Now they can fail to find information about democracy, Falun Gong, Christianity or encryption software at blazing 2 megabit speeds! Hooray for broadband!
Don't forget that the list of trusted sites can be changed at any time. The TrustRank paper describes how the seed sites were carefully reviewed for signs of spamming. The good seeds were chosen partly on the basis of "a clearly identifiable authority (such as a governmental or educational institution or company) that controlled the contents of the site" (page 9).
From Google's point of view, a trusted site would have to have strict editorial standards and link to a lot of sites. I can think of a lot of sites with strict editorial content, but they generally do not link to a lot of sites.
Good seeds don't need to link to a lot of sites. Check out the algorithm - trust is divided among the domains (or pages, depending on the version of the algorithm) that a seed links to, so if a seed links to many domains it will transfer less trust to each domain than a seed that's more selective with its links.
Don't worry, it's a quantum computer so if you observe the smoke escaping then it collapses. You'll just need to keep one eye on your CPU while you're working.
As well as key revocation, there's some interesting stuff about drive revocation on pages 32-42 of the first PDF. It looks like each (model of?) PC drive will have a unique ID, and media will carry revocation lists capable of disabling certain drives. This is much more serious than key revocation, because it also prevents the playback of existing content, whereas key revocation just makes the device incompatible with future content.
There's also a procedure for updating a protected area on the disk using the media key - it looks like pre-recorded media may include a small writable area that can be accessed by approved drives, maybe to store the user's audio and subtitle preferences and the current playback position before the disk is ejected? Or to store your doubleclick cookies before you take the disk back to Blockbuster.;-)
Look at it this way: are you entitled to a refund on your Betamax VCR if everyone switches to VHS and stops releasing Betamax tapes? No. Not even if it happens within the warranty period.
Each time a key is revoked, a new format is created, which is compatible with most existing players but incompatible with the revoked player. New disks are released in the new format and the old format is left to die. Your old player will still play your old disks, but it won't play the new ones. Well, your turntable won't play CDs but that doesn't mean you're entitled to a refund. You don't have a legal right to stop people releasing things in new formats. The only question is whether you have a legal right to know the format before you buy the product, but I'm sure the studios will hire some very expensive lawyers to write the small print on the DVD boxes so that it's clear that you have no right to expect the disk to work in any particular player, as long as it works in most of the players out there.
By the way I'm not defending what they're doing - I think it's a sneaky anti-competitive trick designed to protect an entrenched cartel - but they do seem to have their legal and technological wits about them this time.
What a great idea! You don't even need electronics. Fisher-Price used to make a wind-up record player where the head contained small metal prongs like a music box and the surface of the record had a little bump for each note. You could do the same with movable pins, or even rolls of punch cards, so kids could compose their own music. If you marked a stave on the punch cards it could be a good way to learn musical notation.
I'm not saying that biometrics are perfect, but the point is that regardless of how fallible the biometrics are, cards don't increase security if they're validated by the same biometrics. If you can forge a fingerprint, a digital signature that authenticates the fingerprint you just forged doesn't fix anything. If the biometrics are broken, the card is also broken. If the biometrics aren't broken, the card is redundant.
Please illustrate a situation, as we've dealt with avowed terrorist-harboring regimes like the Taliban, where the policy was to kill innocent people in their homes.
A policy of invasion inevitably has that effect.
applying continual pressure for them to modify (and moderate) their laws and customs into more sensible posture?
Funny how that kind of pressure works with the Sauds but not with Saddam or the Taliban. Or perhaps the benchmarks are different.
(As an aside: is it possible that the close diplomatic ties between the US and Saudi Arabia encourage a transfer of attitudes in both directions? Could it be that Saudi Arabia's small steps towards democracy are matched by small American steps towards fundamentalism and feudalism?)
Isn't it nice that Lybia took itself off the short list of hot spots?
"Nice" that Libya responed to US intimidation (which in the past has been backed up by violence) by announcing the end of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities that it never had in the first place? Sure, call that a victory if you like.
I'm realistic enough to know that we have to choose our battles. This stuff is going to unravel a lot more quickly than did, say, totalitarian communism in eastern Europe, and we had the patience for that.
I think you have a rather rosy view of what motivates American foreign policy. I hope you're right.
I'd say that world is indeed safer, for more people, when larger and larger parts of it are not run by a tiny minority of brutal thugs that shoot women for dressing incorrectly, etc.
Instead, larger and larger parts of it are run by a tiny minority of brutal thugs that kill men, women and children in their own homes and then expect to be thanked because they've brought about a change of government that coincides with their own interests, while they continue to prop up equally "medieval" misogynist dictatorships in neighbouringcountries.
As you pointed out, without online verification it's impossible to revoke or expire IDs. So there will have to be online verification. So what's the purpose of the card again?
ID + fingerprint = something you have + something you are
How is this better than 'fingerprint = something you are'? How does adding an insecure card to a (hopefully) secure biometric increase the security?
If retinal or fingerprint scanners were cheap enough there would be no need for the card.
If the card will be used in the absence of fingerprint or retina scanners that could verify the biometric data, what's the point of including the biometric data?
Biometrics are supposed to transform some physical characteristic of your body into a number that can be used to retrieve a database record. That number could also be printed on your ID card, so a biometric scanner would be able to verify that you were the owner of the card. But biometrics can't authenticate the rest of the card's contents, and they certainly can't provide a secure mapping between you and your database record in the absence of a scanner.
There is no good reason for including biometric data on ID cards - biometrics are an alternative to ID cards, superior because they can't be forged or stolen. A card with biometric data is a card with a false sense of security. Without a scanner you'll never know if the card is stolen; if you have a scanner you don't need the card. Either way, the card is useless. The only reason for including biometrics on an ID card is to justify the collection of biometric data from large numbers of people in order to construct a national database. (Or as the synchronised progress in the US, France and the UK suggests, an international database.)
I don't think it would be too hard - the file selector would be a small setuid (sethat?) program that would run with your full permissions. Other programs would execute it instead of showing their own file selectors, with command line arguments containing the name of a pipe (in the app's own directory), and the action to perform (open/create/save as). The user would select the file, and the file selector would disappear into the background to move data between the file and the pipe.
What I'd really like to see is something more fine-grained than Unix permissions: instead of giving every program permission to access all my files, I'd like to have multiple "hats" per user. Each user would have a personal equivalent of/etc/passwd describing their different hats (web, graphics, work, music, etc). A few programs like the shell, the window manager and the file manager would run with the user's full permissions, while other programs would be restricted to their own directories (eg ~/.mozilla), plus any files passed to them by the file manager (this could be implemented using pipes, or the file manager could change the permissions on the file). The file selection dialog would be provided by the file manager so it would be able to "see" all the user's files, but the application would only be able to access files selected by the user.
Just as the login process forks and drops its root privileges before running your shell, the file manager or window manager would fork and drop its full user privileges before running an application that was supposed to wear a certain hat.
The multiply-adds are only the tip of the iceberg, think about the memory reads and writes. You'll need 10^11 words (0.4 terabytes) to store the activation levels of the neurons, 10^14 words (400 terabytes) to store the weights of the synapses, and every byte will have to be accessed 100 times a second.
The processing is probably quite parallelisable because most connections between neurons are short-range, but even if you think of it as 1,000,000 processors with half a gigabyte of memory each, then desktop machines already have the necessary memory and processing power, but memory bandwidth is where we need to see improvements.
Perhaps it would be better to put specialised multiply-add units on the memory chips themselves. But I don't think half a petabyte of SRAM is ever going to be cheap.;-)
I wonder how much heat would be produced by a computer emulating a single human brain...
The market determines the features, if someone wants to try to sell a DVD player without FF, they are welcome to do so.
Not true - to manufacture DVD players you need a license from the DVD Copy Control Association. If your player includes features that they don't like, such as skipping commercials, they won't give you a license for CSS.
The solution is to wrap the Gimp executable in a script that turns the desktop an ugly grey colour when the Gimp starts, and changes it back when you exit. Hey presto - window in window MDI!
Seriously though, have you tried Gimp 2.2? The interface is much more flexible and IMHO easier to use (eg menubars on image windows instead of right-clicking on the image).
anti-American Muslim extremists in Pakistan or Afghanistan wielding weapons against US forces
Would those be the US forces who were invading their country? I guess that would mean the "extremists" are prisoners of war. If only we had some kind of international agreement about the treatment of POWs...
Two words: domain squatting. If names were free, what would stop someone from writing a script that generated and registered names as fast as their network connection would allow? If the system doesn't allow duplicates then a single squatter can register all trademarks and dictionary words in a matter of seconds; if duplicates are allowed then names are longer a convenient, reliable way of referring to a particular machine, and the system is worse than useless because of the possible abuses. Namespaces have to be centralised.
True, it's dangerous to put infrastructural monopolies in the hands of a single company - the traditional solution is government regulation or even nationalisation. Maybe it's time to think about retiring the international TLDs like.com,.net and.org in favour of the national TLDs, which can be regulated in a more-or-less democratic way.
But in 2003 before I left Ireland, I was watching Sky News and there were like, 3 drive by shootings in London in like a week.
The US has a much higher murder rate than the UK. But never mind the statistics, tell us an anecdote.
Criminals don't obey the law, that is why they are criminals.
Obviously banning guns doesn't stop them from existing, but it does mean you can arrest someone who drives around with a gun in their car before they kill anyone.
Breaking and enterings and rapes and stuff jumped in the UK and Australia when they banned private gun ownership
Bullshit. There was no jump in crime when handguns were banned in the UK. (Private gun ownership is not banned - shotguns and rifles are legal provided you have a license and store them properly.)
Your country just historically doesn't really have rights. European countries have no founding principles because they jsut where always there.
Gosh, I wonder where the French Constitution came from then...
Slashdot Mirror
Now they can fail to find information about democracy, Falun Gong, Christianity or encryption software at blazing 2 megabit speeds! Hooray for broadband!
From Google's point of view, a trusted site would have to have strict editorial standards and link to a lot of sites. I can think of a lot of sites with strict editorial content, but they generally do not link to a lot of sites.
Good seeds don't need to link to a lot of sites. Check out the algorithm - trust is divided among the domains (or pages, depending on the version of the algorithm) that a seed links to, so if a seed links to many domains it will transfer less trust to each domain than a seed that's more selective with its links.
"The network is not subsidized by the City. Tempe is not installing or maintaining the network."
Don't worry, it's a quantum computer so if you observe the smoke escaping then it collapses. You'll just need to keep one eye on your CPU while you're working.
Maybe they've realised they can get more page impressions by posting a dupe than a new story, thanks to all the people bitching about it.
That's why I mentioned the lawyers - the packaging would have to make it clear that the disk might not work in certain players.
There's also a procedure for updating a protected area on the disk using the media key - it looks like pre-recorded media may include a small writable area that can be accessed by approved drives, maybe to store the user's audio and subtitle preferences and the current playback position before the disk is ejected? Or to store your doubleclick cookies before you take the disk back to Blockbuster. ;-)
Each time a key is revoked, a new format is created, which is compatible with most existing players but incompatible with the revoked player. New disks are released in the new format and the old format is left to die. Your old player will still play your old disks, but it won't play the new ones. Well, your turntable won't play CDs but that doesn't mean you're entitled to a refund. You don't have a legal right to stop people releasing things in new formats. The only question is whether you have a legal right to know the format before you buy the product, but I'm sure the studios will hire some very expensive lawyers to write the small print on the DVD boxes so that it's clear that you have no right to expect the disk to work in any particular player, as long as it works in most of the players out there.
By the way I'm not defending what they're doing - I think it's a sneaky anti-competitive trick designed to protect an entrenched cartel - but they do seem to have their legal and technological wits about them this time.
What a great idea! You don't even need electronics. Fisher-Price used to make a wind-up record player where the head contained small metal prongs like a music box and the surface of the record had a little bump for each note. You could do the same with movable pins, or even rolls of punch cards, so kids could compose their own music. If you marked a stave on the punch cards it could be a good way to learn musical notation.
I'm not saying that biometrics are perfect, but the point is that regardless of how fallible the biometrics are, cards don't increase security if they're validated by the same biometrics. If you can forge a fingerprint, a digital signature that authenticates the fingerprint you just forged doesn't fix anything. If the biometrics are broken, the card is also broken. If the biometrics aren't broken, the card is redundant.
A policy of invasion inevitably has that effect.
applying continual pressure for them to modify (and moderate) their laws and customs into more sensible posture?
Funny how that kind of pressure works with the Sauds but not with Saddam or the Taliban. Or perhaps the benchmarks are different.
(As an aside: is it possible that the close diplomatic ties between the US and Saudi Arabia encourage a transfer of attitudes in both directions? Could it be that Saudi Arabia's small steps towards democracy are matched by small American steps towards fundamentalism and feudalism?)
Isn't it nice that Lybia took itself off the short list of hot spots?
"Nice" that Libya responed to US intimidation (which in the past has been backed up by violence) by announcing the end of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities that it never had in the first place? Sure, call that a victory if you like.
I'm realistic enough to know that we have to choose our battles. This stuff is going to unravel a lot more quickly than did, say, totalitarian communism in eastern Europe, and we had the patience for that.
I think you have a rather rosy view of what motivates American foreign policy. I hope you're right.
Surely it doesn't matter if the "key" is public knowledge, as long as no-one can copy or forge it?
Instead, larger and larger parts of it are run by a tiny minority of brutal thugs that kill men, women and children in their own homes and then expect to be thanked because they've brought about a change of government that coincides with their own interests, while they continue to prop up equally "medieval" misogynist dictatorships in neighbouring countries.
ID + fingerprint = something you have + something you are
How is this better than 'fingerprint = something you are'? How does adding an insecure card to a (hopefully) secure biometric increase the security?
The Tories may have avoided the issue in their manifesto, but Michael Howard is personally in favour of ID cards and tried to introduce them in 1995, while Ann Widdecombe voted for them in 2005.
If the card will be used in the absence of fingerprint or retina scanners that could verify the biometric data, what's the point of including the biometric data?
Biometrics are supposed to transform some physical characteristic of your body into a number that can be used to retrieve a database record. That number could also be printed on your ID card, so a biometric scanner would be able to verify that you were the owner of the card. But biometrics can't authenticate the rest of the card's contents, and they certainly can't provide a secure mapping between you and your database record in the absence of a scanner.
There is no good reason for including biometric data on ID cards - biometrics are an alternative to ID cards, superior because they can't be forged or stolen. A card with biometric data is a card with a false sense of security. Without a scanner you'll never know if the card is stolen; if you have a scanner you don't need the card. Either way, the card is useless. The only reason for including biometrics on an ID card is to justify the collection of biometric data from large numbers of people in order to construct a national database. (Or as the synchronised progress in the US, France and the UK suggests, an international database.)
I don't think it would be too hard - the file selector would be a small setuid (sethat?) program that would run with your full permissions. Other programs would execute it instead of showing their own file selectors, with command line arguments containing the name of a pipe (in the app's own directory), and the action to perform (open/create/save as). The user would select the file, and the file selector would disappear into the background to move data between the file and the pipe.
Not quite - groups have to be created by the superuser.
Just as the login process forks and drops its root privileges before running your shell, the file manager or window manager would fork and drop its full user privileges before running an application that was supposed to wear a certain hat.
The processing is probably quite parallelisable because most connections between neurons are short-range, but even if you think of it as 1,000,000 processors with half a gigabyte of memory each, then desktop machines already have the necessary memory and processing power, but memory bandwidth is where we need to see improvements.
Perhaps it would be better to put specialised multiply-add units on the memory chips themselves. But I don't think half a petabyte of SRAM is ever going to be cheap. ;-)
I wonder how much heat would be produced by a computer emulating a single human brain...
Not true - to manufacture DVD players you need a license from the DVD Copy Control Association. If your player includes features that they don't like, such as skipping commercials, they won't give you a license for CSS.
Seriously though, have you tried Gimp 2.2? The interface is much more flexible and IMHO easier to use (eg menubars on image windows instead of right-clicking on the image).
Would those be the US forces who were invading their country? I guess that would mean the "extremists" are prisoners of war. If only we had some kind of international agreement about the treatment of POWs...
Two words: domain squatting. If names were free, what would stop someone from writing a script that generated and registered names as fast as their network connection would allow? If the system doesn't allow duplicates then a single squatter can register all trademarks and dictionary words in a matter of seconds; if duplicates are allowed then names are longer a convenient, reliable way of referring to a particular machine, and the system is worse than useless because of the possible abuses. Namespaces have to be centralised. True, it's dangerous to put infrastructural monopolies in the hands of a single company - the traditional solution is government regulation or even nationalisation. Maybe it's time to think about retiring the international TLDs like .com, .net and .org in favour of the national TLDs, which can be regulated in a more-or-less democratic way.
The US has a much higher murder rate than the UK. But never mind the statistics, tell us an anecdote.
Criminals don't obey the law, that is why they are criminals.
Obviously banning guns doesn't stop them from existing, but it does mean you can arrest someone who drives around with a gun in their car before they kill anyone.
Breaking and enterings and rapes and stuff jumped in the UK and Australia when they banned private gun ownership
Bullshit. There was no jump in crime when handguns were banned in the UK. (Private gun ownership is not banned - shotguns and rifles are legal provided you have a license and store them properly.)
Your country just historically doesn't really have rights. European countries have no founding principles because they jsut where always there.
Gosh, I wonder where the French Constitution came from then...