Hmmm. If I understand correctly, the problem is that bandwidth doesn't scale well -- if you need to distribute data to 100 different sites, you need 100x the bandwidth. The MBONE, if it had ever been adopted, wouldn't solve that problem because not every institution looking at the data will be interested in the same data at the same time -- the distribution problem is more like video-on-demand than like broadcast television.
Solar scientific data is growing too large to handle. The SOHO data are almost small enough to ship around by internet (the whole dataset is something like 20-30 TB for 10 years of operation), though data mining and such are starting to fall back on SneakerNet as the SDAC is shipping around terabyte lunchbox drives as their preferred method of bulk data export.
But Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is currently being built, will generate about 3 TB of data per day. We're all a little worried about how to distribute, store, and use such vast quantities of data. Perpendicular-storage drives like these just might save the day...
Vulnerabilities in security software make me think of those dialogs between the Tortoise and Achilles -- particularly the one where the Tortoise and the Crab are developing ever more fancy record players. The Crab keeps getting nicer record players and the Tortoise keeps giving him records that induce fatal resonance in some mechanism of the record player...
in GEB it was a parable about the Godel incompleteness theorem -- and, of course, designers of security software would do well to think carefully about it...
Nah, in practice LAMP installations can be converted to other database engines rather simply. The key element is the "P" in "LAMP" - perl. The way to handle it is to subclass DBI and intercept all of your SQL before it gets to the DB client layer, then fix it up for the appropriate dialect. For even surprisingly complex applications, simple regexp corrections can handle most dialect differences, so it's not necessary to write a whole SQL parser merely to provide compatibility.
Even in exreme cases (for example, SQLite doesn't provide the "DESCRIBE" directive, only a funky ".schema" macro) you can use a scratch table to mock up a missing or broken directive and return a SELECT command handle instead.
It's unfortunate that DBI itself doesn't provide this sort of compatibility/translation for complete drop-in replacement. I guess that's probably because of the politics of choosing a particular dialect to support on the API side -- providing a complete mode switch (e.g. both to make existing MySQL-friendly programs talk with PostgreSQL, and vice-versa) could grow to be a large project.
Since both reactions produce neutrons they have the same issues - namely dealing with radioactive wastes.
Bollocks.
By far the biggest problem with fission is not neutron activation of the machine itself but rather the creation of unstable intermediate-mass daughter atoms. The problem is that the neutron-proton ratio of heavy stable elements is slightly higher than the neutron-proton ratio of lighter stable elements. Hence if you break apart a heavy nearly-stable nucleus you get very unstable isotopes. A few of those isotopes have half-lives measured in hundreds to thousands of years, causing a big problem because you have to store the waste a long time.
Neutron activation of the machine itself is not a big deal. Fission reactors are largely made of aluminum and water. Aluminum that absorbs a neutron ends up (after a short-lived decay chain) as stable. The oxygen in the water produces mostly the heavier stable oxygen isotopes and a small amount of stable fluorine. The hydrogen produces mostly deuterium and a tiny, tiny amount of tritium (from neutron absorption by deuterium). Tritium is messy but not a long-term problem as its half-life is only 12 years.
Existing fusion machines have neutron-activation problems largely because they are experimental rigs, composed of lots of materials that are not particularly well selected for neutron absorption or non-activation. If tokamak technology becomes an engineering reality, tokamak plants will be engineered for minimal neutron activation.
I used to work at NASA/GSFC, and one of the workstations there sat all day running periodic housekeeping tasks from cron -- parsing telemetry, handling command load updates, etc. The problem was that every once in a while something would stall and the next batch of cron jobs would launch before the first ones completed. Instant snowballing death would ensue as nothing completed and the load average would soar into the hundreds as cron maniacally, stupidly spawned more and more processes into the poor overloaded workstation.
There are several relevant tools available now but then I wrote my own - a perl script called "qproc" that would queue up jobs for execution, kill them if they hung too long, and refrain from launching multiple copies of the same job at the same time.
Until I got hit by that, I never thought about the fact that cron is very dangerous to use on a production server. But it is -- if cron tasks use a non-infinitesimal part of the computer, you have to take steps to prevent the same marching-broomsticks failure mode.
Seriously, the "quarter" quote is a reference to one of the most famous Dilbert strips of all -- in which the hairy, Birkenstock-wearing UNIX guru tells Dilbert to go buy himself a real computer.
These days all programs get their own compy in memory (for stability reasons)
Real OS's like Linux, BSD, and OS-X (for example) all feature working memory managers that can (and do) share DLLs securely between different processes without duplicating the relevant blocks of memory. If Microsoft can't manage that, they're even sorrier than I thought.
Googling is much better. Previous employers, for liability reasons, will usually only indicate whether the subject worked for them. If you're lucky you can also find out whether they would willingly hire the subject back. Google has no such restraint - they only index what's already out there - so you can find out a lot more.
It's true that the golf ball will be going around in something like the ISS orbit (as you point out, there's not much delta-vee in a golf swing) -- but not everyone launches into that orbital plane. Speed of impact for a different orbital plane goes something like 23,000 mph * sin(theta). So, er, I stand corrected: "...Nothing like a 5,000 mph side-window-annihilating golf ball..."
It's also true that the golf ball, like other small space junk, will eventually re-enter. Will the transmitter still be working then? Nobody knows.
Bute given a choice, despite all my frustrations with Windows, I simply find Windows easier to use in a number of ways
.
It's true -- Windows is definitely easier to use. The network transparency makes it really good -- I can fire up an xload on my remote machines and see how they're doing, or even tunnel my Windows connection over SSH for complete security. Oh, wait, you don't mean X Windows?
In seriousness, reading your complaint I think that you may simply be trying the wrong technique. You shouldn't be trying to install novel apps yourself, that is for hobbyists and tinkerers only. You should be using prepackaged user-friendly distros like Mandrake or Fedora, that have nice GUI installers. For a non-command-line movie player, don't use MPlayer -- use Xine, which way doesn't suck.
This is probably the biggest problem facing those who would adopt Linux: there is such a huge morass of options it's hard to tell which path is the easy one.
Great... just what space entrepreneurs need...
on
Golf in Space
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
is another piece of slightly-too-small-to-track, large-enough-to-annihilite-your-windshield piece of 23,000 MPH space junk to worry about.
No, really people reject OpenOffice because it still sucks after all these years. Why struggle along with OpenOffice Draw when you could be using Inkscape? Why hassle with the damned word processor when AbiWord does a better job? Why fight with the spreadsheet when gnumeric is so much more awesome? Beats me. But to my mind OpenOffice is a big force *against* adoption of the Linux desktop. It's still klunky, dog-slow to start, and ugly even after countless man-years of effort.
No, actually, the reason people don't correct their vision to better than about 20/15 is that the surgery itself introduces aberrations at that level. The diffraction limit is about 20/10, so 20/15 with surgery is pretty good. Most high-order LASIK patients come out of the surgery with that level of vision. (that means "more than 50% of...", not "if you get the surgery you will...")
I mean that contacts that correct astigmatism only became popular in the mid-to-late 1990s. Before that (to my knowledge) contacts only corrected the spherical term, which is usually the larger correction. They're hard to manufacture because they have to be constructed to align themselves correctly on the cornea. The ones I use are weighted and rotate slowly if I don't get them in right the first time; some others have little fins/ridges/bumps on them that are designed to be dragged straight by your eyelid when you blink.
On your prescription you can read out your astigmatic correction as the "cyl." term. There's usually a "sph.", which is the overall lens power, a "cyl.", which is the additional cylindrical power (the same sort of effect as looking through the stem of a wine glass), and an "angle", which tells you the direction of the cylindrical correction. The numbers are given in "diopters", which have units of inverse meters, so a +1 correction means that the lens in front of your eye can project an image of distant objects onto a piece of paper 1 meter behind the lens. A +2 correction means that the best focus would happen 0.5 meter behind the lens; a 3.75 correction is relatively strong and means the paper would be only 26 cm (about 10.5 inches) behind the lens. Negative corrections (-3.75) correspond to nearsightedness; positive ones (+3.75) correspond to farsightedness.
Using wavefront sensors to fully characterize your eye is not new. LASIK patients get that treatment now -- you look into an autocollimator that includes a Shack-Hartmann sensor, and it reads out all the high-order aberrations in your eye. The LASIK treatment then gets rid of all those aberrations, so that after correction your eye could in principle be "perfect" -- limited only by quantum uncertainty of the photons entering your pupil.[In practice that's not the case, because the act of cutting your cornea and letting it heal introduces a low level of new aberrations that weren't present when your eye was characterized in the first place].
If wavefront sensing is so easy and painless, why don't we all have super-duper glasses to fix our vision? Historically, it's because high order lenses are hard to grind, but more recently it's because your glasses can't be aligned with your eye very well. You could make high-order corrective glasses out of the usual glass or polycarbonate or whatever, but they would only work if you looked straight through them: if you turned your eyes to look sideways, the corrective aberrations in the lenses would no longer line up with the aberrations in your cornea, and your vision would be worse than with conventional glasses. If you have astigmatism you can get that effect now by turning your glasses 90 degrees as you look through them: at 90 degree rotation, the cylindrical correction actually worsens your astigmatism rather than correcting it. high order terms are more sensitive to angular and positional alignment.
Contact lenses are better since they are attached to your cornea and therefore stay approximately aligned -- but they're not affixed to your eye, they sort of drift around in there. That's one reason that astigmatic contacts (a relatively new product, BTW) are only available in 10 degree increments of correction angle -- they don't line up any better than that. The only thing that stays really fixed relative to your cornea is, well, your cornea -- which is why high-order correction is feasible for LASIK.
So to make your super-duper glasses work right you would have to mount a small camera under the frame, pointed back at your eye. The camera would have to back out the motion of the eye and correct the active pixels in the lens as you looked around. That may be what these guys are doing, but TFM didn't mention it. Without that sort of feedback, high order correction isn't likely to work well.
BTW, wavefront sensors appear like magic to lots of folks but they aren't. Those eye autofocusers at the optometrist work by autocollimation: if your eye is perfectly focused, then a beam coming in should be focused to a single point on the retina, and scattered light from the retina should then be refocused into a beam that goes straight back where it came from. The autocollimator adjusts an external lens assembly until the beam coming back out of your eye is nice and clean. Wavefront sensors use a bug-eye lens to produce (say) 25 little images, each of which records the beam coming out of a small patch of your pupil. If the eye is in focus, then all the little images should line up. If it's not, then they are misaligned. It's that simple.
(Note: I'm not affiliated with CafePress or venganza.org -- this is a genuine suggestion...)
Why not bop over to CafePress and send a Flying Spaghetti Monster mug to George Deutsch? You can get his contact information with "finger george.deutsch@hq.nasa.gov", but I'll list it here. Please don't send anything obnoxious. On the other hand, Mr. Deutsch sounds like a man who could use a few dozen Flying Spaghetti Monster mugs (or perhaps a "This mug holds coffee and pisses off Jesus" mug or two).
name: gdeutsch George Deutsch postal address: NASA Headquarters
300 E ST SW
Washington DC 20546-0001 postal code: 20546-0001 room number: Building: HQ, Room: 3C54 surname: Deutsch telephone: +1 202 358-1324 title: Public Affairs Officer, Science Mission Directorate
and contrary to the eternal "it's just epicycles" cry among Slashdotters, it is testable, falsifiable, and predictive).
Hey, don't run down epicycles! They're testable, falsifiable, and predictive (of future planetary position) -- they're just more weakly predictive, and more complicated, than Newton's laws of gravity. But when Keplerian orbits were invented, those were no more predictive than epicycles. Both are descriptive theories.
Epicycles are actually a valid description of planetary orbits, and are still used today to analyze perturbations in planetary and protoplanetary systems. (A particle in a circular orbit will, if perturbed a small amount, acquire both drift and epicyclic motion relative to its original path).
Authors and musicians were willing to work pretty hard to generate works when copyright expired in 14+14 years. Imagine if architects got the same deal that authors get today. "Design this building and you and your heirs will get a percentage of the rent for your lifetime plus 90 years, unless you manage to grow fat enough to buy some new laws and make it your lifetime plus 120 years...".
Sure, it's wrong to steal an author's work by putting it on the 'net. But on the other hand, that doesn't make it right to lock up entire technologies, economies, and sectors of the public consciousness for centuries. Heinlein's quote is apropos because the music rightsholders are trying to turn back the clock and once again make it practically impossible to copy stuff off the air (as well as simply illegal to do so for redistribution).
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back. --RAH, Life Line, 1939
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. If I understand correctly, the problem is that bandwidth doesn't scale well -- if you need to distribute data to 100 different sites, you need 100x the bandwidth. The MBONE, if it had ever been adopted, wouldn't solve that problem because not every institution looking at the data will be interested in the same data at the same time -- the distribution problem is more like video-on-demand than like broadcast television.
Solar scientific data is growing too large to handle. The SOHO data are almost small enough to ship around by internet (the whole dataset is something like 20-30 TB for 10 years of operation), though data mining and such are starting to fall back on SneakerNet as the SDAC is shipping around terabyte lunchbox drives as their preferred method of bulk data export.
But Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is currently being built, will generate about 3 TB of data per day. We're all a little worried about how to distribute, store, and use such vast quantities of data. Perpendicular-storage drives like these just might save the day...
Vulnerabilities in security software make me think of those dialogs between the Tortoise and Achilles -- particularly the one where the Tortoise and the Crab are developing ever more fancy record players. The Crab keeps getting nicer record players and the Tortoise keeps giving him records that induce fatal resonance in some mechanism of the record player...
in GEB it was a parable about the Godel incompleteness theorem -- and, of course, designers of security software would do well to think carefully about it...
Nah, in practice LAMP installations can be converted to other database engines rather simply. The key element is the "P" in "LAMP" - perl. The way to handle it is to subclass DBI and intercept all of your SQL before it gets to the DB client layer, then fix it up for the appropriate dialect. For even surprisingly complex applications, simple regexp corrections can handle most dialect differences, so it's not necessary to write a whole SQL parser merely to provide compatibility.
Even in exreme cases (for example, SQLite doesn't provide the "DESCRIBE" directive, only a funky ".schema" macro) you can use a scratch table to mock up a missing or broken directive and return a SELECT command handle instead.
It's unfortunate that DBI itself doesn't provide this sort of compatibility/translation for complete drop-in replacement. I guess that's probably because of the politics of choosing a particular dialect to support on the API side -- providing a complete mode switch (e.g. both to make existing MySQL-friendly programs talk with PostgreSQL, and vice-versa) could grow to be a large project.
Bollocks.
By far the biggest problem with fission is not neutron activation of the machine itself but rather the creation of unstable intermediate-mass daughter atoms. The problem is that the neutron-proton ratio of heavy stable elements is slightly higher than the neutron-proton ratio of lighter stable elements. Hence if you break apart a heavy nearly-stable nucleus you get very unstable isotopes. A few of those isotopes have half-lives measured in hundreds to thousands of years, causing a big problem because you have to store the waste a long time.
Neutron activation of the machine itself is not a big deal. Fission reactors are largely made of aluminum and water. Aluminum that absorbs a neutron ends up (after a short-lived decay chain) as stable. The oxygen in the water produces mostly the heavier stable oxygen isotopes and a small amount of stable fluorine. The hydrogen produces mostly deuterium and a tiny, tiny amount of tritium (from neutron absorption by deuterium). Tritium is messy but not a long-term problem as its half-life is only 12 years.
Existing fusion machines have neutron-activation problems largely because they are experimental rigs, composed of lots of materials that are not particularly well selected for neutron absorption or non-activation. If tokamak technology becomes an engineering reality, tokamak plants will be engineered for minimal neutron activation.
... a car with a Plexiglass hood that's glued shut. You can see, but you can't fix.
I used to work at NASA/GSFC, and one of the workstations there sat all day running periodic housekeeping tasks from cron -- parsing telemetry, handling command load updates, etc. The problem was that every once in a while something would stall and the next batch of cron jobs would launch before the first ones completed. Instant snowballing death would ensue as nothing completed and the load average would soar into the hundreds as cron maniacally, stupidly spawned more and more processes into the poor overloaded workstation.
There are several relevant tools available now but then I wrote my own - a perl script called "qproc" that would queue up jobs for execution, kill them if they hung too long, and refrain from launching multiple copies of the same job at the same time.
Until I got hit by that, I never thought about the fact that cron is very dangerous to use on a production server. But it is -- if cron tasks use a non-infinitesimal part of the computer, you have to take steps to prevent the same marching-broomsticks failure mode.
No, no, I had to work at it :-)
Seriously, the "quarter" quote is a reference to one of the most famous Dilbert strips of all -- in which the hairy, Birkenstock-wearing UNIX guru tells Dilbert to go buy himself a real computer.
Real OS's like Linux, BSD, and OS-X (for example) all feature working memory managers that can (and do) share DLLs securely between different processes without duplicating the relevant blocks of memory. If Microsoft can't manage that, they're even sorrier than I thought.
Here's a quarter, kid. Go get yourself a real OS.
Are you the same Scott Swindells that did some work for distributed.net back in 2000? If so, your strategy isn't working.
Googling is much better. Previous employers, for liability reasons, will usually only indicate whether the subject worked for them. If you're lucky you can also find out whether they would willingly hire the subject back. Google has no such restraint - they only index what's already out there - so you can find out a lot more.
It's true that the golf ball will be going around in something like the ISS orbit (as you point out, there's not much delta-vee in a golf swing) -- but not everyone launches into that orbital plane. Speed of impact for a different orbital plane goes something like 23,000 mph * sin(theta). So, er, I stand corrected: "...Nothing like a 5,000 mph side-window-annihilating golf ball..."
It's also true that the golf ball, like other small space junk, will eventually re-enter. Will the transmitter still be working then? Nobody knows.
It's true -- Windows is definitely easier to use. The network transparency makes it really good -- I can fire up an xload on my remote machines and see how they're doing, or even tunnel my Windows connection over SSH for complete security. Oh, wait, you don't mean X Windows?
In seriousness, reading your complaint I think that you may simply be trying the wrong technique. You shouldn't be trying to install novel apps yourself, that is for hobbyists and tinkerers only. You should be using prepackaged user-friendly distros like Mandrake or Fedora, that have nice GUI installers. For a non-command-line movie player, don't use MPlayer -- use Xine, which way doesn't suck.
This is probably the biggest problem facing those who would adopt Linux: there is such a huge morass of options it's hard to tell which path is the easy one.
is another piece of slightly-too-small-to-track, large-enough-to-annihilite-your-windshield piece of 23,000 MPH space junk to worry about.
No, really people reject OpenOffice because it still sucks after all these years. Why struggle along with OpenOffice Draw when you could be using Inkscape? Why hassle with the damned word processor when AbiWord does a better job? Why fight with the spreadsheet when gnumeric is so much more awesome? Beats me. But to my mind OpenOffice is a big force *against* adoption of the Linux desktop. It's still klunky, dog-slow to start, and ugly even after countless man-years of effort.
No, actually, the reason people don't correct their vision to better than about 20/15 is that the surgery itself introduces aberrations at that level. The diffraction limit is about 20/10, so 20/15 with surgery is pretty good. Most high-order LASIK patients come out of the surgery with that level of vision. (that means "more than 50% of...", not "if you get the surgery you will...")
I mean that contacts that correct astigmatism only became popular in the mid-to-late 1990s. Before that (to my knowledge) contacts only corrected the spherical term, which is usually the larger correction. They're hard to manufacture because they have to be constructed to align themselves correctly on the cornea. The ones I use are weighted and rotate slowly if I don't get them in right the first time; some others have little fins/ridges/bumps on them that are designed to be dragged straight by your eyelid when you blink.
On your prescription you can read out your astigmatic correction as the "cyl." term. There's usually a "sph.", which is the overall lens power, a "cyl.", which is the additional cylindrical power (the same sort of effect as looking through the stem of a wine glass), and an "angle", which tells you the direction of the cylindrical correction. The numbers are given in "diopters", which have units of inverse meters, so a +1 correction means that the lens in front of your eye can project an image of distant objects onto a piece of paper 1 meter behind the lens. A +2 correction means that the best focus would happen 0.5 meter behind the lens; a 3.75 correction is relatively strong and means the paper would be only 26 cm (about 10.5 inches) behind the lens. Negative corrections (-3.75) correspond to nearsightedness; positive ones (+3.75) correspond to farsightedness.
Using wavefront sensors to fully characterize your eye is not new. LASIK patients get that treatment now -- you look into an autocollimator that includes a Shack-Hartmann sensor, and it reads out all the high-order aberrations in your eye. The LASIK treatment then gets rid of all those aberrations, so that after correction your eye could in principle be "perfect" -- limited only by quantum uncertainty of the photons entering your pupil.[In practice that's not the case, because the act of cutting your cornea and letting it heal introduces a low level of new aberrations that weren't present when your eye was characterized in the first place].
If wavefront sensing is so easy and painless, why don't we all have super-duper glasses to fix our vision? Historically, it's because high order lenses are hard to grind, but more recently it's because your glasses can't be aligned with your eye very well. You could make high-order corrective glasses out of the usual glass or polycarbonate or whatever, but they would only work if you looked straight through them: if you turned your eyes to look sideways, the corrective aberrations in the lenses would no longer line up with the aberrations in your cornea, and your vision would be worse than with conventional glasses. If you have astigmatism you can get that effect now by turning your glasses 90 degrees as you look through them: at 90 degree rotation, the cylindrical correction actually worsens your astigmatism rather than correcting it. high order terms are more sensitive to angular and positional alignment.
Contact lenses are better since they are attached to your cornea and therefore stay approximately aligned -- but they're not affixed to your eye, they sort of drift around in there. That's one reason that astigmatic contacts (a relatively new product, BTW) are only available in 10 degree increments of correction angle -- they don't line up any better than that. The only thing that stays really fixed relative to your cornea is, well, your cornea -- which is why high-order correction is feasible for LASIK.
So to make your super-duper glasses work right you would have to mount a small camera under the frame, pointed back at your eye. The camera would have to back out the motion of the eye and correct the active pixels in the lens as you looked around. That may be what these guys are doing, but TFM didn't mention it. Without that sort of feedback, high order correction isn't likely to work well.
BTW, wavefront sensors appear like magic to lots of folks but they aren't. Those eye autofocusers at the optometrist work by autocollimation: if your eye is perfectly focused, then a beam coming in should be focused to a single point on the retina, and scattered light from the retina should then be refocused into a beam that goes straight back where it came from. The autocollimator adjusts an external lens assembly until the beam coming back out of your eye is nice and clean. Wavefront sensors use a bug-eye lens to produce (say) 25 little images, each of which records the beam coming out of a small patch of your pupil. If the eye is in focus, then all the little images should line up. If it's not, then they are misaligned. It's that simple.
I don't work for them, I'm just a very happy customer.
(Note: I'm not affiliated with CafePress or venganza.org -- this is a genuine suggestion...)
Why not bop over to CafePress and send a Flying Spaghetti Monster mug to George Deutsch? You can get his contact information with "finger george.deutsch@hq.nasa.gov", but I'll list it here. Please don't send anything obnoxious. On the other hand, Mr. Deutsch sounds like a man who could use a few dozen Flying Spaghetti Monster mugs (or perhaps a "This mug holds coffee and pisses off Jesus" mug or two).
name: gdeutsch
George Deutsch
postal address: NASA Headquarters
300 E ST SW
Washington DC 20546-0001
postal code: 20546-0001
room number: Building: HQ, Room: 3C54
surname: Deutsch
telephone: +1 202 358-1324
title: Public Affairs Officer, Science Mission Directorate
Well, of course. But a particular set of epicyclic coefficients can indeed be falsified.
Epicycles are actually a valid description of planetary orbits, and are still used today to analyze perturbations in planetary and protoplanetary systems. (A particle in a circular orbit will, if perturbed a small amount, acquire both drift and epicyclic motion relative to its original path).
Authors and musicians were willing to work pretty hard to generate works when copyright expired in 14+14 years. Imagine if architects got the same deal that authors get today. "Design this building and you and your heirs will get a percentage of the rent for your lifetime plus 90 years, unless you manage to grow fat enough to buy some new laws and make it your lifetime plus 120 years...".
Sure, it's wrong to steal an author's work by putting it on the 'net. But on the other hand, that doesn't make it right to lock up entire technologies, economies, and sectors of the public consciousness for centuries. Heinlein's quote is apropos because the music rightsholders are trying to turn back the clock and once again make it practically impossible to copy stuff off the air (as well as simply illegal to do so for redistribution).
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
--RAH, Life Line, 1939