There are a lot of differences between typical recreational use and commercial use. So the recreational vs. commercial is only one small part of the guidelines outlined in Advisory 91-57. The main issue is that recreational model aircraft are flown with line of sight, and any camera is used either just for post flight video or for potential assistance, but not for primary flight. This kind of flight is almost useless for commercial use.
A commercial UAS uses the camera as a first person view for actually flying the vehicle. Typically RF power is increased to be able to fly the vehicle much further. This is significantly more dangerous. There is a huge loss in situational awareness. If the camera system fails then you are literally flying blind. The camera is not showing the plane itself so it is more difficult to diagnose the beginning of a failure. When a recreational flyer sees his vehicle failing he can immediately turn it around and since it is not out of line of sight there is a much better chance that the pilot can get the vehicle back or most of the way back. The pilot has full situational awareness of what is under and around the plane/vehicle.
Commercial UAS systems are typically higher power, heavier, larger batteries, etc. You really don't want these things flying over your head. Use of them in urban or suburban settings should be carefully regulated.
Are you talking about websites? Because I can't imagine people were all that excited about new telnet, ftp or gopher sites. If you're talking websites then your timeline is a little off. The World became the first ISP in 1989. Tim Berners-Lee created the first website in December 1990, but didn't really advertise the fact (and make a web browser available) until August of 1991.
UUNET was not providing internet connections at that time. They started out as a UUCP service provider, primarily providing email and Usenet feeds via uucp. So sometimes people will say they are the first ISP, just like people will claim Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were all ISP's back then. But The World was the first true ISP providing access to the Internet, which probably wasn't all that exciting for the general public at that point.
RIght. That nearest hub/station/whatever is called a DSLAM. A DSLAM can be installed near or in your neighborhood and fed by fiber. I have a fiber fed DSLAM in my neighborhood and I subscribe to a 40 Mbit VDSL2 service. I'm less than 1000 feet from the DSLAM, as are most of the people in our neighborhood. The generic "DSL" covers a wide range of service. The fact is that many people can only get 1.5 Mbit (or even only 256 Kbit) service, so they assume that (or 5-7 Mbit, which is the next tier typically available) is the best that DSL can offer.
Perhaps you have been too quick to dismiss DSL. I assume that currently your DSLAM is not very close to the neighborhood and therefore AT&T can only offer the slower DSL speeds. Perhaps you can convince AT&T to install a fiber fed DSLAM near the border of your neighborhood. If there is fiber in the area this can be done without digging up your neighborhood. With current DSL technology (VDSL2) they could offer much higher speeds (up to 100 Mbit down, but more likely 20-40 Mbit). This can be done over your existing neighborhood phone wires as long as the distance to the DSLAM is fairly short.
However, your neighborhood still might not be big enough to make a good case. At the very least you would have to get a significant number of your neighbors to commit to buy a high rate DSL service. Are there other nearby neighborhoods that could benefit? That might increase the chances of it happening.
I'm not saying that there is a high probability that you can convince AT&T to do this, but you should at least consider all your options.
A lot of people are suggesting faraday cages as the answer. I'm not sure that is really as cheap as people think it would be, and I really don't care if people are using their phones during the pre previews or previews. I'm thinking that a zero tolerance policy along with a phone detector system is a better answer. My guess is that once the lights are out, an HD camera mounted in the ceiling over the audience will easily be able to pick out any light coming from the audience. With a one time simple calibration (putting a light in the end seats of each row and telling the software how many seats are in the row) the software can probably report the exact seat location, or close enough. Then after some threshold, say 30-60 seconds of light, the system could report the theater number and seat location of the light source to theater staff. An usher could then be dispatched to observe the behavior and throw the customer out, or at the very least cause the customer to quickly put their phone away when the usher walks into the theatre.
Yes, that is one of the purposes of a pretrial hearing. The judge has to determine whether or not the case should proceed to a trial or be dismissed. In order for there to be a trial, the Judge has to determine if the party bringing the lawsuit (the federal government in this case) has enough evidence to warrant a trial. The Judge also has to make a preliminary judgement about how likely the party bringing the lawsuit will win. This is needed in order to determine whether any preliminary injunctions should be issued prior to the trial (i.e. an injunction that takes place and stays in force until the trial is completed or another hearing reverses the injunction).
This seems to be a reasonable situation to define limits to what a law abiding person needs for personal use.
Seriously? I hope you are the last one to say it. Reading between the lines of your quote above, it would appear that you think it might be reasonable to outlaw access to this technology, solely because you can't think of a legal use for it.
As others have posted, there are certainly legal usages. I can think of others, but that is besides the point. The whole idea of limiting something because it might be used for illegal purposes is ridiculous.
Regardless of the "legal" ideas proposed, sometimes new technology leads to new ideas, i.e. as storage costs go down and capacities go up, new ways of using storage may evolve. One (possibly half-baked) idea I can think of is crowd sourced, highly redundant, "free" backup storage.
No, the article is quoting aureal density which is expressed in gigabits or terabits per square inch.
The problem with the article is that it is combining data from various sources and misreading/misinterpreting the data (so what's new, this is Slashdot after all).
First, the summary above says that Seagate will produce a 60 Tb drive by 2016. That is not true. Seagate has said they will produce a drive with "up to" 60 Tb of capacity (30-60 TB) by the end of the decade. This is based on the theoretical limits of HAMR technology, which are projected to be in the 5-10 Tbits/sq. inch. range. Current 4TB drives are made with platters that have a density of around 650 Gbits/sq. in., so the math works (10Tb/.65Tb is approximately 15x).
The other part of the article is talking about what the maximum density is likely to be over the timeframe from now to 2016 using PMR technology and transitioning to something new like HAMR. PMR technology will top out at about 1Tbit/sq. inch, so anything over that will require something new like HAMR. that underlying article quotes 1.8 Tbit/sq. in in 2016, which may not be out of line with 5-10 Tbit/sq. in. by 2020 as a new technology like HAMR comes online.
The digital TV standard allows for providing up to 16 days of guide data. However, the FCC only mandates that a station provide 12 hours of guide data, and many stations only provide the minimum. In many cases the station is just going with the default settings and can be convinced to change them; however, the most guide data I've seen, at least in the Denver area, is 7 days of guide data.
Huh? There are undelete tools for ext2. Undelete is impossible for ext3 since the information needed to do it is gone immediately once a file is removed, whereas it will still be present in a ext2 file system until it gets overwritten as new files are created.
If this is an April Fools joke then a lot of work went into establishing background for it. According to a CNET article back in January this company (Powercast) attended CES and mentioned Philips as a partner back then. The article referenced here was written on March 30th (although the URL has 04/01 in the name). That article is in complete agreement with the Cnet article. the Powercast website (powercastco.com) was established last October.
Then again, Slashdot has a tradition of a bunch of bogus articles on 04/01, but perhaps this isn't one of them.
Yes, but this would be illegal (which might not stop them). Companies may have the right to monitor all traffic on their networks, read email, etc. They also certainly have the right to block all traffic to your bank. But for them to read your online banking transactions it would require them to forge your banks SSL certificate (i.e. they would need to create a certificate that claims it belongs to your bank, but they would sign it with the companies pre-loaded root cert). IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that would constitute fraud and would be actionable.
You still don't understand the system, and have gotten bogged down with just one feature of it. This system also can be audited in such a way that it verifies that votes in total were not switched and actually counted as intended. Being able to verify your vote with your receipt is just one part of that system. It verifies that there was not an interpretation error, which other systems DON'T give you. Your big black X is far from foolproof. If it is read by a human he can easily make a mistake and put it in the wrong pile, either deliberately or by mistake. You would never know. If it is read by a machine, then the machine can make a mistake reading it. If it is a punch card, it could have been misread. If it is a mark sense card it could have been misscanned, etc.
If the mistakes above were innocent, well that is inevitable, and you would not know. But if they were fraudulent, you still would not know. The punchscan is better because you can see the interpretation of your marks at the polling place, which locks them in, which is far better than placing a ballot into a scanner and having no idea whether or not it was scanned correctly. Then you can once again verify that your ballot was interpreted correctly and properly included in the final tally at home. If a few people have receipts which show errors, then that is tolerable, due to the fact that nothing (even your magic black X) is perfect. They most likely didn't verify the marks at the polling place in the first place. But if there is fraud there will be a LOT of people with mismatched receipts. That is what keeps things honest. Many people won't check, however, the interesting thing is that if people start declaring fraud, more people will check their receipts and more people will audit the election results.
Your issue with the switching of the interpretation AFTER the ballot has been cast has been addressed by this system also. It involves cryptography (cryptological "commitments") and auditing before and after the election. Auditing that you can actually choose to do if you want to (e.g. even if you don't trust other peoples auditing software you could actually write your own, because the whole process is completely open).
There are multiple levels of detail at the site, which you obviously have not read, but that is not surprising, given that this is Slashdot after all. There are details that you can get which I won't try to go into here, but in an attempt to simply explain the system of commitments and auditing they offer the following analogy at the website. Note that in the below quote, consider the "table where all rows are sealed" as the state of the random ballots BEFORE they have been cast. The "switch" they are talking about is the same issue that you are talking about. It might not completely satisfy you, but at least you may understand that they have addressed your issue, and if you really care to understand it in depth, the details are there if you look deep enough:
An election authority publishes a table where all the rows are sealed. How do the voters know that a malicious authority doesn't switch the values? Punchscan uses a mathematical construct called a commitment, which is the equivalent of putting a sealed envelope on the table - as long as the envelope stays in plain view everyone knows it hasn't been changed even though no one knows what is in it. Punchscan commitments work similarly - it is as though the envelope is always on the table.
The following example is analogous to Punchscan's system of commitment and auditing. Imagine you have a friend who owes you $100. Instead of being normal, he is a mathematician and says he will spread out $200 over some number of envelopes. You get to open half of them and verify that they contain $100 - and then take home the other half of the envelopes with whatever money is in there. If you catch him cheating, i.e. you open half the envelopes and don't find $100, he gives you $200.
With 2 envelopes, he can put $100 in one, and 0 in the second and hope
A rocket is not an effective weapon without having a bomb as a payload. If the terrorist can get the materials to make the bomb (where regulation DOES make sense), they are not going to have any problems getting the materials to make the propellant, regardless of whether or not the propellant is regulated.
Second, a rocket with a bomb as a payload is not likely to hit a desired target unless it has guidance. Rocket guidance, especially guidance to a target (rather than guidance to go straight up), even if the target is not moving, is not an easy problem to solve. Sure, it has been solved by many arms manufacturers, etc. but again, if a terrorist has the expertise and determination to build reliable guidance for a rocket, they aren't likely to be impeded by regulation of rocket propellant.
Third, it would probably be much better from the desired targets perspective if a terrorist chose to use a rocket to deliver a bomb rather than a Ryder truck, car or even a Cessna. That would severely limit the size of the bomb he could deliver, and it would SIGNIFICANTLY reduce his chances of success.
There is such a thing as reasonable government control as compared to unreasonable government control. We already have to get a waiver from the FAA to launch high power rockets. This isn't a simple process. We have to submit forms explaining where the launch will be held, what the maximum altitude will be of any rockets we will launch, what times the launch(es) will be held, etc. The FAA can then modify and/or refuse our request. Typically, since this takes a fair amount of effort, we get approval for a whole year of scheduled launches. But we still have to call the FAA to "open" the waiver (that was approved ahead of time) when the launch begins, and then call them back to "close" the waiver at the end of the launch.
There are also maximum limits that take the classification of the rocket out of the "high power" range, which require a much higher level of paperwork to get launch approval. However, this type of regulation is reasonable, since we share the airspace with aircraft and other FAA approved uses.
There is also self regulation that is recognized by the organization that writes the national fire code (NFPA -- National Fire Protection Agency) which is used by states and local governments when adopting their own fire codes. This self regulation divides "High Power" rocketry intro three different levels, where at each level a person has to demonstrate competence to build and fly rockets for that power level. No rocket motor retailer will sell a rocket motor to anyone who is not certified for the corresponding high power level by one of the two national rocketry associations (Tripoli Rocketry Assn. or the National Association of Rocketry).
There is also regulation of the commercial rocket motor manufacturers, since some of the raw ingredients are more dangerous than the resulting rocket propellant, i.e. some of the ingredients MAY legitimately be classified as explosives, but the resulting composite propellant is only fast burning, not explosive.
It wouldn't make much sense for a commercial rocket motor manufacturer to manufacture rocket motors if they could not be shipped legally. So another level of regulation is involved where the manufacturers have to have each different propellant formula tested and classified before the Department of Transportation will allow them to be shipped. Because there are different shipping regulations for low explosives vs. flammable solids, there are advantages to getting your propellant classified as a flammable solid, which many rocket propellants are classified as. The ones that are not classified as flammable solids are classified as low explosives because the manufacturer hasn't wanted to invest the money to have the propellant go through the level of testing required to prove it is a flammable solid.
The propellant in question is less dangerous than the five gallon can of gasoline many of you probably have in your garage, yet we have to store it in a container that is approved for storage of explosives, and be subject to random visits by ATFE agents, etc. That is unreasonable regulation. Any propellant that can be shown NOT to be an explosive by laboratory testing should not be regulated as an explosive.
Well another way to increase the chances of the CD being inserted would be to use a "silver" CD-R (ones that look the closest to mass produced CD-ROMs) with an inkject compatible blank white coating. Use a high quality CD inkjet printer (e.g. Primera) and print a design that is likely to tempt people. One example might be a "Best of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues" using content from the Sports Illustrated website for the design. The suggestion above to "fill" the CD so that there won't be any burn line is also a good one.
Note, I don't in any way condone such actions, but just want to make people think about what could be done, so that they are a little more cautious about inserting random CD's into their computers. I've turned off autoplay for my CD drives just in case.
This article appears to be completely uninformed. Bitlocker works on a volume basis, not on an entire harddrive (unless the harddrive only has one volume). In fact, in order to get Bitlocker to work for Vista you MUST have two volumes, one being the OS volume that is encrypted with Bitlocker, and the other is the system volume which cannot be encrypted with bitlocker.
Nothing prevents you from having multiple volumes and only enabling Bitlocker for some of the Windows Vista volumes. You can have other volumes/partitions with Linux or any other OS you want. The only issue is that you will not be able to read the Bitlocker protected partitions from Linux. Isn't that kind of obvious? You can still have a unencrypted FAT32 partition for sharing data between Linux and Windows, or an unencrypted NTFS partition for one way sharing between Windows and Linux (write support for NTFS on Linux is still not reliable).
As far as recovery, you will not be able to do that with Linux, you will have to do that with Windows. I guess I'm not seeing a real issue here.
I can't claim to be a super DNS guru, but I do know a fair amount. It seems that some of the claims of this research are exaggerated because they don't take DNS glue records into account. Most of the name servers return the IP addresses of the next level name servers, even if they aren't in the domain being looked up (obviously they have to return the IP if the ns is in the domain being looked up).
So, for a normal DNS recursive lookup you will never follow most of the graph because of the short circuits that the glue records provide. So in real life the guy who takes control of the host in Monash Australia doesn't have a chance of subverting www.rkc.lviv.ua.
A little more detail about what I am talking about. If you query the root servers for the ua ccTLD name servers you will get 10 name servers returned ALONG WITH THEIR IP ADDRESSES. So even though one of the ua name servers is aunic.aunic.net, you won't be traversing the aunic.net ns part of the graph (which I think eventually leads to the Monash Australia host) because you already have the IP address of aunic.aunic.net. This continues to apply as you traverse the domains. Sometimes you won't get a glue record, so then you will recurse down from there. But as far as I can see, it is nowhere near as bad as this research tries to make it out to be.
The article Gene Spafford wrote was not his farewell to Usenet. He was maintaining a variety of files, e.g. A list of all groups and what each groups charter was, Usenet History, new user info, etc. He simply said that he was no longer going to maintain that stuff because he didn't feel that people really cared about it (as evidenced by people ignoring most of it). He specifically said in that article that he was going to remain involved in a few groups.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of differences between typical recreational use and commercial use. So the recreational vs. commercial is only one small part of the guidelines outlined in Advisory 91-57. The main issue is that recreational model aircraft are flown with line of sight, and any camera is used either just for post flight video or for potential assistance, but not for primary flight. This kind of flight is almost useless for commercial use. A commercial UAS uses the camera as a first person view for actually flying the vehicle. Typically RF power is increased to be able to fly the vehicle much further. This is significantly more dangerous. There is a huge loss in situational awareness. If the camera system fails then you are literally flying blind. The camera is not showing the plane itself so it is more difficult to diagnose the beginning of a failure. When a recreational flyer sees his vehicle failing he can immediately turn it around and since it is not out of line of sight there is a much better chance that the pilot can get the vehicle back or most of the way back. The pilot has full situational awareness of what is under and around the plane/vehicle. Commercial UAS systems are typically higher power, heavier, larger batteries, etc. You really don't want these things flying over your head. Use of them in urban or suburban settings should be carefully regulated.
Are you talking about websites? Because I can't imagine people were all that excited about new telnet, ftp or gopher sites. If you're talking websites then your timeline is a little off. The World became the first ISP in 1989. Tim Berners-Lee created the first website in December 1990, but didn't really advertise the fact (and make a web browser available) until August of 1991.
UUNET was not providing internet connections at that time. They started out as a UUCP service provider, primarily providing email and Usenet feeds via uucp. So sometimes people will say they are the first ISP, just like people will claim Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were all ISP's back then. But The World was the first true ISP providing access to the Internet, which probably wasn't all that exciting for the general public at that point.
RIght. That nearest hub/station/whatever is called a DSLAM. A DSLAM can be installed near or in your neighborhood and fed by fiber. I have a fiber fed DSLAM in my neighborhood and I subscribe to a 40 Mbit VDSL2 service. I'm less than 1000 feet from the DSLAM, as are most of the people in our neighborhood. The generic "DSL" covers a wide range of service. The fact is that many people can only get 1.5 Mbit (or even only 256 Kbit) service, so they assume that (or 5-7 Mbit, which is the next tier typically available) is the best that DSL can offer.
Perhaps you have been too quick to dismiss DSL. I assume that currently your DSLAM is not very close to the neighborhood and therefore AT&T can only offer the slower DSL speeds. Perhaps you can convince AT&T to install a fiber fed DSLAM near the border of your neighborhood. If there is fiber in the area this can be done without digging up your neighborhood. With current DSL technology (VDSL2) they could offer much higher speeds (up to 100 Mbit down, but more likely 20-40 Mbit). This can be done over your existing neighborhood phone wires as long as the distance to the DSLAM is fairly short. However, your neighborhood still might not be big enough to make a good case. At the very least you would have to get a significant number of your neighbors to commit to buy a high rate DSL service. Are there other nearby neighborhoods that could benefit? That might increase the chances of it happening. I'm not saying that there is a high probability that you can convince AT&T to do this, but you should at least consider all your options.
A lot of people are suggesting faraday cages as the answer. I'm not sure that is really as cheap as people think it would be, and I really don't care if people are using their phones during the pre previews or previews. I'm thinking that a zero tolerance policy along with a phone detector system is a better answer. My guess is that once the lights are out, an HD camera mounted in the ceiling over the audience will easily be able to pick out any light coming from the audience. With a one time simple calibration (putting a light in the end seats of each row and telling the software how many seats are in the row) the software can probably report the exact seat location, or close enough. Then after some threshold, say 30-60 seconds of light, the system could report the theater number and seat location of the light source to theater staff. An usher could then be dispatched to observe the behavior and throw the customer out, or at the very least cause the customer to quickly put their phone away when the usher walks into the theatre.
Yes, that is one of the purposes of a pretrial hearing. The judge has to determine whether or not the case should proceed to a trial or be dismissed. In order for there to be a trial, the Judge has to determine if the party bringing the lawsuit (the federal government in this case) has enough evidence to warrant a trial. The Judge also has to make a preliminary judgement about how likely the party bringing the lawsuit will win. This is needed in order to determine whether any preliminary injunctions should be issued prior to the trial (i.e. an injunction that takes place and stays in force until the trial is completed or another hearing reverses the injunction).
Amtrak doesn't go to Hawaii.
This seems to be a reasonable situation to define limits to what a law abiding person needs for personal use.
Seriously? I hope you are the last one to say it. Reading between the lines of your quote above, it would appear that you think it might be reasonable to outlaw access to this technology, solely because you can't think of a legal use for it.
As others have posted, there are certainly legal usages. I can think of others, but that is besides the point. The whole idea of limiting something because it might be used for illegal purposes is ridiculous.
Regardless of the "legal" ideas proposed, sometimes new technology leads to new ideas, i.e. as storage costs go down and capacities go up, new ways of using storage may evolve. One (possibly half-baked) idea I can think of is crowd sourced, highly redundant, "free" backup storage.
First, the summary above says that Seagate will produce a 60 Tb drive by 2016. That is not true. Seagate has said they will produce a drive with "up to" 60 Tb of capacity (30-60 TB) by the end of the decade. This is based on the theoretical limits of HAMR technology, which are projected to be in the 5-10 Tbits/sq. inch. range. Current 4TB drives are made with platters that have a density of around 650 Gbits/sq. in., so the math works (10Tb/.65Tb is approximately 15x).
The other part of the article is talking about what the maximum density is likely to be over the timeframe from now to 2016 using PMR technology and transitioning to something new like HAMR. PMR technology will top out at about 1Tbit/sq. inch, so anything over that will require something new like HAMR. that underlying article quotes 1.8 Tbit/sq. in in 2016, which may not be out of line with 5-10 Tbit/sq. in. by 2020 as a new technology like HAMR comes online.
The two articles that I am basing the above on are:
Seagate/HAMR article
IHS/ISuppli article
The digital TV standard allows for providing up to 16 days of guide data. However, the FCC only mandates that a station provide 12 hours of guide data, and many stations only provide the minimum. In many cases the station is just going with the default settings and can be convinced to change them; however, the most guide data I've seen, at least in the Denver area, is 7 days of guide data.
Huh? There are undelete tools for ext2. Undelete is impossible for ext3 since the information needed to do it is gone immediately once a file is removed, whereas it will still be present in a ext2 file system until it gets overwritten as new files are created.
If this is an April Fools joke then a lot of work went into establishing background for it. According to a CNET article back in January this company (Powercast) attended CES and mentioned Philips as a partner back then. The article referenced here was written on March 30th (although the URL has 04/01 in the name). That article is in complete agreement with the Cnet article. the Powercast website (powercastco.com) was established last October. Then again, Slashdot has a tradition of a bunch of bogus articles on 04/01, but perhaps this isn't one of them.
Yes, but this would be illegal (which might not stop them). Companies may have the right to monitor all traffic on their networks, read email, etc. They also certainly have the right to block all traffic to your bank. But for them to read your online banking transactions it would require them to forge your banks SSL certificate (i.e. they would need to create a certificate that claims it belongs to your bank, but they would sign it with the companies pre-loaded root cert). IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that would constitute fraud and would be actionable.
You still don't understand the system, and have gotten bogged down with just one feature of it. This system also can be audited in such a way that it verifies that votes in total were not switched and actually counted as intended. Being able to verify your vote with your receipt is just one part of that system. It verifies that there was not an interpretation error, which other systems DON'T give you. Your big black X is far from foolproof. If it is read by a human he can easily make a mistake and put it in the wrong pile, either deliberately or by mistake. You would never know. If it is read by a machine, then the machine can make a mistake reading it. If it is a punch card, it could have been misread. If it is a mark sense card it could have been misscanned, etc.
If the mistakes above were innocent, well that is inevitable, and you would not know. But if they were fraudulent, you still would not know. The punchscan is better because you can see the interpretation of your marks at the polling place, which locks them in, which is far better than placing a ballot into a scanner and having no idea whether or not it was scanned correctly. Then you can once again verify that your ballot was interpreted correctly and properly included in the final tally at home. If a few people have receipts which show errors, then that is tolerable, due to the fact that nothing (even your magic black X) is perfect. They most likely didn't verify the marks at the polling place in the first place. But if there is fraud there will be a LOT of people with mismatched receipts. That is what keeps things honest. Many people won't check, however, the interesting thing is that if people start declaring fraud, more people will check their receipts and more people will audit the election results.
Your issue with the switching of the interpretation AFTER the ballot has been cast has been addressed by this system also. It involves cryptography (cryptological "commitments") and auditing before and after the election. Auditing that you can actually choose to do if you want to (e.g. even if you don't trust other peoples auditing software you could actually write your own, because the whole process is completely open).
There are multiple levels of detail at the site, which you obviously have not read, but that is not surprising, given that this is Slashdot after all. There are details that you can get which I won't try to go into here, but in an attempt to simply explain the system of commitments and auditing they offer the following analogy at the website. Note that in the below quote, consider the "table where all rows are sealed" as the state of the random ballots BEFORE they have been cast. The "switch" they are talking about is the same issue that you are talking about. It might not completely satisfy you, but at least you may understand that they have addressed your issue, and if you really care to understand it in depth, the details are there if you look deep enough:
A rocket is not an effective weapon without having a bomb as a payload. If the terrorist can get the materials to make the bomb (where regulation DOES make sense), they are not going to have any problems getting the materials to make the propellant, regardless of whether or not the propellant is regulated.
Second, a rocket with a bomb as a payload is not likely to hit a desired target unless it has guidance. Rocket guidance, especially guidance to a target (rather than guidance to go straight up), even if the target is not moving, is not an easy problem to solve. Sure, it has been solved by many arms manufacturers, etc. but again, if a terrorist has the expertise and determination to build reliable guidance for a rocket, they aren't likely to be impeded by regulation of rocket propellant.
Third, it would probably be much better from the desired targets perspective if a terrorist chose to use a rocket to deliver a bomb rather than a Ryder truck, car or even a Cessna. That would severely limit the size of the bomb he could deliver, and it would SIGNIFICANTLY reduce his chances of success.
There is such a thing as reasonable government control as compared to unreasonable government control. We already have to get a waiver from the FAA to launch high power rockets. This isn't a simple process. We have to submit forms explaining where the launch will be held, what the maximum altitude will be of any rockets we will launch, what times the launch(es) will be held, etc. The FAA can then modify and/or refuse our request. Typically, since this takes a fair amount of effort, we get approval for a whole year of scheduled launches. But we still have to call the FAA to "open" the waiver (that was approved ahead of time) when the launch begins, and then call them back to "close" the waiver at the end of the launch.
There are also maximum limits that take the classification of the rocket out of the "high power" range, which require a much higher level of paperwork to get launch approval. However, this type of regulation is reasonable, since we share the airspace with aircraft and other FAA approved uses.
There is also self regulation that is recognized by the organization that writes the national fire code (NFPA -- National Fire Protection Agency) which is used by states and local governments when adopting their own fire codes. This self regulation divides "High Power" rocketry intro three different levels, where at each level a person has to demonstrate competence to build and fly rockets for that power level. No rocket motor retailer will sell a rocket motor to anyone who is not certified for the corresponding high power level by one of the two national rocketry associations (Tripoli Rocketry Assn. or the National Association of Rocketry).
There is also regulation of the commercial rocket motor manufacturers, since some of the raw ingredients are more dangerous than the resulting rocket propellant, i.e. some of the ingredients MAY legitimately be classified as explosives, but the resulting composite propellant is only fast burning, not explosive.
It wouldn't make much sense for a commercial rocket motor manufacturer to manufacture rocket motors if they could not be shipped legally. So another level of regulation is involved where the manufacturers have to have each different propellant formula tested and classified before the Department of Transportation will allow them to be shipped. Because there are different shipping regulations for low explosives vs. flammable solids, there are advantages to getting your propellant classified as a flammable solid, which many rocket propellants are classified as. The ones that are not classified as flammable solids are classified as low explosives because the manufacturer hasn't wanted to invest the money to have the propellant go through the level of testing required to prove it is a flammable solid.
The propellant in question is less dangerous than the five gallon can of gasoline many of you probably have in your garage, yet we have to store it in a container that is approved for storage of explosives, and be subject to random visits by ATFE agents, etc. That is unreasonable regulation. Any propellant that can be shown NOT to be an explosive by laboratory testing should not be regulated as an explosive.
Well another way to increase the chances of the CD being inserted would be to use a "silver" CD-R (ones that look the closest to mass produced CD-ROMs) with an inkject compatible blank white coating. Use a high quality CD inkjet printer (e.g. Primera) and print a design that is likely to tempt people. One example might be a "Best of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues" using content from the Sports Illustrated website for the design. The suggestion above to "fill" the CD so that there won't be any burn line is also a good one. Note, I don't in any way condone such actions, but just want to make people think about what could be done, so that they are a little more cautious about inserting random CD's into their computers. I've turned off autoplay for my CD drives just in case.
This article appears to be completely uninformed. Bitlocker works on a volume basis, not on an entire harddrive (unless the harddrive only has one volume). In fact, in order to get Bitlocker to work for Vista you MUST have two volumes, one being the OS volume that is encrypted with Bitlocker, and the other is the system volume which cannot be encrypted with bitlocker. Nothing prevents you from having multiple volumes and only enabling Bitlocker for some of the Windows Vista volumes. You can have other volumes/partitions with Linux or any other OS you want. The only issue is that you will not be able to read the Bitlocker protected partitions from Linux. Isn't that kind of obvious? You can still have a unencrypted FAT32 partition for sharing data between Linux and Windows, or an unencrypted NTFS partition for one way sharing between Windows and Linux (write support for NTFS on Linux is still not reliable). As far as recovery, you will not be able to do that with Linux, you will have to do that with Windows. I guess I'm not seeing a real issue here.
I can't claim to be a super DNS guru, but I do know a fair amount. It seems that some of the claims of this research are exaggerated because they don't take DNS glue records into account. Most of the name servers return the IP addresses of the next level name servers, even if they aren't in the domain being looked up (obviously they have to return the IP if the ns is in the domain being looked up). So, for a normal DNS recursive lookup you will never follow most of the graph because of the short circuits that the glue records provide. So in real life the guy who takes control of the host in Monash Australia doesn't have a chance of subverting www.rkc.lviv.ua. A little more detail about what I am talking about. If you query the root servers for the ua ccTLD name servers you will get 10 name servers returned ALONG WITH THEIR IP ADDRESSES. So even though one of the ua name servers is aunic.aunic.net, you won't be traversing the aunic.net ns part of the graph (which I think eventually leads to the Monash Australia host) because you already have the IP address of aunic.aunic.net. This continues to apply as you traverse the domains. Sometimes you won't get a glue record, so then you will recurse down from there. But as far as I can see, it is nowhere near as bad as this research tries to make it out to be.
Wow, real Paypal and Ebay emails actually exist? That's news to me!
Steve Jobs: Hey we're going to produce a New Coke that we think tastes better than the Old Coke!
The article Gene Spafford wrote was not his farewell to Usenet. He was maintaining a variety of files, e.g. A list of all groups and what each groups charter was, Usenet History, new user info, etc. He simply said that he was no longer going to maintain that stuff because he didn't feel that people really cared about it (as evidenced by people ignoring most of it). He specifically said in that article that he was going to remain involved in a few groups.