Good point. Multiple combinations of bases may yield the same amino acid, yet you want to be recording not only what acid gets created but also which of the possible gene sequences that creates it was used, in (the quite possible) case something else hinges off the same data. Data compression (reuse of the same stored information for more than one purpose) is IIRC not unheard of.
And to think I've just proposed using lossy compression for DNA:-)
I'm doing undergrad biochem and we've done this math several times, as has been mentioned here in other threads, 1GB is the ballpark amount of space a single UNCOMPRESSED human genome should take up.
On one hand, this is a marginal underestimate because there are more than 4 DNA nucleobases (quite rare, but they exist and need to be recorded if you're profiling a genome). However, the genome should be quite happily compressable (think bz2 or some specialized lossless form of compression) due to MANY repeating sequences and the fact that most exons (that you'd normally use 6 bits to describe) can be described using 5 bits by pinpointing their product on an amino-acid table (numbering 20 members most of the time), or even 4 bits if you narrow that table from the 20-most-common to the 15-most-common and use the 16th position to describe less-common sequences using more bits, just to name a few reasons. Maybe a bit of added data they put in describes things we've learned about the data which wasn't physically present in the original DNA such as "here ends intron, here starts exon, here be boundary" etc.
In short, it should be highly compressible and fit in way under 2 DVD's, so for the life of me I can't figure out what they plugged onto two DVDs. Software to decipher it? Gene database correlating what's in your personal genome to what the genes are known to do? Free BonziBuddy extra content? Bonus "behind the scenes" material?
Harm? And I thought all the "Be scared of Hitler Clones" has subsided.
Dude, if we mastered electricity, nuclear technology, chemistry, biological warfare and millions of 1+ ton hunks of metal whizzing around at 100km/h all over the the planet's surface, and made humanity benefit from all the above, do you REALLY think personalized medicine as a consequence of knowing your personal genome would do more bad than good to warrant "being afraid of the technology"?
Gimme a break. 1978 called, they want their hitler DNA back.
The "least permissions" approach has lots of merit when you're talking about a single-application server (say, apache, bind, what have you), but the sweet spot for a homeuser-targeted box (also, where the vast majority of your users are not techs, Windows is not exactly gentoo), the sweet spot of just how restricted or not restricted you want the defaults to be may lie elsewhere than for your apache servers.
Back to the point at hand, nobody (in this thread at least) has any illusions about UAC making a machine utterly bulletproof, and whoever believes that is an idiot. The fact that I give my users non-root accounts on my unix servers doesn't make the unix servers bulletproof. users can still exploit software if I don't keep it up to date. That's just as right for Debian as it is for Vista, MacOS and even, woe and behold, OpenBSD. A person who does not understand that is more fanboy than professional. Nevertheless, if I were to give all my users root accounts instead, I think there isn't a single UNIX admin out there that wouldn't agree with me that this would have been a quick shortcut to royally fucking up my network. Same for Vista. UAC is a CRITICAL improvement for any box that doesn't have security policies otherwise applied to it (domain creds etc). It's not a silver bullet or any such rubbish. But it greatly raises the amount of effort one must put into getting into your system, and it greatly reduces the amount of damage done once most malware starts targeting your userspace rather than c:\windows.
In short - UberSuperKillerSecuritySilverbullet2000 - NO. Great improvement over anything in the everyone-is-root ballpark - absolutely.
/Specific/ overflow bugs are a VERY POOR basis for an OS choice decision that will accompany you for the next so-and-so years. Why? because they will be fixed next week.
I'm not saying vista in unexploitable, or that particular exploits do not at all contribute to an OS's security rating. I'm saying a car with a seatbelt is better than a car without a seatbelt, regardless of which has what easily-pathchable (hence, minor) flaws.
I don't think there is *ANY* debate as to whether/WITH/ user-level security model (vista) is better than/WITHOUT(aka work-as-root)/ model (xp).
Do a few expected exploits (yes, expected, every commercial OS with a marketing clock ticking that ever came out had a whole bunch of them, including most if not all commercial variants of UNIX I ever heard of) and some bugs in the system warrant sticking with a vastly inferior security model? Is an imperfect seatbelt worse than no seatbelt at all? IMHO *no*. MS will fix their shit (as has happened before), exploitability will stabilize in an asymptotic to zero manner (as has happened before), and it will end up a hell more secure than XP due to a better model (again, for home/nondomain use).
Also keep in mind UAC is not a silver bullet, much like the fact that having user accounts on my linux boxes does not make them uncompromisable.
By proving you can root one of my boxes you will NOT have proved that user-accounts (rather than giving everyone root) is useless. The user-based security model is a PROVEN AND VERY EFFECTIVE means to statistically REDUCE the chances of sustaining damage from a random threat, not a magic silver bullet some fanboy idiots try to make of it to discredit it.
By the same coin, by infecting a Vista box with/A/ virus, you will not have proved that it is "just as susceptible to viruses as XP". All you will have proved is that it is just as susceptible to A SPECIFIC virus, an that on a particular patch level (next week's patch level will likely obsolete this virus).
Throw the most frequent 5000 in-the-wild viruses at two boxes running vista and XP, it's quite obvious/STATISTICALLY FEWER/ will have affected Vista. Move 4 years into the future, where new malware will have evolved, and even if we assume that the number of malware threats in a UAC world matches what it was during everyone-is-root era (which I highly doubt), the vast majority will have the LIMITED capability of only being able to infect your userspace, not the entire OS.
Less and less-potent malware, while not being a silver bullet (of which there aren't any anywhere outside people's imagination), is definitely a very big move in a very right direction, and for non-domain use I find it totally as obvious to choose between them as it is between telnet and ssh, regardless of which has one exploit more than the other (assuming of course neither of them has zero exploits, just to make the analogy stick)
For whoever doesn't see this screaming at him, here's a breakdown: In home-user-land, credendials were an option nobody used until Vista. NO amount of buffer-overflow susceptibility can EVEN COME CLOSE to outweighing the security implications of having UAC - a restricted-user+sudo working model rather than XP's work-as-root one. Vista and XP for the home user are incomparable and are in totally different leagues, vista winning by very, very, very long shot.
In corp-land, everybody (who gives a damn about his security) has been using non-administrator-accounts on his workstations (at varying and ever-improving degrees of annoyance) since NT4. For all intents and purposes, XP with domain policies had all the functional benefits of UAC, as did 2000 and NT4. So the battle over which is more secure needs to be resolved on much finer points, such as susceptibility to buffer overflows, code maturity etc. This is what the report in TFA addressed and they may be quite correct on this.
Pushing titles saying "XP less secure than Vista!" without VERY THOROUGHLY POINTING OUT WHEN AND WHERE THIS APPLIES (*WHERE THERE BE NT DOMAINS AND RESTRICTED USER POLICIES*) is a cheap, inflammatory and sensationalist way of getting attention. Most people who have no clue reading this headline will get the VERY WRONG message, become misinformed, spread on more hyperbole about Vista "being less secure than XP" to people who know even less, and the overall effect will be doing WAY more bad than good in the name of either stupidity or anti-MS fanboyism.
Thinking of how long it would take to release the aircraft, you'd probably be right. However, this would not improve your throughput, as the data still needs to be offloaded from the containers to wherever it is going. You're missing my original point about the difference between delivering the MEDIA with the data (a big pile of optical disks, or a container with hard-drive racks) to delivering the DATA itself (which includes reading it off the media and putting it on the destination). The container approach may have some merit if you have a bandwidth problem between where the 747 lands and where the big mother of a storage data center is, but it's debatable if that was part of the thought exercise.
Bottom line, limiting factors that will not play a bottleneck role: * Individual drive throughput (either on-disk read/write or bus (SATA/FC/etc) * Space
Limiting factors that WILL play a role:
* Master uplink(s!) from the entire array to someplace meaningful (think multiple 10GbE links) * WEIGHT of harddrives. (Volumewise, you won't be able to fill the 747 anyway, so containers are pro'lly a great idea) * $$$:-)
That's a highly misleading figure (whatever figure you had in mind).
When you add the amount of time, money, kit and effort that'd go into either burning that many optical disks or filling that many harddrives, then connecting them on the other end and reading it out makes it less attractive than fiber optics.
On the other hand, if the 747 is crammed full of ultra-high-capacity hard-drives (say, the new Hitachi 1TB) in high-density racks that do not need unloading from the aircraft (it lands, it plugs into a power/multiple-10GbE-grid, offloads the data to a local ground facility, then goes out for the next run), you get something that'd possibly be competitive with fiber, as well as a possible business model avenue.
You would, of course, need someone to be willing pay the rough equivalent of.. say.. 500 economy airline tickets (shooting from the hip here, I tried compounding business/first-class costs).. to get that through. That's a lot of cash. Then again, at 1TB/drive, it's a LOT of data.
Aero? Dude, my laptop (Thinkpad X60) has got an i945 integrated chipset that [a] costs next-to-nothing for any motherboard maker to integrate (and many of which do) [b] unlike my gaming rig which houses an 8800GTS, the i945 integrated chipset does not pull 250 Watts when idle. It pulls something much closer to zero. [c] Due to [b], my X60 does not make me pay the cost of a high-end GPU every year through the electricity bill. [d] Due to [b], my X60 can stay afloat on battery for 8 hours. (More like 6-7 running aero, but that's a different story). [e] It runs aero just fine.
AFAIK the only "modern" chipset that is actively being put on modern motherboard designs that will absolutely not pull aero is the Via Unichrome family found on all Via-CPU-based mini-itx motherboards, and that's an understandable compromise as they define their niche market by keeping the entire machine's envelope in the 20-30Watt range (If they put in a chipset that eats, say, 10-20 Watts more, they stray outside their safe niche and a intel-core-based system will eat them for lunch).
Microsoft did not invent sudo. They are the absolute last of the pack to implement it.
It's been optional to use forever. Restricted environments (where users still need to work, save files, etc) have been running in NT domains configured to disallow system modification forever and a decade. Vista's been in beta forever, and you need to have been on the friggin moon to not have known well in advance UAC is coming.
If your software writes outside your profile without a very good reason to do so, either update it, or smack the vendor on the head, because it is absolutely his fault. Just because it was ok to do something a certain way in the past doesn't make it ok to do it that way today. UAC/sudo is a simple Darwinian evolutionary step, a trait that gives advantage in a specific environment (The Internet a-la 2007) and is thus selected for, appearing in the next generation of the microsoft OS.
Blaming microsoft for it is lame (Unless you're blaming them for not having done it when Windows 2000 came out, that's ok.). They didn't do any foul play this time. Some developers having issues coping with the "new" reality? Market forces will take care of them soon enough, nothing to get concerned about.
>> Microsoft should've deprecated UAC heuristics and put a time limit on them. They did.
NT domains running environments where users are not trusted and do not have permissions to modify the system have been around for over a decade. That was also roughly when the windows equivalent of/usr and/home appeared. Microsoft software has been properly using these for all this time, setting proper example. Vista was in beta forever. Any software vendor that was caught by surprise by the instatement of UAC should take his head out of his ass and figure out what kept him in his cozy cave for the last couple of years.
Well, that hinges on how you or I define "Far" (as in "Far" better).
I never installed google desktop and do not plan to. I realize you can find 3rd-party addons that improve UI tremendously.
Comparing the core UI of XP vs the core UI of Vista (with addons you can make either sing, dance and make coffee, that's not new), the vista one takes a big step ahead with the start-menu search. Gadgets also improve UI, and if you want to comparing running as non-admin on XP vs running as non-admin on vista (via UAC), the UI integration of the latter makes it digestible, whereas on XP it was not. And no, Aero is not a UI improvement. It's just a cool toy.
3.11->95 was revolution, not evolution. It was a completely new UI, period. And yes, it was far better. XP->Vista is evolution, but it's significant evolution, and it still qualifies to be far better than XP IMHO. Sure, if one wants to disable all the new stuff and work it just like XP, he won't perceive any of that better bit. But that sorta beats the whole purpose of the comparison, does it not? And so does disqualifying anything except a complete replacement of the entire UI from attaining "Far Better" status as you have (possibly, given I haven't misunderstood you) suggested. That's silly.
To be held up, a space elevator needs a FABRIC with a tensile strength of about 65GPa. To build it, you'd want a safety factor of about two, thereby a tensile strength of about 120-130GPa.
I do not know the specs of the tubes from TFA, however
Very short INDIVIDUAL single-walled carbon nanotubes have been created (in a lab, in small quantities, using processes that may be prohibitively expensive) with measured individual fiber strength of about 60GPA. "Very long" ones were (previously) created at about 1cm with substantially lower tensile strength (circa 4GPA if memory serves me right). The last several years were spent by industry leaders in this field ramping up production of CNI by several orders of magnitude, whereas bulk availability made prices of CNI go down orders of magnitude.
Existing processes of weaving tubes into a fabric involve loading the fabric with ~5+% of CNI. The last Elevator2010 competition saw competition tethers in the 4GPA ballpark (using fibers in the 30-60GPa ballpark I'm guessing), none of which could beat the commercially-available "house tether".
This is all layman talk of an enthusiast, not a professional. I'm a coder/syadmin gone biochem, not an engineer. If someone a bit less clueless than me can correct and/or bring this up to date (some of what I recited here I've acquired ~3 years ago, things would have progressed since then), I think we'd all be the wiser.
It's also a stretch to go from a very big barrel of hydrogen to GEO, and yet it's been proven to get payloads there.
There's nothing particularly revolutionary about any of the physics underlying the SE. Once a point (that is not moving further and further away) of tensile strength (in polymer fabric you can weave, not in the individual material you build it from) is reached, you build it. Period.
If you can make fibers that behave more like thread and less like sand pebbles, you can load more into the fabric, and the strength of the available fabric (per given weight) rises a notch higher.
At some point, it'll reach the elevator-capable point.
The start menu search feature (that text box where the cursor is immediately placed the moment you open the start menu) which searches through the start menu and program files (on my gentoo box I call this katapult) is actually a VERY VERY big improvement on intuitive, kb-driven UI. Not to be confused with the regular file search which is an entirely different thing).
If you want to be stuck on something you've learned to use a decade ago and resist any positive UI progress, go right ahead. I'd rather my choice of UI be based on what makes work more efficiently, not inability to grok something new.
Religious anti-ms-fanaticism aside, I think MS deserve kudos for plugging in this feature (even if they didn't exactly "invent" it).
>> I never said it was run by one, just influenced by one. As it is influenced by every other lobby out there. Arab lobby, RIAA lobby, Consumer Foods of America lobby. What makes the Israeli one special? Why claim the Pro-Israeli is more influencial than [a] the opposing lobby and [b] America's own private interests?
Besides, If anything, I'd have guessed the Jewish lobby would be the decisively more potent one, maybe due to the myth I'm not certain whether to believe or not (but which popular culture may claim is true) about many prominent people with money and power being Jewish.
On the other hand of this conversation comes an enlightening truth, at least in so far as the numbers analyzed by the statistician bloke who wrote Freakonomics tell us. And that's that throwing money at a political figure contributes damn little to his chances of being elected. Period. The public either likes him or not, and from a certain point, once sufficient exposure has been attained (by money), further money has damn little to do with his chances of landing in office. Oh, and all the candidates from the last few decades had way more money than this cutoff red line (where insufficient funds do indeed influence anything) dictates.
So do take the whole lobbyist talk with a grain of salt. Pro-Israeli (or pro-anything-else) lobby can be as powerful as you like and be throwing money at decision makers from here till eternity, yet if you (as an electoral candidate) pitch the wrong thing - say, neglect (betrayal be a stronger word here) of your own national interests for the sake of foreign ones - I daresay you won't get elected no matter how much money is backing you up.
Mmm. Wait a second. In Lebanon that will get you elected.
re the #5 definition of defense, It still does so for a reason called "American Interests". Who gets helped by this gets decided by that. Not the other way around.
>Israel does not depend on US arms either. >> Who cares. That fact has no relevance.
Of course it is of relevance.
Here I sit with a sword, guarding my door.
Cometh America, giveth me another sword. For free. Cool. What happens now? Well,
Here I sit with a sword, guarding my door.
Have I gained any defense value? Am I now more defended that I was with my first sword? No. I still stand by my former assertion. Were I sitting at first without a sword, you'd have had a case. What the US has done may have contributed to me economically (with some more or less apparent reason for doing so that benefits it in some way), but from a purely defense-driven point of view, I'm no more protected now than I was before. I've gained nothing defense-wise, thus the contribution does not defend me. It may have provided means, but not means I did not already have at my disposal.
Israeli arms that current US-arms displace are not technologically obsolete, quite on the contrary, they are in most cases on-par with what the US has to offer.
Since US arms are not fundamentally superios technology-wise to Israeli-made ones, you have no case.
You just hit the nail on the head. You'd gain advertising as an alternate means of currency, just as you gain access to search (e.g. gain gratification) by using google, paying them v(gratifying them back) with your presence, which they provide to advertisers for green currency. All of these are currencies. In the milk example, advertising is such a currency.
Money is just as immaterial as advertising. There is damn little material value in a green piece of paper (or fabric, whatever). What gives it its value is a shared-by-all perception, illusion, if you like, of value. As long as people want it.
Look at the war in Iraq. A billion dollars a week, they say. Why is the US in there? What currency are they paid in? Some postulate that the initial consideration was the decreasing value of the USD, which was artificially kept high for many years by the fact many countries had their national reserve and USD and oil was traded in USD. Quite incidentally, axis-of-evil venezuela changed its national reserve to Euros, and Saddam switched to trading oil in Euros back in 1999 or 2000. Sure enough, keeping oil traded in USD may have seemed and seems today like a good reason to pay 1Bil USD a week to cowboy dubya. The US gains something in return, or so the people that the US public put in power believe.
The US is not run by an Israeli lobby. It is run by the American electorate. If the interests of that electorate coincide with Israel, well, good on Israel. When they'll stop, I daresay the US will kick Israel rolling down the stairs just like they gave Jews the finger for the better part of the holocaust, effectively until it started to serve its interests. Where was your jewish lobby then? Were there no Jews in the US? Americans are nobody's suckers, never were. There are 5 million Israelis with one additional million living abroad. There are short of half a billion americans, much more of which are non-jews than jews. There are, in fact, much more american arabs than american israelis.
Blaming America's political choices on a pro-Israeli lobby is lame narrowmindedness. The lobby doesn't represent that many voters (and is at least partially offset by the arab lobby anyway). America is pro-Israel because America gains something substantial from being pro-Israel. Not because non-american-interest-lobbies acting from within the US like a cancer push it to be so. I utterly love the "It's their fault!" line, one that notorious dictators of the past used it as their platform to get into power.
When I pay a dollar for a carton of milk, I do not get the dollar back. I get the milk, the shop walks away with the dollar (minus costs).
In a more complicated business model the sides eventually get gratification, not neccesarily directly or from each other.
So is the case of the US either lending or giving money to other countries. It does so for a reason, and that reason is not being out of pocket just as the reason for me buying milk is not ending up with a dollar less. It's an unavoidable side-effect. What we term "the cost".
This is ALWAYS the case when two (or more) sides are VOLUNTARILY entering an arrangement. It's called self-interest. It's how you and I, your employer and my employer, your country and my country work.
Rest assured, the US gets SOMETHING back, otherwise it would not be pushing good green taxpayer dollars down that hole. It simply isn't US dollars. It's the milk.
Now you could of course argue, quite legitimately, as in the Iraq case, that either the milk is overpriced, that the US doesn't need this type of milk at all, that it can't afford it, or that its coin is much better spent buying butter. All totally legit opinions that will end up being decided with the next administration being elected, and the one after that.
However, the democratically-elected administrations that represent the US in its entirety when facing external non-US entities have, for the past decades chosen otherwise (in the Israeli context), pointing to the quite obvious - that the US finds it beneficial to aid Israel. Beneficial how? I leave that to you to figure out.
>> Giving someone the means to defend themselves is the same as defending them. If the measns were otherwise inobtainable, I'd be inclined to agree. Since, however, Israel does not depend on said given arms, having proven it can readily supply its own military needs time and again, It's like saying your corner gunshop protects your house. It doesn't. It's just a supplier, that can just as easily be replaced by another supplier.
Believe me, the US does not GIVE anything out for free. There are enough US-interests strings attached to the foreign aid it gives, to make it gain something in return. I stand by my former assertion. It's mutually beneficial arrangement, what we refer to as business, the only thing that needs understanding is the exact currency.
Believe me, the moment the US will stop getting its reward for the foreign aid it gives and the things it agrees to or vetoes in the UN, and this is not only in the Israeli context, it will stop doing so immediately. You'd need to be seriously naive to think otherwise, in face of a lot of other situations where the US mercilessly threw their allies to the dogs.
American soldiers rarely lay so much as a foot on Israeli soil, and I haven't heard of many who actually fell in battle over the defence of an Israeli border. Israel defends Israel. If any people in the world have a very serious chip on their shoulder as far as never ever trusting anyone else in the world, it would be them.
What the US does is "give" them money that can only be used to buy AMERICAN-MADE arms, thus entering a mutually-beneficial pact where one side gains arms and the other brings jobs home. The US does that with half the countries in the world. It's called business, albeit with a somewhat unique business model.
Israel does not depend on US arms either. When nobody sold Israel tanks, they built their own(Merkava etc). When nobody sold Israel jet fighters, Israel built its own (The Kfir, The Lavi initiative later outbid by American-supplied jets) etc. When Israel needed, it built its own A-A and A-S missiles. It does its own avionics, outfits its own ships, builds its own guns, from handguns to assault rifles, sniper rifles and what have you. They have the know-how, the industry, the technology and the money.
The only thing Israel DOES depend on external entities for is raw materials you'd need to build arms (steel etc.), but in this day and age, those can be sourced easily.
Israel usually welcomes US assistance (just as other countries in the region - Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc welcome such assistance), but saying anyone but Israel defended it is just being naive.
And as for the UN, US support or no US support, Israel has always been in the habit of giving the UN the finger, as the UN has, for most of its history, been skewed in favor of arab interests. Israeli stance is usually based on their (apparently justified) opinion - that the UN is powerless to go head-to-head with a properly armed nation, which, incidentally, Israel is. Economic embargos are a different thing (Israel has endured those in the past, at least in so far as arms go), but that hasn't prevented them from doing anything, quite on the contrary, it nudged them to develop their own arms industry.
Wait till the oil runs out and iceland becomes the new saudi arabia by selling hydrogen to everyone. THEN things'll get interesting in the middle east.
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Good point. Multiple combinations of bases may yield the same amino acid, yet you want to be recording not only what acid gets created but also which of the possible gene sequences that creates it was used, in (the quite possible) case something else hinges off the same data. Data compression (reuse of the same stored information for more than one purpose) is IIRC not unheard of.
:-)
And to think I've just proposed using lossy compression for DNA
I'm doing undergrad biochem and we've done this math several times, as has been mentioned here in other threads, 1GB is the ballpark amount of space a single UNCOMPRESSED human genome should take up.
On one hand, this is a marginal underestimate because there are more than 4 DNA nucleobases (quite rare, but they exist and need to be recorded if you're profiling a genome).
However, the genome should be quite happily compressable (think bz2 or some specialized lossless form of compression) due to MANY repeating sequences and the fact that most exons (that you'd normally use 6 bits to describe) can be described using 5 bits by pinpointing their product on an amino-acid table (numbering 20 members most of the time), or even 4 bits if you narrow that table from the 20-most-common to the 15-most-common and use the 16th position to describe less-common sequences using more bits, just to name a few reasons.
Maybe a bit of added data they put in describes things we've learned about the data which wasn't physically present in the original DNA such as "here ends intron, here starts exon, here be boundary" etc.
In short, it should be highly compressible and fit in way under 2 DVD's, so for the life of me I can't figure out what they plugged onto two DVDs. Software to decipher it? Gene database correlating what's in your personal genome to what the genes are known to do? Free BonziBuddy extra content? Bonus "behind the scenes" material?
Harm? And I thought all the "Be scared of Hitler Clones" has subsided.
Dude, if we mastered electricity, nuclear technology, chemistry, biological warfare and millions of 1+ ton hunks of metal whizzing around at 100km/h all over the the planet's surface, and made humanity benefit from all the above, do you REALLY think personalized medicine as a consequence of knowing your personal genome would do more bad than good to warrant "being afraid of the technology"?
Gimme a break. 1978 called, they want their hitler DNA back.
We're almost in agreement then.
The "least permissions" approach has lots of merit when you're talking about a single-application server (say, apache, bind, what have you), but the sweet spot for a homeuser-targeted box (also, where the vast majority of your users are not techs, Windows is not exactly gentoo), the sweet spot of just how restricted or not restricted you want the defaults to be may lie elsewhere than for your apache servers.
Back to the point at hand, nobody (in this thread at least) has any illusions about UAC making a machine utterly bulletproof, and whoever believes that is an idiot. The fact that I give my users non-root accounts on my unix servers doesn't make the unix servers bulletproof. users can still exploit software if I don't keep it up to date. That's just as right for Debian as it is for Vista, MacOS and even, woe and behold, OpenBSD. A person who does not understand that is more fanboy than professional. Nevertheless, if I were to give all my users root accounts instead, I think there isn't a single UNIX admin out there that wouldn't agree with me that this would have been a quick shortcut to royally fucking up my network. Same for Vista. UAC is a CRITICAL improvement for any box that doesn't have security policies otherwise applied to it (domain creds etc).
It's not a silver bullet or any such rubbish. But it greatly raises the amount of effort one must put into getting into your system, and it greatly reduces the amount of damage done once most malware starts targeting your userspace rather than c:\windows.
In short - UberSuperKillerSecuritySilverbullet2000 - NO. Great improvement over anything in the everyone-is-root ballpark - absolutely.
/Specific/ overflow bugs are a VERY POOR basis for an OS choice decision that will accompany you for the next so-and-so years. Why? because they will be fixed next week.
/WITH/ user-level security model (vista) is better than /WITHOUT(aka work-as-root)/ model (xp).
/A/ virus, you will not have proved that it is "just as susceptible to viruses as XP". All you will have proved is that it is just as susceptible to A SPECIFIC virus, an that on a particular patch level (next week's patch level will likely obsolete this virus).
/STATISTICALLY FEWER/ will have affected Vista.
I'm not saying vista in unexploitable, or that particular exploits do not at all contribute to an OS's security rating. I'm saying a car with a seatbelt is better than a car without a seatbelt, regardless of which has what easily-pathchable (hence, minor) flaws.
I don't think there is *ANY* debate as to whether
Do a few expected exploits (yes, expected, every commercial OS with a marketing clock ticking that ever came out had a whole bunch of them, including most if not all commercial variants of UNIX I ever heard of) and some bugs in the system warrant sticking with a vastly inferior security model? Is an imperfect seatbelt worse than no seatbelt at all? IMHO *no*. MS will fix their shit (as has happened before), exploitability will stabilize in an asymptotic to zero manner (as has happened before), and it will end up a hell more secure than XP due to a better model (again, for home/nondomain use).
Also keep in mind UAC is not a silver bullet, much like the fact that having user accounts on my linux boxes does not make them uncompromisable.
By proving you can root one of my boxes you will NOT have proved that user-accounts (rather than giving everyone root) is useless. The user-based security model is a PROVEN AND VERY EFFECTIVE means to statistically REDUCE the chances of sustaining damage from a random threat, not a magic silver bullet some fanboy idiots try to make of it to discredit it.
By the same coin, by infecting a Vista box with
Throw the most frequent 5000 in-the-wild viruses at two boxes running vista and XP, it's quite obvious
Move 4 years into the future, where new malware will have evolved, and even if we assume that the number of malware threats in a UAC world matches what it was during everyone-is-root era (which I highly doubt), the vast majority will have the LIMITED capability of only being able to infect your userspace, not the entire OS.
Less and less-potent malware, while not being a silver bullet (of which there aren't any anywhere outside people's imagination), is definitely a very big move in a very right direction, and for non-domain use I find it totally as obvious to choose between them as it is between telnet and ssh, regardless of which has one exploit more than the other (assuming of course neither of them has zero exploits, just to make the analogy stick)
More fanboys.
For whoever doesn't see this screaming at him, here's a breakdown:
In home-user-land, credendials were an option nobody used until Vista. NO amount of buffer-overflow susceptibility can EVEN COME CLOSE to outweighing the security implications of having UAC - a restricted-user+sudo working model rather than XP's work-as-root one. Vista and XP for the home user are incomparable and are in totally different leagues, vista winning by very, very, very long shot.
In corp-land, everybody (who gives a damn about his security) has been using non-administrator-accounts on his workstations (at varying and ever-improving degrees of annoyance) since NT4. For all intents and purposes, XP with domain policies had all the functional benefits of UAC, as did 2000 and NT4. So the battle over which is more secure needs to be resolved on much finer points, such as susceptibility to buffer overflows, code maturity etc. This is what the report in TFA addressed and they may be quite correct on this.
Pushing titles saying "XP less secure than Vista!" without VERY THOROUGHLY POINTING OUT WHEN AND WHERE THIS APPLIES (*WHERE THERE BE NT DOMAINS AND RESTRICTED USER POLICIES*) is a cheap, inflammatory and sensationalist way of getting attention. Most people who have no clue reading this headline will get the VERY WRONG message, become misinformed, spread on more hyperbole about Vista "being less secure than XP" to people who know even less, and the overall effect will be doing WAY more bad than good in the name of either stupidity or anti-MS fanboyism.
... but linux had the "Screaming accept..." bit pretty much since birth.
We call it sudo, and some of us actually consider it a good thing.
Thinking of how long it would take to release the aircraft, you'd probably be right.
:-)
However, this would not improve your throughput, as the data still needs to be offloaded from the containers to wherever it is going. You're missing my original point about the difference between delivering the MEDIA with the data (a big pile of optical disks, or a container with hard-drive racks) to delivering the DATA itself (which includes reading it off the media and putting it on the destination). The container approach may have some merit if you have a bandwidth problem between where the 747 lands and where the big mother of a storage data center is, but it's debatable if that was part of the thought exercise.
Bottom line, limiting factors that will not play a bottleneck role:
* Individual drive throughput (either on-disk read/write or bus (SATA/FC/etc)
* Space
Limiting factors that WILL play a role:
* Master uplink(s!) from the entire array to someplace meaningful (think multiple 10GbE links)
* WEIGHT of harddrives. (Volumewise, you won't be able to fill the 747 anyway, so containers are pro'lly a great idea)
* $$$
>> I don't really agree with his position, but at least he's fighting for what he believes...
So does Osama.
That's a highly misleading figure (whatever figure you had in mind).
.. say .. 500 economy airline tickets (shooting from the hip here, I tried compounding business/first-class costs).. to get that through. That's a lot of cash. Then again, at 1TB/drive, it's a LOT of data.
When you add the amount of time, money, kit and effort that'd go into either burning that many optical disks or filling that many harddrives, then connecting them on the other end and reading it out makes it less attractive than fiber optics.
On the other hand, if the 747 is crammed full of ultra-high-capacity hard-drives (say, the new Hitachi 1TB) in high-density racks that do not need unloading from the aircraft (it lands, it plugs into a power/multiple-10GbE-grid, offloads the data to a local ground facility, then goes out for the next run), you get something that'd possibly be competitive with fiber, as well as a possible business model avenue.
You would, of course, need someone to be willing pay the rough equivalent of
Aero? Dude, my laptop (Thinkpad X60) has got an i945 integrated chipset that
[a] costs next-to-nothing for any motherboard maker to integrate (and many of which do)
[b] unlike my gaming rig which houses an 8800GTS, the i945 integrated chipset does not pull 250 Watts when idle. It pulls something much closer to zero.
[c] Due to [b], my X60 does not make me pay the cost of a high-end GPU every year through the electricity bill.
[d] Due to [b], my X60 can stay afloat on battery for 8 hours. (More like 6-7 running aero, but that's a different story).
[e] It runs aero just fine.
AFAIK the only "modern" chipset that is actively being put on modern motherboard designs that will absolutely not pull aero is the Via Unichrome family found on all Via-CPU-based mini-itx motherboards, and that's an understandable compromise as they define their niche market by keeping the entire machine's envelope in the 20-30Watt range (If they put in a chipset that eats, say, 10-20 Watts more, they stray outside their safe niche and a intel-core-based system will eat them for lunch).
Microsoft did not invent sudo. They are the absolute last of the pack to implement it.
It's been optional to use forever. Restricted environments (where users still need to work, save files, etc) have been running in NT domains configured to disallow system modification forever and a decade. Vista's been in beta forever, and you need to have been on the friggin moon to not have known well in advance UAC is coming.
If your software writes outside your profile without a very good reason to do so, either update it, or smack the vendor on the head, because it is absolutely his fault. Just because it was ok to do something a certain way in the past doesn't make it ok to do it that way today. UAC/sudo is a simple Darwinian evolutionary step, a trait that gives advantage in a specific environment (The Internet a-la 2007) and is thus selected for, appearing in the next generation of the microsoft OS.
Blaming microsoft for it is lame (Unless you're blaming them for not having done it when Windows 2000 came out, that's ok.). They didn't do any foul play this time. Some developers having issues coping with the "new" reality? Market forces will take care of them soon enough, nothing to get concerned about.
>> Microsoft should've deprecated UAC heuristics and put a time limit on them.
/usr and /home appeared.
They did.
NT domains running environments where users are not trusted and do not have permissions to modify the system have been around for over a decade. That was also roughly when the windows equivalent of
Microsoft software has been properly using these for all this time, setting proper example.
Vista was in beta forever. Any software vendor that was caught by surprise by the instatement of UAC should take his head out of his ass and figure out what kept him in his cozy cave for the last couple of years.
Well, that hinges on how you or I define "Far" (as in "Far" better).
I never installed google desktop and do not plan to. I realize you can find 3rd-party addons that improve UI tremendously.
Comparing the core UI of XP vs the core UI of Vista (with addons you can make either sing, dance and make coffee, that's not new), the vista one takes a big step ahead with the start-menu search. Gadgets also improve UI, and if you want to comparing running as non-admin on XP vs running as non-admin on vista (via UAC), the UI integration of the latter makes it digestible, whereas on XP it was not. And no, Aero is not a UI improvement. It's just a cool toy.
3.11->95 was revolution, not evolution. It was a completely new UI, period. And yes, it was far better.
XP->Vista is evolution, but it's significant evolution, and it still qualifies to be far better than XP IMHO. Sure, if one wants to disable all the new stuff and work it just like XP, he won't perceive any of that better bit. But that sorta beats the whole purpose of the comparison, does it not? And so does disqualifying anything except a complete replacement of the entire UI from attaining "Far Better" status as you have (possibly, given I haven't misunderstood you) suggested. That's silly.
Here's what I remember from last time...
To be held up, a space elevator needs a FABRIC with a tensile strength of about 65GPa.
To build it, you'd want a safety factor of about two, thereby a tensile strength of about 120-130GPa.
I do not know the specs of the tubes from TFA, however
Very short INDIVIDUAL single-walled carbon nanotubes have been created (in a lab, in small quantities, using processes that may be prohibitively expensive) with measured individual fiber strength of about 60GPA.
"Very long" ones were (previously) created at about 1cm with substantially lower tensile strength (circa 4GPA if memory serves me right).
The last several years were spent by industry leaders in this field ramping up production of CNI by several orders of magnitude, whereas bulk availability made prices of CNI go down orders of magnitude.
Existing processes of weaving tubes into a fabric involve loading the fabric with ~5+% of CNI. The last Elevator2010 competition saw competition tethers in the 4GPA ballpark (using fibers in the 30-60GPa ballpark I'm guessing), none of which could beat the commercially-available "house tether".
This is all layman talk of an enthusiast, not a professional. I'm a coder/syadmin gone biochem, not an engineer. If someone a bit less clueless than me can correct and/or bring this up to date (some of what I recited here I've acquired ~3 years ago, things would have progressed since then), I think we'd all be the wiser.
Cheers.
It's also a stretch to go from a very big barrel of hydrogen to GEO, and yet it's been proven to get payloads there.
There's nothing particularly revolutionary about any of the physics underlying the SE. Once a point (that is not moving further and further away) of tensile strength (in polymer fabric you can weave, not in the individual material you build it from) is reached, you build it. Period.
If you can make fibers that behave more like thread and less like sand pebbles, you can load more into the fabric, and the strength of the available fabric (per given weight) rises a notch higher.
At some point, it'll reach the elevator-capable point.
The start menu search feature (that text box where the cursor is immediately placed the moment you open the start menu) which searches through the start menu and program files (on my gentoo box I call this katapult) is actually a VERY VERY big improvement on intuitive, kb-driven UI. Not to be confused with the regular file search which is an entirely different thing).
If you want to be stuck on something you've learned to use a decade ago and resist any positive UI progress, go right ahead. I'd rather my choice of UI be based on what makes work more efficiently, not inability to grok something new.
Religious anti-ms-fanaticism aside, I think MS deserve kudos for plugging in this feature (even if they didn't exactly "invent" it).
>> I never said it was run by one, just influenced by one.
As it is influenced by every other lobby out there. Arab lobby, RIAA lobby, Consumer Foods of America lobby. What makes the Israeli one special? Why claim the Pro-Israeli is more influencial than [a] the opposing lobby and [b] America's own private interests?
Besides, If anything, I'd have guessed the Jewish lobby would be the decisively more potent one, maybe due to the myth I'm not certain whether to believe or not (but which popular culture may claim is true) about many prominent people with money and power being Jewish.
On the other hand of this conversation comes an enlightening truth, at least in so far as the numbers analyzed by the statistician bloke who wrote Freakonomics tell us. And that's that throwing money at a political figure contributes damn little to his chances of being elected. Period. The public either likes him or not, and from a certain point, once sufficient exposure has been attained (by money), further money has damn little to do with his chances of landing in office. Oh, and all the candidates from the last few decades had way more money than this cutoff red line (where insufficient funds do indeed influence anything) dictates.
So do take the whole lobbyist talk with a grain of salt. Pro-Israeli (or pro-anything-else) lobby can be as powerful as you like and be throwing money at decision makers from here till eternity, yet if you (as an electoral candidate) pitch the wrong thing - say, neglect (betrayal be a stronger word here) of your own national interests for the sake of foreign ones - I daresay you won't get elected no matter how much money is backing you up.
Mmm. Wait a second. In Lebanon that will get you elected.
And if I'd have lived till that day with or without your help?
... Sorry, posted before I was finished.
re the #5 definition of defense, It still does so for a reason called "American Interests". Who gets helped by this gets decided by that. Not the other way around.
>Israel does not depend on US arms either.
>> Who cares. That fact has no relevance.
Of course it is of relevance.
Here I sit with a sword, guarding my door.
Cometh America, giveth me another sword. For free. Cool. What happens now? Well,
Here I sit with a sword, guarding my door.
Have I gained any defense value? Am I now more defended that I was with my first sword? No.
I still stand by my former assertion. Were I sitting at first without a sword, you'd have had a case. What the US has done may have contributed to me economically (with some more or less apparent reason for doing so that benefits it in some way), but from a purely defense-driven point of view, I'm no more protected now than I was before. I've gained nothing defense-wise, thus the contribution does not defend me. It may have provided means, but not means I did not already have at my disposal.
Israeli arms that current US-arms displace are not technologically obsolete, quite on the contrary, they are in most cases on-par with what the US has to offer.
Since US arms are not fundamentally superios technology-wise to Israeli-made ones, you have no case.
You just hit the nail on the head. You'd gain advertising as an alternate means of currency, just as you gain access to search (e.g. gain gratification) by using google, paying them v(gratifying them back) with your presence, which they provide to advertisers for green currency. All of these are currencies. In the milk example, advertising is such a currency.
Money is just as immaterial as advertising. There is damn little material value in a green piece of paper (or fabric, whatever). What gives it its value is a shared-by-all perception, illusion, if you like, of value. As long as people want it.
Look at the war in Iraq. A billion dollars a week, they say. Why is the US in there? What currency are they paid in? Some postulate that the initial consideration was the decreasing value of the USD, which was artificially kept high for many years by the fact many countries had their national reserve and USD and oil was traded in USD. Quite incidentally, axis-of-evil venezuela changed its national reserve to Euros, and Saddam switched to trading oil in Euros back in 1999 or 2000. Sure enough, keeping oil traded in USD may have seemed and seems today like a good reason to pay 1Bil USD a week to cowboy dubya. The US gains something in return, or so the people that the US public put in power believe.
The US is not run by an Israeli lobby. It is run by the American electorate. If the interests of that electorate coincide with Israel, well, good on Israel. When they'll stop, I daresay the US will kick Israel rolling down the stairs just like they gave Jews the finger for the better part of the holocaust, effectively until it started to serve its interests. Where was your jewish lobby then? Were there no Jews in the US? Americans are nobody's suckers, never were. There are 5 million Israelis with one additional million living abroad. There are short of half a billion americans, much more of which are non-jews than jews. There are, in fact, much more american arabs than american israelis.
Blaming America's political choices on a pro-Israeli lobby is lame narrowmindedness. The lobby doesn't represent that many voters (and is at least partially offset by the arab lobby anyway). America is pro-Israel because America gains something substantial from being pro-Israel. Not because non-american-interest-lobbies acting from within the US like a cancer push it to be so. I utterly love the "It's their fault!" line, one that notorious dictators of the past used it as their platform to get into power.
You misunderstand business.
When I pay a dollar for a carton of milk, I do not get the dollar back. I get the milk, the shop walks away with the dollar (minus costs).
In a more complicated business model the sides eventually get gratification, not neccesarily directly or from each other.
So is the case of the US either lending or giving money to other countries. It does so for a reason, and that reason is not being out of pocket just as the reason for me buying milk is not ending up with a dollar less. It's an unavoidable side-effect. What we term "the cost".
This is ALWAYS the case when two (or more) sides are VOLUNTARILY entering an arrangement. It's called self-interest. It's how you and I, your employer and my employer, your country and my country work.
Rest assured, the US gets SOMETHING back, otherwise it would not be pushing good green taxpayer dollars down that hole. It simply isn't US dollars. It's the milk.
Now you could of course argue, quite legitimately, as in the Iraq case, that either the milk is overpriced, that the US doesn't need this type of milk at all, that it can't afford it, or that its coin is much better spent buying butter. All totally legit opinions that will end up being decided with the next administration being elected, and the one after that.
However, the democratically-elected administrations that represent the US in its entirety when facing external non-US entities have, for the past decades chosen otherwise (in the Israeli context), pointing to the quite obvious - that the US finds it beneficial to aid Israel. Beneficial how? I leave that to you to figure out.
>> Giving someone the means to defend themselves is the same as defending them.
If the measns were otherwise inobtainable, I'd be inclined to agree.
Since, however, Israel does not depend on said given arms, having proven it can readily supply its own military needs time and again, It's like saying your corner gunshop protects your house. It doesn't. It's just a supplier, that can just as easily be replaced by another supplier.
Believe me, the US does not GIVE anything out for free. There are enough US-interests strings attached to the foreign aid it gives, to make it gain something in return. I stand by my former assertion. It's mutually beneficial arrangement, what we refer to as business, the only thing that needs understanding is the exact currency.
Believe me, the moment the US will stop getting its reward for the foreign aid it gives and the things it agrees to or vetoes in the UN, and this is not only in the Israeli context, it will stop doing so immediately. You'd need to be seriously naive to think otherwise, in face of a lot of other situations where the US mercilessly threw their allies to the dogs.
The US does not DEFEND Israel.
American soldiers rarely lay so much as a foot on Israeli soil, and I haven't heard of many who actually fell in battle over the defence of an Israeli border. Israel defends Israel. If any people in the world have a very serious chip on their shoulder as far as never ever trusting anyone else in the world, it would be them.
What the US does is "give" them money that can only be used to buy AMERICAN-MADE arms, thus entering a mutually-beneficial pact where one side gains arms and the other brings jobs home. The US does that with half the countries in the world. It's called business, albeit with a somewhat unique business model.
Israel does not depend on US arms either. When nobody sold Israel tanks, they built their own(Merkava etc). When nobody sold Israel jet fighters, Israel built its own (The Kfir, The Lavi initiative later outbid by American-supplied jets) etc. When Israel needed, it built its own A-A and A-S missiles. It does its own avionics, outfits its own ships, builds its own guns, from handguns to assault rifles, sniper rifles and what have you. They have the know-how, the industry, the technology and the money.
The only thing Israel DOES depend on external entities for is raw materials you'd need to build arms (steel etc.), but in this day and age, those can be sourced easily.
Israel usually welcomes US assistance (just as other countries in the region - Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc welcome such assistance), but saying anyone but Israel defended it is just being naive.
And as for the UN, US support or no US support, Israel has always been in the habit of giving the UN the finger, as the UN has, for most of its history, been skewed in favor of arab interests. Israeli stance is usually based on their (apparently justified) opinion - that the UN is powerless to go head-to-head with a properly armed nation, which, incidentally, Israel is.
Economic embargos are a different thing (Israel has endured those in the past, at least in so far as arms go), but that hasn't prevented them from doing anything, quite on the contrary, it nudged them to develop their own arms industry.
Wait till the oil runs out and iceland becomes the new saudi arabia by selling hydrogen to everyone. THEN things'll get interesting in the middle east.