Okay, you're right; resuming from power savings modes works perfectly in Vista.
Now, run a test for me. Attach a secondary monitor, and place it to the LEFT of your laptop. Configure everything to work well. Reboot, and notice everything is still good. Open a few applications, move them to the secondary monitor, then close them. Something mainstream, like Outlook, will do.
Now, suspend your laptop. Undock it, and walk to a conference room. Wake it up. Note that many applications now open on the (non-existent) second monitor. Including mainstream applications from major software companies, as an example Outlook.
Suspend it. Take it back in and dock it. Wake it. Notice that Vista now believes that your secondary monitor is on the RIGHT of your laptop.
Heaven help you if you connected your laptop to the conference room projector when you were there.
Yep, Vista works exceptionally well for all common usage scenarios with suspend/hibernate.
Tucson has been working on this for years to protect various local observatories. It's also the home to the international dark sky association: http://www.darksky.org/mc/page.do
They have a city ordinance making it illegal to have a light shining upwards - all lights (street lights, security lights, porch lights, etc) have to have a reflector. It's apparently pretty easy to police - bare bulbs are highly visible from the police helicopter.
Seems to be kinda silly to spend your lighting budget trying to illuminate the universe anyway.
According to http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/large-cell/bcap3000.asp a commercial supercap is roughly 5.5 WH/Kg. So, sufficient Supercap to power this flashlight at your calculated 270 Lumen output is going to weigh roughly a kilogram, and take roughly a liter of volume.
OK, so this proposal basically eliminates the entire rationale behind the Domain Name System. There will no longer be any kind of rational separation of sites. Frankly, I think it's inevitable. It became obvious to me when I attempted to register a personal domain based on my family name, and discovered that the Charles Schwab brokerage had registered Schwab.(com, org, net, edu, gov, etc).
So, my answer is to dump the entire philosophy. Eliminate the.com,.org TLDs, and all the thousands that they are proposing here. Allow thousands of registrars, each of which can register any "tld" that they wish for a nominal fee as long as they can handle the domain lookups for that TLD. Upgrade the root nameservers to support millions of requests for millions of tlds, and just throw it open.
Few complain that I can register "DonkeySodomy.com" now; why should it be different if I register ".DonkeySodomy"? Why should it cost $1800 to register a tld when a domain costs $6? Don't vet the TLDs, just let people register them.
Use the rules and challenge process in place today - if you think you have a stronger claim on a name than someone else, enter into arbitration to decide who has the rights.
For non-trademarked TLD's, run an auction for the initial disposition - auctioning off ".sex" or ".slashdot" should generate plenty of money to administer this program.
I still won't be able to get ".schwab", but I think that's OK. John McDonald down the hall probably can't expect to get the domain he'd want either, nor Ida Brown Moffet expect to get a domain based on her initials./frank
Because I have a secondary monitor to the left of my Microsoft Windows Vista laptop. Why is that an issue?
- Because after undocking, Microsoft Outlook insists on opening on that (non-existent) monitor.
- Because after re-docking, Microsoft Windows insists on logically placing my external monitor to the RIGHT of my Laptop, and swapping the screens that the start bar and sidebar show up on.
- Because after undocking, carrying my laptop to the conference room and plugging it into the projector, all kinds of weird things happen.
I think you're spot-on. As MySpace/Facebook have proven, not using the service doesn't mean that a whole lot of personal information about you can't be revealed by your "friends" who are members.
Imagine that Google (or some other nefarious agency) starts infecting, err, "adding logging" to WiFi access points. I'm sure it'll be innocuous - protects the children, necessity for the war on terror, etc. But, just like your device can collect all the WiFi access point info and report it, getting back a location; all the WiFi access points can collect the MAC addresses of everyone within range and report them.
No confidential information is being reported; much like the argument about public cameras ("You're on a public street, you have no right to privacy"), the fact that your device is transmitting it's MAC address eliminates your ability to whine about people collecting that information and using it, even if "using it" means tracking your every move every second of the day.
This isn't a new threat; every cell phone provider in the country probably does it for every cell phone within range (not just their subscribers)./frank
What an idiot.
"HDs have platter capacity limits that rarely go up".
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png has a nice picture of PC Hard disk sizes. 10 MB in 1984, 1 GB in 1995, 10 GB in 2000, 100 GB in 2004, and 1 TB in 2008. Other than the 1984 drive, they are all 3.5" form factor drives with from 1 to 5 platters ( The 1 TB drives are 4 platters, IIRC, and the 1991 vintage ST-225 was 2). Platter capacity has most certainly gone up, and nearly at the same rate as CPU performance.
Expect them to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But what will I do with a 10 TB drive?
Could a terrorist organization exploit this information to be able to get someone on a plane who wouldn't have been able to before? A fake passport/drivers license in the name of a trusted passenger who knows all the personal information he should. In any kind of rational security process, each and every one of the CLEAR passengers would now be on the TSA Watchlist, subject to extra scrutiny.
Talk about blowback! Talk about (Alanis Morissette be damned) irony! An intrusive system designed to help trusted passengers bypass an intrusive search for terrorists, allows those same terrorists to bypass the search.
1. Evaluation Teachers have as much impact on the learning of their students as almost anything else, and we have never figured out how to evaluate and reward the great ones and fire the poor ones. Until we can do this, everything else is doomed.
2. Honesty. The hardest thing in science is to teach the method, and not the dogma. A career scientist gets excited about a new discovery that upends everything they have believed true up to this point; it's an intellectually challenging and exciting time. The scientific method triumphs when a General Relativity or a Quantum Mechanics can completely change the basic beliefs of science in less than a generation. An honest recognition that much of (at least higher physical classes) is "According to current theory..." or "This is what we currently believe to be the truth" rather than "this is the way it is, has always been, and will always be..." would dispel much of the mystery and fear around the sciences. Physicists are human beings, struggling with frailties, foibles, superstitions, and much smaller brains than we believe to understand the workings of the universe.
3. Openness. The global warming debate is an example of the worst of science. Is the earth warming? Sure is. Why is it warming? Answering this question has gotten so wrapped around the axle of political and religious pseudo-science that it's not clear when honest scholarship can begin again. Hands with hidden agendas have silenced scientists, have falsified basic data, and warped basic theory to try to get it to match observations, on both sides of the fence. When a scientist is afraid to stand and say "That's bullshit, and here's why", we have momentarily lost the method that has lead to the extraordinary scientific knowledge that we have today.
1. I want to be able to install an application without having to give it complete and unfettered access to every single aspect of my machine. As a long list of "reputable" companies (Sony, Intuit, Apple, every game engine, etc) have proven, I can't trust any of them. They all want to install rootkits, spyware, adware, whatever they can when I choose to install their app. I can't find out beforehand what they're going to install, I can't easily find out afterwards what they did install.
Give me a way to sandbox every single app. I don't care if that means that I can't install an app that hooks the keyboard, or the filesystem. I want my machine to continue to run!
2. Implement a "Snitch" mode for performance. Tell me why my computer takes 3 minutes to boot, and name names. Tell me why my computer takes 2 minutes to shut down, and name names.
These are OS-level improvements (not eye candy implemented in the windows manager) that would make my life easier./frank
OK, so a standard solar cell is 15% efficient. So this one is (.15*40) = 600% efficient? And their previous results were 1/4 of that, or 150% efficient?
Dayyyumm!
Wouldn't it exhibit simply harmonic motion, overshooting the center of the earth and rising to near the surface on the far side, then falling again and overshooting?
A botnet succeeds in DDOS because it's able to leverage the bandwidth of 10's or 100's of ISPs to overwhelm the resources of the 1 ISP or server that a site is hosted on.
For a US Military operation, you wouldn't bring the headache of maintaining 1,000,000 crappy old PCs stuffed in unused closets to bear on the problem. You'd build big machines, and you'd locate them on major backbone networks. When it came time to bring a little DDOS to bear on the enemy, you would have your big machine fire packets. It could spoof IP addresses as it wished; it could use yours, and you wouldn't even know it!
No one other than the technicians on the backbone could tell the difference between this and a hacker's botnet. But it would at the same time be much larger scale, cost more, and be theoretically more efficient - all positives in the military contracting arena.
Let's see... It's a military necessity to have a botnet...so it will become my patriotic duty to allow their malware to reside on my machine. AV will be modified to not report it's existence. I will have no control or knowledge of what it's doing, or what it's reporting.
Then, those in charge of the program will complain that the citizen's computers are "unreliable" - they get turned off, are filled with competing malware, etc. So they will let a contract to Grumman or Lockheed for 10 million computers, to be scattered across the country/world as dedicated US Militarty Botnet computers, at, say, 10,000 dollars apiece. Due to specification changes, additional missions, etc., cost ovveruns will push the cost to 100,000 dollars apiece. The Congress will get involved, and will reduce the number of computers to buy to 10,000, will add additional missions and capabilities, and the per-unit cost will climb to $1,000,000. Five years later, the program will be cancelled.
And, still, the government malware will reside on my machine.
And so everyone who ever bought a SECOND cup of coffee at McDonalds knew the temperature that it got served at. It's not a hidden hazard; as you say, it was a corporate policy. And, IMHO, everyone who ever bought a SECOND cup was taking responsibility for handling that cup cautiously.
Was this the lady's first cup of McDonalds coffee? If so, she has a case. If not, I'm sorry for her accident./frank
I always wondered if you could do more precise gaze detection by looking at a person's retina. Could you detect where they were looking on the screen precisely enough to eliminate the need for a mouse cursor (say, within one character space)? How large is the area of sharpest vision?/frank
Drivers can't expect to become invisible to police radar traps anytime soon. "When an object is moving at such close range," he admits, "even the best shield paint doesn't do any good."
And if you are already logged into your machine when they arrest you? Seems to me that full disk encryption is only useful when the computer is already turned OFF when they break down the door.
I'm sitting here talking on a circa 1980 AT&T DTMF phone with the good old style handset. I can guarantee you that my voice is coming back through the earpiece.
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Okay, you're right; resuming from power savings modes works perfectly in Vista.
Now, run a test for me. Attach a secondary monitor, and place it to the LEFT of your laptop. Configure everything to work well. Reboot, and notice everything is still good. Open a few applications, move them to the secondary monitor, then close them. Something mainstream, like Outlook, will do.
Now, suspend your laptop. Undock it, and walk to a conference room. Wake it up. Note that many applications now open on the (non-existent) second monitor. Including mainstream applications from major software companies, as an example Outlook.
Suspend it. Take it back in and dock it. Wake it. Notice that Vista now believes that your secondary monitor is on the RIGHT of your laptop.
Heaven help you if you connected your laptop to the conference room projector when you were there.
Yep, Vista works exceptionally well for all common usage scenarios with suspend/hibernate.
That's why I'm interested in boot times. /frank
Tucson has been working on this for years to protect various local observatories. It's also the home to the international dark sky association: http://www.darksky.org/mc/page.do
They have a city ordinance making it illegal to have a light shining upwards - all lights (street lights, security lights, porch lights, etc) have to have a reflector. It's apparently pretty easy to police - bare bulbs are highly visible from the police helicopter.
Seems to be kinda silly to spend your lighting budget trying to illuminate the universe anyway.
According to
http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/large-cell/bcap3000.asp
a commercial supercap is roughly 5.5 WH/Kg. So, sufficient Supercap to power this flashlight at your calculated 270 Lumen output is going to weigh roughly a kilogram, and take roughly a liter of volume.
That's a really big flashlight.
OK, so this proposal basically eliminates the entire rationale behind the Domain Name System. There will no longer be any kind of rational separation of sites. Frankly, I think it's inevitable. It became obvious to me when I attempted to register a personal domain based on my family name, and discovered that the Charles Schwab brokerage had registered Schwab.(com, org, net, edu, gov, etc).
So, my answer is to dump the entire philosophy. Eliminate the .com, .org TLDs, and all the thousands that they are proposing here. Allow thousands of registrars, each of which can register any "tld" that they wish for a nominal fee as long as they can handle the domain lookups for that TLD. Upgrade the root nameservers to support millions of requests for millions of tlds, and just throw it open.
Few complain that I can register "DonkeySodomy.com" now; why should it be different if I register ".DonkeySodomy"? Why should it cost $1800 to register a tld when a domain costs $6? Don't vet the TLDs, just let people register them.
Use the rules and challenge process in place today - if you think you have a stronger claim on a name than someone else, enter into arbitration to decide who has the rights.
For non-trademarked TLD's, run an auction for the initial disposition - auctioning off ".sex" or ".slashdot" should generate plenty of money to administer this program.
I still won't be able to get ".schwab", but I think that's OK. John McDonald down the hall probably can't expect to get the domain he'd want either, nor Ida Brown Moffet expect to get a domain based on her initials. /frank
Because I have a secondary monitor to the left of my Microsoft Windows Vista laptop. Why is that an issue?
- Because after undocking, Microsoft Outlook insists on opening on that (non-existent) monitor.
- Because after re-docking, Microsoft Windows insists on logically placing my external monitor to the RIGHT of my Laptop, and swapping the screens that the start bar and sidebar show up on.
- Because after undocking, carrying my laptop to the conference room and plugging it into the projector, all kinds of weird things happen.
That's why I shutdown daily.
I think you're spot-on. As MySpace/Facebook have proven, not using the service doesn't mean that a whole lot of personal information about you can't be revealed by your "friends" who are members.
Imagine that Google (or some other nefarious agency) starts infecting, err, "adding logging" to WiFi access points. I'm sure it'll be innocuous - protects the children, necessity for the war on terror, etc. But, just like your device can collect all the WiFi access point info and report it, getting back a location; all the WiFi access points can collect the MAC addresses of everyone within range and report them.
No confidential information is being reported; much like the argument about public cameras ("You're on a public street, you have no right to privacy"), the fact that your device is transmitting it's MAC address eliminates your ability to whine about people collecting that information and using it, even if "using it" means tracking your every move every second of the day.
This isn't a new threat; every cell phone provider in the country probably does it for every cell phone within range (not just their subscribers). /frank
You have a very narrow definition of "security holes".
What an idiot. "HDs have platter capacity limits that rarely go up".
/frank
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png has a nice picture of PC Hard disk sizes. 10 MB in 1984, 1 GB in 1995, 10 GB in 2000, 100 GB in 2004, and 1 TB in 2008. Other than the 1984 drive, they are all 3.5" form factor drives with from 1 to 5 platters ( The 1 TB drives are 4 platters, IIRC, and the 1991 vintage ST-225 was 2). Platter capacity has most certainly gone up, and nearly at the same rate as CPU performance.
Expect them to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But what will I do with a 10 TB drive?
I guess my question is....
Could a terrorist organization exploit this information to be able to get someone on a plane who wouldn't have been able to before? A fake passport/drivers license in the name of a trusted passenger who knows all the personal information he should. In any kind of rational security process, each and every one of the CLEAR passengers would now be on the TSA Watchlist, subject to extra scrutiny.
Talk about blowback! Talk about (Alanis Morissette be damned) irony! An intrusive system designed to help trusted passengers bypass an intrusive search for terrorists, allows those same terrorists to bypass the search.
1. Evaluation
Teachers have as much impact on the learning of their students as almost anything else, and we have never figured out how to evaluate and reward the great ones and fire the poor ones. Until we can do this, everything else is doomed.
2. Honesty.
The hardest thing in science is to teach the method, and not the dogma. A career scientist gets excited about a new discovery that upends everything they have believed true up to this point; it's an intellectually challenging and exciting time. The scientific method triumphs when a General Relativity or a Quantum Mechanics can completely change the basic beliefs of science in less than a generation. An honest recognition that much of (at least higher physical classes) is "According to current theory..." or "This is what we currently believe to be the truth" rather than "this is the way it is, has always been, and will always be..." would dispel much of the mystery and fear around the sciences. Physicists are human beings, struggling with frailties, foibles, superstitions, and much smaller brains than we believe to understand the workings of the universe.
3. Openness. The global warming debate is an example of the worst of science. Is the earth warming? Sure is.
Why is it warming? Answering this question has gotten so wrapped around the axle of political and religious pseudo-science that it's not clear when honest scholarship can begin again. Hands with hidden agendas have silenced scientists, have falsified basic data, and warped basic theory to try to get it to match observations, on both sides of the fence. When a scientist is afraid to stand and say "That's bullshit, and here's why", we have momentarily lost the method that has lead to the extraordinary scientific knowledge that we have today.
1. I want to be able to install an application without having to give it complete and unfettered access to every single aspect of my machine. As a long list of "reputable" companies (Sony, Intuit, Apple, every game engine, etc) have proven, I can't trust any of them. They all want to install rootkits, spyware, adware, whatever they can when I choose to install their app. I can't find out beforehand what they're going to install, I can't easily find out afterwards what they did install.
Give me a way to sandbox every single app. I don't care if that means that I can't install an app that hooks the keyboard, or the filesystem. I want my machine to continue to run!
2. Implement a "Snitch" mode for performance. Tell me why my computer takes 3 minutes to boot, and name names. Tell me why my computer takes 2 minutes to shut down, and name names.
These are OS-level improvements (not eye candy implemented in the windows manager) that would make my life easier. /frank
OK, so a standard solar cell is 15% efficient. So this one is (.15*40) = 600% efficient? And their previous results were 1/4 of that, or 150% efficient? Dayyyumm!
http://www.kitestailstoys.com/product.php?productid=19793 'nuff said.
Well, if you phrase it that way....
Wouldn't it exhibit simply harmonic motion, overshooting the center of the earth and rising to near the surface on the far side, then falling again and overshooting?
The new, improved, Swiss Cheese Earth! /frank
A botnet succeeds in DDOS because it's able to leverage the bandwidth of 10's or 100's of ISPs to overwhelm the resources of the 1 ISP or server that a site is hosted on.
For a US Military operation, you wouldn't bring the headache of maintaining 1,000,000 crappy old PCs stuffed in unused closets to bear on the problem. You'd build big machines, and you'd locate them on major backbone networks. When it came time to bring a little DDOS to bear on the enemy, you would have your big machine fire packets. It could spoof IP addresses as it wished; it could use yours, and you wouldn't even know it!
No one other than the technicians on the backbone could tell the difference between this and a hacker's botnet. But it would at the same time be much larger scale, cost more, and be theoretically more efficient - all positives in the military contracting arena.
Let's see...
It's a military necessity to have a botnet...so it will become my patriotic duty to allow their malware to reside on my machine. AV will be modified to not report it's existence. I will have no control or knowledge of what it's doing, or what it's reporting.
Then, those in charge of the program will complain that the citizen's computers are "unreliable" - they get turned off, are filled with competing malware, etc. So they will let a contract to Grumman or Lockheed for 10 million computers, to be scattered across the country/world as dedicated US Militarty Botnet computers, at, say, 10,000 dollars apiece. Due to specification changes, additional missions, etc., cost ovveruns will push the cost to 100,000 dollars apiece. The Congress will get involved, and will reduce the number of computers to buy to 10,000, will add additional missions and capabilities, and the per-unit cost will climb to $1,000,000. Five years later, the program will be cancelled.
And, still, the government malware will reside on my machine.
And so everyone who ever bought a SECOND cup of coffee at McDonalds knew the temperature that it got served at. It's not a hidden hazard; as you say, it was a corporate policy. And, IMHO, everyone who ever bought a SECOND cup was taking responsibility for handling that cup cautiously. Was this the lady's first cup of McDonalds coffee? If so, she has a case. If not, I'm sorry for her accident. /frank
I always wondered if you could do more precise gaze detection by looking at a person's retina. Could you detect where they were looking on the screen precisely enough to eliminate the need for a mouse cursor (say, within one character space)? How large is the area of sharpest vision? /frank
Modern thermonuclear weapons get more than 50% of their yield from fission, not fusion. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Teller.html
And if you are already logged into your machine when they arrest you? Seems to me that full disk encryption is only useful when the computer is already turned OFF when they break down the door.
I look forward to your first successful implementation.
I'm sitting here talking on a circa 1980 AT&T DTMF phone with the good old style handset. I can guarantee you that my voice is coming back through the earpiece.
We have too much of the wrong isotope of Plutonium. See
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=479826&cid=22679162
They're about 20,000 km up, and orbit about twice per day, according to http://www.gmat.unsw.edu.au/snap/gps/gps_survey/chap2/222sats.htm