Does the local machine actually cache the network credentials between sessions? I thought that it only kept a hash so that it could verify that a password is valid, but that unless the password itself were supplied it couldn't log into the domain controller.
If it did cache the actual credentials, then why would we need to crack hashes in the first place? Why not just use the stored credential?
Best of all, get the person who pays for the service to live in some place in the middle of nowhere - then you can avoid sports blackouts.
However, for the purpose of local channels they still need to be in the general vicinity - the satellites do use directional broadcasts and the local stations for LA aren't going to work in NYC.
Obviously nobody knows the exact algorithm used, but it wouldn't be hard to make a fairly airtight system. Here is an example.
Video is encrypted using a session key. A different session key is used for every channel, and the session key changes fairly often (at least daily) - so getting your hands on a session key is only of limited usefulness.
Each smartcard has a unique decryption key stored inside - it might be conventional or it might be public key based - doesn't really matter. The smartcard is engineered to be extremely difficult to hack, and the key never leaves the smartcard. Yes, this is security by obscurity, but it is a very high level of obscurity.
A satellite channel is used to broadcast a data stream. If you have paid for a channel, then that stream will include the session key for that channel encrypted using your smartcard's ID. If you aren't supposed to get a channel they just don't provide your smartcard with the key. Whenever the receiver spots its smartcard ID in the stream it provides the encrypted session key packet to the smartcard, and the smartcard returns the session key. The receiver then caches the keys it has seen until they expire.
When you try to display a channel the receiver checks its session key cache, and if it doesn't have a key then it tells you that you don't get the channel.
In order to defeat the system you need to extract the key from the smartcard. That is extremely difficult and expensive to do. Then, if you do get it, you can clone that single card a million times, but as soon as the broadcaster gets a hold of one of your cards they can just revoke it, and then all the clones of that card stop working. They can also trace the key back to the originating card (may or may not be useful to track down the leak).
The problem is that it takes a lot of work to clone a card, and the cable company only needs to buy one card on the black market to make the work useless. The only way to defeat the system is to find a way to easily defeat a particular model of smartcard so that it is cheap to make new clones (of course, your customers might not appreciate having to replace their cards every other month). Then you can sell the cloning equipment to individual consumers and they can clone single cards so that the cable company can't figure out which ones are clones (since the clones themselves don't go on the market). If a model of card gets too easy to clone then they come out with a new card model.
Uh, they do use hardware crypto modules. That's what the guy was being paid to crack.
The whole point is that the decryption is carried out by the smartcard - or at least the session key is generated by it (which is good enough - a session key is only going to be good for decrypting a small portion of the video stream).
I can't imagine that a tool like this would allow you to authenticate to the domain controller. Cracking the hash cached on the local system would.
Unless windows is so insecure that the domain controller just takes the local workstation's word that you successfully logged in. I can't imagine such a design lasting this long. If it did you could get the machine's key off the local hard drive and then authenticate as anybody over the network.
Yeah, unless the game author is one of those pixel-pointer types that drives the player nuts. I remember playing one of the Myst games and going nuts because I couldn't get past a part that apparently required you to look in a very particular direction and click on a particular point that wasn't terribly obvious.
Yeah - and if I gave you a CD-ROM containing the complete (public domain) works of shakespere and asked you to copy it, you'd need a sophisticated array of lasers, servos, A/D converters, high speed data transmission busses, tons of logic/control circuitry, and probably a general purpose CPU to do it. Let's not even get into what it takes to make the blank CD-Rs. So, clearly making a copy of a CD is a highly sophisticated process requiring a great deal of care to end up with an accurate reproduction. Never mind that the equipment necessary to do so can be bought in any store selling electronics equipment.
You've made a good case for making an apparatus for copying paintings patentable where it involves some novel approach. However, I don't see how the actual copies can be copyrighted. To create a derivative work requires some kind of creative effort - beyond just executing the copying process properly. If you can write down the steps needed to photo a painting, and I can follow them and end up with a near-perfect reproduction, then I haven't really done anything creative with it.
Now, if the photographer had done something really exotic that really created some kind of a different look to the painting I could see there being an argument for a painting. However, if the photo basically looks like what you'd see if you just looked at the original, then they've simply performed a technical service.
Actually, the average share ratio on ANY communications network is 1.0 exactly (if there is no multicast). Let's take a webserver serving a file - completely non-P2P. 1000 people download 1000 copies from the webserver. That webserver has uploaded the file 1000 times, and the 1000 recipients have uploaded the file zero times. On average they all uploaded 1.0 copies of the file.
Now, the distribution of share ratios can vary greatly depending on the model of the system.
Multicasting also has an impact. Your local TV station broadcasts 1 copy of a show and 1M people watch it.
However, for non-multicast internet traffic, the share ratio is always 1.0 across the full group of participants.
When the project is the pet-project of the CIO it will have an 8-figure annual budget. Money will be availble for even the most trivial task and every need is taken care of.
Then the project is a "success" (maybe it really is, maybe in name only), and everybody is happy with it. Of course, tons of money is available for the launch and transition and training, and everybody marvels at how nicely things go.
Fast forward two years - the system is supported by three guys in 20% of their time, and they're in the process of doing knowledge transfer offshore. Problems that crop up in the system simply aren't taken care of. The CIO is on to newer and better things, and all the big names associated with the project have all gotten their promotions. Any effort spent fixing the system just raises the question "why did all those guys get promoted if the system has all these underlying problems?" Therefore, nobody is eager to open that can of worms and the system just continues to stagnate.
I'm amazed at work at how many systems are rolled out at a cost of millions or tens of millions of dollars, and then the beancounters start virtualizing it on oversubscribed hardware and tuning down the CPU allocation until the end users are dealing with painful performance problems. We'll sink millions on a project and then throw a spanner in the works to save a few thousand dollars per year at most.
And, that kind of mentality is what causes somebody to recycle the tape used for the original moon landing. The ultimate documentation of the product of maybe 10% of the entire national economy for a period of 7 years is lost so that a $50 tape doesn't have to be purchased on a strained departmental budget.
How much of the cost of the production of the HST was marginal, vs fixed cost?
Suppose I contracted Ford to build me ONE car to my specifications. That car would probably cost me $20M. If I instead contracted them to build me 10 cars it might cost me $22M, and if I asked them to build a million of them they'd probably sell for $25k each. The per-unit cost for small production runs tends to be overwhelmingly influenced by one-time costs.
The HST was a cutting edge piece of technology. No doubt getting it working at all cost a fortune. However, once you figure out how to make it, making 10 more can't cost but a fraction of the original cost. I'm sure tens of millions of dollars were required just to write the software that controls the thing - surely that money doesn't need to be spent again?
I tend to be skeptical of complaints that a service is not available "at any price." Usually that really means that a service is unreasonable at any reasonable price.
If you hand me a million dollars cash and a letter, I'd be more than happy to have it delivered to ANY point residing on the surface of the continental US.
Likewise, if somebody with cancer was willing to spend $30M per year, I'm sure sombody would be willing to take care of their health needs.
The issue is that it is not possible to profitably service these kinds of needs as a commodity - not that it is impossible to service them at all.
In any case, this really doesn't impact the original issue - I agree with your points that there is a general need for delivery of official correspondance to remote locations, and as long as you're going to deliver subpoenas and tax forms, you might as well charge a modest fee and allow for the delivery of ordinary mail.
If working antimatter containment were perfected by the US government, you can bet that it would end up in bombs before it ended up in spacecraft.
However, there isn't anything magical about this. You can get to Mars in as little time as you like (short of the speed of light), provided you are willing to expend the fuel accellerating and decellerating, and that the crew can endure the G forces. Of course, the more fuel you expend the harder it will be to launch all that fuel into space in the first place. On the other hand, there is a tradeoff since a faster transit time may require less in the way of supplies and shielding.
The nine month figure is what is needed for the most efficient possible trip in terms of fuel only.
The other consideration is that the faster the transit time the more you need to decellerate when you get there. If you are on the most efficient route then you can probably just use aerobraking to do most of the work to put you in martian orbit. If you are on a hyperbolic orbit out of the solar system then chances are you're going to have to bleed off a lot of speed with thrusters first or you WILL end up leaving the solar system. As others have posted here, an Earth-return trajectory makes sense since it shortens the time modestly and if anything goes wrong you'll at least end up near the Earth (and if you can maneuver enough you might even be able to aerobrake and descend - although your speed will be quite high).
It might not hurt to clarify that the API for native code was only opened up about a week ago. Until then, all applications that used the supported SDK were completely emulated. The SDK did provide APIs for playing video/etc, of course, and the SDK itself would have been natively implemented and would make use if embedded hardware where possible.
Note also that per the request of the phone manufacturers, Google has tried to make it hard to design apps that might encode/compress audio in realtime for network transmission (VOIP/etc). Obviously the phone has that hardware integrated into it for GSM, but the phone company would obviously prefer that all actual phone calls be made via GSM so that they can bill them.
This is not unlike the problems with insurance, which also tends to be inequitable without a lot of regulation. The people who most need it end up being the people who can least afford it.
Now, whether these things ought to be equitable is a legitimate question that society needs to consider. Maybe people born with a higher risk of diabetes or heart disease should have to work three jobs just to barely keep up with the medical bills, and stop receiving treatment at age 40 due to an inability to pay. Maybe people in the middle of Nebraska should have to pay $10 to mail a Christmas card. Perhaps there is some middle ground.
The important thing is to be honest about the pros/cons of the various models of funding these kinds of activities, and then allow society to choose what kind of a world we want to live in.
Your post really amounts to a tautology. You suggest that we ultimately have to bear the consequences of who we are and what we do. Couldn't agree more. However, that doesn't really do much good for somebody who is geneticly disposed to be morbidly obsese any more than it helps to point out that somebody who is mentally retarded isn't going to end up being an engineer.
Why do you think so many people are obsese today? Do you think it really is because nobody is responsible these days? Why is it that we still are able to build bridges? Doesn't that take responsiblity as well? And why is it that many engineers are obese?
The truth regarding food and lifestyle choices is that people are different because they have made different choices than you, and you yourself can make those same choices to change your lifestyle, they're not closed to you because you have created a wall you think you can't climb over.
Oh good - we have somebody offering "the truth." Can you care to indicate where this truth comes from? Was it given to you from on high? Did somebody actually do a controlled study to demonstrate conclusively that the only difference between people who are thin and fat is a matter of choice, and that it is equally easy for everybody to be thin?
What is it that is the same between these imaginary people who all are able to maintain a light weight? They all made the effort. Why aren't you?
I suspect I make as much effort to maintain weight as anybody who isn't neurotic about it. The one thing I love about the internet is that it seems to give people unique insight into the personalities of people that they've never met.:)
Let me guess, you put yourself into the big anonymous pile of "we give up". Am I right?
Nope - I try to regulate my eating, and often end up being hungry as a result. Sure makes life uncomfortable, but I can't see how it is doing my weight much good.
well, this pig flu shows you that you could die at 20, given you're fat enough
Somehow I doubt it would make much difference at my weight - I'm only moderately overweight and I'd have been considered downright normal at other times in history. However, I could die every time I climb into my car, and I'm ok with that.
What you need to do is to start thinking about food, you need to start thinking about what's good food, what's bad food, and how do you tell them apart.
Oh good. That's all there is to it! Everybody agrees that good food is good and bad food is bad. Of course, no more than maybe 2/3rds of the experts out there can ever agree on what belongs in what class. The complete lack of well-controlled studies on diet (you can't put people in cages like mice) doesn't help either.
Don't get me wrong - I'm glad that hard work seems to be paying off for you. I certainly am not claiming to have all the answers. The fact is that I have no more scientific evidence to back up my ideas than those proposing contrary views. My objection is that somebody does some study that shows some sign of a correllation between two variables and suddenly we finally understand the obesity problem. No nation on earth has been able to stamp out smoking and that isn't even controversial and isn't rooted in a basic biological need. Short of some kind of advance in knowledge or medicine that makes it easier to lose weight than to gain it, I doubt that the obseity epidemic is going away anytime soon.
I suspect we don't really know the reasons for the national differences. Some of the recent studies on epigenetics suggest that what your parents/grandparents eat can impact your risk of obsesity. Perhaps some kind of food was popular in the USA 50 years ago and we're paying the price for it now? With WWI/II I wouldn't be surprised if nutrition levels in the US were much higher than in Europe for a significant portion of the first half of the century.
My concern with all of this is that everybody has an "explanation" for what the problem is (genetics/willpower/culture/evil-mcdonalds/etc), but there is little in the way of scientific evidence supporting any conclusion. It is almost impossible to do a controlled study on human diet, and the length of any such study could be measured in many decades if you want to look at epigenetic factors. Sure, any data is better than no data, but I'm very skeptical any time somebody has an easy answer.
Sure, I'm fine with putting video drivers in userspace (think microkernel), but it needs to be done in a more generic fashion. Those video drivers should be accessible by ANY application - they shouldn't be X11-specific. Those drivers should also allow for windowed hardware access by individual applications (application asks server for a window, then can do direct hardware access within that window). The driver should of course enforce rights to space on-screen so that it is not possible for a program to draw outside its window.
IMO the screen should just be like any other piece of hardware on the system - it should be abstracted by drivers and designed to work in a multi-application/user enviornment.
Also - better kernel support for video cards would actually improve stability. Right now if my X server crashes chaces are that I'm not going to be able to switch to a virtual text console, since the kernel doesn't know how to re-initialize my display.
It sounds like this isn't quite just like everything else - the kernel is at least providing some non-root access to hardware, but it isn't abstracting the hardware at all.
Suppose that in order to play a sound you couldn't just send wav data to/dev/dsp or whatever, but instead you had to open the device, send it a command to create a memory buffer, send data to the buffer (in the right format for your make/model sound interface), send a bunch of IO commands to the sound card (including port number and data details), and set up a pointer to your own interrupt handler that you pass to the device so that you can keep the buffer alive. Sure, it might work without root, but basically all you have is the kernel passing through raw device IO and not actually providing any kind of driver.
Exactly. This is why x.org also implements its own TCP stack and network drivers. It isn't like it is possible to design some kind of standard interface so that an application could open a TCP socket on two different operating systems!
Somebody just needs to define a standard for accessing graphics cards via a unix-like operating system and then everybody can code to the standard.
If your timescale is long enough, perhaps it is.:) Not sure if there is any escape from the heat death of the universe (or the death of our sun well before that), but somehow I doubt it involves being better at spearing gazelles.
Some people can maintain a light weight with no effort all.
Some people can maintain a light weight with a moderate effort.
Some people can work hard and maintain a light weight.
Quite a few people have to put in a huge battle and really not get anywhere with it - or they make progress only to lose ground.
Look, I suspect that most people, if they worked REALLY hard, could do as well in math as I do. I'm not a complete prodigy or anything. However, I don't consider people lazy if they end up getting 70s on tests that I score in the high 90s on - that's just how it has been for all of my life - I can cruise through tests that most normal people barely pass with a fair amount of study. However, why should they bother trying to reach my level of proficiency at math? They should just spend their time on something they're better at, and learn enough math to get by in normal life. (Yes - I realize that quite a few people who read this post could outperform me in math - that isn't my point.)
I'm hardly morbidly obese, but I do struggle to keep my weight down. Maybe that means I'll live ten years less than my peers - I'm willing to accept that. I do try to control my diet, but the fact is that unless somebody comes out with some kind of medical advance I'm not going to be average in weight without a huge amount of effort. I'm not sure that effort is really worth it - I'd rather die happy at 70 than suffer until 80.:) And if somebody comes up with better healthy ways to lose weight that don't involve huge amounts of self-deprivation, then that is just a win-win for everybody. Sure, maybe in the meantime I'll statistically cost society more to keep alive than the "average" person, but last time I checked I was paying far more in taxes than the average person and that's just how things work. In the meantime I'll keep working on my health, but if I can refrain from taunting people who weren't developing software in multiple languages in middle school in the 80s perhaps we can get beyond taunting people for having trouble controlling their weight?
IANAF, but isn't the point of subsidies to pay people to make LESS food, thus driving UP prices? Or at least some subsidies. Things like tax breaks make it cheaper to grow food (or not grow food as the case may be - the more land you can buy the more food you can not grow and thus the more you can be paid to not grow it). No, this post doesn't make any sense, but I didn't invent the USDA and the tax code...
Without subsidies the cost of food could go either up or down. There are factors that would push it both ways. Somebody who knows more about this stuff could probably say for sure which way it would go.
The reason your cheeseburgers are so cheap aren't really subsidies, but the invention of fertilizer and farm equipment.
I'm hardly an expert in SOX, but in every big company I'm aware of emails tend to be deleted pretty quickly (less than six months). Emails aren't considered official records. When you're producing official documentation you're suppoed to do it in a more official form (reports/documents/etc). Even drafts of these documents are supposed to be destroyed. The idea is that you want to have final records of anything of importance, and anything that doesn't reflect the official position of the company shouldn't exist.
Again, I'm not an expert. But this has been policy in at least a few big companies, and they certianly pay lawyers big money to write these policies. The company would rather spend $10M to create some official accounting-documentation-creation program than have email considered the official record. Those emails are WAY too expensive (just ask any of those companies with damanging emails posted all over the internet that came up in discovery).
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Does the local machine actually cache the network credentials between sessions? I thought that it only kept a hash so that it could verify that a password is valid, but that unless the password itself were supplied it couldn't log into the domain controller.
If it did cache the actual credentials, then why would we need to crack hashes in the first place? Why not just use the stored credential?
Best of all, get the person who pays for the service to live in some place in the middle of nowhere - then you can avoid sports blackouts.
However, for the purpose of local channels they still need to be in the general vicinity - the satellites do use directional broadcasts and the local stations for LA aren't going to work in NYC.
Obviously nobody knows the exact algorithm used, but it wouldn't be hard to make a fairly airtight system. Here is an example.
Video is encrypted using a session key. A different session key is used for every channel, and the session key changes fairly often (at least daily) - so getting your hands on a session key is only of limited usefulness.
Each smartcard has a unique decryption key stored inside - it might be conventional or it might be public key based - doesn't really matter. The smartcard is engineered to be extremely difficult to hack, and the key never leaves the smartcard. Yes, this is security by obscurity, but it is a very high level of obscurity.
A satellite channel is used to broadcast a data stream. If you have paid for a channel, then that stream will include the session key for that channel encrypted using your smartcard's ID. If you aren't supposed to get a channel they just don't provide your smartcard with the key. Whenever the receiver spots its smartcard ID in the stream it provides the encrypted session key packet to the smartcard, and the smartcard returns the session key. The receiver then caches the keys it has seen until they expire.
When you try to display a channel the receiver checks its session key cache, and if it doesn't have a key then it tells you that you don't get the channel.
In order to defeat the system you need to extract the key from the smartcard. That is extremely difficult and expensive to do. Then, if you do get it, you can clone that single card a million times, but as soon as the broadcaster gets a hold of one of your cards they can just revoke it, and then all the clones of that card stop working. They can also trace the key back to the originating card (may or may not be useful to track down the leak).
The problem is that it takes a lot of work to clone a card, and the cable company only needs to buy one card on the black market to make the work useless. The only way to defeat the system is to find a way to easily defeat a particular model of smartcard so that it is cheap to make new clones (of course, your customers might not appreciate having to replace their cards every other month). Then you can sell the cloning equipment to individual consumers and they can clone single cards so that the cable company can't figure out which ones are clones (since the clones themselves don't go on the market). If a model of card gets too easy to clone then they come out with a new card model.
Uh, they do use hardware crypto modules. That's what the guy was being paid to crack.
The whole point is that the decryption is carried out by the smartcard - or at least the session key is generated by it (which is good enough - a session key is only going to be good for decrypting a small portion of the video stream).
I can't imagine that a tool like this would allow you to authenticate to the domain controller. Cracking the hash cached on the local system would.
Unless windows is so insecure that the domain controller just takes the local workstation's word that you successfully logged in. I can't imagine such a design lasting this long. If it did you could get the machine's key off the local hard drive and then authenticate as anybody over the network.
Yeah, unless the game author is one of those pixel-pointer types that drives the player nuts. I remember playing one of the Myst games and going nuts because I couldn't get past a part that apparently required you to look in a very particular direction and click on a particular point that wasn't terribly obvious.
Uh, wasn't that the whole reason Austrailia was settled in the first place (ignoring the aboriginals)? Getting back to our roots, are we?
Yeah - and if I gave you a CD-ROM containing the complete (public domain) works of shakespere and asked you to copy it, you'd need a sophisticated array of lasers, servos, A/D converters, high speed data transmission busses, tons of logic/control circuitry, and probably a general purpose CPU to do it. Let's not even get into what it takes to make the blank CD-Rs. So, clearly making a copy of a CD is a highly sophisticated process requiring a great deal of care to end up with an accurate reproduction. Never mind that the equipment necessary to do so can be bought in any store selling electronics equipment.
You've made a good case for making an apparatus for copying paintings patentable where it involves some novel approach. However, I don't see how the actual copies can be copyrighted. To create a derivative work requires some kind of creative effort - beyond just executing the copying process properly. If you can write down the steps needed to photo a painting, and I can follow them and end up with a near-perfect reproduction, then I haven't really done anything creative with it.
Now, if the photographer had done something really exotic that really created some kind of a different look to the painting I could see there being an argument for a painting. However, if the photo basically looks like what you'd see if you just looked at the original, then they've simply performed a technical service.
Actually, the average share ratio on ANY communications network is 1.0 exactly (if there is no multicast). Let's take a webserver serving a file - completely non-P2P. 1000 people download 1000 copies from the webserver. That webserver has uploaded the file 1000 times, and the 1000 recipients have uploaded the file zero times. On average they all uploaded 1.0 copies of the file.
Now, the distribution of share ratios can vary greatly depending on the model of the system.
Multicasting also has an impact. Your local TV station broadcasts 1 copy of a show and 1M people watch it.
However, for non-multicast internet traffic, the share ratio is always 1.0 across the full group of participants.
Sounds like work to me.
When the project is the pet-project of the CIO it will have an 8-figure annual budget. Money will be availble for even the most trivial task and every need is taken care of.
Then the project is a "success" (maybe it really is, maybe in name only), and everybody is happy with it. Of course, tons of money is available for the launch and transition and training, and everybody marvels at how nicely things go.
Fast forward two years - the system is supported by three guys in 20% of their time, and they're in the process of doing knowledge transfer offshore. Problems that crop up in the system simply aren't taken care of. The CIO is on to newer and better things, and all the big names associated with the project have all gotten their promotions. Any effort spent fixing the system just raises the question "why did all those guys get promoted if the system has all these underlying problems?" Therefore, nobody is eager to open that can of worms and the system just continues to stagnate.
I'm amazed at work at how many systems are rolled out at a cost of millions or tens of millions of dollars, and then the beancounters start virtualizing it on oversubscribed hardware and tuning down the CPU allocation until the end users are dealing with painful performance problems. We'll sink millions on a project and then throw a spanner in the works to save a few thousand dollars per year at most.
And, that kind of mentality is what causes somebody to recycle the tape used for the original moon landing. The ultimate documentation of the product of maybe 10% of the entire national economy for a period of 7 years is lost so that a $50 tape doesn't have to be purchased on a strained departmental budget.
How much of the cost of the production of the HST was marginal, vs fixed cost?
Suppose I contracted Ford to build me ONE car to my specifications. That car would probably cost me $20M. If I instead contracted them to build me 10 cars it might cost me $22M, and if I asked them to build a million of them they'd probably sell for $25k each. The per-unit cost for small production runs tends to be overwhelmingly influenced by one-time costs.
The HST was a cutting edge piece of technology. No doubt getting it working at all cost a fortune. However, once you figure out how to make it, making 10 more can't cost but a fraction of the original cost. I'm sure tens of millions of dollars were required just to write the software that controls the thing - surely that money doesn't need to be spent again?
I tend to be skeptical of complaints that a service is not available "at any price." Usually that really means that a service is unreasonable at any reasonable price.
If you hand me a million dollars cash and a letter, I'd be more than happy to have it delivered to ANY point residing on the surface of the continental US.
Likewise, if somebody with cancer was willing to spend $30M per year, I'm sure sombody would be willing to take care of their health needs.
The issue is that it is not possible to profitably service these kinds of needs as a commodity - not that it is impossible to service them at all.
In any case, this really doesn't impact the original issue - I agree with your points that there is a general need for delivery of official correspondance to remote locations, and as long as you're going to deliver subpoenas and tax forms, you might as well charge a modest fee and allow for the delivery of ordinary mail.
If working antimatter containment were perfected by the US government, you can bet that it would end up in bombs before it ended up in spacecraft.
However, there isn't anything magical about this. You can get to Mars in as little time as you like (short of the speed of light), provided you are willing to expend the fuel accellerating and decellerating, and that the crew can endure the G forces. Of course, the more fuel you expend the harder it will be to launch all that fuel into space in the first place. On the other hand, there is a tradeoff since a faster transit time may require less in the way of supplies and shielding.
The nine month figure is what is needed for the most efficient possible trip in terms of fuel only.
The other consideration is that the faster the transit time the more you need to decellerate when you get there. If you are on the most efficient route then you can probably just use aerobraking to do most of the work to put you in martian orbit. If you are on a hyperbolic orbit out of the solar system then chances are you're going to have to bleed off a lot of speed with thrusters first or you WILL end up leaving the solar system. As others have posted here, an Earth-return trajectory makes sense since it shortens the time modestly and if anything goes wrong you'll at least end up near the Earth (and if you can maneuver enough you might even be able to aerobrake and descend - although your speed will be quite high).
It might not hurt to clarify that the API for native code was only opened up about a week ago. Until then, all applications that used the supported SDK were completely emulated. The SDK did provide APIs for playing video/etc, of course, and the SDK itself would have been natively implemented and would make use if embedded hardware where possible.
Note also that per the request of the phone manufacturers, Google has tried to make it hard to design apps that might encode/compress audio in realtime for network transmission (VOIP/etc). Obviously the phone has that hardware integrated into it for GSM, but the phone company would obviously prefer that all actual phone calls be made via GSM so that they can bill them.
This is not unlike the problems with insurance, which also tends to be inequitable without a lot of regulation. The people who most need it end up being the people who can least afford it.
Now, whether these things ought to be equitable is a legitimate question that society needs to consider. Maybe people born with a higher risk of diabetes or heart disease should have to work three jobs just to barely keep up with the medical bills, and stop receiving treatment at age 40 due to an inability to pay. Maybe people in the middle of Nebraska should have to pay $10 to mail a Christmas card. Perhaps there is some middle ground.
The important thing is to be honest about the pros/cons of the various models of funding these kinds of activities, and then allow society to choose what kind of a world we want to live in.
Your post really amounts to a tautology. You suggest that we ultimately have to bear the consequences of who we are and what we do. Couldn't agree more. However, that doesn't really do much good for somebody who is geneticly disposed to be morbidly obsese any more than it helps to point out that somebody who is mentally retarded isn't going to end up being an engineer.
Why do you think so many people are obsese today? Do you think it really is because nobody is responsible these days? Why is it that we still are able to build bridges? Doesn't that take responsiblity as well? And why is it that many engineers are obese?
The truth regarding food and lifestyle choices is that people are different because they have made different choices than you, and you yourself can make those same choices to change your lifestyle, they're not closed to you because you have created a wall you think you can't climb over.
Oh good - we have somebody offering "the truth." Can you care to indicate where this truth comes from? Was it given to you from on high? Did somebody actually do a controlled study to demonstrate conclusively that the only difference between people who are thin and fat is a matter of choice, and that it is equally easy for everybody to be thin?
What is it that is the same between these imaginary people who all are able to maintain a light weight? They all made the effort. Why aren't you?
I suspect I make as much effort to maintain weight as anybody who isn't neurotic about it. The one thing I love about the internet is that it seems to give people unique insight into the personalities of people that they've never met. :)
Let me guess, you put yourself into the big anonymous pile of "we give up". Am I right?
Nope - I try to regulate my eating, and often end up being hungry as a result. Sure makes life uncomfortable, but I can't see how it is doing my weight much good.
well, this pig flu shows you that you could die at 20, given you're fat enough
Somehow I doubt it would make much difference at my weight - I'm only moderately overweight and I'd have been considered downright normal at other times in history. However, I could die every time I climb into my car, and I'm ok with that.
What you need to do is to start thinking about food, you need to start thinking about what's good food, what's bad food, and how do you tell them apart.
Oh good. That's all there is to it! Everybody agrees that good food is good and bad food is bad. Of course, no more than maybe 2/3rds of the experts out there can ever agree on what belongs in what class. The complete lack of well-controlled studies on diet (you can't put people in cages like mice) doesn't help either.
Don't get me wrong - I'm glad that hard work seems to be paying off for you. I certainly am not claiming to have all the answers. The fact is that I have no more scientific evidence to back up my ideas than those proposing contrary views. My objection is that somebody does some study that shows some sign of a correllation between two variables and suddenly we finally understand the obesity problem. No nation on earth has been able to stamp out smoking and that isn't even controversial and isn't rooted in a basic biological need. Short of some kind of advance in knowledge or medicine that makes it easier to lose weight than to gain it, I doubt that the obseity epidemic is going away anytime soon.
I suspect we don't really know the reasons for the national differences. Some of the recent studies on epigenetics suggest that what your parents/grandparents eat can impact your risk of obsesity. Perhaps some kind of food was popular in the USA 50 years ago and we're paying the price for it now? With WWI/II I wouldn't be surprised if nutrition levels in the US were much higher than in Europe for a significant portion of the first half of the century.
My concern with all of this is that everybody has an "explanation" for what the problem is (genetics/willpower/culture/evil-mcdonalds/etc), but there is little in the way of scientific evidence supporting any conclusion. It is almost impossible to do a controlled study on human diet, and the length of any such study could be measured in many decades if you want to look at epigenetic factors. Sure, any data is better than no data, but I'm very skeptical any time somebody has an easy answer.
Sure, I'm fine with putting video drivers in userspace (think microkernel), but it needs to be done in a more generic fashion. Those video drivers should be accessible by ANY application - they shouldn't be X11-specific. Those drivers should also allow for windowed hardware access by individual applications (application asks server for a window, then can do direct hardware access within that window). The driver should of course enforce rights to space on-screen so that it is not possible for a program to draw outside its window.
IMO the screen should just be like any other piece of hardware on the system - it should be abstracted by drivers and designed to work in a multi-application/user enviornment.
Also - better kernel support for video cards would actually improve stability. Right now if my X server crashes chaces are that I'm not going to be able to switch to a virtual text console, since the kernel doesn't know how to re-initialize my display.
It sounds like this isn't quite just like everything else - the kernel is at least providing some non-root access to hardware, but it isn't abstracting the hardware at all.
Suppose that in order to play a sound you couldn't just send wav data to /dev/dsp or whatever, but instead you had to open the device, send it a command to create a memory buffer, send data to the buffer (in the right format for your make/model sound interface), send a bunch of IO commands to the sound card (including port number and data details), and set up a pointer to your own interrupt handler that you pass to the device so that you can keep the buffer alive. Sure, it might work without root, but basically all you have is the kernel passing through raw device IO and not actually providing any kind of driver.
Exactly. This is why x.org also implements its own TCP stack and network drivers. It isn't like it is possible to design some kind of standard interface so that an application could open a TCP socket on two different operating systems!
Somebody just needs to define a standard for accessing graphics cards via a unix-like operating system and then everybody can code to the standard.
If your timescale is long enough, perhaps it is. :) Not sure if there is any escape from the heat death of the universe (or the death of our sun well before that), but somehow I doubt it involves being better at spearing gazelles.
Keep in mind that people are all different.
Some people can maintain a light weight with no effort all.
Some people can maintain a light weight with a moderate effort.
Some people can work hard and maintain a light weight.
Quite a few people have to put in a huge battle and really not get anywhere with it - or they make progress only to lose ground.
Look, I suspect that most people, if they worked REALLY hard, could do as well in math as I do. I'm not a complete prodigy or anything. However, I don't consider people lazy if they end up getting 70s on tests that I score in the high 90s on - that's just how it has been for all of my life - I can cruise through tests that most normal people barely pass with a fair amount of study. However, why should they bother trying to reach my level of proficiency at math? They should just spend their time on something they're better at, and learn enough math to get by in normal life. (Yes - I realize that quite a few people who read this post could outperform me in math - that isn't my point.)
I'm hardly morbidly obese, but I do struggle to keep my weight down. Maybe that means I'll live ten years less than my peers - I'm willing to accept that. I do try to control my diet, but the fact is that unless somebody comes out with some kind of medical advance I'm not going to be average in weight without a huge amount of effort. I'm not sure that effort is really worth it - I'd rather die happy at 70 than suffer until 80. :) And if somebody comes up with better healthy ways to lose weight that don't involve huge amounts of self-deprivation, then that is just a win-win for everybody. Sure, maybe in the meantime I'll statistically cost society more to keep alive than the "average" person, but last time I checked I was paying far more in taxes than the average person and that's just how things work. In the meantime I'll keep working on my health, but if I can refrain from taunting people who weren't developing software in multiple languages in middle school in the 80s perhaps we can get beyond taunting people for having trouble controlling their weight?
IANAF, but isn't the point of subsidies to pay people to make LESS food, thus driving UP prices? Or at least some subsidies. Things like tax breaks make it cheaper to grow food (or not grow food as the case may be - the more land you can buy the more food you can not grow and thus the more you can be paid to not grow it). No, this post doesn't make any sense, but I didn't invent the USDA and the tax code...
Without subsidies the cost of food could go either up or down. There are factors that would push it both ways. Somebody who knows more about this stuff could probably say for sure which way it would go.
The reason your cheeseburgers are so cheap aren't really subsidies, but the invention of fertilizer and farm equipment.
I'm hardly an expert in SOX, but in every big company I'm aware of emails tend to be deleted pretty quickly (less than six months). Emails aren't considered official records. When you're producing official documentation you're suppoed to do it in a more official form (reports/documents/etc). Even drafts of these documents are supposed to be destroyed. The idea is that you want to have final records of anything of importance, and anything that doesn't reflect the official position of the company shouldn't exist.
Again, I'm not an expert. But this has been policy in at least a few big companies, and they certianly pay lawyers big money to write these policies. The company would rather spend $10M to create some official accounting-documentation-creation program than have email considered the official record. Those emails are WAY too expensive (just ask any of those companies with damanging emails posted all over the internet that came up in discovery).