The problem with your argument about the cost of a long distance call is that the actual bandwidth is a small fraction of what you are paying. Raw bandwidth in bulk quantities is at least an order of magnitude cheaper than what you pay for that call. You are mostly paying for operational costs, overhead, marketing, etc.
Ummm... how exactly would you define academic value anyway?
Academic pursuit is a kind of game in itself and it has its own set of rules. Even if there really isn't anything there that hasn't been covered in computer magazines it doesn't matter - it hasn't been done in an "academic, peer reviewed journal" - and that's part of the rules of the game.
Another very important rule is "let's all pretend twe are not playing a game".
Raw sockets are a just a slightly easier way to spoof IP addresses. But if someone has 300,000 machines at their command why would they need to spoof the IP addresses at all? Knowing the IPs will not really be of much help against a distributed attack of this scale.
In an early demo of Lernout & Hauspie's speech recognition software it didn't really work too well so they pre-programmed a sequence of words for the demonstrator to use. The operator accidentally pressed the button too many times and it started recognizing the NEXT word he was going to say.
The audience was truly impressed by the speech recognition software that can also tell the future.
Getting spare parts actually wouldn't be that hard - it is built entirely from common components: 8085 cpu and discrete logic components. You can still get them from catalogs like Jameco.
The case and LCD may be a little harder to get, though. It's a good thing the case is nearly indestructible...
I got mail from NetSol asking me to renew a domain name which I have already transferred to another registrar (gandi.net) a few months earlier. I wonder what would have happened if someone actually tried to pay in a case like this - would they accept the payment? This is something that is actually likely to happen in a big company.
P.S. I really recommend gandi.net - they're a bunch of french open source geeks like us (one of the partners in gandi is the one behind the eu.org free DNS). -
The title, abstract and disclosure part of a patent don't really affect what it covers. What's important is the CLAIMS. The patent may describe a very narrow implementation but the claims may try to claim a much wider area of "innovation" which includes this particular implementation.
I'm downloading the patent now to take a closer look at the claims.
how do you know that text file wasn't edited by a disgruntled law-enforcement officer to get the conviction he needs?
You don't. But then how do you know that in cases not involving computers?
I know that quite a lot of readers on this site are very mistrustful of law enforcement officials but don't think about accusing them of anything like this. They don't that it and if they catch any one of their colleagues doing it they will deal with him unmercifully.
Their world view may be very different from yours and you may not agree on a lot of things when it comes to computers and freedom but don't even think about this.
NOTE: This does not mean that you should universally trust keys with a low MSD. This is merely a relative measurement for statistical purposes.
True, trust is not transitive and anyone can sign my key without even knowing me. But the fact is that very few people actually do that, so for statistical purposes only it still means something.
The point is not whether that's how the Egyptians did it - the point is that they COULD have done it this way, as well as in many other ways. We should not get stuck in our mental image of ramps and countless slaves which isn't based on much concrete evidence, either.
This reminds me of a wonderful experiment which shows that Archimedes could have suspected the universality of gravity and prove it with tools and materials available at the time.
According to the above mentioned Yahoo article RedHat's offering will also include online backup and recovery. For small and medium sized systems this could be a really big advantage. Hopefully it will support encryption...
I must add that I am not too impressed with their marketing so far. And neither are their investors.
Their Magicom 2000 product is a clever screen phone/paperless fax device that allows faxing a document and scribbling on it while talking. It's a nice product but is that the right product to launch a revolutionary display technology?. Consider the fact that both parties need to have these devices for it to be useful.
A company called CopyTele has been developing a flat panel display technology they call E-Paper for something like the last 15 years and they have filed well over 200 patents for it on the way. It looks very promising, but unfortunately it's not here yet.
It is based on the principle of electrophoresis - moving microscopic particles with electric charge while suspended in opaque fluid. When the particles are moved to the front they are visible, when they are pulled back they are obscured by the fluid.
Since the particles have the same density as the fluid they don't drift. The image stays even after you turn off the power. Power is only required to modify the image, resulting in extremely low power consumption. No backlight is required - the display is reflective and has very high contrast, supposedly comparable to ink on paper. It is clearly visible in full sunlight.
Since the image remains without refreshing it is not necessary to update the image tens of times per second just to get a stable image. This makes it easier to reach very high resolutions (>200DPI). This technology may not be appropriate for video, but it should be ideal for e-books.
If you look at their site you will see that they now sell encryption devices. This move is relatively recent. In their press releases you can see that they are still working on their display technology. I first heard about them in a Popular Science article in 1985(!). I'm still waiting for them to bring this display to market...
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Following social networks by email
on
The Social Web
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· Score: 2
It would be much more informative to follow the social network by checking which users correspond by email, but the privacy concerns are obvious, even if nobody looks at the actual contents.
There must be a lot of research about social networks through email done at the NSA. I bet Carnivore, for example, is very interested in who is emailing who, possibly more than the actual contents for most of the time.
Having a closed source client is not the solution. Cryptography is the solution. Here's how:
1. For each quantum of the distribution calculation in the range you have been assigned store one or more bits of evidence for the result.
2. Calculate a Merckle hash tree of this evidence vector
3. Use cryptographic hashes of the tree root to "randomly" select 64 leaves of the tree
4. Transmit the branches leading to these leaves as proof that you have performed the full calculations
To verify, the server verifies the hash chains of the branches, the randomly selected challenges and verifies the evidence for the selected leaves by repeating the calculation for a very small subset (64) of the assigned range.
You cannot create this evidence without performing virtually all of the calculation assigned to you.
You can still cheat by finding the solution and not reporting it, but there is no incentive to do this.
The original poster was talking about CGI performance under Apache, which in some cases is actually CPU-bound. This is not that uncommon when doing some types of intensive processing in a scripting language.
Admittedly, finding a good test case of a benchmark is not easy. Serving static files is largely irrelevant, but easy to test.
Technically, there is no reason why the domain name system couldn't handle a virtually infinite number of TLDs.
Here is how this might work:
Anyone can invent a TLD and register a domain name with that TLD. If the TLD does not exist, the domain will be registered but will not be accessible yet. If enough people (more than 1000?) create and pay for domain under a new TLD it will be created. Nobody owns a TLD - anyone can register any name in it through any registrar, just like anyone can register under.com,.net and.org now.
Now apple.records, apple.furniture and apple.computers don't have to argue.
One of the advantages of having lots and lots of TLDs is that trademark owners will find it hard to register their name under all TLDs. This captures the original spirit of trademark law where a trademark is not global - it only applies in a specific area of business or geographical region.
And I have just successfully converted the patent #4558302 to a pdf. Whatever problems you are having may be a result of different versions of the tools pat2pdf uses. That's the problem with scripts like this - too fragile and dependent on the environment you are using.
Does anyone here actually know what was the actual content of this declaration?
Try to re-read the BBS article and see if it actually makes such accusations or merely mentions the fact that attendants were asked to sign some kind of declaration.
Most of the blast of a nuclear bomb exploding in the atmosphere comes from heated air. The actual vaporized mass of the bomb is not that large. A bomb detonating in space will result in a big flash and not much more. The radiation energy will not be efficiently converted to kinetic energy. You need to send some really big tanks of water or other working mass along with the bomb.
According to some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did with a friend it would take tens of thousands of tonnes of working mass and the biggest f**ing nukes currently available to deflect a 1km body even if it is discovered more than a year before impact.
If you want to resolve picosecond pulses, you need electronics that can pass frequencies up to 1 THz.
Not really. In fact, there is probably no frequency higher than 200MHz on the chip, but it can control the phase of the signal with very fine resolution.
Here is how this might work:
Start with a ring oscillator (basically an odd number of NOT gates in a ring) and lock it onto a reference frequency with a phase-locked-loop. Use a multiplexer to tap the signal at different locations along the loop. This gives you the same signal at different phases, but the resolution isn't quite down to tens of picoseconds yet. The next step is to use another multiplexer and a series of carefully tuned delay elements to further improve the resolution. You now have a pulse generator that can modulate the position of individual pulses with a resolution of tens of picoseconds by a digital control word.
This can all be manufactured with standard CMOS processes on a chip.
It may take millions of dollars to develop this technology and make the process repeatable enough, but once you have it, making many copies of the circuit is cheap.
The low power usage results from the fact that an ultrawideband signal does not suffer from fading - if there are no sines then different reflections of the same signal can't arrive out of phase and cancel out each other. Most wireless systems take a very wide margin to accomodate for this type of fading.
"Store information in your Passport wallet that will help you make faster, safer online purchases at any Passport express purchase site." - from Passport.com main page.
Quoting your own advice, perhaps you should "...consider learning about what you're talking about before you go spewing at the mouth."
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your argument about the cost of a long distance call is that the actual bandwidth is a small fraction of what you are paying. Raw bandwidth in bulk quantities is at least an order of magnitude cheaper than what you pay for that call. You are mostly paying for operational costs, overhead, marketing, etc.
Ummm... how exactly would you define academic value anyway?
Academic pursuit is a kind of game in itself and it has its own set of rules. Even if there really isn't anything there that hasn't been covered in computer magazines it doesn't matter - it hasn't been done in an "academic, peer reviewed journal" - and that's part of the rules of the game.
Another very important rule is "let's all pretend twe are not playing a game".
Raw sockets are a just a slightly easier way to spoof IP addresses. But if someone has 300,000 machines at their command why would they need to spoof the IP addresses at all? Knowing the IPs will not really be of much help against a distributed attack of this scale.
In an early demo of Lernout & Hauspie's speech recognition software it didn't really work too well so they pre-programmed a sequence of words for the demonstrator to use. The operator accidentally pressed the button too many times and it started recognizing the NEXT word he was going to say.
The audience was truly impressed by the speech recognition software that can also tell the future.
Getting spare parts actually wouldn't be that hard - it is built entirely from common components: 8085 cpu and discrete logic components. You can still get them from catalogs like Jameco.
The case and LCD may be a little harder to get, though. It's a good thing the case is nearly indestructible...
-
I got mail from NetSol asking me to renew a domain name which I have already transferred to another registrar (gandi.net) a few months earlier. I wonder what would have happened if someone actually tried to pay in a case like this - would they accept the payment? This is something that is actually likely to happen in a big company.
P.S. I really recommend gandi.net - they're a bunch of french open source geeks like us (one of the partners in gandi is the one behind the eu.org free DNS).
-
The title, abstract and disclosure part of a patent don't really affect what it covers. What's important is the CLAIMS. The patent may describe a very narrow implementation but the claims may try to claim a much wider area of "innovation" which includes this particular implementation.
I'm downloading the patent now to take a closer look at the claims.
-
It seems that somebody is already planning to do that.
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Not this century, it won't.
May I remind you of the state of the art in computers, electronics, aviation and space technology just one century ago?
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You don't. But then how do you know that in cases not involving computers?
I know that quite a lot of readers on this site are very mistrustful of law enforcement officials but don't think about accusing them of anything like this. They don't that it and if they catch any one of their colleagues doing it they will deal with him unmercifully.
Their world view may be very different from yours and you may not agree on a lot of things when it comes to computers and freedom but don't even think about this.
-
True, trust is not transitive and anyone can sign my key without even knowing me. But the fact is that very few people actually do that, so for statistical purposes only it still means something.
-
The point is not whether that's how the Egyptians did it - the point is that they COULD have done it this way, as well as in many other ways. We should not get stuck in our mental image of ramps and countless slaves which isn't based on much concrete evidence, either.
This reminds me of a wonderful experiment which shows that Archimedes could have suspected the universality of gravity and prove it with tools and materials available at the time.
-
According to the above mentioned Yahoo article RedHat's offering will also include online backup and recovery. For small and medium sized systems this could be a really big advantage. Hopefully it will support encryption...
-
I must add that I am not too impressed with their marketing so far. And neither are their investors.
Their Magicom 2000 product is a clever screen phone/paperless fax device that allows faxing a document and scribbling on it while talking. It's a nice product but is that the right product to launch a revolutionary display technology?. Consider the fact that both parties need to have these devices for it to be useful.
-
A company called CopyTele has been developing a flat panel display technology they call E-Paper for something like the last 15 years and they have filed well over 200 patents for it on the way. It looks very promising, but unfortunately it's not here yet.
It is based on the principle of electrophoresis - moving microscopic particles with electric charge while suspended in opaque fluid. When the particles are moved to the front they are visible, when they are pulled back they are obscured by the fluid.
Since the particles have the same density as the fluid they don't drift. The image stays even after you turn off the power. Power is only required to modify the image, resulting in extremely low power consumption. No backlight is required - the display is reflective and has very high contrast, supposedly comparable to ink on paper. It is clearly visible in full sunlight.
Since the image remains without refreshing it is not necessary to update the image tens of times per second just to get a stable image. This makes it easier to reach very high resolutions (>200DPI). This technology may not be appropriate for video, but it should be ideal for e-books.
If you look at their site you will see that they now sell encryption devices. This move is relatively recent. In their press releases you can see that they are still working on their display technology. I first heard about them in a Popular Science article in 1985(!). I'm still waiting for them to bring this display to market...
-
It would be much more informative to follow the social network by checking which users correspond by email, but the privacy concerns are obvious, even if nobody looks at the actual contents.
There must be a lot of research about social networks through email done at the NSA. I bet Carnivore, for example, is very interested in who is emailing who, possibly more than the actual contents for most of the time.
-
Since the whole thing resulted from government intervention it kinda makes sense to demand government intervention is setting it right.
Having no government intervention at all would be even better, but it's a long way from A to B.
-
Having a closed source client is not the solution. Cryptography is the solution. Here's how:
1. For each quantum of the distribution calculation in the range you have been assigned store one or more bits of evidence for the result.
2. Calculate a Merckle hash tree of this evidence vector
3. Use cryptographic hashes of the tree root to "randomly" select 64 leaves of the tree
4. Transmit the branches leading to these leaves as proof that you have performed the full calculations
To verify, the server verifies the hash chains of the branches, the randomly selected challenges and verifies the evidence for the selected leaves by repeating the calculation for a very small subset (64) of the assigned range.
You cannot create this evidence without performing virtually all of the calculation assigned to you.
You can still cheat by finding the solution and not reporting it, but there is no incentive to do this.
-
The original poster was talking about CGI performance under Apache, which in some cases is actually CPU-bound. This is not that uncommon when doing some types of intensive processing in a scripting language.
Admittedly, finding a good test case of a benchmark is not easy. Serving static files is largely irrelevant, but easy to test.
-
Technically, there is no reason why the domain name system couldn't handle a virtually infinite number of TLDs.
.com,.net and .org now.
Here is how this might work:
Anyone can invent a TLD and register a domain name with that TLD. If the TLD does not exist, the domain will be registered but will not be accessible yet. If enough people (more than 1000?) create and pay for domain under a new TLD it will be created. Nobody owns a TLD - anyone can register any name in it through any registrar, just like anyone can register under
Now apple.records, apple.furniture and apple.computers don't have to argue.
One of the advantages of having lots and lots of TLDs is that trademark owners will find it hard to register their name under all TLDs. This captures the original spirit of trademark law where a trademark is not global - it only applies in a specific area of business or geographical region.
-
And I have just successfully converted the patent #4558302 to a pdf. Whatever problems you are having may be a result of different versions of the tools pat2pdf uses. That's the problem with scripts like this - too fragile and dependent on the environment you are using.
pat2pdf 1.01
ghostscript 6.0
libtiff 3.5.4
-
Does anyone here actually know what was the actual content of this declaration?
Try to re-read the BBS article and see if it actually makes such accusations or merely mentions the fact that attendants were asked to sign some kind of declaration.
-
Most of the blast of a nuclear bomb exploding in the atmosphere comes from heated air. The actual vaporized mass of the bomb is not that large. A bomb detonating in space will result in a big flash and not much more. The radiation energy will not be efficiently converted to kinetic energy. You need to send some really big tanks of water or other working mass along with the bomb.
According to some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did with a friend it would take tens of thousands of tonnes of working mass and the biggest f**ing nukes currently available to deflect a 1km body even if it is discovered more than a year before impact.
-
If you want to resolve picosecond pulses, you need electronics that can pass frequencies up to 1 THz.
Not really. In fact, there is probably no frequency higher than 200MHz on the chip, but it can control the phase of the signal with very fine resolution.
Here is how this might work:
Start with a ring oscillator (basically an odd number of NOT gates in a ring) and lock it onto a reference frequency with a phase-locked-loop. Use a multiplexer to tap the signal at different locations along the loop. This gives you the same signal at different phases, but the resolution isn't quite down to tens of picoseconds yet. The next step is to use another multiplexer and a series of carefully tuned delay elements to further improve the resolution. You now have a pulse generator that can modulate the position of individual pulses with a resolution of tens of picoseconds by a digital control word.
This can all be manufactured with standard CMOS processes on a chip.
It may take millions of dollars to develop this technology and make the process repeatable enough, but once you have it, making many copies of the circuit is cheap.
The low power usage results from the fact that an ultrawideband signal does not suffer from fading - if there are no sines then different reflections of the same signal can't arrive out of phase and cancel out each other. Most wireless systems take a very wide margin to accomodate for this type of fading.
-
"Store information in your Passport wallet that will help you make faster, safer online purchases at any Passport express purchase site." - from Passport.com main page.
Quoting your own advice, perhaps you should "...consider learning about what you're talking about before you go spewing at the mouth."
-