Two ways of fixing them - the pipeline metaphor of Unix and the object metaphor of OO programming.
In the case of pipelines, an activity is established as a flow of data between things - applications, devices, who cares? You can set up whatever pipelines you like and then your activity is triggered by dropping the initial data into the initial pipeline. Very simple. Anyone familiar with Jackson Structured Diagrams or a flowchart could put together as many activities as they liked without working up a sweat. It becomes nothing more than shell scripting with a GUI shell, and what one of us couldn't write whatever app they wanted in a shell script? Many probably have.
In the OO concept, you create activities by linking the applications as objects. Basically the same idea as pipelines and it's still shell scripting, the difference is that pipelines are isomorphic and isolated, whereas objects are polymorphic and inherited.
It would take most coders maybe a day to write a full-blown "shell" environment using one of these two approaches that would preserve the activity metaphor but give you absolute, total freedom.
There is nothing that politicians respond to more than cold, hard cash. Unions are maybe the next most potent weapon, as collective power IS power. Most geeks and enthusiasts don't have the former and have rejected the latter. (Idiots.) With nothing to back up any protest and with no meaningful influence, you can write all you want and all it'll do is occupy some landfills.
However, a move is something altogether different. Y'see, taxes ARE cold, hard cash. And all those listeners who aren't listening to the commercial stations' advertising? They ARE collective power. No listeners, no advertising revenue, no commercial stations.
(In England, pirate radio eventually forced the Government to license independent stations for the same reason. People defected in far too large numbers to the likes of Stockports' KFM and the monopoly crumbled from a lack of listeners. Protests never made a difference for the same reason they won't with Internet Radio. The people who need to protest most have made their voice willfully the weakest. It won't get heard. The chink of money, however quiet, will be. A politician can hear a cent coin falling on cotton candy from a thousand paces. Moving is the only voice left. If you don't use that, you've nothing left at all.)
Both a dumb writeup and a dumb researcher. FPGAs are commonplace, patching them in-situ in the field is a little unusual but not particularly exceptional. They're cheaper to produce than ASICs (but much slower) but for a lot of stuff, performance is far more I/O-bound than compute-bound and so manufacturers can get away with using FPGAs. Plenty of companies never bother moving off of FPGAs at all.
Patches? Well, you think anyone on OpenCores is going to send patches via a soldering iron? No, they're going to reprogram the FPGA, the same as everyone else does. So even Open Source hardware has this guy beaten by many, many years.
Are FPGAs the only way to do this? Depends on what you mean. Processor-In-Memory devices pre-date FPGAs by at least a decade. PIM architectures are fun, as you get raw CPU performance without any memory access bottlenecks. Want to reprogram it? Well, it's just RAM. You can program it however you like! PIM is vastly superior to FPGA, if (and only if) you know the fundamental logic you are going to use and the fundamental logic isn't going to change. For example, you could build a PIM that had the whole of the MPI protocol built into it. Cray did exactly that. Your program on top of that will change FAR more often than the protocol itself, so so long as you code the protocol correctly in the first place, this will not only run faster but be far easier to change. No rewriting the VHDL or Verilog, because there isn't any.
But programming isn't the only time you'd want to patch defective hardware. Sometimes, hardware goes bad. You can't avoid it. A patch on an FPGA isn't necessarily going to fix that, because there's no way for the engineer to know what went bad and it wouldn't be cost-effective to re-engineer the code to put on it. Well, that's been thought of, too. Sir Clive Sinclair - possibly the most reviled figure in British computing - actually came up with a really neat solution. Simply make the system wafer-scale and format the compute elements as you would a disk. When something goes bad, mark the sector as bad. With massive redundancy and a near-zero failover time to a different sector, you could handle sizable chunks of the chip going up in smoke - something no FPGA patch would even remotely come close to.
Ok, what if you want something that looks and feels like an FPGA - then is this your only answer? No. SOGs (Seas of Gates) have been around for a while.
Finally, CPUs have long supported the notion of microcode - I believe one such system was hacked to run Pascal as the opcode not long after the language was first developed. Yes, that was some time ago. Hell, the Crusoe (if Transmeta had ever published how) could be programmed to look whatever you felt like making it look like. Talk about patchability!
The sheer number of solutions people have come up with to this problem probably outnumbers the gates on the FPGA the researcher was using. I can see nothing credible or interesting in this, and certainly nothing new.
Ultimately, of course, this has nothing to do with when someone invented whatever method. It has to do with when someone actually makes it ubiquitous. Alexander Graham Bell wasn't close to being the inventor of the telephone, but he marketed it like no-one else. That's what people react to and remember. Will this researcher turn what is frankly a pedestrian piece of work into a major slice of the market? I doubt it, but they might. If they do, then all the prior examples in the world will convince no-one. If they don't, then it's one more piece of research that's destined for the rubbish heap.
In fact, AMD's HyperTransport specs are available for free to anyone. Intel's PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e specs are only available to paid subscribers. Not exactly open, is it? But, again, one example doesn't make a rule.
And what of chip companies that do publish specs? There are MANY chips from FreeScale (formerly Motorola's semiconductor division) that include fantastic levels of documentation. All the calls, all the functions, all the features. There are bugger all drivers in any Open Source *nix (xBSD, Linux, Plan9, you name it) for the S1 encryption chip. You want to talk about supporting those vendors who support Open Source? Then support them by adding that support.
Let us get down to basics, here. Part of the reason why companies like ATI can avoid supporting Open Source is because the Open Source community has, itself, failed to support the Open Source community. We have not been perfect, shining examples of our own standards and have no right to expect others to adhere to ideals we ourselves fall desperately short of.
Sure, the Open Source community lacks the kind of funding needed for this sort of stuff. So does AMD, whose profits were almost a billion short of expectation, whose net worth is now not much more than ATI prior to being bought, and whose future (due to Intel's near-monopolistic control over the industry and near-inexhaustible supply of funds) is severely in doubt. AMD has less than a tenth of the money of Intel and can't afford the current price-war for much longer. In the meantime, Intel can not only afford it but can afford to make next-gen components that have exactly the same flaws in concept as all their products have always have. Intel can afford it, Intel will essentially kill AMD, and Intel will only correct the flaws in the logic the next time it is threatened by a chip company.
(I may sound a little harsh on Intel there, but it's basically true of all corporations. Quality for the sake of quality is not a concept most managers comprehend, and "engineering excellence" is an oxymoron in any group outside of a few fringe development projects and maybe a couple of Formula 1 teams.)
If support for Open Source were a criteria, I'd say support nobody and move to another planet. As the old NASA joke goes, there is intelligent life on Earth but it's only visiting. There isn't any meaningful support for Open Source, outside of a handful of individuals.
What about IBM? All those 500+ patents they freed up! Yeah, and how many projects do you see based on them? None? Is that a surprise, when most were hardware patents? Outside of OpenCores, I really don't see many people being able to do much with pipeline optimization or CPU scheduling, and frankly most coders there working on CPUs have been doing just fine using their own methods of solving these problems, and anyone likely to want a high-end 64-bit Open Source chip would probably be looking at the Open Sourced UltraSparc. IBM have released lots of bits of project in the past, but never really maintained them and never really did anything with them. You been using IBM's GUI-based Apache management tool? Ever realized IBM had one?
The community should, by rights, support anything and anyone it can, AMD included, because a monoculture would be far far worse than the putrid stench we have at the moment. The existing mess can be fixed, with a lot of time and a lot of patience. Monocultures are stagnant cultures are cultures waiting to die. What we have right now is no great shakes, but I'll take it over a living death any day. The dead can't be cured - well, unless they're a kipper.
You weren't aware that Bozo the Clown was a leading member of the Illuminati, had developed cold fusion, and the real reason so many clowns could get out of the clown car had much to do with his experiments on combining rabbit DNA with human cloning...
It is perfectly normal for most of the civilized world to regard the US legal system as a cross between a Monty Python sketch and a Loony Tunes cartoon. This isn't, by any means, the longest-running court case. It's not even the longest-running tech court case. (The DR-DOS vs. Microsoft case ran for over a decade and the Microsoft antitrust case in the US was really just an extension of the Windows 95 illegal bundling case.)
Nor is US justice considered particularly competent, by many observers even in the US. There is ample evidence of extreme corruption throughout the system, not particularly helped by the current political scandals affecting the DOJ, nor helped by the scandalous and overtly political appointments of Supreme Court justices.
Even when it is competent, the system is notoriously powerless. The Sioux won in their Supreme Court battle over fifty years ago to reclaim the Black Hills. It's possible you'll live long enough to see the judgement actually carried out, but unless they perfect cryogentics, I wouldn't bet on it.
The justice system is largely ignored, except when it might give someone a slight advantage. I guess that makes it society's answer to COBOL. There will be no winners of this lawsuit, no matter what happens. SCO has openly and blatantly taken the system for a ride and the system has been entirely happy to let it. Nothing will be truly decided (why do you think SCO does so much shapeshifting?), no precedents will be set, no case law produced, no verdicts reached, no penalties exacted. As far as I can tell, this is with a judge who actually knows what they're doing and knows what's happening. The system is so far beyond broken that it is unclear if it is worthy of further consideration.
Doktor Avalanche wrote the MPAA a prescription, and they've been using amphetamine logic ever since. Seriously, Sisters of Mercy actually have enough geek factor to know what/dev/null is, have a drum machine built from military hardware, and seem to have broad enough intellectual and cultural understanding to be respectable. Personally, if there was ever a vote, I'd consider them to be more trustworthy guardians of the music industry than the RIAA. (However, if stage shows are anything to go by, Sabbat and Manowar are much more likely to take up swords and launch a revolution. Hmmm. That could be interesting. Sick, yes, but interesting.)
There are information brokers out there that can supply a person's real name, address, telephone number(s), credit history, credit card number(s), bank account(s), hairdresser, preferred brand of spinach... In the US, these brokers are (mostly) even legal, as there is no right of data privacy (which is one reason why the EU is so narked with them).
If SCO actually wanted information, they'd have gone to the nearest such broker and paid them a few hundred dollars. They'd have all the information they'd want at a fraction of the cost and in a matter of a few days. In fact, the ease of obtaining personal information has been subject to numerous studies and investigations, but bugger all action has ever been taken. Nor is it likely to be. The ease of getting ammunition on political opponents is far more valuable to politicians than the risks to the population.
The fact that SCO has made efforts to look like they're looking, but made no efforts to actually use sources likely to work, is proof enough that they don't want the results, they only want the appearance. (No, I don't like such brokers, but the fact is that they exist, and there's not a whelk's chance in a supernova that anyone can convince me SCO is avoiding them over a matter of ethics. You'd be hard-pressed to convince me anyone at SCO can spell the word.)
If the cards don't do WPA, then cheat. Most wireless-capable routers that don't support WPA -do- support IPSec, as do most laptops and other portable devices. Sure, you're not doing hardware encryption then, but the speed of most modern processors vastly outpaces most wireless connections - you can afford the cycles on an IPSec tunnel to the router. In theory, this is better than WPA, as IPSec is a more mature standard with a lot more people looking at the design.
Seems to get all the timestamps to "now", which is all that matters. Timestamps have no practical value other than for impressing the boss with how late you worked - for just about anything else, any incremental system that preserves sequential coherency is just as good as any other. A file version counter, a-la VMS, would be just as effective and wouldn't need nearly as much storage.
If a car manufacturer sells a car as capable of reaching 170 mph, in full knowledge that said car does not possess an engine and can only reach said speed if launched into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, that car manufacturer is likely to be slowly roasted over the coals by an infuriated consumer market.
If a calculator is sold as capable of displaying nine digits, when said ninth digit is actually part of the model number that lines up with the display, you can expect the lawyers to sharpen their knives in mouth-watering anticipation.
If a floating-point unit is sold as capable of dividing two numbers with a certain level of precision, nobody is going to care that it's sold by Intel.
I don't think Microsoft is responsible for all the world's ills (only most of them), but it is totally responsible for misleading advertising. Remember, misleading doesn't mean "totally wrong". Indeed, most things that are totally wrong are NOT misleading. Statements that are totally wrong are usually just mindboggingly stupid and seen to be such. It is the statements that have enough of a grain of truth to not be outright lies that are by far the most dangerous, as those are the ones hardest to filter.
This does not mean Microsoft should be legally culpable, although I wouldn't cry if it was. I would be as far from upset as you could achieve without passing through infinity, if all marketing claims were required to have a very definitive, measurable, provable, minimal level of truth. It would also be the death of the advertising industry, but I'm not so sure I'd miss that, either.
Fair, but late. The internal combustion engine was a latecomer in the automotive industry, having been beaten by electric motors some time prior. The steam cars weren't too impressive*, but the cars fuelled off methane and other light hydrocarbons were the forerunners of modern engines that can burn hydrogen directly (not via fuel cells).
*Steam cars were a problem, but steam power for vehicles can still be found. It turns out that steam power for extremely massive vehicles is actually quite efficient. Steamrollers were replaced by diesel but only relatively recently.
There are also many forms of internal combustion engine - the standard piston engine is one, but the rotary engine is another. There have been huge problems getting the rotary engine to be efficient - the designs so far have been pretty pathetic - but it would be possible to imagine a rotary engine designed to be extremely efficient that simply blew all existing piston engines off the planet.
Rotary engines suffer from several problems. First, way too much energy is lost as heat. Second, it is usually implemented as a single unit, which means you get very uneven power generation. No sane engineer would build a one-piston engine with the idea of getting better efficiency, so why make that mistake with rotaries? Next, pressures are all wrong. The rotary engine, when first designed, had a nasty habit of exploding from the internal pressure. Material science has come a long way since then, but the materials used to build engines has not. Nor has the cooling. The supercooling geeks in computing have abandoned using car radiators because they are so pathetically crap at getting rid of heat. They only work in a car because the car is moving at a decent pace most of the time.
All in all, I see nothing particularly hard about building a superior car engine. Now, building one that can be easily produced, provide sufficient power to give a car 100MPG at a decent speed, etc - now, that's a tougher problem. I don't think it's as hard as is made out, but it's certainly not trivial.
Of course, I'll never know, as I'm not going to be able to find the investment needed, but I would start with a computer simulation of the different sections of the car and figure out not how much power is wasted, but how much power is theoretically salvageable. (Most power is wasted in the transmission, but it is unclear any transmission is going to save much more than the double semi-automatic gearboxes can already do, so the wastage there doesn't matter. You're not going to reclaim enough to make it worth making that the primary focus.)
There are hundreds of series that cover how aliens built the pyramids. But they're all different aliens! What, was Egypt this gigantic watering hole for trans-galactic marauders? How did they all get along, if they were all trying to enslave Earth? Timeshare?
My theory is that there can only be one true Science Fiction series, and the rest are all bunk. However, which one is true depends on which of the alternative universes you live in. Universes involving ponies (OMG! Ponies!) are, of course, wholly exempt from alien marauders, on account of being obnoxiously cute.
It would be slightly more correct to say that species boundaries depend on your perspective. Genetics is a continuum. Species merely refer to points on that continuum that are sufficiently distinct that they must be classified distinctly, with rather crude circles then drawn round those points to enclose everything that is more related to the central point than to a different central point. One reason that species keep being reclassified and recategorized is that classifications have been somewhat crude and based on incomplete data. Another reason is that the edges aren't simple, they're more analogous to fractals. Combinations that "should" work don't, and some that "shouldn't" have.
The whole debate over evolution (micro or macro) is a meaningless one until there is an accepted, standard baseline from which to argue. At present, there is not. I can claim evolution exists all I want (and I have every reason to believe it does), but I might as well be claiming it in Klingon. If communication is impossible, debate is impossible.
The only thing I find despairing is that Britain has a much better educational system than the US, but almost 30% of people in Britain reject evolution. This is sickeningly high and shows that Western educational systems have totally broken down.
There is indeed the Independent Television News, but there is also the Independent Television Network, which is the federation of all non-BBC terrestrial broadcasters.
London is outside US jurisdiction, unless Tony Blair is off his medicines again, which raises all kinds of jurisdiction issues. The copying (not storing, copying) would have occurred in England. This is an English company. English law is the only law that can be applied to an alleged civil offense in England. Unless someone was planning on applying for an extradition order against YouTube's servers, I don't see how anything that might have transpired along the banks of ye olde Thames could possibly have anything to do with an American law.
Oh, and they CAN get into trouble. A lot of trouble. The ITN network has considerable control over the non-BBC broadcasters, and the BBC ultimately issues the broadcasting licenses themselves. There is also the Governmental broadcasting watchdog, which has the power to fine (and otherwise cripple) broadcasters who break the law. The Listener's Association is nowhere near as powerful a lobbying group as it once was, and is generally highly conservative, but even they would likely rip into a rogue broadcaster like a pack of rabid wolves on speed.
In short, if enough people in Britain actually wanted to kick up a fuss and applied sufficient pressure, anyone involved in the signing of this DMCA application could find themselves begging in Hyde Park sometime next week. Of course, that's if people complain. If they don't and those with a voice show all the verbal muscle of a wet dishcloth, then nothing will get done and nobody should be surprised. Laws are not broken by corporations because nobody finds out (they usually do). Laws are broken by corporations because even when people know, nobody does anything any different, and the corporations know and expect this. Righteous indignation on a blog site may be fair comment, but if that's where you leave it, you might as well not have bothered.
OpenBSD is good, SonicWall is a *BSD derivative and therefore (assuming they didn't break anything) very likely good. NetBSD is supposed to have the fastest stack on the planet, which is important as a firewall is a significant bottleneck, but hasn't anything like the attention to external security. (Efforts to make a "Trusted" *BSD exist, but I know of none that have got much beyond the earliest stages. This is important even in a firewall - firewalls run proxies and a proxy is a potential point of attack. Firewalls also generally run VPN and Active NIDS packages. With Mandatory Access Controls, no big deal - the attacker can hose one thread of one application. It poses no wider risk. Without, you can assume that once any access is gained, TOTAL access will be gained a short time later.)
There are ways around this. The simplest is to place as much software off the firewall as physically possible. So, for example, you'd have a second machine in parallel to the firewall that is running the Active NIDS. This gives you the same level of containment if an attack is detected, but the NIDS machine is now in the DMZ and so a break-in there would pose no risk. You also want to have the main proxy software off the firewall and on a different machine. The firewall would only allow traffic through for the proxy. This eliminates a whole chunk of vulnerable logic on the firewall. It also accelerates internal accesses, as the proxy server now has reduced network logic so can spend more time doing something useful.
If you can find one, the best machine to use as a firewall would be an old DEC VAX. Why? Because nobody has (yet) broken the security of a correctly-configured VMS system. making it two exploits better than even OpenBSD. It makes no difference that porting to VMS is a nightmare, because you wouldn't want to do so. Nor does it matter that VMS kernel developers are about as common as honest lawyers - whatever holes exist are far beyond the capabilities of a sizable percentage of experts in the field. Unless you're keeping nuke missile codes, VMS or OpenVMS should be more than strong enough to keep anyone out.
(Besides, if you look at a VMS terminal screen for too long, you go blind. No cracker would risk it.)
Now that IRIX has been dropped by SGI, it might also be possible to find Trusted IRIX systems that are being replaced. Again, that's damn good security and SGI mostly made its name on making IRIX systems damn fast (for the time). They should easily have the power to handle being used in a firewall and certainly have the security.
This does not make it good - Nessus is hardly the top-of-the-line in security scanners, for a start - but the alternative methods being used are no better. The counting method (add up all of the announcements made) tends to lead to Linux getting the same flaw counted once per distribution, not once per package, resulting in gross overcounting. The Open Source community is also generally better at announcing flaws, whereas commercial vendors won't necessarily report a flaw if it gets covered by a patch or update prior to public discovery. Also, it is a premise of Open Source that bugs will be discovered faster because there are more eyes on the code, so distorting the ratio of bugs discovered per unit time vs. total bugs to be discovered.
On the flip-side, because Windows and OS/X are used more frequently, there are more security experts (white hat and black hat) searching for ways to break the code. It also means that it is much more profitable for commercial scanner products (not used in this case, but I'm talking in general) to concentrate on gathering methods for these OS'. If it cost half as much to gain as many methods for Linux, but only 4% of potential customers gave a damn, why would any security vendor bother? The return on investment would be terrible!
The practical upshot is that none of the methods being used to conduct these kinds of surveys gives you a useful picture. It would take a concerted effort to use multiple methods (and multiple approaches to each) to build up a good enough image to winnow out the false or misleading. Whilst a major security vendor could probably afford the time and resources to do this, again it's return on investment. Who is going to pay for a better study? Managers? No. If Gartner said that the sky was purple and pilchards grew in trees, managers would typically believe it, even if every pilchard expert on the planet worked together to produce a mega-report refuting Gartner line-by-line.
What about the Open Source folk? Surely they'd respond positively. I'd like to believe that, but I never did see Tripwire respond to the Internet Audit, which claimed that binaries were altered without Tripwire detecting it. (And how come there are no host intrusion detectors or network intrusion detectors configured as standard on most Linux distros?) There is also evidence that OpenBSD's track record on dealing with DoS attacks is nowhere near as good as it is with holes that would allow actual machine access. Hey, I'd consider myself above average on Open Source advocacy, but the bottom line is that there isn't this overwhelming, universal passion for Doing The Right Thing in the Open Source world. It's better than in many sectors, but there are plenty of security sinners out there in F/L/OSS-land.
If this had been a question regarding European Universities or colleges, I would have said an honors program that combined mathematics and software engineering or a joint honors program. (Far as I know, they don't do majors/minors anywhere in Europe, and no degree less than a full honors degree is worth a damn. The difference between a single honors with two primary fields and a joint honors program is that the single honors will be run by a single department and will generally be more coherent. Well, as coherent as Universities get, which varies.)
Membership of professional societies in Europe, after graduation, is pretty much the norm. Since gaming is heavily maths-oriented, membership of a mathematical professional society would seem logical. However, companies aren't always logical. Membership of a professional society is considered important with some (but not all) employers, as it is generally only possible to become a member if you have genuinely graduated with a degree of sufficient merit. It makes it harder on the fake Universities, as it's a second level of accreditation that's backed by people with a substantial interest in having their degree worth as much as possible.
The American system is much harder for the likes of me to comprehend. There appears to be minimal validation of the worthiness of a degree (which is why fake credentials are a booming business) and I've heard enough horror stories to make me wonder just how meaningful accreditation even is in the United States. The popularity of certifications would seem to back this, as there's little value in a short-lived certification from a crammer program (where little is learned and less remembered) unless there is serious doubt on the value of any of the alternatives.
Even with saying that, though, there are a few fundamentals that just aren't going to change, wherever you live. First, the advanced maths necessary for the graphics alone is not trivial. There are four-year degrees that just cover that. Don't expect to learn it any faster, unless you're seriously top-notch. People like Ruth Lawrence, however, are generally not going to occur more than once a decade, and are most unlikely to have time to be reading Slashdot - or indeed much of anything outside of their specialty. These are exceptionally rare people. Which may be just as well - otherwise the rest of us wouldn't have a hope in hell of ever being employed.
The second thing is that software engineering is also not a trivial subject. The bulk of programs in existence are horribly buggy and defective, the bulk of user interfaces look like they were designed by a torturer in training, reusability of components is badly neglected (although gaming engines are generally pretty good on this, these days), optimization however really is neglected in all disciplines, with coders relying on faster machines to compensate for crappy coding.
However, it doesn't finish there. I/O bottlenecks are a killer in games, and that means better utilization of the resources available. Which means you need at least a working knowledge of said resources and what you can squeeze out of them, by fair means or foul. Don't expect a software course to cover this, although it might. Generally, you're better off doing this as extra research. Now, there are also shortcuts here, as not everything that you COULD output is useful to output. That means a little more research into what you can avoid shuffling around. Doesn't matter if this is because the hardware can't deliver the extra data to the user, the user's senses aren't capable of handling/differentiating the data, the mind can be tricked into thinking the data was actually there (if important), or whether the brain will simply ignore the data as irrelevant anyway. However, don't expect to find all this info in one place - it's scattered across many disciplines. The more of it you need, the more you'll need to dig.
This gets me to the final thing - anyone who wants to remain
The Swedes and Danes have no problem getting innovators. I don't recall Erik the Red having any problems whatsoever getting anything he damn well wanted. Taxes are solved the same way. Why else do you think they've been working on stealth ships?
...the USPTO outsources reading the applications to outer Mongolia, on the grounds that if they're going to accept them all anyway, what does it matter?
Certainly this is more common than it once was. It is one of the nastiest of the still-effective low-level attacks. Most of the other fundamental stuff (BGP, for example) has improved on the security front. Now, if DNS is only run on dedicated DNS servers, you can just IPSEC between them, but IPSEC is not getting deployed much, either.
So what's the real reason none of this is getting used? "No perceived need" is clearly bogus, so we can dispense with that. Seems to me that the real reason is that DNSSEC and IPSEC place overheads on the system, but most data centers and ISPs run DNS on really cheap, natty boxes. If service was degraded still further from security, there would be a lot of complaints. However, it's either that or putting essential services on much higher-performance boxes, and anyone who has ever worked in such organizations know that management would turn to satanic forces to keep their customers before spending a single extra buck on hardware upgrades.
I'm not as impressed with Java as I once was. It hasn't evolved cleanly, the object nature of it isn't as consistent or as pure as it perhaps should be, there are OO concepts that Java doesn't - and probably will never - support, and although OO is implicitly parallel, its support for parallelisms isn't impressive. (OO is implicit parallelism because the code and data for an object are tightly encapsulated. The whole point of OO is that there is no "program", only message passing between objects.)
Now, am I saying to use Mono or.Net? No..Net is a framework that is designed around C# and the Microsoft concepts of networking. Sure, it can be used with almost any language under the sun, but who cares what it can be made to work with? It has one architecture and one underlying premise. That is all any design can ever have. You can build anything on any foundation you like, but what you build can never be structurally more sound than the foundation it is based on. Sure, there are interfaces for many languages. So? A tone-deaf polyglot can sing very badly in many languages. Versatility is important, sure, but would you use a Swiss Army Knife made entirely from cheese? Versatility alone isn't a useful attribute to have.
Frankly, I believe there are far too many extremely badly-designed programming languages and frameworks out there which should be put out of their misery. After judgement day has been visited upon such disasters, it may make sense for software engineers to develop a CLEAN, UNIFORM, COHERENT design that is logical, rational, usable and (after all that) still worth using. I say it may make sense because although such a language is needed, many languages are developed to serve the commercial purposes of the designers, NOT the engineering purposes of the programmer, OR the trust-related purposes of the user. There'd be no point in eliminating the swiss-cheese languages and environments we have, if all we're going to do is end up with concoctions that are likely to be far worse for everyone other than the IP holders and the "value-added" compiler writers.
It should be possible to determine, provided the genetic material shared is not 100%. What will matter is how the genetic material is distributed. For example, in the story being described, the twins both have two sets of DNA. The presence of some gene G in both twins tells us relatively little. The presence of some gene G in the same subset of DNA on both twins would tell you much more, as would it occurring on one subset of DNA on one twin but in both subsets of DNA on the other.
I'm not so sure about "polar body twins", but it would seem to me that exactly one of them should be chimerical and the other should just have the normal set of DNA, because of the mechanics. This would mean that if you tested two twins and looked for matches in the genetic material, the mismatches would be asymmetric. (2 sets of genes - 1 set != one set - two sets.) This could also happen in the case of non-identical triplets where two of them ARE identical, and the non-identical one merges into one of the identical twins to form a single body. Basically, merging of twins is supposed to be how most chimeras arise, so this is just a variant of that with triplets instead. I guess for something like that, you'd say "polar body twins" is good enough until the technology exists to make greater differentiation meaningful.
Whether or not polar body twins exist, whether or not my musings are even roughly on the mark, I think this goes to show that the field of genetics is a very complicated one. It's no longer a simple case of "map the sequences", because we're discovering lots of new ways in which multiple sequences can simultaneously exist. Of course, it's unlikely a real geneticist has ever seriously believed simple mapping would be sufficient, but given that we now use genetics in everything from modifying food to identifying suspects in a criminal case, it seems apparent that general knowledge could do with improving a whole lot.
(I wonder what will happen if Anna Nicole Smith's baby is found to be a chimera, and all three claimants for father are matches for different DNA. That could pose an interesting problem for the courts. Hell, if the technology existed to safely turn a person into a chimera, this would be the perfect scenario.)
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In the case of pipelines, an activity is established as a flow of data between things - applications, devices, who cares? You can set up whatever pipelines you like and then your activity is triggered by dropping the initial data into the initial pipeline. Very simple. Anyone familiar with Jackson Structured Diagrams or a flowchart could put together as many activities as they liked without working up a sweat. It becomes nothing more than shell scripting with a GUI shell, and what one of us couldn't write whatever app they wanted in a shell script? Many probably have.
In the OO concept, you create activities by linking the applications as objects. Basically the same idea as pipelines and it's still shell scripting, the difference is that pipelines are isomorphic and isolated, whereas objects are polymorphic and inherited.
It would take most coders maybe a day to write a full-blown "shell" environment using one of these two approaches that would preserve the activity metaphor but give you absolute, total freedom.
However, a move is something altogether different. Y'see, taxes ARE cold, hard cash. And all those listeners who aren't listening to the commercial stations' advertising? They ARE collective power. No listeners, no advertising revenue, no commercial stations.
(In England, pirate radio eventually forced the Government to license independent stations for the same reason. People defected in far too large numbers to the likes of Stockports' KFM and the monopoly crumbled from a lack of listeners. Protests never made a difference for the same reason they won't with Internet Radio. The people who need to protest most have made their voice willfully the weakest. It won't get heard. The chink of money, however quiet, will be. A politician can hear a cent coin falling on cotton candy from a thousand paces. Moving is the only voice left. If you don't use that, you've nothing left at all.)
Patches? Well, you think anyone on OpenCores is going to send patches via a soldering iron? No, they're going to reprogram the FPGA, the same as everyone else does. So even Open Source hardware has this guy beaten by many, many years.
Are FPGAs the only way to do this? Depends on what you mean. Processor-In-Memory devices pre-date FPGAs by at least a decade. PIM architectures are fun, as you get raw CPU performance without any memory access bottlenecks. Want to reprogram it? Well, it's just RAM. You can program it however you like! PIM is vastly superior to FPGA, if (and only if) you know the fundamental logic you are going to use and the fundamental logic isn't going to change. For example, you could build a PIM that had the whole of the MPI protocol built into it. Cray did exactly that. Your program on top of that will change FAR more often than the protocol itself, so so long as you code the protocol correctly in the first place, this will not only run faster but be far easier to change. No rewriting the VHDL or Verilog, because there isn't any.
But programming isn't the only time you'd want to patch defective hardware. Sometimes, hardware goes bad. You can't avoid it. A patch on an FPGA isn't necessarily going to fix that, because there's no way for the engineer to know what went bad and it wouldn't be cost-effective to re-engineer the code to put on it. Well, that's been thought of, too. Sir Clive Sinclair - possibly the most reviled figure in British computing - actually came up with a really neat solution. Simply make the system wafer-scale and format the compute elements as you would a disk. When something goes bad, mark the sector as bad. With massive redundancy and a near-zero failover time to a different sector, you could handle sizable chunks of the chip going up in smoke - something no FPGA patch would even remotely come close to.
Ok, what if you want something that looks and feels like an FPGA - then is this your only answer? No. SOGs (Seas of Gates) have been around for a while.
Finally, CPUs have long supported the notion of microcode - I believe one such system was hacked to run Pascal as the opcode not long after the language was first developed. Yes, that was some time ago. Hell, the Crusoe (if Transmeta had ever published how) could be programmed to look whatever you felt like making it look like. Talk about patchability!
The sheer number of solutions people have come up with to this problem probably outnumbers the gates on the FPGA the researcher was using. I can see nothing credible or interesting in this, and certainly nothing new.
Ultimately, of course, this has nothing to do with when someone invented whatever method. It has to do with when someone actually makes it ubiquitous. Alexander Graham Bell wasn't close to being the inventor of the telephone, but he marketed it like no-one else. That's what people react to and remember. Will this researcher turn what is frankly a pedestrian piece of work into a major slice of the market? I doubt it, but they might. If they do, then all the prior examples in the world will convince no-one. If they don't, then it's one more piece of research that's destined for the rubbish heap.
And what of chip companies that do publish specs? There are MANY chips from FreeScale (formerly Motorola's semiconductor division) that include fantastic levels of documentation. All the calls, all the functions, all the features. There are bugger all drivers in any Open Source *nix (xBSD, Linux, Plan9, you name it) for the S1 encryption chip. You want to talk about supporting those vendors who support Open Source? Then support them by adding that support.
Let us get down to basics, here. Part of the reason why companies like ATI can avoid supporting Open Source is because the Open Source community has, itself, failed to support the Open Source community. We have not been perfect, shining examples of our own standards and have no right to expect others to adhere to ideals we ourselves fall desperately short of.
Sure, the Open Source community lacks the kind of funding needed for this sort of stuff. So does AMD, whose profits were almost a billion short of expectation, whose net worth is now not much more than ATI prior to being bought, and whose future (due to Intel's near-monopolistic control over the industry and near-inexhaustible supply of funds) is severely in doubt. AMD has less than a tenth of the money of Intel and can't afford the current price-war for much longer. In the meantime, Intel can not only afford it but can afford to make next-gen components that have exactly the same flaws in concept as all their products have always have. Intel can afford it, Intel will essentially kill AMD, and Intel will only correct the flaws in the logic the next time it is threatened by a chip company.
(I may sound a little harsh on Intel there, but it's basically true of all corporations. Quality for the sake of quality is not a concept most managers comprehend, and "engineering excellence" is an oxymoron in any group outside of a few fringe development projects and maybe a couple of Formula 1 teams.)
If support for Open Source were a criteria, I'd say support nobody and move to another planet. As the old NASA joke goes, there is intelligent life on Earth but it's only visiting. There isn't any meaningful support for Open Source, outside of a handful of individuals.
What about IBM? All those 500+ patents they freed up! Yeah, and how many projects do you see based on them? None? Is that a surprise, when most were hardware patents? Outside of OpenCores, I really don't see many people being able to do much with pipeline optimization or CPU scheduling, and frankly most coders there working on CPUs have been doing just fine using their own methods of solving these problems, and anyone likely to want a high-end 64-bit Open Source chip would probably be looking at the Open Sourced UltraSparc. IBM have released lots of bits of project in the past, but never really maintained them and never really did anything with them. You been using IBM's GUI-based Apache management tool? Ever realized IBM had one?
The community should, by rights, support anything and anyone it can, AMD included, because a monoculture would be far far worse than the putrid stench we have at the moment. The existing mess can be fixed, with a lot of time and a lot of patience. Monocultures are stagnant cultures are cultures waiting to die. What we have right now is no great shakes, but I'll take it over a living death any day. The dead can't be cured - well, unless they're a kipper.
You weren't aware that Bozo the Clown was a leading member of the Illuminati, had developed cold fusion, and the real reason so many clowns could get out of the clown car had much to do with his experiments on combining rabbit DNA with human cloning...
Nor is US justice considered particularly competent, by many observers even in the US. There is ample evidence of extreme corruption throughout the system, not particularly helped by the current political scandals affecting the DOJ, nor helped by the scandalous and overtly political appointments of Supreme Court justices.
Even when it is competent, the system is notoriously powerless. The Sioux won in their Supreme Court battle over fifty years ago to reclaim the Black Hills. It's possible you'll live long enough to see the judgement actually carried out, but unless they perfect cryogentics, I wouldn't bet on it.
The justice system is largely ignored, except when it might give someone a slight advantage. I guess that makes it society's answer to COBOL. There will be no winners of this lawsuit, no matter what happens. SCO has openly and blatantly taken the system for a ride and the system has been entirely happy to let it. Nothing will be truly decided (why do you think SCO does so much shapeshifting?), no precedents will be set, no case law produced, no verdicts reached, no penalties exacted. As far as I can tell, this is with a judge who actually knows what they're doing and knows what's happening. The system is so far beyond broken that it is unclear if it is worthy of further consideration.
Doktor Avalanche wrote the MPAA a prescription, and they've been using amphetamine logic ever since. Seriously, Sisters of Mercy actually have enough geek factor to know what /dev/null is, have a drum machine built from military hardware, and seem to have broad enough intellectual and cultural understanding to be respectable. Personally, if there was ever a vote, I'd consider them to be more trustworthy guardians of the music industry than the RIAA. (However, if stage shows are anything to go by, Sabbat and Manowar are much more likely to take up swords and launch a revolution. Hmmm. That could be interesting. Sick, yes, but interesting.)
If SCO actually wanted information, they'd have gone to the nearest such broker and paid them a few hundred dollars. They'd have all the information they'd want at a fraction of the cost and in a matter of a few days. In fact, the ease of obtaining personal information has been subject to numerous studies and investigations, but bugger all action has ever been taken. Nor is it likely to be. The ease of getting ammunition on political opponents is far more valuable to politicians than the risks to the population.
The fact that SCO has made efforts to look like they're looking, but made no efforts to actually use sources likely to work, is proof enough that they don't want the results, they only want the appearance. (No, I don't like such brokers, but the fact is that they exist, and there's not a whelk's chance in a supernova that anyone can convince me SCO is avoiding them over a matter of ethics. You'd be hard-pressed to convince me anyone at SCO can spell the word.)
If the cards don't do WPA, then cheat. Most wireless-capable routers that don't support WPA -do- support IPSec, as do most laptops and other portable devices. Sure, you're not doing hardware encryption then, but the speed of most modern processors vastly outpaces most wireless connections - you can afford the cycles on an IPSec tunnel to the router. In theory, this is better than WPA, as IPSec is a more mature standard with a lot more people looking at the design.
Seems to get all the timestamps to "now", which is all that matters. Timestamps have no practical value other than for impressing the boss with how late you worked - for just about anything else, any incremental system that preserves sequential coherency is just as good as any other. A file version counter, a-la VMS, would be just as effective and wouldn't need nearly as much storage.
If a calculator is sold as capable of displaying nine digits, when said ninth digit is actually part of the model number that lines up with the display, you can expect the lawyers to sharpen their knives in mouth-watering anticipation.
If a floating-point unit is sold as capable of dividing two numbers with a certain level of precision, nobody is going to care that it's sold by Intel.
I don't think Microsoft is responsible for all the world's ills (only most of them), but it is totally responsible for misleading advertising. Remember, misleading doesn't mean "totally wrong". Indeed, most things that are totally wrong are NOT misleading. Statements that are totally wrong are usually just mindboggingly stupid and seen to be such. It is the statements that have enough of a grain of truth to not be outright lies that are by far the most dangerous, as those are the ones hardest to filter.
This does not mean Microsoft should be legally culpable, although I wouldn't cry if it was. I would be as far from upset as you could achieve without passing through infinity, if all marketing claims were required to have a very definitive, measurable, provable, minimal level of truth. It would also be the death of the advertising industry, but I'm not so sure I'd miss that, either.
*Steam cars were a problem, but steam power for vehicles can still be found. It turns out that steam power for extremely massive vehicles is actually quite efficient. Steamrollers were replaced by diesel but only relatively recently.
There are also many forms of internal combustion engine - the standard piston engine is one, but the rotary engine is another. There have been huge problems getting the rotary engine to be efficient - the designs so far have been pretty pathetic - but it would be possible to imagine a rotary engine designed to be extremely efficient that simply blew all existing piston engines off the planet.
Rotary engines suffer from several problems. First, way too much energy is lost as heat. Second, it is usually implemented as a single unit, which means you get very uneven power generation. No sane engineer would build a one-piston engine with the idea of getting better efficiency, so why make that mistake with rotaries? Next, pressures are all wrong. The rotary engine, when first designed, had a nasty habit of exploding from the internal pressure. Material science has come a long way since then, but the materials used to build engines has not. Nor has the cooling. The supercooling geeks in computing have abandoned using car radiators because they are so pathetically crap at getting rid of heat. They only work in a car because the car is moving at a decent pace most of the time.
All in all, I see nothing particularly hard about building a superior car engine. Now, building one that can be easily produced, provide sufficient power to give a car 100MPG at a decent speed, etc - now, that's a tougher problem. I don't think it's as hard as is made out, but it's certainly not trivial.
Of course, I'll never know, as I'm not going to be able to find the investment needed, but I would start with a computer simulation of the different sections of the car and figure out not how much power is wasted, but how much power is theoretically salvageable. (Most power is wasted in the transmission, but it is unclear any transmission is going to save much more than the double semi-automatic gearboxes can already do, so the wastage there doesn't matter. You're not going to reclaim enough to make it worth making that the primary focus.)
My theory is that there can only be one true Science Fiction series, and the rest are all bunk. However, which one is true depends on which of the alternative universes you live in. Universes involving ponies (OMG! Ponies!) are, of course, wholly exempt from alien marauders, on account of being obnoxiously cute.
The whole debate over evolution (micro or macro) is a meaningless one until there is an accepted, standard baseline from which to argue. At present, there is not. I can claim evolution exists all I want (and I have every reason to believe it does), but I might as well be claiming it in Klingon. If communication is impossible, debate is impossible.
The only thing I find despairing is that Britain has a much better educational system than the US, but almost 30% of people in Britain reject evolution. This is sickeningly high and shows that Western educational systems have totally broken down.
There is indeed the Independent Television News, but there is also the Independent Television Network, which is the federation of all non-BBC terrestrial broadcasters.
Oh, and they CAN get into trouble. A lot of trouble. The ITN network has considerable control over the non-BBC broadcasters, and the BBC ultimately issues the broadcasting licenses themselves. There is also the Governmental broadcasting watchdog, which has the power to fine (and otherwise cripple) broadcasters who break the law. The Listener's Association is nowhere near as powerful a lobbying group as it once was, and is generally highly conservative, but even they would likely rip into a rogue broadcaster like a pack of rabid wolves on speed.
In short, if enough people in Britain actually wanted to kick up a fuss and applied sufficient pressure, anyone involved in the signing of this DMCA application could find themselves begging in Hyde Park sometime next week. Of course, that's if people complain. If they don't and those with a voice show all the verbal muscle of a wet dishcloth, then nothing will get done and nobody should be surprised. Laws are not broken by corporations because nobody finds out (they usually do). Laws are broken by corporations because even when people know, nobody does anything any different, and the corporations know and expect this. Righteous indignation on a blog site may be fair comment, but if that's where you leave it, you might as well not have bothered.
There are ways around this. The simplest is to place as much software off the firewall as physically possible. So, for example, you'd have a second machine in parallel to the firewall that is running the Active NIDS. This gives you the same level of containment if an attack is detected, but the NIDS machine is now in the DMZ and so a break-in there would pose no risk. You also want to have the main proxy software off the firewall and on a different machine. The firewall would only allow traffic through for the proxy. This eliminates a whole chunk of vulnerable logic on the firewall. It also accelerates internal accesses, as the proxy server now has reduced network logic so can spend more time doing something useful.
If you can find one, the best machine to use as a firewall would be an old DEC VAX. Why? Because nobody has (yet) broken the security of a correctly-configured VMS system. making it two exploits better than even OpenBSD. It makes no difference that porting to VMS is a nightmare, because you wouldn't want to do so. Nor does it matter that VMS kernel developers are about as common as honest lawyers - whatever holes exist are far beyond the capabilities of a sizable percentage of experts in the field. Unless you're keeping nuke missile codes, VMS or OpenVMS should be more than strong enough to keep anyone out.
(Besides, if you look at a VMS terminal screen for too long, you go blind. No cracker would risk it.)
Now that IRIX has been dropped by SGI, it might also be possible to find Trusted IRIX systems that are being replaced. Again, that's damn good security and SGI mostly made its name on making IRIX systems damn fast (for the time). They should easily have the power to handle being used in a firewall and certainly have the security.
The screenshots aren't pink and don't mention ponies. How am I supposed to use it on Saturday if there aren't any ponies?
On the flip-side, because Windows and OS/X are used more frequently, there are more security experts (white hat and black hat) searching for ways to break the code. It also means that it is much more profitable for commercial scanner products (not used in this case, but I'm talking in general) to concentrate on gathering methods for these OS'. If it cost half as much to gain as many methods for Linux, but only 4% of potential customers gave a damn, why would any security vendor bother? The return on investment would be terrible!
The practical upshot is that none of the methods being used to conduct these kinds of surveys gives you a useful picture. It would take a concerted effort to use multiple methods (and multiple approaches to each) to build up a good enough image to winnow out the false or misleading. Whilst a major security vendor could probably afford the time and resources to do this, again it's return on investment. Who is going to pay for a better study? Managers? No. If Gartner said that the sky was purple and pilchards grew in trees, managers would typically believe it, even if every pilchard expert on the planet worked together to produce a mega-report refuting Gartner line-by-line.
What about the Open Source folk? Surely they'd respond positively. I'd like to believe that, but I never did see Tripwire respond to the Internet Audit, which claimed that binaries were altered without Tripwire detecting it. (And how come there are no host intrusion detectors or network intrusion detectors configured as standard on most Linux distros?) There is also evidence that OpenBSD's track record on dealing with DoS attacks is nowhere near as good as it is with holes that would allow actual machine access. Hey, I'd consider myself above average on Open Source advocacy, but the bottom line is that there isn't this overwhelming, universal passion for Doing The Right Thing in the Open Source world. It's better than in many sectors, but there are plenty of security sinners out there in F/L/OSS-land.
Membership of professional societies in Europe, after graduation, is pretty much the norm. Since gaming is heavily maths-oriented, membership of a mathematical professional society would seem logical. However, companies aren't always logical. Membership of a professional society is considered important with some (but not all) employers, as it is generally only possible to become a member if you have genuinely graduated with a degree of sufficient merit. It makes it harder on the fake Universities, as it's a second level of accreditation that's backed by people with a substantial interest in having their degree worth as much as possible.
The American system is much harder for the likes of me to comprehend. There appears to be minimal validation of the worthiness of a degree (which is why fake credentials are a booming business) and I've heard enough horror stories to make me wonder just how meaningful accreditation even is in the United States. The popularity of certifications would seem to back this, as there's little value in a short-lived certification from a crammer program (where little is learned and less remembered) unless there is serious doubt on the value of any of the alternatives.
Even with saying that, though, there are a few fundamentals that just aren't going to change, wherever you live. First, the advanced maths necessary for the graphics alone is not trivial. There are four-year degrees that just cover that. Don't expect to learn it any faster, unless you're seriously top-notch. People like Ruth Lawrence, however, are generally not going to occur more than once a decade, and are most unlikely to have time to be reading Slashdot - or indeed much of anything outside of their specialty. These are exceptionally rare people. Which may be just as well - otherwise the rest of us wouldn't have a hope in hell of ever being employed.
The second thing is that software engineering is also not a trivial subject. The bulk of programs in existence are horribly buggy and defective, the bulk of user interfaces look like they were designed by a torturer in training, reusability of components is badly neglected (although gaming engines are generally pretty good on this, these days), optimization however really is neglected in all disciplines, with coders relying on faster machines to compensate for crappy coding.
However, it doesn't finish there. I/O bottlenecks are a killer in games, and that means better utilization of the resources available. Which means you need at least a working knowledge of said resources and what you can squeeze out of them, by fair means or foul. Don't expect a software course to cover this, although it might. Generally, you're better off doing this as extra research. Now, there are also shortcuts here, as not everything that you COULD output is useful to output. That means a little more research into what you can avoid shuffling around. Doesn't matter if this is because the hardware can't deliver the extra data to the user, the user's senses aren't capable of handling/differentiating the data, the mind can be tricked into thinking the data was actually there (if important), or whether the brain will simply ignore the data as irrelevant anyway. However, don't expect to find all this info in one place - it's scattered across many disciplines. The more of it you need, the more you'll need to dig.
This gets me to the final thing - anyone who wants to remain
The Swedes and Danes have no problem getting innovators. I don't recall Erik the Red having any problems whatsoever getting anything he damn well wanted. Taxes are solved the same way. Why else do you think they've been working on stealth ships?
...the USPTO outsources reading the applications to outer Mongolia, on the grounds that if they're going to accept them all anyway, what does it matter?
So what's the real reason none of this is getting used? "No perceived need" is clearly bogus, so we can dispense with that. Seems to me that the real reason is that DNSSEC and IPSEC place overheads on the system, but most data centers and ISPs run DNS on really cheap, natty boxes. If service was degraded still further from security, there would be a lot of complaints. However, it's either that or putting essential services on much higher-performance boxes, and anyone who has ever worked in such organizations know that management would turn to satanic forces to keep their customers before spending a single extra buck on hardware upgrades.
Now, am I saying to use Mono or .Net? No. .Net is a framework that is designed around C# and the Microsoft concepts of networking. Sure, it can be used with almost any language under the sun, but who cares what it can be made to work with? It has one architecture and one underlying premise. That is all any design can ever have. You can build anything on any foundation you like, but what you build can never be structurally more sound than the foundation it is based on. Sure, there are interfaces for many languages. So? A tone-deaf polyglot can sing very badly in many languages. Versatility is important, sure, but would you use a Swiss Army Knife made entirely from cheese? Versatility alone isn't a useful attribute to have.
Frankly, I believe there are far too many extremely badly-designed programming languages and frameworks out there which should be put out of their misery. After judgement day has been visited upon such disasters, it may make sense for software engineers to develop a CLEAN, UNIFORM, COHERENT design that is logical, rational, usable and (after all that) still worth using. I say it may make sense because although such a language is needed, many languages are developed to serve the commercial purposes of the designers, NOT the engineering purposes of the programmer, OR the trust-related purposes of the user. There'd be no point in eliminating the swiss-cheese languages and environments we have, if all we're going to do is end up with concoctions that are likely to be far worse for everyone other than the IP holders and the "value-added" compiler writers.
I'm not so sure about "polar body twins", but it would seem to me that exactly one of them should be chimerical and the other should just have the normal set of DNA, because of the mechanics. This would mean that if you tested two twins and looked for matches in the genetic material, the mismatches would be asymmetric. (2 sets of genes - 1 set != one set - two sets.) This could also happen in the case of non-identical triplets where two of them ARE identical, and the non-identical one merges into one of the identical twins to form a single body. Basically, merging of twins is supposed to be how most chimeras arise, so this is just a variant of that with triplets instead. I guess for something like that, you'd say "polar body twins" is good enough until the technology exists to make greater differentiation meaningful.
Whether or not polar body twins exist, whether or not my musings are even roughly on the mark, I think this goes to show that the field of genetics is a very complicated one. It's no longer a simple case of "map the sequences", because we're discovering lots of new ways in which multiple sequences can simultaneously exist. Of course, it's unlikely a real geneticist has ever seriously believed simple mapping would be sufficient, but given that we now use genetics in everything from modifying food to identifying suspects in a criminal case, it seems apparent that general knowledge could do with improving a whole lot.
(I wonder what will happen if Anna Nicole Smith's baby is found to be a chimera, and all three claimants for father are matches for different DNA. That could pose an interesting problem for the courts. Hell, if the technology existed to safely turn a person into a chimera, this would be the perfect scenario.)