Kernels age according to how rapidly things evolve - ie: it's event-driven, not clock-driven - specifically in ways that involve architectural changes, incompatibilities, API/ABI replacements, etc. Ignoring minor updates, relatively insignificant extensions and other work that just doesn't have a fundamental design impact, what changes are there since 2.6.18? Well, the Wireless Extensions API has been largely cut, the workqueue API has been effectively replaced, the crypto API has been partly re-written, the subsystem structre no longer exists, DMA memory zones are optional, there's now a Completely Fair Scheduler, the virtual memory management is changing, the sysfs core has been replaced, device resource management is now in, we have dynamic ticks and deferrable timers, RDMA support has substantially changed, network labeling has been included, sysctl is being taken out, we're moving towards a tickless system, and more realtime updates have been made.
In my books, one or two major changes constitutes noticeable aging. Fifteen major changes since 2.6.18, plus the numerous minor ones, is more than enough to make 2.6.18 look quaintly prehistoric.
Why would you want to compost your desktop? Ohhhh, composite! My mistake. Looks interesting, but there have been many interesting technologies for X that have died. You seen many window managers lately that let you link and scroll between virtual windows as a single gigantic desktop? Desktops-in-desktops also seem to be curiously absent these days. Not sure I've seen many recent 3D projects using PHIGS, either. OpenGL is great, but nothing is great for everything, and PHIGS was a standard extension for X11.
In other words, this isn't about whether Compiz is any good or whether Intel will smell the coffee, this is about whether the politics and the engineers can get along. That doesn't always happen. Whether Open Source or Closed Source, the best solution is less important than the "acceptable" solution.
Well, single servers with varying rates of intra-server communication should be nearly identical to multiple servers with varying rates of inter-server communication, except the modeling will be much more complex on the multiple servers. If you're unsure if the tools you are using are even going to work at all, of course you are going to want to validate them against the simpler case.
Anyone can produce graphs, but what do you produce graphs OF? If there are N variables in the system, you can produce N(N+1)/2 graphs to describe the system. Do you go for something obvious, or by examining what is modeled, can you infer more promising areas to dig?
In the graphs, the curve defining the number of subscribers roughly mirrored the curve defining the value of the trade, except for some scaling which allowed the ratio between the two to approach 1:1. Knowing how those two interact is going to be important in understanding inflation, supply/demand, etc. Knowing the graphs alone doesn't tell you any of this, it is in knowing why the graphs are the way they are and what will happen next that is important. The raw numbers are vital to knowing what is next, the same way you need a rising agent when baking a cake, but the rising agent alone will never give you a cake, no matter how you cook the numbers.
The other thing to consider is that "economics" is not a single, unified field. You have people worshiping the god of Adam Smith, there are equally feverent devotees of Econophysics and Thermoeconomics. Game theorists tend to listen more to John Nash's work and are likely to have encyclopedic knowledge of John von Neumann, and so on. There is no Grand Unified Theory, there is no real attempt at producing one, and most economists you will read about or hear will assume that theirs is the One True Discipline, the rest being products of the infidels who must be destroyed by corporate jihad.
Well, economics is the study of money, right? Wrong. To quote Wikipedia: "Biophysical economics is a system of economic thought based not on money but on laws of energy and material transformations and empirical assessments of these and their relation to money." It tells you about money, sure, but it makes money the dependent variable of the equation, reversing the conventional line of thinking entirely.
Herein lies the problem with an economic study of EVE. It would be quite impossible for a single economist to study the system using the multitude of theories and models that exist. Most are "good enough" to get better-than-chance results a better-than-chance number of times under any system which has bounded resources and bounded latencies, or nobody would bother with them. Nobody is going to waste time using a system that is inferior to tossing a coin. Coins are cheap, degrees are expensive.
Not only, then, does this economist not know whether the real-world tools will work, but he doesn't even know how the tools will differ in quality when placed in a virtual environment. What is "good enough" in the real world may be a disaster in a virtual one, or vice versa. All we know for certain is that his conclusions can be no more correct than the methodology he applies.
I'm saying that about GFS, the global file system which has a horrible track record (corrupting disks across entire networks was the most dramatic I've heard). It may be in the kernel, but it gets precious little maintenance and those I have discussed it with (primarily users) have preferred almost anything else - even (gasp!) NFS - to using GFS. Of the major users I've encountered with heavy-duty networked filesystem arrangements, they use Lustre or Polyserve. That is the the entire list of what they are willing to stomach. The alternatives aren't even close. Both have been bought out by companies with histories of ditching those product lines that were any good, making it frighteningly likely that neither alternative will survive for much longer.
That is completely bogus much of the time. Take-overs are rarely in the interest of the company being taken over, even when the board approves it. Money talks louder than pride of craftsmanship. It has done for centuries. It's not going to change.
Now, let's consider what Sun gets out of Lustre. This is clearly competition against Polyserve's take-over by HP, as there simply aren't any other rivals to Luster that Sub could have been threatened by. By all accounts, however, Polyserve's products were superior and it is unlikely Sun can survive a direct confrontation with what is (relatively speaking) not much more than a toothpick.
Microsoft? Their Cluster Edition has minimal clustering capability, is truly painful to use, suffers from horrible network filesystem access, and really should be put out of its misery. (I'd suggest finding a suitable volcano and dropping all copies of the source code into it.)
CFS, then! Beep, wrong answer! ClusterFS stand to lose their top developers (that's the usual consequence of such a merger), Sun just don't understand OSS and have a near-xenophobic reaction towards Linux, and precisely because the politics will be very hot, it will be impossible for third-paries to propose any necessary hooks or speedups. Everyone'll be too focussed on the battle.
So Sun and Microsoft get no tangible benefit beyond the elimination of a potential competitor who they could never have matched on a fair playing field. Linux? 1% of the market and the rate of rising is so slow that you could probably find the correct asymptotic equation for it. Besides, when has Microsft ever done anything that wasn't money-making?
There will be no winners in this takeover, only losers. GFS is so dead and beyond the grave that only zombies use it. Oracle OFS2 is no better, abandoned by Oracle themselves and suffering from really bad latency. At least that explains why Mr. Whitham worships at its feet - fools will follow fools. Intermezzo? Merged, abandoned and then unmerged. What a complete waste of time for the core kernel developers. CODA? Right, when did they last do a new tarball?
There are questions as to whether a DFS is even needed - if you can migrate code to data, on the grounds that data is going to typically larger anyway - then you are moving everything from process space to process space (so don't need a filesystem for the processes) and local data would be locally seen. A few people have tried this idea out with mixed success.
I'll wrap up by saying that yes, the little guys do need oxygen. But they're thrice fools if they buy it from the people who shoved them in the airlock in the first place. You seriously think that people who have a long history of betraying users, betraying employees, betraying legal obligations and betraying those in an alliance with it should be trusted with ANYTHING? You think that treachery and financial debauchery didn't play a bigger factor in the death of Spyglass than some perceived "accidental" conflict in their relationship? If a serial spouse abuser gets hauled up in court for the tenth time for the same crime, you'd have to be dumber than beyond to seriously believe the person without some damn convincing evidence.
So why treat this any different? We know about the copyright violations by Microsoft, the open willingness to "murder" in some sense the competition, the open and knowing violation of anti-trust laws, the willingness to ignore reasonable and direct court orders and demands, and so on. If their users can be considered married to their product, Microsoft is guilty of spousal abuse on a grand scale for decades.
What else is different? There's no symbiosis. There's nothing in common between Sun and Microsoft. The don't even use the same type of CPU. Nor is there any between Sun and Linux. Sun's attitudes in the past five to ten years has been nothing short of disgusting. They get CFS and I pretty much guarantee you won't see a damn thing, if they ever distribute anything at all. Don't assume they will.
First, CentOS doesn't include a lot of applications you'd expect in a server and ages awkwardly due to infrequent patch updates and an antique Linux kernel. To me, that makes it surprising even to be an OSS top enterprise winner. Well, unless everyone else suddenly got severe food-poisoning at exactly the same moment.
Secondly, Ubuntu lacks a lot of the real-timeness of a server, which screws with audio/video links, and won't always detect package collisions - it'll sometimes just whatever was/is already running there should do fine.
Thirdly, Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I'd prefer one OS that could be tuned properly than a hundred OS' that can't operate properly because there's no resouces left to go round.
First up, the issue is unrelated to the OS. If an SUV tire explodes, the manufacturer cannot claim indemnification because of the brand of window cleaner you used, or any other unrelated modification. Firestone/Bridgestone didn't take a beating from hell out of choice. A reasonable person would most certainly conclude that a hinge on a case is wholly independent of the OS.
Second, the indemnification is over-broad. If you cannot make any change to the OS, then you cannot download Windows Updates, you cannot install any software, you cannot add users, and if switching the machine on changes so much as a single registry value, you cannot do that either. Such clauses are illegal, and although companies like to tout "collective responsibility" (although not actually admitting responsibility for anything), a manager who is in full knowledge that they are carrying out an illegal instruction may not be protected against a private lawsuit or a targeted Government-initiated lawsuit.
Third, the company may have become liable not only for potential lost earnings by this individual, but for the potential lost earnings by ALL such individuals. A class-action suit is not impossible. It probably won't succeed at the final hurdle, but it doesn't need to. It merely needs to be reasonably proof against early dismissal. After that point, the cost in lawyer fees and bad publicity would vastly overwhelm any actual court-imposed sanction.
The first rule of dealing with dysfunctional individuals or dysfunctional corporations is always the same: the more they are exposed to view, examination and ridicule, the less able they are to retain the dysfunction. Build the pressure slowly but surely, until it overwhelms in an avalanche. This is not legal advice, it's not even clear if this is legal, but it's the only way an individual can produce the power needed to crush the problem once and for all. Oh, you also need to be largely free of having done any such things yourself.
If you hooked a terminate-stay-resident program onto the clock interrupt and used that to page programs in and out, the same way the 4DOS program paged in/out applications on a keystroke, you could have limited multitasking on DOS. However, as noted, nothing was protected, so essentially nothing was safe, but it was possible to use this sort of technique to reduce the limitations of DOS.
No, neither this study nor the countless MRI, fMRI or psychiatric studies before, are concerned with whether one is superior to the other. Indeed, such thinking is far more feeble and delinquent than either side could ever be construed as being. These studies do show that self-centeredness, racism, sexism, hatred, xenophobia and other such characteristics have a neurological basis and that those with such characteristics will be further from the center. If this is a surprise to someone, I suggest they do some research on the word "center".
I would expect fringe views to share much the same brain damage as any and all other fringe views, simply because the only way to really believe in extremism and extremism alone is to have some serious neurological disturbance. Nobody else is that stupid or naive.
(As with all rules, there is an exception. If Roger Price's dream of Homo Superior were to exist in some form or other, I could see them being non-centrist and yet non-deficient. If you don't understand why, or have some delusion that HS is associated with any other superiority complex, then the best I can do is point you to his thoughts - and then run. Nobody with such a viewpoint is worth hanging around, IMHO. However, since we can safely say that there is no evidence at this time for Homo Superior existing in any form whatsoever, it's a moot point anyway.)
Which brings back my question of how anyone can tell whether someone is legitimate or is astroturfing. One of my favorite professors in college, I had her for philosophy, Understanding Religious Man, and some humanities classes, played a mean devil's advocate. We'd be discussing something and she'd leave a person to believe she actually held the position she took. Then the following class she could take the opposite position and have the same effect. Because of her ability nobody actually knew where she stood. A friend of mine interned under her and she didn't even know.
Sure. I know people like that - they usually run the companies I end up working for. This is why the framework can't be left to individuals and why any boundaries must be so utterly clear-cut and so utterly outside of the grey areas that ambiguity is impossible. If it's grey, there's nothing anybody can do about it, precisely because of the people you're talking about. Think of it as the distinction between solids and liquids. There are many liquids that act almost like solids, and many solids that act almost like liquids. But if you've a 20 tonne granite boulder, or a hundred carat diamond, you can be sure that whoever performs whatever test they care to perform and use whatever benchmark they chose to apply, that essentially everyone will reach the same answer. It's merely the scientific method used in the social sciences and political sciences. For once.
"Facts" are easy to manipulate, sure, as are opinions. That's basic psychology and that's why you can't rely on either from a single source of by means of a single mechanism. If you want to know the reality, you need to dig a lot deeper and that's only possible when there's anything substantial to dig through.
How would you apply this to bloggers, though? Most bloggers belong to the grey, undefinable region called personal opinion. As a result, they simply don't apply to any of this. You can't treat opinion or qualitative observation in the same way as an axiom or an empirical observation. As a result, those bloggers can't be classified in any way other than people expressing opinions or qualitative observations. That's as far as you can go.
In the far fringes, in the very extremes, you don't get that woolliness, that fluidity that is part and parcel of being human. The liquid opinions have been replaced by things which are very solid or totally gaseous. There ceases to be ambiguity, the human condition no longer applies because the human is merely the instrument by which the information is conveyed onto the Internet, the information exists in the state that it exists whether the human concerned is there or not.
This is the realm that can be legislated. Long, long past the point of ambiguity, well into the realm where any number of people would reach a near-universal consensus, you can say that that consensus defines absolutely whether something is acceptable or not. We're not talking one or two people agreeing on something, or even twelve or even a hundred thousand. If you could go out tomorrow and hold a national referendum (303 million people or so) on whatever the question is and get 99.9% to give you exactly the same answer, with no variance between class, race, gender, background or any other variable, you simply cannot get greater certainty on social issues than that. Greater certainty doesn't exist.
How do you tell if someone is genuine? You can't be sure for the vast majority of cases, but there will be maybe 0.01% of cases where no matter what the test you apply is, no matter who does the evaluating, no matter how opposing in belief the evaluator decides to be, the person is every time shown to be genuine and nothing but. You can't do much about the other cases, but you CAN say that any blog that indisputably fits in that 0.01% is worthy of every scrap of shielding you can give it. Again, I point out the importance of the "indisp
That, sadly, is one of the greatest problems with content that has neither protection nor restriction. Someone, somewhere, WILL decide what is acceptable and what is not, and they will do so in a totally closed, totally partisan, totally self-serving manner. Political bloggers and (honest) investigative bloggers absolutely have to be protected against such people. Equally, there will also be people who use the medium to slander, libel, harass, abuse, spam, etc.
Discourse is only possible if the signal-to-noise ratio exceeds the critical threshold. Once you fall below that threshold, the medium will die. There are only two variables to consider - the signal (ie: actual bloggers of the political or investigative kind) and the noise (ie: those who have the conscious, deliberate, purposeful intent to kill the signal).
It is my opinion that the only possible option is to protect that which is definitely signal against any possible consequences, and to prohibit that which is definitely noise. Essentially, a legal version of the USENET Death Sentence of old with some journalistic protections.
Ok, so your question is who gets to decide what is what. My argument is that if you need to have someone do the deciding, it's the grey area in between. Leave it alone. If society is so unsure about something that it needs to have an individual pick an answer, then society probably has no business framing the question. It is the stuff that is so clear-cut that it is unambiguous that you can categorize, where an overwhelming (and I mean overwhelming - 99%+) majority of people - whether in a given part of the political spectrum or across the board - totally agree that something is in the public interest or is a deliberate attempt to kill the public's right to have interests.
"But that would never happen!" Maybe so. Maybe the upper and lower bands will always have zero size. I say that is for the public to decide, not some Government quango. If the public decides that there is nothing that must absolutely be protected or be absolutely prevented, then the public has made its voice heard. If it does place things in those categories, then no Government has the right to deny its citizens the ability to make such choices, for good or ill.
The Government has no right to choose on this issue, and that includes the right not to choose. There have been far too many abuses of the political system - whether denial of protection to whistleblowers, or denial of relief against extremist frauds - to allow the Government any further decisions in this matter. It is long past time that those who stand to gain the most from the status quo be given the least say in whether the status quo is maintained. Placing politicians in charge of political discussion is like placing organized crime in charge of the department of justice. You can't seriously imagine they'd make decisions in your favour, do you?
Nor can decisions be allowed to be placed in the hands of special interest groups, corporations, the media, or any other non-representitive group. The mafia are said to have bought one election, the Swift Boaters probably bought another -- either that or Diebold did. I'm sorry, but that is unacceptable conduct in a civilized society. If you want to live in the stone age, there are plenty of other countries that are still there that you can live in.
So long as America claims to be civilized, then certain rights must be inalienable. Rights, not permissions, and as long as your only safeguard is other people looking the other way, all you have is permissions. That is not good enough.
How on earth can anyone call C-Store open source? It hasn't featured on Slashdot, there are no Freshmeat records, it's not part of Fedora Core, the author hasn't declared himself a god - I mean, these are vital features present in all true F/L/OSS projects!
...if the "Cold War" is back on? That's never been where the real danger lies. It wasn't that long ago when fighter aircraft on a training run straffed a school in the US, destroying several rooms. (Practice runs usually involve using camera guns rather than live ammo, but actual civilian buildings. Somehow the live guns were never deactivated.) The claim of an overshoot from a designated target area isn't seriously believed by anyone familiar with the way training is carried out.
Now, picture the same scenario on bomber practice, only they strap nukes on by mistake. It really doesn't matter if the nukes never actually go off - if they break up on impact, it'll be worse than any terror "dirty bomb". There have been historic incidents of nukes going missing, being dropped on the wrong target, being involved in midair collisions, etc. There is plenty of historic data that suggests that a modern accident in a civilian area would be a total disaster.
I would prefer a rule that stated that bloggers who specifically blogged on political matters for the demonstrable purpose of astroturfing were subject to campaign finance laws, but that all bloggers who acted as political correspondents or debaters should be given the same protections and immunities as any other political commentator or journalist. Instead of having no law, which can always be abused because there is equally no explicit protection, have a sensible set of ranges which are either protected or restricted, and THEN define anything else as undefined. Laws for protection are perhaps more important in this debate than laws on restriction.
Usenet is a very good place to ask. Although I've done a little work in the area being asked about - mostly wave analysis through variable media, otherwise known as Ground Penetrating Radar - and can therefore definitely say that toolkits and methods exist all over the place for the general sort of problem described, I can be equally definite in saying that a solution for one sort of problem has no bearing on whether there's a suitable solution to the sorts of problems the original questioner wanted to solve.
(Waves? Waves of what, through what? Does the simulation need to consider diffraction or refraction? With recent studies showing diffraction working just as well with short enough intervals in time as well as in space, do you need to consider diffraction over time? The speed varies through different media, but usually not by significant amounts - however, you can slow light to 30mph or even stop it completely under the right conditions. Are we talking about wave simulations through exotic media? There are just so many unknowns here, and the only thing I'm qualified to say is that I'm unqualified even to know the whole list, never mind the answers to each question.)
Slashdot Mirror
In my books, one or two major changes constitutes noticeable aging. Fifteen major changes since 2.6.18, plus the numerous minor ones, is more than enough to make 2.6.18 look quaintly prehistoric.
In other words, this isn't about whether Compiz is any good or whether Intel will smell the coffee, this is about whether the politics and the engineers can get along. That doesn't always happen. Whether Open Source or Closed Source, the best solution is less important than the "acceptable" solution.
It's that their crawler can't reach sites that far and their lunar indexes risk becoming stagnant.
Anyone can produce graphs, but what do you produce graphs OF? If there are N variables in the system, you can produce N(N+1)/2 graphs to describe the system. Do you go for something obvious, or by examining what is modeled, can you infer more promising areas to dig?
In the graphs, the curve defining the number of subscribers roughly mirrored the curve defining the value of the trade, except for some scaling which allowed the ratio between the two to approach 1:1. Knowing how those two interact is going to be important in understanding inflation, supply/demand, etc. Knowing the graphs alone doesn't tell you any of this, it is in knowing why the graphs are the way they are and what will happen next that is important. The raw numbers are vital to knowing what is next, the same way you need a rising agent when baking a cake, but the rising agent alone will never give you a cake, no matter how you cook the numbers.
The other thing to consider is that "economics" is not a single, unified field. You have people worshiping the god of Adam Smith, there are equally feverent devotees of Econophysics and Thermoeconomics. Game theorists tend to listen more to John Nash's work and are likely to have encyclopedic knowledge of John von Neumann, and so on. There is no Grand Unified Theory, there is no real attempt at producing one, and most economists you will read about or hear will assume that theirs is the One True Discipline, the rest being products of the infidels who must be destroyed by corporate jihad.
Well, economics is the study of money, right? Wrong. To quote Wikipedia: "Biophysical economics is a system of economic thought based not on money but on laws of energy and material transformations and empirical assessments of these and their relation to money." It tells you about money, sure, but it makes money the dependent variable of the equation, reversing the conventional line of thinking entirely.
Herein lies the problem with an economic study of EVE. It would be quite impossible for a single economist to study the system using the multitude of theories and models that exist. Most are "good enough" to get better-than-chance results a better-than-chance number of times under any system which has bounded resources and bounded latencies, or nobody would bother with them. Nobody is going to waste time using a system that is inferior to tossing a coin. Coins are cheap, degrees are expensive.
Not only, then, does this economist not know whether the real-world tools will work, but he doesn't even know how the tools will differ in quality when placed in a virtual environment. What is "good enough" in the real world may be a disaster in a virtual one, or vice versa. All we know for certain is that his conclusions can be no more correct than the methodology he applies.
RSA uses primes. This leaves the ones that don't: HFE, NTRU, ECC, XTR, Paillier, ElGamal, ....
I'm saying that about GFS, the global file system which has a horrible track record (corrupting disks across entire networks was the most dramatic I've heard). It may be in the kernel, but it gets precious little maintenance and those I have discussed it with (primarily users) have preferred almost anything else - even (gasp!) NFS - to using GFS. Of the major users I've encountered with heavy-duty networked filesystem arrangements, they use Lustre or Polyserve. That is the the entire list of what they are willing to stomach. The alternatives aren't even close. Both have been bought out by companies with histories of ditching those product lines that were any good, making it frighteningly likely that neither alternative will survive for much longer.
Now, let's consider what Sun gets out of Lustre. This is clearly competition against Polyserve's take-over by HP, as there simply aren't any other rivals to Luster that Sub could have been threatened by. By all accounts, however, Polyserve's products were superior and it is unlikely Sun can survive a direct confrontation with what is (relatively speaking) not much more than a toothpick.
Microsoft? Their Cluster Edition has minimal clustering capability, is truly painful to use, suffers from horrible network filesystem access, and really should be put out of its misery. (I'd suggest finding a suitable volcano and dropping all copies of the source code into it.)
CFS, then! Beep, wrong answer! ClusterFS stand to lose their top developers (that's the usual consequence of such a merger), Sun just don't understand OSS and have a near-xenophobic reaction towards Linux, and precisely because the politics will be very hot, it will be impossible for third-paries to propose any necessary hooks or speedups. Everyone'll be too focussed on the battle.
So Sun and Microsoft get no tangible benefit beyond the elimination of a potential competitor who they could never have matched on a fair playing field. Linux? 1% of the market and the rate of rising is so slow that you could probably find the correct asymptotic equation for it. Besides, when has Microsft ever done anything that wasn't money-making?
There will be no winners in this takeover, only losers. GFS is so dead and beyond the grave that only zombies use it. Oracle OFS2 is no better, abandoned by Oracle themselves and suffering from really bad latency. At least that explains why Mr. Whitham worships at its feet - fools will follow fools. Intermezzo? Merged, abandoned and then unmerged. What a complete waste of time for the core kernel developers. CODA? Right, when did they last do a new tarball?
There are questions as to whether a DFS is even needed - if you can migrate code to data, on the grounds that data is going to typically larger anyway - then you are moving everything from process space to process space (so don't need a filesystem for the processes) and local data would be locally seen. A few people have tried this idea out with mixed success.
I'll wrap up by saying that yes, the little guys do need oxygen. But they're thrice fools if they buy it from the people who shoved them in the airlock in the first place. You seriously think that people who have a long history of betraying users, betraying employees, betraying legal obligations and betraying those in an alliance with it should be trusted with ANYTHING? You think that treachery and financial debauchery didn't play a bigger factor in the death of Spyglass than some perceived "accidental" conflict in their relationship? If a serial spouse abuser gets hauled up in court for the tenth time for the same crime, you'd have to be dumber than beyond to seriously believe the person without some damn convincing evidence.
So why treat this any different? We know about the copyright violations by Microsoft, the open willingness to "murder" in some sense the competition, the open and knowing violation of anti-trust laws, the willingness to ignore reasonable and direct court orders and demands, and so on. If their users can be considered married to their product, Microsoft is guilty of spousal abuse on a grand scale for decades.
What else is different? There's no symbiosis. There's nothing in common between Sun and Microsoft. The don't even use the same type of CPU. Nor is there any between Sun and Linux. Sun's attitudes in the past five to ten years has been nothing short of disgusting. They get CFS and I pretty much guarantee you won't see a damn thing, if they ever distribute anything at all. Don't assume they will.
Secondly, Ubuntu lacks a lot of the real-timeness of a server, which screws with audio/video links, and won't always detect package collisions - it'll sometimes just whatever was/is already running there should do fine.
Thirdly, Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I'd prefer one OS that could be tuned properly than a hundred OS' that can't operate properly because there's no resouces left to go round.
Second, the indemnification is over-broad. If you cannot make any change to the OS, then you cannot download Windows Updates, you cannot install any software, you cannot add users, and if switching the machine on changes so much as a single registry value, you cannot do that either. Such clauses are illegal, and although companies like to tout "collective responsibility" (although not actually admitting responsibility for anything), a manager who is in full knowledge that they are carrying out an illegal instruction may not be protected against a private lawsuit or a targeted Government-initiated lawsuit.
Third, the company may have become liable not only for potential lost earnings by this individual, but for the potential lost earnings by ALL such individuals. A class-action suit is not impossible. It probably won't succeed at the final hurdle, but it doesn't need to. It merely needs to be reasonably proof against early dismissal. After that point, the cost in lawyer fees and bad publicity would vastly overwhelm any actual court-imposed sanction.
The first rule of dealing with dysfunctional individuals or dysfunctional corporations is always the same: the more they are exposed to view, examination and ridicule, the less able they are to retain the dysfunction. Build the pressure slowly but surely, until it overwhelms in an avalanche. This is not legal advice, it's not even clear if this is legal, but it's the only way an individual can produce the power needed to crush the problem once and for all. Oh, you also need to be largely free of having done any such things yourself.
Oh, I heard that using the -mmanufactuer=pcworld will also cause the laptop to explode, due to massive contradictions in reality.
If you hooked a terminate-stay-resident program onto the clock interrupt and used that to page programs in and out, the same way the 4DOS program paged in/out applications on a keystroke, you could have limited multitasking on DOS. However, as noted, nothing was protected, so essentially nothing was safe, but it was possible to use this sort of technique to reduce the limitations of DOS.
I would expect fringe views to share much the same brain damage as any and all other fringe views, simply because the only way to really believe in extremism and extremism alone is to have some serious neurological disturbance. Nobody else is that stupid or naive.
(As with all rules, there is an exception. If Roger Price's dream of Homo Superior were to exist in some form or other, I could see them being non-centrist and yet non-deficient. If you don't understand why, or have some delusion that HS is associated with any other superiority complex, then the best I can do is point you to his thoughts - and then run. Nobody with such a viewpoint is worth hanging around, IMHO. However, since we can safely say that there is no evidence at this time for Homo Superior existing in any form whatsoever, it's a moot point anyway.)
You're either looking at the adult pages or a commercial news website.
Sure. I know people like that - they usually run the companies I end up working for. This is why the framework can't be left to individuals and why any boundaries must be so utterly clear-cut and so utterly outside of the grey areas that ambiguity is impossible. If it's grey, there's nothing anybody can do about it, precisely because of the people you're talking about. Think of it as the distinction between solids and liquids. There are many liquids that act almost like solids, and many solids that act almost like liquids. But if you've a 20 tonne granite boulder, or a hundred carat diamond, you can be sure that whoever performs whatever test they care to perform and use whatever benchmark they chose to apply, that essentially everyone will reach the same answer. It's merely the scientific method used in the social sciences and political sciences. For once.
"Facts" are easy to manipulate, sure, as are opinions. That's basic psychology and that's why you can't rely on either from a single source of by means of a single mechanism. If you want to know the reality, you need to dig a lot deeper and that's only possible when there's anything substantial to dig through.
How would you apply this to bloggers, though? Most bloggers belong to the grey, undefinable region called personal opinion. As a result, they simply don't apply to any of this. You can't treat opinion or qualitative observation in the same way as an axiom or an empirical observation. As a result, those bloggers can't be classified in any way other than people expressing opinions or qualitative observations. That's as far as you can go.
In the far fringes, in the very extremes, you don't get that woolliness, that fluidity that is part and parcel of being human. The liquid opinions have been replaced by things which are very solid or totally gaseous. There ceases to be ambiguity, the human condition no longer applies because the human is merely the instrument by which the information is conveyed onto the Internet, the information exists in the state that it exists whether the human concerned is there or not.
This is the realm that can be legislated. Long, long past the point of ambiguity, well into the realm where any number of people would reach a near-universal consensus, you can say that that consensus defines absolutely whether something is acceptable or not. We're not talking one or two people agreeing on something, or even twelve or even a hundred thousand. If you could go out tomorrow and hold a national referendum (303 million people or so) on whatever the question is and get 99.9% to give you exactly the same answer, with no variance between class, race, gender, background or any other variable, you simply cannot get greater certainty on social issues than that. Greater certainty doesn't exist.
How do you tell if someone is genuine? You can't be sure for the vast majority of cases, but there will be maybe 0.01% of cases where no matter what the test you apply is, no matter who does the evaluating, no matter how opposing in belief the evaluator decides to be, the person is every time shown to be genuine and nothing but. You can't do much about the other cases, but you CAN say that any blog that indisputably fits in that 0.01% is worthy of every scrap of shielding you can give it. Again, I point out the importance of the "indisp
Discourse is only possible if the signal-to-noise ratio exceeds the critical threshold. Once you fall below that threshold, the medium will die. There are only two variables to consider - the signal (ie: actual bloggers of the political or investigative kind) and the noise (ie: those who have the conscious, deliberate, purposeful intent to kill the signal).
It is my opinion that the only possible option is to protect that which is definitely signal against any possible consequences, and to prohibit that which is definitely noise. Essentially, a legal version of the USENET Death Sentence of old with some journalistic protections.
Ok, so your question is who gets to decide what is what. My argument is that if you need to have someone do the deciding, it's the grey area in between. Leave it alone. If society is so unsure about something that it needs to have an individual pick an answer, then society probably has no business framing the question. It is the stuff that is so clear-cut that it is unambiguous that you can categorize, where an overwhelming (and I mean overwhelming - 99%+) majority of people - whether in a given part of the political spectrum or across the board - totally agree that something is in the public interest or is a deliberate attempt to kill the public's right to have interests.
"But that would never happen!" Maybe so. Maybe the upper and lower bands will always have zero size. I say that is for the public to decide, not some Government quango. If the public decides that there is nothing that must absolutely be protected or be absolutely prevented, then the public has made its voice heard. If it does place things in those categories, then no Government has the right to deny its citizens the ability to make such choices, for good or ill.
The Government has no right to choose on this issue, and that includes the right not to choose. There have been far too many abuses of the political system - whether denial of protection to whistleblowers, or denial of relief against extremist frauds - to allow the Government any further decisions in this matter. It is long past time that those who stand to gain the most from the status quo be given the least say in whether the status quo is maintained. Placing politicians in charge of political discussion is like placing organized crime in charge of the department of justice. You can't seriously imagine they'd make decisions in your favour, do you?
Nor can decisions be allowed to be placed in the hands of special interest groups, corporations, the media, or any other non-representitive group. The mafia are said to have bought one election, the Swift Boaters probably bought another -- either that or Diebold did. I'm sorry, but that is unacceptable conduct in a civilized society. If you want to live in the stone age, there are plenty of other countries that are still there that you can live in.
So long as America claims to be civilized, then certain rights must be inalienable. Rights, not permissions, and as long as your only safeguard is other people looking the other way, all you have is permissions. That is not good enough.
How on earth can anyone call C-Store open source? It hasn't featured on Slashdot, there are no Freshmeat records, it's not part of Fedora Core, the author hasn't declared himself a god - I mean, these are vital features present in all true F/L/OSS projects!
Now, picture the same scenario on bomber practice, only they strap nukes on by mistake. It really doesn't matter if the nukes never actually go off - if they break up on impact, it'll be worse than any terror "dirty bomb". There have been historic incidents of nukes going missing, being dropped on the wrong target, being involved in midair collisions, etc. There is plenty of historic data that suggests that a modern accident in a civilian area would be a total disaster.
I would prefer a rule that stated that bloggers who specifically blogged on political matters for the demonstrable purpose of astroturfing were subject to campaign finance laws, but that all bloggers who acted as political correspondents or debaters should be given the same protections and immunities as any other political commentator or journalist. Instead of having no law, which can always be abused because there is equally no explicit protection, have a sensible set of ranges which are either protected or restricted, and THEN define anything else as undefined. Laws for protection are perhaps more important in this debate than laws on restriction.
(Waves? Waves of what, through what? Does the simulation need to consider diffraction or refraction? With recent studies showing diffraction working just as well with short enough intervals in time as well as in space, do you need to consider diffraction over time? The speed varies through different media, but usually not by significant amounts - however, you can slow light to 30mph or even stop it completely under the right conditions. Are we talking about wave simulations through exotic media? There are just so many unknowns here, and the only thing I'm qualified to say is that I'm unqualified even to know the whole list, never mind the answers to each question.)
Ok, who told you? I thought I hid the pills well.
Been to any airshows lately? :)
But what if he threw the plane at the ground and missed?
The plane was wearing a watch?
Yes he was. There were two in Voyager, so each only flew it half-way.
Correction accepted. Now, if only Slashdot had wiki-like features, your reply plus a few of the other very good ones would make a damn good article.