A ship may not change its flag during a voyage or while in a port of call, save in the case of a real transfer of ownership or change of registry.
Seems there is a loophole - transfer of ownership. I.e. a few guys selling the ship to each other. And you don't have to do this too often, it takes some time for a country to put real pressure on the government of your "convenience country."
One of the first things that I thought of was the possibility that the people who are "bounty hunters" may do what people have done in years past when the government ever gave actual bounties of this kind. All you have to do is just either create some of your own spam and then turn in the "user" or just pay people to post spam under fradulent accounts. Bam instant money.
Easily fixed by having the spammer actually pay the bounty (by having government extracting a fine from him.)
Heisenburg's uncertainty principle states that the position and momentum of a particle or object cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. Surely this means that the singularity would be "smeared out" somehow?
This don't save your day. Both cannot be known with arbitrary precision - but you may indeed measure one of them with any precision you want, screwing up the other one in the process.
So you can measure the position of your singularity with near-infinite precision, and then wonder what way it went as a result of this measurement.
Which prompts the question, in my mind anway, if the alleged victim doesn't really exist has a crime been committed?
No, it was planned, and there was the intent to carry it through. Wether the victim exists isn't interesting. (If it were, cops could hire a 14-year old for setting the trap, and then bust people.)
Can you accuse someone walking into a bank waving a gun? Before he has time to say anything?
On the other hand, when you can go to jail for using pad and pencil, something is wrong with the law.
You can use the pad and pencil to send explicit death threats to your prime minister or president or whatever. I have no problem with imprisoning such types.
There are never valid reasons for the exploitation of children.
Correct, but how do you know that someone really tried to download child porn? You don't know how they got there.
Anybody can set up a site with something different and attract some attention. They may then cause trouble by having mislabeled links into the logging site. Suddenly people get listed as child-porn users because they wanted info on something completely different.
It will look curved. Not by much, because you can't spin it very fast - the far end can't move faster than the speed of light. If this is a steel pole (not something infinitely rigid) then you bend it into a spiral, because the movement is limited by whatever the speed of sound is in steel. (This hold for anything made of atoms.) A steel pole will break at some distance unless you move it *extremely* slow.
For a more interesting effect, use a laser pointer and spin around quickly. Then look at the spiral of light reflected from the dust in your light-day wide environment.
Rember, Eve can't read the data without collapsing the probability states of the entangled photons, so she has to re-generate the data. She can't do this fast enough to accurately mimic the data she originally received.
How little time is there? Using optical computers (assumed possible, not yet made), Eve-ine-the-middle might be able to regenerate data in the time light moves a few cm. Good enough?
... and filed away in that warehouse with the burn-for-5-years lightbulbs
There are burn-for-50-years-or-so lightbulbs, most of them made when lightbulbs were considered high-tech. The reason for not making them is that they have a too low light output for the current they consume.
Try halving the voltage to your lightbulbs. They will last for over 5 years and be very dim. You can easily compensate dimness by using a lot more bulbs, but then you use a lot of electricity generating lots of waste heat.
These are important pieces of functionality that worked once. Why were checkins/merges allowed that broke these?
The cache (among other stuff) were changed so it would be way faster and use about half the memory. Good, eh? All filesystems then needed an overhaul for this to work.
Wasn't the code reviewed? Didn't anyone test for these?
It is being reviewed right now. All software manufacturers do this: Change something, and a lot of stuff is temporarily broken until fixed/adapted. A developer typically work on only a few files at a time. Of course no release take place during the broken time. The same happens to linux, with the difference that you may indeed take a look at code in the "broken state", because you too may do development if you want to help out. The code is not released though, it is merely available. Release happens when they roll out 2.4.0
Could it be claimed that simply by releasing this as a binary file they are encrypting the contents of a copyrighted work (the source code?)
Compiled code isn't a form of encryption - the "decryption" is trivial and documented by the chipmakers.
Compiled code is no more cryptic than translating a message into another (well-known) language, or using UPPEERCASE TEXT as weak encryption (it is harder to read uppercase so many just skip it...)
No vote, no voice. This would be the simplest way to enact real reform. If you are not allowed to vote in an election you cannot run adds in support, lobby, or donate cash to pol.
That would hardly change anything. Gates could extract a huge sum as "salary", and donate to whatever he wants. I assume he has the right to vote himself.
Many corporates just can't see things that way. "If we release our specs to everyone," say the typical Joe Corpobutt, "our concurrent will know how to do the same hardware, and, as they've better engineers than we have, they'll soon sell better and cheapier version of our products! No way!"
Too bad for Joe Corpbutt then - he's lost the linux market already. This is not a problem, as there is hardware enough for us. More is fine, but we don't desperately *need* it anymore.
And the argument is flawed, a spec for what the sw should do to make the hw work doesn't provide enough info for reverse-engineering the hardware itself. Put some custom chips on the card that nobody else can get, and they are lost.
Drivers may become available that wouldn't otherwise be available. (Even a closed-source driver is better than nothing.)
Not that much of a need anymore. Linux supports all kinds of intersting hardware, be a _little_ careful when buying and you'll be fine.
<I>Linux, FreeBSD and other free operating systems wouldn't have to waste time rewriting drivers already implemented, if they all support UDI</I>
Too bad the UDI spec isn't good enough. Several kernel experts says it won't perform well, particularly not on SMP.
<I>I'd rather have an experimental driver run slowly than crash my system!</I> I rather have some pressure on developers to get it right. Most of linux works wery well thanks to this.
There is some overhead during module loading, but once the module is loaded, there really should be no performance loss/gain over a regular compiled driver statically linked into the kernel.
There is a small gain for statically linked drivers on pentium processors. (I don't know about the non-intel ones)
Linux use paged memory, so the CPU's MMU have to look up page tables for every address used. This takes time, so obviously there's a cache for this sort of thing, called TLB (Translation lookaside buffer). The TLB caches a few page adresses, anf get a time-consuming miss whenever some address not in the TLB is accessed.
Pages are usually of size 4k, so there is a lot of misses when working with something substantially bigger. Now, the pentium has a trick, a 4M page used to hold the statically linked kernel. This means kernel code can jump all over the place without getting any TLB miss. Module code however is loaded into ordinary 4k pages, and stand a much higher chance of TLB misses. Just like ordinary programs. So there's a small win for statically linked kernel drivers.
Open source doesn't seem to be helping things like the Linux NTFS driver, which, If I understand it correctly, is about to be dropped
Anybody who wants to can fix it. Seems nobody step up to the task, so nobody (able) are interested in a linux ntfs driver. Dropping it is fine under such circumstances. Oh, you want ntfs after all? Write it then...
I also think it's a mistake they decided to use their own widgets instead of Windows widgets. Users like consistency. People are going to look at this and go "What the hell is this? This isn't Netscape. The fonts are too small. This doesn't even look like Windows". Yes, most people are still Windows users, and for software to be succesful it needs to adopt the Principle-of-Least_Surprise.
People want to see something new different too. So it shouldn't look too much like the old netscape. And using their own widgets makes it consistent across platforms. Netscape 4 looks different on linux and windows, this changes now.
Problem with that is, something that takes down one service takes down both of them. I realize mainframes are pretty damn reliable boxes, but if it goes down, do you want it to take your webserver with it?
Sure - with uptimes measured in decades - I have no problem with that.
<I>One machine fails, 41,000 web servers</I> Mainframe parts fail from time to time, the point is that the machine keeps running, only with a few % drop in speed until you replace the broken part. There is no crash - never. Only slight performance hits from time to time. The machine doesn't rely on everything working simultaneously, and you replace parts while running. No poweroff, no reboot, the new part is recognised instantly as you insert it.
This isn't very useful. You can float some cats this way, but why bother? You can't float a spaceship with this. Put anything heavy on top of the cat and you'll crush it to the ground. Neither cat nor toast work when crushed by the spaceship.
I do not recommend this experiment. Cats do *not* like floating, particularly when they have to struggle continously to not fall on the back. They will usually destroy the toast if able. Or you'll get a lot of screaming and then the animal rights activists show up. That's when it gets ugly.
So what do you call a gigantic mech tearing through trees and stomping primitive but (formerly) effective booby-traps, huh?
It is not hard building primitive but effective traps for these things. All we need is bigger pits - what is it like, stumbling and falling with such a thing? And there are molotov cocktails, steel wire, sticks of dynamite,...
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A ship may not change its flag during a voyage or while in a port of call, save in the case of a real transfer of ownership or change of registry.
Seems there is a loophole - transfer of ownership. I.e. a few guys selling the ship to each other. And you don't have to do this too often, it takes some time for a country to put real pressure on the government of your "convenience country."
One of the first things that I thought of was the possibility that the people who are "bounty hunters" may do what people have done in years past when the government ever gave actual bounties of this kind. All you have to do is just either create some of your own spam and then turn in the "user" or just pay people to post spam under fradulent accounts. Bam instant money.
Easily fixed by having the spammer actually pay the bounty (by having government extracting a fine from him.)
Heisenburg's uncertainty principle states that the position and momentum of a particle or object cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. Surely this means that the singularity would be "smeared out" somehow?
This don't save your day. Both cannot be known with arbitrary precision - but you may indeed measure one of them with any precision you want, screwing up the other one in the process.
So you can measure the position of your singularity with near-infinite precision, and then wonder what way it went as a result of this measurement.
Which prompts the question, in my mind anway, if the alleged victim doesn't really exist has a crime been committed?
No, it was planned, and there was the intent to carry it through. Wether the victim exists isn't interesting. (If it were, cops could hire a 14-year old for setting the trap, and then bust people.)
Can you accuse someone walking into a bank waving a gun? Before he has time to say anything?
On the other hand, when you can go to jail for using pad and pencil, something is wrong with the law.
You can use the pad and pencil to send explicit death threats to your prime minister or president or whatever. I have no problem with imprisoning such types.
There are never valid reasons for the exploitation of children.
Correct, but how do you know that someone really tried to download child porn? You don't know how they got there.
Anybody can set up a site with something different and attract some attention. They may then cause trouble by having mislabeled links into the logging site. Suddenly people get listed as child-porn users because they wanted info on something completely different.
It will look curved. Not by much, because you can't spin it very fast - the far end can't move faster than the speed of light. If this is a steel pole (not something infinitely rigid) then you bend it into a spiral, because the movement is limited by whatever the speed of sound is in steel. (This hold for anything made of atoms.) A steel pole will break at some distance unless you move it *extremely* slow.
For a more interesting effect, use a laser pointer and spin around quickly. Then look at the spiral of light reflected from the dust in your light-day wide environment.
Rember, Eve can't read the data without collapsing the probability states of the entangled photons, so she has to re-generate the data. She can't do this fast enough to accurately mimic the data she originally received.
How little time is there? Using optical computers (assumed possible, not yet made), Eve-ine-the-middle might be able to regenerate data in the time light moves a few cm. Good enough?
... and filed away in that warehouse with the burn-for-5-years lightbulbs
There are burn-for-50-years-or-so lightbulbs, most of them made when lightbulbs were considered high-tech. The reason for not making them is that they have a too low light output for the current they consume.
Try halving the voltage to your lightbulbs. They will last for over 5 years and be very dim. You can easily compensate dimness by using a lot more bulbs, but then you use a lot of electricity generating lots of waste heat.
These are important pieces of functionality that worked once. Why were checkins/merges allowed that broke these?
The cache (among other stuff) were changed so it would be way faster and use about half the memory. Good, eh? All filesystems then needed an overhaul for this to work.
Wasn't the code reviewed? Didn't anyone test for these?
It is being reviewed right now. All software manufacturers do this: Change something, and a lot of stuff is temporarily broken until fixed/adapted. A developer typically work on only a few files at a time. Of course no release take place during the broken time. The same happens to linux, with the difference that you may indeed take a look at code in the "broken state", because you too may do development if you want to help out. The code is not released though, it is merely available. Release happens when they roll out 2.4.0
What about having a voice activated unlocking mechanism for a gun?
Easily faked with a tape recorder or similiar equipment.
Could it be claimed that simply by releasing this as a binary file they are encrypting the contents of a copyrighted work (the source code?)
Compiled code isn't a form of encryption - the "decryption" is trivial and documented by the chipmakers.
Compiled code is no more cryptic than translating a message into another (well-known) language, or using UPPEERCASE TEXT as weak encryption (it is harder to read uppercase so many just skip it...)
It feels very wrong to put the end-of-sentence mark ('.','!', or '?') inside the quotes
Good point, but see how much better it looks when printed in a book, using proper fonts.
"This." looks good.
"This". looks weird.
You know you can rename any icon on your desktop, fix the spelling on NN.
Sure. That's how you fix your own mistakes. The stuff you buy had better come free of spelling errors, or it is perceived as "not serious".
And how do you expect their *code* is written, when they cannot be bothered to spell?
No vote, no voice. This would be the simplest way to enact real reform. If you are not allowed to vote in an election you cannot run adds in support, lobby, or donate cash to pol.
That would hardly change anything. Gates could extract a huge sum as "salary", and donate to whatever he wants. I assume he has the right to vote himself.
Many corporates just can't see things that way. "If we release our specs to everyone," say the typical Joe Corpobutt, "our concurrent will know how to do the same hardware, and, as they've better engineers than we have, they'll soon sell better and cheapier version of our products! No way!"
Too bad for Joe Corpbutt then - he's lost the linux market already. This is not a problem, as there is hardware enough for us. More is fine, but we don't desperately *need* it anymore.
And the argument is flawed, a spec for what the sw should do to make the hw work doesn't provide enough info for reverse-engineering the hardware itself. Put some custom chips on the card that nobody else can get, and they are lost.
Drivers may become available that wouldn't otherwise be available. (Even a closed-source driver is better than nothing.)
Not that much of a need anymore. Linux supports all kinds of intersting hardware, be a _little_ careful when buying and you'll be fine.
<I>Linux, FreeBSD and other free operating systems wouldn't have to waste time rewriting drivers already implemented, if they all support UDI</I>
Too bad the UDI spec isn't good enough. Several kernel experts says it won't perform well, particularly not on SMP.
<I>I'd rather have an experimental driver run slowly than crash my system!</I>
I rather have some pressure on developers to get it right. Most of linux works wery well thanks to this.
There is some overhead during module loading, but once the module is loaded, there really should be no performance loss/gain over a regular compiled driver statically linked into the kernel.
There is a small gain for statically linked drivers on pentium processors. (I don't know about the non-intel ones)
Linux use paged memory, so the CPU's MMU have to look up page tables for every address used. This takes time, so obviously there's a cache for this sort of thing, called TLB (Translation lookaside buffer). The TLB caches a few page adresses, anf get a time-consuming miss whenever some address not in the TLB is accessed.
Pages are usually of size 4k, so there is a lot of misses when working with something substantially bigger. Now, the pentium has a trick, a 4M page used to hold the statically linked kernel. This means kernel code can jump all over the place without getting any TLB miss. Module code however is loaded into ordinary 4k pages, and stand a much higher chance of TLB misses. Just like ordinary programs. So there's a small win for statically linked kernel drivers.
but no one can take the time to figure out the modems that seem to appear in almost every shipping PC?
You're living in a bad part of the world. I don't see much winmodems around here. Too many gullible buyers where you live?
Open source doesn't seem to be helping things like the Linux NTFS driver, which, If I understand it correctly, is about to be dropped
Anybody who wants to can fix it. Seems nobody step up to the task, so nobody (able) are interested in a linux ntfs driver. Dropping it is fine under such circumstances. Oh, you want ntfs after all? Write it then...
I also think it's a mistake they decided to use their own widgets instead of Windows widgets. Users like consistency. People are going to look at this and go "What the hell is this? This isn't Netscape. The fonts are too small. This doesn't even look like Windows". Yes, most people are still Windows users, and for software to be succesful it needs to adopt the Principle-of-Least_Surprise.
People want to see something new different too. So it shouldn't look too much like the old netscape. And using their own widgets makes it consistent across platforms. Netscape 4 looks different on linux and windows, this changes now.
Throughput that will blow your hair off
Ah. So that's why computer guys in bad movies are bald...
Problem with that is, something that takes down one service takes down both of them. I realize mainframes are pretty damn reliable boxes, but if it goes down, do you want it to take your webserver with it?
Sure - with uptimes measured in decades - I have no problem with that.
<I>One machine fails, 41,000 web servers</I>
Mainframe parts fail from time to time, the point is that the machine keeps running, only with a few % drop in speed until you replace the broken part. There is no crash - never. Only slight performance hits from time to time. The machine doesn't rely on everything working simultaneously, and you replace parts while running. No poweroff, no reboot, the new part is recognised instantly as you insert it.
This isn't very useful. You can float some cats this way, but why bother? You can't float a spaceship with this. Put anything heavy on top of the cat and you'll crush it to the ground. Neither cat nor toast work when crushed by the spaceship.
I do not recommend this experiment. Cats do *not* like floating, particularly when they have to struggle continously to not fall on the back. They will usually destroy the toast if able. Or you'll get a lot of screaming and then the animal rights activists show up. That's when it gets ugly.
So what do you call a gigantic mech tearing through trees and stomping primitive but (formerly) effective booby-traps, huh?
...
It is not hard building primitive but effective traps for these things. All we need is bigger pits - what is it like, stumbling and falling with such a thing? And there are molotov cocktails, steel wire, sticks of dynamite,