Obligated by the act of signing the Treaty. Signing is a pledge mutual between Soverigns to follow a commonly agreed upon course of action. If you sign treaties and don't enforce them you aren't likely to be invited to the next one.
Soverign States are just that, Soverign. But they don't exist in a vacumn either. In the end, violators of treaties can be faced with the ultimate treaty enforcement action: War! Go ask Saddam about what repeated violations of treaty obligations can get you.... if you can get permission to visit him in his US prison cell that is.
> Vietnam wasn't even technically a fair fight -- our force was clearly > superior, but our tactics were not.
Another product of public education.... The US military won every major battle in Vietnam. Our tactics were totally superior to anything the VC had. Our weapons were of course overwhelming. Had the issue been decided on the battlefield there could have been only one outcome.
No, The Vietnam War was won right here in the USA, on the college campuses and the halls of Congress, by a superior propaganda campaign spearheaded by, among other infamous Viet Cong irregulars, John Forbes Kerry. Who now is eagar to step forward once more to carry the banner of Saddam, Usama, Chirac and the rest of the new Post-Communist Nihilist movement which is only unified on one goal, destroying Western Civilization and the concept of individual liberty it espouses.
p.s. Yes mods, posting this to the Young Socialists on slashdot IS trolling. So hit me with your best shot biaches, I have plenty of Karma to burn between now and election day and if I can get just ONE person who was going to vote Kerry to reconsider that move (even if they just stay home or vote for Nader) it would be worth dropping all the way to zero Karma.
> It propagates the myth that there is such a thing as "international > law" or "laws of war."
All signatories to the Geneva Convention are obligated to institute local laws to implement the Treaty they signed. So while I agree that the World Court is a joke, if a US soldier violates the Geneva Convention they will be brought up before a Court Martial proceeding and punished according to US law for violating laws placed on the books as a result of the Senate ratifying a Treaty.
Most civilized countries have similar laws. Hell, even the Nazi's did a fair job of upholding the Conventions in WWII. Not that they were paragons of virtue mind you, but it made military sense to have it known that you will accept a surrender. Contrast to the sort of fighting unto death common in the Pacific theatre of operations, where most of the Japanese fought to the death as a matter of honor and after atrocities like Battaan the Allies did as well, fearing death less than becoming a POW. Only total despots (most other socialists, Islamic fanatics, etc.) flaunt the Geneva Convention.
> where a representative politican of either party
Product of the public schools I see. It should have been evident that I was asserting that the party did matter. Republicans in general do not care for the UN and it's orders. Name ONE Democrat on the national stage who doesn't fervently believe in the UN and it's moral authority.
Those old Soviet Era UN treaties are going to prove a major obstable to the commercial development of space unless we have a strong Republican president who will simply renounce them as the Soviet relics they are.
> Bush is a close friend of Lockheed CEO Hoffman
Oh spare me the black helicopter theories. A Republican president shooting down the creation of not just a few high paying jobs, but the birth of a whole NEW INDUSTRY, with the promise of being bigger than Silicon Valley and the upcoming Biotech revolution, to be lead by American firms? Just to make France and Kofi Annon[sp?] happy? Not on this planet he won't. And surely you don't think Burt Rutan is going to open up the Final Frontier all by himself in some idyllic rags to riches story. No, Lockheed, Boing and the rest of the aerospace gang will figure out a way to be right in the middle of it; building stuff and selling it for the sort of good profits that warm the cockles of any good Republican's heart. Being a believer in Capitalism as the best way to create and redistribute wealth, I couldn't be happier with that thought.
> Maybe the White House has missiles that can stop a 747 > from reaching it
We currently do not have anything that can stop a 747, a ballistic missle or a spacefaring vehicle. Which should frighten you and make you ask "why don't we?" and then "Why aren't we doing something about this?" Well W took the first important step by invoking the ABM Treaty's exit clause. Now it up to the chrome domes to actually cook up a workable system; because while I don't think W is nearly the idiot the Dems in the press make him out as, physicist he ain't. Some promising hints to date but nothing I really have a lot of faith in panning out yet. However I'm patient and confident that here there is a will, American technology will find a way.
> What exactly do their Thinkpad configurations have to do with their > support of Linux?
I dunno, I think it says a lot of nice things about their Linux support.
1. Thinkpads are fairly easy to install Linux on. My X31 has almost all the hardware supported right off the install CD and the Winmodem is easy enough to get working. The only thing I can't do is hot or warm dock, which is annoying but I can live with.
2. They ship three button pointers!
3. Yes they still ship with Windoze and you can't get them to ship one without it because Microsoft is flagrently violating their consent decree, but they tend to ship with an empty partition instead of just one big Windoze partition.
1. He is the current standard bearer for the Democratic Party.
2. He is a closet socialist. Just a personal belief, he is smart enough to have never actually SAID it. But just as a first clue, consider that most of the hardcore Blame America First crowd responsible for the loss of the Vietnam War and subsequent massacres of millions were pro Viet Cong and pro Soviet. John Kerry was as hardcore in that movement as you get.
3. He believes in the UN. Does ANY doubt this? It is one of the few positions he has never waffled on during his entire public life. Who is more likely to enforce those old "no private spaceflight" treaties? W certainly doesn't consider himself bound by their edicts and a LOT of Republicans want us to withdraw from the UN entirely. Find ONE Democrat who would ignore a UN Security Council Resolution when they pronounce illegal the first attempt to establish a private moonbase? Or more useful, would have the stones to order our Ambassador to veto said Resolution?
4. He is a Democrat. nuff said. Yes there ARE Democrats left who believe in America, but not very many able to attain national office anymore. Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA) doesn't count, being appointed to fill a vacancy and not even bothering to stand for election this year.
5. He hates Free Enterprise, preferring Big Government. See #1, #2 and #3. (Although, being totally honest W seems to like both Free Enterprise AND Big Government considering how much the FedGov has grown under his watch. He wasn't my choice in the '00 primaries.)
> He'll assign an ABL to zap you on the boost phase!
Not if you stay on your flight plan and don't have a trajectory leading you into a population center. But if you WERE aimed at a population center I wish we did have those ABLs to blast ya. Yet another reason to vote against Kerry because vital projects like those would die on day one of his period of misrule.
> I don't know if you have been living under a rock or not, but TV will > soon go to all digital.
Yes, and a digital transmission consumes almost exactly the same amount of spectrum as an analog transmission. This is not a coincidence, teh FCC mandated that any digital system consume the same or less spectrum. The difference is they can send one HD stream or up to six ED streams in a digital channel. (Plus a lot of other subchannel stuff, but let us not overly complicate the discussion.)
> When they do this, they could go to all digital spread spectrum, > allowing microbraodcase TV stations.
To review, reread the subject line. Spread spectrum isn't magic pixie dust that repeals the laws of information theory. If you want to send X bits per second you need Y Hz of bandwidth assuming Z dB of usable s/n ratio. You can partially obscure that by raising the noise floor on a lot of spectrum a little (by hopping those Y hz around in a much larger window) or raise a spot Y Hz wide a lot (by using more traditional means). The problem is you wouldn't be able to actually put two TV stations inside the spread range of another. So making a 6Mhz TV station into a 50Mhz wide SS signal is a losing proposition. Why do you think WiFi has 11 channels (US) but you can only really use three in a meshed network of access points without them stepping on each other? It is because the current DSSS scheme splatters across five channels so you can really only use 1, 6 and 11. Go read up on some of this stuff!
Spread Spectrum has many positive qualities, but little purpose in broadcasting as it adds complication needlessly.
The primary reason WiFi uses DS spread spectrum is because of a quirk in the FCC regs. They specified some of the limits in terms of detectability of signal instead of peak output power so DSSS got them around the regs with enough ERP to make 11Mbps work at a usable range. Remember that plain 802.11 used the much more primitive FHSS. And the primary reason for any spread spectrum was to minimize the interferrence from all the other crap already operating in the 2.4GHz band. Cordless phones and microwave ovens being the main problems.
Oh get real, the ninth and tenth were dead long before the Supremes started legislating from the bench.:) More than anyone else, thank that bastard Lincoln for killing off States' Rights. Every time I think about the Republican Party being founded by a son of a bitch like him I remind myself that party labels shift over time and that if he were alive today he would almost certainly be out stumping for Kerry.
> Yeah, I guess I was thinking of other bands like TV
Those channels are already spoken for. Wireless Internet, ever more cell phone channels, expanded public service allocations, etc.
On the one hand everyone bitches about cell phone prices, using it as a club to abvocate free spectrum (like that toon did) and not realizing that is it because of how CHEAP cell phones have become that we have the problem of ever expanding frequency allocations for the cell companies. So many people can afford to use a cell to replace their landline, with the insane usage that implies (think teenage females) that they can't build towers, invent new compression schemes and open new bands up fast enough to keep up. And there is no way to eliminate the 'greedy' cell phone companies unless you have an alternate funding source for the hundreds of billions going into the veritable forest of cell towers now covering the fruited plain from sea to shining sea and still growing. Those things aren't cheap to build, and even more expensive to maintain. Guys get paid $/foot to climb them because a non-trivial number DIE every year doing the hazardous duty.
But yes, I'd love to see at least one 6MHz TV channel reallocated to 10W lightly regulated point to point communications among other worthwhile ideas. But this notion of tossing the FCC bandplan that this thread is supposed to be about (remember the 'toon) is just madness from the Seattle anti-WIPO riot, down with authority, anarchy now! set.
> The single most practical reason for the moon landing was to show > up the Soviets.
Exactly. Which is why I don't look to NASA for the next steps in space. Although it must be admitted that the Cold War motives for Apollo were legit and contributed about as much to winning the War as Reagan's key insight that declaring the Emperor to be naked would work wonders.
Yes I know all of the physics reasons why the X-Prize is meaningless, that getting to 100KM isn't anything like the greater effort to have an ORBIT at 100km, etc. But when it gets won it will create the mindset (admittedly mostly among the ones who don't understand what a small step it actually is) needed to get the private funding flowing. Had we waited around for the government to develop aviation we would still be waiting for regular transcontinental flights. Military aviation would be much farther along but mostly classified.
All we need is one or two well heeled industrialists to realize that space is attainable and that there are LIMITLESS riches awaiting someone with the vision to reach out and seize them. And they need to be rich/powerful enough to say a big hearty FUCK YOU to the UN, France and John Kerry's ilk when they try invoking those old Soviet Era UN space treaties intended to hold the 1st world out of space for a century or two until the 3rd worlders catch up.
Once someone opens up space the rest of us will be able to follow as surely as the pilgrims on the Mayflower followed Columbus's well funded expedition of discovery and commercial exploitation. Like many of our forefathers we might travel in steerage, we might have to reinvent indentured servitude to pay the passage, but none of those details will deter the bold, the pioneers, the wanderers. Freed of a single overpopulated, overgoverned, overtaxed Earth, mankind will be Free! At least for a time.....
> Why is that it's always the person who works at 7-11 who's concerned > about where his tax dollars are going?
Because percentage wise, the guy managing a 7-11 is paying more than His Billness at MSFT. (Especially when you figure the whole 15% FICA load as tax, which anyone being honest must.) Because the couple of K$ that guy at 7-11 is contributing to the Welfare State HURTS more than the insane in dollars but not hurting figure Warren Buffet pays.
That lack of pain is why Warren Buffet is calling for higher taxes (of course he SAYS just for 'the rich' but we are now wise to how Democrats decide who is rich and where most of the actual money for the treasury comes from) and why the guy at 7-11 considers cutting taxes as a key voting issue. He is working 50+ hours a week watching non-working idiots come into his 7-11 all day spending food stamps at his overpriced CONVENIENCE STORE; and he knows the money was ripped out of his kids mouths. Income redistribution isn't some abstract theory for him, it is gritty reality and he doesn't like being on the wrong end of it.
> Lastly, Tradition states that a pithy motto be in latin, since it > is a "dead" language, and therefore less likely to be misinterpreted.
Now why didn't our Founding Fathers think of this and write our Constitution in Latin! Of course I doubt that would have actually kept the Supremes from reimagining it whenever the urge hits them. I mean the English they used was pretty unambigious; phrases like "Congress shall make no law...", "...shall not be infringed" and "for limited times."
Have a look at SUSE's shipping kernel that tops the scales at 1000 patches or the horror movie demon child of the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels that is the shipping RHEL3 kernel. Twenty five patches is 'almost stock' when discussing vendor kernels. Sad but true.
We license drivers before allowing them onto public roadways. We also have mandatory liability insurance to make whole the people the idiots bump into. (btw, as a semi-libertarian I'm 100% opposed to mandatory liability insurance. But that veers way off topic.)
> People could block emergency vehicles from even leaving the fire > station.
We have laws against that also. Just like we have laws regulating the RF spectrum prohibiting you from camping your pirate radio transmitter on top of the fire dept's pageout channel.
> But somehow, we seem to all share the limited resource IN A > DYNAMIC INTELLIGENT WAY.
Because we are sentient beings and a lot smarter than the smartest computer. Design and pilot a decentralized radio network that is smart enough to know to cut off web surfers and let the critical public service agencies have the spectrum when something goes FOOM! (not just a 9/11 event, a good warehouse fire threatening to spread out of control is just as bad on a localized scale.) and prove it WILL work as good or better than the current scheme of allocating permanent spectrum to fire/police/etc. and THEN start bloviating.
> There's a maximum volume allowed for audible noises, yet we get to > talk just about whenever we want, and we don't have to keep a > particular audio frequency free for emergency purposes.
There is the same thing for RF as well. An unlicensed transmitter has a mx power level, must accept any interference from a licensed transmitter and must not interfere with any licensed broadcaster. Which is why that cartoon showing a muzzled family was pure propaganda. Carry your ignorant butt to Walmart or Best Buy sometime and look at the little FM radio transmitters they sell to allow you to play your portable CD/MP3 player through your car's radio. That is an unlicensed radio transmitter overlayed on a licensed spectrum. Read the weasel words on the package and they will be almost identical to the first part of this paragraph.
> Sure. I know almost zero about RF issues.
Yet, just as I predicted, knowing nothing and admitting this, you felt compelled to open your piehole. You know something? The First Amendment doesn't compel speech. There are a LOT of threads here on/. I just lurk on, thereby lowering the S/N ratio and increasing my knowledge so that eventually I might feel competent enough to contribute.
> Yet I didn't see you address the article linked to in the story
at all.
Yes, I did read the entire cartoon BEFORE reading the thread. Found it intellectually dishonest and about as science based as a typical Marvel Comic.
> Yeah, I'd thought you would rear your little 'fact:' writing style > when I wrote this.
What you talking about Willis? Don't recall ever having the misfortune of attempting a conversation with you before.
> If there is enough bandwidth for everyone to communicate their > life stories every second at 1 kW,
IF frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their ass every time they hopped. Even assuming your point to be true (it isn't) it wouldn't matter. Next hardware rev beyond WiFi they will be slinging MPEG2 streams around, next HiDef TV streams, then......
Now go look in ANY longhaul trucker's cab. How many kilowatts are they pushing out their CB antenna? Are even 1% of them spectrally pure by any meaning of the word?
Now project that lawlessness to WiFi and imagine idiots pushing 100+ watts out their roof so they can use their laptop on the other side of the block. Got a clue for you. WiFi's band was given over to unlicensed spectrum because it was useless commercially. Because MICROWAVE OVENS operate there. Because those waves REACT to water. Unregulated microwaves in the hands of idiots would be a lethal combination.
As would most of the rest of the spectrum, it is all dangerous stuff in large doses. As things stand now the only people allowed to own/operate high power RF gear are in theory supposed to know enough about the dangers involved to avoid killing themselves and everyone in the neighborhood. Ask yourself the big question. Do you want the pimply faced youth next door who can play Unreal and managed to install a DVD burner in Dad's PC, and therefore considers himself 3l1t3, to be beaming high power electromagnetic radiation through YOUR house?
> This is not good, I thought that the test releases were supposed to > pick things like this up ?
These bugs are shaking down from the 2.6 kernel. Shipping 2.6 was one of the key goals of FC2 so what do you suggest they do? By getting it out onto many systems the bugs will get fixed. Remember that FC is not intended to be a production operating system. That said, I'm posting this from it on an Athlon64. So far the only real problem is I can't use GNOME because Nautilus is borked on x86_64. It's a known issue that will hopefully get solved. So I'm playing with xfce and generally liking what I'm seeing; an environment for UNIX people instead of the pair of braindamaged Windows(tm) clones that get all the column inches in the trade press.
Got the same keyboard myself. btw, it is an Acer not a LiteOn as your subject line says. Runs forever on a pair of AAA batteries.
Consumer electronics uses IR for a reason, it works and it is cheap. Screw BlueTooth until the price drops and even then it's intended range of only a couple of feet makes it unsuitable for a HTPC installation.
Look, Spread Spectrum isn't a magik nostrum to solve all ills. It makes it harder to actually intercept the signal but it raises the noise floor across the band it is operating on. Get enough devices operating and the noise floor comes up and smacks you. Toss the regulations and everyone starts cranking up the outpower and that floor will hit you pretty damned fast unless YOU crank up your power, which means your neighbors have to up THEIR power to overcome your contribution to the noise level, spiral out of control to madness.
Fact: Spectrum is not an infinite resource.
Fact: Spectrum, like every other finite public resource will be allocated in some fashion.
Discussing whether the current bandplan is sensible in the age of WiFi and other emerging technologies is a different debate, one I would love to get into; however there isn't much point of trying that in this thread:
1. This cartoon is a bunch of propaganda from some corporate consortium wanting to SELL lots of small RF devices who managed to tool some leftist think tank to make their arguments for them in terms of anti-corporatism. Kinda silly if you think about it. But with that sort of red meat hanging, the "down with authority" crowd is going to be out in force on this article.
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
> No, it means your UPS plays it safe and doesn't disengage from a > high load status
I think you are confusing a real UPS (a very rare and expensive animal) with what APC markets under that name. But instead of going into all that technical detail I'll just ask you to take a look at my displayed url and consider what I mean by long CPU bound jobs. As in I start a compile running, switch off the monitor and go to bed. In the morning when I check in on it I know that if the UPS is showing two lights the compile isn't finished and there is no need to light up the screen unless I want to work against that kind of load.
> Good job guys. I tire of these posts about heat.
I love my new Athlon64 machine. But it does run pretty damned HOT. I don't really care about your laptop's heat output because guess what? It uses thermal management to throttle down the speed to keep the temp under control. Take a look at the AMD datasheets and watch how much the temp goes down with just a small downshift in clock. My 3200+ sinks the full 89 watts when it is compiling. The temp on the heat sink shoots up nearly 10C during a long CPU bound operation. And that is with the retail AMD heatsink/fan along with a 120mm fan side mounted over the processor area.
Another data point. The load meter on my UPS is only lighting up the first indicator right now with net radio cranking and a 19" LCD on. Start a CPU bound job and the second light will come on. And stay on even if the sound is stopped and the monitor switched off. Which tells me the difference between idle and full draw on the CPU is than the monitor and speaker system combined.
> From my point of view, if you design a network solely for the purpose > of relieving yourself of responsibility for what traverses your network, > you are pretty much screwed once you get to court.
I dunno about that part. Isn't exactly what the telcos do? They intentionally make zero effort to control the traffic passing across their network, lest they lose common carrier status and become legally liable for everything that happens inside their zone of control.
The questionable part is turning off all logging, even dhcp logs of MAC address-IP pairs. That makes it truly impossible to pass the responsibility off even in theory.
> The government can throw me in Guantanamo Bay, but that's different).
No they can't, so stop with with the FUD or lose any right to criticize these asshats.
The only way to get a ticket to Gitmo is to be a non-US citizen captured by US forces in combat with a non-government force. Although personally I believe the Taliban were functioning as a government in every real sense of the word and Al Queda forces in Afganistan were obviously allied under that government so refusing POW status to them was a bad idea and set a bad precedent. But that is a totally different argument. (It is a rational one for starters, as opposed to the primal ranting from the typical slashdotter wearing a tinfoil hat.)
Well other than that one bit of unpleasantness, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln.
> I've just thrown away my Debian machine
Think I have located your problem. Debian is not for you. Debian is for extreme power users and developers, plus the fanboys in dorms. You would have had much better luck with a desktop distro like Mandrake, Suse or RedHat/Fedora.
> For me -- who uses a word processor, IM, mail and web client -- Windows > (in XP flavour) is just better.
All of those items are stock on any good Linux distro. And they "just work."
> When properly set up, it simply works. I don't have to mess with > setting up Java, I don't have any problems with unstable drivers, my > system never ever hangs up, has not been reinstalled since the first > installation...
Windows does NOT come with Java anymore than most Linux distros do. Install & download is pretty much the same with either one. Pick known stable hardware for a linux box and it will run for months without a reboot. Don't even TRY telling me that XP will do that because at a minimum you have to reboot every week or so for a security patch.
Oh, and Windows XP doesn't run on Athlon64 machines yet unless you count a bugridden beta that wouldn't even begin the installer on my machine.
Slashdot Mirror
> Obligated by what authority?
Obligated by the act of signing the Treaty. Signing is a pledge mutual between Soverigns to follow a commonly agreed upon course of action. If you sign treaties and don't enforce them you aren't likely to be invited to the next one.
Soverign States are just that, Soverign. But they don't exist in a vacumn either. In the end, violators of treaties can be faced with the ultimate treaty enforcement action: War! Go ask Saddam about what repeated violations of treaty obligations can get you.... if you can get permission to visit him in his US prison cell that is.
> Vietnam wasn't even technically a fair fight -- our force was clearly
> superior, but our tactics were not.
Another product of public education.... The US military won every major battle in Vietnam. Our tactics were totally superior to anything the VC had. Our weapons were of course overwhelming. Had the issue been decided on the battlefield there could have been only one outcome.
No, The Vietnam War was won right here in the USA, on the college campuses and the halls of Congress, by a superior propaganda campaign spearheaded by, among other infamous Viet Cong irregulars, John Forbes Kerry. Who now is eagar to step forward once more to carry the banner of Saddam, Usama, Chirac and the rest of the new Post-Communist Nihilist movement which is only unified on one goal, destroying Western Civilization and the concept of individual liberty it espouses.
p.s. Yes mods, posting this to the Young Socialists on slashdot IS trolling. So hit me with your best shot biaches, I have plenty of Karma to burn between now and election day and if I can get just ONE person who was going to vote Kerry to reconsider that move (even if they just stay home or vote for Nader) it would be worth dropping all the way to zero Karma.
> It propagates the myth that there is such a thing as "international
> law" or "laws of war."
All signatories to the Geneva Convention are obligated to institute local laws to implement the Treaty they signed. So while I agree that the World Court is a joke, if a US soldier violates the Geneva Convention they will be brought up before a Court Martial proceeding and punished according to US law for violating laws placed on the books as a result of the Senate ratifying a Treaty.
Most civilized countries have similar laws. Hell, even the Nazi's did a fair job of upholding the Conventions in WWII. Not that they were paragons of virtue mind you, but it made military sense to have it known that you will accept a surrender. Contrast to the sort of fighting unto death common in the Pacific theatre of operations, where most of the Japanese fought to the death as a matter of honor and after atrocities like Battaan the Allies did as well, fearing death less than becoming a POW. Only total despots (most other socialists, Islamic fanatics, etc.) flaunt the Geneva Convention.
> where a representative politican of either party
Product of the public schools I see. It should have been evident that I was asserting that the party did matter. Republicans in general do not care for the UN and it's orders. Name ONE Democrat on the national stage who doesn't fervently believe in the UN and it's moral authority.
Those old Soviet Era UN treaties are going to prove a major obstable to the commercial development of space unless we have a strong Republican president who will simply renounce them as the Soviet relics they are.
> Bush is a close friend of Lockheed CEO Hoffman
Oh spare me the black helicopter theories. A Republican president shooting down the creation of not just a few high paying jobs, but the birth of a whole NEW INDUSTRY, with the promise of being bigger than Silicon Valley and the upcoming Biotech revolution, to be lead by American firms? Just to make France and Kofi Annon[sp?] happy? Not on this planet he won't. And surely you don't think Burt Rutan is going to open up the Final Frontier all by himself in some idyllic rags to riches story. No, Lockheed, Boing and the rest of the aerospace gang will figure out a way to be right in the middle of it; building stuff and selling it for the sort of good profits that warm the cockles of any good Republican's heart. Being a believer in Capitalism as the best way to create and redistribute wealth, I couldn't be happier with that thought.
> Maybe the White House has missiles that can stop a 747
> from reaching it
We currently do not have anything that can stop a 747, a ballistic missle or a spacefaring vehicle. Which should frighten you and make you ask "why don't we?" and then "Why aren't we doing something about this?" Well W took the first important step by invoking the ABM Treaty's exit clause. Now it up to the chrome domes to actually cook up a workable system; because while I don't think W is nearly the idiot the Dems in the press make him out as, physicist he ain't. Some promising hints to date but nothing I really have a lot of faith in panning out yet. However I'm patient and confident that here there is a will, American technology will find a way.
> What exactly do their Thinkpad configurations have to do with their
> support of Linux?
I dunno, I think it says a lot of nice things about their Linux support.
1. Thinkpads are fairly easy to install Linux on. My X31 has almost all the hardware supported right off the install CD and the Winmodem is easy enough to get working. The only thing I can't do is hot or warm dock, which is annoying but I can live with.
2. They ship three button pointers!
3. Yes they still ship with Windoze and you can't get them to ship one without it because Microsoft is flagrently violating their consent decree, but they tend to ship with an empty partition instead of just one big Windoze partition.
> Why do you single out Kerry?
1. He is the current standard bearer for the Democratic Party.
2. He is a closet socialist. Just a personal belief, he is smart enough to have never actually SAID it. But just as a first clue, consider that most of the hardcore Blame America First crowd responsible for the loss of the Vietnam War and subsequent massacres of millions were pro Viet Cong and pro Soviet. John Kerry was as hardcore in that movement as you get.
3. He believes in the UN. Does ANY doubt this? It is one of the few positions he has never waffled on during his entire public life. Who is more likely to enforce those old "no private spaceflight" treaties? W certainly doesn't consider himself bound by their edicts and a LOT of Republicans want us to withdraw from the UN entirely. Find ONE Democrat who would ignore a UN Security Council Resolution when they pronounce illegal the first attempt to establish a private moonbase? Or more useful, would have the stones to order our Ambassador to veto said Resolution?
4. He is a Democrat. nuff said. Yes there ARE Democrats left who believe in America, but not very many able to attain national office anymore. Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA) doesn't count, being appointed to fill a vacancy and not even bothering to stand for election this year.
5. He hates Free Enterprise, preferring Big Government. See #1, #2 and #3. (Although, being totally honest W seems to like both Free Enterprise AND Big Government considering how much the FedGov has grown under his watch. He wasn't my choice in the '00 primaries.)
> He'll assign an ABL to zap you on the boost phase!
Not if you stay on your flight plan and don't have a trajectory leading you into a population center. But if you WERE aimed at a population center I wish we did have those ABLs to blast ya. Yet another reason to vote against Kerry because vital projects like those would die on day one of his period of misrule.
> I don't know if you have been living under a rock or not, but TV will
> soon go to all digital.
Yes, and a digital transmission consumes almost exactly the same amount of spectrum as an analog transmission. This is not a coincidence, teh FCC mandated that any digital system consume the same or less spectrum. The difference is they can send one HD stream or up to six ED streams in a digital channel. (Plus a lot of other subchannel stuff, but let us not overly complicate the discussion.)
> When they do this, they could go to all digital spread spectrum,
> allowing microbraodcase TV stations.
To review, reread the subject line. Spread spectrum isn't magic pixie dust that repeals the laws of information theory. If you want to send X bits per second you need Y Hz of bandwidth assuming Z dB of usable s/n ratio. You can partially obscure that by raising the noise floor on a lot of spectrum a little (by hopping those Y hz around in a much larger window) or raise a spot Y Hz wide a lot (by using more traditional means). The problem is you wouldn't be able to actually put two TV stations inside the spread range of another. So making a 6Mhz TV station into a 50Mhz wide SS signal is a losing proposition. Why do you think WiFi has 11 channels (US) but you can only really use three in a meshed network of access points without them stepping on each other? It is because the current DSSS scheme splatters across five channels so you can really only use 1, 6 and 11. Go read up on some of this stuff!
Spread Spectrum has many positive qualities, but little purpose in broadcasting as it adds complication needlessly.
The primary reason WiFi uses DS spread spectrum is because of a quirk in the FCC regs. They specified some of the limits in terms of detectability of signal instead of peak output power so DSSS got them around the regs with enough ERP to make 11Mbps work at a usable range. Remember that plain 802.11 used the much more primitive FHSS. And the primary reason for any spread spectrum was to minimize the interferrence from all the other crap already operating in the 2.4GHz band. Cordless phones and microwave ovens being the main problems.
Oh get real, the ninth and tenth were dead long before the Supremes started legislating from the bench. :) More than anyone else, thank that bastard Lincoln for killing off States' Rights. Every time I think about the Republican Party being founded by a son of a bitch like him I remind myself that party labels shift over time and that if he were alive today he would almost certainly be out stumping for Kerry.
> Yeah, I guess I was thinking of other bands like TV
Those channels are already spoken for. Wireless Internet, ever more cell phone channels, expanded public service allocations, etc.
On the one hand everyone bitches about cell phone prices, using it as a club to abvocate free spectrum (like that toon did) and not realizing that is it because of how CHEAP cell phones have become that we have the problem of ever expanding frequency allocations for the cell companies. So many people can afford to use a cell to replace their landline, with the insane usage that implies (think teenage females) that they can't build towers, invent new compression schemes and open new bands up fast enough to keep up. And there is no way to eliminate the 'greedy' cell phone companies unless you have an alternate funding source for the hundreds of billions going into the veritable forest of cell towers now covering the fruited plain from sea to shining sea and still growing. Those things aren't cheap to build, and even more expensive to maintain. Guys get paid $/foot to climb them because a non-trivial number DIE every year doing the hazardous duty.
But yes, I'd love to see at least one 6MHz TV channel reallocated to 10W lightly regulated point to point communications among other worthwhile ideas. But this notion of tossing the FCC bandplan that this thread is supposed to be about (remember the 'toon) is just madness from the Seattle anti-WIPO riot, down with authority, anarchy now! set.
> The single most practical reason for the moon landing was to show
> up the Soviets.
Exactly. Which is why I don't look to NASA for the next steps in space. Although it must be admitted that the Cold War motives for Apollo were legit and contributed about as much to winning the War as Reagan's key insight that declaring the Emperor to be naked would work wonders.
Yes I know all of the physics reasons why the X-Prize is meaningless, that getting to 100KM isn't anything like the greater effort to have an ORBIT at 100km, etc. But when it gets won it will create the mindset (admittedly mostly among the ones who don't understand what a small step it actually is) needed to get the private funding flowing. Had we waited around for the government to develop aviation we would still be waiting for regular transcontinental flights. Military aviation would be much farther along but mostly classified.
All we need is one or two well heeled industrialists to realize that space is attainable and that there are LIMITLESS riches awaiting someone with the vision to reach out and seize them. And they need to be rich/powerful enough to say a big hearty FUCK YOU to the UN, France and John Kerry's ilk when they try invoking those old Soviet Era UN space treaties intended to hold the 1st world out of space for a century or two until the 3rd worlders catch up.
Once someone opens up space the rest of us will be able to follow as surely as the pilgrims on the Mayflower followed Columbus's well funded expedition of discovery and commercial exploitation. Like many of our forefathers we might travel in steerage, we might have to reinvent indentured servitude to pay the passage, but none of those details will deter the bold, the pioneers, the wanderers. Freed of a single overpopulated, overgoverned, overtaxed Earth, mankind will be Free! At least for a time.....
> Why is that it's always the person who works at 7-11 who's concerned
> about where his tax dollars are going?
Because percentage wise, the guy managing a 7-11 is paying more than His Billness at MSFT. (Especially when you figure the whole 15% FICA load as tax, which anyone being honest must.) Because the couple of K$ that guy at 7-11 is contributing to the Welfare State HURTS more than the insane in dollars but not hurting figure Warren Buffet pays.
That lack of pain is why Warren Buffet is calling for higher taxes (of course he SAYS just for 'the rich' but we are now wise to how Democrats decide who is rich and where most of the actual money for the treasury comes from) and why the guy at 7-11 considers cutting taxes as a key voting issue. He is working 50+ hours a week watching non-working idiots come into his 7-11 all day spending food stamps at his overpriced CONVENIENCE STORE; and he knows the money was ripped out of his kids mouths. Income redistribution isn't some abstract theory for him, it is gritty reality and he doesn't like being on the wrong end of it.
> Lastly, Tradition states that a pithy motto be in latin, since it
> is a "dead" language, and therefore less likely to be misinterpreted.
Now why didn't our Founding Fathers think of this and write our Constitution in Latin! Of course I doubt that would have actually kept the Supremes from reimagining it whenever the urge hits them. I mean the English they used was pretty unambigious; phrases like "Congress shall make no law...", "...shall not be infringed" and "for limited times."
This is not what I call "almost stock".
Have a look at SUSE's shipping kernel that tops the scales at 1000 patches or the horror movie demon child of the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels that is the shipping RHEL3 kernel. Twenty five patches is 'almost stock' when discussing vendor kernels. Sad but true.
> People could crash into others on the highway.
/. I just lurk on, thereby lowering the S/N ratio and increasing my knowledge so that eventually I might feel competent enough to contribute.
We license drivers before allowing them onto public roadways. We also have mandatory liability insurance to make whole the people the idiots bump into. (btw, as a semi-libertarian I'm 100% opposed to mandatory liability insurance. But that veers way off topic.)
> People could block emergency vehicles from even leaving the fire
> station.
We have laws against that also. Just like we have laws regulating the RF spectrum prohibiting you from camping your pirate radio transmitter on top of the fire dept's pageout channel.
> But somehow, we seem to all share the limited resource IN A
> DYNAMIC INTELLIGENT WAY.
Because we are sentient beings and a lot smarter than the smartest computer. Design and pilot a decentralized radio network that is smart enough to know to cut off web surfers and let the critical public service agencies have the spectrum when something goes FOOM! (not just a 9/11 event, a good warehouse fire threatening to spread out of control is just as bad on a localized scale.) and prove it WILL work as good or better than the current scheme of allocating permanent spectrum to fire/police/etc. and THEN start bloviating.
> There's a maximum volume allowed for audible noises, yet we get to
> talk just about whenever we want, and we don't have to keep a
> particular audio frequency free for emergency purposes.
There is the same thing for RF as well. An unlicensed transmitter has a mx power level, must accept any interference from a licensed transmitter and must not interfere with any licensed broadcaster. Which is why that cartoon showing a muzzled family was pure propaganda. Carry your ignorant butt to Walmart or Best Buy sometime and look at the little FM radio transmitters they sell to allow you to play your portable CD/MP3 player through your car's radio. That is an unlicensed radio transmitter overlayed on a licensed spectrum. Read the weasel words on the package and they will be almost identical to the first part of this paragraph.
> Sure. I know almost zero about RF issues.
Yet, just as I predicted, knowing nothing and admitting this, you felt compelled to open your piehole. You know something? The First Amendment doesn't compel speech. There are a LOT of threads here on
> Yet I didn't see you address the article linked to in the story
at all.
Yes, I did read the entire cartoon BEFORE reading the thread. Found it intellectually dishonest and about as science based as a typical Marvel Comic.
> Yeah, I'd thought you would rear your little 'fact:' writing style
> when I wrote this.
What you talking about Willis? Don't recall ever having the misfortune of attempting a conversation with you before.
> If there is enough bandwidth for everyone to communicate their
> life stories every second at 1 kW,
IF frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their ass every time they hopped. Even assuming your point to be true (it isn't) it wouldn't matter. Next hardware rev beyond WiFi they will be slinging MPEG2 streams around, next HiDef TV streams, then......
Now go look in ANY longhaul trucker's cab. How many kilowatts are they pushing out their CB antenna? Are even 1% of them spectrally pure by any meaning of the word?
Now project that lawlessness to WiFi and imagine idiots pushing 100+ watts out their roof so they can use their laptop on the other side of the block. Got a clue for you. WiFi's band was given over to unlicensed spectrum because it was useless commercially. Because MICROWAVE OVENS operate there. Because those waves REACT to water. Unregulated microwaves in the hands of idiots would be a lethal combination.
As would most of the rest of the spectrum, it is all dangerous stuff in large doses. As things stand now the only people allowed to own/operate high power RF gear are in theory supposed to know enough about the dangers involved to avoid killing themselves and everyone in the neighborhood. Ask yourself the big question. Do you want the pimply faced youth next door who can play Unreal and managed to install a DVD burner in Dad's PC, and therefore considers himself 3l1t3, to be beaming high power electromagnetic radiation through YOUR house?
> This is not good, I thought that the test releases were supposed to
> pick things like this up ?
These bugs are shaking down from the 2.6 kernel. Shipping 2.6 was one of the key goals of FC2 so what do you suggest they do? By getting it out onto many systems the bugs will get fixed. Remember that FC is not intended to be a production operating system. That said, I'm posting this from it on an Athlon64. So far the only real problem is I can't use GNOME because Nautilus is borked on x86_64. It's a known issue that will hopefully get solved. So I'm playing with xfce and generally liking what I'm seeing; an environment for UNIX people instead of the pair of braindamaged Windows(tm) clones that get all the column inches in the trade press.
Fedora Core 2 ships an almost stock 2.6 kernel. Which it would have taken you a whole minute to confirm before opening your piehole.
Got the same keyboard myself. btw, it is an Acer not a LiteOn as your subject line says. Runs forever on a pair of AAA batteries.
Consumer electronics uses IR for a reason, it works and it is cheap. Screw BlueTooth until the price drops and even then it's intended range of only a couple of feet makes it unsuitable for a HTPC installation.
> Here is a primer on spread spectrum.
Key word being primer.
Look, Spread Spectrum isn't a magik nostrum to solve all ills. It makes it harder to actually intercept the signal but it raises the noise floor across the band it is operating on. Get enough devices operating and the noise floor comes up and smacks you. Toss the regulations and everyone starts cranking up the outpower and that floor will hit you pretty damned fast unless YOU crank up your power, which means your neighbors have to up THEIR power to overcome your contribution to the noise level, spiral out of control to madness.
Fact: Spectrum is not an infinite resource.
Fact: Spectrum, like every other finite public resource will be allocated in some fashion.
Discussing whether the current bandplan is sensible in the age of WiFi and other emerging technologies is a different debate, one I would love to get into; however there isn't much point of trying that in this thread:
1. This cartoon is a bunch of propaganda from some corporate consortium wanting to SELL lots of small RF devices who managed to tool some leftist think tank to make their arguments for them in terms of anti-corporatism. Kinda silly if you think about it. But with that sort of red meat hanging, the "down with authority" crowd is going to be out in force on this article.
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
> No, it means your UPS plays it safe and doesn't disengage from a
> high load status
I think you are confusing a real UPS (a very rare and expensive animal) with what APC markets under that name. But instead of going into all that technical detail I'll just ask you to take a look at my displayed url and consider what I mean by long CPU bound jobs. As in I start a compile running, switch off the monitor and go to bed. In the morning when I check in on it I know that if the UPS is showing two lights the compile isn't finished and there is no need to light up the screen unless I want to work against that kind of load.
> Good job guys. I tire of these posts about heat.
I love my new Athlon64 machine. But it does run pretty damned HOT. I don't really care about your laptop's heat output because guess what? It uses thermal management to throttle down the speed to keep the temp under control. Take a look at the AMD datasheets and watch how much the temp goes down with just a small downshift in clock. My 3200+ sinks the full 89 watts when it is compiling. The temp on the heat sink shoots up nearly 10C during a long CPU bound operation. And that is with the retail AMD heatsink/fan along with a 120mm fan side mounted over the processor area.
Another data point. The load meter on my UPS is only lighting up the first indicator right now with net radio cranking and a 19" LCD on. Start a CPU bound job and the second light will come on. And stay on even if the sound is stopped and the monitor switched off. Which tells me the difference between idle and full draw on the CPU is than the monitor and speaker system combined.
> Microsoft - Your innovation, our patents
No! No! No! It should be:
Apple's innovation, our patents.
> From my point of view, if you design a network solely for the purpose
> of relieving yourself of responsibility for what traverses your network,
> you are pretty much screwed once you get to court.
I dunno about that part. Isn't exactly what the telcos do? They intentionally make zero effort to control the traffic passing across their network, lest they lose common carrier status and become legally liable for everything that happens inside their zone of control.
The questionable part is turning off all logging, even dhcp logs of MAC address-IP pairs. That makes it truly impossible to pass the responsibility off even in theory.
> The government can throw me in Guantanamo Bay, but that's different).
No they can't, so stop with with the FUD or lose any right to criticize these asshats.
The only way to get a ticket to Gitmo is to be a non-US citizen captured by US forces in combat with a non-government force. Although personally I believe the Taliban were functioning as a government in every real sense of the word and Al Queda forces in Afganistan were obviously allied under that government so refusing POW status to them was a bad idea and set a bad precedent. But that is a totally different argument. (It is a rational one for starters, as opposed to the primal ranting from the typical slashdotter wearing a tinfoil hat.)
> Well, apart from license and money reasons
Well other than that one bit of unpleasantness, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln.
> I've just thrown away my Debian machine
Think I have located your problem. Debian is not for you. Debian is for extreme power users and developers, plus the fanboys in dorms. You would have had much better luck with a desktop distro like Mandrake, Suse or RedHat/Fedora.
> For me -- who uses a word processor, IM, mail and web client -- Windows
> (in XP flavour) is just better.
All of those items are stock on any good Linux distro. And they "just work."
> When properly set up, it simply works. I don't have to mess with
> setting up Java, I don't have any problems with unstable drivers, my
> system never ever hangs up, has not been reinstalled since the first
> installation...
Windows does NOT come with Java anymore than most Linux distros do. Install & download is pretty much the same with either one. Pick known stable hardware for a linux box and it will run for months without a reboot. Don't even TRY telling me that XP will do that because at a minimum you have to reboot every week or so for a security patch.
Oh, and Windows XP doesn't run on Athlon64 machines yet unless you count a bugridden beta that wouldn't even begin the installer on my machine.