For anyone interested, the figures in the paper show clearly the structuring of water in layers near the surface. Moreover they directly measure that the viscosity jumps up considerably for distances less than 2 nm. The viscosity goes from the bulk water value (9E-4 Pa*s) when far from the surface, and increases to as high as 50 Pa*s (500 Poise or 50,000 cP) in the last 0.5 nm. To give you an rough idea of what this means, note that 50,000 cP is similar to the (bulk) viscosity of things like honey or ketchup (for a random table of values, see here or here).
Of course this higher-viscosity persists only over a very short-range, but understanding these "nano-mechanical" properties is crucial for the design and construction of future nano-scale devices.
There's actually alot of evidence in the literature suggesting that water forms a "structured layer" on hydrophillic (water-compatible) surfaces, and around hydrophillic objects dispersed in water. For instance the mobility of water that structures around proteins has been described in the literature as "ice-like." These measurements are typically based on the density of the water or using things like conductivity to infer mobility.
So the notion of water forming solid-like structures near surfaces is not entirely new. However, direct mechanical measurements of the mobility/viscosity of those last few atomic layers of water are not easy, so this paper certainly adds a valuable contribution to the field.
You know, I've also had this "do we really need faster computers?" thought more than once.
Yet inevitably I eventually encounter a situation where my computer is having trouble keeping up, and I'm reminded that, yes, I would indeed like to have a faster computer, and I'd be willing to pay for it (up to some level, obviously).
These "I want more speed" situations don't come up that frequently, but they do come up. And I can think of millions of ways that having arbitrarily more computing power could be put to use. For instance, there are many operations that take a second or two on a current computer (rendering something, refreshing a complicated spreadsheet and graph, doing some data lookup, file searching, etc.). If these operations were somehow 1000X faster, then you could imagine having a slider that the user can move around, and the given operation updates effectively in real-time. That has major useability advantages.
This is but one example, of course. I understand that many people only do web-browsing and email, but I nevertheless maintain that there is a whole world of useability and features that we have not yet touched, simply because it would be too processor intensive to implement. (I'm sure even grandma would appreciate it if after drag-and-dropping a 2Gb video file into an email, it automatically transcodes it down to a 20Mb video file, and it only takes 0.1 second to do so.) Then again, maybe such advances are not "worth it"--but of course the same could be said of any advance in computer software/hardware.
The point is that if your computer eventually breaks, and you need a new one, would you rather get an identical one for $800, or one that is 100X faster for $800 ?
"...Every 24 months, you're doubling the number of transistors, doubling the capacity," he said. "But if you think about the process you're going through--they're taking a wafer, they put some devices on it, they cut it up and sell it to you--the cost of doing that is not doubling every 18 to 24 months."
Is he claiming that the cost of doing lithography on wafers doesn't increase? That's crazy talk! The cost of building and running fabs is in fact also growing exponentially. According to Rock's Law, the cost of building a chip-making plant doubles every four years, and is already into the multi-billion dollar range.
In fact there's alot of debate whether Moore's Law will break-down due to fundamental barriers in the physics, or whether we will first hit an economic wall: no bank will be willing (or able?) to fund the fantastically expensive construction of the new technologies.
If the license gave everyone standing to sue on the open software's behalf
The annoying this is that the situation is not symmetric. With copyright, the FLOSS camp use the GPL to protect their interests. This allows them to put pressure on (or sue) people who break the GPL.
But with patents, there is no reciprocity of control between proprietary and open-source groups. The proprietary guys patent everything they can think of, and then they agree not to sue each other. But no one in the open-source software world is patenting their ideas. This is because it would cost too much, and would be totally against their principles (which is that software patents are invalid to begin with). So the FLOSS camp has no "patent ammunition" to fight back with. Their only weapon is appeals to prior art and the fundamental intention of patents (that implementations, not ideas, are meant to be patented). But in practise this means a costly legal battle.
So, really, there is nothing the FLOSS camp can sue MS for doing... there are no "open source patents." (There are indeed initiatives to address this... we'll see how they work out.)
I guess my point was that it may not cost much right now, but you're basically locking yourself into paying these fees, and have no control over how big those fees might be in the future (it's not like you can buy this "patent protection" from a competitor at a lower price). Being at the mercy of another company seems unsafe.
As to the "very good risk of being sued", I guess that's the very core of the debate. It's really unclear whether Microsoft could win an anti-Linux patent case in court. (Others have tried without success.) I guess some companies want this protection not to avoid losing a court case per se, but to avoid the cost of going to court at all. But like I said, by accepting the patent deal you make it impossible to ever credibly defend yourself against Microsoft's claims that you owe them money.
I don't understand what the companies signing these deals are thinking. It seems like suicide to me. You sign the deal, and MS agrees not to sue you for awhile. But eventually you have to re-sign the deal, and MS can dictate whatever terms they want... because if you don't sign the deal, you won't be able to distribute Linux anymore?
After all, MS can argue in court that your acceptance of the prior deal was basically an admission that you wouldn't have been allowed to distribute Linux without their blessing. So as soon as you sign the deal, you are forever controlled by MS (at least with regard to Linux distribution). Why would a company purposefully agree to have one of their business plans depend upon the whims of another company?
I typically don't like conspiracy theories, but it is almost as if Microsoft is creating these deals (using shady behind-the-scenes payoffs?) in order to create a climate where they can, eventually, either crush Linux through patents, or at least make money off of every Linux sale.
Yes, exactly, all ISPs are in it for the money, not just "the bad ones."
The Pirate Bay is a bad example, since they are not doing anything illegal (according to Swedish law). A better example would be a phishing site. Rather than going after the ISP for hosting it, you would be better off tracking down the people running it and putting them in jail.
Obviously you should also notify the ISP and get a subpoena if necessary to shut down the site. But your original call to "drive the bad ISPs out of business" is, in my opinion, misplaced. After all, the bad sites can easily move to other ISPs.
So you're saying that the "bad ISPs" are the ones that "host anything (legal or not) as long as the money is right" which I suppose by implication means that the "good ISPs" are the ones that "only host appropriate, sanctioned content."
That's weird because I would have said the exact opposite: the "bad ISPs" are the ones that enforce their opinions of right and wrong onto their customers, thereby discriminating and censoring; whereas the "good ISPs" are those that behave as common carriers and don't interfere with the content their customers store or transmit (except in the case of a subpoena).
You ask the question "how do you put the bad ones out of business?" But the question is misplaced. The aim should not be to put "bad ISPs" out of business to stop "bad websites" from existing, anymore than we should aim to destroy "bad roads" for facilitating the transportation of criminals. Instead you should target the "bad websites" themselves. If they are doing something illegal, then make them stop. If they are not doing something illegal, then let them exist. In any case, leave the ISPs out of it.
This technology is another step along to road to widespread technology exploiting Terahertz radiation, which is the region of the EM-spectrum between IR and microwaves. Near the end of the article, they mention the possibility of creating imaging systems that can, for example, see through clothes. These applications of so-called T-rays have in fact already been demonstrated. For example, the image in this article shows a man concealing a knife, which is easily visible in the T-ray image. (See also some other pictures here.) T-rays reflect strongly off of metals but can penetrate to varying extents through things like clothing and tissue. The military and security applications are obvious. However it would also bring up new kinds of medical imaging, and has been investigated for quality control, too (for example, scanning the inside of foods in assembly lines, etc.). In the previous link I put, there is an example of scanning through a Hershey bar, where you can see the positions of the nuts.
Suffice it to say this is an area of active research that may have many, many applications.
I totally agree that calling this a security flaw or DoS is silly. Until it is actually used to exploit the program, it's not a confirmed security flaw.
However using bad documents to crash Word is still a flaw in Word, in my opinion. The application should just say "Can't open bad/corrupted document" and let the user keep working. In the blog he says:
The theory is that it is better to crash (at least with client apps) than it is to be running the bad guy's shell code.
I understand the rationale, but I would argue it's rather sloppy programming that uses a crash as a means to prevent such bad things from happening. Exceptions can be thrown, but they should be caught and used to halt the "bad actions", and revert back to a normal program state.
Obviously it is better to crash than to execute arbitrary enemy code. However it's better still to just refuse to execute arbitrary code, but otherwise keep running. The problem with using crashing as a security system is that then the "bad guys" will try to crash your application on purpose (calling it a DoS is a stretch, mind you), which opens up new security problems. (A crashing app may expose other security vulnerabilities, disclose otherwise protected information, destabilize other apps/the OS, etc.)
However, crashing may be the lesser of the evils in many places. In the event that our apps crash, we have recovery mechanisms, ways to report the crash so we know what function had the problem, and so on.
Okay, handling crashing properly (saving some data, logging errors, etc.) is of course nice. However even the most graceful crash is, as far as "recovery mechanisms" go, pretty bad. A proper recovery mechanism would be rather less disruptive to the user... for instance a prompt that warns the user that something bad happened and the document is being rolled back to before the last action occured. Similarly logging of errors can be done properly without crashing the entire application. A log-file is generated, and the user keeps working even though the last action didn't work, hopefully with some feedback indicating why the last action didn't work.
I am fully aware that writing bug-free software is impossible. Ultimately, it is unavoidable that crashes will occur. When they do occur, they should be handled as gracefully as possible. However one should not defend one's code (and coding flaws) by saying that "sure it crashes--but the crashes are part of our carefully engineered recovery mechanism!" That's a lame excuse, because if you're aware of a consistent crash condition, you should be able to code so that instead of crashing, the program does something more friendly.
I see what you're saying, but I was careful to say "quality/budget ratio" and not simply "quality."
I've seen some independent films that were maybe 1/4 as good (in a technical sense) as big-budget Hollywood movies, but their budget was 1/20 or 1/100 of the movie I'm comparing it to. My point is only that independent movies seem to get "more bang for your buck" than big movies, which suggests that it is possible to make movies of a certain quality level with a more limited budget than what Hollywood uses.
I'm not saying that you can make a slick film with awesome special effects without spending some money--I'm theorizing that Hollywood is very far from making movies optimally (in an economic sense), and that the budgets of their movies are unnecessarily large.
There's no "secret sauce" involved in making a movie; it's just very, very expensive.
caught my eye. Actually I would say it's an untested hypothesis that movies are expensive. Currently movie production is basically a monopoly (actually a cartel). By definition monopolies have no competition, hence there is no incentive to try and make things cheaper. This gives rise to the massive salaries and creative accounting that Hollywood engages in. (Somehow, on paper, they actually have razor-thin profits even when the movie made 10-times as much money as the supposed budget.)
If Hollywood were replaced with something new, that was actually a competitive marketplace to make decent movies at the lowest price, I bet they would cost only a fraction of what they cost now. I imagine a movie that nowadays costs $30 million could actually be made for $600,000 once salaries became more reasonable, advertising were less extensive, and studios were forced to optimize their workflow to keep the budget down. The quality/budget ratio of independent films lends credence to this theory.
Current movie prices are massively inflated because they are a monopoly. If that monopoly were removed, I bet the new price of movies would be low enough that people wouldn't bother with unauthorized duplication... because the genuine article would be cheap enough already.
Re:I were one of the cracking groups...
on
AACS Cracked Again
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with what you describe is that the hacking groups are basically engaged in a (friendly?) competition with each other. All the hacker groups know that any copy-protection will eventually be broken, but "the fun" is in trying to do it *first*. So if one group kept quiet and tried to amass a bunch of cool hacks, they would be "beat" by another group who releases news that they've cracked device X or extracted title key Y. No matter how quiet some hacker groups decide to be, there will always be other groups who don't want to stay quiet. Hence there's no point in trying to keep it secret. If you've got a crack, you may as well take credit for it right away.
Add to this the fact that hacking these devices in general will go much faster if everyone shares what information they've obtained thus far (e.g. the open source philosophy). This also avoids wasted effort on duplicate hacks. For better or worse, it's a fact of life that these cracks will come early and often.
(Note: All of the above is pure speculation. If any of the members of said groups wish to clarify their motivations for releasing hacks early and often, please do so!)
Suffice it to say that a doctor is likely to write an email like:
"Ted, I just read the news about Viagra in the New England Journal of Medicine. Very interesting results, though the error bars are a bit large to draw any major conclusions just yet. What do you think?"
Whereas a doctor rarely writes email like:
"NoW ava ilable is generic V1AGRA at low price! Generic, quality, all low price now!"
The point is that modern spam filters don't just look for "bad words" but consider relative word frequencies, the sender and receiver fields, word correlations, formatting elements, URLs, etc. Spam filters in your email client will be trained against email you typically send/receive, and so can be even more precise. Spammers of course try to make their emails include words so that they end up looking like real email, but if the filter is good enough, then the only way to get past it is to send an email that now lacks those critical spam elements (like the link you're supposed to click to buy the generic drug or whatever)...
You're right--but the size of Gmail gives them another advantage. In those marginal cases where the spam filter isn't sure about an email (is this spam or a mailing list?) it has the advantage of having a huge number of people checking all the emails. That is, the users do the final check.
I have received a spam to my gmail account exactly once. And when I did, shocked, I clicked the "mark as spam" button. The point is that this spam was probably sent to millions of Gmail users, and the algorithm wasn't sure how to categorize it. But because I clicked "spam" (and probably a few other people did, too), it was marked as spam for everyone. So most users never say it in their inbox. Thus only a dozen out of the million recipients was ever bothered by the spam. Conversely, an email list would receive no (or very few) "mark as spam" clicks, and would be allowed to pass. So basically the Gmail userbase acts the workforce to continually train the spam filter, and moreover to detect new spam within minutes of it being sent.
It's hard to beat a system like that. But the point is that it relies on the large number of users who are all (effectively) sharing their spam training sets with each other in realtime.
This is not to say that the baseline algorithm that Gmail implements isn't quite effective, but the point is that Gmail can use the users to resolve those tricky false-positive and false-negative situations.
While I agree that "being an adult" has many self-imposed restrictions (paying bills, holding down a job, taking care of dependents, being reliable, etc.), I have to disagree that an adult has less freedom than a teenager in high-school.
Frankly, alot of high-school was learning to fit into a mold (both for your peers and teachers), and following rules. Yes, to a certain extent you have to deal with those kinds of rules in "real life," but frankly I feel much more free and empowered now as an adult than I ever did as a teenager.
Part of it is financial independence, of course. But there's also much less fear of "not fitting in" or whatever. I mean, in high-school I would never mention to people that I played tabletop RPGs in my free time. Now, as an adult, I really don't care who knows (even though it is even less "normal" for an adult to play RPGs...). The restrictions of jobs and rent are nothing compared to the restrictions of high-school (and, for some people, their parents). Moreover, the very fact that these restrictions are self-imposed makes a huge difference.
All I can say to readers who are still stuck in High-School is: "Don't worry... Life gets better!"
I mostly agree with your comment, and hope it gets modded-up. However:
Notice that this does not restrict adults, and it does not constrict what anyone (including minors) do in the privacy of their own home.
That's where you are very, very wrong. It may not restrict adult's gameplay (for now), but the only way to enforce these rules is, as mentioned, using "registration" and "ID cards" and things like that. This type of tracking most definately imposes a restriction on minors and adults alike, and very specifically on their privacy. In fact, in a country like China, I'm sorry to say that this would have a chilling effect even if the data thereby obtained were not used for anything nefarious.
Freedom and privacy are very important things (yes, even to minors!). All too often our freedoms are slowly eroded by heaping on enough of these seemingly innocuous laws (especially the "but its for the children" kind of laws). It may seem silly, but, yes, we must take a stand against these kinds of seemingly-good laws.
My sentiments exactly. I spent alot of time looking at the different Internet offerings when I moved to where I am now. Eventually I went with Speakeasy, and I've been quite happy with them. Yes, they are more expensive, but they don't block port 80, which means I can run a proper webserver, and they don't throttle any traffic. Plus when you talk to someone on the phone or via email, they actually know what they are talking about. (When they asked "how did you hear about us" and I said "Slashdot" his reply was "cool" and not "what's that?" Similarly when I said I'd be running Linux servers.)
Being owned by Best Buy can't possibly end well for Speakeasy customers. The Best Buy model is to cut corners and slash anything that is not part of their mainstay. How many Linux computers do they sell at Best Buy? So if Best Buy puts pressure on Speakeasy to appeal to the "most common customer" (i.e.: only cares about lowest price, doesn't think about quality of data connection), then Speakeasy will simply become another run-of-the-mill DSL provider.... which means that all their customers will disappear.
Basically Speakeasy has carved out a niche where they offer higher-than-average service to those who are willing to pay for it. If they lose sight of that, they will lose their customer base and die a painful death.
How many times are we going to have a "news item" that uses the same old technique to "prove" that Windows is the most secure. I'll save you the trouble of reading the article, the executive summary is something like:
"The total number of reported vulnerabilities for Windows was lower than for others, therefore it is the most secure."
Wow. That kind of logic would get you a failing grade in any undergraduate class. When TFA actually goes into the breakdown of "severe" versus "not severe." The article even says:
39 vulnerabilities, 12 of which were ranked high priority or severe, were found in Microsoft Windows
and:
of the 208 Red Hat vulnerabilities, the most of the top five operating systems, only two were considered high severity
So having 2 severe vulnerabilities makes it less secure than Windows having 12 severe vulnerabilities? Something doesn't add up. That's even assuming their numbers are correct, which I sincerely doubt. Another flaw in logic (that we've seen many times) is that the total number of publically disclosed vulnerabilities turns out to be higher for the development model that involves full-disclosure, rather than the one that involves hiding information as much as possible. This isn't exactly surprising, and says nothing about how many vulnerabilities actually exist.
Counting vulnerabilities seems like a very silly way to gauge security. It seems like a truer test would be to set up a machine (or rather, a statisically significant bunch of machines) and measure the average time to system compromise. Even this technique has its flaws, of course, but at least it's better than some arbitrary counting technique.
To my mind this is the actual problem with OSS. Accountability is nill. With MS products the same defects are there (though less so as it turns out (predictably)), but in their case at least we know who to blame and can expect the product to be fixed. With OSS I see no way to assure that.
That's not even remotely true. You expound the myth that there is accountability in proprietary software, whereas there is not with OSS. In reality, after you pay for your proprietary software, you have absolutely no guarantee of bug fixes, and no guarantees that changes to the product won't break backwards compatibility (e.g. "mutate"). Don't like it? You can either stick to the current version, or buy the next version, or pay them more money for support contracts that make guarantees.
With OSS, after you freely download the software, you also have no guarantees of bug fixes or interface stability. Don't like it? You can stick to the current version, or freely download other versions, or pay those who make the software for support contracts that make those guarantees, or pay a third party to make those guarantees, or hire people in-house to modify the code to suit your needs, or contract a third party to make those code changes, or port your data to a different software product.
In any case, it's up to a business to evaluate their software needs on a case-by-case basis. But please stop spreading this "because you pay for it there is some guarantee of accountability" myth. Anyone who has tried using phone support for commodity software, or who has read through an EULA, knows this to be a joke.
I use Linux extensively (at home and at work), but I'm always afraid to suggest it as a solution for others. Because then somehow I become responsible when things don't go perfectly smoothly. If instead I just recommend a "status quo" solution, then any bugs encountered will just be treated as "business as usual." The reality is that any software deployment will have annoyances along the way (whether Linux-based or Windows-based). The difference is exactly what you describe: "No one is fired for choosing Microsoft" whereas if you recommend Linux, you become "the guy to blame."
I'm not sure how to fix this state of affairs. It's a totally unreasonable double-standard, but it will exist whenever there is a defacto standard like MS has become (and IBM was, at one time). I think this is actually one of the major (and usually unmentioned) roadblocks to Linux adoption. Yes, you have some vocal Linux advocates... but the majority of us who really understand the advantages of Linux are scared into silence. (Or maybe I'm just a coward.)
All black holes emit "Hawking radiation", which causes them to slowly lose mass. For black holes below a certain size, this evaporation due to Hawking radiation will be so fast that they won't even have a chance to grow through matter accumulation before they evaporate into nothing. I know this doesn't match up with the pop-science description of black holes--where they consume all matter around them until nothing is left--but suffice it to say that the pop-science explanation leaves out many of the important details.
So, again, the creation of micro-black-holes is nothing to worry about. Remember that although the energies in the LHC are really massive, there are other similarly high-energy natural events occuring throughout the universe, and they appear not to routinely form micro-black-holes that consume everything around them. Creating stable (i.e.: big) black holes appears to be a comparatively rare event.
Some people are not appeased by the above arguments and point out that our current theory of particle physics may be lacking in some unforseen way, and we will destroy ourselves. Then again, the only reason to think a black hole will form at all is because of the current theory of particle physics. If that theory is wrong, it's more likely that... well... no black hole will form at all. (Again, look around the universe and notice the distinct lack of universe-consuming mega-black-holes.)
government exists to protect us from other people, not from ourselves?
I agree with you... but just to play devil's advocate for a second here:
When someone creates a traffic accident, it endangers them, but it also endangers everyone else in the vicinity. A car swerving to miss an inattentive pedestrian may hit another (more attentive) pedestrian, or another car, or whatever. A traffic accident can quickly escalate and involve many people/cars. When people drive unsafely, for instance, they are not just putting themselves in danger, but everyone else on the road, too.
That having been said, I'm not convinced that 'inattentive pedestrians' are a sufficient menace to public safety that we need special laws to bring them under control.
Slashdot Mirror
For anyone interested, the figures in the paper show clearly the structuring of water in layers near the surface. Moreover they directly measure that the viscosity jumps up considerably for distances less than 2 nm. The viscosity goes from the bulk water value (9E-4 Pa*s) when far from the surface, and increases to as high as 50 Pa*s (500 Poise or 50,000 cP) in the last 0.5 nm. To give you an rough idea of what this means, note that 50,000 cP is similar to the (bulk) viscosity of things like honey or ketchup (for a random table of values, see here or here).
Of course this higher-viscosity persists only over a very short-range, but understanding these "nano-mechanical" properties is crucial for the design and construction of future nano-scale devices.
There's actually alot of evidence in the literature suggesting that water forms a "structured layer" on hydrophillic (water-compatible) surfaces, and around hydrophillic objects dispersed in water. For instance the mobility of water that structures around proteins has been described in the literature as "ice-like." These measurements are typically based on the density of the water or using things like conductivity to infer mobility.
So the notion of water forming solid-like structures near surfaces is not entirely new. However, direct mechanical measurements of the mobility/viscosity of those last few atomic layers of water are not easy, so this paper certainly adds a valuable contribution to the field.
The actual scientific paper in question can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.75.115415
You know, I've also had this "do we really need faster computers?" thought more than once.
Yet inevitably I eventually encounter a situation where my computer is having trouble keeping up, and I'm reminded that, yes, I would indeed like to have a faster computer, and I'd be willing to pay for it (up to some level, obviously).
These "I want more speed" situations don't come up that frequently, but they do come up. And I can think of millions of ways that having arbitrarily more computing power could be put to use. For instance, there are many operations that take a second or two on a current computer (rendering something, refreshing a complicated spreadsheet and graph, doing some data lookup, file searching, etc.). If these operations were somehow 1000X faster, then you could imagine having a slider that the user can move around, and the given operation updates effectively in real-time. That has major useability advantages.
This is but one example, of course. I understand that many people only do web-browsing and email, but I nevertheless maintain that there is a whole world of useability and features that we have not yet touched, simply because it would be too processor intensive to implement. (I'm sure even grandma would appreciate it if after drag-and-dropping a 2Gb video file into an email, it automatically transcodes it down to a 20Mb video file, and it only takes 0.1 second to do so.) Then again, maybe such advances are not "worth it"--but of course the same could be said of any advance in computer software/hardware.
The point is that if your computer eventually breaks, and you need a new one, would you rather get an identical one for $800, or one that is 100X faster for $800 ?
In fact there's alot of debate whether Moore's Law will break-down due to fundamental barriers in the physics, or whether we will first hit an economic wall: no bank will be willing (or able?) to fund the fantastically expensive construction of the new technologies.
But with patents, there is no reciprocity of control between proprietary and open-source groups. The proprietary guys patent everything they can think of, and then they agree not to sue each other. But no one in the open-source software world is patenting their ideas. This is because it would cost too much, and would be totally against their principles (which is that software patents are invalid to begin with). So the FLOSS camp has no "patent ammunition" to fight back with. Their only weapon is appeals to prior art and the fundamental intention of patents (that implementations, not ideas, are meant to be patented). But in practise this means a costly legal battle.
So, really, there is nothing the FLOSS camp can sue MS for doing... there are no "open source patents." (There are indeed initiatives to address this... we'll see how they work out.)
As to the "very good risk of being sued", I guess that's the very core of the debate. It's really unclear whether Microsoft could win an anti-Linux patent case in court. (Others have tried without success.) I guess some companies want this protection not to avoid losing a court case per se, but to avoid the cost of going to court at all. But like I said, by accepting the patent deal you make it impossible to ever credibly defend yourself against Microsoft's claims that you owe them money.
I don't understand what the companies signing these deals are thinking. It seems like suicide to me. You sign the deal, and MS agrees not to sue you for awhile. But eventually you have to re-sign the deal, and MS can dictate whatever terms they want... because if you don't sign the deal, you won't be able to distribute Linux anymore?
After all, MS can argue in court that your acceptance of the prior deal was basically an admission that you wouldn't have been allowed to distribute Linux without their blessing. So as soon as you sign the deal, you are forever controlled by MS (at least with regard to Linux distribution). Why would a company purposefully agree to have one of their business plans depend upon the whims of another company?
I typically don't like conspiracy theories, but it is almost as if Microsoft is creating these deals (using shady behind-the-scenes payoffs?) in order to create a climate where they can, eventually, either crush Linux through patents, or at least make money off of every Linux sale.
Yes, exactly, all ISPs are in it for the money, not just "the bad ones."
The Pirate Bay is a bad example, since they are not doing anything illegal (according to Swedish law). A better example would be a phishing site. Rather than going after the ISP for hosting it, you would be better off tracking down the people running it and putting them in jail.
Obviously you should also notify the ISP and get a subpoena if necessary to shut down the site. But your original call to "drive the bad ISPs out of business" is, in my opinion, misplaced. After all, the bad sites can easily move to other ISPs.
So you're saying that the "bad ISPs" are the ones that "host anything (legal or not) as long as the money is right" which I suppose by implication means that the "good ISPs" are the ones that "only host appropriate, sanctioned content."
That's weird because I would have said the exact opposite: the "bad ISPs" are the ones that enforce their opinions of right and wrong onto their customers, thereby discriminating and censoring; whereas the "good ISPs" are those that behave as common carriers and don't interfere with the content their customers store or transmit (except in the case of a subpoena).
You ask the question "how do you put the bad ones out of business?" But the question is misplaced. The aim should not be to put "bad ISPs" out of business to stop "bad websites" from existing, anymore than we should aim to destroy "bad roads" for facilitating the transportation of criminals. Instead you should target the "bad websites" themselves. If they are doing something illegal, then make them stop. If they are not doing something illegal, then let them exist. In any case, leave the ISPs out of it.
This technology is another step along to road to widespread technology exploiting Terahertz radiation, which is the region of the EM-spectrum between IR and microwaves. Near the end of the article, they mention the possibility of creating imaging systems that can, for example, see through clothes. These applications of so-called T-rays have in fact already been demonstrated. For example, the image in this article shows a man concealing a knife, which is easily visible in the T-ray image. (See also some other pictures here.) T-rays reflect strongly off of metals but can penetrate to varying extents through things like clothing and tissue. The military and security applications are obvious. However it would also bring up new kinds of medical imaging, and has been investigated for quality control, too (for example, scanning the inside of foods in assembly lines, etc.). In the previous link I put, there is an example of scanning through a Hershey bar, where you can see the positions of the nuts.
Suffice it to say this is an area of active research that may have many, many applications.
However using bad documents to crash Word is still a flaw in Word, in my opinion. The application should just say "Can't open bad/corrupted document" and let the user keep working. In the blog he says: I understand the rationale, but I would argue it's rather sloppy programming that uses a crash as a means to prevent such bad things from happening. Exceptions can be thrown, but they should be caught and used to halt the "bad actions", and revert back to a normal program state.
Obviously it is better to crash than to execute arbitrary enemy code. However it's better still to just refuse to execute arbitrary code, but otherwise keep running. The problem with using crashing as a security system is that then the "bad guys" will try to crash your application on purpose (calling it a DoS is a stretch, mind you), which opens up new security problems. (A crashing app may expose other security vulnerabilities, disclose otherwise protected information, destabilize other apps/the OS, etc.)
I am fully aware that writing bug-free software is impossible. Ultimately, it is unavoidable that crashes will occur. When they do occur, they should be handled as gracefully as possible. However one should not defend one's code (and coding flaws) by saying that "sure it crashes--but the crashes are part of our carefully engineered recovery mechanism!" That's a lame excuse, because if you're aware of a consistent crash condition, you should be able to code so that instead of crashing, the program does something more friendly.
I see what you're saying, but I was careful to say "quality/budget ratio" and not simply "quality."
I've seen some independent films that were maybe 1/4 as good (in a technical sense) as big-budget Hollywood movies, but their budget was 1/20 or 1/100 of the movie I'm comparing it to. My point is only that independent movies seem to get "more bang for your buck" than big movies, which suggests that it is possible to make movies of a certain quality level with a more limited budget than what Hollywood uses.
I'm not saying that you can make a slick film with awesome special effects without spending some money--I'm theorizing that Hollywood is very far from making movies optimally (in an economic sense), and that the budgets of their movies are unnecessarily large.
This assertion: caught my eye. Actually I would say it's an untested hypothesis that movies are expensive. Currently movie production is basically a monopoly (actually a cartel). By definition monopolies have no competition, hence there is no incentive to try and make things cheaper. This gives rise to the massive salaries and creative accounting that Hollywood engages in. (Somehow, on paper, they actually have razor-thin profits even when the movie made 10-times as much money as the supposed budget.)
If Hollywood were replaced with something new, that was actually a competitive marketplace to make decent movies at the lowest price, I bet they would cost only a fraction of what they cost now. I imagine a movie that nowadays costs $30 million could actually be made for $600,000 once salaries became more reasonable, advertising were less extensive, and studios were forced to optimize their workflow to keep the budget down. The quality/budget ratio of independent films lends credence to this theory.
Current movie prices are massively inflated because they are a monopoly. If that monopoly were removed, I bet the new price of movies would be low enough that people wouldn't bother with unauthorized duplication... because the genuine article would be cheap enough already.
The problem with what you describe is that the hacking groups are basically engaged in a (friendly?) competition with each other. All the hacker groups know that any copy-protection will eventually be broken, but "the fun" is in trying to do it *first*. So if one group kept quiet and tried to amass a bunch of cool hacks, they would be "beat" by another group who releases news that they've cracked device X or extracted title key Y. No matter how quiet some hacker groups decide to be, there will always be other groups who don't want to stay quiet. Hence there's no point in trying to keep it secret. If you've got a crack, you may as well take credit for it right away.
Add to this the fact that hacking these devices in general will go much faster if everyone shares what information they've obtained thus far (e.g. the open source philosophy). This also avoids wasted effort on duplicate hacks. For better or worse, it's a fact of life that these cracks will come early and often.
(Note: All of the above is pure speculation. If any of the members of said groups wish to clarify their motivations for releasing hacks early and often, please do so!)
Suffice it to say that a doctor is likely to write an email like:
"Ted, I just read the news about Viagra in the New England Journal of Medicine. Very interesting results, though the error bars are a bit large to draw any major conclusions just yet. What do you think?"
Whereas a doctor rarely writes email like:
"NoW ava ilable is generic V1AGRA at low price! Generic, quality, all low price now!"
The point is that modern spam filters don't just look for "bad words" but consider relative word frequencies, the sender and receiver fields, word correlations, formatting elements, URLs, etc. Spam filters in your email client will be trained against email you typically send/receive, and so can be even more precise. Spammers of course try to make their emails include words so that they end up looking like real email, but if the filter is good enough, then the only way to get past it is to send an email that now lacks those critical spam elements (like the link you're supposed to click to buy the generic drug or whatever)...
You're right--but the size of Gmail gives them another advantage. In those marginal cases where the spam filter isn't sure about an email (is this spam or a mailing list?) it has the advantage of having a huge number of people checking all the emails. That is, the users do the final check.
I have received a spam to my gmail account exactly once. And when I did, shocked, I clicked the "mark as spam" button. The point is that this spam was probably sent to millions of Gmail users, and the algorithm wasn't sure how to categorize it. But because I clicked "spam" (and probably a few other people did, too), it was marked as spam for everyone. So most users never say it in their inbox. Thus only a dozen out of the million recipients was ever bothered by the spam. Conversely, an email list would receive no (or very few) "mark as spam" clicks, and would be allowed to pass. So basically the Gmail userbase acts the workforce to continually train the spam filter, and moreover to detect new spam within minutes of it being sent.
It's hard to beat a system like that. But the point is that it relies on the large number of users who are all (effectively) sharing their spam training sets with each other in realtime.
This is not to say that the baseline algorithm that Gmail implements isn't quite effective, but the point is that Gmail can use the users to resolve those tricky false-positive and false-negative situations.
While I agree that "being an adult" has many self-imposed restrictions (paying bills, holding down a job, taking care of dependents, being reliable, etc.), I have to disagree that an adult has less freedom than a teenager in high-school.
Frankly, alot of high-school was learning to fit into a mold (both for your peers and teachers), and following rules. Yes, to a certain extent you have to deal with those kinds of rules in "real life," but frankly I feel much more free and empowered now as an adult than I ever did as a teenager.
Part of it is financial independence, of course. But there's also much less fear of "not fitting in" or whatever. I mean, in high-school I would never mention to people that I played tabletop RPGs in my free time. Now, as an adult, I really don't care who knows (even though it is even less "normal" for an adult to play RPGs...). The restrictions of jobs and rent are nothing compared to the restrictions of high-school (and, for some people, their parents). Moreover, the very fact that these restrictions are self-imposed makes a huge difference.
All I can say to readers who are still stuck in High-School is: "Don't worry... Life gets better!"
I mostly agree with your comment, and hope it gets modded-up. However:
Notice that this does not restrict adults, and it does not constrict what anyone (including minors) do in the privacy of their own home.
That's where you are very, very wrong. It may not restrict adult's gameplay (for now), but the only way to enforce these rules is, as mentioned, using "registration" and "ID cards" and things like that. This type of tracking most definately imposes a restriction on minors and adults alike, and very specifically on their privacy. In fact, in a country like China, I'm sorry to say that this would have a chilling effect even if the data thereby obtained were not used for anything nefarious.
Freedom and privacy are very important things (yes, even to minors!). All too often our freedoms are slowly eroded by heaping on enough of these seemingly innocuous laws (especially the "but its for the children" kind of laws). It may seem silly, but, yes, we must take a stand against these kinds of seemingly-good laws.
My sentiments exactly. I spent alot of time looking at the different Internet offerings when I moved to where I am now. Eventually I went with Speakeasy, and I've been quite happy with them. Yes, they are more expensive, but they don't block port 80, which means I can run a proper webserver, and they don't throttle any traffic. Plus when you talk to someone on the phone or via email, they actually know what they are talking about. (When they asked "how did you hear about us" and I said "Slashdot" his reply was "cool" and not "what's that?" Similarly when I said I'd be running Linux servers.)
Being owned by Best Buy can't possibly end well for Speakeasy customers. The Best Buy model is to cut corners and slash anything that is not part of their mainstay. How many Linux computers do they sell at Best Buy? So if Best Buy puts pressure on Speakeasy to appeal to the "most common customer" (i.e.: only cares about lowest price, doesn't think about quality of data connection), then Speakeasy will simply become another run-of-the-mill DSL provider.... which means that all their customers will disappear.
Basically Speakeasy has carved out a niche where they offer higher-than-average service to those who are willing to pay for it. If they lose sight of that, they will lose their customer base and die a painful death.
"The total number of reported vulnerabilities for Windows was lower than for others, therefore it is the most secure."
Wow. That kind of logic would get you a failing grade in any undergraduate class. When TFA actually goes into the breakdown of "severe" versus "not severe." The article even says: and: So having 2 severe vulnerabilities makes it less secure than Windows having 12 severe vulnerabilities? Something doesn't add up. That's even assuming their numbers are correct, which I sincerely doubt. Another flaw in logic (that we've seen many times) is that the total number of publically disclosed vulnerabilities turns out to be higher for the development model that involves full-disclosure, rather than the one that involves hiding information as much as possible. This isn't exactly surprising, and says nothing about how many vulnerabilities actually exist.
Counting vulnerabilities seems like a very silly way to gauge security. It seems like a truer test would be to set up a machine (or rather, a statisically significant bunch of machines) and measure the average time to system compromise. Even this technique has its flaws, of course, but at least it's better than some arbitrary counting technique.
To my mind this is the actual problem with OSS. Accountability is nill. With MS products the same defects are there (though less so as it turns out (predictably)), but in their case at least we know who to blame and can expect the product to be fixed. With OSS I see no way to assure that.
That's not even remotely true. You expound the myth that there is accountability in proprietary software, whereas there is not with OSS. In reality, after you pay for your proprietary software, you have absolutely no guarantee of bug fixes, and no guarantees that changes to the product won't break backwards compatibility (e.g. "mutate"). Don't like it? You can either stick to the current version, or buy the next version, or pay them more money for support contracts that make guarantees.
With OSS, after you freely download the software, you also have no guarantees of bug fixes or interface stability. Don't like it? You can stick to the current version, or freely download other versions, or pay those who make the software for support contracts that make those guarantees, or pay a third party to make those guarantees, or hire people in-house to modify the code to suit your needs, or contract a third party to make those code changes, or port your data to a different software product.
In any case, it's up to a business to evaluate their software needs on a case-by-case basis. But please stop spreading this "because you pay for it there is some guarantee of accountability" myth. Anyone who has tried using phone support for commodity software, or who has read through an EULA, knows this to be a joke.
You're absolutely right, and I hate it.
I use Linux extensively (at home and at work), but I'm always afraid to suggest it as a solution for others. Because then somehow I become responsible when things don't go perfectly smoothly. If instead I just recommend a "status quo" solution, then any bugs encountered will just be treated as "business as usual." The reality is that any software deployment will have annoyances along the way (whether Linux-based or Windows-based). The difference is exactly what you describe: "No one is fired for choosing Microsoft" whereas if you recommend Linux, you become "the guy to blame."
I'm not sure how to fix this state of affairs. It's a totally unreasonable double-standard, but it will exist whenever there is a defacto standard like MS has become (and IBM was, at one time). I think this is actually one of the major (and usually unmentioned) roadblocks to Linux adoption. Yes, you have some vocal Linux advocates... but the majority of us who really understand the advantages of Linux are scared into silence. (Or maybe I'm just a coward.)
The short answer is: don't worry.
All black holes emit "Hawking radiation", which causes them to slowly lose mass. For black holes below a certain size, this evaporation due to Hawking radiation will be so fast that they won't even have a chance to grow through matter accumulation before they evaporate into nothing. I know this doesn't match up with the pop-science description of black holes--where they consume all matter around them until nothing is left--but suffice it to say that the pop-science explanation leaves out many of the important details.
So, again, the creation of micro-black-holes is nothing to worry about. Remember that although the energies in the LHC are really massive, there are other similarly high-energy natural events occuring throughout the universe, and they appear not to routinely form micro-black-holes that consume everything around them. Creating stable (i.e.: big) black holes appears to be a comparatively rare event.
Some people are not appeased by the above arguments and point out that our current theory of particle physics may be lacking in some unforseen way, and we will destroy ourselves. Then again, the only reason to think a black hole will form at all is because of the current theory of particle physics. If that theory is wrong, it's more likely that... well... no black hole will form at all. (Again, look around the universe and notice the distinct lack of universe-consuming mega-black-holes.)
government exists to protect us from other people, not from ourselves?
I agree with you... but just to play devil's advocate for a second here:
When someone creates a traffic accident, it endangers them, but it also endangers everyone else in the vicinity. A car swerving to miss an inattentive pedestrian may hit another (more attentive) pedestrian, or another car, or whatever. A traffic accident can quickly escalate and involve many people/cars. When people drive unsafely, for instance, they are not just putting themselves in danger, but everyone else on the road, too.
That having been said, I'm not convinced that 'inattentive pedestrians' are a sufficient menace to public safety that we need special laws to bring them under control.