I don't think EFM is necessary to recover overwritten bits from a hard drive. Custom firmware might be enough. Read the raw bits (with no ECC decoding) say 1000 times and do some statistical analysis of the variation of the bits. (Or less than 1000 times, but in different environmental conditions -- temperature, orientation, vibration, whatever.) My understanding is that current hard drives lean very heavily on ECC because the bit densities are so high that no one bit is ever very reliable. The variability of a bit can probably give some information about its history -- how many times it's been rewritten and what values it's had in the past.
Does such custom firmware already exist? Could anyone other than hard drive engineers write it? I don't know.
Even if firmware couldn't do it, custom controller circuitry might have a better shot.
Firmware can easily be modified without opening or disassembling the drive at all; circuitry can be swapped back and forth without damaging the drive or leaving evidence that it's been tampered with.
For all we know, the hard drive makers might have laboratories already set up to do this kind of recovery, or might sell kits for big $$$ with big NDAs. I think multiple random overwrites are still warranted if you really don't want the data recovered by anyone, ever.
From an engine, power is what matters, not torque. Power is translated through the transmission into torque at the axel, and through the wheel/tire to force at the road, which is what makes the car accelerate. X power is X power, whether it's made by Y torque at Z rpm, or Y*2 torque at Z/2 rpm. Big torque at low rpm doesn't do squat to make the vehicle accelerate.
All that said, I would agree that big power doesn't shorten your commute or get you laid, it just wastes fuel faster. 50 hp is probably plenty for most of what most cars are used for, and hardly anyone ever needs more than 100 hp. It's high time we all learned to live with "weaker" engines.
In college I was very good at the video arcade game "Star Wars". The only time I ever played it stoned I was very, very stoned and got by far my best score ever. The score and my initials remained atop the list as evidence that it wasn't all some drug-induced dream. There were also non-stoned witnesses. Was it coincidence? Or some effect of the drug? My limited anecdotal experience is that marijuana may have some video game performance enhancing benefits. (Level 128 BTW. After 20 years I've forgotten the score, unfortunately.)
Back when the airplanes were designed it was considered more efficient to share facilities (bathroom, kitchen, etc) between the cabin and the cockpit. Weight is a big issue for airplanes.
"Right"? "Wrong"? Says who? When I run out of storage space, I get rid of things. With good organization and plenty of room, having lots of junk is not a problem. Think of it as caching -- obsolete objects retained for potential future use because otherwise empty space would be wasted. Naturally even plentiful space is limited and some objects' storage costs exceed their potential value, so those things go away immediately.
My point was that I don't save stuff just to annoy you, or because I fear my own demise. It's purely a matter of efficiency. In fact, I'm curious how you made that connection between the fear of death and the "annoying" tendency to save; they seem completely separate and unrelated. Once I'm dead all my possessions can go into the incinerator / grave / dump / butchershop / laboratory / dime-store / whatever along with my body, for all I care.
I think people are attacking this subject from entirely the wrong angle. I don't object so much to the cops using high technology (ooo, scary!) to track me, as I object to them messing with my car. They should need a warrant to mess with my car. Any private citizen who does that is signing up for an ass-kicking.
Vincent: What's more chickenshit than fucking with a man's automobile? I mean, don't fuck with another man's vehicle. Lance: You don't do it. Vincent: It's just against the rules.
Totally off-topic, but I keep hearing this phrase and it always bothers me. We don't elect a president to "run the country". That would be a dictator's job. The president's job is to "run" (with the assistance of the congress) one section of one of the USA's many governments (the federal one). The vast majority of the power to "run" things is in private, corporate, and local-government hands.
I know, replying to myself here, but I did do what's forbidden around here.
Can you cite the rule that forbids replying to yourself? People used to make this odd claim about Usenet too, but it was never in any of the netiquette guides AFAIK. In a medium where you can't edit your posted comments, replying to yourself is a reasonable way of adding an occasional addendum or correction. I would even go so far as to suggest that in a medium where you can edit your comments, it's more polite to post an in-thread addendum instead (i.e. a reply), especially if someone else has already posted their own reply in the meantime.
For rational people, "flat" or "round" Earth isn't a matter of belief or even truth. It's a matter of what geometric model works best to describe travel on or near Earth, best accounts for the movements of celestial objects, and so on.
For example, some flat-Earthers in TFA propose a geometric model of Earth as a disc with one "pole" at the center and the other at the circumfrence. Lines of latitude are circles, larger in the south than in the north. However, extra complexity must be added to this model to account for wildly varying rates of travel by the same vehicles around these lines; a simpler and more effective model uses a round Earth with better predictive value. This is not to say that the round Earth model is more "true" or worthy of "belief" -- just that it gives better results. Science doesn't care what is true, and reality doesn't care what you believe. Only results matter.
Authoritative servers are not vulnerable, only recursive servers are. The recursive server provided by your ISP only queries authoritative servers, unless it's set to forward queries to some other recursive server, in which case that's the server that the tool would be testing. ISP servers very rarely (if ever) do this though. Your router on the other hand probably does do it, by forwarding queries from your LAN to the ISP's server. The last server in the recursive query forwarding chain is the one that matters.
Spoken like someone who knows nothing about patents or software development. Have you ever tried to implement an algorithm based on your reading of a patent? It's pretty much impossible. If someone else wrote a program that uses the same algorithm, they either made it up independently or copied from the same place the "inventor" did.
I don't know about other kinds of patents, but software patents fail miserably as a public library of technology. They're written by lawyers, for the purpose of employing lawyers to read and litigate them.
Does a little bit of weight make that much difference? As an experiment I once held my arm out straight in front of me to see how tiring it would be, but gave up due to boredom after 30 minutes, not even slightly tired. I'll give it a try tonight with a 1 kg weight.
It's incredibly hard to believe that taking a punch in the face without falling over is easier than holding your hands up in front of you for an hour. Isn't throwing punches the most tiring part of boxing?
The 9/11 attacks represented, at best, a one week emergency. Air travel was completely shut down, the stock markets were closed, and quite frankly, everybody was a bit scared - was it the precursor to something bigger?
"Everybody was a bit scared"? You bet I was scared -- of the US government! Permanent martial law, here we come.
As far as hijackings and terrorists were concerned, I was ready to get on a plane at noon that day. The odds of getting hit even that morning were still pretty low, and I take bigger risks than that without freaking out. If my hypothetical plane had been hijacked, well, getting the chance to kick the crap out of a few members of that gang would have just made my day, plane crash or no. Those assholes made me a lot more angry than afraid.
So who exactly is this "everybody" who was/is so tremblingly afraid of terrorists?
IMHO, a reasonable response on 2001-09-11 would have been to get all the planes out of the air, check for weapons, then back to business as usual, maybe with instructions to the airport guards to pay more attention to the metal detectors. Follow that up with a big investigation and huge manhunt for whoever was involved in the crime (i.e. bin Laden et al). The 9/11 thing was no national emergency. It was just a particularly flashy mass-murder planned and carried out by a gang of well-funded psychopaths. That was obvious to everyone with at least half a brain right from the start.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, some of us would regard it that way. Those of us who are mammals, anyway.
So we shouldn't deny that it ever happened, even if it never happened? Lashley never said the brain was 90% unused. Oh noes, I'm a denier!
I don't think EFM is necessary to recover overwritten bits from a hard drive. Custom firmware might be enough. Read the raw bits (with no ECC decoding) say 1000 times and do some statistical analysis of the variation of the bits. (Or less than 1000 times, but in different environmental conditions -- temperature, orientation, vibration, whatever.) My understanding is that current hard drives lean very heavily on ECC because the bit densities are so high that no one bit is ever very reliable. The variability of a bit can probably give some information about its history -- how many times it's been rewritten and what values it's had in the past.
Does such custom firmware already exist? Could anyone other than hard drive engineers write it? I don't know.
Even if firmware couldn't do it, custom controller circuitry might have a better shot.
Firmware can easily be modified without opening or disassembling the drive at all; circuitry can be swapped back and forth without damaging the drive or leaving evidence that it's been tampered with.
For all we know, the hard drive makers might have laboratories already set up to do this kind of recovery, or might sell kits for big $$$ with big NDAs. I think multiple random overwrites are still warranted if you really don't want the data recovered by anyone, ever.
From an engine, power is what matters, not torque. Power is translated through the transmission into torque at the axel, and through the wheel/tire to force at the road, which is what makes the car accelerate. X power is X power, whether it's made by Y torque at Z rpm, or Y*2 torque at Z/2 rpm. Big torque at low rpm doesn't do squat to make the vehicle accelerate.
All that said, I would agree that big power doesn't shorten your commute or get you laid, it just wastes fuel faster. 50 hp is probably plenty for most of what most cars are used for, and hardly anyone ever needs more than 100 hp. It's high time we all learned to live with "weaker" engines.
That's an excellent point that's very easy to overlook. Where the money goes may be more important than how much.
In college I was very good at the video arcade game "Star Wars". The only time I ever played it stoned I was very, very stoned and got by far my best score ever. The score and my initials remained atop the list as evidence that it wasn't all some drug-induced dream. There were also non-stoned witnesses. Was it coincidence? Or some effect of the drug? My limited anecdotal experience is that marijuana may have some video game performance enhancing benefits. (Level 128 BTW. After 20 years I've forgotten the score, unfortunately.)
Back when the airplanes were designed it was considered more efficient to share facilities (bathroom, kitchen, etc) between the cabin and the cockpit. Weight is a big issue for airplanes.
Qwest can build a 100-story skyscraper in my front yard if it'll get me FTTP sometime before the heat death of the universe.
You do realize, of course, that 88.3% of all statistics are made up?
Amps are the wrong kind of unit. Joules might work.
Maybe by giving the defense lots of good ideas and research to work from.
However great the IBM lawyers are, they're not as good at reviewing code as thousands of independent programmers.
"Right"? "Wrong"? Says who? When I run out of storage space, I get rid of things. With good organization and plenty of room, having lots of junk is not a problem. Think of it as caching -- obsolete objects retained for potential future use because otherwise empty space would be wasted. Naturally even plentiful space is limited and some objects' storage costs exceed their potential value, so those things go away immediately.
My point was that I don't save stuff just to annoy you, or because I fear my own demise. It's purely a matter of efficiency. In fact, I'm curious how you made that connection between the fear of death and the "annoying" tendency to save; they seem completely separate and unrelated. Once I'm dead all my possessions can go into the incinerator / grave / dump / butchershop / laboratory / dime-store / whatever along with my body, for all I care.
I think people are attacking this subject from entirely the wrong angle. I don't object so much to the cops using high technology (ooo, scary!) to track me, as I object to them messing with my car. They should need a warrant to mess with my car. Any private citizen who does that is signing up for an ass-kicking.
Allow me to cite precedent:
Wow, that's definitely not why I save things. It just easier to throw something out later than to retrieve it from the landfill.
Totally off-topic, but I keep hearing this phrase and it always bothers me. We don't elect a president to "run the country". That would be a dictator's job. The president's job is to "run" (with the assistance of the congress) one section of one of the USA's many governments (the federal one). The vast majority of the power to "run" things is in private, corporate, and local-government hands.
Can you cite the rule that forbids replying to yourself? People used to make this odd claim about Usenet too, but it was never in any of the netiquette guides AFAIK. In a medium where you can't edit your posted comments, replying to yourself is a reasonable way of adding an occasional addendum or correction. I would even go so far as to suggest that in a medium where you can edit your comments, it's more polite to post an in-thread addendum instead (i.e. a reply), especially if someone else has already posted their own reply in the meantime.
For rational people, "flat" or "round" Earth isn't a matter of belief or even truth. It's a matter of what geometric model works best to describe travel on or near Earth, best accounts for the movements of celestial objects, and so on.
For example, some flat-Earthers in TFA propose a geometric model of Earth as a disc with one "pole" at the center and the other at the circumfrence. Lines of latitude are circles, larger in the south than in the north. However, extra complexity must be added to this model to account for wildly varying rates of travel by the same vehicles around these lines; a simpler and more effective model uses a round Earth with better predictive value. This is not to say that the round Earth model is more "true" or worthy of "belief" -- just that it gives better results. Science doesn't care what is true, and reality doesn't care what you believe. Only results matter.
E.g. "The Hole Man" by Larry Niven, (c) 1973.
Authoritative servers are not vulnerable, only recursive servers are. The recursive server provided by your ISP only queries authoritative servers, unless it's set to forward queries to some other recursive server, in which case that's the server that the tool would be testing. ISP servers very rarely (if ever) do this though. Your router on the other hand probably does do it, by forwarding queries from your LAN to the ISP's server. The last server in the recursive query forwarding chain is the one that matters.
Spoken like someone who knows nothing about patents or software development. Have you ever tried to implement an algorithm based on your reading of a patent? It's pretty much impossible. If someone else wrote a program that uses the same algorithm, they either made it up independently or copied from the same place the "inventor" did.
I don't know about other kinds of patents, but software patents fail miserably as a public library of technology. They're written by lawyers, for the purpose of employing lawyers to read and litigate them.
Heh, they're pretty damn light. My BMI at the time was about 18. (I'm up to 21 now and well into middle age so it might not be so easy any more.)
We can't afford it. Real prisons are expensive, and we have an awful lot of convicts.
FYI, that's not a proper name, it's an acronym for "Berkeley Internet Name Daemon", and should properly be written as "BIND".
Does a little bit of weight make that much difference? As an experiment I once held my arm out straight in front of me to see how tiring it would be, but gave up due to boredom after 30 minutes, not even slightly tired. I'll give it a try tonight with a 1 kg weight.
It's incredibly hard to believe that taking a punch in the face without falling over is easier than holding your hands up in front of you for an hour. Isn't throwing punches the most tiring part of boxing?
"Everybody was a bit scared"? You bet I was scared -- of the US government! Permanent martial law, here we come.
As far as hijackings and terrorists were concerned, I was ready to get on a plane at noon that day. The odds of getting hit even that morning were still pretty low, and I take bigger risks than that without freaking out. If my hypothetical plane had been hijacked, well, getting the chance to kick the crap out of a few members of that gang would have just made my day, plane crash or no. Those assholes made me a lot more angry than afraid.
So who exactly is this "everybody" who was/is so tremblingly afraid of terrorists?
IMHO, a reasonable response on 2001-09-11 would have been to get all the planes out of the air, check for weapons, then back to business as usual, maybe with instructions to the airport guards to pay more attention to the metal detectors. Follow that up with a big investigation and huge manhunt for whoever was involved in the crime (i.e. bin Laden et al). The 9/11 thing was no national emergency. It was just a particularly flashy mass-murder planned and carried out by a gang of well-funded psychopaths. That was obvious to everyone with at least half a brain right from the start.