Oh, I dunno. Baiting W.A.S.P.s is fun. What was the good of kicking out Cromwell's stooges (after they "won") if we don't get to continue digging at the very absurdities that led to them being turfed out in the first place?
Oh, it's far easier to hate that which is different, alien or not understood, than it is to hate that which is known and accepted. The Rwanda conflict is an example of artificial alienness - the French invented the term Tutsis and Hutus to distinguish those with a few cattle from those with many, as the locals had no distinctions prior to the occupation. You do not divide and conquer, you divide TO conquer. The two are inseparable. Once the alienation had occurred, the massacre was inescapable. You cannot recombine two peoples, once invaders have created a sufficiently strong illusion of distinction. It is all an illusion, though, just a very powerful one.
What you fail to understand is that this distinction creates a schizo-effective disorder - there is a break with reality. Not a totally clean break (which would be schizophrenia), but enough of one that "them" and "us" cannot ever be unified even in concept. The split in reality, this psychosis, is irrevocable and irreversible, and is what made it possible for American troops to machine-gun down women and children on the beaches of South Korea, for example. Fear of infiltration? Perhaps, but a fear that had become so irrational, so fractured from reality, that grievous war crimes and butchery were not only possible but inevitable. Same with Mai Lai. This was no "accident", but the only possible outcome.
Human nature, you say. Bah! Humbug! Archaeologists have documented hundreds of societies as having done just fine with no wars or armed conflict. "Human nature" is whatever the hell people want it to be. If you want it to be insane, you can make it insane. Ai! Cthulhu! All it takes is adding that ingredient to the mix. You want a civilization incapable of war? No biggie - just don't add that ingredient to your recipe. Physics dictates that you cannot create nor destroy matter/energy. Well, turns out you cannot create nor destroy social energy, either. If you want it absent, want it absent enough to not add it to the mix, then it will be absent. This isn't rocket science. What NASA does is rocket science. This is elementary social studies.
"If the Celts that are around today are the same ones that were around to get the crap beaten out of them a thousand years ago, then guess what, the Romans are fine we just call them Italians now"
I doubt you could find a single Italian alive today who could trace their genetic ancestry to the Seven Hills. According to the work of Steven Oppenheimer, you most definitely can't find a single pure-blood Scotsman alive today who CAN'T trace their ancestry to before the end of the last Ice Age. Neither the Gaellic-speaking nor the Brythonic-speaking celts has changed much (in terms of genetic makeup, population ratios, etc) since the very earliest human habitation of the British Isles.
(In fact, there are far fewer Angles or Saxons in England today than there are remnants of the Ice Age peoples.)
It's getting to the point where schoolteachers in the Cheddar Gorge can show their direct mitochondrial ancestors lived a couple of miles up the road, albeit 6,000 years prior. For an island that "lost" so many wars, the locals seem to have won a rather larger slice of the pie than those who merely claimed victory.
For the rest of your points, I'd agree. Frankly, I think forcing the English to speak Welsh or Scots Gaelic as a second language would be much more interesting than making them speak French or German - which the schools are incompetent to teach, even if any of the kids wanted to learn.
Replacing a population is hard. The British Isles were never more than a few percentage points replaced by the sum total of all the Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Normans combined. The vast majority of the population on the western seaboard is from the Ice Age and of Iberian origin, according to DNA research. The vast majority in the rest of the country are Germanic peoples who also came over around the end of the last Ice Age.
No serious person could possibly contend, though, that the Roman, Saxon, Angle and Norman invasions were failures. Militarily, they were outstanding successes. Politically, they were so-so but there's still no doubt as to who "won". But socially? Genetically? By either of these standards, these very successful victories were mere blips on the landscape that can barely be detected today. By these standards, the winners lost.
And it is precisely because you can pick who "won" by picking what standard you want to use that makes the notion of "winners" and "losers" so moronic. What value does "winning" have if it means nothing at all?
I far prefer the British English keyboard I grew up on* to the American English one, for example, and most European countries have their own. This isn't a perfect solution - the German alphabet has 27 characters, for example, making either the mappings weird or the number of keys weird - but it's better than a totally pan-galactic standardized solution.
(*growing up on a keyboard is painful, though - the keys are too lumpy)
It's "the worst" because no business in its right mind is going to tell its shareholders "our design sucks because we were too cheap". Infrastructure needs an overhaul, nobody wants to pay for it unless gripped in a knot of absolute blind panic, so the obvious and easy solution is to create said panic. Problem solved. Mind you, if the Internet had complied with the design requirement of being nuke-proof to start with, we wouldn't be in this mess. The mess only exists because private industry conned Americans into believing they were less likely to pillage the bank accounts than the Government. The fact is, profit margins only exist because somebody's bank account is being pillaged, so privatizing the Internet was probably one of the worst mistakes ever made.
Can it be fixed? Well, there are close to 300 routing protocols for handling mesh topologies and/or extreme high availability on wired networks, and another 250 for wireless networks. This isn't the sum total of all routing protocols, just the ones you'd need to create a genuine nuke-proof system.
How much can you change the topology, anyway, without breaking even more stuff? Well, the NEMO group would say almost entirely. NEtwork MObility permits you to rewire your entire topology on-the-fly without so much as dropping a single packet. It was designed for mobile networks - no, not mobile machines, mobile networks - but it works perfectly well as the ultimate in high-availability for a wired topology.
Power and heavy industrial networks are a much bigger problem than information networks, however. SCADA-based systems are generally running Windows NT or earlier, on antiquated hardware. Modern systems aren't reliable enough to be trusted, so they're not. These are much more vulnerable to loss of service, even if just from a lack of spare parts. I'd rather see a bigger effort to getting COTS systems sufficiently reliable that they can replace these ancient monstrosities, because that is where the infrastructure is as its weakest.
I've heard that to be the case, and also that Dvorak can't map onto certain international languages at all. True, I'd hate to use Qwerty for writing Younger Futhark, but you can't have everything. Seriously, though, I am not convinced it is possible to map all languages onto a single keyboard layout efficiently. Too many forms (phonetic, alphabetic, syllargy, ideogramatic, etc) and too great a variation in the number of symbols (anything from 16 to 6,000). IMHO, it has been a grievous error to try and make things so cheap and so mass-produced that the very cheapness becomes expensive and the mass-production ceases to be for the masses.
That's strange. I agree about Dvorak, but there's nothing like Sisters of Mercy for shell-scripting, or a bit of Sabbat for a debug session. Paul Di'Anno's Battlezone seems to be better for GUI work, though.
First, the Russians tactically withdrew militarily - same as they did with Chechnya not that long after... temporarily. But they never pulled out politically. So, no, the Russians did not pull out. Nothing more than a regrouing exercise that allows the Northern Alliance and the Taliban to murder more of each other. Which, of course, is exactly what they both did. Honestly, you'd think no-one on Slashdot had ever read any military history or even wargamed. Using the Taliban to destabilize the Northern Alliance in the way that they did was a classic example of what board wargamers refer to as soak-off attacks - using the weakest pieces to soak-off the firepower of the strongest of the adversaries.
Confusing Governments with people? Y'know, there's this little document you might want to read. Starts off "We, the people of the United States of America". Turns out that Governments are made of people, not androids as first investigations had assumed. They're also elected by people, paid for by people, run for people, things like that. (Elected? Well, not so sure about American Presidents, but the Irish Kings were all elected, as were the British Bretwalda. In fact, from the earliest of tribal days, elections have generally been the preferred means of selecting a ruler. Even in the Monarchies and Princedoms of Europe, votes counted. King John was the only "absolute" monarch in British history who did not also have an absolute majority in the view of those he ruled.
Winners write history? Bayoux Tapestry was done by King Harold's followers, so you do you don't really even get that.
Nor is winning much of a virtue. From the mouth of Alain Prost, possibly the greastest French F1 driver of all time: It doesn't matter who leads, it's who finishes. Prefer a political figure? Try Shakyamuni Buddha, who argued that all extremes (winning and losing being extremes) are ultimately losing propositions, that only moderation is sustainable or stable. Prefer a cultural standpoint - not a Government, an entire people? "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game that truly matters." If 15,000 years of experience matters for anything, then listen to it and not the Hollywood/Vegas mentality of winner takes all. Cos the winner rarely takes a damn thing in the long run.
(B) to prevent the other's imminent commission of aggravated kidnapping, murder, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated robbery.
If person A knocks out person B for no discernible reason, can you tell me why a reasonable witness would NOT conclude they were about to witness murder, assault or robbery? In fact, I see nothing in the section that you quoted that even requires a reasonable person. It merely requires that you prevent the imminent commission of those crimes.
Since the law can't expect you to be psychic or be in the possession of a Type 40 space/time capsule, blue or otherwise, the law can't refer to what is actually going to occur, only what you believe is imminent. And since a witness would have to be an incredible moron to believe that senseless acts of gratuitous violence aren't a precursor to something more, knocking someone down does indeed fit the bill. So to speak.
Then you die of radiation sickness eventually. Chernobyl was a mere chemical explosion and the fallout went how far? The US coast, as I recall. My father was involved in measuring the plutonium content of British rainwater. It was substantial, with parts of Britain hitting 2000 times normal background.
If you beat someone in court, you win? Oh, then the Sioux own the Black Hills. Hey, they won their Supreme Court battle to reclaim them, and by your rules that makes them the winner, right? Uh, no.
If someone's down because you punched them, you're the winner? Not in Texas, where this would give every citizen who had a clear view of events the right to shoot you dead under their new self-defence laws. Being dead makes for a lousy winner. (I don't like those laws, but that's not the point. The point is, one battle does not a war make.)
The British have long recognized the futility of talking about winners and losers. The notion that no such animals exist infuse their culture, their media, even their sci-fi. ("Whoever loses shall win, and he who wins shall lose." Dr Who, 5 Doctors. I won't get into Roger Price's routine dissing of the military, save to say that in his view, Homo Superior cannot kill - even in self-defence - and that is what makes them superior.)
Remember the Spacer worlds, who defined "human" to mean people like themselves? More than one book covered robots who killed - or tried to kill - humans because the definition had been made selective enough.
This reflects how real wars are fought, too. Name me one war in all of recorded history that did NOT involve first dehumanizing the enemy by all sides involved. We see that even today, with German soldiers posing by pictures of the skulls of defeated enemy, or American soldiers posing by naked and shackled prisoners. You think these soldiers would be capable of such flagrant human rights violations if they first pictured their opponents as human? This isn't about a few bad apples, it's a product of training.
(As the character of Travis put it in Blake's 7, "I reacted as I was trained to react. I was an instrument of the service. So if I'm guilty of murder, of mass murder, then so are all of you!")
It's also an inescapable product of training. Like I said, dehumanizing isn't limited to a few people or a few wars - it has included ALL combatants in ALL wars in as much of history as we have enough of to comment on. If you want a totally humanized nation, you simply cannot have an armed forces. Likewise, if you have an armed forces, you simply cannot have a totally humanized nation. I don't run the country, so which is "better" is not my problem. What I can be sure of is you can't have it both ways.
I can name plenty of nations that have come "second" in a war - and yet outlasted those who "beat" them. The Scots were crushed by the Romans (the Antonine Wall is practically on the northern beaches), mauled by the Vikings and butchered by the Tudors. Guess who outlasted them all? I'll give you a clue - they also got their Stone back.
They're not the only ones. The Afghans - even with legally-dubious US support - never defeated the Russians, they merely lasted longer than the Russian bank accounts. The Celts were amongst the worst European fighters who ever lived, getting totally massacred by everyone and their cousin Bob, but Carthage stands in ruins, the Angles and Saxons only survive in tiny isolated communities in England and America (Oppenheiner's "The Origins of the British" shows that W.A.S.P.s exist only in their own mind, they have no historical reality), but the Celtic nations are actually doing OK for themselves at the moment.
Arguably, Serbia won the Balkans conflict, having conquered most of the lands belonging to their neighbors and slaughtered anyone who might claim them back. Uh, they're not doing so well for having won, are they? Kicked out of EU merger talks, Montenegro calling them a bunch of losers, Kosovo giving them the finger...
Hell, even the United States won in Iraq, as far as the actual war went.
Winning is the easy part. Anyone can win. Look how much of the world the British conquered. The British won far more than most nations could ever dream of. Yet contemporary accounts (I own several) describe the Great Exhibition as a PR stunt to create a delusion of grandeur that never existed. The Duke of Wellington, that master of winning, was described as a senile buffoon who was dribbling down his shirt and had to be propped up by others to stay on his horse. What's left of the Commonwealth shows you all too well that those descriptions of delusion were the reality, not the winning and not the gloating.
History dictates that who comes second in a war usually outlasts those who come first.
For all we know, it could have been a tester who found a way to spoof the username, or anyone at all who happened to pass by an unlocked console. Given the organization involved, it could also be that a UID table got corrupted and a completely different name originally existed.
Based on the little that is known, the most obvious explanation is that this leak was intended to be discovered (there's no shortage of far more public sites that would offer far greater protection to the person involved) and that in turn makes the idea that an actual "Richard" was involved much less likely.
We won't know until the culprit is found (if they ever are, and if we ever have any reason to believe that anyone unmasked isn't simply a convenient scapegoat) but if I were in this Kevin's shoes, I'd be far more interested in gathering information than issuing threats. For that matter, Mandatory Access Controls have existed for decades. Why was such valuable IP even placed under a discretionary access control system?
(For those not familiar with MAC, it's a concept popularized by the US military but widely used in any secure environment. The idea is that the controls prohibit a user from copying to a location with weaker controls. In the military, you don't want people copying Top Secret files into an unclassified filespace or reassigning them to a user of lower classification, for example. So you simply program the access controls to block any such transfer. Properly implemented, there is no "superuser" - no need of one - and there is no possible way of violating permission boundaries directly or through privilege escalation.)
Yes, this is theft. So would be taking a hundred dollar bill nailed to the gatepost. At some point, a little personal responsibility is called for and a few reasonable precautions should be taken. Kevin Beares' bosses should be asking why neither has happened here - although that might be asking a bit much of Microsoft. Failure to secure trade secrets has, in the past, been grounds for courts to nullify the protections on those trade secrets, and undue harassment by employers of employees has spawned its own lawsuits. (If a Richard isn't found soon, with definite blood on hands, harassment suits can't be far behind.)
This is a very ugly situation for Microsoft to be in and they are hardly an innocent party as they have clearly shown they are not using suitable methods to protect that which is theirs. In a world that has been manipulated into believing there's a bogeyman hiding in every server cupboard, being able to protect your own is key to keeping the confidence of customers. The rights and wrongs are totally a side issue in all of this. The fact it was even possible is everything.
Basically, researchers discovered this quite by accident. A fossil T-Rex bone was too large to be airlifted out of a site it had been found on, so they cut it in half. Imagine their surprise when they found it was NOT rock all the way through, but hollow. Inside, they found reddish spongy organic material. Not fossil, organic.
I feel certain it took a great many scientists a long time (and probably some illegal substances) to recover from the shock. This was most definitely not what they had expected. They've been MRI-ing T-Rex bones ever since, from the sounds of it - Slashdot has covered several stories on bone structures discovered on the interior, for example. (The original bone was thought to have been from a female T-Rex, as it had some internal structure that exists in modern female birds but not in males.)
Anyway, it looks like the material from this bone has now been analysed. They never expected to recover any DNA - there was no evidence of cellular material when they made their initial announcement - but to have extracted specific proteins is a fantastic piece of work. Serendipitous, sure, but fantastic nonetheless.
It will be interesting to know when (not if) other fossils are found to have surviving internal organic matter. You don't really want to go smashing fossils up unnecessarily, so I imagine MRI manufacturers will be rather busy over the next few years. So what if you've found 1% of the material you'd like? A hundred such finds is not impossible, now we know it can happen. It's the overall coverage these researchers can get that will matter in the end, not the coverage in an individual bone.
LPC was nothing compared to the MUD Database Language (MUDDLE). Full sentence parsing, ability to link databases together in a way UnterMUD copied many years later and other really nifty features. It inspired some of the true greats in MUD folklore. Where else but Rock could you slaughter Fraggles with a Black & Decker? Where but MUD-1 did people go carrying dragons as handbags? Until WoW, where else was so addictive that civil servants were stealing tens of thousands of dollars to stay online?
I'd say about 75% of people with tenure are indeed dumb. Tenure is often about who you know, expertise comes from what you know, but neither hold a candle to true brilliance which invariably comes from what you don't know. The true greats, the intellectual genius' - these are not walking encyclopedias of knowledge. They're intellectual kids with insatiable curiosity. These are the people worthy of respect. The rest - ten years from now, you won't even remember their names. Well, other than the ones found guilty of deliberate fraud, assorted ethical violations or the like. Those are usually easy to remember - just not for reasons I'd consider worthwhile.
Ignorance? Yes. Ignorance. The moment you think you know the answer, before finishing the work, is the moment you doom yourself to a life of tedium. Knowing too much ruins a researcher. Knowing what others thought yesterday will tell you nothing about what you should be learning tomorrow. The knowledgeable can fill in the gaps, but they will never be able to reach out beyond.
There is a place and a time for knowledge, but partial knowledge is worse than worthless. It's never going to give you the adventurism needed to discover, and it's too blinkered to give you the skills needed to complete the work that has gone on before. You tell me about the ranking of the University, but so what? Manchester University and UMIST were ranked first and second in Europe for IT respectively for many years. They did some very fine work, too, especially in parallel computing and asynchronous computing. So? You're not using their work today and you are unlikely to see any benefits from their work in your lifetime. Does that cheapen their ranking? No. Does that make their ranking useless as a measure of the real value of their work? Yes.
We need to replace the blink tag with a more general annoy tag that can have blink attributes. This will allow W3C to properly codify all the ways of being a complete pain under a single, unified system.
Slashdot ran a story on total-immersion computing using an oil bath, oh, four or five years ago now. He was using mineral oil. This is not to say it's a bad idea - on the contrary, it's rather overdue on the technology front. However, it does take about this amount of time to go from hobbyist to early market, so maybe this story should have been expected some time this year or next.
He was notorious (and fined several times) for advertising products that didn't exist, then using the initial income to build them. Usually to a lower spec than had been initially published. The QL was originally touted as 32-bit, but when it finally emerged, Sinclair did a really nice speech about how nobody used the capabilities of a processor beyond 8 bits anyway.
The ZX80 was cheap because it used rejected components, as I recall. And the squishy keyboard...? The Spectrum was ok - you can't compare it to the C64 as Commodore was overpricing and underspeccing everything at that point. The Spectrum's colour was ok, but rapidly outclassed by the BBC.
Both the ZX range and the Spectrum range were subject to heating problems and other reliability issues. When they worked, they worked great. They just didn't always work too well.
Can't say I disagree with you. If enough effort went in to make the whole thing easily patched in the field, then there's an excellent chance insufficient effort went in to making the thing right to begin with. I hope noone read my post as excusing those who produce inferior goods because they can fix them later - yeesh. I'm disliked intensely by some where I work now precisely because I don't take any crap from those who prefer the Im-lazy-fix-it-next-year route.
Been done, mind you that was with a thousand 6502s on the same silicon. Actually got decent performance, well according to BBC's Micro Live. (How much would you trust a geek show whose PRESTEL session got hacked live on air?)
Seriously, a massive set of relatively low-power cores on a very tight connection - provided there was a bloody good way of scheduling stuff - would likely work extremely well in both the high-performance world and the high-reliability world. Who gives a damn if one core fails every month in space, if you start with a thousand of them? That would still give you 83 years and 4 months of operation on the world's most highly-available super-redundant platform.
(Since I'm in trivia mode, that would give a deep space probe a maximum range of 21 light-years, using NASA's 15-year-old designs for a 50 Km radius solar sail, which NASA estimated would hit 1/4 the speed of light by the time it reached the heliopause.)
I didn't talk to them on security, but I gave them some feedback on educational software. Ok, a lot. Ok, ok, one of my usual lengthy, drawn-out talks. Enough, already!:) Also told them what I thought of what seemed like a sharp turn towards competitive gaming on their wiki - it's hard for them to attack reward/punishment schemes and promote them at the same time, and competition in the form they were looking at is nothing more than a reward/punishment scheme.
For some reason, I rather suspect they'll politely ignore me or tell me to go jump in a lake. I seem to have that effect on people. Except on Slashdot, where the more outrageous I am, the higher I get modded. Not sure if that's because Slashdot geeks understand that quality thinking requires critical thinking, or whether you're all just more tolerant of a complete nut.
It's Linux, using LinuxBIOS to store the kernel in flash, so in theory you could run the basic system on 2 meg of RAM and a GUI within 4, and don't need filesystem space to boot from. The Linux minimum requirements haven't really changed in over a decade and I don't see them changing now. Ok, sure, they cut it down a bit and called it something else, but that's no different from rolling your own kernel with the useless stuff turned off on the compile flags. Don't get caught up in the marketspeak. It's a patched Linux kernel with a few basic apps as far as any requirements are concerned.
(To a user it may be different, but that's the user's problem. From an engineering perspective, a rose by any other name is still a rose. It is to an English major, too, if they study Shakespere.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I dunno. Baiting W.A.S.P.s is fun. What was the good of kicking out Cromwell's stooges (after they "won") if we don't get to continue digging at the very absurdities that led to them being turfed out in the first place?
Oh, it's far easier to hate that which is different, alien or not understood, than it is to hate that which is known and accepted. The Rwanda conflict is an example of artificial alienness - the French invented the term Tutsis and Hutus to distinguish those with a few cattle from those with many, as the locals had no distinctions prior to the occupation. You do not divide and conquer, you divide TO conquer. The two are inseparable. Once the alienation had occurred, the massacre was inescapable. You cannot recombine two peoples, once invaders have created a sufficiently strong illusion of distinction. It is all an illusion, though, just a very powerful one.
What you fail to understand is that this distinction creates a schizo-effective disorder - there is a break with reality. Not a totally clean break (which would be schizophrenia), but enough of one that "them" and "us" cannot ever be unified even in concept. The split in reality, this psychosis, is irrevocable and irreversible, and is what made it possible for American troops to machine-gun down women and children on the beaches of South Korea, for example. Fear of infiltration? Perhaps, but a fear that had become so irrational, so fractured from reality, that grievous war crimes and butchery were not only possible but inevitable. Same with Mai Lai. This was no "accident", but the only possible outcome.
Human nature, you say. Bah! Humbug! Archaeologists have documented hundreds of societies as having done just fine with no wars or armed conflict. "Human nature" is whatever the hell people want it to be. If you want it to be insane, you can make it insane. Ai! Cthulhu! All it takes is adding that ingredient to the mix. You want a civilization incapable of war? No biggie - just don't add that ingredient to your recipe. Physics dictates that you cannot create nor destroy matter/energy. Well, turns out you cannot create nor destroy social energy, either. If you want it absent, want it absent enough to not add it to the mix, then it will be absent. This isn't rocket science. What NASA does is rocket science. This is elementary social studies.
I doubt you could find a single Italian alive today who could trace their genetic ancestry to the Seven Hills. According to the work of Steven Oppenheimer, you most definitely can't find a single pure-blood Scotsman alive today who CAN'T trace their ancestry to before the end of the last Ice Age. Neither the Gaellic-speaking nor the Brythonic-speaking celts has changed much (in terms of genetic makeup, population ratios, etc) since the very earliest human habitation of the British Isles.
(In fact, there are far fewer Angles or Saxons in England today than there are remnants of the Ice Age peoples.)
It's getting to the point where schoolteachers in the Cheddar Gorge can show their direct mitochondrial ancestors lived a couple of miles up the road, albeit 6,000 years prior. For an island that "lost" so many wars, the locals seem to have won a rather larger slice of the pie than those who merely claimed victory.
For the rest of your points, I'd agree. Frankly, I think forcing the English to speak Welsh or Scots Gaelic as a second language would be much more interesting than making them speak French or German - which the schools are incompetent to teach, even if any of the kids wanted to learn.
No serious person could possibly contend, though, that the Roman, Saxon, Angle and Norman invasions were failures. Militarily, they were outstanding successes. Politically, they were so-so but there's still no doubt as to who "won". But socially? Genetically? By either of these standards, these very successful victories were mere blips on the landscape that can barely be detected today. By these standards, the winners lost.
And it is precisely because you can pick who "won" by picking what standard you want to use that makes the notion of "winners" and "losers" so moronic. What value does "winning" have if it means nothing at all?
(*growing up on a keyboard is painful, though - the keys are too lumpy)
Can it be fixed? Well, there are close to 300 routing protocols for handling mesh topologies and/or extreme high availability on wired networks, and another 250 for wireless networks. This isn't the sum total of all routing protocols, just the ones you'd need to create a genuine nuke-proof system.
How much can you change the topology, anyway, without breaking even more stuff? Well, the NEMO group would say almost entirely. NEtwork MObility permits you to rewire your entire topology on-the-fly without so much as dropping a single packet. It was designed for mobile networks - no, not mobile machines, mobile networks - but it works perfectly well as the ultimate in high-availability for a wired topology.
Power and heavy industrial networks are a much bigger problem than information networks, however. SCADA-based systems are generally running Windows NT or earlier, on antiquated hardware. Modern systems aren't reliable enough to be trusted, so they're not. These are much more vulnerable to loss of service, even if just from a lack of spare parts. I'd rather see a bigger effort to getting COTS systems sufficiently reliable that they can replace these ancient monstrosities, because that is where the infrastructure is as its weakest.
I've heard that to be the case, and also that Dvorak can't map onto certain international languages at all. True, I'd hate to use Qwerty for writing Younger Futhark, but you can't have everything. Seriously, though, I am not convinced it is possible to map all languages onto a single keyboard layout efficiently. Too many forms (phonetic, alphabetic, syllargy, ideogramatic, etc) and too great a variation in the number of symbols (anything from 16 to 6,000). IMHO, it has been a grievous error to try and make things so cheap and so mass-produced that the very cheapness becomes expensive and the mass-production ceases to be for the masses.
That's strange. I agree about Dvorak, but there's nothing like Sisters of Mercy for shell-scripting, or a bit of Sabbat for a debug session. Paul Di'Anno's Battlezone seems to be better for GUI work, though.
Confusing Governments with people? Y'know, there's this little document you might want to read. Starts off "We, the people of the United States of America". Turns out that Governments are made of people, not androids as first investigations had assumed. They're also elected by people, paid for by people, run for people, things like that. (Elected? Well, not so sure about American Presidents, but the Irish Kings were all elected, as were the British Bretwalda. In fact, from the earliest of tribal days, elections have generally been the preferred means of selecting a ruler. Even in the Monarchies and Princedoms of Europe, votes counted. King John was the only "absolute" monarch in British history who did not also have an absolute majority in the view of those he ruled.
Winners write history? Bayoux Tapestry was done by King Harold's followers, so you do you don't really even get that.
Nor is winning much of a virtue. From the mouth of Alain Prost, possibly the greastest French F1 driver of all time: It doesn't matter who leads, it's who finishes. Prefer a political figure? Try Shakyamuni Buddha, who argued that all extremes (winning and losing being extremes) are ultimately losing propositions, that only moderation is sustainable or stable. Prefer a cultural standpoint - not a Government, an entire people? "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game that truly matters." If 15,000 years of experience matters for anything, then listen to it and not the Hollywood/Vegas mentality of winner takes all. Cos the winner rarely takes a damn thing in the long run.
(B) to prevent the other's imminent commission of aggravated kidnapping, murder, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated robbery.
If person A knocks out person B for no discernible reason, can you tell me why a reasonable witness would NOT conclude they were about to witness murder, assault or robbery? In fact, I see nothing in the section that you quoted that even requires a reasonable person. It merely requires that you prevent the imminent commission of those crimes.
Since the law can't expect you to be psychic or be in the possession of a Type 40 space/time capsule, blue or otherwise, the law can't refer to what is actually going to occur, only what you believe is imminent. And since a witness would have to be an incredible moron to believe that senseless acts of gratuitous violence aren't a precursor to something more, knocking someone down does indeed fit the bill. So to speak.
If you beat someone in court, you win? Oh, then the Sioux own the Black Hills. Hey, they won their Supreme Court battle to reclaim them, and by your rules that makes them the winner, right? Uh, no.
If someone's down because you punched them, you're the winner? Not in Texas, where this would give every citizen who had a clear view of events the right to shoot you dead under their new self-defence laws. Being dead makes for a lousy winner. (I don't like those laws, but that's not the point. The point is, one battle does not a war make.)
The British have long recognized the futility of talking about winners and losers. The notion that no such animals exist infuse their culture, their media, even their sci-fi. ("Whoever loses shall win, and he who wins shall lose." Dr Who, 5 Doctors. I won't get into Roger Price's routine dissing of the military, save to say that in his view, Homo Superior cannot kill - even in self-defence - and that is what makes them superior.)
This reflects how real wars are fought, too. Name me one war in all of recorded history that did NOT involve first dehumanizing the enemy by all sides involved. We see that even today, with German soldiers posing by pictures of the skulls of defeated enemy, or American soldiers posing by naked and shackled prisoners. You think these soldiers would be capable of such flagrant human rights violations if they first pictured their opponents as human? This isn't about a few bad apples, it's a product of training.
(As the character of Travis put it in Blake's 7, "I reacted as I was trained to react. I was an instrument of the service. So if I'm guilty of murder, of mass murder, then so are all of you!")
It's also an inescapable product of training. Like I said, dehumanizing isn't limited to a few people or a few wars - it has included ALL combatants in ALL wars in as much of history as we have enough of to comment on. If you want a totally humanized nation, you simply cannot have an armed forces. Likewise, if you have an armed forces, you simply cannot have a totally humanized nation. I don't run the country, so which is "better" is not my problem. What I can be sure of is you can't have it both ways.
They're not the only ones. The Afghans - even with legally-dubious US support - never defeated the Russians, they merely lasted longer than the Russian bank accounts. The Celts were amongst the worst European fighters who ever lived, getting totally massacred by everyone and their cousin Bob, but Carthage stands in ruins, the Angles and Saxons only survive in tiny isolated communities in England and America (Oppenheiner's "The Origins of the British" shows that W.A.S.P.s exist only in their own mind, they have no historical reality), but the Celtic nations are actually doing OK for themselves at the moment.
Arguably, Serbia won the Balkans conflict, having conquered most of the lands belonging to their neighbors and slaughtered anyone who might claim them back. Uh, they're not doing so well for having won, are they? Kicked out of EU merger talks, Montenegro calling them a bunch of losers, Kosovo giving them the finger...
Hell, even the United States won in Iraq, as far as the actual war went.
Winning is the easy part. Anyone can win. Look how much of the world the British conquered. The British won far more than most nations could ever dream of. Yet contemporary accounts (I own several) describe the Great Exhibition as a PR stunt to create a delusion of grandeur that never existed. The Duke of Wellington, that master of winning, was described as a senile buffoon who was dribbling down his shirt and had to be propped up by others to stay on his horse. What's left of the Commonwealth shows you all too well that those descriptions of delusion were the reality, not the winning and not the gloating.
History dictates that who comes second in a war usually outlasts those who come first.
Based on the little that is known, the most obvious explanation is that this leak was intended to be discovered (there's no shortage of far more public sites that would offer far greater protection to the person involved) and that in turn makes the idea that an actual "Richard" was involved much less likely.
We won't know until the culprit is found (if they ever are, and if we ever have any reason to believe that anyone unmasked isn't simply a convenient scapegoat) but if I were in this Kevin's shoes, I'd be far more interested in gathering information than issuing threats. For that matter, Mandatory Access Controls have existed for decades. Why was such valuable IP even placed under a discretionary access control system?
(For those not familiar with MAC, it's a concept popularized by the US military but widely used in any secure environment. The idea is that the controls prohibit a user from copying to a location with weaker controls. In the military, you don't want people copying Top Secret files into an unclassified filespace or reassigning them to a user of lower classification, for example. So you simply program the access controls to block any such transfer. Properly implemented, there is no "superuser" - no need of one - and there is no possible way of violating permission boundaries directly or through privilege escalation.)
Yes, this is theft. So would be taking a hundred dollar bill nailed to the gatepost. At some point, a little personal responsibility is called for and a few reasonable precautions should be taken. Kevin Beares' bosses should be asking why neither has happened here - although that might be asking a bit much of Microsoft. Failure to secure trade secrets has, in the past, been grounds for courts to nullify the protections on those trade secrets, and undue harassment by employers of employees has spawned its own lawsuits. (If a Richard isn't found soon, with definite blood on hands, harassment suits can't be far behind.)
This is a very ugly situation for Microsoft to be in and they are hardly an innocent party as they have clearly shown they are not using suitable methods to protect that which is theirs. In a world that has been manipulated into believing there's a bogeyman hiding in every server cupboard, being able to protect your own is key to keeping the confidence of customers. The rights and wrongs are totally a side issue in all of this. The fact it was even possible is everything.
Three chromosomes for the maths-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dinosaur-lords in their halls of chicken,
Nine for polyglutamine doomed to die,
One for the pneumolysin on his dark throne
In the Land of Slashdot where the Firehoses lie.
One Sequence to rule them all, One Sequence to find them,
One Sequence to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Slashdot where the Firehoses lie.
I feel certain it took a great many scientists a long time (and probably some illegal substances) to recover from the shock. This was most definitely not what they had expected. They've been MRI-ing T-Rex bones ever since, from the sounds of it - Slashdot has covered several stories on bone structures discovered on the interior, for example. (The original bone was thought to have been from a female T-Rex, as it had some internal structure that exists in modern female birds but not in males.)
Anyway, it looks like the material from this bone has now been analysed. They never expected to recover any DNA - there was no evidence of cellular material when they made their initial announcement - but to have extracted specific proteins is a fantastic piece of work. Serendipitous, sure, but fantastic nonetheless.
It will be interesting to know when (not if) other fossils are found to have surviving internal organic matter. You don't really want to go smashing fossils up unnecessarily, so I imagine MRI manufacturers will be rather busy over the next few years. So what if you've found 1% of the material you'd like? A hundred such finds is not impossible, now we know it can happen. It's the overall coverage these researchers can get that will matter in the end, not the coverage in an individual bone.
One Azax Per Child!
Ignorance? Yes. Ignorance. The moment you think you know the answer, before finishing the work, is the moment you doom yourself to a life of tedium. Knowing too much ruins a researcher. Knowing what others thought yesterday will tell you nothing about what you should be learning tomorrow. The knowledgeable can fill in the gaps, but they will never be able to reach out beyond.
There is a place and a time for knowledge, but partial knowledge is worse than worthless. It's never going to give you the adventurism needed to discover, and it's too blinkered to give you the skills needed to complete the work that has gone on before. You tell me about the ranking of the University, but so what? Manchester University and UMIST were ranked first and second in Europe for IT respectively for many years. They did some very fine work, too, especially in parallel computing and asynchronous computing. So? You're not using their work today and you are unlikely to see any benefits from their work in your lifetime. Does that cheapen their ranking? No. Does that make their ranking useless as a measure of the real value of their work? Yes.
We need to replace the blink tag with a more general annoy tag that can have blink attributes. This will allow W3C to properly codify all the ways of being a complete pain under a single, unified system.
Slashdot ran a story on total-immersion computing using an oil bath, oh, four or five years ago now. He was using mineral oil. This is not to say it's a bad idea - on the contrary, it's rather overdue on the technology front. However, it does take about this amount of time to go from hobbyist to early market, so maybe this story should have been expected some time this year or next.
The ZX80 was cheap because it used rejected components, as I recall. And the squishy keyboard...? The Spectrum was ok - you can't compare it to the C64 as Commodore was overpricing and underspeccing everything at that point. The Spectrum's colour was ok, but rapidly outclassed by the BBC.
Both the ZX range and the Spectrum range were subject to heating problems and other reliability issues. When they worked, they worked great. They just didn't always work too well.
Can't say I disagree with you. If enough effort went in to make the whole thing easily patched in the field, then there's an excellent chance insufficient effort went in to making the thing right to begin with. I hope noone read my post as excusing those who produce inferior goods because they can fix them later - yeesh. I'm disliked intensely by some where I work now precisely because I don't take any crap from those who prefer the Im-lazy-fix-it-next-year route.
Seriously, a massive set of relatively low-power cores on a very tight connection - provided there was a bloody good way of scheduling stuff - would likely work extremely well in both the high-performance world and the high-reliability world. Who gives a damn if one core fails every month in space, if you start with a thousand of them? That would still give you 83 years and 4 months of operation on the world's most highly-available super-redundant platform.
(Since I'm in trivia mode, that would give a deep space probe a maximum range of 21 light-years, using NASA's 15-year-old designs for a 50 Km radius solar sail, which NASA estimated would hit 1/4 the speed of light by the time it reached the heliopause.)
For some reason, I rather suspect they'll politely ignore me or tell me to go jump in a lake. I seem to have that effect on people. Except on Slashdot, where the more outrageous I am, the higher I get modded. Not sure if that's because Slashdot geeks understand that quality thinking requires critical thinking, or whether you're all just more tolerant of a complete nut.
(To a user it may be different, but that's the user's problem. From an engineering perspective, a rose by any other name is still a rose. It is to an English major, too, if they study Shakespere.)