Great, so they say they worked with a bunch of audio codec engineers for great sound - how much bandwidth does it use? Can you run it on modems, or do you need 128kbps upstream, or faster? If you're a P2P supernode of some sort, do you need at least 384kbps upstream bandwidth? How does it prioritize voice traffic vs. other data traffic that's less latency sensitive?
Is it a standard codec family or not? The standard telephony codecs start with 8000 samples/second and 8 bits/sample (companded from a ~12-bit range, so it's better than a linear 8 bits), which gets you 4kHz audio, and then use compression algorithms that shrink this either by using simple predictive models or using complex models of human speech sounds which let you get much tighter compression at the cost of lots of CPU. It's easy to get better-than-telephones sound with no CPU horsepower if you use enough bandwidth, an 11kHz sample rate for 5.5kHz audio (natural for PC sound cards) instead of 8kHz, or 16kHz samples, or (less important) more bits per sample, and you could knock the bit rate in half with simple ADPCM compression, or you could get somebody to do a fancier voice compression model if you wanted. Silence Suppression typically cuts average bit rate by about 50%, but your upstream bandwidth needs to be big enough for the maximum rate.
Transmission overhead turns out to be an annoying problem for low bit rate codecs - IP plus UDP plus RTP is about 40 bytes of header, which if you really transmitted 8000 1-byte samples per second would kill you. The common codecs typicall accumulate a string of 10ms or 30ms of sound samples, compress them to a shorter string, and therefore put out 33-100 packets per second, but this still means that if you're not careful, that 8kbps codec will really need 22kbps to transmit (and if you are careful, it'll usually need about 10.5kbps) - so using it on modems is tricky.
A note about encryption overhead - if you take the simple approach and just use IPSEC, you not only have to wrap a layer of IPSEC headers around your packets, you also don't get to use the Compressed RTP (at least on Cisco routers), and you sometimes have to add another layer of headers to make NAT Traversal work. It's really ugly. On the other hand, if you've built encryption into your voice protocol, it's essentially zero overhead - you've got a few setup messages at the beginning of a session to do key exchange, and then the encryption just changes the compressed-voice bits to different encrypted-compressed-voice bits, but doesn't change the number of bits.
Speak Freely is a nice system, but it doesn't really address the problem of global directories and location. It looks like Skype might or might not be able to do this, but you can't really tell because it's proprietary and undocumented, at least until somebody reverse engineers it.
NAT and Firewalls are the two fundamental problems in making things like this work - they both interfere with SIP and Speak Freely and other peer-to-peer applications in ways that are fundamentally hard to solve, and since the Skype protocols are undocumented, I'm skeptical about how useful they are at home and more skeptical about how useful they are at work, and I don't know how to set up my firewalls to let their connections through.
As you say Key Exchange? - it's nice to know they're doing 256-bit AES, but how are they setting the keys? Microsoft's original PPTP had about seven things wrong with it, several of which were key-exchange related, rendering it totally insecure, as did 802.11's WEP. Diffie-Hellman with no authentication? D-H with some kind of SSH-like authentication persistence (User "Bob" has a different key than last time - are you sure?) Kerberos-like secret key server? How does it prevent man-in-the-middle attacks? Strong encryption doesn't help you if the keys are known.
That's why I said it was "temporarily not illegal" - it looked like the provincial government was going to make it a fine and not jail time, but there was a while that a judge had tossed out the old laws entirely.
Some of the stories that Project Censored has covered over the years have been covered up pretty well, but the more important issue is how much they get coverage in the news media - if 95% of the population doesn't see them on TV or in newspaper headlines and 90% of the people who actually read the articles don't see them much, that's good enough - 100% censorship isn't necessary very often. And even if stories do escape, usually the administration can escape blame for it, which is good enough - Enron got blasted, for instance, but the Bush Admin's teflon was still pretty much intact back then, so most of the people who connected them were either already Bush opponents, or were former Enron employees who don't have any money to spend on politics now.
Project Censored's quality varies a lot over the years - they've been doing this for a long time. Some years, they're pointing out really critical stories that haven't gotten enough coverage. Other years, most of their "censored" stories weren't actually censored, they just weren't reported with a sufficiently leftist politically correct spin as opposed to a neutral spin or a right-wing spin - "Those Mean Nasty Republicans Did _X_ and they were BAD!" vs. "The Republicans screwed up and got caught doing _X_" vs. "The Republicans were noticed doing _X_" vs. "Our Boys did _X_ and Really Kicked Ass!"
But that's OK! It's important to have analysis of the news as well as having news, and it's important to have analysis that tries to be balanced and occasionally slips leftward as opposed to just having Rush Limbaugh and his ilk whining about the Liberal Media when the media is so blatantly not liberal. That's one reason to take advantage of the Internet and of the few actual leftie media outlets like Pacifica Radio and get some variety, not just a single ostensibly-balanced source. It's easy to read around biases that you know about in stories your read - it's much harder to read around the biases that result in stories not getting reported, or around biases you don't realize are there. One of my friends even reads World Socialist Web Site, a raving Trotskyite mouthpiece, because they've got different and occasionally insightful commentary on their opponents, even if they're blind as a bat about the faults of the people they do approve of.
UserFriendly on RIAA Settlement with 12-year-old
on
RIAA Bits
·
· Score: 1
Look, none of the *important* promises Bush made during the Last Election were for *you*, and he's paid off on most of the ones to his friends in the military-industrial complex.
"Compassionate Conservatism" become synonomous with "slightly to the left of Darth Vader" on 9/11/1, when Bush could get away with his normal political positions instead of having to pretend to be compassionate.
Back in the 70s, when the reason to consider moving to Canada was to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam was, as opposed to being shot by Americans in the War on Terror, the only part of Canada I knew much about were the Frozen North, e.g. Toronto and Montreal and Hudson Bay. Fortunately I was in the last year of the draft lottery and got a good number; I'd probably have done conscientious objector instead of leaving (and by the way, the same people who chanted "America - Love it or Leave it!" got really pissed if you left.) It wasn't till years later that I went to Vancouver and Victoria and discovered how gorgeous that area was.
But moving there won't do you much good, because that obviously labels you as a Subversive Anti-American, and it's just as easy for them to wiretap you 100 km north of the border as 100 miles south of the border, and the Feds kidnap Americans from Mexico so they'll probably try Canada too, and it's presumed that if you're not going there for Subversive Anti-American Reasons, you're going there because marijuana possession is temporarily not illegal in Ontario and readily available in BC as well, so you must be going there to score drugs for your import business, which still makes you an Illegal Combatant.
Australia's pretty nice, though it's a bit on the socialist side and some of the states are run by right-wing bluenose politicians, and the beer's not any better than American beer, though they do have more of it, and they're more friendly and less polite than the Canadians.
Once upon a time, there was a bookstore called "Computer Literacy Books". They sold lots of cool books about computers, actual books printed on dead trees, for people who wanted to actually know and build things and weren't just consumers of MS couch-potato products. They had a few stores in Silicon Valley, did mailorder, and were commonly seen at Usenix conventions and other technical conferences, and were a good source for Unix books.
Then this DotCom Boom came around, with the Stupid Company Naming Convention, and Computer Literacy turned into Fatbrain. And then they got bought out, hopefully for lots of money, and "Computer Literacy" was just a sideline for B&N's Fatbrain operation, and got closed in late 2001. I didn't go to their stores very often - usually went Printer's Ink, which also had coffee and a good science fiction section, or to Stacey's if I wanted a bigger selection than Printer's. All gone now...
Do not try this at home. This stunt was not performed by trained professionals, but by skilled amateurs who were not paying attention.
A few years ago, some of my friends got together an order for a batch of Dow 3179 Dilatent Compound in its original pinkish color, and I got a kilo or so as a present for my sister's kids back east, whom we were about to go visit. In the shuttle on the way to the airport, my wife and I realized that our carryon luggage had two half-kilo baggies of plasticy clay and a digital alarm clock, and if it looked odd on the baggage xray it might be incorrectly perceived as something bad. But it was too late to turn around and still get to our plane, so we just kept going.
Fortunately, though this was after the mid-90s attempts at restricting US travel and civil liberties and resale of frequent flyer tickets in the name of national security, it was before the military takeover of the US airports, and the rent-a-guards didn't notice anything, so the only negative consequences were the usual ones involving Silly Putty, rugs, furniture, ceilings, etc.
And on the way back, we didn't have the plastic material, and our flight didn't go through the Gate Which Must Not Be Named (you do know not to refer to the 4th gate of Terminal C using the natural name that's between C3 and C5, don't you?:-)
The CPU temperature doesn't tell you how much you're contributing to Global Warming or even to warming your house - it tells you how good your fans and heat sinks are. Look at the power consumption of your computer and monitor - almost all those watts become heat, except a few that become light from your monitor when it's on. Depending on your electric metering setup, figuring out how much power you're using is probably either hard or really hard, but if you can tell how much power you're using when Folding is on vs. off would be interesting.
You can see this kind of effect more directly with laptops running on batteries. I used to run the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search on my work laptops, back when I was also commuting by train, and I had to turn it off during my commute or I'd run out of power. It also gradually killed the batteries' charge-holding capacity, and you could really tell that the machines weren't thermally designed for long-term continuous CPU usage.
Now, if you really want to heat up a room, a Vax 780 will work really well, and so will the tower models of Sun-3:-)
If you're in or near Silicon Valley and want to see some commercial, some prototype, and some hobbyist/hacker electric cars in person, this is a good show - there have been a lot of interesting cars and bikes there over the years. As the directions say, it's really at Palo Alto High School (across El Camino from Stanford.)
Gas taxes in most of Europe are already amazingly high - prices are typically about $1/liter, i.e. $4/gallon, most of which is tax. They've also got taxes on buying cars - VAT is about 17%, compared to typical US sales taxes on cars of 5-6%.
The typical argument against this sort of thing in the US is that poor people often drive older cars with worse gas consumption, but that's still no reason for attacking their privacy.
If you read the articles, it doesn't say that they're stopping Chinese spammers from sending spam to foreign countries. It says that they're blocking mail to Chinese ISPs _from_ 127 alleged spam sites, mostly in Taiwan. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if most or all of them really _are_ spammers, because China has a market for Viagra and Cable Descramblers too, and there'll be spammers happy to fill it. But China's been heavily into censorship for a while, not that it's easily enforced even if you have quasi-monopoly Internet backbone providers.
Unfortunately, I'd guess that almost all of those sites are sending spam in Chinese. I get very little of that - almost all the spam I get from China is in English, though there does seem to be less of it than there used to be.
Sure, we've all seen the Shock and Awe bombing videos, and the Desert Storm video of the cruise missile attacking the Iraqi phone company building as the start of that war. But that's not typical, and theory's a lot closer to practice in theory than it is in practice.
In August 1998, somebody bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Clinton Administration was under political pressure to do something decisive in return. The Pentagon claimed to have "convincing evidence" that a shadowy Saudi figure named Osama bin Laden was responsible, and they also "knew" he was involved with a chemical weapons factory in Sudan, so they sent about 75 cruise missiles to bomb the factory and some of Osama's camps in Afghanistan. Well, of course the "chemical weapons factory" wasn't one - it was the main pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, a country that was desperately in need of medicine given their poverty and civil war, and it's not clear who they killed up in Afghanistan either, but it certainly didn't include Osama. 9/11 was three years later.
In practice, the more effective precise weapons are, the more willing the people who have them are to get into situations where they're useful. The Bush Administration probably wouldn't have done the recent war in Iraq if it didn't have the weapons to do it.
So is this really a "World" Nuclear University, or a "NATO and its politically correct friends" Nuclear University? Will they let in students from countries that don't have the Bomb, and might be trying to build it, or only countries that have it? Pakistan was asking the US for assistance with "peaceful" nuclear programs for about 20 years before testing their bombs, and before India was doing "peaceful" reactors for a long time before they tested the Mohandas Gandhi Memorial Nuclear Weapon.
Sigh. People keep mixing up the two areas, just because they're both related to deep magic stuff:-)
Quantum cryptography is a method for using quantum physics to make sure nobody reads your bits. Technically cool, but seldom practical. If you happen to have direct fibers connecting you with the people you want to talk to, it might be useful, though it's probably more useful and certainly cheaper to just run Gigabit Ethernet and use conventional encryption, such as AES.
Quantum computing is a totally different animal. It uses Quantum Black Magic to create a computer which can collapse a waveform and have it land at the solution of some classes of NP or similarly problems with at least some significant probability of success, thereby cheating on the fact that it normally takes an exponential or at least superpolynomial number of guesses to find a correct answer. One problem that can theoretically be solved if you have a quantum computer of sufficient resolution is factoring - which means that if such a device were developed, it would break RSA and several other public-key algorithms, whose strength depends on them being exponentially hard if you don't have the key and low-order polynomially hard if you have it. For some other classes of algorithms, it doesn't totally break them, but reduces their strength to half the number of bits, i.e. square-root as hard as before, so you'd need to use twice as many key bits. For algorithms like Elliptic Curve, it's not clear whether they'd be broken, but they'd be a lot more dodgy.
The implications of breaking them are that right now, public key lets you build a lot of very useful communication models. It's hard to replicate signatures without PK, but the privacy applications could be replaced by going back to the old Key Distribution Center models, e.g. Kerberos, which are much less socially powerful.
Building a useful quantum computer requires building something that can detect states with sufficient precision. We currently have the technology to make simple quantum computers (one famous one was able to factor the number 15 into 3x5) but nobody knows how to get high precision yet. One question I don't know is whether a QC would be limited by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (i.e. you've got one variable with a resolution that's never better than Planck's Constant, about 10**-47, which is slightly annoying cryptographically but not fatal because you can use longer keys), or whether it can be built by coupling together a number of units, each of which only needs enough precision to get N bits of the output and you get longer numbers of bits by using more units (that would be much more annoying.) We're nowhere near this yet, but it's the one technology that doesn't run into the typical exponential cryptography "brain the size size of the planet of a planet waiting for the Restaurant at the End of the Universe and still don't have an answer, I'm so depressed" kind of limits that we can easily create otherwise.
There's a nice safe place for putting nuclear plants, and it's even got gravity containment for storing large, efficient, long-lived fusion systems and storing waste material, and the transmission end of the power transmission system is already in place. It's about 93 million miles from here.
...
Now, we've got to go build the _receiving_ end of the power transmission system. That's harder - some of the popular approaches create lots of toxic waste (most of the semiconductor systems) and it doesn't work very well at night. But that's mostly a Simple Matter of Engineering.
I was working at Bell Labs back when the Cold Fusion hype happened, though not in one of the chemistry departments. About two days after the initial announcement hit the press, there was an Official Pronouncement that nobody was allowed to withdraw palladium from the company stockroom without their director's approval... A bit later, a researcher at some university was killed in a hydrogen explosion, and any cold fusion research inside the Labs became much more strictly controlled as a response to it - messing with electrolysis is too easy a way to get into chemical accidents.
One of my jobs was sysadmin for a departmental computer lab that was in a big glass-fishbowl room (remember when computers were big?) I was heading off for a week to see a customer on another project, but I took a few minutes to print out a line-printer banner about "Cold Fusion Research Laboratory" and cobble together some random parts and wires and 5-gallon jars of liquid and set them up in the window before I left. They were gone by the time I got back:-)
For $50-$100 or so you can get a firewall box. Any newbie can plug one in. Many cable modems and DSL routers or bridges have similar features built in if you don't want the extra box. Little boxes aren't perfect, but they'll keep out the anklebiter attacks, plus they let you run multiple machines on the same dynamic IP address so you probably want one anyway to support your home PC, your printer, your kid's gamer box, your spouse's work laptop, etc.
In my case, yes, I'm enough of a power user that I want to be able to do absolutely anything from my home line. (Of course my hardware's been sufficiently unreliable that I haven't gotten around to it:-) I'm running the NAT firewall box for several reasons. One is that it's a no-brainer way to get some basic level of protection. Another is that I've got 4 static IP addresses, but my DSL box doesn't seem to have a DHCP server, and I don't want to have to keep my noisy desktop machine running full-time just to make it easy to plug in my laptop (plus it dual-boots Windows and Linux, and I'd have to have a Windows version of a DHCP server.)
I agree that blocking should normally be an optional thing, and unfortunately the default should probably be to block lots of things, because there are too many insecure applications and operating systems out there. The question is *where* to do the blocking. For a dialup system, it's obvious that you should probably implement the blocking at the ISP end, but for a dedicated connection (cable, DSL, private line, business T1, etc.), you've got a choice of whether to block it at the ISP's end or at the router on the user's end (whether it's provided by the user or the ISP). From a scalability standpoint, it's much easier to do the blocking on the user end - that also can work well if you want to let the user turn the blocking on and off - almost all of those devices have enough horsepower to do the job, and routers from certain large router vendors *don't* have the horsepower to do it for lots of users (and if they did, ISPs would make the tradeoff of putting more users on each box.)
There are some exceptions, though - if you're getting a high-volume flood of some sort (DDOS attacks, Slammer worms, ping floods, etc.), it's nice to be able to turn it off at the ISP's end of the wire, because that prevents your bandwidth from getting stepped on by the attackers, while otherwise you might be unable to get any effective work done because 99% of your bandwidth is the attack.
Why more the whole computer? Just move the disk drive! For about $25 you can get removable-drawer technology for standard disk drives. Plug in whatever current 3.5" disk drive you like, and use desktop PCs at both ends. Or get a USB2 or Firewire external drive - either a large one with 3.5" technology or the 2.5" laptop-drive types that are typically intended for MP3 jukeboxes - and just plug it in at each end. Costs a bit more, but it's a lot more rugged.
If rewriteable DVD technology standardizes enough at some point, you could use that; otherwise you can fit most of what you need on a CR-RW, as long as you're not using a bloatware email client that encourages you to keep gigabyte mailbox files.
For any of these approaches, you need some kind of file update / synchronization software or automatic backup software so that your portable storage gets backed up on a probably more stable disk environment (depending on your individual skills and your company's, that may be home or work:-) Microsoft Windows Briefcase seems to be intended for this kind of thing, but backup software could do it too.
If they do come after you, the only reasons NOT to spend your money defending yourself are
You can get some public-spirited organization to do it pro bono, or
You work for a company that will pay for it, or
You can make them go away with a few carefully-written letters without getting to court.
Otherwise
You don't know court procedures well enough to avoid getting screwed even though you're right and they're totally bogus. Lawyers know this stuff, you know computers, so hire them for legal work and have them hire you for computer work.
If you lose, you're setting a precedent that makes it easier for Them to knock over the next little guy, and after blowing over a few easy targets, it makes it easier for them to abuse other people. If you're not going to do an adequate defense, and not going to chicken out and pay them, you're endangering the rest of us.
If you beat them in court, you can often force them to pay your legal costs. If they beat you, they can usually get you to pay their (very high) legal costs as well as whatever bogus damages they claim.
Sometimes you can get triple damages on your legal costs - this RICO statute, for all its really seriously horrendous problems, does make that easier to get.
One reason lawyers from groups like the EFF or ACLU sometimes take cases isn't just good citizenship - it's getting legal costs covered if they win.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it a standard codec family or not? The standard telephony codecs start with 8000 samples/second and 8 bits/sample (companded from a ~12-bit range, so it's better than a linear 8 bits), which gets you 4kHz audio, and then use compression algorithms that shrink this either by using simple predictive models or using complex models of human speech sounds which let you get much tighter compression at the cost of lots of CPU. It's easy to get better-than-telephones sound with no CPU horsepower if you use enough bandwidth, an 11kHz sample rate for 5.5kHz audio (natural for PC sound cards) instead of 8kHz, or 16kHz samples, or (less important) more bits per sample, and you could knock the bit rate in half with simple ADPCM compression, or you could get somebody to do a fancier voice compression model if you wanted. Silence Suppression typically cuts average bit rate by about 50%, but your upstream bandwidth needs to be big enough for the maximum rate.
Transmission overhead turns out to be an annoying problem for low bit rate codecs - IP plus UDP plus RTP is about 40 bytes of header, which if you really transmitted 8000 1-byte samples per second would kill you. The common codecs typicall accumulate a string of 10ms or 30ms of sound samples, compress them to a shorter string, and therefore put out 33-100 packets per second, but this still means that if you're not careful, that 8kbps codec will really need 22kbps to transmit (and if you are careful, it'll usually need about 10.5kbps) - so using it on modems is tricky.
A note about encryption overhead - if you take the simple approach and just use IPSEC, you not only have to wrap a layer of IPSEC headers around your packets, you also don't get to use the Compressed RTP (at least on Cisco routers), and you sometimes have to add another layer of headers to make NAT Traversal work. It's really ugly. On the other hand, if you've built encryption into your voice protocol, it's essentially zero overhead - you've got a few setup messages at the beginning of a session to do key exchange, and then the encryption just changes the compressed-voice bits to different encrypted-compressed-voice bits, but doesn't change the number of bits.
NAT and Firewalls are the two fundamental problems in making things like this work - they both interfere with SIP and Speak Freely and other peer-to-peer applications in ways that are fundamentally hard to solve, and since the Skype protocols are undocumented, I'm skeptical about how useful they are at home and more skeptical about how useful they are at work, and I don't know how to set up my firewalls to let their connections through.
As you say Key Exchange? - it's nice to know they're doing 256-bit AES, but how are they setting the keys? Microsoft's original PPTP had about seven things wrong with it, several of which were key-exchange related, rendering it totally insecure, as did 802.11's WEP. Diffie-Hellman with no authentication? D-H with some kind of SSH-like authentication persistence (User "Bob" has a different key than last time - are you sure?) Kerberos-like secret key server? How does it prevent man-in-the-middle attacks? Strong encryption doesn't help you if the keys are known.
That's why I said it was "temporarily not illegal" - it looked like the provincial government was going to make it a fine and not jail time, but there was a while that a judge had tossed out the old laws entirely.
Project Censored's quality varies a lot over the years - they've been doing this for a long time. Some years, they're pointing out really critical stories that haven't gotten enough coverage. Other years, most of their "censored" stories weren't actually censored, they just weren't reported with a sufficiently leftist politically correct spin as opposed to a neutral spin or a right-wing spin - "Those Mean Nasty Republicans Did _X_ and they were BAD!" vs. "The Republicans screwed up and got caught doing _X_" vs. "The Republicans were noticed doing _X_" vs. "Our Boys did _X_ and Really Kicked Ass!"
But that's OK! It's important to have analysis of the news as well as having news, and it's important to have analysis that tries to be balanced and occasionally slips leftward as opposed to just having Rush Limbaugh and his ilk whining about the Liberal Media when the media is so blatantly not liberal. That's one reason to take advantage of the Internet and of the few actual leftie media outlets like Pacifica Radio and get some variety, not just a single ostensibly-balanced source. It's easy to read around biases that you know about in stories your read - it's much harder to read around the biases that result in stories not getting reported, or around biases you don't realize are there. One of my friends even reads World Socialist Web Site, a raving Trotskyite mouthpiece, because they've got different and occasionally insightful commentary on their opponents, even if they're blind as a bat about the faults of the people they do approve of.
Sunday's Userfriendly.org Cartoon on the $2000 Settlement with Brianna the 12-year-old file-sharing criminal.
"Compassionate Conservatism" become synonomous with "slightly to the left of Darth Vader" on 9/11/1, when Bush could get away with his normal political positions instead of having to pretend to be compassionate.
But moving there won't do you much good, because that obviously labels you as a Subversive Anti-American, and it's just as easy for them to wiretap you 100 km north of the border as 100 miles south of the border, and the Feds kidnap Americans from Mexico so they'll probably try Canada too, and it's presumed that if you're not going there for Subversive Anti-American Reasons, you're going there because marijuana possession is temporarily not illegal in Ontario and readily available in BC as well, so you must be going there to score drugs for your import business, which still makes you an Illegal Combatant.
Australia's pretty nice, though it's a bit on the socialist side and some of the states are run by right-wing bluenose politicians, and the beer's not any better than American beer, though they do have more of it, and they're more friendly and less polite than the Canadians.
Once upon a time, there was a bookstore called "Computer Literacy Books". They sold lots of cool books about computers, actual books printed on dead trees, for people who wanted to actually know and build things and weren't just consumers of MS couch-potato products. They had a few stores in Silicon Valley, did mailorder, and were commonly seen at Usenix conventions and other technical conferences, and were a good source for Unix books.
Then this DotCom Boom came around, with the Stupid Company Naming Convention, and Computer Literacy turned into Fatbrain. And then they got bought out, hopefully for lots of money, and "Computer Literacy" was just a sideline for B&N's Fatbrain operation, and got closed in late 2001. I didn't go to their stores very often - usually went Printer's Ink, which also had coffee and a good science fiction section, or to Stacey's if I wanted a bigger selection than Printer's. All gone now...
A few years ago, some of my friends got together an order for a batch of Dow 3179 Dilatent Compound in its original pinkish color, and I got a kilo or so as a present for my sister's kids back east, whom we were about to go visit. In the shuttle on the way to the airport, my wife and I realized that our carryon luggage had two half-kilo baggies of plasticy clay and a digital alarm clock, and if it looked odd on the baggage xray it might be incorrectly perceived as something bad. But it was too late to turn around and still get to our plane, so we just kept going.
Fortunately, though this was after the mid-90s attempts at restricting US travel and civil liberties and resale of frequent flyer tickets in the name of national security, it was before the military takeover of the US airports, and the rent-a-guards didn't notice anything, so the only negative consequences were the usual ones involving Silly Putty, rugs, furniture, ceilings, etc.
And on the way back, we didn't have the plastic material, and our flight didn't go through the Gate Which Must Not Be Named (you do know not to refer to the 4th gate of Terminal C using the natural name that's between C3 and C5, don't you? :-)
You can see this kind of effect more directly with laptops running on batteries. I used to run the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search on my work laptops, back when I was also commuting by train, and I had to turn it off during my commute or I'd run out of power. It also gradually killed the batteries' charge-holding capacity, and you could really tell that the machines weren't thermally designed for long-term continuous CPU usage.
Now, if you really want to heat up a room, a Vax 780 will work really well, and so will the tower models of Sun-3 :-)
That's really the way to distribute things like this without getting Slashdotted...
If you're in or near Silicon Valley and want to see some commercial, some prototype, and some hobbyist/hacker electric cars in person, this is a good show - there have been a lot of interesting cars and bikes there over the years. As the directions say, it's really at Palo Alto High School (across El Camino from Stanford.)
. If you're in or near Silicon Valley and want to see some commercial, some prototype, and some hobbyist/hacker electric cars in person, this is a good show - there have been a lot of interesting cars and bikes there over the years. As the directions say, it's really at Palo Alto High School (across El Camino from Stanford.)
The typical argument against this sort of thing in the US is that poor people often drive older cars with worse gas consumption, but that's still no reason for attacking their privacy.
Unfortunately, I'd guess that almost all of those sites are sending spam in Chinese. I get very little of that - almost all the spam I get from China is in English, though there does seem to be less of it than there used to be.
In August 1998, somebody bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Clinton Administration was under political pressure to do something decisive in return. The Pentagon claimed to have "convincing evidence" that a shadowy Saudi figure named Osama bin Laden was responsible, and they also "knew" he was involved with a chemical weapons factory in Sudan, so they sent about 75 cruise missiles to bomb the factory and some of Osama's camps in Afghanistan. Well, of course the "chemical weapons factory" wasn't one - it was the main pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, a country that was desperately in need of medicine given their poverty and civil war, and it's not clear who they killed up in Afghanistan either, but it certainly didn't include Osama. 9/11 was three years later.
In practice, the more effective precise weapons are, the more willing the people who have them are to get into situations where they're useful. The Bush Administration probably wouldn't have done the recent war in Iraq if it didn't have the weapons to do it.
So is this really a "World" Nuclear University, or a "NATO and its politically correct friends" Nuclear University? Will they let in students from countries that don't have the Bomb, and might be trying to build it, or only countries that have it? Pakistan was asking the US for assistance with "peaceful" nuclear programs for about 20 years before testing their bombs, and before India was doing "peaceful" reactors for a long time before they tested the Mohandas Gandhi Memorial Nuclear Weapon.
Quantum cryptography is a method for using quantum physics to make sure nobody reads your bits. Technically cool, but seldom practical. If you happen to have direct fibers connecting you with the people you want to talk to, it might be useful, though it's probably more useful and certainly cheaper to just run Gigabit Ethernet and use conventional encryption, such as AES.
Quantum computing is a totally different animal. It uses Quantum Black Magic to create a computer which can collapse a waveform and have it land at the solution of some classes of NP or similarly problems with at least some significant probability of success, thereby cheating on the fact that it normally takes an exponential or at least superpolynomial number of guesses to find a correct answer. One problem that can theoretically be solved if you have a quantum computer of sufficient resolution is factoring - which means that if such a device were developed, it would break RSA and several other public-key algorithms, whose strength depends on them being exponentially hard if you don't have the key and low-order polynomially hard if you have it. For some other classes of algorithms, it doesn't totally break them, but reduces their strength to half the number of bits, i.e. square-root as hard as before, so you'd need to use twice as many key bits. For algorithms like Elliptic Curve, it's not clear whether they'd be broken, but they'd be a lot more dodgy.
The implications of breaking them are that right now, public key lets you build a lot of very useful communication models. It's hard to replicate signatures without PK, but the privacy applications could be replaced by going back to the old Key Distribution Center models, e.g. Kerberos, which are much less socially powerful.
Building a useful quantum computer requires building something that can detect states with sufficient precision. We currently have the technology to make simple quantum computers (one famous one was able to factor the number 15 into 3x5) but nobody knows how to get high precision yet. One question I don't know is whether a QC would be limited by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (i.e. you've got one variable with a resolution that's never better than Planck's Constant, about 10**-47, which is slightly annoying cryptographically but not fatal because you can use longer keys), or whether it can be built by coupling together a number of units, each of which only needs enough precision to get N bits of the output and you get longer numbers of bits by using more units (that would be much more annoying.) We're nowhere near this yet, but it's the one technology that doesn't run into the typical exponential cryptography "brain the size size of the planet of a planet waiting for the Restaurant at the End of the Universe and still don't have an answer, I'm so depressed" kind of limits that we can easily create otherwise.
It's extremely well-known. Donaldson's Commentary on Sturgeon's Law says "Sturgeon was an optimist"
...
Now, we've got to go build the _receiving_ end of the power transmission system. That's harder - some of the popular approaches create lots of toxic waste (most of the semiconductor systems) and it doesn't work very well at night. But that's mostly a Simple Matter of Engineering.
One of my jobs was sysadmin for a departmental computer lab that was in a big glass-fishbowl room (remember when computers were big?) I was heading off for a week to see a customer on another project, but I took a few minutes to print out a line-printer banner about "Cold Fusion Research Laboratory" and cobble together some random parts and wires and 5-gallon jars of liquid and set them up in the window before I left. They were gone by the time I got back :-)
In my case, yes, I'm enough of a power user that I want to be able to do absolutely anything from my home line. (Of course my hardware's been sufficiently unreliable that I haven't gotten around to it :-) I'm running the NAT firewall box for several reasons. One is that it's a no-brainer way to get some basic level of protection. Another is that I've got 4 static IP addresses, but my DSL box doesn't seem to have a DHCP server, and I don't want to have to keep my noisy desktop machine running full-time just to make it easy to plug in my laptop (plus it dual-boots Windows and Linux, and I'd have to have a Windows version of a DHCP server.)
There are some exceptions, though - if you're getting a high-volume flood of some sort (DDOS attacks, Slammer worms, ping floods, etc.), it's nice to be able to turn it off at the ISP's end of the wire, because that prevents your bandwidth from getting stepped on by the attackers, while otherwise you might be unable to get any effective work done because 99% of your bandwidth is the attack.
If rewriteable DVD technology standardizes enough at some point, you could use that; otherwise you can fit most of what you need on a CR-RW, as long as you're not using a bloatware email client that encourages you to keep gigabyte mailbox files.
For any of these approaches, you need some kind of file update / synchronization software or automatic backup software so that your portable storage gets backed up on a probably more stable disk environment (depending on your individual skills and your company's, that may be home or work :-) Microsoft Windows Briefcase seems to be intended for this kind of thing, but backup software could do it too.
- You can get some public-spirited organization to do it pro bono, or
- You work for a company that will pay for it, or
- You can make them go away with a few carefully-written letters without getting to court.
Otherwise