Big, hulking suits of armor and powered transportation that let a single soldier outfight and outmaneuver others...
...is this unique? Not really. Think of the Middle Ages, when Western-style warfare was ruled by mounted knights, with their 100-pound steel suits of full plate armor and their heavy war horses. Back then, armor and equipment was more equally balanced with the lethality of weapons. Hence, small units of elite troops (heavy cavalry) could rout much larger units of normal infantry.
When firearms started to really catch on, mounted knights slowly lost their elite status as they became less effective militarily. The balance between armor and weapons swung once more in favor of weapons, and it became more important to put lots of soldiers on the ground with weapons than it was to field small, specialized units.
So, you have a circle between highly trained units and large masses of soldiers that starts with the Roman legions, goes through Middle Age heavy cavalry, on to the massive conscript armies of Napoleon, then to the German Panzer units of the initial blitzkrieg, to the advent of "endless wave" doctrine used to most effect by China and North Korea, and finally to the development of close air-supported special forces. I obviously focused on land warfare and still left out a lot of different military innovations and tactics throughout history, but you can see a reversible shift between emphasis on lots of weapons and emphasis on specialized, highly trained and well-protected troops.
Maybe more importantly for the here and now, the US military has recognized the need to be flexible, and that both types of land warfare can be effective in the right situation. The many branches of their special operations troops and their huge armored divisions both have their place at the table.
You can divide the computing world into segments, which are analogous to other market segments.
Dell/Microsoft computers = Honda Accords, Toyota Camrys = Chili's restaurant
Standardized up the wazoo, gives pretty good service, aimed squarely at middle-class consumers that want value and reliability at not too high of a price.
Emachine/Microsoft computers = Geo Metros = McDonald's
Extremely standardized (to the lowest level), very cheap... aimed at consumers who want/need the product (be it food, cars, computers) at the least cost. Products aren't as reliable and may produce breakdowns as a side effect (gastric or mechanical). Product as a commodity.
Compaq/Microsoft computers = rental cars = products from Sysco (a food supplier for most restaurants)
Not bad products, aimed at their target segments (companies that need lots of them) mostly for price and cost of ownership (although in Compaq's case, that's debatable).
Apple computers = new VW beetle, Ford Thunderbird = Bellini's Italian restaurant
Aimed at upscale, upper-middle and upper class image-conscious consumers who usually don't know too much about the product they're buying. Product hallmarks are that it looks cool, nobody will look down on you for buying their products (except the next segment), they're usually overpriced, it looks cool, and they have good reliability, service, and ease of use. Did I mention it looks cool? Underneath the appearance, they have pretty standard, very good quality components.
Do-it-yourself/*nix computer = custom-job Corvettes and Mustangs = people who cook their own food, and are excellent at it too (Mom!)
Products that are usually upgraded from stock products by people with a high knowledge of what they're doing with it. In Mom's case, she goes to the grocery store and cooks some damn fine pasta from ingredients she gets there. Sometimes she orders ingredients from specialized stores. In the computer geek's case, they take a stock computer (or build one themselves) and replace and upgrade the parts they choose. And we all have a car geek friend who can tell the 20 different modifications to a '69 Mustang just by listening when someone revs it up. (Sometimes we are that person.)
And how can you summarize another long-winded Katz article and lots and lots of posts?
To each company their own market segment. Business 101.
Arguing that the FBI should be unable to develop Magic Lantern is almost exactly the same as law enforcement agencies arguing that private citizens should not be allowed to access strong encryption.
In both cases:
the argument hinges on the assumption that the party in question will abuse the technology (which is to some extent true, criminals will abuse encryption technology to hide evidence, just as there will be at least one or two cases of the FBI overstepping its bounds with Magic Lantern).
the technology for [encryption, Magic Lantern] exists, and is widely available, so trying to outlaw its existence and use by the [criminals, FBI] is pretty futile.
Writing letters to your representatives and starting petitions about strengthening the oversight mechanisms over the FBI makes a lot more sense, just like the FBI using other methods to gather intelligence on criminals makes more sense than banning strong encryption.
It's the networked computer-version of a phone wiretap.
In both cases, permission to use either information-collecting method has to be authorized first by a court-order. From the article [news.excite.com]:
When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: "Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process."
...which is legalspeak for "Yeah, as long as wiretaps require court orders, so does Magic Lantern."
I can't believe the number of posts comparing the introduction of Magic Lantern to a civil liberties meltdown getting +1 Insightfuls. They're about as insightful as the patriotic idiots who'd allow government agencies unchecked freedom to invade private citizens' lives in the name of antiterrorism.
The citizens of the US have a responsibility to watch over the actions of its government, to serve as a check against the growth of abuse of power. Melodramatic statements like "Welcome to a Brave New World!" and knee-jerk antigovernment statements like "Trust the FBI to abuse this the minute they get it" merely serve to marginalize and decrease the credibility of those that speak out against government agencies becoming too unfettered.
Am I afraid that Magic Lantern may someday be abused? Well, yeah, but I'm a lot more frightened by the potential abuse of "old-fashioned" things like the aforementioned wiretaps and unwarranted searches and seizures than I am of the FBI emailing me an easily detectable and easily deletable script or executable virus. Magic Lantern doesn't strike me as a shadowy menace so much as the amateurish nature of a government agency still in the first steps of dealing with a wired world.
The key to preventing abuse by the FBI and other agencies is not by depriving it of tools to work with, such as wiretaps or Magic Lantern, but to ensure that adequate oversight exists and continues to do so in the future. Spending time and energy protecting and advocating the transparency and accountability of the FBI is infinitely more effective, and more likely to work, than seeking to deprive the FBI of intelligence-gathering tools to work with.
Now, picture Slashdot. Look around at your fellow posters. Do *you* get together on weekends? Do your spouses know any personal details of your fellow posters' spouses, beyond what may have slipped out during a long forgotten KDE/GNOME flamewar? Do you go trolling, play Counterstrike, or help your colleagues with the latest EFF petition? Do you even IM them to go out and get something to drink after work? Is it just the professions who share some element of physical and other danger from their incompetent, overzealous bosses where this stereotypical bonding occurs, or can it occur with everyone outside of Slashdot, too? What are your experiences with Slash relationships in the Dot?
Isn't it striking that people who claim to be members of a group advocating free thought and speech would be so anal and vitrolic about everyone who doesn't call Linux GNU/Linux?
also, note that the 1.7 ghz p4 has a 600 mhz advantage over the 1.1 ghz athlon and usually the performance difference was only 10-40%. the p4 has over 50% more processor mhz than the athlon. what an unfair comparison, especially when the 1.33 ghz athlon is out and available for purchase. processor mhz for processor mhz, the athlon beat the p4.
The point of the extremely long (20-stage) pipeline of the Pentium 4 is the ability to reach extremely high clock speeds - much higher than the Athlon could ever reach. Of course, Mhz-for-Mhz, the Athlon is going to beat the Pentium 4 performance-wise, but it wouldn't tell us anything except the obvious differences in the two's design philosophies.
"The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is giving $3,000 in prizes in a contest which will select the better ideas about how to handling and storing plutonium.. In their words, "We're inviting artists, architects, and general visionaries to submit their artistic work for what we're calling the "Plutonium Memorial," a facility that would house the world's unwanted weapon plutonium."
Better idea for handling and storing plutonium? Recycle it back into forms reusable for nuclear fuel. The main concern which has stopped anyone from recycling nuclear waste back into fuel is the fear that terrorists are going to steal the material. Either A) you have an artistic, monumental waste of plutonium just sitting there requiring massive security or B) you build a reprocessing plant that has the ability to get rid of most of our nuclear waste problem (you're welcome, Nevada) while requiring massive security. Personally, with all of the security problems over in Russia, I doubt knocking off a well-secured reprocessing plant would be half as attractive an option as paying a few bribes to underpaid Russian technicians.
Sure I see the need for a military but its not like we're at war, yet the government continues to build weapons.
Reasons why the government continues to build weapons:
Military strength equals less wars fought.
If a potential enemy knows that it's going to get its ass whipped, what are the chances of it picking a fight? Better weapons increase the chances of this perception taking root. Better weapons are therefore good. Myself, I prefer fewer conflicts over more anyday.
At the most extreme level, consider the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction: it may sound grim, but it's also kept the world's trigger fingers away from the nukes for the last 40 years.
A better generation of weapons will allow our military to accomplish their missions with less risk to the men and women in uniform.
More lethality, increased standoff ranges, decreased response times, more integration, etc. are reasons why the armed forces wants the newest and latest toys. These reasons are important because, bottom line, the more advantages our soldiers have, the more soldiers will be alive after the next conflict (e.g. the Gulf War).
Better weapons now means that we don't have to develop and learn how to use them while we're busy fighting the next war.
Take the M-16 rifle. US infantrymen were still learning the ins and outs of using and taking care of the new M-16 rifle while they were fighting in Vietnam. Result: hundreds of soldiers KIA from having a jammed weapon at exactly the wrong time. Introducing and learning how to use the newest and latest wonder hardware before we get into a fight will save lives.
Some weapons systems take way too long to procure and build to wait until we're near another conflict. The Navy's surface combatants and carriers take years to build, not to mention the time spent in their development phases. Start building Seawolf and Virginia class attack submarines now, and in 15 years we won't be stuck with obsolescent Los Angeles class SSNs when China finally gets around to taking military action against Taiwan.
So for those who don't know the scoop, all the planes that will be replaced by newer ones such as these go up for sale to countries that we have "erratic" ties to like Afghanistan.
More likely, they'll end up going to allies like Taiwan or Egypt, who could use the upgrades for their decaying militaries and we have no problems with selling to. Osama bin Laden's weapons came from the Soviet Afghanistan War, when the mujahedeen were our nominal allies then. Ditto for Iraq in the 1980s against Iran, who had fired on US ships and taken US diplomats hostage.
All these new toys for warfare when people are starving, and our economy slowing tanking. Thanks alot Dumbya.
Okay, you obviously missed A) the economic news that the US economy just grew by 2% and B) that the Fed is cutting interest rates like crazy. I'm not exactly sure how you think the few million dollars could be better spent to help the economy anyways. Monetary policy has been shown to be far superior in prodding the economy along than meager government spending changes.
And pardon me for sounding like a cold-hearted fascist conservative, but throwing money at poor people does not, in the long run, make them any better off! You'd think, after 3+ decades of the welfare state, that people would reconsider using big government as a solution to social and moral ills. Apparently bad ideas, like bad bosses, never go away.
If you were talking about foreign aid (especially to help starving people, a la Ethiopia and Somalia), it's notoriously bad for getting hijacked, commandeered by local warlords, and pocketed by corrupt bureaucrats. Also, consider this: the defense budget is a pittance to what the US government spends in entitlements, corporate subsidies, entitlements, interest towards the national debt, and entitlements. Did I mention entitlements? Sacred Cow programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are using up two-thirds of government expenditures. I wouldn't be worrying about the millions we spend developing UCAVs.
To paraphrase: don't be worrying about our President's education until you check your own noggin.
Clicking "I Agree" without reading a license agreement is legally binding, right?
Nope. According to contract law, there has to be 3 qualifications for a contract (license agreement, whatever) to be legally binding - one of them being that there must be a meeting of the minds, i.e. terms must be agreed to and neither side is deceiving the other. If you don't read the contract, terms can't be agreed to, can they?
This means that there is no license agreement between you and the software company; you technically have an illegal copy of the software installed.
Note that this is different from knowing the terms and agreeing to something unfair, like selling a $10 million painting for $10k.
Carbon is the lowest molecular weight element that easily forms complex chains. This is important for two reasons:
1. Because it's a lower molecular weight, from simple statistics a lot more carbon exists in the universe than similar elements (like silicon). Because it's a lower molecular weight, the sheer size of the electron orbitals doesn't interfere with molecular bonding.
2. "Foobarium", unless it has a tetrahedral organization like carbon, probably won't form the complex chains necessary for life. And since everything above silicon doesn't form chains due to weak molecular bonding, "foobarium", barring a revolution in the basic principles of life, doesn't exist. There are no silicon life forms on Earth because silicon chains break down in the presence of oxygen.
I agree that national missile defense (due to technological restrictions) is a massive waste of money at this time, but you have a lousy way of making your case.
Could it be officials here are disturbed because India could jeapordize the US' intentions of getting their Star Wars program back on the map?
It could be more probable that President George W Bush & co. want to push through on their campaign pledge, and reward the defense industry with a multibillion dollar contract. I doubt that a missile capacity that we've known India to be developing for the past decade really sets our schedules.
"The officials, speaking on condition they not be identified, said test preparations are going ahead in the absence of orders to the contrary from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld."
So Mr. Rumsfeld has himself denounced this but they are still going ahead with it.
If you bothered to read the sentence you noticed more carefully, DefSec Rumsfeld allowed the BMDO to proceed with more testing by not ordering it to stop. The BMDO, because it hasn't received orders to stop, assumes that everything's A-OK and continues with its schedule. No conspiracy here.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi warned that American missile defense "will have a far-reaching and extensive negative impact on the global and regional strategic balance and stability."
Duh! Why would Beijing not list 20 million bad reasons against a missile defense? Any successful national missile defense, no matter how small, would in all probability negate China's small (20 count) intercontinental nuclear arsenal, forcing them to spend tens of billions of dollars to modernize / expand it. I'll let you put 2 + 2 together.
In Moscow, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev asserted that a U.S. missile defense could easily be defeated by technologies the former Soviet Union developed in the 1980s in response to President Reagan's Star Wars plan that was a more ambitious attempt to defend against all-out missile attacks.
"We had three mighty programs to asymmetrically counteract U.S. national missile defenses during Reagan's 'Star Wars,"' Sergeyev was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. He gave no details. Although the programs were halted, "We still have them and can take them up again," he said.
This is the same Igor Sergeyev that predicted the Kosovo War would start World War III, and said that Chechnya would be cleared of terrorists in a bloodless, precision campaign. And now he says 1) we have ways to neutralize the missile defense (aside from the 6,000 warheads they now have) and 2) but we're not going to tell you anything. O-kay. If you believe anything he says at face value, I've got some nice oceanfront property in Oklahoma you might be interested in.
On one hand, yes, the threat of a suitcase nuke is hundreds of times more likely than a nation being stupid enough to lob one at us via ICBM, and yes, kinetic kill interceptor technology is just too unreliable to be workable right now. But making hysterical arguments (or worse, just repeating those hysterical arguments) against it isn't helping the anti-NMD position.
With tons of other [ways to get a five-finger discount], why pay for anything? The whole point of stealing is to get free stuff. I don't care about the companies, and I don't care about the inventors. I care about how fat my wallet is. Shelling out money for anything doesn't go well with me anymore.
Screw da Man! Run, don't walk, to loot your local Gap!
...simply because every MP3 encoder works with a different algorithm, producing slightly different results - not to mention CD audio rippers that produce quantitatively and qualitatively different source files.
Collection size won't be a valid basis for discounts either, because users will make up fake band names and songs for thousands of files to reduce their subscription costs. And since no one will be looking for those fake songs, it will be impossible to enforce.
And the real question is what percentage of Napster users will shell out the clams vs moving to OpenNap or Gnutella.
Of course, this is assuming that most Napster users even know about OpenNap or Gnutella. I know that at least 95% of my computer literate friends have never even heard of either one of them, and the ones that do are the active *nix users, not the casual MS Office users.
If 90% of Napster's clients come from Joe and Jill Schmoe using AOL, who don't know A) what the alternatives are or B) where to get them, than Napster has a pretty good racket going. Hook 'em by giving it away, then start charging later. They probably would have had to go to a subscription basis sooner or later, just to turn a profit, music industry lawsuits or no.
I think VIA is confused about where it wants to position the new Cyrix chip in the marketplace - heck, I think it's aiming for the wrong marketplace.
Cyrix processors of years past, along with the AMD processors before the K6, have proven that there is no place financially in the desktop market for a CPU line that performs subpar, and whose primary consumer incentive is that it's cheaper. It simply is too easy for the other competitors (Intel, and now AMD) to cut prices on their lower-tier CPUs (the ones that aren't the primary money makers anyway) and just squeeze the newcomer out of the marketplace.
Instead, if VIA is truly aiming at the "computing appliance" market, its competition is the Intel ARM processors, and the Motorola handheld processors as well. They should maybe think about paring down the integrated functions on the processor (as computing appliances probably don't need them anyways) to make the new Cyrix chips even cheaper and less power-hungry to make them both price AND performance competitive with the StrongARMs. They should also stop making comparisons to normal desktop CPUs, because they have a mountain of consumer recognition and recall to climb with the Intel and AMD brands, and they underperform them to boot. Just ask AMD how hard it was to break into the desktop market.
My 2 cents on why VIA's headed in the wrong direction.
As someone previously fluent in C/C++, and who picked up Java in a few CS classes, it took me all of, oh, 2 days to get the hang of it.
Java is so structurally similar to C++, barring a few areas like inheritance, pointers, and garbage collection, that switching from one to another is a snap.
From all the groaning and moaning, you would think they were asking to switch from C++ to BASIC. The old school BASIC.
Note that I'm not comparing implementations of the languages; personally, I think anything other than compiled binaries is heresy. =p Java is a nice language to code in, though.
Too much idealism, too little practicality
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 2
It is a good read, but a lot of the rhetoric's a little short on meat. Let me give an example, his proposing a "free" countrywide network for Israel:
"MOGLEN: There's no question. But the world economy would not necessarily be better off if nobody needed to buy any PCs any more. The fact that the hardware market actually saturated with all the computers we really needed years ago is not really an argument for why the society would be so much more prosperous if we stopped making them.
Rather, this is the digital divide problem in a serious way. I made a proposal to the Israeli government a year ago that went like this: Take every computer that you threw away in the state last year, just the ones you scrapped, and put free software on them. They are now the routers, bridges, switches and e-mail servers for an entire free broadband network for all of Israel. The only thing you don't have is the cable. But you have required annual military reserve duty. Take one cycle and say everybody not performing militarily essential service is laying fiber, for one year. You are now finished. Free software, scrapped computers, one year of conscript labor, and the physical cost of the fiber and you're done."
Questions:
Who pays for the fiber? It's not like laying a couple thousand miles of fiber optics is pocket change.
Who administers the network? You have thousands of computers that need to be refurbished and installed with the proper software, not to mention who fixes the bad things that will eventually happen to the network. That takes manpower (and I don't think conscript soldiers can build email servers) and more importantly, money to pay for that manpower.
How much electricity is this network going to suck up? It's not like Israel is bursting at the seams with extra kilowatt-hours.
Exactly how many soldiers on duty do you think Israel feels is doing nothing important? Especially now?
No wonder the Israelis were laughing behind his back. To hear Mr. Moglen say it, he was offering to wire up every Israeli for free...minus certain obvious necessities. He has some good thoughts to offer on almost everything, but I wish he would spend a little more time thinking through his proposals.
Detroit (AP) - With the widespread adoption of the new Ford Model T, in this, the year 1920, it has become clear that most of the issues surrounding the automobile have been addressed in the past twenty-five years of innovation.
For instance, many people are reverting back to walking to go to the neighbor's house, or to simply get some exercise. The automobile has gone from being a novelty to being integrated into the everyday lives of people, and some question whether any new technological advances can be made. Indeed, recent thermodynamic studies question whether the inherent inefficiencies in automobile engines make the pursuit of such advances worthwhile.
People who drive automobiles are generally happy with the way they use them, as intracity and other localized transportation avenues, and demand for other uses for automobiles is dwindling. Despite some fringe elements calling for a countrywide "interstate" system of roads, trains and boats, with their greater hauling capacity and more reliable operation, will probably squeeze out any such ideas of mass cargo transportation by road.
......
...like, duh. How do people who write these articles ever clear it past their editors?
The reason why Burlington Coat factory was such a big deal was because Linux, at that time, was a relative unknown to high-level IT management.
Any kind of enterprise-wide deployment a few years ago, be it Butt Scrapers 'R' Us or IBM, would have been celebrated, and rightly so, as a milestone for Linux adoption.
Nowadays, with all of the overexposure from the mainstream media on down, enterprise deployments have become ho-hum. I think most of us are now waiting on widespread consumer adoption as the next logical wave-maker for the Linux community.
...that this "discussion" is degenerating into a telling of sexist and racist jokes, and that it gets modded up in/.
The Asian locust couldn't drive in any direction...Male or female, it really didn't seem to make a difference, and no matter how much they waved or yelled at it, it just kept going on its merry way.
'Ha ha, yeah, that's brilliant! I think I'll give that a +1: Funny, and how about a +1: Informative, too! Gather 'round the fire, boys, and let's share some more good ones about Nigger and Spic locusts while we're at it!!!'
I hope the poster, and the moderator at least have the good sense to be ashamed. Too bad the poster didn't use his account so I could tell him personally what I think.
I'm talking about the "hey, we're 45 with 2 kids already, OOOOPS, we forgot the birth control kind of mistake!"
I have a pretty good idea (since I'm 9 years younger than my brother and 10 from my sister) that I was such a mistake. There are probably tens of thousands of others in the US just like me. Does that mean my parents love me any less than my siblings because I wasn't planned? No.
Does this mean the parents of that son love him any less than their daughter? No. Get off their backs.
That really suck, and I thought we might be dealing with some intelligance here.
...and bust out laughing? Maybe I'm just strange that way...
But to rebut the aforementioned post, I beg to differ. One-click purchasing is just another implementation of a common business model (using IT to keep track of customer info to use during their next purchase). Papa John's, the most popular pizza parlor here at OU keeps track of addresses based on customer's phone numbers, so all you do is give your order, and based on caller ID they know where to deliver it. Just one of many examples.
Slashdot Mirror
Big, hulking suits of armor and powered transportation that let a single soldier outfight and outmaneuver others...
...is this unique? Not really. Think of the Middle Ages, when Western-style warfare was ruled by mounted knights, with their 100-pound steel suits of full plate armor and their heavy war horses. Back then, armor and equipment was more equally balanced with the lethality of weapons. Hence, small units of elite troops (heavy cavalry) could rout much larger units of normal infantry.
When firearms started to really catch on, mounted knights slowly lost their elite status as they became less effective militarily. The balance between armor and weapons swung once more in favor of weapons, and it became more important to put lots of soldiers on the ground with weapons than it was to field small, specialized units.
So, you have a circle between highly trained units and large masses of soldiers that starts with the Roman legions, goes through Middle Age heavy cavalry, on to the massive conscript armies of Napoleon, then to the German Panzer units of the initial blitzkrieg, to the advent of "endless wave" doctrine used to most effect by China and North Korea, and finally to the development of close air-supported special forces. I obviously focused on land warfare and still left out a lot of different military innovations and tactics throughout history, but you can see a reversible shift between emphasis on lots of weapons and emphasis on specialized, highly trained and well-protected troops.
Maybe more importantly for the here and now, the US military has recognized the need to be flexible, and that both types of land warfare can be effective in the right situation. The many branches of their special operations troops and their huge armored divisions both have their place at the table.
Standardized up the wazoo, gives pretty good service, aimed squarely at middle-class consumers that want value and reliability at not too high of a price.
Extremely standardized (to the lowest level), very cheap... aimed at consumers who want/need the product (be it food, cars, computers) at the least cost. Products aren't as reliable and may produce breakdowns as a side effect (gastric or mechanical). Product as a commodity.
Not bad products, aimed at their target segments (companies that need lots of them) mostly for price and cost of ownership (although in Compaq's case, that's debatable).
Aimed at upscale, upper-middle and upper class image-conscious consumers who usually don't know too much about the product they're buying. Product hallmarks are that it looks cool, nobody will look down on you for buying their products (except the next segment), they're usually overpriced, it looks cool, and they have good reliability, service, and ease of use. Did I mention it looks cool? Underneath the appearance, they have pretty standard, very good quality components.
Products that are usually upgraded from stock products by people with a high knowledge of what they're doing with it. In Mom's case, she goes to the grocery store and cooks some damn fine pasta from ingredients she gets there. Sometimes she orders ingredients from specialized stores. In the computer geek's case, they take a stock computer (or build one themselves) and replace and upgrade the parts they choose. And we all have a car geek friend who can tell the 20 different modifications to a '69 Mustang just by listening when someone revs it up. (Sometimes we are that person.)
And how can you summarize another long-winded Katz article and lots and lots of posts?
To each company their own market segment. Business 101.
In both cases:
Writing letters to your representatives and starting petitions about strengthening the oversight mechanisms over the FBI makes a lot more sense, just like the FBI using other methods to gather intelligence on criminals makes more sense than banning strong encryption.
Magic Lantern is nothing new.
It's the networked computer-version of a phone wiretap.
In both cases, permission to use either information-collecting method has to be authorized first by a court-order. From the article [news.excite.com]:
When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: "Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process."
...which is legalspeak for "Yeah, as long as wiretaps require court orders, so does Magic Lantern."
I can't believe the number of posts comparing the introduction of Magic Lantern to a civil liberties meltdown getting +1 Insightfuls. They're about as insightful as the patriotic idiots who'd allow government agencies unchecked freedom to invade private citizens' lives in the name of antiterrorism.
The citizens of the US have a responsibility to watch over the actions of its government, to serve as a check against the growth of abuse of power. Melodramatic statements like "Welcome to a Brave New World!" and knee-jerk antigovernment statements like "Trust the FBI to abuse this the minute they get it" merely serve to marginalize and decrease the credibility of those that speak out against government agencies becoming too unfettered.
Am I afraid that Magic Lantern may someday be abused? Well, yeah, but I'm a lot more frightened by the potential abuse of "old-fashioned" things like the aforementioned wiretaps and unwarranted searches and seizures than I am of the FBI emailing me an easily detectable and easily deletable script or executable virus. Magic Lantern doesn't strike me as a shadowy menace so much as the amateurish nature of a government agency still in the first steps of dealing with a wired world.
The key to preventing abuse by the FBI and other agencies is not by depriving it of tools to work with, such as wiretaps or Magic Lantern, but to ensure that adequate oversight exists and continues to do so in the future. Spending time and energy protecting and advocating the transparency and accountability of the FBI is infinitely more effective, and more likely to work, than seeking to deprive the FBI of intelligence-gathering tools to work with.
Now, picture Slashdot. Look around at your fellow posters. Do *you* get together on weekends? Do your spouses know any personal details of your fellow posters' spouses, beyond what may have slipped out during a long forgotten KDE/GNOME flamewar? Do you go trolling, play Counterstrike, or help your colleagues with the latest EFF petition? Do you even IM them to go out and get something to drink after work? Is it just the professions who share some element of physical and other danger from their incompetent, overzealous bosses where this stereotypical bonding occurs, or can it occur with everyone outside of Slashdot, too? What are your experiences with Slash relationships in the Dot?
Isn't it striking that people who claim to be members of a group advocating free thought and speech would be so anal and vitrolic about everyone who doesn't call Linux GNU/Linux?
also, note that the 1.7 ghz p4 has a 600 mhz advantage over the 1.1 ghz athlon and usually the performance difference was only 10-40%. the p4 has over 50% more processor mhz than the athlon. what an unfair comparison, especially when the 1.33 ghz athlon is out and available for purchase. processor mhz for processor mhz, the athlon beat the p4.
The point of the extremely long (20-stage) pipeline of the Pentium 4 is the ability to reach extremely high clock speeds - much higher than the Athlon could ever reach. Of course, Mhz-for-Mhz, the Athlon is going to beat the Pentium 4 performance-wise, but it wouldn't tell us anything except the obvious differences in the two's design philosophies.
"The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is giving $3,000 in prizes in a contest which will select the better ideas about how to handling and storing plutonium.. In their words, "We're inviting artists, architects, and general visionaries to submit their artistic work for what we're calling the "Plutonium Memorial," a facility that would house the world's unwanted weapon plutonium."
Better idea for handling and storing plutonium? Recycle it back into forms reusable for nuclear fuel. The main concern which has stopped anyone from recycling nuclear waste back into fuel is the fear that terrorists are going to steal the material. Either A) you have an artistic, monumental waste of plutonium just sitting there requiring massive security or B) you build a reprocessing plant that has the ability to get rid of most of our nuclear waste problem (you're welcome, Nevada) while requiring massive security. Personally, with all of the security problems over in Russia, I doubt knocking off a well-secured reprocessing plant would be half as attractive an option as paying a few bribes to underpaid Russian technicians.
Reasons why the government continues to build weapons:
If a potential enemy knows that it's going to get its ass whipped, what are the chances of it picking a fight? Better weapons increase the chances of this perception taking root. Better weapons are therefore good. Myself, I prefer fewer conflicts over more anyday.
At the most extreme level, consider the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction: it may sound grim, but it's also kept the world's trigger fingers away from the nukes for the last 40 years.
More lethality, increased standoff ranges, decreased response times, more integration, etc. are reasons why the armed forces wants the newest and latest toys. These reasons are important because, bottom line, the more advantages our soldiers have, the more soldiers will be alive after the next conflict (e.g. the Gulf War).
Take the M-16 rifle. US infantrymen were still learning the ins and outs of using and taking care of the new M-16 rifle while they were fighting in Vietnam. Result: hundreds of soldiers KIA from having a jammed weapon at exactly the wrong time. Introducing and learning how to use the newest and latest wonder hardware before we get into a fight will save lives.
Some weapons systems take way too long to procure and build to wait until we're near another conflict. The Navy's surface combatants and carriers take years to build, not to mention the time spent in their development phases. Start building Seawolf and Virginia class attack submarines now, and in 15 years we won't be stuck with obsolescent Los Angeles class SSNs when China finally gets around to taking military action against Taiwan.
So for those who don't know the scoop, all the planes that will be replaced by newer ones such as these go up for sale to countries that we have "erratic" ties to like Afghanistan.
More likely, they'll end up going to allies like Taiwan or Egypt, who could use the upgrades for their decaying militaries and we have no problems with selling to. Osama bin Laden's weapons came from the Soviet Afghanistan War, when the mujahedeen were our nominal allies then. Ditto for Iraq in the 1980s against Iran, who had fired on US ships and taken US diplomats hostage.
All these new toys for warfare when people are starving, and our economy slowing tanking. Thanks alot Dumbya.
Okay, you obviously missed A) the economic news that the US economy just grew by 2% and B) that the Fed is cutting interest rates like crazy. I'm not exactly sure how you think the few million dollars could be better spent to help the economy anyways. Monetary policy has been shown to be far superior in prodding the economy along than meager government spending changes.
And pardon me for sounding like a cold-hearted fascist conservative, but throwing money at poor people does not, in the long run, make them any better off! You'd think, after 3+ decades of the welfare state, that people would reconsider using big government as a solution to social and moral ills. Apparently bad ideas, like bad bosses, never go away.
If you were talking about foreign aid (especially to help starving people, a la Ethiopia and Somalia), it's notoriously bad for getting hijacked, commandeered by local warlords, and pocketed by corrupt bureaucrats. Also, consider this: the defense budget is a pittance to what the US government spends in entitlements, corporate subsidies, entitlements, interest towards the national debt, and entitlements. Did I mention entitlements? Sacred Cow programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are using up two-thirds of government expenditures. I wouldn't be worrying about the millions we spend developing UCAVs.
To paraphrase: don't be worrying about our President's education until you check your own noggin.
Clicking "I Agree" without reading a license agreement is legally binding, right?
Nope. According to contract law, there has to be 3 qualifications for a contract (license agreement, whatever) to be legally binding - one of them being that there must be a meeting of the minds, i.e. terms must be agreed to and neither side is deceiving the other. If you don't read the contract, terms can't be agreed to, can they?
This means that there is no license agreement between you and the software company; you technically have an illegal copy of the software installed.
Note that this is different from knowing the terms and agreeing to something unfair, like selling a $10 million painting for $10k.
Carbon is the lowest molecular weight element that easily forms complex chains. This is important for two reasons:
1. Because it's a lower molecular weight, from simple statistics a lot more carbon exists in the universe than similar elements (like silicon). Because it's a lower molecular weight, the sheer size of the electron orbitals doesn't interfere with molecular bonding.
2. "Foobarium", unless it has a tetrahedral organization like carbon, probably won't form the complex chains necessary for life. And since everything above silicon doesn't form chains due to weak molecular bonding, "foobarium", barring a revolution in the basic principles of life, doesn't exist. There are no silicon life forms on Earth because silicon chains break down in the presence of oxygen.
I agree that national missile defense (due to technological restrictions) is a massive waste of money at this time, but you have a lousy way of making your case.
Could it be officials here are disturbed because India could jeapordize the US' intentions of getting their Star Wars program back on the map?
It could be more probable that President George W Bush & co. want to push through on their campaign pledge, and reward the defense industry with a multibillion dollar contract. I doubt that a missile capacity that we've known India to be developing for the past decade really sets our schedules.
"The officials, speaking on condition they not be identified, said test preparations are going ahead in the absence of orders to the contrary from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld."
So Mr. Rumsfeld has himself denounced this but they are still going ahead with it.
If you bothered to read the sentence you noticed more carefully, DefSec Rumsfeld allowed the BMDO to proceed with more testing by not ordering it to stop. The BMDO, because it hasn't received orders to stop, assumes that everything's A-OK and continues with its schedule. No conspiracy here.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi warned that American missile defense "will have a far-reaching and extensive negative impact on the global and regional strategic balance and stability."
Duh! Why would Beijing not list 20 million bad reasons against a missile defense? Any successful national missile defense, no matter how small, would in all probability negate China's small (20 count) intercontinental nuclear arsenal, forcing them to spend tens of billions of dollars to modernize / expand it. I'll let you put 2 + 2 together.
In Moscow, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev asserted that a U.S. missile defense could easily be defeated by technologies the former Soviet Union developed in the 1980s in response to President Reagan's Star Wars plan that was a more ambitious attempt to defend against all-out missile attacks.
"We had three mighty programs to asymmetrically counteract U.S. national missile defenses during Reagan's 'Star Wars,"' Sergeyev was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. He gave no details. Although the programs were halted, "We still have them and can take them up again," he said.
This is the same Igor Sergeyev that predicted the Kosovo War would start World War III, and said that Chechnya would be cleared of terrorists in a bloodless, precision campaign. And now he says 1) we have ways to neutralize the missile defense (aside from the 6,000 warheads they now have) and 2) but we're not going to tell you anything. O-kay. If you believe anything he says at face value, I've got some nice oceanfront property in Oklahoma you might be interested in.
On one hand, yes, the threat of a suitcase nuke is hundreds of times more likely than a nation being stupid enough to lob one at us via ICBM, and yes, kinetic kill interceptor technology is just too unreliable to be workable right now. But making hysterical arguments (or worse, just repeating those hysterical arguments) against it isn't helping the anti-NMD position.
""There really isn't much value in free," said Miller..."
...as opposed to paying $100 for the latest and greatest bug fixes?
Or maybe Doogie was referring to the value in paying hundreds of dollars per machine for a halfway stable OS (Win 2000).
With tons of other [ways to get a five-finger discount], why pay for anything? The whole point of stealing is to get free stuff. I don't care about the companies, and I don't care about the inventors. I care about how fat my wallet is. Shelling out money for anything doesn't go well with me anymore.
Screw da Man! Run, don't walk, to loot your local Gap!
(/sarcasm)
...simply because every MP3 encoder works with a different algorithm, producing slightly different results - not to mention CD audio rippers that produce quantitatively and qualitatively different source files.
Collection size won't be a valid basis for discounts either, because users will make up fake band names and songs for thousands of files to reduce their subscription costs. And since no one will be looking for those fake songs, it will be impossible to enforce.
And the real question is what percentage of Napster users will shell out the clams vs moving to OpenNap or Gnutella.
Of course, this is assuming that most Napster users even know about OpenNap or Gnutella. I know that at least 95% of my computer literate friends have never even heard of either one of them, and the ones that do are the active *nix users, not the casual MS Office users.
If 90% of Napster's clients come from Joe and Jill Schmoe using AOL, who don't know A) what the alternatives are or B) where to get them, than Napster has a pretty good racket going. Hook 'em by giving it away, then start charging later. They probably would have had to go to a subscription basis sooner or later, just to turn a profit, music industry lawsuits or no.
I think VIA is confused about where it wants to position the new Cyrix chip in the marketplace - heck, I think it's aiming for the wrong marketplace.
Cyrix processors of years past, along with the AMD processors before the K6, have proven that there is no place financially in the desktop market for a CPU line that performs subpar, and whose primary consumer incentive is that it's cheaper. It simply is too easy for the other competitors (Intel, and now AMD) to cut prices on their lower-tier CPUs (the ones that aren't the primary money makers anyway) and just squeeze the newcomer out of the marketplace.
Instead, if VIA is truly aiming at the "computing appliance" market, its competition is the Intel ARM processors, and the Motorola handheld processors as well. They should maybe think about paring down the integrated functions on the processor (as computing appliances probably don't need them anyways) to make the new Cyrix chips even cheaper and less power-hungry to make them both price AND performance competitive with the StrongARMs. They should also stop making comparisons to normal desktop CPUs, because they have a mountain of consumer recognition and recall to climb with the Intel and AMD brands, and they underperform them to boot. Just ask AMD how hard it was to break into the desktop market.
My 2 cents on why VIA's headed in the wrong direction.
As someone previously fluent in C/C++, and who picked up Java in a few CS classes, it took me all of, oh, 2 days to get the hang of it.
Java is so structurally similar to C++, barring a few areas like inheritance, pointers, and garbage collection, that switching from one to another is a snap.
From all the groaning and moaning, you would think they were asking to switch from C++ to BASIC. The old school BASIC.
Note that I'm not comparing implementations of the languages; personally, I think anything other than compiled binaries is heresy. =p Java is a nice language to code in, though.
"MOGLEN: There's no question. But the world economy would not necessarily be better off if nobody needed to buy any PCs any more. The fact that the hardware market actually saturated with all the computers we really needed years ago is not really an argument for why the society would be so much more prosperous if we stopped making them.
Rather, this is the digital divide problem in a serious way. I made a proposal to the Israeli government a year ago that went like this: Take every computer that you threw away in the state last year, just the ones you scrapped, and put free software on them. They are now the routers, bridges, switches and e-mail servers for an entire free broadband network for all of Israel. The only thing you don't have is the cable. But you have required annual military reserve duty. Take one cycle and say everybody not performing militarily essential service is laying fiber, for one year. You are now finished. Free software, scrapped computers, one year of conscript labor, and the physical cost of the fiber and you're done."
Questions:
- Who pays for the fiber? It's not like laying a couple thousand miles of fiber optics is pocket change.
- Who administers the network? You have thousands of computers that need to be refurbished and installed with the proper software, not to mention who fixes the bad things that will eventually happen to the network. That takes manpower (and I don't think conscript soldiers can build email servers) and more importantly, money to pay for that manpower.
- How much electricity is this network going to suck up? It's not like Israel is bursting at the seams with extra kilowatt-hours.
- Exactly how many soldiers on duty do you think Israel feels is doing nothing important? Especially now?
No wonder the Israelis were laughing behind his back. To hear Mr. Moglen say it, he was offering to wire up every Israeli for free...minus certain obvious necessities. He has some good thoughts to offer on almost everything, but I wish he would spend a little more time thinking through his proposals.Detroit (AP) - With the widespread adoption of the new Ford Model T, in this, the year 1920, it has become clear that most of the issues surrounding the automobile have been addressed in the past twenty-five years of innovation.
For instance, many people are reverting back to walking to go to the neighbor's house, or to simply get some exercise. The automobile has gone from being a novelty to being integrated into the everyday lives of people, and some question whether any new technological advances can be made. Indeed, recent thermodynamic studies question whether the inherent inefficiencies in automobile engines make the pursuit of such advances worthwhile.
People who drive automobiles are generally happy with the way they use them, as intracity and other localized transportation avenues, and demand for other uses for automobiles is dwindling. Despite some fringe elements calling for a countrywide "interstate" system of roads, trains and boats, with their greater hauling capacity and more reliable operation, will probably squeeze out any such ideas of mass cargo transportation by road.
Intel can't develop it's own DDR or even normal SDRAM motherboard design for months due to a licensing agreement it signed with Rambus.
Asus is using the Intel design for the i850 with a few tweaks, therefore it uses RDRAM.
The reason why Burlington Coat factory was such a big deal was because Linux, at that time, was a relative unknown to high-level IT management.
Any kind of enterprise-wide deployment a few years ago, be it Butt Scrapers 'R' Us or IBM, would have been celebrated, and rightly so, as a milestone for Linux adoption.
Nowadays, with all of the overexposure from the mainstream media on down, enterprise deployments have become ho-hum. I think most of us are now waiting on widespread consumer adoption as the next logical wave-maker for the Linux community.
The Asian locust couldn't drive in any direction...Male or female, it really didn't seem to make a difference, and no matter how much they waved or yelled at it, it just kept going on its merry way.
'Ha ha, yeah, that's brilliant! I think I'll give that a +1: Funny, and how about a +1: Informative, too! Gather 'round the fire, boys, and let's share some more good ones about Nigger and Spic locusts while we're at it!!!'
I hope the poster, and the moderator at least have the good sense to be ashamed. Too bad the poster didn't use his account so I could tell him personally what I think.
Not medical mistakes, but parental ones.
I'm talking about the "hey, we're 45 with 2 kids already, OOOOPS, we forgot the birth control kind of mistake!"
I have a pretty good idea (since I'm 9 years younger than my brother and 10 from my sister) that I was such a mistake. There are probably tens of thousands of others in the US just like me. Does that mean my parents love me any less than my siblings because I wasn't planned? No.
Does this mean the parents of that son love him any less than their daughter? No. Get off their backs.
That really suck, and I thought we might be dealing with some intelligance here.
...and bust out laughing? Maybe I'm just strange that way...
But to rebut the aforementioned post, I beg to differ. One-click purchasing is just another implementation of a common business model (using IT to keep track of customer info to use during their next purchase). Papa John's, the most popular pizza parlor here at OU keeps track of addresses based on customer's phone numbers, so all you do is give your order, and based on caller ID they know where to deliver it. Just one of many examples.