This will always be a problem because people don't want to have to deal with complex security. I wouldn't mind keeping an RSA authenticated keychain that has a rotating cryptographic key that changes every 60 seconds (a pretty cool solution, I've seen in action), but moron hick who doesn't see why he should have to have more than one password will never stand for it. Juggling multiple methods of authentication is too complex for the average Joe.
I don't know that the rotating key is necessary, but RSA smartcards are a wonderful way to authenticate yourself without divulging information that would enable a third party impersonate you, and their use need not be any more complicated than running a card through a reader or plugging a token into a usb port. Why we even use credit card numbers anymore is a mystery to me.
Thankfully, that average Joe is also the same moron who will fall victim to phishing instead of me. I'll never lose my money, so it's not my problem.
You might be able to avoid being a victim of phishing, but there are other ways you might fall victim to identity theft that are beyond your control (unless you don't use a credit card or divulge sensitive information to anyone, and that's hard to do in our society). The problem is that many organizations who have access to personal data don't have significant incentive to protect that data. It's not their problem if someone steals thousands of credit card numbers off their servers... (Once again, RSA would do wonders to mitigate many of those risks.)
I would agree that if you're buying a complete package like the article describes that you can't legitimately claim you've got a "homebuilt" setup. However, I was replying to the more general question of "will the FCC come after you for using a non-approved antenna?", which is a bit of a gray area. I'm not sure if the FCC considers connecting a mass-manufactured antenna to a mass-manufactured wireless card that weren't engineered to go together would be considered a "homebuilt" station.
Even assuming that we would consider this wireless setup homebuilt, it still would not be covered under this exception because intentionally modifying equipment to transmit outside of FCC emissions standards does not meet the requirement that "the builder is expected to employ good engineering practices to meet the specified technical standards to the greatest extent practicable."
I was not suggesting that anyone do any such thing (in fact I explicitly said that the FCC could come after you for exceeding power or gain limits). It is quite easy to match an antenna with a wireless card such that that particular combination has not been FCC certified, yet they are within FCC limits. The limits for point-to-point links in particular are quite liberal and difficult to exceed without an enormous antenna and/or high power transmitter.
The FCC would hold you responsible for not even taking the most basic steps to determine whether or not you are compliant.
It should go without saying that if you don't know how to verify that you are within FCC limits, you shouldn't be mixing and matching antennas or amplifying your signal.
That would be hard to do unless they are exceeding power or gain limits, or deploying a large number of such devices, since part 15 rules do allow use of non-approved antennas. (I am not a lawyer or an RF engineer, so take this with a grain of salt.)
You are correct that latency is an issue. For 802.11 especially, since each packet is acknowledged individually before the next one is sent (imagine TCP with a fixed window size of 1), you add 1 round trip time to the time to send each packet (at 11mbps, a 1500 byte packet takes about a millisecond and a half, and the acknowledgement takes a few hundred microseconds, so this isn't really a big performance killer).
Another effect, though, is with transmission timeouts. Suppose station A sends a packet, and begins waiting for a reply. Station B sends an ACK. Normally, station A would have priority to send the next packet, since it only has to wait 10 microseconds, versus station B which must wait 50 + 10*R (where R is a random number from 0 to 31). Unfortunately, with a large propogation delay and a small value of R, station B might assume the channel is free and send a packet (a TCP ACK, perhaps) before the second packet from A arrives, resulting in a collision. But that only happens at distances over about 5 miles I believe. Caveat: I haven't tested this effect myself, so I could be wrong in my interpretation of the spec.
Even worse is if the stations are so far apart that a transmission times out before an ACK comes back, but that requires much larger distances (I think it's somewhere around 60 miles, but I could be off by quite a bit on that one).
Going with Netscape instead of Firefox seems like a strange choice to me.
from the article:
Netscape 8 is based on Firefox, but lets users switch between both the Firefox and IE browser engines. Many Web sites have been built to work with IE, so supporting both the Firefox and IE engines maximizes compatibility.
"We specifically chose the Netscape browser because it has the added advantage of hosting numerous security features while also having the ability to run both the Triton (IE) and Gecko (Firefox) rendering engines," Nick Labosky, a director at HP, said in a statement sent via e-mail.
It's been a long time since I've used Netscape. I wasn't aware it could use IE to render its html. What are these security features, and is anyone besides HP convinced that they represent an improvement over firefox?
Actually, I prefer plain txt to pdf if I'm reading from a computer (assuming the book is not illustrated), since I have more control over fonts and colors (and I have read quite a few gutenberg books that way). However, I think the best native format (despite its general user-unfriendliness) would be latex, from which txt, pdf, and html could be generated. On the other hand, I suppose it's much easier to generate txt or pdf from scanned pages than latex.
Yet more webcomics: Real Life, PhD, Applegeeks
on
Webcomics Dissected
·
· Score: 1
And so, here is my obligatory list of favorite webcomics that weren't mentioned: PhD, Real Life,
Applegeeks.
Really, this is only a threat to Microsoft if it is shipped by default as an easy-to-use drop-in PC replacement. Realistically, the masses aren't going to use Linux unless all the system administration and configuration details are well hidden. Also, no one wants to write email or surf the web in front of their TV, unless they are one of the few with high-resolution plasma displays or similar. From wikipedia, it doesn't look like PS3 is going to have DVI or VGA output. It does have USB though. Hooray for standard hardware.
Too bad I don't have mod points, I think your post is funny.
But seriously, the Xbox was successful in a way. It drives down the profitability of those who wish to sell turing-complete devices that don't run a Microsoft OS, and to accomplish that 4 billion is a bargain. One significant threat to Microsoft is that someone might someday decide to sell a game console with vga or dvi output and a usb port, and that can run firefox, open office, and an email client. Suddenly, people find they can do 90% of what they do on their Windows PC on a cheap, low maintenance computing device without paying the Microsoft tax.
As I understand it, single-wall carbon nanotubes range from being fantastically good conductors to being semiconductors depending on the type. Quoting wikipedia:
For a given (n,m) nanotube, if 2n + m=3q (where q is an integer), then the nanotube is metallic, otherwise the nanotube is a semiconductor.... In theory, metallic nanotubes can have an electrical current density more than 1,000 times stronger than metals such as silver and copper.
We currently build transoceanic fiber optic cables that can be completely powered from one end using DC power, with the ocean acting as ground (current technologies require a powered repeater every so often), so we have already built power cables within an order of magnitude of the required length (though the energy it would need to carry would likely be much much higher - a single crawler might use several megawatts continuously)
I would be curious to know how a power cable on a space elevator would interact with the Earth's magnetic field. Would it impart a significant force on the cable? Would the cable need to be shielded?
Alternatively, what are the power generation options in space? Could a nuclear powered crawler be built, and/or could power generation facilities be spaced at regular intervals along the cable?
According to the article, they just want to try out some climbers by letting them climb up and down a cable tethered to a mile-high balloon. They're not getting aproval to launch an actual space elevator. (You are correct though that a space elevator would optimally be tethered near the equator.)
RTLinux, last I checked, was a real time OS completely unlike Linux that was able to run a Linux system as a subtask, much the same as Xen would. Linux tasks would have the same scheduling latency they would normally have, but programs running on RTLinux would have higher scheduling precision. However, you give up a lot in order to achieve low latency - the system doesn't have many of the features most programs would expect to be present, so don't expect, say, Open Office or Firefox to benefit from running on such a system.
On the other hand, maybe my understanding is wrong or out of date (if so, then someone please correct me).
Regarding quality of HP products, I agree. The paper feed in my HP printer doesn't work right, and a former roommate of mine that bought an HP computer had to send it back twice (one time the motherboard was bad iirc).
I recently picked up a scanjet 2100C at a garage sale for $5. I was pleasantly surprised to find it worked perfectly in Linux without any setup whatsoever. Unfortunately, it has very bad striping. I don't know if that's HP's fault or it was abused by the former owner.
Gimp has a filter that works very well for de-striping images, unless you try to destripe a swath of the image wider than about 500 pixels, and then it doesn't work so well. Anyone know any better open-source tools for removing stripes from low-quality scanner output?
Regarding #4, I don't mind the retro look, but I could do without the aliasing and screen tearing. (I tried the Linux demo. I don't know if the Windows version is any different in this respect.)
I could also live without the occasional
./darwinia: line 39: 11241 Segmentation fault $here/lib/darwinia.bin.x86
on startup.
Also, the interface doesn't work well for us dvorak users. WASD isn't exactly intuitive on dvorrak, so I use the arrow keys. Unfortunately, the right ALT doesn't work, only the left, so the inteface effectively requires three hands.
I looked at their website and thought to myself, "yay, it works with Linux!" Alas, upon running the executable I encountered the following:
./lib/darwinia.bin.x86: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Unfortunately, fedora core 4 uses libstdc++.so.6. I installed compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-47.fc4.i386.rpm, though, and everything was fine. It looks like it might be a fun game, though the interface is cumbersome and the units don't seem to be smart enough to go around obstacles they can't climb over.
I have a geforce4, and I've had several recent nvidia drivers that didn't work, and sometimes the older drivers don't get along well with newer kernels. Fortunately, there's a reasonably recent driver that works well with fedora core 4, but about a year ago I had to spend a few days getting Fedora Core 3 to work with an old Nvidia driver. (I had to patch both my kernel source (to un-deprecate a function that the nvidia driver needed) and the source code of the part of the nvidia driver that interfaces with the kernel.)
The next problem facing hydrogen as an energy carrier is the fuel cell, which requires costly noble metal catalysts
Fuel cells may be the most efficient option, but hydrogen could be used to fuel regular internal combustion engines as well.
One of the benefits of using hydrogen as an energy carrier is that the energy need not be consumed immediately, it can be stored when there is an energy surplus and used when there is a shortage. (This is a possible solution to a problem with wind and solar energy -- what do you do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow?)
The article has links to the previous SHA attack papers and Xiaoyun Wang's publication list. (These links were added after the article was posted, so maybe you missed them.)
Why is it the role of the federal government to ensure cheap broadband by 2007?
The problem is that without government intervention, telco companies tend to become monopolies. I'm all for the private sector doing things its own way as long as they're held accountable to market forces, but when there's only one or two wires going into every house, and that wire is owned by the local telco monopoly, there's no competition and they can charge as much as they think people will be willing to pay.
When ISPs and telcos are no longer accountable to normal market forces, some form of government intervention becomes necessary to keep quality up and prices down. At least the government is accountable to voters. A monopoly is accountable to no one.
The argument for government intervention in the telecommunications industry is really the same as the argument for government owned roads (except that people have better defined needs and expectations for roads than for data networks - there's a legitimate concern that the government may decide that 56k Internet is "good enough for anyone").
What do you suppose would happen if a few corporations owned most of the United States highway system, and could charge tolls and disallow vehicles on their roads at their sole discretion?
It seems like forcing ILECs to share their lines with ISPs for reasonable rates is a reasonable compromise to ensure market forces without total government control. Unfortunately, the FCC seems to think that we'll magically get better broadband by removing all traces of competition and letting the ILECs do as they please.
Because, for the most part, a consumer can't tell the difference between a durable product and a non-durable product until well after they've bought it. See The Market for Lemons and/or for some insight into what happens to a market when buyers can't distinguish between high and low quality products.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know that the rotating key is necessary, but RSA smartcards are a wonderful way to authenticate yourself without divulging information that would enable a third party impersonate you, and their use need not be any more complicated than running a card through a reader or plugging a token into a usb port. Why we even use credit card numbers anymore is a mystery to me.
You might be able to avoid being a victim of phishing, but there are other ways you might fall victim to identity theft that are beyond your control (unless you don't use a credit card or divulge sensitive information to anyone, and that's hard to do in our society). The problem is that many organizations who have access to personal data don't have significant incentive to protect that data. It's not their problem if someone steals thousands of credit card numbers off their servers... (Once again, RSA would do wonders to mitigate many of those risks.)I was not suggesting that anyone do any such thing (in fact I explicitly said that the FCC could come after you for exceeding power or gain limits). It is quite easy to match an antenna with a wireless card such that that particular combination has not been FCC certified, yet they are within FCC limits. The limits for point-to-point links in particular are quite liberal and difficult to exceed without an enormous antenna and/or high power transmitter.
It should go without saying that if you don't know how to verify that you are within FCC limits, you shouldn't be mixing and matching antennas or amplifying your signal.
That would be hard to do unless they are exceeding power or gain limits, or deploying a large number of such devices, since part 15 rules do allow use of non-approved antennas. (I am not a lawyer or an RF engineer, so take this with a grain of salt.)
You are correct that latency is an issue. For 802.11 especially, since each packet is acknowledged individually before the next one is sent (imagine TCP with a fixed window size of 1), you add 1 round trip time to the time to send each packet (at 11mbps, a 1500 byte packet takes about a millisecond and a half, and the acknowledgement takes a few hundred microseconds, so this isn't really a big performance killer).
Another effect, though, is with transmission timeouts. Suppose station A sends a packet, and begins waiting for a reply. Station B sends an ACK. Normally, station A would have priority to send the next packet, since it only has to wait 10 microseconds, versus station B which must wait 50 + 10*R (where R is a random number from 0 to 31). Unfortunately, with a large propogation delay and a small value of R, station B might assume the channel is free and send a packet (a TCP ACK, perhaps) before the second packet from A arrives, resulting in a collision. But that only happens at distances over about 5 miles I believe. Caveat: I haven't tested this effect myself, so I could be wrong in my interpretation of the spec.
Even worse is if the stations are so far apart that a transmission times out before an ACK comes back, but that requires much larger distances (I think it's somewhere around 60 miles, but I could be off by quite a bit on that one).
I stand corrected.
What about the Hobbit? I know it's just a rumor that he might produce it, but it doesn't look likely to happen anytime soon in any case.
from the article:
It's been a long time since I've used Netscape. I wasn't aware it could use IE to render its html. What are these security features, and is anyone besides HP convinced that they represent an improvement over firefox?Actually, I prefer plain txt to pdf if I'm reading from a computer (assuming the book is not illustrated), since I have more control over fonts and colors (and I have read quite a few gutenberg books that way). However, I think the best native format (despite its general user-unfriendliness) would be latex, from which txt, pdf, and html could be generated. On the other hand, I suppose it's much easier to generate txt or pdf from scanned pages than latex.
And so, here is my obligatory list of favorite webcomics that weren't mentioned: PhD, Real Life, Applegeeks.
Article is here. I haven't tried this myself, it looks like a lot of work.
According to the article, these were umbilical cord cells, which are considered adult stem cells.
We can only hope.
Really, this is only a threat to Microsoft if it is shipped by default as an easy-to-use drop-in PC replacement. Realistically, the masses aren't going to use Linux unless all the system administration and configuration details are well hidden. Also, no one wants to write email or surf the web in front of their TV, unless they are one of the few with high-resolution plasma displays or similar. From wikipedia, it doesn't look like PS3 is going to have DVI or VGA output. It does have USB though. Hooray for standard hardware.
Too bad I don't have mod points, I think your post is funny.
But seriously, the Xbox was successful in a way. It drives down the profitability of those who wish to sell turing-complete devices that don't run a Microsoft OS, and to accomplish that 4 billion is a bargain. One significant threat to Microsoft is that someone might someday decide to sell a game console with vga or dvi output and a usb port, and that can run firefox, open office, and an email client. Suddenly, people find they can do 90% of what they do on their Windows PC on a cheap, low maintenance computing device without paying the Microsoft tax.
We currently build transoceanic fiber optic cables that can be completely powered from one end using DC power, with the ocean acting as ground (current technologies require a powered repeater every so often), so we have already built power cables within an order of magnitude of the required length (though the energy it would need to carry would likely be much much higher - a single crawler might use several megawatts continuously)
I would be curious to know how a power cable on a space elevator would interact with the Earth's magnetic field. Would it impart a significant force on the cable? Would the cable need to be shielded?
Alternatively, what are the power generation options in space? Could a nuclear powered crawler be built, and/or could power generation facilities be spaced at regular intervals along the cable?
According to the article, they just want to try out some climbers by letting them climb up and down a cable tethered to a mile-high balloon. They're not getting aproval to launch an actual space elevator. (You are correct though that a space elevator would optimally be tethered near the equator.)
RTLinux, last I checked, was a real time OS completely unlike Linux that was able to run a Linux system as a subtask, much the same as Xen would. Linux tasks would have the same scheduling latency they would normally have, but programs running on RTLinux would have higher scheduling precision. However, you give up a lot in order to achieve low latency - the system doesn't have many of the features most programs would expect to be present, so don't expect, say, Open Office or Firefox to benefit from running on such a system.
On the other hand, maybe my understanding is wrong or out of date (if so, then someone please correct me).
Regarding quality of HP products, I agree. The paper feed in my HP printer doesn't work right, and a former roommate of mine that bought an HP computer had to send it back twice (one time the motherboard was bad iirc).
I recently picked up a scanjet 2100C at a garage sale for $5. I was pleasantly surprised to find it worked perfectly in Linux without any setup whatsoever. Unfortunately, it has very bad striping. I don't know if that's HP's fault or it was abused by the former owner.
Gimp has a filter that works very well for de-striping images, unless you try to destripe a swath of the image wider than about 500 pixels, and then it doesn't work so well. Anyone know any better open-source tools for removing stripes from low-quality scanner output?
Regarding #4, I don't mind the retro look, but I could do without the aliasing and screen tearing. (I tried the Linux demo. I don't know if the Windows version is any different in this respect.)
I could also live without the occasional
on startup.Also, the interface doesn't work well for us dvorak users. WASD isn't exactly intuitive on dvorrak, so I use the arrow keys. Unfortunately, the right ALT doesn't work, only the left, so the inteface effectively requires three hands.
I have a geforce4, and I've had several recent nvidia drivers that didn't work, and sometimes the older drivers don't get along well with newer kernels. Fortunately, there's a reasonably recent driver that works well with fedora core 4, but about a year ago I had to spend a few days getting Fedora Core 3 to work with an old Nvidia driver. (I had to patch both my kernel source (to un-deprecate a function that the nvidia driver needed) and the source code of the part of the nvidia driver that interfaces with the kernel.)
Fuel cells may be the most efficient option, but hydrogen could be used to fuel regular internal combustion engines as well.
One of the benefits of using hydrogen as an energy carrier is that the energy need not be consumed immediately, it can be stored when there is an energy surplus and used when there is a shortage. (This is a possible solution to a problem with wind and solar energy -- what do you do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow?)
The article has links to the previous SHA attack papers and Xiaoyun Wang's publication list. (These links were added after the article was posted, so maybe you missed them.)
The problem is that without government intervention, telco companies tend to become monopolies. I'm all for the private sector doing things its own way as long as they're held accountable to market forces, but when there's only one or two wires going into every house, and that wire is owned by the local telco monopoly, there's no competition and they can charge as much as they think people will be willing to pay.
When ISPs and telcos are no longer accountable to normal market forces, some form of government intervention becomes necessary to keep quality up and prices down. At least the government is accountable to voters. A monopoly is accountable to no one.
The argument for government intervention in the telecommunications industry is really the same as the argument for government owned roads (except that people have better defined needs and expectations for roads than for data networks - there's a legitimate concern that the government may decide that 56k Internet is "good enough for anyone").
What do you suppose would happen if a few corporations owned most of the United States highway system, and could charge tolls and disallow vehicles on their roads at their sole discretion?
It seems like forcing ILECs to share their lines with ISPs for reasonable rates is a reasonable compromise to ensure market forces without total government control. Unfortunately, the FCC seems to think that we'll magically get better broadband by removing all traces of competition and letting the ILECs do as they please.
I'd recommend ocaml before scheme. Despite a few syntax oddities, the code tends to be a lot more readable than scheme.