$6000 and up for a white noise generator? WTF?? Anyone with basic electronics skills can build one with parts that will cost about $10. Anyone with basic coding skills can code one for free in about 10 min.
Am I getting something wrong here, or did corporate greed just get worse?
Unfortunatley, you got it completely wrong. They wont be able to get out of poverty. They don't get to save up money. They don't have the time to get an education. And thats what their employers want, so the workers are stuck at the company forever. This is the new economic slavery. And the only way to stop it is to boycott these products (yes, that means boycottint a lot of products - in fact it means changing your whole lifestyle).
By buying these products, you say yes to such practices. You say yes to more outsourcing and unemployed people in the first world. You say yes to a work system that forces people to work all day long, 6 or 7 days a week, so they don't have time to organize and speak up against the system. You say yes to a system that will make some greedy assholes rich while hard working people are kept poor.
You can argue as long as you want and I'm sure you'll find enough arguments to ease your conscience. It's easy to close your eyes and lie to yourself.
The alternative is to honestly think about it. Do you really need all the crap you buy - does it make you happy? Would you rather support some big company in a corrupt country or would you prefer to support people in your neighborhood, even if it's more expensive? Do you honestly believe, if we buy from sweatshpos (and therefore supporting sweatshops), we will help these people?
If you still have doubts, please read the book "Buying the dragons teeth", by Jamyang Norbu, which is freely available. If, after reading this and honestly thinking about it, you still buy "made in china", I can respect that. What I will never respect are people who close their eyes and ignore reality, simply because it's more convenient.
Ironically, even security aware people give away their data - by using gpg and uploading their key (signed by friends etc) to a public keyserver.
I'm sure the gpg keyservers will be mined before myspace etc, because
relations can easily be extracted
most people use their realname for gpg (and it even gets confirmed by signatures)
people using gpg are obviously opposed to the government spying on them, so they're the usual suspects, anyways
One of the basic principles of law for any law-based society is that the state must assume that someone is innocent until the opposite is proven.
Now what happens if I refuse to disclose my key - or even better, destroy it when the get my HD? Will I be punished, because authoritioes can't know if I'm guilty? IANAL, but basic reason tells me, that this is completly against any "in dubio pro reo" principle. This gets dangerously close to middle age (and present medieval societies), when people were just tortured until they confessed anything and everything.
Fortunately, there's a simple solution - use XOR one-time-pad encryption with two different keys (anyone who's remotely serious about being paranoid will not use anything else than XOR anyways):
Create 2GB HD partition filled from/dev/random. Call it "the data".
Create matching 2GB sequence which decrypts the hd partition to something unsuspicious. Store it on a USB stick and call it "the key".
Use a second USB stick to store your actual data, encrypted with the random data from the harddisk. Call it whatever you like, but don't tell anyone you have it. When you change your data, just update the data on this USB stick. "The data" and "the key" never need to be changed.
Whenever authorities get your partition with "the data", just give them "the key".
The only reason, tin foil hats don't work is that you can't completely wrap your head inside foil. If you have an RFID card, you can wrap tin foil all around it. In that case I'd bet it actually works, since it's a faraday cage.
Why I refuse to even worry about this
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
For me, this is another "don't worry, be happy" case, as there is only a very small probability for a danger to a big number of people. Remember the Y2K bug, remember Sadams WMD, remember SARS, remember the mad cow disease? (bonus question: which doesn't fit?) None of these things ever caused real trouble to a major part of the world's population, but on all occasions, people got scared real easy. In fact, people were worried about just everything all through history, back to hiding from fire like scared animals.
Looking at some facts, there is a number of good reasons not to worry about this.
* Until today, only about 100 people died from H5N1
* they were all in contact with birds
* the virus doesn't spread from human to human (yes, it may sometime, but then again it may not - who knows)
* even if you get the virus, you have a good chance of surviving
* concerning the spanish flu: it killed something below 50 mio people worldwide. This is a lot, but with a total population of 2 billions, it also means that more than 97.5% survived
* we got a lot more knowlege about hygiene and biology now
* our body's own immune system is quite sophisticated and very strong against viri - after all it went through a million years of evolutionary development. At least it was good enough for our parents to survive long enough and have children, and also for our 4 grandparents, our 8 grand-grandparents and our $REALBIGNUM other ancestors.
* the media likes to keep us scared, so we keep watching. don't trust them
* the corporate world also likes to keep us scared, so we keep buying their crap. don't trust them either
* don't forget, some companies make real big money from selling medecine to imaginary threats (and I'm not only talking about viri here - think about how many "psychological disorders" that didn't even have a name a decade ago now can be cured with $fancydrug)
And if all else isn't good enough, there is still the top reason for not worring ever at all:
* Yes, we are all going to die someday, but when the time has come, overhasty worries won't save you, or even help you just a little bit. In fact, since death is inevitable, it might be much better to spend the time beeing with something useful, instead of beeing scared all the time.
Of course not worrying doesn't mean not taking precautions, when there is a valid reason for concern, but "valid concern" certainly doesn't apply here. If you're going to panic, please consider looking about ten posts down at an article that says something about Climate Warming.
Control the whole thing with a switch or a phototransistor and you've got a solar-powered light.
You don't even need a phototransistor. I once took one of these things apart and I kept searching for that ominous phototransistor until I noticed that detection of daylight might possibly have been done with that big thing on top of the light - the solar cell.
Actually, in Russia pirated software is sold on the streets by disc, i.e. you pay $2 for WinXP professional on one disc while some 6-disc Linux distro costs you $12. So ironically if they want to save money they gotta go with Win. On the other hand, I think the pricing is quite fair like this.
Sending signals through the chip like waves, thats what I thought first, too. But since one signal may not choose the shortest path while another may, this probably wouldn't allow too much of a speed gain. Maybe building the chip in 3 dimensions (more layers) might help. Anyways, it's sure going to be fun building new chips after they reach this limit.
You are quite correct, but you obviously failed to noticed that my calculation was based upon the assumption that the signal _does_ travel with lightspeed. The speed of a single electron in a conductor is in fact very slow, usually below 1mm/s (!), but as you said it's just the signal that has to get through. On the other hand, the signal cannot be faster than lightspeed, an thus, will not get further than 5cm between one CPU cycle and the next (even _with_ lightspeed). Obviously this is far enough, since the CPU is actually working, but I wonder if lightspeed will soon be a limiting factor to CPU speed (and size).
How big is that CPU? At 6GHz, an electrical signal only gets 0.05m (3*10^8m/6*10^9) between two clocks. I wonder if that's even enough for the signal to get through the whole processor.
Slashdot Mirror
There has been a very interesting talk about this (and other aspects of WikiLeaks) at 26C3.
I wanted to design something that would be still usable in 100 years. (Donald E. Knuth, more than 20 years ago)
..). Oh and smaller filesize, too.
Also, LaTeX will get you nicer documents than any WYSIWYG word processor in less time (once you know it
$6000 and up for a white noise generator? WTF?? Anyone with basic electronics skills can build one with parts that will cost about $10. Anyone with basic coding skills can code one for free in about 10 min.
Am I getting something wrong here, or did corporate greed just get worse?
Unfortunatley, you got it completely wrong. They wont be able to get out of poverty. They don't get to save up money. They don't have the time to get an education. And thats what their employers want, so the workers are stuck at the company forever. This is the new economic slavery. And the only way to stop it is to boycott these products (yes, that means boycottint a lot of products - in fact it means changing your whole lifestyle).
By buying these products, you say yes to such practices. You say yes to more outsourcing and unemployed people in the first world. You say yes to a work system that forces people to work all day long, 6 or 7 days a week, so they don't have time to organize and speak up against the system. You say yes to a system that will make some greedy assholes rich while hard working people are kept poor.
You can argue as long as you want and I'm sure you'll find enough arguments to ease your conscience. It's easy to close your eyes and lie to yourself.
The alternative is to honestly think about it. Do you really need all the crap you buy - does it make you happy? Would you rather support some big company in a corrupt country or would you prefer to support people in your neighborhood, even if it's more expensive? Do you honestly believe, if we buy from sweatshpos (and therefore supporting sweatshops), we will help these people?
If you still have doubts, please read the book "Buying the dragons teeth", by Jamyang Norbu, which is freely available. If, after reading this and honestly thinking about it, you still buy "made in china", I can respect that. What I will never respect are people who close their eyes and ignore reality, simply because it's more convenient.
Now what happens if I refuse to disclose my key - or even better, destroy it when the get my HD? Will I be punished, because authoritioes can't know if I'm guilty? IANAL, but basic reason tells me, that this is completly against any "in dubio pro reo" principle. This gets dangerously close to middle age (and present medieval societies), when people were just tortured until they confessed anything and everything.
Fortunately, there's a simple solution - use XOR one-time-pad encryption with two different keys (anyone who's remotely serious about being paranoid will not use anything else than XOR anyways):
Sure, the tinfoil hat doesn't actually work
The only reason, tin foil hats don't work is that you can't completely wrap your head inside foil. If you have an RFID card, you can wrap tin foil all around it. In that case I'd bet it actually works, since it's a faraday cage.
For me, this is another "don't worry, be happy" case, as there is only a very small probability for a danger to a big number of people. Remember the Y2K bug, remember Sadams WMD, remember SARS, remember the mad cow disease? (bonus question: which doesn't fit?) None of these things ever caused real trouble to a major part of the world's population, but on all occasions, people got scared real easy. In fact, people were worried about just everything all through history, back to hiding from fire like scared animals.
Looking at some facts, there is a number of good reasons not to worry about this.
* Until today, only about 100 people died from H5N1
* they were all in contact with birds
* the virus doesn't spread from human to human (yes, it may sometime, but then again it may not - who knows)
* even if you get the virus, you have a good chance of surviving
* concerning the spanish flu: it killed something below 50 mio people worldwide. This is a lot, but with a total population of 2 billions, it also means that more than 97.5% survived
* we got a lot more knowlege about hygiene and biology now
* our body's own immune system is quite sophisticated and very strong against viri - after all it went through a million years of evolutionary development. At least it was good enough for our parents to survive long enough and have children, and also for our 4 grandparents, our 8 grand-grandparents and our $REALBIGNUM other ancestors.
* the media likes to keep us scared, so we keep watching. don't trust them
* the corporate world also likes to keep us scared, so we keep buying their crap. don't trust them either
* don't forget, some companies make real big money from selling medecine to imaginary threats (and I'm not only talking about viri here - think about how many "psychological disorders" that didn't even have a name a decade ago now can be cured with $fancydrug)
And if all else isn't good enough, there is still the top reason for not worring ever at all:
* Yes, we are all going to die someday, but when the time has come, overhasty worries won't save you, or even help you just a little bit. In fact, since death is inevitable, it might be much better to spend the time beeing with something useful, instead of beeing scared all the time.
Of course not worrying doesn't mean not taking precautions, when there is a valid reason for concern, but "valid concern" certainly doesn't apply here. If you're going to panic, please consider looking about ten posts down at an article that says something about Climate Warming.
Sorry, dude, but thats just false. Both Japan and France use nuclear power. France also has nuclear weapons. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_wit h_nuclear_weapons
Beside that I agree with what you said, though.
You don't even need a phototransistor. I once took one of these things apart and I kept searching for that ominous phototransistor until I noticed that detection of daylight might possibly have been done with that big thing on top of the light - the solar cell.
Actually, in Russia pirated software is sold on the streets by disc, i.e. you pay $2 for WinXP professional on one disc while some 6-disc Linux distro costs you $12. So ironically if they want to save money they gotta go with Win. On the other hand, I think the pricing is quite fair like this.
Sending signals through the chip like waves, thats what I thought first, too. But since one signal may not choose the shortest path while another may, this probably wouldn't allow too much of a speed gain. Maybe building the chip in 3 dimensions (more layers) might help. Anyways, it's sure going to be fun building new chips after they reach this limit.
You are quite correct, but you obviously failed to noticed that my calculation was based upon the assumption that the signal _does_ travel with lightspeed. The speed of a single electron in a conductor is in fact very slow, usually below 1mm/s (!), but as you said it's just the signal that has to get through. On the other hand, the signal cannot be faster than lightspeed, an thus, will not get further than 5cm between one CPU cycle and the next (even _with_ lightspeed). Obviously this is far enough, since the CPU is actually working, but I wonder if lightspeed will soon be a limiting factor to CPU speed (and size).
How big is that CPU? At 6GHz, an electrical signal only gets 0.05m (3*10^8m/6*10^9) between two clocks. I wonder if that's even enough for the signal to get through the whole processor.