Recent content by joema

In United States v. New York Telephone Co., 434 U.S. 159 (1977), NY Telephone Co argued that it wasn't part of the investigation or the criminal wrongdoing, it was just a third-party phone provider. Writing for the majority in a 5-4 decision, Justice Byron White did not dispute they were a...

Upon further thought, it appears the search warrant itself does not grant the authority to compel other parties -- whether involved or not -- to labor in the execution of that warrant. Rather it is the application of the 1789 All Writs Act which was used to command third parties’ assistance to...

What if the best available volcanologist was previously engaged on a research mission he'd waited his entire life for, and he politely declined and referred law enforcement to other less capable volcanologists? Does the warrant give law enforcement the right to command the services (even if...

I don't think this point has been adequately discussed and would be interested in what the current legal precedent is. Surely this situation must have arisen outside the digital domain. Consider a wealthy criminal who has obtained a physical item wanted by law enforcement -- it could be a...

Apparently the whole situation started with a conversation: http://fortune.com/2016/03/23/apple-fbi-denis-mcdonough/

While technically true in the most formal sense, they have apparently threatened to do this: http://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-could-demand-apple-source-code-and-private-key-allowing-feds-to-ghost-iphones/

There are several answers to that. One from TheVerge: http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/19/11064054/apple-fbi-lockscreen-encryption-passcode-backdoor "while the precise software proposed by the FBI can’t be used to unlock other phones, it can still be useful to thieves. If the code fell into the...

Despite having read about fission and fusion, the OP was confused about how matter was converted to energy. Alas, this is typically poorly explained at the popular or even secondary school level. There are always diagrams and descriptions of fission chain reactions and comparisons to dominoes...

There are four main limits re CPU performance: (1) Clock speed scaling, related to Dennard Scaling, which plateaued in the mid-2000s. This prevents much faster clock speeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling (2) Hardware ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism) limits: A superscalar...

A key study (while several years old) covers this exact area: namely the disparity between the "non-recoverable error rate" spec published by HDD manufacturers and empirically-observed results. A spec of one non-recoverable error per 10^14 bits read would equate to one error every 12.5 terabytes...

I'm still investigating this. I think my above numbers and reasoning are incorrect, because the HDD non-recoverable error spec is failed reads per total bits read, not sectors read. However the fact remains, hard drives and RAID5 are much more reliable than indicated by the manufacturer's...

A number of popular-level articles have been published saying that RAID5 is increasingly impractical at larger data volumes due to the chance of an individual HDD having an unrecoverable read error (URE) during the rebuild phase. I think the underlying math which produced this conclusion may be...

The thread title "Detection and Stealth *in* Space" could imply a tactical situation and space-to-space detection. However Scenario #1 implies scientific detection. Obviously all space-located objects are not detected and this is a concern. However this does not mean they're hard to detect, only...

In a late 1980s trade journal, I saw a full-page of polar balance diagrams for each major engine type. For each engine type (V6, V8, inline 6, inline 4, V12, etc) a circular polar chart was presented with overlaid color-coded graphs showing 1st, 2nd and 3rd order balance for 360 degrees of...

OK after several more hours of searching (beyond those I did before my initial post), I finally found the formula. It is FV = PMT/i * ((1 + i)^n - 1), where FV = final value PMT = initial payment i = % increase of each payment n = number of periods E.g: Initial payment = $1000, %...