That seems like it would adequately prevent accidents. However, how do we ensure that no intentional redirects can be used to turn the thing into a weapon?
Let's go Hollywood for a moment and consider worst case scenario. "The terrorists" manage to a) hack into the command and control for the satellite and change the orientation of the antenna, and b) place a secondary pilot beam transmitter at the new 'target' (so that the 'fail safe' finds what it expects to find - a focusing beam in the correct phase)? I know, it sounds like the plot to a movie, but, what makes it impossible?
Japan is an island nation. You could someone minimize the risk of injury or loss of (human) life by directing the beat to a receiver on some micro-island, or maybe a floating platform like an oil rig, then have cables run from the island/platform to mainland Japan. That way, if the satellite goes a *little* off target, it's not as likely to people (although it still might harm aquatic life, I suppose, though I bet the potential damage and the risks are less than the damage from an oil platform/pipe/ship accident).
"You guys do realize that Twitter accounts can be set to "Private", right?"
You do realize that once data is out of your hands/computer, you have NO REAL CONTROL over it, right? You cannot guarantee that such info will remain private forever. Crackers could breach the security system, courts could subpeona the info, governments can order it revealed. Someone might sniff the data at a router (since this is twitter traffic, I bet it's probably not ever encrypted, even when it's 'private', though I'd be happy to be wrong about that).
Yeah, it'll be good times when the next Iranian crackdown happens, and when the people being persecuted try to tell the world about it, twitter has crashed because of 10,000,000 tweets telling us people are watching American Idle.
I could see, potentially, someone trademarking/soundmarking a specific, unique sound. A particular recorded clip, for example. However, 'dynamically' generated sounds like someone blowing a duck call - how can that be 'sound marked'? After all, every time someone blows a duck call, the sound will be *slightly* different, unique, if you will.
How can you trademark/soundmark something which DOES NOT YET EXIST?
Anyhow, people have been using duck calls for many, many years (uhh, hunters, bioloigsts?) How can one company trademark something people have been doing forever.
I would like to sound mark human singing. Yeah, that's the ticket. Every person who makes any money singing, or selling recordings of songs, or selling advertising on 'free' streams/radio/tv broadcasts, songs embedded in video games, or any other media, now owes me a license fee.
I'll start by going after buskers (you know, those aspiring artists who play for tips in subways, street corners, and parks) - they'll be too broke to defend themselves, so I can build up a nice body of 'precedent'. Then, when I start suing larger marks, I can point to the previous cases as precedent.
But, doesn't it require a threshold temperature to be reached before the reaction can even start?
What I'm saying is, let's say the Thermal Reaction can happen when the temperature exceeds T degrees. Then, shutdown the device when the internal temperature reaches some safe threshold, like.8T or.85T. Shutting down power consumption should cause the battery to start cooling off, assuming that the runaway reaction has not YET triggered, yes?
. ..shouldn't it be designed to detect that situation and shut off, or reduce power consumption (e.g. by slowing down the CPU or going into some sort of 'sleep mode', or implement some other strategy to avoid ever exploding or setting on fire?
I feel I'm on pretty solid ground predicting that all the Marvel stuff at Universal Orlando will last for *at least as long* as the terms specified in the original contracts between Universal and Marvel. Those terms are probably long enough to more than pay off the rollercoaster. If, at the end of the contract, Universal isn't ready to tear down that particular coaster and replace it with something newer, they can always rename the coaster, and remove the "Hulk" visual elements from the coaster.
"Christian Science" is a specific religious group in the United States. The name, reminds me, however, of old Mike Myers's SNL skits where he portrays a middle-aged New York lady hosting a talk show, and at some point, she starts losing emotional control ("I'm getting verklempt," (don't know if that last word is quite correct, but (s)he always said something like that), "let me give you a topic to discuss amongst yourselves. . . the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire - discuss.")
Well, near as I've ever been able to figure, "Christian Science" is neither Christian, nor Scientific. Discuss.
(P.S. The 'newspaper' run by the Christian Scientists (that is, the Christian Science Monitor newspaper) seems to have earned something of a reputation as being a decent source of journalism, regardless of its backers; I believe the Christian Science church does not exert much/any editorial influence over the newspaper staff, but I could be wrong).
then he *is* good enough. See, your problem seemms to be a misunderstanding of the terms. If the doctor screws something up, he's *not* good enough. But, a good enough doctor is just fine, and if you aren't rich, that's basically what you'll get. Most people cannot *afford* to be so damn choosy. People have this misconception that because they *want* the world to be some way, the universe will re-arrange itself around their desires. It's part of what very well might bankrupt the US with healthcare in the coming decades - *overspending* because people can't be content with 'good enough' solutions.
I heard something on NPR recently about a guy who was trying to compare health systems around the world (although, his methodology seems rather anecdotal and therefor unconvincing, but it's still interesting). A number of years ago, he had some sort of shoulder injury. At the time, the doctors used some sort of screw to hold the shoulder together. He still has almost full usage of the shoulder, but it was starting to cause him some discomfort.
He went to a US Orthopedic surgeon, who recommended a very expensive shoulder replacement surgery, which if it went well, would give him a near perfect replacement, but there is some risk of serious complications from the surgery that would leave him worse than before. He went to other doctors around the world (U.K., France, Japan, Canada, and I think Germany). Most of the other doctors mentioned the replacement surgery as an option, but *recommended* some sort of steroidal treatment to reduce the inflamation, coupled with some occupational therapy, which would basically get rid of the pain, and be much cheaper.
The point is, did that guy really *need* a replacement shoulder that would cost something like $30,000 for the surgery? Probably not - the original 'fix' by the doctors years ago, really was *good enough*. People might want to complain bitterly about that, and say that is exactly what is wrong with government managed healthcare - as long as people who can afford it can 'opt out' of the government healthcare option, I really don't care if there is a 'public option', and if there is a public option, I don't expect taxpayers to have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the 'best' solution when there is a perfectly reasonable "good enough" solution.
Ok, so if a person is dialing a phone number when they get in an accident, everyone will say they were texting, but technically, they aren't. So, why not just outlaw *manipulating* telephones while driving. What if a person has a voice-recognition device in their car (like the MS/Ford "Sync" that lets them 'dictate' text messages (not sure if Sync actually has such a feature yet, but it *could*).
If you were 'texting', using voice recognition, would you still be in violation of this law?
" In the end it becomes rather difficult to keep the consoles in sync because of the differing rates "
If this were the case, then wouldn't network latency cause different outcomes on different consoles of the *same* type? Wouldn't that 'catch' on one player's XBox become a 'miss' on another XBox because of those timing related issues? Obviously, the game protocol, even if it's sending controller inputs across the network, must be doing *something* to keep the game state on the different consoles in sync; if you can synchronize the game state between consoles of the same type, why not different platforms?
"The Xbox and Xbox 360 use encryption implemented in the kernel as part of the Xbox Live matchmaking."
Is there any reason you couldn't just use your own servers, and skip the whole XBox Live system, and send unencrypted packets? Perhaps XBox doesn't provide developers with any APIs to access the network driver directly, so that you *must* use Live to do networking? Someone mentioned that Final Fantaxy XI on XBox doesn't use the Live server, but connects directly to Square's servers?
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy The Guild, and am quite impressed how good the show is with what they have to work with, but if all TV had to be made with the tiny budgets they work with (each episode is like 10 minutes long, very limited sets, etc), you wouldn't get shows like Star Trek, Babylon 5, Firefly, or Battlestar Galactica, to name but a few.
I for one, am happy that at least *some* bigger budget shows are made (yes, yes, not all big-budget shows are any good - some are just big money holes), but I'd like to see a successful larger-budget online show, to pave the way for a gradual move to more television being online.
If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data.
This whole paragraph makes no sense at all, and makes it clear that you do not understand encryption, especially dual-key cryptography. Please RTFM.
Perhaps you just didn't understand the paragraph. The post I was responding to suggested layering a VPN on top of the WPA2 or whatever wireless security, right? So, that, to me, logically implies if I'm using the VPN, my "secret" text first goes through the VPN layer and becomes cyphertext1 (that is, it's encrypted by the vpn), then it gets passed to the wireless network driver, and gets encrypted again using the wireless crypto protocol, and becomes cyphertext2. That is, cyphertext2 is an encryption of a cyphertext.
So, WPAx gets 'broken', so the attacker 'decrypts' cyphertext2, and discover that the decryption now gives them cyphertext1, right? Now, that means that as long as the security algorithm used by the VPN to create cyphertext1 was truly secure, the best case scenario is that the attacker has to do a brute-force key-search, to recover the text (and such a brute-force key search is impractical, so if that's the best they can do, the secret is secure, BUT, if the VPN is not really secure, because there is some weakness in the VPN algorithm, then they could potentially decrypt cyphertext1 as well. See, that makes some kind of sense, doesn't it? NOTE: I'm not saying the VPN algorithms *are* weak like WEP and WPA/TKIP, I'm just asking what makes people so confident in the VPN system, when it was discovered within a few years of the 'standardization' of WEP and WPA how to break them?
We were told all along that WEP was secure, until it was discovered it wasn't, then told WPA was secure, until it was discovered it wasn't. So, what's next?
It's been my experience that, when the 'new, smaller, cheaper' version of a console comes out, the next-gen console is probably only a year or two away. I think it's pretty clear they're not coming out with a next gen console this year (too late in the year with no hype; if you plan to release a new console, you target a Sept-Oct release timeframe, so that hopefully people buy them for Christmas, and you begin the hype 6 months or a year beforehand), but they could be planning a 2010 or 2011 release of a new console.
Are you *positive* that the VPN connection is uncrackable? If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data. If the VPN system is so secure, why aren't we using it for the wireless connection? That is, make the wireless network a VPN using the same algorithms you use for your VPN?
So, does this mean it's time to start working on whatever the replacement will be for WPA2? WPA is broken. . . but at least we can use WPA2 (for now). I'm guessing WPA2 will someday be broken, so we need to have something to replace it which has not (yet) been broken. Seems like wireless security rests on a never-ending game of move the goal, before the goal is reached (where the 'goal' for crackers is to crack the 'current' security protocol).
Although, thinking about this more, it makes me wonder - does anyone ever 'record' encrypted traffic from targets of interest, in the hopes that, maybe right now they can't crack it, but maybe in 2 or 3 years, they'll be able to crack it, and if they have a 'recording' of the cyphertext, which they can later decrypt, they can get possibly interesting info/data (data could very easily still be useful and interesting 3 or 5 years from now, particularly things like state/corporate secrets, but even more mundane info like people's social security numbers, answers to online password 'reset' security questions, etc).
I suppose that if I could think of it, someone else already has, and already is doing it.
So, from that standpoint, even if the security researchers stay 'ahead' of the blackhats, the blackhats can still get useful info within a relatively useful amount of time. Just because you've upgraded to WPA2 or WPA+AES, doesn't mean you're completely protected, if someone snagged encrypted traffic in the past which was 'secured' by TKIP.
"They got destroyed not because they did not have a superior product but simply because of the monopoly factors (i.e. I can buy a Tivo but I still have to pay the cable company to rent a cable box - why pay twice?)"
I'd like to add to that, compatibility problems - the Cable/Satellite companies seem to like to use their control over the cable signaling system to make it so that you basically cannot use third-party boxes to decode their digital content. Of course, that's done in the name of 'protecting copyright', but, you know, never mind the fact that *their* dvr units can record the 'copy protected' content, but not Tivo's.
I do feel kind of bad for Tivo, because, basically as soon as they created a new market, they were forced out of it, largely, through factors that had nothing to do with the actual merits of their products or their competitor's products.
There could be other explanations. . . maybe the planet wasn't originally part of that star system, but was a rogue planet that got 'captured' when it got too close to that star, relatively recently?
I remember hearing something, from a scientist once, about how as you get deeper into the gravity well of a black hole (that is, nearer to it), that time slows down relative to the 'outside' Universe - that is, what seems like minutes for you might be 10,000 years to everyone else.
So, if that is the case, wouldn't it take a very long time for *anything* to fall into a Black Hole, relative to outside observers?
For a product to succeed, it's not necessarily true that it has to take sales away from other products (that is often the case, but not always). "Smart phones" are, as an 'industry' or 'market segment' or whatever, are still pretty new - most people don't have high-end portable digital handsets yet. So, it's easily possible that this Maemo platform can succeed without hurting Apple or the iPhone at all. Not saying that will necessarily happen, but possibly.
I have little interest in an Apple iPhone (I go back and forth on whether I want one or not), but I am definitely interested, at some point, in getting a phone with more computing and web browsing capabilities. I'm just biding my time, looking for 'the product' that I can finally feel comfortable buying. So far, I'm not interested in the iPhone because it's way too locked down - too much Apple control. I had some initial interest in the Android, but I wasn't particularly pleased with the T-Mobile G1, and no one else seems to be offering any Android devices in the US, so that seems to be going nowhere. Maybe Nokia can do what Google couldn't, in terms of getting an open, Linux-based platform for handheld devices, for which different hardware is available (or, maybe not, time will tell).
"Another dumbass that doesn't bother reading the tech specs [nokia.com]:"
Whoa, some people don't *understand* those tech specs. Seeing "* Quad-band GSM EDGE 850/900/1800/1900" doesn't necessarily make it obvious to people who aren't familiar with which signaling standards and frequencies a given carrier uses.
I think it's a little harsh to calls omeone a "dumbass" just because they don't understand the particulars of cell phone networks. Granted, this is/. so you hope most of the readers understand, but, even though someone is a 'nerd' doesn't make them knowledgeable iin *every* area of technology. They might know more than you ever will about astronomy, or quantum physics, or computer programming, and not know anything about cell networks.
Go ahead and ask. This is/. after all. We *like* to post questions here which would be answered by reading the headline, article summary, or first paragraph of the linked to article.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems like it would adequately prevent accidents. However, how do we ensure that no intentional redirects can be used to turn the thing into a weapon?
Let's go Hollywood for a moment and consider worst case scenario. "The terrorists" manage to a) hack into the command and control for the satellite and change the orientation of the antenna, and b) place a secondary pilot beam transmitter at the new 'target' (so that the 'fail safe' finds what it expects to find - a focusing beam in the correct phase)? I know, it sounds like the plot to a movie, but, what makes it impossible?
Japan is an island nation. You could someone minimize the risk of injury or loss of (human) life by directing the beat to a receiver on some micro-island, or maybe a floating platform like an oil rig, then have cables run from the island/platform to mainland Japan. That way, if the satellite goes a *little* off target, it's not as likely to people (although it still might harm aquatic life, I suppose, though I bet the potential damage and the risks are less than the damage from an oil platform/pipe/ship accident).
"You guys do realize that Twitter accounts can be set to "Private", right?"
You do realize that once data is out of your hands/computer, you have NO REAL CONTROL over it, right? You cannot guarantee that such info will remain private forever. Crackers could breach the security system, courts could subpeona the info, governments can order it revealed. Someone might sniff the data at a router (since this is twitter traffic, I bet it's probably not ever encrypted, even when it's 'private', though I'd be happy to be wrong about that).
Yeah, it'll be good times when the next Iranian crackdown happens, and when the people being persecuted try to tell the world about it, twitter has crashed because of 10,000,000 tweets telling us people are watching American Idle.
I could see, potentially, someone trademarking/soundmarking a specific, unique sound. A particular recorded clip, for example. However, 'dynamically' generated sounds like someone blowing a duck call - how can that be 'sound marked'? After all, every time someone blows a duck call, the sound will be *slightly* different, unique, if you will.
How can you trademark/soundmark something which DOES NOT YET EXIST?
Anyhow, people have been using duck calls for many, many years (uhh, hunters, bioloigsts?) How can one company trademark something people have been doing forever.
I would like to sound mark human singing. Yeah, that's the ticket. Every person who makes any money singing, or selling recordings of songs, or selling advertising on 'free' streams/radio/tv broadcasts, songs embedded in video games, or any other media, now owes me a license fee.
I'll start by going after buskers (you know, those aspiring artists who play for tips in subways, street corners, and parks) - they'll be too broke to defend themselves, so I can build up a nice body of 'precedent'. Then, when I start suing larger marks, I can point to the previous cases as precedent.
But, doesn't it require a threshold temperature to be reached before the reaction can even start?
What I'm saying is, let's say the Thermal Reaction can happen when the temperature exceeds T degrees. Then, shutdown the device when the internal temperature reaches some safe threshold, like .8T or .85T. Shutting down power consumption should cause the battery to start cooling off, assuming that the runaway reaction has not YET triggered, yes?
. . .shouldn't it be designed to detect that situation and shut off, or reduce power consumption (e.g. by slowing down the CPU or going into some sort of 'sleep mode', or implement some other strategy to avoid ever exploding or setting on fire?
I feel I'm on pretty solid ground predicting that all the Marvel stuff at Universal Orlando will last for *at least as long* as the terms specified in the original contracts between Universal and Marvel. Those terms are probably long enough to more than pay off the rollercoaster. If, at the end of the contract, Universal isn't ready to tear down that particular coaster and replace it with something newer, they can always rename the coaster, and remove the "Hulk" visual elements from the coaster.
"Christian Science" is a specific religious group in the United States. The name, reminds me, however, of old Mike Myers's SNL skits where he portrays a middle-aged New York lady hosting a talk show, and at some point, she starts losing emotional control ("I'm getting verklempt," (don't know if that last word is quite correct, but (s)he always said something like that), "let me give you a topic to discuss amongst yourselves. . . the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire - discuss.")
Well, near as I've ever been able to figure, "Christian Science" is neither Christian, nor Scientific. Discuss.
(P.S. The 'newspaper' run by the Christian Scientists (that is, the Christian Science Monitor newspaper) seems to have earned something of a reputation as being a decent source of journalism, regardless of its backers; I believe the Christian Science church does not exert much/any editorial influence over the newspaper staff, but I could be wrong).
then he *is* good enough. See, your problem seemms to be a misunderstanding of the terms. If the doctor screws something up, he's *not* good enough. But, a good enough doctor is just fine, and if you aren't rich, that's basically what you'll get. Most people cannot *afford* to be so damn choosy. People have this misconception that because they *want* the world to be some way, the universe will re-arrange itself around their desires. It's part of what very well might bankrupt the US with healthcare in the coming decades - *overspending* because people can't be content with 'good enough' solutions.
I heard something on NPR recently about a guy who was trying to compare health systems around the world (although, his methodology seems rather anecdotal and therefor unconvincing, but it's still interesting). A number of years ago, he had some sort of shoulder injury. At the time, the doctors used some sort of screw to hold the shoulder together. He still has almost full usage of the shoulder, but it was starting to cause him some discomfort.
He went to a US Orthopedic surgeon, who recommended a very expensive shoulder replacement surgery, which if it went well, would give him a near perfect replacement, but there is some risk of serious complications from the surgery that would leave him worse than before. He went to other doctors around the world (U.K., France, Japan, Canada, and I think Germany). Most of the other doctors mentioned the replacement surgery as an option, but *recommended* some sort of steroidal treatment to reduce the inflamation, coupled with some occupational therapy, which would basically get rid of the pain, and be much cheaper.
The point is, did that guy really *need* a replacement shoulder that would cost something like $30,000 for the surgery? Probably not - the original 'fix' by the doctors years ago, really was *good enough*. People might want to complain bitterly about that, and say that is exactly what is wrong with government managed healthcare - as long as people who can afford it can 'opt out' of the government healthcare option, I really don't care if there is a 'public option', and if there is a public option, I don't expect taxpayers to have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the 'best' solution when there is a perfectly reasonable "good enough" solution.
Ok, so if a person is dialing a phone number when they get in an accident, everyone will say they were texting, but technically, they aren't. So, why not just outlaw *manipulating* telephones while driving. What if a person has a voice-recognition device in their car (like the MS/Ford "Sync" that lets them 'dictate' text messages (not sure if Sync actually has such a feature yet, but it *could*).
If you were 'texting', using voice recognition, would you still be in violation of this law?
Everyone will be confused what you really mean. Everyone else will just *sound* sound like they have a lisp.
The functional programming/lambda calculus guys should be right at home though. . .
" In the end it becomes rather difficult to keep the consoles in sync because of the differing rates "
If this were the case, then wouldn't network latency cause different outcomes on different consoles of the *same* type? Wouldn't that 'catch' on one player's XBox become a 'miss' on another XBox because of those timing related issues? Obviously, the game protocol, even if it's sending controller inputs across the network, must be doing *something* to keep the game state on the different consoles in sync; if you can synchronize the game state between consoles of the same type, why not different platforms?
"The Xbox and Xbox 360 use encryption implemented in the kernel as part of the Xbox Live matchmaking."
Is there any reason you couldn't just use your own servers, and skip the whole XBox Live system, and send unencrypted packets? Perhaps XBox doesn't provide developers with any APIs to access the network driver directly, so that you *must* use Live to do networking? Someone mentioned that Final Fantaxy XI on XBox doesn't use the Live server, but connects directly to Square's servers?
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy The Guild, and am quite impressed how good the show is with what they have to work with, but if all TV had to be made with the tiny budgets they work with (each episode is like 10 minutes long, very limited sets, etc), you wouldn't get shows like Star Trek, Babylon 5, Firefly, or Battlestar Galactica, to name but a few.
I for one, am happy that at least *some* bigger budget shows are made (yes, yes, not all big-budget shows are any good - some are just big money holes), but I'd like to see a successful larger-budget online show, to pave the way for a gradual move to more television being online.
Perhaps you just didn't understand the paragraph. The post I was responding to suggested layering a VPN on top of the WPA2 or whatever wireless security, right? So, that, to me, logically implies if I'm using the VPN, my "secret" text first goes through the VPN layer and becomes cyphertext1 (that is, it's encrypted by the vpn), then it gets passed to the wireless network driver, and gets encrypted again using the wireless crypto protocol, and becomes cyphertext2. That is, cyphertext2 is an encryption of a cyphertext.
So, WPAx gets 'broken', so the attacker 'decrypts' cyphertext2, and discover that the decryption now gives them cyphertext1, right? Now, that means that as long as the security algorithm used by the VPN to create cyphertext1 was truly secure, the best case scenario is that the attacker has to do a brute-force key-search, to recover the text (and such a brute-force key search is impractical, so if that's the best they can do, the secret is secure, BUT, if the VPN is not really secure, because there is some weakness in the VPN algorithm, then they could potentially decrypt cyphertext1 as well. See, that makes some kind of sense, doesn't it? NOTE: I'm not saying the VPN algorithms *are* weak like WEP and WPA/TKIP, I'm just asking what makes people so confident in the VPN system, when it was discovered within a few years of the 'standardization' of WEP and WPA how to break them?
We were told all along that WEP was secure, until it was discovered it wasn't, then told WPA was secure, until it was discovered it wasn't. So, what's next?
It's been my experience that, when the 'new, smaller, cheaper' version of a console comes out, the next-gen console is probably only a year or two away. I think it's pretty clear they're not coming out with a next gen console this year (too late in the year with no hype; if you plan to release a new console, you target a Sept-Oct release timeframe, so that hopefully people buy them for Christmas, and you begin the hype 6 months or a year beforehand), but they could be planning a 2010 or 2011 release of a new console.
Are you *positive* that the VPN connection is uncrackable? If it's going over wireless, then if someone is recording the cyphertext, they will be able to recover the VPN cyphertext out of the WPA cyphertext. If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext, then you are still leaking your data. If the VPN system is so secure, why aren't we using it for the wireless connection? That is, make the wireless network a VPN using the same algorithms you use for your VPN?
So, does this mean it's time to start working on whatever the replacement will be for WPA2? WPA is broken. . . but at least we can use WPA2 (for now). I'm guessing WPA2 will someday be broken, so we need to have something to replace it which has not (yet) been broken. Seems like wireless security rests on a never-ending game of move the goal, before the goal is reached (where the 'goal' for crackers is to crack the 'current' security protocol).
Although, thinking about this more, it makes me wonder - does anyone ever 'record' encrypted traffic from targets of interest, in the hopes that, maybe right now they can't crack it, but maybe in 2 or 3 years, they'll be able to crack it, and if they have a 'recording' of the cyphertext, which they can later decrypt, they can get possibly interesting info/data (data could very easily still be useful and interesting 3 or 5 years from now, particularly things like state/corporate secrets, but even more mundane info like people's social security numbers, answers to online password 'reset' security questions, etc).
I suppose that if I could think of it, someone else already has, and already is doing it.
So, from that standpoint, even if the security researchers stay 'ahead' of the blackhats, the blackhats can still get useful info within a relatively useful amount of time. Just because you've upgraded to WPA2 or WPA+AES, doesn't mean you're completely protected, if someone snagged encrypted traffic in the past which was 'secured' by TKIP.
"They got destroyed not because they did not have a superior product but simply because of the monopoly factors (i.e. I can buy a Tivo but I still have to pay the cable company to rent a cable box - why pay twice?)"
I'd like to add to that, compatibility problems - the Cable/Satellite companies seem to like to use their control over the cable signaling system to make it so that you basically cannot use third-party boxes to decode their digital content. Of course, that's done in the name of 'protecting copyright', but, you know, never mind the fact that *their* dvr units can record the 'copy protected' content, but not Tivo's.
I do feel kind of bad for Tivo, because, basically as soon as they created a new market, they were forced out of it, largely, through factors that had nothing to do with the actual merits of their products or their competitor's products.
There could be other explanations. . . maybe the planet wasn't originally part of that star system, but was a rogue planet that got 'captured' when it got too close to that star, relatively recently?
I remember hearing something, from a scientist once, about how as you get deeper into the gravity well of a black hole (that is, nearer to it), that time slows down relative to the 'outside' Universe - that is, what seems like minutes for you might be 10,000 years to everyone else.
So, if that is the case, wouldn't it take a very long time for *anything* to fall into a Black Hole, relative to outside observers?
For a product to succeed, it's not necessarily true that it has to take sales away from other products (that is often the case, but not always). "Smart phones" are, as an 'industry' or 'market segment' or whatever, are still pretty new - most people don't have high-end portable digital handsets yet. So, it's easily possible that this Maemo platform can succeed without hurting Apple or the iPhone at all. Not saying that will necessarily happen, but possibly.
I have little interest in an Apple iPhone (I go back and forth on whether I want one or not), but I am definitely interested, at some point, in getting a phone with more computing and web browsing capabilities. I'm just biding my time, looking for 'the product' that I can finally feel comfortable buying. So far, I'm not interested in the iPhone because it's way too locked down - too much Apple control. I had some initial interest in the Android, but I wasn't particularly pleased with the T-Mobile G1, and no one else seems to be offering any Android devices in the US, so that seems to be going nowhere. Maybe Nokia can do what Google couldn't, in terms of getting an open, Linux-based platform for handheld devices, for which different hardware is available (or, maybe not, time will tell).
"Another dumbass that doesn't bother reading the tech specs [nokia.com]:"
Whoa, some people don't *understand* those tech specs. Seeing "* Quad-band GSM EDGE 850/900/1800/1900" doesn't necessarily make it obvious to people who aren't familiar with which signaling standards and frequencies a given carrier uses.
I think it's a little harsh to calls omeone a "dumbass" just because they don't understand the particulars of cell phone networks. Granted, this is /. so you hope most of the readers understand, but, even though someone is a 'nerd' doesn't make them knowledgeable iin *every* area of technology. They might know more than you ever will about astronomy, or quantum physics, or computer programming, and not know anything about cell networks.
Go ahead and ask. This is /. after all. We *like* to post questions here which would be answered by reading the headline, article summary, or first paragraph of the linked to article.