Personally, I've been thinking that it might be more appropriate (
than rebuilding the Twin Towers) to level the blocks completely and have everyone's names who dies in this engraved in steel plates, along the lines of the Vietnam Wall.
Compromise: rebuild the Towers, and engrave the names of the dead on the building. A living, working monument. Maybe the first floor outside walls can be marble, with the names engraved; maybe the names can be on the patio tiles around the buildings, or on the floor tiles in the building.
In other news, the automotive industry has taken a cue from the software industry and implemented what it is calling "End Driver Agreements".
Head of the Automotive Licensing League, Bob Smith, "These agreements allow A.L.L., as providers of world-class transportation devices, to offer our customers a quality product, at a reduced price. Most of our Drivers will not notice any change in their Driving Experience (TM), only a decrease in the price they pay for our top-tier products. We manage this amazing feat by removing only one feature, a feature which almost no one uses, and which costs exhorbitant amounts of money. With this near-useless 'feature' removed, we can produce our world-famous transportation solutions at a reduced cost, and pass the savings on to you, our valued Drivers."
Opponents of the new EDAs claim that people who purchase a car and sign an EDA forfeit any and all rights to sue the car manufacturer. These opponents further claim that if EDAs were in wide-spread use, car manufacturers could all reduce the amount of money they spend on safety features and safety research, and victims of the resulting accidents would have no legal recourse. The A.L.L. spokesman denied these allegations, and that's good enough for this reporter.
That assumes that journalists recognize that there are other OSs out there. And that these problems aren't "Acts of God", earthquakes, hurricanes, Outlook-viruses, tornadoes, Word-macros, etc.
I don't think that the goal is to get the government to require secure computer systems. Granted, whenever there is a "safety issue" the government tends to get involved and try to "help", but the Center for Internet Security seems to want industry partners to help each other.
See their Charter's section on Participants in the Process, there are a few government agencies involved, but they are there in capacities which can only be filled by them. The FBI is the best to ask about how to collect data which can be used in a court of law, and one aspect of security is "get the bad guy" after he's done his deed. So why not ask the FBI how you can best support their efforts to find the guy who screwed you? Then there are the various secret-type agencies who are rather good at testing and classifying systems based upon security, so they might be good to talk to when establishing benchmarks.
The group is developing a minimum security standard for computers connected to the Internet that vendors can follow and offering free tools for computer users and network administrators to
test the security levels of their systems.
Doesn't this violate the DMCA? No 'hacking' tools allowed, no reverse engineering, etc. Wouldn't a security checking tool tend to violate the DMCA?
Yeah, I know. I gave in to an extreme example to make my point. Should have found another old dictator who was appeased before he began his real war, who is well known to everyone, and who was then defeated by the forces of good, and used him as the illustration for my arguement.
. ..
If you can think of an example which fits all of those criteria, please let me know.
... I don't think the lines between good and evil are clearly defined.
They may not be, but that line is one of the most important things we can discuss and act on. If I think that Communism is good/evil my actions in relation to that politico-economic system will follow. Whether we can agree on where the "Line of Evil" (TM by Microsoft:) lies, we will each act according to what we believe.
Essentially, we don't have to agree on where the line is, we don't need concensus, we will each act in a manner consistent with where we believe the "Line of Evil" to be.
[RehtoricOn]
Why do you have to stop Stallin? If he really is as bad as you say, his people will revolt and kick him out, we don't have to do anything.
Why do you have to stop Hitler? If he really is as bad as you say, the Germans will stop him themselves, we don't have to do anything.
[RehtoricOff]
Sorry about the 'touchy' Nazi comment, but I think that we need to be reminded occasionally that just because something isn't good (or we think something isn't good; others may think it's better than sliced bread, which makes this sort of thing even harder) doesn't mean that it will be defeated. History is full of horrible stories of evil going unchallenged. There is truth in the cliche "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing."
In that at Kuro5hin the readers vote for the stories for the front page, and the section pages. You don't pay, but you can have a say in what the sight is like.
[picture caption]
Industrial pollution is the main offender Hold on now - isn't that a cooling tower?
Give that man a cigar! That is indeed a cooling tower.
Cooling towers are most commonly associated with nuclear reactors, but they can be used to cool anything which isn't near a VERY large body of water; a more effiecient and less expensive method of cooling is dumping the heat into the nearby ocean/huge lake/massive river. But a cooling tower lets you dump heat directly into the atmosphere, regardless of your location.
[HumorOn] I agree. That's why I code everything in Assembly (on the 8086 architecture, none of this new stuff). Assembly lets you speed-tune code, and the days I spend making Hello World run.01 seconds faster are well spent in my book.
[/HumorOff]
Perl doesn't Look like English (or German or Swahili), but it Acts like English.
In English, the words you use change meaning slightly depending upon the context - "I hate tapioca pudding", "I hate the man who killed my parents"; in Perl, the operators change meaning slightly depending upon the context - scalar, list, etc.
In English you can often get away with omiting grammar which "should" be there, but you must know when your cheating will impair the receiver's ability to understand you - "Wanna go?", "Give it here."; in Perl you can omit much of the grammar which is technically correct - omit the semi-colon in the last line in a loop, omit most parentheses (but you can use them for clarity if you want).
Perl looks like a cross between chicken scratchings and line noise, but that is actually one of it's perverse strengths - it is short and quick to write. Take the substitute operator "s/ //", where the first space is what you want to replace, and the second space is what you want to replace it with. If that were English it would look more like this, "Substitute( ) With( )", over a four-fold increase in typing for the programer. When coding in a language you know well, the later is frustrating and slow, while the former is short and unobtrusive.
Mr. Wall realized that programmers learn a language, regardless of what the commands look like. So he made a language which is easy to program, quick to program, and syntactically preditable, even if it doesn't have the most natural commands and operators. Programmers learn the language they work with, and after the learning is over, it doesn't matter much whether the operators are "natural language", except that natural language operators are longer than those in Perl, and therefore take more effort to use.
Perl trys to get out of the way and let you do your work.
Louis Wu
"Never, ever, EVER trust a telepath. I'm going to have that tattooed on my eyelids."
When did humor become offtopic? "Oh, he mentioned Microsoft, he must be away from the center of the thread." Yeah, and just because I say that *nix is more stable than Windows, I'm bashing MS. Sheesh.
Louis Wu
"Never, ever, EVER trust a telepath. I'm going to have that tattooed on my eyelids."
As I read the intro, the author is saying that what RH includes is expensive/big/innovative.
to develop
this Linux distribution by conventional proprietary means in the U.S.
(my emphasis)
This is essentially commentary on the health of the OS/FREE community; in the last year, the community added 13 MILLION lines of code to RH's distro. Part of the included code is bloat, but much of it is new projects, code mature enough for RH to distibute it to Ma + Pa Linux users. RH didn't do it, and the author doesn't say that RH did it. The programming community did it.
Look at that paragraph again:
the
community added 13,000,000 lines of code
That is incredible! Not 13 million Microsoft-quality lines of proprietary junk charged at $100 per hour, but 13 million lines of reasonably good code, sculpted for the joy of coding!
Actually, I believe that the "light at the end of the tunnel" experience has an explanation that has something to do with loss of blood flow to the brain.
"Loss of blood flow to the brain" is a physiological phenomenon, not usually associated with spirituality of any kind. For the context of that particular discussion, Eviltar and I were talking about medical causes of 'tunnel vision'.
Hold your breath for three minutes, and when you wake up, tell us if your vision "tunneled" before you fell over.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Walls will carry the vibration, so I would stay away from them.
There is one other thing you can do that no one has suggested yet: put everything on a BIG solid mass, like a cube of steel. Why? Mass by itself 'damps' vibration. The equations of vibration point out that the amplitude of vibration can be reduced with straight damping (foam rubber and the like), or with a huge mass.
The reason the mass works is that the vibratory waves need a whole lot of energy to move a very large mass an appreciable distance, and so for any vibrations which don't register on the Richter scale (earthquake measurement system, I'm in California:) the energy in the vibration will only move that big mass a very small distance quite softly. And that small distance isn't critical to your hard drives.
This is the second order linear differential equation which describes most vibration situations. (Most - for one idealized point mass, a single linear spring, and a single linear damper. Seems quite limited, but most vibration can be described in this way quite accurately. I love approximation.)
m * a + c * v + k * x = F(t)
m = mass (the thing which is shaking)
c = damping coefficient (foam rubber)
k = spring constant (relation between the force applied and the distance the spring moves
F(t) = equation describing the action of the force over time
d^2 x
------ = a
d t^2
= the acceleration felt, a function of time
d x
---- = v
d t
= the velocity the mass moves at, a function of time
For the same force, the jackhammer crunching away all day long, a larger mass reduces the acceleration. 'm' goes up, 'a' goes down, simple algebra.
See if you can get a big solid chunk of mass to put everything on top of. But be careful to get something which can't shift internally, it will move more than a single block of the same size will. Maybe a big old steel desk. Whatever you find, I would put rubber cushions between your PCs and the big mass, for more insulation.
Good luck, and backup.:)
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
There are two major regions of light-sensitive 'sensors' in the back of the eye - the center of the retina, and the surrounding area. These areas see light differently due to different concentrations of rods and cones. Rods 'see' black and white, and cones 'see' color. Rods are more sensitive than cones to low levels of light, (which is why you don't see color well at night). This excerpt from The American Optometric Association's description of the eye may help:
Cones are concentrated in the center of the retina, in an area called the macula. In bright light conditions, cones provide clear, sharp central vision and detect colors and fine details. Rods are located outside the macula and extend all the way to the outer edge of the retina. They provide peripheral or side vision. Rods also allow the eyes to detect motion and help us see in dim light and at night.
When you go into 'tunnel vision', it is essentially a shutdown of certain parts of the retina (I think the rods shut down, I ain't sure.), such that only the center of vision is seen; it looks like a tunnel of light.
BTW, this is from memory, and I can't find any references, so please check my facts if they don't look right. For more information on the eye, try The American Optometric Association's website, it has some good introductory information about vision problems.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Think of a system to deploy equipment of most any kind so long as the payload capacity isn't exceeded- to the same possible places in the same possible time.
That would be great, but we better make the X-33 really cheap, or we will be throwing gobs of money down the drain when we can't fly it back.;) What does it take to move an X-33 from a landing site back to the launch platform? If it's like the Shuttle, it has to be towed the ~mile or flown cross-country. Not a good idea near a combat zone, even if you can get the massive equipment to that area. Even if you just need fuel to launch again, can you make a round trip on one tank of fuel?
Maybe this could be used to drop elite troops (think Heinlein's Starship Troopers, dropping from near-orbit), or drop supplies, or get people to/from orbit military platforms. Or use it to get around concerns about "space-based" weapons: with an X-33 you can drop a big rock on a target (No nukes, you are just targeting a meteor, the kinetic energy will destroy the target cleaner than any nuke could hope to.) with two hours notice and still comply with treaties/agreements/public sentiment.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
PDA Power: How much more processing power does mobile computing need to make live, streaming video a reality?
Battery Power: What will the power requirements of these PDAs be? How will they be met?
Camera Representation: How will the ~10,000 cameras in your city be organized such that you can quickly choose the one you want? Click-thru map?
Policy question: Could I see cameras in places I'm not near? From Seattle, could I watch Washington D.C. streets? If not, how do we decide where to draw the line?
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Public surveillance seems to be happening everywhere, and gaining popularity. Many of the problems of surveillance could be addressed if any person could see through any camera at any time.
Example: if I'm running late to meet my friend at the train station, I could use my PDA to look at the cameras in the station to find out if the train is in yet, then call my friend on his mobile phone to tell him I'll be five minutes late. Or I could check the cameras on various street corners if I find myself walking home late at night. Or I could just troll looking for police abuses.
If cameras will be everywhere, then everyone should be able to see what those cameras see.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
I've looked through the files in the tarball, and I can read them all except the lzip file. Can anyone tell me what's in that file? Is it even ASCII?
I really want to know because the rest of the tarball is so funny. And so I reproduce it below for your browsing pleasure.
The TODO file:
Fix problem where all files experience blue-shift when compressed at level 3.
Repair satellite.
Examine possibility of interactive display of file contents as they are being compressed (may not be suitable for small children)
Alpha, UltraSPARC, PowerPC platform support.
.RPM or.DEB packages.
Volume control.
Web-based front-end.
Add support for PostgreSQL.
Weight-training.
And the lunzip file:
Goldfinger.
He's the man, the man with the midas touch.
A spider's touch.
Such a cold finger.
Beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don't go in.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Slashdot Mirror
Head of the Automotive Licensing League, Bob Smith, "These agreements allow A.L.L., as providers of world-class transportation devices, to offer our customers a quality product, at a reduced price. Most of our Drivers will not notice any change in their Driving Experience (TM), only a decrease in the price they pay for our top-tier products. We manage this amazing feat by removing only one feature, a feature which almost no one uses, and which costs exhorbitant amounts of money. With this near-useless 'feature' removed, we can produce our world-famous transportation solutions at a reduced cost, and pass the savings on to you, our valued Drivers."
Opponents of the new EDAs claim that people who purchase a car and sign an EDA forfeit any and all rights to sue the car manufacturer. These opponents further claim that if EDAs were in wide-spread use, car manufacturers could all reduce the amount of money they spend on safety features and safety research, and victims of the resulting accidents would have no legal recourse. The A.L.L. spokesman denied these allegations, and that's good enough for this reporter.
So stop complaining and sign the Agreement.
That assumes that journalists recognize that there are other OSs out there. And that these problems aren't "Acts of God", earthquakes, hurricanes, Outlook-viruses, tornadoes, Word-macros, etc.
See their Charter's section on Participants in the Process, there are a few government agencies involved, but they are there in capacities which can only be filled by them. The FBI is the best to ask about how to collect data which can be used in a court of law, and one aspect of security is "get the bad guy" after he's done his deed. So why not ask the FBI how you can best support their efforts to find the guy who screwed you? Then there are the various secret-type agencies who are rather good at testing and classifying systems based upon security, so they might be good to talk to when establishing benchmarks.
. . .
If you can think of an example which fits all of those criteria, please let me know.
They may not be, but that line is one of the most important things we can discuss and act on. If I think that Communism is good/evil my actions in relation to that politico-economic system will follow. Whether we can agree on where the "Line of Evil" (TM by Microsoft :) lies, we will each act according to what we believe.
Essentially, we don't have to agree on where the line is, we don't need concensus, we will each act in a manner consistent with where we believe the "Line of Evil" to be.
Why do you have to stop Stallin? If he really is as bad as you say, his people will revolt and kick him out, we don't have to do anything. Why do you have to stop Hitler? If he really is as bad as you say, the Germans will stop him themselves, we don't have to do anything.
[RehtoricOff]
Sorry about the 'touchy' Nazi comment, but I think that we need to be reminded occasionally that just because something isn't good (or we think something isn't good; others may think it's better than sliced bread, which makes this sort of thing even harder) doesn't mean that it will be defeated. History is full of horrible stories of evil going unchallenged. There is truth in the cliche "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing."
In that at Kuro5hin the readers vote for the stories for the front page, and the section pages. You don't pay, but you can have a say in what the sight is like.
Cooling towers are most commonly associated with nuclear reactors, but they can be used to cool anything which isn't near a VERY large body of water; a more effiecient and less expensive method of cooling is dumping the heat into the nearby ocean/huge lake/massive river. But a cooling tower lets you dump heat directly into the atmosphere, regardless of your location.
Louis Wu
"Never, ever, EVER trust a telepath. I'm going to have that tattooed on my eyelids."
I agree. That's why I code everything in Assembly (on the 8086 architecture, none of this new stuff). Assembly lets you speed-tune code, and the days I spend making Hello World run
[/HumorOff]
Perl doesn't Look like English (or German or Swahili), but it Acts like English.
- In English, the words you use change meaning slightly depending upon the context - "I hate tapioca pudding", "I hate the man who killed my parents"; in Perl, the operators change meaning slightly depending upon the context - scalar, list, etc.
- In English you can often get away with omiting grammar which "should" be there, but you must know when your cheating will impair the receiver's ability to understand you - "Wanna go?", "Give it here."; in Perl you can omit much of the grammar which is technically correct - omit the semi-colon in the last line in a loop, omit most parentheses (but you can use them for clarity if you want).
Perl looks like a cross between chicken scratchings and line noise, but that is actually one of it's perverse strengths - it is short and quick to write. Take the substitute operator "s/ /Mr. Wall realized that programmers learn a language, regardless of what the commands look like. So he made a language which is easy to program, quick to program, and syntactically preditable, even if it doesn't have the most natural commands and operators. Programmers learn the language they work with, and after the learning is over, it doesn't matter much whether the operators are "natural language", except that natural language operators are longer than those in Perl, and therefore take more effort to use.
Perl trys to get out of the way and let you do your work.
Louis Wu
"Never, ever, EVER trust a telepath. I'm going to have that tattooed on my eyelids."
Louis Wu
"Never, ever, EVER trust a telepath. I'm going to have that tattooed on my eyelids."
Or maybe 'Delta' code, still changing, and stuck in another quadrant of the galaxy.
This is essentially commentary on the health of the OS/FREE community; in the last year, the community added 13 MILLION lines of code to RH's distro. Part of the included code is bloat, but much of it is new projects, code mature enough for RH to distibute it to Ma + Pa Linux users. RH didn't do it, and the author doesn't say that RH did it. The programming community did it.
Look at that paragraph again:
That is incredible! Not 13 million Microsoft-quality lines of proprietary junk charged at $100 per hour, but 13 million lines of reasonably good code, sculpted for the joy of coding!I'm getting misty-eyed.
Hold your breath for three minutes, and when you wake up, tell us if your vision "tunneled" before you fell over.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
There is one other thing you can do that no one has suggested yet: put everything on a BIG solid mass, like a cube of steel. Why? Mass by itself 'damps' vibration. The equations of vibration point out that the amplitude of vibration can be reduced with straight damping (foam rubber and the like), or with a huge mass.
The reason the mass works is that the vibratory waves need a whole lot of energy to move a very large mass an appreciable distance, and so for any vibrations which don't register on the Richter scale (earthquake measurement system, I'm in California :) the energy in the vibration will only move that big mass a very small distance quite softly. And that small distance isn't critical to your hard drives.
This is the second order linear differential equation which describes most vibration situations. (Most - for one idealized point mass, a single linear spring, and a single linear damper. Seems quite limited, but most vibration can be described in this way quite accurately. I love approximation.)
m * a + c * v + k * x = F(t)
m = mass (the thing which is shaking)
c = damping coefficient (foam rubber)
k = spring constant (relation between the force applied and the distance the spring moves
F(t) = equation describing the action of the force over time
d^2 x
------ = a
d t^2
d x
---- = v
d t
For the same force, the jackhammer crunching away all day long, a larger mass reduces the acceleration. 'm' goes up, 'a' goes down, simple algebra.
See if you can get a big solid chunk of mass to put everything on top of. But be careful to get something which can't shift internally, it will move more than a single block of the same size will. Maybe a big old steel desk. Whatever you find, I would put rubber cushions between your PCs and the big mass, for more insulation.
Good luck, and backup. :)
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
BTW, this is from memory, and I can't find any references, so please check my facts if they don't look right. For more information on the eye, try The American Optometric Association's website, it has some good introductory information about vision problems.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Maybe this could be used to drop elite troops (think Heinlein's Starship Troopers, dropping from near-orbit), or drop supplies, or get people to/from orbit military platforms. Or use it to get around concerns about "space-based" weapons: with an X-33 you can drop a big rock on a target (No nukes, you are just targeting a meteor, the kinetic energy will destroy the target cleaner than any nuke could hope to.) with two hours notice and still comply with treaties/agreements/public sentiment.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
What kind of technical work would need to be done to make such wide-spread video viewing a reality?
- Video Compression: How much improvement is needed?
- Broadband/Wireless Access: Cost, reliability, universal access.
- PDA Power: How much more processing power does mobile computing need to make live, streaming video a reality?
- Battery Power: What will the power requirements of these PDAs be? How will they be met?
- Camera Representation: How will the ~10,000 cameras in your city be organized such that you can quickly choose the one you want? Click-thru map?
Policy question: Could I see cameras in places I'm not near? From Seattle, could I watch Washington D.C. streets? If not, how do we decide where to draw the line?Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Example: if I'm running late to meet my friend at the train station, I could use my PDA to look at the cameras in the station to find out if the train is in yet, then call my friend on his mobile phone to tell him I'll be five minutes late. Or I could check the cameras on various street corners if I find myself walking home late at night. Or I could just troll looking for police abuses.
If cameras will be everywhere, then everyone should be able to see what those cameras see.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
I really want to know because the rest of the tarball is so funny. And so I reproduce it below for your browsing pleasure.
The TODO file:
And the lunzip file:Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Bob Goodlatte -
Senator Clinton -
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."