What he's saying is, the...er...well, he means that the, uh...
Piece by piece:
Consider a compact 3-dimensional manifold V without boundary.
Basically, V is a set of points with a whole bunch of properties. Among them are the fact that the points are "smooth," as defined by a funky neighborhoods deal, but it's roughly analogous to the definition of a continuous function. (I believe that the points that satisfy a continuous function would be a topological space - the first part of being a compact manifold).
Compactness is harder to grasp. Essentially you couldn't find a infinite set of open sets whose union is the set of points in the manifest, from which a finite number of sets could be taken whose union would also be the original set. Almost kinda like saying that there aren't discontinuities in the manifold - there aren't gaps.
Without boundary means that it doesn't include it's own boardary - like the open ball, where it's every point inside a certain radius - the surface is the sphere at that radius.
3-dimensional means that you could refer to any point in the manifold with as few as three values. Unless the manifold set is a space, is exists in 4 dimensions. Think about a sphere - you can refer to any point on a sphere with 2 coordinates, like latitude and longitude, but it exists in 3 dimensions.
Is it possible that the fundamental group of V could be trivial
By which he means: there is one equivalence set of loops through the manifold. Every possible loop (A path that returns to its beginning point. Duh.) in the manifold belongs to one set of loops that are pretty much the same - you could push any one of them around and get any other one. A sphere has this quality - any loop you draw on the surface of a 2-sphere (the one that exists in three dimensions), but a torus doesn't - there are the loops that are equivalent to the loop around the outside of the torus, and the ones that run through the hole.
even though V is not homeomorphic to the 3-dimensional sphere?"
Trans: Even though you can't finagle necessarily finagle it into a 3-sphere, even if I let you do it in higher dimensions.
What he's asking is, is it possible there could be an object in 4-dimensions, that has some kind of tangle in it such that you can't make it into a hypersphere, but isn't so mangled that there are fundamentally different ways to "draw lines" on it. The suggestion is fairly reasonable, I think.
For instance, any loop drawn on a plane is homeomorphic to a circle. You're options in connected finite 1-d manifolds amount to line segments, or cirles. But when you upgrade to 2-d, suddenly you've got holes. You can't have holes in 1-d and still be connected, but in 2-d you get donuts and dresses and honeycombs and whatnot. But the thing about a hole is that it means that your fundamental group have more than one set in it, and without a hole, you wind up being a sphere.
So why shouldn't there be another characteristic of 3-d objects, one which allows for more than one kind of simply connected, non-contractable manifold?
On top of that, what right, legal or moral, does the intended recipient have to an email message that has not even been received? I just don't even comprehend the moral issue, for which I apologize to the original poster.
In terms of an entirely in-house Corporate mail delivery policy, none whatsoever. But I think that if the case is an extenuation of the default case, where the destruction of correspondance is wrong, morally and (sometimes) legally.
I define the default case as a public mail system where the actor is unaware of the contents of the correspondence. This is an entirely private delivery system, and the original poster was being asked to act as proxy for someone who he could be sure was the original sender (who knoew not only the content of the correspondence, but the intent.)
I think that no moral imperative to deliver a piece of email exists. I just don't see that there is some moral good attached to delivering mail, e- or snail-. I see a lot of utility inherent in communication, but no moral requirement for communication in general. I think that some moral good may be facilitated or hindered by communication, but now we are speaking in terms of particular instances, rather than in general terms. So, we must evaluate this particular instance.
I disagree with your assessment of the general case. I think you can argue a number of moral impretives not to interrupt the flow of a public delivery system or that of a private one where the contents is unknown (or even the intent is unknown) or in doubt.
If every message were subject to interception, the delivery system has that much more of a reliability problem, and one which presumably will not be fixed. The system becomes a joke, and its utility is destroyed. The utility hit to something that can be so useful to so many is just bad.
Consider a special case where, say, the Orphanage will be repossessed unless a request for extention is received by the bank. If I remove that one letter from the mails, the bank never receives it, and forcloses. Since privacy concerns (and envelopes) mean that I can't tell what letters are important, so I must imagine that any letter could be at least as important as the Orphanage Foreclosure letter, maybe more. On reflection, my interference with mail will probably result in someone's detriment.
Oh, and it's a Federal Offense in the US to steal from the mails.
So, with no a priori moral reason to deliver email, and with the particular message's contents being morally wrong, I conclude that the original poster was, in fact, morally wrong to have refused to delete the email.
There is a priori moral reason to ensure the delivery of mail, but the situation presented was a fairly clear extenuation of those circumstance, and yes, I concur that, when the representitive of the owners of the equipment tells you to do something with that equipment as his proxy, and what he's asking you to do would be moral for him to do, and you've received pay to be his proxy, you are confounding a moral action (and possibly a nice one, too) and so are acting immorally.
Hrm. Not so sure about "proven fact." The Poll you link to was "My computer runs..." not "OS I love most..." Running Windows and loving Windows are two very different things, mi amigo.
This might seem every so slightly off topic, but can anyone explain what features are missing in an "NT-style" domain controller? Last I checked, this was all the Samba could provide, and while we've considered moving to Samba, I need to know what we'd give up by doing so.
On the other manipulator, they do claim to have patented their novel fog screen dingus, so it would seem that the USPTO disagrees with you.
Alternatively, a good demonstration of prior art would invalidate their patent.
Honestly, the "new thing" seems to be the "non-turbulent laminar airflow" used to keep the fog confined and smooth enough to project convincing images on. Basically, it seems like the idea is to blow a smooth, flat stream of air, and then add fog or smoke to the stream. The smoother the stream, the better the image.
Parting shot: is it a patent violation to disseminate kit ideas? I know that the patent itself needs to describe the invention pretty well, but would it be actionable to put DIY instructions on the web? Cause this is kinda neat, and it looks like it might be doable with honeycomb paper, a hair dryer and a block of dry ice.
Question: I've been trying to recall the name of a stand-up arcade game for about ten years. Can anyone on Slashdot Name that Coin-Op?
Description: side scrolling action/platform game, with a fantasy role-playing theme. You chose from 4-6 characters, which included a ninja and a cleric in addition to more traditional FRP characters. Levels were huge, and starting out with it, you explored a level more than anything else. I remember early enemies were golden bees, and that the first boss was a Black Pudding comprised of about a hundred little sphere sprites that jumped around a lot. I also recall that if you couldn't finish the level quickly enough there was a flying skull that hassled you to death.
First off: completely agree about PHP-Nuke. Besides, about 30% of securityfocus traffic relates to PHP-Nuke. Why would you want the hassle?
Why is this useful? The current state of affairs in the 802.11 world is that there are dozens of devices that have vague analogs in the wired networking world, but none of those analogies are perfect. Basically, you have the following classes of device:
WLAN cards. Oronoco cards and the like. You one in a desktop box and it gets wireless ethernet capability. Can either talk to other WLAN cards (in what's called an ad-hoc network) or to a wireless access point. Basically like a NIC, except NICs don't try to plug themselves into hubs or other NICs. And the situation of connecting directly to another box using a crossover cable is usually viewed as a degenerate case; ad-hoc networks are completely legit and workable.
Wireless Access Points are devices designed to allow WLAN cards to talk to a wired network. If there's an AP available, WLAN cards will break out of ad-hoc mode (where everyone talks to everyone) and switch to an associated mode, where they only talk to their AP. Ideally this is the AP with the best signal strength - but not always.
Wireless Bridges are designed to allow a wired network participate in a wireless network.
Anyone who need this explaination probably just went "What!? But there's already a device to connect wireless networks to wired networks!" Ah, would that it were so. As much as AP's resemble wired switches, they're not.
Wired networks are true undirected graphs. Wireless networks are heirarchal and difficult. Repeaters exist, but they're usually a bad idea, because you take huge hits to throughput.
Now, mesh wireless takes care of all that. Got a spot that's a little dim? Plop down a mesh point, it integrates into the network and you're nice and bright there now. Couldn't be easier, and is a whole lot more like a wired ethernet with the wires taken away, as opposed to the completely different animal that non-mesh wireless is.
Short form: wireless is obnoxious even if the results are cool. Mesh wireless is gorgeous, and the results are cooler.
Screw this installed on a $200 WalMart box crap. What would be the killer situ is if AOL started to put their Lindows distro thing on those stupid CDs and DVDs they clutter your mail with. Imagine millions of users who get these CDs being able to install Lindows on their boxes. That's Microsoft's terror and no mistake.
It is how AOL got market penetration. It's how they became worthy to buy into Time Warner (more, it was a merger); why not piggy-back Linux onto the AOL distribution process? And when Linux is as catholic as Windows is now, imagine the glory! Whoo-hoo.
Granted, I wouldn't touch the support desk for that with a ten-hundred foot pole. "Um, where did Windows go?"
So the proposal is that I flatly refuse any email that doesn't have a stamp on it? So when I join this system, everyone I want to communicate with needs to as well? Ick ick. I don't really see any other way to deal with it though, except to configure your spam filters so that stamped mail has a trustworthiness bonus.
Honestly, part of my objection is that there's no other benefit from a stamp system. Face it, stamps are going to require an extra layer of complexity and failure on email. Most users have enough trouble with setting up their SMTP, POP, IMAP or MAPI config. Add onto that a cryptographic keyserver, and the possibility of the keyserver (or network) failure. So it is complex and clunky. What does it buy you? Less spam. Not a great trade, since server-side filtering can already get you less spam.
And there's no guarantee that a stamp system will reduce spam that much. Q.v. bulk mailing, 3rd class mail. Especially since a stamp system is going to have a profit motive, and making 20k USD in a chunk looks extremely good to any business - so I'd expect there to be a bulk emailing category as well.
So, all that considered, is there any other advantage to using a crypto-stamp system? List three.
All either of the systems requires is a stamp server and for participating users to have stamp-aware mail programs.
Please drive through. The biggest requirement a stamp system has is universal participation. First, because if I'm the only person I know using the small stamp system, I give away my 100 stamps in about two days (unless the idea is that non-participants don't report their receipt...)
But the main problem is that if participation is optional, spammers won't participate, and their aren't any other benefits to using a big clunky stamp system.
First of all, because unless I want to go all the way into real estate, I'd be doing my own maintanence, and it's a bit of a commute. Second, I very much think that the situations vary significantly by location. While a lot of money might go to the banks (because, we all know, that's the real racket), the final hourly might be better than either a burger flipper or a software engineer.
For anyone with a following, this is clearly the way to go -- I'll be interested to see if no-name bands can succeed as well though, because the label won't play games with the radio.
Except that, especially as the radio stations continue to fall into One Clear Channel, the RIAA has had a long standing stranglehold on how things get played. It's arguable that as far as music promotion goes, there isn't anything better than radio - possibly that there isn't anything but radio as far as national recognition goes. If you want to hear new music that's not on an RIAA label, your options are your local college radio, p2p mp3s, or local club shows.
Is there a way to reverse this? To me, it looks like the requisite would be either breaking up the radio congomerates (which seems infeasible, given the costs of running a radio station) or countering the offers of the RIAA, which would be, to say the least, impressive.
Sorry to be the Eeyore to your Tigger, but that's the unfortunate face of it. And to fend off cries of "Owl!" I think that a lot of the small-time music that I do find in the venues I just mentioned deserves the play time.
Yeah, when you don't look at all the costs, it sure looks like a steal, but if it's such a steal, don't you think more people would be in the business?
Where I live, the vast majority of the population rents their housing. The reason more people aren't in the business is that more property isn't available. On the other hand, if you're being screwed, you have options, so it isn't all bad.
Excuse me for shouting but WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? I mean, really.
Can't you just let good enough alone? Can't we have actually decent games that aren't retro throwbacks? Can't we let the Atari 2600 fade away? Criminey.
I had serious issues with some of his descriptions of subatomic properties. Especially spin. He seemed to imply it was something like the frequency of rotational symmetry. Of course, then you have negative spin...
Granted, I've never quite gotten an explaination of spin apart from it being a necessary characteristic of a particle (so that Pauli Exclusion works). I always chalked it up as a subatomic magnetic characteristic, but I'm pretty sure that's just my own irrational need to explain things.
I disagree. Proponing the Waterfall Method in situations of life and death is irresponsible. It looks good on paper: we don't go on to step N+1 until N is perfect, but the ultimate seive for the quality of the result of step N is its use in step N+1. Waterfall says "Well, you have to deal with any imperfections, because there aren't any." Granted the exponential effect of errors in early stages (commented on everywhere from the Mythical Man Month to bleeding edge XP publications), making do with a less than perfect requirements document is going to result in grossly problematic results.
A short development cycle is probably much better, since the problem with a previous step can be quickly apprehended and dealt with.
The most evident source of the problem you're describing is that how you model development in your organization. There's an old model called the Waterfall, that basically says, you get requirements, you write spec, you design to spec, code to design, test the code, and release. It's called the Waterfall Model because each step assumes that the previous step is finished; in other words, you never go back.
First of all, the premise of the Waterfall Model is just wrong. Of course you go back. You'll always find a flaw in the req's in mid-spec, and a flaw in spec in mid-design (and a flaw in req when you go back to fix the spec) etc. There's an entire class of development models that are just fixes on the Waterfall Model. But the basis is flawed, and any model based on it is going to be flawed as well.
The solution to your specific problem is one that you've seen other companies use, possibly without knowing. Once a piece of software is feature complete and passes QA (so you release it), a certain number of developer hours need to be devoted to maintenance. Probably that means hiring a junior coder to maintain the well written code of more senior coders.
There comes a point, of course, where software is no longer paying for its maintenance. It's always legitimate to move an old version to a "mature" state, where it's no longer supported. If Microsoft can do that to Windows98, I don't see why any other company can't do that with (say) their Win98 software.
Still think they'd be a good idea if lifting them into space didn't cost so much. I don't know that they'd hit with quite as much force as the authors described, but hey, cool idea.
Actually, IIRC, I remember reading an article about Thor-like non-explosive deorbited projectiles that would release energy like a 10 megaton nuke. Something about building them out of tungsten, and contructing them in such a way that they conversed the jerk of their impact into outward force. My understanding was that the result of suddenly accellerating on impact would be sufficient to cause solid tungsten to explode. Nutty, crazy stuff.
Also, IIRC the Thor devices had nothing more than a radio-controlled rocket to deorbit. Niven's favorite gravitational phenomenon (tidal force) keeps them aligned like spokes around the Earth, and you scatter them in varying orbits. All the intelligence is on the ground: you need to deorbit the right thor at the right moment in order to hit your target. On the other hand, it's the technological equivalent to hurling a metal projectile ten years ago only to snap your fingers today and have it fall out of the sky on your enemy.
I said to myself "here's another situation where the Slashdot article has missed some crucial detail that make everything clear. Why don't I toddle over to the link and see if I can see why one might want a lawn mower connected to the internet."
Having done that, I now feel justified in asking WTF is the point of and internet connected lawn mower? Marketing. I'm convinced it's marketing because I can see zero reason that you'd actually want your lawn mower attached to the internet. So that it can order gas refills? So that you can manually start the mower? (Ignorant of the fact that your toddler is playing on the lawn - just out of view of the web-cam that's part of the package.) Or is it really that the mower is just a robot on a timer, with a webcam on your house. For marketing.
I mean, otherwise, whee, what a fun hack target? What's a better thing to play with over the internet than something that actually moves and cuts things and generally causes mayhem? Simply cannot beat the idea of chasing cats halfway across the world with someone else's robot mower.
Because sheep don't have a length setting. Your options are "no roots" or "haven't eaten that yet." Beastly creatures. All the intelligence of a turkey. Tastier though...
Ultimately, though, for this to be useful, it would have to be automated from end-to-end. Thirty seconds isn't enough to double check the system, and introducing humans into the mix just adds error. But the automated system has problems:
First, "near 100 percent accuracy" isn't 100% accuracy. There's no information here about false positives, but my guess is that, like many testing and alarm problems, tuning out one way, opens up the other side disproportionately. So you'll always have issues where the gas mains don't cut off in time, but people'll understand. But when the gas cuts out from too many false positives, people'll call for the whole thing to be turned off.
The other side of this is: I hope it's not supposed to be wired to the Internet. How's that for a script kiddie prank. "1 4m 2 733t 4 j00! 1 0wn3d CA! h4h4h4h4h!" Punks. Still, even with a large private network, being able to fake an earthquake isn't a small thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Piece by piece:
By which he means: there is one equivalence set of loops through the manifold. Every possible loop (A path that returns to its beginning point. Duh.) in the manifold belongs to one set of loops that are pretty much the same - you could push any one of them around and get any other one. A sphere has this quality - any loop you draw on the surface of a 2-sphere (the one that exists in three dimensions), but a torus doesn't - there are the loops that are equivalent to the loop around the outside of the torus, and the ones that run through the hole.
What he's asking is, is it possible there could be an object in 4-dimensions, that has some kind of tangle in it such that you can't make it into a hypersphere, but isn't so mangled that there are fundamentally different ways to "draw lines" on it. The suggestion is fairly reasonable, I think.
For instance, any loop drawn on a plane is homeomorphic to a circle. You're options in connected finite 1-d manifolds amount to line segments, or cirles. But when you upgrade to 2-d, suddenly you've got holes. You can't have holes in 1-d and still be connected, but in 2-d you get donuts and dresses and honeycombs and whatnot. But the thing about a hole is that it means that your fundamental group have more than one set in it, and without a hole, you wind up being a sphere.
So why shouldn't there be another characteristic of 3-d objects, one which allows for more than one kind of simply connected, non-contractable manifold?
In terms of an entirely in-house Corporate mail delivery policy, none whatsoever. But I think that if the case is an extenuation of the default case, where the destruction of correspondance is wrong, morally and (sometimes) legally.
I define the default case as a public mail system where the actor is unaware of the contents of the correspondence. This is an entirely private delivery system, and the original poster was being asked to act as proxy for someone who he could be sure was the original sender (who knoew not only the content of the correspondence, but the intent.)
I think that no moral imperative to deliver a piece of email exists. I just don't see that there is some moral good attached to delivering mail, e- or snail-. I see a lot of utility inherent in communication, but no moral requirement for communication in general. I think that some moral good may be facilitated or hindered by communication, but now we are speaking in terms of particular instances, rather than in general terms. So, we must evaluate this particular instance.
I disagree with your assessment of the general case. I think you can argue a number of moral impretives not to interrupt the flow of a public delivery system or that of a private one where the contents is unknown (or even the intent is unknown) or in doubt.
- If every message were subject to interception, the delivery system has that much more of a reliability problem, and one which presumably will not be fixed. The system becomes a joke, and its utility is destroyed. The utility hit to something that can be so useful to so many is just bad.
- Consider a special case where, say, the Orphanage will be repossessed unless a request for extention is received by the bank. If I remove that one letter from the mails, the bank never receives it, and forcloses. Since privacy concerns (and envelopes) mean that I can't tell what letters are important, so I must imagine that any letter could be at least as important as the Orphanage Foreclosure letter, maybe more. On reflection, my interference with mail will probably result in someone's detriment.
Oh, and it's a Federal Offense in the US to steal from the mails. So, with no a priori moral reason to deliver email, and with the particular message's contents being morally wrong, I conclude that the original poster was, in fact, morally wrong to have refused to delete the email.There is a priori moral reason to ensure the delivery of mail, but the situation presented was a fairly clear extenuation of those circumstance, and yes, I concur that, when the representitive of the owners of the equipment tells you to do something with that equipment as his proxy, and what he's asking you to do would be moral for him to do, and you've received pay to be his proxy, you are confounding a moral action (and possibly a nice one, too) and so are acting immorally.
Hrm. Not so sure about "proven fact." The Poll you link to was "My computer runs..." not "OS I love most..." Running Windows and loving Windows are two very different things, mi amigo.
This might seem every so slightly off topic, but can anyone explain what features are missing in an "NT-style" domain controller? Last I checked, this was all the Samba could provide, and while we've considered moving to Samba, I need to know what we'd give up by doing so.
Alternatively, a good demonstration of prior art would invalidate their patent.
Honestly, the "new thing" seems to be the "non-turbulent laminar airflow" used to keep the fog confined and smooth enough to project convincing images on. Basically, it seems like the idea is to blow a smooth, flat stream of air, and then add fog or smoke to the stream. The smoother the stream, the better the image.
Parting shot: is it a patent violation to disseminate kit ideas? I know that the patent itself needs to describe the invention pretty well, but would it be actionable to put DIY instructions on the web? Cause this is kinda neat, and it looks like it might be doable with honeycomb paper, a hair dryer and a block of dry ice.
Description: side scrolling action/platform game, with a fantasy role-playing theme. You chose from 4-6 characters, which included a ninja and a cleric in addition to more traditional FRP characters. Levels were huge, and starting out with it, you explored a level more than anything else. I remember early enemies were golden bees, and that the first boss was a Black Pudding comprised of about a hundred little sphere sprites that jumped around a lot. I also recall that if you couldn't finish the level quickly enough there was a flying skull that hassled you to death.
Anyone recognize this? Anyone?
Why is this useful? The current state of affairs in the 802.11 world is that there are dozens of devices that have vague analogs in the wired networking world, but none of those analogies are perfect. Basically, you have the following classes of device:
- WLAN cards. Oronoco cards and the like. You one in a desktop box and it gets wireless ethernet capability. Can either talk to other WLAN cards (in what's called an ad-hoc network) or to a wireless access point. Basically like a NIC, except NICs don't try to plug themselves into hubs or other NICs. And the situation of connecting directly to another box using a crossover cable is usually viewed as a degenerate case; ad-hoc networks are completely legit and workable.
- Wireless Access Points are devices designed to allow WLAN cards to talk to a wired network. If there's an AP available, WLAN cards will break out of ad-hoc mode (where everyone talks to everyone) and switch to an associated mode, where they only talk to their AP. Ideally this is the AP with the best signal strength - but not always.
- Wireless Bridges are designed to allow a wired network participate in a wireless network.
Anyone who need this explaination probably just went "What!? But there's already a device to connect wireless networks to wired networks!" Ah, would that it were so. As much as AP's resemble wired switches, they're not.Wired networks are true undirected graphs. Wireless networks are heirarchal and difficult. Repeaters exist, but they're usually a bad idea, because you take huge hits to throughput.
Now, mesh wireless takes care of all that. Got a spot that's a little dim? Plop down a mesh point, it integrates into the network and you're nice and bright there now. Couldn't be easier, and is a whole lot more like a wired ethernet with the wires taken away, as opposed to the completely different animal that non-mesh wireless is.
Short form: wireless is obnoxious even if the results are cool. Mesh wireless is gorgeous, and the results are cooler.
It is how AOL got market penetration. It's how they became worthy to buy into Time Warner (more, it was a merger); why not piggy-back Linux onto the AOL distribution process? And when Linux is as catholic as Windows is now, imagine the glory! Whoo-hoo.
Granted, I wouldn't touch the support desk for that with a ten-hundred foot pole. "Um, where did Windows go?"
Honestly, part of my objection is that there's no other benefit from a stamp system. Face it, stamps are going to require an extra layer of complexity and failure on email. Most users have enough trouble with setting up their SMTP, POP, IMAP or MAPI config. Add onto that a cryptographic keyserver, and the possibility of the keyserver (or network) failure. So it is complex and clunky. What does it buy you? Less spam. Not a great trade, since server-side filtering can already get you less spam.
And there's no guarantee that a stamp system will reduce spam that much. Q.v. bulk mailing, 3rd class mail. Especially since a stamp system is going to have a profit motive, and making 20k USD in a chunk looks extremely good to any business - so I'd expect there to be a bulk emailing category as well.
So, all that considered, is there any other advantage to using a crypto-stamp system? List three.
Please drive through. The biggest requirement a stamp system has is universal participation. First, because if I'm the only person I know using the small stamp system, I give away my 100 stamps in about two days (unless the idea is that non-participants don't report their receipt...)
But the main problem is that if participation is optional, spammers won't participate, and their aren't any other benefits to using a big clunky stamp system.
The maser seems to be misaligned, Dave. You'll have to take a pod on EVA and realign it.
Didn't I mention, Dave? The coldsleep units have malfunctioned. The rest of the crew in nonfunctional, Dave.
Dave, I'm sorry, but I can't let you do that.
First of all, because unless I want to go all the way into real estate, I'd be doing my own maintanence, and it's a bit of a commute. Second, I very much think that the situations vary significantly by location. While a lot of money might go to the banks (because, we all know, that's the real racket), the final hourly might be better than either a burger flipper or a software engineer.
What would charge to transplant it about a thousand miles? As always, the question is one of location.
Except that, especially as the radio stations continue to fall into One Clear Channel, the RIAA has had a long standing stranglehold on how things get played. It's arguable that as far as music promotion goes, there isn't anything better than radio - possibly that there isn't anything but radio as far as national recognition goes. If you want to hear new music that's not on an RIAA label, your options are your local college radio, p2p mp3s, or local club shows.
Is there a way to reverse this? To me, it looks like the requisite would be either breaking up the radio congomerates (which seems infeasible, given the costs of running a radio station) or countering the offers of the RIAA, which would be, to say the least, impressive.
Sorry to be the Eeyore to your Tigger, but that's the unfortunate face of it. And to fend off cries of "Owl!" I think that a lot of the small-time music that I do find in the venues I just mentioned deserves the play time.
Where I live, the vast majority of the population rents their housing. The reason more people aren't in the business is that more property isn't available. On the other hand, if you're being screwed, you have options, so it isn't all bad.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. Right now I'm trying to decide if karma is important enough to step back in line for. Not really, I don't think.
Can't you just let good enough alone? Can't we have actually decent games that aren't retro throwbacks? Can't we let the Atari 2600 fade away? Criminey.
Granted, I've never quite gotten an explaination of spin apart from it being a necessary characteristic of a particle (so that Pauli Exclusion works). I always chalked it up as a subatomic magnetic characteristic, but I'm pretty sure that's just my own irrational need to explain things.
A short development cycle is probably much better, since the problem with a previous step can be quickly apprehended and dealt with.
First of all, the premise of the Waterfall Model is just wrong. Of course you go back. You'll always find a flaw in the req's in mid-spec, and a flaw in spec in mid-design (and a flaw in req when you go back to fix the spec) etc. There's an entire class of development models that are just fixes on the Waterfall Model. But the basis is flawed, and any model based on it is going to be flawed as well.
The solution to your specific problem is one that you've seen other companies use, possibly without knowing. Once a piece of software is feature complete and passes QA (so you release it), a certain number of developer hours need to be devoted to maintenance. Probably that means hiring a junior coder to maintain the well written code of more senior coders.
There comes a point, of course, where software is no longer paying for its maintenance. It's always legitimate to move an old version to a "mature" state, where it's no longer supported. If Microsoft can do that to Windows98, I don't see why any other company can't do that with (say) their Win98 software.
Actually, IIRC, I remember reading an article about Thor-like non-explosive deorbited projectiles that would release energy like a 10 megaton nuke. Something about building them out of tungsten, and contructing them in such a way that they conversed the jerk of their impact into outward force. My understanding was that the result of suddenly accellerating on impact would be sufficient to cause solid tungsten to explode. Nutty, crazy stuff.
Also, IIRC the Thor devices had nothing more than a radio-controlled rocket to deorbit. Niven's favorite gravitational phenomenon (tidal force) keeps them aligned like spokes around the Earth, and you scatter them in varying orbits. All the intelligence is on the ground: you need to deorbit the right thor at the right moment in order to hit your target. On the other hand, it's the technological equivalent to hurling a metal projectile ten years ago only to snap your fingers today and have it fall out of the sky on your enemy.
Having done that, I now feel justified in asking WTF is the point of and internet connected lawn mower? Marketing. I'm convinced it's marketing because I can see zero reason that you'd actually want your lawn mower attached to the internet. So that it can order gas refills? So that you can manually start the mower? (Ignorant of the fact that your toddler is playing on the lawn - just out of view of the web-cam that's part of the package.) Or is it really that the mower is just a robot on a timer, with a webcam on your house. For marketing.
I mean, otherwise, whee, what a fun hack target? What's a better thing to play with over the internet than something that actually moves and cuts things and generally causes mayhem? Simply cannot beat the idea of chasing cats halfway across the world with someone else's robot mower.
Makes me despair the species, you know?
Because sheep don't have a length setting. Your options are "no roots" or "haven't eaten that yet." Beastly creatures. All the intelligence of a turkey. Tastier though...
First, "near 100 percent accuracy" isn't 100% accuracy. There's no information here about false positives, but my guess is that, like many testing and alarm problems, tuning out one way, opens up the other side disproportionately. So you'll always have issues where the gas mains don't cut off in time, but people'll understand. But when the gas cuts out from too many false positives, people'll call for the whole thing to be turned off.
The other side of this is: I hope it's not supposed to be wired to the Internet. How's that for a script kiddie prank. "1 4m 2 733t 4 j00! 1 0wn3d CA! h4h4h4h4h!" Punks. Still, even with a large private network, being able to fake an earthquake isn't a small thing.
Once I wanted to build a Tesla Coil. But now I want to build a Flux Compression Generator.