Thank you, but that's not what I said. To illustrate the problem, you can read about a recent investigation by the Chinese government here: https://retractionwatch.com/20...
I don't think this factors in what I believe is a higher likelihood for scientific papers originating in China to involve plagiarism and/or fraud. Although the authors note an increase in publications in high-impact journals like Nature and Science, there doesn't appear to be any other real quality metric - just a note about valuing the average paper coming from China as 1/5 as much as a Western paper, based on number of subsequent citations. With the goals of this study, I don't think that's a rigorous enough metric to draw any conclusions other than that the quantity of papers emerging from China is increasing.
A lot of similar systems use solar concentrators involving a concentrating lens or reflector, increasing the amount of illumination on the area of interest. It's conventional to refer to the amount of illumination in terms of multiples of normal solar radiation - so 2 suns, 10 suns, etc.
Nope, the idea is that the device soaks up lots of solar radiation (infrared through ultraviolet, presumably), and heats up. As it heats up, though, it emits as little as possible energy through infrared radiation. This allows the device to stay as warm as possible, speeding up the steam generation - the heat transfer to the water occurs on the device's underside, I believe through conductive heat transfer.
This is a little off-topic, but there's an analogous jump for bandwidth.
I used to work at a fairly large university, and you could watch the bandwidth charts and see what was happening:
9 am - people arrive at work, bandwidth climbs
1 pm - bandwidth plateaus - people are eating lunch / students waking up or getting back from early classes
5 pm - bandwidth halves as workers go home
7 pm - bandwidth climbs again due to student usage
9 pm - plateaus
2 am - begins to decline
6 am - minimal usage
This takes some work to set up, but will give you a lot of control over your power consumption.
As has been mentioned before, a lot of older readers are IDE devices, and so, can easily be converted to USB. (Note that for IDE, the device must be plugged in and powered when the system boots, otherwise it won't be recognized.)
After converting to USB, splice in relays - on the device power cable and the USB +5V cable (to prevent the device from half-powering-up via USB power). Connect the relay control to the appropriate voltage via a pushbutton switch which you can mount on the front of your computer (can sacrifice a drive bay for a panel of switches).
This will let you turn each device on and off as you want.
This is good, I think - although the investment in terms of resources is probably huge, most of it's also (hopefully) a one-time investment....whereas, every time we send a rocket up, we permanently lose an awful lot of materials - among other things, those precious hydrocarbons.......at least, until we're able to mine asteroids / other planets.
Looking at the datasheet for that cable on their website, it seems like the only possibly unique thing they've done is to add a thin metal shield around the cable near the tip - from where it stops being UTP (with all the noise-protection that UTP tends to have) to where the plastic connector-to-NIC starts.
The cable insulation and the rest looks mostly standard - I mean, it's cloth and heatshrink (probably PVC) instead of vinyl, but I can't imagine that the change would make such a huge difference, even in terms of so-called 'vibration protection'. Are electrical signals really that sensitive to normal sounds?
So a huge markup for a very small piece of tin foil and some cloth. Whee!
I understand that they want to do this so that they can display ads that target you... I'm not sure whether I have a problem with that or not - but do we really want advertisements that are targeting our kids?
The only problem I see here is that Sequoia could theoretically sue New Jersey over violating their agreement. Reverse engineering is legal so long as the item that's being analyzed was obtained legally... so the professor should be fine.
IANAL, but, I think - regardless of the terms of the agreement, the voting machine was legally obtained - if they violated the agreement then that's a civil dispute, not a criminal one.
"All utility patents which issue from applications filed on and after December 12, 1980 are subject to the payment of maintenance fees which must be paid to maintain the patent in force. These fees are due at 3 ½, 7 ½ and 11 ½ years from the date the patent is granted and can be paid without a surcharge during the "window-period" which is the six month period preceding each due date, e.g., 3 years to 3 years and six months. (See fee schedule for a list of maintenance fees.)
Failure to pay the current maintenance fee on time may result in expiration of the patent. A 6-month grace period is provided when the maintenance fee may be paid with a surcharge. The grace period is the 6-month period immediately following the due date. The Patent and Trademark Office does not mail notices to patent owners that maintenance fees are due. If, however, the maintenance fee is not paid on time, efforts are made to remind the responsible party that the maintenance fee may be paid during the grace period with a surcharge."
If you're not up to setting up your own DNS server, how about just setting all local systems to use the local gateway as a DNS server - then use pf or ipfw to redirect those packets (incoming to gateway:53) to your ISP's DNS servers?
Drop any incoming packets on the internal interface on port 53 that aren't addressed to the gateway. That'll allow you to keep an eye on the DNS servers easily on a machine that's presumably running *nix and not as susceptible to viruses without having to set up your own.
This might have a small physical cross-section on radar, but I'm not sure that's enough to compensate for the plasma......I work in an electronics lab, and occasionally we use a sputtering system - which generates a ball of plasma to transfer ions from one surface to another. Anyway, point being, when we do this, the guys next door, who do a lot of RF measurements, go absolutely nuts - because we've just screwed all of their instruments and currently-running measurements. (Incidently, between them and the plasma is an inch-thick steel chamber at near-vacuum, plus a thinner steel layer and a reasonably thick wall.)
So sure, it may not look like much when it's off, but it's like a giant pillar of electromagnetic flame when it's on. Still worth it?
This isn't really anything new - shrinking design processes always make life harder for designers. Each design process (.25 um, 90 nm, etc.) has a set of rules about things - for example, how close interconnects can be to each other without causing interference.
The ruleset for quarter-micron was maybe forty pages. The ruleset for 90 nm was the size of a small phonebook. I don't even want to think about what the rules for 65 or 45 nm must look like.
> I simply would not be on the campus network unless the school provided privacy > to its users.
This is hard to do. I used to work for a university - they didn't habitually identify users, but for various purposes (hacked computers, viruses, people running misconfigured DHCP servers, finding stolen computers, broken equipment), we needed to be able to identify, at least, where a computer is physically on campus.
In order to do this, we used a number of techniques. If a computer is plugged in to the LAN, then we could see its MAC address. There was a database of which switchport goes to which wall jack and where that jack is. Many times, this is a dorm room - and at that point, it's pretty easy to ID the user, if necessary. Most of the time we didn't - we'd instead filter their MAC so that when they tried to use the internet they'd get a notice (i.e., 'You have a virus. Please reformat your computer.').
But for those times when it was necessary, if we couldn't pin it down by room, we also had a tool which would keep records of where people logged in to common campus servers from. If you're claiming that that MAC isn't yours and we could see that you'd logged into the mail server daily from there... well, that'd be problematic, to say the least.
I'm all for universities protecting their students privacy - but in order to keep everything running, certain measures need to be in place. Sorry.
As chips get smaller and smaller, they tend to become more and more sensitive to electromagnetic interference....the layer of insulation between a transistor's gate and channel is so tiny that a moderately sized EM pulse should cause it to break down permanently.
I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that the EMP needed to disable these chips would be of a lower magnitude than would cause damage to a person - unless maybe they have a pacemaker.
Perhaps make like the guys in Cryptonomicon and turn your doorway into a giant electromagnet?
-if you're working with microelectonics, definitely a static strap of some sort - you can get a wrist strap that'll hook to your bench, or a heel strap that wraps around your foot.
-at least two multimeters, you're gonna need more than one.
-an oscilloscope
-a water-tight cabinet with some sort of dehumidifier - good for sensitive electronics, water-sensitive chemicals, and some biological material.
-a refrigerator. Good for lunch and bacterial cultures.
I'm surprised nobody has posted on these yet - while a lot of people have mentioned using yoga balls to make you sit up straight, there are also kneeling chairs (where you kneel, rather than sit) which force you to do the same.
They take a little getting used to, as more of your weight is on your knees, but are probably more acceptable in an office environment....although, there probably is a certain satisfaction in being able to hurl your yoga ball at co-workers.
Too right. With this sort of system, the average citizen is damned both if they comply and if they refuse to.
People fear terrorism, which is what this law was probably meant to address. Unfortunately, with this sort of law in place, people still fear terrorism - and begin to fear their own government.
One of the primary roles of any government is to protect the interests of its citizens on at least the most basic levels. But in pursuing their safety, there are lines that ought not be crossed. There is no way - none - to ensure that people are completely safe. We could encase our citizens in underground cells of concrete, steel and lead shielding, but this is still no bar to someone slipping in the shower.
Just because safety is essentially unattainable doesn't mean that it's a bad goal - it's not - but it ought not be treated as paramount, and permitted to reduce civil liberties.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, but that's not what I said. To illustrate the problem, you can read about a recent investigation by the Chinese government here: https://retractionwatch.com/20...
I don't think this factors in what I believe is a higher likelihood for scientific papers originating in China to involve plagiarism and/or fraud. Although the authors note an increase in publications in high-impact journals like Nature and Science, there doesn't appear to be any other real quality metric - just a note about valuing the average paper coming from China as 1/5 as much as a Western paper, based on number of subsequent citations. With the goals of this study, I don't think that's a rigorous enough metric to draw any conclusions other than that the quantity of papers emerging from China is increasing.
A lot of similar systems use solar concentrators involving a concentrating lens or reflector, increasing the amount of illumination on the area of interest. It's conventional to refer to the amount of illumination in terms of multiples of normal solar radiation - so 2 suns, 10 suns, etc.
Nope, the idea is that the device soaks up lots of solar radiation (infrared through ultraviolet, presumably), and heats up. As it heats up, though, it emits as little as possible energy through infrared radiation. This allows the device to stay as warm as possible, speeding up the steam generation - the heat transfer to the water occurs on the device's underside, I believe through conductive heat transfer.
What happens if you have an encrypted boot volume? It's pretty obvious that the disk is encrypted when you power-on.
...similarly, it'd be ... odd ... to claim that you didn't know the password to your computer.
Would it follow that having an encrypted boot volume is sorta pointless because you can automatically be compelled to release the data?
This reminds me an awful lot of a story from the Acts of Gord....
This is a little off-topic, but there's an analogous jump for bandwidth.
I used to work at a fairly large university, and you could watch the bandwidth charts and see what was happening:
9 am - people arrive at work, bandwidth climbs
1 pm - bandwidth plateaus - people are eating lunch / students waking up or getting back from early classes
5 pm - bandwidth halves as workers go home
7 pm - bandwidth climbs again due to student usage
9 pm - plateaus
2 am - begins to decline
6 am - minimal usage
This takes some work to set up, but will give you a lot of control over your power consumption.
As has been mentioned before, a lot of older readers are IDE devices, and so, can easily be converted to USB. (Note that for IDE, the device must be plugged in and powered when the system boots, otherwise it won't be recognized.)
After converting to USB, splice in relays - on the device power cable and the USB +5V cable (to prevent the device from half-powering-up via USB power). Connect the relay control to the appropriate voltage via a pushbutton switch which you can mount on the front of your computer (can sacrifice a drive bay for a panel of switches).
This will let you turn each device on and off as you want.
This is good, I think - although the investment in terms of resources is probably huge, most of it's also (hopefully) a one-time investment. ...whereas, every time we send a rocket up, we permanently lose an awful lot of materials - among other things, those precious hydrocarbons.... ...at least, until we're able to mine asteroids / other planets.
Looking at the datasheet for that cable on their website, it seems like the only possibly unique thing they've done is to add a thin metal shield around the cable near the tip - from where it stops being UTP (with all the noise-protection that UTP tends to have) to where the plastic connector-to-NIC starts.
The cable insulation and the rest looks mostly standard - I mean, it's cloth and heatshrink (probably PVC) instead of vinyl, but I can't imagine that the change would make such a huge difference, even in terms of so-called 'vibration protection'. Are electrical signals really that sensitive to normal sounds?
So a huge markup for a very small piece of tin foil and some cloth. Whee!
There's a good description (albeit, not as technical as it could be) of this phenomenon in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
There's a nice feature on Ira Winkler in attrition.org's charlatan file:
http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan.html#winkler
Privacy issues aside (eek!),
... I'm not sure whether I have a problem with that or not - but do we really want advertisements that are targeting our kids?
I understand that they want to do this so that they can display ads that target you
The only problem I see here is that Sequoia could theoretically sue New Jersey over violating their agreement. Reverse engineering is legal so long as the item that's being analyzed was obtained legally ... so the professor should be fine.
IANAL, but, I think - regardless of the terms of the agreement, the voting machine was legally obtained - if they violated the agreement then that's a civil dispute, not a criminal one.
There are maintenance fees. From http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/mainten.htm :
"All utility patents which issue from applications filed on and after December 12, 1980 are subject to the payment of maintenance fees which must be paid to maintain the patent in force. These fees are due at 3 ½, 7 ½ and 11 ½ years from the date the patent is granted and can be paid without a surcharge during the "window-period" which is the six month period preceding each due date, e.g., 3 years to 3 years and six months. (See fee schedule for a list of maintenance fees.)
Failure to pay the current maintenance fee on time may result in expiration of the patent. A 6-month grace period is provided when the maintenance fee may be paid with a surcharge. The grace period is the 6-month period immediately following the due date. The Patent and Trademark Office does not mail notices to patent owners that maintenance fees are due. If, however, the maintenance fee is not paid on time, efforts are made to remind the responsible party that the maintenance fee may be paid during the grace period with a surcharge."
If you're not up to setting up your own DNS server, how about just setting all local systems to use the local gateway as a DNS server - then use pf or ipfw to redirect those packets (incoming to gateway:53) to your ISP's DNS servers?
Drop any incoming packets on the internal interface on port 53 that aren't addressed to the gateway. That'll allow you to keep an eye on the DNS servers easily on a machine that's presumably running *nix and not as susceptible to viruses without having to set up your own.
This might have a small physical cross-section on radar, but I'm not sure that's enough to compensate for the plasma... ...I work in an electronics lab, and occasionally we use a sputtering system - which generates a ball of plasma to transfer ions from one surface to another. Anyway, point being, when we do this, the guys next door, who do a lot of RF measurements, go absolutely nuts - because we've just screwed all of their instruments and currently-running measurements. (Incidently, between them and the plasma is an inch-thick steel chamber at near-vacuum, plus a thinner steel layer and a reasonably thick wall.)
So sure, it may not look like much when it's off, but it's like a giant pillar of electromagnetic flame when it's on. Still worth it?
Uh, what's to stop the bad guys from taking these techniques and using them against existing networks, e.g., E-bay?
I'm not sure I like this idea....
What happens is someone smacks the patch, or you bump into something?
This isn't really anything new - shrinking design processes always make life harder for designers. Each design process (.25 um, 90 nm, etc.) has a set of rules about things - for example, how close interconnects can be to each other without causing interference.
The ruleset for quarter-micron was maybe forty pages. The ruleset for 90 nm was the size of a small phonebook. I don't even want to think about what the rules for 65 or 45 nm must look like.
> I simply would not be on the campus network unless the school provided privacy
... well, that'd be problematic, to say the least.
> to its users.
This is hard to do. I used to work for a university - they didn't habitually identify users, but for various purposes (hacked computers, viruses, people running misconfigured DHCP servers, finding stolen computers, broken equipment), we needed to be able to identify, at least, where a computer is physically on campus.
In order to do this, we used a number of techniques. If a computer is plugged in to the LAN, then we could see its MAC address. There was a database of which switchport goes to which wall jack and where that jack is. Many times, this is a dorm room - and at that point, it's pretty easy to ID the user, if necessary. Most of the time we didn't - we'd instead filter their MAC so that when they tried to use the internet they'd get a notice (i.e., 'You have a virus. Please reformat your computer.').
But for those times when it was necessary, if we couldn't pin it down by room, we also had a tool which would keep records of where people logged in to common campus servers from. If you're claiming that that MAC isn't yours and we could see that you'd logged into the mail server daily from there
I'm all for universities protecting their students privacy - but in order to keep everything running, certain measures need to be in place. Sorry.
As chips get smaller and smaller, they tend to become more and more sensitive to electromagnetic interference. ...the layer of insulation between a transistor's gate and channel is so tiny that a moderately sized EM pulse should cause it to break down permanently.
I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that the EMP needed to disable these chips would be of a lower magnitude than would cause damage to a person - unless maybe they have a pacemaker.
Perhaps make like the guys in Cryptonomicon and turn your doorway into a giant electromagnet?
A few things:
-if you're working with microelectonics, definitely a static strap of some sort - you can get a wrist strap that'll hook to your bench, or a heel strap that wraps around your foot.
-at least two multimeters, you're gonna need more than one.
-an oscilloscope
-a water-tight cabinet with some sort of dehumidifier - good for sensitive electronics, water-sensitive chemicals, and some biological material.
-a refrigerator. Good for lunch and bacterial cultures.
-possibly a centrifuge?
I'm surprised nobody has posted on these yet - while a lot of people have mentioned using yoga balls to make you sit up straight, there are also kneeling chairs (where you kneel, rather than sit) which force you to do the same.
...although, there probably is a certain satisfaction in being able to hurl your yoga ball at co-workers.
They take a little getting used to, as more of your weight is on your knees, but are probably more acceptable in an office environment.
Link to an example: here.
Too right. With this sort of system, the average citizen is damned both if they comply and if they refuse to.
People fear terrorism, which is what this law was probably meant to address. Unfortunately, with this sort of law in place, people still fear terrorism - and begin to fear their own government.
One of the primary roles of any government is to protect the interests of its citizens on at least the most basic levels. But in pursuing their safety, there are lines that ought not be crossed. There is no way - none - to ensure that people are completely safe. We could encase our citizens in underground cells of concrete, steel and lead shielding, but this is still no bar to someone slipping in the shower.
Just because safety is essentially unattainable doesn't mean that it's a bad goal - it's not - but it ought not be treated as paramount, and permitted to reduce civil liberties.