And to pay for this you get help from the state in the form of the central student aid system: Student aid: $250/month ($1600/semeter) Student loan: $500/month ($3000/semeter)
In practice a lot of students also have a parttime job or two, either to get some extra money, or to avoid taking so large student loans. The student loans have low interest rates and are repaid as a percentage of your salary.
Somehow, many students have the illusion that a degree will bring them to the top automagically. It doesn't work that way. Getting a degree is a good step forward... If they work hard in the university and actually learn. Then they will have to start 3 (or 5) years later in the job market, meaning they will lack many important skills no university teaches and therefor earn less. Even if they learn quickly it takes years to catch up (both in attractiveness on the job market and salary) with those that got into the same field without an university education.
This is true in most fields (including Engineering), but especially true in business administration and management.
The true value of the university education comes after a few years, because many companies have internal rules about giving priority to educated workers. Often there is a hard celing on how far you can get without a master, and it's not unusual for people to go back and get a MBA not only because they need the skills, but also because they need the diploma to continue their career. Some companies even pays for those MBA's to their management.
I can't tell what's supposed to be interesting or spectacular about this. It's a standard rootkit with MBR support along with some special hooks for truecrypt. It won't let anybody read an encrypted truecrypt volume unless you enter the password... And if you do enter the password on an owned computer it's not like trucrypt is going to help you anywhere. If you unlock the volume any malware can grab all the data it wants through the usual calls and hooks. It doesn't seem especially advanced compared to many of the rootkits out there.
Nor does he have the right to upload his screener of the Transformers to 15,000 of his closest friends on the P2P nets.
I hate this argument, especially from people on slashdot who supposedely should know better. It's the same kind of broken logic that is used to motivate huge fines. Each user in a p2p network will (on average) upload the same amount of data as he or she downloads. That's because a p2p system doesn't magically create or destroy bytes. So if you want to put a monetary value on the actions of a p2p user you will find that the actual damage is something along the line of the value of the software he has downloaded. The participation in the p2p net does not significantly increate the damage he can do. It doesn't matter if it's 2 members in the net or 15000.
I am not sure what you are trying to point out here.
Self-liquidating debt is good. Can you explain how much, if any, of the $2 trillion planned deficit for this year is self liquidating?
Of course some of the money goes to economic dead-ends, like driving around in tanks in Iraq. But investments in eduction, social security and infrastructure is not money thrown down the toilet. The government can also repay debt through increasing the money supply. It's different from when a bank lends out money.
If you add up ALL debt (government, personal and corporate) the picture is much worse [market-ticker.org].
But why? The three are different animals in many ways. Corporate debt (also known as leverage) is a sign that corporations are minimizing invested funds to maximize productivity. There are signs it is declining slowly. Personal debt is more troublesome, but it's also seems to be dropping more quickly. Are you trying to say that we should have a big "lets repay everybody we owe money" party?
The government can make up for the decreasing total debt, preventing a quick deflation spiral that would otherwise happen due to the fractional reserve banking system and that a lot of debt is held abroad. Once again, a recession is not when you want to start repaying your debts.
Without the loans we would have had an economic meltdown. So the loans saved us for the moment. If they will save us in the long run, and what the total losses will be on the loan is not yet clear. But what is pretty much clear is that the loans were needed and prevented several major American institutions from going into bankruptcy due to liquidity and trust issues. And some of them are already paying back the money.
That graph is showing just a very small part of the picture. PCE is closely related to inflation (it's often used to predict inflation). So what you can read out of the graph is that we can expect deflation, which is bad but not a disaster, unless the US get caught like Japan was during the lost decade.
You will have to put it in perspective by also showing the graphs for income and savings (which are closely related). When you are looking at all three you will see that Americans are not earning much less. Instead Americans are spending their money on repaying debts, which can be considered healthy after the last few decades of borrowing.
What you want in this situation is that the government should make up for the increased saving by increasing spending. This is the time when bailout money will do the most good. The economy is slowing down quickly, which means that there is a lot of resources to be had for a limited cost, which will let the government buy more than normally. American workers have not suddenly stopped being able to work just because there is nobody who wants to risk the cost of hiring them. Preferably the stimulus money should be invested in things like infrastructure that will serve the US in the future. Tax cuts are not nearly as efficient (as they will simply be used to repay debt).
Be very vary of people who claims that the stimuli has failed. It takes time to work, and the current stimuli package is way too small for the American economy. Obama will have to get a lot more money into the system if the economy is not to go through a sharp slowdown.
A government as large as the US does not play by the same economic rules as a family or a company. Debt is not always a bad thing. In the long run it's obviously a good thing to pay off national debt, but in the short run it's the worst thing the US can do. To have an idea of how the combination of personal and government debt developed you can have a look at
What is hurting here is not the large spending the last couple of months... But the long term deficits during 74-97 and 01-07. Running deficit when the economy is doing alright is a bad thing. But the current debt is still considerably lower than the debt was after the Second World War.
The bailout loans (considerable parts of it is being repaid this month) saved us from a complete system crash. They were needed, but GD 2.0 will indeed be worse, if the banking industry is not more closely regulated. The major problem has been the lack of regulation along with a creative handling of risk
Sadly the size of the banks actually has very little effect on the stability of the system. Even if there were no large banks the same amount of bad loans would have wrecked havoc, possibly even harder to handle. Having 100 small 1 billion banks fail is much worse than 1 large 100 billion bank. You get a domino effect where the failure of a few bad bank destroys the less bad banks... And the destruction of the less bad banks causes failure for good banks. And saving one large bank is much easier than 100 small banks.
Cap and Tax is a very good idea. The major issue with emissions is that it's a tragedy of the commons game on a global scale. And there are really only two ways to try to handle the problem if you want to see a real change in the emissions, as there are strong economic reasons to increase them:
1: You create specific laws, limiting specific types of emissions. Typical example is a maximum emission limit on cars or making SUV's illegal.
2: You place a tax on emissions themselves, then let the market sort out where it makes most economic sense to limit the emissions. If your car emits 3 times as much as other cars you get to pay for it, but the government doesn't tell you you can't own the car.
For some reason there seems to be a strong resistance against letting the market sort out where to save the money. I guess it's because it's more visible than having the car producers spend more money engineering how the car works. And just spewing out the waste is always going to be more expensive than limiting it to sane levels or even taking care of it.
I wonder how many here consider it a good idea to dump As, Pb and Hg in the local rivers to enhance the industrial productivity... After all, not having to take care of heavy metals is one of the large advantages the Chinese industry (traditionally) has over the American. And it saves them billions each year...
Actually SSN are intended to provide identification when dealing with Social Security Administration. That's exactly what it's supposed to do.
Perhaps you wanted to say that SSN were never intended to provide Authorization or Authentication. Which is the major issue with how SSN are used.
Identification is not the same Authentication or Authorization. This is a very common mistake when designing security systems. Anybody can provide an Identification (for example in the form of an SSN), but you need Authentication to prove that this person is bound to the Identity and Authorization to prove that he is allowed to act with the Identity.
Note that this goes the other way around also. You can't let people provide Authentication without first providing Identification or you will leave yourself open to attacks.
Which is more or less exactly what the US government is doing with smaller banks. They take over, give them the resources needed and then shuts the banks down.
I don't think you understand the term "systematic danger". Lets do it in computer science speak:
You have a run away critical process somewhere in your critical system. It is eating memory like mad. It will take down the whole system when you run out of memory. Do you
1: Try to expand the memory for it, even at the cost of less critical applications, while you sort out the problem.
2: Do nothing and wait for the whole thing to come crashing down.
3: Begin looking for who ever wrote the crap to take away his bonus for successfully completing the project last year.
Basicly, letting AIG fail would not just crash the American economy. It would crash the world economy. As in NO MONEY IN THE ATM crash. As in NO FUEL FOR YOUR CAR crash. It might cost billions, but the alternative is far worse. Think Zimbawe. They have been allowed to grow too large to fail, and there is no way out of it except to keep them alive until they can be split up and sold.
What you should be asking is why the Republican party is still against nationalization of banks... Because currently, the taxpayers get to enjoy all the risk, while the owners of the banks gets the profits. And that is not a matter of a few million dollars to the executives. That's a matter of many billions. Being too large to fail is very very profitable.
Look at the Swedish bank crash of 1992. Notice that the Swedish taxpayers actually came out of it with a profit, after nationalizing several failing banks. But that is not what the US is doing. While you are busy arguing about a few millions billions are being pulled from under you.
First of all, the majority of what you are looking for is already implemented in hardware if you have a look at commercial grade equipment. We use eLOM systems (SUN is surprisingly good at this) that lets us reboot servers, change settings and start up a simple remote console. HTTP based and very low bandwidth for normal management. SUN servers are not cheap, but they work.
Any sort of graphical interface will be terrible over satelite links, due to the combination of low bandwidth and high latency. As far as possible I would recommend going the CLI route. But I am pretty sure you knew that already.
By using correctly set watchdogs you can avoid most of the "I need to get there and reboot" issues. I have no idea how well watchdogs works under windows, but I assume it's not a major issue.
If you must live on a software only solution consider placing a virtualization layer such as VMware ESX(i) under the operating system to allow you some management once the OS goes to hell. That way you can reinstall the system remotely or store a fallback copy allowing you to boot up a clean OS.
Well, I would suggest you take a basic course in network design. Peer to Peer is not just a hack. It's the fundamental principle of how Internet is designed.
Internet architecture is built on the principle that all nodes are created equal and should be able to communicate. There are no specific addresses for producers of content and consumer of content... Unlike for example TV. All traffic on the Internet should, according to the original design, be peer to peer.
If you look at the capacity for each potential user Internet has a huge lot of capacity out in the edges of the network and very little capacity in the core. What you want to do, with all traffic, is to move it out to the edges. Peer to Peer protocols takes advantage of this. Yes, you create more traffic on your local link when you download that 100mbit file. But as long as the protocol you are using is reasonably optimized (like, for example, Bittorrent) you will get a majority of the data from nodes that are close to you in the network. Which means that the total distance*data is going to be less than from a major server in a server farm... Unless that server farm happen to be very close to you.
In addition, the global amount of data transfered is only going to be marginally higher (protocol overhead) than the data transfered from a central point, for the same number of downloads.
I have no idea why you are talking about connections. Internet is to a large degree stateless, so connections doesn't matter at all.
Security of peer to peer networks is an interesting subject. The fact that they lack a central authority makes it harder. But is really web of trust worse than a certificate chain? In one case you are trusting a number of other users to verify an identity. In the other case you are trusting a CA, which might have a process involving little more than filling out a form. A central authority is in no way a guarantee for security.
I have been working in a navy (not the US) one, and I have on my own seen the wonderfull effect of a worm infected laptop being used to update onboard chart systems and download tracking data. The end result was that the computerized system decided to have a blue screen of death when we were in the middle of a rescue operation. Which is a point when you are very happy to have paper charts as a fall back.
Frankly, on most naval ship you have physical overrides to the electric systems. And computers are simply not needed to control the vital systems. Not to mention the fact that the enviroment, with bad electicity, shaking, salty air, salt water and often lots of temperature changes is rough on the hardware.
In the merchant navy the situation is very different, as they have much smaller crews and uses computer systems and networks to control the ships. There one less crew member on watch is a huge saving in costs, so they are using many of these systems, often running windows as the people who are using it are not exactly well trained on computers.
If you have problems with taking video or photographs in fluorescent lightning you need to learn how to handle white balance. As long as you are not using film that is too fast for the light it's not a problem. However, take a 60 Hz lamp, set your camera at 1/4000 and take a few fotographs and you are going to get some very interesting effects.
The problem you will end up with using certificates is the same problem as you have on the net. You don't know what the code you are running will do. There are three ways to solve this:
1: Microsoft has to certify all code. This is slow, expensive and still things might slip through. And it give microsoft a kind of controll over the software you are running that you probably don't want.
2: Anybody can sign code Hello, here is the OmegaDriverV3.2. Please install. You end up in a situation where you might be able to verify who has signed the code (Through the usual chain of trust/web of trust, if you trust it...), but has no idea what the code will do.
3: Anybody can sign code, but the code has to follow a security policy that the user accepts This would be a good idea, however, it's only implementable if the code runs in a sandbox today. It can not be done (today) on kernel level code for preformance and complexity reasons.
I heard a lecture by an American professor researching this kind of systems about a year back. It was interesting, but I don't remember all the details. Here is what I remember from the lecture.
He got defence grants (DARPA?), but was rather open with what they were doing and what they could do. He was using MRI and CT and tried to figure out what people were thinking of. His goal was to construct a lie detector. He used neural networks that were trained information about activity in different parts of the brain. He had to retrain the networks for each test subject, but were developing more general networks.
He had bad resolution in both time and space (In time he couldn't measure things shorter than around 10 seconds). The MRI could give continuous information while the CT was more of a one shot deal due to the radioactive isotopes used.
He could tell if people were thinking about various things. He could tell the difference between somebody thinking of a saw, a house and a hammer. He could not tell the difference between a hammer and a sledge.
He could not tell the difference between somebody thinking of a man and a woman. But he could tell the difference in some cases between people thinking of grownups and children.
He could tell the difference between somebody thinking of different classes of words (substantives, verbs etc).
He had barely begun with lies, but mentioned that it was an exceptionally hard area to do research on. Back then there was more or less no research in the area. Just the problem with finding somebody that lies in the proper way while in the MRI machine was quite clearly a hard problem, not to mention checking when he was lying.
My first suggestion would be OpenTTD. It has been my way to introduce many players to strategy games and seems to be quite popular. It's not hard to learn, and very easy to set up cooperatively. It can be found at http://www.openttd.org/
Several of these, especially the later few have some very interesting security implications. Normal USB disks are usually so large that they are possible to locate when searching a home, but trying to locate something like the iDisk in a normal family home would be close to impossible.
So, a person who wants to hide data now has another tool to make discovery even more complicated, and unlike previous methods to store huge amounts of data in compressed form (such as microfilm) this one doesn't require any special equipment. I wonder how the police, or corporate security, are countering this. I have worked at places where USB sticks were banned for security reasons, but sneaking these tiny things past wouldn't be hard.
The government wants you to be safe. It's treason not to be safe. Traitors are shot on sight. Are you safe, citizen? The government obviously needs more trouble-shooters.
(I guess I should be happy not to live in a country slowly creeping closer to becoming alpha complex. Freedom is worth more than safety. We will all die eventually, but not all of us will die free.)
> Creativity is the engine that drives progress. Greed is the engine that drives business. Is it any wonder that the greedy are trying to exploit the creative.
And creative greed is the engine that makes people rich?
I have to disagree. Not everybody can be expected to know everything about computers. Even here at/. it should be clear that a computer is a tool without any purpose of it's own.
As a matter of fact, why can a rouge program waste the system? Why do we/have/ to trust more or less everything we run to be able to run it. Yes, you can run windows as user, but that breaks a huge lot of applications that assume that you are Administrator. The issues about user compromise remain also.
If Microsoft was serious about security they would create a security model with hard walls between each program, the system and the system resources. How many programs have to write outside a temp area and the documents it's working on? How many programs need to read any file on the hard disk? Why does the OS allow any program to write to any file the user has write access to?
Why can any program change the system settings? Come on, how many programs beyond installers really need to add objects to the start-up entries in the registry? Or change your homepage? Or anything else outside it's own little part of the registry?
If they had written a system where outlook.exe (and child processes) could not read/write outside a temp folder (with no execution access) and the mail storage directory a virus/worm/malware would have very little impact, especially if it could not access any system devices such as the network.
If you want to act and not react to the threats you have to build a system where all code is assumed to be evil and rights is only granted to code on a need-to basis, and as minimal rights as possible. Creating an ACL with system rights would not be very hard. However, this would break a lot of legacy code, something Microsoft has been very careful about in the past to avoid protests over the upgrade cycles. They have been unusually effective in getting users to move to new systems due to this and therefore able to drop support for old code.
Exactly the same security issue applies to Linux. Why can any rough program I run with standard settings wipe out my home directory? The thing saving Linux is that most (sane) users don't run weird code as root, as most code can run with user privileges. Still, in a system designed for security code should not have such privileges.
Once upon the time you could trust any user to have access to anything. When the problems became rampant access control systems were created. Once you could trust code that ran in your name. I predict that a security model that gives code more limited access will come. A sort of sandbox for each program that runs. For, seriously, how many program have to be able to wipe your home directory clean? Is it not easier to tell which are allowed to do it than to tell which are not?
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As one that has been through the swedish university system. The budget for a month looks something like this:
Housing: $250
Food: $150
Transport: $50
Books etc: $50
Other stuff: $150
And to pay for this you get help from the state in the form of the central student aid system:
Student aid: $250/month ($1600/semeter)
Student loan: $500/month ($3000/semeter)
In practice a lot of students also have a parttime job or two, either to get some extra money, or to avoid taking so large student loans. The student loans have low interest rates and are repaid as a percentage of your salary.
Somehow, many students have the illusion that a degree will bring them to the top automagically. It doesn't work that way. Getting a degree is a good step forward... If they work hard in the university and actually learn. Then they will have to start 3 (or 5) years later in the job market, meaning they will lack many important skills no university teaches and therefor earn less. Even if they learn quickly it takes years to catch up (both in attractiveness on the job market and salary) with those that got into the same field without an university education.
This is true in most fields (including Engineering), but especially true in business administration and management.
The true value of the university education comes after a few years, because many companies have internal rules about giving priority to educated workers. Often there is a hard celing on how far you can get without a master, and it's not unusual for people to go back and get a MBA not only because they need the skills, but also because they need the diploma to continue their career. Some companies even pays for those MBA's to their management.
I can't tell what's supposed to be interesting or spectacular about this. It's a standard rootkit with MBR support along with some special hooks for truecrypt. It won't let anybody read an encrypted truecrypt volume unless you enter the password... And if you do enter the password on an owned computer it's not like trucrypt is going to help you anywhere. If you unlock the volume any malware can grab all the data it wants through the usual calls and hooks. It doesn't seem especially advanced compared to many of the rootkits out there.
Nor does he have the right to upload his screener of the Transformers to 15,000 of his closest friends on the P2P nets.
I hate this argument, especially from people on slashdot who supposedely should know better. It's the same kind of broken logic that is used to motivate huge fines. Each user in a p2p network will (on average) upload the same amount of data as he or she downloads. That's because a p2p system doesn't magically create or destroy bytes. So if you want to put a monetary value on the actions of a p2p user you will find that the actual damage is something along the line of the value of the software he has downloaded. The participation in the p2p net does not significantly increate the damage he can do. It doesn't matter if it's 2 members in the net or 15000.
I guess we simply disagree on if the risk of additional debt is worth the chance of starving off a greater economical downturn.
We will see what happens
I'm sorry, but no matter who you are 2+2=4
I am not sure what you are trying to point out here.
Self-liquidating debt is good. Can you explain how much, if any, of the $2 trillion planned deficit for this year is self liquidating?
Of course some of the money goes to economic dead-ends, like driving around in tanks in Iraq. But investments in eduction, social security and infrastructure is not money thrown down the toilet. The government can also repay debt through increasing the money supply. It's different from when a bank lends out money.
If you add up ALL debt (government, personal and corporate) the picture is much worse [market-ticker.org].
But why? The three are different animals in many ways. Corporate debt (also known as leverage) is a sign that corporations are minimizing invested funds to maximize productivity. There are signs it is declining slowly. Personal debt is more troublesome, but it's also seems to be dropping more quickly. Are you trying to say that we should have a big "lets repay everybody we owe money" party?
The government can make up for the decreasing total debt, preventing a quick deflation spiral that would otherwise happen due to the fractional reserve banking system and that a lot of debt is held abroad. Once again, a recession is not when you want to start repaying your debts.
Without the loans we would have had an economic meltdown. So the loans saved us for the moment. If they will save us in the long run, and what the total losses will be on the loan is not yet clear. But what is pretty much clear is that the loans were needed and prevented several major American institutions from going into bankruptcy due to liquidity and trust issues. And some of them are already paying back the money.
That graph is showing just a very small part of the picture. PCE is closely related to inflation (it's often used to predict inflation). So what you can read out of the graph is that we can expect deflation, which is bad but not a disaster, unless the US get caught like Japan was during the lost decade.
You will have to put it in perspective by also showing the graphs for income and savings (which are closely related). When you are looking at all three you will see that Americans are not earning much less. Instead Americans are spending their money on repaying debts, which can be considered healthy after the last few decades of borrowing.
What you want in this situation is that the government should make up for the increased saving by increasing spending. This is the time when bailout money will do the most good. The economy is slowing down quickly, which means that there is a lot of resources to be had for a limited cost, which will let the government buy more than normally. American workers have not suddenly stopped being able to work just because there is nobody who wants to risk the cost of hiring them. Preferably the stimulus money should be invested in things like infrastructure that will serve the US in the future. Tax cuts are not nearly as efficient (as they will simply be used to repay debt).
Be very vary of people who claims that the stimuli has failed. It takes time to work, and the current stimuli package is way too small for the American economy. Obama will have to get a lot more money into the system if the economy is not to go through a sharp slowdown.
A government as large as the US does not play by the same economic rules as a family or a company. Debt is not always a bad thing. In the long run it's obviously a good thing to pay off national debt, but in the short run it's the worst thing the US can do. To have an idea of how the combination of personal and government debt developed you can have a look at
http://blogs.cfr.org/geographics/2009/06/12/offsetting-borrowing/
What is hurting here is not the large spending the last couple of months... But the long term deficits during 74-97 and 01-07. Running deficit when the economy is doing alright is a bad thing. But the current debt is still considerably lower than the debt was after the Second World War.
Not quite true.
The bailout loans (considerable parts of it is being repaid this month) saved us from a complete system crash. They were needed, but GD 2.0 will indeed be worse, if the banking industry is not more closely regulated. The major problem has been the lack of regulation along with a creative handling of risk
Sadly the size of the banks actually has very little effect on the stability of the system. Even if there were no large banks the same amount of bad loans would have wrecked havoc, possibly even harder to handle. Having 100 small 1 billion banks fail is much worse than 1 large 100 billion bank. You get a domino effect where the failure of a few bad bank destroys the less bad banks... And the destruction of the less bad banks causes failure for good banks. And saving one large bank is much easier than 100 small banks.
Cap and Tax is a very good idea. The major issue with emissions is that it's a tragedy of the commons game on a global scale. And there are really only two ways to try to handle the problem if you want to see a real change in the emissions, as there are strong economic reasons to increase them:
1: You create specific laws, limiting specific types of emissions. Typical example is a maximum emission limit on cars or making SUV's illegal.
2: You place a tax on emissions themselves, then let the market sort out where it makes most economic sense to limit the emissions. If your car emits 3 times as much as other cars you get to pay for it, but the government doesn't tell you you can't own the car.
For some reason there seems to be a strong resistance against letting the market sort out where to save the money. I guess it's because it's more visible than having the car producers spend more money engineering how the car works. And just spewing out the waste is always going to be more expensive than limiting it to sane levels or even taking care of it.
I wonder how many here consider it a good idea to dump As, Pb and Hg in the local rivers to enhance the industrial productivity... After all, not having to take care of heavy metals is one of the large advantages the Chinese industry (traditionally) has over the American. And it saves them billions each year...
Actually SSN are intended to provide identification when dealing with Social Security Administration. That's exactly what it's supposed to do.
Perhaps you wanted to say that SSN were never intended to provide Authorization or Authentication. Which is the major issue with how SSN are used.
Identification is not the same Authentication or Authorization. This is a very common mistake when designing security systems. Anybody can provide an Identification (for example in the form of an SSN), but you need Authentication to prove that this person is bound to the Identity and Authorization to prove that he is allowed to act with the Identity.
Note that this goes the other way around also. You can't let people provide Authentication without first providing Identification or you will leave yourself open to attacks.
{ref:Ross Anderson: Security Engineering}
Which is more or less exactly what the US government is doing with smaller banks. They take over, give them the resources needed and then shuts the banks down.
I don't think you understand the term "systematic danger". Lets do it in computer science speak:
You have a run away critical process somewhere in your critical system. It is eating memory like mad. It will take down the whole system when you run out of memory. Do you
1: Try to expand the memory for it, even at the cost of less critical applications, while you sort out the problem.
2: Do nothing and wait for the whole thing to come crashing down.
3: Begin looking for who ever wrote the crap to take away his bonus for successfully completing the project last year.
Basicly, letting AIG fail would not just crash the American economy. It would crash the world economy. As in NO MONEY IN THE ATM crash. As in NO FUEL FOR YOUR CAR crash. It might cost billions, but the alternative is far worse. Think Zimbawe. They have been allowed to grow too large to fail, and there is no way out of it except to keep them alive until they can be split up and sold.
What you should be asking is why the Republican party is still against nationalization of banks... Because currently, the taxpayers get to enjoy all the risk, while the owners of the banks gets the profits. And that is not a matter of a few million dollars to the executives. That's a matter of many billions. Being too large to fail is very very profitable.
Look at the Swedish bank crash of 1992. Notice that the Swedish taxpayers actually came out of it with a profit, after nationalizing several failing banks. But that is not what the US is doing. While you are busy arguing about a few millions billions are being pulled from under you.
Please stop being a sheep.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators are nothing new. And they have the same problem as all small "safe" nuclear power generators.
They are full of highly radioactive material.
Even if the stuff can't go boom on it's own they make a perfectly good dirty bomb, if introduced to some simple explosives.
Not to mention that they can and do leak.
The Russians have many Radioisotope thermoelectric generator along their northern coast. And they get lost, leak and are generally a safety hazard.
First of all, the majority of what you are looking for is already implemented in hardware if you have a look at commercial grade equipment. We use eLOM systems (SUN is surprisingly good at this) that lets us reboot servers, change settings and start up a simple remote console. HTTP based and very low bandwidth for normal management. SUN servers are not cheap, but they work.
Any sort of graphical interface will be terrible over satelite links, due to the combination of low bandwidth and high latency. As far as possible I would recommend going the CLI route. But I am pretty sure you knew that already.
By using correctly set watchdogs you can avoid most of the "I need to get there and reboot" issues. I have no idea how well watchdogs works under windows, but I assume it's not a major issue.
If you must live on a software only solution consider placing a virtualization layer such as VMware ESX(i) under the operating system to allow you some management once the OS goes to hell. That way you can reinstall the system remotely or store a fallback copy allowing you to boot up a clean OS.
Time to feed the troll.
Well, I would suggest you take a basic course in network design. Peer to Peer is not just a hack. It's the fundamental principle of how Internet is designed.
Internet architecture is built on the principle that all nodes are created equal and should be able to communicate. There are no specific addresses for producers of content and consumer of content... Unlike for example TV. All traffic on the Internet should, according to the original design, be peer to peer.
If you look at the capacity for each potential user Internet has a huge lot of capacity out in the edges of the network and very little capacity in the core. What you want to do, with all traffic, is to move it out to the edges. Peer to Peer protocols takes advantage of this. Yes, you create more traffic on your local link when you download that 100mbit file. But as long as the protocol you are using is reasonably optimized (like, for example, Bittorrent) you will get a majority of the data from nodes that are close to you in the network. Which means that the total distance*data is going to be less than from a major server in a server farm... Unless that server farm happen to be very close to you.
In addition, the global amount of data transfered is only going to be marginally higher (protocol overhead) than the data transfered from a central point, for the same number of downloads.
I have no idea why you are talking about connections. Internet is to a large degree stateless, so connections doesn't matter at all.
Security of peer to peer networks is an interesting subject. The fact that they lack a central authority makes it harder. But is really web of trust worse than a certificate chain? In one case you are trusting a number of other users to verify an identity. In the other case you are trusting a CA, which might have a process involving little more than filling out a form. A central authority is in no way a guarantee for security.
You forgot one alternative:
-Blame the US for starting this development.
Frankly, if it wasn't for the current US goverment and their unhealthy obsession with terror we would not have this development in Europe.
I have been working in a navy (not the US) one, and I have on my own seen the wonderfull effect of a worm infected laptop being used to update onboard chart systems and download tracking data. The end result was that the computerized system decided to have a blue screen of death when we were in the middle of a rescue operation. Which is a point when you are very happy to have paper charts as a fall back.
Frankly, on most naval ship you have physical overrides to the electric systems. And computers are simply not needed to control the vital systems. Not to mention the fact that the enviroment, with bad electicity, shaking, salty air, salt water and often lots of temperature changes is rough on the hardware.
In the merchant navy the situation is very different, as they have much smaller crews and uses computer systems and networks to control the ships. There one less crew member on watch is a huge saving in costs, so they are using many of these systems, often running windows as the people who are using it are not exactly well trained on computers.
If you have problems with taking video or photographs in fluorescent lightning you need to learn how to handle white balance. As long as you are not using film that is too fast for the light it's not a problem. However, take a 60 Hz lamp, set your camera at 1/4000 and take a few fotographs and you are going to get some very interesting effects.
The problem you will end up with using certificates is the same problem as you have on the net. You don't know what the code you are running will do. There are three ways to solve this:
1: Microsoft has to certify all code.
This is slow, expensive and still things might slip through. And it give microsoft a kind of controll over the software you are running that you probably don't want.
2: Anybody can sign code
Hello, here is the OmegaDriverV3.2. Please install. You end up in a situation where you might be able to verify who has signed the code (Through the usual chain of trust/web of trust, if you trust it...), but has no idea what the code will do.
3: Anybody can sign code, but the code has to follow a security policy that the user accepts
This would be a good idea, however, it's only implementable if the code runs in a sandbox today. It can not be done (today) on kernel level code for preformance and complexity reasons.
I heard a lecture by an American professor researching this kind of systems about a year back. It was interesting, but I don't remember all the details. Here is what I remember from the lecture.
He got defence grants (DARPA?), but was rather open with what they were doing and what they could do. He was using MRI and CT and tried to figure out what people were thinking of. His goal was to construct a lie detector. He used neural networks that were trained information about activity in different parts of the brain. He had to retrain the networks for each test subject, but were developing more general networks.
He had bad resolution in both time and space (In time he couldn't measure things shorter than around 10 seconds). The MRI could give continuous information while the CT was more of a one shot deal due to the radioactive isotopes used.
He could tell if people were thinking about various things. He could tell the difference between somebody thinking of a saw, a house and a hammer. He could not tell the difference between a hammer and a sledge.
He could not tell the difference between somebody thinking of a man and a woman. But he could tell the difference in some cases between people thinking of grownups and children.
He could tell the difference between somebody thinking of different classes of words (substantives, verbs etc).
He had barely begun with lies, but mentioned that it was an exceptionally hard area to do research on. Back then there was more or less no research in the area. Just the problem with finding somebody that lies in the proper way while in the MRI machine was quite clearly a hard problem, not to mention checking when he was lying.
My first suggestion would be OpenTTD. It has been my way to introduce many players to strategy games and seems to be quite popular. It's not hard to learn, and very easy to set up cooperatively. It can be found at http://www.openttd.org/
Several of these, especially the later few have some very interesting security implications. Normal USB disks are usually so large that they are possible to locate when searching a home, but trying to locate something like the iDisk in a normal family home would be close to impossible.
So, a person who wants to hide data now has another tool to make discovery even more complicated, and unlike previous methods to store huge amounts of data in compressed form (such as microfilm) this one doesn't require any special equipment. I wonder how the police, or corporate security, are countering this. I have worked at places where USB sticks were banned for security reasons, but sneaking these tiny things past wouldn't be hard.
The government wants you to be safe.
It's treason not to be safe.
Traitors are shot on sight.
Are you safe, citizen?
The government obviously needs more trouble-shooters.
(I guess I should be happy not to live in a country slowly creeping closer to becoming alpha complex. Freedom is worth more than safety. We will all die eventually, but not all of us will die free.)
> Creativity is the engine that drives progress. Greed is the engine that drives business. Is it any wonder that the greedy are trying to exploit the creative.
And creative greed is the engine that makes people rich?
I have to disagree. Not everybody can be expected to know everything about computers. Even here at /. it should be clear that a computer is a tool without any purpose of it's own.
/have/ to trust more or less everything we run to be able to run it. Yes, you can run windows as user, but that breaks a huge lot of applications that assume that you are Administrator. The issues about user compromise remain also.
As a matter of fact, why can a rouge program waste the system? Why do we
If Microsoft was serious about security they would create a security model with hard walls between each program, the system and the system resources. How many programs have to write outside a temp area and the documents it's working on? How many programs need to read any file on the hard disk? Why does the OS allow any program to write to any file the user has write access to?
Why can any program change the system settings? Come on, how many programs beyond installers really need to add objects to the start-up entries in the registry? Or change your homepage? Or anything else outside it's own little part of the registry?
If they had written a system where outlook.exe (and child processes) could not read/write outside a temp folder (with no execution access) and the mail storage directory a virus/worm/malware would have very little impact, especially if it could not access any system devices such as the network.
If you want to act and not react to the threats you have to build a system where all code is assumed to be evil and rights is only granted to code on a need-to basis, and as minimal rights as possible. Creating an ACL with system rights would not be very hard. However, this would break a lot of legacy code, something Microsoft has been very careful about in the past to avoid protests over the upgrade cycles. They have been unusually effective in getting users to move to new systems due to this and therefore able to drop support for old code.
Exactly the same security issue applies to Linux. Why can any rough program I run with standard settings wipe out my home directory? The thing saving Linux is that most (sane) users don't run weird code as root, as most code can run with user privileges. Still, in a system designed for security code should not have such privileges.
Once upon the time you could trust any user to have access to anything. When the problems became rampant access control systems were created. Once you could trust code that ran in your name. I predict that a security model that gives code more limited access will come. A sort of sandbox for each program that runs. For, seriously, how many program have to be able to wipe your home directory clean? Is it not easier to tell which are allowed to do it than to tell which are not?