You'd need a boot CD that looked at all the boot records and maybe even compared LILO and Grub MD5s^H^H^HSHA1s^H^H^H^HSHA256s against known good values.
Most people who run XP don't use a bootmanager, so the mere presence of one should be enough to ask the user why it's there, with the default action to disable it by installing the standard MBR / bootsector.
Oh, and microsoft kernel mode binaries are public key signed since windows 2000, so you don't need MD5/SHA - you can see if they are haxored or not by checking the signature.
Interestingly enough, you can do Start->Run sigverif.exe on a live system. The problem with sigverif is that it dumbly scans the windows directory for all files, not just the critical ones - I get warnings on a bunch of dlls, because they came with ancient 3rd party software.
Signature verification is the way to check the files on a bootdisk like BartPE or WinPE, though it would be need to be a bit smarter than sigverif.
Hmm, it's interesting idea, and you could do it back in the Dos days - load above Dos, hook some vectors that allow you wake after it loads and the system is yours.
The problem is that Windows takes over completely - it switched into protected mode, overwrites all memory and generates its own interrupt vector table. Hiding from Windows wouldn't be too hard - you'd just hook the Bios to tell it not to use bits of memory when NTDETECT runs. The problem would be getting your code to run after Windows loads.
Actually, you could imagine a virus that virtualises the CPU (maybe with the Vanderpool stuff). That way you'd get called whenever Windows did some trappable operation like changing the page table. You'd wait until system structures has stabilised and then install your Api hooks.
I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.
Is there an evidence for the meme that the US sold Saddam WMD? The only questionable thing I can find evidence for are that the US gave him satellite photos in the Iran/Iraq war because they didn't want him to lose. That was a mistake, no doubt about it.
Officially after the Iran/Iraq war, US policy switched to dual containment rather than being crypto allies with either side. Certainly by the time of the Supergun the US was actively preventing any weapons to Iraq.
And if you look at the equipment the Iraqis fought with, it was all Soviet block stuff - T72s, AK47 and RPG's. It seems much more likely that they bought the conventional stuff from Russia/China and some advanced stuff from France like Osiraq or Germany like Chemical weapons. In fact you can tell the people who sold Saddam arms - they were the ones who were against the US attempt to write off Iraqi debts after Gulf War II.
But plutonium bombs need to be implosion type, rather than the simple gun design.
IIRC the danger from both isn't too bad, assuming you have lumps of it rather than dust. Presumably the people that would do this would have a different sense of acceptable personal risk than average people.
Arguably the law in the UK, that you can use force to defend yourself and your property, is OK it's just that the judges were interpreting it in a rather strict way. The current 'change' is just a directive from the politicians to make them stop doing it.
After the Tony Martin case, there was a proposal to amend the law so that you could use force unless it was "grossly disproportionate", the implication that pretty much anything goes, but that was rejected. Pity really, I liked the idea of a bunch of lawyers trying to work out if sharkpits, killer robots and homemade landmines were grossly disproportionate and thus illegal rather than just disproportonate.
The advantages in our the system are ordinary people have more choice and more access to information and powerful people have limits on their power, not that the powerful people are more altruistic.
Actually, I'd expect executives in a competitive capitalist system to be better at propaganda than the government people in Russia. Here, if you are doing badly, you need to spin things from when the problem becomes publically known until you fix it or go under, whereas there you could just kill, censor or imprison your critics.
Store the kilowatt hour in fat! This would require some genetically engineered photosynthetic bacteria, unless some suitable fat producing bugs could be found. Since the whole system is solar powered anyway, the bacteria could be in a tank on the roof - and would use sunlight to synthesise fats during the day. You could burn the fatty bacteria when you wanted to get the energy out - just skim the scum off the top of the tank.
Fat stores about 9 kilocalories per gram, according to some random diet site so theoretically you could store 1khW in about ninety grams of fat. Realistically, burning things is rather inefficient, so you'd need much more than this.
The idea of a vat of genetically engineered bugs on the roof producing fat from sunlight may strike some people as a bit creepy of course.
Yes, and batteries are expensive, e.g. EUR60 for 75Amp hours at 12V, or about a kilowatt hour.
Mind you, it occured to me that if you don't care about portability, there's another way to store energy. Consider a 1000kg weight attached to an electric motor.
You could use the motor via some gears to lift the weight in the day, and use it as a dynamo to generate power at night. The 1000 kilo weight would be a large barrel of water, or rubble or something - the idea is tha you'd sell the energy storage device unloaded, and the customer would fill it up when they got it home. If the weight was water, you could obviously pump it instead.
Now 1khW=3.6E+6 Joules.
Potential Energy = MgH where M is mass in kilos, g is 9.8m/s^2 and H is the height in kilos.
So you would need to lift the weight
h = 3.6 x 10^6
----------
M x g
h = 3.6 x 10^6
----------
1000 x 9.8
h ~ 3.6 x 10^6
----------
1 x 10^4
h ~ 3.6 * 10^2 = 360m.
Somewhat endearingly, Google can also do this calculation
Hmm, doesn't sound practical does it? - 1 metric tonne is lifted by 360m. On the other hand, you can reduce h by increasing M. You could design the house so that the whole thing is the weight for example. That way, the house would be lifted in the day by the power from solar panels, and would gradually sink at night as the potential energy was extracted.
We may not be able to stop the pirates, but we can have enough of an impact to make pirating a much less attractive option. Given the choice of buying a game or waiting two to three months for a pirated version, a lot of pirates are going to start buying games. Or at least they'll buy their favorite ones.
That's the point - mainstream media works like this
1) Hype for 6 months 2) Release 3) Sell for a couple of months 4) Oblivion
The idea of protection is to hold off a crack for a couple of weeks after release which is when the vast majority of the sales are. If people don't have a choice whether to buy or pirate, the vast majority will buy.
I'm not saying I like copy protection - frankly it irritates me. It's just that hearing empty arguments why it doesn't work from other people with a vested interest in it not being tried irritates me almost as much.
Journalists - bad (60's hippy peaceniks who don't respect the Commander in Chief, except for right wing bloggers) Right wing bloggers who persued a vendetta against Clinton - patriotic Americans. Trade journalists - vital part of functioning free market system People who breach NDA's - bad (violation of contract law) Journalists who report the info - bad (Felonious Consipracy) Capitalist Competition - good (what separates us from the eff/gnu foundation) Journalists who report the info - good, vital part of capitalist competition. Free speech - good (what separates us from Saddam) eff - good, defending free speech. Apple - bad (60's hippies) Apple - good (great American company) Apple's competitors - good eff - bad (communist hippies)
Seriously, I think journalist's sources anonymity should be protected. There may be cases where those sources are involved in something so criminal that this is not the case*, but allegedly breaching an NDA is nowhere near serious enough.
* E.g. Aljazeera could interview someone who claimed to have prior knowledge of a terrorist attack.
Journalists' sources should be protected, I think. Dunno really.
A perky Fox News Info-Babe?
...
Some guy from Al-Jazeera whose cousin is in Gitmo?
Mmmn, Fox babes.
Err, what were we talking about?
Dammnit, this journalist has entered into a Felonious Conspiracy with someone who has violated a NDA and thus contract law. We have to crack down on this sort of thing, it has National Security implications! Chuck 'em into Gitmo and torture them until they reveal their sources!
That's for a Swedish 24 security - three officers, all with background checks working 8 hour shifts, two with 500% overtime. In the US you can get a gun totin' ex con with a chronic speed problem to be a 24 hour rent-a-cop for much less.
Hell, I do it just for the power and unlimited coffee/net access. It's not like my job is in danger of being outsourced/downsized either, especially as I have a reputation for being bit trigger happy.
It is worth noting that there isn't really enough evidence to determine conclusively the success or failure of Patriot missile interceptions during the Gulf War. It is also worth noting that the Patriot system was originally intended for use primarily against aircraft and cruise missiles - although the original specification called for the ability to intercept short range ballistic missiles, this capability was still being introduced during Operation Desert Storm
I'd guess if you decide you want the system to a intercept low tech ICBMs at design time, you could build a system that works. And even if the patriots were 100% dud, which I doubt, they did give the Israeli goverment more justification for not retaliating and making the Arab members of the UN coalition change sides.
Still, fair point - Patriot performance was certainly not the kind of thing you'd want to bet the country on.
Ok, if you don't like that argument, I thought of another.
Consider a situation where somewhere some dictatorship is rumoured by our somewhat unreliable intelligence services to be considering an pre-emptive attack on the US. They have hardened bunkers threaten to launch if aircraft enter their airspace. You could imagine the US President being put in a situation where a pre-emptive nuclear strike could be a plausible way to remove the threat.
In fact this is like the Cuban missile crisis, except the enemy country is more isolated from the outside world, and has less resources to build weapons, like North Korea.
Now if you have no missile defense, I'd say there is a fair chance that the US would do this.
Later on, we might find out that they didn't have as many missiles as we thought, or they we're only considering a pre-emptive strike for the same reasons we were. The rest of the world believes that the US has killed millions of people for no good reason, and they kind of have a point.
Alternatively, maybe the enemy country has more missiles and is crazier than we thought and decides to launch all the ones left in retaliation. They launch a massive attack on the US.
If you have a missile defense system you only need to attack if you're attacked and it fails to shoot down the missiles. You avoid putting a US President in a prisoners dilema situation.
Imagine Bush in this situation. Do you think he'd listen carefully and make the best decision? Hell even JFK came close to fighting a nuclear war over Cuba that neither he nor the Russians wanted to fight.
Your article does not mention them being convinced at all.
I meant convinced not to use them on the invading army - e.g.
Q: Why didn't you use your chemical weapons? Aziz: Well, we didn't think it wise to use them. Q: Can you tell me in more detail....? Aziz: That's all I can say. It was not wise to use such kind of weapons in such kind of war, with such an enemy. Q: Because they had nuclear weapons? Aziz: You can....... make your own conclusions...
Which I interpreted as that the Iraqis had been told that if they used chemical weapons, the US would go nuclear. If you can convince a country to not use it's non conventional arms against an invasion, they are no longer a deterrent against invasion.
Or you could say the US deterred the Iraqi's deterrent, but that sounds like something out of Dr Strangelove:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Most people who run XP don't use a bootmanager, so the mere presence of one should be enough to ask the user why it's there, with the default action to disable it by installing the standard MBR / bootsector.
Oh, and microsoft kernel mode binaries are public key signed since windows 2000, so you don't need MD5/SHA - you can see if they are haxored or not by checking the signature.
Interestingly enough, you can do Start->Run sigverif.exe on a live system. The problem with sigverif is that it dumbly scans the windows directory for all files, not just the critical ones - I get warnings on a bunch of dlls, because they came with ancient 3rd party software.
Signature verification is the way to check the files on a bootdisk like BartPE or WinPE, though it would be need to be a bit smarter than sigverif.
Hmm, it's interesting idea, and you could do it back in the Dos days - load above Dos, hook some vectors that allow you wake after it loads and the system is yours.
The problem is that Windows takes over completely - it switched into protected mode, overwrites all memory and generates its own interrupt vector table. Hiding from Windows wouldn't be too hard - you'd just hook the Bios to tell it not to use bits of memory when NTDETECT runs. The problem would be getting your code to run after Windows loads.
Actually, you could imagine a virus that virtualises the CPU (maybe with the Vanderpool stuff). That way you'd get called whenever Windows did some trappable operation like changing the page table. You'd wait until system structures has stabilised and then install your Api hooks.
It's non trivial though.
ICANN would have allowed the Hutus and Tutsis to have have separate domains like .hu and .tu rather than sharing the .rw domain /Going to hell.
Is there an evidence for the meme that the US sold Saddam WMD? The only questionable thing I can find evidence for are that the US gave him satellite photos in the Iran/Iraq war because they didn't want him to lose. That was a mistake, no doubt about it.
Officially after the Iran/Iraq war, US policy switched to dual containment rather than being crypto allies with either side. Certainly by the time of the Supergun the US was actively preventing any weapons to Iraq.
And if you look at the equipment the Iraqis fought with, it was all Soviet block stuff - T72s, AK47 and RPG's. It seems much more likely that they bought the conventional stuff from Russia/China and some advanced stuff from France like Osiraq or Germany like Chemical weapons. In fact you can tell the people who sold Saddam arms - they were the ones who were against the US attempt to write off Iraqi debts after Gulf War II.
http://www.sequentialpictures.com/moviestarwarsepi sode3.html
"Warned you we did. Listen you did not. Screwed we now are"
That's what they said about Michael Jackson.
Perhaps BIll Limiting Cngress Optimisation of bill names.
Hmm BILCO is catchier.
Yeah, and a climate of fear is bad for liberal societies.
But plutonium bombs need to be implosion type, rather than the simple gun design.
IIRC the danger from both isn't too bad, assuming you have lumps of it rather than dust. Presumably the people that would do this would have a different sense of acceptable personal risk than average people.
Arguably the law in the UK, that you can use force to defend yourself and your property, is OK it's just that the judges were interpreting it in a rather strict way. The current 'change' is just a directive from the politicians to make them stop doing it.
/ t-3455.html
After the Tony Martin case, there was a proposal to amend the law so that you could use force unless it was "grossly disproportionate", the implication that pretty much anything goes, but that was rejected. Pity really, I liked the idea of a bunch of lawyers trying to work out if sharkpits, killer robots and homemade landmines were grossly disproportionate and thus illegal rather than just disproportonate.
http://www.chavscum.co.uk/forum/archive/index.php
The advantages in our the system are ordinary people have more choice and more access to information and powerful people have limits on their power, not that the powerful people are more altruistic.
Actually, I'd expect executives in a competitive capitalist system to be better at propaganda than the government people in Russia. Here, if you are doing badly, you need to spin things from when the problem becomes publically known until you fix it or go under, whereas there you could just kill, censor or imprison your critics.
I had another idea
Store the kilowatt hour in fat! This would require some genetically engineered photosynthetic bacteria, unless some suitable fat producing bugs could be found. Since the whole system is solar powered anyway, the bacteria could be in a tank on the roof - and would use sunlight to synthesise fats during the day. You could burn the fatty bacteria when you wanted to get the energy out - just skim the scum off the top of the tank.
Fat stores about 9 kilocalories per gram, according to some random diet site so theoretically you could store 1khW in about ninety grams of fat. Realistically, burning things is rather inefficient, so you'd need much more than this.
The idea of a vat of genetically engineered bugs on the roof producing fat from sunlight may strike some people as a bit creepy of course.
Yes, and batteries are expensive, e.g. EUR60 for 75Amp hours at 12V, or about a kilowatt hour.
u r+%2F+10%5E4+kilos+m%2Fs%5E2
Mind you, it occured to me that if you don't care about portability, there's another way to store energy. Consider a 1000kg weight attached to an electric motor.
You could use the motor via some gears to lift the weight in the day, and use it as a dynamo to generate power at night. The 1000 kilo weight would be a large barrel of water, or rubble or something - the idea is tha you'd sell the energy storage device unloaded, and the customer would fill it up when they got it home. If the weight was water, you could obviously pump it instead.
Now 1khW=3.6E+6 Joules.
Potential Energy = MgH where M is mass in kilos, g is 9.8m/s^2 and H is the height in kilos.
So you would need to lift the weight
h = 3.6 x 10^6
----------
M x g
h = 3.6 x 10^6
----------
1000 x 9.8
h ~ 3.6 x 10^6
----------
1 x 10^4
h ~ 3.6 * 10^2 = 360m.
Somewhat endearingly, Google can also do this calculation
http://www.google.de/search?hl=en&q=1+kilowatt+ho
Hmm, doesn't sound practical does it? - 1 metric tonne is lifted by 360m. On the other hand, you can reduce h by increasing M. You could design the house so that the whole thing is the weight for example. That way, the house would be lifted in the day by the power from solar panels, and would gradually sink at night as the potential energy was extracted.
Click on Show Options at the top of a post, then click on Reply.
Then you get a text box with the quoting done.
e.g. from here
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_p
That's the point - mainstream media works like this
1) Hype for 6 months
2) Release
3) Sell for a couple of months
4) Oblivion
The idea of protection is to hold off a crack for a couple of weeks after release which is when the vast majority of the sales are. If people don't have a choice whether to buy or pirate, the vast majority will buy.
I'm not saying I like copy protection - frankly it irritates me. It's just that hearing empty arguments why it doesn't work from other people with a vested interest in it not being tried irritates me almost as much.
Wow, it's a good job you said Erich Mielke rather than Adolf Hitler, or you'd have Godwinned yourself.
Or the right wing version -
Journalists - bad (60's hippy peaceniks who don't respect the Commander in Chief, except for right wing bloggers)
Right wing bloggers who persued a vendetta against Clinton - patriotic Americans.
Trade journalists - vital part of functioning free market system
People who breach NDA's - bad (violation of contract law)
Journalists who report the info - bad (Felonious Consipracy)
Capitalist Competition - good (what separates us from the eff/gnu foundation)
Journalists who report the info - good, vital part of capitalist competition.
Free speech - good (what separates us from Saddam)
eff - good, defending free speech.
Apple - bad (60's hippies)
Apple - good (great American company)
Apple's competitors - good
eff - bad (communist hippies)
Seriously, I think journalist's sources anonymity should be protected. There may be cases where those sources are involved in something so criminal that this is not the case*, but allegedly breaching an NDA is nowhere near serious enough.
* E.g. Aljazeera could interview someone who claimed to have prior knowledge of a terrorist attack.
Mmmn, Fox babes.
Err, what were we talking about?
Dammnit, this journalist has entered into a Felonious Conspiracy with someone who has violated a NDA and thus contract law. We have to crack down on this sort of thing, it has National Security implications! Chuck 'em into Gitmo and torture them until they reveal their sources!
It's a box that plugs into firewire (aka 1394) and gives you XLR RCA and maybe SPDIF.
;-)
http://asteroid.co.uk/ is available too
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=756
The ball thingy in Katamari Damacy can pick up both dust (early on) *and* felons (later on) -
5 833
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=5
I'm sure the Daleks will forgive you for that comment when they invade.
That's for a Swedish 24 security - three officers, all with background checks working 8 hour shifts, two with 500% overtime. In the US you can get a gun totin' ex con with a chronic speed problem to be a 24 hour rent-a-cop for much less.
Hell, I do it just for the power and unlimited coffee/net access. It's not like my job is in danger of being outsourced/downsized either, especially as I have a reputation for being bit trigger happy.
No problems, the stuff I write is hardly well thought out either.
I'd guess if you decide you want the system to a intercept low tech ICBMs at design time, you could build a system that works. And even if the patriots were 100% dud, which I doubt, they did give the Israeli goverment more justification for not retaliating and making the Arab members of the UN coalition change sides.
Still, fair point - Patriot performance was certainly not the kind of thing you'd want to bet the country on.
Ok, if you don't like that argument, I thought of another.
Consider a situation where somewhere some dictatorship is rumoured by our somewhat unreliable intelligence services to be considering an pre-emptive attack on the US. They have hardened bunkers threaten to launch if aircraft enter their airspace. You could imagine the US President being put in a situation where a pre-emptive nuclear strike could be a plausible way to remove the threat.
In fact this is like the Cuban missile crisis, except the enemy country is more isolated from the outside world, and has less resources to build weapons, like North Korea.
Now if you have no missile defense, I'd say there is a fair chance that the US would do this.
Later on, we might find out that they didn't have as many missiles as we thought, or they we're only considering a pre-emptive strike for the same reasons we were. The rest of the world believes that the US has killed millions of people for no good reason, and they kind of have a point.
Alternatively, maybe the enemy country has more missiles and is crazier than we thought and decides to launch all the ones left in retaliation. They launch a massive attack on the US.
If you have a missile defense system you only need to attack if you're attacked and it fails to shoot down the missiles. You avoid putting a US President in a prisoners dilema situation.
Imagine Bush in this situation. Do you think he'd listen carefully and make the best decision? Hell even JFK came close to fighting a nuclear war over Cuba that neither he nor the Russians wanted to fight.
I meant convinced not to use them on the invading army - e.g.
Q: Why didn't you use your chemical weapons?
Aziz: Well, we didn't think it wise to use them.
Q: Can you tell me in more detail....?
Aziz: That's all I can say. It was not wise to use such kind of weapons in such kind of war, with such an enemy.
Q: Because they had nuclear weapons?
Aziz: You can....... make your own conclusions...
Which I interpreted as that the Iraqis had been told that if they used chemical weapons, the US would go nuclear. If you can convince a country to not use it's non conventional arms against an invasion, they are no longer a deterrent against invasion.
Or you could say the US deterred the Iraqi's deterrent, but that sounds like something out of Dr Strangelove