The story seems to imply that the works spread faster because of BGP instability...
No.
The story says that the two are "correlated". That means they seem to occur at the same time and to the same degree.
This is a strong hint that one may cause the other or they both may be caused by a common third phenomenon. But it isn't difinitive. And the choice of which is stated first in the report of correlation is totally arbitrary.
As for things we don't agree with in politic we can always resume our quarrels after we beat the shit out of those motherfuckers who killed so many of our people.
I note that if crackers use their skills for information warfare they'll still be breaking the laws mentioned in the quid-pro-quo request.
Orders from officers or officials in the executive branch is no excuse for committing felonies.
So some of the requested actions may be necessary if the government wants to legally use the crackers in their efforts.
Moderators: don't mod up stuff unless there is PROOF or this person has put a real name behind their statements.
You misunderstand the purpose of moderation.
Moderation is to call readers' attention to interesting/informative/funny/whatever POSTINGS, and make it easier for them to avoid redundant/trolling/whatever POSTINGS.
When someone choses to post under their ID they also gain karma if they're moderated up. If they have a preponderance of stuff others want to see eventually their karma gives them an automatic bonus point, to bring their stuff to your attention more quickly. (Similarly, anonymous postings are less likely to be of interet / more likely to be obnoxious, so they start out with a one-point penalty.)
But that doesn't make a particular posting any more or less interesting/informative/redundant/trolling/whateve r when it's posted anonomyously.
So moderators SHOULD moderate anonymous postings up or down, as appropriate.
If you talk to people about your plans to whack a goose, they can't convict you of conspiracy to commit goose-whacking because there's no law against conspiring to goose-whack.
I was under the impression that - at least back in the Vietnam Un-War era - there are/were blanket conspiracy statutes that made conspiracy to commit a crime (even a misdemeanor) a felony.
It was a particularly noxious law. In addition to upping the ante, it criminalized talking about a crime *without committing it*, and made hearsay admissible.
My original point (which has been moderated into oblivion, as I assume this will be too) is that it doesn't make ANY rational sense to be trying to get a MALICIOUS program running on your system.
It makes perfect sense to me, with a couple of changes of emphasis.
It makes sense, when writing an emulator/compatability layer, to TEST whether a malicious program will run, for two reasons:
Discovering whether the emulation is close enough that the emulator is also vulnerable to the malicious software.
Discovering whether the malicious software fails because it depends on a feature - necessary for some NON-malicious programs - which is not correctly emulated. (A malicious program may use a little-known or undocumented "feature" - perhaps one that's been keeping some popular apps from working correctly.)
But beyond debugging the emulation there are additional reasons:
Running the malicious program in the (open-source) emulation environment may provide additional insight into its operation, leading to better defenses, both for the emulation and the original environment.
It's FUNNY!
That's four separate reasons that this makes sense.
Just use the system that best fits your needs. This may mean that your pet OS is not a universal fit for someone else.
That's what this is ABOUT!
The OS and the applications are separate entities. This is a port of the applications so they'll compile and run identically, from a common source base, on both BSDs and Linux. This makes them tweakable on Linux or a BSD, and so on.
Once this is fully done you'll be able to have a common environment across the (unix-like) OS spectrum. Pull out the OS and swap in another, and it won't matter. So you'll be able to pick or change the OS to meet your needs for *OS* performance, hackability, or special feature set, without having to switch to a different set of applications just because you changed the platform under them.
If you have a large network, you might very well be helping yourself far in excess of the bandwith used by the tarpit, certainly a win in my book.
A variant of this that stickied up ALL the ports rather than just port 80 might be interesting. Deply that on your net and anybody who tries to portscan the phantom machines might spend a LONG time trying to categorize them. B-)
Similarly, making some of the otherwise unused ports on a REAL machine sticky would also be a problem for portscanners - though somewhat impolite to people who are attempting to connect for legitimate reasons.
Certainly, we would all be physically safer if we lived in a totalitarian regime with no privacy protection. Would that be worth the cost?
Unfortunately, that is not true. We MIGHT be safer from external threats. But we would be wide open to threats from the members of the regime - both abuse by individual functionaries and institutionalized mayhem.
Historically this has been a recurring theme, with the INternal attacks amassing a body count that dwarfs the extrenal. Consider the Gulags of the Soviet Union, NAZI Germany, the Inquisition, the religious wars throughout Europe just a few hundred years ago, Apartheit, "Ethnic Clensing" in a dozen countries, just to name a few.
The US is far from immune, both historically and recently. The Trail of Tears, the Civil War, the Klan, the Zoot Suit Riots, Ruby Ridge and Waco, again to name a few.
But despite the distortions presented by the media and government-school history, people are far safer in the US than in virtually all other countries. And one of the greatest factors is that when attacked, individually or in mass, they have the ability to fight back. This is by design.
The government can't be everywhere and guard everything and everyone all the time. But every competent adult could easily have his or her own personal armed guard: theirselves.
There is NOTHING magic about the necessary skils. They are easy, quick, and inexpensive to acquire. Police and private guards spend only a few hours learning them. Civilians who chose to go armed generally also chose to train themselves to a far higher standard than that required for police. They have a far better record of defending against "bad guys" and NOT damaging bystanders.
And this is EXACTLY what the founders of the country intended: For the individual citizens to be armed. For them to be their OWN armed guards and their OWN army. So that an armed guard was always available when needed. So that the army was the size of the population. So that the guard and the army always had the citizen's interest, rather than their own or their employer's, as their primary motivation.
The hijacked airliners each had 5 to 6 hijackers and over 50 passengers. If even one in ten of them had been armed the hijackers would never have been able to take down the towers. And if an unknown fraction of the passengers had a habit of traveling armed the hijaclers never would have tried.
But the passengers were NOT armed - even though some of them MIGHT have been able to be armed while going about their daily lives - because the government DISARMED them. And as a result the hijackers were able to convert aircraft into incindeary missiles, and kill over ten thousand people who had NOT chosen to go through the airport search and board the ill-fated planes.
Clinton talked of 10,000 new policemen - even though his program produced nothing of the sort. But if relegalizing concealed carry resulted in even 10% of the population chosing to carry, you're talking over 20,000,000 do-it-yourself armed guards, "working" double shifts, scattered quite evenly through the population (and concentrated at potential trouble spots).
Experience with CCW shows that such people are far less of a danger to each other than professionals would be (even in the total absense of official misconduct). But can you imagine a small band of terrorists trying to pull something in such an environment?
And with that level of physical security who needs wiretaps?
(I'd go into that subject too, but I have to take off now.)
I wonder why Slashdot moderators are so stupid to score such a crap as "2".
Because this hasn't been moderated yet. I get a +1 because of my karma - still far above the cap from all the other interesting and informative factual postings I've made.
THIS IS COMPLETELY INVALID INFORMATION, CAN'T YOU SEE, STUPID MODERATORS?
As far as I know it's God's honest truth. The gunnies are crowing about it big-time. Here's the article:
From Tomás Mano de Carvalho
Alliance Nacional do Brasil
9-15-1
RIO DE JANEIRO - To avoid that an aircraft is used as bomb against important buildings, the Brazilian parlament decided today to liberate lightweapons (calibre less than 0.38) for all passengers over 21 years old.
As 65% of all Brazilians with income more than US$ 2000 always walksequipped with gun, the government finds it safe and guaranteed thatsufficient persons will react against any eventual highjackings.
Extra information will be distributed and presented by the airhostess, when they show the safety equipment they will also inform thepassengers to prepare eventual shot with precision, always take aim at chestto avoid that bullets perforate the shell of the aircraft.
The president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, wanted to make his vetoagainst the proposal, but was rejected by the astounding majority of 234 against 6 votes.
Now maybe it's a hoax. But these things usually aren't. You're welcome to hunt up documentation to disprove this story.
This makes perfect sense to me. To quote a pro-gun billboard: Society is safer when the crooks don't know who's armed. Research has shown that whenever a state in the US legalizes concealed carry their crime rate drops like a rock.
Now just sum the anger of being stupid yourselves to the anger you suffer from this stupid terror incident and set this message as -1.
Telling the truth is stupid? Recognizing the truth when it hits you in the face is stupid?
I don't think so.
About five or six hijackers with box cutters took over each of the four planes. Two of those planes - a total of eleven hijackers - took out both towers of the World Trade Center AND building seven, with a loss of over five thousand lives (and still counting).
Three or so UNarmed passengers took back one of the planes - at least well enough to fly it into the ground instead of a still-unnamed target in DC.
The planes had an average of over fifty people on them. How many hijackers would it have taken if, on the average, more than 32 of those passengers had been armed, and freshly instructed on shooting hijackers without destroying the plane or killing the other passengers?
Would the terrorists have even treid to hijack the planes?
I have seen a report that, in response to the events of last Tuesday (including the passengers who resisted and downed the fourth plane on its way to DC), Brazil has legalized gun-toting by airline passengers.
The flight-attendant speech is being revised to add instructions on how to plug a hijacker with minimum risk of puncturing the pressure hull, crew, and other passengers.
(This may be a bow to the inevitable. I understand that well over 60% of the Brazillian population already carries concealed pistols, often in violation of their existing gun laws.)
FYI: If this is ever legalized where you fly, I recommend the Charter Arms.44 special Bulldog model. It was developed for the US Air Martial program. Fires a big, slow bullet to avoid puncturing the hull or the windows. Kicks like a mule, but a bruised hand is better than a crash. Reasonably easy to conceal.
(Try Glaser Safety Slugs, too - in this or anything else. Think of pistol-round sized shotgun shells that spread out in the first thing they touch, rather than a jacketed bullet that penetrates and damages whatever is behind the target. That's also what "Black Talon" slugs were REALLY about.)
... mobile phone[s] use waves which are quite close in frequency to microwaves.
Actually they ARE microwaves - just a different frequency within the same set of bands.
So how is it possible that the phone can still communicate, even inside the shielding?
The door to the microwave oven has something called a "choke joint". It works like this:
The door has a conductive flange around it's edge.
The oven cavity also has a conductive flange.
When the door is closed the two flanges are parallel to each other and separated by a layer of plastic. They act as a very good transmission line connecting the inside of the cavity to the outside. But...
One of the flanges has a slot in it. It's less than a quarter wavelength wide, and exactly a quarter wavelength deep. It's conductive on the sides and bottom.
A quarter wavelength transmission line acts as an impedence inverter. If the far end is a very good short, the near end is a very good infinite resistance. Each wave goes up the slot, bounces off the end, and comes back to EXACTLY cancel the next half-cycle of the wave.
The result is that the "choke joint" acts as a perfect open circult in the section of the transmission line formed by the two flanges. Outgoing the signal that goes past the slot is exactly canceled by the signal that bounced off the bottom of the slot. Going back into the cavity the signal that bounced off the discontinuity formed by the slot is ADDED to by the signal that bounced off the bottom of the slot. So the slot forms a perfect mirror, reflecting all the microwave energy back into the oven.
But it only works for the frequency that it is tuned to - and the tuning is VERY sharp. For virtually any other frequency (except exactly 3, 5, 7,... times that particular frequency) it just shifts the phase, and all the energy goes right past it. (Well, some goes past it and some goes back. But what goes back, if it doesn't get absorbed, will come out again a few cycles later. Net result is it all comes through.)
The cancelation is also not perfect if there is any attenuation in the slot - which is why it is covered with plastic, and why you want to keep the mating surfaces of the door very clean. (A little stray food right there can cause a bit of the signal to leak out due to imperfect cancelation.)
- you could do a triangulation of the vicem by setting up three loude noise makers spaced far appart. Each would trigger in sequece, and a triangulation could be made by determining how long the cellphone took to hear the noise.
Simpler: Have four (or more) antennas at known relative positions listen for the signal and measure the DIFFERENCE in the arrival time.
I wasn't quite clear. One of the antennas sends the interrogation, all four listen for the reply and measure the arrival time.
Ideally they measure it relative to the arrival of the reply at the other antennas, not to the interrogating signal, so the time it takes the phone to figure out it needs to send a reply doesn't make clocing inaccuracies in the receivers degrade the accuracy of the measurement.
If you could get a cell phone to answer a special emergency incomming call,
You can. As part of the process of connecting a call the cell towers send a message to the phone, asking it to tell them where it is ("Joe, can you hear me?"). The phone responds with a short transmission ("I'm Joe and I hear you!"), and the cell towers that hear the response can measure the signal quality and decide which one has the best signal path to the phone. Then THAT one places the call. If none have an adequate signal the call isn't placed, so the phone doesn't ring.
This means your phone can be "pinged" and located without it doing anything to notify you. If you haven't added an external detector (i.e. diode and piezo sounder) to detect the transmission you won't know it's being done.
I understand that law enforcement agencies already have equipment to do this. Perhaps this is what they're bringing.
and if you could place a cell tower close to the site
For "cell tower" read "small box of test equipment with a little antenna at a known point."
- you could do a triangulation of the vicem by setting up three loude noise makers spaced far appart. Each would trigger in sequece, and a triangulation could be made by determining how long the cellphone took to hear the noise.
Simpler: Have four (or more) antennas at known relative positions listen for the signal and measure the DIFFERENCE in the arrival time. (You can also measure the PHASE of the signal to determine the "difference in arrival time" to as much less than a cycle of the signal as you equipment can measure the phase.)
The surface of constant path difference (result of measuring with two antennas) gives you a hyperbolid. Add a third antenna and you get the intersection of two hyperbolids - a curved line. (Don't recall the family of curves at the moment.) Add the fourth and you're down to two points in space.
You can also do this with four passive devices measuring the time between a cell tower's "ping" and the phone's reply, though the computation is a bit more involved.
Problem is that this is the behavior in free space. Add anything that bounces the signal about or shields the direct path and you're fouled up. And the phones are under tons of material, much of which reflects microwaves.
Forget about measuring phase to locate down to inches - you'll have to depend on the arrival time of the start of the signal, before the additional signals that took a different route arrive. Still good for feet or so. But if you're lucky what you'll find is the hole the signal is coming out of - and if you're not you'll get a bogus location in the vicinity of such a hole or perhaps the vicinity of the singal itself, due to signals taking different bank-shots to different antennas.
Still, I expect it would point you in the right direction and usually send you to the right room-sized volume. And as you dig out more obscuring stuff the quality of the location would progressively improve. That's good - as you get closer you need a better idea where you're goiong, to keep from crushing the person you're after.
Also: There's no reason why you couldn't bring test equipment that, once it got a good path to the phone could CALL it, so (if the person was alive and awake) you could talk to them. (Though it might be good to use the call mostly to tell them to stay off the phone but leave it turned on, to conserve the battery.)
Which brings up one last downside: Some people may have either used up their batteries trying to call out while there was no working base station in reacy, or turned off the phone to conserve power for later.
Similarly it is possible for commercial projects to be developed in a Bazaar style manner especially with the rise of software development techniques like Extreme Programming [extremeprogramming.org] where no one specifically owns a particular part of the project and people are encouraged to participate in all parts of the code and as well as test and review all parts of the code.
Ownership doesn't necessarily mean non-participation of others in test, review, or contribution of code. All ownership does is divide a large project into areas of responsibility. How the owner administers his piece, and whether multiple owners within a project have a common style, are separate issues from whether there's one owner for the whole project or a set of owners for the components.
Typically an owner or his team negotiates interface definitions with the owners of adjacent components. Beyond that the owner makes final decisions about feature set and what code is included in the component. He may keep control of it all himself or break it up and hand pieces to subordinate owners. He may keep his deliberatioins private, make them public without accepting feedback, or invite participation. He may accept contributed code and integrate it, accept suggestions but write the code himself, reject assistance, or even actively try to do something different from what is suggested. He may do his debugging himself, accept bug reports, or stage walk-throughs. And so on. Finally, he may change his policies with time.
All ownership does is create a clear set of responsibility boundaries in a multi-person project.
if there is no mass market for asynchronous chips, there's little incentive to create tools to build them; if there are no tools, no chips get produced. The same problem applies to the development of chip-testing technologies. Without any significant quantity of asynchronous circuits to test, there is no market for third-party testing tools.
But at least here there's an accidental solution - the Cross-Check Array.
Conventional clocked chips can be tested by scan: A multiplexer is added to the flop inputs, and a test signal turns them into one or more long shift registers. The old state of the flops is shifted out for examination while a new state is shifted in to start the next phase of the test. This only works when the flops to be strung together are all part of a common clocking domain.
The Cross-Check Array is more like a RAM. A grid of select lines and sense lines are laid down on the chip, with a transistor at each intersection. The transistor is undersized compared to those of the gates, forming a small tap on a nearby signal - or it can inject a signal if the sense line is driven rather than monitored. Select drivers are laid down along one edge of the chip, sense amplifiers/drivers along another.
This approach does not depend on the flip-flops to be active participants in the observation process (though it can still force their state), and thus can observe signals in asynchronous as well as synchronous designs. It also gives observability of testpoints in combinatorial logic without the addition of extra flops. Compared to a fullscan design it gives much greater observability and takes about half the silicon-area overhead.
The Community Was Served - and by another, too.
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot did provide a very valuable service the day of the attack.
Absolutely!
Take into consideration that during the day at some point all major media web sites died.
Matt's site stayed up when the rest went down. (It also has taken a lot of load in the past, and as a static, hand-edited, HTML page it doesn't have as much potential for database trouble when the going gets rough.) He did a fine job of finding and linking relevant major-media news items as they showed up - and you could often figure out what was up from his summary when the media outlet went down shortly after. He also found stories the US media won't cover - such as the outrage among many Moslems at the attack and a hint at the enormous charitable contributions in Moslem countries for the victims in the US.
But Matt's largely one-man show and dependence on the regular media put him at a disadvantage to Slashdot's fine team and enormous user base - many of whom were on-scene for the events or had expert info to contribute.
Fortunately, comparasons are not necessary. The two outlets complemented each other very well. With Matt to find virtually everything of interest in the old media (and to provide a pipe to keep politically-incorrect stories from being hidden), Slashdot to bring in info the old media miss (and provide ANOTHER pipe for the non-PC), and both sites up throughout (whether through simplicity or heroic effort), internet users who surfed both were some of the best informed people on the planet.
It's predictable that soulless people with an agenda to push will capitalize on tragedy in order to push it. The degree of their true callousness can be measured by how quickly they move to do so.
In times of stress and tragedy - like the death of a loved one or kilodeaths from a terrorist attack - people will respond to the pain by episodes of "displacement behavior" - frantically doing more of whatever it is that they do normally as their specialty.
(For instance: I recall a lawyer who, in the first quarter-hour after being informed of his grandfather's death, thought of at least four possible suits that could result.)
This is generally a GOOD reaction to have.
Those whose specialty is particularly useful to the community in times of trouble (such as the slashteam or the fire/police departments) put on an exceptional burst of productive effort.
Those whose specialty might get in the way usually figure this out in a short time and shift to doing something else.
Those whose specialty is not particularly useful in the situation are kept busy and can be ignored until they get over the shock and find something more useful to do - and even if their specialty is not useful to the particular situation it may be useful to the general health of the community in the long run.
Those whose specialty is totally irrelivant to both the immediate problem and the general health of the community continue to be totally irrelivant.
Of course different members of the Slashdot community will have different opioions of where Katz falls in this list. B-)
Looking for a fast, portable, free-as-in-speech, object-oriented language? Try Squeak
Squeak is Smalltalk. That means, among other things:
The is no clear separation between the environment and the program.
There is a confusion between a pointer and the object itself.
There is no finalaization (destruction)
There is a single memory model for instances (heap) versus, for instance, C++es minimum of 4 (heap, stack, static, member-of-another-object)
There is a single model of memory management (garbage collection over ALL objects - lose them and the memory eventually returns - sometimes after a sudden "freeze" of the program). It is automatic and can't be replaced with improved handling of special cases.
There is no strong typing.
The environment is hostile to multi-programmer cooperation.
The language design allows incomplete programs to appear to run, encouraging the release of incomplete and buggy programs.
Methods (member functions) of subclasses (derived classes) are executed during construction of the superclasses (base class), invalidating the debugging of the superclass (base class) constructor.
I could go on.
Smalltalk is useful for throwing together a program to run once to get an answer to a question or sometimes to test an idea. It is totally unsuitable for the construction of mission-critical or commercial-grade applications.
Since the problem here is to create an environment for writing code you want to DISTRIBUTE to a large number of people who will use them without being inside their development, it's an amazingly wrong language choice.
The reason was because the tunnel and fans made this horrible moaning sound when the wind was blowing (i.e. all the time), and this led to there being an increased amount of people with depression
Not just the audible moaning...
It has been known for a long time that subsonics cause unease and fear - without producing a conscious phenomenon on which to hang the feeling. A few minutes of 14 Hz, for instance, has been claimed to be able to stampeed a crowd.
Wind turbines produce a LOT of sound energy at subsonic frequencies - primarily number-of-blades times revolutions-per-second and harmonics of that.
Furethermore I believe multiple small fans would be more efficient. Now, IANAAE (I am not an aeronautical engineer) but the total airflow through a large fan's housing is much greater than the amount of airflow that actually pushes the fan (obvious)
Nope.
It's not just the air that touches the blade that pushes it. It's also the air behind that air, pushing that air, for a considerable distance. (Like back to the point where the next blade will catch it when its turn comes around.)
Slashdot Mirror
The story seems to imply that the works spread faster because of BGP instability ...
No.
The story says that the two are "correlated". That means they seem to occur at the same time and to the same degree.
This is a strong hint that one may cause the other or they both may be caused by a common third phenomenon. But it isn't difinitive. And the choice of which is stated first in the report of correlation is totally arbitrary.
As for things we don't agree with in politic we can always resume our quarrels after we beat the shit out of those motherfuckers who killed so many of our people.
I note that if crackers use their skills for information warfare they'll still be breaking the laws mentioned in the quid-pro-quo request.
Orders from officers or officials in the executive branch is no excuse for committing felonies.
So some of the requested actions may be necessary if the government wants to legally use the crackers in their efforts.
Moderators: don't mod up stuff unless there is PROOF or this person has put a real name behind their statements.
e r when it's posted anonomyously.
You misunderstand the purpose of moderation.
Moderation is to call readers' attention to interesting/informative/funny/whatever POSTINGS, and make it easier for them to avoid redundant/trolling/whatever POSTINGS.
When someone choses to post under their ID they also gain karma if they're moderated up. If they have a preponderance of stuff others want to see eventually their karma gives them an automatic bonus point, to bring their stuff to your attention more quickly. (Similarly, anonymous postings are less likely to be of interet / more likely to be obnoxious, so they start out with a one-point penalty.)
But that doesn't make a particular posting any more or less interesting/informative/redundant/trolling/whatev
So moderators SHOULD moderate anonymous postings up or down, as appropriate.
Try it out [xmradio.com] at their web site.
No, thanks. It runs under javascript.
If you talk to people about your plans to whack a goose, they can't convict you of conspiracy to commit goose-whacking because there's no law against conspiring to goose-whack.
I was under the impression that - at least back in the Vietnam Un-War era - there are/were blanket conspiracy statutes that made conspiracy to commit a crime (even a misdemeanor) a felony.
It was a particularly noxious law. In addition to upping the ante, it criminalized talking about a crime *without committing it*, and made hearsay admissible.
IANAL so maybe somebody who is can comment.
It makes perfect sense to me, with a couple of changes of emphasis.
It makes sense, when writing an emulator/compatability layer, to TEST whether a malicious program will run, for two reasons:
Discovering whether the emulation is close enough that the emulator is also vulnerable to the malicious software.
Discovering whether the malicious software fails because it depends on a feature - necessary for some NON-malicious programs - which is not correctly emulated. (A malicious program may use a little-known or undocumented "feature" - perhaps one that's been keeping some popular apps from working correctly.)
But beyond debugging the emulation there are additional reasons:
Running the malicious program in the (open-source) emulation environment may provide additional insight into its operation, leading to better defenses, both for the emulation and the original environment.
It's FUNNY!
That's four separate reasons that this makes sense.
Subject says it all.
Install FreeBSD if that's what you want.
Forget GNU. Forget Linux. Forget BSD. Forget Microsoft.
Just use the system that best fits your needs. This may mean that your pet OS is not a universal fit for someone else.
That's what this is ABOUT!
The OS and the applications are separate entities. This is a port of the applications so they'll compile and run identically, from a common source base, on both BSDs and Linux. This makes them tweakable on Linux or a BSD, and so on.
Once this is fully done you'll be able to have a common environment across the (unix-like) OS spectrum. Pull out the OS and swap in another, and it won't matter. So you'll be able to pick or change the OS to meet your needs for *OS* performance, hackability, or special feature set, without having to switch to a different set of applications just because you changed the platform under them.
If you have a large network, you might very well be helping yourself far in excess of the bandwith used by the tarpit, certainly a win in my book.
A variant of this that stickied up ALL the ports rather than just port 80 might be interesting. Deply that on your net and anybody who tries to portscan the phantom machines might spend a LONG time trying to categorize them. B-)
Similarly, making some of the otherwise unused ports on a REAL machine sticky would also be a problem for portscanners - though somewhat impolite to people who are attempting to connect for legitimate reasons.
As 65% of all Brazilians with income more than US$ 2000 always walksequipped with gun...
This may be true. But keep in mind the the percentage of the Brazilian population with income more than US$ 2000 is roughly 5%.
But what percentage of the population with annual income under US$ 2000 will be riding airliners? B-)
Certainly, we would all be physically safer if we lived in a totalitarian regime with no privacy protection. Would that be worth the cost?
Unfortunately, that is not true. We MIGHT be safer from external threats. But we would be wide open to threats from the members of the regime - both abuse by individual functionaries and institutionalized mayhem.
Historically this has been a recurring theme, with the INternal attacks amassing a body count that dwarfs the extrenal. Consider the Gulags of the Soviet Union, NAZI Germany, the Inquisition, the religious wars throughout Europe just a few hundred years ago, Apartheit, "Ethnic Clensing" in a dozen countries, just to name a few.
The US is far from immune, both historically and recently. The Trail of Tears, the Civil War, the Klan, the Zoot Suit Riots, Ruby Ridge and Waco, again to name a few.
But despite the distortions presented by the media and government-school history, people are far safer in the US than in virtually all other countries. And one of the greatest factors is that when attacked, individually or in mass, they have the ability to fight back. This is by design.
The government can't be everywhere and guard everything and everyone all the time. But every competent adult could easily have his or her own personal armed guard: theirselves.
There is NOTHING magic about the necessary skils. They are easy, quick, and inexpensive to acquire. Police and private guards spend only a few hours learning them. Civilians who chose to go armed generally also chose to train themselves to a far higher standard than that required for police. They have a far better record of defending against "bad guys" and NOT damaging bystanders.
And this is EXACTLY what the founders of the country intended: For the individual citizens to be armed. For them to be their OWN armed guards and their OWN army. So that an armed guard was always available when needed. So that the army was the size of the population. So that the guard and the army always had the citizen's interest, rather than their own or their employer's, as their primary motivation.
The hijacked airliners each had 5 to 6 hijackers and over 50 passengers. If even one in ten of them had been armed the hijackers would never have been able to take down the towers. And if an unknown fraction of the passengers had a habit of traveling armed the hijaclers never would have tried.
But the passengers were NOT armed - even though some of them MIGHT have been able to be armed while going about their daily lives - because the government DISARMED them. And as a result the hijackers were able to convert aircraft into incindeary missiles, and kill over ten thousand people who had NOT chosen to go through the airport search and board the ill-fated planes.
Clinton talked of 10,000 new policemen - even though his program produced nothing of the sort. But if relegalizing concealed carry resulted in even 10% of the population chosing to carry, you're talking over 20,000,000 do-it-yourself armed guards, "working" double shifts, scattered quite evenly through the population (and concentrated at potential trouble spots).
Experience with CCW shows that such people are far less of a danger to each other than professionals would be (even in the total absense of official misconduct). But can you imagine a small band of terrorists trying to pull something in such an environment?
And with that level of physical security who needs wiretaps?
(I'd go into that subject too, but I have to take off now.)
Because this hasn't been moderated yet. I get a +1 because of my karma - still far above the cap from all the other interesting and informative factual postings I've made.
THIS IS COMPLETELY INVALID INFORMATION, CAN'T YOU SEE, STUPID MODERATORS?
As far as I know it's God's honest truth. The gunnies are crowing about it big-time. Here's the article:
Now maybe it's a hoax. But these things usually aren't. You're welcome to hunt up documentation to disprove this story.
This makes perfect sense to me. To quote a pro-gun billboard: Society is safer when the crooks don't know who's armed. Research has shown that whenever a state in the US legalizes concealed carry their crime rate drops like a rock.
Now just sum the anger of being stupid yourselves to the anger you suffer from this stupid terror incident and set this message as -1.
Telling the truth is stupid? Recognizing the truth when it hits you in the face is stupid?
I don't think so.
About five or six hijackers with box cutters took over each of the four planes. Two of those planes - a total of eleven hijackers - took out both towers of the World Trade Center AND building seven, with a loss of over five thousand lives (and still counting).
Three or so UNarmed passengers took back one of the planes - at least well enough to fly it into the ground instead of a still-unnamed target in DC.
The planes had an average of over fifty people on them. How many hijackers would it have taken if, on the average, more than 32 of those passengers had been armed, and freshly instructed on shooting hijackers without destroying the plane or killing the other passengers?
Would the terrorists have even treid to hijack the planes?
I have seen a report that, in response to the events of last Tuesday (including the passengers who resisted and downed the fourth plane on its way to DC), Brazil has legalized gun-toting by airline passengers.
.44 special Bulldog model. It was developed for the US Air Martial program. Fires a big, slow bullet to avoid puncturing the hull or the windows. Kicks like a mule, but a bruised hand is better than a crash. Reasonably easy to conceal.
The flight-attendant speech is being revised to add instructions on how to plug a hijacker with minimum risk of puncturing the pressure hull, crew, and other passengers.
(This may be a bow to the inevitable. I understand that well over 60% of the Brazillian population already carries concealed pistols, often in violation of their existing gun laws.)
FYI: If this is ever legalized where you fly, I recommend the Charter Arms
(Try Glaser Safety Slugs, too - in this or anything else. Think of pistol-round sized shotgun shells that spread out in the first thing they touch, rather than a jacketed bullet that penetrates and damages whatever is behind the target. That's also what "Black Talon" slugs were REALLY about.)
I thought /. was harping on Microsoft for shipping a product with thousands of STILL OPEN bugs.
Yep.
But given that the count includes new features, it would be as valid to proclaim that Mozilla had 100,000 new features, then start deducting the bugs.
Besides: A documeted bug IS a "feature". Right? B-)
Oh, and the quote is "Foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds."
A non-rational quote used (from the first time it was uttered) to avoid valid arguments in debate by belittling those who make them.
I prefer a slight rearrangement: "Inconsistency is the mind of a foolish little hobgoblin."
Actually they ARE microwaves - just a different frequency within the same set of bands.
So how is it possible that the phone can still communicate, even inside the shielding?
The door to the microwave oven has something called a "choke joint". It works like this:
The door has a conductive flange around it's edge.
The oven cavity also has a conductive flange.
When the door is closed the two flanges are parallel to each other and separated by a layer of plastic. They act as a very good transmission line connecting the inside of the cavity to the outside. But...
One of the flanges has a slot in it. It's less than a quarter wavelength wide, and exactly a quarter wavelength deep. It's conductive on the sides and bottom.
... times that particular frequency) it just shifts the phase, and all the energy goes right past it. (Well, some goes past it and some goes back. But what goes back, if it doesn't get absorbed, will come out again a few cycles later. Net result is it all comes through.)
A quarter wavelength transmission line acts as an impedence inverter. If the far end is a very good short, the near end is a very good infinite resistance. Each wave goes up the slot, bounces off the end, and comes back to EXACTLY cancel the next half-cycle of the wave.
The result is that the "choke joint" acts as a perfect open circult in the section of the transmission line formed by the two flanges. Outgoing the signal that goes past the slot is exactly canceled by the signal that bounced off the bottom of the slot. Going back into the cavity the signal that bounced off the discontinuity formed by the slot is ADDED to by the signal that bounced off the bottom of the slot. So the slot forms a perfect mirror, reflecting all the microwave energy back into the oven.
But it only works for the frequency that it is tuned to - and the tuning is VERY sharp. For virtually any other frequency (except exactly 3, 5, 7,
The cancelation is also not perfect if there is any attenuation in the slot - which is why it is covered with plastic, and why you want to keep the mating surfaces of the door very clean. (A little stray food right there can cause a bit of the signal to leak out due to imperfect cancelation.)
- you could do a triangulation of the vicem by setting up three loude noise makers spaced far appart. Each would trigger in sequece, and a triangulation could be made by determining how long the cellphone took to hear the noise.
Simpler: Have four (or more) antennas at known relative positions listen for the signal and measure the DIFFERENCE in the arrival time.
I wasn't quite clear. One of the antennas sends the interrogation, all four listen for the reply and measure the arrival time.
Ideally they measure it relative to the arrival of the reply at the other antennas, not to the interrogating signal, so the time it takes the phone to figure out it needs to send a reply doesn't make clocing inaccuracies in the receivers degrade the accuracy of the measurement.
If you could get a cell phone to answer a special emergency incomming call,
You can. As part of the process of connecting a call the cell towers send a message to the phone, asking it to tell them where it is ("Joe, can you hear me?"). The phone responds with a short transmission ("I'm Joe and I hear you!"), and the cell towers that hear the response can measure the signal quality and decide which one has the best signal path to the phone. Then THAT one places the call. If none have an adequate signal the call isn't placed, so the phone doesn't ring.
This means your phone can be "pinged" and located without it doing anything to notify you. If you haven't added an external detector (i.e. diode and piezo sounder) to detect the transmission you won't know it's being done.
I understand that law enforcement agencies already have equipment to do this. Perhaps this is what they're bringing.
and if you could place a cell tower close to the site
For "cell tower" read "small box of test equipment with a little antenna at a known point."
- you could do a triangulation of the vicem by setting up three loude noise makers spaced far appart. Each would trigger in sequece, and a triangulation could be made by determining how long the cellphone took to hear the noise.
Simpler: Have four (or more) antennas at known relative positions listen for the signal and measure the DIFFERENCE in the arrival time. (You can also measure the PHASE of the signal to determine the "difference in arrival time" to as much less than a cycle of the signal as you equipment can measure the phase.)
The surface of constant path difference (result of measuring with two antennas) gives you a hyperbolid. Add a third antenna and you get the intersection of two hyperbolids - a curved line. (Don't recall the family of curves at the moment.) Add the fourth and you're down to two points in space.
You can also do this with four passive devices measuring the time between a cell tower's "ping" and the phone's reply, though the computation is a bit more involved.
Problem is that this is the behavior in free space. Add anything that bounces the signal about or shields the direct path and you're fouled up. And the phones are under tons of material, much of which reflects microwaves.
Forget about measuring phase to locate down to inches - you'll have to depend on the arrival time of the start of the signal, before the additional signals that took a different route arrive. Still good for feet or so. But if you're lucky what you'll find is the hole the signal is coming out of - and if you're not you'll get a bogus location in the vicinity of such a hole or perhaps the vicinity of the singal itself, due to signals taking different bank-shots to different antennas.
Still, I expect it would point you in the right direction and usually send you to the right room-sized volume. And as you dig out more obscuring stuff the quality of the location would progressively improve. That's good - as you get closer you need a better idea where you're goiong, to keep from crushing the person you're after.
Also: There's no reason why you couldn't bring test equipment that, once it got a good path to the phone could CALL it, so (if the person was alive and awake) you could talk to them. (Though it might be good to use the call mostly to tell them to stay off the phone but leave it turned on, to conserve the battery.)
Which brings up one last downside: Some people may have either used up their batteries trying to call out while there was no working base station in reacy, or turned off the phone to conserve power for later.
Similarly it is possible for commercial projects to be developed in a Bazaar style manner especially with the rise of software development techniques like Extreme Programming [extremeprogramming.org] where no one specifically owns a particular part of the project and people are encouraged to participate in all parts of the code and as well as test and review all parts of the code.
Ownership doesn't necessarily mean non-participation of others in test, review, or contribution of code. All ownership does is divide a large project into areas of responsibility. How the owner administers his piece, and whether multiple owners within a project have a common style, are separate issues from whether there's one owner for the whole project or a set of owners for the components.
Typically an owner or his team negotiates interface definitions with the owners of adjacent components. Beyond that the owner makes final decisions about feature set and what code is included in the component. He may keep control of it all himself or break it up and hand pieces to subordinate owners. He may keep his deliberatioins private, make them public without accepting feedback, or invite participation. He may accept contributed code and integrate it, accept suggestions but write the code himself, reject assistance, or even actively try to do something different from what is suggested. He may do his debugging himself, accept bug reports, or stage walk-throughs. And so on. Finally, he may change his policies with time.
All ownership does is create a clear set of responsibility boundaries in a multi-person project.
if there is no mass market for asynchronous chips, there's little incentive to create tools to build them; if there are no tools, no chips get produced. The same problem applies to the development of chip-testing technologies. Without any significant quantity of asynchronous circuits to test, there is no market for third-party testing tools.
But at least here there's an accidental solution - the Cross-Check Array.
Conventional clocked chips can be tested by scan: A multiplexer is added to the flop inputs, and a test signal turns them into one or more long shift registers. The old state of the flops is shifted out for examination while a new state is shifted in to start the next phase of the test. This only works when the flops to be strung together are all part of a common clocking domain.
The Cross-Check Array is more like a RAM. A grid of select lines and sense lines are laid down on the chip, with a transistor at each intersection. The transistor is undersized compared to those of the gates, forming a small tap on a nearby signal - or it can inject a signal if the sense line is driven rather than monitored. Select drivers are laid down along one edge of the chip, sense amplifiers/drivers along another.
This approach does not depend on the flip-flops to be active participants in the observation process (though it can still force their state), and thus can observe signals in asynchronous as well as synchronous designs. It also gives observability of testpoints in combinatorial logic without the addition of extra flops. Compared to a fullscan design it gives much greater observability and takes about half the silicon-area overhead.
Slashdot did provide a very valuable service the day of the attack.
Absolutely!
Take into consideration that during the day at some point all major media web sites died.
I noticed that one other survived: The Drudge Report
Matt's site stayed up when the rest went down. (It also has taken a lot of load in the past, and as a static, hand-edited, HTML page it doesn't have as much potential for database trouble when the going gets rough.) He did a fine job of finding and linking relevant major-media news items as they showed up - and you could often figure out what was up from his summary when the media outlet went down shortly after. He also found stories the US media won't cover - such as the outrage among many Moslems at the attack and a hint at the enormous charitable contributions in Moslem countries for the victims in the US.
But Matt's largely one-man show and dependence on the regular media put him at a disadvantage to Slashdot's fine team and enormous user base - many of whom were on-scene for the events or had expert info to contribute.
Fortunately, comparasons are not necessary. The two outlets complemented each other very well. With Matt to find virtually everything of interest in the old media (and to provide a pipe to keep politically-incorrect stories from being hidden), Slashdot to bring in info the old media miss (and provide ANOTHER pipe for the non-PC), and both sites up throughout (whether through simplicity or heroic effort), internet users who surfed both were some of the best informed people on the planet.
In times of stress and tragedy - like the death of a loved one or kilodeaths from a terrorist attack - people will respond to the pain by episodes of "displacement behavior" - frantically doing more of whatever it is that they do normally as their specialty.
(For instance: I recall a lawyer who, in the first quarter-hour after being informed of his grandfather's death, thought of at least four possible suits that could result.)
This is generally a GOOD reaction to have.
Those whose specialty is particularly useful to the community in times of trouble (such as the slashteam or the fire/police departments) put on an exceptional burst of productive effort.
Those whose specialty might get in the way usually figure this out in a short time and shift to doing something else.
Those whose specialty is not particularly useful in the situation are kept busy and can be ignored until they get over the shock and find something more useful to do - and even if their specialty is not useful to the particular situation it may be useful to the general health of the community in the long run.
Those whose specialty is totally irrelivant to both the immediate problem and the general health of the community continue to be totally irrelivant.
Of course different members of the Slashdot community will have different opioions of where Katz falls in this list. B-)
Squeak is Smalltalk. That means, among other things:
The is no clear separation between the environment and the program.
There is a confusion between a pointer and the object itself.
There is no finalaization (destruction)
There is a single memory model for instances (heap) versus, for instance, C++es minimum of 4 (heap, stack, static, member-of-another-object)
There is a single model of memory management (garbage collection over ALL objects - lose them and the memory eventually returns - sometimes after a sudden "freeze" of the program). It is automatic and can't be replaced with improved handling of special cases.
There is no strong typing.
The environment is hostile to multi-programmer cooperation.
The language design allows incomplete programs to appear to run, encouraging the release of incomplete and buggy programs.
Methods (member functions) of subclasses (derived classes) are executed during construction of the superclasses (base class), invalidating the debugging of the superclass (base class) constructor.
I could go on.
Smalltalk is useful for throwing together a program to run once to get an answer to a question or sometimes to test an idea. It is totally unsuitable for the construction of mission-critical or commercial-grade applications.
Since the problem here is to create an environment for writing code you want to DISTRIBUTE to a large number of people who will use them without being inside their development, it's an amazingly wrong language choice.
The reason was because the tunnel and fans made this horrible moaning sound when the wind was blowing (i.e. all the time), and this led to there being an increased amount of people with depression
Not just the audible moaning...
It has been known for a long time that subsonics cause unease and fear - without producing a conscious phenomenon on which to hang the feeling. A few minutes of 14 Hz, for instance, has been claimed to be able to stampeed a crowd.
Wind turbines produce a LOT of sound energy at subsonic frequencies - primarily number-of-blades times revolutions-per-second and harmonics of that.
Furethermore I believe multiple small fans would be more efficient. Now, IANAAE (I am not an aeronautical engineer) but the total airflow through a large fan's housing is much greater than the amount of airflow that actually pushes the fan (obvious)
Nope.
It's not just the air that touches the blade that pushes it. It's also the air behind that air, pushing that air, for a considerable distance. (Like back to the point where the next blade will catch it when its turn comes around.)
Fluid dynamics is non-obvious.
Wind turbines are more or less silent
Not so.
Wind turbines produce a very large amount of noise at a very low frequency - the number of blades times the number of revolutions per second.
This is usually subsonic, but VERY annoing and can be harmful. It also penetrates large windows and building walls easily.