While I agree with your basic point, look at it from the other side; Joe Dirt is in posession of their "property" which they value at full price.
Bzzzt! WRONG
This isn't about property. This is about copyright.
Copyright is this weird legal construction that regulates people are allowed to COPY even in private, behind closed doors.
By very definition there isn't any deprivation of property going on here as that actually WOULDN'T be copyright infingement, since no copies would need to be made.
Why should Joe have the privledge of enjoying music/movies/anything that he can't pay for?
Why should Joe not be able to make a copy of the contents of a piece of paper his friend hands him?
The whole concept of copyright is a arbitrary construction whose purpose was originally to inspire the creation of new works.
It's has gone completely beyond that.
Joe will get along just fine without access to the Bubba Bandits latest album
This is always the example I hear people using, some trivial piece of pop. What about 100 years of or fucking national history and knowedge?
There's more going on than just Britney's latest album.
How about something very political from someone long dead....
How about an eighty year old mathematics paper?
While you may consider listening to or watching some poppy piece of entertainment a "privilege", how about fundamental knowedge about the world around you?
(there's even this "free" service called the radio and TV).
Which typically airs total shit. And is run by companies who don't have the public's best interest in mind. And.... about a zillion more problems with this cop out. It the only "content" poor people should have access to the shit that's on the TV and radio?
While these successful and growing inustries price their new material highest, slowly dropping prices over time, the music industry prices new material lowest, then raises prices.
See the thing is their "booty" (it really shouldn't be called a product since they typically have nothing to do with it's creation and practically steal it) has a much longer shelf life. There will be a demand for copies of Abbey Road for quite some time whereas the latest crappy action flic is going to get erased from the public consiousness by the next action flic with slightly better special effects.
But I still don't use that as justification for stealing music.
Yes, so you don't shoplift.
Do you download music, or do you not know what stealing is?
Is there really such a thing in this day and age? That $24k has to go somewhere. Can't we just follow the money? It seems like this is the kind of thing that the feds would be all over. I see one of those huge multinational Interpol busts in about 5 weeks.
Yes, obviously....that's why the illegal drugs and prostitution were completely wiped out decades ago.
There are tons of way to get money anonymously. Anyone smart knows that. I should be getting my million dollars anonymously anytime now, just as soon as I cover the advance "fraud prevention" fee for general Tettah's son. Then I'll be able to buy all the drugs, hookers, and source code I want!
The point I'm trying to make is that fuck-ups happen.
Yes, they happen but they are NOT limited to nuclear facilities.
No matter how many safeguards you put in place, the risk is just too great when you are dealing with nuclear material. Period.
What the crap are you talking about?
This is the type of ignorant bullshit that keeps up dependent on foreign oil and mired in political conflit in the middle east.
You don't want to have an actual SANE discussion about how dangerous it is, the risk is too great because you frickin say so.
So tell us, what makes you nuclear risk management specialist?
I suggest you read: How to read exit polls and then go back and look at the exit poll data. Both Ohio and Florida went to Bush according to exit poll information.
It's just not economical. There are plenty of virus writers already out there, because it's just too easy and there are so many computers, it happens. If an antivirus company was discovered to have done this even ONCE, then their entire business would be destroyed instantly.
Interesting statement, which you completely fail to back up.
Just because some viruses are produced for free does not mean there is no financial incentive to create even more viruses.
If they were actually caught doing so, a scapegoat would be fired and business would becontinued as usual. Companies get caught doing illegal things all the time. If they're lucky they'll face the same penalty Microsoft has: nothing.
It would probably be easier than acquiring or building a long range cruise missile.
Not really.
A cruise missile could be built by a few engineers using easily available equipment...
We're talking stuff you could buy online and have it all at you house in a week. Legally.
And once you've got a working prototype, you can start cranking them out like crazy, then launch hundreds of them at once.
Getting a critical mass of uranium or plutonium would be MUCH harder, and then you still need a team of engineers and some equipment that is going to throw up serious red flags if you want your engineers to survive long enough to actually produce ONE bomb. (And you're not going to be able to get enough material to produce lots of nukes.)
I think Galileo has better resolution and coverage.
Better resolution is possible, but better coverage (for civilian applications) doesn't seem very likely. They're going to be using the same carrier frequency and a very similar modulation scheme. This means their power levels are going to have to be carefully matched to those of the GPS system. CDMA demands it to function properly.
If other countries start relying on Amnerican GPS then America has a new means for blackmail, "Do what we say or we shut off your GPS".
Which was the point I was trying to make. The Europeans are being just as paranoid as us Americans, or they wouldn't be building Gallileo in the first place. We're afraid you'll misuse Gallileo and you're afraid we'll misuse GPS. Pot, meet kettle:)
You must not know any Americans. As nearly as I can tell most people in the U.S. are living in fear. Thats why their politicians tell them how they are making them "safe" on a daily basis. Thats why they took down Iraq, they were afraid Saddam was going to nuke an American city.
Well, the funny thing is that I, as an american, didn't get a say in attacking Iraq.
A great many Americans are aware of the REAL reasons we attacked Iraq, but don't really have much ability to do anything about it.
A LOT of us think it's retarded that we had 9 times more people after Saddam than the guy who was ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE for 9/11.
Note: I'm not a military space insider -- just an astrophysicist. These ideas occurred to me in about 30 seconds, so you can bet anyone with his/her own space program already thought of 'em too.
Actually, you can take your idea afurther using "phased array" technology.
By having a bunch of seperate radiating elements what adjustable phase shift, the direction and directivity of the beam can be adjusted on the fly. One antenna can even be used to transmit high-gain signal to multiple, geographically-disparate receivers (TDM of course).
Additionally, filtering techiniques could be deliberately employed to block reception from certain areas.
Of course, it seems like even this setup could be beat with enoguh power, but it might come down to their antenna designer against yours.
It's interesting to think about anyways.
Anyways, at some level you probably WANT your satellite to be jammed, because it's still better than having it rendered inoperaable or blown to little bits.
I don't really follow your whole arguement about rogue states and terrorists using GPS to launch a surprise attack. Fact is the U.S. probably wont know this is happening until it happens unless America's radar coverage is good and responsive enough to catch cruise missiles.
I would expect it is. Modern radars are taking advantage of some really cool DSP techniques. The missile's rate of speed is going to make it stick out pretty well.
Having the ability to deny GPS service is useless unless you know an attack is coming.
Only to a certain extent.
I'd figure a cheap missile is going to have a GPS for long-term accuracy and a few accelerometers for increased resolution/update rate. The missile is going to lose accuracy very quickly once it looses GPS because its position value is then going to be the result of double integration of the accelerometer reading, and thus contain double integrated error.
The classic American military response to this problem is they degrade service to everyone who doesn't have access to the encrypted military channel. The only problem is this severely degrades or precludes many of the valuable civilian applications of GPS like automated landing of aircraft in bad weather.
Yeah the thing that sucks is that's almost the only option. The designers just didn't envision other important uses of the system. There is one interesting prospect arising using what they refer to as a "black key" receiver instead of the typical"red key". receivers. Here's a link on the subject.
It would be very nice if the Gallileo system provided for many more than two classes of service. (Non-military gov't, civilian critcal infrastructure, seperate codes per country, etc).
I imagine the European persective is they would prefer to tap the potential of high precision, widely available GPS and let the Americans cower in their bunkers fearing attack from every direction. Meanwhile they will exploit all the economic advantages of the civilian applications.
Nobody I know is cowering in fear, but it does make sense to be prudent about the situation and consider those "what if" situations. Heck, that's why Gallileo is being built in the first place. It's not as if europeans can use the current GPS system. They're just being prudent themselves.
There really are a million ways to attack the U.S. in the modern world and you aren't going to be able to stop all of the them.
Sure, but it's like locking up your bike. You do as best you can and try to aviod any obvious weak spots. You can't ever be SURE no one can take your bike, but you can make it pretty damn unlikely.
It might be a better strategy to use carrots, get along with people better in the world, avoid pissing off so many people with the bull in a china shop foreign policy, and just carry a big stick so if anyone attacks you they know what they will get in return.
I totally agree, as do many other Americans. I was at a spech where president Clinton pointed out that with what we're currently spending on homeland security, we could provide every child on the planet with a sixth-grade education.
Sounds like a whorthwile idea to me.
While the world WOULD be better if everyone spoke the same language..thats not the way the world IS.
Not necessarily.
I think there is more to lanuage than just verbs and nouns. It's a way of thinking. A method of structing thoughts.....concepts. By having multiple languages, we also have different thought structures. In this way I think the world actually benefits from a diversity of languages. A good example would be the great many would out there that have no translation into other languages.
(For you programmers out there, imagine being forced to working only one programming language.)
So since the world is extreamly multilingual, its better for people to be multilingual.
Sure it doesn't hurt, but it's also a question of what concepts you want to spend your limited time here on earth learning. Personally, I know I'll never even learn everything I want to know from the CURRENT set of human knowledge before I die let anlone new advancements. Perhaps some people would rather spend the time the are forced to spend learing foreign languages in american highschools learing something else of value.
Back when I was in my rate 20's, one of my roommates was a japanese. He came to CSU to learn engrish and to get a bacheror. For about 3 months, we ate runch. Needress to say, that after 8 years of engrish, he could read at a rever that wourd enabre him to get by. But he courd not understand what was being said. It took more than 3 months of talking day and night before he understood that english has l's. Finally, he could pass his toful tests
Basically, if you can not hear the difference in syllables, then you can not learn.
Acutally, one of the issues is that children learn new "sounds" much easier than adults. This is why it's absolutely stupid that in my state we don't even start teaching foreign languages until that period has already expired. As a result, I can learn all the vocab and conjugation I want, but I may NEVER be able to sound like a native speaker.
My girlfriend is actually running a spanish program at her preschool. It's a really cool idea. The point is just to expose the children to the new sounds while they still learn them easily. Then can pick up the rest later. I think it's a kickass concept and I wish it was a widespread phenomenon.
Uh, perhaps you were unaware that China is a now an official partner in Galileo
Actually, I was. Thank you for informing me (really).
I'm quite suprised to hear this. I would have expected something like that to make huge news.
How do reconcile your little rant about "fascist regimes" and the fact they are partnering with your allies in the EU.
Really, that doesn't invaildate my rant. And it's not like this is the first time a European country has made a bad decision.
So you are saying is the U.S. is the only one that understands this technology stuff and its America's job to show their dumb little cousins in Europe how to do it, otherwise they will screw up.
I'm not worried about the satellites falling out of orbit or anything, I'm sure they can build clocks and put them in space. What I'm worried about is them giving acess the wrong people and havin inadequate means to controll it. What if one country goes nuts? Can the other cuts them off? Quickly?
The US fucked up on its on system too.
They did so by not realizing how much critical infrastructure would come to rely on GPS technology. Telecom networks, secondary airport surveilance, etc.
The problem with the US network is that they have very little granulariity over who they deny service to.
And if the EU interprets that responsibility different from America, then the U.S. will make them see the light, by jammer if necessary. Gotta love the "Our way or the highway" mindset that permeates America these days.
See if this truly going to be a "worldwide" network, that means that their satellites are going to be able to guide weapons to tagets INSIDE the US. While one might claim that the US is overstepping its borders another might claim that Gallileo's crossing ours.
Building a global navigation system is kinda like building a bank of misslile launchers pointed at every country on the planet. One should expect the diplomatic issues to be at least as complex as the technological issues.
If you're going to be able to guide weapons into someone else's territory, they're going to want access to the "killswtich" or they're going to start working on a way to shoot the system down or jam it. The seems pretty common sense to me.
Eventually, I expect we'll end up with "mutually assured disruption" of various competing systems.
Anyways, a jammer is a much better option that just shooting the thing down.
Of course the downside is that jamming will be very slow to have any effect on the gallileo ssystem. This means they won't be able to use it WHEN any enemy attack is launched, it will aready be to late (ground based jammers aren't going to do much when you have a directional antenna pointed at outer space).
So you end up in a situation where the jammer will get turned on in advance of a potential situation, which will of course then only serve to escalte the sutiation further (if we don't attack in the next N hours, our guided weapons won't work).
Logically, it seems like the US will want both jamming and destructive capabilities.
Jamming as an only option might actually make the situation worse.
One of the more interesting uses for jamming satellites coming real soon now is Galileo, the European/Chinese GPS constellation, coming on line in a couple of years. The U.S. is most unhappy that there will be a GPS system with 1 meter resolution, with wider coverage, they don't control, because it will break their monopoly on GPS guided weapons and navigation during a conflict unless they have the capbility to jam it. The U.S. GPS system can be selectively crippled/encrypted by the U.S. to deny its use to its enemies.
Perhaps you were unware, but the US an EU are ALLIES!
Yes, the US has its concerns about the the gallileo system, But it's not as if the US and EU are going to war any time soon. I would expect most of the US concerns are those of interference (do you know that some carrier frequencies are SHARED BY BOTH SYSTEMS), and that the EU at least has the capability to selective degrade it's OWN satellite system, so as to not allow for bargain-basement cruise missles.
China's Xinhua has a pretty biting commentary on the subject that appeared on SpaceDaily a couple days ago.
Yes, China bastion of freedom, especially freedom of the press. China is exactly the type of shadow-government fascist regime that the US needs to be able to protect itself against.
It is a further indicator that as the U.S. continues to seek its global empire and world dominion it is going to continue to place itself against and at odds with the entire rest of the world.
Somehow, I don't think I'm going to vote for that. Anyways, the real thing you should be afraid of is global corporations playing governments against each other and eventualy building up enough money and influence that goverments are mere servants to their desires.
Apparently only the U.S. is allowed to decide who can use and deploy basic technology.
I've worked with GPS in a professional capacity enough to know that only certain groups should be allowed to deploy a GPS system. Arguing that anybody should be able to set up their own gps system is like arguing that anybody should be able to make their own nuke.
Both technologies DEMAND responsibility in their design and application.
What the US is afraid of is not that the EU will have its own system, but that the EU will botch the design and allow uncontrollable access to it. With proper access control, people like this guy will be able to sell missiles to the highest bidder, terrorist or not. Seriously, like that guy really had the intelligence capabilities to tell if I'm working for a terrorist when I ask him to build be missiles. What's he gonna do, check for a tatoo that says "terrorist" on their forehead?
As someone who works with GPS in critical infrastructure applications, I can't wait for a redundant "GPS" system to come online, but not at the cost of giving every angry despot cruise missles. The US doesn't *WANT* to shoot the Gallileo system down, just as I don't want to shoot your dog.....but if you let him get rabies he will be shot.
It's important that the EU understands the responsibility they are taking on.
I put "rice tickets" on stupid ricer cars.
Isn't stupid ricer redundant?
If anybody's stupid it's you.
Leave people the fuck alone.
Besides, if you see a modified car, it means that someone cared enough to do it. This means that car is important to someone. Do not fuck with it. If you do so, you are asking for trouble.
Of course what else should we expect from a stupid, flamebait article like this. It's like posting an article under the title "fuck niggers!" We should be modding down the editor as well for contributing to the idiocy of people like yourself.
How come there aren't any Mexicans on Star Trek?
They don't work in the future, either.
See.... how anybody could anybody get offended by that?
Oh wait....I know, because the joke is a mean-spirited jab at a lot of people who don't deserve it. The thing both these jokes have in common is that they rely on stupid, offensive stereotypes to be "funny".
As far as I'm conrecrned, this whole article is a fucking troll.
I run Gentoo. (And love it)
I drive a Japanese sports car. (And love it)
Posting shit like this is just plain ignorant.
I don't care if there are a few people out there who are annoying maligning an entire community like this means you're being a jerk. What's especially annoying is the article summary says:
Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball bats
WHAT THE FUCK!? Why would you "print" that?
Seriously folks, taking a good-natured jab at something that annoys you is one thing but that's way over the line. That's a fucking troll.
Well yeah -- if you remember how often one Slashdotter's flamebait is often another's plain truth.
What are you thinking? So you're saying you think that Gentoo users should be beaten?
I'm sorry man, if you think what this guy's saying is "plain truth", you're an asshole.
Just beacuse some retard actually sincerely agrees with something does not keep it from being flamebait.
You can even use distcc between the two to improve your compile times which is another nice bonus, so the dev system doesn't even have to be that fast if your server can take the hit of compiles.
Another option is to use distcc to farm all the compilation out to a computer other than the production server. You'd still have a bit of load on the sever, but you could use whatever optimisations you want.
Any bank that puts its ATMs on the internet has a moron in charge of IT.
Not necessarily, security is all about tradeoffs.
The best way to secure these things is to make sure that the only physical connection from the ATM is to a well secured computer under controlled by the bank.
So all ATMs would be inside bank vaults.
Fat lot of good they would do us there.
Right now most ATMs seem to rely on POTS (Plain old telephone service)for their com link, and it's not as if the telephone system has never been hacked before.
If banks are acheiving reasonable security with POTS service, whats to stop them from adding some more encryption and doing the same over IP?
I'm pretty sure the system is designed so that the central machine does all the secure stuff, with the ATM being not much more than a calculator keypad.
Were you aware that....... ATMs hand out cash!
If that was my money (oh shit it is) I would be pretty worried about the security of the computer that is handing out $20 bills.
Unless the connection to the actual bill dispensing mechanism is running its OWN computer, and demanding signed-data from the central bank, there is a LOT to worry about.
I would hope that the lesson here has been learned: a mission-critical service (which ATMs are, these days) should be firewalled from everything that it reasonably can be, and should not be running unnecessary services.
The ATMs should be running a custom application to drive the user interface
Ummmm....actually that's not the problem. Mission-critical apps should not be run on crappy, not-meant-for-that-purpose software. It's not a question of how many firewalls you use. ATMs should NOT run windows.
Firewalls are not a "magic fix" for shitty design. Hell the company I work at has a good firewall and they get viruses all the time. A firewall should be a "just in case" security measure, especially for something THAT important.
We're talking about people's money here, it should take more than one guy plugging an infected laptop into the wrong ethernet jack to take it down.
Stuff like this demands a multi-tiered security approach. We're talking encryption of encrypted communications here (with different algorithms), and if they're going to send ANY of this across the internet they better do it right. Otherwise, guess where the next 0-day exploit is going to get tested first?
As long as banks follow these security precautions (and I've worked at a UK bank before now -- they're pretty hot on security, as a rule) they should not be susceptible to virus/worm infection,
Wrong. You can't turn off the ALL the OS services or your custom software can't communicate with anything else. You NEED at least some of the windows code running and that bit of code just may turn out to be the next target of the latest, greatest worm.
except by a custom-written worm that exploits security flaws in the custom ATM software... and at this point it doesn't matter what OS you're using.
Sure it does. A better OS is going to be harder to code an exploit for. What you're saying is that underlying system arcitecture doesn't matter. That's silly.
If it was my call, I would have two boxes running completely different software and hardware, designed by two completely independent teams. I would keep the existence of each team seperate from the other.
One box does the normal ATM stuff, on X86 hardware running something custom and minimalist, communication only via an RSA-encrypted data link.
The second box contains an OS-less processing unit whos purpose is two-fold:
to encrypt the data again using elliptic curve crypto
to perform logging
This would make it much harder of a zero-day exploit OR a funamental math breakthrough to wreck the security AND harder for any of the programmers to leave themselves a little backdoor (Office Space).
Using a firewall in this application would be like using aluminum foil as a bullet-proof vest.
What the hell are you smoking?
They work with any OS (and I have tried mine with OSX, Linux and Windows), and need no configuration. They do show up as removable storage.
There is a program called "iripdb" which you can use in place of the iriver's database ripper. It's open source so you can theoretically compile it for any platform.
Just to back this guy up....
Everything this AC says is right. I have an ihp-120 which I use with Linux. It works great.
Audio is typically sampled at 44kHz to eliminate aliasing distortion. Google for "Nyquist" and "aliasing distortion" for more than you could ever possibly want to know.
Pretty much correct, but no one so far has bothered to mention that audio must be filtered before it is sampled. It is this filtering that prevents aliasing.
Sampling by itself can't do anything to prevent aliasing becuase it just samples everything that's there whether or not it would cause aliasing. (Ex: A distorted electric guitar with a direct box and no filtering would probably alias pretty bad.)
I believe this is worth pointing out because more astute/. readers may have noticed that 2*20KHz=40KHz, yet the sampling rate is 44.1KHz.
This is also worth knowing about because the filtering is the reason for the move to high sampling rates such as 96KHz, not the frequency range. It is impossible to build a filter with and perfect cutoff, so the more space between your maximum frequency of interest and your nyquist cutoff, the better off you are.
I think it's very unlikely that anyone starting from scratch will be able to compete with nVidia or ATi on performance, and there aren't all that many geeks who care about hardware openness enough to give up the value.
So, I predict that it will be expensive and low-volume, and (sadly) will eventually fail.
What's funny is that everything you've just said could be used to predict the failure of linux at its start.
It's not going to happen in a day but it's most certainly possible. These days if you have even VHDL code for what you want it's pretty easy to program it into an FPGA (prototypes) and fab an ASIC (1,000+ units production).
You'd only really need to design maybe one or two chips since everythign else like your RAM and RAMDAC could be purchased off the shelf from a number of vendors.
Then you need a PCB to but it on and some people to build it. No big deal there either. If it with the front page of/. I doubt they would have trouble getting 1000 preorders to cover the initial board run and assembly.
But then there is nothing to prevent some company from developing software in the country that people can afford because the cost of development is cheaper there isn't it?
How about:
COMMON SENSE
Sure pirating something that's already developed may not be legal, but common sense and the law have never been the best of friends.
Duplicated effort to satisfy the law, is a clear case of the law failing to work for the good of the people. It's a waste.....like digging a hole and filling it back in again.
Of course, then there's also the issue of patents, getting bought out, whacked by the mob, etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with your basic point, look at it from the other side; Joe Dirt is in posession of their "property" which they value at full price.
Bzzzt! WRONG
This isn't about property. This is about copyright.
Copyright is this weird legal construction that regulates people are allowed to COPY even in private, behind closed doors.
By very definition there isn't any deprivation of property going on here as that actually WOULDN'T be copyright infingement, since no copies would need to be made.
Why should Joe have the privledge of enjoying music/movies/anything that he can't pay for?
Why should Joe not be able to make a copy of the contents of a piece of paper his friend hands him?
The whole concept of copyright is a arbitrary construction whose purpose was originally to inspire the creation of new works.
It's has gone completely beyond that.
Joe will get along just fine without access to the Bubba Bandits latest album
This is always the example I hear people using, some trivial piece of pop. What about 100 years of or fucking national history and knowedge?
There's more going on than just Britney's latest album.
How about something very political from someone long dead....
How about an eighty year old mathematics paper?
While you may consider listening to or watching some poppy piece of entertainment a "privilege", how about fundamental knowedge about the world around you?
(there's even this "free" service called the radio and TV).
Which typically airs total shit. And is run by companies who don't have the public's best interest in mind. And.... about a zillion more problems with this cop out. It the only "content" poor people should have access to the shit that's on the TV and radio?
While these successful and growing inustries price their new material highest, slowly dropping prices over time, the music industry prices new material lowest, then raises prices.
See the thing is their "booty" (it really shouldn't be called a product since they typically have nothing to do with it's creation and practically steal it) has a much longer shelf life. There will be a demand for copies of Abbey Road for quite some time whereas the latest crappy action flic is going to get erased from the public consiousness by the next action flic with slightly better special effects.
But I still don't use that as justification for stealing music.
Yes, so you don't shoplift.
Do you download music, or do you not know what stealing is?
Is there really such a thing in this day and age? That $24k has to go somewhere. Can't we just follow the money? It seems like this is the kind of thing that the feds would be all over. I see one of those huge multinational Interpol busts in about 5 weeks.
Yes, obviously....that's why the illegal drugs and prostitution were completely wiped out decades ago.
There are tons of way to get money anonymously. Anyone smart knows that. I should be getting my million dollars anonymously anytime now, just as soon as I cover the advance "fraud prevention" fee for general Tettah's son. Then I'll be able to buy all the drugs, hookers, and source code I want!
The point I'm trying to make is that fuck-ups happen.
Yes, they happen but they are NOT limited to nuclear facilities.
No matter how many safeguards you put in place, the risk is just too great when you are dealing with nuclear material. Period.
What the crap are you talking about?
This is the type of ignorant bullshit that keeps up dependent on foreign oil and mired in political conflit in the middle east.
You don't want to have an actual SANE discussion about how dangerous it is, the risk is too great because you frickin say so.
So tell us, what makes you nuclear risk management specialist?
I suggest you read: How to read exit polls and then go back and look at the exit poll data. Both Ohio and Florida went to Bush according to exit poll information.
I suggest you read this post.
It's just not economical. There are plenty of virus writers already out there, because it's just too easy and there are so many computers, it happens. If an antivirus company was discovered to have done this even ONCE, then their entire business would be destroyed instantly.
Interesting statement, which you completely fail to back up.
Just because some viruses are produced for free does not mean there is no financial incentive to create even more viruses.
If they were actually caught doing so, a scapegoat would be fired and business would becontinued as usual. Companies get caught doing illegal things all the time. If they're lucky they'll face the same penalty Microsoft has: nothing.
It would probably be easier than acquiring or building a long range cruise missile.
:)
Not really.
A cruise missile could be built by a few engineers using easily available equipment...
We're talking stuff you could buy online and have it all at you house in a week. Legally.
And once you've got a working prototype, you can start cranking them out like crazy, then launch hundreds of them at once.
Getting a critical mass of uranium or plutonium would be MUCH harder, and then you still need a team of engineers and some equipment that is going to throw up serious red flags if you want your engineers to survive long enough to actually produce ONE bomb. (And you're not going to be able to get enough material to produce lots of nukes.)
I think Galileo has better resolution and coverage.
Better resolution is possible, but better coverage (for civilian applications) doesn't seem very likely. They're going to be using the same carrier frequency and a very similar modulation scheme. This means their power levels are going to have to be carefully matched to those of the GPS system. CDMA demands it to function properly.
If other countries start relying on Amnerican GPS then America has a new means for blackmail, "Do what we say or we shut off your GPS".
Which was the point I was trying to make. The Europeans are being just as paranoid as us Americans, or they wouldn't be building Gallileo in the first place. We're afraid you'll misuse Gallileo and you're afraid we'll misuse GPS. Pot, meet kettle
You must not know any Americans. As nearly as I can tell most people in the U.S. are living in fear. Thats why their politicians tell them how they are making them "safe" on a daily basis. Thats why they took down Iraq, they were afraid Saddam was going to nuke an American city.
Well, the funny thing is that I, as an american, didn't get a say in attacking Iraq.
A great many Americans are aware of the REAL reasons we attacked Iraq, but don't really have much ability to do anything about it.
A LOT of us think it's retarded that we had 9 times more people after Saddam than the guy who was ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE for 9/11.
The only way to use the LM Hash database to reverse the challenge/response is to use it as a hash dictionary.
The real point is that if I can get access to your hard disk, I can grab all your password hashes.
This database make it trivial to then convert all those pasword hases back into passwords, pretty much instantly.
Note: I'm not a military space insider -- just an astrophysicist. These ideas occurred to me in about 30 seconds, so you can bet anyone with his/her own space program already thought of 'em too.
Actually, you can take your idea afurther using "phased array" technology.
By having a bunch of seperate radiating elements what adjustable phase shift, the direction and directivity of the beam can be adjusted on the fly. One antenna can even be used to transmit high-gain signal to multiple, geographically-disparate receivers (TDM of course).
Additionally, filtering techiniques could be deliberately employed to block reception from certain areas.
Of course, it seems like even this setup could be beat with enoguh power, but it might come down to their antenna designer against yours.
It's interesting to think about anyways.
Anyways, at some level you probably WANT your satellite to be jammed, because it's still better than having it rendered inoperaable or blown to little bits.
I don't really follow your whole arguement about rogue states and terrorists using GPS to launch a surprise attack. Fact is the U.S. probably wont know this is happening until it happens unless America's radar coverage is good and responsive enough to catch cruise missiles.
I would expect it is. Modern radars are taking advantage of some really cool DSP techniques. The missile's rate of speed is going to make it stick out pretty well.
Having the ability to deny GPS service is useless unless you know an attack is coming.
Only to a certain extent.
I'd figure a cheap missile is going to have a GPS for long-term accuracy and a few accelerometers for increased resolution/update rate. The missile is going to lose accuracy very quickly once it looses GPS because its position value is then going to be the result of double integration of the accelerometer reading, and thus contain double integrated error.
The classic American military response to this problem is they degrade service to everyone who doesn't have access to the encrypted military channel. The only problem is this severely degrades or precludes many of the valuable civilian applications of GPS like automated landing of aircraft in bad weather.
Yeah the thing that sucks is that's almost the only option. The designers just didn't envision other important uses of the system. There is one interesting prospect arising using what they refer to as a "black key" receiver instead of the typical"red key". receivers. Here's a link on the subject.
It would be very nice if the Gallileo system provided for many more than two classes of service. (Non-military gov't, civilian critcal infrastructure, seperate codes per country, etc).
I imagine the European persective is they would prefer to tap the potential of high precision, widely available GPS and let the Americans cower in their bunkers fearing attack from every direction. Meanwhile they will exploit all the economic advantages of the civilian applications.
Nobody I know is cowering in fear, but it does make sense to be prudent about the situation and consider those "what if" situations. Heck, that's why Gallileo is being built in the first place. It's not as if europeans can use the current GPS system. They're just being prudent themselves.
There really are a million ways to attack the U.S. in the modern world and you aren't going to be able to stop all of the them.
Sure, but it's like locking up your bike. You do as best you can and try to aviod any obvious weak spots. You can't ever be SURE no one can take your bike, but you can make it pretty damn unlikely.
It might be a better strategy to use carrots, get along with people better in the world, avoid pissing off so many people with the bull in a china shop foreign policy, and just carry a big stick so if anyone attacks you they know what they will get in return.
I totally agree, as do many other Americans. I was at a spech where president Clinton pointed out that with what we're currently spending on homeland security, we could provide every child on the planet with a sixth-grade education.
Sounds like a whorthwile idea to me.
I guess the new rule for presidential candidates is no malapropisms, no dyslexia, no gaffes, no speech disorders or impediments of any kind.
Naah.
But it does suck going from a Rhode scholar to someone who can't pronounce "nuclear" and received a "gentleman's C".
While the world WOULD be better if everyone spoke the same language..thats not the way the world IS.
Not necessarily.
I think there is more to lanuage than just verbs and nouns. It's a way of thinking. A method of structing thoughts.....concepts.
By having multiple languages, we also have different thought structures. In this way I think the world actually benefits from a diversity of languages. A good example would be the great many would out there that have no translation into other languages.
(For you programmers out there, imagine being forced to working only one programming language.)
So since the world is extreamly multilingual, its better for people to be multilingual.
Sure it doesn't hurt, but it's also a question of what concepts you want to spend your limited time here on earth learning. Personally, I know I'll never even learn everything I want to know from the CURRENT set of human knowledge before I die let anlone new advancements. Perhaps some people would rather spend the time the are forced to spend learing foreign languages in american highschools learing something else of value.
Back when I was in my rate 20's, one of my roommates was a japanese. He came to CSU to learn engrish and to get a bacheror. For about 3 months, we ate runch. Needress to say, that after 8 years of engrish, he could read at a rever that wourd enabre him to get by. But he courd not understand what was being said. It took more than 3 months of talking day and night before he understood that english has l's. Finally, he could pass his toful tests Basically, if you can not hear the difference in syllables, then you can not learn.
Acutally, one of the issues is that children learn new "sounds" much easier than adults. This is why it's absolutely stupid that in my state we don't even start teaching foreign languages until that period has already expired. As a result, I can learn all the vocab and conjugation I want, but I may NEVER be able to sound like a native speaker.
My girlfriend is actually running a spanish program at her preschool. It's a really cool idea. The point is just to expose the children to the new sounds while they still learn them easily. Then can pick up the rest later. I think it's a kickass concept and I wish it was a widespread phenomenon.
Uh, perhaps you were unaware that China is a now an official partner in Galileo
Actually, I was. Thank you for informing me (really).
I'm quite suprised to hear this. I would have expected something like that to make huge news.
How do reconcile your little rant about "fascist regimes" and the fact they are partnering with your allies in the EU.
Really, that doesn't invaildate my rant. And it's not like this is the first time a European country has made a bad decision.
So you are saying is the U.S. is the only one that understands this technology stuff and its America's job to show their dumb little cousins in Europe how to do it, otherwise they will screw up.
I'm not worried about the satellites falling out of orbit or anything, I'm sure they can build clocks and put them in space. What I'm worried about is them giving acess the wrong people and havin inadequate means to controll it. What if one country goes nuts? Can the other cuts them off? Quickly?
The US fucked up on its on system too.
They did so by not realizing how much critical infrastructure would come to rely on GPS technology. Telecom networks, secondary airport surveilance, etc.
The problem with the US network is that they have very little granulariity over who they deny service to.
And if the EU interprets that responsibility different from America, then the U.S. will make them see the light, by jammer if necessary. Gotta love the "Our way or the highway" mindset that permeates America these days.
See if this truly going to be a "worldwide" network, that means that their satellites are going to be able to guide weapons to tagets INSIDE the US. While one might claim that the US is overstepping its borders another might claim that Gallileo's crossing ours.
Building a global navigation system is kinda like building a bank of misslile launchers pointed at every country on the planet. One should expect the diplomatic issues to be at least as complex as the technological issues.
If you're going to be able to guide weapons into someone else's territory, they're going to want access to the "killswtich" or they're going to start working on a way to shoot the system down or jam it. The seems pretty common sense to me.
Eventually, I expect we'll end up with "mutually assured disruption" of various competing systems. Anyways, a jammer is a much better option that just shooting the thing down.
Of course the downside is that jamming will be very slow to have any effect on the gallileo ssystem. This means they won't be able to use it WHEN any enemy attack is launched, it will aready be to late (ground based jammers aren't going to do much when you have a directional antenna pointed at outer space).
So you end up in a situation where the jammer will get turned on in advance of a potential situation, which will of course then only serve to escalte the sutiation further (if we don't attack in the next N hours, our guided weapons won't work).
Logically, it seems like the US will want both jamming and destructive capabilities.
Jamming as an only option might actually make the situation worse.
One of the more interesting uses for jamming satellites coming real soon now is Galileo, the European/Chinese GPS constellation, coming on line in a couple of years. The U.S. is most unhappy that there will be a GPS system with 1 meter resolution, with wider coverage, they don't control, because it will break their monopoly on GPS guided weapons and navigation during a conflict unless they have the capbility to jam it. The U.S. GPS system can be selectively crippled/encrypted by the U.S. to deny its use to its enemies.
Perhaps you were unware, but the US an EU are ALLIES!
Yes, the US has its concerns about the the gallileo system, But it's not as if the US and EU are going to war any time soon. I would expect most of the US concerns are those of interference (do you know that some carrier frequencies are SHARED BY BOTH SYSTEMS), and that the EU at least has the capability to selective degrade it's OWN satellite system, so as to not allow for bargain-basement cruise missles.
China's Xinhua has a pretty biting commentary on the subject that appeared on SpaceDaily a couple days ago.
Yes, China bastion of freedom, especially freedom of the press. China is exactly the type of shadow-government fascist regime that the US needs to be able to protect itself against.
It is a further indicator that as the U.S. continues to seek its global empire and world dominion it is going to continue to place itself against and at odds with the entire rest of the world.
Somehow, I don't think I'm going to vote for that. Anyways, the real thing you should be afraid of is global corporations playing governments against each other and eventualy building up enough money and influence that goverments are mere servants to their desires.
Apparently only the U.S. is allowed to decide who can use and deploy basic technology.
I've worked with GPS in a professional capacity enough to know that only certain groups should be allowed to deploy a GPS system. Arguing that anybody should be able to set up their own gps system is like arguing that anybody should be able to make their own nuke.
Both technologies DEMAND responsibility in their design and application.
What the US is afraid of is not that the EU will have its own system, but that the EU will botch the design and allow uncontrollable access to it. With proper access control, people like this guy will be able to sell missiles to the highest bidder, terrorist or not. Seriously, like that guy really had the intelligence capabilities to tell if I'm working for a terrorist when I ask him to build be missiles. What's he gonna do, check for a tatoo that says "terrorist" on their forehead?
As someone who works with GPS in critical infrastructure applications, I can't wait for a redundant "GPS" system to come online, but not at the cost of giving every angry despot cruise missles.
The US doesn't *WANT* to shoot the Gallileo system down, just as I don't want to shoot your dog.....but if you let him get rabies he will be shot.
It's important that the EU understands the responsibility they are taking on.
I put "rice tickets" on stupid ricer cars. Isn't stupid ricer redundant?
If anybody's stupid it's you.
Leave people the fuck alone.
Besides, if you see a modified car, it means that someone cared enough to do it. This means that car is important to someone. Do not fuck with it. If you do so, you are asking for trouble.
Of course what else should we expect from a stupid, flamebait article like this. It's like posting an article under the title "fuck niggers!" We should be modding down the editor as well for contributing to the idiocy of people like yourself.
Sure it's just a joke, but so is this:
How come there aren't any Mexicans on Star Trek?
They don't work in the future, either.
See.... how anybody could anybody get offended by that?
Oh wait....I know, because the joke is a mean-spirited jab at a lot of people who don't deserve it. The thing both these jokes have in common is that they rely on stupid, offensive stereotypes to be "funny".
As far as I'm conrecrned, this whole article is a fucking troll.
I run Gentoo. (And love it)
I drive a Japanese sports car. (And love it)
Posting shit like this is just plain ignorant.
I don't care if there are a few people out there who are annoying maligning an entire community like this means you're being a jerk. What's especially annoying is the article summary says:
Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball bats
WHAT THE FUCK!? Why would you "print" that?
Seriously folks, taking a good-natured jab at something that annoys you is one thing but that's way over the line. That's a fucking troll.
Well yeah -- if you remember how often one Slashdotter's flamebait is often another's plain truth.
What are you thinking? So you're saying you think that Gentoo users should be beaten?
I'm sorry man, if you think what this guy's saying is "plain truth", you're an asshole.
Just beacuse some retard actually sincerely agrees with something does not keep it from being flamebait.
You can even use distcc between the two to improve your compile times which is another nice bonus, so the dev system doesn't even have to be that fast if your server can take the hit of compiles.
Another option is to use distcc to farm all the compilation out to a computer other than the production server. You'd still have a bit of load on the sever, but you could use whatever optimisations you want.
Today I like Macs, I have never seen anything special about a Saturn.
Saturns are kinda like american Toyotas.
Park an american car on one side and a japanese car on the other side and pop all three hoods to see what I mean.
Any bank that puts its ATMs on the internet has a moron in charge of IT.
Not necessarily, security is all about tradeoffs.
The best way to secure these things is to make sure that the only physical connection from the ATM is to a well secured computer under controlled by the bank.
So all ATMs would be inside bank vaults.
Fat lot of good they would do us there.
Right now most ATMs seem to rely on POTS (Plain old telephone service)for their com link, and it's not as if the telephone system has never been hacked before.
If banks are acheiving reasonable security with POTS service, whats to stop them from adding some more encryption and doing the same over IP?
I'm pretty sure the system is designed so that the central machine does all the secure stuff, with the ATM being not much more than a calculator keypad.
Were you aware that.......
ATMs hand out cash!
If that was my money (oh shit it is) I would be pretty worried about the security of the computer that is handing out $20 bills.
Unless the connection to the actual bill dispensing mechanism is running its OWN computer, and demanding signed-data from the central bank, there is a LOT to worry about.
Ummmm....actually that's not the problem.
Mission-critical apps should not be run on crappy, not-meant-for-that-purpose software. It's not a question of how many firewalls you use. ATMs should NOT run windows.
Firewalls are not a "magic fix" for shitty design. Hell the company I work at has a good firewall and they get viruses all the time. A firewall should be a "just in case" security measure, especially for something THAT important.
We're talking about people's money here, it should take more than one guy plugging an infected laptop into the wrong ethernet jack to take it down.
Stuff like this demands a multi-tiered security approach. We're talking encryption of encrypted communications here (with different algorithms), and if they're going to send ANY of this across the internet they better do it right. Otherwise, guess where the next 0-day exploit is going to get tested first?
As long as banks follow these security precautions (and I've worked at a UK bank before now -- they're pretty hot on security, as a rule) they should not be susceptible to virus/worm infection,
Wrong. You can't turn off the ALL the OS services or your custom software can't communicate with anything else. You NEED at least some of the windows code running and that bit of code just may turn out to be the next target of the latest, greatest worm.
except by a custom-written worm that exploits security flaws in the custom ATM software... and at this point it doesn't matter what OS you're using.
Sure it does. A better OS is going to be harder to code an exploit for. What you're saying is that underlying system arcitecture doesn't matter. That's silly.
If it was my call, I would have two boxes running completely different software and hardware, designed by two completely independent teams. I would keep the existence of each team seperate from the other.
One box does the normal ATM stuff, on X86 hardware running something custom and minimalist, communication only via an RSA-encrypted data link.
The second box contains an OS-less processing unit whos purpose is two-fold:
This would make it much harder of a zero-day exploit OR a funamental math breakthrough to wreck the security AND harder for any of the programmers to leave themselves a little backdoor (Office Space).
Using a firewall in this application would be like using aluminum foil as a bullet-proof vest.
What the hell are you smoking? They work with any OS (and I have tried mine with OSX, Linux and Windows), and need no configuration. They do show up as removable storage. There is a program called "iripdb" which you can use in place of the iriver's database ripper. It's open source so you can theoretically compile it for any platform.
Just to back this guy up....
Everything this AC says is right. I have an ihp-120 which I use with Linux. It works great.
Audio is typically sampled at 44kHz to eliminate aliasing distortion. Google for "Nyquist" and "aliasing distortion" for more than you could ever possibly want to know.
/. readers may have noticed that 2*20KHz=40KHz, yet the sampling rate is 44.1KHz.
Pretty much correct, but no one so far has bothered to mention that audio must be filtered before it is sampled. It is this filtering that prevents aliasing.
Sampling by itself can't do anything to prevent aliasing becuase it just samples everything that's there whether or not it would cause aliasing. (Ex: A distorted electric guitar with a direct box and no filtering would probably alias pretty bad.)
I believe this is worth pointing out because more astute
This is also worth knowing about because the filtering is the reason for the move to high sampling rates such as 96KHz, not the frequency range. It is impossible to build a filter with and perfect cutoff, so the more space between your maximum frequency of interest and your nyquist cutoff, the better off you are.
I think it's very unlikely that anyone starting from scratch will be able to compete with nVidia or ATi on performance, and there aren't all that many geeks who care about hardware openness enough to give up the value. So, I predict that it will be expensive and low-volume, and (sadly) will eventually fail.
/. I doubt they would have trouble getting 1000 preorders to cover the initial board run and assembly.
What's funny is that everything you've just said could be used to predict the failure of linux at its start.
It's not going to happen in a day but it's most certainly possible. These days if you have even VHDL code for what you want it's pretty easy to program it into an FPGA (prototypes) and fab an ASIC (1,000+ units production).
You'd only really need to design maybe one or two chips since everythign else like your RAM and RAMDAC could be purchased off the shelf from a number of vendors.
Then you need a PCB to but it on and some people to build it. No big deal there either. If it with the front page of
It's actually a really cool idea.
But then there is nothing to prevent some company from developing software in the country that people can afford because the cost of development is cheaper there isn't it?
How about:
COMMON SENSE
Sure pirating something that's already developed may not be legal, but common sense and the law have never been the best of friends.
Duplicated effort to satisfy the law, is a clear case of the law failing to work for the good of the people. It's a waste.....like digging a hole and filling it back in again.
Of course, then there's also the issue of patents, getting bought out, whacked by the mob, etc etc.