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Actually, laws like that have been used successfully in Australia for OHS.

Before the current laws were introduced, workplace safety was based around the same proscriptive model most statute laws still have. Basically, they were a list of things you either had to do or couldn't do. Whenever there was a serious accident, statutes forbidding whatever caused the accident were enacted, ad infinitum.

This resulted in a climate of dependence on state regulation and because the nature of workplaces changed rapidly throughout the 50's to 70's, didn't reduce accidents much. Companies, and the mining industry in particular, continued to kill a large number of employees every year. They were frequently in full compliance with statute laws when they did so, because the laws hadn't caught up with technology.

The British Robens Report in 1972 changed that. Since then, Australian OSH laws have moved towards a set of general duties, where employers have a duty to assess risks and provide a safe workplace, and employees have similar duties to themselves and their workmates. There's a good description here, including a link to the original report.

That change has been very successful, and I believe a similar model could be adopted for internet regulation, where service providers (ISPs) would have a set of duties to their users, including provision of a "clean" feed if that customer requires it.

It's a more flexible approach which would allow competition amongst ISPs to reduce costs to customers.

Actually, I mentioned Moby Dick as a reference to an experiment that showed how you could read predictions about pretty much everything out of any text. Further information behind this link.

I remember seeing this stuff more than 10 years ago. Being Australian the stuff I saw ten years ago was from an Australian University grant from the DSTO (military research organisation), with information that can be found at http://wwwrsphysse.anu.edu.au/~ggb112/

In fact a Typical Fluroscent tube makes a reasonable HF antenna with its frequency dependent on its length. For those that think the glowing plasma makes the antenna detectable in the visible spectrum, its easy to have a material that is opaque in the visible spectrum but transparent in the radio spectrum. A piece of stryofoam is enough to do the job.

D.

Why don't you just use rsync?

I once heard Neal Stevenson give a similar talk. http://db.tidbits.com/article/05951
He drew pie charts labled "threat model" where 99% of the chart was "hyenas."
Today, our threat models are a bit more complex.
http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/NotesCFP2K.html#Steph

junpei wikipedia

Addendum:

http://escience.anu.edu.au/lecture/cg/CGIntroducti on/Data/matrix_Bullet_Time.en.html

That is a link to the methodology of the Matrix effect. Whilst it relies heavily upon post-production CGI to manipulate the captured images, the fundamentals of the technique is a set of sequenced stills cameras.

Privacy is emerging as the real winner of the Internet search engine war as companies aggressively compete with one another by offering stronger protections for user records

No, no, no, no. Please don't propagate this myth. Seriously. Data Privacy is NOT Data Protection. That's corporate bull-crap to utterly change the meaning of data privacy (and, likewise, privacy). As Roger Clarke points out:

Data privacy Individuals claim that data about themselves should not be automatically available to other individuals and organisations, and that, even where data is possessed by another party, the individual must be able to exercise a substantial degree of control over that data and its use. This is sometimes referred to as 'data privacy' and 'information privacy'.

[...]

The term 'privacy' is used by some people, particularly security specialists and computer scientists, and especially in the United States, to refer to the security of data against various risks, such as the risks of data being accessed or modified by unauthorised persons. In some cases, it is used even more restrictively, to refer only to the security of data during transmission.

These aspects are only a small fraction of the considerations within the field of 'information privacy'. More appropriate terms to use for those concepts are 'data security' and 'data transmission security'.

Yeah, it's cyberpunk but whatever. Information Wants to be Free. See wikipedia also. The bottom line is that people will get to the information any way they can. If it's easier to get for free, they will do that. The absolute bottom line is that PUBLISHING COMPANIES CHARGE TOO MUCH, so we would rather steal than pay them extortive rates. No one doubts that the information is valuable, but if people want the information, they will tend to drive the price down, one way or the other. RIAA and the other MAFIAA tried to prevent this from happening with regulation, which was like putting a condom on a firehose.

Now, on the other hand, signing documents with PGP or something actually serves a useful purpose, yet this has been subjugated by industry and government alike. Weird how they don't seem to do what's in our (the customer's) best interests, isn't it? Well, too bad for them, they will go out of business and we will keep buying stuff from someone else. Nice knowing you, ttyl.

You were doing really well, and I agreed for the vast majority with your sentiment, right up until your left-field dig involving the Communist Manifesto. Have you ever read the thing?

Well, had I not read it, how would I know its contents? Here is plank 10 quoted directly from the source(emphasis mine)

"10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc"

Yes, I was being tongue-in-cheek, but really, here's a quote from one of the biggest champions of public schooling ever, Horace Mann: "'Our common schools . . . reach, with more or less directness and intensity, all the children belonging to the State,--children who are soon to be the State.'"

That's pretty much the attitude of 'real' (as opposed to idealistic) communists, isn't it? That all belong to the State. Actually, here, let me do the following: here are the 10 planks given in the communist manifesto. I'm not going to tell you how many of them we incorporate into our government. I'll let you do that yourself. Note that I'm not indicating whether I agree with this document or our government, and I'm not saying I don't. I'm just sayin'.

"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc."

rsync is very complex protocol (to me), it does find matching chunks at different offsets:

http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/how-rsync-works.html
"The sender process reads the file index numbers and associated block checksum sets one at a time from the generator.

For each file id the generator sends it will store the block checksums and build a hash index of them for rapid lookup.

Then the local file is read and a checksum is generated for the block beginning with the first byte of the local file. This block checksum is looked for in the set that was sent by the generator, and if no match is found, the non-matching byte will be appended to the non-matching data and the block starting at the next byte will be compared. This is what is referred to as the "rolling checksum"

If a block checksum match is found it is considered a matching block and any accumulated non-matching data will be sent to the receiver followed by the offset and length in the receiver's file of the matching block and the block checksum generator will be advanced to the next byte after the matching block.

Matching blocks can be identified in this way even if the blocks are reordered or at different offsets. This process is the very heart of the rsync algorithm. "

While you are right that rsync has a much simpler job, it is still based on exchanging a list of checksums.

A long, long time ago I was trying to download a Debian iso image. The howto to generate one was kinda like:
-download "this list" of packages from you favorite mirror
-cat *.deb > foo.iso
-rsync the remote iso image to your local foo.iso

The result was an iso generated from files that could have been downloaded from n sources.

This method is still mentioned under the "Aargh! The script fails with an error - have I downloaded all those MBs in vain?!" section on http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/

Personally I chose Moby Dick to be my personal saviour when I read about the assassination prophecies hidden within the text.

http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html

These codes aren't about prophecy, it's shoe-horning. That's why they only seem to reliably predict events that have already happened.

This is the same principle as the Bible Code which has been shown over and over to be rubbish. If you line things up in various ways you can find just about any pattern you want given sufficiently long input.

*sigh* Fine I'll bite. One. Last. Time. Must... resist... forces... of... ignorance...

Your understanding matches nothing but some vague idea that "language changes therefore just about anything I say can be right". This was never a liguistics discussion, it was about what Communism and Capitalism are. You seem to think that they are vague ideas that are constantly changing. My position from the very start has been that whatever the commoners' understanding of the terms are, most -ism words refer to very thoroughly explored, albeit broad, ideological paradigms. These definitions may change in the future, but at this point in history their origins and intents are still clearly remembered by political and social analysts.

Example from here: "Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownership of the means of production. It can be classified as a branch of the broader socialist movement." Whatever you think Communism is, your idea is wrong. Communism is defined clearly in The Communist Manifesto and if you think it is something else then you are wrong by definition.

Read the whole of that Wiki article as well as the manifesto, and you will see that whatever the average person understands by the term, there is one correct understanding of it. The common person gets his understanding of communism by listening to the rhetoric spouted by American pop culture laced with residual propaganda from Mcarthy's days. This is the reason that most people misunderstand the term, it was and still is deliberately miscast by the western media to look like something sinister and dangerous when in reality it is just an opposing political viewpoint. Most people now think it is some totalitarian system when in fact it's goal is a stateless society. The very word Communist invokes images of Russian generals lurking in bluestone basements with a map of the US and a big red marker deciding which city to bomb first.

To quote from Wiki again: "The communist society Marx envisioned emerging from capitalism has never been implemented, and it remains theoretical; Marx, in fact, commented very little on what communist society would actually look like. However, the term 'Communism', especially when it is capitalized, is often used to refer to the political and economic regimes under communist parties that claimed to embody the dictatorship of the proletariat."

So you see the reference to any existing state such as China, North Korea or whatever as "Communist" is inaccurate. Assumption of the communist label is nothing but a political move by them to lead their people to believe they are acting in their interests. At best, and being incredibly generous, they could be referred to as the intermediate prolitarian revolutionary governments, but that's so much of a stretch that Marx would turn in his grave if you referred to the governments of China or NK in that way. It's just like the "freedom and liberty" rhetoric that western governments espouse to make their people believe they are truly acting altruistically.

You said that most people think of Communism as a totalitarian system. Referring to the Socialism Wikipedia article, "The primary concerns of socialism are social equality and an equitable distribution of wealth that would serve the interests of society as a whole.". Hardly totalitarian theory. In fact, most people wouldn't even know the difference between Socialism and Fascism, they just lump them both in the "these guys are nasty people" category because that's what they have been taught by the media.

The only ill-defined -ism from modern times is Fascism. Due to it's short life and strong political stigma, very few political and social thinkers gave

http://msowww.anu.edu.au/~rmn/C2006P1.htm

This site has a lot of info and viewing directions.

Basically...

By Jan 16, the effect of forward scattering will have dropped back to about zero and the comet will already be heading away from the Sun and Earth; back to the obscurity of the Oort cloud. Although now clearly fading, it will be moving higher into the southern sky away from the sun. At sunset on the 16th, the comet will be about 10 degrees from the sun and just left of directly above the Sun at sunset. It will set 54 mins after the sun, 9 degrees to the left of the sunset point.

From Jan 17 onwards, the comet, although fainter, should be well visible in the darker skies. It then moves into the SW sky at roughly a 45 deg angle up to the left of the sunset point. The angular distance of the comet from sun at the time of sunset from Sydney then increases on a daily basis:

Jan 17 12deg
        18 15deg
        19 17deg

after which date the head of the comet will set when the sun has already passed more than 18 degrees below the horizon (astronomical darkness).

... or somehow convert the CO2 in the atmosphere directly into fuel again, using some form of renewable energy like the sun.

I moved to Linux in 1994 as my primary desktop and server OS. About three years ago I decided that I wanted to produce some video content. Video editing was theoretically possible in Linux - I hooked up my camcorder to my Linux box and did some editing, but the tools were primitive and cofiguration was unusually difficult.

Eventually I looked at OS X and iLife. I decided to jump to a Mac. What a great move!

I found that Linux made it possible to do some things, but OS X made it simple to do them.

Fast forward a few years. I now have a few macs at home - their licensing policy makes it affordable to have several machines and a five user license for the OS and tools. My family loves the power and usability of the Mac.

Recently my linux server at home began acting a bit flaky. I did some analysis and determined that hardware replacement was needed. After checking prices for CPU/motherboard/RAM (and potentially hard disk) I figured out that I'd need a few hundred bucks to replace the CentOS box with a new one. After thinking about whether to drop a few hundred bucks or not on this server, it occurred to me that I might be able to move all of the services hosted on linux to OS X.

I found that samba,
  hotwayd,
  dansguardian,
  uw-imapd,
  fetchmail,
  procmail,
  spamassassin,
    rsync,
  rsnapshot,
  apache2,
  MySQL4,
  PHP,
  perl,
  java, and
  squid were all available for OS X.

Most of these are "in the box" with OS X. The only ones that I need to compile from source are uw-imapd and squid! Of course I need the bundled developer tools to get a compiler, and the Apple/BSD startup mechanism and the netinfo wierdness require some tweaks - but since when did Linux *not* require any tweaking?

What this means to me is that after more than a decade of running Linux at home (and work) I am *this* close to shutting down Linux for good at home.

Hope your experience is similar.

Regards,
Anomaly

PS - I share your recent comments about the loss of a pet. :(

If you had RTFA and actually checked the links there, you would have noticed that beside the 'am-I-depressed-tests' there is also a community. Take a look at the blueboard: http://blueboard.anu.edu.au/ In my opinion that's a huge thing for someone who is really depressed and afraid of talking about it with his family/friends.

Buy a second drive and copy the entire primary drive over once a week.
The second drive can be internal, in a different system on the network or in an external USB case.

Why copy only once a week? Well, if your system gets hacked, if might take a week for you to realized it. Now you have a complete copy of the OS, programs and data right there to compare against.

If you have a failure, chances are, the really important stuff is over a week old. If you have more important items that you can't lose, copy those do a special place over the internet whenever they care changed.

I use rsync over ssh to do this http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/. I didn't care about platform independence, but the program works under cygwin if you want to go between windoze and unix systems. Rsync only copies change data so it is highly efficient and very quick after the initial copy is made.

Oh, it is free.

If you only want to backup a selected subset, rsync has lots of options including "include" or "exclude" file lists.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Either way, I think it's one of the greatest pieces of software ever written, and use it for all sorts of things.

Families, ... operate very successfully in a communistic environment.

Families operate by killing those who control the means of production and siezing control?

You may wish to read the communist manifesto since it is the document written by Marx and Engels for the purpose of "openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies" of the communist party. Among the ideas addressed in that document are the objectives of destroying the family, religion and business. Your notion that families, religions and businesses operate successfully in a communistic envirinment is absurd. To the extent that families, religions and businesses are successful, communism is not, as they are mutually exclusive. At least, according to the Communist Manifesto.

Communism is not another word for sharing. Sharing is common to many philosophies/religions. Sharing in communism is the excuse used for the communists to sieze power and become the new ruling class. The oppresive communist regimes were not an accident, that's how communism actually works.

It's laughable that the stuffed-shirt, Wall Street types are saying that Apple needs to provide more infomation, but the "Information wants to be free" crowd here at Slashdot thinks that Apple should hide the information from everyone lest their competitors find out their margin. Apple competitors know that a consumer doesn't really care if you can beat someone's margins. They care if you can beat their pricing. This is just Apple hiding information because they can.

It drives me up a wall how this company always gets a free pass on this and other sites. Apple is not the greatest computer company ever. They are certianly not Open Source or even close to it. They make pretty boxes for a lot of cash, and now there boxes are just another PC brand.

At least they are built better than Dell's, I'll give you that.

Great, now when MS makes programming mistakes, one of these will knock someone's head off.

Scinetists often re-examine new material in light of new theories, or new developments in analytical techniques which Trevor Ireland happens tp work on. BTW, Ross Taylor of the ANU was invloved in early moon sample analysis.

No, with all due respect, you are very much mistaken. Javascript has had horrible security issues, which keep popping up (pun intended). Not quite as bad as MS Windows, but certainly a contender.

"Show me an attack vector that works with just javascript."

Ok, since you didn't qualify your statement, here are a few from a quick google search, since I'm lazy. Note the email-related ones. Study the issues around javascript (including its architecture) if you want more information.

http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9704/ 0016.html
http://www.peacefire.org/security/hmattach/
http://esj.com/security/article.asp?EditorialsID=8 95
http://www.opera.com/support/search/supsearch.dml? index=781

"but for the adverage person, remote is better"

I've already mentioned that what most people do leaves them open. Most people don't understand security. And most people really don't care. Your original question was directed towards myself. Anyone calling themselves a security expert who blindly lives by depending on remote maintainence is one who is an easy target. Knowledgeable users know how to protect themselves. And the best actually do, since the loss of reputation capital is significant (see how Kevin Mitnick got taken down the last time).

http://www.asimovlaws.com/articles/

http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/SOS/Asim ov.html

Every Robot and Foundation Story by Asimov and the three Bs.
More Info :http://www.asimovonline.com/ Not one mention of the Zeroeth Law in the whole thread, you people disgust me.

The left says that Labor has abandoned its traditional base and values and that its policies are indistinguishable from those of the Coalition.

the Labor party become a catchall party with one overriding objective: to win the next election.

Check out rsync
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/
Back up your files accross the globe using ssh if you want.

Two words for you... rsync and squid. Not error proof, but with checksums and redundancy, pretty close so long as errors are not introduced at the root server.

But wouldn't it be fun to hack the root server and make sure all your old enemies are listed as currently under treatment for syphilis and Dick Chafing (not to be confused with Dick Cheney, which is much worse). ;-)

- Greg

Just wanted to add that these GPS measurement stations put up for this purpose could give valauable information that could also be used for other many purposes, I can mostly think of geophysics purposes as that is what I work with myself, but I imagine such a web could be used for many other things

I remember a paper about the isostatic rebound after the icecap in Scandinavia where GPS recievers were used. A curiosity I remember from the paper was that at the coastal areas there were quite a lot more uncertainty on the vertical movement, which the authors said probably was caused by the bigger amount of snow that assembles on the GPS devices and thereby causing refraction of the waves used for the GPS measurement

GPS information could is also used to determine the absolute movement of plates and I imagine that this system could also with time, be used to predict big earthquakes more precisely and thereby give even more time to prepare for the tsunamies etc.

The plasma thruster is designed to deliver low amounts of thrust over long periods of time with low fuel consuption. They are best suited to use on interplanetary probes and that kind of thing, not for reaching escape veolcity.

One of the most interesting things about this new thruster (developed here at the ANU) is that by using the double layer the need for any metal parts coming in contact with the plasma is reduced. This greatly increases relabily through reduced erosion of the thruster.

See: http://prl.anu.edu.au/SP3/research/HDLT for more info

A reasonable person might well consider an explanation that included the natural evolution of advanced technological civilizations before they resorted to the invention of new particles and laws of physics (as is typically a requirement as soon as you mention 'dark matter').

It is useful to keep in mind that several papers by Charley Lineweaver's group document that ~70% of the "Earth's" in our galaxy are significantly older than ours (perhaps billions of years older). It would not be that unexpected that from time to time we might encounter a galaxy where advanced civilizations had placed *all* of the reasonably available matter and energy "under management". (For the purposes of discussion we will assume that black holes do not constitute a "reasonably available" useful resource despite proposals from time to time that require rather creative physics to make them "useful".)

Thanks for making it clear what is really going on. It sounds like a good idea to me. From my subjective observation of the Hancock Library about 90% of student activity is dedicated to using the computers to research articles, run programs and writeup assignments.

The books and journals are priceless, but are not that heavily used. Most essays reference recent artilces that are mostly online. I personally use books or old journal articles for historical context in the Introduction. It is great to have access to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, for example, which I have used a couple of times. As I said, Priceless.

For convenience though, poring through printed abstracts twenty years ago has nothing on the power of good search tools.

Way back in 1998, work began on an open source Lotus Notes replacement. The design looked pretty cool, and they got replication between Berkley DBs doing I think, before the whole thing stagnated -- probably because very few people are really interested in groupware, and those who are probably don't want to model it on Notes...

Anyway, it was called Yoga, and its homepage is still available.

And the reason I mention this? Well, it started off called Gnuotes, which didn't exactly trip off the tongue, and so the name changed to Yoga. While Yoga stands for "Your Open Groupware Application", it was also chosen because they were "adopting the Lotus position", which I think makes it the wittiest name for a failed Open Source project EVER.

> The "copyright infringement isn't theft" is my favorite,

Depends. What country do you live in and what are the laws? You're assuming that all countries agree on what copyright infringement means and what is an is not theft.

In Canada, you pay a blank medium tax so that you are allowed (by law) to make CD copies and give them to friends via sneakernet or download via P2P (but not upload). In the US, things are different.

Breaking the DMCA is also allowed for interoperability. I run Linux, so if I purchase an Audible book, it's okay for me to infringe on the copyright (which says no breaking of the encryption), if my only purpose is to listen on Linux. In the US, the situation is less clear.

In some countries, copyright is less than the "Sunny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act" specifies and/or it might not cover all the work that was extended (e.g. Mickey Mouse might be public domain).

> So where's the middle ground? One side wants too
> much money, and the other side doesn't want to
> pay anything.

You're missing the point. It's not about money, it's about control. (see
http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF .html
)

* Information wants to be expensive because knowledge is power. The right information in the right place just changes your life or keep you in a comfortable living. In the case of privacy, protecting the right information from getting may allow you to even have a life worth living (e.g. Gattaca - the lead character used deception to avoid unjust DNA discrimination).

* Information wants to be free because information is hard to control (secrets get out even with draconian laws) and because it's so easy to combine it with other information to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.

There's a constant battle between these two ideas and each country makes its own choices on where to draw the information control line. If your society dispises draconian laws or values innovation, then the "free side" wins more. If your society values free enterprise at the expense of innovation and doesn't mind draconian laws, the "expensive side" wins more. If privacy is values, the "expensive side" wins more. If collaboration and self respect is the norm in the society so privacy isn't an issue, then the "free side" wins more.

There's no clear cut easy answer for any culture.

And while you are reading the mentioned discussion, you might even find out what the sentence you seem to despice so much originally meant and most importantly, what sentence followed it.

Since information wants to be free, I'll kill the suspense and give the full quote you were probably referring to:

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Interestingly, in both quotes, they were talking about price, not freedom. See http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF .html

Of course, "Information wants to be free" originally was about gratis. The second, forgotten half of the phrase was "Information also wants to be expensive." It was meant to describe the conflict between the ever-easier, ever-cheaper methods to store and transmit information, and the ever-increasing value placed upon information by those who create and/or use it.

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better. -- Stewart Brand

I just took a look at the Communist Manifesto-- haven't read it since college. The first chapter is quite prescient in its discussion of what is now globalism. There isn't anything in it about murder, nor about mayhem. It is an idealistic 19th Century document.

Definitely, the Communist Party are "now not liberals". The early Marxists desired to reduce suffering among women, children, and the working classes; so did the Christians of that period. The working out of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China had little to do with that idealism, and much to do with traditional power. Neither liberal nor conservative, these regimes carried out policies that were calculated to suppress criticism of all kinds, including liberal criticism.

Consider that the Romans felt the same way about Jesus, who was the quintessential liberal of his time. Without mayhem and murder, he cast out the moneylenders from the temple. Without mayhem and murder, he supported the poor and helpless, ate with undesirables, and defied authority. How many Christian liberals are inspired by this example! And how many "Christian" fanatics (not conservatives) completely ignore it!

Yep, while I was at ANU, we had an HP/Compaq guy full time with us to help maintain a ~500 CPU Alpha cluster we had. HP were keen to show us Itanium, so they loaned us one. Changing between the release version of the Intel compiler at the time to the beta of the next version yielded a 30% increase in performance for no code change at all.

The HP guys were saying that they were expecting these machines to get faster with age, because the compilers were making code run faster with each release. So yes, Itanium performance is largely dependant on the compiler.

As long as we are on the topics there has been some major innovations in the last generation in terms of relativity in the area of optics. That is what would you see if you were going near the speed of light. Turns out is is much more interesting than the typical "everything is shorter in the direction of motion" view of a generation ago. click here for movies with explination.

OpenBSD with PF,

FreeBSD with either PF IPFW,

pretty much any Unix variant OS with IPFilter,

Linux with IPTables

its natural - give us a bunch of extremly efficient copying devices and what else are we gonna do? Information wants to be free as in not fenced in.

"in fact Marx was wary of creating a recipe for a communist society"

Marx may have been wary of creating a recipe for a communist society, but he did:

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

-source

In regards to the Websites, China is just doing number 6. As for my calling communism a form of universal "slavery" being an appropriate term to use I refer you to item 8. I don't think "Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture" could be any better a definition of slavery. Sure it leaves to the imagination what would be done to those that refuse to obey, but Stalin and Mao certainly filled in the details there. Government power is the threat or use of physical force and violence. The only thing that seperates government from common thuggery is the consistency and justice of the system of laws which guide its actions. Forcing people to work using that power is just simple slavery.

Sure the capitalist class is little better than communism when they use their position to create conditions in society that make it impossible for people to survive except in service to them. But the point of a free market is that you choose if and what goods or services you will exchange with others. I realize that the realities of both today's world and that of 1848 mean that in effect many people have very little choice of what to do or where to live or how to get food. But Communism's answer to take individual choice away from all of us and replace it with collectivism is not an answer, rather it is just another way of creating the same old innequalities.

The right thing to do as a society is to ensure that anyone who wants to feed himself and his family can find an appropriate piece of land to farm which does not indebt him to anyone. And to maintain adequate access to common public lands for hunting and fishing. In that way, people do not have to work under an artificially imposed threat of starvation and can begin to exercise real freedom.

Authoritarianism lies at the heart of any communist state and is not incidental to it.

True Communists in the spirit of Marx believe that all forms of communication should be put in the hands of the state, and that state should be controlled exclusivly by the Communist Party (read The Communist Manifesto - http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifes to.html).

How is placing all radio, television, newspapers, telephone, and internet, etc. under the absolute control of a single political party not censorship?

According to Marx, free speech is liberal "Bourgeois Sentimentality".

Do Marxists bother to read Marx nowadays? Go to http://www.marxists.org/ and read up.

Or just under one gallon per tube. And that's assuming 100% efficiency. Biological processes usually have very high energy efficiencies (>80% IIRC)

You are incorrect. RuBisCO, the enzym responsible for the dark reaction and the most abundant protein in nature, actually has a very low efficiency, which is a subject of research

Sorry, correct link:

http://ash.anu.edu.au/tmp/unlucky.mpeg

Yeah well, tell this guy that!

Watch this video, it's a much more accurate representation. It shows replays the journey a number of times, each time adding a new mathmatical distortion until you get exactly what you would see if travelling close to the speed of light.
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/

http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/Obsolete/Rayt racer.html

The results are a lot more realistic.

You can even find some nifty animations there:
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/Obsolete/Down load.html

Greetings
Sven