Solid state is much more linear and low noise than any tubes could hope to be. You might think they sound "better" because you like the characteristics of the distortion they produce. But that's unrelated to what we normally consider audio quality.
You could start a flame war with that assertion. Its been raging on for 40 years on audiophile sites. Slowly over those years your assertion is becoming true. But it was far from true for many years.
Only in recent years (say 10 or 15) have the solid state amps caught up to the sound quality of tube amps. Mostly they did it by building in enough reserve capacity to mimic the massive and instant changes in volume that tubes always handled better.
Quality is mostly subjective anyway. Good marketing has a much bigger influence on your subjective impression of quality than actual linearity in response and low noise floor. We got to the point of diminishing returns on audio quality decades ago.
Well to a point is is subjective. But sitting blindfolded 10 feet away from a single violinist and two very expensive speakers powered by a very expensive tube amp back in the early 80s and NOT being able to tell the difference convinced me that "its all subjective" argument is mostly an excuse.
Switching in a transistor amp was immediately noticed. Switching in different mics was obvious. Switching in the Moster cables, - not so much.
We have backed off so far from the point of diminishing returns since then. Of course my ears have backed off a bit too over the decades. Never the less, you really can't compare the output of any modern digital sound chip driving earbuds from an mp3 to to analog sound from tubes into big speakers or even studio quality headphones and waive the difference away as "subjective".
I know that it is far too early to tell what's going to happen with the U.S. space program, but I find it quite ironic that Russia managed to rebuild their manned and civilian space program within years of the political and economic collapse of the U.S.S.R. and that the U.S.A. is depending upon them even though the American economic collapse is minor in comparison.
The difference is that the US has chosen not to pursue the Shuttle program, so that the money can be spent on never ending social programs. Its purely a political choice, not a technical one. There is nothing preventing the US fro building additional shuttles with upgraded components, other than those that see it as a waste of money.
Saturn V payload to low earth orbit was 262,000 lbs. Energia payload to LEO 220,462 lb, Shuttle payload to LEO is 53,600 lbs. Compared to Soyuz's 6,600 lbs, (even on the equator). The trend is smaller and cheaper.
There is a great deal of heavy lifting that simply has no platform these days.
Ah, but that doesn't fit in with the Hate the US crowd. does it.
It took utter defeat and destruction of virtually every city for the Germans to be temporarily broken of the national superiority complex. (It has long since re-established itself both on an individual and national level into the culture). Japan never for a moment doubted their cultural/racial superiority even while accepting defeat.
I often become somewhat embarrassed by the over the top extravaganzas of rah rah USA showboating that you see in the press or on TV. Until you see the equally nauseating programming from the Canadian Olympics, or the Chinese Olympics, or the marriage of a meaningless royal figurehead of nation long past its prime.
It happens everywhere, but only the USA gets maligned for it. Probably because so much of the world insists on carrying our TV programming and insists on reading our newspapers.
China wants the hot spot operators to keep the logs, the U.S. government wants the ISP's to do the same thing. Where is the outrage?
Read the story again. The word "logs" never appeared.
The Chinese government wants web monitoring and surveillance, which goes way past pen register data which is essentially all you get with logs.
Web monitoring and surveillance suggests deep packet inspection for content, keywords, and web sites regardless of how many anonymous proxies you pass thru on the way. None of that is available from mere logs at the hot-spot, especially when ssl is used in the browsers.
The victim here are the credit card companies themselves. The merchant still gets paid from what I understand, and the credit card company has to eat it. Hence, they are the victims, not you.
Are you Daft?
Credit card companies charge back fraudulent sales to the merchant. They eat little or nothing themselves. The merchants eat it.
The card holder is still on the hook for $50 or so. More if they delay reporting the loss. Further, the cost of goods goes up for everyone due to merchants having to eat the loss of the Color TV purchased with a fraudulent card for which they are charged-back.
The majority of credit cards stolen are not from terminal swipes, but rather on-line purchases, especially repetitive on-line purchases such as routine bill payment where the merchant needs to retain the card info for subsequent billings. (Gas, electricity, news paper, web purchases, etc).
Cartographic signing at a pos terminal is not an option. Further POS sales generally go directly to the payments processor and never even need stop at the mom-and-pop grocer.
The number is not both ID and authentication. (As I suspect you well know). In addition you need a couple other data elements. The unfortunate thing is these are all on the card itself.
But this theft did not involve the card itself. It involved data files from corporate computers. Short of a merchant specific CC numbers, (which are available from some credit card companies) there is no way to allow repetitive payments without retention of card data by the merchant.
This system evolved. It was never designed with the availability of all the protections you imagine. There are literally millions of POS terminals in any given state, and probably billions world wide. Its nice to imagine them all being updated to the latest technology over night, but even if you could bear the cost of doing so you are still left with a mix of old and new for 10 or 20 years.
People (probably you) rail against NFC which has the real potential to solve the POS problem. But nobody has wet solved the Credit Card on File problem that ever on-line-retailer has to deal with.
And the corollary is that you don't need to know everything about a tool to use the tool.
Spending any significant amount of time learning even a close approximation of everything about any given tool wastes the work product of civilization, unless you are the tool maker.
He obtained either by hacking into business computer networks and downloading credit card databases. (If you won't read the article at least read the summary).
The banks, while vulnerable enough, are the least of the problem. The corner grocery, the power company, newspaper, ebay, and any other place from which you routinely purchase are the ones with lax security.
And while its fun to rail at banks, remember that the US DOD was hacked by a bunch of kids. The problem of internet security goes much deeper than your hatred of banks.
No, nothing about the credit card system relies on the belief that the information about you is a secret.
With all due respect to your anti-credit card mentality, most of us get them for convenience, not to remain anonymous or secretive. We are not victimized by the people we do business with via our cards. We enter into those agreements with full knowledge that we expect X amount of money to be charged against our card, and we receive X amount of goods or services. We are all adult enough to realize there is and audit trail and some other uses (fully explained in the TOS) may be made of the information. We are adult enough to realize no one will do all of this for free.
I absolutely REFUSE to let you EXCUSE the theft of 675 thousand credit card data and 37 million dollars of fraud based on your silly objection to the TOS that you knew going in.
The system without the fraudsters does not victimize me. The fraudsters victimize me.
No amount of windmill tilting on your part can change that.
Alzheimers can be 20 years in your body before it causes problems. There is no effective treatment. Forcing people to take this test early would simply mean that otherwise healthy people have 20 years of their lives ruined waiting for Alzheimers before the disease itself starts to affect them.
Really its like you didn't read the article:p
There may or may not be a cure today. But there are certainly things you can do in 20 years by way of prevention and avoidance.
Key "prevent alzheimer's" into google new some day.
Even if only 1 in 10 of these things actually worked, 20 years is a long lead time. If you can stall manifestation off a few years who knows what might come from research over that period.
Ten years means he will probably enjoy the fruits of his labor at 35, when he retires with some of that 36 million (or the other multi-millions the feds never found) that he squirreled away off shore.
The whole premise is stupid anyway. I've worked with plenty of scientists in national labs that turn out production grade, maintainable code; and programmers who didn't. The core issue is getting people who write code for reuse by others to follow guidelines, regardless of title or profession.
Because you can point to a few (very few) exceptions does not make the story untrue in the vast majority of cases.
Scientist code is usually a giant JUST-SO story, sufficient to derive the results they need for the task at hand. They either don't have, or avoid putting in data that will crash the program so limit checking is not necessary. Crashes are fine if they do nothing more than leave a trail of breadcrumbs sufficient to find the offending line of code. Output need not be in final form, and any number of repetitive hand manipulations of either the input or the output are fine as long as the researcher does not need to spend more time writing any more elaborate code.
This is perfectly fine. The cabinet maker makes jigs. They are designed for their own shop and no one else has exactly the same saw and exactly the same gluing clamps. When the cabinet maker sells his shop, these jigs become useless. Nobody else knows how to use them.
The scientist who takes the time to do a full fledged, fully documented, maintainable, fail-soft package for analysis of data that is unique to their project and their apparatus is probably not doing very much science, and probably not doing their intended job. That budgets force them into this situation is not unusual.
It happens every day in industry, academics, and research. To hand waive it away by saying you know someone who delivers the full package merely calls into question your own understanding of the meaning of a complete, fully documented, maintainable, transferable, and robust software package.
True, but where? Figuring out what is stored where in a block of binary storage than you can't even dump to disk for fear of altering it seems like a huge guessing game.
Running as root on read only memory is not as dangerous as it might seem.
Smart people don't run as root because they know that they make mistakes, and might accidentally rm -rf / some day. They also know that some process might replace a system binary.
Both problems are solved with read only memory for the OS.
If the computer is left on the RAM can still leave traces behind.
I don't see how this is any different than any other live CD though.
There are standard system calls available to over right memory in any platform this would run on. Since it doesn't use the hard drive, there launcher just needs to be able to make one pass thru the virtual drive and over write everything.
But it would be far simpler to use encryption on the virtual hard drive. That way, no clean up is necessary.
But your "current machine" is just a host, where you use memory, and nic, and that'ts about it.
The chances that someone can "get to your machine" are extremely small, because it presumably has its own firewall, and Flash, while present, gets to write in temporary memory which gets purged when the browser shuts down.
The developers can't be totally ignorant of the fact about flash, and several modern browsers sandbox flash already. With read only storage flash becomes pretty well contained.
You have to assume a massive amount of juvenile thinking on the part of the Air Force to believe they would be totally unaware of that possibility.
The libraries buy their books, and let many individuals read them serially. They do not let millions of individuals read them simultaneously. See the difference?
Go read the Settlement Agreement. These authors are dead. They left no heirs. They have no estate. There is no known rights holder on the face of planet earth for these works. There is no explicit provision in US (or any country's) law for a copyright to survive the life span of all rights holders.
Who the hell gave you the right to object anyway? Are you a rights holder?
Slashdot Mirror
Solid state is much more linear and low noise than any tubes could hope to be. You might think they sound "better" because you like the characteristics of the distortion they produce. But that's unrelated to what we normally consider audio quality.
You could start a flame war with that assertion. Its been raging on for 40 years on audiophile sites.
Slowly over those years your assertion is becoming true. But it was far from true for many years.
Only in recent years (say 10 or 15) have the solid state amps caught up to the sound quality of tube amps. Mostly they did it by building in enough reserve capacity to mimic the massive and instant changes in volume that tubes always handled better.
Quality is mostly subjective anyway. Good marketing has a much bigger influence on your subjective impression of quality than actual linearity in response and low noise floor. We got to the point of diminishing returns on audio quality decades ago.
Well to a point is is subjective.
But sitting blindfolded 10 feet away from a single violinist and two very expensive speakers powered by a very expensive tube amp back in the early 80s and NOT being able to tell the difference convinced me that "its all subjective" argument is mostly an excuse.
Switching in a transistor amp was immediately noticed.
Switching in different mics was obvious.
Switching in the Moster cables, - not so much.
We have backed off so far from the point of diminishing returns since then. Of course my ears have backed off a bit too over the decades.
Never the less, you really can't compare the output of any modern digital sound chip driving earbuds from an mp3 to to analog sound
from tubes into big speakers or even studio quality headphones and waive the difference away as "subjective".
Plagiarizer and home work are not the same thing.
I know that it is far too early to tell what's going to happen with the U.S. space program, but I find it quite ironic that Russia managed to rebuild their manned and civilian space program within years of the political and economic collapse of the U.S.S.R. and that the U.S.A. is depending upon them even though the American economic collapse is minor in comparison.
The difference is that the US has chosen not to pursue the Shuttle program, so that the money can be spent on never ending social programs.
Its purely a political choice, not a technical one. There is nothing preventing the US fro building additional shuttles with upgraded components, other than those that see it as a waste of money.
Saturn V payload to low earth orbit was 262,000 lbs. Energia payload to LEO 220,462 lb, Shuttle payload to LEO is 53,600 lbs. Compared to Soyuz's 6,600 lbs, (even on the equator). The trend is smaller and cheaper.
There is a great deal of heavy lifting that simply has no platform these days.
Ah, but that doesn't fit in with the Hate the US crowd. does it.
It took utter defeat and destruction of virtually every city for the Germans to be temporarily broken of the national superiority complex. (It has long since re-established itself both on an individual and national level into the culture). Japan never for a moment doubted their cultural/racial superiority even while accepting defeat.
I often become somewhat embarrassed by the over the top extravaganzas of rah rah USA showboating that you see in the press or on TV. Until you see the equally nauseating programming from the Canadian Olympics, or the Chinese Olympics, or the marriage of a meaningless royal figurehead of nation long past its prime.
It happens everywhere, but only the USA gets maligned for it. Probably because so much of the world insists on carrying our TV programming and insists on reading our newspapers.
: American Exceptionalism
I really despise this term. every time I hear it I think "Radical Nationalism"
And that is exactly why the term is used, so some how call you a Nationalsozialist without you realizing they have done so.
China wants the hot spot operators to keep the logs, the U.S. government wants the ISP's to do the same thing. Where is the outrage?
Read the story again. The word "logs" never appeared.
The Chinese government wants web monitoring and surveillance, which goes way past pen register data which is essentially all you get with logs.
Web monitoring and surveillance suggests deep packet inspection for content, keywords, and web sites regardless of how many anonymous proxies you pass thru on the way. None of that is available from mere logs at the hot-spot, especially when ssl is used in the browsers.
I'm sure it will be some white collar low security prison campus like Lompoc, where non-violent offenders go.
The victim here are the credit card companies themselves. The merchant still gets paid from what I understand, and the credit card company has to eat it. Hence, they are the victims, not you.
Are you Daft?
Credit card companies charge back fraudulent sales to the merchant. They eat little or nothing themselves.
The merchants eat it.
The card holder is still on the hook for $50 or so. More if they delay reporting the loss.
Further, the cost of goods goes up for everyone due to merchants having to eat the loss of the Color TV purchased with a fraudulent card for which they are charged-back.
The majority of credit cards stolen are not from terminal swipes, but rather on-line purchases, especially repetitive on-line purchases
such as routine bill payment where the merchant needs to retain the card info for subsequent billings. (Gas, electricity, news paper, web purchases, etc).
Cartographic signing at a pos terminal is not an option. Further POS sales generally go directly to the payments processor and never even need stop at the mom-and-pop grocer.
The number is not both ID and authentication. (As I suspect you well know).
In addition you need a couple other data elements.
The unfortunate thing is these are all on the card itself.
But this theft did not involve the card itself. It involved data files from corporate computers.
Short of a merchant specific CC numbers, (which are available from some credit card companies) there is no way
to allow repetitive payments without retention of card data by the merchant.
This system evolved. It was never designed with the availability of all the protections you imagine.
There are literally millions of POS terminals in any given state, and probably billions world wide. Its nice to imagine them all being updated to the latest technology over night, but even if you could bear the cost of doing so you are still left with a mix of old and new for 10 or 20 years.
People (probably you) rail against NFC which has the real potential to solve the POS problem.
But nobody has wet solved the Credit Card on File problem that ever on-line-retailer has to deal with.
Well said.
And the corollary is that you don't need to know everything about a tool to use the tool.
Spending any significant amount of time learning even a close approximation of everything about any given tool wastes the work product of civilization, unless you are the tool maker.
Where did you get the banks involved in this?
He obtained either by hacking into business computer networks and downloading credit card databases. (If you won't read the article at least read the summary).
The banks, while vulnerable enough, are the least of the problem. The corner grocery, the power company, newspaper, ebay, and any other place from which you routinely purchase are the ones with lax security.
And while its fun to rail at banks, remember that the US DOD was hacked by a bunch of kids. The problem of internet security goes much deeper than your hatred of banks.
No, nothing about the credit card system relies on the belief that the information about you is a secret.
With all due respect to your anti-credit card mentality, most of us get them for convenience, not to remain anonymous or secretive.
We are not victimized by the people we do business with via our cards. We enter into those agreements with full knowledge
that we expect X amount of money to be charged against our card, and we receive X amount of goods or services. We are all adult enough
to realize there is and audit trail and some other uses (fully explained in the TOS) may be made of the information. We are adult enough to realize
no one will do all of this for free.
I absolutely REFUSE to let you EXCUSE the theft of 675 thousand credit card data and 37 million dollars of fraud based on your silly
objection to the TOS that you knew going in.
The system without the fraudsters does not victimize me.
The fraudsters victimize me.
No amount of windmill tilting on your part can change that.
Alzheimers can be 20 years in your body before it causes problems. There is no effective treatment. Forcing people to take this test early would simply mean that otherwise healthy people have 20 years of their lives ruined waiting for Alzheimers before the disease itself starts to affect them.
Really its like you didn't read the article :p
There may or may not be a cure today. But there are certainly things you can do in 20 years by way of prevention and avoidance.
Key "prevent alzheimer's" into google new some day.
Even if only 1 in 10 of these things actually worked, 20 years is a long lead time. If you can stall manifestation off a few years who knows what might come from research over that period.
Ten years means he will probably enjoy the fruits of his labor at 35, when he retires with some of that 36 million (or the other multi-millions the feds never found) that he squirreled away off shore.
The whole premise is stupid anyway. I've worked with plenty of scientists in national labs that turn out production grade, maintainable code; and programmers who didn't. The core issue is getting people who write code for reuse by others to follow guidelines, regardless of title or profession.
Because you can point to a few (very few) exceptions does not make the story untrue in the vast majority of cases.
Scientist code is usually a giant JUST-SO story, sufficient to derive the results they need for the task at hand.
They either don't have, or avoid putting in data that will crash the program so limit checking is not necessary.
Crashes are fine if they do nothing more than leave a trail of breadcrumbs sufficient to find the offending line of code.
Output need not be in final form, and any number of repetitive hand manipulations of either the input or the output are fine as long as the researcher does not need to spend more time writing any more elaborate code.
This is perfectly fine. The cabinet maker makes jigs. They are designed for their own shop and no one else has exactly the same saw and exactly the same gluing clamps. When the cabinet maker sells his shop, these jigs become useless. Nobody else knows how to use them.
The scientist who takes the time to do a full fledged, fully documented, maintainable, fail-soft package for analysis of data that is unique to their project and their apparatus is probably not doing very much science, and probably not doing their intended job. That budgets force them into this situation is not unusual.
It happens every day in industry, academics, and research. To hand waive it away by saying you know someone who delivers the full package merely calls into question your own understanding of the meaning of a complete, fully documented, maintainable, transferable, and robust software package.
True, but where?
Figuring out what is stored where in a block of binary storage than you can't even dump to disk for fear of altering it seems like a huge guessing game.
Why bother?
Just use encryption on the Virtual disk you allocate out of the host machine's memory.
Running as root on read only memory is not as dangerous as it might seem.
Smart people don't run as root because they know that they make mistakes, and might accidentally rm -rf / some day.
They also know that some process might replace a system binary.
Both problems are solved with read only memory for the OS.
If the computer is left on the RAM can still leave traces behind.
I don't see how this is any different than any other live CD though.
There are standard system calls available to over right memory in any platform this would run on.
Since it doesn't use the hard drive, there launcher just needs to be able to make one pass thru
the virtual drive and over write everything.
But it would be far simpler to use encryption on the virtual hard drive. That way, no clean up
is necessary.
But your "current machine" is just a host, where you use memory, and nic, and that'ts about it.
The chances that someone can "get to your machine" are extremely small, because it presumably has its own firewall, and Flash, while present, gets to write in temporary memory which gets purged when the browser shuts down.
The developers can't be totally ignorant of the fact about flash, and several modern
browsers sandbox flash already. With read only storage flash becomes pretty well contained.
You have to assume a massive amount of juvenile thinking on the part of the Air Force to believe
they would be totally unaware of that possibility.
Too bad you don't run China then...
Oh for Pete sake!
Have you read nothing on this thread?
The libraries buy their books, and let many individuals read them serially. They do not let millions of individuals read them simultaneously. See the difference?
Go read the Settlement Agreement. These authors are dead. They left no heirs. They have no estate. There is no known rights holder on the face of planet earth for these works. There is no explicit provision in US (or any country's) law for a copyright to survive the life span of all rights holders.
Who the hell gave you the right to object anyway? Are you a rights holder?