So where is the variety of Apps in.Net running on all sorts of different OSes?
Most computer users are pragmatists. When they need a function they buy a program that does what they want, and a computer that runs that program. It just happens that Windows runs about 100% of all programs that anyone would be interested in[1], so the choice of the OS is quite obvious here.
Of course MS is not going to port their libraries to other OSes. Not only it is not good for Windows, it is also not good for any ISV who would have such an idea. The market for.NET applications on Linux (or even Mac) is not very large, and it's hard to make a business case for that.
But libraries, being defined by their interfaces, can be rewritten from scratch - and that's what Mono is doing, as I understand, beyond the C# itself. It's a lot of effort - especially when you dive into WPF which is a very complex programming framework.
Java (for all it's many pitfalls) ran on multiple platforms right out of the box.
Java was also unusable on all of them..NET is really implemented only on Windows, but it works great. Java appears to be in a better shape now, but still I can't readily recall a major, large program that is written in Java. All Java applications that I ever came across come with their own JRE, talk about compatibility... However it's easy to find examples in.NET world - like Paint.Net - and they run on whatever is installed on your box. Java in interests of portability supports only the lowest common denominator;.NET supports the latest and greatest. Guess which one is more appealing to a new developer?
By now we should know two facts about MS:
MS never releases a quality product in rev. 1
MS always releases a quality product in rev. 3
Today main MS cash cows - Windows, Office,.NET, Visial Studio etc. - are in good shape. It would be unwise to summarily ignore thousands of man-years that went into their development.
[1] Of course that shouldn't be taken literally. I sorely need Squid 3.1 for my IPv4 to IPv6 proxy at home. IPv6 is supported only in the latest rev. 3.1. But Squid on Windows is dead as a doornail, with major pieces missing. I guess I need to splurge on another Ubuntu box, since nothing that I have can take another VM...
Given that, it's easy to see why real names are preferred on a social network; it makes it easier for you to connect with people you know, and you're expected to only really share stuff with people who already know your name anyway.
I fail to see that. For example, I want to contact a guy called Robert Miller. I actually know him in person. However there are thousands of them on the Internet, and probably a hundred in the heavily populated area where we both live. His name is worthless to me as a location tool. If you want to locate a specific person in the USA you'd better use his SSN, and even that is not a guarantee of anything. If you want to locate a specific person in the world... you can't do that.
The only reliable way for me to contact this guy on Internet is to call him (or meet him) and ask "what is your unique ID on the Internet / social network / blog?" - and then he says "Oh, yes, it's bmiller_0x8832E017"... Well, if I go through this exchange I don't need to know his real name as it is registered in the social network - I already know it.
Only the provider of the social network benefits from knowing the real name (and address, etc.) of a participant. Other members of the social network fall into two large groups:
Members who already know who bmiller_0x8832E017 is. They don't need a reminder.
Members who don't know Robert Miller in person. Perhaps he lives in a different country. Then they don't care what his real name is.
There is no third group among the members of the social network that would need to know that an account bmiller_0x8832E017 is really associated with Robert A. Miller, Ph.D., Esq., M.D. living at 123 Main St., Paradise, AZ, USA. What would be the value of this information, especially when obtained in out of band way (not by asking?) Stalking is the most likely answer, or physical threats after some heated cyberspace discussion. Do I want any of that? NFW.
Aside from that reasoning, we already have examples of social networks (Twitter) where the number of followers of certain authors is huge. That may be temporary if the author is at the center of some event, or permanent if the author is a public figure. It wouldn't be reasonable to expect that the author "personally knows" all the followers. Do you think Obama personally knows 9.4 million people who follow him? If so, he has an excellent memory (and doesn't need a teleprompter:-)
if you don't want to use your real name then i usually don't want to have anything to do with you on a social network
Of course. That's why you are using your full real name on Slashdot (which is a sort of a social network.) I wouldn't want to reply to you because of merits of your opinion - no, I'd reply only because I personally know you.
There is a presumption that an issued patent is valid, but that presumption can be rebutted.
A person using Ask Slashdot as his lawyer is not likely to challenge issued, established patents. We shall see if even likes of Samsung are strong enough to defeat Apple's patents.
You can't write a program more complicated than Hello, World! without violating someone's patent, somehow. Even if you don't violate anything, it's still possible to be accused of such a violation - and then it will be you against the $megacorporation, the battle until the first red ink in your legal budget.
With LD50 of 115 mg/kg an average slashdotter needs to eat a teacup full of DDT to have 50% chance of dropping dead. A common rat poison, for comparison, has LD50 between 2 and 8 mg/kg.
So I got to read the article, and the author lists a bunch of good, desirable things there. But none of them will happen until the businesses that provide those cloud services are forced to listen to wishes of the clients.
However majority of clients are not very wise in terms of network security (or anything else, as matter of fact.) So those companies will always have plentiful harvest of suckers, and that's who they will focus on. If you are a green-skinned geek in glasses you are not their audience, and your whimpering that "their service is not perfect" will be summarily ignored.
Geeks can't use the cloud, basically. Anyone who does that surrenders a bit of his|her|its privacy, and on top of that has to obey the arbitrary rules that are imposed by those companies. The only solution is not to play.
I did just that last night. I needed to change the email on Yahoo to something else. I type the name in, and I get in return "#604,E4 This email address is blocked by owner." No help anywhere; other people report this error too, with no resolution. I was able to resolve that. Want to know how? I deleted the whole Yahoo profile. Google profile will be next.
the source they distributed was not "the preferred form of the work for making modifications"
Doesn't it depend on what was contributed as a GPL item? Is there a rule that no object can be licensed as GPL unless it can be GPL-traced back to its origins?
I understand why the license asks for this, but it is not always practical. For example, I can run lots of proprietary simulations, optimize something, and then end up with a single #define. Do I need to publish all my life's work to explain where that #define comes from? That is unreasonable.
Every author is allowed to decide what licenses he uses for what parts of their work. It is typical to use different licenses for different pieces. For example, you can license the binary of a certain program for $a but if you want to license the source then it's $b.
It is entirely up to the author(s) to decide what is offered to the public as GPL. There is no way to stop me from obfuscating some JavaScript and then licensing the result as GPL (I need noone's permission.) The result may be not easy to use, but that's what I published, and that's it. If you don't like it, I will refund you the purchase price:-) but you must stop using it. Eventually the market will sort it all out - you are not required to use a GPL software that you don't want to use for some reason.
With only 140 characters to work with I am finding 65.9% impressive.
That may only look impressive. You need to consider the obvious giveaways (they list them.) So you have a set of words that give you 100% certainty (as far as the words are true.) What must be the percentage of messages with such giveaways to achieve 66%?
If the percentage is zero you have 50% (nothing but blind guesses.) If the percentage is 100% you have 100%. The linear approximation is:
g=50+50*p
Solving for g=66 we get p=0.32. This means that if 1/3 of all messages contains obvious giveaways then the claimed 66% will be achieved.
A launch acceleration of 32G for 22 seconds would give orbital velocity
Why would you want to launch dead bodies into orbit? 32G can be survivable by trained pilots for 50 milliseconds when the alternative is a certain death. Pilots don't need to stay awake during the ejection, and they go to a hospital once they land.
I believe 10G is the maximum a human can take for more than a second while remaining awake. Experiments with higher accelerations (on a rocket sled) resulted in serious traumas in volunteers (loss of eyesight comes first.) 32G over 22 seconds will kill - there is no hospital in orbit, and astronauts need to be 100% functional immediately after the acceleration ends.
On the other hand, you can use a railgun to launch inanimate objects to the LEO. Hardware can certainly be built to take 30G and remain operational.
How is anything I posted "academically dishonest"?
I don't know what the definition of academic dishonesty might be, and I don't want to tag you with that, but here is an example that paints the situation in a different light while reporting the same set of facts:
Democrats : Largely support a women's right to legally kill an unwanted baby, particularly early in pregnancy
Republicans: [Forbid] women to kill children they don't want to have. Once a human life is conceived, it is the woman's moral responsibility to let it be born.
If a simple rewording of a true statement keeps it true and at the same time turns the tables in a discussion then probably both statements are not neutral enough to be judged.
(I personally have no child in this fight and don't particularly care one way or another. I used this as a simple example.)
If a country has a magnetic cannon on the moon they do not even need nuclear warheads to cause mass destruction without the use of radiation.
You seem to presume that the target country has no access to nuclear weapons. But a spaceflight-capable country doesn't need nukes or Moon-based weapons to attack a nuke-free country (see Libya.) However if the target country does have nukes they will be used against the aggressor country. Then the aggressor country is contaminated and unlivable, but the attacked country is clean and can rebuild. This doesn't look like a smart military strategy.
As far as I know, MathCAD can do all this already. It's not an open source format, I guess, but the trick is not as much in encoding the formulas but in solving them in real time.
What prosecutors actually prosecute is a policy decision -- which often means, a political decision.
Or, if you believe the old man Occam, it often is a matter of convenience. Prosecutors need convictions. It's hard to get a conviction in case when one gangbanger assaulted another gangbanger and 100 witnesses "haven't seen a thing." But it's trivial to get conviction on mere technical grounds, and a "hacker case" may have more public visibility than a common assault. If the prosecutor has the goods on this guy, it costs the DA nothing to go ahead and get an easy conviction (or an even easier plea deal.)
A and C aren't anything at all alike in form and function. The device in case A is a transporter and the device in C is a duplicator where you throw away the duplicate.
The case A is not well defined, so I couldn't figure out how it works:
Scenario A) The you who steps in the machine "dies" and a "you" that is identical down to the last atom and thought steps out the other side. Result: The "you" which went in the transporter, in every internally and externally measurable and determinable way, steps out of the transporter
But even if we for the moment assume that it works as you say it works, it can be easily shown that your case A is identical to case C. In essence you are killed and converted into an unthinking set of bits in the machine. Your perception of reality stops. What you have in the transporter's buffer is a copy of you. You are dead by then. What happens to that copy later - whether it is restored in another place, or restored here, or cleared from the buffer - is of no consequence to you, since you no longer exist as a sentient being. But if you were to live a bit longer (as shown in Scenario C) you will not care too much about well-being of your copy if that means your own death.
The problem here is that the software process that we call conscience is currently tied to the CPU that it runs on. If you want you can migrate the process to another CPU - and we know how to do that on proper computers. But most attempts at transporter technology stop at making a snapshot of the process, then pulling the card and sending an elephant to stomp on it, then at some other time and place restoring the bits onto another CPU card, where the process continues as it were. From the point of view of the first CPU card, it was a "copy and destroy the original" method.
One good example of properly implemented transfer of conscience is shown in "Old Man's War". There the protagonist's mind is transferred into a cyborg body. The patient remains aware during the transfer; he simply starts seeing with another pair of eyes, hearing with another pair of ears, is able to control both bodies - until the control of the old body gets weaker and finally is gone completely. Then the mind knows that it left the old body and moved into the new one, and it is psychologically comfortable.
The point is that you only get one chance, so you need to treasure it.
If you want to treasure something, go and buy yourself a tamagotchi:-)
When people play games they take calculated risks. Sometimes they even take unreasonable risks just to see what's down there (but you can't get back... too bad, reload.)
In a game when you see a monster ahead you can't dial 911, step back and wait until the police dispatches the beast. You are the police, and you have to beat the odds - and odds are not always in your favor. For example, in Resistance you have a minigun, but there are so many Leapers coming at you that you will be empty in no time if you don't plan your strategy carefully. But how in the hell would you know how many Leapers are there before you step into it? You can't send a scout, you can't try a way around... you must take risks, get beaten, and try again.
If a game doesn't allow you to take any risks it is a bland game.
I haven't realized that your proposal is that radical. Sure, you can do that. However lack of communication from hijackers also prevents the crew from telling the pilot that there is a sick passenger on board, for example, or that the left engine is on fire, or that a certain passenger from Nigeria has a bomb in his pants, or that the fish is suspect, or whatever else is important to communicate.
The numbers are quite clear on that. There are emergency landings all the time. I remember reading about three airplanes making emergency landings in one airport last week - one unruly Overlord from Saudi Arabia, one sick passenger, and I don't recall what else.
You don't want to fly across the ocean oblivious to what's happening in the cabin - the captain is responsible for the lives of all passengers and must know all the relevant information. If there is a hijacking, he must know what hijackers are trying to tell him - it might be important. If you trust the captain to fly the airplane, it makes sense to also trust him to make the optimal decision about a hijacking; it's not like he is all alone up there in the cockpit, with no radio and in personal danger.
Removal of doors and intercoms has only a psychological advantage, and only in case of a hijacking. However the most likely scenario today - tried several times already - is the explosion on board. Doors and intercoms don't help in this regard. There were zero hijackings since 9/11 and none are expected; not only Air Marshals are often on board, the passengers will not take it lightly anymore.
That way, taking hostages has no impact since you have no way to let the pilot know it even happened
There would be plenty of impact when the airplane lands, the gate crew opens the door and a river of blood starts flowing into the tunnel. But lacking the intercom the pilot couldn't make a dive to the nearest airport, so the ten assailants with piano strings had all the time they needed to kill everyone.
It can be always allowed as long as the old text remains - perhaps crossed out, but readable. This way responses will remain valid, but the rest of the discussion can focus on what the poster really wanted to say, not what he happened to say.
Besides, majority of edits would be typo fixes, like that SMP/SMTP/SNMP/whatever.
You can't depend on the fact that no response has been posted yet - perhaps there are 100 people typing their replies and taking their time to do so. They are replying to the original comment.
But in general/. code is really old. All the latest JavaScript hacks are so useless that I had them all disabled. I'm reading/. as plain text, with no images in sight. Why not, if/. doesn't support anything but 7-bit ASCII anyway?
Thus, both scenarios are equivalent in all meaningful ways and the question is moot.
Let's modify your scenario A:
(C) You step into the machine, get scanned and every atom of your body, every minute electrical charge, and whatever else constitutes "you" is transported somewhere and rebuilt there. The new "you" walks out of the chamber and goes to wherever he needs.
The old "you", however, is still standing in the scanner booth. After the signal comes from the destination you will be led into the termination chamber where your unwanted body will be thrown into a large shredder and the ground meat will be later used as fertilizer.
Do you like this scenario? But then what's the difference between (A) and (C)? The only difference is the period of time between scanning and destruction of the body. But if you are going to die in 1 minute after scanning and it is bad, how would it be OK to die one millisecond after scanning? One microsecond? We have already established that "you" will die; making it almost imperceptible is not going to change this fundamental issue.
Note that ST transporters are built on scenario (B) where your consciousness is retained throughout the entire transport, with even an ability to see things while being transported (which was a plot of one episode.) Also if the discorporated matrix is lost the person dies for real.
The key here is the continuity of consciousness. No forking allowed. Once you fork one branch doesn't get any happier from a promise that the other branch will live happily ever after - every branch thinks for itself.
You step in the transporter, you step out. QED.
If this were to be true, it would be perfectly moral to replicate one person into three. One will walk out of the "official" transporter booth, whereas two other copies will be sent into other booths and covertly sold into slavery to most deprived tyrants, to be used as sex toys and torture objects. But hey, one person walked in and one person walked out - as far as I can see - this must be perfectly OK, isn't it?
...then that games should be like reality... Which is it?!
It's both, of course. You want to play a game that frees you from the boring reality. For example, you can be a wizard or a knight in various RPGs; you can be a mercenary or a cyborg or some other Savior of Humankind in many FPSes. On the other hand, you don't want to stray too far from the familiar world. For example, you can't play a game where you are an elementary particle, obeying laws of quantum mechanics of some parallel Universe. The player would not ever figure out what cause has what effect. You need a situation that you can have feelings for. A good game lets you play your dream.
It doesn't void the effort - the end state of the world is passed on.
The effort *is* voided. The state of the world is indeed passed on, but your knowledge, your skills, everything that you developed during the game is completely lost because you can't play the game again. The game may live on, but why would you care? How far Linux would go if each of us is only allowed to boot it only once in lifetime?
Imagine an FPS where you start the game first time, walk into an ambush, take a single bullet, and the game is over, with no chance of replay. WTF? Many FPSes require many replays of certain boss battles until you figure out what the winning strategy is (or simply get lucky.) Learning is the key to everything; we learn IRL and we learn in games. Playing this "game" wastes all the learning that you have done in there.
People don't like games where they have only one life. They already are playing such a game, for free - why they need to learn some other universe if one mistake just voids all their effort?
One person at a time is stupid. That's not how anyhing in this Universe is happening. We live in the world where everything happens in parallel, where events can be triggered by other players.
Most gamers don't want to play a single sentient being in the whole universe. This game by definition doesn't permit other human players. Too bad.
The religious stuff is fluff that is TL;DR. I only commented on obvious gaming issues. I will gladly leave the religion to priests.
There aren't many people who want to blow something up without getting to make a statement or let anyone know WHY they blew it up.
They can always leave a videotape with that statement, and after the job is done the videotape can be sent to various news companies or simply published on the Web. In theory it could be done automatically, but in practice there are lots of people willing to do this little service to jihadists.
With regard to the tasers, I don't know what is the significance of the one that was found. I believe your proposal of hardening the planes against hijacking was implemented within weeks from 9/11, and today the cockpit door remains locked during flight. Terrorists may take hostages, though, and kill them one by one - no weapons are required for that. But then the pilot will simply initiate an emergency descent, the side effect of which is zero gravity. Few people are trained for hand to hand combat in zero G. A depressurization of the passenger cabin without deploying oxygen masks is also an option that is generally safe.
As the parent post said, "The problem is the introduction of dangerous components into an airplane" - not hijacking. Hijacking died on 9/11.
If you recall, a bunch of recent attempts were about blowing things up, not about taking control over the airplane. You can't make an airplane resistant to a sufficiently large bomb - we still can't do that to ground-based tanks. The size of the bomb is just a matter of concealing enough explosives. As parent post indicates, TSA is not effective in doing that.
The TSA might strip-search every child in the line, but they don't check tens of thousands of tons of materials that daily arrive through the loading docks and cargo gates of airports. Among that stuff is: fuel, spare parts and materials, construction materials, commercial goods, food to be sold by for vendors and on airplanes, machinery of every kind, grass control chemicals, and millions of other items you might think are required to run an airport. There wouldn't be enough people in the whole TSA to inspect all the service traffic into one airport.
But don't forget commercial cargo either. Today Fedex probably is wary of printer cartridges; however in reality there is no way of knowing what chemicals are sealed inside what package. If you ship a refrigerator by air freight do they do a gas chromatography test on the liquid that fills the system? There is no way to do such extensive testing; and as soon as the dangerous materials are delivered into the airport they can be then stored, accumulated, and eventually loaded onto the airplane, one way or another. An airport is a small city, and it is largely populated by low paid workers that come and go on daily basis. You can't be sure who you are hiring, short of a background investigation and a polygraph.
Why would Apple want to share its proprietary designs with a *competing* company already involved (as either the thief or victim) in several industrial espionage incidents when it can just use a "neutral" (not to mention the largest) contract fab like TSMC?
This naively assumes that nobody at the "largest" contract fab is willing to sell a couple of designs to whoever is interested in them. But they are ready to spend millions on chasing that dream.
Apple should understand that once they release something to another company that "something" is instantly copied and sold to the highest bidder. Their only hope would be to keep the high level design in Cupertino and send only the lowest level stuff to be manufactured. But if they want to take this road they can do it already - and as some people commented earlier, they do just that.
As it seems, though, Apple developed a case of corporate paranoia. There were signs of this disease before, but now Apple openly proclaims that "everyone is stealing from us" and such things. They need a head doctor.
Slashdot Mirror
So where is the variety of Apps in .Net running on all sorts of different OSes?
Most computer users are pragmatists. When they need a function they buy a program that does what they want, and a computer that runs that program. It just happens that Windows runs about 100% of all programs that anyone would be interested in[1], so the choice of the OS is quite obvious here.
Of course MS is not going to port their libraries to other OSes. Not only it is not good for Windows, it is also not good for any ISV who would have such an idea. The market for .NET applications on Linux (or even Mac) is not very large, and it's hard to make a business case for that.
But libraries, being defined by their interfaces, can be rewritten from scratch - and that's what Mono is doing, as I understand, beyond the C# itself. It's a lot of effort - especially when you dive into WPF which is a very complex programming framework.
Java (for all it's many pitfalls) ran on multiple platforms right out of the box.
Java was also unusable on all of them. .NET is really implemented only on Windows, but it works great. Java appears to be in a better shape now, but still I can't readily recall a major, large program that is written in Java. All Java applications that I ever came across come with their own JRE, talk about compatibility... However it's easy to find examples in .NET world - like Paint.Net - and they run on whatever is installed on your box. Java in interests of portability supports only the lowest common denominator; .NET supports the latest and greatest. Guess which one is more appealing to a new developer?
By now we should know two facts about MS:
Today main MS cash cows - Windows, Office, .NET, Visial Studio etc. - are in good shape. It would be unwise to summarily ignore thousands of man-years that went into their development.
[1] Of course that shouldn't be taken literally. I sorely need Squid 3.1 for my IPv4 to IPv6 proxy at home. IPv6 is supported only in the latest rev. 3.1. But Squid on Windows is dead as a doornail, with major pieces missing. I guess I need to splurge on another Ubuntu box, since nothing that I have can take another VM...
What's a Bothnian?
A variant of Boskonians perhaps?
Given that, it's easy to see why real names are preferred on a social network; it makes it easier for you to connect with people you know, and you're expected to only really share stuff with people who already know your name anyway.
I fail to see that. For example, I want to contact a guy called Robert Miller. I actually know him in person. However there are thousands of them on the Internet, and probably a hundred in the heavily populated area where we both live. His name is worthless to me as a location tool. If you want to locate a specific person in the USA you'd better use his SSN, and even that is not a guarantee of anything. If you want to locate a specific person in the world ... you can't do that.
The only reliable way for me to contact this guy on Internet is to call him (or meet him) and ask "what is your unique ID on the Internet / social network / blog?" - and then he says "Oh, yes, it's bmiller_0x8832E017" ... Well, if I go through this exchange I don't need to know his real name as it is registered in the social network - I already know it.
Only the provider of the social network benefits from knowing the real name (and address, etc.) of a participant. Other members of the social network fall into two large groups:
There is no third group among the members of the social network that would need to know that an account bmiller_0x8832E017 is really associated with Robert A. Miller, Ph.D., Esq., M.D. living at 123 Main St., Paradise, AZ, USA. What would be the value of this information, especially when obtained in out of band way (not by asking?) Stalking is the most likely answer, or physical threats after some heated cyberspace discussion. Do I want any of that? NFW.
Aside from that reasoning, we already have examples of social networks (Twitter) where the number of followers of certain authors is huge. That may be temporary if the author is at the center of some event, or permanent if the author is a public figure. It wouldn't be reasonable to expect that the author "personally knows" all the followers. Do you think Obama personally knows 9.4 million people who follow him? If so, he has an excellent memory (and doesn't need a teleprompter :-)
if you don't want to use your real name then i usually don't want to have anything to do with you on a social network
Of course. That's why you are using your full real name on Slashdot (which is a sort of a social network.) I wouldn't want to reply to you because of merits of your opinion - no, I'd reply only because I personally know you.
There is a presumption that an issued patent is valid, but that presumption can be rebutted.
A person using Ask Slashdot as his lawyer is not likely to challenge issued, established patents. We shall see if even likes of Samsung are strong enough to defeat Apple's patents.
You can't write a program more complicated than Hello, World! without violating someone's patent, somehow. Even if you don't violate anything, it's still possible to be accused of such a violation - and then it will be you against the $megacorporation, the battle until the first red ink in your legal budget.
With LD50 of 115 mg/kg an average slashdotter needs to eat a teacup full of DDT to have 50% chance of dropping dead. A common rat poison, for comparison, has LD50 between 2 and 8 mg/kg.
So I got to read the article, and the author lists a bunch of good, desirable things there. But none of them will happen until the businesses that provide those cloud services are forced to listen to wishes of the clients.
However majority of clients are not very wise in terms of network security (or anything else, as matter of fact.) So those companies will always have plentiful harvest of suckers, and that's who they will focus on. If you are a green-skinned geek in glasses you are not their audience, and your whimpering that "their service is not perfect" will be summarily ignored.
Geeks can't use the cloud, basically. Anyone who does that surrenders a bit of his|her|its privacy, and on top of that has to obey the arbitrary rules that are imposed by those companies. The only solution is not to play.
I did just that last night. I needed to change the email on Yahoo to something else. I type the name in, and I get in return "#604,E4 This email address is blocked by owner." No help anywhere; other people report this error too, with no resolution. I was able to resolve that. Want to know how? I deleted the whole Yahoo profile. Google profile will be next.
the source they distributed was not "the preferred form of the work for making modifications"
Doesn't it depend on what was contributed as a GPL item? Is there a rule that no object can be licensed as GPL unless it can be GPL-traced back to its origins?
I understand why the license asks for this, but it is not always practical. For example, I can run lots of proprietary simulations, optimize something, and then end up with a single #define. Do I need to publish all my life's work to explain where that #define comes from? That is unreasonable.
Every author is allowed to decide what licenses he uses for what parts of their work. It is typical to use different licenses for different pieces. For example, you can license the binary of a certain program for $a but if you want to license the source then it's $b.
It is entirely up to the author(s) to decide what is offered to the public as GPL. There is no way to stop me from obfuscating some JavaScript and then licensing the result as GPL (I need noone's permission.) The result may be not easy to use, but that's what I published, and that's it. If you don't like it, I will refund you the purchase price :-) but you must stop using it. Eventually the market will sort it all out - you are not required to use a GPL software that you don't want to use for some reason.
With only 140 characters to work with I am finding 65.9% impressive.
That may only look impressive. You need to consider the obvious giveaways (they list them.) So you have a set of words that give you 100% certainty (as far as the words are true.) What must be the percentage of messages with such giveaways to achieve 66%?
If the percentage is zero you have 50% (nothing but blind guesses.) If the percentage is 100% you have 100%. The linear approximation is:
g=50+50*p
Solving for g=66 we get p=0.32. This means that if 1/3 of all messages contains obvious giveaways then the claimed 66% will be achieved.
A launch acceleration of 32G for 22 seconds would give orbital velocity
Why would you want to launch dead bodies into orbit? 32G can be survivable by trained pilots for 50 milliseconds when the alternative is a certain death. Pilots don't need to stay awake during the ejection, and they go to a hospital once they land.
I believe 10G is the maximum a human can take for more than a second while remaining awake. Experiments with higher accelerations (on a rocket sled) resulted in serious traumas in volunteers (loss of eyesight comes first.) 32G over 22 seconds will kill - there is no hospital in orbit, and astronauts need to be 100% functional immediately after the acceleration ends.
On the other hand, you can use a railgun to launch inanimate objects to the LEO. Hardware can certainly be built to take 30G and remain operational.
How is anything I posted "academically dishonest"?
I don't know what the definition of academic dishonesty might be, and I don't want to tag you with that, but here is an example that paints the situation in a different light while reporting the same set of facts:
Democrats : Largely support a women's right to legally kill an unwanted baby, particularly early in pregnancy
Republicans: [Forbid] women to kill children they don't want to have. Once a human life is conceived, it is the woman's moral responsibility to let it be born.
If a simple rewording of a true statement keeps it true and at the same time turns the tables in a discussion then probably both statements are not neutral enough to be judged.
(I personally have no child in this fight and don't particularly care one way or another. I used this as a simple example.)
If a country has a magnetic cannon on the moon they do not even need nuclear warheads to cause mass destruction without the use of radiation.
You seem to presume that the target country has no access to nuclear weapons. But a spaceflight-capable country doesn't need nukes or Moon-based weapons to attack a nuke-free country (see Libya.) However if the target country does have nukes they will be used against the aggressor country. Then the aggressor country is contaminated and unlivable, but the attacked country is clean and can rebuild. This doesn't look like a smart military strategy.
As far as I know, MathCAD can do all this already. It's not an open source format, I guess, but the trick is not as much in encoding the formulas but in solving them in real time.
What prosecutors actually prosecute is a policy decision -- which often means, a political decision.
Or, if you believe the old man Occam, it often is a matter of convenience. Prosecutors need convictions. It's hard to get a conviction in case when one gangbanger assaulted another gangbanger and 100 witnesses "haven't seen a thing." But it's trivial to get conviction on mere technical grounds, and a "hacker case" may have more public visibility than a common assault. If the prosecutor has the goods on this guy, it costs the DA nothing to go ahead and get an easy conviction (or an even easier plea deal.)
A and C aren't anything at all alike in form and function. The device in case A is a transporter and the device in C is a duplicator where you throw away the duplicate.
The case A is not well defined, so I couldn't figure out how it works:
Scenario A) The you who steps in the machine "dies" and a "you" that is identical down to the last atom and thought steps out the other side. Result: The "you" which went in the transporter, in every internally and externally measurable and determinable way, steps out of the transporter
But even if we for the moment assume that it works as you say it works, it can be easily shown that your case A is identical to case C. In essence you are killed and converted into an unthinking set of bits in the machine. Your perception of reality stops. What you have in the transporter's buffer is a copy of you. You are dead by then. What happens to that copy later - whether it is restored in another place, or restored here, or cleared from the buffer - is of no consequence to you, since you no longer exist as a sentient being. But if you were to live a bit longer (as shown in Scenario C) you will not care too much about well-being of your copy if that means your own death.
The problem here is that the software process that we call conscience is currently tied to the CPU that it runs on. If you want you can migrate the process to another CPU - and we know how to do that on proper computers. But most attempts at transporter technology stop at making a snapshot of the process, then pulling the card and sending an elephant to stomp on it, then at some other time and place restoring the bits onto another CPU card, where the process continues as it were. From the point of view of the first CPU card, it was a "copy and destroy the original" method.
One good example of properly implemented transfer of conscience is shown in "Old Man's War". There the protagonist's mind is transferred into a cyborg body. The patient remains aware during the transfer; he simply starts seeing with another pair of eyes, hearing with another pair of ears, is able to control both bodies - until the control of the old body gets weaker and finally is gone completely. Then the mind knows that it left the old body and moved into the new one, and it is psychologically comfortable.
The point is that you only get one chance, so you need to treasure it.
If you want to treasure something, go and buy yourself a tamagotchi :-)
When people play games they take calculated risks. Sometimes they even take unreasonable risks just to see what's down there (but you can't get back... too bad, reload.)
In a game when you see a monster ahead you can't dial 911, step back and wait until the police dispatches the beast. You are the police, and you have to beat the odds - and odds are not always in your favor. For example, in Resistance you have a minigun, but there are so many Leapers coming at you that you will be empty in no time if you don't plan your strategy carefully. But how in the hell would you know how many Leapers are there before you step into it? You can't send a scout, you can't try a way around... you must take risks, get beaten, and try again.
If a game doesn't allow you to take any risks it is a bland game.
I haven't realized that your proposal is that radical. Sure, you can do that. However lack of communication from hijackers also prevents the crew from telling the pilot that there is a sick passenger on board, for example, or that the left engine is on fire, or that a certain passenger from Nigeria has a bomb in his pants, or that the fish is suspect, or whatever else is important to communicate.
The numbers are quite clear on that. There are emergency landings all the time. I remember reading about three airplanes making emergency landings in one airport last week - one unruly Overlord from Saudi Arabia, one sick passenger, and I don't recall what else.
You don't want to fly across the ocean oblivious to what's happening in the cabin - the captain is responsible for the lives of all passengers and must know all the relevant information. If there is a hijacking, he must know what hijackers are trying to tell him - it might be important. If you trust the captain to fly the airplane, it makes sense to also trust him to make the optimal decision about a hijacking; it's not like he is all alone up there in the cockpit, with no radio and in personal danger.
Removal of doors and intercoms has only a psychological advantage, and only in case of a hijacking. However the most likely scenario today - tried several times already - is the explosion on board. Doors and intercoms don't help in this regard. There were zero hijackings since 9/11 and none are expected; not only Air Marshals are often on board, the passengers will not take it lightly anymore.
That way, taking hostages has no impact since you have no way to let the pilot know it even happened
There would be plenty of impact when the airplane lands, the gate crew opens the door and a river of blood starts flowing into the tunnel. But lacking the intercom the pilot couldn't make a dive to the nearest airport, so the ten assailants with piano strings had all the time they needed to kill everyone.
It can be always allowed as long as the old text remains - perhaps crossed out, but readable. This way responses will remain valid, but the rest of the discussion can focus on what the poster really wanted to say, not what he happened to say.
Besides, majority of edits would be typo fixes, like that SMP/SMTP/SNMP/whatever.
You can't depend on the fact that no response has been posted yet - perhaps there are 100 people typing their replies and taking their time to do so. They are replying to the original comment.
But in general /. code is really old. All the latest JavaScript hacks are so useless that I had them all disabled. I'm reading /. as plain text, with no images in sight. Why not, if /. doesn't support anything but 7-bit ASCII anyway?
Thus, both scenarios are equivalent in all meaningful ways and the question is moot.
Let's modify your scenario A:
(C) You step into the machine, get scanned and every atom of your body, every minute electrical charge, and whatever else constitutes "you" is transported somewhere and rebuilt there. The new "you" walks out of the chamber and goes to wherever he needs.
The old "you", however, is still standing in the scanner booth. After the signal comes from the destination you will be led into the termination chamber where your unwanted body will be thrown into a large shredder and the ground meat will be later used as fertilizer.
Do you like this scenario? But then what's the difference between (A) and (C)? The only difference is the period of time between scanning and destruction of the body. But if you are going to die in 1 minute after scanning and it is bad, how would it be OK to die one millisecond after scanning? One microsecond? We have already established that "you" will die; making it almost imperceptible is not going to change this fundamental issue.
Note that ST transporters are built on scenario (B) where your consciousness is retained throughout the entire transport, with even an ability to see things while being transported (which was a plot of one episode.) Also if the discorporated matrix is lost the person dies for real.
The key here is the continuity of consciousness. No forking allowed. Once you fork one branch doesn't get any happier from a promise that the other branch will live happily ever after - every branch thinks for itself.
You step in the transporter, you step out. QED.
If this were to be true, it would be perfectly moral to replicate one person into three. One will walk out of the "official" transporter booth, whereas two other copies will be sent into other booths and covertly sold into slavery to most deprived tyrants, to be used as sex toys and torture objects. But hey, one person walked in and one person walked out - as far as I can see - this must be perfectly OK, isn't it?
There's a game like that, it's called "War."
Despite what most Americans believe, war is not a game.
It's both, of course. You want to play a game that frees you from the boring reality. For example, you can be a wizard or a knight in various RPGs; you can be a mercenary or a cyborg or some other Savior of Humankind in many FPSes. On the other hand, you don't want to stray too far from the familiar world. For example, you can't play a game where you are an elementary particle, obeying laws of quantum mechanics of some parallel Universe. The player would not ever figure out what cause has what effect. You need a situation that you can have feelings for. A good game lets you play your dream.
It doesn't void the effort - the end state of the world is passed on.
The effort *is* voided. The state of the world is indeed passed on, but your knowledge, your skills, everything that you developed during the game is completely lost because you can't play the game again. The game may live on, but why would you care? How far Linux would go if each of us is only allowed to boot it only once in lifetime?
Imagine an FPS where you start the game first time, walk into an ambush, take a single bullet, and the game is over, with no chance of replay. WTF? Many FPSes require many replays of certain boss battles until you figure out what the winning strategy is (or simply get lucky.) Learning is the key to everything; we learn IRL and we learn in games. Playing this "game" wastes all the learning that you have done in there.
People don't like games where they have only one life. They already are playing such a game, for free - why they need to learn some other universe if one mistake just voids all their effort?
One person at a time is stupid. That's not how anyhing in this Universe is happening. We live in the world where everything happens in parallel, where events can be triggered by other players.
Most gamers don't want to play a single sentient being in the whole universe. This game by definition doesn't permit other human players. Too bad.
The religious stuff is fluff that is TL;DR. I only commented on obvious gaming issues. I will gladly leave the religion to priests.
There aren't many people who want to blow something up without getting to make a statement or let anyone know WHY they blew it up.
They can always leave a videotape with that statement, and after the job is done the videotape can be sent to various news companies or simply published on the Web. In theory it could be done automatically, but in practice there are lots of people willing to do this little service to jihadists.
With regard to the tasers, I don't know what is the significance of the one that was found. I believe your proposal of hardening the planes against hijacking was implemented within weeks from 9/11, and today the cockpit door remains locked during flight. Terrorists may take hostages, though, and kill them one by one - no weapons are required for that. But then the pilot will simply initiate an emergency descent, the side effect of which is zero gravity. Few people are trained for hand to hand combat in zero G. A depressurization of the passenger cabin without deploying oxygen masks is also an option that is generally safe.
As the parent post said, "The problem is the introduction of dangerous components into an airplane" - not hijacking. Hijacking died on 9/11.
If you recall, a bunch of recent attempts were about blowing things up, not about taking control over the airplane. You can't make an airplane resistant to a sufficiently large bomb - we still can't do that to ground-based tanks. The size of the bomb is just a matter of concealing enough explosives. As parent post indicates, TSA is not effective in doing that.
The TSA might strip-search every child in the line, but they don't check tens of thousands of tons of materials that daily arrive through the loading docks and cargo gates of airports. Among that stuff is: fuel, spare parts and materials, construction materials, commercial goods, food to be sold by for vendors and on airplanes, machinery of every kind, grass control chemicals, and millions of other items you might think are required to run an airport. There wouldn't be enough people in the whole TSA to inspect all the service traffic into one airport.
But don't forget commercial cargo either. Today Fedex probably is wary of printer cartridges; however in reality there is no way of knowing what chemicals are sealed inside what package. If you ship a refrigerator by air freight do they do a gas chromatography test on the liquid that fills the system? There is no way to do such extensive testing; and as soon as the dangerous materials are delivered into the airport they can be then stored, accumulated, and eventually loaded onto the airplane, one way or another. An airport is a small city, and it is largely populated by low paid workers that come and go on daily basis. You can't be sure who you are hiring, short of a background investigation and a polygraph.
Why would Apple want to share its proprietary designs with a *competing* company already involved (as either the thief or victim) in several industrial espionage incidents when it can just use a "neutral" (not to mention the largest) contract fab like TSMC?
This naively assumes that nobody at the "largest" contract fab is willing to sell a couple of designs to whoever is interested in them. But they are ready to spend millions on chasing that dream.
Apple should understand that once they release something to another company that "something" is instantly copied and sold to the highest bidder. Their only hope would be to keep the high level design in Cupertino and send only the lowest level stuff to be manufactured. But if they want to take this road they can do it already - and as some people commented earlier, they do just that.
As it seems, though, Apple developed a case of corporate paranoia. There were signs of this disease before, but now Apple openly proclaims that "everyone is stealing from us" and such things. They need a head doctor.