It just sounds like putting a WiFi card into constant broadcast mode. I guess you can call that a "flaw", but not talking when someone else is talking is a common necessity to all shared channels, with the exception of code division multiplexing I believe.
what would happen is that you get your iris scanned, it doesn't recognize you, the door doesn't open, and you have to wait for somebody to come out and check your credentials... not that big of a deal...
Credentials are easy to fake. The credentials aren't solving the problem now. The biometric data is supposed to be an extra "un-fakeable" authentication scheme. When you have to check 7% of peoples credentials there's not a lot of time to do thorough checks.
It also IS a big deal if the 7% is consistant. Can you really harass 7% of the population every time they want to enter the country? People simply won't stand for something like that.
If 7% of the time the scanner can't ID you, those people will probbably just routinely be let in. If all you have to do is tear up a little, have long eyelashes, or whatever then anyone that'd be caught be this system will do just that. A system where it's easy to become incorrectly identified is a useless one.
Seriously, blueprints are a GOOD thing. Without them, you can't do simple things like stress calculations, etc. You kinda want to be able to answer questions like: "If the bear pushed me over and jumped on my chest, would it crush me?" theoretically before you do a real, live test.
Very true, but you use the skills you've got when designing something. I saw a TV show about this guy a few years ago. In it they show him doing tests of the suit where he gets hit by a truck, hit with baseball bats, etc. I don't know how close to life all the testing he did, but the suit is very tough.
If I had to go up against a grizzly bear, I'd rather have nothing but a thong and a Desert Eagle than one of these wacky contraptions.
Sure, but the point of the suit is supposed to be so researchers can study grizzly bears up close. Killing the grizzlies would be kind of problematic to that goal.
But simply pointing out your hypocritical belief. It's an attack on YOU not your argument. People don't really like listening to others that don't follow their own advice.
Maybe not the building owners, but the organizers of the flea market certainly have a problem if no one trusts the flea market anymore.
This IS a big potential problem for Ebay, and could easily limit their expansion if people don't trust transactions on Ebay. Something as simple as requiring sellers to accept credit cards on all transactions over $300 would go a long way.
One has to ask oneself, here, why one really expects to be part of a community of open source developers when the project in question is run by a for-profit company and there are thousands of people who want to help and think they can.
What I'm saying is, with the decision to split Fedora from the core product lines, Red Hat essentially removed their own motive for expending huge amounts of time in evaluating user input, particularly user-submitted code
Mozilla seemed to do it, though the reports I've heard seemed to indicate it was rough going at first. From the looks of the article, I'm just not sure how the project is part of the open source community. If Redhat doesn't want to spend the bucks to support Fedora, that's fine. If they do want to spend the bucks, that's fine too. But don't lie to us and tell us that Fedora is going to be part of the OSS community, and then not make it part of the community.
I suspect the real problem is just RH didn't have the infrastructure needed to have community development of Fedora.
Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.
I've got Fedora on my laptop, and we run RHEL on our servers at work. It's a nice mix because I want the latest and greatest on my laptop, and I want long-term support on servers. I don't want to wait a year and half between releases for my laptop, I want the 2.6 kernel as soon as it's reasonably stable. That's Fedora.
As for doing everything myself, I don't know about most administrators, but I _hate_ running up2date, hate compiling new versions of software for bug-fixes, and I hate upgrading working production servers to a new version of an OS. Since RHEL solves all those problems rather nicely, it's a great choice.
I'm not ashamed to be an American, but I am ashamed that you are. You're just a sick fuck who wants to torture people you don't even know or what they've done.
So yes, if you want to talk about decade-old hardware, I did indeed err. I probably should have also said, in my list of ways-such-errors-could-occur, "if you use ancient noname drives"
Bzzzt. Wrong again. These problems were certainly NOT solved "decades ago" The CD-ROM was only invented in 1984. I've had sync problems as late as 1997 or 98. It wasn't on no-name hardware either. I've personally seen on on Mitsumi drives, Lite-On drives, Apple drives, etc. It's a VERY common problem. Yes, if you buy quality hardware you have a mimimum chance of sync errors happening. No, not everyone buys quality hardware. The point is that if you're copying 1000 CDs for backup purposes it's a much better idea to use proven program like EAC to do the job perfectly every time.
Sorry, but you're just plain wrong. Maybe you've never ripped audio CDs before, but you can very easily get sync errors if you use inferrior ripper programs, poor readers, or a combination of both. From the FAQ at exactaudiocopy.org:
Q: Audio extraction is purely digital, how could unremarked errors occur?
A: The data transmission itself is purely digital and also the data stored on the CD. But the Red Book standard (standard for audio CDs) is very weak and only little error correction will be performed in the drive. So on bad CD-ROM drives it is possible that you receive erroneous results.
Sync problems can be bad enough that the errors are quite noticeable and sound like pops and clicks in the music. Exact Audio Copy is a well recognized program that tries to do its very best at getting exact rips of audio CDs every time. If it can't it'll even do the interpolation of the bad data. Anyone that's ripped CDs can attest to the sync problems of poorly written ripper software.
My guess is all the wacko "anti-war" militant groups like the SLA and the Weathermen in the 70s still leaves a mark on the FBI of what to be suspicious of.
The arguments are problematic for text messaging though. Text is a medium where you always need a copy of the transmission to be able to read it whether it's paper, electronic, or whatever. The computers are ALREADY keeping a log of the conversation simply because you have to keep the information in memory for anyone to be able to read it. The fact that you're using text messaging means you've automatically consented to logging.
a student doesn't have an obvious need for information about the tunnels at his school.
And suddenly if you don't have a "need" for information then you're suspected of being a terrorist? Good god man, students being interesting in the tunnel systems underneath Universities is as old as the tunnel systems themselves. Your argument then diverges into a massive straw man argument about fertilizer and blowing up the school.
A simple OPEN request for information about what countless people are interested in (secret tunnel systems) is completely different than ordering massive amounts of amonium nitrate when you're not a farmer. The former has obvious other reasons why someone would be doing it, the latter has very few justifications.
Not a bad idea, but you're aiming WAY to high. These are high school programming classes, not Junion/Senior College level data structures and algorithms class. I'd imagine you'd get college credit for the low-level C++ or Java programming classes, which is kind of worthless since those classes aren't even part of a CSCI major where I went to school.
That the sensor has never detected something doesn't tell you that it's working or not working - or am I am missing something here?
Yah, you're missing the scientific paper. This is a one page write-up written by a journalist. The one page write up doesn't describe how they know the detector works, but I'm sure they have _some_ means of testing that it does. Blame the article, but at this point you can't really accuse anyone of doing shoddy science for grant money.
Why would you teraform a lifeless rock and move billions of people to it if you can just move the asteroid a bit and avoid it hitting the earth? 600 years is plenty of time to develop the technology to do this, and enough time to do it slowly (minimum energy expenditure). I've heard some ideas that merely changing the light reflectivity of the rock would change its orbit.
Desipite evidence from Chips, and Dateline NBC, gas tanks don't blow up. They can start on fire, obviously but a major fire requires the gas tank to be be ruptured. In that case there's this very distinctive smell that gasoline has, maybe you've smelled it before? Live electrical wires don't give you such a warning until you touch them.
Wow, you're a serious Simpsons fanatic. You really think the voice talent of the simpsons should just agree to make less money so they'll make more Simpsons episodes? Are episodes of the Simpsons some kind of public good like curing cancer? Repeat after me, "it's just a television show, it's just a television show". It's not "integral" to American culture. Life will go on after it's canceled.
As far as "substantially" increading the cost of producing each episode, try to realize that it costs about 7 million to pay the cast of Friends PER EPISODE. The rest of the cost production of the Simpsons is substantially lower than other TV shows since you don't have to pay an entire crew of people. The animation is all outsourced to another country I believe, so those costs are low as well. That's the main reason why The Simpsons has gone on for so long.
As interesting as your post is, the government could easily (and probably does to deemed security threats) do it without having to go through that mess. Simple survellience.
Oh I'm sure they do. The difference is that such a system could make monitoring like this cheap and routine.
There's a big difference between what a normal human can see, keep track of, and correlate and what an automated system monitoring every car that drives through town.
Automated systems that try to analyze driving patterns and find "suspicious behavior". People then get watched, searched, harassed, etc because some data mining program put out by PerpAnalysis thinks they're a criminal.
Automated traces on political groups. Find the license plates of some political group the government doesn't like and make detailed analyses of their comings and goings. Who talks to who, who's fucking who, where and when do they eat, etc. Do they go to the drugstore a lot? Doctors office? I'd guess once you do all the traffic analysis you'd get a pretty good picture of just about anyone and any group you wanted.
Does this break privacy? I don't know, maybe not. I still find it frightening as hell.
What THEY are saying is, "You do not actually own that physical Cue-Cat scanner, you have a license to use that device in the manner we have declared, in the same way that you cannot use your cable TV box to get channels you haven't paid for."
That's a pretty abstract argument, and it hasn't really held up very well when consumers excpect to be able to own a product. The Cue-Cat scanner example is a horrible one. No one in their right mind considers a purely physical object to be "licenced". It'd probbably never even stand up in court.
A better example is control of broadcast television, but it still hasn't been enforced well by the courts. The VCR time shifting case was decided for the consumer. The content producers didn't get to decide to prevent people from recording TV on their own VCRs even the the content producers own the content.
I think the differences between the two sides boils down to Law vs. Right and Wrong. We'd like to believe that the Law is supposed to be based on right and wrong and we can make simple assesments of a law if it meets this basic expectation of law. In this case that expectation doesn't hold true, and that's the point the interviewer is trying to drive home. In recent years Corps have gained to much of an upper hand in deciding IP law, and the law has shifed from its original Right And Wrong intent to one of protecting the interests of Large Corporations. It's the same reason why copyright law keeps being extended essentially indefinately.
I believe it's the patents on CSS make a decoding program "illegal" (though I suppose more accurately it's patent infringement, a civil matter). If all you want to do is view a DVD you've rented or own on Linux, there's no Right And Wrong issues. There are, however patent infringement issues. It's a pretty hard sell to tell people that simply watching a DVD on you own property, on software you wrote yourself should be against the law. Jack Velenti doesn't really have a good answer for this except for "well, that's the law". A wholly unsatisfying one.
Science fiction fans may be dismayed to learn that "Mutant X" and "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda" have been cancelled
Though fans of quality television will rejoice. Mutant X? It has to be one of the worst TV shows I've seen more than 5 minutes of in the last 10 years.
A video card is a better example, but still a problematic one. For a simple 2d non-accelerated video card there's not really a problem with releasing the source code. For state-of-the-art 3D accelerated video cards, there's trade secrets embedded in the source.
One of the big advantages that NVidia used to have over ATI was superior drivers. The drivers for 3D video cards are complex things where the optimizations used can't be released because a competitor could use that to their advantage. The drivers can obviously still be reverse engineered, and I'm sure that's done. Reverse engineering is still expensive, and imperfect.
The point is that many hardware devices are becoming increasingly dependant on software. That software then becomes part of the trade secrets, or is encumbered by patents (as in the case of the winmodem).
Slashdot Mirror
It just sounds like putting a WiFi card into constant broadcast mode. I guess you can call that a "flaw", but not talking when someone else is talking is a common necessity to all shared channels, with the exception of code division multiplexing I believe.
what would happen is that you get your iris scanned, it doesn't recognize you, the door doesn't open, and you have to wait for somebody to come out and check your credentials... not that big of a deal...
Credentials are easy to fake. The credentials aren't solving the problem now. The biometric data is supposed to be an extra "un-fakeable" authentication scheme. When you have to check 7% of peoples credentials there's not a lot of time to do thorough checks.
It also IS a big deal if the 7% is consistant. Can you really harass 7% of the population every time they want to enter the country? People simply won't stand for something like that.
But is this really "beating" the scanner?
If 7% of the time the scanner can't ID you, those people will probbably just routinely be let in. If all you have to do is tear up a little, have long eyelashes, or whatever then anyone that'd be caught be this system will do just that. A system where it's easy to become incorrectly identified is a useless one.
Seriously, blueprints are a GOOD thing. Without them, you can't do simple things like stress calculations, etc. You kinda want to be able to answer questions like: "If the bear pushed me over and jumped on my chest, would it crush me?" theoretically before you do a real, live test.
Very true, but you use the skills you've got when designing something. I saw a TV show about this guy a few years ago. In it they show him doing tests of the suit where he gets hit by a truck, hit with baseball bats, etc. I don't know how close to life all the testing he did, but the suit is very tough.
If I had to go up against a grizzly bear, I'd rather have nothing but a thong and a Desert Eagle than one of these wacky contraptions.
Sure, but the point of the suit is supposed to be so researchers can study grizzly bears up close. Killing the grizzlies would be kind of problematic to that goal.
But simply pointing out your hypocritical belief. It's an attack on YOU not your argument. People don't really like listening to others that don't follow their own advice.
Maybe not the building owners, but the organizers of the flea market certainly have a problem if no one trusts the flea market anymore.
This IS a big potential problem for Ebay, and could easily limit their expansion if people don't trust transactions on Ebay. Something as simple as requiring sellers to accept credit cards on all transactions over $300 would go a long way.
One has to ask oneself, here, why one really expects to be part of a community of open source developers when the project in question is run by a for-profit company and there are thousands of people who want to help and think they can.
What I'm saying is, with the decision to split Fedora from the core product lines, Red Hat essentially removed their own motive for expending huge amounts of time in evaluating user input, particularly user-submitted code
Mozilla seemed to do it, though the reports I've heard seemed to indicate it was rough going at first. From the looks of the article, I'm just not sure how the project is part of the open source community. If Redhat doesn't want to spend the bucks to support Fedora, that's fine. If they do want to spend the bucks, that's fine too. But don't lie to us and tell us that Fedora is going to be part of the OSS community, and then not make it part of the community.
I suspect the real problem is just RH didn't have the infrastructure needed to have community development of Fedora.
Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.
I've got Fedora on my laptop, and we run RHEL on our servers at work. It's a nice mix because I want the latest and greatest on my laptop, and I want long-term support on servers. I don't want to wait a year and half between releases for my laptop, I want the 2.6 kernel as soon as it's reasonably stable. That's Fedora.
As for doing everything myself, I don't know about most administrators, but I _hate_ running up2date, hate compiling new versions of software for bug-fixes, and I hate upgrading working production servers to a new version of an OS. Since RHEL solves all those problems rather nicely, it's a great choice.
I'm not ashamed to be an American, but I am ashamed that you are. You're just a sick fuck who wants to torture people you don't even know or what they've done.
So yes, if you want to talk about decade-old hardware, I did indeed err. I probably should have also said, in my list of ways-such-errors-could-occur, "if you use ancient noname drives"
Bzzzt. Wrong again. These problems were certainly NOT solved "decades ago" The CD-ROM was only invented in 1984. I've had sync problems as late as 1997 or 98. It wasn't on no-name hardware either. I've personally seen on on Mitsumi drives, Lite-On drives, Apple drives, etc. It's a VERY common problem. Yes, if you buy quality hardware you have a mimimum chance of sync errors happening. No, not everyone buys quality hardware. The point is that if you're copying 1000 CDs for backup purposes it's a much better idea to use proven program like EAC to do the job perfectly every time.
Sorry buddy, but someone who's 18 while not technically a child is still a kid in many peoples eyes.
From the FAQ at exactaudiocopy.org:
Sync problems can be bad enough that the errors are quite noticeable and sound like pops and clicks in the music. Exact Audio Copy is a well recognized program that tries to do its very best at getting exact rips of audio CDs every time. If it can't it'll even do the interpolation of the bad data. Anyone that's ripped CDs can attest to the sync problems of poorly written ripper software.
My guess is all the wacko "anti-war" militant groups like the SLA and the Weathermen in the 70s still leaves a mark on the FBI of what to be suspicious of.
The arguments are problematic for text messaging though. Text is a medium where you always need a copy of the transmission to be able to read it whether it's paper, electronic, or whatever. The computers are ALREADY keeping a log of the conversation simply because you have to keep the information in memory for anyone to be able to read it. The fact that you're using text messaging means you've automatically consented to logging.
a student doesn't have an obvious need for information about the tunnels at his school.
And suddenly if you don't have a "need" for information then you're suspected of being a terrorist? Good god man, students being interesting in the tunnel systems underneath Universities is as old as the tunnel systems themselves. Your argument then diverges into a massive straw man argument about fertilizer and blowing up the school.
A simple OPEN request for information about what countless people are interested in (secret tunnel systems) is completely different than ordering massive amounts of amonium nitrate when you're not a farmer. The former has obvious other reasons why someone would be doing it, the latter has very few justifications.
We did all that stuff as well. Not everyone does the curriculum in the same order, and order doesn't imply importance.
Not a bad idea, but you're aiming WAY to high. These are high school programming classes, not Junion/Senior College level data structures and algorithms class. I'd imagine you'd get college credit for the low-level C++ or Java programming classes, which is kind of worthless since those classes aren't even part of a CSCI major where I went to school.
That the sensor has never detected something doesn't tell you that it's working or not working - or am I am missing something here?
Yah, you're missing the scientific paper. This is a one page write-up written by a journalist. The one page write up doesn't describe how they know the detector works, but I'm sure they have _some_ means of testing that it does. Blame the article, but at this point you can't really accuse anyone of doing shoddy science for grant money.
Why would you teraform a lifeless rock and move billions of people to it if you can just move the asteroid a bit and avoid it hitting the earth? 600 years is plenty of time to develop the technology to do this, and enough time to do it slowly (minimum energy expenditure). I've heard some ideas that merely changing the light reflectivity of the rock would change its orbit.
Desipite evidence from Chips, and Dateline NBC, gas tanks don't blow up. They can start on fire, obviously but a major fire requires the gas tank to be be ruptured. In that case there's this very distinctive smell that gasoline has, maybe you've smelled it before? Live electrical wires don't give you such a warning until you touch them.
Wow, you're a serious Simpsons fanatic. You really think the voice talent of the simpsons should just agree to make less money so they'll make more Simpsons episodes? Are episodes of the Simpsons some kind of public good like curing cancer? Repeat after me, "it's just a television show, it's just a television show". It's not "integral" to American culture. Life will go on after it's canceled.
As far as "substantially" increading the cost of producing each episode, try to realize that it costs about 7 million to pay the cast of Friends PER EPISODE. The rest of the cost production of the Simpsons is substantially lower than other TV shows since you don't have to pay an entire crew of people. The animation is all outsourced to another country I believe, so those costs are low as well. That's the main reason why The Simpsons has gone on for so long.
As interesting as your post is, the government could easily (and probably does to deemed security threats) do it without having to go through that mess. Simple survellience.
Oh I'm sure they do. The difference is that such a system could make monitoring like this cheap and routine.
There's a big difference between what a normal human can see, keep track of, and correlate and what an automated system monitoring every car that drives through town.
Automated systems that try to analyze driving patterns and find "suspicious behavior". People then get watched, searched, harassed, etc because some data mining program put out by PerpAnalysis thinks they're a criminal.
Automated traces on political groups. Find the license plates of some political group the government doesn't like and make detailed analyses of their comings and goings. Who talks to who, who's fucking who, where and when do they eat, etc. Do they go to the drugstore a lot? Doctors office? I'd guess once you do all the traffic analysis you'd get a pretty good picture of just about anyone and any group you wanted.
Does this break privacy? I don't know, maybe not. I still find it frightening as hell.
What THEY are saying is, "You do not actually own that physical Cue-Cat scanner, you have a license to use that device in the manner we have declared, in the same way that you cannot use your cable TV box to get channels you haven't paid for."
That's a pretty abstract argument, and it hasn't really held up very well when consumers excpect to be able to own a product. The Cue-Cat scanner example is a horrible one. No one in their right mind considers a purely physical object to be "licenced". It'd probbably never even stand up in court.
A better example is control of broadcast television, but it still hasn't been enforced well by the courts. The VCR time shifting case was decided for the consumer. The content producers didn't get to decide to prevent people from recording TV on their own VCRs even the the content producers own the content.
I think the differences between the two sides boils down to Law vs. Right and Wrong. We'd like to believe that the Law is supposed to be based on right and wrong and we can make simple assesments of a law if it meets this basic expectation of law. In this case that expectation doesn't hold true, and that's the point the interviewer is trying to drive home. In recent years Corps have gained to much of an upper hand in deciding IP law, and the law has shifed from its original Right And Wrong intent to one of protecting the interests of Large Corporations. It's the same reason why copyright law keeps being extended essentially indefinately.
I believe it's the patents on CSS make a decoding program "illegal" (though I suppose more accurately it's patent infringement, a civil matter). If all you want to do is view a DVD you've rented or own on Linux, there's no Right And Wrong issues. There are, however patent infringement issues. It's a pretty hard sell to tell people that simply watching a DVD on you own property, on software you wrote yourself should be against the law. Jack Velenti doesn't really have a good answer for this except for "well, that's the law". A wholly unsatisfying one.
Science fiction fans may be dismayed to learn that "Mutant X" and "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda" have been cancelled
Though fans of quality television will rejoice. Mutant X? It has to be one of the worst TV shows I've seen more than 5 minutes of in the last 10 years.
A video card is a better example, but still a problematic one. For a simple 2d non-accelerated video card there's not really a problem with releasing the source code. For state-of-the-art 3D accelerated video cards, there's trade secrets embedded in the source.
One of the big advantages that NVidia used to have over ATI was superior drivers. The drivers for 3D video cards are complex things where the optimizations used can't be released because a competitor could use that to their advantage. The drivers can obviously still be reverse engineered, and I'm sure that's done. Reverse engineering is still expensive, and imperfect.
The point is that many hardware devices are becoming increasingly dependant on software. That software then becomes part of the trade secrets, or is encumbered by patents (as in the case of the winmodem).