I'm no engineer, but wouldn't the use of new self-healing polymers be inferior to a mechanical failsafe or backups. If damage is done to an aircraft, the component of the structure that was carefully designed for a specific use is compromised. When under intense air pressure, self healing doesn't seem to make the cut.
FRPs like fiberglass and carbon-fiber are composed of strengthening fibers embedded in a polymer matrix. The fibers provide the strength, the polymer holds the fibers together with each other (transfers load from one fiber to its neighbors). The initial modes of failure will be the polymer losing its "grip" on the fiber (like pulling a nail out of wood), followed by fracture of polymer that's lost its fiber reinforcement in this manner. The fiber is still there and intact, it's just lost its mechanism for accepting load from adjacent material. Initially there's enough polymer that stresses can be routed around a minor failure of this type (transferring load to adjacent fibers). But eventually you get to the point where you'll have multiple dislocations spanning between fibers, and the polymer is no longer able to transfer stresses to enough fibers to carry the entire load, eventually leading to catastrophic failure.
This self-healing mechanism essentially injects new polymer into the crack thus reseating the fiber within the polymer, sealing the polymer dislocations, and restoring the polymer's ability to transfer load between fibers. The dye to indicate a failure is to catch an inspector's attention just in case the stresses exceeded the fiber's breaking strength (e.g. from a rock or birdstrike). The presence of the dye does not in itself indicate the part is now substantially weaker than a new part (aside from the self-repair mechanism being used up).
Yes, the "healing" polymer is probably not as strong as the original polymer. But because of the nature of the failure mechanisms I've described above, any FRP already has plenty of leeway for polymer failure built into it. If it didn't, the material would be incredibly susceptible to fatigue failure after just a few load cycles.
And the problem is that India and China are huge countries. Google and Yahoo don't want to take a chance of being banned in a country of that size, so they do whatever the governments of these countries want.
That just begs the question. Do you believe civil rights and freedom would be promoted in India and China if Google and Yahoo were banned there? Need I point out that the government of China is working on a (government-controlled) search engine like Google and would like nothing more than for Google (and Yahoo and Wikipedia) to disappear from their neck of the Internet. This is pretty much the same issue that's been debated ever since Nixon normalized relations with China. Do you wait until a rogue country changes its political ideals to sufficiently match yours before you conduct business with them? Or do you partially compromise your ideals and conduct business with them in the hopes that it will accelerate those changes?
Google and Yahoo may be trying to walk a fine line between offering the citizens of those countries access to information, while simultaneously trying to avoid getting banned. That is, this is probably not a case of there being a clear evil choice (turn over the IP address) and a not-evil choice (don't turn over the IP address). If refusing to give the IP address would've gotten them banned from providing service, then turning over the IP address may in fact have been the lesser of two evils.
1994/1995 was the transition period. That was when Mosaic became Netscape. I noticed URLs showing up in print and TV ads around then (granted I was in Boston at the time). It's also when AOL joined Usenet. The WWW's explosive growth during those years played a large role in convincing Microsoft to include a TCP/IP stack in Windows 95. Prior to that, Bill Gates was convinced the CompuServe / AOL model of glorified bulletin boards with a monthly service fee would win out.
Pen computing and touch-screens were supposed to be "the next big thing" back in the late 1980s / early 1990s. I remember IBM spent millions setting up touchscreen information kiosks at the US Open. They were a flop. People's arms aren't designed to be held up and moved precisely in front of them for extended periods of time like a gorilla. Even artists use long paintbrushes so they don't have to move their entire arm to cover any distance.
I suspect one of the reasons (if not the reason) it's successful on the iPhone is because it's not a screen that's fixed vertically in front of you. It's a screen you can hold in your hands, and all you have to do to point is move your fingers. This is much less fatiguing than holding up and moving your entire arm to use it. (This is also why I'm doubtful Microsoft's TouchWall will succeed. It'll work for a tabletop, but it's not going to work on a wall except for the simplest tasks, at which point it's not worth the cost.)
clearly these artificial limbs store kinetic energy in a radically different way. the biomechanics are obviously different. he's using different muscle groups. watch a video of him, and he clearly starts off slower than everyone else, and then speeds up a lot faster than everyone else: he's running on springs
This reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend long ago. What happens when someone is born with a birth defect which happens to enhance his capability in a competitive sport?
Seems like every time you turn on the news you can't help but see some airline going broke.
Meh, 577,000 returns when googling for airlines bankrupt vs. 501,000 returns when googling for airlines expansion. I'd say it's pretty much a wash. The news just reports the big-name airlines going broke more prominently. Southwest has quietly been building and expanding and last year became the largest airline by passengers carried.
I'd happily tack on an extra day or two to my vacation if it meant I could enjoy dinner in a nice dining car. And not get frisked and scanned and have my orange juice confiscated by airport security when I go to board.
That's the rub. Most people can't just tack on an extra day or two to their vacations. They have a fixed number of vacation days and want to spend as many of them as they can actually at their vacation destination, not in transit. If getting frisked and scanned for a few hours means a couple more days at the vacation spot, it's a price they're gladly willing to pay. And losing a $2 bottle of orange juice has no bearing on their decisions about a vacation costing $thousands.
"If timeshifting is a court-granted right, then a broadcaster saying you can't do it and a recording system believing them should be plenty of evidence that it's time to change to a system you control."
Then it's a good thing for broadcasters that time shifting is not a "court-granted right." For that, you'd have to assume A implies B is equivalent to B implies A. The specific case of record television shows to watch later does not violate copyright laws. That does not mean that broadcasters have to make the recording of television shows easy or even possible. Timeshifting is merely a legally valid excuse for what would normally be considered copyright infringement. The court has granted you no rights forcing timeshifting to be made available.
If that's the tactic the studios are using, they're playing with fire. If time-shifting is not a copyright violation, and studios implement measures to prevent time-shifting, then any DVR anti-DRM tools they've been fighting so hard against suddenly have a huge legitimate use. The whole "anti-circumvention" clause in the DMCA becomes shot for their purposes because now those tools are now "primarily" for legally time-shifting rather than for circumventing copyright protection. As such they are no longer contraband under the DMCA, and it would be legal to distribute them.
From the DMCA section 1201:
`(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
Since the protections in the title only cover copyright, if time shifting is legal but the broadcast flag prohibits timeshifting, then a circumvention tool which bypasses the broadcast flag and allows you to timeshift would appear to be immune to the above clause in the DMCA.
Not at all. You have missed part of the point. Distrust the government for selling something that they claim is "not a weapon", but which was designed for civilian crowd control and which they will not allow their own citizens to own.
Are you going to tell me that you do NOT see the hypocrisy in that??
That's a bit premature, don't you think? By the 10th Amendment, U.S. citizens and companies are allowed to do anything that isn't prohibited by law. Since this is a new weapon, the lack of a law restricting its export doesn't necessarily indicate the government supports its sale to China. If the law had prohibited export but the government decided to make an exception for this device, then you'd have a point. But this is probably just a case of lack of foresight rather than hypocrisy.
You can't add pixels that aren't there, and an out of focus picture is effectively a lower resolution.
You can, however, apply statistical analysis and AI learning techniques to guess the likely locations of pixels. In that way, you can sharpen a photo somewhat, though it may be inexact. My understanding is that contextual analysis is the next step- if you have pictures of a person and a blurry person, and have more pictures of that person and less-blurry people, you can make predictions about who the fuzzy people are.
This is wrong. An out of focus picture is not lower resolution. All the original information is still there, it's just been smeared in a mathematically consistent manner - something called the point spread function of the lens at that degree of misfocus. It's very possible to mathematically focus a misfocused picture after it's been shot. The main barriers are not knowing the particular lens' exact point spread function, sensor noise (the de-convolution spreads the sensor noise to adjacent pixels), and grid resolution. But the site I linked to shows you can still get pretty decent results using a generic PSF.
Didn't this already get settled when cable TV was first introduced? IIRC the broadcast companies were up in arms about the cable TV companies effectively re-broadcasting their transmissions, but swapping out the ads for ones which paid the cable company. The cable companies argued that the broadcast companies were being paid a fixed amount for the ads, so it didn't matter if they were or weren't included in cable broadcasts. If I'm remembering right, I pretty sure the cable companies lost. I think the current situation is that the cable companies have to contract agreements with the broadcast studios, and most such agreements stipulate the nationwide ads need to be kept in place, but the cable company can switch out some of the local ads (presumably for a fee).
Duration varies with distance
on
Earthquake In China
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· Score: 3, Informative
The two different types of shaking (P and S waves, basically longitudinal and transverse) travel through the earth at different speeds, so the further away you are the more spread out over time they get, and the longer the shaking goes on. The video doesn't have very severe shaking so it was probably taken quite a distance from the epicenter, so the shaking duration would be extended.
IIRC the Northridge quake in 1994 only lasted about 17 seconds at the epicenter. I was about 100 miles away when it hit and the shaking went on for a good 30-45 seconds. Based on the immediate reports I got from friends over email and their estimates of the duration of shaking, I was able to pinpoint the epicenter somewhere in western Los Angeles long before the news services.
At the epicenter itself, the duration of the shaking generally corresponds to the length of fault that gives way. If only a few km slips, it's a short quake. If several thousand km slips (like happened in Chile 1960 and Alaska 1964) the shaking can go on for several minutes. The Alaska quake was 4 minutes at the epicenter, with several distant but affected communities reporting shaking for almost 10 minutes.
Also note that earthquake magnitude is a measure of energy released, while certain types of damage correspond more to the power (energy over time) of the quake. The Northridge quake was moderate in terms of magnitude, but its direction and focus generated enormous power in certain areas. One seismograph recorded accelerations over 1g, whereas the previous largest recorded acceleration during an earthquake was less than 0.25g (typically you only see about 0.5 - 0.1g).
Getting dinged $0.20 per spam SMS? That's a bit more annoying. There's no way to refuse a text message (on Sprint, at least). And thanks to the email-to-SMS gateway, the spammer doesn't get charged a penny. (I'm noticing that a huge percentage of spam I receive on my regular account is, for some strange reason, under 160 characters.)
If you're with Sprint, just sign up for a Sprint SERO plan. It's cheaper than all of Sprint's regular plans, and they're tossing in free unlimited text until the end of the month (it will stay free and unlimited afterwards, just the promotion ends at the end of the month).
Is the MPEG Chroma bug. That was created by someone who wrote one of the original MPEG decoders that was eventually sold/distributed to most of the companies making the first DVD players (pre-1993). This one just won't go away either - initially most of the DVD manufacturers refused to acknowledge it even existed (probably because they didn't want to recall millions of DVD players with non-upgradeable firmware). I still see it every now and then on TV (indicating one of the upstream broadcasting companies is still using equipment afflicted with the bug). I notice it most often when diagonal red lines end up staircased like they're poorly interlaced (see pictures in the above link).
Since there seem to be legal issues at stake, I'd recommend doing an image copy of the drive to a new drive, then using a live CD to hack into the new drive. That way the original drive is still in its "pristine" state should any legal issues arise from altering the files. Ideally you want to dd the entire partition(s), to also preserve any deleted data.
However naming the delete function 'Wife' would be lacking in class...
I always wondered why most Open Source projects had names based on cute (or not so cute) puns or acronyms, but Reiser's file system bore his own name. Even Linus didn't want to name his project after himself. In light of the stories of Reiser's behavior I'm reading in the press and here, it would seem he had more ego than class.
If you think that Yahoo which is trading over 40 to 50 PE as lowball well then YAHOO is crazy.
Look at the earnings growth of Yahoo for the past five years. IT IS pitiful. Yahoo is being too arrogant for its own good.
Over 5 years, Yahoo stock has outperformed Microsoft stock. If a Yahoo stockholder were basing his decision solely on the 5-year history, he would have to be crazy to want to trade his Yahoo shares for Microsoft shares.
Yahoo has only run into problems during the last 2 years, which is kinda short to declare the company dead. And their current P/E (with a price based on Microsoft's offer) is 35, which seems about average for most tech stocks. The day prior to Microsoft's bid, YHOO had dropped so low I was considering picking some up. I'm still kicking myself for putting off the research for a day so I could watch a movie.
Coast Guard? Coast Guard is the strange cousin of the Military. They invite him to the family get together but you know they talk about him when he's not in ear shot.
Prior to the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, the US Coast Guard was part of the Treasury Department (along with Customs and Border Patrol) during peacetime, and transferred to the Department of Defense during times of war. e.g. During Desert Storm (Iraq War I), the Coast Guard was transferred to the DoD and some of its ships and service members saw action there. I think there was a brief stint in the Department of Transportation as well.
The same arrangement continues with the USCG switching from DHS to DoD during times of war.
That's a lie. Well, or maybe you were hoodwinked by liars to where you think that's the truth, but it isn't. They take in money, invest it, and pay out some. They take in more than they pay out. They have all the functions of a mutual fund, plus some, and function below the cost of a mutual fund. There is no shorfall in Social Security.
So how were the first Social Security recipients paid when the system was first started? They hadn't been paying into it since it hadn't existed when they were working. They were simply paid with the money put into it by the current workers at the time. Yes if you fudge with the accounting you can make it look like your payments are being invested, just like one can pretend everything is fine since your monthly income equals your monthly expenses, while ignoring all those credit card bills demanding payment on $20k outstanding debt. If you honestly believe the money you put into it is all being invested and sitting waiting for your retirement, I'm sorry but you're the one being hoodwinked.
The reality is that the bulk of the money goes to pay current recipients, and only the leftover invested (and prior to the government separating it from the general fund, it wasn't even invested, it was simply used for other purposes with an IOU left in its place). If it were all held and invested, it'd be impossible for it to go into a shortfall -- after all, the original money plus interest would still be there. The only reason it's set to become a problem is because it's mostly not invested, it's used to pay current recipients. And when the payments to recipients exceeds the receipts from current workers, the system starts to fall apart.
With a couple minor tweaks (very minor) SS could be made to be fully funded. It would take at least another generation or two, but making it fully funded is easy
The only way to fix it is for the government put in enough new money into it to offset all the people who got paid out of it without paying into it (complete and partial). At that point the system would have zero past debt and the money you put into it would be held for your retirement. Unless you do that, you're essentially shuffling $1000/mo into a savings account then immediately cashing out $900 of it to pay past debts, all so you can claim "I'm putting aside $1000/mo for retirement."
There are some issues with the random nature of death and uncertainty of duration of payout, but as you say those are tweaks. I don't have a problem with a socialized retirement net per se, but it's in no way comparable to a fully privatized personal retirement account in how it's administrated.
The Social Security has administration costs less than 10% of the average retirement fund. Yes, the government is 10 times better than private practice.
That's because Social Security isn't really investing your money in anything. They're just taking money received from current workers and redistributing it to retired workers. If a private company could "manage" a retirement fund without having to mess with the whole business of actually researching, buying, and selling stock and bonds, heck yeah it could do it a lot cheaper. Only problem being any private company trying to run a similar system would be shut down pretty quickly by the FTC.
I agree about the USPS. Dunno why you would exclude administration costs from schools though.
Seriously, this is no moral question. "Poisoning" Storm is nothing but a good idea.
Unless there's a problem with the command you send out and it completely wipes the end users hard drive and all their personal data or does something else destructive to the infected user. Just because their computer's being ordered around without their permission doesn't mean that it's right for you to start ordering it around without their permission too. Then there's the issue of liability if something goes wrong, etc.
You're comparing a concentrated loss to a distributed loss. The correct assessment in that case is to sum up the losses on both sides. Say "poisoning" Storm results in 1000 users with wiped hard drives losing $10,000 worth of data and productivity (being very generous here). OTOH say letting Storm continue to operate results in 100 million users losing $1 each worth of productivity (spam) and data (compromised systems). That's a $10 million to $100 million balance in favor of poisoning Storm. Obviously the numbers here are made up and I honestly don't know if poisoning Storm is a good idea. But the point is that you just can't look at the losses on one side and say a course of action is unacceptable due to those losses. You have to compare the losses that might happen if you take action, to what losses will happen if you don't take action.
It would be far better to monitor the botnet, find the computers involved and then help them clean their computer and prevent another infection. It's not as simple or efficient in the short term, but it's more moral and more effective in the long run.
Do you maintain any computers for friends or family? No it won't be more effective in the long run. You help them clean their system, and they'll go right back to using it as always. In 6-12 months they'll call you back to help them clean it again. It's just an individual equivalent of a cost of doing business for them. Why should they bother to change their habits when they can pay you a hundred bucks or so every year to clean their system?
In that light, losing all their data might be just what's needed to get them to take computer security seriously. However, I'd consider it a last resort since it's a punitive action rather than a preventative action. The long-term solution is to accept that casual users are going to run their computers like this, and to come up with mechanisms which blunt or dilute the impact of compromised systems. We're already doing this with anti-virus and anti-spyware software, as well as flaming Microsoft so they fix all the security holes in Windows. But it may or may not also involve poisoning botnets.
Off the top of my head, I don't think you need to remove the botnet software. It's probably already secured the box against further infection. So all you need to do is scramble its communication and/or encryption so it doesn't/can't contact the bot master again. It could be as simple as changing one bit in an otherwise unused registry key. So "poisoning" a botnet may be much more benign than your worst case scenario.
Re:Honda car used to steal my parking spot!
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ISP Sued By Irish RIAA
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Police sue automakers for allowing drivers to exceed the speed limit.
Parents of child porn victims sue camera manufacturers for allowing pedophiles to make child porn.
Corporate hacking victims sue computer manufacturers for providing hackers tools to break into their systems.
Violent crime victims sue weapons manufacturers for enabling criminals to harm them.
China sues Western democracies for giving its citizens subversive ideas of freedom and civil liberties.
The problem is run into in the nature of the service being offered. This isn't merely storage, they are distributing the works. The way it seems to run, this isn't a common carrier thing that is being run in good faith, like say any random hosting company, this is a company that is advertising that it will distribute copies of music that you bought from someone else to you on any device you want. That changes the rules, they can't do that without a license, even if you have 5000 copies at home.
This is the ownership / license ambiguity with music cropping up again. Technically, they already have a license - yours. They're not streaming the online music to just anyone, they're only streaming it to people who already have a licensed copy of it. But the music industry has managed to create a legal entity that has all the drawbacks of ownership and licensing, but none of the benefits (for you) of ownership and licensing. In this case, if it were a license, this is an open and shut case. The users have a legal license to listen to the music; it doesn't matter how the music gets to them. If it is ownership, then it's also an open and shut case. The users own their copy and they can put it where ever they want, be it on their home computer or this backup place, but not both at the same time.
But because it's some pseudo-ownership pseudo-license hybrid, the music industry will, as you have, trot out whichever argument works in their favor in this particular case. In this case where the service is clearly legal if viewed in terms of a license, they'll argue that you own the files so you can't have a copy for yourself and give another copy to this service to distribute (even to you). If you needed to format shift your music (e.g. tape to CD) they argued the same thing -- that you owned the song on tape so you had to pay full price to own the same song on CD, or that MP3.com couldn't send you a copy of the song on MP3 if you could prove you already had the CD. But if a situation comes up where ownership would be beneficial to you, they'll turn right around and argue that it's a license. e.g. reselling (which they've tried to stop but thus far has been protected by the doctrine of first sale), playing in public or at an event, etc.
The hybrid nature is why music industry execs gets caught proposing stupid things, like it's illegal to convert your CDs to MP3, or it's illegal to play your CD on your computer because the computer is making a copy of it in memory. Originally, when music (and movies and books) was tied to physical media, it was a marketed as a license but (conveniently for the record companies) had physical limitations similar to ownership due to the media. The world has now gone digital and music is unshackled from any physical media, but the record companies still yearn for the physical limitations that came with ownership of physical media. So they've come up with this hybrid legal construct which is not self-consistent.
At this point it's pretty clear that copyrighted works like music are distributed via a license. We'd be much better off if everyone just acknowledged that and moved on. If they want to add license terms that restrict how I allow others to listen to the music I buy (e.g. public performance), I'm OK with that. But if they want to add license terms that restrict when and how I can listen to the music I've bought a license to listen to, well good luck with that. If this service were allowing people who didn't buy a license to listen to the music, then they'd need to get a distribution license from the studios. But it seems they're deliberately limiting their customers to those who already have such a license. Such a service (if operated as advertised) should clearly be legal. Otherwise you have a situation of charging for two licenses where one would suffice (which I suspect is what the studios want).
If a popular president has an extramarital affair, the press shows no fear and shouts it from the rooftops night and day.
But if the least popular president on record (backed by his administration) maintains that he has the inherent authority to kidnap US citizens at will and make them watch while his goons crush their children's testicles, the "free press" covers his butt so well that if you blink you'll miss the story.
I think you're trying to attribute to politics something that has a rather simple alternative explanation. In the eyes of the public (and therefore the press):
Slashdot Mirror
This self-healing mechanism essentially injects new polymer into the crack thus reseating the fiber within the polymer, sealing the polymer dislocations, and restoring the polymer's ability to transfer load between fibers. The dye to indicate a failure is to catch an inspector's attention just in case the stresses exceeded the fiber's breaking strength (e.g. from a rock or birdstrike). The presence of the dye does not in itself indicate the part is now substantially weaker than a new part (aside from the self-repair mechanism being used up).
Yes, the "healing" polymer is probably not as strong as the original polymer. But because of the nature of the failure mechanisms I've described above, any FRP already has plenty of leeway for polymer failure built into it. If it didn't, the material would be incredibly susceptible to fatigue failure after just a few load cycles.
Google and Yahoo may be trying to walk a fine line between offering the citizens of those countries access to information, while simultaneously trying to avoid getting banned. That is, this is probably not a case of there being a clear evil choice (turn over the IP address) and a not-evil choice (don't turn over the IP address). If refusing to give the IP address would've gotten them banned from providing service, then turning over the IP address may in fact have been the lesser of two evils.
1994/1995 was the transition period. That was when Mosaic became Netscape. I noticed URLs showing up in print and TV ads around then (granted I was in Boston at the time). It's also when AOL joined Usenet. The WWW's explosive growth during those years played a large role in convincing Microsoft to include a TCP/IP stack in Windows 95. Prior to that, Bill Gates was convinced the CompuServe / AOL model of glorified bulletin boards with a monthly service fee would win out.
I suspect one of the reasons (if not the reason) it's successful on the iPhone is because it's not a screen that's fixed vertically in front of you. It's a screen you can hold in your hands, and all you have to do to point is move your fingers. This is much less fatiguing than holding up and moving your entire arm to use it. (This is also why I'm doubtful Microsoft's TouchWall will succeed. It'll work for a tabletop, but it's not going to work on a wall except for the simplest tasks, at which point it's not worth the cost.)
From the DMCA section 1201:
`(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
Since the protections in the title only cover copyright, if time shifting is legal but the broadcast flag prohibits timeshifting, then a circumvention tool which bypasses the broadcast flag and allows you to timeshift would appear to be immune to the above clause in the DMCA.
Didn't this already get settled when cable TV was first introduced? IIRC the broadcast companies were up in arms about the cable TV companies effectively re-broadcasting their transmissions, but swapping out the ads for ones which paid the cable company. The cable companies argued that the broadcast companies were being paid a fixed amount for the ads, so it didn't matter if they were or weren't included in cable broadcasts. If I'm remembering right, I pretty sure the cable companies lost. I think the current situation is that the cable companies have to contract agreements with the broadcast studios, and most such agreements stipulate the nationwide ads need to be kept in place, but the cable company can switch out some of the local ads (presumably for a fee).
IIRC the Northridge quake in 1994 only lasted about 17 seconds at the epicenter. I was about 100 miles away when it hit and the shaking went on for a good 30-45 seconds. Based on the immediate reports I got from friends over email and their estimates of the duration of shaking, I was able to pinpoint the epicenter somewhere in western Los Angeles long before the news services.
At the epicenter itself, the duration of the shaking generally corresponds to the length of fault that gives way. If only a few km slips, it's a short quake. If several thousand km slips (like happened in Chile 1960 and Alaska 1964) the shaking can go on for several minutes. The Alaska quake was 4 minutes at the epicenter, with several distant but affected communities reporting shaking for almost 10 minutes.
Also note that earthquake magnitude is a measure of energy released, while certain types of damage correspond more to the power (energy over time) of the quake. The Northridge quake was moderate in terms of magnitude, but its direction and focus generated enormous power in certain areas. One seismograph recorded accelerations over 1g, whereas the previous largest recorded acceleration during an earthquake was less than 0.25g (typically you only see about 0.5 - 0.1g).
Is the MPEG Chroma bug. That was created by someone who wrote one of the original MPEG decoders that was eventually sold/distributed to most of the companies making the first DVD players (pre-1993). This one just won't go away either - initially most of the DVD manufacturers refused to acknowledge it even existed (probably because they didn't want to recall millions of DVD players with non-upgradeable firmware). I still see it every now and then on TV (indicating one of the upstream broadcasting companies is still using equipment afflicted with the bug). I notice it most often when diagonal red lines end up staircased like they're poorly interlaced (see pictures in the above link).
Since there seem to be legal issues at stake, I'd recommend doing an image copy of the drive to a new drive, then using a live CD to hack into the new drive. That way the original drive is still in its "pristine" state should any legal issues arise from altering the files. Ideally you want to dd the entire partition(s), to also preserve any deleted data.
Yahoo has only run into problems during the last 2 years, which is kinda short to declare the company dead. And their current P/E (with a price based on Microsoft's offer) is 35, which seems about average for most tech stocks. The day prior to Microsoft's bid, YHOO had dropped so low I was considering picking some up. I'm still kicking myself for putting off the research for a day so I could watch a movie.
The same arrangement continues with the USCG switching from DHS to DoD during times of war.
The reality is that the bulk of the money goes to pay current recipients, and only the leftover invested (and prior to the government separating it from the general fund, it wasn't even invested, it was simply used for other purposes with an IOU left in its place). If it were all held and invested, it'd be impossible for it to go into a shortfall -- after all, the original money plus interest would still be there. The only reason it's set to become a problem is because it's mostly not invested, it's used to pay current recipients. And when the payments to recipients exceeds the receipts from current workers, the system starts to fall apart.
The only way to fix it is for the government put in enough new money into it to offset all the people who got paid out of it without paying into it (complete and partial). At that point the system would have zero past debt and the money you put into it would be held for your retirement. Unless you do that, you're essentially shuffling $1000/mo into a savings account then immediately cashing out $900 of it to pay past debts, all so you can claim "I'm putting aside $1000/mo for retirement."There are some issues with the random nature of death and uncertainty of duration of payout, but as you say those are tweaks. I don't have a problem with a socialized retirement net per se, but it's in no way comparable to a fully privatized personal retirement account in how it's administrated.
I agree about the USPS. Dunno why you would exclude administration costs from schools though.
In that light, losing all their data might be just what's needed to get them to take computer security seriously. However, I'd consider it a last resort since it's a punitive action rather than a preventative action. The long-term solution is to accept that casual users are going to run their computers like this, and to come up with mechanisms which blunt or dilute the impact of compromised systems. We're already doing this with anti-virus and anti-spyware software, as well as flaming Microsoft so they fix all the security holes in Windows. But it may or may not also involve poisoning botnets.
Off the top of my head, I don't think you need to remove the botnet software. It's probably already secured the box against further infection. So all you need to do is scramble its communication and/or encryption so it doesn't/can't contact the bot master again. It could be as simple as changing one bit in an otherwise unused registry key. So "poisoning" a botnet may be much more benign than your worst case scenario.
Parents of child porn victims sue camera manufacturers for allowing pedophiles to make child porn.
Corporate hacking victims sue computer manufacturers for providing hackers tools to break into their systems.
Violent crime victims sue weapons manufacturers for enabling criminals to harm them.
China sues Western democracies for giving its citizens subversive ideas of freedom and civil liberties.
But because it's some pseudo-ownership pseudo-license hybrid, the music industry will, as you have, trot out whichever argument works in their favor in this particular case. In this case where the service is clearly legal if viewed in terms of a license, they'll argue that you own the files so you can't have a copy for yourself and give another copy to this service to distribute (even to you). If you needed to format shift your music (e.g. tape to CD) they argued the same thing -- that you owned the song on tape so you had to pay full price to own the same song on CD, or that MP3.com couldn't send you a copy of the song on MP3 if you could prove you already had the CD. But if a situation comes up where ownership would be beneficial to you, they'll turn right around and argue that it's a license. e.g. reselling (which they've tried to stop but thus far has been protected by the doctrine of first sale), playing in public or at an event, etc.
The hybrid nature is why music industry execs gets caught proposing stupid things, like it's illegal to convert your CDs to MP3, or it's illegal to play your CD on your computer because the computer is making a copy of it in memory. Originally, when music (and movies and books) was tied to physical media, it was a marketed as a license but (conveniently for the record companies) had physical limitations similar to ownership due to the media. The world has now gone digital and music is unshackled from any physical media, but the record companies still yearn for the physical limitations that came with ownership of physical media. So they've come up with this hybrid legal construct which is not self-consistent.
At this point it's pretty clear that copyrighted works like music are distributed via a license. We'd be much better off if everyone just acknowledged that and moved on. If they want to add license terms that restrict how I allow others to listen to the music I buy (e.g. public performance), I'm OK with that. But if they want to add license terms that restrict when and how I can listen to the music I've bought a license to listen to, well good luck with that. If this service were allowing people who didn't buy a license to listen to the music, then they'd need to get a distribution license from the studios. But it seems they're deliberately limiting their customers to those who already have such a license. Such a service (if operated as advertised) should clearly be legal. Otherwise you have a situation of charging for two licenses where one would suffice (which I suspect is what the studios want).
Salacious scandal >>> any other type of scandal