They closed their Australian manufacturing plant recently, at the loss of several hundred jobs.
I suspect, however, that there will continue to be a small level of demand for film from analog photography hobbyists for many years to come. It might become a cottege industry, but there'll be an industry of sorts.
While you're at it, read the whole Wikipedia article, and the transcript of the radio series. Specifically, read the bit about Keynesian economics, and how stimulating aggregate demand can encourage more productive use of capacity where it is underutilized. This arguably happened with the development of low-cost Indian outsourcing services. Second, the radio feature suggests that the trigger of the Y2K issue caused businesses to think about their IT infrastructure and how to improve it in ways that made them more efficient in the long term, more so than they would have done without that pressure.
The amount of computation back to the original keys makes any attack against the system imprudent at best, and the use of derivative keys and multiple master keys per device means that even if one were cracked, the others in the device would continue to allow consumer devices to function... which avoids consumer backlash.
Call me ignorant here, but surely if one key were cracked (by whatever means) on a specific device, wouldn't the others likely be vulnerable to the same attack?
The movie could be altered slightly when burned...with some sort of numeric code within the movie video identifying the original purchaser (how could you do this?..Is it possible?)
This is called "watermarking". A number of companies have developed technologies to do it. All the schemes that have been tried for this purpose have been cracked, as far as I know.
If somebody decrypts a movie using their private key and it ends up on the internet, you would not be able to stop it, but you could find the original purchaser and come down on them like a ton of bricks to "make an example".
How? Are you going to insist the device somehow transmits its private key (or a hash thereof) back to a central server? Otherwise, that key is safely hidden on the EEPROM of one of millions of players.
If they made a software patch containing a new player key available, that patch would surely fall into the hands of an attacker. They might encrypt the patch with an "update key", but, remember, the "player key" has already been extracted from your player. If the player key was vulnerable, the update key probably will be too.
The point of this article was that the US government is spending a lot of money to deploy stealthy spy satellites. The idea is that nobody but the US knows where these are, so the "bad guys" can't time their activities to avoid the spysat passes. It was also designed to make it more difficult for the bad guys to shoot spy satellites down.
As far as terrorists go, they're not going to be shooting satellites out of orbit any time soon, and I doubt they'll be tracking them without help from a nation-state. For dealing with terrorists, it would make more sense to spend your money on launching more conventional sats, so you had 24-hour coverage of the entire globe.
Unless 24-hour coverage is impossible, the only reason to have stealthy spy satellites is if you think somebody's going to try and take them down in a conflict. Or, alternatively, the company that's got the contract is a big campaign doner.
Many Realms have their own honours system...
on
Sir Peter Molyneux?
·
· Score: 1
Many Commonwealth Realms have their own honors systems. Australia has its own military and civilian honours, for instance. MBE's, OBE's, KBE's and CBE's are pretty much restricted to Britons these days.
IBM isn't entirely stupid
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
IBM is an enormous company that has been around since 1911 (or the 1890's if you count its predecessors). It continues to make solid profits, and has done more often than not. It has survived the introduction of the digital computer, the minicomputer, microcomputers, and the internet, and is still going strong. Maybe they're doing something right...
Seriously, basing your business plan around hiring a bunch of geniuses is not automatically a smart idea. Geniuses can be lazy, they can be terribly hard to manage because think they know better than their managers, and the supply of grade-A ones is rather limited and competition for them will remain pretty hot. It may well be smarter if your business is set up in such a way that you didn't require all your employees to be geniuses, but through good training and good procedures equipped them to deliver the services that you wish to offer.
Sure, maybe your business is going to be less flexible and adaptable this way. Maybe you're going to need more staff, and more intensive oversight, than the "hire geniuses" route. But the supply and cost of moderately competent, reliable staff is much, much more favourable than competing for geniuses.
In 20 years time, when Google is a mature company trying to protect its patch, let's see whether people are chewing off their right arm to work there, and how the company copes then.
That's entirely configurable. Under Linux, on my Pentium-M laptop I run cpufreqd, which allows you to configure exactly how you want the clock speed to change under power conditions and cpu load. If the CPU load goes up, mine cranks all the way up to full speed again.
I believe that the Windows drivers allow you to do the same thing, if you want.
As for your second point... a diesel engine that's been running for about ten minutes is hot enough that it doesn't need the glow plugs.
That's quite correct. Glow plugs are not necessary if the engine is warm. In fact, diesels will start fine "cold" without glow plugs in civilized climates - we regularly do so in temperatures down to about 10 Celsius (50 Farenheit).
There is a world of difference between programming something to *act* as though it has emotions, and something actually having an emotional or original response.
I'll accept your argument - as soon as you convince me you're really annoyed about the article and aren't just convincingly simulating annoyance:)
(With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke and whomever he stole the comment from...)
Seriously, while you are correct in saying that present computers don't have anything resembling consciousness, who knows what the longer-term future holds?
The only scenario that's been presented so far where a terrorist attack might depend on GPS is the "improvised cruise missile" attack or its minor variant the "improvised JDAM attack". I can think of another one, however - the courier bomb, where you have your bomb couriered (or added to a vehicle without the driver's knowledge) to the place of interest and have it trigger by GPS locator when it gets there. In any case, let's examine the "cruise missile" case. How much harder does it make things if GPS is shut off?
Well, GPS is readily available, cheap, and highly accurate, but there's some pretty simple alternatives out there: radio navigation systems have been around since the 1930's, and could be made to work off radio or TV broadcasts. If a terrorist is sufficiently skilled to engineer a cruise missile, I doubt that they'd have any trouble building one of these. Not accurate enough? Need a backup plan in case the government finds out about your plan and turns off existing radio transmitters? Simply get three or four of your terrorist mates to determine the exact location of several high points within a couple of miles of your target, and wire up some portable beacons. A couple of minutes before the missile reaches its targets, turn the "terminal guidance" beacons on...
Frankly, I'd prefer if the practice of using null-terminated arrays of unknown length as string storage went away entirely and people used bounds-checked string types. If you must use C, use a proper string-handling library, for fsck's sake!
Some of these exploits are "real" security holes, in that they are exploitable by things users might actually do - playing a media file, or printing something.
Others are pretty implausible, for instance the jpegtoavi exploit, which requires the user to run the jpegtoavi program on a set of files provided by an attacker.
On my quick perusal, the nastiest holes seem to be the changepassword hole, a local root exploit, and the twoholes in cups, particularly the first one, which straightforwardly gets the attacker access to user "lp" where they can monitor everything that gets printed.
One thing that is a bit surprising and disappointing is that so many of these bugs are from well-known bad coding practices. Why the hell is *anyone* still using strcat in distributed software, for instance?
and you asked farmers in the 17th century what they wanted out of their horses, all of them would want a horse that could pull a bit bigger plough, had a bit better endurance, and ate a little less. None of them would have said "Hey, what if we could replace the horse with a tractor".
I think the key point is that merely listening to your customers is not enough. You have to show some creativity in figuring out how to meet their requirements if you really want to innovate.
As well as the projects people have mentioned, there is beagle for GNOME. They seem to be using a slightly different approach than the one I've outlined: they patch the kernel to notify the system when files are modified.
It wouldn't be hard to build a Linux tool to do this. There are indexing algorithms in the literature - heck, one of my undergraduate lecturers wrote the book on this stuff. You'd have a niced daemon or a cronjob that goes looking for new files (in specified directories - one great thing about Linux systems is the file system tends to be a lot more organised than Windows, where stuff gets put everywhere). You'd have a plugin system to extract plain text from the various file formats. You could then have multiple frontends - console, GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the GNOME case you'd probably integrate it with nautilus.
One thing you'd have to think carefully about is privacy and security; how do you stop a user finding stuff out about files they're not entitled to read?
I'd start it myself except that I have a thesis to do:)
Have a look at this report, claiming 24,000 deaths a year as a result of coal pollution. This press release mentions a figure of 60,000 deaths in the USA, but doesn't cite a source.
Now, the first study was commissioned by an environmental group, so factor that in. However, if accurate, that's comparable to the number of people who die in car accidents each year in the US (about 40,000).
Why should that piss you off? As a citizen of the US, I absolutely DO NOT want a third party to be able to accurately aim a missile at the White House, the Capitol, or a nuclear power plant.
You grow up. Anybody with the technology to build a missile with enough range, payload and accuracy to hit those targets effectively has the ability to make a nuclear weapon - which makes the issue of accurate targetting moot.
Aside from his purely academic accomplishments, Knuth wrote TeX pretty much on his own.
Another notable omissions is Fred Brooks, chief architect for OS/360 and writer of the famous The Mythical Man-Month - though it's hard to tell what the criteria for getting on the list is...
If I'm not mistaken, the production of CO2 (Carbon-dioxide) is not a big deal, it's CO (Carbon-monoxide) that we don't want.
You're mistaken. Carbon monoxide is poisonous - it's one of the reasons why cars are fitted with all the anti-pollution gear they now have, which either ensures that carbon monoxide isn't produced or converts it into carbon dioxide. To a large extent, CO is a solved problem in the Western world.
Carbon dioxide, while not poisonous (except in really, really high concentrations), is, according to mainstream climate science, the major cause of global warming. However, carbon dioxide emissions are a fundamental consequence of burning fossil fuels. The only way to reduce CO2 emissions are to not burn fossil fuels (ie energy efficiency, renewable energy, or nuclear energy), or carbon sequestration.
Public transportation is not practical for most of the US. It works great in large cities but in small towns public transportaion is not effective.
Um, no. Public transport works perfectly well in reasonably small cities across Europe. The main reason why it works there and it doesn't in comparably-sized American cities is the population density within the cities, and the fact that commerce in European towns and cities is designed/has evolved more around pedestrians and public transport rather than cars.
I live in the midwest and must drive 45 miles to work everyday. I could move but do not want to. (I hate large cities.)
Must? Must? Look, I'm sure you have perfectly good reasons for choosing a lifestyle that requires you to drive 45 (90?) miles a day, but as you said, it's a choice. If fuel cost you $10 per gallon, would you still live that way?
That being said, your suggestions to reduce the impact of the lifestyle choices you've made are very sensible. Another one to add would be better insulation and more efficient appliances: for instance, do you really need a refrigerator the size of a Japanese apartment?
schizophrenia, depression, unemployment...
on
How to Fix U.S. Patents
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Look, I fully support the legalization of the stuff, but there's evidence that marijuana can seriously screw with the heads of some people.
This New Scientist article discusses the evidence for a link between regular pot use and schizophrenia. There is also a possibly a link between pot and depression, but it's hard to tell because regular dope smokers often fail at education and end up unemployed - not exactly a great outcome either.
IP activists in America might do very well to pay more attention to what its government does in FTA negotiations. Not only does it force the rest of the world to sign up to your stupid friggin rules, it will make them much more difficult for America to change them when the time comes that you start winning the arguments in Congress.
The Australian FTA is particularly bad for Australia (from a purely monetary American perspective, you should be glad the Australian government is such a ham-fisted negotiator), but I don't think it's particularly unique here. In fact, FTAs are bad news all round - and this is coming from a perspective of mostly being in favour of free trade. They force all sorts of stupid tracking costs so you can prove that you're not acting as a transshipment point for goods from countries not covered by the FTA, cause all sorts of distortions, and serve as a convenient political cover to force through all sorts of measures multinationals like but citizens aren't so keen on.
Frankly, I think the rest of the world should gang up on the United States at the next round of WTO negotiations and demand looser IP laws. Even if they don't get them it's a hell of a bargaining chip to get the US to play ball on a lot of other issues.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect, however, that there will continue to be a small level of demand for film from analog photography hobbyists for many years to come. It might become a cottege industry, but there'll be an industry of sorts.
While you're at it, read the whole Wikipedia article, and the transcript of the radio series. Specifically, read the bit about Keynesian economics, and how stimulating aggregate demand can encourage more productive use of capacity where it is underutilized. This arguably happened with the development of low-cost Indian outsourcing services. Second, the radio feature suggests that the trigger of the Y2K issue caused businesses to think about their IT infrastructure and how to improve it in ways that made them more efficient in the long term, more so than they would have done without that pressure.
Call me ignorant here, but surely if one key were cracked (by whatever means) on a specific device, wouldn't the others likely be vulnerable to the same attack?
This is called "watermarking". A number of companies have developed technologies to do it. All the schemes that have been tried for this purpose have been cracked, as far as I know.
How? Are you going to insist the device somehow transmits its private key (or a hash thereof) back to a central server? Otherwise, that key is safely hidden on the EEPROM of one of millions of players.
If they made a software patch containing a new player key available, that patch would surely fall into the hands of an attacker. They might encrypt the patch with an "update key", but, remember, the "player key" has already been extracted from your player. If the player key was vulnerable, the update key probably will be too.
As far as terrorists go, they're not going to be shooting satellites out of orbit any time soon, and I doubt they'll be tracking them without help from a nation-state. For dealing with terrorists, it would make more sense to spend your money on launching more conventional sats, so you had 24-hour coverage of the entire globe.
Unless 24-hour coverage is impossible, the only reason to have stealthy spy satellites is if you think somebody's going to try and take them down in a conflict. Or, alternatively, the company that's got the contract is a big campaign doner.
Many Commonwealth Realms have their own honors systems. Australia has its own military and civilian honours, for instance. MBE's, OBE's, KBE's and CBE's are pretty much restricted to Britons these days.
Seriously, basing your business plan around hiring a bunch of geniuses is not automatically a smart idea. Geniuses can be lazy, they can be terribly hard to manage because think they know better than their managers, and the supply of grade-A ones is rather limited and competition for them will remain pretty hot. It may well be smarter if your business is set up in such a way that you didn't require all your employees to be geniuses, but through good training and good procedures equipped them to deliver the services that you wish to offer.
Sure, maybe your business is going to be less flexible and adaptable this way. Maybe you're going to need more staff, and more intensive oversight, than the "hire geniuses" route. But the supply and cost of moderately competent, reliable staff is much, much more favourable than competing for geniuses.
In 20 years time, when Google is a mature company trying to protect its patch, let's see whether people are chewing off their right arm to work there, and how the company copes then.
I believe that the Windows drivers allow you to do the same thing, if you want.
That's quite correct. Glow plugs are not necessary if the engine is warm. In fact, diesels will start fine "cold" without glow plugs in civilized climates - we regularly do so in temperatures down to about 10 Celsius (50 Farenheit).
Just store your pr0n on an encrypted filesystem.
I'll accept your argument - as soon as you convince me you're really annoyed about the article and aren't just convincingly simulating annoyance :)
(With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke and whomever he stole the comment from...)
Seriously, while you are correct in saying that present computers don't have anything resembling consciousness, who knows what the longer-term future holds?
Well, GPS is readily available, cheap, and highly accurate, but there's some pretty simple alternatives out there: radio navigation systems have been around since the 1930's, and could be made to work off radio or TV broadcasts. If a terrorist is sufficiently skilled to engineer a cruise missile, I doubt that they'd have any trouble building one of these. Not accurate enough? Need a backup plan in case the government finds out about your plan and turns off existing radio transmitters? Simply get three or four of your terrorist mates to determine the exact location of several high points within a couple of miles of your target, and wire up some portable beacons. A couple of minutes before the missile reaches its targets, turn the "terminal guidance" beacons on...
Frankly, I'd prefer if the practice of using null-terminated arrays of unknown length as string storage went away entirely and people used bounds-checked string types. If you must use C, use a proper string-handling library, for fsck's sake!
Others are pretty implausible, for instance the jpegtoavi exploit, which requires the user to run the jpegtoavi program on a set of files provided by an attacker.
On my quick perusal, the nastiest holes seem to be the changepassword hole, a local root exploit, and the two holes in cups, particularly the first one, which straightforwardly gets the attacker access to user "lp" where they can monitor everything that gets printed.
One thing that is a bit surprising and disappointing is that so many of these bugs are from well-known bad coding practices. Why the hell is *anyone* still using strcat in distributed software, for instance?
I think the key point is that merely listening to your customers is not enough. You have to show some creativity in figuring out how to meet their requirements if you really want to innovate.
As well as the projects people have mentioned, there is beagle for GNOME. They seem to be using a slightly different approach than the one I've outlined: they patch the kernel to notify the system when files are modified.
One thing you'd have to think carefully about is privacy and security; how do you stop a user finding stuff out about files they're not entitled to read?
I'd start it myself except that I have a thesis to do :)
Now, the first study was commissioned by an environmental group, so factor that in. However, if accurate, that's comparable to the number of people who die in car accidents each year in the US (about 40,000).
You grow up. Anybody with the technology to build a missile with enough range, payload and accuracy to hit those targets effectively has the ability to make a nuclear weapon - which makes the issue of accurate targetting moot.
Another notable omissions is Fred Brooks, chief architect for OS/360 and writer of the famous The Mythical Man-Month - though it's hard to tell what the criteria for getting on the list is...
You're mistaken. Carbon monoxide is poisonous - it's one of the reasons why cars are fitted with all the anti-pollution gear they now have, which either ensures that carbon monoxide isn't produced or converts it into carbon dioxide. To a large extent, CO is a solved problem in the Western world.
Carbon dioxide, while not poisonous (except in really, really high concentrations), is, according to mainstream climate science, the major cause of global warming. However, carbon dioxide emissions are a fundamental consequence of burning fossil fuels. The only way to reduce CO2 emissions are to not burn fossil fuels (ie energy efficiency, renewable energy, or nuclear energy), or carbon sequestration.
Um, no. Public transport works perfectly well in reasonably small cities across Europe. The main reason why it works there and it doesn't in comparably-sized American cities is the population density within the cities, and the fact that commerce in European towns and cities is designed/has evolved more around pedestrians and public transport rather than cars.
Must? Must? Look, I'm sure you have perfectly good reasons for choosing a lifestyle that requires you to drive 45 (90?) miles a day, but as you said, it's a choice. If fuel cost you $10 per gallon, would you still live that way?
That being said, your suggestions to reduce the impact of the lifestyle choices you've made are very sensible. Another one to add would be better insulation and more efficient appliances: for instance, do you really need a refrigerator the size of a Japanese apartment?
This New Scientist article discusses the evidence for a link between regular pot use and schizophrenia. There is also a possibly a link between pot and depression, but it's hard to tell because regular dope smokers often fail at education and end up unemployed - not exactly a great outcome either.
The Australian FTA is particularly bad for Australia (from a purely monetary American perspective, you should be glad the Australian government is such a ham-fisted negotiator), but I don't think it's particularly unique here. In fact, FTAs are bad news all round - and this is coming from a perspective of mostly being in favour of free trade. They force all sorts of stupid tracking costs so you can prove that you're not acting as a transshipment point for goods from countries not covered by the FTA, cause all sorts of distortions, and serve as a convenient political cover to force through all sorts of measures multinationals like but citizens aren't so keen on.
Frankly, I think the rest of the world should gang up on the United States at the next round of WTO negotiations and demand looser IP laws. Even if they don't get them it's a hell of a bargaining chip to get the US to play ball on a lot of other issues.