I had a similar experience to this a few years ago when I was studying for my degree.
There was one guy (a friend of mine) who would regularly play quake 2 on his laptop in lectures. The lecturer pointed out one day that he knew exactly who was playin games in his lectures because for the next three rows behind everybody in viewing distance of the screen was concentrating on my friends gaming rather than his lecture. After the lecture he asked my friend not to bring his laptop to lectures in future as he could not be trusted.
As we all know from grafiti on desks and doodles in the margin, sometimes concentration is not high in lectures. So why make it harder by introducing on of the most efficient distraction mechanisms available (a computer installed with games). Even if you yourself are vigilent enough not to play games in class is everyone in your lecture the same? It only takes one to disrtact several people.
I did a computer science degree by the way and managed just fine without owning a laptop (twice the price of a desktop at the time), so I don't see the sudden need for everyone to be using laptops in class.
This is not the only lifting body design for an airship currently in production today. The SkyCat project by the Advanced Technologies Group in the UK has been developing a lifting body airship for several years now and is very near completion.
Unlike the Dynalifter project (which will use underslung cargo pods) the SkyCat has a hollow central section in the body into which trucks and other vehicles may be driven, kind of like the hold in a ferry.
The skycat is designed to take off and land like a conventional aircraft but it uses two concentric hovercraft cussions instead of conventional landing gear so it can land on hastily prepaired air strips or water if necessary. Once it has landed the pump on the inner hovercraft cussion is reversed creating a vacume that sucks the SkyCat to the ground so that it won't drift off
The Skycat project has had interest from the Americam military and the Chinese government.
In fact the US military has even carried out several tests on the remote controlled SkyCat prototypes and concluded that the lifting body airship design is safer for use in hostile situations than a helicopter.
For further conceptual ideas for uses of the SkyCat see World SkyCat who appear to be a company set up to market the skycat when it reaches full production.
I can't find any references to it on line but the discovery channel in the UK did a fantastic documentary on the SkyCat project a couple of years ago, where they didn't mention the Dynalifter project but they did mention the CargoLifter(German only).
CargoLifter is a massive semi rigid air ship that is designd to lift huge payloads via a winch whilst airborn, transport them to where they are needed and deploy them using the same winch mechanism.
The CargoLifter project is currently on hold due to a lack of funding.
For further information in english on the CargoLifter project see this article at aerospace-technology.com.
I watched this news article on BBC world last night (am British living in forign country). The BBC world account of this story did highlight a couple of points that take the wind out of this sensationalist post.
1. The missing 30Kg is discrepancy between the estimated amount of reclaimed fuel and the actual amount for a whole yeare (See previous post). As any engineer involved with nuclear reclamation will tell you there is no precise method of calculating the amount of fuel that will be reclaimed from nuclear waste until after it has been reclaimed.
2. On several occasions (years) Sellafield has reclaimed more fuel than estimated.
I am also a UK citizen and would like to add that the presence of CCTV cameras does not relate to better police response to crimes or even a reduction in street crime.
Here is a story to highlight my point.
A friend of mines mother and her boyfriend were quite viscously assaulted in front of a CCTV camera. A police operator observed the whole incident but the police did not arrive on the scene until 30 minutes after the incident had finished. My friend's mother was offered the CCTV footage to assist with her claim for damages form the assailants, but the presence of a CCTV camera did nothing to help her when she was in trouble.
Chicago would do well to look into the actuality of crime prevention using CCTV as opposed to the perceived benefits. Remember whilst the crime rate is supposedly falling in the UK the rate of antisocial crime (assaults, vandalism, etc) is rising and we have a huge number of CCTV cameras.
Does anyone know how HP are going to handle the problems with battery life experienced by the Ipod.
Will they be offering a battery replacement service like apples? Will it be cheaper? If its cheaper can existing apple Ipod owners get thier batteries replaced by HP?
One Time Pads are not a cryptographic algorithm (eg RSA, Eliptic Curve) but a technique (eg X509). Therefore the key size depends upon the technique used.
The idea of OTPs is that the sender and reciever both own matched (identical if you are using a symetric encryption algorithm) code books.
These code books have been agreed well before the message is generated or sent and the security lies in the fac that each key (or key pair) in the code book is used to encrypt and decrypt one message only then disgarded.
I used to work for an X509 CA and had a chance to meet one of the guys who worked for the DSA on the RSA algorithm. He still comunicates with some of his old collegues using OTPs. They actually meet in person and exchange the OTPs once a month using phyisical floppy diskettes.
As to the comments bellow about sending the OTP keys over a quantum channel once per session. This is the use of sesion keys and is already the basis of how X509 and some current quantum cryptography works.
X509
The public key (be it RSA or eliptic curve or another) is used to encrypt a session key (usually tripple DES) the session key is then used to encrypt the message.
The private key is used to decrypt the session key which is then used to decrypt the message.
If the message becomes compromised the key that becomes compromised is the session key and not the private key. The advantage of this is that an attacker who may get hold of a series of messages both encrypted and in plain text can not use them enhance a brute force attack, as each message is actually encrypted using an individual session key.
A Quantum Method (currently being researched by BT I think)
One channel is a quantum secure channel and the other is the public broadcast channel. The session keys are sent across the secure channel and used to encrypt the messages (which are broadcast on the public channel).
At intervals (Possibly random) during the broadcast of a message, new session keys are generated each new session key is sent via the quantum secure channel and the next portion of the message is encrypted using the new session key.
Because the quantum secure channel can be monitored for attackers listening in the reciever will know if a sesion key is compromised and can terminate the comunication.
I hope this clarifies things a little people seemed to be getting confused (or voicing new ideas that are actually common practice).
Haribo Vodka
on
Skittlebrau
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A friend of mine recently experimented with haribo and vodka.
Place 1 bag of Haribo cola bottles* in 70cl of vodka and leave in the fridge for 3-4 weeks.
The result is a pleasant sweet tasting liquid that makes it really hard to walk the 200 yards to my house.
If you are unfamiliar with Haribo any gelatinous cola flavoured sweet\candy will do fine.
Correct me if I had the wrong end of the stick a couple of years ago but didn't MS announce that the CLS was to be ported to every major platform when they announced.NET only to then perform a U turn and announce thet the CLS would only be released by MS for MS OSes but other developers may port the CLS to other platforms if they wished.
I gave up following the development of.NET at this point as I already knew java and the JVM is provided by sun for a large majority of OSes (we won't talk about write once debug everywhere).
Given this stance MS surely welcomes Mono. So what if the world stops running MS OSes, MS makes more than enough revenue from it's office suites, productivity tools and develop environments to suport itself well into the next 10 years.
Plus not manufacturing the OS or CLS removes the responsibility for MS having to make them secure (a headache I'm sure MS would love not to have - especially in recent years).
I see this not as MS rubbing it's hands in glee waiting for linux users to become MS dependent and then screw them through undocumented APIs or legal infingements. But MS runbbing its hands with glee at the revenue stream provided by Linux users becoming MS dependent for thier apps rather than the OS (come back into the fold O open source users Bill will make it all better here is the MS office you loved so much).
The company I work for writes bespoke code to control industrial X-Ray systems (we also build the industrial X-Ray systems). I know that a vast amount of the software we produce is not written securely usually due to time constraints and a certain level of ignorance among our developers about how to write secure code (Book clickySun atricle clicky).
I applaud the exposure that this case will bring to the need for secure code in all applications, but wonder what reprocussions it will have if a precident is set that companies can sue for failures in code security.
Will the computing industry become bound by legislated saftey (or security) tests that software must pass before it is issued (i.e. as in the automotive industry as everyone is so prone to compare us)?
Feel sorry for us UK residence it is now law that a gathering of over 7 people in a public place can be classed as a riot is it doesn't dispures when asked.
That is just having a group larger than 7 people (unless obvoiusly you have a permit to hold a public demonstration).
Yay to no constitution and the criminal justice bill in Britian.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a similar experience to this a few years ago when I was studying for my degree.
There was one guy (a friend of mine) who would regularly play quake 2 on his laptop in lectures. The lecturer pointed out one day that he knew exactly who was playin games in his lectures because for the next three rows behind everybody in viewing distance of the screen was concentrating on my friends gaming rather than his lecture. After the lecture he asked my friend not to bring his laptop to lectures in future as he could not be trusted.
As we all know from grafiti on desks and doodles in the margin, sometimes concentration is not high in lectures. So why make it harder by introducing on of the most efficient distraction mechanisms available (a computer installed with games). Even if you yourself are vigilent enough not to play games in class is everyone in your lecture the same? It only takes one to disrtact several people.
I did a computer science degree by the way and managed just fine without owning a laptop (twice the price of a desktop at the time), so I don't see the sudden need for everyone to be using laptops in class.
This is not the only lifting body design for an airship currently in production today. The SkyCat project by the Advanced Technologies Group in the UK has been developing a lifting body airship for several years now and is very near completion.
Unlike the Dynalifter project (which will use underslung cargo pods) the SkyCat has a hollow central section in the body into which trucks and other vehicles may be driven, kind of like the hold in a ferry.
The skycat is designed to take off and land like a conventional aircraft but it uses two concentric hovercraft cussions instead of conventional landing gear so it can land on hastily prepaired air strips or water if necessary. Once it has landed the pump on the inner hovercraft cussion is reversed creating a vacume that sucks the SkyCat to the ground so that it won't drift off
The Skycat project has had interest from the Americam military and the Chinese government.
In fact the US military has even carried out several tests on the remote controlled SkyCat prototypes and concluded that the lifting body airship design is safer for use in hostile situations than a helicopter.
For further conceptual ideas for uses of the SkyCat see World SkyCat who appear to be a company set up to market the skycat when it reaches full production.
I can't find any references to it on line but the discovery channel in the UK did a fantastic documentary on the SkyCat project a couple of years ago, where they didn't mention the Dynalifter project but they did mention the CargoLifter (German only).
CargoLifter is a massive semi rigid air ship that is designd to lift huge payloads via a winch whilst airborn, transport them to where they are needed and deploy them using the same winch mechanism.
The CargoLifter project is currently on hold due to a lack of funding.
For further information in english on the CargoLifter project see this article at aerospace-technology.com.
I Just Laughed coffee through my nose. This deserves to be a +5 funny
I watched this news article on BBC world last night (am British living in forign country). The BBC world account of this story did highlight a couple of points that take the wind out of this sensationalist post.
1. The missing 30Kg is discrepancy between the estimated amount of reclaimed fuel and the actual amount for a whole yeare (See previous post). As any engineer involved with nuclear reclamation will tell you there is no precise method of calculating the amount of fuel that will be reclaimed from nuclear waste until after it has been reclaimed.
2. On several occasions (years) Sellafield has reclaimed more fuel than estimated.
I am also a UK citizen and would like to add that the presence of CCTV cameras does not relate to better police response to crimes or even a reduction in street crime.
Here is a story to highlight my point.
A friend of mines mother and her boyfriend were quite viscously assaulted in front of a CCTV camera. A police operator observed the whole incident but the police did not arrive on the scene until 30 minutes after the incident had finished. My friend's mother was offered the CCTV footage to assist with her claim for damages form the assailants, but the presence of a CCTV camera did nothing to help her when she was in trouble.
Chicago would do well to look into the actuality of crime prevention using CCTV as opposed to the perceived benefits. Remember whilst the crime rate is supposedly falling in the UK the rate of antisocial crime (assaults, vandalism, etc) is rising and we have a huge number of CCTV cameras.
Does anyone know how HP are going to handle the problems with battery life experienced by the Ipod. Will they be offering a battery replacement service like apples? Will it be cheaper? If its cheaper can existing apple Ipod owners get thier batteries replaced by HP?
I would be happy with Norman Lovett instead.
There seems to be some confusion here.
One Time Pads are not a cryptographic algorithm (eg RSA, Eliptic Curve) but a technique (eg X509). Therefore the key size depends upon the technique used.
The idea of OTPs is that the sender and reciever both own matched (identical if you are using a symetric encryption algorithm) code books.
These code books have been agreed well before the message is generated or sent and the security lies in the fac that each key (or key pair) in the code book is used to encrypt and decrypt one message only then disgarded.
I used to work for an X509 CA and had a chance to meet one of the guys who worked for the DSA on the RSA algorithm. He still comunicates with some of his old collegues using OTPs. They actually meet in person and exchange the OTPs once a month using phyisical floppy diskettes.
As to the comments bellow about sending the OTP keys over a quantum channel once per session. This is the use of sesion keys and is already the basis of how X509 and some current quantum cryptography works.
X509
The public key (be it RSA or eliptic curve or another) is used to encrypt a session key (usually tripple DES) the session key is then used to encrypt the message.
The private key is used to decrypt the session key which is then used to decrypt the message.
If the message becomes compromised the key that becomes compromised is the session key and not the private key. The advantage of this is that an attacker who may get hold of a series of messages both encrypted and in plain text can not use them enhance a brute force attack, as each message is actually encrypted using an individual session key.
A Quantum Method (currently being researched by BT I think)
One channel is a quantum secure channel and the other is the public broadcast channel. The session keys are sent across the secure channel and used to encrypt the messages (which are broadcast on the public channel).
At intervals (Possibly random) during the broadcast of a message, new session keys are generated each new session key is sent via the quantum secure channel and the next portion of the message is encrypted using the new session key.
Because the quantum secure channel can be monitored for attackers listening in the reciever will know if a sesion key is compromised and can terminate the comunication.
I hope this clarifies things a little people seemed to be getting confused (or voicing new ideas that are actually common practice).
A friend of mine recently experimented with haribo and vodka.
Place 1 bag of Haribo cola bottles* in 70cl of vodka and leave in the fridge for 3-4 weeks.
The result is a pleasant sweet tasting liquid that makes it really hard to walk the 200 yards to my house.
If you are unfamiliar with Haribo any gelatinous cola flavoured sweet\candy will do fine.
Correct me if I had the wrong end of the stick a couple of years ago but didn't MS announce that the CLS was to be ported to every major platform when they announced .NET only to then perform a U turn and announce thet the CLS would only be released by MS for MS OSes but other developers may port the CLS to other platforms if they wished.
.NET at this point as I already knew java and the JVM is provided by sun for a large majority of OSes (we won't talk about write once debug everywhere).
I gave up following the development of
Given this stance MS surely welcomes Mono. So what if the world stops running MS OSes, MS makes more than enough revenue from it's office suites, productivity tools and develop environments to suport itself well into the next 10 years.
Plus not manufacturing the OS or CLS removes the responsibility for MS having to make them secure (a headache I'm sure MS would love not to have - especially in recent years).
I see this not as MS rubbing it's hands in glee waiting for linux users to become MS dependent and then screw them through undocumented APIs or legal infingements. But MS runbbing its hands with glee at the revenue stream provided by Linux users becoming MS dependent for thier apps rather than the OS (come back into the fold O open source users Bill will make it all better here is the MS office you loved so much).
The company I work for writes bespoke code to control industrial X-Ray systems (we also build the industrial X-Ray systems). I know that a vast amount of the software we produce is not written securely usually due to time constraints and a certain level of ignorance among our developers about how to write secure code (Book clicky Sun atricle clicky).
I applaud the exposure that this case will bring to the need for secure code in all applications, but wonder what reprocussions it will have if a precident is set that companies can sue for failures in code security. Will the computing industry become bound by legislated saftey (or security) tests that software must pass before it is issued (i.e. as in the automotive industry as everyone is so prone to compare us)?
Not a tyraid just a wondering
Feel sorry for us UK residence it is now law that a gathering of over 7 people in a public place can be classed as a riot is it doesn't dispures when asked.
That is just having a group larger than 7 people (unless obvoiusly you have a permit to hold a public demonstration).
Yay to no constitution and the criminal justice bill in Britian.