ok, mr project developer - answer us some questions...
If the sea ice has deteriorated to the extent that it appears on those images, to what extent can we expect it to accelerate further due to various positive feedbacks the melting itself will create?
Can you simulate the effect on the gulf-stream of large amount of freshwater and the current and equilibrium changes caused? I remember the latest data, measured on site a few years ago, showed the gulf-stream has weakened significantly already.
And more importantly, are the scientists there selling their apartments and moving south yet?
Or is it the markets we should be following? Mittens and sunblock are up?
" She swallowed the cow to catch the goat. She swallowed the goat to catch the dog. She swallowed the dog to catch the cat. She swallowed the cat to catch the bird. She swallowed the bird to catch the spider. That wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside her. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly..."
"Each and every problem we face today is the direct and inevitable result of yesterday's brilliant solutions."
The claim that this service provides anonymity and immunity to logging is only true in a very limited sense! This is basically a simple one level proxy which keeps access records which the authorities can get their hands on if they "suspect" a crime is being committed. Sweden is signator to various levels of intellegence sharing deals on international crime and terrorism so none of the Swedish laws on privacy have effect if some outside government presents "reasonable suspicion" of a crime being committed. And no, you don't have to be a terrorist or kiddy pron baron to be concerned here - tyrannical governments have been known throughout history to use any means to available to them suppress and oppress their citizens...
Tor on the otherhand can claim to provide a level of true anonymity because of the 'onion routing' concept. A potential adversary would have to infiltrate the network with enough fake nodes to get to both the input end (to get the ip) and the the exit node (to get the traffic) and then do some traffic analysis to match these two together in order to figure out who is doing what. This being very resource intensive, such capability would only be available to the highest levels of intellegence gathering and even then only for a limited set of survaillance targets.
> And every time i've used windows, i've faced viruses, nagging, spyware, intrusive spying, and massive inefficiency.
Those are not strictly OS related problem and are mostly due to the stupidity of the user and a lack of properly programmed firewall. Obviously you don't know how to use Windows just as I don't claim to be an expert on Linux.
> > The closest thing out there is OSX but it has the hardware vendor-lock-in problem
> this is myth.
What part of not being able to run OSX on non Apple hardware is a myth !?! And why would I want to use some crappy unix/linux apps instead of Apple's - Apple's GUI is the whole point of OSX! Atleast with OSX's MaxOS GUI I would have Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Quark available. And National Instrument's Labview has started supporting OSX recently so I can't use that as an excuse anymore. Now I only need some proper virtualization running my OCAD on OSX...
As I said, ones W2K looses support on the software I use then I will be forces to migrate to OSX - but Linux, hell never!
This must be the millionth time I've seen this comment from a smug linux geek...
First of all Linux is what gives me the discomfort and headaches - W2K with SP2 and SR1 is secure and stable thank you very much. Every time I've tried Linux (Debian, Ubuntu and currently Suse) I've faced hardware problems as well as stupid things you need to hack some Make file or the kerner to get it to work. No thanks. W2K just works (and BTW is currently running apache, ssl, vpn etc. - and this is just my home workstation).
Secondly, yes, we all know that OpenBSD and others are up there in the ivory tower but who really gives a shit. Some people actually do work on these stupid machines and have invested years learning one particular operating system. Migrating to Linux would involve a learning curve that only students have time for. And then there is all the software, some of which might be replaceable but in my case not. The closest thing out there is OSX but it has the hardware vendor-lock-in problem with limited support for various things essential to my work. Maybe one day when the world stops supporting W2K.
DHS sais windows is defective - film at 11
on
The Self-Modifying EULA?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Excuse me for thinking you're missing a few nuts but why the hell do you care what it sais in SP4's EULA? Yes, SP4 EULA has its problems and I would be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt if it was't for your inexplicable explanation that you need to update your windows now cause DHS sais so... doh! Where have you been for the last three years? SP4 came out on June 26, 2003!!! And as for MS products being defective - this is surely news to everyone here. Reality is a harsh place for those who can't cope with it.
Making click-traffic out of mole hills.
on
Apple's Growing Pains
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· Score: 4, Insightful
No, these are not growing pains or any other phenomenon with a common unusual cause. They are all unrelated QC issues that could've happened and do happen with all products of such complexity. The only correlation due to a common cause related to Apple the company is the fact that these are all first generation products with radically new engineering compared to the old Macs all released within a short period of time.
Most of this apparent correlation is due to the fact that the Intel macs are getting unprecidented attention. The attention and scrutany is also amplified by the fact that forums and things like flickr are more popular now then they were during the previous launches of Apple's producs such as the original iMac and iBook lines - both of which had their share of QC issues. I would argue that Apple's Intel Macs have received orders of magnitude more publicity and attention then any of their previous products, as well as their competitors. I mean when was the last time a Dell product was featured in/. WITHOUT it having to first explode or something...
So, no, ars technica - your article is a non-story about a non-issue.
PS: Not that this is suprising -/. has been featuring many of these lately...
ScuttleMonkey writes to tell us that apparently the 'plot-thickens' as some guy somewhere emailed that some people are 'theorizing' alternate motives for the Blackhats keeping wraps on their so-called 'exploit' (that they tried unsuccessfully to smear a OSX security with).
There is no new substance. This bone has been gnawed clean already. Sounds more like some people are making excuses for something...
What I found interesting was the custom carbon fiber body, MIL-STD underwater wiring and connectors and logos on the side like Lockheed Martin and Microsoft. With sponsors and resources like that I wonder where the challenge is? IMHO there should be two different series - an open series like the existing one and one for software only where all teams would use the same platform. And perhaps there should be some limits set on the open series on resources like you would in a Soapbox Derby. That way kids would have to learn use their wits rather than throw money at problems. I guess this explains those military R&D budjets...
"If you're in a forward base in Iraq, it costs you the same per gallon of water as it does per gallon of fuel," said William Lear, a UF associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "It would be better to just have to send fuel out there, especially if you could get refrigeration and water out of it - which is what our system achieves."
And that's exactly what this unit does. It consumes ridiculous amounts of fuel to cool off the milkshakes and hamburgers for the troops that are there to 'obtain' more of it. This is brilliant! And it'll make sure that fuel will remain cheaper than water (at least until Peak Oil). And the efficiency - the unit manages to condense one gallon of "unpotable" water for every gallon of fuel.
And it is also environmentally friendly because it can use traditional fossil fuels as well as biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen and releases only small amounts of pollutants. This kind of system could be used as a mobile unit in case of hurricanes or wars.
It's basically an oridinary gas-turbine with some clevel thermodynamic engineering of the airflow to gain compression that will give "5 to 8 percent more efficiency than a traditional turbine". That's as far as the 'environmentally friendlyness' goes. And any gas-turbine can be made to use "biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen" which doesn't necessarely have anything to do with 'environmental friendlyness'.
And finally they dare to suggest that these could be used in a hurricane disaster! Like for example refrigerate the bodies of the african americans and the poor? Stop exploiting the suffering of those left to die in New Orleans. The federal government didn't respond to Katrina and is are not interested in helping the people. It was basically a huge land grab for the rich, just like Iraq is...
Currently WiFi is the best technology we got for broadband internet access in remote regions. It is the only mass-produced high-bandwidth wireless standard around. And of course any mass-produced complex consumer grade electronics will have a low MTBF. But you have to pick and choose your hardware carefully whatever your project is and plan your maintenance strategy accordingly.
Seems like you've had trouble with 'MESH networks'. MESH network is just a concept - you need to make an efford and have the engineering skills to apply it in reality. And quit whining about FCC limitations on channels and powerlevels. You have to plan around those. For example having multiple radio-interfaces in one accesspoint/router with sector antennas for clients and line-of-sight antennas for trunking will give you managable and predictable performance.
I would start with something like Soekris embedded-linux board with mPCI/PC-card radio-interfaces and custom antennas for each purpose. One radio acts as the accesspoint with omni-antenna and other two are used for trunking with parabolic antennas. That'll give you a basic building block for your network. Then you just loop them around the area you need coverage for and at junctions and high-traffic areas you co-locate a couple hooked together via the eth0 - its all flexible and managable with linux running on the boxes. This wont exactly be a 'MESH-network' (more like a semi-hierarchical mobile-phone tower network) but it will have the same flexibility of coverage and reliability (because of the looping).
What part of "Trusted Computing is Evil" do you not understand? You are defending a company that is spearheading this technology because currently they aren't applying it yet. And how conveniently you bring a comparison to Microsoft into this with a list of potential issues that you imply will never happen with Apple?
I assume ones the *non-intent* of the market requires everyone to use TCP based DRM and authentication, all the Apple Fanboys will explain how Apple is forced to follow suit - after all, all their hardware is fully compatible and ready to roll. Another first for Apple!
So Microsoft's vendor lock-in is called a monopoly while Apple's vendor lock-in is called 'honor system'
We live in different worlds my friend...
...depends entirely on what they do with it, doesn't it?
"If all Iran does with their nuclear program is produce electricity..."
"If all the government does with subcutaneous RFID chips is to track down criminals..."
No, it doesn't depend on the intent of the user - evil technology is evil in anyones hands, and Apple is only marginally less evil then your typical corporation. Just because Apple IS GOD doesn't alter the facts of Trusted Computing which you conveniently want to ignore.
I've been using a free version Agnitum's Outpost firewall for several years now on my w2k machine and its a clever little program, far simpler and thinner than the offererings from the major players. However like any good firewall program it does require the user to make very technical decisions on network traffic permissions whenever a process tries to contact the internet. Now before I praise it for not letting a process (virus/spyware/legitware) do a thing I don't want for the last couple of years, I do have to mention a disclaimer that in addition I've got the latest security updates for w2k, a NATted hardware firewall on the router and generally secured my system according to NSA's manuals.
Unlike in a Unix environment, in Windows the basic security concepts aren't required of the user. Windows computers despite the networking or even server capabilities are still built upon the philisophy of Personal Computer where the user has total control but also total responsiblity for what the software does. Microsoft's attempts to somehow augment security on top of this flawed concept is not going to succeed and in fact seems to be going the opposite way. Certainly my w2k box is easier to make secure than XP with its 'security improvements' and it seems Vista will make it impossible for the user to secure the computer that he's supposed to own and control.
Sadly I will try to stick with poor old w2k as long as possible but eventually I might have to resort to going the OSX way...
No doubt this report will be hyped by the new-age weirdos that are always looking for miracles cures or reasons for paranoia. Why do these articles never EVER tell anything meaningful - like for example the strenght and orientation of the field they used with some simple data tables and statistics? Who has access to some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscrition to get the raw data? New Scientist no.1 Science Magazine, yeah right! - science isn't about wild speculation and hype - its about rigorous examination and critical thinking. I wouldn't be suprised ones other labs try to reproduce the effect it gets debunked.
Ah, such delicious flamebait, I cannot resist the temptation.
Ok, aside from the fact that I was not suggesting any of those things that you claim and was only pointing out "my dismay of the lack of critical thinking and imagination people have"...
I think someone's a bit touchy-feely about supposedly being "excluded" from the "scientific community", whatever that means. Unlike your characterization of science as 'mental dictatorship', things are appreciated as science based on the merit of consistant logical thinking rather than succumbing to the absurd idea of embrasing every idea as equal. Infact the greatest champions of mental dictatorships have often been also the very homes for speudo-sciency hocus-pokus - Nazi German, Soviet Union etc.
With our limited resources and time, humans have to formulate a system which filters things as relevant and irrelevant. Science is an attempt at such a system. If you can suggest a better system then by all means do, but do not hide behind accusations your impossible idea of not having such a system to value certain ideas over others. Indeed because of the very openess and flexibility of the 'system' of science, people are constantly pointing out and fixing errors and shortcomings in it. Perhaps you could do so in the case of the phenomenon called 'telepathy', rather than resort to this naive rhetoric.
And finally, if you are so keen at being considerate of everyones subjective opinion, how do you go on about in life? How do you choose who to go to if you are ill? What criteria do you use to buy a computer? Are you seriously claiming that one shouldn't make decitions based on valuing some 'subjective' things over others? I don't know, perhaps you throw dice...
The Experiment
Many readers pointed out flaws in the experiment, it was not controlled enought to the point that any results from it would be completely invalid and would only play into the hands of the crackpots.
Proving Telepathy doesn't exist
Althought it is not possible to "prove that something doesn't exist", it is possible to show that the consequences of something existing would disagree and conflict with present knowledge and would lead to absurd consequences - reductio ad absurdum et al...
For example it was pointed out that the absense of any unexplained evolutionary advantages that could be due to telepathy existing, does strongly suggest that telepathy is very unlikely to exist (or that most of our knowledge of evolutionanary and behavioural biology is outright wrong).
Some people were desperately clutching straws by suggesting that since we do not know everything (the weirdness of double-slit-interference-experiment e.g.), that we should give the benefit of the doubt to such experiments. However this same argument could be made of any unexplained/unknown phenomenon, pink unicorns, elves, Narnia etc. and is therefore irrelevant since resources for research are finite.
Some people went as far as to suggest mechanisms for how telepathy might work: unknown signals, quantum effects etc. to justify the research. The psychology behind such attempt is imply credibility where there is none. If you cannot devise a method of testing such phenomenon then the value of them, however 'based on science', is nill. Indeed, this should be the very definition of pseudo-science.
Science and Magic
Although I'm often called a strict spectic I find science and biology magical and exiting just because of all the things we don't know. However I'm dismayd by the lack of cricitical mind and imagination that people have. There are plenty of magic left even after you ignore all these weak speudo science ideas.
For example how do oyster and various sea creatures know the phases of the moon when all apparent external signals are blocked and their location is moved thousends of miles? How do birds use geomagnetic fields for navigation and what is the sensitivity and selectivity of their receivers? Or do they have a long endurance inertial navigation system coupled to terrain mapping when available? Even a three year old can devise experiments for these phenomenon and learn volumes about the secret of nature...
it's more likely to disprove the existence of telepathy than to reveal evidence of psychic phenomena.
I'm sorry but as much as anyone would like it to be, it isn't possible to disprove that something doesn't exist. You can merely point out the continuing lack of credible proof that something does exist.
However one can estimate the likelyhood of the existance of so-called psychic phenomenon sphere by simply testing out if it holds up a test of internally consistent and logical structure. Indeed we do not know exactly how our brain functions and if it can send and receive signals. However such a possibility becomes ever less likely as our understanding of physics deepens. For such phenomenon to exist would mean so many ramifications that it would be highly unlikely that our scientific knowledge and measurement abilities wouldn't have stumbled on atleast a few of them by now...
PS: sorry, no references or links at this time of the night - just my own ramblings...
Researchers from San Diego are using supercomputers to accurately predict the shape of the Sun's corona.
In other news researchers are using supercomputers to accurately predict the weather, earthquakes and the stockmarket.
We already have a perfectly good satellite based early warning system for predicting Space Weather. Trouble is the damn thing keeps knocking them out. I think we should skip this trivial phase of technology and move directly to space weather control. I reckon all we need is to turn up the volume in HAARP or hire these guys.
This is a non-free windows VOIP application. There are zillions of similar things already on the market. Why is this one noticeable ? Because it was stuffed into firefox-the-free-software ?
Never were truer words spoken. Would mod this +1 Insightful but all out of points...
My wireless card software can already show me the signal-to-noise levels on all the channels so I fail to see what else that thing can do in addition. And if you insist on seeing a quite useless image of the 'spectrum' then there are free software for that out there already such as Kismet.
The comparison on their website is just silly. You can rent a basic spectrum analyser for a couple of hundred dollars for the day, plug in a directional antenna to your test port and pinpoint your problem, as well as use the tracking generator and a reflection bridge to test all your wireless equipment, tranceivers, cables, antennas, adapters/connectors etc. for attennuation, SWR, passband etc. Having installed a load of wireless stuff just as a hobby I find that thing quite useless.
Are these connections any more secure and reliable than using something in the 802.11 family of protocols?"
There is nothing inherently unsecure about any wireless link - you ALWAYS secure it separately with something (WPA2 certificates/tunneling/VPN etc).
The kind of throughput and safety margins you're looking for, you wanna go higher frequency and licensed band for those anyways regardless of how possible it could be to deploy such links with, let's say multi-channel 802.11g, for example... that is, unless you're on a shoestring budjet. Certainly it is interesting to compare the reliability of wireless links with traditional copper/fibre connections between office buildings since they cannot be accidently 'dug up'.
The current prototype accepts voltage from -23 to +23v
And the guy's writing the article for IEEE Spectrum. Good luck in your next job.
Passenger RF-devices make Planes Crash and Burn
on
JetBlue to Offer WiFi
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Just to pre-empt millions of posts: passenger mobiles/WLAN etc. are not a significant danger to the flight instruments and cause for the plane to crash etc. This has been dealth with before. Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.
Slashdot Mirror
ok, mr project developer - answer us some questions...
If the sea ice has deteriorated to the extent that it appears on those images, to what extent can we expect it to accelerate further due to various positive feedbacks the melting itself will create?
Can you simulate the effect on the gulf-stream of large amount of freshwater and the current and equilibrium changes caused? I remember the latest data, measured on site a few years ago, showed the gulf-stream has weakened significantly already.
And more importantly, are the scientists there selling their apartments and moving south yet?
Or is it the markets we should be following? Mittens and sunblock are up?
" She swallowed the cow to catch the goat. She swallowed the goat to catch the dog. She swallowed the dog to catch the cat. She swallowed the cat to catch the bird. She swallowed the bird to catch the spider. That wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside her. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly..."
"Each and every problem we face today is the direct and inevitable result of yesterday's brilliant solutions."
But what's the point if you can't display it on your bookshelf among all the other tomes you've never read.
"Reading a book on security enginnering does not security enginneer one make."
- Wiseguy
The claim that this service provides anonymity and immunity to logging is only true in a very limited sense! This is basically a simple one level proxy which keeps access records which the authorities can get their hands on if they "suspect" a crime is being committed. Sweden is signator to various levels of intellegence sharing deals on international crime and terrorism so none of the Swedish laws on privacy have effect if some outside government presents "reasonable suspicion" of a crime being committed. And no, you don't have to be a terrorist or kiddy pron baron to be concerned here - tyrannical governments have been known throughout history to use any means to available to them suppress and oppress their citizens...
Tor on the otherhand can claim to provide a level of true anonymity because of the 'onion routing' concept. A potential adversary would have to infiltrate the network with enough fake nodes to get to both the input end (to get the ip) and the the exit node (to get the traffic) and then do some traffic analysis to match these two together in order to figure out who is doing what. This being very resource intensive, such capability would only be available to the highest levels of intellegence gathering and even then only for a limited set of survaillance targets.
> And every time i've used windows, i've faced viruses, nagging, spyware, intrusive spying, and massive inefficiency.
Those are not strictly OS related problem and are mostly due to the stupidity of the user and a lack of properly programmed firewall. Obviously you don't know how to use Windows just as I don't claim to be an expert on Linux.
> > The closest thing out there is OSX but it has the hardware vendor-lock-in problem
> this is myth.
What part of not being able to run OSX on non Apple hardware is a myth !?! And why would I want to use some crappy unix/linux apps instead of Apple's - Apple's GUI is the whole point of OSX! Atleast with OSX's MaxOS GUI I would have Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Quark available. And National Instrument's Labview has started supporting OSX recently so I can't use that as an excuse anymore. Now I only need some proper virtualization running my OCAD on OSX...
As I said, ones W2K looses support on the software I use then I will be forces to migrate to OSX - but Linux, hell never!
This must be the millionth time I've seen this comment from a smug linux geek...
First of all Linux is what gives me the discomfort and headaches - W2K with SP2 and SR1 is secure and stable thank you very much. Every time I've tried Linux (Debian, Ubuntu and currently Suse) I've faced hardware problems as well as stupid things you need to hack some Make file or the kerner to get it to work. No thanks. W2K just works (and BTW is currently running apache, ssl, vpn etc. - and this is just my home workstation).
Secondly, yes, we all know that OpenBSD and others are up there in the ivory tower but who really gives a shit. Some people actually do work on these stupid machines and have invested years learning one particular operating system. Migrating to Linux would involve a learning curve that only students have time for. And then there is all the software, some of which might be replaceable but in my case not. The closest thing out there is OSX but it has the hardware vendor-lock-in problem with limited support for various things essential to my work. Maybe one day when the world stops supporting W2K.
Excuse me for thinking you're missing a few nuts but why the hell do you care what it sais in SP4's EULA? Yes, SP4 EULA has its problems and I would be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt if it was't for your inexplicable explanation that you need to update your windows now cause DHS sais so... doh! Where have you been for the last three years? SP4 came out on June 26, 2003!!! And as for MS products being defective - this is surely news to everyone here. Reality is a harsh place for those who can't cope with it.
No, these are not growing pains or any other phenomenon with a common unusual cause. They are all unrelated QC issues that could've happened and do happen with all products of such complexity. The only correlation due to a common cause related to Apple the company is the fact that these are all first generation products with radically new engineering compared to the old Macs all released within a short period of time.
Most of this apparent correlation is due to the fact that the Intel macs are getting unprecidented attention. The attention and scrutany is also amplified by the fact that forums and things like flickr are more popular now then they were during the previous launches of Apple's producs such as the original iMac and iBook lines - both of which had their share of QC issues. I would argue that Apple's Intel Macs have received orders of magnitude more publicity and attention then any of their previous products, as well as their competitors. I mean when was the last time a Dell product was featured in /. WITHOUT it having to first explode or something...
So, no, ars technica - your article is a non-story about a non-issue.
PS: Not that this is suprising - /. has been featuring many of these lately...
ScuttleMonkey writes to tell us that apparently the 'plot-thickens' as some guy somewhere emailed that some people are 'theorizing' alternate motives for the Blackhats keeping wraps on their so-called 'exploit' (that they tried unsuccessfully to smear a OSX security with).
There is no new substance. This bone has been gnawed clean already. Sounds more like some people are making excuses for something...
What I found interesting was the custom carbon fiber body, MIL-STD underwater wiring and connectors and logos on the side like Lockheed Martin and Microsoft. With sponsors and resources like that I wonder where the challenge is? IMHO there should be two different series - an open series like the existing one and one for software only where all teams would use the same platform. And perhaps there should be some limits set on the open series on resources like you would in a Soapbox Derby. That way kids would have to learn use their wits rather than throw money at problems. I guess this explains those military R&D budjets...
"If you're in a forward base in Iraq, it costs you the same per gallon of water as it does per gallon of fuel," said William Lear, a UF associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "It would be better to just have to send fuel out there, especially if you could get refrigeration and water out of it - which is what our system achieves."
And that's exactly what this unit does. It consumes ridiculous amounts of fuel to cool off the milkshakes and hamburgers for the troops that are there to 'obtain' more of it. This is brilliant! And it'll make sure that fuel will remain cheaper than water (at least until Peak Oil). And the efficiency - the unit manages to condense one gallon of "unpotable" water for every gallon of fuel.
And it is also environmentally friendly because it can use traditional fossil fuels as well as biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen and releases only small amounts of pollutants. This kind of system could be used as a mobile unit in case of hurricanes or wars.
It's basically an oridinary gas-turbine with some clevel thermodynamic engineering of the airflow to gain compression that will give "5 to 8 percent more efficiency than a traditional turbine". That's as far as the 'environmentally friendlyness' goes. And any gas-turbine can be made to use "biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen" which doesn't necessarely have anything to do with 'environmental friendlyness'.
And finally they dare to suggest that these could be used in a hurricane disaster! Like for example refrigerate the bodies of the african americans and the poor? Stop exploiting the suffering of those left to die in New Orleans. The federal government didn't respond to Katrina and is are not interested in helping the people. It was basically a huge land grab for the rich, just like Iraq is...
Currently WiFi is the best technology we got for broadband internet access in remote regions. It is the only mass-produced high-bandwidth wireless standard around. And of course any mass-produced complex consumer grade electronics will have a low MTBF. But you have to pick and choose your hardware carefully whatever your project is and plan your maintenance strategy accordingly.
Seems like you've had trouble with 'MESH networks'. MESH network is just a concept - you need to make an efford and have the engineering skills to apply it in reality. And quit whining about FCC limitations on channels and powerlevels. You have to plan around those. For example having multiple radio-interfaces in one accesspoint/router with sector antennas for clients and line-of-sight antennas for trunking will give you managable and predictable performance.
I would start with something like Soekris embedded-linux board with mPCI/PC-card radio-interfaces and custom antennas for each purpose. One radio acts as the accesspoint with omni-antenna and other two are used for trunking with parabolic antennas. That'll give you a basic building block for your network. Then you just loop them around the area you need coverage for and at junctions and high-traffic areas you co-locate a couple hooked together via the eth0 - its all flexible and managable with linux running on the boxes. This wont exactly be a 'MESH-network' (more like a semi-hierarchical mobile-phone tower network) but it will have the same flexibility of coverage and reliability (because of the looping).
You have a better idea?
What part of "Trusted Computing is Evil" do you not understand? You are defending a company that is spearheading this technology because currently they aren't applying it yet. And how conveniently you bring a comparison to Microsoft into this with a list of potential issues that you imply will never happen with Apple?
I assume ones the *non-intent* of the market requires everyone to use TCP based DRM and authentication, all the Apple Fanboys will explain how Apple is forced to follow suit - after all, all their hardware is fully compatible and ready to roll. Another first for Apple!
So Microsoft's vendor lock-in is called a monopoly while Apple's vendor lock-in is called 'honor system'
We live in different worlds my friend...
"If all Iran does with their nuclear program is produce electricity..."
"If all the government does with subcutaneous RFID chips is to track down criminals..."
No, it doesn't depend on the intent of the user - evil technology is evil in anyones hands, and Apple is only marginally less evil then your typical corporation. Just because Apple IS GOD doesn't alter the facts of Trusted Computing which you conveniently want to ignore.
I've been using a free version Agnitum's Outpost firewall for several years now on my w2k machine and its a clever little program, far simpler and thinner than the offererings from the major players. However like any good firewall program it does require the user to make very technical decisions on network traffic permissions whenever a process tries to contact the internet. Now before I praise it for not letting a process (virus/spyware/legitware) do a thing I don't want for the last couple of years, I do have to mention a disclaimer that in addition I've got the latest security updates for w2k, a NATted hardware firewall on the router and generally secured my system according to NSA's manuals.
Unlike in a Unix environment, in Windows the basic security concepts aren't required of the user. Windows computers despite the networking or even server capabilities are still built upon the philisophy of Personal Computer where the user has total control but also total responsiblity for what the software does. Microsoft's attempts to somehow augment security on top of this flawed concept is not going to succeed and in fact seems to be going the opposite way. Certainly my w2k box is easier to make secure than XP with its 'security improvements' and it seems Vista will make it impossible for the user to secure the computer that he's supposed to own and control.
Sadly I will try to stick with poor old w2k as long as possible but eventually I might have to resort to going the OSX way...
No doubt this report will be hyped by the new-age weirdos that are always looking for miracles cures or reasons for paranoia. Why do these articles never EVER tell anything meaningful - like for example the strenght and orientation of the field they used with some simple data tables and statistics? Who has access to some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscrition to get the raw data? New Scientist no.1 Science Magazine, yeah right! - science isn't about wild speculation and hype - its about rigorous examination and critical thinking. I wouldn't be suprised ones other labs try to reproduce the effect it gets debunked.
Ah, such delicious flamebait, I cannot resist the temptation.
Ok, aside from the fact that I was not suggesting any of those things that you claim and was only pointing out "my dismay of the lack of critical thinking and imagination people have"...
I think someone's a bit touchy-feely about supposedly being "excluded" from the "scientific community", whatever that means. Unlike your characterization of science as 'mental dictatorship', things are appreciated as science based on the merit of consistant logical thinking rather than succumbing to the absurd idea of embrasing every idea as equal. Infact the greatest champions of mental dictatorships have often been also the very homes for speudo-sciency hocus-pokus - Nazi German, Soviet Union etc.
With our limited resources and time, humans have to formulate a system which filters things as relevant and irrelevant. Science is an attempt at such a system. If you can suggest a better system then by all means do, but do not hide behind accusations your impossible idea of not having such a system to value certain ideas over others. Indeed because of the very openess and flexibility of the 'system' of science, people are constantly pointing out and fixing errors and shortcomings in it. Perhaps you could do so in the case of the phenomenon called 'telepathy', rather than resort to this naive rhetoric.
And finally, if you are so keen at being considerate of everyones subjective opinion, how do you go on about in life? How do you choose who to go to if you are ill? What criteria do you use to buy a computer? Are you seriously claiming that one shouldn't make decitions based on valuing some 'subjective' things over others? I don't know, perhaps you throw dice...
The Experiment
Many readers pointed out flaws in the experiment, it was not controlled enought to the point that any results from it would be completely invalid and would only play into the hands of the crackpots.
Proving Telepathy doesn't exist
Althought it is not possible to "prove that something doesn't exist", it is possible to show that the consequences of something existing would disagree and conflict with present knowledge and would lead to absurd consequences - reductio ad absurdum et al...
For example it was pointed out that the absense of any unexplained evolutionary advantages that could be due to telepathy existing, does strongly suggest that telepathy is very unlikely to exist (or that most of our knowledge of evolutionanary and behavioural biology is outright wrong).
Some people were desperately clutching straws by suggesting that since we do not know everything (the weirdness of double-slit-interference-experiment e.g.), that we should give the benefit of the doubt to such experiments. However this same argument could be made of any unexplained/unknown phenomenon, pink unicorns, elves, Narnia etc. and is therefore irrelevant since resources for research are finite.
Some people went as far as to suggest mechanisms for how telepathy might work: unknown signals, quantum effects etc. to justify the research. The psychology behind such attempt is imply credibility where there is none. If you cannot devise a method of testing such phenomenon then the value of them, however 'based on science', is nill. Indeed, this should be the very definition of pseudo-science.
Science and Magic
Although I'm often called a strict spectic I find science and biology magical and exiting just because of all the things we don't know. However I'm dismayd by the lack of cricitical mind and imagination that people have. There are plenty of magic left even after you ignore all these weak speudo science ideas.
For example how do oyster and various sea creatures know the phases of the moon when all apparent external signals are blocked and their location is moved thousends of miles? How do birds use geomagnetic fields for navigation and what is the sensitivity and selectivity of their receivers? Or do they have a long endurance inertial navigation system coupled to terrain mapping when available? Even a three year old can devise experiments for these phenomenon and learn volumes about the secret of nature...
I'm sorry but as much as anyone would like it to be, it isn't possible to disprove that something doesn't exist. You can merely point out the continuing lack of credible proof that something does exist.
However one can estimate the likelyhood of the existance of so-called psychic phenomenon sphere by simply testing out if it holds up a test of internally consistent and logical structure. Indeed we do not know exactly how our brain functions and if it can send and receive signals. However such a possibility becomes ever less likely as our understanding of physics deepens. For such phenomenon to exist would mean so many ramifications that it would be highly unlikely that our scientific knowledge and measurement abilities wouldn't have stumbled on atleast a few of them by now...
PS: sorry, no references or links at this time of the night - just my own ramblings...
In other news researchers are using supercomputers to accurately predict the weather, earthquakes and the stockmarket.
We already have a perfectly good satellite based early warning system for predicting Space Weather. Trouble is the damn thing keeps knocking them out. I think we should skip this trivial phase of technology and move directly to space weather control. I reckon all we need is to turn up the volume in HAARP or hire these guys.
This is a non-free windows VOIP application. There are zillions of similar things already on the market. Why is this one noticeable ? Because it was stuffed into firefox-the-free-software ?
Never were truer words spoken. Would mod this +1 Insightful but all out of points...
PS: how about some links to open VoIP clients ?
My wireless card software can already show me the signal-to-noise levels on all the channels so I fail to see what else that thing can do in addition. And if you insist on seeing a quite useless image of the 'spectrum' then there are free software for that out there already such as Kismet.
The comparison on their website is just silly. You can rent a basic spectrum analyser for a couple of hundred dollars for the day, plug in a directional antenna to your test port and pinpoint your problem, as well as use the tracking generator and a reflection bridge to test all your wireless equipment, tranceivers, cables, antennas, adapters/connectors etc. for attennuation, SWR, passband etc. Having installed a load of wireless stuff just as a hobby I find that thing quite useless.
Are these connections any more secure and reliable than using something in the 802.11 family of protocols?"
There is nothing inherently unsecure about any wireless link - you ALWAYS secure it separately with something (WPA2 certificates/tunneling/VPN etc).
The kind of throughput and safety margins you're looking for, you wanna go higher frequency and licensed band for those anyways regardless of how possible it could be to deploy such links with, let's say multi-channel 802.11g, for example ... that is, unless you're on a shoestring budjet. Certainly it is interesting to compare the reliability of wireless links with traditional copper/fibre connections between office buildings since they cannot be accidently 'dug up'.
And the guy's writing the article for IEEE Spectrum. Good luck in your next job.
Just to pre-empt millions of posts: passenger mobiles/WLAN etc. are not a significant danger to the flight instruments and cause for the plane to crash etc. This has been dealth with before. Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.