At the moment, we have the certificate authorities who have self-appointed themselves as the arbiters of what is legitimate, and what is not. Unfortunately, they are driven by money, being commercial bodies, so the bad guys only need to provide enough cash to appear as legitimate.
Also, at the moment, we have a strong need for anonymity, for whistle blowers, and other people who can not speak publicly for fear of backlash (e.g. Deep Throat). That is almost achieved with the massive amounts of network traffic, as people can disappear into the background noise. There are services available for people who want to make use of this, such as hushmail, tor and anonymous proxies. The downside is that unless you control every hop in the network, you can never be certain that you aren't being logged. By and large, you won't be, but it is a possibility.
In order to have anonymity, people have to accept that abuses will happen, either people being identified, or crap-flooding from people abusing the system. And, anyway, even the best designed systems will be crippled by the 'analogue hole'. If it can be presented to you as information, it can be captured and manipulated. It will require the criminals to get a lot smarter about their online crime, to go undetected like this, but who is to say that they aren't already doing this?
Without attempting to whore this topic, I strongly agree with the above sentiments.
The information that my company publishes is NOT supported by ads.
That's right, there is absolutely no advertising on the site, unless you regard the content to be advertisements for the company.
A decision was made when the site was being established that the company would wear the hosting costs for the goodwill of providing advertising free content.
Yes, it does cost, but that is an accepted cost for doing business / providing information on the Internet. I guess that there are still some people out there who still hold to the idea that the Internet is about free, reliable, information free of advertising pressure / annoyances.
The link is easy enough to find from this post, for those who are interested.
I think that the eWeek article might be slightly off on the flaw being reported.
The DailyDave mailing list suggests that the XPSP2 bug, and the RDP flaw are the same. It will take until the second week in August before the real bug with SP2 will be announced, as declared on the Security-Protocols site.
The ISC diary is talking about port 3389 starting to attract a rise in traffic - the RDP and Terminal Services port, with earlier rumours of a 0-day having raised its head on Windows. If it is the same vulnerability as that on the security-protocols site, then we are stuck until the second week of August before the patch is released, and someone either leaked the exploit, or it was independently uncovered, but news of which hasn't reached the surface, yet.
Looking at Microsoft's own security advisories, number 904797 talks of a known Denial of Service with RDP which is awaiting a patch. Perhaps it is the same as the security-protocols site, and maybe it isn't, but Microsoft only consider it to be a Denial of Service, while the security-protocols site appears to be something which can be actively exploited.
I don't know whether you read the actual details of the flaw, or not. From your response, I doubt that you did.
Essentially, whenever Reader 5.0.9 or 5.0.10 opens a PDF file, it creates a randomly named duplicate in/tmp which can then be read by other users with the appropriate permissions, which makes it a local file disclosure vulnerability. When the file is closed in Reader, the duplicate created is then destroyed.
In addition to the recommended upgrade to version 7, there is a version 5.0.11 which addresses this issue, otherwise, nice troll.
Surely if they ever were going to introduce taxes, they could introduce a proportional tax, linked to the network connection speed, and apply it across the board. Someone on a 14.4 connection might get a fraction of a cent tax on their connection, while someone on more bandwidth than they know what to do with will be taxed accordingly.
If it was possible to ensure that these taxes would be reinvested back into improving infrastructure and subsidising broadband rollout it could be palatable for American users. Essentially the early adopters / massive bandwidth capacity users subsidise the efforts to bring more users up to their standard of connectivity.
This is my thought, too. I am surprised that for something as critical as a root server, that there are not a well distributed (geographically) set of servers. I know that local caching goes a long way to resolve this, but at least spreading them around a bit may help out if any of the major intercontinental links fail, like the recent SME-3 failure which knocked Pakistan off the net.
The problem is that now that the Internet has grown to the size it has, it will take quite a long time for the changed IP addresses to filter through if the root servers get moved. There would be any number of smaller ISPs, specialised applications or even techie home users who poll the root servers occasionally, and who won't bother to update the IP address. Why they are polling the root servers in the first place, and not their local upstream copy, is probably due to a design failure which will require the maintenance of the current root servers to continue operating.
Unfortunately, in the more unregulated fishing areas in the World, explosive, and cyanide fishing is still popular.
The premise behind explosive fishing is to lob down a couple of sticks of your favourite explosive, and then wait for the stunned fish to float to the surface before scooping them into your boat. Unfortunately, it is extremely indiscriminate, can damage the remaining fish, and can cause extensive underwater damage to the seafloor.
Cyanide fishing is just as bad, where divers puff a small amount of cyanide into the water to stun fish before collection. This keeps the fish live, and results in no external physical damage. On a broader scale, mass poison release for wider area fishing is less effective, but just as dangerous to sealife. The other problem is that fish collect toxins in their bodies which then get passed through the food chain, to us.
If you wondered how they got the live fish into the tank at some Asian restaurants, it could very well be the result of cyanide fishing, especially if they are claiming them to be wild fish.
Is this designed just to be another money maker, or is it actually designed to be useful?
With the.xxx TLD, the consensus seemed to be that the.com TLD would still reign supreme, but the only real use would be a complete TLD for filtering companies to block. It seems like this might be headed the same way.
Surely domain squatters will soon rush the registrar with registration of names suggested like win.tel, mo.tel, nor.tel, and so on, which would really defeat the purpose of a specialised.tel TLD if they could be registered.
If I Remember Correctly, the new flavour of the month on the Internet, XMLHttpRequest, was an Internet Explorer only feature, until it was copied by the other browsers for eventual integration with their own codebases. And, as you brought up, there are differences in rendering and transitions between the browser types, so I dare say that the browser unique features would account for a fair portion.
The remainder, I would guess, are sites that require an Active X control, have poor DOM checking / browser sniffing in place, rely upon non-standard coding, or are dead sites that are no longer being maintained, and are a fallback to the late 90s.
Personally, I feel that a 10% failure rate is pretty good, actually, that was the level that the UK Government was aiming for with their recent EDS / Pension debacle (where they encountered around 20% failure).
I think that the Data Protection Act is a wonderful idea, along with all the other privacy related laws that the EU and the US have implemented.
Unfortunately, they all suffer the same weakness - people. No matter how well written the laws become, there will always be someone who has access to valuable information who is willing to sell / destroy / manipulate it for profit.
I think that, in addition to the laws currently on the books, that they should get extended to provide real penalties to companies and people in breach. I also think that there needs to be a greater push made for systems and software that minimises the risk of damage that any one person can make when it deals with information related to these Acts - perhaps a real, useful ISO standard or somesuch (as opposed to ISO 9000 / CMM - where our processes are bad, but they are well documented and traceable).
Yeah, so it's bad form to reply to one's self, but it seems the best way to address the comments brought up.
Before people flame me for wild ass guesses, note that I said 'I thought...', not 'Amazon is definitely...', so they are opinions based on common media reporting.
Okay, 2 years of profitibility in 10, and only the most recent two. Congratulations, so they now have a viable business model. I doubt that many companies can repeat their ability to absorb 8 years of losses before turning a profit. Yes, it takes guts and determination to stick it out for that long, and that is amazing.
4 out of 5 businesses fail in the first 5 years, and 9 out of 10 of the remaining businesses fail before their tenth year (not totally random statistics - look them up). The most common reasons for failure are under-capitalisation (i.e. never establishing a viable cash flow) and over-capitalisation (not wisely reinvesting the profit), so the fact that Amazon could pull this off is amazing, but a lot of questions would have been targeted at the CxO level as to why there are no returns, especially with the modern trend of short term profitability over longer term strength.
From a purely business perspective, how on Earth are Amazon able to afford this?
Okay, so it is 10 years since they were founded, but in that time, how much of a profit have they turned? I understood that there were hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sunk costs with the company, where the only possible return is in the stock price, but I thought that Amazon was still producing negative returns on the balance sheet.
If I was one of the VC firms that initially funded Amazon I would have dragged Bezos over the coals long ago, but I am amazed at the ability of Amazon to continue despite the losses they have suffered to date (losses that would have crushed most other companies).
Wikipedia is not the only information storehouse to suffer from this problem - pretty much any site that claims to present third party facts and analysis suffers from bias and factual inaccuracy. Snopes and the Darwin Awards seem to be particularly bad for this, sometimes using very weak reasoning to dismiss alternative viewpoints that do not back those of the site editors. Their presence as almost being gospel in the minds of the wider public makes it somewhat difficult to refute their content sometimes.
Dead tree volumes and people are also subject to the same, such as errors in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Downing Street Memos, revisionist historians, Holocaust deniers, dissenting scientific viewpoints, dissenting historical viewpoints (such as the Armenian massacre - check out the Turkish version of events, and some Western versions).
The Internet gives a layer of anonymity to people who otherwise would not have a viable outlet for their opinions, so the street corner preacher has the same footing as the Pulitzer winner in an anonymous forum, and their arguments rest on their ability to describe them, and the prevailing bias of the forum.
I think that there will always be a need for knowledge specialists (professional researchers), whose job it is to develop useful results from requests for information, using whatever tools are at hand.
Tools like Google and MSN Search are not the only thing you need to find information. There are still places for other information, and 'because Google said so' is not a valid reason for accepting information as relevant, or factual.
Although these tools will continue to improve, the application of wisdom will still require human input to make the results useful.
I think that Firebird was a Mac specific variant before it was renamed Firefox (on Mac). While there was Firefox on Win and Lin, it was Firebird and Camino on Mac (now Firefox and Camino).
Unfortunately, this is / was, a common practice by major engineering firms. It is a part of risk management and is sometimes called (and I am going to get it wrong here) Headstone Engineering.
Engineering in a Factor of Safety goes some way to overcoming these issues, but if the cost of building in the safety margins is more than the cost of paying out after loss of life due to failure, then it is not likely to be included.
For example, I could build a bridge to cross a gap by placing a plank across it. Cheap, and functional, but it may only be marginally within the weight carriage requirements. If someone then fell and died as a result of the plank failing, that is a cost I would be liable for. Alternatively, I could pour concrete and fill in the gap completely, set up fenced in barriers and other protective measures. This would almost certainly not fail catastrophically and cause death, with such a high factor of safety, but it would not make economic sense as the most optimal solution.
Although a canned example, the problem does scale properly. For example, the failure of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, Victoria, during construction was due to two factors. The first was improper structural design. An insufficient factor of safety had been considered for the bridge elements as individual components during construction. The second factor was the improper construction method being used, which exceeded the factor of safety for a segment, causing a catastrophic structural failure, and death of 35 construction workers. The bridge segments could have been engineered to never fail, but the cost would be prohibitive, and would preclude their use in an efficient bridge design. The design of WTC 1 and 2 is also an example - design took into account an almost empty 707 striking the buildings, not fully fuelled modern commuter jets. Yes, the buildings could have been built to withstand more, but it then would have affected their eventual height, design and cost efficiency.
In the same vein, what about the Australian / US FTA?
There were a lot of concessions in Australia as needed for obtaining the FTA, and I dare say that the proposed Australian / Chinese FTA would put a bit of a damper on things given the apparent disregard for IP that the Chinese seem to display (good thing and bad thing).
I feel that the relevancy of the US as 'global leader' is slipping already, and the cross over point is not far away, where the EU and China become the new powerhouses (look at EU and China proposed weapons deals as an initial indicator). Soon, other countries will treat the US as a toothless tiger and will start ignoring the pressure from the US to do things 'their way', but that is still a little way off (look at posturing in the Korean peninsula, and the sabre-rattling over Taiwan).
How similar is the ethical concern with this as compared to using pig or primate organs as replacement human organs?
It is amazing that something like this can happen, but I fear that there is a risk it might end up like 'medical research' in World War II, where, for some, ethics and decency were set aside in the name of research (but those who maintained their ethics took the results anyway...).
Since the end of 2003, most metropolitan areas in Australia had access to the free-to-air channels as both analogue and digital transmission. The free-to-air networks sometimes use this separate transmission pathway for additional programming, most notably the ABC and SBS.
Recently, the primary Cable TV operator, Foxtel (in conjunction with Telstra) has been pushing their digital services, and the added benefits they claim to deliver through the digital signal (i.e. multiple camera angles for sports, selected news coverage, localised weather, movies-on-demand).
In 2008, the Australian Federal Government will be reviewing whether to convert all free-to-air television transmission to 100% digital. Currently the digital transmissions can be received through set top boxes (which then translates for analogue display), which seem to be coming down in price as more companies come into the market, and can be had for around $150 AUD.
In addition to the HHGTTG books, the only other books which had me laughing so much that I had to put them down was the Red Dwarf books (coincidentally also Space Comedies).
I fail to see how the stealth mode on the firewall will annoy legitimate users of the network, unless you define legitimate users to be something which I don't.
Even based on the page you linked to, there is no information which would lead to other users on a network being annnoyed based on your system applying stealth mode. It could be inferred that problems with DHCP lease allocation could cause the same IP to be allocated to two users, but the ISP should have sufficient technical expertise to not get into such a situation (otherwise they shouldn't be an ISP). The only possible way that stealth mode would impact other users ability to use a network would be if the network gateway, or the ISP, applied stealth mode.
The worst it could do to an end user is drop them off the network if they did not respond to ICMP pings, or heartbeats used by the ISP.
An AC has already made part of this post, but I will finish it off.
Any time that an application can get inside the firewall and install itself without the explicit permission of the user then that is it, all bets are off. While not all applications installed like this provide a root shell equivalent, it is possible for many of them to turn on and off services at will.
If your firewall is on your end user system, then it essentially ceases to exist once your system is compromised, as it can easily be switched off or have rules changed to allow malicious traffic, while still appearing complete.
However, if your firewall is on a separate system, it is more likely to maintain its integrity if your system is compromised.
The idea of having a GPS type device which operates everywhere is a great idea, however the problem with the current system is the need for the receiver device to be able to see satellites (i.e. the signal is line of sight only), and that buildings do a fairly good job of blocking the satellite signal.
There are three solutions to this with the current technology:
Pump up the power output from the satellites. Although possible, I doubt that the satellite owners will boost the transmission power.
Increase the size of your antenna. By increasing the size of the antenna on your unit, you have a better chance of receiving a usable signal from the satellites. In order to get a useful GPS signal indoors / underground, the size of the antenna would defeat the purpose.
Build something like a VOR / DME radio navaid setup. This device would be at a known GPS location, and your handheld device would take the information from the aid to determine a radial and distance from the device, providing a known position. The downside of this is that the power required for such a device to work through buildings would likely cook anything that is nearby, and the fidelity of the position would not be as high as a GPS position.
Further to the above info, there are a number of different types of airspace that you should stay away from.
In Australia, outside of the normal classes A-G of airspace we have Prohibited, Restricted and Danger areas.
Basically, Prohibited means stay away, we don't care who you are, go away! I think the last Prohibited area was around Woomera, but was downgraded to a Restricted area.
Restricted areas can be active 24 hours, or activated at various times. Most military flying bases will have associated restricted training areas. Weapon ranges and military exercise areas also tend to have restricted areas as well - notified by NOTAM. If the restricted area is not for you, or you do not have specific permission from those who created it, then stay away!
Danger areas are sections of airspace that you should be careful when flying through, due to things such as gliders, mining explosive blasts, remote control aircraft, etc. If you have no good reason to be there, then don't go there. There is nothing stopping you from being there, but you probably should avoid it if you can.
When flying near international borders, ADIZ (Air Defence Zones) boundaries can cause a problem, particularly if you will get shot down for accidentally intruding, and should be treated as Prohibited areas unless you have specific approval to be there.
Here in Australia, at least, ALDIS lamps are still used when there has been a communications failure from an airfield tower. Specific series of colours and flashes are used to transmit information to aircraft on the field, or who were in contact with the tower and in visual range.
Also given that navigation aids identify using morse code, coded flashes aren't all that much harder for aircrew to get used to.
Coloured lasers have been used for a while in certain shipping channels to identify the safe shipping lane. The approach to Cairns, QLD uses a red / green laser pair to identify the centre of the shipping lane.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment, we have the certificate authorities who have self-appointed themselves as the arbiters of what is legitimate, and what is not. Unfortunately, they are driven by money, being commercial bodies, so the bad guys only need to provide enough cash to appear as legitimate.
Also, at the moment, we have a strong need for anonymity, for whistle blowers, and other people who can not speak publicly for fear of backlash (e.g. Deep Throat). That is almost achieved with the massive amounts of network traffic, as people can disappear into the background noise. There are services available for people who want to make use of this, such as hushmail, tor and anonymous proxies. The downside is that unless you control every hop in the network, you can never be certain that you aren't being logged. By and large, you won't be, but it is a possibility.
In order to have anonymity, people have to accept that abuses will happen, either people being identified, or crap-flooding from people abusing the system. And, anyway, even the best designed systems will be crippled by the 'analogue hole'. If it can be presented to you as information, it can be captured and manipulated. It will require the criminals to get a lot smarter about their online crime, to go undetected like this, but who is to say that they aren't already doing this?
Without attempting to whore this topic, I strongly agree with the above sentiments.
The information that my company publishes is NOT supported by ads.
That's right, there is absolutely no advertising on the site, unless you regard the content to be advertisements for the company.
A decision was made when the site was being established that the company would wear the hosting costs for the goodwill of providing advertising free content.
Yes, it does cost, but that is an accepted cost for doing business / providing information on the Internet. I guess that there are still some people out there who still hold to the idea that the Internet is about free, reliable, information free of advertising pressure / annoyances.
The link is easy enough to find from this post, for those who are interested.
I think that the eWeek article might be slightly off on the flaw being reported.
The DailyDave mailing list suggests that the XPSP2 bug, and the RDP flaw are the same. It will take until the second week in August before the real bug with SP2 will be announced, as declared on the Security-Protocols site.
The ISC diary is talking about port 3389 starting to attract a rise in traffic - the RDP and Terminal Services port, with earlier rumours of a 0-day having raised its head on Windows. If it is the same vulnerability as that on the security-protocols site, then we are stuck until the second week of August before the patch is released, and someone either leaked the exploit, or it was independently uncovered, but news of which hasn't reached the surface, yet.
Looking at Microsoft's own security advisories, number 904797 talks of a known Denial of Service with RDP which is awaiting a patch. Perhaps it is the same as the security-protocols site, and maybe it isn't, but Microsoft only consider it to be a Denial of Service, while the security-protocols site appears to be something which can be actively exploited.
I don't know whether you read the actual details of the flaw, or not. From your response, I doubt that you did.
Essentially, whenever Reader 5.0.9 or 5.0.10 opens a PDF file, it creates a randomly named duplicate in /tmp which can then be read by other users with the appropriate permissions, which makes it a local file disclosure vulnerability. When the file is closed in Reader, the duplicate created is then destroyed.
In addition to the recommended upgrade to version 7, there is a version 5.0.11 which addresses this issue, otherwise, nice troll.
Surely if they ever were going to introduce taxes, they could introduce a proportional tax, linked to the network connection speed, and apply it across the board. Someone on a 14.4 connection might get a fraction of a cent tax on their connection, while someone on more bandwidth than they know what to do with will be taxed accordingly.
If it was possible to ensure that these taxes would be reinvested back into improving infrastructure and subsidising broadband rollout it could be palatable for American users. Essentially the early adopters / massive bandwidth capacity users subsidise the efforts to bring more users up to their standard of connectivity.
This is my thought, too. I am surprised that for something as critical as a root server, that there are not a well distributed (geographically) set of servers. I know that local caching goes a long way to resolve this, but at least spreading them around a bit may help out if any of the major intercontinental links fail, like the recent SME-3 failure which knocked Pakistan off the net.
The problem is that now that the Internet has grown to the size it has, it will take quite a long time for the changed IP addresses to filter through if the root servers get moved. There would be any number of smaller ISPs, specialised applications or even techie home users who poll the root servers occasionally, and who won't bother to update the IP address. Why they are polling the root servers in the first place, and not their local upstream copy, is probably due to a design failure which will require the maintenance of the current root servers to continue operating.
Unfortunately, in the more unregulated fishing areas in the World, explosive, and cyanide fishing is still popular.
The premise behind explosive fishing is to lob down a couple of sticks of your favourite explosive, and then wait for the stunned fish to float to the surface before scooping them into your boat. Unfortunately, it is extremely indiscriminate, can damage the remaining fish, and can cause extensive underwater damage to the seafloor.
Cyanide fishing is just as bad, where divers puff a small amount of cyanide into the water to stun fish before collection. This keeps the fish live, and results in no external physical damage. On a broader scale, mass poison release for wider area fishing is less effective, but just as dangerous to sealife. The other problem is that fish collect toxins in their bodies which then get passed through the food chain, to us.
If you wondered how they got the live fish into the tank at some Asian restaurants, it could very well be the result of cyanide fishing, especially if they are claiming them to be wild fish.Is this designed just to be another money maker, or is it actually designed to be useful?
With the .xxx TLD, the consensus seemed to be that the .com TLD would still reign supreme, but the only real use would be a complete TLD for filtering companies to block. It seems like this might be headed the same way.
Surely domain squatters will soon rush the registrar with registration of names suggested like win.tel, mo.tel, nor.tel, and so on, which would really defeat the purpose of a specialised .tel TLD if they could be registered.
If I Remember Correctly, the new flavour of the month on the Internet, XMLHttpRequest, was an Internet Explorer only feature, until it was copied by the other browsers for eventual integration with their own codebases. And, as you brought up, there are differences in rendering and transitions between the browser types, so I dare say that the browser unique features would account for a fair portion.
The remainder, I would guess, are sites that require an Active X control, have poor DOM checking / browser sniffing in place, rely upon non-standard coding, or are dead sites that are no longer being maintained, and are a fallback to the late 90s.
Personally, I feel that a 10% failure rate is pretty good, actually, that was the level that the UK Government was aiming for with their recent EDS / Pension debacle (where they encountered around 20% failure).
I was waiting for this response.
I think that the Data Protection Act is a wonderful idea, along with all the other privacy related laws that the EU and the US have implemented.
Unfortunately, they all suffer the same weakness - people. No matter how well written the laws become, there will always be someone who has access to valuable information who is willing to sell / destroy / manipulate it for profit.
I think that, in addition to the laws currently on the books, that they should get extended to provide real penalties to companies and people in breach. I also think that there needs to be a greater push made for systems and software that minimises the risk of damage that any one person can make when it deals with information related to these Acts - perhaps a real, useful ISO standard or somesuch (as opposed to ISO 9000 / CMM - where our processes are bad, but they are well documented and traceable).
Yeah, so it's bad form to reply to one's self, but it seems the best way to address the comments brought up.
Before people flame me for wild ass guesses, note that I said 'I thought...', not 'Amazon is definitely...', so they are opinions based on common media reporting.
Okay, 2 years of profitibility in 10, and only the most recent two. Congratulations, so they now have a viable business model. I doubt that many companies can repeat their ability to absorb 8 years of losses before turning a profit. Yes, it takes guts and determination to stick it out for that long, and that is amazing.
4 out of 5 businesses fail in the first 5 years, and 9 out of 10 of the remaining businesses fail before their tenth year (not totally random statistics - look them up). The most common reasons for failure are under-capitalisation (i.e. never establishing a viable cash flow) and over-capitalisation (not wisely reinvesting the profit), so the fact that Amazon could pull this off is amazing, but a lot of questions would have been targeted at the CxO level as to why there are no returns, especially with the modern trend of short term profitability over longer term strength.
From a purely business perspective, how on Earth are Amazon able to afford this?
Okay, so it is 10 years since they were founded, but in that time, how much of a profit have they turned? I understood that there were hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sunk costs with the company, where the only possible return is in the stock price, but I thought that Amazon was still producing negative returns on the balance sheet.
If I was one of the VC firms that initially funded Amazon I would have dragged Bezos over the coals long ago, but I am amazed at the ability of Amazon to continue despite the losses they have suffered to date (losses that would have crushed most other companies).
Wikipedia is not the only information storehouse to suffer from this problem - pretty much any site that claims to present third party facts and analysis suffers from bias and factual inaccuracy. Snopes and the Darwin Awards seem to be particularly bad for this, sometimes using very weak reasoning to dismiss alternative viewpoints that do not back those of the site editors. Their presence as almost being gospel in the minds of the wider public makes it somewhat difficult to refute their content sometimes.
Dead tree volumes and people are also subject to the same, such as errors in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Downing Street Memos, revisionist historians, Holocaust deniers, dissenting scientific viewpoints, dissenting historical viewpoints (such as the Armenian massacre - check out the Turkish version of events, and some Western versions).
The Internet gives a layer of anonymity to people who otherwise would not have a viable outlet for their opinions, so the street corner preacher has the same footing as the Pulitzer winner in an anonymous forum, and their arguments rest on their ability to describe them, and the prevailing bias of the forum.
I think that there will always be a need for knowledge specialists (professional researchers), whose job it is to develop useful results from requests for information, using whatever tools are at hand.
Tools like Google and MSN Search are not the only thing you need to find information. There are still places for other information, and 'because Google said so' is not a valid reason for accepting information as relevant, or factual.
Although these tools will continue to improve, the application of wisdom will still require human input to make the results useful.
I think that Firebird was a Mac specific variant before it was renamed Firefox (on Mac). While there was Firefox on Win and Lin, it was Firebird and Camino on Mac (now Firefox and Camino).
Your point being?
Unfortunately, this is / was, a common practice by major engineering firms. It is a part of risk management and is sometimes called (and I am going to get it wrong here) Headstone Engineering.
Engineering in a Factor of Safety goes some way to overcoming these issues, but if the cost of building in the safety margins is more than the cost of paying out after loss of life due to failure, then it is not likely to be included.
For example, I could build a bridge to cross a gap by placing a plank across it. Cheap, and functional, but it may only be marginally within the weight carriage requirements. If someone then fell and died as a result of the plank failing, that is a cost I would be liable for. Alternatively, I could pour concrete and fill in the gap completely, set up fenced in barriers and other protective measures. This would almost certainly not fail catastrophically and cause death, with such a high factor of safety, but it would not make economic sense as the most optimal solution.
Although a canned example, the problem does scale properly. For example, the failure of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, Victoria, during construction was due to two factors. The first was improper structural design. An insufficient factor of safety had been considered for the bridge elements as individual components during construction. The second factor was the improper construction method being used, which exceeded the factor of safety for a segment, causing a catastrophic structural failure, and death of 35 construction workers. The bridge segments could have been engineered to never fail, but the cost would be prohibitive, and would preclude their use in an efficient bridge design. The design of WTC 1 and 2 is also an example - design took into account an almost empty 707 striking the buildings, not fully fuelled modern commuter jets. Yes, the buildings could have been built to withstand more, but it then would have affected their eventual height, design and cost efficiency.
In the same vein, what about the Australian / US FTA?
There were a lot of concessions in Australia as needed for obtaining the FTA, and I dare say that the proposed Australian / Chinese FTA would put a bit of a damper on things given the apparent disregard for IP that the Chinese seem to display (good thing and bad thing).
I feel that the relevancy of the US as 'global leader' is slipping already, and the cross over point is not far away, where the EU and China become the new powerhouses (look at EU and China proposed weapons deals as an initial indicator). Soon, other countries will treat the US as a toothless tiger and will start ignoring the pressure from the US to do things 'their way', but that is still a little way off (look at posturing in the Korean peninsula, and the sabre-rattling over Taiwan).
How similar is the ethical concern with this as compared to using pig or primate organs as replacement human organs?
It is amazing that something like this can happen, but I fear that there is a risk it might end up like 'medical research' in World War II, where, for some, ethics and decency were set aside in the name of research (but those who maintained their ethics took the results anyway...).
Since the end of 2003, most metropolitan areas in Australia had access to the free-to-air channels as both analogue and digital transmission. The free-to-air networks sometimes use this separate transmission pathway for additional programming, most notably the ABC and SBS.
Recently, the primary Cable TV operator, Foxtel (in conjunction with Telstra) has been pushing their digital services, and the added benefits they claim to deliver through the digital signal (i.e. multiple camera angles for sports, selected news coverage, localised weather, movies-on-demand).
In 2008, the Australian Federal Government will be reviewing whether to convert all free-to-air television transmission to 100% digital. Currently the digital transmissions can be received through set top boxes (which then translates for analogue display), which seem to be coming down in price as more companies come into the market, and can be had for around $150 AUD.
In addition to the HHGTTG books, the only other books which had me laughing so much that I had to put them down was the Red Dwarf books (coincidentally also Space Comedies).
I fail to see how the stealth mode on the firewall will annoy legitimate users of the network, unless you define legitimate users to be something which I don't.
Even based on the page you linked to, there is no information which would lead to other users on a network being annnoyed based on your system applying stealth mode. It could be inferred that problems with DHCP lease allocation could cause the same IP to be allocated to two users, but the ISP should have sufficient technical expertise to not get into such a situation (otherwise they shouldn't be an ISP). The only possible way that stealth mode would impact other users ability to use a network would be if the network gateway, or the ISP, applied stealth mode.
The worst it could do to an end user is drop them off the network if they did not respond to ICMP pings, or heartbeats used by the ISP.
An AC has already made part of this post, but I will finish it off.
Any time that an application can get inside the firewall and install itself without the explicit permission of the user then that is it, all bets are off. While not all applications installed like this provide a root shell equivalent, it is possible for many of them to turn on and off services at will.
If your firewall is on your end user system, then it essentially ceases to exist once your system is compromised, as it can easily be switched off or have rules changed to allow malicious traffic, while still appearing complete.
However, if your firewall is on a separate system, it is more likely to maintain its integrity if your system is compromised.
The idea of having a GPS type device which operates everywhere is a great idea, however the problem with the current system is the need for the receiver device to be able to see satellites (i.e. the signal is line of sight only), and that buildings do a fairly good job of blocking the satellite signal.
There are three solutions to this with the current technology:
Further to the above info, there are a number of different types of airspace that you should stay away from.
In Australia, outside of the normal classes A-G of airspace we have Prohibited, Restricted and Danger areas.
Basically, Prohibited means stay away, we don't care who you are, go away! I think the last Prohibited area was around Woomera, but was downgraded to a Restricted area.
Restricted areas can be active 24 hours, or activated at various times. Most military flying bases will have associated restricted training areas. Weapon ranges and military exercise areas also tend to have restricted areas as well - notified by NOTAM. If the restricted area is not for you, or you do not have specific permission from those who created it, then stay away!
Danger areas are sections of airspace that you should be careful when flying through, due to things such as gliders, mining explosive blasts, remote control aircraft, etc. If you have no good reason to be there, then don't go there. There is nothing stopping you from being there, but you probably should avoid it if you can.
When flying near international borders, ADIZ (Air Defence Zones) boundaries can cause a problem, particularly if you will get shot down for accidentally intruding, and should be treated as Prohibited areas unless you have specific approval to be there.
Actually, such a scheme is not too complicated.
Here in Australia, at least, ALDIS lamps are still used when there has been a communications failure from an airfield tower. Specific series of colours and flashes are used to transmit information to aircraft on the field, or who were in contact with the tower and in visual range.
Also given that navigation aids identify using morse code, coded flashes aren't all that much harder for aircrew to get used to.
Coloured lasers have been used for a while in certain shipping channels to identify the safe shipping lane. The approach to Cairns, QLD uses a red / green laser pair to identify the centre of the shipping lane.