25% less than 1.1Mbps is 825Kbps. That's before protocol overhead. I stand by my 25% assertion. Although I agree that 800-900Kbps video will be better than what YouTube offers. I didn't think that one through too well. I'm sure YouTube is using a MUCH lower bitrate. I suspect the quality will be acceptable, but less than DVD quality. Most DVDs have an average bitrate of 4-5MBps though this is MPEG-2 video. NetFlix will most likely be using something closer to MPEG-4. I'll admit I'm not an expert on MPEG-4, but I doubt that you can get better than 500% additional compression out of it compared to MPEG-2 without a perceptible quality loss.
I can't believe I didn't see this mentioned (or perhaps it got modded down below the threshold I view at), but the government doesn't need a warrant to ask for information. It only needs a warrant to demand information. Without a warrant, the financial institutions don't have to honor the government's request. If your bank is giving out your personal information without being compelled by a warrant, then get mad at your bank, not the government.
The police can say to your wife, "We thing your husband did something wrong, can we search your house?" If she says yes, no warrant is needed. They can search it. That is completely within their rights. Likewise, the government can ask your bank to share your financial records. That is completely within their rights. The problem is not that the government is asking. The problem is that the banks are saying yes.
Ten bucks off your next Xbox 360 defective unit replacement fee for the Xbot with the best and most inventive 'I saw unsold PS3s' story!
You might want to adjust your prize. Right now the defective unit replacement fee is $0. I bought a 360 at launch in November 2005. I think it was supposed to have a 90 day warranty. Last week mine started locking up after a few minutes of playing it. I think a fan quit. Anyway, I called Microsoft and they're replacing it for free even though it's over a year old. The phone rep said that they're currently treating all 360 units as if they were under warranty no matter when the unit was purchased. Maybe they have a design defect. Maybe they're just trying to compete with better customer service. Either way, I was happy.
I don't have a good "PS3 sitting on shelves" story, because I haven't seen any so I guess I wouldn't win the prize anyway. There really haven't been enough PS3s shipped to gauge demand. I don't think the PS3 will be the next Dreamcast. Even if there isn't enough demand at the current pricing levels, Sony will probably drop the price after doing some cost reductions. Still, I don't expect PS3 to reach the same marketshare as PS2. PS2's dominance of the market would be hard for any console to top.
358MB file / 42m41s = 139.9 kiloBYTES per second.
139.9 * 8 = 1.1 megaBITS per second.
Plus, this is an average bitrate. MPEG video is often encoded at a variable bitrate, so some parts may have a higher bitrate than others. There is also going to be protocol overhead that adds to these numbers -- those IP and TCP or UDP headers take up bandwidth too. Therefore, one would have to assume that Netflix will be encoding at a lower bitrate than what you're used to. Probably at least 25% less. I would expect video quality equivalent to YouTube or perhaps marginally better.
This is a really good question. How do they know the distance? I don't think parallax would work. I would think the difference in angles would be way too small to measure for something 1 billion light years away. Maybe they estimate the distance based on how bright the light is with an assumption about the light output from the star??? Can someone who knows something about astronomy can explain where that 1 billion number comes from?
What if you have an old document that you continue to maintain and update? I can think of a lot of documents like this. They've since been converted to a more recent Word format, but I bet the Word file format contains tags like these to preserve compatibility. The average user won't know or care about these nuances. They'll just see that many of the documents that used to look fine in Office 2007 aren't formatted right in the new version. Think how much time it would take you to go through a 500 page standards document and correct formatting problems or fix broken footnotes. Now think about the number of documents still in use today that may have originally been created with one of these older but popular word processors. Given the number of man-hours that would be required to hand edit all these documents, building backwards compatibility into the application makes a lot of sense.
First I'd use their own witness to establish a possible defense for the alleged infringement. Then I'd point out how weak the argument for claiming the hard drive he examined is not the correct one. Finally, I'd establish that there is no evidence that the hard drive they're trying to subpoena contains any evidence of infringement and portray the whole thing as a big fishing expedition. Let me walk through these 3 in a little more detail.
1. The witness claims the computer was not connected to a router because of the IP addresses he observed in the registry. The addresses you'd typically use for a home router are non-routable ip addresses like 192.168.*, 172.*, or 10.*. These are special address ranges that don't appear on the public internet. Routers use them because you can guarantee that the IP addresses assigned to computers by the router will not conflict with any other address. While it is possible to configure most routers to use a different routable address, the assumption the defendant makes is probably reasonable. However, if no router is being used as the witness claims, then the attached computer did not have the protection a router's NAT provides from outside attacks. I would grill him on this. The theory I would push is that since the computer was insecure, someone else did the infringement but used the defendant's vulnerable computer to run proxy software to hide their illegal activities. This sort of thing actually happens quite frequently. If you search, you can find lots of software for doing this. Further, proxy software isn't that difficult to write. Anyone with a good programming background could easily write one, and anyone with a good understanding of networking who wanted to do something online without it being traceable back to them would likely use this exact technique. Virus scanners already detect many of these programs, but there are many, many more that the virus scanners don't know about yet. I would get him to admit this. There are many, many ways to hide software like this, so even if you look for it and don't find it, you can never be completely sure it isn't there. That's why many experts will tell you that if a system has been compromised, the only sure way to restore it to a secure state is to wipe it and reinstall everything. There's just too many ways to hide malicious software to be sure you found everything the attacker did. 2. I'd point out the many other conclusions one could draw other than, "this must be the wrong hard drive." One possibility is the proxy explanation I gave in #1 - kazaa wouldn't be on the computer in this case. Another explanation for the lack of files on the computer is that the defendant just didn't use the computer very much. Another explanation would be that the computer recently had the hard drive formatted and the software reinstalled - I believe this is undisputed. An explanation for the lack of kazaa files is that kazaa was never there in the first place. Essentially he's saying, "I was told the person using this hard drive was using P2P software to share files. I don't find any evidence of that on this hard drive, so this must be the wrong hard drive." Another explanation is that it's the right hard drive, but that kazaa was not being used and the defendant didn't even use the computer that much. If you try to say a format and reinstall would wipe away all evidence of kazaa, he might try to claim that the forensic software he used could still detect it as not all the data gets overwritten. This is true, but to counter this, ask "Is it possible the data you were looking for could have been overwritten when the operating system was reinstalled?" His answer will be yes. "Could your forensics software detect that data after it has been overwritten by other files or when the operating system was reinstalled?" His answer will be no. 3. Finally, portray the whole thing as a fishing expedition. Ask him about how widespread the problem of illegally sharing files with kazaa is. Ask him if you randomly just
Electrolysis on water with a high salt content (like sea water) will yield hydrogen gas, chlorine gas, and a solution of sodium hydroxide. For electrolysis, you don't really need a lot of stuff dissolved in the water because the goal isn't to run huge electrical currents through the water. You really just want to establish an electical field to pull apart the water molecules.
The 9th amendment says that just because a right isn't specifically granted in the constitution doesn't mean it is disallowed. However, congress can further restrict your rights by passing laws so long as they don't violate the rights enumerated in the constitution. In every state murder is a crime, yet the constitution says nothing about a person's right to murder. The 9th amendment doesn't make murder legal. Likewise, congress is free to enact laws that restrict your privacy rights or even grant others like the FCC authority to restrict your rights so long as they don't enact a law that conflicts with the rights specifically enumerated in the constitution.
Wow. I tend to be more afraid of people who actually wish to do harm to me or others. It's too bad you find ideas to be more threatening than acts of violence. I'm afraid you're doomed to a life of fear. There are relatively few people in this world who would wish you harm, but it will always be easy to find people you disagree with.
Hey dipshit, exctly what rights are being whittled away here? In case you weren't aware, any police agency can get a wiretap after showing probable cause to a judge and getting a warrant. Before 1967, they didn't even need to do that. The only thing this ruling does is ensure that the infrastructure is in place to allow them to obtain wiretaps on VOIP calls in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY THEY'VE BEEN DOING FOR YEARS WITH PSTN CALLS.
If they had telephones in the 1700s, the 4th amendment may well have read "houses, papers, effects, and telephones". So what imact would that addition have? None. As I said in my first posting, the supreme court already recognizes that telephone calls are covered under the 4th amendment. My point was that the 4th amendment never granted absolute protection against any government search or seizure. There have always been circumstances where searches and seizures are legally permitted.
Every civilized society relinquishes a certain amount of personal freedom to their government in order to estabilish an orderly society in which laws can be enforced. Nations with elected governments tend to have the most personal freedom (i.e. The USA, most of Europe, etc.). Less democratic governments tend to offer less personal freedom (i.e. China, Cuba, etc). There are a few "perfect" places in the world where governmental structure is so weak that you don't have to fear any government invasion into your personal life, but I wouldn't want to live there. In countries like that, you'd be too busy figuring out how you're going to get your goats back from the neighboring villiage that stole them from you without being speared to death. If that sounds good to you, great. Personally, I prefer to live in a country where there's a slight chance someone might listen in to one of my phone calls.
As an interesting side note, you might be interested to know that it's much more likely that your phone calls are being listened to by someone who isn't affiliated with the government at all. I design telephone network equipment for a living, and occasionally I've had to go to central offices when customers have had problems with our products. Every time I've been in a central office, the guys working there have "monitored the lines for quality". This is totally legal under the electronic communications privacy act of 1984. However, in my experience "monitoring lines for quality" could easily be mistaken for "I'm bored, let's drop some DS0s out to this speaker and see if we can find a juicy conversation for my own amusement." People working in central offices at night seem to get the most amusement out of drunks and people having phone sex, so if you want to make sure nobody listens to your conversation, talk about something really boring.
Perhaps today would be a good day for a brief civics lesson. Here is the text of the fourth amendement.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There is no absolute protection of privacy granted in that amendment. In fact, it wasn't until 1967 in Katz vs. United States when the Supreme Court ruled that the fourth amendment could offer protection against
wiretaps, reversing previous rulings that said the opposite. In the Katz ruling, the court extended the definition of "search" to include government intrusion into something in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Even after the Katz ruling, the fourth amendment only offers protection against unresonable searches. There are still a lot of cases when the government can conduct a search and violate your privacy. One obvious time is when a warrant is obtained
for the search after probable cause of a crime is presented to a judge. However, there are other cases where searches are not deemed unreasonable. If a police officer is walking by your house and hears screaming and believes someone is in danger, he can forcefully enter your house without a warrant. There's no violation of the fourth amendment
because under the circumstances, entering the house to ensure the saftey of another person is not considdered an "unreasonable" search. If you are stopped for a traffic violation, the police officer is free to shine his flashlight in your window and look around the passenger area. That's because the courts have ruled that if items are within view,
there is no expectation of privacy. As for the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, those are certainly in the gray area. The president argues that warrantless wiretaps of international calls are permitted under Article II as part of the military authority granted to the executive branch so long as the wiretaps are used for intellegence gathering related to
national security, not criminal investigations. Others argue that the wiretaps are an unreasonable government intrusion when there is an expectation of privacy. Both arguments have merit, and reasonable people can have different opinions on the legality of these wiretaps. This is really an issue that needs to be resolved by the courts.
You seem to have many complaints with the United States government. I doubt there was ever a time in the history of the United States when you would have been happy with this country's laws or actions. In fact, I doubt there was ever a country in the history of the world in which you would be content. However, I hope I'm wrong, and I hope you find
a place to live where you will be happy. If you do, I hope your utopia is as perfect as you envision.
No, it's not that simple. Here's how the Geneva Convention defines a civilian:
Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause
So if you're taking an active part in the hostilities, you're not entitled to geneva protections as a civilian. The definition of combatants are somewhat more involved, but here are the ones that pertain to people who are not members of a government's organized standing military:
Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:[ (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
So if you're a combatant, but you don't follow the laws and customs of war or you don't identify yourself as the enemy, then you don't get Geneva protection. That's what "unlawful combatants" are. They're people who are participating in an armed conflict who aren't eligible for Geneva protection because of how they are conducting their combat operations.
Now, in this case, I don't think anyone is suggesting that this hacker was participating in a war against the U.S. government. If he's extradited, he'll get a trial and probably go to prison if he's convicted, but he's not going to end up in Guantanamo.
Re:Australia's known for their flight record
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Actually, they haven't lost a passenger in a JET aircraft, but they have had several fatal crashes. The most recent was on July 15, 1951 when a Qantas plane crashed in New Guinea killing all 7 passengers and crew. They also had half a dozen other fatal crashes in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
Technicallay, Qantas can still say they've never lost a jet aircraft. Though in 1999 one of their 747s over-ran the runway and ended up in a golf course. Nobody died, but the plane was so damaged that it should have been written off. However, Qantas ended up repairing it at a cost of over $100 million -- the most expensive repair in history. Speculation at the time was that Quantas pressured their insurer not to write off the plane as a total loss so that they could continue to claim they've never lost a jet aircraft.
Everytime I see an article about building a media center PC, people always seem to use normal composite or S-Video outputs. Is there a good solution for HD output? Is there a video card supported by linux that can do Y-Cr-Cb component video output at 720p or 1080i? I once had an ATI card that would do this, but it only worked in Windows and even then it didn't compensate for overscan so 10% of the screen got chopped off. Some people have been able to use PowerStrip under windows to get certain video cards to output HDTV compatable timings for TVs that support RGB component inputs. Obviously, this solution is less than ideal. Last time I looked, there wasn't a good solution. Maybe things have changed. Ideally, I'd like to find a video card with HDMI output, but I'm guessing that doesn't exist either. Maybe a fellow slashdotter can prove me wrong.
Current speeds might be good enough for many of today's applications because today's applications have to be built around today's bandwidth limitations. Streaming HD video isn't possible today, but make the pipe big enough and it could be. You could have a whole new set of cable TV providers that offer service exclusively over the internet. Just connect a set top box to your router, and you're ready to go. What if it took only minutes to download full length full resolution movies off of iTunes? How long would Netflix and Blockbuster last? Don't think it's going to happen? Take a look at GPON. 2.5 gig down and 1.25 gig up could open up a host of new services that were never possible before.
I totally agree. I don't like the idea of paying someone to download ringtones and wallpapers to my cellphone. Looks like my decision has been made. I'm not going to buy a cell phone until the wireless providers stop offering optional services that I don't find useful. And if that doesn't work, I'm going to throw a tantrum and hold my breath until my face turns blue.
I call bullshit. The 2005 budget was $2.4 trillion. Medicaid alone made up $188 billion of that. That's almost 8% just with that one program. If you go a step further and and include medicare and social security which are essentially welfare benefits funded by payroll taxes that are paid to the elderly, unemployed, and disabled, it adds up to almost $1 trillion of the $2.4 trillion budget. Then there's all the other programs like food stamps, WIC, etc. I'm not going to go through the budget and add everything up, but total spending on welfare programs is clearly more than 1% of the budget.
Nobody forces the USA to give anything to anybody. The USA gives what it wants to give just like everybody else. The article you point to is a bit misleading since it doesn't factor in things like the support offered by the U.S. military during natural disasters like the tsunami. It's hard to put a price tag on things like that. Still, I don't doubt that the United States isn't on the top of the list of foreign aid donations relative to GDP (though I suspect it is at or near the top in total dollars). Frankly, I don't see why the USA gives as much as it does. I have friends that are constantly donating to different charities to help people in other countries. I used to as well, but not anymore. Every time I turn on the TV, or read a blog, or even read slashdot, I'm reminded of how much everybody else hates the USA. I see people comparing our president to Hitler. I see people burning our flag in their streets chanting "Death to the USA" or other catchy slogans. Any time anything bad happens anywhere in the world, people find a way to blame it on us. Either our actions caused it, or our inaction caused it, or we aren't doing enough to fix it. I 'm sorry people are suffering around the world, but I just don't feel like helping anymore. Until Japan, or the UK, or Poland, or some other country that doesn't hate the US needs our help, my extra cash is going to get spent on bigger TVs and faster computers. At least that way I'm helping out China, and instead of getting hatred and resentment in return, I get a big plasma screen.
Actually, this finding doesn't directly impact IPsec. It just lets you find two texts that generate the same hash in 2^63 time. IPsec uses SHA to generate a HMAC. The idea is that you generate an SHA hash based on the data being sent and a secret key that doesn't get sent. Since both sides know the secret key, both sides are able to generate and verify the hashes. However, somebody intercepting packets will not know the secret key and will not be able to generate valid hashes or modify packets without being detected.
In order to break this part of IPsec, you need to be able to do one of two things:
1) Figure out what the secret key is based on the data and hashes being sent. If you could do this, you could generate your own HMAC and send your own data without being detected.
2) Intercept the packet and find a way to change the data in a way that will still generate the same hash value. This would allow you to change packets without being detected.
The vulnerability the researchers found doesn't help you accomplish either of these tasks, but it does show that SHA-1 has some weaknesses. Therefore, it's probably a good idea to start moving to a different hashing algorithm before somebody figures out a practical way to do #1 or #2. Also keep in mind that an HMAC exploit wouldn't help an attacker decrypt IPsec packets. To do this, a vulnerability would need to be found in either the encryption algorithm or the key exchange algorithm. In reality, a HMAC exploit by itself would only allow an attacker to send garbage data to the target address.
While this finding definitely shows a weakness in the SHA algorithm, it isn't a weakness that makes most applications that use SHA any more vulnerable. They found a way to generate two texts that produce the same hash using an algorithm with a time complexity of 2^63 instead of 2^80 as would be required for a brute force attack. However, being able to generate two texts that produce the same hash won't help you exploit most systems that rely on SHA. If someone finds a way to generate text that produces a SPECIFIED hash in 2^63 time, then there's reason to be concerned. However, since these findings show that SHA-1 has some weaknesses, it's probably time to start looking for a better hashing algorithm before a more serious vulnerability is found.
I think you hit on it. I was talking to some guys from Freescale recently about processor offerings for one of our new board designs and the topic somehow got sidetracked on Apple's switch to Intel. They told me that nobody was really making much money selling processors to Apple. They had to invest a lot of $$$ into R&D to continue cranking out new chips for Apple, and Apple wasn't willing to pay much for the chips. As a result, a business decision was made to focus R&D in the area that had the biggest payoff -- the embedded market. Bottom line: IBM & Freescale were planning to target all new processor designs at the embedded market not the desktop market, and Apple knew it. x86 is really the only processor out there that gets designed specifically for the desktop market. To stay competitive, Apple had to move to x86.
I also saw a TV show on Fox News about how the moon landings might have been faked.
Actually, I think that aired on the fox network, not the fox news channel. They were also the ones that aired the special about the alien autopsy that happened at area 51 if I recall correctly. Unlike the entertainment network, fox news channel's reporting is basically as acurate as the other major news outlets. Most people who hate that channel disagree with the political views expressed in their news analysis shows. The accuracy of the news they report generally isn't the issue.
What bothers me is all the "documentaries" about aliens and ghosts that find their way on to the educational networks like the discovery channel and the learning channel. Now when they show a legitamate documentary, I feel I can't trust it because they air so much junk science. I used to watch those channels all the time, but now the only thing I bother with is Mythbusters -- that show rocks.
Easy. Really easy. It's just a DTMF decoder. If you don't know how DTMF works, see this site for the details. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already some open source software that does DTMF decoding. If not, I would be willing to design a suitable DTMF decoder if someone else wants to write the code to interface it with Skype.
About 5 years ago back when I was in school, I worked on a project sponsored by the state of washington to develop an improved text telephone for people who are both deaf and blind. To help us develop a prototype, we met with a lot of deaf-blind people and people who assisted them. I strongly encourage you to meet with people who are deaf-blind before trying to design a device that would meet their needs. Here are a few things I learned while working on the project.
* Most deaf-blind people are not born deaf and blind. Most deaf-blind people are born either deaf or blind and then lose the other sense as they get older. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but the overwhelming majority of deaf-blind people we met suffered from Usher Syndrome. Most people who have this genetic disorder are born deaf and then start going blind around 30. From my experience, most of these people only start to learn braille when they start to experience vision loss. It can be difficult for adults to learn braille. As a result, it's very useful to have a display suitable for people with reduced vision in addition to a braille display to ease the transition as these people are learning braille.
* Deaf-blind people communicate by using sign language and feeling the speaker's hand as things are signed. However, deaf-blind people often need to communicate with people who do not know sign langage (a repairman, neighbor, paramedics, etc). To do this, they often rely on a computer, text telephone, or similar device that allows them to type messages back and forth to the person they need to communicate with. It's important to keep secondary uses like this in mind when designing a product.
* For the severely vision impaired, we found that LCD and CRT based displays were not easy to read. The displays that were easiest to read had about 2-inch letters and emitted a bright light in the blue-green area of the color spectrum. Scrolling text is very difficult to read for people with severe vision impairments. Many of the people we worked with had severe tunnel vision that made multi-line displays confusing. These people would keep their head a couple of inches from the screen and move their head to scan across the line. We ended up using a large vacuum-flourescent display that would advance a line at a time at the user's control. We also found that having interchangeable color filters for the display made it useful for more people since everyone's vision loss is different.
* We found that multi-line braille displays were confusing for a lot of people and didn't serve much purpose since you can only read one line at a time. The design we used that people seemed to like the best was a 20 character braille display with a button on the left-hand side for scrolling up one line and a button on the right hand side for scrolling down one line.
* Some people we met were good typists, but most people tended to one-finger it. That's bad enough if you can see, but it's even worse for blind people. We had braille lettering on our keys, and we found that a lot of people would scan the keys with their fingers to locate the letter they wanted to type. However, they often ended up inadvertantly pressing these keys as they were scanning the braille. Using very stiff key switches greatly reduced this problem.
* Placement of keys, power switches, etc is very important. Things need to be easy to locate but difficult to inadvertantly hit. This is harder than it sounds and you probably won't know the mistakes in the layout until you ask a blind person to use it.
* Before I worked on this project, I had no idea that there are two different kinds of braille: 6-dot and 8-dot. Far more people are familiar with 6-dot since it's what's used for most books, but 6-dot has a lot of limitations. The only symbols you get are period and comma. Numbers are letters that are prefixed by the number symbol. As you can see, there can be some information l
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25% less than 1.1Mbps is 825Kbps. That's before protocol overhead. I stand by my 25% assertion. Although I agree that 800-900Kbps video will be better than what YouTube offers. I didn't think that one through too well. I'm sure YouTube is using a MUCH lower bitrate. I suspect the quality will be acceptable, but less than DVD quality. Most DVDs have an average bitrate of 4-5MBps though this is MPEG-2 video. NetFlix will most likely be using something closer to MPEG-4. I'll admit I'm not an expert on MPEG-4, but I doubt that you can get better than 500% additional compression out of it compared to MPEG-2 without a perceptible quality loss.
The police can say to your wife, "We thing your husband did something wrong, can we search your house?" If she says yes, no warrant is needed. They can search it. That is completely within their rights. Likewise, the government can ask your bank to share your financial records. That is completely within their rights. The problem is not that the government is asking. The problem is that the banks are saying yes.
You might want to adjust your prize. Right now the defective unit replacement fee is $0. I bought a 360 at launch in November 2005. I think it was supposed to have a 90 day warranty. Last week mine started locking up after a few minutes of playing it. I think a fan quit. Anyway, I called Microsoft and they're replacing it for free even though it's over a year old. The phone rep said that they're currently treating all 360 units as if they were under warranty no matter when the unit was purchased. Maybe they have a design defect. Maybe they're just trying to compete with better customer service. Either way, I was happy.
I don't have a good "PS3 sitting on shelves" story, because I haven't seen any so I guess I wouldn't win the prize anyway. There really haven't been enough PS3s shipped to gauge demand. I don't think the PS3 will be the next Dreamcast. Even if there isn't enough demand at the current pricing levels, Sony will probably drop the price after doing some cost reductions. Still, I don't expect PS3 to reach the same marketshare as PS2. PS2's dominance of the market would be hard for any console to top.
358MB file / 42m41s = 139.9 kiloBYTES per second. 139.9 * 8 = 1.1 megaBITS per second. Plus, this is an average bitrate. MPEG video is often encoded at a variable bitrate, so some parts may have a higher bitrate than others. There is also going to be protocol overhead that adds to these numbers -- those IP and TCP or UDP headers take up bandwidth too. Therefore, one would have to assume that Netflix will be encoding at a lower bitrate than what you're used to. Probably at least 25% less. I would expect video quality equivalent to YouTube or perhaps marginally better.
This is a really good question. How do they know the distance? I don't think parallax would work. I would think the difference in angles would be way too small to measure for something 1 billion light years away. Maybe they estimate the distance based on how bright the light is with an assumption about the light output from the star??? Can someone who knows something about astronomy can explain where that 1 billion number comes from?
What if you have an old document that you continue to maintain and update? I can think of a lot of documents like this. They've since been converted to a more recent Word format, but I bet the Word file format contains tags like these to preserve compatibility. The average user won't know or care about these nuances. They'll just see that many of the documents that used to look fine in Office 2007 aren't formatted right in the new version. Think how much time it would take you to go through a 500 page standards document and correct formatting problems or fix broken footnotes. Now think about the number of documents still in use today that may have originally been created with one of these older but popular word processors. Given the number of man-hours that would be required to hand edit all these documents, building backwards compatibility into the application makes a lot of sense.
First I'd use their own witness to establish a possible defense for the alleged infringement. Then I'd point out how weak the argument for claiming the hard drive he examined is not the correct one. Finally, I'd establish that there is no evidence that the hard drive they're trying to subpoena contains any evidence of infringement and portray the whole thing as a big fishing expedition. Let me walk through these 3 in a little more detail.
1. The witness claims the computer was not connected to a router because of the IP addresses he observed in the registry. The addresses you'd typically use for a home router are non-routable ip addresses like 192.168.*, 172.*, or 10.*. These are special address ranges that don't appear on the public internet. Routers use them because you can guarantee that the IP addresses assigned to computers by the router will not conflict with any other address. While it is possible to configure most routers to use a different routable address, the assumption the defendant makes is probably reasonable. However, if no router is being used as the witness claims, then the attached computer did not have the protection a router's NAT provides from outside attacks. I would grill him on this. The theory I would push is that since the computer was insecure, someone else did the infringement but used the defendant's vulnerable computer to run proxy software to hide their illegal activities. This sort of thing actually happens quite frequently. If you search, you can find lots of software for doing this. Further, proxy software isn't that difficult to write. Anyone with a good programming background could easily write one, and anyone with a good understanding of networking who wanted to do something online without it being traceable back to them would likely use this exact technique. Virus scanners already detect many of these programs, but there are many, many more that the virus scanners don't know about yet. I would get him to admit this. There are many, many ways to hide software like this, so even if you look for it and don't find it, you can never be completely sure it isn't there. That's why many experts will tell you that if a system has been compromised, the only sure way to restore it to a secure state is to wipe it and reinstall everything. There's just too many ways to hide malicious software to be sure you found everything the attacker did.
2. I'd point out the many other conclusions one could draw other than, "this must be the wrong hard drive." One possibility is the proxy explanation I gave in #1 - kazaa wouldn't be on the computer in this case. Another explanation for the lack of files on the computer is that the defendant just didn't use the computer very much. Another explanation would be that the computer recently had the hard drive formatted and the software reinstalled - I believe this is undisputed. An explanation for the lack of kazaa files is that kazaa was never there in the first place. Essentially he's saying, "I was told the person using this hard drive was using P2P software to share files. I don't find any evidence of that on this hard drive, so this must be the wrong hard drive." Another explanation is that it's the right hard drive, but that kazaa was not being used and the defendant didn't even use the computer that much. If you try to say a format and reinstall would wipe away all evidence of kazaa, he might try to claim that the forensic software he used could still detect it as not all the data gets overwritten. This is true, but to counter this, ask "Is it possible the data you were looking for could have been overwritten when the operating system was reinstalled?" His answer will be yes. "Could your forensics software detect that data after it has been overwritten by other files or when the operating system was reinstalled?" His answer will be no.
3. Finally, portray the whole thing as a fishing expedition. Ask him about how widespread the problem of illegally sharing files with kazaa is. Ask him if you randomly just
Electrolysis on water with a high salt content (like sea water) will yield hydrogen gas, chlorine gas, and a solution of sodium hydroxide. For electrolysis, you don't really need a lot of stuff dissolved in the water because the goal isn't to run huge electrical currents through the water. You really just want to establish an electical field to pull apart the water molecules.
The 9th amendment says that just because a right isn't specifically granted in the constitution doesn't mean it is disallowed. However, congress can further restrict your rights by passing laws so long as they don't violate the rights enumerated in the constitution. In every state murder is a crime, yet the constitution says nothing about a person's right to murder. The 9th amendment doesn't make murder legal. Likewise, congress is free to enact laws that restrict your privacy rights or even grant others like the FCC authority to restrict your rights so long as they don't enact a law that conflicts with the rights specifically enumerated in the constitution.
Wow. I tend to be more afraid of people who actually wish to do harm to me or others. It's too bad you find ideas to be more threatening than acts of violence. I'm afraid you're doomed to a life of fear. There are relatively few people in this world who would wish you harm, but it will always be easy to find people you disagree with.
If they had telephones in the 1700s, the 4th amendment may well have read "houses, papers, effects, and telephones". So what imact would that addition have? None. As I said in my first posting, the supreme court already recognizes that telephone calls are covered under the 4th amendment. My point was that the 4th amendment never granted absolute protection against any government search or seizure. There have always been circumstances where searches and seizures are legally permitted.
Every civilized society relinquishes a certain amount of personal freedom to their government in order to estabilish an orderly society in which laws can be enforced. Nations with elected governments tend to have the most personal freedom (i.e. The USA, most of Europe, etc.). Less democratic governments tend to offer less personal freedom (i.e. China, Cuba, etc). There are a few "perfect" places in the world where governmental structure is so weak that you don't have to fear any government invasion into your personal life, but I wouldn't want to live there. In countries like that, you'd be too busy figuring out how you're going to get your goats back from the neighboring villiage that stole them from you without being speared to death. If that sounds good to you, great. Personally, I prefer to live in a country where there's a slight chance someone might listen in to one of my phone calls.
As an interesting side note, you might be interested to know that it's much more likely that your phone calls are being listened to by someone who isn't affiliated with the government at all. I design telephone network equipment for a living, and occasionally I've had to go to central offices when customers have had problems with our products. Every time I've been in a central office, the guys working there have "monitored the lines for quality". This is totally legal under the electronic communications privacy act of 1984. However, in my experience "monitoring lines for quality" could easily be mistaken for "I'm bored, let's drop some DS0s out to this speaker and see if we can find a juicy conversation for my own amusement." People working in central offices at night seem to get the most amusement out of drunks and people having phone sex, so if you want to make sure nobody listens to your conversation, talk about something really boring.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There is no absolute protection of privacy granted in that amendment. In fact, it wasn't until 1967 in Katz vs. United States when the Supreme Court ruled that the fourth amendment could offer protection against wiretaps, reversing previous rulings that said the opposite. In the Katz ruling, the court extended the definition of "search" to include government intrusion into something in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Even after the Katz ruling, the fourth amendment only offers protection against unresonable searches. There are still a lot of cases when the government can conduct a search and violate your privacy. One obvious time is when a warrant is obtained for the search after probable cause of a crime is presented to a judge. However, there are other cases where searches are not deemed unreasonable. If a police officer is walking by your house and hears screaming and believes someone is in danger, he can forcefully enter your house without a warrant. There's no violation of the fourth amendment because under the circumstances, entering the house to ensure the saftey of another person is not considdered an "unreasonable" search. If you are stopped for a traffic violation, the police officer is free to shine his flashlight in your window and look around the passenger area. That's because the courts have ruled that if items are within view, there is no expectation of privacy. As for the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, those are certainly in the gray area. The president argues that warrantless wiretaps of international calls are permitted under Article II as part of the military authority granted to the executive branch so long as the wiretaps are used for intellegence gathering related to national security, not criminal investigations. Others argue that the wiretaps are an unreasonable government intrusion when there is an expectation of privacy. Both arguments have merit, and reasonable people can have different opinions on the legality of these wiretaps. This is really an issue that needs to be resolved by the courts.
You seem to have many complaints with the United States government. I doubt there was ever a time in the history of the United States when you would have been happy with this country's laws or actions. In fact, I doubt there was ever a country in the history of the world in which you would be content. However, I hope I'm wrong, and I hope you find a place to live where you will be happy. If you do, I hope your utopia is as perfect as you envision.
Now, in this case, I don't think anyone is suggesting that this hacker was participating in a war against the U.S. government. If he's extradited, he'll get a trial and probably go to prison if he's convicted, but he's not going to end up in Guantanamo.
Actually, they haven't lost a passenger in a JET aircraft, but they have had several fatal crashes. The most recent was on July 15, 1951 when a Qantas plane crashed in New Guinea killing all 7 passengers and crew. They also had half a dozen other fatal crashes in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
Technicallay, Qantas can still say they've never lost a jet aircraft. Though in 1999 one of their 747s over-ran the runway and ended up in a golf course. Nobody died, but the plane was so damaged that it should have been written off. However, Qantas ended up repairing it at a cost of over $100 million -- the most expensive repair in history. Speculation at the time was that Quantas pressured their insurer not to write off the plane as a total loss so that they could continue to claim they've never lost a jet aircraft.
Everytime I see an article about building a media center PC, people always seem to use normal composite or S-Video outputs. Is there a good solution for HD output? Is there a video card supported by linux that can do Y-Cr-Cb component video output at 720p or 1080i? I once had an ATI card that would do this, but it only worked in Windows and even then it didn't compensate for overscan so 10% of the screen got chopped off. Some people have been able to use PowerStrip under windows to get certain video cards to output HDTV compatable timings for TVs that support RGB component inputs. Obviously, this solution is less than ideal. Last time I looked, there wasn't a good solution. Maybe things have changed. Ideally, I'd like to find a video card with HDMI output, but I'm guessing that doesn't exist either. Maybe a fellow slashdotter can prove me wrong.
Current speeds might be good enough for many of today's applications because today's applications have to be built around today's bandwidth limitations. Streaming HD video isn't possible today, but make the pipe big enough and it could be. You could have a whole new set of cable TV providers that offer service exclusively over the internet. Just connect a set top box to your router, and you're ready to go. What if it took only minutes to download full length full resolution movies off of iTunes? How long would Netflix and Blockbuster last? Don't think it's going to happen? Take a look at GPON. 2.5 gig down and 1.25 gig up could open up a host of new services that were never possible before.
I totally agree. I don't like the idea of paying someone to download ringtones and wallpapers to my cellphone. Looks like my decision has been made. I'm not going to buy a cell phone until the wireless providers stop offering optional services that I don't find useful. And if that doesn't work, I'm going to throw a tantrum and hold my breath until my face turns blue.
Here is the source for these numbers.
Nobody forces the USA to give anything to anybody. The USA gives what it wants to give just like everybody else. The article you point to is a bit misleading since it doesn't factor in things like the support offered by the U.S. military during natural disasters like the tsunami. It's hard to put a price tag on things like that. Still, I don't doubt that the United States isn't on the top of the list of foreign aid donations relative to GDP (though I suspect it is at or near the top in total dollars). Frankly, I don't see why the USA gives as much as it does. I have friends that are constantly donating to different charities to help people in other countries. I used to as well, but not anymore. Every time I turn on the TV, or read a blog, or even read slashdot, I'm reminded of how much everybody else hates the USA. I see people comparing our president to Hitler. I see people burning our flag in their streets chanting "Death to the USA" or other catchy slogans. Any time anything bad happens anywhere in the world, people find a way to blame it on us. Either our actions caused it, or our inaction caused it, or we aren't doing enough to fix it. I 'm sorry people are suffering around the world, but I just don't feel like helping anymore. Until Japan, or the UK, or Poland, or some other country that doesn't hate the US needs our help, my extra cash is going to get spent on bigger TVs and faster computers. At least that way I'm helping out China, and instead of getting hatred and resentment in return, I get a big plasma screen.
1) Figure out what the secret key is based on the data and hashes being sent. If you could do this, you could generate your own HMAC and send your own data without being detected.
2) Intercept the packet and find a way to change the data in a way that will still generate the same hash value. This would allow you to change packets without being detected.
The vulnerability the researchers found doesn't help you accomplish either of these tasks, but it does show that SHA-1 has some weaknesses. Therefore, it's probably a good idea to start moving to a different hashing algorithm before somebody figures out a practical way to do #1 or #2. Also keep in mind that an HMAC exploit wouldn't help an attacker decrypt IPsec packets. To do this, a vulnerability would need to be found in either the encryption algorithm or the key exchange algorithm. In reality, a HMAC exploit by itself would only allow an attacker to send garbage data to the target address.
While this finding definitely shows a weakness in the SHA algorithm, it isn't a weakness that makes most applications that use SHA any more vulnerable. They found a way to generate two texts that produce the same hash using an algorithm with a time complexity of 2^63 instead of 2^80 as would be required for a brute force attack. However, being able to generate two texts that produce the same hash won't help you exploit most systems that rely on SHA. If someone finds a way to generate text that produces a SPECIFIED hash in 2^63 time, then there's reason to be concerned. However, since these findings show that SHA-1 has some weaknesses, it's probably time to start looking for a better hashing algorithm before a more serious vulnerability is found.
I think you hit on it. I was talking to some guys from Freescale recently about processor offerings for one of our new board designs and the topic somehow got sidetracked on Apple's switch to Intel. They told me that nobody was really making much money selling processors to Apple. They had to invest a lot of $$$ into R&D to continue cranking out new chips for Apple, and Apple wasn't willing to pay much for the chips. As a result, a business decision was made to focus R&D in the area that had the biggest payoff -- the embedded market. Bottom line: IBM & Freescale were planning to target all new processor designs at the embedded market not the desktop market, and Apple knew it. x86 is really the only processor out there that gets designed specifically for the desktop market. To stay competitive, Apple had to move to x86.
Actually, I think that aired on the fox network, not the fox news channel. They were also the ones that aired the special about the alien autopsy that happened at area 51 if I recall correctly. Unlike the entertainment network, fox news channel's reporting is basically as acurate as the other major news outlets. Most people who hate that channel disagree with the political views expressed in their news analysis shows. The accuracy of the news they report generally isn't the issue.
What bothers me is all the "documentaries" about aliens and ghosts that find their way on to the educational networks like the discovery channel and the learning channel. Now when they show a legitamate documentary, I feel I can't trust it because they air so much junk science. I used to watch those channels all the time, but now the only thing I bother with is Mythbusters -- that show rocks.
Easy. Really easy. It's just a DTMF decoder. If you don't know how DTMF works, see this site for the details. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already some open source software that does DTMF decoding. If not, I would be willing to design a suitable DTMF decoder if someone else wants to write the code to interface it with Skype.
* Most deaf-blind people are not born deaf and blind. Most deaf-blind people are born either deaf or blind and then lose the other sense as they get older. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but the overwhelming majority of deaf-blind people we met suffered from Usher Syndrome. Most people who have this genetic disorder are born deaf and then start going blind around 30. From my experience, most of these people only start to learn braille when they start to experience vision loss. It can be difficult for adults to learn braille. As a result, it's very useful to have a display suitable for people with reduced vision in addition to a braille display to ease the transition as these people are learning braille.
* Deaf-blind people communicate by using sign language and feeling the speaker's hand as things are signed. However, deaf-blind people often need to communicate with people who do not know sign langage (a repairman, neighbor, paramedics, etc). To do this, they often rely on a computer, text telephone, or similar device that allows them to type messages back and forth to the person they need to communicate with. It's important to keep secondary uses like this in mind when designing a product.
* For the severely vision impaired, we found that LCD and CRT based displays were not easy to read. The displays that were easiest to read had about 2-inch letters and emitted a bright light in the blue-green area of the color spectrum. Scrolling text is very difficult to read for people with severe vision impairments. Many of the people we worked with had severe tunnel vision that made multi-line displays confusing. These people would keep their head a couple of inches from the screen and move their head to scan across the line. We ended up using a large vacuum-flourescent display that would advance a line at a time at the user's control. We also found that having interchangeable color filters for the display made it useful for more people since everyone's vision loss is different.
* We found that multi-line braille displays were confusing for a lot of people and didn't serve much purpose since you can only read one line at a time. The design we used that people seemed to like the best was a 20 character braille display with a button on the left-hand side for scrolling up one line and a button on the right hand side for scrolling down one line.
* Some people we met were good typists, but most people tended to one-finger it. That's bad enough if you can see, but it's even worse for blind people. We had braille lettering on our keys, and we found that a lot of people would scan the keys with their fingers to locate the letter they wanted to type. However, they often ended up inadvertantly pressing these keys as they were scanning the braille. Using very stiff key switches greatly reduced this problem.
* Placement of keys, power switches, etc is very important. Things need to be easy to locate but difficult to inadvertantly hit. This is harder than it sounds and you probably won't know the mistakes in the layout until you ask a blind person to use it.
* Before I worked on this project, I had no idea that there are two different kinds of braille: 6-dot and 8-dot. Far more people are familiar with 6-dot since it's what's used for most books, but 6-dot has a lot of limitations. The only symbols you get are period and comma. Numbers are letters that are prefixed by the number symbol. As you can see, there can be some information l