The most amazing twist to this story is that if the US had delayed its fallout survaillance program by just a few months, the Cold War would have been delayed by years -- until the Soviets tested their next device.
Or the USSR could have built up a stockpile and wiped us out.
The USSR eventually produced over 40,000 nuclear weapons. (The US peaked out around 30,000.) Both sides are now down to around 10,000, which is probably about two orders of magnitude overkill.
The USSR also way overproduced plutonium. Plutonium production continued at the maximum rate years after bomb production declined. (The USSR always had trouble balancing production and consumption.) There's tons of the stuff in storage.
Magneforming is a routine industrial operation. Because it produces a true radially symmetrical squeezing force, it's often used for operations that involve compressing a tube around something. I first saw it used in making hydraulic valve bobbins. These have a machined metal core with "piston rings" compressed around key areas.
Magneforming is just another less-common metalworking techniques. Others include hydroforming, water jet cutting, spinning, and blowing.
For $9.99 I can buy 10-song downloads by unknown bands that mostly suck. 40% cheaper than the RIAA. Wow.
And they don't even offer thirty second previews or an "internet radio" stream so you can find out if any of this stuff is any good.
They also ask for a credit card number without disclosing their business name and address, which is a criminal offense in California. They don't even give a business address in any obvious place on their site. But their lawyers are in California, so they have enough of a California connection to be subject to California law.
If (when) they go out of business, getting your unused "lunch card" credits back will probably be difficult.
The tipoff that this isn't going to happen is that AOL execs are talking about Microsoft paying cash and taking on AOL's debt. This for money-losing AOL. Microsoft doesn't do dumb deals like that.
A Microsoft deal would look more like this:
AOL is spun off as a separate company.
MSN buys AOL's broadband user base at a low price.
MSN licenses some of Warner's better content.
AOL continues in its traditional role as a dial-up ISP.
AOL pays off some of its debt but eventually goes bankrupt.
It only works for Israel because Israel is tiny and homogeneous.
First, Israel has essentially no domestic air travel.
Second, most of the people who want to go to Israel are Jews, which Israel doesn't worry about too much.
(Maybe they should. Prime Minister Rabin was killed by a Jewish law student. They have homegrown right-wing nuts too.)
Thus, the number of people who have to be checked intensively isn't that large.
Microsoft Outlook, the world's leading virus distribution engine.
The Bush Administration's "soft on spamcrime" stance. The CAN-SPAM act legalized spam. Without it, Pfizer would be defending suits on Viagra spam every day, under California's "blame the beneficiary" spam law. ("And you shipped how many truckloads of Viagra to an Internet pharmacy in Coral Gables, Florida? After you'd been informed they were spamming?")
Solve those two problems, and trouble will decline to a manageable level.
As a temporary measure, I suggest that a command be added to the POP protocol to say "I want to receive MIME e-mail." The default is "off". ISPs should be required to implement this on pain of being considered grossly negligent. Clients that ask for MIME e-mail must be virus-resistant, on pain of being considered grossly negligent.
All old systems thus revert to text E-mail during the transition.
In "Idoru", the heroine carries around an "icon dictionary" titled "What Things Are". There are days when you need that.
There used to be a Mac program which found every unique icon on the machine and displayed them all on one screen. Terrifying.
Re:Do you hear the Trademark lawyers running?
on
The ROBOlympic Games
·
· Score: 1
They're going to have to change the name. The USOC has been
successfully cracking down on "Olympic" competitions
for decades now. "Asian Olympics" lost. "Youth Olympiad" lost. "Gay Olympics" lost. "Musical Olympiad" lost. "Olympic Games of the Silent / Deaf Olympics" lost.
It's potentially possible to cut a deal with the USOC, as the "Special Olympics" people did. But even that took years of negotiations.
(h) Disclosure of information to governmental entity pursuant to
court order
A governmental entity may obtain personally identifiable
information concerning a cable subscriber pursuant to a court order
only if, in the court proceeding relevant to such court order -
(1) such entity offers clear and convincing evidence that the
subject of the information is reasonably suspected of engaging in
criminal activity and that the information sought would be
material evidence in the case; and
(2) the subject of the information is afforded the opportunity
to appear and contest such entity's claim.
This is stronger than the laws on wiretapping.
This applies to both cable TV and "other services" provided by a cable TV operator.
If the cable operator owns its own ISP, then that ISP may also be subject to these restrictions.
This business of adding TLDs is stupid. Look at the results of the last addition..BIZ is where spammers live. Few sites in.INFO are worth attention. Almost nobody uses ".MUSEUM".
The number of domain registrations is dropping steadily as the worthless registrations from the speculation boom expire.
Pressure for new TLDs comes from registrars, especially Network Solutions, who see their once-loated revenue declining. All they want is to force real companies and trademark holders to re-register in each TLD.
As a business decision, it now looks dangerous to buy an SCO-licensed product. Where's your protection if SCO goes under? Do you have source code? Do you have source code escrow? Do you have insurance against vendor bankruptcy?
It's a very real issue. Misery is being dependent on software from a failed vendor.
Many years ago, in 1972, I modelled a UI after the displays in "2001". This was a 24x80 text display on a TV showing the status of a mainframe computer.
The upper half of the screen showed constantly updated status information. Ever few seconds, the lower half of the screen switched to a new screen,
alternating between a memory map, a job list, status messages, and requested operator input. High priority messages would immediately preempt the lower half of the screen.
This was a big hit. People would stand outside the glass computer room wall to watch. It was self-explanatory enough that people could follow it
effectively.
I was just out back of PAIX, the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, Silicon Valley's major Internet switching and peering point. It's hot today, and the fan noise was loud enough to make conversation in the parking lot difficult.
UCLA Locus, a "grid computing" UNIX variant from the 1980s, had this. Basic file semantics were atomic:
When a file was opened for writing, the system created a new file, which shared all the pages of the original file but was set up for copy-on-write.
When the file was closed normally, the new file replaced the old file as an atomic operation.
If the program exited abnormally, the new file was discarded.
A program could explicitly call "commit" to commit the changes to a file as an atomic operation, or call "revert" to take the file back to its original state.
Thus, if a program failed, its changes to files were automatically backed out.
This is usually what you want to happen.
The cases when you don't want that are few.
Either you have a log file, to which you append only, or you have a true random-access database.
Those take some special handling. But other than simple text log files, only a modest number of programs need such special handling.
UCLA Locus was way ahead of its time. Linux needs file semantics like that.
If you want fault tolerance, you'd have to have a timeout mechanism for all device drivers.
QNX has that. Because everything is done by message passing, including I/O and networking, and you can time out waits for messages, you can time out of anything. This is essential in the real-time world, where being stuck waiting for something is unacceptable.
The QNX syntax is Posix-compatible. You can call TimerTimeout before any system call or message pass, and if the timer runs out before the call finishes, the call returns with errno=ETIMEDOUT.
It's also possible to force an exit from any system call that blocks via a signal, if necessary.
About the author:
DEAN MACRI is a staff technical marketing engineer in the Software and Solutions Group at Intel.
This guy is not a game developer. He's an Intel marketeer.
Notice what he talks about: Hyperthreading and Intel instruction set extensions. There's no discussion of the graphics subsystem, programmable shader pipelines, multipass rendering, lighting, Z-buffering, or texture memory - the things that concern graphics programmers for games today, and things that Intel doesn't do very well.
If you can't afford Photoshop, get Photoshop Elements, the "lite" version. It's only $99.
That's what I use. Unless you need CYMK separations, it probably has more features than you need.
Or use one of the zillion lousy photo-editing applications that come bundled with cameras, scanners, printers, etc. There's probably one on your machine already, force-installed by some driver installation.
While the eBay ad seems fake, there's a realtor who specializes in missile bases. They're not even that expensive, compared to houses in Silicon Valley. Prices range from $133K ("Underground structures flooded") to a 210-acre Titan-F site for $1.45M.
Some have already been converted to housing ("Spacious marble bath complex, with high ceilings, heavy beams and red cedar 1100 gallon tiled hot tub"). All need some work. Often quite a bit of work.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the USSR could have built up a stockpile and wiped us out.
The USSR eventually produced over 40,000 nuclear weapons. (The US peaked out around 30,000.) Both sides are now down to around 10,000, which is probably about two orders of magnitude overkill.
The USSR also way overproduced plutonium. Plutonium production continued at the maximum rate years after bomb production declined. (The USSR always had trouble balancing production and consumption.) There's tons of the stuff in storage.
Magneforming is just another less-common metalworking techniques. Others include hydroforming, water jet cutting, spinning, and blowing.
And they don't even offer thirty second previews or an "internet radio" stream so you can find out if any of this stuff is any good.
They also ask for a credit card number without disclosing their business name and address, which is a criminal offense in California. They don't even give a business address in any obvious place on their site. But their lawyers are in California, so they have enough of a California connection to be subject to California law.
If (when) they go out of business, getting your unused "lunch card" credits back will probably be difficult.
A Microsoft deal would look more like this:
First, Israel has essentially no domestic air travel.
Second, most of the people who want to go to Israel are Jews, which Israel doesn't worry about too much. (Maybe they should. Prime Minister Rabin was killed by a Jewish law student. They have homegrown right-wing nuts too.)
Thus, the number of people who have to be checked intensively isn't that large.
Solve those two problems, and trouble will decline to a manageable level.
As a temporary measure, I suggest that a command be added to the POP protocol to say "I want to receive MIME e-mail." The default is "off". ISPs should be required to implement this on pain of being considered grossly negligent. Clients that ask for MIME e-mail must be virus-resistant, on pain of being considered grossly negligent. All old systems thus revert to text E-mail during the transition.
I have DSL but no cable, but then I'm not into TV.
There used to be a Mac program which found every unique icon on the machine and displayed them all on one screen. Terrifying.
It's potentially possible to cut a deal with the USOC, as the "Special Olympics" people did. But even that took years of negotiations.
I thought "Independence Day" was a remake of "War of the Worlds".
This, of course, is becase when the Cable TV Privacy Act was written, the only subscriber-generated information was what they were watching.
A governmental entity may obtain personally identifiable information concerning a cable subscriber pursuant to a court order only if, in the court proceeding relevant to such court order -
(1) such entity offers clear and convincing evidence that the subject of the information is reasonably suspected of engaging in criminal activity and that the information sought would be material evidence in the case; and
(2) the subject of the information is afforded the opportunity to appear and contest such entity's claim.This is stronger than the laws on wiretapping. This applies to both cable TV and "other services" provided by a cable TV operator.
If the cable operator owns its own ISP, then that ISP may also be subject to these restrictions.
The number of domain registrations is dropping steadily as the worthless registrations from the speculation boom expire. Pressure for new TLDs comes from registrars, especially Network Solutions, who see their once-loated revenue declining. All they want is to force real companies and trademark holders to re-register in each TLD.
It's not broken. Leave it alone.
If open source programmers had artist girlfriends with any real talent, this wouldn't be a problem.
It's a very real issue. Misery is being dependent on software from a failed vendor.
Look at SCO's stock chart. The stock has dropped from 19 to 8.75 in the last three months, and it's dropping almost every day now.
What a junky mess.
This was a big hit. People would stand outside the glass computer room wall to watch. It was self-explanatory enough that people could follow it effectively.
And you thought you had noise problems.
They've discovered gigabit Ethernet! Wow!
If someone has a report of a legged robot that can run on rough terrain, I need to know about it.
UCLA Locus, a "grid computing" UNIX variant from the 1980s, had this. Basic file semantics were atomic:
Thus, if a program failed, its changes to files were automatically backed out. This is usually what you want to happen.
The cases when you don't want that are few. Either you have a log file, to which you append only, or you have a true random-access database. Those take some special handling. But other than simple text log files, only a modest number of programs need such special handling.
UCLA Locus was way ahead of its time. Linux needs file semantics like that.
QNX has that. Because everything is done by message passing, including I/O and networking, and you can time out waits for messages, you can time out of anything. This is essential in the real-time world, where being stuck waiting for something is unacceptable.
The QNX syntax is Posix-compatible. You can call TimerTimeout before any system call or message pass, and if the timer runs out before the call finishes, the call returns with errno=ETIMEDOUT.
It's also possible to force an exit from any system call that blocks via a signal, if necessary.
This guy is not a game developer. He's an Intel marketeer.
Notice what he talks about: Hyperthreading and Intel instruction set extensions. There's no discussion of the graphics subsystem, programmable shader pipelines, multipass rendering, lighting, Z-buffering, or texture memory - the things that concern graphics programmers for games today, and things that Intel doesn't do very well.
Or use one of the zillion lousy photo-editing applications that come bundled with cameras, scanners, printers, etc. There's probably one on your machine already, force-installed by some driver installation.
Some have already been converted to housing ("Spacious marble bath complex, with high ceilings, heavy beams and red cedar 1100 gallon tiled hot tub"). All need some work. Often quite a bit of work.
They're all in the middle of nowhere.