>Another valid reason for preventing unsanctioned OS's to run on the device is to prevent reverse engineering.
That is never a valid reason! Are you serious? Preventing the owner of a device, who paid money for it and has exclusive ownership of it, from reverse engineering it is the exact same unethical behavior that we (geeks) have been battling for the past 15 years on every platform from gaming systems to routers to phones. If I buy it, I damn well better not be paying for technological measures that are intended to prevent me from figuring out how it works and doing what I want with it. Hardware is not licensed. It is sold.
Never claimed to have one [a law degree]. I was a Lawyer, by the way. A bloody good one.
Right. Let me guess: you were a bloody good "Doctor" too, but you never got an MD, DO, DDS, DVM, OD, PhD, EdD, PsyD, PharmD? Give us all a break. Some people on here actually have advanced degrees, and actually are professionals. By all means, contribute your opinion as a lay person - but don't try to finagle your way into ranks you don't belong to. Your lack of legal knowledge clearly indicates that you do not work in the field.
If your office door is locked, that's good enough security for paper documents or locally-stored electronic documents. However, when you store electronic documents on systems that are not under your physical control, the burden is on you to implement technological security sufficient to reasonably avoid compromising confidentiality. An attorney's actions will be subject to much greater scrutiny when he knowingly and intentionally gives confidential information to a third party, relying on some security measure to prevent the third party from accessing it. What kind of filing cabinet lock would be reasonable if you wanted to give the cabinet full of client docs to your neighbor for safekeeping? It better be a good one. The exact extent of the security requirement for electronic documents on third party systems has not been litigated yet, and will undoubtedly vary between states since every bar's interpretation of the model rules is slightly different. A zip file with a password probably doesn't cut it, but any reasonably modern form of encryption probably does. This is a developing issue in the legal community, and one that will probably be much clearer in a few years. It is coming to the forefront though. I went to a CLE panel discussion on it at the ABA annual meeting in August. (IAAL, but not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.)
Ie if a obsticle traveling.75 C is headed directly towards 2 observers also traveling at.75 C towards it. Those 2 observers could be a constant distance apart, and observe the time the obsticle passed each observer, divide by distance between observers and record a speed of 1.5C.
Actually not. The observed speed would be closer to 0.96C. There is no circumstance under which an observer can measure a speed in excess of C compared to any other object. This is the essence of special relativity. Time dilation and length contraction ensure that the observed speed of any object relative to any other object never reaches C.
I don't understand the submitter's (darkjohnson) contempt for balloons, but 120k feet is not that significant for a rocket.
Balloons are slow and low-tech, hence the contempt. As rockets go, this was about as simple as it gets. 1940's technology at best, except for the 1970's propellant formulation. However, do not underestimate the difficulty of getting a small solid-propellant rocket to 120,000 feet. The apparatus may be rudimentary, but do not forget that this thing reached almost mach 3, literally faster than most bullets. The plastic camera cowling melted from the adiabatic stagnation temperature of the shockwave that formed over it. The engineering and fabrication techniques required to keep something in one piece under those conditions are pretty challenging.
With that said, it would be infinitely cooler if it were liquid propellant.
Take a look in your microwave or (high tech) toaster. Through-hole is still cheaper for simple things, and finds a lot of use in cheap consumer products.
Re:Let's not forget JIR and Fortean Society
on
2011 Ig Nobel Prizes
·
· Score: 2
Don't forget the Journal of Universal Rejection:
http://www.universalrejection.org/
I submitted an excellent paper to them, but they didn't publish it.
I consider myself lucky to have a grandfathered Verizon unlimited data plan, which is now renewed for another 2 years since I got a Droid Bionic last week. Can they still cap me if I use loads? Yes, but they can't charge me more and I'll start anew the next month.
Now I get it! I was so confused about why, when at my new condo, my phone often thinks I'm near my old house. WTF, Google. There needs to be some more rapid means of updating this. It's been almost a year.
I flew on Air Canada a few weeks ago and they had USB ports for charging integrated into the seatback touchscreen displays. When I plugged my phone (HTC Incredible running CM7 nightlies) into it with a USB data cable, it indicated a valid data connection to a host controller! I was surprised and thought the seatback device probably contained a small PC to handle the interactive display. I tried to poke around on the host device to see what I could find, but didn't get anywhere with it. For some reason it didn't even occur to me that the "poking around" could be going the other way. If someone could compromise those seatback devices, the phone contents of thousands of passengers could be automatically collected...
I suppose a brown dwarf might be considered cool in an ironic sense, sort of a reclaiming of both the super-lame color brown and also a traditionally uncool congenital condition. It's the ultimate hipster combination. Especially since all brown dwarfs currently alive to benefit from their new-found ultacoolness were both brown and dwarfy BEFORE IT WAS ULTRACOOL.
Interesting headline. I was trying to figure out how old-school manual construction work would be responsible for tricky power supply problems on Linux machines only.
Plenty of good business decisions are illegal. For example, many international trading companies would be more profitable if they expanded into the lucrative cocaine transportation markets. That doesn't mean they can legally do so just because it increases dividends! If the hacking group in question here is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (yes, there is a list), then giving them money is a federal crime - regardless of the reason for the payment or how much business sense it makes.
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
If you had read all the way to the third sentence, you would have seen:
Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation.
Ohio is part of the US, and the DEA is a US Federal agency.
This is exactly what I said. The warrant based on power usage alone, thus searching a bitcoin miner's house, was in Canada. In the US, other evidence is required in addition to power usage to obtain a warrant. Note that the DEA isn't even obtaining power usage information, nevermind a search warrant, without prior evidence.
The modulation problem can probably be solved with clever use of current technology. Initially at least, the only application for links with this bandwidth would be in aggregated data transmission, accumulating dozens or hundreds of lower bandwidth connections. A clever modulation method would utilize multiple separate electrical modulation signals to control the optical modulation, possibly by using multiple separate modulator elements in the optical path, each operating at a lower modulation rate (but synchronized with the others and phase shifted).
In the long run it will be interesting to see how data transmission technology evolves to accommodate high data rates like this. 500GHz is hardly even an electrical signal, it's almost light-like. Wires don't work at those frequencies; it's waveguide-only territory. It can really only be handled easily as a modulated optical signal. If we are to progress to a point where data rates like these are practical for individual computing devices we will have to switch to all-optical protocols for networking, and probably also for internal data transport within computing devices.
Demodulation of an optical signal with this much modulation bandwidth is pretty much an unsolved problem for now, AFAIK. As with the modulation process, I'd probably try to split it into multiple channels each covering a narrower bandwidth. Unlike the modulation process, I can't think of an obvious way to do that off the top of my head.
It's also worth noting that the professor seems to be contemplating the use of many optical modulators (each at 500GHz), each operating on a different fundamental wavelength to multiply the link bandwidth. Hence the prospect of petabit and exabit data rates from 500GHz modulation.
For every improperly classified document they release, they're releasing thousands of things that should be kept secret.
They aren't competent to do what they are doing, and we're not safe as long as they are making these mistakes.
We're not safe as long as the government is improperly hiding vast amounts of information, either. The most practical solution would be for the government to adopt a trustworthy approach to secrecy and build the public's confidence in their honesty. If the people could reasonably trust that classified information legitimately needed to be kept secret and was not just hiding misdeeds, there would be no need for Wikileaks and no demand for the revelation of any classified documents. Until then, Wikileaks serves a need.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not noticeably radioactive today. The residual radiation from the bombings is below normal background levels. http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa12.html
Um, no. The legal status is not determined by a judge de novo, but instead existed already. The outcome from lawsuit just exposes it, but it was already there, in the statutes, in the precedents, all of which you could look up.
I see you believe in the "natural law" theory. I think it has some merit as a means of describing the philosophical basis of law, but most scholars now agree that's not really how things work. In reality, the law is not a preexisting and inherently complete construct that waits for humans to discover and apply it. "Case law" is so named for a reason: courts do, in fact, make new law when they issue rulings that clarify or modify the existing body of law. This case did so. Prior to this ruling, it was not clear what the result of such a case would be, and by deciding it this way, the judge has created law that answers the questions presented here. This is one of the essential functions of a common law legal system, though it is also one of the more controversial functions in the U.S. due to the inherent overlap between the legislative and judicial branches of our government that results.
IANAL, but IAA law student with 6 weeks until graduation.
The quality and quantity of detailed information we are receiving here is far better than either TMI or Chernobyl, but that's not really a useful comparison. TMI occurred at a time when information spread much more slowly than it does now. Chernobyl also occurred in pre-internet-media days, and within the Soviet Union. In both of those cases, there was also far less technical information available to ANYONE (including the on-site staff) about the state of the reactors, due to a lack of monitoring equipment or the failure thereof. In fact, the lack of real-time technical information was a substantial contributing factor in both of those incidents, and could be said to be the main cause of the TMI incident. Things are different now. If the Japanese merely meet the rate of information release that occurred during the TMI and Chernobyl events, they may still be inexcusably slow and secretive. They have far better monitoring information about the status of the reactors (including the drone video) than anyone did during TMI or Chernobyl, and they have the means to disseminate that information to the world faster and more easily than at those other incidents.
The fact is, they have continuously failed to publicly acknowledge the seriousness of the situation, and their press releases and conferences have consistently been far more optimistic than any third-party analyses of the problem. Bottom line: when workers are receiving potentially fatal radiation doses simply by working in open air outside the buildings at the facility, there is a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM. When helicopters can even attempt to drop water into spent fuel cooling ponds, which are housed inside the primary containment structure and should never be exposed to the open environment, there is a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM. Three Mile Island may have involved a similar degree of core damage, but TMI was strictly a loss-of-coolant incident with a small, controlled release of relatively harmless isotopes. Fukushima is not merely a loss-of-coolant incident, it is already a loss-of-CONTAINMENT accident, which is an entirely different sort of problem. By publicly claiming that the current situation is on par with TMI because the situation in the cores appears similar, the Japanese are being overtly misleading and it's not fooling any of the other informed observers.
Excellent calculations, but based on an almost certainly flawed assumption of 2kW cruising power. 10-20kW is more likely, based on typical electric car requirements. So... you'd need roughly a megawatt of power available for charging. That's the peak draw of a relatively large office building.
Slashdot Mirror
>Another valid reason for preventing unsanctioned OS's to run on the device is to prevent reverse engineering.
That is never a valid reason! Are you serious? Preventing the owner of a device, who paid money for it and has exclusive ownership of it, from reverse engineering it is the exact same unethical behavior that we (geeks) have been battling for the past 15 years on every platform from gaming systems to routers to phones. If I buy it, I damn well better not be paying for technological measures that are intended to prevent me from figuring out how it works and doing what I want with it. Hardware is not licensed. It is sold.
Never claimed to have one [a law degree]. I was a Lawyer, by the way. A bloody good one.
Right. Let me guess: you were a bloody good "Doctor" too, but you never got an MD, DO, DDS, DVM, OD, PhD, EdD, PsyD, PharmD? Give us all a break. Some people on here actually have advanced degrees, and actually are professionals. By all means, contribute your opinion as a lay person - but don't try to finagle your way into ranks you don't belong to. Your lack of legal knowledge clearly indicates that you do not work in the field.
If your office door is locked, that's good enough security for paper documents or locally-stored electronic documents. However, when you store electronic documents on systems that are not under your physical control, the burden is on you to implement technological security sufficient to reasonably avoid compromising confidentiality. An attorney's actions will be subject to much greater scrutiny when he knowingly and intentionally gives confidential information to a third party, relying on some security measure to prevent the third party from accessing it. What kind of filing cabinet lock would be reasonable if you wanted to give the cabinet full of client docs to your neighbor for safekeeping? It better be a good one. The exact extent of the security requirement for electronic documents on third party systems has not been litigated yet, and will undoubtedly vary between states since every bar's interpretation of the model rules is slightly different. A zip file with a password probably doesn't cut it, but any reasonably modern form of encryption probably does. This is a developing issue in the legal community, and one that will probably be much clearer in a few years. It is coming to the forefront though. I went to a CLE panel discussion on it at the ABA annual meeting in August. (IAAL, but not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.)
Ie if a obsticle traveling .75 C is headed directly towards 2 observers also traveling at .75 C towards it. Those 2 observers could be a constant distance apart, and observe the time the obsticle passed each observer, divide by distance between observers and record a speed of 1.5C.
Actually not. The observed speed would be closer to 0.96C. There is no circumstance under which an observer can measure a speed in excess of C compared to any other object. This is the essence of special relativity. Time dilation and length contraction ensure that the observed speed of any object relative to any other object never reaches C.
I don't understand the submitter's (darkjohnson) contempt for balloons, but 120k feet is not that significant for a rocket.
Balloons are slow and low-tech, hence the contempt. As rockets go, this was about as simple as it gets. 1940's technology at best, except for the 1970's propellant formulation. However, do not underestimate the difficulty of getting a small solid-propellant rocket to 120,000 feet. The apparatus may be rudimentary, but do not forget that this thing reached almost mach 3, literally faster than most bullets. The plastic camera cowling melted from the adiabatic stagnation temperature of the shockwave that formed over it. The engineering and fabrication techniques required to keep something in one piece under those conditions are pretty challenging. With that said, it would be infinitely cooler if it were liquid propellant.
Take a look in your microwave or (high tech) toaster. Through-hole is still cheaper for simple things, and finds a lot of use in cheap consumer products.
Don't forget the Journal of Universal Rejection: http://www.universalrejection.org/ I submitted an excellent paper to them, but they didn't publish it.
I consider myself lucky to have a grandfathered Verizon unlimited data plan, which is now renewed for another 2 years since I got a Droid Bionic last week. Can they still cap me if I use loads? Yes, but they can't charge me more and I'll start anew the next month.
Now I get it! I was so confused about why, when at my new condo, my phone often thinks I'm near my old house. WTF, Google. There needs to be some more rapid means of updating this. It's been almost a year.
"or simply rebooted" implies that they rebooted when they were attached to usb, which sounds a bit far fetched tbh.
Many phones will boot when connected to power if they are off to begin with. I think that's what he meant.
I flew on Air Canada a few weeks ago and they had USB ports for charging integrated into the seatback touchscreen displays. When I plugged my phone (HTC Incredible running CM7 nightlies) into it with a USB data cable, it indicated a valid data connection to a host controller! I was surprised and thought the seatback device probably contained a small PC to handle the interactive display. I tried to poke around on the host device to see what I could find, but didn't get anywhere with it. For some reason it didn't even occur to me that the "poking around" could be going the other way. If someone could compromise those seatback devices, the phone contents of thousands of passengers could be automatically collected...
I suppose a brown dwarf might be considered cool in an ironic sense, sort of a reclaiming of both the super-lame color brown and also a traditionally uncool congenital condition. It's the ultimate hipster combination. Especially since all brown dwarfs currently alive to benefit from their new-found ultacoolness were both brown and dwarfy BEFORE IT WAS ULTRACOOL.
Why? Because it gives them money from a non-piracy endeavour...
Such as what? It would certainly give them more money to fun piracy-based endeavors, though.
Interesting headline. I was trying to figure out how old-school manual construction work would be responsible for tricky power supply problems on Linux machines only.
Your high school dork squad members were dating gymnasts and dancers? Well done, sir.
Plenty of good business decisions are illegal. For example, many international trading companies would be more profitable if they expanded into the lucrative cocaine transportation markets. That doesn't mean they can legally do so just because it increases dividends! If the hacking group in question here is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (yes, there is a list), then giving them money is a federal crime - regardless of the reason for the payment or how much business sense it makes.
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
If you had read all the way to the third sentence, you would have seen:
Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation.
Ohio is part of the US, and the DEA is a US Federal agency.
This is exactly what I said. The warrant based on power usage alone, thus searching a bitcoin miner's house, was in Canada. In the US, other evidence is required in addition to power usage to obtain a warrant. Note that the DEA isn't even obtaining power usage information, nevermind a search warrant, without prior evidence.
You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.
The modulation problem can probably be solved with clever use of current technology. Initially at least, the only application for links with this bandwidth would be in aggregated data transmission, accumulating dozens or hundreds of lower bandwidth connections. A clever modulation method would utilize multiple separate electrical modulation signals to control the optical modulation, possibly by using multiple separate modulator elements in the optical path, each operating at a lower modulation rate (but synchronized with the others and phase shifted). In the long run it will be interesting to see how data transmission technology evolves to accommodate high data rates like this. 500GHz is hardly even an electrical signal, it's almost light-like. Wires don't work at those frequencies; it's waveguide-only territory. It can really only be handled easily as a modulated optical signal. If we are to progress to a point where data rates like these are practical for individual computing devices we will have to switch to all-optical protocols for networking, and probably also for internal data transport within computing devices. Demodulation of an optical signal with this much modulation bandwidth is pretty much an unsolved problem for now, AFAIK. As with the modulation process, I'd probably try to split it into multiple channels each covering a narrower bandwidth. Unlike the modulation process, I can't think of an obvious way to do that off the top of my head. It's also worth noting that the professor seems to be contemplating the use of many optical modulators (each at 500GHz), each operating on a different fundamental wavelength to multiply the link bandwidth. Hence the prospect of petabit and exabit data rates from 500GHz modulation.
For every improperly classified document they release, they're releasing thousands of things that should be kept secret.
They aren't competent to do what they are doing, and we're not safe as long as they are making these mistakes.
We're not safe as long as the government is improperly hiding vast amounts of information, either. The most practical solution would be for the government to adopt a trustworthy approach to secrecy and build the public's confidence in their honesty. If the people could reasonably trust that classified information legitimately needed to be kept secret and was not just hiding misdeeds, there would be no need for Wikileaks and no demand for the revelation of any classified documents. Until then, Wikileaks serves a need.
You can't backtrace him.
Maybe they can't, but just wait until they get the CyberPolice on his trail! They can backtrace anyone.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not noticeably radioactive today. The residual radiation from the bombings is below normal background levels.
http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa12.html
Um, no. The legal status is not determined by a judge de novo, but instead existed already. The outcome from lawsuit just exposes it, but it was already there, in the statutes, in the precedents, all of which you could look up.
I see you believe in the "natural law" theory. I think it has some merit as a means of describing the philosophical basis of law, but most scholars now agree that's not really how things work. In reality, the law is not a preexisting and inherently complete construct that waits for humans to discover and apply it. "Case law" is so named for a reason: courts do, in fact, make new law when they issue rulings that clarify or modify the existing body of law. This case did so. Prior to this ruling, it was not clear what the result of such a case would be, and by deciding it this way, the judge has created law that answers the questions presented here. This is one of the essential functions of a common law legal system, though it is also one of the more controversial functions in the U.S. due to the inherent overlap between the legislative and judicial branches of our government that results.
IANAL, but IAA law student with 6 weeks until graduation.
The quality and quantity of detailed information we are receiving here is far better than either TMI or Chernobyl, but that's not really a useful comparison. TMI occurred at a time when information spread much more slowly than it does now. Chernobyl also occurred in pre-internet-media days, and within the Soviet Union. In both of those cases, there was also far less technical information available to ANYONE (including the on-site staff) about the state of the reactors, due to a lack of monitoring equipment or the failure thereof. In fact, the lack of real-time technical information was a substantial contributing factor in both of those incidents, and could be said to be the main cause of the TMI incident. Things are different now. If the Japanese merely meet the rate of information release that occurred during the TMI and Chernobyl events, they may still be inexcusably slow and secretive. They have far better monitoring information about the status of the reactors (including the drone video) than anyone did during TMI or Chernobyl, and they have the means to disseminate that information to the world faster and more easily than at those other incidents.
The fact is, they have continuously failed to publicly acknowledge the seriousness of the situation, and their press releases and conferences have consistently been far more optimistic than any third-party analyses of the problem. Bottom line: when workers are receiving potentially fatal radiation doses simply by working in open air outside the buildings at the facility, there is a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM. When helicopters can even attempt to drop water into spent fuel cooling ponds, which are housed inside the primary containment structure and should never be exposed to the open environment, there is a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM. Three Mile Island may have involved a similar degree of core damage, but TMI was strictly a loss-of-coolant incident with a small, controlled release of relatively harmless isotopes. Fukushima is not merely a loss-of-coolant incident, it is already a loss-of-CONTAINMENT accident, which is an entirely different sort of problem. By publicly claiming that the current situation is on par with TMI because the situation in the cores appears similar, the Japanese are being overtly misleading and it's not fooling any of the other informed observers.
Excellent calculations, but based on an almost certainly flawed assumption of 2kW cruising power. 10-20kW is more likely, based on typical electric car requirements. So... you'd need roughly a megawatt of power available for charging. That's the peak draw of a relatively large office building.