Here in the Philippines if you slip a couple of thousand peso in with your handshake, you can be anyone you want, including I would hazard, Steve Jobs.
If you don't want to do the whole 'bribery' thing, you can opt for the falsification of document pathway instead. Print out a new birth certificate from your laser printer right at home, then have it certified as a true copy by a notary public for about 200 peso at the Land Transportation Office itself. (LTO is the same as your DMV)
But I get your point. We should pick the latter, but we are mostly lazy creatures:-)
You cant exploit windows bugs in them because you cant connect to them from the internet.
You don't need the internet, and they are exploitable - most definitely passively, and very probably actively (I never dared try). How so you ask? While this may be different for your area of the world, here in Asia many ATM's are linked by microwave or satellite depending upon geography. Having had some experience in digital communications for a decade or so, I can claim to have a teeny bit of knowledge on the subject. (Not hacking on ATM's, but in communications - particularly in the search and analysis fields)
Banks put a huge effort in to physical security, and one would naturally assume this extends to network security as well. Traditional copper or fiber based networks, sure, you'll usually find a security guard or two protecting these so it's not like you can just splice or patch your way in without getting the cuffs slapped on. But, Slashdot, meet the humble feed horn, and your bog standard radio link. If 'they' want to beam their signals in to my back yard, they are mine right?:-)
The glossy ATM brochures the bank manager pours over in his throne room portray a safe and secure point to point system. Though we know many aspects of 'security' are naught more than snake oil. These banks, they spend maybe 5 to 10 grand setting up the radio link, a bit more again for the ATM itself, with a nice big fat service contract to whoever maintains it. A simple and cost effective plug and play solution. If the little green light goes out in the comcen, you call the techs. For the bank manager, how it all works might as well be magic. Who cares, it's got 'microwave' so it must be secure.
So how do they communicate?
Simple ad-hoc packet switched network at speeds of generally 19.2 kbps - most have 1/2 rate viterbi - so you can see the information rate is quite low 9.6kbps.
Some are slower, some a little faster.
They are pretty chatty little machines too, they say a whole lot more than I'd ever allow. Since we might as well say they communicate in the clear, you would think the data channel would be devoid of any information that could actually identify the user or their card and its details. You would think!!!
Lets just say for the more technically inclined criminal, the ones they will likely never catch, there really is no point in even bothering to inject or exploit code into the ATM OS. That's too much effort for a single point of access.
If you can see the Clark belt from your particular patch of dirt, you can see this stuff for a few thousand USD too.
And the explanation in your particular case is this:
We roll your eyes at yet another made up story. Simple as that.
Why? Because electronic warfare (ELINT) drones like me know how few RADAR systems are actually capable of measuring velocities that high. We also do the math. We sit down with our EW kit and build a real life fingerprint for the specific emitter that 'tracked' this alleged UFO. We tell you that your PRF / PRI, pulse duration, duty cycle, and your cute little pseudo random stagger pattern make your RADAR physically incapable of tracking anything above XXXX knots. We know this beyond any doubt because we have ego's bigger than your average fighter pilot. We know exactly how many pulses per paint it takes to put a little dot on your PPI because we count them, and not just theoretically, we grab a couple of those fighter jocks and have them run a few supersonic passes at the same time. We sit right there next to the scope with you and gloat as we say "I told you so!", pointing fingers at our scrawled out algebra. In terms of 'UFOs', we don't care about little green men, we actually care about "Non allied sucker popping up out of the waves doing mach 2 over our sigint station for some photographs, and then vanishing in a puff of sonic booms to who the hell knows where"
We leave the X file stuff for people back in the MoD, who then retire a couple of years later and hit the lucrative public talk circuits.
When the psych asked me why I wanted to work in a TS security field, I kid you not, I said "because I wanted to know if UFO's really exist" - we both laughed, but I was actually serious:-)
You think? Military secrecy is far more important than you give credit.
Our cheap 30 dollar widget added to our existing stockpile of shoulder launched anti-aircraft missiles will ground your trillion dollar paper tiger in a heart beat. How so? We built this little gizmo to outwit the countermeasures built in to your trillion dollar paper tiger stacked up over there in the corner of our intelligence office. Not only that, but from those reference specs, we were also able to reverse engineer the bog standard state of the art used on most of your other aircraft too.
Er, that's why they add in GPS, weather stations, and some kind of visible spectrum laser radar. All of the problems you speak of can be rendered entirely obsolete. Each device will know where it is in relation to every other, each will know the atmospheric pressure and temperature so it can calculate the speed of sound and adjust to your position instantly (embedded locator beacon surgery sold separately), and it'll be able to compensate for any distortions in the speed of light as an added bonus.
Don't be a dick and twist things to suit your own political agenda. Giving consumers a choice is not stifling your freedom at all. It may well be annoying for Microsoft, but you are not Microsoft so keep your panties on. Right in the summary it is saying that "YOU" have a ~choice~. If you want internet explorer then pick it, otherwise choose something else. How hard is that? The EU sticking their nose in and saying "Dude, see this fine selection of browsers? One of them can be yours", this is at least a small faction within the greater EU that does not suck.
I wasn't wealthy enough for the heady delights of an Apple IIe or a Vic20, I had to make do with a Mattel Aquarius computer. (Purchased in 1983) It still works, but it's still as useless today as it was in 1983.
It's simple: There is no rule, just one (1) statement.
(Excuse my profanity) You're in Fucking Space! SPACE! At best this is going to happen only a handful of times in the average astronauts lifetime, more likely only once, what the hell are they doing with a DVD player!?!
The short story: Biological brains die when they are shut down, currently this lasts forever. A snapshot of an electronic brain can be made at any moment in time, it can then be shut down and later restarted in exactly the same state as when it was shut down. This would mean the 'intelligent' component can be resurrected with no loss of whatever made it 'it' in the first place.
Not only that, any number of copies of this intelligence could be made at any point along its lifespan, each of these could be fed in to a different host and started up. It'd be interesting to see if they take divergent pathways from the original, but that's another topic. All of these copies would be just as alive as the original.
Would they die when they are switched off? I guess you could say yes, but I'd say they'd have no knowledge of this other than the impending circumstances of the action. They may not be happy about it either, but meh. They can be turned on again.
This might be explained or at least rationalised slightly better if you understand the differences between Asian culture and the one which, presumably, you come from (My assumption is the US, but I could be wrong)
Now, I don't make the rules here, so when I say it is sometimes seen as a 'very grave family insult' to commit suicide, you might think this is stupid, backward, and crazy arsed dumb 12 ways from Sunday. And you would be right too. Thai people tend not to want to directly confront any problem head on, they like to tackle things a little more obliquely, talk about it in vague hand waving first. "Yes" often actually means no, or just maybe.
Knee jerk reactions such as this do sort themselves out in parliament or the legal system. Give it a month or two to have the person responsible for this action will get slapped around, the law might not get stricken from record, but it wont really be enforced either. Aside from this, there are always deeper issues at play, people using tragedy as an excuse to push their agenda. None of us anywhere in the world are stranger to this though!
And the cell tower microwave link pushes all of that 'decrypted' data in one neat little muxed up package over the same bit of air you're fighting with to figure out the GSM encryption key. If these phones are selling for 25 grand, it shows people have far more money than brain cells, though more than this, it shows just how far behind the curve criminals actually are. For that kind of outlay you can buy your own spectrum analyser, microwave receive gear, modems, down converters, data capture cards, and a nice server to suck it all in to. (Most of it second hand) Maybe not quite as easy to lug around as these little Nokia 1100's, but if your purpose in life is stealing money, then you're doing it wrong.
Just for starters:
More than a few (hundred thousand) ATM's are satellite or microwave linked. You might be a little bit surprised (in an angry kind of way) at just how chatty these beasts actually are too. Encrypted? Would you call plain old ebcdic buried in a simple ad-hoc packet switched network 'encryption'? Hell, there are plenty of banks that link their dumb terminals straight in to HQ, this is far worse than waiting for an ATM to fire out its daily sitrep. 97.4% of bald headed bank managers seem to think that if their data is passing through a feed horn at some point on its journey, then it must be secure there too, right? Right? Well, sure why not, whatever you say sir. Now lets just watch in real time exactly what your bank babe is typing in to her terminal over there, all with some cheap off the ebay shelf equipment.
Banks love to make a show of security to the customer, and they are pretty good at it in general, but they let themselves down on the back end. For someone with a bit of an interest in radio and basic networking, though in particular for someone with no moral guidance unit, I guess you could say there is money to be stolen at every turn.
The things people would know, if they only knew:-) It's good to be a consultant sometimes. Money for nothing.
The Nokia 1100 does happen to be one of the best selling products of modern times. 200 million units sold. I'm thinking it might be a little bit difficult to shut that barn door.
Generally they move them out of their parking slot once the propellent hits vapour and someone else moves right on in. The interesting thing is that there is no barrier to entry. For less than a thousand USD you can buy enough kit on ebay to run your own *ahem* pirate E1(2/3/4) and chances are you'll never get caught. The owners might not like it, but at worst they'll just run a CW spike up and down your energy lobe. It's not as though they can actually pinpoint where you are with any great accuracy. In my previous life working for 'the man' (both military and as a civilian) I used to do technical signals analysis of pretty much anything in space that could radiate energy. Some interesting and crazy stuff out there. Imagine your bog standard E1 filled full of V.26 modems sending teletype - People aren't just keeping DOS around for stuff, they are also keeping their 1960's tech going strong as well, they modernize it a bit, but it's all still out there.
FDM's, the odd bit of morse code, but then there are TDMA systems all over the shop, those buggers are a bit harder to work with, I never met anything much more challenging than that though.
Yup, to get the same effect, in human terms, you'd have to be able to knock back more or less 900 cans of your average carbonated diet beverage in a day. That's around 300 litres depending on which country you live in. (Some standardize on 330ml cans, while others are at 375ml)
Before blogs and yahoo answers took over the world it used to be pretty easy to find reliable data on the subject.
If your definition of Operating System = Firmware too (I know mine does), then there are wads of companies out in the world that have been doing this for far longer.
Early 1990's:
Radyne made satellite modems, to activate various types of de/modulation methods, overheads, error correction and so on, you would park a small truck full of money out front of their office, they would take your truck and the money, then give you a series of keys in return. Those key would activate additional parts of the firmware and you'd get your extra features.
What is crazy these days is the price: Back in the day it wasn't uncommon to pay 15 grand US for one of these babies, now the buggers sell on ebay for 20 bucks.
I played with a military version of this about 12 years back when I was, er, military, though it was strictly a top down view only - unless you plugged the feed in to oilstock without permission, and wrote a small script to parse it all. After borrowing the world wide digital terrain elevation data CD's from another agency (again possibly without permission and subsequently taking up several gigabytes of drive space) you could even have a rudimentary google earth like view in 300 easy mouse clicks per reference frame. Want to change the view angle? Remember that 300 mouse click sequence I just showed you?
And here's me thinking I might skip the whole password safe type thing and just wing it. At least until my job required me to sign up for some HSBC corporate banking stuff. Turns out that while you do give a password, they never, ever, ask you for it. 4 weeks later when they get around to telling you your application has been approved, you have dredge back up all the bogus 90210 user@example.com crap you typed in: Mothers maiden name, shoe size at 11 years of age, what you ate for breakfast on the 13 of September 1993, the names of your 4 previous pets that departed our dear earth as a result of unfortunate microwave accidents, that kind of thing.
I'm a tad more careful now. My crap has gained a little more consistency so to speak.
For that kind of money I could buy a little bitty kawasaki zx 10 ninja (or newer) and get from point A to point B getting around 30 to 40 mpg. If I tap that sucker in to 4th gear and let it idle, trying not to get too damn scared as we whine past others on the freeway without even wanting to, we could thus push ourselves up to the 45 mpg mark:-) (I kid, it really only needs 3rd gear and a tiny bit of stick to get in to the triple digit 'holy, fuck me' kind of speed!)
You want some bling in a nice looking package that'll smear your body along the road like some kind of liver paste before your brain can even register its own demise? These two wheeled machines are your ticket!
If you have to sign up to get access to the download links, then it's not free, no matter how glitzy and 'free' you say it is. Terms and conditions that read like you need a lawyer to get a clue, a privacy policy that says what information you make public is ours, and what information you make private will be ours too when we screw up our website and it gets out in the public arena anyway.
I live in the Philippines. I don't know if this is related to your comment exactly, but I have to tell you they make some seriously crappy TV here. His indie film would probably look better even if it was made on a throw away cell phone. See, our cutting edge 2009 special effects make 1963 episodes of Dr. Who seem about as good as the latest Pixar release. Even our best efforts at cinematic release look like they were been pre-aged by 50 or 60 years right on opening night. If it has some 1950's actor turned president turned corrupt agent turned movie star again, then it'll turn a few million bucks long before it hits the pirate stands no matter how crappy it is.
I too am a little bored with the sig, it needs updating.
Well, you could always patent the whole page turning thing before google does then.
Who does that job anyway? I've worked some crappy gigs in my day, but Chief Executive Page Turning Boy (or girl) would probably get boring after, like, 4 seconds. Maybe I should apply.
For a price there is always someone who knows better. Evidently you know better, but who are you? Where are you? How much do you charge? Where were you to inform us that our choices were wrong before we made them?
The vast majority of us are not sitting back in our leather recliner supplied by our fortune 500 overlord reflecting on how to shave a few CPU cycles off a query, we don't have a team of DBA's we can turn to during the planning and implementation stages. At best we have a handful of guys and girls churning out code to a deadline, though more commonly it's just some person nobody knows with a PHP book in hand scratching an itch, management notice and suddenly the title changes from Sector 7-G data entry drone to the resident CTO of a corporation with all of 30 people on the pay roll.
People make mistakes, hell, people barely know how to articulate what it is they want at the best of times, mostly they have no clue what is even possible - you mix this in with the sleaze selling snake oil in every facet of life, a little bit of internet drama, and you have this aforementioned shit splattering on the fan blades.
Instead of being unhappy that the industry is getting undermined by people who shouldn't be allowed in front of a keyboard, change your career goals, be the saviour, make a shit tin of money off the backs of these retards. Build a slick looking website with pictures of old wise men in glasses playing with their grand kids on the front lawn, sell your little patch of "I can do this better than anyone else"
Me, I just want a new motorbike, I'll churn out the code as best I can until that happens, every day I try to learn new ways of doing the same old stuff better, but once in a while I'll still log in to a production environment and chmod -R 700 / for kicks, then delete the audit logs. Screwing up is what we humans do in the real world.
I have one caveat with this design though, I'm not very fond of the Cassegrain system because the quality of the optics is often sacrificed in the process of creating them.
I'm pretty much exclusively involved in the radio parts of the spectrum, not entirely dissimilar, though in this particular case the system is so large and sensitive I'm not sure that it would lend itself very well to any other designs - please do call me out if I'm wrong here though, happy to change my outlook. The alternative to the Cassegrain design would mean the detection equipment has to be located wherever the focal point of the dish happens to fall, somewhere up front of the mirror. My assumption is that this stuff is super sensitive to vibration and the environment, so probably when it comes to a dish this size, it's probably just easier to engineer this way, the losses wouldn't be so large that it'd matter that much:-)
Now to point this sucker at the sun and fry some ants.
Given how many billions of websites and hundreds of millions of domains there are, and the not so insignificant fact that this number is on the increase by quite a few million every year, I think the answer to your point is that it wont, and doesn't, matter at all. Some things might falter and fall by the wayside, some site owner figured they could make it with advert support, bad business decision yes? Not my problem.
Advert supported websites were a gravy train in the 90's and 00's - so here's looking at the next decade and what it might bring. I guess there will be a temporary shift to inline adverts, though this will be brief. Eventually site owners will figure out that if they can't afford to roll out a website, then they shouldn't. If someone has something interesting to say, they'll figure out a way to get it 'out there' without the help of ad pushers.
A few days back I stumbled on a random forum that informed me I was using Ad-Block (I was), it then said unless I turn it off I would not get access to their stuff. I thought that was pretty cute.
Adblock can't be that small if people are beginning to script tests for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the Philippines if you slip a couple of thousand peso in with your handshake, you can be anyone you want, including I would hazard, Steve Jobs.
If you don't want to do the whole 'bribery' thing, you can opt for the falsification of document pathway instead. Print out a new birth certificate from your laser printer right at home, then have it certified as a true copy by a notary public for about 200 peso at the Land Transportation Office itself. (LTO is the same as your DMV)
But I get your point. We should pick the latter, but we are mostly lazy creatures :-)
You cant exploit windows bugs in them because you cant connect to them from the internet.
You don't need the internet, and they are exploitable - most definitely passively, and very probably actively (I never dared try). How so you ask? While this may be different for your area of the world, here in Asia many ATM's are linked by microwave or satellite depending upon geography. Having had some experience in digital communications for a decade or so, I can claim to have a teeny bit of knowledge on the subject. (Not hacking on ATM's, but in communications - particularly in the search and analysis fields)
Banks put a huge effort in to physical security, and one would naturally assume this extends to network security as well. Traditional copper or fiber based networks, sure, you'll usually find a security guard or two protecting these so it's not like you can just splice or patch your way in without getting the cuffs slapped on. But, Slashdot, meet the humble feed horn, and your bog standard radio link. If 'they' want to beam their signals in to my back yard, they are mine right? :-)
The glossy ATM brochures the bank manager pours over in his throne room portray a safe and secure point to point system. Though we know many aspects of 'security' are naught more than snake oil. These banks, they spend maybe 5 to 10 grand setting up the radio link, a bit more again for the ATM itself, with a nice big fat service contract to whoever maintains it. A simple and cost effective plug and play solution. If the little green light goes out in the comcen, you call the techs. For the bank manager, how it all works might as well be magic. Who cares, it's got 'microwave' so it must be secure.
So how do they communicate?
Simple ad-hoc packet switched network at speeds of generally 19.2 kbps - most have 1/2 rate viterbi - so you can see the information rate is quite low 9.6kbps.
Some are slower, some a little faster.
They are pretty chatty little machines too, they say a whole lot more than I'd ever allow. Since we might as well say they communicate in the clear, you would think the data channel would be devoid of any information that could actually identify the user or their card and its details. You would think!!!
Lets just say for the more technically inclined criminal, the ones they will likely never catch, there really is no point in even bothering to inject or exploit code into the ATM OS. That's too much effort for a single point of access.
If you can see the Clark belt from your particular patch of dirt, you can see this stuff for a few thousand USD too.
And the explanation in your particular case is this:
We roll your eyes at yet another made up story. Simple as that.
Why? Because electronic warfare (ELINT) drones like me know how few RADAR systems are actually capable of measuring velocities that high. We also do the math. We sit down with our EW kit and build a real life fingerprint for the specific emitter that 'tracked' this alleged UFO. We tell you that your PRF / PRI, pulse duration, duty cycle, and your cute little pseudo random stagger pattern make your RADAR physically incapable of tracking anything above XXXX knots. We know this beyond any doubt because we have ego's bigger than your average fighter pilot. We know exactly how many pulses per paint it takes to put a little dot on your PPI because we count them, and not just theoretically, we grab a couple of those fighter jocks and have them run a few supersonic passes at the same time. We sit right there next to the scope with you and gloat as we say "I told you so!", pointing fingers at our scrawled out algebra. In terms of 'UFOs', we don't care about little green men, we actually care about "Non allied sucker popping up out of the waves doing mach 2 over our sigint station for some photographs, and then vanishing in a puff of sonic booms to who the hell knows where"
We leave the X file stuff for people back in the MoD, who then retire a couple of years later and hit the lucrative public talk circuits.
When the psych asked me why I wanted to work in a TS security field, I kid you not, I said "because I wanted to know if UFO's really exist" - we both laughed, but I was actually serious :-)
You think? Military secrecy is far more important than you give credit.
Our cheap 30 dollar widget added to our existing stockpile of shoulder launched anti-aircraft missiles will ground your trillion dollar paper tiger in a heart beat. How so? We built this little gizmo to outwit the countermeasures built in to your trillion dollar paper tiger stacked up over there in the corner of our intelligence office. Not only that, but from those reference specs, we were also able to reverse engineer the bog standard state of the art used on most of your other aircraft too.
See the picture?
Er, that's why they add in GPS, weather stations, and some kind of visible spectrum laser radar. All of the problems you speak of can be rendered entirely obsolete. Each device will know where it is in relation to every other, each will know the atmospheric pressure and temperature so it can calculate the speed of sound and adjust to your position instantly (embedded locator beacon surgery sold separately), and it'll be able to compensate for any distortions in the speed of light as an added bonus.
Don't be a dick and twist things to suit your own political agenda. Giving consumers a choice is not stifling your freedom at all. It may well be annoying for Microsoft, but you are not Microsoft so keep your panties on. Right in the summary it is saying that "YOU" have a ~choice~. If you want internet explorer then pick it, otherwise choose something else. How hard is that? The EU sticking their nose in and saying "Dude, see this fine selection of browsers? One of them can be yours", this is at least a small faction within the greater EU that does not suck.
I wasn't wealthy enough for the heady delights of an Apple IIe or a Vic20, I had to make do with a Mattel Aquarius computer. (Purchased in 1983) It still works, but it's still as useless today as it was in 1983.
It's simple: There is no rule, just one (1) statement.
(Excuse my profanity)
You're in Fucking Space! SPACE! At best this is going to happen only a handful of times in the average astronauts lifetime, more likely only once, what the hell are they doing with a DVD player!?!
The short story: Biological brains die when they are shut down, currently this lasts forever. A snapshot of an electronic brain can be made at any moment in time, it can then be shut down and later restarted in exactly the same state as when it was shut down. This would mean the 'intelligent' component can be resurrected with no loss of whatever made it 'it' in the first place.
Not only that, any number of copies of this intelligence could be made at any point along its lifespan, each of these could be fed in to a different host and started up. It'd be interesting to see if they take divergent pathways from the original, but that's another topic. All of these copies would be just as alive as the original.
Would they die when they are switched off? I guess you could say yes, but I'd say they'd have no knowledge of this other than the impending circumstances of the action. They may not be happy about it either, but meh. They can be turned on again.
This might be explained or at least rationalised slightly better if you understand the differences between Asian culture and the one which, presumably, you come from (My assumption is the US, but I could be wrong)
Now, I don't make the rules here, so when I say it is sometimes seen as a 'very grave family insult' to commit suicide, you might think this is stupid, backward, and crazy arsed dumb 12 ways from Sunday. And you would be right too. Thai people tend not to want to directly confront any problem head on, they like to tackle things a little more obliquely, talk about it in vague hand waving first. "Yes" often actually means no, or just maybe.
Knee jerk reactions such as this do sort themselves out in parliament or the legal system. Give it a month or two to have the person responsible for this action will get slapped around, the law might not get stricken from record, but it wont really be enforced either. Aside from this, there are always deeper issues at play, people using tragedy as an excuse to push their agenda. None of us anywhere in the world are stranger to this though!
And the cell tower microwave link pushes all of that 'decrypted' data in one neat little muxed up package over the same bit of air you're fighting with to figure out the GSM encryption key. If these phones are selling for 25 grand, it shows people have far more money than brain cells, though more than this, it shows just how far behind the curve criminals actually are. For that kind of outlay you can buy your own spectrum analyser, microwave receive gear, modems, down converters, data capture cards, and a nice server to suck it all in to. (Most of it second hand) Maybe not quite as easy to lug around as these little Nokia 1100's, but if your purpose in life is stealing money, then you're doing it wrong.
Just for starters:
More than a few (hundred thousand) ATM's are satellite or microwave linked. You might be a little bit surprised (in an angry kind of way) at just how chatty these beasts actually are too. Encrypted? Would you call plain old ebcdic buried in a simple ad-hoc packet switched network 'encryption'? Hell, there are plenty of banks that link their dumb terminals straight in to HQ, this is far worse than waiting for an ATM to fire out its daily sitrep. 97.4% of bald headed bank managers seem to think that if their data is passing through a feed horn at some point on its journey, then it must be secure there too, right? Right? Well, sure why not, whatever you say sir. Now lets just watch in real time exactly what your bank babe is typing in to her terminal over there, all with some cheap off the ebay shelf equipment.
Banks love to make a show of security to the customer, and they are pretty good at it in general, but they let themselves down on the back end. For someone with a bit of an interest in radio and basic networking, though in particular for someone with no moral guidance unit, I guess you could say there is money to be stolen at every turn.
The things people would know, if they only knew :-) It's good to be a consultant sometimes. Money for nothing.
The Nokia 1100 does happen to be one of the best selling products of modern times. 200 million units sold. I'm thinking it might be a little bit difficult to shut that barn door.
Generally they move them out of their parking slot once the propellent hits vapour and someone else moves right on in. The interesting thing is that there is no barrier to entry. For less than a thousand USD you can buy enough kit on ebay to run your own *ahem* pirate E1(2/3/4) and chances are you'll never get caught. The owners might not like it, but at worst they'll just run a CW spike up and down your energy lobe. It's not as though they can actually pinpoint where you are with any great accuracy.
In my previous life working for 'the man' (both military and as a civilian) I used to do technical signals analysis of pretty much anything in space that could radiate energy. Some interesting and crazy stuff out there. Imagine your bog standard E1 filled full of V.26 modems sending teletype - People aren't just keeping DOS around for stuff, they are also keeping their 1960's tech going strong as well, they modernize it a bit, but it's all still out there.
FDM's, the odd bit of morse code, but then there are TDMA systems all over the shop, those buggers are a bit harder to work with, I never met anything much more challenging than that though.
Yup, to get the same effect, in human terms, you'd have to be able to knock back more or less 900 cans of your average carbonated diet beverage in a day. That's around 300 litres depending on which country you live in. (Some standardize on 330ml cans, while others are at 375ml)
Before blogs and yahoo answers took over the world it used to be pretty easy to find reliable data on the subject.
If your definition of Operating System = Firmware too (I know mine does), then there are wads of companies out in the world that have been doing this for far longer.
Early 1990's:
Radyne made satellite modems, to activate various types of de/modulation methods, overheads, error correction and so on, you would park a small truck full of money out front of their office, they would take your truck and the money, then give you a series of keys in return. Those key would activate additional parts of the firmware and you'd get your extra features.
What is crazy these days is the price: Back in the day it wasn't uncommon to pay 15 grand US for one of these babies, now the buggers sell on ebay for 20 bucks.
I played with a military version of this about 12 years back when I was, er, military, though it was strictly a top down view only - unless you plugged the feed in to oilstock without permission, and wrote a small script to parse it all. After borrowing the world wide digital terrain elevation data CD's from another agency (again possibly without permission and subsequently taking up several gigabytes of drive space) you could even have a rudimentary google earth like view in 300 easy mouse clicks per reference frame. Want to change the view angle? Remember that 300 mouse click sequence I just showed you?
They were fun days.
And here's me thinking I might skip the whole password safe type thing and just wing it. At least until my job required me to sign up for some HSBC corporate banking stuff. Turns out that while you do give a password, they never, ever, ask you for it. 4 weeks later when they get around to telling you your application has been approved, you have dredge back up all the bogus 90210 user@example.com crap you typed in: Mothers maiden name, shoe size at 11 years of age, what you ate for breakfast on the 13 of September 1993, the names of your 4 previous pets that departed our dear earth as a result of unfortunate microwave accidents, that kind of thing.
I'm a tad more careful now. My crap has gained a little more consistency so to speak.
For that kind of money I could buy a little bitty kawasaki zx 10 ninja (or newer) and get from point A to point B getting around 30 to 40 mpg. If I tap that sucker in to 4th gear and let it idle, trying not to get too damn scared as we whine past others on the freeway without even wanting to, we could thus push ourselves up to the 45 mpg mark :-) (I kid, it really only needs 3rd gear and a tiny bit of stick to get in to the triple digit 'holy, fuck me' kind of speed!)
You want some bling in a nice looking package that'll smear your body along the road like some kind of liver paste before your brain can even register its own demise? These two wheeled machines are your ticket!
If you have to sign up to get access to the download links, then it's not free, no matter how glitzy and 'free' you say it is. Terms and conditions that read like you need a lawyer to get a clue, a privacy policy that says what information you make public is ours, and what information you make private will be ours too when we screw up our website and it gets out in the public arena anyway.
Don't spam dude.
I live in the Philippines. I don't know if this is related to your comment exactly, but I have to tell you they make some seriously crappy TV here. His indie film would probably look better even if it was made on a throw away cell phone. See, our cutting edge 2009 special effects make 1963 episodes of Dr. Who seem about as good as the latest Pixar release. Even our best efforts at cinematic release look like they were been pre-aged by 50 or 60 years right on opening night. If it has some 1950's actor turned president turned corrupt agent turned movie star again, then it'll turn a few million bucks long before it hits the pirate stands no matter how crappy it is.
I too am a little bored with the sig, it needs updating.
Well, you could always patent the whole page turning thing before google does then.
Who does that job anyway? I've worked some crappy gigs in my day, but Chief Executive Page Turning Boy (or girl) would probably get boring after, like, 4 seconds. Maybe I should apply.
For a price there is always someone who knows better. Evidently you know better, but who are you? Where are you? How much do you charge? Where were you to inform us that our choices were wrong before we made them?
The vast majority of us are not sitting back in our leather recliner supplied by our fortune 500 overlord reflecting on how to shave a few CPU cycles off a query, we don't have a team of DBA's we can turn to during the planning and implementation stages. At best we have a handful of guys and girls churning out code to a deadline, though more commonly it's just some person nobody knows with a PHP book in hand scratching an itch, management notice and suddenly the title changes from Sector 7-G data entry drone to the resident CTO of a corporation with all of 30 people on the pay roll.
People make mistakes, hell, people barely know how to articulate what it is they want at the best of times, mostly they have no clue what is even possible - you mix this in with the sleaze selling snake oil in every facet of life, a little bit of internet drama, and you have this aforementioned shit splattering on the fan blades.
Instead of being unhappy that the industry is getting undermined by people who shouldn't be allowed in front of a keyboard, change your career goals, be the saviour, make a shit tin of money off the backs of these retards. Build a slick looking website with pictures of old wise men in glasses playing with their grand kids on the front lawn, sell your little patch of "I can do this better than anyone else"
Me, I just want a new motorbike, I'll churn out the code as best I can until that happens, every day I try to learn new ways of doing the same old stuff better, but once in a while I'll still log in to a production environment and chmod -R 700 / for kicks, then delete the audit logs. Screwing up is what we humans do in the real world.
I have one caveat with this design though, I'm not very fond of the Cassegrain system because the quality of the optics is often sacrificed in the process of creating them.
I'm pretty much exclusively involved in the radio parts of the spectrum, not entirely dissimilar, though in this particular case the system is so large and sensitive I'm not sure that it would lend itself very well to any other designs - please do call me out if I'm wrong here though, happy to change my outlook. The alternative to the Cassegrain design would mean the detection equipment has to be located wherever the focal point of the dish happens to fall, somewhere up front of the mirror. My assumption is that this stuff is super sensitive to vibration and the environment, so probably when it comes to a dish this size, it's probably just easier to engineer this way, the losses wouldn't be so large that it'd matter that much :-)
Now to point this sucker at the sun and fry some ants.
You predict the end of the internet?
Given how many billions of websites and hundreds of millions of domains there are, and the not so insignificant fact that this number is on the increase by quite a few million every year, I think the answer to your point is that it wont, and doesn't, matter at all. Some things might falter and fall by the wayside, some site owner figured they could make it with advert support, bad business decision yes? Not my problem.
Advert supported websites were a gravy train in the 90's and 00's - so here's looking at the next decade and what it might bring. I guess there will be a temporary shift to inline adverts, though this will be brief. Eventually site owners will figure out that if they can't afford to roll out a website, then they shouldn't. If someone has something interesting to say, they'll figure out a way to get it 'out there' without the help of ad pushers.
A few days back I stumbled on a random forum that informed me I was using Ad-Block (I was), it then said unless I turn it off I would not get access to their stuff. I thought that was pretty cute.
Adblock can't be that small if people are beginning to script tests for it.