How about rephrasing the question: "Would you like that *other* guy to read traffic lights so he doesn't crash into you?"
Although, in most cases, a colorblind person can probably still read the traffic light positionally, e.g. red on top, yellow in the middle, green on the bottom. Might be a problem on a *really* dark night if you can see the lightbulb, but not the body of the traffic light - you know, when the light is 'disembodied' against the solid-black background.
I've often wondered if those one-use codes for DLC are even really legal (in the U.S.), because of the First Sale doctrine. Of course, until someone with money to spend on a lawsuit to settle the question, does, then we'll likely never know the answer.
Perhaps GameStop could sue one of the publishers on behalf of their customers, and make the case that the First Sale doctrine should prevent developers from locking DLC to a particular user.
Or, maybe some lawyer that specializes in class-actions could get a class-action suit going on behalf of the class of users who have purchased downloadable content (or downloadable games, through services like Steam, Direct2Drive, etc), based on the theory that by preventing users from exercising their second-sale rights, with regards to the DLC portion of the purchased product, the publishers have caused damages to those users (by devaluing their used copies). (I mean, if you think about it, if the resale value of used copies is reduced because of the 'missing' content, then you should be able to estimate some value for the 'free' DLC), then you added up all the copies of software which couldn't be sold at the expected resale price for a popular game like, say, Dragon Age: Origins, or Assassin's Creed 2, etc, it probably adds up to millions of dollars.
I have in my hands, right now, a blank piece of printer paper. Now, this is no *ordinary* printer paper. It's *Awesome* printer paper. How awesome is it? Well, for only $8500, *it could be yours*! With a price tag of over $8k, it would have to be awesome.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought users had to actively be using IE, and visit a malicious website, in order for IE to be a botnet-infection vector? If the users are actually *using* a different browser (which, we'll assume for the sake of argument here isn't *also* vulnerable to the malicious web site), and IE is not being used to access those sites, how is IE, as you said, "still there making botnets"?
I suppose there is still a risk that some other app you use might be hard-coded to launch IE (instead of launching the 'default browser'), and once it does, the user might get infected via IE?
I'm not exactly sure what you're complaining about? Seems to me that it would be reasonable that if you already have another browser installed, there's no reason for Windows to bother you with a ballot screen to select another browser? I think I'd be kind of annoyed, really, if it did.
I don't completely disagree with you. I mean, for one thing, if a startup had, say $1 Million in startup cash from a venture capitalist or something similar, it wouldn't be a good idea to immediately drop half of it on an office building. However, if they took out a mortgage on an office building, they might only spend something $50,000 the first year (the down-payment and closing costs being more expensive in the first year), then maybe $35,000/year after that (the numbers are, somewhat made up, but not completely - I did some 'back of the napkin' estimates: figuring that a $500,000 loan will cost you, over the course of a 20 year mortgage, around $750,000 - unless you pay it off early, which isn't a bad idea). A lease isn't usually significantly cheaper than a mortgage, although there's no downpayment, or closing costs. So maybe to lease comparable space, the same startup might pay something like $30,000/yr (including the first year).
After 10 or 15 years, the company that bought has built up a lot of equity. The company that has leased for all those years has spent the money and can never see it again. Assuming the lease ran you $30,000/yr, then after 10 years, you've spent 300,000 and have no equity. Meanwhile, the company that bought might have spent $390,000, but might have $250,000 in equity. Meanwhile, the property has been appreciating in value.
Now, the company decides to move to a larger property. The company that sells, after paying off their original mortgage, might have between $250,000 - $300,000 to put towards the downpayment on a much larger, more expensive property.
Where is the virtue in sending lease checks to a property owner who gets to build their equity at your expense? I'm just really not seeing it - unless you plan to move to other facilities every 2-3 years because of your amazingly rapid expansion. Then, I would totally agree with you - the first 2-3 years of any mortgage is mostly losses due to interest and closing costs, anyhow, so if you will be moving frequently, then yes, buying is probably a bad idea.
"They don't want all that capital tied up in property."
I suppose that depends. If a company is large enough that it has the money it needs to both expand the business, *and* buy the buildings/land it occupies, then it probably makes sense to buy. Why? Because, in the end, when you rent/lease, you are still paying the mortgage, taxes, and upkeep. It's just that you pay the money in the form of monthly (or quarterly, whatever) rent checks you pay to your landlord. Whether you call your monthly payment a 'lease' or a 'mortgage', you're still making payments for the space you use. Shouldn't you at least be building up some equity in the property?
If, on the other hand, you are a startup or small business, I'm sure it often makes sense to rent or lease for a number of reasons. . . the 'upfront' costs are probably lower. The amount you pay per month may be lower. Particularly if you are using only a small portion of an office/retail building which is sectioned up and rented out to multiple different businesses (analogous to apartments for personal housing).
But, once you have enough income to both grow and pay for a building, it very much does make sense to own, just like for individuals, it usually does make sense to own a house or condo rather than to rent the house/apartment (although, when you are going to college, or have just graduated, it usually makes sense to rent, because you don't have enough money saved for a downpayment and closing costs).
"He should create an inventory of the constituent atoms of the rover and rent out custody of individual atoms on monthly subscription to those who want bragging rights to "having" something on the moon."
But, the key point is that the user didn't generate that assembly. The user wrote a C program (granted, the program doesn't actually do any output - it just stores a string in memory, then exits). The user called the compiler to compile the program. The user then *disassembled* the object code which was created by *the compiler*. So, the assembly you see was generated (indirectly, via the objdump command), by the C compiler.
Exception: the user did create a small assembly file with the place-holder _start function. Perhaps, this example would have benefitted by the user defining the _start() function in C also, and using the compiler to compile that - not sure if that actually would have worked or not, but would have been interesting if she had tried.
One other point I'd like to make - ultimately, every C program has to have some assembly *somewhere*. When you call the printf(), printf itself either must use some assembly to interact with the operating system (in order to cause output to be sent to stdout), or printf *might* punt that off to another function, which then has some assembly inside it. The only reason you can do *any* input or output in C (or any other language for that matter) is that, at some point, somewhere, either in the compiler itself, or in a standard library, someone has provided the necessary assembly code for you.
In the case of C, the language designers decided to make the C-language pure 'logic', without any notion of input or output statements, or operating system interactioni, and do all input/output/system calls via library functions (whether you use the standard library, or a 'third-party' library [ I use the term third-party loosely here, because the 'third-party' lib might actually be provided by your compiler vendor, but it's just not the standard library]).
In one of the sections of this article, the author uses, as an example, how complex URL 'interpretation' can be for average users, going over all sorts of ways phishers can attack bank/ebay/paypal/amazon URL's.
I figured this out a long time ago. I'm very much a K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid.) advocate with regards to this particular problem. The advice I would give any 'average user' who came to me is simple: never click links, or call phone numbers, or use any other communications mechanism provided in emails purporting to come from a business entity. If it claims to come from your bank, you should probably call your bank's customer service phone number (from your bank statement or ATM card, or if you know your banks URL, open your browser and type it in yourself, or use a bookmark you have already preveiously saved in your browser from a previous visit to the bank's website) to verify if there is a problem with your account. Just take the email completely out of the equation.
That way, they don't have to judge if the email and link are legitimate or not - just don't use the email.
Links that are just to a page of photos, or a map, or something like that, are ok to click, generally, but if any link you follow from an email asks you for personal info or a login, or asks you to download something to the computer, just close the browser, step back, and do the above (e.g. calling the bank/business, or opening a new browser window and going to the proper website manually for by bookmark).
With that advice, I have to teach them exactly nothing about how to understand URLs. It's also fairly common-sense advice that most people can easily understand - it's very unlikely that the phone number on your bank statements and cards are not 'authentic'. Most bank statements probably include the URL of the bank's website, too, these days - mine definitely do.
By not following links in emails, you can avoid probably 99% of phishing attacks - no matter how cleverly they manage disguise the links in the email.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I don't see why email wouldn't be just a simple extension of the concept of 'papers, and effects'?
Further, I would ask what does the fourth amendment say about 'mail'? It doesn't, and yet, the fourth amend. still applies to the postal service (well, first class mail, anyhow).
Why should email be treated any differently, legally, than postal mail?
I just meant in comparison to some of the other Internet connections out there - I actually have the 'slowest' tier my telco is offering over the fiber. I also believe that recent Cable-Modem Tech has bumped speeds up to over 100Mbps?
My point was, that I already have a hard time actually using the bandwidth available to me - not for lack of imagination on how I could use up some bandwidth, but simply because it seems like it's almost impossible to actually get connections to any other host on the Internet that gives me a sustained throughput that even comes close to the limit advertised, because the backbones and other servers have connections which are too slow.
*If* at 10Mbps, I can't saturate the connection, how would upgrading to 100Mbps give me any real benefit? See, that's the heart of the question.
Excellent point. But, I would like to point out that the intention of my post wasn't that there weren't use-cases which could be of interest to most users which could use that bandwidth. . .
My point is that, because A) 100Mbps service will most likely NOT include 100Mbps upload speed (or even 50Mbps upload speed, most likely), and B) I don't *think* the backbones can actually handle millions of users all transferring 100Mbps data at the same time, that I *still think* the usage cases you bring are still not going to happen?
Take, for example, the HD surveillance of your house at all times - if 10 Million households across the country were trying to do that, would there really be enough bandwidth? I mean, maybe. If we assume that, for example, the HD feeds for properties in, say, Atlanta, GA go to a monitoring center *in* Atlanta (and aren't being punted across the country to a single 'national' monitoring center), and other similar 'local-endpoints' for every service area, then perhaps that could work - but, I think for that to work, people's homes would need not just 100Mbps *download*, but something like 20-50Mbit upload. Does this FCC proposal even *address* upload speeds? Historically, the FCC has been silent about upload speed, only concentrating on download speeds, and I think this has really hurt the potential for what broadband could be used for.
Again, I'm not *against* 100Mbps broadband to the premises. It's not that I can't imagine a use for it. It's that I can't imagine that it would be useful if the necessary focus isn't made on the other parts of the infrastructure as well. Does this FCC proposal deal with the other parts?
"The FCC set a long-term goal of 100 million households with connections of 100 megabits per second"
I remember seeing that statement somewhere else (I think it was ArsTechnica.com), and I can't help but wonder how the FCC thinks that will help consumers if the Internet backbones and servers don't also get improved? Here's what I mean - my local Telco recently rolled out fiber to my apartment building, so I now have a 10Mbs/2Mbs Internet connection - not blazingly fast by any means, but a nice bump up from the 5M/768k connection I previously had with DSL. Anyhow, what I've noticed is that, sometimes I get faster download/upload speeds, but with a lot of servers, I'm not coming anywhere close to fully utilizing the available bandwidth on my connection, because somewhere in the connection (whether it's the server, or some link in-between, I really don't know for sure), something is bandwidth-limited.
It seems to me that any governmental push to increase the speed of service for 100 Million households requires that not only do you upgrade the 'last mile' connection, but there needs to be a focus on getting the backbones and servers on faster connections too. Without that, it's kind of pointless, isn't it? I don't think I'd have any *use* for a 100Mbps Internet connection since almost no servers anywhere are going to be able to consistently feed me data at even a significant fraction of that speed.
Also, since ISPs typically give you a very small fraction of the upload speed compared to your download speed (Coming Soon! 100Mbps Ultra-Broadband Internet!* [fine print: upload speeds of 6Mbps]), users can't really even provide content to *each other* at anywhere close to that rate. So, what am I supposed to do with 100Mbps? I suppose if you have 5 people using computers all at once in your home/apartment/small office, it might be nice that they each 'get their own' 20Mbps, but what is the drive for this particular number? What's so special about 100Mbps?
I kind of wondered the same thing. It occurs to me it would be pretty easy to track down *who* is the source of a leak. . . generate several different versions of the same 'secret' document (maybe have different intentional 'typos' somewhere subtle in the document, or maybe a changed word here or there), hand it out to the people you suspect, then wait till it shows up on Wikileaks and figure out which particular version was posted. Seems like that would very quickly lead you to *exactly* who leaked the document. Ok, maybe typos would be corrected by the leaker before posting, but you might do something even more subtle like a few commas here and there that nobody would either miss, or remove if present, or maybe a digital image with some steganographically hidden identifier bits embedded, which would identify the copy of the document.
I'm sure there's all sorts of tricks like that which can be used to find your leak. Which is why I don't think I'd screw around with leaking anything, unless I was doing it as an intentional act of civil disobedience, knowing I was gonna go to jail - because I think it'd be next to impossible to fully cover my tracks with regards to trying to figure out every possible way the spooks might have 'marked' the document to find the leak.
If you were scanning from a boot CD, the malware would have never loaded into RAM in the first place (unless the boot cd is itself infected, at which point the GP's points apply again), so why would you try to scan ram for malware if you loaded from a boot CD? That really makes no sense.
It *would* make sense to use a boot CD to then scan your hard drive for malware which are installed on disk but which are dormant because you didn't boot from the HD, but that is NOT what the original article is talking about.
If I don't even know I'm infected, how can I remove the malware? If I know that I've been rooted, worst case scenario, I format my hard drive and do a clean install of the OS, apps, and data. Yes, it's better to prevent the infection in the first place, but knowing you *are* infected at least can help you to take actions to do something about the situation. In truth, if an infection can be detected, it can *usually* be removed without requiring a format, so detection is the first step in cleaning up a problem.
One of the things that occurred to me is, if you are 'swapping out everything but the scanner and the kernel', unless the malware for some reason prevents you from swapping it out, too, (I guess the theory is that if the malware is running in kernel space, it won't get swapped out, while everything else will), then you won't detect it, because it'll just 'unload' when you swap everything out, then when you swap everything else back into RAM, it'll get swapped right back in, right?
Now, in the case of a kernel-module type of malware, what's to keep it from 'looking' like a legitimate kernel module/driver? In most modern OSes, code is loaded into the kernel at runtime for all sorts of device drivers, operating system extensions (like virus scanners), etc. How does this 'universal malware detector' know that one kernel module is 'legiimate', while another is not, when it doesn't have a 'rule' to identify that module as a 'known bad' module?
I think the point of the article is that this programming contest the article submitter is interested in having his students participate in only allows a limited list of languages. Now, you could potentially, I suppose, start with something like Scratch or Turtle/Logo to teach them foundational concepts, then transition to one of the other languages, as you're suggesting. But, it would seem like, since the teacher has a (relatively) limited amount of time, he may not feel he has enough time to teach them 2 or 3 programming languages.
The thing about programming, I've found, is that languages, per-se, aren't really that interesting. What's more interesting are the function/class libraries provided by the language, and learning how to construct an elegant solution to a problem using the available algorithms and data types defined by those standard libraries. I'd want to spend more of my time teaching students to think about things like when it's better to use an array vs a linked list, or even the possibility of doing things like linked-lists of pointers to arrays. Trees and graphs. Different sorting algorithms. Hash tables. Etc. Get them thinking about real software design problems, vs. spending too much time worrying about the specific language to use.
That said though, I think I'd avoid straight C (because it's not object-oriented, and I really think that object orientation often does make for easier to understand code; also, C's pointer syntax, I've found, seems to be a bit harder to get 'right' than using references in some of the other languages, I think - although it's maybe a little bit more powerful too).
I wonder, instead of having humans analyzing these things forever, could they use the interactions with humans to 'train' some sort of visual analysis algorithm so that it learns how to identify the 'interesting' images? Then, in the future, maybe a computer can alert Nasa scientists of particularly 'interesting' images for them to manually analyze, while no longer needing public 'screening' by humans?
I thought I remember reading projections somewhere, which indicate that China's population is soon supposed to begin a pretty rapid decline, due to several decades of 'birth control' measures imposed by the government? Contributing even further to that, I had heard that there is a large imbalance in the population ratio between males and females, because, since parents were limited to one child, many of them chose to abort girls and 'try again' until they had a boy? Because of the predominance of males, there are fewer females to become pregnant and birth the next generation, further contributing to long-term population decline?
Shouldn't those things be starting to have an effect 20 years from now?
Slashdot Mirror
How about rephrasing the question: "Would you like that *other* guy to read traffic lights so he doesn't crash into you?"
Although, in most cases, a colorblind person can probably still read the traffic light positionally, e.g. red on top, yellow in the middle, green on the bottom. Might be a problem on a *really* dark night if you can see the lightbulb, but not the body of the traffic light - you know, when the light is 'disembodied' against the solid-black background.
I've often wondered if those one-use codes for DLC are even really legal (in the U.S.), because of the First Sale doctrine. Of course, until someone with money to spend on a lawsuit to settle the question, does, then we'll likely never know the answer.
Perhaps GameStop could sue one of the publishers on behalf of their customers, and make the case that the First Sale doctrine should prevent developers from locking DLC to a particular user.
Or, maybe some lawyer that specializes in class-actions could get a class-action suit going on behalf of the class of users who have purchased downloadable content (or downloadable games, through services like Steam, Direct2Drive, etc), based on the theory that by preventing users from exercising their second-sale rights, with regards to the DLC portion of the purchased product, the publishers have caused damages to those users (by devaluing their used copies). (I mean, if you think about it, if the resale value of used copies is reduced because of the 'missing' content, then you should be able to estimate some value for the 'free' DLC), then you added up all the copies of software which couldn't be sold at the expected resale price for a popular game like, say, Dragon Age: Origins, or Assassin's Creed 2, etc, it probably adds up to millions of dollars.
I have in my hands, right now, a blank piece of printer paper. Now, this is no *ordinary* printer paper. It's *Awesome* printer paper. How awesome is it? Well, for only $8500, *it could be yours*! With a price tag of over $8k, it would have to be awesome.
If you're playing a 2-4 hour (or longer) RPG or tactical/wargame session, do you *really* want to stand for 2 to 4 hours?
I guess it's a good way to make sure your gaming sessions end in a timely manner. . .
. . .MSIE is still there making botnets.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought users had to actively be using IE, and visit a malicious website, in order for IE to be a botnet-infection vector? If the users are actually *using* a different browser (which, we'll assume for the sake of argument here isn't *also* vulnerable to the malicious web site), and IE is not being used to access those sites, how is IE, as you said, "still there making botnets"?
I suppose there is still a risk that some other app you use might be hard-coded to launch IE (instead of launching the 'default browser'), and once it does, the user might get infected via IE?
I'm not exactly sure what you're complaining about? Seems to me that it would be reasonable that if you already have another browser installed, there's no reason for Windows to bother you with a ballot screen to select another browser? I think I'd be kind of annoyed, really, if it did.
I don't completely disagree with you. I mean, for one thing, if a startup had, say $1 Million in startup cash from a venture capitalist or something similar, it wouldn't be a good idea to immediately drop half of it on an office building. However, if they took out a mortgage on an office building, they might only spend something $50,000 the first year (the down-payment and closing costs being more expensive in the first year), then maybe $35,000/year after that (the numbers are, somewhat made up, but not completely - I did some 'back of the napkin' estimates: figuring that a $500,000 loan will cost you, over the course of a 20 year mortgage, around $750,000 - unless you pay it off early, which isn't a bad idea). A lease isn't usually significantly cheaper than a mortgage, although there's no downpayment, or closing costs. So maybe to lease comparable space, the same startup might pay something like $30,000/yr (including the first year).
After 10 or 15 years, the company that bought has built up a lot of equity. The company that has leased for all those years has spent the money and can never see it again. Assuming the lease ran you $30,000/yr, then after 10 years, you've spent 300,000 and have no equity. Meanwhile, the company that bought might have spent $390,000, but might have $250,000 in equity. Meanwhile, the property has been appreciating in value.
Now, the company decides to move to a larger property. The company that sells, after paying off their original mortgage, might have between $250,000 - $300,000 to put towards the downpayment on a much larger, more expensive property.
Where is the virtue in sending lease checks to a property owner who gets to build their equity at your expense? I'm just really not seeing it - unless you plan to move to other facilities every 2-3 years because of your amazingly rapid expansion. Then, I would totally agree with you - the first 2-3 years of any mortgage is mostly losses due to interest and closing costs, anyhow, so if you will be moving frequently, then yes, buying is probably a bad idea.
"They don't want all that capital tied up in property."
I suppose that depends. If a company is large enough that it has the money it needs to both expand the business, *and* buy the buildings/land it occupies, then it probably makes sense to buy. Why? Because, in the end, when you rent/lease, you are still paying the mortgage, taxes, and upkeep. It's just that you pay the money in the form of monthly (or quarterly, whatever) rent checks you pay to your landlord. Whether you call your monthly payment a 'lease' or a 'mortgage', you're still making payments for the space you use. Shouldn't you at least be building up some equity in the property?
If, on the other hand, you are a startup or small business, I'm sure it often makes sense to rent or lease for a number of reasons. . . the 'upfront' costs are probably lower. The amount you pay per month may be lower. Particularly if you are using only a small portion of an office/retail building which is sectioned up and rented out to multiple different businesses (analogous to apartments for personal housing).
But, once you have enough income to both grow and pay for a building, it very much does make sense to own, just like for individuals, it usually does make sense to own a house or condo rather than to rent the house/apartment (although, when you are going to college, or have just graduated, it usually makes sense to rent, because you don't have enough money saved for a downpayment and closing costs).
"He should create an inventory of the constituent atoms of the rover and rent out custody of individual atoms on monthly subscription to those who want bragging rights to "having" something on the moon."
TFIFY.
"If you can read this. . . it didn't work".
What's written by Brian Raiter? The blog post that slashdot linked to had the following author info line:
>>>Posted in computer architecture on March 16th, 2010 by Jessica McKellar.
I've personally never met a man named Jessica (unless you count a drag queen), so I'm defaulting to 'she'.
"At the end, the code was assembler"
But, the key point is that the user didn't generate that assembly. The user wrote a C program (granted, the program doesn't actually do any output - it just stores a string in memory, then exits). The user called the compiler to compile the program. The user then *disassembled* the object code which was created by *the compiler*. So, the assembly you see was generated (indirectly, via the objdump command), by the C compiler.
Exception: the user did create a small assembly file with the place-holder _start function. Perhaps, this example would have benefitted by the user defining the _start() function in C also, and using the compiler to compile that - not sure if that actually would have worked or not, but would have been interesting if she had tried.
One other point I'd like to make - ultimately, every C program has to have some assembly *somewhere*. When you call the printf(), printf itself either must use some assembly to interact with the operating system (in order to cause output to be sent to stdout), or printf *might* punt that off to another function, which then has some assembly inside it. The only reason you can do *any* input or output in C (or any other language for that matter) is that, at some point, somewhere, either in the compiler itself, or in a standard library, someone has provided the necessary assembly code for you.
In the case of C, the language designers decided to make the C-language pure 'logic', without any notion of input or output statements, or operating system interactioni, and do all input/output/system calls via library functions (whether you use the standard library, or a 'third-party' library [ I use the term third-party loosely here, because the 'third-party' lib might actually be provided by your compiler vendor, but it's just not the standard library]).
In one of the sections of this article, the author uses, as an example, how complex URL 'interpretation' can be for average users, going over all sorts of ways phishers can attack bank/ebay/paypal/amazon URL's.
I figured this out a long time ago. I'm very much a K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid.) advocate with regards to this particular problem. The advice I would give any 'average user' who came to me is simple: never click links, or call phone numbers, or use any other communications mechanism provided in emails purporting to come from a business entity. If it claims to come from your bank, you should probably call your bank's customer service phone number (from your bank statement or ATM card, or if you know your banks URL, open your browser and type it in yourself, or use a bookmark you have already preveiously saved in your browser from a previous visit to the bank's website) to verify if there is a problem with your account. Just take the email completely out of the equation.
That way, they don't have to judge if the email and link are legitimate or not - just don't use the email.
Links that are just to a page of photos, or a map, or something like that, are ok to click, generally, but if any link you follow from an email asks you for personal info or a login, or asks you to download something to the computer, just close the browser, step back, and do the above (e.g. calling the bank/business, or opening a new browser window and going to the proper website manually for by bookmark).
With that advice, I have to teach them exactly nothing about how to understand URLs. It's also fairly common-sense advice that most people can easily understand - it's very unlikely that the phone number on your bank statements and cards are not 'authentic'. Most bank statements probably include the URL of the bank's website, too, these days - mine definitely do.
By not following links in emails, you can avoid probably 99% of phishing attacks - no matter how cleverly they manage disguise the links in the email.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I don't see why email wouldn't be just a simple extension of the concept of 'papers, and effects'?
Further, I would ask what does the fourth amendment say about 'mail'? It doesn't, and yet, the fourth amend. still applies to the postal service (well, first class mail, anyhow).
Why should email be treated any differently, legally, than postal mail?
I hope this case gets reviewed by the SCOTUS.
I just meant in comparison to some of the other Internet connections out there - I actually have the 'slowest' tier my telco is offering over the fiber. I also believe that recent Cable-Modem Tech has bumped speeds up to over 100Mbps?
My point was, that I already have a hard time actually using the bandwidth available to me - not for lack of imagination on how I could use up some bandwidth, but simply because it seems like it's almost impossible to actually get connections to any other host on the Internet that gives me a sustained throughput that even comes close to the limit advertised, because the backbones and other servers have connections which are too slow.
*If* at 10Mbps, I can't saturate the connection, how would upgrading to 100Mbps give me any real benefit? See, that's the heart of the question.
Excellent point. But, I would like to point out that the intention of my post wasn't that there weren't use-cases which could be of interest to most users which could use that bandwidth. . .
My point is that, because A) 100Mbps service will most likely NOT include 100Mbps upload speed (or even 50Mbps upload speed, most likely), and B) I don't *think* the backbones can actually handle millions of users all transferring 100Mbps data at the same time, that I *still think* the usage cases you bring are still not going to happen?
Take, for example, the HD surveillance of your house at all times - if 10 Million households across the country were trying to do that, would there really be enough bandwidth? I mean, maybe. If we assume that, for example, the HD feeds for properties in, say, Atlanta, GA go to a monitoring center *in* Atlanta (and aren't being punted across the country to a single 'national' monitoring center), and other similar 'local-endpoints' for every service area, then perhaps that could work - but, I think for that to work, people's homes would need not just 100Mbps *download*, but something like 20-50Mbit upload. Does this FCC proposal even *address* upload speeds? Historically, the FCC has been silent about upload speed, only concentrating on download speeds, and I think this has really hurt the potential for what broadband could be used for.
Again, I'm not *against* 100Mbps broadband to the premises. It's not that I can't imagine a use for it. It's that I can't imagine that it would be useful if the necessary focus isn't made on the other parts of the infrastructure as well. Does this FCC proposal deal with the other parts?
"The FCC set a long-term goal of 100 million households with connections of 100 megabits per second"
I remember seeing that statement somewhere else (I think it was ArsTechnica.com), and I can't help but wonder how the FCC thinks that will help consumers if the Internet backbones and servers don't also get improved? Here's what I mean - my local Telco recently rolled out fiber to my apartment building, so I now have a 10Mbs/2Mbs Internet connection - not blazingly fast by any means, but a nice bump up from the 5M/768k connection I previously had with DSL. Anyhow, what I've noticed is that, sometimes I get faster download/upload speeds, but with a lot of servers, I'm not coming anywhere close to fully utilizing the available bandwidth on my connection, because somewhere in the connection (whether it's the server, or some link in-between, I really don't know for sure), something is bandwidth-limited.
It seems to me that any governmental push to increase the speed of service for 100 Million households requires that not only do you upgrade the 'last mile' connection, but there needs to be a focus on getting the backbones and servers on faster connections too. Without that, it's kind of pointless, isn't it? I don't think I'd have any *use* for a 100Mbps Internet connection since almost no servers anywhere are going to be able to consistently feed me data at even a significant fraction of that speed.
Also, since ISPs typically give you a very small fraction of the upload speed compared to your download speed (Coming Soon! 100Mbps Ultra-Broadband Internet!* [fine print: upload speeds of 6Mbps]), users can't really even provide content to *each other* at anywhere close to that rate. So, what am I supposed to do with 100Mbps? I suppose if you have 5 people using computers all at once in your home/apartment/small office, it might be nice that they each 'get their own' 20Mbps, but what is the drive for this particular number? What's so special about 100Mbps?
I kind of wondered the same thing. It occurs to me it would be pretty easy to track down *who* is the source of a leak. . . generate several different versions of the same 'secret' document (maybe have different intentional 'typos' somewhere subtle in the document, or maybe a changed word here or there), hand it out to the people you suspect, then wait till it shows up on Wikileaks and figure out which particular version was posted. Seems like that would very quickly lead you to *exactly* who leaked the document. Ok, maybe typos would be corrected by the leaker before posting, but you might do something even more subtle like a few commas here and there that nobody would either miss, or remove if present, or maybe a digital image with some steganographically hidden identifier bits embedded, which would identify the copy of the document.
I'm sure there's all sorts of tricks like that which can be used to find your leak. Which is why I don't think I'd screw around with leaking anything, unless I was doing it as an intentional act of civil disobedience, knowing I was gonna go to jail - because I think it'd be next to impossible to fully cover my tracks with regards to trying to figure out every possible way the spooks might have 'marked' the document to find the leak.
"Unless... you were scanning from a boot CD."
If you were scanning from a boot CD, the malware would have never loaded into RAM in the first place (unless the boot cd is itself infected, at which point the GP's points apply again), so why would you try to scan ram for malware if you loaded from a boot CD? That really makes no sense.
It *would* make sense to use a boot CD to then scan your hard drive for malware which are installed on disk but which are dormant because you didn't boot from the HD, but that is NOT what the original article is talking about.
If I don't even know I'm infected, how can I remove the malware? If I know that I've been rooted, worst case scenario, I format my hard drive and do a clean install of the OS, apps, and data. Yes, it's better to prevent the infection in the first place, but knowing you *are* infected at least can help you to take actions to do something about the situation. In truth, if an infection can be detected, it can *usually* be removed without requiring a format, so detection is the first step in cleaning up a problem.
One of the things that occurred to me is, if you are 'swapping out everything but the scanner and the kernel', unless the malware for some reason prevents you from swapping it out, too, (I guess the theory is that if the malware is running in kernel space, it won't get swapped out, while everything else will), then you won't detect it, because it'll just 'unload' when you swap everything out, then when you swap everything else back into RAM, it'll get swapped right back in, right?
Now, in the case of a kernel-module type of malware, what's to keep it from 'looking' like a legitimate kernel module/driver? In most modern OSes, code is loaded into the kernel at runtime for all sorts of device drivers, operating system extensions (like virus scanners), etc. How does this 'universal malware detector' know that one kernel module is 'legiimate', while another is not, when it doesn't have a 'rule' to identify that module as a 'known bad' module?
I think the point of the article is that this programming contest the article submitter is interested in having his students participate in only allows a limited list of languages. Now, you could potentially, I suppose, start with something like Scratch or Turtle/Logo to teach them foundational concepts, then transition to one of the other languages, as you're suggesting. But, it would seem like, since the teacher has a (relatively) limited amount of time, he may not feel he has enough time to teach them 2 or 3 programming languages.
The thing about programming, I've found, is that languages, per-se, aren't really that interesting. What's more interesting are the function/class libraries provided by the language, and learning how to construct an elegant solution to a problem using the available algorithms and data types defined by those standard libraries. I'd want to spend more of my time teaching students to think about things like when it's better to use an array vs a linked list, or even the possibility of doing things like linked-lists of pointers to arrays. Trees and graphs. Different sorting algorithms. Hash tables. Etc. Get them thinking about real software design problems, vs. spending too much time worrying about the specific language to use.
That said though, I think I'd avoid straight C (because it's not object-oriented, and I really think that object orientation often does make for easier to understand code; also, C's pointer syntax, I've found, seems to be a bit harder to get 'right' than using references in some of the other languages, I think - although it's maybe a little bit more powerful too).
Here we go - just start replacing current coastal buildings with these, and when the sea level rises 8 or 10 feet, everyone will be ready.
[JohnHodgemanVoice]You're welcome![/JohnHodgemanVoice]
I wonder, instead of having humans analyzing these things forever, could they use the interactions with humans to 'train' some sort of visual analysis algorithm so that it learns how to identify the 'interesting' images? Then, in the future, maybe a computer can alert Nasa scientists of particularly 'interesting' images for them to manually analyze, while no longer needing public 'screening' by humans?
"and will have a population of about 1.5 billion"
I thought I remember reading projections somewhere, which indicate that China's population is soon supposed to begin a pretty rapid decline, due to several decades of 'birth control' measures imposed by the government? Contributing even further to that, I had heard that there is a large imbalance in the population ratio between males and females, because, since parents were limited to one child, many of them chose to abort girls and 'try again' until they had a boy? Because of the predominance of males, there are fewer females to become pregnant and birth the next generation, further contributing to long-term population decline?
Shouldn't those things be starting to have an effect 20 years from now?