Although I would quibble with some of the Prince of Wales' suggestions for urban villages, I think they would make for a sound footing for any kind of open source urban plan, even if they're sub-optimal. Sort of like POSIX is flawed as an OS specification, but starting from POSIX or using POSIX as a guide often produces better results (such as Linux) than starting completely from scratch (the way Windows has).
I would also point out that optimizing things for mass transit requires that the area in question actually supports meaningful mass transit. Most States either restrict it to a relatively insignificant area (eg: Portland OR's TriMet) or render what is supplied useless (never, ever take a bus in Norfolk, VA, unless you've got a week's supply of food).
I grew up with British Rail, Greater Manchester Transport and - when they finally appeared - Busy Bee Buses. As much as I had contempt for them - BR once excused their late trains on the wrong type of snow, and a single inspection one year failed over 30% of GMT's buses due to brake failure - the speeds, coverage and level of service would put any American mass transit system to shame.
Would I accept the UK's level of service in the US? It wold be infinitely better, but I wouldn't regard it with any less contempt. You don't have to go far to be infinitely better than zero. It would need to be vastly more reliable and vastly more dependable and have superior coverage.
(When you look at the disused stations and abandoned rail lines in the UK, you can get a better feel for what I consider to be an acceptable level of coverage. It must be possible to dispense with cars for the majority of the needs of the majority of the people, or it's insufficient to fix the root problems and will merely delay the inevitable.)
That might be a tough sell. However, if you started by targeting motherboards that are going to be used for embedded systems (eg: PC104s), where memory is an absolute premium, and then persuading those same manufacturers that they can cut costs by using the same software on their other lines, rather than having to license something, then you're in with a chance.
Alternatively, if there was a Ubuntu-derivative that auto-sensed if the motherboard was 100% compatible and offered an upload into flash as an install option, even if nobody uses the option, the added inches in the press and the added enquiries by customers will put pressure on motherboard manufacturers to consider if it might not be a good PR move on their part.
Then you'd use OpenBIOS. CoreBoot is just a bootstrap, anyway, it's not a full BIOS replacement. Which is fine, as very few modern OS' use the BIOS for anything any more. Of course, if you're sick, you can always use CoreBoot to boot OpenBIOS to boot CoreBoot to boot Linux.
Reprogramming the BIOS is not a good idea unless you've some method of recovery. This is true whether you are timid or brave. CoreBoot goes through a lot of bugfixes each day, every day, and there's no telling that tomorrow's patch might relate to a problem with your hardware.
If there's a way to flash your BIOS externally, such as via JTAG, your number one concern should be to get the hardware you need. Dump the contents of the flash to some backup storage (that you can access without a working flash), then flash the BIOS using the CoreBoot/LinuxBIOS tools, then if there's a problem, restore the known-working flash image.
This is perfectly safe to do*. Some cards I've worked with needed me to mess around with installing BIOS images.
*World War III won't start, the universe won't fall into a supermassive black hole, and the sky won't fall more than 3000 feet. Anything else is subject to whatever bugs you just know the motherboard and the programming software have.
Each time I do a Coreboot/LinuxBIOS announcement on Freshmeat, I usually add a whole bunch of chipsets and a fair dollop of motherboards. I don't, as a rule, state the level of completeness, simply because there's barely enough space to list just the components.
Having said that, assume the web page is out-of-date when it comes to fully-supported motherboards. I know for a fact that I've seen a lot more motherboards get listed as complete in the changelog than are listed on the website, even though I started tracking those changes relatively recently and they'd plenty of mobos complete even then.
One of the important things to remember about LinuxBIOS/Coreboot (the new name doesn't have the same ring to it, for me) is that it's a highly modular bootstrap, so it has a high probability of working on just about anything, so long as the components you need are listed and ready. I feel certain that a few good QA guys with a bit of backing from mobo suppliers could pre-qualify a huge number of possible configurations. The developers, as with most projects, don't have time to validate, debug and extend, and their choice has (wisely) been to put a lot of emphasis on the debugging and extending.
Of course, Coreboot isn't even the only player in the game. OpenBIOS is out there. That project is evolving a lot more slowly, and seems to have suffered bit-rot on the Forth engine, but that's a damn good piece of code and it deserves much more attention than it is getting.
Intel also Open Sourced the Tiano BIOS code, but as far as I know, the sum total of interest in that has been zero. I've not seen a single Open Source project use it, I don't recall seeing Intel ever release a patch for it. That's a pity, as there's a lot of interesting code there with a lot of interesting ideas. I'd like to see something done with that code, or at the very least an assessment of what is there.
Cryptography is a plain-text message with secret parameters. If those parameters are found, the cryptography is worthless. Cryptography is still damn useful and the fact that it is ineffective if you know the key doesn't change that usefulness.
Encrypting a message where the key is common within the human brain should be no different. If you know neither the key nor the algorithm as a whole (merely a component of it), your chances of successful decryption are astronomically small.
And you get a blob because all the pixels would be filled at some point or other. Persistence of vision requires a certain amount of signal be generated over a certain period of time, but ALSO requires that the rate of build-up of impression on the retina exceeds the rate of decay of that impression. As different cones for different colours will have different response patterns, I can create pixels that shouldn't be visible but are, and pixels that should be visible but aren't.
So you recognize the approach in 5 minutes. How long will your program take to superimpose the images -correctly-, applying the correct attack and decay curves to each stimulus? Can you guarantee applying the correct physics model before a timeout?
And then you get nothing because pixels that would be filtered by the brain for not being there long enough would not be filtered by your program. If I wanted to be clever, I could cheat by having pixels within the ranges the eye sees poorest last longer than pixels your eye will see.
Remember, to work as a CAPTCHA, all I have to do is place the physics beyond what a home computer can simulate within the timeout typically afforded on a website, and there are lots of physical phenomena that are very difficult to simulate accurately quickly.
This won't work forever, because computers will get more powerful, but give optical science some credit for being able to do more than skript kiddies and drunken petty thieves can with the technology to hand right now.
Why jumble the images? Computer monitors function as 75-100 refreshes a second, or more. The human eye will superimpose two images that are 1/12.5 seconds apart, which is why PAL televisions using interlace can trick the eye into seeing a single fluidly-moving picture when playing at 25 frames per second (and thus 12.5 updates on a given line per second).
You should be able to use this to create an animated page, in which you scatter pixels through time, such that persistence of vision tricks the eye into seeing the actual page when an analysis of a single frame would show only random dots.
What you'd end up with is something that a screen scraper or image capture program could never process, but the human brain (because you're exploiting its limitations) can.
Well, computers are still pretty crappy at herustics, whereas the human brain is much better. Non-computable problems cannot be solved by a computer at all.
Let us take a theoretical CAPTCHA. This CAPTCHA uses optical illusions to create images in the brain that do not appear on the screen. These illusions are not, however, contained within a single image but an animation that is rapidly flipped through, exploiting persistence of vision to include the elements of the images you actually want and to exclude elements of the image introduced as deliberate noise.
This CAPTCHA is not pre-generated and pulled from a dictionary, but is generated at time of use from an effectively infinite pool of possibilities.
What I have described to you as a CAPTCHA system is not far removed from how John Logi Baird's colour TVs worked. This is not new stuff, and if some half-forgotten inventor in the days of thermionic valves could produce entire TV shows by this method, any website should be able to generate such CAPTCHAs using a high-end modern computer with a fraction of the effort.
However, could a computer solve such a CAPTCHA? Algorithmically, probably not. The information has been distributed in time as well as space, and simple line-removal code won't help you figure out what is signal and what isn't.
You could use algorithms to raytrace each layer of the data via a model of the computer screen and eye, apply the aliasing effects within the eye, then filter out the noise, but you're now talking one or two hours per CAPTCHA - well above the timeout most websites have. Because there's no dictionary and there are an effectively infinite number of permutations for the same output, you cannot take shortcuts or buy a CD with pre-rendered solutions.
Computers will equal humans on such a system the day that the Turing Test is truly passed, but no computer will ever out-perform a human on this style of CAPTCHA, because the human brain is simply far far too good at the sort of parallel processing tasks required.
Why odd? Farms scale, good doctors don't. It cost me $150 to brew 3 gallons of extremely high-quality mead, and purchased alcohol won't be anything like up to that standard. A 7T MRI scanner, plus a building with sufficient reinforced concrete to avoid pulling nearby aircraft out the skies, costs a few million times as much.
What, then, is the contradiction between hospital care needing to operate on a gigantic scale with resources only a Government can possibly pour in, and thus best being on a national level, and home produce needing to operate on small scales and best being done locally?
All I see is some rather nonsensical thinking that everything is equal at an equal scale. No. You can either view everything equally and run them at very different scales, OR you can accept that they are very different problems when run at the same scale.
You are free to not pay National Insurance in the UK. It is a voluntary contribution. If you don't pay NI, you lose national health services for the time you don't pay. If you don't pay NI for long enough, you also can't claim a State pension in addition to the one you get from your employer. However, if you don't want any of that, you are free to withhold NI contributions.
So, no, not everyone pays for the NHS. It is voluntary, and it a volunteer service many are happy to provide. There are those who would argue that this is because the British have a greater sense of the worth of people being beyond the value of people.
Mind you, these are a lot like the Brits who kept to orderly lines and let women and children go first to the lifeboats on the Titanic, which is why more Americans survived. Compassion isn't necessarily a great survival trait for the individual, although it is arguably a superb survival trait for a species.
The NHS reflects this in some ways. It is not necessarily best for the individuals concerned, but the fact remains that it costs half what the US system does and has half the mortality rate per capita, giving you four times the bang for the buck at the level of the entire society.
America will never have socialized medicine for that reason. Its creed of individualism first, last and always, is irreconcilable with activity which only makes sense when talking of large populations and entire nations.
The NSA is believed to supply the UK with signals intelligence on UK citizens, and the UK signals intelligence on US citizens. This gathered a lot of credibility some time back when the Australian government officially admitted to working with the US on "Echelon" (a project never actually defined by the Australians except that it involved SIGINT).
The NSA refused to answer Congress' questions on the subject at the time, as I recall, claiming attorney-client privilege. I am still curious as to who the clients were, if the NSA were the lawyers.
However, we will never know the truth of the matter. Plenty of codenames are bandied around, but with no information, all you have is a bunch of words.
This is one reason why we should stop worrying about what the agencies are up to right now. We can't stop them, even if we knew the truth. What we need to focus on is better education. Educated people tend to be less insular and less paranoid, so you would expect them to abuse trust less to "safeguard" themselves.
Paranoid citizens are the ones likely to apply for such jobs, becoming paranoid spymasters, who then become doubly paranoid as they know from experience how paranoid the citizens are - paranoid citizens being the kind of people who tend to go and do something stupid and/or genuinely dangerous.
The system as it stands won't reform and cannot reform, because those with a sense of decency are most unlikely to even want these kinds of jobs (and would be lousy at them even if they did), so there is no-one to replace the psychos and megalomaniacs who are in the upper echelons except with equally psychotic and/or megalomaniac individuals.
If reform right now is impossible, along with accurate diagnosis right now and/or any kind of meaningful band-aid, it is simply a waste of time to spend brain-cycles on it. If you want genuine change, you've got to rip out the hamster-wheel that keeps this kind of abuse not only happening but inevitable. Destroy the self-perpetuating nature of it.
The only vulnerability it has it that ignorance and fear are tightly bound. You cannot eliminate ignorance entirely, but you can minimize it. Drive it out of the mainstream and into the wilderness. Then and only then will you be safe from Yet Another Nixon.
Until that happens, Nixon/Reagan/Bush-type figures will dominate the landscape, from the trailer parks through to the corridors of power. Ignorant people are not only fearful people, they are also very loud people and very violent people when they don't get their way, which is why they DO dominate, and which is why the few "good guys" still out there remain the insignificant guys.
Depends. If you're hunting round undersea volcanoes (plenty of gas bubbles), hang around toothed whales (who use air bubbles to trap prey underwater), or merely want to get your submersible from wherever you can park your ship to a more appropriate X/Y location on the surface of the ocean, I can see ways you could use surface tension.
Or you could just theorise that I'm way down on sleep and am rambling incoherently with the occasional effort to sound somewhat sane.
In this case, it should be "does it run in Linux". (The answer is no. The surface tension is too low. The kernel mailing list tension, on the other hand, would be perfect.)
Full-sized boats, yes. Surface-tension isn't going to be nearly strong enough. Useful boats - depends on the use. You can build very small robotic probes, and a robot submersible that can replace a motor and motor fuel with additional sensors and additional extra data storage is definitely going to be useful to a lot of marine biologists.
It's going to be just as useful if Arthur C. Clarke ever lets a probe land on Europa, as lower overheads and superior data collection could make or break any mission sent to the possible oceans there.
The thing is, Seagate is considered Enterprise-class, and a mirrored RAID array where all the drives are bricked is no more useful than a single drive that's bricked.
The firmware is supposed to be tested by Seagate, sure. But then the original buggy Barracuda firmware was supposed to be tested, as was the patch. Unless you mean by Iron Mountain itself. Yes, they'd probably test any system before distributing it, but then you run into the question of how.
Does Seagate provide them with a test harness for automated testing, plus a test manual? And if so, why would anyone expect that to catch bugs Seagate themselves miss when using the same routines?
I'm not saying anyone who has invested in Iron Mountain should panic, but rather that if one link in the chain is broken, you need to start asking questions about the chain. You might still rely on what's left of it, but do so with knowledge rather than guesswork and hope.
If there are good grounds for that faith, great. You've nothing to worry about, but not knowing is never a smart way to deal with uncertainty.
So this is why Apple now uses Wintel chips and why they paid Microsoft to provide Office on the Mac? Besides, monopoly doesn't mean 100% of the market, 98% is considered "good enough".
They are also legally classed a monopoly by the EU Courts and the US Courts - and as they're the ones who get to define what the term means, a dissenting opinion means bugger all.
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No, the Oxy Moron is the person who hires an urban planner.
Although I would quibble with some of the Prince of Wales' suggestions for urban villages, I think they would make for a sound footing for any kind of open source urban plan, even if they're sub-optimal. Sort of like POSIX is flawed as an OS specification, but starting from POSIX or using POSIX as a guide often produces better results (such as Linux) than starting completely from scratch (the way Windows has).
I would also point out that optimizing things for mass transit requires that the area in question actually supports meaningful mass transit. Most States either restrict it to a relatively insignificant area (eg: Portland OR's TriMet) or render what is supplied useless (never, ever take a bus in Norfolk, VA, unless you've got a week's supply of food).
I grew up with British Rail, Greater Manchester Transport and - when they finally appeared - Busy Bee Buses. As much as I had contempt for them - BR once excused their late trains on the wrong type of snow, and a single inspection one year failed over 30% of GMT's buses due to brake failure - the speeds, coverage and level of service would put any American mass transit system to shame.
Would I accept the UK's level of service in the US? It wold be infinitely better, but I wouldn't regard it with any less contempt. You don't have to go far to be infinitely better than zero. It would need to be vastly more reliable and vastly more dependable and have superior coverage.
(When you look at the disused stations and abandoned rail lines in the UK, you can get a better feel for what I consider to be an acceptable level of coverage. It must be possible to dispense with cars for the majority of the needs of the majority of the people, or it's insufficient to fix the root problems and will merely delay the inevitable.)
Better than a capitalist hell hole. Socialist hell holes are more equitable between demons and tortured souls.
I tried giving a computer some irony filings before. It seemed to sense them just fine.
That might be a tough sell. However, if you started by targeting motherboards that are going to be used for embedded systems (eg: PC104s), where memory is an absolute premium, and then persuading those same manufacturers that they can cut costs by using the same software on their other lines, rather than having to license something, then you're in with a chance.
Alternatively, if there was a Ubuntu-derivative that auto-sensed if the motherboard was 100% compatible and offered an upload into flash as an install option, even if nobody uses the option, the added inches in the press and the added enquiries by customers will put pressure on motherboard manufacturers to consider if it might not be a good PR move on their part.
Then you'd use OpenBIOS. CoreBoot is just a bootstrap, anyway, it's not a full BIOS replacement. Which is fine, as very few modern OS' use the BIOS for anything any more. Of course, if you're sick, you can always use CoreBoot to boot OpenBIOS to boot CoreBoot to boot Linux.
^ti^it
See: "Erik The Viking" for details.
Reprogramming the BIOS is not a good idea unless you've some method of recovery. This is true whether you are timid or brave. CoreBoot goes through a lot of bugfixes each day, every day, and there's no telling that tomorrow's patch might relate to a problem with your hardware.
If there's a way to flash your BIOS externally, such as via JTAG, your number one concern should be to get the hardware you need. Dump the contents of the flash to some backup storage (that you can access without a working flash), then flash the BIOS using the CoreBoot/LinuxBIOS tools, then if there's a problem, restore the known-working flash image.
This is perfectly safe to do*. Some cards I've worked with needed me to mess around with installing BIOS images.
*World War III won't start, the universe won't fall into a supermassive black hole, and the sky won't fall more than 3000 feet. Anything else is subject to whatever bugs you just know the motherboard and the programming software have.
Each time I do a Coreboot/LinuxBIOS announcement on Freshmeat, I usually add a whole bunch of chipsets and a fair dollop of motherboards. I don't, as a rule, state the level of completeness, simply because there's barely enough space to list just the components.
Having said that, assume the web page is out-of-date when it comes to fully-supported motherboards. I know for a fact that I've seen a lot more motherboards get listed as complete in the changelog than are listed on the website, even though I started tracking those changes relatively recently and they'd plenty of mobos complete even then.
One of the important things to remember about LinuxBIOS/Coreboot (the new name doesn't have the same ring to it, for me) is that it's a highly modular bootstrap, so it has a high probability of working on just about anything, so long as the components you need are listed and ready. I feel certain that a few good QA guys with a bit of backing from mobo suppliers could pre-qualify a huge number of possible configurations. The developers, as with most projects, don't have time to validate, debug and extend, and their choice has (wisely) been to put a lot of emphasis on the debugging and extending.
Of course, Coreboot isn't even the only player in the game. OpenBIOS is out there. That project is evolving a lot more slowly, and seems to have suffered bit-rot on the Forth engine, but that's a damn good piece of code and it deserves much more attention than it is getting.
Intel also Open Sourced the Tiano BIOS code, but as far as I know, the sum total of interest in that has been zero. I've not seen a single Open Source project use it, I don't recall seeing Intel ever release a patch for it. That's a pity, as there's a lot of interesting code there with a lot of interesting ideas. I'd like to see something done with that code, or at the very least an assessment of what is there.
Cryptography is a plain-text message with secret parameters. If those parameters are found, the cryptography is worthless. Cryptography is still damn useful and the fact that it is ineffective if you know the key doesn't change that usefulness.
Encrypting a message where the key is common within the human brain should be no different. If you know neither the key nor the algorithm as a whole (merely a component of it), your chances of successful decryption are astronomically small.
And you get a blob because all the pixels would be filled at some point or other. Persistence of vision requires a certain amount of signal be generated over a certain period of time, but ALSO requires that the rate of build-up of impression on the retina exceeds the rate of decay of that impression. As different cones for different colours will have different response patterns, I can create pixels that shouldn't be visible but are, and pixels that should be visible but aren't.
So you recognize the approach in 5 minutes. How long will your program take to superimpose the images -correctly-, applying the correct attack and decay curves to each stimulus? Can you guarantee applying the correct physics model before a timeout?
And then you get nothing because pixels that would be filtered by the brain for not being there long enough would not be filtered by your program. If I wanted to be clever, I could cheat by having pixels within the ranges the eye sees poorest last longer than pixels your eye will see.
Remember, to work as a CAPTCHA, all I have to do is place the physics beyond what a home computer can simulate within the timeout typically afforded on a website, and there are lots of physical phenomena that are very difficult to simulate accurately quickly.
This won't work forever, because computers will get more powerful, but give optical science some credit for being able to do more than skript kiddies and drunken petty thieves can with the technology to hand right now.
Which goes to prove that teleporting physicists have lost their marbles.
In breaking news, the molester has been ordered to both sign and not sign the Atomic Sexual Deviancy Register at the same time.
Why jumble the images? Computer monitors function as 75-100 refreshes a second, or more. The human eye will superimpose two images that are 1/12.5 seconds apart, which is why PAL televisions using interlace can trick the eye into seeing a single fluidly-moving picture when playing at 25 frames per second (and thus 12.5 updates on a given line per second).
You should be able to use this to create an animated page, in which you scatter pixels through time, such that persistence of vision tricks the eye into seeing the actual page when an analysis of a single frame would show only random dots.
What you'd end up with is something that a screen scraper or image capture program could never process, but the human brain (because you're exploiting its limitations) can.
Well, computers are still pretty crappy at herustics, whereas the human brain is much better. Non-computable problems cannot be solved by a computer at all.
Let us take a theoretical CAPTCHA. This CAPTCHA uses optical illusions to create images in the brain that do not appear on the screen. These illusions are not, however, contained within a single image but an animation that is rapidly flipped through, exploiting persistence of vision to include the elements of the images you actually want and to exclude elements of the image introduced as deliberate noise.
This CAPTCHA is not pre-generated and pulled from a dictionary, but is generated at time of use from an effectively infinite pool of possibilities.
What I have described to you as a CAPTCHA system is not far removed from how John Logi Baird's colour TVs worked. This is not new stuff, and if some half-forgotten inventor in the days of thermionic valves could produce entire TV shows by this method, any website should be able to generate such CAPTCHAs using a high-end modern computer with a fraction of the effort.
However, could a computer solve such a CAPTCHA? Algorithmically, probably not. The information has been distributed in time as well as space, and simple line-removal code won't help you figure out what is signal and what isn't.
You could use algorithms to raytrace each layer of the data via a model of the computer screen and eye, apply the aliasing effects within the eye, then filter out the noise, but you're now talking one or two hours per CAPTCHA - well above the timeout most websites have. Because there's no dictionary and there are an effectively infinite number of permutations for the same output, you cannot take shortcuts or buy a CD with pre-rendered solutions.
Computers will equal humans on such a system the day that the Turing Test is truly passed, but no computer will ever out-perform a human on this style of CAPTCHA, because the human brain is simply far far too good at the sort of parallel processing tasks required.
Why odd? Farms scale, good doctors don't. It cost me $150 to brew 3 gallons of extremely high-quality mead, and purchased alcohol won't be anything like up to that standard. A 7T MRI scanner, plus a building with sufficient reinforced concrete to avoid pulling nearby aircraft out the skies, costs a few million times as much.
What, then, is the contradiction between hospital care needing to operate on a gigantic scale with resources only a Government can possibly pour in, and thus best being on a national level, and home produce needing to operate on small scales and best being done locally?
All I see is some rather nonsensical thinking that everything is equal at an equal scale. No. You can either view everything equally and run them at very different scales, OR you can accept that they are very different problems when run at the same scale.
You are free to not pay National Insurance in the UK. It is a voluntary contribution. If you don't pay NI, you lose national health services for the time you don't pay. If you don't pay NI for long enough, you also can't claim a State pension in addition to the one you get from your employer. However, if you don't want any of that, you are free to withhold NI contributions.
So, no, not everyone pays for the NHS. It is voluntary, and it a volunteer service many are happy to provide. There are those who would argue that this is because the British have a greater sense of the worth of people being beyond the value of people.
Mind you, these are a lot like the Brits who kept to orderly lines and let women and children go first to the lifeboats on the Titanic, which is why more Americans survived. Compassion isn't necessarily a great survival trait for the individual, although it is arguably a superb survival trait for a species.
The NHS reflects this in some ways. It is not necessarily best for the individuals concerned, but the fact remains that it costs half what the US system does and has half the mortality rate per capita, giving you four times the bang for the buck at the level of the entire society.
America will never have socialized medicine for that reason. Its creed of individualism first, last and always, is irreconcilable with activity which only makes sense when talking of large populations and entire nations.
The NSA is believed to supply the UK with signals intelligence on UK citizens, and the UK signals intelligence on US citizens. This gathered a lot of credibility some time back when the Australian government officially admitted to working with the US on "Echelon" (a project never actually defined by the Australians except that it involved SIGINT).
The NSA refused to answer Congress' questions on the subject at the time, as I recall, claiming attorney-client privilege. I am still curious as to who the clients were, if the NSA were the lawyers.
However, we will never know the truth of the matter. Plenty of codenames are bandied around, but with no information, all you have is a bunch of words.
This is one reason why we should stop worrying about what the agencies are up to right now. We can't stop them, even if we knew the truth. What we need to focus on is better education. Educated people tend to be less insular and less paranoid, so you would expect them to abuse trust less to "safeguard" themselves.
Paranoid citizens are the ones likely to apply for such jobs, becoming paranoid spymasters, who then become doubly paranoid as they know from experience how paranoid the citizens are - paranoid citizens being the kind of people who tend to go and do something stupid and/or genuinely dangerous.
The system as it stands won't reform and cannot reform, because those with a sense of decency are most unlikely to even want these kinds of jobs (and would be lousy at them even if they did), so there is no-one to replace the psychos and megalomaniacs who are in the upper echelons except with equally psychotic and/or megalomaniac individuals.
If reform right now is impossible, along with accurate diagnosis right now and/or any kind of meaningful band-aid, it is simply a waste of time to spend brain-cycles on it. If you want genuine change, you've got to rip out the hamster-wheel that keeps this kind of abuse not only happening but inevitable. Destroy the self-perpetuating nature of it.
The only vulnerability it has it that ignorance and fear are tightly bound. You cannot eliminate ignorance entirely, but you can minimize it. Drive it out of the mainstream and into the wilderness. Then and only then will you be safe from Yet Another Nixon.
Until that happens, Nixon/Reagan/Bush-type figures will dominate the landscape, from the trailer parks through to the corridors of power. Ignorant people are not only fearful people, they are also very loud people and very violent people when they don't get their way, which is why they DO dominate, and which is why the few "good guys" still out there remain the insignificant guys.
Depends. If you're hunting round undersea volcanoes (plenty of gas bubbles), hang around toothed whales (who use air bubbles to trap prey underwater), or merely want to get your submersible from wherever you can park your ship to a more appropriate X/Y location on the surface of the ocean, I can see ways you could use surface tension.
Or you could just theorise that I'm way down on sleep and am rambling incoherently with the occasional effort to sound somewhat sane.
In this case, it should be "does it run in Linux". (The answer is no. The surface tension is too low. The kernel mailing list tension, on the other hand, would be perfect.)
Full-sized boats, yes. Surface-tension isn't going to be nearly strong enough. Useful boats - depends on the use. You can build very small robotic probes, and a robot submersible that can replace a motor and motor fuel with additional sensors and additional extra data storage is definitely going to be useful to a lot of marine biologists.
It's going to be just as useful if Arthur C. Clarke ever lets a probe land on Europa, as lower overheads and superior data collection could make or break any mission sent to the possible oceans there.
The thing is, Seagate is considered Enterprise-class, and a mirrored RAID array where all the drives are bricked is no more useful than a single drive that's bricked.
The firmware is supposed to be tested by Seagate, sure. But then the original buggy Barracuda firmware was supposed to be tested, as was the patch. Unless you mean by Iron Mountain itself. Yes, they'd probably test any system before distributing it, but then you run into the question of how.
Does Seagate provide them with a test harness for automated testing, plus a test manual? And if so, why would anyone expect that to catch bugs Seagate themselves miss when using the same routines?
I'm not saying anyone who has invested in Iron Mountain should panic, but rather that if one link in the chain is broken, you need to start asking questions about the chain. You might still rely on what's left of it, but do so with knowledge rather than guesswork and hope.
If there are good grounds for that faith, great. You've nothing to worry about, but not knowing is never a smart way to deal with uncertainty.
So this is why Apple now uses Wintel chips and why they paid Microsoft to provide Office on the Mac? Besides, monopoly doesn't mean 100% of the market, 98% is considered "good enough".
They are also legally classed a monopoly by the EU Courts and the US Courts - and as they're the ones who get to define what the term means, a dissenting opinion means bugger all.