Well yes, to an extent an electronic voting machine's complexity is going to make it more prone to hacking. Such is the nature of complex electronic devices compared to say printed paper ballots.
Let us not forget the reason electronic machines were pushed, was that the paper ballot's in florida were, apparently, too complex for everyone to figure out consistently, and thus the push for a touch screen based system. At any rate, I'm not a crusader for electronic voting machines. A simple paper ballot works. It is also very difficult to introduce fraud in a massive scale into such a system.
You can, if you want, consider my post a, if your going to go electronic then you need to make sure you do it carefully, and in a well thought and publically reviewed manner. You point out a fairly unlikely way to monitor an election and that is to try to monitor the RF generated.
Basically, with any design that you want to be publically trusted, I see no reason that you could not lease a copy of the the system to people in the public for review by independent groups. The hardware does need to be kept track of though, and the official seals should be removed from it. You should also probably deface the plastic with a dremel or something and etch in something like "not valid for an actual election." to any machines leased out for review.
The best security is usually involves layers. Sometimes little things enhance security and sometimes big things. Careful design and appropriate shielding can likely make picking up anything via the recording of radio frequency emissions next to impossible. The careful use of cryptography can make the running of code that was not signed by a central authority very difficult. The allowance of independent review of the systems can expose problems which can then be fixed in the next version of the system. [This includes the issue of making sure the voter order cannot be determined by the paper trail that someone else mentioned.]
All in all though, I think most people can agree, that if your going to trust the future of our country to it, you need to do far better than they have done with what is available now. Just the use of printers, and at least spot checking the results by hand of any places where the exit polling differs from what is reported signficantly brings us a long way, but I'm of the opinion that if your going to go electronic you should do it right, such that at least the majority of the experts in the area agree that it is done right. We are certainly not there yet, but hopefully we will move in that direction, since I rather doubt we will go back to a pure non electronic paper only ballot anytime soon.
Finally, I encourage review of the rest of the voting process. It does little good to have the results of one machine tabulated correctly, if somehow that result is not correctly and verifiably added to the tally.
The roll printer idea, where the people see their votes printed, but don't actually get to touch the printout is fine. This should be done regardless, but i'm going to go a few steps beyond that.
Basically for some of the rest of the design, if your going to make it electronic, first look at all the ways the xbox security system, for instance could have been made much harder to hack. [I wouldn't necessarily limit it with that, but that is actually a decent start.] For simplicity I'll list some ideas, off the top of my head, and then justify them.
1) Soldered in main cpu (The cpu will be important, and as such must not be something that can be easily changed.)
2) Security seals on the case that show signs of tampering.
3) Ideally the GPU will be inside the cpu. [This prevents what is display from being easily tampered with, although the need for this can be argued, but what you see on the screen, is, of course, what you hoep you are voting for.]
4) The system on boot will be able to read from only one source for its OS. The CPU will read the OS and compute a crytographic hash on the entire system. The ROM image (or whatever) will also have a separate field which contains a public key encrypted version of that same hash. The cpu will decrypt that hash with its public key and if the two match, the system will finish booting.
5) Obviously the private key originally used to encrypt that hash must be stored in a very safe place. [The cpu never needs to know that key, and as such, there is no way that possesion of one of the devices can alloy you to create an arbitrary rom image that check out.]
6) The bottom part of the screen should, at minimum show the cryptographic hash of the software, at all times, so that independent people can verify things.
7) Optional: Take the original hash and use say the last so many bits from it to randomly select from a stack of pictures, or perhaps several pictures. The key part here is to create a visual representation of what the cryptographic hash is, at least in part. You can show this to the voter as a series of icons on the bottom of the screen say to the right of that hash, as an additional check on security. If all of the code that does this is in hardware, this provides an additional check to verify the software has not been modified that people might remember. Of course there are lots of variations of this, including just say making the last 4 digits of the hash bold, or whatever.
8) Keep the code open source. There is no particular reason this is 8, it could as easily be (1). If the cpu is a custom chip, it might require releasing an open source emulator so people can test it. Of course, most likely you are going to use some common cpu core, even if you say put the cpu/gpu on the same chip. Just to reinterate, the key with some of this to be on the same silicon is to prevent tampering. If say the chip that verified the hash was elsewhere, then you might be able to just send a "it passes" signal for everything. Similarly if the code that computes the hash or the encryption is elsewhere, you also have a vulnerability. By having everything security related on the same silicon, you can be reasonably assured that when it checks out the election software that it truly is secure.
9) You can argue with the need to be able to update these fast, and if you agree with that, then you might have to boot from a second source, in order to update the flash, or whatever storage the device uses. All in all though, i don't buy that argument. if you say put it on a flash device that is behind a seal, then you can as easily physically change the flash module. Of course, if you are going to allow a second booting source to reprogram the device, it had better pass its own cryptographic checks to insure it comes from a trusted source.
10) Don't forget the paper trail. While, I've tried to make the previous ideas sound, I likely missed things. This is, after all, a relatively quick post, and I'm only one pe
I think he has a right to refuse to be tested, but I still think he should do it within reason. I think they should pay him a premium for his time though. Altruism is all well and good, but considering most drug research appears to be, primarily, for the purpose of enriching those that pay for the research, I see no reason why he should not be compensated.
The bottom line is that time is valuable so upgrading more often can be costly as well. The reason for this is, usually, a system that works and is reliable will stay that way, barring failure of a hard drive or other mechanical failure. (I think the reason my dual AMD board eventually got more unreliable was partly due to the capacitors leaking out.)
In general, any upgrade that changes the motherboard, or even the memory is apt to create an instability that you have to take time to debug. Things are getting better these days and it doesn't happen as often, but it does happen. Even changing the cpu can cause it, especially if the frequencies the FSB operates at changes, or heat becomes an issue.
In general, if cash isn't an extreme short term issue then getting something near the top, but far enough away not to be paying the cutting edge price seems to work well. Also being a little away from top of the line can mean that there are linux drivers for most things.
This is an old topic, and it is not as if the answers change when it is repeated. Broadband in this country is apt to continue to be lousy in many places. Simply put, our current government seems to believe that big business will find answers to all the worlds problems. It doesn't always work. Things like roads have to be built by the government for the common good. I'd argue that health care and Internet access also need to be built by the government for the common good. There are direct parallels between roads and broadband. It is not cost effective to build either for all locations and pay for them with toll boxes. These days businesses often require both, either for themselves or their customers.
As to health care, well, just look at the numbers. Canada spends 1/2 what we do per capita on health care and they have a better system. No system where people will hide medical conditions and avoid going to the doctor to avoid getting something on their medical record and thus raise their rates can ever be considered ideal. Our health care system seems more focused on fixing problems after they become emergencies rather than keeping one healthy in the first place. One may argue that the second topic is unrelated, but shortsightedness on the part of our government is at the heart of both, and both cost this country economic growth in the long run.
Electricity seems to be the key. With electricity you can find ways to store that power like batteries and fuel cells(Its inefficient to turn water into hydrogren, but if you have enough electricity..)
Now how do we get electricity without causing global warning, tons of C02, lots of emitted radioactive particles (coal), etc? The only answer that comes to mind is nuclear. Yes you would have to go through a lot of trouble to keep the plants safe and make sure to use a good design. Yes you would have to go to ridiculous lengths to store the waste material. Compared to the alternatives, it seems the only thing that makes sense to me.
Natural gas is probably a close second except for the CO2 emitted. I do wonder if dumping the heat from a geothermal system used to cool down and create liquid natural gas into the ocean is a good idea, since warmer water is supposed to make hurricanes worse. (I wonder if it is signficant, but I suppose you could just shut down the plan during certain times of the year..)
Well to clarify, it is also a really good idea to invest in things like geothermal heat, efficient houses, etc, etc. There is little point in using more electricity than necessary. One of these days I'll install a geothermal heat pump at my house.. You get around 4 units of energy for every unit put in, by forcefully extracting the energy from the ground..
Well, while I have made no real attempt to read the article, I find the concept somewhat laughable.
10 days? I think not.. You didn't learn Windows in ten days so why should anyone have the expectation of replacing it in ten days? While I use Linux almost exclusively, I still find it hard to recommend for everyone.
Windows is known, it is supported, and for the great majority of people does the job fairly well.
I'm guessing that most of the security/worm/etc issues, with windows computers on broadband, could be solved by a redesign such there are no ports enabled on first boot and no Internet access possible until updates are completed and of course leaving auto updates on.
Linux isn't quite there yet, although I suspect if Dell or Gateway supported it adequately (does either?) then it might be perfectly fine for many that just need their pc to work..
Has anyone seen an alternative engine or engines worth putting in older cars to save money on fuel?
I've got a 90 lincoln towncar that is in excellent shape other than the engine, and I'm toying with the idea of putting a new or rebuilt engine in it.
Now if I could somehow find a drop in replacement V-6 diesel that would be a reasonable compromise I might consider it. With a diesel engine you could use biodiesel I suppose, and as long as the v-6 wasn't too small should give adequate performance. I certainly wouldn't get 50MPG, but given the size of those cars that is no suprise. It should be more reasonable though, and maybe a sane alternative to a new car.
Of course changing from gas to diesel would be a mess, yet it might be an interesting project. I suppose the best bet is just to sell it and buy something smaller, but at 6'4" legroom is appreciated.
Sure I'd pay $100 for about a 1GB swap file in memory, but not at the cost of using a pci card.
You can already get compact flash IDE devices and store a core linux OS on them in squashfs or similar format. As long as the solid state disk works and is cheaper than normal memory it would work well for a unionfs merge of that read only squashfs system. If the memory retains its contents you could probably also use the system like a normal pc including saving files that survive a reboot.
Well I've used the following for just over a year so far. I had a more complex setup, but this works well and is simple.
-35 gallon trash can with lid bought new at hardware store for $8 -little submersible pump -1/2" cheap garden hose $10 -water blocks, T's, fittings ?? $50+ -old cheap water filter. It's course enough it shouldn't clog and it sits inside the trash can. -pool chemical -- You _need_ something to keep the water from getting stale.
Basically you can avoid fans with enough surface area, although the actual volume of water doesn't matter too much. I'm not sure its worth the trouble, but then I am sure its not worth the trouble to change back. I may give up water cooling someday when this dual AMD system dies.
Of course the ultimate house design, if noise is a serious (read paranoid) concern might be to run a pipe to every computer location from a utility area. (The return lines could be combined if one wanted.) In winter this could be used to preheat the liquid used in a ground source heat pump. You can probably use the same coolant loop in summer too, but I suppose you would have to know what temperatures that coolant hits. This approach has the added benefit of not forcing you to remove heat from the house from computers via air conditioning. Of course, in reality, such a system would likely be way too much trouble for the gain...
Thats the sad thing. What big business wants, big business gets, eventually. The only thing to stop it is if a massive amount of average people (voters) are upset. The average voter doesn't know what a software patent is, and probably has no clue what linux or open source is.
In short, I rather doubt they can be stopped. Sooner or later they will likely go in, although I hope I'm wrong. On the other hand there will probably always be a few countries where such laws do not exist and those countries might become the place to do some forms of OSS coding.
I wonder if it will ever get to the point where linux is illegal to download because ideas are locked up by particular companies and cannot be legally used by anyone else.
At any rate while I'm not 100% against software patents, if you have the idea and at least do some considerable work to be the first to implement it. They should, however, be for a very limited, non renewable term. A few years should be adequate on anything software related. Beyond that and you are stifling innovation, and not encouraging it, and wasn't that the whole point for them in the first place?
Raid is not that exciting unless your maintaining a critical server for the internet or something. You also have to deal with the mess of having the drives _have_ to remain in that configuration for the data to be read. Personally, I would rather have the convienience of separate drives, and just make backups. Some old parts could make a backup server. All it really needs is a big drive. You can even unplug it for safety if you want.
Some admins at college are reasonable, and some well you just don't want to deal with and to be honest sometimes not dealing with certain types of people is the best way to get along.
Basically I never used a school computer other than to check my mail or do something I couldn't do easier at home. It wasn't worth the hassle and aggravation of dealing with systems that were put together so as not to be messed with. Also if you changed something in the one private lab I, in theory, worked in then you had to possibly deal with how that change would affect everyone else in the lab, and get it approved in triplicate, etc, etc.
I'd far rather be responsible for my own hardware whenever possible, even if that means buying my own, or dealing with substandard junk. That way all the IT guys need to do is register a MAC address. If they have a problem with that system well they can find the network jack.
Computers are reasonably cheap and getting cheaper. If you need a computer that does something your own doesn't use VNC or something to port your display to whatever machine your on. That way you don't need to install anything and you can just run a single exe file from the desktop. If the rare case where you have to print something, well if its linux you can print to a postscript file, convert to a pdf and ftp it wherever.
Note, I think VNC may have some security issues to be aware of so its probably better to have two applications. Putty to login to a linux box and start VNC only when its really needed, and of course VNC so you can get work done at a Windows PC. Of course, its possible that some computer admins would even consider that unnacceptable in which case well I've no clue.
No, it is not the best example in the world, but its hardly the worst either. When you can patent the outright trivial then NOTHING is safe.
More critical things are of course patenting fundamental things like multimedia patents, gui patents, etc which might make it possible to even create open source versions or even commericial versions of many things without the patent holders permission which in many cases will not be received. Defending a patent suit, even if they have a good case is enough to drive small companies out of business. Patents should be far rarer than they are.
Competition is actually becoming rarer and rarer. You should be shocked. Some of my favorites.
1) Clever deals that bundle many products making it very difficult for competitors to enter a market. I.E. Microsoft's software bundling.
2) Copyright and patenting even trivial things to death making it impossible to enter a particular realm of business. I.E. Amazon.com's 1 click patent.
3) Lobbying for laws that prevent or severely limit competition. I.E. SBC now has exclusive control of all the remote terminal boxes. Are they in any hurry to finally get DSLAM's in those boxes? No, and now no one else can either. Basic infrastructure should be publicly owned, that way many companies can compete to deliver services. Also, companies cannot afford to invest in infrastructure where it does not profit the company, whereas basic roads as well other infrastructure like internet access does benefit the country as a whole.
One point I will point out is that while he apparently did damage, it seems that he didn't go out of his way to do as much damage as possible.
Since there are undoubtably people out there that want to do as much damage as possible, it is possible that they will learn enough from this incident to save far more cost and chaos later. Does that excuse it? No.
In a typical setup like an Xbox the hardware only runs signed code. Now they want the software to only run on Apple signed hardware. I see no reason that wouldn't be doable.
Possibly OS updates could check for the correct sha-256 hashes of the files critical for checking for valid hardware. I think someone mentioned something similar. Could it still possibly be cracked? Maybe, but it likely wouldn't involve directly attacking the cryptography, but a weakness elsewhere.
I know someone who has had problems with vandals. Something like this, if you could hide it, and if it had a motion detector that waited a few minutes from when you entered that mode to sense would be quite useful.
I.E. it would be a low cost way to catch crooks on video if they break back in, and it would be cheap enough you could risk its theft.
For that matter 20 minutes of video is more than enough to monitor a lot of locations that should get no traffic normally..
Something like OSDL seems a good idea to me as well. For that matter I wouldn't be opposed to seeing what Linus Torvalds would do with it. If he doesn't know the best areas to focus on then its likely someone he works with does.
One of the weak areas that comes to mind is gaming on Linux. I don't particular care about gaming, but for Linux to eventually gain market dominance people are going to want to play the latest and greatest games on it, so you need to improve cross platform solutions that allow game developers to write essentially one game and run it on their platform of choice.
Again the goal isn't to spread gaming to Linux, but to instead encourage adoption of Linux which will in turn spur more R&D funding. Also the wider user base would encourage hardware developers to write more drivers...
802.11 would require me to have a 90' tower around here to work with the existing Wisps and most of them have limitations on how much you can actually use the link. Of course they all keep claiming that another tower is just around the corner.. They have been claiming that for nearly a year now.
To get a 802.11 link to work reasonably would require access to a tower and some other unlimited internet link. By the time you pay rental fees for the tower, the second isp, and whatever other fees I doubt its practical. Now if you owned property that was at a high enough elevation and could get broadband you would be set, but I don't.
ISDN is ok, but I really want something faster, and its costing me around 190 a month by the time you pay for the repeater and the isp. (145/40). They use a repeater since they don't have equipment at the local CO, and installing it isn't even an option they would consider.
Basically if your in SBC territory, and I doubt they are unique, you wait until its easily profitable for them to serve you. Now if they were a bit more flexible and charged more in areas that were harder to serve I might think more highly of them... Last I heard SDSL was repeatable with a bit of work..
While I can't prove it conclusively without having a way to go back I think the upgrade to the R4B9 firmware is what is making this card so unreliable.
Sony Ericsson flat out refuses to send me the old firmware. [Their updater just updates as soon as you double click and doesn't give any option to save the old firmware.] Cingular refers you to Ericsson.
At any rate if you have a GC83 and your using linux I seriously recommend thinking twice before upgraded your firmware. There is no going back and you may regret it. Well I certainly do.
Here shows someone elses experience with that firmware on a GC82. http://www.eskimo.com/~roger/programming/ He apparently has copies of the old firmware for GC82's there, but I rather suspect it would be a bad move to try them on a GC83. Of course you use any file you find randomly on the internet at your own risk...
If anyone has a copy of R3B9 for GC83 or even one of the older firmwares and wants to provide a link I'd be very grateful. More importantly, I'd like to know if the firmware can be downgraded sucessfully without causing problems.
"Internet access is not, never has been, and should not be considered a basic public service."
What a ridiculous statement. Internet access facilitates commerce just like a road or any other utility does. If the private sector won't do it because they can't make short term profits then the public sector must. Now if the private sector can do various areas in a more efficient way, then by all means they should.
If you want the economy to grow the infrastructure _must_ be sound and somebody has got to build it. Now I'm not saying everyone has a right to a 100Mb line, but some reasonable compromise would have done a heck of a lot more for the long term benefit of the economy than the Bush tax cuts. We are what 11th or something in broadband access these days?
It is difficult to introduce a large cast in 2 hours and have anyone care about them. Usually movies seem to do better if they focus only on a few characters.
The general approach used in tv shows is to throw all the characters together and then do individual stories or scenes that give the secondary characters depth later. That being said a new movie would probably end up beging a series premiere for a new tv show. It wouldn't have to make a great deal of money as long as it get ratings for the tv show. Of course nothing gaurantees having a meaningful plot...
I tend to agree that people who want improvements with OS applications need to be willing to support the coders who can do those improvements in one way or another.
Expecting OSS coders to just jump and do the improvements out of their limited free time to make something that may have no direct benefit to themselves is of course unreasonable.
Personally I think the goverment ought to have a budget just for supporting OSS projects that will benefit the country. The real question is what provides the best long term benefit to the country for the least amount of money. Of course similar questions can be asked about some homeland security initiatives. Bruce Schnier (sp?) often comments on such things in his newsletters.
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Well yes, to an extent an electronic voting machine's complexity is going to make it more prone to hacking. Such is the nature of complex electronic devices compared to say printed paper ballots.
Let us not forget the reason electronic machines were pushed, was that the paper ballot's in florida were, apparently, too complex for everyone to figure out consistently, and thus the push for a touch screen based system. At any rate, I'm not a crusader for electronic voting machines. A simple paper ballot works. It is also very difficult to introduce fraud in a massive scale into such a system.
You can, if you want, consider my post a, if your going to go electronic then you need to make sure you do it carefully, and in a well thought and publically reviewed manner. You point out a fairly unlikely way to monitor an election and that is to try to monitor the RF generated.
Basically, with any design that you want to be publically trusted, I see no reason that you could not lease a copy of the the system to people in the public for review by independent groups. The hardware does need to be kept track of though, and the official seals should be removed from it. You should also probably deface the plastic with a dremel or something and etch in something like "not valid for an actual election." to any machines leased out for review.
The best security is usually involves layers. Sometimes little things enhance security and sometimes big things. Careful design and appropriate shielding can likely make picking up anything via the recording of radio frequency emissions next to impossible. The careful use of cryptography can make the running of code that was not signed by a central authority very difficult. The allowance of independent review of the systems can expose problems which can then be fixed in the next version of the system. [This includes the issue of making sure the voter order cannot be determined by the paper trail that someone else mentioned.]
All in all though, I think most people can agree, that if your going to trust the future of our country to it, you need to do far better than they have done with what is available now. Just the use of printers, and at least spot checking the results by hand of any places where the exit polling differs from what is reported signficantly brings us a long way, but I'm of the opinion that if your going to go electronic you should do it right, such that at least the majority of the experts in the area agree that it is done right. We are certainly not there yet, but hopefully we will move in that direction, since I rather doubt we will go back to a pure non electronic paper only ballot anytime soon.
Finally, I encourage review of the rest of the voting process. It does little good to have the results of one machine tabulated correctly, if somehow that result is not correctly and verifiably added to the tally.
The roll printer idea, where the people see their votes printed, but don't actually get to touch the printout is fine. This should be done regardless, but i'm going to go a few steps beyond that.
Basically for some of the rest of the design, if your going to make it electronic, first look at all the ways the xbox security system, for instance could have been made much harder to hack. [I wouldn't necessarily limit it with that, but that is actually a decent start.] For simplicity I'll list some ideas, off the top of my head, and then justify them.
1) Soldered in main cpu (The cpu will be important, and as such must not be something that can be easily changed.)
2) Security seals on the case that show signs of tampering.
3) Ideally the GPU will be inside the cpu. [This prevents what is display from being easily tampered with, although the need for this can be argued, but what you see on the screen, is, of course, what you hoep you are voting for.]
4) The system on boot will be able to read from only one source for its OS. The CPU will read the OS and compute a crytographic hash on the entire system. The ROM image (or whatever) will also have a separate field which contains a public key encrypted version of that same hash. The cpu will decrypt that hash with its public key and if the two match, the system will finish booting.
5) Obviously the private key originally used to encrypt that hash must be
stored in a very safe place. [The cpu never needs to know that key, and as such, there is no way that possesion of one of the devices can alloy you to create an arbitrary rom image that check out.]
6) The bottom part of the screen should, at minimum show the cryptographic hash of the software, at all times, so that independent people can verify things.
7) Optional: Take the original hash and use say the last so many bits from it to randomly select from a stack of pictures, or perhaps several pictures. The key part here is to create a visual representation of what the cryptographic hash is, at least in part. You can show this to the voter as a series of icons on the bottom of the screen say to the right of that hash, as an additional check on security. If all of the code that does this is in hardware, this provides an additional check to verify the software has not been modified that people might remember. Of course there are lots of variations of this, including just say making the last 4 digits of the hash bold, or whatever.
8) Keep the code open source. There is no particular reason this is 8, it could as easily be (1). If the cpu is a custom chip, it might require releasing an open source emulator so people can test it. Of course, most likely you are going to use some common cpu core, even if you say put the cpu/gpu on the same chip. Just to reinterate, the key with some of this to be on the same silicon is to prevent tampering. If say the chip that verified the hash was elsewhere, then you might be able to just send a "it passes" signal for everything. Similarly if the code that computes the hash or the encryption is elsewhere, you also have a vulnerability. By having everything security related on the same silicon, you can be reasonably assured that when it checks out the election software that it truly is secure.
9) You can argue with the need to be able to update these fast, and if you agree with that, then you might have to boot from a second source, in order to update the flash, or whatever storage the device uses. All in all though, i don't buy that argument. if you say put it on a flash device that is behind a seal, then you can as easily physically change the flash module. Of course, if you are going to allow a second booting source to reprogram the device, it had better pass its own cryptographic checks to insure it comes from a trusted source.
10) Don't forget the paper trail. While, I've tried to make the previous ideas sound, I likely missed things. This is, after all, a relatively quick post, and I'm only one pe
I think he has a right to refuse to be tested, but I still think he should do it within reason. I think they should pay him a premium for his time though. Altruism is all well and good, but considering most drug research appears to be, primarily, for the purpose of enriching those that pay for the research, I see no reason why he should not be compensated.
The bottom line is that time is valuable so upgrading more often can be costly as well. The reason for this is, usually, a system that works and is reliable will stay that way, barring failure of a hard drive or other mechanical failure. (I think the reason my dual AMD board eventually got more unreliable was partly due to the capacitors leaking out.)
In general, any upgrade that changes the motherboard, or even the memory is apt to create an instability that you have to take time to debug. Things are getting better these days and it doesn't happen as often, but it does happen. Even changing the cpu can cause it, especially if the frequencies the FSB operates at changes, or heat becomes an issue.
In general, if cash isn't an extreme short term issue then getting something near the top, but far enough away not to be paying the cutting edge price seems to work well. Also being a little away from top of the line can mean that there are linux drivers for most things.
This is an old topic, and it is not as if the answers change when it is repeated. Broadband in this country is apt to continue to be lousy in many places. Simply put, our current government seems to believe that big business will find answers to all the worlds problems. It doesn't always work. Things like roads have to be built by the government for the common good. I'd argue that health care and Internet access also need to be built by the government for the common good. There are direct parallels between roads and broadband. It is not cost effective to build either for all locations and pay for them with toll boxes. These days businesses often require both, either for themselves or their customers. As to health care, well, just look at the numbers. Canada spends 1/2 what we do per capita on health care and they have a better system. No system where people will hide medical conditions and avoid going to the doctor to avoid getting something on their medical record and thus raise their rates can ever be considered ideal. Our health care system seems more focused on fixing problems after they become emergencies rather than keeping one healthy in the first place. One may argue that the second topic is unrelated, but shortsightedness on the part of our government is at the heart of both, and both cost this country economic growth in the long run.
Electricity seems to be the key. With electricity you can find ways to store that power like batteries and fuel cells(Its inefficient to turn water into hydrogren, but if you have enough electricity..)
Now how do we get electricity without causing global warning, tons of C02, lots of emitted radioactive particles (coal), etc? The only answer that comes to mind is nuclear. Yes you would have to go through a lot of trouble to keep the plants safe and make sure to use a good design. Yes you would have to go to ridiculous lengths to store the waste material. Compared to the alternatives, it seems the only thing that makes sense to me.
Natural gas is probably a close second except for the CO2 emitted. I do wonder if dumping the heat from a geothermal system used to cool down and create liquid natural gas into the ocean is a good idea, since warmer water is supposed to make hurricanes worse. (I wonder if it is signficant, but I suppose you could just shut down the plan during certain times of the year..)
Well to clarify, it is also a really good idea to invest in things like geothermal heat, efficient houses, etc, etc. There is little point in using more electricity than necessary. One of these days I'll install a geothermal heat pump at my house.. You get around 4 units of energy for every unit put in, by forcefully extracting the energy from the ground..
Well, while I have made no real attempt to read the article, I find the concept somewhat laughable.
10 days? I think not.. You didn't learn Windows in ten days so why should anyone have the expectation of replacing it in ten days? While I use Linux almost exclusively, I still find it hard to recommend for everyone.
Windows is known, it is supported, and for the great majority of people does the job fairly well.
I'm guessing that most of the security/worm/etc issues, with windows computers on broadband, could be solved by a redesign such there are no ports enabled on first boot and no Internet access possible until updates are completed and of course leaving auto updates on.
Linux isn't quite there yet, although I suspect if Dell or Gateway supported it adequately (does either?) then it might be perfectly fine for many that just need their pc to work..
Has anyone seen an alternative engine or engines worth putting in older cars to save money on fuel?
I've got a 90 lincoln towncar that is in excellent shape other than the engine, and I'm toying with the idea of putting a new or rebuilt engine in it.
Now if I could somehow find a drop in replacement V-6 diesel that would be a reasonable compromise I might consider it. With a diesel engine you could use biodiesel I suppose, and as long as the v-6 wasn't too small should give adequate performance. I certainly wouldn't get 50MPG, but given the size of those cars that is no suprise. It should be more reasonable though, and maybe a sane alternative to a new car.
Of course changing from gas to diesel would be a mess, yet it might be an interesting project. I suppose the best bet is just to sell it and buy something smaller, but at 6'4" legroom is appreciated.
Sure I'd pay $100 for about a 1GB swap file in memory, but not at the cost of using a pci card.
You can already get compact flash IDE devices and store a core linux OS on them in squashfs or similar format. As long as the solid state disk works and is cheaper than normal memory it would work well for a unionfs merge of that read only squashfs system. If the memory retains its contents you could probably also use the system like a normal pc including saving files that survive a reboot.
Well I've used the following for just over a year so far. I had a more complex setup, but this works well and is simple.
-35 gallon trash can with lid bought new at hardware store for $8
-little submersible pump
-1/2" cheap garden hose $10
-water blocks, T's, fittings ?? $50+
-old cheap water filter. It's course enough it shouldn't clog and it sits inside the trash can.
-pool chemical -- You _need_ something to keep the water from getting stale.
Basically you can avoid fans with enough surface area, although the actual volume of water doesn't matter too much. I'm not sure its worth the trouble, but then I am sure its not worth the trouble to change back. I may give up water cooling someday when this dual AMD system dies.
Of course the ultimate house design, if noise is a serious (read paranoid) concern might be to run a pipe to every computer location from a utility area. (The return lines could be combined if one wanted.) In winter this could be used to preheat the liquid used in a ground source heat pump. You can probably use the same coolant loop in summer too, but I suppose you would have to know what temperatures that coolant hits. This approach has the added benefit of not forcing you to remove heat from the house from computers via air conditioning. Of course, in reality, such a system would likely be way too much trouble for the gain...
No you can't. The latency on cell phone based access is lousy. 500ms pings is about the best i've seen.
Thats the sad thing. What big business wants, big business gets, eventually. The only thing to stop it is if a massive amount of average people (voters) are upset. The average voter doesn't know what a software patent is, and probably has no clue what linux or open source is.
In short, I rather doubt they can be stopped. Sooner or later they will likely go in, although I hope I'm wrong. On the other hand there will probably always be a few countries where such laws do not exist and those countries might become the place to do some forms of OSS coding.
I wonder if it will ever get to the point where linux is illegal to download because ideas are locked up by particular companies and cannot be legally used by anyone else.
At any rate while I'm not 100% against software patents, if you have the idea and at least do some considerable work to be the first to implement it. They should, however, be for a very limited, non renewable term. A few years should be adequate on anything software related. Beyond that and you are stifling innovation, and not encouraging it, and wasn't that the whole point for them in the first place?
Or for that matter you could use dvd-r's...
Basically I never used a school computer other than to check my mail or do something I couldn't do easier at home. It wasn't worth the hassle and aggravation of dealing with systems that were put together so as not to be messed with. Also if you changed something in the one private lab I, in theory, worked in then you had to possibly deal with how that change would affect everyone else in the lab, and get it approved in triplicate, etc, etc.
I'd far rather be responsible for my own hardware whenever possible, even if that means buying my own, or dealing with substandard junk. That way all the IT guys need to do is register a MAC address. If they have a problem with that system well they can find the network jack.
Computers are reasonably cheap and getting cheaper. If you need a computer that does something your own doesn't use VNC or something to port your display to whatever machine your on. That way you don't need to install anything and you can just run a single exe file from the desktop. If the rare case where you have to print something, well if its linux you can print to a postscript file, convert to a pdf and ftp it wherever.
Note, I think VNC may have some security issues to be aware of so its probably better to have two applications. Putty to login to a linux box and start VNC only when its really needed, and of course VNC so you can get work done at a Windows PC. Of course, its possible that some computer admins would even consider that unnacceptable in which case well I've no clue.
No, it is not the best example in the world, but its hardly the worst either. When you can patent the outright trivial then NOTHING is safe.
More critical things are of course patenting fundamental things like multimedia patents, gui patents, etc which might make it possible to even create open source versions or even commericial versions of many things without the patent holders permission which in many cases will not be received. Defending a patent suit, even if they have a good case is enough to drive small companies out of business. Patents should be far rarer than they are.
Competition is actually becoming rarer and rarer. You should be shocked. Some of my favorites. 1) Clever deals that bundle many products making it very difficult for competitors to enter a market. I.E. Microsoft's software bundling. 2) Copyright and patenting even trivial things to death making it impossible to enter a particular realm of business. I.E. Amazon.com's 1 click patent. 3) Lobbying for laws that prevent or severely limit competition. I.E. SBC now has exclusive control of all the remote terminal boxes. Are they in any hurry to finally get DSLAM's in those boxes? No, and now no one else can either. Basic infrastructure should be publicly owned, that way many companies can compete to deliver services. Also, companies cannot afford to invest in infrastructure where it does not profit the company, whereas basic roads as well other infrastructure like internet access does benefit the country as a whole.
One point I will point out is that while he apparently did damage, it seems that he didn't go out of his way to do as much damage as possible.
Since there are undoubtably people out there that want to do as much damage as possible, it is possible that they will learn enough from this incident to save far more cost and chaos later. Does that excuse it? No.
In a typical setup like an Xbox the hardware only runs signed code. Now they want the software to only run on Apple signed hardware. I see no reason that wouldn't be doable.
Possibly OS updates could check for the correct sha-256 hashes of the files critical for checking for valid hardware. I think someone mentioned something similar. Could it still possibly be cracked? Maybe, but it likely wouldn't involve directly attacking the cryptography, but a weakness elsewhere.
I know someone who has had problems with vandals. Something like this, if you could hide it, and if it had a motion detector that waited a few minutes from when you entered that mode to sense would be quite useful.
I.E. it would be a low cost way to catch crooks on video if they break back in, and it would be cheap enough you could risk its theft.
For that matter 20 minutes of video is more than enough to monitor a lot of locations that should get no traffic normally..
One of the weak areas that comes to mind is gaming on Linux. I don't particular care about gaming, but for Linux to eventually gain market dominance people are going to want to play the latest and greatest games on it, so you need to improve cross platform solutions that allow game developers to write essentially one game and run it on their platform of choice.
Again the goal isn't to spread gaming to Linux, but to instead encourage adoption of Linux which will in turn spur more R&D funding. Also the wider user base would encourage hardware developers to write more drivers...
802.11 would require me to have a 90' tower around here to work with the existing Wisps and most of them have limitations on how much you can actually use the link. Of course they all keep claiming that another tower is just around the corner.. They have been claiming that for nearly a year now. To get a 802.11 link to work reasonably would require access to a tower and some other unlimited internet link. By the time you pay rental fees for the tower, the second isp, and whatever other fees I doubt its practical. Now if you owned property that was at a high enough elevation and could get broadband you would be set, but I don't. ISDN is ok, but I really want something faster, and its costing me around 190 a month by the time you pay for the repeater and the isp. (145/40). They use a repeater since they don't have equipment at the local CO, and installing it isn't even an option they would consider. Basically if your in SBC territory, and I doubt they are unique, you wait until its easily profitable for them to serve you. Now if they were a bit more flexible and charged more in areas that were harder to serve I might think more highly of them... Last I heard SDSL was repeatable with a bit of work..
While I can't prove it conclusively without having a way to go back I think the upgrade to the R4B9 firmware is what is making this card so unreliable.
Sony Ericsson flat out refuses to send me the old firmware. [Their updater just updates as soon as you double click and doesn't give any option to save the old firmware.] Cingular refers you to Ericsson.
At any rate if you have a GC83 and your using linux I seriously recommend thinking twice before upgraded your firmware. There is no going back and you may regret it. Well I certainly do.
Here shows someone elses experience with that firmware on a GC82.
http://www.eskimo.com/~roger/programming/
He apparently has copies of the old firmware for GC82's there, but I rather suspect it would be a bad move to try them on a GC83. Of course you use any file you find randomly on the internet at your own risk...
If anyone has a copy of R3B9 for GC83 or even one of the older firmwares and wants to provide a link I'd be very grateful. More importantly, I'd like to know if the firmware can be downgraded sucessfully without causing problems.
"Internet access is not, never has been, and should not be considered a basic public service." What a ridiculous statement. Internet access facilitates commerce just like a road or any other utility does. If the private sector won't do it because they can't make short term profits then the public sector must. Now if the private sector can do various areas in a more efficient way, then by all means they should. If you want the economy to grow the infrastructure _must_ be sound and somebody has got to build it. Now I'm not saying everyone has a right to a 100Mb line, but some reasonable compromise would have done a heck of a lot more for the long term benefit of the economy than the Bush tax cuts. We are what 11th or something in broadband access these days?
It is difficult to introduce a large cast in 2 hours and have anyone care about them. Usually movies seem to do better if they focus only on a few characters.
The general approach used in tv shows is to throw all the characters together and then do individual stories or scenes that give the secondary characters depth later. That being said a new movie would probably end up beging a series premiere for a new tv show. It wouldn't have to make a great deal of money as long as it get ratings for the tv show. Of course nothing gaurantees having a meaningful plot...
Expecting OSS coders to just jump and do the improvements out of their limited free time to make something that may have no direct benefit to themselves is of course unreasonable.
Personally I think the goverment ought to have a budget just for supporting OSS projects that will benefit the country. The real question is what provides the best long term benefit to the country for the least amount of money. Of course similar questions can be asked about some homeland security initiatives. Bruce Schnier (sp?) often comments on such things in his newsletters.