The U.S., from a national security perspective, does NOT want people to have cheap and easy access to space.
Robert A. Heinlein pointed this out back in the 1950s; any country that gets access to the moon has the capacity to control the earth.
it would only be a matter of time before someone loaded up one of those ships with as much ceramic coated rebar as the thing could carry.
There is an excellent book called Space Wars by Coumatos, Scott and Birnes, it's also available in the dollar stores (which is how I bought a copy) and explains the use of tungsten rods, dropped from space. No expensive or complicated ceramics, just high-melting-point metal rods, which can withstand the heat of falling through the atmosphere, but vaporize on impact, melting anything in their path for quite a distance, and leaving no fingerprints behind (no evidence) to indicate what country dropped it on them.
Whoever started this thread misspelled "voters".:)
A politician cannot get elected to the highest offices unless they prioritize getting (re-)elected over achieving meaningful progress... But we put them there... if they weren't drunken whoring bastards (never mind the fact that many of those we elect ARE drunken whoring bastards -- they just don't look like it because they have an army of PR staff).
Your quote reminds me of the story of the late Charlie Wilson, who, in essence, was a "drunken whoring bastard" but figured out how to get the funds - plus matching funds from other countries - to allow the Afghans to have the means to force the Soviets out of their country, To mis-quote from Schlock Mercenary, "Charlie Wilson was a drunken whoring bastard, but he was our drunken whoring bastard!" And despite all his faults, he won the war, and turned Afganistan into the Russians' Vietnam.
A few years ago NASA wanted to develop some form of on-line community similar to Second Life. So it sent out requests for ideas. I even submitted a few, figuring that if they did this right it could provide a serious environment for education and entertainment. NASA eventually announced a public hearing where potential developers could go. Well, what basically happened was, NASA had no funding for this, the proponents were expected to develop this at their own expense.
I saw the point here: you'd basically have to set up something which provided an environment for developing content, you'd have to figure out how to monetize your system to cover its costs. Consider that, since, unlike games like World of Warcraft, you can get into the existing virtual worlds for free, and NASA wanted at least a minimum area you could enter for free, a monetization through admission (game kit sales charges, or monthly fees) were basically out. You'd either have to sell space or find some way to sell add-ons, and very likely NASA would have a veto on what content or user actions were there. All you'd get for your trouble was the privilege of using NASA's "meatball" logo as part of your project. As this wasn't much of an incentive - anyone who wanted to be in the Virtual World business was already there - it died on the vine.
I seriously believe a few thousand dollars could have allowed NASA to create a programmable on-line virtual-reality based system which could have started small and been built up as those who used it figured out what to do with it, sort of the way Wikipedia bloomed from its small and humble beginnings. But they wanted an unrealistic system without a means to finance it. And their unrealistic expectations got them exactly what could be expected. A nothing that went nowhere.
I tried posting the following reply on the website the original article appeared on, but their comment system kept having an error so I'll post it here and expand upon what I would have said.
There is nothing new here; the problems of electronic data deteriorating or becoming unreadable because of proprietary lock in of various closed-source applications is well-known going back more than 20 years that I'm aware of, and certainly a lot longer than that. The use of wire recorders, player piano rolls, 78-RPM records, phonorecords now, 8-track tapes, laserdiscs, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies, Jazz discs, Zip discs, and now 3 1/2 inch floppies, (and lots of other media I know I've forgotten) are all now obsolete storage media, some of which may have data which can no-longer be retrieved because the hardware and/or software to read them is unavailable, lost or forgotten.
RMS on Digital PDP minicomputers running RSX and RSTS and VAX machines and OS . ISAM and PAM on Univac VS/9 OS on 90/60/70 and/80. VSAM on IBM mainframes (except the few places continuing to run z-System). The Control Data Cyber systems and their data file formats. Gould, Goodyear, Harris and RCA mainframes. All of these are basically obsolete, most if not all are gone, and data stored on media from those systems, if developed by a proprietary application, is probably, for all intents and purposes, lost forever even if the data is still present. The media may have deteriorated, and the systems to read them are essentially nonexistent.
Mechanisms for regular conversion as technology changes have to be provided for. This, however, requires that as the older media ages, that there be budget and personnel available to provide the conversion while both old and new media types are available. As the case of NASA cited in the article (an employee scrounged equipment and tapes on her own in order to keep the data alive until a means to retrieve it could be found), sometimes either or both may not be available.
Libraries have mentioned how their resources are stretched thin as it is, they may not have the funds or trained personnel to export old data to new media. And at the rate media keep changing this is happening more and more frequently. 30 years ago is 1980, 250K 8" disks are still in use. The 5 1/4" 360K disc is popular because of MS DOS machines. 20 years ago is 1990, and then, the 5 1/4 was still and 3 1/2 inch floppies were becoming popular, 15 years ago a reasonable medium for high-capacity storage were 100-meg zip disks. Now I don't even have a 5 1/4" drive, my computer still has a 3 1/2 but I don't have any floppies or use them, because I have a 4 gb jump drive I wear on a lanyard around my neck, and cost ten bucks.
We've gone to digital storage because it's orders of magnitude cheaper than analog. I've pointed out in previous articles that with a digital camera and 4GB SD cards, I can take thousands of pictures at an effective cost per picture that effectively rounds to zero. A single photo might take 1/2 to 1 meg, which means, without changing media, I can take upwards of 3,500 photos. Net cost is $10 when the media is bought; nothing more unless I print an image. When I take pictures, I don't take one, I take 3, or 5, or 20 because the extra pictures are essentially free and I can delete the ones I don't want later. When I was using 35MM film, each photo, with film and developing, was about 30c. A couple hundred pictures would set you back over US$50. Today, for $50 I can take more than 20,000 images.
But my sister still has an older digital camera that uses Smartmedia, She has to be careful to copy her images to hard disc when she uses it because you basically can't buy smartmedia any more and even when you could, the maximum size was 128 meg. Her photos were in the 150K size range so she can still take more than 500 photos on a 64M chip, and also the cost is effectively zero.
And for current media it's still near-zero per image. I bought a 1 te
I thought VAC was pretty decent in preventing cheating in CS and Valve has been banning cheaters left and right?
I'm not going to rise to the bait and think you were serious in believing they were referring to "CS" as Counter Strike as opposed to Computer Science. But I have my own story of people intentionally confusing others.
Over 20 years ago when I lived in Southern California, KABC radio in Los Angeles has a (white) gentleman with an English accent as one of their talk radio show hosts, whose name is Michael Jackson. So me and another guy on a BBS were going on with this back-and-forth conversation about how he sure sounds different on his show on the radio, and so on with other comments, clearly "wrong". Eventually one guy took the bait, and pointed out to us that it's two different people. That's when we pointed out we already knew this, we just wanted to see how long it would take before someone noticed.
When the much more famous singer died, people went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame to look up the star for "Michael Jackson." Unfortunately, it wasn't his; it was the one that was given to the radio personality.
I would offer help to other students at this one college I would visit, and this one guy had a problem with his Turbo Pascal program (version 3) that it wouldn't compile and he couldn't figure out why. This was a fairly long program, say on the order of 20 screens (about 1,000 lines) so it wasn't clearly obvious. So I ask him if I can make a few changes. I go in and I find a point where the code should be complete, e.g. no pending procedures, and I insert a 'BEGIN END.' I exit and compile and the compile works. So I remove this and I go further down, insert BEGIN END., exit and try a compile, and this time it faults with an error, the same one he's getting. So I go upward and try again, and eventually - meaning in about 3 minutes - I find the problem and it was a very subtle bug even I didn't spot, he had left an open brace { in his code, so, it ignored everything to the next close brace, or the end of the program, (I forget which), because it treated everything from that point on until the brace was closed (or the end of the program), as a comment.
The guy was absolutely amazed that I found the bug as fast as I had. He had been spending something over 2 hours trying to find it, and not succeeding. I found it in less than five minutes. It could be that I was a fresh pair of eyes, or it might be I'd had over 3 years (then) experience doing programming didn't hurt either...
Reminds me of a similar experience; I was writing.. something.. in assembly language that had a very subtle hiesenbug that only came up after rigourous testing.
I figured -- if *I* can't find it, the TA sure as hell isn't going to.
I was right.
I know exactly how you feel. We had some kind of a problem with one of the line printers at a college I went to, where you'd randomly get an extra " appearing at the end of a listing. This was one of those 'really fast' chain-drive printers hooked to a Hitachi or an Amdahl (an IBM System/370 Mainframe work-alike), the printer was something like a 1402 I think. Cost then, probably several thousand dollars, speed, about 6 pages a minute (300 LPM), not even as fast as my $110 8 ppm laser printer today.
As it turned out, one time I was doing an assignment, and by mistake I ran the same job twice, one after the other, one of the listings had the spurious character and the other didn't, so I conclusively proved it was the printer causing the problem, not the computer somehow sending a spurious character.
I won't say where, but a couple of times I did someone else's college computer programming assignment for them, making sure I 'dumbed down' the quality of the work so that it wouldn't be too obvious that someone who has a considerable amount of experience (over 5 years, then) did it, as opposed to a new student. What can I say other than I was broke and needed eating money, and as with today, it was just as hard then to get a job programming without a degree as it is now. At least it's over 20 years ago so the statute of limitations applies, presuming I did anything illegal. I can admit, however, I think I actually learned a few things from having to do the assignment.
"About the things I've done in the past, I hope either they've been forgotten, or if not forgotten, covered by the Statute of Limitations." — Robert A. Heinlein
I am guessing that the site was slashdotted because the video never ran. Yet another example of some imbecile who designs their own video player and either can't run the material correctly or can't handle the load. I see this over and over, someone - or some site - decides to run their own video player and it's either inoperative or runs badly. I wrote about this on my blog in October 2008 how so many places try - and fail - to properly run video.
You know, running video correctly isn't rocket science, YouTube does it fine under loads that would slashdot Slashdot. But do these stupidos use YouTube to serve their video? Noooo, they'd prefer to use some incompetent who can't provide it properly, probably because they're under the impression they'd lose ad revenue or something, I guess. But I see this all the time. The New York Times provides video for some of their stories, But their video doesn't work, and stalls, but has no way to cache the video so that if it fails you can either get it to run smoothly or go back and run it again without having to download the entire video all over again after it's already been served. I guess they never thought about people having problems,
If these were streamed video like a live event, that would be one thing. But they do the exact same thing YouTube does, they feed stored video to a player written using Adobe Flash. So there's no excuse for their failures except pure incompetence and/or stupidity.
Manager: Hmmm. Well, it needs to work by next Tuesday.
Coder: (very quiet expletive)
Code Monkey have boring meeting with boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
but his output stink
his code not functional or elegant
what do Code Monkey think
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write goddamn login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy just proud
-- Jonathan Coulton
I remember when someone gave a figure of something like an estimate of TCO (total cost of ownership) for PCs was something like $10,000 a year or $12,000 a year because it priced out everything at the maximum professional cost for software failures, installation of new software, etc. Ignoring PCs in non-commercial environments, I have a PC here at home; It's what I'm using to write this. My labor costs me nothing and the changes I make to my computer are for my benefit, and thus, while my own labor might have some value to me, it is not costing me anything other than opportunity cost, which again, has actual financial expenditure to me of zero.
If a team has to spend $10 million to develop an application because they had to do it twice and if they had done it right the first time would have cost $3 million, you can claim that it's a loss of $7 million, or you can - correctly - claim that it's a system that cost $10 million to develop including false starts. It all depends on how you want to cook the numbers.
If they are claiming that $6+ trillion represents complete failures I find that a bit unlikely. But if you count the amounts wasted because the customer didn't know what they wanted, should we then count as failures and expense costs all of the people who take perfectly working bathrooms and kitchens who gut them after a few years because they no longer like the way they look?
You can create any kind of number by how you count failure, if you include redesigns for performance, redesigns because of desire for increased features, or redesign for maintenance. You can also count failure as systems needing to be scrapped because they have absolutely no usability for any of the problems needed to be solved. If that was what was being claimed I would, again, find that number highly suspect. It all depends on where they get their numbers from.
Let's also not forget, again, this is an estimate, because most of these numbers are neither published nor available to outsiders to the company that developed the program or system. The number could be higher, or it could be lower. It reminds me of the supposed estimate of the losses for pirated software raised to huge numbers by claiming every copy made was a lost sale that would have been at full price without discounting. Some kid who made a copy of a program where he had to ask someone for a free disc is certainly not going to pay $200 for a copy, but the numbers presumed that the bootleg copy would have resulted in a full-price sale.
So if someone wants to claim that the total cost of software failures is US$6,200,000,000,000.00 I'd really like to know how they got this number. Are they pricing out costs in Africa as if the cost of labor is the same in New York City? Are they pricing labor in Los Angeles the same as in Baton Rouge, Louisiana? How are they determining costs?
The purpose of the GPL was to ensure that a distributor of software release source and if they made any changes, that they release the source to those changes. The GPL was meant to ensure that the person have the freedom to know what the software contains and to modify and re-release if they choose to do so. The GPL in no way prevents or discourages anyone from selling a GPL licensed product. In fact, the GPL specifically states one may charge any fee they want for the application as long as they make access to the source available either with the sale or at a nominal charge from some other point if it's necessary to copy it. If you make the source available as part of the application, your responsibility under the GPL has been completely complied with, and you are entitled to charge whatever the traffic will bear.
If they don't like it, they should have written their own license that requires source release and prohibits charging. As it is, under the GPL you can charge anything you want and the people who originally released it have no right to object. You've got expenses, and for that matter, if you want to make a small profit - or even a large one - you're perfectly entitled to do so.
Nobody says a goddamn word when Redhat or Suse makes millions reselling a large collection of open source applications without paying the developers anything at all. Of course, Redhat does spend several million a year contributing code to the Linux distribution that everyone also gets to use, but that's beside the point; no one objects to Redhat making a huge profit, and if you can make something off a released GPL application and comply with the license, more power to you, and tell those whiners that the purpose of the GPL was to ensure protection of the user's freedom, not protection of obtaining something for nothing,
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Paul Robinson <paul@paul-robinson.us> - My Blog
The copyright of machine generated work has been a matter of law for more than a hundred years.
If you think this is in any way open to debate, ask yourself who drew Toy Story.
The computers simply rendered the images and drew them. But human beings put considerable thought into a script, settings, voices, etc. This is a far cry from a computer amalgam of existing facts. Further, in order to claim anything other than actual damages, the work must be registered within three months of when it was first created. Unless Wolfram registers every search output, all they can get is provable damages, they can't get automatic attorney's fees or statutory damages. Not sure whether they even are eligible for attorneys fees on unregistered works. (This whole thing applies to U.S. works, works from authors outside of the U.S. might not have to register.)
The U.S. Supreme Court decided around 1992 in the case of Feist v. Rural Telephone that the mere aggregation of customer information of a telephone company is inadequate to obtain copyright protection, basically tossing out the entire premise that "sweat of the brow" alone was adequate, and overturning a more than 80 year precedent in Pacific Telephone v. Leon from 1911, I think.
Since there is no creativity in the computer generating an automated result, I suspect the results are not copyrightable.
Obviously, everyone is glad Rodheis home safely. Neverthess, many around the blogosphere have pointed out that the Times has a two-faced approach to this kind of secrecy.
In case you're unaware, The Times, among other outlets, back during the Iranian Hostage crisis, did not mention - until after they got out of Iran - that Americans were hiding in the Canadian embassy in Teheran.
Take, for example, the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which the Times did a big expose of back in '06. There were absolutely no questions that this program was
Constitutional
legal
briefed to the appropriate members of congress, and
working!
Yet that didn't stop the Times from announcing to every terrorist from Marrakech to Jakarta all about it, how to avoid getting caught by it, etc.
Again, there is no dispute that this program was working; in other words, nailing terrorists -> saving civilian lives. Too bad the lives it was saving weren't those of Times employees!
So the Times should not report to the American public when the U.S. Government operates secret facilities which are used to capture some people? If we go that route, and decide that "this hidden government program is a good idea and we shouldn't report on it," while "this hidden government program isn't a good idea and we should report on it," then we get into cases where you have suppression of torture or other misconduct - like Abu Ghraib or the CIA "extraordinary rendition" black sites - because some reporter agrees with the behavior being done by the government. We live in a constitutional republic which, for all intents and purposes is a democracy, and as such, we the people are the sovereign power to which the government must answer to; and we as a people cannot know if our government is acting in a way we agree it should be if reporters do less than their job, and deciding which secret government programs to cheerlead is not a reporter's job.
Besides, if the Times can discover it, probably anyone could, and then you would have the bad guys knowing about it while the public is kept in the dark. Besides, any terrorist worth his salt is not using traceable financing methods anyway, all the Times probably did is expose the "low hanging fruit" of the obvious and easily detectable transfer methods. If I was going to be doing finance transfers for some terrorist group, I'd be using shell companies that had no connection to the operation and switch them on a regular basis. How is someone going to know that a $100,000 wire transfer from Steel Corporation of London LTD to Islamabad Ore SDN BHD is a terrorist transfer or a funds transfer for several tons of iron ore?
In this case, the information about this reporter was suppressed to protect his life, not to prevent, say, someone else's embarrassment or to cover-up misconduct or otherwise prevent the publication of information the public should know to protect the democratic process.
Back during the Iranian Hostage crisis, the news media cooperatively agreed not to publicize the information that there were Americans hiding in the Canadian embassy until after they were able to get out of Iran. One reporter likened the potential for publishing such information to be on the level of "giving the Nazis' Anne Frank's home address."
This is the sort of limited exception to the free publication of relevant information to the public where the news media can and does suppress a story on a temporary basis in order to prevent death or injury to others or where it is important to the issues involved that the story not be exposed for a short time. When people talk about "responsible journalism," it is this sort of behavior they are referring to.
The statement that software engineering - which is a mislabel - cannot be a rigorous, formal system is so obvious that it might as well be one of those things we never think about until we have to and when we do think about it it's intuitively obvious.
Consider what will happen when you die, there are only three possibilities: You exist after you die and you like the results; you exist after you die and you do not like the results; you do not exist after you die. All three possibilities are equally valid since we have no evidence of any of them. If as it turns out, that when you die you cease to exist, it is not something you need to worry about. Now, the thought probably terrifies you - it used to terrify me, too - until you realize something: if you cease to exist, you will know nothing. You'll never know that you don't exist.
So consider the conditions of the existence of software. Software is always perfect and is always the same, it never changes. It does not rot, rust, age, get moldy, crumble, break, shatter or fail. It never needs maintenance, lubrication, cleaning, sharpening, polishing, repair or replacement. As long as the hardware that copies it makes identical copies, it is perfect and always will be perfect, except for the extremely rare and unusual case of deterioration of the storage media due to cosmic ray damage. Which can be detected by mathematical algorithm, in which case, if there is another source, another perfect copy can be made and it's right back where it was. Software is never defective and can never be defective other than the case I've given of the rare possibility of cosmic-ray damage to media or hardware failure in copying, and thus it never needs change, modification or updating.
Every year, every country makes changes to its tax laws. Any software which must comply with those new changes has to be changed according to the decisions of tax accountants and lawyers as to what is needed to be in compliance. If you have a cellular network and want to add new features, you have to modify the software - in the switches, the handsets, the gateways, and/or all of these - to be able to enable them to offer new features. In both cases the software needs updating.
Both statements are true, but you might ask how they can be when they appear to be conflicting. They're not, and I'll explain why.
Any software package, from a 1-line APL function to a 20 million-line COBOL behemoth application suite that runs a trillion dollar bank, large insurance company or government agency, only requires maintenance or change because in someone's subjective opinion it needs a change. A bridge needs replacement when it collapses or when it is beyond its useful life; a building needs replacement under the same circumstances. A piece of metal furniture needs replacement when its structure rusts into dust, fails or is unable to support a load due to metal fatigue. These are objective facts, either the structure is usable or it isn't. An engineer can determine by experience and judgment that the structure is at its lifespan limit or can point to signs of physical rust, deterioration, or structure failure indicators that prove their opinion.
Any declaration that a software package needs updating, change, or replacement is strictly based upon the subjective opinion of someone saying that it needs the work. All software change is the result of some person's opinion that the change needs to be made and have no basis in reality except their opinion. Their opinion is correct if you agree with them or if in your opinion you can't disagree with their opinion. They may be correct that because of errors in how the software performs its desired function, need for new function, or need for changes in existing function, the software needs change, replacement or updating, but they can only be "correct" because it is considered that in someone's opinion they agree with their opinion that the change is needed.
But the claim by someone that a software package needs cha
Right now, a typical 100 watt incandescent light bulb lasts, oh, 500-1000 hours, costs about 25c and uses, of course, 100 watts.
I am currently using a 23 watt compact fluorescent light bulb, which produces the same amount of light, and because of economies of scale has gotten down to 12 times the price of an incandescent, about $3.75 and supposedly will last as much as 10,000 hours. On total cost if you include electricity, a CF is going to be less expensive long term.
But the best deal so far, if the numbers are correct, is the LED light bulb, which unfortunately is about 8 times as expensive as a compact fluorescent at about $8.00, but the electricity numbers are shocking (pun unintentional). The $8 bulb will presumably run about as long as a CF, and produce about the equivalent of 100 watts of light, and do so on ONE WATT. If the LED can produce the same lumens for 1% of the electrical cost and 10 times the operating life, it would be hands down the best bargain in net total costs even though it's basically about 64 times as expensive for the bulb as the Incandescent. Presuming a cost of 6c per KWH, an incandescent will burn $6 worth of electricity at 100 hours, while the CF would have burned $2 and the LED would have burned 6c. For the expected lifetimes, that is, 10 Incandescent bulbs or 1 CF or LED, the costs would be as follows.
Incandescent, $2.50 for bulbs, $60 worth of electricity, $62.50
CF, $3.75 for bulb, $20 worth of electricity, $23.75
Maybe I'm jaded, but this issue was already settled by science fiction more than 20 years ago. In space, you can't be disposing water and importing it - other than the amounts needed to startup the facility - would be ruinously expensive. If you're going to be staying there for any period of time you have to do the same thing to water that the earth has been doing for four billion years: recycle it.
You're most likely going to run the urine, plus possibly sweat and shower water, through activated charcoal or ordinary sand to capture solids. But on second thought, you might not even need to filter the water. You've got plenty of heat from direct exposure to the sun, so you boil the water and recapture the steam, which will be pure water and sterilized. You can cool it through a radiator to bring it down to room temperature.
Why do we reverse convictions made based on evidence that was obtained illegally ?
Because police will use illegal evidence otherwise.
No matter how it was obtained, as long as it's real evidence, I don't see why that means the person who did the crime should go free because of it.
How do you determine what is "real" evidence and what might be fabricated, lies or worse, evidence obtained by serious criminality, like beating a suspect to obtain a conviction?
Instead, the officer should face charges for breaking the law and they both go to jail.
Doesn't happen that way. Police officers will almost never be arrested for misconduct. Has to be a stinking mess in the newspapers before that happens. As a result, what you'd get is police committing crimes to collect evidence and the protections of the Constitution being nothing but a toothless paper tiger.
A number of police and prosecutors conspired to convict people in Illinois and knowing they were innocent still put them on trial and on death row. This went on for years until arrests were made, and the mess stank so bad the governor of Illinois had to commute over 150 death sentences. In the mean time a lot of people had their lives ruined. Expecting police misconduct to be punished doesn't help much if you end up on death row for a crime you didn't commit.
Meter maids use chalk to mark car tires all the time to track how long a car has been parked; is that a "modification" of your tires?
SirWired
If they were using the chalk to track your vehicle and where it has been, I would say yes. But that's not what a meter maid is doing it for; they're doing it to determine if your vehicle is still sitting in the same spot on a public street, not to track its movements, (other than to track it has moved from a parking space:) ).
If following somebody in an unmarked car without a warrant is legal (and it is), I'm not sure why an electronic device that accomplishes the same thing through satellite tracking would not be.
SirWired
Because the electronic device can track the person's movements everywhere, including places on private property that the police could not go.
You go right ahead and live on the block where 10 guilty guys went free.
Tell you what. I'll live with the criminals, and you live in the next town over where the cops can do whatever the hell they want. I guarantee you I'll have a longer, safer life than you will. What people like you never seem to understand is that when cops don't follow the law, they're no longer serving and protecting -- they're just the biggest, toughest, meanest gang on the street.
Funny, they said that in CSI once. A cop was talking to someone who was in a gang, and said that if he wanted to join a better gang, he should consider the police department, they have better guns. Where upon one of the CSI quips, "And dental!"
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S., from a national security perspective, does NOT want people to have cheap and easy access to space.
Robert A. Heinlein pointed this out back in the 1950s; any country that gets access to the moon has the capacity to control the earth.
it would only be a matter of time before someone loaded up one of those ships with as much ceramic coated rebar as the thing could carry.
There is an excellent book called Space Wars by Coumatos, Scott and Birnes, it's also available in the dollar stores (which is how I bought a copy) and explains the use of tungsten rods, dropped from space. No expensive or complicated ceramics, just high-melting-point metal rods, which can withstand the heat of falling through the atmosphere, but vaporize on impact, melting anything in their path for quite a distance, and leaving no fingerprints behind (no evidence) to indicate what country dropped it on them.
A politician cannot get elected to the highest offices unless they prioritize getting (re-)elected over achieving meaningful progress... But we put them there... if they weren't drunken whoring bastards (never mind the fact that many of those we elect ARE drunken whoring bastards -- they just don't look like it because they have an army of PR staff).
Your quote reminds me of the story of the late Charlie Wilson, who, in essence, was a "drunken whoring bastard" but figured out how to get the funds - plus matching funds from other countries - to allow the Afghans to have the means to force the Soviets out of their country, To mis-quote from Schlock Mercenary, "Charlie Wilson was a drunken whoring bastard, but he was our drunken whoring bastard!" And despite all his faults, he won the war, and turned Afganistan into the Russians' Vietnam.
A few years ago NASA wanted to develop some form of on-line community similar to Second Life. So it sent out requests for ideas. I even submitted a few, figuring that if they did this right it could provide a serious environment for education and entertainment. NASA eventually announced a public hearing where potential developers could go. Well, what basically happened was, NASA had no funding for this, the proponents were expected to develop this at their own expense.
I saw the point here: you'd basically have to set up something which provided an environment for developing content, you'd have to figure out how to monetize your system to cover its costs. Consider that, since, unlike games like World of Warcraft, you can get into the existing virtual worlds for free, and NASA wanted at least a minimum area you could enter for free, a monetization through admission (game kit sales charges, or monthly fees) were basically out. You'd either have to sell space or find some way to sell add-ons, and very likely NASA would have a veto on what content or user actions were there. All you'd get for your trouble was the privilege of using NASA's "meatball" logo as part of your project. As this wasn't much of an incentive - anyone who wanted to be in the Virtual World business was already there - it died on the vine.
I seriously believe a few thousand dollars could have allowed NASA to create a programmable on-line virtual-reality based system which could have started small and been built up as those who used it figured out what to do with it, sort of the way Wikipedia bloomed from its small and humble beginnings. But they wanted an unrealistic system without a means to finance it. And their unrealistic expectations got them exactly what could be expected. A nothing that went nowhere.
I tried posting the following reply on the website the original article appeared on, but their comment system kept having an error so I'll post it here and expand upon what I would have said.
There is nothing new here; the problems of electronic data deteriorating or becoming unreadable because of proprietary lock in of various closed-source applications is well-known going back more than 20 years that I'm aware of, and certainly a lot longer than that. The use of wire recorders, player piano rolls, 78-RPM records, phonorecords now, 8-track tapes, laserdiscs, 8" floppies, 5 1/4" floppies, Jazz discs, Zip discs, and now 3 1/2 inch floppies, (and lots of other media I know I've forgotten) are all now obsolete storage media, some of which may have data which can no-longer be retrieved because the hardware and/or software to read them is unavailable, lost or forgotten.
RMS on Digital PDP minicomputers running RSX and RSTS and VAX machines and OS . ISAM and PAM on Univac VS/9 OS on 90/60 /70 and /80. VSAM on IBM mainframes (except the few places continuing to run z-System). The Control Data Cyber systems and their data file formats. Gould, Goodyear, Harris and RCA mainframes. All of these are basically obsolete, most if not all are gone, and data stored on media from those systems, if developed by a proprietary application, is probably, for all intents and purposes, lost forever even if the data is still present. The media may have deteriorated, and the systems to read them are essentially nonexistent.
Mechanisms for regular conversion as technology changes have to be provided for. This, however, requires that as the older media ages, that there be budget and personnel available to provide the conversion while both old and new media types are available. As the case of NASA cited in the article (an employee scrounged equipment and tapes on her own in order to keep the data alive until a means to retrieve it could be found), sometimes either or both may not be available.
Libraries have mentioned how their resources are stretched thin as it is, they may not have the funds or trained personnel to export old data to new media. And at the rate media keep changing this is happening more and more frequently. 30 years ago is 1980, 250K 8" disks are still in use. The 5 1/4" 360K disc is popular because of MS DOS machines. 20 years ago is 1990, and then, the 5 1/4 was still and 3 1/2 inch floppies were becoming popular, 15 years ago a reasonable medium for high-capacity storage were 100-meg zip disks. Now I don't even have a 5 1/4" drive, my computer still has a 3 1/2 but I don't have any floppies or use them, because I have a 4 gb jump drive I wear on a lanyard around my neck, and cost ten bucks.
We've gone to digital storage because it's orders of magnitude cheaper than analog. I've pointed out in previous articles that with a digital camera and 4GB SD cards, I can take thousands of pictures at an effective cost per picture that effectively rounds to zero. A single photo might take 1/2 to 1 meg, which means, without changing media, I can take upwards of 3,500 photos. Net cost is $10 when the media is bought; nothing more unless I print an image. When I take pictures, I don't take one, I take 3, or 5, or 20 because the extra pictures are essentially free and I can delete the ones I don't want later. When I was using 35MM film, each photo, with film and developing, was about 30c. A couple hundred pictures would set you back over US$50. Today, for $50 I can take more than 20,000 images.
But my sister still has an older digital camera that uses Smartmedia, She has to be careful to copy her images to hard disc when she uses it because you basically can't buy smartmedia any more and even when you could, the maximum size was 128 meg. Her photos were in the 150K size range so she can still take more than 500 photos on a 64M chip, and also the cost is effectively zero.
And for current media it's still near-zero per image. I bought a 1 te
I thought VAC was pretty decent in preventing cheating in CS and Valve has been banning cheaters left and right?
I'm not going to rise to the bait and think you were serious in believing they were referring to "CS" as Counter Strike as opposed to Computer Science. But I have my own story of people intentionally confusing others.
Over 20 years ago when I lived in Southern California, KABC radio in Los Angeles has a (white) gentleman with an English accent as one of their talk radio show hosts, whose name is Michael Jackson. So me and another guy on a BBS were going on with this back-and-forth conversation about how he sure sounds different on his show on the radio, and so on with other comments, clearly "wrong". Eventually one guy took the bait, and pointed out to us that it's two different people. That's when we pointed out we already knew this, we just wanted to see how long it would take before someone noticed.
When the much more famous singer died, people went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame to look up the star for "Michael Jackson." Unfortunately, it wasn't his; it was the one that was given to the radio personality.
I would offer help to other students at this one college I would visit, and this one guy had a problem with his Turbo Pascal program (version 3) that it wouldn't compile and he couldn't figure out why. This was a fairly long program, say on the order of 20 screens (about 1,000 lines) so it wasn't clearly obvious. So I ask him if I can make a few changes. I go in and I find a point where the code should be complete, e.g. no pending procedures, and I insert a 'BEGIN END.' I exit and compile and the compile works. So I remove this and I go further down, insert BEGIN END., exit and try a compile, and this time it faults with an error, the same one he's getting. So I go upward and try again, and eventually - meaning in about 3 minutes - I find the problem and it was a very subtle bug even I didn't spot, he had left an open brace { in his code, so, it ignored everything to the next close brace, or the end of the program, (I forget which), because it treated everything from that point on until the brace was closed (or the end of the program), as a comment.
The guy was absolutely amazed that I found the bug as fast as I had. He had been spending something over 2 hours trying to find it, and not succeeding. I found it in less than five minutes. It could be that I was a fresh pair of eyes, or it might be I'd had over 3 years (then) experience doing programming didn't hurt either...
Reminds me of a similar experience; I was writing .. something .. in assembly language that had a very subtle hiesenbug that only came up after rigourous testing.
I figured -- if *I* can't find it, the TA sure as hell isn't going to.
I was right.
I know exactly how you feel. We had some kind of a problem with one of the line printers at a college I went to, where you'd randomly get an extra " appearing at the end of a listing. This was one of those 'really fast' chain-drive printers hooked to a Hitachi or an Amdahl (an IBM System/370 Mainframe work-alike), the printer was something like a 1402 I think. Cost then, probably several thousand dollars, speed, about 6 pages a minute (300 LPM), not even as fast as my $110 8 ppm laser printer today.
As it turned out, one time I was doing an assignment, and by mistake I ran the same job twice, one after the other, one of the listings had the spurious character and the other didn't, so I conclusively proved it was the printer causing the problem, not the computer somehow sending a spurious character.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
I prefer the one, "I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy."
I won't say where, but a couple of times I did someone else's college computer programming assignment for them, making sure I 'dumbed down' the quality of the work so that it wouldn't be too obvious that someone who has a considerable amount of experience (over 5 years, then) did it, as opposed to a new student. What can I say other than I was broke and needed eating money, and as with today, it was just as hard then to get a job programming without a degree as it is now. At least it's over 20 years ago so the statute of limitations applies, presuming I did anything illegal. I can admit, however, I think I actually learned a few things from having to do the assignment.
"About the things I've done in the past, I hope either they've been forgotten, or if not forgotten, covered by the Statute of Limitations."
— Robert A. Heinlein
I am guessing that the site was slashdotted because the video never ran. Yet another example of some imbecile who designs their own video player and either can't run the material correctly or can't handle the load. I see this over and over, someone - or some site - decides to run their own video player and it's either inoperative or runs badly. I wrote about this on my blog in October 2008 how so many places try - and fail - to properly run video.
You know, running video correctly isn't rocket science, YouTube does it fine under loads that would slashdot Slashdot. But do these stupidos use YouTube to serve their video? Noooo, they'd prefer to use some incompetent who can't provide it properly, probably because they're under the impression they'd lose ad revenue or something, I guess. But I see this all the time. The New York Times provides video for some of their stories, But their video doesn't work, and stalls, but has no way to cache the video so that if it fails you can either get it to run smoothly or go back and run it again without having to download the entire video all over again after it's already been served. I guess they never thought about people having problems,
If these were streamed video like a live event, that would be one thing. But they do the exact same thing YouTube does, they feed stored video to a player written using Adobe Flash. So there's no excuse for their failures except pure incompetence and/or stupidity.
Manager: Hmmm. Well, it needs to work by next Tuesday.
Coder: (very quiet expletive)
Code Monkey have boring meeting with boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
but his output stink
his code not functional or elegant
what do Code Monkey think
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write goddamn login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy just proud
-- Jonathan Coulton
I remember when someone gave a figure of something like an estimate of TCO (total cost of ownership) for PCs was something like $10,000 a year or $12,000 a year because it priced out everything at the maximum professional cost for software failures, installation of new software, etc. Ignoring PCs in non-commercial environments, I have a PC here at home; It's what I'm using to write this. My labor costs me nothing and the changes I make to my computer are for my benefit, and thus, while my own labor might have some value to me, it is not costing me anything other than opportunity cost, which again, has actual financial expenditure to me of zero.
If a team has to spend $10 million to develop an application because they had to do it twice and if they had done it right the first time would have cost $3 million, you can claim that it's a loss of $7 million, or you can - correctly - claim that it's a system that cost $10 million to develop including false starts. It all depends on how you want to cook the numbers.
If they are claiming that $6+ trillion represents complete failures I find that a bit unlikely. But if you count the amounts wasted because the customer didn't know what they wanted, should we then count as failures and expense costs all of the people who take perfectly working bathrooms and kitchens who gut them after a few years because they no longer like the way they look?
You can create any kind of number by how you count failure, if you include redesigns for performance, redesigns because of desire for increased features, or redesign for maintenance. You can also count failure as systems needing to be scrapped because they have absolutely no usability for any of the problems needed to be solved. If that was what was being claimed I would, again, find that number highly suspect. It all depends on where they get their numbers from.
Let's also not forget, again, this is an estimate, because most of these numbers are neither published nor available to outsiders to the company that developed the program or system. The number could be higher, or it could be lower. It reminds me of the supposed estimate of the losses for pirated software raised to huge numbers by claiming every copy made was a lost sale that would have been at full price without discounting. Some kid who made a copy of a program where he had to ask someone for a free disc is certainly not going to pay $200 for a copy, but the numbers presumed that the bootleg copy would have resulted in a full-price sale.
So if someone wants to claim that the total cost of software failures is US$6,200,000,000,000.00 I'd really like to know how they got this number. Are they pricing out costs in Africa as if the cost of labor is the same in New York City? Are they pricing labor in Los Angeles the same as in Baton Rouge, Louisiana? How are they determining costs?
Paul Robinson — Paul@paul-robinson.us — My Blog
The purpose of the GPL was to ensure that a distributor of software release source and if they made any changes, that they release the source to those changes. The GPL was meant to ensure that the person have the freedom to know what the software contains and to modify and re-release if they choose to do so. The GPL in no way prevents or discourages anyone from selling a GPL licensed product. In fact, the GPL specifically states one may charge any fee they want for the application as long as they make access to the source available either with the sale or at a nominal charge from some other point if it's necessary to copy it. If you make the source available as part of the application, your responsibility under the GPL has been completely complied with, and you are entitled to charge whatever the traffic will bear.
If they don't like it, they should have written their own license that requires source release and prohibits charging. As it is, under the GPL you can charge anything you want and the people who originally released it have no right to object. You've got expenses, and for that matter, if you want to make a small profit - or even a large one - you're perfectly entitled to do so.
Nobody says a goddamn word when Redhat or Suse makes millions reselling a large collection of open source applications without paying the developers anything at all. Of course, Redhat does spend several million a year contributing code to the Linux distribution that everyone also gets to use, but that's beside the point; no one objects to Redhat making a huge profit, and if you can make something off a released GPL application and comply with the license, more power to you, and tell those whiners that the purpose of the GPL was to ensure protection of the user's freedom, not protection of obtaining something for nothing,
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Paul Robinson <paul@paul-robinson.us> - My Blog
The copyright of machine generated work has been a matter of law for more than a hundred years.
If you think this is in any way open to debate, ask yourself who drew Toy Story.
The computers simply rendered the images and drew them. But human beings put considerable thought into a script, settings, voices, etc. This is a far cry from a computer amalgam of existing facts. Further, in order to claim anything other than actual damages, the work must be registered within three months of when it was first created. Unless Wolfram registers every search output, all they can get is provable damages, they can't get automatic attorney's fees or statutory damages. Not sure whether they even are eligible for attorneys fees on unregistered works. (This whole thing applies to U.S. works, works from authors outside of the U.S. might not have to register.)
The U.S. Supreme Court decided around 1992 in the case of Feist v. Rural Telephone that the mere aggregation of customer information of a telephone company is inadequate to obtain copyright protection, basically tossing out the entire premise that "sweat of the brow" alone was adequate, and overturning a more than 80 year precedent in Pacific Telephone v. Leon from 1911, I think.
Since there is no creativity in the computer generating an automated result, I suspect the results are not copyrightable.
Paul Robinson <paul@paul-robinson.us> - My Blog
Obviously, everyone is glad Rodheis home safely. Neverthess, many around the blogosphere have pointed out that the Times has a two-faced approach to this kind of secrecy.
In case you're unaware, The Times, among other outlets, back during the Iranian Hostage crisis, did not mention - until after they got out of Iran - that Americans were hiding in the Canadian embassy in Teheran.
Take, for example, the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which the Times did a big expose of back in '06. There were absolutely no questions that this program was
Yet that didn't stop the Times from announcing to every terrorist from Marrakech to Jakarta all about it, how to avoid getting caught by it, etc.
Again, there is no dispute that this program was working; in other words, nailing terrorists -> saving civilian lives. Too bad the lives it was saving weren't those of Times employees!
So the Times should not report to the American public when the U.S. Government operates secret facilities which are used to capture some people? If we go that route, and decide that "this hidden government program is a good idea and we shouldn't report on it," while "this hidden government program isn't a good idea and we should report on it," then we get into cases where you have suppression of torture or other misconduct - like Abu Ghraib or the CIA "extraordinary rendition" black sites - because some reporter agrees with the behavior being done by the government. We live in a constitutional republic which, for all intents and purposes is a democracy, and as such, we the people are the sovereign power to which the government must answer to; and we as a people cannot know if our government is acting in a way we agree it should be if reporters do less than their job, and deciding which secret government programs to cheerlead is not a reporter's job.
Besides, if the Times can discover it, probably anyone could, and then you would have the bad guys knowing about it while the public is kept in the dark. Besides, any terrorist worth his salt is not using traceable financing methods anyway, all the Times probably did is expose the "low hanging fruit" of the obvious and easily detectable transfer methods. If I was going to be doing finance transfers for some terrorist group, I'd be using shell companies that had no connection to the operation and switch them on a regular basis. How is someone going to know that a $100,000 wire transfer from Steel Corporation of London LTD to Islamabad Ore SDN BHD is a terrorist transfer or a funds transfer for several tons of iron ore?
In this case, the information about this reporter was suppressed to protect his life, not to prevent, say, someone else's embarrassment or to cover-up misconduct or otherwise prevent the publication of information the public should know to protect the democratic process.
Back during the Iranian Hostage crisis, the news media cooperatively agreed not to publicize the information that there were Americans hiding in the Canadian embassy until after they were able to get out of Iran. One reporter likened the potential for publishing such information to be on the level of "giving the Nazis' Anne Frank's home address."
This is the sort of limited exception to the free publication of relevant information to the public where the news media can and does suppress a story on a temporary basis in order to prevent death or injury to others or where it is important to the issues involved that the story not be exposed for a short time. When people talk about "responsible journalism," it is this sort of behavior they are referring to.
Paul Robinson - <paul@paul-robinson.us> - My Blog
The statement that software engineering - which is a mislabel - cannot be a rigorous, formal system is so obvious that it might as well be one of those things we never think about until we have to and when we do think about it it's intuitively obvious.
Consider what will happen when you die, there are only three possibilities: You exist after you die and you like the results; you exist after you die and you do not like the results; you do not exist after you die. All three possibilities are equally valid since we have no evidence of any of them. If as it turns out, that when you die you cease to exist, it is not something you need to worry about. Now, the thought probably terrifies you - it used to terrify me, too - until you realize something: if you cease to exist, you will know nothing. You'll never know that you don't exist.
So consider the conditions of the existence of software. Software is always perfect and is always the same, it never changes. It does not rot, rust, age, get moldy, crumble, break, shatter or fail. It never needs maintenance, lubrication, cleaning, sharpening, polishing, repair or replacement. As long as the hardware that copies it makes identical copies, it is perfect and always will be perfect, except for the extremely rare and unusual case of deterioration of the storage media due to cosmic ray damage. Which can be detected by mathematical algorithm, in which case, if there is another source, another perfect copy can be made and it's right back where it was. Software is never defective and can never be defective other than the case I've given of the rare possibility of cosmic-ray damage to media or hardware failure in copying, and thus it never needs change, modification or updating.
Every year, every country makes changes to its tax laws. Any software which must comply with those new changes has to be changed according to the decisions of tax accountants and lawyers as to what is needed to be in compliance. If you have a cellular network and want to add new features, you have to modify the software - in the switches, the handsets, the gateways, and/or all of these - to be able to enable them to offer new features. In both cases the software needs updating.
Both statements are true, but you might ask how they can be when they appear to be conflicting. They're not, and I'll explain why.
Any software package, from a 1-line APL function to a 20 million-line COBOL behemoth application suite that runs a trillion dollar bank, large insurance company or government agency, only requires maintenance or change because in someone's subjective opinion it needs a change. A bridge needs replacement when it collapses or when it is beyond its useful life; a building needs replacement under the same circumstances. A piece of metal furniture needs replacement when its structure rusts into dust, fails or is unable to support a load due to metal fatigue. These are objective facts, either the structure is usable or it isn't. An engineer can determine by experience and judgment that the structure is at its lifespan limit or can point to signs of physical rust, deterioration, or structure failure indicators that prove their opinion.
Any declaration that a software package needs updating, change, or replacement is strictly based upon the subjective opinion of someone saying that it needs the work. All software change is the result of some person's opinion that the change needs to be made and have no basis in reality except their opinion. Their opinion is correct if you agree with them or if in your opinion you can't disagree with their opinion. They may be correct that because of errors in how the software performs its desired function, need for new function, or need for changes in existing function, the software needs change, replacement or updating, but they can only be "correct" because it is considered that in someone's opinion they agree with their opinion that the change is needed.
But the claim by someone that a software package needs cha
Right now, a typical 100 watt incandescent light bulb lasts, oh, 500-1000 hours, costs about 25c and uses, of course, 100 watts.
I am currently using a 23 watt compact fluorescent light bulb, which produces the same amount of light, and because of economies of scale has gotten down to 12 times the price of an incandescent, about $3.75 and supposedly will last as much as 10,000 hours. On total cost if you include electricity, a CF is going to be less expensive long term.
But the best deal so far, if the numbers are correct, is the LED light bulb, which unfortunately is about 8 times as expensive as a compact fluorescent at about $8.00, but the electricity numbers are shocking (pun unintentional). The $8 bulb will presumably run about as long as a CF, and produce about the equivalent of 100 watts of light, and do so on ONE WATT. If the LED can produce the same lumens for 1% of the electrical cost and 10 times the operating life, it would be hands down the best bargain in net total costs even though it's basically about 64 times as expensive for the bulb as the Incandescent. Presuming a cost of 6c per KWH, an incandescent will burn $6 worth of electricity at 100 hours, while the CF would have burned $2 and the LED would have burned 6c. For the expected lifetimes, that is, 10 Incandescent bulbs or 1 CF or LED, the costs would be as follows.
LED, $8 for bulb, 60c worth of electricity, $8.60
You're most likely going to run the urine, plus possibly sweat and shower water, through activated charcoal or ordinary sand to capture solids. But on second thought, you might not even need to filter the water. You've got plenty of heat from direct exposure to the sun, so you boil the water and recapture the steam, which will be pure water and sterilized. You can cool it through a radiator to bring it down to room temperature.
Why do we reverse convictions made based on evidence that was obtained illegally ?
Because police will use illegal evidence otherwise.
No matter how it was obtained, as long as it's real evidence, I don't see why that means the person who did the crime should go free because of it.
How do you determine what is "real" evidence and what might be fabricated, lies or worse, evidence obtained by serious criminality, like beating a suspect to obtain a conviction?
Instead, the officer should face charges for breaking the law and they both go to jail.
Doesn't happen that way. Police officers will almost never be arrested for misconduct. Has to be a stinking mess in the newspapers before that happens. As a result, what you'd get is police committing crimes to collect evidence and the protections of the Constitution being nothing but a toothless paper tiger.
A number of police and prosecutors conspired to convict people in Illinois and knowing they were innocent still put them on trial and on death row. This went on for years until arrests were made, and the mess stank so bad the governor of Illinois had to commute over 150 death sentences. In the mean time a lot of people had their lives ruined. Expecting police misconduct to be punished doesn't help much if you end up on death row for a crime you didn't commit.
Meter maids use chalk to mark car tires all the time to track how long a car has been parked; is that a "modification" of your tires?
SirWired
If they were using the chalk to track your vehicle and where it has been, I would say yes. But that's not what a meter maid is doing it for; they're doing it to determine if your vehicle is still sitting in the same spot on a public street, not to track its movements, (other than to track it has moved from a parking space :) ).
If following somebody in an unmarked car without a warrant is legal (and it is), I'm not sure why an electronic device that accomplishes the same thing through satellite tracking would not be.
SirWired
Because the electronic device can track the person's movements everywhere, including places on private property that the police could not go.
The problem is the Miranda Warning, 1966.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning
Ed Meese was right to argue against it during the Reagan Administration.
Isn't that the guy where they had the signs around saying, "Experts agree: Meese is a Pig"? Who are you to be arguing with the experts? :)
You go right ahead and live on the block where 10 guilty guys went free.
Tell you what. I'll live with the criminals, and you live in the next town over where the cops can do whatever the hell they want. I guarantee you I'll have a longer, safer life than you will. What people like you never seem to understand is that when cops don't follow the law, they're no longer serving and protecting -- they're just the biggest, toughest, meanest gang on the street.
Funny, they said that in CSI once. A cop was talking to someone who was in a gang, and said that if he wanted to join a better gang, he should consider the police department, they have better guns. Where upon one of the CSI quips, "And dental!"