"When Portugal colonized Brazil, for quite sometime the ruling elite was made of pretty much a bunch of aristocratic good-for-nothing lawyers/slackers that graduated from Coimbra University, in Portugal. The basic characteristic of such people were a basic lack of common sense as well as a despise for work. Instead of working, they made laws. And more laws."
Brazil has been independent since 1822. It got rid of the Portuguese entirely from 1889! It is true that, from my knowledge, it inherited, by choice and in the start of ots independence, a lot of the Portuguese royal decrees and law. But, Brazil has already been throught seven, I repeat, seven constitutions since, the last one approved in 1988. Since then it has already been amended 52 times. You still believe it is the fault of the Portuguese? Perhaps it is time to wake up, smell the coffee and start assuming brazil's own responsability on the legal "explosion" it is facing.
"Portugal is notorious for having discovered America and then having ended up owing a huge amount of money to the Brits, as foreign debt, losing all the gold they had amassed, right?"
You do know that we did have an earthquake in Portugal in 1775 that wiped out most of our capital city of Lisbon, do you?
"Until recently, it was possible to maneuver in legal waters to a point that even trivial matters went to the Supreme Court. By trivial, I mean a dog biting the neighbour."
Comparing the Brazilian with the Portuguese constitutions (latest since 1976), at first, they look identicaly oriented. Both have a comparable number of articles. But when you start really looking, you see that the Brazilian constitution is an insane display of maximalist constitutionalism. Even tough the Portuguese constitution faces critics that it is too vague and long, the Brazilian is in an intire diferent ball game. Everything (or close) is inside the Brasilian constituition! Its sheer size bears resemblance with the size of the Portuguese whole code of civil law! It comes at no surprese that everything and its oposite gets to be interpreted out of such a constitution, sometimes depending on how much a lawyer you present or even on the slight amendments that you can politicaly get through.
Though I feel the news are mostly positive, I remain cautious.
But I think this step by the Commission might be a hint of other things to come, namely (for good or evil), that the EU will in fact try to takeover the EPO. At least the upcoming juridical problems are garanteed.
Taking for granted that the Commission wants to clarify software patenteability, we who are against that option can be shure of one thing: all the pro-soft-patent lobbying that was going on at the EPO is quickly going to move (get back;-) ) to the Commission!
It will be interesting to follow if a directive is issued (directives must be incorporated by all EU countries in their national law, that presently is shaped around the European Patent Convention) that defines different criteria for patenteability that are clearly incompatible with the EPC (both regarding soft-patents and "traditional" patents). Particularly because the current "european patent" is not a patent by itself but a portfolio of national patents issued simultaneously by the EPO.
What can happen is a in-practice removal of power from the EPO since, unlike the Commission, it does not hold relevant "muscle" to enforce its position. While the EPO is sustained by the "benevolence" of the EPC signataries, the Commission can impose sanctions to EU countries if they don't transpose the directive. In practice, we are possibly going to see the Commission pushing away the EU coutries from the EPC and forcing them to abandon it, or else being submerged in a complicated judicial problem involving conflicting internal and international law.
Stonehenge Where the demons dwell Where the banshees live And they do live well
Stonehenge Where a man is a man And the children dance to The pipes of pan
Stonehenge 'Tis a magic place Where the moon doth rise With a dragon's face
Stonehenge Where the virgins lie And the prayer of devils Fill the midnight sky
And you my love Won't you take my hand We'll go back in time To that mystic land Where the dew drops cry And the cats meow I will take you there I will show you how
Stonehenge by Spinal Tap
Sorry, couldn't resist...;)
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: 1
I don't see Apple's choice of single buttoned mice to be worth the flamewars. I use both a PC and a Mac (iBook) and adapted quickly to the ctrl-button thing. I don't miss the second button much.
Where I think Apple is being stubborn and partisan is in not accepting that scroll-wheel mice are a better paradigm. This I do miss.I don't think I will be buying an Apple branded mouse until they start providing scroll-wheel enabled ones.
As for companies only suing if there is money loss, that simple isn't so. Several companies, like Microsoft, are building huge patent portfolios to simply lock in the market by fear of lawsuits, and then proceed to feed lawyers loads of cash to simply sue anyone who tries to take a cut.
Specially in the Free Software arena, who can stand going to court and fight being sued by Microsoft? For example, should somebody develop a HD-DVD player for Linux, even though no other would exist on the market and Microsoft was not obviously expecting to make one, so "no money was lost by Microsoft", you can bet your socks he would be sued for doing it on patent infringement and the DMCA.
In the case of DVD Jon, you are correct. As I state in my post, CSS is not patented, it's a trade secret. DRM patents are public and enforcible by patent law, and given it is a protection/encryption algorithm, also by the DMCA. Trade secrets, should they gets to the public, are their owner's problem.
As for not being in the US, check out thisguy. The problem, although distinct, was also being prosecuted according to the DMCA. This time he was lucky. Perhaps somebody else in the future is not so. Trade agreements can be nasty, you know...
As for loss of profits for reverse engineering a protocol, go ask Microsoft how much they are losing in Windows licenses with Samba...
You're right, for now, on the US!=World issue. I'm European (Portuguese). The problem is that discussion on our European software patent law is still on the table. The chance of having a strict, not reverse engeneering allowing software patent law is still in sight. Guess who's pushing some big bucks for it to be a reality...
Should this law come to be a reality, any DVD Jon-to-be would be prosecuted for patent infringement this side of the pond and by violating the DMCA in the US.
Although I'm not a particular "conspiracy theory" freak, I'm starting to smell a rat on the latest moves on the DVD arena. First, the industry tries to play good sport and announces (also here and here, and discussed on Slashdot) out of a sudden it's going to "tolerate" limited copy of DVD, allowing them to be backed up and to transfer content to portable devices. The "gift" is based on technology being developed by a consortium that includes IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Toshiba, Matsushita, Warner Bros. and Disney, and is being labeled Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Trying the usual PR stunt of passing a consumer right, upheld by most Worldwide copyright laws that for a long time have entitled consumers to private copy (something that has up to now, and as you will see, in the future, been denied), as their "gift" to society, they have just, as usual, forgot to mention some "little details".
The same industry that brought us region encoding, supposedly to avoid the possibility of buying a movie in a given place before it premieres at the cinema, although it is available elsewhere, in practice a cover-up to allow regional pricing of DVD (what else justifies 20, 30, 40 year old movies being region encoded?), has "forgot" to stress that this "feature" will only be available on the upcoming new-generation DVD format, still being cooked up by the DVD Forum, former DVD Consortium. So, to keep it short, they want us to buy all over again our DVD collection, now in a neat DRM crippled format.
After failing miserably with the CSS content encryption of current DVD, quickly cracked by the uber-reverse-engineer DVD Jon, and being at the present time little more than a nuisance, they want to have another go. But this time they are making their homework. Lets take the steps and see.
A little more than one year ago, Microsoft unveiled its plans for a new DRM system, nicknamed Janus. One year later it is confirmed and Microsoft lets out a few more details on the features, licensing and partners. A few weeks later, the DVD Forum announces it is going to include Microsoft WM9 codec in its upcoming HD-DVD specification (as a mandatory requirement). Although it may seem they are going down the same road and bound again to be reverse-engineered and fail miserably all over again, things are now different: of course Microsoft is going to patent its DRM scheme. So, while CSS was qualified as a "trade secret", not allowing the ones who cracked it to be prosecuted, reverse-engineering Microsoft DRM scheme will be violating patent law, and the all-mighty DMCA, what makes it a completely different scenario.
Microsoft has already shown it is very interested in the media turf. After developing its own audio and video codecs and using its dominating position to spread them to the web and hardware devices like portable players and even some standalone players, and after including its Media Player in all current Windows version (earning them the current EU law suit), that will of course support both the WM9 codec and the Janus DRM, we can already see they are trying to broaden their scope. This can be seen on their Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, and it would not surprise me to see it ported to standalone devices, either on its current packaging or by porting it to Windows CE.
So what can we see as the outcome of this scenario?
Sorry to sour your milk, but with the upcomming European Constitution, it won't be your government's task to legislate it! It will be a EU decision affecting you, Estonia and everybody else...
I use IMAP. Mail.app does not honour the server-side.mailboxlist file, so all the files in the remote server appear as mailboxes. This is EXTREMELY annoying, and made me move to Thunderbird right away.
I know the "natural" adversity you brits and yanks have against ID, but should we have a State Certification Authority issuing dirt cheap personal and business (for registered businesses) digital certificates, in the first case preferably in a smartcard based ID that would allow easy transferral of the certificate to the browser and mail client (and other...), we wouldn't have a problem like this to begin with! SSL client authentication would be widespread and transparent.
The State has been traditionaly trusted with the task of certifying identity, so this would only be a step to adapt to a new physical reality.
The credit card companies would love it (credit cards wouldn't even need to exist physically!), public services (tax deliveries, contract signing, etc.) would be much simpler, and Economy, Web Security (no more SPAM anybody?) and the whole public and private service infra-structure would have a lot to benifit.
But no, it is better to perpetuate the interests of the existing commercial CA, issuing you a certificate for $200 a year, with who-knows-what given credentials...:(
Am I the only one that sees this as a stab on the future use of biometric identification schemes?
How can I, being for ex. a businessman of a foreign country competing with a US company and traveling to the US, trust on using byometric ID for anything important in my corporation afterwords?
It is know, or at least suspected that inteligence gathered info was supplied and used before by US corporations to battle foreign competitors (ex. Boeing vs. Airbus Consortium). Who is going to have access to the database?
How can I allow a foreign country to have precise byometric info on me, and to keep it in a database, cross-referenced with my personal info?
This might be as much a privacy issue as a trade secret one.
Not necessarily for the case in order, but metals are not by definition good conductors. Generally metals are good conductors for a given frequency range.
Even at 50-60Hz and in the case of power conductors, harmonics suffer what is called pelicular effect, which basicaly is the fact that these harmonics, as their frequency rises, propagate gradually towards the outer layers of the cable, raising the effective resistence of the cable "seen" by that harmonic (less area to conduct->resistance proportional to the inverse of the conductive cross-section).
If the frequency should become high enough, it would become in the end non-conductive. Thats why you need waveguides (at those frequencies air is the good conductor!). Thats also why printed circuits for very high frequency are extremely bulky.
You should be doing lots of great stuff with the P100 32MB Win95 machine... And 2k on a 64Mb P400 must just, like, fly!
You are comparing uncomparable things. Did you "great" old machine support USB (insert random modern hardware...)? What patches/updates is M$ still releasing for it? Your local kiddies must like you really much!
As for Debian docs, I guess you haven't been looking in the right places.
Apt is regarded, I believe correctly, as probably the best packaging format (no holy war intended!), not only for apt itself, but for the quality of the distributed packages. And don't come whining about old. If you haven't checked, all those kool bootable CDs, like knoppix rely on, imagine... your getting there...Debian!
Also, I'm running "old" Gnome 2.4 and "old" OpenOffice.org 1.1 etc., on my testing machine.
Also, Debian is a distro that doesn't try to install every single distro package and run as default every freakn' service!
I'm also very interested on the great features of rpm/up2date you must know.
This all sounds pretty much to me as "we know M$ has the market share for desktop and its gonna be a lot of work to pull it from them", so "buy our enterprise and please don't think the other GNU/Linux distros can do the job". "If you want desktop, go to the enemy we know, don't create competition in our turf".
I hardly see any future for Red Hat exclusively in the enterprise market, without falling in some sort of "lock-in" strategy, breaking compatibility and having to deal with the GPL. I see them heading down the road of traditional UNIX, and re-enacting its pitfalls.
There is a significative mass of GNU/Linux admins who are perfectly OK to live without support and with more "clean cut" and modular distros like Debian. There is no killer "enterprise only" app and I'm not seeing them being able to convince the small/medium enterprise large market to shift from Windows with that stategy, when you can have a "cheap" admin providing the support and tayloring his fav distro to run what they want, be it the web server, DB, file servers or desktops...
I see as a much more viable future for enterprise for IBM to one of these days come up with their own distro and "eat up" all the market. You see, they have the "big" name, they have a lot of the market and also do enterprise hardware! They have a priviledged position hard to come by.
My view of the current trend of research in Europe is that it aims towards disperse production, particularly in the spread of microproduction in distribution networks.
The idea is to move primary sources of energy (gas, wind, even diesel) towards the final consumer, replacing part of the high cost production and transport of energy, and allowing the final consumer to produce a significant part of its consumption, either by using a more primary source of energy (ex. for heating) or by localy producing electricity. This would also allow small parts of the network to operate disconnected from the system during a contingency.
I usualy make the comment that producing electricity burning coal or fuel at relativily low eficiency, transporting it for a long distance and then use it, again with low eficiency, to generate heat is hardly rational and environmental...
Modern developments like fuel cells, microturbines and modern wind generators, combined with a maturing use of power electronics, seem to be the way to go in increasing the reliability of the system. This, together with the use of equipments like flywheels and battery storage, starts making possible the operation of contingency created network islands until it is solved.
But this neads a change of the habits of the consumers and of the system operators. Also, the distribution network needs changes to accomodate this trend. But I believe there is a future in this approach, and that it works well with the current trend of liberalization and de-regulation of the market.
Perhaps the solution to the growing blackouts is not an "update" of the network, but a change of paradigm.
Not all power lines are inductive. Underground cables (like NY underground high voltage power network) are mainly capacitive.
Frequency variation has nothing to do with phase shifts. As it says, it has to do with the fact that, in a transient state of the network after a load change, the generators have to balance the new load (electrical torque the generator "sees") with a change on its mechanical torque (acting on the prime mover). This doesn't happen in all generators, only the ones equipped with a speed governor, which are said to "contribute to frequency regulation". This adjustment is not instantaneous, and causes oscilation in the frequency value, until all the generators stabilize in the new operating point. Should the load change be too big, it might trip some of the generators, either by absolute deviation from the 60Hz (generally around 1Hz), or by rate of frequency change.
I agree that it is (sorta!) easy to fake an operating command to the RTU. What I was trying to say is that the situation would still be noticed by the SCADA and by the command center, possibly generating alarms, since the neighbouring measures would indicate the real state of the equipment. Some State Estimation software even infers the real state of switching devices through measurements... So, even if you manage to, for ex., fake the opening of a breaker, the measurements on the opened side of the network would show 0 (zero), generating an alarm in the control center, triggering imediate action.
Trippings due to over line sag making them hit the ground, buildings or trees usualy happens before the thermal limit is reached. Also, per se sagging doesn't destroy the lines. This sort of behaviour is usualy even used as some sort of "primary protection", to avoid reaching the thermal limit by progressively overloading the line.
Reaching the thermal operation limit, like I said, destroys the lines, and they would have to be replaced.
I still believe the security issue is not an issue. I think you can separate the worries in two:
Fake measures: This is solved by what is called a State Estimator in the SCADA, that in simple terms, tries to reduce measurement errors and to infer on unavailable ones using measure redundancy. That means that, even though the RTU message to the SCADA would be tapped, and measures faked, the SCADA would filter it out. Only chance would be to fake them on a geographically large area, with coherence, and that would be, to say the least, complicated.
Tele-command: Since SCADA also involves the tele-control of grid equipments, ex: breakers, a fake order could be sent to the RTU. This is complicated because:
You would need to also fake measurements (previous point).
Not all kind of maneuvers and maneuvering sequences are allowed by the local controllers or apparatus.
Given the fact that measures are hard to fake, the control center would detect the error quickly and call the local units or send a team to see whats happening.
In the end (see previous post about stolen servers), it would be easier to just, for example, tear down a line post with a truck, to short the line or to sabotage the facility...
SCADA, which I believe you misspeled, has nothing to do with communication protocols. It stands for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, and it's more of a concept of a supervision system. It aims at processing measures from the supervised network, trying to eliminate errors and to create a reliable "snapshot" of the supervised system. It usually relies on a network of measuring devices, whose measures are aggregated in RTU or Remote Transmission Units, and sent to a central SCADA, using generally private networks and assynchronous protocols.
Since the networks are generally private, privacy and security is not an issue.
I sincerely don't think that any transmission line operator would allow lines to reach a 400 degrees Celsius operating temperature! The question is that there is a thermal limit for line operation, much lower than the mentioned temperature, that trashes the lines should it be transposed. It has to do with the permanent loss of mechanical properties copper and aluminium endure at that temperature.
The twice-as-rated load situation would only subsist for a small transient period of time, not allowing the lines to heat up, since line protections would kick in.
- The first Matrix was created perfect, but the human nature would refuse to accept it.
- Subsequentialy, deliberate flaws were introduced in the Matrix, to make it more "humanly gullable".
- These flaws side effect was that some humans were able to perceive the fake reality they were living in.
Now here is the tricky part!
- Perceiving it, they were fed with the idea that they could escape from it, "awakening". My notion is that Zion and the ones living there are still in the Matrix, in a sort of "garbage collector" that gathers the ones that perceive the flaws. I believe that, at some time, the Architect mentions that the ones "escaping" from the Matrix would evolve exponentialy.
- Neo's part, instigated by the Oracle, who acts like a Matrix system process that monitors the amount of "anomalies", is to act as an "escape valve", that triggers when the anomalies reach a given critical mass, letting the Matrix know that it's time for a "reboot", eliminating the existing anomalies and starting all over again. This is the weekness of this Matrix model.
- What is also happening (I believe), is that, despite this "reboot" process, the cleanup is not being total, and Neo is being able to retain knowledge between cycles. This explains the alusion to previous "flawed" Neo's.
All of this explains one of the points I believe is crucial, the usage of Neo's powers in Zion, towards the end of the flick. I believe he is still in the Matrix!
Also, I believe that the Matrix cycles will como to a stop, and the Matrix exposed, when Neo finaly becomes aware that the reality he believe is "real" (Zion) is still a lie and that he is still in the Matrix, which seams is starting to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
"When Portugal colonized Brazil, for quite sometime the ruling elite was made of pretty much a bunch of aristocratic good-for-nothing lawyers/slackers that graduated from Coimbra University, in Portugal. The basic characteristic of such people were a basic lack of common sense as well as a despise for work. Instead of working, they made laws. And more laws."
Brazil has been independent since 1822. It got rid of the Portuguese entirely from 1889! It is true that, from my knowledge, it inherited, by choice and in the start of ots independence, a lot of the Portuguese royal decrees and law. But, Brazil has already been throught seven, I repeat, seven constitutions since, the last one approved in 1988. Since then it has already been amended 52 times. You still believe it is the fault of the Portuguese? Perhaps it is time to wake up, smell the coffee and start assuming brazil's own responsability on the legal "explosion" it is facing.
"Portugal is notorious for having discovered America and then having ended up owing a huge amount of money to the Brits, as foreign debt, losing all the gold they had amassed, right?"
You do know that we did have an earthquake in Portugal in 1775 that wiped out most of our capital city of Lisbon, do you?
"Until recently, it was possible to maneuver in legal waters to a point that even trivial matters went to the Supreme Court. By trivial, I mean a dog biting the neighbour."
Comparing the Brazilian with the Portuguese constitutions (latest since 1976), at first, they look identicaly oriented. Both have a comparable number of articles. But when you start really looking, you see that the Brazilian constitution is an insane display of maximalist constitutionalism. Even tough the Portuguese constitution faces critics that it is too vague and long, the Brazilian is in an intire diferent ball game. Everything (or close) is inside the Brasilian constituition! Its sheer size bears resemblance with the size of the Portuguese whole code of civil law! It comes at no surprese that everything and its oposite gets to be interpreted out of such a constitution, sometimes depending on how much a lawyer you present or even on the slight amendments that you can politicaly get through.
But blaming it on the Portuguese... Please!
Though I feel the news are mostly positive, I remain cautious.
;-) ) to the Commission!
But I think this step by the Commission might be a hint of other things to come, namely (for good or evil), that the EU will in fact try to takeover the EPO. At least the upcoming juridical problems are garanteed.
Taking for granted that the Commission wants to clarify software patenteability, we who are against that option can be shure of one thing: all the pro-soft-patent lobbying that was going on at the EPO is quickly going to move (get back
It will be interesting to follow if a directive is issued (directives must be incorporated by all EU countries in their national law, that presently is shaped around the European Patent Convention) that defines different criteria for patenteability that are clearly incompatible with the EPC (both regarding soft-patents and "traditional" patents). Particularly because the current "european patent" is not a patent by itself but a portfolio of national patents issued simultaneously by the EPO.
What can happen is a in-practice removal of power from the EPO since, unlike the Commission, it does not hold relevant "muscle" to enforce its position. While the EPO is sustained by the "benevolence" of the EPC signataries, the Commission can impose sanctions to EU countries if they don't transpose the directive. In practice, we are possibly going to see the Commission pushing away the EU coutries from the EPC and forcing them to abandon it, or else being submerged in a complicated judicial problem involving conflicting internal and international law.
Stonehenge
;)
Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live
And they do live well
Stonehenge
Where a man is a man
And the children dance to
The pipes of pan
Stonehenge
'Tis a magic place
Where the moon doth rise
With a dragon's face
Stonehenge
Where the virgins lie
And the prayer of devils
Fill the midnight sky
And you my love
Won't you take my hand
We'll go back in time
To that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry
And the cats meow
I will take you there
I will show you how
Stonehenge by Spinal Tap
Sorry, couldn't resist...
I don't see Apple's choice of single buttoned mice to be worth the flamewars. I use both a PC and a Mac (iBook) and adapted quickly to the ctrl-button thing. I don't miss the second button much.
Where I think Apple is being stubborn and partisan is in not accepting that scroll-wheel mice are a better paradigm. This I do miss.I don't think I will be buying an Apple branded mouse until they start providing scroll-wheel enabled ones.
As for companies only suing if there is money loss, that simple isn't so. Several companies, like Microsoft, are building huge patent portfolios to simply lock in the market by fear of lawsuits, and then proceed to feed lawyers loads of cash to simply sue anyone who tries to take a cut.
Specially in the Free Software arena, who can stand going to court and fight being sued by Microsoft? For example, should somebody develop a HD-DVD player for Linux, even though no other would exist on the market and Microsoft was not obviously expecting to make one, so "no money was lost by Microsoft", you can bet your socks he would be sued for doing it on patent infringement and the DMCA.
In the case of DVD Jon, you are correct. As I state in my post, CSS is not patented, it's a trade secret. DRM patents are public and enforcible by patent law, and given it is a protection/encryption algorithm, also by the DMCA. Trade secrets, should they gets to the public, are their owner's problem.
As for not being in the US, check out this guy. The problem, although distinct, was also being prosecuted according to the DMCA. This time he was lucky. Perhaps somebody else in the future is not so. Trade agreements can be nasty, you know...
As for loss of profits for reverse engineering a protocol, go ask Microsoft how much they are losing in Windows licenses with Samba...
You're right, for now, on the US!=World issue. I'm European (Portuguese). The problem is that discussion on our European software patent law is still on the table. The chance of having a strict, not reverse engeneering allowing software patent law is still in sight. Guess who's pushing some big bucks for it to be a reality...
Should this law come to be a reality, any DVD Jon-to-be would be prosecuted for patent infringement this side of the pond and by violating the DMCA in the US.
Wrote this on my blog a while ago...
Although I'm not a particular "conspiracy theory" freak, I'm starting to smell a rat on the latest moves on the DVD arena. First, the industry tries to play good sport and announces (also here and here, and discussed on Slashdot) out of a sudden it's going to "tolerate" limited copy of DVD, allowing them to be backed up and to transfer content to portable devices. The "gift" is based on technology being developed by a consortium that includes IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Toshiba, Matsushita, Warner Bros. and Disney, and is being labeled Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Trying the usual PR stunt of passing a consumer right, upheld by most Worldwide copyright laws that for a long time have entitled consumers to private copy (something that has up to now, and as you will see, in the future, been denied), as their "gift" to society, they have just, as usual, forgot to mention some "little details".
The same industry that brought us region encoding, supposedly to avoid the possibility of buying a movie in a given place before it premieres at the cinema, although it is available elsewhere, in practice a cover-up to allow regional pricing of DVD (what else justifies 20, 30, 40 year old movies being region encoded?), has "forgot" to stress that this "feature" will only be available on the upcoming new-generation DVD format, still being cooked up by the DVD Forum, former DVD Consortium. So, to keep it short, they want us to buy all over again our DVD collection, now in a neat DRM crippled format.
After failing miserably with the CSS content encryption of current DVD, quickly cracked by the uber-reverse-engineer DVD Jon, and being at the present time little more than a nuisance, they want to have another go. But this time they are making their homework. Lets take the steps and see.
A little more than one year ago, Microsoft unveiled its plans for a new DRM system, nicknamed Janus. One year later it is confirmed and Microsoft lets out a few more details on the features, licensing and partners. A few weeks later, the DVD Forum announces it is going to include Microsoft WM9 codec in its upcoming HD-DVD specification (as a mandatory requirement). Although it may seem they are going down the same road and bound again to be reverse-engineered and fail miserably all over again, things are now different: of course Microsoft is going to patent its DRM scheme. So, while CSS was qualified as a "trade secret", not allowing the ones who cracked it to be prosecuted, reverse-engineering Microsoft DRM scheme will be violating patent law, and the all-mighty DMCA, what makes it a completely different scenario.
Microsoft has already shown it is very interested in the media turf. After developing its own audio and video codecs and using its dominating position to spread them to the web and hardware devices like portable players and even some standalone players, and after including its Media Player in all current Windows version (earning them the current EU law suit), that will of course support both the WM9 codec and the Janus DRM, we can already see they are trying to broaden their scope. This can be seen on their Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, and it would not surprise me to see it ported to standalone devices, either on its current packaging or by porting it to Windows CE.
So what can we see as the outcome of this scenario?
Sorry to sour your milk, but with the upcomming European Constitution, it won't be your government's task to legislate it! It will be a EU decision affecting you, Estonia and everybody else...
I use IMAP. Mail.app does not honour the server-side .mailboxlist file, so all the files in the remote server appear as mailboxes. This is EXTREMELY annoying, and made me move to Thunderbird right away.
I know the "natural" adversity you brits and yanks have against ID, but should we have a State Certification Authority issuing dirt cheap personal and business (for registered businesses) digital certificates, in the first case preferably in a smartcard based ID that would allow easy transferral of the certificate to the browser and mail client (and other...), we wouldn't have a problem like this to begin with! SSL client authentication would be widespread and transparent.
:(
The State has been traditionaly trusted with the task of certifying identity, so this would only be a step to adapt to a new physical reality.
The credit card companies would love it (credit cards wouldn't even need to exist physically!), public services (tax deliveries, contract signing, etc.) would be much simpler, and Economy, Web Security (no more SPAM anybody?) and the whole public and private service infra-structure would have a lot to benifit.
But no, it is better to perpetuate the interests of the existing commercial CA, issuing you a certificate for $200 a year, with who-knows-what given credentials...
I'm here too, ready to take my share of coconut... ;)
Am I the only one that sees this as a stab on the future use of biometric identification schemes?
How can I, being for ex. a businessman of a foreign country competing with a US company and traveling to the US, trust on using byometric ID for anything important in my corporation afterwords?
It is know, or at least suspected that inteligence gathered info was supplied and used before by US corporations to battle foreign competitors (ex. Boeing vs. Airbus Consortium). Who is going to have access to the database?
How can I allow a foreign country to have precise byometric info on me, and to keep it in a database, cross-referenced with my personal info?
This might be as much a privacy issue as a trade secret one.
Not necessarily for the case in order, but metals are not by definition good conductors. Generally metals are good conductors for a given frequency range.
Even at 50-60Hz and in the case of power conductors, harmonics suffer what is called pelicular effect, which basicaly is the fact that these harmonics, as their frequency rises, propagate gradually towards the outer layers of the cable, raising the effective resistence of the cable "seen" by that harmonic (less area to conduct->resistance proportional to the inverse of the conductive cross-section).
If the frequency should become high enough, it would become in the end non-conductive. Thats why you need waveguides (at those frequencies air is the good conductor!). Thats also why printed circuits for very high frequency are extremely bulky.
You should be doing lots of great stuff with the P100 32MB Win95 machine... And 2k on a 64Mb P400 must just, like, fly!
You are comparing uncomparable things. Did you "great" old machine support USB (insert random modern hardware...)? What patches/updates is M$ still releasing for it? Your local kiddies must like you really much!
As for Debian docs, I guess you haven't been looking in the right places.
Apt is regarded, I believe correctly, as probably the best packaging format (no holy war intended!), not only for apt itself, but for the quality of the distributed packages. And don't come whining about old. If you haven't checked, all those kool bootable CDs, like knoppix rely on, imagine... your getting there...Debian!
Also, I'm running "old" Gnome 2.4 and "old" OpenOffice.org 1.1 etc., on my testing machine.
Also, Debian is a distro that doesn't try to install every single distro package and run as default every freakn' service!
I'm also very interested on the great features of rpm/up2date you must know.
Get real.
This all sounds pretty much to me as "we know M$ has the market share for desktop and its gonna be a lot of work to pull it from them", so "buy our enterprise and please don't think the other GNU/Linux distros can do the job". "If you want desktop, go to the enemy we know, don't create competition in our turf".
I hardly see any future for Red Hat exclusively in the enterprise market, without falling in some sort of "lock-in" strategy, breaking compatibility and having to deal with the GPL. I see them heading down the road of traditional UNIX, and re-enacting its pitfalls.
There is a significative mass of GNU/Linux admins who are perfectly OK to live without support and with more "clean cut" and modular distros like Debian. There is no killer "enterprise only" app and I'm not seeing them being able to convince the small/medium enterprise large market to shift from Windows with that stategy, when you can have a "cheap" admin providing the support and tayloring his fav distro to run what they want, be it the web server, DB, file servers or desktops...
I see as a much more viable future for enterprise for IBM to one of these days come up with their own distro and "eat up" all the market. You see, they have the "big" name, they have a lot of the market and also do enterprise hardware! They have a priviledged position hard to come by.
I see a bleak future for Red Hat.
Remember to keep cell phone away from my short-n-curlies...
Ouch!
My view of the current trend of research in Europe is that it aims towards disperse production, particularly in the spread of microproduction in distribution networks.
The idea is to move primary sources of energy (gas, wind, even diesel) towards the final consumer, replacing part of the high cost production and transport of energy, and allowing the final consumer to produce a significant part of its consumption, either by using a more primary source of energy (ex. for heating) or by localy producing electricity. This would also allow small parts of the network to operate disconnected from the system during a contingency.
I usualy make the comment that producing electricity burning coal or fuel at relativily low eficiency, transporting it for a long distance and then use it, again with low eficiency, to generate heat is hardly rational and environmental...
Modern developments like fuel cells, microturbines and modern wind generators, combined with a maturing use of power electronics, seem to be the way to go in increasing the reliability of the system. This, together with the use of equipments like flywheels and battery storage, starts making possible the operation of contingency created network islands until it is solved.
But this neads a change of the habits of the consumers and of the system operators. Also, the distribution network needs changes to accomodate this trend. But I believe there is a future in this approach, and that it works well with the current trend of liberalization and de-regulation of the market.
Perhaps the solution to the growing blackouts is not an "update" of the network, but a change of paradigm.
Joao Luis
Just to correct you:
I agree that it is (sorta!) easy to fake an operating command to the RTU. What I was trying to say is that the situation would still be noticed by the SCADA and by the command center, possibly generating alarms, since the neighbouring measures would indicate the real state of the equipment. Some State Estimation software even infers the real state of switching devices through measurements... So, even if you manage to, for ex., fake the opening of a breaker, the measurements on the opened side of the network would show 0 (zero), generating an alarm in the control center, triggering imediate action.
Best,
Joao
Trippings due to over line sag making them hit the ground, buildings or trees usualy happens before the thermal limit is reached. Also, per se sagging doesn't destroy the lines. This sort of behaviour is usualy even used as some sort of "primary protection", to avoid reaching the thermal limit by progressively overloading the line.
Reaching the thermal operation limit, like I said, destroys the lines, and they would have to be replaced.
I still believe the security issue is not an issue. I think you can separate the worries in two:
In the end (see previous post about stolen servers), it would be easier to just, for example, tear down a line post with a truck, to short the line or to sabotage the facility...
SCADA, which I believe you misspeled, has nothing to do with communication protocols. It stands for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, and it's more of a concept of a supervision system. It aims at processing measures from the supervised network, trying to eliminate errors and to create a reliable "snapshot" of the supervised system. It usually relies on a network of measuring devices, whose measures are aggregated in RTU or Remote Transmission Units, and sent to a central SCADA, using generally private networks and assynchronous protocols.
Since the networks are generally private, privacy and security is not an issue.
I sincerely don't think that any transmission line operator would allow lines to reach a 400 degrees Celsius operating temperature! The question is that there is a thermal limit for line operation, much lower than the mentioned temperature, that trashes the lines should it be transposed. It has to do with the permanent loss of mechanical properties copper and aluminium endure at that temperature.
The twice-as-rated load situation would only subsist for a small transient period of time, not allowing the lines to heat up, since line protections would kick in.
Well, this is the way I see it:
(The mandatory ***** SPOILER ALERT! *****)
- The first Matrix was created perfect, but the human nature would refuse to accept it.
- Subsequentialy, deliberate flaws were introduced in the Matrix, to make it more "humanly gullable".
- These flaws side effect was that some humans were able to perceive the fake reality they were living in.
Now here is the tricky part!
- Perceiving it, they were fed with the idea that they could escape from it, "awakening". My notion is that Zion and the ones living there are still in the Matrix, in a sort of "garbage collector" that gathers the ones that perceive the flaws. I believe that, at some time, the Architect mentions that the ones "escaping" from the Matrix would evolve exponentialy.
- Neo's part, instigated by the Oracle, who acts like a Matrix system process that monitors the amount of "anomalies", is to act as an "escape valve", that triggers when the anomalies reach a given critical mass, letting the Matrix know that it's time for a "reboot", eliminating the existing anomalies and starting all over again. This is the weekness of this Matrix model.
- What is also happening (I believe), is that, despite this "reboot" process, the cleanup is not being total, and Neo is being able to retain knowledge between cycles. This explains the alusion to previous "flawed" Neo's.
All of this explains one of the points I believe is crucial, the usage of Neo's powers in Zion, towards the end of the flick. I believe he is still in the Matrix!
Also, I believe that the Matrix cycles will como to a stop, and the Matrix exposed, when Neo finaly becomes aware that the reality he believe is "real" (Zion) is still a lie and that he is still in the Matrix, which seams is starting to happen.
Hope somebody follows along my line of thought!