The amount of research done by colleges always impresses me, but one thing I've noticed is that they're really never doing anythign up in space. I think colleges could possibly link up and actually get something done out there in conjunction with NASA. Would it not be a nice step towards more space exploration? Colleges know mucho!
Actually, it's more a case of NASA/JPL taking all the credit for the missions that get the publicity. Don't take this the wrong way, they do a great job on these missions, but if you read through the science reports that come out, you find that most of the instruments are experiments run by scientists at one or more universities.
Just running down some of the projects I know came out of the lab where I work (at the U. of Chicago), our scientists were responsible for the dust sensor on one of the Halley's Comet missions, we've got one of the principal investigators for Ulysses, the scientist who designed Pathfinder's APXS (the rock composition sensor thing)... and that's just from walking down one hallway.
Believe me, universities the world over are heavily involved in every space science mission that goes up. But it's the people with the big press room and private TV network that get to make the announcements.
1) Flash drivers 2) a viable Flash File System 3) Bootloader from flash/ROM
Many embedded systems (PC104 comes to mind) present the flash chips as an IDE interface, so the standard linux disk drivers work fine. The trouble with flash chips is the ~100K rewrite limit, but you can usually just keep all your dymanic data in a ramdrive to solve this problem. Check out the initrd kernel options.
XHTML is as much a standard language as the Linux Kernel Recommended Coding Style. According to the W3C press release, Authors writing XHTML use the well-known elements of HTML 4 (to mark up paragraphs, links, tables, lists, etc.), but with XML syntax, which promotes markup conformance. So, as I understand it, you write HTML 4, but throw in some extra informative tags and generally make sure your page plays nicely with hypothetical non-web browser programs reading your code.
Incidentally, I don't see any support for such tricks as using tables to lay out a page. Will this force people to recode their layouts with CSS (which they probably should do anyway), or just give coders another excuse to ignore W3C recommendations?
The press release from the JPL says that, now that they know what the signal should look like in the data stream, analysis should only take a few days. It would take considerably longer than that to modify the SETI@Home (or distributed.net, etc) clients and distribute them widely enough to be useful.
This isn't a bad thought, though -- perhaps in the future, projects such as this actually could make use of distributed processing on the internet. However, this strikes me as unlikely because, considering how cheap processing power actually is these days, projects like this one don't generally spend very long on any one problem, and so benefit greatly from being able to change the running algorithms at will.
Anyway, I wish the JPL teams the best of luck on this one. Who knows, maybe they'll even figure out a way to fix the relay to Global Surveyor. At any rate, it would be a great relief to everybody involved just to know what actually went wrong with the mission.
ET-Linux - Runs on embedded x86 systems, and really IS meant for small, embedded systems (eg. little to no security). glibc2.1/kernel 2.0.38. Used with an ADC card to acquire data in the astrophysics lab where I work. It'll fit nicely in a 6MB flash chip.
TINY Linux - Really meant for recycling old 386s, works in an embedded environment without too much work. A full install with X takes around 80MB, but you can pare it down to 10-20. Based on libc5, though, so watch out when compiling new packages.
MicroLinux - I haven't used this one, nor do I read Russian (which the page is in), but I've heard that it works and has a very small installed footprint.
MuLinux - An Italian distro, still in development, major feature of which is the ability to live in a ramdisk on a computer with only 4MB of ram, if I understand correctly what I've read about it. (Haven't actually used this one either.)
Trojan asteroid 3753 Cruithne was actually shown to be orbiting the Earth in the June 12, 1997 issue of Nature. However, as its orbital motion is pretty complex, I don't doubt that it took this long to confirm the result. Simply put, 3753 Cruithne has the most complex horseshoe-type orbit ever observed. See this site for a more detailed analysis.
Of course, this technically shouldn't be termed a moon. This body shares an orbit with the Earth about the sun, and does not in any usual sense orbit the Earth. Instead, their orbits coincide so that Cruithne can occupy the same orbital region as the Earth over long periods of time without being ejected by a close approach.
Until we have more information, it's rather premature to suppose that the Norwegian law enforcement is violating their Constitution. From the description of the events as posted, it sounds very much as though Johensen is being charged with criminal acts somehow related to CSS.
Anyway, as often occurs in US law, broad statements made in the Constitution often do not correspond well to the actual laws in place. Consider that the clause against "unreasonable search and seizure" regularly allows defendants to exclude evidence from trials, but somehow also allows police to basically confiscate property that has, however incidentally, been involved with drugs (Civil Forfeiture).
At any rate, Johansen should probably just be glad that he is in Norway. In the US, he'd probably still be sitting in jail six months from now, wondering if he will be given a bail hearing while the media paints him as an uber-cyber-villian. Disclaimer: I do physics, not Norwegian law.
So these students have developed a rudimentary adaptive processing algorithm... great! As a participant in science fairs all through middle and high school, I can say two things about them right away -- on the whole, little original actually gets done, but the mere experience of performing experimental research in what passes for a peer-review environment has produced quite a few outstanding student (and later, professional) scientists. Moreover, at each science fair, I invariably made an assortment of contacts that later proved important to my future career as a student and researcher.
So, anyway, don't knock them for reproducing ancient and well-studied algorithms. Instead, encourage them for trying to develop something at all, and hope they continue to do so.
Removing personal web sites would effectively kill what people are wanting the internet to become. Why bother to have things like a T-1 or a DSL line if you can't publish something. Controversial web sites are a little bit of a problem. Ok for example I have some content I thought I would like to put on a web site. The only problem is that the content is slightly pornographic is there a place that offers maybe free webhosting for pages that has almost anything on it? (well except kiddie porn). You really can't find too many (as far as I have seen) because it is controversial in nature.
Well, the way Congress would like things to work (fortunately, this is still tied up in the courts) it would be illegal to post anything considered "offensive" on the internet without somehow verifying that the person on the other end isn't a minor. So, because it's unclear as to what the laws/liabilities will turn out to be, pretty much nobody in the US will host even a slightly pornographic page that is freely viewable.
Anyway, though, it isn't the ability to publish independent pages that is really in danger of dissapearing, though (provided, as above, it isn't "offensive" to the sexually-dysfunctional white male policy-makers). But consider: what good does it do anybody if you publish your insightful, revolutionary views on your home page, if nobody in the world is going to find it on their own? Chances are, it'll never be linked to by cnn.com, warnerbrothers.com, etc-owned-by-mega-corp-X.com, and thusly, the vast majority of net users will never know you exist.
The concept of businesses killing things that are free would be a little silly. I am sure that Americans the world over probably don't like communism. However there are several over 1 billion of them in the world in China. Does this mean that communism is in trouble? Probably not for at least 50+ years at the rate we are going.
Communism in China is already dead. China is an essentially capitalist nation with a few state-owned industries struggling to compete and a more zealous than average government, when it comes to maintaining the power of it's leaders. It's been on it's way out for decades, but the capitalist forces in SE Asia did it in (as anything more than a buzzword, anyway) about ten years ago.
If what I say is not verbally offensive then I have little reason to worry. Publishing code on the internet is not an offensive action. Just because a rich business man decides he dosn't like it dosn't mean that I will not have some means to publish my code.
See above. Certainly, you can distribute your code one way or another; the internet is too large and interconnected for anybody to actually squelch some piece of information completely. It's been tried before, witness the Religions Technology Center (Scientology) and it's attempts to abolish criticism from the 'net. However, if a company has the power that AOL-Time-Warner is going to have, they can certainly make sure that most people will have to already know exactly what they're looking for before they'll ever run across it. Again, the vast majority of the 'net users will never know you or your code exists.
And since the record is at least as old as October 29th, I guess they're not squatting (unlessthey knew about Cubane way back then...).
Well, since cubane was produced back in the late 70s and was known then to be unstable (highly stressed carbon-carbon bonds), I'd assume they knew about it last year. Heck, researchers at Ohio State made dodecahedrane back in 1982, which is considerably harder to synthesize, if rather less explosive.
The present advance is just nitrating it, so that instead of burning vigorously, it explodes. This happens because the molecule is now bonded to an oxidizing agent, so when the stressed carbon bonds are broken (by heat, shock, whatever), they can recombine with the nitrogen and oxygen just a few nanometers away, instead of pulling oxygen from the air.
Anyways, it looks to be a standard "watch adds, receive free dialup" service.. And, like Altavista's service, it looks to be easily spoofed (just dialup, and have a little daemon pulling certain content:-)).
Sure, but consider who the service is being marketed to. Windows users only, probably the AOL/webTV crowd. Somehow, I suspect that the fraction of this demographic that is both capable of and interested in reverse-engineering their protocol to fake ad-bar feedback is negligible.
This is just one of a whole slew of such businesses popping up these days. It's really not too surprising that it's only available to users of win32 -- it's by far the largest market, especially considering the fraction of MS customers used to putting up with such things as compared to, e.g., Linux/Be/MacOS/non-market-dominating-OS-of-choice users.
You wouldn't really think that such services would make any money, but we all know that AOL made heaps of cash, even when the transition to flat-rate service was pinching their subscription-fee cash flow. If they can even provice comparable service to AOL, but for free, they might just do alright. Frankly, AOL's interface (esp. after v5) sounds plenty worse than an ad bar floating on my desktop. Sure, I wouldn't put up with it, but it's not exactly being marketed to me, either.
Disclaimer: I'm on a school net, and hardly in need of a dialup ISP.
This has more than once provided me all I ever needed to know about the configuration file in question. That's not so difficult. Just poke around/etc/ until you find a file that looks likely, then check the manpage.
You can use debconf, et al, if you like, but back when I was a newbie I was fortunate enough to discover an up-to-date HOWTO archive sitting right on my very first (it was Debian) install CD. Collectively, those files made for a very comprehensive reference manual for setting up my system.
What about building a text-gui index to the HOWTO files (HTMLed, I suppose) and putting it in the installer as a sort of online-help system? I have nothing against linuxconf, of course, but an easily accessable HOWTO database should cover a wider array of possibilities, IMHO.
I'd actually suggest contesting the claim that the monetary damages are so different. The EFF lawyers made the point that bandwidth considerations severely limit the rate at which pirated DVDs could propogate over the internet (and burning one yourself has got to be slow as well).
Moreover, they should consider the cost of modifying pages to remove the links. Most of the people I know who do professional web design get upwards of $30/hr. If they sum this amount over the number of people they're asking to modify their sites, they could produce a surprising quantity.
Everybody link to Project LiViD. WHOIS says they're registered from Berlin, so I'm assuming they'll stay up regardless.
Disclaimer: I do physics, not web design.
Re:If most pollution comes from N why hole @ S pol
on
Total Lunar Eclipse
·
· Score: 1
If the US is the world's greatest polluter and in fact most pollution comes from nations in the northern hemisphere, then why is the "hole" over the antartic and not over the arctic?
The tropospheric prevailing winds in the Northern hemisphere being from the north, the US's pollutants end up in the vicinity of the equator, where convection moves them into the stratosphere. From there they diffuse more or less equally (I believe) to the poles, and are trapped there by the circumpolar jet streams. Since the antarctic is much drier than the arctic, more of the pollutants stay in the upper atmosphere there than in the north.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's more a case of NASA/JPL taking all the credit for the missions that get the publicity. Don't take this the wrong way, they do a great job on these missions, but if you read through the science reports that come out, you find that most of the instruments are experiments run by scientists at one or more universities.
Just running down some of the projects I know came out of the lab where I work (at the U. of Chicago), our scientists were responsible for the dust sensor on one of the Halley's Comet missions, we've got one of the principal investigators for Ulysses, the scientist who designed Pathfinder's APXS (the rock composition sensor thing) ... and that's just from walking down one hallway.
Believe me, universities the world over are heavily involved in every space science mission that goes up. But it's the people with the big press room and private TV network that get to make the announcements.
Linux needs -
1) Flash drivers
2) a viable Flash File System
3) Bootloader from flash/ROM
Many embedded systems (PC104 comes to mind) present the flash chips as an IDE interface, so the standard linux disk drivers work fine. The trouble with flash chips is the ~100K rewrite limit, but you can usually just keep all your dymanic data in a ramdrive to solve this problem. Check out the initrd kernel options.
Incidentally, I don't see any support for such tricks as using tables to lay out a page. Will this force people to recode their layouts with CSS (which they probably should do anyway), or just give coders another excuse to ignore W3C recommendations?
This isn't a bad thought, though -- perhaps in the future, projects such as this actually could make use of distributed processing on the internet. However, this strikes me as unlikely because, considering how cheap processing power actually is these days, projects like this one don't generally spend very long on any one problem, and so benefit greatly from being able to change the running algorithms at will.
Anyway, I wish the JPL teams the best of luck on this one. Who knows, maybe they'll even figure out a way to fix the relay to Global Surveyor. At any rate, it would be a great relief to everybody involved just to know what actually went wrong with the mission.
Don't forget these as well:
ET-Linux - Runs on embedded x86 systems, and really IS meant for small, embedded systems (eg. little to no security). glibc2.1/kernel 2.0.38. Used with an ADC card to acquire data in the astrophysics lab where I work. It'll fit nicely in a 6MB flash chip.
TINY Linux - Really meant for recycling old 386s, works in an embedded environment without too much work. A full install with X takes around 80MB, but you can pare it down to 10-20. Based on libc5, though, so watch out when compiling new packages.
MicroLinux - I haven't used this one, nor do I read Russian (which the page is in), but I've heard that it works and has a very small installed footprint.
MuLinux - An Italian distro, still in development, major feature of which is the ability to live in a ramdisk on a computer with only 4MB of ram, if I understand correctly what I've read about it. (Haven't actually used this one either.)
Of course, this technically shouldn't be termed a moon. This body shares an orbit with the Earth about the sun, and does not in any usual sense orbit the Earth. Instead, their orbits coincide so that Cruithne can occupy the same orbital region as the Earth over long periods of time without being ejected by a close approach.
Until we have more information, it's rather premature to suppose that the Norwegian law enforcement is violating their Constitution. From the description of the events as posted, it sounds very much as though Johensen is being charged with criminal acts somehow related to CSS.
Anyway, as often occurs in US law, broad statements made in the Constitution often do not correspond well to the actual laws in place. Consider that the clause against "unreasonable search and seizure" regularly allows defendants to exclude evidence from trials, but somehow also allows police to basically confiscate property that has, however incidentally, been involved with drugs (Civil Forfeiture).
At any rate, Johansen should probably just be glad that he is in Norway. In the US, he'd probably still be sitting in jail six months from now, wondering if he will be given a bail hearing while the media paints him as an uber-cyber-villian. Disclaimer: I do physics, not Norwegian law.
So these students have developed a rudimentary adaptive processing algorithm ... great! As a participant in science fairs all through middle and high school, I can say two things about them right away -- on the whole, little original actually gets done, but the mere experience of performing experimental research in what passes for a peer-review environment has produced quite a few outstanding student (and later, professional) scientists. Moreover, at each science fair, I invariably made an assortment of contacts that later proved important to my future career as a student and researcher.
So, anyway, don't knock them for reproducing ancient and well-studied algorithms. Instead, encourage them for trying to develop something at all, and hope they continue to do so.
Removing personal web sites would effectively kill what people are wanting the internet to become. Why bother to have things like a T-1 or a DSL line if you can't publish something. Controversial web sites are a little bit of a problem. Ok for example I have some content I thought I would like to put on a web site. The only problem is that the content is slightly pornographic is there a place that offers maybe free webhosting for pages that has almost anything on it? (well except kiddie porn). You really can't find too many (as far as I have seen) because it is controversial in nature.
Well, the way Congress would like things to work (fortunately, this is still tied up in the courts) it would be illegal to post anything considered "offensive" on the internet without somehow verifying that the person on the other end isn't a minor. So, because it's unclear as to what the laws/liabilities will turn out to be, pretty much nobody in the US will host even a slightly pornographic page that is freely viewable.
Anyway, though, it isn't the ability to publish independent pages that is really in danger of dissapearing, though (provided, as above, it isn't "offensive" to the sexually-dysfunctional white male policy-makers). But consider: what good does it do anybody if you publish your insightful, revolutionary views on your home page, if nobody in the world is going to find it on their own? Chances are, it'll never be linked to by cnn.com, warnerbrothers.com, etc-owned-by-mega-corp-X.com, and thusly, the vast majority of net users will never know you exist.
The concept of businesses killing things that are free would be a little silly. I am sure that Americans the world over probably don't like communism. However there are several over 1 billion of them in the world in China. Does this mean that communism is in trouble? Probably not for at least 50+ years at the rate we are going.
Communism in China is already dead. China is an essentially capitalist nation with a few state-owned industries struggling to compete and a more zealous than average government, when it comes to maintaining the power of it's leaders. It's been on it's way out for decades, but the capitalist forces in SE Asia did it in (as anything more than a buzzword, anyway) about ten years ago.
If what I say is not verbally offensive then I have little reason to worry. Publishing code on the internet is not an offensive action. Just because a rich business man decides he dosn't like it dosn't mean that I will not have some means to publish my code.
See above. Certainly, you can distribute your code one way or another; the internet is too large and interconnected for anybody to actually squelch some piece of information completely. It's been tried before, witness the Religions Technology Center (Scientology) and it's attempts to abolish criticism from the 'net. However, if a company has the power that AOL-Time-Warner is going to have, they can certainly make sure that most people will have to already know exactly what they're looking for before they'll ever run across it. Again, the vast majority of the 'net users will never know you or your code exists.
And since the record is at least as old as October 29th, I guess they're not squatting (unlessthey knew about Cubane way back then...).
Well, since cubane was produced back in the late 70s and was known then to be unstable (highly stressed carbon-carbon bonds), I'd assume they knew about it last year. Heck, researchers at Ohio State made dodecahedrane back in 1982, which is considerably harder to synthesize, if rather less explosive.
The present advance is just nitrating it, so that instead of burning vigorously, it explodes. This happens because the molecule is now bonded to an oxidizing agent, so when the stressed carbon bonds are broken (by heat, shock, whatever), they can recombine with the nitrogen and oxygen just a few nanometers away, instead of pulling oxygen from the air.
Disclaimer: I do physics, not organic chemistry.
Anyways, it looks to be a standard "watch adds, receive free dialup" service.. And, like Altavista's service, it looks to be easily spoofed (just dialup, and have a little daemon pulling certain content :-)).
Sure, but consider who the service is being marketed to. Windows users only, probably the AOL/webTV crowd. Somehow, I suspect that the fraction of this demographic that is both capable of and interested in reverse-engineering their protocol to fake ad-bar feedback is negligible.
You wouldn't really think that such services would make any money, but we all know that AOL made heaps of cash, even when the transition to flat-rate service was pinching their subscription-fee cash flow. If they can even provice comparable service to AOL, but for free, they might just do alright. Frankly, AOL's interface (esp. after v5) sounds plenty worse than an ad bar floating on my desktop. Sure, I wouldn't put up with it, but it's not exactly being marketed to me, either.
Disclaimer: I'm on a school net, and hardly in need of a dialup ISP.
This has more than once provided me all I ever needed to know about the configuration file in question. That's not so difficult. Just poke around /etc/ until you find a file that looks likely, then check the manpage.
What about building a text-gui index to the HOWTO files (HTMLed, I suppose) and putting it in the installer as a sort of online-help system? I have nothing against linuxconf, of course, but an easily accessable HOWTO database should cover a wider array of possibilities, IMHO.
I'd actually suggest contesting the claim that the monetary damages are so different. The EFF lawyers made the point that bandwidth considerations severely limit the rate at which pirated DVDs could propogate over the internet (and burning one yourself has got to be slow as well).
Moreover, they should consider the cost of modifying pages to remove the links. Most of the people I know who do professional web design get upwards of $30/hr. If they sum this amount over the number of people they're asking to modify their sites, they could produce a surprising quantity.
Everybody link to Project LiViD. WHOIS says they're registered from Berlin, so I'm assuming they'll stay up regardless.
Disclaimer: I do physics, not web design.
The tropospheric prevailing winds in the Northern hemisphere being from the north, the US's pollutants end up in the vicinity of the equator, where convection moves them into the stratosphere. From there they diffuse more or less equally (I believe) to the poles, and are trapped there by the circumpolar jet streams. Since the antarctic is much drier than the arctic, more of the pollutants stay in the upper atmosphere there than in the north.
disclaimer: I do physics, not climatology.