Want to use Outlook? Good luck sharing your address book with Gmail or (hah) Thunderbird
Gosh, I must be extremely lucky; I typed "export contacts" in Outlook help, and, what do you know, I got a link to an article helpfully named "Transfer contacts between Outlook and Google Gmail".
Just export your Outlook contact list as a CSV file and import it into GMail. Trivial.
Why digital? I made analog circuits with single transistors
You did, did you? Well, I made analog circuits with single NAND gates:). Take a 4011 CMOS NAND, or even a venerable bipolar 7400, apply a bit of negative feedback, and you get op amp-like behavior; very usable for example as a linear amplifier in the audio band (or anything under maybe 1 MHz). Or suppose you need a bit of analog circuitry, maybe a voltage stabilizer on your board: just use any leftover NAND (or any inverter) gate; the possibilities are endless:)
get the feeling that you haven't the slightest idea what you're saying about bits.
I will be really nice and explain it to you in even simpler terms; you'll get more detail here, but any introductory text on information theory should serve.
Let's say you have a very short password - only one letter, and you're limited to lowercase ASCII. You have a choice of one of 26 different symbols, and you pick a random one. An attacker trying to brute force your password will only need to try 26 different passwords (from 'a' through 'z').
Now, suppose your password is a random combination of bits; with 1 bit, you can get 2 different values for your password (0 or 1). With 2 bits, you could pick one of 00, 01, 10 or 11, for a total of 4 combinations, and so on. With 5 bits, you'd have 32 possible combinations. If an attacker would try to brute force your 5 bit password, he'd have to try a maximum of 32 combinations. Note that 5 random bits generate more possible combinations than a single lowercase ASCII letter, even though the ASCII symbol has 7 bits. That's because some of the bits in the ASCII code are known beforehand, so the attacker doesn't need to bother with them. Your actual randomness is somewhere between 4 and 5 bits (you can get the exact formula in the Wikipedia article in the link above).
Let's say now that we eliminate the restriction on using lowercase symbols: the attacker will have to try all printable ASCII symbols in order to guess your 1 symbol password. He doesn't need to bother with the non-printable ones, so he only needs to try 95 symbols of the 128 symbol ASCII set. By using a similar reasoning as above, we see that the randomness is somewhere between 6 and 7 bits (with 6 random bits you'd get a total of 64 possible combinations, and with 7 you'd get 128).
By using more symbols to your password, you add some randomness. This forces the attacker to try more and more combinations, until a brute force attack becomes operationally impossible. If each symbol is completely independent from the others, the "randomness" bits add up. A 2 letter printable ASCII password will have something like 12-14 bits of randomness. A 10 symbol password results in 95^10 combinations (about 65 bits of randomness); the chances of the attacker hitting on the correct combinations become very remote.
I need a record of my passwords outside my brain. Where should that record exist?
For backup, on a piece of paper, maybe in your wallet. For quick access from your computer, get a password manager. PasswordSafe works great for me. Make sure you get a newer version, because some attacks have been found against older ones (but that's true about almost any security software).
This method will not create passwords that are strong enough. A truly strong password should have at least three of the following, if not all four:
Uppercase letters
Lowercase letters
Numbers
Non-Latin characters (i.e. symbols)
That's just not true. Admins request this kind of nonsense to force a bigger password space with shorter passwords. Informally, the security of your password is given by the number of random bits you have. With ASCII passwords using only lowercase letters, you're adding less than 5 bits of randomness per character. Even worse, most people use real words as passwords, so they can remember them easily. That reduces the randomness even more and makes dictionary attacks feasible. Adding uppercase, numbers and symbols gives you an extra bit or two of randomness per character, but makes the password much more difficult to remember.
Microsoft's method works around the password memorization by using the inkblots. The security is given by the much larger size of the resulting password. They get a password of 20 lowercase characters, say about 100 bits of randomness (less than that, because not all letter combinations are equiprobable - very few words I know begin and end with a q for example). A totally random password consisting of a mix of 10 symbols, numbers and different cased letters only gives you a bit less than 70 bits of randomness.
But...um...how exactly do you get a spin current without the electrons actually moving? I mean, given that the spins in question are nailed to the electron?
Quite easily, actually. Use some mechanism (magnetic fields in the FA) to force an electron's spin to align to a neighboring one, then align the next one, and so on. You get a spin wave travelling through your medium, but the actual electrons don't move.
Just don't use credit cards. [...] if you don't have a credit card, they can't rack up the charges. If you were to use a debit card instead, [...] once it runs out, it's gone and they can't keep charging more.
That's not necessarily true, because of a nice feature named overdraft protection. It's a big moneymaker for banks; you could argue it's an opt-in service, but here's a recent press release, describing a debit card with "built-in" overdraft protection (the link is to the cache, because the original article has expired). And I'll bet dollars to pennies that you won't get a warning when the overdraft "protection" kicks in, so you could just continue blissfully using the card and get hit with multiple overdraft charges.
In order to apply a free market analysis to a situation you first need to establish that the market in question is free. [...] and that's completely ignoring the point that public health is a public good that even a perfect free market might missallocate resources for.
Yup, you're right on the money. The health care area certainly isn't a free market, and I really not convinced it can (or should) be modeled and treated as a market at all. Of course, the "free market" shibboleth is more often missaplied than not (see all the health care plans currently being touted by a variety of politicos for great examples), with often absurd consequences.
... Al Gore, uses the word "if" too much. It's an old debating trick, to say "if X, then Y", and focus on the terrible consequence Y, and completely avoid the debate - which is over the validity/scope/level/definition of X
I don't see it as a trick, but rather as being honest. Many of the "X" items aren't certain; it would be a lie to present them as such. But we can estimate the probability of X (based on the current state of knowledge), and explore the consequences if X *does* occur. Gore's argument is that the consequences are serious enough to require action now, even it X may not happen after all. Most climate change skeptics I've seen ignore that and focus on the fact that the Xs aren't 100% surely proven.
What does per capita spending tell you about the US health care system, beyond the rather obvious fact that it isn't focused on maximizing value across patients?
Tells me exactly that: it's focused on maximizing value (as in financial) and not on maximizing health or general well-being.
We DO spend enough on technology and education. It's been a while since I've seen the numbers, but I believe that we spend more, both per-capita and in absolute terms, on education than most other countries.
You're confusing spending on education with quality of education. Many countries spend less than the USA and have much better standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools. Here's a quote from "The Economist": Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. Actually the whole article is very interesting: find it here
[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.
Sure, but does the Walmart laptop ...
b) allow you to write it off on your taxes?
The write-off isn't really an argument. If you write off $200, and you're in the 25% tax bracket, you only end up saving 50 bucks. Your final price is still $350 for a remarkably underpowered laptop. Moreover, the technological choices in its design make sense in a third world country, but really aren't a selling point in the USA (for example the optional hand-crank generator, or the ambient-light monochrome display mode).
If your intention is charitable, there are lots of organizations that provide education and tools to third world countries children; you can send them the 400 dollars. If you want a laptop, you can easily get a better one for not much more money.
current users of software "X" are unaffected by someone taking an open source project proprietary, it is only the code itself which is no longer free
Enlighten me, please: how can code be free? In my humble, freedom belongs to people, and people are perfectly free to use this code any way they want. Talking about some company "taking an open source project proprietary" is straight FUD: they can only make proprietary their new code or their changes to existing code, but they can't "take" the original code proprietary. Does the original code become unavailable? Does it suddenly become tainted? No, and "some company" can't stop me from using it, so why say it not "free" anymore?
Even adding "some company" in the discussion sounds questionable to me. Why should I, as a user of the original code, care that "some company" uses the same code as well? And why introduce "some company" in the discussion at all, except that they make a nice villain for a strawman?
I seem to remember that one of the original concepts around BSD was to provide good quality code that could be used by all coders, and thus improve the quality of all software, whether open-source or proprietary. The BSD group seems to be adhering to this ideal, while the GPL side's approach is a bit too ideological for my taste.
Linux makes a lot of inroads against MS in the enterprise market..
I know this is the conventional wisdom around those parts, but it doesn't seem to be the case: here is an article that indicates the share of both Windows and Linux servers growing in businesses, while Unix usage dropped dramatically. And in related news, another recent article here shows IIS 6 making inroads against Apache. So Sun's decision does make economic sense.
A random number generator would have an equal probability of generating any of these strings of bits,
011010011010
000000000000
111111111111
010101010101
101010101010
Of course, equal probability does not guarantee the randomness of your output: your generator may for example be a simple counter, going 000000, 000001, 000010 and so on. Not random at all, but it satisfies your requirement. So, equiprobability is a must have, but independence is also required
True randomness is really difficult to ascertain. Knuth has an interesting discussion on generating random numbers (I believe in Vol II)
Depending on the key logger's capabilities, an easy way to improve your security is to open another edit window (for example notepad) next to the password input window. Enter a character of your secret password, credit card number, etc), then, using the mouse, switch focus to the second window, type in a bunch of random characters, switch back, rinse and repeat. The logger ends with a bunch of gibberish, some of which is your key. If you do it right, extracting your secret from the resulting log will be really difficult (especially since the mouse allows you to add new characters in the middle of the already typed string, which means the characters in your secret won't even be in order).
Much to my surprise, this time the FUDsters aren't the slashdotters; the FUD (including the title) is in the FA, which, probably being new here, I did read. The whole article (available here)is pretty much a lot of BS, but it sounded anti-MS enough that it was picked up and dumped on the first page by the crack team of/. editors.
BTW: What exactly do you mean by "halter"? I Wiki'd it and all I could find was something worn either by women or horses (depending on the sort of halter you're talking about).
I assume he means barbell, since the French word for barbell is "haltère". So the OP's first language could be French or another Romance language
Of course, I still can't figure out why MS cares about the entertainment industry. They would save a lot of money if they just said "Screw DRM it's not worth it." Let the entertainment industry deal with it.
Well, how do you think the entertainment industry will deal with it? Very probably they'll start with a big lawsuit, accusing MS of aiding and abetting the pirates, followed by a set of licences and/or technological attempts to disallow or make difficult the playback of DVDs and other media items on PCs. It wouldn't work in the long term - you can't stop progress - but in the short term it would still be a serious annoyance. The average users want their DVD playback. They don't much care about DRM, because it's a minor issue in most cases, and they're not interested in the related politics, as long as they get their circus. Since MS wants to make things easiest for the not very sophisticated home user, they need to take the requirements of the entertainment industry into account.
Of course, the entertainment industry is overreaching so far it's not even funny, and there hasn't been any serious force opposing it yet (shrieking slashdotters really don't matter as much as they like to believe). I hope MS, Google and the others can do something about Holywood's encroachment on fair use.
It's also a far cry from MS's (paraphrased) "However you post it, wherever you post it, on any of our services (public or private) we have the right to use it, sell it, license it to our partners" clauses.
FUD, pure and simple; here's the relevant part of the Live license, from MS's web site here.
8. Your Materials.
You may be able to submit materials for use in connection with the service. Except for material that we license to you, we do not claim ownership of the materials you post or otherwise provide to us related to the service (called a "submission"). However, by posting or otherwise providing your submission, you are granting to the public free permission to:
use, copy, distribute, display, publish and modify your submission, each in connection with the service;
publish your name in connection with your submission; and grant these permissions to other persons.
This section only applies to legally permissible content and only to the extent that use and publishing of the legally permissible content does not breach the law. We will not pay you for your submission. We may refuse to publish, and may remove your submission from the service at any time. For every submission you make, you must have all rights necessary for you to grant the permissions in this section.
Please point out where exactly it says MS has the right to sell your content.
>>500 Kg steel ball in orbit, which would make a weapon as good as a nuke
>Tell ya what. De-orbit that into San Diego Bay. I'll stand on the beach and watch.
>And then I'll go have a fish dinner. Nukes have a wee bit more power.
Let's see, an object falling from LEO yields about say 35 MJ/kg; for 500 kg, that's 1.75e+10 J, the equivalent of about 4 tons of TNT. That's about one percent of the yield of the smallest nuke available. Still, a pretty big bang.
As another poster noted, the future of the U.S. economy is in areas such as intellectual property and services (specifically those that need not be performed in person). Reich calls this "symbolic analysis."
The problem I can see with this, regarding the US economy, is that all those areas are extremely portable. Moving car manufacturing (for example) from a country to another requires a *lot* of investment and infrastructure in the target country. For IP and many services the costs of such a move are much smaller, both in capital and infrastructure. With the growth in communications many services can be outsources (and many already are). Moreover, the few services that aren't easily portable (like waitressing or other personal services) are quite low tech, and therefore low paying. But IP stuff like software development can easily be outsourced (as many here know). I already heard about a number of medical services (for example, interpretation of X-rays) being outsourced to qualified physicians in India and other countries. Tax services too. Financial services can be outsourced as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't already.
The US used to have a huge advantage in the high quality of the education, compounded by the fact that it managed to attract so many bright people from abroad. This is changing - many countries are improving their education infrastructure, and the US immigration policy is more and more skewed towards less qualified candidates. So the question is: in twenty years, what unique services will the US be able to offer in a competitive way?
Slashdot Mirror
Want to use Outlook? Good luck sharing your address book with Gmail or (hah) Thunderbird
Gosh, I must be extremely lucky; I typed "export contacts" in Outlook help, and, what do you know, I got a link to an article helpfully named "Transfer contacts between Outlook and Google Gmail". Just export your Outlook contact list as a CSV file and import it into GMail. Trivial.
Why digital? I made analog circuits with single transistors
:). Take a 4011 CMOS NAND, or even a venerable bipolar 7400, apply a bit of negative feedback, and you get op amp-like behavior; very usable for example as a linear amplifier in the audio band (or anything under maybe 1 MHz). Or suppose you need a bit of analog circuitry, maybe a voltage stabilizer on your board: just use any leftover NAND (or any inverter) gate; the possibilities are endless :)
You did, did you? Well, I made analog circuits with single NAND gates
CO2 is not a pollutant
The Supreme Court disagrees with you.
get the feeling that you haven't the slightest idea what you're saying about bits.
I will be really nice and explain it to you in even simpler terms; you'll get more detail here, but any introductory text on information theory should serve.
Let's say you have a very short password - only one letter, and you're limited to lowercase ASCII. You have a choice of one of 26 different symbols, and you pick a random one. An attacker trying to brute force your password will only need to try 26 different passwords (from 'a' through 'z').
Now, suppose your password is a random combination of bits; with 1 bit, you can get 2 different values for your password (0 or 1). With 2 bits, you could pick one of 00, 01, 10 or 11, for a total of 4 combinations, and so on. With 5 bits, you'd have 32 possible combinations. If an attacker would try to brute force your 5 bit password, he'd have to try a maximum of 32 combinations. Note that 5 random bits generate more possible combinations than a single lowercase ASCII letter, even though the ASCII symbol has 7 bits. That's because some of the bits in the ASCII code are known beforehand, so the attacker doesn't need to bother with them. Your actual randomness is somewhere between 4 and 5 bits (you can get the exact formula in the Wikipedia article in the link above).
Let's say now that we eliminate the restriction on using lowercase symbols: the attacker will have to try all printable ASCII symbols in order to guess your 1 symbol password. He doesn't need to bother with the non-printable ones, so he only needs to try 95 symbols of the 128 symbol ASCII set. By using a similar reasoning as above, we see that the randomness is somewhere between 6 and 7 bits (with 6 random bits you'd get a total of 64 possible combinations, and with 7 you'd get 128).
By using more symbols to your password, you add some randomness. This forces the attacker to try more and more combinations, until a brute force attack becomes operationally impossible. If each symbol is completely independent from the others, the "randomness" bits add up. A 2 letter printable ASCII password will have something like 12-14 bits of randomness. A 10 symbol password results in 95^10 combinations (about 65 bits of randomness); the chances of the attacker hitting on the correct combinations become very remote.
I need a record of my passwords outside my brain. Where should that record exist?
For backup, on a piece of paper, maybe in your wallet. For quick access from your computer, get a password manager. PasswordSafe works great for me. Make sure you get a newer version, because some attacks have been found against older ones (but that's true about almost any security software).
This method will not create passwords that are strong enough. A truly strong password should have at least three of the following, if not all four:
Uppercase letters
Lowercase letters
Numbers
Non-Latin characters (i.e. symbols)
That's just not true. Admins request this kind of nonsense to force a bigger password space with shorter passwords. Informally, the security of your password is given by the number of random bits you have. With ASCII passwords using only lowercase letters, you're adding less than 5 bits of randomness per character. Even worse, most people use real words as passwords, so they can remember them easily. That reduces the randomness even more and makes dictionary attacks feasible. Adding uppercase, numbers and symbols gives you an extra bit or two of randomness per character, but makes the password much more difficult to remember.
Microsoft's method works around the password memorization by using the inkblots. The security is given by the much larger size of the resulting password. They get a password of 20 lowercase characters, say about 100 bits of randomness (less than that, because not all letter combinations are equiprobable - very few words I know begin and end with a q for example). A totally random password consisting of a mix of 10 symbols, numbers and different cased letters only gives you a bit less than 70 bits of randomness.
But...um...how exactly do you get a spin current without the electrons actually moving? I mean, given that the spins in question are nailed to the electron?
Quite easily, actually. Use some mechanism (magnetic fields in the FA) to force an electron's spin to align to a neighboring one, then align the next one, and so on. You get a spin wave travelling through your medium, but the actual electrons don't move.
Just don't use credit cards. [...] if you don't have a credit card, they can't rack up the charges. If you were to use a debit card instead, [...] once it runs out, it's gone and they can't keep charging more.
That's not necessarily true, because of a nice feature named overdraft protection. It's a big moneymaker for banks; you could argue it's an opt-in service, but here's a recent press release, describing a debit card with "built-in" overdraft protection (the link is to the cache, because the original article has expired). And I'll bet dollars to pennies that you won't get a warning when the overdraft "protection" kicks in, so you could just continue blissfully using the card and get hit with multiple overdraft charges.
In order to apply a free market analysis to a situation you first need to establish that the market in question is free. [...] and that's completely ignoring the point that public health is a public good that even a perfect free market might missallocate resources for.
Yup, you're right on the money. The health care area certainly isn't a free market, and I really not convinced it can (or should) be modeled and treated as a market at all. Of course, the "free market" shibboleth is more often missaplied than not (see all the health care plans currently being touted by a variety of politicos for great examples), with often absurd consequences.
Oh yeah? First show me the code!
Ask, and you shall be given.
... Al Gore, uses the word "if" too much. It's an old debating trick, to say "if X, then Y", and focus on the terrible consequence Y, and completely avoid the debate - which is over the validity/scope/level/definition of X
I don't see it as a trick, but rather as being honest. Many of the "X" items aren't certain; it would be a lie to present them as such. But we can estimate the probability of X (based on the current state of knowledge), and explore the consequences if X *does* occur. Gore's argument is that the consequences are serious enough to require action now, even it X may not happen after all. Most climate change skeptics I've seen ignore that and focus on the fact that the Xs aren't 100% surely proven.
What does per capita spending tell you about the US health care system, beyond the rather obvious fact that it isn't focused on maximizing value across patients?
Tells me exactly that: it's focused on maximizing value (as in financial) and not on maximizing health or general well-being.
We DO spend enough on technology and education. It's been a while since I've seen the numbers, but I believe that we spend more, both per-capita and in absolute terms, on education than most other countries.
You're confusing spending on education with quality of education. Many countries spend less than the USA and have much better standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools. Here's a quote from "The Economist": Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. Actually the whole article is very interesting: find it here
Stephen Baxter rocks! ... This one, unfortunately is mediocre
James Nicoll said it better than I ever could:
[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.
Sure, but does the Walmart laptop
...
b) allow you to write it off on your taxes?
The write-off isn't really an argument. If you write off $200, and you're in the 25% tax bracket, you only end up saving 50 bucks. Your final price is still $350 for a remarkably underpowered laptop. Moreover, the technological choices in its design make sense in a third world country, but really aren't a selling point in the USA (for example the optional hand-crank generator, or the ambient-light monochrome display mode).
If your intention is charitable, there are lots of organizations that provide education and tools to third world countries children; you can send them the 400 dollars. If you want a laptop, you can easily get a better one for not much more money.
current users of software "X" are unaffected by someone taking an open source project proprietary, it is only the code itself which is no longer free
Enlighten me, please: how can code be free? In my humble, freedom belongs to people, and people are perfectly free to use this code any way they want. Talking about some company "taking an open source project proprietary" is straight FUD: they can only make proprietary their new code or their changes to existing code, but they can't "take" the original code proprietary. Does the original code become unavailable? Does it suddenly become tainted? No, and "some company" can't stop me from using it, so why say it not "free" anymore?
Even adding "some company" in the discussion sounds questionable to me. Why should I, as a user of the original code, care that "some company" uses the same code as well? And why introduce "some company" in the discussion at all, except that they make a nice villain for a strawman?
I seem to remember that one of the original concepts around BSD was to provide good quality code that could be used by all coders, and thus improve the quality of all software, whether open-source or proprietary. The BSD group seems to be adhering to this ideal, while the GPL side's approach is a bit too ideological for my taste.
Linux makes a lot of inroads against MS in the enterprise market..
I know this is the conventional wisdom around those parts, but it doesn't seem to be the case: here is an article that indicates the share of both Windows and Linux servers growing in businesses, while Unix usage dropped dramatically. And in related news, another recent article here shows IIS 6 making inroads against Apache. So Sun's decision does make economic sense.
A random number generator would have an equal probability of generating any of these strings of bits,
011010011010
000000000000
111111111111
010101010101
101010101010
Of course, equal probability does not guarantee the randomness of your output: your generator may for example be a simple counter, going 000000, 000001, 000010 and so on. Not random at all, but it satisfies your requirement. So, equiprobability is a must have, but independence is also required
True randomness is really difficult to ascertain. Knuth has an interesting discussion on generating random numbers (I believe in Vol II)
Depending on the key logger's capabilities, an easy way to improve your security is to open another edit window (for example notepad) next to the password input window. Enter a character of your secret password, credit card number, etc), then, using the mouse, switch focus to the second window, type in a bunch of random characters, switch back, rinse and repeat. The logger ends with a bunch of gibberish, some of which is your key. If you do it right, extracting your secret from the resulting log will be really difficult (especially since the mouse allows you to add new characters in the middle of the already typed string, which means the characters in your secret won't even be in order).
The title of this Slashdot thread is FUD.
/. editors.
Much to my surprise, this time the FUDsters aren't the slashdotters; the FUD (including the title) is in the FA, which, probably being new here, I did read. The whole article (available here)is pretty much a lot of BS, but it sounded anti-MS enough that it was picked up and dumped on the first page by the crack team of
BTW: What exactly do you mean by "halter"? I Wiki'd it and all I could find was something worn either by women or horses (depending on the sort of halter you're talking about).
I assume he means barbell, since the French word for barbell is "haltère". So the OP's first language could be French or another Romance language
Of course, I still can't figure out why MS cares about the entertainment industry. They would save a lot of money if they just said "Screw DRM it's not worth it." Let the entertainment industry deal with it.
Well, how do you think the entertainment industry will deal with it? Very probably they'll start with a big lawsuit, accusing MS of aiding and abetting the pirates, followed by a set of licences and/or technological attempts to disallow or make difficult the playback of DVDs and other media items on PCs. It wouldn't work in the long term - you can't stop progress - but in the short term it would still be a serious annoyance. The average users want their DVD playback. They don't much care about DRM, because it's a minor issue in most cases, and they're not interested in the related politics, as long as they get their circus. Since MS wants to make things easiest for the not very sophisticated home user, they need to take the requirements of the entertainment industry into account.
Of course, the entertainment industry is overreaching so far it's not even funny, and there hasn't been any serious force opposing it yet (shrieking slashdotters really don't matter as much as they like to believe). I hope MS, Google and the others can do something about Holywood's encroachment on fair use.
It's also a far cry from MS's (paraphrased) "However you post it, wherever you post it, on any of our services (public or private) we have the right to use it, sell it, license it to our partners" clauses.
FUD, pure and simple; here's the relevant part of the Live license, from MS's web site here.
8. Your Materials.
You may be able to submit materials for use in connection with the service. Except for material that we license to you, we do not claim ownership of the materials you post or otherwise provide to us related to the service (called a "submission"). However, by posting or otherwise providing your submission, you are granting to the public free permission to:
use, copy, distribute, display, publish and modify your submission, each in connection with the service;
publish your name in connection with your submission; and grant these permissions to other persons.
This section only applies to legally permissible content and only to the extent that use and publishing of the legally permissible content does not breach the law. We will not pay you for your submission. We may refuse to publish, and may remove your submission from the service at any time. For every submission you make, you must have all rights necessary for you to grant the permissions in this section.
Please point out where exactly it says MS has the right to sell your content.
>>500 Kg steel ball in orbit, which would make a weapon as good as a nuke
>Tell ya what. De-orbit that into San Diego Bay. I'll stand on the beach and watch.
>And then I'll go have a fish dinner. Nukes have a wee bit more power.
Let's see, an object falling from LEO yields about say 35 MJ/kg; for 500 kg, that's 1.75e+10 J, the equivalent of about 4 tons of TNT. That's about one percent of the yield of the smallest nuke available. Still, a pretty big bang.
As another poster noted, the future of the U.S. economy is in areas such as intellectual property and services (specifically those that need not be performed in person). Reich calls this "symbolic analysis."
The problem I can see with this, regarding the US economy, is that all those areas are extremely portable. Moving car manufacturing (for example) from a country to another requires a *lot* of investment and infrastructure in the target country. For IP and many services the costs of such a move are much smaller, both in capital and infrastructure. With the growth in communications many services can be outsources (and many already are). Moreover, the few services that aren't easily portable (like waitressing or other personal services) are quite low tech, and therefore low paying. But IP stuff like software development can easily be outsourced (as many here know). I already heard about a number of medical services (for example, interpretation of X-rays) being outsourced to qualified physicians in India and other countries. Tax services too. Financial services can be outsourced as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't already.
The US used to have a huge advantage in the high quality of the education, compounded by the fact that it managed to attract so many bright people from abroad. This is changing - many countries are improving their education infrastructure, and the US immigration policy is more and more skewed towards less qualified candidates. So the question is: in twenty years, what unique services will the US be able to offer in a competitive way?