I disagree about the shelf life. I have burned cds that are over three years old and read fine.
Protect them from light and bleach fumes and they'll last a longer time than if you leave them lying about on your desk. B-) Protect them from oxygen and they'll probably last quite a while.
But you can't count on it. Especially if they're your only backup. Doubly so if you keep sticking them in a drive and shining a laser on them because somebody wants to read the contents.
So you have to assume they're short-timers when you do your planning.
The dies in writable CDs have a much shorter lifetime than the printed ones. Like three-ish years. So figure they have to make new copies ever two years, plus at least two spars of each, for redundancy. Call it 15K/year CD burnings just for this batch of 10,000 images.
Now an automated burning operation can do a bit more than 7 1/2 disks/hour single-shift. But then you have to have a carousell to handle 10,000 CDs (times several for redundancy), in order to automate the process.
So I don't think burning them to CDs is the solution.
Call it 3 CDs per gig. Or a bunch more, since most of 'em won't be full, so make that 10/gig. That's one terrabyte. Don't we have hard drives about that big now? Build a RAID, mirror it (offsite), replace disks as they die, and clone the mirror every few years to cover for catastrophic multi-disk failures and obsolescence of the RAID platforms and disks. Online all the time that way, too.
I'd say we lost half the battle when people started accepting "stolen intellectual property" as a meaningful term.
Yep. But that's a separate issue.
The legal system currently recognizes the right to control the distribution and/or copying of certain creations as a property right. Don't like it? Get the law changed, struck down, or overthrow the whole system.
But be careful if you want to exercise that last option. If you succeed, you'll take pot luck on the NEXT system. Meanwhile, the system has lasted this long, in part, because it resists being overthrown.
And ignoring the law in this case - by breaking it - may be effective. But it's not "passive resistance", and may attract undesirable attention from the authorities.
In the '60s many of my peers thought the drug laws could be overthrown by saturating the system. Look how effective THAT has been at getting the drug laws ended. And unlike the drug laws, the copyright laws have a clear "victim", in the form of someone with a legal and financial interest in pushing the government to enforce his privileges.
Of course the Swiss don't have this problem. Their government REQUIRES them each to have a machine gun (or some other piece of large-scale military nastiness) handy. B-)
Well, a little red knife, anyway.
Or the big red knife:
- Tiny little scisors
- Tiny little screwdriver
- Tiny little tommygun
- Tiny little satelite uplink
- Tiny little antitank missile
- Tiny little tactical nuke...
CNET posted an article claiming you could be liable for $250,000 in fines and up to 3 years in prison for p2p file sharing.
No it did not.
It posted an article saying that you could be [etc.] for p2p file sharing of COPYRIGHTED WORKS, WITHOUT PERMISSION.
It's just FINE to run or use a p2p network and share UNCOPYRIGHTED works or copyrighted works WITH permission.
Let's get it RIGHT people. If we let "p2p file sharing" become synonomous with "p2p file sharing of stolen intelectual property" we've lost half the battle.
It used to be - as with "hackers" vs. "crackers" - the mainstream media getting it wrong and tarring the good guys with the bad-guy brush, and the nerd sites getting it right but crying in the wilderness. Now we've got a mainstream site getting it right, while the slashdot posting gets it wrong.
I can just imagine the RIAA lawyers pouncing on this article as further evidence that "the only use for p2p is theft". "See! Even they admit it!"
So let's have a little more attention to such distinctions - from the posters, or for GOD'S SAKE at LEAST from the EDITORS!
In Switzerland, they actually let people VOTE on whether they want these acts or not.
Nice to hear it. Wish we had that here.
Got to love America?s "Democratic" government, passing laws without even letting the people know.
Actually, the US isn't a democracy. It's a republic. The general population doesn't vote on the laws (as in a democracy). The enfranchised portion of the general population votes on the legislators, then the legislators vote on the laws.
Originally the general population voted on the representatives and the states chose the senators (with the states' population in turn chosing the state reps and governor who were the ones chosing the senators). But that got changed so the population votes directly on both.
Of course sometimes they pass laws without the CONGRESSMEN knowing.
- The congresscritters rarely read the text, but depend on the recommendations of their staff, their party, (or sometimes their major contributors B-( ).
- Even if they want to read what they're voting, often it's impossible. The staffers put together the final text of enormous bills, which appear on the legislators desks within hours, or even minutes, of the final vote. (I recall one that was a stack of paper several feet thick that showed up in just such a fashion.) I've yet to hear of a congresscritter voting against a bill because "I haven't had time to read it."
- A conference committee might completely re-write a bill (possibly with similar staff "assistance"). Both houses normally rubber-stamp a conference committee's results.
And even when the congresscritters know what they're voting on, maybe nobody else does, or has a chance to comment. For instance:
The "Firearm Owners Protection Act" was a bill to protect gunowners from the web of 30,000-ish conflicting state, county, and local firearms laws when traveling. A tiny bill that said ~"If it's legal where you start your trip, legal where you finish it, and locked up in between, it's ok to transport it no matter what the state and local laws say in the places you pass through"~. Much support from pro-firearms groups.
In the minutes before the final vote it was amended to also ban the manufacture of new machine guns for sale to private citizens in the (already heavily regulated) private market. So the supply would be limited to those already papered - and thus become obsolete, expensive, and eventually disappear.
SURPRISE!
Of course it passed. (And some pro-gun organizations got a lot of undeserved flack for "selling out" the machine-gun fans, when it was really a crooked political gambit by the anti-gun politicians.)
Of course the Swiss don't have this problem. Their government REQUIRES them each to have a machine gun (or some other piece of large-scale military nastiness) handy. B-)
The article tried to make it sound like the semiconductor industry has an environmental impact somewhere between the near-extinction of the buffalo and the Cretaceous event. In fact the impact is somewhere between stubbing your toe on a weed (considerting the direct costs alone) and returning us to the garden of eden (adding in the benefits from the REDUCTION of other environmental costs through the APPLICATION of semiconductor technology to design, process control, etc.)
For starters, condsider the reduced polution from automobiles - thanks to computer-aided design and computerized low-emission/high-mileage engines.
But on your cost-only points:
and how do you propose people get these chips without this additional waste? [...] hydroelectric dams have had a devastating effect [...]
The point is that the energy used is a vanishingly tiny drop from a very large bucket. If you want to save the fish and such, you'll do more by turning out your desklamp lightbulb religiously than by foregoing the manufacture of a RAM chip.
[coolant] water is often taken from really cold, fast-running streams. when returned to the river or stream, the cumulative effect of many industries has raised water temperatures to almost fatal levels for fish species such as salmon, many of which are endangered.
Not only do you not understand thermal pollution and its effects on fish, but you also don't understand the regulation of it, at least here in the US.
First: Thermal pollution does not harm fish by "raising the temperature to a fatal level". (In fact, warmer water is often much more healthy for the fish population than cold - mostly by promoting the growth of nutrients.)
The alleged harm from dumping hot water into cold streams is from fish swiming through the boundary and having their reproductive cycles upset by the thermal shock. But here we're talking something ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE different from a chip fab. We're talking a nuke plant using a stream for the cold end of the heat engine.
A chip fab's cooling needs are comparable to airconditioning an office building of equivalent floor space. There's enough heat in one place to rate a small forced-air evaporative cooler on the hot end of the HVAC unit - the sort you see blowing fog on other large institutional buildings. Cool a fab by dumping enough hot water into a running stream to shock the fish? Get real.
And even if they DID need to dump that much heat, they won't be doing it into streams at a US fab. (Go pester the third world to police their own industries of you're more concerned for THEIR fish than their people.)
[solvent dumping...] any idea how many lawsuits against the EPA there are yearly to address these scenarios?
Bunches. I live in Silicon Valley, so you don't need to tell me about what HP did back during the cold war.
But:
- It was nothing, in toxicity or volume, compared to what OTHER industries were doing at the time.
- These days such stuff happens mainly when the government inspectors go corrupt and/or get sidetracked onto eco-wacko hotbutton issues (like mismanaging the wilderness areas in ways that make them all burn down).
- And most of the suits result from a law that gives law firms standing to file, and payment for prosecuting, environmental lawsuits (bogus or otherwise). Subsidize environmental lawsuits to the tune of millions (or even billions) of dollars in legal fees and you'll get a LOT of them, regardless of their merit.
producing and using a 32MB DRAM chip weighing 2 grams
And storing 32 MB of data. In the '60s (decades into the computer revolution) 32 K by 36 bits cost around a million bux (in '60s currnecy, of which $24 would buy a troy ounce of gold) and worth every penny. It occupied one standard IBM 70x cabinet - roughly 3' x 6' by 8' or maybe more, just barely fitting into a standard elevator car, CHOCK FULL of circuit boards soldered with lead and wired with copper...
requires 32 kg of water,
And what happens to that water? Is it disintegrated into its compoent subatomic particles and beamed into outer space, never to be heard from again? Is it sealed into a vault with the radioactive waste and buried for geologic time? Or is it cleaned up back to super-purity and reused to make ANOTHER chip, and ANOTHER ad-infinitim, until it finally evaporates and comes back as rain?
1.6 kg of fossil fuels,
3 1/2 pints of fuel oil - enough to make about 1 3/4 pints of gasoline. Call it five chips to the galon. You probably burned more gas per chip just to GO PICK 'EM UP the last time you upgraded your RAM.
Of course that's assuming all the energy came from fossil fuels - which are still used because they're so abundant that they're cheaper than most alternatives. But the last time I looked the windmills at Altamont Pass were still spinning, and the hydroelectric dams were still generating, etc.
700 g of elemental gases,
Yeah - liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. And any that doesn't end up in the chip itself (i.e. the oxide layers), like, say, the liquid nitrogen used to supercool gas traps or purge ambient air and its contaminants, eventually goes back to the air from which it was extracted.
and 72 g of other chemicals,
2 1/2 ounces.
many of which are hazardous.
And some of 'em (such as the doping gasses, used in microscopic amounts) are SO hazardous - both to humans and to the next step of the process - that any excess is destroyed at the end of the step where it is used. Others (like the cleaning solvents and etchants) can also be supercleaned and reused, destroyed, or disposed of in other safe ways. That's where a lot of that energy goes. Want to cut its use?
Of course if some cheapscate wants to dump used solvent, that's what the threat of the EPA is for: to make it more expensive to dump it than to deal with it properly. Meanwhile, the solvents are the same class of stuff that your auto mechanic sprays on your (toxic!) brake pads every time you get a brake job. Any bets on whether the chips in a 1/4G SIMM, built by a hypothetical scumbag manufacturer who dumps ALL his used solvent, would pollute the environment more than your last brake job?
And how much modern RAM would it take to match the pollution and resource consumption of building, or operating, that '60s-era 32Kx36 RAM box?
Uhh...the Slashdot article on the sale of DALnet was a joke, but the DDoS attack on DALnet is very real. Actually, several IRC networks have been getting DDoSed in recent months.
The (new) article referenced in this article's initial post describes, not a DDoS attack on the IRC server, but a use of the IRC server as a control point for a DDoS attack on something else. (The "bots" - infected machines - connect to the IRC server and lurk on the channel for their master to give them orders.)
So perhaps the DDoSing of DALnet and/or other IRC servers is not an attempt to take out the servers themselves, but a side-effect of the progeny of a particularly fecund worm "phoning home" to ask for futher orders.
And perhps those trying to track down the authors of the worms will soon be bugging the worms' favorite IRC servers in the hopes of tracing the perpetrator when he finally logs in to give 'em marching orders.
Worse yet would be an attempt to shut down IRC servers in general. Of course this wouldn't stop the worms, as the authors would quickly switch to another method of controlling them. So it would just eliminate another Internet tool without having any perceptable benefits.
Apple has sworn to democratize the tools of music and movie making like they once did desktop publishing. The intended audience isn't just privileged members of a movie making or music recording cartel. The intended audience is anybody who wants to make a movie or record a song.
Which puts Apple (and the rest of the computer industry) in direct opposition to the media conglomerates. The computer industry has some new "killer apps" to sell - along with new boxes to run them. And it's the audio and video publishing empires on the receiving end of the killing. Or else the empires can hang on by getting the new tech crippled or banned by government intervention. But then the apps - and the computer industry - get killed.
And government is in the position of picking sides. The media empires got it to pick THEIR side in the first couple battles, and the computer industry has finally woken up and JUST STARTED to strike back.
But what I'm waiting for is the Republican Party to wake up and see which side the bread is buttered on. Hi tek tends both to avoid politics and contribute at least some to both major parties. The media are almost totally and rabidly on the Democrats' side - both with money and with more-expensive-than-money free propaganda that isn't touched by "campaign finance reform" laws.
So when the government choses sides, in a battle where the winner becomes richer and the loser broke, which side would a self-interested Republican-party-controlled government pick?
Of course the Republicans have repeatedly shown themselves to be clueless about such things. So let's see if they rent a couple on this issue.
Some (college kids) were even already bent over their practice locks honing their MIT lockpicking skills.
It's not just MIT. MOST technical colleges have a few people making master keys in every class. It's a tech puzzle. (On colleges with steam tunnels success also admits the practitioner to the tunnels, which are quite interesting places.)
There was a presentation on this vulnerability at a small computer conference last fall. It was one of the most heavily-attended sessions (nearly the whole conference membership). During it the audience was polled on how many of them had made master keys in their college years. Nearly all raised their hands.
Normal pedestrians cannot get blanks for some key types. The blanks are kept locked away.
In particular: Medico. Their keyways (the pattern of slots on the key's side that admit it to the cylinder) in their high-security models are in a number of (copyrighted) combinations, each sold only to one locksmithing company which is under contract to only resell cut keys, keep records (with ID and passwords) of the buyers, and only sell COPIES to the legitimate owner(s) of the particular lock. The privileged smiths go along with this, too, because Medico tries to get them to violate the contract and will transfer it (along with the lucrative business) to some more picky locksmith if they do.
So unconnected people who want to try such attacks against Medico locks need to make their own blanks. But that's not hard with a model-maker's midget milling machine, of which several brands are available.
(But Medico is also less vulnerable to attacks of the sort described. The lock's pins have a wedge-shaped tip, the cut in the key is at an angle across the axis of the key, and the pin must be rotated by the proper angle as well as lifted to release.)
But most of those "do not duplicate" keys are just ordinary keys from common manufacturers, which have been stamped. The stamp relates to laws prohibiting the copying of such a key and penalizing vendors who get caught doing so.
Of course if someone sticks a label saying something like "garage" or "front door" over the stamp, most hardware store clerks won't notice the stamp and will blithely make as many copies as desired.
I used to work for a software firm [...] To control access to our part of the building we were issued with contactless swipe cards.
[...] The management had fitted special sensors at the toilet and cafe doors as well as at the drinks machines and smoking rooms. [...]
Once our bi-monthly productivity appraisals came round we were presented with a detailed breakdown of our movement round the building. I was asked why I made 12 visits to the coffee machine in one day (all drinks were free) and why I once spent more than 10 minutes in the toilet [...]
[...] This whole setup was implemented to try and achieve productivity gains, in fact it did the opposite. [...]
AND, no doubt, led to the resignation of some of the company's best talent (perhaps including yourself).
Please post the name of the company (if it still exists) and any management who were involved with either the decision to deploy this added "feature" or who used its output in performance reviews.
Any executive who is misusing his time and the company's resources in such a fashion should be fired. If he is not immediately fired, his manager's competency is also suspect, as is the competency of HIS manger if HE is retained, and so on.
Further, the board and stockholders have a right to know how their company and investment are being mismanaged.
- Roleplaying games were luring viewers from broadcast TV. Result: A spate of programs and stories on how RPGs led to Satanism, lower gradepoints (actually they tended to go up...), brain damage, social ostracism, introversion, and suicide.
(Interesting sidelight: I hear the suicide cited was a young man who advertised in the classifieds for a dungen master to try to get an RPG session together. He ended up in a very different sort of session doing a very different sort of roleplaying with a very different sort of dungen master {of the same sex}, enjoyed it, but became suicidally depressed over the fear that he must therefore be homosexual. Seems to me it's quite a leap to blame THAT on RPGs.)
I remember reading something recently here on/. where the recording companies want to file an ISP surcharge to recoup losses to piracy [...]
Recouping losses isn't the only motive.
Another is that it gives them a slush fund, to spend on more lobbying and legal action.
But IMHO the biggie is that it penalizes their competitors. Consider:
The media conglomerates are in the business of selling the viewers' eyeball time to the sponsors. (The viewer is NOT the customer. The viewer is the PRODUCT.) And for years they have been taking swipes at any industry that competes with them for that eyeball time. For instance:
- Cable companies were luring viewers from broadcast TV. So broadcast TV did a bunch of pieces slamming cable companies and their operators. (One I recall: A cop show where the murderer and victim were two cable operators fighting over a franchise.)
- Early video games were luring viewers from broadcast TV. Result: A spate of shows, both fiction and newscast, where games were causing medical syndromes, juvinile delinquency, drops in grade point, drug use, and radio and TV interference.
- Netnews was luring viewers from broadcast TV, especially from news programming. Result: A spate of news items on internet addiction, child porn, urban myths (i.e. only believe OUR myths, especially those on the news shows...), unreliability of network postings (have YOU ever seen a reporter get anything right in a story where YOU know what happened?), etc. Some of this is still going on.
- Now the Web is luring viewers from broadcast TV and network news - and working on a much wider audience. So more of the same, plus use of the Internet by terrorists, racists, cults, and of course music and video "pirates" (a term formerly used for people who SOLD unauthorized copies via commercial enterprises).
In addition to creating an ENORMOUS rakeoff, charging a "piracy fee" for internet access means significantly raising the price of a broadband connection. That means the fewer people will buy one and switch from the Empire's offerings to the "free market of ideas". The TV audience eyeball time is thus higher, while potential customers for internet alternative streaming entertainment are reduced, producing yet another roadblock to the creation of such a medium.
In the U.S., naturally, we get no rights in return for the tariff [...]
So I wonder how long until someone hauled into court by the RIAA says:
"But, your Honor! I already PAID them their royalty when I bought the disk I downloaded the music onto. I paid [this amount] extra, according to federal law, and that money was given to them to pay for music I might copy onto that disk. I move to dismiss on the ground that they've already been paid any royalty they were due and thus have no case."
At $15 a card, how much of our personal information will we be forced to carry around in our pockets?
Change that to "could" and the answer becomes "all of it". B-(
But who cares the size of the card? Ten decimal digits (plus a few for population growth and aliases) is enough for a unique identifier for everybody. With the cops wired they can access a government database of any desired size in real-time.
So why put the info on a $15 card that YOU carry around with you - and potentially could read or even modify - when they could just give you a $0.02 piece of plastic with a number and have the same "benefits" (to them) without the "risks"?
So, to summarize, it's the worst because it says "Windows".
Nope.
It's the worst because a significnat number of the programmers at Microsoft write unreliable code that Microsoft ships. The result is something too unreliable for life-critical systems.
That's not just an uninformed opinion. I've spent much of my professional life (which started when the logic used vacuum tubes for the DIODES in the logic) writing high-reliability embedded software. (One of my colleagues once commented that I was the only person he'd trust to program his pacemaker.) My wife spent some years dealing with WinCE's bugs at a company that made the mistake of trying to use it in a telephony application. Some of her laments made my jaw drop.
I'm sorry if this annoys you, zjbs14. But an OS that crashes when you pass a NULL pointer (or handle) as an argument that is labeled "undefined" in an interface description is NOT ready for life-critical applications.
In fact, an OS that crashes AT ALL, no matter WHAT an application feeds it, is not ready for life-critical applications.
Because Windows in all its variants has proven to be significantly less reliable than most of the alternatives.
Desktops can take a reboot when you run out of memory (or deref a null pointer because some fool in development thought "undefined" on the interface definition didn't mean "feed me anything, I'll still work".) But automotive, medical, telephony, aerospace, machine-tool control, and other life-critical applications require a higher standard.
Not sure if it was an APC (though that sounds familiar). But my wife had a problem at work a couple years ago.
Seems some fool programmer had plugged everything on his desk into the UPS - including a couple heating appliances (coffee maker and such). The unit began emitting acrid smoke and shut down.
She unplugged it and took it outside. He brought it back in. It wasn't plugged in, but the smoke kept getting worse. Obviously it was in the process of catching fire. (Since she and the programmer weren't in the same command chain she went and got somebody who ranked him in his own hierarchy to get the box outside before the building went up.)
A UPS SHOULD handle overloads by shutting down gracefully. And a UL approval rating SHOULD mean that the UL lab checked this model for this functionallity (or at least checked that it won't emit toxic gas or liquids, flame, or superheated gas, or high-velocity debris as a result of excessive load {let alone from being penetrated by a postal worker's bullet or a lifttruck's fork}.
Did this model have a UL rating? Did UL screw up, or did APC change some element of the design (or have some defective component or manufacturing error)?
Don't need a shocker. Just program the phone to start the vibrator when the speech level is too high. Gives the user the necessary tactile feedback without requiring an additional mechanism.
It would be useful in general, too. The Nokia phones that my wife and I use don't provide enough "sidetone" - the playback of your own voice in the earphone which helps you regulate your voice level. So my wife tends to talk so loudly into the phone that her voice becomes distorted. (I'm probably doing something similar, though I have experience with ham radio, which has no sidetone, and thus tend to err in the other direction.)
Of course the proper solution would be for the handset manufacturers to put the right amount of sidetone into the phone in the first place.
How could you send a list of files to the RIAA without snort detecting the connection?
a) Make a "request" to a not-obviously-RIAA server ASKING for the files in question.
b) Serve a file containing the filenames and make a "request" as in a) to advertise the existence the file.
c) "Ping" a not-obviously-RIAA host with a packet that contains the advertisement of a file-of-filenames as in B.
d) Store a file-of-filenames on another peer in the network, for RIAA to pick up later.
I could go on...
General form is to
- make what *appears* to be a legitimate request in essentially any protocol likely to be allowed through a firewall
- to a site that is unlikely to be identified with the RIAA.
As a Western-state voter, I fully intend to lie to any exit pollers who ask me how I voted.
There are already several groups systematically lying to pollsters - especially exit pollsters, but also telephone pollsters, etc.
One of the points is to foul up the "parallel election" you mentioned, in the hope that they'll either stop it or be discredited and ignored.
But others are making various political points - again trying to get the pollsters to make wildly inaccurate predictions and lose credibility with the public (some of whome try to conform with the crowd and/or "vote for the winner") and/or with politicians (who, once elected become isolated from their constituents and tend to believe the media and the polls).
Meanwhile: When listening to poll results, take careful notice of WHICH polling outfit is doing the work. Some polls (including most that hit the airwaves) are commissioned by people who want to create an image and use it to swing popular opinion and/or legislators, rather than to actually measure public opinion. And some poll operations cater to this market to make money.
My impression:
Zogby: Actually tries to predict elections, and does perhaps the best job of it.
Field: Their results seem to completely mirror the Democratic Party line and are often wildly at odds with the actual results once an election is held.
Gallup: Depends on the poll and the season. Better than Field come election time (though not as good as Zogby) but still seems to whore on other issues between elections.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree about the shelf life. I have burned cds that are over three years old and read fine.
Protect them from light and bleach fumes and they'll last a longer time than if you leave them lying about on your desk. B-) Protect them from oxygen and they'll probably last quite a while.
But you can't count on it. Especially if they're your only backup. Doubly so if you keep sticking them in a drive and shining a laser on them because somebody wants to read the contents.
So you have to assume they're short-timers when you do your planning.
The obvious solution
They should burn the CD images to CDs.
The obvious problem with that:
The dies in writable CDs have a much shorter lifetime than the printed ones. Like three-ish years. So figure they have to make new copies ever two years, plus at least two spars of each, for redundancy. Call it 15K/year CD burnings just for this batch of 10,000 images.
Now an automated burning operation can do a bit more than 7 1/2 disks/hour single-shift. But then you have to have a carousell to handle 10,000 CDs (times several for redundancy), in order to automate the process.
So I don't think burning them to CDs is the solution.
Call it 3 CDs per gig. Or a bunch more, since most of 'em won't be full, so make that 10/gig. That's one terrabyte. Don't we have hard drives about that big now? Build a RAID, mirror it (offsite), replace disks as they die, and clone the mirror every few years to cover for catastrophic multi-disk failures and obsolescence of the RAID platforms and disks. Online all the time that way, too.
I'd say we lost half the battle when people started accepting "stolen intellectual property" as a meaningful term.
Yep. But that's a separate issue.
The legal system currently recognizes the right to control the distribution and/or copying of certain creations as a property right. Don't like it? Get the law changed, struck down, or overthrow the whole system.
But be careful if you want to exercise that last option. If you succeed, you'll take pot luck on the NEXT system. Meanwhile, the system has lasted this long, in part, because it resists being overthrown.
And ignoring the law in this case - by breaking it - may be effective. But it's not "passive resistance", and may attract undesirable attention from the authorities.
In the '60s many of my peers thought the drug laws could be overthrown by saturating the system. Look how effective THAT has been at getting the drug laws ended. And unlike the drug laws, the copyright laws have a clear "victim", in the form of someone with a legal and financial interest in pushing the government to enforce his privileges.
Of course the Swiss don't have this problem. Their government REQUIRES them each to have a machine gun (or some other piece of large-scale military nastiness) handy. B-)
...
Well, a little red knife, anyway.
Or the big red knife:
- Tiny little scisors
- Tiny little screwdriver
- Tiny little tommygun
- Tiny little satelite uplink
- Tiny little antitank missile
- Tiny little tactical nuke
CNET posted an article claiming you could be liable for $250,000 in fines and up to 3 years in prison for p2p file sharing.
No it did not.
It posted an article saying that you could be [etc.] for p2p file sharing of COPYRIGHTED WORKS, WITHOUT PERMISSION.
It's just FINE to run or use a p2p network and share UNCOPYRIGHTED works or copyrighted works WITH permission.
Let's get it RIGHT people. If we let "p2p file sharing" become synonomous with "p2p file sharing of stolen intelectual property" we've lost half the battle.
It used to be - as with "hackers" vs. "crackers" - the mainstream media getting it wrong and tarring the good guys with the bad-guy brush, and the nerd sites getting it right but crying in the wilderness. Now we've got a mainstream site getting it right, while the slashdot posting gets it wrong.
I can just imagine the RIAA lawyers pouncing on this article as further evidence that "the only use for p2p is theft". "See! Even they admit it!"
So let's have a little more attention to such distinctions - from the posters, or for GOD'S SAKE at LEAST from the EDITORS!
In Switzerland, they actually let people VOTE on whether they want these acts or not.
Nice to hear it. Wish we had that here.
Got to love America?s "Democratic" government, passing laws without even letting the people know.
Actually, the US isn't a democracy. It's a republic. The general population doesn't vote on the laws (as in a democracy). The enfranchised portion of the general population votes on the legislators, then the legislators vote on the laws.
Originally the general population voted on the representatives and the states chose the senators (with the states' population in turn chosing the state reps and governor who were the ones chosing the senators). But that got changed so the population votes directly on both.
Of course sometimes they pass laws without the CONGRESSMEN knowing.
- The congresscritters rarely read the text, but depend on the recommendations of their staff, their party, (or sometimes their major contributors B-( ).
- Even if they want to read what they're voting, often it's impossible. The staffers put together the final text of enormous bills, which appear on the legislators desks within hours, or even minutes, of the final vote. (I recall one that was a stack of paper several feet thick that showed up in just such a fashion.) I've yet to hear of a congresscritter voting against a bill because "I haven't had time to read it."
- A conference committee might completely re-write a bill (possibly with similar staff "assistance"). Both houses normally rubber-stamp a conference committee's results.
And even when the congresscritters know what they're voting on, maybe nobody else does, or has a chance to comment. For instance:
The "Firearm Owners Protection Act" was a bill to protect gunowners from the web of 30,000-ish conflicting state, county, and local firearms laws when traveling. A tiny bill that said ~"If it's legal where you start your trip, legal where you finish it, and locked up in between, it's ok to transport it no matter what the state and local laws say in the places you pass through"~. Much support from pro-firearms groups.
In the minutes before the final vote it was amended to also ban the manufacture of new machine guns for sale to private citizens in the (already heavily regulated) private market. So the supply would be limited to those already papered - and thus become obsolete, expensive, and eventually disappear.
SURPRISE!
Of course it passed. (And some pro-gun organizations got a lot of undeserved flack for "selling out" the machine-gun fans, when it was really a crooked political gambit by the anti-gun politicians.)
Of course the Swiss don't have this problem. Their government REQUIRES them each to have a machine gun (or some other piece of large-scale military nastiness) handy. B-)
Vaughn, I believe you missed my point.
...] any idea how many lawsuits against the EPA there are yearly to address these scenarios?
The article tried to make it sound like the semiconductor industry has an environmental impact somewhere between the near-extinction of the buffalo and the Cretaceous event. In fact the impact is somewhere between stubbing your toe on a weed (considerting the direct costs alone) and returning us to the garden of eden (adding in the benefits from the REDUCTION of other environmental costs through the APPLICATION of semiconductor technology to design, process control, etc.)
For starters, condsider the reduced polution from automobiles - thanks to computer-aided design and computerized low-emission/high-mileage engines.
But on your cost-only points:
and how do you propose people get these chips without this additional waste? [...] hydroelectric dams have had a devastating effect [...]
The point is that the energy used is a vanishingly tiny drop from a very large bucket. If you want to save the fish and such, you'll do more by turning out your desklamp lightbulb religiously than by foregoing the manufacture of a RAM chip.
[coolant] water is often taken from really cold, fast-running streams. when returned to the river or stream, the cumulative effect of many industries has raised water temperatures to almost fatal levels for fish species such as salmon, many of which are endangered.
Not only do you not understand thermal pollution and its effects on fish, but you also don't understand the regulation of it, at least here in the US.
First: Thermal pollution does not harm fish by "raising the temperature to a fatal level". (In fact, warmer water is often much more healthy for the fish population than cold - mostly by promoting the growth of nutrients.)
The alleged harm from dumping hot water into cold streams is from fish swiming through the boundary and having their reproductive cycles upset by the thermal shock. But here we're talking something ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE different from a chip fab. We're talking a nuke plant using a stream for the cold end of the heat engine.
A chip fab's cooling needs are comparable to airconditioning an office building of equivalent floor space. There's enough heat in one place to rate a small forced-air evaporative cooler on the hot end of the HVAC unit - the sort you see blowing fog on other large institutional buildings. Cool a fab by dumping enough hot water into a running stream to shock the fish? Get real.
And even if they DID need to dump that much heat, they won't be doing it into streams at a US fab. (Go pester the third world to police their own industries of you're more concerned for THEIR fish than their people.)
[solvent dumping
Bunches. I live in Silicon Valley, so you don't need to tell me about what HP did back during the cold war.
But:
- It was nothing, in toxicity or volume, compared to what OTHER industries were doing at the time.
- These days such stuff happens mainly when the government inspectors go corrupt and/or get sidetracked onto eco-wacko hotbutton issues (like mismanaging the wilderness areas in ways that make them all burn down).
- And most of the suits result from a law that gives law firms standing to file, and payment for prosecuting, environmental lawsuits (bogus or otherwise). Subsidize environmental lawsuits to the tune of millions (or even billions) of dollars in legal fees and you'll get a LOT of them, regardless of their merit.
No, I didn't go poking around.
Smart move.
Can you say "honeypot"? I KNEW you could.
producing and using a 32MB DRAM chip weighing 2 grams
...
And storing 32 MB of data. In the '60s (decades into the computer revolution) 32 K by 36 bits cost around a million bux (in '60s currnecy, of which $24 would buy a troy ounce of gold) and worth every penny. It occupied one standard IBM 70x cabinet - roughly 3' x 6' by 8' or maybe more, just barely fitting into a standard elevator car, CHOCK FULL of circuit boards soldered with lead and wired with copper
requires 32 kg of water,
And what happens to that water? Is it disintegrated into its compoent subatomic particles and beamed into outer space, never to be heard from again? Is it sealed into a vault with the radioactive waste and buried for geologic time? Or is it cleaned up back to super-purity and reused to make ANOTHER chip, and ANOTHER ad-infinitim, until it finally evaporates and comes back as rain?
1.6 kg of fossil fuels,
3 1/2 pints of fuel oil - enough to make about 1 3/4 pints of gasoline. Call it five chips to the galon. You probably burned more gas per chip just to GO PICK 'EM UP the last time you upgraded your RAM.
Of course that's assuming all the energy came from fossil fuels - which are still used because they're so abundant that they're cheaper than most alternatives. But the last time I looked the windmills at Altamont Pass were still spinning, and the hydroelectric dams were still generating, etc.
700 g of elemental gases,
Yeah - liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. And any that doesn't end up in the chip itself (i.e. the oxide layers), like, say, the liquid nitrogen used to supercool gas traps or purge ambient air and its contaminants, eventually goes back to the air from which it was extracted.
and 72 g of other chemicals,
2 1/2 ounces.
many of which are hazardous.
And some of 'em (such as the doping gasses, used in microscopic amounts) are SO hazardous - both to humans and to the next step of the process - that any excess is destroyed at the end of the step where it is used. Others (like the cleaning solvents and etchants) can also be supercleaned and reused, destroyed, or disposed of in other safe ways. That's where a lot of that energy goes. Want to cut its use?
Of course if some cheapscate wants to dump used solvent, that's what the threat of the EPA is for: to make it more expensive to dump it than to deal with it properly. Meanwhile, the solvents are the same class of stuff that your auto mechanic sprays on your (toxic!) brake pads every time you get a brake job. Any bets on whether the chips in a 1/4G SIMM, built by a hypothetical scumbag manufacturer who dumps ALL his used solvent, would pollute the environment more than your last brake job?
And how much modern RAM would it take to match the pollution and resource consumption of building, or operating, that '60s-era 32Kx36 RAM box?
Uhh...the Slashdot article on the sale of DALnet was a joke, but the DDoS attack on DALnet is very real. Actually, several IRC networks have been getting DDoSed in recent months.
The (new) article referenced in this article's initial post describes, not a DDoS attack on the IRC server, but a use of the IRC server as a control point for a DDoS attack on something else. (The "bots" - infected machines - connect to the IRC server and lurk on the channel for their master to give them orders.)
So perhaps the DDoSing of DALnet and/or other IRC servers is not an attempt to take out the servers themselves, but a side-effect of the progeny of a particularly fecund worm "phoning home" to ask for futher orders.
And perhps those trying to track down the authors of the worms will soon be bugging the worms' favorite IRC servers in the hopes of tracing the perpetrator when he finally logs in to give 'em marching orders.
(A marching army of worms. What an image. Something like an angry horde of bananna slugs on pogo sticks.
Worse yet would be an attempt to shut down IRC servers in general. Of course this wouldn't stop the worms, as the authors would quickly switch to another method of controlling them. So it would just eliminate another Internet tool without having any perceptable benefits.
Apple has sworn to democratize the tools of music and movie making like they once did desktop publishing. The intended audience isn't just privileged members of a movie making or music recording cartel. The intended audience is anybody who wants to make a movie or record a song.
Which puts Apple (and the rest of the computer industry) in direct opposition to the media conglomerates. The computer industry has some new "killer apps" to sell - along with new boxes to run them. And it's the audio and video publishing empires on the receiving end of the killing. Or else the empires can hang on by getting the new tech crippled or banned by government intervention. But then the apps - and the computer industry - get killed.
And government is in the position of picking sides. The media empires got it to pick THEIR side in the first couple battles, and the computer industry has finally woken up and JUST STARTED to strike back.
But what I'm waiting for is the Republican Party to wake up and see which side the bread is buttered on. Hi tek tends both to avoid politics and contribute at least some to both major parties. The media are almost totally and rabidly on the Democrats' side - both with money and with more-expensive-than-money free propaganda that isn't touched by "campaign finance reform" laws.
So when the government choses sides, in a battle where the winner becomes richer and the loser broke, which side would a self-interested Republican-party-controlled government pick?
Of course the Republicans have repeatedly shown themselves to be clueless about such things. So let's see if they rent a couple on this issue.
Some (college kids) were even already bent over their practice locks honing their MIT lockpicking skills.
It's not just MIT. MOST technical colleges have a few people making master keys in every class. It's a tech puzzle. (On colleges with steam tunnels success also admits the practitioner to the tunnels, which are quite interesting places.)
There was a presentation on this vulnerability at a small computer conference last fall. It was one of the most heavily-attended sessions (nearly the whole conference membership). During it the audience was polled on how many of them had made master keys in their college years. Nearly all raised their hands.
Normal pedestrians cannot get blanks for some key types. The blanks are kept locked away.
In particular: Medico. Their keyways (the pattern of slots on the key's side that admit it to the cylinder) in their high-security models are in a number of (copyrighted) combinations, each sold only to one locksmithing company which is under contract to only resell cut keys, keep records (with ID and passwords) of the buyers, and only sell COPIES to the legitimate owner(s) of the particular lock. The privileged smiths go along with this, too, because Medico tries to get them to violate the contract and will transfer it (along with the lucrative business) to some more picky locksmith if they do.
So unconnected people who want to try such attacks against Medico locks need to make their own blanks. But that's not hard with a model-maker's midget milling machine, of which several brands are available.
(But Medico is also less vulnerable to attacks of the sort described. The lock's pins have a wedge-shaped tip, the cut in the key is at an angle across the axis of the key, and the pin must be rotated by the proper angle as well as lifted to release.)
But most of those "do not duplicate" keys are just ordinary keys from common manufacturers, which have been stamped. The stamp relates to laws prohibiting the copying of such a key and penalizing vendors who get caught doing so.
Of course if someone sticks a label saying something like "garage" or "front door" over the stamp, most hardware store clerks won't notice the stamp and will blithely make as many copies as desired.
I used to work for a software firm [...] To control access to our part of the building we were issued with contactless swipe cards.
[...] The management had fitted special sensors at the toilet and cafe doors as well as at the drinks machines and smoking rooms. [...]
Once our bi-monthly productivity appraisals came round we were presented with a detailed breakdown of our movement round the building. I was asked why I made 12 visits to the coffee machine in one day (all drinks were free) and why I once spent more than 10 minutes in the toilet [...]
[...] This whole setup was implemented to try and achieve productivity gains, in fact it did the opposite. [...]
AND, no doubt, led to the resignation of some of the company's best talent (perhaps including yourself).
Please post the name of the company (if it still exists) and any management who were involved with either the decision to deploy this added "feature" or who used its output in performance reviews.
Any executive who is misusing his time and the company's resources in such a fashion should be fired. If he is not immediately fired, his manager's competency is also suspect, as is the competency of HIS manger if HE is retained, and so on.
Further, the board and stockholders have a right to know how their company and investment are being mismanaged.
So, are we going to start seeing people swap tires with each other?
They already do.
Park your car in a garage in New York City. See if you have the same tires when you get it back.
B-)
Another example:
- Roleplaying games were luring viewers from broadcast TV. Result: A spate of programs and stories on how RPGs led to Satanism, lower gradepoints (actually they tended to go up...), brain damage, social ostracism, introversion, and suicide.
(Interesting sidelight: I hear the suicide cited was a young man who advertised in the classifieds for a dungen master to try to get an RPG session together. He ended up in a very different sort of session doing a very different sort of roleplaying with a very different sort of dungen master {of the same sex}, enjoyed it, but became suicidally depressed over the fear that he must therefore be homosexual. Seems to me it's quite a leap to blame THAT on RPGs.)
I remember reading something recently here on /. where the recording companies want to file an ISP surcharge to recoup losses to piracy [...]
Recouping losses isn't the only motive.
Another is that it gives them a slush fund, to spend on more lobbying and legal action.
But IMHO the biggie is that it penalizes their competitors. Consider:
The media conglomerates are in the business of selling the viewers' eyeball time to the sponsors. (The viewer is NOT the customer. The viewer is the PRODUCT.) And for years they have been taking swipes at any industry that competes with them for that eyeball time. For instance:
- Cable companies were luring viewers from broadcast TV. So broadcast TV did a bunch of pieces slamming cable companies and their operators. (One I recall: A cop show where the murderer and victim were two cable operators fighting over a franchise.)
- Early video games were luring viewers from broadcast TV. Result: A spate of shows, both fiction and newscast, where games were causing medical syndromes, juvinile delinquency, drops in grade point, drug use, and radio and TV interference.
- Netnews was luring viewers from broadcast TV, especially from news programming. Result: A spate of news items on internet addiction, child porn, urban myths (i.e. only believe OUR myths, especially those on the news shows...), unreliability of network postings (have YOU ever seen a reporter get anything right in a story where YOU know what happened?), etc. Some of this is still going on.
- Now the Web is luring viewers from broadcast TV and network news - and working on a much wider audience. So more of the same, plus use of the Internet by terrorists, racists, cults, and of course music and video "pirates" (a term formerly used for people who SOLD unauthorized copies via commercial enterprises).
In addition to creating an ENORMOUS rakeoff, charging a "piracy fee" for internet access means significantly raising the price of a broadband connection. That means the fewer people will buy one and switch from the Empire's offerings to the "free market of ideas". The TV audience eyeball time is thus higher, while potential customers for internet alternative streaming entertainment are reduced, producing yet another roadblock to the creation of such a medium.
In the U.S., naturally, we get no rights in return for the tariff [...]
So I wonder how long until someone hauled into court by the RIAA says:
"But, your Honor! I already PAID them their royalty when I bought the disk I downloaded the music onto. I paid [this amount] extra, according to federal law, and that money was given to them to pay for music I might copy onto that disk. I move to dismiss on the ground that they've already been paid any royalty they were due and thus have no case."
At $15 a card, how much of our personal information will we be forced to carry around in our pockets?
Change that to "could" and the answer becomes "all of it". B-(
But who cares the size of the card? Ten decimal digits (plus a few for population growth and aliases) is enough for a unique identifier for everybody. With the cops wired they can access a government database of any desired size in real-time.
So why put the info on a $15 card that YOU carry around with you - and potentially could read or even modify - when they could just give you a $0.02 piece of plastic with a number and have the same "benefits" (to them) without the "risks"?
So, to summarize, it's the worst because it says "Windows".
Nope.
It's the worst because a significnat number of the programmers at Microsoft write unreliable code that Microsoft ships. The result is something too unreliable for life-critical systems.
That's not just an uninformed opinion. I've spent much of my professional life (which started when the logic used vacuum tubes for the DIODES in the logic) writing high-reliability embedded software. (One of my colleagues once commented that I was the only person he'd trust to program his pacemaker.) My wife spent some years dealing with WinCE's bugs at a company that made the mistake of trying to use it in a telephony application. Some of her laments made my jaw drop.
I'm sorry if this annoys you, zjbs14. But an OS that crashes when you pass a NULL pointer (or handle) as an argument that is labeled "undefined" in an interface description is NOT ready for life-critical applications.
In fact, an OS that crashes AT ALL, no matter WHAT an application feeds it, is not ready for life-critical applications.
So, why is CE the worst choice?
Because Windows in all its variants has proven to be significantly less reliable than most of the alternatives.
Desktops can take a reboot when you run out of memory (or deref a null pointer because some fool in development thought "undefined" on the interface definition didn't mean "feed me anything, I'll still work".) But automotive, medical, telephony, aerospace, machine-tool control, and other life-critical applications require a higher standard.
Not sure if it was an APC (though that sounds familiar). But my wife had a problem at work a couple years ago.
Seems some fool programmer had plugged everything on his desk into the UPS - including a couple heating appliances (coffee maker and such). The unit began emitting acrid smoke and shut down.
She unplugged it and took it outside. He brought it back in. It wasn't plugged in, but the smoke kept getting worse. Obviously it was in the process of catching fire. (Since she and the programmer weren't in the same command chain she went and got somebody who ranked him in his own hierarchy to get the box outside before the building went up.)
A UPS SHOULD handle overloads by shutting down gracefully. And a UL approval rating SHOULD mean that the UL lab checked this model for this functionallity (or at least checked that it won't emit toxic gas or liquids, flame, or superheated gas, or high-velocity debris as a result of excessive load {let alone from being penetrated by a postal worker's bullet or a lifttruck's fork}.
Did this model have a UL rating? Did UL screw up, or did APC change some element of the design (or have some defective component or manufacturing error)?
Don't need a shocker. Just program the phone to start the vibrator when the speech level is too high. Gives the user the necessary tactile feedback without requiring an additional mechanism.
It would be useful in general, too. The Nokia phones that my wife and I use don't provide enough "sidetone" - the playback of your own voice in the earphone which helps you regulate your voice level. So my wife tends to talk so loudly into the phone that her voice becomes distorted. (I'm probably doing something similar, though I have experience with ham radio, which has no sidetone, and thus tend to err in the other direction.)
Of course the proper solution would be for the handset manufacturers to put the right amount of sidetone into the phone in the first place.
How could you send a list of files to the RIAA without snort detecting the connection?
a) Make a "request" to a not-obviously-RIAA server ASKING for the files in question.
b) Serve a file containing the filenames and make a "request" as in a) to advertise the existence the file.
c) "Ping" a not-obviously-RIAA host with a packet that contains the advertisement of a file-of-filenames as in B.
d) Store a file-of-filenames on another peer in the network, for RIAA to pick up later.
I could go on...
General form is to
- make what *appears* to be a legitimate request in essentially any protocol likely to be allowed through a firewall
- to a site that is unlikely to be identified with the RIAA.
As a Western-state voter, I fully intend to lie to any exit pollers who ask me how I voted.
There are already several groups systematically lying to pollsters - especially exit pollsters, but also telephone pollsters, etc.
One of the points is to foul up the "parallel election" you mentioned, in the hope that they'll either stop it or be discredited and ignored.
But others are making various political points - again trying to get the pollsters to make wildly inaccurate predictions and lose credibility with the public (some of whome try to conform with the crowd and/or "vote for the winner") and/or with politicians (who, once elected become isolated from their constituents and tend to believe the media and the polls).
Meanwhile: When listening to poll results, take careful notice of WHICH polling outfit is doing the work. Some polls (including most that hit the airwaves) are commissioned by people who want to create an image and use it to swing popular opinion and/or legislators, rather than to actually measure public opinion. And some poll operations cater to this market to make money.
My impression:
Zogby: Actually tries to predict elections, and does perhaps the best job of it.
Field: Their results seem to completely mirror the Democratic Party line and are often wildly at odds with the actual results once an election is held.
Gallup: Depends on the poll and the season. Better than Field come election time (though not as good as Zogby) but still seems to whore on other issues between elections.