At an ISP I once worked at I was involved in establishing newsgroup policies and the possible legal consequences and this is my take based upon the legal advice and discussions I had at the time. Unless there have been some changes in the past few years that I've missed, the minute an ISP changes their terms of service to explicitly block access based on the legality of content they technically lose their "common carrier" status protection and can be held liable etc.
Unfortunately these kinds of cases never get to court in any way that would force a change of this type of crap because of the purposefully vague and specious language describing what exactly you're paying for in that same damned ToS.
Basically it still boils down to whether your lawyer(money) can beat up their lawyer(money), though the size of the ToS "backdoors" & loopholes can help:)
Unless the number of attacking clients is large relative to the number of legitimate clients, that should limit the damage.
Until incoming packets can be torn down, analyzed and determination made to allow/deny at a rate equal or greater than the wire speed at the router device then DDoS will always be possible. Yeah you can throttle forged-source-address attacks just dandy but your site is still screwed if the sheer amount of inbound packets pegs the CPU/memory on your router(s) to where it falls behind in processing the queue.... There are some methods you can put into hardware (ASICs etc) but unlike SSL accelerator cards (like in the F5 or Foundry) and similar approaches, the complexity at that front-end would make the cost of the solution prohibitive or result in still more dedicated devices (load balancers etc) at the network level... and there's always going to be a bottleneck to cause things to jam.
From the article: The long-term goal of the partnership is to develop and deploy a solution that will enable Internet service providers and data centers to identify when their networks are under a DDoS attack and also to discover and eliminate the "zombies" that attackers use to launch their assaults.
Okay, so they will eventually have a way to slow and possibly even stop the spread of the garden variety DDoS attack like the packet floods or viral-zombie Code Red types they mention as the detection mechanisms improve. However, the sad truth folks is that it just isn't possible to stop a DDoS attack.
Don't believe me? Before you warm up your flamethrowers just follow along here for a sec.
Think for a bit about how the net works. You got your SYN, the SYN_RECV's, the SYN_ACK's. You got packets that have a frame, header and route info, a data payload etc. You got stuff that has to be there in order for this neat internet doohickey to function. In other words there is a framework that makes pattern matching algorithms and heuristics (and other stuff involving math:) possible so you can try to separate good packets from the bad packets.
Problem is that there's one thing that can't be predicted/recognized/prevented/controlled: where that first SYN is coming from. And that's the reason that DDoS works so well. All the Black Hats have to do is keep coming up with stuff that is harder and harder to crack pattern-wise while having that randomized Ace up their sleeve.
The perfect DDoS attack tool would be a method that infects thousands of machines and each machine has a unique source or random strain of the tool in such a manner that the only thing they share is the trigger to set it in motion at a target... and the trigger isn't where anti-virus or other client checking stuff could detect it. When you pull the trigger thousands of infected machines attack the target and there's no way the target can tell it's not legit traffic. Basically a code version of the Slashdot Effect. CmdrTaco pulls the trigger with an article link and we "zombies" blast the crap out of the site.:)
Actually they're using an Arrowpoint CS-800 (can't recall offhand if was a single box or an actual redundant pair). Sweet box.. until Cisco bought Arrowpoint and then proceeded muck it up by "migrating" the CS OS to an "IOS-friendly" standard.
Roxio and Gracenote had a licensing agreement where Gracenote would provide a service for Roxio's software. Service allows software to access/use database info. Agreement expires. Roxio chooses a different service provider. Gracenote throws tantrum and points LawyerGoons at target with the most cash.
Apparently, being a Gracenote customer/licensee is just like being in the Mafia... except without all the pasta. You dare leave the family and they 'sic a bloodsucker on you.
Now, what exactly is Gracenote claiming is their IP? The database data itself or the method of access? Roxio ain't got none of the former (neither does freedb.org IIRC) and the latter is what is technically known as a database string query.. which is apparently so Super-Elite-Mondo-Sekret! that we'll all contract herpes and a stutter if we dare trespass upon Gracenote's Divine Right to Screw Everyone.
Re:here is my perspective
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AI Movie Promo
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you'd be insulting the poor amoeba...
Yes you would, asshole.
Your impressions on the recent MS Interview
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Ask Robert Young
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Yesterday on Slashdot we got responses from an interview of MS exec Doug Miller and he touched upon some areas of Linux that caused a lot of debate and discussion in the forum. My question to you is, would you skim through the Doug's reponses and provide us with your counterarguments or comments?
You have a good point...but if you combined the in-house efforts with open source you add even more eyeballs (a Good Thing).
And as the open source side of the equation is free to tinker without adhering to strict guidelines that the in-house coders are working under, the potential for getting bitten by tunnel-vision is minimized. By having contributors with a different perspective you could spot problems in the abilities and scope of the project that can be totally unrelated to whether the code is buggy or not.
Kinda like how HELLO WORLD is bug-free... but that won't help a blind man use it worth a damn.
In fact, the design and method MS is using to implement "skinning" has caused some concern in the community of various commercial and open-source Windows shell replacements. There was recently a thread on the Litestep mailing list about some of the contortions that will now be required to do what was previously a simple modification to the registry (or.ini files for the 9x OS versions) to replace the explorer.exe shell.
Sure you can still skin windows but with XP MS is apparently moving towards requiring the explorer.exe shell in order to do so.. thus leaving the user without a choice again. Well, a choice dependent on the terms and whims of MS. And explorer.exe is notoriously bloated and slow, especially in comparison to the Litestep shell (which is a shell based upon module loading in essence)
I don't see this as a good thing.
I would highly recommend to those who still use Windows at all to investigate some of the various shell replacements out there. I avoided Windows like the plague after becoming used to how *nix will allow me to setup a shell to work the way I want to work and not the other way around. Litestep in particular is the only reason I have MS on one of my boxes, it's that sweet.
Plus I still get a kick out of people asking me how I managed to get Office working in Linux.:)
I don't know if I think of AMD as a second class CPU maker/distributor, but I still hold Intel in a higher regard simply because they tend to offer more in the way of innovation.
Is it "innovation" or "let's add stuff to lock more people into our products!"?
Take a look at Itanium (or their IA-64 instruction set) vs. AMD's Sledgehammer core-- IA-64 is just another operating environment, like Protected Mode was to Real Mode, except that IA-64 processors start out in IA-64 mode instead of having to switch modes after being reset. Sledgehammer, AFAIK, is just new instructions without a new operating mode. IA-64 introduces a HUGE number of general purpose CPU registers (no more EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX, EDI, ESI limitations!) while (from an admittedly brief review) AMD adds a total of 8 general purpose registers.
So Intel has added as of yet unused and so far unnecessary registers to a new operating mode which can (will?) potentially lock consumers into their products as software gets written to take advantage of said (dubious and patented) innovations?
While AMD has simply taken an existing operating mode, added a few general purpose and non-proprietary registers, and improved the overall design and performance of a tried-and-true architecture with known quantitative qualities?
Do I need to bring up the higher monetary entry point in the marketplace for those "innovations"? Why pay extra for something that isn't fully utilized when I can purchase a similar product, which performs just as well (if not better) for much less?
Somehow this doesn't seem to be "innovation" to me. It reminds me somewhat of how the Japanese do little that is truly "new" in the gestalt sense but instead rely on tweaking existing technologies to bring out their full potential. And last time I checked they 0wn3d many major markets which were invented and developed elsewhere (VCR anyone?) by approaching the market in such a manner.
Of course, I'm probably just an idiot.
Re:It goes against reason, check your bible !
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New Human Ancestor?
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If we really are descended from monkeys, how come we don't all enjoy swinging from trees, eating bananas and mindless copulation with the closest memeber of either sex ?
I can't speak for the rest of you but I highly enjoy all of the above. Especially the mindless copulation. Oooh yeah.
All posts regarding this article probably can be summarized by:
"Dude! NASA's doing RobotWars! I got $5 on the Martian Pathfinder!"
"RobotWars/BattleBots/CowboyNeal is much cooler than this and here is a link cause I'm karma whoring."
"RobotWars/Battlebots is way better than RobotWars/Battlebots!"
"This is actually the FIRST competition and is a NASA-funded educational program. The focus of this competition is not to break the other robots (which is actually against the rules), but to score points by putting balls into goals"
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but since plastic polymers tend to follow a thread-like structure (which gives them the flexibility, strength, etc) instead of the more common crystalline formations of other known superconducting materials, wouldn't that lessen their usefulness at any temps colder than your suggestion of liquid nitrogen?
I would assume that a lot of the benefits from plastic would be negated by the temperatures necessary to superconduct... since the threaded polymer structure would be frozen past any point of flexibility as well as being structurally weaker then the crystalline alternatives in a rigid state. So, even if you can mold the material easier, once in superconducting environments you lose a large portion of the very reasons why you wanted plastic in the first place.
The other metal-like materials can still run at warmer temps, would be able to deal with a higher resistance to breakage/warping, and can also be molded into wires, albeit not as easily (which you stated and I agree on). That really only leaves cost factors...
I still don't see the point... unless they can significantly increase the temp at which plastic superconducts in some manner which I highly doubt given the very conducting-resistant nature of plastic itself!
Like I said, anything that can conduct electricity at some minute level could superconduct under optimal conditions. The hard part is finding stuff that will do so in conditions that neither negate the efficiency gains of superconducting (environment control too high etc) nor limit the usefulness & adaptability of the superconducting material itself.
So far, the other metal-like stuff is way ahead in those regards.
Fossil fuels are the end result of the breakdown of biomass over time. Biomass meaning living stuff. Meaning as long as we have life on earth we will have a renewing supply of fossil fuels. The only limiting factor of this resource is the amount of.. uh.. processed(?) fuel... and the length of the processing.
Just think of it as a really slow drive-thru. You know the burger's are coming out eventually but in the meantime you could starve to death if you ran out of rogue french fries on the floor.
Hmm.. That's gotta be the weirdest analogy for conservation I've ever seen. Yep, I am having a stupid day after all:)
At 4 degrees above absolute zero, and the "higher" temp metals having a head-start in refinement/research etc, what do you see as compelling reasons to use plastic? Cost of material? flexibility? The temp difference is fairly significant and I'm just not seeing the point other the geek-factor.
I mean, given the way superconducting works, at some point you can make almost any material capable of passing electrical energy...
It's not always the patch gymnastics required and/or app dependencies that dictate company policies & mindset towards keeping systems up-to-date, nor is it always "Trained Monkey Syndrome" from lack of competent & clued admins. A lot of the time it's the downtime required to fix whatever's broken. Companies in many cases decide the potential risk of getting hacked is outweighed by the measurable cost to fix it... and the cost can be anything from lost ecommerce revenue to lost productivity to employee costs.
I work with some world-class NT engineers and they know their shit. While I give them a hard time for not using a real OS, I have to admit that they've proven to me that it's the quality of the syadmins, not the quality of the OS, that really matters. (I still think windows sucks, but I admit you can make it suck less)
However, even God's Gift to NT can't change the fact that in order to do certain things in windows (service packs in particular) you have to jump through so many hoops, and the multitude of reboots (and hence downtime) from those hoops, that many companies can't or won't afford the downtime. With *nix and most other OS's you aren't nearly so screwed and can address the vast majority of updates/fixes etc without incurring any downtime.
And that is one of the main reasons these known holes in the Windows world are so common and exploited. Not to mention that it has the added bonus of reinforcing the perception that NT Admin==Clueless Monkey which we all love to laugh about.:)
The fact is that all code of sufficient size and complexity will have bugs in it. I leave it to the reader to decide whether they want the buggy programs they depend upon to be open or closed.
It doesn't matter how large or complex the code is nor how elegant and securely it's written if the underlying architecture & methodology principles suck.
Bugs can be fixed and holes patched but if the very process the code uses to do its thing is flawed then there will always be ways to exploit that process in some capacity.
One poster asked how it was possible to still be finding holes in BIND after all these years when so many eyes have gone through the source code... maybe we should take a pointer from the *BSD camp; they fix how the code functions and then they evaluate why the code does something in that manner so design flaws can be addressed.
BIND 9.x is on the right track. They've completely rewritten nearly all aspects of the underlying architecture to address the design problems inherent in BIND 4 & 8.
And by cheaper I mean more cost-effective and a greater ROI.
If the "Exchange faction" can give hard, detailed technical reasons why a move to MS Exchange (including downtime, costs for licensing, hardware for infrastructure, people costs) would be beneficial that's all well and good. We both know that on technical merits the existing solution is optimal. However that's not where this battle will be won. Follow the money instead.
Unless they can put a monetary amount on the reasons and justify that amount in cost savings somewhere then your best bet to squash these morons is to present your case to the bean-counters in terms of cost/benefit and ROI of the existing system.. which we both know will be considerably less than anything the Exchange peons can come up with. Case closed.
Every company above a certain start-up metatlity bases infrastructure decisions on how it affects the bottom line. You handle it the way suggested here and I guarantee you'll not have a problem.
Patents != research incentive, profit does...
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and that game is going to be over soon.
Pharmaceutical companies have screwed themselves because of their success. It's not the patents or patent length that'll kick em in the ass and slow R&D but price controls and a little thing called "compulsory licensing."
In November President Clinton signed bill H.R. 4461 (Senate counterpart S. 2520), also known as the Medicine Equity & Drug Safety Act of 2000, which will allow wholesalers to import drugs from abroad so that Americans can get the benefit of discounted prices charged elsewhere. Right now companies recoup their research costs from their US customers, while letting customers elsewhere in the world pay a much smaller margin over manufacturing costs. A 3 month supply of tamoxifen (the most widely prescribed breast cancer drug in the world) costs $298 in the US, but only $26 in Canada. Did I mention that tamoxifen has to be taken for up to 5 years? Prozac nets Eli Lilly corp. $2.6 billion a year, retailing for $115 for 45 capsules in the U.S., and $35 in Canada... and the prices are cheaper in places like Africa & Europe.
The 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. had collective sales of $179 billion the past 12 months and collective gross profit (excess of sales over manufacturing costs) of $121 billion. That $121 billion in gross profit gets reamed if price controls (which is essentially what this bill is) come into play, threatening marketing budgets as well as R&D (a collective $20.5 billion) and pretax income ($40billion).
It'll hurt em, but do the math and they're still netting a combined profit of roughly $60 billion/year.
Patents don't get around the compulsory licensing issue either. A foreign government can take away an exclusive product when "the health or safety of a nation is at risk." Under compulsory licinesing a company can produce a drug discovered by a U.S. company in exchange for a licensing fee. Thos efees are chicken feed compared to being undersold by the generic. To quote Pfizer's executive VP of corporate affairs on this point, "It would make it impossible to develop lifesaving medicines from the human genome system."
Patents themselves are not the guaranteed safe haven for these companies they once were if you consider that next March Congress will hold hearings on whether to reduce the length of monopoly ptotection from 20 years to 10.
Patents? Bah, these companies have got bigger problems. To rely on what IMHO are stupid and specious patents anyway is not something to bet your bottom line on.
True Taco could add Javascript to break out of it but it'd be a pain in the ass. I don't know if there is a simple way to identify a particular frame from a particular site (such as NameZero) without some kind of hash matching and set it up to break the frame. This matters because I don't know how a blanket framebreak code would affect legitimate partner sites Slashdot might have that frame their site (if there are any) . One does not want to upset one's partners:)
And, the domain holder using NameZero is legally bound by the user agreement to not use code to break the frame himself in their NameZero control setup. That's what some people don't seem to grok and assume that if the intent was good that the domain holder would have removed the frame etc etc...
Oh and I'm sure by this point that Taco has gotten some sort of email from someone about it..:)
Someone mentioned slahsdot.org being registered via Namzero...
Let me clarify something so anyone can direct their Cmdr Taco empathy & ire at what I see are the correct targets, the abusive domain holder (squatter) and not the helpful squatter or registrar/service.
NameZero allows you to register a domain for free. That domain resolves to their custom DNS servers which puts a (relatively) small frame at the bottom which displays their logo, a random banner ad, and a control panel. The NameZero domain owner chooses a URL in their account setup to redirect their domain to a "real" page (slahsdot.org -> slashdot.org in this case) utilizing the control panel
The NameZero service (with the frames that seem to burn Cmdr's ass) essentially does nothing more than map a domain they resolve DNS for to the domain holder's content. The frame stays until you go to a new URL via the location field or use a bookmark, otherwise it redirects all links you click on etc through their DNS so the frame stays since it assumes you are still within "slahsdot.org". Even that is customizable by the domain holder...
The ad banner click-thru abuse is minimal as the frame loads only once and doesn't benefit anyone but NameZero, once for the ad hit, and for an indefinite time for the exposure of their service via the frame til the surfer goes elsewhere.
So, it really depends on how the typosquatter uses the domain. Redirects and services such as NameZero's that are useful and of no real benefit to the squatter are cool IMHO, but someone using a typodomain to fuel their ad banner hits/moneyshot by abusing it is "pretty slimey" as Taco puts it.
So... if I try to read that in english what you are saying is that I was on to something in my original post?:)
In other words, though I possibly didn't have the correct chemistry terms or specifics my hunch was based in reality and not the result of smokin' $3 rock?
One thing not mentioned in the article is how much calcium chloride is needed to produce the titanium... not too mention how often the electrolyte bath can be reused before the effectiveness of the conversion from solid titanium dioxide electrodes to titanium might start to fail. I'm assuming the basic principle behind this is similar to how a battery generates current until the chemical reaction dies from dilution.. Some/.'er with a more recent chemistry background care to comment? It's been way too long since I was in school learning this crap.
If the reaction has a relatively small window then the gain of using this process might be outweighed by the cost of managing/disposing of the spent calcium chloride...
I haven't paid much attention to the details of standalone DVD players as I'm perfectly happy with the playback on my DVD-ROM to a 21" monitor. Plus I've been more concerned with the erosion of my legal/constitutional rights by the MPAA/RIAA/DCMA etc. BUT, the wife wants one for our tv (I think I've seen it in the house somewhere, don't watch tv much:) and is asking me, the resident computer geek to find a good deal.
Lurking through the discussions I was made aware that there are region "issues" I need to take into consideration and someone posted a comment for feedback of region-free players (yes, I know the technical details just never cared to research more til now). Never really thought about the player capabilities really but yeah, I want one region-free or, like the Panasonic 909, one that can emulate whatever region is needed by the disc at the time. Time Warner needs to get its ass out of my life and stop making things difficult for me, a non-pirate, to watch friggin "The Iron Giant" 6 billion times to placate the kids.
That all said, anyone care to shed some light on what are some of the better models? If I can find one with a built-in VCR that ignores Macrovision so I can make copies direct on the appliance itself that would be sweeeeet. I refuse to let
Slashdot Mirror
Heathen.
At an ISP I once worked at I was involved in establishing newsgroup policies and the possible legal consequences and this is my take based upon the legal advice and discussions I had at the time. Unless there have been some changes in the past few years that I've missed, the minute an ISP changes their terms of service to explicitly block access based on the legality of content they technically lose their "common carrier" status protection and can be held liable etc.
:)
Unfortunately these kinds of cases never get to court in any way that would force a change of this type of crap because of the purposefully vague and specious language describing what exactly you're paying for in that same damned ToS.
Basically it still boils down to whether your lawyer(money) can beat up their lawyer(money), though the size of the ToS "backdoors" & loopholes can help
Until incoming packets can be torn down, analyzed and determination made to allow/deny at a rate equal or greater than the wire speed at the router device then DDoS will always be possible. Yeah you can throttle forged-source-address attacks just dandy but your site is still screwed if the sheer amount of inbound packets pegs the CPU/memory on your router(s) to where it falls behind in processing the queue.... There are some methods you can put into hardware (ASICs etc) but unlike SSL accelerator cards (like in the F5 or Foundry) and similar approaches, the complexity at that front-end would make the cost of the solution prohibitive or result in still more dedicated devices (load balancers etc) at the network level... and there's always going to be a bottleneck to cause things to jam.
Amoeba
Okay, so they will eventually have a way to slow and possibly even stop the spread of the garden variety DDoS attack like the packet floods or viral-zombie Code Red types they mention as the detection mechanisms improve. However, the sad truth folks is that it just isn't possible to stop a DDoS attack.
Don't believe me? Before you warm up your flamethrowers just follow along here for a sec.
Think for a bit about how the net works. You got your SYN, the SYN_RECV's, the SYN_ACK's. You got packets that have a frame, header and route info, a data payload etc. You got stuff that has to be there in order for this neat internet doohickey to function. In other words there is a framework that makes pattern matching algorithms and heuristics (and other stuff involving math :) possible so you can try to separate good packets from the bad packets.
Problem is that there's one thing that can't be predicted/recognized/prevented/controlled: where that first SYN is coming from. And that's the reason that DDoS works so well. All the Black Hats have to do is keep coming up with stuff that is harder and harder to crack pattern-wise while having that randomized Ace up their sleeve.
The perfect DDoS attack tool would be a method that infects thousands of machines and each machine has a unique source or random strain of the tool in such a manner that the only thing they share is the trigger to set it in motion at a target... and the trigger isn't where anti-virus or other client checking stuff could detect it. When you pull the trigger thousands of infected machines attack the target and there's no way the target can tell it's not legit traffic. Basically a code version of the Slashdot Effect. CmdrTaco pulls the trigger with an article link and we "zombies" blast the crap out of the site. :)
Amoeba
Actually they're using an Arrowpoint CS-800 (can't recall offhand if was a single box or an actual redundant pair). Sweet box.. until Cisco bought Arrowpoint and then proceeded muck it up by "migrating" the CS OS to an "IOS-friendly" standard.
Apparently, being a Gracenote customer/licensee is just like being in the Mafia... except without all the pasta. You dare leave the family and they 'sic a bloodsucker on you.
Now, what exactly is Gracenote claiming is their IP? The database data itself or the method of access? Roxio ain't got none of the former (neither does freedb.org IIRC) and the latter is what is technically known as a database string query.. which is apparently so Super-Elite-Mondo-Sekret! that we'll all contract herpes and a stutter if we dare trespass upon Gracenote's Divine Right to Screw Everyone.
Yes you would, asshole.
Yesterday on Slashdot we got responses from an interview of MS exec Doug Miller and he touched upon some areas of Linux that caused a lot of debate and discussion in the forum. My question to you is, would you skim through the Doug's reponses and provide us with your counterarguments or comments?
And as the open source side of the equation is free to tinker without adhering to strict guidelines that the in-house coders are working under, the potential for getting bitten by tunnel-vision is minimized. By having contributors with a different perspective you could spot problems in the abilities and scope of the project that can be totally unrelated to whether the code is buggy or not.
Kinda like how HELLO WORLD is bug-free... but that won't help a blind man use it worth a damn.
Sure you can still skin windows but with XP MS is apparently moving towards requiring the explorer.exe shell in order to do so.. thus leaving the user without a choice again. Well, a choice dependent on the terms and whims of MS. And explorer.exe is notoriously bloated and slow, especially in comparison to the Litestep shell (which is a shell based upon module loading in essence)
I don't see this as a good thing.
I would highly recommend to those who still use Windows at all to investigate some of the various shell replacements out there. I avoided Windows like the plague after becoming used to how *nix will allow me to setup a shell to work the way I want to work and not the other way around. Litestep in particular is the only reason I have MS on one of my boxes, it's that sweet.
Plus I still get a kick out of people asking me how I managed to get Office working in Linux. :)
Is it "innovation" or "let's add stuff to lock more people into our products!"?
Take a look at Itanium (or their IA-64 instruction set) vs. AMD's Sledgehammer core-- IA-64 is just another operating environment, like Protected Mode was to Real Mode, except that IA-64 processors start out in IA-64 mode instead of having to switch modes after being reset. Sledgehammer, AFAIK, is just new instructions without a new operating mode. IA-64 introduces a HUGE number of general purpose CPU registers (no more EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX, EDI, ESI limitations!) while (from an admittedly brief review) AMD adds a total of 8 general purpose registers.
So Intel has added as of yet unused and so far unnecessary registers to a new operating mode which can (will?) potentially lock consumers into their products as software gets written to take advantage of said (dubious and patented) innovations?
While AMD has simply taken an existing operating mode, added a few general purpose and non-proprietary registers, and improved the overall design and performance of a tried-and-true architecture with known quantitative qualities?
Do I need to bring up the higher monetary entry point in the marketplace for those "innovations"? Why pay extra for something that isn't fully utilized when I can purchase a similar product, which performs just as well (if not better) for much less?
Somehow this doesn't seem to be "innovation" to me. It reminds me somewhat of how the Japanese do little that is truly "new" in the gestalt sense but instead rely on tweaking existing technologies to bring out their full potential. And last time I checked they 0wn3d many major markets which were invented and developed elsewhere (VCR anyone?) by approaching the market in such a manner.
Of course, I'm probably just an idiot.
I can't speak for the rest of you but I highly enjoy all of the above. Especially the mindless copulation. Oooh yeah.
"Dude! NASA's doing RobotWars! I got $5 on the Martian Pathfinder!"
"RobotWars/BattleBots/CowboyNeal is much cooler than this and here is a link cause I'm karma whoring."
"RobotWars/Battlebots is way better than RobotWars/Battlebots!"
"This is actually the FIRST competition and is a NASA-funded educational program. The focus of this competition is not to break the other robots (which is actually against the rules), but to score points by putting balls into goals"
"Robots+destruction=bad"
"Robots+destruction=good"
"All your bots are belong to us"
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but since plastic polymers tend to follow a thread-like structure (which gives them the flexibility, strength, etc) instead of the more common crystalline formations of other known superconducting materials, wouldn't that lessen their usefulness at any temps colder than your suggestion of liquid nitrogen?
I would assume that a lot of the benefits from plastic would be negated by the temperatures necessary to superconduct... since the threaded polymer structure would be frozen past any point of flexibility as well as being structurally weaker then the crystalline alternatives in a rigid state. So, even if you can mold the material easier, once in superconducting environments you lose a large portion of the very reasons why you wanted plastic in the first place.
The other metal-like materials can still run at warmer temps, would be able to deal with a higher resistance to breakage/warping, and can also be molded into wires, albeit not as easily (which you stated and I agree on). That really only leaves cost factors...
I still don't see the point... unless they can significantly increase the temp at which plastic superconducts in some manner which I highly doubt given the very conducting-resistant nature of plastic itself!
Like I said, anything that can conduct electricity at some minute level could superconduct under optimal conditions. The hard part is finding stuff that will do so in conditions that neither negate the efficiency gains of superconducting (environment control too high etc) nor limit the usefulness & adaptability of the superconducting material itself.
So far, the other metal-like stuff is way ahead in those regards.
Fossil fuels are the end result of the breakdown of biomass over time. Biomass meaning living stuff. Meaning as long as we have life on earth we will have a renewing supply of fossil fuels. The only limiting factor of this resource is the amount of.. uh.. processed(?) fuel... and the length of the processing.
:)
Just think of it as a really slow drive-thru. You know the burger's are coming out eventually but in the meantime you could starve to death if you ran out of rogue french fries on the floor.
Hmm.. That's gotta be the weirdest analogy for conservation I've ever seen. Yep, I am having a stupid day after all
At 4 degrees above absolute zero, and the "higher" temp metals having a head-start in refinement/research etc, what do you see as compelling reasons to use plastic? Cost of material? flexibility? The temp difference is fairly significant and I'm just not seeing the point other the geek-factor.
I mean, given the way superconducting works, at some point you can make almost any material capable of passing electrical energy...
I must be having a stupid day.
I work with some world-class NT engineers and they know their shit. While I give them a hard time for not using a real OS, I have to admit that they've proven to me that it's the quality of the syadmins, not the quality of the OS, that really matters. (I still think windows sucks, but I admit you can make it suck less)
However, even God's Gift to NT can't change the fact that in order to do certain things in windows (service packs in particular) you have to jump through so many hoops, and the multitude of reboots (and hence downtime) from those hoops, that many companies can't or won't afford the downtime. With *nix and most other OS's you aren't nearly so screwed and can address the vast majority of updates/fixes etc without incurring any downtime.
And that is one of the main reasons these known holes in the Windows world are so common and exploited. Not to mention that it has the added bonus of reinforcing the perception that NT Admin==Clueless Monkey which we all love to laugh about. :)
It doesn't matter how large or complex the code is nor how elegant and securely it's written if the underlying architecture & methodology principles suck.
Bugs can be fixed and holes patched but if the very process the code uses to do its thing is flawed then there will always be ways to exploit that process in some capacity.
One poster asked how it was possible to still be finding holes in BIND after all these years when so many eyes have gone through the source code... maybe we should take a pointer from the *BSD camp; they fix how the code functions and then they evaluate why the code does something in that manner so design flaws can be addressed.
BIND 9.x is on the right track. They've completely rewritten nearly all aspects of the underlying architecture to address the design problems inherent in BIND 4 & 8.
If the "Exchange faction" can give hard, detailed technical reasons why a move to MS Exchange (including downtime, costs for licensing, hardware for infrastructure, people costs) would be beneficial that's all well and good. We both know that on technical merits the existing solution is optimal. However that's not where this battle will be won. Follow the money instead.
Unless they can put a monetary amount on the reasons and justify that amount in cost savings somewhere then your best bet to squash these morons is to present your case to the bean-counters in terms of cost/benefit and ROI of the existing system.. which we both know will be considerably less than anything the Exchange peons can come up with. Case closed.
Every company above a certain start-up metatlity bases infrastructure decisions on how it affects the bottom line. You handle it the way suggested here and I guarantee you'll not have a problem.
Pharmaceutical companies have screwed themselves because of their success. It's not the patents or patent length that'll kick em in the ass and slow R&D but price controls and a little thing called "compulsory licensing."
In November President Clinton signed bill H.R. 4461 (Senate counterpart S. 2520), also known as the Medicine Equity & Drug Safety Act of 2000, which will allow wholesalers to import drugs from abroad so that Americans can get the benefit of discounted prices charged elsewhere. Right now companies recoup their research costs from their US customers, while letting customers elsewhere in the world pay a much smaller margin over manufacturing costs. A 3 month supply of tamoxifen (the most widely prescribed breast cancer drug in the world) costs $298 in the US, but only $26 in Canada. Did I mention that tamoxifen has to be taken for up to 5 years? Prozac nets Eli Lilly corp. $2.6 billion a year, retailing for $115 for 45 capsules in the U.S., and $35 in Canada... and the prices are cheaper in places like Africa & Europe.
The 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. had collective sales of $179 billion the past 12 months and collective gross profit (excess of sales over manufacturing costs) of $121 billion. That $121 billion in gross profit gets reamed if price controls (which is essentially what this bill is) come into play, threatening marketing budgets as well as R&D (a collective $20.5 billion) and pretax income ($40billion).
It'll hurt em, but do the math and they're still netting a combined profit of roughly $60 billion/year.
Patents don't get around the compulsory licensing issue either. A foreign government can take away an exclusive product when "the health or safety of a nation is at risk." Under compulsory licinesing a company can produce a drug discovered by a U.S. company in exchange for a licensing fee. Thos efees are chicken feed compared to being undersold by the generic. To quote Pfizer's executive VP of corporate affairs on this point, "It would make it impossible to develop lifesaving medicines from the human genome system."
Patents themselves are not the guaranteed safe haven for these companies they once were if you consider that next March Congress will hold hearings on whether to reduce the length of monopoly ptotection from 20 years to 10.
Patents? Bah, these companies have got bigger problems. To rely on what IMHO are stupid and specious patents anyway is not something to bet your bottom line on.
True Taco could add Javascript to break out of it but it'd be a pain in the ass. I don't know if there is a simple way to identify a particular frame from a particular site (such as NameZero) without some kind of hash matching and set it up to break the frame. This matters because I don't know how a blanket framebreak code would affect legitimate partner sites Slashdot might have that frame their site (if there are any) . One does not want to upset one's partners :)
:)
And, the domain holder using NameZero is legally bound by the user agreement to not use code to break the frame himself in their NameZero control setup. That's what some people don't seem to grok and assume that if the intent was good that the domain holder would have removed the frame etc etc...
Oh and I'm sure by this point that Taco has gotten some sort of email from someone about it..
Let me clarify something so anyone can direct their Cmdr Taco empathy & ire at what I see are the correct targets, the abusive domain holder (squatter) and not the helpful squatter or registrar/service.
NameZero allows you to register a domain for free. That domain resolves to their custom DNS servers which puts a (relatively) small frame at the bottom which displays their logo, a random banner ad, and a control panel. The NameZero domain owner chooses a URL in their account setup to redirect their domain to a "real" page (slahsdot.org -> slashdot.org in this case) utilizing the control panel
The NameZero service (with the frames that seem to burn Cmdr's ass) essentially does nothing more than map a domain they resolve DNS for to the domain holder's content. The frame stays until you go to a new URL via the location field or use a bookmark, otherwise it redirects all links you click on etc through their DNS so the frame stays since it assumes you are still within "slahsdot.org". Even that is customizable by the domain holder...
The ad banner click-thru abuse is minimal as the frame loads only once and doesn't benefit anyone but NameZero, once for the ad hit, and for an indefinite time for the exposure of their service via the frame til the surfer goes elsewhere.
So, it really depends on how the typosquatter uses the domain. Redirects and services such as NameZero's that are useful and of no real benefit to the squatter are cool IMHO, but someone using a typodomain to fuel their ad banner hits/moneyshot by abusing it is "pretty slimey" as Taco puts it.
So... if I try to read that in english what you are saying is that I was on to something in my original post? :)
In other words, though I possibly didn't have the correct chemistry terms or specifics my hunch was based in reality and not the result of smokin' $3 rock?
One thing not mentioned in the article is how much calcium chloride is needed to produce the titanium... not too mention how often the electrolyte bath can be reused before the effectiveness of the conversion from solid titanium dioxide electrodes to titanium might start to fail. I'm assuming the basic principle behind this is similar to how a battery generates current until the chemical reaction dies from dilution.. Some /.'er with a more recent chemistry background care to comment? It's been way too long since I was in school learning this crap.
If the reaction has a relatively small window then the gain of using this process might be outweighed by the cost of managing/disposing of the spent calcium chloride...
It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
I haven't paid much attention to the details of standalone DVD players as I'm perfectly happy with the playback on my DVD-ROM to a 21" monitor. Plus I've been more concerned with the erosion of my legal/constitutional rights by the MPAA/RIAA/DCMA etc. BUT, the wife wants one for our tv (I think I've seen it in the house somewhere, don't watch tv much :) and is asking me, the resident computer geek to find a good deal.
Lurking through the discussions I was made aware that there are region "issues" I need to take into consideration and someone posted a comment for feedback of region-free players (yes, I know the technical details just never cared to research more til now). Never really thought about the player capabilities really but yeah, I want one region-free or, like the Panasonic 909, one that can emulate whatever region is needed by the disc at the time. Time Warner needs to get its ass out of my life and stop making things difficult for me, a non-pirate, to watch friggin "The Iron Giant" 6 billion times to placate the kids.
That all said, anyone care to shed some light on what are some of the better models? If I can find one with a built-in VCR that ignores Macrovision so I can make copies direct on the appliance itself that would be sweeeeet. I refuse to let