Tornado in a Can, industrial version
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There's an industrial version installed at a University of Maryland agricultural test facility.
This is basically a high-powered cyclone dryer. Cyclone dryers have been around for decades, but they're not usually run at power levels high enough to get grinding effects.
Remember those L. Ron Hubbard billboards? "Ten Bestsellers - and More to Come!" that appeared after he was dead? Scientology put those up during that weird period when it wasn't clear whether Hubbard was dead or not.
It's a hideously inefficient method of distributing a rather modest volume of material. The music industry only generates a few tens of megabytes per day of new content, expressed as MP3 files. If it were legal, it would be minor traffic in the USENET binary groups. Even as cacheable HTTP traffic, the server load would be minimal.
Instead, horrendously inefficient "file sharing" systems are chewing up vast amounts of bandwidth.
It might pay for some Internet or computer company to buy out the music industry, just to get the overhead down.
The entire music industry is considerably smaller than Compaq was, after all. At one point, Red Hat had a much bigger market cap than the entire music industry.
Frankly, we can appreciate the
intention of the Court based on the submissions and understand the basis for
it. We think, Your Honor, however, that in a few minutes this morning we
can convince you that the more appropriate path is to follow a rule or an
outline of the rule in Rule 3 3 that basically says that because the issues
involved in this discovery involve a complex interplay between facts and
law, that instead of granting the motion, what the Court should simply do is
put the motion on hold until very specific discovery has been identified and
produced and then make a ruling. And before I address this -- [judge interrupts] yes, Your
Honor?
THE COURT:
No.
What I was going to say, Mr. McBride, is that in reviewing
all the submissions and reviewing the pertinent case law, it appears to me
that what is happening is somewhat circular in that defendant indicates that
it cannot answer plaintiff's interrogatories until plaintiff has identified
the source codes, et cetera, but the manner in which those have been
submitted make it, I believe, unduly burdensome on the defendants and so we
go 'round and 'round.
And I find also that it appears to me that if there's
any argument to be made on the failure to confer under Rule 37 that -- that
there has been a good faith effort to comply, but that because we can't get
off the ground because of this circular problem, that I would not find that
a sufficient basis for, you know, further postponing.
There are hours of argument you can read through, in which SCO proposes novel legal theories under which they don't have to specifically identify infringing material. The judge doesn't buy this at all.
I suspect that SCO will not produce specific infringing material in thirty days. That will lead to an appeal from the magistrate judge to the district judge. Then it gets complicated. SCO may try to litigate their concept of discovery at the appeals court level before proceeding to trial. That's usually not allowed, but there are exceptions to that rule and some of what SCO's lawyers are saying hint that they may try to go in that direction.
Fundamentally, once SCO's novel theory of vague infringement gets knocked down, it's all over for them. So we'll see all sorts of maneuvering to keep it alive. But so far, they lost the first round.
Does this provide a way of packing large amounts of energy into an arbitrarily small space? That's always useful for pushing the limits of physics.
Supposedly, if you were able to create a powerful enough light beam, the gravitational attraction of the photons would, over a sufficient distance, narrow the beam down to near-zero diameter. Is this progress in that direction?
Shares of SCO Group, the company challenging the popular Linux movement, fell sharply Monday after the company lost a court motion Friday and postponed its earnings report.
After trading as low as $15.10 intraday Monday, SCO shares closed down $1.32, or 8%, at $15.27.
Two events from Friday were feeding the selloff. First, SCO lost a motion asking IBM for source code. The court also ruled SCO must provide the code relevant to the case to IBM within the next 30 days.
SCO shares closed down $1.32, or 8%, at $15.27....
Secondly, SCO on Friday postponed its fourth-quarter earnings report, initially scheduled for Monday...
It worked, too. See SCO's chart. The stock dropped about 10-15% in moderately heavy Tuesday and Wednesday trading, but has since bounced back by about half that much.
McMurdo experienced a three-day storm just a few days ago. Forty people were trapped overnight at the airport. Two people had to be rescued with a tracked vehicle. The search and rescue team had to find two more people stuck out by the runway. They're plowing and digging out. "We'll be feeling this for another four or five weeks," fleet operations supervisor Crist said. "Some of it for the rest of the season."
That's what was going on when this bozo landed.
This gives EU mail services a competitive edge
on
UK Spam Law Goes Live
·
· Score: 1
There's no reason your mailbox can't be in another country, after all. Maintaining a mailbox in the EU may have some value, if the EU goes in for aggressive spam prosecutions.
This may provide the political leverage to toughen up US spam laws. If EU ISPs (like Virgin.net") start advertising in the US, that would put pressure on Congress.
That's one of the better stories about SCO to appear in the financial press this week. They totally ignore SCO's hype and concentrate on real transactions.
It's not like it's rocket science. Mostly I just used Google.
I did look in US trademarks. One page claimed "Asta Design" and "SeafishNET" were registered trademarks.
They're not. Nor is either business registered as a Florida corporation. Nor are they in Dun and Bradstreet.
There are many ways to trace businesses. When you put a credit card number in, a transaction record pops out at your bank. That lets you follow the money. Any site that accepts credit cards can be tracked in this way.
The documents and information on this Web site are copyrighted materials of SeafishNET, Asta Designs and its information providers....
"SeafishNET" and the SeafishNET logo are registered trademarks of SeafishNET.
SeafishNET
360 NE 49 St.
Oakland Park, Florida 33334 USA
(954) 351-7961
seafish1@ix.netcom.com
Same address and zip code, but in Oakland Park,
a Ft. Lauderdale neighborhood. Now we have a phone number. Google gives us
Charles Fish, (954) 351-7961, 360 NE 49th St, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33334
Checking the satellite imagery,
that's a tract house backing up to a six-lane highway. It's not a mailbox service.
Since we're talking about felony computer intrusion here, that's the address to give the cops. This may or may not be the intruder, but they probably know who it is.
The surprising thing about all this is the stock price. SCO is locked in a legal battle with IBM, isn't doing well, and is being sued by others. That's not a good position to be in.
Yet SCOX is still hovering around $16.
Volume is low; yesterday's news doesn't seem to have induced much trading.
That Motley Fool article is the first article about Monday's court rulings on SCO to be listed as "news" in the financial world. Still, SCOX is up today.
That article ends:
More and more, SCO Group is like the mouse that roared. PR only goes so far. You have to back up with substance. The SCO Group has 30 days.
I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful. - Jobs
Microsoft has been reasonably successful in forcing a subscription model on their customers, in the form of "Software Assurance". So has the cable TV industry. If you have a monopoly, you can do it.
There's been a last-minute change in the bill. The version passed by the Senate and approved by the House was to take effect 120 days after enactment.
A last-minute change makes the bill effective January 1, 2004. This prevents California's tough anti-spam law from being in effect for over three months.
Outsourcing is only temporary. From there, it gets worse.
The companies that handle the outsourcing soon reach the point where they don't need the US company any more. That happened in consumer electronics and appliances years ago, and it's happening in apparel. If it can be sold through Wal-Mart, there's no need for a US company to be involved
in manufacturing or distribution. Branding problems can be fixed with advertising, acquisition, or pressure. Some well-known US brands are already just fronts for offshore operations.
In service areas, if the service can be delivered over the Internet or by phone, it can be moved offshore. Right now, most of the companies doing this are fronted by US companies. But those companies become hollowed out, until they're just brands.
Next, the intellectual property moves offshore.
This has already happened in consumer electronics and is happening in semiconductors. No US company can make a CD-ROM drive without licensing technology from Asian companies.
Finally, the money moves offshore.
The US could end up with Third World income levels as a result of this race to the bottom. Don't think it can happen? Twenty years ago, nobody though there would be armies of permanently homeless people in US cities. Or that Argentina would become a poor country. Or that Britain would become poorer than Italy.
In the US, average real weekly earnings peaked in 1973. That's why your parents are better off than you are.
The US tried that in the 1950s. Atlas ICBMs were deployed from 1969 to 1965, but those missiles were replaced with solid fuel ICBMs as soon as it was possible to do so. Atlas boosters are still used as launchers, but their ICBM career was short.
Cyrogenic ICBMs are first-strike weapons. It takes so long to prep and fuel them that they're useless as a retaliation weapon. The opposition's ICBMs will land on your silos first. Keeping a cyrogenic system at a high state of readiness for years on end is difficult.
The Cuban missile crisis is sometimes said to have occured because the US put cyrogenic ICBMs in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union. That looked like the US was planning a first strike on Moscow. The Soviet Union had to respond to that threat.
(Decades later, interviews with the Soviet officials who made that decision revealed that most of them didn't look at it that way, but that's another issue. The communication-by-strategic-threat thing never worked as some of the gurus of deterrence thought it did. The most famous example of such miscommunication was that Kennedy's advisers thought the Soviet missile base in Cuba was deliberately laid out just like the ones in Russia so that the US would recognize it as a threat.
Years later, the Red Army colonel in charge of
building the base was asked about this, and said
"No, we just did it that way because that's what the field manual said to do." All the military personnel present nodded in understanding.)
Focus on SCO's theft of the work of thousands of people.
Use words like "theft", and "stolen".
Keep mentioning that SCO did not write Linux and has only the limited rights to it given them by the General Public License. Those rights don't include converting it to a proprietary product.
What SCO is doing used to be called "conversion" in law, but is now just called theft. Conversion is the "unauthorized exercise of dominion, by one person over the property of another, in a manner inconsistent with his rights of possession." Borrowing or renting something and then reselling it is conversion.
A few years ago, McDonalds made a big deal about moving to robotics in their outlets. But other than drink dispensing, not much seems to have been deployed.
AMF built a hard-automation hamburger stand in the 1960s. It had huge capacity but was inflexible. The test location was outside some big industrial plant where most of the day's business was in a single half hour period.
Airline meals are sometimes assembled on conveyor lines by industrial robots.
Slashdot Mirror
This is basically a high-powered cyclone dryer. Cyclone dryers have been around for decades, but they're not usually run at power levels high enough to get grinding effects.
Remember those L. Ron Hubbard billboards? "Ten Bestsellers - and More to Come!" that appeared after he was dead? Scientology put those up during that weird period when it wasn't clear whether Hubbard was dead or not.
Instead, horrendously inefficient "file sharing" systems are chewing up vast amounts of bandwidth.
It might pay for some Internet or computer company to buy out the music industry, just to get the overhead down. The entire music industry is considerably smaller than Compaq was, after all. At one point, Red Hat had a much bigger market cap than the entire music industry.
Thank you, Your Honor.
Frankly, we can appreciate the intention of the Court based on the submissions and understand the basis for it. We think, Your Honor, however, that in a few minutes this morning we can convince you that the more appropriate path is to follow a rule or an outline of the rule in Rule 3 3 that basically says that because the issues involved in this discovery involve a complex interplay between facts and law, that instead of granting the motion, what the Court should simply do is put the motion on hold until very specific discovery has been identified and produced and then make a ruling. And before I address this -- [judge interrupts] yes, Your Honor?
THE COURT:
No.
What I was going to say, Mr. McBride, is that in reviewing all the submissions and reviewing the pertinent case law, it appears to me that what is happening is somewhat circular in that defendant indicates that it cannot answer plaintiff's interrogatories until plaintiff has identified the source codes, et cetera, but the manner in which those have been submitted make it, I believe, unduly burdensome on the defendants and so we go 'round and 'round.
And I find also that it appears to me that if there's any argument to be made on the failure to confer under Rule 37 that -- that there has been a good faith effort to comply, but that because we can't get off the ground because of this circular problem, that I would not find that a sufficient basis for, you know, further postponing.
There are hours of argument you can read through, in which SCO proposes novel legal theories under which they don't have to specifically identify infringing material. The judge doesn't buy this at all.
I suspect that SCO will not produce specific infringing material in thirty days. That will lead to an appeal from the magistrate judge to the district judge. Then it gets complicated. SCO may try to litigate their concept of discovery at the appeals court level before proceeding to trial. That's usually not allowed, but there are exceptions to that rule and some of what SCO's lawyers are saying hint that they may try to go in that direction.
Fundamentally, once SCO's novel theory of vague infringement gets knocked down, it's all over for them. So we'll see all sorts of maneuvering to keep it alive. But so far, they lost the first round.
Supposedly, if you were able to create a powerful enough light beam, the gravitational attraction of the photons would, over a sufficient distance, narrow the beam down to near-zero diameter. Is this progress in that direction?
After trading as low as $15.10 intraday Monday, SCO shares closed down $1.32, or 8%, at $15.27.
Two events from Friday were feeding the selloff. First, SCO lost a motion asking IBM for source code. The court also ruled SCO must provide the code relevant to the case to IBM within the next 30 days. SCO shares closed down $1.32, or 8%, at $15.27. ...
Secondly, SCO on Friday postponed its fourth-quarter earnings report, initially scheduled for Monday ...
It worked, too. See SCO's chart. The stock dropped about 10-15% in moderately heavy Tuesday and Wednesday trading, but has since bounced back by about half that much.
That's what was going on when this bozo landed.
This may provide the political leverage to toughen up US spam laws. If EU ISPs (like Virgin.net") start advertising in the US, that would put pressure on Congress.
Now, science fiction can go on to something else.
(And what are we getting? "Battlestar Galactia, the Next Generation")
Bloomberg hasn't picked this up yet. Bloomberg is slipping. Yahoo Finance doesn't have it yet either.
This is an unusual investment for a bank. It's a pure speculative play. Their management is probably kicking themselves for buying in at the top.
And Jim Clark is still rich.
We need much longer holding periods for insiders, as Buffett (Warren, not Jimmy) used to point out.
I did look in US trademarks. One page claimed "Asta Design" and "SeafishNET" were registered trademarks. They're not. Nor is either business registered as a Florida corporation. Nor are they in Dun and Bradstreet.
There are many ways to trace businesses. When you put a credit card number in, a transaction record pops out at your bank. That lets you follow the money. Any site that accepts credit cards can be tracked in this way.
I have one, I've used it for years, it's been refurbished once, and it works fine.
Realistically, though, I can't see getting into 35mm film at this late date. Larger formats, maybe.
The spam contains ads for the "Asta Design Group", which has been widely spamvertized. A bit of searching turns up this address:
360 NE 49 St
Fort Lauderdale, Florida USA 33334
E-mail: seafish1@ix.netcom.com
Another lead gives us
SeafishNET
360 NE 49 St.
Oakland Park, Florida 33334 USA
(954) 351-7961
seafish1@ix.netcom.com
Same address and zip code, but in Oakland Park, a Ft. Lauderdale neighborhood. Now we have a phone number. Google gives us
Checking the satellite imagery, that's a tract house backing up to a six-lane highway. It's not a mailbox service.
Since we're talking about felony computer intrusion here, that's the address to give the cops. This may or may not be the intruder, but they probably know who it is.
The surprising thing about all this is the stock price. SCO is locked in a legal battle with IBM, isn't doing well, and is being sued by others. That's not a good position to be in. Yet SCOX is still hovering around $16. Volume is low; yesterday's news doesn't seem to have induced much trading.
Where? Kuro5hin's search engine is broken.
That article ends:
A good pithy line from the Fool.
Microsoft has been reasonably successful in forcing a subscription model on their customers, in the form of "Software Assurance". So has the cable TV industry. If you have a monopoly, you can do it.
There's been a last-minute change in the bill. The version passed by the Senate and approved by the House was to take effect 120 days after enactment. A last-minute change makes the bill effective January 1, 2004. This prevents California's tough anti-spam law from being in effect for over three months.
We covered this. Spam becomes legal 120 days after this is signed, even in states where it wasn't legal before.
Actually building a secure server - now that would be innovation.
The companies that handle the outsourcing soon reach the point where they don't need the US company any more. That happened in consumer electronics and appliances years ago, and it's happening in apparel. If it can be sold through Wal-Mart, there's no need for a US company to be involved in manufacturing or distribution. Branding problems can be fixed with advertising, acquisition, or pressure. Some well-known US brands are already just fronts for offshore operations.
In service areas, if the service can be delivered over the Internet or by phone, it can be moved offshore. Right now, most of the companies doing this are fronted by US companies. But those companies become hollowed out, until they're just brands.
Next, the intellectual property moves offshore. This has already happened in consumer electronics and is happening in semiconductors. No US company can make a CD-ROM drive without licensing technology from Asian companies.
Finally, the money moves offshore.
The US could end up with Third World income levels as a result of this race to the bottom. Don't think it can happen? Twenty years ago, nobody though there would be armies of permanently homeless people in US cities. Or that Argentina would become a poor country. Or that Britain would become poorer than Italy.
In the US, average real weekly earnings peaked in 1973. That's why your parents are better off than you are.
Cyrogenic ICBMs are first-strike weapons. It takes so long to prep and fuel them that they're useless as a retaliation weapon. The opposition's ICBMs will land on your silos first. Keeping a cyrogenic system at a high state of readiness for years on end is difficult.
The Cuban missile crisis is sometimes said to have occured because the US put cyrogenic ICBMs in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union. That looked like the US was planning a first strike on Moscow. The Soviet Union had to respond to that threat.
(Decades later, interviews with the Soviet officials who made that decision revealed that most of them didn't look at it that way, but that's another issue. The communication-by-strategic-threat thing never worked as some of the gurus of deterrence thought it did. The most famous example of such miscommunication was that Kennedy's advisers thought the Soviet missile base in Cuba was deliberately laid out just like the ones in Russia so that the US would recognize it as a threat. Years later, the Red Army colonel in charge of building the base was asked about this, and said "No, we just did it that way because that's what the field manual said to do." All the military personnel present nodded in understanding.)
So it's a launcher, not an ICBM.
Focus on SCO's theft of the work of thousands of people. Use words like "theft", and "stolen". Keep mentioning that SCO did not write Linux and has only the limited rights to it given them by the General Public License. Those rights don't include converting it to a proprietary product.
What SCO is doing used to be called "conversion" in law, but is now just called theft. Conversion is the "unauthorized exercise of dominion, by one person over the property of another, in a manner inconsistent with his rights of possession." Borrowing or renting something and then reselling it is conversion.
AMF built a hard-automation hamburger stand in the 1960s. It had huge capacity but was inflexible. The test location was outside some big industrial plant where most of the day's business was in a single half hour period.
Airline meals are sometimes assembled on conveyor lines by industrial robots.
But illegal immigrants are so cheap.