Finland was only one of several pawns that got traded during pre-war times. Other pawns were on both sides; Hitler took some Austria, Stalin took some Poland... Say what you want, but those times were tough and unfair - and that was only the beginning.
We can go there after all the things wrong on Earth are fixed," said Betty Collatrella, a retiree from Caldwell, New Jersey.
Yea, right - find a person who has no clue about anything, and ask her "a question of cosmic proportions", to cite Prof. Preobrazhensky... I bet she also has a fully formed opinion about usefulness of synchrotrons, and is ready to advise humanity on how useless tensors are (since she can't buy them at Wal-Mart.)
These people are flatlanders - always were, and always will be. People that can't lift their eyes off the ground and look into the sky. People who think inside the box and are proud of that. People who want to stop you from looking up.
This is a well known flaw of democracy. It breeds mediocrity, because every social innovation tends to be suppressed if it does not serve the most immediate needs of the society, since the society in its voting average is stupid.
One truly may wish to have a Space Tyrant as a ruler; maybe ruthless sometimes, but smart and with a vision - not that circus of politicians who don't even know what a vision is, and who bury the society deeper and deeper every year.
But I doubt that it would be too expensive to develop such a launch system?
It would require redesign of a lot of systems. Soyuz, for example, is powered by kerosene + liquid oxygen, but Proton (designed by a different team) runs on dimethylhydrazine. The former is harmless; the latter is deadly. Guess which one would you choose for a manned flight? Then we would go into redundant, voting systems, crew ejection tower, and many other things that do not even exist on cargo rockets.
Some people would even say that you need to design the whole rocket from scratch. Imagine, for example, that you need to upgrade your Ford Taurus to win Indy or F-1 race. Where would you start? And consider that failure of any single part can doom the mission; so you need to go through *all* parts and improve them or make sure the failure will be contained.
It's not like NASA haven't done it before. The trick is that the old rocket scientists of Von Braun vintage all retired long ago, some are dead already. Nobody at NASA (or at Boeing, etc.) has a clue about where to begin. Design from scratch, and then testing, and then inevitable failures will take many years (say ten) to reach good reliability numbers.
If you compare this situation to Chinese, Russian and European efforts - which are up to date, and quite finely debugged by now, and for which trained technicians and engineers exist, then you will see that NASA painted itself into a corner. It has only Shuttle, and nothing but Shuttle. Today it can't operate anything else, and it can't develop anything else either (proof of that is in many canceled X-projects which were meant as a replacement or a companion for the Shuttle.)
The Ariane 5, for example, was initially developed with the french shuttle Hermes in mind.
Show me this Hermes thing in orbit, and then I will take it seriously:-)
Actually, you can be sure that the Shuttle program will be scrapped in case of another catastrophe. There simply could be no "program" with only two vehicles remaining.
when they need to launch a crew and cargo at the same time
This is needed on every flight to the ISS, since the station wants lots of big thingies all the time (until it is built; then it will require lots of food and water instead.)
or when they somehow need the land-like-an-aeroplane ability.
I doubt this was ever needed. You want to land, and that's pretty much all. Only the most sensitive experiments could benefit from softer landing; I don't know if that was ever the case; and relatively hard capsule landings never stopped earlier spacefarers.
A Reusable Capsule, for about 5 people perhaps
NASA does not have a man-rated rocket for the capsule. Reliability of most cargo-rated rockets is about 95% - which is OK for satellites, but hardly sufficient for people. Soyuz rocket, for example, is man-rated; Proton is not.
Cheap launch rockets, when they need to launch cargo
If it was we would all have our own orbiters and I would be abducting Venusian women.
Come on, abductions are not politically correct any more; don't give the Venus government the chance to blame Earth again:-)
Anyways, it is most definitely understood that anything involving space is a little bit more difficult than eating a pretzel. In this context (which is presumed to be blatantly obvious to/. readers) it _is_ trivial to equip an astronaut with soft gloves, compared to the much less trivial matter of launching him to the orbit in first place.
Probably nothing will happen. NASA, that young sprinter of 70's, now looks like old Sumo wrestler, and is as agile as a snail. If China challenges NASA, it will take years for the bureaucracy to even comprehend the challenge!
As matter of fact, China already announced its intentions - to fly to the Moon and beyond. What transpired at NASA? You guessed it. Nothing. As if China does not exist.
On the other hand, NASA does not have resources to do anything even if the challenge is valid and immediate. Imagine that China establishes its Moon base in June 2004. What NASA can possibly do? It is even cut off of space at the moment, and its best chance to launch anyone would be... in a Chinese capsule:-)
There is a good chance anyone going over the side to look at the heat tiles will actually damage more in the course of the repair.
That would be the case if an untrained spaceperson does that (like those on Columbia). However it is trivial now to establish means for safe inspection, and all astronauts can be trained to use them.
I don't work for NASA, but even I can think of soft rubber shoes and gloves that would allow you to touch the surface w/o damaging it. The spaceman would be weightless, so no static pressure would be applied; he only needs to keep his moment in check, which is easy as long as he is not in a hurry (and does not weigh a ton:-)
This was not a weird tax at all. Peter wanted to move ancient, ossified and bound with old customs Russian society toward much more modern and agile West. As part of that, he wanted to promote Western ideas - clothes, language, customs. Western men usually didn't wear beards then, and in their eyes a beard was probably a sign of a savage.
Most airplanes can't glide well because their aerodynamic quality is low. This parameter describes how many miles the airplane can glide when released from one mile height. A good glider can cover 40-50 miles without utilizing air currents. A regular commercial airplane will glide maybe 0.5 to 1 mile before it meets the ground.
To get good quality you need to design for it; a glider will have very thin and long wings, narrow fuselage, and will have very smooth surfaces everywhere. This is not something that commercial airplanes are designed for.
I took a professional signal analysis software package and analyzed the file in detail. There is indeed a signal, quite discernible, at about 570 Hz. However the package that I have is visual only, it is not suitable for audio playback, and I am too lazy to add audio output to it... not worth of $100 for sure. Also, the signal drifts considerably.
you'd have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that not getting the imagery done caused the loss of life
It is already known, as presented in the report, that there would be options to keep the crew alive. So if the imagery would indicate damage then the landing would be cancelled, with crew staying up there, in cold, mostly sedated, and waiting for some rescue.
In other words, if the photos show the damage, then the crew would be alive. Maybe not on the ground, but alive nevertheless. The report gives plenty of rope to hang those managers.
Who said you had to use the SMTP host on the network?
I was thinking about my own network here. Only officially blessed MTA (Postfix) is permitted to go outside. Every other computer on the LAN is allowed only to talk to each other, or to designated servers (Postfix and Squid). Needless to say, these servers are granted wide authority to deny service in best of the best BOFH traditions:-) I did that shortly after some virus showed up that used to email company's documents to random addresses, just to be sure (though Outlook is not permitted here, as well as IE).
A program running as you has the ability to delete your email and data files and the ability to send out email to propagate itself.
The virus won't work because of some unresolved library dependency:-)
In a proper environment a virus can't delete your email on the IMAP server. It can try to connect, but it doesn't know the password; and the MUA isn't scriptable for this very reason.
The virus also can't email itself because the SMTP host on the network requires TLS and authorization to do that, and the virus is not in posession of the login credentials.
Basically, the virus only can erase all the files that you are authorized to erase. This includes the virus, and that would be the end of it.
With all these TCPA laws flying around, what is the threshold when a board with chips becomes a computer?
There are plenty of single-chip MCUs, from Atmel AVRs on 8-bit scale to ARM on 32-bit, and everything else as well. Some of those chips are plenty powerful; for example, Netwinder was based on StrongARM, and Intel now moved onto even better architecture. I have PC/104 card in front of me, it runs Linux on XScale CPU as I type this.
So the question is, will it be mandated that every little chip must have this nefarious "secure core" or whatever they call it today?
It is plain impossible, price-wise, to embed this technology into every CPU manufactured. Most of those CPUs cost about $10, and they are self-sufficient; only add power. Even worse, there are soft implementations of many popular CPUs, MIPS/ARM being the prime example. These can be embedded into any blank FPGA just by pasting the code... and the FPGA definitely won't have the security required for the TCPA.
So where does it leave us? Will only PC platforms be affected by the law? Or maybe all Linksys routers (with Linux inside) will have to be reworked? And all Tivos? And all PDAs? This is getting ridiculous fast.
I work with embedded systems most of the time, and I tell you, this law simply can't go anywhere. We are immersed into a sea of computers, most of which are faster and more powerful than your average desktop. There are DSPs that, despite being poor in some operations, will encode your DivX movie faster than the best Pentium. Your cell phone has a few CPUs in it, as well as your TV and your car. Where this law is going to stop?
I also guess that if s/w vendors can raise the prices, they will. Cost of traditional s/w will shoot through the roof, now that you *must* pay for every copy. This will create a unique combination - a TCPA-free hardware and free software, and there will be a market hungry for both of the above simply because they can't afford to be robbed by ISVs, they just don't have the money. People who hold onto their olden Win95 boxes will have to either give up computing, or to switch to TCPA-free hardware and free software. The industry digs its own grave, as it seems.
His problem has nothing to do with static vs. dynamic IP addresses. He has LWL server to overcome dynamic addressing, and he had it there for 8 years already.
Actually, power plants can use their own generated energy for maintenance of the plant, similarly to how a car can recharge the battery.
However this is not the primary mode of operation, only a backup and safety measure in case peers go offline. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to start the plant (and it would be awfully dark and cold there to begin with.)
But this experiment looks weird. I can't figure out what exactly this guy is trying to measure - looks like he is trying some sort of deception (Chewbacca Defense comes to mind). Nobody argues that the current will flow through his solution, so what's the point? His setup is by design unable to return any power into the power grid; so what he is trying to show?
Quick! Make a mod for Quake or Unreal Tournament! The whole opposing team would be bots skinned as SCO officers and board members (as they already are, in fact.) This mod would work only in god mode, and all human players would have all weapons and all ammo. Results of each round would be emailed to SCO, and captures of best games broadcast on Internet.
Your arguments are valid, of course. However why would anyone keep a damaged file? You can always pre-play the initial segment of the file as it is being downloaded, and I guess people do use this function because of ever increasing number of bad rips and cuckoo eggs. If the file does not pre-play, why would a regular user continue to download it?
There is another issue. It is difficult to convince the judge and jury that a non-tech person is capable of figuring out that Allegro.mp3 in fact contains illegal pr0n. All the defense needs to do is to give the judge a random file (which may even play for a few seconds, if they are sneaky) and ask him to find out what it is. The judge will fail this test, as would anyone without good computer knowledge *and* expectation of something of the sort.
With regard to the populace being fooled all the time, that's just sad. Voters with IQ below 100 should have their voting rights revoked; their opinions are usually wrong anyway. A few more years of this "democracy" will surely push me right into Monarchists camp. What we have right now is dictatorship of fools, tyranny of unwashed masses.
We know that the RIAA (or an oursourced company) is interjecting junk mp3's into the system now, whats to stop them from retagging porn with mp3 headers to make their point?
And what that point would be? An iPod or WinAmp or XMMS is unlikely to display photos or movies. Short of file(1), most casual users would never even find out what the file really contains. They will just delete it as corrupted...
That proves the allegation. Nobody I know uses FrameMaker; nobody even knows what it does. Everybody uses MS Office, and few people use Illustrator and Photoshop.
IANAL, but it's not a problem. Sale of a personal property is not a commercial usage because how can one use something that he is parting with?
As another example, CDs are also authorized to be used non-commercially, but it is legal to sell a used CD.
Commercial usage would occur if you, for example, play the song in your bar, or broadcast it through your own radio station. None of that applies here.
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Finland was only one of several pawns that got traded during pre-war times. Other pawns were on both sides; Hitler took some Austria, Stalin took some Poland... Say what you want, but those times were tough and unfair - and that was only the beginning.
Yea, right - find a person who has no clue about anything, and ask her "a question of cosmic proportions", to cite Prof. Preobrazhensky... I bet she also has a fully formed opinion about usefulness of synchrotrons, and is ready to advise humanity on how useless tensors are (since she can't buy them at Wal-Mart.)
These people are flatlanders - always were, and always will be. People that can't lift their eyes off the ground and look into the sky. People who think inside the box and are proud of that. People who want to stop you from looking up.
This is a well known flaw of democracy. It breeds mediocrity, because every social innovation tends to be suppressed if it does not serve the most immediate needs of the society, since the society in its voting average is stupid.
One truly may wish to have a Space Tyrant as a ruler; maybe ruthless sometimes, but smart and with a vision - not that circus of politicians who don't even know what a vision is, and who bury the society deeper and deeper every year.
18 SU-30MKM were sold to Malaysia yesterday for $50M each. But the customer requested a lot of optional equipment.
It would require redesign of a lot of systems. Soyuz, for example, is powered by kerosene + liquid oxygen, but Proton (designed by a different team) runs on dimethylhydrazine. The former is harmless; the latter is deadly. Guess which one would you choose for a manned flight? Then we would go into redundant, voting systems, crew ejection tower, and many other things that do not even exist on cargo rockets.
Some people would even say that you need to design the whole rocket from scratch. Imagine, for example, that you need to upgrade your Ford Taurus to win Indy or F-1 race. Where would you start? And consider that failure of any single part can doom the mission; so you need to go through *all* parts and improve them or make sure the failure will be contained.
It's not like NASA haven't done it before. The trick is that the old rocket scientists of Von Braun vintage all retired long ago, some are dead already. Nobody at NASA (or at Boeing, etc.) has a clue about where to begin. Design from scratch, and then testing, and then inevitable failures will take many years (say ten) to reach good reliability numbers.
If you compare this situation to Chinese, Russian and European efforts - which are up to date, and quite finely debugged by now, and for which trained technicians and engineers exist, then you will see that NASA painted itself into a corner. It has only Shuttle, and nothing but Shuttle. Today it can't operate anything else, and it can't develop anything else either (proof of that is in many canceled X-projects which were meant as a replacement or a companion for the Shuttle.)
The Ariane 5, for example, was initially developed with the french shuttle Hermes in mind.
Show me this Hermes thing in orbit, and then I will take it seriously :-)
Actually, you can be sure that the Shuttle program will be scrapped in case of another catastrophe. There simply could be no "program" with only two vehicles remaining.
This is needed on every flight to the ISS, since the station wants lots of big thingies all the time (until it is built; then it will require lots of food and water instead.)
or when they somehow need the land-like-an-aeroplane ability.
I doubt this was ever needed. You want to land, and that's pretty much all. Only the most sensitive experiments could benefit from softer landing; I don't know if that was ever the case; and relatively hard capsule landings never stopped earlier spacefarers.
A Reusable Capsule, for about 5 people perhaps
NASA does not have a man-rated rocket for the capsule. Reliability of most cargo-rated rockets is about 95% - which is OK for satellites, but hardly sufficient for people. Soyuz rocket, for example, is man-rated; Proton is not.
Cheap launch rockets, when they need to launch cargo
Those are plentiful indeed.
Come on, abductions are not politically correct any more; don't give the Venus government the chance to blame Earth again :-)
Anyways, it is most definitely understood that anything involving space is a little bit more difficult than eating a pretzel. In this context (which is presumed to be blatantly obvious to /. readers) it _is_ trivial to equip an astronaut with soft gloves, compared to the much less trivial matter of launching him to the orbit in first place.
As matter of fact, China already announced its intentions - to fly to the Moon and beyond. What transpired at NASA? You guessed it. Nothing. As if China does not exist.
On the other hand, NASA does not have resources to do anything even if the challenge is valid and immediate. Imagine that China establishes its Moon base in June 2004. What NASA can possibly do? It is even cut off of space at the moment, and its best chance to launch anyone would be ... in a Chinese capsule :-)
That would be the case if an untrained spaceperson does that (like those on Columbia). However it is trivial now to establish means for safe inspection, and all astronauts can be trained to use them.
I don't work for NASA, but even I can think of soft rubber shoes and gloves that would allow you to touch the surface w/o damaging it. The spaceman would be weightless, so no static pressure would be applied; he only needs to keep his moment in check, which is easy as long as he is not in a hurry (and does not weigh a ton :-)
This was not a weird tax at all. Peter wanted to move ancient, ossified and bound with old customs Russian society toward much more modern and agile West. As part of that, he wanted to promote Western ideas - clothes, language, customs. Western men usually didn't wear beards then, and in their eyes a beard was probably a sign of a savage.
A horse :-)
To get good quality you need to design for it; a glider will have very thin and long wings, narrow fuselage, and will have very smooth surfaces everywhere. This is not something that commercial airplanes are designed for.
I took a professional signal analysis software package and analyzed the file in detail. There is indeed a signal, quite discernible, at about 570 Hz. However the package that I have is visual only, it is not suitable for audio playback, and I am too lazy to add audio output to it... not worth of $100 for sure. Also, the signal drifts considerably.
It is already known, as presented in the report, that there would be options to keep the crew alive. So if the imagery would indicate damage then the landing would be cancelled, with crew staying up there, in cold, mostly sedated, and waiting for some rescue.
In other words, if the photos show the damage, then the crew would be alive. Maybe not on the ground, but alive nevertheless. The report gives plenty of rope to hang those managers.
I was thinking about my own network here. Only officially blessed MTA (Postfix) is permitted to go outside. Every other computer on the LAN is allowed only to talk to each other, or to designated servers (Postfix and Squid). Needless to say, these servers are granted wide authority to deny service in best of the best BOFH traditions :-) I did that shortly after some virus showed up that used to email company's documents to random addresses, just to be sure (though Outlook is not permitted here, as well as IE).
The virus won't work because of some unresolved library dependency :-)
In a proper environment a virus can't delete your email on the IMAP server. It can try to connect, but it doesn't know the password; and the MUA isn't scriptable for this very reason.
The virus also can't email itself because the SMTP host on the network requires TLS and authorization to do that, and the virus is not in posession of the login credentials.
Basically, the virus only can erase all the files that you are authorized to erase. This includes the virus, and that would be the end of it.
There are plenty of single-chip MCUs, from Atmel AVRs on 8-bit scale to ARM on 32-bit, and everything else as well. Some of those chips are plenty powerful; for example, Netwinder was based on StrongARM, and Intel now moved onto even better architecture. I have PC/104 card in front of me, it runs Linux on XScale CPU as I type this.
So the question is, will it be mandated that every little chip must have this nefarious "secure core" or whatever they call it today?
It is plain impossible, price-wise, to embed this technology into every CPU manufactured. Most of those CPUs cost about $10, and they are self-sufficient; only add power. Even worse, there are soft implementations of many popular CPUs, MIPS/ARM being the prime example. These can be embedded into any blank FPGA just by pasting the code... and the FPGA definitely won't have the security required for the TCPA.
So where does it leave us? Will only PC platforms be affected by the law? Or maybe all Linksys routers (with Linux inside) will have to be reworked? And all Tivos? And all PDAs? This is getting ridiculous fast.
I work with embedded systems most of the time, and I tell you, this law simply can't go anywhere. We are immersed into a sea of computers, most of which are faster and more powerful than your average desktop. There are DSPs that, despite being poor in some operations, will encode your DivX movie faster than the best Pentium. Your cell phone has a few CPUs in it, as well as your TV and your car. Where this law is going to stop?
I also guess that if s/w vendors can raise the prices, they will. Cost of traditional s/w will shoot through the roof, now that you *must* pay for every copy. This will create a unique combination - a TCPA-free hardware and free software, and there will be a market hungry for both of the above simply because they can't afford to be robbed by ISVs, they just don't have the money. People who hold onto their olden Win95 boxes will have to either give up computing, or to switch to TCPA-free hardware and free software. The industry digs its own grave, as it seems.
His problem has nothing to do with static vs. dynamic IP addresses. He has LWL server to overcome dynamic addressing, and he had it there for 8 years already.
However this is not the primary mode of operation, only a backup and safety measure in case peers go offline. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to start the plant (and it would be awfully dark and cold there to begin with.)
But this experiment looks weird. I can't figure out what exactly this guy is trying to measure - looks like he is trying some sort of deception (Chewbacca Defense comes to mind). Nobody argues that the current will flow through his solution, so what's the point? His setup is by design unable to return any power into the power grid; so what he is trying to show?
Quick! Make a mod for Quake or Unreal Tournament! The whole opposing team would be bots skinned as SCO officers and board members (as they already are, in fact.) This mod would work only in god mode, and all human players would have all weapons and all ammo. Results of each round would be emailed to SCO, and captures of best games broadcast on Internet.
There is another issue. It is difficult to convince the judge and jury that a non-tech person is capable of figuring out that Allegro.mp3 in fact contains illegal pr0n. All the defense needs to do is to give the judge a random file (which may even play for a few seconds, if they are sneaky) and ask him to find out what it is. The judge will fail this test, as would anyone without good computer knowledge *and* expectation of something of the sort.
With regard to the populace being fooled all the time, that's just sad. Voters with IQ below 100 should have their voting rights revoked; their opinions are usually wrong anyway. A few more years of this "democracy" will surely push me right into Monarchists camp. What we have right now is dictatorship of fools, tyranny of unwashed masses.
And what that point would be? An iPod or WinAmp or XMMS is unlikely to display photos or movies. Short of file(1), most casual users would never even find out what the file really contains. They will just delete it as corrupted...
That proves the allegation. Nobody I know uses FrameMaker; nobody even knows what it does. Everybody uses MS Office, and few people use Illustrator and Photoshop.
Commercial usage would occur if you, for example, play the song in your bar, or broadcast it through your own radio station. None of that applies here.