Well, what do you expect? Apple's kernel is a warmed over Next kernel, which is a warmed over Mach kernel, which is a warmed over BSD kernel. There's probably legacy code in there from the 1980s.
A big problem with "cable TV" is that, even though the cable company has a box on the user's premises which they own and to which they can talk, they don't do network management that way. They're mostly still organized as if their systems were entirely one-way.
For decades, telcos have checked out their wire systems using Automatic Line Insulation Test gear. This runs some test voltages down the line and checks for shorts, opens, leakage to ground, etc. (This usually happens around 4 AM, at the time of maximum humidity, and some
cheap phones produce a "bell tap" ding when a DC spike is sent down the line to check the insulation.)
The cable companies, on the other hand, started with a completely one-way outside plant, and no institutional history of network
management. Even though newer cable gear is two-way, it's mostly a kludge on a one-way system. Cable companies don't have the concept of automatically monitoring every piece of outside plant. They wait for customer complaints.
The newer cable hardware can at least talk to central control, but cable boxes don't seem to come with the kind of line quality monitoring that modern DSL interfaces do. It's not something that cable companies have demanded from cable box suppliers. Ask your cable company to read out your bit error rate and line levels remotely, and they'll say "Huh?"
We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone. If you get a standalone GPS for your car, you have a receive-only device that doesn't give up your location. So it's not essential that your phone "give up your location". That's a decision the phone vendor made, not something inherent in the technology. There's no fundamental reason that the "assisted GPS" system used in cell phones has to have location info available on the server side, either. There's enough CPU power in cell phones now to run the entire GPS algorithm locally.
We give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points. This is getting completely out of hand. There's now a "rewards" program connected to medical insurance. This area needs regulation. There's some sentiment in the airline industry for getting rid of "frequent flyer" programs, if only all the airlines do it at the same time.
We give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. No, we don't "give it up", it's taken from us. It's not a transaction, it's a mugging. If we want that to stop, one way is to hook up face recognition software to as many cameras as possible and track politicians, then put it on a site like "wheresmysenator.com". Or "copwatch.com". That will get some action.
Look. Spolsky runs a dinky little software development firm that sells a little project management program. And it's still a dinky little software development firm after a decade. It's not like this guy runs a company that does anything critical, like avionics software, or anything really big and tightly integrated like Facebook, or financially significant like Chase's banking system, or leading-edge robotics like Boston Dynamics, or cutting-edge manufacturing like HyperMill. No, they just do Windows and Mac desktop apps. That's trailing edge technology at this point.
Some of the better shops don't hesitate to rewrite. Some have systems which intercommunicate by message passing and are designed to be rewritten in sections. (Facebook, works that way internally.) The bigger shops may have one team on the new version and a maintenance team on the old one; a small firm may not be staffed for that.
I wonder if Google Storage can be abused as a way to host phishing pages?
There's a phishing page that's been on Google Sites since February. Google is good about kicking off most phishing pages, but this one is different. Here's the phishing page as a web page. The actual hostile page (which is a bogus login page for Stickam) is on the "Click here to download your attachment". The actual url is http://2699962600425641406-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/stickamcomlogindo/login.html?attachauth=ANoY7cpc6fembideFQyYULstnVDU-XMkgwzNLFkUv77Suh8bUq_LGrFRQ-RtLkw6pEPJb5Vk0XW4JMbOVQtqT_R6CjNCh5N2r29quoFkE5Cq1XQXUFhuegVtr4kQUMN9T3dT3yO1q-FthiahDl45UqMmFfD6gKSYwQP4bsgVoM-N5cQN0hHRvDZskuvmTdy0lqnQqUhmKFYP&attredirects=0. That's probably a page in Google Storage.
This raises the question of whether Google should be running hostile-code checks on publicly-accessible Google Storage pages.
After reading through the API, if anything, it's too simple. You can't copy a bucket without reading it from Google's servers and writing it back, which is far slower than a copy carried out within their high-speed network. The "list" capability isn't well documented. The security model is about as dumb as the UNIX/Linux one; it doesn't have capabilities or anything like that. Bucket transactions are themselves atomic, but there are no user-specified atomic transactions. You can't, for example, rename "current" to "old" and "new" to "current" as an atomic transaction. (That's a normal operation in SQL, and a useful one when you've constructed a new copy of a mostly-static table and want to make it live.) Nor do buckets have version management. There's no way to read replication status; although bucket data is supposedly replicated, when does this happen? Right after uploading a bucket, or some time later?
This looks more like Microsoft giving up than going for world domination. A few years ago, Microsoft had a presence at robotics
conventions, pushing the thing. That shrank, then disappeared.
A basic problem is that Microsoft Robotics Studio is built on Microsoft Web Services, which is not exactly the tool you want for real-time operation. It has a simple-minded visual programming environment. There's little (any?) vision support. There's little, if any, machine learning. It's really only about two notches above Lego Mindstorms, and way below stuff like DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles or Boston Dynamics' robots.
If you want to see more cutting edge stuff, download Willow Robotics code. They're working hard on vision and making real progress.
Hobbyist robotics needs a major quality upgrade. People are still building '80s type robots. By now, any serious robot should have a vision system and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). Any robot with a laptop, or one of the fancier cell phones, on board has enough compute power for that. But Microsoft Robotics Studio won't take you there.
Firefox has a real problem in the plug-in space. They're deprecating the old API, and the new "JetPack" API isn't fully implemented yet, let alone deployed. That's a killer mistake. When there's a hiatus like that, developers leave and go
do something else. This can kill a technology.
"Web3D" was a good example of that class of disaster. "Web3D" was supposed to be VRML in XML syntax. There was a long hiatus between the official deprecation of VRML and the first X3D tools, during which almost everybody went away. X3D now works, but nobody cares.
If a "newsletter" needs help to get through a spam filter, it's spam. If you want to distribute updates to real "subscribers", use an RSS feed. The user then has total control over their subscription. But most "newsletter" spammers don't want that.
IronPort used to play both sides of the street back in 2002. They sold rackmount "spam filter" boxes, and they also sold, er, "email delivery appliances". These included mechanisms for using hundreds of different IP addresses, to avoid triggering spam filters. IronPort was also behind "Bonded Spammer", a scheme where they paid ISPs to whitelist their spam. They even bought SpamCop and built Bonded Spammer into it.
Cisco finally bought IronPort, and they got out of the spamming business. Bonded Spammer lives on as ReturnPath. If you have anything to do with mail processing, it's worth understanding how to identify ReturnPath email (the IP address is tagged in DNS) so it can be moved to the "bulk" folder. If you use SpamAssassin, it comes with a big negative value for ReturnPath emails to get them through filters. Change that to +2 or so; if somebody paid to use ReturnPath, they're a bulk sender.
The fanboys claimed that they didn't want all of that.
That goes a long way back. For the original Mac, the fanboys were saying "The Mac has resolution; it doesn't need color." (IBM had color. Sun had color. Apple was strictly black and white. Not even greyscale in the early models. Fortunately for Apple, they had Susan Kare, who made the Mac interface look good under those limitations.)
slap in the face to these hard working people who for the most part just want to be left the hell alone.
And collect checks from the Federal Government.
Most of the states from which you hear the most noise about "government encroachment" and "getting rid of Government" get more in Federal expenditures than they pay in taxes.
Montana, from which you hear lots of whining, gets $1.47 back for every $1 they pay in taxes. Alaska gets $1.84; they're pigging out on Federal tax money. New Mexico is the biggest pig of all, at $2.03. And those "liberal" states? They pull their own weight. New York only gets back $0.79 for every dollar they pay in taxes. California gets even less, $0.78. Massachusetts gets $0.82.
Texas gets $0.94, so they're paying their way, but not by much.
On the English Wikipedia, this was an issue, and it was dealt with through Wikipedia's usual mechanisms. Someone ran a program to make a list of images actually used in Wikipedia. Others went down that list, and put most of those images through "deletion review". Each one was voted on; most of them were restored. Images that nobody asked to have restored remain deleted. Essentially all the historical images were restored. Some of the junkier stuff was voted off the island. That all took place within a few days, and wasn't particularly contentious. On Wikipedia, this is now a closed issue. On Commons, which is administered by different people, there's still a discussion going on.
Understand that you can upload images separately to Wikipedia or to the Wikimedia Commons. If you upload an image to Wikipedia, and it's not currently used in an article, it will be automatically deleted after a few weeks. So if others delete the image link in the article, and it stays deleted, after a while, the image file is deleted too. Commons, though, has a policy that "by custom the uploading of small numbers of images for use on a personal Commons user page is allowed." Some people try to use Commons as if it were Flickr, and if they don't overdo it, that's tolerated. A few people uploaded their porn collection. That seems to be the cause of the difficulty.
Complicating this is a system which automatically moves images that have been on the English Wikipedia for a while to Commons, changes the links to point to the copy on Commons, and deletes the copy on Wikipedia. This is intended to make images available to all the other language versions of Wikipedia, rather than having a separate copy for each language version. The assumption has been that nothing that went through that move would ever be deleted from Commons. When some images moved via that process were deleted, many Wikipedia editors were very bothered. Automatic movement of images to Commons was shut down for a while. There isn't a way to determine if an image on Commons is used on any wiki (there's a way for each wiki, but no global backlink search.). So automatically separating single-user personal stuff from images used in real articles is not currently implemented. I suspect that will be fixed.
On the governance side, it was pointed out that Wales isn't the head of the Wikimedia foundation any more. He's just a member of the board of directors. If he wanted to do this through the board, he can call a board meeting and try to get them to pass a resolution to change policy. He didn't take that route. As others pointed out, if anybody else did what Wales did, they'd be blocked. The general consensus is that Wales was out of line. Wales gave up some privileges, and the issue isn't even active in the dispute resolution system.
All in all, this was well handled. Wikipedia has had far worse disputes.
Imagine, if you can't download Windows, Photoshop or MS Office anymore.
The problem is buying a machine without Windows or MS Office, not downloading it.
Photoshop Elements ($79) is enough for most people. Really, the typical teenager in his parent's basement has no need for CYMK separation capability. Most printing plants prefer to do that themselves now; they know their own ink and press capabilities.
Car networks need a firewall between the entertainment and display systems and the vehicle control systems. You shouldn't be able to send anything from the entertainment bus and ports to brake, engine, and steering control.
This is going to get worse before it gets better. Vehicles with active roll control (a big win on top-heavy SUVs) have accelerometers and rate gyros tied into a complex algorithm with inputs into the engine and braking systems. Advanced cruise control systems have a radar tied in. Automatic parking systems have cameras. There's a lot going on in there, and it probably shouldn't be accessible from a cell phone.
Personally, I think vehicle control software should be stored in read-only memories. Real read-only, not flash. To change it, someone should have to go under the hood, break a seal, unbolt a ROM cartridge, and bolt in a new one. (That's how it worked in the 1980s.) And it should be possible to read out the MD5 of the ROM cartridge easily, and compare it with published lists in the maintenance documentation.
The laser could have been invented in the 1930's, and very nearly was!
There are many inventions that could have been made "earlier", but in most cases, either the theory or some other supporting technology wasn't there yet. Somebody actually built and patented a FET-like transistor in the 1920s, but it's not clear that it ever worked. Lacking both ultrapure crystals and underlying theory, the best they could have done back then was to build a flaky device that sometimes worked, like a "crystal radio" with a "cat's whisker" that had to be adjusted manually to find a good spot on a galena crystal.
Scanning tunneling microscopy could easily have been done in the early 1950s. That was closer to a failure of imagination, because an STM isn't that complicated; it's far simpler than an electron microscope.
Steam engines might have happened maybe 2000 years earlier. But steel and precision cannon-boring had to come first. Affordable steel production was a surprisingly late invention. It wasn't until 1876 (!) that the "basic Bessemer process" made steel a high-volume item.
Most of the 19th century ran on cast and wrought iron. Even boilers, which was Not A Good Thing.
Amusingly, the Technet blog entry has text marked as "Calibri" font, with no alternatives. Calibri is a Microsoft-only font that comes with Vista. So non-Vista systems render the text in Times Roman. Calibri is a sans-serif font, and all the other fonts in that Wordpress theme are sans-serif, so the page looks awful.
Now that font downloading works in essentially all the current browsers, that's not necessary, at least if you stick to public-domain fonts. However, there aren't many public-domain fonts that don't suck at small type sizes. (Here's a page of mine with some downloaded fonts.) If you have anti-aliasing on, it looks OK; if not, the text font looks ugly. Interestingly, Linux and Macs do anti-aliasing routinely, but older Windows systems do not.
Google Docs has the same problem. Currently, it works like classic HTML; if you have the font locally, you can use it, but if not, you get some default. The stock fonts in Google Docs are the lowest common denominator: "Normal", "Normal/Serif", "Courier New", "Trebuchet", and "Verdana".
If Google is going to make a big push on competing with Word, they need to do better than that. Google could make progress on this by buying twenty or so really good body fonts outright from a major font foundry, and setting them up for download on demand for Google Docs.
Are they trying to plug the leak, or are they really trying to salvage the bore there and get back to pumping oil?
They're trying to plug the leak. At the same time, there's another drilling platform nearby drilling another well,
which will be used to take the pressure off and get back to pumping oil. But that will take months.
Bear in mind that this is all going on a mile down. That's 160 atmospheres, and at that pressure, the water temperature is forced to 4C because that's the lowest density of water. Under those conditions, methane is a solid, and methane ice from escaping natural gas is clogging up the repair operation.
Once the hole is plugged, or at least slowed down, it takes about four months to four years for natural processes to dispose of the oil. The heavy components like asphalt sink; the light ones like gasoline evaporate off. Fishing and tourism might suffer for a while, but that's not a big deal.
Once you get past all the extra machinery, it's a 3-shaft planetary differential being driven by two electric motors on the input sides, and with one output shaft. The "control motor" is geared down, so that it appears that a smaller motor can be used as the control motor.
This appears to work because there's no significant load on the thing. The output end is a small hand crank. If the thing was connected to a load comparable to what the "power" motor could drive, it would become clear. Actually, it's rather lame that he has to drive the "control" motor. With better design, it would be running as a generator, and control would be exercised by loading the generator.
You can just use a brake on the "control" shaft to the differential and get much the same effect. The Model T Ford did that. And, of course, many hybrids have a 3-shaft differential system connecting the wheels, electric motor, and IC engine, often with some brakes
and clutches thrown in to keep the IC engine happy.
There are successful infinitely variable hydraulic transmissions. They're widely used on tractors, earthmovers, small locomotives, and other machines that need serious torque to get some big load moving. The
design has no frictional components, but has some inherent unbalance and gets noisy at high speed, so this is mostly a technology for the world of big, slow, heavy, but very powerful machines.
That article is worth a read. The elephant in the room is that real income per hour worked in the US peaked in 1973.
Real income per capita doubled from 1947 to 1973; it's only gone up 20% since then, and that gain is only because there are more two-income families and longer hours.
Think about that. All the progress since 1973, and there's no payoff. Nobody talks about that much. Until the 1970s, annual improvements in per-capital real median income were trumpeted in the press. Today, it's tough to find those numbers in Department of Labor tables.
Until the 1980s, the US had very few homeless people. Now that's accepted as normal.
There's an illusion that things are getting better, because one of the classic measures is whether income is increasing for an individual. Income increases with age, but today's thirtysomething makes less than the thirtysomething of twenty years ago.
So doing better with your life requires getting ahead of someone else. That's where a college education comes in. It's not so much the useful skills; it's a product differentiator for people.
Slashdot Mirror
Mainline kernel people are difficult to hire...
Well, what do you expect? Apple's kernel is a warmed over Next kernel, which is a warmed over Mach kernel, which is a warmed over BSD kernel. There's probably legacy code in there from the 1980s.
And that's the retail price.
A big problem with "cable TV" is that, even though the cable company has a box on the user's premises which they own and to which they can talk, they don't do network management that way. They're mostly still organized as if their systems were entirely one-way.
For decades, telcos have checked out their wire systems using Automatic Line Insulation Test gear. This runs some test voltages down the line and checks for shorts, opens, leakage to ground, etc. (This usually happens around 4 AM, at the time of maximum humidity, and some cheap phones produce a "bell tap" ding when a DC spike is sent down the line to check the insulation.) The cable companies, on the other hand, started with a completely one-way outside plant, and no institutional history of network management. Even though newer cable gear is two-way, it's mostly a kludge on a one-way system. Cable companies don't have the concept of automatically monitoring every piece of outside plant. They wait for customer complaints.
The newer cable hardware can at least talk to central control, but cable boxes don't seem to come with the kind of line quality monitoring that modern DSL interfaces do. It's not something that cable companies have demanded from cable box suppliers. Ask your cable company to read out your bit error rate and line levels remotely, and they'll say "Huh?"
Let's go through this guy's arguments.
Look. Spolsky runs a dinky little software development firm that sells a little project management program. And it's still a dinky little software development firm after a decade. It's not like this guy runs a company that does anything critical, like avionics software, or anything really big and tightly integrated like Facebook, or financially significant like Chase's banking system, or leading-edge robotics like Boston Dynamics, or cutting-edge manufacturing like HyperMill. No, they just do Windows and Mac desktop apps. That's trailing edge technology at this point.
Some of the better shops don't hesitate to rewrite. Some have systems which intercommunicate by message passing and are designed to be rewritten in sections. (Facebook, works that way internally.) The bigger shops may have one team on the new version and a maintenance team on the old one; a small firm may not be staffed for that.
yes you can :) You make a new bucket and copy all of the objects. The objects will copy on the server side.
OK. The example in the documentation shows a copy on the user side.
I wonder if Google Storage can be abused as a way to host phishing pages?
There's a phishing page that's been on Google Sites since February. Google is good about kicking off most phishing pages, but this one is different. Here's the phishing page as a web page. The actual hostile page (which is a bogus login page for Stickam) is on the "Click here to download your attachment". The actual url is http://2699962600425641406-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/stickamcomlogindo/login.html?attachauth=ANoY7cpc6fembideFQyYULstnVDU-XMkgwzNLFkUv77Suh8bUq_LGrFRQ-RtLkw6pEPJb5Vk0XW4JMbOVQtqT_R6CjNCh5N2r29quoFkE5Cq1XQXUFhuegVtr4kQUMN9T3dT3yO1q-FthiahDl45UqMmFfD6gKSYwQP4bsgVoM-N5cQN0hHRvDZskuvmTdy0lqnQqUhmKFYP&attredirects=0. That's probably a page in Google Storage.
This raises the question of whether Google should be running hostile-code checks on publicly-accessible Google Storage pages.
After reading through the API, if anything, it's too simple. You can't copy a bucket without reading it from Google's servers and writing it back, which is far slower than a copy carried out within their high-speed network. The "list" capability isn't well documented. The security model is about as dumb as the UNIX/Linux one; it doesn't have capabilities or anything like that. Bucket transactions are themselves atomic, but there are no user-specified atomic transactions. You can't, for example, rename "current" to "old" and "new" to "current" as an atomic transaction. (That's a normal operation in SQL, and a useful one when you've constructed a new copy of a mostly-static table and want to make it live.) Nor do buckets have version management. There's no way to read replication status; although bucket data is supposedly replicated, when does this happen? Right after uploading a bucket, or some time later?
This looks more like Microsoft giving up than going for world domination. A few years ago, Microsoft had a presence at robotics conventions, pushing the thing. That shrank, then disappeared.
A basic problem is that Microsoft Robotics Studio is built on Microsoft Web Services, which is not exactly the tool you want for real-time operation. It has a simple-minded visual programming environment. There's little (any?) vision support. There's little, if any, machine learning. It's really only about two notches above Lego Mindstorms, and way below stuff like DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles or Boston Dynamics' robots.
If you want to see more cutting edge stuff, download Willow Robotics code. They're working hard on vision and making real progress.
Hobbyist robotics needs a major quality upgrade. People are still building '80s type robots. By now, any serious robot should have a vision system and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). Any robot with a laptop, or one of the fancier cell phones, on board has enough compute power for that. But Microsoft Robotics Studio won't take you there.
Now I see why the Amazon Cloud people have been so insistent on people in Hacker Dojo's machine learning class run problems on their "cloud".
This stuff is actually fairly routine by now. It's much the same technology that's behind spam filters.
Firefox has a real problem in the plug-in space. They're deprecating the old API, and the new "JetPack" API isn't fully implemented yet, let alone deployed. That's a killer mistake. When there's a hiatus like that, developers leave and go do something else. This can kill a technology.
"Web3D" was a good example of that class of disaster. "Web3D" was supposed to be VRML in XML syntax. There was a long hiatus between the official deprecation of VRML and the first X3D tools, during which almost everybody went away. X3D now works, but nobody cares.
If a "newsletter" needs help to get through a spam filter, it's spam. If you want to distribute updates to real "subscribers", use an RSS feed. The user then has total control over their subscription. But most "newsletter" spammers don't want that.
IronPort used to play both sides of the street back in 2002. They sold rackmount "spam filter" boxes, and they also sold, er, "email delivery appliances". These included mechanisms for using hundreds of different IP addresses, to avoid triggering spam filters. IronPort was also behind "Bonded Spammer", a scheme where they paid ISPs to whitelist their spam. They even bought SpamCop and built Bonded Spammer into it.
Cisco finally bought IronPort, and they got out of the spamming business. Bonded Spammer lives on as ReturnPath. If you have anything to do with mail processing, it's worth understanding how to identify ReturnPath email (the IP address is tagged in DNS) so it can be moved to the "bulk" folder. If you use SpamAssassin, it comes with a big negative value for ReturnPath emails to get them through filters. Change that to +2 or so; if somebody paid to use ReturnPath, they're a bulk sender.
The fanboys claimed that they didn't want all of that.
That goes a long way back. For the original Mac, the fanboys were saying "The Mac has resolution; it doesn't need color." (IBM had color. Sun had color. Apple was strictly black and white. Not even greyscale in the early models. Fortunately for Apple, they had Susan Kare, who made the Mac interface look good under those limitations.)
slap in the face to these hard working people who for the most part just want to be left the hell alone.
And collect checks from the Federal Government.
Most of the states from which you hear the most noise about "government encroachment" and "getting rid of Government" get more in Federal expenditures than they pay in taxes. Montana, from which you hear lots of whining, gets $1.47 back for every $1 they pay in taxes. Alaska gets $1.84; they're pigging out on Federal tax money. New Mexico is the biggest pig of all, at $2.03. And those "liberal" states? They pull their own weight. New York only gets back $0.79 for every dollar they pay in taxes. California gets even less, $0.78. Massachusetts gets $0.82.
Texas gets $0.94, so they're paying their way, but not by much.
On the English Wikipedia, this was an issue, and it was dealt with through Wikipedia's usual mechanisms. Someone ran a program to make a list of images actually used in Wikipedia. Others went down that list, and put most of those images through "deletion review". Each one was voted on; most of them were restored. Images that nobody asked to have restored remain deleted. Essentially all the historical images were restored. Some of the junkier stuff was voted off the island. That all took place within a few days, and wasn't particularly contentious. On Wikipedia, this is now a closed issue. On Commons, which is administered by different people, there's still a discussion going on.
Understand that you can upload images separately to Wikipedia or to the Wikimedia Commons. If you upload an image to Wikipedia, and it's not currently used in an article, it will be automatically deleted after a few weeks. So if others delete the image link in the article, and it stays deleted, after a while, the image file is deleted too. Commons, though, has a policy that "by custom the uploading of small numbers of images for use on a personal Commons user page is allowed." Some people try to use Commons as if it were Flickr, and if they don't overdo it, that's tolerated. A few people uploaded their porn collection. That seems to be the cause of the difficulty.
Complicating this is a system which automatically moves images that have been on the English Wikipedia for a while to Commons, changes the links to point to the copy on Commons, and deletes the copy on Wikipedia. This is intended to make images available to all the other language versions of Wikipedia, rather than having a separate copy for each language version. The assumption has been that nothing that went through that move would ever be deleted from Commons. When some images moved via that process were deleted, many Wikipedia editors were very bothered. Automatic movement of images to Commons was shut down for a while. There isn't a way to determine if an image on Commons is used on any wiki (there's a way for each wiki, but no global backlink search.). So automatically separating single-user personal stuff from images used in real articles is not currently implemented. I suspect that will be fixed.
On the governance side, it was pointed out that Wales isn't the head of the Wikimedia foundation any more. He's just a member of the board of directors. If he wanted to do this through the board, he can call a board meeting and try to get them to pass a resolution to change policy. He didn't take that route. As others pointed out, if anybody else did what Wales did, they'd be blocked. The general consensus is that Wales was out of line. Wales gave up some privileges, and the issue isn't even active in the dispute resolution system.
All in all, this was well handled. Wikipedia has had far worse disputes.
Slavery is the antithesis of America. Slaves are neither free, nor can they improve their situation through hard work.
Just think of it as "lifetime employment security".
The US no longer needs slavery. We have homelessness instead. Fear of the whip has been replaced by fear of the street.
Imagine, if you can't download Windows, Photoshop or MS Office anymore.
The problem is buying a machine without Windows or MS Office, not downloading it.
Photoshop Elements ($79) is enough for most people. Really, the typical teenager in his parent's basement has no need for CYMK separation capability. Most printing plants prefer to do that themselves now; they know their own ink and press capabilities.
Car networks need a firewall between the entertainment and display systems and the vehicle control systems. You shouldn't be able to send anything from the entertainment bus and ports to brake, engine, and steering control.
This is going to get worse before it gets better. Vehicles with active roll control (a big win on top-heavy SUVs) have accelerometers and rate gyros tied into a complex algorithm with inputs into the engine and braking systems. Advanced cruise control systems have a radar tied in. Automatic parking systems have cameras. There's a lot going on in there, and it probably shouldn't be accessible from a cell phone.
Personally, I think vehicle control software should be stored in read-only memories. Real read-only, not flash. To change it, someone should have to go under the hood, break a seal, unbolt a ROM cartridge, and bolt in a new one. (That's how it worked in the 1980s.) And it should be possible to read out the MD5 of the ROM cartridge easily, and compare it with published lists in the maintenance documentation.
The laser could have been invented in the 1930's, and very nearly was!
There are many inventions that could have been made "earlier", but in most cases, either the theory or some other supporting technology wasn't there yet. Somebody actually built and patented a FET-like transistor in the 1920s, but it's not clear that it ever worked. Lacking both ultrapure crystals and underlying theory, the best they could have done back then was to build a flaky device that sometimes worked, like a "crystal radio" with a "cat's whisker" that had to be adjusted manually to find a good spot on a galena crystal.
Scanning tunneling microscopy could easily have been done in the early 1950s. That was closer to a failure of imagination, because an STM isn't that complicated; it's far simpler than an electron microscope.
Steam engines might have happened maybe 2000 years earlier. But steel and precision cannon-boring had to come first. Affordable steel production was a surprisingly late invention. It wasn't until 1876 (!) that the "basic Bessemer process" made steel a high-volume item. Most of the 19th century ran on cast and wrought iron. Even boilers, which was Not A Good Thing.
It would be more interesting if rms@gnu.org was added to the CC list.
But not more enlightening. I've met Stallman.
Amusingly, the Technet blog entry has text marked as "Calibri" font, with no alternatives. Calibri is a Microsoft-only font that comes with Vista. So non-Vista systems render the text in Times Roman. Calibri is a sans-serif font, and all the other fonts in that Wordpress theme are sans-serif, so the page looks awful.
Now that font downloading works in essentially all the current browsers, that's not necessary, at least if you stick to public-domain fonts. However, there aren't many public-domain fonts that don't suck at small type sizes. (Here's a page of mine with some downloaded fonts.) If you have anti-aliasing on, it looks OK; if not, the text font looks ugly. Interestingly, Linux and Macs do anti-aliasing routinely, but older Windows systems do not.
Google Docs has the same problem. Currently, it works like classic HTML; if you have the font locally, you can use it, but if not, you get some default. The stock fonts in Google Docs are the lowest common denominator: "Normal", "Normal/Serif", "Courier New", "Trebuchet", and "Verdana". If Google is going to make a big push on competing with Word, they need to do better than that. Google could make progress on this by buying twenty or so really good body fonts outright from a major font foundry, and setting them up for download on demand for Google Docs.
Are they trying to plug the leak, or are they really trying to salvage the bore there and get back to pumping oil?
They're trying to plug the leak. At the same time, there's another drilling platform nearby drilling another well, which will be used to take the pressure off and get back to pumping oil. But that will take months.
Bear in mind that this is all going on a mile down. That's 160 atmospheres, and at that pressure, the water temperature is forced to 4C because that's the lowest density of water. Under those conditions, methane is a solid, and methane ice from escaping natural gas is clogging up the repair operation.
Once the hole is plugged, or at least slowed down, it takes about four months to four years for natural processes to dispose of the oil. The heavy components like asphalt sink; the light ones like gasoline evaporate off. Fishing and tourism might suffer for a while, but that's not a big deal.
Once you get past all the extra machinery, it's a 3-shaft planetary differential being driven by two electric motors on the input sides, and with one output shaft. The "control motor" is geared down, so that it appears that a smaller motor can be used as the control motor.
This appears to work because there's no significant load on the thing. The output end is a small hand crank. If the thing was connected to a load comparable to what the "power" motor could drive, it would become clear. Actually, it's rather lame that he has to drive the "control" motor. With better design, it would be running as a generator, and control would be exercised by loading the generator.
You can just use a brake on the "control" shaft to the differential and get much the same effect. The Model T Ford did that. And, of course, many hybrids have a 3-shaft differential system connecting the wheels, electric motor, and IC engine, often with some brakes and clutches thrown in to keep the IC engine happy.
There are successful infinitely variable hydraulic transmissions. They're widely used on tractors, earthmovers, small locomotives, and other machines that need serious torque to get some big load moving. The design has no frictional components, but has some inherent unbalance and gets noisy at high speed, so this is mostly a technology for the world of big, slow, heavy, but very powerful machines.
That article is worth a read. The elephant in the room is that real income per hour worked in the US peaked in 1973. Real income per capita doubled from 1947 to 1973; it's only gone up 20% since then, and that gain is only because there are more two-income families and longer hours.
Think about that. All the progress since 1973, and there's no payoff. Nobody talks about that much. Until the 1970s, annual improvements in per-capital real median income were trumpeted in the press. Today, it's tough to find those numbers in Department of Labor tables.
Until the 1980s, the US had very few homeless people. Now that's accepted as normal.
There's an illusion that things are getting better, because one of the classic measures is whether income is increasing for an individual. Income increases with age, but today's thirtysomething makes less than the thirtysomething of twenty years ago.
So doing better with your life requires getting ahead of someone else. That's where a college education comes in. It's not so much the useful skills; it's a product differentiator for people.