I would dare say that the XFL is about the technology. Sure, there were camera shots of things that we would never expect to see in an NFL game, and we had the "X-Cam" that provided the downfield view of the action as opposed to the typical sideline view.
All the XFL is is trying to take what Vince McManhan learned from years of WWF wrestling television and that is making the spectacle more exciting than the sport. We all know that the
moves that are put on the mat in WWF are scripted and mostly stunts (still dangerous, but definitely not skill), but what draws people to keep watching it is the trash talk, the babes, and the "thrill" of what goes on outside the ring. And that was perfectly duplicated in what I watched of that XFL preview - you had trash talk (hearing the scrimage talk over the mikes), the babes, and all those extra shots of locker rooms, etc etc. And even a causal watching of football knows that what was played was worse than most high school teams. Heck, the stadium looked like a large-scale high school or small-town college stadium.
And while I'm sure no one is going to admit it, I do believe that there is scripting going on for some of the games and the confrontations between players. Most of these people are no-names, so how did the broadcasters know which people to focus on in the opening bits? And then was it a big surprise that these same people were the focus of some scuffles on the field after key plays? I wouldn't go as far to say that every play is scripted, nor the winner of the particular game, but some players have probably been told to liven things up to push the 'plot' forware. It's written very much like the WWF once you look under the surface.
In other words, XFL isn't a sport. It's simply the WWF translated into a different realm.
If you do want to talk technology in sports broadcasts, let's talk about the Super Bowl, with the matrix-like images (which do work well), the masking of the 1st down line in real time, and the broadcasting ability to manipulate that many cameras and personal and produce a quality broadcast.
MIME encoded attachments aren't the same as HTML email -- first, I've yet to see a mail client open these by default, and surprisingly a large number of 'newbies' know well enough not to open an attachment from an unknown source thanks to things like Melissa and ILOVEYOU. HTML email rarely gives you that option, or at least, the embedded browser window that is used to view the email, and will open everything without question. Second, MIME headers are standard text formats, so I with mutt or pine can figure out that you sent me a picture using LookOut or Eudora, and can save that attactment to a file. I've yet to see any specific standard for HTML email -- do you send it as an attachment? as the message? with the plain text version of message? Generally if you and your sender are using the same client, that's not a problem, but even two html-award email clients may view HTML differently, and the message will be garbled at one end. If you have to send something else besides text, MIME attachments are the right and RFC'd way to go.
Let's say, in my HTML email with your client, I sent:
<IMG SRC="mysecret.server.com/cgi/tracker.pl" HEIGHT=1 WIDTH=1>
Where in the tracker.pl script, I just query the HTTP environment variables to tell what host the request came from and another other juicy details I might get, then return a 1x1 GIF image. There's no Javascript, and I don't need you to click on anything -- I just need you to open it and I can get information.
HTML email is still very dangerous, and should be avoided.
A few weeks back we had a discussion here about a new email client for Linux that was 'compatible' with LookOut, including support for HTML email. I posted a small rant on why that's not a feature, but a bug, and a few called me a ludite.
*THIS* type of vunerability is exactly one of the reasons that you should not be using HTML for email, particular with the email clients that use an embedded browser window to display the information. Because not only do you as a
malicious email sender gain access to the bugs that arise from the email client itself (eg the ability to email everyone in the address book from a script), but bugs inherit from the browser.
The email RFC says to stick to plain text for all messages, and if you do that, the only bugs that you will encounter will be those that are from the mailers, and it will be very hard to trigger security problems such as this. You might complain about losing formatting and such, but that's also why the Rich Text format was developed; it carries enough of the HTML formatting that some need to emphasis email but none of the deadweight that can trigger security and privacy violations. Unfortunately, RTF wasn't highly accepted and after MS did a nice 'embrace and extend' of it, it was pretty much worthless.
But how do you tell the difference between "doing 80 in a 60 zone for a few seconds because you felt like it" and "doing 80 in a 60 zone for a few seconds to avoid an accident"? There isn't any if you only use GPS, and even if you have the cops look at the physical evidence, if you speed up to avoid an accident, there most likely wouldn't be any evidence of an accident.
Besides, we already have a way for cops to tell if you are speeding for the purposes of speeding, and that's physical observation. Now, I know in Chicago and in the state of Michigan, the effectiveness is rather poor (ie the cops will observe someone going 80 in a 60 zone and do nothing about it, causing that person and more people to feel they can put the speed limit up), but that's a problem of how the personnel are trained and told how to do their job and not a technological problem.
I do agree that a controlled maximum speed is a BAD thing and will lead to more accidents than we have already.
However, if you imply the latter part (have the GPS report back if you were speeding, then determine if it was necessary or not), that leads
to "guilty until proven innocent" attitudes that we need to get away from.
GPS is one of those things that can be easily abused by a gov't in the name of nation-state security but limiting privacy and personal freedom. It's important to have GPS for numerous apps, but there has to be an agreement that the GPS cannot be traced or recorded or whatever.
Since Charades is mentioned, I'd also add games that are meant for large numbers of people at parties and such, including:
Outburst - Draw a card with 10 related objects on it and their relation, give other team the relation and X seconds to name as many of the items there; good for brainstorming and the like.
Taboo - Given a word or phrase, get your team to describe it but without using 5 key words that would make it really easy to name it.
Pictionary - Like Taboo, except you can only use drawning to convey the word.
Scattagories - Given a list of general catagories and a random letter, come up with things that fit those catagories that start with that letter, but to be as unique as possible for more points.
I'm sure there's plenty of others out there that similar in nature. Sure, you do keep some score, but when you play these games in large groups, it's a matter of having fun and enjoying each other as opposed to winning the game. And if you are talking 'fun for the family', there are kids versions of these games that are generally well-suited for family playing.
Re:Dreamed up by sick venture capitalists
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Juno And Privacy
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· Score: 2
Have you looked at folding@home?
On my P600, I only got through one or two 'batches' in a day if leave it run, and this I would condiser to be an mid-to-top range system. The people that will be using Juno will most likely have low-to-mid range PCs (why else would they be using a free Juno), and I would expect one
'batch' of folding@home data would take several days to complete.
Thus, if I were Juno, all I know is that I would have to send enough 'batches' to last a month on one of these systems, and expect that the user would be calling up every week or so, as to get their results and then to put another new week of problems to be solved.
You need to remember that the way most of the distributed programs work is that they work in large, independent chucks of data; they don't have to talk to the controlling process as often as typical pallarel processing data.
I know Lessig has enforced the idea before, but alot of these problems all stem from excessive terms on copyrights. If copyrights were only allowed to be held for 10 years after the date of creation, then most of the problems with music distribution, ebooks, etc etc will be removed; it will encourage those that create the copyrights to continue to make *new* items.
I'm pretty sure this was on/. before, and NYT had a bit about it last week, but some company realized that the average roll of scotch tape that you can store about 300megs (or more?) of data in a holographic format, with the bonus that you only need to move the laser to read/write as opposed to having to spin the tape roll. And the way it's set up is such that you can simply use off-the-shelf rolls for this, no need for specially made tape.
...and the patents that infringe on them are still 'valid'. This only means that the parties that posted the reward money in each of these cases now has a strong way to challenge the patents, but even then, it doesn't render the patents null and void yet. For example, the music distribution case specifically states that the finding of the musicans distribution methods prior to the patent filing might knock several of the claims out, but not all of the claims -- this particular patent may still be around but not as inclusive as it started as.
Needless to say, this is rather common in filing patents: grab more than you want, including possible cases that might infringe, as then you'll probably end up with at least as much as you wanted if not a bit more, as opposed to getting too little.
Now, of course, something like the Orcale database snapshot sounds like it's completely dead in the water, since the prior art completely nullifies the case.
First, children do not have the same rights as adults. Even if we did have rights to privacy (we don't, it's only implied by 'illegal search and seizure'), that right would not be granted to children, or at least, it would be proxied through their parents or guardians. Therefore, if as a parent I installed software that would normally invade an adult's "right" to privacy but was being used to monitor my child, there is no legal issues regarding this. And, truthfully, if I were a parent, I'd like to know where my child was going to, at least at some aggregate level, but at least thru a proxy or url logger. Adult sites start appearing? Have "The Talk" with them. Sites about depression or suicide prevention? Sit down with them, and try to figure out what's going on. Would I necessary stiffle their access to such sites? All depends on the situation, but in general, probably not. Child rearing is an interactive process, and filters cannot be used to remove the interaction that parents must do to raise children effectively.
Second, filtering is not censoring; it is a slippery slope to it, and as Katz pointed out, the fact that only closed commercial solutions exist seems to legitize the fact that a non-publically controlled entity can decide what's right or wrong. But until mandatory filters are installed on every computer in the nation (not just those that children might access), it's not censoring. That said, either we must remove the mandatory filter law or change it such that local government has a large say whether to filter or not without the threat of losing thousands of dollars of funding, or require that any filtering program that is in use must have source code available as well as a list of sites and reasons for them being on that list, both which can be requested for at any time by the public. Here's where an open source software solution could work nicely.
Now, again, what gets me is that COPA says you cannot collect information (presumably identifiable) from children without the consent of the parent, yet we have the other part of the law that requires the use of filtering software, some which collects data AND makes money off it. If that's not a conflict of interest, I'd be very surprised. There's a case pending in a NE state where a parent wanted the log of sites visited by students at his local school, which he claimed under the Freedom of Information act his has rights to. The problem is that the school had the same log for staff and teachers as it used for students, and apparently there was sufficient identifying information in that log to say which teachers visited which sites. The court, last I heard, was trying to figure out if giving the unaltered logs would violate COPA and other privacy acts, or if even modifying the logs to strip out the identifications would be violating the FOI act. This situation should have never happened.
Finally, I still think that there is no reason for a grade school to have a fat pipeline to the rest of the internet; it is certainly possible to dilute the amount of data that comes downstream to the terminals that students use such that they have a cached but useful subset of the internet for those general computers, and possibly full access at one or two terminals in a library, where their actions CAN be watched by the librarian. You'd not have to worry about filtering or logging or anything like that, since the number of points where that can occur would be limited and be supervised.
I don't think we are necessarily any closer to proving that life exists elsewhere. All the discovery indicated was the presence of benzene in some other place besides earth.
Benzene is a rather difficult molecule to make, but once made, is extremely stable. A common chemical engineering problem is to try to make benzene from cyclohexane (C6H6 from C6H12); it's not too hard to extract 4 hydrogen atoms to leave cyclohexadiene (C6H8), but that last pair of atoms to convert to C6H8 to C6H6 is impossible to extract under the same conditions used for the first two steps; fortunately, elevating temperature and other factors gets the job done. Similarly, trying to add two hydrogen atoms back to 'saturate' the benzene is very tricky to get going, but once it's no longer benzene, it rapidly converts all the way back to cyclohexane.
In addition, we're talking about the formation of carbon-carbon bonds, nearly the most difficult and most stable bond that you can make. There is research that is trying to take carbon {mono|di}oxides and hydrogen and convert these to pure organics, thus requiring some C-C bond formation, but it is very slow even under intense conditions.
This all boils down to the fact that if the results that the astromers observed is true, then all we are seeing is that there a area in space that was sufficient in carbon content, temperature, and the like, for benzene to be formed, which is a very difficult reaction, but one necessary that would eventually lead to amino acids, and the possibility of life. All I think this would do is help to quality the possibility of life term in that one equation, the name which I forget, but goes something like "Number of stars in the universe, x fraction of stars with planets..." etc.
Over the last year or so, most American animation houses were experiencing belt-tightening, and with the recent AOL TW merger, there's even more in the near future. It's costly to produce animation, more-so for kids animation as there tends to be less profit per dollar spent there. Typical costs of a single 30-min episodes (well, 22 min) is around $250k to upwards of a $1mill, easily (from what I've heard, most of the recent Batman cartoons were that costly). And with many more distractions keeping kids away from the TV, the profits are dropping. But, by FCC law, networks have to show x hours of childrens programming, including 3 hrs/wk of educational material, so they have to produce what they can.
Now, consider anime; while it's expensively made in Japan, it's rather cheap to get the rights. WB got Pokemon for practically a song, compared with how much they would have had to spend for a similar episode run. Even the stuff on Toonami isn't that expensive to license, and in the end, probably cheaper than a new seasons of Powerpuff Girls or the like. So if you're a network, the bottom line is going to be better if you license an existing program than it is to make a new one. Thus, the rise of anime in mainstream television.
Now you also have to recall the differences in standards that anime and American animation goes by; the FCC requires a bit more in terms of non-violence and such from American counterparts than from anime. And with television ratings, the networks can simply show these more violent shows and slap a TV-Y7 on it, satisfying the FCC and most parents. So all we're seeing is typical
american fare being replaced by anime on a larger basis, but beyond that, nothing's really changed. American cartoons haven't changed in violence level, nor have anime shows.
If I was faced with those two choices as a school board, I'd take option 3: pull the net plug. There is NO reason that a grade school needs to have net access. Computers, yes, but not full net access. Maybe set up one or two networked computers in the library where they will be under the watchful eyes of librarians, so the virtual filter works as opposed to any software (or lack thereof) solution. Buy plenty of copies of the electronic encyclopedias, and I bet you can find a way that would cache a site like CNN every 2 or 3 hours so that current events could be covered. If you still want the schoolkids to use email within the school, no problem there, just block any outgoing mail.
The key point here is, without the current mandatory filters requirement, schools can balance the parents that want tight control and the free-speech advocates by limiting the number of computers that would present such a problem to a number that can be easily monitored by a staff member; you can still have effective computer learning and research, but having full internet access for a GRADE SCHOOL child while in school is
not necessary for a good education.
I had started an app yet to be finished that did use plugins (stored as.jars) that simply sat in a blessed folder; the plugin loader would simply iterate over the files in there, check for a valid plugin indicator, and loaded the class via a custom class loader. I know you can also unload such class assuming (the biggest stumbling block) all instances of that class (including any other loaded classes along with it) have been deleted.
Probably the trickiest part is to indicate where the entry point of the code should be; what I had done was use the.jar manifest file to add a line that was specific for my program, which indicated the dynamic class to load. As this class had to be a subtype of a specific class (as so the plugin would work), this point would be where the 'completeness' of the plugin would be test and failed.
Sure, there's a lot more work; writing a class loader is not the easiest thing out there, but there's plenty of example code to go by. Keeping track of all dynamic objects created might be a bit harder, but if you use static elements that help to keep track of instances, that would work as well. But you gain an dynamic system that works on all platforms with Java Reflection which will happen RSN. Unfortunately, as this seems to be a priority now, your choice is limited.
Re:Already being used to generate random numbers
on
The ASCII Cam
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· Score: 2
At least we know that one bit from the movie Johnny Mnemonic wasn't far off track with real world science...
For those that avoided this movie (good choice!),
our hero as played by Keanu "Whoa" Reeves, encodes a large block of data in his mind by using 3 random images from television. The recieving end would have gotten the images by one means while Keanu's character would have travelled a different route, as such to protect the data. Of course, that's not at all how smoothly it works out...
One problem is that for a machine of equivalent CPU, memory, etc, developing under a unix-like environment within Windows is
much faster and efficient that developing on a true unix environment running X-Windows, and much much much more efficiently than playing with the console. I've found that I can move between windows faster, and because most useful documentation is online, regardless of your opinion on them, the Windows browsers work much better here.
I also can see it for cases where you remotely develop unix apps where the connectivity between the unix box and your workstation (in this case, a windows box), is poor. I did this when I had a dialup during school stuff. Make sure everything works well in Windows, and then transfer to unix, and double check to make sure it works; assuming the ports are true, then you have no problems.
It will be interesting to see how they try to persue this. Will they go the route that BT is trying to do with their patent on hyperlinks, in this case, suing a small but important player, someone that they can probably match in legal fees so they have a test basis for further cases? In addition, suing a small player will be downplayed in the media, and thus few people would get a bad outlook on BT; if BT then won, they can take on bigger players, using their previous victory with the right media spin saying "Hey, just protecting our interests". Quite possible, but the question is which of the search engines out there would CMGI sue? If they tried to hit Yahoo or Google, they'd get a black eye really fast from the media world, so I suspect it will be something like HotBot or a minor search player.
I know that I've tried to fight the battle as much as I could on my end to make sure that the public at large knows the difference between Hackers and Crackers. I know others have too, but I think that that battle is moot; with
CNN and Cnet and USA Today, and the rest of the media continuing to use to the work "hacker" for what we mean as "cracker", anyone that seems to use the work "hacker" correctly (in our terms) tends to be frowned upon as one that is fighting the system, etc etc. Look at Judge Kaplan's feelings in the deCSS case.
We need to strongly promote a word or phrase that implies that that person is not one that hacks to undermine a system, but to learn and possibly improve a product. "White hat hacker" I've heard used, but it still has some negative connetation.
Of course, even if we come up with such a word, we need to inject it into the mainstream press somehow, and that can only be done by groups that
are leading the hacking effect, include Linus, Red Hat, and other distros.
Right now, and for the next concievable 20 years, you won't have a 'choice' between the Dem or Rep party. For all pratical purposes, the presidental election is the only time where the American public will wake up to party politics and possibly listen to other points of view, but those other points of view need to have a strong presence to be heard during that election. So you're talking about 4 to 5 election periods that you need to invoke change.
There's two things working for us (the anti-partisan folks), the fact that the party platforms of the Rep and Dem are getting too large and self-conflicting, and that the 2000 election problems along with a most-likely ineffectualy or disappointing Dubya adminstartion, means that 2004 will be an interesting year for elections. I don't expect a third party to break through any major ground, but at that junction , they just may have the needed 5% to get the funds for 2008. And if they have those funds, assuming they continue to pick strong candidates, that 5% might get to 10% by 2012, and 25% by 2016...
Which is why if you don't feel you can support either the Dem or Rep candidate in an election, you need to vote for a third party, regardless if he has a chance to win, because it's what will lead us away from a 2party system and a more open government.
Molecule length is not the only factor in octane rating, but when you compare molecules of the same family (in this case the alkanes), then the smaller molecules will have a higher octane rating that larger ones. Obviously, you can't compare methane and methanol, which would be a similar size, and expect similar octane ratings because alcohols and alkanes are significantly different. But octane number also increases with branched isomers, as well as with having double bonds (aklenes or olefins) or being an aromatic (benzene or toulene). Of course, you can't just add octane numbers together for a gas mixture, as it's not an associative property -- you have to test the mixture (which the above post pretty much has correct).
One more quick point: if the mixture of hydrocarbons has a octane number of X, then it has the same knocking characteristics of a mixture of X% of iso-octane and (100-X)% n-heptane (thus why those two are assigned 100 and , respectively).
But the key point I was trying to make is that when you do deep HDS, you will increasingly break down the branched alkanes and alkenes (with high octane numbers) to smaller straight-chained alkanes (with pitiful octane numbers) as you increase the sulfur removal level.
It bothers me that the Free Software Hacker world is so incredibly anti-Repbulican.
It's not that most OSS advocates are anti-Republican, but it's just that we are anti-partisian politics. We carry no party label, and only identify with candidates based on issues and not a word or title.
Last election, most people that read/. probably votes for Nader, Browne, or one of the independant parties. I voted for Nader, not because I consider myself a Green party person (as I do have qualms with some of their ideals), but because I believe that Nader would fix issues that I have with our current government in terms of corruption and outside influences from corporate America, based on the various platform speeches that he gave. Others chose their own candidates in the same way. Unfortunately, the other 95% of voters in the states tend to identify with a party and go straight ticket, even if the ticket conflicts with ideals.
Like I and others have said, political parties are akin to organized religion : it's equivalent of mass mind control. People want the easy way to success, whether in this life or the next, and to completely identity with one of a few alternative choices out there is much easier than having to decide for yourself how to vote or to think.
As the summary of the articles suggests, all the FTC can do is say if DoubleClick and Abacus were legal in aggregating information. As of this time, the US Congress has not given the FTC any power to restrict or hound companies that do not violate privacy rights, save in the case that if promise the user one thing and do another (the classic toysmart.com case) then they can step in, but only under the guise of untruthful business practices.
Now, if we DO get a privacy bill, I would suspect that it would give the FTC the power to say where to draw the line at collecting personal information and/or aggregating it. If we had such a bill now, I would have expected that the FTC would have come down hard on DoubleClick. Fortunately, privacy may be an issue with the Dubya adminstration, so we might see such a bill soon.
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All the XFL is is trying to take what Vince McManhan learned from years of WWF wrestling television and that is making the spectacle more exciting than the sport. We all know that the moves that are put on the mat in WWF are scripted and mostly stunts (still dangerous, but definitely not skill), but what draws people to keep watching it is the trash talk, the babes, and the "thrill" of what goes on outside the ring. And that was perfectly duplicated in what I watched of that XFL preview - you had trash talk (hearing the scrimage talk over the mikes), the babes, and all those extra shots of locker rooms, etc etc. And even a causal watching of football knows that what was played was worse than most high school teams. Heck, the stadium looked like a large-scale high school or small-town college stadium.
And while I'm sure no one is going to admit it, I do believe that there is scripting going on for some of the games and the confrontations between players. Most of these people are no-names, so how did the broadcasters know which people to focus on in the opening bits? And then was it a big surprise that these same people were the focus of some scuffles on the field after key plays? I wouldn't go as far to say that every play is scripted, nor the winner of the particular game, but some players have probably been told to liven things up to push the 'plot' forware. It's written very much like the WWF once you look under the surface.
In other words, XFL isn't a sport. It's simply the WWF translated into a different realm.
If you do want to talk technology in sports broadcasts, let's talk about the Super Bowl, with the matrix-like images (which do work well), the masking of the 1st down line in real time, and the broadcasting ability to manipulate that many cameras and personal and produce a quality broadcast.
MIME encoded attachments aren't the same as HTML email -- first, I've yet to see a mail client open these by default, and surprisingly a large number of 'newbies' know well enough not to open an attachment from an unknown source thanks to things like Melissa and ILOVEYOU. HTML email rarely gives you that option, or at least, the embedded browser window that is used to view the email, and will open everything without question. Second, MIME headers are standard text formats, so I with mutt or pine can figure out that you sent me a picture using LookOut or Eudora, and can save that attactment to a file. I've yet to see any specific standard for HTML email -- do you send it as an attachment? as the message? with the plain text version of message? Generally if you and your sender are using the same client, that's not a problem, but even two html-award email clients may view HTML differently, and the message will be garbled at one end. If you have to send something else besides text, MIME attachments are the right and RFC'd way to go.
Let's say, in my HTML email with your client, I sent: <IMG SRC="mysecret.server.com/cgi/tracker.pl" HEIGHT=1 WIDTH=1> Where in the tracker.pl script, I just query the HTTP environment variables to tell what host the request came from and another other juicy details I might get, then return a 1x1 GIF image. There's no Javascript, and I don't need you to click on anything -- I just need you to open it and I can get information.
HTML email is still very dangerous, and should be avoided.
*THIS* type of vunerability is exactly one of the reasons that you should not be using HTML for email, particular with the email clients that use an embedded browser window to display the information. Because not only do you as a malicious email sender gain access to the bugs that arise from the email client itself (eg the ability to email everyone in the address book from a script), but bugs inherit from the browser.
The email RFC says to stick to plain text for all messages, and if you do that, the only bugs that you will encounter will be those that are from the mailers, and it will be very hard to trigger security problems such as this. You might complain about losing formatting and such, but that's also why the Rich Text format was developed; it carries enough of the HTML formatting that some need to emphasis email but none of the deadweight that can trigger security and privacy violations. Unfortunately, RTF wasn't highly accepted and after MS did a nice 'embrace and extend' of it, it was pretty much worthless.
Besides, we already have a way for cops to tell if you are speeding for the purposes of speeding, and that's physical observation. Now, I know in Chicago and in the state of Michigan, the effectiveness is rather poor (ie the cops will observe someone going 80 in a 60 zone and do nothing about it, causing that person and more people to feel they can put the speed limit up), but that's a problem of how the personnel are trained and told how to do their job and not a technological problem.
However, if you imply the latter part (have the GPS report back if you were speeding, then determine if it was necessary or not), that leads to "guilty until proven innocent" attitudes that we need to get away from.
GPS is one of those things that can be easily abused by a gov't in the name of nation-state security but limiting privacy and personal freedom. It's important to have GPS for numerous apps, but there has to be an agreement that the GPS cannot be traced or recorded or whatever.
- Outburst - Draw a card with 10 related objects on it and their relation, give other team the relation and X seconds to name as many of the items there; good for brainstorming and the like.
- Taboo - Given a word or phrase, get your team to describe it but without using 5 key words that would make it really easy to name it.
- Pictionary - Like Taboo, except you can only use drawning to convey the word.
- Scattagories - Given a list of general catagories and a random letter, come up with things that fit those catagories that start with that letter, but to be as unique as possible for more points.
I'm sure there's plenty of others out there that similar in nature. Sure, you do keep some score, but when you play these games in large groups, it's a matter of having fun and enjoying each other as opposed to winning the game. And if you are talking 'fun for the family', there are kids versions of these games that are generally well-suited for family playing.On my P600, I only got through one or two 'batches' in a day if leave it run, and this I would condiser to be an mid-to-top range system. The people that will be using Juno will most likely have low-to-mid range PCs (why else would they be using a free Juno), and I would expect one 'batch' of folding@home data would take several days to complete.
Thus, if I were Juno, all I know is that I would have to send enough 'batches' to last a month on one of these systems, and expect that the user would be calling up every week or so, as to get their results and then to put another new week of problems to be solved.
You need to remember that the way most of the distributed programs work is that they work in large, independent chucks of data; they don't have to talk to the controlling process as often as typical pallarel processing data.
Needless to say, this is rather common in filing patents: grab more than you want, including possible cases that might infringe, as then you'll probably end up with at least as much as you wanted if not a bit more, as opposed to getting too little.
Now, of course, something like the Orcale database snapshot sounds like it's completely dead in the water, since the prior art completely nullifies the case.
Second, filtering is not censoring; it is a slippery slope to it, and as Katz pointed out, the fact that only closed commercial solutions exist seems to legitize the fact that a non-publically controlled entity can decide what's right or wrong. But until mandatory filters are installed on every computer in the nation (not just those that children might access), it's not censoring. That said, either we must remove the mandatory filter law or change it such that local government has a large say whether to filter or not without the threat of losing thousands of dollars of funding, or require that any filtering program that is in use must have source code available as well as a list of sites and reasons for them being on that list, both which can be requested for at any time by the public. Here's where an open source software solution could work nicely.
Now, again, what gets me is that COPA says you cannot collect information (presumably identifiable) from children without the consent of the parent, yet we have the other part of the law that requires the use of filtering software, some which collects data AND makes money off it. If that's not a conflict of interest, I'd be very surprised. There's a case pending in a NE state where a parent wanted the log of sites visited by students at his local school, which he claimed under the Freedom of Information act his has rights to. The problem is that the school had the same log for staff and teachers as it used for students, and apparently there was sufficient identifying information in that log to say which teachers visited which sites. The court, last I heard, was trying to figure out if giving the unaltered logs would violate COPA and other privacy acts, or if even modifying the logs to strip out the identifications would be violating the FOI act. This situation should have never happened.
Finally, I still think that there is no reason for a grade school to have a fat pipeline to the rest of the internet; it is certainly possible to dilute the amount of data that comes downstream to the terminals that students use such that they have a cached but useful subset of the internet for those general computers, and possibly full access at one or two terminals in a library, where their actions CAN be watched by the librarian. You'd not have to worry about filtering or logging or anything like that, since the number of points where that can occur would be limited and be supervised.
Benzene is a rather difficult molecule to make, but once made, is extremely stable. A common chemical engineering problem is to try to make benzene from cyclohexane (C6H6 from C6H12); it's not too hard to extract 4 hydrogen atoms to leave cyclohexadiene (C6H8), but that last pair of atoms to convert to C6H8 to C6H6 is impossible to extract under the same conditions used for the first two steps; fortunately, elevating temperature and other factors gets the job done. Similarly, trying to add two hydrogen atoms back to 'saturate' the benzene is very tricky to get going, but once it's no longer benzene, it rapidly converts all the way back to cyclohexane.
In addition, we're talking about the formation of carbon-carbon bonds, nearly the most difficult and most stable bond that you can make. There is research that is trying to take carbon {mono|di}oxides and hydrogen and convert these to pure organics, thus requiring some C-C bond formation, but it is very slow even under intense conditions.
This all boils down to the fact that if the results that the astromers observed is true, then all we are seeing is that there a area in space that was sufficient in carbon content, temperature, and the like, for benzene to be formed, which is a very difficult reaction, but one necessary that would eventually lead to amino acids, and the possibility of life. All I think this would do is help to quality the possibility of life term in that one equation, the name which I forget, but goes something like "Number of stars in the universe, x fraction of stars with planets..." etc.
Now, consider anime; while it's expensively made in Japan, it's rather cheap to get the rights. WB got Pokemon for practically a song, compared with how much they would have had to spend for a similar episode run. Even the stuff on Toonami isn't that expensive to license, and in the end, probably cheaper than a new seasons of Powerpuff Girls or the like. So if you're a network, the bottom line is going to be better if you license an existing program than it is to make a new one. Thus, the rise of anime in mainstream television.
Now you also have to recall the differences in standards that anime and American animation goes by; the FCC requires a bit more in terms of non-violence and such from American counterparts than from anime. And with television ratings, the networks can simply show these more violent shows and slap a TV-Y7 on it, satisfying the FCC and most parents. So all we're seeing is typical american fare being replaced by anime on a larger basis, but beyond that, nothing's really changed. American cartoons haven't changed in violence level, nor have anime shows.
The key point here is, without the current mandatory filters requirement, schools can balance the parents that want tight control and the free-speech advocates by limiting the number of computers that would present such a problem to a number that can be easily monitored by a staff member; you can still have effective computer learning and research, but having full internet access for a GRADE SCHOOL child while in school is not necessary for a good education.
Probably the trickiest part is to indicate where the entry point of the code should be; what I had done was use the .jar manifest file to add a line that was specific for my program, which indicated the dynamic class to load. As this class had to be a subtype of a specific class (as so the plugin would work), this point would be where the 'completeness' of the plugin would be test and failed.
Sure, there's a lot more work; writing a class loader is not the easiest thing out there, but there's plenty of example code to go by. Keeping track of all dynamic objects created might be a bit harder, but if you use static elements that help to keep track of instances, that would work as well. But you gain an dynamic system that works on all platforms with Java Reflection which will happen RSN. Unfortunately, as this seems to be a priority now, your choice is limited.
For those that avoided this movie (good choice!), our hero as played by Keanu "Whoa" Reeves, encodes a large block of data in his mind by using 3 random images from television. The recieving end would have gotten the images by one means while Keanu's character would have travelled a different route, as such to protect the data. Of course, that's not at all how smoothly it works out...
I also can see it for cases where you remotely develop unix apps where the connectivity between the unix box and your workstation (in this case, a windows box), is poor. I did this when I had a dialup during school stuff. Make sure everything works well in Windows, and then transfer to unix, and double check to make sure it works; assuming the ports are true, then you have no problems.
It will be interesting to see how they try to persue this. Will they go the route that BT is trying to do with their patent on hyperlinks, in this case, suing a small but important player, someone that they can probably match in legal fees so they have a test basis for further cases? In addition, suing a small player will be downplayed in the media, and thus few people would get a bad outlook on BT; if BT then won, they can take on bigger players, using their previous victory with the right media spin saying "Hey, just protecting our interests". Quite possible, but the question is which of the search engines out there would CMGI sue? If they tried to hit Yahoo or Google, they'd get a black eye really fast from the media world, so I suspect it will be something like HotBot or a minor search player.
We need to strongly promote a word or phrase that implies that that person is not one that hacks to undermine a system, but to learn and possibly improve a product. "White hat hacker" I've heard used, but it still has some negative connetation. Of course, even if we come up with such a word, we need to inject it into the mainstream press somehow, and that can only be done by groups that are leading the hacking effect, include Linus, Red Hat, and other distros.
There's two things working for us (the anti-partisan folks), the fact that the party platforms of the Rep and Dem are getting too large and self-conflicting, and that the 2000 election problems along with a most-likely ineffectualy or disappointing Dubya adminstartion, means that 2004 will be an interesting year for elections. I don't expect a third party to break through any major ground, but at that junction , they just may have the needed 5% to get the funds for 2008. And if they have those funds, assuming they continue to pick strong candidates, that 5% might get to 10% by 2012, and 25% by 2016...
Which is why if you don't feel you can support either the Dem or Rep candidate in an election, you need to vote for a third party, regardless if he has a chance to win, because it's what will lead us away from a 2party system and a more open government.
One more quick point: if the mixture of hydrocarbons has a octane number of X, then it has the same knocking characteristics of a mixture of X% of iso-octane and (100-X)% n-heptane (thus why those two are assigned 100 and , respectively).
But the key point I was trying to make is that when you do deep HDS, you will increasingly break down the branched alkanes and alkenes (with high octane numbers) to smaller straight-chained alkanes (with pitiful octane numbers) as you increase the sulfur removal level.
It's not that most OSS advocates are anti-Republican, but it's just that we are anti-partisian politics. We carry no party label, and only identify with candidates based on issues and not a word or title.
Last election, most people that read /. probably votes for Nader, Browne, or one of the independant parties. I voted for Nader, not because I consider myself a Green party person (as I do have qualms with some of their ideals), but because I believe that Nader would fix issues that I have with our current government in terms of corruption and outside influences from corporate America, based on the various platform speeches that he gave. Others chose their own candidates in the same way. Unfortunately, the other 95% of voters in the states tend to identify with a party and go straight ticket, even if the ticket conflicts with ideals.
Like I and others have said, political parties are akin to organized religion : it's equivalent of mass mind control. People want the easy way to success, whether in this life or the next, and to completely identity with one of a few alternative choices out there is much easier than having to decide for yourself how to vote or to think.
Now, if we DO get a privacy bill, I would suspect that it would give the FTC the power to say where to draw the line at collecting personal information and/or aggregating it. If we had such a bill now, I would have expected that the FTC would have come down hard on DoubleClick. Fortunately, privacy may be an issue with the Dubya adminstration, so we might see such a bill soon.