haha no I should point out I do it for personal use only, buying/selling I won't take part in, as I believe that breaks down the "well I wasn't going to buy it anyway" argument against percieved losses due to piracy. My sig is mearly a link to a website I'm building for someone that I'm trying to help promote:-)
"designed to keep us from watching our purchased content"
You would purchase this? I suppose people must do... personally, I don't own DVD players, I watch everything through my computer, so the only way I could watch it would be to download it.
That doesn't make america free, or n.korea's nuclear bomb test a missile test.
Also, please tell me that's just what came up top when you searched for a quick link to the story, and that you don't actually get your information on what's going on in america/the world from fox news?
And finally, there's no [foxnews.com] after your link... what happened to those? I'm sure I didn't turn that off... hmm, time to hunt through the preferences pages.
This isn't really true. Electrons, having mass, cannot reach the speed of light, even if they travel in a straight line, which through a wire they don't, so current actually moves rather slowly. However the actual signal is carried by an electromagnetic field, which is the force that causes the negatively charged electrons to move. This field is carried by photons, massless packets of energy, that travel at the speed of light (light = photons, so speed of photons = speed of light) if left to travel in a straight line.
That said, the signal still won't propogate at the speed of light, through either medium, becaues the photons won't be travelling in a straight line (instead they bounce around off the insides of the wire/fiber etc). The general rule is the denser the medium, the slower photons can travel through it, and the more energy per unit of distance they will lose (resistance).
One of the problems with transmitting over eg, copper wire, is capacitance; the amount of energy the wire can actually store. You can imagine the difference between tapping at one end of a long stick, you'll feel it at the other end. However if the stick is made of a light rubber, it will absorb some of the energy so it won't be felt at the other end, unless you tap slower and harder. Similar is true while using copper wire, if you try push too high a frequency, it will just be absorbed by the wire itself, and won't reach the other end. Optic fiber doesn't have anywhere near that level of capacitance, so you can push much higher frequencies down it, thus have higher bandwidth, even if the signal does propagate at about the same speed.
I don't see which is supposed to apply to sites that use javascript to provide extra functionality... surely a browser that has this functionality disabled is the one that's broken.
"Please don't tell me you can predict with any certainty that no one will ever read this device from a distance of great than 1mm"
I'm not saying that the limit can't be broken, by 10, maybe even 100 times the distance... but nothing to be worried about. Sure technologies like bluetooth and wifi can stretch over their spec'ed distance, this can be achieved with various methods such as increasing the power to the antenna and/or using directional antennas. But if you're not going to notice somebody attaching a directional antenna to the memory chip, then you quite frankly have bigger worries. Also, the micro circuitry in something as small as the chip isn't going to be able to handle a huge amount of current without it getting hot 'n blowin, so there's a hard limit to how much you can increase the power to it. So no, I don't think it's anything worth worrying about.
Yeah he missed the whole networking thing, that moves resources out of the local workstation by being able to share them... he was assuming the pc would do more on its own. He's always wanted to tack on extra functionality to their os's, whether they came up with the ideas themselves, or could even pull off doing it themselves, is another matter.
But more to the point, it's urban myth, there's no citation, nobody who will stand by claims that they heard him say it, or anything (if you can prove me wrong, by all means, go ahead, end the debate). Therefore there's no reason to believe it over and other mythical claim, you may as well believe the world is 6000 years old, or any other claims based on "faith" rather than any actual evidence.
There's no "of course" about it. The visionary who was laughed at when he said there will be a computer in every home, couldn't see a use for more than 640k? You really believe that? Whatever you can say about bill gates, him not being able to imagine people having uses for a computer (and a more powerful computer) is not one of them.
I don't believe it's an issue... you'd need the pringles tube around the chip to make any significant distance, as this is the bit that you can't significantly increase its broadcast power (as it's just too small to collect, handle, and transmit a large enough amount of energy, no matter how much energy you send to it). Without that, you amplifying (either using more power or a directional antenna) your signal to it won't make any difference, it can't reply with all that extra power, and so you're going to have a greater difficulty differenciating between the signal and background radiation the further away you get.
Other than that, the idea of getting someone to put a pringles tube around their chip so you can "secretly" read it is a bit absurd, so I really don't think we have anything to worry about.
The 1mm thing isn't because of security/privacy, it just happens to rule out many of those concerns. The issue is, if you want the chip to be able to transmit futher, it would need to be bigger, to be able to collect, handle, and transmit greater power.
You're totally right, for a laptop to be called "turned off", there shouldn't be a *single* electron moving inside it... that's why I dip mine in liquid hydrogen before taking it anywhere. I know anyone could bitch that unless it's absolute zero, there's still gonna be/some/ electrons moving, but liquid hydrogen's all I could get without it being a real PITA.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of
:-)
"576 = 5 + 7 + 6 = 18 (9 * 2)"
you could have continued to the 9, in which case they all result in 9
576 = 5 + 7 + 6 = 18, 1 + 8 = 9
who, fox news?
Or to update it even more:
"sue 'em"
True... then I must suspect them all! It's the american way!
Lets get me some downloadage!!!!
haha no I should point out I do it for personal use only, buying/selling I won't take part in, as I believe that breaks down the "well I wasn't going to buy it anyway" argument against percieved losses due to piracy. My sig is mearly a link to a website I'm building for someone that I'm trying to help promote :-)
"designed to keep us from watching our purchased content"
You would purchase this? I suppose people must do... personally, I don't own DVD players, I watch everything through my computer, so the only way I could watch it would be to download it.
That doesn't make america free, or n.korea's nuclear bomb test a missile test.
Also, please tell me that's just what came up top when you searched for a quick link to the story, and that you don't actually get your information on what's going on in america/the world from fox news?
And finally, there's no [foxnews.com] after your link... what happened to those? I'm sure I didn't turn that off... hmm, time to hunt through the preferences pages.
This isn't really true. Electrons, having mass, cannot reach the speed of light, even if they travel in a straight line, which through a wire they don't, so current actually moves rather slowly. However the actual signal is carried by an electromagnetic field, which is the force that causes the negatively charged electrons to move. This field is carried by photons, massless packets of energy, that travel at the speed of light (light = photons, so speed of photons = speed of light) if left to travel in a straight line.
That said, the signal still won't propogate at the speed of light, through either medium, becaues the photons won't be travelling in a straight line (instead they bounce around off the insides of the wire/fiber etc). The general rule is the denser the medium, the slower photons can travel through it, and the more energy per unit of distance they will lose (resistance).
One of the problems with transmitting over eg, copper wire, is capacitance; the amount of energy the wire can actually store. You can imagine the difference between tapping at one end of a long stick, you'll feel it at the other end. However if the stick is made of a light rubber, it will absorb some of the energy so it won't be felt at the other end, unless you tap slower and harder. Similar is true while using copper wire, if you try push too high a frequency, it will just be absorbed by the wire itself, and won't reach the other end. Optic fiber doesn't have anywhere near that level of capacitance, so you can push much higher frequencies down it, thus have higher bandwidth, even if the signal does propagate at about the same speed.
(roughly)
America - free?
N.Korea's nuclear test - there was a MISSILE involved??
You - know what you're talking about???
(sorry all of those "don't feed the troll" types, but damn the main article is boring... someone managed a whole book about rss feeds?)
I don't see which is supposed to apply to sites that use javascript to provide extra functionality... surely a browser that has this functionality disabled is the one that's broken.
"Please don't tell me you can predict with any certainty that no one will ever read this device from a distance of great than 1mm"
I'm not saying that the limit can't be broken, by 10, maybe even 100 times the distance... but nothing to be worried about. Sure technologies like bluetooth and wifi can stretch over their spec'ed distance, this can be achieved with various methods such as increasing the power to the antenna and/or using directional antennas. But if you're not going to notice somebody attaching a directional antenna to the memory chip, then you quite frankly have bigger worries. Also, the micro circuitry in something as small as the chip isn't going to be able to handle a huge amount of current without it getting hot 'n blowin, so there's a hard limit to how much you can increase the power to it. So no, I don't think it's anything worth worrying about.
Yeah he missed the whole networking thing, that moves resources out of the local workstation by being able to share them... he was assuming the pc would do more on its own. He's always wanted to tack on extra functionality to their os's, whether they came up with the ideas themselves, or could even pull off doing it themselves, is another matter.
But more to the point, it's urban myth, there's no citation, nobody who will stand by claims that they heard him say it, or anything (if you can prove me wrong, by all means, go ahead, end the debate). Therefore there's no reason to believe it over and other mythical claim, you may as well believe the world is 6000 years old, or any other claims based on "faith" rather than any actual evidence.
"Of course he said it"
There's no "of course" about it. The visionary who was laughed at when he said there will be a computer in every home, couldn't see a use for more than 640k? You really believe that? Whatever you can say about bill gates, him not being able to imagine people having uses for a computer (and a more powerful computer) is not one of them.
Nope.
(note that this isn't what they're observing, but x-rays from just outside the blackhole, but I thought i'd point it out for interests sake)
I don't believe it's an issue... you'd need the pringles tube around the chip to make any significant distance, as this is the bit that you can't significantly increase its broadcast power (as it's just too small to collect, handle, and transmit a large enough amount of energy, no matter how much energy you send to it). Without that, you amplifying (either using more power or a directional antenna) your signal to it won't make any difference, it can't reply with all that extra power, and so you're going to have a greater difficulty differenciating between the signal and background radiation the further away you get.
Other than that, the idea of getting someone to put a pringles tube around their chip so you can "secretly" read it is a bit absurd, so I really don't think we have anything to worry about.
The 1mm thing isn't because of security/privacy, it just happens to rule out many of those concerns. The issue is, if you want the chip to be able to transmit futher, it would need to be bigger, to be able to collect, handle, and transmit greater power.
If you're a sheep.
Wow, your post takes "missed the point" to a totally new level.
Bandwidth bills are so 2003. Flat rate's the way to go now ya know!
You can't just dump lasers onto sharks you know, sharks aren't a truck... they're a cereal of tubes!
(if you're gonna use such dated jokes, at least throw a few of them together!)
What if we're in the one universe where alternate universes /don't/ exist? :-p
Put a mirror behind your laptop, you can watch the porn on BOTH screens at once!!!
Oo, oo, venetian blinds!!! Classy...
You gotta understand that most people will be running windows on the laptop; this will save them having to run that to use their computer ;-)
You're totally right, for a laptop to be called "turned off", there shouldn't be a *single* electron moving inside it... that's why I dip mine in liquid hydrogen before taking it anywhere. I know anyone could bitch that unless it's absolute zero, there's still gonna be /some/ electrons moving, but liquid hydrogen's all I could get without it being a real PITA.