Does anyone here read Stephen Baxter? In his Xeelee Sequence (spread across several books), EVERY LIVING THING IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE is killed, some of them TWICE (time travel is involved). Some folks in OTHER universes, as well ("Raft")
The Xeelee Starbreaker is a pretty impressive weapon, too - a small handgun that destroys stars!
Prior to movable-type printing, books (other than those central to organized religon, such as the Bible) were essentially unavailable and thus irrelevant to those outside of scholarly circles. To those WITHIN the literate classes (which were at that time NOT inclusive of the wealthy, for the most part), the practices of marginalia and commentary provided a valuble means of somewhat-interactive expression.
Why do you think that there are "controls" on existing encylopedias? They are the products of companies and organizations who are seeking profits and/or the propagation of their own memes. The review process, if any, is not open to the general public or even to a wide selection of experts in the appropriate fields. Opposing viewpoints are often not sought out or represented in the articles. Are we supposed to trust them just because they are are printed on dead trees with gilt edges and genuine-fake-leather covers?
When books were hand-transcribed, the scribes added their own "marginalia" to clarify, endorse, expand, or object to the views of the original author. This practice was lost with the advent of printing (perhaps the only real downside to printing). Books became a "top down", one way communication medium with an implied promise of "if it's in print, it must be true".
This type of elitism has lead to the virtually unopposed spread of untruths ranging from the trivial (dates and details of events that are widely accepted, but demonstrably false by recourse to primary sources) to the tragic (the use of falsified history and anthropology to justify genocide).
In the case of Nupedia, the articles are at least offered for online peer review. Contribute your services - help MAKE it accurate.
My response to ABC: I found Mr. Moody's article on the referenced page to be not merely misleading, but actually offensive to many if not most of the persons who are well acquainted with the underlying facts of the issues it addresses. I am unsure whether Mr. Moody is deliberately trying to mislead his readers or whether he himself is misled. To use these raw "bug counts" to make his point ignores the central fact that Linux is created and maintained by a community of volunteer nit-picking perfectionists who revel in the temporary glory of having found an error in someone else's code. In contrast, Microsoft is a secretive profit-centered business with corporate policies that, apparently, regulate the publication of known vulnerabilities by its employees. In addition, Mr. Moody's summary of the data was misleading about exactly what software was affected by the reported bugs, as I am certain other readers have pointed out.
The world you describe has NOTHING in common with the life of engineers and computer scientists in the US. Technical professionals are so-called "exempt" workers and are not protected by wage and hour laws. Contracts are also rarely encountered in these professions.
If done on purpose, it's absolutely slimey. MSIE5 has a pretty good workaround built-in though - just right click on the back button and select a site from the drop-down list.
There are multiple reasons this won't occur: 1. The Pu fuel is (probably - I don't actually know this as a fact about Galileo specifically) in the oxide form, not metallic, and therefore less reactive 2. The fuel for these things is normally in a VERY tough metal container designed to withstand re-entry into Earth's atmosphere 3. Bad movies notwithstanding, nuclear reactors can go very wrong (i.e. Chernobyl), but they do not produce full-on fission explosions 4. By "fire" if you mean normal combustion, no way. Jupiter's atmosphere is full of stuff that would burn in OUR atmosphere (it is a "reducing" gas mixture) but THERE, there's little or no free oxygen to burn it with. If you mean to initiate fusion, the pressures and initial temperatures reached would be too low to allow fusion to become a self-sustaining process within Jupiter. 5. The recent cometary impact delivered FAR more energy into Jupiter's atmosphere than even the most powerful nuclear weapons.
Let's not lose sight of the real goal here: that.DOC will become a quaint historical curiousity as Open Source file formats become the standard! Do your part by NEVER using MS's proprietary file formats. Even if you use MS at work, save your files as.RTF and advise your less-hip coworkers to do so as well. (I would say save as.HTM, except that Word produces EXTREMELY ugly HTML).
Raman amplification should not be confused with EDFA's (Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers). EDFA's use relatively short lengths of fiber ( 100M) doped with the rare earth element Erbium. These VERY expensive specialty fibers are contained entirely within the head-end equipment driving the fiber and in the repeaters along the way. Raman amplification uses non-linearities and energy soakage effects of the long lengths of ordinary "outside plant" fibers to create optical gain. This works at least to some degree on all common single-mode fibers (the type used for long-distance transmission). The effect has been known for some time, but there were difficuties (apparently resolved by Bell Labs) in using this method in high-density systems. TrueWave is not, by the way, an experimental fiber. There is a fairly large installed base of this class of fibers (Non Zero Dispersion Shifted).
The CO2 output of these devices, from a global standpoint, is completely insignificant. One medium-sized forest fire would release more CO2 in a day than millions of these fuel cells running for decades. Here's the seat o' the pants math: They say the methanol containers are similar to fountain pen cartridges, so assume about 10g of methanol each. Methanol and cellulose (wood) produce roughly similar quantities of CO2 per unit mass when burned. So, if, say a BILLION people worldwide (everybody that has or is likely to have soon a cell phone or laptop) are using one of these a DAY (worst case), each, thats 1E10 grams (10 million kg or 10000 metric tons) of fuel consumed. A typical medium-sized tree might weigh 10 tons. So: it's equivalent to a forest fire burning 1000 trees/ day (pretty piddly by forest fire standards). These are rough numbers, but it's the inability or unwillingness to do this kind of guesstimate that makes so many people gullible believers in unfounded statements like the previous post.
Actually, the earliest detective story is considerably earlier: the Apocryphal (or Deuterocanonical, depending on your viewpoint) Bible book "Daniel, Bel, and the Dragon" is a set of three stories in which Daniel solves three crimes in ancient Babylon. He employed relatively sophisticated investigative and interviewing techniques, including the use of flour dusted on a temple floor to trace the footprints of the priests of Bel, who embezzled sacrificial offerings.
A lot of things are MUCH more or less toxic to some animals than others. Dogs, for example, can eat half-rotten meat that would kill a human, but can be poisoned by chocolate or even baby formula!!! (synthetic galactose - they can't metabolize it properly... Owls are very resistant to cyanide but sensitive to DDT (which is actually not very toxic to humans, despite its reputation. SO, our notional superbugs may very well have their own non-obvious weakness (plain old oxygen, most likely...)
Can't say about 1. or 2., but the law is very clear on 3. : A patent gives the holder ( or licensee) an exclusive right to "make or use the invention" - there is no exception for freebies. Of course, this case was based on trade secret disclosure, not patent infringement. With only a very few exceptions (mostly nuclear/ defense tech), patents are NOT secret - they are public documents and may be freely reproduced and transmitted.
I would still have to go with Gutenberg (would Bach's influence have spread so widely without printed scores?). I noticed the top 100 list also contained Beethoven and Mozart - great composers, surely, but neither had the influence on the deep structure of music that Bach did.
If anything they will just use Double$peak. They could release source only for the same code they document now for developers and hype their "New Open Source Windows 2002!!!" while key aspects of security and interoperability features are quietly kept closed. I wouldn't bet on any right to make your own mods, either - there will probably be the usual unilateral license "agreement" that you invoke by just looking at the code.
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Does anyone here read Stephen Baxter? In his Xeelee Sequence (spread across several books), EVERY LIVING THING IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE is killed, some of them TWICE (time travel is involved). Some folks in OTHER universes, as well ("Raft") The Xeelee Starbreaker is a pretty impressive weapon, too - a small handgun that destroys stars!
When books were hand-transcribed, the scribes added their own "marginalia" to clarify, endorse, expand, or object to the views of the original author. This practice was lost with the advent of printing (perhaps the only real downside to printing). Books became a "top down", one way communication medium with an implied promise of "if it's in print, it must be true".
This type of elitism has lead to the virtually unopposed spread of untruths ranging from the trivial (dates and details of events that are widely accepted, but demonstrably false by recourse to primary sources) to the tragic (the use of falsified history and anthropology to justify genocide).
In the case of Nupedia, the articles are at least offered for online peer review. Contribute your services - help MAKE it accurate.
My response to ABC: I found Mr. Moody's article on the referenced page to be not merely misleading, but actually offensive to many if not most of the persons who are well acquainted with the underlying facts of the issues it addresses. I am unsure whether Mr. Moody is deliberately trying to mislead his readers or whether he himself is misled. To use these raw "bug counts" to make his point ignores the central fact that Linux is created and maintained by a community of volunteer nit-picking perfectionists who revel in the temporary glory of having found an error in someone else's code. In contrast, Microsoft is a secretive profit-centered business with corporate policies that, apparently, regulate the publication of known vulnerabilities by its employees. In addition, Mr. Moody's summary of the data was misleading about exactly what software was affected by the reported bugs, as I am certain other readers have pointed out.
The world you describe has NOTHING in common with the life of engineers and computer scientists in the US.
Technical professionals are so-called "exempt" workers and are not protected by wage and hour laws. Contracts are also rarely encountered in these professions.
If done on purpose, it's absolutely slimey. MSIE5 has a pretty good workaround built-in though - just right click on the back button and select a site from the drop-down list.
There are multiple reasons this won't occur:
1. The Pu fuel is (probably - I don't actually know this as a fact about Galileo specifically) in the oxide form, not metallic, and therefore less reactive
2. The fuel for these things is normally in a VERY tough metal container designed to withstand re-entry into Earth's atmosphere
3. Bad movies notwithstanding, nuclear reactors can go very wrong (i.e. Chernobyl), but they do not produce full-on fission explosions
4. By "fire" if you mean normal combustion, no way. Jupiter's atmosphere is full of stuff that would burn in OUR atmosphere (it is a "reducing" gas mixture) but THERE, there's little or no free oxygen to burn it with. If you mean to initiate fusion, the pressures and initial temperatures reached would be too low to allow fusion to become a self-sustaining process within Jupiter.
5. The recent cometary impact delivered FAR more energy into Jupiter's atmosphere than even the most powerful nuclear weapons.
Let's not lose sight of the real goal here: that .DOC will become a quaint historical curiousity as Open Source file formats become the standard! Do your part by NEVER using MS's proprietary file formats. Even if you use MS at work, save your files as .RTF and advise your less-hip coworkers to do so as well. (I would say save as .HTM, except that Word produces EXTREMELY ugly HTML).
Raman amplification should not be confused with EDFA's (Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers). EDFA's use relatively short lengths of fiber ( 100M) doped with the rare earth element Erbium. These VERY expensive specialty fibers are contained entirely within the head-end equipment driving the fiber and in the repeaters along the way.
Raman amplification uses non-linearities and energy soakage effects of the long lengths of ordinary "outside plant" fibers to create optical gain. This works at least to some degree on all common single-mode fibers (the type used for long-distance transmission). The effect has been known for some time, but there were difficuties (apparently resolved by Bell Labs) in using this method in high-density systems.
TrueWave is not, by the way, an experimental fiber. There is a fairly large installed base of this class of fibers (Non Zero Dispersion Shifted).
The CO2 output of these devices, from a global standpoint, is completely insignificant. One medium-sized forest fire would release more CO2 in a day than millions of these fuel cells running for decades.
Here's the seat o' the pants math: They say the methanol containers are similar to fountain pen cartridges, so assume about 10g of methanol each. Methanol and cellulose (wood) produce roughly similar quantities of CO2 per unit mass when burned. So, if, say a BILLION people worldwide (everybody that has or is likely to have soon a cell phone or laptop) are using one of these a DAY (worst case), each, thats 1E10 grams (10 million kg or 10000 metric tons) of fuel consumed. A typical medium-sized tree might weigh 10 tons. So: it's equivalent to a forest fire burning 1000 trees/ day (pretty piddly by forest fire standards). These are rough numbers, but it's the inability or unwillingness to do this kind of guesstimate that makes so many people gullible believers in unfounded statements like the previous post.
From now on, let's all just refer to computer criminals as "journalists".
Actually, the earliest detective story is considerably earlier: the Apocryphal (or Deuterocanonical, depending on your viewpoint) Bible book "Daniel, Bel, and the Dragon" is a set of three stories in which Daniel solves three crimes in ancient Babylon. He employed relatively sophisticated investigative and interviewing techniques, including the use of flour dusted on a temple floor to trace the footprints of the priests of Bel, who embezzled sacrificial offerings.
A lot of things are MUCH more or less toxic to some animals than others. Dogs, for example, can eat half-rotten meat that would kill a human, but can be poisoned by chocolate or even baby formula!!! (synthetic galactose - they can't metabolize it properly... Owls are very resistant to cyanide but sensitive to DDT (which is actually not very toxic to humans, despite its reputation. SO, our notional superbugs may very well have their own non-obvious weakness (plain old oxygen, most likely...)
Good Intentions are, apparently, durable and resistant to temperature extremes...
Can't say about 1. or 2., but the law is very clear on 3. :
A patent gives the holder ( or licensee) an exclusive right to "make or use the invention" - there is no exception for freebies.
Of course, this case was based on trade secret disclosure, not patent infringement. With only a very few exceptions (mostly nuclear/ defense tech), patents are NOT secret - they are public documents and may be freely reproduced and transmitted.
Aww, shoot... Maybe next time...
I'm glad that someone remembers those of us using Lynx, Palmscape, AvantGo, etc....
First post??
I would still have to go with Gutenberg (would Bach's influence have spread so widely without printed scores?). I noticed the top 100 list also contained Beethoven and Mozart - great composers, surely, but neither had the influence on the deep structure of music that Bach did.
If anything they will just use Double$peak. They could release source only for the same code they document now for developers and hype their "New Open Source Windows 2002!!!" while key aspects of security and interoperability features are quietly kept closed.
I wouldn't bet on any right to make your own mods, either - there will probably be the usual unilateral license "agreement" that you invoke by just looking at the code.