pretty sure that if somebody important needs care they are sure to get it.
At least in the US they're honest about how things work...
Again, I'm actually a fan of many elements of EU healthcare, but I'm under no illusions that it is the great brotherhood of equality that everybody makes it out to be.