That might have been thinking about a year with two leap seconds, with both leap seconds inserted at the same time. The literature says that the rule is to keep UTC within 900 ms of UT1 (astronomical time). If multiple leap seconds are needed, they would be inserted on different dates, say the end of June and December.
FreeBSD has a live filesystem CD that you can boot, although it didn't work properly in the first release that I saw (3.2?), it should work on the newer releases.
The general rule is to install Microsoft operating systems first, than any other operating systems. Microsoft writes their installation software on the assumption that they can trash any existing MBRs, boot blocks and partitions.
Chips with smaller feature sizes are usually more susceptible to radiation. Space qualified, radiation hardened chips are often several generations behind commercial chips. Most vendors have bailed out of the milspec/space market. The profits (if any) are too small in comparison to the commercial market. ESA designed a space qualified version of the SPARC and Sandia National Laboratory is working on a space qualified Pentium.
The end-of-year rollover has been a recurrent source of problems in many programs that predict the orbits of spacecraft, such as antenna control software for ground stations. Even without the year 2000, it is a time to be avoided. The ranges (Cape Canaveral & Vandenberg) also are partially shutdown at the end of the year so that people can take holiday vacations.
Federal government publications are not copyrighted. Federal employees are usually encouraged to apply for patents on new technology.
I'm not sure about software copyrights. I once got into an argument with an engineer who included copyright notices in his source code, he insisted that the software could be copyrighted, even though it was written by civil service employees.
Would the courts consider the USPS a private corporation or a component of the federal government?
I believe most states already require you to declare and pay use taxes on all items purchased out of state. This is ignored by most people. Some states do go after the purchasers of big ticket items such as boats and cars. In the Maryland/Virginia/D.C. area, revenue agents have been known to follow people who buy large quantities of liquor or tobacco in neighboring states.
There is a simple reason why: a digitally-encoded movie for theater projection will easily fit on a 12" (305 mm) optical disk (if we're using the same pit size as those on DVD discs).
Is a 12" optical disk with a DVD pit size practical? I thought that one of the reasons that disk platters have shrunk in diameter is the difficulty in designing track-following servo systems for increasingly narrower tracks. A smaller diameter platter reduces the magnitude of the errors that the servo system must deal with.
Ovulation and Menstruation
on
Sex in Space
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· Score: 2
Is there any data on the effects of weightlessness on ovulation and menstruation? Is gravity needed for the movement of the egg and the discharge of the lining of the uterus?
If you are thinking about buying from Barnes & Noble instead of Amazon, you might want to read this. It is an interview with an Assistant Editor at the Monthly Review. There is an interesting section that describes how Barnes & Noble takes advantage of small publishers.
The site has many interesting interviews with people in diverse occupations.
You hear something, you see something, and blend it in together with another random idea that hits you, and voila, instant 'idea'.
Sometimes inventions are like that, a final brick in a wall composed of bricks provided by others. That helps explain why some inventions are independently invented by multiple people during a short period of time.
I would argue that there are ideas and inventions that are so profound that the inventor deserves more than to be characterized as mental flypaper that reached critical mass. These are the ideas that require a special genius that can make a leap into new and undiscovered territory.
I've worked on embedded systems where every operator command, equipment status change and alarm had to be logged to a disk file and printed on a line printer. Each entry included the date and time of the event. All voice communication circuits were recorded on a tape recorder with a time code track.
This was done so that the causes of major failures could be determined and the appropriate people could be shot (just kidding).
There is a famous study, Men Against Fire by S.L.A. Marshall, that showed that only a small proportion (~20%) of U.S. soldiers in combat situations in World War II, actively used their weapons. That suggests that killing the enemy is not instinctive for most people, even during a war.
As a matter of public policy and law, gambling debts are unenforceable in many states. This can be traced back to the Statute of Anne (1710) in England. A legal discussion of the situation in California can be found here.
I don't have any sympathy for credit card companies that issue merchant accounts to a on-line casino. It is blindingly obvious that it will be used for lending money to gamblers.
Re:This v2-os.. no protection.
on
V2 OS
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· Score: 2
second, it has NO memory protection.
Seriously, that is a feature. There are a lot of engineers who directly access I/O ports and memory mapped I/O in their programs. Microsoft tries to make this difficult. Who wants to write a device driver just to twiddle some bits on an I/O board?
Lots of people are using PC hardware for real-time embedded systems. I've seen many migrations from VME 680X0 systems to rack-mount x86 PCs. The VME hardware is nice but it is horribly expensive and the compilers and OSs aren't cheap.
Maybe we should have a law that all print shops must ID all their customers and maintain a register containing the customer's identity and a sample of the item printed. Next, we can mandate the registration of all typewriters and photocopy machines with the government.
If you wait for a war, especially in modern times, it is too late. You need an existing intelligence infrastructure and it takes years to get it up to speed.
Ideally, war can be prevented or avoided with good intelligence. Part of the stability of the Cold War was due to the United States having accurate information on Soviet strategic forces such as long range bombers and ICBMs. That took some of the fire out of the arms race and allowed the United States to make decisions based on reality, rather than Kruschev speeches or red scare paranoia in congress.
Everyone spies on everyone else, whether they are allies or enemies. Secretary of State (later War) Stimson's naive view that "Gentlemen do not read other people's mail" has never been popular. Even Stimson changed his mind on the subject.
Are you going to throw France out of the EU? The DGSE has a very active intelligence program. They spy on everyone.
The CIA and NSA are supposed to collect intelligence that may have military or diplomatic value to the United States. That includes information on the armed forces and weapons systems of our allies. After a coup, yesterday's ally may be today's enemy. Weapons systems are often sold to countries that may not always be friendly to the United States.
Echelon is just a way to pool resources, share intelligence and avoid duplication of effort.
If you don't like it, use encryption and avoid satellite and microwave links. If you transmit information over the airwaves, you run the risk of having it intercepted by any intelligence agency with SIGINT capabilities. Even if the NSA was closed down, there would be a long list of other intelligence agencies to worry about.
The Congress has a great deal of control over the funding of the executive branch. If they want to zero out the funding for the NSA, they could do it tomorrow. The executive branch can make policy but it can't force the congress to appropriate money to implement that policy. Agencies such as the CIA, NRO and NSA have more autonomy than other federal agencies. That could end quickly if congress gets pissed off.
There is limited cooperation between NASA and the USAF in some areas, but the two organizations have very distinct missions.
When the USAF and NASA were jointly funding and cooperating on the Shuttle program, the USAF was not happy about losing control over how their money was being spent and the loss of operational control. The USAF wanted a blue shuttle, and their own launch facility at Vandenberg AFB. This was shot down for budgetary reasons. After the Challenger disaster, the USAF bailed out of the Shuttle program and returned to expendable launch vehicles.
NASA is using multicast on a private Internet to distribute spacecraft data to end users. This allows the use of COTS (commercial, off the shelf) networking hardware and software instead of proprietary protocols and systems. The ground station that receives spacecraft data transmits a single stream of multicast UDP packets. Multicast enabled IP routers split the single stream into multiple streams as needed. This allows efficient use of the bandwidth on the network backbone.
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That might have been thinking about a year with two leap seconds, with both leap seconds inserted at the same time. The literature says that the rule is to keep UTC within 900 ms of UT1 (astronomical time). If multiple leap seconds are needed, they would be inserted on different dates, say the end of June and December.
FreeBSD has a live filesystem CD that you can boot, although it didn't work properly in the first release that I saw (3.2?), it should work on the newer releases.
The general rule is to install Microsoft operating systems first, than any other operating systems. Microsoft writes their installation software on the assumption that they can trash any existing MBRs, boot blocks and partitions.
Fat12 is used for floppies and small (less than 32MB) disk partitions.
Some people think that coming down from the trees was a bad idea.
Chips with smaller feature sizes are usually more susceptible to radiation. Space qualified, radiation hardened chips are often several generations behind commercial chips. Most vendors have bailed out of the milspec/space market. The profits (if any) are too small in comparison to the commercial market. ESA designed a space qualified version of the SPARC and Sandia National Laboratory is working on a space qualified Pentium.
The end-of-year rollover has been a recurrent source of problems in many programs that predict the orbits of spacecraft, such as antenna control software for ground stations. Even without the year 2000, it is a time to be avoided. The ranges (Cape Canaveral & Vandenberg) also are partially shutdown at the end of the year so that people can take holiday vacations.
I'm not sure about software copyrights. I once got into an argument with an engineer who included copyright notices in his source code, he insisted that the software could be copyrighted, even though it was written by civil service employees.
Would the courts consider the USPS a private corporation or a component of the federal government?
I believe most states already require you to declare and pay use taxes on all items purchased out of state. This is ignored by most people. Some states do go after the purchasers of big ticket items such as boats and cars. In the Maryland/Virginia/D.C. area, revenue agents have been known to follow people who buy large quantities of liquor or tobacco in neighboring states.
Is a 12" optical disk with a DVD pit size practical? I thought that one of the reasons that disk platters have shrunk in diameter is the difficulty in designing track-following servo systems for increasingly narrower tracks. A smaller diameter platter reduces the magnitude of the errors that the servo system must deal with.
Is there any data on the effects of weightlessness on ovulation and menstruation? Is gravity needed for the movement of the egg and the discharge of the lining of the uterus?
The site has many interesting interviews with people in diverse occupations.
Sometimes inventions are like that, a final brick in a wall composed of bricks provided by others. That helps explain why some inventions are independently invented by multiple people during a short period of time.
I would argue that there are ideas and inventions that are so profound that the inventor deserves more than to be characterized as mental flypaper that reached critical mass. These are the ideas that require a special genius that can make a leap into new and undiscovered territory.
This was done so that the causes of major failures could be determined and the appropriate people could be shot (just kidding).
There is a famous study, Men Against Fire by S.L.A. Marshall, that showed that only a small proportion (~20%) of U.S. soldiers in combat situations in World War II, actively used their weapons. That suggests that killing the enemy is not instinctive for most people, even during a war.
I don't have any sympathy for credit card companies that issue merchant accounts to a on-line casino. It is blindingly obvious that it will be used for lending money to gamblers.
Seriously, that is a feature. There are a lot of engineers who directly access I/O ports and memory mapped I/O in their programs. Microsoft tries to make this difficult. Who wants to write a device driver just to twiddle some bits on an I/O board?
Lots of people are using PC hardware for real-time embedded systems. I've seen many migrations from VME 680X0 systems to rack-mount x86 PCs. The VME hardware is nice but it is horribly expensive and the compilers and OSs aren't cheap.
There was RSX-11, RT-11, DOS, IAS, RSTS, MUMPS and UNIX. It was probably IAS, a timesharing system if my memory is correct.
Maybe we should have a law that all print shops must ID all their customers and maintain a register containing the customer's identity and a sample of the item printed. Next, we can mandate the registration of all typewriters and photocopy machines with the government.
Ideally, war can be prevented or avoided with good intelligence. Part of the stability of the Cold War was due to the United States having accurate information on Soviet strategic forces such as long range bombers and ICBMs. That took some of the fire out of the arms race and allowed the United States to make decisions based on reality, rather than Kruschev speeches or red scare paranoia in congress.
Are you going to throw France out of the EU? The DGSE has a very active intelligence program. They spy on everyone.
The CIA and NSA are supposed to collect intelligence that may have military or diplomatic value to the United States. That includes information on the armed forces and weapons systems of our allies. After a coup, yesterday's ally may be today's enemy. Weapons systems are often sold to countries that may not always be friendly to the United States.
Echelon is just a way to pool resources, share intelligence and avoid duplication of effort.
If you don't like it, use encryption and avoid satellite and microwave links. If you transmit information over the airwaves, you run the risk of having it intercepted by any intelligence agency with SIGINT capabilities. Even if the NSA was closed down, there would be a long list of other intelligence agencies to worry about.
The Congress has a great deal of control over the funding of the executive branch. If they want to zero out the funding for the NSA, they could do it tomorrow. The executive branch can make policy but it can't force the congress to appropriate money to implement that policy. Agencies such as the CIA, NRO and NSA have more autonomy than other federal agencies. That could end quickly if congress gets pissed off.
There is limited cooperation between NASA and the USAF in some areas, but the two organizations have very distinct missions.
When the USAF and NASA were jointly funding and cooperating on the Shuttle program, the USAF was not happy about losing control over how their money was being spent and the loss of operational control. The USAF wanted a blue shuttle, and their own launch facility at Vandenberg AFB. This was shot down for budgetary reasons. After the Challenger disaster, the USAF bailed out of the Shuttle program and returned to expendable launch vehicles.
NASA is using multicast on a private Internet to distribute spacecraft data to end users. This allows the use of COTS (commercial, off the shelf) networking hardware and software instead of proprietary protocols and systems. The ground station that receives spacecraft data transmits a single stream of multicast UDP packets. Multicast enabled IP routers split the single stream into multiple streams as needed. This allows efficient use of the bandwidth on the network backbone.