You'd probably need to obtain an actual transmitter. Even assuming it's RF, just plugging broadband antenna into a spectrum analyser might not work; the control signal probably would not last as long as the analyser's sweep time, so you'd miss it.
Can you not just use your own MTA at/usr/lib/sendmail? If you have to use your ISP's SMTP server then configure your MTA to send all mail via a smarthost. Dead easy to do with exim and not much harder with sendmail. If you have to do a POP3 retrieval before you can send SMTP then put this in your crontab:
replacing fred, b00bies and pop3.myisp.co.uk as appropriate. This will setup a POP3 connection (but not retrieve any mail) every 10 minutes. Alternatively, use fetchmail to retrieve your mail and configure your email clients to use your ordinary unix mailbox.
Yeah, really. The Gutmann paper, for all its fancy words, is bollocks.
There's a lot of theory out there, but no proof. That's because recovery of remanent data is impossible in practice. Oh, you might get a few bits; but you'd get just as good a result, if not better, by guessing. You won't find any company willing to take on the job of undoing DBAN. If they could do it, they'd be shouting it out loud..... but they can't. And as I said, the phenomenon has not been exploited commercially -- except as a gimmick, and a poor one at that.
Physical access to someone's passport is not hard to obtain. Many hotels and campsites insist to see the passports of foreign nationals. All it takes is few bent people in a few tourist resorts, and you can build up a stock of identity information. As a previous poster stated, the more identities you have, the more likely it is that one of them will resemble somebody who wants a false passport.
Indeed. In order to get an identity card in the first place, you have to prove your identity with something. Whatever that something is, could just as easily be used by someone pretending to be you. Or you could just use that something to prove your identity in the first place, negating the need for the card.
If I had known ten years ago that all this was going to happen, I would have signed up for my electricity, gas, water and telephone services all in different names -- and encouraged everyone I knew to do the same.
The article states that if you can see the human-readable part of the passport, or even just take a good guess at the details, you can extract the rest of the data from the RFID chip -- and clone it. Encryption is used to ensure that nobody can eavesdrop on a transaction once initiated, but that doesn't help the fact that every transaction is presumed legitimate -- and the very nature of RFID means that you aren't always able to know that a transaction is taking place. If there isn't a human being checking passports, just a machine -- and one day, that is exactly how it will be -- one of those cloned RFID chips will be enough to get you past it.
Attempting to automate people out of the loop is asking for trouble, because we can always know what tests a machine is performing and falsify the results. Criminals are not stupid -- and smart people can often be bought. If the anticipated returns are high enough, you can be sure that someone will put up the stake. Security through obscurity is worse than no security, because it leads people to believe that their details are safe when they are not.
By the way, if you want to see how easy it is to commit identity theft, start here.
But that's the point: you can'tchange the spin of particle A. At least, not without breaking the entanglement. That actually happens as soon as you measure its spin; from the moment the two opposed particles are created, their properties are wave functions, each of which collapses into one of two eigenstates when either one is measured. It's certainly interesting that they always fall into opposite states (though anything else almost certainly would violate conservation of energy), but once you measure the status of particle A (and know by inference the status of particle B), the two particles are no longer entangled.
To go back to the playing cards analogy, what you are suggesting would be like looking at your playing card, seeing it was black (and therefore your partner's card must be red), replacing it with a new, red playing card and expecting your partner's card somehow to turn black. It doesn't work that way with cards, and it doesn't work that way with quantum particles.
It is entirely possible to recover this data - providing that you have the equipment to do so./blockquote>
No it isn't. Nobody has ever provably done it.
More to the point, nobody has ever built a memory device that used magnetic remanence phenomena. Given that (1) all computer memory (barring a few oddities based around cathode ray tubes and delay lines) used to be magnetic before the advent of solid-state RAM in the 1970s, and (2) prices of different system components have changed at different rates with respect to one another over the years, there must have been a time when it would have been economically viable to build a remanence memory. Search through computer museums and history books all you like, but you won't find one anywhere. The nearest thing you'll find are a few analogue reel-to-reel audio tape recorders from the 1950s and 1960s, which had a "trick recording" switch, which would disconnect the erase head {they used energised-field erase heads in those days} so you could mix a new recording with an existing one.
Recovery of overwritten magnetic data is a myth. It's never happened and it never will, because it's impossible.
Changing from FAT16 to FAT32 doesn't overwrite most of the disk. FAT16 and FAT32 are very similar internally, so a drive already formatted as FAT16 just needs to have a FAT32 FAT written to it to make it FAT32.
Windows also has different FAT entries for "freshly formatted" and "deleted files", preferring not to overwrite a deleted file if it can avoid it. When you convert a disk from FAT16 to FAT32, the reformatter actually respects previously deleted files. If there was enough room on the drive to fit all of Windows 98 on there away from the existing Windows 95 installation, then that's what it would have done.
You can't recover genuinely-overwritten data with software. A disk drive is designed so that, as far as anything talking to the drive through the proper interface is concerned, a one which used to be a zero is indistinguible from a one which has always been a one, and a zero which has always been a zero is indistinguible from a zero which used to be a one. But very often, data isn't actually overwritten, because of the way Windows tries not to overwrite old data. Other OSes aren't so recovery-friendly. There was talk a few years ago about being able to recover imperfectly-overwritten data if the head wandered slightly, but today's data densities mean less head wander. And there's more data on a disk nowadays, most of which isn't relevant. If you tried to use magnetic force microscopy, it would take you a very long time -- several years -- to recover the missed data; you probably wouldn't get all of it; and you would not have any clue which bits were the bits you wanted.
I stand by my assertion that one overwrite pass will put any data well out of OnTrack's reach. I haven't got the money to waste proving it, though.
Yes! As long as the drive's already been formatted once, all you need to do is write out an empty sector map (or FAT, or inode table, or whatever name your OS calls it) showing that every sector on the disk is "free space" and not part of a file. You don't need to change the data. The awkward bit is finding out which sector on the disk belongs to which file.
Data that has actually been overwritten, even just once, can never, no matter what anyone tells you, be recovered by any kind of analysis of the drive. But data isn't often overwritten. When you "delete" a file, it just gets marked as free space -- what's worse, it actually gets marked as "free space, after a fashion, but only use as a last resort" so as to give you a longer window of opportunity to recover it. New stuff will only get saved over the top of old stuff if there's really nowhere else to stick it. You can make sure data gets overwritten by first filling up the drive with junk files till there's no room to save anything else, then deleting the stuff you want rid of (which just marks it as free space), then creating more junk files -- knowing that the only place they can possibly be saved now, is over the top of the stuff you just deleted. Delete all the junk files and the drive is ready for re-use.
Actually, modern keyboards -- with the printed membrane switches -- will be fine if put through a dishwasher, as long as you dry them out thoroughly as soon as possible after washing.
If you really never want to see your data again, just record it on a DVD-minus-R.
If the data on the drive has been overwritten even once, it's impossible for anybody to recover it. Government agencies who claim to have recovered data from overwritten drives have almost certainly done so using rubber-hose methods.
You can't quite apply all that quantum mec framework to two macroscopic objects.
So they're not like Schrödinger's playing cards, whose colour is a wave function which collapses into one of two eigenstates, "red" or "black", when they are first looked at?;-)
We're only concerned about the "oppositeness" of the two objects. My point is that just because the particles are entangled, if you measure the spin of one particle and find it to be positive, you can deduce from that that the spin of the other one -- no matter how far away it may be -- must be negative. Or vice-versa; if the one you measure is negative then the other must be positive. But it's not as though any information is being transmitted from one particle to the other. The oppositeness is just there (and anyway, you would have to use some conventional communication channel to check your results and prove there really was no cheating).
BTW, on the higher (or should that be lower?) levels of Nethack, you sometimes see a creature called a Quantum Mechanic; some of which are carrying a large box containing either a live cat or a dead cat named Schrödinger's Cat.
It's my understanding that quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit any useful information. Just because Particles A and B have opposite properties, doesn't help us. If we find that particle A has positive spin, we know that particle B, wherever it may be in the universe, must have negative spin.
I really don't see how that's any different than me having two playing cards, one red and one black, and you selecting one of the pair at random and taking it halfway around the world. As soon as I look at my card, I instantly know the colour of your card. But that's not transmitting any information -- all I did was solve a simple equation.
"Government has no business or expertise mandating the use of one technology platform over the other. Government's role is to partner with the private sector in providing the environment and business framework in which innovation, creativity and freedom of informed choice can thrive, especially in the area of technology which is characterized by dynamism and disruptive change."
Government has every business ensuring that the needs of citizens are met. Where the use of a specific technology platform runs counter to that objective (for example, by requiring the use of proprietary goods or services available only from a monopoly or cartel merely in order to comply with the law or to access public information) then Government absolutely should derecommend it. Government's rôle is to protect citizens from abuse of privilege by corporations, not to protect any supposed right of corporations to profit at the expense of citizens. Innovation, creativity and freedom of informed choice cannot thrive in an environment where a few players jealously guard secrets and discourage competition.
See also this letter from a Peruvian MP to the general manager of Microsoft Peru.
You only need one overwrite pass to obliterate data forever. Even governments can't recover it (except perhaps by means of non-computerisedtechniques). Fred in the Shed has no chance.
Given the way prices for each component of a computer system have changed at different rates with respect to one another over the years, if four-dimensional storage was at all possible, it must have been economically viable at some stage (bear in mind that until the advent of solid-state RAM in the mid-1970s, computers used all-magnetic storage), and there'd be a computer in a museum somewhere based on the principle.
Yeah, what was the deal with that? It's not like there is anybody out there who has never seen a nipple, extremely close up, at least once in their life!
It's up to users to fight back. I have configured Firefox to ask me about cookies every time one is offered. If I see the dreaded __utma or RMID, I will block all cookies from that site. Others I will accept for the session only. I don't mind the odd PHPSESSID (even had one of them from a site pretending to be.asp once -- wonder if that was done for legacy compatibility reasons [keep the old filename even after upgrading to a better server platform] or by some smart IT bods getting paid to develop a site for a Microsoft server, then hosting it on a proper one and pocketing the money?)
If you're smart, you won't be tracked by cookies. But I've seen scary stackloads of cookies on machines running Microsoft crap. Come to think of it, even Firefox accepts all cookies by default.
Making browsers default to a safer cookie setting (disabled, or session-only) would be a step in the right direction, and so would simply outlawing data-mining (not that I expect anyone would take any notice of such a ban); but ultimately, it's still no substitute for users having some smarts.
I don't think the distinction should be drawn between physical and intellectual property. The distinction needs to be drawn between Scarce goods -- which are diminished by the act of sharing -- and Plentiful goods, which are not diminished by the act of sharing. For example, a pie is an example of Scarce goods. If I bake a pie, and give you half of it, I only have half a pie. The view of the London skyline is Plentiful -- it doesn't get any less beautiful the more people are looking at it. If you light an unlit candle from my lit candle, my room does not get any darker.
Before IR1, we lived in an age of Scarcity, because the cost of labour used in manufacturing anything outweighed the cost of the raw materials from which it was made. Mass production should have ushered in an age of Plenty, as the cost of labour was reduced to next to nothing (it's a lot less effort to apply a few drops of oil to a machine and maybe tighten up a few bolts every now and again, than to make the same goods by hand as that machine is used to make). Instead, sometime between then and now, some people got greedy and decided to create Artificial Scarcity. Goods are manufactured very cheaply, and designed to fail so we have to buy more of them. Sometimes manufacturers even produce more goods than they can sell, then destroy the surplus to inflate the selling price.
Cars can be made to fall apart after a few hundred megametres of driving, boilers can be made with heat exchangers that fail after a few years of heating, fridges can be made to slowly lose their refrigerants, and so on; but software can be made to run indefinitely, just by changing the computer. There is no way to provide built-in obsolescence in software because software is inherently Plentiful: once it has been written, it exists forever. So software vendors who want to sell more software have to resort to dirty tricks: change the saved file formats with every new release, so anybody still using the old version won't be able to read files saved by anybody using the latest version, and will have to buy the latest version for themself. But this relies on keeping the operation of the software secret, which is nothing but anti-competitive behaviour. And EU law specifically requires a competitive marketplace, on the basis that competition benefits consumers.
Actually, the "competitor" giving Microsoft the most trouble isn't the Open Source community, or any closed-source software company; but Microsoft themselves. There are plenty of old, yet still perfectly-usable copies of Microsoft software in existence -- and EU law means Microsoft cannot legally force anybody not to use old software by tying it, through a licence agreement, to specific hardware.
It's much easier to make motors and other electricial appliance implementations with 3-phase power.
The 1950s called, they want their words back. Inverters aren't hard to build. Just turn your AC into DC; then have a three-stage phase-shift oscillator with each output driving a power amplifier. There's your 3-phase AC. You can even change the frequency (which gives you motor speed) and the phase ordering (which gives you direction of rotation) electronically.
DC brushless motors are everywhere nowadays. In case you've been living under a rock, a DC brushless motor has a permanent magnet for an armature, with alternating south and north poles. Cheap ones have four poles, high-quality ones for true hi-fi record turntables have 16 poles. The stator has coils forming electromagnets with an equal number of poles, and a Hall effect sensor. This senses whether the nearest magnet pole is south or north.
What will happen when this is powered up is that the magnetic forces will push the armature into a stable position where every north pole on the armature is next to a south pole on the stator, and vice versa. Reversing the current at this point will turn the armature another step. In a "conventional" DC motor, the armature has coils and the stator has permanent magnets; the rotation of the armature is used to reverse the current in the windings by bringing different contacts on the commutator into contact with the brushes. If the stator is not a permanent magnet but an electromagnet, and this is wired in series with the armature coil, then the motor will always spin in the same direction irrespective of which way the current is flowing, since all north poles will become south poles and vice versa, so a series-wound motor will work equally well on DC or AC (though it performs best at low frequencies. Some countries' railways, when first electrified, used series-wound motors; these had to be fed from a special, low-frequency supply of 16.7Hz. rather than the usual 50Hz.). In a brushless motor, each end of the stator coils has two transistors; one which will take it "high" and the other which will take it "low" (and a bit more circuitry to ensure that they never both come on at the same time). So the current can be reversed, or cut off (if both transistors at one or both ends of the coil are off) entirely electronically. The current reversal is controlled by the Hall effect sensor. Speed control is achieved through pulse-width modulation: a control signal of several kHz., with an adjustable duty cycle, is used to turn off all 4 transistors. The longer the transistors are "on", the faster the motor runs. Since the transistors have either next to no voltage across them (when "on") or next to no current through them (when "off"), they dissipate hardly any power.
As to the stuff about the battle of the currents: I did some research, and it was fascinating comparing it to the present-day battle of the sources. I almost expect Ballmer and co to start killing stray cats and dogs around Redmond with Open Source software just to prove how dangerous it is!
Listen to me, OPEN SOURCE DOES NOT BENEFIT EVERYTHING!
Open source benefits a lot more people than closed source. Which would you rather have: a bank where you receive interest according to just how much money you have in your account, or a bank where you receive interest according to how much money is in everyone's account put together?
Eventually they get tired of fighting Apple's copy-protection mechanisms and go back to Linux.
And if there weren't any copy-protection mechanisms to fight against in the first place..... wouldn't they stay?
What Apple have to gain by open sourcing OS XI: more users.
Open sourcing the OS will "save them most of the effort" of distribution, because customers will take care of distribution themselves. The most Apple need to do is seed a torrent, or whatever technology replaces that.
Apple would want to help people run the OS on non-Apple hardware in order -- however counter-intuitive this may sound -- to sell Apple hardware. Get people used to the operating system on any old cheap hardware; then when they inevitably run up against the limitations of said cheap hardware, sell them properly-built hardware. It's a little bit less cynical than Microsoft's policy of allowing people to run pirated Microsoft software to allow them to get used to it (and incidentally kill off competitors; who's going to buy a £50 software package when they can get a £500 one for nothing?) then threatening them with jail time if they don't stump up the full price.
The idea is to allow content producers to have exclusive rights, thus allowing artists to safely exercise their creativity and produce new things.
Yes -- the important bit being to create new things, not just endlessly recycle existing things.
What is the point of putting something into the public domain if people have a disincentive to use it?
The public domain is for everyone, not just "content producers".
The original stated purpose of copyright was to encourage contributions to the public domain. It may well be that there is now a better way of doing that; and if so, copyright must be abandoned in favour of that better method.
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You'd probably need to obtain an actual transmitter. Even assuming it's RF, just plugging broadband antenna into a spectrum analyser might not work; the control signal probably would not last as long as the analyser's sweep time, so you'd miss it.
Can you not just use your own MTA at /usr/lib/sendmail? If you have to use your ISP's SMTP server then configure your MTA to send all mail via a smarthost. Dead easy to do with exim and not much harder with sendmail. If you have to do a POP3 retrieval before you can send SMTP then put this in your crontab:
0-59/10 * * * * echo -e "USER fred\nPASS b00bies\nQUIT" |nc pop3.myisp.co.uk 110
replacing fred, b00bies and pop3.myisp.co.uk as appropriate. This will setup a POP3 connection (but not retrieve any mail) every 10 minutes. Alternatively, use fetchmail to retrieve your mail and configure your email clients to use your ordinary unix mailbox.
Yeah, really. The Gutmann paper, for all its fancy words, is bollocks.
..... but they can't. And as I said, the phenomenon has not been exploited commercially -- except as a gimmick, and a poor one at that.
There's a lot of theory out there, but no proof. That's because recovery of remanent data is impossible in practice. Oh, you might get a few bits; but you'd get just as good a result, if not better, by guessing. You won't find any company willing to take on the job of undoing DBAN. If they could do it, they'd be shouting it out loud
Physical access to someone's passport is not hard to obtain. Many hotels and campsites insist to see the passports of foreign nationals. All it takes is few bent people in a few tourist resorts, and you can build up a stock of identity information. As a previous poster stated, the more identities you have, the more likely it is that one of them will resemble somebody who wants a false passport.
Indeed. In order to get an identity card in the first place, you have to prove your identity with something. Whatever that something is, could just as easily be used by someone pretending to be you. Or you could just use that something to prove your identity in the first place, negating the need for the card.
If I had known ten years ago that all this was going to happen, I would have signed up for my electricity, gas, water and telephone services all in different names -- and encouraged everyone I knew to do the same.
Have we learned nothing?
The article states that if you can see the human-readable part of the passport, or even just take a good guess at the details, you can extract the rest of the data from the RFID chip -- and clone it. Encryption is used to ensure that nobody can eavesdrop on a transaction once initiated, but that doesn't help the fact that every transaction is presumed legitimate -- and the very nature of RFID means that you aren't always able to know that a transaction is taking place. If there isn't a human being checking passports, just a machine -- and one day, that is exactly how it will be -- one of those cloned RFID chips will be enough to get you past it.
Attempting to automate people out of the loop is asking for trouble, because we can always know what tests a machine is performing and falsify the results. Criminals are not stupid -- and smart people can often be bought. If the anticipated returns are high enough, you can be sure that someone will put up the stake. Security through obscurity is worse than no security, because it leads people to believe that their details are safe when they are not.
By the way, if you want to see how easy it is to commit identity theft, start here.
But that's the point: you can't change the spin of particle A. At least, not without breaking the entanglement. That actually happens as soon as you measure its spin; from the moment the two opposed particles are created, their properties are wave functions, each of which collapses into one of two eigenstates when either one is measured. It's certainly interesting that they always fall into opposite states (though anything else almost certainly would violate conservation of energy), but once you measure the status of particle A (and know by inference the status of particle B), the two particles are no longer entangled.
To go back to the playing cards analogy, what you are suggesting would be like looking at your playing card, seeing it was black (and therefore your partner's card must be red), replacing it with a new, red playing card and expecting your partner's card somehow to turn black. It doesn't work that way with cards, and it doesn't work that way with quantum particles.
Changing from FAT16 to FAT32 doesn't overwrite most of the disk. FAT16 and FAT32 are very similar internally, so a drive already formatted as FAT16 just needs to have a FAT32 FAT written to it to make it FAT32.
Windows also has different FAT entries for "freshly formatted" and "deleted files", preferring not to overwrite a deleted file if it can avoid it. When you convert a disk from FAT16 to FAT32, the reformatter actually respects previously deleted files. If there was enough room on the drive to fit all of Windows 98 on there away from the existing Windows 95 installation, then that's what it would have done.
You can't recover genuinely-overwritten data with software. A disk drive is designed so that, as far as anything talking to the drive through the proper interface is concerned, a one which used to be a zero is indistinguible from a one which has always been a one, and a zero which has always been a zero is indistinguible from a zero which used to be a one. But very often, data isn't actually overwritten, because of the way Windows tries not to overwrite old data. Other OSes aren't so recovery-friendly. There was talk a few years ago about being able to recover imperfectly-overwritten data if the head wandered slightly, but today's data densities mean less head wander. And there's more data on a disk nowadays, most of which isn't relevant. If you tried to use magnetic force microscopy, it would take you a very long time -- several years -- to recover the missed data; you probably wouldn't get all of it; and you would not have any clue which bits were the bits you wanted.
I stand by my assertion that one overwrite pass will put any data well out of OnTrack's reach. I haven't got the money to waste proving it, though.
Yes! As long as the drive's already been formatted once, all you need to do is write out an empty sector map (or FAT, or inode table, or whatever name your OS calls it) showing that every sector on the disk is "free space" and not part of a file. You don't need to change the data. The awkward bit is finding out which sector on the disk belongs to which file.
Data that has actually been overwritten, even just once, can never, no matter what anyone tells you, be recovered by any kind of analysis of the drive. But data isn't often overwritten. When you "delete" a file, it just gets marked as free space -- what's worse, it actually gets marked as "free space, after a fashion, but only use as a last resort" so as to give you a longer window of opportunity to recover it. New stuff will only get saved over the top of old stuff if there's really nowhere else to stick it. You can make sure data gets overwritten by first filling up the drive with junk files till there's no room to save anything else, then deleting the stuff you want rid of (which just marks it as free space), then creating more junk files -- knowing that the only place they can possibly be saved now, is over the top of the stuff you just deleted. Delete all the junk files and the drive is ready for re-use.
Actually, modern keyboards -- with the printed membrane switches -- will be fine if put through a dishwasher, as long as you dry them out thoroughly as soon as possible after washing.
If you really never want to see your data again, just record it on a DVD-minus-R.
If the data on the drive has been overwritten even once, it's impossible for anybody to recover it. Government agencies who claim to have recovered data from overwritten drives have almost certainly done so using rubber-hose methods.
We're only concerned about the "oppositeness" of the two objects. My point is that just because the particles are entangled, if you measure the spin of one particle and find it to be positive, you can deduce from that that the spin of the other one -- no matter how far away it may be -- must be negative. Or vice-versa; if the one you measure is negative then the other must be positive. But it's not as though any information is being transmitted from one particle to the other. The oppositeness is just there (and anyway, you would have to use some conventional communication channel to check your results and prove there really was no cheating).
BTW, on the higher (or should that be lower?) levels of Nethack, you sometimes see a creature called a Quantum Mechanic; some of which are carrying a large box containing either a live cat or a dead cat named Schrödinger's Cat.
It's my understanding that quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit any useful information. Just because Particles A and B have opposite properties, doesn't help us. If we find that particle A has positive spin, we know that particle B, wherever it may be in the universe, must have negative spin.
I really don't see how that's any different than me having two playing cards, one red and one black, and you selecting one of the pair at random and taking it halfway around the world. As soon as I look at my card, I instantly know the colour of your card. But that's not transmitting any information -- all I did was solve a simple equation.
See also this letter from a Peruvian MP to the general manager of Microsoft Peru.
It's possible if you compiled Apache2 from source :)
You only need one overwrite pass to obliterate data forever. Even governments can't recover it (except perhaps by means of non-computerised techniques). Fred in the Shed has no chance.
Given the way prices for each component of a computer system have changed at different rates with respect to one another over the years, if four-dimensional storage was at all possible, it must have been economically viable at some stage (bear in mind that until the advent of solid-state RAM in the mid-1970s, computers used all-magnetic storage), and there'd be a computer in a museum somewhere based on the principle.
Yeah, what was the deal with that? It's not like there is anybody out there who has never seen a nipple, extremely close up, at least once in their life!
"Discothèque" is actually French for "record library".
It's up to users to fight back. I have configured Firefox to ask me about cookies every time one is offered. If I see the dreaded __utma or RMID, I will block all cookies from that site. Others I will accept for the session only. I don't mind the odd PHPSESSID (even had one of them from a site pretending to be .asp once -- wonder if that was done for legacy compatibility reasons [keep the old filename even after upgrading to a better server platform] or by some smart IT bods getting paid to develop a site for a Microsoft server, then hosting it on a proper one and pocketing the money?)
If you're smart, you won't be tracked by cookies. But I've seen scary stackloads of cookies on machines running Microsoft crap. Come to think of it, even Firefox accepts all cookies by default.
Making browsers default to a safer cookie setting (disabled, or session-only) would be a step in the right direction, and so would simply outlawing data-mining (not that I expect anyone would take any notice of such a ban); but ultimately, it's still no substitute for users having some smarts.
I don't think the distinction should be drawn between physical and intellectual property. The distinction needs to be drawn between Scarce goods -- which are diminished by the act of sharing -- and Plentiful goods, which are not diminished by the act of sharing. For example, a pie is an example of Scarce goods. If I bake a pie, and give you half of it, I only have half a pie. The view of the London skyline is Plentiful -- it doesn't get any less beautiful the more people are looking at it. If you light an unlit candle from my lit candle, my room does not get any darker.
Before IR1, we lived in an age of Scarcity, because the cost of labour used in manufacturing anything outweighed the cost of the raw materials from which it was made. Mass production should have ushered in an age of Plenty, as the cost of labour was reduced to next to nothing (it's a lot less effort to apply a few drops of oil to a machine and maybe tighten up a few bolts every now and again, than to make the same goods by hand as that machine is used to make). Instead, sometime between then and now, some people got greedy and decided to create Artificial Scarcity. Goods are manufactured very cheaply, and designed to fail so we have to buy more of them. Sometimes manufacturers even produce more goods than they can sell, then destroy the surplus to inflate the selling price.
Cars can be made to fall apart after a few hundred megametres of driving, boilers can be made with heat exchangers that fail after a few years of heating, fridges can be made to slowly lose their refrigerants, and so on; but software can be made to run indefinitely, just by changing the computer. There is no way to provide built-in obsolescence in software because software is inherently Plentiful: once it has been written, it exists forever. So software vendors who want to sell more software have to resort to dirty tricks: change the saved file formats with every new release, so anybody still using the old version won't be able to read files saved by anybody using the latest version, and will have to buy the latest version for themself. But this relies on keeping the operation of the software secret, which is nothing but anti-competitive behaviour. And EU law specifically requires a competitive marketplace, on the basis that competition benefits consumers.
Actually, the "competitor" giving Microsoft the most trouble isn't the Open Source community, or any closed-source software company; but Microsoft themselves. There are plenty of old, yet still perfectly-usable copies of Microsoft software in existence -- and EU law means Microsoft cannot legally force anybody not to use old software by tying it, through a licence agreement, to specific hardware.
Notice that little star alongside the username?
DC brushless motors are everywhere nowadays. In case you've been living under a rock, a DC brushless motor has a permanent magnet for an armature, with alternating south and north poles. Cheap ones have four poles, high-quality ones for true hi-fi record turntables have 16 poles. The stator has coils forming electromagnets with an equal number of poles, and a Hall effect sensor. This senses whether the nearest magnet pole is south or north.
What will happen when this is powered up is that the magnetic forces will push the armature into a stable position where every north pole on the armature is next to a south pole on the stator, and vice versa. Reversing the current at this point will turn the armature another step. In a "conventional" DC motor, the armature has coils and the stator has permanent magnets; the rotation of the armature is used to reverse the current in the windings by bringing different contacts on the commutator into contact with the brushes. If the stator is not a permanent magnet but an electromagnet, and this is wired in series with the armature coil, then the motor will always spin in the same direction irrespective of which way the current is flowing, since all north poles will become south poles and vice versa, so a series-wound motor will work equally well on DC or AC (though it performs best at low frequencies. Some countries' railways, when first electrified, used series-wound motors; these had to be fed from a special, low-frequency supply of 16.7Hz. rather than the usual 50Hz.). In a brushless motor, each end of the stator coils has two transistors; one which will take it "high" and the other which will take it "low" (and a bit more circuitry to ensure that they never both come on at the same time). So the current can be reversed, or cut off (if both transistors at one or both ends of the coil are off) entirely electronically. The current reversal is controlled by the Hall effect sensor. Speed control is achieved through pulse-width modulation: a control signal of several kHz., with an adjustable duty cycle, is used to turn off all 4 transistors. The longer the transistors are "on", the faster the motor runs. Since the transistors have either next to no voltage across them (when "on") or next to no current through them (when "off"), they dissipate hardly any power.
As to the stuff about the battle of the currents: I did some research, and it was fascinating comparing it to the present-day battle of the sources. I almost expect Ballmer and co to start killing stray cats and dogs around Redmond with Open Source software just to prove how dangerous it is!
What Apple have to gain by open sourcing OS XI: more users.
Open sourcing the OS will "save them most of the effort" of distribution, because customers will take care of distribution themselves. The most Apple need to do is seed a torrent, or whatever technology replaces that.
Apple would want to help people run the OS on non-Apple hardware in order -- however counter-intuitive this may sound -- to sell Apple hardware. Get people used to the operating system on any old cheap hardware; then when they inevitably run up against the limitations of said cheap hardware, sell them properly-built hardware. It's a little bit less cynical than Microsoft's policy of allowing people to run pirated Microsoft software to allow them to get used to it (and incidentally kill off competitors; who's going to buy a £50 software package when they can get a £500 one for nothing?) then threatening them with jail time if they don't stump up the full price.
The original stated purpose of copyright was to encourage contributions to the public domain. It may well be that there is now a better way of doing that; and if so, copyright must be abandoned in favour of that better method.