And I think the reason is greed: those releasing GPL software don't want the fruits of their work to be used by somebody to make money without any kind of compensation, but consider adhering to GPL to be enough compensation.
s/greed/fairness/
That is because a developer (GPL or BSD) doesn't get richer from releasing under GPL. If I want to share my code I want it to stay free, available to others for enjoyment, education and improvements. Why would a developer want to work days and nights on some code only to learn later that someone took it "as is", put into a box and sold 100M of these? I wouldn't be getting any money either way, but in case of GPL that "someone" would have to hire a programmer and make their own implementation; this is only fair.
commercial software developers had to buy a commercial license for QT.
And I did that. Qt developers need to eat too, and it's not too much to ask for a small, one time fee for the privilege of selling Qt apps. It's just a couple thousand dollars anyway; if your commercial enterprise can't take that, there is something wrong with your business plan.
What I can't understand is why they're still inventing whole lander thing when technology for safe landing (and going back up) of people is tried FORTY years ago?!!
We know how to land in dense atmosphere (Earth, Venus) and in vacuum (the Moon). But there are no good solutions for landing in thin atmosphere (Mars). You can't use a parachute because there isn't enough atmosphere for it, and you can't use a rocket engine because incoming flow of atmospheric gases interferes with the engine (extinguishes flame and creates oscillations like in a whistle.) That's why robots are just dropped on Mars in a big airbag. But the deceleration is too high for a human.
Let's be clear: the poster said he did something, which he fully admits he did, and was wrong, that was investigated by the FBI.
As a fictituous example, he did some phreaking. It's something FBI would investigate if he called the wrong number (of some TLA.) Such an action would be wrong indeed, and he would be questioned, but once the agent determines that he is not an anarchist or a terrorist but just a kid, he'd be released.
And how that could be accidental, involuntary or just done stupidly without a malicious intent? Just make a typo in your dialplan, set it to dial some other FidoNet node and go to school. When you are back you see LEOs swarming around your house. That's how it can be accidental.
And of course "done stupidly" could be easily accomplished after watching WarGames. As I recall, the protagonist in that movie was shown not as a lowly criminal thrown in jail to rot, but as some kind of valuable specialist, "a good boy."
If your potential employer is willing to disqualify you because one of your friends might have had some illicit substance in his possession 15 years ago...
The employer is not likely to gain access to details of the case, generally [don't know how much was disclosed here.] Typically the employer would find an arrest record at best, or a vague reference to it, and that's all. You may not even know if it was for jaywalking or for going postal with guns blazing.
you don't want to work for him anyway
There are already B2B companies offering background checks for employers (see the link, the service #1 at ESR is "criminal record search".) Modern trends of contracting every nonessential job out tell me that this is coming. And if every good business in your town does such a check on you, you'll have to work for not-so-good employers whether you like them or not. Or die from hunger.
Yes, of course. But inaction also can be damaging, and not every action is of "guilty mind" type.
For example, you have a choice to not ride in a car with your friends late at night - but your other choice is to pay money for a taxi or walk, and you don't have the money. So you get into the car, and you all end up arrested for something like 0.001 microgram of a drug that one of your friends had in a pocket (and possibly didn't know about that.)
Or another example. You and your friend climb on the roof of your University. Your friend falls off the roof and dies. You may be arrested to start with, and if there is any chance that you might have had a reason to kill him, you may be indicted - regardless of whether you actually push him or not. The idea to climb on the roof was stupid, admittedly, but is it fair to deny you all the good jobs forever just because of that?
It is indeed sad that modern technologies, and fierce competition for few remaining jobs, require you to be an angel to even be considered for a position. Some posters already said, as a joke, that once you make a mistake you might as well end it all right here and then, since you are done for. This is not yet true, but it might be true soon enough.
The FORTRAN teacher gave us JCL statements as black magic, to be used as directed, without changes. Later I found books and learned all that there is worth knowing. DD rules:-)
That can be relatively easily built on top of netfilter libraries. But IMO the usefulness of this product would be fairly low, just as it is low for comparable products on Windows. For example, there are TCP connections made by the/tmp/dhcp-client process, what does it mean to a *normal* user? "All is well," that's what it means to them. What if you see a/usr/bin/wget opening an HTTP connection? Do you recall using wget a week ago, or perhaps it was some evil script? Mere logging of past events is tedious to review and ineffectual, just like installing an alarm at your barn to wake you up after the horse is out.
First of all, you want to prevent connections made by malware, not to register the fact hours or days later. It doesn't take long to archive and upload your personal documents (bookmarks, Firefox's saved passwords, ~/{.ssh,.pgp,.gnupg}, etc.) You want that prevented entirely.
Currently firewalls (like iptables) do not guard against rogue processes; the whole box is trusted. I don't recall any iptables rules where you could conditionalize it on a process. And how do you identify processes to begin with? The binaries are not signed; process IDs change; names are arbitrary. To do it right you need to design these features into the OS, so that each process can be identified whenever necessary. I believe SE Linux is all about it.
So if there is a way to bring some sort of a reliable process tag into iptables, that would be probably good enough. Next you only need to make sure that malware can't use your legitimate apps (like the browser) to proxy their evil requests; that requires killing whatever automation there is (command line URLs, for example, and no more wget.)
If that happens then there is a hope of having a system where only whitelisted apps have Internet access, and all other are either locked out of the network completely, or restricted to your LAN. Then in the worst case the malware can only delete your entire $HOME.
Why not have a kernel network access logging module with a userland process that periodically reports to users which programs are accessing the TCP/IP network?
That's basically lsof.
The number of programs that do this for many users is quite low.
I would say every program will be there that checks for updates. Also malicious code in network software will be not detected. Many modern apps use Internet one way or another - IM, streaming, P2P, IP telephony, etc. You'd really need to go back to basics to find an app that doesn't open a connection somewhere.
So how many of these (usually slightly cheaper) Linux netbooks are wiped the moment they get home and an illegal copy of XP put on?
Zero, since Linux netbooks are more expensive (as other posters pointed out) and hard to find.
the owner [...] decides they don't like Linux and put an illegal copy of XP on?
a) It's hard to imagine an owner who specifically orders a Linux netbook without first learning what Linux is, and most importantly what applications he will have available.
b) Why must that copy of XP be illegal? TigerDirect has XP Home and Pro in stock ($90 and $140 as of now.)
I'm unsure how should I respond to that:-) May I ask, have you driven a car in Canada, in winter? I suspect not, because you need an ice scraper to remove the *thick* ice from the glass (outside) before you can hope that the heat from the heater will melt the rest. Without the heater all the windows will be opaque in, say, 10 seconds after you get in.
But yes, opening a window is a popular way to look outside, and I did that more than once. That assumes that you *can* lower the window - and that is not always true. And in any case, driving with window(s) open in winter, when it is snowing, is not my standard of comfort. Note that in the car comfort often translates into safety.
these are cars that people from the US are conditioned to reject because for them, only big is beautiful.
You should have seen how many sacks of salt for the water softener I brought home today in my Prius. I hardly could push the shopping cart from Lowe's to the car. And that is not something unusual if you own a house and have to maintain it. I even need a truck now and then, though I don't own one.
So don't be so quick to explain the "big => good" opinion with just a local kind of insanity. Rational people buy cars of the size that they need. I sometimes have 2-3 passengers in my car; often I carry stuff from the stores. I can't afford three cars; I buy one that does most of what I need. And needs of a single student who lives in a dorm are considerably different from needs of a homeowner.
Defrosting of the windshield (and preventing the water vapor from your breath to freeze on it again) is an important duty of the climate control system.
What makes you think Verizon isn't doing packet inspection to datamine regardless?
It takes leaving a default setting unchanged to have logs of all DNS requests that Verizon's servers answer. The effort spent: zero. The data volume: minimal (only DNS requests.)
It takes a lot more to inspect all packets (TCP and UDP) that may be related to DNS. It has to be bought, then connected to the main data link(s), then configured to log what you want, then maintained. On Verizon's scale it's some serious money right here.
Since Verizon is not in datamining business, I don't see why they would want to trouble themselves with such a complex arrangement.
On top of that, logging users' Internet traffic is not something that Verizon needs to do as part of their usual business. Logs on the DNS server may be easily explained because the server is needed and they need to know what goes wrong when it does. However the packet inspection box has no business reason to be there, and it can affect Verizon's common carrier status.
But wait, here is another. I was studying a foreign language in school, many years ago. The language had a pronunciation that is very different from my native language. Me and my friends sometimes used a "secret language"; it was a transliteration, when characters of words in language A are transliterated into [poorly matching] script B, with di- and trigraphs, and the result pronounced with phonems of B. It was completely unintelligible to speakers of either language who don't know the rules, but we could easily speak it. That "secret language" would have conformed to Zipf's law because it was a natural language.
If this manuscript is such a mystery, how come nobody tried to do this with the "herb" section before?
That was the first thing everyone tried. Unfortunately, very few plants can be recognized, the rest apparently is fictional. That feeds the hypothesis that the whole document is a hoax. Absence of another example of such a script is another hint at that - there is little reason to write a manuscript if nobody else can read it.
it should become immediately obvious if she's on the right track by just trying to decode some of the other pages.
She doesn't speak Italian, and it's awfully hard to decode anagrams of words that you never saw. Her own samples of decoded plants are all wrong.
And in any case, the anagram approach would be only useful if the manuscript is written as notes to self. It takes an unusual mind to make and decode anagrams on the fly. Most people would be struggling with each word even if they understand the script.
I don't recall hearing anything about a worldwide flood in my history books, or geology class
Just for completeness, here is a possible explanation. We must understand that when those religious books were written the world was very, very small. A minor flooding of a local pond, displacing a handful of families, could be easily written up as a major event. Pretty much just as media does things today:-)
And a RPG is not going to be able to sink a large cargo ship. Could it punch a hole in the hull? Yes, not a big enough one to overwhelm the bilge pumps.
What if the ship is an oil tanker?
But in general I agree. An RPG hit above the waterline is not going to let much water in, if any. And an RPG hit below the waterline is impossible. Only a lucky hit *at* exactly the waterline, especially when there are waves, can cause a flooding.
Gallium arsenide is a carcinogen, and arsenic is released when the crystal is exposed to water (after the LED light is thrown out and ends up in a landfill.) Manufacturing of semiconductors is producing poisonous waste, and it requires large amounts of energy.
Currently a 1W desk lamp (of which I happen to have two) uses about 30 LEDs. It is cool to the touch, but the light is mostly blue, and the intensity of the light is just enough to use it as a night light. I like these lamps for what I'm using them, but there is no way currently to replace the overhead lights with them, they are 100x too weak and 10x too expensive.
Binoculars are a lot easier to hold steady than a 10 lb (give or take, plus ammo) rifle.
Not exactly. I suggest you try and compare the two. The mass of the rifle takes out the high frequency jitter, and only the low frequency sway remains. As long as you make the shot before your arms are tired (30-40 seconds) you will be very much OK. In any case, you have plenty of support on the ship (or on the bench.) Heavier weapons wobble less, provided that you don't need to hold them for long. Most precise rifles are heavy, and they are fired from sandbags or a sled.
In my experiment I could have used a rifle with a VX-3 scope, but it is a bad idea to point a rifle at something that isn't a target.
You definitely don't want to use a laser dot sight, you are right about that. I don't have one and I don't need one. Also you are right that assault rifles (like AK series) don't come with scopes; but these are simply not right weapons for this job, they are close combat weapons (up to 300 meters at best.)
hunters tend to be far better shots than the average soldier
Then you know who to hire. Indeed, there are many soldiers that never held a rifle in their hands because that's not what they do in the army. But it's more difficult to find a hunter who never shot a rifle or a shotgun; you'd need to find some very dedicated archer for that:-)
Standard marksmanship training for US Marines goes up to 500m using the iron sights and from the prone position
Could be. As long as that's the rules it's fair - it's just a test. But in real life a telescopic sight is a requirement because it offers not only magnification, it also places the target and the reticle into a single plane, that is easier on eyes. Army marksmen successfully engage targets miles away. I wouldn't expect that in the sea, but if people like that are involved, all pirates would be dead before they can hit the broad side of the ship with their weapons.
I propose that a tow behind weapons platform be towed behind cargo vessels. Then when they wish to enter foreign ports they simply anchor their weapons platforms at sea when the vessels wish to enter harbors.
There is an easier way. Each foreign port places a large old ship, a barge, or something just outside their border. Incoming ships can send their guards, with their weapons, to that floating hotel for the duration of the stay in the port. If the guards want they can leave the weapons there, come back and enter the port. Weapons will be guarded by the port's security and returned when the ship leaves the port.
A trained soldier has a hard time hitting a man-sized target at 400m on the rifle range.
I don't know where you hire your trained soldiers, they aren't any good. Some deer were taken from 800+ yards, and a deer is about human size. Maybe you are talking about grunts who are running *and* firing their assault rifles on full auto, but that's not applicable to this scenario.
First of all, I recall that I was still in school when we went to a range and shot at 200m targets, with iron sights. Absolutely everyone hit them (the targets reacted to the impact.) Some even did really well, accuracy-wise.
But I just went to my balcony with my laser rangefinder. It has a reticle of sorts, and the device is just binoculars-sized. Not as steady as a rifle. So I pointed it at a transformer on a pole about 400 meters away (confirmed by the rangefinder) and tried to hold the reticle still on the transformer. It was quite easy. With a rifle, let alone a benchrest, it would be even easier. A half-decent rifle will give you 0.5"-1" groups at 100 meters. Good rifles will give you 6" groups at 1000 meters. So 400 meters is an *easy* distance; I will be hunting squirrels at 200+ meters in the spring, and squirrels are considerably smaller than a human:-)
Now, back to the subject. True, it's harder to shoot accurately from a moving ship. However the attackers are under even worse conditions - their boat is small and moves far more than a huge container ship or an oil tanker. So here is one advantage.
Next is another advantage - you, on the big ship, have truly infinite ammo. You can shoot as much as you want, from a well prepared position. If you need a night vision scope you've got it. You need every 5th bullet a tracer - you have them. You want a.50 caliber gun - you can have it. You even can have a guided missile rack, for all I care.
But that's not all. You are on a huge ship, behind the armor. The pirates really can't do anything to you, and they don't carry weapons that can do much harm to your ship from afar. You, on the other hand, can set their boat on fire from half a mile with incendiary bullets. Their boat is small, but every hit counts; your only constraint in the rate of fire is the hot barrel of your gun. Your ship is big but there is nobody on the deck who could be wounded or killed. At most the pirates can try an RPG on your ship, but the theoretical RPG range is about 1000m, and in practice it is much less than that.
So the real problem here is lack of will to do anything about pirates. As a military force they are laughable; a couple of US deer hunters with their 30-30 hunting rifles can shoot half of the pirates dead and then sink their boat. In this economy I don't see any difficulty in hiring armed guards for ships, that sure beats the ransom demand. If some ports don't welcome ships with weapons onboard... too bad, these ports have to change their policy or go out of business.
Perhaps the fudge numbers were being used to test the program before the real numbers were found?
It could well be the case. However to prove it one way or another the code, as is, needs to be compiled (it's not FORTRAN) and the whole calculation has to be repeated. It's unclear yet, though, if there is a known good data to be fed into this chain.
The fact that some code is commented out is not a definite proof of anything; but it's a "reasonable cause" to be suspicious. It takes only a second to comment something out and save, and CRU has no version control. As far as I know, nothing is tagged so that we know which versions of which files were used in what release. I believe the code was hacked left and right as they went along; this is not unusual among scientists because they seldom have a design document when they start:-) The code could have been used to produce results at any point of its evolution. Lack of methodical approach and good documentation on what they did hurts them more than any suspicious code. The only way, IMO, to understand what's going on is to repeat *everything* from scratch. I think it's a fair price to pay, considering the worldwide costs of CO(2) emission caps.
I used to do particle physics analysis. As part of this I had a piece of code which introduced a fake signal of the thing I was trying to measure (and subsequently publish on) into a data set.
That is a prudent thing to do. But yes, if anyone would see that, you'd need to show that the unit testing code was not executed during processing of real data. Myself, I use #define for such things, and if the symbol is defined then I print (or otherwise conspicuously show) a huge text "NOT FOR RELEASE - TEST ONLY". In a GUI I may set the window background to some ugly color. You can't then accidentally use or release a testing build.
The CRU code does not seem to offer any options to bypass the "fudge factor". The only possible explanation is that this particular source was used to compile a test code. But then there should be a code without the fudge factor... it's a mess, and I don't expect anyone at CRU to adequately explain this. Probably not many people even know, given that the original author of much of that, a PhD student, left CRU years ago. They don't have a version control system in place, and they have no backups.
Slashdot Mirror
And I think the reason is greed: those releasing GPL software don't want the fruits of their work to be used by somebody to make money without any kind of compensation, but consider adhering to GPL to be enough compensation.
That is because a developer (GPL or BSD) doesn't get richer from releasing under GPL. If I want to share my code I want it to stay free, available to others for enjoyment, education and improvements. Why would a developer want to work days and nights on some code only to learn later that someone took it "as is", put into a box and sold 100M of these? I wouldn't be getting any money either way, but in case of GPL that "someone" would have to hire a programmer and make their own implementation; this is only fair.
commercial software developers had to buy a commercial license for QT.
And I did that. Qt developers need to eat too, and it's not too much to ask for a small, one time fee for the privilege of selling Qt apps. It's just a couple thousand dollars anyway; if your commercial enterprise can't take that, there is something wrong with your business plan.
What I can't understand is why they're still inventing whole lander thing when technology for safe landing (and going back up) of people is tried FORTY years ago?!!
We know how to land in dense atmosphere (Earth, Venus) and in vacuum (the Moon). But there are no good solutions for landing in thin atmosphere (Mars). You can't use a parachute because there isn't enough atmosphere for it, and you can't use a rocket engine because incoming flow of atmospheric gases interferes with the engine (extinguishes flame and creates oscillations like in a whistle.) That's why robots are just dropped on Mars in a big airbag. But the deceleration is too high for a human.
Let's be clear: the poster said he did something, which he fully admits he did, and was wrong, that was investigated by the FBI.
As a fictituous example, he did some phreaking. It's something FBI would investigate if he called the wrong number (of some TLA.) Such an action would be wrong indeed, and he would be questioned, but once the agent determines that he is not an anarchist or a terrorist but just a kid, he'd be released.
And how that could be accidental, involuntary or just done stupidly without a malicious intent? Just make a typo in your dialplan, set it to dial some other FidoNet node and go to school. When you are back you see LEOs swarming around your house. That's how it can be accidental.
And of course "done stupidly" could be easily accomplished after watching WarGames. As I recall, the protagonist in that movie was shown not as a lowly criminal thrown in jail to rot, but as some kind of valuable specialist, "a good boy."
If your potential employer is willing to disqualify you because one of your friends might have had some illicit substance in his possession 15 years ago...
The employer is not likely to gain access to details of the case, generally [don't know how much was disclosed here.] Typically the employer would find an arrest record at best, or a vague reference to it, and that's all. You may not even know if it was for jaywalking or for going postal with guns blazing.
you don't want to work for him anyway
There are already B2B companies offering background checks for employers (see the link, the service #1 at ESR is "criminal record search".) Modern trends of contracting every nonessential job out tell me that this is coming. And if every good business in your town does such a check on you, you'll have to work for not-so-good employers whether you like them or not. Or die from hunger.
Actions have consequences
Yes, of course. But inaction also can be damaging, and not every action is of "guilty mind" type.
For example, you have a choice to not ride in a car with your friends late at night - but your other choice is to pay money for a taxi or walk, and you don't have the money. So you get into the car, and you all end up arrested for something like 0.001 microgram of a drug that one of your friends had in a pocket (and possibly didn't know about that.)
Or another example. You and your friend climb on the roof of your University. Your friend falls off the roof and dies. You may be arrested to start with, and if there is any chance that you might have had a reason to kill him, you may be indicted - regardless of whether you actually push him or not. The idea to climb on the roof was stupid, admittedly, but is it fair to deny you all the good jobs forever just because of that?
It is indeed sad that modern technologies, and fierce competition for few remaining jobs, require you to be an angel to even be considered for a position. Some posters already said, as a joke, that once you make a mistake you might as well end it all right here and then, since you are done for. This is not yet true, but it might be true soon enough.
I thought that operating systems were designed to work with the processor(s). When did it get to be the other way around?
When it became easier to design a new processor than to design a new OS (and port all apps onto it.)
The FORTRAN teacher gave us JCL statements as black magic, to be used as directed, without changes. Later I found books and learned all that there is worth knowing. DD rules :-)
And it's a good idea.
That can be relatively easily built on top of netfilter libraries. But IMO the usefulness of this product would be fairly low, just as it is low for comparable products on Windows. For example, there are TCP connections made by the /tmp/dhcp-client process, what does it mean to a *normal* user? "All is well," that's what it means to them. What if you see a /usr/bin/wget opening an HTTP connection? Do you recall using wget a week ago, or perhaps it was some evil script? Mere logging of past events is tedious to review and ineffectual, just like installing an alarm at your barn to wake you up after the horse is out.
First of all, you want to prevent connections made by malware, not to register the fact hours or days later. It doesn't take long to archive and upload your personal documents (bookmarks, Firefox's saved passwords, ~/{.ssh,.pgp,.gnupg}, etc.) You want that prevented entirely.
Currently firewalls (like iptables) do not guard against rogue processes; the whole box is trusted. I don't recall any iptables rules where you could conditionalize it on a process. And how do you identify processes to begin with? The binaries are not signed; process IDs change; names are arbitrary. To do it right you need to design these features into the OS, so that each process can be identified whenever necessary. I believe SE Linux is all about it.
So if there is a way to bring some sort of a reliable process tag into iptables, that would be probably good enough. Next you only need to make sure that malware can't use your legitimate apps (like the browser) to proxy their evil requests; that requires killing whatever automation there is (command line URLs, for example, and no more wget.)
If that happens then there is a hope of having a system where only whitelisted apps have Internet access, and all other are either locked out of the network completely, or restricted to your LAN. Then in the worst case the malware can only delete your entire $HOME.
Why not have a kernel network access logging module with a userland process that periodically reports to users which programs are accessing the TCP/IP network?
That's basically lsof.
The number of programs that do this for many users is quite low.
I would say every program will be there that checks for updates. Also malicious code in network software will be not detected. Many modern apps use Internet one way or another - IM, streaming, P2P, IP telephony, etc. You'd really need to go back to basics to find an app that doesn't open a connection somewhere.
So how many of these (usually slightly cheaper) Linux netbooks are wiped the moment they get home and an illegal copy of XP put on?
Zero, since Linux netbooks are more expensive (as other posters pointed out) and hard to find.
the owner [...] decides they don't like Linux and put an illegal copy of XP on?
a) It's hard to imagine an owner who specifically orders a Linux netbook without first learning what Linux is, and most importantly what applications he will have available.
b) Why must that copy of XP be illegal? TigerDirect has XP Home and Pro in stock ($90 and $140 as of now.)
without them there would we collapse like Rome did? Will We yet?
Just look outside of the gates and try to count the barbarians. They make quite a crowd, I'd say.
Openning the window may help with that.
I'm unsure how should I respond to that :-) May I ask, have you driven a car in Canada, in winter? I suspect not, because you need an ice scraper to remove the *thick* ice from the glass (outside) before you can hope that the heat from the heater will melt the rest. Without the heater all the windows will be opaque in, say, 10 seconds after you get in.
But yes, opening a window is a popular way to look outside, and I did that more than once. That assumes that you *can* lower the window - and that is not always true. And in any case, driving with window(s) open in winter, when it is snowing, is not my standard of comfort. Note that in the car comfort often translates into safety.
these are cars that people from the US are conditioned to reject because for them, only big is beautiful.
You should have seen how many sacks of salt for the water softener I brought home today in my Prius. I hardly could push the shopping cart from Lowe's to the car. And that is not something unusual if you own a house and have to maintain it. I even need a truck now and then, though I don't own one.
So don't be so quick to explain the "big => good" opinion with just a local kind of insanity. Rational people buy cars of the size that they need. I sometimes have 2-3 passengers in my car; often I carry stuff from the stores. I can't afford three cars; I buy one that does most of what I need. And needs of a single student who lives in a dorm are considerably different from needs of a homeowner.
Why do you need the cabin to be above freezing?
Defrosting of the windshield (and preventing the water vapor from your breath to freeze on it again) is an important duty of the climate control system.
What makes you think Verizon isn't doing packet inspection to datamine regardless?
It takes leaving a default setting unchanged to have logs of all DNS requests that Verizon's servers answer. The effort spent: zero. The data volume: minimal (only DNS requests.)
It takes a lot more to inspect all packets (TCP and UDP) that may be related to DNS. It has to be bought, then connected to the main data link(s), then configured to log what you want, then maintained. On Verizon's scale it's some serious money right here.
Since Verizon is not in datamining business, I don't see why they would want to trouble themselves with such a complex arrangement.
On top of that, logging users' Internet traffic is not something that Verizon needs to do as part of their usual business. Logs on the DNS server may be easily explained because the server is needed and they need to know what goes wrong when it does. However the packet inspection box has no business reason to be there, and it can affect Verizon's common carrier status.
[citation needed]
Here it is.
But wait, here is another. I was studying a foreign language in school, many years ago. The language had a pronunciation that is very different from my native language. Me and my friends sometimes used a "secret language"; it was a transliteration, when characters of words in language A are transliterated into [poorly matching] script B, with di- and trigraphs, and the result pronounced with phonems of B. It was completely unintelligible to speakers of either language who don't know the rules, but we could easily speak it. That "secret language" would have conformed to Zipf's law because it was a natural language.
If this manuscript is such a mystery, how come nobody tried to do this with the "herb" section before?
That was the first thing everyone tried. Unfortunately, very few plants can be recognized, the rest apparently is fictional. That feeds the hypothesis that the whole document is a hoax. Absence of another example of such a script is another hint at that - there is little reason to write a manuscript if nobody else can read it.
it should become immediately obvious if she's on the right track by just trying to decode some of the other pages.
She doesn't speak Italian, and it's awfully hard to decode anagrams of words that you never saw. Her own samples of decoded plants are all wrong.
And in any case, the anagram approach would be only useful if the manuscript is written as notes to self. It takes an unusual mind to make and decode anagrams on the fly. Most people would be struggling with each word even if they understand the script.
I don't recall hearing anything about a worldwide flood in my history books, or geology class
Just for completeness, here is a possible explanation. We must understand that when those religious books were written the world was very, very small. A minor flooding of a local pond, displacing a handful of families, could be easily written up as a major event. Pretty much just as media does things today :-)
And a RPG is not going to be able to sink a large cargo ship. Could it punch a hole in the hull? Yes, not a big enough one to overwhelm the bilge pumps.
What if the ship is an oil tanker?
But in general I agree. An RPG hit above the waterline is not going to let much water in, if any. And an RPG hit below the waterline is impossible. Only a lucky hit *at* exactly the waterline, especially when there are waves, can cause a flooding.
LEDs [...] no toxic materials
Gallium arsenide is a carcinogen, and arsenic is released when the crystal is exposed to water (after the LED light is thrown out and ends up in a landfill.) Manufacturing of semiconductors is producing poisonous waste, and it requires large amounts of energy.
Currently a 1W desk lamp (of which I happen to have two) uses about 30 LEDs. It is cool to the touch, but the light is mostly blue, and the intensity of the light is just enough to use it as a night light. I like these lamps for what I'm using them, but there is no way currently to replace the overhead lights with them, they are 100x too weak and 10x too expensive.
Binoculars are a lot easier to hold steady than a 10 lb (give or take, plus ammo) rifle.
Not exactly. I suggest you try and compare the two. The mass of the rifle takes out the high frequency jitter, and only the low frequency sway remains. As long as you make the shot before your arms are tired (30-40 seconds) you will be very much OK. In any case, you have plenty of support on the ship (or on the bench.) Heavier weapons wobble less, provided that you don't need to hold them for long. Most precise rifles are heavy, and they are fired from sandbags or a sled.
In my experiment I could have used a rifle with a VX-3 scope, but it is a bad idea to point a rifle at something that isn't a target.
You definitely don't want to use a laser dot sight, you are right about that. I don't have one and I don't need one. Also you are right that assault rifles (like AK series) don't come with scopes; but these are simply not right weapons for this job, they are close combat weapons (up to 300 meters at best.)
hunters tend to be far better shots than the average soldier
Then you know who to hire. Indeed, there are many soldiers that never held a rifle in their hands because that's not what they do in the army. But it's more difficult to find a hunter who never shot a rifle or a shotgun; you'd need to find some very dedicated archer for that :-)
Standard marksmanship training for US Marines goes up to 500m using the iron sights and from the prone position
Could be. As long as that's the rules it's fair - it's just a test. But in real life a telescopic sight is a requirement because it offers not only magnification, it also places the target and the reticle into a single plane, that is easier on eyes. Army marksmen successfully engage targets miles away. I wouldn't expect that in the sea, but if people like that are involved, all pirates would be dead before they can hit the broad side of the ship with their weapons.
I propose that a tow behind weapons platform be towed behind cargo vessels. Then when they wish to enter foreign ports they simply anchor their weapons platforms at sea when the vessels wish to enter harbors.
There is an easier way. Each foreign port places a large old ship, a barge, or something just outside their border. Incoming ships can send their guards, with their weapons, to that floating hotel for the duration of the stay in the port. If the guards want they can leave the weapons there, come back and enter the port. Weapons will be guarded by the port's security and returned when the ship leaves the port.
A trained soldier has a hard time hitting a man-sized target at 400m on the rifle range.
I don't know where you hire your trained soldiers, they aren't any good. Some deer were taken from 800+ yards, and a deer is about human size. Maybe you are talking about grunts who are running *and* firing their assault rifles on full auto, but that's not applicable to this scenario.
First of all, I recall that I was still in school when we went to a range and shot at 200m targets, with iron sights. Absolutely everyone hit them (the targets reacted to the impact.) Some even did really well, accuracy-wise.
But I just went to my balcony with my laser rangefinder. It has a reticle of sorts, and the device is just binoculars-sized. Not as steady as a rifle. So I pointed it at a transformer on a pole about 400 meters away (confirmed by the rangefinder) and tried to hold the reticle still on the transformer. It was quite easy. With a rifle, let alone a benchrest, it would be even easier. A half-decent rifle will give you 0.5"-1" groups at 100 meters. Good rifles will give you 6" groups at 1000 meters. So 400 meters is an *easy* distance; I will be hunting squirrels at 200+ meters in the spring, and squirrels are considerably smaller than a human :-)
Now, back to the subject. True, it's harder to shoot accurately from a moving ship. However the attackers are under even worse conditions - their boat is small and moves far more than a huge container ship or an oil tanker. So here is one advantage.
Next is another advantage - you, on the big ship, have truly infinite ammo. You can shoot as much as you want, from a well prepared position. If you need a night vision scope you've got it. You need every 5th bullet a tracer - you have them. You want a .50 caliber gun - you can have it. You even can have a guided missile rack, for all I care.
But that's not all. You are on a huge ship, behind the armor. The pirates really can't do anything to you, and they don't carry weapons that can do much harm to your ship from afar. You, on the other hand, can set their boat on fire from half a mile with incendiary bullets. Their boat is small, but every hit counts; your only constraint in the rate of fire is the hot barrel of your gun. Your ship is big but there is nobody on the deck who could be wounded or killed. At most the pirates can try an RPG on your ship, but the theoretical RPG range is about 1000m, and in practice it is much less than that.
So the real problem here is lack of will to do anything about pirates. As a military force they are laughable; a couple of US deer hunters with their 30-30 hunting rifles can shoot half of the pirates dead and then sink their boat. In this economy I don't see any difficulty in hiring armed guards for ships, that sure beats the ransom demand. If some ports don't welcome ships with weapons onboard ... too bad, these ports have to change their policy or go out of business.
Perhaps the fudge numbers were being used to test the program before the real numbers were found?
It could well be the case. However to prove it one way or another the code, as is, needs to be compiled (it's not FORTRAN) and the whole calculation has to be repeated. It's unclear yet, though, if there is a known good data to be fed into this chain.
The fact that some code is commented out is not a definite proof of anything; but it's a "reasonable cause" to be suspicious. It takes only a second to comment something out and save, and CRU has no version control. As far as I know, nothing is tagged so that we know which versions of which files were used in what release. I believe the code was hacked left and right as they went along; this is not unusual among scientists because they seldom have a design document when they start :-) The code could have been used to produce results at any point of its evolution. Lack of methodical approach and good documentation on what they did hurts them more than any suspicious code. The only way, IMO, to understand what's going on is to repeat *everything* from scratch. I think it's a fair price to pay, considering the worldwide costs of CO(2) emission caps.
I used to do particle physics analysis. As part of this I had a piece of code which introduced a fake signal of the thing I was trying to measure (and subsequently publish on) into a data set.
That is a prudent thing to do. But yes, if anyone would see that, you'd need to show that the unit testing code was not executed during processing of real data. Myself, I use #define for such things, and if the symbol is defined then I print (or otherwise conspicuously show) a huge text "NOT FOR RELEASE - TEST ONLY". In a GUI I may set the window background to some ugly color. You can't then accidentally use or release a testing build.
The CRU code does not seem to offer any options to bypass the "fudge factor". The only possible explanation is that this particular source was used to compile a test code. But then there should be a code without the fudge factor... it's a mess, and I don't expect anyone at CRU to adequately explain this. Probably not many people even know, given that the original author of much of that, a PhD student, left CRU years ago. They don't have a version control system in place, and they have no backups.