Technically there a different forms of Unix and there is Linux. The Unix systems include the BSDs since they evolved from now proprietary versions by slowly replacing all code with newly written code under BSD license.
Linux however was written from scratch and does not share ancestry with Unix systems (and is in that way not a Unix, even if it looks and feels like one). Therefore I don't understand what place the arrow from Minix 1.0 to Linux 0.01 has in the diagram you linked. It was written and compiled on Minix, but I would not consider that as an "evolved from" which the arrow implies.
Cell phones of today (or at least a few years ago) are easily scanned too.
Only the analog cell phones that are AFAIK only still used in the US.
I am not sure how it is now with all the digital cell phones and what not... Some at least probably have encryption or just don't transmit anything that a human would understand without another cell phone at the end decoding it.
These are packetized to share bandwidth on the same frequency and is also using multiple frequencies at the same time, IIRC. With the common scanner you would get a big mess listening on one frequency, additionally the connections are encrypted.
The encryption is weak however, and man-in-the-middle attacks have been successfully demonstrated. Build your own phone cell which forwards to the real network and off you go, handling and listening on all calls while the respective phones consider your cell to be the strongest in range.
So why should something be licensed if no one is making money off of it, is it to be geek-chic or something?
Easy. If it's not licensed it can't be free software. Anything that does not have a license will get the default copyright permissions applied, and these do not allow you to distribute someone else's software.
For example, if someone gives you some source code without a license attached to it and you put it up for public download, you could get sued by the copyright owner. If people want their own software to be freely modifiable and distributable, they have to explicitly state this intention in a license.
So you propose to distribute one time pads over another channel that is using a stream or block cipher with fixed key length, arguing that that channel can't be attacked since only random data is transmitted (if I got you right).
Sorry, this doesn't work. You might get only random data on decryption attempts, but it's only a limited set which you can test by decrypting OTP encrypted messages in order to crack the key of the distribution channel (you just added one additional step). That makes the combination of both methods no more secure than the distribution channel alone, so you might as well use that to send messages directly.
If you've been in contact with someone, just give them a set of decryption keys for one-time pads. Then, for the last one, send another batch.
If I understand you right, you want to distribute OTPs via the OTP encrypted channel. That doesn't work (or rather doesn't make any sense) since OTP encryption uses up exactly as many key bits as data is encrypted. If you send someone 500k of fresh OTP bits encrypted you use up 500k of the existing bits and will gain nothing. In effect you just replace a set of OTP bits with another set of the same length, which is useless.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Theft \Theft\ (?), n.
1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
2. The thing stolen. [R.] If the theft be certainly found in his hand alive, . . . he shall restore double. --Ex. xxii.
It's because more educated people tend to be leftists. Or, a corollary, not all Republicans are stupid people, but most stupid people are Republican...
It's probably the same all over the world. Conservatism, national pride/security/... (as an excuse for anything), fear of change/difference and scapegoating is understood by the dumbest of people, it's all so simple.
Just look at the cheap newspapers targetted at the masses. These are conservative and opportunistic, the uneducated masses read it and feel that they are understood. Credibility or multiple sources of information mean nothing to them.
A high quality of education is important for society as a whole, but some mainstream political parties conveniently ignore that.
...because whatever energy the sun gives off to the Earth (and is used up by plants and tractors) is lost chemical potential energy on the part of the sun.
Sorry, but the sun doesn't create energy through chemical processes. Apart from that I agree with your judgment of the previous poster.
Or that crazy German guy who embalms corpses in order to sculpt them (saw it on the Learning Channel).
Probably you refer to plastination, with a travelling exhibition. I have personally only seen it on TV yet. They don't just make it a medical exhibition but turn it into art.
In theory, as one approached toward the center of such an object, it will look more and more normal because gravity starts to cancel itself out.
The gravity will get less, but me thinks this will be more than made up for by the pressure from the layers above. After all, a sun's core is where the fusion happens (i.e. where the conditions are the most dramatic), even though gravity cancels itself out there. This shouldn't be any different for neutron stars.
Which other forms of communication could there be, other than transmitting electromagnetic waves?
Freaky quantum stuff. I think using coupled ("verschränkt", the English term escapes me at the moment) particle pairs are discussed on theoretic levels for communications or teleportation.
But, as others have pointed out, even radio communication does not have to be detectable. I think even ours gets less and less detectable outside Saturn's orbit. We are moving from high power broadcast to localized, low energy communications. This comes with the move to high bandwidth, digital communications. There are plans to switch terrestrial TV broadcast entirely from analog to digital in Germany by 2007 or so, for example.
If a civilization does not intentionally set up radio beacons the waves could probably only be detected in the short period (~100 years?) between emergence of radio waves as forms of communications and advancements of technology making them move to digital high bandwidth communications.
Probably because as you said the metal was on the bottom? This should get it grounded to the oven so there are no visible sparks since no static charge can build up. Depends on how conducting the base of your microwave is, I guess.
That gamma radiation comes from matter spiraling in on the black hole. It forms a disc around the black hole, which is hot and has strong magnetic fields. That should be bright by itself, but charged particles getting accelerated in a magnetic field directly emit radiation.
The virtual particle radiation is a function of event horizon surface, the smaller it gets the more energy is lost through radiation. That's why black holes are said to explode at the end of their lives and that's why microscopic black holes that could possibly created in future particle accelerators won't eat the earth.
I'm no expert at this, but I think that only the state where energy is created from/destroyed to nothing must be unobservable. The actual act of separating the virtual particles and thus making particles out of nothing is not observed.
The observation shows you a stream of particles escaping from the black hole (although nothing should be able to leave from the inside) and the black hole losing mass. No energy or mass is created or destroyed in the observation.
There are only two countries out there that have manned spaceflight programs
To do some nitpicking, a few more countries have manned spaceflight programs, but only USA and Russia have the vehicles to launch people into space. The others buy space flights for their astronauts from these two.
The ESA is not much better, having blown up at least one Ariane rocket because they'd swapped a + for a -.
If you refer to the Ariane 5 disaster (at least I don't know any other that got destroyed due to a software problem), then the effects which required it to be destroyed were a bit more complicated. The reason was however relatively simple. They used the proven Ariane 4 software, but missed a function which was not able to handle the wider input range caused by the more powerful rocket, which then subsequently reported errors that could not be handled or just gave wrong results (don't remember which) causing the rocket to stray excessively off-course, which then had to be destroyed.
At least this was not in regular operation but on the maiden voyage of the system (still with payload and expensive, of course), got fixed and they did a bunch of flawless Ariane 5 launches.
A large reason for that being that Europe totally lacks suitable launch grounds(you need lots of empty ground east of your launch spot to let the various stages of the rockets fall down)
Actually Europe has better launch grounds than the NASA (not geographically as in located in Europe, but as in being owned by the ESA). It's in French-Guyana (South America), opens over the ocean and is only slightly north of the equator, unlike NASA's launch grounds.
If they want to shoot something into an equatorial orbit (e.g. commercial satellites to geostationary) they can save a lot of fuel by exploiting earth's rotation speed, which is highest on the equator. And the Ariane rockets aren't exactly unsuccessful, commercially or otherwise... (in fact, the ISS will get supplies through Ariane 5 rockets, IIRC).
The biggest problem with this is that if I'm going to nuke some city and I think they have anti-missile defenses, I will detonate a high altitude burst to generate an EMP, disabling most defenses you might have.
Miltary equipment is EMP hardened. I don't think this would be an option. EMPs probably serve best as a strike against civilian life and "public order".
Your criticisms further assume a Clinton-style defense system where the first line of defense is a small-scale ground-based system that targets warheads, not a large-scale space-based defense that targets missiles.
From all information I have, it's ground based. That's why it's useless, but it still creates so much political trouble. Try to install weapon platforms in space crossing Russian and Chinese skies multiple times a day and then you'll see really angry governments.
We're banking on the fact that we can stay ahead of the nations NMD is supposed to protect us against in decoy technology.
Decoy technology, yeah right. You obviously can't put up some plastic decoys, but it's really simple to make a decoy that shows up on the radar screen identically to the real thing (use the same package). For IR sensors, include some heating to simulate excess heat from nuclear reactions. Program them all for valid targets, of course.
These decoys are indistinguishable from real warheads until you get near enough to disassemble them, or until they are supposed to blow up.
Required countermeasures against the missile defense would be around nothing for a large scale attack (since the system would take out practically nothing). For small attacks like single nukes the solution would be to make it equivalent to a large attack by sending fake warheads with the real one.
If there are five fakes on a real warhead, they would have to shoot down each and every of the six nukes on their screen. How high is the propability for that? How high is the propability that they will hit the real nuke in the subset (one of the six, if at all) they manage to destroy?
[The Saturn V were originally] designed to hurl very big nukes at the Russians...
This sounds rather unbelievable. Wouldn't they be a bit *very* big for this? Considering the stages were enough to get to the moon and that you don't need that to hit Russia (sub-orbital ballistic is enough), that would be a nuke the size of Skylab exactly (and that even did it to orbit). And Skylab was huge in volume/diameter.
What would they have planned to do with a nuke of that size? Shoot Moscow through the middle of the earth and out the other side?
Slashdot Mirror
Technically there a different forms of Unix and there is Linux. The Unix systems include the BSDs since they evolved from now proprietary versions by slowly replacing all code with newly written code under BSD license.
Linux however was written from scratch and does not share ancestry with Unix systems (and is in that way not a Unix, even if it looks and feels like one). Therefore I don't understand what place the arrow from Minix 1.0 to Linux 0.01 has in the diagram you linked. It was written and compiled on Minix, but I would not consider that as an "evolved from" which the arrow implies.
Only the analog cell phones that are AFAIK only still used in the US.
I am not sure how it is now with all the digital cell phones and what not... Some at least probably have encryption or just don't transmit anything that a human would understand without another cell phone at the end decoding it.
These are packetized to share bandwidth on the same frequency and is also using multiple frequencies at the same time, IIRC. With the common scanner you would get a big mess listening on one frequency, additionally the connections are encrypted.
The encryption is weak however, and man-in-the-middle attacks have been successfully demonstrated. Build your own phone cell which forwards to the real network and off you go, handling and listening on all calls while the respective phones consider your cell to be the strongest in range.
Easy. If it's not licensed it can't be free software. Anything that does not have a license will get the default copyright permissions applied, and these do not allow you to distribute someone else's software.
For example, if someone gives you some source code without a license attached to it and you put it up for public download, you could get sued by the copyright owner. If people want their own software to be freely modifiable and distributable, they have to explicitly state this intention in a license.
So you propose to distribute one time pads over another channel that is using a stream or block cipher with fixed key length, arguing that that channel can't be attacked since only random data is transmitted (if I got you right).
Sorry, this doesn't work. You might get only random data on decryption attempts, but it's only a limited set which you can test by decrypting OTP encrypted messages in order to crack the key of the distribution channel (you just added one additional step). That makes the combination of both methods no more secure than the distribution channel alone, so you might as well use that to send messages directly.
If I understand you right, you want to distribute OTPs via the OTP encrypted channel. That doesn't work (or rather doesn't make any sense) since OTP encryption uses up exactly as many key bits as data is encrypted. If you send someone 500k of fresh OTP bits encrypted you use up 500k of the existing bits and will gain nothing. In effect you just replace a set of OTP bits with another set of the same length, which is useless.
Oh, but we already have. Ranging from 8-bitters to the LEON (32 bit SPARC implementation, written under ESA contract).
Of course, there is a lot more to open source hardware than just CPUs, just look at OpenCores.
It's probably the same all over the world. Conservatism, national pride/security/... (as an excuse for anything), fear of change/difference and scapegoating is understood by the dumbest of people, it's all so simple.
Just look at the cheap newspapers targetted at the masses. These are conservative and opportunistic, the uneducated masses read it and feel that they are understood. Credibility or multiple sources of information mean nothing to them.
A high quality of education is important for society as a whole, but some mainstream political parties conveniently ignore that.
Sorry, but the sun doesn't create energy through chemical processes. Apart from that I agree with your judgment of the previous poster.
Probably you refer to plastination, with a travelling exhibition. I have personally only seen it on TV yet. They don't just make it a medical exhibition but turn it into art.
The gravity will get less, but me thinks this will be more than made up for by the pressure from the layers above. After all, a sun's core is where the fusion happens (i.e. where the conditions are the most dramatic), even though gravity cancels itself out there. This shouldn't be any different for neutron stars.
Freaky quantum stuff. I think using coupled ("verschränkt", the English term escapes me at the moment) particle pairs are discussed on theoretic levels for communications or teleportation.
But, as others have pointed out, even radio communication does not have to be detectable. I think even ours gets less and less detectable outside Saturn's orbit. We are moving from high power broadcast to localized, low energy communications. This comes with the move to high bandwidth, digital communications. There are plans to switch terrestrial TV broadcast entirely from analog to digital in Germany by 2007 or so, for example.
If a civilization does not intentionally set up radio beacons the waves could probably only be detected in the short period (~100 years?) between emergence of radio waves as forms of communications and advancements of technology making them move to digital high bandwidth communications.
Probably because as you said the metal was on the bottom? This should get it grounded to the oven so there are no visible sparks since no static charge can build up. Depends on how conducting the base of your microwave is, I guess.
That gamma radiation comes from matter spiraling in on the black hole. It forms a disc around the black hole, which is hot and has strong magnetic fields. That should be bright by itself, but charged particles getting accelerated in a magnetic field directly emit radiation.
The virtual particle radiation is a function of event horizon surface, the smaller it gets the more energy is lost through radiation. That's why black holes are said to explode at the end of their lives and that's why microscopic black holes that could possibly created in future particle accelerators won't eat the earth.
I'm no expert at this, but I think that only the state where energy is created from/destroyed to nothing must be unobservable. The actual act of separating the virtual particles and thus making particles out of nothing is not observed.
The observation shows you a stream of particles escaping from the black hole (although nothing should be able to leave from the inside) and the black hole losing mass. No energy or mass is created or destroyed in the observation.
To do some nitpicking, a few more countries have manned spaceflight programs, but only USA and Russia have the vehicles to launch people into space. The others buy space flights for their astronauts from these two.
If you refer to the Ariane 5 disaster (at least I don't know any other that got destroyed due to a software problem), then the effects which required it to be destroyed were a bit more complicated. The reason was however relatively simple. They used the proven Ariane 4 software, but missed a function which was not able to handle the wider input range caused by the more powerful rocket, which then subsequently reported errors that could not be handled or just gave wrong results (don't remember which) causing the rocket to stray excessively off-course, which then had to be destroyed.
At least this was not in regular operation but on the maiden voyage of the system (still with payload and expensive, of course), got fixed and they did a bunch of flawless Ariane 5 launches.
Actually Europe has better launch grounds than the NASA (not geographically as in located in Europe, but as in being owned by the ESA). It's in French-Guyana (South America), opens over the ocean and is only slightly north of the equator, unlike NASA's launch grounds.
If they want to shoot something into an equatorial orbit (e.g. commercial satellites to geostationary) they can save a lot of fuel by exploiting earth's rotation speed, which is highest on the equator. And the Ariane rockets aren't exactly unsuccessful, commercially or otherwise... (in fact, the ISS will get supplies through Ariane 5 rockets, IIRC).
Miltary equipment is EMP hardened. I don't think this would be an option. EMPs probably serve best as a strike against civilian life and "public order".
From all information I have, it's ground based. That's why it's useless, but it still creates so much political trouble. Try to install weapon platforms in space crossing Russian and Chinese skies multiple times a day and then you'll see really angry governments.
Decoy technology, yeah right. You obviously can't put up some plastic decoys, but it's really simple to make a decoy that shows up on the radar screen identically to the real thing (use the same package). For IR sensors, include some heating to simulate excess heat from nuclear reactions. Program them all for valid targets, of course.
These decoys are indistinguishable from real warheads until you get near enough to disassemble them, or until they are supposed to blow up.
Required countermeasures against the missile defense would be around nothing for a large scale attack (since the system would take out practically nothing). For small attacks like single nukes the solution would be to make it equivalent to a large attack by sending fake warheads with the real one.
If there are five fakes on a real warhead, they would have to shoot down each and every of the six nukes on their screen. How high is the propability for that? How high is the propability that they will hit the real nuke in the subset (one of the six, if at all) they manage to destroy?
Oh, and he doesn't spell astronaut as astronaut but Astro-not! A pun! It's one of the creative dudes.
They can be so amusing...
Bloody hell no it isn't. That kind of misconception makes me shiver. To get an actual definition here:
x = root(a,n) = a^(1/n) <=> x^n = a
Courtesy of "Springers mathematische Formeln" (2nd edition).
This sounds rather unbelievable. Wouldn't they be a bit *very* big for this? Considering the stages were enough to get to the moon and that you don't need that to hit Russia (sub-orbital ballistic is enough), that would be a nuke the size of Skylab exactly (and that even did it to orbit). And Skylab was huge in volume/diameter.
What would they have planned to do with a nuke of that size? Shoot Moscow through the middle of the earth and out the other side?