That's why this Litvinenko the radioactive spy poisoning death is so interesting. He wrote a book in which he claimed that Putin instigated the Russian apartment bombings that started the Second Chechen war:
In the book Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, published with the financial support of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent, alleged that agents from the FSB co-ordinated the apartment block bombings. On 29 December 2003 Russian authorities confiscated over 5000 copies of the book en route to Moscow from the publisher in Latvia.[18]. Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London in November 2006.
That is so true. Not only do they manufacture, but they export this to other nations. Read this 2006 report for some details:
China's infringing products dominate the black markets of the world, and the reputation of China's industry has suffered as a result. China is not doing enough to stop the outbound infringing products at its borders.
Trade in pirated optical discs continues to thrive, supplied by smugglers and by both licensed and unlicensed factories. Small retail shops continue to be the major commercial outlets for pirated movies and music, and roaming vendors offering cheap pirated discs continue to be very visible in major cities across China.
Interesting tidbit:
Piracy and counterfeiting are partly products of China's market access restrictions, which artificially limit the availability of foreign content and thus lead consumers to the black market. Various U.S. right holders continue to be adversely impacted by restrictions on imports, including having to go through import monopolies, restrictions on foreign investment in distribution, and delays in regulatory approval. Examples include restrictions on the import and distribution of legitimate foreign movies and delays created by the censorship process. Efforts to speed up content review for entertainment software have also been unavailing.
Most pertinent:
The United States is also encouraged that authorities in China started to take enforcement actions against Internet piracy in 2005, following China's 2005 JCCT commitment to carry out a "nationwide crack-down on Internet piracy, including through enforcement at Internet cafes." This included a temporary campaign from October 2005 through February 2006, the concrete results of which remain unclear.
Another team found 10 to 100 times more species of bacteria than they expected to, including rare microbes that may be relics from the early days of the planet.
Cool! Bacteria that our immune system has never seen!
I believe you're right. Lets do some simple calculation:
This HD has 600 000 hr MTBF max and transfer rate of 300MB/s. Say you transfer at this rate for all its MTBF life thats 600 000 hr * 3600s/hr * 300MB/s = 648 000 000 000 MB or 6.48 petabytes max transfer in its life
MTBF(sec.) * Transfer rate = Max lifetime transfer
Normal flash has 300,000 write cycles/block amortized among N GB blocks (block = byte) so thats 300,000 * N cycles with (comparable)max rate of 300MB/s or 90 000 000 * N MB max transfer in its lifetime.
(WC * n blocks) * Transfer rate = Max lifetime transfer
MTBF = WC * N blocks
N = MTBF/WC -> higher write-cycle flash needs less space to approach MTBF of HDs
N would need to be about 64 800/9 MB or ~7.2 GB capacity to approach the lifetime transfer of a hard drive. I realize that with each failing block, size of the flash would be shrinking, but the total failure of the flash would occur when no blocks could be written to. This is just a rough comparison of the two. Also I assumed the same transfer rate as the HD which is not very realistic, but its there to show a rough comparison.
As you can see a 100GB or so flash disk with a 1,000,000 block write-cycle would more than surpass the MTBF in current Hard Drives.
I think the ultimate point will be the $/GB. I don't think that Flash can compete with Hard Drives in that department, not yet anyway. Perhaps we will see them as a buffer(it's already being used in Vista) between Hard Drive and main memory. And eventually(!?) overtake HDs. We can always hope..
You won't see mandatory service(perhaps ever) for a few reasons. One of those reasons is Vietnam. It's much easier to tell people to fuck off once "they signed up."
The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the
richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest
10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world
adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the
world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the
2
world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest
1%, a group which -- with 37 million members worldwide -- is far from an exclusive club.
When people start talking about those damn rich people think about this--you're one of them. "Huh, what me?" Exactly. I'm sure most people here have computers that cost more than half the population on this planet has in total assets. Somehow I think most people here belong in the 1% club.
I'm still waiting to find out what rights I have as the consumer. Seems like the media is moving towards a nasty pay-per-view model. A model where you don't own what you buy. Kind of like it is now, only you can't pretend anymore. I don't know what is worse, seeing these rackets make the laws or seeing them enforce them.
merely inflicting temporary pain and mild burns to incapacitate an enemy combatant is undeniably the lesser of two evils. Would you seriously prefer we shoot them dead instead?
Woah there buddy nobody said this was going to be used in combat. These are to be used in protests and crowds of civilians. See the examples: rubber bullets, tasers, pepper spray, batons. Don't think Iraq, think Vietnam. Funny that you mention torture, that is the first use that popped into my mind. Actually I'm starting to wonder where they are conducting these tests... Anyway if you want to feel the *mildly* burned sensation stick your hand in the microwave, and call me when it's done. You'll survive, they just might have to chop it off. After all it is *non-lethal*. And surely, there's nothing worse than death!
It's here. Thanks for the headsup. There is one very weird thing though:
Orrin Hatch, songwriter and Republican senator from Utah, seems to be the only person in Washington with a progressive view of copyright law.
Uh...wtf? Hatch, progressive? All that crack she's been smoking has gotten to her. Either that or there are a lot of worse people ready to take his place. Quite frankly, I don't know which is worse.
I was trying to make a point that not even the mighty CIA could infiltrate Iraq. Such was his intelligence network. Also, I am not trying to imply that his sadistic torture and extermination weren't integral in keeping him in power. What made him powerful is jailing, torturing and executing specific political opponents(and their families). How do you know who is an opponent? By spying on them, making everybody fear him and opposing him. Caligula said "Let them hate me as long as they fear me" and this is exactly what he was instilling in people. This is the best document I could find on his intelligence agencies; he actually had many. Also you might want too look at this good documentary.
By saying he "was the law" is saying that there was nothing other than his own power guiding his actions. He couldn't be held accountable to anybody internal to Iraq but himself. He made sure of that. Above the law would mean that there were laws he was violating but couldn't be held accountable by legal means. Saddam used his intelligence system to get rid of opposition and control it. That's what kept him in power.
Maybe we are saying the same thing but from different perspectives. I do agree that his ruthlessness was important to keeping him in power, but without the knowledge where to exercise it he would just be another thug waiting for a revolution. Obviously that revolution wouldn't have happened without US intervention.
But what I was ultimately trying to do was to show that every new surveillance system brings us closer to Saddam's wet dream. Only this time you're not relying on people as agents but cameras, trackers, habits, motivations etc. all inferred from the mass of information you hemorrhage through private corporations willing so sell it for a buck.
Also last thing I want to mention for the public vs private debate. This corporate information has already been used for political purposes. You might want to look into the "voter vault" Karl Rove has:
They are relying on the so-called Voter Vault, a computer at GOP headquarters loaded with voting history and consumer information that can be used to "micro-target" voters. By analyzing such bits of data as what magazines the members of a household subscribe to, how many children they have, what types of cars they drive and what churches they attend, the program can pinpoint who is most likely to be open to a Republican appeal.
Imagine what Saddam would have done with such information. *shivers*
Why do I have to buy "Zune Points" to then make music purchases? It's just stupid.
Because of credit card transfer charges. Song prices are low and credit card is usually $0.20 + 2%. That obviously doesn't work well with purchases ~$1. I read somewhere how iTunes does it. They basically open a credit of up to $15 to your account but don't finalize it until a few weeks later. That lets them charge all the music you make in the meantime. If you don't buy more than one song they just charge you for that and take the hit.
It doesn't matter who they are. The information can be readily bought. See here. And it's all legal.
And your kneejerk comments about Saddam are unwelcome. Saddam was not "above the law." He was the law. If you can't tell the difference then keep your nonsense to yourself. Look at any modern dictatorship and where their money goes and how big an intelligence agency they have. If you doubt the importance of this then consider the "intelligence" that led to his removal--there was none.
It is not impinging on a right to freedom, it is just following through the obvious implication - if you are in a public space you are being observed.
This is false on so many levels. First, there is not a person behind each camera watching it. The technology is way beyond the ability of people to harness it. Thus you have new technologies such as face recognition, gait recognition, to recognize specific persons. The implication you state is obvious is not really so. Shoplifters and Vegas Cheaters have found ways to cheat the observer by being nonchalant and inconspicuous. Thus you have the very people that you are trying to stop being the only ones that have the motivations and ability to evade the system. Obvious?
The obvious is to stop the people that get caught and put them in massive databases shared and cross-shared. Mark them, if you get my drift. Follow them and their lives. If you think these gears aren't already in motion then you are the one missing the obvious 1984 allusions.
Second, what is public and what is private is no longer a valid argument. I will give you an example. Say I bought a book on "Surviving Cancer" and I'm looking for a health insurance company. I buy the book with a credit card and it is easily linked to me. The health insurance companies use a third-party company which assesses the risks posed by each individual. What would the insurance company do?
You may think this was a contrived example but it illustrates an important point. What you think is private isn't so private. Everything you buy goes into a database. Everywhere you go(cellphone, onstar, cameras) goes into a database. This information is not private, it is sold, cross-referenced, linked and mined for profit. All of a sudden it's quite easy to track people. Not only what they do but who they're with along with thir histories(good and bad). You can infer a lot of information, whether right or wrong, from these pieces.
The CCTV is just another drop in the bucket. Private and public is not so different in a "CCTV fetish" kind of society. Only this time there needs not be black van with a black man following you. Then we get these kind of misguided ideas that there is such a thing as a division between the two. Or that privacy is not correlated with freedom. Maybe you should learn how dictators like Saddam hold a grip on their power:
What made Saddam Hussein powerful? Information. Whenever a person checked into a hotel, a paper with his full name and a copy of his passport was given to the security quarters. Iraq was a castle; a bird could not go in without being checked. If you caused offense, you could be put in prison for good. If you were lucky you would be tried one day; if not, then we have a word in Arabic that means you rot, as food rots.
In the US, when you sign for your license you agree to accept breathalizer test. You can refuse to take it once prompted, but you will lose your license. I don't know if they can then bring criminal charges against you though.
Its kinda hard to do one without the other though. Piping and scripting is a type of programming. The whole Linux philosophy is a programmer's paradigm. Compare this to Windows where you have to be a 'professional'
I was thinking of a way one can prevent these kinds of abuses. Would considering personal information the "intellectual property"(bear with me) of the individual solve it? Think of copyright. Anything you write is copyrighted immediately. Nobody can then take your work and then sell it for profit. Why on earth should they be able to do this with your personal information? Sure you can know that I was in such and such a bar at such and such a time by just observing, but you cannot sell this specific information to anybody without my permission.
If one considers one's life as one's "work" and all the individual pieces that make it up: dob, ssn, name, addr, what one drives, owns, where one lives, where one works, worked, thinks, wants--these are all the property of its creator. This whole privacy invasion is a staple of a society in flux--information is free! We can do with it what we like! But information has always had its price. I hope we can put a real price on it and put the thieves in jail.
The only way one can expect some semblance of control over their personal information is by commoditising it. It used to be hard to get at these pieces of information. Personal investigators would pay a fortune to find these things out. Nowadays they just visit your Myspace page and troll the Millions of databases out there with your personal information.
I admit it seems somewhat far fetched. But consider this: once your life is being monitored and recorded and sold and gutted and butchered for someone's profit, it is going to be hard to get it back. Even now, if somebody is stalking you, you will have a hard time keeping out of sight short of changing not only your name, but date of birth, social security number, where you lived, worked etc. In other words it's practically impossible. Just try getting an apartment(you would want to live in) without any of these. And getting your name and address out of the vast online and offline databases. Good Luck!
According to this
commentary in a previous article, you are right:
Some facts have been omitted from this article which shed further light on the appalling waste of taxpayers money that was the Birmingham City Council's Linux trial:
1) A trial of 4 differently configured Linux desktops (Ubuntu-based) and one Sun Java Desktop machine was held at Birmingham's central library in the summer 2005. A local research company was employed to measure the outcomes of the double-blind trial, specifcally which configuration was viewed as the best by participants. The Linux desktops took the top four spots with Sun's Java Desktop coming in last. Unsurprisingly the report was never published. BCC are a major Sun client.
2) The Open Source community, especially the Open Source Consortium (others included the Gnome Foundation), was entirely excluded from the project after the initial trial. BCC IT's department thought they could undertake the deployment themselves. The failure of this project proves this was not the case.
3) BCC selected an obsolete version of Suse Linux rather than the Ubuntu desktops that won the Library trial. They were unable to replicate the winning desktop configuration because the IT department accidentially erased it.
4) Open Forum Europe managed the Open Source Academy and were responsible for the dissemination programme.
Slashdot Mirror
Not very suprising.
Maybe speed-wise, but not availability-wise. However, nobody said it's easy finding it. eDonkey is better in this respect as opposed to bittorrent.
Interesting tidbit:
Most pertinent: I guess this will please their WTO overlords?
Tape systems are quite expensive. Even more expensive than HD solutions. I didn't think that was possible.
I believe you're right. Lets do some simple calculation:
This HD has 600 000 hr MTBF max and transfer rate of 300MB/s.
Say you transfer at this rate for all its MTBF life thats
600 000 hr * 3600s/hr * 300MB/s = 648 000 000 000 MB or 6.48 petabytes max transfer in its life
MTBF(sec.) * Transfer rate = Max lifetime transfer
Normal flash has 300,000 write cycles/block amortized among N GB blocks (block = byte) so thats 300,000 * N cycles with (comparable)max rate of 300MB/s or 90 000 000 * N MB max transfer in its lifetime.
(WC * n blocks) * Transfer rate = Max lifetime transfer
MTBF = WC * N blocks
N = MTBF/WC -> higher write-cycle flash needs less space to approach MTBF of HDs
N would need to be about 64 800/9 MB or ~7.2 GB capacity to approach the lifetime transfer of a hard drive. I realize that with each failing block, size of the flash would be shrinking, but the total failure of the flash would occur when no blocks could be written to. This is just a rough comparison of the two. Also I assumed the same transfer rate as the HD which is not very realistic, but its there to show a rough comparison.
As you can see a 100GB or so flash disk with a 1,000,000 block write-cycle would more than surpass the MTBF in current Hard Drives.
I think the ultimate point will be the $/GB. I don't think that Flash can compete with Hard Drives in that department, not yet anyway. Perhaps we will see them as a buffer(it's already being used in Vista) between Hard Drive and main memory. And eventually(!?) overtake HDs. We can always hope..
This is Ted's last show of defiance. He is trying to clog the tubes with his failures!
You won't see mandatory service(perhaps ever) for a few reasons. One of those reasons is Vietnam. It's much easier to tell people to fuck off once "they signed up."
(when you mentioned 5-10 I just couldn't resist
Until you realize that you are saying "blurray" as in a Canadian version of blurry.
I'm still waiting to find out what rights I have as the consumer. Seems like the media is moving towards a nasty pay-per-view model. A model where you don't own what you buy. Kind of like it is now, only you can't pretend anymore. I don't know what is worse, seeing these rackets make the laws or seeing them enforce them.
I for one welcome our sadistic taser-wielding millimeter-waving overlords.
Woah there buddy nobody said this was going to be used in combat. These are to be used in protests and crowds of civilians. See the examples: rubber bullets, tasers, pepper spray, batons. Don't think Iraq, think Vietnam. Funny that you mention torture, that is the first use that popped into my mind. Actually I'm starting to wonder where they are conducting these tests... Anyway if you want to feel the *mildly* burned sensation stick your hand in the microwave, and call me when it's done. You'll survive, they just might have to chop it off. After all it is *non-lethal*. And surely, there's nothing worse than death!
By saying he "was the law" is saying that there was nothing other than his own power guiding his actions. He couldn't be held accountable to anybody internal to Iraq but himself. He made sure of that. Above the law would mean that there were laws he was violating but couldn't be held accountable by legal means. Saddam used his intelligence system to get rid of opposition and control it. That's what kept him in power.
Maybe we are saying the same thing but from different perspectives. I do agree that his ruthlessness was important to keeping him in power, but without the knowledge where to exercise it he would just be another thug waiting for a revolution. Obviously that revolution wouldn't have happened without US intervention.
But what I was ultimately trying to do was to show that every new surveillance system brings us closer to Saddam's wet dream. Only this time you're not relying on people as agents but cameras, trackers, habits, motivations etc. all inferred from the mass of information you hemorrhage through private corporations willing so sell it for a buck.
Also last thing I want to mention for the public vs private debate. This corporate information has already been used for political purposes. You might want to look into the "voter vault" Karl Rove has:
Imagine what Saddam would have done with such information. *shivers*
It doesn't matter who they are. The information can be readily bought. See here. And it's all legal.
And your kneejerk comments about Saddam are unwelcome. Saddam was not "above the law." He was the law. If you can't tell the difference then keep your nonsense to yourself. Look at any modern dictatorship and where their money goes and how big an intelligence agency they have. If you doubt the importance of this then consider the "intelligence" that led to his removal--there was none.
This is false on so many levels. First, there is not a person behind each camera watching it. The technology is way beyond the ability of people to harness it. Thus you have new technologies such as face recognition, gait recognition, to recognize specific persons. The implication you state is obvious is not really so. Shoplifters and Vegas Cheaters have found ways to cheat the observer by being nonchalant and inconspicuous. Thus you have the very people that you are trying to stop being the only ones that have the motivations and ability to evade the system. Obvious?
The obvious is to stop the people that get caught and put them in massive databases shared and cross-shared. Mark them, if you get my drift. Follow them and their lives. If you think these gears aren't already in motion then you are the one missing the obvious 1984 allusions.
Second, what is public and what is private is no longer a valid argument. I will give you an example. Say I bought a book on "Surviving Cancer" and I'm looking for a health insurance company. I buy the book with a credit card and it is easily linked to me. The health insurance companies use a third-party company which assesses the risks posed by each individual. What would the insurance company do?
You may think this was a contrived example but it illustrates an important point. What you think is private isn't so private. Everything you buy goes into a database. Everywhere you go(cellphone, onstar, cameras) goes into a database. This information is not private, it is sold, cross-referenced, linked and mined for profit. All of a sudden it's quite easy to track people. Not only what they do but who they're with along with thir histories(good and bad). You can infer a lot of information, whether right or wrong, from these pieces.
The CCTV is just another drop in the bucket. Private and public is not so different in a "CCTV fetish" kind of society. Only this time there needs not be black van with a black man following you. Then we get these kind of misguided ideas that there is such a thing as a division between the two. Or that privacy is not correlated with freedom. Maybe you should learn how dictators like Saddam hold a grip on their power:
In the US, when you sign for your license you agree to accept breathalizer test. You can refuse to take it once prompted, but you will lose your license. I don't know if they can then bring criminal charges against you though.
It has to do with how it stores data. I think you need to use compact n repair every once in a while. More info here.
Its kinda hard to do one without the other though. Piping and scripting is a type of programming. The whole Linux philosophy is a programmer's paradigm. Compare this to Windows where you have to be a 'professional'
I was thinking of a way one can prevent these kinds of abuses. Would considering personal information the "intellectual property"(bear with me) of the individual solve it? Think of copyright. Anything you write is copyrighted immediately. Nobody can then take your work and then sell it for profit. Why on earth should they be able to do this with your personal information? Sure you can know that I was in such and such a bar at such and such a time by just observing, but you cannot sell this specific information to anybody without my permission.
If one considers one's life as one's "work" and all the individual pieces that make it up: dob, ssn, name, addr, what one drives, owns, where one lives, where one works, worked, thinks, wants--these are all the property of its creator. This whole privacy invasion is a staple of a society in flux--information is free! We can do with it what we like! But information has always had its price. I hope we can put a real price on it and put the thieves in jail.
The only way one can expect some semblance of control over their personal information is by commoditising it. It used to be hard to get at these pieces of information. Personal investigators would pay a fortune to find these things out. Nowadays they just visit your Myspace page and troll the Millions of databases out there with your personal information.
I admit it seems somewhat far fetched. But consider this: once your life is being monitored and recorded and sold and gutted and butchered for someone's profit, it is going to be hard to get it back. Even now, if somebody is stalking you, you will have a hard time keeping out of sight short of changing not only your name, but date of birth, social security number, where you lived, worked etc. In other words it's practically impossible. Just try getting an apartment(you would want to live in) without any of these. And getting your name and address out of the vast online and offline databases. Good Luck!