Posts by Charles 9
2008 posts • joined Wednesday 10th June 2009 16:31 GMT
Page:
Not really.
"Voyager 1's ultraviolet spectrometer (UVS), a light meter which is its only working instrument..."
Means this is the only instrument that's still doing some sort of work. All the others are beyond their usefulness (e.g. the camera is too far from anything to take a good picture, and the temp sensor is pegged at the bottom) and have been shut down as a result.
"NASA said it expects Voyagers 1 and 2 to be unable to power any single instrument by 2025."
Means even the UVS won't be able to get enough juice by that time, as the batteries won't have enough power anymore. At that point, the Voyagers will just become inert, slightly-radioactive lumps in deep space.
Taking your analogy further...
...your adversary (a state) discovers this possibility and, seeing as it's a way to crack your kettle, works on it (they have the time and money to do it). Next thing you know, you put your kettle over the fire, and come back some time later to suddenly find your kettle cracked open...and the water within stolen.
There's two aspects of this article. It's not just that software is vulnerable, but ALSO that STATES don't play by the same rules as most firms. Think of this for a while: who else but a state in the 1940's could pull off something like the Manhattan Project? Or the Space Race in the 1960's?
Posted in SOPA is dead. Are you happy now?
But how do you counter freedom of the press?
Especially "mudspray" ads that happen to smother one or more candidates without specifically endorsing anyone. That's still a form of bullhorning, it's also covered by the first amendment., and you have no way to conclusively determine under whose budget it falls. As we've learned, many forms of speech can be both political and subtle at the same time. If politicos are anything, they're sneaky. Any form of reform would have to put very tight rules as to how the campaign would be structured so that there's little if any weasel room.
Posted in SOPA is dead. Are you happy now?
Won't work.
They can counter your counter with, "No copyright, no incentive, so no new works. Oh, by the way, if you even hope to get another term, you better play along with us." Nothing like the threat of a massive mudslinging ad campaign (endorsing no one so it goes under no candidate's name) to make Congresspeople sit up and take notice. How would you counter such a massive influence (in other words, how do you beat the bullhorn)?
Posted in SOPA is dead. Are you happy now?
But what if they can't meet?
What if there reaches a divide such that the film industry won't go lower because then they're not profitable while further down there's a point the viewers won't go higher because that's too much hoop-jumping? In terms of supply-demand economics, what if the supply curve and the demand curve don't intersect?
Posted in SOPA is dead. Are you happy now?
Congrats, you killed the independent.
Independent candidates, by definition, have no party. So how would an independent candidate bankroll a campaign without a personal bankroll (the only one he's got). If someone else funds him, he's essentially part of a party and no longer independent.
What's REALLY needed is to understand that perhaps the Founding Fathers didn't quite get it all the way right. 200+ years of experience is teaching us that free speech only goes so far. Like capitalism, sooner or later you get a bully. The only way to control the bully is to set the rules so that everyone has their say. In other words, FREE speech isn't as important as FAIR speech (and to see that in action, look into the courts, where speech is under certain rules of honesty and fairness--Ads could use the same treatment).
But who moderates the campaign if you can't trust anyone (not even the government) to keep it fair?
Posted in WTF is... 802.11ac?
Maybe for new homes that are bought...
...but many old homes are still on the market, and retrofitting a home for Ethernet (especially a multi-story house) can be problematic. Then there is the issue of flats and other properties that are rented rather than sold. IIRC most rental agreements mandate no new holes in the walls bigger than a nail hole, and wired properties don't have as much influence as rent and location.
One question.
How do you do #1 and #2 if they're based in countries who don't respect American copyrights (China springs to mind)? And they don't respect American law enforcement. And they know how to get around any blocking tactic you can think of--probably by disguising their addresses as American ones. IOW, how do you play ball when there's a stubborn guy on the field who keeps stealing the balls and chucking them over the fence into the backward with the bulldog (and the house owners are his parents and encouraging him to do it, so there's no convincing him to stop, you get the picture).
What man can do, man can undo.
"What is needed is a form of DRM that actually works and can't be cracked (yes I know it's unlikely) but with a method for passing on the rights to another user."
Unlikely. As far as we know, any computer process CAN be reversed (a true one-way function would prove P != NP, you see, and we don't know that, yet), so using that as a basis, we can logically conclude that there is a fair possibility that any form of protection devised (and DRM is a form of protection) can be undone. IOW, a bulletproof DRM would have greater implications than simply proof of purchase.
I said something LIKE Kaiten.
Kaiten and their like just happen to be proof that Linux is not immune, and I'm simply pointing out that if Linux was vulnerable once, it can be vulnerable again, especially when your adversary is a hostile state with abundant (I'm not going to say unlimited) resources to find vulnerabilities in any piece of software your government uses: open-source or not. That's why I say software security is like a castle. In BOTH cases, a truly determined adversary (like a state) WILL get through no matter how hard you fortify. Things like Stuxnet show just how far some adversaries will go to do some damage. And let's not forget that MacOS X is Unix-based (BSD, this time), and it is finding an increasing number of vulnerabilities.
Then you end up with false negatives.
Excerpts of passwords only work if you're able to arbitrarily memorize PARTS of a password, but many people memorize the password by some sort of mnemonic and so go from start to finish: otherwise, they mess up. That could be frustrating in a scenario where you can't type the whole thing and than backtrack (think ATMs). In any event, extracts simply make the malware get a little smarter and recognize that passwords being entered are incomplete. If the malware records the card number, the excerpt, and what the excerpt represents, they'll reconstruct the entire thing after enough fishing. On-screen keyboards with random layouts? Useless to the blind (they need to be able to FEEL the keys—usually by Braille) and powerless against screenreader malware and overlays that can point a camera at the screen. And since you can't physically rearrange a physical keyboard...
OR...
...the fact that your hard drive crashed and the backup failed. Or you're trying to access the passwords from your phone where the secret password isn't kept for security reasons.
1Password sounds interesting, but I hear the Android interface isn't well polished. I would also like to have a cloud sync to say Dropbox in case I change machines or phones (had a phone break--thank goodness for a phone insurance plan). Perhaps if there was an alternative...
Assuming you pack the venue...
...and the manager doesn't take too big of a cut. But for the average garage band, touring can be a real chore. Not to mention the fuel expenses...
Not quite.
Sure, it may be Skyipot today, but what's to stop it being something like Kaiten (Hint: this one's a Linux trojan) the next? And even Linux is vulnerable to privilege escalation (as anyone hacking the Kindle Fire or B&N Nook Tablet can attest). After all, the term "rooting" owes its (cough) roots to Unix.
Dirty needles.
Hate to be behind the guy with HIV or AIDS who uses the system. And there may be other diseases out there hardy enough to withstand various means of "cleaning" the needle afterward.
Some people have bad memories.
That's like saying just write it all down in a memo book...until you lose the memo book.
Or in this case, put them in a password vault under one super password...until you forget THAT password.
Backup provisions.
The Copyright Act and various court interpretations and amendments since then have stated that, for the purposes of getting the music from one device YOU OWN to another device YOU OWN and getting it to work there, copying is OK in such a case because the work in question never officially changes hands. It's why it used to be legal to keep backups of software when they came of floppy disks, in case the original disks failed.
Kinda shows the point.
That 11,000 tons was meant to take the 30 tons of actual payload up into space. Put it this way. Simple physics dictates that it takes a LOT of force to accelerate from a standstill (relative to Earth) to about 30,000km/h against the Earth's rotation (escape velocity).
How about this for a spell?
I've been busy writing a book.
You happen to give it an evil look.
One day what's taken me an age
has been copied from me, page for page.
I intended to sell it to make a dollar.
Now everyone has it without a holler.
A living lost, my money taken.
That's theft, if I am not mistaken.
Not interested anyway?
Why's my work seeing the light of day?
Oh, that cliffhanger at the end?
Don't bother waiting—I've hung my pen.
BTW, if you should ever find a copy of the old EA game Hard Nova, read the inside cover. Has its own interesting spin on the whole piracy deal, and it's the basis for this little poem.
Only one thing.
"and the people who werent him, like the original poster above, cheered and said job well done."
Thing was, by the time they got to Joe Plumber, there was no one left to cheer for the job well done. Everyone else with more technical expertise had been grabbed ahead of time (after all, there will be SOME guilty pleasure they'll block that we'll try to get around, human nature and all).
Security is like a castle.
You can only build so many defenses before you have to knuckle down and "fort up". It's like the old saying, "You have to be lucky all the time, they only have to be lucky ONCE." In any event, if this is a state-sponsored break, then the OS wouldn't matter; exploits and privilege escalations exist for all operating systems (yes, even Linux) for the simple reason that they're all made by fallible humans. If the military were using Linux systems, you can bet every yuan that they'd simply store up a batch of zero-day LInux vulnerabilities to take control and then escalate from there. And in state-vs-state warfare (including cyberwarfare), money is no object, resources are usually plentiful, and motivation is a given.
I believe they've tried.
Both Overnet and Kadmelia (Serverless variants of EDonkey and EMule, respectively) are completely serverless and rely on other clients to establish a mesh by which one can funnel search requests and the like. The trick is that this decentralized nature inevitably has hiccups. People may not be on all the time, breaking parts of the mesh. Meanwhile, searches have to be bounced through node after node, taking time.
OTOH...
...if the costs WITHOUT subsidy are still too high (as has been the complaint in the past), then not enough people go, and you still end up short. There is already a good degree of stratification in society, and that doesn't tend to be healthy since that leads to class warfare.
Put it this way. How many people would be able to actually own a home if they had to come up with the entire amount in unencumbered cash up-front? Keeping in mind that domicile is rather required these days, so if you're not in a home, you're likely paying rent elsewhere, reducing the money that can be put away for such a huge expense.
Not to mention the stigma.
The words "dweeb", "geek", and "nerd" still carry significant amounts of stigma that dates back decades. Basically, unless a nerd can show up a jock in a real-life life-or-death matter and garners national/international attention, I don't see that stigma breaking anytime soon.
Something bugs me.
I believe multiple antennas are becoming more of a necessity as more wireless features are being used *simultaneously*. For example, WiFi tethering (both sanctioned and unsanctioned) employs both the 3G/4G frequency and the WiFi frequency at the same time. I don't think one antenna could cover both roles without a lot of shuffling back and forth which could result in increased wear.
I scan QR codes regularly...
...but the barcode Scanner program I use for the job doesn't open the site right away. It displays the decoded URL, then lets me decide.
More efficient than corn, perhaps, but what about vs. sugar beets?
Funny thing that..
If DHMO were so toxic, how come fish can live their entire lives immersed in it (and dolphins and other aquatic mammals survive for long periods in it)? If DHMO were so toxic, why does it compose around 70% of our mass?
Nah, what people are afraid of are the chlorine and flouride that "the gubmint" is pumping into our taps every day, without any recourse to remove it. They say it kills bad things and strengthens our teeth...but that's what THEY say, of course.
Taxing vices...
I recall there's been an historic aversion to taxing various vices. Perhaps if I knew more about it, I'd understand better, because at least taxing a vice means you can still partake it IF you pay the admission. Perhaps if the practice were extended more broadly to cover things like excessively-sweetened or extra-salty foods or maybe things with more processed and fewer raw agricultural ingredients, it may start giving people pause. It might also help to even out the inherent imbalance between cheap but nasty vs. good but expensive food.
True HD
Begging your pardon, but under the defined standards, 1280x720 IS an HDTV resolution (720p). 1920x1080 isn't the only defined HDTV resolution, and indeed is not possible under most broadcast television standards except when interlaced (which is unsuitable for high-motion scenes because of tearing) or for lower-rate film footage. OTOH, the same bandwidth can easily accommodate 720p at full progressive resolution, making it the resolution of choice for most sports networks.
Irrelevant.
Even on a sloped surface or on a lap, coffee that is only at 60 degrees (your average coffee temperature) would elicit cries of pain and a scramble to get the hot stuff off, but the odds are good you'll get nothing worse than a mild redness which should fade over a day or two. Coffee (or any other liquid) at *90* degrees is just asking for trouble: almost like holding your hand in front of a steam vent while the kettle's boiling. The point being made (and the nail for that McD's franchise) was they they didn't just make the coffee too hot--they made it HAZARDOUS. Hazardous as in carrying 90-degree coffee would be pretty much like carrying a similar amount of concentrated nitric or sulfuric acid.
From what I've read...
The temperature of the coffee in question being served was somewhere near 90 degrees (Celsius, in case any Americans are reading). That 10 shy of water's boiling point and well above your average coffee serving temperature (a much safer but still hot 60 degrees, which is also right about the scalding point).
One problem.
SOPA includes an anti-circumvention clause. Which means not only is it a crime to pirate, but (and here's the important part) it becomes a crime to do something which could be used to commit said crime. In other words, there is no opt-out. Skirting the regulation would itself be illegal. And since information can be passed on in all sorts of ways (not all of which are purely electronic--see QR Codes and Steganography), a slippery slope can be established before anyone realizes it. Probably the first thing that'll get criminalized is any form of encryption that the government can't already crack realtime (since, after all, ANY form of encryption can foil a deep packet inspection). That alone can put a big crimp on freedom of speech since any form of anonymity on the Internet depends on encryption in some form, and given that just about every other bitstream format is well-known and can be detected, it would be exceedingly difficult to continue to achieve anything other than quick bursts without there being SOME way of detecting it.
"You are quite correct and that is, pretty much, "The Plan". Only one problem. This is Internet, progeny of Arpanet, survivor of nuclear attacks. SOPA is just another blockage, it will be identified and by-passed."
Unless they go straight to the heart of the matter and start attacking the Internet ITSELF. The text of SOPA includes a provision like the DMCA: in that any attempt to circumvent screenings is ITSELF a violation of the act. IOW, they can outlaw anything that could be used as a screen...such as ENCRYPTION. Why do you think DNSSEC is considered under threat? Because a vital tool of authenticity is ALSO a vital tool of ANONYMITY. Goodbye, Freenet and Tor; hello Big Brother.
You need a stronger hook, then.
You're going to have to get down to base emotions: fear and the like. Perhaps invoking Nineteen Eighty-Four or the like where they'll say, "If Congress gets its way, your freedom of speech, your right to complain, can be silenced without recourse." or "Think it would never happen? Then why does no one talk about it?" or "Act now, or the limited government enshrined in the Constitution will cease to exist." Sure, the last one is a lie and may need an adjustment, but you need something of that intensity of fear to make people pay attention.
Something on the level of a mushroom cloud .
Moral dilemma.
The trouble is that this "distilled" news is what people WANT. People are inherently lazy (I'm not speaking about this in a negative context rather as an evolutionary trait--perhaps the term "economy of effort" would make a more accurate description). With all the average person undergoes every day, the last thing they want to do is be forced to THINK their way through the evening news. They want to know what's going on around them without having to think so much, so "distilled" news tends to get watched and read.
Not surprised.
Self-preservation motive is in effect here, so some sort of counter-force is needed to make people aware of things going on under their noses.
Looks like what it might take is a TV ad campaign by people opposed to the SOPA act to get people involved. Preferably get it plastered during the nightly news broadcasts. Trick would be getting around the networks' discretion: probably by challenging their discretion on freedom of speech/press, discrimination, or even political speech issues.
Posted in Kodak heading to Chapter 11
Thing is...
...the roads, rails, and skies all have physics to bolster their advantages. If you want delivery from warehouse straight to warehouse, it's hard to beat a tractor-trailer that can travel the roads from loading bay straight to loading bay. That said, trains have advantages in bulk and less friction to fight, which is why they can transports lots of stuff for much less per mile than truck. And then you have jets: when speed is a must.
It'll be interesting to see how any of these can be unseated while still obeying the physics that give each method its preferred niche.
Thing about sandboxes.
AFAIK no one's been able to build one completely sand-tight and failsafe. Microsoft should adopt the philosophy that even a Metro app could escape the sandbox conceivably unless they intend to vet every Metro app and app update personally ala Apple.
Posted in Boffins demo time-warp cloaking device
Differences.
While airplanes come in all shapes and sizes they have a number of differences from the flying car concept. They require dedicated areas to operate. Can't just set one down in front of the house or like that. Pilots receive specialist training that goes well beyond your average road exam. And since airplanes don't suffer from the design constraints of the concept of flying cars (think objects the size--at worst, slightly larger--of the average automobile), certain aerodynamic considerations can be factored in to make certain kinds of failure a less-than-catastrophic affair.
Question.
The article states that the Metro apps will be kept on these processes. What if the problem IS a Metro app?
Posted in Kodak heading to Chapter 11
In any event...
Both Duracell and Energizer are still going. People still need alkaline batteries for their everyday stuff, and they keep a diverse line of specialist batteries (such as lithium watch batteries, NiMH rechargables--they incidentally keep working on that tech to differentiate themselves, it's why we have batteries that hold charges for longer), so I don't think either one is going away anytime soon (in any event, Energizer is now a conglomerate with acquisitions in personal care products as well). Nor is Rayovac, which continues to hold a nice spot at the low end of the battery spectrum.
Posted in Kodak heading to Chapter 11
In addition...
...I think Fuji was smart enough to focus on the one part of the old process that still had significance: the printing. They adapted the process to one that could used image files as the base, and suddenly digital cameras weren't a concern at that end (since many people still want physical prints in the end). I'm sure you'll find many print labs still using Fuji equipment (I know Walmart still uses them for their standard photo systems--the "instant" jobs go through HP) and Fuji digital camera processing frontends.
Posted in Boffins demo time-warp cloaking device
Probably it's that future that's wrong.
Flying cars and vacations on the moon, for the time being, have run into a couple of nasty reality checks.
For the first, it's the basic fact of gravity: what goes up must come down, so if your flying car breaks down OVER the middle of nowhere, where does that leave you?
For the second, it seems to escape some people that getting something out of the earth's gravity well takes an extraordinary amount of energy. if we want space travel to be more ubiquitous, we're gonna need to lick the problem of a better source of escape energy first: something like an electric->kinetic converter useable up to over 30,000km/h.
Session hijacking.
How do you get past a two-factor authorization? Simple. Wait until an action needing the second factor is given, then alter the details behind the scenes. The bank gets the request the malware wants and sends out the second factor request. Depending on the variant, either the user enters the second factor thinking it's for their action when it's really for the malware or a mobile extension of the malware (perhaps orchestrated by alterations made by the PC variant) snags the factor off your phone. Either way, the malware now has clearance to do its dirty work.
I thnk that's the point.
It's intended to make the user aware of the motives of the website, much like how, in the US. most states require that all retail prices be posted PRE-tax, so that they become aware of how much extra they pay to their respective state governments (petrol is one exception owing to the fact it's covered under multiple taxes and normally purchased to a price rather to a quantity--taxes are posted by other means there).
If a site won't operate unless they track you, then it should make you pause and think, "Is there an alternative?" Now, it may well be that sites, losing advertising reveneues, may switch over to paywalls; this could well be the intention, an attempt to put an actual price on parts the Internet for public debate on the price of personal data.
Nah.
Word will get out that imitation horn powder is on the loose. That it's not good, could make you sick, even. Next thing you know, the demand will switch to WHOLE horn. Besides, they'll spin a yarn that the mystic effects of rhino horn actually dissipate within 60 minutes of grinding (exposure to the air and such) so that it's actually for the best to get the horn whole, grind and imbibe it in one sitting.
Counterfeiting rhino horn powder (essentially keratin) is one thing. Counterfeiting a whole rhino horn (including the shape, colours, and natural impuriies--which are supposedly the "magic ingredients" in rhino horn) would probably get more complicated.
Posted in LightSquared demands FCC ruling
It ain't slander...
...if it's fact. Speaking the truth is not inherently a crime. Calling a man a bastard is perfectly fine if you can prove he really IS the illegitimate son of a nobleman.
What would you rather have?
America (especially conservative Americans) doesn't like government control of things. They sold the spectrum on the market, and things simply gravitated. Trouble is, fairness and competition tend to have large areas of exclusivity. Unless competition is cutthroat, there's no incentive to be better, yet this cutthroat competition inevitably causes things to gravitate towards having winners and losers, which is inherently unfair. People have been trying to mull that problem long before America came about.
How about...
...give a man a smartphone and he'll be able to look up not just how to find a good rod cheap but also where is a good place to fish? Knowledge is power, and fishing smart can be more productive than fishing hard.
