Not only will you be a lot more productive, but you'll be a lot more marketable if you just succumb to the "dark side" that is today's trend in programming languages.
I might disagree with the productive part, while agreeing with the marketable part. If you can talk the talk, "oh yeah, I did this project where we pasted Javascript between Ajax and Ruby modules for X and Y all accessing a common SQL server and it scaled up to 20 parallel servers before the funding ran out..." that's what gets you hired - pointy haired boss thinks he needs somebody who can "leverage the existing Ruby codebase and deliver an SQL backend for the new client," so, you said Ruby and SQL in there and sounded convincing while you said it, you're hired.
As for productive, we had a little Python vs. C++ vs. Excel Macro code-off last year, Excel was the nominal winner because the existing data was in Excel and the destination of the processed data was also Excel, so it had a pretty strong homefield advantage, but the Macro code was really specifically purposed and very inflexible, to the point of pushing back on the requirements a little. C++ on Qt and Python on WxWidgets were more or less neck and neck for ease of coding and flexibility of product, Qt of course has access to more platforms and runs faster if you're doing something big, but in its place Python-Wx is just as good if you know how to use it.
If the project requirements had grown to about 3x the complexity (this was a one day programming exercise), I'd say the Excel Macro would have imploded and started to be a serious maintenance problem, Python and C++ would have scaled better, and at maybe 10-20x the complexity, the Python would have gotten a little creaky too, not so much due to inherent flaws in the language but more because of how it is typically used. Of course, you can write horrible C++ code too, but it has been around long enough that most experienced C++ programmers recognize the bad stuff in C++ on sight and can regale you with tales of projects gone wrong because it was done that way.
If your idea of productive is whipping off 3 or 4 relatively independent projects a week, leaning heavily on existing script libraries and not giving a damn if what you are doing is efficient or not, sure, JavaScript is fine, and it has the home field advantage in HTML5. If you're building bigger systems that evolve and need a maintenance lifetime of 5+ years, there are better tools for that.
Quartz crystals are the basis of reliable, relatively frequency stable oscillators. They are at the heart of most every computer system of any size or complexity (yes, some use RC oscillators, others use more exotic stuff, but, we're talking the 99% here...)
Without a reliable time source, you cannot do asynchronous serial communications and any number of other things that require your computer to have the same sense of time as another computer it is attempting to talk to.
These same crystals are also at the frequency basis for many radio systems for similar reasons, except in the radio realm the crystals can be used to control the radio frequency for transmitters and receivers to lock to each other without much tuning fuss.
Extra geek points if you remember the crystal color combinations to make Sleestak repellent noise (from Land of the Lost).
10 feet thick, say we want 50,000 cubic feet of shielded volume, that's a cube about 37' per side, so 47' external dimension, round up and call it 6 plates 50x50x10, 150,000 cubic feet of shield - weighing 4.25 million kg - that would be 36 Saturn V launches to get the water up to LEO... yeah, it'll be more fun to track down water bearing asteroids, even though launch costs of $40B aren't really that high, for the cost of the Iraq war we could have launched 20 of these water shields.
Practical stenography would be something in the middle of those two, perhaps a CG scene of a pleated curtain blowing in the wind where the relative wide-narrow relationship of the pleats across a hundred frames varies differently according to the serial number, or a 30 second fire-fight scene where the relative timing of the gunshots is dithered by the serial number.
Are you serious? They're obviously not going to re-film the scene for every single user, and even re-rendering a CG scene would be prohibitively expensive.
Pick a single scene - 30 seconds or so, and give it over to the "algorithmic rendering department" for millions of variations to be produced. Not today, maybe 10 years from now, 20 years from now I think it will be easy if they want to.
Studios are spending hundreds of millions a year on production, if they put even 0.1% of that resource into a technical creative stenography effort, they can stay well ahead of attempts to crack them.
0.1% of a hundred million dollars is a hundred thousand dollars. That's substantially less than the salary and benefits necessary to hire even a single decent programmer for a year. Then you release a scheme and you have a million half time pirates and a thousand full time university professors trying to break it. Somehow I think it's a losing battle.
Hundreds - plural - and one engineer working full time on encryption schemes that include security by obscurity should be able to stay a couple of years ahead of the rabble trying to break him. All cryptography is breakable, it's just a matter of how long it takes. The value of new titles diminishes rapidly with time, if the scheme holds secure for 3 years, it has done its job well.
Compare the cost of cryptographers to a legal team. If the lawyers stop paying off, crypto will be cheap by comparison.
So to summarise your anecdote, 23 years ago you were briefly delayed and subjected to a pat down because you were too lazy/stupid to take a metallic object out of your pocket and put it on a tray along with your watch when you went through a security scanner.
Fuck me, it's like Nazi Germany all over again.
Parent was bitching about US TSA - my point was that London is no better, actually a bit worse in some ways. At least in the US they let you empty your pockets and try walking through again.
I think mine was a Casio - the cool thing about it was that it had an acoustic phone dialer on it, so you could press it up to the telephone and it would dial it for you, including all those messed up phone credit card access numbers. It was about the size and weight of the cell phone I carry today.
I think there must be a lot of severely repressed homosexuals posting to slashdot, to judge from the hysteria associated with being patted down by another man.
It only counts as gay if you kiss each other afterwards.
For my perspective on it, it was just kind of amusing to have to stand there and wait for the 60 year old cross between Benny Hill and Warwick Davis show up to do the patdown, and he was very professional about the whole thing - a little worrying that it might cause me to miss my connection, but otherwise harmless.
However, with U.S. TSA agents especially, on an exceptional day I could imagine the whole thing devolving into a cavity search just to amuse the "agent" - there's nothing good about TSA hiring practices.
Also, I will be surprised if distributed digital works don't start carrying stenographic serial numbers unique to the purchaser within the next 20 years... so, you can give your friend a copy, but if he gives it to 2 friends and they each give it to 2 friends, etc., it will have your identifying information embedded in it. Yes, there will be stenographic stripper programs, then stealthier stenography, etc. etc. in an ever escalating arms race, just like software serial numbers, but, just like software and more recently video games, expect your new media to "check in with the cloud" before operating properly, even if there is no good reason for it to.
You can't really use steganography for that. Embedding data within an image or audio file requires you to change how it is rendered for the user. You can "see" all the changes made if you look closely enough at all the individual pixels. As a result you almost have to use the least significant bit(s), e.g. you have a bunch of 16-bit numbers and you encode using the least significant bit, because generally the color represented by 18,552 is so close to the color represented by 18,553 that the difference is immaterial. Flipping any of the more significant bits would alter the image in an unacceptable way: The color represented by 16,388 is not at all the same as the color represented by 4. But such steganographic data can then be trivially removed just by randomizing the least significant bits.
In addition to that, a motion picture or audio file can't "phone home" in the same way that a game can. The game is software. You can't convert a game into an MP4 file and still have a game. You can convert any song or movie into an MP3 or MP4 and there will be nothing left to phone home. (This even before considering that most games with phone home nonsense have been cracked.)
If the games industry really tried, they could stay ahead of the crackers - mostly they aren't trying very hard for copy-protection yet, mostly because they're still making plenty of money without strong copy protection. I don't know how easy/hard it is to forge a WoW account, but they seem to still be making plenty of money with their "phone home scheme." Expect successes like this to be imitated, while game genres/styles which actually have their profits gouged by piracy (deep enough to hurt) are not developed in the future.
If the digital work is a movie, stenography could range from frames that have a serial number printed in plain-text in the upper right corner of the frame - at the obvious and easily defaced extreme, to differential encoding of the LSB of blue intensity at specific pixel numbers - obliterated by transcoding, if anybody bothers to transcode when you can just copy the file. Practical stenography would be something in the middle of those two, perhaps a CG scene of a pleated curtain blowing in the wind where the relative wide-narrow relationship of the pleats across a hundred frames varies differently according to the serial number, or a 30 second fire-fight scene where the relative timing of the gunshots is dithered by the serial number. Even if _you_ have a cracked (open source, or whatever) player that doesn't phone home, some fool that copies your movie will play it on a player that does phone home.
Studios are spending hundreds of millions a year on production, if they put even 0.1% of that resource into a technical creative stenography effort, they can stay well ahead of attempts to crack them. Instead, at the moment, they're using the traditional legal approaches, I think mostly because it's been historically the most effective way to maximize profits, and the people in charge are mostly on the verge of becoming historical artifacts themselves (insert tasteless Steve Jobs reference here...)
What I'm saying is that the distinction you're drawing will be short-lived. You can operate something in the nature of TOR or Freenet in such a way that you can obtain any data that exists on the entire network without making a direct connection to any node not operated by someone you personally know and trust. Doing it that way is very slow, which is why today hardly anybody does it, but "slow" goes away as time passes and networks become faster and cheaper.
Freenet (and similar concepts) have been around a long time, it doesn't have nearly the social adoption rate of Napster, or any of the "Facebook like" hyper-open systems where everybody shares basically everything with basically everybody by default. There's a sliver of counter-culture who use things like Freenet (and, by the way, since they're rare freaks, they also are raising a big flag over their head for closer scrutiny), but they're found in the same (lack of) abundance as people who encrypt all their e-mails.
In other words, the larger commercial market isn't threatened by this type of activity because the larger commercial market doesn't do it. Even if the encryption tech is one-click easy to install and use, building a meaningful "web of trust" will always take more manual effort than most people are willing to expend, and, circle back to that thing about raising a flag over your head if you do participate in a closed "web of trust" network, lots of people won't do it because it would mark them as weird.
The tipping point for this kind of activity into the "normal mainstream" is very far away, so far away that it may not happen in our lifetimes. It took 30 years of "trickle down economics" before even 1% of the U.S. stood up and protested in any significant way, and it will probably take 30 more for them to effect meaningful change. File sharing networks are only a tiny fraction as meaningful to people's daily lives.
Re:The ocean frontier - not
on
Remembering Sealab
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, I _can_ see some motivations for living in a habitat located on a 60' deep tropical coral reef.
A) The cool factor of having fish right outside your window, oh, sorry, ummmm... access to do long term observations of marine fauna in their natural habitat, for research, yeah.
B) relative protection from surface storms, although you'll need more than 60' depth for that in hurricane conditions.
C) ready access to fresh seafood...
D) no morning/evening commute to work: sorry man, I'm saturated, can't come up today.
E) stable (non-moving) habitat to work in (relative to a ship.)
F) in the 1960s, I'm sure they were also thinking natural Nuclear bomb shelter too.
Yeah, very expensive just for those things, and important to our cash driven society is that you can't really generate anything of value more efficiently by living underwater to do it. Still, I think a 6000 square foot structure, with decent 8'+ ceilings, ample natural light in every room (bigger windows than terrestrial structures due to less light at depth), moon pool entry at about 25' depth (internal pressure ~+12.5psi), hella powerful A/C system to keep the humidity at bay, ROV spearfishing system, and some kind of self-sufficient ocean generated energy system would make a decent working platform for 3-4 people to study, well, ocean generated energy systems for one thing. I could also see studying underwater building materials (3d printing with underwater concrete?) and any number of other things related to sustainable ocean dwelling.
Thing is, it looks like a playtime project, so nobody will fund it, even if it would generate useful spinoff tech, and waste less resources than any number of less visible pork projects.
Oh, and a random thought: how much water (ice) would it take to effectively shield a Earth-Mars shuttle from radiation? And, could we collect asteroids/comets to put together an ice-ball big enough to put a nice transit lounge habitat (not too dissimilar from the undersea habitat mentioned above, except that the fish will be frozen) into an Earth-Mars figure 8 orbit? Think solar-powered ion engines instead of chemical reactions...
Re:The ocean frontier - not
on
Remembering Sealab
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· Score: 4, Informative
I think that undersea conditions are actually more challenging than Space, at least LEO Space. You've got a terrible corrosion problem underwater, typically saturation level humidity, and the pressure differential to a "shirtsleeve" environment is higher as soon as you get below 60' (at 30' depth, you can saturation dive indefinitely with no special gasses and no decompression needed...), and then there's the mixed gas / decompression thing if you want to run your environment at a higher pressure to make a larger hull practical.
A blowout in the space-station can be plugged with duct tape (from the inside)... a blowout in an undersea habitat at 100' depth is considerably harder to deal with.
It is a shorter trip to "the undersea world," but the challenges pile up very quickly as you go down.
Re:The ocean frontier - not
on
Remembering Sealab
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Do you remember how efficiently crude oil was harvested and refined 100 years ago? I wouldn't be surprised if the early wells achieved 10% extraction of the available raw material.
All we need to get lunar petroleum back to Earth is a space elevator pipeline, (relatively) easy to build on the moon, and if you pump it fast enough, it will get slung out the other end with more energy than you are pumping into it. Then we just have to catch it as it free falls toward Earth and give it a safe re-entry, again, Space Elevators seem like the way to go, and you can run some pretty nice generating turbines capturing the kinetic energy of the falling petroleum.
Anyone who believes the above is serious needs to check their humor sensors... on the other hand, using space elevators to lower raw materials from orbit just might be a good way to power mass up to orbit...
When I read statements like yours I'm often left wondering, why do you think the American security services will single you out of the other 64 million travelers to the United States per year?
London, Heathrow, 1989, I was "detained" while in transit through the airport from one plane to another, a metal detector picked up the PDA in my pocket and I had to wait for a male security officer to be summoned to pat me down. 1989, PDAs were relatively rare, not yet standard procedure to inform bleary eyed travelers at 4:30am their local time about removing them before walking through the detector; which, by the way, didn't look much like the metal detector stations in US airports at the time, especially due to the fact that I was just changing planes and wasn't expecting a security checkpoint.
Granted, the shoe removal show in US airports easily trumps that now, but, staying out of the US will not keep you out of TSA style shakedowns.
As the internet, and the nodes that interface to it, mature with another century of experience, it will become increasingly difficult to freely trade "protected" information across it with impunity.
That is the exact opposite of what will happen.
The reason that piracy is so difficult to stop is that copying bits is very inexpensive. As technology improves, that cost will only go down further, making it even more difficult to stop. How much easier is it to "smuggle" information once you can fit the entire Library of Congress on a USB stick, or transfer it over a wire in seconds rather than days?
I draw a distinction between "warez" privately shared on hard encrypted links and Napster style public posting of well known works "in the clear" for all to access. The former may go on for a very long time, but the latter is already shorter lived today than it was 10 years ago, and there will probably come a day when it is not practical to go to a search engine, and find and download any piece of pop culture (music, videos, etc.) at will. What I am saying is that using the public internet to get pirated/bootlegged content from people you don't know is the thing that's going to become increasingly difficult, and well nigh impossible in another 100 years, assuming society itself lasts that long.
Encryption, too, may fall to quantum computing, and quantum computers will be prohibitively expensive for some time after they arrive. During that era, I wouldn't be surprised if "the authorities" "read the mail" and censor protected works from transit on the public internet. Of course, you can still trade memory chips with your friends, but that's a far cry from Napster style distribution.
Also, I will be surprised if distributed digital works don't start carrying stenographic serial numbers unique to the purchaser within the next 20 years... so, you can give your friend a copy, but if he gives it to 2 friends and they each give it to 2 friends, etc., it will have your identifying information embedded in it. Yes, there will be stenographic stripper programs, then stealthier stenography, etc. etc. in an ever escalating arms race, just like software serial numbers, but, just like software and more recently video games, expect your new media to "check in with the cloud" before operating properly, even if there is no good reason for it to.
I have great hope that "free software," "free music," and "free movies" will rise up and challenge the establishment - but that's been a slow starter in the software arena, and slower still in the entertainment realm. In the early days of software (say, 1980s for video games), it was possible for one guy in his garage to turn out a "world class" title. With production budgets escalating into the 100s of millions of dollars for some of the top titles, it's going to be hard for the Blair Witch Project to ever challenge the likes of Avatar just on the basis that the people charging money for Avatar are acting like jerks.
I don't think the analogy with 17th and 18th century piracy really fits. We're not talking about a few groups cracking DRM and selling the music. In fact, it's not like that at all. Most of the piracy, so it is called, isn't even for profit any more.
Bootlegging, then? A more populist revolt, to be sure, but, while I agree that RIAA, DMCA and all the related alphabet soup makes about as much sense as hanging pickpockets, and the "damage" done by IP theft is virtually impossible to quantify (and, that, in-fact some IP theft actually creates value for the "victim"), I believe that there is still some value to society in the concept of "Intellectual Property," and that some form of protection of that property is both warranted and just.
Today, I feel like the enforcement is akin to swinging a sledgehammer in a room thick with flies, ineffective at best, and horribly unjust to many of the punished. Kind of like being hung for associating with pirates of the high seas.
The fiber just got laid 10-15 years ago, we've barely managed to start rolling out IPv6 (I'd equate IPv4 to square rigging...), piracy will be around for quite awhile, but it will eventually be marginalized just Jean Lafitte and his like have been."
That was the single most foolish statement ever made on Slashdot.
Fixed that for you, you're easily topping it with:
The reason Sea "pirates" dont have a chance is because they dont have Trillions of dollars to have massive balttleships built and they typically are low IQ types. If they had any brains they would get their hands on some old WW-II submarines and utterly own the US navy. a WW-II torpedo will take out a US ship easily. We are just lucky that the pirates out there are simply opportunists that are nothing more than petty thieves and muggers of the sea.
On the internet, a 13 year old kid has as much technology and power as the entire US government has. This scares the shit out of the governments of the world and big business. Even after IPv8 has been in place for 20 years and quantum processors have been in the iPad 12 and iPhone 47 a 13 year old that has been studying technology and the internet will STILL have as much power as any government on this planet when on the internet.
The internet is nothing like the physical world where it takes a lot of money and resources to build something.
If WW-II submarines ever became a problem for the US Navy, how many hours do you think it would be before the Pentagon had a report on the location and capability of every WW-II submarine operating in the world? Do you think that one could surface and operate its diesel engines long enough to recharge the batteries before being spotted by satellite? How about refueling? And where do you get the torpedoes? Sure, anybody _could_ make a WW-II torpedo in an average warehouse space, but could you build a number of them and deliver them to the subs without being noticed? I find SPECTRE more believable than your proposed fantasy.
200 years ago, Privateers were not exactly on-par with national navies, but they were a force to be reckoned with in individual encounters. Today, the kids on the internet are in a similar position with government intelligence agencies, but that's not a situation that's going to last for centuries - it might continue for 50 or 100 years, but eventually ideas like Echelon will be workable, and deployed, and (more) effectively policing internet traffic, and, yes, they will take enormous resources to create and operate, resources unavailable to your average 13 year old suburbanite punk.
The whole "victimless crime" thing is a distinction between IP theft and theft of physical goods. Just what constitutes IP is a far more ephemeral construct than a bar of gold or barrel of salted pork.
I was referring to the "gallant nobility" of Jean Lafitte, or Robin Hood, or any of the old (mostly romanticized and false) stories of persons operating outside the law as a manner of making a living. For a more realistic depiction of what it meant to operate outside the law in the "good old days," see: The Bounty. Today's Somali pirates are certainly a much smaller fraction of the global commerce picture than the Privateers were 200 years ago.
As the internet, and the nodes that interface to it, mature with another century of experience, it will become increasingly difficult to freely trade "protected" information across it with impunity. A global consensus definition of "protected information" is one of the things that will have to develop before intellectual property will become more difficult to "steal" using the global network, but, even if there never is 100% agreement about just what is IP and what protection it deserves, you will see "blowback" from the interests that feel wronged against both the little guys who can't defend themselves and the big flamboyant pirates like Kim Dotcom.
If it's possible to make a movie and sell it cheaply online, with no DRM, and still make a profit as the article suggests why hasn't anyone done that successfully?
It's the distribution channel, my friend
Tell me, currently what are the distribution channel for movies, and how do they distribute them?
The distribution channel for physical goods was sailing ships, and in the early days of sailing ships (1400-1850ish) piracy was in its glory years, now pirates are marginalized by the power and pervasiveness of modern warships, and air pirates are almost non-existent.
The fiber just got laid 10-15 years ago, we've barely managed to start rolling out IPv6 (I'd equate IPv4 to square rigging...), piracy will be around for quite awhile, but it will eventually be marginalized just Jean Lafitte and his like have been.
In the meanwhile, expect brutal but ineffective attempts to stop it by the commercial interests who perceive it as a threat (see: Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies for a fictionalized depiction of the basic human responses at work...)
We have a long history of public support for forward thinking long term policies here.
People are not as dumb as you think, and the assumption that you are so vastly superior to the masses doesn't reflect well on yourself.
I wouldn't call it superior, I'd call it different priorities. And, as for me personally, I am just as guilty as the next westerner, driving my car to work every day, buying 90% of our food from the grocery store instead of local farmers, heating and cooling my home with electricity from the coal plant down the road, and having electronic gadgets delivered to our door via FedEx. It's not my priority to attempt to save the world by my actions alone, but I do support short term "expensive" policies that have longer term benefits, which places me in the minority of my countrymen most of the time.
And, yes, Germans occasionally throw up a green flag and wave it around, but as I recall you (Germany) still burn mostly coal for your electricity, and just opened a bunch of new coal burning plants to beat some upcoming regulations? Your homeland is not exactly the picture postcard of biodiversity or native habitat preservation. Don't take me as condescending, but if the whole world operated as Germany does now, the planet would be sinking faster into oblivion than it already is.
I live in the U.S., and we are basically "less Green" than Germany, but blessed with more land. We also have many nice forward thinking policies that you can talk about for days and days, but on the balance, I'd say we're less than 5% along the way toward a goal of a long term sustainable society.
None of the other bodies in our solar system is habitable by humans. Terraforming is a silly fiction. Think about it. If we had the level of technology to radically transform an entire planet's atmosphere, generate soil and water, etc. it would be a LOT easier to use it on earth in the wake of anything short of an earth-SHATTERING asteroid than to use it on Mars.
Humans should make the most of our time here, and stop worrying so much about all the silly ways we can imagine our doom.
Terraforming Mars 101
0) Get political buy-in to spend the resources on the project (the basic stumbling block to most large scale programs that do not involved "killing the enemy", or "cheating our own death through healthcare") 1) Redirect water rich comets into collision orbits (decades to execute, not practical on Earth for the obvious reasons) 2) Seed appropriate microbes / plants to convert CO2 atmosphere to a reasonable mix of oxygen, wait a couple of hundred years (not necessary or helpful on Earth) 3) Have fun mucking around in your stinky, unpleasant Eden for a few thousand years before you've got anything approaching a "beautiful" habitat 4) Thumb your nose when Earth finally screws up so badly that Mars looks like paradise by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only will you be a lot more productive, but you'll be a lot more marketable if you just succumb to the "dark side" that is today's trend in programming languages.
I might disagree with the productive part, while agreeing with the marketable part. If you can talk the talk, "oh yeah, I did this project where we pasted Javascript between Ajax and Ruby modules for X and Y all accessing a common SQL server and it scaled up to 20 parallel servers before the funding ran out..." that's what gets you hired - pointy haired boss thinks he needs somebody who can "leverage the existing Ruby codebase and deliver an SQL backend for the new client," so, you said Ruby and SQL in there and sounded convincing while you said it, you're hired.
As for productive, we had a little Python vs. C++ vs. Excel Macro code-off last year, Excel was the nominal winner because the existing data was in Excel and the destination of the processed data was also Excel, so it had a pretty strong homefield advantage, but the Macro code was really specifically purposed and very inflexible, to the point of pushing back on the requirements a little. C++ on Qt and Python on WxWidgets were more or less neck and neck for ease of coding and flexibility of product, Qt of course has access to more platforms and runs faster if you're doing something big, but in its place Python-Wx is just as good if you know how to use it.
If the project requirements had grown to about 3x the complexity (this was a one day programming exercise), I'd say the Excel Macro would have imploded and started to be a serious maintenance problem, Python and C++ would have scaled better, and at maybe 10-20x the complexity, the Python would have gotten a little creaky too, not so much due to inherent flaws in the language but more because of how it is typically used. Of course, you can write horrible C++ code too, but it has been around long enough that most experienced C++ programmers recognize the bad stuff in C++ on sight and can regale you with tales of projects gone wrong because it was done that way.
If your idea of productive is whipping off 3 or 4 relatively independent projects a week, leaning heavily on existing script libraries and not giving a damn if what you are doing is efficient or not, sure, JavaScript is fine, and it has the home field advantage in HTML5. If you're building bigger systems that evolve and need a maintenance lifetime of 5+ years, there are better tools for that.
Quartz crystals for geeks 101:
Quartz crystals are the basis of reliable, relatively frequency stable oscillators. They are at the heart of most every computer system of any size or complexity (yes, some use RC oscillators, others use more exotic stuff, but, we're talking the 99% here...)
Without a reliable time source, you cannot do asynchronous serial communications and any number of other things that require your computer to have the same sense of time as another computer it is attempting to talk to.
These same crystals are also at the frequency basis for many radio systems for similar reasons, except in the radio realm the crystals can be used to control the radio frequency for transmitters and receivers to lock to each other without much tuning fuss.
Extra geek points if you remember the crystal color combinations to make Sleestak repellent noise (from Land of the Lost).
wont it make more sense to ship directly from China?
Will avoid multiple customs duties as well. (no customs will need to be paid for the UK entry)
Alec Guinness voiceover: The customs laws are more complex than you can possibly imagine.
Wait. I thought these were supposed to be **$25**?
Yeah, and I thought they were coming without ethernet ports, but we were both wrong, and I'm happier for it.
If the $25 board came out first, I'd have to buy both flavors, this way I can just get the one I really want.
(81 microwatts) per (square centimeter) = 0.0752514624 watts per (square foot)
75 watts from 1000 square feet of collecting area? I think there are better uses for the zinc and tin making the substrate.
10 feet thick, say we want 50,000 cubic feet of shielded volume, that's a cube about 37' per side, so 47' external dimension, round up and call it 6 plates 50x50x10, 150,000 cubic feet of shield - weighing 4.25 million kg - that would be 36 Saturn V launches to get the water up to LEO... yeah, it'll be more fun to track down water bearing asteroids, even though launch costs of $40B aren't really that high, for the cost of the Iraq war we could have launched 20 of these water shields.
Practical stenography would be something in the middle of those two, perhaps a CG scene of a pleated curtain blowing in the wind where the relative wide-narrow relationship of the pleats across a hundred frames varies differently according to the serial number, or a 30 second fire-fight scene where the relative timing of the gunshots is dithered by the serial number.
Are you serious? They're obviously not going to re-film the scene for every single user, and even re-rendering a CG scene would be prohibitively expensive.
Pick a single scene - 30 seconds or so, and give it over to the "algorithmic rendering department" for millions of variations to be produced. Not today, maybe 10 years from now, 20 years from now I think it will be easy if they want to.
Studios are spending hundreds of millions a year on production, if they put even 0.1% of that resource into a technical creative stenography effort, they can stay well ahead of attempts to crack them.
0.1% of a hundred million dollars is a hundred thousand dollars. That's substantially less than the salary and benefits necessary to hire even a single decent programmer for a year. Then you release a scheme and you have a million half time pirates and a thousand full time university professors trying to break it. Somehow I think it's a losing battle.
Hundreds - plural - and one engineer working full time on encryption schemes that include security by obscurity should be able to stay a couple of years ahead of the rabble trying to break him. All cryptography is breakable, it's just a matter of how long it takes. The value of new titles diminishes rapidly with time, if the scheme holds secure for 3 years, it has done its job well.
Compare the cost of cryptographers to a legal team. If the lawyers stop paying off, crypto will be cheap by comparison.
Ok, now you've stopped laughing I guess in another 50 years we will have one.
Yeah, 50 years ago "skyscrapers OMG 100 stories tall!!!" were impressive, it's time to take the game to the next level.
So to summarise your anecdote, 23 years ago you were briefly delayed and subjected to a pat down because you were too lazy/stupid to take a metallic object out of your pocket and put it on a tray along with your watch when you went through a security scanner.
Fuck me, it's like Nazi Germany all over again.
Parent was bitching about US TSA - my point was that London is no better, actually a bit worse in some ways. At least in the US they let you empty your pockets and try walking through again.
I think mine was a Casio - the cool thing about it was that it had an acoustic phone dialer on it, so you could press it up to the telephone and it would dial it for you, including all those messed up phone credit card access numbers. It was about the size and weight of the cell phone I carry today.
I think there must be a lot of severely repressed homosexuals posting to slashdot, to judge from the hysteria associated with being patted down by another man.
It only counts as gay if you kiss each other afterwards.
For my perspective on it, it was just kind of amusing to have to stand there and wait for the 60 year old cross between Benny Hill and Warwick Davis show up to do the patdown, and he was very professional about the whole thing - a little worrying that it might cause me to miss my connection, but otherwise harmless.
However, with U.S. TSA agents especially, on an exceptional day I could imagine the whole thing devolving into a cavity search just to amuse the "agent" - there's nothing good about TSA hiring practices.
You mad, bro?
More like amused...
Also, I will be surprised if distributed digital works don't start carrying stenographic serial numbers unique to the purchaser within the next 20 years... so, you can give your friend a copy, but if he gives it to 2 friends and they each give it to 2 friends, etc., it will have your identifying information embedded in it. Yes, there will be stenographic stripper programs, then stealthier stenography, etc. etc. in an ever escalating arms race, just like software serial numbers, but, just like software and more recently video games, expect your new media to "check in with the cloud" before operating properly, even if there is no good reason for it to.
You can't really use steganography for that. Embedding data within an image or audio file requires you to change how it is rendered for the user. You can "see" all the changes made if you look closely enough at all the individual pixels. As a result you almost have to use the least significant bit(s), e.g. you have a bunch of 16-bit numbers and you encode using the least significant bit, because generally the color represented by 18,552 is so close to the color represented by 18,553 that the difference is immaterial. Flipping any of the more significant bits would alter the image in an unacceptable way: The color represented by 16,388 is not at all the same as the color represented by 4. But such steganographic data can then be trivially removed just by randomizing the least significant bits.
In addition to that, a motion picture or audio file can't "phone home" in the same way that a game can. The game is software. You can't convert a game into an MP4 file and still have a game. You can convert any song or movie into an MP3 or MP4 and there will be nothing left to phone home. (This even before considering that most games with phone home nonsense have been cracked.)
If the games industry really tried, they could stay ahead of the crackers - mostly they aren't trying very hard for copy-protection yet, mostly because they're still making plenty of money without strong copy protection. I don't know how easy/hard it is to forge a WoW account, but they seem to still be making plenty of money with their "phone home scheme." Expect successes like this to be imitated, while game genres/styles which actually have their profits gouged by piracy (deep enough to hurt) are not developed in the future.
If the digital work is a movie, stenography could range from frames that have a serial number printed in plain-text in the upper right corner of the frame - at the obvious and easily defaced extreme, to differential encoding of the LSB of blue intensity at specific pixel numbers - obliterated by transcoding, if anybody bothers to transcode when you can just copy the file. Practical stenography would be something in the middle of those two, perhaps a CG scene of a pleated curtain blowing in the wind where the relative wide-narrow relationship of the pleats across a hundred frames varies differently according to the serial number, or a 30 second fire-fight scene where the relative timing of the gunshots is dithered by the serial number. Even if _you_ have a cracked (open source, or whatever) player that doesn't phone home, some fool that copies your movie will play it on a player that does phone home.
Studios are spending hundreds of millions a year on production, if they put even 0.1% of that resource into a technical creative stenography effort, they can stay well ahead of attempts to crack them. Instead, at the moment, they're using the traditional legal approaches, I think mostly because it's been historically the most effective way to maximize profits, and the people in charge are mostly on the verge of becoming historical artifacts themselves (insert tasteless Steve Jobs reference here...)
What I'm saying is that the distinction you're drawing will be short-lived. You can operate something in the nature of TOR or Freenet in such a way that you can obtain any data that exists on the entire network without making a direct connection to any node not operated by someone you personally know and trust. Doing it that way is very slow, which is why today hardly anybody does it, but "slow" goes away as time passes and networks become faster and cheaper.
Freenet (and similar concepts) have been around a long time, it doesn't have nearly the social adoption rate of Napster, or any of the "Facebook like" hyper-open systems where everybody shares basically everything with basically everybody by default. There's a sliver of counter-culture who use things like Freenet (and, by the way, since they're rare freaks, they also are raising a big flag over their head for closer scrutiny), but they're found in the same (lack of) abundance as people who encrypt all their e-mails.
In other words, the larger commercial market isn't threatened by this type of activity because the larger commercial market doesn't do it. Even if the encryption tech is one-click easy to install and use, building a meaningful "web of trust" will always take more manual effort than most people are willing to expend, and, circle back to that thing about raising a flag over your head if you do participate in a closed "web of trust" network, lots of people won't do it because it would mark them as weird.
The tipping point for this kind of activity into the "normal mainstream" is very far away, so far away that it may not happen in our lifetimes. It took 30 years of "trickle down economics" before even 1% of the U.S. stood up and protested in any significant way, and it will probably take 30 more for them to effect meaningful change. File sharing networks are only a tiny fraction as meaningful to people's daily lives.
Well, I _can_ see some motivations for living in a habitat located on a 60' deep tropical coral reef.
A) The cool factor of having fish right outside your window, oh, sorry, ummmm... access to do long term observations of marine fauna in their natural habitat, for research, yeah.
B) relative protection from surface storms, although you'll need more than 60' depth for that in hurricane conditions.
C) ready access to fresh seafood...
D) no morning/evening commute to work: sorry man, I'm saturated, can't come up today.
E) stable (non-moving) habitat to work in (relative to a ship.)
F) in the 1960s, I'm sure they were also thinking natural Nuclear bomb shelter too.
Yeah, very expensive just for those things, and important to our cash driven society is that you can't really generate anything of value more efficiently by living underwater to do it. Still, I think a 6000 square foot structure, with decent 8'+ ceilings, ample natural light in every room (bigger windows than terrestrial structures due to less light at depth), moon pool entry at about 25' depth (internal pressure ~+12.5psi), hella powerful A/C system to keep the humidity at bay, ROV spearfishing system, and some kind of self-sufficient ocean generated energy system would make a decent working platform for 3-4 people to study, well, ocean generated energy systems for one thing. I could also see studying underwater building materials (3d printing with underwater concrete?) and any number of other things related to sustainable ocean dwelling.
Thing is, it looks like a playtime project, so nobody will fund it, even if it would generate useful spinoff tech, and waste less resources than any number of less visible pork projects.
Oh, and a random thought: how much water (ice) would it take to effectively shield a Earth-Mars shuttle from radiation? And, could we collect asteroids/comets to put together an ice-ball big enough to put a nice transit lounge habitat (not too dissimilar from the undersea habitat mentioned above, except that the fish will be frozen) into an Earth-Mars figure 8 orbit? Think solar-powered ion engines instead of chemical reactions...
I think that undersea conditions are actually more challenging than Space, at least LEO Space. You've got a terrible corrosion problem underwater, typically saturation level humidity, and the pressure differential to a "shirtsleeve" environment is higher as soon as you get below 60' (at 30' depth, you can saturation dive indefinitely with no special gasses and no decompression needed...), and then there's the mixed gas / decompression thing if you want to run your environment at a higher pressure to make a larger hull practical.
A blowout in the space-station can be plugged with duct tape (from the inside)... a blowout in an undersea habitat at 100' depth is considerably harder to deal with.
It is a shorter trip to "the undersea world," but the challenges pile up very quickly as you go down.
Do you remember how efficiently crude oil was harvested and refined 100 years ago? I wouldn't be surprised if the early wells achieved 10% extraction of the available raw material.
All we need to get lunar petroleum back to Earth is a space elevator pipeline, (relatively) easy to build on the moon, and if you pump it fast enough, it will get slung out the other end with more energy than you are pumping into it. Then we just have to catch it as it free falls toward Earth and give it a safe re-entry, again, Space Elevators seem like the way to go, and you can run some pretty nice generating turbines capturing the kinetic energy of the falling petroleum.
Anyone who believes the above is serious needs to check their humor sensors... on the other hand, using space elevators to lower raw materials from orbit just might be a good way to power mass up to orbit...
When I read statements like yours I'm often left wondering, why do you think the American security services will single you out of the other 64 million travelers to the United States per year?
London, Heathrow, 1989, I was "detained" while in transit through the airport from one plane to another, a metal detector picked up the PDA in my pocket and I had to wait for a male security officer to be summoned to pat me down. 1989, PDAs were relatively rare, not yet standard procedure to inform bleary eyed travelers at 4:30am their local time about removing them before walking through the detector; which, by the way, didn't look much like the metal detector stations in US airports at the time, especially due to the fact that I was just changing planes and wasn't expecting a security checkpoint.
Granted, the shoe removal show in US airports easily trumps that now, but, staying out of the US will not keep you out of TSA style shakedowns.
As the internet, and the nodes that interface to it, mature with another century of experience, it will become increasingly difficult to freely trade "protected" information across it with impunity.
That is the exact opposite of what will happen.
The reason that piracy is so difficult to stop is that copying bits is very inexpensive. As technology improves, that cost will only go down further, making it even more difficult to stop. How much easier is it to "smuggle" information once you can fit the entire Library of Congress on a USB stick, or transfer it over a wire in seconds rather than days?
I draw a distinction between "warez" privately shared on hard encrypted links and Napster style public posting of well known works "in the clear" for all to access. The former may go on for a very long time, but the latter is already shorter lived today than it was 10 years ago, and there will probably come a day when it is not practical to go to a search engine, and find and download any piece of pop culture (music, videos, etc.) at will. What I am saying is that using the public internet to get pirated/bootlegged content from people you don't know is the thing that's going to become increasingly difficult, and well nigh impossible in another 100 years, assuming society itself lasts that long.
Encryption, too, may fall to quantum computing, and quantum computers will be prohibitively expensive for some time after they arrive. During that era, I wouldn't be surprised if "the authorities" "read the mail" and censor protected works from transit on the public internet. Of course, you can still trade memory chips with your friends, but that's a far cry from Napster style distribution.
Also, I will be surprised if distributed digital works don't start carrying stenographic serial numbers unique to the purchaser within the next 20 years... so, you can give your friend a copy, but if he gives it to 2 friends and they each give it to 2 friends, etc., it will have your identifying information embedded in it. Yes, there will be stenographic stripper programs, then stealthier stenography, etc. etc. in an ever escalating arms race, just like software serial numbers, but, just like software and more recently video games, expect your new media to "check in with the cloud" before operating properly, even if there is no good reason for it to.
I have great hope that "free software," "free music," and "free movies" will rise up and challenge the establishment - but that's been a slow starter in the software arena, and slower still in the entertainment realm. In the early days of software (say, 1980s for video games), it was possible for one guy in his garage to turn out a "world class" title. With production budgets escalating into the 100s of millions of dollars for some of the top titles, it's going to be hard for the Blair Witch Project to ever challenge the likes of Avatar just on the basis that the people charging money for Avatar are acting like jerks.
I don't think the analogy with 17th and 18th century piracy really fits. We're not talking about a few groups cracking DRM and selling the music. In fact, it's not like that at all. Most of the piracy, so it is called, isn't even for profit any more.
Bootlegging, then? A more populist revolt, to be sure, but, while I agree that RIAA, DMCA and all the related alphabet soup makes about as much sense as hanging pickpockets, and the "damage" done by IP theft is virtually impossible to quantify (and, that, in-fact some IP theft actually creates value for the "victim"), I believe that there is still some value to society in the concept of "Intellectual Property," and that some form of protection of that property is both warranted and just.
Today, I feel like the enforcement is akin to swinging a sledgehammer in a room thick with flies, ineffective at best, and horribly unjust to many of the punished. Kind of like being hung for associating with pirates of the high seas.
The fiber just got laid 10-15 years ago, we've barely managed to start rolling out IPv6 (I'd equate IPv4 to square rigging...), piracy will be around for quite awhile, but it will eventually be marginalized just Jean Lafitte and his like have been."
That was the single most foolish statement ever made on Slashdot.
Fixed that for you, you're easily topping it with:
The reason Sea "pirates" dont have a chance is because they dont have Trillions of dollars to have massive balttleships built and they typically are low IQ types. If they had any brains they would get their hands on some old WW-II submarines and utterly own the US navy. a WW-II torpedo will take out a US ship easily. We are just lucky that the pirates out there are simply opportunists that are nothing more than petty thieves and muggers of the sea.
On the internet, a 13 year old kid has as much technology and power as the entire US government has. This scares the shit out of the governments of the world and big business. Even after IPv8 has been in place for 20 years and quantum processors have been in the iPad 12 and iPhone 47 a 13 year old that has been studying technology and the internet will STILL have as much power as any government on this planet when on the internet.
The internet is nothing like the physical world where it takes a lot of money and resources to build something.
If WW-II submarines ever became a problem for the US Navy, how many hours do you think it would be before the Pentagon had a report on the location and capability of every WW-II submarine operating in the world? Do you think that one could surface and operate its diesel engines long enough to recharge the batteries before being spotted by satellite? How about refueling? And where do you get the torpedoes? Sure, anybody _could_ make a WW-II torpedo in an average warehouse space, but could you build a number of them and deliver them to the subs without being noticed? I find SPECTRE more believable than your proposed fantasy.
200 years ago, Privateers were not exactly on-par with national navies, but they were a force to be reckoned with in individual encounters. Today, the kids on the internet are in a similar position with government intelligence agencies, but that's not a situation that's going to last for centuries - it might continue for 50 or 100 years, but eventually ideas like Echelon will be workable, and deployed, and (more) effectively policing internet traffic, and, yes, they will take enormous resources to create and operate, resources unavailable to your average 13 year old suburbanite punk.
The whole "victimless crime" thing is a distinction between IP theft and theft of physical goods. Just what constitutes IP is a far more ephemeral construct than a bar of gold or barrel of salted pork.
I was referring to the "gallant nobility" of Jean Lafitte, or Robin Hood, or any of the old (mostly romanticized and false) stories of persons operating outside the law as a manner of making a living. For a more realistic depiction of what it meant to operate outside the law in the "good old days," see: The Bounty. Today's Somali pirates are certainly a much smaller fraction of the global commerce picture than the Privateers were 200 years ago.
As the internet, and the nodes that interface to it, mature with another century of experience, it will become increasingly difficult to freely trade "protected" information across it with impunity. A global consensus definition of "protected information" is one of the things that will have to develop before intellectual property will become more difficult to "steal" using the global network, but, even if there never is 100% agreement about just what is IP and what protection it deserves, you will see "blowback" from the interests that feel wronged against both the little guys who can't defend themselves and the big flamboyant pirates like Kim Dotcom.
If it's possible to make a movie and sell it cheaply online, with no DRM, and still make a profit as the article suggests why hasn't anyone done that successfully?
It's the distribution channel, my friend
Tell me, currently what are the distribution channel for movies, and how do they distribute them?
The distribution channel for physical goods was sailing ships, and in the early days of sailing ships (1400-1850ish) piracy was in its glory years, now pirates are marginalized by the power and pervasiveness of modern warships, and air pirates are almost non-existent.
The fiber just got laid 10-15 years ago, we've barely managed to start rolling out IPv6 (I'd equate IPv4 to square rigging...), piracy will be around for quite awhile, but it will eventually be marginalized just Jean Lafitte and his like have been.
In the meanwhile, expect brutal but ineffective attempts to stop it by the commercial interests who perceive it as a threat (see: Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies for a fictionalized depiction of the basic human responses at work...)
We have a long history of public support for forward thinking long term policies here.
People are not as dumb as you think, and the assumption that you are so vastly superior to the masses doesn't reflect well on yourself.
I wouldn't call it superior, I'd call it different priorities. And, as for me personally, I am just as guilty as the next westerner, driving my car to work every day, buying 90% of our food from the grocery store instead of local farmers, heating and cooling my home with electricity from the coal plant down the road, and having electronic gadgets delivered to our door via FedEx. It's not my priority to attempt to save the world by my actions alone, but I do support short term "expensive" policies that have longer term benefits, which places me in the minority of my countrymen most of the time.
And, yes, Germans occasionally throw up a green flag and wave it around, but as I recall you (Germany) still burn mostly coal for your electricity, and just opened a bunch of new coal burning plants to beat some upcoming regulations? Your homeland is not exactly the picture postcard of biodiversity or native habitat preservation. Don't take me as condescending, but if the whole world operated as Germany does now, the planet would be sinking faster into oblivion than it already is.
I live in the U.S., and we are basically "less Green" than Germany, but blessed with more land. We also have many nice forward thinking policies that you can talk about for days and days, but on the balance, I'd say we're less than 5% along the way toward a goal of a long term sustainable society.
None of the other bodies in our solar system is habitable by humans. Terraforming is a silly fiction. Think about it. If we had the level of technology to radically transform an entire planet's atmosphere, generate soil and water, etc. it would be a LOT easier to use it on earth in the wake of anything short of an earth-SHATTERING asteroid than to use it on Mars.
Humans should make the most of our time here, and stop worrying so much about all the silly ways we can imagine our doom.
Terraforming Mars 101
0) Get political buy-in to spend the resources on the project (the basic stumbling block to most large scale programs that do not involved "killing the enemy", or "cheating our own death through healthcare")
1) Redirect water rich comets into collision orbits (decades to execute, not practical on Earth for the obvious reasons)
2) Seed appropriate microbes / plants to convert CO2 atmosphere to a reasonable mix of oxygen, wait a couple of hundred years (not necessary or helpful on Earth)
3) Have fun mucking around in your stinky, unpleasant Eden for a few thousand years before you've got anything approaching a "beautiful" habitat
4) Thumb your nose when Earth finally screws up so badly that Mars looks like paradise by comparison.