Of course Sony could block Microsoft from using the cell in the next Xbox.
And no, changing the layout would just bring on a lot of lawsuits. Furthermore, some of the IP on that chip is purportedly owned by Sony. Even with a new layout, Sony would have to permit the sale, something they are not about to do. Playstation is Sony's largest net revenue source.
As for prohibiting MS use of the Cell, Sony certainly has a lot of contracts with IBM regarding Cell. And if one of those contracts prohibited sale of the cell to other console manufacturers, then IBM would be contractually prohibited from selling those chips to Microsoft.
Far more common outright prohibitions are contracts allowing exclusive time periods. For instance, Sony having a 1 year exclusive on the newest revisions of any Cell processor. Considering how infrequently consoles are released, even that relatively minor 1-year exclusivity would forever lock Microsoft out of the best Cell processors. Exclusive time period contracts like that are very common, and there is absolutely nothing illegal about them.
But the biggest reason the next Xbox won't have Cell is because the next Xbox is scheduled to ship before the Cell will be available in quantity. Maybe the Xbox After next will have a cell, but that's easily 4 years from now.
You're making a common, but incorrect assumption. Yes, both Microsoft's and Sony's new consoles will be using IBM processors. But there is no way in hell Microsoft is getting the Cell processor for the next Xbox.
The new Xbox is rumored to be using dual-core Power PC chips. Nothing very new there and not very different from what one can buy in a Mac today.
To see why Microsoft won't be getting the cell, one only has to consider the huge level of investment Sony has made to the initiatiave. Not only has Sony been involved in the development of Cell for a number of years, they're even building their own multi-billion dollar Cell chip manufacturing plant.
Would Sony become this involved in development and production of a revolutionary processor just to let their leading console rival use it right out of the gate? I could almost guarantee you MS is contractually locked out of the Cell for a few years yet.
The final straw is that the next Xbox is probably going to be shiping before Cell chips are even in mass production. I guess you might see a Cell in Xbox 3, look for that around 2009.
I guess you forgot that Diesel engines don't have spark plugs.;)
So the dream of having a non electronic car is not very out of reach. Any diesel truck or other diesel vehicle old enough to predate ECU's could probably survive a nuclear EMP.
Re:Terrorism isn't even worth one minute of concer
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So to clarify, you are thousands of times more likely to be murdered by someone you know than by a terrorist. Small comfort that.
BTW, when husbands wives and associates murder someone, they become "common criminals". Sure random murder is rare, but common criminal murder, unfortunately, is not.
Terrorism isn't even worth one minute of concern.
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I can only assume by your comment that you disagree with the poster. You actually beleive terrorism is something we should really be concerned about...
You're thousands of times more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a foreign terrorist.
You're tens of thousands of times more likely to be killed by preventable disease than a foreign terrorist.
You are thousands of times more likely to be murdered by a common criminal than killed by foreign terrorism.
Here in the US, you're more likely to be killed by lightning, falling off your roof, the flu, tripping on the sidewalk, just about anything you can think of that regularly kills people is more dangerous that foreign terrorists.
Yet when someone points out how ridiculous it is that we US citizens spend all this money to avoid the tiny risk of terrorism, you take it personally? Sometimes the truth hurts, suck it up.
Bottom line, if you live in the US and are honestly concerned about terrorism, you're either a coward or a fool. Take your pick.
That's so awfully wrong it truly qualifies as libel. Your statements make it ridiculously clear you did not go to school with Jeri. And that you have never met, known or even talked with someone that has every spoken with her.
Perhaps, as another poster indicates, you've confused Jeri with an entirely different person. If so, you should stand up and apologize. Whatever the case, what you've written is libelous and it's on you now.
Sex change? Jeri a him??? Please.... She may play for the other team, but she's as XX-chromosome a female as you're ever going meet. Something you've quite obviously never done.
A series of fingerprints?
So people have to label their fingers 1 to 10 and use them in specific orders? Don't you think that's just a little bit silly?
Because we're assuming their fingerprints have been compromised, as such, offering no additional security. In such a case, tapping out fingers in order would be no more secure than using a simple memorized numeric password.
Biometric security is an oxymoron.
The scenario is simple and inevitable. A hacker will steal a database full of biometric data and all those passwords will be compromised, forever!
Ordinarily, when a password is compromised, the user just changes the password. But how are users going to change a compromised fingerprint? How will they change a compromised retina pattern? Or with the biometric data planned for new US Passports, how will users change a compromised face?
Another little tidbit biometric security proponents usually overlook is the ease with which many systems can be hacked. $30 worth of drugstore purchases can create false fingerprint overlays able to fool nearly every fingerprint scanner on the market.
Biometric security sounds nice in theory, but like many failed technologies, it doesn't pass the field test. The liabilities it introduces greatly outweigh any advantages.
The only way to prevent biometric identity theft victims from becoming permanent financial outcasts is never to allow biometric security to become the norm. Don't let corporations or governments use your biometric data as routine passwords.
If we had endless fusion power, we could manufacturer as much hydrogen as we liked.
You're obviously not aware that standard, internal combustion engine automobiles can be cheaply adapted to burn hydrogen instead of gasoline. Currently, a very similar modification is available. Aftermarket installers will adapt your regular car to run on natural gas for two to three thousand dollars. Those costs would plummet if cars were built to hydrogen spec by the auto manufacturers. Building a car to exclusively burn hydrogen would likely make cars even cheaper. Because all those expensive components designed specifically to clean up gasoline emissions could be left out.
No, burning hydrogen in internal combustion engines is not as efficient as hydrogen fuel cells. But with an endless supply of hydrogen, it wouldn't matter so much. Fuel cells would eventually take over the market. But direct burning would allow for a relatively easy migration to the newer technologies.
As I understand it, incandescent "black" light aren't real black lights, they're just regular lightbulbs which have been painted violet.
Which is quite different from florescent black lights. The fluorescents are the real deal and include the warned against UV.
You're absolutely right.
And if the illicit code were hidden in a boot rom or some other non-core area like the memory card, the best application disassembly of the system code might not find the exploit.
As the poster above suggested, perhaps source code wouldn't be necessary, but access to the actual machines would be.
Electronic voting fraud is more than possible, it's inevitable. Did it occur in this election? Unless a group with a lot of skill can get unlimited access to each sort of machine and acquire the source code used in the machines for this election (not the old Diebold source that was leaked), we will probably never know.
As for fraud, it wouldn't have to be a conspiracy at all. A conspiracy means a group of more than one. Yet in a case like this, a single coder with access to the voting machines, say, someone working for Diebold, could throw an entire national election.
If the code were self modifying and obfuscated it could be very difficult to detect. Especially as the Diebold code used in this election has never been publicly scrutinized and may never be. And as the system is running Windows, it will have nearly endless areas in which an illicit bit of code could be inserted.
This single hacker could write a very small bit of code with any number of tests and checks to insure it only ran during an actual election. It could also have tests to insure it only skewed votes in districts with little oversight. I've only given it a moment's thought, but I've come up with a few good tests, I'm sure a bit of thought and intimate knowledge of voting procedures could devise even better ones.
Most obviously, these systems certainly have clocks, so the illicit code could wait until November 2nd. Then it could check for very complex schedules of events that only occur during an actual election. For example, the machine being turned on for many hours, yet only being asked to record a vote once a minute or less, on average.
A simple test like that could get past most quality assurance testing efforts. Most tests would fail to activate the hidden application because QA testers usually run through a testing process much faster than actual users (voters) use the machines. The hidden application could combine those tests with a bunch of other tests.
The illicit code could be designed to only skew the voting when the votes for a certain candidate (Bush) were overwhelming. Meaning it would never skew results in the districts strongly the other way, or districts with close finishes. So the districts with most of the monitoring would never have their votes altered.
But in each strongly republican district, this sort of check would change the tally to give Bush just a slightly larger percentage of votes than were actually cast.. I suspect few people would give a moment's thought to Bush winning a strongly republican district by 65% instead of 60%.
Yet skewing results exclusively in strongly republican districts could shift state-wide election totals by a percentage point or more. A close election such as those seen in any number of states this year could be stolen by just such an effort.
The system could have further checks to insure it was never activated when being tested or monitored. It could wait to skew results until it was uploading data back to the source. That source machine could have an otherwise innocuous vendor setting that the illicit application would recognize as the trigger to skew results.
Such a system could even potentially print extra paper receipts to cover its tracks in the case of a cursory audit. But that would probably not even be necessary. Because recounts cost candidates a lot of money. And I can't imagine a democratic candidate paying for a recount in an uncontested, heavily republican district.
This is not some nightmare scenario, if it hasn't happened yet, it is bound to happen sometime. Only by returning to some sort of user fulfilled ballot can we prevent a single hacker from fixing a national election.
Sure, Palm One's Treo's are nice. But a lot of us don't want our cell phones built into our PDA's. And some of us in medical and security conscious fields can't bring cell phones into work environments. Unfortunately, it looks as though Palm One is putting all their development into Phones, at the expense of their PDA's.
I had $400 bucks put aside to buy the new top of the line Palm PDA. I'd heard the T5 was about to be out, and was ready to buy it day one. Then I read the feature list and was shocked to find it has none of the new features I was looking for.
It is a horribly disappointing device. It has no Wi-Fi, they've removed the voice recorder and vibrate alarm that was present in the T3, and they've made it out of plastic instead of the T3's metal housing. It has no camera, only a single memory slot, which means no place at all for an external memory card if a Wi-Fi card is installed.
And that new multi-media version of Palm OS? The one based on BEOS? The one that was released to developers nearly a year ago? No it isn't present either. They're using the same old Palm OS that's on every other Palm device on the market.
Sony is of course out of the Palm PDA market, but devices they released 8 months ago are still better than what was just announced by Palm. It's sad really, I don't want to buy a WinCE machine, but the only machines with big hi-res screens, built in Wi-Fi, removable batteries and featuring full multimedia support are WinCE.
Message to Palm: Get off your butts, crash develop a feature laden, high end PDA (not cell phone) and release it in the next few months. Either that, or just cede the entire high end PDA market to the WinCE machines. Or hell, just license one of the many Taiwanese designed WinCE PDA's and drop PalmOS on it.
Please, what this guy did is a minor offense, not "gross" misconduct. Your example is horrible in more ways than one. He didn't crap on a desk. All he's guilty of is something each of us do from time to time. He used work computers, after hours, to do perform some non-work related tasks.
Ever stay at work a few hours extra and use a work computer to write a letter, research something on the net, create a flyer? That's against most general policies of computer use as well, but who gets fired for that?
He deserved a warning, perhaps even a reprimand, he did Not deserve to be fired. And he certainly didn't deserve the defamatory remarks made about him to the press.
And since what his boss said about him is defamatory, it's almost certainly in Specific and Explicit contravention of existing state policies. So by your measure, there is absolutely no doubt that his boss should be fired.
Most state government employees can easily file a grievance to challenge any termination. No lawyers or representation is usually necessary, but just to be safe he might want some.
If this firing were challenged in my state, especially considering the derogatory and defamatory comments issued by this employees boss, a grievance committee would almost certainly give his job back.
I suspect this employee was given no warnings about the conduct for which he was fired. In addition, he probably wasn't violating any direct orders or specific policies. Sure, he was in violation of general policies regarding personal use of computers. But when his boss publically accused him of being crazy, he almost certainly overrode any minor policy violations by the employee.
In my state, the comments made by his boss would have violated any number of state regulations and policies regarding correct termination procedures. And considering that this employee could sue for defamation, I wouldn't be surprised to see his boss actually fired over this.
One might ask why he would want his job back? Certainly he wouldn't want to work for this jerk again. Because state governments are large, and he could immediately apply for a transfer to another agency. One where he would no longer have to work for the ignorant fool that is Tom Hayes.
You say the audio tapes aren't genuine? I guess you know better than the CIA and the rest of the world's intelligence agencies, because they say he is alive.
The audio messages he has taped since the Tora Bora bombing have been confirmed to be Bin Laden's voice. Confirmed by the CIA, the world media, other intelligence agencies, confirmed by the Bin Laden family members and captured Al Quida members....
It's provable that some of those messages were taped long after 12/01. Because they mention events that occurred as recently as the past year.
It's also been surmised that Bin Laden got into Pakistan months prior to the US bombings of Tora Bora. He was given months of warning to move, many suspect that's exactly what he did.
General Tommy Franks said recently that there was no firm intelligence that Bin Laden was ever in Tora Bora. Bomb it to hell and back, how could it kill him if he wasn't there?
Why can't he be found? The intelligence community has suggested he uses notes, passed hand to hand, and his taped recordings in order to communicate with his followers. They say he could be in Pakistani badlands or possibly Cashmere. Either location would making finding him neigh on impossible.
There's a big difference between wishful thinking and facts on the ground. Wish him dead with the rest of us, but the facts and most experts believe Osama Bin Laden is still alive.
If you and yours lived only 50 miles from the DMZ, I don't think you'd be spouting such nonsense.
As the poster above suggested, any move by the US would be met with decimation of the South Korean capital.
The North Koreans have enough artillery and incendiary weapons to make Seoul look like post WWII Dresden. Neither the US nor the South Koreans have enough weapons to destroy all those artillery positions before they've done their work. Yes, the US would eventually win. But it would take at least 1 to 3 months to fight North Korea to a standstill. Perhaps longer, as most of our forces are committed elsewhere.
You may be able to accept a few hundred thousand South Korean civilian casualties and the reduction of their capital to rubble. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that the South Koreans are not so anxious to risk that possibility. And that's just the conventional weapon threat. If the North managed to lob a single nuclear device towards the south, the casualties could run to millions.
I suggest you do your tough talking when it's the lives of your family on the line. In this case, the South Korean's have every right to drive the direction of these negotiations. It's their families only 50 miles away from the DMZ, not yours or mine.
Actually the Bush administration refused to meet with the North Koreans in Bi-Lateral talks. The North Koreans never wanted multi-lateral talks, and these talks were generally seen to be a complete failure.
Refusing to even meet 1 to 1 with the North Koreans will seem in hindsight, to be an exceedingly short sighted strategy if this happens to have been an nuclear bomb.
And to correct your "creative" history on this matter:
After the North Koreans broke their initial agreement, the Bush administration decried the Clinton plan. The Bush administration said they would never have agreed to a deal like the Clinton plan, one that provided fuel and build safe reactors for the North Koreans in return for decommissioning of their enrichment reactors.
Yet only a few months ago, it turns out the Bush administration was trying to work a very similar deal with North Korea. Continue building a safe nuke plant for them and giving them oil...
Pot, Kettle, Black
"North Korea is the reason we went into Iraq" ? Talk about spin, where do you get this stuff?
You go on with the ridiculous suggestion that "everyone believed the WMD lies"?
There were only 2 intelligence agencies that actually believed the Iraqi's had WMD, the US and the UK.. And as we now know, nearly all of that was based on the lies and forgeries by members of Chalibi's Iraqi National Congress dissidents.
In fact, MOST of the world's intelligence agencies thought Iraq had No WMD. You can exempt the US CIA, but even our own State Department was incredulous. Why? Because there was only a single source for all these intelligence lies, and all they had was verbal assurances. There were no photos, videos, or any kind of hard proof. Even newspapers try to find dual sources for their stories. The CIA never bothered.
Even Saddam's biggest enemies, the Israeli's were humming the "no WMD tune" until 9/11 of '01. Mossad had been keeping track of all industrial imports to Iraq, and told the US prior to 9/11 of '01 that no significant shipments of WMD components or duel use technology had been imported. Sure, the Israeli's tune changed after 9/11 when they saw the possibilities of getting rid of Saddam. But they knew the truth, and that truth was ignored as it conflicted with the goal of invading Iraq.
Because of this, most of the world's intelligence agencies saw right through this charade. Our CIA and the Brits were alone among the major players in believing Chalibi's crap. And I think a lot of that was due to expectations set by Bush administration. They told the CIA to find proof of WMD in Iraq, so the CIA found someone willing to say there was proof.
You should do some research for yourself. Not just parrot everything you hear from the right (or left) leaning press. Use your brain, don't be a lemming.
Just because our government (the US) hasn't announced it, doesn't mean they don't know about it.
Our current (mis)Leader has a lot of reasons for not wanting to make a big deal of this. Most of them having to do with the upcoming election.
Proof of a NK bomb will make it crystal clear that he went after the Wrong rogue nation . And that his policy of refusing to participate in bi-lateral talks with North Korea was an abject failure.
That W went after the country "without" the weapons of mass destruction (WMD), instead of the country everyone knew had WMD will not do much for his re-election hopes..
For what it's worth, the Russians used to have some satellites capable of similar blast detection. Although I've know idea if any of them are still operating. Either way, this wont stay quite long, the Chinese will leak it when their radiation detectors spike.
Or more probably, the North Koreans will release the video footage for the PR.
No, the law does Not say "GPS" has to be installed in cell phones. It simply says the phones need to be able to be tracked by location. And that this location information needs to be available to emergency services (911). And despite a lot of protestations from the tinfoil hat crowd, this law will not mandate the installation of trackers into new cell phones. Why? Because all cell phones can already be tracked today.
Building GPS into phones would be silly because GPS needs to be within line of sight to the sky. A roof over your head and the GPS tracking wouldn't work at all.
There is a huge difference between GPS and cellular phone triangulation. And neither the device described in this article nor any of the "GPS Tracking" devices I've seen actually use GPS. They use cellular phone networks to triangulate your location based on the known positions of the cell phone towers. I read about some hackers doing this in 2600 magazine about a decade ago. The reason a lot of these devices are falsely called "GPS Trackers" is simply because they report locations in GPS coordinate format instead of longitude and latitude. They actually have zero to do with GPS satellites.
Anyway, the cell phone industry is not building trackers into cell phones. They don't need to. They can triangulate your position any time your phone is turned on, right now! They've always done this to a certain extent. It's how they hand off your call to the next tower.
The only difference now is that government legislation is forcing the phone companies to upgrade their main office phone equipment. Allowing export of this existing triangulation data to emergency services. Is it big brotherish? Sure, but you're kidding yourself if you think the dark and scary government agencies haven't had access to this stuff for ages.
The good part about this is that anyone suspecting they've been tagged can check for these devices with a cheap cell phone signal detector. I guess some of these devices could be very sneaky and only turn on for a short burst every minute or so. So the safest bet would be to purchase a portable cell phone jammer. Jammers are cheap and easily available on the net from non-US sources. And they should entirely disable any of theses "GPS trackers.".
As far as I am aware, none of these illicit "GPS tracking" devices actually use GPS to do any of their tracking. These devices have no GPS receivers and don't receive any GPS signals. But I wouldn't blame shoddy reporting in the press, because the manufacturers of these devices blatantly false advertise their products.
The reason why they're not using GPS should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever used a GPS device. GPS devices need to be pointed towards the sky in order to read the GPS satellite signals. Without line of sight access to the sky, GPS devices just won't work.
And since law enforcement (or stalkers) really don't want the people they're tracking to know they're being tracked, GPS devices are of no use to them. Even the smallest GPS device would be pretty obvious once placed in a functional location on a car. The devices would have to be installed in plain view to be able to perform any tracking.
Since the real need is for devices that can be easily hidden in or under a car, they need to connect to a transmission system that is not line of sight. Each and of these I've researched actually use cellular phone networks to triangulate the target position. Sure, these devices might report that position correlated to the GPS coordinate map. They could just as easily report the location in longitude and latitude, but since they report it in GPS numbers, they call them "GPS trackers". In my mind, every advertisement calling these devices "GPS Trackers", are complete and total lies.
An added benefit to these devices exclusive use of the cellular networks would make it seem damn simple to protect oneself from them. A simple, cheap and easy to find cell phone jammer (available over the net from Canada or Israel) should make all of these trackers totally useless.
Bottom line, it's not the responsibility of US workers or the US government to improve the Indian economy and help Indian programmers get jobs. The responsibility of US elected officials is quite the opposite, it's to see that highly trained US workers don't become redundant. And that too many of these highly skilled jobs don't move offshore to third world countries.
And for those who suggest everyone should have an equal chance to get a job no matter where in the world they live, you are living in a world of make-believe on lollypop lane. One might as well say "Gee, why don't all the countries of the world won't simply open their borders and let anyone to immigrate anywhere."
The truth is, there is very little totally "free trade" in the world, especially little of it India. And those that suggest anything that's not completely "free trade" must be "protectionism" are just drinking the free-trade kool-aid.
Most of the goods and services in the world are somewhere in the middle, not totally free trade, but neither are they totally restricted. That's where US high tech jobs need to be, somewhere in the middle. We can't afford to allow all of the United States technical base to migrate overseas, yet neither can we afford to totally cut ourselves off from the world. There will have to be reasonable restrictions. Reasonable restrictions do not equal protectionism.
Also keep in mind that India is one of the most restrictive, anti-free trade countries in the entire world. The offshoring of US jobs isn't an example of free trade, it's actually an example of very unfair trade. The Indian workforce doesn't have nearly the same worker protections and regulations affecting US workers and companies. The Indian government disallows many American products from being imported and actually manufacturers many US products in India without paying the US patent holders for their products. The US pharmaceutical industry alone loses billions a year in un-paid license fees.
So before any suggest offshoring is "Free Trade" Let's see India walk the "free trade" walk by paying those license fees to US patent holders. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
I suspect they're accusing the recording and movie industry of doing (effectively) what the Kazaa light group did. Making custom version of the Kazaa client to suit their own needs. It's a clear violation of the DMCA and of Kazaa's copyrights.
The RIAA and MPAA have employed very secretive companies like Bay TSP to develop systems designed to disrupt the P2P networks. Bay TSP has apparently authored specialized version of the Kazaa client to do just this. Which of course, because of the DMCA, is an act of illegal reverse engineering. In addition, this work had the clear intention of disrupting a network, a probable criminal violation.
There are probably a number of cyber crime laws that Bay TSP regularly violates as well. Because what Bay TSP is doing for the RIAA and MPAA is nothing more than serving as a paid vigilante.
While it is the duty of the RIAA and MPAA to report instances of copyright violation to law enforcement, they have gone far beyond that. They're now actively subverting the computer systems of those they assume to be guilty. There is no trial, there isn't even any official accusation. They are their own judge, jury and executioner. This is why vigilantism is illegal in most forms, just as it is in this one.
And if this means Bay TSP and their ilk are knocked down a notch and forced to act within the law, I applaud Kazaa for this action.
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Of course Sony could block Microsoft from using the cell in the next Xbox.
And no, changing the layout would just bring on a lot of lawsuits. Furthermore, some of the IP on that chip is purportedly owned by Sony. Even with a new layout, Sony would have to permit the sale, something they are not about to do. Playstation is Sony's largest net revenue source.
As for prohibiting MS use of the Cell, Sony certainly has a lot of contracts with IBM regarding Cell. And if one of those contracts prohibited sale of the cell to other console manufacturers, then IBM would be contractually prohibited from selling those chips to Microsoft.
Far more common outright prohibitions are contracts allowing exclusive time periods. For instance, Sony having a 1 year exclusive on the newest revisions of any Cell processor. Considering how infrequently consoles are released, even that relatively minor 1-year exclusivity would forever lock Microsoft out of the best Cell processors. Exclusive time period contracts like that are very common, and there is absolutely nothing illegal about them.
But the biggest reason the next Xbox won't have Cell is because the next Xbox is scheduled to ship before the Cell will be available in quantity. Maybe the Xbox After next will have a cell, but that's easily 4 years from now.
You're making a common, but incorrect assumption. Yes, both Microsoft's and Sony's new consoles will be using IBM processors. But there is no way in hell Microsoft is getting the Cell processor for the next Xbox.
The new Xbox is rumored to be using dual-core Power PC chips. Nothing very new there and not very different from what one can buy in a Mac today.
To see why Microsoft won't be getting the cell, one only has to consider the huge level of investment Sony has made to the initiatiave. Not only has Sony been involved in the development of Cell for a number of years, they're even building their own multi-billion dollar Cell chip manufacturing plant.
Would Sony become this involved in development and production of a revolutionary processor just to let their leading console rival use it right out of the gate? I could almost guarantee you MS is contractually locked out of the Cell for a few years yet.
The final straw is that the next Xbox is probably going to be shiping before Cell chips are even in mass production. I guess you might see a Cell in Xbox 3, look for that around 2009.
I guess you forgot that Diesel engines don't have spark plugs. ;)
So the dream of having a non electronic car is not very out of reach. Any diesel truck or other diesel vehicle old enough to predate ECU's could probably survive a nuclear EMP.
So to clarify, you are thousands of times more likely to be murdered by someone you know than by a terrorist. Small comfort that.
BTW, when husbands wives and associates murder someone, they become "common criminals". Sure random murder is rare, but common criminal murder, unfortunately, is not.
I can only assume by your comment that you disagree with the poster. You actually beleive terrorism is something we should really be concerned about...
You're thousands of times more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a foreign terrorist.
You're tens of thousands of times more likely to be killed by preventable disease than a foreign terrorist.
You are thousands of times more likely to be murdered by a common criminal than killed by foreign terrorism.
Here in the US, you're more likely to be killed by lightning, falling off your roof, the flu, tripping on the sidewalk, just about anything you can think of that regularly kills people is more dangerous that foreign terrorists.
Yet when someone points out how ridiculous it is that we US citizens spend all this money to avoid the tiny risk of terrorism, you take it personally? Sometimes the truth hurts, suck it up.
Bottom line, if you live in the US and are honestly concerned about terrorism, you're either a coward or a fool. Take your pick.
That's so awfully wrong it truly qualifies as libel. Your statements make it ridiculously clear you did not go to school with Jeri. And that you have never met, known or even talked with someone that has every spoken with her.
Perhaps, as another poster indicates, you've confused Jeri with an entirely different person. If so, you should stand up and apologize. Whatever the case, what you've written is libelous and it's on you now.
Sex change? Jeri a him??? Please.... She may play for the other team, but she's as XX-chromosome a female as you're ever going meet. Something you've quite obviously never done.
A series of fingerprints?
So people have to label their fingers 1 to 10 and use them in specific orders? Don't you think that's just a little bit silly?
Because we're assuming their fingerprints have been compromised, as such, offering no additional security. In such a case, tapping out fingers in order would be no more secure than using a simple memorized numeric password.
Biometric security is an oxymoron.
The scenario is simple and inevitable. A hacker will steal a database full of biometric data and all those passwords will be compromised, forever!
Ordinarily, when a password is compromised, the user just changes the password. But how are users going to change a compromised fingerprint? How will they change a compromised retina pattern? Or with the biometric data planned for new US Passports, how will users change a compromised face?
Another little tidbit biometric security proponents usually overlook is the ease with which many systems can be hacked. $30 worth of drugstore purchases can create false fingerprint overlays able to fool nearly every fingerprint scanner on the market.
Biometric security sounds nice in theory, but like many failed technologies, it doesn't pass the field test. The liabilities it introduces greatly outweigh any advantages.
The only way to prevent biometric identity theft victims from becoming permanent financial outcasts is never to allow biometric security to become the norm. Don't let corporations or governments use your biometric data as routine passwords.
If we had endless fusion power, we could manufacturer as much hydrogen as we liked.
You're obviously not aware that standard, internal combustion engine automobiles can be cheaply adapted to burn hydrogen instead of gasoline. Currently, a very similar modification is available. Aftermarket installers will adapt your regular car to run on natural gas for two to three thousand dollars. Those costs would plummet if cars were built to hydrogen spec by the auto manufacturers. Building a car to exclusively burn hydrogen would likely make cars even cheaper. Because all those expensive components designed specifically to clean up gasoline emissions could be left out.
No, burning hydrogen in internal combustion engines is not as efficient as hydrogen fuel cells. But with an endless supply of hydrogen, it wouldn't matter so much. Fuel cells would eventually take over the market. But direct burning would allow for a relatively easy migration to the newer technologies.
As I understand it, incandescent "black" light aren't real black lights, they're just regular lightbulbs which have been painted violet.
Which is quite different from florescent black lights. The fluorescents are the real deal and include the warned against UV.
You're absolutely right.
And if the illicit code were hidden in a boot rom or some other non-core area like the memory card, the best application disassembly of the system code might not find the exploit.
As the poster above suggested, perhaps source code wouldn't be necessary, but access to the actual machines would be.
Electronic voting fraud is more than possible, it's inevitable. Did it occur in this election? Unless a group with a lot of skill can get unlimited access to each sort of machine and acquire the source code used in the machines for this election (not the old Diebold source that was leaked), we will probably never know.
As for fraud, it wouldn't have to be a conspiracy at all. A conspiracy means a group of more than one. Yet in a case like this, a single coder with access to the voting machines, say, someone working for Diebold, could throw an entire national election.
If the code were self modifying and obfuscated it could be very difficult to detect. Especially as the Diebold code used in this election has never been publicly scrutinized and may never be. And as the system is running Windows, it will have nearly endless areas in which an illicit bit of code could be inserted.
This single hacker could write a very small bit of code with any number of tests and checks to insure it only ran during an actual election. It could also have tests to insure it only skewed votes in districts with little oversight. I've only given it a moment's thought, but I've come up with a few good tests, I'm sure a bit of thought and intimate knowledge of voting procedures could devise even better ones.
Most obviously, these systems certainly have clocks, so the illicit code could wait until November 2nd. Then it could check for very complex schedules of events that only occur during an actual election. For example, the machine being turned on for many hours, yet only being asked to record a vote once a minute or less, on average.
A simple test like that could get past most quality assurance testing efforts. Most tests would fail to activate the hidden application because QA testers usually run through a testing process much faster than actual users (voters) use the machines. The hidden application could combine those tests with a bunch of other tests.
The illicit code could be designed to only skew the voting when the votes for a certain candidate (Bush) were overwhelming. Meaning it would never skew results in the districts strongly the other way, or districts with close finishes. So the districts with most of the monitoring would never have their votes altered.
But in each strongly republican district, this sort of check would change the tally to give Bush just a slightly larger percentage of votes than were actually cast.. I suspect few people would give a moment's thought to Bush winning a strongly republican district by 65% instead of 60%.
Yet skewing results exclusively in strongly republican districts could shift state-wide election totals by a percentage point or more. A close election such as those seen in any number of states this year could be stolen by just such an effort.
The system could have further checks to insure it was never activated when being tested or monitored. It could wait to skew results until it was uploading data back to the source. That source machine could have an otherwise innocuous vendor setting that the illicit application would recognize as the trigger to skew results.
Such a system could even potentially print extra paper receipts to cover its tracks in the case of a cursory audit. But that would probably not even be necessary. Because recounts cost candidates a lot of money. And I can't imagine a democratic candidate paying for a recount in an uncontested, heavily republican district.
This is not some nightmare scenario, if it hasn't happened yet, it is bound to happen sometime. Only by returning to some sort of user fulfilled ballot can we prevent a single hacker from fixing a national election.
Sure, Palm One's Treo's are nice. But a lot of us don't want our cell phones built into our PDA's. And some of us in medical and security conscious fields can't bring cell phones into work environments. Unfortunately, it looks as though Palm One is putting all their development into Phones, at the expense of their PDA's.
I had $400 bucks put aside to buy the new top of the line Palm PDA. I'd heard the T5 was about to be out, and was ready to buy it day one. Then I read the feature list and was shocked to find it has none of the new features I was looking for.
It is a horribly disappointing device. It has no Wi-Fi, they've removed the voice recorder and vibrate alarm that was present in the T3, and they've made it out of plastic instead of the T3's metal housing. It has no camera, only a single memory slot, which means no place at all for an external memory card if a Wi-Fi card is installed.
And that new multi-media version of Palm OS? The one based on BEOS? The one that was released to developers nearly a year ago? No it isn't present either. They're using the same old Palm OS that's on every other Palm device on the market.
Sony is of course out of the Palm PDA market, but devices they released 8 months ago are still better than what was just announced by Palm. It's sad really, I don't want to buy a WinCE machine, but the only machines with big hi-res screens, built in Wi-Fi, removable batteries and featuring full multimedia support are WinCE.
Message to Palm: Get off your butts, crash develop a feature laden, high end PDA (not cell phone) and release it in the next few months. Either that, or just cede the entire high end PDA market to the WinCE machines. Or hell, just license one of the many Taiwanese designed WinCE PDA's and drop PalmOS on it.
Please, what this guy did is a minor offense, not "gross" misconduct. Your example is horrible in more ways than one. He didn't crap on a desk. All he's guilty of is something each of us do from time to time. He used work computers, after hours, to do perform some non-work related tasks.
Ever stay at work a few hours extra and use a work computer to write a letter, research something on the net, create a flyer? That's against most general policies of computer use as well, but who gets fired for that?
He deserved a warning, perhaps even a reprimand, he did Not deserve to be fired. And he certainly didn't deserve the defamatory remarks made about him to the press.
And since what his boss said about him is defamatory, it's almost certainly in Specific and Explicit contravention of existing state policies. So by your measure, there is absolutely no doubt that his boss should be fired.
Most state government employees can easily file a grievance to challenge any termination. No lawyers or representation is usually necessary, but just to be safe he might want some.
If this firing were challenged in my state, especially considering the derogatory and defamatory comments issued by this employees boss, a grievance committee would almost certainly give his job back.
I suspect this employee was given no warnings about the conduct for which he was fired. In addition, he probably wasn't violating any direct orders or specific policies. Sure, he was in violation of general policies regarding personal use of computers. But when his boss publically accused him of being crazy, he almost certainly overrode any minor policy violations by the employee.
In my state, the comments made by his boss would have violated any number of state regulations and policies regarding correct termination procedures. And considering that this employee could sue for defamation, I wouldn't be surprised to see his boss actually fired over this.
One might ask why he would want his job back? Certainly he wouldn't want to work for this jerk again. Because state governments are large, and he could immediately apply for a transfer to another agency. One where he would no longer have to work for the ignorant fool that is Tom Hayes.
You say the audio tapes aren't genuine? I guess you know better than the CIA and the rest of the world's intelligence agencies, because they say he is alive.
The audio messages he has taped since the Tora Bora bombing have been confirmed to be Bin Laden's voice. Confirmed by the CIA, the world media, other intelligence agencies, confirmed by the Bin Laden family members and captured Al Quida members.
It's provable that some of those messages were taped long after 12/01. Because they mention events that occurred as recently as the past year.
It's also been surmised that Bin Laden got into Pakistan months prior to the US bombings of Tora Bora. He was given months of warning to move, many suspect that's exactly what he did.
General Tommy Franks said recently that there was no firm intelligence that Bin Laden was ever in Tora Bora. Bomb it to hell and back, how could it kill him if he wasn't there?
Why can't he be found? The intelligence community has suggested he uses notes, passed hand to hand, and his taped recordings in order to communicate with his followers. They say he could be in Pakistani badlands or possibly Cashmere. Either location would making finding him neigh on impossible.
There's a big difference between wishful thinking and facts on the ground. Wish him dead with the rest of us, but the facts and most experts believe Osama Bin Laden is still alive.
If you and yours lived only 50 miles from the DMZ, I don't think you'd be spouting such nonsense.
As the poster above suggested, any move by the US would be met with decimation of the South Korean capital.
The North Koreans have enough artillery and incendiary weapons to make Seoul look like post WWII Dresden. Neither the US nor the South Koreans have enough weapons to destroy all those artillery positions before they've done their work. Yes, the US would eventually win. But it would take at least 1 to 3 months to fight North Korea to a standstill. Perhaps longer, as most of our forces are committed elsewhere.
You may be able to accept a few hundred thousand South Korean civilian casualties and the reduction of their capital to rubble. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that the South Koreans are not so anxious to risk that possibility. And that's just the conventional weapon threat. If the North managed to lob a single nuclear device towards the south, the casualties could run to millions.
I suggest you do your tough talking when it's the lives of your family on the line. In this case, the South Korean's have every right to drive the direction of these negotiations. It's their families only 50 miles away from the DMZ, not yours or mine.
Actually the Bush administration refused to meet with the North Koreans in Bi-Lateral talks. The North Koreans never wanted multi-lateral talks, and these talks were generally seen to be a complete failure.
Refusing to even meet 1 to 1 with the North Koreans will seem in hindsight, to be an exceedingly short sighted strategy if this happens to have been an nuclear bomb.
And to correct your "creative" history on this matter:
After the North Koreans broke their initial agreement, the Bush administration decried the Clinton plan. The Bush administration said they would never have agreed to a deal like the Clinton plan, one that provided fuel and build safe reactors for the North Koreans in return for decommissioning of their enrichment reactors.
Yet only a few months ago, it turns out the Bush administration was trying to work a very similar deal with North Korea. Continue building a safe nuke plant for them and giving them oil...
Pot, Kettle, Black
"North Korea is the reason we went into Iraq" ? Talk about spin, where do you get this stuff?
You go on with the ridiculous suggestion that "everyone believed the WMD lies"?
There were only 2 intelligence agencies that actually believed the Iraqi's had WMD, the US and the UK.. And as we now know, nearly all of that was based on the lies and forgeries by members of Chalibi's Iraqi National Congress dissidents. In fact, MOST of the world's intelligence agencies thought Iraq had No WMD. You can exempt the US CIA, but even our own State Department was incredulous. Why? Because there was only a single source for all these intelligence lies, and all they had was verbal assurances. There were no photos, videos, or any kind of hard proof. Even newspapers try to find dual sources for their stories. The CIA never bothered.
Even Saddam's biggest enemies, the Israeli's were humming the "no WMD tune" until 9/11 of '01. Mossad had been keeping track of all industrial imports to Iraq, and told the US prior to 9/11 of '01 that no significant shipments of WMD components or duel use technology had been imported. Sure, the Israeli's tune changed after 9/11 when they saw the possibilities of getting rid of Saddam. But they knew the truth, and that truth was ignored as it conflicted with the goal of invading Iraq.
Because of this, most of the world's intelligence agencies saw right through this charade. Our CIA and the Brits were alone among the major players in believing Chalibi's crap. And I think a lot of that was due to expectations set by Bush administration. They told the CIA to find proof of WMD in Iraq, so the CIA found someone willing to say there was proof.
You should do some research for yourself. Not just parrot everything you hear from the right (or left) leaning press. Use your brain, don't be a lemming.
Just because our government (the US) hasn't announced it, doesn't mean they don't know about it.
Our current (mis)Leader has a lot of reasons for not wanting to make a big deal of this. Most of them having to do with the upcoming election.
Proof of a NK bomb will make it crystal clear that he went after the Wrong rogue nation . And that his policy of refusing to participate in bi-lateral talks with North Korea was an abject failure.
That W went after the country "without" the weapons of mass destruction (WMD), instead of the country everyone knew had WMD will not do much for his re-election hopes..
For what it's worth, the Russians used to have some satellites capable of similar blast detection. Although I've know idea if any of them are still operating. Either way, this wont stay quite long, the Chinese will leak it when their radiation detectors spike.
Or more probably, the North Koreans will release the video footage for the PR.
No, the law does Not say "GPS" has to be installed in cell phones. It simply says the phones need to be able to be tracked by location. And that this location information needs to be available to emergency services (911). And despite a lot of protestations from the tinfoil hat crowd, this law will not mandate the installation of trackers into new cell phones. Why? Because all cell phones can already be tracked today.
Building GPS into phones would be silly because GPS needs to be within line of sight to the sky. A roof over your head and the GPS tracking wouldn't work at all.
There is a huge difference between GPS and cellular phone triangulation. And neither the device described in this article nor any of the "GPS Tracking" devices I've seen actually use GPS. They use cellular phone networks to triangulate your location based on the known positions of the cell phone towers. I read about some hackers doing this in 2600 magazine about a decade ago. The reason a lot of these devices are falsely called "GPS Trackers" is simply because they report locations in GPS coordinate format instead of longitude and latitude. They actually have zero to do with GPS satellites.
Anyway, the cell phone industry is not building trackers into cell phones. They don't need to. They can triangulate your position any time your phone is turned on, right now! They've always done this to a certain extent. It's how they hand off your call to the next tower.
The only difference now is that government legislation is forcing the phone companies to upgrade their main office phone equipment. Allowing export of this existing triangulation data to emergency services. Is it big brotherish? Sure, but you're kidding yourself if you think the dark and scary government agencies haven't had access to this stuff for ages.
The good part about this is that anyone suspecting they've been tagged can check for these devices with a cheap cell phone signal detector. I guess some of these devices could be very sneaky and only turn on for a short burst every minute or so. So the safest bet would be to purchase a portable cell phone jammer. Jammers are cheap and easily available on the net from non-US sources. And they should entirely disable any of theses "GPS trackers.".
As far as I am aware, none of these illicit "GPS tracking" devices actually use GPS to do any of their tracking. These devices have no GPS receivers and don't receive any GPS signals. But I wouldn't blame shoddy reporting in the press, because the manufacturers of these devices blatantly false advertise their products.
The reason why they're not using GPS should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever used a GPS device. GPS devices need to be pointed towards the sky in order to read the GPS satellite signals. Without line of sight access to the sky, GPS devices just won't work.
And since law enforcement (or stalkers) really don't want the people they're tracking to know they're being tracked, GPS devices are of no use to them. Even the smallest GPS device would be pretty obvious once placed in a functional location on a car. The devices would have to be installed in plain view to be able to perform any tracking.
Since the real need is for devices that can be easily hidden in or under a car, they need to connect to a transmission system that is not line of sight. Each and of these I've researched actually use cellular phone networks to triangulate the target position. Sure, these devices might report that position correlated to the GPS coordinate map. They could just as easily report the location in longitude and latitude, but since they report it in GPS numbers, they call them "GPS trackers". In my mind, every advertisement calling these devices "GPS Trackers", are complete and total lies.
An added benefit to these devices exclusive use of the cellular networks would make it seem damn simple to protect oneself from them. A simple, cheap and easy to find cell phone jammer (available over the net from Canada or Israel) should make all of these trackers totally useless.
Bottom line, it's not the responsibility of US workers or the US government to improve the Indian economy and help Indian programmers get jobs. The responsibility of US elected officials is quite the opposite, it's to see that highly trained US workers don't become redundant. And that too many of these highly skilled jobs don't move offshore to third world countries.
And for those who suggest everyone should have an equal chance to get a job no matter where in the world they live, you are living in a world of make-believe on lollypop lane. One might as well say "Gee, why don't all the countries of the world won't simply open their borders and let anyone to immigrate anywhere."
The truth is, there is very little totally "free trade" in the world, especially little of it India. And those that suggest anything that's not completely "free trade" must be "protectionism" are just drinking the free-trade kool-aid.
Most of the goods and services in the world are somewhere in the middle, not totally free trade, but neither are they totally restricted. That's where US high tech jobs need to be, somewhere in the middle. We can't afford to allow all of the United States technical base to migrate overseas, yet neither can we afford to totally cut ourselves off from the world. There will have to be reasonable restrictions. Reasonable restrictions do not equal protectionism.
Also keep in mind that India is one of the most restrictive, anti-free trade countries in the entire world. The offshoring of US jobs isn't an example of free trade, it's actually an example of very unfair trade. The Indian workforce doesn't have nearly the same worker protections and regulations affecting US workers and companies. The Indian government disallows many American products from being imported and actually manufacturers many US products in India without paying the US patent holders for their products. The US pharmaceutical industry alone loses billions a year in un-paid license fees.
So before any suggest offshoring is "Free Trade" Let's see India walk the "free trade" walk by paying those license fees to US patent holders. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
I suspect they're accusing the recording and movie industry of doing (effectively) what the Kazaa light group did. Making custom version of the Kazaa client to suit their own needs. It's a clear violation of the DMCA and of Kazaa's copyrights.
The RIAA and MPAA have employed very secretive companies like Bay TSP to develop systems designed to disrupt the P2P networks. Bay TSP has apparently authored specialized version of the Kazaa client to do just this. Which of course, because of the DMCA, is an act of illegal reverse engineering. In addition, this work had the clear intention of disrupting a network, a probable criminal violation.
There are probably a number of cyber crime laws that Bay TSP regularly violates as well. Because what Bay TSP is doing for the RIAA and MPAA is nothing more than serving as a paid vigilante.
While it is the duty of the RIAA and MPAA to report instances of copyright violation to law enforcement, they have gone far beyond that. They're now actively subverting the computer systems of those they assume to be guilty. There is no trial, there isn't even any official accusation. They are their own judge, jury and executioner. This is why vigilantism is illegal in most forms, just as it is in this one.
And if this means Bay TSP and their ilk are knocked down a notch and forced to act within the law, I applaud Kazaa for this action.
Government inspected you...
and determined whether you were able to travel freely within your own country.
Not funny? No, it isn't.