You need to read up on the history of UNIX. Until the 4.4-lite release, there NEVER was a "free" UNIX distribution. It ALWAYS had required a license. The big draw for universitys, was that the source code license for educational institutions was increadibly inexpensive, when compared to other commercial OSs.
And just what protection does the GPL offer in this scenario? If V1 of a program is released under GPL, what's to stop the original author from making V2 propritary? If you're the end user, you're faced with making a choice between sticking with V1 and perhaps enhancing it yourself, or agreeing to the authors new terms.
You seem to ignore the counter-example to your argument, OpenSSH. A program that was originally released under a BSDish license, was switched to a more restrictive license by the author. Others have taken the BSD licensed code and enhanced it to the point where is is arguably superior to the commercial version, while retaining the BSDish license.
While a third person might take the OpenSSH code and create another version, who cares? Unless it were so superiour to the previous implementations of the SSH protocol that no-one would consider using anything else, development on the others would continue.
Nice idea, too bad it doesn't work. All the noise would do is put an upper limit on the covert channel's bandwidth. The only way this method could work perfectly, is to return purely random values for any resource reported. (i.e. time(), etc.)
What you have to do in this case, is determine just how much bandwidth you'll accept for a covert channel. 1-bit/second? 1-bit/hour? If it has to be zero, you need an air gap.
Re:I doubt any system could be approved before 201
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
You sound like an idiot, claiming the DNC and the NAACP but not the RNC want a flawed voting system.
The biggest flaw in your logic is that you seem to equate an automated system with security. The fact is that any automated system can be tampered with, if you are allowed physical access to the equipment. The history of "machine" politics gives plenty of examples. Computerized systems could be reprogrammed to alter votes however one would like, and (in theory) erase evidence of the rogue code. Mechanical systems can simply arrive in "hostile" districts DOA. Other weaknesses are legion.
(Go visit the RISKS archives and get an education on the subject.)
To be blunt, paper ballots, either punched or marked, is probably the most secure and reliable voting system available. As long as the ballots are physically available, the voters can vote the way they want. And, it leaves a physical record for later examination, which an automated system would not.
Now, what's going on in Florida does show that there needs to be some work done on usability standards for paper ballots. Some people have been whining that if people are too stupid to know which hole to punch, we shouldn't care how they've voted. Given the number of invalidated ballots from both this and previous elections I suspect that a major problem might simply be that the vision of the elderly voters has degraded to the point where they couldn't see the correct place to punch, no matter how lucid they might be.
Here's a proposal: Standarize the size of every entry on the ballot AND the relative location of the spot to mark/punch. This would allow voters to use a common "guide", with a window to highlight a single entry, with a smaller notch for those requiring a yes/no decision, and a single hole for marking/punching.
I agree, voting should take place on more than one day. Keep the polls open later, too. That would reduce problems with the polls closing while people are still in line waiting to vote.
But be honest, if it were Al Gore who was ahead by a few hundred votes, wouldn't the republicans be making exactly the same challenges?
Too bad Eric's own "ethically challenged" behaviour hurt his case, as far as the judge was concerned. If you read the order, the judge points to the blocking of portions of the website at CRC's direction (to boost sales), and Eric's request to CRC that full access to the site to be restored, as evidence that CRC was in control.
If Eric hadn't gotten greedy, and hobbled his site in order to boost book sales, he might have been in a better postion to argue that he intended to retain the rights to his work.
Congratulations. You've just proved that suspension bridges and contruction cranes are impossible.
If you don't want to look like as big an idiot as the other catastrophists, you might try looking for weaknesses in your theorys before posting them.
For example, yes, a human arm would fatigue quickly if held out horizontally. However, the Golden Gate bridge (suspension) opened in 1937, and has yet to collapse from fatigue. Neither has the Firth of Forth bridge (Cantilever) which was finished in 1890. Could it be that the human arm is a bad model for the operation of a sauropod neck? Try this for a experiment. Try holding both arms out to your sides, with your hands elevated just slightly above your shoulders. Notice how quickly they tire. After you've rested, repeat the experiment, while stretching a piece of rope between your hands. Notice how your arm muscles are only needed to keep your arms straight, while the weight of your arm is now supported by the rope, counterbalanced by the weight of your other arm.
BTW, besides the catastrophists, just who thinks that a body builders arm is comparable to a sauropod's neck? Certainly no one with a background in Mech E.
And from a few dozen base-pairs, too.
Oh well, what can you expect from writers who posit an intelligent race who seed neighboring worlds with life, and then set up an alarm system that will kill their new neigbors, if they happen to knock instead of searching for the door bell...
"Days of runtime on a Cray" doesn't really tell that much. The Cray is a finicky beast. If your problem doesn't suit the machines architecture (i.e. vector operations), the performance isn't all that spectacular.
If you had access to the relevant specs, you could manufacture your own, at least in theory. Without mass production techniques, it would be much more expensive.
There's an interesting question in it's own right:
Are there any laws (of specific interest to me, in the USA) against maufacturing writable DVD's without the preburnt sector?
Sir, you do have a machiavellian streak. While I do tend to share that attitude, I doubt that this is really in their plans. Do you really think the top execs at Nokia would risk releasing a truely broken product in an attempt to make Linux look bad? Do you really think they want to wake up the morning after the product gets released, just to hear on the news that hundreds of new web pages have sprung up, saying not only that Nokia's product is broken, but also how to fix it?
Oh well, I'll probably wipe it, juat like I do anything with Windows, and load OpenBSD on it. Just think, I'd have the world's most secure DVR.
Ov course I just loved this bit from their Mediascreen web page:
the platform is Linux, the sole truly open operating system which can
incidentally be downloaded by anybody from the Internet.
I guess the BSD license is just too verbose and restrictive for them to comprehend. Oh well, I guess I can't expect much better from their Marketing Weasels, at least they managed to spell "Linux" correctly.
Also, wouldn't you be able to recover some of the energy cost when you bring the elevator back down (regenerative braking)?
Exactly right. It's the same principal as counterweights in ordinary elevators. Or the Cablecars in San Francisco. The counterweight balances the weight of the car, so all the motor really has to do is lift the passengers. In a space elevator, the energy from braking the cars going down, helps provide the power to lift the cars going up.
Also, how about the energy generation possibilities of a vary long cable moving through a magnetic field...
Unfortuantly, (IIRC) the cable wouldn't be moving that much in respect to the magnetic field.
Err, go back and read it again. Nobody said GEO was 50km high. The idea is that stucture that attaches the cable to the earth would be a 50km tower. GEO is about a thousand times higher.
Also, materials science has progressed somewhat since Clark and Sheffield wrote their books. The fullerene nanotubes seem to have the needed properties. At least in terms of tensile strength.
On one hand, Niven's Ringworld was built of "Scrith", which apparently someone calculated would need to have a tensile strength on the order of the force that hold an atomic nucleus together.
But, remember, Ringworld was built around a star and (IIRC) had a radius on the order of 100 million miles.
On the other hand, Clark's doesn't rotate, but simply sits in GEO, so it wouldn't need to be nearly so strong. It's main purpose would be to connect the multiple towers together and provide additional stability to the towers. The towers connection to the planet, would in turn prevent the a Ringworld style instability.
On the gripping hand, you'd probably want something somewhere between the two. If you build the ring a little ways outside of GEO, you would have a small amount of artificial gravity produced. It would be small, depending on how far out you built, but it would help keep junk from just floating about in mid-air. Multiple rings could provide different levels of gravity to suit different needs.
Yep, you'd drop no matter what. Required orbital velocity for all orbits below GEO is greater than the velocity you'd have by virtue of the Earth's
rotation.
Close but not quite right. At GEO you'd have enough velocity for a circular orbit. Below that point you'd fall into an eliptical orbit. The key question is, how far up the cable do you have to be for that orbit to remain above the atmosphere? Unfortuanatly, my relevant references are at home, so I can't do the math right now.
Not having details of that particular test at hand, I can think of two possible reasons:
1. The satellite was in a known, stable, orbit and didn't need to be actively tracked, except for the terminal interception.
2. It was a "Sargent York" demo. (i.e. Someone decided that the missle was "near enough" to the target and triggered a self destruct device in the satellite itself.)
Evolution is fundamentally racist. Take, for example, when the first explorers went from England to Australia. They discovered the Aboriginal people and, very quickly, classed them as non-human---or at the very best a less-developed version of mankind.
Odd isn't it, how evolution can be to blame for events that took place before the theory was even published?
How much would you care to wager, that those explorers you talk about, were not atheistic believers of evolution, but instead were god fearing, bible carrying Christians? Just like those involved in the African slave trade? And most, if not all of the leaders in Nazi Germany? (In his younger days, Hitler was a member of the German Christian Social Movement, whose leaders held much the same racist and anti-semetic views that pervaded the Nazi movment.)
It's a sad fact that bigots will use anything, from the bible to evolution, to support their belief in their own superiority over anyone else. For different perspective try this link: http://www.onthenet.com. au/~stear/cg_science_of_racism.htm
I have to agree. Use the best tool for the job. If you're using Solaris and Oracle, use tools that are designed to work with them. For instance, (IIRC) Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) can run on all the nodes in the cluster at once. This gives you more bang for the buck while all the nodes are operating, and fault tolerance when one fails.
If your company depends on having that database available, your management needs to ask themselves if they can afford be effectively closed, while your HA software decides that your master node really is down and starts to recover on the other node?
If you try to roll your own solution based on Free/Open Source tools, be ready to spend a lot of time thinking about what might go wrong. (e.g. What happens when a failed node recovers? Do you leave the currently running node as the master, or do you migrate back? How do you migrate the required filesystems? How do you make sure the recovering node doesn't try to run fsck on a filesystem the other node is actively using?)
Just ask youself, or your management, if you really want to be alpha testing some home grown HA software on your production servers?
Unfortunatly, the "Constitution Party" looks to be just another group of religious extreamists looking to turn the US into a theocracy.
A quick look through their platform finds they claim the country was founded "under god", and they thank their "lord, Jesus Christ". Also, the claim our contry is based on "biblical law". There goes the First Amendment, except for their freedom to practice their religion. I'd guess they'd be selective about which biblical laws they endorse, too. For instance, do their candidates follow all the biblical dietary laws?
They oppose Roe-vs-Wade, so the 9th and 10th amendments get a selective reading as well.
That's as far as I got, before my disgust overpowered morbid fascination.
No, not the whole earth, just the interesting parts.:-)
Really, the radar they're using to map the terrain can only image the areas the shuttles orbit carrys it over. From the launch site at KSC, they can't reach high inclination orbits. From the now mothballed facility at Vandeberg, they could have reached covered most of the earths surface.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to read up on the history of UNIX. Until the 4.4-lite release, there NEVER was a "free" UNIX distribution. It ALWAYS had required a license. The big draw for universitys, was that the source code license for educational institutions was increadibly inexpensive, when compared to other commercial OSs.
And just what protection does the GPL offer in this scenario? If V1 of a program is released under GPL, what's to stop the original author from making V2 propritary? If you're the end user, you're faced with making a choice between sticking with V1 and perhaps enhancing it yourself, or agreeing to the authors new terms.
You seem to ignore the counter-example to your argument, OpenSSH. A program that was originally released under a BSDish license, was switched to a more restrictive license by the author. Others have taken the BSD licensed code and enhanced it to the point where is is arguably superior to the commercial version, while retaining the BSDish license.
While a third person might take the OpenSSH code and create another version, who cares? Unless it were so superiour to the previous implementations of the SSH protocol that no-one would consider using anything else, development on the others would continue.
Nice idea, too bad it doesn't work. All the noise would do is put an upper limit on the covert channel's bandwidth. The only way this method could work perfectly, is to return purely random values for any resource reported. (i.e. time(), etc.)
What you have to do in this case, is determine just how much bandwidth you'll accept for a covert channel. 1-bit/second? 1-bit/hour? If it has to be zero, you need an air gap.
You sound like an idiot, claiming the DNC and the NAACP but not the RNC want a flawed voting system.
The biggest flaw in your logic is that you seem to equate an automated system with security. The fact is that any automated system can be tampered with, if you are allowed physical access to the equipment. The history of "machine" politics gives plenty of examples. Computerized systems could be reprogrammed to alter votes however one would like, and (in theory) erase evidence of the rogue code. Mechanical systems can simply arrive in "hostile" districts DOA. Other weaknesses are legion.
(Go visit the RISKS archives and get an education on the subject.)
To be blunt, paper ballots, either punched or marked, is probably the most secure and reliable voting system available. As long as the ballots are physically available, the voters can vote the way they want. And, it leaves a physical record for later examination, which an automated system would not.
Now, what's going on in Florida does show that there needs to be some work done on usability standards for paper ballots. Some people have been whining that if people are too stupid to know which hole to punch, we shouldn't care how they've voted. Given the number of invalidated ballots from both this and previous elections I suspect that a major problem might simply be that the vision of the elderly voters has degraded to the point where they couldn't see the correct place to punch, no matter how lucid they might be.
Here's a proposal: Standarize the size of every entry on the ballot AND the relative location of the spot to mark/punch. This would allow voters to use a common "guide", with a window to highlight a single entry, with a smaller notch for those requiring a yes/no decision, and a single hole for marking/punching.
I agree, voting should take place on more than one day. Keep the polls open later, too. That would reduce problems with the polls closing while people are still in line waiting to vote.
But be honest, if it were Al Gore who was ahead by a few hundred votes, wouldn't the republicans be making exactly the same challenges?
It's an HTML problem. The author used a "soft" hyphen () instead of a "hard" hyphen.
Too bad Eric's own "ethically challenged" behaviour hurt his case, as far as the judge was concerned. If you read the order, the judge points to the blocking of portions of the website at CRC's direction (to boost sales), and Eric's request to CRC that full access to the site to be restored, as evidence that CRC was in control.
If Eric hadn't gotten greedy, and hobbled his site in order to boost book sales, he might have been in a better postion to argue that he intended to retain the rights to his work.
Congratulations. You've just proved that suspension bridges and contruction cranes are impossible.
If you don't want to look like as big an idiot as the other catastrophists, you might try looking for weaknesses in your theorys before posting them.
For example, yes, a human arm would fatigue quickly if held out horizontally. However, the Golden Gate bridge (suspension) opened in 1937, and has yet to collapse from fatigue. Neither has the Firth of Forth bridge (Cantilever) which was finished in 1890. Could it be that the human arm is a bad model for the operation of a sauropod neck? Try this for a experiment. Try holding both arms out to your sides, with your hands elevated just slightly above your shoulders. Notice how quickly they tire. After you've rested, repeat the experiment, while stretching a piece of rope between your hands. Notice how your arm muscles are only needed to keep your arms straight, while the weight of your arm is now supported by the rope, counterbalanced by the weight of your other arm.
BTW, besides the catastrophists, just who thinks that a body builders arm is comparable to a sauropod's neck? Certainly no one with a background in Mech E.
Try tendon, not muscle, along the top. Much closer to the suspension bridge cable in you analogy.
And from a few dozen base-pairs, too. Oh well, what can you expect from writers who posit an intelligent race who seed neighboring worlds with life, and then set up an alarm system that will kill their new neigbors, if they happen to knock instead of searching for the door bell...
"Days of runtime on a Cray" doesn't really tell that much. The Cray is a finicky beast. If your problem doesn't suit the machines architecture (i.e. vector operations), the performance isn't all that spectacular.
If you had access to the relevant specs, you could manufacture your own, at least in theory. Without mass production techniques, it would be much more expensive.
There's an interesting question in it's own right:
Are there any laws (of specific interest to me, in the USA) against maufacturing writable DVD's without the preburnt sector?
Hmmm, both the MPAA and RIAA are made up of individual member companies. I really should go back and read the RICO statutes, again...
Oh well, I'll probably wipe it, juat like I do anything with Windows, and load OpenBSD on it. Just think, I'd have the world's most secure DVR.
I guess the BSD license is just too verbose and restrictive for them to comprehend. Oh well, I guess I can't expect much better from their Marketing Weasels, at least they managed to spell "Linux" correctly.
Unfortuantly, (IIRC) the cable wouldn't be moving that much in respect to the magnetic field.
4. Vent it in the direction of the enemy, to scatter the beam.
Err, go back and read it again. Nobody said GEO was 50km high. The idea is that stucture that attaches the cable to the earth would be a 50km tower. GEO is about a thousand times higher.
Also, materials science has progressed somewhat since Clark and Sheffield wrote their books. The fullerene nanotubes seem to have the needed properties. At least in terms of tensile strength.
On one hand, Niven's Ringworld was built of "Scrith", which apparently someone calculated would need to have a tensile strength on the order of the force that hold an atomic nucleus together. But, remember, Ringworld was built around a star and (IIRC) had a radius on the order of 100 million miles.
On the other hand, Clark's doesn't rotate, but simply sits in GEO, so it wouldn't need to be nearly so strong. It's main purpose would be to connect the multiple towers together and provide additional stability to the towers. The towers connection to the planet, would in turn prevent the a Ringworld style instability.
On the gripping hand, you'd probably want something somewhere between the two. If you build the ring a little ways outside of GEO, you would have a small amount of artificial gravity produced. It would be small, depending on how far out you built, but it would help keep junk from just floating about in mid-air. Multiple rings could provide different levels of gravity to suit different needs.
Not having details of that particular test at hand, I can think of two possible reasons:
1. The satellite was in a known, stable, orbit and didn't need to be actively tracked, except for the terminal interception.
2. It was a "Sargent York" demo. (i.e. Someone decided that the missle was "near enough" to the target and triggered a self destruct device in the satellite itself.)
Perhaps because there is no way of verifying that the "tool" that's been verified is actually the tool that's been deployed?
Perhaps because there is no independent oversight of how the tool is configured or altered after the "review"?
Did you ever think that the reason for the delay in finding someone to review the code, is to give them time to sanitize the source code?
Then try changing your user info a couple of times.
I've never purchased anything from Amazon. And right now, I'm happy I haven't.
Odd isn't it, how evolution can be to blame for events that took place before the theory was even published?
How much would you care to wager, that those explorers you talk about, were not atheistic believers of evolution, but instead were god fearing, bible carrying Christians? Just like those involved in the African slave trade? And most, if not all of the leaders in Nazi Germany? (In his younger days, Hitler was a member of the German Christian Social Movement, whose leaders held much the same racist and anti-semetic views that pervaded the Nazi movment.)
It's a sad fact that bigots will use anything, from the bible to evolution, to support their belief in their own superiority over anyone else. For different perspective try this link: http://www.onthenet.com. au/~stear/cg_science_of_racism.htm
If your company depends on having that database available, your management needs to ask themselves if they can afford be effectively closed, while your HA software decides that your master node really is down and starts to recover on the other node?
If you try to roll your own solution based on Free/Open Source tools, be ready to spend a lot of time thinking about what might go wrong. (e.g. What happens when a failed node recovers? Do you leave the currently running node as the master, or do you migrate back? How do you migrate the required filesystems? How do you make sure the recovering node doesn't try to run fsck on a filesystem the other node is actively using?)
Just ask youself, or your management, if you really want to be alpha testing some home grown HA software on your production servers?
Unfortunatly, the "Constitution Party" looks to be just another group of religious extreamists looking to turn the US into a theocracy.
A quick look through their platform finds they claim the country was founded "under god", and they thank their "lord, Jesus Christ". Also, the claim our contry is based on "biblical law". There goes the First Amendment, except for their freedom to practice their religion. I'd guess they'd be selective about which biblical laws they endorse, too. For instance, do their candidates follow all the biblical dietary laws?
They oppose Roe-vs-Wade, so the 9th and 10th amendments get a selective reading as well.
That's as far as I got, before my disgust overpowered morbid fascination.
No, not the whole earth, just the interesting parts. :-)
Really, the radar they're using to map the terrain can only image the areas the shuttles orbit carrys it over. From the launch site at KSC, they can't reach high inclination orbits. From the now mothballed facility at Vandeberg, they could have reached covered most of the earths surface.