Reuters reports that the real news coming out of this conference is the I/S/T consortium's Cell microprocessor is ready to hit the market. The Cell will be what powers the Playstation 3.
The idea goes basically like this, AFAIK, and I apologize if you already know most of this:
The Big Three do not distinguish between you asking for your credit report and anyone else asking for it (please note, I do not mean this in a privacy sense, only in an actuarial sense). They keep track of how many times a credit report on you is requested. As you may know, some of these are legitimate and some are less so -- but it's not really up to the Big Three (Experian, Equifax, Trans Union) to decide what's a legit request and what's not -- they just process the requests. Reports are requested for virtually every major financial transaction you engage in, including rent, mortgage, credit cards, department store cards, opening a bank account, etc. Ultimately, the theory goes, it's your credit, so it's your responsibility to maintain it.
Credit ratings are based on actuarial tables (just like insurance policy rates). There's a whole industry based on creating formulas and algorithms designed to determine within a certain statistical variation how likely you are to be a good credit risk (ie, pay back the loan with interest) or a bad credit risk (ie, default on the loan). Some of the determining factors for these are income, age, residence, length of current job, whether you rent or own a home, etc. In short, they're trying to figure out how stable you are.
If you apply for a lot of credit cards, though, that's a very, very major red flag -- short of bankruptcy, it's probably the biggest red flag they have. That implies that (a) you're trying to live way beyond your means through credit, (b) you're trying to pay off almost-defaulted credit cards with other credit card loans, or (c) everyone keeps turning you down for loans. Any or all of those are Very Bad Things for a legitimate credit agency, and as chum is to sharks for credit scam artists.
All of which says that you requesting a credit report on yourself several times a year can start to push you into higher risk categories, since they don't really distinguish between you asking and someone else. In addition, there may well be an actuarial calculation that says that people who request their report constantly are bad credit risks, because they have some need to do so (as opposed to being mildly paranoid and/or financially sound).
I would hope that any legislation calls upon the actuaries to change their rating tables so that personal credit requests are eliminated from consideration, but AFAIK that's not Congress's bailiwick. Since the tables are all determined by private industry consortiums, I don't think Congress can actually mandate a change in them -- but I could be wrong about that.
True, polygraphs are inadmissable as evidence in a court of law. But that's not the main point.
As anyone who works for a defense contractor or secure government facility can tell you, polys are the ONLY way you can get to levels of clearance above Top Secret (TS). In fact, there's TS, and there's TS-Poly above that, and then there's all the ones we can't tell you about above them.
The fact is, people beat polys and get into extremely high levels of clearance. I personally know people who have (mostly on the drug use questions). Now, these folks are my friends, and generally good people, so I don't really have a problem with them per se -- but claiming that polys are indestructible perpetuates the mindset of the higherups that polys don't lie. I'm not saying that the GAO and DOD don't perform good background checks -- they do -- but using polys as a check of last resort leaves a fairly large hole in our nation's security net.
Would you really want a bright young programmer to get a job in No Such Agency or DIA while having claimed his father was from Kuwait instead of Yemen, all on the strength of having beaten a polygraph?
Not only are BetaMax and BetaCam different, but BetaCam itself has undergone several changes since the late '70s when it was introduced. (Yes, there was an Alpha system as well, but AFAIK, it never left the R&D stage).
However, BetaCam has now run its useful life and almost nobody purchases new BetaCam systems anymore, preferring to go with either a digital tape-based system, or, increasingly, solid-state or disk-based systems.
The basic problem for media formats is that Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic) are like Microsoft and, well, Microsoft. Beta tapes only work in Beta players and in Beta cameras; DVCPro tapes only work in DVCPro players and DVCPro cameras; and so on. One of the main reasons for the explosion in homemade movies over the last decade or so has been the development of DV, a standards-based media recording format that isn't proprietary.
The fear with Blu-Ray is that it is a Sony product, and Sony will do what it always does (Beta, MiniDisc, IMX) and require the purchase of Sony equipment and/or charge massive licensing fees to use the technology. There is much speculation that the reason Blu-Ray didn't come out four or five years ago -- when, according to rumor, it was technologically feasible to do so -- was because Sony didn't have the support of anyone else in the industry, and management knew that to bring a Sony-proprietary video media storage format to market that no one else supported was a lost cause from the beginning.
Note, too, that the vast majority of the names associated with the Blu-Ray consortium are equipment manufacturers. That's pretty meaningless if you don't have the manufacturers of the actual media themselves on board. Guess what NEC and especially Toshiba are known for.
As for Matsushita, don't let the marketing fool you -- they're competing *bitterly* with Blu-Ray. Oh, they may make some players that will accept the format for consumer use, but there's no way they're letting Sony take over the broadcast market, which is vastly profitable. Sony's trying to push Blu-Ray as the next gen of tapeless recording, but Panasonic's hard-disk system actually beat them to market (Sony's hasn't been released yet, and Panasonic's came out last year.)
Mind over Matter
on
Animal Robots
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, the basic idea's been around in compsci and robsci for decades -- simple machines. The article suggests that researchers are trying to imitate certain species of existing animals, and while that is no doubt true, the point is much more basic. Animals adapt to their environs in the long run (evolution) and the short run (whatever short-term evolution is called). Copying evolutionary development (ie, the long run adaptation) is really rather pointless, unless you want a robot to perform exactly as a lobster does under the sea.
If, on the other hand, you wish to use some of the lobster's physical and electromechanical techniques to create a robot that can respond to its environment independently of its controller, then you may have something worthwhile. The dramatic success of the Mars rovers, AFAIK, is due in large part to their adaptable mobility, the main impulse paths for which were copied from insects (ants?).
So, it seems to me that article misses the point -- it's not the physical structures of animals, but the neural processes that guide them, that researchers are so giddy about copying.
A very, VERY big part of it was losing the biggest single phone contract in the world, the United States Government FTS (Federal Telephone Service), to MCI a few years ago.
It is the maintenance of this contract that has kept MCI afloat despite its woes and which, coupled with AT&T's rapid expansion (TCI, etc.), has led to AT&T's dramatic fall in the residential marketplace.
I would also guess that the extreme growth in cellphone and DSL use has hurt AT&T, since more and more people are using those technologies instead of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) for home use.
This is the great myth of the InterWeb security policies of most corporations -- you're only as safe as the weakest link in the chain. IBM, GE, et al, are probably among the most secure commercial sites available, and yet their customers still get nailed by third-party lapses.
Anyone want to take a gander on when Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion get busted for going through some minor service provider?
Not exactly. SuperKendall observes who donates to whose presidential campaign. Also:
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
Of the 9 Representatives from the Apple State, the breakdown is 3 Republicans, 6 Democrats.
I used to work for the Senate Dems, and I can absolutely guarantee you that Microsoft has no greater friend than Patty Murray in Congress. And Ron Wyden, D-OR, is a pretty major booster, too.
Simply put, all politics is local. The parties have no say whatsoever in this. You simply can't win in Washington without supporting Microsoft, Boeing, and apples one hundred and fifty percent.
The problem, as I see it, is the classic clash between a technology company and its public owners. Sun's stock price was absolutely hammered in the crash, and it has not even come close to recovering. I *still own* my Sun stock, because it's completely worthless to sell. Institutional investors, in particular, are not patient; they've been howling for Sun to return to its pre-crash levels for several years now.
Over the past three years, the price has risen, slowly, to its current level of a little over $4 per share. And that's with the revamping of the company, and maintaining Sun's place in the tech community. If their stock price is going to return even to the mid-level position it held seven or eight years ago, Sun probably can't rely on the tech community to get there. They're going to have to rely on the public.
Branding in tech is monumentally difficult, since you're dealing with such a huge information gap between techies and the vast majority of the buyers of the products don't have a clue as to what advantage AMD might provide over Intel, for example. The MOST selective of them might look up one or two specs, shut their eyes, and guess. The others will simply buy Dells.
Java is one of the very few things that non-techies may have heard about in computing. Ergo, if you're going to try and build your stock price, you're going to have to hope that non-techies will respond to you in some new way. That's going to be much, much easier relying on existing brands that have some toehold with consumers, rather than introducing some new brand that means nothing to consumers.
Microsoft, of course, is the champion of tech branding, and Intel is a pretty close second. If Sun has any hope of recovering its stock price (which I freely admit is a very different prospect than developing new or better technologies), it's going to have to develop a brand on par with these or Dell/Cisco. Not easy.
Actually, it's very easy to prove that record business is being hurt -- look at revenue growth and/or profit (as opposed to gross sales, which don't take into account things like inflation). I don't have those figures in front of me, but I know that the RIAA is screaming that sales growth has plummeted; they may be going so far as to say they've lost market share. I can't verify one way or the other, but it's really easy to do.
And keep in mind, DRM does NOT just apply to the RIAA. It applies equally to movies, OS's, and, the big one, software. Microsoft ain't fighting Bertelsmann AG's fight -- Microsoft is fighting the 90% of Asian-sold PowerPoints that are pirated.
The big fight with DRM is not 14-yr-olds downloading Vanessa Carlton, it's software pirates stealing intellectual property. The RIAA portion of it, while that stirs up the most emotions and gets the most headlines, is really a smaller part of a much, much larger picture, one that will affect the economic course of the next century. China is beating us at this game, and if we don't figure out how to protect ourselves, we're going to go down, and fast.
Given that a large portion of/.ers are employed by the software industry, it seems a little masochistic to attack something that may, if implemented gently, in the long run save their jobs.
The government owns (thousands of) patents on technical work and research at facilities such as the CDC, NIH, Los Alamos, JPL, etc., but as far as I know, there is no such thing as a government copyright. (Possibly software, but that's not my field.)
Government patents, too, last for much shorter periods of time than those typically granted to private industry, and the express purpose of a government patent is to prevent a private company from hoarding the technology and preventing other companies from using it (and to license dangerous or classified technology responsibly). If the government invented it, it belongs to all Americans, not just to one company.
Equally, by definition, if the federal government produces documentation, it is in the public domain; only a classified designation can prevent its dissemination. (Although you may need to file an FOIA request to get the info.)
My neighbor knows everything there is about the internal combustion engine, and could write a decent semblance of a dissertation on Japanese transmissions.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out which side the gas tank is on.
I do, however, have the ability to configure his living room for THX-certified home theater at wholesale prices on equipment and free labor.
And he's enabled my (1987) Toyota to survive 150,000 miles longer than is remotely feasible by normal means.
We're both happy, and the government gets no tax revenue.
As has been elucidated elsewhere here, the physical nature of QC prevents eavesdropping because of the nature of quantum mechanics. Traditional cryptography is based on bits, as you are no doubt aware; bits exist in purely binary format.
Quantum bits, or qubits, on the other hand, are physical photons, not binary data, and as such, they exist in several states at once; you might have a single qubit that is right circularly polarized, or left vertically polarized. The point is, you have far more to work with than a single binary digit -- theoretically, since the mechanical equations are complex (in the mathematical sense), you have an infinite number of possible values for any one qubit. (This is the quantum principle of superposition, btw.)
What this means is that you can send a photon of light polarized in a particular fashion to represent an ordinary bit. If your partner on the far end uses a polarizer to "read" your photon, he will either affect it or not, depending on whether his polarizer is oriented in the same direction as yours.
So what you ("Alice", in crypto-speak) do is, you randomly switch polarizers on the photon you shoot towards Bob, your crypto-speak partner. Now let's say that Alice uses "up" and "down" as her binary states, and that she alternates random polarizers of vertical or diagonal condition. Vertical polarizers don't affect vertical particles; diagonal ones do. (I think.) Therefore, when Alice polarizes vertically, the original state is unchanged, but when she polarizes diagonally, the original state changes.
Moreover, when the diagonal polarizer changes the data, it does so randomly. This is a basic principle of quantum mechanics; the vertical photon can become EITHER northeast-southwest OR southeast-northwest (the two diagonal states), and until it is measured, it has an exactly equal chance of becoming either when it is polarized. So what Bob sees on the other end is a seemingly random collection of vertical and diagonal data. And if, in combination with alternating her polarizers randomly, Alice randomly alternates her original data between vertical and diagonal states (again, choosing one of the two binary diagonal conditions to be "1" or "0"), then her data is impossible to detect.
Or is it? Because, of course, Bob has to be able to read it. So Bob slaps on a polarizer of his own, again, randomly alternating them. So some of Bob's polarizers will match Alice's, and some of them will be different -- about 50% of the time, they'll match. And if Bob's polarizer matches Alice, then the original data can be reconstructed, since we know how polarizers treat photons.
So how does Bob know if Alice and he have the same polarizers? Simple. He calls and asks her. They go through a list of each photon (usually several thousand, although there's no reason why it couldn't be millions) and compare polarizer choices. Those that match, they keep. Those that don't, they toss. They'll have, on average, about half the original data left -- and that becomes the basis of the secret key for their traditional crypto transmission. (Because you toss out so much data, you can't really use quantum to transmit plaintext in itself.)
But wait, you say. Since Bob calls Alice over the telephone (gasp!) or uses email (horrors!) to request and send his polarizer data, couldn't that be obtained by an eavesdropper? Sure. It's virtually guaranteed to be intercepted. But so what? Eve can't do anything about it.
Let's say that Eve gets in the middle of the exchange and puts in her own polarizers. (Since that's the only way to read the data.) Now, she doesn't know which polarizer Alice is using at any one time, so she has to randomize them herself, just like Bob. And if she guesses right, she will not affect the data that Alice is sending Bob. The problem, though, is if she guesses wrong. At that point, she changes the data that Bob reads.
Absolutely. We're a government facility, including a few areas that are nominally very secure, and as such, we have an extremely good IT department, all of whom work tirelessly to prevent nasty people and things from seeing our noodlings.
The problem is, the vast majority of people who work here are either academic researchers, who are used to open collaborative discussion and find passwords inherently distasteful, or administrative workers, who, while they may be very dedicated civil servants, find the different password systems for email, LAN logon, timesheets, billing, contracts, grants, etc., to be tedious at best and bewildering at worst. Since they are not allowed to have the same universal password, for obvious security reasons, nor is that password allowed to be a recognizable English phrase, they have a great deal of difficulty memorizing each one.
Add in the fact that each password must be changed every six months at a minumum (monthly for some systems) and that passwords cannot be repeated for five cycles, and that's as many as fifty or so passwords over the course of a year for some administrative officers. That's a lot to ask, even for someone with a technically-oriented mindset.
Recognizing that writing them in a booklet next to the desk- or lap-top is a problem, many offices have taken to writing them down inside a lockbox.
Biometrics may help, but if our physical plant is any evidence, we'll be ten or so years behind the curve getting such systems installed.
Dude... read what I said. Show me where I indicated they've killed anybody. I would've put in the Ulster Unionists and Gerry Adams if I thought there was ever a chance in hell the US would act against them.
There is a chance, albeit a monumentally slight one, that in order to curry favor with a major trading partner (Mexico), the US might act against an opposition group -- especially one that espouses Maoism and uses firearms, however legally obtained, to get its point across -- in that country at the behest of its leadership. (As long as the opposition doesn't have a supportive voting bloc in this country, which eliminates the Irish, and besides, they're making nice now anyway.)
But I fear that this would be the political reality of a superweapon of that precision -- assassination for hire. This was my main point, and I suppose I didn't make it clearly. I apologize.
But perhaps you'd prefer I listed FARC instead? Far greater likelihood that Manuel Marulanda would be killed than Subcommandante Marcos, anyway. And it would be a very logical escalation to the "drug war".
Seems like the real use for such a weapon would not be its actual use, but the threat of actual use. Our nuclear deterrent capability is no longer the Ace of Spades it was fifty years ago; hell, even Brazil may have the bomb now, and at any rate, the club has expanded way beyond five members.
A fully-implemented and -tested space weapons program would place the USofA back into a position of having wartime veto capability.
In addition, this is the only viable deterrent weapon against a non-state actor: Osama, al-Zawahiri, the Zapatistas, the remnants of the Sendero Luminoso, the LTTE, and any other group of terrorists/freedom fighters who run afoul of our sensibilities, all know that the US government is not going to bomb the country in which they may currently reside, no matter what they do to us. Likewise, Robert Mugabe, Yassir Arafat, General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and our ol' buddy Kim know that we're not going to bomb their country, either, as long as they don't openly wage war against us. The humanitarian and political repercussions would be unimaginable, despite the Dear Leader's obsessions.
But if we could knock them out individually, and if they knew it, then we might regain our former position of bargaining strength. My guess is, very few people in the Pentagon would ever actually advocate using such a weapon realistically, and even then, only under the most dire and certain circumstances, and certainly not publicly.
Oops. "Granite".
A "graphite" safe would be a little less secure, wouldn't it? Although it might make really pretty rubbings on the cinderblock wall behind it...
*grin*
And in response to the other "gentleman", no, I was not implying that it was a requirement. That's just what our particular facility has (with the caveat that I wrote the wrong substance, as per above). And yes, the GSA regs are confusing, but you shouldn't let it get you so upset. Bad for your blood pressure.
Which is why secured government facilities are required to shred all classified documents. And as for Mr. Feynman's legendary escapades, Los Alamos was recently severely upbraided by the DOE for its lax security.
Most government facilities have the lowest level of classified information ("Secret"). Very few have "Top Secret" or higher. And even with Secret, there are very extensive procedures in place in terms of document storage, personnel access, etc.; you're not going to be able to get in with a penknife, leastways not when the document is in a 2-ton graphite safe with 70-point rotary dial behind an armed guard gate.
And as for the guy who found a 10-Base T hub? Dude. That's nothing. We throw old junk away all the time. I just threw 5 Betacam SP decks, worth about $6000 each, in the trash last week. Remember, the agencies can't sell equipment; only the GSA sells surplus, and that's at auction. And it's not like the agencies get credit for turning stuff in. So there is no financial incentive for the agencies to save old equipment, and the paperwork is far too much of a hassle to deal with, just to get it transferred off the books to surplus. (You have to verify condition and certify it, blah blah blah.) So we just get it written off as damaged beyond repair, and toss it.
Believe me, I'd take the stuff home if I could, but then I'd technically be stealing. It has to be officially thrown away first.
Part of the problem here is that there is no universal video codec standard. This is very different from, say, the telecom or satellite industry, which has organizations like the ITU to enable global communication standards for phone service or video teleconferencing (thus the ubiquitous G.711, H.264, T.120 standards, etc.). MPEG-4 has been pushed as the closest thing to a universal streaming standard, but there's a much larger piece of pie out there than streaming, and that's where the real fight lies.
Win Media 9 is attempting to compete with higher-level MPEG encoding used in broadcast applications (DigiBeta, IMX, D1/D5/D9, DVCPro 25/50/100), which traditionally have been the realm exclusively of Sony, Matsushita (Panasonic), and JVC. Now, Win Media is nowhere near good enough to transmit SDI (serial digital interface, which ops at 270/360 Mbps for SD up to 1.45 Gbps for HD) -- yet. But I assure you that those busy little bees up there in Redmond are working their asses off to develop a codec that will begin to compete with the big boys. And already you're starting to see all three broadcast manufacturers (and the fourth, Thomson/Grass Valley) offer streaming from cameras and switchers, in addtion to competing over the next generation of acquisition media. Any leg MS can get in the door in terms of developing a fully-accepted worldwide digital video standard will help it with the high-end fight -- which has a MUCH higher profit margin than the PC world.
The main reason I can see for MS offering VC-9 as open-source for the new HD-DVD standard is to begin to compete with Sony and Matsushita on tapeless acquisition, ie, recording to DVDs/CDs/opticals/hard disks, both at the professional and the consumer level. (Licensing for this is extremely profitable.) And VC-9 is visually very, very similar to Media 9, although their internal mechanisms are obviously very different. It's not too far down the line when you will probably find broadcast-studios-in-a-box running a Windows OS with Win Media 15 or so bundled for all encoding. And if you think Real's raising a stink, wait'll you see what Sony throws at 'em when their most profitable line of business is threatened...
Sounds to me like this is something designed mainly for the Oriental market, especially Japan and S. Korea. With the associated costs, and the release of PS3, few people are going to purchase a PSP without already having a PS2 (ie, for standalone use). And given the choice between a PSP/PS2 combo and a PS3 -- that's a no-brainer. (Despite the myriad possibilities presented by newer and better Tingle Tuners.)
So the only market I can see this really applying to is the gadget-crazy market -- like my roommate, God bless him, and the denizens of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
... and the inexorable march of science continues unabated.
This is a significant breakthrough, if not a huge step forward, in the process, and there will probably be another within 12-18 months, and so on. FWIW, I think the most positive aspect of this is that it will bring bioresearch back into the public eye, and will hopefully foster intelligent, measured discussion on the obvious benefits and admitted drawbacks to all forms of new technology, bio, nano, or otherwise.
As the proliferation of nuclear technology (now 60 years old) has shown, technology will out, despite all attempts to contain it. Therefore, we need to be discussing the ethics and ramifications of said technology well before it becomes public domain. Note that I'm not advocating the containment of technology -- heaven forbid! I'm merely suggesting that we're not yet ready to deal with these issues as a nation or as a race, and the time to begin thinking about them is sooner rather than later.
Is the recent growth in your user group due to an influx of homegrown Iraqi talent, or are there more foreign users (ie, contractors) coming incountry?
Possession is 0.9, as they say.
We're a government facility that owns all sorts of patents. Our scientists have no claim on the patented processes they create here; anything created for the agency, with taxpayer dollars, is licensed by the agency (and, technically, owned by the American people).
So my guess is, your robot's patents would go to the agency or facility in which it performs its research.
I think the basic point is, if it can identify -- and thus record -- me as an individual, it can be modified to store that information. I, for one, do not ascribe massive malicious intent to the large majority of employers (I used to run my own business, with fantastic employees whom I wish I could have paid more). However, there's no end to the innovative ways in which raw data can, and will, be mined.
Suppose, for instance, that McDonald's Corp. notices that it begins having an unusually high palm reader error rate with a group of franchises near a major urban area... Houston, for arbitrary purposes. Naturally, Administration will, and should, investigate. Do they have a batch of bad readers? They need to find out.
Now suppose that nothing is found to be wrong with the readers. The only noticeable anomaly is that for certain employees, their palm map seems to be shrinking slightly. Turns out that these employees are losing weight.
Now suppose that news reports begin to surface of an upswing of HIV infections in the Houston area.
So now McDonald's has a serious dilemma. They have an identifiable subgroup of employees who prepare food, who use sharp kitchen implements, who may be infected with HIV. Corporate has no reason to suspect this other than their clock-in reports, but they have to act on it. This is begging for a lawsuit (either for violating the 4th Amendment rights of their employees, or by recklessly endangering the lives of their customers, or for decreasing shareholder value by sitting on the information and doing nothing).
Slashdot Mirror
Reuters reports that the real news coming out of this conference is the I/S/T consortium's Cell microprocessor is ready to hit the market. The Cell will be what powers the Playstation 3.
The idea goes basically like this, AFAIK, and I apologize if you already know most of this:
The Big Three do not distinguish between you asking for your credit report and anyone else asking for it (please note, I do not mean this in a privacy sense, only in an actuarial sense). They keep track of how many times a credit report on you is requested. As you may know, some of these are legitimate and some are less so -- but it's not really up to the Big Three (Experian, Equifax, Trans Union) to decide what's a legit request and what's not -- they just process the requests. Reports are requested for virtually every major financial transaction you engage in, including rent, mortgage, credit cards, department store cards, opening a bank account, etc. Ultimately, the theory goes, it's your credit, so it's your responsibility to maintain it.
Credit ratings are based on actuarial tables (just like insurance policy rates). There's a whole industry based on creating formulas and algorithms designed to determine within a certain statistical variation how likely you are to be a good credit risk (ie, pay back the loan with interest) or a bad credit risk (ie, default on the loan). Some of the determining factors for these are income, age, residence, length of current job, whether you rent or own a home, etc. In short, they're trying to figure out how stable you are.
If you apply for a lot of credit cards, though, that's a very, very major red flag -- short of bankruptcy, it's probably the biggest red flag they have. That implies that (a) you're trying to live way beyond your means through credit, (b) you're trying to pay off almost-defaulted credit cards with other credit card loans, or (c) everyone keeps turning you down for loans. Any or all of those are Very Bad Things for a legitimate credit agency, and as chum is to sharks for credit scam artists.
All of which says that you requesting a credit report on yourself several times a year can start to push you into higher risk categories, since they don't really distinguish between you asking and someone else. In addition, there may well be an actuarial calculation that says that people who request their report constantly are bad credit risks, because they have some need to do so (as opposed to being mildly paranoid and/or financially sound).
I would hope that any legislation calls upon the actuaries to change their rating tables so that personal credit requests are eliminated from consideration, but AFAIK that's not Congress's bailiwick. Since the tables are all determined by private industry consortiums, I don't think Congress can actually mandate a change in them -- but I could be wrong about that.
True, polygraphs are inadmissable as evidence in a court of law. But that's not the main point.
As anyone who works for a defense contractor or secure government facility can tell you, polys are the ONLY way you can get to levels of clearance above Top Secret (TS). In fact, there's TS, and there's TS-Poly above that, and then there's all the ones we can't tell you about above them.
The fact is, people beat polys and get into extremely high levels of clearance. I personally know people who have (mostly on the drug use questions). Now, these folks are my friends, and generally good people, so I don't really have a problem with them per se -- but claiming that polys are indestructible perpetuates the mindset of the higherups that polys don't lie. I'm not saying that the GAO and DOD don't perform good background checks -- they do -- but using polys as a check of last resort leaves a fairly large hole in our nation's security net.
Would you really want a bright young programmer to get a job in No Such Agency or DIA while having claimed his father was from Kuwait instead of Yemen, all on the strength of having beaten a polygraph?
Not only are BetaMax and BetaCam different, but BetaCam itself has undergone several changes since the late '70s when it was introduced. (Yes, there was an Alpha system as well, but AFAIK, it never left the R&D stage).
However, BetaCam has now run its useful life and almost nobody purchases new BetaCam systems anymore, preferring to go with either a digital tape-based system, or, increasingly, solid-state or disk-based systems.
The basic problem for media formats is that Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic) are like Microsoft and, well, Microsoft. Beta tapes only work in Beta players and in Beta cameras; DVCPro tapes only work in DVCPro players and DVCPro cameras; and so on. One of the main reasons for the explosion in homemade movies over the last decade or so has been the development of DV, a standards-based media recording format that isn't proprietary.
The fear with Blu-Ray is that it is a Sony product, and Sony will do what it always does (Beta, MiniDisc, IMX) and require the purchase of Sony equipment and/or charge massive licensing fees to use the technology. There is much speculation that the reason Blu-Ray didn't come out four or five years ago -- when, according to rumor, it was technologically feasible to do so -- was because Sony didn't have the support of anyone else in the industry, and management knew that to bring a Sony-proprietary video media storage format to market that no one else supported was a lost cause from the beginning.
Note, too, that the vast majority of the names associated with the Blu-Ray consortium are equipment manufacturers. That's pretty meaningless if you don't have the manufacturers of the actual media themselves on board. Guess what NEC and especially Toshiba are known for.
As for Matsushita, don't let the marketing fool you -- they're competing *bitterly* with Blu-Ray. Oh, they may make some players that will accept the format for consumer use, but there's no way they're letting Sony take over the broadcast market, which is vastly profitable. Sony's trying to push Blu-Ray as the next gen of tapeless recording, but Panasonic's hard-disk system actually beat them to market (Sony's hasn't been released yet, and Panasonic's came out last year.)
Well, the basic idea's been around in compsci and robsci for decades -- simple machines. The article suggests that researchers are trying to imitate certain species of existing animals, and while that is no doubt true, the point is much more basic. Animals adapt to their environs in the long run (evolution) and the short run (whatever short-term evolution is called). Copying evolutionary development (ie, the long run adaptation) is really rather pointless, unless you want a robot to perform exactly as a lobster does under the sea.
If, on the other hand, you wish to use some of the lobster's physical and electromechanical techniques to create a robot that can respond to its environment independently of its controller, then you may have something worthwhile. The dramatic success of the Mars rovers, AFAIK, is due in large part to their adaptable mobility, the main impulse paths for which were copied from insects (ants?).
So, it seems to me that article misses the point -- it's not the physical structures of animals, but the neural processes that guide them, that researchers are so giddy about copying.
Peace, Love, and Soul.
A very, VERY big part of it was losing the biggest single phone contract in the world, the United States Government FTS (Federal Telephone Service), to MCI a few years ago.
It is the maintenance of this contract that has kept MCI afloat despite its woes and which, coupled with AT&T's rapid expansion (TCI, etc.), has led to AT&T's dramatic fall in the residential marketplace.
I would also guess that the extreme growth in cellphone and DSL use has hurt AT&T, since more and more people are using those technologies instead of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) for home use.
This is the great myth of the InterWeb security policies of most corporations -- you're only as safe as the weakest link in the chain. IBM, GE, et al, are probably among the most secure commercial sites available, and yet their customers still get nailed by third-party lapses.
Anyone want to take a gander on when Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion get busted for going through some minor service provider?
Not exactly. SuperKendall observes who donates to whose presidential campaign. Also:
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
Of the 9 Representatives from the Apple State, the breakdown is 3 Republicans, 6 Democrats.
I used to work for the Senate Dems, and I can absolutely guarantee you that Microsoft has no greater friend than Patty Murray in Congress. And Ron Wyden, D-OR, is a pretty major booster, too.
Simply put, all politics is local. The parties have no say whatsoever in this. You simply can't win in Washington without supporting Microsoft, Boeing, and apples one hundred and fifty percent.
The problem, as I see it, is the classic clash between a technology company and its public owners. Sun's stock price was absolutely hammered in the crash, and it has not even come close to recovering. I *still own* my Sun stock, because it's completely worthless to sell. Institutional investors, in particular, are not patient; they've been howling for Sun to return to its pre-crash levels for several years now.
Over the past three years, the price has risen, slowly, to its current level of a little over $4 per share. And that's with the revamping of the company, and maintaining Sun's place in the tech community. If their stock price is going to return even to the mid-level position it held seven or eight years ago, Sun probably can't rely on the tech community to get there. They're going to have to rely on the public.
Branding in tech is monumentally difficult, since you're dealing with such a huge information gap between techies and the vast majority of the buyers of the products don't have a clue as to what advantage AMD might provide over Intel, for example. The MOST selective of them might look up one or two specs, shut their eyes, and guess. The others will simply buy Dells.
Java is one of the very few things that non-techies may have heard about in computing. Ergo, if you're going to try and build your stock price, you're going to have to hope that non-techies will respond to you in some new way. That's going to be much, much easier relying on existing brands that have some toehold with consumers, rather than introducing some new brand that means nothing to consumers.
Microsoft, of course, is the champion of tech branding, and Intel is a pretty close second. If Sun has any hope of recovering its stock price (which I freely admit is a very different prospect than developing new or better technologies), it's going to have to develop a brand on par with these or Dell/Cisco. Not easy.
Actually, it's very easy to prove that record business is being hurt -- look at revenue growth and/or profit (as opposed to gross sales, which don't take into account things like inflation). I don't have those figures in front of me, but I know that the RIAA is screaming that sales growth has plummeted; they may be going so far as to say they've lost market share. I can't verify one way or the other, but it's really easy to do.
/.ers are employed by the software industry, it seems a little masochistic to attack something that may, if implemented gently, in the long run save their jobs.
And keep in mind, DRM does NOT just apply to the RIAA. It applies equally to movies, OS's, and, the big one, software. Microsoft ain't fighting Bertelsmann AG's fight -- Microsoft is fighting the 90% of Asian-sold PowerPoints that are pirated.
The big fight with DRM is not 14-yr-olds downloading Vanessa Carlton, it's software pirates stealing intellectual property. The RIAA portion of it, while that stirs up the most emotions and gets the most headlines, is really a smaller part of a much, much larger picture, one that will affect the economic course of the next century. China is beating us at this game, and if we don't figure out how to protect ourselves, we're going to go down, and fast.
Given that a large portion of
The government owns (thousands of) patents on technical work and research at facilities such as the CDC, NIH, Los Alamos, JPL, etc., but as far as I know, there is no such thing as a government copyright. (Possibly software, but that's not my field.)
Government patents, too, last for much shorter periods of time than those typically granted to private industry, and the express purpose of a government patent is to prevent a private company from hoarding the technology and preventing other companies from using it (and to license dangerous or classified technology responsibly). If the government invented it, it belongs to all Americans, not just to one company.
Equally, by definition, if the federal government produces documentation, it is in the public domain; only a classified designation can prevent its dissemination. (Although you may need to file an FOIA request to get the info.)
My neighbor knows everything there is about the internal combustion engine, and could write a decent semblance of a dissertation on Japanese transmissions.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out which side the gas tank is on.
I do, however, have the ability to configure his living room for THX-certified home theater at wholesale prices on equipment and free labor.
And he's enabled my (1987) Toyota to survive 150,000 miles longer than is remotely feasible by normal means.
We're both happy, and the government gets no tax revenue.
God Bless America.
Not to pile on to the other posters, but:
As has been elucidated elsewhere here, the physical nature of QC prevents eavesdropping because of the nature of quantum mechanics. Traditional cryptography is based on bits, as you are no doubt aware; bits exist in purely binary format.
Quantum bits, or qubits, on the other hand, are physical photons, not binary data, and as such, they exist in several states at once; you might have a single qubit that is right circularly polarized, or left vertically polarized. The point is, you have far more to work with than a single binary digit -- theoretically, since the mechanical equations are complex (in the mathematical sense), you have an infinite number of possible values for any one qubit. (This is the quantum principle of superposition, btw.)
What this means is that you can send a photon of light polarized in a particular fashion to represent an ordinary bit. If your partner on the far end uses a polarizer to "read" your photon, he will either affect it or not, depending on whether his polarizer is oriented in the same direction as yours.
So what you ("Alice", in crypto-speak) do is, you randomly switch polarizers on the photon you shoot towards Bob, your crypto-speak partner. Now let's say that Alice uses "up" and "down" as her binary states, and that she alternates random polarizers of vertical or diagonal condition. Vertical polarizers don't affect vertical particles; diagonal ones do. (I think.) Therefore, when Alice polarizes vertically, the original state is unchanged, but when she polarizes diagonally, the original state changes.
Moreover, when the diagonal polarizer changes the data, it does so randomly. This is a basic principle of quantum mechanics; the vertical photon can become EITHER northeast-southwest OR southeast-northwest (the two diagonal states), and until it is measured, it has an exactly equal chance of becoming either when it is polarized. So what Bob sees on the other end is a seemingly random collection of vertical and diagonal data. And if, in combination with alternating her polarizers randomly, Alice randomly alternates her original data between vertical and diagonal states (again, choosing one of the two binary diagonal conditions to be "1" or "0"), then her data is impossible to detect.
Or is it? Because, of course, Bob has to be able to read it. So Bob slaps on a polarizer of his own, again, randomly alternating them. So some of Bob's polarizers will match Alice's, and some of them will be different -- about 50% of the time, they'll match. And if Bob's polarizer matches Alice, then the original data can be reconstructed, since we know how polarizers treat photons.
So how does Bob know if Alice and he have the same polarizers? Simple. He calls and asks her. They go through a list of each photon (usually several thousand, although there's no reason why it couldn't be millions) and compare polarizer choices. Those that match, they keep. Those that don't, they toss. They'll have, on average, about half the original data left -- and that becomes the basis of the secret key for their traditional crypto transmission. (Because you toss out so much data, you can't really use quantum to transmit plaintext in itself.)
But wait, you say. Since Bob calls Alice over the telephone (gasp!) or uses email (horrors!) to request and send his polarizer data, couldn't that be obtained by an eavesdropper? Sure. It's virtually guaranteed to be intercepted. But so what? Eve can't do anything about it.
Let's say that Eve gets in the middle of the exchange and puts in her own polarizers. (Since that's the only way to read the data.) Now, she doesn't know which polarizer Alice is using at any one time, so she has to randomize them herself, just like Bob. And if she guesses right, she will not affect the data that Alice is sending Bob. The problem, though, is if she guesses wrong. At that point, she changes the data that Bob reads.
So when Bob and Alice compare their dat
Absolutely. We're a government facility, including a few areas that are nominally very secure, and as such, we have an extremely good IT department, all of whom work tirelessly to prevent nasty people and things from seeing our noodlings.
The problem is, the vast majority of people who work here are either academic researchers, who are used to open collaborative discussion and find passwords inherently distasteful, or administrative workers, who, while they may be very dedicated civil servants, find the different password systems for email, LAN logon, timesheets, billing, contracts, grants, etc., to be tedious at best and bewildering at worst. Since they are not allowed to have the same universal password, for obvious security reasons, nor is that password allowed to be a recognizable English phrase, they have a great deal of difficulty memorizing each one.
Add in the fact that each password must be changed every six months at a minumum (monthly for some systems) and that passwords cannot be repeated for five cycles, and that's as many as fifty or so passwords over the course of a year for some administrative officers. That's a lot to ask, even for someone with a technically-oriented mindset.
Recognizing that writing them in a booklet next to the desk- or lap-top is a problem, many offices have taken to writing them down inside a lockbox.
Biometrics may help, but if our physical plant is any evidence, we'll be ten or so years behind the curve getting such systems installed.
Dude ... read what I said. Show me where I indicated they've killed anybody. I would've put in the Ulster Unionists and Gerry Adams if I thought there was ever a chance in hell the US would act against them.
There is a chance, albeit a monumentally slight one, that in order to curry favor with a major trading partner (Mexico), the US might act against an opposition group -- especially one that espouses Maoism and uses firearms, however legally obtained, to get its point across -- in that country at the behest of its leadership. (As long as the opposition doesn't have a supportive voting bloc in this country, which eliminates the Irish, and besides, they're making nice now anyway.)
But I fear that this would be the political reality of a superweapon of that precision -- assassination for hire. This was my main point, and I suppose I didn't make it clearly. I apologize.
But perhaps you'd prefer I listed FARC instead? Far greater likelihood that Manuel Marulanda would be killed than Subcommandante Marcos, anyway. And it would be a very logical escalation to the "drug war".
Seems like the real use for such a weapon would not be its actual use, but the threat of actual use. Our nuclear deterrent capability is no longer the Ace of Spades it was fifty years ago; hell, even Brazil may have the bomb now, and at any rate, the club has expanded way beyond five members.
A fully-implemented and -tested space weapons program would place the USofA back into a position of having wartime veto capability.
In addition, this is the only viable deterrent weapon against a non-state actor: Osama, al-Zawahiri, the Zapatistas, the remnants of the Sendero Luminoso, the LTTE, and any other group of terrorists/freedom fighters who run afoul of our sensibilities, all know that the US government is not going to bomb the country in which they may currently reside, no matter what they do to us. Likewise, Robert Mugabe, Yassir Arafat, General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and our ol' buddy Kim know that we're not going to bomb their country, either, as long as they don't openly wage war against us. The humanitarian and political repercussions would be unimaginable, despite the Dear Leader's obsessions.
But if we could knock them out individually, and if they knew it, then we might regain our former position of bargaining strength. My guess is, very few people in the Pentagon would ever actually advocate using such a weapon realistically, and even then, only under the most dire and certain circumstances, and certainly not publicly.
Oops. "Granite". A "graphite" safe would be a little less secure, wouldn't it? Although it might make really pretty rubbings on the cinderblock wall behind it ...
*grin*
And in response to the other "gentleman", no, I was not implying that it was a requirement. That's just what our particular facility has (with the caveat that I wrote the wrong substance, as per above). And yes, the GSA regs are confusing, but you shouldn't let it get you so upset. Bad for your blood pressure.
Forgot about FOUO, we don't have it here. We're Secret, TS, and, um, well, you know. I stand well corrected.
... I worked down the hall from it for a year. That sucks in mid-July when the AC's out.
And as for the incinerator
Thanks for keeping me in check.
Which is why secured government facilities are required to shred all classified documents. And as for Mr. Feynman's legendary escapades, Los Alamos was recently severely upbraided by the DOE for its lax security.
Most government facilities have the lowest level of classified information ("Secret"). Very few have "Top Secret" or higher. And even with Secret, there are very extensive procedures in place in terms of document storage, personnel access, etc.; you're not going to be able to get in with a penknife, leastways not when the document is in a 2-ton graphite safe with 70-point rotary dial behind an armed guard gate.
And as for the guy who found a 10-Base T hub? Dude. That's nothing. We throw old junk away all the time. I just threw 5 Betacam SP decks, worth about $6000 each, in the trash last week. Remember, the agencies can't sell equipment; only the GSA sells surplus, and that's at auction. And it's not like the agencies get credit for turning stuff in. So there is no financial incentive for the agencies to save old equipment, and the paperwork is far too much of a hassle to deal with, just to get it transferred off the books to surplus. (You have to verify condition and certify it, blah blah blah.) So we just get it written off as damaged beyond repair, and toss it.
Believe me, I'd take the stuff home if I could, but then I'd technically be stealing. It has to be officially thrown away first.
God Bless America.
From the broadcast/NLE side of the fence:
...
Part of the problem here is that there is no universal video codec standard. This is very different from, say, the telecom or satellite industry, which has organizations like the ITU to enable global communication standards for phone service or video teleconferencing (thus the ubiquitous G.711, H.264, T.120 standards, etc.). MPEG-4 has been pushed as the closest thing to a universal streaming standard, but there's a much larger piece of pie out there than streaming, and that's where the real fight lies.
Win Media 9 is attempting to compete with higher-level MPEG encoding used in broadcast applications (DigiBeta, IMX, D1/D5/D9, DVCPro 25/50/100), which traditionally have been the realm exclusively of Sony, Matsushita (Panasonic), and JVC. Now, Win Media is nowhere near good enough to transmit SDI (serial digital interface, which ops at 270/360 Mbps for SD up to 1.45 Gbps for HD) -- yet. But I assure you that those busy little bees up there in Redmond are working their asses off to develop a codec that will begin to compete with the big boys. And already you're starting to see all three broadcast manufacturers (and the fourth, Thomson/Grass Valley) offer streaming from cameras and switchers, in addtion to competing over the next generation of acquisition media. Any leg MS can get in the door in terms of developing a fully-accepted worldwide digital video standard will help it with the high-end fight -- which has a MUCH higher profit margin than the PC world.
The main reason I can see for MS offering VC-9 as open-source for the new HD-DVD standard is to begin to compete with Sony and Matsushita on tapeless acquisition, ie, recording to DVDs/CDs/opticals/hard disks, both at the professional and the consumer level. (Licensing for this is extremely profitable.) And VC-9 is visually very, very similar to Media 9, although their internal mechanisms are obviously very different. It's not too far down the line when you will probably find broadcast-studios-in-a-box running a Windows OS with Win Media 15 or so bundled for all encoding. And if you think Real's raising a stink, wait'll you see what Sony throws at 'em when their most profitable line of business is threatened
Just my thoughts.
Sounds to me like this is something designed mainly for the Oriental market, especially Japan and S. Korea. With the associated costs, and the release of PS3, few people are going to purchase a PSP without already having a PS2 (ie, for standalone use). And given the choice between a PSP/PS2 combo and a PS3 -- that's a no-brainer. (Despite the myriad possibilities presented by newer and better Tingle Tuners.)
So the only market I can see this really applying to is the gadget-crazy market -- like my roommate, God bless him, and the denizens of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
... and the inexorable march of science continues unabated. This is a significant breakthrough, if not a huge step forward, in the process, and there will probably be another within 12-18 months, and so on. FWIW, I think the most positive aspect of this is that it will bring bioresearch back into the public eye, and will hopefully foster intelligent, measured discussion on the obvious benefits and admitted drawbacks to all forms of new technology, bio, nano, or otherwise. As the proliferation of nuclear technology (now 60 years old) has shown, technology will out, despite all attempts to contain it. Therefore, we need to be discussing the ethics and ramifications of said technology well before it becomes public domain. Note that I'm not advocating the containment of technology -- heaven forbid! I'm merely suggesting that we're not yet ready to deal with these issues as a nation or as a race, and the time to begin thinking about them is sooner rather than later.
Is the recent growth in your user group due to an influx of homegrown Iraqi talent, or are there more foreign users (ie, contractors) coming incountry?
Possession is 0.9, as they say. We're a government facility that owns all sorts of patents. Our scientists have no claim on the patented processes they create here; anything created for the agency, with taxpayer dollars, is licensed by the agency (and, technically, owned by the American people). So my guess is, your robot's patents would go to the agency or facility in which it performs its research.
I think the basic point is, if it can identify -- and thus record -- me as an individual, it can be modified to store that information. I, for one, do not ascribe massive malicious intent to the large majority of employers (I used to run my own business, with fantastic employees whom I wish I could have paid more). However, there's no end to the innovative ways in which raw data can, and will, be mined.
... Houston, for arbitrary purposes. Naturally, Administration will, and should, investigate. Do they have a batch of bad readers? They need to find out.
Suppose, for instance, that McDonald's Corp. notices that it begins having an unusually high palm reader error rate with a group of franchises near a major urban area
Now suppose that nothing is found to be wrong with the readers. The only noticeable anomaly is that for certain employees, their palm map seems to be shrinking slightly. Turns out that these employees are losing weight.
Now suppose that news reports begin to surface of an upswing of HIV infections in the Houston area.
So now McDonald's has a serious dilemma. They have an identifiable subgroup of employees who prepare food, who use sharp kitchen implements, who may be infected with HIV. Corporate has no reason to suspect this other than their clock-in reports, but they have to act on it. This is begging for a lawsuit (either for violating the 4th Amendment rights of their employees, or by recklessly endangering the lives of their customers, or for decreasing shareholder value by sitting on the information and doing nothing).
It's not black and white, by any means.